News

Catherine Wolfram: High-energy scholar

November 22, 2024

In the mid 2000s, Catherine Wolfram PhD ’96 reached what she calls “an inflection point” in her career. After about a decade of studying U.S. electricity markets, she had come to recognize that “you couldn’t study the energy industries without thinking about climate mitigation,” as she puts it.At the same time, Wolfram understood that the […]

A model of virtuosity

November 19, 2024

A crowd gathered at the MIT Media Lab in September for a concert by musician Jordan Rudess and two collaborators. One of them, violinist and vocalist Camilla Bäckman, has performed with Rudess before. The other — an artificial intelligence model informally dubbed the jam_bot, which Rudess developed with an MIT team over the preceding several […]

Linzixuan (Rhoda) Zhang wins 2024 Collegiate Inventors Competition

November 14, 2024

Linzixuan (Rhoda) Zhang, a doctoral candidate in the MIT Department of Chemical Engineering, recently won the 2024 Collegiate Inventors Competition, medaling in both the Graduate and People’s Choice categories for developing materials to stabilize nutrients in food with the goal of improving global health.   The annual competition, organized by the National Inventors Hall of Fame […]

Dancing with currents and waves in the Maldives

November 14, 2024

Any child who’s spent a morning building sandcastles only to watch the afternoon tide ruin them in minutes knows the ocean always wins. Yet, coastal protection strategies have historically focused on battling the sea — attempting to hold back tides and fighting waves and currents by armoring coastlines with jetties and seawalls and taking sand […]

School of Engineering faculty receive awards in summer 2024

November 14, 2024

Faculty and researchers receive many external awards throughout the year. The MIT School of Engineering periodically highlights the honors, prizes, and medals won by community members working in academic departments, labs, and centers. Summer 2024 honorees include the following: Polina Anikeeva, the Matoula S. Salapatas Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, professor of brain and […]

Stopping the bomb

November 14, 2024

“The question behind my doctoral research is simple,” says Kunal Singh, an MIT political science graduate student in his final year of studies. “When one country learns that another country is trying to make a nuclear weapon, what options does it have to stop the other country from achieving that goal?” While the query may […]

Samurai in Japan, then engineers at MIT

November 14, 2024

In 1867, five Japanese students took a long sea voyage to Massachusetts for some advanced schooling. The group included a 13-year-old named Eiichirō Honma, who was from one of the samurai families that ruled Japan. Honma expected to become a samurai warrior himself, and enrolled in a military academy in Worcester. And then some unexpected things […]

Graph-based AI model maps the future of innovation

November 12, 2024

Imagine using artificial intelligence to compare two seemingly unrelated creations — biological tissue and Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 9.” At first glance, a living system and a musical masterpiece might appear to have no connection. However, a novel AI method developed by Markus J. Buehler, the McAfee Professor of Engineering and professor of civil and environmental […]

Faces of MIT: Gene Keselman

November 8, 2024

Gene Keselman wears a lot of hats. He is a lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, the executive director of Mission Innovation Experimental (MIx), and managing director of MIT’s venture studio, Proto Ventures. Colonel in the Air Force Reserves at the Pentagon, board director, and startup leader are only a few of the […]

Bridging military service and engineering

November 8, 2024

For graduate students Kelsey Pittman and Jacqueline Orr, service in the U.S. military led to their interest in engineering, and to the MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE). Pittman’s first exposure to the military and engineering took place during her undergraduate years at the United States Military Academy West Point.  “I remember back […]