Diffuse puffs of “missing” matter surround most galaxies

Stars and galaxies make up much of the universe’s ordinary, observable matter. But for decades, scientists have wrestled with a cosmic conflict: There should be much more. 

Physicists have good estimates of how much matter was present in the early universe. Shortly after the Big Bang, roughly 83 percent of all matter in the universe was composed of invisible dark matter, with ordinary matter making up the rest. And yet, these estimates exceed the amount of ordinary matter seen in stars and galaxies today. Where, then, did all the missing ordinary matter go? 

Now MIT scientists, as part of the CHIME/FRB Collaboration, are using far-off radio signals to reveal missing matter in the vast space between galaxies. The team has developed a new method to search out missing matter by combining locations of galaxies with detections of fast radio bursts. 

A fast radio burst, or FRB, is an ultrabright, millisecond flash of radio waves emitted by extremely energetic phenomena in the distant universe. As it travels through space, the signal from a fast radio burst gets stretched, or “smeared,” in time. The more missing matter that it passes through, the more smeared the signal becomes. 

The MIT-led team measured the degree of smearing experienced by thousands of FRB signals detected on Earth. Then they compared each FRB smear with locations of galaxies across the universe to determine how much of an FRB’s smearing was due to galaxy matter versus other, missing matter. 

The new method revealed not only whether missing matter was present, but also where. Specifically, the researchers discovered that it exists in very diffuse clouds surrounding groups of galaxies. These clouds extend out from the galaxies, to much further distances than scientists had predicted. 

“We find that, overall, where there are more galaxies, there tends to be more missing matter around them,” says Haochen Wang, a graduate student in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.

The results, reported today in the journal Physical Review Letters, support the idea that matter is flung outside a galaxy through black hole jets, exploding stars, and other highly energetic processes within a galaxy. What’s more, the findings suggest that such processes are more energetic than scientists had thought. 

“We’re finding missing matter that is pushed out to larger scales,” says Kiyoshi Masui, associate professor of physics at MIT. “These measurements indicate that star activity, and activity from black holes, is stronger and much more violent than predicted.”

Masui and Wang are co-authors of the new study, which includes Shion Andrew, Adam Lanman, Kenzie Nimmo, and Ryan Raikman from MIT, and collaborators from multiple other institutions as part of the CHIME/FRB Collaboration. 

The shape of matter

The vast majority of ordinary, observable matter in the universe is built from baryons — a type of subatomic particle that includes protons and neutrons, and that makes up most of an atom’s mass. Scientists estimate that just 17 percent of the early universe was made from this “baryonic” matter, shortly after the Big Bang. 

Some of that early matter was forged into every substantial thing we see today, from planets, stars, and galaxies, to our own bodies. But as scientists have realized, this matter doesn’t quite add up. The total mass of all the stars, galaxies, and galactic clouds is about a tenth of the baryonic matter that existed in the early universe. There must be more matter, likely in the spaces between galaxies. But the universe is vast. Any leftover matter likely exists at extremely low densities, of around a single proton per cubic meter, making it extremely challenging to detect.  

Recently, however, Masui and others have found that such missing matter could be sussed out using fast radio bursts. FRBs were first discovered in 2007, and since then astronomers have detected several thousand of the mysterious, ultrashort signals from distant galaxies, billions of light years away. 

“What makes FRBs good to probe missing matter is that they have a special property,” Wang says. “They start out as a very quick flash, and as they pass through matter, they smear out in time. And we can measure that smearing very precisely, which is directly proportional to how much missing matter the FRB passed through.”

Researchers have previously taken advantage of this smearing property of FRBs to detect missing matter around galaxies. These efforts have confirmed that tenous clouds exist in the vast spaces between galaxies. Masui and Wang wanted to go a step further. 

“We’re not just probing if the gas is with the galaxy or not, but we are seeing the shape of the missing matter that’s around the galaxies,” Wang says. “By mapping the shape of missing matter, we can understand how galaxies form and how they interact with their environment.”

Galactic fountains

For their new study, the team mapped the shape of missing matter around galaxies by cross-correlating thousands of FRB measurements with locations of millions of galaxies. They used data from two sources: the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) and the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) survey. 

CHIME is a large radio telescope located in British Columbia, Canada, that is designed to scan the entire northern sky for incoming radio waves. The telescope is sensitive to ultrashort, ultrabright radio signals, and since it began observing, CHIME has detected about 4,000 fast radio bursts across the sky. 

DESI is an instrument that is mounted on the Mayall Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory, near Tucson, Arizona. The instrument makes detailed measurements of the light coming from over 30 million galaxies, to provide estimates of dark energy — the mysterious force that drives the expansion of the universe. 

