U.S. News and World Report has again placed MIT’s graduate program in engineering at the top of its annual rankings, released today. The Institute has held the No. 1 spot since 1990, when the magazine first ranked such programs.

The MIT Sloan School of Management also placed highly, occupying the No. 6 spot for the best graduate business programs.

Among individual engineering disciplines, MIT placed first in six areas: aerospace/aeronautical/astronautical engineering, chemical engineering, computer engineering (tied with the University of California at Berkeley), electrical/electronic/communications engineering (tied with Stanford University and Berkeley), materials engineering, and mechanical engineering. It placed second in nuclear engineering.

In the rankings of individual MBA specialties, MIT placed first in four areas: business analytics, entrepreneurship (with Stanford), production/operations, and supply chain/logistics. It placed second in executive MBA programs (with the University of Chicago).

U.S. News bases its rankings of graduate schools of engineering and business on two types of data: reputational surveys of deans and other academic officials, and statistical indicators that measure the quality of a school’s faculty, research, and students. The magazine’s less-frequent rankings of graduate programs in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities are based solely on reputational surveys.

In the sciences, ranked by U.S. News for the first time in four years, MIT’s doctoral programs placed first in four areas: biology (with Scripps Research Institute), chemistry (with Berkeley and Caltech), computer science (with Carnegie Mellon University and Stanford), and physics (with Caltech, Princeton University, and Stanford). The Institute placed second in mathematics (with Harvard University, Stanford, and Berkeley).

To improve data center efficiency, multiple storage devices are often pooled together over a network so many applications can share them. But even with pooling, significant device capacity remains underutilized due to performance variability across the devices.

MIT researchers have now developed a system that boosts the performance of storage devices by handling three major sources of variability simultaneously. Their approach delivers significant speed improvements over traditional methods that tackle only one source of variability at a time.

The system uses a two-tier architecture, with a central controller that makes big-picture decisions about which tasks each storage device performs, and local controllers for each machine that rapidly reroute data if that device is struggling.

The method, which can adapt in real-time to shifting workloads, does not require specialized hardware. When the researchers tested this system on realistic tasks like AI model training and image compression, it nearly doubled the performance delivered by traditional approaches. By intelligently balancing the workloads of multiple storage devices, the system can increase overall data center efficiency.

“There is a tendency to want to throw more resources at a problem to solve it, but that is not sustainable in many ways. We want to be able to maximize the longevity of these very expensive and carbon-intensive resources,” says Gohar Chaudhry, an electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) graduate student and lead author of a paper on this technique. “With our adaptive software solution, you can still squeeze a lot of performance out of your existing devices before you need to throw them away and buy new ones.”

Chaudhry is joined on the paper by Ankit Bhardwaj, an assistant professor at Tufts University; Zhenyuan Ruan PhD ’24; and senior author Adam Belay, an associate professor of EECS and a member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. The research will be presented at the USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation.

Leveraging untapped performance

Solid-state drives (SSDs) are high-performance digital storage devices that allow applications to read and write data. For instance, an SSD can store vast datasets and rapidly send data to a processor for machine-learning model training.   

Pooling multiple SSDs together so many applications can share them improves efficiency, since not every application needs to use the entire capacity of an SSD at a given time. But not all SSDs perform equally, and the slowest device can limit the overall performance of the pool.

These inefficiencies arise from variability in SSD hardware and the tasks they perform.

To utilize this untapped SSD performance, the researchers developed Sandook, a software-based system that tackles three major forms of performance-hampering variability simultaneously. “Sandook” is an Urdu word that means “box,” to signify “storage.”

One type of variability is caused by differences in the age, amount of wear, and capacity of SSDs that may have been purchased at different times from multiple vendors.

The second type of variability is due to the mismatch between read and write operations occurring on the same SSD. To write new data to the device, the SSD must erase some existing data. This process can slow down data reads, or retrievals, happening at the same time.

