Building on more than two decades of research, a study by MIT neuroscientists at The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory reports a new way to treat pathology and symptoms of fragile X syndrome, the most common genetically-caused autism spectrum disorder. The team showed that augmenting a novel type of neurotransmitter signaling reduced hallmarks of fragile X in mouse models of the disorder.

The new approach, described in Cell Reports, works by targeting a specific molecular subunit of “NMDA” receptors that they discovered plays a key role in how neurons synthesize proteins to regulate their connections, or “synapses,” with other neurons in brain circuits. The scientists showed that in fragile X model mice, increasing the receptor’s activity caused neurons in the hippocampus region of the brain to increase molecular signaling that suppressed excessive bulk protein synthesis, leading to other key improvements.

Setting the table

“One of the things I find most satisfying about this study is that the pieces of the puzzle fit so nicely into what had come before,” says study senior author Mark Bear, Picower Professor in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. Former postdoc Stephanie Barnes, now a lecturer at the University of Glasgow, is the study’s lead author.

Bear’s lab studies how neurons continually edit their circuit connections, a process called “synaptic plasticity” that scientists believe to underlie the brain’s ability to adapt to experience and to form and process memories. These studies led to two discoveries that set the table for the newly published advance. In 2011, Bear’s lab showed that fragile X and another autism disorder, tuberous sclerosis (Tsc), represented two ends of a continuum of a kind of protein synthesis in the same neurons. In fragile X there was too much. In Tsc there was too little. When lab members crossbred fragile X and Tsc mice, in fact, their offspring emerged healthy, as the mutations of each disorder essentially canceled each other out.

More recently, Bear’s lab showed a different dichotomy. It has long been understood from their influential work in the 1990s that the flow of calcium ions through NMDA receptors can trigger a form of synaptic plasticity called “long-term depression” (LTD). But in 2020, they found that another mode of signaling by the receptor — one that did not require ion flow — altered protein synthesis in the neuron and caused a physical shrinking of the dendritic “spine” structures housing synapses.

For Bear and Barnes, these studies raised the prospect that if they could pinpoint how NMDA receptors affect protein synthesis they might identify a new mechanism that could be manipulated therapeutically to address fragile X (and perhaps tuberous sclerosis) pathology and symptoms. That would be an important advance to complement ongoing work Bear’s lab has done to correct fragile X protein synthesis levels via another receptor called mGluR5.

Receptor dissection

In the new study, Bear and Barnes’ team decided to use the non-ionic effect on spine shrinkage as a readout to dissect how NMDARs signal protein synthesis for synaptic plasticity in hippocampus neurons. They hypothesized that the dichotomy of ionic effects on synaptic function and non-ionic effects on spine structure might derive from the presence of two distinct components of NMDA receptors: “subunits” called GluN2A and GluN2B. To test that, they used genetic manipulations to knock out each of the subunits. When they did so, they found that knocking out “2A” or “2B” could eliminate LTD, but that only knocking out 2B affected spine size. Further experiments clarified that 2A and 2B are required for LTD, but that spine shrinkage solely depends on the 2B subunit.

The next task was to resolve how the 2B subunit signals spine shrinkage. A promising possibility was a part of the subunit called the “carboxyterminal domain,” or CTD. So, in a new experiment Bear and Barnes took advantage of a mouse that had been genetically engineered by researchers at the University of Edinburgh so that the 2A and 2B CTDs could be swapped with one another. A telling result was that when the 2B subunit lacked its proper CTD, the effect on spine structure disappeared. The result affirmed that the 2B subunit signals spine shrinkage via its CTD.

Another consequence of replacing the CTD of the 2B subunit was an increase in bulk protein synthesis that resembled findings in fragile X. Conversely, augmenting the non-ionic signaling through the 2B subunit suppressed bulk protein synthesis, reminiscent of Tsc.

Treating fragile X

Putting the pieces together, the findings indicated that augmenting signaling through the 2B subunit might, like introducing the mutation causing Tsc, rescue aspects of fragile X.

Indeed, when the scientists swapped in the 2B subunit CTD of NMDA receptor in fragile X model mice they found correction of not only the excessive bulk protein synthesis, but also altered synaptic plasticity, and increased electrical excitability that are hallmarks of the disease. To see if a treatment that targets NMDA receptors might be effective in fragile X, they tried an experimental drug called Glyx-13. This drug binds to the 2B subunit of NMDA receptors to augment signaling. The researchers found that this treatment can also normalize protein synthesis and reduced sound-induced seizures in the fragile X mice.

The team now hypothesizes, based on another prior study in the lab, that the beneficial effect to fragile X mice of the 2B subunit’s CTD signaling is that it shifts the balance of protein synthesis away from an all-too-efficient translation of short messenger RNAs (which leads to excessive bulk protein synthesis) toward a lower-efficiency translation of longer messenger RNAs.

Bear says he does not know what the prospects are for Glyx-13 as a clinical drug, but he noted that there are some drugs in clinical development that specifically target the 2B subunit of NMDA receptors.

In addition to Bear and Barnes, the study’s other authors are Aurore Thomazeau, Peter Finnie, Max Heinreich, Arnold Heynen, Noboru Komiyama, Seth Grant, Frank Menniti, and Emily Osterweil.

The FRAXA Foundation, The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, The Freedom Together Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health funded the study.

When Zoe Fisher was in fourth grade, her art teacher asked her to draw her vision of a dream job on paper. At the time, those goals changed like the flavor of the week in an ice cream shop — “zookeeper” featured prominently for a while — but Zoe immediately knew what she wanted to put down: a mad scientist.

When Fisher stumbled upon the drawing in her parents’ Chicago home recently, it felt serendipitous because, by all measures, she has realized that childhood dream. The second-year doctoral student at MIT's Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE) is studying materials for fusion power plants at the Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) under the advisement of Michael Short, associate professor at NSE. Dennis Whyte, Hitachi America Professor of Engineering at NSE, serves as co-advisor.

On track to an MIT education

Growing up in Chicago, Fisher had heard her parents remarking on her reasoning abilities. When she was barely a preschooler she argued that she couldn’t have been found in a purple speckled egg, as her parents claimed they had done.

Fisher didn’t put together just how much she had gravitated toward science until a high school physics teacher encouraged her to apply to MIT. Passionate about both the arts and sciences, she initially worried that pursuing science would be very rigid, without room for creativity. But she knows now that exploring solutions to problems requires plenty of creative thinking.

It was a visit to MIT through the Weekend Immersion in Science and Engineering (WISE) that truly opened her eyes to the potential of an MIT education. “It just seemed like the undergraduate experience here is where you can be very unapologetically yourself. There’s no fronting something you don’t want to be like. There’s so much authenticity compared to most other colleges I looked at,” Fisher says. Once admitted, Campus Preview Weekend confirmed that she belonged. “We got to be silly and weird — a version of the Mafia game was a hit — and I was like, ‘These are my people,’” Fisher laughs.

Pursuing fusion at NSE

Before she officially started as a first-year in 2018, Fisher enrolled in the Freshman Pre-Orientation Program (FPOP), which starts a week before orientation starts. Each FPOP zooms into one field. “I’d applied to the nuclear one simply because it sounded cool and I didn’t know anything about it,” Fisher says. She was intrigued right away. “They really got me with that ‘star in a bottle’ line,” she laughs. (The quest for commercial fusion is to create the energy equivalent of a star in a bottle). Excited by a talk by Zachary Hartwig, Robert N. Noyce Career Development Professor at NSE, Fisher asked if she could work on fusion as an undergraduate as part of an Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) project. She started with modeling solders for power plants and was hooked. When Fisher requested more experimental work, Hartwig put her in touch with Research Scientist David Fischer at the Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC). Fisher eventually moved on to explore superconductors, which eventually morphed into research for her master’s thesis.

For her doctoral research, Fisher is extending her master’s work to explore defects in ceramics, specifically in alumina (aluminum oxide). Sapphire coatings are the single-crystal equivalent of alumina, an insulator being explored for use in fusion power plants. “I eventually want to figure out what types of charge defects form in ceramics during radiation damage so we can ultimately engineer radiation-resistant sapphire,” Fisher says.

When you introduce a material in a fusion power plant, stray high-energy neutrons born from the plasma can collide and fundamentally reorder the lattice, which is likely to change a range of thermal, electrical, and structural properties. “Think of a scaffolding outside a building, with each one of those joints as a different atom that holds your material in place. If you go in and you pull a joint out, there’s a chance that you pulled out a joint that wasn’t structurally sound, in which case everything would be fine. But there’s also a chance that you pull a joint out and everything alters. And [such unpredictability] is a problem,” Fisher says. “We need to be able to account for exactly how these neutrons are going to alter the lattice property,” Fisher says, and it’s one of the topics her research explores.

The studies, in turn, can function as a jumping-off point for irradiating superconductors. The goals are two-fold: “I want to figure out how I can make an industry-usable ceramic you can use to insulate the inside of a fusion power plant, and then also figure out if I can take this information that I’m getting with ceramics and make it superconductor-relevant,” Fisher says. “Superconductors are the electromagnets we will use to contain the plasma inside fusion power plants. However, they prove pretty difficult to study. Since they are also ceramic, you can draw a lot of parallels between alumina and yttrium barium copper oxide (YBCO), the specific superconductor we use,” she adds. Fisher is also excited about the many experiments she performs using a particle accelerator, one of which involves measuring exactly how surface thermal properties change during radiation.

Sailing new paths

It’s not just her research that Fisher loves. As an undergrad, and during her master’s, she was on the varsity sailing team. “I worked my way into sailing with literal Olympians, I did not see that coming,” she says. Fisher participates in Chicago’s Race to Mackinac and the Melges 15 Series every chance she gets. Of all the types of boats she has sailed, she prefers dinghy sailing the most. “It’s more physical, you have to throw yourself around a lot and there’s this immediate cause and effect, which I like,” Fisher says. She also teaches sailing lessons in the summer at MIT’s Sailing Pavilion — you can find her on a small motorboat, issuing orders through a speaker.

Teaching has figured prominently throughout Fisher’s time at MIT. Through MISTI, Fisher has taught high school classes in Germany and a radiation and materials class in Armenia in her senior year. She was delighted by the food and culture in Armenia and by how excited people were to learn new ideas. Her love of teaching continues, as she has reached out to high schools in the Boston area. “I like talking to groups and getting them excited about fusion, or even maybe just the concept of attending graduate school,” Fisher says, adding that teaching the ropes of an experiment one-on-one is “one of the most rewarding things.”

She also learned the value of resilience and quick thinking on various other MISTI trips. Despite her love of travel, Fisher has had a few harrowing experiences with tough situations and plans falling through at the last minute. It’s when she tells herself, “Well, the only thing that you’re gonna do is you’re gonna keep doing what you wanted to do.”

That eyes-on-the-prize focus has stood Fisher in good stead, and continues to serve her well in her research today.

For as long as people have been communicating through writing, they have found ways to keep their messages private. Before the invention of the gummed envelope in 1830, securing correspondence involved letterlocking, an ingenious process of folding a flat sheet of paper to become its own envelope, often using a combination of folds, tucks, slits, or adhesives such as sealing wax. Letter writers from Erasmus to Catherine de’ Medici to Emily Dickinson employed these techniques, which Jana Dambrogio, the MIT Libraries’ Thomas F. Peterson (1957) Conservator, has named “letterlocking.”

“The study of letterlocking very consciously bridges humanities and sciences,” says Dambrogio, who first became interested in the practice as a fellow in the conservation studio of the Vatican Apostolic Archives, where she discovered examples from the 15th and 16th centuries. “It draws on the perspectives of not only conservators and historians, but also engineers, imaging experts, and scientists.”