From CHIME’s catalog of detections, members of the CHIME/FRB collaboration analyzed 2,870 FRB signals. Each signal is a burst of radio waves, at multiple wavelengths, from highest to lowest energy. The higher-energy “blue” waves typically are less affected by any missing matter they travel through, and therefore should arrive at a detector before lower-energy “red” wavelengths, which are more delayed, or “smeared,” in time. 

The team measured the smearing of each FRB’s various wavelengths, which they could then directly relate to the amount of matter that the FRB must have traveled through before reaching CHIME’s detectors. Masui and Wang then correlated these measurements with the locations of over 6 million galaxies provided by DESI data. In this way, they could look for an association between the missing matter and the galaxies, and measure where one is in relation to the other. 

Their analysis revealed a pattern: Missing baryonic matter tended to be found around galaxies and galaxy clusters. But rather than gathering close to galaxies in a dense ball, missing matter was scattered across a large radius, similar to a diffuse puff. 

“A galaxy is maybe a few 100,000 light years across, and we found missing matter out to about 4 million light years,” Masui says. “That’s further than the simulations predict, by quite a bit.”

“We are finding that the activity in galaxies is messier than we thought,” Wang says. “They’re more like fountains, and really push out gas to very large distances.”

The new results show that fast radio bursts can be a reliable method by which to search for missing matter. As CHIME continues to detect more FRBs, the team says its method can only improve.

“We got it to work for the first time, and will get it to work even more precisely as data gets better,” Masui says. 

CHIME and CHIME/FRB are supported by the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and, the provinces of British Columbia, Québec, and Ontario. This study was supported in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation.

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Engineering Design Studio hosts alumni on their fifth, 10th … and 55th reunions

Every year, MIT’s graduation coincides with the joyful reunion of classes past, but this year brought a special occasion for the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS). Senior Lecturer Gim Hom hosted a special reunion for around 15 of his classmates from the Class of 1971 in the Cypress Engineering Design Studio, a staffed makerspace and classroom run by the department. (Yes, for those of you doing some hasty subtraction, that is a 55th-year reunion.) Participants worked with electronic components just as they did in labs long ago, building their choice of two projects: a simplified electrocardiogram (ECG) and an audio amplifier. But the event wasn’t only a reunion. For Hom, the activity doubled as his chance to teach a “last class.” 

He explains: “As a lecturer, I use real-world problems and solutions to teach concepts in analog and digital design. For the reunion activity, I drew upon two existing labs from my courses and stripped out the theory material, leaving only the assembly for the reunion activity.”

For the first activity, attendees refreshed their soldering skills, assembling a printed circuit board (PCB) that approximated the design of an ECG before attaching electrodes and rolling up their sleeves (literally) to view the electrical impulses of their heartbeats. Hom explains that “in 6.2040 (Analog Lab), I use the ECG as a platform for teaching signal acquisition, filtering, and display. Students first analyze the design of an ECG circuit and then build and solder the board themselves, gaining hands-on experience with printed circuit board assembly. For many students, this is their first exposure to soldering.”

In the second activity, the alumni learned to surface mount solder, a skill that, while technically possible, had not yet become popularized during their time as undergraduates at MIT. “Modern electronics primarily rely on surface-mount technology (SMT),” explains Hom. “To give students exposure to SMT assembly, I designed an optional laboratory project: a small USB-powered audio amplifier that students can use to play music from their phones. While external speakers must be connected, the amplifier yields surprisingly good sound quality.”

Throughout the day, technical instructors Anthony Pennes and Liam Ackerman (both coincidentally celebrating their own reunions, at 10 and 5 years out from MIT, respectively) remained on hand to answer questions and familiarize attendees with the technology available in the Engineering Design Studio, which is open to the EECS community from morning until nearly midnight throughout the school year. 

“It was wonderful to see alumni leave with a working board with big smiles on their faces,” says Hom, who, while no longer teaching, will continue part time as an advisor to EECS students.

Meanwhile, his classmates have a working memento of their time at MIT — and a reminder that technical skills can last a lifetime. 

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Emery Brown, Daniel Hastings, and Douglas Lauffenburger named Institute Professors

A physician and neuroscientist who studies how anesthesia affects the brain; a leader in aerospace engineering, policy, and education; and the founding head of MIT’s Department of Biological Engineering have been awarded MIT’s highest faculty honor: the title of Institute Professor.

With the appointments of Emery Brown, Daniel Hastings SM ’78, PhD ’80, and Douglas Lauffenburger, there are now 12 Institute Professors at MIT, along with 10 Institute Professors Emeriti.

The appointments, which took effect July 1, were announced today in an email to the faculty from Sally Kornbluth, MIT’s president; Anantha Chandrakasan, MIT provost; and Roger Levy, chair of the faculty and a professor of brain and cognitive sciences. 

Emery Brown

Brown, who has been a member of the MIT faculty since 2005, says he is “tremendously honored” to be appointed as an Institute Professor.

