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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A dataset bottleneck

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Data generation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leveraging a cultural touchstone for good

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sharing the “power of FIRST”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Building a better future

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sound genes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sticker health

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No net loss — but more risk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tuning the policy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A sea of ions

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spray and spin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This research is supported, in part, by NASA.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forming droplets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Controlling reactions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The news was met with joyful and sustained applause.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Science: Curiosity on a Mission

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The responsibility to work with others”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MIT: “Where I really learned to solve problems”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The commitment to act ethically”

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

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

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

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

Good afternoon.

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

Congratulations.

You earned this. 

Standing here feels different than I expected.

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

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

Then I walked into 6.001 and 6.002.

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

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

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

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

You wrestled with the problem.

You blew up a circuit or two.

And then, somehow … the thing worked.

And suddenly, you realized you could build something real.

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

One of the best parts of MIT is UROP.

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

That changed my life.

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

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

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

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

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

It was the coolest thing ever.

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

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

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

And that is when I fell in love with semiconductors.

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

That was where I really learned how to solve problems.

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

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

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

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

And along the way, I started believing in myself.

Not the confidence that I would always know the answer.

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

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

Mens et manus.

Mind and hand.

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

Now I think it captures exactly what makes MIT special.

MIT teaches you to think deeply.

But it also teaches you to build.

To test ideas.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It cares whether your ideas work.

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

Run toward the hardest problems.

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

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

Hard problems teach you what you're capable of. 

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

I had the opportunity to become CEO of AMD.

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

Some of my mentors thought taking the job was risky.

But for me, this was my dream job.

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

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

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

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

We gave our talented team the room to think big. 

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

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

I call it the engineer’s instinct. 

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

But, at AMD, I learned something else. 

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

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

Which brings me to today.

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

The internet changed how we communicate.

Mobile computing changed how we live.

Cloud computing changed how we work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AI can help us change that. 

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

That is the promise of AI at its best.

It does not replace people.

It makes each of us more capable.

Medicine. 

Science. 

Energy. 

Climate. 

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

Now let me be clear. 

Technology itself does not decide what the future looks like. 

People do.

For all the promise of AI …

AI cannot decide which problems are worth solving.

It cannot make the hard judgment calls with imperfect information.

It cannot take responsibility for the outcome.

These are our responsibilities.

And they matter more now than ever. 

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

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

It needs people who know what to use them for.

People with a sense of purpose. 

Judgment.

Courage. 

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

And that is exactly who you have become here. 

So here is what I want to leave you with.

I am fortunate in many ways.

I am fortunate to have great parents.

I received an extraordinary education.

I have had the chance to work with great people.

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

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

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

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

It is taking the risk to work on something hard. 

It is challenging yourself.

Choosing problems at the edge of what you know.

Surrounding yourself with people who make you better.

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

So be ambitious about the problems you choose.

Run toward the hardest ones.

And trust your engineer’s instinct.

That is how you make your luck. 

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

None of these graduates got here alone.

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

This achievement belongs to you too. 

And to the Class of 2026…

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

You’ve done this before.

Go figure it out.

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

Congratulations, Class of 2026.

On May 28, MIT President Sally Kornbluth and Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey announced plans for a new laboratory to accelerate the development of next-generation quantum technologies that will enable Massachusetts to remain a national hub for quantum innovation.

Speaking at the Samberg Conference Center on campus, the leaders introduced the Quantum Systems Laboratory (QSL) at MIT, a shared-use facility that will catalyze quantum development in the region and help keep America at the forefront of a technology seen as critical for a range of industries.

“Quantum technologies have the potential to drive transformative change in fields from computing, security, and navigation to health sciences, defense technologies, and space exploration,” Kornbluth said. “Greater Boston has the greatest concentration of quantum talent of anywhere in the world, so it has been clear to us for some time that if we could magnify all of that talent with the right facilities — a shared quantum toolbox — we could establish Massachusetts as a national hub for quantum innovation and help catalyze the next generation of quantum technologies.”

The Quantum Systems Laboratory will join a state-of-the-art quantum computer with the components needed to make it a scalable, practical technology for solving complex, real-world problems. Such components include peripheral hardware such as sensors and quantum interconnects, which are physical channels that transfer quantum information. Located at MIT’s Building 39, the facilities will be open to researchers both from and beyond MIT. 

Thanks to a $25 million investment from the state, announced today, which will match a portion of the federal funding for quantum research already underway at MIT, the Institute is now in a position to move forward as early as this summer with construction on the QSL facility. The Commonwealth’s investment adds to MIT’s own financial commitment, as well as generous philanthropic support from Thomas Tull.

“This is good news for MIT, good news for Massachusetts, and frankly, good news for the world that we’re working together to make this happen,” Healey said. “The return on investment is clear: We know the Quantum Systems Laboratory will be a first-of-its-kind center for the shared study and development of quantum science and technology. It’s going to unleash the great power of scientists and innovators from around the state and across the world, and also be a place for collaboration, both for academic and commercial ventures. It will offer incredible opportunities for both scientific progress and economic growth. It’s a testament to MIT’s unrelenting, unyielding belief in the power of openness and collaboration to advance science.”

The new lab will be the physical home for the MIT Quantum Initiative (or QMIT) announced by President Kornbluth in December. It also complements advanced facilities already used for quantum research at MIT, such as MIT.nano and MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s SQUILL foundry, both of which share the mission of democratizing access to world-class facilities. SQUILL and MIT.nano have already made a major impact on the quantum industry through research, startups, and new standards for creating and transmitting quantum information.

“I want to emphasize that just as MIT.nano is a facility for all, there will be many people from beyond MIT that come to use this equipment” at QSL, Kornbluth said. “This is a hub to make Massachusetts the center of the world for quantum. These resources are rare enough that we have to make sure they are available to our colleagues at the University of Massachusetts, Harvard, and beyond. Our plan is to mobilize all the talent in the area through this facility.”

Leading in quantum innovation is important for the prosperity and security of the country, but quantum research requires meticulously controlled environments. The new facilities will give scientists access to the cutting-edge quantum hardware and specialized experimental capabilities needed to achieve the full transformative potential of quantum science and engineering.

The new laboratory’s underlying mission is to return broad scientific, workforce, and economic benefit to the public.

For example, quantum technologies provide significant opportunities in the fields of life sciences and defense technologies, which are $50-billion contributors to the local economy, with dozens of startups working in the area. The new lab is designed to create new job opportunities in the form of academic research, startups, and more. Construction on the QSL facility alone is anticipated to create over 150 full-time, on-site jobs, plus another 75 to 100 jobs across the Commonwealth in supply chain and professional services supporting the project.

