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Scene at MIT: Learning Ikebana during IAP

Fri, 02/02/2024 - 4:50pm

Since 1988, Hiroko Matsuyama, a master instructor of the Ohara School of Ikebana, has worked with MIT students on the basics of the ancient art of Japanese flower arrangement. Through an Independent Activities Period (IAP) course offered each year by the MIT-Japan Program, Matsuyama works with students to create their own arrangements.

This year marked the final IAP Ikebana course for Matsuyama, who is stepping down. At the conclusion of this year's course, representatives from the MIT-Japan Program presented Matsuyama with a certificate of appreciation.

“These workshops I’ve taught at MIT have been a treasure to me,” says Matsuyama. “It made me feel more global and become more worldly.”

A chronicler of the biotech boom

Fri, 02/02/2024 - 12:00am

For decades now, MIT’s Kendall Square neighborhood has been dotted by cranes, scaffolding, and construction sites — the unofficial symbols of the biotechnology boom that has made East Cambridge an industry capital.

True, there are other kinds of tech firms in Kendall Square, from Silicon Valley giants to startups. But the Kendall area is one of the places where the biotech business launched in the 1970s. It’s where blockbuster drugs have been developed and an innovative Covid-19 vaccine was created on short notice, and it keeps powering onward today.

“It’s the most vibrant biotechnology cluster in the world,” says MIT Associate Professor Robin Scheffler, a historian of science. “We are talking about a location that plays a huge role in defining the future of how biology can improve the human experience.”

Scheffler has become a historian of this transformation. An expert in the history of bioscience, he is currently writing a book about the rise and further rise of biotech in Kendall Square and greater Boston. Based heavily on original archival documents, Scheffler’s work will present a new look at everyday life in labs to further understand these companies, how innovation clusters function, and how medical innovations shape health care policy.

“A defining characteristic of Kendall Square’s ascendancy in biotechnology is its sheer density,” Scheffler says. “It’s so closely packed together and includes all these other dimensions of science and biology — hospitals, medical schools, and universities. Research and commercialization and production happen in this very small area.”

He adds: “Looking at the Boston area gives you a window into the evolution and growth of the industry as a whole.”

Studying the fairly recent past lets Scheffler illuminate how the scientific enterprise works today. Scheffler’s first book, “A Contagious Cause,” published in 2019, examined postwar fears that there was a general, transmittable “cancer virus.” A big federal funding effort in the 1960s helped prove otherwise, and in the process uncovered oncogenes — a driver of many cancers — while helping develop molecular biology. Meanwhile, researchers have since found other ways that viral illnesses are implicated in certain kinds of cancers.

In short, biotechnology moves rapidly and unpredictably, and there is never a bad time to analyze its progress. For his research and teaching, Scheffler earned tenure at MIT last year.

Building bridges

Asked about his own career trajectory, Scheffler — like many a good historian — can cite multiple factors to explain it, with some representing root causes. Scheffler has a long-standing inclination to find different fields of study fascinating, and to link them together. The history of science allows him to do that perpetually.

Growing up in California, Scheffler enjoyed philosophy, science, and math as a student, then attended the University of Chicago as an undergraduate and started redefining his interests a little.

“By the time I got to college I really enjoyed bridging things together,” he says. “I ended up being interested in two things, history and chemistry, that are both bridge-building fields. History bridges humanistic questions about life and experience with the social sciences, and chemistry bridges physics with biology.”

Scheffler received his undergraduate degree in both history and chemistry, and credits a few Chicago faculty from the time — Ronald Suny, Cathy Gere, and the late Alison Winter — with spurring his interest in the history of science. He earned a master’s degree in the history and philosophy of science from Cambridge University, supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship — unusually for a historian of science — then moved to Yale University for his doctoral studies.

There, with historian of science Daniel Kevles as his advisor, Scheffler zeroed in on tumor viruses as his dissertation topic on its interdisciplinary merits.

“If I followed tumor viruses, I would have a historical object that allowed me to go to many realms: politics and policy, medicine, molecular biology,” Scheffler says. “I wanted to produce history that dissolved disciplinary divides. I think it’s important because it allows scientists to understand they are members of society and not just of the scientific community, but it also produces, I hope, a nuanced appreciation of what science can do.”

Scheffler also hit on a timely topic by publishing a major book on federally backed virus research just before the global Covid-19 pandemic occurred.

“Interest in viruses has spiked,” Scheffler says. “People want to know about the history of viral research in the 20th century, and regard it as a resource.” After the pandemic started, when Scheffler taught a course about biotech, he says, in class discussions, “Everybody’s example of biotechnology was a vaccine.”

Of his first book, he also notes: “Viruses were objects of an ambitious and positive effort to structure research. The overall vision that the government could step in to make [and support] a valuable contribution remains a very powerful idea. Having an appreciation for what was happening then, I hope, provides useful ideas for how to approach the present.”

A spotlight on “invisible technicians”

While wrapping up the book, Scheffler started writing a chapter about how the hunt for tumor viruses had helped create the contemporary biotech industry. But it did not quite fit with the rest of his material.

“I realized I wasn’t looking at the final chapter of a first book, I was looking at the outline of a second book,” Scheffler says.

After that dawned on him, Scheffler began researching the second project, centering it on the Boston area. And while some parts of the Kendall Square biotech boom have been well-documented, others remain less chronicled — such as the daily process of lab work that turns concepts into life-saving medicines.

“I’m very interested in what historians of science call ‘invisible technicians,’” Scheffler says. “We know a fair amount about biotech’s founders. I’m focused on people who are taking scientific ideas and transforming them into meaningful products. Otherwise, they’re just good ideas. Focusing on that level also knits the industry into the city of Cambridge, because that’s where the social dimension of this industry really takes place. It all stacks up in understanding how the world’s leading biotechnology cluster operates.”

Scheffler is looking in detail at the ways academia provides an essential talent pool for the biotech industry and serves as an anchor point for the Boston-area cluster of companies. He is also examining a full range of economic forces, urban planning issues, and other matters essential to thinking about the operations of any industrial cluster of companies. It does not hurt, he notes, to be living in the place he is studying.

“It’s been wonderful to get to know where I live, and understand the layers of history beneath my office in East Cambridge,” Scheffler says. “The opportunity to research this project while living in its midst is a special experience. People have provided me with great suggestions and observations.”

Meanwhile, the cranes and booms keep arriving in East Cambridge, the frames of buildings keep rising, and new firms keep exploring leading-edge concepts in medical research.

“At every single juncture, more companies arrive and it continues to grow,” Scheffler says.

Projects investigating Swahili, global media win SHASS Humanities Awards

Thu, 02/01/2024 - 1:50pm

Two projects — the Global Mediations Lab led by Paul Roquet and the MIT Swahili Studies Initiative led by Per Urlaub — have won Humanities Awards from the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.

The pilot program, launched in fall 2023, aims to support humanities-focused, collaborative projects that can have a broad impact within SHASS or MIT, or have a substantial impact on undergraduate education. Each winning project receives up to $100,000 in funding.

Paul Roquet: Investigating media and information impacts 

Paul Roquet is the project lead for the Global Mediations Lab, which will enable a globe-spanning study of media texts, industries, and infrastructure.

These studies, Roquet asserts, will reach beyond what he describes as “the usual focus on anglophone North America and Europe” to “map the global media landscape in its moments of contestation and transformation.” 

“The big, difficult question here is how to enable a more fully global understanding of media technologies — how these tools are used for good and ill, in ways both predictable and unforeseen,” he says. This work, he believes, can provide practitioners with context regarding the history and values feeding the exclusion of other ideas and perspectives. “We seek to understand how the spread of media is itself mediated by culture, place, politics, and history,” Roquet states.

Roquet will work alongside co-principal investigator Paloma Duong, associate professor of Latin American studies in MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing (CMS/W), and principal investigator Ian Condry, professor of Japanese culture and media studies, CMS/W, and MIT Anthropology. They anticipate an integrated, diverse, and inclusive slate of events, conferences, and other efforts. 

“I think it would also be great to experiment with other formats that take seriously our own media milieu, or that allow for more participatory collaborations and more process-oriented (versus outcome-oriented) forms of research and scholarship,” Duong says.

The team wants to develop, deliver, and maintain an expansive suite of operations that invites participation from across MIT and the world. Faculty, postdocs, graduate students, and MIT Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program participants can benefit.

Roquet believes the Global Mediations Lab can serve as a hub for mapping how media practices transform as they spread around the world, and the importance of this understanding for work at MIT and among the broader community. “I want the Global Mediations Lab to be a venue for experimenting with how to bring global media insights more directly to bear on the understanding of media and technology,” Roquet says.

Per Urlaub: Reexamining language studies and curricula

Per (pronounced "pear") Urlaub, project lead of the MIT Swahili Studies Initiative, envisions a robust program scheduled during MIT’s annual Independent Activities Period. Urlaub and his colleagues want to offer students, colleagues, and staff the opportunity to study Swahili and associated cultures over the next five years throughout the academic year through co-curricular events.

“There is an undeniable gap in MIT’s language curriculum — and this gap negatively impacts the ability of MIT undergraduate students to consider the perspectives of the African continent in their important work,” says Urlaub, who heads MIT Global Languages.

Urlaub has enlisted the help of several colleagues from across multiple investigative areas at MIT to help plan and launch the Swahili studies program. They include:

Urlaub selected Swahili for further study because “it’s one of the largest African languages, and arguably the language that has currently the most significant momentum in terms of growth and impact.” 

Swahili, Urlaub notes, has been spoken primarily in Tanzania, Kenya, and Mozambique, but the total number of Swahili speakers, be they native or second-language speakers, is estimated to be around 200 million. 

“In recent decades, the language has developed into a lingua franca across Eastern Africa, competing successfully for this status with English,” Urlaub continues.

Swahili’s growing influence is evident in its ubiquity across a substantial swath of the African continent, widely used in the African Great Lakes region, East and Southern Africa, some parts of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Malawi, Mozambique, the southern tip of Somalia, and Zambia.

Urlaub highlights the value of language education at MIT while also acknowledging what he describes as “the enduring impact of colonialism on language and cultural studies.”

“We believe we owe the MIT community opportunities to broaden their intellectual horizons toward the African continent,” Urlaub says.

Urlaub wants students to appreciate the complex and fascinating linguistic landscape of African countries, including the implications of the dominance of Swahili language for other regional languages. He further seeks expanded opportunities for student and faculty access to African nations’ rich historical and cultural tapestries. 

“MIT students’ opportunities to engage with Africa are reduced to either mono-linguistic exchanges in English, or through other languages in our current curriculum that were introduced to the continent through military conquest and colonial exploitation, like French, Portuguese, and Arabic,” Urlaub continues. 

Ultimately, Urlaub values the investigation of language as a key element in cross-disciplinary understanding for future leaders. 

“MIT students gravitate to us because many recognize the value of linguistic and intercultural skills as tools that will empower them to address some of the world’s most urgent challenges by collaborating with partners around the world,” Urlaub asserts.

DiOnetta Jones Crayton: Change-maker at MIT

Thu, 02/01/2024 - 12:00pm

Associate Dean and Office of Minority Education (OME) Director DiOnetta Jones Crayton has announced that she will step down from her role on Feb. 2. She has led the office for 14 years, advancing OME’s efforts to provide a robust portfolio of programs, services, and resources for undergraduate students of color.

“It has been my honor to serve as director of the OME for the past 14 years,” Crayton wrote in a letter to the staff of the Office of the Vice Chancellor announcing her departure. “As a team, we have accomplished great things together … It has been so rewarding and such a blessing to contribute to so many lives as well as different committees, programs, events, and services over the years.”

Founded in 1975, OME aims to foster academic excellence, build strong communities, and cultivate students’ professional mindsets to position them to become leaders in all career fields, as well as in civic life.

“DiOnetta has been a long-standing advisor, mentor, and change-maker at the Institute,” says Ian A. Waitz, vice chancellor for undergraduate and graduate education. “She has served on numerous Institute committees and been an essential thought partner in navigating some of the most challenging issues facing our students. I have personally valued her commitment to excellence, her strategic vision and leadership, and her ability to communicate her passion to others.”

