Water is essential for life on Earth. So, the liquid must be a requirement for life on other worlds. For decades, scientists’ definition of habitability on other planets has rested on this assumption.

But what makes some planets habitable might have very little to do with water. In fact, an entirely different type of liquid could conceivably support life in worlds where water can barely exist. That’s a possibility that MIT scientists raise in a study appearing this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

From lab experiments, the researchers found that a type of fluid known as an ionic liquid can readily form from chemical ingredients that are also expected to be found on the surface of some rocky planets and moons. Ionic liquids are salts that exist in liquid form below about 100 degrees Celsius. The team’s experiments showed that a mixture of sulfuric acid and certain nitrogen-containing organic compounds produced such a liquid. On rocky planets, sulfuric acid may be a byproduct of volcanic activity, while nitrogen-containing compounds have been detected on several asteroids and planets in our solar system, suggesting the compounds may be present in other planetary systems.

Ionic liquids have extremely low vapor pressure and do not evaporate; they can form and persist at higher temperatures and lower pressures than what liquid water can tolerate. The researchers note that ionic liquid can be a hospitable environment for some biomolecules, such as certain proteins that can remain stable in the fluid.

The scientists propose that, even on planets that are too warm or that have atmospheres are too low-pressure to support liquid water, there could still be pockets of ionic liquid. And where there is liquid, there may be potential for life, though likely not anything that resembles Earth’s water-based beings.

“We consider water to be required for life because that is what’s needed for Earth life. But if we look at a more general definition, we see that what we need is a liquid in which metabolism for life can take place,” says Rachana Agrawal, who led the study as a postdoc in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. “Now if we include ionic liquid as a possibility, this can dramatically increase the habitability zone for all rocky worlds.”

The study’s MIT co-authors are Sara Seager, the Class of 1941 Professor of Planetary Sciences in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences and a professor in the departments of Physics and of Aeronautics and Astronautics, along with Iaroslav Iakubivskyi, Weston Buchanan, Ana Glidden, and Jingcheng Huang. Co-authors also include Maxwell Seager of Worcester Polytechnic Institute, William Bains of Cardiff University, and Janusz Petkowski of Wroclaw University of Science and Technology, in Poland.

A liquid leap

The team’s work with ionic liquid grew out of an effort to search for signs of life on Venus, where clouds of sulfuric acid envelope the planet in a noxious haze. Despite its toxicity, Venus’ clouds may contain signs of life — a notion that scientists plan to test with upcoming missions to the planet’s atmosphere.

Agrawal and Seager, who is leading the Morning Star Missions to Venus, were investigating ways to collect and evaporate sulfuric acid. If a mission collects samples from Venus’ clouds, sulfuric acid would have to be evaporated away in order to reveal any residual organic compounds that could then be analyzed for signs of life.

The researchers were using their custom, low-pressure system designed to evaporate away excess sulfuric acid, to test evaporation of a solution of the acid and an organic compound, glycine. They found that in every case, while most of the liquid sulfuric acid evaporated, a stubborn layer of liquid always remained. They soon realized that sulfuric acid was chemically reacting with glycine, resulting in an exchange of hydrogen atoms from the acid to the organic compound. The result was a fluid mixture of salts, or ions, known as an ionic liquid, that persists as a liquid across a wide range of temperatures and pressures.

This accidental finding kickstarted an idea: Could ionic liquid form on planets that are too warm and host atmospheres too thin for water to exist?

“From there, we took the leap of imagination of what this could mean,” Agrawal says. “Sulfuric acid is found on Earth from volcanoes, and organic compounds have been found on asteroids and other planetary bodies. So, this led us to wonder if ionic liquids could potentially form and exist naturally on exoplanets.”

Rocky oases

On Earth, ionic liquids are mainly synthesized for industrial purposes. They do not occur naturally, except for in one specific case, in which the liquid is generated from the mixing of venoms produced by two rival species of ants.

The team set out to investigate what conditions ionic liquid could be naturally produced in, and over what range of temperatures and pressures. In the lab, they mixed sulfuric acid with various nitrogen-containing organic compounds. In previous work, Seager’s team had found that the compounds, some of which can be considered ingredients associated with life, are surprisingly stable in sulfuric acid.

“In high school, you learn that an acid wants to donate a proton,” Seager says. “And oddly enough, we knew from our past work with sulfuric acid (the main component of Venus’ clouds) and nitrogen-containing compounds, that a nitrogen wants to receive a hydrogen. It’s like one person’s trash is another person’s treasure.”

The reaction could produce a bit of ionic liquid if the sulfuric acid and nitrogen-containing organics were in a one-to-one ratio — a ratio that was not a focus of the prior work. For their new study, Seager and Agrawal mixed sulfuric acid with over 30 different nitrogen-containing organic compounds, across a range of temperatures and pressures, then observed whether ionic liquid formed when they evaporated away the sulfuric acid in various vials. They also mixed the ingredients onto basalt rocks, which are known to exist on the surface of many rocky planets.

“We were just astonished that the ionic liquid forms under so many different conditions,” Seager says. “If you put the sulfuric acid and the organic on a rock, the excess sulfuric acid seeps into the rock pores, but you’re still left with a drop of ionic liquid on the rock. Whatever we tried, ionic liquid still formed.”

The team found that the reactions produced ionic liquid at temperatures up to 180 degrees Celsius and at extremely low pressures — much lower than that of the Earth’s atmosphere. Their results suggest that ionic liquid could naturally form on other planets where liquid water cannot exist, under the right conditions.

“We’re envisioning a planet warmer than Earth, that doesn’t have water, and at some point in its past or currently, it has to have had sulfuric acid, formed from volcanic outgassing,” Seager says. “This sulfuric acid has to flow over a little pocket of organics. And organic deposits are extremely common in the solar system.”

Then, she says, the resulting pockets of liquid could stay on the planet’s surface, potentially for years or millenia, where they could theoretically serve as small oases for simple forms of ionic-liquid-based life. Going forward, Seager’s team plans to investigate further, to see what biomolecules, and ingredients for life, might survive, and thrive, in ionic liquid.

“We just opened up a Pandora’s box of new research,” Seager says. “It’s been a real journey.”

This research was supported, in part, by the Sloan Foundation and the Volkswagen Foundation.

The cost of solar panels has dropped by more than 99 percent since the 1970s, enabling widespread adoption of photovoltaic systems that convert sunlight into electricity.

A new MIT study drills down on specific innovations that enabled such dramatic cost reductions, revealing that technical advances across a web of diverse research efforts and industries played a pivotal role.

The findings could help renewable energy companies make more effective R&D investment decisions and aid policymakers in identifying areas to prioritize to spur growth in manufacturing and deployment.

