The Mexico City Initiative at MIT, led by the Institute’s Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism (LCAU), has conceived and modeled an impressive array of solutions for challenges facing urban areas in Mexico and beyond. Faculty and students have designed the repurposing of a vintage roller coaster as a public meeting space, modeled strategies to decarbonize a municipal neighborhood, and proposed plans to convert nearly 990 acres of what was once Latin America’s largest landfill into a model of ecological restoration and clean energy production. The initiative has also spawned a sustainable construction startup that’s contributing to local economies in both Mexico and the United States.

When asked what’s most impactful about their work, however, those leading and collaborating with the LCAU’s Mexico City Initiative point to something else: the cross-border human connections they say are essential to continuing the ideation, development, and implementation of projects designed for Mexico City, but likely to be scalable and beneficial in urban centers around the world.

“To really create change in cities, we need to build relationships, friendships, and new networks. And through building them together, we can go so much further,” says Sarah Williams, director of the LCAU, which leads the initiative in collaboration with the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), the Mexico City government, and the engineering firm Mota-Engil Mexico.

“I think one of the big things we’re proud of is there have been a lot of personal connections created between MIT and UNAM, and I think research collaboration will result from these connections,” says Onésimo Flores PhD ’13, director general of Mota-Engil Mexico’s transportation mobility division. “I think what we have contributed to building is deepening collaboration.”   

UNAM associate professor of architecture Elena Tudela agrees, noting that “beyond the projects themselves, we have developed a genuine friendship that I hope will continue long after this specific collaboration ends.”

“What I personally value most from these years of collaboration on Mexico City’s energy transition is the set of relationships we have built — with researchers, professors and especially the team at the LCAU,” says Tudela, an initiative collaborator. “For local students, the impact has been even more profound. It built bonds that transcend the workshop’s objectives, contributing to a deeper understanding of design as a collaborative, multidisciplinary practice.”

Williams credits Flores with helping to obtain Mota-Engil’s crucial financial support for the LCAU’s Mexico City Initiative. An MIT alumnus who earned his PhD in urban studies and planning in 2013 with Mota-Engil scholarship aid, Flores says the company’s support is meant to accomplish three goals: connect Mexican researchers with MIT, get Mexican students involved in MIT programs, and stimulate interest in projects relevant to cities like Mexico City among MIT faculty.   

“If you can find urban solutions for a city as complex as Mexico City, you can probably figure it out for any city in the world, particularly in the Global South,” he says.

Over the past three years, faculty and students from MIT and UNAM have worked on projects centered on energy transition. Project teams, collaborators, interested local officials, business leaders, and others gathered for a recent symposium showcasing the progress made on the Mexico City Initiative’s projects so far.

Held in Mexico City last fall and featuring presentations by several MIT faculty, the “Energy Transitions” symposium was hosted by the LCAU, UNAM, and Mota-Engil Mexico. Its purpose “was to make sure the research effort that was done together was presented to the public and private sectors — groups that might be able to take the research to the next level,” says Williams, an MIT associate professor of technology and urban planning.

“The lecture series was exciting because we saw an interest in extending all the projects. I also think the conversations and ideas that were had in the room spark the kind of civic debate needed to transform our cities,” Williams says.

Established in 2013, the LCAU’s work cuts across diverse research fields to create innovation in cities.

“There’s not one field that can transform our future cities — innovation happens when we cross disciplines,” says Williams, who became LCAU director four years ago and has since focused the center’s mission on building and maintaining long-term relationships with cities through “City Initiatives.”

Other City Initiatives have included collaborations in Boston, as well as Sydney, Australia; Beirut, Lebanon; Bogota, Colombia; and Pristina, Kosovo. Mexico City was among the first initiatives and is the LCAU’s longest-standing program. Activities have included several classes held between MIT and Mexico City, a public exhibition, a hackathon with MITdesignX, and numerous joint research projects.

Williams describes it as “a fantastic relationship,” which began with development of a strategic plan for a Mexico City Innovation Lab, leading to a decision to focus the initiative on themes playing out over the course of about two years. The current theme is Energy Intersections, which looks at the role design plays in transitioning to cleaner energy infrastructure. 

