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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Complementary collaboration

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

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

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

New projects

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Multiple mentors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nancy Hopkins awarded the National Academy of Sciences Public Welfare Medal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Individual goals, shared experience

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Instructive interactions

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enduring connections

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pushing the boundaries of innovation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fulfilling a mission

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DNA particles that mimic viruses hold promise as vaccines

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mimicking viruses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Immunologically silent”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unlocking interest in the infinitesimal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inspiring tomorrow’s scientists

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Study: Smart devices’ ambient light sensors pose imaging privacy risk

Mon, 01/29/2024 - 3:55pm

In George Orwell’s novel “1984,” Big Brother watches citizens through two-way, TV-like telescreens to surveil citizens without any cameras. In a similar fashion, our current smart devices contain ambient light sensors, which open the door to a different threat: hackers.

These passive, seemingly innocuous smartphone components receive light from the environment and adjust the screen's brightness accordingly, like when your phone automatically dims in a bright room. Unlike cameras, though, apps are not required to ask for permission to use these sensors. In a surprising discovery, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) uncovered that ambient light sensors are vulnerable to privacy threats when embedded on a smart device’s screen. The team proposed a computational imaging algorithm to recover an image of the environment from the perspective of the display screen using subtle single-point light intensity changes of these sensors to demonstrate how hackers could use them in tandem with monitors. An open-access paper on this work was published in Science Advances on Jan. 10.

“This work turns your device's ambient light sensor and screen into a camera! Ambient light sensors are tiny devices deployed in almost all portable devices and screens that surround us in our daily lives,” says Princeton University professor Felix Heide, who was not involved with the paper. “As such, the authors highlight a privacy threat that affects a comprehensive class of devices and has been overlooked so far.”

While phone cameras have previously been exposed as security threats for recording user activity, the MIT group found that ambient light sensors can capture images of users’ touch interactions without a camera. According to their new study, these sensors can eavesdrop on regular gestures, like scrolling, swiping, or sliding, and capture how users interact with their phones while watching videos. For example, apps with native access to your screen, including video players and web browsers, could spy on you to gather this permission-free data.

According to the researchers, a commonly held belief is that ambient light sensors don’t reveal meaningful private information to hackers, so programming apps to request access to them is unnecessary. “Many believe that these sensors should always be turned on,” says lead author Yang Liu, a PhD student in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a CSAIL affiliate. “But much like the telescreen, ambient light sensors can passively capture what we’re doing without our permission, while apps are required to request access to our cameras. Our demonstrations show that when combined with a display screen, these sensors could pose some sort of imaging privacy threat by providing that information to hackers monitoring your smart devices.”

Collecting these images requires a dedicated inversion process where the ambient light sensor first collects low-bitrate variations in light intensity, partially blocked by the hand making contact with the screen. Next, the outputs are mapped into a two-dimensional space by forming an inverse problem with the knowledge of the screen content. An algorithm then reconstructs the picture from the screen’s perspective, which is iteratively optimized and denoised via deep learning to reveal a pixelated image of hand activity.

The study introduces a novel combination of passive sensors and active monitors to reveal a previously unexplored imaging threat that could expose the environment in front of the screen to hackers processing the sensor data from another device. “This imaging privacy threat has never been demonstrated before,” says Liu, who worked alongside Frédo Durand on the paper, who is an MIT EECS professor, CSAIL member, and senior author of the paper.

The team suggested two software mitigation measures for operating system providers: tightening up permissions and reducing the precision and speed of the sensors. First, they recommend restricting access to the ambient light sensor by allowing users to approve or deny those requests from apps. To further prevent any privacy threats, the team also proposed limiting the capabilities of the sensors. By reducing the precision and speed of these components, the sensors would reveal less private information. From the hardware side, the ambient light sensor should not be directly facing the user on any smart device, they argued, but instead placed on the side, where it won’t capture any significant touch interactions.

Getting the picture

The inversion process was applied to three demonstrations using an Android tablet. In the first test, the researchers seated a mannequin in front of the device, while different hands made contact with the screen. A human hand pointed to the screen, and later, a cardboard cutout resembling an open-hand gesture touched the monitor, with the pixelated imprints gathered by the MIT team revealing the physical interactions with the screen.

A subsequent demo with human hands revealed that the way users slide, scroll, pinch, swipe, and rotate could be gradually captured by hackers through the same imaging method, although only at a speed of one frame every 3.3 minutes. With a faster ambient light sensor, malicious actors could potentially eavesdrop on user interactions with their devices in real time.

In a third demo, the group found that users are also at risk when watching videos like films and short clips. A human hand hovered in front of the sensor while scenes from Tom and Jerry cartoons played on screen, with a white board behind the user reflecting light to the device. The ambient light sensor captured the subtle intensity changes for each video frame, with the resulting images exposing touch gestures.

While the vulnerabilities in ambient light sensors pose a threat, such a hack is still restricted. The speed of this privacy issue is low, with the current image retrieval rate being 3.3 minutes per frame, which overwhelms the dwell of user interactions. Additionally, these pictures are still a bit blurry if retrieved from a natural video, potentially leading to future research. While telescreens can capture objects away from the screen, this imaging privacy issue is only confirmed for objects that make contact with a mobile device’s screen, much like how selfie cameras cannot capture objects out of frame.

Two other EECS professors are also authors on the paper: CSAIL member William T. Freeman and MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab member Gregory Wornell, who leads the Signals, Information, and Algorithms Laboratory in the Research Laboratory of Electronics. Their work was supported, in part, by the DARPA REVEAL program and an MIT Stata Family Presidential Fellowship.

Benchtop test quickly identifies extremely impact-resistant materials

Mon, 01/29/2024 - 3:00pm

An intricate, honeycomb-like structure of struts and beams could withstand a supersonic impact better than a solid slab of the same material. What’s more, the specific structure matters, with some being more resilient to impacts than others.

That’s what MIT engineers are finding in experiments with microscopic metamaterials — materials that are intentionally printed, assembled, or otherwise engineered with microscopic architectures that give the overall material exceptional properties.

In a study appearing today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the engineers report on a new way to quickly test an array of metamaterial architectures and their resilience to supersonic impacts.