The researchers’ modeling approach shows that key innovations often originated outside the solar sector, including advances in semiconductor fabrication, metallurgy, glass manufacturing, oil and gas drilling, construction processes, and even legal domains.

“Our results show just how intricate the process of cost improvement is, and how much scientific and engineering advances, often at a very basic level, are at the heart of these cost reductions. A lot of knowledge was drawn from different domains and industries, and this network of knowledge is what makes these technologies improve,” says study senior author Jessika Trancik, a professor in MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society.

Trancik is joined on the paper by co-lead authors Goksin Kavlak, a former IDSS graduate student and postdoc who is now a senior energy associate at the Brattle Group; Magdalena Klemun, a former IDSS graduate student and postdoc who is now an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University; former MIT postdoc Ajinkya Kamat; as well as Brittany Smith and Robert Margolis of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. The research appears today in PLOS ONE.

Identifying innovations

This work builds on mathematical models that the researchers previously developed that tease out the effects of engineering technologies on the cost of photovoltaic (PV) modules and systems.

In this study, the researchers aimed to dig even deeper into the scientific advances that drove those cost declines.

They combined their quantitative cost model with a detailed, qualitative analysis of innovations that affected the costs of PV system materials, manufacturing steps, and deployment processes.

“Our quantitative cost model guided the qualitative analysis, allowing us to look closely at innovations in areas that are hard to measure due to a lack of quantitative data,” Kavlak says.

Building on earlier work identifying key cost drivers — such as the number of solar cells per module, wiring efficiency, and silicon wafer area — the researchers conducted a structured scan of the literature for innovations likely to affect these drivers. Next, they grouped these innovations to identify patterns, revealing clusters that reduced costs by improving materials or prefabricating components to streamline manufacturing and installation. Finally, the team tracked industry origins and timing for each innovation, and consulted domain experts to zero in on the most significant innovations.

All told, they identified 81 unique innovations that affected PV system costs since 1970, from improvements in antireflective coated glass to the implementation of fully online permitting interfaces.

“With innovations, you can always go to a deeper level, down to things like raw materials processing techniques, so it was challenging to know when to stop. Having that quantitative model to ground our qualitative analysis really helped,” Trancik says.

They chose to separate PV module costs from so-called balance-of-system (BOS) costs, which cover things like mounting systems, inverters, and wiring.

PV modules, which are wired together to form solar panels, are mass-produced and can be exported, while many BOS components are designed, built, and sold at the local level.

“By examining innovations both at the BOS level and within the modules, we identify the different types of innovations that have emerged in these two parts of PV technology,” Kavlak says.

BOS costs depend more on soft technologies, nonphysical elements such as permitting procedures, which have contributed significantly less to PV’s past cost improvement compared to hardware innovations.

“Often, it comes down to delays. Time is money, and if you have delays on construction sites and unpredictable processes, that affects these balance-of-system costs,” Trancik says.

Innovations such as automated permitting software, which flags code-compliant systems for fast-track approval, show promise. Though not yet quantified in this study, the team’s framework could support future analysis of their economic impact and similar innovations that streamline deployment processes.

Interconnected industries

The researchers found that innovations from the semiconductor, electronics, metallurgy, and petroleum industries played a major role in reducing both PV and BOS costs, but BOS costs were also impacted by innovations in software engineering and electric utilities.

Noninnovation factors, like efficiency gains from bulk purchasing and the accumulation of knowledge in the solar power industry, also reduced some cost variables.

In addition, while most PV panel innovations originated in research organizations or industry, many BOS innovations were developed by city governments, U.S. states, or professional associations.

“I knew there was a lot going on with this technology, but the diversity of all these fields and how closely linked they are, and the fact that we can clearly see that network through this analysis, was interesting,” Trancik says.

“PV was very well-positioned to absorb innovations from other industries — thanks to the right timing, physical compatibility, and supportive policies to adapt innovations for PV applications,” Klemun adds.

The analysis also reveals the role greater computing power could play in reducing BOS costs through advances like automated engineering review systems and remote site assessment software.

“In terms of knowledge spillovers, what we've seen so far in PV may really just be the beginning,” Klemun says, pointing to the expanding role of robotics and AI-driven digital tools in driving future cost reductions and quality improvements.

In addition to their qualitative analysis, the researchers demonstrated how this methodology could be used to estimate the quantitative impact of a particular innovation if one has the numerical data to plug into the cost equation.

For instance, using information about material prices and manufacturing procedures, they estimate that wire sawing, a technique which was introduced in the 1980s, led to an overall PV system cost decrease of $5 per watt by reducing silicon losses and increasing throughput during fabrication.

“Through this retrospective analysis, you learn something valuable for future strategy because you can see what worked and what didn’t work, and the models can also be applied prospectively. It is also useful to know what adjacent sectors may help support improvement in a particular technology,” Trancik says.

Moving forward, the researchers plan to apply this methodology to a wide range of technologies, including other renewable energy systems. They also want to further study soft technology to identify innovations or processes that could accelerate cost reductions.

“Although the process of technological innovation may seem like a black box, we’ve shown that you can study it just like any other phenomena,” Trancik says.

This research is funded, in part, by the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Energies Technology Office.

Davi Augusto Oliveira Pinto’s career in Brazil’s foreign service took him all over the world. His work as a diplomat for more than two decades exposed him to the realities of life for all kinds of people, which informed his interest in economics and public policy. 

Oliveira Pinto is now focused on strengthening his diplomatic work through his MIT education. He completed the MITx MicroMasters program in Data, Economics, and Design of Policy (DEDP), which is jointly administered by MIT Open Learning and the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), and then applied and was accepted to the DEDP master’s program within MIT’s Department of Economics. 

“I think governments should be able to provide data-driven, research-supported services to their constituents,” he says. “Returning to my role as a diplomat, I hope to use the tools I acquired in the DEDP program to enhance my contributions as a public servant.”

Oliveira Pinto was one of Brazil’s representatives to the World Trade Organization (WTO), helped Brazilian citizens and companies abroad, and worked to improve relationships with governments in South Africa, Argentina, Italy, Spain, and Uruguay. He observed firsthand how economic disparities could influence laws and lives. He believes in a nonpartisan approach to public service, producing and sharing policy based on peer-reviewed data and research that can help as many people as possible. 

“We need public policy informed by evidence and science, rather than by politics and ideology,” he says. “My experience at MIT reinforced my conviction that diplomacy should be used to gather people from different backgrounds and develop joint solutions to our collective challenges.”

As someone responsible for dealing with international trade issues and who understands the potential negative, far-reaching impacts of poorly researched and instituted policies, Oliveira Pinto saw MIT and its world-class economics programs as potentially world-altering tools to help him advance his work. 

