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

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

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

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

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

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

Large-scale art, fine-scale detail

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

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

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

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

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

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

From steel plates to soaring form

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Turning up the heat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Microelectronic applications

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quark shadows

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A wake tag

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From engineering to immunology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pursuing vaccine targets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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