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.

Without federal support for curiosity-driven research, the innovation and talent pipeline that has helped ensure our nation’s prosperity and safety could run dry, warned President Sally Kornbluth during a Washington Post Live event. 

During "The Next Generation," a panel discussion moderated by Washington Post reporter Zachary Goldfarb at The Washington Post’s “Building America Summit,” Kornbluth and Arizona State University (ASU) President Michael Crow joined forces for a spirited discussion on the importance of curiosity-driven research, examining how universities are preparing the next generation of scientists to lead in America’s rapidly changing technological landscape. 

“Many of the things we have in our everyday lives, whether they be medical advances, technological advances, a lot of these things came from 30, 40, 50 years of scientists just trying to figure out how things work,” emphasized Kornbluth.

Kornbluth pointed to MIT’s curriculum that focuses on teaching foundational skills that can be applied to a myriad of technological advances, skills that will be indispensable to leading in an AI-enabled world.

“I do not think that any of our traditional subjects are now outmoded [by AI]. It’s how you approach them,” said Kornbluth. “In our new curriculum, not only are we leaning into basic STEM fields. We really feel we have to resurrect some of the old, moral and civic and ethical educational goals much more strongly because we want all these kids that are learning to be leading-edge technologists, to come at it from a moral, civic and ethical perspective.”

Artificial intelligence

Key to Kornbluth’s mission is maintaining a human-centric approach to AI. Inspired by MIT’s motto, “mens et manus” (mind and hand), she shared: “We really want students to be able to use physical AI. We want our students to still be able to build things, but use AI as an augmentation tool.”

Kornbluth expressed the importance of teaching interested faculty and students how to best use AI as a tool and her commitment to uplifting student collaboration. 

“We’re putting a big emphasis on things like teamwork. So, [students] need to be able to use these tools and come together towards goals, because you could imagine a situation that AI becomes your buddy instead of your study group. We don’t really want that to happen,” said Kornbluth. 

Using AI effectively requires writing strong prompts. Kornbluth discussed how foundational knowledge in fields like math, physics, biology and chemistry, along with teaching students how to write and communicate clearly and effectively, enables students to use AI responsibly when it comes to applying these new technologies to scientific research.

Students need to be able “to take that knowledge and think about how they can use AI to the greatest good and also learn to write the right prompts,” said Kornbluth. 

Kornbluth noted the MIT Sloan School of Management’s unique role in AI exploration. “It’s because the students are all coming with business experience and the demand out there in the field for them to have really strong AI knowledge is very high,” she said. 

The impact of frozen funds

Federal funding fuels curiosity-driven research—the groundwork of medical, technological and countless scientific breakthroughs.

“It is very difficult to make a groundbreaking discovery that’s going to revolutionize human life because you want to do that. You really have to be figuring out how things work and traditionally that sort of research in this country has been funded by the government because it does not have an immediate return,” said Kornbluth.

Discussing issues with federal funding, Kornbluth said that although money has been appropriated for universities, it has not been released to them by and large.

“We’re really trying to figure out what the funding stream is going to be going forward,” said Kornbluth. 

When asked about the consequences of these frozen funds, Kornbluth pointed to the long timeline required to develop life-saving treatments. 

As one example, Kornbluth pointed to diabetes treatments. 

“[Treatments] started with injections of insulin saving people and now it’s automated pumps and CGMs [Continuous Glucose Monitors],” said Kornbluth. “The next phase is going to be an actual functional cure, which is stem cell implantation—masking the cells so they’re not rejected by the immune system. But it takes a lot of basic work to be able to get there.”

“That [diabetes] is just one area. You can extrapolate that to cancer therapy,” said Kornbluth. 

Investment in basic research can advance treatments such as immunotherapy. 

“Immunotherapy is just in its infancy—it doesn’t work in every possible kind of cancer at this point. But all of the modifications that are being done now in basic science laboratories through to pharmaceutical companies and biotech are making it more and more broadly applicable so that pancreatic cancer is not absolutely a death sentence now,” Kornbluth emphasized.

National impact

Beyond research and AI, the president concluded by highlighting the strength of MIT’s student body, programs, and spinouts. 

Kornbluth underscored the value of an MIT education for students and the greater economy. 

Twenty percent of MIT’s class of 2029 were first-generation students. Education“is the best pathway to economic mobility,” said Kornbluth. 

She continued: “MIT has spun out north of 30,000 companies. The economic impact of MIT on this country is equivalent to the 14th largest GDP in the world. We are having a huge impact on the economy and we’re producing the next generation of talent.”

Though MIT is highly selective, Kornbluth noted it is financially accessible through its free tuition program for students with parental incomes under $200,000. She further highlighted MIT for America, an initiative expanding access to calculus, a required course for institutions such as MIT, in under-resourced high schools nationwide.

Kornbluth and Crow concluded the panel by highlighting how their respective universities learn from one another.

“What we [ASU] learn from MIT is, where’s the edge of technology,” said Crow. “We learn how master technologists, and master scientists work in small groups.” For ASU, which has a student population of over 150,000, “ it’s instructive to learn and then operate at a different scale and in a different way. There’s a lot of back and forth,” he said.

Kornbluth expressed her hope for MIT to continue its longstanding tradition of research and education in service of the nation’s next 250 years.

“As a smaller private institution, we’re putting a much stronger footprint in how we can impact people well beyond the MIT walls,” said Kornbluth, “as well as having a scientific impact on society through our discoveries.” 

After more than 10 years at the helm of the Laboratory for Nuclear Science (LNS), Boleslaw “Bolek” Wyslouch will step down to continue research in nuclear physics as director of the Bates Research and Engineering Center, a subgroup of LNS.

“LNS scientists, including Bolek himself, are world leaders in particle and nuclear physics,” says Nergis Mavalvala, dean of the MIT School of Science and the Curtis and Kathleen Marble Professor of Astrophysics. “Bolek has ensured that LNS has flourished during his time as director, supporting our teams’ critical large-scale, international, collaborative research.”

The largest university-based program of its kind in the country, LNS was established in 1946 to provide support for basic research in the fields of nuclear and high-energy physics. Wyslouch has served as LNS director since 2015.

Since Bolek’s appointment as LNS director in 2015, he has helped significantly increase the Laboratory’s research volume. This growth reflects expansion across many areas of nuclear and particle physics, with LNS supporting several new faculty members. His vision was instrumental in bringing low-energy nuclear physics into the laboratory as a major new research area, the only subfield of nuclear physics in which the laboratory had not previously engaged.

“The leadership to inspire this capacity growth brought in young and vibrant faculty research groups, which helped lead to the expansion in LNS research volume,” says Rick Peterson, executive director of the lab. “Further, this new technical expertise facilitated new partnerships across the national laboratories, enabling LNS to develop and build a presence at all U.S.-based nuclear physics labs.” Most recently, LNS is engaged in an effort to compete for bids to the Department of Energy’s Genesis mission, a potential source of funding in the AI era. 

During his tenure, LNS saw the successful bid for the National Science Foundation-funded AI Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions, led by LNS scientists and supporting more than 25 physics and AI senior researchers at MIT and Harvard, Northeastern, and Tufts universities. Last year, the Center for Theoretical Physics (CTP), part of LNS, also received a $20 million donation from the Leinweber Foundation to create a Leinweber Institute within CTP.

“Perhaps most importantly, Bolek led LNS toward a culture where each individual is valued for their own contributions, regardless of their status within a lab group,” says Peterson, adding that he developed new pathways for postdoc support and sponsored other community-building activities. 

At Bates, Bolek has led and overseen a wide range of complex engineering and scientific projects. These include the development of advanced particle detectors for major international research facilities such as CERN, Brookhaven National Laboratory, and Jefferson Lab. Under his leadership, the laboratory established collaborations with industry partners on innovative technologies, including next-generation batteries, advanced accelerator systems, and medical applications of nuclear science. Through these efforts, the laboratory is helping advance both fundamental research and the development of technologies with broad scientific and societal impact.

In his own research, Wyslouch is one of the founders and leaders of the relativistic heavy ion program in the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva.

Wyslouch studies the interactions between subatomic particles by looking at the very energetic collisions of heavy ions. The earliest runs of the LHC showed that hot plasma strongly suppressed production of high-energy jets, redistributing the jet energy among slow particles. Wyslouch’s CMS group further discovered surprisingly strong collective effects in ion-ion collisions, as well as in proton-proton and proton-ion collisions.

Before joining CMS, Wyslouch conducted high-energy and nuclear experiments at CERN and at the Brookhaven National Laboratory Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider facility, and took a leadership role at Brookhaven in creating PHOBOS, a project designed to create and study a quark-gluon plasma.

After completing his undergraduate work in physics at the University of Warsaw, Poland, in 1981, Wyslouch began his association with MIT as a doctoral student, earning a PhD in physics in 1987. After postdoctoral appointments at LNS and CERN, he joined the MIT faculty in the Department of Physics in 1991. He has also served as the head of the Nuclear and Particle Physics Division of the Department of Physics since 2013. 

Wyslouch was recognized for his contribution to education at MIT with a 2004 William W. Buechner Teaching Prize. He was elected as a fellow of the American Physical Society in 2013, and as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2024.

For people at high risk of developing breast cancer, yearly mammograms may not be enough to detect tumors early. To make earlier diagnosis easier, an MIT team has developed portable detectors based on ultrasound, which could be used much more frequently.

In a new paper, the team reports that they have improved the resolution of the images produced by their system, making it easier to spot potential tumors, as well as cysts and microcalcifications. The researchers also created a user interface that makes it simple to use the ultrasound probe, even for people with no expertise in ultrasonography.

This system, they believe, could not only enable earlier detection, but also allow for long-term monitoring following breast cancer treatment — either in a doctor’s office or at home.

“At each time interval, the computer interface guides you to position the device in exactly the same location, which is important for the longitudinal monitoring of a given tissue. It’s very intuitive and quite easy to use,” says Canan Dagdeviren, an associate professor of media arts and sciences at MIT and the senior author of the study.

Former MIT postdoc Md Osman Goni Nayeem and MIT graduate students Shrihari Viswanath and Hyeokjun Yoon are the lead authors of the paper, which appears today in Nature Communications.

Higher-quality imaging

While many people receive annual mammograms to check for breast cancer, it is possible for cancer to develop in between these annual screenings. These cancers, known as interval cancers, tend to be more aggressive, and they account for 20 to 30 percent of all breast cancer cases.

After losing an aunt to an interval breast cancer in 2015, Dagdeviren was motivated to develop a screening technique that would be more effective on women with dense breast tissue and could be performed more often than mammography. She decided on ultrasound, which uses sound waves to create images of tissue. Ultrasounds are often used to follow up on abnormal mammograms, but current ultrasound technology requires large equipment and a trained operator.

Earlier this year, Dagdeviren’s lab published a study in which they demonstrated a small ultrasound probe attached to an acquisition and processing module that is a little larger than a smartphone. This compact system can create a 3D image of the entire breast by scanning just two or three locations.

In the new Nature Communications study, the researchers reported several advances that allow for higher resolution imaging and greater ease of use.

One key advance is the addition of a “backing layer” to the ultrasound transducer. This layer helps to contain and focus the ultrasound waves, improving the resolution and quality of the resulting images. It also increases the range of soundwave frequencies that can be absorbed, and reduces both acoustical noise and electrical noise, further enhancing the images.

“With the backing layer, the device produces more accurate and sharper images, with a wider operating range of frequencies,” Nayeem says.

To further improve the quality of the images, the researchers designed an algorithm that adaptively performs a process called beamforming. This algorithm allows the system to compensate for differences in the speed at which sound waves travel through different types of tissue, such as skin and fat. 

“What we are trying to do is predict the speed of sound properties of the tissue you’re imaging, and then use that to reconstruct the image more accurately. We see up to a 10 percent improvement in the resolution just by applying this technique,” Viswanath says. 

The researchers asked 10 volunteers, who were not experts in ultrasound technology, to use the system to try to identify small micro targets embedded in a “tissue phantom” — a gel-like material engineered to mimic human tissue. Participants had a much higher success rate locating the spheres when they used the new system than when they used a traditional ultrasound probe.

A user-friendly system

For the new version of this system, the researchers also created a user interface, displayed on a computer screen, that guides the user to place the probe in the correct location. This could be especially important for tracking progression of treatments such as neoadjuvent therapy, or long-term monitoring of known abnormalities such as fibroadenomas or microcalcifications.