Advocacy and economics

Growing up in Minas Gerais, Brazil, Oliveira Pinto learned about the country’s past of economic cycles driven by exporting commodities like minerals and coffee. He also witnessed what he described as Brazil’s “eternal state of development,” one in which broad swaths of the population suffered, and very soon became aware of the impact that issues like inflation and unemployment had on the country. 

“I thought studying economics could help solve issues I observed when growing up,” he says.

Oliveira Pinto earned an undergraduate degree in economics from Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais and a master’s degree in public policy from Escola Nacional de Administração Pública.

Oliveira Pinto’s personal experiences and his commitment to understanding and improving the lives of his fellow Brazilians led him to enroll in the Instituto Rio Branco, Brazil’s diplomatic academy, where he was trained in a variety of disciplines. “I was drawn to investigate inequality between countries, which led to my diplomatic career,” he says. “I worked to help Brazilian migrants abroad, promoted Brazilian companies’ exports, represented Brazil at the WTO, and helped pandemic-era assistance efforts for people in Brazil’s poor border towns.”

During the pandemic, Oliveira Pinto found himself drawn to the DEDP MicroMasters program. He was able to review foundational economics concepts, improve his ability to synthesize and interpret data, and refine his analytical skills. “My favorite course, Data Analysis for Social Scientists, reinforced the critical importance of interpreting data correctly in a world where information is increasingly abundant,” he recalls. 

The online program also offered an opportunity for him to apply to study in person. Now at MIT, Oliveira Pinto is finishing his degree with a capstone project focused on how J-PAL works with governments to support the scaling of evidence-informed policies.  

J-PAL’s research center and network have built long-term partnerships with government agencies around the world to generate evidence from randomized evaluations and incorporate the findings into policy decisions. They work closely with policymakers to inform anti-poverty programs to improve their effectiveness, an area of particular interest to the Brazilian diplomat. 

“I’m trying to understand how J-PAL’s partnerships in these places are working, any lessons we can learn from successes, challenges faced, and how we can most effectively scale the successful programs,” he says.

Inside and beyond MIT

Oliveira Pinto was welcomed into a thriving, diverse community in Cambridge, a journey that was both edifying and challenging. “My family and I found a home,” he notes, observing that many Brazilians live in the area, “and it’s sobering to see so many people from my country working hard to build their lives in the U.S.”

Oliveira Pinto says working closely with members of the MIT community was one of the DEDP master’s program’s big draws. “The ability to forge connections with students and faculty while learning from Nobel laureates and accomplished researchers and practitioners is amazing,” he says. Collaborating with people from a variety of professional, experiential, and backgrounds, he notes, was especially satisfying. 

Oliveira Pinto offered special praise for MIT’s support for his family, describing it as “particularly rewarding.” “MIT offers so many different activities for families,” he says. “My wife and three daughters benefited from the support the Institute provides.” While taking advantage of his time in the States to visit Canada and Washington, D.C., they also made the most of their time in Cambridge. The family enjoyed sailing, swimming, yoga, sports, pottery, lectures, and more while Davi pursued his studies. “The facilities are awesome,” he continues.

Assessing and quantifying impact

Oliveira Pinto’s investigations have yielded some fascinating findings. “Data can be misused,” he notes. “I learned how easily data can tell all kinds of stories, so it’s important to be careful and rigorous when assessing different claims.” He recalls how, during an econometrics class, he learned about parties on opposite sides of a health insurance divide pursuing radically different ends using the same data, each side promoting different views. 

Oliveira Pinto believes his studies have improved his abilities as a diplomat, one of the reasons he’s excited about his eventual return to the public service. “I’ll return to government service armed with the skills the DEDP program and the research conducted during my capstone project have provided,” he says. “My job as a diplomat is to seek opportunities to connect with different people, investigate carefully, and find common ground,” work for which his DEDP MicroMasters and master’s studies have helped prepare him.

Completing his capstone, Oliveira Pinto hopes to draw lessons from J-PAL’s work with governments to improve constituents' quality of life. He’s helping generate case studies that may foster future collaborations between researchers and the public sector. 

“Work like this can be a good opportunity for governments interested in a research-supported, data-driven approach to policymaking,” he says. 

There are 63 million people caring for family members with an illness or disability in the U.S. That translates to one in four adults devoting their time to helping loved ones with things like transportation, meals, prescriptions, and medical appointments.

Caregiving exacts a huge toll on the people responsible, and ianacare is seeking to lessen the burden. The company, founded by Steven Lee ’97, MEng ’98 and Jessica Kim, has built a platform that helps caregivers navigate available tools and local resources, build a network of friends and family to assist with everyday tasks, and coordinate meals, rides, and care shifts.

The name ianacare is short for “I am not alone care.” The company’s mission is to equip and empower the millions of people who perform a difficult and underappreciated role in our society.

“Family caregivers are the invisible backbone of the health care system,” Lee says. “Without them, the health care system would literally collapse, but they are still largely unrecognized. Ianacare acts as the front door for family caregivers. These caregivers are often thrust into this role untrained and unguided. But the moment they start, they have to become experts. Ianacare fills that gap.”

The company has partnered with employers and health care providers to serve more than 50,000 caregivers to date. And thanks to a partnerships with organizations like Elevance Health, the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), and Medicare providers, its coordination and support tools are available to family caregivers across the country.

“Ultimately we want to make the biggest impact possible,” Lee says. “From a business standpoint, the 50,000 caregivers we’ve served is a huge number. But from the overall universe of caregivers that could use our help, it’s relatively small. We’re on a mission to help all 63 million caregivers.”

From ad tech to ianacare

As an electrical engineering and computer science student at MIT in the 1990s, Lee conducted research on early speech-recognition technology as part of the Spoken Language Systems group in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

Following graduation, Lee started a company with Waikit Lau ’97 that optimized video advertising placement within streams. The company has gone through several mergers and acquisitions, but is now part of the public company Magnite, which places the ads on platforms like Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+.

Lee left the company in 2016 and began advising startups through programs including MIT’s Venture Mentoring Service as he looked to work on something he would find more meaningful.

“Over the years, the MIT network has been invaluable for connecting with customers, recruiting top talent, and engaging investors,” Lee says. “So much innovation flows out of MIT, and I’ve loved giving back, especially working alongside [VMS Venture Mentor] Paul Bosco ’95 and the rest of the VMS team. It’s deeply rewarding to share the best practices I’ve learned with the next generation of innovators.”

In 2017, Lee met Kim, who was caregiving for her mother with pancreatic cancer. Hearing about her experience brought him back to his own family’s challenges caring for his grandfather with Parkinson’s disease when Lee was a child.

