Ben Vinson III, president of Howard University, made a compelling call for artificial intelligence to be “developed with wisdom,” as he delivered MIT’s annual Karl Taylor Compton Lecture on campus Monday. 

The broad-ranging talk posed a series of searching questions about our human ideals and practices, and was anchored in the view that, as Vinson said, “Technological progress must serve humanity, and not the other way around.”

In the course of his remarks, Vinson offered thoughts about our self-conception as rational beings; the effects of technological revolutions on human tasks, jobs, and society; and the values and ethics we want our lives and our social fabric to reflect.   

“Philosophers like Cicero argue that the good life centers on the pursuit of virtue and wisdom,” Vinson said. “Can AI enhance our pursuit of virtue and wisdom? Does it risk automating critical aspects of human reflection? Does a world that increasingly defers to AI for decision-making and artistic creation, and even ethical deliberation, does that reflect a more advanced society? Or does it signal a quiet surrender of human agency?”

Vinson’s talk, titled “AI in an Age After Reason: A Discourse on Fundamental Human Questions,” was delivered to a large audience in MIT’s Samberg Conference Center.

He also suggested that universities can serve as an “intellectual compass” in the development of AI, bringing realism and specificity to the topic and “separating real risks from speculative fears, ensuring that AI is neither demonized nor blindly embraced but developed with wisdom, with ethical oversight, and with societal adaptation.”

The Compton lecture series was introduced in 1957, in honor of Karl Taylor Compton, who served as MIT’s ninth president, from 1930 to 1948, and as chair of the MIT Corporation from 1948 to 1954.

In introductory remarks, MIT President Sally A. Kornbluth observed that Compton “helped the Institute transform itself from an outstanding technical school for training hands-on engineers to a truly great global university. A renowned physicist, President Compton brought a new focus on fundamental scientific research, and he made science an equal partner with engineering at MIT.”

Beyond that, Kornbluth added, “through the war, he helped invent a partnership between the federal government and America’s research universities.”

Introducing Vinson, Kornbluth described him as an academic leader who projects a “wonderful sense of energy, positivity, and forward movement.”

Vinson became president of Howard University in September 2023, having previously served as provost and executive vice president of Case Western Reserve University; dean of George Washington University's Columbian College of Arts and Sciences; and vice dean for centers, interdisciplinary studies, and graduate education at Johns Hopkins University. A historian who has studied the African diaspora in Latin America, Vinson is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a former president of the American Historical Association.

Using history as a guide, Vinson suggested that AI has potential to substantially influence society and the economy, even if it may not fully deliver all of the advances it is imagined to bring.

“It serves as a Rorschach test for society’s deepest hopes and anxieties,” Vinson said of AI. “Optimists, they see it as a productivity revolution and a leap in human evolution, while pessimists warn of mass surveillance, bias, job displacement, and even existential risk. The reality, as history suggests, will likely fall somewhere in between. AI will likely evolve through a cycle of inflated expectations, disillusionment, and eventual pragmatic inspiration.”

Still, Vinson suggested there were substantial differences between AI and some of our earlier technological leaps — the industrial revolution, the electrical revolution, and the digital revolution, among others.

“Unlike previous technologies that have extended human labor, again, AI targets cognition, creativity, decision-making, and even emotional intelligence,” Vinson said.

In all cases, Vinson said, people should be active about discussing the profound effects technological change can have upon society: “AI is not just about technological progress, it is about power, it is about justice, and the very essence of what it means to be human.”

At a few times, Vinson’s remarks looped back to the subject of education and the impact of AI. Howard, one of the nation’s leading historically Black colleges and universities, has recently achieved an R1 designation as a university with a very high level of research activity. At the same time, it has thriving programs in the humanities and social sciences that depend on individual cognition and inquiry.

But suppose, Vinson remarked, that AI eventually ends up displacing a portion of humanistic scholarship. “Does a world with fewer humanities truly represent human progress?” he asked.

All told, Vinson proposed, as AI advances, we have a responsibility to engage with the advances and potential of the field while keeping everyday human values in mind.

“Let’s guide the world through this transformative age with more wisdom, with foresight, and with an unwavering dedication to the common good,” Vinson said. “This is not just a technological moment. It is a moment that calls for a form of intellectual courage and moral imagination. Together, we can shape an AI future that honors dignity for everyone, and at the same time, advances the ideals of humanity itself.”

It’s difficult to build devices that replicate the fluid, precise motion of humans, but that might change if we could pull a few (literal) strings.

At least, that’s the idea behind “cable-driven” mechanisms in which running a string through an object generates streamlined movement across an object’s different parts. Take a robotic finger, for example: You could embed a cable through the palm to the fingertip of this object and then pull it to create a curling motion.

While cable-driven mechanisms can create real-time motion to make an object bend, twist, or fold, they can be complicated and time-consuming to assemble by hand. To automate the process, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have developed an all-in-one 3D printing approach called “Xstrings.” Part design tool, part fabrication method, Xstrings can embed all the pieces together and produce a cable-driven device, saving time when assembling bionic robots, creating art installations, or working on dynamic fashion designs.

In a paper to be presented at the 2025 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI2025), the researchers used Xstrings to print a range of colorful and unique objects that included a red walking lizard robot, a purple wall sculpture that can open and close like a peacock’s tail, a white tentacle that curls around items, and a white claw that can ball up into a fist to grab objects.

To fabricate these eye-catching mechanisms, Xstrings allows users to fully customize their designs in a software program, sending them to a multi-material 3D printer to bring that creation to life. You can automatically print all the device’s parts in their desired locations in one step, including the cables running through it and the joints that enable its intended motion.

MIT CSAIL postdoc and lead author Jiaji Li says that Xstrings can save engineers time and energy, reducing 40 percent of total production time compared to doing things manually. “Our innovative method can help anyone design and fabricate cable-driven products with a desktop bi-material 3D printer,” says Li.

A new twist on cable-driven fabrication

To use the Xstrings program, users first input a design with specific dimensions, like a rectangular cube divided into smaller pieces with a hole in the middle of each one. You can then choose which way its parts move by selecting different “primitives:” bending, coiling (like a spring), twisting (like a screw), or compressing — and the angle of these motions.

For even more elaborate creations, users can incorporate multiple primitives to create intriguing combinations of motions. If you wanted to make a toy snake, you could include several twists to create a “series” combo, in which a single cord drives a sequence of motions. To create the robot claw, the team embedded multiple cables into a “parallel” combination, where several strings are embedded, to enable each finger to close up into a fist.

Beyond fine-tuning the way cable-driven mechanisms move, Xstrings also facilitates how cables are integrated into the object. Users can choose exactly how the strings are secured, in terms of where the “anchor” (endpoint), “threaded areas” (or holes within the structure that the cord passes through), and “exposed point” (where you’d pull to operate the device) are located. With a robot finger, for instance, you could choose the anchor to be located at the fingertip, with a cable running through the finger and a pull tag exposed at the other end.

Xstrings also supports diverse joint designs by automatically placing components that are elastic, compliant, or mechanical. This allows the cable to turn as needed as it completes the device’s intended motion.

Driving unique designs across robotics, art, and beyond

Once users have simulated their digital blueprint for a cable-driven item, they can bring it to life via fabrication. Xstrings can send your design to a fused deposition modeling 3D printer, where plastic is melted down into a nozzle before the filaments are poured out to build structures up layer by layer.

Xstrings uses this technique to lay out cables horizontally and build around them. To ensure their method would successfully print cable-driven mechanisms, the researchers carefully tested their materials and printing conditions.

For example, the researchers found that their strings only broke after being pulled up and down by a mechanical device more than 60,000 times. In another test, the team discovered that printing at 260 degrees Celsius with a speed of 10-20 millimeters per second was ideal for producing their many creative items.

“The Xstrings software can bring a variety of ideas to life,” says Li. “It enables you to produce a bionic robot device like a human hand, mimicking our own gripping capabilities. You can also create interactive art pieces, like a cable-driven sculpture with unique geometries, and clothes with adjustable flaps. One day, this technology could enable the rapid, one-step creation of cable-driven robots in outer space, even within highly confined environments such as space stations or extraterrestrial bases.”

The team’s approach offers plenty of flexibility and a noticeable speed boost to fabricating cable-driven objects. It creates objects that are rigid on the outside, but soft and flexible on the inside; in the future, they may look to develop objects that are soft externally but rigid internally, much like humans’ skin and bones. They’re also considering using more resilient cables, and, instead of just printing strings horizontally, embedding ones that are angled or even vertical.

Li wrote the paper with Zhejiang University master’s student Shuyue Feng; Tsinghua University master’s student Yujia Liu; Zhejiang University assistant professor and former MIT Media Lab visiting researcher Guanyun Wang; and three CSAIL members: Maxine Perroni-Scharf, an MIT PhD student in electrical engineering and computer science; Emily Guan, a visiting researcher; and senior author Stefanie Mueller, the TIBCO Career Development Associate Professor in the MIT departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering, and leader of the HCI Engineering Group.

This research was supported, in part, by a postdoctoral research fellowship from Zhejiang University, and the MIT-GIST Program.

Within the human brain, a network of regions has evolved to process language. These regions are consistently activated whenever people listen to their native language or any language in which they are proficient.

A new study by MIT researchers finds that this network also responds to languages that are completely invented, such as Esperanto, which was created in the late 1800s as a way to promote international communication, and even to languages made up for television shows such as “Star Trek” and “Game of Thrones.”

To study how the brain responds to these artificial languages, MIT neuroscientists convened nearly 50 speakers of these languages over a single weekend. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the researchers found that when participants listened to a constructed language in which they were proficient, the same brain regions lit up as those activated when they processed their native language.

“We find that constructed languages very much recruit the same system as natural languages, which suggests that the key feature that is necessary to engage the system may have to do with the kinds of meanings that both kinds of languages can express,” says Evelina Fedorenko, an associate professor of neuroscience at MIT, a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research and the senior author of the study.

The findings help to define some of the key properties of language, the researchers say, and suggest that it’s not necessary for languages to have naturally evolved over a long period of time or to have a large number of speakers.

“It helps us narrow down this question of what a language is, and do it empirically, by testing how our brain responds to stimuli that might or might not be language-like,” says Saima Malik-Moraleda, an MIT postdoc and the lead author of the paper, which appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Convening the conlang community

Unlike natural languages, which evolve within communities and are shaped over time, constructed languages, or “conlangs,” are typically created by one person who decides what sounds will be used, how to label different concepts, and what the grammatical rules are.

Esperanto, the most widely spoken conlang, was created in 1887 by Ludwik Zamenhok, who intended it to be used as a universal language for international communication. Currently, it is estimated that around 60,000 people worldwide are proficient in Esperanto.

In previous work, Fedorenko and her students have found that computer programming languages, such as Python — another type of invented language — do not activate the brain network that is used to process natural language. Instead, people who read computer code rely on the so-called multiple demand network, a brain system that is often recruited for difficult cognitive tasks.

Fedorenko and others have also investigated how the brain responds to other stimuli that share features with language, including music and nonverbal communication such as gestures and facial expressions.

“We spent a lot of time looking at all these various kinds of stimuli, finding again and again that none of them engage the language-processing mechanisms,” Fedorenko says. “So then the question becomes, what is it that natural languages have that none of those other systems do?”

That led the researchers to wonder if artificial languages like Esperanto would be processed more like programming languages or more like natural languages. Similar to programming languages, constructed languages are created by an individual for a specific purpose, without natural evolution within a community. However, unlike programming languages, both conlangs and natural languages can be used to convey meanings about the state of the external world or the speaker’s internal state.

To explore how the brain processes conlangs, the researchers invited speakers of Esperanto and several other constructed languages to MIT for a weekend conference in November 2022. The other languages included Klingon (from “Star Trek”), Na’vi (from “Avatar”), and two languages from “Game of Thrones” (High Valyrian and Dothraki). For all of these languages, there are texts available for people who want to learn the language, and for Esperanto, Klingon, and High Valyrian, there is even a Duolingo app available.

“It was a really fun event where all the communities came to participate, and over a weekend, we collected all the data,” says Malik-Moraleda, who co-led the data collection effort with former MIT postbac Maya Taliaferro, now a PhD student at New York University.

