Persistence, teamwork, and some healthy competition

When Veronica Calzadilla Sosa transferred to MIT from Miami Dade College in Florida, she was an incoming second-year student with an interest in chemical engineering. She didn’t know how involved she would soon become as a student leader in the department.

She would also go on to discover her competitive side.

At the encouragement of a friend who was then a team captain, Calzadilla Sosa joined MIT’s chapter of American Institute of Chemical Engineers, and the two worked with the Department of Chemical Engineering to build up the team of students representing MIT in the organization’s lively chemical engineering competitions. As the organization’s competition chair last year and the vice president of external relations this year, she has fallen in love with the club and found joy in bringing students together to work toward a common goal and have fun along the way.

When she first took on the role, MIT was new to the competition, and students were participating in only one of several events. Now, they participate in three categories: ChemE Cube (where teams build a miniature chemical plant that fits inside a 1-cubic-foot cube), ChemE Jeopardy (a “Jeopardy!”-style trivia competition), and ChemE Sports (where teams operate and optimize a virtual chemical plan). 

Calzadilla Sosa also captained MIT’s first ChemE Sports team, working alongside two first-year students. At their first competition, their challenge involved optimizing a distillation column, drawing on concepts Calzadilla Sosa was learning in her separation processes class. The team placed second at regionals.

“The competition was challenging, technical, and at times stressful, but also incredibly fun and rewarding,” she said after the event. “Experiences like this remind me how much engineering extends beyond technical knowledge alone.” 

For Calzadilla Sosa, the experience was about more than the result. It gave her the chance to take on a leadership role, work through unfamiliar problems with her teammates, and help create an opportunity for students who might not otherwise have participated.

Building community has been particularly important to Calzadilla Sosa, who began her undergraduate education in Cuba before moving to the U.S. When she later transferred to the Institute after earning her associate degree from Miami Dade, where she was part of the Honors College, “I was a sophomore for the third time,” she jokes. At that point, many of her new classmates had already spent a year getting to know one another and finding their footing.

She began to find her place in an unexpected setting: office hours.

During her first chemical engineering class at MIT, Calzadilla Sosa regularly went to office hours for help with difficult problems. She soon noticed that she was not the only one struggling.

“I was there because I was struggling with a problem, but then I would see more people also struggling with the same exact things,” she says. “And that, for some reason, gave me this idea that I wasn’t alone in that sense.”

Those shared struggles became a starting point for conversations, friendships, and a support system. She learned that finding a community did not necessarily mean having everything figured out. 

“Sometimes you find your community simply by allowing yourself to struggle alongside other people,” she says.

Throughout her undergraduate experience, Calzadilla Sosa has also explored the many ways chemical engineering can be applied beyond the classroom. 

While studying in Miami, she interned with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, analyzing data on toxic elements in food, and with the engineering consulting firm Jacobs, where she learned about water and wastewater infrastructure projects in the county. As an MIT student, she has been a materials intern at the medical device company Convatec, and a materials chemistry/chemical engineering intern at the startup Folia Materials. 

In the process, she has gotten a closer look at different industries and begun to figure out which ones interest her most. At MIT, she has become particularly interested in energy systems and how existing resources and infrastructure can be used more efficiently.

“I think exploring different areas is very valuable,” she says. “I find myself thinking ‘Maybe I could do this or I could do that. Maybe I don’t like this. Maybe I prefer doing another thing.’”

Outside of her studies, Calzadilla Sosa enjoys cooking and baking for family and friends, traveling, and going to concerts and dance performances. She also likes bringing people together, especially when she returns to her first home in Cuba and has the chance to reconnect with loved ones.

As graduation approaches, Calzadilla Sosa is excited to leave student life behind and see where her degree takes her. She has not settled on one career path, but she is comfortable with that uncertainty. After studying at multiple institutions and exploring different corners of chemical engineering, she knows there is still plenty left to discover.

“I spent so many years as an undergrad, so I’m really excited to go to industry and take that next step and see the results of my education,” she says.

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This design software reimagines everyday objects as self-aware devices

As a child, you likely saw a few Disney movies depicting inanimate objects, such as clocks, cups, and toys, as interactive companions to humans — an act of pure magic, seemingly. But scientists at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) are now doing something similar: transforming stationary items into self-aware tools that perceive and respond to human motion to complete a task.

