Boston recently got its own good luck charm, “Amulet,” a 19-foot-tall tangle of organic spires installed in City Hall Plaza and embedded with the wishes, hopes, and prayers of residents from across the city.

The public artwork, by artist Rhea Vedro — also a lecturer and metals artist-in-residence in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE) — was installed on the north side of City Hall, in a newly renovated stretch of the plaza along Congress Street, in October and dedicated with a ribbon cutting on Dec. 19.

“I’m really interested in this idea of protective objects worn on the skin by humans across cultures, across time,” said Vedro at the event in the Civic Pavilion, across the plaza from the sculpture. “And then, how do you take those ideas off the body and turn them into a blown-up version — a stand-in for the body?”

Vedro started exploring that question in 2021, when she was awarded a Boston Triennial Public Art Accelerator fellowship and later commissioned by the city to create the piece — the first artwork installed in the refurbished section of the plaza. She invited people to workshops and community centers to create hundreds of “wishmarks” — steel panels with hammered indentations and words, each representing a personal wish or reflection.

The plates were later used to form the metal skin of the sculpture — three bird-like forms designed to be, in Vedro’s words, a “protective amulet for the landscape.”

“I didn’t ask anyone to share what their actual wishes were, but I met people going into surgery, people who were homeless and looking for housing, people who had just lost a loved one, people dealing with immigration issues,” Vedro said. She asked participants to meditate on the idea of a journey and safe passage. “That could be a literal journey with ideas around immigration and migration,” she said, “or it could be your own internal journey.”

Large-scale art, fine-scale detail

Vedro, who has several public artworks to her name, said in a video about making “Amulet” that the project was “the biggest thing I’ve ever done.” While artworks of this scale are often handed off to fabrication teams, she handled the construction herself, starting on her driveway until zoning rules forced her to move to her father-in-law’s warehouse. Sections were also welded at Artisans Asylum, a community workshop in Boston, where she was an artist in residence, and then moved to a large industrial studio in Rhode Island.

At the ribbon-cutting event, Vedro thanked friends, family members, and city officials who helped bring the project to life. The celebration ended with a concert by musician Veronica Robles and her mariachi band. Robles runs the Veronica Robles Cultural Center in East Boston, which served as the main site for wishmark workshops. The sculpture is expected to remain in City Hall Plaza for up to five years.

Vedro’s background is in fine arts metalsmithing, a discipline that involves shaping and manipulating metals like silver, gold, and copper through forging, casting, and soldering. She began working at a very different scale, making jewelry, and then later moved primarily to welded steel sculpture — both techniques she now teaches at MIT. When working with steel, Vedro applies the same sensitivity a jeweler brings to small objects, paying close attention to small undulations and surface texture.

She loves working with steel, Vedro says — “shaping and forming and texturing and fighting with it” — because it allows her to engage physically with the material, with her hands involved in every millimeter.

The sculpture’s fluid design began with loose, free-form bird drawings on a cement floor and rubber panels with soapstone, oil pastels, and paint sticks. Vedro then built the forms in metal, welding three-dimensional armatures from round steel bars. The organic shapes and flourishes emerged through a responsive, intuitive process.

“I’m someone who works in real-time, changing my mind and responding to the material,” Vedro says. She likens her process to making a patchwork quilt of steel pieces: forming patterns in a shapeable material like tar paper, transferring them to steel sheets, cutting and shaping and texturing the pieces, and welding them together. “So I can get lots of curvatures that way that are not at all modular.”

From steel plates to soaring form

The sculpture’s outer skin is made from thin, 20-gauge mild steel — a low-carbon steel that’s relatively soft and easy to work with — used for the wishmarks. Those plates were fitted over an internal armature constructed from heavier structural steel.

Because there were more wishmark panels than surface area, Vedro slipped some of them into the hollow space inside the sculpture before welding the piece closed. She compares them to treasures in a locket, “loose, rattling around, which freaked out the team when they were installing.” Any written text on the panels was burned off when the pieces were welded together.

“I believe the stuff’s all alchemized up into smoke, which to me is wonderful because it traverses realms just like a bird,” she says.

The surface of the sculpture is coated with a sealant — necessary because the outer skin material is prone to rust — along with spray paints, patinas, and accents including gold leaf. Its appearance will change over time, something Vedro embraces.

“The idea of transformation is actually integral to my work,” she says.

Standing outside the warmth of the Civic Pavilion on a windy, rainy day, artist Matt Bajor described the sculpture as “gorgeous,” attributing its impact in part to Vedro’s fluency in working across vastly different scales.

“The attention to detail — paying attention to the smaller things so that as it comes together as a whole, you have that fineness throughout the whole sculpture,” he said. “To do that at such a large scale is just crazy. It takes a lot of skill, a lot of effort, and a lot of time.”

Suveena Sreenilayam, a DMSE graduate student who has worked closely with Vedro, said her understanding of the relationship between art and craft brings a unique dimension to her work.

“Metal is hard to work with — and to build that on such small and large scales indicates real versatility,” Sreenilayam said. “To make something so artistic at this scale reflects her physical talent, and also her eye for detail and expression.”

Bajor said “Amulet” is a striking addition to the plaza, where the clean lines of City Hall’s Brutalist architecture contrast with the sculpture’s sinuous curves — and to Boston itself.

“I’m looking forward to seeing it in different conditions — in snow and bright sun — as the metal changes over time and as the patina develops,” he said. “It’s just a really great addition to the city.”

Through the MITx MicroMasters Program in Data, Economics, and Design of Policy, Munip Utama strengthened the skills he was already applying in his work with Baitul Enza, a nonprofit helping students in need via policy-shaping research and hands-on assistance. 

Utama’s commitment to advancing education for underprivileged students stems from his own background. His father is an elementary school teacher in a remote area and his mother has passed away. While financial hardship has always been a defining challenge, he says it has also been the driving force behind his pursuit of education. With the assistance of special programs for high-achieving students, Utama attended top schools and completed his bachelor’s degree in economics at UIN Jakarta — becoming the second person in his family to earn a university degree.

Utama joined Baitul Enza two months before graduation, through a faculty-led research project, and later became its manager, leading its programs and future development. In this interview, he describes how his experiences with the MicroMasters Program in Data, Economics, and Design of Policy (DEDP), offered by the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) and MIT Open Learning, are shaping his education, career, and personal mission.

Q: What motivated you to pursue the MITx MicroMasters Program in Data, Economics, and Design of Policy?

A: I was seeking high-quality, evidence-based courses in economics and development. I needed rigorous training in data analysis, economic reasoning, and policy design to strengthen our interventions at Baitul Enza. The MITx MicroMasters Program in Data, Economics, and Design of Policy offered exactly that: a curriculum grounded in real-world problem-solving, aligned with the challenges I face in Indonesia.

I deeply admire MIT’s commitment to transforming teaching and learning not only through innovation, but also through empathy. The DEDP program exemplifies this mission: It connects theory with practice, allowing learners like me to apply analytical tools directly to real development challenges. This approach has inspired me to adopt the same philosophy in my own teaching and mentoring, encouraging students to use data and critical thinking to solve problems in their communities.

Q: What have you gained from the MITx DEDP program? 

A: The DEDP courses have provided me with rigorous analytical and quantitative training in data analysis, economics, and policy design. They have strengthened both my research and mentorship abilities by teaching me to approach poverty and inequality through evidence-based frameworks. My experience conducting independent and collaborative research projects has informed how I mentor students, guiding them to carry out their own evidence-based research projects. I continue to seek further academic dialogue to broaden my understanding and prepare for future graduate studies.

Another key component has been the program’s financial assistance offers. Even with DEDP’s personalized income-based course pricing, financial constraints remain a significant challenge for me, and Baitul Enza operates entirely on donations and volunteer support. The scholarships administered by DEDP have been crucial in enabling me to continue my studies. It has allowed me to focus on learning without the constant burden of financial insecurity, while staying committed to my mission of breaking cycles of poverty through education. 

Q: How are you applying what you’ve learned from MIT Open Learning’s MITx programs, and how will you use what you’ve learned going forward?

A: The DEDP program has transformed how I lead Baitul Enza. I now apply data-driven and evidence-based approaches to program design, monitoring, and evaluation — enhancing cost-effectiveness and long-term impact. The program has enabled me to design case-based learning modules for students, where they analyze real-world data on poverty and education; mentor youth researchers to conduct small-scale projects using evidence-based methods; and improve program cost-effectiveness and outcome measurement to attract collaborators and government support.

Coming from a lower-middle-class family with limited access to education, MIT Open Learning has opened doors I never imagined possible. It has reaffirmed my belief that education, grounded in data and empathy, can break the cycle of poverty. The DEDP program continues to inspire me to mentor young researchers, empower disadvantaged students, and build a community rooted in evidence-based decision-making.

With the foundation built by MITx, I aim to produce policy-relevant research and scale up Baitul Enza’s impact. My long-term vision is to generate experimental evidence in Indonesia on scalable education interventions, inform national policy, and empower marginalized youth to thrive. MITx has not only prepared me academically, but has also strengthened my resolve to lead with clarity, design with evidence, and act with purpose. Beyond my own growth, MITx has multiplied its impact by empowering the next generation of students to use data and evidence in solving local development challenges.

MIT researchers have designed silicon structures that can perform calculations in an electronic device using excess heat instead of electricity. These tiny structures could someday enable more energy-efficient computation.

In this computing method, input data are encoded as a set of temperatures using the waste heat already present in a device. The flow and distribution of heat through a specially designed material forms the basis of the calculation. Then the output is represented by the power collected at the other end, which is thermostat at a fixed temperature.      

The researchers used these structures to perform matrix vector multiplication with more than 99 percent accuracy. Matrix multiplication is the fundamental mathematical technique machine-learning models like LLMs utilize to process information and make predictions.

While the researchers still have to overcome many challenges to scale up this computing method for modern deep-learning models, the technique could be applied to detect heat sources and measure temperature changes in electronics without consuming extra energy. This would also eliminate the need for multiple temperature sensors that take up space on a chip.

“Most of the time, when you are performing computations in an electronic device, heat is the waste product. You often want to get rid of as much heat as you can. But here, we’ve taken the opposite approach by using heat as a form of information itself and showing that computing with heat is possible,” says Caio Silva, an undergraduate student in the Department of Physics and lead author of a paper on the new computing paradigm.

Silva is joined on the paper by senior author Giuseppe Romano, a research scientist at MIT’s Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies and a member of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab. The research appears today in Physical Review Applied.

Turning up the heat

This work was enabled by a software system the researchers previously developed that allows them to automatically design a material that can conduct heat in a specific manner.

Using a technique called inverse design, this system flips the traditional engineering approach on its head. The researchers define the functionality they want first, then the system uses powerful algorithms to iteratively design the best geometry for the task.

They used this system to design complex silicon structures, each roughly the same size as a dust particle, that can perform computations using heat conduction. This is a form of analog computing, in which data are encoded and signals are processed using continuous values, rather than digital bits that are either 0s or 1s.

The researchers feed their software system the specifications of a matrix of numbers that represents a particular calculation. Using a grid, the system designs a set of rectangular silicon structures filled with tiny pores. The system continually adjusts each pixel in the grid until it arrives at the desired mathematical function.

Heat diffuses through the silicon in a way that performs the matrix multiplication, with the geometry of the structure encoding the coefficients.

“These structures are far too complicated for us to come up with just through our own intuition. We need to teach a computer to design them for us. That is what makes inverse design a very powerful technique,” Romano says.

But the researchers ran into a problem. Due to the laws of heat conduction, which impose that heat goes from hot to cold regions, these structures can only encode positive coefficients. 

They overcame this problem by splitting the target matrix into its positive and negative components and representing them with separately optimized silicon structures that encode positive entries. Subtracting the outputs at a later stage allows them to compute negative matrix values.

