Nearly everyone has experienced it: After a night of poor sleep, you don’t feel as alert as you should. Your brain might seem foggy, and your mind drifts off when you should be paying attention.

A new study from MIT reveals what happens inside the brain as these momentary failures of attention occur. The scientists found that during these lapses, a wave of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) flows out of the brain — a process that typically occurs during sleep and helps to wash away waste products that have built up during the day. This flushing is believed to be necessary for maintaining a healthy, normally functioning brain.

When a person is sleep-deprived, it appears that their body attempts to catch up on this cleansing process by initiating pulses of CSF flow. However, this comes at a cost of dramatically impaired attention.

“If you don’t sleep, the CSF waves start to intrude into wakefulness where normally you wouldn’t see them. However, they come with an attentional tradeoff, where attention fails during the moments that you have this wave of fluid flow,” says Laura Lewis, the Athinoula A. Martinos Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, a member of MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science and the Research Laboratory of Electronics, and an associate member of the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory.

Lewis is the senior author of the study, which appears today in Nature Neuroscience. MIT visiting graduate student Zinong Yang is the lead author of the paper.

Flushing the brain

Although sleep is a critical biological process, it’s not known exactly why it is so important. It appears to be essential for maintaining alertness, and it has been well-documented that sleep deprivation leads to impairments of attention and other cognitive functions.

During sleep, the cerebrospinal fluid that cushions the brain helps to remove waste that has built up during the day. In a 2019 study, Lewis and colleagues showed that CSF flow during sleep follows a rhythmic pattern in and out of the brain, and that these flows are linked to changes in brain waves during sleep.

That finding led Lewis to wonder what might happen to CSF flow after sleep deprivation. To explore that question, she and her colleagues recruited 26 volunteers who were tested twice — once following a night of sleep deprivation in the lab, and once when they were well-rested.

In the morning, the researchers monitored several different measures of brain and body function as the participants performed a task that is commonly used to evaluate the effects of sleep deprivation.

During the task, each participant wore an electroencephalogram (EEG) cap that could record brain waves while they were also in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. The researchers used a modified version of fMRI that allowed them to measure not only blood oxygenation in the brain, but also the flow of CSF in and out of the brain. They also measured each subject’s heart rate, breathing rate, and pupil diameter.

The participants performed two attentional tasks while in the fMRI scanner, one visual and one auditory. For the visual task, they had to look at a screen that had a fixed cross. At random intervals, the cross would turn into a square, and the participants were told to press a button whenever they saw this happen. For the auditory task, they would hear a beep instead of seeing a visual transformation.

Sleep-deprived participants performed much worse than well-rested participants on these tasks, as expected. Their response times were slower, and for some of the stimuli, the participants never registered the change at all.

During these momentary lapses of attention, the researchers identified several physiological changes that occurred at the same time. Most significantly, they found a flux of CSF out of the brain just as those lapses occurred. After each lapse, CSF flowed back into the brain.

“The results are suggesting that at the moment that attention fails, this fluid is actually being expelled outward away from the brain. And when attention recovers, it’s drawn back in,” Lewis says.

The researchers hypothesize that when the brain is sleep-deprived, it begins to compensate for the loss of the cleansing that normally occurs during sleep, even though these pulses of CSF flow come with the cost of attention loss.

“One way to think about those events is because your brain is so in need of sleep, it tries its best to enter into a sleep-like state to restore some cognitive functions,” Yang says. “Your brain’s fluid system is trying to restore function by pushing the brain to iterate between high-attention and high-flow states.”

A unified circuit

The researchers also found several other physiological events linked to attentional lapses, including decreases in breathing and heart rate, along with constriction of the pupils. They found that pupil constriction began about 12 seconds before CSF flowed out of the brain, and pupils dilated again after the attentional lapse.

“What’s interesting is it seems like this isn’t just a phenomenon in the brain, it’s also a body-wide event. It suggests that there’s a tight coordination of these systems, where when your attention fails, you might feel it perceptually and psychologically, but it’s also reflecting an event that’s happening throughout the brain and body,” Lewis says.

This close linkage between disparate events may indicate that there is a single circuit that controls both attention and bodily functions such as fluid flow, heart rate, and arousal, according to the researchers.

“These results suggest to us that there’s a unified circuit that’s governing both what we think of as very high-level functions of the brain — our attention, our ability to perceive and respond to the world — and then also really basic fundamental physiological processes like fluid dynamics of the brain, brain-wide blood flow, and blood vessel constriction,” Lewis says.

In this study, the researchers did not explore what circuit might be controlling this switching, but one good candidate, they say, is the noradrenergic system. Recent research has shown that this system, which regulates many cognitive and bodily functions through the neurotransmitter norepinephrine, oscillates during normal sleep.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Research Fellowship, a NAWA Fellowship, a McKnight Scholar Award, a Sloan Fellowship, a Pew Biomedical Scholar Award, a One Mind Rising Star Award, and the Simons Collaboration on Plasticity in the Aging Brain.

