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.

Loons, gulls, puffins, and petrels are some of the 100 species of birds that can both fly and swim. These diving birds can plunge in water to swim after prey, and leap back into the air to fly away. 

Inspired by these naturally aquatic aviators, engineers at MIT and EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, have designed a robot that can swim underwater, then flap out of the water to continue flying through air, much like diving birds. 

The “flapping-wing aerial-aquatic vehicle,” or FAAV, weighs less than 300 grams (about half a pound) and is designed to help scientists study the mechanics that enable diving birds to fly through air and water. 

The robot has a central body, or fuselage; two flexible, flapping wings; and a steerable tail. The wings and tail can be swapped out for different sizes. In experiments carried out in a water tank and at a local lake, the engineers identified combinations of wing size, flapping frequency, and tail angle that enable the robot to smoothly transition from swimming through water to breaking through the surface to flying through the air.

Their results, which appear today in the journal Science, could help scientists understand how diving birds adapt their flight mechanics to move through air and water — mediums with very different physical properties. The design could also launch a new class of aerial-aquatic drones and vehicles. The researchers envision such winged robots could be deployed in oceanography to fly to and sample from aquatic regions that would otherwise be too dangerous for traditional ocean vessels to access.

“Our dream vision is for oceanographers, marine biologists, and members of coastal communities to launch this robot from a boat, or from shore, and it would fly close to the area of interest, such as an iceberg or a port facility, or over a pod of whales,” says Raphael Zufferey, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. “It would dive into the water to take a measurement or collect a sample, and fly back to deliver the data at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods. Then it could go back out to dive for more.” 

Zufferey is the lead author of the new study, which includes co-authors from EPFL and Northwest Indian College in Bellingham, Washington.

Flight mechanics

At MIT, Zufferey heads up the AURA Lab, where he and his students engineer aerial and aquatic vehicles inspired by biomechanics in nature. The robots they build are small in size and designed to unobtrusively explore and monitor the health of oceans and waterways. 

For their new work, the team aimed to design a vehicle that can fly in the air and underwater. Any such vehicle would have to adapt to and transition between two very different substances. Water is 1,000 times denser than air, and moving through one or the other requires very different mechanics. Or so people might assume.

“You have to do some adaptation to make that transition work. But there’s a solution that exists in nature,” Zufferey says. “Birds like puffins can fly very fast through the air, and can dive and swim through water at speeds of 3 meters per second. They’re able to do pretty amazing things. So we knew is was possible. Just no one had tried this in a mobile robotic system.”

To get an idea for how diving birds fly, the team looked through the scientific literature and pulled together available data on puffins, petrels, kingfishers, and other diving birds. They observed that smaller birds flap their wings around 10 times per second when flying through air, and around four times per second when swimming through water. Larger birds have a slightly lower flapping frequency through both air and water due to their wider wingspans. 

With the biomechanics of birds in mind, the team developed a winged robot designed to flap at similar frequencies to that of actual diving birds. 

Making the leap

The new robot roughly resembles a bird, with a body, two wings, and a tail. The body contains a battery and waterproof electric motor that drives a crankshaft, which in turn pumps the wings up and down at preset frequencies. The wings are made of thin membranes that are coated with hydrophobic nanoparticles to help wick away water. And the tail is motorized, enabling it to change its angle to help the robot fly up or dive down. 

The wings can be swapped out for different sizes. The researchers fabricated and tested three sets of wings: small (60 centimeters wide), medium (80 centimeters), and large (100 centimeters). They carried out experiments first in a small water tank, then in Lake Geneva in Switzerland.

In their tests, they placed the robot underwater, about half a meter below the surface. They programmed the wings to flap at certain frequencies and the tail to pitch at certain angles throughout the robot’s flight. They then observed under what conditions the robot successfully swam up toward the surface, out of the water and into the air. 

The robot flew multiple flights with different wing sizes, flapping frequencies, and tail angles. Overall, the team found the robot was able to reliably fly, swim, and transition between water and air when it flew with medium-sized wings. Flexibility in the wings is key; the wings need to be flexible enough to minimize flapping amplitude in water and also firm enough to keep the robot aloft in the air. 

The researchers also found the robot could swim through water at speeds of almost 1 meter per second when it flapped with a frequency of around 5 herz, or five flaps per second. The robot could fly through the air at around 6 meters per second, when flapping at a similar frequency. The speeds and flapping frequencies of the robot were similar to that of actual diving birds. 

To make the leap from water to air, they found the robot should be pitched at 70 degrees — a relatively steep angle that keeps the robot’s wingtips from touching the water’s surface as it flaps up and into the air. Any steeper, and the robot would tip back into the water.

Interestingly, this combination of wing size, flap frequency, and tail pitch enabled the robot to swim underwater, launch off the surface, and fly, without something that many diving birds require: feet. When birds such as puffins and ducks take off from the water’s surface, they paddle their feet, along with flapping their wings and pitching their tails. Surprisingly, Zufferey and his colleagues found that, at least in robotics, the act of flying out of water doesn’t necessarily require a paddling maneuver. 

“If you look at birds, most birds need to paddle at the surface to take off. And the question was, do we need the same for robots? And it turns out we don’t,” Zufferey says.

Going forward, the team is improving the design of the wings to enable them to turn in addition to flapping up and down. They will also test the robot’s performance under turbulent conditions, such as swimming out of choppy waters and flying through wind. Then, they hope to deploy the vehicle to help answer questions in ocean science.

“One of the major challenges in ocean science is collecting data both frequently and across many locations, which is something this robot could do in the future,” Zufferey says. “You could send this out not just every week, but every hour. It could fly out at high speeds, dive in fly back, deliver its data, and go back out, multiple times.”

This work was supported, in part, by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions fellowship grant.

In southwestern Bangladesh, where extreme heat and severe tropical cyclones threaten the lives of millions of people, a new kind of climate refuge has opened its doors.

At the Baradal Aftab Uddin Collegiate School in the Satkhira district, the Jameel Observatory Climate Resilience Early Warning System Network (Jameel Observatory-CREWSnet) opened its first “adaptation fortress,” a solar-powered community shelter designed to protect residents from extreme heat and tropical storms.

A year-round refuge

When the heat arrives in southwestern Bangladesh, people have traditionally looked for relief under the shade of trees or near bodies of water. Now, during heatwaves, temperatures can reach 44 degrees Celsius (111 degrees Fahrenheit), levels at which shade is no longer enough.

A school by day and refuge from disaster, the adaptation fortress transforms the traditional concept of a cyclone shelter into a permanent year-round community resilience hub.

The facility offers residents protection from two of the region’s fastest-growing climate threats. During government-declared heat emergencies, it can host up to 200 people in four air-conditioned rooms supplied with clean drinking water. As a cyclone shelter, it can accommodate up to 500 people in additional rooms.

For the 30 million residents in southwestern Bangladesh, caught in a compounding cycle of cyclones and record-breaking heatwaves, the fortress represents something larger: a shift from reacting to disasters to preparing for them.

From forecast to fortress

That shift is the founding premise of the Jameel Observatory-CREWSnet project, which develops climate-resilience solutions that help vulnerable communities prepare for and adapt to life-altering conditions. 

The opening of the adaptation fortress marks a milestone for the project, and for MIT’s broader climate mission. Jameel Observatory-CREWSnet was one of MIT's five Climate Grand Challenges flagship projects, selected to translate climate research into tangible solutions for underserved communities facing some of the world’s most urgent climate threats. 

The project started in 2022 with Community Jameel and a research team at MIT led by Elfatih Eltahir, the H.M. King Bhumibol Professor of Hydrology and Climate in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, along with John Aldridge, assistant leader of the Human Resilience Technology Group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, and Deborah Campbell, senior staff scientist at MIT Lincoln Laboratory.  

Working in collaboration with BRAC International, a Bangladesh-founded nonprofit organization, the project combines advanced climate and socioeconomic forecasting with practical adaptation solutions. The adaptation fortress extends the project’s mission from forecasting climate threats to building permanent protection against them.

“When we launched the Jameel Observatory-CREWSnet, our goal was to close the gap between what climate science tells us is coming and what communities can actually do about it,” says Eltahir. “The adaptation fortress is that idea made concrete. Our models project more intense heatwaves for this region, and now residents of Satkhira have a place built to withstand them.”

The project’s climate modeling gives the fortress its urgency. Developed over decades in Eltahir’s research group, the models predict increasingly intense heatwaves across southwestern Bangladesh in the years ahead — dangerous heat layered on top of the cyclone risks they already endure. 

That same evidence shaped who gets through the door first. A priority access list focuses on those the heat endangers most: the elderly, people with respiratory conditions such as asthma, expectant mothers and mothers with infants, and students of the Baradal school.

Built to outlast the grid

The building was designed to weather climate shocks. A rooftop solar array powers the building as its primary energy source, with a battery backup that keeps it fully operational during grid outages. Solar grid-based air conditioning units combat extreme heat, and windows of glass encased in iron protect against breakage while sealing in the cool air.

The facility also integrates rainwater harvesting to mitigate the severe salinity that plagues local groundwater, and is designed to help cover its own upkeep. A net-metering interface allows surplus electricity generated during low-occupancy periods to be sold back to the national grid, creating a circular revenue stream that funds long-term maintenance.

The fortress is built with the community. A school committee oversees day-to-day operations and emergency protocols in partnership with BRAC, formalized through a signed memorandum of understanding to ensure long-term sustainability. The facility is supported by a comprehensive user guide translated into Bangla to empower local management.

Engineered to scale 

The Satkhira adaptation fortress is a pilot, and will be rigorously assessed. Remote sensors will track temperature, humidity, and power consumption. The findings will directly inform a second adaptation fortress planned for a secondary school in the Jashore district, where construction is scheduled to begin before the end of 2026.

If the evidence supports the model’s effectiveness, the concept could ultimately scale to as many as 1,250 fortresses across southwestern Bangladesh.

“From the start, our vision for this project has been a capability that could extend far beyond any single community,” says Campbell. “The adaptation fortress is a model we can learn from and refine in Satkhira, then carry to the many other places facing these same compounding climate threats.”

The work is supported by Community Jameel for Jameel Observatory CREWSnet, and by MIT Climate Grand Challenges.

The path to launching and growing a startup can be full of twists and turns. For a budding entrepreneur, gaining perspective from those who have already experienced the journey can be incredibly valuable, and highly inspirational. 

“There are so many amazing entrepreneurial stories among our alumni. We want to bring those stories to our students and our community and build networks with our incredible alumni founders,” says John Hart, the Class of 1922 Professor and head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE). “Through the Founder’s Journey class and other new programs, we want to cultivate interest in entrepreneurship among our students and expand opportunities to bring MechE-born technologies to the world.” 

According to a 2015 report on MIT’s global entrepreneurial impact, there are more than 30,000 active companies founded by MIT alumni worldwide, employing some 4.6 million people. Marina Hatsopoulos SM ’93, founding CEO of Z Corp., an early market leader in 3D printing, said one of the aims of the course was to show students they don’t need to reinvent everything. “So much of this has been done before. I want them to understand that this is a well-trod path.” 

Class 2.S977/2.S979 (Founder’s Journey: Launching and Scaling Hardware Startups) explores real-life challenges of startups focused on building and scaling hardware technologies. First held in spring 2025, the inaugural class invited students to “find and activate their entrepreneurial energy” through the lens of challenges faced by founders and their teams at various stages in development of new hardware-focused companies — ranging from fundraising to supply chain development, and much more. 

Each week of the class was structured around a key challenge faced during the development and growth of a hardware startup, presented by the instructors and guest speaker. The speakers were founders of companies in robotics, energy, 3D printing, consumer products, and other frontier technologies. Students engaged through preparing questions for the speakers and participating in follow-on discussions and reflective exercises throughout the semester. 

Ken Zolot, senior lecturer at MIT, and Hatsopoulous co-led the class and developed it along with Hart. Hart, who was among the alumni speakers in the course’s first iteration, also spoke to the class about his experience as a co-founder of VulcanForms, which began through collaboration with fellow co-founder Martin Feldmann MEng ’14. 