In a trial with seven people, the researchers found that the users were able to accurately place the probe in the correct location each time they did a scan. 

“Conventionally, you need an operator to move the probe around the breast, but we made a computer-vision interface for users to do it by themselves. This is very user-friendly and it shows live images on the screen,” Yoon says.

For future versions of this technology, the researchers hope to create an interface that could be used with a cellphone or tablet, making the system easier to carry. In addition to enabling earlier diagnosis, this type of system could make ultrasound more accessible to patients in areas where there aren’t enough trained ultrasound technicians, the researchers say.

Dagdeviren and some of her students now hope to form a company to work toward making the technology commercially available. While breast cancer diagnosis is their first target application, they hope to expand it to many others.

“The technology is so versatile that it can be used for any soft tissue imaging, from ovarian cancer to measuring endometriosis progression, or fetal monitoring,” Dagdeviren says.

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award, the Lyda Hill Foundation, the MIT Media Lab Consortium, and a Tata Center Technology and Design Fellowship.

A new big-data analysis of the U.S. pinpoints how urban design aids the health of city residents — especially when cities provide walking opportunities, greenery, and mixed-use streets with a blend of commercial and residential activity. 

The study examines tens of thousands of urban census-bureau tracts in the U.S., seeing how city features correlate with population health measures, while accounting for socioeconomic considerations as well. 

“We found that on a very large scale, urban planning and design, such as the availability of different amenities and their spatial arrangement, plays a critical role in population health outomes,” says Winston Yap, a visiting scholar at the MIT Senseable City Lab, a postdoc at Cornell University, and co-author of a new paper outlining the study’s findings. 

While there is not one design template for all locations, short and well-connected blocks with a variety of amenities, as well as the strategic placement of parks, all help well-being — physiologically and psychologically. 

“We usually think about physical health first, but we also found a high correlation between good design and mental health,” says Fabio Duarte, an MIT researcher and co-author of the paper. “If you are walking more, it is not only a matter of physical fitness, but gives people a chance to avoid isolation, have serendipitous meetings with people, and at least see there are others around.”

The paper, “Urban motifs associated with population health,” appears today in Nature Health. The authors are Yap; Duarte, who is associate director and a principal research scientist at MIT Senseable City Lab; postdocs Yu Zheng, Kee Moon Zhang, and Peng Luo, who is also an incoming assistant professor at the University of Iowa; Paolo Vineis, a professor at Imperial College, London; Carlo Ratti, director of the MIT Senseable City Lab; and Filip Biljecki, an associate professor at the National University of Singapore.

Only connect

The researchers say they conducted the analysis not just due to an interest in cities, but out of recognition that health care systems are often swamped, and preventative health measures are ever-more important. 

“We wanted to do this study because health care systems around the world are overloaded,” Yan says. “There’s a lot of burden on health care systems, and there is a need not just for treatment but for prevention as well, for obesity, high cholesterol, depression and other mental health issues, and more.” 

To conduct the study, the researchers analyzed 28,323 census tracts, using data from the U.S. Census Bureau along with health data from the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). They then used geospatial data, including more than 8 million street view images, to see how urban form related to the health status of residents in those areas. The study accounts for socioeconomic factors and other variables in building an assessment of the relationship between design and health. The study confimed that by themselves, socioeconomic factors are associated with urban health disparities; it then examined the relative impact of differences in urban design in those different settings. 

“By bringing together open demographic, health, and environmental data, the study highlights the importance of open data accessibility for planning healthy cities,” says Ratti.

The scholars also applied a graph deep-learning model to the data, an emerging machine-learning technique they used to help understand which key factors in urban design are most connected to health outcomes. 

The research reveals that in some cases, rectangularity in city blocks, and “building spread,” meaning structures that cover the full size of their lots, can enhance wellness. Examples of this include Manhattan or Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood, where mixed-use buildings on relatively short blocks create many amenities and a variety of walking routes. That said, circular and curving street forms can also work, as long as they feature a lot of interconnectedness as well. 

Urban greenery is almost always a significant factor in urban wellness, with parks scoring high as a facet of city design that helps resident health. Beyond that, expanding the tree canopy can also help urban health outcomes. 

The presence of cultural institutions and restaurants are also linked to general health, while access to health care amenities are understandably connected to physical health improvements. In general, access to points of interest, broadly defined, whether cultural or commercial, is a significant factor in abetting better health, in cities across the country. 

“One of the major contributions of the study is that we look at not only one or two cities, but the entire United States,” Yap says. “In a large-scale study, we were trying to find patterns that were consistent across different urban contexts, as well as populations with different characteristics. Just using this data, we can predict very confidently the population health outcomes for a neighborhood.”

Knowing where to intervene

The research also provides a kind of road map for urban planners and city officials when it comes to policy decisions and local improvements. Among other things, the study suggests where cities might see the greatest return on investment in urban improvements, in health terms. Improvements in lower-income neighborhoods, on aggregate, may generate about four times the added health benefits than the same level of investment in better-off areas that already realize the benefits of good urban amenities. 

“It’s important to know where to intervene,” Yan says. 

“I think for me it shows how intertwined different policies are,” Duarte adds. “Some funding for urban development could have a direct influence on health, and could be more inexpensive than [direct spending on health].”

The researchers regard the study as just one empirical step in this domain. As they note, additional studies could observe changes over time, to further enhance our picture of the connection between urban design and health. Still, as the authors write in the paper, “we believe that our broad picture provides an overarching scaffolding for the understanding of the social and material determinants of health and can guide [further] analytical studies.” 

The research received support from the Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise (CREATE) program of the National Research Foundation Singapore; the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART); and the MIT Senseable City Lab consortium. It is part of the Largescale 3D Geospatial Data for Urban Analytics project, supported by the National University of Singapore.

For decades, neuroscientists have known that specific regions in the brain’s left hemisphere are responsible for processing language. However, a new study by MIT researchers shows that language processing also occurs in many other parts of the brain.

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data from more than 700 people, the researchers identified 17 additional regions of the brain that appear to play a role in language. These regions are scattered across the brain, including parts of the cerebellum, hippocampus, and cerebral cortex, and they make up about 5 percent of the total volume of the adult brain — about the size of a large strawberry.

“Even though there are all these distant components, it’s pretty restricted in terms of volume. You don’t need that much of the brain to do language,” says Evelina Fedorenko, an MIT associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences, a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research,and the senior author of the study.

Exactly how these regions contribute to language processing is still to be discovered, although the researchers have made some progress toward determining the functions of the cerebellar regions that they identified.

MIT postdoc Agata Wolna is the lead author of the paper, which appears in the Journal of Neuroscience. Other authors include Aaron Wright, a K. Lisa Yang Post-Baccalaureate Research Scholar at MIT; Colton Casto, a graduate student at Harvard University; Samuel Hutchinson, a graduate student at MIT; and Benjamin Lipkin PhD ’26.

Tracking language

The brain’s language processing centers include Broca’s area, first discovered in the 1800s, plus additional regions in the left frontal and temporal lobes of the brain. Scientists have found that some of the corresponding areas of the right hemisphere also contribute to processing language, especially the social-emotional components of language.

There have also been hints that other parts of the brain might be involved in language processing. Early in her career, Fedorenko’s language studies often showed active brain regions outside of the canonical language centers, but she says she was discouraged from including them in her papers.

“When we initially started looking at language, in the first couple of papers, I tried to be comprehensive and include anything that seemed consistent across participants, and there was a huge amount of resistance,” she says. “People would say things like, ‘Well, we know those are not language areas, so please focus on the language areas.’”

In the new study, she and Wolna wanted to revisit those brain scans and see if they could systematically identify language regions outside of the standard language-processing areas.

To do that, they analyzed data from 772 people who had been scanned in Fedorenko’s lab since 2013. Each of these participants underwent a task known as a language localizer, which is used to determine the location of language processing areas for each subject. 

During the test, participants read or listen to sentences as well as sequences of nonwords. For each person, the researchers measure the difference in strength of response when reading real sentences or nonsense sequences. The brain areas that work harder during the sentence condition are considered to be doing something relevant to language, especially if they respond while both reading and listening to sentences.

“It’s a very simple paradigm that lets you identify this core language system in individual brains,” Wolna says.

When searching for language areas, the researchers usually use a relatively strict statistical threshold. In this study, they relaxed the threshold and also used some targeted searches in subcortical areas, in hopes of finding all areas that may contribute to language processing.“We always see this frontal temporal network, but there’s quite a lot of evidence that there are other regions that are also critical for language processing,” Wolna says. “By using a laxer threshold and zooming in on areas with weak MRI signal, we tried to maximize the chances of finding small and weakly responsive regions outside of this left frontal temporal system.”

A widespread network

For about 490 of the participants, the researchers also had data on how their brain responded during a spatial working memory task — remembering the locations of flashing squares on a grid. This task engages a brain network called the multiple demand system, which does not overlap with the core language areas.

This task allowed the researchers to ask whether any of the newly identified language-sensitive regions specifically respond to language and not more general cognitive processes.

Of the 17 new language sites that were revealed by this study, five are located in the cerebellum, which is mainly involved in coordinating the body’s movement. In a study published earlier this year, researchers led by Casto found that three of those cerebellar regions also became engaged during some nonlinguistic cognitive tasks, which was also seen in the new study.

“Those areas that respond to both language and some other tasks could be really interesting and important because they may be doing something like integrating information from different cortical systems,” Fedorenko says.

They also found language-selective regions in the medial frontal cortex, the bottom surface of the left temporal lobe, the hippocampus, and the amygdala. The researchers now plan to further study how these brain regions might contribute to language processing.

“We can now test some ideas from past work, and also more rigorously characterize these regions across different kinds of language manipulations, and different kinds of nonlinguistic tasks, to try to understand what it is that they’re doing,” Fedorenko says.

The research was funded by the Simons Center for the Social Brain at MIT, the McGovern Institute, MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and the MIT Siegel Family Quest for Intelligence.

As a new academic year dawns, the MIT-Kalaniyot program is welcoming its second cohort of scholars to campus, expanding an innovative effort to build new connections between MIT and researchers from Israel. 

In fall 2026, MIT-Kalaniyot has 11 new scholars arriving at MIT to pursue research, collaborating with Institute faculty across a wide variety of disciplines. They consist of seven new Kalaniyot Postdoctoral Fellows and four new Kalaniyot Sabbatical Scholars, who are faculty on leave from institutions in Israel. 

It is another step forward for a program which, less than two years ago was still an idea on a drawing board. The project aims to enhance research and create stronger community ties — not only among those connected to the program, but across the MIT campus.

“The goals of the program are to build academic ties between MIT and Israel, alongside a strong, supportive community,” says Or Hen, an MIT nuclear physicist and a co-founder of MIT-Kalaniyot. “MIT has a mission that revolves around research, education, and entrepreneurship, and MIT-Kalaniyot strengthens MIT, to help meet that mission for the world.”

The scholars will be working on a wide range of topics, including mathematics, materials science, behavioral economics, architecture, modern history, chemistry, quantum computing, and computational methods for examining cellular activity.

“We designed Kalaniyot to strengthen MIT’s research and its community at the same time,” says Ernest Fraenkel, a professor of biological engineering and a co-founder of  MIT-Kalaniyot. “We now have scholars in the program working in each of MIT’s five schools. The academic breadth shows our model is working.” MIT-Kalaniyot will also feature its first teaching fellow at the Institute, hosted by MIT’s History program. 

MIT-Kalaniyot was founded by Hen and Fraenkel as a constructive response to discord over conflict in the Middle East. Hen is the Class of 1956 Associate Professor of Physics and associate director of the Laboratory for Nuclear Science; Fraenkel is the Grover M. Hermann Professor in Health Sciences and Technology.

Fraenkel and Hen credit multiple members of MIT’s community and upper administration for backing the MIT-Kalaniyot idea from the start, making it feasible for the program to launch. 

“When we first shared the idea, we were very encouraged by the response from MIT’s senior leadership,” Fraenkel says. “They understood the value of a faculty-led effort, and their constructive response gave us confidence that our approach could be successful.”

“This would be impossible to do the way we’re doing it without the administration’s support,” Hen says. “The program is faculty-led and institution-backed. That’s what you want.”

Hen adds: “I think MIT today is home to one of the most, if not the most, accepting and welcoming communities for Israelis, and I can stand by that statement very strongly. The way our community grew these past years is remarkable.”