They can also tune the thickness of the structures, which allows them to realize a greater variety of matrices. Thicker structures have greater heat conduction.

“Finding the right topology for a given matrix is challenging. We beat this problem by developing an optimization algorithm that ensures the topology being developed is as close as possible to the desired matrix without having any weird parts,” Silva explains.

Microelectronic applications

The researchers used simulations to test the structures on simple matrices with two or three columns. While simple, these small matrices are relevant for important applications, such as fusion sensing and diagnostics in microelectronics.     

The structures performed computations with more than 99 percent accuracy in many cases.

However, there is still a long way to go before this technique could be used for large-scale applications such as deep learning, since millions of structures would need to be tiled together. As the matrices become more complicated, the structures become less accurate, especially when there is a large distance between the input and output terminals. In addition, the devices have limited bandwidth, which would need to be greatly expanded if they were to be used for deep learning.

But because the structures rely on excess heat, they could be directly applied for tasks like thermal management, as well as heat source or temperature gradient detection in microelectronics.

“This information is critical. Temperature gradients can cause thermal expansion and damage a circuit or even cause an entire device to fail. If we have a localized  heat source where we don’t want a heat source, it means we have a problem. We could directly detect such heat sources with these structures, and we can just plug them in without needing any digital components,” Romano says.

Building on this proof-of-concept, the researchers want to design structures that can perform sequential operations, where the output of one structure becomes an input for the next. This is how machine-learning models perform computations. They also plan to develop programmable structures, enabling them to encode different matrices without starting from scratch with a new structure each time.

Keeril Makan has been appointed vice provost for the arts at MIT, effective Feb. 1. In this role, Makan, who is the Michael (1949) and Sonja Koerner Music Composition Professor at MIT, will provide leadership and strategic direction for the arts across the Institute.

Provost Anantha Chandrakasan announced Makan’s appointment in an email to the MIT community today.

“Keeril’s record of accomplishment both as an artist and an administrative leader makes him exceedingly qualified to take on this important role,” Chandrakasan wrote, noting that Makan “has repeatedly taken on new leadership assignments with skill and enthusiasm.”

Makan’s appointment follows the publication last September of the final report of the Future of the Arts at MIT Committee. At MIT, the report noted, “the arts thrive as a constellation of recognized disciplines while penetrating and illuminating countless aspects of the Institute’s scientific and technological enterprise.” Makan will build on this foundation as MIT continues to strengthen the role of the arts in research, education, and community life.

As vice provost for the arts, Makan will provide Institute-wide leadership and strategic direction for the arts, working in close partnership with academic leaders, arts units, and administrative colleagues across MIT, including the Office of the Arts; the MIT Center for Art, Science and Technology; the MIT Museum; the List Visual Arts Center; and the Council for the Arts at MIT. His role will focus on strengthening connections between artistic practice, research, education, and community life, and on supporting public engagement and interdisciplinary collaboration.

“At MIT, the arts are a vital way of thinking, making, and convening,” Makan says. “As vice provost, my priority is to support and strengthen the extraordinary artistic work already happening across the Institute, while listening carefully to faculty, students, and staff as we shape what comes next. I’m excited to build on MIT’s distinctive, only-at-MIT approach to the arts and to help ensure that artistic practice remains central to MIT’s intellectual and community life.”

Makan says he will begin his new role with a period of listening and learning across MIT’s arts ecosystem, informed by the Future of the Arts at MIT report. His initial focus will be on understanding how artistic practice intersects with research, education, and community life, and on identifying opportunities to strengthen connections, visibility, and coordination across MIT’s many arts activities.

Over time, Makan says he will work with the arts community to advance MIT’s long-standing commitment to artistic excellence and experimentation, while supporting student participation and public engagement in the arts. He said his approach will “emphasize collaboration, clarity, and sustainability, reflecting MIT’s distinctive integration of the arts with science and technology.”

Makan came to MIT in 2006 as an assistant professor of music. From 2018 to 2024, he served as head of the Music and Theater Arts (MTA) Section in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS). In 2023, he was appointed associate dean for strategic initiatives in SHASS, where he helped guide the school’s response to recent fiscal pressures and led Institute-wide strategic initiatives.

With colleagues from MTA and the School of Engineering, Makan helped launch a new, multidisciplinary graduate program in music technology and computation. He was intimately involved in the project to develop the new Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building (Building 18), a state-of-the-art facility that opened in 2025. 

Makan was a member of the Future of the Arts at MIT Committee and chaired a working group on the creation of a center for the humanities, which ultimately became the MIT Human Insight Collaborative (MITHIC), one of the Institute’s strategic initiatives. Since last year, he has served as MITHIC’s faculty lead. Under his leadership, MITHIC has awarded $4.7 million in funding to 56 projects across 28 units at MIT, supporting interdisciplinary, human-centered research and teaching.

Trained initially as a violinist, Makan earned undergraduate degrees in music composition and religion from Oberlin and a PhD in music composition from the University of California at Berkeley.

A critically-acclaimed composer, Makan is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Luciano Berio Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. His music has been recorded by the Kronos Quartet, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, and the International Contemporary Ensemble, and performed at Carnegie Hall, the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, and Tanglewood. His opera, “Persona,” premiered at National Sawdust and was performed at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and by the Los Angeles Opera. The Los Angeles Times described the music from “Persona” as “brilliant.”

Makan succeeds Philip Khoury, the Ford International Professor of History, who served as vice provost for the arts from 2006 before stepping down in 2025. Khoury will return to the MIT faculty following a sabbatical.

In its first moments, the infant universe was a trillion-degree-hot soup of quarks and gluons. These elementary particles zinged around at light speed, creating a “quark-gluon plasma” that lasted for only a few millionths of a second. The primordial goo then quickly cooled, and its individual quarks and gluons fused to form the protons, neutrons, and other fundamental particles that exist today.

Physicists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland are recreating quark-gluon plasma (QGP) to better understand the universe’s starting ingredients. By smashing together heavy ions at close to light speeds, scientists can briefly dislodge quarks and gluons to create and study the same material that existed during the first microseconds of the early universe.

Now, a team at CERN led by MIT physicists has observed clear signs that quarks create wakes as they speed through the plasma, similar to a duck trailing ripples through water. The findings are the first direct evidence that quark-gluon plasma reacts to speeding particles as a single fluid, sloshing and splashing in response, rather than scattering randomly like individual particles.

“It has been a long debate in our field, on whether the plasma should respond to a quark,” says Yen-Jie Lee, professor of physics at MIT. “Now we see the plasma is incredibly dense, such that it is able to slow down a quark, and produces splashes and swirls like a liquid. So quark-gluon plasma really is a primordial soup.”

To see a quark’s wake effects, Lee and his colleagues developed a new technique that they report in the study. They plan to apply the approach to more particle-collision data to zero in on other quark wakes. Measuring the size, speed, and extent of these wakes, and how long it takes for them to ebb and dissipate, can give scientists an idea of the properties of the plasma itself, and how quark-gluon plasma might have behaved in the universe’s first microseconds.

“Studying how quark wakes bounce back and forth will give us new insights on the quark-gluon plasma’s properties,” Lee says. “With this experiment, we are taking a snapshot of this primordial quark soup.”

The study’s co-authors are members of the CMS Collaboration — a team of particle physicists from around the world who work together to carry out and analyze data from the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment, which is one of the general-purpose particle detectors at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. The CMS experiment was used to detect signs of quark wake effects for this study. The open-access study appears in the journal Physics Letters B.

Quark shadows

Quark-gluon plasma is the first liquid to have ever existed in the universe. It is also the hottest liquid ever, as scientists estimate that during its brief existence, the QGP was around a few trillion degrees Celsius. This boiling stew is also thought to have been a near-“perfect” liquid, meaning that the individual quarks and gluons in the plasma flowed together as a smooth, frictionless fluid.

This picture of the QGP is based on many independent experiments and theoretical models. One such model, derived by Krishna Rajagopal, the William A. M. Burden Professor of Physics at MIT, and his collaborators, predicts that the quark-gluon plasma should respond like a fluid to any particles speeding through it. His theory, known as the hybrid model, suggests that when a jet of quarks is zinging through the QGP, it should produce a wake behind it, inducing the plasma to ripple and splash in response.

Physicists have looked for such wake effects in experiments at the Large Hadron Collider and other high-energy particle accelerators. These experiments whip up heavy ions such as lead, to close to the speed of light, at which point they can collide and produce a short-lived droplet of primordial soup, typically lasting for less than a quadrillionth of a second. Scientists essentially take a snapshot of the moment to try and identify characteristics of the QGP.

To identify quark wakes, physicists have looked for pairs of quarks and “antiquarks” — particles that are identical to their quark counterparts, except that certain properties are equal in magnitude but opposite in sign. For instance, when a quark is speeding through plasma, there is likely an antiquark that is traveling at exactly the same speed, but in the opposite direction.

For this reason, physicists have looked for quark/antiquark pairs in the QGP produced in heavy-ion collisions, assuming that the particles might produce identical, detectable wakes through the plasma.

“When you have two quarks produced, the problem is that, when the two quarks go in opposite directions, the one quark overshadows the wake of the second quark,” Lee says.

He and his colleagues realized that looking for the wake of the first quark would be easier if there were no second quark obscuring its effects.

“We have figured out a new technique that allows us to see the effects of a single quark in the QGP, through a different pair of particles,” Lee says.

A wake tag

Rather than search for pairs of quarks and antiquarks in the aftermath of lead ion collisions, Lee’s team instead looked for events with only one quark moving through the plasma, essentially back-to-back with a “Z boson.” A Z boson is a neutral, electrically weak elementary particle that has virtually no effect on the surrounding environment. However, because they exist at a very specific energy, Z bosons are relatively straightforward to detect.

“In this soup of quark-gluon plasma, there are numerous quarks and gluons passing by and colliding with each other,” Lee explains. “Sometimes when we are lucky, one of these collisions creates a Z boson and a quark, with high momentum.”

In such a collision, the two particles should hit each other and fly off in exact opposite directions. While the quark could leave a wake, the Z boson should have no effect on the surrounding plasma. Whatever ripples are observed in the droplet of primordial soup would have been made entirely by the single quark zipping through it.

The team, in collaboration with Professor Yi Chen’s group at Vanderbilt University, reasoned that they could use Z bosons as a “tag” to locate and trace the wake effects of single quarks. For their new study, the researchers looked through data from the Large Hadron Collider’s heavy-ion collision experiments. From 13 billion collisions, they identified about 2,000 events that produced a Z boson. For each of these events, they mapped the energies throughout the short-lived quark-gluon plasma, and consistently observed a fluid-like pattern of splashes in swirls — a wake effect — in the opposite direction of the Z bosons, which the team could directly attribute to the effect of single quarks zooming through the plasma.

What’s more, the physicists found that the wake effects they observed in the data were consistent with what Rajagopal’s hybrid model predicts. In other words, quark-gluon plasma does in fact flow and ripple like a fluid when particles speed through it.

“This is something that many of us have argued must be there for a good many years, and that many experiments have looked for,” says Rajagopal, who was not directly involved with the new study.

“What Yen-Jie and CMS have done is to devise and execute a measurement that has brought them and us the first clean, clear, unambiguous, evidence for this foundational phenomenon,” says Daniel Pablos, professor of physics at Oviedo University in Spain and a collaborator of Rajagopal’s who was not involved in the current study.

“We’ve gained the first direct evidence that the quark indeed drags more plasma with it as it travels,” Lee adds. “This will enable us to study the properties and behavior of this exotic fluid in unprecedented detail.”

This work was supported, in part, by the U.S. Department of Energy.

