Nature Climate Change, Published online: 21 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02635-8

New steel capacity expansion is critical for the feasibility of climate targets, as plants operate for decades. Researchers estimate that while existing and planned plants could commit large emissions, strategic investments using climate finance can largely avert this.

MIT scientists Sven Dorkenwald and Whitney Henry have been named 2026 Searle Scholars, an award given annually to 15 exceptional early-career researchers in the fields of biomedical sciences and chemistry. Dorkenwald is an assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences and an investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. Henry is the Robert A. Swanson (1969) Career Development Professor of Life Sciences and an intramural faculty member at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.

In addition, MIT alumni Irene Kaplow ’10 and Jared Mayers PhD ’15 were also honored.

Chosen by a scientific advisory board, Searle Scholars are considered among the most creative young researchers pursuing high-risk/high-reward research. The Searle Scholars Program is funded through the Searle Funds at The Chicago Community Trust and administered by Kinship Foundation. Each scholar will each receive $450,000 in flexible funding to support their work over the next three years.

Sven Dorkenwald

Sven Dorkenwald is a computational neuroscientist investigating the organizational principles of neuronal circuits. The synaptic connectivity of neurons, their connectome, is fundamental to how networks of neurons function. Dorkenwald develops computational and collaborative tools to map, analyze, and interpret synapse-resolution connectomes. His work has led to large connectomic reconstructions of the fruit fly brain and parts of mammalian brains. He uses these connectomes to investigate the architecture of neuronal circuits and how their structure supports complex computations.

“As I establish my new lab, the Searle Scholars Award will help us launch ambitious projects and set our long-term scientific direction,” says Dorkenwald. “I am deeply grateful for the support from the Kinship Foundation and look forward to interacting with this amazing cohort of Searle Scholars.”

Dorkenwald joined the faculty of MIT in 2026 as an assistant professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and an investigator at the McGovern Institute. He earned a BS in physics and an MS in computer engineering from the University of Heidelberg, followed by a PhD in computer science and neuroscience at Princeton University in 2023 under the mentorship of Sebastian Seung and Mala Murthy. Dorkenwald completed his postdoctoral training as a Shanahan Research Fellow at the Allen Institute and the University of Washington, while serving as a visiting faculty researcher at Google Research.

Whitney Henry

Whitney Henry investigates the potential of ferroptosis, an iron-dependent form of cell death, for developing novel therapies that target subpopulations of cancer cells that are highly metastatic, therapy-resistant, and therefore critical instigators of tumor relapse. Her research is focused on uncovering the molecular factors influencing ferroptosis susceptibility, investigating its effects on the tumor microenvironment, and developing innovative methods to manipulate ferroptosis resistance in living organisms, drawing from functional genomics, metabolomics, bioengineering, and a range of in vitro and in vivo models.

“I am incredibly grateful to the Kinship Foundation for supporting our research and giving us the freedom to ask bold, curiosity-driven scientific questions,” says Henry. “This support allows us to pursue ambitious ideas, take creative risks, and embark on new research directions.”

Henry joined the MIT faculty in 2024 as an assistant professor in the Department of Biology and a member of the Koch Institute, and is currently an HHMI Freeman Hrabowski Scholar. She received her bachelor's degree in biology with a minor in chemistry from Grambling State University and her PhD from Harvard University. Following her doctoral studies, she worked in the lab of Robert Weinberg at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and was supported by fellowships from the Jane Coffin Childs Memorial Fund for Medical Research and the Ludwig Center at MIT.

Alumni also honored

Irene Kaplow ’10, a graduate of the MIT Department of Mathematics, is an assistant professor in the Department of Biology and the Ray and Stephanie Lane Computational Biology Department at Carnegie Mellon University. Her selection as a Searle Scholar is for “deciphering transcriptional regulatory mechanisms underlying mammalian dietary phenotype evolution and their relationships to transcriptional regulatory responses to changes in diet.”

