When Earth iced over, early life may have sheltered in meltwater ponds

When the Earth froze over, where did life shelter? MIT scientists say one refuge may have been pools of melted ice that dotted the planet’s icy surface.

In a study appearing today in Nature Communications, the researchers report that 635 million to 720 million years ago, during periods known as “Snowball Earth,” when much of the planet was covered in ice, some of our ancient cellular ancestors could have waited things out in meltwater ponds.

The scientists found that eukaryotes — complex cellular lifeforms that eventually evolved into the diverse multicellular life we see today — could have survived the global freeze by living in shallow pools of water. These small, watery oases may have persisted atop relatively shallow ice sheets present in equatorial regions. There, the ice surface could accumulate dark-colored dust and debris from below, which enhanced its ability to melt into pools. At temperatures hovering around 0 degrees Celsius, the resulting meltwater ponds could have served as habitable environments for certain forms of early complex life.

The team drew its conclusions based on an analysis of modern-day meltwater ponds. Today in Antarctica, small pools of melted ice can be found along the margins of ice sheets. The conditions along these polar ice sheets are similar to what likely existed along ice sheets near the equator during Snowball Earth.

The researchers analyzed samples from a variety of meltwater ponds located on the McMurdo Ice Shelf in an area that was first described by members of Robert Falcon Scott's 1903 expedition as “dirty ice.” The MIT researchers discovered clear signatures of eukaryotic life in every pond. The communities of eukaryotes varied from pond to pond, revealing a surprising diversity of life across the setting. The team also found that salinity plays a key role in the kind of life a pond can host: Ponds that were more brackish or salty had more similar eukaryotic communities, which differed from those in ponds with fresher waters.

“We’ve shown that meltwater ponds are valid candidates for where early eukaryotes could have sheltered during these planet-wide glaciation events,” says lead author Fatima Husain, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). “This shows us that diversity is present and possible in these sorts of settings. It’s really a story of life’s resilience.”

The study’s MIT co-authors include Schlumberger Professor of Geobiology Roger Summons and former postdoc Thomas Evans, along with Jasmin Millar of Cardiff University, Anne Jungblut at the Natural History Museum in London, and Ian Hawes of the University of Waikato in New Zealand.

Polar plunge

“Snowball Earth” is the colloquial term for periods of time in Earth history during which the planet iced over. It is often used as a reference to the two consecutive, multi-million-year glaciation events which took place during the Cryogenian Period, which geologists refer to as the time between 635 and 720 million years ago. Whether the Earth was more of a hardened snowball or a softer “slushball” is still up for debate. But scientists are certain of one thing: Most of the planet was plunged into a deep freeze, with average global temperatures of minus 50 degrees Celsius. The question has been: How and where did life survive?

“We’re interested in understanding the foundations of complex life on Earth. We see evidence for eukaryotes before and after the Cryogenian in the fossil record, but we largely lack direct evidence of where they may have lived during,” Husain says. “The great part of this mystery is, we know life survived. We’re just trying to understand how and where.”

There are a number of ideas for where organisms could have sheltered during Snowball Earth, including in certain patches of the open ocean (if such environments existed), in and around deep-sea hydrothermal vents, and under ice sheets. In considering meltwater ponds, Husain and her colleagues pursued the hypothesis that surface ice meltwaters may also have been capable of supporting early eukaryotic life at the time.

“There are many hypotheses for where life could have survived and sheltered during the Cryogenian, but we don’t have excellent analogs for all of them,” Husain notes. “Above-ice meltwater ponds occur on Earth today and are accessible, giving us the opportunity to really focus in on the eukaryotes which live in these environments.”

Small pond, big life

For their new study, the researchers analyzed samples taken from meltwater ponds in Antarctica. In 2018, Summons and colleagues from New Zealand traveled to a region of the McMurdo Ice Shelf in East Antarctica, known to host small ponds of melted ice, each just a few feet deep and a few meters wide. There, water freezes all the way to the seafloor, in the process trapping dark-colored sediments and marine organisms. Wind-driven loss of ice from the surface creates a sort of conveyer belt that brings this trapped debris to the surface over time, where it absorbs the sun’s warmth, causing ice to melt, while surrounding debris-free ice reflects incoming sunlight, resulting in the formation of shallow meltwater ponds.

