The U.S. opioid crisis has varied in severity across the country, leading to extended debate about how and why it has spread.

Now, a study co-authored by MIT economists sheds new light on these dynamics, examining the role that geography has played in the crisis. The results show how state-level policies inadvertently contributed to the rise of opioid addiction, and how addiction itself is a central driver of the long-term problem.

The research analyzes data about people who moved within the U.S., as a way of addressing a leading question about the crisis: How much of the problem is attributable to local factors, and to what extent do people have individual characteristics making them prone to opioid problems?

“We find a very large role for place-based factors, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t person-based factors as well,” says MIT economist Amy Finkelstein, co-author of a new paper detailing the study’s findings. “As is usual, it’s rare to find an extreme answer, either one or the other.”

In scrutinizing the role of geography, the scholars developed new insights about the spread of the crisis in relation to the dynamics of addiction. The study concludes that laws restricting pain clinics, or “pill mills,” where opioids were often prescribed, reduced risky opioid use by 5 percent over the 2006-2019 study period. Due to the path of addiction, enacting those laws near the onset of the crisis, in the 1990s, could have reduced risky use by 30 percent over that same time.

“What we do find is that pill mill laws really matter,” says MIT PhD student Dean Li, a co-author of the paper. “The striking thing is that they mattered a lot, and a lot of the effect was through transitions into opioid addiction.”

The paper, “What Drives Risky Prescription Opioid Use: Evidence from Migration,” appears in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. The authors are Finkelstein, who is the John and Jennie S. MacDonald Professor of Economics; Matthew Gentzkow, a professor of economics at Stanford University; and Li, a PhD student in MIT’s Department of Economics.

The opioid crisis, as the scholars note in the paper, is one of the biggest U.S. health problems in recent memory. As of 2017, there were more than twice as many U.S. deaths from opioids as from homicide. There were also at least 10 times as many opioid deaths compared to the number of deaths from cocaine during the 1980s-era crack epidemic in the U.S.

Many accounts and analyses of the crisis have converged on the increase in medically prescribed opioids starting in the 1990s as a crucial part of the problem; this was in turn a function of aggressive marketing by pharmaceutical companies, among other things. But explanations of the crisis beyond that have tended to fracture. Some analyses emphasize the personal characteristics of those who fall into opioid use, such as a past history of substance use, mental health conditions, age, and more. Other analyses focus on place-based factors, including the propensity of area medical providers to prescribe opioids.

To conduct the study, the scholars examined data on prescription opioid use from adults in the Social Security Disability Insurance program from 2006 to 2019, covering about 3 million cases in all. They defined “risky” use as an average daily morphine-equivalent dose of more than 120 milligrams, which has been shown to increase drug dependence.

By studying people who move, the scholars were developing a kind of natural experiment — Finkelstein has also used this same method to examine questions about disparities in health care costs and longevity across the U.S. In this case, in focusing on the opioid consumption patterns of the same people as they lived in different places, the scholars can disentangle the extent to which place-based and personal factors drive usage.

Overall, the study found a somewhat greater role for place-based factors than for personal characteristics in accounting for the drivers of risky opioid use. To see the magnitude of place-based effects, consider someone moving to a state with a 3.5 percentage point higher rate of risky use — akin to moving from the state with the 10th lowest rate of risky use to the state with the 10th highest rate. On average, that person’s probability of risky opioid use would increase by a full percentage point in the first year, then by 0.3 percentage points in each subsequent year.

Some of the study’s key findings involve the precise mechanisms at work beneath these top-line numbers.

In the research, the scholars examine what they call the “addiction channel,” in which opioid users fall into addiction, and the “availability channel,” in which the already-addicted find ways to sustain their use. Over the 2006-2019 period, they find, people falling into addiction through new prescriptions had an impact on overall opioid uptake that was 2.5 times as large as that of existing users getting continued access to prescribed opiods.

When people who are not already risky users of opioids move to places with higher rates of risky opioid use, Finkelstein observes, “One thing you can see very clearly in the data is that in the addiction channel, there’s no immediate change in behavior, but gradually as they’re in this new place you see an increase in risky opioid use.”

She adds: “This is consistent with a model where people move to a new place, have a back problem or car accident and go to a hospital, and if the doctor is more likely to prescribe opioids, there’s more of a risk they’re going to become addicted.”

By contrast, Finkelstein says, “If we look at people who are already risky users of opioids and they move to a new place with higher rates of risky opioid use, you see there’s an immediate increase in their opioid use, which suggests it’s just more available. And then you also see the gradual increase indicating more addiction.”

By looking at state-level policies, the researchers found this trend to be particularly pronounced in over a dozen states that lagged in enacting restrictions on pain clinics, or “pill mills,” where providers had more latitude to prescribe opioids.

In this way the research does not just evaluate the impact of place versus personal characteristics; it quantifies the problem of addiction as an additional dimension of the issue. While many analyses have sought to explain why people first use opioids, the current study reinforces the importance of preventing the onset of addiction, especially because addicted users may later seek out nonprescription opioids, exacerbating the problem even further.

“The persistence of addiction is a huge problem,” Li says. “Even after the role of prescription opioids has subsided, the opioid crisis persists. And we think this is related to the persistence of addiction. Once you have this set in, it’s so much harder to change, compared to stopping the onset of addiction in the first place.”

Research support was provided by the National Institute on Aging, the Social Security Administration, and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.

Researchers from the MIT Media Lab have developed an antenna — about the size of a fine grain of sand — that can be injected into the body to wirelessly power deep-tissue medical implants, such as pacemakers in cardiac patients and neuromodulators in people suffering from epilepsy or Parkinson’s disease.

“This is the next major step in miniaturizing deep-tissue implants,” says Baju Joy, a PhD student in the Media Lab’s Nano-Cybernetic Biotrek research group. “It enables battery-free implants that can be placed with a needle, instead of major surgery.”

A paper detailing this work was published in the October issue of IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation. Joy is joined on the paper by lead author Yubin Cai, PhD student at the Media Lab; Benoît X. E. Desbiolles and Viktor Schell, former MIT postdocs; Shubham Yadav, an MIT PhD student in media arts and sciences; David C. Bono, an instructor in the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering; and senior author Deblina Sarkar, the AT&T Career Development Associate Professor at the Media Lab and head of the Nano-Cybernetic Biotrek group.

Deep-tissue implants are currently powered either with a several-centimeters-long battery that is surgically implanted in the body, requiring periodic replacement, or with a surgically placed magnetic coil, also of a centimeter-scale size, that can harvest power wirelessly. The coil method functions only at high frequencies, which can cause tissue heating, limiting how much power can be safely delivered to the implant when miniaturized to sub-millimeter sizes.

“After that limit, you start damaging the cells,” says Joy.

As is stated in the team’s IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation paper, “developing an antenna at ultra-small dimensions (less then 500 micrometers) which can operate efficiently in the low-frequency band is challenging.”

The 200-micrometer antenna — developed through research led by Sarkar — operates at low frequencies (109 kHz) thanks to a novel technology in which a magnetostrictive film, which deforms when a magnetic field is applied, is laminated with a piezoelectric film, which converts deformation to electric charge. When an alternating magnetic field is applied, magnetic domains within the magnetostrictive film contort it in the same way that a piece of fabric interwoven with pieces of metal would contort if subjected to a strong magnet. The mechanical strain in the magnetostrictive layer causes the piezoelectric layer to generate electric charges across electrodes placed above and below.

