“You’re surrounded by a community that cares about you”

As the sun broke through the clouds on a breezy Monday morning, first-year students and their families gathered on Kresge Oval for MIT’s Convocation, the Institute’s annual welcome to the incoming class.

The ceremony marked one of the first major events MIT has hosted on campus since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. And while some aspects of the occasion were shaped by the ongoing pandemic — notably, masks were required of all who attended — the message to the 1,184 members of MIT’s Class of 2025 was one of hope, connection, and gratitude.

“Whether you know it or not, along with your suitcases, your boxes, your duffel bags, and your satchels, you also brought a gift to our community,” said President L. Rafael Reif in welcoming the incoming class. “You brought to us a gift of your talent, your energy, your curiosity, your creativity, and your drive. And you cannot imagine how grateful we are for that.”

As guests settled into their seats under a large and airy tent, the event opened with “Diary of a Pandemic Year,” a virtual performance that was written, composed, produced, and performed by hundreds of MIT musicians and community members.

“It is a homemade MIT masterpiece,” Reif said of the composition. “It offers a marvelous taste of so many things we love about MIT: a wonderful mix of people and backgrounds, the pleasure we take in making things together, and the energy and creative aspiration of everyone we meet.”

“Your new home”

Reif recalled first arriving at MIT in 1980 as an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science — “Which is course…?” he asked of the new students, to which they confidently shouted back, “Six!”

Having grown up in Caracas, Venezuela, with an accent that was shaped 2,000 miles south of Cambridge, Reif was anxious about fitting in at MIT. But he quickly found that, like him, many at MIT “came from somewhere else, and they cared about helping each other, and helping society.”

Joining Reif onstage were several senior members of the MIT administration: Provost Martin Schmidt, Chancellor Melissa Nobles, Vice Chancellor for Undergraduate and Graduate Education Ian Waitz, and Vice Chancellor and Dean for Student Life Suzy Nelson. Reif briefly introduced each of them, noting that they represent essential pieces of a rich support system available to MIT students.

“You’re surrounded by a community that cares about you,” he said. “All of us are dedicated to your success, and we believe in you.”

Moments to meander

Reif then introduced three members of the MIT faculty, who also happen to be MIT alumni: Shankar Raman ’86, section head and professor of literature; Evelyn Wang ’00, the Ford Professor of Engineering and head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering; and Steven D. Eppinger ’83, SM ’84, ScD ’88, the General Motors Leaders for Global Operations Professor of Management at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

Raman, Wang, and Eppinger each spoke about living and learning at the Institute. For Raman, the MIT experience started out predictably enough. He recalled arriving as an undergraduate from India, “determined to major in Course 6 and emerge an electrical engineer.”

He also loved literature and philosophy, and on his way toward an engineering degree he sampled courses in German, poetry, and Western philosophy. After signing up for a filmmaking class, he stumbled upon MIT’s Department of Architecture, where the course was taught at the time. This encounter sprouted a new path, and Raman went on to earn degrees in both electrical engineering and architecture.

“Whatever your major, remember these four years are probably the only ones in your life where you can meander — where you can decide to not follow the main avenue, but to follow oblique paths and detours, to discover new areas of study,” he said.

His career continued to take unexpected turns. While pursuing a master’s in electrical engineering from the University of California at Berkeley, he realized that “my heart wasn’t fully in it.” So, he switched fields entirely, earning a PhD in literature from Stanford University. In 1995, he returned to MIT as a faculty member in the MIT Literature Section, and today serves as its head, teaching classes in Shakespeare, postcolonial fiction, and perspectives on artificial intelligence.

“I had come to MIT to become an electrical engineer, and I had certainly learned that,” Raman said. “But MIT also taught me how not to be one. And for that lesson, I will be forever grateful, and I hope it’s one you all will experience.”

“You’ve got this”

As a first-year herself, Evelyn Wang recalled setting out with energy, ready to “bring my ‘A’ game.” But her older brother, who also had attended MIT, warned her about “the wicked-hard problem sets,” and that she might not always get the A’s she was accustomed to in high school.

“Getting straight A’s is really, really tough,” Wang said. “You’re probably going to get a B, and maybe even a C or D, and that’s okay. I got an F on my first physics exam. Grades are only one way to measure what you’ll learn here.”

She offered tips for students to make the most of their time at MIT. The first is to be resilient and keep from dwelling on stress.

“Take breaks when you need to. Walk along Memorial Drive. Take a sailing class on the Charles. Tinker with a pet robot. Then get back to the problem sets,” Wang said. “You’ve got this.”

She also encouraged students to build a community — of friends, professors, and loved ones back home — who can support, advise, and ground them as they navigate the next four years.

Wang also reminded students to stay healthy, and pace themselves — advice she learned the hard way as an undergraduate. During a particularly grueling week, she recalled getting very little sleep while attempting to finish multiple class projects. She and her friends were fueled by cans of Mountain Dew, which they erected at the end of the ordeal, in a massive “victory tower.”

“Afterward, I slept for 36 hours straight,” Wang said. “Even when you are young, your body will fall apart if you do that every week. Please hydrate, and maybe drink less Mountain Dew than I did.”

“You are not alone”

As a newly arrived first-year at a similar MIT welcome event, Steven Eppinger remembered being given an obvious yet unsettling reality check.

“A speaker warned us, ‘half of you will be at the bottom half of the class,’” Eppinger said, drawing laughter from the crowd after a beat. “That statistical reality really struck me. Here we were, all these highly accomplished students, being told we may be average or worse. How could I process that?”

He did so by being open to imperfection. He came to MIT on a chemistry scholarship and had been the top chemistry student in both his high school and his state. At MIT, though, he quickly learned to redefine his expectations. “I was not devastated to score poorly on several chemistry exams in my first year,” he said.

Instead, he expanded his interests, by pledging a fraternity, joining the crew team, and participating in design challenges, a talent show, and even some campus hacks — all of which gave him a sense of community and helped to put his heavy courseload into perspective.

He encouraged the Class of 2025 to explore, and to reach out — to study groups, teaching assistants, advisors, and MIT’s Student Support Services — for help along the way.

“You are not alone in this journey,” said Eppinger, closing with a hopeful vision for the future:

“All of you are going to play a role in changing the world, through science and engineering, and a range of humanitarian endeavours,” he said. “You are going to be people of great consequence, who will do great things.”

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Comparing seniors who relocate long-distance shows where you live affects your longevity

Would you like to live longer? It turns out that where you live, not just how you live, can make a big difference.

That’s the finding of an innovative study co-authored by an MIT economist, which examines senior citizens across the U.S. and concludes that some locations enhance longevity more than others, potentially for multiple reasons.

The results show that when a 65-year-old moves from a metro area in the 10th percentile, in terms of how much those areas enhance longevity, to a metro area the 90th percentile, it increases that person’s life expectancy by 1.1 years. That is a notable boost, given that mean life expectancy for 65-year-olds in the U.S. is 83.3 years.

“There’s a substantively important causal effect of where you live as an elderly adult on mortality and life expectancy across the United States,” says Amy Finkelstein, a professor in MIT’s Department of Economics and co-author of a newly published paper detailing the findings.

Researchers have long observed significant regional variation in life expectancy in the U.S., and often attributed it to “health capital” — tendencies toward obesity, smoking, and related behavioral factors in the regional populations. But by analyzing the impact of moving, the current study can isolate and quantify the effect that the location itself has on residents.

As such, the research delivers important new information about large-scale drivers of U.S. health outcomes — and raises the question of what it is about different places that affects the elderly’s life expectancy. One clear possibility is the nature of available medical care. Other possible drivers of longevity include climate, pollution, crime, traffic safety, and more.

“We wanted to separate out the role of people’s prior experiences and behaviors — or health capital — from the role of place or environment,” Finkelstein says.

The paper, “Place-Based Drivers of Mortality: Evidence of Migration,” is published in the August issue of the American Economic Review. The co-authors are Finkelstein, the John and Jennie S. MacDonald Professor of Economics at MIT, and Matthew Gentzkow and Heidi Williams, who are both professors of economics at Stanford University.

Comparing movers to see how place matters

To conduct the study, Finkelstein, Gentzkow, and Williams analyzed Medicare records from 1999 to 2014, focusing on U.S. residents between the ages of 65 and 99. Ultimately the research team studied 6.3 million Medicare beneficiaries. About 2 million of those moved from one U.S. “commuting zone” to another, and the rest were a random 10 percent sample of people who had not moved over the 15-year study period. (The U.S. Census Bureau defines about 700 commuting zones nationally.)

A central element of the study involves seeing how different people who were originally from the same locations fared when moving to different destinations. In effect, says Finkelstein, “The idea is to take two elderly people from a given origin, say, Boston. One moves to low-mortality Minneapolis, one moves to high-mortality Houston. We then compare thow long each lives after they move.”

Different people have different health profiles before they move, of course. But Medicare records include detailed claims data, so the researchers applied records of 27 different illnesses and conditions — ranging from lung cancer and diabetes to depression — to a standard mortality risk model, to categorize the overall health of seniors when they move. Using these “very, very rich pre-move measures of their health,” Finkelstein notes, the researchers tried to account for pre-existing health levels of seniors from the same location who moved to different places.

Still, even assessing people by 27 measures does not completely describe their health, so Finkelstein, Gentzkow, and Williams also estimated what fraction of people’s health conditions they had not observed — essentially by calibrating the observed health of seniors against health capital levels in places they were moving from. They then consider how observed health varies across individuals from the same location moving to different destinations and, assuming that differences in unobserved health — such as physical mobility — vary in the same way as observed differences in health, they adjust their estimates accordingly.