The bottom of each pond is lined with mats of microbes that have built up over years to form layers of sticky cellular communities.

“These mats can be a few centimeters thick, colorful, and they can be very clearly layered,” Husain says.

These microbial mats are made up of cyanobacteria, prokaryotic, single-celled photosynthetic organisms that lack a cell nucleus or other organelles. While these ancient microbes are known to survive within some of the the harshest environments on Earth including meltwater ponds, the researchers wanted to know whether eukaryotes — complex organisms that evolved a cell nucleus and other membrane bound organelles — could also weather similarly challenging circumstances. Answering this question would take more than a microscope, as the defining characteristics of the microscopic eukaryotes present among the microbial mats are too subtle to distinguish by eye.

To characterize the eukaryotes, the team analyzed the mats for specific lipids they make called sterols, as well as genetic components called ribosomal ribonucleic acid (rRNA), both of which can be used to identify organisms with varying degrees of specificity. These two independent sets of analyses provided complementary fingerprints for certain eukaryotic groups. As part of the team’s lipid research, they found many sterols and rRNA genes closely associated with specific types of algae, protists, and microscopic animals among the microbial mats. The researchers were able to assess the types and relative abundance of lipids and rRNA genes from pond to pond, and found the ponds hosted a surprising diversity of eukaryotic life.

“No two ponds were alike,” Husain says. “There are repeating casts of characters, but they’re present in different abundances. And we found diverse assemblages of eukaryotes from all the major groups in all the ponds studied. These eukaryotes are the descendants of the eukaryotes that survived the Snowball Earth. This really highlights that meltwater ponds during Snowball Earth could have served as above-ice oases that nurtured the eukaryotic life that enabled the diversification and proliferation of complex life — including us — later on.”

This research was supported, in part, by the NASA Exobiology Program, the Simons Collaboration on the Origins of Life, and a MISTI grant from MIT-New Zealand.

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QS ranks MIT the world’s No. 1 university for 2025-26

MIT has again been named the world’s top university by the QS World University Rankings, which were announced today. This is the 14th year in a row MIT has received this distinction.

The full 2026 edition of the rankings — published by Quacquarelli Symonds, an organization specializing in education and study abroad — can be found at TopUniversities.com. The QS rankings are based on factors including academic reputation, employer reputation, citations per faculty, student-to-faculty ratio, proportion of international faculty, and proportion of international students.

MIT was also ranked the world’s top university in 11 of the subject areas ranked by QS, as announced in March of this year.

The Institute received a No. 1 ranking in the following QS subject areas: Chemical Engineering; Civil and Structural Engineering; Computer Science and Information Systems; Data Science and Artificial Intelligence; Electrical and Electronic Engineering; Linguistics; Materials Science; Mechanical, Aeronautical, and Manufacturing Engineering; Mathematics; Physics and Astronomy; and Statistics and Operational Research.

MIT also placed second in seven subject areas: Accounting and Finance; Architecture/Built Environment; Biological Sciences; Business and Management Studies; Chemistry; Earth and Marine Sciences; and Economics and Econometrics.

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The MIT Press acquires University Science Books from AIP Publishing

The MIT Press announces the acquisition of textbook publisher University Science Books from AIP Publishing, a subsidiary of the American Institute of Physics (AIP).

University Science Books was founded in 1978 to publish intermediate- and advanced-level science and reference books by respected authors, published with the highest design and production standards, and priced as affordably as possible. Over the years, USB’s authors have acquired international followings, and its textbooks in chemistry, physics, and astronomy have been recognized as the gold standard in their respective disciplines. USB was acquired by AIP Publishing in 2021.