Embedded at MIT

MIT-Kalaniyot, named for a well-known flower that grows in Israel and other parts of the region, welcomed its first cohort of scholars to the MIT campus for the 2025-26 academic year. Hen and Fraenkel also give Tal Cohen, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, substantial credit for developing the concept. 

Scholars at Israel’s nine state-recognized universities are eligible to seek the MIT-Kalaniyot fellowships, which enable research, collaboration, and training at the Institute. The scholars come from a range of academic and personal backgrounds, including both Arab and Jewish citizens of Israel. 

The program is highly competitive, with many more applicants than positions currently available. Applicants are encouraged to identify in advance MIT faculty they would like to work with; accepted applicants then already have a “faculty host” lined up. Many of the new fellows will be working with researchers in established MIT labs, for instance. 

“When they’re here, they are treated exactly like anybody else in an academic unit at MIT and that’s really important,” Fraenkel says. “They’re embedded in these places.”

The program is also intended to generate the kinds of community connections that help scholars flourish, both professionally and personally. MIT-Kalaniyot features weekly lunches, attended by people from the larger community, where scholars can forge connections and friendship. 

The program also features informal academic talks and discussions, with the talks given by MIT researchers both within and outside of MIT-Kalaniyot. Hen, for one, has already seen the benefits of such events; one paper he has recently co-authored directly stemmed from discussions he had at a program event. 

“The range of MIT faculty who stepped forward as hosts has been one of the most gratifying parts of the program,” Fraenkel says. “It shows that this is not confined to one field or one corner of the Institute. It is becoming part of MIT’s broader academic life.”

Adds Hen: “I think it sends a very strong and important message. We’re able to move forward at MIT and build collaborative partnerships with strong ties.”

An additional facet of the program is the potential impact of MIT-based research in practical, tangible ways. One of the 2025 fellows, a leading physician, focused her MIT work on new methods of breast cancer detection, and now, back in Israel, is working to apply those findings in active medical settings. 

Plans for future growth

Having first taken root at MIT, the MIT-Kalaniyot concept is now spreading to other places. In the last two years, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Southern California have implemented the concept, with other universities in the process of adopting it as well. 

“This national movement all started by replicating the MIT model,” Hen says. “Each university then innovated in their own way. They start from the MIT approach, and then they adapt to what’s happening on their campus. They learn from us, we learn from them, and together we support a broad academic network.”

The progress at MIT and elsewhere has led Hen and Fraenkel to feel optimistic about the ongoing evolution of MIT-Kalaniyot. 

“We started at a tense time on our campus, not really knowing what the future would hold, and it’s exceeded our hopes,” Fraenkel says. “Now we want Kalaniyot to become a recognized center at MIT, funding seed grants for research that wouldn’t happen any other way.”  

While Fraenkel and Hen do not yet have a firm timetable for those developments, they regard them as being realistic. 

“Now we see Kalaniyot as a program that helps MIT well beyond our community,” Hen says. After all, he observes, simply as a vehicle for research, the program has the potential to provide added capacity for MIT, as well as the further connections to top scholars being generated by the effort. 

Indeed, Hen reflects, he is motivated the question: “How do we best support MIT in realizing its mission for the world?” Overall, he says, “I think that’s the ultimate goal of Kalaniyot. We do it in one way, other people can do it in other ways, and as long as you do net good, and support the MIT mission, we value and treasure that, and just want to be part of it.”

“I really believe this is the DNA of MIT,” Fraenkel says. “We’re all about finding practical solutions to society’s biggest problems. Kalaniyot brings extraordinary people here to do exactly that, and the whole Institute is stronger for it.”

Three teams comprising 35 students across eight different MIT departments and Wellesley College have been at work since fall 2025, designing critical early infrastructure elements that a moon base would require. This June, their designs were recognized with five awards at NASA’s 2026 Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts — Academic Linkage (RASC-AL) Forum. 

Among 75 submissions and 14 finalists, the MIT teams earned first and second place in the competition, as well as three best-in-theme awards. The Exploration-Class Lunar Integrated Power SystEm (ECLIPSE) team won first place overall and first in its theme category, lunar surface power. The communications and navigation constellation team, MELIORA, won second place overall and first in its theme category on Mars communications, position navigation and timing, which included a strategy for proving the design at the moon. And CHEESEBURGER, a campaign to mine and process lunar regolith into oxygen, metals, and bricks, won first in its theme category, lunar technology demonstrations. 

“NASA spent the spring telling the world what critical early infrastructure their upcoming permanent moon base will need,” says George Lordos, a research scientist and lecturer in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro) and in System Design and Management (SDM), who co-advised all three teams. “Over 30 MIT students spent this academic year designing much of the moon base — systems for generating, storing, and distributing power; robust systems for positioning, navigating, and communicating; and early experiments with essential technologies to live sustainably off the moon’s own dirt.”

A power grid for surviving lunar night and winter

The hardest constraint on NASA’s moon base is staying powered, because a failure in life-support power would doom the crew within hours. ECLIPSE is a reference design for a lunar grid engineered to stay up for more than 99.995 percent of the time — fewer than 27 minutes of downtime a year in the worst-case scenario, the standard demanded of the most critical data centers on Earth. It pairs two power sources that fail in different ways: banks of 20-meter solar masts in the sunlit highlands near the south pole, and, for the roughly 18-day stretch each year when the sun drops below the horizon, a pair of buried 20 kilowatt microreactors the team named CARROT, (Compact Autonomous Regolith-shielded Reactor Operating for Ten years). The CARROT reactor, a novel design developed independently by the ECLIPSE team, ended up being similar in design to NASA’s SR-1 reactor for the 2028 mission to Mars, both aiming to maximize speed-to-deployment. 

“Burying each reactor 1.3 meters down shrinks the keep-out zone from kilometers to meters, so crews can work nearby, and it saves tons on required shielding mass,” says Taylor Hampson, a PhD student in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering and ECLIPSE team co-lead.

The full design delivers an initial 120 kilowatts using a grid of buried aluminum cables and shielded direct-current power equipment. Laser-equipped rovers provide “Frontier Power” capability, beaming up to 10 kilowatts to sites beyond any cable, from a shadowed crater to a new outpost before its own grid exists. Patrick Riley, a graduate student in the Department of AeroAstro and ECLIPSE team co-lead, says the design’s point is to put reliability ahead of mass: “We sized it so the most likely failures never reach the moon base inhabitants, and so it scales from a first crew of six up to industrial demand without interrupting a commercial lunar economy.”

A network for exploring the moon and Mars, and calling home

MELIORA acts as the base’s relay and GPS. Although RASC-AL framed the communications, positioning, navigation, and timing competition sub-theme around Mars, the team also proposed a plan to validate their design in lunar geometry first, in step with the agency’s strategy to prove technology on the moon before extending it to Mars. To find the best design, the team ran a trade study across 5,764 candidate constellation geometries. The result grows from an initial three satellites to 23, returns more than 100 megabits per second to Earth-orbiting data networks over free-space optical links, and pins a user’s position to within 10 meters. For the Mars design, four relay satellites parked at gravitationally stable Lagrange points keep the link alive even during solar conjunction, the weeks when the sun sits between the two worlds and ordinarily cuts communication. On the surface, a user needs only a portable radio terminal and a chip-scale atomic clock — a timekeeper the size of a matchbox. 

“You should never have to think about whether the network is there — it just is, the way you don’t think about a cell tower,” says Ekaterina Tiukhtikova, an undergraduate studying both AeroAstro and electrical engineering and computer science (EECS), and a MELIORA team co-lead. “We put almost all the complexity up in orbit, so everything on the surface stays portable and simple,” adds Clayton Lieberman, a graduate of the SDM program and team co-lead who wrote his thesis on MELIORA.

Making oxygen, metal, and bricks from lunar dirt

After power and communications, the third essential pillar of a lunar base is living off the land. The moon’s own regolith can supply oxygen to breathe and burn, metal to build with, and shielding to hide behind for protection from deadly radiation. CHEESEBURGER is a campaign of five robotic payloads that prove the supply chain one link at a time, followed by integration of the five into the first end-to-end lunar industry. 

The payloads carry a kitchen’s worth of names: SWISS prospects for the richest ore, BRIOCHES digs and sorts the regolith, BACON casts it into bricks, GRILLED MEAT melts it electrically to pull out metal and oxygen, and AVOCADO is the robotic builder that stacks the products into structures, including interlocking Moon BRICCSS that shield a habitat from radiation. The food theme was born during a January team outing at Sandwich, Massachusetts. “Naming the prospector SWISS and the metal extractor GRILLED MEAT turned a wall of acronyms into something the whole team could enjoy,” says Cesar Meza, a graduate student in AeroAstro and CHEESEBURGER co-lead. “It sounds like a joke until you see that each acronym clearly describes a serious piece of hardware doing one job in the pipeline.”

Thirty students, eight departments, and three teams for one moon base

More than 30 students contributed across the teams, from AeroAstro, SDM, Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE), EECS, Mechanical Engineering (MechE), the Technology and Policy Program, the MIT Sloan School of Management, and Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), along with a student from Wellesley College. Several student mentors and faculty advisors worked across more than one team, which is why ECLIPSE’s grid is sized to power CHEESEBURGER’s processing, CHEESEBURGER’s regolith handling is used to bury and shield ECLIPSE’s grid, and all three projects are designed to translate moon base lessons for a future mission to Mars. The teams were advised by Olivier de Weck, the Apollo Program Professor of Astronautics and Engineering Systems and interim department head of AeroAstro, who led ECLIPSE; Kerri Cahoy, the Sheila Evans Widnall Professor of Aerospace Engineering, who led MELIORA; Jeffrey Hoffman, professor of the practice in AeroAstro and a former NASA astronaut, who led CHEESEBURGER; Koroush Shirvan, Atlantic Richfield Career Development Professor in Energy Studies in Nuclear Science and Engineering, who co-advised ECLIPSE; and Lordos, who co-advised all three. Much of the day-to-day mentorship work is led by PhD student volunteers and runs through the MIT Space Resources Workshop, which Lordos founded in 2019.

“The winning teams demonstrated how academic innovation can support Artemis mission goals,” says Daniel Mazanek, RASC-AL program sponsor and senior space systems engineer at NASA’s Langley Research Center, in NASA's announcement of the awards. “Their work highlights the important role student research plays in shaping future space exploration.”

NASA expects astronauts living on the lunar surface for months at a time by the early 2030s — the window ECLIPSE, MELIORA, and CHEESEBURGER were designed for. The picture the three teams had worked toward is unified: a crew at the lunar south pole, the lights on through the winter night, the network always up, and the first oxygen and bricks coming out of the ground beneath them. 

“A permanent base is no longer a slide in a strategy deck; NASA begins landing the first elements in 2027,” says de Weck. “Studies like these three let the agency see, before the concrete sets, how its power, communications, and resource choices depend on one another. That is precisely when independent, integrated architecture work has the most influence on the real plan.”

RASC-AL is administered by the National Institute of Aerospace on behalf of NASA. MIT has a long record in NASA’s student design competitions, with recent winning teams including the  HYDRATION Mars water production system, the Pale Red Dot Mars homesteading architecture, the deployable lunar tower MELLTT, the MARTEMIS lunar Mars analog campaign, the MAPLE autonomous lunar robot pathfinding system, the CERBERUZ lunar recycling project, and the THERMOS cryogenic fluid management system. This work was supported in part by NASA, the Massachusetts Space Grant, MIT AeroAstro, and the MIT Space Resources Workshop. One student was supported by a NASA Space Technology Graduate Research Opportunity Fellowship.

The full teams:

ECLIPSE — Team leads: Taylor Hampson (graduate student, Nuclear Science and Engineering) and Patrick Riley (graduate student, AeroAstro). Reactor team: Liliana Arias, Sydney Menne, Julian Rocher and Pavel Shilenko (graduate students, NSE). Power management and distribution team: Evrard Constant and Mary Foxen (graduate students, AeroAstro), Janhavi Joglekar and Asma Patel (undergraduate students, AeroAstro). Solar and architecture team: Zachary Dawson (graduate student, System Design and Management), Sreeja Akula and Ian Jimenez (undergraduate students, AeroAstro; EAPS), Yohan Lim (graduate student, AeroAstro/Technology and Policy Program), CJ Taglienti (graduate student, AeroAstro/MBA). Student co-advisors: Yana Charoenboonvivat, Lanie McKinney (AeroAstro), Palak Patel (MechE). Industry mentor: Sully Marigliano-Crevecoeur (Technetics). Faculty: Olivier de Weck (lead) and Jeffrey Hoffman (AeroAstro), George Lordos (AeroAstro and SDM), and Koroush Shirvan (NSE).