Some of the most expensive drugs currently in use are gene therapies to treat specific diseases, and their high cost limits their availability for those who need them. Part of the reason for the cost is that the manufacturing process yields as much as 90 percent non-active material, and separating out these useless parts is slow, leads to significant losses, and is not well adapted to large-scale production. Separation accounts for almost 70 percent of the total gene therapy manufacturing cost. But now, researchers at MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering and Center for Biomedical Innovation have found a way to greatly improve that separation process.

The findings are described in the journal ACS Nano, in a paper by MIT Research Scientist Vivekananda Bal, Edward R. Gilliland Professor Richard Braatz, and five others.

“Since 2017, there have been around 10,000 clinical trials of gene therapy drugs,” Bal says. Of those, about 60 percent are based on adeno-associated virus, which is used as a carrier for the modified gene or genes. These viruses consist of a sort of shell structure, known as capsids, that protects the genetic material within, but the production systems used to manufacture these drugs tend to produce large quantities of empty capsids with no genetic material inside.

These empty capsids, which can make up anywhere from half to 90 percent of the yield, are useless therapeutically, and in fact can be counterproductive because they can add to any immune reaction in the patient without providing any benefit. They must be removed prior to the formulation as a part of the manufacturing process. The existing purification processes are not scalable and involve multiple stages, have long processing times, and incur high product losses and high cost. 

Separating full from empty capsids is complicated by the fact that in almost every way, they appear nearly identical. “They both have similar structure, the same protein sequences,” Bal says. “They also have similar molecular weight, and similar density.” Given the similarity, it’s extremely challenging to separate them. “How do you come up with a method?”

Most systems presently use a method based on chromatography, in which the mixture passes through a column of absorbent material, and slight differences in the properties can cause them to pass through at different rates, so that they can be separated out. Because the differences are so slight, the process requires multiple rounds of processing, in addition to filtration steps, adding to the time and cost. The method is also inefficient, wasting up to 30 or 40 percent of the product, Bal says. And the resulting product is still only about two-thirds pure, with a third of inactive material remaining.

There is another purification method that is widely used in the small molecule pharmaceutical industry, which uses a preferential crystallization process instead of chromatography, but this method had not been tried for protein purification — specifically, capsid-based drugs — before. Bal decided to try it, since with this method “its operating time is low and the product loss is also very low, and the purity achieved is very, very high because of the high selectivity,” he says. The method separates out empty from full capsids in the solution, as well as separating out cell debris and other useless material, all in one step, without requiring the significant pre-processing and post-processing steps needed by the other methods.

“The time required for purification using the crystallization method is around four hours, compared to that required for the chromatography method, which is about 37 to 40 hours,” he says. “So basically, it is about 10 times more effective in terms of operating time.” This novel method will reduce the cost of gene therapy drugs by five to 10 times, he says.

The method relies on a very slight difference in the electrical potential of the full versus empty capsids. DNA molecules have a slight negative charge, whereas the surface of the capsids has a positive charge. “Because of that, the overall charge density distribution of the full capsids will be different from that of the empty capsids,” he says. That difference leads to a difference in the crystallization rates, which can be used to create conditions that favor the crystallization of the full capsids while leaving the empty ones behind.

Tests proved the effectiveness of the method, which can be easily adapted to large-scale pharmaceutical manufacturing processes, he says. The team has applied for a patent through MIT’s Technology Licensing Office, and is already in discussions with a number of pharmaceutical companies about beginning trials of the system, which could lead to the system becoming commercialized within a couple of years, Bal says.

“They’re basically collaborating,” he says of the companies. “They’re transferring their samples for a trial with our method,” and ultimately the process will either be licensed to a company, or form the basis of a new startup company, he says.

In addition to Bal and Braatz, the research team also included Jacqueline Wolfrum, Paul Barone, Stacy Springs, Anthony Sinskey, and Robert Kotin, all of MIT’s Center for Biomedical Innovation. The work was supported by the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center, Sanofi S.A., Sartorius AG, Artemis Life Sciences, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

For almost 30 years, Mary Gallagher has supported award-winning faculty members and their labs in the same way she tends the soil beneath her garden. In both, she pairs diligence and experience with a delight in the way that interconnected ecosystems contribute to the growth of a plant, or an idea, seeded in the right place.

Gallagher, a senior administrative assistant in the Department of Biology, has spent much of her career at MIT. Her mastery in navigating the myriad tasks required by administrators, and her ability to build connections, have supported and elevated everyone she interacts with, at the Institute and beyond.

Oh, the people you’ll know

Gallagher didn’t start her career at MIT. Her first role following graduation from the University of Vermont in the early 1980s was at a nearby community arts center, where she worked alongside a man who would become a household name in American politics. 

“This guy had just been elected mayor, shockingly, of Burlington, Vermont, by under 100 votes, unseating the incumbent. He went in and created this arts council and youth office,” Gallagher recalls.

That political newcomer was none other than a young Bernie Sanders, now the longest-serving independent senator in U.S. congressional history. 

Gallagher arrived at MIT in 1996, becoming an administrative assistant (aka “lab admin”) in what was then called the MIT Energy Laboratory. Shortly after her arrival, Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics and Engineering Systems Ernest Moniz transformed the laboratory into the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI).

