Earle Leonard Lomon PhD ’54, MIT professor emeritus of physics, died on March 7 in Newton, Massachusetts, at the age of 94.  

A longtime member of the Center for Theoretical Physics, Lomon was interested primarily in the forces between protons and neutrons at low energies, where the effects of quarks and gluons are hidden by their confinement.

His research focused on the interactions of hadrons — protons, neutrons, mesons, and nuclei — before it was understood that they were composed of quarks and gluons. 

“Earle developed an R-matrix formulation of scattering theory that allowed him to separate known effects at long distance from then-unknown forces at short distances,” says longtime colleague Robert Jaffe, the Jane and Otto Morningstar Professor of Physics.

“When QCD [quantum chromodynamics] emerged as the correct field theory of hadrons, Earle moved quickly to incorporate the effects of quarks and gluons at short distance and high energies,” says Jaffe. “Earle’s work can be interpreted as a precursor to modern chiral effective field theory, where the pertinent degrees of freedom at low energy, which are hadrons, are matched smoothly onto the quark and gluon degrees of freedom that dominate at higher energy.”

“He was a truly cosmopolitan scientist, given his open mind and deep kindness,” says Bruno Coppi, MIT professor emeritus of physics.

Early years

Born Nov. 15, 1930, in Montreal, Quebec, Earle was the only son of Harry Lomon and Etta Rappaport. At Montreal High School, he met his future wife, Ruth Jones. Their shared love for classical music drew them both to the school's Classical Music Club, where Lomon served as president and Ruth was an accomplished musician.

While studying at McGill University, he was a research physicist for the Canada Defense Research Board from 1950 to 1951. After graduating in 1951, he married Jones, and they moved to Cambridge, where he pursued his doctorate at MIT in theoretical physics, mentored by Professor Hermann Feshbach.

Lomon spent 1954 to 1955 at the Institute for Theoretical Physics (now the Niels Bohr Institute) in Copenhagen. “With the presence of Niels Bohr, Aage Bohr, Ben Mottelson, and Willem V.R. Malkus, there were many physicists from Europe and elsewhere, including MIT’s Dave Frisch, making the Institute for Physics an exciting place to be,” recalled Lomon.

In 1956-57, he was a research associate at the Laboratory for Nuclear Studies at Cornell University. He received his PhD from MIT in 1954, and did postdoctoral work at the Institute of Theoretical Physics in Denmark, the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, and Cornell. He was an associate professor at McGill from 1957 until 1960, when he joined the MIT faculty.

In 1965, Lomon was awarded a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and was a visiting scientist at CERN. In 1968, he joined the newly formed MIT Center for Theoretical Physics. He became a full professor in 1970 and retired in 1999.

Los Alamos and math theory

From 1968 to 2015, Lomon was an affiliate researcher at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. During this time, he collaborated with Fred Begay, a Navajo nuclear physicist and medicine man. New Mexico became the Lomon family’s second home, and Lomon enjoyed the area hiking trails and climbing Baldy Mountain.   

Lomon also developed educational materials for mathematical theory. He developed textbooks, educational tools, research, and a creative problem-solving curriculum for the Unified Science and Mathematics for Elementary Schools. His children recall when Earle would review the educational tools with them at the dinner table. From 2001 to 2013, he was program director for mathematical theory for the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Theoretical Physics research hub.

Lomon was an American Physical Society Fellow and a member of the Canadian Association of Physicists.

Husband of the late Ruth Lomon, he is survived by his daughters Glynis Lomon and Deirdre Lomon; his son, Dylan Lomon; grandchildren Devin Lomon, Alexia Layne-Lomon, and Benjamin Garner; and six great-grandchildren. There will be a memorial service at a later date; instead of flowers, please consider donating to the Los Alamos National Laboratory Foundation. 

Around 11 billion tons of goods, or about 1.5 tons per person worldwide, are transported by sea each year, representing about 90 percent of global trade by volume. Internationally, the merchant shipping fleet numbers around 110,000 vessels. These ships, and the ports that service them, are significant contributors to the local and global economy — and they’re significant contributors to greenhouse gas emissions.

A new consortium, formalized in a signing ceremony at MIT last week, aims to address climate-harming emissions in the maritime shipping industry, while supporting efforts for environmentally friendly operation in compliance with the decarbonization goals set by the International Maritime Organization.

“This is a timely collaboration with key stakeholders from the maritime industry with a very bold and interdisciplinary research agenda that will establish new technologies and evidence-based standards,” says Themis Sapsis, the William Koch Professor of Marine Technology at MIT and the director of MIT’s Center for Ocean Engineering. “It aims to bring the best from MIT in key areas for commercial shipping, such as nuclear technology for commercial settings, autonomous operation and AI methods, improved hydrodynamics and ship design, cybersecurity, and manufacturing.” 

Co-led by Sapsis and Fotini Christia, the Ford International Professor of the Social Sciences; director of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS); and director of the MIT Sociotechnical Systems Research Center, the newly-launched MIT Maritime Consortium (MC) brings together MIT collaborators from across campus, including the Center for Ocean Engineering, which is housed in the Department of Mechanical Engineering; IDSS, which is housed in the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing; the departments of Nuclear Science and Engineering and Civil and Environmental Engineering; MIT Sea Grant; and others, with a national and an international community of industry experts.

The Maritime Consortium’s founding members are the American Bureau of Shipping (ABS), Capital Clean Energy Carriers Corp., and HD Korea Shipbuilding and Offshore Engineering. Innovation members are Foresight-Group, Navios Maritime Partners L.P., Singapore Maritime Institute, and Dorian LPG.

“The challenges the maritime industry faces are challenges that no individual company or organization can address alone,” says Christia. “The solution involves almost every discipline from the School of Engineering, as well as AI and data-driven algorithms, and policy and regulation — it’s a true MIT problem.”

Researchers will explore new designs for nuclear systems consistent with the techno-economic needs and constraints of commercial shipping, economic and environmental feasibility of alternative fuels, new data-driven algorithms and rigorous evaluation criteria for autonomous platforms in the maritime space, cyber-physical situational awareness and anomaly detection, as well as 3D printing technologies for onboard manufacturing. Collaborators will also advise on research priorities toward evidence-based standards related to MIT presidential priorities around climate, sustainability, and AI.

MIT has been a leading center of ship research and design for over a century, and is widely recognized for contributions to hydrodynamics, ship structural mechanics and dynamics, propeller design, and overall ship design, and its unique educational program for U.S. Navy Officers, the Naval Construction and Engineering Program. Research today is at the forefront of ocean science and engineering, with significant efforts in fluid mechanics and hydrodynamics, acoustics, offshore mechanics, marine robotics and sensors, and ocean sensing and forecasting. The consortium’s academic home at MIT also opens the door to cross-departmental collaboration across the Institute.

The MC will launch multiple research projects designed to tackle challenges from a variety of angles, all united by cutting-edge data analysis and computation techniques. Collaborators will research new designs and methods that improve efficiency and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, explore feasibility of alternative fuels, and advance data-driven decision-making, manufacturing and materials, hydrodynamic performance, and cybersecurity.

“This consortium brings a powerful collection of significant companies that, together, has the potential to be a global shipping shaper in itself,” says Christopher J. Wiernicki SM ’85, chair and chief executive officer of ABS. 

“The strength and uniqueness of this consortium is the members, which are all world-class organizations and real difference makers. The ability to harness the members’ experience and know-how, along with MIT’s technology reach, creates real jet fuel to drive progress,” Wiernicki says. “As well as researching key barriers, bottlenecks, and knowledge gaps in the emissions challenge, the consortium looks to enable development of the novel technology and policy innovation that will be key. Long term, the consortium hopes to provide the gravity we will need to bend the curve.”