MELIORA — Team leads: Clayton Lieberman and Katiyayni Balachandran (System Design and Management), Ekaterina Tiukhtikova (undergraduate, AeroAstro and EECS), Celvi Lisy (AeroAstro). Team members: Thomas Harrington and Zachary T. Barnes (SDM), Asael Acosta (undergraduate, AeroAstro). Student co-advisor: Lanie McKinnery (AeroAstro). Faculty: Kerri Cahoy (lead), Jeffrey Hoffman and Olivier de Weck (AeroAstro), and George Lordos (AeroAstro and SDM).

CHEESEBURGER — Team leads: Cesar Meza (graduate student, AeroAstro) and Elizabeth Romero (undergraduate, AeroAstro). Team members: Rachel Dunphy, Shreya Kothnur, Hailey Polson (undergraduates, AeroAstro), Christopher Kwon, Jose Soto, Lanie McKinney (graduate students, AeroAstro), Marvin Martinez (undergraduate, MechE), Ananda Santos Figueiredo (graduate student, Technology and Policy Program), Evangeline Haiqi Wang (undergraduate, Computer Science and Psychology, Wellesley College). Faculty: Jeffrey Hoffman (lead) and Olivier de Weck (AeroAstro), and George Lordos (AeroAstro and SDM).

An MIT-led research program aimed at creating future microsystems capable of sustainably transmitting data with greater bandwidth and higher efficiency than is possible today has made several significant advances since it was established in 2022. 

These include the invention of devices within systems that can much more easily integrate electronics — manipulating data with electricity — with photonics, which does the same with light. The microsystems, the first of their kind, also promise to be cost-effective because, among other advantages, they can be manufactured using existing equipment in traditional electronics foundries and packaging houses.

“Our disruptive electronic-photonic integrated solutions will enable us to leap from [transmitting data at] hundreds of terabits per second to greater than 1 petabit per second,” said Anu Agarwal, who leads MIT’s FUTUR-IC, at an April webinar titled, “Shaping the Future of Semiconductors: Power, Performance, and Possibility.” The event was sponsored by the MIT Industrial Liaison Program and Startup Exchange.

An advanced system using co-packaged optics can provide improved bandwidth and energy savings compared to what is used today, which is electronics-only or pluggable optics.

Toward sustainability

The microchips behind everything from smartphones to medical imaging can be traced to about 500 megatons of carbon dioxide-equivalent lifetime emissions in 2021, and every year the world produces more than 50 million tons of electronic waste. Further, the huge data centers necessary for complex computations like on-demand video are growing, and will require close to 10 percent of the world’s electricity by 2030.

“This is neither scalable nor sustainable, and cannot continue,” Agarwal has reiterated over the years. FUTUR-IC, funded by the National Science Foundation Convergence Accelerator, was created to address these resource-efficiency issues.

For example, integrating photonics with the electronics that underpin today’s microchips could address energy use because the transmission, or communication of data, using light is much more energy efficient. “Our mantra is to use electronics for computation and photonics for communication to bring this energy crisis under control,” says Agarwal.

Currently, however, it is difficult and expensive to connect electronic chips with their photonic counterparts within a single package. That’s partly because the supply-chain ecosystem for co-packaged optics is still immature.

New devices

Enter two new devices developed through FUTUR-IC aimed at making it easier — and less expensive — to integrate photonic chips with microchips. One, the evanescent coupler, was featured on the cover of Advanced Engineering Materials last year. Another, known as the graded index coupler (GRIN), was reported in the March 2026 print issue of the Journal of Physics: Photonics. 

A third new coupler was developed by an MIT team led by Professor Juejun Hu of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. It was reported in a 2023 issue of Laser & Photonics Reviews. That work was supported by the Department of Energy. 

The three couplers are the first optical equivalents of “solder bumps,” or the tiny dots of metal that allow chip-to-chip or chip-to-substrate connections for electron flow. Until this MIT work, there were no analogous “optical bump” options for photonics.

And if photonics is to be integrated with electronics, “you’ll need both metal bumps and optical bumps, because there are devices on your photonics chip that will require both an electrical signal and an optical signal,” says Drew Weninger PhD ’25, first author of the papers on both the evanescent and GRIN couplers. Weninger is now at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

As with electronics, many options of optical bumps will be necessary, as “each type has substantial trade-offs,” wrote Weninger and colleagues in a review article in Nature about coupler advances published earlier this year.

For example, the GRIN coupler can be used over a wider spectrum of light than is possible with the evanescent coupler, Weninger says. The evanescent coupler, however, is easier to fabricate and can be packed in tighter to form a higher number of connections.

Additional advances

FUTUR-IC is organized into three dimensions: Technology (the coupler work is a good example), Value Chain Innovation, and Workforce. 

Under the Value Chain sector, researchers developed a new tool to support companies’ decisions toward sustainability. Earthster provides a visual model for quickly determining the energy, materials usage, and environmental sustainability across a company’s products. For example, says Agarwal, “looking at [Earthster], a supplier can tell right away their hot spots for carbon emissions, and start working to minimize them.”

FUTUR-IC has also developed several programs aimed at developing a future workforce for next-generation microchips. For example, “it is introducing an online course on semiconductor resource efficiency,” Agarwal says. “We also offer gamified digital learning and problem-based learning, plus a summer academy and a hands-on bootcamp.” For K-12 awareness, FUTUR-IC has created TED-Ed videos.

Agarwal concluded her April webinar by acknowledging the range of industries FUTUR-IC aims to help. “If you’re a packaging vendor, a materials vendor, or you are in the supply chain for data centers, FUTUR-IC can provide value.”

Additional authors of the paper on the GRIN coupler are Agarwal; Lionel Kimerling, the Thomas Lord Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering; Christian Duessel BS ’25, now at SiLC Technologies, a silicon photonics company; and Samuel Serna, professor of physics, photonics, and optical engineering at Bridgewater State University.

Additional authors of the Nature review paper are Serna; Luigi Ranno PhD ’25, now at Ayar Labs; Kimerling; and Agarwal.

The deployment of automated software systems called AI agents has recently exploded. A November 2025 report by MIT Sloan School of Management and Boston Consulting Group found that 35 percent of surveyed businesses had already deployed AI agents, while another 44 percent planned to implement agentic AI soon. 

To understand the fundamentals and potential impacts of these increasingly popular tools, MIT News spoke with Phillip Isola, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), who studies the intelligence AI agents possess, as well as the underlying models and mechanisms that power agentic AI systems.

Q: What is agentic AI and how is it different from generative AI models like ChatGPT and Claude?

A: Agentic AI is AI that takes actions in the world. These actions could be a physical action, like robotic manipulation, or a digital action, like booking a flight. On the other hand, we think of generative AI as making up stories, poems, art, and images, rather than taking actions for us. 

The word “agent” is just a brand name. It usually means AI that is going to help people interact with an application, a website, or the physical world. Most agents we encounter today are digital agents, like customer service agents you can talk with about product complaints. 

Most companies that offer agents use the same few AI models under the hood and give them the ability to take actions and remember what happened. An agent starts with a fundamental generative AI system, like Claude, at the core. Then companies put different wrappers around that foundation model for their product or application. Those wrappers might be specific tools that agent can use, and those tools depend on the application. Maybe the agent has access to a calculator so it can solve math problems, or maybe it has access to a more complicated hard drive and operating system so it can remember a firm’s financial data and past business negotiations. 

The biggest challenge in developing agentic AI comes from a lack of training data. If I want to create a system that can go online and book a flight for me, that seems pretty simple. But we don’t have a lot of data that spells out exactly how to do that — where to move the mouse, which buttons to click on, what to do if something goes wrong, or how to call somebody and negotiate about the price of the airline ticket. One way to train a system like this is to have the AI agent visit airline websites, try things out, and see what works and what doesn’t work. These environments are hard to model, so often the agent must learn by trial and error.

Q: What are some promising applications of agentic AI?

A: I think the area where we’ve seen the most success has been with coding agents. This is something that evolved from generative AI. People trained language models on code, and then they can predict what a human would do to solve a coding problem. In addition, an agent can learn to do this by going through a feedback loop where it tries out different solutions and checks to see if it got the answer right. As long as it can check the answer, the AI agent can perform this trial-and-error loop until it figures out a good strategy.

But there is always a balance between automating decision making versus simply assisting and informing humans. Analytical AI methods, like the systems that help predict possible outcomes of decisions, are not agentic in nature, but are very informative to human decision-makers. For cases that are either high-stakes or safety-critical, like medicine, security, high-level business policies, etc., the technology might not be ready for AI to completely automate those processes, or we might not even be comfortable with that.

Q: Are there risks we should be thinking about when using AI agents?

A: One big risk area comes from the fact that it is often very easy to get agents to do certain types of work for you. With coding agents, you can “vibe code” and just ask the agent to make a code for you, so you don’t have to do the hard work yourself. There is a big risk that, because it is so easy, people will not put enough effort into verifying that it is doing the right thing. Bugs will be introduced, private data will get leaked — this is already happening.

Agents aren’t perfect, in the sense that they might make mistakes because they are not well-trained and don’t know what to do. But even if they are very competent, if a human doesn’t use them appropriately or gives them an instruction that is too vague, the AI agent could make a mistake because the human made a mistake. If humans are less involved in thinking through all the consequences, I think we might be more prone to making those mistakes. 

An additional aspect is the risk of de-skilling. It is unclear how far this will go, but when we are relying on agents to do our homework, our coding, and our math, we might lose the ability to do that ourselves, and we might lose that ability too soon because the technology is not yet ready to fully automate those processes.

Q: What does the future hold for agentic AI?

A: What we think of now as agentic AI refers to large language models using tools to interact with digital and physical systems. One obvious limitation is that, under the hood, these have the architecture of a language model and are trained on text data. To make even more powerful AI agents, we might need to model videos, physical forces, time series, radar scans, and other modalities. We might need to have models with fundamentally different architectures that can handle continuous data, high-dimensional data, stochastic data, and so on. 

But, on the other hand, maybe an extremely good coding model could act as a puppeteer to interface with sensors, actuators, and web APIs? Perhaps, once you have a super-smart reasoning system that understands math, language, and code, you can give it a camera and a keyboard and it will figure out what to do in the spatial domain. Is the next wave of AI just going to be Claude with sensors, actuators, and tools, or is it going to be something built in a new way from the ground up? That’s the big question a lot of people in AI are grappling with right now.

The Antarctic ozone hole was discovered in 1985, when scientists observed a severe depletion in the Earth’s protective layer of stratospheric ozone. Industrial chemicals known as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), then widely used as refrigerants, propellants, foam-blowing agents, and solvents, were at the root of the ozone depletion. After concerted global effort to phase out the use of CFCs, ozone today is recovering, especially in the Antarctic. 

The discovery of the ozone hole was possible thanks, in part, to the measurement tools that were available at the time. Advances in those tools, along with satellites and other monitoring technologies, have since allowed scientists to track ozone’s recovery. 

But what if today’s tech was available much earlier? Would scientists have been able to spot even earlier signs of human-induced ozone depletion? And if so, when would those first signs have popped up, and where? 

MIT scientists now have some answers. The team, led by atmospheric chemist Susan Solomon, has carried out a thought experiment in which they consider a hypothetical world where today’s atmospheric monitoring capabilities were available throughout the last century. In this scenario, they simulated the atmosphere’s chemistry through history and discovered not only when the earliest sign of ozone depletion would have been detectable, but also where, and why. 

In a study appearing today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the scientists suggest that the first signs of ozone depletion appeared as early as 1957 — about 30 years before the ozone hole was discovered. And, this first signal of ozone loss popped up not in the Antarctic, but in the upper stratosphere of the tropics. What’s more, the cause of this early depletion was not due to CFCs, but to another industrial chemical: carbon tetrachloride. 

“What we’ve learned from textbooks is that CFCs result in ozone depletion,” says the study’s first author, Jian Guan, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). “It turns out there was another compound that caused ozone depletion much earlier than CFCs. This was a big surprise.”

For Solomon, who was an early pioneer in the study of ozone’s effects on the atmosphere, and who was the first to show that CFCs were the main agent eroding Antarctic ozone, the new results were a complete shock. 