“We are leveraging this mechanical vibration to convert the magnetic field to an electric field,” Joy says.

Sarkar says the newly developed antenna delivers four to five orders of magnitude more power than implantable antennas of similar size that rely on metallic coils and operate in the GHz frequency range.

“Our technology has the potential to introduce a new avenue for minimally invasive bioelectric devices that can operate wirelessly deep within the human body,” she says.

The magnetic field that activates the antenna is provided by a device similar to a rechargeable wireless cell phone charger, and is small enough to be applied to the skin as a stick-on patch or slipped into a pocket close to the skin surface.

Because the antenna is fabricated with the same technology as a microchip, it can be easily integrated with already-existing microelectronics.

“These electronics and electrodes can be easily made to be much smaller than the antenna itself, and they would be integrated with the antenna during nanofabrication,” Joy says, adding that the researchers’ work leverages 50 years of research and development applied to making transistors and other electronics smaller and smaller. “The other components can be tiny, and the entire system can be placed with a needle injection.”

Manufacture of the antennas could be easily scaled up, the researchers say, and multiple antennas and implants could be injected to treat large areas of the body.

Another possible application of this antenna, in addition to pacemaking and neuromodulation, is glucose sensing in the body. Circuits with an optical sensor for detecting glucose already exist, but the process would benefit greatly with a wireless power supply that can be non-invasively integrated inside of the body.

“That’s just one example,” Joy says. “We can leverage all these other techniques that are also developed using the same fabrication methods, and then just integrate them easily to the antenna.”

Around 80 percent of global energy production today comes from the combustion of fossil fuels. Combustion, or the process of converting stored chemical energy into thermal energy through burning, is vital for a variety of common activities including electricity generation, transportation, and domestic uses like heating and cooking — but it also yields a host of environmental consequences, contributing to air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.

Sili Deng, the Doherty Chair in Ocean Utilization and associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, is leading research to drive the transition from the heavy dependence on fossil fuels to renewable energy with storage.

“I was first introduced to flame synthesis in my junior year in college,” Deng says. “I realized you can actually burn things to make things, [and] that was really fascinating.”

Deng says she ultimately picked combustion as a focus of her work because she likes the intellectual challenge the concept offers. “In combustion you have chemistry, and you have fluid mechanics. Each subject is very rich in science. This also has very strong engineering implications and applications.”

Deng’s research group targets three areas: building up fundamental knowledge on combustion processes and emissions; developing alternative fuels and metal combustion to replace fossil fuels; and synthesizing flame-based materials for catalysis and energy storage, which can bring down the cost of manufacturing battery materials.

One focus of the team has been on low-cost, low-emission manufacturing of cathode materials for lithium-ion batteries. Lithium-ion batteries play an increasingly critical role in transportation electrification (e.g., batteries for electric vehicles) and grid energy storage for electricity that is generated from renewable energy sources like wind and solar. Deng’s team has developed a technology they call flame-assisted spray pyrolysis, or FASP, which can help reduce the high manufacturing costs associated with cathode materials.

FASP is based on flame synthesis, a technology that dates back nearly 3,000 years. In ancient China, this was the primary way black ink materials were made. “[People burned] vegetables or woods, such that afterwards they can collect the solidified smoke,” Deng explains. “For our battery applications, we can try to fit in the same formula, but of course with new tweaks.”

The team is also interested in developing alternative fuels, including looking at the use of metals like aluminum to power rockets. “We’re interested in utilizing aluminum as a fuel for civil applications,” Deng says, because aluminum is abundant in the earth, cheap, and it’s available globally. “What we are trying to do is to understand [aluminum combustion] and be able to tailor its ignition and propagation properties.”

Among other accolades, Deng is a 2025 recipient of the Hiroshi Tsuji Early Career Researcher Award from the Combustion Institute, an award that recognizes excellence in fundamental or applied combustion science research.

In most states, schools are required to screen students as they enter kindergarten — a process that is meant to identify students who may need extra help learning to read. However, a new study by MIT researchers suggests that these screenings may not be working as intended in all schools.

The researchers’ survey of about 250 teachers found that many felt they did not receive adequate training to perform the tests, and about half reported that they were not confident that children who need extra instruction in reading end up receiving it.

When performed successfully, these screens can be essential tools to make sure children get the extra help they need to learn to read. However, the new findings suggest that many school districts may need to tweak how they implement the screenings and analyze the results, the researchers say.

“This result demonstrates the need to have a systematic approach for how the basic science on how children learn to read is translated into educational opportunity,” says John Gabrieli, the Grover Hermann Professor of Health Sciences and Technology, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences, and a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research.

Gabrieli is the senior author of the new open-access study, which appears today in Annals of Dyslexia. Ola Ozernov-Palchik, an MIT research scientist who is also a research assistant professor at Boston University Wheelock College of Education and Human Development, is the lead author of the study.

Boosting literacy

Over the past 20 years, national reading proficiency scores in the United States have trended up, but only slightly. In 2022, 33 percent of fourth-graders achieved reading proficiency, compared to 29 percent in 1992, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress reading report card. (The highest level achieved in the past 20 years was 37 percent, in 2017.)

In hopes of boosting those rates, most states have passed laws requiring students to be screened for potential reading struggles early in elementary school. In most cases, the screenings are required two or three times per year, in kindergarten, first grade, and second grade.

These tests are designed to identify students who have difficulty with skills such as identifying letters and the sounds they make, blending sounds to make words, and recognizing words that rhyme. Students with low scores in these measures can then be offered extra interventions designed to help them catch up.

“The indicators of future reading disability or dyslexia are present as early as within the first few months of kindergarten,” Ozernov-Palchik says. “And there’s also an overwhelming body of evidence showing that interventions are most effective in the earliest grades.”

In the new study, the researchers wanted to evaluate how effectively these screenings are being implemented in schools. With help from the National Center for Improving Literacy, they posted on social media sites seeking classroom teachers and reading specialists who are responsible for administering literacy screening tests.

The survey respondents came from 39 states and represented public and private schools, located in urban, suburban, and rural areas. The researchers asked those teachers dozens of questions about their experience with the literacy screenings, including questions about their training, the testing process itself, and the results of the screenings.

One of the significant challenges reported by the respondents was a lack of training. About 75 percent reported that they received fewer than three hours of training on how to perform the screens, and 44 percent received no training at all or less than an hour of training.

“Under ideal conditions, there is an expert who trains the educators, they provide practice opportunities, they provide feedback, and they observe the educators administer the assessment,” Ozernov-Palchik says. “None of this was done in many of the cases.”

Instead, many educators reported that they spent their own time figuring out how to give the evaluations, sometimes working with colleagues. And, new hires who arrived at a school after the initial training was given were often left on their own to figure it out.

Another major challenge was suboptimal conditions for administering the tests. About 80 percent of teachers reported interruptions during the screenings, and 40 percent had to do the screens in noisy locations such as a school hallway. More than half of the teachers also reported technical difficulties in administering the tests, and that rate was higher among teachers who worked at schools with a higher percentage of students from low socioeconomic (SES) backgrounds.