Jared Mayers PhD ’15, who earned his doctorate from the MIT Department of Biology, is an assistant professor at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center at the University of Washington. His selection as a Searle Scholar is for “a reverse-translational framework to decipher metabolic vulnerabilities of bacterial pathogens.”

In 2023, the Center for Computational Science and Engineering (CCSE), an academic unit in the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, introduced a new standalone PhD degree program. This interdisciplinary PhD program blends both coursework and a thesis, enabling students to pursue research in cross-cutting methodological aspects of computational science and engineering.

PhD candidate Emily Williams is poised to be the first graduate of the program. With a technical background in aerospace engineering and applied mathematics, her research interests include stochastic and generative modeling for multiscale chaotic systems. She earned a BS in aerospace engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and an MS in aeronautics and astronautics from MIT. She was awarded the Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship, which funded her doctoral research. Here, she discusses her experience with the program and its impact on her career trajectory.

Q: What has been a highlight of the CCSE degree program?

A: I found the program curriculum to be extremely thoughtful and intentional. In particular, the program of study was constructed to cover many important areas of computational science and engineering research and education, from engineering and mathematical modeling to scientific and parallel computing. I found a lot of overlap with the DoE CSGF program of study, so I was given a lot of freedom to pursue very interesting technical electives that fit within CSE that I might not have been able to explore if I had been in a discipline-centric program.

Q: Why is this program so impactful, especially in the context of having a stand-alone PhD program?

A: I think a stand-alone PhD program helps to further establish the MIT CCSE as a leader in CSE research and education. The joint programs give graduate researchers more opportunity to learn and apply leading CSE methodologies to their disciplinary areas and primarily stay within their home department. For me, I’ve found that I’ve had more opportunities for collaboration, in potentially applying my methods to a wide range of different exciting applications. I think this theme of collaboration will continue to foster through those advancing through the standalone program in particular.

Q: What advice would you give to students considering this program?

A: I think my advice would be to keep an open mind. My interest in CSE was shaped by common threads in my education and research interests over the years that I didn’t think were connected at all. Through my fellowship and the standalone program, I felt like I was able to create my own path to my degree and take courses that excited me and fit within the CSE themes of our program of study.

A high-performance steel with MIT origins has come full circle. 

After proving its worth in Formula One and Baja 1000 race cars, the computationally designed material has now been incorporated into the 2026 electric race car built by the student-run MIT Motorsports team.

The MIT car is scheduled to race against cars from other universities in the Formula SAE Electric competition in June.

Designing materials

Gregory B. Olson, professor of the practice in the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering, founded the MIT Steel Research Group (SRG) in 1985 with the goal of using computers to accelerate the hunt for new materials by plumbing databases of those materials’ fundamental properties. It was the beginning of a new field — computational materials design — that would eventually lead to the Materials Genome Initiative, a national program announced by President Barack Obama in 2011.

In 1985, however, “nobody knew whether we could really do this,” says Olson. Olson and colleagues eventually showed that the approach worked, and around 1990 the Army Research Office funded an SRG project aimed at developing high-performance steels for the gears in helicopters. That work came to the attention of producers at “Infinite Voyage,” a science documentary that ran on the Public Broadcasting System.

“When “Infinite Voyage” came to see me about the helicopter gear steels,” Olson remembers, “we got into a discussion about my interest in race cars” and whether the steels might have an application there.

The answer was yes, and Olson found himself connecting with the Newman/Haas racing team that Michael and Mario Andretti were driving for. Newman/Haas was also featured in the “Infinite Voyage” program, so “my first discussion with their chief engineer was on live television,” says Olson, who is also affiliated with the MIT Materials Research Laboratory.

He and colleagues went on to design a novel gear steel that could withstand the extreme conditions associated with a race car. They did the work over a weekend. “The surface hardness was the same as for a conventional gear steel, but we gave it the core properties of an armor steel,” Olson says.

Introducing Ferrium C61

That steel, which became known as Ferrium C61, was commercialized through QuesTek Innovations, the materials-design company Olson co-founded. It became the company’s first product.

