Fact Sheet: Supporting MIT’s Jewish Community

MIT leadership has in the strongest terms rejected antisemitism and taken thoughtful and steadfast action to prevent it, to promote student-wellbeing, to respond to complaints raised by community members, and to address policy violations. 

Some examples of steps MIT has taken to address concerns of antisemitism

• MIT President Sally Kornbluth and other senior leaders have sent multiple campus-wide letters and video messages condemning reports of antisemitism on campus. 
• Prior to October 7, MIT joined the Hillel Campus Climate Initiative, which helps universities build awareness of and take action against antisemitism. Learnings from that engagement continue to guide MIT’s campus response. 
• MIT increased security around campus, including at the Office of Religious, Spiritual, and Ethical Life building, which houses MIT Hillel.
• MIT participated in the Brandeis Leadership Symposium on Antisemitism in Higher Education.
• MIT created multiple opportunities for training, education, and dialogue, e.g.: 
  • American Jewish Committee training on antisemitism for Academic Council, which comprises the Institute’s senior leadership 
  • ADL training on antisemitism for MIT’s Bias Response Team 
  • Institute-level educational programming, including an event featuring Professor Pamela Nadell—director of the Jewish Studies Program at American University and a scholar of antisemitism in America
• The Institute updated, publicized, and enforced its policies on protests and demonstrations and posters/displays.
• MIT provided financial support for two years of weekly lunches focused on supporting MIT’s Jewish community.
• MIT’s leadership provided support for MIT-Kalaniyot, which brings Israel-based faculty and postdocs to MIT with the intent of building and strengthening ties between Israeli researchers and the MIT community.
• The Institute established a cross-functional team with representatives from the Institute Discrimination and Harassment Response Office (IDHR), Office of Student Conduct and Community Standards (OSCCS), Division of Student Life, Human Resources, and the Office of General Counsel to promptly and fairly triage reports of antisemitism and other forms of bias relating to the conflict in the Middle East. 
• Instituted disciplinary proceedings for policy violations stemming from campus protests and related activities, which resulted in significant sanctions for a number of students, including suspensions, expulsions, and numerous individual bans from being on campus, as well as permanent derecognition of a student organization. 
• And MIT established a Title VI coordinator.

Student discipline process improvements

Apart from individual student discipline cases as described above, MIT conducted a holistic review of its student discipline process, which resulted in a number of policy and procedure changes, including: 

• The senior administration has a more direct role in reviewing significant student discipline cases, with the Vice Chancellor for Student Life regularly conferring with the Chair of the Committee on Discipline (COD) and participating in hearing panels in serious cases. 
• The role of the Senior Associate Dean of Student Conduct and Community Standards has been enhanced and elevated, reporting directly to the Vice Chancellor for Student Life. 
• A more streamlined process allows the Chair of the COD to take action in response to noncompliance with previous COD sanctions.
• Additional sanctions were added to the COD Rules, giving the COD a broader range of tools to address student misconduct.
• Enhanced training on discriminatory harassment were made available to COD members. 

Over the last couple years, MIT has experienced a significant decline in the number of reports of student misconduct arising out of allegations of antisemitism or other forms of bias based on religion or ethnic/national origin. 

Courts have dismissed lawsuits claiming antisemitism at MIT

As a result of MIT’s actions, including specifically some of those described above, federal courts have dismissed claims of antisemitic harassment and discrimination asserted against MIT under Title VI. In doing so, the courts have acknowledged the escalating steps MIT has taken to promote a safe, inclusive community for its Jewish community members. For example, in a unanimous decision by the First Circuit Court of Appeals holding that MIT satisfied its Title VI obligations, the Court noted:   

• “As the protest gatherings occurred over the course of seven months, culminating in the Kresge Lawn encampment, MIT took an escalating series of actions aimed at calming the turmoil without violence… Even if we accept plaintiffs' position that some conduct of some protestors was antisemitic, that would not provide a Title VI pretext for requiring MIT to eliminate the protests entirely. In that respect, by managing the situation so as to avoid escalation and violence, MIT was much more effective than plaintiffs claim.” 
• “[A]ny reasonable school administrator in MIT's position could have reasonably surmised that its progressively evolving responses prevented the on-campus conflict from exploding into real violence between October 2023 and May 2024.”

Importantly, MIT took these steps to protect the MIT community even while the Court concluded that much of the campus protest activity at MIT amounted to legally protected expression and not a violation of Title VI: 

• “This absence of consensus reflects ongoing debate as to the relationship between anti-Zionism and antisemitism – debate that our constitutional scheme resolves through discourse, not judicial fiat. Indeed, the debate on occasion has been formal and high profile…We decline to interpret Title VI as arming either side of that debate with the powers of a censor.”

2026 Quality of Life survey results

Below are data from the spring 2026 Quality of Life survey, a community-wide survey administered every two years to better understand the lives of faculty, staff, postdoctoral scholars, and students. The data reflect responses from those who selected “Judaism” as their religion, alone or in part (respondents were able to select more than one religion).