“The fact that ozone depletion would have happened as early as the late 1950s, which is much earlier than I would have thought, just absolutely blew my mind,” says Solomon, the Lee and Geraldine Martin Professor of Environmental Studies and Chemistry at MIT. “This study shows it’s really important to keep monitoring so that we can fully understand how the atmosphere responds and recovers.”

The study’s MIT co-authors include Peidong Wang, Yaowei Li, and Kane Stone; along with Benjamin Santer of the University of East Anglia; Qiang Fu of the University of Washington; Rolando Garcia, Douglas Kinnison, and Jun Zhang of the National Center for Atmospheric Research; Jean-Francois Lamarque of Climate Modeling and Analysis LLC; and Gabriel Chiodo of the Spanish National Research Council. 

Chlorine connection

Ozone is a highly reactive molecule, made from three oxygen atoms, that exists naturally in the upper layers of the atmosphere. In the stratosphere, ozone acts as a shield, absorbing the sun’s rays and reducing the harmful ultraviolet radiation that can reach the Earth’s surface. 

In the late 1980s, after scientists first observed signs of ozone depletion in the Antarctic, Solomon led expeditions to the region to measure the stratosphere’s composition. Those measurements confirmed that ozone’s agent of destruction was CFCs — the chemicals which were used globally in refrigeration, air conditioning, and aerosol propellants, among other uses. 

Specifically, Solomon measured higher-than-expected levels of chlorine dioxide in the Antarctic stratosphere. The presence of this molecule, in the same place where ozone depletion was observed, had only one chemical explanation: Ozone was being broken apart by rogue atoms of chlorine. At the time, chlorine-heavy CFCs were in wide use, and MIT chemist Mario Molina proposed that if CFCs drifted up to the stratosphere, photons from the sun could break apart the molecules and release atoms of chlorine, which would then be free to break apart ozone’s oxygen atoms. 

Molina’s work, and Solomon’s measurements, were key in showing that CFCs could deplete ozone — a discovery that earned Molina a share of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Soon after, nearly every country in the world signed the Montreal Protocol, which ultimately led to the successful phase-out of CFCs and other ozone-depleting substances. In recent years, as a result of that global cooperation, scientists have observed initial signs of ozone recovery.

“We know what we have now, and ozone is starting to recover,” Solomon says. “But no one has ever really documented where and when and why the first ozone depletion would have happened.”

Signal over noise

For their new study, Solomon, Guan, and their colleagues took a “what-if” approach, posing the question: What if the past had the monitoring capabilities of the present? When would we have been able to detect the earliest sign of human-induced ozone depletion? 

Today’s monitoring tools are sensitive to a certain signal to noise, meaning they can identify patterns of ozone loss that are more likely a “signal” of human-induced depletion (such as from CFCs), versus ozone loss that is due to “noise,” such as random fluctuations from weather and natural phenomena. 

With this in mind, the team looked to reproduce the chemistry of the atmosphere over the last century to see whether they could see a signal over the noise, based on the sensitivity of today’s monitoring tools. 

The team used 16 different model runs, each of which simulates varying conditions and dynamics of the atmosphere at various latitudes and altitudes, as well as the concentrations and interactions of ozone and other molecules. Ozone is affected by not only human-caused chemicals but also natural phenomena such as volcanic eruptions and El Niño weather patterns. Each model run simulates ozone’s response to these natural phenomena, which the team combined to establish a range of “noise,” or ozone depletion that likely is due to natural variability.

They added to each model the various industrial chemicals that were known to have been produced at various times over the last century. 

“Year by year, we have estimates from industry of how much of these chemicals were made and sold globally, and the emissions of all these chemicals, which the models include,” Solomon explains. “And in the case of carbon tetrachloride, the really cool thing is, we also have ice core data.”

Ice cores are drilled-out cylinders of deeply buried ice, that had formed in the Antarctic and Arctic from the falling and layering of snow over hundreds of years. Ice cores contain the remnants of snow, as well as whatever trace chemicals in the atmosphere the snow originally fell through. Scientists can therefore use ice cores to estimate the composition of the atmosphere through history. 

“We actually see in the ice cores that carbon tetrachloride starts increasing already by the 1940s,” Solomon notes. 

The team incorporated industrial and ice core data into their models, then looked to see whether a signal of human-induced ozone loss stood out from the noise of natural fluctuations. Their analysis revealed that a signal did appear, as early as 1957. Not only did they see when the signal appeared, but also where: in the tropics, rather than the Antarctic. 

The researchers say that human-induced ozone loss was likely occurring globally, but was easier to spot in the tropical upper stratosphere, since that is the region where the range of natural fluctuations is the smallest, and therefore where a signal can stand out better.

Finally, the analysis indicated that carbon tetrachloride, and not CFCs, was the cause of the earliest ozone depletion. 

“That’s the only ozone-depleting substance that was increasing that early,” Solomon says. “We started using carbon tetrachloride in the 1930s as a dry-cleaning agent, and as a degreasing solvent. We didn’t start using CFCs until quite a bit later.”

Carbon tetrachloride has since been phased out of use in most of the world, initially due to its health concerns; the chemical can cause nervous system disorders with prolonged exposure and is a suspected carcinogen. Since the Montreal Protocol began to tightly limit its use in the 1990s, the molecule’s concentrations in the atmosphere have been on a decline. Still, Solomon says the new study highlights the need for vigilance in monitoring carbon tetrachloride, CFCs, and other ozone-depleting substances that may have been phased out but can still linger for decades.

“We’ve gone through a big effort to get rid of these chemicals,” Solomon says. “Don’t we have an obligation to keep monitoring to make sure the atmosphere responds the way we think it should?”

This research was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the European Commission.

The MIT Music Technology and Computation (MTC) Graduate Program — launched in fall 2024 as a collaboration between the Music and Theater Arts Section in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS), and the School of Engineering (SoE) — presented its inaugural MIT Music Technology Research Showcase on May 13. The event played to a standing room-only house in the Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building’s Thomas Tull Concert Hall and featured diverse and captivating research presentations and music performances.

The celebratory occasion featured MTC’s first five enrollees (all of whom were previously MIT undergraduates), alongside several PhD students and faculty. Each scholar presented inspiring exemplars of artful engineering that reflected the broader and burgeoning music technology scene at MIT. 

The 90-minute event exhibited a broad array of research projects, including a real-time visualization of what an AI co-improvising agent is about to play on a piano; a sound-art installation based on noisy network communication; a hip-hop dance circle where music is generated from dancing; and the use of electroencephalogram (EEG) signals to identify the musical tunes that our brains are imagining.

“A new space for exploration and insights” 

An interplay of technical presentation with live performance, the showcase began with remarks from SHASS Dean and professor of philosophy Agustín Rayo, SOE Dean and professor of chemical engineering Paula Hammond, and MTC Director and professor of the practice of music Eran Egozy.

Rayo began, “The goal of this program is simple — for MIT to lead the world in music technology theory and application,” adding “it’s not just about making music with technology; it’s also about working across disciplines to help better shape the future of expression in an AI-driven world, all while reflecting MIT at its best.” 

Rayo noted the graduate program was made possible in part by the opening of the Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building in 2025, which provided new classrooms, studios, rehearsal spaces, and a dedicated music technology lab. He also credited the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing for its support for the graduate program. 

Hammond followed: “As those in this room already know, music and engineering share some common roots. Both rely on mathematical precision and are informed by defined structures, rhythms, and frequencies. Both demand hard work and technical know-how, paired with inspiration and imagination, to create something entirely new. Given those congruities, it’s no surprise that so many faculty, students, and staff members across MIT are also accomplished musicians and artists.”  

She continued, “Our music program is a gem. Only at MIT could we bring the top technologists and the top musicians together to create unique opportunities for collaboration. Here we have brought together faculty and students who identify strongly with both music and engineering to form a new space for exploration and insights. It’s a strong example of the collaborative culture that defines the Institute.”  

Egozy called the event a “harmonious hybrid of concert and symposium,” and recollected, “it’s a little mind-boggling to see what our students have achieved in just one short and fast-paced year. While we originally debated the trade-offs between a one-year and a two-year master’s program, I think this cohort really showed us that we can make huge strides in learning and research abilities in a concentrated period of time.” 

Student research on display

One of those students is Claire Southard ’25, SM ’26, who developed a machine-learning model used to identify musical notes hidden in EEG signals.  

Southard explains, “every year, musicians are diagnosed with movement disorders such as Parkinson’s disease and dystonia, or experience injuries that prevent them from controlling their hands and bodies in the ways required to play their instruments. Because of this, too many musicians are forced to stop doing what they love. My work explores one strategy to help such musicians perform again by translating the music they’re trying to play directly from their brain activity — bypassing the need for motor control altogether. To do this, I trained machine-learning models to predict the music a person is imagining from their brain activity measured using EEG, and many of the predicted pieces were found to be recognizable representations of what the user imagined. By designing a system that allows musicians to create music regardless of their physical abilities, I hope this work helps bring a more accessible future for music performance closer to reality.”  

Before joining MTC, Southard was initially unaware of the breadth, scope, and magnitude of what the program could offer for further pursuing and realizing her interests. “The MIT Music Technology and Computation Graduate Program taught me so much about the possibilities at the intersection of STEM and the arts," she says. "When I first started the program, I honestly wasn’t sure what counted as ‘music technology.’ Through classes, research, and conversations with faculty, guest speakers, and peers, I learned the field was far broader and more fascinating than I could have previously imagined.”  

She continues, “coming from a background in neuro- and computer science, many of my undergraduate projects happened entirely on devices. But this program allowed me to encounter more hands-on experiences, from conducting audio recordings to building electronic musical instruments from scratch.” 

Another MTC graduate, and student speaker at the 2026 SHASS Advanced Degree Ceremony, Mariano Salcedo ’25, SM ’26, presented a custom web application allowing anyone to create unique emergent visuals that are driven by real-time streaming music. To accomplish this effect, Salcedo built algorithms that leverage the complex visual behavior of self-organized systems as the means toward an aesthetically synergetic end.  

In his Advanced Degree Ceremony oration, Salcedo expressed his gratitude and admiration for the passionate people that he’s met not only in MTC, but at MIT overall. In an appropriately compassionate mode, he empathetically opined, “I think what times like this call from us is to lead the way in human and humane-centered technology, which means we don’t only just ask what we can build, but we also ask who is it going to affect, who is not going to affect? Who does it benefit?”  

Music technology thriving at MIT

Associate Professor Anna Huang SM ’08 of MTA and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS, through SCC), a graduate of the MIT Media Lab, and one of the world’s leading researchers in collaborative human-AI music-making, echoed both Southard and Salcedo’s sentiments through her keynote presentation, “In Search of Resonance in Human-AI Interaction.” A compelling and intimately conversational address, her speech emphasized the importance of centering the human musician in all that is done relating to AI, while also making efforts to include all musics of the world in its discourse at every opportunity. 

With many of her family members in the audience, Huang reflected, “I have the privilege of being in both MIT Music and EECS — an interdisciplinary, shared space. What does it mean to build music technology in this context? We’re surrounded by extremely talented musicians, so we take this co-design approach: We work with these musicians, we go into the studio, and every week we try something. And the technology grows with the creative process. We’re always trying to push both of these forward, and it’s always on the edge. It’s very, very rewarding. It’s where I feel most at home.”   

Huang also explained how this practice sets the stage for a new Studies in Music Technology subject that she will be co-teaching in the fall with recently appointed Professor of Theater Arts Grisha Coleman. Class 21M.369/569 (Tuning Attention: Creative Practices in Movement, Sound, and AI) proposes that the study of sound and movement practices can inform how we build and envision computational systems, focusing particularly on our relationship to AIs. It will introduce students to a range of musical practices in improvisation and somatics by way of motion-capture technologies, critical interaction design, generative modeling, and algorithms for interpretability and learning through human feedback. 

All considered, the future of the MIT Music Technology and Computation Graduate Program is bright. Egozy says MTC admitted 10 master’s students for the 2026-27 academic year from over 100 applicants. Unlike this year’s class, next year’s students will not only include recent MIT undergraduate alumni, but also new faces to campus. 

“Widening the pool to graduates of other schools and institutions will bring an extraordinary wealth of perspectives and experiences to the program. Additionally, all three shared faculty between MTA and EECS — including Mark Rau, Paris Smaragdis SM ’97, PhD ’01, and Huang — are inviting new Music Technology PhD students to their labs by way of EECS,” Egozy says. 

Embodying its mission, MTC is proving to be a vibrant, multidisciplinary program that attracts many kinds of students with a variety of career objectives from wide-ranging backgrounds. 