In their experiments, the team suspended tiny printed metamaterial lattices between microscopic support structures, then fired even tinier particles at the materials, at supersonic speeds. With high-speed cameras, the team then captured images of each impact and its aftermath, with nanosecond precision.

Their work has identified a few metamaterial architectures that are more resilient to supersonic impacts compared to their entirely solid, nonarchitected counterparts. The researchers say the results they observed at the microscopic level can be extended to comparable macroscale impacts, to predict how new material structures across length scales will withstand impacts in the real world.

“What we’re learning is, the microstructure of your material matters, even with high-rate deformation,” says study author Carlos Portela, the Brit and Alex d’Arbeloff Career Development Professor in Mechanical Engineering at MIT. “We want to identify impact-resistant structures that can be made into coatings or panels for spacecraft, vehicles, helmets, and anything that needs to be lightweight and protected.”

Other authors on the study include first author and MIT graduate student Thomas Butruille, and Joshua Crone of DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory.

Pure impact

The team’s new high-velocity experiments build off their previous work, in which the engineers tested the resilience of an ultralight, carbon-based material. That material, which was thinner than the width of a human hair, was made from tiny struts and beams of carbon, which the team printed and placed on a glass slide. They then fired microparticles toward the material, at velocities exceeding the speed of sound.  

Those supersonic experiments revealed that the microstructured material withstood the high-velocity impacts, sometimes deflecting the microparticles and other times capturing them.

“But there were many questions we couldn’t answer because we were testing the materials on a substrate, which may have affected their behavior,” Portela says.

In their new study, the researchers developed a way to test freestanding metamaterials, to observe how the materials withstand impacts purely on their own, without a backing or supporting substrate.

In their current setup, the researchers suspend a metamaterial of interest between two microscopic pillars made from the same base material. Depending on the dimensions of the metamaterial being tested, the researchers calculate how far apart the pillars must be in order to support the material at either end while allowing the material to respond to any impacts, without any influence from the pillars themselves.

“This way, we ensure that we’re measuring the material property and not the structural property,” Portela says.

Once the team settled on the pillar support design, they moved on to test a variety of metamaterial architectures. For each architecture, the researchers first printed the supporting pillars on a small silicon chip, then continued printing the metamaterial as a suspended layer between the pillars.

“We can print and test hundreds of these structures on a single chip,” Portela says.

Punctures and cracks

The team printed suspended metamaterials that resembled intricate honeycomb-like cross-sections. Each material was printed with a specific three-dimensional microscopic architecture, such as a precise scaffold of repeating octets, or more faceted polygons. Each repeated unit measured as small as a red blood cell. The resulting metamaterials were thinner than the width of a human hair.

The researchers then tested each metamaterial’s impact resilience by firing glass microparticles toward the structures, at speeds of up to 900 meters per second (more than 2,000 miles per hour) — well within the supersonic range. They caught each impact on camera and studied the resulting images, frame by frame, to see how the projectiles penetrated each material. Next, they examined the materials under a microscope and compared each impact’s physical aftermath.

“In the architected materials, we saw this morphology of small cylindrical craters after impact,” Portela says. “But in solid materials, we saw a lot of radial cracks and bigger chunks of material that were gouged out.”

Overall, the team observed that the fired particles created small punctures in the latticed metamaterials, and the materials nevertheless stayed intact. In contrast, when the same particles were fired at the same speeds into solid, nonlatticed materials of equal mass, they created large cracks that quickly spread, causing the material to crumble. The microstructured materials, therefore, were more efficient in resisting supersonic impacts as well as protecting against multiple impact events. And in particular, materials that were printed with the repeating octets appeared to be the most hardy.

“At the same velocity, we see the octet architecture is harder to fracture, meaning that the metamaterial, per unit mass, can withstand impacts up to twice as much as the bulk material,” Portela says. “This tells us that there are some architectures that can make a material tougher which can offer better impact protection.”

Going forward, the team plans to use the new rapid testing and analysis method to identify new metamaterial designs, in hopes of tagging architectures that can be scaled up to stronger and lighter protective gear, garments, coatings, and paneling.

“What I’m most excited about is showing we can do a lot of these extreme experiments on a benchtop,” Portela says. “This will significantly accelerate the rate at which we can validate new, high-performing, resilient materials.”

This work was funded, in part, by DEVCOM ARL Army Research Office through the MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies.

Astronomers spot 18 black holes gobbling up nearby stars

Mon, 01/29/2024 - 3:00pm

Star-shredding black holes are everywhere in the sky if you just know how to look for them. That’s one message from a new study by MIT scientists, appearing today in the Astrophysical Journal.

The study’s authors are reporting the discovery of 18 new tidal disruption events (TDEs) — extreme instances when a nearby star is tidally drawn into a black hole and ripped to shreds. As the black hole feasts, it gives off an enormous burst of energy across the electromagnetic spectrum.

Astronomers have detected previous tidal disruption events by looking for characteristic bursts in the optical and X-ray bands. To date, these searches have revealed about a dozen star-shredding events in the nearby universe. The MIT team’s new TDEs more than double the catalog of known TDEs in the universe.

The researchers spotted these previously “hidden” events by looking in an unconventional band: infrared. In addition to giving off optical and X-ray bursts, TDEs can generate infrared radiation, particularly in “dusty” galaxies, where a central black hole is enshrouded with galactic debris. The dust in these galaxies normally absorbs and obscures optical and X-ray light, and any sign of TDEs in these bands. In the process, the dust also heats up, producing infrared radiation that is detectable. The team found that infrared emissions, therefore, can serve as a sign of tidal disruption events.

By looking in the infrared band, the MIT team picked out many more TDEs, in galaxies where such events were previously hidden. The 18 new events occurred in different types of galaxies, scattered across the sky.

“The majority of these sources don’t show up in optical bands,” says lead author Megan Masterson, a graduate student in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. “If you want to understand TDEs as a whole and use them to probe supermassive black hole demographics, you need to look in the infrared band.”

Other MIT authors include Kishalay De, Christos Panagiotou, Anna-Christina Eilers, Danielle Frostig, and Robert Simcoe, and MIT assistant professor of physics Erin Kara, along with collaborators from multiple institutions including the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany.

Heat spike

The team recently detected the closest TDE yet, by searching through infrared observations. The discovery opened a new, infrared-based route by which astronomers can search for actively feeding black holes.