During that event, which also featured talks from several of the conlang creators, the researchers used fMRI to scan 44 conlang speakers as they listened to sentences from the constructed language in which they were proficient. The creators of these languages — who are co-authors on the paper — helped construct the sentences that were presented to the participants.

While in the scanner, the participants also either listened to or read sentences in their native language, and performed some nonlinguistic tasks for comparison. The researchers found that when people listened to a conlang, the same language regions in the brain were activated as when they listened to their native language.

Common features

The findings help to identify some of the key features that are necessary to recruit the brain’s language processing areas, the researchers say. One of the main characteristics driving language responses seems to be the ability to convey meanings about the interior and exterior world — a trait that is shared by natural and constructed languages, but not programming languages.

“All of the languages, both natural and constructed, express meanings related to inner and outer worlds. They refer to objects in the world, to properties of objects, to events,” Fedorenko says. “Whereas programming languages are much more similar to math. A programming language is a symbolic generative system that allows you to express complex meanings, but it’s a self-contained system: The meanings are highly abstract and mostly relational, and not connected to the real world that we experience.”

Some other characteristics of natural languages, which are not shared by constructed languages, don’t seem to be necessary to generate a response in the language network.

“It doesn’t matter whether the language is created and shaped over time by a community of speakers, because these constructed languages are not,” Malik-Moraleda says. “It doesn’t matter how old they are, because conlangs that are just a decade old engage the same brain regions as natural languages that have been around for many hundreds of years.”

To further refine the features of language that activate the brain’s language network, Fedorenko’s lab is now planning to study how the brain responds to a conlang called Lojban, which was created by the Logical Language Group in the 1990s and was designed to prevent ambiguity of meanings and promote more efficient communication.

The research was funded by MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department, the Simons Center for the Social Brain, the Frederick A. and Carole J. Middleton Career Development Professorship, and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

Prototyping large structures with integrated electronics, like a chair that can monitor someone’s sitting posture, is typically a laborious and wasteful process.

One might need to fabricate multiple versions of the chair structure via 3D printing and laser cutting, generating a great deal of waste, before assembling the frame, grafting sensors and other fragile electronics onto it, and then wiring it up to create a working device.

If the prototype fails, the maker will likely have no choice but to discard it and go back to the drawing board.

MIT researchers have come up with a better way to iteratively design large and sturdy interactive structures. They developed a rapid development platform that utilizes reconfigurable building blocks with integrated electronics that can be assembled into complex, functional devices. Rather than building electronics into a structure, the electronics become the structure.

These lightweight three-dimensional lattice building blocks, known as voxels, have high strength and stiffness, along with integrated sensing, response, and processing abilities that enable users without mechanical or electrical engineering expertise to rapidly produce interactive electronic devices.

The voxels, which can be assembled, disassembled, and reconfigured almost infinitely into various forms, cost about 50 cents each.

The prototyping platform, called VIK (Voxel Invention Kit), includes a user-friendly design tool that enables end-to-end prototyping, allowing a user to simulate the structure’s response to mechanical loads and iterate on the design as needed.

“This is about democratizing access to functional interactive devices. With VIK, there is no 3D printing or laser cutting required. If you just have the voxel faces, you are able to produce these interactive structures anywhere you want,” says Jack Forman, an MIT graduate student in media arts and sciences and affiliate of the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA) and the MIT Media Lab, and co-lead author of a paper on VIK.

Forman is joined on the paper by co-lead author and fellow graduate student Miana Smith; graduate student Amira Abdel-Rahman; and senior author Neil Gershenfeld, an MIT professor and director of the CBA. The research will be presented at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Functional building blocks

VIK builds upon years of work in the CBA to develop discrete, cellular building blocks called voxels. One voxel, an aluminum cuboctahedra lattice (which has eight triangular faces and six square faces), is strong enough to support 228 kilograms, or about the weight of an upright piano.

Instead of being 3D printed, milled, or laser cut, voxels are assembled into largescale, strong, durable structures like airplane components or wind turbines that can respond to their environments.

The CBA team merged voxels other work in their lab centered on interconnected electrical components, yielding voxels with structural electronics. Assembling these functional voxels generates structures that can transmit data and power, as well as mechanical forces, without the need for wires.

They used these electromechanical building blocks to develop VIK.

“It was an interesting challenge to think about adapting a lot of our previous work, which has been about hitting hard engineering metrics, into a user-friendly system that makes sense and is fun and easy for people to work with,” Smith says.

For instance, they made the voxel design larger so the lattice structures are easier for human hands to assemble and disassemble. They also added aluminum cross-bracing to the units to improve their strength and stability.

In addition, VIK voxels have a reversible, snap-fit connection so a user can seamlessly assemble them without the need for additional tools, in contrast to some prior voxel designs that used rivets as fasteners.

“We designed the voxel faces to permit only the correct connections. That means that, if you are building with voxels, you are guaranteed to be building the correct wiring harness. Once you finish your device, you can just plug it in and it will work,” says Smith.

Wiring harnesses can add significant cost to functional systems and can often be a source of failure.

An accessible prototyping platform

To help users who have minimal engineering expertise create a wide array of interactive devices, the team developed a user-friendly interface to simulate 3D voxel structures.

The interface includes a Finite Element Analysis (FEA) simulation model that enables users to draw out a structure and simulate the forces and mechanical loads that will be applied to it. It adds colors to an animation of the user’s device to identify potential points of failure.

“We created what is essentially a ‘Minecraft’ for voxel applications. You don’t need a good sense of civil engineering or truss analysis to verify that the structure you are making is safe. Anyone can build something with VIK and have confidence in it,” Forman says.

Users can also easily integrate off-the-shelf modules, like speakers, sensors, or actuators, into their device. VIK emphasizes flexibility, enabling makers to use the types of microcontrollers they are comfortable with.

“The next evolution of electronics will be in three-dimensional space and the Voxel Invention Kit (VIK) is the stepping stone that will enable users, designers, and innovators a way to visualize and integrate electronics directly into structures,” says Victor Zaderej, manager of advanced electronics packaging technology at Molex, a manufacturer of electronic, electrical, and fiber optic connectivity systems. “Think of the VIK as the merging of a LEGO building kit and an electronics breadboard. When creative engineers and designers begin thinking about potential applications, the opportunities and unique products that will be enabled will be limitless.”

Using the design tool for feedback, a maker can rapidly change the configuration of voxels to adjust a prototype or disassemble the structure to build something new. If the user eventually wishes to discard the device, the aluminum voxels are fully recyclable.

This reconfigurability and recyclability, along with the high strength, high stiffness, light weight, and integrated electronics of the voxels, could make VIK especially well-suited for applications such as theatrical stage design, where stage managers want to support actors safely with customizable set pieces that might only exist for a few days.

And by enabling the rapid-prototyping of large, complex structures, VIK could also have future applications in areas like space fabrication or in the development of smart buildings and intelligent infrastructure for sustainable cities.

But for the researchers, perhaps the most important next step will be to get VIK out into the world to see what users come up with.

“These voxels are now so readily available that someone can use them in their day-to-day life. It will be exciting to see what they can do and create with VIK,” adds Forman.

The MIT women's track and field team won its first NCAA Division III National Championship in program history on Saturday, March 15, at the 2025 NCAA Division III Track and Field Championships, hosted by Nazareth College in Rochester, New York.

The Engineers, who entered the meet as the top-ranked team in the nation, scored the most points ever scored by an MIT women's team at a national indoor meet. They finished with 49 points, which earned them a first place finish in a field of 62. They were ahead of Washington University, with 45.5 points; the University of Wisconsin at La Crosse, with 37 points; Loras College, with 32 points; and the State University of New York at Geneseo, with 29 points.

“This was such a fun and exciting outcome, and what our team has been working toward all year,” says Julie Heyde, MIT director of track and field and head coach of cross country and track and field. “Since last year, even, the team knew they had a possibility of being national champs. We didn't gear only toward this goal; we have been very process-driven, and that's why this team win is so special. Each and every person competed for each other, representing a total team culture.” 

Field events

Senior Alexis Boykin's (Clayton, Ohio) third attempt in the shot put was the mark to beat, as the defending national champion registered a mark of 15.31 meters. Boykin also repeated as the indoor national champion in the shot put, which gave her two titles on the weekend and her seventh individual NCAA national championship. 

Senior Emily Ball (Des Moines, Iowa) set a new personal record with a mark of 14.19m (46 feet, 6-3/4 inches) to finish in sixth and earn All-American honors. Ball's second throw was the best attempt for the MIT senior, earning the Engineers three valuable points in the team standings. 

Junior Nony Otu Ugwu (Katy, Texas) finished ninth in the first flight of the triple jump and did not advance to the final. Otu Ugwu's best mark came on her second jump with a mark of 11.78m (38 feet, 7-3/4 inches).

Running events

Graduate student Gillian Roeder (Delmar, New York) finished fifth in the mile event in a hard-fought race, earning All-America honors with a time of 4:51.97.

With MIT on the verge of clinching the national title, Roeder, senior Christina Crow (Mercer Island, Washington), and juniors Rujuta Sane (Chandler, Arizona) and Kate Sanderson (West Hartford, Connecticut) took to the track in the 3,000-meter event. Sane finished 20th in 10:02.86, with Roeder taking 16th in 9:56.02. Crow and Sanderson held in the middle of the pack for most of the race before Sanderson made a late move, taking over sixth place with just a few laps remaining. Sanderson would hold the position to earn three points and clinch the national championship. Crow took 11th in 9:44.99.

Other numbers of note

Otu Ugwu was making her second appearance at indoor nationals and her third overall NCAA appearance. She was 14th in the triple jump at both the indoor and outdoor national championship last year. Roeder was running in the final in the mile for the first time since 2023 indoor nationals, where she also finished fifth. Sanderson qualified for indoor nationals in the 5,000 meters in both 2023 and 2024, but Saturday was her first All-American after finishing 16th in 2024 and 20th in 2023.

MIT will head outside in two weeks, opening the outdoor track and field season Thursday-Saturday, March 27-29, at the Raleigh Relays, hosted by North Carolina State University in Raleigh.

A version of this article first appeared on the MIT Athletics website. 

When you’re challenging a century-old assumption, you’re bound to meet a bit of resistance. That’s exactly what John Joannopoulos and his group at MIT faced in 1998, when they put forth a new theory on how materials can be made to bend light in entirely new ways.

“Because it was such a big difference in what people expected, we wrote down the theory for this, but it was very difficult to get it published,” Joannopoulos told a capacity crowd in MIT’s Huntington Hall on Friday, as he delivered MIT’s James R. Killian, Jr. Faculty Achievement Award Lecture.

Joannopoulos’ theory offered a new take on a type of material known as a one-dimensional photonic crystal. Photonic crystals are made from alternating layers of refractive structures whose arrangement can influence how incoming light is reflected or absorbed.

In 1887, the English physicist John William Strutt, better known as the Lord Rayleigh, established a theory for how light should bend through a similar structure composed of multiple refractive layers. Rayleigh predicted that such a structure could reflect light, but only if that light is coming from a very specific angle. In other words, such a structure could act as a mirror for light shining from a specific direction only.

More than a century later, Joannopoulos and his group found that, in fact, quite the opposite was true. They proved in theoretical terms that, if a one-dimensional photonic crystal were made from layers of materials with certain “refractive indices,” bending light to different degrees, then the crystal as a whole should be able to reflect light coming from any and all directions. Such an arrangement could act as a “perfect mirror.”

The idea was a huge departure from what scientists had long assumed, and as such, when Joannopoulos submitted the research for peer review, it took some time for the journal, and the community, to come around. But he and his students kept at it, ultimately verifying the theory with experiments.

That work led to a high-profile publication, which helped the group focus the idea into a device: Using the principles that they laid out, they effectively fabricated a perfect mirror and folded it into a tube to form a hollow-core fiber. When they shone light through, the inside of the fiber reflected all the light, trapping it entirely in the core as the light pinged through the fiber. In 2000, the team launched a startup to further develop the fiber into a flexible, highly precise and minimally invasive “photonics scalpel,” which has since been used in hundreds of thousands of medical procedures including a surgeries of the brain and spine.