“It’s a pleasure to know that your colleagues hold you in such high esteem and that the work that you’re doing is valued,” says Brown, the Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering. “When you look down the list of people who have had this title, it’s an amazing group.”

After graduating from Harvard University with a bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics in 1978, Brown earned a PhD in statistics, also from Harvard, and an MD from Harvard Medical School. Since 1992, he has been a member of the Harvard Medical School faculty, and until recently he was a practicing anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. 

Throughout his career, Brown has made contributions in several different areas of neuroscience. In the early stages of his research career, he developed statistical methods to characterize the properties of the human circadian clock. He showed how light exposure can shift the phase of the human clock, depending on the circadian phase during which the light is administered. He also developed methods to demonstrate, from analyses of physiological data collected under special low-light conditions, that the intrinsic period of the human clock, like that of other species, is closer to 24 hours and not 25. Brown also measured the impact of shift work schedules that were designed using circadian physiology. 

Later, he developed new statistical techniques and signal processing methods to analyze data collected in systems neuroscience experiments. As part of this work, he devised algorithms to decode the position of an animal in its environment by reading the activity of a small group of place cell neurons in the animal’s brain. 

Joining MIT’s faculty just over 20 years ago represented an “inflection point” in his career, Brown says. 

“I was an anesthesiologist doing statistical research, interested in neuroscience, and MIT allowed me to tie all those together,” he says. “I could work with colleagues who could help me understand the neuroscience of anesthesia, have another outlet for the statistical research that I was doing, and also more direct interactions with undergraduates and grad students.”

Over the past two decades, Brown has applied statistical techniques to studying what happens to the brain under anesthesia. His work has revealed how drugs such as propofol alter the brain’s intrinsic oscillations, which can be seen with electroencephalography (EEG).

During the awake state, these oscillations usually have high frequencies and low amplitudes, but as anesthetic drugs are given, they shift to low frequencies and high amplitudes. These changes disrupt normal communication between different brain regions, leading to loss of consciousness.

Brown has also shown that these EEG oscillations can be used to monitor whether a patient is too deeply unconscious, and he has developed a closed-loop anesthesia delivery system that can monitor these oscillations in real-time and guide anesthetic dosing during surgery. 

In 2024, Brown was presented with the National Medal of Science. Among his other awards, he is also a recipient of a National Institute of Health Director’s Pioneer Award, the Gruber Prize in Neuroscience, and the Swartz Prize for Computational and Theoretical Neuroscience. He one of a small group of researchers to be an elected member of all three National Academies of Medicine, Sciences, and Engineering, as well as the National Academy of Inventors.

From 2012 to 2022, he served as co-director of the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology. He has also played an instrumental role in several important efforts at MIT, including the 2010 Report on the Initiative for Faculty Race and Diversity, and the founding of the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS) in 2015.

Outside of his work at MIT, Brown served on President Obama’s Brain Initiative Working Group, as well as the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Women in Science and Engineering and the Council of the National Institutes of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

Brown is also known for his commitment to teaching and mentoring students. In 2024, he was named a recipient of MIT’s “Committed to Caring” award — an honor given by MIT’s Office of Graduate Education to faculty members who have served as exceptional mentors to graduate students.

Daniel Hastings

When Hastings, the Cecil (1923) and Ida Green Professor in Education, was notified of the new distinction, it came as a total surprise.

“The people who were there will tell you that I could not believe it at first,” he says. “I never thought of myself as being in the same league as some of the Institute Professors I knew.”

Hastings grew up in England and Jamaica, and developed an early fascination with space, as a fan of the fictional “Star Trek,” and later “Star Wars” and “Stargate” (he’s seen every episode and movie of all three franchises), as well as the very real NASA Apollo program. 

After receiving a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Oxford University, he enrolled at MIT, earning his master’s degree in 1978 and PhD in 1980, both in aeronautics and astronautics. In 1985 he joined the faculty as an assistant professor and was promoted to full professor in 1993. 

Throughout his tenure, Hastings has made significant and lasting impacts in astronautical engineering, particularly through his studies in space plasma environment interactions, electric propulsion, and space systems architecture. 

His early research on the physical interactions between plasma and spacecraft, for which he co-wrote the definitive text (“Spacecraft Environment Interactions,” published in 1996), enabled the safe operation of solar panels on spacecraft today. Prior to Hastings’ work, high voltage solar arrays on satellites often experienced catastrophic arcing — a dangerous jumping of electrical current from one panel to another. These failures turned out to be a result of interactions with the surrounding space plasma. 

Hastings developed theories to characterize these interactions. His theories informed NASA’s design of the solar panels to power the International Space Station, which are still in operation today. His work also established guidelines across the aerospace industry on the design of resilient solar panels and ways to handle issues once in orbit. 