All told, the study found that many urban areas on the East and West Coasts — including New York City, San Francisco, and Miami — have positive effects on longevity for seniors moving there. Some Midwestern metro areas, including Chicago, also score well.

By contrast, a large swath of the deep South has negative effects on longevity for seniors moving there, including much of Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, and northern Florida. Much of the Southwest, including parts of Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona, fares similarly poorly.

The scholars also estimate that health capital accounts for about 70 percent of the difference in longevity across areas of the U.S., and that location effects account for about 15 percent of the variation.

“Yes, health capital is important, but yes, place effects also matter,” Finkelstein says.

Other leading experts in health economics say they are impressed by the study. Jonathan Skinner, the James O. Freeman Presidential Professor of Economics, Emeritus, at Dartmouth College, says the scholars “have provided a critical insight” into the question of place effects “by considering older people who move from one place to another, thus allowing the researchers to cleanly identify the pure effect of the new location on individual health — an effect that is often different from the health of long-term residents. This is an important study that will surely be cited and will influence health policy in coming years.”

The Charlotte Effect: What makes a difference?

Indeed, the significance of place effects on life expectancy is also evident in another pattern the study found. Some locations — such as Charlotte, North Carolina — have a positive effect on longevity but still have low overall life expectancy, while other places — such as Santa Fe New Mexico — have high overall life expectancy, but a below-average effect on the longevity of seniors who move there.

Again, the life expectancy of an area’s population is not the same thing as that location’s effect on longevity. In places where, say, smoking is highly prevalent, population-wide longevity might be subpar, but other factors might make it a place where people of average health will live longer. The question is why.

“Our [hard] evidence is about the role of place,” Finkelstein says, while noting that the next logical step in this vein of research is to look for the specific factors at work. “We know something about Charlotte, North Carolina, makes a difference, but we don’t yet know what.”

With that in mind, Finkelstein, Gentzkow, and Williams, along with other colleagues, are working on a pair of new studies about health care practices to see what impact place-based differences may have; one study focuses on doctors, and the other looks at the prescription opioid epidemic.

In the background of this research is a high-profile academic and policy discussion about the impact of health care utilization. One perspective, associated with the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care project, suggests that the large regional differences in health care use it has documented have little impact on mortality. But the current study, by quantifying the variable impact of place, suggest there may be, in turn, a bigger differential impact in health care utilization yet to be identified.

For her part, Finkelstein says she would welcome further studies digging into health care use or any other factor that might explain why different places have different effects on life expectancy; the key is uncovering more hard evidence, wherever it leads.

“Differences in health care across places are large and potentially important,” Finkelstein says. “But there are also differences in pollution, weather, [and] other aspects. … What we need to do now is get inside the black box of ‘the place’ and figure out what it is about them that matters for longevity.”

The study was supported, in part, by the National Institute on Aging, the National Science Foundation, and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.

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Landmark Bio, a biomanufacturing facility co-founded by MIT, breaks ground in Watertown Arsenal

On July 29, MIT Provost Martin A. Schmidt and Associate Provost Krystyn Van Vliet attended a groundbreaking ceremony to celebrate the construction of Landmark Bio, a new 40,000-square foot biopharma manufacturing facility at The Arsenal on the Charles in Watertown, Massachusetts. Jongyoon Han, MIT professor of electrical engineering and biological engineering, and Richard D. Braatz, the Edwin R. Gilliland Professor, faculty research officer, and professor of chemical engineering at MIT also attended the event.

Landmark Bio emerged from a public-private partnership formed in 2019 among MIT and four founding members: Harvard University, FUJIFILM Diosynth Biotechnologies, Cytiva, and Alexandria Real Estate Equities.

The facility — which will house manufacturing and development spaces under the same roof — is open to MIT faculty and their research groups conducting research to advance cell-based and RNA-based therapies for challenging diseases such as cancer, as well as for regenerative medicine. Landmark Bio’s mission is to advance and remove barriers to manufacturing technologies while serving as a forum for workforce development available to workers in Massachusetts and beyond.

“With this collaboration among academia, industry, and government, we have a collective opportunity to advance the technologies that manufacture and distribute new and next-generation medicines by incubating and analyzing the data behind those technologies,” says Schmidt. “MIT is proud to play a role in the development of new technologies to make, measure, and analyze new medicines better than we can today.”

For MIT, the partnership will connect to the Institute’s ongoing advanced manufacturing workforce development efforts including a hands-on cell therapy manufacturing offering piloted this past spring at MIT. Van Vliet, who represents MIT on the Landmark Bio project, led the development of a course to train workers pursuing careers in advanced biomanufacturing in Greater Boston-Cambridge and beyond. More than 2,000 students in the United States and from 90 other countries enrolled in the first online offering.

“This includes MIT’s Center for Biomedical Innovation as well as online classes and hands-on training to enable reskilling and upskilling of tomorrow’s manufacturing workforce. Many roles are needed to make these next-generation medicines reach more patients,” says Van Vliet.

A public-private collaboration, Landmark Bio partner members include Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston Children’s Hospital, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Massachusetts General Hospital, and the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center.  

“The partnership promotes cross-sector collaborations to accelerate innovation and strengthen the leading position of the Commonwealth in the life sciences,” says Ran Zheng, Landmark Bio’s chief executive officer. “One of the initiatives we are collaborating on is workforce development. With MIT’s world-class approach to teaching and learning and Landmark Bio’s cutting-edge process development and biomanufacturing facility, we believe we can provide an immersive learning experience to a diverse pool of talent, help address the workforce shortage in novel modality development and manufacturing, and enable the growth of the life sciences sector.”

Each of the founding members invested in the construction and operations of the facility, which is slated to open in 2022.

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Making the case for hydrogen in a zero-carbon economy

As the United States races to achieve its goal of zero-carbon electricity generation by 2035, energy providers are swiftly ramping up renewable resources such as solar and wind. But because these technologies churn out electrons only when the sun shines and the wind blows, they need backup from other energy sources, especially during seasons of high electric demand. Currently, plants burning fossil fuels, primarily natural gas, fill in the gaps.

“As we move to more and more renewable penetration, this intermittency will make a greater impact on the electric power system,” says Emre Gençer, a research scientist at the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI). That’s because grid operators will increasingly resort to fossil-fuel-based “peaker” plants that compensate for the intermittency of the variable renewable energy (VRE) sources of sun and wind. “If we’re to achieve zero-carbon electricity, we must replace all greenhouse gas-emitting sources,” Gençer says.

Low- and zero-carbon alternatives to greenhouse-gas emitting peaker plants are in development, such as arrays of lithium-ion batteries and hydrogen power generation. But each of these evolving technologies comes with its own set of advantages and constraints, and it has proven difficult to frame the debate about these options in a way that’s useful for policymakers, investors, and utilities engaged in the clean energy transition.

Now, Gençer and Drake D. Hernandez SM ’21 have come up with a model that makes it possible to pin down the pros and cons of these peaker-plant alternatives with greater precision. Their hybrid technological and economic analysis, based on a detailed inventory of California’s power system, was published online last month in Applied Energy. While their work focuses on the most cost-effective solutions for replacing peaker power plants, it also contains insights intended to contribute to the larger conversation about transforming energy systems.

“Our study’s essential takeaway is that hydrogen-fired power generation can be the more economical option when compared to lithium-ion batteries — even today, when the costs of hydrogen production, transmission, and storage are very high,” says Hernandez, who worked on the study while a graduate research assistant for MITEI. Adds Gençer, “If there is a place for hydrogen in the cases we analyzed, that suggests there is a promising role for hydrogen to play in the energy transition.”

Adding up the costs

California serves as a stellar paradigm for a swiftly shifting power system. The state draws more than 20 percent of its electricity from solar and approximately 7 percent from wind, with more VRE coming online rapidly. This means its peaker plants already play a pivotal role, coming online each evening when the sun goes down or when events such as heat waves drive up electricity use for days at a time.

“We looked at all the peaker plants in California,” recounts Gençer. “We wanted to know the cost of electricity if we replaced them with hydrogen-fired turbines or with lithium-ion batteries.” The researchers used a core metric called the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) as a way of comparing the costs of different technologies to each other. LCOE measures the average total cost of building and operating a particular energy-generating asset per unit of total electricity generated over the hypothetical lifetime of that asset.

Selecting 2019 as their base study year, the team looked at the costs of running natural gas-fired peaker plants, which they defined as plants operating 15 percent of the year in response to gaps in intermittent renewable electricity. In addition, they determined the amount of carbon dioxide released by these plants and the expense of abating these emissions. Much of this information was publicly available.

Coming up with prices for replacing peaker plants with massive arrays of lithium-ion batteries was also relatively straightforward: “There are no technical limitations to lithium-ion, so you can build as many as you want; but they are super expensive in terms of their footprint for energy storage and the mining required to manufacture them,” says Gençer.

But then came the hard part: nailing down the costs of hydrogen-fired electricity generation. “The most difficult thing is finding cost assumptions for new technologies,” says Hernandez. “You can’t do this through a literature review, so we had many conversations with equipment manufacturers and plant operators.”

The team considered two different forms of hydrogen fuel to replace natural gas, one produced through electrolyzer facilities that convert water and electricity into hydrogen, and another that reforms natural gas, yielding hydrogen and carbon waste that can be captured to reduce emissions. They also ran the numbers on retrofitting natural gas plants to burn hydrogen as opposed to building entirely new facilities. Their model includes identification of likely locations throughout the state and expenses involved in constructing these facilities.