Now the rich history of this centuries-old document security technology is the subject of a new book, “Letterlocking: The Hidden History of the Letter,” published by the MIT Press and co-authored with Daniel Starza Smith, a lecturer in early modern English literature at King’s College London. Dambrogio and Smith have pioneered the field of letterlocking research over the last 10 years, working with an international and interdisciplinary collection of experts, the Unlocking History Research Group.

With more than 300 images and diagrams, “Letterlocking” explores the practice’s history through real examples from all over the world. It includes a dictionary of 60 technical terms and concepts, systems the authors developed while studying more than 250,000 historic letters. The book aims to be a springboard for new discoveries, whether providing a new lens on history or spurring technological advancements.

In working with the Brienne Collection — a 17th-century postal trunk full of undelivered letters — the Unlocking History Research Group sought to study intact examples of locked letters without destroying them in the process. This stimulated advances in conservation, radiology, and computational algorithms. In 2020, the team collaborated with researchers from the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), Amanda Ghassaei SM ’17, and Holly Jackson ’22, to develop new algorithms that could virtually read an unopened letter, publishing the results in Nature Communications in 2021.

“Letterlocking” also offers a comprehensive guide to making one’s own locked letters. “The best introduction to letterlocking is to make some models,” says Dambrogio. “Feel the shape and the weight; see how easy it would be to conceal or hard to open without being noticed. We’re inviting people to explore and expand this new field of study through ‘mind and hand.’”

When Louis DeRidder was 12 years old, he had a medical emergency that nearly cost him his life. The terrifying experience gave him a close-up look at medical care and made him eager to learn more.

“You can’t always pinpoint exactly what gets you interested in something, but that was a transformative moment,” says DeRidder.

In high school, he grabbed the chance to participate in a medicine-focused program, spending about half of his days during his senior year in high school learning about medical science and shadowing doctors.

DeRidder was hooked. He became fascinated by the technologies that make treatments possible and was particularly interested in how drugs are delivered to the brain, a curiosity that sparked a lifelong passion.

“Here I was, a 17-year-old in high school, and a decade later, that problem still fascinates me,” he says. “That’s what eventually got me into the drug delivery field.”

DeRidder’s interests led him to transfer half-way through his undergraduate studies to Johns Hopkins University, where he performed research he had proposed in a Goldwater Scholarship proposal. The research focused on the development of a nanoparticle-drug conjugate to deliver a drug to brain cells in order to transform them from a pro-inflammatory to an anti-inflammatory phenotype. Such a technology could be valuable in the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

In 2019, DeRidder entered the joint Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology program, where he has embarked on a somewhat different type of drug delivery project — developing a device that measures the concentration of a chemotherapy drug in the blood while it is being administered and adjusts the infusion rate so the concentration is optimal for the patient. The system is known as CLAUDIA, or Closed-Loop AUtomated Drug Infusion RegulAtor, and can allow for the personalization of drug dosing for a variety of different drugs.

The project stemmed from discussions with his faculty advisors — Robert Langer, the David H. Koch Institute Professor, and Giovanni Traverso, the Karl Van Tassel Career Development Professor and a gastroenterologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. They explained to him that chemotherapy dosing is based on a formula developed in 1916 that estimates a patient’s body surface area. The formula doesn’t consider important influences such as differences in body composition and metabolism, or circadian fluctuations that can affect how a drug interacts with a patient.

“Once my advisors presented the reality of how chemotherapies are dosed,” DeRidder says, “I thought, ‘This is insane. How is this the clinical reality?’”

He and his advisors agreed this was a great project for his PhD.

“After they gave me the problem statement, we began to brainstorm ways that we could develop a medical device to improve the lives of patients” DeRidder says, adding, “I love starting with a blank piece of paper and then brainstorming to work out the best solution.”

Almost from the start, DeRidder’s research process involved MATLAB and Simulink, developed by the mathematical computer software company MathWorks.

“MathWorks and Simulink are key to what we do,” DeRidder says. “They enable us to model the drug pharmacokinetics — how the body distributes and metabolizes the drug. We also model the components of our system with their software. That was especially critical for us in the very early days, because it let us know whether it was even possible to control the concentration of the drug. And since then, we’ve continuously improved the control algorithm, using these simulations. You simulate hundreds of different experiments before performing any experiments in the lab.”

With his innovative use of the MATLAB and Simulink tools, DeRidder was awarded MathWorks fellowships both last year and this year. He has also received a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

“The fellowships have been critical to our development of the CLAUDIA drug-delivery system,” DeRidder says, adding that he has “had the pleasure of working with a great team of students and researchers in the lab.”

He says he would like to move CLAUDIA toward clinical use, where he thinks it could have significant impact. “Whatever I can do to help push it toward the clinic, including potentially helping to start a company to help commercialize the system, I’m definitely interested in doing it.”

In addition to developing CLAUDIA, DeRidder is working on developing new nanoparticles to deliver therapeutic nucleic acids. The project involves synthesizing new nucleic acid molecules, as well as developing the new polymeric and lipid nanoparticles to deliver the nucleic acids to targeted tissue and cells.

DeRidder says he likes working on technologies at different scales, from medical devices to molecules — all with the potential to improve the practice of medicine.

Meanwhile, he finds time in his busy schedule to do community service. For the past three years, he has spent time helping the homeless on Boston streets.

“It’s easy to lose track of the concrete, simple ways that we can serve our communities when we’re doing research,” DeRidder says, “which is why I have often sought out ways to serve people I come across every day, whether it is a student I mentor in lab, serving the homeless, or helping out the stranger you meet in the store who is having a bad day.”

Ultimately, DeRidder says, he’ll head back to work that also recalls his early exposure to the medical field in high school, where he interacted with a lot of people with different types of dementia and other neurological diseases at a local nursing home.

“My long-term plan includes working on developing devices and molecular therapies to treat neurological diseases, in addition to continuing to work on cancer,” he says. “Really, I’d say that early experience had a big impact on me.”

On Feb. 14, some of the nation’s most talented high school researchers convened in Boston for the annual American Junior Academy of Science (AJAS) conference, held alongside the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting. As a highlight of the event, MIT once again hosted its renowned “Breakfast with Scientists,” offering students a unique opportunity to connect with leading scientific minds from around the world.

The AJAS conference began with an opening reception at the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, where professor of biology and chemistry Catherine Drennan delivered the keynote address, welcoming 162 high school students from 21 states. Delegates were selected through state Academy of Science competitions, earning the chance to share their work and connect with peers and professionals in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).

Over breakfast, students engaged with distinguished scientists, including MIT faculty, Nobel laureates, and industry leaders, discussing research, career paths, and the broader impact of scientific discovery.

Amy Keating, MIT biology department head, sat at a table with students ranging from high school juniors to college sophomores. The group engaged in an open discussion about life as a scientist at a leading institution like MIT. One student expressed concern about the competitive nature of innovative research environments, prompting Keating to reassure them, saying, “MIT has a collaborative philosophy rather than a competitive one.”

At another table, Nobel laureate and former MIT postdoc Gary Ruvkun shared a lighthearted moment with students, laughing at a TikTok video they had created to explain their science fair project. The interaction reflected the innate curiosity and excitement that drives discovery at all stages of a scientific career.

Donna Gerardi, executive director of the National Association of Academies of Science, highlighted the significance of the AJAS program. “These students are not just competing in science fairs; they are becoming part of a larger scientific community. The connections they make here can shape their careers and future contributions to science.”

Alongside the breakfast, AJAS delegates participated in a variety of enriching experiences, including laboratory tours, conference sessions, and hands-on research activities.

“I am so excited to be able to discuss my research with experts and get some guidance on the next steps in my academic trajectory,” said Andrew Wesel, a delegate from California.

A defining feature of the AJAS experience was its emphasis on mentorship and collaboration rather than competition. Delegates were officially inducted as lifetime Fellows of the American Junior Academy of Science at the conclusion of the conference, joining a distinguished network of scientists and researchers.

Sponsored by the MIT School of Science and School of Engineering, the breakfast underscored MIT’s longstanding commitment to fostering young scientific talent. Faculty and researchers took the opportunity to encourage students to pursue careers in STEM fields, providing insights into the pathways available to them.

“It was a joy to spend time with such passionate students,” says Kristala Prather, head of the Department of Chemical Engineering at MIT. “One of the brightest moments for me was sitting next to a young woman who will be joining MIT in the fall — I just have to convince her to study ChemE!”

MIT Professor Markus J. Buehler has been named the recipient of the 2025 Washington Award, one of the nation’s oldest and most esteemed engineering honors. 

The Washington Award is conferred to “an engineer(s) whose professional attainments have preeminently advanced the welfare of humankind,” recognizing those who have made a profound impact on society through engineering innovation. Past recipients of this award include influential figures such as Herbert Hoover, the award’s inaugural recipient in 1919, as well as Orville Wright, Henry Ford, Neil Armstrong, John Bardeen, and renowned MIT affiliates Vannevar Bush, Robert Langer, and software engineer Margaret Hamilton.

Buehler was selected for his “groundbreaking accomplishments in computational modeling and mechanics of biological materials, and his contributions to engineering education and leadership in academia.” Buehler has authored over 500 peer-reviewed publications, pioneering the atomic-level properties and structures of biomaterials such as silk, elastin, and collagen, utilizing computational modeling to characterize, design, and create sustainable materials with features spanning from the nano- to the macro- scale. Buehler was the first to explain how hydrogen bonds, molecular confinement, and hierarchical architectures govern the mechanics of biological materials via the development of a theory that bridges molecular interactions with macroscale properties.

His innovative research includes the development of physics-aware artificial intelligence methods that integrate computational mechanics, bioinformatics, and generative AI to explore universal design principles of biological and bioinspired materials. His work has advanced the understanding of hierarchical structures in nature, revealing the mechanics by which complex biomaterials achieve remarkable strength, flexibility, and resilience through molecular interactions across scales.

Buehler's research included the use of deep learning models to predict and generate new protein structures, self-assembling peptides, and sustainable biomimetic materials. His work on materiomusic — converting molecular structures into musical compositions — has provided new insights into the hidden patterns within biological systems.

Buehler is the Jerry McAfee (1940) Professor in Engineering in the departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) and Mechanical Engineering. He served as the department head of CEE from 2013 to 2020, as well as in other leadership roles, including as president of the Society of Engineering Science.

A dedicated educator, Buehler has played a vital role in mentoring future engineers, leading K-12 STEM summer camps to inspire the next generation and serving as an instructor for MIT Professional Education summer courses.

His achievements have been recognized with numerous prestigious honors, including the Feynman Prize, the Drucker Medal, the Leonardo da Vinci Award, and the J.R. Rice Medal, and election to the National Academy of Engineering. His work continues to push the boundaries of computational science, materials engineering, and biomimetic design.

The Washington Award was presented during National Engineers Week in February, in a ceremony attended by members of prominent engineering societies, including the Western Society of Engineers; the American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical and Petroleum Engineers; the American Society of Civil Engineers; the American Society of Mechanical Engineers; the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers; the National Society of Professional Engineers; and the American Nuclear Society. The event also celebrated nearly 100 pre-college students recognized for their achievements in regional STEM competitions, highlighting the next generation of engineering talent.

In biology, seeing can lead to understanding, and researchers in Professor Edward Boyden’s lab at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research are committed to bringing life into sharper focus. With a pair of new methods, they are expanding the capabilities of expansion microscopy — a high-resolution imaging technique the group introduced in 2015 — so researchers everywhere can see more when they look at cells and tissues under a light microscope.

“We want to see everything, so we’re always trying to improve it,” says Boyden, the Y. Eva Tan Professor in Neurotechnology at MIT. “A snapshot of all life, down to its fundamental building blocks, is really the goal.” Boyden is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and a member of the Yang Tan Collective at MIT. 

