Monthly Archives: October 2012

In the introduction to [Therese Huston’s Teaching What You Don’t Know], which was just released in paperback, Huston points out that graduate students and new faculty members traditionally expect to be able to teach courses in their areas of expertise. That seems like a benign enough assumption. However, she writes, “college and university faculty members often find themselves having to teach what they don’t know. They have to get up in front of their classes and explain something that they learned just last week, or two days ago, or, in the worst-case scenario, that same morning over a very hurried breakfast.” I can confirm that easily enough from my own dozen years of teaching at a liberal-arts college. Although my background is in 20th-century British literature, I regularly have to dip back into the 19th century for my survey course on British literature. With almost no formal training in rhetoric, I count “Argument and Persuasion” among my standard course offerings. Every member of my department could make similar claims. Read the whole article on The Chronicle of Higher Education.  photo by Brian Taylor

MIT students interested in creating an educational video have the chance to earn $1,000 if their video is selected.  Last year Ian Waitz, MIT’s Dean of Engineering, launched the MIT-K12 project, driven by a series of questions: How can we change the perception of the role of engineers and scientists in the world?  What can MIT do, right now, to improve education at the K12 level?  What if MIT became a publicly accessible “experiential partner” to the country’s K12 educators?  What if MIT students generated short-form videos to aid the work those educators are already doing in their classrooms and homes?  Students interested in making a video for this important project can find more information on the website.

Political Science Professors Andrea Campbell, Devin Caughey, and Charles Stewart III will be hosting a lively discussion of issues surrounding the 2012 election on Tuesday, October 30th, 2012, from 4:00pm to 6:00pm in MIT Room E25-111. They will discuss the place of this election in historical context, the effect of voter ID laws and other election administration issues on the voting process, and the public policy issues at stake, such as the future of the Obama health reform, entitlement reform, and the fiscal issues facing the nation.

For the novice, the logistical challenges of an academic job search can be exasperating, especially when dozens of applications are involved. Getting things right (providing the correct materials, from CV to sample syllabi, in the style and form most sought by a particular search committee) and submitting the application on time (via sometimes complicated e-interfaces) are never as easy as they may sound on initial prospect. It follows that obsessiveness is a good quality in applicants for tenure-track positions. Most fields (although not all subfields) are buyers’ markets. With hundreds of candidates—many of them highly qualified—for one position in, say, 20th-century American literature, harried committees are often looking for some way to narrow the pool. A missing item (like Page 2 of your teaching-philosophy statement), a late upload (because you put off doing it until the midnight of the deadline and your hard drive crashed), or even a typo on the sixth paragraph of your cover letter may get you passed up before you’re even fully considered. So details matter. All the more reason to get the materials and the procedures right. Read the rest of the article on The Chronicle of Higher Education.  photo by Brian Taylor

The MIT Summer Research Program (MSRP) provides nine exciting weeks of intensive research experience to undergraduates considering graduate school. This past summer, 39 interns conducted research in 14 different departments, working in labs under the guidance of experienced scientists and engineers who are MIT faculty members, postdoctoral fellows, and advanced graduate students. Nineteen of the host labs were new to the program, joining over 250 faculty members who have been key to MSRP’s success since it began. MSRP seeks to promote the value of graduate education; to improve the research enterprise through increased diversity; and to prepare and recruit the best and brightest for graduate education at MIT. Students who participate in this program will be better prepared and motivated to pursue advanced degrees, thereby helping to sustain a rich talent pool in critical areas of research and innovation. Click “Read more” to see a great video about this past summer, or visit the MSRP page on the ODGE website.

Read more

The MIT Executive MBA Program, launched in 2010, will graduate its second class in the spring. The rigorous 20-month MBA program has attracted scores of successful mid-career professionals who travel to campus for four one-week modules and 26 weekends over 20 months, in addition to a one-week international action learning trip, all while holding down a job. News@MITSloan recently chatted with EMBA ’13 candidate Frank Golding, YouTube Director, Head of Sport for North America, about why he chose MIT for his MBA and the future of sports on YouTube. Continue reading this article on News@MITSloan.