The third source of variability is garbage collection, a process of gathering and removing outdated data to free up space. This process, which slows SSD operations, is triggered at random intervals that a data center operator cannot control.

“I can’t assume all SSDs will behave identically through my entire deployment cycle. Even if I give them all the same workload, some of them will be stragglers, which hurts the net throughput I can achieve,” Chaudhry explains.

Plan globally, react locally

To handle all three sources of variability, Sandook utilizes a two-tier structure. A global schedular optimizes the distribution of tasks for the overall pool, while faster schedulers on each SSD react to urgent events and shift operations away from congested devices.

The system overcomes delays from read-write interference by rotating which SSDs an application can use for reads and writes. This reduces the chance reads and writes happen simultaneously on the same machine.

Sandook also profiles the typical performance of each SSD. It uses this information to detect when garbage collection is likely slowing operations down. Once detected, Sandook reduces the workload on that SSD by diverting some tasks until garbage collection is finished.

“If that SSD is doing garbage collection and can’t handle the same workload anymore, I want to give it a smaller workload and slowly ramp things back up. We want to find the sweet spot where it is still doing some work, and tap into that performance,” Chaudhry says.

The SSD profiles also allow Sandook’s global controller to assign workloads in a weighted fashion that considers the characteristics and capacity of each device.

Because the global controller sees the overall picture and the local controllers react on the fly, Sandook can simultaneously manage forms of variability that happen over different time scales. For instance, delays from garbage collection occur suddenly, while latency caused by wear and tear builds up over many months.

The researchers tested Sandook on a pool of 10 SSDs and evaluated the system on four tasks: running a database, training a machine-learning model, compressing images, and storing user data. Sandook boosted the throughput of each application between 12 and 94 percent when compared to static methods, and improved the overall utilization of SSD capacity by 23 percent.

The system enabled SSDs to achieve 95 percent of their theoretical maximum performance, without the need for specialized hardware or application-specific updates.

“Our dynamic solution can unlock more performance for all the SSDs and really push them to the limit. Every bit of capacity you can save really counts at this scale,” Chaudhry says.

In the future, the researchers want to incorporate new protocols available on the latest SSDs that give operators more control over data placement. They also want to leverage the predictability in AI workloads to increase the efficiency of SSD operations.

“Flash storage is a powerful technology that underpins modern datacenter applications, but sharing this resource across workloads with widely varying performance demands remains an outstanding challenge. This work moves the needle meaningfully forward with an elegant and practical solution ready for deployment, bringing flash storage closer to its full potential in production clouds,” says Josh Fried, a software engineer at Google and incoming assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who was not involved with this work.

This research was funded, in part, by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the Semiconductor Research Corporation.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 07 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02611-2

Lessons from the International Court of Justice Advisory Opinion for Indigenous rights

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 07 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02602-3

Meeting global temperature targets requires deep mitigation across sectors. Moving away from cost optimality when allocating mitigation by sector, the authors link integrated assessment models and portfolio analysis to identify and balance trade-offs between Sustainable Development Goal indicators.

Mike Masnick points out that the recent New Mexico court ruling against Meta has some bad implications for end-to-end encryption, and security in general:

If the “design choices create liability” framework seems worrying in the abstract, the New Mexico case provides a concrete example of where it leads in practice.

One of the key pieces of evidence the New Mexico attorney general used against Meta was the company’s 2023 decision to add end-to-end encryption to Facebook Messenger. The argument went like this: predators used Messenger to groom minors and exchange child sexual abuse material. By encrypting those messages, Meta made it harder for law enforcement to access evidence of those crimes. Therefore, the encryption was a design choice that enabled harm...

Google says that it will fully transition to post-quantum cryptography by 2029. I think this is a good move, not because I think we will have a useful quantum computer anywhere near that year, but because crypto-agility is always a good thing.

Slashdot thread.

Administrator Lee Zeldin says his agency can't regulate greenhouse gases without congressional approval. Some legal experts disagree.

A bill that passed Florida’s Legislature would prevent local governments from capping greenhouse gas emissions.

