Unlocking new doors to artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence research is constantly developing new hypotheses that have the potential to benefit society and industry; however, sometimes these benefits are not fully realized due to a lack of engineering tools. To help bridge this gap, graduate students in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science’s 6-A Master of Engineering (MEng) Thesis […]
3 Questions: Fotini Christia on racial equity and data science
Fotini Christia is the Ford International Professor in the Social Sciences in the Department of Political Science, associate director of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), and director of the Sociotechnical Systems Research Center (SSRC). Her research interests include issues of conflict and cooperation in the Muslim world, and she has conducted fieldwork […]
Launchpad for health care entrepreneurs
When computation and systems biology PhD student Elvira Kinzina was diagnosed with Lyme disease during her first year at MIT, she struggled to find a doctor specializing in the disease — even though Boston is renowned for its thriving health care community. She soon found out this was common for Lyme patients, with many specialists […]
Training STEM teachers to uncover students’ full potential
In the summer of 2011, MIT PhD student Heather Beem traveled to a rural region of Ghana to try engaging students from low-resource schools in hands-on learning projects.
Fostering an enriching and compassionate research environment
While her research focuses on the study of language acquisition, MIT professor Athulya Aravind also helps her students acquire the skills and knowledge they need to succeed in their field.
Four from MIT named Meta Fellows for 2022
Meta, the parent organization of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and other subsidiaries, recently announced the winners of its highly competitive 2022 Meta Fellows program. The incoming group of fellows includes four MIT graduate students from three programs around the Institute. Jaume Vives i Bastida is a PhD candidate in the Department of Economics, advised by Alberto […]
School of Engineering welcomes new faculty
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 […]
Responding to the tragedy in Ukraine
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 […]
Bridging the worlds of research and industry
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 […]
MIT entrepreneurs think globally, act locally
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 […]
Progress toward a sustainable campus food system
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 […]
Tuning in to invisible waves on the JET tokamak
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 […]
Robotic cubes shapeshift in outer space
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: Eyes on the skies and a passion for planetary science
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 […]
A revolution in learning
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 […]
On a mission to alleviate chronic pain
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 community members elected to the National Academy of Engineering for 2022
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 to speak at MIT’s 2022 Commencement
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 announces 2022 global challenges and the Indigenous Communities Fellowship
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 […]
Eddie Glaude Jr.: “We must run toward our fears”
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
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
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 […]
Beth Marois
Monday: 3-136Tuesday: RemoteWednesday: RemoteThursday: RemoteFriday: Remote I can help you with personal and advising issues that are impacting a grad student’s experience/academic progress at MIT, and with understanding the MIT graduate student perspective and shaping resources, policy and support around that. I love celebrating everything — from birthdays to milestones to the start of a […]
Cynthia Barnhart named MIT provost
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 […]
L. Rafael Reif to step down as MIT president
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 […]
Invisible machine-readable labels that identify and track objects
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
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
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
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
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 […]
2021-22 Takeda Fellows: Leaning on AI to advance medicine for humans
In fall 2020, MIT’s School of Engineering and Takeda Pharmaceuticals Company Limited launched the MIT-Takeda Program, a collaboration to support members of the MIT community working at the intersection of artificial intelligence and human health. Housed at the Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health, the collaboration aims to use artificial intelligence to […]
Fast-tracking the search for energy-efficient materials
Born into a family of architects, Nina Andrejević loved creating drawings of her home and other buildings while a child in Serbia. She and her twin sister shared this passion, along with an appetite for math and science. Over time, these interests converged into a scholarly path that shares some attributes with the family profession, […]
Ezra Zuckerman Sivan
Professor Zuckerman Sivan is dedicated to helping students find spaces to “play with ideas for their own sake, for the love of knowledge.” As he notes, this will result in better work – “and you will be happier too.” Ezra Zuckerman Sivan is the Deputy Dean of the Sloan School of Management as well as […]
Jinhua Zhao
Despite innumerable responsibilities, Professor Jinhua Zhao shows up for his students with “unbounded energy.” That, according to student nominators, is what enables him to advise “each of his students in a personally meaningful way.” As the Edward and Joyce Linde Associate Professor of City and Transportation Planning at MIT, Professor Zhao founded and directs the […]
Kamal Youcef-Toumi
Developing an “open and respectful bond” with each member of his lab is paramount to Youcef-Toumi. In a nomination letter, one lab member writes that “he genuinely cares and he knows that his time and patience listening to his students is what drives them to perform better.” Professor Youcef-Toumi joined the MIT Mechanical Engineering Department […]
Dennis Whyte
Professor Dennis Whyte has made community building a top priority. For example, Dennis installed a lounge in the Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) where students and scientists can gather to discuss science, relax, and feel more connected with one another. He also hosts open office hours for students where they can freely voice any […]