The Pappalardo Apprentice program pushes the boundaries of the traditional lab experience, inviting a selected group of juniors and seniors to advance their fabrication skills while also providing mentor training and peer-to-peer mentoring opportunities in an environment fueled by creativity, safety, and fun.

“This apprenticeship was largely born of my need for additional lab help during our larger sophomore-level design course, and the desire of third- and fourth-year students to advance their fabrication knowledge and skills,” says Daniel Braunstein, senior lecturer in mechanical engineering (MechE) and director of the Pappalardo Undergraduate Teaching Laboratories. “Though these needs and wants were nothing particularly new, it had not occurred to me that we could combine these interests into a manageable and meaningful program.”

Apprentices serve as undergraduate lab assistants for class 2.007 (Design and Manufacturing I), joining lab sessions and assisting 2.007 students with various aspects of the learning experience including machining, hand-tool use, brainstorming, and peer support. Apprentices also participate in a series of seminars and clinics designed to further their fabrication knowledge and hands-on skills, including advancing understanding of mill and lathe use, computer-aided design and manufacturing (CAD/CAM) and pattern-making.

Putting this learning into practice, junior apprentices fabricate Stirling engines (a closed-cycle heat engine that converts thermal energy into mechanical work), while returning senior apprentices take on more ambitious group projects involving casting. Previous years’ projects included an early 20th-century single-cylinder marine engine and a 19th-century torpedo boat steam engine, on permanent exhibit at the MIT Museum. This spring will focus on copper alloys and fabrication of a replica of an 1899 anchor windlass from the Herreshoff Manufacturing Co., used on the famous New York 70 class sloops.

The sloops, designed by MIT Class of 1870 alumnus Nathanael Greene Herreshoff for wealthy New York Yacht Club members, were a short-lived, single-design racing vessels meant for exclusive competition. The historic racing yachts used robust manual windlasses — mechanical devices used to haul large loads — to manage their substantial anchors.

“The more we got into casting, I was modestly surprised that [the students’] exposure to metals was very limited. So that really launched not just a project, but also a more specific curriculum around metallurgy,” says Braunstein.

Metallurgy is not a traditional part of the curriculum. “I think [the project] really opened up my eyes to how much material choice is an important thing for engineering in general,” says apprentice Jade Durham.

In casting the windlasses, students are working from century-old drawings. “[Looking at these old drawings,] we don't know how they made [the parts],” says Braunstein. “So, there is an element of the discovery of what they may or may not have done. It’s like technical archaeology.”

“You’re really just relying on your knowledge of the windlass system, how it’s meant to work, which surfaces are really critical, and kind of just applying your intuition,” says apprentice Saechow Yap. “I learned a lot about applying my art skills and my ability to judge and shape aesthetic.”

Learning by doing is an important hallmark of an MIT MechE education. The Pappalardo Apprentice Program, which celebrated its 10th year last spring, is housed in the Pappalardo Lab. The lab, established through a gift from Neil Pappalardo ’64, is the self-proclaimed “most wicked labs on campus” — “wicked,” for readers outside of Greater Boston, is slang used in a variety of ways, but generally meaning something is pretty awesome.

“Pappalardo is my favorite place on campus, I had never set foot in any sort of like makerspace or lab before I came to MIT,” says apprentice Wilhem Hector. “I did not just learn how to make things. I got empowered ... [to] make anything.”

Braunstein developed the Pappalardo Apprentice program to reinforce the learning of the older students while building community. In a 2023 interview, he said he called the seminar an apprenticeship to emphasize MIT’s relationship with the art — and industrial character — of engineering.

“I did want to borrow from the language of the trades,” Braunstein said. “MIT has a strong heritage in industrial work; that’s why we were founded. It was not a science institution; it was about the mechanical arts. And I think the blend of the industrial, plus the academic, is what makes this lab particularly meaningful.”

Today, he says the most enjoyable part of the program, for him, is watching relationships develop. “They come in, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and then to see them go to people who are capable of pouring iron, tramming mills, teaching other people how to do it and having this tight group of friends … that's fun to watch.”

Collaborators from across the Commonwealth of Massachusetts came together in December for a daylong summit of the Massachusetts Prison Education Consortium (MPEC), hosted by the Educational Justice Institute (TEJI) at MIT. Held at MIT’s Walker Memorial, the summit aimed to expand access to high-quality education for incarcerated learners and featured presentations by leaders alongside strategy sessions designed to turn ideas into concrete plans to improve equitable access to higher education and reduce recidivism in local communities.

In addition to a keynote address by author and resilience expert Shaka Senghor, speakers such as Molly Lasagna, senior strategy officer in the Ascendium Education Group, and Stefan LoBuglio, former director of the National Institute of Corrections, discussed the roles of learning, healing, and community support in building a more just system for justice-impacted individuals.

The MPEC summit, “Building Integrated Systems Together: Massachusetts Community Colleges and County Corrections 2.0,” addressed three key issues surrounding equitable education: the integration of Massachusetts community college education with county corrections to provide incarcerated individuals with access to higher education; the integration of carceral education with industry to expand work and credentialing opportunities; and the goal of better serving women who experience unique challenges within the criminal legal system.

Created by TEJI, MPEC is a statewide network of Massachusetts colleges, organizations and correctional partners working together to expand access to high-quality, credit-bearing education in Massachusetts prisons and jails. The consortium works on all levels of the pipeline, from academic programming, faculty support, research, reentry pathways, and more, drawing from the research and success of the MIT Prison Education Initiative and the recent restoration of Pell Grant eligibility for incarcerated learners.

The summit was hosted by TEJI co-directors Lee Perlman and Carole Cafferty. Perlman founded the MIT Prison Initiative after years of teaching in MIT’s Experimental Study Group (ESG) and in correctional classrooms. He has been recognized for his work in bringing humanities education to prison settings with three Irwin Sizer Awards and MIT’s Martin Luther King Jr. Leadership Award.

Cafferty jointly co-founded TEJI after more than 30 years’ experience with corrections, including working as superintendent of the Middlesex Jail and House of Correction. She now guides the institute with the knowledge she gained from building integrative and therapeutic educational programs that have since been replicated nationally.

“TEJI serves two populations, incarcerated learners and the MIT community. All of our classes involve MIT students, either learning alongside the incarcerated students or as TAs [teaching assistants],” emphasizes Perlman. In discussing the unification of TEJI with the roles and experiences MIT students take, Perlman further notes: “Our humanities classes, which we call our philosophical life skills curriculum, give MIT students the opportunity to discuss how we want to live our lives with incarcerated students with very different backgrounds.”

These courses, offered through ESG, are subjects with a unique focus that often differ from the traditional focus of a more academic course, often prioritizing hands-on learning and innovative teaching methods. Perlman’s courses are almost always taught in a carceral setting, and he notes that these courses can be highly impactful on the MIT community: “In courses like Philosophy of Love; Non-violence as a Way of Life; and Authenticity and Emotional Intelligence for Teams, the discussions are rich and personal. Many MIT students have described their experience in these classes as life-changing.”

Throughout morning addresses and afternoon strategy sessions, summit attendees developed concrete plans for scaling classroom capacity, aligning curricula with regional labor markets, and strengthening academic and reentry supports that help students remain on the right path after release. Panels explored practical issues, such as how to coordinate registration and credit transfer when a student moves between facilities and how to staff hybrid classrooms that combine in-person and remote instruction, as well as how to measure program outcomes beyond enrollment.

Co-directors Perlman and Cafferty highlighted that the average length of stay within these programs in county facilities is only six months, and that inspired a particular focus on making sure these programs are high-impact even when community members are only able to participate for a short period of time.

Speakers repeatedly emphasized that these logistical challenges often sit atop deeper, more human challenges. In his keynote, Shaka Senghor traced his own journey from trauma to transformation, stressing the power of reading, mentorship, and completing something of one’s own. “What else can you do with your mind?” he asked, describing the moment he realized that the act of reading and writing could change the trajectory of his life.

The line became a refrain throughout the day, a question that caused all to reflect on how prison education could not only function as a workforce pathway, but as a catalyst for dignity and hope after reentry. Senghor also directly confronted the stigma that returning citizens face. “They said I’d be back in prison in six months,” he recalled, using the remark from a corrections officer from the day he was released on parole as a reminder of the structural and social barriers encountered after release.

The summit also brought together funders and implementers who are shaping the field’s future. Molly Lasagna of Ascendium Education Group described the organization’s strategy of “Expand, Support, Connect,” which funds the creation of new educational programs, strengthens basic needs and advising infrastructure, and ensures that individuals leaving prison can transition into high-quality employment opportunities. “How is this education program putting somebody on a pathway to opportunity?” she asked, noting that true change requires aligning education, reentry, and workforce systems.

Participants also heard from Stefan LoBuglio, former director of the National Institute of Corrections and a national thought leader in corrections and reentry, who lauded Massachusetts as a leader while cautioning that staffing shortages, limited program space, and uneven access to technology continue to constrain progress. “We have a crisis in staffing in corrections that does affect our educational programs,” he noted, calling for attention to staff wellness and institutional support as essential components of sustainability.

Throughout the day, TEJI and MPEC leaders highlighted emerging pilots and partnerships, including a new “Prisons to Pathways” initiative aimed at building stackable, transferable credentials aligned with regional industry needs. Additional collaborations with the American Institutes for Research will support new implementation guides and technical assistance resources designed by practitioners in the field.

The summit concluded with a commitment to sustain collaboration. As Senghor reminded participants, the work is both practical and moral. The question he posed, “What else can you do with your mind?,” serves as a reminder to Massachusetts educators, corrections partners, funders, and community organizations to ensure that learning inside prison becomes a foundation for opportunity outside it.
 

On his desk, Bryan Bryson ’07, PhD ’13 still has the notes he used for the talk he gave at MIT when he interviewed for a faculty position in biological engineering. On that sheet, he outlined the main question he wanted to address in his lab: How do immune cells kill bacteria?

Since starting his lab in 2018, Bryson has continued to pursue that question, which he sees as critical for finding new ways to target infectious diseases that have plagued humanity for centuries, especially tuberculosis. To make significant progress against TB, researchers need to understand how immune cells respond to the disease, he says.

“Here is a pathogen that has probably killed more people in human history than any other pathogen, so you want to learn how to kill it,” says Bryson, now an associate professor at MIT. “That has really been the core of our scientific mission since I started my lab. How does the immune system see this bacterium and how does the immune system kill the bacterium? If we can unlock that, then we can unlock new therapies and unlock new vaccines.”

The only TB vaccine now available, the BCG vaccine, is a weakened version of a bacterium that causes TB in cows. This vaccine is widely administered in some parts of the world, but it poorly protects adults against pulmonary TB. Although some treatments are available, tuberculosis still kills more than a million people every year.

“To me, making a better TB vaccine comes down to a question of measurement, and so we have really tried to tackle that problem head-on. The mission of my lab is to develop new measurement modalities and concepts that can help us accelerate a better TB vaccine,” says Bryson, who is also a member of the Ragon Institute of Mass General Brigham, MIT, and Harvard.

From engineering to immunology

Engineering has deep roots in Bryson’s family: His great-grandfather was an engineer who worked on the Panama Canal, and his grandmother loved to build things and would likely have become an engineer if she had had the educational opportunity, Bryson says.

The oldest of four sons, Bryson was raised primarily by his mother and grandparents, who encouraged his interest in science. When he was three years old, his family moved from Worcester, Massachusetts, to Miami, Florida, where he began tinkering with engineering himself, building robots out of Styrofoam cups and light bulbs. After moving to Houston, Texas, at the beginning of seventh grade, Bryson joined his school’s math team.

As a high school student, Bryson had his heart set on studying biomedical engineering in college. However, MIT, one of his top choices, didn’t have a biomedical engineering program, and biological engineering wasn’t yet offered as an undergraduate major. After he was accepted to MIT, his family urged him to attend and then figure out what he would study.