Indeed, Crayton has been a change-maker since she arrived at MIT in August 2009, after holding leadership roles at Cornell University, the National Consortium for Graduate Degrees for Minorities in Engineering and Science, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of the Pacific in Stockton, California. Within her first academic year alone, OME adopted a new mission statement; launched comprehensive, data-driven assessments of several existing programs; and devised a new staffing model to ensure the office would reach “optimal success,” as she said at the time.

She also piloted several new programs that year that have become mainstays in OME, including Master Your Future, a professional development workshop series. And she restructured OME’s industry partnership program, the Industrial Advisory Council for Minority Education (IACME), resulting in a threefold increase in member companies, as well as adding nonprofits, government labs, and alumni affinity groups to the mix.

Beyond making campus-based improvements, DiOnetta also “led outward,” co-chairing a major conference on underrepresented minority student success in higher education, held at MIT in April 2010. The conference brought together national experts, university diversity officers, and academic administrators from Ivy-Plus schools and other leading institutions to discuss the challenges at their institutions. The lessons gleaned from the gathering informed her strategic vision for her office, as well as her involvement in diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts more broadly at MIT.

Cordelia Price ’78, SM ’82, who has worked with Crayton since 2009, says, “I have seen DiOnetta’s excellent leadership, organizational, communication, initiative, effective meeting, and listening skills in action.” Price serves as the Black Alumni of MIT (BAMIT) representative to IACME and as chair of operations for the BAMIT Community Advancement Program, which funds student projects that benefit underserved communities of color.

Under Crayton’s leadership, Price adds, “[OME] programs have helped many students with their academic success, their opportunities for internships, their preparation for future employment or graduate school, and provided opportunities to serve the community. She also established or strengthened mentor programs, including mentors from IACME companies as well as MIT alumni.”

During Crayton’s tenure, OME has embraced a spirit of innovation — a quality well-suited for MIT’s ethos — to best meet students’ needs. For example, long before the pandemic forced the Institute to pivot to remote instruction and programs in 2020, she and her staff were already implementing a plan to adapt one of OME’s signature programs, Interphase EDGE (IP), into an online format. Applications for IP, a two-year scholar enrichment program that includes a seven-week summer session on campus, had been increasing dramatically. In an effort to serve more students, in 2018 Crayton’s team began working with MITx on an online platform to accommodate a new, remote cohort called IPx. By 2020, with that infrastructure in place, OME was able to offer the remote program to both cohorts, despite the closure of campus that summer.

So much of OME’s success comes down to Crayton’s emphasis on listening, says Myles Noel, a senior majoring in chemistry. He’s gotten to know her well as an IP participant and through interacting with her on various committees and student organizations. “Her leadership style is a lot of listening; she’s willing to listen to the issues that students are experiencing and from that, she is able to offer support and advice,” he says.

Listening to students has also informed the development of new programs. Two recent examples are The Standard, for men of color, and the CRWN (pronounced “crown”), for women of color. Both programs address a need that undergraduate students articulated — a desire to create a close-knit affinity group — while also supporting their academic and professional success.

“DiOnetta’s extraordinary leadership and unwavering emotional investment has helped countless students identify, open, and walk through doors of opportunity,” says Chancellor Melissa Nobles. “Her deep belief in our students has inspired them to believe in themselves and work towards their dreams — especially when they were unsure of themselves. She has made OME, MIT, and our world a better place over these past 14 years.”

Indeed, students speak fondly of Crayton’s ability to inspire them to believe in themselves. Noel says she has been an invaluable mentor and advisor. “She has been a pillar of support for me and a lot of other students in the community.” Kerrie Greene, an MD/PhD student who has known Crayton for almost 10 years, adds, “Dean Crayton is such a light, her warmth surrounds everything and everyone she supports. Under her guidance and leadership, I have seen countless numbers of my peers, including myself, blossom during their time at MIT and beyond.”

“Students will feel her loss, but the impact that she’s had is going to be lasting, and I think that’s something to be happy for,” says Noel.

Noubar Afeyan PhD ’87 to deliver MIT’s 2024 Commencement address

Thu, 02/01/2024 - 7:00am

Noubar Afeyan PhD ’87, an inventor and parallel entrepreneur with a penchant for bold ideas, will deliver the address at the OneMIT Commencement Ceremony on Thursday, May 30.

Afeyan is the founder and CEO of the venture creation company Flagship Pioneering, which founds companies that build biotechnology platforms to transform human health and sustainability. Since its founding in 2000, the company has built more than 100 science-based companies; Flagship-founded companies currently have more than 60 drugs in clinical development.

One of Afeyan’s most well-known successes is Moderna, which invented and produced an effective Covid-19 vaccine approved and deployed to billions of people in more than 70 countries. Currently the company’s chairman, he co-founded Moderna working with his team at Flagship and three academic co-founders in 2010, when the idea of using messenger RNA in therapies was virtually unheard of. But Afeyan has long been known for asking unconventional “What if?” questions and building companies with visionary goals. “Why wouldn’t you think you can actually change the world?” he said in a 2021 interview with Forbes.

“You might expect that after Moderna’s success in bringing lifesaving Covid-19 vaccines to the world, Noubar would rest on his laurels. But he isn’t that kind of entrepreneur,” says MIT President Sally Kornbluth. “In fact, he cautions that anyone seeking to benefit humanity on a large scale should avoid getting comfortable. He’s not afraid to make long-shot, long-term bets, investing in the most innovative science for the biggest impact. We are delighted to welcome Noubar to share his bold, dynamic outlook with the Class of 2024.”

“MIT is a place where audacious ideas abound, thanks in large part to its remarkable students. I’m thrilled to address the Class of 2024 as they prepare to make an impact in the world. We need their curiosity, imagination, inventiveness, courage, and determination — now more than ever,” Afeyan says.

A member of the MIT Corporation, Afeyan has a long relationship with the Institute. He earned his PhD in biochemical engineering at MIT in 1987 and was a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management for 16 years, starting in 2000. Among other activities, he serves on the advisory board of the MIT Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning, and has spoken at numerous Institute events, including MIT Solve.

“Afeyan has shown repeatedly that outstanding scientific talent, when relentlessly focused on audacious goals, can yield breakthroughs that many thought were impossible. His prolific record of invention, along with his coaching, funding, and mentoring of scores of science-driven startup businesses, provides a user’s guide on how to channel advances in science and technology to promote the public good,” says James Poterba, the Mitsui Professor of Economics and the chair of the Commencement Committee.

Born in Beirut to Armenian parents, Afeyan is a staunch advocate for the contributions of immigrants to economic and scientific progress. He is the co-founder of the Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity and a number of other philanthropic projects.

"I’m excited to learn from Dr. Afeyan as our commencement speaker. His work in biotechnology and entrepreneurship is truly inspiring, and I can’t wait to hear the insights and experiences that he will share with us,” senior class president Penny Brant says.

“I hold great admiration for the groundbreaking work of Moderna and its revolutionary vaccine development. Dr. Afeyan’s contributions to the field of biotechnology are truly commendable. As the UA president and a representative of my constituents, I am interested to hear what insights he will share with our graduating class,” Andre Hamelberg, president of the Undergraduate Association, says.

“I think it’s great that our speaker will have shared so many of our experiences. I’m excited for what advice he will offer us all,” Mikala Molina, president of the Graduate Student Council, says.

Afeyan joins notable recent MIT Commencement speakers including YouTuber and inventor Mark Rober (2023); Director-General of the World Trade Organization Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala (2022); lawyer and social justice activist Bryan Stevenson (2021); retired U.S. Navy four-star admiral William McRaven (2020); three-term New York City mayor and philanthropist Michael Bloomberg (2019); and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg (2018).            

A night at the orchestra, with Pokémon on the program

Thu, 02/01/2024 - 12:00am

Around 50 musicians crowd the well-lit Kresge Auditorium stage. They wear formal black attire and concentrated facial expressions. As the conductor carefully raises her baton, the audience comes to a perfect silence. A single piano lets forth a delicate cascade of high-pitched notes and is soon joined by a dozen violins that burst into a catchy, fast-paced melody. Many audience members look at their friends and smile. They recognize the tune.

The 90-minute performance goes on to incorporate saxophones, cellos, percussion instruments, a French horn, and a variety of other instruments. But with due respect to Beethoven and Bach, their work did not make the program on this night. Instead, the orchestra offered emotionally stirring renditions of songs from video games like “Mario Kart”, “Plants vs. Zombies,” and “Pokémon.”

This is the MIT Video Game Orchestra, a student-led group dedicated to performing original arrangements of video game music, film soundtracks, and other kinds of music not usually heard in concert halls. The group performs at least two concerts a year, and all arrangements are written by members of the orchestra and tailored to the group.

In addition to the performances, the group also runs workshops to help members develop their skills, provides soundtracks and introductions for events, and hosts socials featuring film screenings and video games.

“I think it’s really cool that there are so many genres that fall under the umbrella term of video game music,” says junior Lynn Jung, who serves a co-music director of the group. “It allows you to explore different musical avenues.”

Many members of the group grew up learning classical instruments and playing classical music. The Video Game Orchestra gives them the opportunity to break that mold and play music more in line with their interests.

“I was definitely into video game music growing up,” says Alex Wardle, a junior who is in charge of managing the group’s library of music. “I listened to it a lot in high school and I really wanted to perform it, but I didn't have the opportunity. None of the music groups that I joined would cover modern soundtracks. I always wished there was an opportunity for me to get to play some of the pieces I really love.”

The group’s organizers are quick to point out that a love for video games is not a requirement for joining. Some students join because they want to continue playing their instruments in a more casual environment. But many came to the Video Game Orchestra to merge two longtime hobbies.

“I was more into playing video games than listening to them, but at the audition, I remember saying, ‘I like video games and I like music, so I will definitely like video game music,’" Jung recalls.

Beyond the tunes, there are several key differences between the group and a traditional orchestra, the largest being the open approach to preparing the arrangements.

“It's a more collaborative environment, where it’s less the conductors choosing the music we play and more of a community effort based on the pieces we like as a community,” Wardle says. “Through our feedback process with arrangements, it becomes this group effort in which everyone’s working together.”

A key part of that process is inviting students to try their hand at writing music through workshops each semester.

“I had a little background in writing music. I loved listening to videogame music and I’d played for quite a while, but I definitely hadn’t done anything like an orchestral arrangement,” Wardle says. “By playing student-made arrangements my first year, I realized I could do something like that. There were people I could reach out to, like other students, who had done it in the past, so I jumped straight in and have been pushing out arrangements ever since.”

Many members joined because they loved making music and video games, but they say they’ve stayed because of the community.

“A big reason I’ve stayed in VGO is the community and the people,” says Ishika Shah, a senior who serves as the group’s co-music director. “It’s been a great way to meet new people and join a community I’ve really enjoyed being a part of.”

The group’s organizers encourage participants to mingle outside of their instrument section, and rehearsals are often interspersed with casual talk of music and video games. But the music and performances are still taken seriously.

Concerts have had as many as 200 attendees — with many more watching online (the group’s YouTube channel features most performances). Renditions of emotional pieces have sometimes moved people to tears, and because many people attend out of an interest in video games, the group attracts a broader audience to orchestral music than traditional symphony orchestras.

In addition to classically orchestrated headliners, the orchestra also plays pieces that feature more rock or jazz and that get people dancing and clapping along. In one performance of a karaoke favorite, “Baka Mitai” (or “I’ve Been a Fool” in Japanese), the orchestra invited the audience to sing along.

The orchestra’s decisions are guided by whatever sounds fun — and for the people that don’t put video game music in the same class as Beethoven, the group believes they’re adding credibility to a perhaps underrated genre.

“Honestly, I think at the end of the day what I care about when I am listening to music or playing music is just that the music resonates with me in some way, or that it’s fun to listen to or fun to play,” Jung says. “For some people, that might be classical music, but for me that happens to be a lot of video game music.”

Professor Emeritus Igor Paul, an expert in product design and safety, dies at 87

Wed, 01/31/2024 - 4:35pm

Professor Emeritus Igor Paul ’60, SM ’61, PhD ’64, an influential professor of mechanical engineering, passed away on Dec. 17, 2023 at his home in St. Petersburg, Florida. He was 87. 