Bestsellers include John Taylor’s “Classical Mechanics,” the No. 1 adopted text for undergrad mechanics courses in the United States and Canada, and his “Introduction to Error Analysis;” and Don McQuarrie’s “Physical Chemistry: A Molecular Approach” (commonly known as “Big Red”), the second-most adopted physical chemistry textbook in the U.S.

“We are so pleased to have found a new home for USB’s prestigious list of textbooks in the sciences,” says Alix Vance, CEO of AIP Publishing. “With its strong STEM focus, academic rigor, and high production standards, the MIT Press is the perfect partner to continue the publishing legacy of University Science Books.” 

“This acquisition is both a brand and content fit for the MIT Press,” says Amy Brand, director and publisher of the MIT Press. “USB’s respected science list will complement our long-established publishing history of publishing foundational texts in computer science, finance, and economics.”

The MIT Press will take over the USB list as of July 1, with inventory transferring to Penguin Random House Publishing Services, the MIT Press’ sales and distribution partner.

For details regarding University Science Books titles, inventory, and how to order, please contact the MIT Press. 

Established in 1962, The MIT Press is one of the largest and most distinguished university presses in the world and a leading publisher of books and journals at the intersection of science, technology, art, social science, and design.

AIP Publishing is a wholly owned not-for-profit subsidiary of the AIP and supports the charitable, scientific, and educational purposes of AIP through scholarly publishing activities on its behalf and on behalf of our publishing partners.

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Supercharged vaccine could offer strong protection with just one dose

Researchers at MIT and the Scripps Research Institute have shown that they can generate a strong immune response to HIV with just one vaccine dose, by adding two powerful adjuvants — materials that help stimulate the immune system.

In a study of mice, the researchers showed that this approach produced a much wider diversity of antibodies against an HIV antigen, compared to the vaccine given on its own or with just one of the adjuvants. The dual-adjuvant vaccine accumulated in the lymph nodes and remained there for up to a month, allowing the immune system to build up a much greater number of antibodies against the HIV protein.

This strategy could lead to the development of vaccines that only need to be given once, for infectious diseases including HIV or SARS-CoV-2, the researchers say.

“This approach is compatible with many protein-based vaccines, so it offers the opportunity to engineer new formulations for these types of vaccines across a wide range of different diseases, such as influenza, SARS-CoV-2, or other pandemic outbreaks,” says J. Christopher Love, the Raymond A. and Helen E. St. Laurent Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT, and a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard.

Love and Darrell Irvine, a professor of immunology and microbiology at the Scripps Research Institute, are the senior authors of the study, which appears today in Science Translational Medicine. Kristen Rodrigues PhD ’23 and Yiming Zhang PhD ’25 are the lead authors of the paper.

More powerful vaccines

Most vaccines are delivered along with adjuvants, which help to stimulate a stronger immune response to the antigen. One adjuvant commonly used with protein-based vaccines, including those for hepatitis A and B, is aluminum hydroxide, also known as alum. This adjuvant works by activating the innate immune response, helping the body to form a stronger memory of the vaccine antigen.

Several years ago, Irvine developed another adjuvant based on saponin, an FDA-approved adjuvant derived from the bark of the Chilean soapbark tree. His work showed that nanoparticles containing both saponin and a molecule called MPLA, which promotes inflammation, worked better than saponin on its own. That nanoparticle, known as SMNP, is now being used as an adjuvant for an HIV vaccine that is currently in clinical trials.

Irvine and Love then tried combining alum and SMNP and showed that vaccines containing both of those adjuvants could generate even more powerful immune responses against either HIV or SARS-CoV-2.

In the new paper, the researchers wanted to explore why these two adjuvants work so well together to boost the immune response, specifically the B cell response. B cells produce antibodies that can circulate in the bloodstream and recognize a pathogen if the body is exposed to it again.

For this study, the researchers used an HIV protein called MD39 as their vaccine antigen, and anchored dozens of these proteins to each alum particle, along with SMNP.