The researchers spent months compiling a giant dataset before setting out on the task of analysis. The results from their modeling were clear: “Hydrogen can be a more cost-effective alternative to lithium-ion batteries for peaking operations on a power grid,” says Hernandez. In addition, notes Gençer, “While certain technologies worked better in particular locations, we found that on average, reforming hydrogen rather than electrolytic hydrogen turned out to be the cheapest option for replacing peaker plants.”

A tool for energy investors

When he began this project, Gençer admits he “wasn’t hopeful” about hydrogen replacing natural gas in peaker plants. “It was kind of shocking to see in our different scenarios that there was a place for hydrogen.” That’s because the overall price tag for converting a fossil-fuel based plant to one based on hydrogen is very high, and such conversions likely won’t take place until more sectors of the economy embrace hydrogen, whether as a fuel for transportation or for varied manufacturing and industrial purposes.

A nascent hydrogen production infrastructure does exist, mainly in the production of ammonia for fertilizer. But enormous investments will be necessary to expand this framework to meet grid-scale needs, driven by purposeful incentives. “With any of the climate solutions proposed today, we will need a carbon tax or carbon pricing; otherwise nobody will switch to new technologies,” says Gençer.

The researchers believe studies like theirs could help key energy stakeholders make better-informed decisions. To that end, they have integrated their analysis into SESAME, a life cycle and techno-economic assessment tool for a range of energy systems that was developed by MIT researchers. Users can leverage this sophisticated modeling environment to compare costs of energy storage and emissions from different technologies, for instance, or to determine whether it is cost-efficient to replace a natural gas-powered plant with one powered by hydrogen.

“As utilities, industry, and investors look to decarbonize and achieve zero-emissions targets, they have to weigh the costs of investing in low-carbon technologies today against the potential impacts of climate change moving forward,” says Hernandez, who is currently a senior associate in the energy practice at Charles River Associates. Hydrogen, he believes, will become increasingly cost-competitive as its production costs decline and markets expand.

A study group member of MITEI’s soon-to-be published Future of Storage study, Gençer knows that hydrogen alone will not usher in a zero-carbon future. But, he says, “Our research shows we need to seriously consider hydrogen in the energy transition, start thinking about key areas where hydrogen should be used, and start making the massive investments necessary.”

Funding for this research was provided by MITEI’s Low-Carbon Energy Centers and Future of Storage study.

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Transformative truth-telling at the MIT Open Documentary Lab

A man’s ghostly voice speak-sings from the black screen: “Rock-a-bye baby, on the treetops …” It’s a tentative voice, unused to intoning lullabies, the voice of a man who was just released from prison. When he was convicted, his twin children were 45 days old. Now, they’re 21. This father’s voice is one of dozens collected in the ongoing documentary project “A Father’s Lullaby” by current MIT Open Documentary Lab Fellow Rashin Fahandej. It comprises a compilation of recorded lullabies and oral histories from incarcerated fathers separated from their young children. The project has taken such forms as a geo-located sound installation and an award-winning museum exhibition.

This inventive and moving inventory of lost lullabies is one of many examples of the boundary-pushing creative works that are found in the MIT Open Documentary Lab (ODL) archive — a deep archive known as the Docubase. Others include a poetic city symphony of Nairobi in virtual reality, a hybrid animated documentary and virtual reality game that tells the story of an Egyptian lesbian couple, and a participatory oral history of immigrant communities in Los Angeles. Many of these projects can also be described as “transmedia”— a term for works that extend beyond a single medium while playing to the strengths of each one.  

Docubase, which takes the form of a vast website repository, is only one facet of the ODL’s ongoing mission to explore and incubate innovative forms of documentary using emerging technologies and techniques, among them cell phone recordings, virtual and augmented reality, and deep-fake manipulations. Other facets of the lab include many original projects; a co-creation studio; a weekly publication; conferences; championing public literacy about technologies, including AI, and their implications; and weekly lecture series open to the MIT community and beyond. Now celebrating its 10th year, ODL also boasts a far-reaching network of fellows, creators, and researchers, all perched at, and defining, the cutting edge of what a documentary can be. 

Origins

In the late aughts, William Uricchio, a professor of comparative media studies and the founding principal investigator of ODL, recognized that documentary was in a moment of transition. He formulated the idea of a new lab at MIT’s unique crossroads of artistic and technological innovation, inspired by the Institute’s long history of using media to record aspects of the world.

Sarah Wolozin, the lab’s founding director and the creator of Docubase, says, “If you look at the history of documentary, it’s always evolving depending on what technology was available. One of the earliest examples are cave paintings. Today people use cellphones, cameras, computers, sensors, and many other technologies and processes to create stories about the world around us.”

Before helping Uricchio found the lab, Wolozin was working as a program manager at MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing. As a multiplatform documentarian herself, she had been experimenting with media forms as a maker since the mid-’90s, when the internet first became publicly accessible.

Witnessing

Uricchio saw new technologies — and cell phones in particular — as revealing the many perspectives that go into telling any story and potentially changing who gets to tell it. Documentary, he and Wolozin realized, could have a new, accessible home on the internet where the many roles engaged in the genre — creator, producer, technician, subjects, and audience — blur together generatively. The legacy of the open-source movement at MIT also influenced their inspiration for the “open” ethos of the documentary lab: an open system that allows many people to contribute to and iterate on works.

The sea-change of cellphone technology and ubiquitous cameras can be felt deeply in our culture, Uricchio observes. Without omnipresent, publicly accessible camera footage, watershed national events, including the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis — and the resulting national and international protests — would simply not have been visible to the country and the world. Understanding how documentary works and is experienced, as a form of witnessing and truth-telling, has developed into a significant focus of research at the ODL — and an exploration that has become more complex with the advent of deep fakes and other forms of manipulation. 

Imagining the future

The nascent Open Documentary Lab hit the ground running in 2011 with its first New Arts of Documentary conference, which overflowed the Media Lab’s massive sixth floor with industry experts, makers, technologists, scholars, and curators.

Uricchio recalls the concept: “We thought: Let’s put the funders, the technologists, the film festival people, and the makers at the same table to have a conversation. And it was magical. It’s been amazing to watch these folks help one another to reimagine the future of documentary storytelling.”

“We were very outward facing from the very beginning,” says Wolozin. “It was really about being in dialogue and interacting with the field.”

Wolozin began fostering partnerships with Tribeca, Sundance, and other leading organizations in the field. The International Documentary Festival of Amsterdam, whose new media program is led by Uricchio’s former student, became an important collaborator. Together they created Moments of Innovation, Uricchio’s visual white paper that formed the basis for the lab’s approach to documentary. Another immediate outcome was a program for MIT students developed by Wolozin and Sundance Film Festival New Frontier curator Shari Frilot called “Creating Critics” that still exists today. Recognizing that there was very little critical discourse about the emerging new forms of documentary, ODL graduate student researchers are sent to Sundance Festival’s New Frontier program as critics to write about the New Frontier exhibit. Their articles are published in Indiewire, a film industry online publication.

Uricchio had also helped found MIT’s Comparative Media Studies/Writing program itself — the department in MIT SHASS that houses ODL — working in collaboration with foundational new media theorist Henry Jenkins. Where Jenkins’ landmark scholarship focuses on participatory media in a networked body of work (e.g., user-generated content fueling massive companies like YouTube and Twitter, for instance), Uricchio’s ODL spirals participation toward vast new speculative horizons: How can stories be told in novel and innovative formats that both give voice to the subject and agency to the audience? The work produced by ODL and its fellows is often interactive and immersive — creating the feeling of being actively engaged and embedded in a story and often, enabling users to find their own stories.

Recalling some of her earliest work on the web in the 1990s — as the world first had public access to the internet — Wolozin reflects, “These impulses for participatory starts, storytelling, and interactivity have always been there, and they just evolve and change based on the technology that’s available.”

Co-creation

“We look at where new technology meets the mission of documentary,” says Uricchio. In his own scholarship, which entwines media historicity with forward-thinking possibilities, he is fascinated with how past forms of media inform the present and the future. “Media technologies and affordances have changed over the centuries, and if documentary as an interrogation of the world around us is to remain relevant, we must push the boundaries of — and better understand the implications of — today’s trends such as personalization, interactivity, and immersion. Just as importantly, we now have an opportunity to shift the balance of agency and change who tells the story.”

In that spirit, ODL is also the home of the MIT Co-Creation Studio. Launched in 2016, the Co-Creation Studio dives into the methodological implications of how documentaries are made in a networked world.

Katerina Cizek, a multi-Emmy Award-winning documentarian who has been pioneering participatory and interactive documentary production for decades, leads the young but prolific Co-Creation Studio. Beginning in the early 2000s, Cizek worked as a director with the National Film Board of Canada, reinventing a huge program to use film to advance social justice and community development by partnering with people in the community across disciplines and sectors.

When she first came to ODL as a visiting artist, Cizek recalls, there was no real global hub for exploring co-creative methodologies. Five years ago, Wolozin and Uricchio invited her to bring her idea for a co-creation studio to MIT. MIT Press will publish the Co-Creation Studio’s first book, “Collective Wisdom,” in 2022, which in turn is based on a pivotal field study from the studio that rejuvenated interest in the how’s and why’s of the co-creative process in creative fields.

“What the Studio particularly contributes is a focus on new and collective methodologies,” says Cizek.

Narrative sovereignty

This past academic year, the studio launched a big, ongoing project: Indigenous Digital Delegation, a partnership with the Indigenous Screen Office based in Canada. It is an initiative for what the Indigenous Screen Office calls “Indigenous narrative sovereignty”: Indigenous control over how Indigenous stories are told and who tells them. The delegation’s partnership with MIT puts Indigenous media scholars and artists into conversation with a wide breadth of experts and thinkers at the Institute.