The Keller Gallery at MIT Architecture presents the Objects by Architects Gallery, curated by Sarah M. Hirschman.  The Gallery will be open in the Keller Gallery at MIT Architecture, Room 7-408, Monday through Friday from 9:00am to 6:00 pm (or by appointment) until Thursday, November 1st, 2012.  The Gallery features work by: Molo, Stanley Saitowitz, Actual / Josh Jakus, Eternity Stew, Moorhead + Moorhead, Meejin Yoon / MY Studio, Deger Cengiz, Nervous System, Barbara Flanagan, Yung Ho Chang, Cheryl Baxter, Nader Tehrani / NADAAA, Atelier Manferdini, Lightexture, Incorporated Architecture and Design, FTF Design Studio, Fiyel Levent, Rael San Fratello, MOS, and Graypants.

Sponsored by First-Year Experience, this year’s wellness fair is centered around the idea of stress reduction and finding little ways to make every day a little more manageable. On Thursday, October 25th, 2012, from 3:30pm to 5:00pm at Kresge Auditorium, learn about healthy eating and sleeping habits, get a massage, play with a puppy, and join representatives from numerous student groups, offices and departments across MIT who are there to provide guidance, advice and other methods of support.  For more information contact fye@mit.edu.

Xiaolu Hsi, Ph.D, will be hosting a workshop entitled “Staring Down the Blank Screen – the Psychology of Thesis Writing for Master’s Students,” designed to help master’s students who will be writing a thesis as a part of their degree requirement.  Topics to be discussed are the essentials of thesis writing, self-direction, accessing support (like a thesis advisor, peers, and writing resources), time management, stress and sleep management, productivity, anxiety-induced procrastinating, as well as other interpersonal issues related to the thesis process.  These workshops will take place at MIT Medical Mental Health and Counseling Services on Monday afternoons at 5:00pm (dates available when you call 3-2916 to sign up).  There is a limit of 10 to 15 per workshop; a follow up session is available upon request.  For questions, email hsix@med.mit.edu.

The GEM Grad Lab (Get Ready for Advanced Degrees) is a free event sponsored by the Massachusetts Consortium of S.T.E.M. Programs, designed to inform students from underrepresented groups in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (S.T.E.M.) about the importance of pursuing an advanced degree, how to apply for graduate school and prepare a competitive application, and graduate school funding opportunities.  The event will take place on Saturday, October 20th, 2012, from 9:00am to 4:00pm EST (registration at 8:30am) at the Broad Institute, 415 Main Street, Cambridge.  A panel of speakers will also provide their insights and experiences about graduate school and beyond.  A continental breakfast and lunch will be provided.

In a research laboratory at the vaunted Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a group of scientists, engineers and architects observes an ancient armored fish, known as polypterus, which has a completely flexible yet protective outer coat that changes shape in response to threats. Looking closely at its skin and scales, the group extrapolates design principles to help them create a new kind of human body armor that could protect soldiers at war, disaster area first-responders, even athletes. Across the room, another team of scientists studies the molecular structure of human cartilage in order to understand why people who suffer from osteoarthritis feel pain. They map out a detailed and microscopic snapshot of the disease, work that could one day lead to personalized medical treatments for arthritis patients. This may seem like the futuristic setting for a sci-fi thriller coming to your local multiplex, but it’s actually the real-life innovation incubator of Christine Ortiz,  professor of materials science and engineering at MIT, and Dean of the school’s prestigious graduate education program… Read the rest of the article on NBC Latino.