Startups from MIT are also a key driver of the region’s entrepreneurial ecosystem; in 2015, Sloan Professors Edward Roberts and Fiona Murray published a report detailing how the Institute’s alumni entrepreneurs have created more than 30,000 active companies, employing 4.6 million people and generating annual global revenues of $1.9 trillion, a figure greater than the gross domestic product (GDP) of the world’s 10th-largest economy, as of 2014. The QSL facility will provide the necessary equipment and facilities for startups working on quantum technologies, thereby strengthening the region’s innovation economy. 

Below is the text of President Sally Kornbluth’s Commencement remarks, as prepared for delivery today.

Technically, as MIT’s president, it’s now my job to deliver a “charge” to the graduates. 

But this year, I faced that assignment with a serious case of humility. You’re entering a world that I’m certain you’ll navigate better than I could.

So, for your “charge,” I decided to draw on a special resource: the collective wisdom of our alumni.

I talk with a lot of MIT graduates — around the world, across the country, on our faculty.

They each put it their own way. But nearly all of them talk about how MIT changed their lives. It wasn’t a subject they studied, or a skill they acquired. It was the whole MIT experience! Of living and working here, together, and of belonging to a community with our distinctive passions and values.

So, as you go out into the world, I want to emphasize a few of those values that will serve you wherever you go. The banners in Lobby 7 feature our whole MIT Values Statement.  Let’s focus first on the two words at the top: Excellence and Curiosity.

Now, “excellence” is an easy thing to say. Most companies claim it. Probably every university too. But I have never seen a community live its commitment to excellence the way it’s done at MIT.

It’s easy to measure in the outward accomplishments of our faculty and graduates: the prizes, the discoveries, the inventions. The architecture and the industries. The companies and cures. 

But you also feel it here, every day — when everyone you meet in the hallway wants to tell you about what they’re working on – and it just blows you away. 

As members of this community, we strive to hold ourselves to “the highest standards of intellectual and creative excellence.” Just as important, we inspire each other to reach for those standards too!

(As one timely metaphor: This week 400 of you apparently felt that earning a degree from MIT wasn’t hard enough – so you also had to jump out of a plane!)

As an institution, we support these standards of individual excellence with a systematic focus on merit. For instance: No legacy admissions. No back-door admissions for donors. 
Because we value “potential over pedigree.”

A long-ago colleague had a sign in his office. It said, “If you take a lick of the lollipop of mediocrity, you will suck forever.” 

Now, let me be clear — I’m talking about self-discipline, not self-regard.

In the work we do, a conscious commitment to excellence is not the same as arrogance. 

In fact, it’s kind of the opposite.

The American poet Walt Whitman captured this idea. As he wrote, 

“I like the scientific spirit — the holding off, the being sure, but not too sure, the willingness to surrender ideas when the evidence is against them: This … keeps the way beyond open [and] … gives the whole man a chance to try over again.”

So I hope, wherever your life and work lead you, that you’ll strive to sustain our MIT standards of excellence. 

And I also hope, in the spirit of Whitman, that you’ll “accept the risk of failing as a rung on the ladder of growth.” Because, in all the fields you’ve studied, the willingness to try, and fail, and try again is the golden path to breakthroughs!

Now, for curiosity.

A few months ago, I was interviewed by a journalist who understands the current challenges for higher education. 

He described me as “inexplicably ebullient.”

(He doesn’t see me every day!) 

But honestly, if I’m ebullient in leading this community, it’s entirely explicable! 

MIT is custom-made for people whose curiosity never sleeps. Which describes our faculty, our staff, our alumni — and every one of you.

Feeding that curiosity is an incredible source of pleasure. You don’t need me to encourage you in this life-long feast!

But I do hope I can count on you to help the world understand that curiosity is also our intellectual rocket fuel — and that this fact is enormously important for our society as a whole.

At MIT, we know that curiosity-driven science is the path to new knowledge – the kind that spawns world-changing innovations. 

Curiosity is the force that transforms deadly cancers into treatable conditions, that turns fusion energy from a dream to a reality, that uncovers new ways to grow more food using less of every resource. 

We like to say that science is curiosity on a mission.

But we also know that the “curious” path to those deep discoveries can look like a wandering road.
 
(Years ago, after a long conversation about my PhD work, my own grandmother once asked, “Wait, you’re not trying to cure cancer in humans, you’re trying to give it to chickens?”)

Luckily, over eight decades, the United States had the foresight to see the value of discovery science. It invested public money with steady patience, knowing that the “practical payoff” could be 20, 30, 40 years away. 

Today – as many of you know from experience in your own labs — US investment in curiosity-driven science is in sharp decline. 

The tragedy here is that shrinking the pipeline of basic discovery research means choking off the flow of future solutions, innovations and cures – and shrinking the supply of future scientists.

So I hope you will join in a great shared effort to sustain the work of scientific curiosity — on a mission to serve.

A final thought: Every one of you here possesses uncommon talent. And with great talent comes great responsibility. 

I have no doubt that, like our alumni, you will be top-flight performers in your fields: Innovators. Engineers. Scientists. Doctors and designers. Entrepreneurs, investors and astronauts. Pioneers in whatever realm you chose. 

I mentioned Excellence and Curiosity, two of MIT's core values. 

But I hope we also hold, together, another core value — the commitment to always act ethically, with integrity, and with consideration for our fellow human beings. 

After more than six decades on Earth, I know that living up to this standard requires constant reinforcement and awareness! You will face many temptations, and opportunities to lose focus on that north star. 

And you simply have to resist. 

I have no doubt that, with your uncommon talent, you can do it!

And if you keep that goal in sight, I know you will do great things for the world. 

Congratulations — and warmest best wishes to you for a happy life and fulfilling career!

Demand for lithium has surged in recent years as lithium-ion batteries power increasingly more of our world. And yet, even as places like the U.S., Europe, and Australia have abundant lithium resources within their borders, China dominates global lithium refining. The biggest hurdle to tapping into the U.S. and Australia’s lithium is getting it out of hard rock minerals in a form that is useful.

Extracting lithium from hard rock today is an energy- and waste-intensive process that is often far more expensive than getting lithium from brine water, which also has major environmental drawbacks. Currently, lithium hard rock extraction involves baking the rock at over 1,000 Celsius and chemically leaching it to extract lithium. The rest of the rock is discarded.

Now, a team of researchers from MIT and elsewhere has developed a low-temperature process for extracting battery-grade lithium from the most common type of lithium-bearing mineral. The process uses a liquid reagent to dissolve the rock into the useful forms of its constituent parts: not just battery-ready lithium salts, but also smelter-grade alumina and cement-ready silica. After the minerals are extracted, the solvent and reagent can be recovered and used again so waste levels approach zero.

The researchers estimate the closed-loop process is half the cost of traditional lithium hard rock extraction and could make it cost-competitive with extracting lithium from brine water.

A paper describing the process was published today in Science. The researchers have already begun commercializing the technology through an MIT spinout, Rock Zero.

