The Haystack 37m Telescope: A new era of astrophysical research

The Haystack 37m Telescope has been a landmark in radio astronomy and radar studies of the solar system since its first light in 1964. Over the following four decades, it supported NASA's Apollo landings on the moon, made planetary radar maps of the surface of Venus, contributed to experimental tests of Einstein's general relativity, supported the development of VLBI, and conducted foundational studies of quasars and star-forming regions. 

Recently, the Haystack 37m Telescope — a 37-meter radio and millimeter-wavelength antenna at MIT Haystack Observatory in Westford, Massachusetts — made its return to front-line astronomical research following an extended period of system upgrades. These observations reconnect this instrument with its long tradition of scientific discovery and open a new chapter.

On Dec. 8, 2025, Haystack scientists observed the supermassive black hole system at the center of the galaxy Messier 87 (M87) using a technique called very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) that links telescopes across continents to achieve extraordinary resolution. These observations mark the return of one of America's most storied radio telescopes to its historical scientific and educational mission.

The observations targeted the powerful jet of energy and matter launched from M87’s central black hole, M87*. This jet, driven by a black hole six-and-a-half billion times the mass of our sun, extends thousands of light years into intergalactic space and is one of the most energetic phenomena in the known universe. 

Previous international campaigns, namely those led by the Event Horizon Telescope, have imaged the black hole's immediate “shadow.” The Haystack 37m Telescope observations, performed in collaboration with the telescopes of the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) and the Greenland Telescope (GLT), help to probe the larger-scale structure of the jet, investigating how energy is transported far beyond the black hole's vicinity. Understanding this process is central to explaining how supermassive black holes shape the galaxies that surround them.

“The Haystack 37m Telescope’s exceptional sensitivity enables the intercontinental telescope array to detect faint emission from around the distant M87* black hole,” says Paul Tiede, principal investigator of the M87 study. “In tandem with the GLT and the VLBA, Haystack is helping create the first multifrequency movies of M87*’s faint jet, greatly improving our understanding of black hole physics.”

The upgraded Haystack 37m Telescope opens multiple new lines of research. At MIT, Saverio Cambioni and Richard Teague of the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) plan to use the instrument within MIT’s Planetary Defense Project to measure asteroid sizes and shapes, characterizing objects that could pose a hazard to Earth and deepening our understanding of the solar system’s formation. Associate Professor Brett McGuire of the Department of Chemistry plans to search for complex organic molecules in space, work that speaks to the question of how the chemical precursors to life arise.

“We are thrilled to provide the research community with a powerful telescope at a time where few such instruments are available,” says Jens Kauffmann, principal investigator of the Haystack 37m Telescope Astronomy Program, who uses the telescope to study the formation of stars and their planets. “Even more exciting are the prospects this generates for the next generation of astronomers. Hands-on training opportunities on world-class research telescopes have become exceptionally rare worldwide, and now we can offer this singular advanced workforce development program right here in Massachusetts.”

Student involvement with the Haystack 37m Telescope has already resumed: Undergraduate interns at Haystack Observatory played an active role in developing the telescope’s control systems and data analysis algorithms. This work exemplifies Haystack’s role as a hands-on research and training environment where students contribute directly and gain practical experience with a frontline research instrument.

The return to research-focused observations is the result of more than 10 years of careful, sustained work. From 2010 to 2014, the Haystack 37m Telescope underwent a major upgrade and refurbishment that enhanced its ability to observe at millimeter wavelengths. This work was primarily done to improve the antenna’s capability as a space radar. The dish now primarily serves U.S. government agencies in that capability, and astronomy was temporarily a secondary activity. 

But work to restore the telescope's science capability never stopped. Initial support from the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 2015 modernized systems for data analysis and radio signal processing. The first successful engineering-oriented VLBI experiments with the new dish were conducted at the same time. Additional NSF funding in 2019, provided in the context of the Next Generation Event Horizon Telescope (ngEHT) program, enabled a more general and sustained effort to upgrade receiver equipment and computing systems. Support from private donors to Haystack also aided in this longer-term effort.

Several recent developments, particularly in 2025, proved significant. With support from MIT's Jarve Seed Fund for Science Innovation, scientists and engineers removed lingering technical limitations with astronomy systems and expanded the telescope's scientific reach. Other funding for projects led by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory enabled the M87 campaign and commissioning of the next-generation digital back end, a highly advanced signal-processing system developed for the ngEHT. Together, these advances made the December 2025 observations possible. MIT Haystack Observatory is now pursuing support from both private and federal sources for further improvements under the Haystack 37m Telescope Astronomy Program.

“The upgraded Haystack 37m Telescope empowers MIT students and researchers to pursue fundamental questions relating to our origins and our solar system,” says Richard Teague, professor at MIT EAPS. “With privileged access to such a powerful facility, we can undertake ambitious observational programs previously impossible to schedule. This is the beginning of what we expect will be an exciting era of new discoveries with the Haystack 37m Telescope.”