If you throw a ball underwater, you’ll find that the smaller it is, the faster it moves: A larger cross-section greatly increases the water’s resistance. Now, a team of MIT researchers has figured out a way to use this basic principle, on a microscopic scale, to carry out biomedical tests that could eventually lead to fast, compact and versatile medical-testing devices. The results, based on work by graduate student Elizabeth Rapoport and assistant professor Geoffrey Beach, of MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE), are described in a paper published in the journal Lab on a Chip. MIT graduate student Daniel Montana ’11 also contributed to the research as an undergraduate. Continue reading this article on MIT news or click “More” to see the video. Read more

The Office of the Dean for Graduate Education is pleased to make available our strategic plan for 2011 – 2016: “From Imagination to Impact: Empowering graduate students to create the future.” The one-year long ODGE strategic planning process involved extensive interaction with and input from graduate students, faculty, administrators, and staff.  The focus was on-campus residential graduate education, in the context of a largely decentralized MIT infrastructure where individual graduate programs and faculty members possess great autonomy in directing graduate education in their disciplines.  Five major themes emerged:

• Supporting Educational Innovation and Excellence
• Competitiveness in Graduate Funding
• Administration and Policy
• Diversity and Climate
• Holistic Graduate Student Experience

To read more, visit the ODGE Strategic Plan webpage.

Michaël Bikard, from MIT Sloan and the Center for Biomedical Innovation will present a talk entitled “Technology Spawning and the Genesis of New Science-Based Inventions” beginning at 3 p.m., Wednesday, October 17, in E25-401. New scientific knowledge sometimes remains underutilized as compared to its technological potential. The talk will examine two views of the process of science-based invention at the level of the knowledge-producing organization.

In one, widespread access to the new scientific knowledge is crucial, and the academic environment therefore fosters invention. In the other, control is paramount and scientific research conducted in firms leads to more new technologies. Analysis of follow-on inventions, based on 39 simultaneous discoveries between academia and industry involving 90 teams and cited in 533 patents, indicates that a scientific publication originating from a firm is 20-30 percent more likely to be cited in follow-on patents than its academic twin. Contrary to the idea that ease of access plays a crucial role, inventors that did not take part in the discovery appear more likely to draw their knowledge from firms rather than from the “Ivory Tower.” Read the rest of the article on News@MITSloan.

A new study from MIT neuroscientists sheds light on a neural circuit that makes us likelier to remember what we’re seeing when our brains are in a more attentive state. The team of neuroscientists found that this circuit depends on a type of brain cell long thought to play a supporting role, at most, in neural processing. When the brain is attentive, those cells, called astrocytes, relay messages alerting neurons of the visual cortex that they should respond strongly to whatever visual information they are receiving. Naiyan Chen, Computational & Systems Biology, is a lead author of the corresponding paper, along with research scientist Hiroki Sugihara; the senior author is Mriganka Sur, the Paul E. and Lilah Newton Professor of Neuroscience at MIT.  Read the rest of the article on MIT news.

Jesal Kapadia, an artist, co-arts editor for the journal Rethinking Marxism, and frequent collaborator with 16Beaver group in NY, will be lecturing for ACT on Monday, October 15th, 2012 from 7:00pm to 9:00pm in the ACT cube, Wiesner Building (E15-001, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge).  This lecture is free and open to the public and is part of the Experiments in Thinking, Action, and Form: Cinematic Migrations Fall 2012 Lecture Series.

What would a cinema that serves its subjects, rather than forces of capital, look like? A cinema of refusal, a cinematic non-form that breaks away from the conditions set by capital. A cinema made entirely of the process itself, that cannot be retained, that disappears and renews itself when recalled, that creates an unforgettable loss, but loss with value on the autonomous side. The evening involves performing live annotations and a screening of Kapadia’s footage shot in Sikkim, India–a dialogue and call-and-response with the activists who went on a yearlong relay hunger strike. What kinds of subject positions would be needed to create this counter-aesthetic practice, one that contains the will to keep social justice alive?

Desire for cinema perhaps existed before its creation.  Today, cinema can be thought as the umbrella term for the variety of moving images and time-based forms that currently circulate and which have intersecting, yet specific, histories of emergence.  These encompass the changing technological and spatial forms themselves—from collective halls to handheld devices—in which cinema appears, as well as the movement and interpretation of cinemas throughout the world.  Cinematic Migrations is a multi-faceted look at the role of cinema’s transmutations over time and its worldwide and circuitous shifts.  This lecture series will take place in the ACT Cube, Wiesner Bldg (E15-001), Lower Level; 20 Ames Street; Cambridge, MA on Mondays (October 15th, 19th, November 5th, 19th, and 26th) from 7:00pm to 9:00pm.  These lectures are free and open to the public. Lecturers and guests participating in this series will examine these terms in different ways, along with their own explorations.