“By 2040, we need to quadruple production of lithium globally, which amounts to hundreds of new lithium producing assets,” says author Camden Hunt, a former project manager in MIT’s Center for Electrification and Decarbonization of Industry. “Hard rock is abundant; you can find it everywhere. But most hard rock refining is done in China. Our central thesis is if you can find an easier way to crack the rock, get lithium out, and make battery-grade lithium salts, you can change the lithium market. It aligns with the recent push to onshore production of critical minerals in the U.S.”

Joining Hunt on the paper are former MIT postdoc Benjamin Mowbray; PhD candidate Kalyn Fuelling; MIT undergraduate Jacqueline Prawira; Khashayar Jafari, a former senior research scientist at the MIT green cement spinout Sublime Systems; and Yet-Ming Chiang, MIT’s Kyocera Professor of Materials Science and Engineering.

From bathrooms to batteries

The research has its roots in a bathroom renovation. About 25 years ago, as Chiang made a trip to a hardware store to look for something that would turn clear glass blocks translucent, he stumbled on a glass etching cream that works by “eating away” at the surface of the glass. The active ingredient turned out to be ammonium fluoride.

More recently, as Chiang was brainstorming ways to chemically break apart the most abundant lithium-bearing mineral, spodumene, he thought back to that etching cream. Spodumene, like glass, consists mostly of silica. Conventional chemistry-based methods for extracting metals from ores preferentially dissolve more reactive elements and leave behind a silica-enriched residue because of the strength of silicon-oxygen bonds. By designing their process to use a mixture of water and ammonium fluoride, the researchers are able to dissolve silica first, reversing the process.

The researchers showed they could dissolve spodumene rock at room temperature, which represented a breakthrough over traditional processes requiring extreme heat. But it was still only the first step to a closed-loop system that produced useful materials.

“Dissolving silica is the hard part in mining,” Mowbray says. “The next question was how do we apply it to impactful mineral processing problems?”

The mineral spodumene is mainly made up of three elements: lithium, aluminum, and silica. Mowbray and Hunt, who both have their PhDs in chemistry, began exploring ways to refine those components separately after they were broken apart in the ammonium fluoride solution.

First, the researchers isolated lithium fluoride, a useful input for common electrolyte materials used in batteries. Chiang, who has founded several battery companies over his multi-decade career at MIT, next asked the research team if they could isolate lithium hydroxide and lithium carbonate, two lithium salts useful for making battery cathodes. The researchers went back to the lab and found they could make both by developing new processes, some of which involved adding carbon dioxide or sodium carbonate. Chiang tasked the research team with a similar challenge for the aluminum part of the rock, which was isolated using a high-temperature separation technique, and then silica, which was isolated by precipitation.

“First our goal was to produce these products, then there were additional steps of characterizing their purity and properties and making sure our products met the specifications for target markets,” Mowbray explains. “For the lithium salts, we identified the purity specifications for battery-grade lithium carbonate, the most widely used lithium salt. For the silica, we wanted it to be used as a cement additive, so we did cement reactivity tests and eventually created cubes of cement from it for strength testing using industrial methods. For aluminum, we targeted smelter-grade aluminum. If any product didn’t meet the target specs, you’d end up with a waste stream.”

The researchers then developed a process to reuse the ammonium fluoride and water that starts the reaction.

“We’re able to dissolve the rock with the spodumene in it, and that liberates all the elements, including the aluminum and lithium,” Chiang says. “The silica is in the solution, but on the way to making ammonium fluoride, ammonia gas also comes off. If that ammonia gas is then reapplied, it precipitates the silica again. That sequence gives us back the starting ammonium fluoride. That’s why it’s a circular process.”

The researchers successfully processed 17 different spodumene rock sources, showing its widespread applicability using rocks around the world.

“You’ve heard of nose-to-tail eating?” Chiang says. “We refer to this as nose-to-tail mining. Our researchers came to MIT to look for impactful problems to work on in sustainability. With their skill sets, it was just a matter of setting them loose on this problem. We went through all these steps, and for each one, I’d just say, ‘Can you do this next step?’ And a week or two later they’d say, ‘Okay, we’ve shown we can do that.’ That’s how this entire process got built.”

Scaling the process

Chiang further challenged his research team to evaluate the commercial feasibility of their new system.

“Once we had these core operations worked out, Yet encouraged us to do some math,” Mowbray explains. “Is there enough spodumene in the world to supply 100 terrawatt-hours of battery production? The follow up was: If you supply all the world’s batteries with this process, what are the volumes of the co-products? Do they match global commodity markets? Then we started looking at the cost of the reagents, the cost of the energy, equipment. We started gaining conviction that this could have a big impact.”

The work has special significance for Mowbray, who grew up in a historic mining town in rural British Columbia.

The researchers worked with MIT’s Technology Licensing Office to spin out their company, Rock Zero, which is now located at The Engine and scaling up the system.

“We believe this approach is the lowest-energy, lowest-cost way of getting lithium not only out of hard rock, but period,” Chiang says. “That’s what’s motivating us to scale this. It will enable the energy transition through batteries that use lithium. This was one of the goals of The Climate Project at MIT — to work on projects that, within a short number of years, could transition from the lab to commercialization and impact.”

The work was supported, in part, by the Department of Energy Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), the MIT Climate Grant Challenges program, and the National Science Foundation. The work made use of MIT.nano facilities.

Every year, about 85,000 Americans are diagnosed with bladder cancer. While treatment is often successful, bladder cancer has one of the highest rates of recurrence of any cancer: Following treatment, about 50 percent of patients develop tumors again within the next five years. This makes it one of the most expensive cancers for society to treat.

MIT researchers have now developed a new way to regularly monitor those patients, which could enable regrowing tumors to be detected much earlier. Using a catheter coated with specialized nanosensors, the team showed that they could detect very low levels of a protein produced by bladder cancer cells and image their location in tissue.

The researchers calculate that this sensing approach is nearly 50,000 times more sensitive than urinalysis, an approach that has been used to monitor bladder cancer in patients. In an animal study, they showed that fluorescent signals produced by the sensors can be used to pinpoint the location of the tumor within the lining of the bladder, providing a chemical image.

“It’s like a camera for molecules instead of light,” says Michael Strano, the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT. “If you have a billion nanosensors in an array, you can use them to make a chemical image that helps you locate their source.” 

Strano is the senior author of the study, which appears today in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. Wonjun Yim, a Schmidt Science postdoc, and Hohyung Kang, an MIT postdoc, are the lead authors of the paper. Other authors include MIT graduate student Marco Machado, undergraduate student Maeve McGinnis, and postdoc Byungha Kang.

“Chemical images”

The new detection approach is based on carbon nanotubes — hollow, nanometer-thick cylinders made of carbon that naturally fluoresce when exposed to laser light. Over the past 10 years, Strano’s lab has shown that these nanotubes can be customized to sense different molecules by coating them with “synthetic antibodies” — polymers that can be designed to interact with a specific target.