In his studies of electric propulsion, Hastings characterized the fundamental physical interactions between ion engine plumes and spacecraft systems. His work was pivotal in incorporating ion propulsion systems into many commercial satellites and deep space probes and helped to push what was an experimental technology into mainstream use in space propulsion.

In his more recent work, Hastings has explored the concept of flexible and distributed space architectures. He and his students are developing models for spacecraft that can serve purposes beyond their original mission intent. For instance, a spacecraft may incorporate a port that could serve as a waystation for future satellites to dock and refuel. Such a flexible and distributed system could help to support future missions to the moon and Mars.

In recognition of his research contributions, Hastings received the AIAA Losey Atmospheric Sciences Award in 2002, was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2017, and was recognized as an honorary fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) in 2021. 

Throughout his career, Hastings has taken on numerous leadership roles, at the national, international, and Institute levels. Shortly after becoming full professor, he served as associate department head of research in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro). He then took a two-year leave from the Institute to serve as chief scientist of the U.S. Air Force. During that time, he advised the Air Force chief of staff and secretary and successfully strengthened investments in space research in the U.S.  Air Force space program. 

Hastings has served as an advisor on multiple expert panels and boards, including as the chair of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board, and as a member of the NASA Advisory Council, the National Science Board, the Intelligence Science Board, and most recently, the Defense Science Board and User Advisory Group of the National Space Council. He has also chaired multiple National Research Council studies and advised the space and engineering industries in various capacities, including serving on the boards of the Aerospace Corporation, Draper, and Blue Origin. He has just finished a two-year term as president of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

At MIT, Hastings has stepped up to serve in pivotal leadership posts. From 2000 to 2005, he served as the director of MIT’s Technology and Policy Program, then director of the Engineering Systems Division. From 2006 to 2013, as dean for undergraduate education, he helped to develop initiatives in equity, financial aid, and curriculum development, and strengthened international education and study abroad programs during a nationally challenging economic period. He received the Gordon Y. Billard Award in 2013 for his work on international education. In 2014 he began a five-year term as director of the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology, during which he worked to reinforce MIT’s global collaborations. And from 2019 to 2023 he served as head of AeroAstro, supporting new research and educational initiatives as he navigated the department through the global pandemic.

Hastings has also worked in multiple capacities to make the Institute a more welcoming and inclusive community. He has served as associate dean of engineering for diversity, equity, and inclusion (2021-2023), Institute Community and Equity Officer (interim, 2023-2024), and co-chair of the MIT Values Statement Committee, as well as vice chancellor for undergraduate and graduate education (interim, 2024-2025). 

“MIT has been a great place for me,” Hastings reflects. “It has a mission to address some of the most pressing problems in the world. It is a high-energy place. This is a place that I am excited to work in and I want to give back to make it better.”

Douglas Lauffenburger

Lauffenburger, who is the Ford Professor of Biological Engineering, Chemical Engineering, and Biology, was the central founder of MIT’s Department of Biological Engineering, which he chaired from its inception in 1998 until 2019.

Before coming to MIT, Lauffenburger earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1975 and a PhD from the University of Minnesota at the Twin Cities in 1979, both in chemical engineering. 

While in graduate school, he became fascinated by the biological sciences. Early in his career, as a faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania and at the University of Illinois, his research and teaching straddled the line between chemical engineering and cell biology. Due to his unique background, MIT recruited Lauffenburger in the late 1990s to launch its new Department of Biological Engineering.

At the time, many universities had programs in biomedical engineering — an interdisciplinary field that applies techniques from electrical, chemical, or mechanical engineering to medical problems. Lauffenburger envisioned a distinct discipline of biological engineering, in which engineers would pursue an understanding of how biological systems function at the level of molecular and cellular mechanisms, with the goal of manipulating them to create new technologies for applications across medicine, energy, the environment, nutrition, and manufacturing.

“What was clear to me was that because biological systems comprise molecular processes, which are integrated in very complex ways, a true engineering analysis and design approach ought to be useful in moving it beyond mere tinkering and trial-and-error,” he says. “We needed to develop engineering frameworks for biology based on design principles, models, and predictions.”

As department head, Lauffenburger guided the development of new curricula at both graduate and undergraduate levels, and recruited faculty members whose work spanned engineering, molecular and cellular biology, microbiology, and immunology. The new department began offering graduate degrees in the late 1990s, and an undergraduate major beginning in 2005. Since its inception, the program has served as a model for similar programs at many other institutions worldwide.

Lauffenburger described being named an Institute Professor as “an honor that is especially gratifying because it recognizes the extraordinary impact of our unique MIT biological engineering department. I’ve been blessed with the rare opportunity to help create something revolutionary, here in this remarkable institution.”

Lauffenburger also played key roles in launching new interdisciplinary programs within MIT and with other institutions, including the Center for Biomedical Engineering, the Computational and Systems Biology Initiative, the DuPont-MIT Alliance, and the Cambridge-MIT Initiative.