That first detection spurred the group to comb for more TDEs. For their new study, the researchers searched through archival observations taken by NEOWISE — the renewed version of NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer. This satellite telescope launched in 2009 and after a brief hiatus has continued to scan the entire sky for infrared “transients,” or brief bursts.

The team looked through the mission’s archived observations using an algorithm developed by co-author Kishalay De. This algorithm picks out patterns in infrared emissions that are likely signs of a transient burst of infrared radiation. The team then cross-referenced the flagged transients with a catalog of all known nearby galaxies within 200 megaparsecs, or 600 million light years. They found that infrared transients could be traced to about 1,000 galaxies.

They then zoomed in on the signal of each galaxy’s infrared burst to determine whether the signal arose from a source other than a TDE, such as an active galactic nucleus or a supernova. After ruling out these possibilities, the team then analyzed the remaining signals, looking for an infrared pattern that is characteristic of a TDE — namely, a sharp spike followed by a gradual dip, reflecting a process by which a black hole, in ripping apart a star, suddenly heats up the surrounding dust to about 1,000 kelvins before gradually cooling down.

This analysis revealed 18 “clean” signals of tidal disruption events. The researchers took a survey of the galaxies in which each TDE was found, and saw that they occurred in a range of systems, including dusty galaxies, across the entire sky.

“If you looked up in the sky and saw a bunch of galaxies, the TDEs would occur representatively in all of them,” Masteron says. “It’s not that they’re only occurring in one type of galaxy, as people thought based only on optical and X-ray searches.”

“It is now possible to peer through the dust and complete the census of nearby TDEs,” says Edo Berger, professor of astronomy at Harvard University, who was not involved with the study. “A particularly exciting aspect of this work is the potential of follow-up studies with large infrared surveys, and I’m excited to see what discoveries they will yield.”

A dusty solution

The team’s discoveries help to resolve some major questions in the study of tidal disruption events. For instance, prior to this work, astronomers had mostly seen TDEs in one type of galaxy — a “post-starburst” system that had previously been a star-forming factory, but has since settled. This galaxy type is rare, and astronomers were puzzled as to why TDEs seemed to be popping up only in these rarer systems. It so happens that these systems are also relatively devoid of dust, making a TDE’s optical or X-ray emissions naturally easier to detect.

Now, by looking in the infrared band, astronomers are able to see TDEs in many more galaxies. The team’s new results show that black holes can devour stars in a range of galaxies, not only post-starburst systems.

The findings also resolve a “missing energy” problem. Physicists have theoreticially predicted that TDEs should radiate more energy than what has been actually observed. But the MIT team now say that dust may explain the discrepancy. They found that if a TDE occurs in a dusty galaxy, the dust itself could absorb not only optical and X-ray emissions but also extreme ultraviolet radiation, in an amount equivalent to the presumed “missing energy.”

The 18 new detections also are helping astronomers estimate the rate at which TDEs occur in a given galaxy. When they figure the new TDEs in with previous detections, they estimate a galaxy experiences a tidal disruption event once every 50,000 years. This rate comes closer to physicists’ theoretical predictions. With more infrared observations, the team hopes to resolve the rate of TDEs, and the properties of the black holes that power them.

“People were coming up with very exotic solutions to these puzzles, and now we’ve come to the point where we can resolve all of them,” Kara says. “This gives us confidence that we don’t need all this exotic physics to explain what we’re seeing. And we have a better handle on the mechanics behind how a star gets ripped apart and gobbled up by a black hole. We’re understanding these systems better.”

This research was supported, in part, by NASA.

Opening the doorway to drawing

Sun, 01/28/2024 - 12:00am

On the first Friday in November, the students of 21A.513 (Drawing Human Experience) were greeted by two unfamiliar figures: a bespectacled monkey holding a heart-shaped message (“I’m so glad you are here”) and the person who drew that monkey on the whiteboard: award-winning cartoonist and educator Lynda Barry, whose “Picture This” was a central text on the new interdisciplinary course’s syllabus.

As the afternoon’s guest speaker, Barry welcomed each arrival, her long gray braids swinging, pens dangling from her neck. Within minutes, she had everyone — even the course’s instructors, anthropologist Graham Jones and visual artist Seth Riskin — settled around tables with their eyes closed, drawing giraffes.

When Barry asked participants to open their eyes and hold up their giraffes, the room filled with laughter over the menagerie of stubby legs, irregular necks, and erratic spots.

“It came out better than I thought!” one student exclaimed.

“Watching people draw with their eyes closed is fantastic,” Barry beamed. “It’s like being in the room with everyone dreaming.”

“Picture This” contends that everyone can draw; children do it unselfconsciously up to a certain age, Barry writes, but all too often conventional qualms put a stop to this expressive and deeply human practice. Jones saw evidence of this when the class convened in September.

“When we went around the room asking students what they wanted to get out of the class, about two-thirds said something like ‘I used to make art, but I don’t have time to do it anymore,’ or ‘I didn’t feel like I was good enough at it,’” he recalls. “For some students, we’ve been opening up a doorway to a set of experiences that’s been shut for a long time.” 

Senior Charles Williams, a computer engineering major, counts himself among that group. “This class breathes back into you the creative and artistic expression that is too often lost as we grow up and mature,” he says.

What it means to be human

Newly offered last fall, Drawing Human Experience was supported by a cross-disciplinary class development grant from the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST). It was co-presented by MIT Anthropology and the MIT Museum Studio and Compton Gallery.

It is the second CAST grant shared by Jones and Riskin. In 2019 they co-taught 21A.S01 (Paranormal Machines), which explored how humans can use interactive technologies to create experiences beyond everyday life. That course left them eager to delve further into the intersection of their disciplines at the most essential level.

“Drawing is deceptively simple,” Jones notes. “You can do extraordinarily complicated things with the kind of media that everybody has immediately at hand.”

The course’s syllabus opens with a declaration — “We do not accept distinctions between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ drawing” — and a hint of what students would work toward: “We draw to give our inner world outer form, to create a zone of communication between both us and ourselves, and ourselves and others.”

The course bases students’ grades on their sincere investment in investigating that zone of communication — developing their own visual language along the way — rather than a mastery of photorealistic representation.

