News

Building on an enduring bond

October 20, 2023

Robert Robinson Taylor’s impressive legacy straddles two institutions. There’s MIT, where he studied architecture and became the Institute’s first African American graduate; and then there is Tuskegee University, originally the Tuskegee Institute, where Taylor spent most of his career, heading the architecture department of the historically Black college, helping to shape its educational philosophy that […]

To excel at engineering design, generative AI must learn to innovate, study finds

October 19, 2023

ChatGPT and other deep generative models are proving to be uncanny mimics. These AI supermodels can churn out poems, finish symphonies, and create new videos and images by automatically learning from millions of examples of previous works. These enormously powerful and versatile tools excel at generating new content that resembles everything they’ve seen before. But […]

A new way to integrate data with physical objects

October 18, 2023

To get a sense of what StructCode is all about, says Mustafa Doğa Doğan, think of Superman. Not the “faster than a speeding bullet” and “more powerful than a locomotive” version, but a Superman, or Superwoman, who sees the world differently from ordinary mortals — someone who can look around a room and glean all […]

Institute Professor Daron Acemoglu Wins A.SK Social Science Award

October 18, 2023

Daron Acemoglu, Institute Professor and the Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics in MIT’s School of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, is the 2023 recipient of the WZB Berlin Social Science Center’s A.SK Social Science Award, one of the most highly endowed international awards in the social sciences. Acemoglu received the award for “his vastly […]

Analyzing pathways to persuasion

October 18, 2023

As political conversations shift online, Chloe Wittenberg PhD ’23 is learning how the information Americans consume shapes their attitudes and beliefs. An MIT postdoc in political science who recently earned her doctorate at the Institute, Wittenberg is interested in comparing the persuasive powers of video-based political content to text-based content. As Americans increasingly turn to […]

Presidential Graduate Fellows Reception honors 2023 cohort

October 17, 2023

On Tuesday, October 10, Vice Chancellor Ian Waitz and the Office of Graduate Education co-hosted the annual Presidential Graduate Fellows Reception. MIT established this prestigious program to recruit the most outstanding students worldwide to pursue graduate studies at the Institute. The 24th cohort of fellows were honored with speeches and certificates. Students enjoyed the celebration […]

Ariel Furst and Fan Wang receive 2023 National Institutes of Health awards

October 16, 2023

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded grants to MIT’s Ariel Furst and Fan Wang, through its High-Risk, High-Reward Research program. The NIH High-Risk, High-Reward Research program awarded 85 new research grants to support exceptionally creative scientists pursuing highly innovative behavioral and biomedical research projects.  Ariel Furst was selected as the recipient of the NIH […]

Designing a revolution

October 16, 2023

It is widely recognized that the period in the early 1970s in which Salvador Allende was president of Chile was a moment of political innovation, when people thought they could bring about socialist transformation peacefully and within existing democratic institutions. “People thought that this would be a political third way,” says Eden Medina, an associate […]

Printing a new approach to fusion power plant materials

October 14, 2023

When Alexander O’Brien sent in his application for graduate school at MIT’s Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, he had a germ of a research idea already brewing. So when he received a phone call from Professor Mingda Li, he shared it: The student from Arkansas wanted to explore the design of materials that could […]

From MIT to Burning Man: The Living Knitwork Pavilion

October 13, 2023

Set against the vast and surreal backdrop of the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, Burning Man is an annual gathering that transforms the flat, barren expanse into a vibrant playground for artistic and creative expression. Here, “Burners” come to both witness and contribute to the ephemeral Black Rock City, which participants build anew each year. […]