His research has touched on many areas of biological science, including molecular cell biology, systems biology, and computational biology. Much of his work focuses on unraveling cell signaling mechanisms, using a combination of computational modeling and quantitative experiments. This work has shed light on processes such as cell proliferation, death, adhesion, and migration.

In the field of systems biology, he has created computational models across a spectrum of mathematical approaches, which can be used to identify drug targets and patient stratification strategies for a variety of diseases, including cancer and chronic inflammation, and predict the efficacy of drugs against those targets. 

In 2021, he and Linda Griffith, the School of Engineering Professor of Teaching Innovation at MIT, were jointly awarded the Bernard M. Gordon Prize for Innovation in Engineering and Technology Education, the most prestigious engineering education award in the United States.

Lauffenburger is an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a founding fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, and has served as president of the Biomedical Engineering Society.

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School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences welcomes six new faculty for 2026

The MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) and Dean Agustín Rayo recently welcomed six new professors to the MIT community. They arrive with diverse backgrounds and vast knowledge in their areas of research.

Grisha Coleman is a full professor in the Music and Theater Arts Section. Her research explores tensions between our physiological, technological, and ecological systems; human movement, our machines, and the places we inhabit. Her practice engages an interdisciplinary approach to these explorations. Coleman received the Doris Duke Foundation’s Performing Arts Technologies Lab Award. Her work has been supported by Carnegie Mellon University’s STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, Creative Capital, the Jerome Foundation, MacDowell, the MAP Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Pioneer Works, the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, Stanford University’s Mohr Visiting Artist program, and the Surdna Foundation. Coleman was previously a professor at Northeastern University and an associate professor at Arizona State University. She earned an MFA in music composition and integrated media from California Institute of the Arts.

Tung-Hui Hu is an associate professor with tenure in the Comparative Media Studies/Writing program. A poet and a scholar of digital media, he is the author of five books, most recently “Digital Lethargy: Dispatches from an Age of Disconnection” (MIT Press, 2022), “A Prehistory of the Cloud” (MIT Press, 2015), and “Greenhouses, Lighthouses” (Copper Canyon Press, 2013). Hu is interested in how concepts such as race and normal language became measurable, governable objects in the form of datasets. His research on data centers, artificial intelligence, burnout, and visual art has been featured in places such as CBS News, BBC Radio 4, WIRED, and MoMA R&D. He has been awarded fellowships from the American Academy in Rome, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the American Academy in Berlin. Prior to joining MIT, he was a faculty member at the University of Michigan.

Claire Luchette is an assistant professor in the Comparative Media Studies/Writing program. Luchette is the author of the novel “Agatha of Little Neon.” The winner of a Whiting Award and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree, Luchette has received fellowships from the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, MacDowell, Yaddo, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Their writing appears in Best American Short Stories, Ploughshares, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. Their second novel, “Swans,” and a story collection, “Big Whoop,” are forthcoming.

Shota Momma is an associate professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. Momma is a specialist in psycholinguistics and its interaction with linguistic theory — with a particular focus on the mechanisms of sentence production. Previously, Momma taught as an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He earned a PhD in linguistics from the University of Maryland and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California San Diego. 

Lindsey Raymond PhD ’24 is an assistant professor in the Department of Economics, holding an MIT Schwarzman College of Computing shared position with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Her research examines how new technologies shape labor markets and market competition, and how insights from economics can inform algorithm design. She is a Schmidt Sciences AI2050 Early Career Fellow and served as a staff economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers in 2021–22. Before joining MIT, Raymond was a postdoc at Microsoft Research. She earned her PhD from MIT and her BA from Yale University.

Makoto Harris Takao is the Class of 1957 Career Development Professor in the Music and Theater Arts Section. Working at the intersection of cultural history, religious studies, and musicology, Takao maps Japan’s entanglement with other world regions over the past 500 years. His current book project, “The Clef and the Cross: Music and Kirishitan Transculturation in Sixteenth-Century Japan,” asks what early modern Japanese Catholicism sounded like and how it was understood and expressed through Buddhist frameworks of sound, music, and movement. His work to date has appeared in such venues as Early Music, Journal of Music History Pedagogy, Journal of Religious History, Journal of Jesuit Studies, Zeithistorische Forschungen, and Oxford Bibliographies in Music. A player of the viola da gamba, Takao completed a joint PhD in history and musicology at the University of Western Australia. Before joining MIT, he was an assistant professor of musicology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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Following the questions where they lead

Ever since she was a child playing on her family’s farmland in Wisconsin, Bailey Flanigan was guided by her own selective, yet wide-ranging, curiosity. Describing her young self as spirited and a bit unruly, she directed her energies to everything from building booby traps to doing experimental construction projects to exploring an intense interest in medicine to writing fiction and music to planning nonprofit organizations to help lessen social inequality.