The other alumni speakers included Mick Mountz (Kiva/Amazon); Jon Hirschtick (Solidworks/Onshape); Max Lobovsky (Formlabs); Elise Strobach (Aeroshield); Greg Mark (Markforged); Seemantini Nadkarni (Coalesenz); Eran Egozy (Harmonix); Renuka Babu (DOTS Technology); Davide Marini (Inkbit); Loewen Cavill (Amira); and Colin Angle (iRobot).

Colin Angle ’89, SM ’91, co-founder of iRobot

Colin Angle ’89, SM ’91, co-founder and former CEO of iRobot, now CEO and co-founder of Familiar Machines and Magic, identified a passion for building things early on. 

“This idea that you can create something from nothing, that you can have an idea and not just draw it, but build it and make it real, is something I’ve always loved,” he says. “MIT had such a strong, hands-on ethos, and that really, powerfully resonated.”

While living in the Alpha Delta Phi Fraternity house at MIT, Angle watched several companies get their start (by his count, five multimillion-dollar companies were started by his fraternity brothers during his time in the house). Seeing others do it helped to demystify the process. 

He started iRobot in his living room, beginning at first not with a product concept, but a grand vision. “We’re supposed to have robots. So, if not us, who? And if not now, when? It was a magical day.” 

iRobot may be best known for the Roomba, an autonomous robotic vacuum cleaner, but through the years the company also sent robots to Afghanistan (saving thousands of lives with the Pack Bot tactical mobile robot) and explored the Great Pyramid in Giza live on National Geographic. 

“The joy I have taken from my entrepreneurial journey has been the ability to build bigger things, from building teams to building a company capable of building something far beyond what I could have ever imagined doing myself … we created inventions that no one thought possible, simply because we believed we could.”

Elise Strobach SM ’17, PhD ’20, CEO and co-founder of AeroShield

Elise Strobach SM ’17, PhD ’20 is CEO and co-founder of AeroShield Materials. The company, co-founded with Kyle Wilke PhD ’19 and Aaron Baskerville-Bridges SM ’20, MBA ’20, develops super-insulating transparent window inserts with technology based on transparent silica aerogels developed by Strobach while she was completing her PhD in Professor Evelyn Wang’s lab.

“I wasn’t thinking of myself as an entrepreneur at that time, but looking back, that’s definitely where that seed was planted,” says Strobach. As entrepreneurs, she says, “We have the … freedom to find the best problem to solve and to continue to seek the best way to solve that problem.”

Aerogels, which were first invented almost 100 years ago and were first commercialized by NASA to insulate equipment in space, had a hazy blue tint that limited their use in certain applications. The aerogel material created by Strobach and her team is completely see-through, creating a variety of new everyday applications. The company recently achieved another milestone, with their work on display at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington.

“You don’t have to know everything to start. You just have to know that this is what you want to do and just get started.”

Maxim Lobovsky SM ’11, CEO and co-founder of FormLabs

Maxim Lobovsky SM ’11 was already working on 3D printers when he came to MIT to study at the MIT Media Lab. As he was finishing his master’s degree, he saw an opportunity to build something new.  

Lobovsky, with fellow Media Lab graduates David Cranor SM ’11 and Natan Linder SM ’11, founded Formlabs, a developer and manufacturer of 3D printing technology. The trio set out to build a professional-level 3D printer, but a significant cost reduction and one that would be easier to use than what was then available on the market. At a time when 3D printers could cost $100,000 or more, Formlabs’ product started around $3,000.

“We definitely built Formlabs in a classic, disruptive innovation path,” Lobovsky says. They achieved the cost reduction through several different ways, including replacing technology developed in the 1980s with modern consumer electronics components like the laser diodes that were developed for Blu-ray Disc players, and with “just a lot of clever engineering.” 

It was a long grind to raise the first round of funding, he says. The team participated in MIT’s 100K competition and pitched their idea to many potential investors (with limited success, initially). Their big break came in the form of an overheard conversation. 

“As someone who is naturally introverted, shy engineer … a really important lesson [was] that, sometimes, you can get lucky,” he says. “Sometimes talking loudly at a restaurant is actually a good way to get things going.” 

Lobovsky and one of his co-founders were having dinner with a potential investor at Legal Seafoods in Harvard Square. The pitch to the initial investor didn’t go well, but Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus Software and an early pioneer in the PC industry overheard the conversation, and he ended up leading Formlabs’ first round of funding. 

Today, Formlabs is the largest supplier of professional stereolithography and selective laser sintering 3D printers in the world. 

Jon Hirschtick ’83, SM ’83, co-founder of SolidWorks and Onshape

Jon Hirschtick ’83, SM ’83, co-founder of SolidWorks and Onshape, says the first time he can remember thinking about starting a company was when he was an undergraduate. 

“I had heard about startups, and it sounded like a lot of things that I was drawn to … a sense of being able to realize your vision, express yourself; a sense of excitement, of making money, and even the idea of a chaotic environment,” he says. 

Hirschtick has spent over four decades building computer-aided design (CAD) software, starting as an intern at MIT in 1981 and continuing that work today. “I thought, ‘hey, the world could use this software.’ It’ll be a better place with the software that I envisioned.”

He refers to CAD as a meta product design. “We’re designing a product that other people use to design products, and that’s just really cool to me.” 

“I think startups just fit me,” he says. “The excitement, the idea of trying to solve a lot of problems at the same time. MIT is a place of problem-solving ... and a startup is a place where there’s lots of problems to solve.” He adds that a lot of big companies are doing new things, but “startups are always doing things.”

He says most anything today that is a manufactured product is modeled in CAD first. “If you’re interested and excited by product development, then building a CAD system lets you get involved in the world’s product development.”

“Nobody knows for sure when they start a company whether it’s going to be successful or not. If it were, if there was a way of knowing for sure, then there wouldn’t be all these classes in entrepreneurship. They’d just tell you the secret. There’s always risk. Visions and hallucinations, they look and feel the same. You only find out which is which once you really try to realize them.”

A version of this story appears in the 2026 issue of MechE Connects, the Department of Mechanical Engineering’s magazine. 

Researchers at MIT Lincoln Laboratory have designed a throwable, baseball-sized sensor that can remotely detect hazardous vapors and aerosols. 

Called the Tactical Optical Spherical Sensor for Interrogating Threats (TOSSIT), the sensor is designed to alert military service members, first responders, and law enforcement to the presence of chemical threats like nerve and blister agents, industrial chemical accidents, or fentanyl dust. 

Users can simply toss, drone-drop, or launch TOSSIT into an area of concern. To detect chemicals, the sensor samples the air and uses an internal camera to observe color changes on a removable dye card.

If certain chemicals are present, TOSSIT alerts users via an app or alarms in the sensor.

"TOSSIT fills an unmet need, providing a low-cost sensing option for vapors and solid aerosol threats — think toxic dust particles — that would otherwise not be detectable by small deployed sensor systems,” says principal investigator Richard Kingsborough.

After extensive testing in the field, the technology is being transferred to the U.S. military.

Most people think of the waterfront as the edge of the city. A team of MIT researchers sees it as a dynamic, Lego-like construction site.

Their new system, called “FloatForm,” is a swarm of small square robotic boats that assemble themselves into larger structures on the water, break apart, and reassemble into something new, all with minimal human direction. 

Each robot, about the size of a dinner plate at 21 centimeters square, is a self-contained vessel with its own thrusters, sensors, and magnetic latches. Together, they hint at a future in which floating infrastructure could become more adaptive: a temporary platform after an emergency, a market on a canal, or a stage that appears for a festival and dissolves when the crowd goes home.

“Our FloatForm projects envisions a future where the waterfront becomes a programmable extension of the city, where autonomous boats can self-organize into bridges, platforms, and other useful structures on demand,” says Daniela Rus, the Panasonic Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). “This kind of distributed robotics opens new possibilities for mobility, emergency response, public space, and infrastructure on water.”

“With FloatForm, we are essentially turning static water surfaces into dynamic, programmable spaces,” says Wei Wang, lead author of a new paper on the project and a former MIT research scientist who now leads the Marine Robotics Lab at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “Imagine an urban environment where public space isn’t fixed, but can autonomously expand, contract, or reconfigure on demand.” 

“We see it as forming infrastructure on the water, using a modular system to create one larger system,” says Alejandro Gonzalez-Garcia, a former researcher with MIT CSAIL and the Senseable City Lab. “If there’s an emergency, you could form a new bridge to alleviate traffic in the city. Or you could create floating markets and floating stages. If you want a more livable city, you want to use the water, too.”

The open-access work, published today in Nature Communications, comes from the labs of Rus and Carlo Ratti, professor of practice of urban technologies and planning at MIT and director of the Senseable City Lab, and grows out of Roboat, their joint project with the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions that put full-size autonomous vessels on Amsterdam’s canals. Those canals once carried the city’s goods; today, they mostly carry tourists. 

“We explored whether the canals could be used for waste collection, or for transport, to offload some of the stress on the roads back onto the water,” says Niklas Hagemann, an MIT graduate student in architecture, CSAIL affiliate, and former Senseable City Lab researcher who has worked on the project since its early stages. “Urban areas are getting denser, so could you expand public space onto water that’s currently underutilized?”

FloatForm shrinks that vision down to tabletop scale to answer a harder question: How do you get dozens, and eventually thousands, of floating robots to organize themselves?

Lessons from the ant raft

The team found its answer in biology. Fire ants famously survive floods by linking their bodies into living rafts, with no leader choreographing the assembly. Each ant follows simple local rules, and a resilient structure emerges.

“Each ant is an independent agent,” says Gonzalez-Garcia. “We wanted each robot to have its own capabilities, the same way ant colonies form a raft.”

Most existing self-assembling robot systems, on water and elsewhere, rely on a central computer dictating every move. That approach is vulnerable to single points of failure and scales poorly: The planning math balloons as robots are added, and the swarm must assemble sequentially, with most robots idling while they wait their turn. FloatForm flips the balance. A lightweight central planner steps in only sparingly, assigning each robot a final position to perfect the lattice, a level of geometric precision that purely distributed methods struggle to guarantee. Everything else, including navigating toward the target shape, avoiding collisions, and adapting to disturbances, runs on the robots themselves, which coordinate by exchanging positions with their immediate neighbors. The whole swarm moves at once.

That parallelism is what sets the work apart. The planning complexity of FloatForms approach depends only on a robot’s local neighbors, not the total size of the swarm. “What we’re trying to do is to have minimal central intervention, and have them all move together at the same time,” says Gonzalez-Garcia.

In experiments at MIT, a fleet of eight robots repeatedly gathered from random positions into a target shape, latched into a rigid structure, broke apart on command, reassembled into a new configuration, and then drove across the pool as a single vessel, with each run taking four to eight minutes. In that final mode, called collective transport, a planner charts a trajectory for the whole structure and each robot computes its own contribution. “Every robot becomes an actuator,” Gonzalez-Garcia explains. Simulations showed the framework scaling smoothly to swarms of 64.

“The beauty of this largely decentralized approach is that the computation doesn’t get bogged down as the swarm grows,” says Wang. “Whether you are working with eight boats or 80, the entire fleet coordinates and moves simultaneously. Because the overall assembly time doesn’t significantly increase in principle, the system remains highly scalable.” 

There's a physical payoff to sticking together, too. “Our boats become more stable by joining together, like the ant raft, if you have waves or currents,” Hagemann says.

An origami handshake

The robots connect through a latching mechanism hidden entirely inside each hull. A single servo motor at the center drives an origami-inspired auxetic structure, a geometry that contracts uniformly in all directions at once, pulling permanent magnets on all four sides inward to release, or pushing them outward to grab a neighbor across gaps of 10 to 15 centimeters. The magnets are arranged with alternating polarities, so the boats reliably click into clean square lattices.