“It’s two-way conversation,” says Cizek. “It’s really about developing deep conversation around Indigenous epistemologies, artificial intelligence, and digital worlds. The pickup at MIT was amazing. We had over 60 faculty, staff, and students respond to and participate in a variety of ways with the delegation, and we’ll be running the program again next spring.” 

Even today, there is no other lab doing this kind of work, says Wolozin, of the range and nature of ODL’s portfolio. There are new technological factors in the game — extended reality and artificial intelligence, to name two — but the lab’s mission continues to be bringing storytellers and technology scholars together to explore the relationship between representation and reality.

Immerse

Each week, Immerse, ODL’s publication on Medium, offers a clear window onto the lab’s mission in action, from the role of street projections that subvert official narratives in South America to the social media life of an aging robot to speculative nonfictions in public space.  The content of Immerse is all about how stories are being told now, in a dazzling array of media.

Co-founded by Wolozin and Ingrid Kopp, the director of interactive media at Tribeca Film Institute, and Jessica Clark, founder and CEO of Dot Connector in 2015, the publication is currently headed by Abby Sun, a CMS/W master’s student with an extensive professional history in film festivals and programming. “Editing Immerse is a collective undertaking,” says Sun, honoring the input of several key collaborators and industry veterans, including Wolozin and Cizek. “My role as editor has expanded my consciousness and context for the long history and vibrant future of this work.” 

Also at home in Immerse is research and writing by MIT Comparative Media Studies faculty and graduate students, including Sun and Diego Cerna Aragon in the first 2021 issue. MIT alumni who were associated with ODL include Andrea Kim SM ’21, who recently received a Fulbright fellowship to continue her work on avatars; Sarah Rafsky ’18, a journalist and documentarian who produced an important investigative short film on Mecca, Mexico, for Netflix; Sue Ding SM ’17, a documentarian on the West Coast, with a breakout 2020 feature on Netflix about “The Baby-Sitters’ Club”; and Samuel Mendez ’20 who is now in a PhD program in public health at Harvard University and marries media art and public policy as a programmer.

Making space

A major function of the lab is making space for marginalized storytellers to take agency of how their own stories are told. Currently, ODL is engaged in a massive, two-year project on augmenting public space — either through geo-located sounds, projections on the sides of buildings, or QR codes. “Now that we’re challenging the master narrative of which monuments should be there,” asks Uricchio, “how can we leave traces in a more collective way? How can we actually augment and enhance spaces with people’s stories and narratives?” 

In one place-based act of history-telling, ODL Fellow Assia Boundaoui projected redacted FBI surveillance reports of Muslim Americans against the walls of the U.S. National Security Agency building, while using artificial intelligence technology to fill in the redacted language.

Recently, a joint fellowship with the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology to partner with Black Public Media brought two new fellows to ODL. One resultant project is “Mapping Blackness,” a powerful work by 2020-21 ODL Fellow Carla Bishop that uses innovative, intergenerational oral histories to document forgotten Black communities in northern Texas and Oklahoma. These small, century-old towns are very much alive and thriving — even if you might miss them if you blink driving by on the highway. Bishop’s work is a way to archive the stories of these communities and their histories accessible to a larger public.

Public literacy

Overall, the lab focuses on the guiding ethos of increasing public literacy about emerging technologies: Storytelling is a powerful way to demystify new technologies, to increase an understanding of their implications, and engage the public in decision-making about how emerging technologies will be deployed.

Documentary itself as a discipline has always been deeply entrenched with technological and scientific thinking. “The reality at the core of documentary has made it an ideal lens through which understand our representational conventions,” Uricchio says. “Mastering those conventions, and at times strategically breaking them, enables documentary not just to interpret the world, but to change it.”

“Making technologies accessible has always been important in my work,” says Wolozin. “Helping people understand their potential for storytelling and information. If we think about stories as a way to understand the world, we can do that with technology, and we can reach people in new ways. Because when people change the way they communicate, they change the way that they tell stories. And by so doing, they can transform how people see the world.”

Story prepared by MIT SHASS Communications
Editorial team: Alison Lanier and Emily Hiestand

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Study: Ending an eviction moratorium increases Covid-19 hazard

Ending an eviction moratorium for renters makes people in a community significantly more likely to contract Covid-19, according to a new study co-authored by MIT researchers.

The study uses the variable timing of state-level moratoriums, issued and terminated at different points during the Covid-19 pandemic, to quantify their effect. It is the first study to identify the individual-level risk for people in different social circumstances, due to eviction moratoriums ending. The increased risk runs throughout communities, the research shows, meaning that ending eviction moratoriums does not just affect those who lose their housing.

Eviction moratoriums have been used to protect renters in danger of losing their housing at a time of economic strain caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. The study shows that, on average, when a state lifted its moratorium and let evictions resume, the hazard of contracting Covid-19 was 1.39 times greater after five weeks and 1.83 times greater after 12 weeks, rather than if the moratorium had continued.

When people had three or more co-morbidities, that likelihood increased by 2.37 times within 12 weeks. The hazard of contracting Covid-19 in nonaffluent areas, and in areas of high rent burden, were 2.14 times and 2.31 times higher, respectively, within 12 weeks in states that lifted eviction moratoriums, as opposed to maintaining them.

“Not having access to a stable way of sheltering yourself from the pandemic can be very impactful for how the pandemic spreads, not just for you but for your community,” says Sebastian Sandoval-Olascoaga, a doctoral student at MIT and co-author of the new paper. “There are spillover effects, and there is a transmission process created by evictions within a community.”

For that reason, Sandoval-Olascoaga adds, “As new variants spread, our study suggests that this policy, which protects low-income communities and people with co-morbidities, can also create health equity and provide protection for groups with more advantages.”

The paper, “Eviction Moratoria Expiration and COVID-19 Infection Risk Across Strata of Health and Socioeconomic Status in the United States,” was published today by the journal JAMA Network Open.

The co-authors are Sandoval-Olascoaga, a doctoral student in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP); Atheendar S. Venkataramani, an assistant professor of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine; and Mariana Arcaya, an MIT associate professor of urban planning and public health, and associate head of DUSP.

“The public health rationale for eviction moratoria appears strong,” says Arcaya.

Different states, different Covid-19 rates

Eviction moratoriums have been the subject of ongoing political debate during the Covid-19 pandemic, and last week the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Biden administration’s federal eviction moratorium, which had been issued by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The CDC issued an initial ban of its own in the fall of 2020, which had been extended multiple times until the Supreme Court ruling. By September 2020, an estimated 47 percent of renters behind in their payments were in danger of eviction, according to U.S. Census Bureau surveys. Amid this policy uncertainty, 43 U.S. states plus the District of Columbia issued eviction moratoriums during the pandemic; seven never have.

Of those 44 state-level governments, 26 wound up lifting their eviction bans, while 18 did not, in effect forming “treatment” and “control” groups for the study. The researchers used variations in the timing of eviction bans in 2020, while controlling for complicating factors, to identify what difference the resumption of evictions made to state-level trajectories of Covid-19 spread.

“We have a natural experiment where some states could help us as a control group, and some could help us as a treatment group,” Sandoval-Olascoaga says.

To conduct the study, the scholars also examined anonymized commercial insurance and Medicare Advantage records from a large national database with health information on nearly 200 million people; ultimately they analyzed a random sample of 500,000 U.S. residents, to evaluate how the moratoriums affected health. Because many things affect the spread of Covid-19, the study controlled for a wide range of complicating factors, including state policies such as mask mandates, stay-at-home or shelter-in-place orders, school closures, business restrictions, and existing Covid-19 levels at the county and state levels.

Multiple potential mechanisms

The researchers suggest there are multiple potential mechanisms through which lifting an eviction ban increases the spread of Covid-19. More people, once evicted from their housing, may start living with relatives or friends in more crowded settings, in which Covid-19 is more likely to spread. Ending eviction bans also increases homelessness, which likely sends more people into crowded shelters or other situations where they have increased proximity to others.

Additionally, because people in poor health are more likely to be affected by the end of an eviction ban, it means that individuals with greater-than-average vulnerability to getting Covid-19 are put into situations where there is increased likelihood of transmission. As Sandoval-Olascoaga observes, “an eviction creates a cascade of events” in which Covid-19 can spread more easily.

Moreover, Sandoval-Olascoaga notes, because the study uses data from 2020, the findings show what happens when evictions resume in the context of a less transmissible version of Covid-19 than the currently prevalent Delta variant.

“These results occurred when the Delta variant was not a thing,” Sandoval-Olascoaga says. “We were able to find an impact with a Covid strain that was not as transmissible as this one.”

For her part, Arcaya says that “the pandemic is not over, and while we hear a lot about what individuals can do to protect themselves — with masking and vaccination being critical — stopping evictions and otherwise helping people stay in stable housing are part of how cities, states, and the federal government can protect all of us.”

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Who can bend light for cheaper internet?

Wide Area Networks (WANs), the global backbones and workhorses of today’s internet that connect billions of computers over continents and oceans, are the foundation of modern online services. As Covid-19 has placed a vital reliance on online services, today's networks are struggling to deliver high bandwidth and availability imposed by emerging workloads related to machine learning, video calls, and health care. 

To connect WANs over hundreds of miles, fiber optic cables that transmit data using light are threaded throughout our neighborhoods, made of incredibly thin strands of glass or plastic known as optical fibers. While they’re extremely fast, they’re not always reliable: They can easily break from weather, thunderstorms, accidents, and even animals. These tears can cause severe and expensive damage, resulting in 911 service outages, lost connectivity to the internet, and inability to use smartphone apps. 

