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

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

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

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

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

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

Overcoming the limits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leveraging magnetism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The minute you think, ‘I’ve done everything I can possibly do for Lincoln Lab,’ next thing you know, you’re belly crawling through a mock rubble pile,” says Niki Fandel. 

Through hundreds of photo shoots each year, the MT Lincoln Laboratory photographer captures technical innovations — from functional fibers to advanced radar systems ­— and the people who develop them for national security. Her work brings her to every corner of the laboratory’s main campus in Lexington, Massachusetts, and to field sites across the country.  

Video by Tim Briggs/MIT Lincoln Laboratory | 5 minutes, 56 seconds

A new study by neuroscientists in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT shows how the brain encodes information throughout the decision-making process to keep options clearly in mind and to ensure that chosen and unchosen options are remembered.

The key, the researchers show in the journal iScience, is that the brain convenes ensembles to produce coordinated patterns of electrical activity that distinctly represent and sort options, both during consideration and after choice. 

“It keeps different neural ensembles, different thoughts, distinct from one another, preventing interference between them,” says senior author Earl K. Miller, Picower Professor in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.

Lead author Huidi Li, a graduate student in Miller’s lab, says the study results show how the brain responds dynamically to meet the challenge of decision-making.

“The brain doesn’t just hold information statically,” Li says. “Throughout the decision process, the brain flexibly reorganizes information representation to meet the changing task demands.”

Decisions decoded

To conduct the study, Li, Miller, and their team trained two animals to play a game in which they had to look in the direction of one of two indicated targets on a screen, based on which target was assigned the higher reward value. Importantly, the two options were presented and their values were assigned in sequence — first one target, then its value, then the other target and then its value. That way, the brain had to juggle multiple representations for each target — for instance, the order of presentation before the decision, and then chosen-or-not after the decision. Meanwhile, each time the animals played the game, researchers measured the electrical activity of hundreds of neurons in the lateral prefrontal cortex, a surface brain region known for having a key role in linking options, values, and actions in decision-making.

Using “declassifier” algorithms to decode the electrical patterns, the researchers found that the neurons acted in functional ensembles whose collective activity clearly indicated decision-related information, including the distinct target directions and their assigned values. To interpret and compare each ensemble’s patterns, the researchers visualized these “subspaces” geometrically as planes on a 3D graph.

The researchers’ key finding was that before the values were assigned and a decision was made, the neural ensemble patterns consistently represented options based on their order of presentation. For example, on the graphs each “target 1” plane was nicely parallel with the others. Similarly, each “target 2” plane was parallel with its brethren, but the target 2s were more orthogonal, or more perpendicular, with the target 1s, showing that they were represented as entirely distinct from each other.

Then, after the decision, new ensembles provided new representations. Now the “chosen” options, whether they had been presented first or second, had parallel representations. The unchosen targets were also represented as parallel with each other, but as orthogonal from the chosen ones. 

Getting one’s neural ducks in a row

In other words, before the decision, the brain convened ensembles of neurons to distinguish targets by their presentation order, and then after the decisions, gathered ensembles to sort them by whether they were chosen or not. This consistent way of representing chosen options, Li and Miller wrote, could aid decision-making by essentially packaging it for downstream circuits responsible for converting the decision into action (in this case, directing the animal’s gaze in the chosen target direction).

“The observed alignment of chosen target representations could allow downstream areas to read out the location of the chosen target with a single decoder, regardless of its initial presentation order,” the authors wrote.

Notably, the researchers also found that round by round of the game, individual neurons could often be recruited in to different ensembles. A neuron that in one round seemed “selective” for option 2 could end up being selective for option 1 the next. The ensembles were therefore not permanent circuits of specialized neurons, but instead were assembled ad hoc among multifunctional neurons.

In other research, Miller has found that the brain uses brain waves to rapidly and flexibly accomplish this goal of ensemble recruitment.

Another clear implication of the data, Miller says, is that the brain maintained distinct memories of each option, whether it was chosen or not. This could be important for assigning credit down the line to facilitate learning. For instance, remembering that choosing target 2 in round 3 earned a reward.

“Our results illustrate the dynamic subspace reorganization supporting option maintenance and selection in economic decisions,” the authors wrote.

In addition to Li and Miller, the paper’s other authors are Nikolaos Chrysanthidis, Scott Brincat, and Jonas Rose.

The U.S. Office of Naval Research, the U.S. Army Research Office, the Freedom Together Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health provided support for the research.

Patricia and James Poitras ’63, longtime MIT supporters, have launched a fellowship program for graduate students and postdocs studying major mental illness, expanding their MIT philanthropy to directly support early-career scientists. The commitment establishes 50 two-year fellowships through the Poitras Center for Psychiatric Disorders Research at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research. Five fellowships will be awarded every year for the next decade, creating a long-term talent pipeline focused specifically on psychiatric disorders.

The $10 million gift is the latest in a series of philanthropic investments from the Poitras family to strengthen MIT’s capacity to address the growing burden of severe depression and anxiety, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and other complex psychiatric conditions. “Pat and Jim have remained steadfast in their decades-long commitment to bold research that can transform mental wellness,” says Robert Desimone, director of the McGovern Institute and head of the Poitras Center. “Their remarkable support of rising talent in the MIT ecosystem is yet another emblem of their commitment to that cause.”

A philanthropic legacy

Many recent mental health discoveries emerging from MIT — from molecular tools that can rewrite DNA to artificial intelligence-powered technologies that can calculate a person’s risk for developing mental illness — were hard to imagine two decades ago. Yet, Patricia and James Poitras envisioned a future where enigmatic mental health conditions could be solved. They understood this future would require not just research, but a fundamental reimagining of how psychiatric research itself is conducted.

In 2007, inspired by meetings with leadership at the McGovern Institute, the Poitras Family gifted $20 million to launch the Poitras Center. By bridging the fields of basic neuroscience, clinical psychiatry, and molecular biology, the center sought to establish a unified blueprint for understanding how psychiatric disorders hijack the mind at every level, from molecular mechanisms to whole brain systems, and guide the creation of novel therapies to better treat them. 

Since the center’s establishment, additional investments by the Poitras family have supported research ranging from genome engineering to cognitive neuroscience. These investments have empowered scientists across disciplines to pursue innovative research questions, including how ketamine acts on synaptic communication and why schizophrenia distorts inner speech and reasoning. These efforts have ushered in major breakthroughs in mental health: an AI-powered calculator for predicting bipolar disorder risk in adolescents, molecular carriers that precisely deliver therapies throughout the body, and strategies that use patients’ brain activity patterns to match them with optimal treatments, among other advances. 

Expanding support for early career scientists

The Poitras family’s latest gift invests directly in the PhD students and postdocs who will carry the field of psychiatric research forward. It comes at a time when federal funding has grown especially precarious. “To make the greatest impact on the world’s mental health, we recognize that we must not only support transformational research, but also the young people driving its progress,” says James Poitras, who is also chair of the McGovern Institute’s board.

Five McGovern Institute researchers have been selected as the inaugural cohort of Poitras Center Fellows and Graduate Scholars. Their projects span multiple areas in brain research and could reveal a suite of new ways to heal the mind.

• Amrita Lamba: Postdoc, Saxe lab
  Drawing on her expertise in social neuroscience and game theory, Lamba will examine whether a two-player economic game could be used to distinguish generalized anxiety from social anxiety — a critical step toward personalized treatments for disorder subtypes. 
• Hoonwon Lee: Postdoc, Jasanoff lab
  As a molecular biologist who studies memory formation in the brain, Lee examines how fear memories develop and persist across brain networks, connecting what’s happening at the cellular level to larger brain-wide patterns. His findings may lead to new targets for post-traumatic stress disorder.
• Karen Pang: Graduate student, Anikeeva lab
  Pang studies how the gut communicates with the brain to influence anxiety and depression, developing new tools to understand this connection and ultimately create treatments that address both digestive and mental health problems together.
• Smriti Saini: Graduate student, Gabrieli lab
  Saini is using brain imaging and computational techniques to identify which people with severe social anxiety will benefit from cognitive behavioral therapy, so doctors can personalize treatment decisions rather than relying only on symptoms. 
• Linghua Zhang: Postdoc, Wang lab
  Exercise is known to boost mood, but how it reshapes the mind is unclear. Zhang will study the circuit-level mechanisms behind the brain benefits of physical activity.

The new gift extends the Poitras family’s support of mental health research at MIT to over $100 million. It also marks another step toward a bold vision years in the making. 

“Serious brain disorders profoundly affect patients, families, and caregivers,” says Patricia Poitras. “We believe that investing in the next generation of researchers will accelerate powerful discoveries that lead to life-changing treatments and better future for countless patients and families.”

The next application window for Poitras Center fellowships will open in May 2027. 

U.S. News and World Report has designated MIT as the top school in its annual rankings of the nation’s best universities, announced today. 

Among the academic specialties that U.S. News evaluates, MIT’s engineering program continues to lead the rankings of undergraduate engineering programs at a doctoral institution. The Institute’s undergraduate computer science and economics programs also ranked No. 1, and its undergraduate business program ranked No. 2.

U.S. News ranked MIT highly in several other categories: The Institute is No. 1  for undergraduate research and creative projects, No. 2 on the list of most innovative schools, and No. 3 on the list of best value schools.

MIT placed first in five engineering specialties: aerospace/aeronautical/astronautical engineering; chemical engineering; electrical/electronic/communication engineering; materials engineering; and mechanical engineering. It placed second in computer engineering.

Other schools in the top five overall for undergraduate engineering programs are Georgia Tech, Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, and Caltech. 

In computer science, MIT placed first in three specialties: biocomputing/bioinformatics/biotechnology (tied with Carnegie Mellon University); computer systems (tied with Carnegie Mellon); and theory. It placed second in three other disciplines: artificial intelligence, data analytics/science; and programming languages.

Other schools in the top five overall for undergraduate computer science programs are Carnegie Mellon and Stanford (both tied with MIT at No. 1), as well as UC Berkeley, Georgia Tech, Princeton University, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 

In economics, MIT placed first in four specialties: development economics; econometrics; industrial organization (tied with Northwestern University); and microeconomics. It placed second in macroeconomics (tied with UC Berkeley).

Other schools in the top five overall for undergraduate economics programs are Harvard University, Princeton, and University of Chicago (all tied with MIT at No. 1), as well as Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Yale University.

Among undergraduate business specialties, the MIT Sloan School of Management led in three categories: analytics; production/operations management; and quantitative analysis. It placed second in entrepreneurship.  

Other undergraduate business programs ranking in the top five include the University of Pennsylvania, UC Berkeley, New York University, and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. 

Following World War II, the MIT faculty convened a committee to assess the Institute’s principles of education and their relevance “in a new era emerging from social upheaval and the disasters of war.” One of the outcomes of this pivotal report was the establishment of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS). MIT News convened a discussion with three SHASS faculty — David Kaiser, Heather Paxson, and Jonathan Gruber — about what makes the school special and why it’s a core part of the MIT experience. Listen to the conversation or read the transcript below.

Peter Dizikes: Welcome to MIT, everybody. My name is Peter Dizikes and I’m a writer for MIT News. Every year, over 1,000 undergraduates enroll at MIT. Once they’re here, they’ll spend at least a quarter of their time studying a set of core subjects such as music and theater arts, history, anthropology, and economics, linguistics and philosophy, literature, political science. These are all offered within MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, known on campus as SHASS and a core piece of the university.

MIT is 165 years old. This month, SHASS turns 75 and is celebrating its anniversary with a two-day conference, September 24th and 25th. For this MIT News Roundtable, we’re delighted to have three distinguished faculty members from SHASS with us, historian and physicist David Kaiser, anthropologist Heather Paxson, and economist Jonathan Gruber, who are all here to talk about what makes SHASS a special place. Thank you all for joining us.

David Kaiser: Thanks for having us.

Peter Dizikes: If it’s all right, I’d like to just jump in and start by asking each of you a different question about SHASS. Perhaps we could start with you, David. David Kaiser, for our audience, is the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and Professor of Physics at MIT. He’s written numerous books about the history of physics and done scientific research focused on inflationary cosmology, the very rapid, very early expansion of our universe. He’s also edited a volume about the history of MIT and is, I think, the lead organizer of the SHASS 75 Conference.

David Kaiser: It has taken a village, but I’ve been lucky to work with a whole group.

Peter Dizikes: Very good. Well, on that note, the note being MIT history, right after World War II, MIT decided that it wanted to form SHASS. Why was that and how has that worked out for us?