Overall, how satisfied are you being a student at MIT? 
(Percentages are a sum of respondents who selected “very satisfied” + “somewhat satisfied”)

Jewish Undergraduates:
2024: 87%
2026: 97% (compared to 86% for all undergraduate students) 

Jewish Graduate Students:
2024: 78%
2026: 94% (compared to 88% for all undergraduate students)

I feel that I belong at MIT. 
(Percentages are a sum of respondents who selected “strongly agree” or “somewhat agree”)

Jewish Undergraduates
2024: 83%
2026: 92% (compared to 80% for all graduate students)

Jewish Graduate Students 
2024: 70%
2026: 79% (compared to 79% for all undergraduate students)

Notably, not a single Jewish undergraduate respondent in 2026 disagreed with the statement “I feel that I belong at MIT.”

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Harriet having it all

In winter 1997, at age 60, when many researchers might be looking forward to retirement, Harriet Latham Robinson SM ’61, PhD ’65 was pursuing a faculty position as the chief of microbiology and immunology at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. 

She got the job. 

There, she would also co-found GeoVax, a biotechnology company, based on her preclinical research, including work on developing an HIV-1 vaccine. 

Often, as the only woman in a room throughout much of her career, and in the still-developing and male-dominated field of molecular biology, her colleagues were referred to as “doctor” or “professor” at scientific symposia and committee meetings. 

“In contrast,” she recalls, “I was Harriet.”

Becoming a scientist

Robinson was born in 1938, the second of four children, to a mother, Ruth, and a father, Allen, from Ohio and Connecticut, respectively. After finishing grammar school, she attended the Girls’ Latin School, a public magnet school for college-bound young women. Although the school offered only two classes in science — one semester of chemistry and a health class — Robinson credits her time there for inspiring a lifelong love of learning, especially history and languages. 

“At our 50th and 60th high school reunions, I was struck by what my Girls’ Latin school classmates had done with their lives,” she says. “We had become not only wives, mothers, teachers, and nurses we were supposed to become, but also physicians, lawyers, professors, politicians, and businesswomen.” 

Robinson pursued her undergraduate studies at Swarthmore College, where she intended to study political science. After an introductory biology course, however, she switched her major. Despite the shift, a love of languages persisted: Robinson took Russian and, the summer after her senior year of college, served as a Russian-English speaking guide at the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow. Despite mounting tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, she served again in a similar role from September 1961 to January 1962 for a traveling transportation exhibition in Russia and Ukraine, where she was stationed by a Ford Thunderbird, wearing a TWA stewardess uniform.

“We were true entertainment, as well as education, and I worked to do my best to answer questions about America,” she says. “I was most surprised by the pride the Russian people took in the post-World War II accomplishments of their country.” 

Robinson might not have had a career in science at all had it not been for a dean at Radcliffe College who recognized Robinson’s interest in science. Robinson had thought it appropriate, as a young lady, to pursue marriage and to only further her education to become a teacher or nurse. Seeking permission to take chemistry instead of education courses to fulfill requirements for getting a teaching degree, she was referred to a dean who considered it perfectly appropriate for a young woman to pursue another career. Robinson recalls that the dean declared, “My dear, you want to be a scientist.” 

The foundation for a career

Robinson was soon accepted at MIT and was offered a fellowship to teach in an introductory biology lab to help pay her way. She returned from Moscow just five days before the start of a master’s program in biochemistry. In the Department of Biology at MIT, there were only a handful of women, no female faculty, and few ladies’ rooms in 1959. 

It was there that she met Walter “Wally” J.K. Tannenberg, a onetime partner but lifelong friend and companion, an MD taking courses at MIT. He wasn’t “at all taken aback by my becoming an educated woman,” Robinson says. He taught her to ski, and they sailed his lightening, the Ondine, in circles around Robinson’s parents’ comparatively slow motor sailor, the Palometa. 

Their breakup just before the winter holidays in 1963 precipitated her reentry to graduate school, to pursue her thesis work in the lab of Jim Darnell; she threw herself into studies to sit a qualifying exam less than a month after reentry. 

“A Bell Labs physicist who had just joined the Darnell Lab opined that any concept in biology could be mastered in two weeks,” Robinson says. “Much to everyone’s amazement, I not only passed my qualifying exam, but did much better than expected.”

It was at the University of California at Berkeley during her postdoctoral work that she met her husband. Although the marriage would not last the test of time, Robinson and her husband were blessed with three boys, each 13 months apart.

Robinson knew that she wanted to take time away from her career to stay home with her children before they entered primary school. As a graduate student at MIT, to prepare for both having a career and pursuing motherhood, Robinson hired a housekeeper and committed to being in the lab for only a typical 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. workday. If she were to compete with her male counterparts and be with her children, she needed to be able to get things done while working short hours. 

Robinson successfully completed her thesis work in just over two years.

“The difference between bearing children and rising up professional ladders is that you can start up the professional ladder after you are 40,” she advises. “Such is more problematic for having children.”

Robinson’s thesis work at MIT concerned how DNA, which is identical in all cells of an organism, produces different cell types from the same genetic blueprint. She explored this question through the lens of messenger RNA, a gene product that determines which DNA sequences are expressed in a cell. Later, her work on cancer-causing viruses in chickens would help lay the groundwork for gaining insight into genes that can cause tumors to form. 

“In contrast to becoming a wife, becoming a PhD from MIT did not falter, but rather provided me with the foundations for a career I loved in which I used molecular biology and chickens to study the genetic basis of cancer and pioneered the use of DNA as a new method of vaccination,” Robinson says.