When the target analytes are present, their interaction with the synthetic antibodies causes the carbon nanotubes to shift the wavelength or change the fluorescent intensity that they produce. Strano’s lab has previously developed about two dozen different sensors that can detect different targets, including hydrogen peroxide, riboflavin, and viral proteins.

For the new study, the researchers designed a sensor that could detect a protein known as nuclear matrix protein 22 (NMP-22), which is already FDA-approved for use as a biomarker for bladder cancer. NMP-22 can be detected in urine samples, but it is often significantly diluted, degraded, and cleared after secretion. This means that tumors can only be detected once they have reached more advanced stages.

To enable earlier detection, the MIT team sought a way to deploy their sensors inside the bladder, where they could detect NMP-22 near the tumor at locally elevated concentrations. The device they designed consists of a urinary catheter coated with nanotubes that can sense NMP-22. The catheter also contains a tiny device known as a ball lens, located within the tip of the catheter. 

This lens rotates 360 degrees, emitting laser light and then absorbing the fluorescent light emitted by the nanosensors. By analyzing the color and location of these fluorescent signals, the researchers can map the location of any biomarker that is detected.

These chemical images can reveal not only whether the biomarker is present, but also the location of the cancerous cells.

“If you are scanning over a region of tissue, you would like to know not just that there is a signal indicating that a tumor is there, but also its location so that you can treat it or perform a biopsy,” Strano says. “Before an early-stage tumor breaks through the urothelium so that it’s visible, it’s under the surface but still emitting chemical signals that can be imaged. When a chemical hits the catheter, we don’t just detect its presence, but we collect a map that pinpoints its location.”

Tests in animal bladders showed that this type of detection can be 180 times more sensitive than performing a conventional urinalysis because it detects biomarkers directly where they are produced in the bladder, rather than measuring them later in dilute fluids such as urine, where their concentration is much lower. This high degree of sensitivity would allow the sensors to detect signals from a tumor as small as 16 square millimeters, the researchers say.

Earlier detection

Researchers in Strano’s lab are now working on designing a more compact version of their prototype imaging system, so that it could be used more easily at a doctor’s office. They also hope to incorporate their sensors into a type of catheter known as a cystoscope, which has a camera attached and is used to visualize tumors in the lining of the bladder. 

Currently, patients who have been treated for bladder cancer undergo cystoscopy annually, or in some cases even more often, to monitor for cancer recurrence. The new MIT diagnostics should be able to detect recurring tumors earlier than cystoscopy, making them easier to treat and cutting down on the costs of treatment and monitoring, the researchers say.

“What we’re looking for is something that could be faster and more effective. It could be used right in a doctor’s office, and it could make that screening more efficient and less invasive, with much lower cost. The goal is to be able to detect potential tumors much earlier,” Strano says. 

“This paper is exciting because it shows how diagnostics can be more effective when the sensor is brought to the individual,” says Daniel Heller, a professor of physiology and pharmacology at Weill Cornell Medicine, who was not involved in the research. “Strano and colleagues demonstrated that a carbon nanotube-based nanosensor technology can be used to monitor a cancer right where it is, improving the speed of cancer detection, and potentially enabling the improvement of cancer treatment.”

This approach could also be integrated with endoscopy to detect other types of cancer or other diseases, such as cardiovascular or gastrointestinal diseases, by swapping out the nanosensors attached to the catheter.

“The beauty of polymer chemistry is that if we understand the molecular structures of target biomarkers and the design principles of binding sites, we can develop new sensors tailored to different diseases,” Yim says. “You can imagine if these sensors were integrated onto the catheter, they could reveal invisible biomarkers that current endoscopic procedures miss, opening the door to detecting many other diseases in the future.”

The research was funded by the Bridge Project of the Koch Institute and Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center, a Schmidt Science Fellowship, the MIT UROP Program, Mathworks Inc., and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

• MIT and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts announced plans to establish the Quantum Systems Laboratory (QSL) at MIT, which will be open to researchers across the region. 
• With the new funding from the state, which will match federal funding for quantum research already underway at MIT, the Institute aims to begin construction on the QSL facility this summer. 
• The QSL will host specialized facilities that will enable Massachusetts scientists to undertake impactful work applying quantum research across practical domains, including life sciences and national defense.

Quantum technologies promise transformative changes in fields from computing, security, and navigation to health sciences, defense technologies, and space exploration. But how do we ensure Massachusetts stays on the leading edge of our nation’s coming quantum leap? Doing so is vital to the prosperity and security of our Commonwealth and country, serving to protect and advance America’s technological leadership in a world that has been upended by geopolitical rivalries.   

On Thursday, May 28, Governor Maura Healey joined President Sally Kornbluth at MIT to announce a new effort aimed at establishing Massachusetts as a national hub for quantum innovation and catalyzing next generation quantum technologies. MIT and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts announced plans to establish the Quantum Systems Laboratory (QSL) at MIT, a new shared-use facility that will serve as a quantum toolbox for the region, aimed at accelerating quantum research, innovation, and growth in this critical field.

The QSL seeks to be the first facility in the world to bring together state‑of‑the‑art quantum computers with quantum sensors and peripherals, joined by quantum interconnects (physical channels that transfer quantum information). The facility will provide researchers from MIT and other institutions hands‑on access to significant quantum hardware and specialized experimental capabilities that are necessary to achieve the full transformative potential of quantum science and engineering. 

Thanks to a $25 million investment from the state, which will match a portion of the federal funding for quantum research already underway at MIT, the Institute is now in a position to move forward as early as this summer with construction on the QSL facility, positioning the region to dominate the next generation of quantum research, according to Institute officials. The Commonwealth’s investment adds to MIT’s own financial commitment, as well as generous philanthropic support from Thomas Tull.

“Greater Boston has the greatest concentration of quantum talent anywhere in the world, working on a range of potential applications. Through the new Quantum Systems Laboratory, we will help position Massachusetts to lead the next era of quantum technologies,” says Kornbluth. “This facility will serve those at the edges of our wildest imaginations in physics and quantum computing, yes. But it will also equip the talent in our region -- and ultimately, our nation -- to push our knowledge to new limits, and new innovations.” 

The QSL will be located at Building 39 on the MIT campus and will serve as a multi-disciplinary quantum hub with modern experimental infrastructure. Because quantum research involves the creation and study of coherent phenomena in systems that are isolated from the rest of the universe, it must take place in a highly controlled environment. Work is already underway in Building 39, with significant investments by MIT, to upgrade the physical infrastructure for these unique demands. The state’s support will supercharge this work and allow for the transformation of the lab into a hub for scientists across the region working on next-generation quantum technologies, startup applications, defense and health tech, and more. 