The elegant part is what the mechanism doesn’t do: consume (much) power. A 3D-printed gearbox holds the latch in either state with the motor switched off. “It uses energy to latch and de-latch, but in between those states, it doesn’t use any energy,” says Hagemann. For infrastructure that might hold a configuration for hours, that matters. “Because the robots are so small, you can only have a battery so big,” adds Gonzalez-Garcia. “If they use less energy on latching, they can use more on computation, or on actually moving.”

Getting there took some humbling engineering. Four miniature thrusters arranged in an “X” give each robot omnidirectional motion, including turning in place, but they pack large forces relative to the robots’ tiny inertia, which made early prototypes twitchy and prone to aggressive spins at low speeds. The team added stabilizing fins to increase hydrodynamic drag and tuned the controllers to stay robust across robots that, at this scale, are never quite identical. The magnets posed their own problem: They held on so well that de-latching sometimes required the robots to twist themselves free.

From the tank to the canal

Across 10 trials, the system completed its missions without human intervention 90 percent of the time with four robots and 70 percent with eight. When things did go wrong, the architecture showed its resilience: A robot that briefly lost its bearings could rejoin the structure on its own, without bringing the whole swarm to a halt, and robots stuck in formation deadlocks learned to shake themselves free and retry.

Moving from a controlled indoor tank to a real canal or harbor will take more than confidence. “There’s always a relationship between the size of a boat and the magnitude of the disturbance it can handle,” says Gonzalez-Garcia. “These boats are very small, so in very disturbed water, they cannot work.” Scaling up will mean reinforcing the latches, potentially with mechanical interlocking like the full-size Roboat used, and trading the lab’s ultrasonic indoor positioning for GPS or vision-based sensing. Helpfully, the coordination algorithm was designed to be sensor-agnostic: swap the sensors, keep the logic.

The team envisions applications well beyond city canals, from forming temporary platforms for offshore inspection and maintenance to adaptive sensor networks for studying migratory species to reconfigurable docking stations for emergency response in hard-to-reach areas. There is also potential for offshore and remote operations, from temporary construction platforms to environmental monitoring and scientific expeditions.

And the geography is wide open. “Venice, the Netherlands, Belgium, the fjords and lakes of Norway, really any city with a river can take advantage of this,” says Gonzalez-Garcia. “The project uses spaces where water is already important, but it also raises the question: Where else can water be used for something more?” 

“This is an exciting step forward in realizing distributed collective behaviors on water,” says University of Michigan Assistant Professor Steven Ceron, who wasn’t involved in the research. “Assembly, self-reconfiguration, and collective motion are difficult enough in dry environments, but achieving these behaviors in a predominantly distributed fashion on water represents a serious additional challenge, and this team has credibly overcome it. By shifting the computational burden onto the robots themselves, they have built a more resilient system that in the near future could enable robot collectives like this to be deployed in open-water environments for search operations, environmental monitoring, and reconfigurable marine infrastructure.”

Gonzalez-Garcia, Hagemann, and Wang wrote the paper with senior authors Ratti, who is also a professor at Politecnico di Milano, and Rus. Gonzalez-Garcia is additionally affiliated with the MECO Research Team at KU Leuven. The research was supported by a grant from the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions, with additional support from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. The team thanks MIT Sea Grant and Professor Michael Triantafyllou for providing the test tank.

With Boston serving as a host city for the FIFA World Cup, the whole Bay State has soccer fever, including Henry Wang. As a child growing up in Dallas, sports were everything to him. Today, Wang is working on research that could impact some of the biggest sporting events in the world, including future World Cups.

The first such event that made a big impression on Wang involved a different form of football.

“The first ever sports game I remember watching was Super Bowl XLII in 2008,” he says. “I was really drawn to the competition, and the way it was presented. It’s this whole big spectacle.”

Wang, a fourth-year PhD candidate in social and engineering systems within MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, studies how data and technology can improve the way sports are played, analyzed, and refereed. Working in the MIT Sports Lab in collaboration with FIFA, he develops systems with the goals of helping referees make faster, more accurate decisions and expanding access to performance analytics across the globe.

Now in the final stretch of his doctoral program and preparing to defend his thesis at the end of this year, Wang has spent nearly a decade at MIT. After earning his undergraduate degree in 2023 with a double major in computer science, economics, and data science and business analytics, he transitioned directly into graduate school. Sports have been a constant throughout that journey.

A competitive swimmer since age 7, Wang says athletics shaped both his identity and his community.

“Athletic competition was always a really big part of my life,” he says. “It’s kind of how I made a lot of friends, around the pool, and now at school, or in the lab and office.”

Ironically, swimming entered his life not because of a burning passion for sports, but because of a doctor’s recommendation.

“I don’t really come from a huge sports family,” Wang says. When he was diagnosed with asthma as a child, his pediatrician suggested swimming to strengthen his lungs. 

His parents, both scientific researchers in radiology and medical physics, supported his growing passion. That support eventually led Wang to MIT, where he served as captain of the men’s swimming and diving team. In tandem, he continued pursuing research opportunities that merged his technical interests with his love of sports.

His first sports analytics project began with a cold email.

As a first-year student, Wang reached out to MIT Sloan School of Management Senior Lecturer Ben Shields to see if he could assist Shields with his research on sports strategy and analytics. Shields later connected Wang with a coach he knew who was interested in analyzing the two-point conversion strategy for MIT’s football team.

The project revealed that MIT could benefit from attempting two-point conversions much more frequently. The experience opened the door to the MIT Sports Lab, where Wang found mentors including Lecturer Christina Chase, Professor Anette “Peko” Hosoi, and former research scientist Ferran Vidal-Codina.

His research now focuses on two central questions: How can technology democratize access to sports data, and how can it help officials make better decisions?

Wang works with FIFA Innovation, the group within soccer’s global governing body that leads the development and testing of match technology used on the field. His research explores automatic event detection and officiating technologies designed to assist referees without disrupting the fan experience.

In one recent project, Wang helped develop a semi-automated system that uses players’ skeletal data and ball tracking to determine which player last touched the ball before it goes out of bounds. The research prototype aims to assist goal kick and corner kick decisions while minimizing interruptions to the game.

For Wang, success means that referees find the tools helpful, and fans barely notice it at all.

“A ball goes out of bounds, and we can immediately tell the referee it’s a corner kick,” he says. “The fans don’t even notice it.”

Alongside his doctoral research, Wang has gained experience across professional sports, spending two years with the Boston Red Sox’s baseball sciences team before accepting a role as a senior data scientist in basketball research and development with the Philadelphia 76ers, where he will continue working after graduation.

Despite his demanding schedule, he says the work rarely feels like work.

“I enjoy it so much,” he says. “I really don’t know what else I would be doing.”

Outside the lab, sports continue to anchor his life. Swimming at MIT provided structure and community during challenging moments.

“MIT can be pretty hard,” Wang says. “Having a consistent 5-to-7 o’clock swim practice every day definitely helped a lot.”

For Wang, sports have always been more than competition. They have shaped his friendships, inspired his research, and guided his career trajectory.

Now, as he works to build technologies that could change how billions of people experience the world’s most popular games, he is still driven by the same sense of love he felt watching sports as a child.

“I want every kid who plays sports to have the best experience possible, because I know how meaningful that can be toward someone’s life journey,” Wang says.

Ana Miljački looks back at her nearly 20 years teaching in the MIT Department of Architecture and says that one thing was perfectly clear to her on arrival: the caliber of her students.

“I appreciated immediately that these were students comfortable being at the edge of the discipline, eager to push and transform it,” says Miljački. “They didn’t necessarily seek the spotlight, but understood the value of participating in important transformations.”

Transformations are forthcoming for Miljački, the Francis White Davis Professor of Architecture: She became head of the Department of Architecture for the School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P) on July 1, and the architecture department itself will move to the Metropolitan Storage Warehouse (the Met) in late summer. 

Miljački takes the reins from Nicholas de Monchaux, the Weber-Shaughness Professor, who helped significantly advance the department’s commitment to studio-based research and impact, particularly around climate resilience and sustainability. He also helped catalyze and deepen the ongoing exchange between MIT and Tuskegee University rooted in the legacy of Robert R. Taylor.

In announcing Miljački’s new role, SA+P Dean Hashim Sarkis noted that Miljački has directed two of the department’s specialized graduate degree programs: the Master of Science in Architecture Studies program (2023-25) and the Master of Architecture program (2016-20), and played a central role in shaping the department’s academic and pedagogical culture.

“Ana has led many of the department’s academic programs with dedication, advancing experimentation in pedagogy, encouraging critical thinking, and linking research and learning in a manner that is distinctly MIT,” says Sarkis. “She teaches history, theory, and design, and her work is internationally recognized for its contributions to architectural discourse, pedagogy, and institutional critique. I look forward to seeing her bring this vision to the department as a whole.”

Building a career at MIT

Having taught at Columbia University, City College in New York, and Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Miljački quickly recognized the value of being at MIT as a young faculty member. She found generous support for her research — humanities-driven historical scholarship, criticism, and her curatorial work. 

“When junior faculty are supported to produce their own work, they also support students who are helping them,” says Miljački. “That is not something I had encountered until coming to MIT. The way the Institute has historically treated young faculty is unmatched by any other institution.”

She launched a distinguished career as a scholar and curator examining the organization, politics, authorship, and cultural production of architecture from Cold War-era Eastern Europe to contemporary architectural practice. In 2014, she co-curated the U.S. Pavillion at the Venice Architecture Biennale, which featured the exhibition “OfficeUS.” 

In 2018, Miljački founded the Critical Broadcasting Lab at MIT, with a goal to cultivate tools necessary for critical practice, including the capacity to grapple with complexity, nuance, and politics of architectural production. Intervening in the world but operating from within the protections of academic life, its broadcasting and curatorial work remains insulated from special interests and its members retain the freedom to speak critically. The lab has made important contributions to São Paulo and Seoul biennials, as well as to the Great Repair exhibition in Berlin. It mounted a solo exhibition and an accompanying discussion at the Museum of Yugoslavia in Serbia in 2025. 

Last year, Miljački co-curated, with Nicholas de Monchaux and Calvin Zhong, work from the Department of Architecture that examines diverse responses to the global climate crisis. The exhibition — The Next Earth: Computation, Crisis, Cosmology — was one of the collateral events of the Venice Biennale’s 19th International Architecture Exhibition. The vibrant presentation of MIT Architecture’s work in progress highlighted both the direct and circuitous narratives that link all of the department’s research and production to our contemporary climate crisis and possible responses to it.

Criticism as a core element of education

“I Would Prefer Not To” is Miljački’s podcast, conceived and produced by the Critical Broadcasting Lab in collaboration with the Architectural League of New York, and currently in its fifth season. The series sheds light on an unexamined part of architecture: why an architect turns down a commission. For Miljački, the podcast and all of her work as a critic and curator are forms of exhibition-making. Last year, her podcast won the Architecture in Media Award from the American Institute of Architects.

Students, says Miljački, are the reason she gets up every day. Even with her new responsibilities as department head, she will continue to teach class 4.210 (Positions: Cultivating Critical Practice), the History, Theory, and Criticism course required for incoming MArch students. The course, which transforms every year to include the most urgent topics of the moment, explores the recent past of architectural discourse, enables students to locate their own concerns, and is oriented toward the future. She sees the course as less of an opportunity to deliver a fixed body of knowledge and more as a process of shaping how students engage with ideas and one another. The class “intellectually socializes” incoming students, creating a shared framework that allows them to become meaningful interlocutors for each other over time. 

“We have to think critically about this present that we occupy: how we got here. What it means to practice architecture today. How might we do it differently?” she says. “Sometimes we forget that we make the reality. It matters to what end we do it, how we understand the context in which we operate, and how it has already shaped us.”

A 19th century warehouse for the 21st century

Adding a new dimension to her tenure as department head is that, in August, the Department of Architecture moves into its new home — the Met (W41). Faculty and students have for generations worked on Building 7’s fourth floor, which skirts around the building’s dome. The fragmented space is not optimal for building community and spontaneously sharing work designed in the various studios. The Met will provide a unified home for MIT Architecture — and for most of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning — where the disciplines and their research on the built environment may overlap.