“This came from the group seeing that Mexico wanted to be a player in the global manufacturing marketplace and one of the barriers was how heavily polluted their energy infrastructure was,” Willliams says.

“The LCAU was founded for this idea that the work and research that we do about cities should be experimental, but also framed within contemporary policies and politics,” she says, adding that the team had considered other possible themes — from water and emergency planning to housing — but “as we started to think about energy, it just became so clearly important.”

Attracting about 70 attendees from Mexico City’s academic, government, and private sectors, the symposium was convened to enable MIT and UNAM researchers to share findings and discuss paths forward for several projects. Featured projects included:

• Redesigning Vallejo-I — aimed at transforming Mexico City’s Vallejo Industrial Zone into a revitalized hub for industry, transportation and housing;
• Decarbonize and Revitalize: Urban Regeneration for Mexico City’s Neighborhoods — which envisions ways for energy, equity, and design to regenerate Mexico City neighborhoods, using the Daniel Garza neighborhood as a model; and
• Bordo Poniente: Territories of Industrial and Ecological Metabolism — which presents strategies for reinventing what was once the world’s third-largest solid waste landfill (Bordo Poniente).

Leading the Bordo Poniente panel was project leader Eran Ben-Joseph, professor of landscape architecture and urban planning at MIT. Developed with UNAM and Mota-Engil partners, the project involved 12 MIT School of Architecture and Planning graduate students working across disciplines to address four integrated objectives: converting waste into public value, advancing energy transition (through methane/leachate capture), promoting equity and environmental justice for neighboring communities, and generating actionable policy recommendations, Ben-Joseph says.

“This collaborative effort exemplifies how international courses can combine rigorous fieldwork, interdisciplinary expertise, and community engagement to reimagine a toxic site as a model of urban regeneration and ecological repair,” he says, adding that the project “reflects MIT’s commitments to climate action, urban innovation, and applied systems thinking.” With over 100,000 landfills worldwide, he says, “a replicable ‘Bordo Model’ positions MIT as a global leader in transformation of waste landscapes into energy, ecological, and civic assets.”

In a similar vein, the Vallejo project reimagines urban industrial blocks as engines of clean energy generation, water resilience, and sustainable mobility. Led by MIT Department of Architecture Lecturer Roi Salgueiro Barrio and moderated by UNAM associate professor of architecture and project collaborator Daniel Daou, the symposium’s Redesigning Vallejo panel discussed how the project establishes an actionable framework for energy and industrial transition that can inspire and guide the revival of other industrial areas.

Finally, MIT professor of architecture and urbanism and project leader Rafi Segal presented the team’s Daniel Garza neighborhood case study, which highlighted two replicable urban planning and community clean energy project designs resulting from work by MIT and UNAM researchers.

“The most impactful aspect of ‘Decarbonize and Revitalize’ is its ability to merge energy transition with urban regeneration at the neighborhood scale. The project does not fit neatly into a single disciplinary category; it operates at the intersection of energy, design, and social infrastructure,” says Daniela Martinez Chapa, a former MIT student and an architect and urban designer who served as research assistant on the MIT team. “The project exemplifies MIT’s commitment to collaborative, context-specific innovation,” she adds.

Like others involved with the Mexico City Initiative, UNAM’s Tudela pointed out how working across disciplines, institutions, and borders has benefited both UNAM and MIT.

“MIT brings cutting-edge tools and methodologies in fields such as energy and urban data science, while UNAM contributes deep local expertise, strong social perspectives, and long-standing engagement with communities,” Tudela says. “This combination has produced highly creative, context-sensitive outcomes.”

As for next steps, Williams is hopeful that conversations started at this fall’s symposium might push the team’s research into the local limelight, helping them go from research and strategies to on-the-ground reality. She pointed to the success of an earlier LCAU Mexico City project as an example of what can happen when the right ideas and stakeholders coalesce.

For the 2022 Mextropoli Architecture and City Festival in Mexico City, an MIT team presented “Sueños con Fiber/Timber, Earth/Concrete.”

“As part of that project, we took a decommissioned roller coaster and reused it as a public forum space. And so that was talking about reuse of wood and making sure that building materials are reused in unique ways,” Williams says.