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Single-molecule tracker illuminates workings of cancer-related proteins

Using a powerful single-molecule imaging method they developed, a research team from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard has unveiled a dynamic view of how some cancer-related proteins interact in living cells. 

The technique relies on highly stable nanoparticle probes that brightly illuminate individual molecules for long periods of time. The researchers used their method to observe, for the first time, individual receptors as they move around the cell membrane, attaching to and then letting go of other receptors to alter signaling within the cell.

Described in the journal Cell, the work demonstrates the method’s potential for investigating other receptors and molecules, and for improved drug screening to better understand the effects of therapeutics on living cells.

“With our photostable probes, we can map out the entire lifespan of these molecules in their native environment and see things that have never been observable before,” says study leader Sam Peng, a Broad Institute core institute member and assistant professor of chemistry at MIT.

Molecular movies

Peng’s method solves a problem with existing contrast agents used in single-molecule tracking, such as dyes. Under the laser light that’s used to excite these dyes, they burn out after a few seconds in a phenomenon known as photobleaching, which means that scientists could only use them to take a few snapshots of cell receptors, and not follow them over the entirety of the signaling process.

For a longer and richer view, Peng’s lab developed long-lasting probes, known as upconverting nanoparticles, which emit signals that remain stable under laser excitation. The nanoparticles contain rare-earth ions that continue to luminescence for minutes, hours, and potentially years. In addition, by altering the type and doses of the ions, scientists can engineer probes emitting in many different colors, enabling tracking of many targets in a single experiment.

In the current study, the researchers aimed to uncover new biology by focusing on the EGFR family of cell receptors, which have been linked to several kinds of cancer. They collaborated with EGFR experts Matthew Meyerson and Heidi Greulich of the Broad’s Cancer Program. They knew that EGFR receptors need to pair up, or “dimerize,” in order to initiate signaling within the cell, but they wanted to learn more about the dynamics of these pairings — what the receptors partner with, how long they stay together, and how they find new partners.

For a better and more sustained look at the receptors, the research team customized their upconverting nanoparticles to tag EGFR and related receptors HER2 and HER3, which are linked to cancer, and used them to track the molecules in living human cells.

A new view of protein pairings

In this study, Peng and his team observed that, when activated with a stimulating molecule, EGFR receptors can pair up and stay dimerized for several minutes, something not observable using traditional dyes. Excessive and prolonged dimerization can lead to too much cell growth and cancer.

A microscopy video shows upconverting nanoparticles tagged to EGFR receptors (labeled pink and green), which track individual receptors as they dimerize. Image courtesy of the researchers.

When the EGFR molecules carried cancer-related mutations, the dimers became more stable, with the more stabilizing mutations linked to more potent cancers in people. In addition, the mutated receptors could form stable dimers even without an external stimulus prompting them to dimerize. The finding helps explain how EGFR mutations can lead to uncontrolled cell growth and cancer, and could inform efforts to target this process therapeutically.

The team discovered several other new and surprising details about how HER2 and HER3 form stable pairings with themselves, which helps illuminate the role of these molecules in related cancers.

When the research team tagged all three receptor types in one experiment, they observed a vibrant scene with receptors navigating the cell surface, finding partners, unpairing, and then finding new partners, over and over again.

Beyond shedding light on EGFR biology, the scientists hope that collaborators in other fields will apply their method to ask new scientific questions about other proteins of interest. “We think this technique could be transformative for studying molecular biology, because it enables dynamic biological processes to be observed with high spatiotemporal resolution over unprecedented timescales,” says Peng.

They are also planning to explore the method’s use in studying the mechanism of drug action, to reveal how potential therapeutics alter individual molecules over time. In addition, they will continue to improve their methods, such as making the probes smaller, brighter, and able to emit more colors.

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New research enables a robot to chart a better course

In the aftermath of a devastating earthquake, unpiloted aerial vehicles (UAVs) could fly through a collapsed building to map the scene, giving rescuers information they need to quickly reach survivors. 

But this remains an extremely challenging problem for an autonomous robot, which would need to swiftly adjust its trajectory to avoid sudden obstacles while staying on course.

Researchers from MIT and the University of Pennsylvania developed a new trajectory-planning system that tackles both challenges at once. Their technique enables a UAV to react to obstacles in milliseconds while staying on a smooth flight path that minimizes travel time. 

Their system uses a new mathematical formulation that ensures the robot travels safely to its destination along a feasible path, and that is less computationally intensive than other techniques. In this way, it generates smoother trajectories faster than state-of-the-art methods.

The trajectory planner is also efficient enough for real-time flight using only the robot’s onboard computer and sensors. 