“The difference between an ordinary drawing class and this class is that it puts the quality of mind before technical skills,” says Riskin, manager of the MIT Museum Studio and Compton Gallery (where the course met), as well as co-instructor of a long-running class on vision in art and neuroscience.

Jones is a professor of anthropology who researches how people use language and other media to perform and interact.

“On the deepest level, anthropology asks the question ‘what does it mean to be human?’” he says. “What we’re trying to do in this class is allow the students to ask this fundamental anthropological question by going very deeply into their own experience.”

The instructors divided the course into three modules: abstraction, figuration, and diagrams. In the third unit, Jones lectured on the use of diagrams in anthropology to visualize complex social structures such as kinship and gift-giving networks. “Diagrams organize thinking,” Jones told the class, “and they organize people around that thought process. They’re one of the most profound inventions in human history.”

While diagrams the students encounter elsewhere in their studies might aim for the precise presentation of facts, Riskin urged them to consider the term more expansively. “Ambiguity is a very powerful vehicle in art,” he reminded them. “If there’s not ambiguity, maybe it’s not art anymore because there’s no role for the viewer’s imagination.”

Students discussed the work of artist Christine Sun Kim, who uses infographics for social commentary, as in her series of pie charts on “Deaf Rage” that have been exhibited at the MIT List Visual Arts Center and internationally. Then they partnered up for an exercise, documenting their changing relationship with a classmate before, during, and after a getting-to-know-you conversation. The resulting diagrams resembled swirling plasma, mushrooms releasing spores, spiky plants emerging from seeds — nary an x- or y-axis in sight.

The essence of drawing

Between classes, students completed “D-Sets” (drawing-based problem sets) in the hardbound sketchbooks they’d received at the start of the semester. D-Set number four, for example, had them practice gesture drawing — employing rapid, broad strokes — while observing passersby in a public space. The goal, explains Riskin, was “not to capture the many details that accurately represent the human form, but rather in two or three seconds to capture the whole, the gestalt, of a human figure.” He and Jones designed several such exercises for “training immediacy” — an antidote to the self-critical, goal-oriented attitudes that turn many adults away from the act of drawing.

“The assignments helped me think more about drawing to convey, rather than to represent,” says junior Jaclyn Thi, a computer science and engineering major. “They made drawing much more enjoyable overall.”

While students were urged not to overthink the process of putting marks on paper, class meetings provided a social, supportive space to reflect on the results.

“The second class was kind of a shock,” Jones remembers. “We had come up with this whole plan about how they were going to exchange their sketchbooks, and we had prepared all of these prompts. But as soon as I said, ‘OK, turn to somebody next to you who hasn’t seen your work,’ the room immediately erupted in conversation. They talked for half-an-hour about the drawings, and we had to cut it off. It was like the floodgates opened.”

During a peer feedback session in week six, the students clustered around the studio’s plain wooden tables, which had been pushed together to form a large surface. They gazed down at nearly two dozen sketchbooks splayed open to the latest D-Set: gesture drawings conveying emotional connections to important figures in their lives. Some pages were covered in thick, moody smudges, while others crawled with wispy lines, and a few clean white pages bore only a few bold marks.

Several students singled out a classmate’s drawing, remarking how its confident charcoal strokes — suggesting short hair, glasses, the slight curve of a smile — managed to evoke a sense of lightness and joy. Riskin addressed the artist: “Maybe the drawing surprised you a bit because it was easy? You were just with the person and the drawing came out as an expression of that,” he guessed, eliciting a nod of recognition. “That, to me, is the essence of drawing.”

Sophomore Kanna Pichappan, a brain and cognitive sciences major and anthropology minor, looks back on that assignment as one of her most challenging. “I chose to depict Goddess Durga, a deity from the Hindu tradition who motivates me to live with courage, inner strength, and a commitment to righteousness,” says Pichappan. “I was apprehensive that my drawing might not turn out the way I envisioned. Until this class, I hadn’t even realized that a depiction of a figure’s form is not the same as experiencing the feelings the figure inspires. That D-Set helped me establish new habits: drawing what I feel, rather than what something should look like.”

Weeks later, when choosing a subject for her final project, Pichappan decided to return to exploring the goddess’s role in her life “from a place of creativity and freedom.” The course, she says, made that possible: “It helped me shift from the belief that art is created to represent something, towards the understanding that drawing can be a powerful way of deepening and enriching our understanding of our personal human life experiences.”

School of Engineering fourth quarter 2024 awards

Fri, 01/26/2024 - 2:20pm

Faculty and researchers across MIT’s School of Engineering receive many awards in recognition of their scholarship, service, and overall excellence. The School of Engineering periodically recognizes their achievements by highlighting the honors, prizes, and medals won by faculty and research scientists working in our academic departments, labs, and centers.

Susan Solomon wins VinFuture Award for Female Innovators

Fri, 01/26/2024 - 10:00am

Lee and Geraldine Martin Professor of Environmental Studies Susan Solomon has been awarded the 2023 VinFuture Award for Female Innovators. Solomon was picked out of almost 1,400 international nominations across four categories for “The discovery of the ozone depletion mechanism in Antarctica, contributing to the establishment of the Montreal Protocol.” The award, which comes with a $500,000 prize, highlights outstanding female researchers and innovators that can serve as role models for aspiring scientists.

“I'm tremendously humbled by that, and I'll do my best to live up to it,” says Solomon, who attended the ceremony in Hanoi, Vietnam, on Dec. 20.

The VinFuture Awards are given annually to “honor scientific research and breakthrough technological innovations that can make a significant difference” according to their site. In addition to Female Innovators, the award has two other special categories, Innovators from Developing Countries and Innovators with Outstanding Achievements in Emerging Fields, as well as their overall grand prize. The awards have been given out by the Vietnam-based VinFuture Foundation since 2021.

“Countries all around the world are part of scientific progress and innovation, and that a developing country is honoring that is really very lovely,” says Solomon, whose career as an atmospheric chemist has brought her onto the international stage and has shown her firsthand how important developing countries are in crafting global policy.

In 1986 Solomon led an expedition of 16 scientists to Antarctica to measure the degradation of the ozone layer; she was the only woman on the team. She and her collaborators were able to figure out the atmospheric chemistry of chlorofluorocarbons and other similar chemicals that are now known as ozone-depleting substances. This work became foundational to the creation of the Montreal Protocol, an international agreement that banned damaging chemicals and has allowed the ozone to recover.