Although it was never used in Newman/Haas cars, QuesTek pitched it to Baja 1000 off-road racers.

“We particularly focused on the 1600 class of those racing dune buggies. They would go flying over a sand dune with the wheels spinning in the air. And when they land, there would be a tremendous jolt to the drive gears,” Olson says. The result: The racers’ gears made with conventional steel regularly failed.

“The average life for conventional drive gears was point-six race,” says Olson (meaning on average they lasted for only 60 percent of a race). “With Ferrium C61, we changed it from point-six to six races.” The gears could now complete an average six races before failing.

QuesTek brought that data to meetings with different Formula One teams “to try to get C61 into other racing classes,” Olson says. 

Enter Red Bull, the British-licensed Formula One team. “The leading mechanical failure in Formula One racing is gearbox failures,” Olsen says. The gearbox houses the gearset, or collection of gears, in a car’s engine. “Once Red Bull adopted our steel for the gearset, they never had any gearbox failures, and they were world champions four times in the last decade.”

MIT Motorsports heard of this history and within the past year approached Olson about getting a sample of C61. “QuesTek had some stock available, and sold it at a high discount to the MIT team with, of course, instructions on how to heat-treat it,” Olson says. 

Because, of course, the students, who are mostly undergraduates, made the gears — and the car — themselves.

When it comes to keeping our texts, chats, and other digital messages safe from prying eyes, we have a powerful tool: end-to-end encryption. Used correctly, end-to-end encryption turns our conversations online into secret messages that can only be decoded by their intended recipients. In our latest EFFector newsletter, we're covering new developments in this tool, and how you can use it to prevent tech companies, governments, and other eavesdroppers from listening in.

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For over 35 years, EFFector has been your guide to understanding the intersection of technology, civil liberties, and the law. This latest issue covers the shaky science backing social media bans, Canada's surveillance nightmare bill, and a victory for keeping private messages private.

Prefer to listen in? EFFector is now available on all major podcast platforms. This time, we're chatting with EFF Senior Security and Privacy Activist Thorin Klosowski on an important step forward for encrypted messaging—as well as a notable disappointment. You can find the episode and subscribe on your podcast platform of choice:

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Good report:

Executive Summary: Let’s say you wanted to make sure that your AI is secure. Can you just maximize the security and privacy benchmark and call it a day? Nope, because benchmarks don’t actually work for measuring AI capabilities (even when they are NOT emergent systemic properties like security). So let’s take a step back: how do you measure security in the first place? Good question. Over the last 30 years, security engineering for software evolved from black box penetration testing, through whitebox code analysis and architectural risk analysis to de facto process-driven standards like the Building Security In Maturity Model (BSIMM). Software had a very deep impact on business operations, and it appears that AI is going to have an even deeper impact. Will a software security-like measurement move work for AI? Probably. In the meantime we can make real progress in AI security by cleaning up our WHAT piles and managing risk by identifying and applying good assurance processes. (Spoiler alert: no matter what we do, we still don’t get a security meter for AI, so we need to be extra vigilant about security.)...

House Science Chair Brian Babin wants to ensure "rigorous oversight" is applied to companies that seek to alter the atmosphere.

Lone Star State officials are scrambling to get ready for projects that serve artificial intelligence, but a draft water outlook skips the subject.

Electric cars are expected to reach 30 percent of vehicle sales this year.

Insurers lack crucial detail about homes such as roof condition. In half of the homes surveyed by Moody's, insurance was mispriced.

Rep. Kathy Castor is still confident she can stay in Congress despite redistricting meant to push her out.

"It cannot be as bad as we thought, but it cannot be as good as we hoped,” said a climate researcher.

Urban camps are scaling back activities for children due to burdensome safety plan requirements, and rural camps are closing due to uncertainty.

The market for carbon credits has come under intense scrutiny in recent years after a series of projects were found to have exaggerated their climate benefits.

