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, […]
MIT engineers John Cohn and Franz-Josef Ulm and are among 111 new members and 22 international members elected to the National Academy of Engineering for 2022. Nineteen MIT alumni were also elected as new members. John Cohn ’81, an IBM Fellow in the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, was honored for improving design productivity of high-performance […]
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala MCP ’78, PhD ’81, director-general of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and former finance minister of Nigeria, will deliver the address at the OneMIT Commencement Ceremony on Friday, May 27. An expert in global finance, economics, and international development, Okonjo-Iweala is the first woman and first African to lead the WTO. Known as […]
MIT Solve, an MIT initiative aimed at driving innovation to solve world challenges, has announced the launch of its 2022 Global Challenges and the Indigenous Communities Fellowship. Solve seeks tech-based solutions from social entrepreneurs around the world that address specific challenges. The program invites anyone, anywhere to submit a solution to this year’s challenges by […]
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, […]