“Our region has unparalleled strengths in science-intensive innovations and tough tech breakthroughs that combine engineering, science, and computing,” notes Anantha Chandrakasan, MIT’s provost. “With the new Quantum Systems Laboratory, we aim to arm Massachusetts with the compute power and integrated platforms needed to lead the coming era of quantum technologies.”

By the numbers 

The QSL will host specialized facilities that will enable Massachusetts scientists to undertake impactful work applying quantum research across practical domains. As a shared-use facility, the QSL is being developed with the underlying mission of returning broad scientific, workforce, and economic benefit to the public. 

For example, quantum technologies provide significant opportunities in the fields of life sciences and defense technologies, which are $50 billion contributors to the Massachusetts economy, with dozens of startups working in the area. During a time of increased economic anxiety and labor market concerns, investing in foundational quantum facilities will infuse our region with new job opportunities, in academic research institutions, startups and more. Construction on the QSL facility alone is anticipated to create over 150 full-time, on-site construction jobs, plus another 75 to 100 jobs across the Commonwealth in supply chain and professional services supporting the project. 

Startups from MIT are also a key driver of the state’s entrepreneurial ecosystem; in 2015, Sloan Professors Edward Roberts and Fiona Murray published a report detailing how the Institute’s alumni entrepreneurs have created more than 30,000 active companies, employing 4.6 million people, and generating annual global revenues of $1.9 trillion, a figure greater than the gross domestic product (GDP) of the world’s 10th-largest economy, as of 2014. The QSL facility will provide the necessary equipment and facilities for startups working on quantum technologies, thereby strengthening the region’s innovation economy. 

“The new QSL will introduce modern experimental infrastructure to quantum research at MIT and beyond, allowing us to scale experiments and expand into critical domains in disciplines such as biology and chemistry, where we see enormous innovative potential,” explains Ian Waitz, MIT’s vice president for research. “As the new physical home of the MIT Quantum Initiative (or QMIT), the QSL will serve not only as an on-campus incubator, but more broadly, a regional hub to catalyze quantum innovation, growth, and investment in this critical R&D sector for the Commonwealth.” 

One floor of the facility will allow for development of radio-frequency (RF) electronics for controlling and interfacing with quantum systems. The QSL will also support researchers in the creation of customized quantum experiments with advanced high-frequency packages, which are required to protect quantum data in real-world applications. The facility will also develop the associated THz electronics needed by advanced quantum systems. 

A history of future-focused plays

Nearly a decade ago, MIT made a similarly big bet on nanotechnology, developing MIT.nano — a state-of-the-art, shared-use facility with more than 200 tools and instruments that support nanoscale discovery and innovation through imaging, fabrication, characterization, and prototyping. Set in the heart of campus in the Lisa T. Su Building, MIT.nano is home to a thriving research community, an industry consortium, and a startup accelerator. More than a fifth of the 1,500 users of MIT.nano come from outside of MIT, and half of the companies in its START.nano accelerator have had non-MIT founders.

The QSL will also complement the capabilities of MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s SQUILL Foundry, a quantum fabrication hub for superconducting qubit systems that serves researchers across Massachusetts and the nation free of charge.

The MIT Corporation — the Institute’s board of trustees — has elected 10 full-term members, who will serve five-year terms, and two life members. Corporation Chair Mark P. Gorenberg ’76 announced the election results today.

The full-term members are: Kate A. Bergeron, Elizabeth Choe, Kevin B. Churchwell, Stephen P. DeFalco, Bennett W. Golub, Pearl S. Huang, Steve Isakowitz, Adrianna C. Ma, Pamela Melroy, and Alex Morcos. The life members are Eran Broshy and Ray A. Rothrock. Gorenberg was also re-elected as Corporation chair.

David L. Fung ’85, the 2026-2027 president of the Association of Alumni and Alumnae of MIT, will also join the Corporation as an ex officio member. He succeeds Stephen P. DeFalco ’83, SM ’88.

As of July 1, 2026, the Corporation will consist of 75 distinguished leaders in education, science, engineering, and industry. Of those, 22 are life members and eight are ex officio. An additional 33 individuals are life members emeritus.

The 10 new term members are:

Kate A. Bergeron ’93, MBA ’13, vice president of hardware engineering at Apple, Inc.

Bergeron joined Apple in 2002 as a senior mechanical engineer and has served as vice president of hardware engineering since 2014. Previously, she was senior director for ecosystem products and technologies and senior director of Macintosh product design. Bergeron co-developed the course MIT D-Lab: Design for Scale, which she co-taught from 2013 to 2017. Earlier in her career, she worked as a mechanical engineer at EM Designs and at the Palo Alto Design Group (now Flextronics International Ltd.). She has regularly been named by Business Insider as one of the most powerful female engineers in the world and was elected to the National Academy of Engineers in 2022.

Elizabeth Choe ’13, PhD ’25, director of AI strategy for translational medicine at AstraZeneca 

At AstraZeneca, Choe oversees the deployment of biomedical deep-learning models for cancer drug development and leads upskilling programs for biologists and clinicians. As an MIT PhD student, she worked on brain cancer therapies at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. Between her undergraduate and graduate studies, she worked in digital media in several roles: leading MIT+K12 Videos, producing media for National Geographic and the National Institutes of Health, designing global online teacher training programs at the MIT Media Lab’s Learning Initiative, and serving as assistant director of communications in the Office of Undergraduate Admissions. Throughout her graduate studies, she was actively involved in campus leadership, serving as a graduate resident advisor and participating in the Graduate Student Council, the Presidential Search Committee, and other groups.

Kevin B. Churchwell ’83, CEO of Boston Children’s Hospital

At Boston Children’s Hospital, Churchwell leads an organization dedicated to advancing child health through clinical care, research and innovation, medical education, and community engagement. Since joining the hospital in 2013 as chief operating officer and executive vice president of health affairs, he led a transformation that significantly reduced safety events affecting patients and employees. Earlier, Churchwell served as CEO of Nemours/Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children in Wilmington and CEO and executive director of Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville. He is currently a professor of pediatric anesthesia and the Robert and Dana Smith Professor of Anesthesia at Harvard Medical School.

Stephen P. DeFalco ’83, SM ’88, executive chair of Creation Technologies

Before assuming his current role, DeFalco served as chairman and CEO at Creation Technologies, an electronics manufacturing services provider, for six years. Prior to that, he was a partner at Lindsay Goldberg Private Equity, following a role as president and CEO of Crane Currency. DeFalco has also held CEO roles at MDS, a global life sciences company; Senseonics, a diabetes care company, where he is still chairman; and PathoGenetix. He was also president of PerkinElmer Instruments, a strategy consultant at McKinsey and Company, and a product development leader at IBM.