“We realized the gaps that existed in caregiving support three decades ago still exist,” Lee says. “Nothing has changed.”

Officially launched in 2018, ianacare may seem far-removed from speech recognition or ad technologies, but Lee sees the work as an extension of his previous experiences.

“In my mind, AI got its start in speech recognition, and the intelligence we use to surface recommendations and create care plans for family caregivers uses a lot of the same statistical modeling techniques I used in speech recognition and ad placement,” Lee says. “It all goes back to the foundation I got at MIT.”

The founders first launched a free solution that allowed caregivers to connect with friends and family members to coordinate caregiving tasks.

“In our app, you can coordinate with anyone who’s interested in helping,” Lee says. “When you share a struggle with a friend or co-worker, they always say, ‘How can I help?’ But caregivers rarely go back to them and actually ask. In our platform, you can add those people to your informal care team and ask the team for help with something instead of having to text someone directly, which you’re less likely to do.”

Next, the founders built an enterprise solution so businesses could help employee caregivers, adding features like resource directories and ways to find and select various caregiving tools.

“An immense amount of local resources are available, but nobody knows about them,” Lee says. “For instance, every county in the country has an Area Agency on Aging, but these agencies aren’t marketing experts, and caregivers don’t know where to get guidance.”

Last year, ianacare began working with AARP and health care providers participating in the nationwide GUIDE model (for “Guiding an Improved Dementia Experience”) to improve the quality of life for dementia patients and their caregivers. Through the voluntary program, participants can use ianacare’s platform to coordinate care, access educational resources, and access free respite care up to $2,500 each year.

Lee says the CMS partnership gives ianacare a pathway to reach millions of people caring for dementia patients across the country.

“This is already a crisis, and it will get worse because we have an aging population and a capacity-constraint in our health care system,” Lee says. “The population above 65 is set to double between 2000 and 2040. We aren’t going to have three times the hospitals or three times the doctors or nurse practitioners. So, we can either make clinicians more efficient or move more health care into the home. That’s why we have empower family caregivers.”

Aging with dignity

Lee recalls one family who used ianacare after their son was born with a severe disease. The child only lived eight months, but for those eight months, the parents had meals delivered to them in the hospital by friends and family.

“It was not something they had to worry about the entire time their son was alive,” Lee says. “It’s been rewarding to help these people in so much need.”

Other ianacare users say the platform has helped them keep their parents out of the hospital and lessen their depression and anxiety around caregiving.

“Nobody wants to die in a hospital, so we’ve worked hard to honor the wishes of loved ones who want to age in the home,” Lee says. “We have a lot of examples of folks who, if our support was not there, their loved one would have had to enter a nursing home or institution. Ianacare is there to ensure the home is safe and that the caregiver can manage the care burden. It’s a win-win for everybody because it’s also less costly for the health care system.”

Each year, faculty and researchers across the MIT School of Engineering are recognized with prestigious awards for their contributions to research, technology, society, and education. To celebrate these achievements, the school periodically highlights select honors received by members of its departments, labs, and centers. The following individuals were recognized in spring 2025:

Markus Buehler, the Jerry McAfee (1940) Professor in Engineering in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, received the Washington Award. The award honors engineers whose professional attainments have preeminently advanced the welfare of humankind.

Sili Deng, an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, received the 2025 Hiroshi Tsuji Early Career Researcher Award. The award recognizes excellence in fundamental or applied combustion science research. Deng was honored for her work on energy conversion and storage, including combustion fundamentals, data-driven modeling of reacting flows, carbon-neutral energetic materials, and flame synthesis of materials for catalysis and energy storage.

Jonathan How, the Richard Cockburn Maclaurin Professor in Aeronautics and Astronautics, received the IEEE Transactions on Robotics King-Sun Fu Memorial Best Paper Award. The award recognizes the best paper published annually in the IEEE Transactions on Robotics for technical merit, originality, potential impact, clarity, and practical significance.

Richard Linares, the Rockwell International Career Development Professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, received the 2024 American Astronautical Society Emerging Astrodynamicist Award. The award honors junior researchers making significant contributions to the field of astrodynamics.

Youssef Marzouk, the Breene M. Kerr (1951) Professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, was named a fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. He was honored for influential contributions to multiple aspects of uncertainty quantification, particularly Bayesian computation and measure transport.

Dava Newman, the director of the MIT Media Lab and the Apollo Program Professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, received the Carolyn “Bo” Aldigé Visionary Award. The award was presented in recognition of the MIT Media Lab's women’s health program, WHx, for groundbreaking research in advancing women’s health.

Martin Rinard, a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, received the 2025 SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award. The award recognizes his fundamental contributions in pioneering the new fields of program repair and approximate computing.

Franz-Josef Ulm, the Class of 1922 Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, was named an ASCE Distinguished Member. He was recognized for contributions to the nano- and micromechanics of heterogeneous materials, including cement, concrete, rock, and bone, with applications in sustainable infrastructure, underground energy harvesting, and human health.

Enter the basement in one of MIT’s iconic buildings and you’ll find students hammering on anvils and forging red-hot metal into blades. This hands-on lesson in metallurgy is captured in the documentary “That Creative Spark,” which won an Emmy Award for the Education/Schools category at the 48th annual Boston/New England Emmy Awards Ceremony held in Boston in June.

“It’s wonderful to be recognized for the work that we do,” says Clayton Hainsworth, director of MIT Video Productions at MIT Open Learning. “We’re lucky to have incredible people who have decided to bring their outstanding talents here in order to tell MIT’s stories.”

The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Boston/New England Chapter recently honored Hainsworth, the documentary’s executive producer; Joe McMaster, director/producer; and Wesley Richardson, cinematographer.

“That Creative Spark” spotlights a series of 2024 Independent Activities Period (IAP) classes about bladesmithing, guest-taught by Bob Kramer, a world-renowned maker of hand-forged knives. In just one week, students learned how to grind, forge, and temper blocks of steel into knives sharp enough to slice through a sheet of paper without resistance.

“It’s an incredibly physical task of making something out of metal,” says McMaster, senior producer for MIT Video Productions. He says this tangible example of hands-on learning “epitomized the MIT motto of ‘mens et manus’ [‘mind and hand’].”

The IAP Bladesmithing with Bob Kramer course allowed students to see concepts and techniques like conductivity and pattern welding in action. Abhi Ratna Sharda, a PhD student at the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE), still recalls the feeling of metal changing as he worked on it.

“Those are things that you can be informed about through readings and textbooks, but the actual experience of doing them leaves an intuition you’re not quick to forget,” Sharda says.