Solomon joined the MIT faculty in 2012 and holds joint appointments in the departments of Chemistry and Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. The success of the Montreal Protocol demonstrates the ability for international cooperation to enact effective environmental agreements; Solomon sees it as a blueprint for crafting further policy when it comes to addressing global climate change.

“Women can do anything, even help save the ozone layer and solve other environmental problems,” she says. “Today's problem of climate change is for all of us to be involved in solving.”

Study: Stars travel more slowly at Milky Way’s edge

Fri, 01/26/2024 - 12:00am

By clocking the speed of stars throughout the Milky Way galaxy, MIT physicists have found that stars further out in the galactic disk are traveling more slowly than expected compared to stars that are closer to the galaxy’s center. The findings raise a surprising possibility: The Milky Way’s gravitational core may be lighter in mass, and contain less dark matter, than previously thought.

The new results are based on the team’s analysis of data taken by the Gaia and APOGEE instruments. Gaia is an orbiting space telescope that tracks the precise location, distance, and motion of more than 1 billion stars throughout the Milky Way galaxy, while APOGEE is a ground-based survey. The physicists analyzed Gaia’s measurements of more than 33,000 stars, including some of the farthest stars in the galaxy, and determined each star’s “circular velocity,” or how fast a star is circling in the galactic disk, given the star’s distance from the galaxy’s center.

The scientists plotted each star’s velocity against its distance to generate a rotation curve — a standard graph in astronomy that represents how fast matter rotates at a given distance from the center of a galaxy. The shape of this curve can give scientists an idea of how much visible and dark matter is distributed throughout a galaxy.

“What we were really surprised to see was that this curve remained flat, flat, flat out to a certain distance, and then it started tanking,” says Lina Necib, assistant professor of physics at MIT. “This means the outer stars are rotating a little slower than expected, which is a very surprising result.”

The team translated the new rotation curve into a distribution of dark matter that could explain the outer stars’ slow-down, and found the resulting map produced a lighter galactic core than expected. That is, the center of the Milky Way may be less dense, with less dark matter, than scientists have thought.

“This puts this result in tension with other measurements,” Necib says. “There is something fishy going on somewhere, and it’s really exciting to figure out where that is, to really have a coherent picture of the Milky Way.”

The team reports its results this month in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Society Journal. The study’s MIT co-authors, including Necib, are first author Xiaowei Ou, Anna-Christina Eilers, and Anna Frebel.

“In the nothingness”

Like most galaxies in the universe, the Milky Way spins like water in a whirlpool, and its rotation is driven, in part, by all the matter that swirls within its disk. In the 1970s, astronomer Vera Rubin was the first to observe that galaxies rotate in ways that cannot be driven purely by visible matter. She and her colleagues measured the circular velocity of stars and found that the resulting rotation curves were surprisingly flat. That is, the velocity of stars remained the same throughout a galaxy, rather than dropping off with distance. They concluded that some other type of invisible matter must be acting on distant stars to give them an added push.

Rubin’s work in rotation curves was one of the first strong pieces of evidence for the existence of dark matter — an invisible, unknown entity that is estimated to outweigh all the stars and other visible matter in the universe.

Since then, astronomers have observed similar flat curves in far-off galaxies, further supporting dark matter’s presence. Only recently have astronomers attempted to chart the rotation curve in our own galaxy with stars.

“It turns out it’s harder to measure a rotation curve when you’re sitting inside a galaxy,” Ou notes.

In 2019, Anna-Christina Eilers, assistant professor of physics at MIT, worked to chart the Milky Way’s rotation curve, using an earlier batch of data released by the Gaia satellite. That data release included stars as far out as 25 kiloparsecs, or about 81,000 light years, from the galaxy’s center.

Based on these data, Eilers observed that the Milky Way’s rotation curve appeared to be flat, albeit with mild decline, similar to other far-off galaxies, and by inference, the galaxy likely bore a high density of dark matter at its core. But this view now shifted, as the telescope released a new batch of data, this time including stars as far out as 30 kiloparsecs — almost 100,000 light years from the galaxy’s core.

“At these distances, we’re right at the edge of the galaxy where stars start to peter out,” Frebel says. “No one had explored how matter moves around in this outer galaxy, where we’re really in the nothingness.”

Weird tension

Frebel, Necib, Ou, and Eilers jumped on Gaia’s new data, looking to expand on Eilers’ initial rotation curve. To refine their analysis, the team complemented Gaia’s data with measurements by APOGEE — the Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment, which measures extremely detailed properties of more than 700,000 stars in the Milky Way, such as their brightness, temperature, and elemental composition.

“We feed all this information into an algorithm to try to learn connections that can then give us better estimates of a star’s distance,” Ou explains. “That’s how we can push out to farther distances.”

The team established the precise distances for more than 33,000 stars and used these measurements to generate a three-dimensional map of the stars scattered across the Milky Way out to about 30 kiloparsecs. They then incorporated this map into a model of circular velocity, to simulate how fast any one star must be traveling, given the distribution of all the other stars in the galaxy. They then plotted each star’s velocity and distance on a chart to produce an updated rotation curve of the Milky Way.

“That’s where the weirdness came in,” Necib says.

Instead of seeing a mild decline like previous rotation curves, the team observed that the new curve dipped more strongly than expected at the outer end. This unexpected downturn suggests that while stars may travel just as fast out to a certain distance, they suddenly slow down at the farthest distances. Stars at the outskirts appear to travel more slowly than expected.

When the team translated this rotation curve to the amount of dark matter that must exist throughout the galaxy, they found that the Milky Way’s core may contain less dark matter than previously estimated.

“This result is in tension with other measurements,” Necib says. “Really understanding this result will have deep repercussions. This might lead to more hidden masses just beyond the edge of the galactic disk, or a reconsideration of the state of equilibrium of our galaxy. We seek to find these answers in upcoming work, using high resolution simulations of Milky Way-like galaxies."

This research was funded, in part, by the National Science Foundation.