By high school, Flanigan was intensely drawn to particular subjects.

“I found myself unmotivated to take all the AP [advanced placement] classes for the sake of it. My interest was captured by classes where I could be creative — where I could use math to solve real-world problems, creatively write, make music, connect distant ideas, or deeply explore the humanities — and I worked on such classes obsessively, as an opportunity to explore my intuitions and interests,” she says. “Instead of joining clubs, I ended up spending a lot of time thinking and creating on my own, and trying to understand what I enjoyed.”

Today Flanigan is a shared faculty member between the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and the MIT departments of Political Science and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), and a principal investigator in the MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems. She has been involved in research at the University of Wisconsin, the National Institutes of Health, Google, and Carnegie Mellon, Drexel, Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford universities. Her current work focuses on using computational and mathematical tools to create new avenues for meaningful democratic participation.

Perhaps not surprisingly, her path has crossed huge expanses of subject matter and specialties — from medicine and bioengineering to public health, and from economics to her joint appointment at MIT in computer science and political science, which began in fall 2025.

“My trajectory across disciplines was just a result of me chasing down the problems I felt were most pressing or inspiring at the time. Along the way, I wound up in a lot of situations where I was less well-trained or qualified in the standard ways. While this was sometimes precarious, it was also incredibly fun, and it cultivated my ability to learn the languages of new disciplines more easily — a skill pretty much essential to my current research and job.”

In college at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Flanigan worked in a wet lab on therapeutic targets in cancer and computationally on tumor genetics. She says she found the research intellectually interesting, but eventually began to wonder about whether it would have the kind of impact she wanted.

“At the time, I started to worry that the science I was developing might only, in the best case, be used by a small, relatively wealthy fraction of the world, when there were people suffering from much more-preventable diseases in much larger numbers,” she says.

So Flanigan moved toward public health, where she researched microfluidic devices for HIV detection that could be used in low-resource settings. Still bothered by the circumstances driving these settings’ limited resources to begin with, she then started to dabble in economics.

Around the same time, Flanigan’s academic advisors were chipping away at preconceptions she held about her own abilities.

Steven Wright, a professor of law and creative writing at UW-Madison, served as Flanigan’s informal mentor throughout college, and they worked together on a case at the Wisconsin Innocence Project.

“He guided me through my evolving interests in science, social inequality, and economics,” she says. “He was one of the people most responsible for convincing me that I could aim higher in my career, and that I could actually go to places like MIT or Harvard.”

Also while she was in college, the two heads of the UW-Madison scholarship office, Debbie Berger and Julie Stubbs, sent Flanigan repeated emails, encouraging her to apply for a Goldwater Scholarship.

“I kept deleting their emails, thinking they were spam — I didn’t think I was the kind of person that would apply for something like that. Their persistence convinced me to apply, and in the process, the horizons I perceived for myself started to change,” she says.

After graduating from UW-Madison, Flanigan worked as a predoctoral research assistant in economics at Princeton. There, Professor Evita Nestoridi, now an associate professor at Stony Brook University, also provided a pivotal moment of support, letting Flanigan audit her real analysis class.

“Evita’s class was my first real exposure to formal mathematics and proofs, and I loved it so much that it completely changed my career trajectory,” Flanigan says. “Despite my initial doubts, she convinced me that I could do math at the graduate level; because of her encouragement, I applied to computer science PhD programs the subsequent fall.”

Choosing Carnegie Mellon for her PhD, Flanigan began research on social choice and democratic decision-making, serving her dual passions for technical research and the issue of “who gets what and why,” she says, quoting Nobel Prize-winning economist Al Roth. 

Flanigan has developed algorithms that randomly choose participants of citizens’ assemblies, designed for the common case where willing participants self-select in ways that do not reflect the larger population. In a policy brief, Flanigan gave a hypothetical  example of an assembly on artificial intelligence, whose willing participants might skew toward younger, more educated citizens with an interest in technology, leaving other groups underrepresented despite their stake in the issue. The tools Flanigan has developed help balance representation with such features of the selection process as equality among individuals’ chances to participate, resistance to manipulation of the process, and transparency — all of which can affect the general perception of a decision-making group’s legitimacy.

Flanigan’s work is now deployed on panelot.org, a widely used open-access website hosting algorithms for randomly selecting citizen assembly participants.

“The site basically walks practitioners through a series of otherwise very technical trade-offs, making those trade-offs legible and then optimizing according to the priorities practitioners dictate,” she says.

Flanigan says she is motivated to improve how the public makes political decisions, “because if any political solution is going to be viable, the public needs to feel that it was arrived at via a legitimate political process — at least under the forms of government I find most appealing.”