Named MIGHTY, the open-source system does not require proprietary software packages that can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. It could be more readily deployed in a wider variety of real-world settings.

In addition to search-and-rescue, MIGHTY could be utilized in applications like last-mile delivery in urban spaces, where UAVs need to avoid buildings, wires, and people, or in industrial inspection of complex structures, such as wind turbines.

“MIGHTY achieves comparable or better performance using only open-source tools, which means any researcher, student, or company — anywhere in the world — can use it freely. By removing this cost barrier, MIGHTY helps democratize high-performance trajectory planning and opens the door for a much broader community to build on this work,” says Kota Kondo, an aeronautics and astronautics graduate student and lead author of a paper on this trajectory planner.

Kondo is joined on the paper by Yuwei Wu, a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania; Vijay Kumar, a professor at UPenn; and senior author Jonathan P. How, a Ford professor of aeronautics and astronautics and a principal investigator in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) and the Aerospace Controls Laboratory (ACL) at MIT. The research appears in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.

Overcoming trade-offs           

When Kondo was a child, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident occurred following the Great East Japan Earthquake. With school cancelled, Kondo was stuck at home and watched the news every day as workers explored and secured the reactor site. Some workers still had to enter hazardous areas to contain the damage and assess the situation, exposing them to high doses of radioactive material.

“I became passionate about creating autonomous robots that can go into these dynamic and dangerous situations, then come back and report to humans who stay out of harm’s way,” Kondo says.

This task requires a strong trajectory planner, which is software that decides the path a robot should follow to safely get from point A to point B. 

But many existing systems force tradeoffs that limit performance. 

While some commercial systems can rapidly generate smooth trajectories, they can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Open-source alternatives often underperform compared to commercial solvers or are difficult to use.      

With MIGHTY, Kondo and his colleagues developed an open-source system that produces high-quality, smooth trajectories while reacting to obstacles in real-time, and which runs fast enough for flight using only onboard components.

To do this, they overcame a key challenge that limits many open-source systems. 

These methods usually estimate how long it will take the robot to get from point A to point B as a first step. From that fixed estimation of travel time, the planner finds the best path to reach the destination.

While using a fixed travel time allows the planner to rapidly generate a trajectory, it has drawbacks. For one, if the UAV must go far out of its way to avoid obstacles, it could be forced to crank up the speed to meet the fixed travel-time budget. This makes it harder to avoid sudden hazards.

A MIGHTY method

Instead, MIGHTY uses a mathematical technique, called a Hermite spline, that optimizes the travel time and flight path together, in a single step, to form a smooth trajectory that can be precisely controlled.

“Optimizing the spatial and temporal components together gets us better results, but now the optimization becomes so much bigger that it is harder to solve in a feasible amount of time,” Kondo says.

The researchers used a clever technique to reduce this computational overhead. 

Instead of generating a trajectory from scratch each time, MIGHTY makes an initial guess of a trajectory. Then it refines the trajectory through an iterative optimization, using a map of the scene generated by the UAV’s lidar sensors.

“We can make a decent guess of what the trajectory should be, which is a lot faster than generating the entire thing from nothing,” Kondo says.

This enables MIGHTY to react in real-time to unknown obstacles while keeping the trajectory smooth and minimizing travel time. The system utilizes the UAV’s onboard components, which is important for applications where a robot might travel far from a base station.

In simulated experiments, MIGHTY needed only about 90 percent of the computation time required by state-of-the-art methods, while safely reaching its destination about 15 percent faster than these approaches. 

When they tested the system on real robots, it reached a speed of 6.7 meters per second while avoiding every obstacle that appeared in its path.

“With MIGHTY, everything is integrated in one piece. It doesn’t need to talk to any other piece of software to get a solution. This helps us be even faster than some of the commercial solvers,” Kondo says.

In the future, the researchers want to enhance MIGHTY so it can be used to control multiple robots at once and conduct more flight experiments in challenging environments. They hope to continue improving the open-source system based on user feedback.

“MIGHTY makes an important contribution to agile robot navigation by revisiting the trajectory representation itself. Hermite splines have already been successfully used in visual simultaneous localization and mapping, and it is nice to see their advantages now being exploited for trajectory planning in mobile robots. By enabling joint optimization of path geometry, timing, velocity, and acceleration while retaining local control of the trajectory, MIGHTY gives robots more freedom to compute fast, dynamically feasible motions in cluttered environments,” says Davide Scaramuzza, professor and director of the Robotics and Perception Group at the University of Zurich, who was not involved with this research.

This research was funded, in part, by the United States Army Research Laboratory and the Defense Science and Technology Agency in Singapore.

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A bet that has paid off 500 million times over

In 2001, at the dawn of the digital age, MIT made a bold decision: to open its curriculum to the world. Through MIT OpenCourseWare — now part of MIT Open Learning — the Institute began sharing materials from nearly all of its courses online for free.  

