Brian Hanna, operations manager of MIT Venture Mentoring Service (VMS), connects skilled volunteer mentors with MIT entrepreneurs looking to launch, expand, and enhance their vision.  

MIT VMS is a free service, supporting innovation across the Institute, available to all current MIT students, staff members, faculty members, or alums of a degree-granting program living in the Greater Boston area. If a community member has an idea that they’d like help developing, Hanna and his team will match them with a team of mentors who can provide practical, as-needed expertise and knowledge to guide your venture. 

VMS is part of the MIT ecosystem for entrepreneurs. VMS mentors are selected for their experience in areas relevant to entrepreneurs’ needs and assist with a range of business challenges, including marketing, finance, and product development. As the program celebrates its 25th anniversary of serving MIT’s entrepreneurial community, it has supported more than 3,500 ventures and mentored over 4,800 participants. 

When Hanna began working at VMS in 2023, he was new to the program but not to the Institute. Prior to joining VMS, he served as the employer relations coordinator in Career Advising and Professional Development (CAPD), where he worked with companies interested in recruiting MIT talent. His responsibilities included organizing career fairs, scheduling interviews, and building relationships with various local employers. After two years at CAPD, Hanna transitioned to the role of center coordinator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. While Hanna does not claim to be a neuroscientist, his organizational skills proved valuable as he supported six different research centers at McGovern, with research ranging from autism to bionics.  

As the VMS operations manager, Hanna supervises staff members who run events and boot camps and schedule an average of 50 mentoring sessions a month. Whether it’s a first-time entrepreneur who comes up with an idea on their morning commute or an industry veteran with licensing and a patent in place, Hanna strategically matches them with mentors who can help them build their skill set and grow their business. Hanna also provides oversight to over 200 volunteer VMS mentors, half of which are MIT alumni. 

In addition to processing all incoming applications (about 25 per month), Hanna also oversees a monthly mentor meeting centered around strengthening the VMS mentor community. During the meeting, the VMS team shares announcements, discusses upcoming events, hosts guest speakers, and invites a group of current ventures to give four-minute pitches for additional advice. These pitches allow mentees to receive input from the entire mentor network, rather than just their mentor team.   

The relationship between mentees, mentors, and VMS does not have an expiration date. Hanna notes that a saying in the office is, “we are VMS for life.” This rings true, as some ventures and mentors have been a part of the program for most of its 25-year existence. 

When a mentee is ready to meet with their mentors for the first time, VMS aims to schedule an in-person meeting to create a strong relationship. After that, the program embraces the flexibility of meeting via Zoom to help make scheduling easier. One of the most valuable resources outside of the mentoring sessions is the theme-specific boot camps sprinkled throughout the year. These sessions are four- or five-hour events led by mentors who cover topics such as marketing, business-to-business sales, or building an IP portfolio. They serve as crash courses where mentees can learn the basics of important aspects of entrepreneurship. Another resource offered to active mentees is office hours with experts in areas such as human resources, legal, and accounting. 

In December, VMS will celebrate its 25th anniversary with an event honoring current and former mentors. The event will look back on 25 years of impact and look ahead to the future of the program. 

Soundbytes 

Q: Do you have an MIT memory or project that brings you pride? 

Hanna: At the McGovern Institute, I was part of a team that worked on the first board meeting and launch event for the K. Lisa Yang Center for Bionics, which was an incredible experience. It was a brand-new research center led by world-class researchers and innovators. Since it was the first board meeting it was a big deal, so we planned to host a celebration tied to the meeting. There were a lot of moving parts and collaboration between faculty, researchers, staff, board members, and vendors. It took place at the tail end of Covid, which was an added challenge. With such an important event you don’t want to let anyone down. In the end, it worked out really well, was a fun event to be a part of, and something I never thought I would be able to do.

Q: How would you describe the community at MIT? 

Hanna: Very welcoming. I was intimidated when I first interviewed at MIT because, as someone who isn’t a STEM person, MIT was never on my radar. Then a job came up, and I thought, I'll apply for that. When I started working here, there was always someone available to provide assistance and point me in the right direction. Everyone is incredibly talented and innovative — not just in creating things, but also in problem-solving and finding ways to collaborate. Each time I changed roles, everyone I met was down-to-earth, kind, and extremely helpful during onboarding. It was never sink or swim — it was always nurturing. 

Q: What advice would you give to a new staff member at MIT? 

Hanna: Make connections with people outside of your immediate network. Get involved in the community by attending events or reaching out to people. For both jobs which I held after working at CAPD, I reached out to the hiring manager when I saw the job posting and asked a couple clarifying questions. Also, it’s important to know that everything is numbered; the buildings, the majors, everything.  

Some 200 light years from Earth, the core of a dead star is circling a larger star in a macabre cosmic dance. The dead star is a type of white dwarf that exerts a powerful magnetic field as it pulls material from the larger star into a swirling, accreting disk. The spiraling pair is what’s known as an “intermediate polar” — a type of star system that gives off a complex pattern of intense radiation, including X-rays, as gas from the larger star falls onto the other one.

Now, MIT astronomers have used an X-ray telescope in space to identify key features in the system’s innermost region — an extremely energetic environment that has been inaccessible to most telescopes until now. In an open-access study published in the Astrophysical Journal, the team reports using NASA’s Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) to observe the intermediate polar, known as EX Hydrae.