Scientists from the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and from Facebook recently came up with a way to preserve the network when the fiber is down, and to reduce cost. Their system, called “ARROW,” reconfigures the optical light from a damaged fiber to healthy ones, while using an online algorithm to proactively plan for potential fiber cuts ahead of time, based on real-time internet traffic demands. 

ARROW is built on the crossroads of two different approaches: “failure-aware traffic engineering,” a technique that steers traffic to where the bandwidth resources are during fiber cuts, and “wavelength reconfiguration,” which restores failed bandwidth resources by reconfiguring the light. 

Though this combination is powerful, the problem is mathematically difficult to solve because of its NP-hardness in computational complexity theory. 

The team created a novel algorithm that can essentially create “LotteryTickets” as an abstraction for the “wavelength reconfiguration problem” on optical fibers and only feed essential information into the “traffic engineering problem.” This works alongside their “optical restoration method,” which moves the light from the cut fiber to “surrogate’’ healthy fibers to restore the network connectivity. The system also takes real-time traffic into account to optimize for maximum network throughput. 

Using large-scale simulations and a testbed, ARROW could carry 2 to 2.4 times more traffic without having to deploy new fibers, while maintaining the network highly reliable. 

“ARROW can be used to improve service availability, and enhance the resiliency of the internet infrastructure against fiber cuts. It renovates the way we think about the relationship between failures and network management — previously failures were deterministic events, where failure meant failure, and there was no way around it except over-provisioning the network,” says MIT postdoc Zhizhen Zhong, the lead author on a new paper about ARROW. “With ARROW, some failures can be eliminated or partially restored, and this changes the way we think about network management and traffic engineering, opening up opportunities for rethinking traffic engineering systems, risk assessment systems, and emerging applications too.”

The design of today's network infrastructures, both in data centers and in wide-area networks, still follow the “telephony model,” where network engineers treat the physical layer of networks as a static black box with no reconfigurability. 

As a result, the network infrastructure is equipped to carry the worst-case traffic demand under all possible failure scenarios, making it inefficient and costly. Yet, modern networks have elastic applications that could benefit from a dynamically reconfigurable physical layer, to enable high throughput, low latency, and seamless recovery from failures, which ARROW helps enable.  

In traditional systems, network engineers decide in advance how much capacity to provide in the physical layer of the network. It might seem impossible to change the topology of a network without physically changing the cables, but since optical waves can be redirected using tiny mirrors, they’re capable of quick changes: no rewiring required. This is a realm where the network is no longer a static entity but a dynamic structure of interconnections that may change depending on the workload. 

Imagine a hypothetical subway system where some trains might fail once in a while. The subway control unit wants to plan how to distribute the passengers to alternative routes while considering all possible trains and traffic on them. Using ARROW, then, when a train fails, the control unit just announces to the passengers the best alternative routes to minimize their travel time and avoid congestion. 

“My long-term goal is to make large-scale computer networks more efficient, and ultimately develop smart networks that adapt to the data and application,” says MIT Assistant Professor Manya Ghobadi, who supervised the work. “Having a reconfigurable optical topology revolutionizes the way we think of a network, as performing this research requires breaking orthodoxies established for many years in WAN deployments.’ 

To deploy ARROW in real-world wide-area networks, the team has been collaborating with Facebook and hopes to work with other large-scale service providers. “The research provides the initial insight into the benefits of reconfiguration. The substantial potential in reliability improvement is attractive to network management in production backbone,” says Ying Zhang, a software engineer manager at Facebook who collaborated on this research. 

“We are excited that there would be many practical challenges ahead to bring ARROW from research lab ideas to real-world systems that serve billions of people, and possibly reduce the number of service interruptions that we experience today, such as less news reports on how fiber cuts affect internet connectivity,” says Zhong. “We hope that ARROW could make our internet more resilient to failures with less cost.” 

Zhong wrote the paper alongside Ghobadi; MIT graduate student Alaa Khaddaj; and Facebook engineers Jonathan Leach, Ying Zhang, and Yiting Xia. They presented the research at ACM’s SIGCOMM conference.

This work was led by MIT in collaboration with Facebook. The technique is being evaluated for deployment at Facebook. Facebook provided resources for performing the research. The MIT affiliated authors were supported by Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the U.S. National Science Foundation.

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Drug delivery capsule could replace injections for protein drugs

In recent years, scientists have developed monoclonal antibodies — proteins that mimic the body’s own immune defenses — that can combat a variety of diseases, including some cancers and autoimmune disorders such as Crohn’s disease. While these drugs work well, one drawback to them is that they have to be injected.

A team of MIT engineers, in collaboration with scientists from Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Novo Nordisk, is working on an alternative delivery strategy that could make it much easier for patients to benefit from monoclonal antibodies and other drugs that usually have to be injected. They envision that patients could simply swallow a capsule that carries the drug and then injects it directly into the lining of the stomach.

“If we can make it easier for patients to take their medication, then it is more likely that they will take it, and healthcare providers will be more likely to adopt therapies that are known to be effective,” says Giovanni Traverso, the Karl van Tassel Career Development Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT and a gastroenterologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

In a study appearing today in Nature Biotechnology, the researchers demonstrated that their capsules could be used to deliver not only monoclonal antibodies but also other large protein drugs such as insulin, in pigs.

Traverso and Ulrik Rahbek, vice president at Novo Nordisk, are the senior authors of the paper. Former MIT graduate student Alex Abramson and Novo Nordisk scientists Morten Revsgaard Frederiksen and Andreas Vegge are the lead authors.

Targeting the stomach

Most large protein drugs can’t be given orally because enzymes in the digestive tract break them down before they can be absorbed. Traverso and his colleagues have been working on many strategies to deliver such drugs orally, and in 2019, they developed a capsule that could be used to inject up to 300 micrograms of insulin.

That pill, about the size of a blueberry, has a high, steep dome inspired by the leopard tortoise. Just as the tortoise is able to right itself if it rolls onto its back, the capsule is able to orient itself so that its needle can be injected into the lining of the stomach. In the original version, the tip of the needle was made of compressed insulin, which dissolved in the tissue after being injected into the stomach wall.

The new pill described in the Nature Biotechnology study maintains the same shape, allowing the capsule to orient itself correctly once it arrives in the stomach. However, the researchers redesigned the capsule interior so that it could be used to deliver liquid drugs, in larger quantities — up to 4 milligrams.

Delivering drugs in liquid form can help them reach the bloodstream more rapidly, which is necessary for drugs like insulin and epinephrine, which is used to treat allergic responses.

The researchers designed their device to target the stomach, rather than later parts of the digestive tract, because the amount of time it takes for something to reach the stomach after being swallowed is fairly uniform from person to person, Traverso says. Also, the lining of the stomach is thick and muscular, making it possible to inject drugs while mitigating harmful side effects.

The new delivery capsule is filled with fluid and also contains an injection needle and a plunger that helps to push the fluid out of the capsule. Both the needle and plunger are held in place by a pellet made of solid sugar. When the capsule enters the stomach, the humid environment causes the pellet to dissolve, pushing the needle into the stomach lining, while the plunger pushes the liquid through the needle. When the capsule is empty, a second plunger pulls the needle back into the capsule so that it can be safely excreted through the digestive tract.

Significant levels

In tests in pigs, the researchers showed that they could deliver a monoclonal antibody called adalimumab (Humira) at levels similar to those achieved by injection. This drug is used to treat autoimmune disorders such as inflammatory bowel disease and rheumatoid arthritis. They also delivered a type of protein drug known as a GLP-1 receptor agonist, which is used to treat type 2 diabetes.

“Delivery of monoclonal antibodies orally is one of the biggest challenges we face in the field of drug delivery science,” Traverso says. “From an engineering perspective, the ability to deliver monoclonal antibodies at significant levels really transforms how we start to think about the management of these conditions.”

Additionally, the researchers gave the animals capsules over several days and found that the drugs were delivered consistently each time. They also found no signs of damage to the stomach lining following the injections, which penetrate about 4.5 millimeters into the tissue.

David Brayden, a professor of advanced drug delivery at University College Dublin, who was not involved in the research, described the new approach as “a very exciting advance for the potential oral delivery of macromolecules. That similar blood levels to those arising from injections of these types of drugs can be achieved by stomach administration to large animals is a technical landmark for the field.”

The MIT team is now working with Novo Nordisk to further develop the system.

“Although it is still early days, we believe this device has the potential to transform treatment regimens across a range of therapeutic areas,” Rahbek says. “The ongoing research and development of this approach mean that several drugs that can currently only be administered via parenteral injections (non-oral routes) might be administered orally in the future. Our aim is to get the device into clinical trials as soon as possible.”

Other authors of the paper include MIT’s David H. Koch Institute Professor Robert Langer, Brian Jensen Mette Poulsen, Brian Mouridsen, Mikkel Oliver Jespersen, Rikke Kaae Kirk, Jesper Windum, Frantisek Hubalek, Jorrit Water, Johannes Fels, Stefan Gunnarsson, Adam Bohr, Ellen Marie Straarup, Mikkel Wennemoes Hvitfeld Ley, Xiaoya Lu, Jacob Wainer, Joy Collins, Siddartha Tamang, Keiko Ishida, Alison Hayward, Peter Herskind, Stephen Buckley, and Niclas Roxhed.

The research was funded by Novo Nordisk, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, Brigham and Women’s Hospital’s Division of Gastroenterology, and the Viking Olof Bjork scholarship trust.