Several years ago, SDM Fellow Rajesh Nair returned to his native India and noticed that the television stations focused almost solely on Bollywood stars and overpaid athletes. It disturbed him, because, as he put it, “India is actually built by entrepreneurs and innovators. And we never give them the due that they deserve.” Nair, who is the founder and CTO of Degree Controls, Inc., a U.S.-based engineering firm that specializes in thermal management for electronics, took action when he founded TechTop, an engineering competition for India’s college students. The first competition was held in 2006, and it has now grown into an annual event that attracts over 200 entrepreneurial proposals. Participants invent product proposals and then judges (Indian scientists, engineers,  IT professionals, and Nair himself) whittle the list down to 50 semi-finalists, and then 20 finalists, and finally, three winners. Several have gone on to form successful companies with the prize money, which is about 100K rupees. “It’s like a mini [MIT] $100K competition,” said Nair. To continue reading the article, visit News@MITSloan.

Living systems are made of complex architectural organization of various cell types in defined microenvironments. The intricate interactions between different cell types control the specific functions of the associated tissues, such as the functions of native liver and cardiac tissues, metastasis and invasion of tumors, and embryonic development. MIT researchers have developed a new versatile technique to control spatial distribution of multiple cell types in predefined 3-D geometries which was described in a paper published online Sept. 3 in Advanced Materials. Halil Tekin, the leading author of the paper, is a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. To read the rest of the article, visit MIT news.  photo by Halil Tekin

Danielle Sewell, MBA ’13, has been named as this year’s McGowan Fellow. The William G. McGowan Charitable Fund was established to realize the magnificent human potential that William McGowan, founder of MCI Communications, foresaw. The foundation’s vision is to have an impact on lives today, create sustainable change, and empower future generations to achieve their greatest potential. Read the rest of the article on News@MITSloan.

The annual MIT Family Weekend Concert is taking place this Friday, October 12th, 2012, at 8:00pm at Kresge Auditorium.  Admission is free.  This concert will feature the MIT Wind Ensemble and the MIT Festival Jazz Ensemble with Frederick Harri, Jr. as Music Director and Kenneth Amis as Assistant Conductor.  The MIT Wind Ensemble will play music from Russia, England, Australia, and America, including Prokofiev, March, op. 99; Vaughn Williams, Rhosymedre; Gorb, Yiddish Dances; Grainger, Children’s March; Bernstein, Overture to Candide.  The MIT Festival Jazz Ensemble, celebrating its golden anniversary, will perform pieces from each decade of its history including works by Ellington, Mingus, La Porta, Sharifi, and others.

For the first time, an MIT team has managed to create three-dimensional “movies” of electron behavior in a topological insulator, or TI. The movies can capture vanishingly small increments of time — down to the level of a few femtoseconds, or millionths of a billionth of a second — so that they can catch the motions of electrons as they scatter in response to a very short pulse of light. Electrons normally have mass, just like many other fundamental particles, but when moving along the surface of TIs they move as if they were massless, like light — one of the extraordinary characteristics that give these new materials such promise for new technologies. The dramatic new results are published this week in the journal Physical Review Letters, in a paper by MIT graduate student Yihua Wang, assistant professor of physics Nuh Gedik, and six other researchers. Read the rest of the article on MIT news.

Chances are that if you own a smartphone you have downloaded a host of different applications, from weather tools to maps, social media applications and games. Many consumers are aware that smartphone applications tend to gather personal information about users, oftentimes tracking location and usage activity. New research from the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory’s (CSAIL) Decentralized Information Group (DIG) shows that a majority of applications not only collect user information when the application is in operation, but also when the application is inactive or when the user has turned off his or her smartphone screen. Under the guidance of CSAIL Principal Investigator Hal Abelson — the Class of 1922 Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science — CSAIL graduate students Fuming Shih and Frances Zhang are investigating how much certain smartphone applications know about users. They started by exploring Google maps, a common download for smartphone users. Shih and Zhang found that the Google maps application continues to gather location information from users even when the application has been closed. Based on their initial investigation, the researchers were curious to see how many other applications continued to track users when not in operation. Read the rest of the article on MIT news.