A quarter of a century later, that decision has impacted the lives of more than 500 million people across the world who have used OpenCourseWare’s resources to expand their knowledge and develop new skills. 

“When MIT opens its doors, the world walks in,” said Dimitris Bertsimas, vice provost for open learning, at OpenCourseWare’s recent 25th Anniversary Symposium. “Twenty-five years ago, MIT made a bet on openness, generosity, and on the belief that knowledge is a public good. That bet has paid off 500 million times over.”

The impact of that bet took center stage as nearly 200 people gathered on campus for the symposium on April 8. The daylong celebration brought together faculty and staff, OpenCourseWare learners and educators, new and early funders of the program, MIT President Sally Kornbluth, Bertsimas, and others to reflect on OpenCourseWare’s global impact and the future of free and open education. 

The occasion also marked the premiere of “The Courage to Be Open: MIT OpenCourseWare and the Democratization of Knowledge.” Produced by MIT Open Learning’s Emmy Award-winning video team, the short documentary explores the origin, influence, and global reach of OpenCourseWare.

Initially announced as a 10-year initiative, MIT OpenCourseWare now offers more than 2,500 courses that span the undergraduate and graduate curriculum. Learners can freely access lecture notes, syllabi, problem sets, exams, and video lectures through the MIT Learn platform, the OpenCourseWare website, and its YouTube channel, which has grown into the platform’s most popular higher education channel with more than 6 million subscribers. To extend that reach even further, the OpenCourseWare Mirror Site Program provides free copies of course content on hard drives to educational organizations with limited or costly internet access.

From an idea to a global movement

In launching OpenCourseWare, MIT sparked a global movement, inspiring other universities to create their own open course initiatives and solidifying grassroots open education efforts into worldwide communities like OE Global. “Today, [OpenCourseWare] is cited in national education strategies, by nonprofit initiatives, and by international development programs — proof that openness scales when you lead with vision and courage,” Kornbluth said.

That impact lives on in the learners who turn to the Institute’s free course materials every day — from a community college student in Boston to a teenager in Australia to medical students in Turkey. OpenCourseWare has expanded the reach of MIT’s life-changing knowledge to nearly every corner of the world and opened doors to learners of all ages and backgrounds.

For many, that access is transformative. High school senior Hinata Yamahara and Andrea Henshall, a veteran of the United States Air Force, shared how OpenCourseWare helped fuel their curiosity, support their studies, and advance their goals.

“OpenCourseWare [reduces] the barrier to entry to more specialized topics,” said Yamahara, who discovered the resources while exploring an interest in urban planning, and now credits an MIT workshop with helping him pass the Federal Aviation Administration’s Private Pilot Knowledge Test.

From access to agency

What emerges across stories is that MIT’s decision to give away its course materials exemplified its mission to advance knowledge in service of the nation and the world. Openness, noted speakers, is part of the Institute’s DNA. “It’s written into our values,” said Chris Bourg, director of libraries at MIT, where she is also the founding director of the Center for Research on Equitable and Open Scholarship (CREOS).

Those values have also drawn thousands of supporters — from alumni and individual learners to businesses and the world’s leading philanthropic foundations — to help underwrite the initiative, and Open Learning more generally.

By making course materials not only free, but open, the Institute enables anyone to download, copy, modify, reuse, remix, and redistribute its resources for educational, non-commercial uses. “Access is powerful and absolutely necessary,” said Curt Newton, director of OpenCourseWare. “But openness goes further. It invites participation.”

For educators like Elizabeth Siler, a professor at Worcester State University in the department of business administration and economics, and Victor Odumuyiwa, an associate professor in computer science at the University of Lagos, OpenCourseWare offers a window into how MIT designs learning experiences and a foundation to bring those approaches into their own classrooms.

“I applied the same approach back home and, sincerely, I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback from people getting jobs in global companies after taking the course that I designed,” Odumuyiwa said. 

For faculty on MIT’s campus, OpenCourseWare has also been transformative, fostering interdisciplinary collaborations and innovative uses of digital educational tools. Referencing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, Christopher Capozzola, the Elting E. Morison Professor of History at MIT, pointed to quality education (goal 4), reduced inequalities (goal 10), and peace, justice, and strong institutions (goal 16) as a guiding equation for open education. “I believe that MIT, through OpenCourseWare and all of our open education initiatives, has committed to solving that problem,” he said. “I just wanted to roll up my sleeves and be part of that.”

A new era for open education

If the rise of the internet in the early 2000s catalyzed MIT’s decision to “open its doors to the world without requiring a key,” said Kornbluth, artificial intelligence now presents a new moment to lead.