Entrepreneur creates career pathways with MIT OpenCourseWare

Thu, 01/25/2024 - 2:10pm

When June Odongo interviewed early-career electrical engineer Cynthia Wacheke for a software engineering position at her company, Wacheke lacked knowledge of computer science theory but showed potential in complex problem-solving.

Determined to give Wacheke a shot, Odongo turned to MIT OpenCourseWare to create a six-month “bridging course” modeled after the classes she once took as a computer science student. Part of MIT Open Learning, OpenCourseWare offers free, online, open educational resources from more than 2,500 courses that span the MIT undergraduate and graduate curriculum. 

“Wacheke had the potential and interest to do the work that needed to be done, so the way to solve this was for me to literally create a path for her to get that work done,” says Odongo, founder and CEO of Senga Technologies. 

Developers, Odongo says, are not easy to find. The OpenCourseWare educational resources provided a way to close that gap. “We put Wacheke through the course last year, and she is so impressive,” Odongo says. “Right now, she is doing our first machine learning models. It’s insane how good of a team member she is. She has done so much in such a short time.”

Making high-quality candidates job-ready

Wacheke, who holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Nairobi, started her professional career as a hardware engineer. She discovered a passion for software while working on a dashboard design project, and decided to pivot from hardware to software engineering. That’s when she discovered Senga Technologies, a logistics software and services company in Kenya catering to businesses that ship in Africa. 

Odongo founded Senga with the goal of simplifying and easing the supply chain and logistics experience, from the movement of goods to software tools. Senga’s ultimate goal, Odongo says, is to have most of their services driven by software. That means employees — and candidates — need to be able to think through complex problems using computer science theory.

“A lot of people are focused on programming, but we care less about programming and more about problem-solving,” says Odongo, who received a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and an MBA from Harvard Business School. “We actually apply the things people learn in computer science programs.”

Wacheke started the bridging course in June 2022 and was given six months to complete the curriculum on the MIT OpenCourseWare website. She took nine courses, including: Introduction to Algorithms; Mathematics for Computer Science; Design and Analysis of Algorithms; Elements of Software Construction; Automata, Computability, and Complexity; Database Systems; Principles of Autonomy and Decision Making; Introduction to Machine Learning; and Networks

“The bridging course helped me learn how to think through things,” Wacheke says. “It’s one thing to know how to do something, but it’s another to design that thing from scratch and implement it.”

During the bridging course, Wacheke was paired with a software engineer at Senga, who mentored her and answered questions along the way. She learned Ruby on Rails, a server-side web application framework under the MIT License. Wacheke also completed other projects to complement the theory she was learning. She created a new website that included an integration to channel external requests to Slack, a cross-platform team communication tool used by the company’s employees.

Continuous learning for team members

The bridging course concluded with a presentation to Senga employees, during which Wacheke explained how the company could use graph theory for decision-making. “If you want to get from point A to B, there are algorithms you can use to find the shortest path,” Wacheke says. “Since we’re a logistics company, I thought we could use this when we’re deciding which routes our trucks take.”

The presentation, which is the final requirement for the bridging course, is also a professional development opportunity for Senga employees. “This process is helpful for our team members, particularly those who have been out of school for a while,” Odongo says. “The candidates present what they’ve learned in relation to Senga. It’s a way of doing continuous learning for the existing team members.”

After successfully completing the bridging course in November 2022, Wacheke transitioned to a full-time software engineer role. She is currently developing a “machine” that can interpret and categorize hundreds of documents, including delivery notes, cash flows, and receipts.

“The goal is to enable our customers to simply feed those documents into our machine, and then we can more accurately read and convert them to digital formats to drive automation,” Odongo says. “The machine will also enable someone to ask a document a question, such as ‘What did I deliver to retailer X on date Y?’ or ‘What is the total price of the goods delivered?’”

The bridging course, which was initially custom-designed for Wacheke, is now a permanent program at Senga. A second team member completed the course in October 2023 and has joined the software team full time. 

“Developers are not easy to find, and you also want high-quality developers,” Odongo says. “At least when we do this, we know that the person has gone through what we need.”

Performance art and science collide as students experience “Blue Man Group”

Thu, 01/25/2024 - 1:10pm

On a blustery December afternoon, with final exams and winter break on the horizon, the 500 undergraduate students enrolled in Professor Bradley Pentelute’s Course 5.111 (Principles of Chemical Science) class were treated to an afternoon at the theater — a performance of “Blue Man Group” at Boston’s Charles Playhouse — courtesy of Pentelute and the MIT Office of the First Year.

Theatrical thrills aside, it was Blue Man Group’s practical application of chemical principles that inspired Pentelute to initiate and fund this excursion. The MIT Office of the First Year was pleased to collaborate with him to support an opportunity for first-year students to interact with one another outside of the classroom by providing funding for 300 of the tickets and T passes for all.

“By observing the use of specialized paints and materials in the show, students gain a deeper understanding of how chemistry intersects with creative expression,” says Pentelute. “This unique experience is inspired by our discussions on the chemistry of pigments and the role of chemistry in everyday life, aiming to bridge theoretical knowledge with real-world applications. The visit served as an engaging opportunity to enhance [the group’s] learning and foster a sense of community within our class.”

A fixture in Boston’s theater district since 1995, “Blue Man Group” is a euphoric, multi-sensory performance featuring three silent “Blue Men” who interact with the audience and one another not with words, but with art, music, comedy, and non-verbal communication. The characters are other-worldly in their innocence, appearing mystified by the audience and the most commonplace of objects. No two performances are completely alike, as the Blue Men pull members of the audience on stage, make music with instruments fashioned out of construction and plumbing materials, and, possibly most notably, drums covered in liquid paint that splash all over everything — and everyone — in what is known as the Poncho Zone.

The Charles Playhouse has a capacity of 500 seats, so the audience of this particular show was made up entirely of MIT undergraduate students — any tickets not utilized by 5.111 students were offered to first-generation first-year students. The experience proved to be an exciting example of practical applications of the general chemistry concepts and undergraduate camaraderie.

Catherine Hazard, a Department of Chemistry graduate student and the teaching assistant for 5.111, was one of the many attendees thrilled to see science in action at the theater.