When most people buy cars, the sticker price is only part of the cost. The other part involves the loan, since folks usually borrow money for auto purchases. Therefore the interest rate, monthly payment size, and total repayment cost all matter too.

And yet, on aggregate, people do more comparison shopping about car prices than about lenders, and they frequently settle for relatively expensive loans. What happens when the financing costs more? The answer is, people buy older cars with lower sticker prices.

“The car they’re driving right now could be a year older because of that,” says Christopher Palmer PhD ’14, an associate professor of finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management, who helped discover this phenomenon through a study examining millions of U.S. car loans. That research is like much of Palmer’s work: grounded in hard data and shining new light on issues, even familiar ones, about personal money management.

“I study household financial decision-making,” Palmer says. “Both how households make decisions and how those decisions are influenced by external factors. That covers a lot of things.”

It sure does. Palmer, often working with co-authors, has also discovered that people prefer to make monthly payments that are multiples of $100 — which can lead them to agree to worse financing terms. And since household finance includes housing, Palmer co-authored a high-profile study showing that people are remarkably more likely to use housing vouchers and move to another neighborhood when they have a modest amount of assistance from a “navigator” who helps with the move.

But he isn’t just looking for behavioral quirks: Another Palmer study found that the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing efforts after the financial crisis of 2008 helped cash-strapped people refinance their mortgages — though mostly those who had been able to make a down payment of 20 percent or more in the first place.

Overall, Palmer looks at big-picture economic scenarios in which people feel a financial crunch, and at consumer behavior, especially involving credit.

“If you look at whether someone can make a monthly payment, you need to understand their labor market, their expectations for the future, and more,” Palmer says. “Credit markets are interconnected to almost everything you might care about. Part of the reason I’m trying to shine a light on consumer credit markets is that they affect all kinds of human outcomes.”

For his research and teaching, Palmer earned tenure at MIT last year.

Useful intuition

Palmer grew up in the Boston area and enjoyed math in school, while always being interested in how people made financial decisions, especially about real estate. As an undergraduate at Brigham Young University, he soon recognized that he wanted to use his math skills to analyze everyday phenomena.

“I like the way you can take your intuition and have it be useful as you work through problems, along with this element of being able to observe what’s happening around you and being a listener in the world,” Palmer says.

As a student, though, that didn’t mean Palmer narrowed his interests. If anything, he saw the value in widening his studies.

“I also pretty quickly realized in college that I wanted to double major in econ and math,” Palmer says. “And that became the pipeline to get a PhD.”

After graduating from BYU, Palmer entered the doctoral program at MIT in 2008. In addition to taking classes, he immediately started working as a research assistant on a study of rent control along with professors David Autor — his eventual advisor — and Parag Pathak. That research eventually turned into a couple of high-profile papers. But while rent control is a kind of household-finance issue, the subject of household finance wasn’t really an established subdiscipline at the time.

It soon would be, however. Indeed, Palmer’s graduate-school career is almost a case study in how academic research broadens and evolves over time. Just as Palmer enrolled at MIT, the subprime-lending implosion helped generate the financial-markets crash of 2008, and both became greater focal points for academic research. Suddenly the topics that had been percolating around in Palmer’s mind were in pressing need of academic research.

“All of a sudden mortgages and household finance were front and center,” Palmer says. “That allowed me the space to write a dissertation about how distressed income households make mortgage decisions. There was an appetite for that.”

After receiving his PhD, Palmer joined the faculty at the University of California at Berkeley, at the Haas School of Business, and then moved back to MIT in 2017.

“Household finance as a field is small, so you have to intersect it with something else if you want your question to make a difference in the world,” Palmer says. “For me, that might be macroeconomics, labor economics, corporate finance, or banking. This is partly why MIT is an amazing place to be, because it’s so easy to get exposure to all of those fields.”

Keeping a list of questions at hand

With a wide-ranging research portfolio, Palmer has to be nimble about identifying topics he can study in depth. That means looking for good data related to household finance and consumer credit, and shaping his studies around meaningful questions.

“I think a good microeconomist is always on the hunt for things,” Palmer says.

“I’ve always wanted to be question-driven,” he adds. “I try to have a list of questions in mind, so that if somebody says, ‘I have an interesting data set, what can we do with it?’ I might have ideas about what in the data we can look at.”

Take the massive study on auto loans, which arose after a co-author approached Palmer and said, more or less, that he had identified an interesting data set and was wondering what to do with it. One unresolved question was: How much do people search for the best car price or the best loan terms?

As a graduate student, Palmer recalls, “I remembered [MIT professor] Glenn Ellison once saying in class that the subject of search is a really juicy topic. Consumers face tricky decisions, and companies do not want to make it easy for people to comparison-shop. And no one had done much about search in household finance.”

So, Palmer and his colleagues based the auto-loan study partly around the search issue. The work analyzes the geographic locations of millions of buyers, and the number of lenders within 20-minute drive of them, and examines how thoroughly consumers hunt for the best deals. The study includes credit scores, auto prices, and loan terms, illuminating the complete dynamics involving credit and auto purchases. 

Best behavior

Some of Palmer’s work, meanwhile, takes the form of experiments. The paper he co-authored about what helps people move was one such case. It was set in Seattle, and the research team collaborated with local policymakers to construct an experiment on the subject.

It turns out that in Seattle, among people granted housing vouchers to move to new neighborhoods, the percentage actually utilizing the vouchers jumped from 15 percent to 53 percent — an eye-opening change — when they were given slightly more information and resources, and most of all a “navigator” helping with basic logistics.

Studying how people manage money means Palmer’s work yields plenty of insights in the mode of behavioral economics, the subfield that studies irrationalities — or lack thereof — in finance. Palmer thinks such findings are important, while emphasizing that he is not principally on a hunt for irrationality. Instead he always seeks to link the study of behavior to major economic and policy matters: how we borrow, what we can afford, and how we respond to economic stress.

“When a study of behavior is motivated by a tight connection to public policy, it satisfies the is-this-important hurdle right away,” Palmer says. “I’m always aiming to produce work that a large community of scholars would find important and that the broader world would find impactful.”

The MIT women's swimming and diving team won the program's first national championship, jumping ahead of New York University by erasing a 20-point deficit as the Engineers finished with 497 points at the 2025 NCAA Women's Swimming and Diving National Championships, hosted by the Old Dominion Athletic Conference March 19-22 at the Greensboro Aquatic Center in Greensboro, North Carolina.   

MIT entered the event ranked as the top team in the country. Overall, MIT won three individual national titles and four relay titles. The head coach, Meg Sisson French, was named the College Swimming and Diving Coaches Association of America Women’s Swim Coach of the Year. 

On day 1 of the championships, the 400 Medley Relay team of senior Kate Augustyn (Eau Claire, Wisconsin), first-year Sarah Bernard (Brookline, Massachusetts), sophomore Sydney Smith (Atlanta, Georgia), and graduate student Alexandra Turvey (Vancouver, British Colombia) touched the wall first in 3:38.48, just beating the NYU team by 0.8 second and setting a new school record. 

Day 2 highlights included Smith posting a winning time of 53.96 in the 100 fly, beating out Nicole Ranile of NYU by under a second. The 200 freestyle relay team of Turvey, Smith, sophomore Ella Roberson (Midland, Michigan) and junior Annika Naveen (Wynnewood, Pennsylvania) held off Pomona-Pitzer for the gold as Naveen brought the title home and gave the Engineers a national record time of 1:30.00. 