Paul was a member of the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering faculty from 1964 until his retirement in 2003, and helped to develop the department’s design and manufacturing curriculum, which continues to thrive today. His research interests included product and machine design, safety, and risk analysis; robotics; biomechanics; and dynamic systems modeling. 

A leading expert in product design and safety, with a particular focus on sports devices like helmets, Igor served as an expert witness in many landmark product liability cases. He also contributed to the development of artificial joints and the development of inertial guidance systems for NASA and provided consulting services to a number of area hospitals and medical centers. 

Paul was known for his good nature, quick wit, and pleasant disposition, and his deep passion for teaching. Among the courses he instructed through the years were 2.72 (Elements of Mechanical Design), 2.70 (now 2.007, Design and Manufacturing I), and 2.009 (Product Engineering Processes). He served for many years as the faculty advisor to the student chapter of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. 

He also co-authored more than 80 publications and won numerous awards in the areas of design, bio-engineering, and education, including the DeFlorez Award for Creativity in Design (MIT, 1960); the Ralph R. Teetor Distinguished Educator Award (SAE); Outstanding Orthopedic Research Award (Orthopedic Research Society); and the Carl Soderberg Distinguished Service Award (MIT, 2003). 

Paul was born on Oct. 28, 1936, in Kharkov, Ukraine, and migrated across Europe during World War II, arriving in the United States eight years later on Christmas Day 1951. After gaining admission to MIT, he earned all three of his degrees in the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

He is survived by his wife, Natasha Paul (Gruzinov); his daughter, Tahisa Southwell of Las Vegas, Nevada; his son, Victor Paul of Zurich, Switzerland; and four grandchildren. He was preceded in death by his parents, Leo and Lily Paul; his sister, Nina Karouna; and his beloved daughter, Tanya Paul.

Outside of his professional achievements, Paul enjoyed tennis, golf, and traveling the globe. After his retirement in 2003, he and Natasha moved from Andover, Massachusetts, to New London, New Hampshire, then recently settled in St. Petersburg, Florida. 

Paul leaves behind a legacy of scientific contributions, dedication to education, and love for his family. 

MIT Press’s Direct to Open opens access to full list of 2024 monographs

Wed, 01/31/2024 - 3:45pm

Now in its third year of operation, the MIT Press' Direct to Open (D2O) recently announced that it reached its full funding goal in 2024 and will open access to 79 new monographs and edited book collections this year

Launched in 2021, D2O is an innovative sustainable framework for open-access monographs that shifts publishing from a solely market-based, purchase model where individuals and libraries buy single e-books, to a collaborative, library-supported open-access model. 

“Reaching our overall funding goal — in full and on time — is a major milestone in developing a sustainable open-access publishing model,” says Amy Harris, senior manager, library relations and sales at the MIT Press. “We are extremely grateful for the support of our library and consortium partners that makes this possible.” 

There are other models that offer fund-to-open opportunities on a title-by-title basis or that focus on opening access within specific disciplines. D2O is unique because it allows the press to open access to its entire slate of scholarly books at scale during each funding cycle. Thanks to D2O, all monograph authors have the opportunity for their work to be open access, and the press can offer equal support to traditionally underfunded disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. 

At a time when the traditional market for scholarly books continues to decline, works funded through D2O are reaching larger audiences online than ever before — averaging 2,694 reads per title and bringing important scholarship to new audiences. D2O books have also been academically cited almost 1,100 times.

“D2O is meeting the needs of academics, readers, and libraries alike, and our usage and citation stats demonstrate that the academic community is embracing open-access scholarship across a wide range of fields and for many purposes — from the classroom to research projects to professional interest reading,” says Harris. “This further aligns the work of the MIT Press with the mission of MIT to advance knowledge in science, technology, the arts, and other areas of scholarship to best serve the nation and the world, and provides opportunities for expansion of the model in the forthcoming years.”

The MIT Press will now turn its attention to its fourth funding cycle and invites libraries and library consortia to participate. For details, please visit: mitpress.mit.edu/D2O.

New fellowship to help advance science journalism in Africa and the Middle East

Wed, 01/31/2024 - 3:25pm

The Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT has announced a new one-semester fellowship — the Fellowship for Advancing Science Journalism in Africa and the Middle East — that will start this year.

The fellowship, developed through a generous gift from the global publishing company Springer Nature, was created in honor of the influential Egyptian science journalist Mohammed Yahia, who died last year at the age of 41.

Yahia worked for Springer Nature for over 13 years, primarily as managing editor of the Nature Portfolio in the Middle East, where he built an award-winning team. He was widely admired for his work advancing the status of science journalism both in that region and throughout Africa. He was president of the World Federation of Science Journalists from 2017 to 2019, working also to help build a network of science journalists around the globe.

Springer Nature, the founding sponsor of the fellowship, is well-known for its standing as a publisher of some the most high-profile and respected research journals and magazines in the world. “Mohammed was known for his unwavering commitment to science and his talent for simplifying complex research,” says Stephen Pincock, vice president in Springer Nature’s Solutions Group. “With this fellowship we want to inspire more to follow in his footsteps, as trusted communicators of evidence-based research.”

The first Fellowship for Advancing Science Journalism in Africa and the Middle East will be hosted by the Knight Science Journalism Program this fall and will continue in subsequent fall semesters. Thanks to a generous grant from Springer Nature, the program will offer a $40,000 stipend for the fellowship period from Aug. 16 to Dec. 31. KSJ will also cover the fellow’s health insurance and a $5,000 housing stipend to help with relocation costs.

The Knight Science Journalism Program, established at MIT in 1983, is the world’s leading science journalism fellowship program. More than 400 leading science journalists from six continents have graduated from the full-year academic program, which offers a course of study at MIT, Harvard University, and other leading institutions in the Boston area, as well as specialized training workshops, seminars, and science-focused field trips for all attendees.

“The Knight Science Journalism Program is honored to partner with Springer Nature in honoring Mohammed Yahia and in creating this new fellowship to help support science journalism in this important part of the world,” says KSJ Director Deborah Blum. “We believe strongly in the global nature of both science and the importance of telling its story in the most helpful and insightful way. We believe this new fellowship is an excellent way to advance that mission.”

Fellows supported by this new program will join the regular KSJ class of journalists for the fall semester in a program of study at MIT and other Cambridge/Boston area universities and in the program’s seminars, training workshops, and field trips throughout the semester. They will also have access to such benefits as MIT’s program of subsidized public transportation and access to libraries, museums, and other Boston-area programs, as well as connections to a thriving community of science journalists.

The program will open an applications process for journalists from Africa and the Middle East on Feb. 1 and submissions will be accepted until March 1. All journalists from the region with at least three years of experience in covering science, health, and the environment are encouraged to apply. The selected fellow will be announced by the end of March.

For further questions about the fellowship or the application process, please write to info@ksj.mit.edu.

Blood cell family trees trace how production changes with aging

Wed, 01/31/2024 - 3:10pm

Blood cells make up the majority of cells in the human body. They perform critical functions and their dysfunction is implicated in many important human diseases, from anemias to blood cancers like leukemia. The many types of blood cells include red blood cells that carry oxygen, platelets that promote clotting, as well as the myriad types of immune cells that protect our bodies from threats such as viruses and bacteria.

What these diverse types of blood cells have in common is that they are all produced by hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs). HSCs must keep producing blood cells in large quantities throughout our entire lives in order to continually replenish our bodies’ supply. Researchers want to better understand HSCs and the dynamics of how they produce the many blood cell types, both in order to understand the fundamentals of human blood production and to understand how blood production changes during aging or in cases of disease.

Jonathan Weissman, an MIT professor of biology, member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, and a Howard Hughes Medical Investigator; Vijay Sankaran, a Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School associate professor who is also a Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard associate member and attending physician at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute; and Chen Weng, a postdoc in both of their labs, have developed a new method that provides a detailed look at the family trees of human blood cells and the characteristics of the individual cells, providing new insights into the differences between lineages of HSCs. The research, published in the journal Nature on Jan. 22, answers some long-standing questions about blood cell production and how it changes as we age. The work also demonstrates how this new technology can give researchers unprecedented access to any human cells’ histories and insight into how those histories have shaped their current states. This will render open to discovery many questions about our own biology that were previously unanswerable.

“We wanted to ask questions that the existing tools could not allow us to,” Weng says. “This is why we brought together Jonathan and Vijay’s different expertise to develop a new technology that allows us to ask those questions and more, so we can solve some of the important unknowns in blood production.”

How to trace the lineages of human cells

Weissman and others have previously developed methods to map the family trees of cells, a process called lineage tracing, but typically this has been done in animals or engineered cell lines. Weissman has used this approach to shed light on how cancers spread and on when and how they develop mutations that make them more aggressive and deadly. However, while these models can illuminate the general principles of processes such as blood production, they do not give researchers a full picture of what happens inside of a living human. They cannot capture the full diversity of human cells or the implications of that diversity on health and disease.

The only way to get a detailed picture of how blood cell lineages change through the generations and what the consequences of those changes are is to perform lineage tracing on cells from human samples. The challenge is that in the research models used in the previous lineage tracing studies, Weissman and colleagues edited the cells to add a trackable barcode, a string of DNA that changes a little with each cell division, so that researchers can map the changes to match cells to their closest relatives and reconstruct the family tree. Researchers cannot add a barcode to the cells in living humans, so they need to find a natural one: some string of DNA that already exists and changes frequently enough to allow this family tree reconstruction.

Looking for mutations across the whole genome is cost-prohibitive and destroys the material that researchers need to collect to learn about the cells’ states. A few years ago, Sankaran and colleagues realized that mitochondrial DNA could be a good candidate for the natural barcode. Mitochondria are in all of our cells, and they have their own genome, which is relatively small and prone to mutation. In that earlier research, Sankaran and colleagues identified mutations in mitochondrial DNA, but they could not find enough mutations to build a complete family tree: in each cell, they only detected an average of zero to one mutations.

Now, in work led by Weng, the researchers have improved their detection of mitochondrial DNA mutations 10-fold, meaning that in each cell they find around 10 mutations — enough to serve as an identifying barcode. They achieved this through improvements in how they detect mitochondrial DNA mutations experimentally and how they verify that those mutations are genuine computationally. Their new and improved lineage tracing method is called ReDeeM, an acronym drawing from single-cell "regulatory multi-omics with deep mitochondrial mutation profiling." Using the method, they can recreate the family tree of thousands of blood cells from a human blood sample, as well as gather information about each individual cell’s state: its gene expression levels and differences in its epigenome, or the availability of regions of DNA to be expressed.

Combining cells’ family trees with each individual cell’s state is key for making sense of how cell lineages change over time and what the effects of those changes are. If a researcher pinpoints the place in the family tree where a blood cell lineage, for example, becomes biased toward producing a certain type of blood cell, they can then look at what changed in the cells’ state preceding that shift in order to figure out what genes and pathways drove that change in behavior. In other words, they can use the combination of data to understand not just that a change occurred, but what mechanisms contributed to that change.

“The goal is to relate the cell’s current state to its past history,” Weissman says. “Being able to do that in an unperturbed human sample lets us watch the dynamics of the blood production process and understand functional differences in hematopoietic stem cells in a way that has just not been possible before.”

Using this approach, the researchers made several interesting discoveries about blood production.

Blood cell lineage diversity shrinks with age

The researchers mapped the family trees of blood cells derived from each HSC. Each one of these lineages is called a clonal group. Researchers have had various hypotheses about how clonal groups work: Perhaps they are interchangeable, with each stem cell producing equivalent numbers and types of blood cells. Perhaps they are specialized, with one stem cell producing red blood cells, and another producing white blood cells. Perhaps they work in shifts, with some HSCs lying dormant while others produce blood cells. The researchers found that in healthy, young individuals, the answer is somewhere in the middle: Essentially every stem cell produced every type of blood cell, but certain lineages had biases toward producing one type of cell over another. The researchers took two samples from each test subject four months apart, and found that these differences between the lineages were stable over time.