Bennett W. Golub ’79, SM ’82, PhD ’84, co-founder of and senior advisor at BlackRock

In 1988, Golub was one of eight people to start the global asset management company BlackRock, Inc; he stepped down from his day-to-day activities in 2022 to assume a part-time role of senior policy advisor. Formerly, he served as chief risk officer with responsibilities that included investment, counterparty, technology, and operational risk, and he chaired BlackRock’s Enterprise Risk Management Committee. Beginning in 1995, he was co-head and founder of BlackRock Solutions, the company’s risk advisory business. He also served as the acting CEO of Trepp, LLC. and as vice president at The First Boston Corporation (now Credit Suisse).

Pearl S. Huang ’80, CEO and president of Dunad Therapeutics, Inc.

Huang has decades of experience spanning the biotech and pharmaceutical industries, with oversight across early drug discovery and development, translational research, and alliance management. Prior to Dunad, she was CEO and president of Cygnal Therapeutics, founded by Flagship Pioneering, where she was also a venture partner. Earlier, she held leadership roles as senior vice president of therapeutic modalities at Roche; vice president and global head of discovery partnerships with academia at GSK; and vice president, oncology franchise integrator, at Merck. She was also a founder and acting chief scientific officer of Beigene. 

Steve Isakowitz ’83, SM ’84, former CEO and president of the Aerospace Corporation

Throughout his career, Isakowitz has worked across the public and private sectors to advance U.S. leadership in space. At the Aerospace Corporation, he led a strategic transformation of the organization to address the rapid commercialization of the space sector, the emergence of space as a warfighting domain, and the need for faster, more agile technical execution. Before that, he held leadership positions as chief technology officer at Virgin Galactic, and later president of the company’s space ventures business; chief financial officer at the U.S. Department of Energy; and deputy associate administrator for exploration at NASA. He also served in roles at the Central Intelligence Agency and the White House Office of Management and Budget. 

Adrianna C. Ma ’95, MEng ’96, operating partner at Index Ventures

At Index Ventures, Ma oversees operations, facilitates the investment process, and is responsible for fundraising and capital partnering. Previously, she was a managing partner of the investment firm the Fremont Group, a managing director of General Atlantic, and a technology mergers and acquisitions banker at Morgan Stanley. At the Fremont Group, she oversaw a portfolio of actively managed funds, public securities, and private co-investments; chaired the investment committee; and assisted with Fremont’s direct private equity investments. During her 10 years at General Atlantic, she led investments in, and served on the boards of, growth-stage technology companies around the world. At Morgan Stanley, she focused on technology-related mergers and acquisitions.

Pamela Melroy SM ’84, president and managing partner of Melroy and Hollett Technology Partners

As deputy administrator of NASA, Melroy was responsible for laying the agency’s vision and representing NASA to the executive office of the president and others. Before retiring from the U.S. Air Force in 2007, she logged more than 6,000 flight hours as a co-pilot, aircraft commander, instructor pilot, and test pilot. She is a veteran of Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm and Operation Just Cause. As a NASA astronaut, Melroy served as pilot on two space shuttle missions and was the mission commander on a third. She later took on a number of leadership roles, including at Lockheed Martin, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and Nova Systems, and as an advisor to the Australian Space Agency.

Alex Morcos ’97, ’98, MEng ’98, co-founder of Chaincode Labs

Morcos co-founded Hudson River Trading in 2002, where he spent 10 years helping to build the quantitative trading firm. In 2014, he and fellow co-founder Suhas Daftuar started Chaincode Labs, a research and development center for Bitcoin, with a focus on open-source software and education. Recently, he applied his interest in emerging technologies to help found Fulcrum Science, a public good initiative to use AI to accelerate scientific research.

The two new life members are:

Eran Broshy ’79, former CEO and chair of Syneos Health

Broshy has spent more than 35 years as a health care executive, building high-growth public and private health care businesses as CEO, board chair, director, strategist, and investor. He served for over a decade as CEO and chairman of Syneous Health (formerly inVentiv Health), taking the company public and turning it into the leading global provider of outsourced clinical and commercial services to pharmaceutical and life sciences companies. Before that, he served as the CEO of the biotechnology platform company Coelacanth Corp, and as a managing partner at The Boston Consulting Group. Since 2010, Broshy has worked in private equity across the health care space globally.

Ray A. Rothrock SM ’78, partner emeritus at Venrock

A philanthropist, venture capitalist, and advocate for clean energy, Rothrock spent 25 years at the venture capital firm Venrock, focusing on early-stage investments related to information technology, cybersecurity, and energy. He served as chair of the National Venture Capital Association and as CEO of the cybersecurity technology startup RedSeal, and he previously held management positions at Sun Microsystems. Earlier in his career, Rothrock held various engineering positions at Yankee Atomic Electric, Exxon Minerals, and Sagus. Today, he is a venture partner with Shield Capital and advisor to numerous venture capital firms. He was a member of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Nuclear Energy Advisory Committee, and in the last decade he co-produced several documentary films.

When doctors and scientists want to see inside a body, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a powerful tool. MRI can noninvasively capture detailed images of the body’s muscles, organs, and bones. It can monitor blood flow to generate a map of brain activity. And with new sensors developed by bioengineers at MIT, MRI can track the kinds of molecules that make our brains and bodies work.

In the May 13 issue of the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering, a team led by Alan Jasanoff, the Eugene McDermott Professor in the Brain Sciences and Human Behavior at MIT, reports on their new sensors, which can brighten or dim MRI signals in response to specific molecular targets. The probes are designed to amplify the effect that each target molecule has on MRI signal, dramatically improving sensitivity over previous small-molecule sensors. Jasanoff, who is also an associate investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, says the approach his team used should enable the development of MRI sensors that detect neurotransmitters and other important molecules in the brain.

“We want to be able to measure distinct chemical signals like neurotransmitters, neuropeptides, and metabolites as they fluctuate across the whole brain,” Jasanoff says. “These chemicals are important ingredients in neural computations, and we want to use the types of probes that we developed to detect these signals dynamically.”

Jasanoff explains that researchers have struggled to use MRI to sensitively detect small molecules in the brain because the amount of any given neurochemical is low. Sensors can be designed to change the brightness of an MRI signal in the presence of specific molecules — but it takes a lot of contrast agent to achieve this. If every molecule of contrast agent needs its own target molecule to activate it, low concentrations of the target molecule limit the sensors’ visibility in an MRI scan. “The signal change that you see in the imaging will be very modest,” Jasanoff says. “It won’t let us detect physiological events.”

The Jasanoff team’s new sensors, whose development was led by postdoc Sayani Das and graduate student Jacob Cyert Simon, overcome this problem. To generate a greater signal change in response to target molecules, the researchers designed probes in which a single target molecule impacts not one contrast agent, but many.

To achieve this, Das and Simon packaged an MRI contrast agent inside tiny sacs called liposomal nanoparticles. Each nanoparticle is packed with many molecules of gadolinium, a magnetic material that brightens the MRI signal that arises from hydrogen atoms in water. Inside their protective sacs, gadolinium has no effect on MRI signal, unless water molecules can easily get in and out.