Filming in the forge — the Merton C. Flemings Materials Processing Laboratory — is not an experience the MIT Video Productions team will be quick to forget, either. Richardson, field production videographer at MIT Video Productions, held the camera just six feet away from red-hot blades being dipped into tubs of oil, creating minor fireballs and plumes of smoke.

“It’s intriguing to see the dexterity that the students have around working with their hands with very dangerous objects in close proximity to each other,” says Richardson. “Students were able to get down to these really precise knives at the end of the class.”

Some people may be surprised to learn that MIT has a working forge, but metalworking is a long tradition at the Institute. In the documentary, Yet-Ming Chiang, Kyocera Professor of Ceramics at DMSE, points out a clue hidden in plain sight: “If you look at the MIT logo, there’s a blacksmith, and ‘mens et manus’ — ‘mind and hand,’” says Chiang, referring to the Institute’s official seal, adopted in 1894. “So the teaching and the practice of working with metals has been an important part of our department for a long time.”

Chiang invited Kramer to be a guest instructor and lecturer for two reasons: Kramer is an industry expert, and he achieved success through hands-on learning — an integral part of an MIT education. After dropping out of college and joining the circus, Kramer later gained practical experience in service-industry kitchens and eventually became one of just 120 Master Bladesmiths in the United States today.

“This nontraditional journey of Bob’s inspires students to think about projects and problems in different ways,” Hainsworth says.

Sharda, for example, is applying the pattern welding process he learned from Kramer in both his PhD program and his recreational jewelry making. The effect creates striking visuals — from starbursts to swirls looking like agate geodes, and more — that extend all the way through the steel, not just the surface of the blade.

“A lot of my research has to do with bonding metals and bonding dissimilar metals, which is the foundation for pattern welding,” Sharda says, adding how this technique has many potential industrial applications. He compares it to the mokume-gane technique used with precious metals, a practice he encountered while researching solid-state welding methods.

“Seeing that executed in a space where it’s very difficult to achieve that level of precision — it inspired me to polish all the tightest nooks and crannies of the pieces I make, and make sure everything is as flawless as possible,” Sharda adds.

In the documentary, Kramer reflects on his month of teaching experience: “When you give someone the opportunity and guide them to actually make something with their hands, there’s very few things that are as satisfying as that.”

In addition to highlighting MIT’s hands-on approach to teaching, “That Creative Spark” showcases the depth of its unique learning experiences.

“There are many sides to MIT in terms of what the students are actually given access to and able to do,” says Richardson. “There is no one face of MIT, because they're highly gifted, highly talented, and often those talents and gifts extend beyond their courses of study.”

That message resonates with Chiang, who says the class underscores the importance of hands-on, experimental research in higher education.

“What I think is a real benefit in experimental research is the physical understanding of how objects and forces relate to each other,” he says. “This kind of class helps students — especially students who’ve never had that experience, never had a job that requires real hands-on work — gain an understanding of those relationships.”

Hainsworth says it’s wonderful to collaborate with his team to tell stories about the spirit and generosity of Institute faculty, guest speakers, and students. The documentary was made possible, in part, thanks to the generous support of A. Neil Pappalardo ’64 and Jane Pappalardo.

“It really is a joy to come in every day and collaborate with people who care deeply about the work they do,” Hainsworth says. “And to be recognized with an Emmy, that is very rewarding.”

Jason Sparapani contributed to this story.

The various aspects of design — such as creation, function, and aesthetic — can be applied to many different disciplines and provide them with a value. While this is universally true for architecture, it has not traditionally been acknowledged for real estate, despite the close association between the two. Traditionally, real estate valuation has been determined by certain sales factors: income generated, recent similar sales, and replacement costs.

Now, a new book by researchers at MIT explores how design can be quantified in real estate valuation. “Value of Design: Creating Agency Through Data-Driven Insights” (Applied Research and Design Publishing) uses data-driven research to reveal how design leaves measurable traces in the built environment that correlate with real economic, social, and environmental outcomes.

The late MIT Research Scientist Andrea Chegut, along with Visiting Instructor Minkoo Kang SMRED ’18, Helena Rong SMArchS ’19, and Juncheng “Tony” Yang SMArchS ’19, present a body of years of interdisciplinary social science research that weave together historical context, real-world case studies, and critical reflections that engage a broader dialogue on design, value, and the built environment.

Kang, Rong, and Yang met as students at the MIT Real Estate Innovation Lab, which was co-founded and directed by Chegut, who passed away in December 2022. Under Chegut’s direction, interdisciplinary research at the lab helped establish the analytical tools and methodologies that underpin the book’s core arguments. The lab formerly closed after Chegut’s passing.

Q: How might the tools used in this research impact how an investor or real estate developer makes decisions on a property?

Kang: This book doesn’t offer a formula for replicable outcomes, nor should it. Real estate is deeply contextual, and every project carries its own constraints and potential. What our research provides is evidence: looking back at 20 years of patterns in New York City data, we see that design components — physical features such as podiums, unique non-orthogonal geometries, and high-rise setbacks; environmental qualities like daylight access, greenery, and open views; and a building’s contextual fit within its neighborhood — has a more substantial and consistent influence on value than the industry tends to credit.

Rong: One reason design has been left out of valuation practice is the siloing of architectural information: drawings stay inside individual firms, and there are no standards for identifying or quantifying the components that make up a design. We have countless databases, but never a true “design database.” This book starts to fill that gap by inventorying architectural features and showing how to measure them with both insights from architectural theory and exploration of computational methods and tools. Using today’s reality-capture technologies and the large-scale transaction data we obtained, we uncovered long-term patterns: Buildings that invested in thoughtful design often performed better, not only in financial terms, but also in how they contributed to neighborhood identity and sustained demand. The takeaway isn’t prescriptive, but directional. Design should not be treated as an aesthetic afterthought, or an intangible variable. Its impact is durable, measurable, and, importantly, undervalued, which is why it is something developers and investors should not only pay attention to, but actively prioritize.

Q: Can you share an example of how design influences urban change?

Kang: As a designer and real estate developer, my work sits at the intersection of architecture, finance, and neighborhood communities. I often collaborate with resident stakeholders to reimagine overlooked or underutilized properties as meaningful, long-term assets — using design both as a tool to shape development strategy and as a medium for community engagement and consensus building.

One recent example involved supporting a longtime property owner in transforming their single-family home into a 40-unit, mixed-income apartment building. Rather than maximizing density at all costs, the project prioritized livability, sustainability, and contextual fit — compact units with generous access to light and air, shared amenities like co-working space and a community room, and passive house-level energy performance.