With new ways of staining their samples and processing images, users of expansion microscopy can now see vivid outlines of the shapes of cells in their images and pinpoint the locations of many different proteins inside a single tissue sample with resolution that far exceeds that of conventional light microscopy. These advances, both reported in open-access form in the journal Nature Communications, enable new ways of tracing the slender projections of neurons and visualizing spatial relationships between molecules that contribute to health and disease.

Expansion microscopy uses a water-absorbing hydrogel to physically expand biological tissues. After a tissue sample has been permeated by the hydrogel, it is hydrated. The hydrogel swells as it absorbs water, preserving the relative locations of molecules in the tissue as it gently pulls them away from one another. As a result, crowded cellular components appear separate and distinct when the expanded tissue is viewed under a light microscope. The approach, which can be performed using standard laboratory equipment, has made super-resolution imaging accessible to most research teams.

Since first developing expansion microscopy, Boyden and his team have continued to enhance the method — increasing its resolution, simplifying the procedure, devising new features, and integrating it with other tools.

Visualizing cell membranes

One of the team’s latest advances is a method called ultrastructural membrane expansion microscopy (umExM), which they described in the Feb. 12 issue of Nature Communications. With it, biologists can use expansion microscopy to visualize the thin membranes that form the boundaries of cells and enclose the organelles inside them. These membranes, built mostly of molecules called lipids, have been notoriously difficult to densely label in intact tissues for imaging with light microscopy. Now, researchers can use umExM to study cellular ultrastructure and organization within tissues.

Tay Shin SM ’20, PhD ’23, a former graduate student in Boyden’s lab and a J. Douglas Tan Fellow in the Tan-Yang Center for Autism Research at MIT, led the development of umExM. “Our goal was very simple at first: Let’s label membranes in intact tissue, much like how an electron microscope uses osmium tetroxide to label membranes to visualize the membranes in tissue,” he says. “It turns out that it’s extremely hard to achieve this.”

The team first needed to design a label that would make the membranes in tissue samples visible under a light microscope. “We almost had to start from scratch,” Shin says. “We really had to think about the fundamental characteristics of the probe that is going to label the plasma membrane, and then think about how to incorporate them into expansion microscopy.” That meant engineering a molecule that would associate with the lipids that make up the membrane and link it to both the hydrogel used to expand the tissue sample and a fluorescent molecule for visibility.

After optimizing the expansion microscopy protocol for membrane visualization and extensively testing and improving potential probes, Shin found success one late night in the lab. He placed an expanded tissue sample on a microscope and saw sharp outlines of cells.

Because of the high resolution enabled by expansion, the method allowed Boyden’s team to identify even the tiny dendrites that protrude from neurons and clearly see the long extensions of their slender axons. That kind of clarity could help researchers follow individual neurons’ paths within the densely interconnected networks of the brain, the researchers say.

Boyden calls tracing these neural processes “a top priority of our time in brain science.” Such tracing has traditionally relied heavily on electron microscopy, which requires specialized skills and expensive equipment. Shin says that because expansion microscopy uses a standard light microscope, it is far more accessible to laboratories worldwide.

Shin and Boyden point out that users of expansion microscopy can learn even more about their samples when they pair the new ability to reveal lipid membranes with fluorescent labels that show where specific proteins are located. “That’s important, because proteins do a lot of the work of the cell, but you want to know where they are with respect to the cell’s structure,” Boyden says.

One sample, many proteins

To that end, researchers no longer have to choose just a few proteins to see when they use expansion microscopy. With a new method called multiplexed expansion revealing (multiExR), users can now label and see more than 20 different proteins in a single sample. Biologists can use the method to visualize sets of proteins, see how they are organized with respect to one another, and generate new hypotheses about how they might interact.

A key to that new method, reported Nov. 9, 2024, in Nature Communications, is the ability to repeatedly link fluorescently labeled antibodies to specific proteins in an expanded tissue sample, image them, then strip these away and use a new set of antibodies to reveal a new set of proteins. Postdoc Jinyoung Kang fine-tuned each step of this process, assuring tissue samples stayed intact and the labeled proteins produced bright signals in each round of imaging.

After capturing many images of a single sample, Boyden’s team faced another challenge: how to ensure those images were in perfect alignment so they could be overlaid with one another, producing a final picture that showed the precise positions of all of the proteins that had been labeled and visualized one by one.

Expansion microscopy lets biologists visualize some of cells’ tiniest features — but to find the same features over and over again during multiple rounds of imaging, Boyden’s team first needed to home in on a larger structure. “These fields of view are really tiny, and you’re trying to find this really tiny field of view in a gel that’s actually become quite large once you’ve expanded it,” explains Margaret Schroeder, a graduate student in Boyden’s lab who, with Kang, led the development of multiExR.

To navigate to the right spot every time, the team decided to label the blood vessels that pass through each tissue sample and use these as a guide. To enable precise alignment, certain fine details also needed to consistently appear in every image; for this, the team labeled several structural proteins. With these reference points and customized imaging processing software, the team was able to integrate all of their images of a sample into one, revealing how proteins that had been visualized separately were arranged relative to one another.

The team used multiExR to look at amyloid plaques — the aberrant protein clusters that notoriously develop in brains affected by Alzheimer’s disease. “We could look inside those amyloid plaques and ask, what’s inside of them? And because we can stain for many different proteins, we could do a high-throughput exploration,” Boyden says. The team chose 23 different proteins to view in their images. The approach revealed some surprises, such as the presence of certain neurotransmitter receptors (AMPARs). “Here’s one of the most famous receptors in all of neuroscience, and there it is, hiding out in one of the most famous molecular hallmarks of pathology in neuroscience,” says Boyden. It’s unclear what role, if any, the receptors play in Alzheimer’s disease — but the finding illustrates how the ability to see more inside cells can expose unexpected aspects of biology and raise new questions for research.

Funding for this work came from MIT, Lisa Yang and Y. Eva Tan, John Doerr, the Open Philanthropy Project, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the U.S. Army, Cancer Research U.K., the New York Stem Cell Foundation, the U.S. National Institutes of Health, Lore McGovern, Good Ventures, Schmidt Futures, Samsung, MathWorks, the Collamore-Rogers Fellowship, the U.S. National Science Foundation, Alana Foundation USA, the Halis Family Foundation, Lester A. Gimpelson, Donald and Glenda Mattes, David B. Emmes, Thomas A. Stocky, Avni U. Shah, Kathleen Octavio, Good Ventures/Open Philanthropy, and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 program.

The 2025 Times Higher Education World University Ranking has ranked MIT first in three subject categories: Arts and Humanities, Business and Economics, and Social Sciences. 

The Times Higher Education World University Ranking is an annual publication of university rankings by Times Higher Education, a leading British education magazine. The subject rankings are based on 18 rigorous performance indicators. Criteria include teaching, research environment, research volume and influence, industry, and international outlook.

Disciplines included in the 2025 top-ranked subjects are housed in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS), the School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P), and the MIT Sloan School of Management.

“The rankings are a testament to the extraordinary quality of the research and teaching that takes place in SHASS and across MIT,” says Agustín Rayo, Kenan Sahin Dean of SHASS and professor of philosophy. “There has never been a more important time to ensure that we train students who understand the social, economic, political, and human aspects of the great challenges of our time.”

The Arts and Humanities ranking evaluated 750 universities from 72 countries in the disciplines of languages, literature, and linguistics; history, philosophy, and theology; architecture; archaeology; and art, performing arts, and design. This marks the first time MIT has earned the top spot in this subject since Times Higher Education began publishing rankings in 2011.

The ranking for Business and Economics evaluated 990 institutions from 85 countries and territories across three core disciplines: business and management; accounting and finance; and, economics and econometrics. This is the fourth consecutive year MIT has been ranked first in this subject.

The Social Sciences ranking evaluated 1,093 institutions from 100 countries and territories in the disciplines of political science and international studies; sociology, geography, communication and media studies; and anthropology. The areas under evaluation include political science and international relations; sociology; geography; communication and media studies; and anthropology. MIT claimed the top spot alone in this subject, after tying for first in 2024 with Stanford University.

In other subjects, MIT was also named among the top universities, ranking third in Computer Science, Engineering, and Life Sciences, and fourth in Physical Sciences. Overall, MIT ranked second in the Times Higher Education 2025 World University Ranking.

An MIT startup’s personalized heart implants, designed to help prevent strokes, won this year’s MIT Sloan Healthcare Innovation Prize (SHIP) on Thursday.

Spheric Bio’s implants grow inside the body once injected, to fit within the patient’s unique anatomy. This could improve stroke prevention because existing implants are one-size-fits-all devices that can fail to fully block the most at-risk regions, leading to leakages and other complications.

“Our mission is to transform stroke prevention by building personalized medical devices directly inside patients’ hearts,” said Connor Verheyen PhD ’23, a postdoc in the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology (HST), who made the winning pitch.

Verheyen’s co-founders are MIT Associate Professor Ellen Roche and HST postdoc Markus Horvath PhD ’22.

Spheric Bio was one of seven teams that pitched their solution at the event, which was held in the MIT Media Lab and kicked off the MIT Sloan Healthcare and BioInnovations Conference.

Spheric took home the event’s $25,000 first-place prize. The second-place prize went to nurtur, another MIT alumnus-founded startup, that has developed an artificial intelligence-powered platform designed to detect and prevent postpartum depression. Last summer, nurtur participated in the delta v startup accelerator program organized by the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship.

The audience choice award was given to Merunova, which is using AI and MRI diagnostics to improve the diagnosis and treatment of spinal cord disorders. Merunova was co-founded by Dheera Ananthakrishnan, a former spine surgeon who completed an executive MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management in 2023.

Personalized stroke prevention

Spheric Bio’s first implants aim to solve the problem of atrial fibrillation, a condition that causes areas of the heart to beat irregularly and rapidly, leading to a dramatic increase in stroke risk. The problem begins when blood pools and clots in the heart. Those clots then move to the brain and cause a stroke.

“This is a problem I’ve witnessed firsthand in my family,” says Verheyen. “It’s so common that millions of families around the world have had to experience a loved one go through a stroke as well.”

Patients with atrial fibrillation today can either go on blood thinners, in many cases for years or even life, or undergo a procedure in which surgeons insert a device into the heart to close off an area known as the left atrial appendage, where about 90 percent of such originate.

The implants on the market today for that procedure are typically prefabricated metal devices that don’t account for the wide variations seen in patient heart anatomy. Verheyen says up to half of the devices fail to seal the appendage. They can also lead to complications and complex care pathways designed to manage those shortcomings.

“There’s a fundamental mismatch between the devices available and what human patients actually look like,” says Verheyen. “Humans are infinitely variable in shape and size, and these tissues in particular are really soft, complex, delicate tissues. It leaves you with a pretty profound incompatibility.”

Spheric Bio’s implants are designed to conform to a patient’s anatomy like water filling a glass. The implant is made of biomaterials developed over years of research at MIT. They are delivered through a catheter and then expand and self-heal to custom fit the patient.

“This gives us complete closure of the appendage for every patient, every time,” said Verheyen, who has successfully tested the device in animals. “It also allows us to reduce device-related complications and simplifies deployment for operators.”

Verheyen conducted his PhD work on medical imaging and medical physics in Roche’s lab. Roche is also the associate head of Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT.

Innovations for impact

The 23rd annual pitch competition offered anyone interested in health care innovation a look at the promising new solutions being developed at universities. The event is open to all early-stage health care startups with at least one student or recent graduate co-founder.

The event was the result of a months-long process in which more than 100 applicants were whittled down over the course of three rounds by a group of 20 judges.