The startup said it was impossible to secure "conditions necessary to obtain the financing required" to proceed with the project.

Among all of the possible chemical compounds, it’s estimated that between 1020 and 1060 may hold potential as small-molecule drugs.

Evaluating each of those compounds experimentally would be far too time-consuming for chemists. So, in recent years, researchers have begun using artificial intelligence to help identify compounds that could make good drug candidates. 

One of those researchers is MIT Associate Professor Connor Coley PhD ’19, the Class of 1957 Career Development Associate Professor with shared appointments in the departments of Chemical Engineering and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing. His research straddles the line between chemical engineering and computer science, as he develops and deploys computational models to analyze vast numbers of possible chemical compounds, design new compounds, and predict reaction pathways that could generate those compounds. 

“It’s a very general approach that could be applied to any application of organic molecules, but the primary application that we think about is small-molecule drug discovery,” he says.

The intersection of AI and science

Coley’s interest in science runs in the family. In fact, he says, his family includes more scientists than non-scientists, including his father, a radiologist; his mother, who earned a degree in molecular biophysics and biochemistry before going to the MIT Sloan School of Management; and his grandmother, a math professor.

As a high school student in Dublin, Ohio, Coley participated in Science Olympiad competitions and graduated from high school at the age of 16. He then headed to Caltech, where he chose chemical engineering as a major because it offered a way to combine his interests in science and math.

During his undergraduate years, he also pursued an interest in computer science, working in a structural biology lab using the Fortran programming language to help solve the crystal structure of proteins. After graduating from Caltech, he decided to keep going in chemical engineering and came to MIT in 2014 to start a PhD.

Advised by professors Klavs Jensen and William Green, Coley worked on ways to optimize automated chemical reactions. His work focused on combining machine learning and cheminformatics — the application of computation methods to analyze chemical data — to plan reaction pathways that could make new drug molecules. He also worked on designing hardware that could be used to perform those reactions automatically. 

Part of that work was done through a DARPA-funded program called Make-It, which was focused on using machine learning and data science to improve the synthesis of medicines and other useful compounds from simple building blocks.

“That was my real entry point into thinking about cheminformatics, thinking about machine learning, and thinking about how we can use models to understand how different chemicals can be made and what reactions are possible,” Coley says.

Coley began applying for faculty jobs while still a graduate student, and accepted an offer from MIT at age 25. He received a mix of advice for and against taking a job at the same school where he went to graduate school, and eventually decided that a position at MIT was too enticing to turn down.

“MIT is a very special place in terms of the resources and the fluidity across departments. MIT seemed to be doing a really good job supporting the intersection of AI and science, and it was a vibrant ecosystem to stay in,” he says. “The caliber of students, the enthusiasm of the students, and just the incredible strength of collaborations definitely outweighed any potential concerns of staying in the same place.”

Chemistry intuition

Coley deferred the faculty position for one year to do a postdoc at the Broad Institute, where he sought more experience in chemical biology and drug discovery. There, he worked on ways to identify small molecules, from billions of candidates in DNA-encoded libraries, that might have binding interactions with mutated proteins associated with diseases.

After returning to MIT in 2020, he built his lab group with the mission of deploying AI not only to synthesize existing compounds with therapeutic potential, but also to design new molecules with desirable properties and new ways to make them. Over the past few years, his lab has developed a variety of computational approaches to tackle those goals. 

“We try to think about how to best pair a challenge in chemistry with a potential computational solution. And often that pairing motivates the development of new methods,” Coley says. One model his lab has developed, known as ShEPhERD, was trained to evaluate potential new drug molecules based on how they will interact with target proteins, based on the drug molecules’ three-dimensional shapes. This model is now being used by pharmaceutical companies to help them discover new drugs.

“We’re trying to give more of a medicinal chemistry intuition to the generative model, so the model is aware of the right criteria and considerations,” Coley says.

In another project, Coley’s lab developed a generative AI model called FlowER, which can be used to predict the reaction products that will result from combining different chemical inputs. 