Engineers have 3D-printed these dynamic items with built-in sensing, using conductive materials for sensors and traces (sort of like wires) inside. The issue: both components were typically fabricated using the same material, so they’d emit similar signals. It’s sort of like hearing two radio stations at the same time, a mixup that’s hard to interpret. This confuses, say, a glove that relays instructions to a robotic hand about how to handle a specific object. The device couldn’t filter out the noise or verify the angle of a user’s motions, leading a humanoid student to make errors.

Researchers at CSAIL and Tianjin University (TJU) in China may have found a way to 3D print more precise interactive items. With their “X-Hinges” software, users can customize a design, and the tool will automatically embed two different materials: a filament for the sensors designed to send the strongest signal possible, and another for the wire-like elements that don’t interfere. Interactions won’t get lost in translation, meaning users can fabricate objects that respond in real-time, such as small robots, household decor, object-detection systems, and toys.

With X-Hinges, users can put together an item by selecting and connecting different shapes, then choosing how certain parts move. The item won’t be limited to moving in just one way like previous approaches; instead, users can select up to three “axes:” compressing, up and down, or to the sides. Building a robotic hand, for example, you’d likely want its fingertips to move vertically and laterally. The new tool would then embed sensors where the object bends (in this case, its joints) to capture motion data from both angles. That way, the device can understand and respond to your interactions more dynamically once it’s 3D-printed.

“It’s kind of like adding a conscious element to everyday objects,” says Jiaji Li, MIT electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) postdoc and CSAIL researcher, who is a senior author on a paper introducing the work. “What you get is objects that better understand how they’re being used and have more ways to respond. In the same way an AI agent is programmed to make certain decisions based on our instructions, these creations have built-in sensing to adaptively react to human touch.”

Jiaji Li and lead author Xiang Chang, a TJU PhD student and visiting researcher at CSAIL, used X-Hinges to create many clever devices. For example, they made a glove that can teach a robot how to grasp blocks. It adjusts to the size of a user’s hands, then records how the joints in their fingers bend via sensors before rapidly relaying that information to a humanoid hand to mimic it. The glove could be useful in factories or homes, where a robot often needs to learn new interactions quickly.

The researchers also produced a small, origami-style lamp using X-Hinges. It senses when a human pinches it closed and adjusts its brightness accordingly. When you turn on this adaptive, portable light source (sort of like a reading light), it looks like a piece of folded-up paper that sprouts into a lamp.

X-Hinges can even assemble devices that identify which objects have been placed on it. You could put a banana on top, for instance, and it’ll recognize the fruit almost immediately based on the tactile data it’s recorded using its sensors. This advanced physical awareness could be integrated into detection systems in places such as airports and grocery stores. 

Behind each of the scientists’ creations is an easy-to-use interface that helps you design interactive objects from scratch. Users can choose how each part of their design looks and moves, just as the researchers did when making a video game controller that resembles a cartoon shark.

X-Hinges gives you four shapes to choose from: a custom option, cylinder, rectangle, and thin outline. To recreate the unique look of a shark’s tail, the researchers designed their own shape. They then chose how the toy bent, opting for its tail to move up and down, sort of like a joystick. Finally, the program embedded the sensors, and the scientists 3D-printed their device.

The researchers say that X-Hinges’ diverse motions are a novel feature compared to past attempts to 3D-print responsive everyday objects. “Most methods only allow for one axis of motion, often due to signal interference. X-Hinges enables your 3D-printed item to move from three angles,” says Chang. “Ultimately, you get a design with the intended movement you want. It also records motion data in each of those areas at the same time, making the device responsive to different kinds of interactions.”

The tool could help realize the untapped potential of the seemingly mundane. Objects we use every day for a specific purpose, like a water bottle for drinking or a lamp for lighting, could become interactive gadgets. Much like how a chatbot uses a sort of digital intelligence to answer your prompts, an object could leverage a kind of physical intelligence to execute a physical task when users interact with it.

For now, though, X-Hinges faces a calibration bottleneck. Each time an item is 3D-printed, its layout of electrical elements varies slightly, so two devices that appear identical from the outside may not make the same sensor readings. This is crucial if you’re building a deformable fitness glove, for instance, for two separate users. To fix this, Chang and Li built a computer vision system that can recalibrate outputs to align, ensuring data is accurate across two of the same items, although they hope to develop a built-in signal recalibration mechanism in the future.

That ambition traces back to the throughline in Jiaji Li’s own research: letting actuation and sensing “grow” directly inside a 3D-printed object, instead of adding them on afterward. He previously built printed tendon-driven mechanisms that gave objects the ability to move; X-Hinges is how he’s now building on the ability to sense. The next step, he says, is combining the two in a single print — it’s actuation and sensing born together in the same fabrication process, opening the door to new physical platforms for embodied intelligence and AI agents.