Teachers also reported difficulties when it came to evaluating students categorized as English language learners (ELL). Many teachers relayed that they hadn’t been trained on how to distinguish students who were having trouble reading from those who struggled on the tests because they didn’t speak English well.

“The study reveals that there’s a lot of difficulty understanding how to handle English language learners in the context of screening,” Ozernov-Palchik says. “Overall, those kids tend to be either over-identified or under-identified as needing help, but they’re not getting the support that they need.”

Unrealized potential

Most concerning, the researchers say, is that in many schools, the results of the screening tests are not being used to get students the extra help that they need. Only 44 percent of the teachers surveyed said that their schools had a formal process for creating intervention plans for students after the screening was performed.

“Even though most educators said they believe that screening is important to do, they’re not feeling that it has the potential to drive change the way that it’s currently implemented,” Ozernov-Palchik says.

In the study, the researchers recommended several steps that state legislatures or individual school districts can take to make the screening process run more smoothly and successfully.

“Implementation is the key here,” Ozernov-Palchik says. “Teachers need more support and professional development. There needs to be systematic support as they administer the screening. They need to have designated spaces for screening, and explicit instruction in how to handle children who are English language learners.”

The researchers also recommend that school districts train an individual to take charge of interpreting the screening results and analyzing the data, to make sure that the screenings are leading to improved success in reading.

In addition to advocating for those changes, the researchers are also working on a technology platform that uses artificial intelligence to provide more individualized instruction in reading, which could help students receive help in the areas where they struggle the most.

The research was funded by Schmidt Futures, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative for the Reach Every Reader project, and the Halis Family Foundation.

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.”

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.”

Professor Ioannis V. Yannas SM ’59, a physical chemist and engineer known for the invention of artificial skin for the treatment of severe burns, and a longtime member of the MIT faculty, died on Oct. 19 at the age of 90.

“Professor Yannas was a beloved and distinguished colleague, teacher, and mentor. The impact of his inventions, and his legacy on the field of bioengineering was immense,” says John Hart, the Class of 1922 Professor and head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering. 

Yannas, known to friends and colleagues as Yanni, held appointments in the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology. His principal research interest throughout his career was the process of induced organ regeneration used to replace organs that are either severely injured or terminally diseased. His work also advanced the clinical use of collagen tubes to treat peripheral nerve injuries.

In 1969, when Yannas approached the late John Burke of Massachusetts General Hospital to collaborate, Burke took him on a tour of a children’s burn unit. “There was a great deal of human misery that was confronting me, and I felt I had to do something about it,” said Yannas in later interviews. In 1981, the pair announced their success: an amalgam of a silicone outer sheet over a scaffolding of molecular material drawn from cow tendon and shark cartilage. Offering protection from infection and dehydration, the scaffolding enabled healthy skin cells to grow. Their discovery would be transformative for the treatment of burn victims.

Their artificial skin, patented and now manufactured as Integra, is still widely used on patients with severe and extensive burns, and for other applications including some types of plastic surgery and the treatment of chronic skin wounds commonly suffered by people with diabetes. The groundbreaking advance, which was later recognized as the first example of organ regeneration in adults, had previously been considered impossible.

“Yanni’s boldness in attacking a wide array of medical problems, including spinal cord transection, in his investigations of applications of collagen-based implants, inspired others, including myself, to work toward solutions to devastating conditions such as blindness, stroke, and spinal cord injury,” says Myron Spector, professor emeritus of orthopedic surgery (biomaterials) at Massachusetts General Brigham and Harvard Medical School, and an affiliate of the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology. Yannas and Spector created several MIT courses together, including 2.79 (Biomaterial-Tissue Interactions).

“As we were talking about the content [for 2.79], Yanni proposed that we codify the cell behavior underlying the tissue response to implants,” explains Spector. “Within a short time, we laid out the plan for ‘unit cell processes’ to offer students a code to decipher the often inconceivably complex cellular processes that not only underlie the tissue response to implants, but that can guide the selection of the tools necessary to engineer medical devices and reveal their targets for treatment. This was all Yanni, taking a fundamental concept, the control volume used in chemical engineering to analyze systems, and applying it to cellular processes in the human body. I since use UCPs myself all the time.”

As a colleague serving as a collaborator in teaching and in research, Spector says Yannas was eager to help and to learn, bold in his thinking, smart in his choices, able to keep his eye on the goal, respectful of students as well as faculty and other colleagues, and selfless. “These are just the traits that we teach our students to look for when seeking the collaborators who are so necessary in science and engineering.”

Yannas was born on April 14, 1935, in Athens, Greece, where he completed his high school education at Athens College. He received a BA in chemistry at Harvard College in 1957, followed by an MS in chemical engineering from MIT in 1959. After a period of industrial research on polymers at W. R. Grace & Co., in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he attended Princeton University, where he completed an MS degree in 1965 and a PhD in 1966, both in physical chemistry. Yannas joined the MIT faculty immediately thereafter and remained at the Institute for the next 59 years until his passing.

For his discoveries in organ regeneration, Yannas was elected member of the National Academy of Medicine (1987), the National Inventors Hall of Fame (2015), and the National Academy of Engineering (2017). He was also elected Fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biomedical Engineering.

Further, he was the recipient of many prestigious awards including the Society for Biomaterials Founders Award (1982) and the Society’s Clemson Award for Applied Science and Engineering (1992). He was an author of numerous journal articles, and the sole author of the influential book, “Tissue and Organ Regeneration in Adults.”

Yannas’ work, and 2015 induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, was the subject of “Hope Regenerated,” a video produced by the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering. The film chronicles the development of Integra, which was initially characterized as a “failed experiment” but became a life-saving discovery that launched a new field of regenerative medicine.

“My father's relationship with MIT was deeply meaningful to him,” says Tania Yannas Kluzak. “He regarded MIT as the ideal partner in his life's work — pioneering lifesaving research in organ regeneration.”

Yannas was predeceased by his brother, Pavlos. He is survived by his two children, Tania Kluzak and her husband Gordon, and Alexi Yannas and his wife Maria; his grandchildren — Alexandra, Marina, Sophia, Philippos, and Nefeli; his sister, Elizabeth Sitinas; and many loving relatives and friends. A celebration of life will be announced at a later date. 

How can you use science to build a better gingerbread house?

That was something Miranda Schwacke spent a lot of time thinking about. The MIT graduate student in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE) is part of Kitchen Matters, a group of grad students who use food and kitchen tools to explain scientific concepts through short videos and outreach events. Past topics included why chocolate “seizes,” or becomes difficult to work with when melting (spoiler: water gets in), and how to make isomalt, the sugar glass that stunt performers jump through in action movies.

Two years ago, when the group was making a video on how to build a structurally sound gingerbread house, Schwacke scoured cookbooks for a variable that would produce the most dramatic difference in the cookies.

“I was reading about what determines the texture of cookies, and then tried several recipes in my kitchen until I got two gingerbread recipes that I was happy with,” Schwacke says.

She focused on butter, which contains water that turns to steam at high baking temperatures, creating air pockets in cookies. Schwacke predicted that decreasing the amount of butter would yield denser gingerbread, strong enough to hold together as a house.

“This hypothesis is an example of how changing the structure can influence the properties and performance of material,” Schwacke said in the eight-minute video.