Next, the researchers took blood samples from people of older age. They found that as humans age, some clonal groups begin to dominate and produce a significantly above-average percent of the total blood cells. When a clonal group outcompetes others like this, it is called expansion. Researchers knew that in certain diseases, a single clonal group containing a disease-related mutation could expand and become dominant. They didn’t know that clonal expansion was pervasive in aging even in seemingly healthy individuals, or that it was typical for multiple clonal groups to expand. This complicates the understanding of clonal expansion but sheds light on how blood production changes with age: The diversity of clonal groups decreases. The researchers are working on figuring out the mechanisms that enable certain clonal groups to expand over others. They are also interested in testing clonal groups for disease markers to understand which expansions are caused by or could contribute to disease.

ReDeeM enabled the researchers to make a variety of additional observations about blood production, many of which are consistent with previous research. This is what they hoped to see: the fact that the tool efficiently identified known patterns in blood production validates its efficacy. Now that the researchers know how well the method works, they can apply it to many different questions about the relationships between cells and what mechanisms drive changes in cell behavior. They are already using it to learn more about autoimmune disorders, blood cancers, and the origins of certain types of blood cells.

The researchers hope that others will use their method to ask questions about cell dynamics in many scenarios in health and disease. Sankaran, who is a practicing hematologist, also hopes that the method one day revolutionizes the patient data to which clinicians have access.

“In the not-too-distant future, you could look at a patient chart and see that this patient has an abnormally low number of HSCs, or an abnormally high number, and that would inform how you think about their disease risk,” Sankaran says. “ReDeeM provides a new lens through which to understand the clone dynamics of blood production, and how they might be altered in human health and diseases. Ultimately, we will be able to apply those lessons to patient care.”

Imaging method reveals new cells and structures in human brain tissue

Wed, 01/31/2024 - 2:00pm

Using a novel microscopy technique, MIT and Brigham and Women’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School researchers have imaged human brain tissue in greater detail than ever before, revealing cells and structures that were not previously visible.

Among their findings, the researchers discovered that some “low-grade” brain tumors contain more putative aggressive tumor cells than expected, suggesting that some of these tumors may be more aggressive than previously thought.

The researchers hope that this technique could eventually be deployed to diagnose tumors, generate more accurate prognoses, and help doctors choose treatments.

“We’re starting to see how important the interactions of neurons and synapses with the surrounding brain are to the growth and progression of tumors. A lot of those things we really couldn’t see with conventional tools, but now we have a tool to look at those tissues at the nanoscale and try to understand these interactions,” says Pablo Valdes, a former MIT postdoc who is now an assistant professor of neuroscience at the University of Texas Medical Branch and the lead author of the study.

Edward Boyden, the Y. Eva Tan Professor in Neurotechnology at MIT; a professor of biological engineering, media arts and sciences, and brain and cognitive sciences; a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator; and a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research and Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research; and E. Antonio Chiocca, a professor of neurosurgery at Harvard Medical School and chair of neurosurgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, are the senior authors of the study, which appears today in Science Translational Medicine.

Making molecules visible

The new imaging method is based on expansion microscopy, a technique developed in Boyden’s lab in 2015 based on a simple premise: Instead of using powerful, expensive microscopes to obtain high-resolution images, the researchers devised a way to expand the tissue itself, allowing it to be imaged at very high resolution with a regular light microscope.

The technique works by embedding the tissue into a polymer that swells when water is added, and then softening up and breaking apart the proteins that normally hold tissue together. Then, adding water swells the polymer, pulling all the proteins apart from each other. This tissue enlargement allows researchers to obtain images with a resolution of around 70 nanometers, which was previously possible only with very specialized and expensive microscopes such as scanning electron microscopes.

In 2017, the Boyden lab developed a way to expand preserved human tissue specimens, but the chemical reagents that they used also destroyed the proteins that the researchers were interested in labeling. By labeling the proteins with fluorescent antibodies before expansion, the proteins’ location and identity could be visualized after the expansion process was complete. However, the antibodies typically used for this kind of labeling can’t easily squeeze through densely packed tissue before it’s expanded.

So, for this study, the authors devised a different tissue-softening protocol that breaks up the tissue but preserves proteins in the sample. After the tissue is expanded, proteins can be labelled with commercially available fluorescent antibodies. The researchers then can perform several rounds of imaging, with three or four different proteins labeled in each round. This labelling of proteins enables many more structures to be imaged, because once the tissue is expanded, antibodies can squeeze through and label proteins they couldn’t previously reach.

“We open up the space between the proteins so that we can get antibodies into crowded spaces that we couldn’t otherwise,” Valdes says. “We saw that we could expand the tissue, we could decrowd the proteins, and we could image many, many proteins in the same tissue by doing multiple rounds of staining.”

Working with MIT Assistant Professor Deblina Sarkar, the researchers demonstrated a form of this “decrowding” in 2022 using mouse tissue.

The new study resulted in a decrowding technique for use with human brain tissue samples that are used in clinical settings for pathological diagnosis and to guide treatment decisions. These samples can be more difficult to work with because they are usually embedded in paraffin and treated with other chemicals that need to be broken down before the tissue can be expanded.

In this study, the researchers labeled up to 16 different molecules per tissue sample. The molecules they targeted include markers for a variety of structures, including axons and synapses, as well as markers that identify cell types such as astrocytes and cells that form blood vessels. They also labeled molecules linked to tumor aggressiveness and neurodegeneration.

Using this approach, the researchers analyzed healthy brain tissue, along with samples from patients with two types of glioma — high-grade glioblastoma, which is the most aggressive primary brain tumor, with a poor prognosis, and low-grade gliomas, which are considered less aggressive.

“We wanted to look at brain tumors so that we can understand them better at the nanoscale level, and by doing that, to be able to develop better treatments and diagnoses in the future. At this point, it was more developing a tool to be able to understand them better, because currently in neuro-oncology, people haven't done much in terms of super-resolution imaging,” Valdes says.

A diagnostic tool

To identify aggressive tumor cells in gliomas they studied, the researchers labeled vimentin, a protein that is found in highly aggressive glioblastomas. To their surprise, they found many more vimentin-expressing tumor cells in low-grade gliomas than had been seen using any other method.

“This tells us something about the biology of these tumors, specifically, how some of them probably have a more aggressive nature than you would suspect by doing standard staining techniques,” Valdes says.

When glioma patients undergo surgery, tumor samples are preserved and analyzed using immunohistochemistry staining, which can reveal certain markers of aggressiveness, including some of the markers analyzed in this study.   

“These are incurable brain cancers, and this type of discovery will allow us to figure out which cancer molecules to target so we can design better treatments. It also proves the profound impact of having clinicians like us at the Brigham and Women’s interacting with basic scientists such as Ed Boyden at MIT to discover new technologies that can improve patient lives,” Chiocca says. 

The researchers hope their expansion microscopy technique could allow doctors to learn much more about patients’ tumors, helping them to determine how aggressive the tumor is and guiding treatment choices. Valdes now plans to do a larger study of tumor types to try to establish diagnostic guidelines based on the tumor traits that can be revealed using this technique.

“Our hope is that this is going to be a diagnostic tool to pick up marker cells, interactions, and so on, that we couldn’t before,” he says. “It’s a practical tool that will help the clinical world of neuro-oncology and neuropathology look at neurological diseases at the nanoscale like never before, because fundamentally it’s a very simple tool to use.”

Boyden’s lab also plans to use this technique to study other aspects of brain function, in healthy and diseased tissue.

“Being able to do nanoimaging is important because biology is about nanoscale things — genes, gene products, biomolecules — and they interact over nanoscale distances,” Boyden says. “We can study all sorts of nanoscale interactions, including synaptic changes, immune interactions, and changes that occur during cancer and aging.”

The research was funded by K. Lisa Yang, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, John Doerr, Open Philanthropy, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Koch Institute Frontier Research Program, the National Institutes of Health, and the Neurosurgery Research and Education Foundation.

3 Questions: What can graduate students expect from MIT’s newest grad housing option?

Wed, 01/31/2024 - 9:15am

In October 2017, MIT made a commitment to add 950 on-campus beds for graduate students as part of the Volpe zoning agreement with the City of Cambridge that allows the Institute to develop a 10-acre parcel in Kendall Square. Since then, MIT opened the Graduate Tower at Site 4 residential community in Kendall Square with about 250 net-new beds for graduate students and families, and reallocated the 135 beds in 70 Amherst Street to graduate students.

In December 2020, MIT entered into a partnership with American Campus Communities (ACC) to build and operate a graduate housing complex on Vassar Street, adjacent to Simmons Hall. Owned by MIT but operated by American Campus Communities, this MIT-affiliated community fulfills the Volpe commitment and introduces a new residential option for graduate students and families. Named “Graduate Junction,” the residence is split between two buildings framing a gateway to Fort Washington Park and the Cambridgeport neighborhood. Flanking a central plaza and green space, the buildings will rise in five- and six-story sections and then progress to a 10-story segment as it extends beyond the park. Housing options will include efficiencies and one-, two-, and four-bedroom units that will be licensed by ACC to individuals, couples, and families.

With the addition of 676 beds at the new Graduate Junction and the beds gained by the reconfiguration of rooms in other buildings, the Institute has now exceeded the original commitment with a total of 1,076 new graduate beds. With Graduate Junction due to open this August, David Friedrich, senior associate dean for housing and residential services, shared some important project updates and perspectives on what potential residents can expect from the newest graduate residence on MIT’s campus.

Q: How is the Graduate Junction project going, and when will it open?

A: You can already see the buildings taking shape on Vassar Street and the construction timeline puts us on target for an August 2024 opening. This is a product of years of collaborative work with students and campus stakeholders, who teamed up to design an option to fill gaps in the student housing market. It is thrilling to see it near completion. 

The project is also going well thanks to our productive relationship with ACC. ACC is an experienced student housing company and has built or managed more than 100,000 beds on more than 90 campuses across the U.S., including graduate residences at peer institutions. As we add this new MIT-affiliated housing option to our portfolio of residences, we’re actively working with the leadership of ACC to onboard the team that will manage the property. Kendra Lowery, the general manager of Graduate Junction, is a dynamic and thoughtful partner with a breadth of experience managing student housing. She will be an excellent resource for Graduate Junction residents.

We are pleased to meet the recommendations of the 2018 Graduate Housing Working Group to add beds while providing students with additional cost-effective options for their residential experience. The Working Group — composed of students, staff, and faculty — was instrumental in shaping the project and provided substantive data to inform an optimal combination of unit types and amenities desirable to graduate students. In the coming weeks, we will highlight Graduate Junction alongside the Institute’s existing eight graduate residences to help students select the housing option that best suits their needs.

Q: How will living in Graduate Junction differ from living in MIT-operated residences?

A: Graduate Junction offers a new approach that combines apartment-style living with proximity to main campus — an off-campus experience with an on-campus location. Our partner ACC will be responsible for the housing license process, maintenance, building access, and IT infrastructure. While student residents will have access to MIT’s student support resources and can participate in on-campus social events, there will not be a faculty head of house or resident governance structure. Instead, ACC will directly work with Graduate Junction residents to address needs and answer questions. 

Residents of Graduate Junction will enjoy the same flexibility and pricing of an on-campus housing license and will not need to pay first and last months' rent, security deposit, or a broker fee — all upfront costs typical of off-campus properties. Instead, Graduate Junction will have a utility-inclusive rental rate for furnished apartments set by MIT. Since this partnership with ACC provides a different model for managing on-campus residences at the Institute, this approach is also a pilot to test if partners like ACC can help the Institute manage the demand for graduate housing.

Q: What would you say to incoming graduate students considering Graduate Junction or other on-campus residences?

A: The MIT housing system is designed to offer students choices so they can determine their own residential experience. We want to make living on campus the first and best option and do so by careful analysis that prices our units at below market rates. Combined with the Institute’s support for students and families through the Office of Graduate Education, the on-campus experience is tailored to fit graduate student needs. 

Graduate Junction responds to what students say is most important — location, unit configuration, all-inclusive payments, and flexibility in securing or leaving their housing arrangements. Bordering Cambridgeport, Graduate Junction is proximate to Cambridge public schools, local grocery stores, and neighborhood parks and playgrounds.