MIT opened day 3 with another national title, this time in the 200 medley relay. Augustyn led off, followed by Bernard and Naveen. Ella Roberson brought the title home for MIT as she completed her anchor leg in 22.02, which gave the team a combined time of 1:39.51. Roberson was able to hold off a late charge by Kenyon College, which finished second in 1:40.26 as the Engineers set another national record. Augustyn later defended her title in the 100 backstroke as she clocked in with a time of 53.41, tying her own national record. 

The final day of action saw MIT pull ahead of NYU with two more national titles. In the 200 backstroke, Augustyn held the lead through most of the event, but Sophia Verkleeren of Williams College caught up to the defending champion in the last half of the race. With just 25 yards left, Augustyn pulled away to defeat Verkleeren with a time of 1:55.85. Augustyn shaved almost 2 seconds off her preliminary time and fell just short of the national record time of 1:55.67. With the win, the Engineers pulled to within one point of NYU for the top spot. 

The Engineers sealed the overall national championship by winning their fourth relay of the championship, besting the team from NYU. Turvey set the pace with her lead-off, followed by Smith and Augustyn. Roberson, swimming the anchor leg, held off Kaley McIntyre of NYU, who earlier set the national record in the 100 freestyle, to give MIT the win with a time of 3:19.03 as the Violets took second in 3:19.36.   

Augustyn defended her title in the 200 backstroke while sweeping the National Championship in both the 100 and 200 backstroke in consecutive years. She concludes her career as one of the most decorated swimmers in program history, collecting four individual national championships, four relay national championships, and 27 all-America honors, the most in program history. 

Bar graphs and other charts provide a simple way to communicate data, but are, by definition, difficult to translate for readers who are blind or low-vision. Designers have developed methods for converting these visuals into “tactile charts,” but guidelines for doing so are extensive (for example, the Braille Authority of North America’s 2022 guidebook is 426 pages long). The process also requires understanding different types of software, as designers often draft their chart in programs like Adobe Illustrator and then translate it into Braille using another application.

Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have now developed an approach that streamlines the design process for tactile chart designers. Their program, called “Tactile Vega-Lite,” can take data from something like an Excel spreadsheet and turn it into both a standard visual chart and a touch-based one. Design standards are hardwired as default rules within the program to help educators and designers automatically create accessible tactile charts.

The tool could make it easier for blind and low-vision readers to understand many graphics, such as a bar chart comparing minimum wages across states or a line graph tracking countries’ GDPs over time. To bring your designs to the real world, you can tweak your chart in Tactile Vega-Lite and then send its file to a Braille embosser (which prints text as readable dots).

This spring, the researchers will present Tactile Vega-Lite in a paper at the Association of Computing Machinery Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. According to lead author Mengzhu “Katie” Chen SM ’25, the tool strikes a balance between the precision that design professionals want for editing and the efficiency educators need to create tactile charts quickly.

“We interviewed teachers who wanted to make their lessons accessible to blind and low-vision students, and designers experienced in putting together tactile charts,” says Chen, a recent CSAIL affiliate and master's graduate in electrical engineering and computer science and the Program in System Design and Management. “Since their needs differ, we designed a program that’s easy to use, provides instant feedback when you want to make tweaks, and implements accessibility guidelines.”

Data you can feel

The researchers’ program builds off of their 2017 visualization tool Vega-Lite by automatically encoding both a flat, standard chart and a tactile one. Senior author and MIT postdoc Jonathan Zong SM ’20, PhD ’24 points out that the program makes intuitive design decisions so users don’t have to.

“Tactile Vega-Lite has smart defaults to ensure proper spacing, layout, and texture and Braille conversion, following best practices to create good touch-based reading experiences,” says Zong, who is also a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and an incoming assistant professor at the University of Colorado. “Building on existing guidelines and our interviews with experts, the goal is for teachers or visual designers without a lot of tactile design expertise to quickly convey data in a clear way for tactile readers to explore and understand.”

Tactile Vega-Lite’s code editor allows users to customize axis labels, tick marks, and other elements. Different features within the chart are represented by abstractions — or summaries of a longer body of code — that can be modified. These shortcuts allow you to write brief phrases that tweak the design of your chart. For example, if you want to change how the bars in your graph are filled out, you could change the code in the “Texture” section from “dottedFill” to “verticalFill” to replace small circles with upward lines.

To understand how these abstractions work, the researchers added a gallery of examples. Each one includes a phrase and what change that code leads to. Still, the team is looking to refine Tactile Vega-Lite’s user interface to make it more accessible to users less familiar with coding. Instead of using abstractions for edits, you could click on different buttons.

Chen says she and her colleagues are hoping to add machine-specific customizations to their program. This would allow users to preview how their tactile chart would look before it’s fabricated by an embossing machine and make edits according to the device’s specifications.

While Tactile Vega-Lite can streamline the many steps it usually takes to make a tactile chart, Zong emphasizes that it doesn’t replace an expert doing a final check-over for guideline compliance. The researchers are continuing to incorporate Braille design rules into their program, but caution that human review will likely remain the best practice.

“The ability to design tactile graphics efficiently, particularly without specialized software, is important for providing equal access of information to tactile readers,” says Stacy Fontenot, owner of Font to Dot, who wasn’t involved in the research. “Graphics that follow current guidelines and standards are beneficial for the reader as consistency is paramount, especially with complex, data-filled graphics. Tactile Vega-Lite has a straightforward interface for creating informative tactile graphics quickly and accurately, thereby reducing the design time in providing quality graphics to tactile readers.”

Chen and Zong wrote the paper with Isabella Pineros ’23, MEng ’24 and MIT Associate Professor Arvind Satyanarayan. The researchers’ work was supported by a National Science Foundation grant.

The CSAIL team also incorporated input from Rich Caloggero from MIT’s Disability and Access Services, as well as the Lighthouse for the Blind, which let them observe technical design workflows as part of the project.

Reducing the amount of agricultural sprays used by farmers — including fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides — could cut down the amount of polluting runoff that ends up in the environment while at the same time reducing farmers’ costs and perhaps even enhancing their productivity. A classic win-win-win.

A team of researchers at MIT and a spinoff company they launched has developed a system to do just that. Their technology adds a thin coating around droplets as they are being sprayed onto a field, greatly reducing their tendency to bounce off leaves and end up wasted on the ground. Instead, the coated droplets stick to the leaves as intended.

The research is described today in the journal Soft Matter, in a paper by recent MIT alumni Vishnu Jayaprakash PhD ’22 and Sreedath Panat PhD ’23, graduate student Simon Rufer, and MIT professor of mechanical engineering Kripa Varanasi.

A recent study found that if farmers didn’t use pesticides, they would lose 78 percent of fruit, 54 percent of vegetable, and 32 percent of cereal production. Despite their importance, a lack of technology that monitors and optimizes sprays has forced farmers to rely on personal experience and rules of thumb to decide how to apply these chemicals. As a result, these chemicals tend to be over-sprayed, leading to runoff and chemicals ending up in waterways or building up in the soil.

Pesticides take a significant toll on global health and the environment, the researchers point out. A recent study found that 31 percent of agricultural soils around the world were at high risk from pesticide pollution. And agricultural chemicals are a major expense for farmers: In the U.S., they spend $16 billion a year just on pesticides.

Making spraying more efficient is one of the best ways to make food production more sustainable and economical. Agricultural spraying essentially boils down to mixing chemicals into water and spraying water droplets onto plant leaves, which are often inherently water-repellent. “Over more than a decade of research in my lab at MIT, we have developed fundamental understandings of spraying and the interaction between droplets and plants — studying when they bounce and all the ways we have to make them stick better and enhance coverage,” Varanasi says.