Cancer-causing viruses

Robinson, supported by an National Science Foundation fellowship, pursued postdoc training at the University of California at Berkeley, in the lab of Harry Rubin. The Rubin Lab specialized in work on a virus known to cause cancer: the Rous sarcoma virus, which causes rapid tumor onset when introduced into chickens. RNA, it had recently been discovered, was the underlying genetic cause of tumors developing in chickens exposed to the Rous sarcoma virus. It cannot, however, do this deadly work without co-infection with something called a helper virus — in this case, avian leukosis virus. 

Both Rous sarcoma virus and its helper viruses were retroviruses, which can make DNA copies from RNA sequences, a departure from the previously accepted dogma that DNA is only transcribed into RNA, and not the other way around.

Robinson joined the Worcester Foundation for Biomedical Research in 1977, where she continued research on Rous helper viruses and had the opportunity to run her own lab for the first time. In 1998, she was recruited to be a professor of pathology at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. While there, she conducted pioneering studies on the use of DNA for vaccination and worked on developing an AIDS vaccine. 

In 1999, she moved again, this time to step into the role of chief of microbiology and immunology at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University, where she began testing her candidate HIV vaccines in primates. While at the University of Massachusetts and Emory, Robinson and her lab used DNA vaccines, both with and without a poxvirus booster vaccine provided by Bernie Moss at the National Institutes of Health, to immunize animals against influenza, HIV, measles, and Ebola.

“From the early days of DNA vaccines, I had wanted to start a company to help move DNA vaccines from bench to bedside,” she says. 

Thus, GeoVax, short for “Georgia Vaccines,” was born. Robinson co-founded it with Don Hildebrand in 2001 after her move to Yerkes; Robinson would serve as chief scientific officer and a member of the board of directors during her tenure at the company. 

GeoVax successfully moved Robinson’s candidate AIDS vaccine into human clinical trials. These trials were stopped due to the generally poor performance of HIV vaccines in clinical trials, compared to the outstanding therapeutic potential of more recently developed anti-HIV drugs. GeoVax, however, continues to work on vaccines for Mpox, Covid-19, and Ebola, and has expanded its scope to include a cancer treatment.  

A well-deserved retirement 

After rounds of good-natured roasting from colleagues at Emory University and GeoVax, Robinson retired and has been enjoying returning to Palo Alto, California, where her oldest son, Bill, and his wife now live. 

Ultimately, Robinson hopes that her story can encourage everyone, especially young women, not to let pursuing a challenging and enriching career prevent them from realizing the dream of having a family.

“I have had a wonderful life, far exceeding what I ever could have anticipated,” Robinson says. “I have had international adventure, the romance of a man who truly loved me, the joy of motherhood, and the warmth, wonder, and adventure of family and friends, and last, but not least, the exhilaration of a career in molecular biology.”

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MIT engineers find a way to deliver drugs directly to the esophagus

There are few treatment options available for people with disorders of the esophagus. Delivering drugs directly to this part of the body is difficult, so patients are usually treated with systemic drugs, which can have unwanted side effects.

To overcome that challenge, MIT engineers developed a gel-like oral drug formulation that can coat the mucosal lining of the esophagus after being swallowed, allowing drugs to pass through the tissue.

The formulation, which includes a hydrogel and other key ingredients that promote rapid drug absorption, could be used to deliver antibodies including infliximab, used to treat a number of autoimmune diseases, or other types of antibodies or small-molecule drugs.

“There are many people with esophageal disease, and if you look at drugs for these conditions, they’re very limited in their ability to target this part of the body and it’s very difficult to develop them. We hope this platform will make it easier to develop systems that can help patients suffering from these conditions,” says Giovanni Traverso, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, a gastroenterologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and an associate member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

Traverso is the senior author of the new study, which appears today in Nature Biomedical Engineering. Former MIT postdoc Christina Karavasili, now an assistant professor at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece, is the paper’s lead author.

Direct delivery

One of the most common disorders of the esophagus is eosinophilic esophagitis, a type of inflammation that is caused by food allergies and leads the esophagus to close up, making it impossible to swallow food. Crohn’s disease can also cause inflammation of the esophagus. 

These disorders are usually treated with systemic drugs, including infliximab, an antibody that neutralizes an inflammatory protein called tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-alpha). However, this drug is an immunosuppressant that can lead to a higher risk for infections and other health problems.

Delivering the drug directly to the esophageal tissue could reduce those side effects, but this is inherently challenging because drugs taken orally pass through the esophagus so quickly. Adding to the difficulty, the esophagus is lined by a layer of tissue called stratified squamous epithelium, which is very impermeable to drugs.

Injecting drugs into the esophageal tissue is another option, but that is uncomfortable for patients and inconvenient because it has to be done at a doctor’s office. There is also at least one anti-inflammatory steroid drug that is formulated as a thick mixture, allowing it to remain in the esophagus longer after being swallowed, but the drug still has some difficulty passing through the impermeable squamous layer.

In this study, the researchers set out to develop new drug formulations that would include molecules that could increase the permeability of those esophageal cells, allowing more of the drug to pass through. 

To identify molecules that would enhance permeability, the researchers designed a screening system that mimics the structure of the esophagus. This system contains esophageal tissue pressed between two vertical plates. Drug formulations can be poured into the top of the system, simulating oral ingestion. The researchers can then measure how much of the drug passes through the tissue and is collected by wells in one of the plates.