Building on that legacy, MIT Open Learning is leading the way with the launch of MIT Learn, an AI-enabled hub for the Institute’s non-degree learning opportunities. The platform brings together innovations like AskTIM — an AI assistant that helps learners discover relevant offerings and, in select offerings, enhances understanding with guided support — and new self-paced, modular online learning experiences that prepare learners to take on complex global challenges, including AI and climate. Together, these advances move MIT closer to a future of truly personalized education at global scale, grounded in faculty expertise and research.

“Sometime in the next five years, I’m looking for a moment that rhymes with what happened in 2001,” Newton said.

With the launch of MIT Learn and Open Learning’s goal of reaching 1 billion learners in the next decade, that next chapter is already taking shape.

“The future of open learning is bright, and belongs to all of us,” Bertsimas said.

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Startup making reusable emergency housing wins MIT $100K competition

A startup making emergency housing cheaper and faster to deploy won this year’s MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition on May 12.

Uplift Microhome is building reusable, modular housing units to provide housing on demand to people affected by natural disasters and other emergencies. Each of the company’s homes has its own batteries and water reservoir, allowing them to quickly be transported and placed off-grid.

“Every year, millions of Americans are displaced by natural disasters,” said co-founder Charlie Nitschelm, who is in MIT’s Leaders for Global Operations program, earning a master’s in engineering and an MBA. “If they're lucky, they can stay with friends or family. If they’re not so lucky, they could end up in a homeless shelter. But disasters aren’t just two-week problems. It takes months, sometimes years, to get back to what life was like before. Bottom line: We lack dignified and affordable housing after disasters.”

Uplift Microhome was one of seven teams chosen to pitch at the final event, which took place inside a packed Kresge Auditorium. Each team got five minutes to pitch their startups before a few minutes of questioning from judges.

This year’s competition started in April with more than 80 applications. The program’s judges selected 16 teams to compete in the semifinal before whittling that number down to the finalist teams for Tuesday’s event.

“This competition isn’t just about one big night,” $100K managing director and MIT Sloan School of Management student Celine Christory said. “It’s a year-long journey for our organizers and students. It kicks off with the ‘Pitch’ event in December, moves to ‘Accelerate’ in March, and culminates in the ‘Launch’ event.”

In the pitch that won the $100,000 Danny Lewin Grand Prize, Nitschelm said it takes an average of four months for the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to deploy single-use housing after a disaster. That’s because these homes require power and utilities in addition to extensive foundation preparation.

“As a result, less than 1 percent of survivors actually receive a physical home,” Nitschelm said. “The rest get a check and are told to go figure it out. This isn’t just our opinion. The Department of Homeland Security audited FEMA and recommended providing a cost-effective housing alternative that allows disaster survivors to stay close to their home.”

Uplift’s homes can be transported on the back of a tractor trailer and deployed using a standard forklift. In addition to its battery and water reservoir, the homes feature self-leveling bases that allow them to be deployed on uneven terrain.

“That dramatically simplifies delivery, installation, and deactivation to the point where you can economically recover, refurbish, and redeploy the unit,” says co-founder Trevor O’Leary, a student at Harvard Business School.

The company has already built a home and believes it can manufacture each unit at a cost similar to the cheapest tractor trailer while delivering housing in hours. The company expects the marginal cost of reusing each unit to be an order of magnitude less expensive than current solutions. Down the line, it plans to deploy homes to combat housing insecurity, for seasonal workers and during construction projects. It plans to manufacture its homes in the United States.

The second-place $50,000 David T. Morgenthaler Founder’s Prize was awarded to the startup Mohan, which is using generative artificial intelligence to map the Earth’s subsurface in three dimensions. The company is deploying its technology to help mining companies decide where to drill, starting by targeting copper deposits.

“Everyone is talking about AI and chips, but no one is talking about what they sit on: copper,” said co-founder Hongze Bo, a PhD student in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. “Every cable, GPU, and data center depends on copper. By 2030, we’re going to be 4 million tons of copper short. But we don't know where the next deposit is. Today we just drill and hope.”

The core of Mohan’s technology is a diffusion AI model that iteratively removes noise from subsurface data to create underground scans. The company also develops its own subsurface data.

“We built a full, 3D subsurface model using generative AI,” explained Bo. “It’s the same technology behind [image generation tools] Sora and Midjourney.”

The third place $5,000 prize went to Iceberg Systems, which is using autonomous AI agents to predict how risk cascades across the economy. The company invented a new class of AI systems at MIT that coordinates millions of AIs to simulate how risks emerge through interaction. It has been working with the Department of Energy.

“Iceberg simulates behaviors across millions of market participants, from brokers to consumers to institutions, to simulate and predict how shocks cascade through their interactions and create systemic risk in the economy,” says co-founder and MIT PhD student Ayush Chopra.