Chang and Li wrote the paper with MIT associate professor of EECS and CSAIL principal investigator Stefanie Mueller and recent TJU graduate Haiyang Yan. Their work was supported, in part, by a postdoctoral research fellowship from Zhejiang University and the MIT-GIST Program.

The researchers will present their work at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology in early November.

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MIT’s Kavanaugh Fellowship: From invention to impact

Entrepreneurship and MIT have become a classic pairing, with a storyline that seems to write itself: A researcher develops a brilliant innovation in the lab, spins out a company, and brings a product to market that saves lives or improves society. It happens, sure — but long-term startup success is far from guaranteed.

That’s the challenge that prompted the launch of the MIT Kavanaugh Translational Fellows Program a decade ago, giving scholars who want to turn academic research into solutions to pressing challenges the time, tools, and business training to improve their chances of success.

“MIT has this world-class research facility and faculty and everything, but it also has world-class entrepreneurial programs,” says Nick Diaco, an MIT postdoc and 2025 Kavanaugh Fellow, in a new video about the program. “You really need both if you actually want to take an idea from the lab and put it into the real world and put it into situations where it’s actually affecting people’s lives.”

The program’s focus reflects a fundamental challenge for academic innovators: developing a promising technology is only the beginning. Turning it into a viable business requires making difficult decisions about customers, markets, financing, and other factors that may fall outside a typical researcher’s expertise.

“Even in a place like MIT, the majority of those people who choose to start businesses or bring that product to another business, the majority are going to fail,” said philanthropist Bart Kavanaugh at a May event announcing the 2026 fellows. Kavanaugh is one of the namesakes of the Saks-Kavanaugh Foundation, which supports the fellowship. He and his wife, Betty Saks, run the organization.

The foundation, he explained, analyzed what distinguishes successful startups. The selection process for the fellowship, he told the three new fellows — John Zhang, Maximiliano Jara Fornerod, and Xinyuan Zhang — is intended to identify researchers who have the potential to succeed.

The three are developing technologies ranging from a faster way to manufacture custom optical lenses to at-home strep throat tests and infrared detectors that can operate without energy-intensive cryogenic cooling.

They join a growing legacy of Kavanaugh Fellows whose research has moved toward commercialization, including Sublime Systems, a manufacturer of low-carbon cement; SiTration, which develops technology for extracting materials; and Stratagen Bio, which develops tools for quantitative biomarker assessment.

The yearlong program, managed by MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, gives MIT scholars time to focus on the business side of their ideas and develop the planning and decision-making skills needed to move promising research beyond the lab.

“If while you’re doing your research, you’re able to set aside some time to investigate the commercial potential before you leave the university, you get a really good picture on, 'is this a good idea for commercialization?'” says Diana Mojahed in the video. Mojahed was a postdoc at MIT when she became a 2023 Kavanaugh Fellow and is now the CEO of Lightfinder, which makes handheld spectrometers for health care, manufacturing, and telecommunications.

“It’s so much more than just achieving good specs with whatever you’re trying to achieve. There has to be a market for it. The unit economics need to work out. There’s a lot that goes into building a company.”

Learn more about the Kavanaugh Translational Fellows Program.

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Startup plans to rejuvenate the nuclear power industry with a new manufacturing approach

Building a nuclear power plant is one of the world’s most complex construction projects. It requires thousands of trucks to ship parts, often to remote regions, where huge teams of skilled workers like electricians and welders come together to assemble everything over many years.

Financing such projects is difficult, in part, because no one wants to risk loaning money to a project that might never generate power and revenue, whether that’s due to technical failures, the inability to recruit enough talent, or regulatory hurdles.

Stated this way, it’s no surprise the average nuclear plant costs twice as much as originally expected and faces delays of many years. Those cost overruns and delays have ground the nuclear industry to a near halt: When Georgia finally turned on its Vogtle Unit 3 reactor in 2023 (seven years late), it was the first new reactor constructed in the U.S. in over 30 years.

Blue Energy wants to make deploying nuclear power plants more like wind, solar, and gas projects. The company prefabricates huge blocks of its nuclear plants at shipyards, where workers and equipment already produce huge steel structures for the oil and gas industry every day, then ships the blocks on barges to the site of the plant for final assembly.