Beyond her work on citizens’ assemblies, Flanigan’s research is exploring new avenues related to how to more systematically get public input on complex decisions, and how the format of questions we ask people in preference elicitation contexts can affect the substance of what we conclude.

“I feel so lucky to be studying these questions from within both political science and EECS, because I have the freedom to explore both the political and technical substance of tools for more direct governance as deeply as I want,” she says.

Flanigan’s curiosity-driven journey through widely varying terrain feels right in the MIT environment, she says.

“From the beginning, I got this sense of belonging at MIT — like my ways of thinking and problem-solving, which had seemed peculiar in many situations, actually made me belong more,” she says. “This was a super refreshing feeling, and it has been 100 percent borne out since I arrived.”

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How an influx of salt may affect microbial ecosystems

As sea levels rise due to climate change, encroaching sea water will likely make freshwater environments saltier. In a new study, MIT researchers have shown how that increase in salinity might affect microbial ecosystems found in environments such as rivers and estuaries.

These microbial communities play important roles in the carbon cycle, and they also help to decompose organic matter such as algae. The MIT team found that when salt levels rise, these populations lose diversity as faster-growing strains tend to take over the community, but they maintain their overall growth rate.

“At higher salinity, you lose diversity, which is ultimately not good for an ecosystem. But what we were surprised at is that in the meantime, even though diversity decreases, the growth of the community and the production of biomass is not impacted that much,” says Jana Huisman, an MIT postdoc and the lead author of the new study.

Jeff Gore, an MIT professor of physics, is the senior author of the paper, which appears today in Nature Microbiology. Martina Dal Bello, a former MIT postdoc who is now an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Yale University, is also an author of the study.

Rising salt levels

Microbes that live in aquatic environments are typically adapted to thrive in fresh or salt water, or somewhere in between. Microbes that live in higher salt environments have cell walls that are optimized to resist osmotic pressure, and membrane transporters that can pump sodium ions out of the cell.

Freshwater lakes and rivers have salt concentrations around 1 gram of salt per liter of water (g/L), while oceans can reach 35 g/L. As the climate warms and sea levels rise, those oceanic waters may seep into estuaries and other inland bodies of water, increasing their salinity.

“When you think about climate change, you can think about rising temperatures, which is very common, but also a lot of other environmental stresses are going to increase,” Huisman says.

Huisman is from the Netherlands, a country with an extensive coastal delta, and she was interested in exploring how changes in salinity might affect microbial ecosystems in those aquatic habitats. The new study builds on previous work from Gore’s lab showing that higher seawater temperatures tend to favor slower-growing bacteria. 

For the new study, the researchers took samples from three aquatic environments with varying salinity: the Charles River near the MIT Sailing Pavilion (4 g/L), Boston Harbor (30 g/L), and a beach in Nahant, Massachusetts (35 g/L). Each community contained hundreds of species of microbes. The researchers then grew each population in three environments of varying salinity — 16, 31, or 46 g/L.

Over two weeks, the researchers measured the communities’ growth rates and found that overall, each community maintained the same growth rate at each of the three concentrations. However, in the communities exposed to higher salt environments, the overall composition became less diverse. Further studies showed that these communities tended to be dominated by faster-growing species. 

“We saw that those communities that had been propagated at higher salinity had reached a markedly different composition than the ones that lower salinity,” Huisman says.

Natural ecosystems

To explore whether their lab results might correspond to what happens in natural ecosystems, the researchers analyzed publicly available genomic data from microbes found in different aquatic ecosystems, including the Chesapeake Bay, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Baltic Sea.

For this portion of the study, the researchers focused on a genetic marker called the 16S rRNA gene copy number, which can be used as a proxy for the maximum growth rate that a species can attain. The more copies of this gene that a species has, the faster its intrinsic growth rate.

The researchers found that in these natural communities, environments with higher salinity also tended to be dominated by faster-growing species.

“When we first saw that, it was very exciting — that, indeed, what we found in the lab seems to also be represented in data from natural communities, sampled across a range of different environments,” Huisman says. “You see the same signatures in such data, and that’s highly suggestive that what we found in the lab might also be true in natural environments.”

One potential drawback to this loss of diversity is a reduction in microbial populations’ ability to withstand other types of environmental stress, the researchers say.

In this study, the researchers did not investigate the functions of the individual bacterial strains that ended up becoming more prevalent. Some of them may play beneficial roles, but it’s also possible that some of them might be pathogenic strains.

“Whether you want faster-growing species to take over or not might also be related to what the identity of those species is. That is something that I’m interested in looking at in the future,” Huisman says. 

The research was funded by a Human Frontier Science Program Fellowship and a Schmidt Science Polymath Award.

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Diana Grass: Listening to the body’s language

Growing up in Colombia, Diana Grass had a simple response whenever someone told her something was impossible.

“I’ll figure it out.”