The $5,000 Audience Choice Prize went to Pixology, an agentic AI platform that creates on-brand, sponsor-ready sports content to help monetize live moments.

The other finalists that presented at this year’s event were:

• NeuralPhysics, which is building foundation physics models and agents for hardware design simulation and manufacturing;
• DesignFlownAI, a design intelligence app embedded in computer-aided design software to give engineers insights in real time; and
• Auto Lab, an autonomous AI platform that helps teams build better models faster. 

The $100K Entrepreneurship Competition is one of MIT’s annual flagship entrepreneurial events. It began more than 30 years ago when a group of students, along with the late Ed Roberts, who was the founder and chair of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, decided to start a startup pitch competition.

The prize started at $10,000 then grew to $50,000 before reaching today’s $100,000 grand prize. Past participants include HubSpot, Akamai, and Lightmatter.

In addition to the prizes, teams received mentorship from venture capitalists, serial entrepreneurs, corporate executives, and attorneys; funding for prototypes; business plan feedback; and more.

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Big strides in cancer detection and treatment from the tiniest technologies

That there is tremendous potential for nanotechnology to transform cancer detection and treatment is a vision that has guided faculty at the Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine through its first 10 years. 

On April 9, the center gathered researchers, entrepreneurs, clinicians, industry collaborators, and members of the public at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research galleries to celebrate a milestone anniversary and reflect on its journey.

“Our purpose has always been clear: to empower discovery and community in nanomedicine at MIT,” said Sangeeta Bhatia, faculty director at the Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine and the John J. and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT.

“A decade in, we are seeing that vision materialize not just in publications, but in our community, our startups, and ultimately, in patients whose lives are being changed,” Bhatia told an audience of about 150 gathered in person for the celebration.

The event featured an overview of the Marble Center by Bhatia and a perspective on nanomedicine by Robert S. Langer, the David H. Koch (1962) Institute Professor and faculty member at the Marble Center. 

A panel on translational nanomedicine followed the talks. It was moderated by Susan Hockfield, president emerita and professor of neuroscience at MIT, and included Noor Jailkhani, former MIT postdoc in the laboratory of the late MIT professor of biology Richard Hynes and CEO, co-founder and president of Matrisome Bio; Peter DeMuth ’13, chief scientific officer at Elicio Therapeutics; Vadim Dudkin, founding chief technology officer at Soufflé Therapeutics; and Viktor Adalsteinsson ’15, co-founder of Amplifyer Bio and director of the Gerstner Center for Cancer Diagnostics at the Broad Institute.

A decade of impact in nanomedicine

Established in 2016 through a generous gift from Kathy and Curt Marble ’63, the Marble Center brings together leading Koch Institute faculty members and their teams to focus on grand challenges in cancer detection, treatment, and monitoring through miniaturization and convergence — the blending of the life and physical sciences with engineering, a core concept fueling multidisciplinary research at the Koch Institute. 

At the center’s founding, Bhatia and Langer were joined by five additional faculty members: Daniel G. Anderson, professor of chemical engineering and member of the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science; Angela M. Belcher, the James Mason Crafts Professor in the departments of Biological Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering; Michael Birnbaum, professor of biological engineering; Paula T. Hammond, Institute professor and dean of the School of Engineering; and Darrell J. Irvine, who is now professor and vice-chair at the Department of Immunology and Microbiology at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California.

“Over the past decade, the center and its member laboratories have trained close to 500 researchers. Among them, 109 have become faculty in 79 clinical and research universities. We also have worked in close collaboration with clinical and industry partners to produce the results you are seeing today,” said Tarek Fadel, associate director of the Marble Center and director of strategic alliance at the Koch Institute. 

“Twenty-three startup companies have emerged from Marble Center laboratories during that time with companies such as Cision Vision, Soufflé Therapeutics, Orna Therapeutics, Matrisome Bio, Amplifyer Bio, Gensaic, among several others that hold so much promise for the early detection of disease and drug delivery,” Fadel added.

The Marble Center has launched several topical programs aimed at trainee development and industry engagement. At monthly seminars, trainees at the Marble Center lead an open forum on emerging issues in their fields. The Convergence Scholars Program, which was originally launched in 2017 to further the development of postdocs beyond the laboratory bench, is now a competitive award program offered to postdocs at the Koch Institute. Through an industry affiliate program, the center worked closely with several key players in the field of nanoscience. Industry collaborators mentor trainees and participate as judges in an annual poster symposium. 

More recently, MIT-wide grants have catalyzed new collaborations: In 2023, the Global Oncology in Nanomedicine grant supported a project on leveraging AI-based approaches to speed the development of RNA vaccines and other RNA therapies. The project was led by Giovanni Traverso, the Karl Van Tassel (1925) Career Development Professor and a professor of mechanical engineering.