It joins a range of housing options available to students, and there are residences to fit a diverse array of budgets. With the added benefit of close proximity to labs and classes, student support, campus services, and other amenities, on-campus residences remain a great value. We invite graduate students to review the new rate sheet for 2024-25 and consider living on campus.

Simons Center’s collaborative approach propels autism research, at MIT and beyond

Tue, 01/30/2024 - 4:35pm

The secret to the success of MIT’s Simons Center for the Social Brain is in the name. With a founding philosophy of “collaboration and community” that has supported scores of scientists across more than a dozen Boston-area research institutions, the SCSB advances research by being inherently social.

SCSB’s mission is “to understand the neural mechanisms underlying social cognition and behavior and to translate this knowledge into better diagnosis and treatment of autism spectrum disorders.” When Director Mriganka Sur founded the center in 2012 in partnership with the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (SFARI) of Jim and Marilyn Simons, he envisioned a different way to achieve urgently needed research progress than the traditional approach of funding isolated projects in individual labs. Sur wanted SCSB’s contribution to go beyond papers, though it has generated about 350 and counting. He sought the creation of a sustained, engaged autism research community at MIT and beyond.

“When you have a really big problem that spans so many issues  a clinical presentation, a gene, and everything in between  you have to grapple with multiple scales of inquiry,” says Sur, the Newton Professor of Neuroscience in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (BCS) and The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory. “This cannot be solved by one person or one lab. We need to span multiple labs and multiple ways of thinking. That was our vision.”

In parallel with a rich calendar of public colloquia, lunches, and special events, SCSB catalyzes multiperspective, multiscale research collaborations in two programmatic ways. Targeted projects fund multidisciplinary teams of scientists with complementary expertise to collectively tackle a pressing scientific question. Meanwhile, the center supports postdoctoral Simons Fellows with not one, but two mentors, ensuring a further cross-pollination of ideas and methods. 

Complementary collaboration

In 11 years, SCSB has funded nine targeted projects. Each one, by design, involves a deep and multifaceted exploration of a major question with both fundamental importance and clinical relevance. The first project, back in 2013, for example, marshaled three labs spanning BCS, the Department of Biology, and The Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research to advance understanding of how mutation of the Shank3 gene leads to the pathophysiology of Phelan-McDermid Syndrome by working across scales ranging from individual neural connections to whole neurons to circuits and behavior. 

Other past projects have applied similarly integrated, multiscale approaches to topics ranging from how 16p11.2 gene deletion alters the development of brain circuits and cognition to the critical role of the thalamic reticular nucleus in information flow during sleep and wakefulness. Two others produced deep examinations of cognitive functions: how we go from hearing a string of words to understanding a sentence’s intended meaning, and the neural and behavioral correlates of deficits in making predictions about social and sensory stimuli. Yet another project laid the groundwork for developing a new animal model for autism research.

SFARI is especially excited by SCSB’s team science approach, says Kelsey Martin, executive vice president of autism and neuroscience at the Simons Foundation. “I’m delighted by the collaborative spirit of the SCSB,” Martin says. “It’s wonderful to see and learn about the multidisciplinary team-centered collaborations sponsored by the center.”

New projects

In the last year, SCSB has launched three new targeted projects. One team is investigating why many people with autism experience sensory overload and is testing potential interventions to help. The scientists hypothesize that patients experience a deficit in filtering out the mundane stimuli that neurotypical people predict are safe to ignore. Studies suggest the predictive filter relies on relatively low-frequency “alpha/beta” brain rhythms from deep layers of the cortex moderating the higher frequency “gamma” rhythms in superficial layers that process sensory information. 

Together, the labs of Charles Nelson, professor of pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH), and BCS faculty members Bob Desimone, the Doris and Don Berkey Professor, and Earl K. Miller, the Picower Professor, are testing the hypothesis in two different animal models at MIT and in human volunteers at BCH. In the animals they’ll also try out a new real-time feedback system invented in Miller’s lab that can potentially correct the balance of these rhythms in the brain. And in an animal model engineered with a Shank3 mutation, Desimone’s lab will test a gene therapy, too.

“None of us could do all aspects of this project on our own,” says Miller, an investigator in the Picower Institute. “It could only come about because the three of us are working together, using different approaches.”

Right from the start, Desimone says, close collaboration with Nelson’s group at BCH has been essential. To ensure his and Miller’s measurements in the animals and Nelson’s measurements in the humans are as comparable as possible, they have tightly coordinated their research protocols. 

“If we hadn’t had this joint grant we would have chosen a completely different, random set of parameters than Chuck, and the results therefore wouldn’t have been comparable. It would be hard to relate them,” says Desimone, who also directs MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research. “This is a project that could not be accomplished by one lab operating in isolation.”

Another targeted project brings together a coalition of seven labs — six based in BCS (professors Evelina Fedorenko, Edward Gibson, Nancy Kanwisher, Roger Levy, Rebecca Saxe, and Joshua Tenenbaum) and one at Dartmouth College (Caroline Robertson) — for a synergistic study of the cognitive, neural, and computational underpinnings of conversational exchanges. The study will integrate the linguistic and non-linguistic aspects of conversational ability in neurotypical adults and children and those with autism.

Fedorenko said the project builds on advances and collaborations from the earlier language Targeted Project she led with Kanwisher.

“Many directions that we started to pursue continue to be active directions in our labs. But most importantly, it was really fun and allowed the PIs [principal investigators] to interact much more than we normally would and to explore exciting interdisciplinary questions,” Fedorenko says. “When Mriganka approached me a few years after the project’s completion asking about a possible new targeted project, I jumped at the opportunity.”

Gibson and Robertson are studying how people align their dialogue, not only in the content and form of their utterances, but using eye contact. Fedorenko and Kanwisher will employ fMRI to discover key components of a conversation network in the cortex. Saxe will examine the development of conversational ability in toddlers using novel MRI techniques. Levy and Tenenbaum will complement these efforts to improve computational models of language processing and conversation. 

The newest Targeted Project posits that the immune system can be harnessed to help treat behavioral symptoms of autism. Four labs — three in BCS and one at Harvard Medical School (HMS) — will study mechanisms by which peripheral immune cells can deliver a potentially therapeutic cytokine to the brain. A study by two of the collaborators, MIT associate professor Gloria Choi and HMS associate professor Jun Huh, showed that when IL-17a reaches excitatory neurons in a region of the mouse cortex, it can calm hyperactivity in circuits associated with social and repetitive behavior symptoms. Huh, an immunologist, will examine how IL-17a can get from the periphery to the brain, while Choi will examine how it has its neurological effects. Sur and MIT associate professor Myriam Heiman will conduct studies of cell types that bridge neural circuits with brain circulatory systems.

“It is quite amazing that we have a core of scientists working on very different things coming together to tackle this one common goal,” Choi says. “I really value that.”

Multiple mentors

While SCSB Targeted Projects unify labs around research, the center’s Simons Fellowships unify labs around young researchers, providing not only funding, but a pair of mentors and free-flowing interactions between their labs. Fellows also gain opportunities to inform and inspire their fundamental research by visiting with patients with autism, Sur says.

“The SCSB postdoctoral program serves a critical role in ensuring that a diversity of outstanding scientists are exposed to autism research during their training, providing a pipeline of new talent and creativity for the field,” adds Martin, of the Simons Foundation.

Simons Fellows praise the extra opportunities afforded by additional mentoring. Postdoc Alex Major was a Simons Fellow in Miller’s lab and that of Nancy Kopell, a mathematics professor at Boston University renowned for her modeling of the brain wave phenomena that the Miller lab studies experimentally. 

“The dual mentorship structure is a very useful aspect of the fellowship” Major says. “It is both a chance to network with another PI and provides experience in a different neuroscience sub-field.”

Miller says co-mentoring expands the horizons and capabilities of not only the mentees but also the mentors and their labs. “Collaboration is 21st century neuroscience,” Miller says. “Some our studies of the brain have gotten too big and comprehensive to be encapsulated in just one laboratory. Some of these big questions require multiple approaches and multiple techniques.” 

Desimone, who recently co-mentored Seng Bum (Michael Yoo) along with BCS and McGovern colleague Mehrdad Jazayeri in a project studying how animals learn from observing others, agrees. 

“We hear from postdocs all the time that they wish they had two mentors, just in general to get another point of view,” Desimone says. “This is a really good thing and it’s a way for faculty members to learn about what other faculty members and their postdocs are doing.”

Indeed, the Simons Center model suggests that research can be very successful when it’s collaborative and social.

Nancy Hopkins awarded the National Academy of Sciences Public Welfare Medal

Tue, 01/30/2024 - 4:25pm

The National Academy of Sciences has awarded MIT biologist Nancy Hopkins, the Amgen Professor of Biology Emerita, with the 2024 Public Welfare Medal in recognition of “her courageous leadership over three decades to create and ensure equal opportunity for women in science.” 

The award recognizes Hopkins’s role in catalyzing and leading MIT’s “A Study on the Status of Women Faculty in Science,” made public in 1999. The landmark report, the result of the efforts of numerous members of the MIT faculty and administration, revealed inequities in the treatment and resources available to women versus men on the faculty at the Institute, helped drive significant changes to MIT policies and practices, and sparked a national conversation about the unequal treatment of women in science, engineering, and beyond.

Since the medal was established in 1914 to honor extraordinary use of science for the public good, it has been awarded to several MIT-affiliated scientists, including Karl Compton, James R. Killian Jr., and Jerome B. Wiesner, as well as Vannevar Bush, Isidor I. Rabi, and Victor Weiskopf.

“The Public Welfare Medal has been awarded to MIT faculty who have helped define our Institute and scientists who have shaped modern science on the national stage,” says Susan Hockfield, MIT president emerita. “It is more than fitting for Nancy to join their ranks, and — importantly — celebrates her critical role in increasing the participation of women in science and engineering as a significant national achievement.”

When Hopkins joined the faculty of the MIT Center for Cancer Research (CCR) in 1973, she did not set out to become an advocate for equality for women in science. For the first 15 years, she distinguished herself in pioneering studies linking genes of RNA tumor viruses to their roles in causing some forms of cancer. But in 1989, Hopkins changed course: She began developing molecular technologies for the study of zebrafish that would help establish it as an important model for vertebrate development and cancer biology.

To make the pivot, Hopkins needed more space to accommodate fish tanks and new equipment. Although Hopkins strongly suspected that she had been assigned less lab space than her male peers in the building, her hypothesis carried little weight and her request was denied. Ever the scientist, Hopkins believed the path to more lab space was to collect data. One night in 1993, with a measuring tape in hand, she visited each lab to quantify the distribution of space in her building. Her hypothesis appeared correct.

Hopkins shared her initial findings — and her growing sense that there was bias against women scientists — with one female colleague, and then others, many of whom reported similar experiences. The senior women faculty in MIT’s School of Science began meeting to discuss their concerns, ultimately documenting them in a letter to Dean of Science Robert Birgeneau. The letter was signed by professors Susan Carey, Sylvia Ceyer, Sallie “Penny” Chisholm, Suzanne Corkin, Mildred Dresselhaus, Ann Graybiel, Ruth Lehmann, Marcia McNutt, Terry Orr-Weaver, Mary-Lou Pardue, Molly Potter, Paula Malanotte-Rizzoli, Leigh Royden, Lisa Steiner, and Joanne Stubbe. Also important were Hopkins’s discussions with Lorna Gibson, a professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, since Gibson had made similar observations with her female colleagues in the School of Engineering. Despite the biases against these women, they were highly accomplished scientists. Four of them were eventually awarded the U.S. National Medal of Science, and 11 were, or became, members of the National Academy of Sciences.

In response to the women in the School of Science, Birgeneau established the Committee on the Status of Women Faculty in 1995, which included both female faculty and three male faculty who had been department chairs: Jerome Friedman, Dan Kleitman, and Robert Silbey. In addition to interviewing essentially all the female faculty members in the school, they collected data on salaries, space, and other resources. The committee found that of 209 tenured professors in the School of Science only 15 were women, and they often had smaller wages and labs, and were raising more of their salaries from grants than equivalent male faculty.