The team found a surprisingly high degree of X-ray polarization, which describes the direction of an X-ray wave’s electric field, as well as an unexpected direction of polarization in the X-rays coming from EX Hydrae. From these measurements, the researchers traced the X-rays back to their source in the system’s innermost region, close to the surface of the white dwarf.

What’s more, they determined that the system’s X-rays were emitted from a column of white-hot material that the white dwarf was pulling in from its companion star. They estimate that this column is about 2,000 miles high — about half the radius of the white dwarf itself and much taller than what physicists had predicted for such a system. They also determined that the X-rays are reflected off the white dwarf’s surface before scattering into space — an effect that physicists suspected but hadn’t confirmed until now.

The team’s results demonstrate that X-ray polarimetry can be an effective way to study extreme stellar environments such as the most energetic regions of an accreting white dwarf.

“We showed that X-ray polarimetry can be used to make detailed measurements of the white dwarf's accretion geometry,” says Sean Gunderson, a postdoc in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, who is the study’s lead author. “It opens the window into the possibility of making similar measurements of other types of accreting white dwarfs that also have never had predicted X-ray polarization signals.”

Gunderson’s MIT Kavli co-authors include graduate student Swati Ravi and research scientists Herman Marshall and David Huenemoerder, along with Dustin Swarm of the University of Iowa, Richard Ignace of East Tennessee State University, Yael Nazé of the University of Liège, and Pragati Pradhan of Embry Riddle Aeronautical University.

A high-energy fountain

All forms of light, including X-rays, are influenced by electric and magnetic fields. Light travels in waves that wiggle, or oscillate, at right angles to the direction in which the light is traveling. External electric and magnetic fields can pull these oscillations in random directions. But when light interacts and bounces off a surface, it can become polarized, meaning that its vibrations tighten up in one direction. Polarized light, then, can be a way for scientists to trace the source of the light and discern some details about the source’s geometry.

The IXPE space observatory is NASA’s first mission designed to study polarized X-rays that are emitted by extreme astrophysical objects. The spacecraft, which launched in 2021, orbits the Earth and records these polarized X-rays. Since launch, it has primarily focused on supernovae, black holes, and neutron stars.

The new MIT study is the first to use IXPE to measure polarized X-rays from an intermediate polar — a smaller system compared to black holes and supernovas, that nevertheless is known to be a strong emitter of X-rays.

“We started talking about how much polarization would be useful to get an idea of what’s happening in these types of systems, which most telescopes see as just a dot in their field of view,” Marshall says.

An intermediate polar gets its name from the strength of the central white dwarf’s magnetic field. When this field is strong, the material from the companion star is directly pulled toward the white dwarf’s magnetic poles. When the field is very weak, the stellar material instead swirls around the dwarf in an accretion disk that eventually deposits matter directly onto the dwarf’s surface.

In the case of an intermediate polar, physicists predict that material should fall in a complex sort of in-between pattern, forming an accretion disk that also gets pulled toward the white dwarf’s poles. The magnetic field should lift the disk of incoming material far upward, like a high-energy fountain, before the stellar debris falls toward the white dwarf’s magnetic poles, at speeds of millions of miles per hour, in what astronomers refer to as an “accretion curtain.” Physicists suspect that this falling material should run up against previously lifted material that is still falling toward the poles, creating a sort of traffic jam of gas. This pile-up of matter forms a column of colliding gas that is tens of millions of degrees Fahrenheit and should emit high-energy X-rays.

An innermost picture

By measuring any polarized X-rays emitted by EX Hydrae, the team aimed to test the picture of intermediate polars that physicists had hypothesized. In January 2025, IXPE took a total of about 600,000 seconds, or about seven days’ worth, of X-ray measurements from the system.

“With every X-ray that comes in from the source, you can measure the polarization direction,” Marshall explains. “You collect a lot of these, and they’re all at different angles and directions which you can average to get a preferred degree and direction of the polarization.”

Their measurements revealed an 8 percent polarization degree that was much higher than what scientists had predicted according to some theoretical models. From there, the researchers were able to confirm that the X-rays were indeed coming from the system’s column, and that this column is about 2,000 miles high.

“If you were able to stand somewhat close to the white dwarf’s pole, you would see a column of gas stretching 2,000 miles into the sky, and then fanning outward,” Gunderson says.

The team also measured the direction of EX Hydrae’s X-ray polarization, which they determined to be perpendicular to the white dwarf’s column of incoming gas. This was a sign that the X-rays emitted by the column were then bouncing off the white dwarf’s surface before traveling into space, and eventually into IXPE’s telescopes.

“The thing that’s helpful about X-ray polarization is that it’s giving you a picture of the innermost, most energetic portion of this entire system,” Ravi says. “When we look through other telescopes, we don’t see any of this detail.”

The team plans to apply X-ray polarization to study other accreting white dwarf systems, which could help scientists get a grasp on much larger cosmic phenomena.

“There comes a point where so much material is falling onto the white dwarf from a companion star that the white dwarf can’t hold it anymore, the whole thing collapses and produces a type of supernova that’s observable throughout the universe, which can be used to figure out the size of the universe,” Marshall offers. “So understanding these white dwarf systems helps scientists understand the sources of those supernovae, and tells you about the ecology of the galaxy.”

This research was supported, in part, by NASA.