David Kaiser: That’s right. So they didn’t decide very rapidly. And again, as people might know, there were some departments that we would now associate with SHASS that preexisted this. Economics, for example, had been taught at MIT as its own department from well before then. But there was this famous — famous for us, famous on campus — something called the “Lewis Report,” which you’ll hear about over and over again this year, I’m sure. And it was actually, I think, a three-year effort. So the group was put together very soon after the end of the second World War, starting in 1946, very soon. And they got together and studied almost everything you can imagine about life and the future at MIT. I mean, like parking lots and how far do the faculty commute, which is on my mind, as well as things like the undergraduate curriculum, dormitories, really every aspect, intellectual, residential, social, and beyond. It’s a really remarkable report and it’s easy to download from the web. It’s really worth reading even, I think, to this day.

But as you rightly know, when they completed the report in 1949, among their most significant recommendations was that MIT should not just have a few departments in humanities and social sciences, but have a concerted effort in what we would now call SHASS. Originally, it was the School of Humanities and Social Sciences. And of course, about 25 or so years ago, 50 years since the founding, we also very proudly added arts to our name.

So the point is the Lewis Committee said, in essence, there are so many striking, dramatic, literally world-changing developments that we can associate with what we might now call STEM, or science and technology, and they had in mind things like the Manhattan Project and nuclear weapons, which had been used to such dramatic effect just not long before they wrote the report. And they were concerned that changes that could be that rapid and that far-reaching simply require an informed leadership, an informed citizenry, more generally, of people who can try to think critically and carefully and kind of contextually and not only understand neutron diffusion, but also understand the flow of people and ideas and cultures and politics and beyond.

They argued not just that SHASS should be founded, it should be, as they said, “A co-equal school to the existing schools.” The report was very clear: This needs to be as central to MIT’s existence and experience as School of Science, School of Engineering, and of course there are other great schools as well. And it really was, there’s too much at stake, changing too rapidly with too far-ranging implications for our students and our faculty and staff and the broader community not to have the toolkit to think about history, governance, economics, culture, identity, human expression — that these were inescapable parts of being an educated member and a responsible member of the new nuclear age.

Peter Dizikes: Surely we still have enough challenges today that that rationale would hold up, we think?

David Kaiser: I think we’re done! No, we haven’t nailed it. There’s a few more things to worry about. And so I think when I say I return to that Lewis Report, I really do because some parts will seem quaint — what were the concerns in 1949 might not always resonate today — but a lot of the concerns sound actually quite contemporary. And with only a little bit of keyword swapping, I think we’ll get to it, I’m sure, in our discussion, no shortage of topics today that are filling a kind of intellectual role that the disruptions of the second World War had played for that earlier generation.

Peter Dizikes: Right. Thank you. Heather, I’d like to toss a question to you as well. Heather Paxson, for our audience, is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Anthropology at MIT, a former head of the MIT program in anthropology, and she is currently associate dean for faculty in SHASS. You’ve written multiple books, including “The Life of Cheese,” which I can vouch goes very deep into the American psyche. Heather, given that you are dean and I think have a lot of visibility into what’s going on SHASS-wide, in a sense, could you just say a little bit more for us about the breadth of everything that happens in SHASS?

Heather Paxson: Thank you, Peter. So putting the humanities and the arts and the social sciences together in a school is actually quite unusual among our peer institutions and does make for some really fun collaborations and convenings.

So just to give you a little taste of that breadth, just this week yesterday, our colleagues in political science, Adam Berinsky and Charles Stewart, and research that they’re doing in collaboration with Chara Podimata, who is an operations research specialist in the Sloan School of Management. They are using AI to study AI. They did a huge study or are in the midst of a huge study of looking at how AI chatbots are providing information to citizens about elections that may or may not be biased and tailored to the asker and what the effects that will have on our midterms coming up. So very timely, amazing work. That’s social sciences.

In the arts, yesterday I saw our colleague Jay Scheib, who’s the head of Music and Theater Arts. He’s a stage director and he’s just back from Germany where he’s been staging a production of Wagner in Germany. So, really, just a lot of fun stuff.

Peter Dizikes: It is actually amazing the breadth of people circulating around here. Jon, I have a question for you as well on a slightly different note. So Jon Gruber is Ford Professor of Economics at MIT, a former head of the Department of Economics, he’s published over 200 research papers, I think I can say is one of the most influential figures in the expansion of health care access in the U.S. You’re also the only person here right now who’s been an MIT student. You were an undergrad here. Could you just say a few words about what was significant about your student experience, what you took with you from being a student?

Jonathan Gruber: One thing that’s sort of embarrassing is when I started as undergrad here, I was closer to the Lewis Report than we are today. And the Lewis Report was still, in many ways, being implemented when I was undergraduate. I would say SHASS was much more of a second-class citizen then than it is now. It was sort of embarrassing to say one was a SHASS major without saying a double major, but it was really viewed as a service organization, something kids took so they could get on with their courses that mattered.

I really think that’s changed. I think the MIT student body’s changed from when I was here. We’re a much more well-rounded student body. We’re now competing with these Ivy League institutions that we were very separate from when I was a student, and that wouldn’t be possible without SHASS. But I think what’s important to recognize is MIT is no longer a school that just competes with engineering schools. We’re a school that competes with all universities. And the only way to do that is a well-rounded education. Folks aren’t going to come here if they can’t have a well-rounded education, if it’s just a science education. So SHASS has developed to become so much more integral into the life of MIT. The respect level of SHASS, everything has just really improved.

Peter Dizikes: Were there particular classes or courses that jump out in retrospect?

Jonathan Gruber: Well, I think I’m a great story for SHASS in the sense that I came to MIT as someone who’s good at math, but didn’t like math. I was just good at it, but I wasn’t someone who was doing proofs in my basement. I just didn’t find it appealing. But I came to MIT because it was a math-y school and it was the best school I got into and I was good at math. And then I took 14.01, which is our Intro to Economics class, and I was like, “Oh my God, I can use math for something interesting. I can actually take this math I love to answer questions I really want to answer and on topics I really care about in the real world.” And that was just eye-opening to me. I literally can picture standing at the crosswalk at 77 Mass Ave with my then girlfriend telling her how excited I was. I can picture that moment, what 14.01 had opened up for me. So you can imagine it’s incredibly thrilling for me now to get to teach 14.01 and hopefully inspire some of those students the way that I was inspired.

Peter Dizikes: What’s interesting is many people here have slightly indirect paths to what they ended up doing, right? So you didn’t come here expecting for that to happen, but it happened.

Jonathan Gruber: That’s exactly right. I think one thing that’s very important at part of the university education is to open yourself up to learning new things and heading in new directions. One concern I always have about MIT is that students come here too predetermined to do X. I think that’s almost more of a problem here than other universities. I think that’s why SHASS is so important. Because we want to open their minds to the fact that even if they move from science major X to science major Y, along the way they’re exposed to a range of things that allow them to choose what’s going to give them the most fulfilling future, not just what they thought was interesting in high school.

Peter Dizikes: And when I said at the outset that a quarter of the time they’ll be spending on some of these subjects is this is one of the MIT requirements, is that people need eight classes from SHASS during their four years here. So hopefully they do get that kind of exposure.

Jonathan Gruber: That is why we have that requirement and hopefully they take those classes seriously and are open-eyed and can really… I’ll tell you, Peter, one of the things that distresses me most is the number of juniors and seniors I have taking 14.01 saying, “God, I wish I took this freshman year. I would’ve studied more economics.” Which makes me feel good about my class, but a little disappointed that it’s taken that long to find it.

Heather Paxson: Oh, we thought that was just anthropology! They don’t even know how to find econ?

Jonathan Gruber: Exactly.

Peter Dizikes: Well, stepping back for one second. In daily life, what is special about being at SHASS? Teaching and learning is one of those things, but if you had to cite a couple of things about the qualities and characteristics of being here, the students, your colleagues, what would you say?

Jonathan Gruber: I mean, I would say that what’s special and unique about SHASS at MIT is the fact that we are at MIT and that we are the place that can bring together the science and the social sciences and humanities and arts in a productive way, which is so important right now. The conversation cannot go on without talking about AI, but basically the fundamental central issue in AI right now is how do we think about it ethically? How do we regulate it? And there’s no place better to think about that than MIT, where you’ve got the people developing the frontier AI models next to the people who can help you think about how to regulate and think ethically about those models. And so I think this world is increasingly becoming STEM-based, and I think, as a result, the most productive place to learn about topics from anthropology to history to economics is a place where you’ll learn about that alongside STEM.

Peter Dizikes: Since you mentioned that everything is affected by AI, I’m interested in what everybody’s favorite teaching experiences have been here, but you’re also probably having to be a little bit mindful of how to make sure that everybody is doing their own work and putting in the hard work and the hard thinking that it takes to really get what you want out of MIT. So those are two questions. From pre-AI days, do you have a particular favorite kind of teaching experience? What made it great? And then how are we adapting now?

David Kaiser: One of the courses I really love teaching here, I’ve been teaching it on and off, really, for 20 plus years, is cross-listed in our program in Science, Technology, and Society, my home department, also in Physics, and it counts as another one of these, I think, very important requirements that all the undergraduates must take. It’s a communications-intensive course in the major for the physics major. So they have to learn to write essays and express themselves coherently as part of their physics education, as well as, of course, throughout their SHASS coursework.

And so it’s predominantly students who are, like Jon had been, very interested in math and math-y things and physics and all those things, but they also have to come in there and not just rely on their, frankly, fabulous calculating skills. They have to practice reading stuff that might look a little unfamiliar or unexpected to them and they have to practice really composing coherent arguments about that. And the arguments sometimes are about the intellectual work, what was Einstein’s thinking in 1905 and how do we know and why does it matter?

A lot of it in this class turns to the things like I think were on the minds of those authors of the Lewis Report. What are educated people’s responsibilities under very complicated disruptive times like wartime, like the escalation of fighting of Vietnam? The list is long, just within recent history. What does it mean to take a remarkable education in a variety of fields and do something with that that is consistent with what you think you want to do as a person and as a member of a larger group? And to watch our physics majors wrestle with this creatively, and there’s no single answer that they’re racing toward, I think that’s just incredibly rewarding.

And a lot of them, I hear over and over again from seniors who are about to go to very fancy PhD programs in physics, “I never really paused to think about time dilation until I had write an essay about it. Oh, yeah, there’s kind of a reason for that.” Or, “I never really got my head around quantum theory, I could solve my problem sets, but there’s something really strange happening in the universe and it’s not only captured by these very, very complicated mathematical expressions, so that’s essential too.” So I have this collection of favorite moments of these kinds of “aha” where the eyes light up and the jaw drops at least a little bit and you say, “I didn’t even know that was a thing I didn’t know.” And it’s really fun to see that.

Peter Dizikes: And that comes out of having them write about things.

David Kaiser: It has them reading text, and not only a textbook, and then really having to make their own argument based on their own selection of primary and secondary sources, the way we would teach to do in our other courses.

Peter Dizikes: We like to say that writing is thinking.

David Kaiser: Yeah. They have to clarify and make a case. Yeah.

Peter Dizikes: Heather, do you have?

Heather Paxson: I’ve been teaching here for quite a few years now, but before I got here, I probably taught at five other colleges and universities, so lots of different teaching experience in different sorts of institutions. And for many years I would say, MIT students, it’s just different. It is just so much more fun to teach anthropology with MIT students because they came to class having approached the texts, reading them, not to decide whether they agreed with the text or not, they were needed to be persuaded by the argument, and it really made for a very rich conversation in the classroom.

I think it’s interesting because the moments in the classroom that I can think about or the assignments or the engagements that I can think about are actually things that I think we are all trying to steer more towards today. So the things that I’m doing in class or trying to do in class today, more experience-based projects, more hands-on, are the things that actually, thinking back, I’ve done for a long time and are the most memorable.

So just one example, a class I haven’t taught in a very long time, but a colleague is teaching it now, a class called Art Craft Science, which is really fun to teach here. The assignment was to make mozzarella cheese. So I gave them instructions straight from the box of this mozzarella making kit and the instructions were not very well written. They were predicated on a knowledge of cooking and so forth. That was the point. So they had to go home, I gave them the ingredients, they made cheese, and then they write it up as a lab. I figured they knew how to do that, write it up as a lab. And the discussion of the lab was to reflect on the skills that they relied on to be able to enact these really poorly written instructions. So it was all about tacit knowledge. And so that was the lesson.

And that’s the kind of thing I think we’re all trying to reinvent now in the age of AI, but I’m sure we’ve all been doing it, we just didn’t have as much sense of attention to it. But that is MIT, the “mens et manus” thing. It’s all over our curriculum. It always has been, but now it does have this new, I think, shiny coin value to it. So that’s what’s fun.

Peter Dizikes: Our motto “mens et manus” is “mind and hand,” and I’m sure there is going to have to be a lot of continual reinventing of these kinds of exercises going forward. Do you have?