Adjacent to the repurposed roller coaster, Caitlin Mueller, an associate professor in MIT’s departments of Architecture and Civil and Environmental Engineering, built a structure made of 3D printed bricks that capture the traditional style of Mexican construction, but with a fraction of the carbon footprint. Mueller has since taken the Sueños project further, co-founding a design and technology company (Forma Systems) focused on expanding access to high-quality, low-carbon affordable housing and building systems by reimagining widely available materials such as concrete and earth.

“Caitlin’s project with the bricks is just such a good example of what the Cities Initiative can do. We seeded collaborative research, and now there’s a startup based off the idea, and they are continuing to do the work,” Williams says. “I think that’s the idea — we help to fund research that combines deep local knowledge and MIT’s innovation environment to help inspire new ideas and technologies for cities.

“I would hope these new projects just presented in Mexico would have a similar trajectory,” she says. “The future is open.”

Michael J. Moody, who has served as Institute auditor since 2014, will retire from MIT in October, following a career in internal and external audit spanning 40 years.

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

“I have greatly appreciated Mike’s rigorous and collaborative approach to auditing and advising on the Institute’s policies and processes,” Shor wrote. “He has helped MIT accomplish far-reaching ambitions while adhering to best practices in administering programs and services.”

As Institute auditor, Moody oversees a division that conducts financial, operational, compliance, and technology reviews across MIT. He leads a team of internal auditors that serve as trusted advisors to administrative leadership and members of the MIT Corporation, assessing processes and making recommendations to control risks, improve processes, and enhance decision-making.

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

“Mike is highly principled and rigorous with detail, earning our committee’s trust,” says Pat Callahan, chair of the Risk and Audit Committee. “The committee runs like clockwork because of Mike’s dedication and skill.”

Moody has guided the Audit Division through a transformative period, spearheading several impactful initiatives throughout his tenure. He advanced the approval of the first-ever Audit Division Charter to codify the unit’s independence and objectivity and to articulate its mandates for accountability and oversight, and he implemented a new process to distribute audit reports to all senior administrative officers as a best practice. He also initiated the Institute’s inaugural external quality assurance review, for which MIT received the highest rating. Moody has continued the practice of externally auditing the division.

Having a particular interest in leveraging analytics and data to improve workflows and inform assessments, Moody added a data analyst to his team in 2016. The team also sponsors the cross-Institute Data Analysts and Data Scientists (DADS) group, which seeks to foster collaboration while advancing analytics and data practices at an Institute level.

More recently, Moody helped establish the MIT AI Cohort to advance artificial intelligence solutions across the Institute while minimizing associated risks. The group, launched in November 2025, includes representatives from MIT Sloan School of Management, the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, the School of Engineering, MIT Libraries, the Office of the Vice President for Research, the Division of Graduate and Undergraduate Education, and MIT Health, among others.

A key aspect of Moody's work — and one that has been especially meaningful to him — is helping the MIT community understand the Audit Division's mission and role in furthering the Institute’s positive impact. To facilitate this, he instilled in his team a set of core values that emphasizes professionalism, objectivity, pragmatism, openness, and willingness to listen, and has presented it as a model for peer institutions. He has in this vein focused on building relationships with the community to identify the right opportunities for improvement in MIT’s operations and ensure that the Audit Division’s feedback is constructively delivered and received.

“Mike has been an invaluable partner,” says Suzy Nelson, MIT vice chancellor for student life. “Over the years, his collaborative and knowledgeable approach has helped us improve so many areas — from student organization event management to our business practices to enhancing our student support services. Mike has listened carefully to students’ needs and offered guidance aligned with the goals of the program and student safety.”

Before joining MIT, Moody served in audit and compliance roles at Northwestern University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the state of Illinois. At the public accounting firm Coopers and Lybrand (now Pricewaterhouse Coopers LLP), he managed and performed information technology audits and served as a financial and technology consultant for clients in a variety of industries. Moody has also held numerous volunteer and elected leadership positions in international, national, and local professional audit associations. He holds certified internal auditor and certified information systems auditor designations, along with a certification in risk management assurance.