Gallagher quickly learned how versatile the work of an administrator can be. As MITEI rapidly grew, she interacted with people across campus and its vast array of disciplines at the Institute, including mechanical engineering, political science, and economics. 

“Admin jobs at MIT are really crazy because of the depth of work that we’re willing to do to support the institution. I was hired to do secretarial work, and next thing I know, I was traveling all the time, and planning a five-day, 5,000-person event down in D.C.,” Gallagher says. “I developed crazy computer and event-planner skills.”

Although such tasks may seem daunting to some, Gallagher has been thrilled with the opportunities she’s had to meet so many people and develop so many new skills. As a lab admin in MITEI for 18 years, she mastered navigating MIT administration, lab finances, and technical support. When Moniz left MITEI to lead the U.S. Department of Energy under President Obama, she moved to the Department of Biology at MIT.

Mutual thriving

Over the years, Gallagher has fostered the growth of students and colleagues at MIT, and vice versa. 

Friend and former colleague Samantha Farrell recalls her first days at MITEI as a rather nervous and very "green" temp, when Gallagher offered an excellent cappuccino from Gallagher’s new Nespresso coffee machine. 

“I treasure her friendship and knowledge,” Farrell says. “She taught me everything I needed to know about being an admin and working in research.”

Gallagher’s experience has also set faculty across the Institute up for success. 

According to one principal investigator she currently supports, Novartis Professor of Biology Leonard Guarente, Gallagher is “extremely impactful and, in short, an ideal administrative assistant."

Similarly, professor of biology Daniel Lew is grateful that her extensive MIT experience was available as he moved his lab to the Institute in recent years. “Mary was invaluable in setting up and running the lab, teaching at MIT, and organizing meetings and workshops,” Lew says. “She is a font of knowledge about MIT.”

A willingness to share knowledge, resources, and sometimes a cappuccino, is just as critical as a willingness to learn, especially at a teaching institution like MIT. So it goes without saying that the students at MIT have left their mark on Gallagher in turn — including teaching her how to format a digital table of contents on her very first day at MIT.

“Working with undergrads and grad students is my favorite part of MIT. Their generosity leaves me breathless,” says Gallagher. “No matter how busy they are, they’re always willing to help another person.” 

Campus community

Gallagher cites the decline in community following the Covid-19 pandemic shutdown as one of her most significant challenges. 

Prior to Covid, Gallagher says, “MIT had this great sense of community. Everyone had projects, volunteered, and engaged. The campus was buzzing, it was a hoot!” 

She nurtured that community, from active participation in the MIT Women’s League to organizing an award-winning relaunch of Artist Behind the Desk. This subgroup of the MIT Working Group for Support Staff Issues hosted lunchtime recitals and visual art shows to bring together staff artists around campus, for which the group received a 2005 MIT Excellence Award for Creating Connections.

Moreover, Gallagher is an integral part of the smaller communities within the labs she supports.

Professor of biology and American Cancer Society Professor Graham Walker, yet another Department of Biology faculty member Gallagher supports, says, “Mary’s personal warmth and constant smile has lit up my lab for many years, and we are all grateful to have her as such a good colleague and friend.”

She strives to restore the sense of community that the campus used to have, but recognizes that striving for bygone days is futile.

“You can never go back in time and make the future what it was in the past,” she says. “You have to reimagine how we can make ourselves special in a new way.”

Spreading her roots

Gallagher’s life has been inextricably shaped by the Institute, and MIT, in turn, would not be what it is if not for Gallagher’s willingness to share her wisdom on the complexities of administration alongside the “joie de vivre” of her garden’s butterflies.

She recently bought a home in rural New Hampshire, trading the buzzing crowds of campus for the buzzing of local honeybees. Her work ethic is reflected in her ongoing commitment to curiosity, through reading about native plant life and documenting pollinating insects as they wander about her flowers. 

Just as she can admire each bug and flower for the role it plays in the larger system, Gallagher has participated in and contributed to a culture of appreciating the role of every individual within the whole.

“At MIT’s core, they believe that everybody brings something to the table,” she says. “I wouldn’t be who I am if I didn’t work at MIT and meet all these people.”

Good Wall Street Journal article on criminal gangs that scam people out of their credit card information:

Your highway toll payment is now past due, one text warns. You have U.S. Postal Service fees to pay, another threatens. You owe the New York City Department of Finance for unpaid traffic violations.

The texts are ploys to get unsuspecting victims to fork over their credit-card details. The gangs behind the scams take advantage of this information to buy iPhones, gift cards, clothing and cosmetics.

Criminal organizations operating out of China, which investigators blame for the toll and postage messages, have used them to make more than $1 billion over the last three years, according to the Department of Homeland Security...

Electric vehicles are becoming cost-competitive with gas-fueled cars, with battery prices falling 30 percent over the last five years.

Regulations to enable large rate increases contrast with other state efforts to stabilize insurance markets.

Greenhouse gas pollution in 2035 would be only 6 percent lower than levels that countries have previously promised to hit by 2030, according to a U.N. report based on skimpy submissions from governments around the world.

Both parties blame the other for rising electricity prices. Washington lawmakers are watching closely with the midterms in mind.

A Swedish company showed off its hydrofoil technology on the Potomac River last week.