The final competition also kicked off the MIT Sloan Healthcare and BioInnovations Conference, which took place Feb. 27 and 28. This year’s conference was titled From Innovation to Impact: The Changing Face of Healthcare, and featured keynotes with health care industry veterans including Chris Boerner, the CEO of Bristole Myers Squibb, and James Davis, the CEO of Quest Diagnostics.

The competition’s keynote was delivered by Iterative Health CEO Jonathan Ng, who was a finalist in the competition in 2017. Ng expressed admiration for this year’s contestants.

“It’s inspiring to look around and see people who want to change the world,” said Ng, whose company is using cameras and AI to improve colorectal cancer screening. “There’s a lot of easier industries to work in, but MIT is such a good place to find your tribe: to find people who want to make the same sort of impact on the world as you.”

Michele David has had a long and varied career in medicine. But, she says, it took coming to MIT nine years ago to find “a job that fully engages all of who I am.”

David, a highly accomplished physician, currently serves as chief of clinical quality and patient safety at MIT Health, the Institute’s multispecialty group practice and health resource serving the MIT community — including students, faculty, and staff, as well as affiliated families and retirees. While she began her MIT tenure as a primary care provider in 2015, David now focuses on quality improvement projects for the organization. In particular, she developed and now leads the ambulatory safety net team, which is tasked with creating protocols and workflows for completing health screenings of a variety of disorders and diseases, and for managing abnormal test results.

Much of who David is was shaped by the strong women she looked up to during her childhood in Haiti. Her father died when David was just 6 months old, leaving her mother, a young schoolteacher, with four children, the oldest just 5. Despite having many suitors, she never remarried. In Haiti’s patriarchal society, she later told David, marrying again would have yielded all the power in the household to a man, something she did not want her three young daughters to experience. David’s maternal aunt, who graduated from medical school in Haiti in 1956, completed her residency in the United States, and eventually became chief of pathology at the West Side VA Medical Center in Chicago. She was another role model for David, who nudged her toward a career in medicine. The death of her infant godson from an easily curable diarrheal illness due to the local hospital’s lack of basic medical supplies further strengthened the then-teenage David’s resolve to become someone who could make a difference.

David’s passion for public health and health equity grew as she earned her medical degree from the University of Chicago School of Medicine and completed her residency at the New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center in Manhattan. The hospital where she trained was divided into sections for patients who could pay for their care and those who were uninsured. It was also the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, and David saw firsthand how fear of the disease led to bias and discrimination against members of already-marginalized communities. At the time, David was not allowed to donate blood alongside other residents, because she was Haitian.

Her subsequent career included training and working in pulmonary critical care medicine, teaching medical students, researching health disparities among populations of Caribbean and African American women, and caring for patients, with a focus on women’s health. David also contributes her knowledge and energy to causes close to her heart. She is chair of the board for Health Equity International; an advisor to the Resilient Sisterhood Project; and a member of the Massachusetts Public Health Council.

By 2015, disillusioned by what she describes as a combination of “the glass ceiling” and “corporate medicine,” David began planning an early retirement. That’s when a member of the leadership team from MIT Health heard about her plans and gave her a call. “I told him all the reasons I wanted to quit medicine. He said, ‘It won’t be like that at MIT Health. Please come join us.’”

At MIT Health, David started as a primary care provider before gradually assuming additional administrative responsibilities for clinical quality and patient safety. While still seeing patients, she wrote and received a grant to develop an “ambulatory safety net” for the organization, a system of check-ins and procedures to help ensure that patients receive care that maximizes positive health outcomes. David started by assembling a team to create a safety net for colorectal cancer screening, which identified and contacted patients who were overdue for screenings or at high risk. Within the first year of the project, scheduled or completed colonoscopies among MIT Health patients in these groups increased from 29 to 97 percent.

Last spring, David transitioned to a full-time administrative role at MIT Health. Her team recently launched additional safety nets for breast cancer screening and behavioral health and is developing safety nets for prostate cancer and lung cancer.

And as for that early retirement? “I don’t have another 20 years left in me,” David says. “But I’d like to stay at MIT for as long as I can.”

Soundbytes

Q: How did you make the decision to assume your current, full-time role as chief of clinical quality and patient safety?

A: It was a role I already had, but I was doing it part time. I was also caring for a very complex panel of patients. When Chief Health Officer Cecilia Stuopis asked me if I would consider doing it full time, I was somewhat ambivalent, because I’ve always enjoyed taking care of patients. I thought about it and realized that it was another way of doing the same thing.

Q: What do you like about working at MIT?

A: Working at MIT Health feels like the first time I’ve been able to use my entire skill set to do my job. I wear my policy and public health hats when I’m working on ambulatory safety nets. I’m able to mentor and advise students, and I collaborate with my colleagues on patient care. I also feel fully supported by MIT Health’s leadership team. They are truly invested in me, and I feel that my work matters — not only to me and to them, but also to my co-workers and direct reports. Because of this, I am able to bring my best self to work.

Q: Have you been able to keep up with your many outside projects while working at MIT?

A: Yes. I lecture regularly on medical racism and health-care disparities at conferences and at other institutions. I continue to create and exhibit fine art quilts. Last year, in my role with the Resilient Sisterhood Project and in conjunction with “Call and Response,” an exhibition at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, I was able to bring a film and panel discussion to campus. The event focused on the “mothers of gynecology,” three enslaved women — Anarcha, Betsey, and Lucy — who were forced to undergo numerous experimental surgeries without anesthesia by J. Marion Sims, the South Carolina doctor long recognized as the “father of gynecology.” This is one of the stories I started telling my medical students in the late 1990s, after one student asked me why African American patients are often so distrustful of health care. This history was not in medical textbooks at that time.

Q: What are you proudest of so far in your time at MIT?

A: Even though I’m no longer seeing my own patients in person, I’m making systemic changes that are improving health outcomes for the entire panel of patients at MIT Health.

For the fifth time in the history of the annual William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, and for the fifth year in a row, MIT swept all five of the contest’s top spots.

The top five scorers each year are named Putnam Fellows. Senior Brian Liu and juniors Papon Lapate and Luke Robitaille are now three-time Putnam Fellows, sophomore Jiangqi Dai earned his second win, and first-year Qiao Sun earned his first. Each receives a $2,500 award. This is also the fifth time that any school has had all five Putnam Fellows.

MIT’s team also came in first. The team was made up of Lapate, Robitaille, and Sun (in alphabetical order); Lapate and Robitaille were also on last year’s winning team. This is MIT’s ninth first-place win in the past 11 competitions. Teams consist of the three top scorers from each institution. The institution with the first-place team receives a $25,000 award, and each team member receives $1,000.  

First-year Jessica Wan was the top-scoring woman, finishing in the top 25, which earned her the $1,000 Elizabeth Lowell Putnam Prize. She is the eighth MIT student to receive this honor since the award was created in 1992. This is the sixth year in a row that an MIT woman has won the prize.

In total, 69 MIT students scored within the top 100. Beyond the top five scorers, MIT took nine of the next 11 spots (each receiving a $1,000 award), and seven of the next nine spots (earning $250 awards). Of the 75 receiving honorable mentions, 48 were from MIT. A total of 3,988 students took the exam in December, including 222 MIT students.

This exam is considered to be the most prestigious university-level mathematics competition in the United States and Canada. 

The Putnam is known for its difficulty: While a perfect score is 120, this year’s top score was 90, and the median was just 2. While many MIT students scored well, the Department of Mathematics is proud of everyone who just took the exam, says Professor Michel Goemans, head of the Department of Mathematics. 

“Year after year, I am so impressed by the sheer number of students at MIT that participate in the Putnam competition,” Goemans says. “In no other college or university in the world can one find hundreds of students who get a kick out of thinking about math problems. So refreshing!” 

Adds Professor Bjorn Poonen, who helped MIT students prepare for the exam this year, “The incredible competition performance is just one manifestation of MIT’s vibrant community of students who love doing math and discussing math with each other, students who through their hard work in this environment excel in ways beyond competitions, too.”

While the annual Putnam Competition is administered to thousands of undergraduate mathematics students across the United States and Canada, in recent years around 70 of its top 100 performers have been MIT students. Since 2000, MIT has placed among the top five teams 23 times.  

MIT’s success in the Putnam exam isn’t surprising. MIT’s recent Putnam coaches are four-time Putnam Fellow Bjorn Poonen and three-time Putnam Fellow Yufei Zhao ’10, PhD ’15. 

MIT is also a top destination for medalists participating in the International Mathematics Olympiad (IMO) for high school students. Indeed, over the last decade MIT has enrolled almost every American IMO medalist, and more international IMO gold medalists than the universities of any other single country, according to forthcoming research from the Global Talent Fund (GTF), which offers scholarship and training programs for math Olympiad students and coaches.

IMO participation is a strong predictor of future achievement. According to the International Mathematics Olympiad Foundation, about half of Fields Medal winners are IMO alums — but it’s not the only ingredient.

“Recruiting the most talented students is only the beginning. A top-tier university education — with excellent professors, supportive mentors, and an engaging peer community — is key to unlocking their full potential," says GTF President Ruchir Agarwal. "MIT’s sustained Putnam success shows how the right conditions deliver spectacular results. The catalytic reaction of MIT’s concentration of math talent and the nurturing environment of Building 2 should accelerate advancements in fundamental science for years and decades to come.”

Many MIT mathletes see competitions not only as a way to hone their mathematical aptitude, but also as a way to create a strong sense of community, to help inspire and educate the next generation. 

Chris Peterson SM ’13, director of communications and special projects at MIT Admissions and Student Financial Services, points out that many MIT students with competition math experience volunteer to help run programs for K-12 students including HMMT and Math Prize for Girls, and mentor research projects through the Program for Research in Mathematics, Engineering and Science (PRIMES).

Many of the top scorers are also alumni of the PRIMES high school outreach program. Two of this year’s Putnam Fellows, Liu and Robitaille, are PRIMES alumni, as are four of the next top 11, and six out of the next nine winners, along with many of the students receiving honorable mentions. Pavel Etingof, a math professor who is also PRIMES’ chief research advisor, states that among the 25 top winners, 12 (48 percent) are PRIMES alumni.

“We at PRIMES are very proud of our alumnae’s fantastic showing at the Putnam Competition,” says PRIMES director Slava Gerovitch PhD ’99. “PRIMES serves as a pipeline of mathematical excellence from high school through undergraduate studies, and beyond.”

Along the same lines, a collaboration between the MIT Department of Mathematics and MISTI-Africa has sent MIT students with Olympiad experience abroad during the Independent Activities Period (IAP) to coach high school students who hope to compete for their national teams. 

First-years at MIT also take class 18.A34 (Mathematical Problem Solving), known informally as the Putnam Seminar, not only to hone their Putnam exam skills, but also to make new friends. 

“Many people think of math competitions as primarily a way to identify and recognize talent, which of course they are,” says Peterson. “But the community convened by and through these competitions generates educational externalities that collectively exceed the sum of individual accomplishment.”  

Math Community and Outreach Officer Michael King also notes the camaraderie that forms around the test. 

“My favorite time of the Putnam day is right after the problem session, when the students all jump up, run over to their friends, and begin talking animatedly,” says King, who also took the exam as an undergraduate student. “They cheer each other’s successes, debate problem solutions, commiserate over missed answers, and share funny stories. It’s always amazing to work with the best math students in the world, but the most rewarding aspect is seeing the friendships that develop.”   

A full list of the winners can be found on the Putnam website.

Rohit Karnik, the Tata Professor in the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering, has been named the new director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS), effective March 1. Karnik, who has served as associate director of J-WAFS since 2023, succeeds founding director John H. Lienhard V, Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Water and Mechanical Engineering.

