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

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

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

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

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

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

Overcoming the limits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leveraging magnetism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The following press release was issued Sept. 1 by the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

In recent years, scientists have built methods to measure a cell’s transcriptome, or all the RNA produced by a cell, to study the cell’s identity and genetic activity. However, these methods rely on killing the cell to access the bits of RNA within, and offer only a one-time snapshot. 

Now, researchers at the Broad Institute and at MIT have invented a “cellular self-reporting” approach to make living cells share their own transcriptomes, so that scientists can analyze them without killing the cells. Described in Cell, the live cell transcriptomic method relies on virus-like particles, which the cells use to package and deliver RNA to the culture medium they’re bathed in. Scientists can simply sample the medium to isolate the RNA, and do this repeatedly to reveal how gene activity in the same cell population changes as the cells mature or respond to perturbations. The researchers applied their method to a variety of cellular model systems, demonstrating its potential to help reveal how cells go awry over time in disease and how drugs affect cells. 

“Our lab focuses our time and resources on developing tools that will actually get used and make real impact on the broader field,” says study senior author Paul Blainey, who is a core member of the Broad and a professor of biological engineering at MIT. “It’s so gratifying to see a real coming to fruition of this concept, which was complete science fiction when we started. It’s a great example of the innovative impact long-term high-risk, high-reward research can have.”

A cellular special delivery

The effort to build the new method began more than a decade ago, when the Blainey lab set out to find a new way to do RNA sequencing without killing cells. “The existing methods were a bit medieval and involved stabbing cells or cutting pieces off of them,” recalls Blainey. Inspired by the performance of molecular technologies such as CRISPR-based technology and their ease of adoption, Blainey and study first author Jacob Borrajo committed to developing a molecular method, which they knew would be challenging and take time, but would also make the approach scalable and easy for other labs to perform. 

The team found inspiration in retroviruses, which over millions of years evolved the ability to package their RNA genomes in protein shells to spread from one infected cell to another. To build their method, the team engineered mammalian cells to express a retroviral structural protein that can encapsulate not only viral RNA but also a cell’s RNA. Integrated into the cell’s membrane, the viral protein is able to recruit cellular RNA, form a shell around it to create a virus-like particle, and bud off from the membrane to enter the liquid medium around the cell. The scientists then take a sample of the medium, isolate the RNA, and sequence it to get a view of the transcriptome from that cell population — all without destroying or damaging the cells.

“Compared to methods using robotics or mechanical biopsies of cells, our molecularly encoded solution could be much more broadly enabling for the average life science or biomedical lab, particularly the time dynamic questions that we hope to elucidate with this technology,” says co-first author Mohamad Najia, research fellow in the Blainey lab and the lab of George Daley at Boston Children’s Hospital. Najia and Borrajo led the work along with co-first author Anna Le, a postdoc in the Blainey lab. 

Message in a bottle

To test the method’s broad applicability, the researchers showed that it worked in immortalized human cells, in cancer cell lines, in stem cells and neuronal cells made from them, and in primary cells from human donors. They also tested a culture of two human cell types growing together, using tags on the virus-like particles so that the signals from the two cell types could be distinguished during analysis. 

In addition, cellular self-reporting is useful for studying systems with crucial three-dimensional structures that researchers would rather not disturb. The team demonstrated their method on spheroids of human endothelial cells, capturing short-term transcriptional changes after biochemically stimulating the cells. 

They also collaborated with Linda Griffith, a professor of biological and mechanical engineering at MIT, to apply their method to her lab’s organ-on-a-chip devices. These models mimic the physiology of organs and can help minimize preclinical or animal model testing, but their complexity makes retrieving cells from the devices for analysis difficult. With cellular self-reporting, the researchers monitored gene expression dynamics in endothelial cells within the devices over time, revealing changes in genes related to how tissues form vascular networks that depended upon the source of supporting fibroblasts, such as from either uterus or lung. 

The Broad team is continuing to look for new applications and biological questions to ask with their system, and are working to make the approach feasible for studying single cells. For now, they hope that scientists interested in following how cells and tissues change over time will give their method a try.

For generations, the steel mills of Southeast Chicago offered work and a way of life, experienced by tens of thousands of families. Open around the clock, three shifts per day, the vast works of U.S. Steel, Republic Steel, Inland Steel, and many others provided demanding but steady jobs, while making materials to build the country. 

Professor Christine Walley, head of the MIT Anthropology program, grew up in the area, where her father worked for Wisconsin Steel. Over time, U.S. manufacturing downsized — her father’s plant closed in 1980 — and the mills left Chicago. Walley’s 2013 book, “Exit Zero: Family and Class in Postindustrial Chicago,” chronicles the economic and psychological toll plant closures took on the area’s workers and families. The book was followed by a documentary, “Exit Zero,” directed by Chris Boebel, media development director at MIT Open Learning (and Walley’s husband).

Then Walley turned to a new effort — the Southeast Chicago Archive and Storytelling Project, an online repository of objects and images, as well as new video features about the industry, labor history, and the local community. The project was  developed in collaboration with a team from the Southeast Chicago Historical Society, which in 1985 opened a museum about the steelworking life. This award-winning newer online project has been supported, in part, by MIT, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and others.

The idea is to use objects to tell stories about the area’s history. To mark Labor Day, MIT News offers this photo essay based on materials from the Southeast Chicago Archive and Storytelling Project, recognizing America’s workers — and reflecting on the jobs, work, and life produced by industry and innovation. 

It’s hard to depict the vastness of Southeast Chicago’s steel manufacturing area, which stretched for miles into Northwest Indiana and included mills that employed 120,000 workers at their peak. This vintage postcard shows the industry along the Calumet River. 

MIT’s 12th president, Howard Johnson, grew up in the area during the Great Depression, where family members toiled in the mills. Johnson’s father worked for U.S. Steel for 50 years, becoming a bookkeeper and accountant, and Johnson attended Bowen High School, which is still open today.

“Families — ours and thousands like it — were the essential centers of life in the community,” Johnson writes in his memoir, published by the MIT Press.

Families have also been essential to the Southeast Chicago Archive and Storytelling Project, which displays more than 1,100 items from the local historical museum’s collection: clothing, photos, scrapbooks, news clippings, recreational objects, oral history materials, and more. Walley says that anyone could take this approach, and use objects to tell stories about their own local history, work, and community life.

“People tend to experience history in their day-to-day lives not through books written by experts, but by telling stories around family objects and photos,” Walley says. “What is meaningful to us about the things we save from the past? Might these items be ‘clues’ that take us on a deeper historical journey?”

Kitty Kalwasinski Markovich (above, left) didn’t set out to become a welder — but as one, she nearly appeared the movies. Born Kazmira Kalwasinski, she immigrated with her family to Chicago from Poland in 1913, at age 10. During World War II, the steel mills sought replacements for men serving in the military, and she started welding at the South Works of U.S. Steel in Chicago. 

Warner Brothers depicted her in this photo shoot (with Florence Josephs, right), as a worker in the “Rosie the Riveter” mode, and considered making a film featuring her. Five of her brothers served in the military, and their names are seen on Markovich’s welding helmet. One of them, Frank Kalwasinski, was killed in World War II, and his sacrifice is represented by the solid star.

Although many American women returned to their former lives as homemakers at the conclusion of the war, Markovich kept working in the mills, welding for 23 years in the South Works before she retired in 1967. It’s also where she met her husband, Michael Markovich. Kitty Kalwasinski Markovich’s family donated many materials to the Southeast Chicago Archive and Storytelling Project. 

This hard hat, made around 1986, was donated to the Southeast Chicago Historical Museum along with a cutting from the last beam ever produced at U.S. Steel’s once-mighty South Works, which closed in 1992, having produced steel since the 1800s. 

At its peak, South Works employed about 20,000 people. The Chicago steel mill closures, the 1970s through the 1990s, devastated employees and their families who, as Walley details in the “Exit Zero” book, identified strongly with steelworking. Her own father was a third-generation steelworker.

The online storytelling project deploys MIT scholar Sherry Turkle’s notion of “evocative objects,” those that hold great resonance and get our minds in motion. As Turkle writes, “we love the objects we think with.” 

Donated to the museum by James Stapay, this hard hat evokes the end of a long industrial era in Chicago, and is featured in “The Closing of the Mills,” one of the project’s four documentary videos created from donated objects.

Working in steel mills was not just physically demanding, but dangerous. Worker injuries and deaths were a recognized problem, especially in the early years. This is prototype safety gear from around 1911-12, from a series of photo albums donated to the Southeast Chicago Historical Society by U.S. Steel itself in the 1980s. 

U.S. Steel set up a Committee of Safety early in the 1900s, which recommended 3,000 changes to operations. However, in oral history interviews, workers often recount continuing dangers and terrible accidents in the steel mills. 

Some first-person accounts state that as late as the 1960s, workers were still not regularly wearing hard hats. Basic safety practices seemed to improve, though, after the introduction of the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration in 1970. Worker safety was a long-term work in progress. 

Many of the close-knit communities formed around the mills have donated materials to the project that range far beyond the factory. For instance, family recreation was important in steelworks neighborhoods. Pictured here, in a photo donated by the Cordero family, is the “Mayas” softball team, made up of members of Southeast Chicago’s Mexican-American community, which won a 1937 community league championship.

Justino Cordero immigrated to Chicago in 1923, became a steelworker, then eventually did electrical work in the mills while opening a radio shop. Cordero, a father of three (two of his children are pictured), organized and coached youth sports teams to keep kids “out of trouble”; wrote a column for The Daily Calumet, a local newspaper; and was involved with his church, Our Lady of Guadalupe. After retirement, Cordero earned undergraduate and master’s degrees, to work with children with disabilities.

Another documentary video from the Southeast Chicago Archive and Storytelling Project, “Mexican-American Journeys,” explores the long history of Mexican-American steelworkers in Chicago, in many dimensions. At least a dozen parishoners of Our Lady of Guadalupe members who had been in the U.S. military in the 1960s were killed in the Vietnam War, serving their country. 

In 1937, steelworkers went on strike in Chicago. On Memorial Day, during a peaceful protest at Republic Steel, 10 workers were killed by law enforcement officials — an event that provoked congressional hearings in Washington. The image at left is a poster made up for Local 1033, the union branch for the Republic Steel plant; at right, Local 1033 workers take a vote in later years. 

While the so-called “Memorial Day Massacre” was a landmark event in national labor history, it is remembered in more intimate ways in the local area, with many families later donating photos, news clippings, scrapbooks, and interviews about it to the Southeast Chicago Historical Society. 

And though the Southeast Chicago Archive and Storytelling Project project focuses heavily on working-class employment and daily life, there are many other possibilities for U.S. community-based history, involving almost any topic. Whatever the places, objects, and stories, but the goal is the same: to keep the past alive. 

It started with a vision: Move MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P) into the Metropolitan Storage Warehouse, an unoccupied, fortress-like brick building on MIT’s campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

After all, SA+P needed more space and new facilities. And here, visible from its old offices across the street, was an unused building the size of an airplane hangar. It could offer bigger studios, more work areas, an auditorium, and galleries for events, and become a campus-wide hub for teaching, research, and public engagement. 

“MIT thrives on this idea that we’re all connected,” says Hashim Sarkis, dean of SA+P and a key proponent of the project.

But that vision required hundreds of design decisions: how to bring light into the building, create workspaces and circulation, encourage communication among the school’s populations, and more.

“The conception of the project was not like an automatic flash,” says Elizabeth Diller, founding partner at Diller Scofido + Renfro (DS+R), the architecture firm that was selected to revamp the Met Warehouse, as it’s now called.

“It was a very challenging building to work with,” says Benjamin Gilmartin, another DS+R partner. “There was a lot of innovation needed.”

Innovation is welcome at MIT, however. 

“They transformed the Met Warehouse toward the things we want, which is to do more collaborative work, and to combine instruction and research,” Sarkis says. 

Here’s how DS+R, working with MIT over several years, created the new Met Warehouse — which has a ceremonial moving-in procession on Sept. 8. 

Five buildings in one 

The Met Warehouse was built in several phases starting in 1894; by 1923 it was a five-story building with 2-foot-thick brick walls and 1,500 storage units inside. It was a fortress used for private storage, with the words “Metropolitan Storage Warehouse Fire Proof” painted on the side, visible from across the river in Boston. 

The structure was built in five segments, over time. That became crucial to its transformation. Diller and Gilmartin created a large design studio inside each of the segments. 

“When you start a project like this, there are some big moves that seem very clear and obvious,” Diller says. “There are five buildings that were built basically in succession, making for a 500-foot long building. That is just too big, so how do we break it up into neighborhoods? We decided each building itself would have a stack of floating studios in it.” 

That was essential for SA+P and the components of it that will use the building, such as the MIT Morningside Academy for Design, which was established through a $100 million gift from the Morningside Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the T.H. Chan family. This founding gift from family members Gerald and Beryl Chan and Ronnie and Barbara Chan included support for the Met Warehouse transformation. 

Each building segment features double-height, column-free studios which, thanks to virtuoso engineering, are suspended from roof trusses that bring the weight back down to the existing structure. 

Those spaces will benefit the interdisciplinary work taking place at MIT. 

“In those five spaces, we’re putting the making and the research together,” Sarkis says. “The studio and the lab will become one and the same.”

Bringing in light

For about a century, the Met Warehouse featured tiny window slits as its only apertures. That raised a question: How could natural light be brought inside? 