“And get this: We have estimated more than 500,000 procedures across hospitals in the U.S. and abroad,” Joannopoulos proudly stated, to appreciative applause.

Joannopoulos is the recipient of the 2024-2025 James R. Killian, Jr. Faculty Achievement Award, and is the Francis Wright Davis Professor of Physics and director of the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies at MIT. In response to an audience member who asked what motivated him in the face of initial skepticism, he replied, “You have to persevere if you believe what you have is correct.”

Immeasurable impact

The Killian Award was established in 1971 to honor MIT’s 10th president, James Killian. Each year, a member of the MIT faculty is honored with the award in recognition of their extraordinary professional accomplishments.

Joannopoulos received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 1974, then immediately joined MIT’s physics faculty. In introducing his lecture, Mary Fuller, professor of literature and chair of the MIT faculty, noted: “If you do the math, you’ll know he just celebrated 50 years at MIT.” Throughout that remarkable tenure, Fuller noted Joannopoulos’ profound impact on generations of MIT students.

“We recognize you as a leader, a visionary scientist, beloved mentor, and a believer in the goodness of people,” Fuller said. “Your legendary impact at MIT and the broader scientific community is immeasurable.”

Bending light

In his lecture, which he titled “Working at the Speed of Light,” Joannopoulos took the audience through the basic concepts underlying photonic crystals, and the ways in which he and others have shown that these materials can bend and twist incoming light in a controlled way.

As he described it, photonic crystals are “artificial materials” that can be designed to influence the properties of photons in a way that’s similar to how physical features in semiconductors affect the flow of electrons. In the case of semiconductors, such materials have a specific “band gap,” or a range of energies in which electrons cannot exist.

In the 1990s, Joannopoulos and others wondered whether the same effects could be realized for optical materials, to intentionally reflect, or keep out, some kinds of light while letting others through. And even more intriguing: Could a single material be designed such that incoming light pinballs away from certain regions in a material in predesigned paths?

“The answer was a resounding yes,” he said.

Joannopoulos described the excitement within the emerging field by quoting an editor from the journal Nature, who wrote at the time: “If only it were possible to make materials in which electromagnetic waves cannot propagate at certain frequencies, all kinds of almost-magical things would be possible.”

Joannopoulos and his group at MIT began in earnest to elucidate the ways in which light interacts with matter and air. The team worked first with two-dimensional photonic crystals made from a horizontal matrix-like pattern of silicon dots surrounded by air. Silicon has a high refractive index, meaning it can greatly bend or reflect light, while air has a much lower index. Joannopoulos predicted that the silicon could be patterned to ping light away, forcing it to travel through the air in predetermined paths.

In multiple works, he and his students showed through theory and experiments that they could design photonic crystals to, for instance, bend incoming light by 90 degrees and force light to circulate only at the edges of a crystal under an applied magnetic field.

“Over the years there have been quite a few examples we’ve discovered of very anomalous, strange behavior of light that cannot exist in normal objects,” he said.

In 1998, after showing that light can be reflected from all directions from a stacked, one-dimensional photonic crystal, he and his students rolled the crystal structure into a fiber, which they tested in a lab. In a video that Joannopoulos played for the audience, a student carefully aimed the end of the long, flexible fiber at a sheet of material made from the same material as the fiber’s casing. As light pumped through the multilayered photonic lining of the fiber and out the other end, the student used the light to slowly etch a smiley face design in the sheet, drawing laughter from the crowd.

As the video demonstrated, although the light was intense enough to melt the material of the fiber’s coating, it was nevertheless entirely contained within the fiber’s core, thanks to the multilayered design of its photonic lining. What’s more, the light was focused enough to make precise patterns when it shone out of the fiber.

“We had originally developed this [optical fiber] as a military device,” Joannopoulos said. “But then the obvious choice to use it for the civilian population was quite clear.”

“Believing in the goodness of people and what they can do”

He and others co-founded Omniguide in 2000, which has since grown into a medical device company that develops and commercializes minimally invasive surgical tools such as the fiber-based “photonics scalpel.” In illustrating the fiber’s impact, Joannopoulos played a news video, highlighting the fiber’s use in performing precise and effective neurosurgery. The optical scalpel has also been used to perform procedures in larynology, head and neck surgery, and gynecology, along with brain and spinal surgeries.

Omniguide is one of several startups that Joannopoulos has helped found, along with Luminus Devices, Inc., WiTricity Corporation, Typhoon HIL, Inc., and Lightelligence. He is author or co-author of over 750 refereed journal articles, four textbooks, and 126 issued U.S. patents. He has earned numerous recognitions and awards, including his election to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The Killian Award citation states: “Professor Joannopoulos has been a consistent role model not just in what he does, but in how he does it. … Through all these individuals he has impacted — not to mention their academic descendants — Professor Joannopoulos has had a vast influence on the development of science in recent decades.”

At the end of the talk, Yoel Fink, Joannopoulos’ former student and frequent collaborator, who is now professor of materials science, asked Joannopoulos how, particularly in current times, he has been able to “maintain such a positive and optimistic outlook, of humans and human nature.”

“It’s a matter of believing in the goodness of people and what they can do, what they accomplish, and giving an environment where they’re working in, where they feel extermely comfortable,” Joannopoulos offered. “That includes creating a sense of trust between the faculty and the students, which is key. That helps enormously.”

Olivier Blanchard PhD ’77, the Robert M. Solow Professor of Economics Emeritus, has been named a winner of the 2025 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Economics, Finance and Management for “profoundly influencing modern macroeconomic analysis by establishing rigorous foundations for the study of business cycle fluctuations,” as described in the BBVA Foundation’s award citation.

Blanchard, who is also senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, shares the award with MIT alumni Jordi Galí PhD ’89 of the Centre de Recerca en Economia Internacional and Pompeu Fabra University in Spain and Michael Woodford PhD ’83 of Columbia University. The three economists were instrumental in developing the New Keynesian model, now widely taught and applied in central banking policy around the world.

The framework builds on classical Keynesian models in part by introducing the role of consumer expectations to macroeconomic policy analysis — in short, using the public’s perception of the future to help inform current policy. The model’s unconventional tools, including greater transparency around monetary policy, were tested by policymakers following the burst of the dotcom bubble in the early 2000s and applied by the Federal Reserve and European Central Bank in response to the 2008 financial crisis.

Blanchard played a foundational role in the development of New Keynesian economics, beginning with a 1987 paper coauthored with Princeton University’s Nobuhiro Kiyotaki (also a Frontiers of Knowledge laureate) on the effects of monetary policy under monopolistic competition. A decade later, Woodford described optimal monetary policy within the New Keynesian framework, laying key theoretical groundwork for the model, and Galí extended and synthesized the framework, ultimately resulting in a blueprint for designing optimal monetary policy.

Blanchard, who joined the MIT faculty in 1983 and served as head of the Department of Economics from 1998 to 2003, advised and taught decades of macroeconomics students at MIT, including Galí. As chief economist of the International Monetary Fund from 2008 to 2015, Blanchard used his framework to help design policy during the Global Financial Crisis and the Euro debt crisis. Blanchard’s leadership as a scholar, student advisor, teacher, and policy advisor is at the heart of the trio’s prize-winning research.

MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber, current head of the economics department, praises Blanchard’s multifaceted contributions.

“Olivier is not only an amazing macroeconomist whose work continues to have profound influence in this time of global macroeconomic uncertainty,” says Gruber, “but also a pillar of the department. His leadership in research and enormous dedication to our program were central in carrying forward the legacy of the department’s early greats and making MIT Economics what it is today.”

Blanchard, Galí, and Woodford share the award’s 400,000-euro prize and will be formally honored at a ceremony in Bilbao, Spain, in June.

The BBVA Foundation works to support scientific research and cultural creation, disseminate knowledge and culture, and recognize talent and innovation, focusing on five strategic areas: environment, biomedicine and health, economy and society, basic sciences and technology, and culture. The Frontiers of Knowledge Awards, spanning eight prize categories, recognize world-class research and cultural creation and aim to celebrate and promote the value of knowledge as a global public good.

Since 2009, the BBVA has given awards to more than a dozen MIT faculty members, including MIT economist Daron Acemoglu, as well as to the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), led by MIT economists Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Ben Olken.

We move thanks to coordination among many skeletal muscle fibers, all twitching and pulling in sync. While some muscles align in one direction, others form intricate patterns, helping parts of the body move in multiple ways.

In recent years, scientists and engineers have looked to muscles as potential actuators for “biohybrid” robots — machines powered by soft, artificially grown muscle fibers. Such bio-bots could squirm and wiggle through spaces where traditional machines cannot. For the most part, however, researchers have only been able to fabricate artificial muscle that pulls in one direction, limiting any robot’s range of motion.

Now MIT engineers have developed a method to grow artificial muscle tissue that twitches and flexes in multiple coordinated directions. As a demonstration, they grew an artificial, muscle-powered structure that pulls both concentrically and radially, much like how the iris in the human eye acts to dilate and constrict the pupil.

The researchers fabricated the artificial iris using a new “stamping” approach they developed. First, they 3D-printed a small, handheld stamp patterned with microscopic grooves, each as small as a single cell. Then they pressed the stamp into a soft hydrogel and seeded the resulting grooves with real muscle cells. The cells grew along these grooves within the hydrogel, forming fibers. When the researchers stimulated the fibers, the muscle contracted in multiple directions, following the fibers’ orientation.

“With the iris design, we believe we have demonstrated the first skeletal muscle-powered robot that generates force in more than one direction. That was uniquely enabled by this stamp approach,” says Ritu Raman, the Eugene Bell Career Development Professor of Tissue Engineering in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering.

The team says the stamp can be printed using tabletop 3D printers and fitted with different patterns of microscopic grooves. The stamp can be used to grow complex patterns of muscle — and potentially other types of biological tissues, such as neurons and heart cells — that look and act like their natural counterparts.

“We want to make tissues that replicate the architectural complexity of real tissues,” Raman says. “To do that, you really need this kind of precision in your fabrication.”

She and her colleagues published their open-access results Friday in the journal Biomaterials Science. Her MIT co-authors include first author Tamara Rossy, Laura Schwendeman, Sonika Kohli, Maheera Bawa, and Pavankumar Umashankar, along with Roi Habba, Oren Tchaicheeyan, and Ayelet Lesman of Tel Aviv University in Israel.

Training space

Raman’s lab at MIT aims to engineer biological materials that mimic the sensing, activity, and responsiveness of real tissues in the body. Broadly, her group seeks to apply these bioengineered materials in areas from medicine to machines. For instance, she is looking to fabricate artificial tissue that can restore function to people with neuromuscular injury. She is also exploring artificial muscles for use in soft robotics, such as muscle-powered swimmers that move through the water with fish-like flexibility.

Raman has previously developed what could be seen as gym platforms and workout routines for lab-grown muscle cells. She and her colleagues designed a hydrogel “mat” that encourages muscle cells to grow and fuse into fibers without peeling away. She also derived a way to “exercise” the cells by genetically engineering them to twitch in response to pulses of light. And, her group has come up with ways to direct muscle cells to grow in long, parallel lines, similar to natural, striated muscles. However, it’s been a challenge, for her group and others, to design artificial muscle tissue that moves in multiple, predictable directions.

“One of the cool things about natural muscle tissues is, they don’t just point in one direction. Take for instance, the circular musculature in our iris and around our trachea. And even within our arms and legs, muscle cells don’t point straight, but at an angle,” Raman notes. “Natural muscle has multiple orientations in the tissue, but we haven’t been able to replicate that in our engineered muscles.”

Muscle blueprint

In thinking of ways to grow multidirectional muscle tissue, the team hit on a surprisingly simple idea: stamps. Inspired in part by the classic Jell-O mold, the team looked to design a stamp, with microscopic patterns that could be imprinted into a hydrogel, similar to the muscle-training mats that the group has previously developed. The patterns of the imprinted mat could then serve as a roadmap along which muscle cells might follow and grow.

“The idea is simple. But how do you make a stamp with features as small as a single cell? And how do you stamp something that’s super soft? This gel is much softer than Jell-O, and it’s something that’s really hard to cast, because it could tear really easily,” Raman says.

