The following letter was sent to the MIT community on Saturday by President L. Rafael Reif. To the members of the MIT community, Though 4,500 miles separate Kyiv and Cambridge, several factors make the shock of the Russian invasion and its terrible consequences feel very close to home. I write to let you know how […]
The School of Engineering is welcoming 17 new faculty members to its departments, institutes, labs, and centers. With research and teaching activities ranging from the development of robotics and machine learning technologies to modeling the impact of elevated carbon dioxide levels on vegetation, they are poised to make significant contributions in new directions across the school and […]
Graduate student Nidhi Juthani was not content with just one graduate degree. Instead, she decided to earn two in one fell swoop, via MIT’s PhD in Chemical Engineering Practice (PhDCEP) program, which allows her to obtain a doctorate and an MBA concurrently. The combination is a perfect fit for Juthani, who wants to pursue a […]
Born and raised amid the natural beauty of the Dominican Republic, Andrés Bisonó León feels a deep motivation to help solve a problem that has been threatening the Caribbean island nation’s tourism industry, its economy, and its people. As Bisonó León discussed with his long-time friend and mentor, the Walter M. May and A. Hazel […]
As part of MIT’s updated climate action plan, known as “Fast Forward,” Institute leadership committed to establishing a set of quantitative goals in 2022 related to food, water, and waste systems that advance MIT’s commitment to climate. Moving beyond the impact of campus energy systems, these newly proposed goals take a holistic view of the […]
Research scientist Alex Tinguely is readjusting to Cambridge and Boston. As a postdoc with the Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC), the MIT graduate spent the last two years in Oxford, England, a city he recalls can be traversed entirely “in the time it takes to walk from MIT to Harvard.” With its ancient stone […]
If faced with the choice of sending a swarm of full-sized, distinct robots to space, or a large crew of smaller robotic modules, you might want to enlist the latter. Modular robots, like those depicted in films such as “Big Hero 6,” hold a special type of promise for their self-assembling and reconfiguring abilities. But […]
Richard Binzel has long held a see-for-yourself attitude toward astronomy. It developed in 1970, when he received a Criterion RV6 telescope for his 12th birthday. It was on a cold Ohio night looking through that telescope at the rings of Saturn that he first realized he wanted to be a planetary astronomer. “I thought, ‘Oh […]
To understand a country, it helps to know its schools. To grasp Mexico, MIT historian Tanalís Padilla believes, that means learning about its rural “normales,” teacher-training schools with outsized historical influence on the country’s politics. This might seem surprising. At its height, the system of rural normales consisted of only 35 such boarding schools, scattered […]
About 50 million Americans suffer from chronic pain, which interferes with their daily life, social interactions, and ability to work. MIT Professor Fan Wang wants to develop new ways to help relieve that pain, by studying and potentially modifying the brain’s own pain control mechanisms. Her recent work has identified an “off switch” for pain, […]