In designing that model, the researchers built in an understanding of fundamental physical principles, such as the law of conservation of mass. They also compelled the model to consider the feasibility of the intermediate steps that need to take place on the pathway from reactants to products. These constraints, the researchers found, improved the accuracy of the model’s predictions.

“Thinking about those intermediate steps, the mechanisms involved, and how the reaction evolves is something that chemists do very naturally. It’s how chemistry is taught, but it’s not something that models inherently think about,” Coley says. “We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to make sure that our machine-learning models are grounded in an understanding of reaction mechanisms, in the same way an expert chemist would be.”

Students in his lab also work on many different areas related to the optimization of chemical reactions, including computer-aided structure elucidation, laboratory automation, and optimal experimental design.

“Through these many different research threads, we hope to advance the frontier of AI in chemistry,” Coley says.

Justin Solomon, associate professor in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), has been appointed associate dean of engineering education in the MIT School of Engineering, effective July 1.

In this new role, Solomon will focus on advancing innovation in engineering education across the school. He will help shape new pedagogical approaches in the context of an AI-enabled world and will explore experiential, hands-on, and other modes of learning. Working closely with academic departments, Solomon will serve as a thought partner in integrating AI into curricula and will help facilitate interdisciplinary and shared teaching opportunities across departments and other schools. He will also play a key role in helping the school implement relevant recommendations from the Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training. 

Solomon will explore opportunities to build industry collaborations, including new models for internships and industry-engaged learning on campus. Collaborating with department heads and the School of Engineering leadership team, he will also support faculty in designing new courses and evolving existing programs to meet emerging opportunities in engineering.

“Justin’s interdisciplinary approach will be especially valuable as we continue to evolve engineering education to meet new opportunities and challenges. His extensive experience applying AI across a wide range of domains will help each academic department thoughtfully integrate AI and new educational models into their curricula,” says Paula T. Hammond, dean of the School of Engineering and Institute Professor. “I look forward to the vision and perspective he will bring to the school’s leadership team.”

A dedicated educator, Solomon has played a central role in shaping computing education at MIT. He is a key contributor to the Common Ground for Computing, where he co-teaches the core class 6.C01 (Modeling with Machine Learning: From Algorithms to Applications) with Regina Barzilay, the Delta Electronics Professor in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and affiliate faculty member at the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science. Within EECS, he teaches 6.7350 (Numerical Algorithms for Computing and Machine Learning) as well as 6.8410 (Shape Analysis). He is also the founder of the Summer Geometry Initiative, a six-week program that introduces students to geometry processing through intensive training, collaboration, and research experiences.

Solomon’s dedication to teaching and helping students has been honored with various awards, including the EECS Outstanding Educator Award and the Burgess (1952) and Elizabeth Jamieson Prize for Excellence in Teaching. He is the author of “Numerical Algorithms,” a textbook that presents a modern approach to numerical analysis for computer science students.

Solomon is a principal investigator at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), where he leads the Geometric Data Processing Group. His research sits at the intersection of geometry and computation, with applications spanning computer graphics, autonomous navigation, political redistricting, physical simulation, 3D modeling, and medical imaging. He is also a core faculty member of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, contributing to research that advances the foundations and applications of artificial intelligence.

His scholarly contributions have been recognized with numerous distinctions, including the 2023 Harold E. Edgerton Faculty Achievement Award for exceptional contributions in teaching, research, and service. In 2025, he was named a Schmidt Polymath, supporting interdisciplinary research across areas such as acoustics and climate that rely on large-scale simulation of physical systems.

Solomon joined the MIT faculty in 2016. He previously held an NSF Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Princeton University’s Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics. He earned his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees from Stanford University. While studying at Stanford, he also worked as a research assistant at Pixar Animation Studios.