That same curiosity about materials properties and performance drives her research on the high energy cost of computing, especially for artificial intelligence. Schwacke develops new materials and devices for neuromorphic computing, which mimics the brain by processing and storing information in the same place. She studies electrochemical ionic synapses — tiny devices that can be “tuned” to adjust conductivity, much like neurons strengthening or weakening connections in the brain.

“If you look at AI in particular — to train these really large models — that consumes a lot of energy. And if you compare that to the amount of energy that we consume as humans when we’re learning things, the brain consumes a lot less energy,” Schwacke says. “That’s what led to this idea to find more brain-inspired, energy-efficient ways of doing AI.”

Her advisor, Bilge Yildiz, underscores the point: One reason the brain is so efficient is that data doesn’t need to be moved back and forth.

“In the brain, the connections between our neurons, called synapses, are where we process information. Signal transmission is there. It is processed, programmed, and also stored in the same place,” says Yildiz, the Breene M. Kerr (1951) Professor in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering and DMSE. Schwacke’s devices aim to replicate that efficiency.

Scientific roots

The daughter of a marine biologist mom and an electrical engineer dad, Schwacke was immersed in science from a young age. Science was “always a part of how I understood the world.”

“I was obsessed with dinosaurs. I wanted to be a paleontologist when I grew up,” she says. But her interests broadened. At her middle school in Charleston, South Carolina, she joined a FIRST Lego League robotics competition, building robots to complete tasks like pushing or pulling objects. “My parents, my dad especially, got very involved in the school team and helping us design and build our little robot for the competition.”

Her mother, meanwhile, studied how dolphin populations are affected by pollution for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That had a lasting impact.

“That was an example of how science can be used to understand the world, and also to figure out how we can improve the world,” Schwacke says. “And that’s what I’ve always wanted to do with science.”

Her interest in materials science came later, in her high school magnet program. There, she was introduced to the interdisciplinary subject, a blend of physics, chemistry, and engineering that studies the structure and properties of materials and uses that knowledge to design new ones.

“I always liked that it goes from this very basic science, where we’re studying how atoms are ordering, all the way up to these solid materials that we interact with in our everyday lives — and how that gives them their properties that we can see and play with,” Schwacke says.

As a senior, she participated in a research program with a thesis project on dye-sensitized solar cells, a low-cost, lightweight solar technology that uses dye molecules to absorb light and generate electricity.

“What drove me was really understanding, this is how we go from light to energy that we can use — and also seeing how this could help us with having more renewable energy sources,” Schwacke says.

After high school, she headed across the country to Caltech. “I wanted to try a totally new place,” she says, where she studied materials science, including nanostructured materials thousands of times thinner than a human hair. She focused on materials properties and microstructure — the tiny internal structure that governs how materials behave — which led her to electrochemical systems like batteries and fuel cells.

AI energy challenge

At MIT, she continued exploring energy technologies. She met Yildiz during a Zoom meeting in her first year of graduate school, in fall 2020, when the campus was still operating under strict Covid-19 protocols. Yildiz’s lab studies how charged atoms, or ions, move through materials in technologies like fuel cells, batteries, and electrolyzers.

The lab’s research into brain-inspired computing fired Schwacke’s imagination, but she was equally drawn to Yildiz’s way of talking about science.

“It wasn’t based on jargon and emphasized a very basic understanding of what was going on — that ions are going here, and electrons are going here — to understand fundamentally what’s happening in the system,” Schwacke says.

That mindset shaped her approach to research. Her early projects focused on the properties these devices need to work well — fast operation, low energy use, and compatibility with semiconductor technology — and on using magnesium ions instead of hydrogen, which can escape into the environment and make devices unstable.

Her current project, the focus of her PhD thesis, centers on understanding how the insertion of magnesium ions into tungsten oxide, a metal oxide whose electrical properties can be precisely tuned, changes its electrical resistance. In these devices, tungsten oxide serves as a channel layer, where resistance controls signal strength, much like synapses regulate signals in the brain.

“I am trying to understand exactly how these devices change the channel conductance,” Schwacke says.

Schwacke’s research was recognized with a MathWorks Fellowship from the School of Engineering in 2023 and 2024. The fellowship supports graduate students who leverage tools like MATLAB or Simulink in their work; Schwacke applied MATLAB for critical data analysis and visualization.

Yildiz describes Schwacke’s research as a novel step toward solving one of AI’s biggest challenges.

“This is electrochemistry for brain-inspired computing,” Yildiz says. “It’s a new context for electrochemistry, but also with an energy implication, because the energy consumption of computing is unsustainably increasing. We have to find new ways of doing computing with much lower energy, and this is one way that can help us move in that direction.”

Like any pioneering work, it comes with challenges, especially in bridging the concepts between electrochemistry and semiconductor physics.

“Our group comes from a solid-state chemistry background, and when we started this work looking into magnesium, no one had used magnesium in these kinds of devices before,” Schwacke says. “So we were looking at the magnesium battery literature for inspiration and different materials and strategies we could use. When I started this, I wasn’t just learning the language and norms for one field — I was trying to learn it for two fields, and also translate between the two.”

She also grapples with a challenge familiar to all scientists: how to make sense of messy data.

“The main challenge is being able to take my data and know that I’m interpreting it in a way that’s correct, and that I understand what it actually means,” Schwacke says.

She overcomes hurdles by collaborating closely with colleagues across fields, including neuroscience and electrical engineering, and sometimes by just making small changes to her experiments and watching what happens next.

Community matters

Schwacke is not just active in the lab. In Kitchen Matters, she and her fellow DMSE grad students set up booths at local events like the Cambridge Science Fair and Steam It Up, an after-school program with hands-on activities for kids.

“We did ‘pHun with Food’ with ‘fun’ spelled with a pH, so we had cabbage juice as a pH indicator,” Schwacke says. “We let the kids test the pH of lemon juice and vinegar and dish soap, and they had a lot of fun mixing the different liquids and seeing all the different colors.”

She has also served as the social chair and treasurer for DMSE’s graduate student group, the Graduate Materials Council. As an undergraduate at Caltech, she led workshops in science and technology for Robogals, a student-run group that encourages young women to pursue careers in science, and assisted students in applying for the school’s Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships.

For Schwacke, these experiences sharpened her ability to explain science to different audiences, a skill she sees as vital whether she’s presenting at a kids’ fair or at a research conference.

“I always think, where is my audience starting from, and what do I need to explain before I can get into what I’m doing so that it’ll all make sense to them?” she says.

Schwacke sees the ability to communicate as central to building community, which she considers an important part of doing research. “It helps with spreading ideas. It always helps to get a new perspective on what you’re working on,” she says. “I also think it keeps us sane during our PhD.”

Yildiz sees Schwacke’s community involvement as an important part of her resume. “She’s doing all these activities to motivate the broader community to do research, to be interested in science, to pursue science and technology, but that ability will help her also progress in her own research and academic endeavors.”

After her PhD, Schwacke wants to take that ability to communicate with her to academia, where she’d like to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers. Yildiz has no doubt she’ll thrive.

“I think she’s a perfect fit,” Yildiz says. “She’s brilliant, but brilliance by itself is not enough. She’s persistent, resilient. You really need those on top of that.”

Physicists at MIT have developed a new way to probe inside an atom’s nucleus, using the atom’s own electrons as “messengers” within a molecule.