After vaccinating mice with these particles, the researchers found that the vaccine accumulated in the lymph nodes — structures where B cells encounter antigens and undergo rapid mutations that generate antibodies with high affinity for a particular antigen. This process takes place within clusters of cells known as germinal centers.

The researchers showed that SMNP and alum helped the HIV antigen to penetrate through the protective layer of cells surrounding the lymph nodes without being broken down into fragments. The adjuvants also helped the antigens to remain intact in the lymph nodes for up to 28 days.

“As a result, the B cells that are cycling in the lymph nodes are constantly being exposed to the antigen over that time period, and they get the chance to refine their solution to the antigen,” Love says.

This approach may mimic what occurs during a natural infection, when antigens can remain in the lymph nodes for weeks, giving the body time to build up an immune response.

Antibody diversity

Single-cell RNA sequencing of B cells from the vaccinated mice revealed that the vaccine containing both adjuvants generated a much more diverse repertoire of B cells and antibodies. Mice that received the dual-adjuvant vaccine produced two to three times more unique B cells than mice that received just one of the adjuvants.

That increase in B cell number and diversity boosts the chances that the vaccine could generate broadly neutralizing antibodies — antibodies that can recognize a variety of strains of a given virus, such as HIV.

“When you think about the immune system sampling all of the possible solutions, the more chances we give it to identify an effective solution, the better,” Love says. “Generating broadly neutralizing antibodies is something that likely requires both the kind of approach that we showed here, to get that strong and diversified response, as well as antigen design to get the right part of the immunogen shown.”

Using these two adjuvants together could also contribute to the development of more potent vaccines against other infectious diseases, with just a single dose.

“What’s potentially powerful about this approach is that you can achieve long-term exposures based on a combination of adjuvants that are already reasonably well-understood, so it doesn’t require a different technology. It’s just combining features of these adjuvants to enable low-dose or potentially even single-dose treatments,” Love says.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health; the Koch Institute Support (core) Grant from the National Cancer Institute; the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard; and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

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New 3D chips could make electronics faster and more energy-efficient

The advanced semiconductor material gallium nitride will likely be key for the next generation of high-speed communication systems and the power electronics needed for state-of-the-art data centers.

Unfortunately, the high cost of gallium nitride (GaN) and the specialization required to incorporate this semiconductor material into conventional electronics have limited its use in commercial applications.

Now, researchers from MIT and elsewhere have developed a new fabrication process that integrates high-performance GaN transistors onto standard silicon CMOS chips in a way that is low-cost and scalable, and compatible with existing semiconductor foundries.

Their method involves building many tiny transistors on the surface of a GaN chip, cutting out each individual transistor, and then bonding just the necessary number of transistors onto a silicon chip using a low-temperature process that preserves the functionality of both materials.

The cost remains minimal since only a tiny amount of GaN material is added to the chip, but the resulting device can receive a significant performance boost from compact, high-speed transistors. In addition, by separating the GaN circuit into discrete transistors that can be spread over the silicon chip, the new technology is able to reduce the temperature of the overall system.

The researchers used this process to fabricate a power amplifier, an essential component in mobile phones, that achieves higher signal strength and efficiencies than devices with silicon transistors. In a smartphone, this could improve call quality, boost wireless bandwidth, enhance connectivity, and extend battery life.

Because their method fits into standard procedures, it could improve electronics that exist today as well as future technologies. Down the road, the new integration scheme could even enable quantum applications, as GaN performs better than silicon at the cryogenic temperatures essential for many types of quantum computing.

“If we can bring the cost down, improve the scalability, and, at the same time, enhance the performance of the electronic device, it is a no-brainer that we should adopt this technology. We’ve combined the best of what exists in silicon with the best possible gallium nitride electronics. These hybrid chips can revolutionize many commercial markets,” says Pradyot Yadav, an MIT graduate student and lead author of a paper on this method.