DS+R produced a dramatic answer, drawn from recent architectural history. Along the long north side of the Met Warehouse, adjacent to a set of railroad tracks, they carved large voids for the studios. Aligned with the studios, large segments of the brick exterior were replaced with glass facades.

This way, natural light pours into the studios and beyond, while occupants look out to a lively Cambridge cityscape.

“The process was like an extraction of the dense mass of the building to create open and light-filled space connecting all,” Diller says. 

Her aesthetic inspiration included the artist Gordon Matta-Clark, known for making bold cuts into New York City buildings in the 1970s. 

“Right from the beginning there was a nod to Gordon Matta-Clark,” Diller says, though she notes that Matta-Clark’s work consisted of building-scale interventions motivated by political and social critique. Whereas, “In our case, we use subtraction to build — to make space for new uses and to expose the anatomy of the building.” 

The living lab

To ensure the huge cuts and windows would work, MIT collaborated with DS+R, as well as Leers Weinzapfel Associates, the project’s associate architects, and Shawmut Design and Construction, to test slab cuts and window arrangements directly in the Met Warehouse itself.

“This hands-on approach allowed us to prove the design concepts through actual construction methodologies and logistics,” says Nicole Bernabei, a senior project manager for campus construction at MIT, who has worked on the Met Warehouse effort since 2018. 

Those slices into the building, needed to create the studios, revealed the Met Warehouse’s original structural features as cross-sections now appearing in walls. The designers envisioned those cuts as features to remain visible, something students can still learn from.

“For a school of architecture and planning, this approach feels especially fitting,” Bernabei says. “The building itself has become a teaching tool — a living laboratory where students, faculty, staff, and visitors experience how rigorous design thinking translates into a built reality. Every detail, from the celebrated slab edges to the transformative light, tells the story of collaboration and precision.”

And while those issues were being addressed, the architects had to grapple with, well, everything else. 

Asymmetry inside

There is another reason the architects placed the huge glass walls on the north side of the Met Warehouse. The Cambridge Historical Commission (CHC) asked MIT to keep the building’s south and east sides essentially intact. The long south facade, the one historically visible from Boston, was particularly significant.

“Changing the building’s surface there [on the north side], bringing in the large glass, wouldn’t impact the character of the building as it would on the south side,” Diller says. For that reason, in the interior, “the big spaces drift to the north.” 

The architects placed smaller spaces, like offices, on the south side. 

“The fabric of the existing Met Warehouse building, with its column grids, offered a lot of opportunities for more serialized smaller spaces where you can have seminars, faculty offices, teaching spaces, research areas, next to and in dialogue with the larger multistory spaces that we introduced,” Gilmartin says. 

So, the Met Warehouse is asymmetric inside: big studios extending from the north side, across much of the building; and smaller rooms on the south side.

It was not obvious how to bring more light into the south-side rooms, however. But an extended dialogue between DS+R, MIT, and the CHC produced an “intersect window” strategy — box frame windows sometimes intersecting with the small apertures already on the south side. The steel frames of the new windows, now at a proper height for looking out, distribute the weight of the brick and stone sills once carried by the solid brick that was removed. 

“This meeting of the old and new satisfied the Cambridge Historical Commission’s desire for a minimal touch, but also created an unexpected and delightfully playful effect on the south facade,” says Morgan Pinney MArch ’10, a senior campus planner at MIT. The project, she adds, “allowed us to step into an exceptionally collaborative working relationship with CHC staff — one MIT is very proud of and will certainly continue to build upon for years to come.”

The unusual layout grants a centrality to the studio areas while ensuring that a full range of other spaces are wrapped around them. 

“The logic of the building is that making things is in the middle,” says Sarkis, referring to the studio spaces. “This is MIT. There is making and research in the studios, with seminar rooms and offices all around.” Referring to the school motto, “mens et manus,” he adds, “That’s our culture. MIT is about mind and hand.” 

Still, Sarkis and the architects wanted another element inside, too: interior passages connecting it all.   

Extending the Infinite Corridor

MIT’s main group of buildings features the Infinite Corridor, a busy walkway spanning one-sixth of a mile indoors, linking many other spaces. MIT leaders thought the Met Warehouse could extend the concept. 

“We conceived of it as having an ‘Infinite Corridor,’” says Sarkis, who hoped the corridor would be “visible and accessible all the way through.”

Diller, the architect behind New York City’s High Line, which turned elevated railroad tracks into a wildly popular urban park, knows about getting people walking. She wanted Met Warehouse occupants to “share a circulation system.”

And so every floor of the Met Warehouse has its own “infinite” corridor. Some overlook studio space one floor down, with the cityscape beyond, echoing High Line atmospherics. The off-center circulation spine connects the large studios on the north side and the offices at the south edge of the building. Being flexible about that placement allowed the whole Met Warehouse plan to work. 

“That helps create the space for the large studios,” says John Ochsendorf, director of the MIT Morningside Academy for Design. Besides, he offers, “There’s a happy alignment between historical protection of the south facade, and where the sun is in the sky most of the year. You don’t want direct sunlight on the south side” — where glass walls would create a greenhouse effect — “and the city wanted to protect that view. The architects found this balance.”

A vertical vision

Meanwhile, the architects designed large stairs that pierce through the corridors, helping people access all floors of the building. 

“We didn’t want a layering of the building with horizontal stratification,” Gilmartin says. The stairs will provide “moments of serendipity and exchange with other people.”

The first time Gilmartin drafted stairs for the building, they were “more blade-like and expressive formally” than the final version. But MIT asked for a stripped-down sensibility, so Gilmartin made the design “almost as simple as it could be.”

The stairs still have expansive scope and meeting-place potential.

“That central spine stair is sort of a ceremonial stair,” Diller says. “To see and be seen. I think it will be lively.”

Culture change

The Met Warehouse is very different from the previous quarters of SA+P, a warren of rooms in MIT’s buildings 7 and 9. Many peer institutions have design studios that place all students in a large common space. Not MIT, which has had a different culture, with smaller, specialized design spaces.

Now, the Met Warehouse does feature larger and more visible design areas. 

“We’re trying to give the school the ability to adapt it and change it, and balance the past culture of MIT and a new culture with kinds of spaces where ideas can cross-pollinate and there’s a lot of room for large-scale experimentation,” Gilmartin says. 

Design practice is becoming bigger across MIT, and as more people connect with it, the Met Warehouse will let MIT evolve. 

Gilmartin again: “There’s just a lot of opportunity for smaller groupings of people to be organized in ways that are visible and connected to the larger spaces, but also offer the prospect of a retreat and focused work. I think it is hopefully attuned very well to MIT.” 

The shock of the rebuilt 

It’s unusual to move a major architecture school into an old building. Some of the best-known U.S. universities house their architecture schools in buildings with high-modernist stylings or postwar brutalist aesthetics, heavy on concrete, light on graceful curves. 

“Those buildings come out of the modernist tradition predicated on the shock of the new,” Gilmartin says. “There was something confrontational about those buildings in their material expression and image, and spatial ideas of openness and flexibility, which was quite different from most historic buildings. In their time, they were pretty thrilling.” 

But as the saying goes, that was then, and this is now. 

“The reality of our future is that we can’t tear everything down and build new for every generation,” Gilmartin says. The Met Warehouse “makes a claim about the future of design and what the orientation of that needs to be, in our work,” he adds. 

MIT agrees. 

“I think it sends a very good message that this vanguard school of architecture, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is moving into a historic building and adapting it for the future,” Sarkis has said. 

Along with the Morningside Foundation, another key project donor was Sidara (formerly the Dar Group), a global collaborative of specialist design, engineering, and consulting firms, owned by Maha and Talal Shair; they have supported the creation of the building’s Sidara Auditorium and Sidara Gallery space.

Adaptive re-use 

Ultimately, DS+R was ideal for the Met Warehouse project because of their experience transforming structures. Besides the High Line, they transformed a London media center built for the 2012 Olympics into the Victoria and Albert Museum’s new open storage facility, the V&A East Storehouse.

Diller suggests the key is being pragmatic.

“When you have a building that is that thick, that heavy, that present, sometimes it’s more expensive to demolish it than to invent a way of reusing it,” she says.

Besides, she adds, “Because it’s an architecture school, it’s important that the students understand adaptive reuse firsthand, as we share a planet with limited resources. It’s a good thing to repurpose buildings, to change their program, to update their innards where possible, rather than just preserving them in formaldehyde — or destroying them and taking away the character of a city.”

The Met Warehouse was old, is new again, and is ready for the MIT community to make it their own.

“Very often contemporary buildings are so sanitized and clinical, you don’t feel like you can touch anything,” Diller says. “It doesn’t feel like home. Here, we wanted students to feel uninhibited — a place that would feel like home.”

The MIT School of Architecture and Planning recognized 11 faculty members with promotions for their significant contributions to the school, effective July 1, 2026. Four faculty promotions are in the Department of Architecture, three are in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), and four are in the program in Media Arts and Sciences.

“These individuals offer the MIT community creativity, knowledge, and scholarship that is exhilarating,” says Hashim Sarkis, dean of the School of Architecture and Planning. “Collectively, they add considerable strength to our faculty and research capacity.” 

Department of Architecture

Xavi Aguirre has been promoted to associate professor without tenure. Aguirre is also director of DIS-ASSEMBLIES LAB, where his work focuses on learning from and designing for when architectures come apart. Through building (and unbuilding) projects, product development, and research, he considers our relationship to material and commodity circulations, both technically and culturally. Aguirre’s work has been commissioned by the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Industry Opera Co., MOCA Geffen, and Dartmouth College, among others. He is the is founder/director of the design studio stock-a-studio.

Rosalyne Shieh has been promoted to associate professor without tenure. Shieh is an architect based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Her work engages places at the intersection of material culture, oral history, and postcolonial identity; architectural projects are processes for thinking-with-site, and design is the extension and invention from the ordinary. Shieh has worked for Stan Allen Architect, ARO, and Abalos & Herreros, and was formerly co-director of the collaborative practice Schaum/Shieh. She is co-author of “Blanking: An Annotated Archive of Projects and Thoughts on Architecture” (Park Books, 2025). 

Nida Sinnokrot has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. Sinnokrot is an artist and educator whose work explores how various forms of power and bias are embedded in dominant narrative structures and attendant articulations of time and space. Working across film, video, photography, sculpture, installation, and agriculture, Sinnokrot seeks to expose and cannibalize — through tactile, tactical, and material acts of technical and conceptual detournement — various technologies of control that give rise to shifting social, political, and environmental instabilities. He is a co-founder of Sakiya, an international residency program and research platform in the West Bank village of Ein Qinya. His recent solo shows include “Nida Sinnokrot” at Kunst-Station Sankt Peter, Cologne (2019-20) and “Expand Extract Repent Repeat” at Carlier | Gebauer in Berlin (2018-19).

Kristel Smentek has been promoted to full professor. Smentek is a historian of 18-century European art with specializations in histories of the graphic and decorative arts in their transcultural contexts, the history of collecting, and European encounters with Asia. Smentek has received fellowships and awards from a host of organizations including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In her current book project, “Disorient: Arts from China in Eighteenth-Century France,” Smentek analyzes European engagements with Asian imports in the 18th century and their impact on continental art and aesthetic theory. Smentek is also active as a curator. Most recently, she was co-curator of the exhibition “Dare to Know: Prints and Drawings in the Age of Enlightenment,” which examined the constitutive role of works on paper in the propagation of European Enlightenment ideals and blind spots, and a contributor to and co-editor of its accompanying catalog (Harvard Art Museums, 2022).

Department of Urban Studies and Planning

Jason Jackson has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. Jackson is an associate professor of political economy and director of the Political Economy Lab. His research focuses on the relationship between states and markets, particularly the role of economic ideas and moral beliefs in shaping market institutions under modern capitalism. Empirically, his work focuses on contexts ranging from the role of economic nationalism in industrial development to the rise of the digital “platform” economy and urban mobility markets in contemporary cities in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Jackson is the author of “Traders, Speculators and Captains of Industry: How Capitalist Legitimacy Shaped Foreign Investment Policy in India” (Harvard University Press, 2025) and “Constructing Economic Nationalisms in Brazil and India” (Cambridge University Press, 2026).

Justin Steil has been promoted to full professor. Steil is professor of law and urban planning and a Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellow. As Academic Curriculum Committee faculty chair, he leads a new faculty committee for the MIT Center for Real Estate and the Master of Science in Real Estate Development program, bringing together faculty from across the school to shape the future of the curriculum. As a lawyer, a paramedic, and an urban planner, Steil’s research focuses on spatial dimensions of inequality. Steil analyzes spatial inequality in the domains of environmental justice, housing and land use policies, and health equity, among others. Recent research focuses on the effects of neighborhoods on health, on mobility risk, and on the role of emergency medical services in advancing health equity. 

Sarah Williams has been promoted to full professor. Williams, the Norman B. (1938) and Muriel Leventhal professor of architecture and planning, is the director of the Civic Data Design Lab and director of the Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism. Williams combines her training in computation and design to create communication strategies that expose urban policy issues to broad audiences and create civic change, a process she calls Data Action. Williams is co-founder and developer of Envelope.city, a web-based software product that visualizes and allows users to modify zoning in New York City. In her book “Data Action: Using Data for Public Good” (The MIT Press, 2022), Williams provides a guide for working with data in more ethical and responsible ways.  