For years, civil society organizations, workers, journalists, and human rights experts have warned that major technology companies risk enabling grave human rights abuses when they provide cloud computing, AI, and surveillance infrastructure to governments implicated in violations of international and humanitarian law. While many companies pay lip service to evaluating customers and contracts for human rights implications (lip service Exhibit A: Palantir!), too often those processes fail to provide any meaningful accountability when their standards are not met or are simply ignored. But recent developments at Microsoft suggest that accountability for failing to uphold the human rights standards that a company itself sets, even if incomplete, is possible. 

According to recent reporting, Microsoft’s Israel chief has departed amid an escalating ethical controversy surrounding the company’s business relationships with the Israeli Ministry of Defense. The move follows months of scrutiny, internal dissent, and sustained pressure from inside the organization along with press and civil society, especially after a report by The Guardian revealed that Microsoft technologies were used in systems connected to mass surveillance and military targeting operations in Gaza in ways that appeared to violate Microsoft’s own standards. This did not happen overnight.

In September 2025, Microsoft reportedly suspended certain services after initial investigations raised serious concerns about how its cloud and AI infrastructure may have been used. That alone distinguished Microsoft from many of its peers. Rather than simply dismissing mounting concerns or hiding behind vague claims of neutrality, Microsoft appeared to recognize that providing technology in conflict settings creates real human rights responsibilities. Now, after additional investigation and continued public scrutiny, it appears the company has taken another step, one that should send a strong signal to others that violating Microsoft’s human rights commitments could cost you your job. This is important. 

There is still much more Microsoft should do, of course. The company has yet to fully disclose the scope of its findings, explain exactly which services were suspended, or clarify what safeguards remain in place to prevent its technologies from contributing to human rights abuses in the future. We shouldn’t have to infer the connection between this employment action and the company’s investigation. 

Just prior to reports that Microsoft had fired its Israel Country General Manager, EFF joined Access Now, Amnesty International, Fight for the Future, and 7amleh in a joint May 7, 2026 letter to Microsoft leadership calling on the company to publicly release the findings of its investigation, suspend business relationships tied to serious human rights abuses, and implement meaningful safeguards to prevent its technologies from contributing to further harm. The letter detailed allegations regarding Microsoft’s reported provision of Azure cloud and AI services to Israeli military and intelligence units involved in surveillance and targeting operations, while also pressing the company to take concrete human rights due diligence measures going forward. Those demands remain urgent, even as Microsoft appears to be taking some of the steps we urged.

But even as we push for more, it is important to recognize when a company takes steps in the right direction. Because this is what it means to put human rights commitments into practice. It means acknowledging that human rights policies are not just branding exercises or transparency reports. It means accepting that companies providing cloud infrastructure and AI services have responsibilities when credible evidence emerges that their technologies may be enabling violations of international law. And it means taking concrete action when those risks become known.

The allegations facing Microsoft are serious. Human rights organizations and investigative reporting have documented claims that Microsoft Azure services were used by Israeli military and intelligence units to process large-scale surveillance data, support AI-assisted targeting systems, and sustain military cloud infrastructure during the war in Gaza. The concerns raised extend beyond ordinary business risk; they implicate potential complicity in violations of international humanitarian and human rights law.

Faced with these allegations, Microsoft could have chosen the path many tech companies take: deny everything, attack critics, suppress worker dissent, and continue business as usual. Instead, the company appears to have begun responding to the evidence.

Technology companies are not powerless bystanders. Cloud providers and AI companies make choices every day about who gets access to their infrastructure, under what conditions, and with what oversight. When companies claim to uphold human rights principles, those commitments should have operational consequences. Too many companies, in both international and domestic policing contexts, provide technology to institutions that violate people’s human rights and civil liberties, then fall back on the claim that they are merely providing a service that their customers can use how they see fit. This is an ethical failing that falls short of most companies’ publicly expressed commitments. Microsoft’s recent actions suggest that sustained public pressure, worker organizing, investigative journalism, and civil society advocacy can force even the world’s largest technology companies to respond.