Das and Simon built water channels into the walls of their gadolinium-filled nanoparticles, engineering them so that their opening depends on the presence or absence of a target molecule. When the channels open, more water enters and the gadolinium brightens the local MRI signal, lighting up that spot in a scan.

The researchers call their target-responsive sensors liposomal nanoparticle reporters, or LisNRs (pronounced “listeners”). They designed LisNRs that let water in only in the presence of their target molecule. The water channels in these nanoparticles stay blocked until they encounter their target, which can knock aside a channel-blocking bit of protein. 

Once the channel blocker is displaced, water enters and MRI signal brightens. They also made LisNRs that dim the MRI signal in the presence of the molecule they are designed to detect. These have a channel that stays open until the target molecule comes along and blocks it, keeping water out. Jasanoff lab members Vinay Sharma, Samira Abozeid, and Gregory Thiabaud played key roles in understanding and optimizing these interactions, and collaborators in the laboratory of Masayuki Inoue at the University of Tokyo helped the group engineer channels with higher potency.

In experiments led by postdoc Miranda Dawson, Jasanoff’s team used their LisNRs to detect a molecule called biotin in the brains and bodies of living rats, illustrating the probe’s amplifying effects. “We showed that we could detect micromolar-scale levels of biotin with about tenfold greater sensitivity than we would have if we’d used a more conventional, one-to-one type sensing approach,” Jasanoff says. He adds that the team’s modeling suggests that with further development, they may be able to achieve even greater sensitivity gains.

The group showed that the new sensors can be delivered systemically, reaching various organs and spreading throughout the brain. This makes them promising tools for brain-wide imaging, as well as imaging targets in the peripheral nervous system or other tissues.

A next step will be engineering LisNRs that respond to the specific neurochemicals that Jasanoff and his team hope to study. “There are something like 100 neurochemicals in the brain that we’d love to detect, in principle,” he says. They’ll start with dopamine and glutamate — two important and relatively abundant molecules that mediate communications between neurons.

This research, including support for postdoctoral fellows and graduate students involved in the work, was funded, in part, by Lore Harp McGovern, the Yang Tan Collective at MIT, the K. Lisa Yang Brain-Body Center at MIT, the Hock E. Tan and K. Lisa Yang Center for Autism Research at MIT, and the K. Lisa Yang and Hock E. Tan Center for Molecular Therapeutics at MIT.

Aiming to transition away from fossil fuels and avert the worst consequences of climate change, world leaders aspire to achieve net zero global greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and cap global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius. But actions to meet such targets and minimize adverse impacts on lives, livelihoods, and infrastructure are not one-size-fits-all; they will require different approaches in different places. 

To better understand the patchwork causes and effects of the climate crisis and elements of viable solutions to it, researchers in MIT’s Living Climate Futures (LCF) initiative — 20 MIT faculty and affiliates from across the Institute — collaborate with frontline communities in diverse physical and socioeconomic landscapes around the world. 

Funded by the MIT Human Insight Collaborative (MITHIC) and based at the MIT School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (SHASS), LCF is a multi-disciplinary research hub and community of practice; focuses on how climate change impacts people’s everyday lives; and creates knowledge and research collaborations with community organizations. 

At MIT on April 23-25 — just after Earth Day — LCF showcased several of these collaborations at its second Living Climate Futures Symposium, which brought together community environmental organizations with MIT researchers and students to explore how climate change challenges and responses to them are playing out in locations from New England to Mongolia. 

“Across the next two days, we’ll have conversations about community-based work and scholarly research that’s aimed at understanding the structural causes and social effects of climate change as it’s experienced in people’s everyday lives,” said MIT professor of anthropology and MITHIC faculty co-lead Heather Paxson in remarks at the start of the first full day of the conference. “I’m really excited for this symposium, and for where Living Climate Futures can go from here.”

Resisting environmental harm: Confronting data centers

A session on data centers, energy concerns, and community health in Greene County in Western Pennsylvania highlighted how stakeholders are attempting to proactively avert long-term threats to the environment and public health in and beyond their neighborhoods. Nicholas Hood, senior organizer at the Center for Coalfield Justice (CCJ), which has worked to improve policy and regulations on fossil fuel extraction and use in the region since 1994, described local environmental and health impacts of these activities, including fracking, which has increased water pollution, asthma, and lymphoma. “We have coal mines, these old oil wells, and fracking on top of that, and now we’re going to add data centers,” he said. “So, ask yourself, do you think we want that?”

CCJ community advocate Jason Capello noted that market forces compel data center developers to build as cheaply as possible in places where they believe the population is unlikely to raise concerns about adverse environmental and health impacts. These impacts include pollution from on-site water-based cooling systems, diesel generators and mini-power plants that run on natural gas, and fine particulate matter-linked illnesses such as childhood asthma, heart attacks, stroke, and lung disease. But in a subsequent presentation, Livia Garofalo, a cultural and medical anthropologist on Data and Society’s Trustworthy Infrastructures team in Philadelphia, showed that many communities have pushed back against data center project proposals. “Through protests, canvassing, petitions, and public hearings, communities have been able to resist and even stop data center projects,” she said. 

To help communities resist or limit the impact of proposed data center projects, Michael Cork, a postdoc in biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, described a tool he has developed to estimate emissions, model how pollution would spread, estimate who will be exposed, and assess likely health and economic impacts. To further explore how communities can respond to such projects, MIT associate professor of anthropology Amy Moran-Thomas and Stanford University postdoc Anjuli Jain Figueroa facilitated an educational game conceived by Northeastern University associate professor of sociology and health science Sara Wylie. 

The game helped teach participants how often-overlooked community stakeholders can negotiate community benefit agreements (CBAs), or plans that specify project developers’ commitments to address their concerns and provide local improvements such as jobs and affordable housing. Gathered around several tables, symposium participants worked together to identify potential pros, cons, and trade-offs of allowing a data center to be built in a fictitious community. Offering another avenue for community advocacy, Moran-Thomas also moderated a workshop led by public anthropologist Ieva Jusionyte on how to write op-eds that inspire change.

Repairing environmental harm: More than a matter of money

A session on global perspectives and methodologies for potential climate reparations focused on the context for and definition of the term. Veronica Coptis, senior advisor at Taproot Earth, a U.S.-based nongovernmental organization, described her view of climate justice as a movement about reducing not only excessive greenhouse gas emissions, but also changing the systems that have produced them, all while building a world where everyone can live, rest, and thrive in the places they love. “[Taproot Earth’s] mission is building power and cultivating solutions with frontline communities to advance climate justice through Black liberation, Indigenous sovereignty, and democracy,” said Coptis.