Throughout his first year, Bryson deliberated over his decision, with electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) and aeronautics and astronautics both leading contenders. As he recalls, he thought he might study aero/astro with a minor in biomedical engineering and work on spacesuit design.

However, during an internship the summer after his first year, his mentor gave him a valuable piece of advice: “You should study something that will let you have a lot of options, because you don’t know how the world is going to change.”

When he came back to MIT for his sophomore year, Bryson switched his major to mechanical engineering, with a bioengineering track. He also started looking for undergraduate research positions. A poster in the hallway grabbed his attention, and he ended up with working with the professor whose work was featured: Linda Griffith, a professor of biological engineering and mechanical engineering.

Bryson’s experience in the lab “changed the trajectory of my life,” he says. There, he worked on building microfluidic devices that could be used to grow liver tissue from hepatocytes. He enjoyed the engineering aspects of the project, but he realized that he also wanted to learn more about the cells and why they behaved the way they did. He ended up staying at MIT to earn a PhD in biological engineering, working with Forest White.

In White’s lab, Bryson studied cell signaling processes and how they are altered in diseases such as cancer and diabetes. While doing his PhD research, he also became interested in studying infectious diseases. After earning his degree, he went to work with a professor of immunology at the Harvard School of Public Health, Sarah Fortune.

Fortune studies tuberculosis, and in her lab, Bryson began investigating how Mycobacterium tuberculosis interacts with host cells. During that time, Fortune instilled in him a desire to seek solutions to tuberculosis that could be transformative — not just identifying a new antibiotic, for example, but finding a way to dramatically reduce the incidence of the disease. This, he thought, could be done by vaccination, and in order to do that, he needed to understand how immune cells response to the disease. 

“That postdoc really taught me how to think bravely about what you could do if you were not limited by the measurements you could make today,” Bryson says. “What are the problems we really need to solve? There are so many things you could think about with TB, but what’s the thing that’s going to change history?”

Pursuing vaccine targets

Since joining the MIT faculty eight years ago, Bryson and his students have developed new ways to answer the question he posed in his faculty interviews: How does the immune system kill bacteria?

One key step in this process is that immune cells must be able to recognize bacterial proteins that are displayed on the surfaces of infected cells. Mycobacterium tuberculosis produces more than 4,000 proteins, but only a small subset of those end up displayed by infected cells. Those proteins would likely make the best candidates for a new TB vaccine, Bryson says.

Bryson’s lab has developed ways to identify those proteins, and so far, their studies have revealed that many of the TB antigens displayed to the immune system belong to a class of proteins known as type 7 secretion system substrates. Mycobacterium tuberculosis expresses about 100 of these proteins, but which of these 100 are displayed by infected cells varies from person to person, depending on their genetic background.

By studying blood samples from people of different genetic backgrounds, Bryson’s lab has identified the TB proteins displayed by infected cells in about 50 percent of the human population. He is now working on the remaining 50 percent and believes that once those studies are finished, he’ll have a very good idea of which proteins could be used to make a TB vaccine that would work for nearly everyone.

Once those proteins are chosen, his team can work on designing the vaccine and then testing it in animals, with hopes of being ready for clinical trials in about six years.

In spite of the challenges ahead, Bryson remains optimistic about the possibility of success, and credits his mother for instilling a positive attitude in him while he was growing up.

“My mom decided to raise all four of her children by herself, and she made it look so flawless,” Bryson says. “She instilled a sense of ‘you can do what you want to do,’ and a sense of optimism. There are so many ways that you can say that something will fail, but why don’t we look to find the reasons to continue?”

One of the things he loves about MIT is that he has found a similar can-do attitude across the Institute.

“The engineer ethos of MIT is that yes, this is possible, and what we’re trying to find is the way to make this possible,” he says. “I think engineering and infectious disease go really hand-in-hand, because engineers love a problem, and tuberculosis is a really hard problem.”

When not tackling hard problems, Bryson likes to lighten things up with ice cream study breaks at Simmons Hall, where he is an associate head of house. Using an ice cream machine he has had since 2009, Bryson makes gallons of ice cream for dorm residents several times a year. Nontraditional flavors such as passion fruit or jalapeno strawberry have proven especially popular.

“Recently I did flavors of fall, so I did a cinnamon ice cream, I did a pear sorbet,” he says. “Toasted marshmallow was a huge hit, but that really destroyed my kitchen.”

Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics at MIT, has won the 2025 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Basic Sciences for “discoveries concerning the ‘magic angle’ that allows the behavior of new materials to be transformed and controlled.”

He shares the 400,000-euro award with Allan MacDonald of the University of Texas at Austin. According to the BBVA Foundation, “the pioneering work of the two physicists has achieved both the theoretical foundation and experimental validation of a new field where superconductivity, magnetism, and other properties can be obtained by rotating new two-dimensional materials like graphene.” Graphene is a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in hexagons resembling a honeycomb structure.

Theoretical foundation, experimental validation

In a theoretical model published in 2011, MacDonald predicted that on twisting two graphene layers at a given angle, of around 1 degree, the interaction of electrons would produce new emerging properties.
 
In 2018, Jarillo-Herrero delivered the experimental confirmation of this “magic angle” by rotating two graphene sheets in a way that transformed the material’s behavior, giving rise to new properties like superconductivity.

The physicists’ work “has opened up new frontiers in physics by demonstrating that rotating matter to a given angle allows us to control its behavior, obtaining properties that could have a major industrial impact,” explained award committee member María José García Borge, a research professor at the Institute for the Structure of Matter. “Superconductivity, for example, could bring about far more sustainable electricity transmission, with virtually no energy loss.”

Almost science fiction

MacDonald’s initial discovery had little immediate impact. It was not until some years later, when it was confirmed in the laboratory by Jarillo-Herrero, that its true importance was revealed. 

“The community would never have been so interested in my subject, if there hadn’t been an experimental program that realized that original vision,” observes MacDonald, who refers to his co-laureate’s achievement as “almost science fiction.”

Jarillo-Herrero had been intrigued by the possible effects of placing two graphene sheets on top of each other with a precise rotational alignment, because “it was uncharted territory, beyond the reach of the physics of the past, so was bound to produce some interesting results.”

But the scientist was still unsure of how to make it work in the lab. For years, he had been stacking together layers of the super-thin material, but without being able to specify the angle between them. Finally, he devised a way to do so, making the angle smaller and smaller until he got to the “magic” angle of 1.1 degrees at which the graphene revealed some extraordinary behavior.

“It was a big surprise, because the technique we used, though conceptually straightforward, was hard to pull off in the lab,” says Jarillo-Herrero, who is also affiliated with the Materials Research Laboratory.

Since 2009, the BBVA has given Frontiers of Knowledge Awards to more than a dozen MIT faculty members. The Frontiers of Knowledge Awards, spanning eight prize categories, recognize world-class research and cultural creation and aim to celebrate and promote the value of knowledge as a global public good. The BBVA Foundation works to support scientific research and cultural creation, disseminate knowledge and culture, and recognize talent and innovation. 

Researchers in Class of 1942 Professor of Chemistry Matthew D. Shoulders’ lab have uncovered a sinister hidden mechanism that can allow cancer cells to survive (and, in some cases, thrive) even when hit with powerful drugs. The secret lies in a cellular “safety net” that gives cancer the freedom to develop aggressive mutations.

This fascinating intersection between molecular biology and evolutionary dynamics, published Jan. 22 on the cover of Molecular Cell, focuses on the most famous anti-cancer gene in the human body, TP53 (tumor protein 53, known as p53), and suggests that cancer cells don’t just mutate by accident — they create a specialized environment that makes dangerous mutations possible. 

The guardian under attack

Tasked with the job of stopping damaged cells from dividing, the p53 protein has been known for decades as the “guardian of the genome” and is the most mutated gene in cancer. Some of the most perilous of these mutations are known as “dominant-negative” variants. Not only do they stop working, but they actually prevent any healthy p53 in the cell from doing its job, essentially disarming the body’s primary defense system.

To function, p53 and most other proteins must fold into specific 3D shapes, much like precise cellular origami. Typically, if a mutation occurs that ruins this shape, the protein becomes a tangled mess, and the cell destroys it.

A specialized network of proteins, called cellular chaperones, help proteins fold into their correct shape, collectively known as the proteostasis network. 

“Many chaperone networks are known to be upregulated in cancer cells, for reasons that are not totally clear,” says Stephanie Halim, a graduate student in the Shoulders Group and co-first author of the study, along with Rebecca Sebastian PhD ’22. “We hypothesized that increasing the activities of these helpful protein folding networks can allow cancer cells to tolerate more mutations than a regular cell.”

The research team investigated a “helper” system in the cell called the proteostasis network. This network involves many proteins known as chaperones that help other proteins fold correctly. A master regulator called Heat Shock Factor 1 (HSF1) controls the composition of the proteostasis network, with HSF1 activity upregulating the network to create supportive protein folding environments in response to stress. In healthy cells, HSF1 stays dormant until heat or toxins appear. In cancer, HSF1 is often permanently in action mode.

To see how this works in real-time, the team created a specialized cancer cell line that let them chemically “turn up” the activity of HSF1 on demand. They then used a cutting-edge technique to express every possible singly mutated version of a p53 protein — testing thousands of different genetic “typos” at once.

The results were clear: When HSF1 was amplified, the cancer cells became much better at handling “bad” mutations. Normally, these specific mutations are so physically disruptive that they would cause the protein to collapse and fail. However, with HSF1 providing extra folding help, these unstable, cancer-driving proteins were able to stay intact and keep the cancer growing.

“These findings show that chaperone networks can reshape the fundamental mutational tolerance of the most mutated gene in cancer, linking proteostasis network activity directly to cancer development,” said Halim. “This work also puts us one step closer to understanding how tinkering with cellular protein folding pathways can help with cancer treatment.”

Unravelling cancer’s safety net

The study revealed that HSF1 activity specifically protects normally disruptive amino acid substitutions located deep inside the protein’s core — the most sensitive areas. Without this extra folding help, these substitutions would likely cause degradation of these proteins. With it, the cancer cell can keep these broken proteins around to help it grow.

This discovery helps explain why cancer is so resilient, and why previous attempts to treat cancer by blocking chaperone proteins (like HSP90, an abundant cellular chaperone) have been so complex. By understanding how cancer “buffers” its own bad mutations, doctors may one day be able to break that safety net, forcing the cancer’s own mutations to become its downfall.

The research was conducted in collaboration with the labs of professors Yu-Shan Lin of Tufts University; Francisco J. Sánchez-Rivera of the MIT Department of Biology; William C. Hahn, institute member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and professor of medicine in the Department of Medical Oncology at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School; and Marc L. Mendillo of Northwestern University.

MIT Professor Emeritus Richard O. Hynes PhD ’71, a cancer biologist whose discoveries reshaped modern understandings of how cells interact with each other and their environment, passed away on Jan. 6. He was 81.

Hynes is best known for his discovery of integrins, a family of cell-surface receptors essential to cell–cell and cell–matrix adhesion. He played a critical role in establishing the field of cell adhesion biology, and his continuing research revealed mechanisms central to embryonic development, tissue integrity, and diseases including cancer, fibrosis, thrombosis, and immune disorders.

Hynes was the Daniel K. Ludwig Professor for Cancer Research, Emeritus, an emeritus professor of biology, and a member of the Koch Institute for Integrated Cancer Research at MIT and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. During his more than 50 years on the faculty at MIT, he was deeply respected for his academic leadership at the Institute and internationally, as well as his intellectual rigor and contributions as an educator and mentor.