Karnik assumes the role of director at a pivotal time for J-WAFS, as it celebrates its 10th anniversary. Announcing the appointment today in a letter to the J-WAFS research community, Vice President for Research Ian A. Waitz noted Karnik’s deep involvement with the lab’s research efforts and programming, as well as his accolades as a researcher, teacher, leader, and mentor. “I am delighted that Rohit will bring his talent and vision to bear on the J-WAFS mission, ensuring the program sustains its direct support of research on campus and its important impact around the world,” Waitz wrote.

J-WAFS is the only program at MIT focused exclusively on water and food research. Since 2015, the lab has made grants totaling approximately $25M to researchers across the Institute, including from all five schools and 40 departments, labs, and centers. It has supported 300 faculty, research staff, and students combined. Furthermore, the J-WAFS Solutions Program, which supports efforts to commercialize innovative water and food technologies, has spun out 12 companies and two open-sourced products. 

“We launched J-WAFS with the aim of building a community of water and food researchers at MIT, taking advantage of MIT’s strengths in so many disciplines that contribute to these most essential human needs,” writes Lienhard, who will retire this June. “After a decade’s work, that community is strong and visible. I am delighted that Rohit has agreed to take the reins. He will bring the program to the next level.” 

Lienhard has served as director since founding J-WAFS in 2014, along with executive director Renee J. Robins ’83, who last fall shared her intent to retire as well. 

“It’s a big change for a program to turn over both the director and executive director roles at the same time,” says Robins. “Having worked alongside Rohit as our associate director for the past couple of years, I am greatly assured that J-WAFS will be in good hands with a new and steady leadership team.”

Karnik became associate director of J-WAFS in July 2023, a move that coincided with the start of a sabbatical for Lienhard. Before that time, Karnik was already well engaged with J-WAFS as a grant recipient, reviewer, and community member. As associate director, Rohit has been integral to J-WAFS operations, planning, and grant management, including the proposal selection process. He was instrumental in planning the second J-WAFS Grand Challenge grant and led workshops at which researchers brainstormed proposal topics and formed teams. Karnik also engaged with J-WAFS’ corporate partners, helped plan lectures and events, and offered project oversight. 

“The experience gave me broad exposure to the amazing ideas and research at MIT in the water and food space, and the collaborations and synergies across departments and schools that enable excellence in research,” says Karnik. “The strengths of J-WAFS lie in being able to support principal investigators in pursuing research to address humanity’s water and food needs; in creating a community of students though the fellowship program and support of student clubs; and in bringing people together at seminars, workshops, and other events. All of this is made possible by the endowment and a dedicated team with close involvement in the projects after the grants are awarded.”

J-WAFS was established through a generous gift from Community Jameel, an independent, global organization advancing science to help communities thrive in a rapidly changing world. The lab was named in honor of the late Abdul Latif Jameel, the founder of the Abdul Latif Jameel company and father of MIT alumnus Mohammed Jameel ’78, who founded and chairs Community Jameel. 

J-WAFS’ operations are carried out by a small but passionate team of people at MIT who are dedicated to the mission of securing water and food systems. That mission is more important than ever, as climate change, urbanization, and a growing global population are putting tremendous stress on the world’s water and food supplies. These challenges drive J-WAFS’ efforts to mobilize the research, innovation, and technology that can sustainably secure humankind’s most vital resources. 

As director, Karnik will help shape the research agenda and key priorities for J-WAFS and usher the program into its second decade.

Karnik originally joined MIT as a postdoc in the departments of Mechanical and Chemical Engineering in October 2006. In September 2007, he became an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, before being promoted to associate professor in 2012. His research group focuses on the physics of micro- and nanofluidic flows and applying that to the design of micro- and nanofluidic systems for applications in water, healthcare, energy, and the environment. Past projects include ones on membranes for water filtration and chemical separations, sensors for water, and water filters from waste wood. Karnik has served as associate department head and interim co-department head in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. He also serves as faculty director of the New Engineering Education Transformation (NEET) program in the School of Engineering.

Before coming to MIT, Karnik received a bachelor’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay, and a master’s and PhD from the University of California at Berkeley, all in mechanical engineering. He has authored numerous publications, is co-inventor on several patents, and has received awards and honors including the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the U.S. Department of Energy Early Career Award, the MIT Office of Graduate Education’s Committed to Caring award, and election to the National Academy of Inventors as a senior member. 

Lienhard, J-WAFS’ outgoing director, has served on the MIT faculty since 1988. His research and educational efforts have focused on heat and mass transfer, water purification and desalination, thermodynamics, and separation processes. Lienhard has directly supervised more than 90 PhD and master’s theses, and he is the author of over 300 peer-reviewed papers and three textbooks. He holds more than 40 U.S. patents, most commercialized through startup companies with his students. One of these, the water treatment company Gradiant Corporation, is now valued over $1 billion and employs more than 1,200 people. Lienhard has received many awards, including the 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award of the International Desalination and Reuse Association.

Since 1998, Renee Robins has worked on the conception, launch, and development of a number of large interdisciplinary, international, and partnership-based research and education collaborations at MIT and elsewhere. She served in roles for the Cambridge MIT Institute, the MIT Portugal Program, the Mexico City Program, the Program on Emerging Technologies, and the Technology and Policy Program. She holds two undergraduate degrees from MIT, in biology and humanities/anthropology, and a master’s degree in public policy from Carnegie Mellon University. She has overseen significant growth in J-WAFS’ activities, funding, staffing, and collaborations over the past decade. In 2021, she was awarded an Infinite Mile Award in the area of the Offices of the Provost and Vice President for Research, in recognition of her contributions within her role at J-WAFS to help the Institute carry out its mission.

“John and Renee have done a remarkable job in establishing J-WAFS and bringing it up to its present form,” says Karnik. “I’m committed to making sure that the key aspects of J-WAFS that bring so much value to the MIT community, the nation, and the world continue to function well. MIT researchers and alumni in the J-WAFS community are already having an impact on addressing humanity’s water and food needs, and I believe that there is potential for MIT to have an even greater positive impact on securing humanity’s vital resources in the future.”

The following is a joint announcement from the MIT Microsystems Technology Laboratories and GlobalFoundries. 

MIT and GlobalFoundries (GF), a leading manufacturer of essential semiconductors, have announced a new research agreement to jointly pursue advancements and innovations for enhancing the performance and efficiency of critical semiconductor technologies. The collaboration will be led by MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL) and GF’s research and development team, GF Labs.

With an initial research focus on artificial intelligence and other applications, the first projects are expected to leverage GF’s differentiated silicon photonics technology, which monolithically integrates radio frequency silicon-on-insulator (RF SOI), CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor), and optical features on a single chip to realize power efficiencies for data centers, and GF’s 22FDX platform, which delivers ultra-low power consumption for intelligent devices at the edge.

“The collaboration between MIT MTL and GF exemplifies the power of academia-industry cooperation in tackling the most pressing challenges in semiconductor research,” says Tomás Palacios, MTL director and the Clarence J. LeBel Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Palacios will serve as the MIT faculty lead for this research initiative.

“By bringing together MIT's world-renowned capabilities with GF's leading semiconductor platforms, we are positioned to drive significant research advancements in GF’s essential chip technologies for AI,” says Gregg Bartlett, chief technology officer at GF. “This collaboration underscores our commitment to innovation and highlights our dedication to developing the next generation of talent in the semiconductor industry. Together, we will research transformative solutions in the industry.”

“Integrated circuit technologies are the core driving a broad spectrum of applications ranging from mobile computing and communication devices to automotive, energy, and cloud computing,” says Anantha P. Chandrakasan, dean of MIT's School of Engineering, chief innovation and strategy officer, and the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “This collaboration allows MIT’s exceptional research community to leverage GlobalFoundries’ wide range of industry domain experts and advanced process technologies to drive exciting innovations in microelectronics across domains — while preparing our students to take on leading roles in the workforce of the future.”

The new research agreement was formalized at a signing ceremony on campus at MIT. It builds upon GF’s successful past and ongoing engagements with the university. GF serves on MTL’s Microsystems Industrial Group, which brings together industry and academia to engage in research. MIT faculty are active participants in GF’s University Partnership Program focused on joint semiconductor research and prototyping. Additionally, GF and MIT collaborate on several workforce development initiatives, including through the Northeast Microelectronics Coalition, a U.S. Department of Defense Microelectronics Commons Hub.

High-temperature superconducting magnets made from REBCO, an acronym for rare earth barium copper oxide, make it possible to create an intense magnetic field that can confine the extremely hot plasma needed for fusion reactions, which combine two hydrogen atoms to form an atom of helium, releasing a neutron in the process.

But some early tests suggested that neutron irradiation inside a fusion power plant might instantaneously suppress the superconducting magnets’ ability to carry current without resistance (called critical current), potentially causing a reduction in the fusion power output.

Now, a series of experiments has clearly demonstrated that this instantaneous effect of neutron bombardment, known as the “beam on effect,” should not be an issue during reactor operation, thus clearing the path for projects such as the ARC fusion system being developed by MIT spinoff company Commonwealth Fusion Systems.

The findings were reported in the journal Superconducting Science and Technology, in a paper by MIT graduate student Alexis Devitre and professors Michael Short, Dennis Whyte, and Zachary Hartwig, along with six others.

“Nobody really knew if it would be a concern,” Short explains. He recalls looking at these early findings: “Our group thought, man, somebody should really look into this. But now, luckily, the result of the paper is: It’s conclusively not a concern.”

The possible issue first arose during some initial tests of the REBCO tapes planned for use in the ARC system. “I can remember the night when we first tried the experiment,” Devitre recalls. “We were all down in the accelerator lab, in the basement. It was a big shocker because suddenly the measurement we were looking at, the critical current, just went down by 30 percent” when it was measured under radiation conditions (approximating those of the fusion system), as opposed to when it was only measured after irradiation.

Before that, researchers had irradiated the REBCO tapes and then tested them afterward, Short says. “We had the idea to measure while irradiating, the way it would be when the reactor’s really on,” he says. “And then we observed this giant difference, and we thought, oh, this is a big deal. It’s a margin you’d want to know about if you’re designing a reactor.”

After a series of carefully calibrated tests, it turned out the drop in critical current was not caused by the irradiation at all, but was just an effect of temperature changes brought on by the proton beam used for the irradiation experiments. This is something that would not be a factor in an actual fusion plant, Short says.

“We repeated experiments ‘oh so many times’ and collected about a thousand data points,” Devitre says. They then went through a detailed statistical analysis to show that the effects were exactly the same, under conditions where the material was just heated as when it was both heated and irradiated.

This excluded the possibility that the instantaneous suppression of the critical current had anything to do with the “beam on effect,” at least within the sensitivity of their tests. “Our experiments are quite sensitive,” Short says. “We can never say there’s no effect, but we can say that there’s no important effect.”

To carry out these tests required building a special facility for the purpose. Only a few such facilities exist in the world. “They’re all custom builds, and without this, we wouldn’t have been able to find out the answer,” he says.

The finding that this specific issue is not a concern for the design of fusion plants “illustrates the power of negative results. If you can conclusively prove that something doesn’t happen, you can stop scientists from wasting their time hunting for something that doesn’t exist.” And in this case, Short says, “You can tell the fusion companies: ‘You might have thought this effect would be real, but we’ve proven that it’s not, and you can ignore it in your designs.’ So that’s one more risk retired.”

That could be a relief to not only Commonwealth Fusion Systems but also several other companies that are also pursuing fusion plant designs, Devitre says. “There’s a bunch. And it’s not just fusion companies,” he adds. There remains the important issue of longer-term degradation of the REBCO that would occur over years or decades, which the group is presently investigating. Others are pursuing the use of these magnets for satellite thrusters and particle accelerators to study subatomic physics, where the effect could also have been a concern. For all these uses, “this is now one less thing to be concerned about,” Devitre says.