In a study appearing today in the journal Science, the physicists precisely measured the energy of electrons whizzing around a radium atom that had been paired with a fluoride atom to make a molecule of radium monofluoride. They used the environments within molecules as a sort of microscopic particle collider, which contained the radium atom’s electrons and encouraged them to briefly penetrate the atom’s nucleus.

Typically, experiments to probe the inside of atomic nuclei involve massive, kilometers-long facilities that accelerate beams of electrons to speeds fast enough to collide with and break apart nuclei. The team’s new molecule-based method offers a table-top alternative to directly probe the inside of an atom’s nucleus.

Within molecules of radium monofluoride, the team measured the energies of a radium atom’s electrons as they pinged around inside the molecule. They discerned a slight energy shift and determined that electrons must have briefly penetrated the radium atom’s nucleus and interacted with its contents. As the electrons winged back out, they retained this energy shift, providing a nuclear “message” that could be analyzed to sense the internal structure of the atom’s nucleus.

The team’s method offers a new way to measure the nuclear “magnetic distribution.” In a nucleus, each proton and neutron acts like a small magnet, and they align differently depending on how the nucleus’ protons and neutrons are spread out. The team plans to apply their method to precisely map this property of the radium nucleus for the first time. What they find could help to answer one of the biggest mysteries in cosmology: Why do we see much more matter than antimatter in the universe?

“Our results lay the groundwork for subsequent studies aiming to measure violations of fundamental symmetries at the nuclear level,” says study co-author Ronald Fernando Garcia Ruiz, who is the Thomas A. Franck Associate Professor of Physics at MIT. “This could provide answers to some of the most pressing questions in modern physics.”

The study’s MIT co-authors include Shane Wilkins, Silviu-Marian Udrescu, and Alex Brinson, along with collaborators from multiple institutions including the Collinear Resonance Ionization Spectroscopy Experiment (CRIS) at CERN in Switzerland, where the experiments were performed.

Molecular trap

According to scientists’ best understanding, there must have been almost equal amounts of matter and antimatter when the universe first came into existence. However, the overwhelming majority of what scientists can measure and observe in the universe is made from matter, whose building blocks are the protons and neutrons within atomic nuclei.

This observation is in stark contrast to what our best theory of nature, the Standard Model, predicts, and it is thought that additional sources of fundamental symmetry violation are required to explain the almost complete absence of antimatter in our universe. Such violations could be seen within the nuclei of certain atoms such as radium.

Unlike most atomic nuclei, which are spherical in shape, the radium atom’s nucleus has a more asymmetrical configuration, similar to a pear. Scientists predict that this pear shape could significantly enhance their ability to sense the violation of fundamental symmetries, to the extent that they may be potentially observable.

“The radium nucleus is predicted to be an amplifier of this symmetry breaking, because its nucleus is asymmetric in charge and mass, which is quite unusual,” says Garcia Ruiz, whose group has focused on developing methods to probe radium nuclei for signs of fundamental symmetry violation.

Peering inside the nucleus of a radium atom to investigate fundamental symmetries is an incredibly tricky exercise.

“Radium is naturally radioactive, with a short lifetime and we can currently only produce radium monofluoride molecules in tiny quantities,” says study lead author Shane Wilkins, a former postdoc at MIT. “We therefore need incredibly sensitive techniques to be able measure them.”

The team realized that by placing a radium atom in a molecule, they could contain and amplify the behavior of its electrons.

“When you put this radioactive atom inside of a molecule, the internal electric field that its electrons experience is orders of magnitude larger compared to the fields we can produce and apply in a lab,” explains Silviu-Marian Udrescu PhD ’24, a study co-author. “In a way, the molecule acts like a giant particle collider and gives us a better chance to probe the radium’s nucleus.”

Energy shift

In their new study, the team first paired radium atoms with fluoride atoms to create molecules of radium monofluoride. They found that in this molecule, the radium atom’s electrons were effectively squeezed, increasing the chance for electrons to interact with and briefly penetrate the radium nucleus.

The team then trapped and cooled the molecules and sent them through a system of vacuum chambers, into which they also sent lasers, which interacted with the molecules. In this way the researchers were able to precisely measure the energies of electrons inside each molecule.

When they tallied the energies, they found that the electrons appeared to have a slightly different energy compared to what physicists expect if they did not penetrate the nucleus. Although this energy shift was small — just a millionth of the energy of the laser photon used to excite the molecules — it gave unambiguous evidence of the molecules’ electrons interacting with the protons and neutrons inside the radium nucleus.

“There are many experiments measuring interactions between nuclei and electrons outside the nucleus, and we know what those interactions look like,” Wilkins explains. “When we went to measure these electron energies very precisely, it didn’t quite add up to what we expected assuming they interacted only outside of the nucleus. That told us the difference must be due to electron interactions inside the nucleus.”

“We now have proof that we can sample inside the nucleus,” Garcia Ruiz says. “It’s like being able to measure a battery’s electric field. People can measure its field outside, but to measure inside the battery is far more challenging. And that’s what we can do now.”

Going forward, the team plans to apply the new technique to map the distribution of forces inside the nucleus. Their experiments have so far involved radium nuclei that sit in random orientations inside each molecule at high temperature. Garcia Ruiz and his collaborators would like to be able to cool these molecules and control the orientations of their pear-shaped nuclei such that they can precisely map their contents and hunt for the violation of fundamental symmetries.

“Radium-containing molecules are predicted to be exceptionally sensitive systems in which to search for violations of the fundamental symmetries of nature,” Garcia Ruiz says. “We now have a way to carry out that search.”

This research was supported, in part, by the U.S. Department of Energy. 

Back and better than ever, the Cambridge Science Carnival, an annual free family-friendly science extravaganza, was held on Sunday, Sept. 21, at the Kendall/MIT Open Space.

Founded by the MIT Museum in 2007, and organized with the support of MIT and the City of Cambridge, the 2025 event drew approximately 20,000 attendees and featured more than 140 activities, demonstrations, and installations tied to the topics of science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics (STEAM).

Among the carnival’s wide variety of activities was the popular robot petting zoo, an annual showcase involving more than a dozen companies and local robotics clubs, including FIRST Tech Challenge and FIRST Robotics Competition. Participants were invited to engage with a range of different robots, from building with LEGOs and erector sets to piloting underwater robots to learning about the science of automation.

“Every exhibit and every moment of discovery today reinforces why Cambridge remains a global leader in STEAM,” Cambridge Mayor Denise Simmons said in her remarks at the event. “The creativity, ingenuity, and joy on display here today are a powerful reminder that science isn’t just for labs and lecture halls — it’s for everyone.”

Other activities included an appearance from the popular kid-friendly podcast “Tumble Science,” with co-host Marshall Escamilla testing fans’ knowledge of different STEAM topics drawn from “Tumble Science.” Clark University’s smoke-ring air cannons were a particular hit with the under-7-year-old set, while “Cycle To Science” showed off a gravity-defying bicycle wheel that, while spinning, was suspended on one side by a simple piece of string. Attendees also enjoyed live music, food trucks, and activities exploring everything from pipette art to the chemistry of glass. 

At the robot petting zoo, FIRST Robotics volunteer mentor Dominique Regli reflected on the event as someone who was herself first inspired by similar festivals more than a decade earlier. 