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Professor Emeritus Paul Schimmel donates $50 million to support MIT life sciences enterprise

Professor Emeritus Paul Schimmel PhD ’66 and his family recently committed $50 million to support the life sciences at MIT. They provided an initial gift of $25 million to establish the Schimmel Family Program for Life Sciences. This gift matches $25 million secured from other sources in support of the Department of Biology. The remaining $25 million from the Schimmel family will go to support the Schimmel Family Program in the form of matching funds as other gifts are secured over the next five years. Schimmel, who is the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics Emeritus, is a lifelong supporter of the Institute in teaching, research, and philanthropy.

“I am tremendously grateful to Paul and his family for their generosity and support, and for their advocacy for our department and the life sciences,” says department head Alan D. Grossman, the Praecis Professor of Biology.

This most recent gift is one among many that Schimmel and his family have provided to MIT during their more than 50-year affiliation with the Institute, which includes Paul’s doctorate and his 30 years of teaching and research in the department. While at MIT, Paul and Cleo, Paul’s wife and philanthropic partner, provided an anonymous donation for the construction of Building 68, the most recent home for the Department of Biology.

“We cannot overstate our gratitude for our MIT experience. It was MIT that provided a ‘frontier of knowledge, which has no bounds’ and introduced us to some of the finest minds and people in the world,” Schimmel says.  

“They educated and uplifted us, and convinced us of MIT’s singular role in making this a better world for all peoples,” says Cleo Schimmel, who was a past chair of the MIT Women’s League and, in her own right, contributed to the endowment of the league and other efforts to support women at MIT.

Currently, Paul Schimmel is the Ernst and Jean Hahn Professor at the Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology at the Scripps Research Institute. Schimmel formally left MIT in 1997 to join Scripps Research, but he has remained actively involved in supporting the Institute’s research enterprise, specifically MIT graduate students.

Graduate funding for the future

Shortly after Paul left MIT, the Schimmels endowed four graduate fellowships for outstanding women in life sciences. “Since 2000, the Cleo and Paul Schimmel Scholars fellowships have helped the biology department recruit and retain the best talent,” says Grossman. Kristin Knouse PhD ’17 is a former Schimmel Scholar who rejoined the department this past July as an assistant professor.

“The MIT Department of Biology encompasses a remarkable breath of biology within a very close-knit community that places a strong emphasis on graduate training,” says Knouse. “Once in the lab, the resources and collaborations available through MIT provide unparalleled opportunities to accelerate and advance your research.”

Schimmel, who sits on the department’s Visiting Committee, continued to champion graduate student support by helping to endow the Teresa Keng Graduate Teaching Prize to support excellence in graduate student teaching in the department. In 2013, the Schimmel family donated the proceeds from the sale of their La Jolla, California, home for the purpose of training the next generation of MIT graduates in the life sciences. What formally became the department’s Graduate Training Initiative (GTI) was supported by others, including biology alumni Eric Schmidt PhD ’96 and Tracy Smith PhD ’96.

The GTI supports departmental efforts to enhance the graduate student experience in the form of both direct student support, including tuition and stipend, and indirect support, including programmatic activities such as seed funds for student-directed projects, shared computing facilities, and forums related to post-graduation employment.

This new gift to establish the Schimmel Family Program for Life Sciences will support not only the GTI in the Department of Biology, but also graduate students across MIT.

“The life sciences educational enterprise spreads across a dozen departments at MIT,” says Schimmel. “What makes the biology department and the life sciences at MIT so extraordinary is the singular ability to transfer knowledge and inventions to society for its benefit. That is much of why Kendall Square and Boston are what they are.”

To that end, Schimmel has also been an active player in shaping the MIT-Kendall Square innovation ecosystem, including the founding of companies such as Alnylam Pharmaceuticals in 2002. Alnylam — founded by Schimmel along with Institute Professor Phillip Sharp, MIT Professor David Bartel, MIT postdocs Thomas Tuschl and Phillip Zamore, and investors — has been a major player in the biopharma scene. Most recently, Alnylam partnered with Vir Biotechnology to develop therapeutics for coronavirus infections, including Covid-19.

Having a longstanding interest in the applications of basic biomedical research to human health, Schimmel holds numerous patents and is a co-founder or founding director of several biotechnology companies in addition to Alnylam, including aTyr Pharma, Alkermes, Cubist Pharmaceuticals, Metabolon, Repligen, and Sirtris Pharmaceuticals.

“I’ve been talking to the people that I’ve started companies with, reminding them that none of the extensive commercial and residential real estate development, restaurants, hotels, and the founding and locating of major biopharmaceutical enterprises would have happened without the MIT life sciences enterprise,” says Schimmel. “MIT’s Kendall Square is to biopharma what Silicon Valley is to technology. None of the robust economic impact would have occurred if it hadn’t been for MIT’s life sciences.”

The $50 million commitment was a capstone gift to MIT’s Campaign for a Better World, supporting important campaign priorities of human health and discovery science. In addition, Schimmel has future plans to continue supporting the life sciences at MIT through his estate plan with the Institute.

“We are extraordinarily grateful to Paul, Cleo, and the entire family,” says Nergis Mavalvala PhD ’97, the Curtis and Kathleen Marble Professor of Astrophysics and the dean of the MIT School of Science. “Not only do the Schimmels understand, from a firsthand perspective, the need to support graduate students, but they also understand that these young researchers are the future of our life sciences endeavors outside of MIT, in fundamental research, biopharma industries, and beyond.”

Schimmel graduated from Ohio Wesleyan University, earned a doctorate from MIT, and completed postdoc research at Stanford University. His many accomplishments include the publication of more than 500 scientific papers, numerous awards and honorary degrees, and elected membership to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Institute of Medicine (National Academy of Medicine), and National Academy of Inventors.

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Jordan Harrod: Brain researcher and AI-focused YouTuber

Scientist, writer, policy advocate, YouTuber – before Jordan Harrod established her many successful career identities, her first role was as a student athlete. While she enjoyed competing in everything from figure skating to fencing, she also sustained injuries that left her with chronic pain. These experiences as a patient laid the groundwork for an interest in biomedical research and engineering. “I knew I wanted to make tools that would help people with health issues similar to myself,” she says.

Harrod went on to pursue her BS in biomedical engineering at Cornell University. Before graduating, she spent a summer at Stanford University doing machine-learning research for MRI reconstruction. “I didn’t know anything about machine learning before that, so I did a lot of learning on the fly,” she says. “I realized that I enjoyed playing with data in different ways. Machine learning was also becoming the new big thing at the time, so it felt like an exciting path to follow.”

Harrod looked for PhD programs that would combine her interests in helping patients, biomedical engineering, and machine learning. She came across the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology (HST) and realized it would be the perfect fit. The interdisciplinary program requires students to perform clinical rotations and take introductory courses alongside medical students. “I’ve found that the clinical perspective was often underrated on the research side, so I wanted to make sure I’d have that. My goal was that my research would be translatable to the real world,” Harrod says.

Mapping the brain to understand consciousness

Today, Harrod collaborates with professors Emery Brown, an anesthesiologist, and Ed Boyden, a neuroscientist, to study how different parts of the brain relate to consciousness and arousal. They seek to understand how the brain operates under different states of consciousness and the way this affects the processing of signals associated with pain. By studying arousal in mice and applying statistical tools to analyze large datasets of activated brain regions, for example, Brown’s team hopes to improve the current understanding of anesthesia.

“This is another step toward creating better anesthesia regimens for individual patients,” says Harrod.

Since beginning her neuroscience research, Harrod has been amazed to learn how much about the brain still needs to be uncovered. In addition to understanding biological mechanisms, she believes there is still work to be done at a preliminary cause and effect level. “We’re still learning how different arousal centers work together to modulate consciousness, or what happens if you turn one off,” says Harrod. “I don’t think I realized the magnitude or the difficulty of the challenge, let alone how hard it is to translate our research to brains in people.”

“I didn’t come into graduate school with a neuroscience background, so every day is an opportunity to learn new things about the brain. Even after three years, I’m still amazed with how much we have yet to discover.”

Sharing knowledge online and beyond

Outside of the lab, Harrod focuses her time on communicating research to the public and advocating for improved science policies. She is the chair of the External Affairs Board of the Graduate Student Council, an Early Career Policy Ambassador for the Society for Neuroscience, and the co-founder of the MIT Science Policy Review, which publishes peer reviewed reports on different science policy issues.

“Most of our research is funded by our taxpayers, yet most people don’t necessarily understand what’s going on in the research that they’re funding,” explains Harrod. “I wanted to create a way so people could better understand how different regulations affect them personally.”

In addition to her advocacy roles, Harrod also has a dedicated online presence. She writes articles for Massive Science and is well-known for her YouTube channel. Her videos, released weekly, investigate the different ways we interact with artificial intelligence daily. What began as a hobby three years ago has developed into an active community with 70,000 subscribers. “I hadn’t seen many other people talking about AI and machine learning in a casual way, so I decided to do it for fun,” she says. “It’s been a great way to keep me looped into the broader field questions.”

Harrod’s most popular video focuses on how AI can be used to monitor online exam proctoring. With the shift to online learning occurring during the pandemic, many students have used her video to understand how AI proctors can detect cheating. “As the audience grows, it’s been exciting to read the comments and see people get curious about AI applications they had never heard of before. I’ve also gotten to have interesting conversations with people who I wouldn’t have come across otherwise,” she says.

In the future, Harrod hopes to find a career that will allow her to balance her time between lab research, policy, and science communication. She plans on continuing to use her knowledge as a scientist to debunk hype and tell truthful stories to the public. “I’ve seen so many articles with headlines that could be misleading if someone only read the title. For example, a small study done in mice can be exaggerated to make mind-reading technology seem real, when the research still has a long way to go.”

“Since making my YouTube channel, I’ve learned it’s important to give people reasonable expectations about what’s real and what they’re going to encounter in their lives. They deserve to know the full picture so they can make informed decisions,” she says.