The team had previously found a way to reduce the amount of sprayed liquid that bounces away from the leaves it strikes, which involved using two spray nozzles instead of one and spraying mixtures with opposite electrical charges. But they found that farmers were reluctant to take on the expense and effort of converting their spraying equipment to a two-nozzle system. So, the team looked for a simpler alternative.

They discovered they could achieve the same improvement in droplet retention using a single-nozzle system that can be easily adapted to existing sprayers. Instead of giving the droplets of pesticide an electric charge, they coat each droplet with a vanishingly thin layer of an oily material.

In their new study, they conducted lab experiments with high-speed cameras. When they sprayed droplets with no special treatment onto a water-repelling (hydrophobic) surface similar to that of many plant leaves, the droplets initially spread out into a pancake-like disk, then rebounded back into a ball and bounced away. But when the researchers coated the surface of the droplets with a tiny amount of oil — making up less than 1 percent of the droplet’s liquid — the droplets spread out and then stayed put. The treatment improved the droplets’ “stickiness” by as much as a hundredfold.

“When these droplets are hitting the surface and as they expand, they form this oil ring that essentially pins the droplet to the surface,” Rufer says. The researchers tried a wide variety of conditions, he says, explaining that they conducted hundreds of experiments, “with different impact velocities, different droplet sizes, different angles of inclination, all the things that fully characterize this phenomenon.” Though different oils varied in their effectiveness, all of them were effective. “Regardless of the impact velocity and the oils, we saw that the rebound height was significantly lower,” he says.

The effect works with remarkably small amounts of oil. In their initial tests they used 1 percent oil compared to the water, then they tried a 0.1 percent, and even .01. The improvement in droplets sticking to the surface continued at a 0.1 percent, but began to break down beyond that. “Basically, this oil film acts as a way to trap that droplet on the surface, because oil is very attracted to the surface and sort of holds the water in place,” Rufer says.

In the researchers’ initial tests they used soybean oil for the coating, figuring this would be a familiar material for the farmers they were working with, many of whom were growing soybeans. But it turned out that though they were producing the beans, the oil was not part of their usual supply chain for use on the farm. In further tests, the researchers found that several chemicals that farmers were already routinely using in their spraying, called surfactants and adjuvants, could be used instead, and that some of these provided the same benefits in keeping the droplets stuck on the leaves.

“That way,” Varanasi says, “we’re not introducing a new chemical or changed chemistries into their field, but they’re using things they’ve known for a long time.”

Varanasi and Jayaprakash formed a company called AgZen to commercialize the system. In order to prove how much their coating system improves the amount of spray that stays on the plant, they first had to develop a system to monitor spraying in real time. That system, which they call RealCoverage, has been deployed on farms ranging in size from a few dozen acres to hundreds of thousands of acres, and many different crop types, and has saved farmers 30 to 50 percent on their pesticide expenditures, just by improving the controls on the existing sprays. That system is being deployed to 920,000 acres of crops in 2025, the company says, including some in California, Texas, the Midwest, France and Italy. Adding the cloaking system using new nozzles, the researchers say, should yield at least another doubling of efficiency.

“You could give back a billion dollars to U.S. growers if you just saved 6 percent of their pesticide budget,” says Jayaprakash, lead author of the research paper and CEO of AgZen. “In the lab we got 300 percent of extra product on the plant. So that means we could get orders of magnitude reductions in the amount of pesticides that farmers are spraying.”

Farmers had already been using these surfactant and adjuvant chemicals as a way to enhance spraying effectiveness, but they were mixing it with a water solution. For it to have any effect, they had to use much more of these materials, risking causing burns to the plants. The new coating system reduces the amount of these materials needed, while improving their effectiveness.

In field tests conducted by AgZen, “we doubled the amount of product on kale and soybeans just by changing where the adjuvant was,” from mixed in to being a coating, Jayaprakash says. It’s convenient for farmers because “all they’re doing is changing their nozzle. They’re getting all their existing chemicals to work better, and they’re getting more product on the plant.”

And it’s not just for pesticides. “The really cool thing is this is useful for every chemistry that’s going on the leaf, be it an insecticide, a herbicide, a fungicide, or foliar nutrition,” Varanasi says. This year, they plan to introduce the new spray system on about 30,000 acres of cropland.

Varanasi says that with projected world population growth, “the amount of food production has got to double, and we are limited in so many resources, for example we cannot double the arable land. … This means that every acre we currently farm must become more efficient and able to do more with less.” These improved spraying technologies, for both monitoring the spraying and coating the droplets, Varanasi says, “I think is fundamentally changing agriculture.”

AgZen has recently raised $10 million in venture financing to support rapid commercial deployment of these technologies that can improve the control of chemical inputs into agriculture. “The knowledge we are gathering from every leaf, combined with our expertise in interfacial science and fluid mechanics, is giving us unparalleled insights into how chemicals are used and developed — and it’s clear that we can deliver value across the entire agrochemical supply chain,” Varanasi says  “Our mission is to use these technologies to deliver improved outcomes and reduced costs for the ag industry.” 

Two years ago, MIT professor of literature Arthur Bahr had one of the best days of his life. Sitting in the British Library, he was allowed to page through the Pearl-Manuscript, a singular bound volume from the 1300s containing the earliest versions of the masterly medieval poem “Pearl,” the famous tale “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” and two other poems.

Today, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” is commonly read in high school English classes. But it probably would have been lost to history without the survival of the Pearl-Manuscript, like the other works in the same volume. As it stands, no one knows who authored these texts. But one thing is clear: the surviving manuscript is a carefully crafted volume, with bespoke illustrations and the skilled use of parchment. This book is its own work of art.

“The Pearl-Manuscript is just as extraordinary and unusual and unexpected as the poems it contains,” Bahr says of the document, whose formal name is “British Library MS Cotton Nero A X/2.”

Bahr explores these ideas in a new book, “Chasing the Pearl-Manuscript: Speculation, Shapes, Delight,” published this month by the University of Chicago Press. In it, Bahr combines his deep knowledge of the volume’s texts with detailed examination of its physical qualities — thanks to technologies such as spectroscopy, which has revealed some manuscript secrets, as well as the good, old-fashioned scrutiny Bahr gave the book in person.

“My argument is that this physical object adds up to more than the sum of its parts, through its creative interplay of text, image, and materials,” Bahr says. “It is a coherent volume that evokes the concerns of the poems themselves. Most manuscripts are constructed in utilitarian ways, but not this one.”

Ode to the most beautiful poem

Bahr first encountered “Pearl” as an undergraduate at Amherst College, in a course taught by medievalist Howell D. Chickering. The poem is an intricate examination of Christian ethics; a father, whose daughter has died, dreams he is discussing the meaning of life with her.

“It is the most beautiful poem I have ever read,” Bahr says. “It blew me away, for its formal complexity, and for the really poignant human drama.” He adds: “It’s in some sense why I’m a medievalist.”

And since Bahr’s first book, “Fragments and Assemblages,” studies how medieval bound volumes were often collections of disparate documents, it was natural for him to apply this scholarly lens to the Pearl manuscript as well.

Most scholars think the Pearl manuscript has a single author — although we cannot be certain. After beginning with “Pearl,” the manuscript follows with two other poems, “Cleanness” and “Patience.” Closing the volume, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” is an eerie, surreal tale of courage and chivalry set in the (possibly fictional) court of King Arthur.