“It’s a matter of time,” said Tata Power CEO Praveer Sinha. “There are a large number of plants in India which are more than 40 years old."

Swedish startup Stegra has been hailed as a bellwether for the steel industry’s fossil-fuel-free transformation but is facing a funding crunch.

“Achieving [Paris Agreement] targets while balancing the impact on people’s lives is a very significant challenge,” Environment Minister Hirotaka Ishihara said.

An Indian Ocean tsunami and Hurricane Katrina spurred the rapid expansion of the global housing nonprofit.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 28 October 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02465-0

A human-driven increase in upwelling of carbon-rich deep waters threatens the efficiency of the Southern Ocean carbon sink, which substantially mitigates global warming. Long-term observations reveal that surface freshening since the 1990s has acted as a barrier, preventing CO2 release to the atmosphere and, temporarily, preserving the Southern Ocean’s role in slowing down climate change.

Nuclear security can be a daunting topic: The consequences seem unimaginable, but the threat is real. Some scholars, though, thrive on the close study of the world’s most dangerous weapons. That includes Caitlin Talmadge PhD ’11, an MIT faculty member who is part of the Institute’s standout group of nuclear security specialists.

Talmadge, who joined the MIT faculty in 2023, has become a prominent scholar in security studies, conducting meticulous research about militaries’ on-the-ground capabilities and how they are influenced by political circumstances.

Earlier in her career, Talmadge studied the military capabilities of armies run by dictatorships. For much of the last decade, though, she has focused on specific issues of nuclear security: When can conventional wars raise risks of nuclear use? In what circumstances will countries ratchet up nuclear threats?

“A scenario that’s interested me a lot is one where the conduct of a conventional war actually raises specific nuclear escalation risks,” Talmadge says, noting that military operations may put pressure on an adversary’s nuclear capabilities. “There are many other instabilities in the world. But I’ve gotten pretty interested in what it means that the U.S., unlike in the Cold War when there was more of a bipolar competition, now faces multiple nuclear-armed adversaries.”

MIT is a natural intellectual home for Talmadge, who is the Raphael Dorman and Helen Starbuck Associate Professor in MIT’s Department of Political Science. She is also part of MIT’s Security Studies Program, long the home of several of the Institute’s nuclear experts, and a core member of the recently launched MIT Center for Nuclear Security Policy, which supports scholarship as well as engagement with nuclear security officials.

“I think dialogue for practitioners and scholars is important for both sides,” says Talmadge, who served on the Defense Policy Board, a panel of outside experts that directly advises senior Pentagon leaders, during the Biden administration. “It’s important for me to do scholarship that speaks to real-world problems. And part of what we do at MIT is train future practitioners. We also sometimes brief current practitioners, meet with them, and get a perspective on the very difficult problems they encounter. That interaction is mutually beneficial.”

Why coup-proofing hurts armies

From a young age, Talmadge was interested in global events, especially military operations, while growing up in a family that supported her curiosity about the world.

“I was fortunate to have parents that encouraged those interests,” Talmadge says. “Education was a really big value in our family. I had great teachers as well.”

Talmadge earned her BA degree at Harvard University, where her interests in international relations and military operations expanded.

“I didn’t even know the term security studies before I went to college,” she says. “But I did, in college, get very interested in studying the problems that had been left by the Soviet nuclear legacy.”

Talmadge then worked at a think tank before deciding to attend graduate school. She had not been fully set on academia, as opposed to, say, working in Washington policy circles. But while earning her PhD at the Institute, she recalls, “it turned out that I really liked research, and I really liked teaching. And I loved being at MIT.”

Talmadge is quick to credit MIT’s security studies faculty for their intellectual guidance, citing the encouragement of a slew of faculty, including Barry Posen (her dissertation advisor), Taylor Fravel, Roger Peterson, Cindy Williams, Owen Cote, and Harvey Sapolsky. Her dissertation examined the combat power of armies run by authoritarians.

That research became her 2015 book, “The Dictator’s Army: Battlefield Effectiveness in Authoritarian Regimes,” published by Cornell University Press. In it she examines how, for one thing, using a military for domestic “coup-proofing” limits its utility against external forces. In the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, to cite one example, Iraq’s military improved in the later years of the war, after coup-proofing measures were dropped, whereas Iran’s army performed worse over time as it became more preoccupied with domestic opposition.

“We tend to think of militaries as being designed for external conventional wars, but autocrats use the military for regime-protection tasks, and the more you optimize your military for doing that, sometimes it’s harder to aggregate combat power against an external adversary,” Talmadge says.

In the time since that book was published, even more examples have become evident in the world.

“It may be why the Russian invasion of Ukraine did so poorly in 2022,” she adds. “When you’re a personalist dictator and divide the military so it can’t be strong enough to overthrow you, and direct the intelligence apparatus internally instead of at Ukraine, it affects what your military can achieve. It was not the only factor in 2022, but I think the authoritarian character of Russia’s civil-military relations has played a role in Russia’s rather surprising underperformance in that war.”