He is joined on the paper by fellow MIT graduate students Jinchen Wang and Patrick Darmawi-Iskandar; MIT postdoc John Niroula; senior authors Ulriche L. Rodhe, a visiting scientist at the Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL), and Ruonan Han, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and member of MTL; and Tomás Palacios, the Clarence J. LeBel Professor of EECS, and director of MTL; as well as collaborators at Georgia Tech and the Air Force Research Laboratory. The research was recently presented at the IEEE Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits Symposium.

Swapping transistors

Gallium nitride is the second most widely used semiconductor in the world, just after silicon, and its unique properties make it ideal for applications such as lighting, radar systems and power electronics.

The material has been around for decades and, to get access to its maximum performance, it is important for chips made of GaN to be connected to digital chips made of silicon, also called CMOS chips. To enable this, some integration methods bond GaN transistors onto a CMOS chip by soldering the connections, but this limits how small the GaN transistors can be. The tinier the transistors, the higher the frequency at which they can work.

Other methods integrate an entire gallium nitride wafer on top of a silicon wafer, but using so much material is extremely costly, especially since the GaN is only needed in a few tiny transistors. The rest of the material in the GaN wafer is wasted.

“We wanted to combine the functionality of GaN with the power of digital chips made of silicon, but without having to compromise on either cost of bandwidth. We achieved that by adding super-tiny discrete gallium nitride transistors right on top of the silicon chip,” Yadav explains.

The new chips are the result of a multistep process.

First, a tightly packed collection of miniscule transistors is fabricated across the entire surface of a GaN wafer. Using very fine laser technology, they cut each one down to just the size of the transistor, which is 240 by 410 microns, forming what they call a dielet. (A micron is one millionth of a meter.)

Each transistor is fabricated with tiny copper pillars on top, which they use to bond directly to the copper pillars on the surface of a standard silicon CMOS chip. Copper to copper bonding can be done at temperatures below 400 degrees Celsius, which is low enough to avoid damaging either material.

Current GaN integration techniques require bonds that utilize gold, an expensive material that needs much higher temperatures and stronger bonding forces than copper. Since gold can contaminate the tools used in most semiconductor foundries, it typically requires specialized facilities.

“We wanted a process that was low-cost, low-temperature, and low-force, and copper wins on all of those related to gold. At the same time, it has better conductivity,” Yadav says.

A new tool

To enable the integration process, they created a specialized new tool that can carefully integrate the extremely tiny GaN transistor with the silicon chips. The tool uses a vacuum to hold the dielet as it moves on top of a silicon chip, zeroing in on the copper bonding interface with nanometer precision.

They used advanced microscopy to monitor the interface, and then when the dielet is in the right position, they apply heat and pressure to bond the GaN transistor to the chip.

“For each step in the process, I had to find a new collaborator who knew how to do the technique that I needed, learn from them, and then integrate that into my platform. It was two years of constant learning,” Yadav says.

Once the researchers had perfected the fabrication process, they demonstrated it by developing power amplifiers, which are radio frequency circuits that boost wireless signals.

Their devices achieved higher bandwidth and better gain than devices made with traditional silicon transistors. Each compact chip has an area of less than half a square millimeter.

In addition, because the silicon chip they used in their demonstration is based on Intel 16 22nm FinFET state-of-the-art metallization and passive options, they were able to incorporate components often used in silicon circuits, such as neutralization capacitors. This significantly improved the gain of the amplifier, bringing it one step closer to enabling the next generation of wireless technologies.

“To address the slowdown of Moore’s Law in transistor scaling, heterogeneous integration has emerged as a promising solution for continued system scaling, reduced form factor, improved power efficiency, and cost optimization. Particularly in wireless technology, the tight integration of compound semiconductors with silicon-based wafers is critical to realizing unified systems of front-end integrated circuits, baseband processors, accelerators, and memory for next-generation antennas-to-AI platforms. This work makes a significant advancement by demonstrating 3D integration of multiple GaN chips with silicon CMOS and pushes the boundaries of current technological capabilities,” says Atom Watanabe, a research scientist at IBM who was not involved with this paper.