A federal judge says litigation can continue over Chubb's decision to bar a proposal to study the benefits of suing companies responsible for climate change.

Ken Paxton has accused four residential solar companies of engaging in “fraudulent and deceptive practices.” He's battling fellow Republican John Cornyn for a U.S. Senate seat.

As sand resources decline, hard-pressed cranberry bog owners are turning to sand mining for revenue. Their neighbors aren't happy.

The program would offer grants of up to $10,000 to help homeowners to retrofit their properties for storm protection

Koko Networks folded amid concerns it was issuing more carbon credits than its products warranted, a claim the company has denied.

The Finance Ministry said the new requirements were intended to align rural credit with conservation and sustainability policies.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 06 April 2026; doi:10.1038/s41558-026-02600-5

The authors consider risks to global biodiversity from wildfire under climate change. They show increased risk to 83.9% of species pre-identified as wildfire vulnerable, with high risks for species with small ranges, high conservation concern and those in South America, Australia and South Asia.

You’re invited on a journey inside the privacy battles that shaped the internet. EFF’s Executive Director Cindy Cohn has tangled with the feds, fought for your data security, and argued before judges to protect our access to science and knowledge on the internet.

Join Cindy at three events in New York discussing her bestselling new book: Privacy's Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance, on sale now. All proceeds from the book benefit EFF. Find the full event details below, and RSVP to let us know if you can make it.

April 20 - With Women in Security and Privacy (WISP)

Join Women in Security and Privacy (WISP) and EFF for a conversation featuring American University Senior Professorial Lecturer Chelsea Horne and EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn as they dive into data security, Federal access to data, and your digital rights.

Privacy's Defender with WISP
Kennedys
22 Vanderbilt Avenue, Suite 2400, New York, NY 10017
Monday, April 20, 2026
6:00 pm to 8:00 pm
REGISTER NOW

April 21 - With Julie Samuels at Civic Hall

Join Tech:NYC President and CEO Julie Samuels, in conversation with EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn for a discussion about Cindy's work, her new book, and what we're all wondering: Can have private conversations if we live our lives online?

Privacy's Defender at Civic Hall
Civic Hall
124 E 14th St, New York, NY 10003
Tuesday, April 21, 2026
6:00 pm to 9:00 pm
REGISTER NOW

April 23 - With Anil Dash at Brooklyn Public Library

Join antitech Principal & Cofounder Anil Dash, in conversation with EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn to discuss Cindy's new book: Privacy's Defender: My Thirty-Year Fight Against Digital Surveillance.

Privacy's Defender at Brooklyn Public Library
Brooklyn Public Library - Central Library, Info Commons Lab
10 Grand Army Plz 1st floor, Brooklyn, NY 11238
Thursday, April 23, 2026
6:00 pm to 7:30 pm
REGISTER NOW

"Privacy’s Defender is a compelling account of a life well lived and an inspiring call to action for the next generation of civil liberties champions."
~Edward Snowden, whistleblower; author of Permanent Record

Can't make it? Look for Cindy at a city (or web connection) near you! Find the latest tour dates on the Privacy’s Defender hub or follow EFF for more.

Part memoir and part legal history for the general reader, Privacy’s Defender is a compelling testament to just how much privacy and free expression matter in our efforts to combat authoritarianism, grow democracy, and strengthen human rights. Thank you for being a part of that fight.

Want to support the cause and get a copy of the new book? New or renewing EFF members can preorder one as their annual gift!

Legal intern Raj Gambhir was the principal author of this post.

The Trump administration has restricted the First Amendment right to record law enforcement by issuing an unprecedented nationwide flight restriction preventing private drone operators, including professional and citizen journalists, from flying drones within half a mile of any ICE or CBP vehicle.

In January, EFF and media organizations including The New York Times and The Washington Post responded to this blatant infringement of the First Amendment by demanding that the FAA lift this flight restriction. Over two months later, we’re still waiting for the FAA to respond to our letter.