“The nuclear problem is a construction problem,” says Blue Energy founder and CEO Jake Jurewicz ’14, SM ’15, who grew up in the construction industry and studied the differences between nuclear and oil and gas projects at MIT. “On paper, nuclear technology is almost perfect: It operates above 90 percent capacity, it’s zero carbon, dispatchable, extremely high reliability, and has predictable cash flow. We don’t have enough nuclear power because we’re really bad at building it. But there’s already a huge manufacturing supply base for offshore oil and gas and offshore wind. If we can point that toward building nuclear plants, and finance it the same way, we can reinvigorate the industry.”

Blue Energy’s prefabricated blocks weigh around 1,500 tons and are designed to be easily assembled at their destination to complete a nuclear power unit over the course of a single year. The company is further reducing barriers to financing and speeding up construction timelines by designing its early plants to run on gas initially before switching to nuclear reactors, which it hopes will generate revenue within three years from the start of construction.

The company has already gained approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for its gas-to-nuclear approach and has also secured an agreement with GE Vernova Hitachi Nuclear Energy for its first project, a 2.5 gigawatt hybrid nuclear power plant in Victoria, Texas, that is scheduled to begin producing power in 2030. This September, Blue Energy submitted the first part of its application to the NRC to begin construction on its Texas project, making it just one of five companies to do so in the current nuclear development era.

“Our first site is a great power generation project for that community because it's going to generate a lot of excess power,” Jurewicz says. “It’s going to show a new model for the world: This is a way the U.S. and its allies can deliver a turnkey nuclear power plant and turnkey energy sovereignty.”

A new blueprint for nuclear

Jurewicz grew up in Chicago, where he worked as a construction draftsman through high school. When he arrived at MIT, he double majored in nuclear engineering and physics, then stayed at MIT for a masters in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering. He also minored in energy studies through the MIT Energy Initiative.

Jurewicz’s master’s thesis explored ways nuclear power plant construction could apply lessons from the offshore oil and gas industry.

“If you’re trying to solve the construction problem, find parallel industries where people have solved it before,” Jurewicz says. “That’s why I looked at offshore oil and gas as well as nuclear shipyards in the U.S. and South Korea. We build oil and gas plants all the time, so what looks different about the way we build and execute an oil and gas plant relative to how we build a nuclear plant? They’re both mostly steel welding.”

Shipyards have several advantages over other sites for building nuclear power plants. For one, they already have thousands of skilled workers and loads of specialized equipment. They can also manufacture things in controlled environments, enabling increased automation and reducing uncertainty.

Following graduation, Jurewicz worked in corporate strategy at the utility company Exelon Energy, where he sponsored research at MIT. He originally considered starting Blue Energy as a graduate student with an approach that included creating a new passive safety system and going through a new regulatory insurance framework.

When he founded Blue Energy in 2023, he wanted to minimize risks with a more conventional reactor design. That includes prefabricating functional chunks of the reactor — what the company calls “Blue Blocks” — at a shipyard using standard manufacturing approaches that meet nuclear licensing and quality assurance requirements.

“The 1,500-ton Blue Block prefabricated modules are fully functional mechanically and electrically, they have plumbing — everything is delivered ready to run directly to the site,” Jurewicz says. “Then we have this gas-to-nuclear technology that allows us to get things going earlier with gas by building the whole nuclear steam turbine system right away and energizing it with steam from gas combustion turbines, which means we can finance it as a gas plant, so the cost of capital goes down. It dramatically lowers the cost of the project, and it reduces risk. Then we switch it with the nuclear reactor.”

Blue Energy’s nuclear reactor will be a small modular light water reactor that has already been approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and is made by GE Vernova Hitachi Nuclear Energy.

Blue Energy’s first power plant in Texas will provide 1 gigawatt of power using two GE Vernova gas turbines in 2030 and then add another 1.5 gigawatts of power from up to five small modular reactors beginning in 2032.

“It will be pretty easy to add more modular reactors to the site, so we can lower the cost to that community to provide things like water desalination, which is a big issue in south Texas,” Jurewicz says. “This power infrastructure is clean, reliable, and resilient through hurricanes or any other weather scenario that can happen in that community. It creates hundreds of high-paying permanent jobs and the foundation for a lot of local economic growth.”

Faster, cheaper nuclear

Historically, nuclear power plants have taken 10-plus years of construction. Blue Energy believes it can shorten that to about 36 months. The company is projecting power from later projects to reach about $5,000 per kilowatt. For context, the Vogtle nuclear plant delivers power at more than twice that cost.

Jurewicz believes Blue Energy’s lower prices could finally inject much-needed life into the U.S. nuclear industry.