On to nuclear escalation

After earning her PhD from MIT, Talmadge joined the faculty of George Washington University, where she taught from 2011 to 2018; she then served on the faculty at Georgetown University, before returning to MIT. And for the last decade, she has continued to study conventional military operations while also exploring the relationship between those operations and nuclear risk.

One issue is that conventional military strikes that might degrade an opponent’s nuclear capabilities. Talmadge is examining why states adopt military postures that threaten adversaries in this way in a book that’s in progress; her co-author is Brendan Rittenhouse Green PhD ’11, a political scientist at the University of Cincinnati.

The book focuses on why the U.S. has at times adopted military postures that increase nuclear pressure on opponents. Historically these escalatory postures have been viewed as unintentional, the result of aggressive military planning.

“In this book we make a different argument, which is that often these escalatory risks are hardwired into force posture deliberately and knowingly by civilian [government leaders] who at times have strategic rationales,” Talmadge says. “If you’re my opponent and I want to deter you from starting a war, it might be helpful to convince you that if you start that war, you’re eventually going to be backed into a nuclear corner.”

This logic may explain why many countries adopt force postures that seem dangerous, and it may offer clues as to how future wars involving the U.S., Russia, China, North Korea, India, or Pakistan could unfold. It also suggests that reining in nuclear escalation risk requires more attention to civilian decisions, not just military behavior.

While being in the middle of research, book-writing, teaching, and engaging with others in the field, Talmadge is certain she has landed in an ideal academic home, especially with MIT’s work in her field being bolstered by the Stanton Foundation gift to establish the Center for Nuclear Security Policy.

“We’re so grateful for the support of the Stanton Foundation,” Talmadge says. “It’s incredibly invigorating to be in a place with so much talent and just constantly learning from the people around you. It’s really amazing, and I do not take it for granted.”

She adds: “It is a little surreal at times to be here because I’m going into the same rooms where I have memories as myself as a grad student, but now I’m the professor. I have a little bit of nostalgia. But one of my primary reasons for coming to MIT, besides the great faculty colleagues, was the students, including the chance to work with the PhD students in the Security Studies Program, and I have not been disappointed. It doesn’t feel like work. It’s a joy to try to have a positive influence helping them become scholars.”

MIT researchers recently studied a region of space called the Taurus Molecular Cloud-1 (TMC-1) and discovered more than 100 different molecules floating in the gas there — more than in any other known interstellar cloud. They used powerful radio telescopes capable of detecting very faint signals across a wide range of wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum.

With over 1,400 observing hours on the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) — the world’s largest fully steerable radio telescope, located in West Virginia — researchers in the group of Brett McGuire collected the astronomical data needed to search for molecules in deep space and have made the full dataset publicly available. From these observations, published in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series (ApJS), the team censused 102 molecules in TMC-1, a cold interstellar cloud where sunlike stars are born. Most of these molecules are hydrocarbons (made only of carbon and hydrogen) and nitrogen-rich compounds, in contrast to the oxygen-rich molecules found around forming stars. Notably, they also detected 10 aromatic molecules (ring-shaped carbon structures), which make up a small but significant fraction of the carbon in the cloud.

“This project represents the single largest amount of telescope time for a molecular line survey that has been reduced and publicly released to date, enabling the community to pursue discoveries such as biologically relevant organic matter,” said Ci Xue, a postdoc in the McGuire Group and the project’s principal researcher. “This molecular census offers a new benchmark for the initial chemical conditions for the formation of stars and planets.”

To handle the immense dataset, the researchers built an automated system to organize and analyze the results. Using advanced statistical methods, they determined the amounts of each molecule present, including variations containing slightly different atoms (such as carbon-13 or deuterium).

“The data we’re releasing here are the culmination of more than 1,400 hours of observational time on the GBT, one of the NSF’s premier radio telescopes,” says McGuire, the Class of 1943 Career Development Associate Professor of Chemistry. “In 2021, these data led to the discovery of individual PAH molecules in space for the first time, answering a three-decade-old mystery dating back to the 1980s. In the following years, many more and larger PAHs have been discovered in these data, showing that there is indeed a vast and varied reservoir of this reactive organic carbon present at the earliest stages of star and planet formation. There is still so much more science, and so many new molecular discoveries, to be made with these data, but our team feels strongly that datasets like this should be opened to the scientific community, which is why we’re releasing the fully calibrated, reduced, science-ready product freely for anyone to use.”

Overall, this study provides the single largest publicly released molecular line survey to date, enabling the scientific community to pursue discoveries such as biologically relevant molecules. This molecular census offers a new benchmark for understanding the chemical conditions that exist before stars and planets form.

This summer, nine MIT students worked across the Middle East through the MISTI Arab World Program. 

“At MISTI Arab World, the most impactful learning occurs when students venture beyond their comfort zones and experience the richness of a dynamic region,” says Maye Elqasem, program administrator of MISTI Arab World. “Our students return not only with new technical and professional capabilities, but also with a greater sense of self, resilience, and global awareness.” 

Since it launched in 2014, more than 200 students have participated in MISTI Arab World, providing them with essential international perspectives while connecting them to meaningful work.

“Each internship is a bridge connecting MIT to the region, bridging theory with implementation,” Elqasem says.