The team tried variations on the stamp design and eventually landed on an approach that worked surprisingly well. The researchers fabricated a small, handheld stamp using high-precision printing facilities in MIT.nano, which enabled them to print intricate patterns of grooves, each about as wide as a single muscle cell, onto the bottom of the stamp. Before pressing the stamp into a hydrogel mat, they coated the bottom with a protein that helped the stamp imprint evenly into the gel and peel away without sticking or tearing.

As a demonstration, the researchers printed a stamp with a pattern similar to the microscopic musculature in the human iris. The iris comprises a ring of muscle surrounding the pupil. This ring of muscle is made up of an inner circle of muscle fibers arranged concentrically, following a circular pattern, and an outer circle of fibers that stretch out radially, like the rays of the sun.  Together, this complex architecture acts to constrict or dilate the pupil.

Once Raman and her colleagues pressed the iris pattern into a hydrogel mat, they coated the mat with cells that they genetically engineered to respond to light. Within a day, the cells fell into the microscopic grooves and began to fuse into fibers, following the iris-like patterns and eventually growing into a whole muscle, with an architecture and size similar to a real iris.

When the team stimulated the artificial iris with pulses of light, the muscle contracted in multiple directions, similar to the iris in the human eye. Raman notes that the team’s artificial iris is fabricated with skeletal muscle cells, which are involved in voluntary motion, whereas the muscle tissue in the real human iris is made up of smooth muscle cells, which are a type of involuntary muscle tissue. They chose to pattern skeletal muscle cells in an iris-like pattern to demonstrate the ability to fabricate complex, multidirectional muscle tissue.

“In this work, we wanted to show we can use this stamp approach to make a ‘robot’ that can do things that previous muscle-powered robots can’t do,” Raman says. “We chose to work with skeletal muscle cells. But there’s nothing stopping you from doing this with any other cell type.”

She notes that while the team used precision-printing techniques, the stamp design can also be made using conventional tabletop 3D printers. Going forward, she and her colleagues plan to apply the stamping method to other cell types, as well as explore different muscle architectures and ways to activate artificial, multidirectional muscle to do useful work.

“Instead of using rigid actuators that are typical in underwater robots, if we can use soft biological robots, we can navigate and be much more energy-efficient, while also being completely biodegradable and sustainable,” Raman says. “That’s what we hope to build toward.”

This work was supported, in part, by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, the U.S. Army Research Office, the U.S. National Science Foundation, and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

A decade after scientists in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT first began testing whether sensory stimulation of the brain’s 40Hz “gamma” frequency rhythms could treat Alzheimer’s disease in mice, a growing evidence base supporting the idea that it can improve brain health — in humans as well as animals — has emerged from the work of labs all over the world. A new open-access review article in PLOS Biology describes the state of research so far and presents some of the fundamental and clinical questions at the forefront of the noninvasive gamma stimulation now.

“As we’ve made all our observations, many other people in the field have published results that are very consistent,” says Li-Huei Tsai, Picower professor of neuroscience at MIT, director of MIT’s Aging Brain Initiative, and senior author of the new review, with postdoc Jung Park. “People have used many different ways to induce gamma including sensory stimulation, transcranial alternating current stimulation, or transcranial magnetic stimulation, but the key is delivering stimulation at 40 hertz. They all see beneficial effects.”

A decade of discovery at MIT

Starting with a paper in Nature in 2016, a collaboration led by Tsai has produced a series of studies showing that 40Hz stimulation via light, sound, the two combined, or tactile vibration reduces hallmarks of Alzheimer’s pathology such as amyloid and tau proteins, prevents neuron death, decreases synapse loss, and sustains memory and cognition in various Alzheimer’s mouse models. The collaboration’s investigations of the underlying mechanisms that produce these benefits have so far identified specific cellular and molecular responses in many brain cell types including neurons, microglia, astrocytes, oligodendrocytes, and the brain’s blood vessels. Last year, for instance, the lab reported in Nature that 40Hz audio and visual stimulation induced interneurons in mice to increase release of the peptide VIP, prompting increased clearance of amyloid from brain tissue via the brain’s glymphatic “plumbing” system.

Meanwhile, at MIT and at the MIT spinoff company Cognito Therapeutics, phase II clinical studies have shown that people with Alzheimer’s exposed to 40Hz light and sound experienced a significant slowing of brain atrophy and improvements on some cognitive measures, compared to untreated controls. Cognito, which has also measured significant preservation of the brain’s “white matter” in volunteers, has been conducting a pivotal, nationwide phase III clinical trial of sensory gamma stimulation for more than a year.

“Neuroscientists often lament that it is a great time to have AD [Alzheimer’s disease] if you are a mouse,” Park and Tsai wrote in the review. “Our ultimate goal, therefore, is to translate GENUS discoveries into a safe, accessible, and noninvasive therapy for AD patients.” The MIT team often refers to 40Hz stimulation as “GENUS” for Gamma Entrainment Using Sensory Stimulation.

A growing field

As Tsai’s collaboration, which includes MIT colleagues Edward Boyden and Emery N. Brown, has published its results, many other labs have produced studies adding to the evidence that various methods of noninvasive gamma sensory stimulation can combat Alzheimer’s pathology. Among many examples cited in the new review, in 2024 a research team in China independently corroborated that 40Hz sensory stimulation increases glymphatic fluid flows in mice. In another example, a Harvard Medical School-based team in 2022 showed that 40Hz gamma stimulation using Transcranial Alternating Current Stimulation significantly reduced the burden of tau in three out of four human volunteers. And in another study involving more than 100 people, researchers in Scotland in 2023 used audio and visual gamma stimulation (at 37.5Hz) to improve memory recall.

Open questions

Amid the growing number of publications describing preclinical studies with mice and clinical trials with people, open questions remain, Tsai and Park acknowledge. The MIT team and others are still exploring the cellular and molecular mechanisms that underlie GENUS’s effects. Tsai says her lab is looking at other neuropeptide and neuromodulatory systems to better understand the cascade of events linking sensory stimulation to the observed cellular responses. Meanwhile, the nature of how some cells, such as microglia, respond to gamma stimulation and how that affects pathology remains unclear, Tsai adds.

Even with a national phase III clinical trial underway, it is still important to investigate these fundamental mechanisms, Tsai says, because new insights into how noninvasive gamma stimulation affects the brain could improve and expand its therapeutic potential.

“The more we understand the mechanisms, the more we will have good ideas about how to further optimize the treatment,” Tsai says. “And the more we understand its action and the circuits it affects, the more we will know beyond Alzheimer’s disease what other neurological disorders will benefit from this.”

Indeed, the review points to studies at MIT and other institutions providing at least some evidence that GENUS might be able to help with Parkinson’s disease, stroke, anxiety, epilepsy, and the cognitive side effects of chemotherapy and conditions that reduce myelin, such as multiple sclerosis. Tsai’s lab has been studying whether it can help with Down syndrome as well.

The open questions may help define the next decade of GENUS research.

It is a deep question, from deep in our history: When did human language as we know it emerge? A new survey of genomic evidence suggests our unique language capacity was present at least 135,000 years ago. Subsequently, language might have entered social use 100,000 years ago.

Our species, Homo sapiens, is about 230,000 years old. Estimates of when language originated vary widely, based on different forms of evidence, from fossils to cultural artifacts. The authors of the new analysis took a different approach. They reasoned that since all human languages likely have a common origin — as the researchers strongly think — the key question is how far back in time regional groups began spreading around the world.

“The logic is very simple,” says Shigeru Miyagawa, an MIT professor and co-author of a new paper summarizing the results. “Every population branching across the globe has human language, and all languages are related.” Based on what the genomics data indicate about the geographic divergence of early human populations, he adds, “I think we can say with a fair amount of certainty that the first split occurred about 135,000 years ago, so human language capacity must have been present by then, or before.”

The paper, “Linguistic capacity was present in the Homo sapiens population 135 thousand years ago,” appears in Frontiers in Psychology. The co-authors are Miyagawa, who is a professor emeritus of linguistics and the Kochi-Manjiro Professor of Japanese Language and Culture at MIT; Rob DeSalle, a principal investigator at the American Museum of Natural History’s Institute for Comparative Genomics; Vitor Augusto Nóbrega, a faculty member in linguistics at the University of São Paolo; Remo Nitschke, of the University of Zurich, who worked on the project while at the University of Arizona linguistics department; Mercedes Okumura of the Department of Genetics and Evolutionary Biology at the University of São Paulo; and Ian Tattersall, curator emeritus of human origins at the American Museum of Natural History.

The new paper examines 15 genetic studies of different varieties, published over the past 18 years: Three used data about the inherited Y chromosome, three examined mitochondrial DNA, and nine were whole-genome studies.

All told, the data from these studies suggest an initial regional branching of humans about 135,000 years ago. That is, after the emergence of Homo sapiens, groups of people subsequently moved apart geographically, and some resulting genetic variations have developed, over time, among the different regional subpopulations. The amount of genetic variation shown in the studies allows researchers to estimate the point in time at which Homo sapiens was still one regionally undivided group.

Miyagawa says the studies collectively provide increasingly converging evidence about when these geographic splits started taking place. The first survey of this type was performed by other scholars in 2017, but they had fewer existing genetic studies to draw upon. Now, there are much more published data available, which when considered together point to 135,000 years ago as the likely time of the first split.

The new meta-analysis was possible because “quantity-wise we have more studies, and quality-wise, it’s a narrower window [of time],” says Miyagawa, who also holds an appointment at the University of São Paolo.

Like many linguists, Miyagawa believes all human languages are demonstrably related to each other, something he has examined in his own work. For instance, in his 2010 book, “Why Agree? Why Move?” he analyzed previously unexplored similarities between English, Japanese, and some of the Bantu languages. There are more than 7,000 identified human languages around the globe.

Some scholars have proposed that language capacity dates back a couple of million years, based on the physiological characteristics of other primates. But to Miyagawa, the question is not when primates could utter certain sounds; it is when humans had the cognitive ability to develop language as we know it, combining vocabulary and grammar into a system generating an infinite amount of rules-based expression.

“Human language is qualitatively different because there are two things, words and syntax, working together to create this very complex system,” Miyagawa says. “No other animal has a parallel structure in their communication system. And that gives us the ability to generate very sophisticated thoughts and to communicate them to others.”

This conception of human language origins also holds that humans had the cognitive capacity for language for some period of time before we constructed our first languages.

“Language is both a cognitive system and a communication system,” Miyagawa says. “My guess is prior to 135,000 years ago, it did start out as a private cognitive system, but relatively quickly that turned into a communications system.”

So, how can we know when distinctively human language was first used? The archaeological record is invaluable in this regard. Roughly 100,000 years ago, the evidence shows, there was a widespread appearance of symbolic activity, from meaningful markings on objects to the use of fire to produce ochre, a decorative red color.

Like our complex, highly generative language, these symbolic activities are engaged in by people, and no other creatures. As the paper notes, “behaviors compatible with language and the consistent exercise of symbolic thinking are detectable only in the archaeological record of H. sapiens.”

Among the co-authors, Tattersall has most prominently propounded the view that language served as a kind of ignition for symbolic thinking and other organized activities.

“Language was the trigger for modern human behavior,” Miyagawa says. “Somehow it stimulated human thinking and helped create these kinds of behaviors. If we are right, people were learning from each other [due to language] and encouraging innovations of the types we saw 100,000 years ago.”

To be sure, as the authors acknowledge in the paper, other scholars believe there was a more incremental and broad-based development of new activities around 100,000 years ago, involving materials, tools, and social coordination, with language playing a role in this, but not necessarily being the central force.

For his part, Miyagawa recognizes that there is considerable room for further progress in this area of research, but thinks efforts like the current paper are at least steps toward filling out a more detailed picture of language’s emergence.

“Our approach is very empirically based, grounded in the latest genetic understanding of early homo sapiens,” Miyagawa says. “I think we are on a good research arc, and I hope this will encourage people to look more at human language and evolution.”

This research was, in part, supported by the São Paolo Excellence Chair awarded to Miyagawa by the São Paolo Research Foundation.

More than 60,000 tons of plastic makes the journey down the Amazon River to the Atlantic Ocean every year. And that doesn’t include what finds its way to the river’s banks, or the microplastics ingested by the region’s abundant and diverse wildlife.