“Despite their diversity, our students all possess a central commonality,” Egozy says, “not just a shared love for music, but also a deep desire to augment that passion by way of technology in a very warmhearted, humanitarian way.” 

List of projects

Rachel Loh, Quanta Fellow in Music Technology and Computation: “Visualizing the Internal State of Music Models for Live Human-AI Improvisation” 

Noble Harasha, Quanta Fellow in Music Technology and Computation: “Modeling Subjectivity and Collective Sensory Perception as Noisy, Analog Communication in Feedback-Driven Networks” 

Z Chen, Quanta Fellow in Music Technology and Computation: “Generative Music as a Catalyst for Social Choreography” 

Nithya Shikarpur: “The Moving Drone: A Live Improvisation in the Context of Hindustani Music with the Human Voice, Generative models, and Loops”

Mariano Salcedo, Alex Rigopulos (1992) Fellow in Music Technology and Computation: “Neural Cellular Automata for Interactive Music Visualization”

Claire Southard, John Piscitello Fellow in Music Technology and Computation: “Neural Decoding of Imagined Music”

Stephen Brade, Suwan Kim, Valerie Chen: “Whale, Cello (there?): A Musical Dialog between Cello and a Real-time Diffusion Model Trained on Whale Songs” 

Whitney Henry and Harikesh Wong have been named 2026 Pew Scholars in the Biomedical Sciences. The Pew Charitable Trusts announced the 21-member class of early-career researchers, which includes the two MIT scientists as well as two alumni, on June 16. Each scholar will receive four years of funding to pursue cutting-edge research into human health and disease. Xin Gu PhD ’22 of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Christina Tringides ’15 of Rice University were also selected as scholars.

Henry, the Robert A. Swanson (1969) Career Development Professor of Life Sciences and a faculty member at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, will use the Pew scholarship to examine how a stress-induced cell death program called ferroptosis contributes to injury and regeneration in the liver. Wong, assistant professor of biology at MIT and core member at the Ragon Institute of Mass General Brigham, MIT, and Harvard, will use his award to investigate how groups of immune cells reach a “communal decision” about whether to tolerate or attack a particular target.

Whitney Henry

Henry’s research centers on ferroptosis — an iron-dependent form of regulated cell death — and its role in shaping cell fate and tissue remodeling. Her lab investigates why some cells can withstand stress while others cross the threshold for ferroptosis, focusing on the molecular, metabolic, and tissue-level cues that shape ferroptosis vulnerability. The work draws on chemical biology, metabolomics, functional genomics, and in vivo models. By defining the mechanisms that govern ferroptosis susceptibility, Henry’s group aims not only to identify novel therapies that target the most dangerous subpopulations of cancer cells, those that are highly metastatic and resistant to conventional treatment, but also to advance understanding of diseases in which ferroptosis drives tissue injury, fibrosis, or impaired repair. 

Harikesh Wong

Wong investigates how groups of cells organize into networks that collectively process information and control immune responses within tissues. These networks must continually balance the body’s need to protect itself against pathogens and tumors with the need to preserve healthy tissue function. Combining the tools of immunology with high-resolution fluorescence microscopy, computational modeling, and gene manipulation, his lab seeks to map, model, and manipulate the cell-cell interactions that govern these decisions within intact tissues, revealing how subtle changes in multicellular organization and communication can shift immune responses toward pathogen clearance and tolerance, or toward autoimmunity, chronic inflammation, and cancer.

Pew scholars are chosen from applicants nominated by leading academic institutions across the United States. This year’s class of 21 was selected from 211 nominees. The incoming scholars join a legacy of more than 1,000 scientists supported by the program since 1985. During their time as scholars, they will meet annually with fellow Pew-funded scientists to build connections across a wide variety of disciplines.

“Scientific discovery is moving at a rapid pace, and now more than ever we need curious and creative researchers leading the charge,” says Lee Niswander, a 1995 Pew scholar and chair of the program’s national advisory committee. “These new biomedical scholars are prepared to meet that challenge, and I look forward to watching their research unfold.”

In the early months of a PhD program, everything can feel urgent. Ideas move quickly, expectations feel high, and timelines, especially initial deadlines, may become heavy.  In those moments, Professor Anantha P. Chandrakasan is there for his students, armed with steady mentorship and clear guidance to help them regain perspective and move forward with confidence.

Appointed provost of MIT in 2025, Chandrakasan is a pioneering researcher in low-power electronics, integrated circuits, and energy-efficient system design within MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. His work has shaped how modern devices — from mobile systems to large-scale computing platforms — manage energy consumption and performance. Spanning circuits and systems for sensing, communication, and machine learning, his research focuses on pushing the limits of efficiency. Students note that his scholarship is defined by rigor, precision, and a forward-thinking approach, and that the same principles carry through to his mentorship.

One of the 18 faculty members within the 2025–27 Committed to Caring cohort, Chandrakasan is recognized for a style that meets students not just at the level of their research, but at the level of their experience. His guidance works to ground students, balancing ambition with steadiness, and precision with perspective. Across his lab and the broader MIT community, he has become known for a simple but clear pattern: When pressure rises, he is there to help.

Interrupting the pressure cycle

One student recalls their first semester at the Institute as a blur of excitement, but also of mounting stress. Given the opportunity to contribute to a conference-bound project, they pushed hard to meet a January submission deadline. 

“I poured myself into the work, but as the deadline approached, it became clear that the project was taking longer than expected,” remembers the student. “I began to … worry that I might not finish in time.”

When Chandrakasan noticed, his response was not to continue with the current unsustainable pace of research, but to recalibrate it — adding both perspective and a support structure to help ground the work.

He connected the student with a more senior lab member, creating a steady channel for both technical troubleshooting and day-to-day guidance. “This not only helped me overcome research challenges, but also created a natural environment for me to engage in discussions and build relationships with lab members,” the student reflected. 

Within Chandrakasan’s research group, mentorship is never confined to one-on-one advising. He actively builds structures that allow students to learn from one another, pairing newer members with more experienced researchers and encouraging organic collaboration across projects.

These connections serve a dual purpose. They accelerate technical growth, but they also reduce the isolation that can accompany early-stage research. By embedding students within a broader support network, he ensures that they are never navigating unfamiliar challenges entirely on their own. 

One nominator describes this emphasis on camaraderie as a defining feature of the lab: an environment where independence is cultivated, but never at the expense of connection.

Redefining what counts

In addition to creating this support structure, Chandrakasan also reframed the overwhelmed student’s situation. Rather than treating the conference deadline as definitive, he reminded the student that one missed milestone would not determine the trajectory of their PhD, or of their career as a whole. “His thoughtful words and calm demeanor helped me regain my balance, both emotionally and academically,” noted the student. 

It was a small shift in framing, but a consequential one. The pressure that had once felt absolute became part of a much larger perspective. Armed with that reassurance, the student recovered footing and ultimately completed the submission. 

While this particular story of looming deadlines and stress is one student’s experience, it is a relatable one for graduate students. Within academic spaces, it is easy for tangible milestones — papers, conferences, and results — to become the primary measure of progress. Chandrakasan does not dismiss their importance, but he does encourage a broader view.

“There will always be another opportunity,” he tells students. This principle serves as a consistent baseline for how to engage with the work. The goal is not to remove challenges, but to ensure that the work can endure through them. 

Chandrakasan’s advising philosophy centers on calibration: of expectations, goals, and how students interact with their academic work. “My technical advising is direct, because I believe clarity is a form of care,” shares Chandrakasan. In his eyes, precise feedback is one of the most meaningful forms of support a mentor can offer.

While his style is often candid, it is never harsh — honest feedback is softened by sincerity. Students describe an approach that is highly attuned to the individual, with Chandrakasan compromising, showing empathy, and adapting his teaching style to fit their needs. When asked, Chandrakasan shares that his advising technique is “always personal … focused on drawing out each student’s strengths, rather than imposing a single template of success.”

Students are encouraged to arrive at their own conclusions, with Chandrakasan shifting the focus from short-term fixes to long-term capability. “I help in creating space for students to think deeply, develop their own perspectives, and arrive at their own solutions,” he explains. This strategy “builds both independence and confidence.” 

His mentorship extends beyond immediate outcomes. It shapes how students come to understand their own potential, how they navigate difficulty, and how they, in turn, show up for others. In a field driven by innovation and speed, Chandrakasan’s approach offers something grounding: a model of mentorship where rigor and care are not competing priorities, but mutually reinforcing ones.

Reflecting on their time in Chandrakasan’s lab, his student shared that “I learned that real mentorship is not just about solving problems — it’s about understanding the person behind them.”

“Beyond Data-Driven Aesthetics,” by MIT Architecture alumnus and researcher Alexandros Haridis, on view at the MIT Keller Gallery through June 30, examines 20th- and 21st-century efforts to transform computing into a medium for creative production and aesthetic judgment in architecture and the applied arts. Drawing on philosophy, mathematics, computer science, and design computation, the exhibition translates algorithms, theories, and machine-learning systems into physical installations and interactive visualizations.

Q: What inspired “Beyond Data-Driven Aesthetics,” and what questions does it explore?

A: The conceptual origins of “Beyond Data-Driven Aesthetics” emerged from three intersecting lines of research.

First, while completing my PhD in design and computation in the MIT Department of Architecture around 2022, I observed in real time how advances in data-driven machine learning — systems such as ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion — were rapidly entering public discussions about creativity, aesthetic judgment, design, and even high-profile art auctions.

At the same time, my own research was already focused on aesthetic judgment and evaluation, and it became increasingly clear to me that many of the questions presented publicly as “new” in relation to AI actually have a much longer history across the 20th century. For example, in the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project, a foundational event for the field of AI, creation and evaluation processes were identified as one of seven key dimensions of human intelligence that future AI research should address.

Second, the exhibition was influenced by research in design computation and shape grammars that investigates relationships between human insight and computation through rule-based methods, rather than purely data-driven learning. More recent interpretative studies of aesthetic theories — drawing from figures such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Oscar Wilde, and even John von Neumann — have been especially important to me. These studies examine whether theories of aesthetic value and comparison articulated in philosophical and literary texts may reveal possibilities or limitations in contemporary models of digital computation and AI in architecture and design.

Finally, the exhibition was motivated by the use of design, fabrication, and data visualization as methods for interpreting mathematical concepts, algorithms, and “black box” machine-learning systems. Across disciplines, researchers increasingly use reconstruction and visualization techniques to make computational systems more tangible and interpretable — from neural network visualization in computer science to software reconstruction and digital fabrication in architecture and curatorial practice.

Q: How do you translate research on computation and aesthetics into an exhibition?

A: The approach of the exhibition is to ask what exactly in a particular research paper or book captures its most salient idea, and then use design to interpret that idea in a visual, spatial, and experiential format. Drawing on design techniques such as software reconstruction, physical making, and data visualization, the exhibition takes written sources that are dense with algorithmic ideas, abstract concepts, and mathematical formulas, and translates them into stories in space that include interaction, material form, and digital visualization.

The exhibition itself is organized around five thematic areas: Aesthetic Measure, Aesthetic Guidelines, Algorithmic Aesthetics, Aesthetic Appropriation, and Aesthetic Novelty. Each theme functions as a selective “window” into a distinct computational approach to aesthetic judgment drawn from a specific publication — a book or research paper. The titles of these themes are derived from concepts central to each publication. For example, “measure” refers to mathematician George Birkhoff’s work in the 1930s to quantify aesthetic value mathematically, while “novelty” examines how the machine learning system AICAN judges generated images according to a theory in cognitive aesthetics that balances familiarity and deviation from known artistic styles.

Across all five cases, the key insight is that design itself can function as a method of interpretative translation — a way of making visible, tangible, and experiential what traditional academic scholarship in technical domains typically communicates only through words and word-like representational devices, such as scientific diagrams and tables.

Q: What questions are you hoping to explore next?

A: “Beyond Data-Driven Aesthetics” is conceived both as a research exhibition and as an ongoing platform for investigating how computational systems participate in processes of aesthetic judgment, generation, and transformation across architecture and the applied arts.

One of the central questions of the exhibition — and one that researchers across architecture, design, and engineering are increasingly focusing on — is computational evaluation beyond purely performative or functional requirements. This applies to many different design spaces, whether buildings, structural forms, or everyday products. The exhibition’s case studies suggest that many of these questions long predate current interest in computing and AI, and have been approached through a range of computational and theoretical models of evaluation since at least the early 20th century.