“The use of brightly colored oil paints, a hallmark of the show, was a direct representation of chemical structures and crystal field theory concepts covered in class,” explains Hazard. “We learned how energy splitting of d orbitals influences color of varying inorganic transition metal complexes, as well as how chemicals such as waxes, resins, polymers, and stabilizers give the oil paint the proper consistency for the performance. The event was a fun culmination of the lessons learned just before heading into a week of finals.”

The goal of the Office of the First Year is to provide excellent services and programs to catalyze student exploration and access to opportunity, and promote the academic success and personal development of undergraduates. Programs and experiences like this one serve to enrich and support undergraduate education at MIT.

Pentelute joined the MIT faculty in 2011. His research group in the Department of Chemistry develops new protein modification chemistries, adapts nature's machines for efficient macromolecule delivery into cells, invents flow technologies for rapid biopolymer production, and discovers peptide binders to proteins.

Unlocking history with geology and genetics

Thu, 01/25/2024 - 12:00am

Fatima Husain grew up in the heart of the Midwest, surrounded by agriculture. “Every time you left your home, you saw fields of corn and soybeans. And it was really quite beautiful,” she says. During elementary school, she developed her own love of gardening and cultivated a small plot in her family’s backyard.

“Having the freedom to make a mess, experiment, and see things grow was very impactful,” says Husain, a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) and a Hugh Hampton Young Fellow. This experimentation in the garden was the seed that blossomed into her fascination with science. “When you think about gardening and agriculture in Iowa,” she says, “you think about soil and its origins, which led me to geology and geochemistry and all these interdisciplinary fields that play a role in the Earth sciences.”

Husain has maintained that scientific curiosity throughout her academic career. As a graduate student in EAPS’ Program in Geology, Geochemistry, and Geobiology, she studies the fossil and genetic records of ancient and modern life forms to better understand the history of life on Earth. She says, “Twenty years ago, I was a stoked kid working with topsoil in Iowa. Now, I get to work with ancient dirt and sediments to better understand Earth and life’s past.” 

Sharing science

Though Husain loved her environmental science class in high school, when she enrolled at Brown University, she wasn’t sure which STEM major to pursue. Then, a guest lecture in her first-year biology course dispelled any uncertainty. “A professor walked on stage and introduced himself as a biogeochemist, and after that, everything just clicked,” she says. Within weeks of that fateful lecture, she had declared a major in geochemistry. “I’ve never looked back,” she says.

She then immersed herself in her Earth science classes, which applied the core science disciplines she studied to topics such as the oceans, weather and climate, and water quality. “I gained a sincere appreciation for the excellent teaching and writing that helped me access the world of the geosciences,” she says, “And that helped me realize the value in communicating science clearly.”

To hone her writing skills, Husain took nonfiction writing classes as her electives and joined one of the school newspapers. There, she took on the role of science writer and editor. As she neared graduation, she knew that she would eventually pursue geochemistry at the graduate level, but first she wanted to focus on journalism and writing. She reasoned that, if she could formally learn the fundamentals of science writing and reporting, then “I could more effectively share all the science I learned after that point,” she says. With the support of her undergraduate professors, she decided to apply to MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing, one of the only such programs in the country.

The program refined Husain’s writing skills and paved the way for her to pursue science journalism opportunities across a variety of media, including print, video, podcasting, and radio. She worked as a writing intern for MIT News during this time, and has written a number of MIT News articles while at MIT. After graduating, she served as a Curiosity Correspondent for the MIT-Nord Anglia Education Collaboration based at the MIT Museum. In that role, she says, “I worked on communicating the amazing science happening here at MIT to K-12 students around the world via educational videos.” Since beginning her PhD studies, Husain has transitioned to a new role in the collaboration — hosting a monthly webinar series called MIT Abstracts, which connects MIT researchers and experts with an international audience of middle schoolers.

Along the way, Husain has also worked as a reporter and managing producer for a Rhode Island-based sustainability science radio show called Possibly. In 2019, she founded a podcast with her colleagues called BIOmarkers, which serves as an oral history project for the discipline of organic geochemistry.

Acquiring the “biggest tool set” possible

After completing her master’s thesis, Husain began to return to her roots in geochemistry. She says, “At some point, when I was interviewing other scientists and they described their experiments, I’d miss being in the lab myself. That feeling helped me realize the time was right to get back into research.” Husain chose to stay at MIT for her PhD. “I couldn’t resist the opportunity to continue working on challenging, interdisciplinary problems within such an exciting environment,” she says. “There really is no other place quite like it.”

She joined the lab group of Roger Summons, the Schlumberger Professor of Geobiology. For her first project as a research assistant, Husain helped then-postdoc Ainara Sistiaga reconstruct the environment of Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge 1.7 million years into the past, using molecule-scale fossils preserved in archeological sediments. Part of Africa’s Great Rift Valley, the site preserves evidence of ancient hominin tools and activities. The research team’s findings were later published in published in PNAS.

Under the mentorship of her advisors, Gregory Fournier, an associate professor of geobiology, and Summons, Husain studies both the fossil record and the genetic records of organisms alive today to answer fundamental questions about life’s evolution on Earth. “The farther back into Earth’s history we go, the fewer complete records we have,” Husain says, “To answer the questions that arise, I hope to employ the biggest tool set I can.”

Currently, Husain investigates the biomarkers of microbes living in Antarctic biofilms, which she hopes will provide hints about the types of places where the ancestors of complex life sheltered during global glaciation events through Earth’s Cryogenian period, which stretched between 720 to 635 million years ago. To do this, Husain applies techniques from chemistry, such as chromatography and mass spectrometry, to isolate and study microbial lipids, the precursors of molecular fossils preserved in the geologic record.

Husain also uses “molecular clocks,” tools which employ the genetic sequences of living organisms to estimate when in evolutionary time different species diverged, to better understand how long ago aerobic respiration arose on Earth. Using the growing databases of publicly available gene sequences, Husain says it’s possible to track the histories of metabolisms that arose billions of years ago in Earth’s past. Much of her research can also be applied to astrobiology, the study of potential life elsewhere in the universe.

As a PhD student, Husain has also had the opportunity to serve as teaching assistant for 12.885 (Science, Politics, and Environmental Policy) for two semesters. In that role, she says, “My goal is to help students improve their writing skills so that they are equipped to successfully communicate about important issues in science and policy in the future.”