“I think it’s a really exciting moment to transform physically where we are and how we relate to one another,” says Miljački. “I have brilliant colleagues in the department, but we’ve been spending too much time circling around the dome looking for each other. The new building provides a place for us to gather, to see each other’s work, and thus truly conduct our research and teaching in each other’s presence.

“Also, importantly, we will be in a building that is a great example of adaptive reuse by the architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Reusing, recycling, and maintaining the existing architectural stock is what we need to figure out how to do well in the field of architecture right now. To be able to didactically read this building every day will be very important. Our move will literally help guide us in teaching and learning while it also signals both internally and externally our commitment to this necessary shift in the discipline.”

Histories and timelines

Miljački sees the project of an architectural school as a collective cultivation of utopia. Over the years and in various leadership roles at MIT, she has forged how she thinks of leadership itself. 

“I now think that leadership importantly involves narrating stories in which we can all recognize ourselves,” she says. “For me, it may be primarily about fostering a sense of collective purpose in the face of an unacceptable status quo.

“Recently, I’ve been describing the school as a series of material, human, and other timelines, all unfolding at different speeds and tangling together to consequentially meet and materialize in the aging walls that surround us, in our care and labor protocols, in our pedagogies, collective and individual political investments, joys and heartaches. Cycles of global catastrophes and major weather events that arrive in the form of black and red clouds we all breathe in, connect us back to more- and less-recent forms of extraction here and elsewhere on the planet. Architectural fashions, and sometimes technical expertise, travel the same channels by which political action spreads. And importantly, learning and enabling of all sorts of action happen in many more ways that are not codified than those that are. Every school is its own version of this mesh of timelines, people, and things. I am humbled daily to take part in the MIT version of it, and to now take the helm on behalf of this collective.”

Some people find it useful to talk through their problems — but language isn’t necessary for logical reasoning, cognitive neuroscientists at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research say. 

In research published this week in the journal PNAS, researchers led by MIT associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences Evelina Fedorenko have shown that people can perform well on tasks that require logical reasoning even if their language abilities are severely impaired. What’s more, brain imaging shows that language-processing parts of the brain are not called on for logical reasoning.

Philosophers, linguists, and cognitive scientists have debated the relationship between language and thought for thousands of years, with many arguing that we use language to think. There are good reasons to suspect a close relationship between logic and language, acknowledges Hope Kean, a postdoc and former K. Lisa Yang Integrative Computational Neuroscience (ICoN) Center graduate fellow in Fedorenko’s lab. “Abstract thinking has properties that look a lot like language,” Kean says, pointing to structural similarities. “You can decompose a thought into subcomponents, like little atoms of logical propositions, and you can combine them in a hierarchical manner to make more complex structured rules, very akin to language.”

But she and Fedorenko, who is also a McGovern Institute investigator, suspected that while we largely depend on language to communicate about logical reasoning — from presenting a problem to explaining how we have arrived at conclusions — the brain might use a separate system for the reasoning itself. 

“There are aspects of thinking that seem to go beyond some of the limitations of language,” Kean explains. Logical reasoning demands precision that language often lacks. And language is linear, progressing one word at a time, whereas evaluating available information to reach logical conclusions can require thinking in less linear ways.

Logical reasoning

These observations left Kean curious about how the brain handles logical reasoning. It’s a particularly difficult question to answer scientifically, because it’s hard to take language out of the equation when working with human study participants. But Fedorenko’s team did just that by collaborating with Rosemary Varley, a neuroscientist at University College London who studies acquired language disorders, and her team.

Together, the scientists worked with two patients who had experienced stroke that damaged language-processing parts of their brains, leaving them with severe impairments in both understanding and producing language. They designed language-free logic games in which participants were asked to infer relationships between sets of numbers. Given two lists, they had to figure out the hidden rule that turned one list into the other, such as reversing the digits or removing numbers above a certain value. Once they thought they’d discovered the rule, they had to apply it to new examples. In a second game, participants were presented a set of geometric patterns and asked to identify another pattern to complete the matrix.

As participants solved increasingly difficult puzzles, it became clear that people don’t need language for this kind of reasoning. Patients with language impairments solved the problems as well as a control group, and were even able to communicate the rules they inferred using gestures, or with a sketch. “It really upends a theory that says that symbolic rule induction is not possible without linguistic capacities,” says Kean.

Alongside this part of the study, Kean and colleagues also used functional brain imaging to study what happens in the brains of healthy adults when they are engaged in logical reasoning. Participants in this part of the study visited MIT for a series of MRI scans, which captured images of their brain activity during an array of tasks. In addition to completing different kinds of logic games inside the scanner, participants were asked to engage in tasks designed to map the language-processing parts of their brain. Another set of tasks was used to map each person’s so-called “multiple demand network” — a distributed brain system that supports complex problem-solving.

These neurotypical participants completed logic games similar to those used with the language-impaired patients. They were also presented with problems that required syllogistic reasoning, using “if-then” statements such as “if the ball is red, then it is big. The ball is red. Is the ball big?” The team varied the difficulty of the logic puzzles so they could see which brain areas became more active when the need for logical reasoning intensified. Likewise, they looked for changes in brain activity when participants had to infer a hidden rule, versus simply applying a rule they’d been given.

Here, too, a separation between language and logic was clear: The MRI scans showed the brain’s language system is not engaged for either inductive reasoning (when participants identified hidden rules) or deductive reasoning (when they assessed the validity of syllogistic conclusions). Surprisingly, the multiple demand network, which many scientists had suspected was important for logical reasoning, was engaged during inductive reasoning, but didn’t seem to get involved in deductive reasoning — a finding Kean is building on in her ongoing work.

For Fedorenko and Kean, the findings are strong support for a separation of logic and language in the brain. They add to previous findings from Fedorenko’s lab showing that other types of thinking, such as object categorization and social reasoning, also do not rely on language.

Acquired language impairments and AI

The researchers say these findings have important implications for how we think about acquired language impairments, or aphasia. Specialists who work with people with aphasia have long recognized that loss of language does not mean loss of intelligence. People with aphasia can continue to enjoy playing chess, solving sudoku puzzles, or being in charge of the family’s finances. But it is common for others to confuse their communicative difficulties with thinking difficulties.

“This research adds to a growing body of work establishing that even severely aphasic individuals can preserve their ability for abstract logical thought — a defining feature of our species,” Fedorenko says. “We should continue to educate the public that linguistic difficulties — in aphasia, but also in those with developmental language conditions, such as stuttering, or those who do not speak English natively — are not indicative of how smart or capable someone is.”

There could be implications for artificial intelligence, too. Large language models like ChatGPT and Claude are trained entirely on text and use text as their output — yet they convincingly simulate some kinds of human reasoning. Exploring the differences between these models and the human brain, where language and abstract logical thought are distinct, might offer useful insights to inform future models, Kean says.

When it comes to understanding how the human brain reasons, Kean calls this a new frontier in the geography of thought — and she says it’s one she is eager to explore.

From the basement of MIT’s Building 35 to Monterrey, Mexico, and now beyond. That is the journey of FrED, a low-cost desktop fiber (Fr) extrusion (E) device (D), designed and assembled by students in an educational factory at MIT.

That factory is transforming how manufacturing is taught — replacing textbook learning with hands-on experience in a space where tinkering is encouraged and information flows continuously. Through a collaboration between MIT and Tecnológico de Monterrey (Tec) managed by MIT.nano, FrED has been refined across dozens of graduate theses and undergraduate research stays. It is used to study manufacturing systems in academic and professional courses, and at FrED factories, first established at MIT and now at Tec’s campuses in Monterrey and Mexico City.

“What does it mean to bring the factory to the learner?” asked Brian W. Anthony, MIT.nano associate director and principal research scientist in the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE) at the second annual FrED summit in Mexico City. “We have FrED as a process that manufactures a fiber, and we also have the FrED factory that’s an education and practice factory where we are manufacturing a real product. It’s not just a learning factory where we tear apart the product when we’re done. We really ship FrEDs to our online learners, to educators at MIT and Tec, and soon, to new partners around the world.”

Designed from the start for multi-node community scaling, FrED and the FrED factory have created a thriving, collaborative ecosystem for current and future manufacturing engineers. The next step is to expand that ecosystem globally. Announced at the FrED summit by Tec professor Pedro Ponce Cruz, a new FrED factory at Tec’s Saltillo campus will be opening in the next academic year. After that, the team plans to expand to other campuses across the United States and Mexico.

“Together, we are helping build a global engineering talent pipeline,” says Adriana Vargas Martinez, executive director of research strategy at Tec. “Through the FrED and FrED factory initiative, nearly 500 students have already been trained in advanced manufacturing automation, moving from Tec classrooms into research laboratories and collaborative projects with MIT.” 

Discussing FrED and FrED factory’s research impact, she notes 25 publications and seven papers in development. “International mobility has also been an important dimension of this partnership,” she says.

A shift toward modern manufacturing deep-tech themes

FrED’s expansion comes at a time when manufacturing at MIT and across industry is shifting toward smart manufacturing, or Industry 4.0, integrating automation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. One of MIT’s strategic priorities, the MIT Initiative for New Manufacturing (INM), is working to support new manufacturing research, development of new courses and workforce training, and building of shared facilities to pilot production lines and immersive manufacturing experiences. FrED and the FrED factory are already designed to support these efforts, and at an international scale.

“FrED and the FrED factory is really, I think, solving at least one problem: how we give real, physically meaningful physical context and production-level data, production-level problems in an academic environment that is directly transferable to the knowledge that you need on the factory floor,” says Anthony. It’s difficult to get data out of a real factory, he adds; what FrED offers is physical context crossed with data science, providing an open platform and open data for learning and experimenting.

FrED naturally generates the multi-modal data required for digital twins, analytics, and AI-driven process improvement, turning abstract AI/manufacturing integration into hands-on practice. The next set of research objectives in the FrED factory will focus on developing a realistic and interactive digital twin of the factory, immersive technology for collaborative learning, integrating agentic controllers. They will include new downstream manufacturing processes and machines that take as input the fiber from FrED — all to enhance smart manufacturing education.

These goals will be worked on by MIT and Tecnológico de Monterrey students as part of a FrED factory research stay. This program brings Tec undergraduates to MIT to work side-by-side with MIT students — not observing, but fully integrated into the research team. The students then take what they’ve learned back to Mexico, to enhance FrED factories at their home institution. 

“Beyond the technical side, FrED gave me memories, friendships, and a lot more confidence in myself than I knew I had,” says Naomi Najera, a Tec undergraduate student who completed a research stay at MIT in 2025. “It also gave me a space where I could make mistakes and learn from them. And also to realize how much I can achieve with my team. That human side of this project really changed my whole experience.”

A recent result from this exchange, announced June 23 by the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), a paper entitled “Hands-On Predictive Maintenance Kit for Manufacturing Education: An Accessible Experiential Learning Approach,” written by Tec and MIT students, received the 2026 ASEE Manufacturing Division Best Paper Award.

Shifting classroom learning to factory operations

At MIT’s campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, passersby can look down into the Building 35 basement windows to see a constant flow of activity, materials, and knowledge in the MIT FrED factory. In Mexico, seven cohorts of students over four years each designed a custom version of FrED and built and operated an automated FrED factory production line. Indeed, FrED has restructured how Tec teaches mechatronics and manufacturing systems. “This collaboration integrates research directly into education,” says Vargas Martinez, “combining learning factories and our manufacturing environments with student-centered research.”

The Tec students’ enthusiasm has led to the launch of an Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program-like curriculum (FRAME: Factory-based Research for All in Mechatronics Education) in Mexico, where first-year undergraduates are working alongside graduate level students in the FrED factory. 

“Joining FrED as a first-semester university student has been an amazing opportunity for me to get hands-on experience in real-world projects in areas such as coding, manufacturing, and robotics,” says Katherine Lucia McLean. “It’s helped me grow a lot as an engineering student.”