Seeing the Middle East for herself

One of this year’s students was junior Khadiza Rahman, a chemical and biological engineering major. Born in Bangladesh and raised in Queens, New York, Rahman hadn’t left the United States in over a decade. She spent 10 weeks in Casablanca, Morocco, working at the OCP Group, the world’s largest phosphate mining company.

Rahman’s interest in the region was sparked last year as a student in class 21H.161 (The Modern Middle East), a course taught by Pouya Alimagham.

“It was an eye-opening class. Through scholarly works, my opinion of the region changed and I realized biases that I held. It made me want to go to the Middle East to see it for myself,” she says.

Her internship was with Pixel, a sustainability startup incubated at OCP through Le Mouvement, an internal initiative where employees pitch business ideas at a demo day (similar to those often hosted at MIT) and then receive seed funding and the workday space to launch them.

“Pixel aims to create an integrated system for helping farmers around the world get better crop results,” Rahman explains.

“I essentially combined genomic, climate, and environmental data to create a model to provide actionable forecasts that could be used for policy decisions. For example, if we were to receive the climate data, it could predict the biological richness and diversity of the soil.”

The experience reinforced her interest in engineering and management while also challenging and inspiring her in unexpected ways. For example,  her coworkers began each day with tea and conversation. This “human-centered approach” is something she hopes to carry into her own career.

For housing, Rahman was paired with another woman from MIT, and MISTI and helped them find an apartment in Casablanca’s financial center. “At the beginning, I was a little afraid to venture outside my comfortable apartment, but the real experiences you get from MISTI come from going out and exploring,” she says.

One highlight was a hike in the Ourika Valley outside Marrakech. “I wasn’t sure if I was physically prepared for a long hike,” she admits. “We climbed a really high mountain in the Ourika Valley. It was scary at first, but it turned into an amazing experience, with incredible views of the mountain range and waterfalls. I stood there at the peak and realized that I should never have doubted myself in the first place.” 

That’s a lesson that Rahman says she’ll remember amidst whatever challenges her future career throws her way. 

Harnessing AI to improve the passenger experience

MIT senior Amitoj Singh, a computer science and electrical engineering major, joined MISTI after taking four courses on Middle Eastern history and politics. His internship with Abu Dhabi Airports combined his regional interest with his technical expertise and gave him a new sense of direction.

Raised near Los Angeles, Singh had never left North America. He first connected with MISTI in January 2025 through doing a short internship in a startup in the MITdesignX accelerator in Dubai. After helping a fintech company streamline United Arab Emirates mortgage applications using artificial intelligence, he sought out another, longer work opportunity.  

Elqasem worked closely with him to finalize a placement with Abu Dhabi Airports Smart Airports Initiative.

“My skill set fit what the airport was looking for, and it turned out to be a perfect match,” Singh says.

MISTI also paired him with mentor Rajeet Sampat, a 2017-18 MIT Sloan Fellow and vice president of strategy at Abu Dhabi Airports.

“My day-to-day work in the office involved working on an independent use-case, which is developing an application of machine learning and AI software to perform predictive data analysis at Abu Dhabi Airports,” Singh says.

The Smart Airports Initiative uses biometrics and AI to streamline travel — from facial recognition that replaces stressfully long check-ins to real-time virtual simulations of airport operations.

“For example, if an airline experiences an unexpected flight delay, air traffic controllers would be able to seamlessly visit their virtual environment dashboard to make an immediate decision about which terminals the aircraft can park at when it arrives, eliminating further delays,” Singh explains.

Despite the fact that he was directing various airport divisions, Sampat took his mentoring responsibility seriously, meeting with Singh weekly, helping him to clarify strengths and identify aspects of work that could bring long-term fulfillment.

“Very inclusive, collaborative, and startup-inspired,” is how Sampat describes his office’s culture.

For Singh, the most valuable lesson was learning to work in a global environment with colleagues from many backgrounds and specialties. “When I got stuck, there was always someone to ask for help in finding a solution,” he says. “They were highly welcoming and collaborative.”

Singh is still exploring career paths, but discovered he seeks work that connects him to others and “ultimately be able to use college as a journey that will eventually help me to give back to others more.”

Sampat offered him advice: “You can be somebody who enjoys coding and putting things together, but there’s another side of things in the corporate world. I need people with strengths like you to also strategize and lead the way.” To push him, Sampat invited Singh to join the AI team in shaping future strategy. “That is how a coder turns into a leader,” he says.

To learn more about applying or partnering with the program, visit the MISTI Arab World website.

We’ve known since ancient times that physical activity can prevent and treat a broad range of mental and physical illnesses. But today, exercise is not a central focus of modern health-care systems. Why? This is the motivating question behind MIT’s class STS.041/PE&W.0537 (Exercise is Medicine: From Ancient Civilizations to Modern Healthcare Systems) — a collaboration between the MIT Program in Science, Technology, and Society (STS) and the Department of Athletics, Physical Education, and Recreation (DAPER).

Going beyond the MIT tradition of hands-on learning, Exercise is Medicine (EIM) offers full-body experiential education, combining readings, lectures, and physical activity at the Zesiger Center and on MIT’s playing fields. Students investigate topics including barriers to exercise, loneliness as a public health issue, and social determinants of health through partner acrobatics, broomball, and sailing. During midterm week, they reflect on the mental health impact of activities, including meditation and pickleball. They also learn about the principles of traditional Chinese medicine through Qigong.