The First Amendment guarantees the right to record law enforcement. As we have seen with the extrajudicial killings of George Floyd, Renée Good, and Alex Pretti, capturing law enforcement on camera can drive accountability and raise awareness of police misconduct.

A 21-Month Long “Temporary” Flight Restriction?

The FAA regularly issues temporary flight restrictions (TFRs) to prevent people from flying into designated airspace. TFRs are usually issued during natural disasters, or to protect major sporting events and government officials like the president, and in most cases last mere hours.

Not so with the restriction numbered FDC 6/4375, which started on January 16, 2026. This TFR lasts for 21 months—until October 29, 2027—and covers the entire nation. It prevents any person from flying any unmanned aircraft (i.e., a drone) within 3000 feet, measured horizontally, of any of the “facilities and mobile assets,” including “ground vehicle convoys and their associated escorts,” of the Departments of Defense, Energy, Justice, and Homeland Security. Violators can be subject to criminal and civil penalties, and risk having their drones seized or destroyed.

In practical terms, this TFR means that anyone flying their drone within a half mile of an ICE or CBP agent’s car (a DHS “mobile asset”) is liable to face criminal charges and have their drone shot down. The practical unfairness of this TFR is underscored by the fact that immigration agents often use unmarked rental cars, use cars without license plates, or switch the license plates of their cars to carry out their operations. Nor do they provide prior warning of those operations.

The TFR is an Unconstitutional Infringement of Free Speech

While the FAA asserts that the TFR is grounded in its lawful authority, the flight restriction not only violates multiple constitutional rights, but also the agency’s own regulations.

First Amendment violation. As we highlighted in the letter, nearly every federal appeals court has recognized the First Amendment right of Americans to record law enforcement officers performing their official duties. By subjecting drone operators to criminal and civil penalties, along with the potential destruction or seizure of their drone, the TFR punishes—without the required justifications—lawful recording of law enforcement officers, including immigration agents.  

Fifth Amendment violation. The Fifth Amendment guarantees the right to due process, which includes being given fair notice before being deprived of liberty or property by the government. Under the flight restriction, advanced notice isn’t even possible. As discussed above, drone operators can’t know whether they are within 3000 horizontal feet of unmarked DHS vehicles. Yet the TFR allows the government to capture or even shoot down a drone if it flies within the TFR radius, and to impose criminal and civil penalties on the operator.

Violations of FAA regulations. In issuing a TFR, the FAA’s own regulations require the agency to “specify[] the hazard or condition requiring” the restriction. Furthermore, the FAA must provide accredited news representatives with a point of contact to obtain permission to fly drones within the restricted area. The FAA has satisfied neither of these requirements in issuing its nationwide ban on drones getting near government vehicles.

EFF Demands Rescission of the TFR

We don’t believe it’s a coincidence that the TFR was put in place in January 2026, at the height of the Minneapolis anti-ICE protests, shortly after the killing of Renée Good and shortly before the shooting of Alex Pretti. After both of those tragedies, civilian recordings played a vital role in contradicting the government’s false account of the events.

By punishing civilians for recording federal law enforcement officers, the TFR helps to shield ICE and other immigration agents from scrutiny and accountability. It also discourages the exercise of a key First Amendment right. EFF has long advocated for the right to record the police, and exercising that right today is more important than ever.

Finally, while recording law enforcement is protected by the First Amendment, be aware that officers may retaliate against you for exercising this right. Please refer to our guidance on safely recording law enforcement activities.

The electrons that power our society flow left and right through the circuitry in our electronics, back and forth along the transmission lines that make up our power grid, and up and down to light up every floor of every building. But the electrons in newly discovered “moiré crystals” move in much stranger ways. They can move left and right, back and forth, or up and down in our three-dimensional world, but these electrons also act as if they can teleport in and out of a mysterious fourth dimension of space that is perpendicular to our perceivable reality. Physicists have found that this strange, newly discovered quantum behavior has nothing to do with the electrons themselves and everything to do with the strange material environment in which they live.