The research team also included David Fischer, Kevin Woller, Maxwell Rae, Lauryn Kortman, and Zoe Fisher at MIT, and N. Riva at Proxima Fusion in Germany. This research was supported by Eni S.p.A. through the MIT Energy Initiative.

A vast search of natural diversity has led scientists at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard to uncover ancient systems with potential to expand the genome editing toolbox. 

These systems, which the researchers call TIGR (Tandem Interspaced Guide RNA) systems, use RNA to guide them to specific sites on DNA. TIGR systems can be reprogrammed to target any DNA sequence of interest, and they have distinct functional modules that can act on the targeted DNA. In addition to its modularity, TIGR is very compact compared to other RNA-guided systems, like CRISPR, which is a major advantage for delivering it in a therapeutic context.  

These findings are reported online Feb. 27 in the journal Science.

“This is a very versatile RNA-guided system with a lot of diverse functionalities,” says Feng Zhang, the James and Patricia Poitras Professor of Neuroscience at MIT, who led the research. The TIGR-associated (Tas) proteins that Zhang’s team found share a characteristic RNA-binding component that interacts with an RNA guide that directs it to a specific site in the genome. Some cut the DNA at that site, using an adjacent DNA-cutting segment of the protein. That modularity could facilitate tool development, allowing researchers to swap useful new features into natural Tas proteins.

“Nature is pretty incredible,” says Zhang, who is also an investigator at the McGovern Institute and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a core member of the Broad Institute, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences and biological engineering at MIT, and co-director of the K. Lisa Yang and Hock E. Tan Center for Molecular Therapeutics at MIT. “It’s got a tremendous amount of diversity, and we have been exploring that natural diversity to find new biological mechanisms and harnessing them for different applications to manipulate biological processes,” he says. Previously, Zhang’s team adapted bacterial CRISPR systems into gene editing tools that have transformed modern biology. His team has also found a variety of programmable proteins, both from CRISPR systems and beyond. 

In their new work, to find novel programmable systems, the team began by zeroing in a structural feature of the CRISPR-Cas9 protein that binds to the enzyme’s RNA guide. That is a key feature that has made Cas9 such a powerful tool: “Being RNA-guided makes it relatively easy to reprogram, because we know how RNA binds to other DNA or other RNA,” Zhang explains. His team searched hundreds of millions of biological proteins with known or predicted structures, looking for any that shared a similar domain. To find more distantly related proteins, they used an iterative process: from Cas9, they identified a protein called IS110, which had previously been shown by others to bind RNA. They then zeroed in on the structural features of IS110 that enable RNA binding and repeated their search. 

At this point, the search had turned up so many distantly related proteins that they team turned to artificial intelligence to make sense of the list. “When you are doing iterative, deep mining, the resulting hits can be so diverse that they are difficult to analyze using standard phylogenetic methods, which rely on conserved sequence,” explains Guilhem Faure, a computational biologist in Zhang’s lab. With a protein large language model, the team was able to cluster the proteins they had found into groups according to their likely evolutionary relationships. One group set apart from the rest, and its members were particularly intriguing because they were encoded by genes with regularly spaced repetitive sequences reminiscent of an essential component of CRISPR systems. These were the TIGR-Tas systems.

Zhang’s team discovered more than 20,000 different Tas proteins, mostly occurring in bacteria-infecting viruses. Sequences within each gene’s repetitive region — its TIGR arrays — encode an RNA guide that interacts with the RNA-binding part of the protein. In some, the RNA-binding region is adjacent to a DNA-cutting part of the protein. Others appear to bind to other proteins, which suggests they might help direct those proteins to DNA targets.     

Zhang and his team experimented with dozens of Tas proteins, demonstrating that some can be programmed to make targeted cuts to DNA in human cells. As they think about developing TIGR-Tas systems into programmable tools, the researchers are encouraged by features that could make those tools particularly flexible and precise.

They note that CRISPR systems can only be directed to segments of DNA that are flanked by short motifs known as PAMs (protospacer adjacent motifs). TIGR Tas proteins, in contrast, have no such requirement. “This means theoretically, any site in the genome should be targetable,” says scientific advisor Rhiannon Macrae. The team’s experiments also show that TIGR systems have what Faure calls a “dual-guide system,” interacting with both strands of the DNA double helix to home in on their target sequences, which should ensure they act only where they are directed by their RNA guide. What’s more, Tas proteins are compact — a quarter of the size Cas9, on average — making them easier to deliver, which could overcome a major obstacle to therapeutic deployment of gene editing tools.  

Excited by their discovery, Zhang’s team is now investigating the natural role of TIGR systems in viruses, as well as how they can be adapted for research or therapeutics. They have determined the molecular structure of one of the Tas proteins they found to work in human cells, and will use that information to guide their efforts to make it more efficient. Additionally, they note connections between TIGR-Tas systems and certain RNA-processing proteins in human cells. “I think there’s more there to study in terms of what some of those relationships may be, and it may help us better understand how these systems are used in humans,” Zhang says.

This work was supported by the Helen Hay Whitney Foundation, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, K. Lisa Yang and Hock E. Tan Center for Molecular Therapeutics, Broad Institute Programmable Therapeutics Gift Donors, Pershing Square Foundation, William Ackman, Neri Oxman, the Phillips family, J. and P. Poitras, and the BT Charitable Foundation. 

One large metropolis might have several different train systems, from local intercity lines to commuter trains to longer regional lines.

When designing a system of train tracks, stations, and schedules in this network, should rail operators assume each entity operates independently, seeking only to maximize its own revenue? Or that they fully cooperate all the time with a joint plan, putting their own interest aside?

In the real world, neither assumption is very realistic.

Researchers from MIT and ETH Zurich have developed a new planning tool that mixes competition and cooperation to help operators in a complex, multiregional network strategically determine when and how they should work together.

Their framework is unusual because it incorporates co-investment and payoff-sharing mechanisms that identify which joint infrastructure projects a stakeholder should invest in with other operators to maximize collective benefits. The tool can help mobility stakeholders, such as governments, transport agencies, and firms, determine the right time to collaborate, how much they should invest in cooperative projects, how the profits should be distributed, and what would happen if they withdrew from the negotiations.

“It might seem counterintuitive, but sometimes you want to invest in your opponent so that, at some point, this investment will come back to you. Thanks to game theory, one can formalize this intuition to give rise to an interesting class of problems,” says Gioele Zardini, the Rudge and Nancy Allen Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT, a principal investigator in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), an affiliate faculty with the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), and senior author of a paper on this planning framework.

Numerical analysis shows that, by investing a portion of their budget into some shared infrastructure projects, independent operators can earn more revenue than if they operated completely noncooperatively.

In the example of the rail operators, the researchers demonstrate that co-investment also benefits users by improving regional train service. This win-win situation encourages more people to take the train, boosting revenues for operators and reducing emissions from automobiles, says Mingjia He, a graduate student at ETH Zurich and lead author.

“The key point here is that transport network design is not a zero-sum game. One operator’s gain doesn’t have to mean the others’ loss. By shifting the perception from isolated, self-optimization to strategic interaction, cooperation can create greater value for everyone involved,” she says.

Beyond transportation, this planning framework could help companies in a crowded industry or governments of neighboring countries test co-investment strategies.

He and Zardini are joined on the paper by ETH Zurich researchers Andrea Censi and Emilio Frazzoli. The research will be presented at the 2025 American Control Conference (ACC), and the paper has been selected as a Student Best Paper Award finalist.

Mixing cooperation and competition

Building transportation infrastructure in a multiregional network typically requires a huge investment of time and resources. Major infrastructure projects have an outsized impact that can stretch far beyond one region or operator.

Each region has its own priorities and decision-makers, such as local transportation authorities, which often results in the failure of coordination.

“If local systems are designed separately, regional travel may be more difficult, making the whole system less efficient. But if self-interested stakeholders don’t benefit from coordination, they are less likely to support the plan,” He says.

To find the best mix of cooperation and competition, the researchers used game theory to build a framework that enables operators to align interests and improve regional cooperation in a way that benefits all.

For instance, last year the Swiss government agreed to invest 50 million euros to electrify and expand part of a regional rail network in Germany, with the goal of creating a faster rail connection between three Swiss cities.

The researchers’ planning framework could help independent entities, from regional governments to rail operators, identify when and how to undertake such collaborations.

The first step involves simulating the outcomes if operators don’t collaborate. Then, using the co-investment and payoff-sharing mechanisms, the decision-maker can explore cooperative approaches.

To identify a fair way to split revenues from shared projects, the researchers design a payoff-sharing mechanism based on a game theory concept known as the Nash bargaining solution. This technique will determine how much benefit operators would receive in different cooperative scenarios, taking into account the benefits they would achieve with no collaboration.

The benefits of co-investment

Once they had designed the planning framework, the researchers tested it on a simulated transportation network with multiple competing rail operators. They assessed various co-investment ratios across multiple years to identify the best decisions for operators.

In the end, they found that a semicooperative approach leads to the highest returns for all stakeholders. For instance, in one scenario, by co-investing 50 percent of their total budgets into shared infrastructure projects, all operators maximized their returns.

In another scenario, they show that by investing just 3.3 percent of their total budget in the first year of a multiyear cooperative project, operators can boost outcomes by 30 percent across three metrics: revenue, reduced costs for customers, and lower emissions.

“This proves that a small, up-front investment can lead to significant long-term benefits,” He says.

When they applied their framework to more realistic multiregional networks where all regions weren’t the same size, this semicooperative approach achieved even better results.

However, their analyses indicate that returns don’t increase in a linear way — sometimes increasing the co-investment ratio does not increase the benefit for operators.

Success is a multifaceted issue that depends on how much is invested by all operators, which projects are chosen, when investment happens, and how the budget is distributed over time, He explains.

“These strategic decisions are complex, which is why simulations and optimization are necessary to find the best cooperation and negotiation strategies. Our framework can help operators make smarter investment choices and guide them through the negotiation process,” she says.

The framework could also be applied to other complex network design problems, such as in communications or energy distribution.

In the future, the researchers want to build a user-friendly interface that will allow a stakeholder to easily explore different collaborative options. They also want to consider more complex scenarios, such as the role policy plays in shared infrastructure decisions or the robust cooperative strategies that handle risks and uncertainty.

This work was supported, in part, by the ETH Zurich Mobility Initiative and the ETH Zurich Foundation.

MIT physicists report the unexpected discovery of electrons forming crystalline structures in a material only billionths of a meter thick. The work adds to a gold mine of discoveries originating from the material, which the same team discovered only about three years ago.

In a paper published Jan. 22 in Nature, the team describes how electrons in devices made, in part, of the new material can become solid, or form crystals, by changing the voltage applied to the devices when they are kept at a temperature similar to that of outer space. Under the same conditions, they also showed the emergence of two new electronic states that add to work they reported last year showing that electrons can split into fractions of themselves.

The physicists were able to make the discoveries thanks to new custom-made filters for better insulation of the equipment involved in the work. These allowed them to cool their devices to a temperature an order of magnitude colder than they achieved for the earlier results.

The team also observed all of these phenomena using two slightly different “versions” of the new material, one composed of five layers of atomically thin carbon; the other composed of four layers. This indicates “that there’s a family of materials where you can get this kind of behavior, which is exciting,” says Long Ju, an assistant professor in the MIT Department of Physics who led the work. Ju is also affiliated with MIT’s Materials Research Laboratory and Research Lab of Electronics.