Co-taught by professors Jennifer Light and Carrie Moore, in addition to other DAPER instructors, EIM was first offered in spring 2024 for 20 undergraduates. Students from every major are invited to enroll — the next offering filled quickly, doubling in size to 40 students, with a long waitlist.

Exercise is Medicine is one of three courses Light and Moore offer as part of the MIT Project on Embodied Education, launched in 2022. Professor Light was eager to create an academic class where students spent at least 50 percent of their learning time out of their seats doing a physical activity that reinforced the academic objectives she was presenting.

“I was developing a new research project on the ancient wisdom and modern science of movement and learning, and was looking to develop courses that put this method into practice. Through Anthony Grant, athletic director and head of the DAPER, I connected with Carrie. We are having so much fun collaborating; one course quickly became two, and now three,” says Light.

History of medicine and health systems courses have long been a staple of the STS program. In EIM, students visit with MIT Chief Health Officer Cecelia Stuopis, who offers insight into the place of exercise in health care throughout the history of the Institute. Discussions also include the economic factors that may impact ideas and innovations from STEM fields.

The partnership with DAPER helps students deepen their understanding of the readings and lectures and, Light hopes, sets them up to find ways to integrate movement into their lives after the semester’s end. Moore adds, “This course allows students to reflect on the impact of movement on their cognition — experiencing increases in motivation, mood, focus, and community, as well as improved retention of content by engaging more parts of the brain.”

“DAPER instructors have an amazing ability to make so many physical activities accessible at the beginner level, and students come away from the course appreciating new activities they can do while on campus or as they move into the real world,” says Light.

Nathan Kim, a senior in Course 15 (Management), says, “When I think of my MIT education, I mostly think about problem sets and studying for exams. Learning is initially thought of as a cognitive output and performance. Even in project-based classes, there’s little attention to the body’s role in comprehension. However, this course broke that mold. Instead of treating the body as separate from the mind, it treated it as an essential partner in learning.”

“I love that this class stretches students’ minds and bodies at the same time. They get to learn serious academic content, try all sorts of new physical activities, and do so in a context that aims to make what they’re learning personally relevant to the remainder of their time in college and life beyond. The idea that their bodies aren’t just there to transport their heads around campus — but can be resources for academic learning — is a revelation to pretty much everyone in the class,” says Light.

Emily Zhou, a senior in computer science and engineering, adds, “After reading about the role of team sports in reducing loneliness and improving mental health, I didn’t expect the connection to feel so immediate. But the moment I was slipping and falling on the ice [while playing broomball] with my teammates, some of whom I had never met before, it clicked for me. As we coordinated strategies and cheered together every time we made a goal, I gained a deeper understanding of the reading, and why collective physical activity builds meaningful connections. I could genuinely feel how community forms differently when I’m trusting people with my physical body.”

“It’s a unique and enriching experience for the students to have experiential learning be a component of the class. Not only does it create shared memories of something special that we hope they will have for a lifetime, but it’s also a lot of fun. It frees their minds from to-do lists and other tasks and it gives them extra energy throughout the day. Their brains may be tired at the end of the day, but not their bodies,” says Moore.

The class also fulfills MIT’s General Institute Requirements. Students who successfully complete the class earn HASS credit and two Physical Education and Wellness points. 

Earlier this year, Light and Moore presented findings from their ongoing class collaborations at the National Association for Kinesiology in Higher Education conference. The pair showcased how they connected the academic side of MIT with the activity side of campus, with the hopes of inspiring others to follow in a similar direction. They’re also working to help other MIT instructors bridge the two sides of Massachusetts Avenue.

“Professor Light and I have created a synergy of what education could be,” says Moore. “The model created works at MIT and is received well by our students, so we want to help faculty reshape the way they teach to enrich learning and the student experience. We hope that when our students become leaders in their careers, they will share the lessons they learned in our classes with their colleagues. If they do so, then we’ve done our job.”

MIT professors Michael McDonald and Kristala Prather embody a form of mentorship defined not only by technical expertise, but by care. They remind us that the most lasting academic guidance is not only about advancing research, but about nurturing their students along the way.

For McDonald’s students, his presence is one of deep empathy and steady support. They describe him as fully committed to their well-being and success — someone whose influence reaches beyond academics to the heart of what it means to feel valued in a community. Prather is celebrated for the way she invests in her mentees beyond formal advising, offering guidance and encouragement that helps them chart paths forward with confidence.

Together, they create spaces where students are affirmed as individuals as well as scholars. 

Professors McDonald and Prather are members of the 2023–25 Committed to Caring cohort, recognized for their dedication to fostering growth, resilience, and belonging across MIT.

Michael McDonald: Empathetic, dedicated, and deeply understanding

Michael McDonald is an associate professor of physics at the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. His research focuses on the evolution of galaxies and clusters of galaxies, and the role that environment plays in dictating this evolution. 