It’s a phrase that she still lives by today as PhD candidate in the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology (HST), as she develops soft bioelectronic devices to study the physiological signals through which the brain and body communicate. 

“I’ve always been fascinated by one question: How do complex systems work?” Grass says.

An instinct to get to the bottom of things has guided Grass’ unconventional academic journey across continents and disciplines. Before becoming a neuroscientist and engineer, Grass studied philology and education to understand how language evolves, preserves knowledge, and shapes human communication. Looking back, she sees a common thread. “I wasn’t just studying language,” she says. “I was learning how complex systems communicate.”

But it wasn’t until she moved to the United States and began working as a medical interpreter that her scientific interests took a new direction.

“Every day, I translated conversations between physicians and patients with neurological disorders,” she says. “Watching those interactions sparked a fascination with the brain. I was intrigued by how a single organ could shape how we communicate, and ultimately who we are.”

Working alongside clinicians, Grass watched them rely on laboratory tests, medical imaging, and vital signs to understand what was happening inside the body. Despite remarkable advances in medical imaging and diagnostics, clinicians still rely largely on isolated snapshots of biological processes that are continuously changing inside the body.

“The body is communicating all the time,” she says. “We still lack the tools to understand its language.”

Determined to better understand the brain, Grass returned to school to study neuroscience with a minor in pre-medicine. She joined an immunology laboratory at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, where she investigated neuroimmune communication and gained a new appreciation for the body’s interconnected physiology.

“Until then, I had been fascinated by the brain,” she says. “My work in immunology made me realize that the nervous system doesn’t function in isolation,” she says. “It continuously communicates with the immune system and peripheral organs to coordinate physiology and maintain homeostasis. To understand health and disease, we have to understand how those interactions preserve or disrupt that balance.” 

That realization transformed her scientific focus from understanding the brain to understanding how the nervous system coordinates physiology through continuous communication with the rest of the body, beginning with the immune system.

The complexity of that question ultimately brought Grass to pursue a PhD in medical engineering and medical physics with the HST program. She works in the Bioelectronics Group, led by Polina Anikeeva, the Matoula S. Salapatas Professor and head of MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and also uses facilities in the T.J. Rodgers Laboratory and MIT.nano.

Today, Grass develops soft bioelectronic devices that integrate seamlessly with soft peripheral tissues without damaging them, to continuously monitor multiple physiological signals while enabling electrical recording and stimulation of neural circuits. These technologies provide a new way to investigate how neural communication coordinates physiology across the entire body. This knowledge could enable earlier diagnosis, more precise therapies, and a new generation of bioelectronic medicine.

For Grass, the work has taken on an even deeper significance since becoming a mother. Grass has two school-age children and for her, the possibility of developing technologies that help detect disease earlier and personalize treatments isn’t just a scientific goal; it’s one she hopes will shape the future of medicine for the next generation. 

“I want to contribute to a future where medicine understands the body physiology well enough to predict disease instead of simply reacting to it, personalize therapies with greater precision, and ultimately give families more healthy years together,” she says. “Because once you become a parent, every scientific question becomes deeply human.”

The complexity of Grass’ research has required her to step well beyond her original training. After studying neuroscience and immunology, she immersed herself in materials science, systems physiology, device fabrication, bioelectronics, and surgery to develop the tools needed to answer fundamental biological questions.

“The scientific question was bigger than any one discipline,” she says. “HST taught me to begin with biology, not disciplines. Once you understand the biological principles, medicine, engineering, and science stop being separate fields. They become complementary ways of answering the same question.”

The constant need to learn a new discipline has been both the most rewarding and challenging part of Grass’ research so far. 

“Every time I crossed into a new discipline, I felt like an immigrant again,” she says. “I had to learn a new language, understand a new culture, and earn the trust of people who had spent their careers there.”

Grass’ passion for understanding cultures extends well beyond the lab. Soon after arriving at MIT, she co-founded the Graduate First-Generation Low-Income Student Group to create a supportive space for students and connect them with the resources they need to thrive. What began as a small initiative has grown into a community of more than 300 graduate students representing over 60 countries, connecting students with faculty, alumni, entrepreneurs, and industry leaders.

“It has been really rewarding to see new GFLI leaders emerge and continue this legacy,” Grass says.

As an avid traveler, Grass’ favorite pastime is exploring new cultures, whether that be through learning a new traditional recipe or a new language. She speaks four languages fluently and can say “thank you” in roughly 50 more.

Whether she’s cooking Thai food with her children or introducing friends to recipes from around the world, she sees food as another language capable of connecting people across cultures. That same philosophy shapes how she thinks about science.

“I’ve realized that every culture has its own language and every scientific discipline its own way of understanding the world,” she says. “Looking back, every stage of my life has been about understanding how complex systems communicate. Today, my goal is to help medicine understand the principles that govern communication across the human body in health and disease.”

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