It’s easy to demonize plastic, but it has been crucial in developing the society we live in today. Creating materials that have the benefits of plastics while reducing the harms of traditional production methods is a goal of chemical engineering and materials science labs the world over, including that of Bradley Olsen, the Alexander and I. Michael Kasser (1960) Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT.

Olsen, a Fulbright Amazonia scholar and the faculty lead of MIT-Brazil, works with communities to develop alternative plastics solutions that can be derived from resources within their own environments.

“The word that we use for this is co-design,” says Olsen. “The idea is, instead of engineers just designing something independently, they engage and jointly design the solution with the stakeholders.”

In this case, the stakeholders were small businesses around Manaus in the Brazilian state of Amazonas curious about the feasibility of bioplastics and other alternative packaging.

“Plastics are inherent to modern life and actually perform key functions and have a really beautiful chemistry that we want to be able to continue to leverage, but we want to do it in a way that is more earth-compatible,” says Desirée Plata, MIT associate professor of civil and environmental engineering.

That’s why Plata joined Olsen in creating the course 1.096/10.496 (Design of Sustainable Polymer Systems) in 2021. Now, as a Global Classroom offering under the umbrella of MISTI since 2023, the class brings MIT students to Manaus during the three weeks of Independent Activities Period (IAP).

“In my work running the Global Teaching Labs in Brazil since 2016, MIT students collaborate closely with Brazilian undergraduates,” says Rosabelli Coelho-Keyssar, managing director of MIT-Brazil and MIT-Amazonia, who also runs MIT’s Global Teaching Labs program in Brazil. “This peer-learning model was incorporated into the Global Classroom in Manaus, ensuring that MIT and Brazilian students worked together throughout the course.”

The class leadership worked with climate scientist and MIT alumnus Carlos Nobre PhD ’83, who facilitated introductions to faculty at the Universidade Estadual de Amazonas (UAE), the state university of Amazonas. The group then scouted businesses in the Amazonas region who would be interested in partnering with the students.

“In the first year, it was Comunidade Julião, a community of people living on the edge of the Tarumã Mirim River west of Manaus,” says Olsen. “This year, we worked with Comunidade Para Maravilha, a community living in the dry land forest east of Manaus.”

A tailored solution

Plastic, by definition, is made up of many small carbon-based molecules, called monomers, linked by strong bonds into larger molecules called polymers. Linking different monomers and polymers in different ways creates different plastics — from trash bags to a swimming pool float to the dashboard of a car. Plastics are traditionally made from petroleum byproducts that are easy to link together, stable, and plentiful.

But there are ways to reduce the use of petroleum-based plastics. Packaging can be made from materials found within the local ecosystem, as was the focus of the 2024 class. Or carbon-based monomers can be extracted from high-starch plant matter through a number of techniques, the goal of the 2025 cohort. But plants that grow well in one location might not in another. And bioplastic production facilities can be tricky to install if the necessary resources aren’t immediately available.

“We can design a whole bunch of new sustainable chemical processes, use brand new top-of-the-line catalysts, but if you can’t actually implement them sustainably inside an environment, it falls short on a lot of the overall goals,” says Brian Carrick, a PhD candidate in the Olsen lab and a teaching assistant for the 2025 course offering.

So, identifying local candidates and tailoring the process is key. The 2025 MIT cohort collaborated with students from throughout the Amazonas state to explore the local flora, study its starch content in the lab, and develop a new plastic-making process — all within the three weeks of IAP.

“It’s easy when you have projects like this to get really locked into the MIT vacuum of just doing what sounds really cool, which isn’t always effective or constructive for people actually living in that environment,” says Claire Underwood, a junior chemical-biological engineering major who took the class. “That’s what really drew me into the project, being able to work with people in Brazil.”

The 31 students visited a protected area of the Amazon rainforest on Day One. They also had chances throughout IAP to visit the Amazon River, where the potential impact of their work became clear as they saw plastic waste collecting on its banks.

“That was a really cool aspect to the class, for sure, being able to actually see what we were working towards protecting and what the goal was,” says Underwood.

They interviewed stakeholders, such as farmers who could provide the feedstock and plastics manufacturers who could incorporate new techniques. Then, they got into the classroom, where massive intellectual ground was covered in a crash course on the sustainable design process, the nitty gritty of plastic production, and the Brazilian cultural context on how building such an industry would affect the community. For the final project, they separated into teams to craft preliminary designs of process and plant using a simplified model of these systems.

Connecting across boundaries

Working in another country brought to the fore how interlinked policy, culture, and technical solutions are.

“I know nothing about economics, and especially not Brazilian economics and politics,” says Underwood. But one of the Brazilian students in her group was a management and finance major. “He was super helpful when we were trying to source things and account for inflation and things like that — knowing what was feasible, and not just academically feasible.”

Before they parted at the end of IAP, each team presented their proposals to a panel of company representatives and Brazilian MIT alumni who chose first-, second-, and third-place winners. While more research is needed before comfortably implementing the ideas, the experience seemed to generate legitimate interest in creating a local bioplastics production facility.

Understanding sustainable design concepts and how to do interdisciplinary work is an important skill to learn. Even if these students don’t wind up working on bioplastics in the heart of the Amazon, being able to work with people of different perspectives — be it a different discipline or a different culture — is valuable in virtually every field.

“The exchange of knowledge across different fields and cultures is essential for developing innovative and sustainable solutions to global challenges such as climate change, waste management, and the development of eco-friendly materials,” says Taisa Sampaio, a PhD candidate in materials chemistry at UEA and a co-instructor for the course. “Programs like this are crucial in preparing professionals who are more aware and better equipped to tackle future challenges.”

Right now, Olsen and Plata are focused on harnessing the deep well of connections and resources they have around Manaus, but they hope to develop that kind of network elsewhere to expand this sustainable design exploration to other regions of the world.

“A lot of sustainability solutions are hyperlocal,” says Plata. “Understanding that not all locales are exactly the same is really powerful and important when we’re thinking about sustainability challenges. And it’s probably where we've gone wrong with the one-size-fits-all or silver-bullet solution — seeking that we’ve been doing for the past many decades.”

Collaborations for the 2026 trip are still in development but, as Olsen says, “we hope this is an experience we can continue to offer long into the future, based on how positive it has been for our students and our Brazilian partners.”

Many companies invest heavily in hiring talent to create the high-performance library code that underpins modern artificial intelligence systems. NVIDIA, for instance, developed some of the most advanced high-performance computing (HPC) libraries, creating a competitive moat that has proven difficult for others to breach.

But what if a couple of students, within a few months, could compete with state-of-the-art HPC libraries with a few hundred lines of code, instead of tens or hundreds of thousands?

That’s what researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have shown with a new programming language called Exo 2.

Exo 2 belongs to a new category of programming languages that MIT Professor Jonathan Ragan-Kelley calls “user-schedulable languages” (USLs). Instead of hoping that an opaque compiler will auto-generate the fastest possible code, USLs put programmers in the driver's seat, allowing them to write “schedules” that explicitly control how the compiler generates code. This enables performance engineers to transform simple programs that specify what they want to compute into complex programs that do the same thing as the original specification, but much, much faster.

One of the limitations of existing USLs (like the original Exo) is their relatively fixed set of scheduling operations, which makes it difficult to reuse scheduling code across different “kernels” (the individual components in a high-performance library).

In contrast, Exo 2 enables users to define new scheduling operations externally to the compiler, facilitating the creation of reusable scheduling libraries. Lead author Yuka Ikarashi, an MIT PhD student in electrical engineering and computer science and CSAIL affiliate, says that Exo 2 can reduce total schedule code by a factor of 100 and deliver performance competitive with state-of-the-art implementations on multiple different platforms, including Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms (BLAS) that power many machine learning applications. This makes it an attractive option for engineers in HPC focused on optimizing kernels across different operations, data types, and target architectures.

“It’s a bottom-up approach to automation, rather than doing an ML/AI search over high-performance code,” says Ikarashi. “What that means is that performance engineers and hardware implementers can write their own scheduling library, which is a set of optimization techniques to apply on their hardware to reach the peak performance.”

One major advantage of Exo 2 is that it reduces the amount of coding effort needed at any one time by reusing the scheduling code across applications and hardware targets. The researchers implemented a scheduling library with roughly 2,000 lines of code in Exo 2, encapsulating reusable optimizations that are linear-algebra specific and target-specific (AVX512, AVX2, Neon, and Gemmini hardware accelerators). This library consolidates scheduling efforts across more than 80 high-performance kernels with up to a dozen lines of code each, delivering performance comparable to, or better than, MKL, OpenBLAS, BLIS, and Halide.

Exo 2 includes a novel mechanism called “Cursors” that provides what they call a “stable reference” for pointing at the object code throughout the scheduling process. Ikarashi says that a stable reference is essential for users to encapsulate schedules within a library function, as it renders the scheduling code independent of object-code transformations.

“We believe that USLs should be designed to be user-extensible, rather than having a fixed set of operations,” says Ikarashi. “In this way, a language can grow to support large projects through the implementation of libraries that accommodate diverse optimization requirements and application domains.”

Exo 2’s design allows performance engineers to focus on high-level optimization strategies while ensuring that the underlying object code remains functionally equivalent through the use of safe primitives. In the future, the team hopes to expand Exo 2’s support for different types of hardware accelerators, like GPUs. Several ongoing projects aim to improve the compiler analysis itself, in terms of correctness, compilation time, and expressivity.

Ikarashi and Ragan-Kelley co-authored the paper with graduate students Kevin Qian and Samir Droubi, Alex Reinking of Adobe, and former CSAIL postdoc Gilbert Bernstein, now a professor at the University of Washington. This research was funded, in part, by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the U.S. National Science Foundation, while the first author was also supported by Masason, Funai, and Quad Fellowships.

Converting one type of cell to another — for example, a skin cell to a neuron — can be done through a process that requires the skin cell to be induced into a “pluripotent” stem cell, then differentiated into a neuron. Researchers at MIT have now devised a simplified process that bypasses the stem cell stage, converting a skin cell directly into a neuron.

Working with mouse cells, the researchers developed a conversion method that is highly efficient and can produce more than 10 neurons from a single skin cell. If replicated in human cells, this approach could enable the generation of large quantities of motor neurons, which could potentially be used to treat patients with spinal cord injuries or diseases that impair mobility.

“We were able to get to yields where we could ask questions about whether these cells can be viable candidates for the cell replacement therapies, which we hope they could be. That’s where these types of reprogramming technologies can take us,” says Katie Galloway, the W. M. Keck Career Development Professor in Biomedical Engineering and Chemical Engineering.

As a first step toward developing these cells as a therapy, the researchers showed that they could generate motor neurons and engraft them into the brains of mice, where they integrated with host tissue.

Galloway is the senior author of two papers describing the new method, which appear today in Cell Systems. MIT graduate student Nathan Wang is the lead author of both papers.

From skin to neurons

Nearly 20 years ago, scientists in Japan showed that by delivering four transcription factors to skin cells, they could coax them to become induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). Similar to embryonic stem cells, iPSCs can be differentiated into many other cell types. This technique works well, but it takes several weeks, and many of the cells don’t end up fully transitioning to mature cell types.

“Oftentimes, one of the challenges in reprogramming is that cells can get stuck in intermediate states,” Galloway says. “So, we’re using direct conversion, where instead of going through an iPSC intermediate, we’re going directly from a somatic cell to a motor neuron.”

Galloway’s research group and others have demonstrated this type of direct conversion before, but with very low yields — fewer than 1 percent. In Galloway’s previous work, she used a combination of six transcription factors plus two other proteins that stimulate cell proliferation. Each of those eight genes was delivered using a separate viral vector, making it difficult to ensure that each was expressed at the correct level in each cell.

In the first of the new Cell Systems papers, Galloway and her students reported a way to streamline the process so that skin cells can be converted to motor neurons using just three transcription factors, plus the two genes that drive cells into a highly proliferative state.

Using mouse cells, the researchers started with the original six transcription factors and experimented with dropping them out, one at a time, until they reached a combination of three — NGN2, ISL1, and LHX3 — that could successfully complete the conversion to neurons.

Once the number of genes was down to three, the researchers could use a single modified virus to deliver all three of them, allowing them to ensure that each cell expresses each gene at the correct levels.