From lab to clinic: Lessons in nanomedicine translation

Panelists at the anniversary event shared candid reflections on the often messy, but exhilarating process of turning their ideas into commercial technologies. 

DeMuth described how Elicio Therapeutics, whose core technologies originated from his graduate research in Irvine’s group, harnesses the natural power of the lymph nodes to generate enhanced immune responses against tumors. The amphiphile platform uses the body’s natural albumin transport system to “shuttle” medicines into the lymph nodes, boosting immune cell activation. Elicio is now advancing their platform through a Phase 2 trial in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma and colorectal cancer.  

Jailkhani co-founded Matrisome Bio with Bhatia and Hynes. Matrisome Bio is pioneering a new class of therapies, small protein binders called nanobodies that deliver potent payloads directly to the extracellular matrix of tumors and metastases while sparing normal tissues. Matrisome Bio is currently testing radioligand modalities with their targeting platform for the treatment of cancer. 

Adalsteinsson co-founded Amplifyer Bio with Bhatia and J. Christopher Love, the Raymond A. (1921) and Helen E. St. Laurent Professor of Chemical Engineering and associate director of the Koch Institute, with the goal of developing priming agents for liquid biopsy. Priming agents injected before a blood draw transiently slow the clearance of cell-free DNA from the bloodstream, thus allowing up to 100-fold more tumor DNA to be recovered for liquid biopsy applications. While injection for medical diagnostics has been done for decades in the context of imaging scans, Amplifyer Bio’s approach would be the first of its kind in the field of liquid biopsy.

Dudkin described Soufflé Therapeutics’ vision to enable targeted delivery with receptor-mediated uptake to any type of cell in the human body. Soufflé Therapeutics is working to engineer cell-specific ligands to deliver siRNA-based medicines that are precise and transferred across the cell membrane to their target, by combining proprietary technologies for identification of cell-specific receptors, ligand optimization, and potent siRNA engineering. 

Panelists stressed that successful translation requires complex choices. While platform technologies can theoretically address many cancer problems, startups must focus on specific indications and clinical modalities to succeed in resource-limited, commercial settings. While the academic lab offers freedom to explore multiple applications, commercialization demands strategic narrowing of scope. 

Reproducibility during scale-up emerged as another critical consideration: Founders building platform companies must demonstrate not only that their technology works, but that their underlying discovery is reproducible and robust enough to support a business. All panelists agreed that thinking about manufacturability early in research, rather than as an afterthought, significantly improves a startup’s path to the clinic. Highlighting tension between selecting cutting-edge approaches and managing their inherent regulatory risks, they recommended minimizing risk by leveraging established processes and chemistries that have already been validated in approved drugs.

Finally, panelists highlighted the importance of institutional collaborations, particularly with centers like the Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine. These partnerships offer access to collaborative, mission-driven researchers who can push technological boundaries, while startups maintain focus on narrow clinical applications. Panelists emphasized that faculty collaborators, such as at the Marble Center, often provide “big sky thinking” that explores new directions and applications that complement the company’s core mission.

The next chapter in nanomedicine at MIT

As the Marble Center enters its second decade, the community is focused on expanding collaborations, leveraging advances in computation and other intersecting disciplines, and exploring new disease indications. 

“The next 10 years will be defined by our ability to leverage insights gained at the nanoscale to push the boundaries of precision medicine. The Marble Center is in a unique position to do just that, as we evolve this incredible community at MIT to be a global hub for nanomedicine research,” said Bhatia. 

Bhatia also announced that in June, the Marble Center will launch a new grant, Integrated Nanoscale Sensing, Imaging, and Health Technologies (INSIHT), aimed at advancing new imaging and sensing technologies for precision medicine. 

Similarly, panelists expressed optimism about nanomedicine’s transformative potential, centered on precision medicine. The field, they argued, will focus on minimizing side effects while opening previously unavailable therapeutic windows — enabling treatments that are fundamentally more targeted and effective. This precision could render many currently untreatable diseases manageable, or even curable, while also enabling in some cases the repurposing of drugs that failed in earlier clinical contexts. 

“Ten years ago, Sangeeta, Tyler Jacks, and the Marble Center community had a vision” said Matthew Vander Heiden, director of the Koch Institute and Lester Wolfe (1919) Professor of Molecular Biology. 

“Today, that vision is creating a place where bold ideas turn into transformative advances that can help cancer patients and non-cancer patients as well. It is exciting to see this momentum in nanomedicine at MIT and what will happen in the coming decade.” 

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How the war in the Middle East is impacting global energy systems

One day after the announcement of a ceasefire between the United States and Iran, the head of the International Energy Agency (IEA) outlined the implications of the war in the Middle East on the global energy system and the world’s economy, offering his expertise to an MIT audience.