“Richard had an enormous impact in his career. He was a visionary leader of the MIT Cancer Center, what is now the Koch Institute, during a time when the progress in understanding cancer was just starting to be translated into new therapies,” reflects Matthew Vander Heiden, director of the Koch Institute and the Lester Wolfe (1919) Professor of Molecular Biology. “The research from his laboratory launched an entirely new field by defining the molecules that mediate interactions between cells and between cells and their environment. This laid the groundwork for better understanding the immune system and metastasis.”

Pond skipper

Born in Kenya, Hynes grew up during the 1950s in Liverpool, in the United Kingdom. While he sometimes recounted stories of being schoolmates with two of the Beatles, and in the same Boy Scouts troop as Paul McCartney, his academic interests were quite different, and he specialized in the sciences at a young age. Both of his parents were scientists: His father was a freshwater ecologist, and his mother a physics teacher. Hynes and all three of his siblings followed their parents into scientific fields.

"We talked science at home, and if we asked questions, we got questions back, not answers. So that conditioned me into being a scientist, for sure," Hynes said of his youth.

He described his time as an undergraduate and master’s student at Cambridge University during the 1960s as “just fantastic,” noting that it was shortly after two 1962 Nobel Prizes were awarded to Cambridge researchers — one to Francis Crick and James Watson for the structure of DNA, the other to John Kendrew and Max Perutz for the structures of proteins — and Cambridge was “the place to be” to study biology.

Newly married, Hynes and his wife traded Cambridge, U.K. for Cambridge, Massachusetts, so that he could conduct doctoral work at MIT under the direction of Paul Gross. He tried (and by his own assessment, failed) to differentiate maternal messages among the three germ layers of sea urchin embryos. However, he did make early successful attempts to isolate the globular protein tubulin, a building block for essential cellular structures, from sea urchins.

Inspired by a course he had taken with Watson in the United States, Hynes began work during his postdoc at the Institute of Cancer Research in the U.K. on the early steps of oncogenic transformation and the role of cell migration and adhesion; it was here that he made his earliest discovery and characterizations of the fibronectin protein.

Recruited back to MIT by Salvador Luria, founding director of the MIT Center for Cancer Research, whom he had met during a summer at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute on Cape Cod, Hynes returned to the Institute in 1975 as a founding faculty member of the center and an assistant professor in the Department of Biology.

Big questions about tiny cells

To his own research, Hynes brought the same spirit of inquiry that had characterized his upbringing, asking fundamental questions: How do cells interact with each other? How do they stick together to form tissues?

His research focused on proteins that allow cells to adhere to each other and to the extracellular matrix — a mesh-like network that surrounds cells, providing structural support, as well as biochemical and mechanical cues from the local microenvironment. These proteins include integrins, a type of cell surface receptor, and fibronectins, a family of extracellular adhesive proteins. Integrins are the major adhesion receptors connecting the extracellular matrix to the intracellular cytoskeleton, or main architectural support within the cell.

Hynes began his career as a developmental biologist, studying how cells move to the correct locations during embryonic development. During this stage of development, proper modulation of cell adhesion is critical for cells to move to the correct locations in the embryo.

Hynes’ work also revealed that dysregulation of cell-to-matrix contact plays an important role in cancer cells’ ability to detach from a tumor and spread to other parts of the body, key steps in metastasis.

As a postdoc, Hynes had begun studying the differences in the surface landscapes of healthy cells and tumor cells. It was this work that led to the discovery of fibronectin, which is often lost when cells become cancerous.

He and others found that fibronectin is an important part of the extracellular matrix. When fibronectin is lost, cancer cells can more easily free themselves from their original location and metastasize to other sites in the body. By studying how fibronectin normally interacts with cells, Hynes and others discovered a family of cell surface receptors known as integrins, which function as important physical links with the extracellular matrix. In humans, 24 integrin proteins have been identified. These proteins help give tissues their structure, enable blood to clot, and are essential for embryonic development.

“Richard’s discoveries, along with others’, of cell surface integrins led to the development of a number of life-altering treatments. Among these are treatment of autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis,” notes longtime colleague Phillip Sharp, MIT Institute professor emeritus.

As research technologies advanced, including proteomic and extracellular matrix isolation methods developed directly in Hynes’ laboratory, he and his group were able to uncover increasingly detailed information about specific cell adhesion proteins, the biological mechanisms by which they operate, and the roles they play in normal biology and disease.

In cancer, their work helped to uncover how cell adhesion (and the loss thereof) and the extracellular matrix contribute not only to fundamental early steps in the metastatic process, but also tumor progression, therapeutic response, and patient prognosis. This included studies that mapped matrix protein signatures associated with cancer and non-cancer cells and tissues, followed by investigations into how differentially expressed matrix proteins can promote or suppress cancer progression. 

Hynes and his colleagues also demonstrated how extracellular matrix composition can influence immunotherapy, such as the importance of a family of cell adhesion proteins called selectins for recruiting natural killer cells to tumors. Further, Hynes revealed links between fibronectin, integrins, and other matrix proteins with tumor angiogenesis, or blood vessel development, and also showed how interaction with platelets can stimulate tumor cells to remodel the extracellular matrix to support invasion and metastasis. In pursuing these insights into the oncogenic mechanisms of matrix proteins, Hynes and members of his laboratory have identified useful diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers, as well as therapeutic targets.

Along the way, Hynes shaped not only the research field, but also the careers of generations of trainees.

“There was much to emulate in Richard’s gentle, patient, and generous approach to mentorship. He centered the goals and interests of his trainees, fostered an inclusive and intellectually rigorous environment, and cared deeply about the well-being of his lab members. Richard was a role model for integrity in both personal and professional interactions and set high expectations for intellectual excellence,” recalls Noor Jailkhani, a former Hynes Lab postdoc.

Jailkhani is CEO and co-founder, with Hynes, of Matrisome Bio, a biotech company developing first-in-class targeted therapies for cancer and fibrosis by leveraging the extracellular matrix. “The impact of his long and distinguished scientific career was magnified through the generations of trainees he mentored, whose influence spans academia and the biotechnology industry worldwide. I believe that his dedication to mentorship stands among his most far-reaching and enduring contributions,” she says.

A guiding light

Widely sought for his guidance, Hynes served in a number of key roles at MIT and in the broader scientific community. As head of MIT’s Department of Biology from 1989 to 1991, then a decade as director of the MIT Center for Cancer Research, his leadership has helped shape the Institute’s programs in both areas.

“Words can’t capture what a fabulous human being Richard was. I left every interaction with him with new insights and the warm glow that comes from a good conversation,” says Amy Keating, the Jay A. Stein (1968) Professor, professor of biology and biological engineering, and head of the Department of Biology. “Richard was happy to share stories, perspectives, and advice, always with a twinkle in his eye that conveyed his infinite interest in and delight with science, scientists, and life itself. The calm support that he offered me, during my years as department head, meant a lot and helped me do my job with confidence.”

Hynes served as director of the MIT Center for Cancer Research from 1991 until 2001, positioning the center’s distinguished cancer biology program for expansion into its current, interdisciplinary research model as MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. “He recruited and strongly supported Tyler Jacks to the faculty, who subsequently became director and headed efforts to establish the Koch Institute,” recalls Sharp.

Jacks, a David H. Koch (1962) Professor of Biology and founding director of the Koch Institute, remembers Hynes as a thoughtful, caring, and highly effective leader in the Center for Cancer Research, or CCR, and in the Department of Biology. “I was fortunate to be able to lean on him when I took over as CCR director. He encouraged me to drop in — unannounced — with questions and concerns, which I did regularly. I learned a great deal from Richard, at every level,” he says.

Hynes’ leadership and recognition extended well beyond MIT to national and international contexts, helping to shape policy and strengthen connections between MIT researchers and the wider field. He served as a scientific governor of the Wellcome Trust, a global health research and advocacy foundation based in the United Kingdom, and co-chaired U.S. National Academy committees establishing guidelines for stem cell and genome editing research.

“Richard was an esteemed scientist, a stimulating colleague, a beloved mentor, a role model, and to me a partner in many endeavors both within and beyond MIT,” notes H. Robert Horvitz, a David H. Koch (1962) Professor of Biology. He was a wonderful human being, and a good friend. I am sad beyond words at his passing.”

Awarded Howard Hughes medical investigator status in 1988, Hynes’ research and leadership have since been recognized with a number of other notable honors. Most recently, he received the 2022 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award, which he shared with Erkki Ruoslahti of Sanford Burnham Prebys and Timothy Springer of Harvard University, for his discovery of integrins and pioneering work in cell adhesion.

His other awards include the Canada Gairdner International Award, the Distinguished Investigator Award from the International Society for Matrix Biology, the Robert and Claire Pasarow Medical Research Award, the E.B. Wilson Medal from the American Society for Cell Biology, the David Rall Medal from the National Academy of Medicine and the Paget-Ewing Award from the Metastasis Research Society. Hynes was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the Royal Society of London, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Easily recognized by a commanding stature that belied his soft-spoken nature, Hynes was known around MIT’s campus not only for his acuity, integrity, and wise counsel, but also for his community spirit and service. From serving food at community socials to moderating events and meetings or recognizing the success of colleagues and trainees, his willingness to help spanned roles of every size.

“Richard was a phenomenal friend and colleague. He approached complex problems with a thoughtfulness and clarity that few can achieve,” notes Vander Heiden. “He was also so generous in his willingness to provide help and advice, and did so with a genuine kindness that was appreciated by everyone.”

Hynes is survived by his wife Fleur, their sons Hugh and Colin and their partners, and four grandchildren.

A new computational model of the brain based closely on its biology and physiology not only learned a simple visual category learning task exactly as well as lab animals, but even enabled the discovery of counterintuitive activity by a group of neurons that researchers working with animals to perform the same task had not noticed in their data before, says a team of scientists at Dartmouth College, MIT, and the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Notably, the model produced these achievements without ever being trained on any data from animal experiments. Instead, it was built from scratch to faithfully represent how neurons connect into circuits and then communicate electrically and chemically across broader brain regions to produce cognition and behavior. Then, when the research team asked the model to perform the same task that they had previously performed with the animals (looking at patterns of dots and deciding which of two broader categories they fit), it produced highly similar neural activity and behavioral results, acquiring the skill with almost exactly the same erratic progress.

“It’s just producing new simulated plots of brain activity that then only afterward are being compared to the lab animals. The fact that they match up as strikingly as they do is kind of shocking,” says Richard Granger, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth and senior author of a new study in Nature Communications that describes the model.

A goal in making the model, and newer iterations developed since the paper was written, is not only to offer insight into how the brain works, but also how it might work differently in disease and what interventions could correct those aberrations, adds co-author Earl K. Miller, Picower Professor in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT. Miller, Granger, and other members of the research team have founded the company Neuroblox.ai to develop the models’ biotech applications. Co-author Lilianne R. Mujica-Parodi, a biomedical engineering professor at Stony Brook who is lead principal investigator for the Neuroblox Project, is CEO of the company.

“The idea is to make a platform for biomimetic modeling of the brain so you can have a more efficient way of discovering, developing, and improving neurotherapeutics. Drug development and efficacy testing, for example, can happen earlier in the process, on our platform, before the risk and expense of clinical trials,” says Miller, who is also a faculty member of MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.

Making a biomimetic model

Dartmouth postdoc Anand Pathak created the model, which differs from many others in that it incorporates both small details, such as how individual pairs of neurons connect with each other, and large-scale architecture, including how information processing across regions is affected by neuromodulatory chemicals such as acetylcholine. Pathak and the team iterated their designs to ensure they obeyed various constraints observed in real brains, such as how neurons become synchronized by broader rhythms. Many other models focus only on the small or big scales, but not both, he says.

“We didn’t want to lose the tree, and we didn’t want to lose the forest,” Pathak says.