“Seeing kids of all ages interact with the robots made me think back to when I was a seventh grader, and how getting to see some of these robots for the first time was truly life-changing for me,” said Regli, who has been involved with FIRST Robotics since 2018 and is now an MIT computer science PhD student and affiliate of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). “These types of events are so important to expose students to what's possible.”

Throughout its history, a key aspect of the carnival has been MIT’s close collaboration with the City of Cambridge, which ran several activities. Cambridge Public School teachers led and the Public Works Department hosted a “Trash or Treasure” activity, which helped teach kids about recycling and composting. The carnival is a major contribution to the Institute’s objective of connecting the MIT ecosystem with Cambridge residents and local communities. 

“Cambridge is one of the world’s leading science cities, with more Nobel laureates per capita than any other city on the planet,” says Michael John Gorman, director of the MIT Museum. “The Cambridge Science Carnival is a beloved day in the Cambridge calendar which brings science out of the labs and onto the streets.” 

With a focus on engaging families and kids ranging from kindergarten to the eighth grade, one important outcome this year was to give undergraduate and graduate students the opportunity to showcase their work and hone their skills in clearly communicating science concepts to the public. There were over 50 activities led by MIT students, as well as participants from other local schools such as Boston College and Boston, Clark, Harvard, Northeastern, and Tufts universities.

Typically organized as part of the annual Cambridge Science Festival, this year the Cambridge Science Carnival returned as a standalone event while the larger festival undergoes a strategic transition for its relaunch in 2026. The MIT Museum offered free admission during the carnival and is always free to Cambridge residents, as well as active military, EBT cardholders, members of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, and MIT ID holders.

“For MIT researchers, discovery often happens in a lab or a classroom, but the truth is, the spark of discovery can happen anywhere,” said Alfred Ironside, MIT vice president for communications, in remarks at the event. “That’s really what today is about: feeding curiosity, encouraging questions, and showing that science is not locked away behind closed doors. It’s for everyone.”

Pills are by far the most convenient form of cancer treatment, but most oral cancer drugs quickly dissolve in the stomach, delivering a burst of chemicals into the bloodstream all at once. That can cause side effects. It also may limit the drug’s effectiveness because its concentration in the blood may become too low after the initial burst.

Now, the startup Enzian Pharmaceutics, founded by Aron Blaesi PhD ’14 and former principal research scientist Nannaji Saka ScD ’74, is developing an oral tablet that delivers drugs into the gastric fluid and the blood steadily over time. The company’s tablets use tiny 3D-printed fibers that turn into a gel-like substance when exposed to water. The tablets have been shown to stay in the stomach of animals for up to a day, slowly degrading while releasing the drug in controlled quantities.

The company is currently validating its tablets’ ability to stay in place in a small number of healthy human volunteers. In about a year, it plans to begin testing the technology’s ability to improve the effectiveness and safety of cancer drugs in patients.

“A lot of orally delivered cancer drugs could benefit from this,” says Blaesi, who incorporated the company in 2016. “Right now, soon after someone has taken a cancer drug, its concentration in the blood can be up to 50 times greater than when they are supposed to take the next pill. During the peak, the drug goes into the heart, it goes into the liver, the brain, and it can cause a lot of problems, while at the end of the dosing interval the concentration in the blood may be too low. By taking out that peak and increasing the time the drug is released, we could improve the effectiveness of treatments and mitigate certain side effects.”

In search of innovation

When Blaesi came to MIT, he knew he wanted his mechanical engineering PhD work to form the basis of a company. Early on, as part of the Novartis-MIT Center for Continuous Manufacturing, he worked on manufacturing pills with an injection molding machine that melted and solidified the material, in contrast to the traditional process of compacting powder. He noticed injection molding made the pills far less porous.

“If you put a typical pill into a fluid or into the stomach, the fluid percolates the pores and quickly dissolves it,” Blaesi explains. “That’s not the case when you have an injection molded product. That’s when Dr. Saka, who I met almost daily to discuss my research with, and I started to realize that microstructure is very important.”

The researchers began exploring how different tablet microstructures changed the rate at which drugs are released. For more precision, they moved from injection molding to 3D printing.

Using MIT machine shops, Blaesi built a 3D printer and produced tightly wound microstructures that could carry the drugs. He focused on fibrous structures with space between the fibers, because they would allow gastrointestinal fluid to percolate the pill and dissolve rapidly. He tested the structures in both his Cambridge, Massachusetts, apartment and at MIT’s shared facilities.

Blaesi then experimented with different carrier materials, finding that the higher the molecular weight, the longer it took the pill to dissolve because the material would absorb water and expand before degrading.

“Initially I thought, ‘Oh no, the drug isn’t being dissolved fast enough anymore,’” Blaesi recalls. “Then we thought, ‘Everything has its place.’ This could stay in the stomach for longer because of the expansion. Then it could release the drug over time. We realized this wouldn’t just improve manufacturing, it would improve the product.”

In 2019, Blaesi and Saka published the first paper on their expandable fibrous tablets for prolonged drug delivery. It received a mixed reception.

“Some reviewers said, ‘Research on similar gastroretentive dosage forms has been done for 40 years and no one’s really succeeded,’” Blaesi recalls. “People said, ‘It will never work. Do experiments in animals and then we’ll talk.’”

Blaesi moved back to Switzerland during the Covid-19 pandemic and ran his animal experiments there.

“The reviewers were right: What we had didn’t work,” Blaesi says. “But we adjusted the design and showed we could make the pill stay in the stomach for longer.”

Inside Enzian’s final tablet design, tiny fibers are arranged in a grid. When water flows into the spaces between the fibers, they expand to form a strong gel-like substance that slowly erodes in the stomach, steadily releasing the drug. In animal studies, Enzian’s team showed its technology allowed tablets to remain in the stomach for 12 to 24 hours before being safely excreted.

The team soon found cancer drugs would be a good fit for their technology.

“A lot of cancer drugs are only soluble in acidic solutions, so they can only be absorbed while the drug is in the stomach,” Blaesi explains. “But on an empty stomach, the drug may be in the stomach for just 30 or 40 minutes at present. For a full stomach, it’s a few hours. And because you have a short time to deliver the drug, you need to release a high dose immediately. That shoots up the blood concentration, and if you dose every 12 hours, the concentration is going down during the other 10 hours.”

From the lab to patients

In upcoming human trials, Enzian plans to use its tablets to deliver a drug for prostate cancer that Blaesi says is currently dosed at several hundred milligrams a day. He hopes to get down to about a tenth of that with a better therapeutic effect.

Enzian also believes its technology could improve treatments for blood, skin, and breast cancers.

“This could really be used to improve treatment for a variety of cancers,” Blaesi says. “We believe this is a more efficient and effective way to deliver drugs.”

Maximizing effectiveness and minimizing side effects is also important in clinical trials, where a new drug’s superiority over existing treatments must be shown, and a single adverse event can end its development.

The upcoming move into patients is the culmination of more than a decade of work for Blaesi, who is confident Enzian can deliver on its promise of improving treatments.

“The opportunity is enormous,” Blaesi says. “So many oral cancer drugs have this delivery problem. We still have to do the efficacy and safety studies on patients, but we expect this to be a game changer.”

On Oct. 20 during its annual meeting, the National Academy of Medicine announced the election of 100 new members, including MIT faculty members Dina Katabi and Facundo Batista, along with three additional MIT alumni.