Jonathan Gruber: I would say there are two things that make me happiest as a teacher. One is when I illustrate the power of economics through counterintuitive lessons, when I can see the kids are like, “Wow, that’s really cool. I didn’t think of it that way till I took this class.” That’s really great. When it just can change the way that they think, they can think about things somewhat differently. And that’s what I hope the kids take from the class. I always say, “I don’t care if you remember certain terms, I just want you to think like an economist.” And when I see that happening, it’s wonderful. But most enjoyable is when they laugh at my jokes. My wife can tell if I’ve had a good lecture day, a bad lecture day, what percent of my jokes they laugh at, which is always below 10%, by the way. But the question is, is it 10% or 1%? And that’s really the most important thing to me.

David Kaiser: Jon, quick question. Does the proportion rise closer to midterms? Are they gaming the system?

Jonathan Gruber: No. No, not at all.

David Kaiser: No time series?

Jonathan Gruber: No time series.

David Kaiser: Just checking. All right, good to know.

Peter Dizikes: You haven’t had anyone come in and really study that empirically, though?

Jonathan Gruber: No, but the best review I ever got, now this was many years before he got famous for a different reason, was that I was viewed as a “well-dressed Pee-wee Herman.”

Peter Dizikes: Students will say if a professor makes them laugh, they’ll take that class when they’re shopping around, right?

Jonathan Gruber: Yeah, hopefully so.

Peter Dizikes: Slightly different kind of question here, which is: How has being at SHASS perhaps influenced your careers? You’re all people who’ve done different things in the same career. Heather, you’ve written about some very different topics. Jon, you’ve been very involved in research and also public policy. And Dave, you’ve had two careers in one as a physicist and a historian. So what is it about this place that maybe encourages you to try different things and follow through with them?

Jonathan Gruber: Well, Dave, you’re the two-in-one. You should start.

David Kaiser: Oh, okay. It’s buy one, get one free, I think. So one example comes to mind, Peter. I think many will eventually. But a number of years ago I wrote a book as an historian that I just loved immersing myself in all the things historians do, finding dusty old papers and interviewing people around. And it was called “How the Hippies Saved Physics.” It was a kind of an obnoxious title or funny title. And it was really who cared about certain obscure sounding questions in quantum physics before the whole field knew we had to care about them. It was really, I think, to me, at least an engaging and fun story about people on the margins who made contributions there.

Where I’m going with this is because I’m here and very lucky to live in more than one department and interact with all kinds of folks, one of the extremely gifted postdocs in physics who had just come to MIT to work with me on the physics side, read the book on a lark because it had a funny cover, I think is why he probably picked it up. And the upshot is that got us thinking more about our own physics projects because the historical study said, “Oh, I never thought that’s where these ideas came from, and I see what they did then and we’ve learned a lot more about these things in the interim. Let’s try this something new.” So we put a little group together and that became a five-year, really, adventure for me on the physics side that grew entirely, at least for me, from the fact that I’d spent several years writing this kind of deep-dive historical study.

The ability to have one lead to the other, to have these conversations happening close in time and close on campus to each other, I mean, that’s extraordinary and I’m very lucky, and I don’t know that I would have that at many other places where I could have been or where our friends are. So I think that the boundaries are not actually that high between our various parts of campus. They can feel high at times, but there really is the kind of cross-campus traffic, and we’re trying to get more of that going with recent initiatives. I think we really can just bring questions together without saying, “Oh, but you’re in that department, I’m in this department.”

Peter Dizikes: Having read “How the Hippies Saved Physics,” which came out in 2011, I would say you were writing about figures who, even at the time, were semi-overlooked, but since then have gone on to win major awards, and in a way the whole area of study there has been elevated.

David Kaiser: Well, that’s right. One of what I like to call “my hippies,” shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 2022. And in fact, one of the colleagues that I got to do the physics work as a follow-on with shared that same Nobel Prize, I think it’s, frankly, because he began working with me. Anton hasn’t gone on record, but I think the record speaks for itself. Anyway, the point is it’s now sort of extraordinarily exciting work that came from just 50+ years earlier from really being on the margin and being denigrated. And that kind of arc in the span of a single human lifetime or a career is really rapid change. Anyway, to be able to sit and watch that from many facets, it was a great adventure.

Peter Dizikes: And that joke landed, so you’re batting over 10% in this.

David Kaiser: I mean, look, I’m not keeping score, Peter, but I know where it’s going to be at the end.

Jonathan Gruber: I would say two things. So one is, going back to my undergrad days, I think many students here are head down, do the work, don’t necessarily engage with a lot of what’s going on in the world. I had a political science professor named Louis Menand who changed my life, who made me engage. He’d worked in the great society. He really was very opinionated, but in a way that he could defend it. It really opened my eyes and he began by getting involved in working on policy at MIT. So I was the first student representative to the committee on the undergraduate program when Margaret MacVicar set it up in 1985. I was the first student representative. And then it grew into my interest in just policy in general, so that was very exciting for me.

And then the other thing was the way I’ve been involved in policy is a particularly MIT way, which is that I’m the numbers guy when health care policy gets made. I develop computer models and mathematical models to help folks understand how their policies will affect people. But those models themselves don’t do any good unless we can explain what they’re doing in clear terms. So it’s really that crosswalk of why it’s great to be at MIT, which is I have the math skills to do it and I have the incredible students to help me, I mean, the work in this area has been helped by so many amazing students, but to have the SHASS skills and the communication skills to be able to explain what I’m doing and why it’s important, that is really kind of where SHASS is perfect for me.

Peter Dizikes: And also noteworthy that you had such an influential class that was not in econ, as important as you found those to be, but this is a political science class as well that helped feed into it.

Jonathan Gruber: Exactly.

Peter Dizikes: Heather, on maybe a slightly different note, how do you keep this healthy, productive culture going in all these different departments? We have this famous culture in the Department of Economics and in many other departments throughout SHASS where there’s this culture of openness to inquiry and elevating interest in students, but how does one, over 75 years, keep that going?

Heather Paxson: Well, thanks for asking the anthropologist about culture. I think we often think of culture in terms of ideas and values, a shared set of ideas and values, but my one word answer to that is actually “participation.” I love that, Jon, you were a student rep on an institute committee. I mean, it’s that kind of participation in the workings of our organizations and the workings of our departments, of our deciding what gets included in the curriculum, that participation is what creates a sense of belonging and certainly is the stuff of culture.

Peter Dizikes: So the things we study over 75 years are going to evolve and change, the things we believe are going to evolve and change.

Heather Paxson: So like an institution’s culture is what mediates between what changes and what stays constant.

Peter Dizikes: Do you find that to be broadly the case here?

Jonathan Gruber: That’s a great quote. I will be using that.

Peter Dizikes: Also, you’re now batting 100% on jokes as well. Dave, what can we expect from the conference which is coming up in the very near future?

David Kaiser: Very near future. I’m really excited about it. It’s been a lot of work from really, genuinely a very large, wonderful, hardworking committee. I’m most excited because we have 40 plus speakers, including Jon, and Heather’s going to share us a panel. We’re going to hear from early career scholars, from more experienced scholars, we’re going to hear from people representing every single unit in SHASS, from alumni, including Jon, more recent alumni, done different things with their SHASS and MIT educations out in the broader world. We’re going to have a session I’m especially excited about, a showcase put together by Music and Theater Arts, original musical compositions, a dance performance, the jazz ensemble play. I mean, this is just fantastic. For free, really? Plus really good food. It’s going to be great.

It’s going to be an exhausting, but, I think, very, very exciting two days. I think the goal really is to showcase how we’re thrilled to be doing things in our own fields, advancing knowledge in the way that we and our immediate colleagues are most excited about, and it’s not only limited to that. And I think part of the message will be, and has been, as we began the discussion with, practically every challenge we might tick off on our finger is the biggies that keep us up at night. None of those will be solved by a technical fix alone, or frankly, a little tweak on a humanistic side or social science either. We really, really have to continue getting even better at doing the kinds of collaborative work across fields and across departments.

None of these challenges has a single or simple answer. If they did, they wouldn’t be persistent challenges. So the more that we can share with ourselves across our departments with MIT and beyond, it’s open to the public, the symposium is, that this is really a place where we can enter together with humility and experience, both, and try to build teams that couldn’t do these things on their own. And I think we’ve been doing more and more of that with the presidential initiatives, MITHIC and the whole series of them. I think we just have to keep building that as a muscle we can flex and get used to using more often. And if the symposium can help recenter that emphasis for our own colleagues and beyond, I think that’d be a great, great success.

Jonathan Gruber: Peter, I think this raised a really important issue, which is in economics, we have the concept of the public good. What’s the public good? That’s a good where one person’s efforts benefit everyone. In this world of incredibly intense academic pressure and pressure to earn a good living, it’s hard to come to university and focus on the public good as opposed to private good. SHASS is the place at MIT that focuses students on the public good.

You have people like David and Heather who spend so much time dedicated to so many different committees and making MIT function, and that’s led by SHASS. Not that there aren’t great participants all around the university, but SHASS is really the participation leader. And universities need that. That’s the lifeblood of this university, is that kind of volunteerism and participation. I hope that students by being exposed our courses get the value of the public good, that they realize that maybe it’s not as valuable to them, per se, but that there’s a value to the institution and the world of them doing the kind of volunteering that Heather and David do.

Peter Dizikes: That’s very well said.

Jonathan Gruber: Thank you.

Peter Dizikes: Thank you all so much for joining us.

Jonathan Gruber: Thank you.

David Kaiser: Thank you.

Heather Paxson: Thank you, Peter.

Peter Dizikes: It’s much appreciated.

Most mornings this summer, Marina Milea arrived at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research building ready to juggle several experiments at once. While one set of samples incubated, she stained mouse tissue sections for immunohistochemical analysis, prepared to run a Western Blot gel, and checked in on an organoid culture. 

All this work, and more, was part of learning the complex workflows behind studying how cancer evolves over time in the Jacks Lab at MIT. For the rising senior, who is majoring in biology at the City College of New York (CCNY), the pace was exactly what she had hoped to find through MIT's Bernard S. and Sophie G. Gould MIT Summer Research Program in Biology (BSG-MSRP-Bio).

"The techniques can be taught," she says. "The hardest part has been understanding the complex mouse and organoid models and why we're using them. Once you understand the biology behind the model, you can really interpret your results and think about how they might translate to human biology."

Milea is investigating how lung cancers driven by mutations in the KRAS gene become resistant to targeted therapies by transforming into a different subtype that is often harder to detect and treat, a phenomenon called adeno-to-squamous transition. By studying the signaling pathways and protein families that support this transition, researchers hope to identify new therapeutic targets for patients whose histologically-transformed cancers no longer respond to treatment.

"I wanted to do something that had translational aspects to it — to work on research that could potentially change how patients receive therapy," she says. "That's incredibly motivating as an undergraduate."

Building a foundation

Milea says CCNY has played an important role in helping her pursue research to build upon her strong academic foundation. Located in New York City, the university is uniquely positioned to foster collaborations with nearby institutions, connecting students with laboratory experiences across the city while serving a diverse student population that includes many first-generation and low-income students.

Milea's interest in biology began while attending high school in England, where students choose academic subjects early. Initially drawn to medicine, she pivoted to biomedical research after being diagnosed with an understudied health condition, sparking her curiosity about the mechanisms underlying disease.

Before coming to MIT, Milea gained research experience in several laboratories, most notably at Columbia University between the Azizi and McFaline-Figueroa labs.

"I went from having no cell culture experience to learning CRISPR techniques, T-cell engineering, and machine-learning approaches in a single summer," she says. "It was intense, but it gave me confidence that I could handle a research environment like MIT's."

Learning to think like a scientist

At MIT, Milea found herself in a laboratory that matched both her scientific interests and her desire for close mentorship, working with graduate student Carrie Rodriguez. 

"I could tell Carrie genuinely wanted to teach," she says. "She explains not just the protocols, but the biology behind them. By understanding why we're doing each experiment, I could contribute my own ideas."

As the weeks progressed, Rodriguez gradually entrusted Milea with carrying out more and more work independently.

"By the second month, I was running entire workflows on my own," Milea says. "I felt like I was really helping move the project forward."

Milea's willingness to learn and engage deeply with the science made her a valuable member of the lab. 

"Marina arrived in the lab with an outstanding attitude, ready to take full advantage of this opportunity. Over the course of the summer, she was able to learn a number of new techniques and, more importantly, dig deep into the biology of lung cancer. She was a wonderful addition to the lab," Tyler Jacks says.

Looking ahead

Outside the laboratory, faculty lectures, journal clubs, and conversations with researchers all play a part in broadening the scientific perspective of BSG-MSRP-Bio program students. A lecture by MIT Professor David C. Page, for example, whose work explores sex differences in health and disease, reinforced Milea's long-term goal of advancing research in women's health.

"He talked about pursuing scientific questions because you believe they're important, even if they're not yet considered priorities," she says. "That, in particular, resonated deeply with me."

Following graduation, Milea plans to pursue a PhD in biomedical sciences and hopes to build a career that combines research, teaching, and mentorship.