At the same time, I’m increasingly interested in how these ideas can move into broader applications related to the built environment. In particular, I am interested in how research connected to “Beyond Data-Driven Aesthetics” can help designers and engineers better understand how computation — whether rule-based or data-driven — can inform us about what contributes positively to human experience in relation to the spaces and objects people inhabit and use.

Finally, a direction I continue to explore is the methodological role of design itself as an interpretative device. Through software reconstruction, visualization, and physical making, the exhibition uses design to translate opaque computational systems into more legible, tangible, and experiential artifacts. More broadly, this opens questions not only about mechanizing “beauty” or “taste” (the traditional preoccupation of aesthetic formalism in the 20th century), but also about how traditional forms of research scholarship and communication may evolve through spatial, visual, and public-facing formats.

The ordinary graphite in pencil lead is proving to be surprisingly multifaceted at the microscale. 

In a study appearing today in the journal Nature, MIT researchers report that a certain microscopic structure found in natural graphite can host multiple superconducting states. Superconductivity is an electronic state of matter in which electrons pair up and glide through a material with zero resistance. 

While there are thousands of materials that are known to be superconductors, it is rare for one material to host multiple forms of superconductivity. 

The researchers discovered the multiple superconducting states in atomically thin exfoliations of graphite, known as graphene. Specifically, graphene is a single-atom-thin sheet of carbon atoms arranged precisely in a microscopic lattice. The team made its discoveries in samples of rhombohedral graphene, which is a natural structure within graphite consisting of a stack of four or five graphene layers. 

Interestingly, the researchers found that several of the new superconducting states in rhombohedral graphene are able to persist in the presence of a magnetic field, which normally kills superconductivity. 

And in a further surprise, these superconducting states even get stronger when exposed to a magnetic field. 

Overall, the findings reveal a new family of unconventional superconducting states in one seemingly simple material. 

“People might assume that this is a simple, boring carbon material,” says Long Ju, the Lawrence C. and Sarah W. Biedenharn Associate Professor of Physics at MIT. “But we can control this material by tuning certain experimental ‘knobs,’ such as electrical voltages. This is how a simple physical material can exhibit so many different superconducting properties.” 

It’s still unclear exactly how each of the multiple superconducting states arise, or how they are able to persist under a magnetic field, when normally superconductivity should fade.

“From a fundamental physics point of view, it’s very exotic that a magnetic field doesn’t kill superconductivity, and instead it boosts it,” Ju says. “We have provided a lot of experimental results and provided the nutrition that people can absorb to try to think about what’s going on here.” 

The study’s MIT co-authors include co-first authors Junseok Seo and Shenyong Ye, together with Tonghang Han, Zhenghan Wu, Wei Xu, Jixiang Yang, Emily Aitken, Prayoga Liong, Phatthanon Pattanakanvijit, Zach Hadjri, and Mingda Li. External collaborators are co-first author Armel Cotten and members of Dominik Zumbuhl’s group at the University of Basel in Switzerland, plus others at Florida State University, the University of Florida, Gainesville, and the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan. 

Natural steps

Graphene and other atomically thin, two-dimensional materials can exhibit unexpected electronic, magnetic, thermal, and physical properties. And when two or more sheets of graphene are stacked and twisted at precise orientations, the “magic-angle” structure can suddenly host weird and exotic phenomena. 

Ju’s group has been probing the exceptional properties of graphene. But rather than artificially stacking and twisting layers, they have looked for interesting behavior in naturally occurring graphene structures. In recent years, they have unearthed surprising electronic properties in rhombohedral graphene. This particular configuration consists of graphene layers stacked on top of each other, each one slightly offset from the last, similar to the steps in a staircase. 

Rhombohedral graphene can be found naturally in ordinary graphite. But to find it first requires exfoliating a block of graphite (usually with Scotch tape), then searching the exfoliated sample for the telltale staircase-like pattern, which researchers can then isolate for further experimentation. 

Using this approach, Ju and his colleagues have been able to isolate and probe samples of four- and five-layer rhombohedral graphene. They have so far discovered that the structure can host a rare, “chiral” form of superconductivity, as well as fractional electron charge, among other behavior. 

In the flow

For their new study, the team took a slightly different approach in studying rhombohedral graphene. Previously, they electrically “doped” their samples, progressively adding electrons as they passed a separate electric current into the material. They then measured the voltage, or essentially the force that pushes the current through the material, and looked for instances when the voltage dropped to zero, indicating that the current was passing through without resistance.

In this way, the team has observed superconductivity when adding electrons to rhombohedral graphene. So they wondered: What might happen if they did the opposite, and took electrons away? 

In their new study, the team looked for signs of superconductivity as they carefully removed electrons from rhombohedral graphene, progressively lowering the material’s electron density, as they applied a separate, external electric current to measure the electrical resistance. In these experiments, they also applied external magnetic field along directions parallel and perpendicular to the graphene plane. These experiments were carried out in collaboration with Zumbuhl’s group in Switzerland, who provided access to a laboratory setup in which graphene samples could be exposed to high magnetic fields and ultracold temperatures. 

In these experiments, the researchers found that at certain electron densities, four different superconducting states emerged. What’s more, three of the states persisted in the presence of a relatively high magnetic field. 

Normally, magnets destroy superconductivity by severing the bond between the paired electrons gliding through the material. 

But in Ju’s experiments, the team observed three superconducting states that survived in a magnetic field up to around 9 tesla, which is about 180,000 times stronger than the Earth’s magnetic field. In these instances, the magnetic field they applied was in a parallel orientation with respect to the plane of the material. When they switched the magnetic field to a perpendicular orientation, they discovered another surprise: At a certain electron density, superconductivity not only persisted, but increased. The material was able to continue superconducting, at higher temperatures than predicted. 

Every superconducting material has a critical temperature below which electrons can conduct without resistance, and above which superconductivity cannot persist. But the team found that, at a certain electron density, and in the presence of a perpendicular magnetic field, superconductivity in rhombohedral graphene was able to survive beyond the material’s critical temperature that corresponds to zero magnetic field. 

“The superconductivity actually is enhanced, as in, the transition temperature goes from 55 millikelvin to probably 90 millikelvin,” Ju explains. “At the same time, the material can take another 50 or 60 percent extra current before superconductivity gets destroyed. And that is very unusual.”

The researchers are unsure of what microscopic behavior is enabling multiple and unconventional superconducting states, though they propose one idea. Conventional superconductivity emerges when electrons pair up. These “Cooper pairs” consist of electrons with opposite spin, and it’s thought that a magnetic field can pull the spins out of their opposite configurations, and as a result, break up superconductivity. 

Instead, the team proposes that perhaps in rhombohedral graphene, and at certain electron densities, electrons can pair up with aligned spins. Any magnetic field would still pull on the spins, but in the same direction, preserving their alignment, and their superconductivity. 

The researchers acknowledge that the idea needs much more investigation, both experimentally and theoretically. For now, they see the results as a demonstration of what new and exotic phenomena can emerge in a seemingly simple material, with the right measurements and controls. 

“We can control the simplest chemical and structural material— crystalline carbon— as part of the fun,” says lead author Junseok Seo, who is a graduate student in Ju’s group. “We’re not only dealing with what nature gives us, but we’re applying additional controls to change it to something that nature does not give us, but that can exist in the same material.”

This work was supported, in part, by the U.S. Office of Naval Research. Device fabrication was carried out, in part, at MIT.nano.

David Autor, the Daniel (1972) and Gail Rubinfeld Professor in the MIT Department of Economics, has been named head of the Department of Economics, effective July 1.

“David is a world-class labor economist,” says Agustín Rayo, the Kenan Sahin Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. “He is also an individual of wisdom and insight. I look forward to welcoming him to the school’s leadership team.”

Autor’s scholarship explores the labor-market impacts of technological change and globalization on job polarization, skill demands, earnings levels and inequality, and electoral outcomes. He serves as faculty co-director of the James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Inequality and Shaping the Future of Work. 

“I’ve been at MIT since 1999, and I owe my career to the Institute, the department, and colleagues who are as kind as they are accomplished,” Autor says. “Stepping into this role is a chance to contribute to a place that has shaped me at every stage.”

Autor succeeds Jon Gruber, the Ford Professor of Economics, who has served as department head since July 2023.

Autor says he “aims to build on the stellar standard set by its faculty and students while navigating budget tightening and a shifting political landscape.” 

“Just as important, I want to lead the department toward the opportunities that advancing AI is opening in how we teach and what we research,” he adds.

Autor serves as co-director of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Labor Studies Program. He earned a BA in psychology from Tufts University in 1989 and a PhD in public policy from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government in 1999. 

Autor has received numerous awards for both his scholarship — the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, the Sherwin Rosen Prize for outstanding contributions to the field of Labor Economics, the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship in 2019, the Society for Progress Medal in 2021 — and for his teaching, including the MIT MacVicar Faculty Fellowship, the James A. and Ruth Levitan Award for excellence in teaching, the Undergraduate Economic Association Teaching Award, and the Faculty Appreciation Award from the MIT Technology and Policy Program.

In 2020, Autor received the Heinz 25th Special Recognition Award from the Heinz Family Foundation for his work “transforming our understanding of how globalization and technological change are impacting jobs and earning prospects for American workers.” 

In 2023, Autor was one of two researchers across all scientific fields who was named a NOMIS Distinguished Scientist. 

In 2024, Autor was one of five senior scholars selected by the Schmidt Sciences Foundation as an AI2050 Senior Fellow.

The number of U.S. data centers is growing, largely to power artificial intelligence programs. That has led to concern about the environmental consequences of data centers — and their impact on the energy grid itself. What will happen if scores of new data centers come online? 

A new study by MIT researchers indicates that the impact of data centers could vary significantly, depending on how their energy use is structured.

Specifically, if data centers move a significant portion of their energy consumption to non-peak hours, it might actually help lower average energy costs. The environmental impact, in terms of type of energy consumed, would differ by location, with some places likely seeing a greater buildout of renewables and others experiencing a relative increase in fossil fuel use. 

“The key with data centers is: How can we add them to the network without adding a lot to our peak usage?” says Christopher Knittel, an economist in the MIT Sloan School of Management and co-author of a new paper detailing the study. “One way for data centers to do that — to add to average usage but not the peak usage — is if they provide some grid flexibility during those high-cost periods. And that’s what we’ve been interested in understanding.”

Specifically, the paper finds that a flexible arrangement for data-center energy consumption, compared to an inflexible one, would produce cost savings of up to 5 percent in Texas, 4 percent in the Mid-Atlantic region, and 2 percent in the western U.S. states. To achieve that, data centers would have to move more than 20 percent of their consumption — sometimes more like 50 percent — to non-peak hours. 

The paper is titled “Flexible Data Centers Reduce Power System Costs But Can Increase Emissions,” and appears today in the journal iScience. The authors are Juan Ramon L. Senga, a postdoc in MIT’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research; Shen Wang, a postdoc in MIT’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research; and Knittel, who is the George P. Schultz Professor at MIT Sloan and the associate dean for climate and sustainability at MIT. 

The 20 percent solution

The expansion of data centers has raised questions about additional stress for the U.S. grid, the global effects of increased fossil-fuel consumption, and the local environmental effects of data centers. The current study examines the first two of these issues. 

To conduct the research, the scholars extensively simulated scenarios in which data centers expand, using the so-called “Gen X” model of the U.S. power grid, for a year’s worth of energy use. 

The study focused on the grid systems in three areas: Texas, the Mid-Atlantic region, and the “Western Interconnect,” comprising the 11 large western states in the lower 48 states of the U.S. The researchers studied these regions because they collectively host most of the country’s data centers — about 82 percent of U.S. data centers by 2030, according to one analysis. 

A bit counterintuitively, the researchers found that adding data centers could lower energy costs in some scenarios. Typically, about 60 percent of grid expenses are fixed costs, like power lines, while about 40 percent consists of energy costs. Adding data centers to the grid could, in effect, apportion the fixed costs over a higher volume of energy use. 

“It’s really just math,” Knittel says. 

But there is a catch. Lower costs might only happen if data centers increase their average consumption faster than their peak-hours consumption, when energy is most expensive. As it happens, most data centers do have flexibility built into their energy-use patterns, since they usually run at about 80 percent capacity.

In the study’s modeling, that flexibility often consists of shifting use from early-morning and early-evening peaks, to more midday energy consumption, when the energy load is lower and solar is at full capacity. The simulations show this makes a difference.