Using this system, the researchers were able to measure how different excipients — inactive ingredients that help enhance drug effects — affect the permeability of the esophageal tissue. First, they tested about 100 different compounds and identified several top candidates. Then, they tested pairs of these excipients and found that the most effective combination was a pair of bile salts called sodium chenodeoxycholate and sodium cholate.

These salts appear to work together to loosen up the cell-cell junctions that normally act as a barrier to drug molecule entry. The researchers added those bile salts to a polysaccharide-derived hydrogel, which has a viscous consistency that allows it to lightly coat the lining of the esophagus.

“The hydrogel helps the formulation remain on the esophageal surface for longer, while the bile salts help increase transport across the tissue,” Karavasili says. “Our data suggest that the bile salts temporarily loosen these cell–cell junctions, mainly by interacting with calcium ions that help maintain junction integrity. This creates a more permissive pathway between the cells, allowing larger molecules to move into the mucosal tissue more efficiently.”

Minimizing side effects

In tests in animals, the researchers showed that this formulation could be used to effectively deliver infliximab to the esophagus. They also found that the loosening of the cell-cell junctions was temporary, and the cells returned to normal within three days.

This kind of delivery could help to avoid the side effects that patients sometimes experience when infliximab is given systemically, the researchers say. 

“We were interested in delivering anti-TNFs as a model drug, but also to help people who suffer from conditions like Crohn’s disease to have options that could be delivered to the site,” Traverso says. “If we have the possibility of site-directed delivery, we may be able to mitigate systemic side effects from these immunosuppressing agents.”

The researchers are now working on further optimizing the formulation for potential testing in humans. One key goal is to ensure that the gel adheres for long enough to deliver the drugs, but not so long as to cause discomfort for patients. The researchers are also exploring the possibility of using this approach to deliver other types of drugs. 

“This is a platform to enable the development of drug-delivery systems for the esophagus, which hasn’t been possible before because the tools haven’t existed,” Traverso says.

The research was funded by the Karl van Tassel Career Development Professorship, the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, the Division of Gastroenterology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), which notes that the views and conclusions contained in this article are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies of the United States government.

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The long history of vaccine hesitancy

Debates about vaccines are a recurring feature of contemporary politics. It turns out they actually date back more than 200 years, since the development of the first smallpox vaccine. MIT Professor Thomas Levenson, one of the country’s leading science writers, explores this important history in a new book about the contours of anti-vaccination thought. Levenson identifies different types of arguments vaccination opponents have developed through history, to help shed light on our current debates. He spoke with MIT News about his new book, “A Pox on Fools: The True Believers, Grifters, and Cynics Who Convinced Us to Reject Vaccines,” published this week by Penguin Random House. 

Q: Your book is about the longer history of anti-vaccination arguments. How far back does this go, and what have those arguments been? 

A: Hesitation, skepticism, and outright opposition to vaccines is not a new thing. It didn’t just happen starting in the late 1990s. Opposition to vaccines dates back to the beginning of the vaccine era, around the early 19th century. The first kind of opposition to vaccines is this sense that it violates the moral or the natural order. If you believed that God has authority over all of us and is mindful of everything, intervening in the disease process could seem blasphemous. 

In the early 19th century, the first true vaccine, the smallpox vaccine, used material from a related disease, cowpox, that doesn’t cause human beings to fall ill but does provide immunity to smallpox. That shifted the initial focus on God’s plans to the notion that vaccination — sticking some cow-stuff into people — violated the natural order. That sort of uneasiness is easily co-opted by a broader philosophy that says: If you align yourself with nature, you don’t need to use vaccines. 

I want to emphasize that in the early history of the anti-vaccine movement, there were reasonable fears being expressed. That changes over time, because science advances and the mystery of vaccines falls away. Still, the current anti-vaccine movement includes an impulse we all have: We wish to be in control. I would never deny the value of exercise, sunlight, and sanitation, but they are not sufficient when you are faced with many pathogens, and that’s what the modern anti-vaccine movement obscures. We share this world with bacteria and viruses that do their thing no matter what we eat or how much we exercise. 

Q: One section of your book explores the argument that vaccines have been actively harmful. What is that historical trajectory like? 

A: The idea that vaccines are not just unnecessary but actively bad for you is certainly very contemporary, but it too goes back to the beginning of the vaccine era. The first true smallpox vaccine came into public use in 1798. Very soon afterward people started pointing to different harms. Most of them were spurious. They were just making things up or mistaking another infection that was already there. But there were some flaws in the early forms of vaccination. People thought it conferred life-long immunity, and that wasn’t always the case. Additionally, people mistook syphilis infections for cowpox infections and transmitted syphilis to healthy people. There were maybe 750 cases in Europe.

What is repeated over and over in the history of vaccination is that when problems became apparent, people found a way to address them. A problem with diphtheria antitoxin at the turn of the century led directly to the first U.S. regulatory body, the Division of Biological Controls. And when the first polio vaccine was released to the public in 1955, one of the five drug companies making it had shoddy production practices. Thousands got sick, a hundred died, and some were paralyzed. The flawed vaccine was identified after two weeks on sale and stopped cold, and that ended that particular problem. What came out of it was the development of an FDA vaccine division with teeth. 