Google and Amazon should especially see this as a clear example to follow. Both companies also provide services to the Israeli Ministry of Defense and have faced years of criticism over those contracts and services, including from EFF. Yet neither has demonstrated the level of responsiveness or accountability that Microsoft has shown. If Microsoft can suspend services, investigate allegations, and make leadership changes amid mounting evidence and ethical concerns, then other cloud giants can no longer pretend that meaningful action is impossible.

The technology industry has spent years insisting that ethics and human rights matter. The real test has always been whether those principles survive when profits, government contracts, and geopolitical pressure are on the line. Microsoft’s recent steps are not the end of that story, but they may mark the beginning of what real accountability can look like.

We’re looking at you, Amazon and Google. If Microsoft can do it, why can’t you?

Urbanization in the Asia-Pacific region of the world is occurring at an alarmingly rapid pace, with more than 2.2 billion people now living in cities in the region, and an additional 1.2 billion projected to migrate to cities by 2050, according to a February 2026 report from the U.N. Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, the Asian Development Bank, and the U.N. Development Program.

Such rapid growth places stress on nearly every aspect of urban areas, including housing, drinking water and sewage sources, roads and other transportation modes, and often results in environmental degradation and an increased vulnerability to climate-related disaster. But the situation also presents opportunities for doing things differently by deploying improved urban planning and management approaches, economic development strategies, as well as innovative technologies in real estate development and investment.

With a keen awareness of this ongoing urbanization and the pressures it brings, the MIT Center for Real Estate (CRE) within the MIT School of Architecture and Planning established the MIT Asia Real Estate Initiative (AREI) in 2022. The AREI mission is to serve as a platform for collaborative research, education, and industry engagement that will help urban areas across the Asia-Pacific region and the Gulf Corridor adapt to these ongoing challenges and allow their growing populations to thrive.

The AREI is co-directed by Professor Siqi Zheng, faculty director of the CRE and director of the MIT Sustainable Urbanization Lab, and James Scott MS ’16, a lecturer who is director of industry and professional programs for the CRE and director of the MIT Real Estate Transformation Lab.

“Imagine a region building the equivalent of a Boston every 40 days,” says Zheng, the STL Champion Professor of Urban and Real Estate Sustainability. “Asia is not just urbanizing. It’s redefining city life on a planetary scale.

“Drawing on MIT CRE’s deep roots in the region — more than half of international students in our MSRED program hail from Asia, and we have a robust 40-year alumni network spanning the Asia-Pacific countries and Gulf Corridor countries of West Asia — the AREI will naturally extend MIT’s role as a global convening point for real estate thought leaders.”

The initiative’s work will center on three pillars tailored to Asia’s urban needs: sustainable cities and real estate, urban vibrancy and dynamics, and technology and innovation.

Zheng is a leading scholar of sustainable urban development, real estate markets, and environmental quality, with particular expertise in China and Asia. She currently serves as president of the American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association and is a former president of the Asia Real Estate Society. Her research, which has appeared in leading journals across urban and real estate economics, environmental science, and urban studies, examines the tensions and synergies between fast urbanization and quality of life in cities, and how cities can develop their resilience against future uncertainties. She is now coauthoring a book with Matthew Kahn titled, “The Triumph of Asian Cities: Growth, Risk and Resilience in the 21st Century” (Harvard University Press).

Co-director Scott specializes in technology and innovation in the built environment. While attending MIT as a graduate student, his focus quickly moved in this direction. He has since played a pivotal role in advancing innovation and adoption of technology across some of the largest and most forward-thinking real estate organizations. Much of his work now is in PropTech, an inclusive phrase referring to new technologies in all areas of real estate, including financing, construction, sales, and materials lifespan, among others. His focal areas are Japan, South Korea, the United Arab Emirates, and other West Asian countries.

Scott credits the quick uptake of new PropTech for helping advance the speed of development in these regions.

“The sheer scale and pace of development across the Asia-Pacific and Gulf Corridor regions is extraordinary, from landmark projects like the Burj in Dubai to the transformative mega-developments in Saudi Arabia and the remarkable urban expansion seen in cities like Beijing and Shanghai over the past 10 to 15 years,” Scott says.