“Despite all of the excitement around nuclear, you haven’t seen real power purchase agreements get signed because there’s a stalemate on who’s going to take the construction overrun risk,” Jurewicz says. “The government doesn’t want to take it. The construction companies don’t have the balance sheet to take it. The utilities can’t take it. Even the hyperscalers won’t take a two-or-three-times cost overrun risk. Blue Energy is introducing a fifth party to break the stalemate, which is the shipyards and fab yards, which are best positioned to take the risk because they can make things in a controlled fabrication environment, so they'll take the risk on construction in their own yards.”

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For students with their sights set on space medicine, a new community takes flight

Since its launch two years ago, MIT’s Doctors Without Gravity club has already amassed more than 100 student members. The club was co-founded by graduate students Anna Wadhwa and Nicole McGaa, who now serve as president and vice president, respectively.

Bringing together students from MIT and Harvard University who are interested in the intersection of medicine, health, and space exploration, Doctors Without Gravity is the student chapter of the Aerospace Medical Association (AsMA) and the Aerospace Medical Student and Resident Organization (AMSRO). The club is open to both undergraduate and graduate students from both institutions.

Students interested in the club do not need to be aero/astro, biology, or pre-med majors, says Wadhwa, noting that the club also has many mechanical engineering students interested in spacecraft mechanics, for example. Wadhwa adds that all majors are welcome to join.

“We want to help increase student awareness and education about aerospace medicine as a potential field that people can study and pursue for a career,” says Wadhwa, who is part of the Aerospace Physiology Lab and pursuing a PhD in aeronautics and astronautics at MIT before returning to Harvard Medical School to complete her medical degree. “We hope to achieve this by connecting the existing communities that are already in place at Harvard, MIT, and Boston by hosting events, lightning talks, and our annual symposium.”

Building a community around space medicine

To bring community members together, Doctors Without Gravity hosts general social events where members can get to know one another and network in a casual setting. They also hold workshops and fireside chats with faculty, researchers, physicians from Massachusetts General Hospital, and residents in training, so students can ask questions, learn more about their research, and ask for career advice. “It’s a great way to get students plugged into the Boston area network of people interested in space medicine,” says Wadhwa.

The club’s director of science communications, Maryam Hiradfar, a graduate student in the Harvard Biophysics Program, says the club’s interdisciplinary membership is one of its greatest strengths.

“Members are a diverse group of students who can all learn from one another. We have members who are not doing active space research or space life research, including myself, but I think just being able to spark that interest in them and hopefully give people direction to get involved in that kind of research if they're interested.”

She adds, “members of the club pursue a wide variety of fields after graduating, including medical consultants, physicians, and research. Some people go into academia and research. There are numerous ways to explore space medicine; it doesn't have to be just as a flight surgeon at NASA. People interested in the field also work at Mission Control to monitor astronauts' health not only while in space, but also on a daily basis, while others do contract work for SpaceX or Axiom Space.”

The club also helps students learn about career opportunities as they arise. Wadhwa notes that if SpaceX, NASA, Axiom Space, Blue Origin, or other groups reach out to the club with job or internship possibilities, the information is quickly passed along to its members.

Faculty advisor and director of the Aerospace Physiology Lab, Associate Professor Lonnie Petersen, adds, “Doctors Without Gravity brings together curious students from many different fields who share an interest in advancing medical care beyond Earth. As faculty advisor, I am proud to support these students, expand their network, and provide opportunities for them.”

Researching the effects of spaceflight on the human body

Hiradfar is conducting research in the Integrated Positron Emission Tomography and MRI lab at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging. Much of her time is spent scanning patients on a total-body positron emission tomography system. She does everything from scanning to adapting and developing conventional analysis pipelines and algorithms to analyze this new type of whole-body scan.

Wadhwa is conducting research in the Aerospace Physiology Lab with Petersen. Her work specifically focuses on how the brain reacts to spaceflight, because astronauts experience fluid shifts while in space and it is crucial to understand how those changes affect brain health. She is studying this both on a cellular and a systems level.

Both Wadhwa and Hiradfar say they would like to take flying lessons one day, but their schedules are too busy at the moment.

Helping colleagues with a study, Wadhwa did have the opportunity to take a ride in a centrifuge, accelerating from 1G to 4G — the equivalent of 88 mph.

“The test was designed to simulate the dynamics of flight maneuvers of a jet, in order to study patient physiology. It would go up for five seconds and then back down and then up and down. At the end, you do feel like you just got off a roller coaster, and I had to stay really still for a few minutes after the centrifuge finished,” she says.