This is an area where the rhetorical skill of the anti-vaccine movement is on display. Anything human beings do carries some risk. Anything you do medically. I had my hip replaced last year. That carries some risk, such as surgical site infections. Well, the risks of vaccines are incredibly small. The most common response is a sore arm the next day, and maybe feeling under the weather. There is extremely close control over manufacturing now. We have stories of great harm, but the various specific allegations of the last 30 or 35 years have proven to be incorrect. But there’s a power to an anecdote versus statistics. 

Q: This book raises an issue also explored in your last one, “So Very Small,” that the sheer success of vaccines has, paradoxically, created a situation in which people take their effects for granted and find it easier to argue against them. Can you explain this phenomenon?

A: The reason that occurs is because vaccines have worked so brilliantly well. At the turn of the century, life expectancy was much lower, 47 years in the U.S. Several top causes of death were infectious diseases, and child mortality was high. Now, life expectancy is around 80 years in every developed nation, and child mortality is a tiny fraction of 1 percent. By 1970, you had almost a complete set of vaccines against what used to be called childhood diseases. And those diseases, up until extremely recently, had essentially disappeared. And that’s amazing. 

In the 1950s, before the measles vaccine, for instance, everybody had an experience of what it meant to be at at the mercy of waves of infection. But by the 1970s, that was no longer the expected, ordinary, common experience of raising kids. So we’ve forgotten how unpleasant even an ordinary case of one of these diseases is that you recover from, much less the more severe problems and death. In 1952, there was the largest polio outbreak in U.S. history, and it was scary to let your kid go to the movies or a swimming pool. They could go to someone’s birthday party, come back, and two weeks later start feeling muscle aches and a fever, and two weeks after that were maybe paralyzed, or dead. Then in 1955 the Salk polio vaccine came out. We don’t live that way any more. 

And so, because infectious disease seems like a nonexistent threat, vaccines, even with a tiny potential of harm, are made to seem worse because we don’t realize what happens if we let our vaccine coverage lapse. Well, we’re starting to get a glimpse of it, because the measles rate in the U.S. is shooting up, and we see what happens when vaccine coverage wanes, and in particular, when we lose herd immunity. In every population, some people cannot be vaccinated: infants who are too young, some people who have had transplants and are on immunosuppressive drugs, or the elderly in whom sometimes immunity wanes. Some diseases are so infectious, and measles is famous for this, that about 95 percent of a population must be vaccinated or the disease spreads. If we’re not at that threshold, every newborn is at risk. 

We don’t know what it’s like to live with the genuine risk and fear of those diseases. If you were born in 1970, you’re 56 now, and you literally never lived in a world where these diseases were common. 

Q: One source of resistance to vaccines is not strictly medical, but political and philosophical at one level. This also has a lengthy history, it seems. 

A: Another major theme of the anti-vaccination movement is to argue the question: Who has the right to say that somebody else must put something in their body? Again, all this is not new: In the mid-19th century, in the United Kingdom, there was a requirement that children be vaccinated against smallpox, and these mandates brought immediate opposition as an infringement of liberty. 

In 1850 the country’s top doctor, John Simon, physician to the privy council in England, described the right that people claim against vaccination as the liberty of “omissional infanticide,” that you are killing kids by not protecting them. Where do I stand? This is a philosophical question. Does the state have the right to make me do something because it will make society as a whole safer? I think, “Yes.” We live in societies, we depend on each other for all kinds of things, we aren’t just atomized individuals. But I can understand those who say, “No.” I just think it’s wrong. But it’s an argument that’s winning in some places. What I realized as I worked on this book is that the argument against vaccination on philosophical grounds is a lonely view: I owe nothing to anyone, and nothing owes anything to me. I think it’s a fearful one, too.

Q: For the vaccine hesitant, for those questioning vaccines, what will they get out of this book? 

A: On social media you see some people calling vaccine-hesitant people stupid, but that’s not right. People are busy. We all have daily lives. Get the kids ready for school, pack their lunches, go to work, get home, fix dinner. All of us offload some decisions to people we trust as experts. I have a ton of sympathy and empathy both for people trying to think how to make it through an incredibly complicated world. They hear noise about how vaccines are problematic and there’s no easy way for them to get to the bottom of the issue. That’s an opening the anti-vaccine movement exploits.

I hope my book reaches people who are vaccine hesitant. It’s understandable that people might think that where there’s smoke, there’s fire. But when you get down to the bottom question: Do vaccines help human flourishing, do they support the ability of human beings to live healthy, fulfilled lives? Yes, they do. Unequivocally, they are the greatest lifesaving invention humankind has ever come up with.

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MIT affiliates win 2026 Hertz Foundation Fellowships

The Hertz Foundation announced that it awarded 2026 fellowships to three current MIT students as well as an incoming graduate student. They are: Annika Marschner, Alvin Q. Meng, Zachary S. Siegel, and Matthew Wanta.

The prestigious science and technology award provides each recipient with five years of financial support — a stipend and full tuition equivalent — which gives them an unusual measure of autonomy to pursue ground-breaking research in their graduate work.

“What particularly impresses me about this cohort is their fearlessness in taking on new challenges and advancing the frontiers of science,” says Philip Welkhoff, a Hertz Fellow and director of the malaria program at the Gates Foundation, who co-led the selection process. “Each has exhibited tremendous creativity, grit, and vision, and I cannot wait to see what each accomplishes with the freedom to innovate provided by the Hertz Fellowship.”