Through design, we were able to unlock a new housing typology — one that balances financial feasibility with community ownership and long-term affordability. It’s a reminder that design’s influence on urban change extends beyond aesthetics or form. It helps determine who development serves, how neighborhoods evolve, and what kinds of futures are made possible.

Q: How can this research be of use to policymakers?

Yang: Policymakers usually consider broader and longer-term urban outcomes: livability, resilience, equity, and community cohesion. This research provides the empirical foundation to connect those outcomes to concrete design choices.

By quantifying how design influences not just real estate performance, but neighborhood identity, access, and sustainability, the book offers policymakers a new evidence base to inform zoning, public incentives, and regulatory frameworks. But more than that, we think this kind of data-driven insight can help align interests across the ecosystem: urban planners, private developers, community organizations, and residents, by demonstrating that high-quality design delivers shared, long-term value.

In a time when urban space is increasingly contested, being able to point to measurable impacts of design helps shift debates from ideology to informed decision-making. It gives public agencies a firmer ground to demand more, and to build coalitions around the kinds of neighborhoods we want to sustain. Basically, this research helps create agency by making design intelligible in urban spaces where key decisions are made. The kind of agency we’re interested in is not about control, but about influence and authorship. Design shapes how cities function and feel, who they serve, and how they change. Yet too often, those decisions are made without recognizing design’s role. By surfacing how design leaves durable, measurable traces in the built environment, this work gives designers and allied actors a stronger voice in shaping development and public discourse. It also invites broader participation: community groups, resident advocates, and others can use this evidence to articulate why building attributes and environmental quality matter. In this sense, the agency is distributed. It’s not just about empowering designers, but about equipping all stakeholders to see design as a shared, strategic tool for shaping more equitable, resilient, and humane urban futures.

Any motorist who has ever waited through multiple cycles for a traffic light to turn green knows how annoying signalized intersections can be. But sitting at intersections isn’t just a drag on drivers’ patience — unproductive vehicle idling could contribute as much as 15 percent of the carbon dioxide emissions from U.S. land transportation.

A large-scale modeling study led by MIT researchers reveals that eco-driving measures, which can involve dynamically adjusting vehicle speeds to reduce stopping and excessive acceleration, could significantly reduce those CO2 emissions.

Using a powerful artificial intelligence method called deep reinforcement learning, the researchers conducted an in-depth impact assessment of the factors affecting vehicle emissions in three major U.S. cities.

Their analysis indicates that fully adopting eco-driving measures could cut annual city-wide intersection carbon emissions by 11 to 22 percent, without slowing traffic throughput or affecting vehicle and traffic safety.

Even if only 10 percent of vehicles on the road employ eco-driving, it would result in 25 to 50 percent of the total reduction in CO2 emissions, the researchers found.

In addition, dynamically optimizing speed limits at about 20 percent of intersections provides 70 percent of the total emission benefits. This indicates that eco-driving measures could be implemented gradually while still having measurable, positive impacts on mitigating climate change and improving public health.

“Vehicle-based control strategies like eco-driving can move the needle on climate change reduction. We’ve shown here that modern machine-learning tools, like deep reinforcement learning, can accelerate the kinds of analysis that support sociotechnical decision making. This is just the tip of the iceberg,” says senior author Cathy Wu, the Thomas D. and Virginia W. Cabot Career Development Associate Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS) at MIT, and a member of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS).

She is joined on the paper by lead author Vindula Jayawardana, an MIT graduate student; as well as MIT graduate students Ao Qu, Cameron Hickert, and Edgar Sanchez; MIT undergraduate Catherine Tang; Baptiste Freydt, a graduate student at ETH Zurich; and Mark Taylor and Blaine Leonard of the Utah Department of Transportation. The research appears in Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies.

A multi-part modeling study

Traffic control measures typically call to mind fixed infrastructure, like stop signs and traffic signals. But as vehicles become more technologically advanced, it presents an opportunity for eco-driving, which is a catch-all term for vehicle-based traffic control measures like the use of dynamic speeds to reduce energy consumption.

In the near term, eco-driving could involve speed guidance in the form of vehicle dashboards or smartphone apps. In the longer term, eco-driving could involve intelligent speed commands that directly control the acceleration of semi-autonomous and fully autonomous vehicles through vehicle-to-infrastructure communication systems.

“Most prior work has focused on how to implement eco-driving. We shifted the frame to consider the question of should we implement eco-driving. If we were to deploy this technology at scale, would it make a difference?” Wu says.

To answer that question, the researchers embarked on a multifaceted modeling study that would take the better part of four years to complete.

They began by identifying 33 factors that influence vehicle emissions, including temperature, road grade, intersection topology, age of the vehicle, traffic demand, vehicle types, driver behavior, traffic signal timing, road geometry, etc.

“One of the biggest challenges was making sure we were diligent and didn’t leave out any major factors,” Wu says.

Then they used data from open street maps, U.S. geological surveys, and other sources to create digital replicas of more than 6,000 signalized intersections in three cities — Atlanta, San Francisco, and Los Angeles — and simulated more than a million traffic scenarios.

The researchers used deep reinforcement learning to optimize each scenario for eco-driving to achieve the maximum emissions benefits.

Reinforcement learning optimizes the vehicles’ driving behavior through trial-and-error interactions with a high-fidelity traffic simulator, rewarding vehicle behaviors that are more energy-efficient while penalizing those that are not.

However, training vehicle behaviors that generalize across diverse intersection traffic scenarios was a major challenge. The researchers observed that some scenarios are more similar to one another than others, such as scenarios with the same number of lanes or the same number of traffic signal phases.

As such, the researchers trained separate reinforcement learning models for different clusters of traffic scenarios, yielding better emission benefits overall.

But even with the help of AI, analyzing citywide traffic at the network level would be so computationally intensive it could take another decade to unravel, Wu says.

Instead, they broke the problem down and solved each eco-driving scenario at the individual intersection level.

“We carefully constrained the impact of eco-driving control at each intersection on neighboring intersections. In this way, we dramatically simplified the problem, which enabled us to perform this analysis at scale, without introducing unknown network effects,” she says.

Significant emissions benefits

When they analyzed the results, the researchers found that full adoption of eco-driving could result in intersection emissions reductions of between 11 and 22 percent.

These benefits differ depending on the layout of a city’s streets. A denser city like San Francisco has less room to implement eco-driving between intersections, offering a possible explanation for reduced emission savings, while Atlanta could see greater benefits given its higher speed limits.

Even if only 10 percent of vehicles employ eco-driving, a city could still realize 25 to 50 percent of the total emissions benefit because of car-following dynamics: Non-eco-driving vehicles would follow controlled eco-driving vehicles as they optimize speed to pass smoothly through intersections, reducing their carbon emissions as well.