This work is supported, in part, by the U.S. Department of Defense through the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship Program and CHIMES, one of the seven centers in JUMP 2.0, a Semiconductor Research Corporation Program by the Department of Defense and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Fabrication was carried out using facilities at MIT.Nano, the Air Force Research Laboratory, and Georgia Tech.

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This compact, low-power receiver could give a boost to 5G smart devices

MIT researchers have designed a compact, low-power receiver for 5G-compatible smart devices that is about 30 times more resilient to a certain type of interference than some traditional wireless receivers.

The low-cost receiver would be ideal for battery-powered internet of things (IoT) devices like environmental sensors, smart thermostats, or other devices that need to run continuously for a long time, such as health wearables, smart cameras, or industrial monitoring sensors.

The researchers’ chip uses a passive filtering mechanism that consumes less than a milliwatt of static power while protecting both the input and output of the receiver’s amplifier from unwanted wireless signals that could jam the device.

Key to the new approach is a novel arrangement of precharged, stacked capacitors, which are connected by a network of tiny switches. These miniscule switches need much less power to be turned on and off than those typically used in IoT receivers.

The receiver’s capacitor network and amplifier are carefully arranged to leverage a phenomenon in amplification that allows the chip to use much smaller capacitors than would typically be necessary. 

“This receiver could help expand the capabilities of IoT gadgets. Smart devices like health monitors or industrial sensors could become smaller and have longer battery lives. They would also be more reliable in crowded radio environments, such as factory floors or smart city networks,” says Soroush Araei, an electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) graduate student at MIT and lead author of a paper on the receiver.

He is joined on the paper by Mohammad Barzgari, a postdoc in the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE); Haibo Yang, an EECS graduate student; and senior author Negar Reiskarimian, the X-Window Consortium Career Development Assistant Professor in EECS at MIT and a member of the Microsystems Technology Laboratories and RLE. The research was recently presented at the IEEE Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits Symposium.

A new standard

A receiver acts as the intermediary between an IoT device and its environment. Its job is to detect and amplify a wireless signal, filter out any interference, and then convert it into digital data for processing.

Traditionally, IoT receivers operate on fixed frequencies and suppress interference using a single narrow-band filter, which is simple and inexpensive.

But the new technical specifications of the 5G mobile network enable reduced-capability devices that are more affordable and energy-efficient. This opens a range of IoT applications to the faster data speeds and increased network capability of 5G. These next-generation IoT devices need receivers that can tune across a wide range of frequencies while still being cost-effective and low-power.

“This is extremely challenging because now we need to not only think about the power and cost of the receiver, but also flexibility to address numerous interferers that exist in the environment,” Araei says.

To reduce the size, cost, and power consumption of an IoT device, engineers can’t rely on the bulky, off-chip filters that are typically used in devices that operate on a wide frequency range.

One solution is to use a network of on-chip capacitors that can filter out unwanted signals. But these capacitor networks are prone to special type of signal noise known as harmonic interference.

In prior work, the MIT researchers developed a novel switch-capacitor network that targets these harmonic signals as early as possible in the receiver chain, filtering out unwanted signals before they are amplified and converted into digital bits for processing.

Shrinking the circuit

Here, they extended that approach by using the novel switch-capacitor network as the feedback path in an amplifier with negative gain. This configuration leverages the Miller effect, a phenomenon that enables small capacitors to behave like much larger ones.

“This trick lets us meet the filtering requirement for narrow-band IoT without physically large components, which drastically shrinks the size of the circuit,” Araei says.

Their receiver has an active area of less than 0.05 square millimeters.

One challenge the researchers had to overcome was determining how to apply enough voltage to drive the switches while keeping the overall power supply of the chip at only 0.6 volts.

In the presence of interfering signals, such tiny switches can turn on and off in error, especially if the voltage required for switching is extremely low.