The FrED factory model forces real leadership behaviors: coordinating multi-station systems, managing bottlenecks, building maintenance logic into the student experience, enforcing quality measurement, and iterating system design year after year. As each class graduates and a new one begins, knowledge is transferred, some of it lost, most of it built upon. In this way, FrED never becomes outdated, as each cohort is reimagining manufacturing technologies and systems for a smarter, more productive factory.

FrED and the FrED factory have momentum. Anthony taught the global capstone course at the Monterrey campus last year, and will expand to teach at all five international Tec campuses in 2027. The FrED Factory Conference will take place at MIT in 2027.

Hydrogels are squishy, bio-friendly materials that are made mostly of water and a bit of polymer. The Jell-O-like substance is available in the form of medical patches, sprays, and glues, and can be stuck to the skin or implanted in the body to dress wounds, affix implants, and encapsulate and release medicine over time. 

For all their sticky, stretchy, and protective properties, hydrogels lack one key trait: breathability. If worn for too long, a bandage or patch can trap moisture and sweat, which can irritate tissues and reduce the effectiveness of any device that a hydrogel adheres.  

Now MIT engineers have come up with a recipe for a hydrogel that is both hydrated and aerated, or permeable to air. The new material is just as soft, stretchy, and robust as conventional hydrogels, but a network of tiny tunnels running through the gel allows air to pass through. 

The aerated hydrogel can be worn for longer periods of time compared to conventional hydrogels, without causing skin irritation. It can also reduce sweat buildup, even during exercise. In experiments, volunteers wore wireless heart monitors that were attached to their chest with the new breathable hydrogel. After working out regularly for 10 days, the volunteers showed no signs of skin irritation, and the heart monitors maintained clear readings.  

The results, which are reported today in the journal Nature, may enable longer-lasting hydrogel products, such as breathable bandages and dressings, cosmetic face masks, and contact lenses, along with better-performing health monitors and implants. 

“Water and oxygen are both essential for life,” says Xuanhe Zhao, the Uncas (1923) and Helen Whitaker Professor of Mechanical Engineering, and a professor of civil and environmental engineering, and medical engineering and science. “Now that we’ve added air to hydrogels, people can find broad applications.”

Zhao’s MIT co-authors on the study include Xiao-Yun Yan, Shucong Li, Won Jun Song, Runze Li, Bastien Aymon, Jingjing Wu, Gengxi Lu, Jiayi Liu, Shu Wang, Eric Lu, Hyunhee Lee, James Zhang, Casey O’Brien, and Zachary Smith, along with collaborators from multiple other institutions.

Breathing through Jello

Water makes up about 90 percent of a typical hydrogel. The rest of the material consists of polymers. When mixed with water in a chemical process known as “cross-linking,” the polymers settle into a sort of scaffold that holds the water in place, forming a gel that’s both squishy and stretchy. But because hydrogel’s composition is mainly water, it’s inherently challenging for any air to make its way through the material effectively. 

“In general, water is not breathable,” co-lead author Xiao-Yun Yan says. “Hydrogel is 80 to 90 percent water, similar to Jell-O. And you cannot breathe through Jell-O.”

Other groups have tried to design air-permeable hydrogels, mainly taking one of two approaches. The first has been to essentially puncture microscopic holes throughout the gel. Such designs are breathable, but only in air. When they are placed in liquid, the holes quickly clog up. 

Researchers have also tried mixing hydrogel with certain polymers, such as silicone, that naturally allow air through. But this approach requires adding a large amount of polymers to the hydrogel in order to create enough permeable space for air to move through the entire gel. These hydrogels end up having a greater balance of polymer to water, making them less hydrated in general. 

Zhao, who has been a leader in the development and application of hydrogels, looked to make a hydrogel that lets air through without losing its water-heavy makeup. 

“We want to have lots of tiny channels to let air through, while also maintaining lots of water in the gel,” Zhao says. “This was a significant challenge, and something that people thought was impossible to do.”

Highways for air

After several years of investigation, the team hit on an ideal recipe for a breathable hydrogel that minimizes the non-water ingredients needed to let air through. In their new study, they report that the key to the recipe is “phase separation.” A common example of this process is the interaction between oil and water. The difference in the two liquids’ phases cause them to instantly separate. When the two are mixed, oil and water glom to their own kind, while avoiding the other. 

Zhao and his colleagues took advantage of viscoelastic phase separation in concocting a breathable hydrogel. For their new design, they mixed their conventional hydrogel recipe with a very small amount of silica aerogel particles, which are essentially “solid-form” air bubbles. 

“They are like boba beads,” Yan offers. “The particles are made of silica, which is hydrophobic, meaning that water does not want to leak through them, so they are very stable in water.” 

And as it turns out, the particles are similar to oil when mixed with water. The researchers found that when they mixed just a small amount of the particles with a solution of the water-heavy hydrogel, the water molecules glommed together, essentially finding each other faster than the less abundant silica particles. This effect of viscoelastic phase separation created large pockets of water and squeezed the silica particles into skinny, interconnected tunnels. The team observed that after a few hours, this effect formed a network of thin and sturdy, silica-skinned tunnels through which air could flow.

“It’s as if the particles formed a network of connected tunnels, like air-permeable highways within the hydrated hydrogel,” says co-lead author Shucong Li. 

Once they confirmed that the network had formed, the team cross-linked the mixture, essentially freezing the gel, and its breathable network, in place. They then tested the gel’s breathability and mechanical performance over multiple experiments, including one in which they asked several volunteers to wear the gel, attached to a wireless electrocardiogram (ECG) monitor, while exercising for 20 minutes. The volunteers also wore monitors with conventional, commercial hydrogel adhesives.

Throughout the workouts, the researchers observed that the breathable hydrogel maintained a strong ECG signal, in contrast to the conventional gel which exhibited significant signal fluctuations.The researchers observed similar results in an experiment with several volunteers who wore the breathable hydrogel and ECG monitor over 10 days. 

“We reliably saw that after 10 days, the quality of the ECG signal is still pretty good, and after you take off the monitor, there were no noticeable blisters or redness on the skin,” Li says. “This indicates healthy skin conditions.”

The team also exercised the gel itself, putting it through 10,000 cycles of stretching and compression. After these tests, they found the gel still retained the network of air channels, maintaining its breathability. 

“After 10,000 cycles, there was less than a 5 percent drop in oxygen permeability,” Li says. “That matters, because even with your heartbeat, your chest continuously undergoes small strains. So we have to make sure this gel is durable for such daily activity.”

Zhao says the new study provides a novel approach for others to fabricate breathable and multifunctional hydrogels, using the concept of visoelastic phase separation as a guide. 

“We’ve discovered that this process can create these air-permeable hydrogels, and we demonstrate one application,” he says. “But we think there can be very broad applications. This is a technology platform.”

This work was carried out in part through the use of MIT.nano’s facilities. This work was supported in part by the MIT Hatsopoulos Faculty Fellowship, the Uncas and Helen Whitaker Professorship, a HEALS seed grant, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Defense Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs.

In 2024, a U.S. government official warned that Russia could be developing a new satellite designed to carry nuclear weapons into space. The statement followed the launch of a suspicious Russian satellite into low-Earth orbit in 2022, just a few weeks before the country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

A nuclear detonation in low-Earth orbit — the region about 100 miles to 1,200 miles above Earth’s surface — would release trillions of highly energetic electrons that would destroy many of the satellites in space, disrupting telecommunications networks, GPS, space-based internet, and more.

The 1967 Outer Space Treaty bans the placement of nuclear weapons in space, but there’s currently no way to verify satellites don’t contain nuclear weapons. In fact, no verification methods have even been proposed in unclassified, peer-reviewed literature.

Now, MIT Professor Areg Danagoulian is proposing a way to determine if a satellite orbiting Earth contains a nuclear weapon. In a new paper published in Nature, Danagoulian describes his idea for a satellite-based sensor system that could orbit close by a suspect satellite and detect neutrons generated by high-energy protons colliding with radioactive material.

In the paper, Danagoulian calculates that a sensor system the size of a large encyclopedia could detect a nuclear weapon with 99 percent accuracy if it orbited within 4,000 meters of the suspect satellite for about a week. He also estimates that the detection time could be cut to a matter of hours if multiple satellite sensors were used or the sensor satellite was able to get within 1,000 meters of the suspect satellite.

“If we eventually have some verification mechanisms for the Outer Space Treaty, that will put pressure on countries to respect the treaty or disclose what they are doing, because they know if they try to violate it, we will find out,” Danagoulian says. “I very much hope this will turn into a real system, or proof-of-concept system, but the goal right now is to get national labs to use this work for their own research, and to get policymakers to seriously consider this technology as a potential part of national technical means.”

Protecting space

In 1962, the U.S. detonated a 1.4-megaton thermonuclear warhead in space, which unintentionally destroyed many of the early satellites of the era. The blast released enormous volumes of highly energized electrons, and many became trapped in Earth’s magnetic field, where they damage any electronics in their path.

“When you have a nuclear detonation in outer space, basically the whole body of the bomb becomes ionized, and nearly every single electron in the weapon’s mass becomes free,” Danagoulian explains. “It gets injected into what’s called the inner Van Allen radiation belt. Once there, the electrons start hitting everything flying through those belts, causing ionization, radiation damage, and more. As you go further out into space, you create these thick belts around Earth populated by highly energetic protons and electrons.”

The 1967 Outer Space Treaty declared space the “province of all mankind” and banned nuclear weapons in space, among other safeguards. It has since been signed by 118 countries including the U.S., China, and Russia.

Monitoring compliance with the treaty has taken on increased urgency since Russia’s 2022 launch of a suspicious satellite, Cosmos2553, which Russia claims is used for surveillance and sensing. However, U.S. authorities believe it may carry components of a nuclear device undergoing testing, with the possible future goal of fielding an actual nuclear anti-satellite weapon. The detonation of a nuclear weapon at that orbit could destroy many of the U.S. reconnaissance satellites, international communication satellite platforms, as well as the Starlink satellites.

“The Russians launched this satellite in a very strange and unusual orbit because it goes through the most hostile environment possible around the planet,” Danagoulian explains. “No one puts satellites there because it’s highly radioactive. Why would you put a satellite in that orbit? Well, that location is likely the best point for trapping electrons if you were to detonate a thermonuclear weapon.”

Danagoulian notes most research on nuclear detection is highly classified, making it hard to know how much progress has been made in national labs. But he wanted to show that scientifically proving the presence of a nuclear weapon in space is possible.

Particle bombardment

The approach Danagoulian developed centers on a reaction known as spallation, caused by highly energetic protons in radioactive environments.

“When an energetic proton slams into elements with a high atomic number, like uranium and plutonium, each proton may knock out something like 40 neutrons,” he explains. “That’s a ridiculously large number. We’re talking about millions of protons per second per square centimeter, with many of them generating 40 neutrons. The question is can you detect some of those neutrons?”

Normal satellites wouldn’t emit nearly as many neutrons, but there are still naturally occurring protons, neutrons, and electrons in the atmosphere, especially in low-Earth orbit. Danagoulian’s concept uses two panels made up of pixels of neutron sensors known as scintillators that interact with radiation and emit light. The panels are sandwiched between synthetic crystal diamond detectors that allow the system to distinguish between neutrons coming from radioactive materials and natural protons and electrons. The two-panel construction then can be used to estimate the direction of the neutron, allowing it to differentiate between natural atmospheric neutrons and those coming from a suspected satellite. 

“Most neutron detectors are very sensitive to protons, so you have to come up with some smart ways to reject protons but keep neutrons,” Danagoulian says. “You also have to tell the difference between naturally occurring neutrons and neutron spallation from the satellite.”

He believes the system, placed inside of an inspector satellite, would be strong enough to survive the harsh environment of low-Earth orbit while also being fast enough to process the protons, electrons, and neutrons that bombard it.