The metaphorical “trees,” called “primitives” in the study, are small circuits of a few neurons each that connect based on electrical and chemical principles of real cells to perform fundamental computational functions. For example, within the model’s version of the brain’s cortex, one primitive design has excitatory neurons that receive input from the visual system via synapse connections affected by the neurotransmitter glutamate. Those excitatory neurons then densely connect with inhibitory neurons in a competition to signal them to shut down the other excitatory neurons — a “winner-take-all” architecture found in real brains that regulates information processing.

At a larger scale, the model encompasses four brain regions needed for basic learning and memory tasks: a cortex, a brainstem, a striatum, and a “tonically active neuron” (TAN) structure that can inject a little “noise” into the system via bursts of aceytlcholine. For instance, as the model engaged in the task of categorizing the presented patterns of dots, the TAN at first ensured some variability in how the model acted on the visual input so that the model could learn by exploring varied actions and their outcomes. As the model continued to learn, cortex and striatum circuits strengthened connections that suppressed the TAN, enabling the model to act on what it was learning with increasing consistency.

As the model engaged in the learning task, real-world properties emerged, including a dynamic that Miller has commonly observed in his research with animals. As learning progressed, the cortex and striatum became more synchronized in the “beta” frequency band of brain rhythms, and this increased synchrony correlated with times when the model (and the animals) made the correct category judgement about what they were seeing.

Revealing “incongruent” neurons

But the model also presented the researchers with a group of neurons — about 20 percent — whose activity appeared highly predictive of error. When these so-called “incongruent” neurons influenced circuits, the model would make the wrong category judgement. At first, Granger says, the team figured it was a quirk of the model. But then they looked at the real-brain data Miller’s lab accumulated when animals performed the same task.

“Only then did we go back to the data we already had, sure that this couldn’t be in there because somebody would have said something about it, but it was in there, and it just had never been noticed or analyzed,” he says.

Miller says these counterintuitive cells might serve a purpose: it’s all well and good to learn the rules of a task, but what if the rules change? Trying out alternatives from time to time can enable a brain to stumble upon a newly emerging set of conditions. Indeed, a separate Picower Institute lab recently published evidence that humans and other animals do this sometimes.

While the model described in the new paper performed beyond the team’s expectations, Granger says, the team has been expanding it to make it sophisticated enough to handle a greater variety of tasks and circumstances. For instance, they have added more regions and new neuromodulatory chemicals. They’ve also begun to test how interventions such as drugs affect its dynamics.

In addition to Granger, Miller, Pathak and Mujica-Parodi, the paper’s other authors are Scott Brincat, Haris Organtzidis, Helmut Strey, Sageanne Senneff, and Evan Antzoulatos.  

The Baszucki Brain Research Fund, United States, the Office of Naval Research, and the Freedom Together Foundation provided support for the research.

MIT undergraduate Akorfa Dagadu has been named a Schwarzman Scholar and will join the program’s Class of 2026-27 scholars from 40 countries and 83 universities. This year’s 150 Schwarzman Scholars were selected for their leadership potential from a pool of over 5,800 applicants, the highest number in the Schwarzman Scholarship’s 11-year history.

Schwarzman Scholars pursue a one-year, fully funded master’s degree program in global affairs at Schwarzman College, Tsinghua University, in Beijing, China. The graduate curriculum focuses on the pillars of leadership, global affairs, and China, with additional opportunities for cultural immersion, experiential learning, and professional development. The program aims to build a global network of leaders with a well-rounded understanding of China’s evolving role in the world.

Hailing from Ghana, Dagadu is a senior majoring in chemical-biological engineering. At MIT, she researches how enzyme-polymer systems can be designed to break down plastics at end-of-life, work that has been recognized internationally through publications and awards, including the CellPress Rising Scientist Award.

Dagadu is the founder of Ishara, a venture transforming recycling in Ghana by connecting informal waste pickers to transparent, efficient systems with potential to scale across growth markets. She aspires to establish a materials innovation hub in Africa to address the end-of-life of materials, from plastics to e-waste.

MIT’s Schwarzman Scholar applicants receive guidance and mentorship from the distinguished fellowships team in MIT Career Advising and Professional Development, as well as the Presidential Committee on Distinguished Fellowships. Students and alumni interested in learning more should contact Kimberly Benard, associate dean and director of distinguished fellowships and academic excellence.

MIT Lincoln Laboratory has transformed weather intelligence by miniaturizing microwave sounders, instruments that measure Earth's atmospheric temperature, moisture, and water vapor. These instruments are 1/100th the size of traditional sounders aboard multibillion-dollar satellites, enabling them to fit on shoebox-sized CubeSats. 

When deployed in a constellation, the CubeSats can observe rapidly intensifying storms near-hourly — providing fresh data to forecasting professionals during critical windows of storm development that have largely been undetectable by past remote-sensing technology.

Developed at Lincoln Laboratory, the mini microwave sounders were first demonstrated on NASA's TROPICS mission, which measured temperature and humidity soundings as well as precipitation. TROPICS concluded in 2025 with over 11 billion observations, providing scientists with key insights into tropical cyclone evolution. 

Now the technology has been licensed by the commercial firm Tomorrow.io, allowing for the enhancement of global weather coverage for customers in aviation, logistics, agriculture, and emergency management. Tomorrow.io provides clients with hyperlocal forecasts around the globe and is set to launch their own constellation of satellites based on the TROPICS program. Says John Springman, Tomorrow.io's head of space and sensing: “Our overall goal is to fundamentally improve weather forecasts, and that'll improve our downstream products like our weather intelligence.”

Video by Tim Briggs/Lincoln Laboratory | 13 minutes, 58 seconds

Robert Liebeck, a professor of the practice in the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and one of the world’s leading experts on aircraft design, aerodynamics, and hydrodynamics, died on Jan. 12 at age 87.

“Bob was a mentor and dear friend to so many faculty, alumni, and researchers at AeroAstro over the course of 25 years,” says Julie Shah, department head and the H.N. Slater Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT. “He’ll be deeply missed by all who were fortunate enough to know him.”

Liebeck’s long and distinguished career in aerospace engineering included a number of foundational contributions to aerodynamics and aircraft design, beginning with his graduate research into high-lift airfoils. His novel designs came to be known as “Liebeck airfoils” and are used primarily for high-altitude reconnaissance airplanes; Liebeck airfoils have also been adapted for use in Formula One racing cars, racing sailboats, and even a flying replica of a giant pterosaur.

He was perhaps best known for his groundbreaking work on blended wing body (BWB) aircraft. He oversaw the BWB project at Boeing during his celebrated five-decade tenure at the company, working closely with NASA on the X-48 experimental aircraft. After retiring as senior technical fellow at Boeing in 2020, Liebeck remained active in BWB research. He served as technical advisor at BWB startup JetZero, which is aiming to build a more fuel-efficient aircraft for both military and commercial use and has set a target date of 2027 for its demonstration flight. 

Liebeck was appointed a professor of the practice at MIT in 2000, and taught classes on aircraft design and aerodynamics. 

“Bob contributed to the department both in aircraft capstones and also in advising students and mentoring faculty, including myself,” says John Hansman, the T. Wilson Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics. “In addition to aviation, Bob was very significant in car racing and developed the downforce wing and flap system which has become standard on F1, IndyCar, and NASCAR cars.”

He was a major contributor to the Silent Aircraft Project, a collaboration between MIT and Cambridge University led by Dame Ann Dowling. Liebeck also worked closely with Professor Woody Hoburg ’08 and his research group, advising on students’ research into efficient methods for designing aerospace vehicles. Before Hoburg was accepted into the NASA astronaut corps in 2017, the group produced an open-source Python package, GPkit, for geometric programming, which was used to design a five-day endurance unmanned aerial vehicle for the U.S. Air Force.

“Bob was universally respected in aviation and he was a good friend to the department,” remembers Professor Ed Greitzer.

Liebeck was an AIAA honorary fellow and Boeing senior technical fellow, as well as a member of the National Academy of Engineering, Royal Aeronautical Society, and Academy of Model Aeronautics. He was a recipient of the Guggenheim Medal and ASME Spirit of St. Louis Medal, among many other awards, and was inducted into the International Air and Space Hall of Fame.

An avid runner and motorcyclist, Liebeck is remembered by friends and colleagues for his adventurous nature and generosity of spirit. Throughout a career punctuated by honors and achievements, Liebeck found his greatest satisfaction in teaching. In addition to his role at MIT, he was an adjunct faculty member at University of California at Irving and served as faculty member for that university’s Design/Build/Fly and Human-Powered Airplane teams.

“It is the one job where I feel I have done some good — even after a bad lecture,” he told AeroAstro Magazine in 2007. “I have decided that I am finally beginning to understand aeronautical engineering, and I want to share that understanding with our youth.”

More than 200 years ago, the steam boiler helped spark the Industrial Revolution. Since then, steam has been the lifeblood of industrial activity around the world. Today the production of steam — created by burning gas, oil, or coal to boil water — accounts for a significant percentage of global energy use in manufacturing, powering the creation of paper, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, food, and more.

Now, the startup AtmosZero, founded by Addison Stark SM ’10, PhD ’14; Todd Bandhauer; and Ashwin Salvi, is taking a new approach to electrify the centuries-old steam boiler. The company has developed a modular heat pump capable of delivering industrial steam at temperatures up to 150 degrees Celsius to serve as a drop-in replacement for combustion boilers.

The company says its first 1-megawatt steam system is far cheaper to operate than commercially available electric solutions thanks to ultra-efficient compressor technology, which uses 50 percent less electricity than electric resistive boilers. The founders are hoping that’s enough to make decarbonized steam boilers drive the next industrial revolution.

“Steam is the most important working fluid ever,” says Stark, who serves as AtmosZero’s CEO. “Today everything is built around the ubiquitous availability of steam. Cost-effectively electrifying that requires innovation that can scale. In other words, it requires a mass-produced product — not one-off projects.”

Tapping into steam

Stark joined the Technology and Policy Program when he came to MIT in 2007. He ultimately completed a dual master’s degree by adding mechanical engineering to his studies.

“I was interested in the energy transition and in accelerating solutions to enable that,” Stark says. “The transition isn’t happening in a vacuum. You need to align economics, policy, and technology to drive that change.”

Stark stayed at MIT to earn his PhD in mechanical engineering, studying thermochemical biofuels.

After MIT, Stark began working on early-stage energy technologies with the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency— Energy (ARPA-E), with a focus on manufacturing efficiency, the energy-water nexus, and electrification.

“Part of that work involved applying my training at MIT to things that hadn’t really been innovated on for 50 years,” Stark says. “I was looking at the heat exchanger. It’s so fundamental. I thought, ‘How might we reimagine it in the context of modern advances in manufacturing technology?’”

The problem is as difficult as it is consequential, touching nearly every corner of the global industrial economy. More than 2.2 gigatons of CO2 emissions are generated each year to turn water into steam — accounting for more than 5 percent of global energy-related emissions.

In 2020, Stark co-authored an article in the journal Joule with Gregory Thiel SM ’12, PhD ’15 titled, “To decarbonize industry, we must decarbonize heat.” The article examined opportunities for industrial heat decarbonization, and it got Stark excited about the potential impact of a standardized, scalable electric heat pump.

Most electric boiler options today bring huge increases in operating costs. Many also make use of factory waste heat, which requires pricey retrofits. Stark never imagined he’d become an entrepreneur, but he soon realized no one was going to act on his findings for him.

“The only path to seeing this invention brought out into the world was to found and run the company,” Stark says. “It’s something I didn’t anticipate or necessarily want, but here I am.”

Stark partnered with former ARPA-E awardee Todd Bandhauer, who had been inventing new refrigerant compressor technology in his lab at Colorado State University, and former ARPA-E colleague Ashwin Salvi. The team officially founded AtmosZero in 2022.