To address this, the researchers came up with a novel solution, using a special circuit technique called bootstrap clocking. This method boosts the control voltage just enough to ensure the switches operate reliably while using less power and fewer components than traditional clock boosting methods.

Taken together, these innovations enable the new receiver to consume less than a milliwatt of power while blocking about 30 times more harmonic interference than traditional IoT receivers.

“Our chip also is very quiet, in terms of not polluting the airwaves. This comes from the fact that our switches are very small, so the amount of signal that can leak out of the antenna is also very small,” Araei adds.

Because their receiver is smaller than traditional devices and relies on switches and precharged capacitors instead of more complex electronics, it could be more cost-effective to fabricate. In addition, since the receiver design can cover a wide range of signal frequencies, it could be implemented on a variety of current and future IoT devices.

Now that they have developed this prototype, the researchers want to enable the receiver to operate without a dedicated power supply, perhaps by harvesting Wi-Fi or Bluetooth signals from the environment to power the chip.

This research is supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation.

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Gaspare LoDuca named VP for information systems and technology and CIO

Gaspare LoDuca has been appointed MIT’s vice president for information systems and technology (IS&T) and chief information officer, effective Aug. 18. Currently vice president for information technology and CIO at Columbia University, LoDuca has held IT leadership roles in or related to higher education for more than two decades. He succeeds Mark Silis, who led IS&T from 2019 until 2024, when he left MIT to return to the entrepreneurial ecosystem in the San Francisco Bay area.

Executive Vice President and Treasurer Glen Shor announced the appointment today in an email to MIT faculty and staff.

“I believe that Gaspare will be an incredible asset to MIT, bringing wide-ranging experience supporting faculty, researchers, staff, and students and a highly collaborative style,” says Shor. “He is eager to start his work with our talented IS&T team to chart and implement their contributions to the future of information technology at MIT.”

LoDuca will lead the IS&T organization and oversee MIT’s information technology infrastructure and services that support its research and academic enterprise across student and administrative systems, network operations, cloud services, cybersecurity, and customer support. As co-chair of the Information Technology Governance Committee, he will guide the development of IT policy and strategy at the Institute. He will also play a key role in MIT’s effort to modernize its business processes and administrative systems, working in close collaboration with the Business and Digital Transformation Office.

“Gaspare brings to his new role extensive experience leading a complex IT organization,” says Provost Cynthia Barnhart, who served as one of Shor's advisors during the search process. “His depth of experience, coupled with his vision for the future state of information technology and digital transformation at MIT, are compelling, and I am excited to see the positive impact he will have here.”

“As I start my new role, I plan to learn more about MIT’s culture and community to ensure that any decisions or changes we make are shaped by the community’s needs and carried out in a way that fits the culture. I’m also looking forward to learning more about the research and work being done by students and faculty to advance MIT’s mission. It’s inspiring, and I’m eager to support their success,” says LoDuca.

In his role at Columbia, LoDuca has overseen the IT department, headed IT governance committees for school and department-level IT functions, and ensured the secure operation of the university’s enterprise-class systems since 2015. During his tenure, he has crafted a culture of customer service and innovation — building a new student information system, identifying emerging technologies for use in classrooms and labs, and creating a data-sharing platform for university researchers and a grants dashboard for principal investigators. He also revamped Columbia’s technology infrastructure and implemented tools to ensure the security and reliability of its technology resources.

Before joining Columbia, LoDuca was the technology managing director for the education practice at Accenture from 1998 to 2015. In that role, he helped universities to develop and implement technology strategies and adopt modern applications and systems. His projects included overseeing the implementation of finance, human resources, and student administration systems for clients such as Columbia University, University of Miami, Carnegie Mellon University, the University System of Georgia, and Yale University.

“At a research institution, there’s a wide range of activities happening every day, and our job in IT is to support them all while also managing cybersecurity risks. We need to be creative and thoughtful in our solutions, and consider the needs and expectations of our community,” he says.

LoDuca holds a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Michigan State University. He and his wife are recent empty nesters, and are in the process of relocating to Boston.

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