In addition to funding, fellows receive lifelong access to Hertz Foundation programs including events, mentoring, and networking opportunities, with the over 1,300 fellows named since the fellowship was established in 1963. The connections forged among these individuals have sparked collaborative startups, research, and commercialization in a range of technology, science, and engineering fields. Hertz Fellows have contributed to breakthroughs in such areas as advanced medical therapies, global defense networks, and the James Webb Space Telescope.

This year’s MIT-affiliated recipients are among a total of 19 Hertz Foundation Fellows scholars selected from across the United States. 

Annika Marschner ’26 majored in mechanical engineering and will begin her PhD at MIT in the fall. Her undergraduate research centered on the development of novel technologies for both biointerfacing and bio-inspired systems, including a custom benchtop stereoscope-compatible incubator and extrusion-based desktop bioprinter for MIT’s Raman Lab, a light-based filamented bioprinting system for ETH Zürich’s Tissue Engineering and Biofabrication Lab, and large-scale hardware designs for robotic systems in MIT’s Biomimetic Robotics Lab. Marschner’s undergraduate thesis focused on improving the speed and dexterity of dynamic motions in bio-inspired robotic limbs. As a graduate student, she plans to continue her work on both hardware and control system design in biologically relevant settings, especially in the areas of assistive medical technology and surgical robotics. 

Alvin Q. Meng is doctoral student in inorganic chemistry focusing on understanding the fundamental interactions underlying chemical structure and reactivity. He is currently studying iron-sulfur clusters under the guidance of Professor Daniel L.M. Suess. Born in Tianjin, China, Meng immigrated to the United States at the age of 10. He received undergraduate degrees in chemistry and mathematics from the University of Virginia, where he worked in the research group of Professor W. Dean Harman. His research involved the synthesis and characterization of dihapto-coordinated tungsten complexes of cyclopentadiene, focusing on a class of unusual binuclear species containing a carbon–carbon bond linking two metal-bound five-membered rings.

Zachary S. Siegel is an electrical engineering and computer science graduate student pursuing a PhD in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where he works at the intersection of robotics, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. He graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University with a BSE in computer science and a minor in philosophy, receiving honors including Tau Beta Pi, Sigma Xi and the Outstanding Computer Science Independent Work Prize. His senior thesis, advised by Tom Griffiths and Jacob Andreas, investigated how humans infer the goals of others in open-ended, real-world environments. Siegel demonstrated how Bayesian inference serves as an accurate model of people’s goal predictions by comparing partial observations to a learned library of possible plans weighted by their prior likelihood. His doctoral research goal is to build machines that learn and reason more like people — systems that can learn from limited data and generalize to new situations by combining robot planning and Bayesian inference. Siegel is particularly interested in combinatorial generalization: the human capacity to compose known skills in novel ways to solve previously unseen problems without additional demonstrations. At MIT, he is advised by Leslie P. Kaelbling, Tomás Lozano-Pérez, and Joshua B. Tenenbaum.

Matthew Wanta is an incoming doctoral student who will begin operations research at MIT in the fall. He is a class of 2026 graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point with a bachelor’s degree in computer science and mathematical sciences, both with honors. His work centered on machine learning for autonomous systems, integrating probabilistic modeling and computer vision into cooperative drone search and swarm control frameworks. In collaboration with DEVCOM Armaments Center, Wanta developed computer vision models for detecting energetic defects in artillery munitions, enabling rapid, nonintrusive quality control in defense manufacturing. His work with U.S. Special Operations Command and Army C5ISR organizations focused on autonomous aerial search and sensing, where he built simulation architectures for probabilistic target localization and multi-agent coordination. Wanta served as company commander for Bravo Company, 2nd Regiment; president of Upsilon Pi Epsilon; and vice president of Phi Kappa Phi. He is an Astronaut Scholar and Sapper School graduate, and commissioned as an Army officer in the Cyber Corps.

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A shot of carbon dioxide rewires how cement sets

One September day, it started to snow inside MIT’s Pierce Laboratory. 

Researchers depressurized a tank of liquid carbon dioxide (CO₂), instantly freezing it and releasing solid flakes. These were blended into cement paste and pressed into discs roughly the size of a dime, each sealed with a thin layer of vegetable oil to keep water in and air out. The team trained lasers on each, observing for the first time the transient chemical reaction that might explain why CO₂-injected cement paste gains its strength faster.

Injecting CO₂ into cement products like concrete is one way to store it and keep it out of the atmosphere. The process has attracted commercial interest, with a growing number of companies offering CO₂-injected concrete mixes. But until now, the underlying cement chemistry hadn't been directly visualized.

A new open-access paper in the Journal of the American Ceramic Society — led by Associate Professor Admir Masic and first-authored by graduate student Marcin Hajduczek, both of the MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub and MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering — describes the chemical sequence that unfolds after CO₂ meets fresh cement paste. Co-authors include MIT colleagues Santiago El Awad and Franz-Josef Ulm, alongside researchers from IIT Jodhpur and CarbonCure Technologies.