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Aziza Almanakly, Belinda Li receive Clare Boothe Luce Graduate Fellowship for Women

MIT PhD students Aziza Almanakly and Belinda Li have been selected as the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) recipients of the multi-year Clare Boothe Luce Graduate Fellowship for Women, an honor designed to encourage and support graduate women in STEM. The rigorous selection process for this prestigious fellowship took into account the two students’ outstanding track record of scientific achievement and inquiry, as well as their contributions to the STEM community.

Importantly, the fellowships represent the culmination of an intensive effort on the part of both the Institute and the EECS department. Upon MIT's selection by the Clare Boothe Luce Program for Women in STEM to submit a full proposal, EECS entered the MIT internal competition and was selected to submit a full application on behalf of the Institute to the national competition held by the Henry Luce Foundation. Funds from the Luce Foundation, combined with cost-sharing funds from EECS, will provide full financial support for a period of two years for Almanakly and Li.

“These fellowships are a powerful assertion of institutional support for women in STEM,” says Professor Asu Ozdaglar, head of EECS. “Our dedication to supporting women in STEM extends far beyond attracting top candidates to our program; we are committed to providing continued, concrete support to their research careers once they arrive at MIT.” Both Almanakly and Li will be deferring the start of their CBL Graduate Fellowships until they complete their current fellowship awards; the two recipients are already capturing attention in the red-hot technical fields of quantum computing and language modeling. 

A rising second-year PhD candidate advised by Professor Will Oliver, Aziza Almanakly conducts research on waveguide quantum electrodynamics and microwave quantum optics with superconducting qubits. Within the first nine months of her time at MIT, Almanakly successfully demonstrated controlled, directional generation of single microwave photons on a new qubit chip of her own design — a novel accomplishment, and an indicator of her exceptional talent. Of Almanakly’s work, Oliver says, “Her success is rooted in a combination of raw talent, strong intuition, perseverance, and a strong desire to improve herself, her research, her workplace, and the lives of those around her. I have absolutely no doubt that Aziza will succeed in her research, and I fully expect she will become a future leader in science and technology.” As part of her personal commitment to passing on the mentorship and encouragement she has received, Almanakly teaches the fundamentals of quantum computing to underrepresented high school students through IBM Quantum and the Coding School. Prior to her arrival at MIT, Almanakly conducted research at New York University, Caltech, the City University of New York, and Princeton University. Among other honors, Almanakly has won the P.D. Soros Fellowship for New Americans.

A rising second-year PhD candidate advised by Professor Jacob Andreas, Belinda Li conducts research on language models and natural language processing. Li’s interest in language models and natural language processing was fueled by a year spent working with the AI Integrity team within the Facebook AI Applied Research group, in which she worked on building automated detectors for hate speech and misinformation. Of her work, Li says, “I am interested in interrogating the relationship between language models (LMs) and the knowledge they encode: what exactly do LMs know about the external world? And how can we expand their ability to learn and utilize such knowledge in a systematic way? More fundamentally, what is the relationship between language/language technologies, and the broader society?” Li’s ambitious research goals have taken her far within her first year at MIT. Her advisor Andreas reports: “Despite starting this year [during the pandemic], Belinda has already made significant discoveries about the organization of information in machine learning models trained for language processing tasks … In the six months she’s been here, Belinda has basically started running a mini-lab of her own.” Additionally, Li has taken on the responsibility of mentoring underrepresented undergrads through MIT EECS’s GAAP program. Among many other awards, Li has been named a recipient of the Ida M. Green Memorial Fellowship, the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, and the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship.

Established by the prominent American journalist, playwright, ambassador, and Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce, the CBL Program for Women in STEM was created “to encourage women to enter, study, graduate, and teach” in areas in which they continue to be underrepresented, including science, mathematics, and engineering. To date, the program has supported more than 2,800 women at the undergraduate, graduate, and beginning tenure-track faculty stages, making the CBL program the single most significant source of private support for women in science, mathematics, and engineering in higher education in the United States.

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Scene at MIT: Serene summer sunset on the Charles

“I took this picture from the opposite side of the Charles River in a clear Friday evening. I used a tripod and a 70-300mm telescope lens with long time exposure to capture the amazing glow of the sunset and the reflection on the river. It’s lucky that I can seize this moment of our campus, since I’ve noticed that the surface of the river is ever changing every day. When it is cloudy or windy, it’s relatively hard to get a tranquil and clear surface for the beautiful reflections of sunset and lights from the Great Dome.

I am a postdoc in experimental condensed-matter physics. Currently I am studying the fascinating electrical and optical properties of two-dimensional quantum materials, such as graphene. Having been here at MIT for over two years, I am always enjoying the challenges in research and also the life on campus.

I love taking pictures during my leisure time. I feel that the moment I press the shutter is like freezing a slice of time from the flow. Scenes along the Charles River are among my favorites. I love the sense of seasons changing when I observe the river freezing, the trees blossoming, the full moon rising, etc. To me, the days doing research at MIT and the pictures taken here are an invaluable treasure of my life.”

—Tianyi Han, postdoc in the Department of Physics

Have a creative photo of campus life you'd like to share? Submit it to Scene at MIT.

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Playing with proteins

It’s a cloudy July afternoon in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and MIT Edgerton Center Instructor Amanda Mayer is using brightly-colored plastic to build proteins. She takes a small yellow block and moves it to the end of a chain of blue and green ones, clicking it into place. “Congratulations,” she says to the four high school students guiding her hand over Zoom. “You’ve all become synthetic biologists.”

Together, the group has assembled a model of the complex molecules found in their food and bodies. “I used to think proteins were just one thing,” says a high school student named Fatima, who has the same blocks laid out before her at home. “Now I know that what I ate has lots and lots of amino acids in it.”

Mayer is one of two biologists who are crafting models and lesson plans that schoolteachers around the country — and the world — are using to teach their students about one of the most fundamental concepts in biology: how cells use DNA to make proteins. Both she and Kathy Vandiver, MIT Edgerton Center advisor and director of the Community Outreach Education and Engagement Core at the MIT Center for Environmental Health Sciences, discovered their love for sharing biology with schoolchildren after completing their PhDs.

Vandiver, who spent 16 years teaching middle school science before joining MIT in 2005, created classroom models throughout her career. In 2008, Mayer joined her at the Edgerton Center, helping her perfect the lessons and activity booklets that accompany the models. The duo uses their sets to teach students and schoolteachers, as well as nurses and biotechnologists. “This is about helping other people learn more about biology, and making it much more accessible,” Vandiver says.

Creating life: From blueprints to building blocks

In school, students learn that DNA determines the features they inherit from their parents, like the color of their eyes. This is because DNA contains the instructions for making proteins, which in turn make up our cells. Vandiver says that even though protein synthesis is the one lesson that every biology teacher has to teach, proteins don’t always get the attention they deserve. “DNA is the glamour molecule — it’s on T-shirts everywhere,” she says. “But DNA just stores the instructions for building proteins. They do all the work in the cell.”

Vandiver believes that if students are to grasp tricky processes like protein synthesis, they need more than just the labeled diagrams found frequently in science classrooms. Tactile decision-making is a much more engaging method of learning than looking at a diagram, or even watching a video, she says. “When you watch a cell do different things, you can still tune out. But here, you have to make a decision.”

Since students can learn by doing, they’re also not held back by the pressure to master vocabulary, a typical hurdle in the biology classroom. The models are useful for various levels: a sixth grader may use them simply as building blocks, while older students can use clever design details to learn higher-level concepts, such as directionality and bond strength.

Vandiver and Mayer are careful to put as much thought into the lessons that accompany the models. For a protein to do its job, its building blocks must be strung together in the right sequence. The standard classroom strategy for teaching protein synthesis is a chronological one, Vandiver says, in which the information stored in DNA is first transferred to another molecule called RNA, and then finally to proteins.

“But it’s so confusing for the students. They’re going through this multitude of steps, and they have no idea what they’re making,” she explains. Over the years, as Vandiver and Mayer taught thousands of students of different ages at the MIT Museum, they observed that students learned protein synthesis much better if they already knew what the end product looked like. So, in their lessons, students begin with a finished protein, containing a specific sequence of amino acids. Then they start from scratch, learning and following the body’s steps for putting those pieces together.

Working with teachers

Throughout the year, Mayer and Vandiver hold workshops for teachers in Massachusetts, Texas, and Arizona, training them how to use the kits. With the help of a grant, they’ve distributed sets to 30 of Boston’s public high schools for teachers to use in their classrooms.

Mayer says that after working with the kits, teachers understand the material much better — and feel more confident about teaching it. “Teaching teachers is fantastic,” she says. “Think of all the students they’ll teach in their lifetimes, and how many biologists they’re going to create by making students excited about doing this.”

The DNA kits are being used in other countries, as well: Vandiver has trained teachers in Italy, India, China, Singapore, Cambodia, and Mexico. And when the center occasionally hosts students from abroad, Mayer and Vandiver hold workshops for them.

They also work with local students. For the past five summers, MIT’s biology department has partnered with the LEAH Knox Scholars program to host talented high-school students from communities underrepresented in science. Every year, the Edgerton Center kicks the program off by offering the students a crash course in molecular biology. “With the DNA kits, I actually felt like I was inside the cell in some way,” says Breetika Maharjan, a high-school senior who attended one of the workshops. “It wasn’t like a boring high-school textbook with just words.”