Election to the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) is considered one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine, recognizing individuals who have demonstrated outstanding professional achievement and commitment to service.

Facundo Batista is the associate director and scientific director of the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard, as well as the first Phillip T. and Susan M. Ragon Professor in the MIT Department of Biology. The National Academy of Medicine recognized Batista for “his work unraveling the biology of antibody-producing B cells to better understand how our body’s immune systems responds to infectious disease.” More recently, Facundo’s research has advanced preclinical vaccine and therapeutic development for globally important diseases including HIV, malaria, and influenza.

Batista earned a PhD from the International School of Advanced Studies and established his lab in 2002 as a member of the Francis Crick Institute (formerly the London Research Institute), simultaneously holding a professorship at Imperial College London. In 2016, he joined the Ragon Institute to pursue a new research program applying his expertise in B cells and antibody responses to vaccine development, and preclinical vaccinology for diseases including SARS-CoV-2 and HIV. Batista is an elected fellow or member of the U.K. Academy of Medical Sciences, the American Academy of Microbiology, the Academia de Ciencias de América Latina, and the European Molecular Biology Organization, and he is chief editor of The EMBO Journal.

Dina Katabi SM ’99, PhD ’03 is the Thuan (1990) and Nicole Pham Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. Her research spans digital health, wireless sensing, mobile computing, machine learning, and computer vision. Katabi’s contributions include efficient communication protocols for the internet, advanced contactless biosensors, and novel AI models that interpret physiological signals. The NAM recognized Katabi for “pioneering digital health technology that enables non-invasive, off-body remote health monitoring via AI and wireless signals, and for developing digital biomarkers for Parkinson’s progression and detection. She has translated this technology to advance objective, sensitive measures of disease trajectory and treatment response in clinical trials.”

Katabi is director of the MIT Center for Wireless Networks and Mobile Computing. She is also a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), where she leads the Networks at MIT Research Group. Katabi received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Damascus and MS and PhD degrees in computer science from MIT. She is a MacArthur Fellow; a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, National Academy of Sciences, and National Academy of Engineering; and a recipient of the ACM Computing Prize. 

Additional MIT alumni who were elected to the NAM for 2025 are:

• Christopher S. Chen SM ’93, PhD ’97, an alumnus of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology;
   
• Michael E. Matheny SM ’06, an alumnus of the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology; and
   
• Rebecca R. Richards-Kortum SM ’87, PhD ’90, and alumna of the Department of Physics and the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology.

Established originally as the Institute of Medicine in 1970 by the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine addresses critical issues in health, science, medicine, and related policy, and inspires positive actions across sectors.

“I am deeply honored to welcome these extraordinary health and medicine leaders and researchers into the National Academy of Medicine,” says NAM President Victor J. Dzau. “Their demonstrated excellence in tackling public health challenges, leading major discoveries, improving health care, advancing health policy, and addressing health equity will critically strengthen our collective ability to tackle the most pressing health challenges of our time.” 

If you think of a single atom as a grain of sand, then a wavelength of visible light — which is a thousand times larger than the atom’s width — is comparable to an ocean wave. The light wave can dwarf an atom, missing it entirely as it passes by. This gulf in size has long made it impossible for scientists to see and resolve individual atoms using optical microscopes alone.

Only recently have scientists found ways to break this “diffraction limit,” to see features that are smaller than the wavelength of light. With new techniques known as super-resolution microscopy, scientists can see down to the scale of a single molecule.

And yet, individual atoms have still been too small for optical microscopes — which are much simpler and less expensive than super-resolution techniques — to distinguish, until now.

In an open-access paper appearing today in Nature Communications, MIT scientists present a new computational method that enables optical microscopes to resolve individual atoms and zero in on their exact locations in a crystal structure.

The team’s new “discrete grid imaging technique,” or DIGIT, is a computational imaging approach that scientists can apply to optical data to calculate the most probable location of individual atoms based on a very important clue: the material’s known atomic configuration. As long as scientists have an idea of what a material’s physical atomic layout should be, they can use this layout as a sort of map to determine where specific atoms or features must be located.

“It’s like you know there’s a seating chart,” says lead author Yuqin “Sophia” Duan, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS). “Previous methods could tell you what section an atom is in. But now we can take this seating chart as prior knowledge, and can pinpoint exactly which seat the atom is in.”

With DIGIT, the team can now pinpoint individual atoms with a resolution of 0.178 angstroms. (One angstrom is one-tenth of a nanometer, which is less than half the width of a single atom). The technique enables optical microscopes to localize atomic-scale features in any material that has a known atomic pattern, such as crystalline materials or certain proteins with repeating molecular chains.

The team says the method could help guide the design of quantum devices, which often require placing individual atoms precisely within a crystal. Beyond quantum technologies, DIGIT can also provide new insights into how defects and impurities shape the behavior of advanced materials — from semiconductors to superconductors.

Duan’s co-authors at MIT are Qiushi Gu, Hanfeng Wang, Yong Hu, Kevin Chen, Matthew Trusheim, and EECS Professor Dirk Englund.

Grid support

Scientists can image features smaller than a nanometer, and sometimes as small as a single atom, but not with optical microscopes. In these cases, they use transmission or scanning electron microscopes, which send high-energy beams of electrons into a sample to generate an image based on the pattern in which the electrons scatter. These electron-based methods produce highly detailed, near-atomic-scale images, but they require imaging in a vacuum and at high energies, and only work in ultrathin, synthetic, or solid-state materials. Electron-based imaging methods are too harsh for more delicate living specimens.

In contrast, optical microscopes work at lower energies, in ambient conditions, and are safe to apply to biological samples. But they cannot discern features past the diffraction limit. Essentially, a microscope is unable to see features that are smaller than half the wavelength of visible light (about 200 to 300 nanometers) that a microscope sends in to probe a sample. Atoms, then, have long eluded optical microscopes.

In 2014, however, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to developers of a technique to overcome the diffraction limit. Super-resolution microscopy works by shining laser light on a sample at a specific frequency that is known to resonate with a feature of interest, such as a certain molecule. When that molecule resonates, it effectively announces its presence in the material. With this optical manipulation, scientists can visualize features as small as 10 nanometers, on the scale of a single molecule.

Duan and Englund looked to resolve even smaller features by combining super-resolution techniques with statistical analysis and knowledge of materials that has often been overlooked.

“One thing that gets ignored in imaging optical systems is the physical configuration of your system,” Duan says. “For example, if you want to visualize defects in a diamond system, these defects can only be at certain positions, since they have to follow the grid of the atomic diamond structure. In proteins, there are some structures that grow in an organized grid, and their location must be somewhere along that physical grid.”

The researchers suspected that if they had a reasonably accurate map of a material’s atomic structure (imagine the ball-and-stick models of molecules in a chemistry classroom), they might use such maps as a template and try out many different orientations and rotation angles to find the closest match to whatever features are initially visualized using super-resolution microscopy.

“No one has ever done this before, to include the physical constraints or system information into the resolution technique,” Duan says.

Blurriness, collapsed

To test their idea, the researchers worked with a sample of diamond — a crystal whose microstructure is well-understood and resembles an organized grid, or lattice, of repeating carbon atoms. The researchers blindly knocked out some carbon atoms in the lattice and replaced them with silicon atoms using facilities at MIT.nano. Their goal was to identify and determine the precise locations of the errant silicon atoms.