In the book, Bahr finds the four texts to be thematically linked, analyzing the “connective tissue” through which the “manuscript starts to cohere into a wrought, imperfect, temporally layered whole,” as he writes. Some of these links are broad, including recurring “challenges to our speculative faculties”; the works are full of seeming paradoxes and dreamscapes that test the reader’s interpretive capacity.

There are other ways the text seem aligned. “Pearl” and “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” each have 101 stanzas. The texts have numerically consistent structures, in the case of “Pearl” based around the number 12. All but one of its stanzas has 12 lines (and Bahr suspects this imperfection is intentional, like a fine rug with a deliberate flaw, which may be the case for the “extra” 101st stanza). There are 36 lines per page. And from examining the manuscript in person, Bahr found 48 places with decorated initials, although we do not know whose.

“The more you look, the more you find,” Bahr says.

Materiality matters

Some of our knowledge about the Pearl-Manuscript is quite new: Spectroscopy has revealed that the volume originally had simple line drawings, which were later filled in with colored ink.

But there is no substitute for reading books in person. That took Bahr to London in 2023, where he was permitted an extended look at the Pearl-Manuscript in the flesh. Far from being a formality, that gave Bahr new insights.

For instance: The Pearl-Manuscript is written on parchment, which is animal skin. At a key point in the “Patience” poem, a reworking of the tale of Jonah and the whale, the parchment has been reversed, so that the “hair” side of the material faces up, rather than the “flesh” side; it is the only case of this in the manuscript.

“When you’re reading about Jonah being swallowed by the whale, you feel the hair follicles when you wouldn’t expect to,” Bahr says. “At precisely the moment when the poem is thematizing an unnatural reversal of inside and outside, you are feeling the other side of another animal.”

He adds: “The act of touching the Pearl-Manuscript really changed how I think this poem would have worked for the medieval reader.” In this vein, he says, “Materiality matters. Screens are enabling, and without the digital facsimile I could not have written this book, but they cannot ever replace the original. The ‘Patience’ chapter reinforces that.”

Ultimately, Bahr thinks the Pearl-Manuscript buttresses his view in the “Fragments and Assemblages” book, that the medieval reading experience was often bound up with the way volumes were physically constructed.

“My argument in ‘Fragments and Assemblages’ was that medieval readers and book constructors thought in a serious and often sophisticated way about how the material construction and the selection of the texts into a physical object made a difference — mattered — and had the potential to change the meanings of the texts,” he says.

Good grade on the group project

“Chasing the Pearl-Manuscript” has received praise from other scholars. Jessica Brantley, professor and chair of the English Department at Yale University, has said that Bahr “offers an adventurous multilayered reading of both text and book and provides an important reinterpretation of the codex and its poems.”

Daniel Wakelin of Oxford University has said that Bahr “sets out an authoritative reading of these poems” and presents “a bold model for studying material texts and literary works together.”

For his part, Bahr hopes to appeal to an array of readers, just as his courses on medieval literature appeal to students with an array of intellectual interests. In the making of his book, Bahr also credits two MIT students, Kelsey Glover and Madison Sneve, who helped the project through the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP), studying the illustrations and distinctive manuscript markings, among other things.

“It’s a very MIT kind of poem in the sense that not only is the author, or authors, obsessed with math and geometry and numbers and proportion, they are also obsessed with artifact construction, with architectural details and physical craft,” Bahr says. “There’s a very ‘mens et manus’ quality to the poems that’s reflected in the manuscript,” he says, referring to MIT’s motto, “mind and hand.” “I think helps explain why these extraordinary MIT students helped me so much.”

The MIT campus came alive with artistic energy on March 13 as Artfinity — the Institute's new festival celebrating creativity and community — took over multiple venues with interactive experiences, exhibitions, and performances.

Artfinity participants created their own paths through interconnected artistic encounters across campus, exploring everything from augmented reality (AR) experiences in the Infinite Corridor to innovative musical performances at the Media Lab. The events were designed to build upon each other, allowing visitors to flow naturally between locations while experiencing a range of creative expressions.

Daytime offerings included several exhibitions: Coloring with Wide Tim at the Welcome Center; “Golden Cargo: Conquest of the Tropics” at the ACT Gallery, examining the complex history of the United Fruit Company; two exhibitions at the List Visual Arts Center — “List Projects 31: Kite” and “Pedro Gómez-Egaña: The Great Learning”; and "Mission Control" at the Media Lab. Throughout the day, the “Layers of Place” AR experience revealed hidden histories and perspectives on the pillars of Building 7, “The Alchemist” sculpture, and the Infinite Corridor.

The MIT Museum served as the hub for the evening with its After Dark series, featuring a talk on technology in art by the Media Lab’s Critical Matter group director and award-winning designer Behnaz Farahi (whose large projection on MIT's dome, “Gaze to the Stars,” was on view later that evening), alongside galleries showcasing faculty works, including Rania Ghosn's “Cosmograph,” Azra Akšamija's “Hallucinating Traditions,” and other new exhibitions featuring work from the Media Lab. Throughout the museum, visitors engaged with interactive activities ranging from flash portrait sessions to textile design.

As evening progressed, the campus transformed with performances and installations. The Media Lab hosted Moving Music, premiering two unusual works: “Here...NOW” by Ana Schon and “MAICE” by Tod Machover, a new piece for renowned marimba player Ji Hye Jung. Large-scale projections also illuminated campus buildings, including “Creative Lumens,“ where students transformed the exteriors of the new Linde Music Building, the MIT Chapel, and Zesiger Center with vibrant projections.

Additional events that evening included Argus Installation, exploring the interplay of light and hand-blown glass at the MIT Museum Studio; the Welcome Center's speed networking for artists and creatives followed by All Our Relations, where MIT's Indigenous community brought native and non-native people together for song, dance, and story; and a film screening at the Open Space Screen, offering a behind-the-scenes look at Laura Anderson Barbata's “Intervention: Ocean Blues.”

Attendance topped 1,000 on campus that evening, with many more viewing the large-scale art projections as passersby. Artfinity continues through May 2 and will have featured more than 80 free performing and visual arts events celebrating creativity and community at MIT.

If you filled out a March Madness bracket this month, you probably faced the same question with each college match-up: What gives one team an edge over another? Is it a team’s record through the regular season? Or the chemistry among its players? Maybe it’s the experience of its coaching staff or the buzz around a top scorer.

All of these factors play some role in a team’s chance to advance. But according to a new study by MIT researchers, there’s one member who consistently boosts their team’s performance: the data analyst.

The new study, which was published this month in the Journal of Sports Economics, quantifies the influence of basketball analytics investment on team performance. The study’s authors looked in particular at professional basketball and compared the  investment in data analytics on each NBA team with the team’s record of wins over 12 seasons. They found that indeed, teams that hired more analytics staff, and invested more in data analysis in general, tended to win more games.

Analytics department headcount had a positive and statistically significant effect on team wins even when accounting for other factors such as a team’s roster salary, the experience and chemistry among its players, the consistency of its coaching staff, and player injuries through each season. Even with all of these influences, the researchers found that the depth of a team’s data analytics bench, so to speak, was a consistent predictor of the team’s wins.

What’s more, they were able to quantify basketball analytics’ value, based on their impact on team wins. They found that for every four-fifths of one data analyst, a team gains one additional win in a season. Interestingly, a team can also gain one additional win by increasing its roster salary by $9.6 million. One way to read this is that one data analyst’s impact is worth at least $9 million.

“I don’t know of any analyst who’s being paid $9 million,” says study author Henry Wang, a graduate student in the MIT Sports Lab. “There is still a gap between how the player is being valued and how the analytics are being valued."