“This is the largest energy crisis we’ve ever had in the world,” Fatih Birol, the executive director of the IEA, said at the MIT Energy Initiative’s (MITEI) Earth Day Colloquium on April 8. Birol put the current disruption of the world’s energy markets into historical perspective, shared what he believes will be the long-term impacts of this war — even in the best-case scenario where the ceasefire paves a path toward peace — and emphasized the need to create a more sustainable, resilient system moving forward.

In 1973, and again in 1979, there were oil crises that led the world economy into recession, with many countries — especially those with developing economies — spiraling into debt. More recently, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine led to a natural gas crisis. “The current crisis, the amounts of oil and gas we’ve lost, is bigger than all those three put together,” Birol stated. According to data received two hours before the seminar, Birol confirmed that 80 energy facilities in the Middle East had been damaged, with over one-third of those having been severely damaged.

The IEA has played a significant role in the global response to the war. “Our job is to have a real-world impact,” said Birol. Earlier in the conflict, after making clear to policymakers and members of the press the scale of the problem at hand, the IEA turned to its member countries — which are required to have significant oil stock reserves — to bring their reserves to the market. “Since the disruption was so big, we brought all the countries together, which is not easy,” Birol said. “We released 400 million barrels of oil, which is the highest we have ever done. This calmed markets and put downward pressure on prices.” The IEA also released a suite of recommendations for conserving oil quickly, many of which countries around the world are already implementing, said Birol.

The implications of this crisis are far-reaching, and will vary in severity depending on how long the war lasts and how quickly normal operations resume afterwards — which could take some time, considering the extent of the damage to the Middle East’s energy infrastructure, Birol said.

Birol explained the more immediate impacts of the war on the gas industry. Although the natural gas industry has presented itself as a reliable, affordable, and flexible energy source, Birol highlighted that the two major gas crises in the last four years have brought that assertion into question.

“Is [natural gas] still reliable? Is it still flexible? Is it still affordable? After these two big crises, the natural gas industry needs to work hard to regain its brand,” he said.

Birol also outlined three potential outcomes that this shift may bring to the renewable energy sector. First, there is historical precedent for building up nuclear power plants in response to the oil crises of the 1970s. “Around 45 percent of nuclear power plants operating today were built as a response to those crises,” said Birol. He believes there will be another large push for nuclear power, including small nuclear reactors.

Second, renewables may be the biggest beneficiaries of this situation, he said. “In Europe, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the renewable annual installations increased by a factor of three,” he said.

Third, especially in Asia, we will likely see an increase in the market penetration of electric vehicles, Birol said. This is especially important to note because Asia is the center of current oil demand growth, but the adoption of more electric vehicles could have an impact on that, he suggested. Previous crises have also led to car manufacturers improving the fuel efficiency of their cars.

“The energy security premium will be a factor of the energy trade in the future, in addition to the cost of energy,” said Birol, speaking to the longer-term effects on the global energy market. “Countries will be more careful now with whom they are trading.”

Addressing the current crisis also necessitates changes to our energy system going forward, according to Birol. He explained that the entire global economy is being held hostage by the 50 kilometers of the Strait of Hormuz, which is a critical path not only for oil and gas shipments, but for materials used to make fertilizer, which are needed to feed the world’s population, and materials such as helium, which are needed to manufacture products like cell phones.

“I'm afraid that after this is finished, some of the countries will come back faster because they have stronger financial muscles, better engineering capabilities, and better technologies, whereas other countries will suffer,” he said. “It will be, in my view, not easy for the global economy. I believe who will be suffering under this economic damage will be mainly developing countries.”

The burden on developing countries will not only come in the form of energy prices, but also lasting impacts on fertilizer consumption, food security, and food prices, which Birol emphasized is a global problem. “What should be the response to have a more secure, but also more sustainable, future for everybody?” he asked.

Birol suggested the best possible outcome to the current global energy and economic disruption would be if the ceasefire leads to a peaceful settlement of the war. Still, this “best possible outcome” includes significant risk for much of the world.

If there is a settlement of peace, Birol said he expects oil and the gas production in the region to restart. He noted that there are about 200 fully laden oil tankers and 15 loaded liquid natural gas ships that could leave the Gulf fairly quickly if the Strait of Hormuz fully reopens.

“But I don’t think that in a very short period of time we will go back where we were before the war,” Birol said. “And this may keep the prices at elevated levels. This is surely not good news, especially in the emerging world. I would be surprised if we don’t see significant inflationary pressures in Asian developing countries, in Africa, and in Latin America,” Birol said. “In addition to that, the petrochemical industry, fertilizers, we will discover how important those commodities are for the supply chains we have … I expect a bit of volatility in the markets.”

This speaker series highlights energy experts and leaders at the forefront of the scientific, technological, and policy solutions needed to transform our energy systems. Visit the MIT Energy Initiative’s events page for more information on this and additional events. The series will return this fall.

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