The electrons in moiré crystals leap into a fourth dimension through a process called “quantum tunneling.” While a soccer ball sitting at the bottom of a hill will stay put until someone retrieves it, a quantum particle in a valley can jump out all on its own. Quantum tunneling may seem magical to us, but it is quite commonplace in the microscopic quantum world, on the length scales of atoms. Quantum tunneling is also important on larger length scales, particularly in large superconducting circuits that underlie an emerging landscape of quantum technology, as recognized by the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics. 

However, quantum tunneling in moiré crystals is different, in that once an electron tunnels, physicists have now measured that it acts as if it had tunneled into a completely different world and come back again, as if it had been transported through a fourth “synthetic” dimension.

In a paper published recently in the journal Nature, a team of MIT researchers realize a long-anticipated scalable technique for producing high-quality moiré materials as moiré crystals, overcoming a materials bottleneck for next-generation electronic applications. In addition, the electrons in these crystals act as if they can teleport through a fourth dimension of space, unlocking a realistic materials approach for realizing numerous theoretical predictions of higher-dimensional superconductivity and higher-dimensional topological properties in the laboratory.

The study’s co-lead authors are Kevin Nuckolls, a Pappalardo postdoc in physics at MIT, and Nisarga Paul PhD ’25, and the study’s corresponding author is Joe Checkelsky, professor of physics at MIT. In addition, the study’s MIT co-authors include Alan Chen, Filippo Gaggioli, Joshua Wakefield, and Liang Fu, along with collaborators at Harvard University, Toho University, and the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory.

Crystal perfection

To make a moiré material, physicists first start with atomically thin two-dimensional (2D) materials, like the thinnest sheets of carbon known as graphene. Moiré materials can be created by combining individual sheets of the same 2D material and twisting them back and forth with respect to one another. Moiré materials can also be created by combining two different 2D materials that are very similar, but not quite the same, which ensures that they can never perfectly match one another even when carefully aligned. Both of these methods create intricate interference patterns where the individual layers of moiré materials are nearly aligned in some areas and visibly misaligned in others. Physicists call these patterns “moiré superlattices,” named after historical French fabrics that show similarly beautiful patterns generated by overlaying two different threading patterns.

For more than a decade, moiré materials have completely reshaped how physicists design and control quantum material properties, and the physics labs at MIT have been the hotbed of transformative discoveries in this ever-growing research field. Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics at MIT, and Raymond Ashoori, professor of physics at MIT, were early adopters of new techniques for fabricating moiré materials. Together in 2014, their labs discovered that electrons in moiré materials made from graphene and the 2D material boron nitride live in an intricate quantum fractal known as “Hofstadter’s butterfly.” In 2018, Jarillo-Herrero’s lab discovered that moiré materials made from twisting two sheets of graphene were fertile grounds for unconventional superconductivity that, by some metrics, is one of the strongest superconductors ever discovered. Long Ju, the Lawrence C. and Sarah W. Biedenharn Associate Professor of Physics, and his lab discovered in 2024 that moiré materials made from multilayer graphene and boron nitride cause electrons to split apart into fractional pieces, a quantum phenomenon previously thought to be exclusively confined to extremely high magnetic fields, but now realized without the need for a magnetic field.

Common across all of these experiments, and those performed around the world, were the tireless efforts of students and postdocs in carefully assembling moiré material devices by hand, one at a time. To make a moiré material device, 2D materials like graphene are peeled using Scotch tape from rock-like crystals, such as graphite. Then, sticky polymer films and microscopes enable researchers to pick up different 2D materials one by one with a precise sequence of twist angles. Finally, these stacks of 2D materials are etched into individual devices that allow researchers to investigate their properties in the lab.