While the study focuses on professional basketball, the researchers say the findings are relevant beyond the NBA. They speculate that college teams that make use of data analytics may have an edge over those who don’t. (Take note, March Madness fans.) And the same likely goes for sports in general, along with any competitive field.

“This paper hits nicely not just in sports but beyond, with this question of: What is the tangible impact of big data analytics?” says co-author Arnab Sarker PhD ’25, a recent doctoral graduate of MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems and Society (IDSS). “Sports are a really nice, controlled place for analytics. But we’re also curious to what extent we can see these effects in general organizational performance.”

The study is also co-authored by Anette “Peko” Hosoi, the Pappalardo Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT.

Data return

Across the sports world, data analysts have grown in number and scope over the years. Sports analytics’ role in using data and stats to improve team performance was popularized in 2011 with the movie “Moneyball,” based on the 2003 book “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game” by Michael Lewis, who chronicled the 2002 Oakland Athletics and general manager Billy Beane’s use of baseball analytics to win games against wealthier Major League Baseball teams.

Since then, data analysis has expanded to many other sports, in an effort to make use of the varied and fast-paced sources of data, measurements, and statistics available today. In basketball, analysts can take on many roles, using data, for instance, to optimize a player’s health and minimize injury risk, and to predict a player’s performance to inform draft selection, free agency acquisition, and contract negotiations.

A data analyst’s work can also influence in-game strategy. Case in point: Over the last decade, NBA teams have strategically chosen to shift to shooting longer-range three-pointers, since Philadelphia 76ers President of Basketball Operations Daryl Morey SM ’00 determined that statistically, shooting more three-pointers wins more games. Today, each of the 30 NBA teams employs at least one basketball analytics staffer. And yet, while a data analyst’s job is entirely based on data, there is not much data on the impact of analysts themselves.

“Teams and leagues are spending millions of dollars on embracing analytical tools without a real sense of return-on-investment,” Wang notes.

Numbers value

The MIT researchers aimed in their new study to quantify the influence of NBA team analysts, specifically on winning games. To do so, they looked to major sources of sports data such as ESPN.com, and NBAstuffer.com, a website that hosts a huge amount of stats on NBA games and team stats, including hired basketball analytics staff, that the website’s managers compile based on publicly available data, such as from official team press releases and staff directories, as well as LinkedIn and X profiles, and news and industry reports.

For their new study, Wang and his colleagues gathered data on each of the 30 NBA teams, over a period from 2009 to 2023, 2009 being the year that NBAstuffer.com started compiling team data. For every team in each season during this period, the researchers recorded an “analyst headcount,” meaning the number of basketball operations analytics staff employed by a team. They considered an analyst to be data analysts, software engineers, sports scientists, directors of research, and other technical positions by title, but also staff members who aren’t formally analysts but may be known to be particularly active in the basketball analytics community. In general, they found that in 2009, a total of 10 data analysts were working across the NBA. In 2023, that number ballooned to 132, with some teams employing more analysts than others.

“What we’re trying to measure is a team’s level of investment in basketball analytics,” Wang explains. “The best measure would be if every team told us exactly how much money they spent every year on their R&D and data infrastructure and analysts. But they’re not going to do that. So headcount is the next best thing.”

In addition to analytics headcount, the researchers also compiled data on other win-influencing variables, such as roster salary (Does a higher-paid team win more games?), roster experience (Does a team with more veterans win more games?), consistent coaching (Did a new coach shake up a team’s win record?) and season injuries (How did a team’s injuries affect its wins?). The researchers also noted “road back-to-backs,” or the number of times a team had to play consecutive away games (Does the wear and tear of constant travel impact wins?).

The researchers plugged all this data into a “two-way fixed effects” model to estimate the relative effect that each variable has on the number of additional games a team can win in a season.

“The model learns all these effects, so we can see, for instance, the tradeoff between analyst and roster salary when contributing to win total,” Wang explains.

Their finding that teams with a higher analytics headcount tended to win more games wasn’t entirely surprising.

“We’re still at a point where the analyst is undervalued,” Wang says. “There probably is a sweet spot, in terms of headcount and wins. You can’t hire 100 analysts and expect to go in 82-and-0 next season. But right now a lot of teams are still below that sweet spot, and this competitive advantage that analytics offers has yet to be fully harvested.”

Next time you cross a crowded plaza, crosswalk, or airport concourse, take note of the pedestrian flow. Are people walking in orderly lanes, single-file, to their respective destinations? Or is it a haphazard tangle of personal trajectories, as people dodge and weave through the crowd?

MIT instructor Karol Bacik and his colleagues studied the flow of human crowds and developed a first-of-its-kind way to predict when pedestrian paths will transition from orderly to entangled. Their findings may help inform the design of public spaces that promote safe and efficient thoroughfares.

In a paper appearing this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers consider a common scenario in which pedestrians navigate a busy crosswalk. The team analyzed the scenario through mathematical analysis and simulations, considering the many angles at which individuals may cross and the dodging maneuvers they may make as they attempt to reach their destinations while avoiding bumping into other pedestrians along the way.

The researchers also carried out controlled crowd experiments and studied how real participants walked through a crowd to reach certain locations. Through their mathematical and experimental work, the team identified a key measure that determines whether pedestrian traffic is ordered, such that clear lanes form in the flow, or disordered, in which there are no discernible paths through the crowd. Called “angular spread,” this parameter describes the number of people walking in different directions.

If a crowd has a relatively small angular spread, this means that most pedestrians walk in opposite directions and meet the oncoming traffic head-on, such as in a crosswalk. In this case, more orderly, lane-like traffic is likely. If, however, a crowd has a larger angular spread, such as in a concourse, it means there are many more directions that pedestrians can take to cross, with more chance for disorder.

In fact, the researchers calculated the point at which a moving crowd can transition from order to disorder. That point, they found, was an angular spread of around 13 degrees, meaning that if pedestrians don’t walk straight across, but instead an average pedestrian veers off at an angle larger than 13 degrees, this can tip a crowd into disordered flow.

“This all is very commonsense,” says Bacik, who is a instructor of applied mathematics at MIT. “The question is whether we can tackle it precisely and mathematically, and where the transition is. Now we have a way to quantify when to expect lanes — this spontaneous, organized, safe flow — versus disordered, less efficient, potentially more dangerous flow.”

The study’s co-authors include Grzegorz Sobota and Bogdan Bacik of the Academy of Physical Education in Katowice, Poland, and Tim Rogers at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom.

Right, left, center

Bacik, who is trained in fluid dynamics and granular flow, came to study pedestrian flow during 2021, when he and his collaborators looked into the impacts of social distancing, and ways in which people might walk among each other while maintaining safe distances. That work inspired them to look more generally into the dynamics of crowd flow.

In 2023, he and his collaborators explored “lane formation,” a phenomenon by which particles, grains, and, yes, people have been observed to spontaneously form lanes, moving in single-file when forced to cross a region from two opposite directions. In that work, the team identified the mechanism by which such lanes form, which Bacik sums up as “an imbalance of turning left versus right.” Essentially, they found that as soon as something in a crowd starts to look like a lane, individuals around that fledgling lane either join up, or are forced to either side of it, walking parallel to the original lane, which others can follow. In this way, a crowd can spontaneously organize into regular, structured lanes.

“Now we’re asking, how robust is this mechanism?” Bacik says. “Does it only work in this very idealized situation, or can lane formation tolerate some imperfections, such as some people not going perfectly straight, as they might do in a crowd?”