“In reflecting on my time here, I’m most proud of assembling a team that has made positive changes to how MIT operates,” says Moody. “It’s been very rewarding having leaders, staff, and researchers reach out for advice and assistance. It's a testament to the strong relationships we've built across the Institute.”

Shor and Callahan will soon formally launch a search for Institute auditor, and expect to identify Moody’s successor during the fall 2026 semester.

One of the hallmarks of Alzheimer’s disease is the clumping of proteins called Tau, which form tangled fibrils in the brain. The more severe the clumping, the more advanced the disease is.

The Tau protein, which has also been linked to many other neurodegenerative diseases, is unstructured in its normal state, but in the pathological state it consists of a well-ordered rigid core surrounded by floppy segments. These disordered segments form a “fuzzy coat” that helps determine how Tau interacts with other molecules.

MIT chemists have now shown, for the first time, they can use nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy to decipher the structure of this fuzzy coat. They hope their findings will aid efforts to develop drugs that interfere with Tau buildup in the brain.

“If you want to disaggregate these Tau fibrils with small-molecule drugs, then these drugs have to penetrate this fuzzy coat,” says Mei Hong, an MIT professor of chemistry and the senior author of the new study. “That would be an important future endeavor.”

MIT graduate student Jia Yi Zhang is the lead author of the paper, which appears today in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Former MIT postdoc Aurelio Dregni is also an author of the paper.

Analyzing the fuzzy coat

In a healthy brain, Tau proteins help to stabilize microtubules, which give cells their structure. However, when Tau proteins become misfolded or otherwise altered, they form clumps that contribute to neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and frontotemporal dementia.

Determining the structure of the Tau tangles has been difficult because so much of the protein — about 80 percent — is found in the fuzzy coat, which tends to be highly disordered.

This fuzzy coat surrounds a rigid inner core that is made from folded protein strands known as beta sheets. Hong and her colleagues have previously analyzed the structure of the core in a particular Tau fibril using NMR, which can reveal the structures of molecules by measuring the magnetic properties of atomic nuclei within the molecules.

Until now, most researchers had overlooked Tau’s fuzzy coat and focused on the rigid core of the fibrils because those disordered segments change their structures so often that standard structure characterization techniques such as cryoelectron microscopy and X-ray crystallography can’t capture them.

However, in the new study, the researchers developed NMR techniques that allowed them to study the entire Tau protein. In one experiment, they were able to magnetize protons within the most rigid amino acids, then measure how long it took for the magnetization to be transferred to the mobile amino acids. This allowed them to track the magnetization as it traveled from rigid regions to floppy segments, and vice versa.

Using this approach, the researchers could estimate the proximity between the rigid and mobile segments. They complemented this experiment by measuring the different degrees of movement of the amino acids in the fuzzy coat.

“We have now developed an NMR-based technology to examine the fuzzy coat of a full-length Tau fibril, allowing us to capture both the dynamic regions and the rigid core,” Hong says.

Protein dynamics

For this particular fibril, the researchers showed that the overall structure of the Tau protein, which contains about 10 different domains, somewhat resembles a burrito, with several layers of the fuzzy coat wrapped around the rigid core.

Based on their measurements of protein dynamics, the researchers found that these segments fell into three categories. The rigid core of the fibril was surrounded by protein regions with intermediate mobility, whereas the most dynamic segments were found in the outermost layer.

The most dynamic segments of the fuzzy coat are rich in the amino acid proline. In the protein sequence, these prolines are near the amino acids that form the rigid core, and were previously thought to be partially immobilized. Instead, they are highly mobile, indicating that these positively charged proline-rich regions are repelled by the positive charges of the amino acids that form the rigid core.

This structural model gives insight into how Tau proteins form tangles in the brain, Hong says. Similar to how prions trigger healthy proteins to misfold in the brain, it is believed that misfolded Tau proteins latch onto normal Tau proteins and act as a template that induces them to adopt the abnormal structure.

In principle, these normal Tau proteins could add to the ends of existing short filaments or pile onto the sides. The fact that the fuzzy coat wraps around the rigid core indicates that normal Tau proteins more likely add onto the ends of the filaments to generate longer fibrils.