Previous studies had pieced together a story about CO₂ injection’s chemical impacts from theory and indirect evidence; the key reactions simply moved too fast, and vanished too completely, for conventional techniques to catch them in the act. Raman confocal microscopy could — and it works on a simple principle: Illuminate a molecule with a laser, and the scattered light will reveal its identity. The light interacts with each material’s unique chemical bonds, shifting in energy to produce a distinct spectral “fingerprint.” Even the most fleeting and amorphous phases leave a readable trace.

“We’ve used Raman spectroscopy to better understand some of the most interesting materials in history, from the Dead Sea Scrolls to Ancient Roman concrete,” says Masic. “Cement paste may seem less glamorous in comparison, but pointing a laser at CO₂-injected cement paste as it hardens allows us to visualize things that haven’t been seen before.”

What they saw, unfolding during 24 hours of continuous scanning, was a three-act chemical drama.

Act One: Capturing calcium

The moment that CO₂ is added to the fresh cement paste, it goes to work. It dissolves into the pore solution and reacts with calcium released by the dissolving clinker, precipitating as various forms of calcium carbonate. Clinker is produced by heating limestone and aluminosilicate materials in a kiln, forming the primary ingredient ground into a fine powder to make cement. This happens within the first hour, temporarily slowing the normal hydration reaction, which requires calcium to proceed. 

In contrast, when CO₂ is not present, the calcium released by the dissolving clinker remains available locally, supporting the gradual formation of the material’s binding phases as it sets.

Left without calcium, the silicates released by the clinker dissolve into the pore solution and precipitate far from their source, linking together into chains that form an interconnected silica gel network throughout the paste. This amorphous, fleeting gel sets the stage for what follows.

Act Two: The ghostly gel

Once the injected CO₂ is fully mineralized — around four to five hours after mixing — normal hydration resumes. Calcium hydroxide begins to precipitate into the pore space, and when it does, it encounters the silica gel network waiting for it.

The reaction between the two phases begins immediately, producing calcium silicate hydrate (C-S-H), the compound that gives cement its binding ability. What makes this form of C-S-H distinct is where and how it forms: not clustered around clinker particles as in conventional hydration, but distributed throughout the entire matrix, wherever the silica gel had spread.

The CO₂ had temporarily suppressed the paste’s alkalinity, and that lower pH was the only thing keeping the silica-gel intact. As hydration reasserts itself and produces standard hydration products, namely C-S-H and calcium hydroxide, the latter drives pH back up to typical levels in a self-reinforcing loop; the silica-gel reacts with calcium hydroxide through a so-called pozzolanic reaction. Within eight hours, the silica gel is almost entirely gone — the previously well-distributed gel network turns rapidly into additional C-S-H during this critical early window. 

“At first, the fleeting nature of the silica gel looked like a fluke in the Raman data. But it quickly became clear that its sudden disappearance was a consistent, undeniable feature of every CO₂-injected sample,” says Hajduczek.

Act Three: A rewired matrix

With the silica gel consumed, the paste settles into conventional hydration, but what it leaves behind is measurably different. Because the new binder was distributed more evenly throughout the cement matrix, the resulting microstructure is stronger and more uniform at an early age. In the study, paste mixed with CO₂ at 1 percent by cement weight achieved, on average, 13 percent higher compressive strength at 24 hours, compared to reference mixes.

“We’ve been injecting CO₂ into cement products for years without fully understanding what it was doing inside. Now that we can see it and understand the underlying mechanism that leads to improved performance, we can start to control it. And there’s a lot of room to push,” says Masic.

The findings also refine a leading explanation for CO₂-injected cement paste’s higher early age strength: the calcium carbonate crystals, previously suspected to seed C-S-H growth, turn out to be passive bystanders embedded in the silica gel template rather than reacting to form C-S-H. 

Where the chemistry goes next

Knowing the mechanism gives researchers a more specific set of questions to pursue. The silica gel template explains the distribution of the new C-S-H, but directly measuring its mechanical properties remains a next step.

On the practical side, dosage matters: Flood the system with too much CO₂ and calcium gets locked into carbonate before the gel can form and react. If the paste used here forms abundant C-S-H, it could theoretically offset up to 40 percent of the carbon emissions from cement production, excluding emissions associated with the fossil fuels used in the process. In practice, however, the achievable offset is likely to be only a fraction of that value, although still potentially significant.

But even with these open questions, the ghostly gel has been caught. And now that researchers know what to look for, the chemistry that unfolds in those first eight hours is no longer invisible.

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New imaging system sees through murky waters

For remotely operated underwater vehicles, cloudy and turbulent waters are often a no-go. When vehicles settle on the seafloor or dig through a sandbed, they can kick up clouds of sediment that make it tough for onboard cameras to see through. Often, the only thing to do is to wait until the marine dust settles before a vehicle can safely proceed. 

But a new underwater mapping technique developed by engineers at MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) may allow vehicles to see through murky, low-visibility waters. 

The method fuses visual images from optical cameras with acoustic data from sonar sensors. The combination enables a vehicle to quickly map the general shape of its surroundings using sonar, even in low-visibility waters. A vehicle can move toward certain shapes in the sonar-mapped environment, coming close enough for optical cameras to visually resolve specific objects in detail. 

The technique is akin to pairing a dolphin’s echolocation with a sea turtle’s close-range vision to see and navigate through murky water, in real-time. 

The researchers tested the method in tank experiments where they could control the water’s degree of visibility. Even in the cloudiest conditions, the system was able to see through the sediment to map the tank’s environment and visualize centimeter-scale details of objects in the tank. 