Upcoming events

Doctors Without Gravity is already planning for their 2027 Symposium to be held during Massachusetts Space Week, April 19-25, 2027. Additional details will be announced as they become available.

At last year’s annual symposium, the keynote speaker was MIT Professor Dava Newman, Apollo Program Professor and director of the Human Systems Lab, who brought some samples of flight testing materials for everyone to see and touch. In 2025, the keynote was given by Erik Antonsen, director of the Mass General Brigham Space Medicine Fellowship. 

For students interested in exploring the possibilities of aerospace medicine, Doctors Without Gravity offers a place to learn, make connections, and discover the many paths into the field. Students interested in potentially joining the club may join the group’s mailing list.

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Tod Machover’s new symphony plays with AI while reflecting on democracy

Innovation, reflection, and celebration will blend at the Boston Symphony Orchestra this week, where MIT composer Tod Machover’s inventive new work “already and not yet” will see its world premiere on Thursday.

Machover, one of the world’s most prominent composers, has incorporated multiple ongoing interests into the new symphony, including AI tools interacting with the musicians, and a piece that is structured as a meditation on the crisis and promise of democracy. 

“An orchestra is an interesting ensemble to use for thinking about how different groups of people can relate to each other,” says Machover, who is the Muriel R. Cooper Professor of Music and Media and faculty director at the MIT Media Lab, where he also serves as director of the Opera of the Future group. 

He adds: “John Cage used to say one way to think of a piece of music is that it should be like the society you’d like to live in. I was always inspired by this idea, and thought of the orchestra — and constructed this new piece — in this way.” 

If the innovation in “already and not yet” comes from its use of artificial intelligence, and the reflection pertains to democracy, the celebration involved in the event partly relates to MIT: The performances are coordinated with the MIT Media Lab’s 40th anniversary celebrations occurring this week. Machover has been a member of the Media Lab since it opened. 

“In many ways, the piece is also an homage to the lab and to its spirit of invention and reinvention,” Machover says. 

The acclaimed conductor Kent Nagano — a longtime collaborator and advocate for Machover’s music — will lead the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s performances, which are taking place Oct. 22-24 at Boston’s Symphony Hall. 

Inspired by the possibilities

Machover’s extensive career has often featured the invention of new technologies within his compositions. Among many other technologically related projects, he has led the development of hyperinstruments, which can be responsive to the playing techniques of musicians and expand their range of expression; renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma is among those who have performed Machover’s work using them. 

Working across diverse musical forms, Machover’s 2010 opera “Death and the Powers” was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. He has also used locally sourced and community-created sounds as additional aural layers in his “City Symphonies,” which have been created around the world. The next project in the series, underway in Seoul, South Korea, is scheduled for premiere in September 2027.

“I’ve always been inspired by the possibilities of technology and the expressive potential it opens up,” Machover says. “It is kind of the core language of our time and something we have to grapple with so that it evolves in the most positive human-enhancing ways. I feel so fortunate that I have been able to pursue this vision at MIT, and particularly at the Media Lab, for all these years.” 

Machover’s “already and not yet” reflects on democracy in multiple ways. One is through the form of the composition, which has three movements relating to different stages of democracy. In the first movement, “Smash Up,” strings and winds eventually get crowded out by what Machover calls the “oppressive, aggressive” sounds of brass, percussion, and electronics. The second movement, “Wake Up,” presents a moment to reflect and regroup, but little by little weaves together a thriving melodic and textural presence. The third movement, “Stand Up,” involves more vigorous interplay between all the musicians, inviting the players to participate in establishing a new kind of balance between individuality and community. 

In this way, “already and not yet” conceptualizes the orchestra as a way of representing the stress and revival of democracy, and uses a “Live AI” system created at the Media Lab — along with layers of electronics crafted in Machover’s studio — to emphasize this struggle and progression. In the second movement of “already and not yet,” the AI tools aim to underscore the distinctiveness of each instrumentalist, establishing an ensemble of soloists; in the third movement, more broadly representing the regrowth of a polity, the AI system aims to find common ground, building new sonic bridges across the orchestra and extending it out into the hall using extra, specially installed loudspeakers. 

“I’ve used the way the orchestra plays, how much is scripted and how much freedom they have, and how they negotiate their relationship with the conductor, as part of the story,” Machover says. “It’s not said explicitly, but I think the players and the audience will feel it. It’s a whole society up there on stage, and the liveliness and ever-changing nature of the AI systems for this piece both dramatize and encourage a new way of playing and listening.”