In some cases, eco-driving could also increase vehicle throughput by minimizing emissions. However, Wu cautions that increasing throughput could result in more drivers taking to the roads, reducing emissions benefits.

And while their analysis of widely used safety metrics known as surrogate safety measures, such as time to collision, suggest that eco-driving is as safe as human driving, it could cause unexpected behavior in human drivers. More research is needed to fully understand potential safety impacts, Wu says.

Their results also show that eco-driving could provide even greater benefits when combined with alternative transportation decarbonization solutions. For instance, 20 percent eco-driving adoption in San Francisco would cut emission levels by 7 percent, but when combined with the projected adoption of hybrid and electric vehicles, it would cut emissions by 17 percent.

“This is a first attempt to systematically quantify network-wide environmental benefits of eco-driving. This is a great research effort that will serve as a key reference for others to build on in the assessment of eco-driving systems,” says Hesham Rakha, the Samuel L. Pritchard Professor of Engineering at Virginia Tech, who was not involved with this research.

And while the researchers focus on carbon emissions, the benefits are highly correlated with improvements in fuel consumption, energy use, and air quality.

“This is almost a free intervention. We already have smartphones in our cars, and we are rapidly adopting cars with more advanced automation features. For something to scale quickly in practice, it must be relatively simple to implement and shovel-ready. Eco-driving fits that bill,” Wu says.

This work is funded, in part, by Amazon and the Utah Department of Transportation.

The MIT Center for International Studies announced the launch of a new pilot initiative with Angola, to be implemented through its MIT-Africa Program.

The new initiative marks a significant collaboration between MIT-Africa, Sonangol (Angola’s national energy company), and the Instituto Superior Politécnico de Tecnologias e Ciências (ISPTEC). The collaboration was formalized at a signing ceremony on MIT’s campus in June with key stakeholders from all three institutions present, including Diamantino Pedro Azevedo, the Angolan minister of mineral resources, petroleum, and gas, and Sonangol CEO Gaspar Martins.

“This partnership marks a pivotal step in the Angolan government’s commitment to leveraging knowledge as the cornerstone of the country’s economic transformation,” says Azevedo. “By connecting the oil and gas sector with science, innovation, and world-class training, we are equipping future generations to lead Angola into a more technological, sustainable, and globally competitive era.”

The sentiment is shared by the MIT-Africa Program leaders. “This initiative reflects MIT’s deep commitment to fostering meaningful, long-term relationships across the African continent,” says Mai Hassan, faculty director of the MIT-Africa Program. “It supports our mission of advancing knowledge and educating students in ways that are globally informed, and it provides a platform for mutual learning. By working with Angolan partners, we gain new perspectives and opportunities for innovation that benefit both MIT and our collaborators.”

In addition to its new collaboration with MIT-Africa, Sonangol has joined MIT’s Industrial Liaison Program (ILP), breaking new ground as its first corporate member based in sub-Saharan Africa. ILP enables companies worldwide to harness MIT resources to address current challenges and to anticipate future needs. As an ILP member, Sonangol seeks to facilitate collaboration in key sectors such as natural resources and mining, energy, construction, and infrastructure.

The MIT-Africa Program manages a portfolio of research, teaching, and learning initiatives that emphasize two-way value — offering impactful experiences to MIT students and faculty while collaborating closely with institutions and communities across Africa. The new Angola collaboration is aligned with this ethos, and will launch with two core activities during the upcoming academic year:

1. Global Classroom: An MIT course on geo-spatial technologies for environmental monitoring, taught by an MIT faculty member, will be brought directly to the ISPTEC campus, offering Angolan students and MIT participants a collaborative, in-country learning experience.
2. Global Teaching Labs: MIT students will travel to ISPTEC to teach science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics subjects on renewable energy technologies, engaging Angolan students through hands-on instruction.

“This is not a traditional development project,” says Ari Jacobovits, managing director of MIT-Africa. “This is about building genuine partnerships rooted in academic rigor, innovation, and shared curiosity. The collaboration has been designed from the ground up with our partners at ISPTEC and Sonangol. We’re coming in with a readiness to learn as much as we teach.”

The pilot marks an important first step in establishing a long-term collaboration with Angola. By investing in collaborative education and innovation, the new initiative aims to spark novel approaches to global challenges and strengthen academic institutions on both sides.

These agreements with MIT-Africa and ILP “not only enhance our innovation and technological capabilities, but also create opportunities for sustainable development and operational excellence,” says Gaspar. “They advance our mission to be a leading force in the African energy sector.”

“The vision behind this initiative is bold,” says Hassan. “It’s about co-creating knowledge and building capacity that lasts.”

Four new faculty members join the School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P) this fall, offering the MIT community creativity, knowledge, and scholarship in multidisciplinary roles.

“These individuals add considerable strength and depth to our faculty,” says Hashim Sarkis, dean of the School of Architecture and Planning. “We are excited for the academic vigor they bring to research and teaching.”

Karrie G. Karahalios ’94, MEng ’95, SM ’97, PhD ’04 joins the MIT Media Lab as a full professor of media arts and sciences. Karahalios is a pioneer in the exploration of social media and of how people communicate in environments that are increasingly mediated by algorithms that, as she has written, “shape the world around us.” Her work combines computing, systems, artificial intelligence, anthropology, sociology, psychology, game theory, design, and infrastructure studies. Karahalios’ work has received numerous honors including the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, SIGMOD Best Paper Award, and recognition as an ACM Distinguished Member.

Pat Pataranutaporn SM ’18, PhD ’20 joins the MIT Media Lab as an assistant professor of media arts and sciences. A visionary technologist, scientist, and designer, Pataranutaporn explores the frontier of human-AI interaction, inventing and investigating AI systems that support human thriving. His research focuses on how personalized AI systems can amplify human cognition, from learning and decision-making to self-development, reflection, and well-being. Pataranutaporn will co-direct the Advancing Humans with AI Program.

Mariana Popescu joins the Department of Architecture as an assistant professor. Popescu is a computational architect and structural designer with a strong interest and experience in innovative ways of approaching the fabrication process and use of materials in construction. Her area of expertise is computational and parametric design, with a focus on digital fabrication and sustainable design. Her extensive involvement in projects related to promoting sustainability has led to a multilateral development of skills, which combine the fields of architecture, engineering, computational design, and digital fabrication. Popescu earned her doctorate at ETH Zurich. She was named a “Pioneer” on the MIT Technology Review global list of “35 innovators under 35” in 2019.