Researchers in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT have developed an algorithm that can analyze information from medical images to identify diseased areas of the brain and their connections with other regions. The MIT researchers will present the work in October at the International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention in Nice, France. The algorithm, developed by Polina Golland, an associate professor of computer science, and graduate student Archana Venkataraman, extracts information from two different types of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans. The first, called diffusion MRI, looks at how water diffuses along the white-matter fibers in the brain, providing insight into how closely different areas are connected to one another. The second, known as functional MRI, probes how different parts of the brain activate when they perform particular tasks, and so can reveal when two areas are active at the same time and are therefore connected. Read the rest of the article on MIT news.  photo by Marek Kubicki

When the parasite responsible for malaria infects human red blood cells, it launches a 48-hour remodeling of the host cells. During the first 24 hours of this cycle, a protein called RESA undertakes the first step of renovation: enhancing the stiffness of the cell membranes. That increased rigidity impairs red blood cells’ ability to travel through the blood vessels, especially at fever temperatures, according to a new study from researchers at MIT, the Institut Pasteur and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). The study — coordinated by MIT’s Ming Dao, a principal research scientist in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE); Monica Diez Silva, a research scientist in DMSE; and YongKeun Park, an assistant professor of physics at KAIST — appears Aug. 30 in Scientific Reports, an online journal of Nature. Other MIT authors are Subra Suresh, former dean of the MIT School of Engineering and Vannevar Bush Professor of Engineering who is currently on leave from MIT serving as the director of the National Science Foundation; Jongyoon Han, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS); Sha Huang, an EECS graduate student; recent PhD recipient Hansen Bow; and the late Michael Feld, professor of physics. Read the rest of the article on MIT news.  photo by M. Scott Brauer

Most major websites these days maintain huge databases: Shopping sites have databases of inventory and customer ratings, travel sites have databases of seat availability on flights, and social-networking sites have databases of photos and comments. Almost any transaction on any of these sites requires multiple database queries, which can slow response time. At the 38th International Conference on Very Large Databases — the premier database conference — researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory presented a new system that automatically streamlines websites’ database access patterns, making the sites up to three times as fast. And where other systems that promise similar speedups require the mastery of special-purpose programming languages, the MIT system, called Pyxis, works with the types of languages already favored by Web developers. Alvin Cheung, a graduate student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), is first author on the paper. He’s joined by his advisor, EECS professor Sam Madden, and by Owen Arden and Andrew Myers of Cornell University’s Department of Computer Science. Continue reading the article on MIT news.  photo by Christine Daniloff

MIT researchers have designed and made alloys that form extremely tiny grains — called nanocrystals — that are only a few billionths of a meter across. These alloys retain their nanocrystalline structure even in the face of high heat. Such materials hold great promise for high-strength structural materials, among other potential uses. Graduate student Tongjai Chookajorn, of MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE), guided the effort to design and synthesize a new class of tungsten alloys with stable nanocrystalline structures. Her fellow DMSE graduate student, Heather Murdoch, came up with the theoretical method for finding suitable combinations of metals and the proportions of each that would yield stable alloys. Chookajorn then successfully synthesized the material and demonstrated that it does, in fact, have the stability and properties that Murdoch’s theory predicted. They have co-authored the paper with their advisor Christopher Schuh, the Danae and Vasilis Salapatas Professor of Metallurgy and department head of DMSE. Read the rest of the article on MIT news.  photo by Dominick Reuter

MIT plans to construct a roughly 14,000-square-foot Technology Children’s Center (TCC) that will nearly double the on-campus childcare slots available to Institute faculty, staff, postdocs and graduate students. The new facility, at 219 Vassar St., is expected to open in late summer 2013. The center was made possible through the generosity of MIT alumni David H. Koch, who provided a lead gift, and Charles W. and Jennifer C. Johnson. To read the rest of the article, visit MITnews.  photo by Benjamin F. Reynolds