“Boston, by contrast, reflects a more incremental but equally important model of urban evolution,” he says. “The difference is not one of ambition, but of tempo and scale, and it underscores the diverse ways cities around the world are driving innovation in the built environment. This also highlights how the AREI can foster two-way learning across different development contexts, creating a platform for shared insights between rapidly evolving markets and more incremental urban ecosystems.”

In addition to its MIT headquarters, the initiative has two regional hubs — one in Tokyo, the other in Dubai, with a third planned for Hong Kong. The hubs will serve as loci for regional research, as well as provide a means of organizing the CRE’s many alumni in these areas for professional opportunities. For this reason, successful alumni have been selected to head each of the hubs.

Taka Kiura MS ’00 is director of the Toyko hub. After working for the global real estate development firm Heitman for more than 20 years, Kiura last year founded Base-K, a real estate and venture capital investment firm. He also is CEO and founder of HyStat, an investment firm that backs and accelerates the adoption of next-generation technologies.

The Dubai Hub is directed by Ocean Saleem Jangda MS ’25, who works on development innovation partnerships at Majid Al Futtaim Properties, one of the largest mixed-use developers in the Gulf Region.

This spring, Zheng is co-taught course 15.S67 (Special Seminar in Management) in the MIT Sloan-CRE Real Estate Lab. The course, co-taught with Hong Ru, a visiting associate professor in the MIT Sloan School of Management, deployed interdisciplinary student teams to work on applied projects, one of which is in Singapore. Zheng also has partnered with MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives, a program under the MIT Center for International Studies, that is offering student internships with the AREI Hong Kong hub next January.

Another of the steps in the directors’ goal of coalescing CRE alumni in these areas will be organized by Ryan Othman, who will return to Saudi Arabia following completion of his master’s this month to launch his real estate development business in mid-sized market residential and industrial projects.

Othman, who also holds a BS in civil engineering and an SM in finance, will lead an MSRED/AREI trek to introduce next year’s MSRED students to alumni and other business and government officials in Saudi Arabia. “The MIT’s master’s in real estate development is the oldest in the country,” he says. “It’s a powerful program with an amazing alumni network, which I’d like to help expand.”

“Asian cities have become the defining arena for global economic growth, environmental change, and human welfare in the 21st century,” Zheng explains. “Their future depends on durable, place-based infrastructure, real estate investments shaped by regional integration, human capital, and how these cities interact with each other and the rest of the world.

“The outcome of this incredible growth will largely determine global living standards and environmental consequences for the remainder of this century. I believe the MIT Asia Real Estate Initiative is a great platform for the MIT community to make its intellectual contribution to these mega-dynamics.” 

Senior MBA student Patrick Yeung came to MIT Sloan School of Management wanting to be surrounded by a community of builders. 

“I come from a consulting background, which has its own strengths and gives you a specific toolkit, but I felt like I was not very technical, and so I wanted to be surrounded and inspired by people who had that knowledge and experience,” he says.

“MIT Sloan’s Sustainability Initiative provides a great platform to help a generalist like myself become more specialized in this space, whether it be the Sustainability lunch series that they run every Thursday, the annual conference that gets organized, or the class catalog that aligns with the Sustainability Certificate.”

Yeung eventually hopes to join a climate tech scale-up to help formalize the business and scale, using what he’s learned at MIT Sloan to make a real impact.

“I've come to appreciate the systems thinking approach to sustainability that MIT Sloan has, especially in the context of the tech and lab-scale tech spinout ecosystem that MIT more broadly has. The technology is obviously an important piece of both climate mitigation and adaptation, but we will also need other techno-economic regime changes to be able to truly change our planet for the better — that takes policy and legal changes, that takes leadership and courage, and ultimately it takes a willingness to fail, over and over, in order to iterate.”

The following photo gallery provides a snapshot of what a typical day for Yeung has been like as an MIT student.