“There are two dimensions that data centers have to make decisions about,” Knittel says. “One is how much of their load in any one time period is flexible. And two, how many hours, plus or minus, can they move that computation?”

Pretty soon, real money

Additionally, data centers have different amounts of flexibility based on the types of AI-related computation they host. Data centers being used for AI training data tend to consume energy at a steady rate, but as a result could provide more flexibility for shifting power loads compared to inference data centers, which are used more for online search queries. In the latter case, consumption is driven more by end-user Internet habits.

Overall, Knittel emphasizes, the magnitude of cost savings suggested by the study, ranging from 2 percent to 7 percent, is significant. 

“Three percent is a big number,” Knittel says. “When you’re talking about the grid, 3 percent or 6 percent doesn’t sound like a lot. But when you’re multiplying it by 100 billion dollars, it becomes real money.”

When it comes to environmental impact, the modeling finds that the projected level of data center growth by 2030 would be very significant in terms of carbon dioxide emissions. Compared to a world with no data center growth, the study finds those emissions would rise by 58 percent in Texas, 20 percent in the Mid-Atlantic region, and by 24 percent in the western U.S. That underscores the need to be strategic about data center consumption. 

But the modeling also finds that the implications of data center buildout for clean-energy use vary by region. In Texas, where 54 percent of grid power is wind energy, having more data centers with flexible patterns of energy use could reduce emissions, by increasing demand for wind energy. The study finds that in this scenario, there could be 40 percent fewer CO2 emissions. 

However, in the Mid-Atlantic region, where there is a reasonable amount of solar energy but relatively less wind power, more data centers with flexible consumption patterns could increase both renewable energy and fossil-fuel energy consumption.  Here the modeling suggests an increase in CO2 emissions system-wide of 3 percent. 

“When data centers provide some flexibility in that latter scenario, the data centers actually move hours to when sun and wind energy production is slowing, and that allows a coal plant to stay on,” Knittel observes. “So it doesn’t necessarily attract more renewable investment. It attracts more coal investment.”

“That’s why we have policy”

For any of this to happen, however, the data centers would have to implement the flexible energy-use schedules modeled in the study. And it’s not clear that companies using data centers would be motivated to do that. To Knittel, this suggests officials might have to craft regulations in this area. 

“That’s why we have policy,” Knittel says.

More specifically, he adds, there is one big policy lever officials could use to achieve this goal: offering quicker initial hookups to the grid in return for time-of-use flexibility. 

“One big concern about these data centers now is how long it takes for them to connect to the grid,” Knittel says. “One way to provide flexibility now is what’s called ‘connect and manage,’ which is, connecting you faster to the grid if you agree to provide flexibility. Tech firms would take that deal. They would rather connect a year earlier, and throttle down computation a few hours a day, than to have to wait. We do this with power plants too.”

Certainly, Knittel adds, as firms competing with each other, “Tech companies say they won’t provide flexibility alone. But if everyone in the industry has to, it’s okay.” 

The current study is the first to examine the “end-to-end” implications of the centers for costs and emissions. The results, the scholars feel, bear further evaluation — and it is a topic they are continuing to model. 

“Those are two dimensions I think we should all be considering here,” Knittel says. “The end result is really up to us, and up to policy.” 

The research received support from the Future Energy Systems Center of the MIT Energy Initiative. 

Preventing adversaries from interfering with communications is crucial to national security. Tactical satellite communications (SATCOM) focus on securing reliable communications channels against adversaries in contested environments. In support of this mission, a team from MIT Lincoln Laboratory is building a prototype antenna characterized by low size, weight, power, and cost (SWaP-C).

Threats in contested environments — specifically proliferated low Earth orbit (pLEO), where satellites must be as low-SWaP as possible because of the high volume of satellites present — are signal jamming and signals intelligence. Mitigating these threats through methods such as changing the shape of antenna beams in real time so that the ground user's signals can't be interfered with, and preparing for future advanced capabilities, are key to ensuring that satellites stay in communication with users on the ground.

"Looking toward the future challenges of tactical SATCOM, there is a clear need for novel approaches to radio-frequency (RF) aperture designs that are scalable and low SWaP-C without sacrificing functionality," says Michael Craton, a technical staff member in Lincoln Laboratory's Tactical Satellite Communications Group. "That is, we want to think about ways we can achieve exquisite performance using less-expensive hardware. We want to anticipate future threats and have an idea about how to deal with them before they become a problem."

One way to tackle the challenge of proliferated interference and jamming is through adaptive antenna arrays. Unlike single-element antennas, arrays are made up of multiple antennas that work together to guide and shape energy to and from the array. Adaptive arrays can change beam states quickly (a technique called adaptive beamforming) and change them in real time, depending on conditions, to prevent interference in certain directions by placing nulls, or signals that interfere with others. However, adaptive arrays have high SWaP, making them difficult to operate in SWaP-constrained environments like pLEO.  

To address this problem, the team developed the Hosted Nimble Beamforming Anti-Jam Reflectarray (HoNi BAJR), a scanning reflectarray antenna prototype with a surface made up of reflective elements that can be individually controlled. When a signal hits the surface of the reflectarray, individual elements reflect energy with some phase shift to control the beam that is formed so that it blocks interference. Because the elements are very simple, the array can be scaled and controlled easily. Reflectarrays are similar to phased arrays, which consist of multiple elements that can be electronically controlled for quick beam changes, but scanning reflectarrays reflect signals toward a separate feed antenna, which eliminates much of the design complexity in conventional antenna arrays.

Unlike phased arrays that require amplifiers for each antenna element, reflectarrays do not require amplifiers because signals are collected by the feed antenna and combined in free space; this lack of amplifiers for each element in the reflectarray lowers the SWaP required and helps with scalability, as the beamforming network does not have to be redesigned each time the size of the array is changed. A reflectarray uses much less power than a typical array, dropping the power consumption by about 95 percent.  

The prototype HoNi BAJR reflectarray was designed for communications in a pLEO constellation with wide coverage across the horizon and can cater to low-power users in the presence of proliferated jamming. The array is sized to fit on a typical small satellite platform.

The HoNi BAJR team tested the array's beamforming capabilities at the laboratory's RF Systems Testing Facility, successfully demonstrating a high scan angle, which means the array can receive signals from a wide area. Their testing also showed that there is little loss in signal when synthesizing multipeak beams, or splitting the beam, indicating that reflectarrays can get signals to multiple users without information loss. 

Suppressing interference (unwanted signals from equipment like cell phone towers or electrical devices) is also very important to ensuring the antenna works correctly. The HoNi BAJR team's work in this area is based on two programs funded through an internally administered R&D portfolio: Deployable Electronically Scanning Reflectarray (DESRa) and Phase Analog Beamforming (PhAB, which uses DESRa hardware). PhAB demonstrated that it was possible to adapt to nulls and mitigate signal jamming in real time. However, in the dynamic signal environment of HoNi BAJR, there may not be time to adapt these beams fast enough for the signal environment. The team innovated a solution: creating regions of interference suppression, instead of targeting individual points of interference, by shaping the side lobes of the beam. The technique faltered slightly in testing because of difficulty in controlling the side lobes, as they're sensitive to small signal changes. However, proper calibration (measuring effects from the instruments and the system to ensure the full signal received and transmitted by the antenna is accounted for) may help.

While key to ensuring a system works correctly, calibration is one of the biggest challenges of operating reflectarrays. Not much precedent exists for calibrating a scanning reflectarray, so the team is researching approaches. All aspects of the reflectarray (e.g., forming and shaping beams) will be improved by calibration, and full usage of the array will require a comprehensive understanding of calibration. Another major area the team is exploring is where reflectarrays can best be used.

"Designing hardware is always a challenge, but figuring out how to fit the technology into a complete and functional system that meets mission needs is the hardest part," Craton says. "We believe scanning reflectarrays have a lot of untapped potential for the missions we care about, but because they have not been used in this space before, a lot of gaps in functionality remain. We need to first build up capabilities for the things that we need to do."

Early studies show that reflectarrays can be used in situations where beams are scheduled, where there is proliferated interference in less-dynamic signal environments (or dynamic signal environments, if you can achieve good calibration), and on power-constrained platforms. Future work will focus on further exploring how reflectarrays can be used, improving calibration procedures, and refining beamforming capabilities.

“Illuminating.” “Spectacular.” “Compelling.” This is how community college students described the two days they spent at MIT.nano learning about the complex tools inside the cleanroom and building and packaging their own functional photonic chips.

“Integrated photonics is an essential part of semiconductor packaging today,” says Anu Agarwal, principal research scientist in the Materials Research Laboratory at MIT. “But there is no single, standardized university curriculum for integrated electronics-photonics packaging. We need to create educational materials to teach this subject across the talent pipeline from K-12 and beyond, which is exactly what we’re doing at the Initiative for Knowledge and Innovation in Manufacturing (IKIM) and MIT.nano.”

As leader of the Lab for Education and Application Prototypes (LEAP) facility located on MIT.nano’s fifth floor, Agarwal stresses the importance of hands-on learning when studying integrated photonics, the science of guiding and manipulating light on a semiconductor chip. Through the Northeast Consortia for Advanced Integrated Silicon Technologies (NCAIST) program, she’s bringing community and four-year college students to MIT.nano for experimental boot camps that teach how to use semiconductor tools for electronic-photonic packaging and testing.

“Having a workforce skilled in resource-efficient semiconductor manufacturing, including electronic-photonic packaging, is critical to maintain the exponential growth of the chip industry and build national security,” says Agarwal. “MIT.nano, through programs like NCAIST, are helping to train more people in STEM.”

Working closely with AIM Photonics, a U.S. Manufacturing Innovation Institute, NCAIST coordinates and accelerates the transition of technician education content and teaching methodologies from key AIM-affiliated U.S. universities to community, technical, and four-year colleges in the Northeast. Through NCAIST, in Massachusetts, the Massachusetts Bay Community College (MBCC) is paired with MIT, North Shore Community College (NSCC) with Stonehill College, and Springfield Technical Community College (STCC) with Western New England University.

“The NCAIST program offers a transformative opportunity for our community college students to experience hands-on training at MIT.nano’s LEAP facility,” says Marina Bograd, professor and chair of the engineering department at MassBay Community College. “For many of them, this is their first time stepping into a cleanroom or seeing semiconductor manufacturing up close. The experience helps open doors that might otherwise feel out of reach, builds confidence, and inspires our students to see themselves pursuing careers in emerging technologies.”

The most recent MIT.nano boot camp, held on May 20-21, expanded participation to include not only those from MBCC, but also students from NSCC, Stonehill College, and SUNY Polytechnic Institute, where NCAIST is headquartered. Twelve students spent two full days at MIT.nano operating a die saw, die bonder, wire bonder, and flip chip tool to build and test a packaged chip.

“I found the combination of hands-on activities, lectures, and informal discussion with the MIT.nano team and fellow students fostered an awesome learning environment,” says Cari Caudill, a student at NSCC. “As a mechanical engineering student, I was most interested in packaging and the machines themselves, so I loved getting direct experience with the tools and discussing with our instructors how procedural and technological development has impacted precision, efficiency, and scalability in the semiconductor industry.”

"The NCAIST boot camp was an exciting and illuminating experience!” adds MassBay Community College student Wyatt Maurer. “I really appreciated getting the chance to work with semiconductor manufacturing tools and to learn about the future of photonics from leaders in the field.”

Students attended lectures on cleanroom safety by Kristofor Payer, assistant director of operations at MIT.nano; electronic-photonic packaging by Agarwal; and photonic integrated circuit sensing by Department of Materials Science and Engineering graduate student Lizzie Gower. They were also offered virtual reality (VR) simulation exercises by Sajan Saini, the director of education at IKIM, to help build intuition about photonic devices and semiconductor packaging tools. These VR simulations serve as a foundational tool to help students visualize photonic devices and complex tool mechanics, as well as run digital process steps and deepen their technical understanding. By bridging physical fabrication with advanced simulation resources, the LEAP students are mastering highly specialized manufacturing, assembly, and testing pipelines required to build the future of electronic-photonic integration.

“The experience at this boot camp not only strengthens our student technical skills, it helps them see themselves as future contributors to a rapidly evolving field,” says Mary Beth Steigerwald, professor and engineering department chair at North Shore Community College. “It also enriches their professional portfolios and gives them a stronger, more compelling story to share during internship and transfer interviews.”

The students will use this training to secure summer internships at hard technology companies. Several have also been accepted to four-year degree programs to continue their education in the fall.