To do so, they first used established techniques of super-resolution microscopy to probe the diamond sample, using lasers set to specific wavelengths at frequencies known to resonate with the silicon atoms but not the carbon atoms. With this technique, researchers produced images that depicted the silicon atoms, but only as a uniform blur.

The team then applied DIGIT to further resolve the picture. Knowing that diamond in general has a grid-like configuration of carbon atoms, the researchers took this configuration as a map, or seating chart of sorts, and assumed that any silicon atoms that took the place of a carbon atom must sit within the grid, which has a known spacing between atoms.

“Because the silicon atoms are substituting carbon atoms in the lattice, that means they must obey some integer multiple of the atomic spacing of the crystal lattice, separating any two silicon atoms,” Englund says. “That prior knowledge makes the localization different than if you add a purely amorphous material.”

The researchers essentially simulated many possibilities of orientations and rotation angles of the diamond lattice, superimposed on the blurry image of atoms that the super-resolution microscopy technique produced.

“The trick is that, in certain materials, atoms aren’t spread out randomly — they sit on a grid inside a crystal,” Duan explains. “We used that prior knowledge to sharpen the microscope’s picture. Once we factored in that ‘atomic grid,’ the blurriness collapsed, and we could pinpoint exact positions.”

In the end, they found the technique could pinpoint the location of individual silicon atoms within the diamond lattice, with a precision of 0.178 angstroms — the sharpest resolution of any optical-based imaging technique. The team has made the DIGIT code available on GitHub for anyone to apply to their optical measurements, provided their sample of interest has a well-understood atomic structure. Then, they hope that scientists will start to see much finer and detailed features and processes using light.

“It’s a big step — it takes optical microscopes into the realm of atomic scale, something people thought only electron microscopes or X-rays could do,” Duan says. “That opens up a whole new way of studying materials and biology.”

The degree to which someone trusts the information depicted in a chart can depend on their assumptions about who made the data visualization, according to a pair of studies by MIT researchers.

For instance, if someone infers that a graph about a controversial topic like gun violence was produced by an organization they feel is in opposition with their beliefs or political views, they may discredit the information or dismiss the visualization all together.

The researchers found that even the clearest visualizations often communicate more than the data they explicitly depict, and can elicit strong judgments from viewers about the social contexts, identities, and characteristics of those who made the chart.

Readers make these assessments about the social context of a visualization primarily from its design features, like the color palette or the way information is arranged, rather than the underlying data. Often, these inferences are unintended by the designers.

Qualitative and quantitative studies revealed that these social inferences aren’t restricted to certain subgroups, nor are they caused by limited data literacy.

The researchers consolidate their findings into a framework that scientists and communicators can use to think critically about how design choices might affect these social assumptions. Ultimately, they hope this work leads to better strategies for scientific communication.

“If you are scrolling through social media and you see a chart, and you immediately dismiss it as something an influencer has produced just to get attention, that shapes your entire experience with the chart before you even dig into the data. We’ve shown in these papers that visualizations do more than just communicate the data they are depicting — they also communicate other social signals,” says Arvind Satyanarayan, an associate professor in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and co-senior author of this research.

He is joined on the paper by co-lead authors Amy Rae Fox, a former CSAIL postdoc, and Michelle Morgenstern, a current postdoc in MIT’s anthropology program; and co-senior author Graham M. Jones, professor of anthropology. Two related papers on this research will be presented at the IEEE Visualization Conference.

Charts as social artifacts

During the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, social media was awash in charts from organizations like the World Health Organization and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which were designed to convey information about the spread of disease.

The MIT researchers studied how these visualizations were being used to discuss the pandemic. They found that some citizen scientists were using the underlying data to make visualizations of their own, challenging the findings of mainstream science.

“This was an unexpected discovery as, previously, citizen scientists were typically aligned with mainstream scientists. It took us a few years to figure out how to study this phenomenon more deeply,” Satyanarayan says.

Most research into data visualization studies how charts communicate data. Instead, the researchers wanted to explore visualizations from a social and linguistic perspective to assess the information they convey beyond the data.

Linguistic anthropologists have found that, while language allows people to communicate ideas, it also holds social meaning beyond the words people use. For instance, an accent or dialect can indicate that someone is part of a particular community.

By “pointing” to certain social meanings, identities, and characteristics, language serves what is known as a socio-indexical function.

“We wanted to see if things in the visual language of data communication might point to certain institutions, or the kinds of people in those institutions, that carry a meaning that could be unintended by the makers of the visualization,” Jones says.

To do this, the researchers conducted an initial, qualitative study of users on the social media platform Tumblr. During one-on-one interviews, the researchers showed users a variety of real visualizations from online sources, as well as modified visualizations where they removed the textual information, like titles and axes labels.

Stripping out the textual information was particularly important, since it mimics the way people often interact with online visualizations.

“Our engagement with social media is a few quick seconds. People aren’t taking the time to read the title of a chart or look at the data very carefully,” Satyanarayan says.

The interviews revealed that users made detailed inferences about the people or organizations who created the visualizations based on what they called “vibes,” design elements, like colors or the use of certain graphics. These inferences in turn impacted their trust in the data.

For instance, after seeing a chart with the flags of Georgia and Texas and a graph with two lines in red and black, but no text, one user said, “This kind of looks like something a Texas Republican (legislator) would put on Twitter or on their website, or as part of a campaign presentation.”

A quantitative approach

Building on this initial work, the researchers used the same methodology in three quantitative studies involving surveys sent to larger groups of people from a variety of backgrounds.

They found the same phenomenon: People make inferences about the social context of a visualization based on its design, which can lead to misunderstandings about, and mistrust in, the data it depicts.

For instance, users felt some visualizations were so neatly arranged they believed them to be advertisements, and therefore not trustworthy. In another example, one user dismissed a chart by a Pulitzer-prize winning designer because they felt the hand-drawn graphical style indicated it was made by “some female Instagram influencer who is just trying to look for attention.”

“If that is the first reaction someone has to a chart, it is going to massively impact the degree to which they trust it,” Satyanarayan says.

Moreover, when the researchers reintroduced text in the visualizations from which it had been removed, users still made these social inferences.

Typically, in data visualization, the solution to such a problem would be to create clearer charts or educate people about data literacy. But this research points to a completely different kind of data literacy, Jones says.

“It is not erroneous for people to be drawing these inferences. It requires a lot of cultural knowledge about where visualizations come from, how they are made, and how they circulate. Drawing these inferences is a feature, not a bug, of the way we use signs,” he says.

From these results, they created a classification framework to organize the social inferences users made and the design elements that contributed to them. They hope the typology serves as a tool designers can use to develop more effective visualizations, as well as a starting point for additional studies.

Moving forward, the researchers want to continue exploring the role of data visualizations as social artifacts, perhaps by drilling down on each design feature they identified in the typology. They also want to expand the scope of their study to include visualizations in research papers and scientific journals.

“Part of the value of this work is a methodological contribution to render a set of phenomena amenable to experimental study. But this work is also important because it showcases an interdisciplinary cross-pollination that is powerful and unique to MIT,” Jones says.

This work was supported, in part, by MIT METEOR and PFPFEE fellowships, an Amar G. Bose Fellowship, an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship, and the National Science Foundation.