Program in Media Arts and Sciences

Fadel Adib has been promoted to full professor. Founding director of the Signal Kinetics research group, Adib holds a joint appointment in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He has spent his career expanding the frontiers of wireless sensing, developing technologies that locate hidden objects, navigate indoor environments, and detect contaminants in food and water. Since receiving tenure in 2022, his group has integrated generative AI with wireless vision, enabling robots to interact with objects blocked entirely from view. His spinoff, Cartesian Systems, is now deployed in more than 700 stores across 55 countries. Adib was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2024 and received the Great Arab Minds Award in Engineering and Technology in 2023.

Canan Dağdeviren has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. Dağdeviren is the founder and director of the Conformable Decoders research group and has built a research program around the idea that the human body continuously produces coded physical patterns — through motion, pressure, sound, electrical activity, and biochemical change — that carefully designed materials and devices can decode to improve human health. Her group develops technologies that bend and conform to the body, including a wearable ultrasound breast patch for more frequent and accessible cancer screening, and ImPULS, an implantable piezoelectric ultrasound stimulator for deep brain stimulation. Dağdeviren also serves as faculty lead of the MIT Media Lab's WHx Women's Health Program, which this year became an official program of the MIT HEALS Initiative — a significant institutional recognition of her commitment to addressing longstanding gaps in women's health through bold, cross-disciplinary research.

Kevin Esvelt has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. Esvelt, who leads the Sculpting Evolution research group, invents new ways to study and influence the evolution of ecosystems, addressing some of humanity's most difficult ecological and public health challenges with a commitment to openness and humility. His community-driven “Mice Against Ticks” project, featured in a landmark 60 Minutes segment last year, is engineering Lyme-immune mice on Nantucket, Massachusetts to stop the disease at its source. He has also emerged as one of the nation's leading voices on biosecurity, with research exposing the dangers of AI systems capable of generating biological weapons information — highlighted by The New York Times in April — and a Policy Forum piece in Science on mirror life that has advanced critical public conversations about the governance of emerging biotechnologies. His work on CRISPR gene drives, RoboPace, and “daisy drives” has reshaped global conversations about the future of evolution.

Danielle Wood has been promoted to associate professor with tenure. Wood, the founding director of the Space Enabled research group, has spent her career proving that satellite technology can be a powerful instrument for justice on earth. Holding a joint appointment in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and serving as MIT's faculty lead for African and African Diaspora Studies, Wood has developed the EVDT framework — Environment-Vulnerability-Decision-Technology — a systems approach applied successfully in countries including Ghana, Angola, and Brazil. Her impact extends well beyond the MIT Media Lab: She received the 2026 Paul Gray Faculty Award for Public Service and the 2025 Letten Prize, and has served multiple times as a private sector advisor to the U.S. Delegation to the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space.

Vice Provost for International Activities Duane Boning oversees MIT’s international policies and engagements. Here he discusses why international engagement remains vital to MIT’s mission of advancing knowledge, educating students, and innovating to serve the nation and the world.

Q: Why does MIT consider international engagement important to its institutional mission?

A: International engagement is an integral part of what makes MIT strong. It allows us to collaborate with excellent partners, access facilities and research environments unavailable at home, monitor and learn from worldwide progress, and remain closely connected to the world of ideas and innovation.

MIT’s mission is to advance knowledge, educate students, and develop innovations that serve the nation and the world. To do those things well, we have to understand — and help shape — the global landscape of science and technology.

Today’s breakthroughs don’t emerge in isolation. Scientific talent, research facilities, and technological advances are distributed across the world. To ensure that we remain at the forefront of discovery and innovation, we need to know what is happening beyond our borders, collaborate where it serves our mission, and prepare our students to compete in a changing world.

That does not mean engagement without limits. We are open to international collaboration and global talent paired with sensible, risk-based safeguards. We welcome international collaboration where it advances our educational and research mission, while applying rigorous safeguards to protect sensitive research, intellectual property, and national security.

The world is already deeply interconnected, and we believe that thoughtful engagement makes us stronger.

Q: How does engaging this way benefit MIT and the nation?

A: International collaboration is central to keeping MIT and our graduates at the forefront of knowledge and innovation in the 21st century. 

Collaboration is vital to attracting, retaining, and educating the leaders of tomorrow — students, faculty, and researchers from both the United States and around the world — and to feeding MIT's innovative and entrepreneurial spirit. 

Frankly, throughout its history, MIT has flourished in part because of its capacity to attract the world’s very best students, faculty, and researchers — many of whom remain permanent contributors in the United States. These individuals have gone on to teach, deliver breakthroughs, and create American startups.

International partnerships also give MIT researchers access to things that aren’t readily accessible in the United States. For example, MIT researchers working in Singapore were able to test autonomous vehicle technologies years before suitable facilities were widely available domestically. Off the coast of Portugal, MIT researchers are now partnering to develop the next generation of deep-ocean monitoring systems in offshore environments that don’t exist here. The knowledge and insights gained in such settings benefit everything we do.

Q: How is MIT adapting to a changing and more uncertain world?

A: Our mission to serve the nation and the world remains steadfast, but we acknowledge that the world has changed. MIT has rigorous processes for evaluating and mitigating potential risk associated with international engagements in a thoughtful and thorough way, allowing the Institute to engage appropriately in new opportunities when and where possible.

Global collaboration still plays an essential role in advancing research, education, and innovation. But we recognize the challenges of operating within a rapidly shifting environment marked by geopolitical uncertainty, evolving federal funding priorities, regulatory complexity, policy shifts limiting international mobility, and competition for global talent and collaborations.

On the research front, we seek to cultivate relationships across industry, government, and the global alumni community. On education and student experience, we recognize that the United States benefits when American students understand the world around them. It expands opportunities for both undergraduate and graduate students to gain international experience while strengthening relationships with trusted partners and maintaining the flexibility to adapt as global conditions change.

While MIT’s global engagement is partly built on long-standing relationships that have delivered meaningful outcomes for students and researchers, today’s volatile landscape calls for forward-thinking cultivation of new relationships around the world. By investing in new regions, MIT will be better positioned to adapt to changing global circumstances. 

International engagement enables MIT to deepen its impact, strengthen innovation, and enable students and researchers to take part in tackling the world’s most pressing challenges.

MIT Assistant Professor Thomas Rose, an expert in ancient metallurgy, passed away on Sept. 2 due to injuries sustained during a bicycle accident in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The incident, currently under investigation, occurred at the intersection of Memorial Drive and Massachusetts Avenue. Rose was 37.

Rose, who was MIT’s POSCO Professor of Materials Science and a member of MIT’s Center for Materials Research in Archaeology (CMRAE), joined MIT in January of this year and was still putting the finishing touches on his laboratory. But he had already endeared himself to colleagues and students by going the extra mile in mentorship, encouraging others to use his new equipment, and even using a portion of his lab startup funds on things the department needed.

“Everyone can look at his papers and his past and understand why he was such a good fit here technically,” Senior Lecturer Michael Tarkanian says. “But in the time he was here, it was even more impressive how likable, friendly, and open he was. He was everything you could have asked for as a colleague and a person. I thought, ‘What luck to be able to work with this person for the rest of my career.’ He was that good.”

Rose was born in Berlin, Germany. He discovered his life’s passion as a child, through a set of books about ancient Egypt.

“Thomas had a strong interest in archaeology already from a young age and participated in an excavation before he began his studies of archaeology,” Katrin Westner of the Deutsches Bergbau Museum Bochum and Professor Sabine Klein of the Ruhr University of Bochum wrote in a joint email tribute. “He was an incredibly inspired and enthusiastic researcher and was always bursting with new research ideas. We remember Thomas not only as a brilliant and dedicated researcher but also as a very close friend. We miss him deeply.”

Rose received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Goethe University Frankfurt and earned his PhD in archaeology through a joint doctoral program at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel and Sapienza University of Rome in Italy. Before coming to MIT, Rose held research and coordination roles in Germany at the Deutsches Bergbau Museum Bochum and Goethe University Frankfurt.

Rose’s research focused on ancient metallurgy and pyrotechnology that shaped early human societies, including how copper and its alloys were produced, transformed, and circulated.

The work integrated geochemistry, mineralogy, experimental archaeology, and materials science, making Rose an excellent fit in MIT’s tight-knit CMRAE group, which merges materials science with archaeology.

“The field of archaeometallurgy is unique,” explains Professor Polina Anikeeva, head of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. “We had been looking for a faculty with the right skill set for at least 20 years. We needed someone who was world class in archaeology and materials science. We were looking for a unicorn, and we found him.”

Following the announcement of Rose’s hiring, a group from CMRAE traveled to a conference in Italy and heard from scholars based around the world about how lucky they were to have him.

“Thomas was an exceptionally talented and versatile scientist,” says University of Tuebingen Professor Silvia Amicone. “His ability to bring together archaeology, archaeometallurgy, geoscience, and materials science was remarkable. He was also committed to developing digital tools and promoting open, accessible, and reusable archaeological data. This combination of scientific rigor, methodological creativity, and engagement with broader archaeological questions made his work especially valuable. I was always impressed by Thomas’s brilliant intellect, collegial spirit, enthusiasm, and dedication to his work. Above all, he was a genuinely kind and good person.”

Rose had never taught before coming to MIT, but he was excited to begin his first courses this fall. His lab’s first batch of graduate researchers just arrived at MIT, but Rose had already begun mentoring students.

“He was the kindest person you could meet,” says Assistant Professor Tania Lopez-Silva, whose office was close to Rose’s. “He was always smiling. He really cared about his students, and he had a lot of momentum here. He was here first thing in the morning and late into the night.”

Several colleagues recalled the energy and enthusiasm he brought to work.

“He was so excited every day,” Anikeeva says. “Every day was a dream come true for Thomas. He was at the right place at the right time. He was so excited to collaborate and learn. He felt like he got his dream job, and everything he’d ever imagined was about to happen. It’s an unrealized vision.”

Tarkanian had recently restarted weekly meetings among researchers in CMRAE, which Rose attended consistently. Forging connections was a theme of Rose’s career.

“He had a long reach with both young and established scholars, and he inspired his friends and colleagues to show up,” says postdoc Benjamin Sabatini. “His work in archaeometry was paramount, and it showed in the people who gathered around him.”

Rose was also the co-founder of the Young Researchers in Archaeometry workshop, which brought together early-career researchers from around the world to present work and connect.

“Since [its founding], he accompanied every year’s workshop organizing meeting, always with immense kindness and support, making a lasting impact on each of us,” researchers Sinem Haciosmanoglu and Baptiste Solard wrote together in an email. “He was an exceptionally talented and dedicated researcher. Even at an early stage of his career, he brought new ideas and perspectives to the field. For many of us, he also played an important role in bringing together all fields of archaeological sciences, natural sciences, and cultural heritage.”

Outside of research, Rose was fond of rowing on the Charles River and was an avid member of MIT’s Archery Club. He loved manga Japanese comics and dancing. Lopez-Silva described Rose as humble and sometimes reserved, but on a recent recruitment outing with students, he fully committed himself to a very memorable karaoke performance.

“The students loved him,” Tarkanian says. “You could see that he cared about them, and they cared about him. He was going to be that kind of mentor.”

The field of silicon photonics, which uses light rather than electricity to transmit and process data on semiconductor chips, has enabled optical systems to evolve from bulky setups to compact and advanced systems. Typically, however, these silicon-photonics chips are rigid and opaque.

MIT scientists have now figured out a scalable way to make silicon-photonics chips flexible and transparent, opening a route to advanced microchips that could be used in applications such as discreet health monitors that conform to the body or transparent augmented-reality displays that fit the curve of a pilot’s helmet.

While scientists have recently performed lab demonstrations of chips that were flexible or transparent, they could only fabricate a few devices at a time.

The MIT researchers, in close collaboration with engineers at NY Creates at the Albany NanoTech Complex, created a fabrication process that uses standard semiconductor manufacturing techniques to generate flexible and transparent silicon-photonics chips on large-scale wafers.

To validate this platform, the researchers bent a single chip thousands of times around cylinders with various diameters — down to the width of a small screw — with no drop in performance. They also determined that looking through the chips would not cause much haze or distortion. 

“We’ve now developed a wafer-scale process that produces wafers that are mechanically flexible and optically transparent, enabling novel applications that weren’t previously possible with silicon photonics. We hope that, by working closely with our colleagues at NY Creates and using the foundry at the Albany NanoTech Complex, there’s the potential for us to make the platform accessible to other groups within our research community and open these new application areas to the field of silicon photonics as a whole,” says Jelena Notaros, the Robert J. Shillman Career Development Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at MIT, a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics, and senior author of a paper on this fabrication platform.

Her co-authors include lead author Tal Sneh and Andres Garcia Coleto, EECS graduate students; Thomas Dyer and Kevin Fealey of the New York Center for Research, Economic Advancement, Technology, Engineering, and Science (NY Creates); and Milica Notaros PhD ’23. The paper appears in the journal Optica.

Flexible and transparent

Over the past decade, researchers have developed techniques to fabricate precise and highly reliable silicon-photonics devices at scale. 

They use advanced microelectronics foundry processes to produce 300-millimeter-diameter wafers with billions of nanoscale optical devices. But these methods yield silicon-photonics chips that are rigid and opaque.

“We realized that there are a lot of applications that would benefit from having a chip that is flexible and transparent,” Notaros says.

Scientists have previously made single silicon-photonics chips that were either transparent or flexible, but these techniques weren’t scalable. To address this scaling challenge, Notaros’ group recently demonstrated a foundry-scale process for making silicon-photonics chips on a flexible substrate.

Now, the team pushed these innovations even farther with a scalable process that produces 300-millimeter silicon-photonics wafers that are both transparent and flexible. 

Their fabrication process begins as if they were making a traditional, rigid silicon wafer. The researchers carefully deposit and pattern tiny optical wires known as waveguides onto this rigid silicon substrate. 

Then they bond a temporary silicon wafer on top. They flip the wafer over and remove all of the original silicon substrate from what is now the top of the wafer. They are then left with a flat layer of material with a thickness less than a tenth of a human hair.

“Thanks to the fact that we added that rigid temporary support before we flipped the wafer over, we can go all the way down so we are just left with the oxide and waveguiding layers,” Sneh says.

They use an adhesive to stick a thin, transparent polyester film on top of these ultrathin layers and “de-bond” the temporary silicon wafer from the bottom to remove it. 

This leaves them with a flexible, transparent wafer only a few microns thick that contains the oxide and waveguide layers needed to capture and transport light for silicon photonics.

“Because we are using stable 300-millimeter foundry fabrication tools, we can design systems with a very large number of devices and feel confident that they are going to perform up to specifications, which is extremely important,” Sneh adds.

The biggest challenge in developing this fabrication process was removing enough material from a large 300-millimeter-diameter silicon wafer to leave only a few microns of material behind.

During fabrication, stress on the wafer typically causes it to bow slightly, making this silicon removal process especially challenging. 

“As we were flipping the wafers over on these substrates, if the strain isn’t properly managed and the wafer isn’t perfectly flat, it is going to get ripples across its surface or even shatter in the fabrication line,” Dyer says.

The researchers carefully managed that stress by sticking to low temperature processes at or below 500 degrees Celsius.

They also had to find the right ordering and combination of removal methods. 

They used industrial processes to thin the silicon layer, but switched to a more precise selective chemical etch for the last bit. This ensured they would not damage the ultrathin layers left behind.

An eye on performance

The researchers performed three experiments to test different functionalities of these flexible, transparent silicon-photonics wafers.

First, they tested the optical performance of chips with integrated waveguides of different lengths to determine their waveguiding properties. 

Then they tested flexibility by bending a chip thousands of times around cylinders with different diameters. These experiments showed no degradation in performance even when they bent it around a cylinder about the size of a small screw. The device didn’t start to degrade until the researchers bent it around a toothpick several times.

“This experiment validated that the platform can be used for our proposed applications, performing even well beyond the metrics required for these intended systems,” Garcia Coleto says.

They also evaluated transparency by setting up a bionic eye and testing whether the chip would distort the user’s vision when placed in front of the eye. They found that the chip causes only minimal haze for the viewer and would not noticeably distort images the eye perceives when looking through it.

These characteristics could make these chips especially well-suited for enabling silicon-photonics systems for applications like curved augmented-reality displays that conform to a heads-up-display windshield or airplane pilot’s visor. In a pilot’s visor, for instance, such an augmented-reality display could replace the heavy bulk-optical systems that currently provide real-time information to help the pilot react to dangerous conditions.

In the future, the researchers want to add more complex components and functionality to the chips as they move toward enabling these and other new applications. They also want to refine the design to further improve waveguide efficiency and boost transparency performance.

This research was funded, in part, by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and a MathWorks Fellowship. Wafer processing was performed at NY Creates, and chip dicing was conducted at MIT.nano.

Researchers from MIT have designed a new qubit architecture that enables qubits to interact with each other much more quickly while remaining very stable. This advance could someday help scientists build practical quantum computers that can run long, complex algorithms with high accuracy.

Qubits, which are the building blocks of a quantum computer, usually only store data and rely on other electronics to perform operations and communicate. But qubits are so fragile and error-prone that it is difficult for scientists to connect enough qubits before they lose their information and need to be reset.

The MIT team designed a dual-purpose qubit with two separate parts: one component that stores data and one component that interacts with other qubits and electronics. This design improves the reliability of the qubit and enables it to operate with a reduced error rate, so it can perform more computations in the same time span.

Their simulations indicate that this new qubit architecture could allow significantly faster and higher-fidelity operations than existing designs. 

While this research is still in its early days, it holds the potential to help scientists build large-scale, useful quantum computers that can solve real problems which are too difficult for traditional supercomputers to handle.

“This work feels like a big step. It is a new architecture that shows how much these systems can be engineered. We have taken two ideas and put them together in a way that can help us accomplish this qubit codesign that we are looking for, creating a pretty rare combination of the things we need to do quantum error correction,” says Alec Yen, who earned his electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) PhD this spring and is co-author of a paper describing the new architecture.

He is joined on the paper by lead author Jeremy Kline, an EECS graduate student; Stanley Chen, an MIT undergraduate; and senior author Kevin O’Brien, an associate professor in EECS and principal investigator in the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE). The work appears in Physical Review Applied.

A dual-purpose qubit

Just like the bits in a classical computer, quantum bits store information. But unlike classical bits, quantum bits have very short lifespans and can break down quickly when scientists connect them to make a quantum computer.

This degradation, known as decoherence, introduces errors in computations that rapidly build up, derailing long calculations before they are complete.

“The goal for doing all this is to build a fault-tolerant quantum computer where you can correct these errors as they happen, so then you can do long computations and actually do useful things with a quantum computer,” O’Brien explains.

To make qubits more reliable, the MIT researchers developed a new design that includes two separate but connected components: one which stores data and one which interacts with every other part of the quantum circuit.

This interaction component is like an arm that reaches out to other parts of the system, so the researchers call their design the “arm qubit.”

“It is engineered for these two, dual purposes — accomplished together by the data mode and arm mode — and these two goals really matter when you try to do quantum error correction,” Yen says.

Essentially, their design combines two different types of qubits. To make the data mode, they use one popular qubit design which has been known to have a very long lifespan, or coherence. 

The arm mode utilizes a different design that exhibits very strong interactions with other components such as a resonator, which is an electronic component that allows for readout of quantum computations. Readout is the process of measuring a quantum system’s state and translating it into a classical value.

The key to this new architecture is a special coupling unit the researchers previously developed, which they used to connect the data mode and the arm mode. 

Stronger coupling

Normally, coupling the modes together could cause unwanted interactions between them that would build up as more qubits are linked to the system. 

One way to avoid this mixing is to use a technique called nonlinear coupling, which occurs when two components are linked in such a way that changing the state of one causes the other to change in response. Nonlinear coupling is essential for running most quantum algorithms.

The special device the researchers used, known as a quarton coupler, enables very strong nonlinear coupling between the data mode and arm mode, which significantly reduces unwanted mixing. This coupling allows the qubit to perform operations faster before it decoheres.

“By dedicating the ‘arm’ component to coupling, we were able make a design that is scalable, robust to manufacturing errors, and still uses a quarton coupler to achieve strong nonlinear coupling,” Kline says.

When they tested the design in simulations, the arm qubit outperformed other superconducting qubit architectures by yielding state-of-the-art coherence time as well as faster operations and readout. 

The speed and reliability of this new architecture may accelerate quantum error correction, which is an important step in making quantum computers practical.

From here, the researchers plan to work toward fabricating the arm qubit so they can further study its properties and capabilities and integrate it into real quantum systems. 

“This work leaves me with a lot of suspense because our simulations are very promising. Next, we’ll need to see if we can make it, and determine whether we missed anything in the modeling or design. If we can fabricate this qubit, it could be a building block for future error-correcting quantum computers,” O’Brien says.

This work is funded, in part, by the Army Research Office, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, a Doc Bedard Fellowship from the MIT Center for Quantum Engineering and the Laboratory for Physical Sciences. 

Each year, farmers around the world spend $80 billion on pesticides for their crops. Those pesticides impact not only harmful insects but also bees and beneficial bacteria in the soil. They can also run off into waterways and harm the environment. And, they are increasingly being linked to human diseases like Parkinson’s and cancer.

Amid growing awareness of those problems, pesticides made from living microbes are gaining popularity. Unfortunately, such microbial pesticides are often less effective, forcing farmers to choose between potential environmental damage and higher crop yields.

Now, Robigo is equipping naturally occurring microbes with more potent pest-fighting capabilities. The company, which was co-founded by Andee Wallace PhD ’20, uses technologies more commonly associated with medical applications, like RNA interference and CRISPR, to engineer self-replicating microbes that target plant pathogens more precisely than chemical pesticides and more effectively than other biologically based solutions.

“Chemical pesticides have been a cornerstone of agricultural production for the past 70 years, to the point that it’s nearly impossible to envision an agricultural system without them,” Wallace says. “But that’s the long-term vision we have: providing growers new tools to enable a food system that is in balance with the environment, and that is productive, resilient, and safe.”

In field trials across five states, the company has already shown its microbes offer comparable results to chemical pesticides. In one trial comparing Robigo’s product with another commercial microbial product last summer, Robigo’s system led to a 250 percent increase in crop yield.

“Many crops, like lettuce, are harvested by hand, and the grower told me if a disease reduces yield even by just 25 percent, it’s not economical for them to pay workers to harvest the field at all,” Wallace says. “Growers are just trying to produce enough food to feed everyone. That’s why they use pesticides in the first place. We’re trying to give them a better choice.”

Engineered biology for agriculture

Wallace did her PhD in the lab of Chris Voigt, MIT’s Daniel I.C. Wang Professor and the head of the Department of Biological Engineering. She joined the lab after working at Bolt Threads, a startup spun out of the Voigt lab that was designing a material for the fashion industry inspired by spider silk.

“I came into MIT knowing that I wanted to join Voigt’s lab,” Wallace says. “I was really enamored with biomaterials in general. There are so many examples of animals and organisms that make incredible materials that we humans can’t replicate.”

Wallace’s PhD focused on engineering microbes in an attempt to replicate intricate glass nanostructures produced by single-cell algae called diatoms.

Wallace enjoyed her startup experience and explored entrepreneurship throughout her time at MIT. But it wasn’t until after graduation that she reconnected with two MIT students, Jai Padmakumar PhD ’23 and Connor Sweeney ’21, and decided to start her own company.

The founders’ initial idea was to engineer microbes to deliver CRISPR to target and kill bacteria that are harmful to crops. They used a number of MIT resources to get the company off the ground, including the Venture Mentoring Service, MIT Sandbox, delta v, and the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition. Sweeney was involved in the venture for about a year. Padmakumar left Robigo in 2022.

Today Robigo is addressing a problem of growing importance to the agriculture industry.

“Chemical pesticides are under incredible pressures: increasing scrutiny from consumers and regulators, and increasing pesticide resistance among pests, diseases, and weeds,” Wallace explains. “Over the past 40 years, only two new herbicide chemistry modes of action have been commercialized, so people are understandably worried. If we can’t develop new solutions, resistance is only going to grow and will leave growers without effective tools to protect their crops. I think biotechnology has the potential to solve that problem.”

Farmers hope so, too: In an attempt to address environmental and health concerns, they have increasingly turned to so-called biological pesticide solutions, which are mostly made from natural sources like plant extracts, microbe-derived natural products, and increasingly biotechnology solutions like peptides and RNA.

“They are safer and better for the environment, but currently they just don’t perform as well or as reliably as synthetic chemistry pesticides, so there’s a big distrust among growers,” Wallace says. “Growers are being asked to choose between high performance or safety and sustainability. Robigo is trying to solve that problem by giving them products that do both.”

Robigo’s ARGO biotechnology platform combines synthetic biology and proprietary computational design processes to engineer microbes that perform at a similar level to chemical pesticides, but with improved safety profiles for people and the planet. A key part of that approach is leveraging microbes’ self-replicating abilities to continuously produce and deliver bioactive molecules in the field over the course of the growing season.

The company has moved in recent years from delivering CRISPR to RNA-interference, or RNAi, which inhibits key functions in the pathogens they want to target.

Robigo also differs from other microbial pesticide companies in its approach. Wallace says other companies screen to discover new microbes with the properties they want, then cultivate those for sprays and other modes of applications. But these specialized microbes may not be able to thrive in, say, the microbiome of California farm soil where they’re needed. That means they may die off soon after being deployed. Robigo, conversely, focuses on equipping robust, industry-proven microbes with the ability to target specific pests and diseases.

“Our starting point is ‘What crops will this be used for? and ‘What diseases do we want to control?’” Wallace says. “To design safer products, we need to be direct in how we’re designing RNAi to target different diseases. Another layer of our technology is what we call RNAi stacking, where we combine multiple RNAi into a single microbe to broaden the spectrum of pathogens we can control with a single product.”

Lab to farm to table

Last year, Robigo ran field trials for its two lead products, with soybeans and lettuce across the U.S. Midwest and West. Working with third-party testing companies, they showed a single application of their microbes offered protection for crops over the entire growing season and matched the performance of the leading chemical pesticide at a fraction of the cost. 

“That’s very unusual for biological products, and even many chemical products, so we’re really optimistic about engineered microbes being a new solution that disrupts the conventional chemical pesticide paradigm,” Wallace says.

Wallace says Robigo is expanding fourfold this year and plans to expand even faster next year with the help of major agrochemical companies interested in more sustainable solutions. The company is also partnering to expand to other crops as it helps farmers around the world.

“There are a lot of opportunities we’re excited about, and we’re working with a number of partners as we scale,” Wallace says. “Over the past nine months, we’ve systematically used our ARGO platform to tackle new opportunities, and we have a number of products in the pipeline we’re working to bring to growers around the world.”

How do you build something that lasts? For MIT Assistant Professor Iwnetim "Tim" Abate, the answer is the same whether he’s reimagining how the materials beneath our feet can store energy and manufacture essential chemicals, or mentoring MIT’s future researchers: focus on the foundation.

Rocks provide an unexpected thread connecting Abate’s research and his approach to mentorship. His research brings together electrochemistry, materials science, and Earth sciences to explore how the materials that make up our planet can be harnessed to address some of society’s most pressing challenges in energy and sustainable manufacturing.

In one line of inquiry, his group uses Earth-abundant elements found in rocks, such as manganese and iron, to develop high-energy, low-cost, and more sustainable batteries. In another, they are exploring how the Earth’s subsurface itself could function as a chemical factory. By harnessing naturally reactive rocks, geothermal heat, and injected fluids, they seek to pioneer new ways of producing valuable fuels and chemicals underground, with lower external energy requirements and emissions than conventional industrial processes.

Although batteries and subsurface chemical manufacturing operate at vastly different scales, they share a common philosophy: understanding the intrinsic chemistry of Earth’s materials deeply enough to harness it for useful transformations.

While Abate's research spans a broad range of scientific disciplines, his approach to mentorship is guided by a simple principle: helping students lay the groundwork for their careers after graduate school. Rather than measuring success solely through publications or technical accomplishments, he strives to equip students with the scientific skills, resilience, curiosity, and perspective needed to navigate any path their career may take.

"I often think about mentorship through the image of a rock," Abate explains. "A structure built on rock can withstand storms and the test of time. In the same way, I believe the most important role of a mentor is not simply to help students complete a project or publish papers, but to help them build a strong foundation."

Abate puts this philosophy into practice through his investment in his students' growth as researchers, professionals, and individuals.

In celebration of his exemplary mentorship, Abate has been recognized through MIT's Committed to Caring initiative, a student-driven program that honors graduate mentors who foster supportive and inclusive research environments.

Building holistic relationships

Students often arrive at graduate school with different ambitions. Whether they hope to pursue academia, industry, entrepreneurship, or public service, Abate begins by learning about each person's long-term goals.

Each time a new student joins his group, he meets with them individually to discuss their aspirations and helps tailor aspects of their PhD experience accordingly. Students say these conversations continue throughout their time in the lab, with regular one-on-one meetings focused on both research progress and career development, homing in on their opportunities beyond MIT.

For students interested in entrepreneurship, Abate leverages his own network, introducing them to venture capital firms, philanthropic organizations, and collaborators working across academia and industry. He encourages his students to pursue internships, recognizing that experiences outside the university can strengthen both their research perspective and their future careers.

Students also emphasize his ability to connect them with the expertise they need to push research forward. Whether facilitating access to specialized instrumentation or identifying researchers with complementary knowledge, Abate actively builds the relationships that allow his students and their projects to thrive.

Despite leading a growing research group while balancing teaching responsibilities and launching a startup, nominators wrote that Abate "consistently [shows] up for his students."

He makes time for individual chats with students, subgroup discussions, and weekly lab meetings, all while actively seeking their perspectives on research challenges. "Tim is often curious [to hear] our point of view on research problems and actively looks for our feedback," reflected one nominator. 

This openness creates a synergistic environment where students are encouraged to help shape the direction of the group's work.

Creating space for ambitious ideas

Innovation, Abate believes, depends on more than technical expertise.

"Students need to know that it is OK to pursue ideas that may not work, and that setbacks are part of discovery, rather than signs of failure," he says. "My goal is to create an environment where ambitious ideas are welcomed, careful thinking is valued, and students know they have someone who believes in them through both successes and disappointments."

Students say this philosophy is reflected in the way that Abate approaches advising. Rather than directing every decision, he encourages them to think independently, remaining available whenever guidance is needed. His vast professional network often becomes an extension of that mentorship, opening doors to partnerships and expertise that help students tackle increasingly ambitious research questions.

This commitment to building strong foundations extends beyond his own research group. Since graduate school, Abate has worked to expand access to STEM education through his nonprofit Sci-Fro, which supports educational outreach across Africa. He has also contributed to broader efforts to strengthen scientific infrastructure and research institutions across the continent. 

For Abate, these efforts reflect the same philosophy that guides his mentorship: lasting scientific progress depends not only on individual discoveries, but also on investing in people, communities, and institutions that enable future generations of scientists to thrive.

Supporting the person behind the PhD

Abate regularly checks in during one-on-one meetings, asking how his students are doing and what support they need. He believes these conversations are an essential part of advising.

"Graduate school is one of the most formative periods of a person's life," he says. "While research is important, I don't think success should come at the expense of health, relationships, or personal growth."

He encourages students to build lives that remain meaningful beyond the laboratory, recognizing that the habits, friendships, and perspectives developed during graduate school often shape them just as much as their scientific accomplishments.

Through steady guidance, meaningful connections, and genuine care for each student's well-being, Abate demonstrates a passion for developing exceptional researchers.

"I hope they leave MIT with a strong foundation — both scientifically and personally — that enables them to navigate future challenges, lead with integrity, and build fulfilling lives wherever their careers take them."

The experience of transitioning from research based in theory to focusing on real-world application can vary significantly for different researchers. However, for two former MIT graduate students and a former postdoc, all now at IBM, working with the MIT-IBM Computing Research Lab (formerly the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab) during their formative years enabled them to not only close the gap between education and employment, but also to generate ideas promising to business impact. 

Despite pursuing varied careers in quantum machine learning, reinforcement learning and artificial intelligence agents,and trustworthy and fair AI, respectively, Srinivasan Arunachalam, Zhang-Wei Hong PhD ’25, and Irene Ko PhD ’24 have consistently found ways to tackle problems defined by novelty and rigor, and translate them to systems with real constraints. Here, the MIT-IBM Computing Research Lab served as a conduit for research relationship building and the flow of their expertise to industry applications.

“Among all the industrial labs, I think MIT-IBM has way better academic collaboration policy and opportunity [than the others],” says Hong, an IBM research staff member with the MIT-IBM Computing Research Lab who began his PhD at MIT in 2020 in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS).

Hong has been captivated with reinforcement learning since discovering that DeepMind could play Atari and learn from raw screen pixels via feature engineering. During his graduate work with EECS Associate Professor Pulkit Agrawal, who is also a principal investigator with the lab, Hong sought to build on this: improving value function learning for reinforcement learning in video games, using “Montezuma’s Revenge” in Atari, in order to predict and optimize the policy performance of an agent. With the lab, Hong developed techniques to ground AI for more realistic applications and provide better reward feedback, which he applied to domains such as robotics, large language models (LLMs), and reinforcement learning for science. 

“I’m very excited about curiosity-driven exploration,” says Hong of the MIT-IBM graduate work that helped propel him into his profession. This, he says, allows agents to be inquisitive about new data, like humans, and perform a variety of tasks — from generating test cases to stress-test LLMs to exploring new environments. Now, as a mentor for students of his own, Hong continues to pursue similar lines of open-ended reinforcement learning research, leading him to investigate test-time training for agents and foundation models, and develop infrastructure for IBM’s agentic framework for enterprise tasks like chart reading and tool calling for database queries. This includes evolutionary computing to drive better optimization for exploration and leveraging neuroscience to inform deployment time model improvement. 

“If successful, I think that it would be a very useful system and framework for all of the practitioners in reinforcement learning, because it will be the first framework that enables a model to improve — self-evolve their model weights online at a deployment time,” says Hong.

Irene Ko’s research has also been value-driven, from a personal and professional standpoint. “I started to work [on trustworthy AI] with IBM researchers from day 1 in my PhD, because it was funded by MIT-IBM,” says Ko. This, she says, was particularly advantageous since her goals to develop frontier-safe, robust, accurate, and fair AI also align with that of MIT and IBM, closing the gap between development and real-world deployment. “That really strikes a balance between pure research and something that’s of industry standard or value.” 

Further, her MIT-IBM collaboration through her advisor in EECS, Joseph F. and Nancy P. Keithley Professor Luca Daniel, and IBM Principal Research Scientist Pin-Yu Chen, helped define the direction and parameters of her work to maximize impact, first in neural networks and later with foundation models and LLMs. After graduating in 2024, Ko joined IBM Research to continue her work on trustworthy AI as a research scientist. 

“The reason I chose to go into industry after my PhD, and IBM specifically, is that I found great joy in the collaboration during my PhD. That process, those five years, gave me very high rewards in personal fulfillment,” says Ko. “I wanted to continue the momentum.” 

Her current project focuses on finding pain points in current trustworthy methods that are not widely deployed in AI inference platforms. Unlike using low-rank adapters, which add extra steps to monitor and modify model behavior, her work on vLLM Hook provides a way to access internal model signals, like hidden states or activations, for decoding LLMs. This vector acts on transformer modules to analyze safety scores, such as identifying the likelihood of prompt-injection and hallucination. Here, Ko has developed a lightweight vLLM inference engine plugin framework to program the model internals that could provide significant cost savings over other methods. “I’m very proud of this project because this is really, as far as we know, the first bridge between the deployment and development in trustworthy AI with the inference engines.”

While Srinivasan Arunachalam has always dabbled in quantum research, he constantly explores other areas of theory, seeking to find quantum insights and deep math in unexpected lines of inquiry and papers. “Right off the bat, you don’t see it. You think, maybe this is just a vanilla problem, and then once you start investigating it further, you find some really interesting math that comes out of it, which I think is pretty cool,” he says. 

This drew Arunachalam to MIT as a postdoc in 2018 in the group of Professor Aram Harrow in the Department of Physics. With a learning theory-first perspective, Arunachalam looked for target algorithms, subroutines, and circuits where quantum speed-ups might be possible. Conversations with Isaac Chuang, the Julius A. Stratton Professor in Electrical Engineering and Physics and an MIT-IBM PI, led him to collaborate with the lab and IBM researcher Kristan Temme. 

With a seamless transition to IBM, Arunachalam more closely involved himself with problems that are potentially implementable on a near-term quantum device, keeping in mind constraints like nearest-neighbor architecture, noise, and simpler observable measurements. During this time, Arunachalam focused on quantum machine learning and areas where quantum computing would be superior to classical computing, increasingly prioritizing provability grounded in theory to heuristics. That MIT-IBM connection helped turn theoretical questions into concrete research directions, shaping work that culminated in two prominent papers: one on Hamiltonian learning, which gave rigorous guarantees for learning the dynamics of quantum systems, and another on quantum kernels, which provided theoretical evidence that quantum feature spaces can offer advantages over classical kernels under widely believed hardness assumptions.

Arunachalam also continued to expand his knowledge base by pouring himself into different branches of computer science to uncover structure in problems others may have missed. “One thing which I’ve been a huge fan of is exposing connections between different fields.” This has allowed him to explore learning quantum states — from completely classically simulatable quantum objects to the extremely complicated quantum objects.

Although Hong, Arunachalam, and Ko navigate different domains, they share an instinct: to move ideas across the space between what is possible in principle and what is useful in practice. In their own way, each is applying knowledge gained from collaborations, like that of MIT-IBM Computing Research Lab, to develop “killer applications” — a real-world use case that proves the underlying research can matter beyond the lab.

Self-driving cars are often controlled by deep learning models that sometimes fail in unexpected situations. For instance, the car might inexplicably brake and block the path of an oncoming emergency vehicle. A human driver or passenger may need to react rapidly to prevent a collision.

To help humans better anticipate a vehicle’s mistakes, researchers from MIT and autonomous vehicle technology company Motional developed a new method that provides clear explanations of the underlying model’s decisions.

Usually, the internal reasoning process of a deep learning model is opaque and difficult to understand. But the new method, called the Concept-Wrapper Network (CW-Net), translates that reasoning process into concepts that faithfully describe the autonomous vehicle’s decisions without altering its driving performance.

CW-Net explains the decisions of machine learning-based planners using understandable concepts, like “approaching stopped vehicle” or “close to cyclist.” These explanations can correct misconceptions drivers and passengers have about vehicle behavior and improve their situational awareness.

In road tests on a private track, CW-Net explanations helped safety drivers more accurately predict vehicle behavior; a larger simulation study with nonexpert users yielded similar results. These experiments show how CW-Net can provide important feedback for engineers as they troubleshoot in-vehicle artificial intelligence systems. In the longer term, this technique could boost the safety and transparency of autonomous vehicles, while building appropriate trust in drivers and passengers.

“This work shows how explanations are supportive to the human’s mental model and understanding of the behavior of a system, and how it could be used in engineering and development to improve the technology,” says Julie Shah, an MIT professor of aeronautics and astronautics, director of the Interactive Robotics Group in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), and co-senior author of the paper on CW-Net. “Unless we are building these technologies in a way that we can rely on and predict their behavior, then it is a shaky and unsafe foundation for their use.”

She is joined on the paper by lead author Eoin Kenny, a former MIT postdoc who is now a senior AI researcher at J.P. Morgan Chase; co-senior author Momchil Tomov, a staff research scientist at Motional; as well as Motional team members Akshay Dharmavaram, Sang Uk Lee, Tung Phan-Minh, Shreyas Rajesh, Yunqing Hu, and Laura Major, president and CEO of Motional. The research appears today in Nature.

Faithful explanations

Machine-learning-based planners act as the “brain” of a self-driving car. These powerful deep-learning architectures process data from the vehicle’s cameras and lidar sensors, generate a high-level summary of the vehicle’s environment, decide what the car should do next, and output a trajectory for it to follow.

The planners are usually black-box models, which means their internal decision-making process is so complex it is difficult to understand. This can leave scientists and safety drivers in the dark about why an autonomous vehicle made an unexpected decision, like phantom braking.

The researchers designed CW-Net to explain a vehicle’s decisions using understandable concepts, while ensuring those explanations accurately reflect the true reasons behind its behavior. 

“Especially in high-stakes settings like self-driving cars, it’s important that the explanations are not potentially misleading. Because CW-Net is causally faithful in how it makes decisions, that provides certain guarantees around the explanations,” Kenny says.

CW-Net is a “concept classifier,” an AI algorithm that has been trained to predict the high-level concepts that exist within input data. The researchers plug the CW-Net module into the middle of an autonomous vehicle’s existing machine-learning planner architecture.

It translates the model’s internal reasoning process into understandable concepts, like “approaching stopped vehicle” or “close to cyclist.” Then it forces the final piece of the planning model architecture to use those concepts when it decides what the vehicle should do next. In this way, CW-Net ensures the concepts faithfully explain the vehicle’s actions. 

At the same time, CW-Net uses the concepts it classified to generate clear explanations that are output along with the vehicle trajectory, in real-time.

“Instead of just wondering why the car stopped, having real-time data provides feedback that lets you test the system during deployment. You could also give that data to an engineer to potentially improve the system,” Kenny says. 

The researchers trained CW-Net to predict concepts using a dataset of 130 million examples of scenes from self-driving cars, with multiple labeled concepts in each scene. Using such a large, labeled dataset enables it to identify concepts accurately in a wide range of settings.

They also designed CW-Net to mimic the driving decisions of machine-learning-based planners, so the module would not negatively impact vehicle performance.

In the end, CW-Net generates accurate, understandable explanations without altering the original deep learning model.

Improving situational awareness

To test CW-Net, the researchers deployed the module on a real autonomous driving test vehicle (a Motional robotaxi) on a private track with a safety driver. They found that CW-Net helped the safety driver better predict how the vehicle would behave in surprising situations.

For instance, the vehicle consistently stopped when it approached a cyclist, and the safety driver assumed it did so because it detected that cyclist. But CW-Net explanations revealed that the model wasn’t properly configured to detect the cyclist and chose a trajectory that would have caused a collision. Instead, it stopped because its emergency braking procedure kicked in when it got too close.

Armed with this information about the model’s mistake, the safety driver could reduce speed or engage manual driving mode sooner in similar situations. This could also help engineers fix the model to avoid this failure in the future.

In larger online simulation studies using real driving situations captured on the roads of Las Vegas, the researchers saw similar results. CW-Net explanations significantly improved participants’ abilities to predict how an autonomous vehicle will behave.

In the future, the researchers could extend CW-Net so the module can cover more concepts and explore different training and design techniques that could boost performance and improve interpretability.

“Our study shows how crucial interpretability can be to these high-stakes environments, and how it should be on the mind of people as they are making AI in the future, for self-driving cars or other safety-critical environments,” Kenny says.

Neutrinos are the pervasive yet intangible particles that permeate the universe, streaming through whole planets, stars, and our bodies by the trillions each second. The elementary particles are often described as “ghostly” for their near-zero mass and their elusive nature, as they have very little interaction with normal matter. 

Since their discovery in 1956, neutrinos have continued to surprise physicists with their unexpected properties and behaviors. For instance, the particles come in multiple “flavors” and can morph from one to the other like subatomic shape-shifters. Neutrinos may also be their own anti-particle, in a Jekyll-and-Hyde-like quantum duality. And their extremely weak interactions make them nearly impossible to detect.  

Last year, scientists seemed to add to the particle’s mystique, with a concept for a neutrino laser. They proposed that a concentrated beam of neutrinos could be produced by cooling a cloud of radioactive atoms to nanokelvin temperatures, one-billionth the temperature of interstellar space. Slowed to a near-frozen crawl, the atoms would form a Bose-Einstein condensate and should act as one quantum, coherent whole, in a way that speeds up and amplifies their radioactive decay. The physicists assumed that neutrinos, being a natural byproduct of radioactive decay, should also be amplified, and that such a process should emit a laser-like beam of the ghostly particles. 

But work by MIT physicists has now shown that the neutrino laser concept, and a similar proposal for gamma-rays, is impossible. In two companion papers appearing today in Physical Review Letters, Wolfgang Ketterle, the John D. MacArthur Professor of Physics at MIT, together with postdocs Hanzhen Lin and Yu-Kun Lu, presents a two-part analysis that demonstrates both concepts are physically and fundamentally not possible. More specifically, they have shown that the neutrino laser concept is flawed, due to “recoil” (as in, the kinetic energy created by the reaction), and due to a neutrino’s fundamental “fermionic” nature. 

“These two papers are sort of punch one and punch two,” Ketterle says. “Each paper would have killed the proposal.”

MIT professor of physics Joe Formaggio, who put forth the neutrino laser proposal with Ben Jones, who at the time was associate professor of physics at the University of Texas at Arlington, sees the new results as a convincing and constructive challenge. 

“When a new idea — such as the one we proposed — is shared, it is the duty of the community to scrutinize it. Such is the scientific process,” Formaggio says. “Indeed, it was great to see how our paper generated a lot of thinking outside of our original concept. We suspect that will continue.”

A quantum amplifier

The proposal for a neutrino laser was based on the idea of “superradiance” — a quantum, amplifying effect that had only been observed for photons. 

One form of superradiance occurs when a cloud of atoms is cooled to near absolute zero, at which point an atom’s motion is determined not by thermal effects, but purely by quantum uncertainty. In this state of near standstill, which is known as a “Bose-Einstein condensate,” (BEC) the atoms move in sync, as a quantumly correlated whole. 

If photons are pumped into the condensate as a laser beam, the atoms synchronize to scatter the photons back out, in the exact same direction. In contrast, a cloud of atoms at room temperature would simply scatter the photons in random directions, generating, at best, a soft glow. As photons scatter off atoms, the atoms should in turn “recoil,” as if they were physically pushed backward from the impact. In a BEC, because the atoms recoil in sync, the rate at which they scatter photons, in the same direction, grows exponentially. This amplifying effect results in a “superradiant” laser of photons, which scientists have observed. 

In their proposal, Formaggio and Jones, who is now at the University of Manchester, suggested that the same superradiant effect could be possible for radioactive atoms, which naturally emit neutrinos as they decay. If a cloud of radioactive atoms were cooled to form a Bose-Einstein condensate, a similar amplifying effect should kick in and generate a concentrated beam of neutrinos as the atoms decay in sync. To illustrate their point, they outlined a scenario in which a cloud of radioactive rubidium atoms, once cooled into a BEC, would accelerate its radioactive decay, from a half-life of 86 days, to one minute.

No one has ever produced a BEC from radioactive atoms. But if it could be done, then the quantum state should, in theory, produce a neutrino laser. 

Instant recoil

For Ketterle, the idea seemed too good to be true. Ketterle is the leading expert on Bose-Einstein condensates, which he co-discovered in 1995, and for which he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001. He and his group at MIT have revealed many surprising properties in Bose-Einstein condensates and other ultracold matter, where the energy of atoms is at their lowest.

“My experience has always been that the condensate can do marvelous things at low energy — superfluidity, vortices — and if you were to speak in a room filled with condensate, it would take one hour for you to hear my voice. That’s how slow the condensate is,” Ketterle says. “And I had always come to the conclusion that for anything violent, like nuclear reactions, the condensate would not do anything.”

Compared to visible photons, which have an energy of 1 electron volt, neutrinos are naturally emitted as atoms decay, with a million times more energy. When a neutrino blasts out from an atom, the emission should cause the atom in turn to recoil a million times more strongly than for visible photons. 

“As long as the recoil atom stays in the condensate, it can make the condensate superradiant,” Ketterle says. “But when a neutrino is emitted at a million electronvolts, the atom recoils at velocities equivalent to Mach 10, faster than a fighter jet. This is so fast that the atom would almost instantly disappear.”

Even so, the neutrino laser proposal assumed that the escaped atom should leave a sort of quantum imprint in the condensate, which tells the condensate as a whole to emit future neutrinos in the same exact, laser-like direction.

But in the first of two new papers, Ketterle and his team show through a theoretical analysis that this is not the case. They considered a model that describes superradiance. This model determines the conditions that would lead to superradiance of photons. Ketterle applied the model to the case of radioactive atoms and neutrinos, taking into account the range of energies at which the particles are emitted, as well as the resulting recoil of the decaying atom and the dynamics of the condensate throughout. 

These calculations showed that, in every scenario the team considered, superradiance was not possible. The atom simply recoiled too fast for any quantum imprint to build up. It was as if the condensate instantly loses the “memory” of the neutrino emitted, and therefore would continue emitting neutrinos as atoms normally would, without enhancement.

An anti-memory

In their second paper, the MIT researchers showed that in addition to being impossible due to a physical recoil effect, the concept of a neutrino laser is flawed due to the fundamental nature of neutrinos. 

They found that even if a recoiling atom were to leave a quantum imprint in the condensate, the imprint would not be of what to emit next, but rather, what not to emit. In other words, the memory of the emitted neutrino would tell the condensate to emit the next neutrino in any other direction, preventing the buildup of a directional neutrino beam. The researchers showed that this opposing memory, or “anti-correlation,” is due to the fact that a neutrino is, fundamentally, a fermion. 

Fermions and bosons are the two fundamental classes of particles that make up all the matter in the universe. Bosons are particles with whole-integer spins, such as photons. In contrast, fermions, such as electrons and neutrinos, have half-integer spins. Whether a particle has a whole or half integer spin determines how it interacts at a quantum level with other particles. 

“In superradiance, it is about a memory effect, or quantum correlations in the condensate. And in that context, people had thought that whatever is emitted from the condensate, it doesn’t matter if it is a boson or a fermion,” Ketterle explains. “But we analyzed it, and if you describe it correctly for emitted fermions, you get an anti-memory, which makes the condensate not accelerate in a superradiant form. It rather has the memory to not do it.”

Ketterle, Formaggio, and Jones have met on numerous occasions to talk through the original neutrino laser proposal, and Ketterle’s challenge to it.

“I suspect that someday, someone will do the experiment,” Formaggio says. “Nature, as always, is the final arbiter of such things. And here I would be remiss to not point out that every prior prediction about neutrinos has been wrong. The one thing about neutrinos that never surprises physicists is that they never fail to surprise.”

In part, Ketterle agrees: 

“Creative ideas and discussions among scientists are needed to uncover nature’s surprises,” he says. “But in the case of neutrino lasers, the surprise was too good to be true.”

This research is supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation, the Center for Ultracold Atoms, the Vannevar-Bush Faculty Fellowship, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and the U.S. Army Research Office.

Walter Torous, senior lecturer in the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) and the MIT Sloan School of Management, and director of the Master of Science in Real Estate Development Program (MSRED), was recently named executive director of the MIT Center for Real Estate (CRE) — effective July 1, 2026.

In announcing Torous’ appointment, School of Architecture and Planning Dean Hashim Sarkis also said that Justin Steil, professor of law and urban planning, will represent CRE as faculty chair of the Academic Curriculum Council.

“Together, Walter and Justin will guide CRE’s academic and strategic direction as it continues to strengthen its role within our school and the Institute,” Sarkis said. “Their appointments reflect the center’s distinctive position at the intersection of finance, design, planning, technology, and public policy — and its long-standing commitment to understanding real estate not only as a market force, but also as a driver of urban transformation and social change.”

As executive director, Torous will lead the CRE’s teaching, consortium activities, fundraising, and major events, while continuing to direct the MSRED program. He will also oversee the center’s staff, budget, and strategic direction, and work closely with Steil on the continuing evolution of CRE’s academic programs and industry engagement.

His appointment as executive director follows the tenure of STL Champion Professor Siqi Zheng, who served as CRE faculty director from July 2020 to June 2026.

Before coming to MIT in 2013, Torous was a professor at the Anderson School of Management at the University of California at Los Angeles and founding director of its Ziman Center for Real Estate. In addition to those positions, he also has held faculty appointments at the University of Michigan and the London Business School.

“Since joining MIT, Walter has played an important role in the growth and development of the MSRED program, educating generations of students in real estate finance and mortgage securitization,” Sarkis says. 

“Real estate, both commercial and residential, is undergoing a tremendous change in the U.S., as well as in Europe and Asia,” Torous says. “Demographic changes, as an aging population stays longer in their homes, are creating an imbalance in residential real estate markets. New technologies and work from home are buffeting commercial real estate. Retail is changing.  We’re in a period of turmoil, and I view the center’s role as being primarily to educate the next generation of leaders, especially in technology and financial markets, which are becoming ever more important to the functioning of real estate assets and markets. That requires that we train our students to be very facile with technology, so that they’re not affected by the ebbs and flows of changes, can maintain a strong career trajectory, and be stewards of the real estate industry going forward.” 

For this reason, he would like to see the MSRED curriculum expand beyond DUSP to add more content from architecture, civil and environmental engineering, the Media Lab, MIT Sloan, and other areas of the Institute. 

Torous also wants to more fully engage the 1,200-plus alumni from the center’s 43 years educating graduate students.

“A lot of our alums have assumed important positions in the real estate industry around the world,” he says. “In terms of training the next generation of real estate leaders, there’s a lot that we can learn from the industry leaders we’ve already produced.”

An economist and expert in the financial aspects of real estate known for his empirical studies of derivatives, options, mortgages, and other debt instruments, Torous’ research interests include the reorganization of financially distressed firms and statistical issues in finance.

His recent research has focused on better understanding why homeowners default on their mortgages. He is also interested in the application of machine learning to investigate how the dynamics of the U.S. commercial office market changed with the Covid-19 pandemic, and the lessons developers can learn about the new office market landscape. This research reflects the growing importance of AI and large language models to every aspect of real estate decision-making. Because of this, the MSRED curriculum now includes a class on AI and real estate, and Torous and Steil plan to add other, similar offerings.

“It’s important going forward that we focus on all aspects of real estate,” he says. “I look forward to working with Justin to create a curriculum that goes across the Institute and that will prepare CRE students to be leaders in the field.”

A new theory, published in The Journal of Neuroscience by three scientists in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT, offers an explanation of how the brain produces cognition and consciousness: It uses traveling waves of rhythmic neural activity to coordinate nimble neural networks with analog computations. 

The metaphor that the brain operates with “circuits” is incomplete, says Picower Professor Earl K. Miller, the paper’s senior author. Indubitably, the brain’s physically connected circuits provide the infrastructure to store our memories and represent our ongoing needs and goals. But when we need to make improvised use of that knowledge in the rapid-fire, anything-goes sensory context the world constantly throws our way, we can’t just depend on the relatively slow chemical process of rewiring those circuit connections called “synapses,” he says. 

Instead, the brain needs a control system that can coordinate millions of neurons to process information in a fraction of a second. Brain waves, long understood to be the synchronized rhythmic fluctuations of large groups of neurons, turn out to be performing that crucial service, Miller and his colleagues argue, citing years of experimental evidence from his lab and many others.

“Circuits and synapses are important and fundamental, that’s the start. But there is more going on,” says Miller, a member of MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences faculty. “The brain generates waves, and wave dynamics are a highly efficient way to coordinate and perform computation.”

While digital circuits make calculations one step at a time through sequential switches and gates, analog computation, which can be performed via the interference of waves, processes multiple calculations in parallel. That’s not only more efficient, but also locally focused traveling waves happen to be a ubiquitous feature of the brain, the scientists note.

“The brain exploits its own physics,” wrote Miller and co-authors Scott L. Brincat and Jefferson E. Roy, who are research scientists in Miller’s lab.

The new theory is important not only because it provides an explanation of cognition and consciousness, but also because it asserts the potential importance of considering waves in clinical treatment. Conveniently, waves can be manipulated non-invasively.

“Developing treatments based on brain wave dynamics is not just an opportunity, but also an obligation,” says Miller, whose lab is part of a collaboration studying brain waves in autism.

Building the analog argument

To make the case that the brain uses waves to coordinate neurons to produce cognition and consciousness, the scientists begin with the now well-established observation that many neurons don’t just do one job. Instead, they respond to multiple cues and contexts, essentially participating in multiple functional networks at once, a property called “mixed selectivity.” Miller and colleagues have argued for years that this gives the brain immense computational horsepower, but it also initially raised the question of how the brain organizes these multiple overlapping networks with such speed and flexibility to produce the nimble thought we all depend on.

After numerous studies, the answer that has emerged for Miller and many other neuroscientists is that brain waves organize neural ensembles to process information. Miller has shown that brain waves of different frequencies govern cognitive processes such as working memory and predictive coding. Relatively slow “alpha” and “beta” frequency waves, representing memories and goals, regulate faster frequency “gamma” waves, which represent and report incoming sensory information.

The new theory posits that these alpha/beta control waves emerge from the coordinated spiking of neurons in circuits (connected at junctions called “synapses”) that encode stored memories and goals. 

“Synapses store representations, while wave dynamics help determine which representations are active at any given time,” the authors wrote.

In some of the Miller lab’s newer research, the team has found evidence that even as waves emerge from neural spiking, the waves can rapidly grow to directly influence and coordinate spiking via an electric field-mediated process called ephaptic coupling. Importantly, electric fields can exert this coordinating influence very rapidly.

Another essential component of the theory, which Miller’s lab has also shown experimentally, is that alpha/beta waves are capable of exerting their control spatially, by affecting local areas of the cortex, and temporally, by traveling along the cortex. Essentially, the beta waves act as mobile stencils that govern where and when gamma waves can process sensory information and which ensembles of neurons will participate. Taken together, this suggests that the brain engages in “spatiotemporal computing,” the authors write. And where the waves intersect, they can add and subtract, enabling analog computations.

Miller acknowledges that his lab’s next step should be to provide direct evidence that the analog computations are taking place.

“This is a theory. We aim to test it by looking for signatures of analog computation in brain wave patterns,” Miller says. 

Connection to consciousness

The article asserts that consciousness “emerges when these dynamic wave patterns bring the cortex in an organized, globally integrated state, one that naturally links and influences widespread activity.”

Some of the most compelling evidence linking wave dynamics to consciousness comes from studies of general anesthesia that Miller has conducted with Picower Institute colleague Emery N. Brown, who is an Institute professor at MIT, an anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, and a professor in Harvard Medical School. Their labs have shown that three different drugs, each with different molecular mechanisms of action, all similarly disrupt brain wave dynamics to produce unconsciousness.

“Consciousness depends less on specific receptors or cell types and more on the integrity of large-scale wave organization,” the authors write in the review.

In other words, much like cognition, consciousness depends on how the brain efficiently organizes itself with brain waves.

“Electric field dynamics offer a low-overhead substrate for organizing and coordinating information across cortical networks,” they conclude. “Given strong evolutionary pressure to maximize computation per unit energy, it would be surprising if evolution did not exploit such a built-in analog computing substrate.”

The Freedom Together Foundation, The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, the U.S. Army Research Office, the U.S. Office of Naval Research, a MURI grant, the National Institutes of Health, and the Simons Center for the Social Brain supported the research.

A region of the brain called the striatum is critical for many cognitive and motor functions, including decision-making, control of movement, habit formation, and processing of reward. It also plays a role in addiction and is significantly affected by Huntington’s disease, schizophrenia, and other disorders.

In work that could help scientists devise new treatments for those diseases, MIT researchers have generated a new atlas of the neurons found within the striatum. Using single-cell RNA sequencing and other techniques, they were able to identify 31 subgroups of neurons based on which genes they express.

These groups include neurons that are involved in addiction, depression, and schizophrenia. The researchers also discovered why some neurons of the striatum are more vulnerable to Huntington’s disease. All of these results, the researchers say, could help scientists develop new drugs to combat these conditions.

“We see this as the foundation that will allow more studies in our Huntington’s disease and opioid use disorder projects. We needed a roadmap of what is there,” says Myriam Heiman, the Picower Professor of Neuroscience and director of MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory.

Heiman; Manolis Kellis, a professor of computer science in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and a member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard; and Dana Gabuzda, a principal investigator at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and a professor of neurology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, are the senior authors of the study, which appears today in Cell. MIT postdoc Raleigh Linville and MIT graduate student Benjamin James are the paper’s lead authors.

Mapping the striatum

The striatum, located deep within the brain, receives diverse inputs from the cortex, midbrain, hippocampus, and other regions, which it uses to coordinate planning, movement, and decision-making, as well as processing reward. In this study, the researchers focused on the most populous cell type in the striatum, a type of inhibitory neuron called the medium spiny neuron, which responds to dopamine.

Most of these medium spiny neurons belong to either the direct pathway, which helps to promote movement, or the indirect pathway, which suppresses unwanted movements. These pathways are distinguishable by what type of dopamine receptor they express — dopamine receptor 1 (D1) or dopamine receptor 2 (D2).

Beyond these two divisions, scientists knew that there were many subpopulations performing different roles, especially in the anatomically ventral (lower) regions of the striatum. However, it has been difficult to generate a consensus on how to classify these cells, in part because prior studies focused on specific subregions, meaning that overarching principles of striatal cellular organization were lacking.

To overcome that challenge, the researchers worked closely with brain banks in the United States and Canada to collect postmortem striatal samples representing diverse anatomical regions. 

Then, they used three different techniques to analyze the samples, including single-cell RNA sequencing — a method that can measure RNA molecules within individual cells to reveal which genes are being expressed. Two additional techniques — multiplexed fluorescent in situ hybridization and spatial transcriptomics — allowed the researchers to identify spatial principles of organization within the tissue.

Using these techniques, the researchers were able to identify 31 different subpopulations of neurons, including nine types of medium spiny neurons. Among their medium spiny neuron types are two “outlier” populations that appear to play important roles in schizophrenia, substance use disorder, and depression.

One of those populations, known as D1 outliers, showed high expression of genes involved in addiction and substance use disorder, especially genes related to opioid response. Another population, called D2 outliers, showed high expression of genes that respond to antidepressants. And, both populations appeared to respond strongly to clozapine, an antipsychotic drug used to treat schizophrenia.

Clozapine is among the most effective antipsychotics available, but it’s not widely used in the United States because it can cause a fatal blood disorder in a small percentage of patients. Now that researchers know which cells the drug acts on, they may be able to design more targeted therapeutics to overcome psychosis, but without the harmful side effects, Heiman says.

Huntington’s vulnerability

Another key finding of the paper helps to shed light on why the dorsal (upper) part of the striatum is more vulnerable to Huntington’s disease. The disease is caused by an inherited version of the huntingtin gene that carries too many repetitive DNA segments, called CAG repeats. 

The researchers found that dorsal populations of medium spiny neurons express higher levels of the genes MSH2 and MSH3, which play a role in increasing the number of CAG repeats found in the huntingtin gene. As more of those repeats accumulate, the mutated version of the huntingtin protein becomes more harmful to cells.

The researchers also found that a rare population of medium spiny neurons that forms island-like structures in the ventral striatum was more resistant to the accumulation of CAG repeats. Further study of this class of cells might help researchers learn how to induce other medium spiny neurons to become more resistant to the disease, Heiman says.

“Looking at the genes that these neurons express or don’t express might give us some clues as to how to make other medium spiny neurons resilient like them,” she says. 

Insights into substance use disorders

The researchers also compared their findings from human tissue samples to samples from mice and found several differences, especially in the expression of genes related to drug response and substance use disorders. One such gene, which encodes the mu opioid receptor (OPRM1), is highly expressed in the human D1 outlier population, but not in the corresponding population of neurons in mice. 

This means that standard mouse models may not fully capture the biology of opioid responses, and that engineering mice to express this receptor in a similar manner to humans could make those models significantly more accurate.

“Some of the diversity we’re seeing in the human ventral striatum is species-specific and has implications for modeling substance use disorder in rodents,” Heiman says. “Now that we understand better the species differences, we can use the rodent models for specific questions that apply for conserved genes, but we could also think about humanizing some models.”

The researchers hope that this map, built from tissue contributions by brain donors and their families, and assembled across disciplines and institutions, will provide an important starting point for researchers pursuing new treatments for some of the most difficult-to-treat brain disorders.

The research was funded, in part, by the National Institutes of Health, the G. Harold and Leila Y. Mathers Charitable Foundation, the Freedom Together Foundation, the Natalia Mental Health Foundation, the Biswas Family Foundation, and the Milken Institute.

Before Ila Kumar thinks about how to build technology, she asks a different question: What is the context that technology will operate in, and who needs to be involved in the design? 

For Kumar, meaningful innovation doesn’t result from engineers or designers working in isolation. Instead, she believes the best innovations emerge when the people who stand to benefit from a technology help create it from the very beginning. 

That philosophy has guided her research in the Lifelong Kindergarten group, where she works alongside young people who have experienced trauma during childhood, particularly those involved in the child welfare system, to reimagine how technology can support healing, connection, and independence. 

“I really think that community-based design is the only way that we can make technology that accounts for communities’ needs, but also their barriers, their cultures, their concerns,” Kumar says. “It’s the only way that we can make really sustainable and positively impactful technology.” 

Today, Kumar is preparing to enter the sixth and final year of her PhD. But when she first arrived at MIT in 2021, she envisioned staying only long enough to complete a master’s degree. However, Kumar quickly fell in love with her work and decided to stay at MIT and pursue her doctorate.

Before graduate school, Kumar grew up in Philadelphia, attended the University of Pennsylvania, and worked on several projects at the intersection of technology and mental health or psychology research. 

Through those experiences, Kumar began to question whether the technology she was helping to develop was having the sustained impact she hoped for. “I had done a number of projects that were ‘tech for good,’” she says. “And I wasn’t seeing that what I was doing had a long-term impact.” 

Rather than walking away from technology altogether, Kumar began to rethink how it was created. “If we design technology in community-based ways and really think about holistic well-being,” she says, “maybe we can actually create things that help people.” 

That conviction eventually became the foundation of her doctoral research, and over the course of her PhD, Kumar has increasingly moved from simply listening to communities to building with them. 

Public conversations about technology often present a choice: Embrace it or reject it. Kumar believes that it’s not that simple. 

Kumar sees the way digital platforms have the potential to both harm young people’s mental health and development, and help young people process emotions, strengthen relationships, and practice healthy vulnerability — if those tools are designed thoughtfully and embedded in the systems where young people already receive care and support. 

Much of her work explores exactly what that could look like. 

One project Kumar worked on, in partnership with Stepping Forward LA and with the input of the young people who would use the app, replaces text-heavy communication with a visual collage system to help young people impacted by trauma and the child welfare system to express emotions that may be difficult to put into words, and to build a sense of connectedness with one another. 

In an ongoing project, Kumar is collaborating with the Justice Resource Institute to design a mobile app that supports youth in playing an active role in their treatment-planning process and helps them work toward the goals they set outside of the therapy office. The group is working with clinicians and youth to design and evaluate the system.

“We are not sitting at MIT designing tools and just throwing them at people,” Kumar says.  “We’re designing it together. We need to actually have the folks that are relevant to providing the care in the room.” 

That idea became even clearer to Kumar through a 10-month technology leadership circle she co-facilitated with Foster America. The program brought together people with lived experience of foster care and technology experts to envision how digital technologies could fill gaps in care for young people in the child welfare system. 

This project surfaced the importance of not just designing tools that center youths’ needs but also considering the ways in which social services need to be brought into the innovation process. 

Those ideas have also led Kumar to explorations that involve one of technology’s newest frontiers: artificial intelligence. She began asking questions after she realized that young people who had experienced trauma had already been turning to AI to make critical life decisions, even as many caregivers were not aware of it.

As a result, Kumar has increasingly focused on supporting care providers in talking with young people about AI. She has led training workshops with organizations that serve young people impacted by trauma or involved in the child welfare system.

Kumar’s passion for advocating for young people extends far beyond the lab. She also volunteers as a court-appointed special advocate, working one-on-one with a young person in the child welfare system while pursuing her PhD. 

The role has deepened both her understanding of the challenges young people face and her belief that lasting change depends on relationships.

Some of her most meaningful moments have come while working directly with young people.  Last summer, she, alongside another graduate student in her lab, mentored two interns with foster care experience during a six-week program that blended technology, creativity, and personal growth. 

“It felt like a real privilege,” Kumar says. “Even the six weeks was not enough.” 

Those relationships have also inspired Kumar to address how community-based research is conducted at MIT. 

Recognizing that many students interested in community-engaged work often feel isolated, she collaborated with the Priscilla King Gray Public Service Center to co-teach a course on community-driven innovation. She later established a biweekly community of practice connecting researchers across MIT and Harvard University who are navigating the benefits and challenges of conducting research alongside communities rather than simply studying them. 

Outside of research, Kumar enjoys birdwatching, cooking with friends, and creating graphic illustrations — creative pursuits that, much like her research, reward patience, observation, and careful attention. 

As technology becomes increasingly woven into young people’s lives, Kumar hopes innovation will move beyond the lab and into the communities it is meant to serve. 

“The future of actually impactful technologies,” Kumar says, “is when researchers are making decisions with communities instead of for them.”

Solving complex social problems with multiple interrelated causes can involve juggling a variety of factors. Securing funding, designing the right programs, and sustaining the political will necessary to implement them demands a targeted approach.

Lyonel Tanganco, a graduate student in MIT’s Master in Data, Economics, and Design of Policy (DEDP) program, seeks to connect data, policy, and practice-based community interventions to improve living conditions and service delivery in middle-income countries. His studies have allowed him to work with innovative practitioners making real improvements in the world, he says.

“There’s innovation at work in middle-income countries,” says Tanganco, a native of the Philippines. “Seeing the attitudes to adopt and scale new policies and procedures to improve lives has been very interesting to me.” 

Taking those innovative practices and investigating their adaptability and potential to scale is at the heart of Tanganco’s research and work. “How do we make growth broad-based and inclusive?” he asks.

The DEDP master’s program, jointly run by MIT’s Department of Economics and the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), equips development professionals from across the globe with the practical skills and theoretical knowledge needed to tackle these and other kinds of challenges. J-PAL seeks to reduce poverty by ensuring that policy is informed by scientific evidence — conducting randomized impact evaluations; helping governments, nongovernmental organizations, donors, and the private sector apply the resulting evidence to their work; and training researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and donors to generate and use that evidence.

Designing a path to more effective policies and practices

Before arriving at MIT, Tanganco earned degrees in management science and economics, graduating at the top of his class from Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines. He was previously the director of the Policy, Research, and Liaison Office in the Philippine Department of Finance. His work focused on helping develop the nation’s response to the Covid-19 outbreak, tax policy reform, and communications support for key policy initiatives.

“During my time in government, we sought to increase revenues for health care and increase outlays for health-care programs,” he says. “We were thinking about health care from the financing perspective.” 

Tanganco’s efforts helped increase taxes on cigarettes, vaping, and alcohol products, which funded a sixfold increase in the health-care budget. Allocating more funding for health care, he says, may yield better outcomes. 

Additionally, Tanganco supported reforms to increase taxation on top Filipino income earners while lowering taxes for others, which the government subsequently implemented. Later, he and some of his colleagues formed a “policy think-and-do tank” — Malusog at Matalinong Bata Coalition (Smart and Healthy Kids Coalition) — that collaborates closely with government agencies on large-scale social programs. 

There, he played a key role in designing and advancing a conditional cash transfer program aimed at addressing malnutrition that now reaches more than 190,000 Filipino households. “The program gives families the equivalent of $12 per month under the condition that they bring their children for regular monthly checkups,” Tanganco says. “It increased health-seeking behavior eightfold.”

While he saw success in implementing these programs, Tanganco still found gaps in both knowledge and implementation he thought he could close by enrolling in a program like DEDP. “I wanted a graduate program that taught me what I couldn’t get from a professional career,” he says.

Expanding research into targeted areas

Tanganco describes living in a middle-income country as “living in two contradictory worlds at the same time.” 

“I’ve seen gleaming metropolitan skylines alongside underserved communities; pockets of affluence surrounded by persistent poverty; world-class hospitals alongside children who still lack access to basic health care,” he says. “The through line in my work is figuring out how to help middle-income countries translate economic growth to better lives and better human outcomes.” 

His DEDP studies have taken him to Indonesia this summer for work on a capstone project with economist Benjamin Olken, the TEPCO Professor of Economics and co-faculty director of J-PAL. The research, conducted in collaboration with Indonesian local governments, involves the design and rollout of a randomized evaluation of a tax intervention. 

“So far, I’ve visited and conferred with several local Indonesian governments to assess tax administration issues,” he says. Investigating Indonesian governmental interventions may help improve service delivery and support. One of the ways Tanganco hopes to help Indonesians, Filipinos, and others is by developing tools to raise revenues in simple, effective, and fair ways, making it easier to improve constituent sentiment and service delivery. 

Tanganco wants to help policymakers and others understand how politics and other factors influence areas like investments in nutrition and environment. His studies have sharpened his investigative approach in these critical areas.

In the Philippines, for example, one-in-four children is malnourished. “Children who lack proper nutrition before age 2 develop smaller brains, perform worse in school and work, and are far more likely to remain in poverty,” Tanganco reports. “Their potential is capped before they get the chance to use it.”  

Middle-income countries also suffer disproportionately from climate-change-related impacts. “Typhoons and extreme heat severely disrupt learning and economic growth in the Philippines,” Tanganco says. “More than a tenth of school days are lost because of climate issues.” 

Essentially, without improved policies and practices alongside a sustained effort to improve lives, “we’re losing extraordinary opportunities for human advancement to wasted potential,” Tanganco believes. “Experiences like that abound,” he says. 

From the classroom to the next chapter 

Tanganco values opportunities to range beyond his DEDP studies. He fondly remembers completing a doctoral-level course in environmental economics co-taught by Olken and Jacob Moscona, the 3M Career Development Assistant Professor of Economics. Its focus on research appealed to him. “I was glad to have time to think about the problems I’m trying to solve,” he says.

Tanganco also enjoyed exploring Greater Boston with his wife — a graduate student at Harvard University — and his fellow DEDP students. From restaurants to concerts with other music nerds, he appreciates the time they spent outside the classroom. “We discuss our hopes and our home countries’ challenges,” he enthuses. “I’m excited to see what folks will do after this.”

Tanganco is especially pleased with the Institute’s commitment to ensuring scholarship centers an interdisciplinary approach. He likens the MIT educational style to “Avatar: The Last Airbender’s” Uncle Iroh, who recommends drawing wisdom from a variety of elements to ensure wisdom doesn’t grow stale. 

These and additional opportunities to step outside his previously defined areas of expertise left a lasting impact on him. “Everyone at MIT is open to collaboration,” he says. “There are a lot of thinkers and doers here, and you don’t have to work hard to convince other students to help you.”

As Tanganco continues his work, he encourages practitioners — doctors, nutritionists, and community health workers, for example — to partner with economists and other researchers to translate their expertise into quantifiable metrics policymakers can understand. “Develop an eye for impact,” he adds.

Enrolling in the DEDP program “has been game-changing,” Tanganco concludes. “The program provides a solid foundation for understanding the world and how to make a positive, measurable difference in the lives of other people, especially the least fortunate among us.”

After extensive modifications over the past seven years, the Gulfstream IV (G-IV) aircraft operated and maintained by MIT Lincoln Laboratory's Tactical Defense Systems Group and Flight Test Facility (FTF) recently flew home from Canada. 

Transforming the standard business jet into a highly specialized research platform — which will support the U.S. Air Force's Air Vehicle Survivability Evaluation (AVSE) program for decades to come — represented the largest and most complex airborne test bed modernization in Lincoln Laboratory history. The Tactical Defense Systems Group, assisted by the FTF, coordinated the effort with the Toronto-based aerospace company Field Aviation.

"Our team made hundreds of trips to Canada and dedicated countless weekends to keep the project moving along," says David Culbertson, FTF manager. "Seeing the aircraft finally return to the laboratory invoked a sense of pride and satisfaction."

An airborne testing infrastructure

For more than 40 years, the Tactical Defense Systems Group has supported the AVSE program, leveraging airborne test beds to assess how U.S. aircraft and space assets fare against current and emerging threats. The group had been conducting airborne testing for the AVSE program with a modified Gulfstream II (G-II) since the early 1990s. In 2013, they began a series of studies to replace the G-II because parts availability issues were looming. These studies concluded that the G-IV was the best option, given its performance and capabilities, including its respectively higher altitude and longer range; long-term sustainability; and cost. The laboratory purchased the G-IV in 2015.

To avoid repeatedly reopening the costly Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) certification process over the planned operational lifetime of the G-IV (25 to 30 years), the group decided to complete all anticipated aircraft modifications at once, rather than in phases. Following a competitive bidding process, the laboratory selected Field Aviation to perform the modifications. Field Aviation had modified the G-II, in addition to other laboratory aircraft. In December 2018, FTF pilots flew the G-IV to Toronto, where it was expected to remain for approximately three to four years.

However, Covid-19 pandemic-related disruptions and contractor management shifts extended this timeline. To help bring the aircraft home, the laboratory stepped in to oversee aircraft modifications, maintenance, and reassembly. Laboratory engineers, mechanics, pilots, program managers, and legal teams worked together to secure Canadian work permits and maintain a continuous onsite presence. Senior aircraft mechanic Craig Rowe served as lead crew chief, traveling monthly with team members to Canada; for his efforts, he was recognized with a 2026 MIT Excellence Award for Outstanding Contributor. 

A structural overhaul

To modify the aircraft, mechanics removed, tracked, and ultimately reinstalled more than 2,000 components. The revamped G-IV incorporated 12 major modifications that required sweeping structural changes.

For example, on the wings, mechanics installed four pylons for carrying external sensor pods weighing anywhere from 200 to more than 1,000 pounds. The wings had to be structurally fortified to withstand the added weight, stress, and aerodynamic loads that would be experienced during flight. They added a fifth sensor pylon, capable of holding up to 2,000 pounds and accommodating systems nearly 19 feet long, to the forward lower fuselage. Development of the pylons spanned nearly five years because of intensive reverse engineering, including purchasing and disassembling a wing from a scrapped G-IV to measure the internal structural components. Installation took almost two years because access to the inner wing structure was limited to small panels normally used for inspections.

Mechanics modified the roof and lower fuselage to create flat surfaces to allow rapid mounting of external antennas and sensor systems without repeated incursions into the aircraft's pressurized fuselage. They extended the aircraft's nose and tail with standardized sensor-mounting interfaces to enable rapid placement of sensors for both forward- and aft-facing test scenarios. The six-foot nose extension required completely gutting the cockpit so the internal structure could be reinforced to bear the weight of the mounting interface and test systems.

In the interior, the team installed 14 equipment racks; workstations for six onboard operators; fiber-optic, Ethernet, and coaxial cables; liquid- and air-cooling systems; and dedicated power-distribution infrastructure separated from the baseline aircraft for safety reasons.

The remodel also required developing a means to generate sufficient electrical power to operate the test systems in flight while meeting FAA fire-containment standards. The aircraft’s original auxiliary power unit (APU) — normally intended to assist only with engine startup — was far too small for the mission requirements and could not operate airborne. Field Aviation engineers designed an entirely new fireproof titanium enclosure to house a larger APU capable of producing nearly double the original electrical output up to the 45,000-foot G-IV altitude ceiling. The laboratory's Engineering Division ran simulations to validate that the APU inlet airflow would allow for maximum APU power output throughout the flight duration.

Steps toward mission qualification 

After reassembling the G-IV, FTF mechanics conducted hundreds of operational checks to ensure every aircraft system disturbed during the modification worked properly and to validate aircraft safety and readiness to resume flight operations. The aircraft completed multiple post-modification flights without a single maintenance write-up.

"It's extremely rare for a heavily modified aircraft of this complexity to have no write-ups," says program manager Paul Mancini from the Tactical Defense Systems Group. "That's a testament to the quality of work of the FTF mechanics who put the airplane back together and the Field Aviation engineers who completed the modifications."

Since the G-IV returned home this spring, test pilots have been evaluating its airworthiness — i.e., in-flight safety and functionality. The Tactical Defense Systems Group expects approximately another 18 months to complete flight testing, mission systems modification, test systems installation, and FAA certification before the aircraft becomes fully mission-qualified to operationally support the AVSE program.