Lane change

For their new study, the team looked to identify a key transition in crowd flow: When do pedestrians switch from orderly, lane-like traffic, to less organized, messy flow? The researchers first probed the question mathematically, with an equation that is typically used to describe fluid flow, in terms of the average motion of many individual molecules.

“If you think about the whole crowd flowing, rather than individuals, you can use fluid-like descriptions,” Bacik explains. “It’s this art of averaging, where, even if some people may cross more assertively than others, these effects are likely to average out in a sufficiently large crowd. If you only care about the global characteristics like, are there lanes or not, then you can make predictions without detailed knowledge of everyone in the crowd.”

Bacik and his colleagues used equations of fluid flow, and applied them to the scenario of pedestrians flowing across a crosswalk. The team tweaked certain parameters in the equation, such as the width of the fluid channel (in this case, the crosswalk), and the angle at which molecules (or people) flowed across, along with various directions that people can “dodge,” or move around each other to avoid colliding.

Based on these calculations, the researchers found that pedestrians in a crosswalk are more likely to form lanes, when they walk relatively straight across, from opposite directions. This order largely holds until people start veering across at more extreme angles. Then, the equation predicts that the pedestrian flow is likely to be disordered, with few to no lanes forming.

The researchers were curious to see whether the math bears out in reality. For this, they carried out experiments in a gymnasium, where they recorded the movements of pedestrians using an overhead camera. Each volunteer wore a paper hat, depicting a unique barcode that the overhead camera could track.

In their experiments, the team assigned volunteers various start and end positions along opposite sides of a simulated crosswalk, and tasked them with simultaneously walking across the crosswalk to their target location without bumping into anyone. They repeated the experiment many times, each time having volunteers assume different start and end positions. In the end, the researchers were able to gather visual data of multiple crowd flows, with pedestrians taking many different crossing angles.

When they analyzed the data and noted when lanes spontaneously formed, and when they did not, the team found that, much like the equation predicted, the angular spread mattered. Their experiments confirmed that the transition from ordered to disordered flow occurred somewhere around the theoretically predicted 13 degrees. That is, if an average person veered more than 13 degrees away from straight ahead, the pedestrian flow could tip into disorder, with little lane formation. What’s more, they found that the more disorder there is in a crowd, the less efficiently it moves.

The team plans to test their predictions on real-world crowds and pedestrian thoroughfares.

“We would like to analyze footage and compare that with our theory,” Bacik says. “And we can imagine that, for anyone designing a public space, if they want to have a safe and efficient pedestrian flow, our work could provide a simpler guideline, or some rules of thumb.”

This work is supported, in part, by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council of UK Research and Innovation.

Over the course of nearly five decades, Biogen has played a major role in catalyzing and shaping Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, now heralded as the “most innovative square mile on the planet.” Today, Biogen announced its decision to centralize operations in a new facility at 75 Broadway in MIT’s Kendall Common development. The move, which will take place in 2028, highlights the company’s commitment to Cambridge and the regional innovation ecosystem — a wellspring of biomedical advances.

“It’s fitting that Biogen — a company with such close ties to people at MIT — will make Kendall Common’s first building its new home,” says MIT President Sally Kornbluth. “The motto of Kendall Square might as well be ‘talent in proximity’ and Biogen’s decision to intensify its presence here promises great things for the whole ecosystem. To achieve this milestone on the occasion of the company’s 50th anniversary is especially meaningful. We are grateful to Chris Viehbacher, president and chief executive officer of Biogen, for his keen vision of the future and his ongoing commitment to Cambridge and Kendall Square.”

The approximately 580,000-square-foot facility will integrate Biogen’s research and development teams together with its global and North American commercialization organizations. The building will incorporate advanced conservation, efficiency, and sustainable design elements.

“Biogen’s story in Kendall Square is unlike any other,” says Anantha Chandrakasan, MIT’s chief innovation and strategy officer. “Institute Professor Phil Sharp’s early work in genetics and molecular biology and his co-founding of Biogen in 1978 set life sciences on a bold trajectory in the region — and in the world. MIT’s intertwined history with Biogen has benefited society through significant research advancements — from classroom and lab to market — in treating multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, and other neuromuscular disorders. I’m so pleased that our fruitful partnership will continue.”

The new building, designed by Elkus-Manfredi Architects, will activate the corner at 75 Broadway, and protect and accentuate the abutting 6th Street Walkway — a favorite tree-lined path for residents and Kendall employees alike. A joint venture partnership between the MIT Investment Management Company and BioMed Realty, a Blackstone Real Estate portfolio company, is facilitating advancement of the project.

“Helping to ensure that Biogen stays in Cambridge was very important to us,” says Patrick Rowe, senior vice president in MIT’s real estate group, which is part of the Institute’s investment management company. “The company’s nearly 50-year history is a foundational component of the Kendall Square innovation ecosystem.”

“We are thrilled to partner with MIT in the development and activation of this world-class lab and office asset in the heart of Kendall Square,” says Bill Kane, BioMed Realty’s president of East Coast and U.K. markets. “75 Broadway will provide mission-critical infrastructure to Biogen that enables the development of the next generation of life-saving medicines and therapies.”

Ultimately, the 10-acre Kendall Common development will include eight buildings for residential, office, lab, retail, and community uses. The project’s 10-year review process and federal agreement led to the recent opening of the MIT-built John A. Volpe National Transportation Systems Center.

Life takes shape with the motion of a single cell. In response to signals from certain proteins and enzymes, a cell can start to move and shake, leading to contractions that cause it to squeeze, pinch, and eventually divide. As daughter cells follow suit down the generational line, they grow, differentiate, and ultimately arrange themselves into a fully formed organism.

Now MIT scientists have used light to control how a single cell jiggles and moves during its earliest stage of development. The team studied the motion of egg cells produced by starfish — an organism that scientists have long used as a classic model for understanding cell growth and development.

The researchers focused on a key enzyme that triggers a cascade of motion within a starfish egg cell. They genetically designed a light-sensitive version of the same enzyme, which they injected into egg cells, and then stimulated the cells with different patterns of light.

They found that the light successfully triggered the enzyme, which in turn prompted the cells to jiggle and move in predictable patterns. For instance, the scientists could stimulate cells to exhibit small pinches or sweeping contractions, depending on the pattern of light they induced. They could even shine light at specific points around a cell to stretch its shape from a circle to a square.

Their results, appearing today in the journal Nature Physics, provide scientists with a new optical tool for controlling cell shape in its earliest developmental stages. Such a tool, they envision, could guide the design of synthetic cells, such as therapeutic “patch” cells that contract in response to light signals to help close wounds, or drug-delivering “carrier” cells that release their contents only when illuminated at specific locations in the body. Overall, the researchers see their findings as a new way to probe how life takes shape from a single cell.

“By revealing how a light-activated switch can reshape cells in real time, we’re uncovering basic design principles for how living systems self-organize and evolve shape,” says the study’s senior author, Nikta Fakhri, associate professor of physics at MIT. “The power of these tools is that they are guiding us to decode all these processes of growth and development, to help us understand how nature does it.”

The study’s MIT authors include first author Jinghui Liu, Yu-Chen Chao, and Tzer Han Tan; along with Tom Burkart, Alexander Ziepke, and Erwin Frey of Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich; John Reinhard of Saarland University; and S. Zachary Swartz of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.

Cell circuitry

Fakhri’s group at MIT studies the physical dynamics that drive cell growth and development. She is particularly interested in symmetry, and the processes that govern how cells follow or break symmetry as they grow and divide. The five-limbed starfish, she says, is an ideal organism for exploring such questions of growth, symmetry, and early development.