Referring to the new material, known as rhombohedral pentalayer graphene, Ju says, “We found a gold mine, and every scoop is revealing something new.”

New material

Rhombohedral pentalayer graphene is essentially a special form of pencil lead. Pencil lead, or graphite, is composed of graphene, a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in hexagons resembling a honeycomb structure. Rhombohedral pentalayer graphene is composed of five layers of graphene stacked in a specific overlapping order.

Since Ju and colleagues discovered the material, they have tinkered with it by adding layers of another material they thought might accentuate the graphene’s properties, or even produce new phenomena. For example, in 2023 they created a sandwich of rhombohedral pentalayer graphene with “buns” made of hexagonal boron nitride. By applying different voltages, or amounts of electricity, to the sandwich, they discovered three important properties never before seen in natural graphite.

Last year, Ju and colleagues reported yet another important and even more surprising phenomenon: Electrons became fractions of themselves upon applying a current to a new device composed of rhombohedral pentalayer graphene and hexagonal boron nitride. This is important because this “fractional quantum Hall effect” has only been seen in a few systems, usually under very high magnetic fields. The Ju work showed that the phenomenon could occur in a fairly simple material without a magnetic field. As a result, it is called the “fractional quantum anomalous Hall effect” (anomalous indicates that no magnetic field is necessary).

New results

In the current work, the Ju team reports yet more unexpected phenomena from the general rhombohedral graphene/boron nitride system when it is cooled to 30 millikelvins (1 millikelvin is equivalent to -459.668 degrees Fahrenheit). In last year’s paper, Ju and colleagues reported six fractional states of electrons. In the current work, they report discovering two more of these fractional states.

They also found another unusual electronic phenomenon: the integer quantum anomalous Hall effect in a wide range of electron densities. The fractional quantum anomalous Hall effect was understood to emerge in an electron “liquid” phase, analogous to water. In contrast, the new state that the team has now observed can be interpreted as an electron “solid” phase — resembling the formation of electronic “ice” — that can also coexist with the fractional quantum anomalous Hall states when the system’s voltage is carefully tuned at ultra-low temperatures.

One way to think about the relation between the integer and fractional states is to imagine a map created by tuning electric voltages: By tuning the system with different voltages, you can create a “landscape” similar to a river (which represents the liquid-like fractional states) cutting through glaciers (which represent the solid-like integer effect), Ju explains.

Ju notes that his team observed all of these phenomena not only in pentalayer rhombohedral graphene, but also in rhombohedral graphene composed of four layers. This creates a family of materials, and indicates that other “relatives” may exist.

“This work shows how rich this material is in exhibiting exotic phenomena. We’ve just added more flavor to this already very interesting material,” says Zhengguang Lu, a co-first author of the paper. Lu, who conducted the work as a postdoc at MIT, is now on the faculty at Florida State University.

In addition to Ju and Lu, other principal authors of the Nature paper are Tonghang Han and Yuxuan Yao, both of MIT. Lu, Han, and Yao are co-first authors of the paper who contributed equally to the work. Other MIT authors are Jixiang Yang, Junseok Se, Lihan Shi, and Shenyong Ye. Additional members of the team are Kenji Watanabe and Takashi Taniguchi of the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan.

This work was supported by a Sloan Fellowship, a Mathworks Fellowship, the U.S. Department of Energy, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science KAKENHI, and the World Premier International Research Initiative of Japan. Device fabrication was performed at the Harvard Center for Nanoscale Systems and MIT.nano. 

Nearly three years after Russian military forces invaded Ukraine, escalating a decade-long conflict, Ukrainian cities lie in ruin as the war drags on. The seaside city of Mariupol was particularly hard hit. Bombs hollowed out hospitals and homes and leveled banks and playgrounds. Schools sit charred and empty.

The remaining 30 percent of the population still residing in Mariupol, now under Russian occupation, lack reliable electricity, clean water, and medical care. And of the 65,000 Mariupolites in exile across Ukraine and abroad, many have no home to return to. While Ukraine’s future remains uncertain, its mayors and municipal managers are laser-focused on planning for recovery after the war. “Ukrainian communities know we should build back better when the war is finished, so what is that experience?” says Vadym Boichenko, Mariupol mayor and head of development of de-occupied and temporarily occupied communities for the Association of Ukrainian Cities. To secure funding for rebuilding, “leaders need to prepare good projects with vision and innovation for their communities,” he adds.

Success depends on drawing from cutting-edge research and forward-thinking approaches to urban economic development and planning. To expedite learning, the Kyiv-based Association of Ukrainian Cities, Mariupol City Council, and the nonprofit Mariupol Reborn created a virtual Community Recovery Academy that leans on MIT’s expertise. This online training program for Ukrainian officials includes a series of lectures by professors in the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), part of the Institute’s School of Architecture and Planning. Talks include wisdom drawn from case studies coupled with theoretical lessons.

“When I first learned of this opportunity, trying to mobilize a contribution from DUSP was a no-brainer; it’s the very least we can offer,” says Christopher Zegras, DUSP department head and professor of mobility and urban planning. Increasingly destructive weather events and ongoing conflicts worldwide have made post-disaster planning “a global need, and unfortunately probably an increasing global need,” Zegras adds.

An MIT connection

The connection to Ukrainian officials came from Washington-based DUSP alumnus Victor Hoskins MCP ’81. Last spring, the president and CEO of the Fairfax County Economic Development Authority learned about Ukraine’s need from a former colleague he had worked with as deputy mayor of planning and economic development in D.C.

Hoskins has worked internationally, traveling often to Europe and Asia, where his office has branches that work to attract foreign companies to Fairfax County. In prior positions, “a lot of my work has centered around going into jurisdictions that are having trouble and turning them around economically,” Hoskins says.

He set up a call with the vice-mayor of Mariupol, Sergiy Orlov, and staff, who work in exile in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro. “They’re in circumstances unimaginable to us,” Hoskins says. “Anything we can do to help is a good thing.” One strategy Hoskins has used in his own planning and development work is consulting academic institutions for guidance. Orlov asked him to suggest a few schools in the United States. “I said, try the best universities in the world,” says Hoskins. “Try MIT.”

Hoskins connected Orlov and Zegras, who pledged DUSP’s support after learning about the project. Officials from 37 communities across Ukraine, especially small- to medium-sized ones, were eager to learn best practices in urban development and about reconstruction planning and funding strategies to support rebuilding.

From Boichenko’s makeshift office, where air alerts are common and missiles often hum overhead, a small team sketched out the Community Recovery Academy’s modules and curriculum. The academy launched in September 2024 with seven MIT professors on board to give lectures as part of the initiative’s second of four modules: “Economic Modeling, Recovery of Cities and Territories.”

DUSP Lecturer Andrew Stokols, whose ancestors hail from Ukraine, helped Zegras coordinate schedules and calls. “It’s important to think about how planners can respond to ongoing conflicts in the world,” Stokols says. “Scholarly exchange is useful, and it’s nice to know we can do something, however small it is, to help out.”

Planning for the future

Lecture topics included transportation resilience and recovery by Jinhua Zhao, professor of cities and transport and director of MIT Mobility Initiative, and revitalizing main streets and small-town economic development strategies by Jeffrey Levine, associate professor of the practice of economic development and planning.

Andres Sevtsuk, associate professor of urban science and planning, spoke on street commerce and designing to create vibrant urban sidewalks. Former special assistant for manufacturing and economic development at the White House National Economic Council and current DUSP professor of the practice Liz Reynolds also spoke on industrial transformation. Timothy Sturgeon, an affiliate with the MIT Industrial Performance Center, ran a session with a Ukrainian counterpart on integrating Ukraine’s software industry with global value chains.

Talks were simultaneously translated into Ukrainian, and participants had ample time to ask pressing questions.

Mary Anne Ocampo, associate professor of the practice of urban design and planning and principal at Sasaki and Associates, shared insights from her work on Kabul’s 2017 to 2019 reconstruction during her presentation for Ukrainian officials.

She spoke about ways to attract investment and build consensus among key organizations and institutions that can support rebuilding, while encouraging Ukrainian leaders to consider how marginalized Ukrainian populations could influence reconstruction. Small, quick-win projects can be key, she said.

Albert Saiz, the Daniel Rose Associate Professor of Urban Economics and Real Estate, imparted lessons around urban and housing economics plus the economics of master planning. He drew from examples of cities in the U.S. Midwest that had seen sharp declines, including Detroit and Cleveland. He also delved into Japan and Germany’s recoveries after World War II.

A crucial lesson for Ukraine is the vital role external trade plays in recovery, Saiz says. Post WWII, Japan focused on trade with other countries, and it emerged stronger because of it. “In Japan, cities recovered very quickly,” says Saiz. For Ukraine, “it’s important to reestablish firm-based external, international relationships right now.”

Saiz explained how to structure credit guarantees, which will be essential to helping Ukraine secure international financing. Building temporary structures can be helpful, too, he told officials — for example, constructing FEMA-type homes as an interim solution. Meanwhile, clarity in planning is key.

“I shared that you have to establish a clear path to your stakeholders, but then you have to have flexibility within that path,” Saiz says.

An ongoing collaboration

The Community Recovery Academy is currently underway with the support of the U.K. government under the U.K. International Development and the International Republican Institute (IRI UKRAINE), in collaboration with steel and mining company Metinvest and Ukrainian investment group SCM.

Metinvest and SCM are also supporting planning work that’s been underway through the nonprofit organization Mariupol Reborn. The group’s 2040 urban vision document includes insight from urban planners, architects and other experts. As for the academy, there’s ongoing demand for more lessons. “The request is quite huge,” Boichenko says. Around 100 territorial communities applied to participate in the academy, and the first phase accommodated a few dozen.

Orlov and Zegras hope to produce another set of MIT lectures this spring. Longer term, plans are in the works for a multidisciplinary, multi-departmental fall 2025 MIT practicum during which students would work alongside Ukrainian officials on recovery planning. In the meantime, lectures will be packaged into a free and open-access online learning course.

Zegras says he hopes the learning that’s gone into the work to date helps to provide an initial blueprint for Ukraine’s future, as well as for planning’s potential role in rebuilding in a world where these types of efforts are increasingly needed — whether it be Sudan, Gaza, or Los Angeles.

For Boichenko, the academy has been foundational work. “We are only in the beginning,” he says. “We are building strong relationships, and we are definitely happy to work with MIT.”

What if the clothes you wear could care for your health?

MIT researchers have developed an autonomous programmable computer in the form of an elastic fiber, which could monitor health conditions and physical activity, alerting the wearer to potential health risks in real-time. Clothing containing the fiber computer was comfortable and machine washable, and the fibers were nearly imperceptible to the wearer, the researchers report.

Unlike on-body monitoring systems known as “wearables,” which are located at a single point like the chest, wrist, or finger, fabrics and apparel have an advantage of being in contact with large areas of the body close to vital organs. As such, they present a unique opportunity to measure and understand human physiology and health.

The fiber computer contains a series of microdevices, including sensors, a microcontroller, digital memory, bluetooth modules, optical communications, and a battery, making up all the necessary components of a computer in a single elastic fiber.

The researchers added four fiber computers to a top and a pair of leggings, with the fibers running along each limb. In their experiments, each independently programmable fiber computer operated a machine-learning model that was trained to autonomously recognize exercises performed by the wearer, resulting in an average accuracy of about 70 percent.

Surprisingly, once the researchers allowed the individual fiber computers to communicate among themselves, their collective accuracy increased to nearly 95 percent.