Holly Samuelson joins the Department of Architecture as an associate professor in the Building Technology Program at MIT, teaching architectural technology courses. Her teaching and research focus on issues of building design that impact human and environmental health. Her current projects harness advanced building simulation to investigate issues of greenhouse gas emissions, heat vulnerability, and indoor environmental quality while considering the future of buildings in a changing electricity grid. Samuelson has co-authored over 40 peer-reviewed papers, winning a best paper award from the journal Energy and Building. As a recognized expert in architectural technology, she has been featured in news outlets including The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, the BBC, and The Wall Street Journal. Samuelson earned her doctor of design from Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

Peter Temin PhD ’64, the MIT Elisha Gray II Professor of Economics, emeritus, passed away on Aug. 4. He was 87. 

Temin was a preeminent economic historian whose work spanned a remarkable range of topics, from the British Industrial Revolution and Roman economic history to the causes of the Great Depression and, later in his career, the decline of the American middle class. He also made important contributions to modernizing the field of economic history through his systematic use of economic theory and data analysis.

“Peter was a dedicated teacher and a wonderful colleague, who could bring economic history to life like few before or since,” says Jonathan Gruber, Ford Professor and chair of the Department of Economics. “As an undergraduate at MIT, I knew Peter as an engaging teacher and UROP [Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program] supervisor. Later, as a faculty member, I knew him as a steady and supportive colleague. A great person to talk to about everything, from research to politics to life at the Cape. Peter was the full package: a great scholar, a great teacher, and a dedicated public goods provider.”

When Temin began his career, the field of economic history was undergoing a reorientation within the profession. Led by giants like Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow, economics had become a more quantitative, mathematically rigorous discipline, and economic historians responded by embracing the new tools of economic theory and data collection. This “new economic history” (today also known as “cliometrics”) revolutionized the field by introducing statistical analysis and mathematical modeling to the study of the past. Temin was a pioneer of this new approach, using econometrics to reexamine key historical events and demonstrate how data analysis could lead to the overturning of long-held assumptions.

A prolific scholar who authored 17 books and edited six, Temin made important contributions to an incredibly diverse set of topics. “As kindly as he was brilliant, Peter was a unique type of academic,” says Harvard University Professor Claudia Goldin, a fellow economic historian and winner of the 2023 Nobel Prize in economic sciences. “He was a macroeconomist and an economic historian who later worked on today’s social problems. In between, he studied antitrust, health care, and the Roman economy.”

Temin’s earliest work focused on American industrial development during the 19th century and honed the signature approach that quickly made him a leading economic historian — combining rigorous economic theory with a deep understanding of historical context to reexamine the past. Temin was known for his extensive analysis of the Great Depression, which often challenged prevailing wisdom. By arguing that factors beyond monetary policy — including the gold standard and a decline in consumer spending — were critical drivers of the crisis, Temin helped recast how economists think about the catastrophe and the role of monetary policy in economic downturns.

As his career progressed, Temin’s work increasingly expanded to include the economic history of other regions and periods. His later work on the Great Depression placed a greater emphasis on the international context of the crisis, and he made significant contributions to our understanding of the drivers of the British Industrial Revolution and the nature of the Roman economy.

“Peter Temin was a giant in the field of economic history, with work touching every aspect of the field and original ideas backed by careful research,” says Daron Acemoglu, Institute Professor and recipient of the 2024 Nobel Prize in economics. “He challenged the modern view of the Industrial Revolution that emphasized technological changes in a few industries, pointing instead to a broader transformation of the British economy. He took on the famous historian of the ancient world, Moses Finley, arguing that slavery notwithstanding, markets in the Roman economy — especially land markets — worked. Peter’s influence and contributions have been long-lasting and will continue to be so.”

Temin was born in Philadelphia in 1937. His parents were activists who emphasized social responsibility, and his older brother, Howard, became a geneticist and virologist who shared the 1975 Nobel Prize in medicine. Temin received his BA from Swarthmore College in 1959 and went on to earn his PhD in Economics from MIT in 1964. He was a junior fellow of Harvard University’s Society of Fellows from 1962 to 1965.

Temin started his career as an assistant professor of industrial history at the MIT Sloan School of Management before being hired by the Department of Economics in 1967. He served as department chair from 1990t o 1993 and held the Elisha Gray II professorship from 1993 to 2009. Temin won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2001, and served as president of the Economic History Association (1995-96) and the Eastern Economic Association (2001-02).

At MIT, Temin’s scholarly achievements were matched by a deep commitment to engaging students as a teacher and advisor. “As a researcher, Peter was able to zero in on the key questions around a topic and find answers where others had been flailing,” says Christina Romer, chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Obama and a former student and advisee. “As a teacher, he managed to draw sleepy students into a rousing discussion that made us think we had figured out the material on our own, when, in fact, he had been masterfully guiding us. And as a mentor, he was unfailingly supportive and generous with both his time and his vast knowledge of economic history. I feel blessed to have been one of his students.”

When he became the economics department head in 1990, Temin prioritized hiring newly-minted PhDs and other junior faculty. This foresight continues to pay dividends — his junior hires included Daron Acemoglu and Abhijit Banerjee, and he launched the recruiting of Bengt Holmström for a senior faculty position. All three went on to win Nobel Prizes and have been pillars of economics research and education at MIT.

Temin remained an active researcher and author after his retirement in 2009. Much of his later work turned toward the contemporary American economy and its deep-seated divisions. In his influential 2017 book, “The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy,” he argued that the United States had become a “dual economy,” with a prosperous finance, technology, and electronics sector on one hand and, on the other, a low-wage sector characterized by stagnant opportunity.

“There are echoes of Temin’s later writings in current department initiatives, such as the Stone Center on Inequality and Shaping the Future of Work” notes Gruber. “Temin was in many ways ahead of the curve in treating inequality as an issue of central importance for our discipline.”

In “The Vanishing Middle Class,” Temin also explored the role that historical events, particularly the legacy of slavery and its aftermath, played in creating and perpetuating economic divides. He further explored these themes in his last book, “Never Together: The Economic History of a Segregated America,” published in 2022. While Temin was perhaps best known for his work applying modern economic tools to the past, this later work showed that he was no less adept at the inverse: using historical analysis to shed light on modern economic problems.

Temin was active with MIT Hillel throughout his career, and outside the Institute, he enjoyed staying active. He could often be seen walking or biking to MIT, and taking a walk around Jamaica Pond was a favorite activity in his last few months of life. Peter and his late wife Charlotte were also avid travelers and art collectors. He was a wonderful husband, father, and grandfather, who was deeply devoted to his family.

Temin is lovingly remembered by his daughter Elizabeth “Liz” Temin and three grandsons, Colin and Zachary Gibbons and Elijah Mendez. He was preceded in death by his wife, Charlotte Temin, a psychologist and educator, and his daughter, Melanie Temin Mendez.