A shining example of an empathetic and caring advisor, McDonald supports his students, fostering an environment where they can overcome challenges and grow with confidence. One of his students says that “if one of his research or class students is progressing slowly or otherwise struggling, he treats them with respect, care, and understanding, enabling them to maintain confidence and succeed.”

McDonald also goes above and beyond in offering help and guidance, never expecting thanks, praise, or commendation. A student expressed, “he does not need to be asked to advocate for students experiencing personal or academic challenges. He does not need to be asked to improve graduate student education and well-being at MIT. He does not need to be asked to care for students who may otherwise be left behind.”

When asked to describe his advising style, McDonald shared the mantra “we’re humans first, scientists second." He models his commitment to this idea, prioritizing balance for himself while also ensuring that his students feel happy and fulfilled. “If I’m not doing well, or am unhappy with my own work/life balance, then I’m not going to be a very good or understanding advisor,” McDonald says.

Students are quick to identify McDonald as a dedicated and deeply understanding teacher and mentor. “Mike was consistently engaging, humble, and kind, both bolstering our love of astrophysics and making us feel welcome and supported,” one advisee commended.

On top of weekly meetings, he conducts separate check-ins with his students on a semesterly basis to track not only their accomplishments and progress toward their personal goals, but also to evaluate his own mentoring and identify areas of improvement.

McDonald “thinks deeply and often about the long-term trajectory of his advisees, how they will fit into the modern research landscape, and helps them to develop professional and personal support networks that will help them succeed and thrive.”

McDonald feels that projects should be so much fun that they do not feel like work. To this end, he spends a lot of time developing and fleshing out a wide variety of research projects. When he takes on a new student, he presents them with five to 10 possible projects that they could lead, and works with them to find the one that is best matched to the student’s interests and abilities. 

“This is a lot of work on my end — and many of these projects never see the light of day — but I think it leads to better outcomes and happier group members,” McDonald says. One of the most impactful qualities in a mentor and supervisor is how they deal with challenges and failures, both their own and those of others, which McDonald does very effectively.

One nominator sums up McDonald’s character, writing that “Michael McDonald fully embodies the spirit of Committed to Caring as a teacher, advisor, counselor, and role model for the MIT community. He consistently impacts the lives of his students, mentees, and the physics community as a whole, encouraging us to be the best versions of ourselves while striving to be a better mentor, father, and friend.”

Kristala Prather: Meaningful support and departmental impact

Kristala Prather is the Arthur Dehon Little Professor of Chemical Engineering and is the head of the Department of Chemical Engineering. Her research involves the design and assembly of novel pathways for biological synthesis, enhancement of enzyme activity and control of metabolic flux, and bioprocess engineering and design.

Prather has proven to be a dedicated mentor and role model for her students, particularly those from underrepresented backgrounds. One nominator mentions that as an immigrant woman of color with no prior exposure to academia before coming to MIT, Prather’s guidance has been extremely important for her. Prather has pointed the nominator to resources that she didn't know existed, and helped her navigate U.S. and academic norms that she was not well-versed in. 

“As an international student navigating two new cultures (that of the U.S. as well as that of academia), it is easy to feel inadequate, confused, frustrated, or undeserving,” the student stated. Prather’s level of mentorship may not be easy to find, and it is extremely important to the success of all students, especially to marginalized students. 

Prather actively listens to her students’ concerns and helps them to identify their areas of academic improvement with regard to their desired career path. She consistently creates a comfortable space for authentic conversations where mentees feel supported both professionally and personally. Through her deep caring, advisees feel a sense of belonging and worthiness in academia.

“I treat everyone fairly, which is not the same as treating everyone the same,” Prather says. This is Prather’s way of acknowledging the reality that each individual comes as a unique person; different people need different advising approaches. The goal is to get everyone to the same endpoint, irrespective of where they start.

In addition to the meaningful support which Prather provides her students, she has also dedicated extra time to mentoring. One nominator explained that Prather has been known to meet with individual students in the department to check in on their progress and help them navigate academia. She also works closely with the Office of Graduate Education to connect students from disadvantaged backgrounds to resources that will help them succeed. In the department, she is known to be a trustworthy and caring mentor. 

Since much of Prather’s mentoring goes beyond her official duties, this work can easily be overlooked. It is clear that she has deliberately dedicated extra time to help students, adding to her numerous commitments and official positions both inside and outside of the department. Through their nominations, students called for the recognition of Prather’s mentorship, stating that it  “has meaningfully impacted so many in the department.”

I assume I don’t have to explain last week’s Louvre jewel heist. I love a good caper, and have (like many others) eagerly followed the details. An electric ladder to a second-floor window, an angle grinder to get into the room and the display cases, security guards there more to protect patrons than valuables—seven minutes, in and out.

There were security lapses:

The Louvre, it turns out—at least certain nooks of the ancient former palace—is something like an anopticon: a place where no one is observed. The world now knows what the four thieves (two burglars and two accomplices) realized as recently as last week: The museum’s Apollo Gallery, which housed the stolen items, was monitored by a single outdoor camera angled away from its only exterior point of entry, a balcony. In other words, a free-roaming Roomba could have provided the world’s most famous museum with more information about the interior of this space. There is no surveillance footage of the break-in...