Looking ahead, Husain hopes to continue applying both her science and communication skills to challenging problems related to Earth and the environment. Along the way, she knows that she wants to share the opportunities that she had with others. “Whichever form it takes,” she says, “I hope to play a role in cultivating the same types of supportive environments which have led me here.”  

Researchers demonstrate rapid 3D printing with liquid metal

Thu, 01/25/2024 - 12:00am

MIT researchers have developed an additive manufacturing technique that can print rapidly with liquid metal, producing large-scale parts like table legs and chair frames in a matter of minutes.

Their technique, called liquid metal printing (LMP), involves depositing molten aluminum along a predefined path into a bed of tiny glass beads. The aluminum quickly hardens into a 3D structure.

The researchers say LMP is at least 10 times faster than a comparable metal additive manufacturing process, and the procedure to heat and melt the metal is more efficient than some other methods.

The technique does sacrifice resolution for speed and scale. While it can print components that are larger than those typically made with slower additive techniques, and at a lower cost, it cannot achieve high resolutions.

For instance, parts produced with LMP would be suitable for some applications in architecture, construction, and industrial design, where components of larger structures often don’t require extremely fine details. It could also be utilized effectively for rapid prototyping with recycled or scrap metal.

In a recent study, the researchers demonstrated the procedure by printing aluminum frames and parts for tables and chairs which were strong enough to withstand postprint machining. They showed how components made with LMP could be combined with high-resolution processes and additional materials to create functional furniture.

“This is a completely different direction in how we think about metal manufacturing that has some huge advantages. It has downsides, too. But most of our built world — the things around us like tables, chairs, and buildings — doesn’t need extremely high resolution. Speed and scale, and also repeatability and energy consumption, are all important metrics,” says Skylar Tibbits, associate professor in the Department of Architecture and co-director of the Self-Assembly Lab, who is senior author of a paper introducing LMP.

Tibbits is joined on the paper by lead author Zain Karsan SM ’23, who is now a PhD student at ETH Zurich; as well as Kimball Kaiser SM ’22 and Jared Laucks, a research scientist and lab co-director. The research was presented at the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture Conference and recently published in the association’s proceedings.

Significant speedup

One method for printing with metals that is common in construction and architecture, called wire arc additive manufacturing (WAAM), is able to produce large, low-resolution structures, but these can be susceptible to cracking and warping because some portions must be remelted during the printing process.

LMP, on the other hand, keeps the material molten throughout the process, avoiding some of the structural issues caused by remelting.

Drawing on the group’s previous work on rapid liquid printing with rubber, the researchers built a machine that melts aluminum, holds the molten metal, and deposits it through a nozzle at high speeds. Large-scale parts can be printed in just a few seconds, and then the molten aluminum cools in several minutes.

“Our process rate is really high, but it is also very difficult to control. It is more or less like opening a faucet. You have a big volume of material to melt, which takes some time, but once you get that to melt, it is just like opening a tap. That enables us to print these geometries very quickly,” Karsan explains.

The team chose aluminum because it is commonly used in construction and can be recycled cheaply and efficiently.

Bread loaf-sized pieces of aluminum are deposited into an electric furnace, “which is basically like a scaled-up toaster,” Karsan adds. Metal coils inside the furnace heat the metal to 700 degrees Celsius, slightly above aluminum’s 660-degree melting point.

The aluminum is held at a high temperature in a graphite crucible, and then molten material is gravity-fed through a ceramic nozzle into a print bed along a preset path. They found that the larger the amount of aluminum they could melt, the faster the printer can go.

“Molten aluminum will destroy just about everything in its path. We started with stainless steel nozzles and then moved to titanium before we ended up with ceramic. But even ceramic nozzles can clog because the heating is not always entirely uniform in the nozzle tip,” Karsan says.

By injecting the molten material directly into a granular substance, the researchers don’t need to print supports to hold the aluminum structure as it takes shape. 

Perfecting the process

They experimented with a number of materials to fill the print bed, including graphite powders and salt, before selecting 100-micron glass beads. The tiny glass beads, which can withstand the extremely high temperature of molten aluminum, act as a neutral suspension so the metal can cool quickly.

“The glass beads are so fine that they feel like silk in your hand. The powder is so small that it doesn’t really change the surface characteristics of the printed object,” Tibbits says.

The amount of molten material held in the crucible, the depth of the print bed, and the size and shape of the nozzle have the biggest impacts on the geometry of the final object.

For instance, parts of the object with larger diameters are printed first, since the amount of aluminum the nozzle dispenses tapers off as the crucible empties. Changing the depth of the nozzle alters the thickness of the metal structure.

To aid in the LMP process, the researchers developed a numerical model to estimate the amount of material that will be deposited into the print bed at a given time.

Because the nozzle pushes into the glass bead powder, the researchers can’t watch the molten aluminum as it is deposited, so they needed a way to simulate what should be going on at certain points in the printing process, Tibbits explains.

They used LMP to rapidly produce aluminum frames with variable thicknesses, which were durable enough to withstand machining processes like milling and boring. They demonstrated a combination of LMP and these post-processing techniques to make chairs and a table composed of lower-resolution, rapidly printed aluminum parts and other components, like wood pieces.

Moving forward, the researchers want to keep iterating on the machine so they can enable consistent heating in the nozzle to prevent material from sticking, and also achieve better control over the flow of molten material. But larger nozzle diameters can lead to irregular prints, so there are still technical challenges to overcome.

“If we could make this machine something that people could actually use to melt down recycled aluminum and print parts, that would be a game-changer in metal manufacturing. Right now, it is not reliable enough to do that, but that’s the goal,” Tibbits says.

“At Emeco, we come from the world of very analog manufacturing, so seeing the liquid metal printing creating nuanced geometries with the potential for fully structural parts was really compelling,” says Jaye Buchbinder, who leads business development for the furniture company Emeco and was not involved with this work. “The liquid metal printing really walks the line in terms of ability to produce metal parts in custom geometries while maintaining quick turnaround that you don’t normally get in other printing or forming technologies. There is definitely potential for the technology to revolutionize the way metal printing and metal forming are currently handled.”

Additional researchers who worked on this project include Kimball Kaiser, Jeremy Bilotti, Bjorn Sparrman, and Schendy Kernizan.

This research was funded, in part, by Aisin Group, Amada Global, and Emeco.

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