At the urging of Lotte Bailyn, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and chair of the faculty, Hopkins and the committee summarized their findings to be presented to MIT’s faculty. Struck by the pervasive and well-documented pattern of bias against women across the School of Science, both Birgeneau and MIT President Charles Vest added prefaces to the report before it was published in the faculty newsletter. Vest commented, “I have always believed that contemporary gender discrimination within universities is part reality and part perception. True, but I now understand that reality is by far the greater part of the balance.”

Vest took an “engineers’ approach” to addressing the report’s findings, remarking “anything I can measure, I can fix.” He tasked Provost Robert Brown with establishing committees to produce reports on the status of women faculty for all five of MIT’s schools. The reports were published in 2002 and drew attention to the small number of women faculty in some schools, as well as discrepancies similar to those first documented in the School of Science.

In response, MIT implemented changes in hiring practices, updated pay equity reviews, and worked to improve the working environment for women faculty. On-campus day care facilities were built and leave policies were expanded for the benefit of all faculty members with families. To address underrepresentation of individuals of color, as well as the unique biases against women of color, Brown established the Council on Faculty Diversity with Hopkins and Philip Clay, then MIT’s chancellor and a professor in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. Meanwhile, Vest spearheaded a collaboration with presidents of other leading universities to increase representation of women faculty.

MIT increased the numbers of women faculty by altering hiring procedures  — particularly in the School of Engineering under Dean Thomas Magnanti and in the School of Science under Birgeneau, and later Associate Dean Hazel Sive. MIT did not need to alter its standards for hiring to increase the number of women on its faculty: Women hired with revised policies at the Institute have been equally successful and have gone on to important leadership roles at MIT and other institutions.

In the wake of the 1999 report the press thrust MIT — and Hopkins — into the national spotlight. The careful documentation in the report and first Birgeneau’s and then Vest’s endorsement of and proactive response to its findings were persuasive to many reporters and their readers. The reports and media coverage resonated with women across academia, resulting in a flood of mail to Hopkins’s inbox, as well as many requests for speaking engagements. Hopkins would eventually undertake hundreds of talks across the United States and many other countries about advocating for the equitable treatment of women in science.

Her advocacy work continued after her retirement. In 2019, Hopkins, along with Hockfield and Sangeeta Bhatia, the John J. and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, founded the Boston Biotech Working Group — which later evolved into the Faculty Founder Initiative — to increase women’s representation as founders and board members of biotech companies in Massachusetts.

Hopkins, however, believes she became “this very visible person by chance.”

“An almost uncountable number of people made this happen,” she continues. “Moreover, I know how much work went on before I even set foot on campus, such as by Emily Wick, Shirley Ann Jackson, Sheila Widnall, and Mildred Dresselhaus. I stood on the shoulders of a great institution and the long, hard work of many people that belong to it.”

The National Academy of Sciences will present the 2024 Public Welfare Medal to Hopkins in April at its 161st annual meeting. Hopkins is the recipient of many other awards and honors, both for her scientific achievements and her advocacy for women in science. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the AACR Academy. Other awards include the Centennial Medal from Harvard University, the MIT Gordon Y. Billard Award for “special service” to MIT, the MIT Laya Wiesner Community Award, the Maria Mitchell Women in Science Award, and the STAT Biomedical Innovation Award. In addition, she has received eight honorary doctorates, most recently from Rockefeller University, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and the Weizmann Institute.

Creating new skills and new connections with MIT’s Quantitative Methods Workshop

Tue, 01/30/2024 - 3:45pm

Starting on New Year’s Day, when many people were still clinging to holiday revelry, scores of students and faculty members from about a dozen partner universities instead flipped open their laptops for MIT’s Quantitative Methods Workshop, a jam-packed, weeklong introduction to how computational and mathematical techniques can be applied to neuroscience and biology research. But don’t think of QMW as a “crash course.” Instead the program’s purpose is to help elevate each participant’s scientific outlook, both through the skills and concepts it imparts and the community it creates.

“It broadens their horizons, it shows them significant applications they've never thought of, and introduces them to people whom as researchers they will come to know and perhaps collaborate with one day,” says Susan L. Epstein, a Hunter College computer science professor and education coordinator of MIT’s Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines, which hosts the program with the departments of Biology and Brain and Cognitive Sciences and The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory. “It is a model of interdisciplinary scholarship.”

This year 83 undergraduates and faculty members from institutions that primarily serve groups underrepresented in STEM fields took part in the QMW, says organizer Mandana Sassanfar, senior lecturer and director of diversity and science outreach across the four hosting MIT entities. Since the workshop launched in 2010, it has engaged more than 1,000 participants, of whom more than 170 have gone on to participate in MIT Summer Research Programs (such as MSRP-BIO), and 39 have come to MIT for graduate school.

Individual goals, shared experience

Undergraduates and faculty in various STEM disciplines often come to QMW to gain an understanding of, or expand their expertise in, computational and mathematical data analysis. Computer science- and statistics-minded participants come to learn more about how such techniques can be applied in life sciences fields. In lectures; in hands-on labs where they used the computer programming language Python to process, analyze, and visualize data; and in less formal settings such as tours and lunches with MIT faculty, participants worked and learned together, and informed each other’s perspectives.

And regardless of their field of study, participants made connections with each other and with the MIT students and faculty who taught and spoke over the course of the week.

Hunter College computer science sophomore Vlad Vostrikov says that while he has already worked with machine learning and other programming concepts, he was interested to “branch out” by seeing how they are used to analyze scientific datasets. He also valued the chance to learn the experiences of the graduate students who teach QMW’s hands-on labs.

“This was a good way to explore computational biology and neuroscience,” Vostrikov says. “I also really enjoy hearing from the people who teach us. It’s interesting to hear where they come from and what they are doing.”

Jariatu Kargbo, a biology and chemistry sophomore at University of Maryland Baltimore County, says when she first learned of the QMW she wasn’t sure it was for her. It seemed very computation-focused. But her advisor Holly Willoughby encouraged Kargbo to attend to learn about how programming could be useful in future research — currently she is taking part in research on the retina at UMBC. More than that, Kargbo also realized it would be a good opportunity to make connections at MIT in advance of perhaps applying for MSRP this summer.

“I thought this would be a great way to meet up with faculty and see what the environment is like here because I’ve never been to MIT before,” Kargbo says. “It’s always good to meet other people in your field and grow your network.”

QMW is not just for students. It’s also for their professors, who said they can gain valuable professional education for their research and teaching.

Fayuan Wen, an assistant professor of biology at Howard University, is no stranger to computational biology, having performed big data genetic analyses of sickle cell disease (SCD). But she’s mostly worked with the R programming language and QMW’s focus is on Python. As she looks ahead to projects in which she wants analyze genomic data to help predict disease outcomes in SCD and HIV, she says a QMW session delivered by biology graduate student Hannah Jacobs was perfectly on point.

“This workshop has the skills I want to have,” Wen says.

Moreover, Wen says she is looking to start a machine-learning class in the Howard biology department and was inspired by some of the teaching materials she encountered at QMW — for example, online curriculum modules developed by Taylor Baum, an MIT graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science and Picower Institute labs, and Paloma Sánchez-Jáuregui, a coordinator who works with Sassanfar.

Tiziana Ligorio, a Hunter College computer science doctoral lecturer who together with Epstein teaches a deep machine-learning class at the City University of New York campus, felt similarly. Rather than require a bunch of prerequisites that might drive students away from the class, Ligorio was looking to QMW’s intense but introductory curriculum as a resource for designing a more inclusive way of getting students ready for the class.

Instructive interactions

Each day runs from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., including morning and afternoon lectures and hands-on sessions. Class topics ranged from statistical data analysis and machine learning to brain-computer interfaces, brain imaging, signal processing of neural activity data, and cryogenic electron microscopy.

“This workshop could not happen without dedicated instructors — grad students, postdocs, and faculty — who volunteer to give lectures, design and teach hands-on computer labs, and meet with students during the very first week of January,” Saassanfar says.

The sessions surround student lunches with MIT faculty members. For example, at midday Jan. 2, assistant professor of biology Brady Weissbourd, an investigator in the Picower Institute, sat down with seven students in one of Building 46’s curved sofas to field questions about his neuroscience research in jellyfish and how he uses quantitative techniques as part of that work. He also described what it’s like to be a professor, and other topics that came to the students’ minds.

Then the participants all crossed Vassar Street to Building 26’s Room 152, where they formed different but similarly sized groups for the hands-on lab “Machine learning applications to studying the brain,” taught by Baum. She guided the class through Python exercises she developed illustrating “supervised” and “unsupervised” forms of machine learning, including how the latter method can be used to discern what a person is seeing based on magnetic readings of brain activity.

As students worked through the exercises, tablemates helped each other by supplementing Baum’s instruction. Ligorio, Vostrikov, and Kayla Blincow, assistant professor of biology at the University of the Virgin Islands, for instance, all leapt to their feet to help at their tables.

At the end of the class, when Baum asked students what they had learned, they offered a litany of new knowledge. Survey data that Sassanfar and Sánchez-Jáuregui use to anonymously track QMW outcomes, revealed many more such attestations of the value of the sessions. With a prompt asking how one might apply what they’ve learned, one respondent wrote: “Pursue a research career or endeavor in which I apply the concepts of computer science and neuroscience together.”

Enduring connections

While some new QMW attendees might only be able to speculate about how they’ll apply their new skills and relationships, Luis Miguel de Jesús Astacio could testify to how attending QMW as an undergraduate back in 2014 figured into a career where he is now a faculty member in physics at the University of Puerto Rico Rio Piedras Campus. After QMW, he returned to MIT that summer as a student in the lab of neuroscientist and Picower Professor Susumu Tonegawa. He came back again in 2016 to the lab of physicist and Francis Friedman Professor Mehran Kardar. What’s endured for the decade has been his connection to Sassanfar. So while he was once a student at QMW, this year he was back with a cohort of undergraduates as a faculty member.

Michael Aldarondo-Jeffries, director of academic advancement programs at the University of Central Florida, seconded the value of the networking that takes place at QMW. He has brought students for a decade, including four this year. What he’s observed is that as students come together in settings like QMW or UCF’s McNair program, which helps to prepare students for graduate school, they become inspired about a potential future as researchers.

“The thing that stands out is just the community that’s formed,” he says. “For many of the students, it's the first time that they're in a group that understands what they're moving toward. They don’t have to explain why they’re excited to read papers on a Friday night.”

Or why they are excited to spend a week including New Year’s Day at MIT learning how to apply quantitative methods to life sciences data.

New MIT.nano equipment to accelerate innovation in “tough tech” sectors

Tue, 01/30/2024 - 1:00pm

A new set of advanced nanofabrication equipment will make MIT.nano one of the world’s most advanced research facilities in microelectronics and related technologies, unlocking new opportunities for experimentation and widening the path for promising inventions to become impactful new products.

The equipment, provided by Applied Materials, will significantly expand MIT.nano’s nanofabrication capabilities, making them compatible with wafers — thin, round slices of semiconductor material — up to 200 millimeters, or 8 inches, in diameter, a size widely used in industry. The new tools will allow researchers to prototype a vast array of new microelectronic devices using state-of-the-art materials and fabrication processes. At the same time, the 200-millimeter compatibility will support close collaboration with industry and enable innovations to be rapidly adopted by companies and mass produced.

MIT.nano’s leaders say the equipment, which will also be available to scientists outside of MIT, will dramatically enhance their facility’s capabilities, allowing experts in the region to more efficiently explore new approaches in “tough tech” sectors, including advanced electronics, next-generation batteries, renewable energies, optical computing, biological sensing, and a host of other areas — many likely yet to be imagined.

“The toolsets will provide an accelerative boost to our ability to launch new technologies that can then be given to the world at scale,” says MIT.nano Director Vladimir Bulović, who is also the Fariborz Maseeh Professor of Emerging Technology. “MIT.nano is committed to its expansive mission — to build a better world. We provide toolsets and capabilities that, in the hands of brilliant researchers, can effectively move the world forward.”

The announcement comes as part of an agreement between MIT and Applied Materials, Inc. that, together with a grant to MIT from the Northeast Microelectronics Coalition (NEMC) Hub, commits more than $40 million of estimated private and public investment to add advanced nano-fabrication equipment and capabilities at MIT.nano.