Using a separate virus, the researchers also delivered genes encoding p53DD and a mutated version of HRAS. These genes drive the skin cells to divide many times before they start converting to neurons, allowing for a much higher yield of neurons, about 1,100 percent.

“If you were to express the transcription factors at really high levels in nonproliferative cells, the reprogramming rates would be really low, but hyperproliferative cells are more receptive. It’s like they’ve been potentiated for conversion, and then they become much more receptive to the levels of the transcription factors,” Galloway says.

The researchers also developed a slightly different combination of transcription factors that allowed them to perform the same direct conversion using human cells, but with a lower efficiency rate — between 10 and 30 percent, the researchers estimate. This process takes about five weeks, which is slightly faster than converting the cells to iPSCs first and then turning them into neurons.

Implanting cells

Once the researchers identified the optimal combination of genes to deliver, they began working on the best ways to deliver them, which was the focus of the second Cell Systems paper.

They tried out three different delivery viruses and found that a retrovirus achieved the most efficient rate of conversion. Reducing the density of cells grown in the dish also helped to improve the overall yield of motor neurons. This optimized process, which takes about two weeks in mouse cells, achieved a yield of more than 1,000 percent.

Working with colleagues at Boston University, the researchers then tested whether these motor neurons could be successfully engrafted into mice. They delivered the cells to a part of the brain known as the striatum, which is involved in motor control and other functions.

After two weeks, the researchers found that many of the neurons had survived and seemed to be forming connections with other brain cells. When grown in a dish, these cells showed measurable electrical activity and calcium signaling, suggesting the ability to communicate with other neurons. The researchers now hope to explore the possibility of implanting these neurons into the spinal cord.

The MIT team also hopes to increase the efficiency of this process for human cell conversion, which could allow for the generation of large quantities of neurons that could be used to treat spinal cord injuries or diseases that affect motor control, such as ALS. Clinical trials using neurons derived from iPSCs to treat ALS are now underway, but expanding the number of cells available for such treatments could make it easier to test and develop them for more widespread use in humans, Galloway says.

The research was funded by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences and the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program.

Sports analytics is fueled by fans, and funded by teams. The 19th annual MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference (SSAC), held last Friday and Saturday, showed more clearly than ever how both groups can join forces.

After all, for decades, the industry’s main energy source has been fans weary of bad strategies: too much bunting in baseball, too much punting in football, and more. The most enduring analytics icon, Bill James, was a teacher and night watchman until his annual “Baseball Abstract” books began to upend a century of conventional wisdom, in the 1980s. After that, sports analytics became a profession.

Meanwhile, franchise valuations keep rising, women’s sports are booming, and U.S. college sports are professionalizing. All of it should create more analytics jobs, as “Moneyball” author Michael Lewis noted during a Friday panel.

“This whole analytics movement is a byproduct of the decisions becoming really expensive decisions,” Lewis said. “It didn’t matter if you got it wrong if you were paying someone $50,000 a year. But if you’re going to pay them $50 million, you better get it right. So, all of a sudden, someone who can give you a little bit more of an edge in that decision-making has more value.”

Would you like to be a valued sports analytics professional? Here are five ideas, gleaned from MIT’s industry-leading event, about how to gain traction in the field.

1. You can jump into this industry.

Bill James, as it happens, was the first speaker on the opening Friday-morning panel at SSAC, held at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston. His theme: the value of everyone’s work, since today’s amateurs become tomorrow’s professionals.

“Time will reveal that the people doing really important work here are not the people sitting on the stages, but the people in the audience,” James said.

This year, that audience had 2,500 attendees, from 44 U.S. states, 42 countries, and over 220 academic institutions, along with dozens of panels, a research paper competition, and thousands of hallway conversations among networking attendees. SSAC was co-founded in 2007 by Daryl Morey SM ’00, president of basketball operations for the Philadelphia 76ers, and Jessica Gelman, CEO of KAGR, the Kraft Analytics Group. The first three conferences were held in MIT classrooms.

But even now, sports analytics remains largely a grassroots thing. Why? Because fans can observe sports intensively, without being bound to its conventions, then study it quantitatively.

“The driving thing for a lot of people is they want to take this [analytical] way of thinking and apply it to sports,” soccer journalist Ryan O’Hanlon of ESPN said to MIT News, in one of those hallway conversations.

O’Hanlon’s 2022 book, “Net Gains,” chronicles the work of several people who held non-sports jobs, made useful advances in soccer analytics, then jumped into the industry. Soon, the sport may have more landing spots, between the growth of Major League Soccer in the U.S. and women’s soccer everywhere. Also, in O’Hanlon’s estimation, only three of the 20 clubs in England’s Premier League are deeply invested in analytics: Brentford, Brighton, and (league-leading) Liverpool. That could change.

In any case, most of the people who leap from fandom to professional status are willing to examine issues that others take for granted.

“I think it’s not being afraid to question the way everyone is doing things,” O’Hanlon added. “Whether that’s how a game is played, how we acquire players, how we think about anything. Pretty much anyone who gets to a high level and has impact [in analytics] has asked those questions and found a way to answer some.”

2. Make friends with the video team.

Suppose you love a sport, start analyzing it, produce good work that gets some attention, and — jackpot! — get hired by a pro team to do analytics.

Well, as former NBA player Shane Battier pointed out during a basketball panel at SSAC, you still won’t spend any time talking to players about your beloved data. That just isn’t how professional teams work, not even stat-savvy ones.

But there is good news: Analysts can still reach coaches and athletes through skilled use of video clips. Most European soccer managers ignore data, but will pay attention to the team’s video analysts. Basketball coaches love video. In American football, film study is essential. And technology has made it easier than ever to link data to video clips.

So analysts should become buddies with the video group. Importantly, analytics professionals now grasp this better than ever, something evident at SSAC across sports.

“Video in football [soccer] is the best way to communicate and get on the same page,” said Sarah Rudd, co-founder and CTO of src | ftbl, and a former analyst for Arsenal, at Friday’s panel on soccer analytics.

3. Seek opportunities in women’s sports analytics.

Have we mentioned that women’s sports is booming? The WNBA is expanding, the size of the U.S. transfer market in women’s soccer has doubled for three straight years, and you can now find women’s college volleyball in a basic cable package.

That growth is starting to fund greater data collection, in the WNBA and elsewhere, a frequent conversation topic at SSAC.

As Jennifer Rizzotti, president of the WNBA’s Connecticut Sun, noted of her own playing days in the 1990s: “We didn’t have statistics, we didn’t have [opponents’] tendencies that were being explained to us. So, when I think of what players have access to now and how far we’ve come, it’s really impressive.” And yet, she added, the amount of data in men’s basketball remains well ahead of the women’s game: “It gives you an awareness of how far we have to go.”

Some women’s sports still lack the cash needed for basic analytics infrastructure. One Friday panelist, LPGA golfer Stacy Lewis, a 13-time winner on tour, noted that the popular ball-tracking analytics system used in men’s golf costs $1 million per week, beyond budget for the women’s game.

And at a Saturday panel, Gelman said that full data parity between men’s and women’s sports was not imminent. “Sadly, I think we’re years away because we just need more investment into it,” she said.

But there is movement. At one Saturday talk, data developer Charlotte Eisenberg detailed how the website Sports Reference — a key resource of free public data —has been adding play-by-play data for WNBA games. That can help for evaluating individual players, particularly over long time periods, and has long been available for NBA games.

In short, as women’s sports grow, their analytics opportunities will, too.

4. Don’t be daunted by someone’s blurry “eye test.”

A subtle trip-wire in sports analytics, even at SSAC, is the idea that analytics should match the so-called “eye test,” or seemingly intuitive sports observations.

Here’s the problem: There is no one “eye test” in any sport, because people’s intuitions differ. For some basketball coaches, an unselfish role player stands out. To others, a flashy off-the-dribble shooter passes the eye test, even without a high shooting percentage. That tension would exist even if statistics did not.

Enter analytics, which confirms the high value of efficient shooting (as well as old-school virtues like defense, rebounding, and avoiding turnovers). But in a twist, the definition of a good shot in basketball has famously changed. In 1979-80, the NBA introduced the three-point line; in 1985, teams were taking 3.1 three-pointers per game; now in 2024-25, teams are averaging 37.5 three-pointers per game, with great efficiency. What happened?

“People didn’t use [the three-point shot] well at the beginning,” Morey said on a Saturday panel, quipping that “they were too dumb to know that three is greater than two.”

Granted, players weren’t used to shooting threes in 1980. But it also took a long time to change intuitions in the sport. Today, analytics shows that a contested three-pointer is a higher-value shot that an open 18-foot two-pointer. That might still run counter to someone’s “eye test.”

Incidentally, always following analytically informed coaching might also lead to a more standardized, less interesting game, as Morey and basketball legend Sue Bird suggested at the same panel.

“There’s a little bit of instinct that is now removed from the game,” Bird said. Shooting threes makes sense, she concurred, but “You’re only focused on the three-point line, and it takes away all the other things.”

5. Think about absolute truths, but solve for current tactics. 

Bill James set the bar high for sports analytics: His breakthrough equation, “runs created,” described how baseball works with almost Newtonian simplicity. Team runs are the product of on-base percentage and slugging percentage, divided by plate appearances. This applies to individual players, too.

But it’s almost impossible to replicate that kind of fundamental formula in other sports.

“I think in soccer there’s still a ton to learn about how the game works,” O’Hanlon told MIT News. Should a team patiently build possession, play long balls, or press up high? And how do we value players with wildly varying roles?

That sometimes leads to situations where, O’Hanlon notes, “No one really knows the right questions that the data should be asking, because no one really knows the right way to play soccer.”

Happily, the search for underlying truths can also produce some tactical insights. Consider one of the three finalists in the conference’s research paper competition, “A Machine Learning Approach to Player Value and Decision Making in Professional Ultimate Frisbee,” by Braden Eberhard, Jacob Miller, and Nathan Sandholtz.

In it, the authors examine playing patterns in ultimate, seeing if teams score more by using a longer string of higher-percentage short-range passes, or by trying longer, high-risk throws. They found that players tend to try higher-percentage passes, although there is some variation, including among star players. That suggests tactical flexibility matters. If the defense is trying to take away short passes, throw long sometimes.

It is a classic sports issue: The right way to play often depends on how your opponent is playing. In the search for ultimate truths, analysts can reveal the usefulness of short-term tactics. That helps team win, which helps analytics types stay employed. But none of this would come to light if analysts weren’t digging into the sports they love, searching for answers and trying to let the world know what they find.

“There is nothing happening here that will change your life if you don’t follow through on it,” James said. “But there are many things happening here that will change your life if you do.” 

In 2022, Randall Pietersen, a civil engineer in the U.S. Air Force, set out on a training mission to assess damage at an airfield runway, practicing “base recovery” protocol after a simulated attack. For hours, his team walked over the area in chemical protection gear, radioing in geocoordinates as they documented damage and looked for threats like unexploded munitions.

The work is standard for all Air Force engineers before they deploy, but it held special significance for Pietersen, who has spent the last five years developing faster, safer approaches for assessing airfields as a master’s student and now a PhD candidate and MathWorks Fellow at MIT. For Pietersen, the time-intensive, painstaking, and potentially dangerous work underscored the potential for his research to enable remote airfield assessments.

“That experience was really eye-opening,” Pietersen says. “We’ve been told for almost a decade that a new, drone-based system is in the works, but it is still limited by an inability to identify unexploded ordnances; from the air, they look too much like rocks or debris. Even ultra-high-resolution cameras just don’t perform well enough. Rapid and remote airfield assessment is not the standard practice yet. We’re still only prepared to do this on foot, and that’s where my research comes in.”

Pietersen’s goal is to create drone-based automated systems for assessing airfield damage and detecting unexploded munitions. This has taken him down a number of research paths, from deep learning to small uncrewed aerial systems to “hyperspectral” imaging, which captures passive electromagnetic radiation across a broad spectrum of wavelengths. Hyperspectral imaging is getting cheaper, faster, and more durable, which could make Pietersen’s research increasingly useful in a range of applications including agriculture, emergency response, mining, and building assessments.