The team is further improving the technique, which they’ve named Sonar-MASt3R. They envision that the mapping method could safely guide underwater vehicles through murky environments for a range of applications, including scientific exploration, underwater construction and maintenance, and deep-sea recovery. 

“We hope that this work enables us to do more operations in those challenging, low-visibility environments, and helps provide more coverage in areas that are difficult to operate in today,” says Amy Phung, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, who led the work. 

Phung presented a paper detailing Sonar-MASt3R this week at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). The paper’s co-author is Richard Camilli, senior scientist of applied ocean physics and engineering at WHOI. 

The best of both

To see underwater, scientists have generally taken an either/or approach, using either optical cameras or sonar sensors to guide the way. Optical cameras can provide detailed visual imagery of a scene, but only in waters that are relatively clear and well-lit. In contrast, sonar sensors perform just as well in clear and murky water; by emitting acoustic waves and measuring the time and angle at which they return, sonar sensors can determine the exact shape, distance, and depth of objects in the environment, though a sonar map lacks any visual detail. 

To get the best of both modes, scientists have looked to combine the two in a new approach known as “opti-acoustic fusion.” In a handful of prior works, research groups have merged sonar and optical data in mapping techniques that are mostly geared toward object recognition and reconstructing workplace environments. Most techniques require time to sync and process the data and therefore do not work in real-time, while only a few can map an environment in 3D. None have been applied to high-resolution mapping underwater in murky, turbid conditions. 

Phung, who is a student in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program, and Camilli, her advisor, aimed to develop an opti-acoustic fusion technique that would generate detailed 3D maps of underwater environments in real time and in low-visibility conditions. The team was motivated, in part, by challenges in safely recovering unexploded underwater mines.

“There can be old explosives in areas that make it unsafe for ships to be in, and the ability to get rid of those safely is best done by robotics,” Camilli says. “But a lot of these explosives are set in surf zone environments where visibility adds to the challenge of doing this safely. That’s one of many applications that our technique can be used for.”

Cloudy, with a chance of mapping

The new method, Sonar-MASt3R, builds on an existing technique, MASt3R, that was developed by researchers in France. MASt3R is an image matching algorithm that is trained to take in visual images of the same scene and quickly estimate the relative depth of each pixel in the scene. In this way, MASt3R can generate a 3D map of the environment in real-time, based on a camera’s 2D images. 

“The downside is that there is no sense of scale,” Phung says. “It will say ‘this pixel is five units closer than this pixel,’ but it can’t say whether that’s 5 meters or 5 feet.”

Luckily, sonar provides absolute measurements of scale. The timing of sonar reflections can be translated directly into a specific depth and distance of objects that the signals bounced off, as well as their shape and contour. 

In their new work, Phung and Camilli used sonar data to correct MASt3R’s scaling and generate precise 3D maps of underwater environments. Even in murky water, the method’s sonar-corrected map would enable a vehicle to know the precise location of objects, and therefore how far to safely move in for a closer inspection, which the vehicle could then do using conventional optical cameras.

The team tested Sonar-MASt3R in experiments with a tank that they filled with water, sediment, and a variety of objects such as a small boulder, a coffee mug, and a packing crate. Inside the tank, they also set up a robotic arm, onto which they mounted an underwater camera, and a sonar sensor. 

For each experimental run, they first carried out a sweep trajectory, in which the robotic arm slowly swept from one side of the tank to the other to capture sonar and visual data. With this first sweep, Sonar-MASt3R quickly creates a coarse sonar-based map of the shapes and contours of the tank and its objects. The coarse map is then used to record close-up camera images of the objects, which are used to improve the map resolution. A “keyframe” approach quickly compares each new image frame to the last keyframe. If a frame provides new information not contained in the last keyframe, the image is added as a new keyframe to the map. If it is similar, it is immediately discarded. In this way, the approach can quickly fill in the map with relevant visual detail, in real-time. 

The researchers tested their new approach underwater, testing eight different levels of turbidity, which they created by stirring up the tank’s sediment. Compared with other opti-acoustic fusion approaches, Sonar-MASt3R generated more accurate 3D maps and resolved smaller, centimeter-scale details, and in cloudier conditions. In the cloudiest condition, which the robotic arm’s cameras could not see through, its sonar sensors were able to generate a rough map of the tank’s hidden objects. This initial map enabled the arm to move safely through the murk and closer to specific objects, which its underwater camera could then visualize in more detail. 

“An analogy would be if you were to go into a china shop in the dark, and try to pick your way around to find a specific coffee mug without knocking things over,” Camilli offers. “This would allow you to do that.”

The team plans to test the approach in natural underwater conditions, where they suspect that the mapping task should be more straightforward. 

“In a tank, it’s like an echo chamber,” Camilli says. “It’s like trying to do this in a funhouse mirror setting where you get all these distortions and reverberations and ghost images that really complicates the processing. If you put it in the real world, it should be easier.”

Then, they say, Sonar-MASt3R could help scientists safely explore in cloudy, turbid, and murky underwater regions.

“The real value in this effort is so we can use this technology in mission scenarios that are untractable right now,” Phung says. “And there are plenty of untractable missions because we don’t have the observational or perception capabilities.”

This research was supported, in part, by NASA, and the National Science Foundation.

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