“We don’t believe there is another space in the United States that will offer the same kind of versatility, capability, and accessibility, with 8-inch toolsets integrated right next to more fundamental toolsets for research discoveries,” Bulović says. “It will create a seamless path to accelerate the pace of innovation.”

Pushing the boundaries of innovation

Applied Materials is the world’s largest supplier of equipment for manufacturing semiconductors, displays, and other advanced electronics. The company will provide at MIT.nano several state-of-the-art process tools capable of supporting 150- and 200-millimeter wafers and will enhance and upgrade an existing tool owned by MIT. In addition to assisting MIT.nano in the day-to-day operation and maintenance of the equipment, Applied Materials engineers will develop new process capabilities to benefit researchers and students from MIT and beyond.

“This investment will significantly accelerate the pace of innovation and discovery in microelectronics and microsystems,” says Tomás Palacios, director of MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories and the Clarence J. Lebel Professor in Electrical Engineering. “It’s wonderful news for our community, wonderful news for the state, and, in my view, a tremendous step forward toward implementing the national vision for the future of innovation in microelectronics.”

Nanoscale research at universities is traditionally conducted on machines that are less compatible with industry, which makes academic innovations more difficult to turn into impactful, mass-produced products. Jorg Scholvin, associate director for MIT.nano’s shared fabrication facility, says the new machines, when combined with MIT.nano’s existing equipment, represent a step-change improvement in that area: Researchers will be able to take an industry-standard wafer and build their technology on top of it to prove to companies it works on existing devices, or to co-fabricate new ideas in close collaboration with industry partners.

“In the journey from an idea to a fully working device, the ability to begin on a small scale, figure out what you want to do, rapidly debug your designs, and then scale it up to an industry-scale wafer is critical,” Scholvin says. “It means a student can test out their idea on wafer-scale quickly and directly incorporate insights into their project so that their processes are scalable. Providing such proof-of-principle early on will accelerate the idea out of the academic environment, potentially reducing years of added effort. Other tools at MIT.nano can supplement work on the 200-millimeter wafer scale, but the higher throughput and higher precision of the Applied equipment will provide researchers with repeatability and accuracy that is unprecedented for academic research environments. Essentially what you have is a sharper, faster, more precise tool to do your work.”

Scholvin predicts the equipment will lead to exponential growth in research opportunities.

“I think a key benefit of these tools is they allow us to push the boundary of research in a variety of different ways that we can predict today,” Scholvin says. “But then there are also unpredictable benefits, which are hiding in the shadows waiting to be discovered by the creativity of the researchers at MIT. With each new application, more ideas and paths usually come to mind — so that over time, more and more opportunities are discovered.”

Because the equipment is available for use by people outside of the MIT community, including regional researchers, industry partners, nonprofit organizations, and local startups, they will also enable new collaborations.

“The tools themselves will be an incredible meeting place — a place that can, I think, transpose the best of our ideas in a much more effective way than before,” Bulović says. “I’m extremely excited about that.”

Palacios notes that while microelectronics is best known for work making transistors smaller to fit on microprocessors, it’s a vast field that enables virtually all the technology around us, from wireless communications and high-speed internet to energy management, personalized health care, and more.

He says he’s personally excited to use the new machines to do research around power electronics and semiconductors, including exploring promising new materials like gallium nitride, which could dramatically improve the efficiency of electronic devices.

Fulfilling a mission

MIT.nano’s leaders say a key driver of commercialization will be startups, both from MIT and beyond.

“This is not only going to help the MIT research community innovate faster, it’s also going to enable a new wave of entrepreneurship,” Palacios says. “We’re reducing the barriers for students, faculty, and other entrepreneurs to be able to take innovation and get it to market. That fits nicely with MIT’s mission of making the world a better place through technology. I cannot wait to see the amazing new inventions that our colleagues and students will come out with.”

Bulović says the announcement aligns with the mission laid out by MIT’s leaders at MIT.nano’s inception.

"We have the space in MIT.nano to accommodate these tools, we have the capabilities inside MIT.nano to manage their operation, and as a shared and open facility, we have methodologies by which we can welcome anyone from the region to use the tools,” Bulović says. “That is the vision MIT laid out as we were designing MIT.nano, and this announcement helps to fulfill that vision.”

MIT, Applied Materials, and the Northeast Microelectronics Coalition Hub to bring 200mm advanced research capabilities to MIT.nano

Tue, 01/30/2024 - 1:00pm

The following is a joint announcement from MIT and Applied Materials, Inc.

MIT and Applied Materials, Inc., announced an agreement today that, together with a grant to MIT from the Northeast Microelectronics Coalition (NEMC) Hub, commits more than $40 million of estimated private and public investment to add advanced nano-fabrication equipment and capabilities to MIT.nano, the Institute’s center for nanoscale science and engineering. The collaboration will create a unique open-access site in the United States that supports research and development at industry-compatible scale using the same equipment found in high-volume production fabs to accelerate advances in silicon and compound semiconductors, power electronics, optical computing, analog devices, and other critical technologies.

The equipment and related funding and in-kind support provided by Applied Materials will significantly enhance MIT.nano’s existing capabilities to fabricate up to 200-millimeter (8-inch) wafers, a size essential to industry prototyping and production of semiconductors used in a broad range of markets including consumer electronics, automotive, industrial automation, clean energy, and more. Positioned to fill the gap between academic experimentation and commercialization, the equipment will help establish a bridge connecting early-stage innovation to industry pathways to the marketplace.

“A brilliant new concept for a chip won’t have impact in the world unless companies can make millions of copies of it. MIT.nano’s collaboration with Applied Materials will create a critical open-access capacity to help innovations travel from lab bench to industry foundries for manufacturing,” says Maria Zuber, MIT’s vice president for research and the E. A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics. “I am grateful to Applied Materials for its investment in this vision. The impact of the new toolset will ripple across MIT and throughout Massachusetts, the region, and the nation.”

Applied Materials is the world’s largest supplier of equipment for manufacturing semiconductors, displays, and other advanced electronics. The company will provide at MIT.nano several state-of-the-art process tools capable of supporting 150 and 200mm wafers and will enhance and upgrade an existing tool owned by MIT. In addition to assisting MIT.nano in the day-to-day operation and maintenance of the equipment, Applied engineers will develop new process capabilities that will benefit researchers and students from MIT and beyond.

“Chips are becoming increasingly complex, and there is tremendous need for continued advancements in 200mm devices, particularly compound semiconductors like silicon carbide and gallium nitride,” says Aninda Moitra, corporate vice president and general manager of Applied Materials’ ICAPS Business. “Applied is excited to team with MIT.nano to create a unique, open-access site in the U.S. where the chip ecosystem can collaborate to accelerate innovation. Our engagement with MIT expands Applied’s university innovation network and furthers our efforts to reduce the time and cost of commercializing new technologies while strengthening the pipeline of future semiconductor industry talent.”

The NEMC Hub, managed by the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative (MassTech), will allocate $7.7 million to enable the installation of the tools. The NEMC is the regional “hub” that connects and amplifies the capabilities of diverse organizations from across New England, plus New Jersey and New York. The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) selected the NEMC Hub as one of eight Microelectronics Commons Hubs and awarded funding from the CHIPS and Science Act to accelerate the transition of critical microelectronics technologies from lab-to-fab, spur new jobs, expand workforce training opportunities, and invest in the region’s advanced manufacturing and technology sectors.

The Microelectronics Commons program is managed at the federal level by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering and the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Crane Division, and facilitated through the National Security Technology Accelerator (NSTXL), which organizes the execution of the eight regional hubs located across the country. The announcement of the public sector support for the project was made at an event attended by leaders from the DoD and NSTXL during a site visit to meet with NEMC Hub members.

The installation and operation of these tools at MIT.nano will have a direct impact on the members of the NEMC Hub, the Massachusetts and Northeast regional economy, and national security. This is what the CHIPS and Science Act is all about,” says Ben Linville-Engler, deputy director at the MassTech Collaborative and the interim director of the NEMC Hub. “This is an essential investment by the NEMC Hub to meet the mission of the Microelectronics Commons.”

MIT.nano is a 200,000 square-foot facility located in the heart of the MIT campus with pristine, class-100 cleanrooms capable of accepting these advanced tools. Its open-access model means that MIT.nano’s toolsets and laboratories are available not only to the campus, but also to early-stage R&D by researchers from other academic institutions, nonprofit organizations, government, and companies ranging from Fortune 500 multinationals to local startups. Vladimir Bulović, faculty director of MIT.nano, says he expects the new equipment to come online in early 2025.

“With vital funding for installation from NEMC and after a thorough and productive planning process with Applied Materials, MIT.nano is ready to install this toolset and integrate it into our expansive capabilities that serve over 1,100 researchers from academia, startups, and established companies,” says Bulović, who is also the Fariborz Maseeh Professor of Emerging Technologies in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “We’re eager to add these powerful new capabilities and excited for the new ideas, collaborations, and innovations that will follow.”

As part of its arrangement with MIT.nano, Applied Materials will join the MIT.nano Consortium, an industry program comprising 12 companies from different industries around the world. With the contributions of the company’s technical staff, Applied Materials will also have the opportunity to engage with MIT’s intellectual centers, including continued membership with the Microsystems Technology Laboratories.

DNA particles that mimic viruses hold promise as vaccines

Tue, 01/30/2024 - 5:00am

Using a virus-like delivery particle made from DNA, researchers from MIT and the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard have created a vaccine that can induce a strong antibody response against SARS-CoV-2.

The vaccine, which has been tested in mice, consists of a DNA scaffold that carries many copies of a viral antigen. This type of vaccine, known as a particulate vaccine, mimics the structure of a virus. Most previous work on particulate vaccines has relied on protein scaffolds, but the proteins used in those vaccines tend to generate an unnecessary immune response that can distract the immune system from the target.

In the mouse study, the researchers found that the DNA scaffold does not induce an immune response, allowing the immune system to focus its antibody response on the target antigen.

“DNA, we found in this work, does not elicit antibodies that may distract away from the protein of interest,” says Mark Bathe, an MIT professor of biological engineering. “What you can imagine is that your B cells and immune system are being fully trained by that target antigen, and that’s what you want — for your immune system to be laser-focused on the antigen of interest.”

This approach, which strongly stimulates B cells (the cells that produce antibodies), could make it easier to develop vaccines against viruses that have been difficult to target, including HIV and influenza, as well as SARS-CoV-2, the researchers say. Unlike T cells, which are stimulated by other types of vaccines, these B cells can persist for decades, offering long-term protection.

“We’re interested in exploring whether we can teach the immune system to deliver higher levels of immunity against pathogens that resist conventional vaccine approaches, like flu, HIV, and SARS-CoV-2,” says Daniel Lingwood, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and a principal investigator at the Ragon Institute. “This idea of decoupling the response against the target antigen from the platform itself is a potentially powerful immunological trick that one can now bring to bear to help those immunological targeting decisions move in a direction that is more focused.”

Bathe, Lingwood, and Aaron Schmidt, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and principal investigator at the Ragon Institute, are the senior authors of the paper, which appears today in Nature Communications. The paper’s lead authors are Eike-Christian Wamhoff, a former MIT postdoc; Larance Ronsard, a Ragon Institute postdoc; Jared Feldman, a former Harvard University graduate student; Grant Knappe, an MIT graduate student; and Blake Hauser, a former Harvard graduate student. 

Mimicking viruses

Particulate vaccines usually consist of a protein nanoparticle, similar in structure to a virus, that can carry many copies of a viral antigen. This high density of antigens can lead to a stronger immune response than traditional vaccines because the body sees it as similar to an actual virus. Particulate vaccines have been developed for a handful of pathogens, including hepatitis B and human papillomavirus, and a particulate vaccine for SARS-CoV-2 has been approved for use in South Korea.

These vaccines are especially good at activating B cells, which produce antibodies specific to the vaccine antigen.

“Particulate vaccines are of great interest for many in immunology because they give you robust humoral immunity, which is antibody-based immunity, which is differentiated from the T-cell-based immunity that the mRNA vaccines seem to elicit more strongly,” Bathe says.

A potential drawback to this kind of vaccine, however, is that the proteins used for the scaffold often stimulate the body to produce antibodies targeting the scaffold. This can distract the immune system and prevent it from launching as robust a response as one would like, Bathe says.