In their new study, Joe Checkelsky and his lab have discovered a new technique for generating moiré materials that skips over all of these laborious steps. Their new method takes an entirely different approach, and it’s one that can assemble moiré materials by the tens of thousands. Instead of assembling samples one by one and layer by layer, Checkelsky and his lab have found new chemical synthesis routes that enlist Mother Nature’s help to grow “moiré crystals” with high-quality moiré superlattices built into each of their layers. By analogy, if one were to think of previous generations of moiré materials like two stacked sheets of paper with different line spacings, Checkelsky has figured out how to generate entire libraries of encyclopedias whose odd-numbered pages and even-numbered pages have two different line spacings.

“It feels incredible for our team to have made this materials discovery, particularly at MIT,” says Nuckolls, co-lead author on the work. “Moiré materials have become a central focus of quantum materials research today in large part because of the work of our colleagues just down the hallway.”

In the end, it turns out that nature is by far the best at assembling moiré materials when given the right tools. The MIT team discovered that naturally grown moiré materials are nearly perfect and highly reproducible. This offers a long-anticipated proof-of-concept demonstration of a potentially scalable route to using moiré materials in next-generation electronics. Although there are many more obstacles to be overcome to transform these fundamental science results into usable technology, the team has demonstrated a crucial first step in the right direction.

4D in 4K

After discovering how to grow and manipulate moiré superlattices in moiré crystals, the team began to investigate their properties. Initially, the team found that the metallic properties of these materials were surprisingly complicated, but they soon shifted their perspective to think from a higher-dimensional point of view, an idea inspired by theoretical proposals made roughly half a century ago. To peer into this prospective four-dimensional quantum world, the team performed detailed studies of the electronic and magnetic properties of moiré crystals at very large magnetic fields. The electrons in common metals move in tight circular orbits when placed in a magnetic field. However, something very special happens when they move in moiré crystals with two different interfering lattices. This interference generates a moiré superlattice that is mathematically equivalent to an emergent four-dimensional “superspace” lattice. Guided by this new 4D superspace lattice, the team discovered that these electrons could now move through this fourth dimension when their motion aligns to the direction where the two competing lattices interfere the most.

“Metaphorically, our measurements uncover ‘shadows’ of emergent 4D landscape upon which the electrons live,” says Nuckolls. “By carefully analyzing these 3D silhouettes from different angles and perspectives, our measurement reconstructs the 4D landscape that guides electrons in moiré crystals.”

Although this extra synthetic dimension is fictitious and the electrons in moiré crystals are actually still stuck in our 3D reality, they simulate a four-dimensional quantum world so closely that the measured properties of moiré crystals appear as if the researchers had actually performed their experiments in 4D. It seems like moiré crystals aren’t particularly bothered by whether the fourth dimension is fictitious and synthetic or if it’s real. It’s all the same to them.

“Mathematically, the equations describing the electron dynamics in these crystals are four-dimensional,” says co-lead author Nisarga Paul. “The electrons propagate in the synthetic dimension just as they do in our world’s three physical dimensions. It’s hard to detect this motion, but one of the striking realizations was that a magnetic field can reveal fingerprints of this synthetic dimension in experimentally measurable electronic properties known as quantum oscillations.”

Going forward, the team will explore how a wide variety of material properties might benefit from extra synthetic dimensions, which now could be within reach of realization.

“It’s fascinating to consider what may be possible next,” Checkelsky says. “There are long-standing theoretical predictions for higher-dimensional conductors and superconductors, for example — materials of this type may offer a new platform to examine these experimentally in the laboratory.”

This research was supported, in part, by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, the U.S. Office of Naval Research, the U.S. Army Research Office, U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, MIT Pappalardo Fellowships in Physics, the Swiss National Science Foundation, and the U.S. National Science Foundation. 

For the past three summers, MIT master’s students and recently graduated planners have collaborated with cities and community organizations to advance climate, infrastructure, and economic development initiatives. They’re known as the Freedom Summer Fellows, participants in an impact-driven program launched in 2023 by the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), an expression of the department’s commitment to equal opportunity and experiential learning. 