Danagoulian’s calculations on how long the detector satellite would have to be near the suspect satellite give him confidence in the feasibility of the system. If a detector satellite were able to get within 1,000 meters of the suspect satellite, it could accurately detect nuclear weapons in about one hour. That would amount to a single flyby.

Danagoulian calls the paper a feasibility study of the concept.

“I say in the paper this isn’t a completely proven system,” he says. “The purpose of the paper is to show the scientific community that it’s scientifically possible to do this. But there are many more practical considerations to be made to actually build these detectors.”

Danagoulian hopes the study will stimulate further research and development. He is also working with researchers in MIT’s Center for Nuclear Security and Policy (CNSP) to understand the policy landscape around this issue.

If a version of his system is eventually developed, Danagoulian believes it could encourage the nonproliferation that has helped preserve satellites so far. He notes that while adversarial countries are naturally suspicious of each other’s claims, scientific evidence would strengthen trust.

“You can fake intelligence,” he says, “but you can’t fake physics.”

The work was supported, in part, by the National Nuclear Security Administration, the Carnegie Foundation, and Longview Philanthropy.

If you are crossing an unfamiliar room in the dark, you may grope around a bit to get a sense of your space.

But for many animals, feeling out a space comes more naturally. A mouse, for instance, can efficiently navigate in the dark just by grazing its whiskers against walls and other obstacles.

Fan Wang, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences and an investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, has discovered how neurons in a mouse’s brainstem use signals from the animal’s touch-sensitive whiskers to estimate an object’s distance from the face.

Her team’s findings, published June 25 in the journal Neuron, unlock key circuitry the brain uses to represent the space immediately surrounding the body.

Mapping space

The circuit the team discovered is part of the brain’s system for creating an egocentric map of space — that is, understanding where things are relative to one’s own body. Neuroscientists know that the brain calls on specialized circuits to understand space in this way, which are different from its system for mapping space using external landmarks.

In their study, Wang and her team explored how the brain maps the space closest to the body, known as the peripersonal space. This is the space in which we move, and it is vital that we understand where things are in relationship to our bodies so we can reach, step, avoid hazards, and otherwise interact effectively with our environment.

Wang says mice were an appealing model for investigating how the brain understands objects’ distance within the peripersonal space, because a rodent’s whiskers seem so much like a built-in set of rulers. These whiskers, which vary in length, are swept back and forth as the animals explore their environment. As whiskers bend and vibrate, the mechanical sensations are relayed to the brain by sensory neurons at their base. Those neurons fire more when a whisker bends close to the face than they do in response to contact near the whisker’s tip, communicating information about the proximity of the touch.

Wang’s team wanted to know if the brain uses these signals to build an internal ruler-like representation of distance more precise than “near” or “far.” To find out, graduate student Wenxi Xiao and Research Scientist Kyle Severson monitored neural activity in a small sensory-processing region in the brainstem where tactile signals from the whiskers first arrive in the brain. They studied what happened there as mice walked on a treadmill while brushing their whiskers against a wall that passed by at different distances.

Many neurons in the region were sensitive to the whisker bending triggered by the wall. Some behaved similarly to the sensory neurons they were getting their information from, firing more when the wall was closer to the face and thus serving as a proximity-based distance code. But other cells were tuned in to discrete distances, firing only when the distance of the wall the whiskers had touched was within a specific range.

The whiskers rule

For some neurons, activity peaked when the wall was 23 millimeters away from the face, near the tips of the longest whiskers. Others responded most when the wall was at intermediate distances. “Each of these neurons represents a specific distance, and together they span the full range reached by the longest whisker, like tick marks on the ruler,” Wang explains. “We call that the map code.”

The team wanted to know how the brain converts proximity signals from different whiskers into accurate map code of object’s distances from the head. “You cannot just listen to individual whisker neurons, because a contact at the tip of a short whisker would be in the middle of a long whisker. You need a brain circuit to build a unified distance map,” Wang says.

Through computational modeling and by exploring what happened when they manipulated neural signaling in specific ways, Wang’s team showed how distances can be calculated by comparing inputs from different sensory neurons. Their findings suggest that each brainstem neuron that makes up the map code receives both direct excitatory inputs from proximity-sensitive whisker neurons and inhibitory inputs from neurons driven by proximity-dependent whisker touch signals.

“Essentially, the inhibitory pathway allows the brainstem to compare two inputs by subtraction,” Wang explains. “If one input signals ‘this is how far it is’ and the other signals ‘this is how far I estimate it to be,’ subtracting one from the other yields an intermediate value. We think it’s a simple and elegant way to transform tactile input into a representation of discrete distance.”

Wang notes that despite their importance, the brain’s body-centered representations of space have so far received little attention from neuroscientists, who know much more about how we understand locations in space relative to landmarks (an allocentric map). She is eager to investigate how the egocentric map code her team discovered is integrated with other brain systems to guide movement, social interactions, and other behavior, and hopes the findings will further exploration from other groups.

The study was funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health.

In today's world, artificial intelligence chatbots such as ChatGPT and Claude can perform many functions, such as composing work emails and planning travel itineraries. These chatbots are systems built around large vision-language models (VLMs): AI trained on a massive dataset that includes books, websites, code, and images. 

The AI algorithms are then refined on massive amounts of human-generated feedback to follow instructions and avoid harmful or unwanted output, and use that "knowledge" to produce text or images based on input from a user. Although chatbots have clear limitations, they can be very helpful for a wide range of tasks, including in some areas that traditionally require specialized skills, like computer programming.

As part of a project for the U.S. Department of the Air Force–MIT AI Accelerator's Phantom Program, U.S. Air Force cadet Joshua Lynch — with the help of his mentor, Laura Niss, a technical staff member in the Embedded and AI Systems Group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory — wanted to determine if, as a complete novice to coding, he could develop a fully functional program. He used a process called "vibe-coding," in which a user relies entirely on prompts to guide a generative AI chatbot to write and refine code. 

His motivation was to empower anyone familiar with the military problem space, regardless of their technical background, to advance their ideas for useful software applications, essentially bypassing the time and cost constraints of the traditional military software development pipeline. Lynch aimed to build his own application while Niss monitored his experience with the technology.

"The Phantom student wanted to see if he could create a useful application through self-identified vibe-coding, without any previous experience," Niss says. "Within this project, I wanted to understand how his perception of AI changed over time with use. We both wanted to understand better where and how AI could be used by nontechnical users in the military."

Lynch set out to see if, starting with no coding skills and using chatbots, he could create an application specific to his type of tactical team to help reduce collateral damage while enhancing survivability in the broader mission. This application would offer capabilities including AI-assisted target recognition; modular intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance; autonomous striking; and communication management on the battlefield. 

During the project, Lynch completed several professional development courses in AI and familiarized himself with both military and nonmilitary uses of the technology. For the basis for his code generation, he used the paid models of three AI chatbots: Anthropic's Claude, OpenAI's ChatGPT, and Google's Gemini. Most of this work was done only through the chatbots' main chat function on a web browser, not as an integrated system within a development environment, as is standard now. The final application was produced using Google AI Studio App, which can create applications that interface with the Gemini application programming interface and has AI integrated in the development environment. 

Over three months, Lynch worked with these models to build his application, called the Remote Operating Modular Augmentation Device (ROMAD-AI). During this time, he learned several methods to improve the code output. For example, he often encountered difficulties with the AI chatbots lacking hierarchical focus and modifying unrelated code sections. He discovered it was important to break problems into small parts, frame questions clearly, and steer conversations back on topic when they stray too far from the objective. 

Learning to recognize the chatbots' limitations and effectively work around them took up most of the project timeline. As Lynch gained more experience with the chatbots, limitations in the AI capabilities and time for development caused him to re-scope the project, moving it from an application that could assist on the battlefield to one that could perform basic document processing, such as analyzing tactical maps of battlefields and generating mission-planning documents through an interface with a VLM-powered chatbot. While the resulting prototype did not perform all capabilities Lynch originally set out to include (and in its current iteration was not secure for the desired use case), it proved the capability and usefulness of such an application for service members.

"I was quite impressed with this final product, and it showed me how powerful these systems can be at prototyping designs from nonexperts," Niss says. "I'm now of the opinion that these can be powerful tools for nontechnical experts to convey problems and possible solutions to technical experts, and aid in communicating desired outcomes."

Niss observed the change in Lynch's perspective of AI language models during his experience. After starting with an impressive goal, Lynch gained understanding of the capabilities of current technology and significantly scoped down his expectations by the end of the project period. Measures of his perceptions of the different AI systems over time and across system updates were particularly interesting to Lynch and Niss, with Claude showing more stability than ChatGPT across traits such as likeability, anthropomorphism, and perceived intelligence. Lynch found AI to be a helpful tutor, but noted its inaccuracies on topics he knew well.

The project showed that AI chatbots can empower nontechnical service members to produce viable software applications for their unique problems, although it works better as a prototyping assistant than as a full production tool when handling sensitive information and for critical applications. Improper vetting of code may lead to security risks, as demonstrated by an instance where Lynch didn't realize that the final application was sending the input documents to a Gemini AI model to analyze, rather than parsing the documents locally on his computer. Although AI can generate significant amounts of functional code, code review remains a bottleneck in this space.

"For me, this project reinforced the expanse between experts in different fields," Niss says. "No matter how good AI gets, I think we'll always need to collaborate to get to the best solutions for the most important problems."

Research was sponsored by the Department of the Air Force Artificial Intelligence Accelerator and was accomplished under Cooperative Agreement Number FA8750-19-2-1000.

When a star dies, a black hole is born. This has been the textbook origin story for most black holes. At the end of a massive star’s life, its outer layers blast away in a brilliant supernova, and its core collapses into a gravitationally tight and dense region, forming a black hole.

Recent discoveries from gravitational-wave detectors have revealed hundreds of merging black holes across the universe. Many of them have been thought to come directly from exploding stars. But black holes can also come from other, smaller black holes. The products of previous black hole mergers can, in principle, merge again, creating a more massive black hole. This alternative, black-holes-birthing-black-holes pathway is known as “hierarchical merging.”

Now MIT scientists are finding that a good number of merging black holes may have indeed merged before. They carried out a new analysis of recent data from the LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA observatories, containing 155 pairs of binary black holes, and found about 14 percent of merging black holes in the universe may in fact be second-generation black holes that formed from the previous merging of two smaller black holes. 

The results, which the team reports this week in Physical Review Letters, suggest that repeated hierarchical merging is a significant pathway by which black holes form. 

“We’re finding that, for some of these merging black holes, it’s not their first rodeo,” says the study’s first author, Cailin Plunkett, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Physics. “Overall in the universe, black holes are merging all the time. The question of how often are they repeatedly merging was pretty uncertain. Now we’re seeing a relatively consistent picture where there’s a decent percentage of black holes that are coming from this repeated pathway.”

The study’s co-authors are Salvatore Vitale, associate professor of physics at MIT; Thomas Callister of Williams College; and Michael Zevin of Adler Planetarium and Northwestern University.

Lopsided pairs

When a massive star collapses and dies, the resulting black hole should have very little spin. In addition to losing a huge amount of mass when it explodes, the star should also lose much of its inherent spin, or angular momentum. The black hole left over should then have little to no spin. 

In contrast, when two black holes merge, the collision should create a new, wildly spinning second-generation black hole. 

“They would be spinning very fast, at about 70 percent their maximum possible spin,” Vitale says. 

Scientists suspect that hierarchical mergers occur in dense stellar environments, where stars are so tightly packed together that multiple neighboring stars could die and collapse to form black holes that are then close enough to merge with each other to form second-generation black holes. 

“You might have a ton of stars whizzing around each other, and if some are massive and explode, they become black holes. The black holes continue to whizz around, and can capture each other and merge,” Plunkett says. “This process can repeat potentially ad infinitum, by virtue of the fact that you have a ton of stars and black holes in this really dense environment.”

