News

Eddie Glaude Jr.: “We must run toward our fears”

February 15, 2022

At this year’s annual MIT celebration of the life and work of Martin Luther King Jr, keynote speaker Eddie S. Glaude Jr., the James S. Donnell Distinguished University Professor at Princeton University, invoked King’s memory in an impassioned appeal for confronting the realities of the United States’ history and the country’s racist beliefs and actions, […]

First-ever Climate Grand Challenges recognizes 27 finalists

February 14, 2022

All-carbon buildings, climate-resilient crops, and new tools to improve the prediction of extreme weather events are just a few of the 27 bold, interdisciplinary research projects selected as finalists from a field of almost 100 proposals in the first MIT Climate Grand Challenges competition. Each of the finalist teams received $100,000 to develop a comprehensive […]

Student-led MIT course provides an inside look at K-pop

February 11, 2022

Jeana Choi and Lisa Yoo had already bonded over their appreciation for Korean music when they decided to organize a K-pop course at MIT during the Institute’s Independent Activities Period (IAP) this January. Both graduating fifth-year master’s students in electrical engineering and computer science, Choi and Yoo became friends in class 21M.294 (Popular Musics of […]

L. Rafael Reif to step down as MIT president

February 10, 2022

L. Rafael Reif announced today that he plans to step down as president of MIT at the end of 2022, after more than 10 years in the role. Reif has guided the Institute through a decade of dynamic growth, greatly enhancing its global stature and magnetism. Under his watch, MIT evolved into one of the […]

Cynthia Barnhart named MIT provost

February 10, 2022

Cynthia Barnhart SM ’86, PhD ’88, a longtime faculty member and MIT’s former chancellor, will be the Institute’s next provost, President L. Rafael Reif announced today. Barnhart, a Ford Foundation Professor of Engineering and professor of operations research at the MIT Sloan School of Management, has served the Institute in a variety of roles since […]

Invisible machine-readable labels that identify and track objects

February 9, 2022

If you download music online, you can get accompanying information embedded into the digital file that might tell you the name of the song, its genre, the featured artists on a given track, the composer, and the producer. Similarly, if you download a digital photo, you can obtain information that may include the time, date, […]

3 Questions: Kuheli Dutt reflects on diversity in science

February 9, 2022

In summer 2021, the MIT School of Science welcomed Kuheli Dutt, one of the six assistant deans for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) at the Institute. Dutt came to MIT from Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, where she led Lamont’s DEI efforts and initiatives since 2008. At Columbia, she also co-chaired the university’s Senate Commission […]

Professor Emery Brown has big plans for anesthesiology

February 8, 2022

Emery N. Brown — the Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering and of Computational Neuroscience at MIT, an MIT professor of health sciences and technology, an investigator with The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT, and the Warren M. Zapol Professor of Anaesthesia at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) […]

An explorer in the sprawling universe of possible chemical combinations

February 6, 2022

The direct conversion of methane gas to liquid methanol at the site where it is extracted from the Earth holds enormous potential for addressing a number of significant environmental problems. Developing a catalyst for that conversion has been a critical focus for Associate Professor Heather Kulik and the lab she directs at MIT. As important […]

The downside of machine learning in health care

February 1, 2022

While working toward her dissertation in computer science at MIT, Marzyeh Ghassemi wrote several papers on how machine-learning techniques from artificial intelligence could be applied to clinical data in order to predict patient outcomes. “It wasn’t until the end of my PhD work that one of my committee members asked: ‘Did you ever check to […]