Machover credits two PhD candidates in his group at the Media Lab for their extensive work on the project: Manaswi Mishra, who designed and built the AI systems for the performances, and Ana Schon, who will be doing the complex sound mixing in Symphony Hall during each performance. 

Reflections of an AI veteran

For Machover, the application of machine learning and AI is hardly a newfound idea; he has been exploring the concept for decades, giving him a distinctive perspective on this topic du jour. 

“The current generation of AI, especially generative AI, has capabilities that are different than AI from 20 or 30 years ago,” Machover says. “It’s good at certain things that were hard to do 20 years ago, but less good at some things that were easier to do back then.” 

When he designed a hypercello for Yo-Yo Ma, for instance, those systems would analyze Ma’s sound, playing techniques, and expressive intent in order to shape the extensions of the instrument. Today’s AI tools “are less good at analysis, but very good at detecting significant features and patterns in the audio itself, information that can be leveraged to powerful musical effect,” Machover says. 

“Current systems aren’t so good at what we did [for Yo-Yo Ma], like trying to understand the performance or the music itself,” Machover says. “But evolving AI models do an incredible job — especially in Manaswi’s magical systems — at establishing an immediate, creative dialogue with musicians, producing sophisticated and surprising augmentations that in turn inspire performers or composers to discover truly new ideas.”  

Ultimately, Machover says, “I think this piece — through its technology, its ‘story,’ and its sounds — is meant to take people on a journey of recognition about where we are at this moment in time and where we might be going. It’s meant to be an optimistic and inspiring piece.” He adds, “The idea, expressed in the work’s title, is that we’re so lucky to be at this place in this moment, even with everything that’s wrong and in critical need of repair. We really are. At the same time, it’s so urgent to realize that the vision of a just and flourishing society, for which the foundation exist, isn’t finished at all. Not only that, it’s in crisis. So this is the last time to be complacent, or discouraged.”

For all of that, Machover also expresses hope that the audience at Symphony Hall can simply engross themselves in the music itself, and find it compelling on its own terms. 

“My biggest wish is that people listen to this piece as music — forget about the AI or the story and just get swept along,” Machover says. “There’s one melody in this piece that’s trying to express itself in the first movement, and appears in fragmented form in the second movement. In the third movement, it’s the center of everything, a kind of vision of resolve, hope, and purpose. If people come out of the performance and don’t have some part of that melody in their heads, I’d be surprised. I hope that audiences listen for that, try to hold on to it, and see where it might lead.”

The piece was commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and supported by the New Works Fund of the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

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MIT student team CERBERUZ wins NASA LunaRecycle Centennial Challenge, turning lunar trash into tools

Establishing a human presence on the moon will require state-of-the-art spacecraft, spacesuits, life-support systems, and some of the most sophisticated technology humans have ever built. It will also require figuring out where to put the garbage.

A future lunar outpost will receive a steady stream of supplies from Earth, bringing packaging and other materials that could quickly become a mountain of waste. Meanwhile, astronauts will need tools, replacement parts, and materials to maintain the outpost, and shipping supplies from Earth is astronomically expensive. An MIT student team has won first prize in a NASA competition for developing a way to turn that trash into useful materials for lunar living.

The Composites for Extraterrestrial Recycling By Engineering the Reuse and Upcycling of Zotek (CERBERUZ) team was named first-prize winner in both the Prototype and Digital Twin tracks of NASA’s LunaRecycle Challenge. The challenge — part of NASA’s Centennial Challenges series — asked participants to design and develop solutions that can reuse, recycle, or upcycle space waste and improve the sustainability of longer-duration lunar missions. Teams were encouraged to envision solutions that not only addressed recycling in deep space, but could also have applications on Earth.

The CERBERUZ team’s system turns otherwise unusable waste into new composite materials, grinding it down, melting it, and molding it into useful parts. The approach reduces the need for costly shipments from Earth and keeps bulky packaging from piling up in lunar landfills.

“Waste packaging materials will inevitably accumulate when a lunar outpost is built, and at the same time, outpost construction and maintenance will require a steady supply of new materials, including replacement parts,” says George Lordos, a research scientist in the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and System Design and Management, and the lead advisor for the CERBERUZ team. “Recycling waste materials into such parts can help reduce materials needed to be launched from Earth.”

Waste not, want not

CERBERUZ separates non-biological waste into two streams: thermoplastics and everything else. All materials are then ground into a fine powder and mixed together. The powder mixture is loaded into an injection molding machine, where the thermoplastics melt with the remaining materials suspended in the molten plastic. The mixture is finally injected into a mold, producing high-quality composite parts that can be quickly and reliably replicated.
 