Finding computer science and community

Growing up in a suburb of Sacramento, California, Pietersen gravitated toward math and physics in school. But he was also a cross country athlete and an Eagle Scout, and he wanted a way to put his interests together.

“I liked the multifaceted challenge the Air Force Academy presented,” Pietersen says. “My family doesn’t have a history of serving, but the recruiters talked about the holistic education, where academics were one part, but so was athletic fitness and leadership. That well-rounded approach to the college experience appealed to me.”

Pietersen majored in civil engineering as an undergrad at the Air Force Academy, where he first began learning how to conduct academic research. This required him to learn a little bit of computer programming.

“In my senior year, the Air Force research labs had some pavement-related projects that fell into my scope as a civil engineer,” Pietersen recalls. “While my domain knowledge helped define the initial problems, it was very clear that developing the right solutions would require a deeper understanding of computer vision and remote sensing.”

The projects, which dealt with airfield pavement assessments and threat detection, also led Pietersen to start using hyperspectral imaging and machine learning, which he built on when he came to MIT to pursue his master’s and PhD in 2020.

“MIT was a clear choice for my research because the school has such a strong history of research partnerships and multidisciplinary thinking that helps you solve these unconventional problems,” Pietersen says. “There’s no better place in the world than MIT for cutting-edge work like this.”

By the time Pietersen got to MIT, he’d also embraced extreme sports like ultra-marathons, skydiving, and rock climbing. Some of that stemmed from his participation in infantry skills competitions as an undergrad. The multiday competitions are military-focused races in which teams from around the world traverse mountains and perform graded activities like tactical combat casualty care, orienteering, and marksmanship.

“The crowd I ran with in college was really into that stuff, so it was sort of a natural consequence of relationship-building,” Pietersen says. “These events would run you around for 48 or 72 hours, sometimes with some sleep mixed in, and you get to compete with your buddies and have a good time.”

Since coming to MIT with his wife and two children, Pietersen has embraced the local running community and even worked as an indoor skydiving instructor in New Hampshire, though he admits the East Coast winters have been tough for him and his family to adjust to.

Pietersen went remote between 2022 to 2024, but he wasn’t doing his research from the comfort of a home office. The training that showed him the reality of airfield assessments took place in Florida, and then he was deployed to Saudi Arabia. He happened to write one of his PhD journal publications from a tent in the desert.

Now back at MIT and nearing the completion of his doctorate this spring, Pietersen is thankful for all the people who have supported him in throughout his journey.

“It has been fun exploring all sorts of different engineering disciplines, trying to figure things out with the help of all the mentors at MIT and the resources available to work on these really niche problems,” Pietersen says.

Research with a purpose

In the summer of 2020, Pietersen did an internship with the HALO Trust, a humanitarian organization working to clear landmines and other explosives from areas impacted by war. The experience demonstrated another powerful application for his work at MIT.

“We have post-conflict regions around the world where kids are trying to play and there are landmines and unexploded ordnances in their backyards,” Pietersen says. “Ukraine is a good example of this in the news today. There are always remnants of war left behind. Right now, people have to go into these potentially dangerous areas and clear them, but new remote-sensing techniques could speed that process up and make it far safer.”

Although Pietersen’s master’s work primarily revolved around assessing normal wear and tear of pavement structures, his PhD has focused on ways to detect unexploded ordnances and more severe damage.

“If the runway is attacked, there would be bombs and craters all over it,” Pietersen says. “This makes for a challenging environment to assess. Different types of sensors extract different kinds of information and each has its pros and cons. There is still a lot of work to be done on both the hardware and software side of things, but so far, hyperspectral data appears to be a promising discriminator for deep learning object detectors.”

After graduation, Pietersen will be stationed in Guam, where Air Force engineers regularly perform the same airfield assessment simulations he participated in in Florida. He hopes someday soon, those assessments will be done not by humans in protective gear, but by drones.

“Right now, we rely on visible lines of site,” Pietersen says. “If we can move to spectral imaging and deep-learning solutions, we can finally conduct remote assessments that make everyone safer.”

Three outstanding educators have been named MacVicar Faculty Fellows: associate professor in comparative media studies/writing Paloma Duong, associate professor of economics Frank Schilbach, and associate professor of urban studies and planning Justin Steil.

For more than 30 years, the MacVicar Faculty Fellows Program has recognized exemplary and sustained contributions to undergraduate education at MIT. The program is named in honor of Margaret MacVicar, MIT’s first dean for undergraduate education and founder of the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program. Fellows are chosen through a highly competitive, annual nomination process. The MIT Registrar’s Office coordinates and administers the award on behalf of the Office of the Vice Chancellor; nominations are reviewed by an advisory committee, and final selections are made by the provost.

Paloma Duong: Equipping students with a holistic, global worldview

Paloma Duong is the Ford International Career Development Associate Professor of Latin American and Media Studies. Her work has helped to reinvigorate Latin American subject offerings, increase the number of Spanish minors, and build community at the Institute.

Duong brings an interdisciplinary perspective to teaching Latin American culture in dialogue with media theory and political philosophy in the Comparative Media Studies/Writing (CMS/W) program. Her approach is built on a foundation of respect for each student’s unique academic journey and underscores the importance of caring for the whole student, honoring where they can go as intellectuals, and connecting them to a world bigger than themselves.

Senior Alex Wardle says that Professor Duong “broadened my worldview and made me more receptive to new concepts and ideas … her class has deepened my critical thinking skills in a way that very few other classes at MIT have even attempted to.”

Duong’s Spanish language classes and seminars incorporate a wide range of practices — including cultural analyses, artifacts, guest speakers, and hands-on multimedia projects — to help students engage with the material, think critically, and challenge preconceived notions while learning about Latin American history. CMS/W head and professor of science writing Seth Mnookin notes, “students become conversant with region-specific vocabularies, worldviews, and challenges.” This approach makes students feel “deeply respected” and treats them as “learning partners — interlocutors in their own right,” observes Bruno Perreau, the Cynthia L. Reed Professor of French Studies and Language.

Outside the classroom, Duong takes the time to mentor and get to know students by supporting and attending programs connected to MIT Cubanos, Cena a las Seis, and Global Health Alliance. She also serves as an advisor for comparative media studies and Spanish majors, is the undergraduate officer for CMS/W, and is a member of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences Education Advisory Committee and the Committee on Curricula.

“Subject areas like Spanish and Latin American Studies play an important role at MIT,” writes T.L. Taylor, professor in comparative media studies/writing and MacVicar Faculty Fellow. “Students find a sense of community and support in these spaces, something that should be at the heart of our attention more than ever these days. We are lucky to have such a dynamic and engaged educator like Professor Duong.”

On receiving this award, Duong says, “I’m positively elated! I’m very grateful to my students and colleagues for the nomination and am honored to become part of such a remarkable group of fellow teachers and mentors. Teaching undergraduates at MIT is always a beautiful challenge and an endless source of learning; I feel super lucky to be in this position.”

Frank Schilbach: Bringing energy and excitement to the curriculum

Frank Schilbach is the Gary Loveman Career Development Associate Professor of Economics. His connection and dedication to undergraduates, combined with his efforts in communicating the importance of economics as a field of study, were key components in the revitalization of Course 14.

When Schilbach arrived at MIT in 2015, there were only three sophomore economics majors. “A less committed teacher would have probably just taken it as a given and got on with their research,” writes professor of economics Abhijit Banerjee. “Frank, instead, took it as a challenge … his patient efforts in convincing students that they need to make economics a part of their general education was a key reason why innovations [to broaden the major] succeeded. The department now has more than 40 sophomores.”

In addition to bolstering enrollment, Schilbach had a hand in curricular improvements. Among them, he created a “next step” for students completing class 14.01 (Principles of Microeconomics) with a revised class 14.13 (Psychology and Economics) that goes beyond classic topics in behavioral economics to explore links with poverty, mental health, happiness, and identity.

Even more significant is the thoughtful and inclusive approach to teaching that Schilbach brings. “He is considerate and careful, listening to everyone, explaining concepts while making students understand that we care about them … it is just a joy to see how the students revel in the activities and the learning,” writes Esther Duflo, the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics. Erin Grela ’20 notes, “Professor Schilbach goes above and beyond to solicit student feedback so that he can make real-time changes to ensure that his classes are serving his students as best they can.”

His impacts extend beyond MIT as well. Professor of economics David Atkin writes: “Many of these students are inspired by their work with Frank to continue their studies at the graduate level, with an incredible 29 of his students going on to PhD studies at many of the best programs in the country. For someone who has only recently been promoted to a tenured professor, this is a remarkable record of advising.”

“I am delighted to be selected as a MacVicar Fellow,” says Schilbach. “I am thrilled that students find my courses valuable, and it brings me great joy to think that my teaching may help some students improve their well-being and inspire them to use their incredible talents to better the lives of others.”

Justin Steil: Experiential learning meets public service

“I am honored to join the MacVicar Faculty Fellows,” writes associate professor of law and urban planning Justin Steil. “I am deeply grateful to have the chance to teach and learn with such hard-working and creative students who are enthusiastic about collaborating to discover new knowledge and solve hard problems, in the classroom and beyond.”

Professor Steil uses his background as a lawyer, a sociologist, and an urban planner to combine experiential learning with opportunities for public service. In class 11.469 (Urban Sociology in Theory and Practice), he connects students with incarcerated individuals to examine inequality at one of the state’s largest prisons, MCI Norfolk. In another undergraduate seminar, students meet with leaders of local groups like GreenRoots in Chelsea, Massachusetts; Alternatives for Community and Environment in Roxbury, Massachusetts; and the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative in Roxbury to work on urban environmental hazards. Ford Professor of Urban Design and Planning and MacVicar Faculty Fellow Lawrence Vale calls Steil’s classes “life-altering.”

In addition to teaching, Steil is also a paramedic and has volunteered as an EMT for MIT Emergency Medical Service (EMS), where he continues to transform routine activities into teachable moments. “There are numerous opportunities at MIT to receive mentorship and perform research. Justin went beyond that. My conversations with Justin have inspired me to go to graduate school to research medical devices in the EMS context,” says Abigail Schipper ’24.

“Justin is truly devoted to the complete education of our undergraduate students in ways that meaningfully serve the broader MIT community as well as the residents of Cambridge and Boston,” says Andrew (1956) and Erna Viterbi Professor of Biological Engineering Katharina Ribbeck. Miho Mazereeuw, associate professor of architecture and urbanism and director of the Urban Risk Lab, concurs: “through his teaching, advising, mentoring, and connections with community-based organizations and public agencies, Justin has knit together diverse threads into a coherent undergraduate experience.”

Student testimonials also highlight Steil’s ability to make each student feel special by delivering undivided attention and individualized mentorship. A former student writes: “I was so grateful to have met an instructor who believed in his students so earnestly … despite being one of the busiest people I’ve ever known, [he] … unerringly made the students he works with feel certain that he always has time for them.”

Since joining MIT in 2015, Steil has received a Committed to Caring award in 2018; the Harold E. Edgerton Award for exceptional contributions in research, teaching, and service in 2021; and a First Year Advising Award from the Office of the First Year in 2022.

Learn more about the MacVicar Faculty Fellows Program on the Registrar’s Office website. 

QS World University Rankings has placed MIT in the No. 1 spot in 11 subject areas for 2025, the organization announced today.

The Institute received a No. 1 ranking in the following QS subject areas: Chemical Engineering; Civil and Structural Engineering; Computer Science and Information Systems; Data Science and Artificial Intelligence; Electrical and Electronic Engineering; Linguistics; Materials Science; Mechanical, Aeronautical, and Manufacturing Engineering; Mathematics; Physics and Astronomy; and Statistics and Operational Research.

MIT also placed second in seven subject areas: Accounting and Finance; Architecture/Built Environment; Biological Sciences; Business and Management Studies; Chemistry; Earth and Marine Sciences; and Economics and Econometrics.

For 2024, universities were evaluated in 55 specific subjects and five broader subject areas. MIT was ranked No. 1 in the broader subject area of Engineering and Technology and No. 2 in Natural Sciences.

Quacquarelli Symonds Limited subject rankings, published annually, are designed to help prospective students find the leading schools in their field of interest. Rankings are based on research quality and accomplishments, academic reputation, and graduate employment.