The researchers now plan to explore whether they can stimulate normal Tau proteins to assemble into the type of fibrils seen in Alzheimer’s disease, using misfolded Tau proteins from Alzheimer’s patients as a template.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health.

As a graduate student, Leslie Tilley spent years studying and practicing the music of Bali, Indonesia, including a traditional technique in which two Balinese drummers play intricately interlocking rhythms while simultaneously improvising. It was beautiful and compelling music, which Tilley heard an unexpected insight about one day.

“The higher drum is the bus driver, and the lower drum is the person who puts the bags on the top of the bus,” a Balinese musician told Tilley.

Today, Tilley is an MIT faculty member who works as both an ethnomusicologist, studying music in its cultural settings, and a music theorist, analyzing its formal principles. The tools of music theory have long been applied to, say, Bach, and rather less often to Balinese drumming. But one of Tilley’s interests is building music theory across boundaries. As she recognized, the drummer’s bus driver analogy is a piece of theory. 

“That doesn’t feel like the music theory I had learned, but that is 100 percent music theory,” Tilley said. “What is the relationship between the drummers? The higher drum has to stick to a smaller subset of rhythms so that the lower drum has more freedom to improvise around. Putting it that way is just a different music-theoretical language.”

Tilley’s anecdote touches on many aspects of her career: Her work ranges widely, while linking theory, practice, and learning. Her studies in Bali became the basis for an award-winning book, which uses Balinese music as a case study for a more generalized framework about collective improvisation, one that can apply to any type of music.

Currently, Tilley is engaged in another major project, supported by a multiyear, $500,000 Mellon Foundation grant, to develop a reimagined music theory curriculum. That project aims to produce an alternative four-semester open access music theory curriculum with a broader scope than many existing course materials, to be accompanied by a new audio-visual textbook. The effort includes a major conference later this year that Tilley is organizing, and is designed as a collaborative project; she will work with other scholars on the curriculum and textbook, with 2028 as a completion date.

If that weren’t enough, Tilley is also working on a new book about the phenomenon of cover songs in modern pop music, from the 1950s onward. Here too, Tilley is combining careful cultural analysis of select popular artists and their work, along with a formal examination of the musical choices they have made while developing cover versions of songs.

All told, understanding how music works within a culture, while understanding the inner workings of music, can deliver us new insights — about music, performers, and audiences.

“What I am focused on fundamentally is how musicians take a musical thing and make something new out of it,” Tilley says. “And then how listeners react to that thing. What is happening here musically? And can that explain the human reaction to it, which is messy and subjective?”

Across all these projects, Tilley has been a consistently innovative scholar who reshapes existing genres of work. For her research and teaching, Tilley has received tenure and is now an associate professor in MIT’s Music and Theater Arts Program.

The joy of collective improv

Both of Tilley’s parents were musicians, but “they never had any intention for their kids to go into music,” says Tilley, a native of Halifax, Nova Scotia. Growing up, she studied piano, violin, and French horn for years; played in a symphony orchestra, brass band, and concert bands; sang in choirs; and performed in musicals. Ultimately she realized she could make a career out of music as well. 

“In 12th grade I suddenly realized, music is what I do. Music is who I am. Music is what I love,” Tilley says. Back then, she pictured herself being an opera singer. Subsequently, as she recalls, “Somewhere along the way, I steered myself into music scholarship.”

Tilley received her bachelor of music degree from Acadia University in Nova Scotia, and then conducted her graduate studies in music at the University of British Columbia, where she earned an MA and PhD. It was in graduate school that Tilley began studying the music of Bali — on campus and during extended periods of field research.

Studying Balinese music was “mildly accidental,” Tilley says, calling it “a little bit of happy happenstance. Encountering these musical traditions exploded the way I thought about music and ways of understanding the interactions of musicians.”

In her research, Tilley looked intensively at two distinct improvised Balinese musical practices: the four-person melodic gong technique “reyong norot” and the two-person drumming practice “kendang arja.” Both are featured in her 2019 book, “Making It Up Together: The Art of Collective Improvisation in Balinese Music and Beyond.” Published by the University of Chicago Press, it won the 2022 Emerging Scholar Award from the Society for Music Theory.