Looking ahead

Mayer and Vandiver say they’ve still got a lot to do. Since 2014, they’ve been importing the parts for their kits from Singapore and assembling them in Cambridge with the help of volunteers; this allows them to offer the kits to educators at cost. They have a new set on chromosomes on the way, and they’re constantly designing lessons for new audiences such as nurses, who may soon be caring for patients with DNA-tailored treatment plans.

“The number one comment we get from people after they go through our lessons and play with this is, ‘Oh wow, if I had this, I would probably have liked biology. I might even have become a biology researcher,’” says Mayer.

Vandiver believes the kits are successful because they embody Doc Edgerton’s memorable motto about teaching:  “The trick to education,” she quotes, “is to not let them know they’re learning anything until it’s too late.”

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A pivot from accounting to neuroscience

Patricia Pujols grew up in the city of Ponce, Puerto Rico, fascinated by documentaries she had seen about human behavior and psychology. She wanted to learn the molecular roots of things like memory, love, hate, happiness, and anger. Despite her early curiosity, becoming a scientist and studying these phenomena didn’t seem like a possibility.

“Where I grew up, people didn't really encourage me to study science,” she says. Instead, she initially pursued a career in accounting. “Later on, after the death of my father, I realized life is short. I prefer to do the thing that I love and am passionate about. And for me, that is teaching and learning science.”

With a strong network of mentors to inspire and push her, Pujols is now well on her way to becoming a scientist. She has a semester left in her undergraduate degree at Universidad Central de Bayamón in Puerto Rico, where she is pursuing a major in neuroscience and a minor in psychology. After she graduates, she plans to earn a PhD. This summer, she was part of the MIT Summer Research Program in Biology (MSRP-Bio), which invites non-MIT undergraduate science majors to the Institute for 10 weeks of summer research.

“MSRP-Bio is designed for students like Patricia, who are driven and passionate about science, with limited access to research at their own institution and ready for a challenging and rigorous research experience at MIT that will prepare them for graduate school and open a lot of doors,” says Mandana Sassanfar, the Department of Biology’s director of outreach. “In addition, the program greatly facilitates access to MIT faculty and graduate students and provides a strong community-building component to give students a sense of belonging.”

Pujols arrived at MIT through the guidance of one of her undergraduate professors, molecular neuroscientist Ramon Jorquera. Jorquera worked with Pujols back in Puerto Rico, and is now at the Universidad Andrés Bello in Santiago, Chile.

“He was the first person to invite me to a research lab,” Pujols says. “He has helped me a lot with everything, with gaining confidence, with my English language skills, and with seeing that I can really do this.”

Years ago, Jorquera worked as a fellow in the lab of Troy Littleton, the Menicon Professor of Biology at MIT and the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory. It was Jorquera who encouraged Pujols to apply to a research program at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte several summers ago, and then to apply to MSRP-Bio. Now, just like her mentor, Pujols is working in the Littleton lab to answer crucial questions about human behavior.

Every summer, the Littleton lab welcomes MSRP students.

“This year, while pairing candidates, Patricia was sort of an obvious match for us in terms of her prior research and interests,” Littleton says. “The major interest of my lab is to really understand how neurons talk to each other within the nervous system. The ability of neurons to rapidly communicate drives our behavior, ability to learn, and to remember. That biology all occurs at specific sites known as synapses, where neurons connect with each other.”

Problems in synapse formation or function contribute to the progression of brain disorders and diseases including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, schizophrenia, and many others.

At each of the billions of synapses in the human nervous system, one neuron sends a chemical message and the next receives it –– just like two friends texting. The sender is known as the presynaptic neuron, and the receiver is called the postsynaptic neuron. To allow for seamless, rapid transit of information, the sites where the chemicals are released from on the presynaptic neuron must perfectly align with the receptors on the postsynaptic neuron.

“All of our work is built around genetics,” Littleton says. “We do manipulations where you take out a gene or alter its coding a bit and see how things change. This allows us to piece together how the individual proteins at synapses work to allow neurons to effectively talk to each other.”

To conduct their work, the Littleton lab uses Drosophila melanogaster, the common fruit fly whose genome is well-characterized and is widely used as a genetic model system. After removing a piece of genetic code, they can image the fly’s synapses to see if there was a change in the alignment of the synaptic chemical receptors. They also test if the synapses’ ability to actually transmit and receive chemical messages has changed.

This summer, Pujols is studying the neuromuscular junction, a particular type of synapse where a motor neuron communicates with a muscle cell. This communication enables movement.

In mammals, the motor neuron (the sender, in this case), secretes a protein called agrin that helps to align the key components of the synapse. Agrin is important for organizing acetylcholine receptors in the synapse. Acetylcholine is a neurotransmitter released from motor neurons that is essential for movement. Mutations in agrin in humans can therefore cause muscular dystrophies and various autoimmune disorders.

In Drosophila, it is a neurotransmitter called glutamate, not acetylcholine, that operates at the neuromuscular junction. Researchers want to know if the way that agrin organizes acetylcholine receptors in the mammalian neuromuscular junction is similar to the way that a protein called perlecan organizes the neuromuscular junctions in Drosophila.

To address this question, Pujols has spent her summer removing perlecan from either the sending motor neuron or the receiving muscle cell in Drosophila, and examining how synapse formation and clustering of glutamate receptors is altered. Pujols is working closely with PhD candidate Ellen Guss in a partnership she calls “the best experience ever.”

Both Littleton and Pujols stress the importance of mentorship in the journey to becoming a scientist. When he was an undergraduate at Louisiana State University, Littleton spent a summer at the University of Florida, working with a scientist whose guidance shaped him. That summer was one of his most influential experiences as a scientist, he says.

At MIT, Pujols says, “I stepped out of my comfort zone and strengthened my skills. MSRP gave me all the tools I needed to have an enriching experience in science, as well as the opportunity to meet colleagues that I will remember for the rest of my life.”

To other students thinking of pursuing a career as a scientist, Pujols says, “don’t be afraid.” 

“You will get a lot of opinions about what to do, that it’s too difficult, or you don't have the potential, or some other negative thing,” Pujols says. “I think the most important thing is that you do what you love, even though maybe you are going against the current. You don’t want to have regrets.”

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TESS Science Conference II draws nearly 700 virtual attendees

On glowing screens in 41 countries across the world, over 680 people logged on to the second TESS Science Conference from Aug. 2-6. Experts not only in exoplanets, but also in extragalactic astronomy, stellar astrophysics, data analysis, and solar system science presented on discoveries made possible by the NASA TESS Mission via 193 posters uploaded to Zenodo and 50 talks livestreamed and archived on YouTube, with views numbering in the thousands. The conference, hosted by the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, also boasted a vibrant community of online participants across Slack, gather.town, and the conference hashtag, #TESScon2. Attendees shared photos of pets, screenshots of avatars congregated in the virtual conference hall, and reactions to the new NASA TESS poster released during the conference. 

This TESS Science Conference took place two years following the first conference, held at MIT in 2019, and three years after TESS began its full-sky survey to find thousands of exoplanets orbiting bright nearby stars. As mission principal investigator, MIT Senior Research Scientist George Ricker stated in his opening remarks that since the four TESS cameras started imaging the sky in summer 2018, TESS has discovered thousands of exoplanet candidates. The mission has surpassed its primary science requirement of confirming 50 new planets smaller than Neptune (or smaller than four times Earth’s radius) and measuring their masses. This success is due in large part to the open-ended and abundant nature of the TESS data. 

In two 13.7-day orbits per observing period, TESS takes a continuous series of "postage stamp"-sized images of 20,000 preselected stars every two minutes. It also records wide-field images of a 24-by-96-degree swath of the sky (approximately four times the sky area of the constellation Orion, or close to 6 percent of the entire sky) taken in ever-shrinking frequency intervals: first every 30 minutes for the two years of the TESS prime mission (August 2018-June 2020), then every 10 minutes during the first TESS extended mission (July 2020-April 2022), and now potentially every 200 seconds in the proposed second TESS extended mission, which would start in early fall 2022. Astronomers are resorting to machine learning and heavy-duty computing resources to handle the ever-growing body of TESS data.

Astronomers have found a near-endless variety of uses for TESS's month-long "stop-motion movies" of millions of stars. The diversity of topics presented at the TESS Science Conference, from within the Solar System to beyond the galaxy attests to how versatile the TESS data are. Beyond exoplanets and stellar astrophysics, the mainstays of the first TESS conference, this year's meeting included asteroseismology, cosmic geochronology, asteroids, the search for Planet 9, and even SETI. All TESS data are publicly available, with a wide variety of open-access platforms and software packages for data analysis. In addition to the hundreds of professional astronomers who are diving into the TESS data, over 30,000 citizen-scientists have contributed to the discovery and follow-up of new TESS exoplanet candidates and supernovae. 

Looking ahead, TESS will continue to work in concert with other missions, providing promising exoplanets for more in-depth study, and contributing visible light observations of supernovae and active galactic nuclei observed also by other telescopes in other wavelengths. TESS has already entered the realm of big-data astronomy, and will likely continue the trend based on plans for future extended missions with full-frame images every 200 seconds, more frequent data downlinks from TESS to Earth, and the possibility of another TESS-like spacecraft in orbit.

At the conference's conclusion, Ricker remarked, "TESS is everything that we had dreamed that it might be … certainly it was my dream come true, in that sense." With TESS Science Conference III on the horizon in 2024, Ricker and the collaborative TESS community fully expect to continue making new and unexpected discoveries with this unique space telescope.

TESS is a NASA Astrophysics Explorer mission led and operated by MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Additional partners include Northrop Grumman, based in Falls Church, Virginia; NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley; the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian in Cambridge, Massachusetts; MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory; and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. More than a dozen universities, research institutes, and observatories worldwide are participants in the mission.

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