MIT has been ranked as the No. 1 university in the world by QS World University Rankings for 13 straight years.

For those looking to climb the corporate ladder in the U.S., here’s an idea you might not have considered: debate training.

According to a new research paper, people who learn the basics of debate are more likely to advance to leadership roles in U.S. organizations, compared to those who do not receive this training. One key reason is that being equipped with debate skills makes people more assertive in the workplace.

“Debate training can promote leadership emergence and advancement by fostering individuals’ assertiveness, which is a key, valued leadership characteristic in U.S. organizations,” says MIT Associate Professor Jackson Lu, one of the scholars who conducted the study.

The research is based on two experiments and provides empirical insights into leadership development, a subject more often discussed anecdotally than studied systematically.

“Leadership development is a multi-billion-dollar industry, where people spend a lot of money trying to help individuals emerge as leaders,” Lu says. “But the public doesn’t actually know what would be effective, because there hasn’t been a lot of causal evidence. That’s exactly what we provide.”

The paper, “Breaking Ceilings: Debate Training Promotes Leadership Emergence by Increasing Assertiveness,” was published Monday in the Journal of Applied Psychology. The authors are Lu, an associate professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management; Michelle X. Zhao, an undergraduate student at the Olin Business School of Washington University in St. Louis; Hui Liao, a professor and assistant dean at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business; and Lu Doris Zhang, a doctoral student at MIT Sloan.

Assertiveness in the attention economy

The researchers conducted two experiments. In the first, 471 employees in a Fortune 100 firm were randomly assigned to receive either nine weeks of debate training or no training. Examined 18 months later, those receiving debate training were more likely to have advanced to leadership roles, by about 12 percentage points. This effect was statistically explained by increased assertiveness among those with debate training.

The second experiment, conducted with 975 university participants, further tested the causal effects of debate training in a controlled setting. Participants were randomly assigned to receive debate training, an alternative non-debate training, or no training. Consistent with the first experiment, participants receiving the debate training were more likely to emerge as leaders in subsequent group activities, an effect statistically explained by their increased assertiveness.

“The inclusion of a non-debate training condition allowed us to causally claim that debate training, rather than just any training, improved assertiveness and increased leadership emergence,” Zhang says. 

To some people, increasing assertiveness might not seem like an ideal recipe for success in an organizational setting, as it might seem likely to increase tensions or decrease cooperation. But as the authors note, the American Psychological Association conceptualizes assertiveness as “an adaptive style of communication in which individuals express their feelings and needs directly, while maintaining respect for others.”

Lu adds: “Assertiveness is conceptually different from aggressiveness. To speak up in meetings or classrooms, people don’t need to be aggressive jerks. You can ask questions politely, yet still effectively express opinons. Of course, that’s different from not saying anything at all.”

Moreover, in the contemporary world where we all must compete for attention, refined communication skills may be more important than ever.

“Whether it is cutting filler or mastering pacing, knowing how to assert our opinions helps us sound more leader-like,” Zhang says.

How firms identify leaders

The research also finds that debate training benefits people across demographics: Its impact was not significantly different for men or women, for those born in the U.S. or outside it, or for different ethnic groups.

However, the findings raise still other questions about how firms identify leaders. As the results show, individuals might have incentive to seek debate training and other general workplace skills. But how much responsibility do firms have to understand and recognize the many kinds of skills, beyond assertiveness, that employees may have?

“We emphasize that the onus of breaking leadership barriers should not fall on individuals themelves,” Lu says. “Organizations should also recognize and appreciate different communication and leadership styles in the workplace.”

Lu also notes that ongoing work is needed to understand if those firms are properly valuing the attributes of their own leaders.

“There is an important distinction between leadership emergence and leadership effectiveness,” Lu says. “Our paper looks at leadership emergence. It’s possible that people who are better listeners, who are more cooperative, and humbler, should also be selected for leadership positions because they are more effective leaders.”

This research was partly funded by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.

How do we foster trust in science in an increasingly polarized world? A group including scientists, journalists, policymakers and more gathered at MIT on March 10 to discuss how to bridge the gap between scientific expertise and understanding.

The conference, titled “Building Trust in Science for a More Informed Future,” was organized by the MIT Press and the nonprofit Aspen Institute’s Science and Society Program. It featured talks about the power of storytelling, the role of social media and generative artificial intelligence in our information landscape, and why discussions about certain science topics can become so emotionally heated.

A common theme was the importance of empathy between science communicators and the public.

“The idea that disagreement is often seen as disrespect is insightful,” said MIT’s Ford Professor of Political Science Lily Tsai. “One way to communicate respect is genuine curiosity along with the willingness to change one’s mind. We’re often focused on the facts and evidence and saying, ‘Don’t you understand the facts?’ But the ideal conversation is more like, ‘You value ‘x.’ Tell me why you value ‘x’ and let’s see if we can connect on how the science and research helps you to fulfill those values, even if I don’t agree with them.’”

Many participants discussed the threat of misinformation, a problem exacerbated by the emergence of social media and generative AI. But it’s not all bad news for the scientific community. MIT Provost Cindy Barnhart opened the event by citing surveys showing a high level of trust broadly in scientists across the globe. Still, she also pointed to a U.S. survey showing communication was seen as an area of relative weakness for scientists.

Barnhart noted MIT’s long commitment to science communication and commended communication efforts affiliated with MIT including MIT Press, MIT Technology Review, and MIT News.

“We’re working hard to communicate the value of science to society as we fight to build public support for the scientific research, discovery, and evidence that is needed in our society,” Barnhart said. “At MIT, an essential way we do that is by shining a bright light on the groundbreaking work of our faculty, research, scientists, staff, postdocs, and students.”

Another theme was the importance of storytelling in science communication, and participants including the two keynote speakers offered plenty of their own stories. Francis Collins, who directed the National Institutes of Health between 2009 and 2021, and Sudanese climate journalist Lina Yassin delivered a joint keynote address moderated by MIT Vice President for Communications Alfred Ironside.

Recalling his time leading the NIH through the Covid-19 pandemic, Collins said the Covid-19 vaccine development was a major success, but the scientific community failed to explain to the public the way science evolves based on new evidence.

“We missed a chance to use the pandemic as a teachable moment,” Collins said. “In March of 2020, we were just starting to learn about the virus and how it spread, but we had to make recommendations to the public, which would often change a month or two later. So people began to doubt the information they were getting was reliable because it kept changing. If you’re in a circumstance where you’re communicating scientific evidence, start by saying, ‘This is a work in progress.’”

Collins said the government should have had a better plan for communicating information to the public when the pandemic started.

“Our health system was badly broken at the time because it had been underinvested in for far too long, so community-based education wasn’t really possible,” Collins said, noting his agency should have done more to empower physicians who were trusted voices in rural communities. “Far too much of our communication was top down.”

In her keynote address, Yassin shared her experience trying to get people in her home country to evacuate ahead of natural disasters. She said many people initially ignored her advice, citing their faith in God’s plan for them. But when she reframed her messaging to incorporate the teachings of Islam, a religion most of the country practices, she said people were much more receptive.

That was another recurring lesson participants shared: Science discussions don’t occur in a vacuum. Any conversation that ignores a person’s existing values and experiences will be less effective.

“Personal experience, as well as personal faith and belief, are critically important filters that we encounter every time we talk to people about science,” Ironside said.

As the price of solar panels has plummeted in recent decades, installation costs have taken up a greater share of the technology’s overall price tag. The long installation process for solar farms is also emerging as a key bottleneck in the deployment of solar energy.

Now the startup Charge Robotics is developing solar installation factories to speed up the process of building large-scale solar farms. The company’s factories are shipped to the site of utility solar projects, where equipment including tracks, mounting brackets, and panels are fed into the system and automatically assembled. A robotic vehicle autonomously puts the finished product — which amounts to a completed section of solar farm — in its final place.

“We think of this as the Henry Ford moment for solar,” says CEO Banks Hunter ’15, who founded Charge Robotics with fellow MIT alumnus Max Justicz ’17. “We’re going from a very bespoke, hands on, manual installation process to something much more streamlined and set up for mass manufacturing. There are all kinds of benefits that come along with that, including consistency, quality, speed, cost, and safety.”

Last year, solar energy accounted for 81 percent of new electric capacity in the U.S., and Hunter and Justicz see their factories as necessary for continued acceleration in the industry.

The founders say they were met with skepticism when they first unveiled their plans. But in the beginning of last year, they deployed a prototype system that successfully built a solar farm with SOLV Energy, one of the largest solar installers in the U.S. Now, Charge has raised $22 million for its first commercial deployments later this year.

From surgical robots to solar robots

While majoring in mechanical engineering at MIT, Hunter found plenty of excuses to build things. One such excuse was Course 2.009 (Produce Engineering Processes), where he and his classmates built a smart watch for communication in remote areas.

After graduation, Hunter worked for the MIT alumni-founded startups Shaper Tools and Vicarious Surgical. Vicarious Surgical is a medical robotics company that has raised more than $450 million to date. Banks was the second employee and worked there for five years.

“A lot of really hands on, project-based classes at MIT translated directly into my first roles coming out of school and set me up to be very independent and run large engineering projects,” Banks says, “Course 2.009, in particular, was a big launch point for me. The founders of Vicarious Surgical got in touch with me through the 2.009 network.”

As early as 2017, Hunter and Justicz, who majored in mechanical engineering and computer science, had discussed starting a company together. But they had to decide where to apply their broad engineering and product skillsets.

“Both of us care a lot about climate change. We see climate change as the biggest problem impacting the greatest number of people on the planet,” Hunter says. “Our mentality was if we can build anything, we might as well build something that really matters.”

In the process of cold calling hundreds of people in the energy industry, the founders decided solar was the future of energy production because its price was decreasing so quickly.

“It’s becoming cheaper faster than any other form of energy production in human history,” Hunter says.

When the founders began visiting construction sites for the large, utility-scale solar farms that make up the bulk of energy generation, it wasn’t hard to find the bottlenecks. The first site they traveled to was in the Mojave Desert in California. Hunter describes it as a massive dust bowl where thousands of workers spent months repeating tasks like moving material and assembling the same parts, over and over again.

“The site had something like 2 million panels on it, and every single one was assembled and fastened the same way by hand,” Hunter says. “Max and I thought it was insane. There’s no way that can scale to transform the energy grid in a short window of time.”

Hunter says he heard from each of the largest solar companies in the U.S. that their biggest limitation for scaling was labor shortages. The problem was slowing growth and killing projects.

Hunter and Justicz founded Charge Robotics in 2021 to break through that bottleneck. Their first step was to order utility solar parts and assemble them by hand in their backyards.

“From there, we came up with this portable assembly line that we could ship out to construction sites and then feed in the entire solar system, including the steel tracks, mounting brackets, fasteners, and the solar panels,” Hunter explains. “The assembly line robotically assembles all those pieces to produce completed solar bays, which are chunks of a solar farm.”

Each bay represents a 40-foot piece of the solar farm and weighs about 800 pounds. A robotic vehicle brings it to its final location in the field. Banks says Charge’s system automates all mechanical installation except for the process of pile driving the first metal stakes into the ground.

Charge’s assembly lines also have machine-vision systems that scan each part to ensure quality, and the systems work with the most common solar parts and panel sizes.

From pilot to product

When the founders started pitching their plans to investors and construction companies, people didn’t believe it was possible.

“The initial feedback was basically, ‘This will never work,’” Hunter says. “But as soon as we took our first system out into the field and people saw it operating, they got much more excited and started believing it was real.”

Since that first deployment, Charge’s team has been making its system faster and easier to operate. The company plans to set up its factories at project sites and run them in partnership with solar construction companies. The factories could even run alongside human workers.

“With our system, people are operating robotic equipment remotely rather than putting in the screws themselves,” Hunter explains. “We can essentially deliver the assembled solar to customers. Their only responsibility is to deliver the materials and parts on big pallets that we feed into our system.”

Hunter says multiple factories could be deployed at the same site and could also operate 24/7 to dramatically speed up projects.

“We are hitting the limits of solar growth because these companies don’t have enough people,” Hunter says. “We can build much bigger sites much faster with the same number of people by just shipping out more of our factories. It’s a fundamentally new way of scaling solar energy.”