“Our bodies broadcast gigabytes of data through the skin every second in the form of heat, sound, biochemicals, electrical potentials, and light, all of which carry information about our activities, emotions, and health. Unfortunately, most — if not all — of it gets absorbed and then lost in the clothes we wear. Wouldn’t it be great if we could teach clothes to capture, analyze, store, and communicate this important information in the form of valuable health and activity insights?” says Yoel Fink, a professor of materials science and engineering at MIT, a principal investigator in the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) and the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies (ISN), and senior author of a paper on the research, which appears today in Nature.

The use of the fiber computer to understand health conditions and help prevent injury will soon undergo a significant real-world test as well. U.S. Army and Navy service members will be conducting a monthlong winter research mission to the Arctic, covering 1,000 kilometers in average temperatures of -40 degrees Fahrenheit. Dozens of base layer merino mesh shirts with fiber computers will be providing real-time information on the health and activity of the individuals participating on this mission, called Musk Ox II.

“In the not-too-distant future, fiber computers will allow us to run apps and get valuable health care and safety services from simple everyday apparel. We are excited to see glimpses of this future in the upcoming Arctic mission through our partners in the U.S. Army, Navy, and DARPA. Helping to keep our service members safe in the harshest environments is a honor and privilege,” Fink says.

He is joined on the paper by co-lead authors Nikhil Gupta, an MIT materials science and engineering graduate student; Henry Cheung MEng ’23; and Syamantak Payra ’22, currently a graduate student at Stanford University; John Joannopoulos, the Francis Wright Professor of Physics at MIT and director of the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies; as well as others at MIT, Rhode Island School of Design, and Brown University.

Fiber focus

The fiber computer builds on more than a decade of work in the Fibers@MIT lab at the RLE and was supported primarily by ISN. In previous papers, the researchers demonstrated methods for incorporating semiconductor devices, optical diodes, memory units, elastic electrical contacts, and sensors into fibers that could be formed into fabrics and garments.

“But we hit a wall in terms of the complexity of the devices we could incorporate into the fiber because of how we were making it. We had to rethink the whole process. At the same time, we wanted to make it elastic and flexible so it would match the properties of traditional fabrics,” says Gupta.

One of the challenges that researchers surmounted is the geometric mismatch between a cylindrical fiber and a planar chip. Connecting wires to small, conductive areas, known as pads, on the outside of each planar microdevice proved to be difficult and prone to failure because complex microdevices have many pads, making it increasingly difficult to find room to attach each wire reliably.

In this new design, the researchers map the 2D pad alignment of each microdevice to a 3D layout using a flexible circuit board called an interposer, which they wrapped into a cylinder. They call this the “maki” design. Then, they attach four separate wires to the sides of the “maki” roll and connected all the components together.

“This advance was crucial for us in terms of being able to incorporate higher functionality computing elements, like the microcontroller and Bluetooth sensor, into the fiber,” says Gupta.

This versatile folding technique could be used with a variety of microelectronic devices, enabling them to incorporate additional functionality.

In addition, the researchers fabricated the new fiber computer using a type of thermoplastic elastomer that is several times more flexible than the thermoplastics they used previously. This material enabled them to form a machine-washable, elastic fiber that can stretch more than 60 percent without failure.

They fabricate the fiber computer using a thermal draw process that the Fibers@MIT group pioneered in the early 2000s. The process involves creating a macroscopic version of the fiber computer, called a preform, that contains each connected microdevice.

This preform is hung in a furnace, melted, and pulled down to form a fiber, which also contains embedded lithium-ion batteries so it can power itself.

“A former group member, Juliette Marion, figured out how to create elastic conductors, so even when you stretch the fiber, the conductors don’t break. We can maintain functionality while stretching it, which is crucial for processes like knitting, but also for clothes in general,” Gupta says.

Bring out the vote

Once the fiber computer is fabricated, the researchers use a braiding technique to cover the fiber with traditional yarns, such as polyester, merino wool, nylon, and even silk.

In addition to gathering data on the human body using sensors, each fiber computer incorporates LEDs and light sensors that enable multiple fibers in one garment to communicate, creating a textile network that can perform computation.

Each fiber computer also includes a Bluetooth communication system to send data wirelessly to a device like a smartphone, which can be read by a user.

The researchers leveraged these communication systems to create a textile network by sewing four fiber computers into a garment, one in each sleeve. Each fiber ran an independent neural network that was trained to identify exercises like squats, planks, arm circles, and lunges.

“What we found is that the ability of a fiber computer to identify human activity was only about 70 percent accurate when located on a single limb, the arms or legs. However, when we allowed the fibers sitting on all four limbs to ‘vote,’ they collectively reached nearly 95 percent accuracy, demonstrating the importance of residing on multiple body areas and forming a network between autonomous fiber computers that does not need wires and interconnects,” Fink says.

Moving forward, the researchers want to use the interposer technique to incorporate additional microdevices.

Arctic insights

In February, a multinational team equipped with computing fabrics will travel for 30 days and 1,000 kilometers in the Arctic. The fabrics will help keep the team safe, and set the stage for future physiological “digital twinning” models.

“As a leader with more than a decade of Arctic operational experience, one of my main concerns is how to keep my team safe from debilitating cold weather injuries — a primary threat to operators in the extreme cold,” says U.S. Army Major Mathew Hefner, the commander of Musk Ox II. “Conventional systems just don’t provide me with a complete picture. We will be wearing the base layer computing fabrics on us 24/7 to help us better understand the body’s response to extreme cold and ultimately predict and prevent injury.”

Karl Friedl, U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine senior research scientist of performance physiology, noted that the MIT programmable computing fabric technology may become a “gamechanger for everyday lives.”

“Imagine near-term fiber computers in fabrics and apparel that sense and respond to the environment and to the physiological status of the individual, increasing comfort and performance, providing real-time health monitoring and providing protection against external threats. Soldiers will be the early adopters and beneficiaries of this new technology, integrated with AI systems using predictive physiological models and mission-relevant tools to enhance survivability in austere environments,” Friedl says.

“The convergence of classical fibers and fabrics with computation and machine learning has only begun. We are exploring this exciting future not only through research and field testing, but importantly in an MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering course ‘Computing Fabrics,’ taught with Professor Anais Missakian from the Rhode Island School of Design,” adds Fink.

This research was supported, in part, by the U.S. Army Research Office Institute for Soldier Nanotechnology (ISN), the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Fannie and John Hertz Foundation Fellowship, the Paul and Daisy Soros Foundation Fellowship for New Americans, the Stanford-Knight Hennessy Scholars Program, and the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation.

About 60 percent of all cancer patients in the United States receive radiation therapy as part of their treatment. However, this radiation can have severe side effects that often end up being too difficult for patients to tolerate.

Drawing inspiration from a tiny organism that can withstand huge amounts of radiation, researchers at MIT, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and the University of Iowa have developed a new strategy that may protect patients from this kind of damage. Their approach makes use of a protein from tardigrades, often also called “water bears,” which are usually less than a millimeter in length.

When the researchers injected messenger RNA encoding this protein into mice, they found that it generated enough protein to protect cells’ DNA from radiation-induced damage. If developed for use in humans, this approach could benefit many cancer patients, the researchers say.

“Radiation can be very helpful for many tumors, but we also recognize that the side effects can be limiting. There’s an unmet need with respect to helping patients mitigate the risk of damaging adjacent tissue,” says Giovanni Traverso, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT and a gastroenterologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Traverso and James Byrne, an assistant professor of radiation oncology at the University of Iowa, are the senior authors of the study, which appears today in Nature Biomedical Engineering. The paper’s lead authors are Ameya Kirtane, an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School and a visiting scientist at MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, and Jianling Bi, a research scientist at the University of Iowa.

Extreme survival

Radiation is often used to treat cancers of the head and neck, where it can damage the mouth or throat, making it very painful to eat or drink. It is also commonly used for gastrointestinal cancers, which can lead to rectal bleeding. Many patients end up delaying treatments or stopping them altogether.

“This affects a huge number of patients, and it can manifest as something as simple as mouth sores, which can limit a person’s ability to eat because it’s so painful, to requiring hospitalization because people are suffering so terribly from the pain, weight loss, or bleeding. It can be pretty dangerous, and it’s something that we really wanted to try and address,” Byrne says.

Currently, there are very few ways to prevent radiation damage in cancer patients. There are a handful of drugs that can be given to try to reduce the damage, and for prostate cancer patients, a hydrogel can be used to create a physical barrier between the prostate and the rectum during radiation treatment.

For several years, Traverso and Byrne have been working on developing new ways to prevent radiation damage. In the new study, they were inspired by the extraordinary survival ability of tardigrades. Found all over the world, usually in aquatic environments, these organisms are well known for their resilience to extreme conditions. Scientists have even sent them into space, where they were shown to survive extreme dehydration and cosmic radiation.

One key component of tardigrades’ defense systems is a unique damage suppressor protein called Dsup, which binds to DNA and helps protect it from radiation-induced damage. This protein plays a major role in tardigrades’ ability to survive radiation doses 2,000 to 3,000 times higher than what a human being can tolerate.

When brainstorming ideas for novel ways to protect cancer patients from radiation, the researchers wondered if they might be able to deliver messenger RNA encoding Dsup to patient tissues before radiation treatment. This mRNA would trigger cells to transiently express the protein, protecting DNA during the treatment. After a few hours, the mRNA and protein would disappear.

For this to work, the researchers needed a way to deliver mRNA that would generate large amounts of protein in the target tissues. They screened libraries of delivery particles containing both polymer and lipid components, which have been used separately to achieve efficient mRNA delivery. From these screens, they identified one polymer-lipid particle that was best-suited for delivery to the colon, and another that was optimized to deliver mRNA to mouth tissue.

“We thought that perhaps by combining these two systems — polymers and lipids — we may be able to get the best of both worlds and get highly potent RNA delivery. And that’s essentially what we saw,” Kirtane says. “One of the strengths of our approach is that we are using a messenger RNA, which just temporarily expresses the protein, so it’s considered far safer than something like DNA, which may be incorporated into the cells’ genome.”

Protection from radiation

After showing that these particles could successfully deliver mRNA to cells grown in the lab, the researchers tested whether this approach could effectively protect tissue from radiation in a mouse model.

They injected the particles into either the cheek or the rectum several hours before giving a dose of radiation similar to what cancer patients would receive. In these mice, the researchers saw a 50 percent reduction in the amount of double-stranded DNA breaks caused by radiation.

“This study shows great promise and is a really novel idea leveraging natural mechanisms of protection again DNA damage for the purpose of protecting healthy cells during radiation treatments for cancer,” says Ben Ho Park, director of the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, who was not involved in the study.

The researchers also showed that the protective effect of the Dsup protein did not spread beyond the injection site, which is important because they don’t want to protect the tumor itself from the effects of radiation. To make this treatment more feasible for potential use in humans, the researchers now plan to work on developing a version of the Dsup protein that would not provoke an immune response, as the original tardigrade protein likely would.

If developed for use in humans, this protein could also potentially be used to protect against DNA damage caused by chemotherapy drugs, the researchers say. Another possible application would be to help prevent radiation damage in astronauts in space.

Other authors of the paper include Netra Rajesh, Chaoyang Tang, Miguel Jimenez, Emily Witt, Megan McGovern, Arielle Cafi, Samual Hatfield, Lauren Rosenstock, Sarah Becker, Nicole Machado, Veena Venkatachalam, Dylan Freitas, Xisha Huang, Alvin Chan, Aaron Lopes, Hyunjoon Kim, Nayoon Kim, Joy Collins, Michelle Howard, Srija Manchkanti, and Theodore Hong.

The research was funded by the Prostate Cancer Foundation Young Investigator Award, the U.S. Department of Defense Prostate Cancer Program Early Investigator Award, a Hope Funds for Cancer Research Fellowship, the American Cancer Society, the National Cancer Institute, MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, and the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health.