Over the course of eight to 10 weeks, fellows are immersed in the real stakes and challenges of projects that involve navigating a network of interconnected causes, competing agendas, a range of stakeholders, and rapidly changing circumstances. Host organizations define discrete tasks and provide ongoing supervision, while fellows develop actionable tools and materials designed to empower organizations in the long term — from policy research and grant application strategies to navigate funding, to analytical tools and implementation frameworks to ensure informed and streamlined project management. 

“You can’t teach planning today without grappling with how policy actually unfolds within communities; under pressure, with limited resources, and with multiple conflicting interests,” says Phillip Thompson, professor of urban planning at MIT and former New York City deputy mayor for strategic policy initiatives under Mayor Bill de Blasio. “The Freedom Summer Fellowship is about capacity building through cooperative learning — a knowledge exchange intended to have lasting positive results for communities, while equipping planners with critical experience as they embark on their careers.”

From classroom to communities

The fellowship emerged from Bills and Billions, a DUSP Independent Activities Period course taught by Thompson and Elisabeth Reynolds, professor of the practice at MIT and former special assistant to President Joe Biden for manufacturing and economic development. The course examines U.S. federal policy and its intersection with local economic development, labor markets, and the infrastructure of industry, energy, and the built environment more broadly.  

“We were at an inflection point,” says Reynolds, speaking of her return to MIT in fall 2022 after serving at the National Economic Council. “There was a real sense of urgency about the wave of new legislation and funding around clean energy, infrastructure, and reindustrialization, and much of the investment and work in these areas continues today. It’s a very dynamic time for cities and states, with significant experimentation and innovative strategies — a perfect environment for MIT graduate students and recent grads.”  

Securing federal funding is typically dependent on competitive grants requiring technical, financial, and community planning that many local governments and nonprofits are not equipped for. “While much funding to localities has since been cut, the momentum for change is still there,” says Thompson. “The incentives put forward by the Inflation Reduction Act encouraged localities and communities to initiate their own clean energy projects, and there’s a continued recognition that climate change is going to take a movement from the bottom up.”

At a time when the U.S. is experiencing a paradigm shift in policy — characterized by challenges to a free-market economy and global trade, renewed investment in industrial strategy, and the lifting of environmental and other regulations — the fellowship offers a way to support the planning and implementation of equitable development strategies and to redirect resources where they are needed most.

From placements to professional practice

Since 2023, 31 Freedom Summer Fellows have collaborated with 19 host organizations, and contributed to more than $100 million in state, federal, and philanthropic grant applications, including a successful $3 million EPA Climate Pollution Reduction grant for Hawaii. Fellows have helped convene more than 3,500 community members and have produced dozens of planning tools, including implementation maps, technical tools, and dashboards that support equitable project design and production. Collaborations have inspired the focus of graduate theses produced as client reports for hosts, and in several cases fellows have extended their positions to full-time roles. 

For Sara Jex MCP ’25, her 2024 Freedom Summer Fellowship became a direct pathway from graduate study to professional practice. She was placed with the Site Readiness Fund for Good Jobs in Cleveland, Ohio, an organization working to transform brownfields and disinvested industrial sites into engines of inclusive economic growth.

“Much of my work that summer involved developing an EPA Community Change Grant application for a proposed industrial district spanning over 350 acres — 200 of which we’re looking to reactivate,” says Jex. “So, it’s a transformative project that will bring in new jobs, but there are also major challenges that come with industrial place-making, especially given the proximity to residential neighborhoods. In Rust Belt cities, there’s a history of industrial disinvestment leading to job loss, population decline, and environmental injustices. We don’t want to repeat the harms of the past — we want to create something better.”

To support equitable development strategies for the industrial corridor, Jex helped to prepare technical tools mapping the effects of development on home values, seeking to identify a balance of growth, affordability, and resident benefit. She also evaluated wealth-building strategies such as land trusts and mixed-income neighborhood trusts, offering recommendations for community ownership of land holdings.

“Our vision for the project is not just about bringing in new businesses and creating new jobs,” says Jex, “it’s also about going beyond job creation to create lasting benefit for communities surrounding the sites.”