Grounded in empirical evidence, the book proposes a novel, universal framework for understanding the components of collective improvisation. That includes both the more strictly musical aspects of improvisation — how much flexibility musicians give themselves to improvise, for instance — as well as the forms of interaction musicians have with their co-performers.

“My book is about collective improvisation and what it means,” Tilley says. “What is the give and take of that process, and how can we analyze that? There are lots of scholars who have discussed collective improvisation as it exists in jazz. The delicious joy of collective improvisation is something anybody who improvises in a musical group will talk about. My book looks at examples, especially the case studies I have from Bali, and then creates bigger analytical frameworks, so there can finally be an umbrella way of looking at this phenomenon across music cultures and practices.”

Despite her years of immersing herself in the music, and playing it, Tilley says, “I am a beginner in comparison to the drummers I studied with, who have been playing forever and played with other masters their whole lives, and were generous enough to allow me to learn from them.” Still, she thinks the experience of playing music while studying it is indispensable.

“Ethnomusicology is a field that takes a bit from other fields,” Tilley notes. “The idea of participant observation, we borrow that from anthropology, and the idea of close musical analysis is from musicology or music theory. It’s an in-between way of thinking about music where I get to both participate and observe. But also I’m a music analysis nerd: What’s happening in the notes? Looking at music note-by-note, but from a place of physical embodiment, provides a better understanding than if I had just looked at the notes.”

Expanding instruction

At present, Tilley is devoting significant effort to her music-theory curriculum work, which is funded by the Mellon Foundation as a three-year effort. The upcoming summer conference she is organizing, also supported by the Mellon Foundation, will be a key part of the project, allowing a wide range of scholars to air perspectives about reimagining music theory studies in the 21st century.

Substantively, the idea is to broaden the scope of music theory instruction. Often, Tilley says, “music theory is learning how to understand the musical structures that are essentially between Bach and early Beethoven, that kind of narrow range of a couple hundred years, really amazing musical systems with a very deep, written-down music theory. But that accepted canon leaves out so many other kinds of music and ways of knowing.” Instead, she adds, “If we were not beholden to any assumptions about what we should have in a music program, what skills would we want our students to walk away from four semesters of music theory with?”

About the conference, Tilley quips: “Sitting in a room and nerding out with a bunch of people who care deeply about a thing you care about, which in my case is music, music theory, and pedagogy, is possibly the coolest thing you can do with your time. Hopefully something wonderful comes out of it.”

As Tilley views it, her current book project on pop music cover songs stems from some of the same issues that have long animated her thinking: How do artists fashion their work out of existing knowledge?

“The project on cover songs is similar to the project on collective improvisation in Bali,” Tilley says, in the sense that when it comes to improvisation, “I have a bank of things I know, in my head and in my body about this musical practice, and within that context I can create something that is new and mine, based on something that exists already.”

She adds: “Cover songs to me are the same, but different. The same in that it’s a musical transformation, but different because a pop song doesn’t just have lyrics, melody, and chords, but the vocal quality, the arrangement, the brand of the performer, and so much more. What we think about in popular music isn’t just the song, it’s the person singing it, the social and political contexts, and the listener’s personal relationships to all those things, and they’re so wrapped up together we almost can’t disentangle them.”

As with her earlier work, Tilley is not just examining individual pieces of music, but building a larger analytical model in the process — one that factors in the formal musical changes artists make as well as the cultural components of the phenomenon, to understand why cover songs can produce strong and varying reactions among listeners.

In the process, Tilley has been presenting conference papers and invited talks on the topic for a number of years now. One case that interests Tilley is the singer-songwriter Tori Amos, whose many cover versions transform the viewpoint, music, and meaning of songs by artists from Eminem to Nirvana, and more. There may also be some Taylor Swift content in the next book, although with thousands and thousands of songs to choose from in the pop-rock era, there could be something for everyone — fitting Tilley’s ethos of studying music broadly, across time and space as it is created, recreated, and recreated again.

“This is why music is infinitely cool,” Tilley says. “It’s so malleable, and so open to interpretation.”