Eliane Lakam, global policy and partnerships specialist at Taproot Earth, described a two-decades-long process, sparked by Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of marginalized communities on the U.S. Gulf Coast, that led to a Global Climate Reparations Working Statement at the Global Climate Reparations Governance Assembly of 200 climate leaders in Nairobi, Kenya, in 2024.

Urban agriculture: Reclaiming and revitalizing degraded land

A session on advancing urban agriculture in a changing climate featured a panel of four organizational representatives of various growing spaces in Greater Boston, many of which were formerly vacant lots and garbage dumps that were repurposed as farms and gardens. The panel included Sabrina Pilet-Jones, urban farm manager at Haley House; Cecilia Del Cid, director of food justice and youth programs at GreenRoots; Olivia Golden, urban agriculture educator at UMass Extension; and Matthew Ellison, assistant farm manager at the Urban Farming Institute. 

The panelists showed how their efforts to grow food locally in an urban setting are challenging past and ongoing environmental inequality in myriad ways. These include preserving and expanding green spaces, increasing access to fresh produce, empowering their communities to become actively engaged in how their food is grown, building community connection and pride, and inspiring young people to grow food in their neighborhoods. They framed their organizations’ youth education programs as gateways for enabling the transfer of knowledge from elders to young people, promoting a strong work ethic and healthy lifestyles, and identifying pathways to livelihoods that address food access and sustainability. To provide participants with an opportunity to learn about urban agriculture and do some volunteer farm labor, the symposium offered a field trip to The Food Project in Roxbury. 

Rural and urban adaptation: Responding to a changing climate

A session on climate change as a place-based phenomenon explored how communities are responding to a changing climate on Mongolian grasslands, in the greater Southwestern United States, and along the Boston Harbor. 

Munkh-Erdene Gantulga, a PhD candidate in geography at the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford, described his studies at the National University of Mongolia on how pastoralists at two field sites are protecting their livelihoods as more-frequent severe weather events increase livestock mortality and pasture degradation. Perceiving climate change as a lack of rainfall, hotter temperatures, and inadequate grass growth, herders at the two sites are either migrating to greener pastures or applying three strategies: not milking their animals so as to boost survival of mothers and their offspring; selling off parts of their herds; or specializing in more climate-resilient animals, such as camels. A separate screening of the film “If Only I Could Hibernate” dramatized the environmental and economic obstacles faced by youth in Mongolia. 

Breanna Lameman, an Indigenous data sovereignty doctoral scholar and graduate research associate at the University of Arizona, and Nekai Eversole, wildlife biologist and program lead with Climate Change Program - Navajo Nation Department of Fish and Wildlife, described how traditional Diné ecological knowledge and innovative technologies are helping Navajo Nation communities to adapt to hotter temperatures, long droughts, and harsher soil conditions. Lameman cited Diné concepts of restoring balance and maintaining kinship with the natural world as essential to the local response. “This reminds us that the plants, animals, water, and soils are relatives, not resources, and that we all need to work together,” she said. “Watching the stars, observing the winds, the plant cycles, and animal behaviors, really helps us predict seasonal shifts better than any app out there.” Eversole noted that this mindset is combined with innovative technologies ranging from hydroponics to wetland restoration structures. A separate screening of the film “Climate Voices” and Q&A with director Leslie Jonas, MLK Jr. Visiting Scholar and Elder Eel Clan member of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, explored perspectives from Native experts and climate scientists working on the front lines.

Elisa Guerrero, community engagement manager at the Stone Living Lab and Sustainable Solutions Lab at the University of Massachusetts Boston, highlighted two examples of adaptation measures to protect vulnerable Boston Harbor infrastructure from sea-level rise, coastal storms, and storm surges: testing seawalls designed to mimic natural habitat for how well they slow down wave action and preserve marine biodiversity, and monitoring salt marshes to better understand the factors that degrade and promote their health. A separate Stone Living Lab tour enabled symposium participants to visit a living seawall, nature-based flood protection infrastructures, and a community-based flood sensor project as Boston tries to address rising sea levels.

Training the next generation in community-oriented research

In addition to highlighting LCF’s role as a research hub linking MIT researchers and students with community organizations in the United States and around the world, the symposium also sought to draw attention to efforts to train the next generation in this approach. The Saturday session “Experiential Learning, ‘Anthro-Engineering,’ and Learning to Do Community-Oriented Research” showcased some of the interdisciplinary classes that LCF supports. MIT students who participated in these classes engaged in activities ranging from building chicken coops with a Boston farming collective while learning about urban agriculture to exploring how to decarbonize the steel industry in Pittsburgh and Southeast Chicago while creating well-paying green jobs to spending time in Ulaanbaatar’s ger districts (informal residential areas) while working with Mongolian collaborators on non-coal methods for heating homes. 

Student panelists shared highlights from their learning experiences through presentations, activities, artwork, and written accounts from their travel notebooks.

“People have always been part of why I chose to study engineering,” said nuclear engineering PhD student Alina Jugan. “But learning how to integrate a human perspective, and one that accounts for multitudes of realities, is essential. The first step in making a solution is learning what the real problem is and how people experience it. This is what ‘Anthro-Engineering’ teaches us.”

Panel and symposium co-organizer Laura Frye-Levine, a research scientist at the MIT Anthropology Section and affiliate of the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy, concurred. “In building relationships in place-based contexts, the students on this panel demonstrate the value of engaging with social and cultural expertise in addressing climate change,” she said. “These projects are fantastic examples of collaborations that hold promise for MIT’s approach to developing climate solutions.”

Lessons in resilience from frontline community groups 

In a session entitled “Xa xah Xechnging: A Sacred Obligation in a Time of Climate Chaos,” panelists from Se’Si’Le and Children of the Setting Sun Productions — two Indigenous-led environmental organizations from the U.S Pacific Northwest that have collaborated with LCF on experiential learning activities — described how they draw upon cultural, spiritual, scientific, legal, and other resources in their efforts to heal and restore the planet amid political and corporate opposition. At the core of their work is a perspective in which everything has a spirit, and is thus worthy of love, honor, respect, dignity, pride, and compassion.

Sundance chief Rueben George, a board member of Se’Si’Le, recounted how this perspective energized the campaign he led against the development of the Trans Mountain Pipeline, a fossil fuel megaproject on Tsleil-Waututh Nation territories in British Columbia. “We just shared facts about what it is, and we led with our culture,” said George, who is also chair of Salish Elements, an Indigenous-run company that produces green hydrogen. “That’s the biggest, most important thing, is we always led with our culture.”

At an earlier session, representatives of organizations that participated in the 2022 Living Climate Futures symposium, ranging from GreenRoots to Se’Si’Le, said that they draw strength from the wisdom of ancestors, a growth mindset, and communal bonds among people who seek a better future for the places they call home. Kurt Russo, co-executive director of Se’Si’Le, noted: “I come back to the indomitability of the human spirit.”

Additional photos can be viewed here.