Jex continued working with Site Readiness Fund for Good Jobs during her second year at MIT and now holds a full-time role at the organization. “The Freedom Summer Fellowship gave me a platform to start building my planning career,” she reflects. “It was eye-opening to be in a cohort of other students doing similar work across the country. The insights from our weekly meetings have stayed with me since graduating — we were able to share perspectives on the challenges we were facing from multiple different contexts, and that brought a new dimension to the learning process.”

Redefining resilience

For Deena Darby, an MIT master’s student with a background in architecture and public art, her 2025 Freedom Summer Fellowship offered a way to bridge creative practice with structural change. Working with the LA84 Foundation and the Ubuntu Climate Initiative in Los Angeles, Darby focused on neighborhood-based resilience in the context of the 2025 wildfires and the upcoming 2028 Olympics.

“My decision to apply to do a master’s in city planning at MIT was informed by the projects I had been working on in Harlem, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and other cities, including Philadelphia and Detroit. Much of that work involved community engagement work when producing public art at an architectural scale, but I kept feeling that residents deserved more than an art piece at the end of a project.” 

During the fellowship, Darby contributed to asset mapping across six neighborhoods, developed case studies on resilience hubs, and helped shape strategies that tied climate adaptation to culture, play, and community ownership. Her immersion in the lived experience of those neighborhoods — visiting sites, meeting organizers, and participating in local coalitions — was crucial to her development of strategic recommendations for decentralized infrastructure, cultural arts cohorts, and neighborhood-based resilience festivals.

“Resilience is often narrowly framed around climate,” Darby reflects. “But what we were really redefining was economic resilience, social resilience, and the ability of communities to tell their own stories.” 

Darby’s fellowship experience has led to her thesis project, working with the residents of a historically Black neighborhood in her hometown of Savannah, Georgia, who are experiencing displacement. “Coming from an architecture and planning background, my instinct is to ask, How can we frame these issues in terms of cultural preservation and community-based policy development and implementation?” says Darby. “How can we manage change, with the goal of benefiting present residents as well as honoring those who have lived here in the past?”

For Darby, gaining practical understanding of the inseparability of planning and policy has been key to shaping her approach to navigating the educational opportunities at MIT. “In a higher-education context, you’ll often find policy housed separately from planning. But the moment you’re working in situ, it doesn’t make sense to separate the two. For me, the fellowship was a bridge between two often-siloed disciplines.”

Reassessing expertise

“Impact at MIT is typically associated with technological breakthroughs,” says Reynolds. “But much of MIT’s work can make a huge difference when applied in the near term, on the ground. At DUSP, we’re all about bringing theory and practice together, about the interrelation of communities, infrastructure, policy, and how that maps out in the built environment. We can bring expertise and knowledge into the field tomorrow, into places that can immediately benefit from the collaboration.” 

Initial funding for the fellowship at MIT was provided by the MIT Climate Project, in addition to national foundations. Faculty are exploring ways to expand and increase the number of student placements, further embedding relationships between MIT and cities across the United States. There are also discussions about sharing the model with other institutions, including historically Black colleges and international collaborators. 

“We’re just starting these conversations with other institutions, but it’s the model of engaged, experiential, cooperative learning that matters,” says Thompson. “It’s clear that the experts aren’t necessarily those who have read a lot of books about planning or design, but those who are embedded within communities, trying to figure out these challenges from the inside.”

The planner might not be the primary expert — but they are the ones who guide decisions that shape the futures of communities. The Freedom Summer Fellowship is about fostering a culture of urban planning in which those decisions are centered upon the lived experience of stakeholders. An approach to practice in which — as Jex put it, reflecting on her experience in Cleveland: “Planners are the people who make decisions about how cities shape access to opportunity.”

Applications for the 2026 Freedom Summer Fellowships are being accepted now through April 7. 

Here’s a fossil of a 150-million year old fish that choked to death on a belemnite rostrum: the hard, internal shell of an extinct, squid-like animal.

Original paper.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

Blog moderation policy.