The team’s approach is especially notable for its treatment of Zotek F30, a closed-cell thermoset foam commonly used in aerospace packaging. Mixed thermoplastics and thermoset foams like Zotek F30 have no established recycling solutions, even on Earth. CERBERUZ takes a unique approach to this challenge by incorporating the Zotek as a reinforcing filler for the molten feedstock.

Zotek presents another peculiar engineering challenge that makes the need to break it down even more pressing: It is so lightweight that enormous quantities are needed to produce a useful mass of material. “We had big shipments of Zotek coming in, and one person can carry them on their head like it’s nothing,” says José Soto, a graduate student in AeroAstro and the team's pre-processing lead. “The box is the size of a person.”

The team designed the process around the constraints of operating far from Earth. Because CERBERUZ uses mechanical methods powered by electricity, it doesn’t rely on water-intensive recycling processes or chemical depolymerization, and produces no secondary chemical waste. This could allow packaging and other materials delivered to a lunar outpost to become a local source of manufacturing feedstock, giving astronauts the ability to produce needed items from material they already have on hand. 

“We set out to build something that would actually make sense on the moon, not just in a lab,” says Lanie McKinney, a graduate student in AeroAstro and team lead for CERBERUZ. “That means no water and no chemicals you can’t replace. Every design choice we made was driven by those constraints. And we don’t want to recycle just for recycling’s sake; we want to make useful things. Part of how we framed the problem was to create a system that can process nearly any feedstock and turn it into a wide array of components, giving more utility than producing a single item.”

Alongside the physical recycling system, the team developed DEIMOS, or Digital Environment for Intelligent Modeling of Operational Systems, a digital twin of its injection molding machine. Using data collected during actual production runs, DEIMOS models how different combinations of recycled materials and part geometries will behave during manufacturing, predicting factors including mold fill, warpage, and shrinkage risk. Ultimately, the digital twin could help astronauts determine how recycled materials will perform before committing limited resources to manufacturing a part on the moon.

Where ideas become hardware

The CERBERUZ team grew out of the MIT Space Resources Workshop, a co-curricular initiative of students passionate about designing, building, and testing systems to support future moon and Mars exploration. Founded in 2017, the workshop is well-known for building teams that take on, and conquer, grand challenges in NASA-sponsored competitions.

The team brings together undergraduate and graduate students from four MIT departments: Aeronautics and Astronautics, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Materials Science and Engineering. Professor Jeffrey Hoffman, a former NASA astronaut, and Lordos served as advisors for the team. 

“What impresses me most about this team is the quality of leadership,” says Lordos. “Lanie McKinney has been an outstanding team lead, and the co-leads — Palak Patel on manufacturing and materials characterization, Lilly Etzenbach on the digital twin, and José Soto on pre-processing — have each built and managed subteams doing cutting-edge research in lunar sustainability.”

The win caps nearly two years of work on the challenge. CERBERUZ was selected as a Phase 1 winner in 2025 before advancing through Phase 2 and earning milestone prizes in both tracks on its way to the final demonstration in summer 2026. The team earned $925,000 in prize money over the course of the challenge, and hopes to reinvest their winnings in the Space Resources Workshop, funding equipment and facilities that will enable future teams to rise to ever-more-complex challenges. Those advances will help turn a return to the moon into something more permanent: a human presence, built to last.

“If we’re able to reduce the amount of waste that’s inevitably going to be left on the moon, rather than letting it pile up like a landfill,” Soto says, “we can preserve both the beauty of the moon and make exploration more efficient and sustainable. And perhaps we can inspire people back on Earth to take another look at our trash and find more ways to recycle or reuse it.”

CERBERUZ team leads are Lanie McKinney, Palak B. Patel, Lilly Etzenbach, and José Soto. Team members include Sophia Augier, Sophie Berkvist, Ariella Blackman, Keira Boone, Constantine Bulavenko, Seth Burrowes, Andrew Chen, Alex Chen, Chris Choe, Johnson Cristales, Brady Cruse, Hillel Dei, Natalie Hatzigeorgiu, Intia Ibnah, Avishai Jeselsohn, Mollie Johnson, Uma Kirk, Christopher Kwon, Jessica Meza, Juan Orrego, Giuliana Pertuz, Jordan Prawira, Brandy Romine, Dustin Wang, Madison Wood, and Adrian Yang. 

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