“A starfish is a fascinating system because it starts with a symmetrical cell and becomes a bilaterally symmetric larvae at early stages, and then develops into pentameral adult symmetry,” Fakhri says. “So there’s all these signaling processes that happen along the way to tell the cell how it needs to organize.”

Scientists have long studied the starfish and its various stages of development. Among many revelations, researchers have discovered a key “circuitry” within a starfish egg cell that controls its motion and shape. This circuitry involves an enzyme, GEF, that naturally circulates in a cell’s cytoplasm. When this enzyme is activated, it induces a change in a protein, called Rho, that is known to be essential for regulating cell mechanics.

When the GEF enzyme stimulates Rho, it causes the protein to switch from an essentially free-floating state to a state that binds the protein to the cell’s membrane. In this membrane-bound state, the protein then triggers the growth of microscopic, muscle-like fibers that thread out across the membrane and subsequently twitch, enabling the cell to contract and move. 

In previous work, Fakhri’s group showed that a cell’s movements can be manipulated by varying the cell’s concentrations of GEF enzyme: The more enzyme they introduced into a cell, the more contractions the cell would exhibit.

“This whole idea made us think whether it’s possible to hack this circuitry, to not just change a cell’s pattern of movements but get a desired mechanical response,” Fakhri says.

Lights and action

To precisely manipulate a cell’s movements, the team looked to optogenetics — an approach that involves genetically engineering cells and cellular components such as proteins and enzymes, such that they activate in response to light.

Using established optogenetic techniques, the researchers developed a light-sensitive version of the GEF enzyme. From this engineered enzyme, they isolated its mRNA — essentially, the genetic blueprint for building the enzyme. They then injected this blueprint into egg cells that the team harvested from a single starfish ovary, which can hold millions of unfertilized cells. The cells, infused with the new mRNA, then began to produce light-sensitive GEF enzymes on their own.

In experiments, the researchers then placed each enzyme-infused egg cell under a microscope and shone light onto the cell in different patterns and from different points along the cell’s periphery. They took videos of the cell’s movements in response.

They found that when they aimed the light in specific points, the GEF enzyme became activated and recruited Rho protein to the light-targeted sites. There, the protein then set off its characteristic cascade of muscle-like fibers that pulled or pinched the cell in the same, light-stimulated spots. Much like pulling the strings of a marionette, they were able to control the cell’s movements, for instance directing it to morph into various shapes, including a square.

Surprisingly, they also found they could stimulate the cell to undergo sweeping contractions by shining a light in a single spot, exceeding a certain threshold of enzyme concentration.

“We realized this Rho-GEF circuitry is an excitable system, where a small, well-timed stimulus can trigger a large, all-or-nothing response,” Fakhri says. “So we can either illuminate the whole cell, or just a tiny place on the cell, such that enough enzyme is recruited to that region so the system gets kickstarted to contract or pinch on its own.”

The researchers compiled their observations and derived a theoretical framework to predict how a cell’s shape will change, given how it is stimulated with light. The framework, Fakhri says, opens a window into “the ‘excitability’ at the heart of cellular remodeling, which is a fundamental process in embryo development and wound healing.”

She adds: “This work provides a blueprint for designing ‘programmable’ synthetic cells, letting researchers orchestrate shape changes at will for future biomedical applications.”

This work was supported, in part, by the Sloan Foundation, and the National Science Foundation.

MIT engineers have devised a new way to deliver certain drugs in higher doses with less pain, by injecting them as a suspension of tiny crystals. Once under the skin, the crystals assemble into a drug “depot” that could last for months or years, eliminating the need for frequent drug injections.

This approach could prove useful for delivering long-lasting contraceptives or other drugs that need to be given for extended periods of time. Because the drugs are dispersed in a suspension before injection, they can be administered through a narrow needle that is easier for patients to tolerate.

“We showed that we can have very controlled, sustained delivery, likely for multiple months and even years through a small needle,” says Giovanni Traverso, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, a gastroenterologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), an associate member of the Broad Institute, and the senior author of the study.

The lead authors of the paper, which appears today in Nature Chemical Engineering, are former MIT and BWH postdoc Vivian Feig, who is now an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Stanford University; MIT graduate student Sanghyun Park; and Pier Rivano, a former visiting research scholar in Traverso’s lab.

Easier injections

This project began as part of an effort funded by the Gates Foundation to expand contraceptive options, particularly in developing nations.

“The overarching goal is to give women access to a lot of different formats for contraception that are easy to administer, compatible with being used in the developing world, and have a range of different timeframes of durations of action,” Feig says. “In our particular project, we were interested in trying to combine the benefits of long-acting implants with the ease of self-administrable injectables.”

There are marketed injectable suspensions available in the United States and other countries, but these drugs are dispersed throughout the tissue after injection, so they only work for about three months. Other injectable products have been developed that can form longer-lasting depots under the skin, but these typically require the addition of precipitating polymers that can make up 23 to 98 percent of the solution by weight, which can make the drug more difficult to inject.

The MIT and BWH team wanted to create a formulation that could be injected through a small-gauge needle and last for at least six months and up to two years. They began working with a contraceptive drug called levonorgestrel, a hydrophobic molecule that can form crystals. The team discovered that suspending these crystals in a particular organic solvent caused the crystals to assemble into a highly compact implant after injection. Because this depot could form without needing large amounts of polymer, the drug formulation could still be easily injected through a narrow-gauge needle.

The solvent, benzyl benzoate, is biocompatible and has been previously used as an additive to injectable drugs. The team found that the solvent’s poor ability to mix with biological fluids is what allows the solid drug crystals to self-assemble into a depot under the skin after injection.

“The solvent is critical because it allows you to inject the fluid through a small needle, but once in place, the crystals self-assemble into a drug depot,” Traverso says.

By altering the density of the depot, the researchers can tune the rate at which the drug molecules are released into the body. In this study, the researchers showed they could change the density by adding small amounts of a polymer such as polycaprolactone, a biodegradable polyester.

“By incorporating a very small amount of polymers — less than 1.6 percent by weight — we can modulate the drug release rate, extending its duration while maintaining injectability. This demonstrates the tunability of our system, which can be engineered to accommodate a broader range of contraceptive needs as well as tailored dosing regimens for other therapeutic applications,” Park says.

Stable drug depots

The researchers tested their approach by injecting the drug solution subcutaneously in rats and showed that the drug depots could remain stable and release drug gradually for three months. After the three-month study ended, about 85 percent of the drug remained in the depots, suggesting that they could continue releasing the drugs for a much longer period of time.

“We anticipate that the depots could last for more than a year, based on our post-analysis of preclinical data. Follow-up studies are underway to further validate their efficacy beyond this initial proof-of-concept,” Park says.

Once the drug depots form, they are compact enough to be retrievable, allowing for surgical removal if treatment needs to be halted before the drug is fully released.

This approach could also lend itself to delivering drugs to treat neuropsychiatric conditions as well as HIV and tuberculosis, the researchers say. They are now moving toward assessing its translation to humans by conducting advanced preclinical studies to evaluate self-assembly in a more clinically relevant skin environment. “This is a very simple system in that it’s basically a solvent, the drug, and then you can add a little bit of bioresorbable polymer. Now we’re considering which indications do we go after: Is it contraception? Is it others? These are some of the things that we’re starting to look into as part of the next steps toward translation to humans,” Traverso says.

The research was funded, in part, by the Gates Foundation, the Karl van Tassel Career Development Professorship, the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering, a Schmidt Science Fellows postdoctoral fellowship, the Rhodes Trust, a Takeda Fellowship, a Warren M. Rohsenow Fellowship, and a Kwangjeong Educational Foundation Fellowship.