“To neutralize the SARS-CoV-2 virus, you want to have a vaccine that generates antibodies toward the receptor binding domain portion of the virus’ spike protein,” he says. “When you display that on a protein-based particle, what happens is your immune system recognizes not only that receptor binding domain protein, but all the other proteins that are irrelevant to the immune response you’re trying to elicit.”

Another potential drawback is that if the same person receives more than one vaccine carried by the same protein scaffold, for example, SARS-CoV-2 and then influenza, their immune system would likely respond right away to the protein scaffold, having already been primed to react to it. This could weaken the immune response to the antigen carried by the second vaccine.

“If you want to apply that protein-based particle to immunize against a different virus like influenza, then your immune system can be addicted to the underlying protein scaffold that it’s already seen and developed an immune response toward,” Bathe says. “That can hypothetically diminish the quality of your antibody response for the actual antigen of interest.”

As an alternative, Bathe’s lab has been developing scaffolds made using DNA origami, a method that offers precise control over the structure of synthetic DNA and allows researchers to attach a variety of molecules, such as viral antigens, at specific locations.

In a 2020 study, Bathe and Darrell Irvine, an MIT professor of biological engineering and of materials science and engineering, showed that a DNA scaffold carrying 30 copies of an HIV antigen could generate a strong antibody response in B cells grown in the lab. This type of structure is optimal for activating B cells because it closely mimics the structure of nano-sized viruses, which display many copies of viral proteins in their surfaces.

“This approach builds off of a fundamental principle in B-cell antigen recognition, which is that if you have an arrayed display of the antigen, that promotes B-cell responses and gives better quantity and quality of antibody output,” Lingwood says.

“Immunologically silent”

In the new study, the researchers swapped in an antigen consisting of the receptor binding protein of the spike protein from the original strain of SARS-CoV-2. When they gave the vaccine to mice, they found that the mice generated high levels of antibodies to the spike protein but did not generate any to the DNA scaffold.

In contrast, a vaccine based on a scaffold protein called ferritin, coated with SARS-CoV-2 antigens, generated many antibodies against ferritin as well as SARS-CoV-2.

“The DNA nanoparticle itself is immunogenically silent,” Lingwood says. “If you use a protein-based platform, you get equally high titer antibody responses to the platform and to the antigen of interest, and that can complicate repeated usage of that platform because you’ll develop high affinity immune memory against it.”

Reducing these off-target effects could also help scientists reach the goal of developing a vaccine that would induce broadly neutralizing antibodies to any variant of SARS-CoV-2, or even to all sarbecoviruses, the subgenus of virus that includes SARS-CoV-2 as well as the viruses that cause SARS and MERS.

To that end, the researchers are now exploring whether a DNA scaffold with many different viral antigens attached could induce broadly neutralizing antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 and related viruses. 

The research was primarily funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Fast Grants program.

AgeLab’s Bryan Reimer named to US Department of Transportation innovation committee

Mon, 01/29/2024 - 5:20pm

Bryan Reimer, research scientist at the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics’ (MIT CTL) AgeLab, has been appointed by the U.S. Department of Transportation (DoT) to the Transforming Transportation Advisory Committee (TTAC). The committee advises the DoT and the secretary of transportation about plans and approaches for transportation innovation.

Reimer, who has been at MIT since 2003, joins a team of 27 experts on the committee chosen to provide diverse perspectives across sectors, geographies, and areas of expertise. Their advice will help ensure that transportation's future is safe, efficient, sustainable, equitable, and transformative.

A mobility futurist and expert in the human element of assisted and automated vehicle safety, Reimer collaborates with industries worldwide on behavioral, technological, and public policy challenges associated with driver attention, driver assistance systems, automated driving, vulnerable road users, and electric vehicles. These varied interests are reflected in Reimer’s wide-ranging research projects.

He is the founder and co-director of AgeLab’s Advanced Vehicle Technology (AVT) Consortium and Advanced Human Factors Evaluator for Attentional Demand (AHEAD) consortium. AVT launched in 2015 and is a global academic-industry collaboration on developing a data-driven understanding of how drivers respond to commercially available vehicle technologies. The consortium focuses especially on how systems perform and the impacts of technology on driving behavior and consumer attitudes. AHEAD is an academic-industry partnership launched in 2013 that is working to develop a framework for driver attention support and safeguards that can be operationalized.

In 2018, Reimer delivered a TEDx talk entitled “There’s more to safety of driverless cars than AI.” The talk focused on transparency in the deployment and operation of driverless cars and on the “trusted information consumers need” before these automated vehicles become the future of mobility. He believes the public and private sectors must work together to ensure consumers' safety on public roads.

“Working at the intersection of technology, driver behavior, and public policy for over 20 years, I have long recognized that neither the public or private sectors can solve these complex issues independently,” says Reimer. “A safer, greener, convenient, comfortable, and more economical mobility system will require a deeper collaboration between the public and private sectors. Industries also need appropriate government support and oversight to help them develop, produce, and deploy new technologies that optimize the impact on society. I hope that my work with the committee can highlight needs in this area.”

In a statement, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg remarked on the committee’s mission. “We are living in a time filled with unprecedented opportunity and unprecedented challenges in transportation,” he said. “The deep expertise and diverse perspectives of this impressive group will provide advice to ensure the future of transportation is safe, efficient, sustainable, equitable, and transformative.”

The TTAC is tasked with exploring and considering issues related to:

  • pathways to safe, secure, equitable, environmentally friendly, and accessible deployments of emerging technologies;
  • integrated approaches to promote greater cross-modal integration of emerging technologies, particularly applications to deploy automation;
  • policies that encourage automation to grow and support a safe and productive U.S. workforce, as well as foster economic competitiveness and job quality;
  • approaches and frameworks that encourage the secure exchange and sharing of transformative transportation data, including technologies and infrastructure, across the public and private sectors that can guide core policy decisions across DOT’s strategic goals;
  • ways the DOT can identify and elevate cybersecurity solutions and protect privacy across transportation systems and infrastructure; and
  • other emerging issues, topics, and technologies.

The AgeLab has deep expertise in many of these areas with a multidisciplinary research program that includes home logistics and services and transportation and livable communities topics. It works with businesses, government, and nongovernmental organizations to improve the quality of life of older people and those who care for them. Personal mobility and the availability of delivery systems are critically important elements of this work.

MIT CTL, of which AgeLab is a part, also offers expertise in freight transportation. For example, MIT CTL’s FreightLab has conducted groundbreaking research with industry partners on issues such as truck drivers' performance, truck transportation availability, and the impact of natural disasters on freight movement.

Transportation research is more critical than ever, given the advance of automation and innovations such as AI-based management systems. Also, there is increasing demand from consumers and governments to make the movement of goods and people more efficient and environmentally friendly.

TTAC members will serve two-year terms and may be reappointed. The committee’s first meeting was held on Jan. 18.

Middle-school students meet a beam of electrons, and excitement results

Mon, 01/29/2024 - 5:00pm

Want to get middle-school kids excited about science? Let them do their own experiments on MIT.nano’s state-of-the-art microscopes — with guidelines and adult supervision, of course. That was the brainchild of Carl Thrasher and Tao Cai, MIT graduate students who spearheaded the Electron Microscopy Elevating Representation and Growth in Education (EMERGE) program.

Held in November, EMERGE invited 18 eighth-grade students to the pilot event at MIT.nano, an interdisciplinary facility for nanoscale research, to get hands-on experience in microscopy and materials science.

The highlight of the two-hour workshop: Each student explored mystery samples of everyday materials using one of two scanning electron microscopes (SEMs), which scan material samples using a beam of electrons to form an image. Though highly sophisticated, the instruments generated readily understandable data — images of intricate structures in a butterfly wing or a strand of hair, for example.

The students had an immediate, tangible sense of success, says Thrasher, from MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE). He led the program along with Cai, also from DMSE, and Collette Gordon, a grad student in the Department of Chemistry.

“This experience helped build a sense of agency and autonomy around this area of science, nurturing budding self-confidence among the students,” Thrasher says. “We didn’t give the students instructions, just empowered them to solve problems. When you don’t tell them the solution, you get really surprised with what they come up with.”

Unlocking interest in the infinitesimal

The students were part of a multi-year science and engineering exploration program called MITES Saturdays, run by MIT Introduction to Technology, Engineering, and Science, or MITES. A team of volunteers was on hand to help students follow the guidance set out by Thrasher, ensuring the careful handling of the SEMs — worth roughly $500,000 each.

MITES Saturdays program administrator Lynsey Ford was thrilled to observe the students’ autonomous exploration and enthusiasm.

“Our students got to meet real scientists who listened to them, cared about the questions they were asking, and welcomed them into a world of science,” Ford says. “A supportive learning environment can be just as powerful for science discovery as a half-million-dollar microscope.”

The pilot workshop was the first step for Thrasher and his team in their goal to build EMERGE into a program with broad impact, engaging middle-to-high school students from a variety of communities.

The partnership with MITES Saturdays is crucial for this endeavor, says Thrasher, providing a platform to reach a wider audience. “Seeing students from diverse backgrounds participating in EMERGE reinforces the profound difference science education can have.”

MITES Saturdays students are high-achieving Massachusetts seventh through 12th graders from Boston, MIT’s hometown of Cambridge, and nearby Lawrence.

“The majority of students who participate in our programs would be the first person in their family to go to college. A lot of them are from families balancing some sort of financial hardship, and from populations that are historically underrepresented in STEM,” Ford says.

Experienced SEM users set up the instruments and prepared test samples so students could take turns exploring specimens such as burrs, butterfly wings, computer chips, hair, and pollen by operating the microscope to adjust magnification, focus, and stage location.

Students left the EMERGE event with copies of the electron microscope images they generated. Thrasher hopes they will use these materials in follow-up projects, ideally integrating them into existing school curricula so students can share their experiences.

EMERGE co-director Cai says students were excited with their experimentation, both in being able to access such high-end equipment and in seeing what materials like Velcro look like under an SEM (spoiler alert: it’s spaghetti).

“We definitely saw a spark,” Cai says. “The subject matter was complex, but the students always wanted to know more.” And the after-program feedback was positive, with most saying the experience was fun and challenging. The volunteers noted how engaged the students were with the SEMs and subject matter. One volunteer overheard students say, “I felt like a real scientist!”

Inspiring tomorrow’s scientists

EMERGE is based on the Scanning Electron Microscopy Educators program, a long-running STEM outreach program started in 1991 by the Air Force Research Laboratory and adopted by Michigan State University. As an Air Force captain stationed at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, Thrasher participated in the program as a volunteer SEM expert.

“I thought it was an incredible opportunity for young students and wanted to bring it here to MIT,” he says.

The pilot was made possible thanks to support from the MITES Saturdays team and the Graduate Materials Council (GMC), the DMSE graduate student organization. Cai and DMSE grad student Jessica Dong, who are both GMC outreach chairs, helped fund, organize, and coordinate the event.

The MITES Saturdays students included reflections on their experience with the SEMs in their final presentations at the MITES Fall Symposium in November.

“My favorite part of the semester was using the SEM as it introduced me to microscopy at the level of electrons,” said one student.

“Our students had an incredible time with the EMERGE team. We’re excited about the possibility of future partnerships with MIT.nano and other departments at MIT, giving our scholars exposure to the breadth of opportunities as future scientists,” says Eboney Hearn, MITES executive director.

With the success of the pilot, the EMERGE team is looking to offer more programs to the MITES students in the spring. Anna Osherov is excited to give students more access to the cumulative staff knowledge and cutting-edge equipment at MIT.nano, which opened in 2018. Osherov is associate director for Characterization.nano, a shared experimental facility for advanced imaging and analysis.

“Our mission is to support mature researchers — and to help inspire the future PhDs and professors who will come to MIT to learn, research, and innovate,” Osherov says. “Designing and offering such programs, aimed at fostering natural curiosity and creativity of young minds, has a tremendous long-term benefit to our society. We can raise tomorrow’s generation in a better way.”

For her part, Ford is still coasting on the students’ excitement. “They come into the program so curious and hungry for knowledge. They remind me every day how amazing the world is.”

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