“The compressor is the engine of the heat pump and defines the efficiency, cost, and performance,” Stark says. “The fundamental challenge of delivering heat is that the higher your heat pump is raising the air temperature, the lower your maximum efficiency. It runs into thermodynamic limitations. By designing for optimum efficiency in the operational windows that matter for the refrigerants we’re using, and for the precision manufacturing of our compressors, we’re able to maximize the individual stages of compression to maximize operational efficiency.”

The system can work with waste heat from air or water, but it doesn’t need waste heat to work. Many other electric boilers rely on waste heat, but Stark thinks that adds too much complexity to installation and operations.

Instead, in AtmosZero’s novel heat pump cycle, heat from ambient-temperature air is used to warm a liquid heat transfer material, which evaporates a refrigerant so it flows into the system’s series of compressors and heat exchangers, reaching high enough temperatures to boil water while recovering heat from the refrigerant once it reaches lower temperatures. The system can be ramped up and down to seamlessly fit into existing industrial processes.

“We can work just like a combustion boiler,” Stark says. “At the end of the day, customers don’t want to change how their manufacturing facilities operate in order to electrify. You can’t change or increase complexity on-site.”

That approach means the boiler can be deployed in a range of industrial contexts without unique project costs or other changes.

“What we really offer is flexibility and something that can drop in with ease and minimize total capital costs,” Stark says.

From 1 to 1,000

AtmosZero already has a pilot 650 kilowatt system operating at a customer facility near its headquarters in Loveland, Colorado. The company is currently focused on demonstrating year-round durability and reliability of the system as they work to build out their backlog of orders and prepare to scale. 

Stark says once the system is brought to a customer’s facility, it can be installed in an afternoon and deployed in a matter of days, with zero downtime.

AtmosZero is aiming to deliver a handful of units to customers over the next year or two, with plans to deploy hundreds of units a year after that. The company is currently targeting manufacturing plants using under 10 megawatts of thermal energy at peak demand, which represents most U.S. manufacturing facilities.

Stark is proud to be part of a growing group of MIT-affiliated decarbonization startups, some of which are targeting specific verticals, like Boston Metal for steel and Sublime Systems for cement. But he says beyond the most common materials, the industry gets very fragmented, with one of the only common threads being the use of steam.

“If we look across industrial segments, we see the ubiquity of steam,” Stark says. “It’s a tremendously ripe opportunity to have impact at scale. Steam cannot be removed from industry. So much of every industrial process that we’ve designed over the last 160 years has been around the availability of steam. So, we need to focus on ways to deliver low-emissions steam rather than removing it from the equation.”

MIT researchers have identified significant examples of machine-learning model failure when those models are applied to data other than what they were trained on, raising questions about the need to test whenever a model is deployed in a new setting.

“We demonstrate that even when you train models on large amounts of data, and choose the best average model, in a new setting this ‘best model’ could be the worst model for 6-75 percent of the new data,” says Marzyeh Ghassemi, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), a member of the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, and principal investigator at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems.

In a paper that was presented at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2025) conference in December, the researchers point out that models trained to effectively diagnose illness in chest X-rays at one hospital, for example, may be considered effective in a different hospital, on average. The researchers’ performance assessment, however, revealed that some of the best-performing models at the first hospital were the worst-performing on up to 75 percent of patients at the second hospital, even though when all patients are aggregated in the second hospital, high average performance hides this failure.

Their findings demonstrate that although spurious correlations — a simple example of which is when a machine-learning system, not having “seen” many cows pictured at the beach, classifies a photo of a beach-going cow as an orca simply because of its background — are thought to be mitigated by just improving model performance on observed data, they actually still occur and remain a risk to a model’s trustworthiness in new settings. In many instances — including areas examined by the researchers such as chest X-rays, cancer histopathology images, and hate speech detection — such spurious correlations are much harder to detect.

In the case of a medical diagnosis model trained on chest X-rays, for example, the model may have learned to correlate a specific and irrelevant marking on one hospital’s X-rays with a certain pathology. At another hospital where the marking is not used, that pathology could be missed.

Previous research by Ghassemi’s group has shown that models can spuriously correlate such factors as age, gender, and race with medical findings. If, for instance, a model has been trained on more older people’s chest X-rays that have pneumonia and hasn’t “seen” as many X-rays belonging to younger people, it might predict that only older patients have pneumonia.

“We want models to learn how to look at the anatomical features of the patient and then make a decision based on that,” says Olawale Salaudeen, an MIT postdoc and the lead author of the paper, “but really anything that’s in the data that’s correlated with a decision can be used by the model. And those correlations might not actually be robust with changes in the environment, making the model predictions unreliable sources of decision-making.”

Spurious correlations contribute to the risks of biased decision-making. In the NeurIPS conference paper, the researchers showed that, for example, chest X-ray models that improved overall diagnosis performance actually performed worse on patients with pleural conditions or enlarged cardiomediastinum, meaning enlargement of the heart or central chest cavity.

Other authors of the paper included PhD students Haoran Zhang and Kumail Alhamoud, EECS Assistant Professor Sara Beery, and Ghassemi.

While previous work has generally accepted that models ordered best-to-worst by performance will preserve that order when applied in new settings, called accuracy-on-the-line, the researchers were able to demonstrate examples of when the best-performing models in one setting were the worst-performing in another.

Salaudeen devised an algorithm called OODSelect to find examples where accuracy-on-the-line was broken. Basically, he trained thousands of models using in-distribution data, meaning the data were from the first setting, and calculated their accuracy. Then he applied the models to the data from the second setting. When those with the highest accuracy on the first-setting data were wrong when applied to a large percentage of examples in the second setting, this identified the problem subsets, or sub-populations. Salaudeen also emphasizes the dangers of aggregate statistics for evaluation, which can obscure more granular and consequential information about model performance.

In the course of their work, the researchers separated out the “most miscalculated examples” so as not to conflate spurious correlations within a dataset with situations that are simply difficult to classify.

The NeurIPS paper releases the researchers’ code and some identified subsets for future work.

Once a hospital, or any organization employing machine learning, identifies subsets on which a model is performing poorly, that information can be used to improve the model for its particular task and setting. The researchers recommend that future work adopt OODSelect in order to highlight targets for evaluation and design approaches to improving performance more consistently.

“We hope the released code and OODSelect subsets become a steppingstone,” the researchers write, “toward benchmarks and models that confront the adverse effects of spurious correlations.”

Our thoughts are specified by our knowledge and plans, yet our cognition can also be fast and flexible in handling new information. How does the well-controlled and yet highly nimble nature of cognition emerge from the brain’s anatomy of billions of neurons and circuits? 

A study by researchers in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT provides new evidence from tests in animals that the answer might be found within a theory called “spatial computing.”

First proposed in 2023 by Picower Professor Earl K. Miller and colleagues Mikael Lundqvist and Pawel Herman, spatial computing theory explains how neurons in the prefrontal cortex can be organized on the fly into a functional group capable of carrying out the information processing required by a cognitive task. Moreover, it allows for neurons to participate in multiple such groups, as years of experiments have shown that many prefrontal neurons can indeed participate in multiple tasks at once. 

The basic idea of the theory is that the brain recruits and organizes ad hoc “task forces” of neurons by using “alpha” and “beta” frequency brain waves (about 10-30Hz) to apply control signals to physical patches of the prefrontal cortex. Rather than having to rewire themselves into new physical circuits every time a new task must be done, the neurons in the patch instead process information by following the patterns of excitation and inhibition imposed by the waves.

Think of the alpha and beta frequency waves as stencils that shape when and where in the prefrontal cortex groups of neurons can take in or express information from the senses, Miller says. In that way, the waves represent the rules of the task and can organize how the neurons electrically “spike” to process the information content needed for the task.

“Cognition is all about large-scale neural self-organization,” says Miller, senior author of the paper in Current Biology and a faculty member in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. “Spatial computing explains how the brain does that.”

Testing five predictions

A theory is just an idea. In the study, lead author Zhen Chen and other current and former members of Miller’s lab put spatial computing to the test by examining whether five predictions it makes about neural activity and brain wave patterns were actually evident in measurements made in the prefrontal cortex of animals as they engaged in two working memory and one categorization tasks. Across the tasks there were distinct pieces of sensory information to process (e.g., “A blue square appeared on the screen followed by a green triangle”) and rules to follow (e.g., “When new shapes appear on the screen, do they match the shapes I saw before and appear in the same order?”)

The first two predictions were that alpha and beta waves should represent task controls and rules, while the spiking activity of neurons should represent the sensory inputs. When the researchers analyzed the brain wave and spiking readings gathered by the four electrode arrays implanted in the cortex, they found that indeed these predictions were true. Neural spikes, but not the alpha/beta waves, carried sensory information. While both spikes and the alpha/beta waves carried task information, it was strongest in the waves, and it peaked at times relevant to when rules were needed to carry out the tasks.

Notably, in the categorization task, the researchers purposely varied the level of abstraction to make categorization more or less cognitively difficult. The researchers saw that the greater the difficulty, the stronger the alpha/beta wave power was, further showing that it carries task rules.

The next two predictions were that alpha/beta would be spatially organized, and that when and where it was strong, the sensory information represented by spiking would be suppressed, but where and when it was weak, spiking would increase. These predictions also held true in the data. Under the electrodes, Chen, Miller, and the team could see distinct spatial patterns of higher or lower wave power, and where power was high, the sensory information in spiking was low, and vice versa.

Finally, if spatial computing is valid, the researchers predicted, then trial by trial, alpha/beta power and timing should accurately correlate with the animals’ performance. Sure enough, there were significant differences in the signals on trials where the animals performed the tasks correctly versus when they made mistakes. In particular, the measurements predicted mistakes due to messing up task rules versus sensory information. For instance, alpha/beta discrepancies pertained to the order in which stimuli appeared (first square then triangle) rather than the identity of the individual stimuli (square or triangle).

Compatible with findings in humans

By conducting this study with animals, the researchers were able to make direct measurements of individual neural spikes as well as brain waves, and in the paper, they note that other studies in humans report some similar findings. For instance, studies using noninvasive EEG and MEG brain wave readings show that humans use alpha oscillations to inhibit activity in task-irrelevant areas under top-down control, and that alpha oscillations appear to govern task-related activity in the prefrontal cortex.

While Miller says he finds the results of the new study, and their intersection with human studies, to be encouraging, he acknowledges that more evidence is still needed. For instance, his lab has shown that brain waves are typically not still (like a jump rope), but travel across areas of the brain. Spatial computing should account for that, he says.

In addition to Chen and Miller, the paper’s other authors are Scott Brincat, Mikael Lundqvist, Roman Loonis, and Melissa Warden.

The U.S. Office of Naval Research, The Freedom Together Foundation, and The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory funded the study.

Gemstones like precious opal are beautiful to look at and deceivingly complex. As you look at such gems from different angles, you’ll see a variety of tints glisten, causing you to question what color the rock actually is. It’s iridescent thanks to something called structural color — microscopic structures that reflect light to produce radiant hues.

Structural color can be found across different organisms in nature, such as on the tails of peacocks and the wings of certain butterflies. Scientists and artists have been working to replicate this quality, but outside of the lab, it’s still very hard to recreate, causing a barrier to on-demand, customizable fabrication. Instead, companies and individual designers alike have resorted to adding existing color-changing objects like feathers and gems to things like personal items, clothes, and artwork.