A program that values potential

Looking back, Milea hopes other students will feel confident pursuing opportunities that initially appear out of reach.

"A lot of people count themselves out without understanding what a program like this one is looking for," she says. "They value people who have original thinking and who can really contribute to the projects intellectually and practically."

Although the BSG-MSRP-Bio program is one of the country's premier undergraduate research programs, she believes its commitment to fostering students' potential is what makes it exceptional. 

"It's somehow the most competitive and the most open-access program there is in the country," she says. "You can be an international student, first-generation, low-income, or from a non-research-intensive university — but you still need to meet high expectations. It's somehow both, which is great."

For Milea, that's what makes the program unique.

"They have high expectations," she says, "but you can be anybody."

Carter Stubbs has been appointed MIT’s Institute auditor, effective Nov. 2. 

Stubbs, who currently serves as audit assistant director for IT Audit and Advisory Services, has been a member of the MIT community for more than 11 years and brings deep institutional knowledge, highly salient management experience, and a forward-looking vision to the role. Stubbs will succeed Michael Moody, who has served as Institute auditor for 12 years and will retire from MIT in October. 

Executive Vice President and Treasurer Glen Shor announced the news today in a letter to MIT’s Academic Council.

“Carter stood out in a competitive field of candidates thanks to his impressive audit and IT expertise, collaborative leadership style, and robust understanding of MIT’s complex operations,” Shor says. “He has earned the trust and admiration of colleagues inside and outside the division and is well-positioned to write its next chapter.”

As Institute auditor, Stubbs will lead a team of internal auditors responsible for independently evaluating MIT’s academic, research, and administrative processes, including operations at Lincoln Laboratory. He will oversee a comprehensive, risk-based audit and advisory program spanning financial, operational, compliance, and technology reviews across the Institute. 

The MIT Audit Division maintains a dual reporting structure to ensure its independence. Stubbs and the audit team work for the MIT Corporation Risk and Audit Committee, but receive administrative support from the MIT Office of the Executive Vice President and Treasurer.

“Carter’s strong technical command of IT auditing and hands-on experience auditing and advising on major systems implementations will be especially valuable as the Institute continues to advance its business and digital transformation roadmap,” says Pat Callahan, the chair of the Risk and Audit Committee. “The committee will be well-served by his experience with our current audit program, his demonstrated leadership and sound judgment, and his wide-ranging knowledge of the Institute.”

Stubbs joined MIT in 2015 as a senior auditor of information technology, steadily assuming increasing responsibility for information technology, data analytics, and advisory services. He now leads those functions for the Audit Division and serves on the division’s management team. Working closely with the Institute auditor, Stubbs shapes annual risk assessment work, audit planning, and broader division strategy while managing the oversight of complex engagements; contributing to quality assurance and advancing the division’s capabilities; and proactively responding to emerging institutional needs. Stubbs collaborates with leaders from across MIT’s academic, research, administrative, and technology units, including Lincoln Laboratory, and facilitates communications with Institute governance.

During his time at MIT, Stubbs has built an extensive network of partners and developed a multifaceted understanding of the Institute’s operating model, higher education and research risks, and the leadership judgment necessary to navigate complex institutional matters. He has helped steer cross-Institute efforts involving research data management, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and digital transformation. A graduate of the 2025 MIT Leader to Leader program, Stubbs served as an advisor to the MIT Working Group on Artificial Intelligence in Administration and Operations and is a member of the MIT Data Incident Response Team. 

“I am honored to serve as MIT’s next Institute auditor,” says Stubbs. “The Audit Division plays an essential role in advancing the Institute’s mission of education and research through independent insight, trusted partnership, and thoughtful perspective on risk. I look forward to building on the division’s strong foundation and helping the Institute navigate an increasingly complex regulatory and risk environment.”

Prior to joining MIT, Stubbs held audit roles at Clean Harbors Environmental Services, Denbury Resources, and PricewaterhouseCoopers, where he developed broad expertise in IT and business process controls across multiple industries. He holds certifications as both a certified internal auditor and certified information systems auditor and earned a BBA in information and operations management from Texas A&M University.

Using materials safe for human consumption, MIT researchers have created tiny batteries that could be used to power ingestible electronic devices. Such batteries could make the devices safer for patients and minimize the environmental impact of the batteries after they are excreted.

In a new study, the researchers showed that the batteries, which generate 1.84 volts, could power two different types of devices: an RFID tag that can transmit from the stomach, and a capsule that produces a small electrical current that stimulates production of ghrelin, the hunger hormone.

This type of battery, which contains electrodes made from magnesium and molybdenum trioxide, could also be deployed in other ingestible devices for sensing or therapeutic applications, the researchers say.

“For many of the systems we’re developing, we need power, and we power the system through different ways,” says Giovanni Traverso, a professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, a gastroenterologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and an associate member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. “Often, we use batteries, so the question here was: Could we develop a battery that was bioresorbable, and then apply that across a range of application areas?”

Traverso is the senior author of the paper, which appears today in Nature Chemical Engineering. Former MIT postdoc Mehmet Girayhan Say is the paper’s lead author.

Biocompatible batteries

Over the past decade, Traverso and his collaborators have developed ingestible capsules that can monitor vital signs, deliver a variety of drugs, and detect opioid overdoses.

Not all of these devices require a power source. For those that do, the researchers have powered the devices from an external source that wirelessly transmits power, harvested power from the GI tract, or used small coin batteries. However, those batteries, which usually contain lithium, silver oxide, or other metals, could pose a safety risk if the battery’s protective coating was damaged while traveling through the GI tract. 

To create a safer battery and allow the systems to be fully self-contained with no external power needed, the researchers turned to metals that can act as electrodes but are safe for human consumption in small amounts — magnesium and molybdenum trioxide. 

“Those materials are known to be relatively safe. That was the biggest driver, thinking about materials that can be tolerated by humans,” Traverso says.

The researchers used magnesium to create the battery’s anode and molybdenum trioxide for the cathode. The battery also contains an ionic liquid gel electrolyte, and the entire system is bioresorbable, meaning that it can be fully broken down and absorbed by the body. The researchers designed two different versions of the battery that could be used for different applications —a disc 7.5 millimeters in diameter and a rectangular bar 24 millimeters long.

To test how the batteries would behave in the GI tract, the researchers first exposed them to a highly acidic solution similar to gastric juice. They found that the batteries function normally for about three days, then their performance begins to slowly decline. Within a few weeks, they break down completely.

The researchers then incorporated the rectangular battery into a degradable device they first reported in 2023, which is designed to deliver a small electrical current to the lining of the stomach. In their earlier work, Traverso’s lab showed that this jolt could stimulate endocrine cells in the stomach to produce ghrelin.

Stimulating ghrelin secretion could prove useful for treating diseases that involve nausea or loss of appetite, such as cachexia (loss of body mass that can occur in patients with cancer or other chronic diseases).

The initial version of that device was powered by two silver oxide coin batteries, similar to those used in FDA-approved ingestible devices. By replacing those with the new magnesium-molybdenum oxide batteries, the researchers made nearly the entire device — with the exception of a printed circuit board — bioresorbable. Any components that aren’t absorbed can be passed through the GI tract and excreted.

In the new study, the researchers showed that new battery was strong enough to generate continuous electrical stimulation for up to three days. Tests in animals showed that 20 minutes of stimulation within the stomach could boost ghrelin levels by about 50 percent.

“What makes this work exciting is that we were able to show that a bioresorbable battery is not just a concept. It can actually power clinically relevant functions inside the gastrointestinal tract and then simply dissolve,” Say says.

Battery-powered communication

The researchers then incorporated the battery into a RFID device, which they designed to help patients adhere to their medication schedules. This capsule can transmit its location from within the GI tract via a bioresorbable RFID tag made from molybdenum and cellulose. 

An earlier RFID system, known as SAFARI and reported by Traverso’s lab in January, used passive RFID tags, powered by harvested energy, which limits the communication range. 

In the new study, tests in animals showed that RFID tags could be effectively powered by a disc-shaped bioresorbable battery. With the new battery, the device could transmit continuously from the GI tract, and with a longer range (up to 1.5 meters).

The researchers are now planning a clinical trial for the SAFARI system, which they expect will begin in about two years. Such systems could not only be safer for patients, but also would reduce the environmental impact of batteries that would eventually be excreted into the sewage system. 

“The benefits are twofold: one, the ability to be bioresorbable, but also the potential to minimize environmental impact because the materials will be degraded in the environment as well,” Traverso says.

The research was funded by Novo Nordisk, the Karl van Tassel Career Development Professorship, MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, the Brigham and Women’s Hospital Division of Gastroenterology, and the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H). 

As we age, some of the cells in our body enter a state of senescence, in which they stop dividing but do not die. Those senescent cells can contribute to age-related disorders such as cancer, tissue degeneration, and inflammatory diseases.

In an advance that could lead to better ways to diagnose and treat those diseases, MIT researchers have developed a noninvasive way to detect biomarkers of senescence. Their method is based on Raman microscopy, which can reveal the biochemical composition of cells without harming them.

By combining Raman microscopy with gene expression data at single-cell resolution from the same cells, the researchers were able to identify unique “barcodes” that can be used to quickly identify senescent cells. This study was done in mouse cells, but the researchers are now working on adapting it for use with human tissue.

“You can imagine that one day we may develop an endoscope that can look inside your body and identify cellular senescence,” says Jeon Woong Kang, an MIT research scientist and one of the senior authors of the study.

The research is part of a National Institutes of Health initiative called the Cellular Senescence Network, which is pursuing a deeper understanding of senescence in hopes of developing therapies that could combat some of the tissue-damaging effects of senescent cells.

Peter So, director of the MIT Laser Biomedical Research Center (LBCR) and an MIT professor of biological engineering and mechanical engineering, and Jian Shu, an assistant professor at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Harvard Medical School, and an associate member of the Broad Institute and Ragon Institute, are also senior authors of the paper, which appears today in Nature Aging. Lead authors of the paper are Ke Zhang, an instructor at MGH and Harvard Medical School; Xingjian Chen, a postdoc at MGH and Harvard Medical School; Francesco Monticolo, a postdoc at MGH and Harvard Medical School; and Salvatore Sorrentino, a postdoc at MIT. 

Characterizing senescence

Cell senescence is often triggered by DNA damage, which leads to an irreversible arrest of the cell cycle. These cells don’t die, but they undergo significant changes to their shape, metabolic processes, and gene expression profiles. 

The immune system is responsible for clearing out these “zombie cells,” but as people age, this process becomes less efficient. When senescent cells accumulate, they may contribute to sagging skin, muscle weakness, and chronic conditions such as osteoarthritis and type 2 diabetes.

Cellular senescence also has beneficial effects, playing critical roles in embryonic development and tissue regeneration.

“Senescence is not just a pathological condition,” So says. “The idea behind the NIH Cellular Senescence Network is to take a very comprehensive approach to understand senescence and identify senescent cells, because it plays a role in so many normal physiological conditions and many pathological conditions.”

Scientists have already identified a few biomarkers for senescence, including two proteins called p16 and p21, which are involved in halting the cell cycle. However, those proteins can only be identified using a process that ends up destroying the cells.

The MIT team wanted to find a way to noninvasively identify senescent cells using Raman microscopy. Unlike RNA-sequencing, which consumes the cells as it analyzes them, Raman microscopy is a nondestructive technique that reveals the chemical composition of tissues or cells by shining near-infrared or visible light on them.

In the new study, the researchers used Raman microscopy in conjunction with spatial RNA sequencing — a technique that reveals where genes are active within a tissue — to identify new markers of senescence. By combining these two techniques, they were able to generate a much broader picture of the distinctive features of senescent cells, including gene expression levels, spatial location, and other biochemical information.

“Our idea was to look at many different features to characterize senescence. That’s why we wanted to combine both single-cell gene expression and Raman microscopy, so that we can characterize the senescence from two complementary views,” Shu says.

Using both methods of analysis, the researchers examined skin and lung tissue from 2-month-old mice and 26-month-old mice.

One of the most dramatic changes seen in both lung and skin cells was an increase in lipid synthesis in older cells, along with accumulation of lipids. How this affects the physiology of the cells is not yet known, the researchers say.

The researchers also found some effects that were specific to each tissue. In senescent skin cells, they discovered that cellular pathways associated with muscle contraction and with remodeling of collagen and the extracellular matrix were significantly affected. And in aged lung tissue, they found increased activity of genes involved in immune activation and inflammation.

In future work, the researchers hope to study further what role these changes play in senescent cells. 

Identifying senescent cells

Using these data, the researchers were able to identify combinations of Raman peaks that correlate with senescence. These peaks, which represent specific chemical bonds, are linked to the presence of certain lipids, proteins, or other molecules.

“Combining the most important Raman features with the most important gene signatures, we were able to create a barcode that can help us to identify senescent cells in a more unbiased way,” Sorrentino says. “Using this barcode, we can focus on a few Raman bands that emerged as the most informative in this work.” Using these bands, it could be possible to identify senescent cells by looking for just those bands of the Raman spectrum. This could help to enable diagnostics that would detect cells that have become senescent. 

To help make that possible, the researchers are now working on a higher-speed version of their Raman imaging system. Currently, it takes about 30 hours to analyze a tissue sample about one square millimeter in size, but they hope to develop a system that can quickly pick out the Raman barcodes they identified from larger samples.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health and Massachusetts General Hospital. 

Warming temperatures are fueling more extreme weather-related events — catastrophic floods, severe hurricanes and cyclones, and wildfires exacerbated by drought. But the tools used by local communities, emergency and public safety agencies, and insurance and risk markets have not kept pace with the up-to-date data and modeling for accurately predicting how these events will evolve.

Addressing that shortcoming was one of five research areas selected for MIT’s 2022 Climate Grand Challenges, an ambitious effort to accelerate science-based solutions to climate problems. The area, titled “Preparing for a New World of Weather and Climate Extremes,” focuses on tools to help evaluate a location’s vulnerabilities to flooding, cyclones, humid heat waves, or other climate-related events.

Four years later, collaborations among more than 40 faculty and student researchers on Weather and Climate Extremes projects have yielded 29 published research papers and digital tools and datasets that are already in use or close to deployment. Individual projects cut across forecasting, risk assessment, on-the-ground planning, and resilient infrastructure.                                               

“Communities across the United States and around the world are already confronting the consequences of extreme weather,” says Evelyn Wang, MIT’s vice president for energy and climate, whose office has been funding and supporting all of the Grand Challenges since 2024. “Through the Climate Grand Challenges, an interdisciplinary team at MIT is advancing the science, technologies, and practical strategies needed to help communities anticipate these risks and build greater resilience.”

Reducing scientific uncertainties

Paul O’Gorman, the Robert R. Shrock Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at MIT and co-lead of Weather and Climate Extremes, is refining the science behind forecasting extreme weather events, such as last year’s major flooding events in Central Texas and in Pakistan. “There have been a lot of unprecedented, record-breaking events,” he says, “and we want to understand how they are changing as the climate warms, and how they’re changing in different regions.”

One aspect that his group has been examining is the relationship between extreme rainfall events and a warming climate. Climate models predict that extreme rainfall increases less in summer than other seasons in much of the United States and Europe. O’Gorman’s team found that these seasonal shifts stem from not only how much water is in the atmosphere, which is measured by specific humidity, but also how close it is to saturation, which is measured by relative humidity. “We found that changes in relative humidity played a big role, which was something that hadn’t been appreciated before, and something we need to take into account,” he says. 

Modeling is challenging: Relative humidity depends on air circulation, how fast land warms relative to the ocean, soil moisture, and vegetation. “It’s a complex story, but this helps us understand precipitation patterns,” O’Gorman says.

Kerry Emanuel, MIT professor of atmospheric science who was also a co-lead of Weather and Climate Extremes, is researching better ways to estimate the risks of extreme hurricanes and severe convective storms, such as thunderstorms and tornadoes. “For hurricanes, we’re pretty much there. We can reproduce the statistics of real hurricanes extremely well just using coarse-grained weather data that has no hurricanes in it,” he says. But for severe convective storms, “we’re not close to being there,” and these storms “in the last decade have cost more lives and more damage than hurricanes.” 

Research on the physics of storms is already influencing practice, Kerry notes. For example, a company called First Street uses Kerry’s methods to guide local governments, insurers, developers, and real-estate platforms on environmental risk for every piece of private property in the United States.

Improving resilience

Another phase of the Grand Challenge, led by Miho Mazereeuw, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Architecture and a leading expert on resilient design, translates the information from scientific modeling and data collection into tools for on-the-ground planners. For example, working with leaders and community members in Boston and Broward County, Florida, the team has developed interactive web-based tools that make it easier to plan for impacts such as flooding over a broad range of scenarios.

“When an extreme event happens, there is a gap between scientific knowledge and actionable public information,” says Aditya Barve, a research scientist in Mazereeuw’s Urban Risk Lab. This happens at various levels — from getting real-time information out to people when they need it to collecting data to enable long-term planning to disseminating those plans to communities. “The idea is to target the gap through tools in community emergency data collection, proactive recovery planning, and AI-assisted tools for at-scale visualization of future climate impacts, so that communities are prepared when something happens.”

The team has worked on making flood modeling outputs usable by a wider range of stakeholders, especially where the need for specialized software or technical expertise can slow decision-making across city departments. “Users can ask practical questions, such as which schools are likely to stay driest across different flood scenarios, and receive answers grounded in flood models and city datasets within seconds,” Barve says.

As for recovery after extreme weather events, Mazereeuw points out that most municipalities have an emergency response plan, but few create a recovery plan that includes housing before the event. But, she says, if communities plan how recovery can lead to a better future for the city, they can better leverage emergency relief funding that becomes available. “In almost all cases, the resources available after a disaster are much larger,” she says. “By having a plan in place, those resources can fit the vision of the place moving forward.”

Optimizing energy infrastructure

Associate Professor Michael Howland is working to analyze the impacts of extreme weather on energy infrastructure with a team that includes Jessika Trancik, a professor in the MIT Institute of Data Systems and Society (IDSS), and Moshe Ben-Akiva, the Edmund K. Turner Professor in Civil Engineering at MIT. The team is particularly looking at impacts on the electrical power system and ways to optimize decisions on the placement and sizing of new energy infrastructure. 

Howland, who is the Jeffrey Cheah Career Development Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT, says electrical power systems are increasingly being altered by two things at the same time: first, the proliferation of renewable energy and storage technologies, and second, large-scale changes in weather and extreme events driven by climate change. “Each of these would independently push our electrical power system potentially outside of what we are used to, and their combined, synergistic impacts could be even larger because they are occurring simultaneously,” he says.

Bringing climate modeling and grid-infrastructure work together has accelerated practical insights into how we can adapt to climate change while simultaneously mitigating it, Howland notes. Such modeling can also help to inform infrastructure decisions in ways that may not be obvious. For example, he says, their optimization model for the siting of power resources in Texas resulted in placing a number of wind power plants along the Gulf Coast. “If you look at an average wind speed map,” he says, “you would say this doesn’t make much sense because it’s really windy in northwest Texas on average, and much less windy along the Gulf Coast.”

But it turns out that the typical daily cycle of winds is complementary, so that wind farms distributed between both locations tend to smooth each other out and to better complement solar power generation, easing burdens on the grid. Now, “we’re trying to take it further not just by smoothing the generation, but actually aligning it with the time- and space-varying electricity demand so that we can reduce storage, transmission, and other backup generation needs,” he says.

This work is ongoing, and the hope is that it will lead to products that can directly help utility grid planners and regulators with actionable information about the siting and sizing of various electrical infrastructure resources, Howland says. “We want to continuously push on model realism and accuracy to eventually make it more of a practical and useful tool for grid planners.”

Emanuel adds that the Weather and Climate Extremes Grand Challenge, and other projects working to pinpoint the kinds of risks that can be expected from a changing climate, have produced a great deal of specific and detailed information that could guide political, economic, and civic decision-making. Applying it in the real world can be a slow — “like steering a supertanker,” he says — but progress will come.

As it marks its 10-year anniversary, MIT Reads is being reimagined for the age of artificial intelligence. 

Recognizing the need to foster social connection and a sense of our shared humanity, the popular MIT Libraries’ program will turn its focus to fiction and memoir, and to the particular power of stories to help us understand ourselves and our place in the world. 

“At MIT, we spend a great deal of time on imagining and building for the future. Reading fiction prompts us to think about how what we build might change us,” says MIT Libraries Director Chris Bourg. “Reading together also gives us the increasingly rare opportunity for both individual reflection and shared connection.” 

MIT Reads is also evolving with MIT as it explores AI’s influence on the education landscape and the social fabric of the Institute. The value of collective reading, reflection, and discussion has never been more relevant. 

A recently released report from MIT’s Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training urges strengthening social connection and personal well-being, citing MIT Reads as a way to “engage many more people across campus in conversation about shared norms and why community matters.” 

Launched in 2016, MIT Reads was designed to foster empathy, understanding, and belonging within the campus community. Each selected book is accompanied by programming such as talks by the featured author, panel discussions, and small-group conversations facilitated by library staff. 

The program’s reach extends well beyond MIT. Most author events are open to the public and streamed online, and videos of MIT Reads talks have been viewed more than 5,000 times.

To mark this new era of MIT Reads, President Sally Kornbluth has selected the fall 2026 book “Exhalation,” by Ted Chiang. “Exhalation” is a bestselling collection of short stories, named one of The New York Times’ best books of 2019. In it, Chiang creates thought-provoking science fiction scenarios involving robots, time travel, and alternate universes, while exploring timely issues of identity, free will, language, and the impacts of technology. 

“With the stories in his 2019 ‘Exhalation’ collection, Ted Chiang offered an uncanny preview of many issues we’re grappling with now concerning technology, particularly the relationship between humans and artificial intelligence,” says Kornbluth. “He raises deep questions about the future that humans and machines will share and offers provocative ideas and possibilities. I’m delighted that MIT Reads will give us the opportunity to explore his work together.”

“MIT is not alone in grappling with these big questions around technology and its relationship with humanity,” adds Bourg. “These questions call for a much wider discussion, and we invite readers everywhere to join us.”

In addition to its discussion as part of MIT Reads, students in the first-year advising seminar 21.A01 (Reading Great Books with Compass) will be reading “Exhalation” this fall; the class is part of the Compass initiative designed by faculty from across the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences and supported by the MIT Human Insight Collaborative.

Antimicrobial resistance is one of the most pressing global health and development challenges of our time. Bacteria and other pathogens are rapidly developing resistance to existing treatments, making infections harder to treat. Without new approaches, minor inconveniences today, such as routine surgeries or even a paper cut, could become life-threatening tomorrow. 

Now, an international group of scientists reports the discovery of aminovaleramididine synthetase (AvaS), the first identified pyridoxal phosphate (PLP)-dependent enzyme responsible for producing a chemical modification linked to how bacteria respond to metabolic stress. This discovery sheds new light on how bacteria use RNA modification to control protein production, opening new avenues to study bacterial adaptation and identify future targets and better strategies for developing antimicrobial therapeutics. 

The work was led by researchers from the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology’s Antimicrobial Resistance interdisciplinary research group (SMART AMR), alongside collaborators from MIT, Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and institutions in the United States, Poland, and France.

“While many RNA modifications have been known for decades, researchers are still uncovering the full extent of their roles. The discovery of AvaS opens a previously unknown chapter in RNA biology and is an important step forward in our understanding of processes relevant to antimicrobial resistance,” says Professor Peter Dedon, co-lead principal investigator at SMART AMR, professor of biological engineering at MIT, and co-corresponding author of a new paper on the work. “As we continue to map the RNA modification landscape, we expect many more discoveries with meaningful implications for infectious disease, antimicrobial resistance, and fundamental biology.”

Bacteria can develop resistance to antibiotics using various strategies, many of which depend on the bacteria’s ability to regulate which proteins are made, when they are made, and how accurately they are produced — whether by pumping drugs out of their cell, creating enzymes that break down drugs, or developing new cell processes to avoid the antibiotics’ target.

To build these proteins, bacteria rely on RNA molecules to read genetic instructions and direct protein production. Among these RNA molecules are transfer ribonucleic acid (tRNAs), a specialized class of RNA that acts as molecular delivery vehicles bringing chemical “stickers” to help bacteria control how proteins are made in response to stress and changing conditions such as exposure to antibiotics.

In the open-access paper, “Pyridoxal phosphate-dependent biosynthesis of aminovaleramide by AvaS in tRNA,” published Sept. 9 in Nature Chemical Biology, the researchers described their discovery of the new enzyme and identified it as being responsible for creating a tRNA chemical modification known as aminovaleramide cytidine (ava2C) in Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a harmful bacterium responsible for a range of serious human infections such as pneumonia and sepsis. While ava2C had previously been detected in several bacteria and plants, the enzyme responsible for producing this modification was previously unknown.

Using SMART AMR’s high-throughput liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS)-based RNA modification profiling platform, the team systematically screened thousands of P. aeruginosa mutants and discovered AvaS. The researchers also confirmed the presence of ava2C in other organisms, including the bacteria Acinetobacter baumannii and Vibrio cholerae, as well as the plant Arabidopsis thaliana.

The research revealed that AvaS uses PLP, a vitamin B6 derivative, to convert a known modification, lysidine (k2C), into ava2C; marking the first time that a PLP-dependent enzyme has been linked to tRNA modification. Traditionally, PLP-dependent enzymes have only been associated with amino acid metabolism and related biochemical pathways. 

The research findings revealed a few important insights about PLP-dependent enzymes. First, the discovery establishes PLP-dependent enzymes as a previously unrecognized class of tRNA-modifying enzymes, expanding the known chemical mechanisms, such as methylation, thiolation, and isomerisation, that bacteria use to regulate protein production. Second, it reveals an entirely new biological function of PLP-dependent enzymes, demonstrating that they can directly modify tRNA in addition to their well-established roles in metabolic processes.

The research also found that ava2C changes how bacteria read genetic codes, enabling the bacteria to produce protein faster and more efficiently while helping them adapt to metabolic and oxidative stress.

“Our discovery has revealed, for the first time, that PLP-dependent enzymes can directly modify tRNA, expanding our knowledge and understanding of RNA-modifying chemistry,” says Jingjing Sun, research scientist at SMART AMR, first author, and co-corresponding author of the paper. “This opens up new avenues for studying bacterial adaptation and developing new and more effective strategies to overcome drug-resistant bacteria.”

Building on this discovery, the SMART AMR team plans to investigate how ava2C affects bacterial stress responses and metabolism and explore how the modification can be disrupted or prevented. Understanding this process could uncover new ways to fight harmful bacteria and develop future antimicrobial therapeutics. With ava2C also being observed in plants, future studies could explore whether other living organisms use similar biological tools to produce certain chemical modifications and how ava2C influences the way proteins are built beyond bacteria.

More broadly, this work highlights the strength of SMART AMR’s first-of-its-kind epitranscriptomics platform as a powerful engine in discovering more unknown RNA-modifying enzymes at scale. This capability could also support biotechnology and pharmaceutical researchers in finding new drug targets and developing better treatments, particularly as bacteria continue to develop resistance against existing drug treatments.

The research conducted at SMART is supported by the National Research Foundation Singapore under its Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise program.

When Lanie McKinney was 3 years old, her parents stopped at a massive meteor crater during a road trip through the U.S. Southwest. As they prepared to leave, McKinney began to protest.

“I want to wait here for the next one,” she told them.

She didn’t yet understand that another meteor wasn’t likely to land in exactly the same spot. But the story, which her parents still tell, captures a fascination that has remained with McKinney throughout her life.

“I just always remember being captivated by space and what is out there,” she says.

Today, McKinney is entering her fifth year as a PhD candidate at MIT, where she works in the Aerospace Plasma Group with Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Associate Professor Carmen Guerra-Garcia. McKinney’s research focuses on developing technologies that could help humans explore Mars.

One of the challenges of sending humans to the Red Planet is figuring out how to supply them once they arrive — including how to enable their journey back home. Rather than transporting everything from Earth, McKinney is interested in using the resources already available on the planet, a concept known as in-situ resource utilization, or ISRU.

“If we don’t build gas stations on Mars, it will be very difficult to get humans back to Earth,” she says. “We’re going to need some way to produce the propellant on site.”

McKinney’s research uses cold plasma to convert carbon dioxide, which is abundant in the martian atmosphere, into oxygen and carbon monoxide, a technology that could eventually be used to produce life support and propellant on Mars. 

An Oklahoma native, McKinney earned her bachelor’s at the University of Tulsa, where she studied physics and applied mathematics. She had initially expected to pursue astrophysics, but a summer research internship at the University of Colorado at Boulder introduced her to plasma physics through a project involving dusty plasmas in the lunar environment. 

“I thought it was an incredibly interesting problem,” she says. 

At MIT, McKinney has developed a small reactor that can convert carbon dioxide into oxygen and other products. The challenge now is separating out the oxygen before it recombines.

“We can actually perform the conversion step really well,” she says. “But what happens in a plasma is we convert it, and then we get a mixture that needs to be separated.”

Her current work pairs the plasma reactor with an oxygen-selective membrane designed to extract oxygen rapidly. The integration process isn’t well-understood, leaving McKinney and her colleagues with questions about how the reactive plasma environment will affect the membrane.

“We are not entirely sure what we will see,” she says.

For McKinney, the possibility of connecting laboratory experiments to future human missions is what makes the work particularly rewarding.

“I get to work in a really cool lab and develop exciting experiments,” she says. “I get ownership over an entire experimental system, and then I get to connect that to performance requirements for a future Mars system. That’s just the dream.” 

That same philosophy has shaped McKinney’s work beyond her thesis. Through MIT’s Space Resources Workshop, she has participated in NASA competitions focused on sustaining humans in space. Her first competition involved designing a self-sustaining Mars mission for 10 years.

“I had no clue what was going on,” she says. “I  didn’t know anything about space systems. So, my mentality was, let me jump in and learn.”

She later co-led MIT’s CERBERUZ team for NASA’s LunaRecycle Challenge, which asked teams to develop ways to recycle waste on missions to the moon and deep space. The MIT team recently won first prize in Phase 2, receiving $775,000 in awards for a system that grinds mixed trash into powder that can be reused via injection molding to make spare parts and 3D-printing filament. 

Another project McKinney enjoyed brought together engineers and architects through MAS.S66/4.154/16.89 (Space Architecture) to tackle a different problem: how to protect lunar habitats from radiation using only resources available on the moon. The students’ solution was to produce cast bricks from lunar regolith that could be stacked without mortar or another binder. For McKinney, the project demonstrated the value of bringing together people with different expertise.

“The kinds of innovative solutions that can be discovered when you work on a team that brings together different expertise and experiences was one of the project’s major takeaways,” she says.

The experience reflects a broader lesson McKinney has taken from MIT: Research may involve focused individual work, but solving the problems of human space exploration will require collaborations across disciplines.

“I feel like I have learned so much from being a part of these different teams,” she says. 

McKinney sees that collaboration as essential to the future she hopes to help build. Reaching the Moon and Mars is only the first step: “What comes next is building up a permanent presence so that we can do amazing science and be really effective at exploration,” she says.

McKinney’s fascination with exploration extends beyond her research. She is an avid hiker and mountaineer, having grown up hiking with her family in the Rockies. She recently completed a mountaineering course in Alaska and summited Mount Baker in the Cascade Range. She sees a connection between those adventures and the curiosity that first drew her to space.

“I love to explore and go on adventures,” she says. “And space is the ultimate thing you could explore.”

That curiosity has also shaped how McKinney approaches her work. When she arrived at MIT from the University of Tulsa, she initially felt intimidated.

“I thought that it was a fluke that I’d gotten in,” she says. “I was very nervous that I was not going to measure up to the environment.”

Over time, she learned to approach unfamiliar problems by asking questions and committing fully to whatever interested her.

“If something interests you, try it and go all in,” she says.

In 2026, five faculty were granted tenure in the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.

Volha Charnysh is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science. She studies the role of identity in state-building and economic development and the effects of violence. Her first book, “Uprooted: How post-WWII Population Transfers Remade Europe” (Cambridge University Press, 2024), focuses on the enduring consequences of mass displacement and resulting cultural heterogeneity. She received her PhD from Harvard University in 2017 and joined the MIT faculty in 2018.

Grisha Coleman is a full professor in the Music and Theater Arts Section. Her research explores tensions between our physiological, technological, and ecological systems; human movement, our machines, and the places we inhabit. Her practice engages an interdisciplinary approach to these explorations. She earned an MFA in music composition and integrated media from California Institute of the Arts. She joined the MIT faculty in 2026.

Tung-Hui Hu is an associate professor in the Comparative Media Studies/Writing program. A poet and a scholar of digital media, he is the author of five books, most recently “Digital Lethargy: Dispatches from an Age of Disconnection” (MIT Press, 2022), “A Prehistory of the Cloud” (MIT Press, 2015), and “Greenhouses, Lighthouses” (Copper Canyon Press, 2013). Hu is interested in how concepts such as race and normal language became measurable, governable objects in the form of datasets. He earned a BA in comparative literature from Princeton University, an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan, and a PhD in film studies from the University of California at Berkeley. He joined the MIT faculty in 2026. 

Tobias Salz is an associate professor in the Department of Economics. He works in the field of industrial organization and studies how digital platforms and other intermediaries shape competition and market outcomes. The applications of his research span digital markets, transportation, and artificial intelligence, and often combine economic theory with novel data and field experiments. His recent work examines market power in web search, personalized platform pricing, and how human experts and AI can work together in medical diagnosis. He received his PhD in economics from New York University in 2016 and joined the MIT faculty in 2019.

Christian Wolf is an associate professor in the Department of Economics. His research is primarily concerned with the question of how monetary and fiscal policy can be used to stabilize the economy. A key aim of his work is to learn as much as possible about such stabilization policy directly from micro- and macroeconomic data, rather than through reliance on structural models. Wolf joined the MIT faculty in 2021 after earning his PhD in economics from Princeton University.

Each year, faculty and researchers across the MIT School of Engineering are recognized with prestigious awards for their contributions to research, technology, society, and education. To celebrate these achievements, the school periodically highlights select honors received by members of its departments, institutes, labs, and centers. The following individuals were recognized in spring 2026:

Faez Ahmed, the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, received a 2025 Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Program Award. The award provides early-career U.S. scientists and engineers with up to $450,000 over three years to support innovative research.

Navid Azizan, the Alfred Henry (1929) and Jean Morrison Hayes Career Development Professor and an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award. The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a foundation-wide activity that offers the NSF’s most prestigious awards in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.

Yet-Ming Chiang, the Kyocera Professor of Materials Science and Engineering in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, was named a Boston Globe Tech Power Player 2026. The annual list highlights the impact of local leaders on technology and business.

Samantha Coday, an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, received a 2025 ARPA-E IGNIITE Award. The award aims to support early-career innovators seeking to convert disruptive and unconventional ideas into impactful new technologies across the full spectrum of energy applications.

Srini Devadas, the Edwin Sibley Webster Professor and a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, received the 2026 ACM-IEEE CS Eckert-Mauchly Award, which recognizes contributions to computer and digital systems architecture.

Joel Emer, professor of the practice in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, received the 2026 ACM SIGARCH/IEEE TCCA Influential Paper Award. This award recognizes the paper from the ISCA Proceedings 20 years earlier that has had the most impact on the field (in terms of research, development, products, or ideas) during the intervening years.

Chuchu Fan, an associate professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, received the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Academic Career Award in Robotics and Automation. The award recognizes academics who have made an identifiable contribution or contributions that have had a major impact on the robotics and/or automation fields.

Yoel Fink, the Danae and Vasilis (1961) Salapatas Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, received the American Physical Society Andrei Sakharov Prize, which recognizes outstanding leadership and achievements of scientists in upholding human rights.

Aristide Gumyusenge, an assistant professor the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, received the 2026 Early Investigator Award from the American Chemical Society's Polymeric Materials: Science and Engineering Division. Honorees are chosen from early-career emerging leaders who have made significant contributions in their respective fields within polymer materials science and engineering.

Paula Hammond, dean of the School of Engineering and an Institute Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering, received the AIChE 2026 John M. Prausnitz Institute Lecture Award. The Prausnitz AIChE Institute Lectureship is awarded to a distinguished member of AIChE who has made significant contributions to chemical engineering in their field of specialization.

Robert Langer, the David H. Koch (1962) Institute Professor in the departments of Biological Engineering (BE) and Chemical Engineering, received the 2026 Robert A. Welch Award in Chemistry from the Welch Foundation. This prestigious prize recognizes important research contributions that have had a significant and positive impact on humankind.

Gareth McKinley, the School of Engineering Professor of Teaching Innovation and a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Awardees are recognized by their peers for their outstanding contributions to research in the natural and social sciences.

Farnaz Niroui, Robert J. Shillman (1974) Career Development Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and an associate professor, received the Rising Star of Microsystems Award from the Transducer Research Foundation, which is intended to highlight the next generation of innovators shaping the future of microsystems, microfabrication, MEMS, micro/nanomanufacturing, and closely related fields.

Tomás Palacios, the Clarence J. LeBel Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, received the 2026 Quantum Devices Award from the International Symposium on Compound Semiconductors for significant advancements in wide bandgap semiconductors and nanostructures to improve electronics and pave the way for heterogeneous integration with silicon CMOS.

Ritu Raman, the Eugene Bell Career Development Professor of Tissue Engineering and an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, received a Grainger Foundation Frontiers of Engineering Grant from the National Academy of Engineering. The grants provide seed funding for participants at U.S.-based institutions to support further pursuit of new interdisciplinary research and projects stimulated by interactions at the U.S. Frontiers of Engineering symposium.

Lindsey Raymond, an assistant professor in the departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and of Economics, was named a 2025 Early Career Fellow by Schmidt Sciences AI2050. AI2050 issues awards to enable and encourage bold and ambitious research, often multidisciplinary, that is typically hard to fund but socially beneficial. Awards are given for exceptional work tackling one or multiple items from a working list of hard problems.

Daniela Rus, the Panasonic Professor and a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, received the 2026 High-Tech Prize of the Bavarian Minister-President. This prize is the most highly endowed award for technology and engineering in Germany.

Afreen Siddiqi, a research scientist in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, received a 2026 Guggenheim Fellowship. Working across 55 disciplines, the fellows were selected from almost 5,000 applicants for “prior career achievement and exceptional promise.”

Vincent Sitzmann, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, received both a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation and the Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI) Young Researcher Award from the IEEE Computer Society. The PAMI Young Researcher Award is given to a researcher within seven years of completing their PhD for outstanding early career research contributions.

Loza Tadesse, the Latham Family Career Development Professor and an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, was named to Chemical & Engineering News’ 2026 Talented 12. This annual list recognizes early-career researchers who are rising stars in chemistry, selected for their innovative work and growing impact in the field.

Kripa Varanasi, the Maher A. Elmasri Professor of Mechanical Engineering, accepted a United Nations World Intellectual Property Organization Global Award on behalf of his startup, AgZen. The award recognizes the company’s efficient agrochemical spraying patent portfolio.

At a moment when global alliances are shifting, technological change is accelerating, and the boundaries between science and geopolitics are dissolving, understanding the world demands new ways of thinking. 

For 75 years, the MIT Center for International Studies (CIS) has helped meet that challenge — bringing together engineers, social scientists, and policy practitioners to confront the most pressing global challenges of their time. From developing the foundations of modern international security to redefining how the United States engages with the world, CIS has not only studied global affairs, it has helped shape them. 

What distinguishes CIS is not just the scope of its work, but the way it approaches it. 

At MIT, international studies does not sit apart from science and technology, it is embedded within it. This proximity has enabled generations of scholars to tackle geopolitical problems with tools and perspectives rarely found in traditional academic and policy environments. 

“Being situated within the world’s leading technical institution enables a lot of exciting possibilities,” says Evan Lieberman, the director of CIS and the Total Professor of Political Science and Contemporary Africa. “We focus on critical problems in international development and security — always with an eye towards the challenges and opportunities presented by technological change. Beyond that, a big part of our mission is to provide global perspectives and engagement avenues relevant to scientists and engineers.” 

Established during the dawn of the Cold War, CIS pioneered a new understanding of global power: that science, technology, and geopolitics were becoming deeply intertwined. From the beginning, it convened faculty across disciplines — economics, political science, engineering, and beyond — setting a template that has since become a model for institutions around the world. Over the decades, this approach has produced an outsized impact. 

In 1961, a memorandum to President John F. Kennedy from MIT economist Max Millikan — the inaugural director of CIS — helped inspire the creation of the Peace Corps, fundamentally reshaping how the United States engages in global development. 

CIS scholars such as Lincoln Bloomfield and William “Bill” Kaufman played a central role in establishing security studies as a rigorous academic field in the late 1950s. Less than two decades later, Jack Ruina and George Rathjens founded the center’s Arms Control and Defense Policy Program (now known as the MIT Security Studies Program), which has influenced generations of policymakers and trained generations of scholars.

The study of modernization and political development has also long been central to the work of the center, with notable luminaries such as Lucian Pye and Myron Weiner helping to lead the way. 

A legacy of global exchange 

At the same time, CIS has reshaped how knowledge flows across borders. The MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI), launched in 1983 by Institute Professor Suzanne Berger, has sent thousands of MIT students abroad to work, study, and conduct research alongside international partners — experiences that extend far beyond traditional study abroad. In doing so, it helped change longstanding assumptions about the United States’ role in the world, demonstrating that learning is most powerful when it is reciprocal. 

That ethos of mutual exchange continues to define CIS today. Through initiatives such as the Global Seed Funds, MIT faculty, researchers, and their students collaborate with academic partners around the world to advance shared research agendas. 

The connection between these initiatives can be traced to Richard Samuels, Ford International Professor of Political Science and director of CIS from 2000 until 2023. His creation of the MIT-Japan Program in 1981 served as the model for MISTI. He was also the visionary behind the launch of the Global Seed Funds in 2008. 

Together, these programs reflect a consistent vision: that the strongest ideas emerge through sustained engagement with partners around the world. 

Expertise in action 

Drawing on deep regional expertise, CIS also serves as a platform for global engagement across MIT, mobilizing cross-disciplinary knowledge to respond to unfolding international crises and inform both scholarly and policy debates. 

Its MIT-MENA Program, led by Richard Nielsen, associate professor of political science, recently convened experts to assess the energy and security implications of disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz; the MIT-Ukraine Program, under the direction of Elizabeth Wood, Ford International Professor of History, brings together scientific, technical, and academic expertise to design sustainable solutions for a nation at war; and the MIT-China Program, directed by Yasheng Huang, professor of global economics and management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, is creating a hub for scholars and policy experts focused on balancing the Institute’s engagement with China. 

Scholarship that shapes security 

For decades, the MIT Security Studies Program, directed since 2019 by Taylor Fravel, the Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science, has been a leading incubator of ideas that have shaped debates on grand strategy, nuclear policy, civil conflict and Asian security. Its affiliated scholars, fellows, and graduate students have produced policy relevant research that continues to inform policymakers grappling with an increasingly complex international security challenges. 

Building on that legacy, SSP recently established the Center for Nuclear Security Policy (CNSP) — made possible by a $45 million gift from the Stanton Foundation. Directed by Vipin Narang, the Frank Stanton Professor of Nuclear Security and Political Science, the CNSP aims to expand MIT’s leadership in addressing one of the most urgent challenges of our time: managing the risks posed by nuclear weapons in a rapidly evolving and uncertain geopolitical environment. 

Another cornerstone of CIS’s security work is Seminar XXI, currently led by Kelly Greenhill, who holds faculty appointments at MIT and Tufts University. The annual, nine-month program brings together rising leaders from across the U.S. government, military, and national security community. In three decades, more than 2,500 participants have engaged deeply with issues such as nationalism, technological disruption, and global conflict — developing new frameworks for decision-making in high-stakes environments. 

Advancing research, expanding dialogue beyond its anchor programs, CIS continues to invest in the next generation of scholars and practitioners. Undergraduate research initiatives, postdoctoral fellowships, and visiting scholar programs — including the Robert E Wilhelm Fellowship — create space for emerging and established leaders to explore critical questions, from governance and corruption to political reform and social change. 

It also prioritizes policy-relevant research by supporting conferences, workshops, labs, and research initiatives on key problems in international affairs. 

Finally, CIS plays a vital role in connecting MIT to the broader world. Through public events like the Starr Forum, the center brings leading global voices to campus, fostering dialogue on issues that shape international politics and policy. 

The next 75 years 

As CIS looks to the future, its mission is evolving to meet a dramatically changing global landscape. 

“The moment we’re in now is so different from the Cold War era,” says Lieberman. “We’re seeing a much more complex global system, with new actors and new kinds of challenges.” 

In what Lieberman describes as CIS 2.0, the center is sharpening its focus on the forces that will define the coming decades. This includes the geopolitical implications of artificial intelligence, the future of global cooperation in an era of climate crisis, and the evolving role of the United States within an increasingly contested international order. 

Addressing these challenges will require exactly the kind of interdisciplinary, globally engaged approach that has defined CIS for the past 75 years. It will also require a renewed commitment to collaboration — across fields, across institutions, and across countries. 

“A key source of our value added is to convene complementary sources of expertise,” Lieberman says. “It’s about bringing people together who might not otherwise be in the same room, and asking how we can have the greatest possible impact.” 

Seventy-five years after its founding, CIS remains guided by a simple but powerful idea: that understanding the world — and improving it — demands more than any single discipline, perspective, or nation can offer alone.

The CIS’s 75th anniversary symposium, taking place Oct. 15-16, will explore the defining challenges of today with leading thinkers.

Nearly 170 interns recently dispersed from MIT Lincoln Laboratory to return to their undergraduate or advanced degree programs. For Anna Raymaker and Vivek Jagadeesh, however, the work is just getting started. They are among more than two dozen interns staying on as student technical assistants, continuing to support the laboratory's national security research during the 2026-27 academic year.

"Our summer research program is a key pathway for developing talent to support defense-critical programs," says Robert Loynd, executive officer in the Director's Office. "Interns are embedded in R&D teams across nearly all mission areas, from missile defense and cyber operations to advanced communications and quantum technologies."

In 2026, the laboratory's intern program was named to Yello and WayUp's Top 100 Internship Program list and received the organizations' Public Service Award. This award recognizes programs that demonstrate exceptional commitment to meaningful intern engagement that benefits the public good. 

Anna Raymaker: Securing maritime infrastructure

Anna Raymaker found her bearings when she began researching maritime security. Four years ago, the PhD student at Georgia Tech had just started her cybersecurity studies, but hadn't yet settled on a focus area. When her advisor offered a project building a boat test bed, the Florida native was hooked.

As she began presenting her test bed research at academic cybersecurity conferences, she noticed a gap: "No one was really looking at shipping security," she says. That realization led her to speak directly with mariners to learn about the cybersecurity issues they faced.

One issue mariners repeatedly raised was the security of the Automatic Identification System (AIS), a device that helps ships avoid collisions by broadcasting their location, speed, and course. International regulations require all ships over 300 gross tons — such as cargo, tanker, and cruise ships — to transmit their identity via AIS at all times. 

"Mariners told me that AIS is their source of truth, so it was very scary when they experienced it being manipulated in the wild," Raymaker says. For example, so-called "ghost fleets" could use AIS to disguise themselves as other vessel types to evade sanctions. Such deception is possible because AIS does not require identity verification.

This summer, Raymaker examined AIS security firsthand at Lincoln Laboratory. Her goal was to analyze the trust assumptions built into the system and identify where those assumptions could be exploited. Her research revealed several methods of interfering with AIS, including radio-based "spoofing," in which false messages can appear to come from a legitimate device. Spoofed messages could, for instance, instruct ships to switch transmission channels or report a fake vessel position, potentially causing ships to change course. Working with her Lincoln Laboratory advisor, Hamed Okhravi, she then explored defenses against these false signals.

"Recent events have demonstrated that AIS security is not merely a theoretical concern, as manipulation or spoofing of maritime positioning data can directly affect navigation, safety, and global shipping. Anna's work directly contributes to understanding and mitigating these emerging risks," Okhravi says. "She built a new experimental test bed from scratch, conducted detailed experiments, analyzed the results, and helped turn the work into a publication, demonstrating excellent hands-on technical and research skills."

Raymaker says she has been both surprised and encouraged by the laboratory's collaborative culture. Mentioning her AIS project in a hallway conversation would prompt staff to offer help or connect her with relevant experts. "The opportunity to network with all these experts and see what other groups do is extremely unique. Any student would benefit from that kind of exposure," she says. 

As a student technical assistant, Raymaker will research other dimensions of maritime security. She's particularly interested in preventing the malicious cutting of undersea cables, which has become a major geopolitical security concern. "Ships are big and slow. If we have data on where they're moving, maybe we could use it to predict when a ship is going to do something bad," she says.

After graduation in the spring, she hopes to keep working through the problems she heard from mariners: "I want to go one by one down that list to create solutions that might help. Their job at sea is hard, and they deserve to be protected."

Vivek Jagadeesh: Readying cyber technology for industry adoption

Vivek Jagadeesh is a master's student at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. His path to Lincoln Laboratory came together naturally. After interviewing for a summer position, he learned that his advisor had a connection with staff in the Secure Resilient Systems and Technology Group. That connection gave him the confidence that the laboratory was the right fit for his interests. As it turned out, the group's work aligned closely with the problems Jagadeesh was tackling in his research: securing operating systems.

Specifically, Lincoln Laboratory researchers have been developing Hardware-Assisted Kernel Compartmentalization (HAKC). The core software of an operating system, a kernel typically has the highest level of access to a computer's hardware. Because of that access, a single bug in kernel code can lead to catastrophic security failures. HAKC mitigates this risk by dividing kernel code into smaller components, each separated by access-control checks. The team anticipates that the technology can resolve vulnerabilities in Linux kernels, which power most of the world's devices.

Jagadeesh's focus has been on supporting HAKC's transition to industry. "The idea is to make the technology less proprietary, so that any of the big distributors of Linux, like Red Hat, or Canonical, can use it," he says. Those distributors, however, need clear insight into how HAKC modifies the kernel code. To enable this insight, Jagadeesh developed a tool called a source-to-source compiler, or transpiler. 

A compiler converts C source code into binary for machines to execute. Different compilers process code differently, and the compiler HAKC uses differs from the compiler used frequently by the greater Linux community. Modifications to code are usually done at an intermediate stage — a translated version of the code that compilers use before generating binary — but interfacing with the code at this stage varies by compiler, making modifications hard to transfer between systems. To avoid this problem, Jagadeesh's transpiler inserts HAKC code directly into the original C source file, while preserving the source file's original information and making additions easily identifiable. As a result, any developer can audit the changes HAKC implements, and HAKC can cleanly integrate into the complicated build systems used by kernel developers and distributors.  

"Creating a transpiler is a non-trivial task, but that is nevertheless what Vivek achieved. His transpiler is capable of transforming the entire Linux kernel, a key milestone we need to bring HAKC to industry," says his Lincoln Laboratory advisor, Derrick McKee, who began developing HAKC as a student researcher himself five years ago.

According to McKee, the transpiler will serve as the foundation for the next iteration of HAKC. That new version is planned for release under the Open Resilient Compartmentalization Alliance, a Linux Foundation initiative dedicated to bringing compartmentalization technology to Linux systems.

Jagadeesh says he felt strongly supported throughout the internship, meeting with the project's two principal investigators at least twice a week. "It felt like we were working on this together in a big way — and I got a lot of support from everyone responsible for it," he says. He looks forward to working on other aspects of system security in the group this fall. 

For students considering a laboratory internship, Jagadeesh offers this perspective: "You get to work on real things that have an actual impact. It's work that, after you go back to school, you'll apply to more research going forward."

More information on Lincoln Laboratory's summer research program and other student opportunities can be found here. 

Every new generation of phone display, television screen, and solar panel is a result of precision optics experiments, which use lasers and other light sources to measure the optical properties of candidate materials. These experiments can take months to run, requiring scientists to meticulously angle and adjust delicate light sources, mirrors, cameras, and other components, in a careful and constant tuning that can be physically tedious and time-consuming. 

But MIT scientists say the whole process of building and running an optics experiment could one day be fully automated. Taking a step toward such a future, they have developed a reconfigurable, robotic optics laboratory. 

The new robotic lab autonomously assembles standard optical components into desired configurations. It can then tune the angle and position of mirrors and lenses with micron-scale precision to produce beams of light with specific properties. The system can also safely dismantle an experiment and reassemble the parts into an entirely new setup. 

The team showed that the robotic system could autonomously build and fine-tune a tabletop laser cavity — a key element of most optics experiments. The system could also precisely manipulate components to perform several optical tasks, such as centering a laser beam, aligning multiple beams, and automatically stabilizing the beams in response to physical disturbances.

“We start with randomly placed components,” says Sachin Vaidya, a postdoc in MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics. “At the end, we have a fully functioning laser that the robot has built.”

The researchers are expanding the robotic lab, in a physical and virtual sense. In addition to improving the system’s physical sensing, maneuvering, and overall space, they are developing a cloud-based application that gives users virtual access to the physical robot. They envision that one day, scientists from anywhere will be able to remotely access robotic optics labs and virtually submit experimental protocols or queries that the labs would then set up and run autonomously. 

“There are many things this could enable,” says Marin Soljacic, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics at MIT. “A robot isn’t going to get bored. It can work 365 days, 24 hours a day, on very boring things. That will free up so much creativity and time for scientists to then push theories and see what we can do. Science could progress much faster.”

The MIT team will present the details of the new system at the Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) conference later this month. Along with Soljacic and Vaidya, project team members include co-lead Seou Choi, Caio Silva, and Shrish Choudhury from MIT, Shiekh Uddin of Nokia Bell Labs, and Sajib Shuvo of Arizona State University.

A city of light

A tabletop optics experiment can resemble a miniature city of densely packed mirrors, lenses, and light sources. Scientists manually arrange and align the various components in precise configurations, then shine light into the experiment. The lenses and mirrors bounce and focus the beam into a desired wavelength, frequency, or intensity that can then be used to probe or manipulate a given material. 

“Sometimes this manual setup takes days or months depending on the complexity of the experiment,” Soljacic says. “It’s meticulous work that has to be done again and again for each experiment.”

Most labs do incorporate some level of automation in an optics setup, such as motorized tuners that mechanically turn knobs to precisely angle a mirror. 

“These components can automate the most tedious parts of an experiment,” Vaidya notes. “But no one has built a full system that goes from no setup to a completely aligned setup in one tool. That was our goal, to show complete automation through all the steps that go into an optics experiment.”

Auto-tuned optics

The team’s robotic lab centers around a robotic arm with seven moveable joints that is attached to a metallic tabletop. The robot picks and places lenses, mirrors, and other optical components, each of which the researchers installed in its own 3D-printed plastic housing. 

The housings are designed such that the robot can easily and safely grip and move each component. The researchers etched the top of each housing with a QR code containing information about the component within the housing (such as whether it is a lens versus a mirror, and its exact dimensions and capabilities). Each housing has a magnetic base that helps stabilize a component once the arm places it down on the metallic tabletop. 

The researchers designed a Wi-Fi-enabled “fine-adjustment tool” that clips onto the mount of standard optical components. The motorized tool can be wirelessly controlled to turn a component’s knobs, for instance to angle a mirror. 

“The way humans do this tuning is by feel, and based on a lot of intuition,” Vaidya says. “This tool is at least as precise as a human, but in reality it is much more precise.”

The team also installed a pair of cameras over the entire setup that provides a birds-eye view of the tabletop experiment. Finally, they developed a “software stack,” or a set of programs that enables the robot to navigate through every step of setting up and continuously tuning an experiment. These steps include recognizing a specific component, knowing how to safely approach and pick it up, where to move it, and how to avoid collisions with other parts of the experiment along the way. 

Finally, they designed a simple virtual user interface to allow an experimenter to remotely direct the robot. For instance, when a user drags the icon for a mirror from one spot to another, and clicks a button to confirm, the robot responds by picking up the actual mirror and placing it down at the corresponding location on the table. 

As a demonstration, they directed the robot to assemble various components into a laser cavity. A laser cavity consists of two mirrors arranged on either side of a crystal. When a beam of light is shone into the setup, it pings back and forth between the two mirrors. With each pass, the light also passes through the crystal, which amplifies the light’s intensity, to a point that whatever light escapes, is intense enough to form a laser. 

“We wanted to pick a demonstration in optics that’s reasonably challenging,” says co-lead author Seou Choi, a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science. “This is not something a new trainee could do in an afternoon. It requires a lot of alignment and component experience.”

In the end, the robot successfully built a functional laser cavity by autonomously carrying out 50 maneuvers, all within 30 minutes. When the researchers introduced physical disturbances to the setup, such as randomly moving a component on the table, the system automatically readjusted components to maintain the laser’s intensity. 

“Even tiny vibrations or temperature changes can degrade an optics experiment,” Vaidya says. “An autonomous lab could continuously monitor its own performance and repair the alignment before valuable data is lost.”

The researchers envision that robotic labs like theirs could be paired with a nearby library of physical components that another robot could fetch and deliver to a tabletop robot to arrange into an experiment. Such a system could work to build and run experiments, then break them down and set up new ones on demand, or continuously run an experiment that requires active 24/7 monitoring.

“A system like this could help industry test prototypes faster, for everything from cameras and displays to solar cells and AR/VR goggles,” Vaidya says. 

For their part, the researchers are applying the new robot lab to test promising carbon-capture materials. By shining light with specific properties at these materials, they can get information about how a material absorbs carbon dioxide. 

“Experimental optics is the backbone of many important fields,” Vaidya says. “Our work takes the first step toward optical labs that can operate faster, more reliably, and without manual intervention in a domain that demands extreme precision and diversity of experimental setups.”

This research was supported, in part, by the Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies Overseas PhD Scholarship, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the U.S. Army DEVCOM ARL Army Research Office, Parviz Tayebati, the MIT Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP), the MIT Generative AI Impact Consortium (MGAIC), and Shell International Exploration and Production Inc.

Jay Wilcoxson, counsel in the MIT Office of General Counsel (OGC), does not shy away from a crisis. In fact, he enjoys navigating uncertainty to steer a conflict toward an outcome that is beneficial to the Institute. Drawing on his background in private law practice and his love for problem-solving, Wilcoxson ensures his work supports MIT's mission and principles. 

After attending Boston University School of Law, Wilcoxson joined the Boston law firm Goodwin Procter LLP, specializing in commercial business litigation. While the work was interesting and challenging, there were aspects of law firm life that he didn’t love, and he expected to eventually shift to a role as an in-house lawyer. He had always believed in the mission of higher education, and as universities are complex organizations with many moving parts, he was drawn to the range of issues they present. The challenge was that legal jobs in higher education are rare — people get them and don’t leave. 

For several years, Wilcoxson kept his eye on openings and met with general counsels at several universities, who reiterated how competitive these roles can be. One also mentioned something that stuck with him: Being a lawyer in higher education requires a high tolerance for ambiguity, which can be counterintuitive, as legal work is typically focused on applying the law to a set of facts to reach a clear outcome. In 2007, he opened Mass Lawyers Weekly and saw that MIT was looking for a lawyer with a background in litigation and other disputes at his level of seniority, so he applied. He was hired in August of that year as the first new lawyer to join the recently-created OGC. Before the office was established in January 2007, lawyers at MIT were not centralized in one office, but instead spread across several units on campus. 

Since joining MIT, Wilcoxson jokes that he is a “reformed litigator” because, unlike in private practice where he was often in court and managing the day-to-day of active lawsuits, much of his work now is focused on avoiding litigation. He works to identify potential friction points and reduce the risk of conflict or legal disputes before they escalate. His work is strategic and collaborative — working with clients across campus to identify and prevent potential areas of conflict and thinking broadly about how a case should be defended and whether there are opportunities to resolve it. 

Although Wilcoxson’s practice is very broad, his primary focus is on student life. He works regularly with the Division of Student Life, the Office of the Chancellor, the Office of Graduate Education, and the Institute Discrimination and Harassment Response Office, among other departments, laboratories, centers, and institutes. If an issue comes to the OGC and the client isn’t sure about whom to contact, Wilcoxson and his colleagues confer to ensure that it makes its way to the lawyer best suited to handle it. As he notes, it is not the community’s responsibility to find the right lawyer — the OGC team makes sure each matter lands with the right person. 

Wilcoxson credits the team in the OGC for building an office that people want to work with. He believes the community sees him and his colleagues as trusted thought partners and teammates. All members of the MIT community — faculty, staff, and sometimes even students — can reach out for guidance on Institute legal issues. As lawyers, Wilcoxson and his colleagues approach problems differently than engineers, scientists, or those in the humanities, offering a distinct perspective on how to navigate complex issues. 

The advice Wilcoxson received before starting his job at MIT, that he would need a high tolerance for ambiguity, turned out to be the best guidance he received, and, to his surprise after 19 years at the Institute, is one of his favorite things about his job. “I really like the uncertainty,” he says. “That’s what makes the job interesting.” 

Soundbytes 

Q: What about your job brings you the most joy? 

A: The relationships I’ve developed. Part of what brought me to MIT is also what keeps me here, the development of deep relationships. There are some people I have talked to every day for almost 20 years. There’s a mutual appreciation for how we help each other move MIT’s agenda forward. Those relationships are important because helping resolve conflicts and disputes affects people’s lives, so the pressure can be high. Having people you know and trust, who have your back, and you have theirs, is what really helps you get through when things are stressful. 

Q: How would you describe the community at MIT? 

A: There’s no one word to describe it; I get to work with so many different types of people, all bringing different life experiences and expertise. “Quirky” comes to mind. “Brilliant” comes to mind. Ultimately, what draws me most are problem-solvers. I work with many people, but I have one client: MIT. That's easy to say, hard to explain, and really hard to put into practice. On any given day my client is whoever is acting on behalf of MIT. It could be a faculty member, it could be a dean, department head, or vice president, or maybe even a graduate student. 

I love MIT and am immensely proud to be part of this amazing institution. I’m not inventing things, I’m not solving the climate crisis, I’m not creating cleaner energy, but I am helping people do that. I hope I can take things off their plates so they can focus on their work. 

Q: Are you involved in any other areas of the Institute that are not directly related to your job? 

A: What I really try to do is find ways to be part of the community. I go to faculty meetings and lectures, and I’ve brought my family to weekend events. I’m on a lot of committees with students, many of which focus on developing a policy or how to approach an issue that might be the subject of rules or policy. I also often serve on search committees for leadership roles on campus. 

My favorite side hustle is being a name reader at Commencement. I’ve been doing it for close to 10 years. We used to have one huge ceremony, where eight of us stood on stage in Killian Court and read the name of every graduate. What’s really cool is that when I read a graduate’s name, they’re handed their actual diploma with their actual name on it, thanks to an incredible effort by the registrar’s office and a large team of volunteers. We used to read all 3,500 names live and we spent a lot of time practicing.   

Although Commencement is now broken into smaller ceremonies, we still read names live at the Undergraduate Commencement in Killian Court. Each of us reads about 200 names. It's a fun group of about six of us who have been reading for years, and we all love coming back to do it year after year. 

I also was recently asked to serve on the Presidential Committee on Distinguished Fellowships. This is the Institute committee that works with students who are applying for various international scholarships, such as Rhodes and Marshall Scholarships. I’m very excited to work with and mentor these talented students as they pursue these amazing opportunities.