One sign of a hierarchical merger is that one black hole in a pair of merging black holes has a much higher spin, and higher mass, than the other. Such a lopsided duo would signal that at least one of the black holes came from the collision of two previous black holes. 

In 2024, scientists detected two such lopsided mergers in signals recorded by the LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA observatories. The observatories detect incoming gravitational waves — incredibly small wobbles in the fabric of space and time — that are the reverberations from distant cosmic phenomena, such as colliding black holes. 

The observatories detected two gravitational-wave signals, labeled GW241011 and GW241110, each of which likely contain a black hole spinning much faster than its partner. The hierarchical mergers were discovered by analyzing each signal in detail to tease out the specific masses and spins of the black holes involved in each merger.

That work inspired Plunkett and Vitale to do a search of similar hierarchical mergers using all the gravitational-wave signals that the observatories have captured to date. 

A pattern of wobbles

For their new study, the team analyzed the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Gravitational Wave Transient Catalog 4.0 (GWTC-4.0), which comprises gravitational-wave detections from the observatories’ fourth observing run. Rather than analyze each gravitational-wave signal one by one, which is what scientists did for GW241011 and GW241110, Plunkett and Vitale searched for a characteristic pattern of hierarchical mergers across the data overall, to see if any matching signals popped out.

The pattern they searched for represents a range of orbital “wobbles.” Just before they merge, two black holes spiral toward each other in a disk-like, orbital plane. When the spins of the pair are perpendicular to the plane, this remains relatively steady. But when one or both spins are not perpendicular to the plane, the disk will wobble. The degree to which the whole plane wobbles, or “precesses,” can tell scientists about the balance of masses and spins between the two spiraling black holes. 

Plunkett and Vitale developed a model for the range of wobbling that should be a sign of a hierarchical merger, specifically between a first-generation and a second-generation black hole. 

The team applied the model to the entire GWTC-4.0 catalog, which comprises gravitational-wave signals from 153 black hole mergers, in addition to the signals from GW241011 and GW241110. Their analysis revealed that a number of mergers fit the pattern for orbital wobbling that was likely caused by the colliding of first- and second-generation black holes. 

Specifically, they found that roughly 14 percent of merging black holes in the universe may have merged before, and that these second-generation black holes had very particular masses: Black holes of around 10 solar masses (10 times the mass of the sun) and 30 solar masses were run-of-the-mill star-born black holes, while second-generation black holes had masses of around 20 solar masses or 40 solar masses and above. 

“One of the reasons why the 40-and-above regime is interesting is, stellar evolution theory predicts you shouldn’t be able to form black holes in that mass range at all from just a supernova,” Plunkett says. “We think supernovae from really massive stars end up being so violent that they leave no black holes at all above roughly 45 solar masses. Yet we have seen black holes that are that massive. And the question is: Where did they come from?”

The team’s new analysis provides support for the idea that black holes can form from the repeated merging of other black holes, and that this alternate origin story could explain some of the curious black holes that we can detect today. 

This work was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation, and the Brinson Foundation.

Many experts refer to hydrogen as “the fuel of the future.” It is expected to help decarbonize the global economy in two main ways: burning it or feeding it into a fuel cell produces storable energy with no carbon emissions, just water. And it can be used in place of fossil fuels or as a chemical feedstock in hard-to-decarbonize industrial processes such as steel and cement production.

But for hydrogen to realize its potential, two challenges must be overcome. Researchers worldwide are now working to address the first: finding a method of producing pure hydrogen that’s both cheap and low in carbon emissions.

Just as critical is finding a good means of transporting and storing hydrogen. A team led by researchers at the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) has been tackling that less-discussed but important challenge. The location where the pure hydrogen is produced is likely to be far away from where it will be used, so moving it will be critical — and difficult.

The problem stems from two characteristics of hydrogen: It’s the lightest gas there is, and it has low energy density per volume. Therefore, delivering a given amount of energy requires a large volume of hydrogen and a container that’s sealed so tightly that the hydrogen molecules can’t escape. Suffice it to say, moving a liquid fuel such as gasoline is easier. And without a good means of storing and transporting hydrogen, it can’t fulfill its promise as the world’s clean fuel of the future.

In 2024, with funding provided by ExxonMobil Technology and Engineering Co. through MITEI, a team of MITEI researchers and their Exxon colleagues began examining various approaches to transporting hydrogen. The researchers have now concluded that there’s no single answer; the cost and carbon emissions from a given transportation method will vary from one location to another. Therefore, instead of presenting a table showing the “best” outcome, the team created a tool that enables users to understand the various options and choose the best option for their particular use case. 

The researchers present their study and the tool they developed in a new paper published in the journal Fuel.    

The study was led by former MITEI postdocs Gasim Ibrahim, now an R&D engineer/scientist at Honeywell, and Guiyan Zang, former MITEI group lead who is now an associate professor at Washington State University. Additional MIT co-authors include former postdocs Bosong Lin, Jacqueline Garrido, Woojae Shin, and Haoxiang Lai.

The hydrogen challenge and hydrogen “carriers” that can help

The team’s starting assumption was that for hydrogen to become a viable fuel for the world, it would need to be transported over long distances — specifically, overseas, across continents, or across large water bodies. Given the properties of hydrogen gas, it would be best to convert it to some liquid form before shipping.

There are known ways to do that, but what would be best for shipping? How much would various methods cost, and how much would they add to the carbon intensity of the delivered hydrogen?

“There hasn’t been a lot of attention paid to addressing those questions,” Ibrahim says. While some studies have been done, their conclusions are inconsistent and many uncertainties remain, both because the cost and carbon emissions will differ from place to place and because there’s not a lot of data to inform how the large-scale transportation of hydrogen will work.

“So we decided the best thing to do was to develop an adaptive tool that would enable users to perform their own assessments — a tool that could be updated very easily,” Ibrahim explains. “And we would make it open source, so anyone can see and update the numbers that we used in formulating and testing it. As the industry develops, and as scale becomes more a factor, the assumptions made in [our initial] assessments of the economics and the carbon intensity [of different shipping methods] will need to be updated.”

To focus on the transportation and storage issues, their model — called the Hydrogen Carrier Analysis Tool, or HyCAT — doesn’t consider how the starting hydrogen is produced, or how the hydrogen is used after it’s delivered. HyCAT focuses on determining the costs and carbon emissions incurred as the hydrogen is transported and delivered. In addition, while a full life-cycle assessment would include all environmental impacts, HyCAT focuses on emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs).

The tool is easy to use, says Ibrahim. Built into it is a user interface with drop-down menus for inputting assumptions, and results from an analysis are presented in simple bar charts that include links to tables presenting the details.

Ibrahim clarifies that, while HyCAT has a well-defined boundary — “incoming hydrogen to outgoing hydrogen” — in an analysis of a specific situation, the user will input various factors about the local situation, including the carbon intensity and cost associated with production of the incoming hydrogen. “So that will inform the final values that come out of a HyCAT analysis,” says Ibrahim, and in part explains why the results vary from place to place.

Based on the user’s assumptions, HyCAT calculates the cost and GHG emissions at five steps in the “supply chain”:

• converting the hydrogen into liquid form at the “export” terminal;
• storing the hydrogen-rich liquid;
• shipping it when an empty tanker becomes available;
• storing it at the “import” terminal; and
• releasing the hydrogen as a gas suitable for burning or being fed into a pipeline for distribution.  

Options for liquifying hydrogen gas

The main decision in analyzing the cost and emissions of a proposed hydrogen transport plan is how to convert the gaseous hydrogen to a liquid, and then how to recover the hydrogen gas at the end.

One approach is to simply change the gaseous hydrogen into an easily transportable liquid. But turning hydrogen gas into a liquid requires making it very, very cold. Indeed, notes Ibrahim, “you would need to consume about a third of the energy content of the hydrogen to make the gaseous hydrogen cold enough to liquify.” A further problem arises as the liquified hydrogen is being stored and moved. Unless the vessel containing the liquid hydrogen is properly insulated, the liquid hydrogen can re-gasify and escape. The upside of hydrogen liquefaction is that no chemical reactions are required.

Other options involve using a hydrogen “carrier.” Some liquid chemical compounds will absorb hydrogen atoms under certain conditions, and under other conditions will release them. Therefore, one approach to solving the hydrogen transportation problem is to make a carrier compound absorb the hydrogen where it’s made and then release it when it reaches its destination. This approach therefore involves two chemical reactions — one to bind the hydrogen to the carrier and the other to release it.  

In their demonstration runs, the researchers looked at the hydrogen carriers involving three potential compounds, each of which has known advantages and disadvantages.

One of those carriers is produced by adding hydrogen to toluene. That chemical reaction hasn’t been studied a lot, but there’s one known drawback: the source of toluene is typically the oil and gas industry, so the toluene itself has a relatively high carbon intensity when it picks up the hydrogen. Moreover, over time some of the toluene is lost, so more toluene must be added.
    
The researchers also looked at “synthetic methane,” which is made by reacting hydrogen with carbon dioxide. That reaction has been known for some time. Ibrahim notes that making synthetic methane actually consumes carbon dioxide, often captured from the atmosphere. On the negative side, however, one of the products of the reaction is water, so some of the hydrogen is lost each time the reaction occurs.

The final option they analyzed is ammonia, which forms when hydrogen reacts with nitrogen from the air. That reaction is very well-studied and is used commercially. “We’ve been producing ammonia for a long time,” says Ibrahim. And the infrastructure for transporting and storing it is well established. While Ibrahim refers to ammonia as the “most promising option,” the reaction needed to release the hydrogen has not received much attention.

Varying conclusions and future plans

Based on their sample runs, the researchers observed that the best path to follow will vary from place to place and from situation to situation. “As we developed the tool, we saw that the ‘best’ carrier was very specific to the supply chain at hand,” says Ibrahim. “It’s a function of how far you’re trying to ship your hydrogen, energy and shipping costs at your exporting and importing countries, the capital cost of building the needed facilities at both ends, and more.”

Ibrahim and his team are now planning a follow-up study in which they use HyCAT to analyze specific supply chains under certain conditions. They’ll then select assumptions that are highly uncertain and look at the range of possible values for those assumptions. “Then we’ll be able to say, ‘under these conditions, this carrier is better than that one,’ or ‘this carrier is better at cost, but worse at carbon intensity,’” says Ibrahim.

For now, the main conclusion of the study, says Ibrahim, is that “there’s no conclusion.” He warns decision-makers not to assume that anything they see in the literature can easily be generalized or extrapolated to their specific conditions. Instead, decision-makers should use HyCAT to explore the options available to them. Guided by their results and the objectives and values of their company, they will be able to optimize their supply chains and make clean-burning hydrogen a reality.

Professor Jesse Thaler has been named director of the MIT Laboratory for Nuclear Science (LNS), effective Aug. 1. He succeeds Professor Bolek Wyslouch, who directed LNS for the past decade. Thaler is a theoretical particle physicist who combines techniques from quantum field theory and machine learning to address outstanding questions in fundamental physics. 

“In his research, Jesse has done pioneering work on particle jets at the Large Hadron Collider and is a leader in combining AI and machine learning with fundamental particle physics,” says Nergis Mavalvala, dean of the MIT School of Science and the Curtis and Kathleen Marble Professor of Astrophysics. “The collaborative nature of his research programs will serve the Laboratory for Nuclear Science as science enters a new era of AI-driven discovery.”

Thaler is the William and Emma Rogers Professor of Physics in the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics — a Leinweber Institute (CTP-LI). Since 2020, he has served as inaugural director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) AI Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions, or IAIFI, which was recently renewed for another five years. Mike Williams, professor of physics, will succeed Thaler as IAIFI director. LNS is also poised to pursue new research projects through the Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission, which has a focus on AI-enabled scientific discovery.

“In my own field of particle physics, researchers are developing cutting-edge AI algorithms to handle the data deluge from collider experiments and to perform heroic theoretical calculations. This work has direct implications for discovering new physics, but the algorithms themselves turn out to be valuable well beyond our field,” says Thaler. “I’m excited to bring LNS into the next wave of discoveries supported by AI-driven capabilities.”

At IAIFI, Thaler has championed education and research activities at the intersection of physics and AI. With the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, IAIFI leadership created a doctoral program in physics, statistics, and data science. IAIFI also created dedicated postdoctoral fellowships to give early-career researchers the freedom to pursue interdisciplinary work. 

“Giving young scientists space to build connections across domains, universities, and career stages has been transformative within IAIFI,” says Thaler, who hopes to bring this type of framework to LNS. Established in 1946 to support nuclear and particle physics, LNS now encompasses research spanning cosmology, gravity, field theory, and quantum information science.

As head of LNS, Thaler will also oversee his home center of CTP-LI, which last year received a donation from the Leinweber Foundation to establish a network of theoretical physics research institutes. According to the Science Philanthropy Alliance, a nonprofit organization that promotes philanthropy for science, this constitutes the largest philanthropic commitment ever for this field.

Thaler received his PhD in physics from Harvard University in 2006, and his BS in math/physics from Brown University in 2002. From 2006 to 2009, he was a fellow at the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science at the University of California at Berkeley. He joined the MIT faculty in 2010.

As advanced medical technology gets closer to hitting consumer markets, the need for guardrails on protected usage should increase. What might begin as a neural implant to aid in communication could become a device used to police one’s innermost thoughts.

Intrigued by the far-reaching benefits and risks of neural implants, Rachel Sava, a PhD candidate in the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology, explores how a life-changing medical device can become a tool for surveillance by corporations and government entities in her winning submission, “Superintelligence, Superintimate,” for the fourth annual Envisioning the Future of Computing Prize. 

Sava’s concept was inspired by an internship at IBM, where she worked on a project with the PACE Center in London. “A mentor on the project was Kevin Brown, who had himself designed one of the earliest brain decoders — an EEG-based system he built for a colleague who had suffered a stroke that left him with locked-in syndrome,” she says. “It was this patient population for whom the body has become an unreliable vehicle for the mind that motivated my writing about neuroprostheses some six years later.”

Sava explains that research and applications right now are at a “watershed moment in neurotechnology.” Using examples like companies taking advantage of neural implants to monitor mental productivity, or authorities policing a population for “thought crimes,” Sava said that as this tech hits consumer markets, there is a genuine fear that what starts as a revolutionary medical device could transition into more dystopian usages.

Presented by the Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC), a cross-campus initiative of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, in collaboration with the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences and with support from MAC3 Philanthropies, the competition invited MIT students to identify, in 3,000 words or fewer, which sector stands to gain the highest net positive impact from artificial intelligence. Students were encouraged to explore realistic technological deployments while considering potential risks and ethical concerns. All submissions were eligible for cash awards with the grand prize set at $10,000.

During a live awards ceremony hosted by Caspar Hare, former associate dean of SERC and professor of philosophy, who founded the prize in 2023, three finalists each gave a 20-minute presentation on their concepts and took questions from a panel of judges and audience members.

“SERC and the donors who make this prize possible year after year are asking us, the next generation of scientists: ‘what world do you want to see?’ I think it’s worth taking the time to ask yourself the same,” Sava said. “And if, as it did for me, the sentiment grows bright enough to motivate further action — then it’s worth giving yourself permission to explore it as deeply as you do your other academic work.”

Each year, the Envisioning the Future of Computing Prize asks students to look beyond technological advancement and consider the societal benefits and costs of their work from the outset. From its inception, the competition has consistently attracted undergraduate and graduate students from across a wide range of disciplines.

“This year’s submissions were amazing and included essays on brain-computer interfaces, AI and religion, AI for scientific discovery, finding efficiencies in the power grid, and many more,” says Brian Hedden, co-associate dean of SERC and a professor of philosophy, who holds an MIT Schwarzman College of Computing shared position with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “They showed the breadth and depth of thinking going on at MIT on the social and ethics impacts of technologies.”

Nikos Trichakis, co-associate dean of SERC and the J.C. Penney Professor of Management, adds “what is most striking about these essays is the breadth of imagination they display: the students move fluidly across medicine, neurotechnology, law, ethics, and public institutions, while keeping human agency at the center. Their work is creative, rigorous, and deeply thoughtful, showing a remarkable ability to envision not only what AI can do, but what it should do.”

In addition to awarding Sava the $10,000 grand prize, the judges recognized two runners-up with $5,000 each: Cordiana Cozier, a PhD candidate in the Department of Chemistry, for her paper on the use of AI as a cognitive buffer for public defenders; and Strahinja Janjusevic, a graduate student in the Technology and Policy Program in the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, for his submission on agency and ownership in the field of neural-controlled prosthetics. The judges also named four honorable mentions, each of whom received a $500 cash prize.

Next generation batteries that use new electrolyte materials could achieve far higher energy density than today’s lithium-ion batteries, without many of the safety concerns. But advanced batteries, such as those that use solid or almost-solid electrolytes, have been plagued by the formation of tiny spikes of lithium metal called dendrites that cause the batteries to lose efficiency and fail.

Exactly how those dendrites form is still up for debate. While the interface between the battery’s electrolyte and electrodes has been the focus of most research, another culprit is the boundary where two grains of electrolyte in a solid material meet. Researchers know these boundaries can seed dendrites within electrolytes, although the effects have been difficult to study.

Now researchers at MIT and the Technical University of Munich have uncovered why such boundaries can lead to dendrites: Hidden electrical imbalances across the boundaries affect how the electrolyte conducts electrical charges, which influences how the ions and electrons move through the material during battery operation. In a paper published today in Nature Nanotechnology, the researchers characterized the electrical and chemical behavior of the boundaries and showed that adjusting how the electrolyte is processed enhances the movement of ions while reducing electron leakage. This adjustment can increase critical current density by more than 300 percent, which could enable solid-state batteries that charge faster and last longer.

“Grain boundaries are like the weather: Everyone talks about it, but nobody does anything about it,” says senior author Harry Tuller, a professor in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering. “In this paper, we’ve decided to do something about grain boundaries, and by doing something we’ve shown improved performance and demonstrated the importance of grain boundaries more broadly.”

Joining Tuller on the paper are first author Hyunwon Chu PhD ’25; former MIT professor Jennifer Rupp, the Electrochemical Material Professor at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), who led the study; TUM researchers Waldemar Kaiser, Lukas Wolz, Fran Kurnia, Kun Joong Kim, David Egger, and Johanna Eichhorn; Thomas Defferriere PhD ’22; Willis O’Leary PhD ’24; and University of Antwerp researchers Proloy Nandi, Johan Verbeeck, Sara Bals, and Thomas Altantzis.

Investigating grain boundaries

Rupp’s research group, which moved from MIT to TUM during this research, has spent years studying the behavior of next-generation electrolyte materials. Electrolytes in solid-state batteries are made of many tiny crystals of material packed together.

“What we call a grain, like a grain of salt, is actually a single crystal, but it might only be on the order of 1 micron in size,” explains Tuller. “Under high temperature processes, the best materials essentially consolidate to be void or pore-free and can be nearly 100 percent dense, but each of those crystallites is separated from its neighbor by a grain boundary.”

Solid-state battery researchers have increasingly focused on grain boundaries as the source of the lithium metal dendrites that cause them to short circuit. It’s been suspected that grain boundaries have different chemical and electrical properties from the grains, which interact with the ions and electrons shuttling between electrodes during battery charging and discharging. However, the exact mechanisms by which the boundaries slowed the ions down, leaked electrons, and led to dendrites was unknown.

“Grain boundaries are like defects,” Tuller says. “The boundaries have a higher level of defects than in the grains themselves, and generally that means as carriers of charge approach the boundary, whether electrons or ions, there’s some kind of blockage to overcome.”

To better understand that interference, the researchers developed a model to explain how local electrical imbalances at grain boundaries change the movement of lithium ions and electronic charge carriers. They tested the model in a common solid electrolyte material called lithium lanthanum zirconate, or LLZO, using techniques including electron microscopy, machine learning modeling, and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy, which measures how easily a charge moves through a material.

They found the cores of the boundaries carry a local electrical charge, building up local electric fields that lead to enhanced ionic resistance while causing a build-up of electrons in the boundary region, where they can reduce lithium ions, leading to lithium metal dendrite formation.

“For the last 30 years, the world has been dominated by lithium-ion batteries, but there is a growing recognition that other battery types are needed for batteries used in a variety of uses,” Rupp explains. “This work gives us the fundamental understanding of the space charge interface at the grain boundary. If understood properly, we can come up with engineering concepts to increase cycle life, transference of ions over electrons at these interfaces, and ultimately a better battery.”

Better battery materials

The researchers used their observations to adjust the material processing conditions of the LLZO electrolyte material and minimize the negative charges at the boundaries, finding they could ease the movement of lithium ions and reduce the leakage of electrons.

The modifications allowed them to create an electrolyte that had a critical current density more than 300 percent higher than a baseline sample. Higher current density allows for faster charging and discharging. It should also delay short circuiting to extend the life of batteries.

“Fires are currently a huge issue in the battery industry,” Rupp says. “By showing how to engineer these space charges in a controlled way, which is new in the field, we can have a strong impact on safety. It’s a new way to turn up the notch and get these batteries to charge faster and last longer before they break.”

The findings, along with the researchers’ engineering work, present a roadmap for battery researchers to accelerate the development of high-performance, longer lasting solid-state batteries.

“We showed we can control the initiation of these dendrites to maximize solid state batteries’ high performance,” Chu says. “In this paper, we started with a theory for how these dendrites form, then we did the material characterization to support that theory, then we did the engineering to apply the findings and actually improve battery performance.”

The work was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Lerna Ekmekcioglu, the McMillan-Stewart Professor of History, has been named head of the History Section, effective July 1. 

“Lerna is an exceptional scholar and a proven leader. I am confident that she will guide the unit with thoughtfulness, wisdom, and a deep commitment to its continued success. I very much look forward to working with her in the years ahead,” says Agustín Rayo, the Kenan Sahin Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.

Ekmekcioglu, who joined the MIT faculty in 2011, is a historian of the modern Middle East, the Ottoman Empire, and Turkey, Armenian history, gender, feminism, genocide, and minority politics. She served as director of the Program in Women’s and Gender Studies from 2022 to 2025, where she remains an affiliated faculty member.

Ekmekciouglu succeeds Malick Ghachem, who was named head of the History Section on July 1, 2023. 

“As I begin this new role, my first priority is to sustain and expand the remarkable momentum already underway in the unit. It is truly an exciting moment to be head of History,” says Ekmekciouglu. “We have ambitious new initiatives, extraordinary faculty work, and — this is not a small thing — a group of colleagues who actually like and trust one another.”

She cites the History of Now, launched in 2025, as one of several exciting initiatives underway, adding that her role will be ensuring the section’s projects are sustainable, visible, and intellectually fruitful.

“The work ahead is both practical and intellectual: supporting faculty research and teaching, sustaining new initiatives, expanding public engagement, and demonstrating why historical inquiry is indispensable to MIT’s mission,” she says.

Ekmekcioglu’s first monograph, “Recovering Armenia: The Limits of Belonging in Post-Genocide Turkey” (Stanford University Press, 2016), explored the Armenian community in Turkey after the Armenian Genocide and the limits of minority belonging in the early Turkish Republic.

It won the Der Mugrdechian Society for Armenian Studies Outstanding Book Award.

Her forthcoming book, “Feminism in Armenian: Lives and Texts Through Empire, Genocide, and Diaspora,” co-authored with Melissa Bilal of the University of California at Los Angeles, continues her long-standing work on Armenian feminist thought, activism, and archives across empire, violence, and dispersion.

Ekmekcioglu is a 2016 recipient of the the James A. and Ruth Levitan Award for excellence in teaching. She also organizes the biannual McMillan-Stewart Lecture Series on women, gender, religion, politics, and law across the Middle East and North Africa.

Ekmekcioglu earned a BA from Boğaziçi University in Istanbul 2002 and a PhD from New York University in 2010.