Now MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) researchers have replicated nature’s brilliance with a new optical system called “MorphoChrome.” MorphoChrome allows users to design and program iridescence onto everyday objects (like a glove, for example), augmenting them with the structurally colored multi-color glimmer reminiscent of many gemstones. You select particular colors from a color wheel in the team’s software program and use their handheld device to “paint” with multi-color light onto holographic film. Then, you apply that painted sheet to 3D-printed objects or flexible substrates such as fashion items, sporting goods, and other personal accessories, using their unique epoxy resin transfer process.

“We wanted to tap into the innate intelligence of nature,” says MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) PhD student and CSAIL researcher Paris Myers SM ’25, who is a lead author on a recent paper presenting MorphoChrome. “In the past, you couldn’t easily synthesize structural color yourself, but using pigments or dyes gave you full creative expression. With our system, you have full creative agency over this new material space, predictably programming iridescent designs in real-time.”

MorphoChrome showed it could add a luminous touch to things like a necklace charm of a butterfly. What started as a static, black accessory became a shiny pendant with green, orange, and blue glimmers, thanks to the system’s programmable color process. MorphoChrome also turned golfing gloves into beginner-friendly training equipment that shine green when you hold a golf club at the correct angle, and even helped one user adorn their fingernails with a gemstone-like look.

These multi-color displays are the result of a handheld fabrication process where MorphoChrome acts as a “brush" to paint with red-green-blue (RGB) laser light, while a holographic photopolymer film (used for things like passports and debit cards) is the canvas. Users first connect the system’s handheld device to a computer via a USB-C port, then open the software program. They can then click “send color” to rapidly transmit different hues from their laptop or home computer to the MorphoChrome hardware tool.

This handheld device transforms the colors on a screen into a controllable, multi-color RGB laser light output that instantly exposes the film, a sort of canvas where users can explore different combinations of hues. About the size of a glue bottle, MorphoChrome’s optical machine houses red, green, and blue lasers, which are activated at various intensities depending on the color chosen. These lights are reflected off mirrors toward an optical prism, where the colors mix and are promptly released as a single combined beam of light. 

After designing the film, one can fabricate diverse structurally colored objects by first coating a chosen object with a thin layer of epoxy resin. Next, the holographic film (litiholographics) — composed of a photopolymer layer and a protective plastic backing — is bonded to the object through a 20-second ultraviolet cure, essentially using a handheld UV light to transfer the colored design onto the surface. Finally, users peel off the film’s protective plastic sheet, revealing a color-changing, structurally-colored object that looks like a jewel. 

Do try this at home

MorphoChrome is surprisingly user-friendly, consisting of a straightforward fabrication blueprint and an easy-to-use device that encourages do-it-yourself designers and other makers to explore iridescent designs at home. Instead of spending time searching for hard-to-find artistic materials or chemically synthesizing structural color in the lab, users can focus on expressing various ideas and experimenting with programming different radiant color mixes.

The array of possible colors stems from intriguing fusions. Nagenta, for instance, is created after the system’s blue and red lasers mix. Selecting cyan on the MorphoChrome software’s color wheel will mix the green and blue lights.

Users should note that the time it takes to fully expose the film to each color will vary, based on the researchers’ multi-color findings and the intrinsic properties of holographic photopolymer film. MorphoChrome activates green in 2.5 seconds, whereas red takes about 3 seconds, and blue needs roughly 6 seconds to saturate. The reason for this discrepancy is that each color is a particular wavelength of light, requiring a certain level of light exposure (blue needing more than green or red).

Look at this hologram

MorphoChrome builds upon previous work on stretchable structural color by co-author Benjamin Miller PhD ’24, Professor Mathias Kolle, and Kolle’s Laboratory for Biologically Inspired Photonic Engineering group at MIT's Department of Mechanical Engineering. The CSAIL researchers, who work in the Human-Computer Interaction Engineering Group, say that MorphoChrome also advances their ongoing work on merging computation with unique materials to create dynamic, programmable color interfaces. 

Going forward, their goal is to push the capabilities of holographic structural color as a reprogrammable design and manufacturing space, empowering individuals and industries alike to customize iridescent and diffuse multi-color interfaces. “The polymer sheet we went with here is holographic, which has potential beyond what we’re showing here,” says co-author Yunyi Zhu ’20, MEng ’21, who is an MIT EECS PhD student and CSAIL researcher. “We’re working on adapting our process for creating entire 3D light fields in one film.”

Customizing full light-field holographic messages onto objects would allow users to encode information and 3D images. One could imagine, for example, that a passport could have a sticker that beams out a 3D green check mark. This hologram would signal its authenticity when viewed through a particular device or at a certain angle.

The team is also inspired by how animals use structural color as an adaptive communication channel and camouflage technique. Going forward, they are curious how programmable structural color could be integrated into different types of environments, perhaps as camouflage for soft robotic structures to blend into an environment. For instance, they imagine a robot studying jungle terrain may need to match the appearance of nearby bushes to collect data, with a human reprogramming the machine’s color from afar.

In the meantime, MorphoChrome recreates the majestic structural color found in various ecosystems, connecting a natural phenomenon with our creative processes. MIT researchers will look to improve the system’s color gamut and maximize how luminous mixed colors are. They’re also considering using another material for the device’s casing, since its current 3D-printing housing leaks out some light.

“Being able to easily create and manipulate structural color is a great new tool, and opens up new avenues for discovery and expression,” says Liti Holographics CEO Paul Christie SM ’97, who wasn’t involved in the research. “Simplifying the process to be more easily accessible allows for new applications to be developed in a wider range of areas, from art and jewelry to functional fabric.”

Myers, Zhu, and Miller wrote the paper with senior author Stefanie Mueller, who is an MIT associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science and CSAIL principal investigator. Their research was supported by the National Science Foundation, and presented as a demo paper and poster at the 2025 ACM Symposium on Computational Fabrication in November.

Over the years, passing spacecraft have observed mystifying weather patterns at the poles of Jupiter and Saturn. The two planets host very different types of polar vortices, which are huge atmospheric whirlpools that rotate over a planet’s polar region. On Saturn, a single massive polar vortex appears to cap the north pole in a curiously hexagonal shape, while on Jupiter, a central polar vortex is surrounded by eight smaller vortices, like a pan of swirling cinnamon rolls.

Given that both planets are similar in many ways — they are roughly the same size and made from the same gaseous elements — the stark difference in their polar weather patterns has been a longstanding mystery.

Now, MIT scientists have identified a possible explanation for how the two different systems may have evolved. Their findings could help scientists understand not only the planets’ surface weather patterns, but also what might lie beneath the clouds, deep within their interiors.

In a study appearing this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team simulates various ways in which well-organized vortex patterns may form out of random stimulations on a gas giant. A gas giant is a large planet that is made mostly of gaseous elements, such as Jupiter and Saturn. Among a wide range of plausible planetary configurations, the team found that, in some cases, the currents coalesced into a single large vortex, similar to Saturn’s pattern, whereas other simulations produced multiple large circulations, akin to Jupiter’s vortices.

After comparing simulations, the team found that vortex patterns, and whether a planet develops one or multiple polar vortices, comes down to one main property: the “softness” of a vortex’s base, which is related to the interior composition. The scientists liken an individual vortex to a whirling cylinder spinning through a planet’s many atmospheric layers. When the base of this swirling cylinder is made of softer, lighter materials, any vortex that evolves can only grow so large. The final pattern can then allow for multiple smaller vortices, similar to those on Jupiter. In contrast, if a vortex’s base is made of harder, denser stuff, it can grow much larger and subsequently engulf other vortices to form one single, massive vortex, akin to the monster cyclone on Saturn.

“Our study shows that, depending on the interior properties and the softness of the bottom of the vortex, this will influence the kind of fluid pattern you observe at the surface,” says study author Wanying Kang, assistant professor in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). “I don’t think anyone’s made this connection between the surface fluid pattern and the interior properties of these planets. One possible scenario could be that Saturn has a harder bottom than Jupiter.”

The study’s first author is MIT graduate student Jiaru Shi.

Spinning up

Kang and Shi’s new work was inspired by images of Jupiter and Saturn that have been taken by the Juno and Cassini missions. NASA’s Juno spacecraft has been orbiting around Jupiter since 2016, and has captured stunning images of the planet’s north pole and its multiple swirling vortices. From these images, scientists have estimated that each of Jupiter’s vortices is immense, spanning about 3,000 miles across — almost half as wide as the Earth itself.

The Cassini spacecraft, prior to intentionally burning up in Saturn’s atmosphere in 2017, orbited the ringed planet for 13 years. Its observations of Saturn’s north pole recorded a single, hexagonal-shaped polar vortex, about 18,000 miles wide.

“People have spent a lot of time deciphering the differences between Jupiter and Saturn,” Shi says. “The planets are about the same size and are both made mostly of hydrogen and helium. It’s unclear why their polar vortices are so different.”

Shi and Kang set out to identify a physical mechanism that would explain why one planet might evolve a single vortex, while the other hosts multiple vortices. To do so, they worked with a two-dimensional model of surface fluid dynamics. While a polar vortex is three-dimensional in nature, the team reasoned that they could accurately represent vortex evolution in two dimensions, as the fast rotation of Jupiter and Saturn enforces uniform motion along the rotating axis.

“In a fast-rotating system, fluid motion tends to be uniform along the rotating axis,” Kang explains. “So, we were motivated by this idea that we can reduce a 3D dynamical problem to a 2D problem because the fluid pattern does not change in 3D. This makes the problem hundreds of times faster and cheaper to simulate and study.”

Getting to the bottom

Following this reasoning, the team developed a two-dimensional model of vortex evolution on a gas giant, based on an existing equation that describes how swirling fluid evolves over time.

“This equation has been used in many contexts, including to model midlatitude cyclones on Earth,” Kang says. “We adapted the equation to the polar regions of Jupiter and Saturn.”

The team applied their two-dimensional model to simulate how fluid would evolve over time on a gas giant under different scenarios. In each scenario, the team varied the planet’s size, its rate of rotation, its internal heating, and the softness or hardness of the rotating fluid, among other parameters. They then set a random “noise” condition, in which fluid initially flowed in random patterns across the planet’s surface. Finally, they observed how the fluid evolved over time given the scenario’s specific conditions.

Over multiple different simulations, they observed that some scenarios evolved to form a single large polar vortex, like Saturn, whereas others formed multiple smaller vortices, like Jupiter. After analyzing the combinations of parameters and variables in each scenario and how they related to the final outcome, they landed on a single mechanism to explain whether a single or multiple vortices evolve: As random fluid motions start to coalesce into individual vortices, the size to which a vortex can grow is limited by how soft the bottom of the vortex is. The softer, or lighter the gas is that is rotating at the bottom of a vortex, the smaller the vortex is in the end, allowing for multiple smaller-scale vortices to coexist at a planet’s pole, similar to those on Jupiter.

Conversely, the harder or denser a vortex bottom is, the larger the system can grow, to a size where eventually it can follow the planet’s curvature as a single, planetary-scale vortex, like the one on Saturn.

If this mechanism is indeed what is at play on both gas giants, it would suggest that Jupiter could be made of softer, lighter material, while Saturn may harbor heavier stuff in its interior.

“What we see from the surface, the fluid pattern on Jupiter and Saturn, may tell us something about the interior, like how soft the bottom is,” Shi says. “And that is important because maybe beneath Saturn’s surface, the interior is more metal-enriched and has more condensable material which allows it to provide stronger stratification than Jupiter. ”

"Because Jupiter and Saturn are otherwise so similar, their different polar weather has been a puzzle,” says Yohai Kaspi, a professor of geophysical fluid dynamics at the Weizmann Institute of Science, and a member of the Juno mission’s science team, who was not involved in the new study. “The work by Shi and Kang reveals a surprising link between these differences and the planets’ deep interior ‘softness’, offering a new way to map the key internal properties that shape their atmospheres."

This research was supported, in part, by a Mathworks Fellowship and endowed funding from MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences.