Lerna Ekmekcioglu named head of MIT's History Section

Lerna Ekmekcioglu, the McMillan-Stewart Professor of History, has been named head of the History Section, effective July 1. 

“Lerna is an exceptional scholar and a proven leader. I am confident that she will guide the unit with thoughtfulness, wisdom, and a deep commitment to its continued success. I very much look forward to working with her in the years ahead,” says Agustín Rayo, the Kenan Sahin Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.

Ekmekcioglu, who joined the MIT faculty in 2011, is a historian of the modern Middle East, the Ottoman Empire, and Turkey, Armenian history, gender, feminism, genocide, and minority politics. She served as director of the Program in Women’s and Gender Studies from 2022 to 2025, where she remains an affiliated faculty member.

Ekmekciouglu succeeds Malick Ghachem, who was named head of the History Section on July 1, 2023. 

“As I begin this new role, my first priority is to sustain and expand the remarkable momentum already underway in the unit. It is truly an exciting moment to be head of History,” says Ekmekciouglu. “We have ambitious new initiatives, extraordinary faculty work, and — this is not a small thing — a group of colleagues who actually like and trust one another.”

She cites the History of Now, launched in 2025, as one of several exciting initiatives underway, adding that her role will be ensuring the section’s projects are sustainable, visible, and intellectually fruitful.

“The work ahead is both practical and intellectual: supporting faculty research and teaching, sustaining new initiatives, expanding public engagement, and demonstrating why historical inquiry is indispensable to MIT’s mission,” she says.

Ekmekcioglu’s first monograph, “Recovering Armenia: The Limits of Belonging in Post-Genocide Turkey” (Stanford University Press, 2016), explored the Armenian community in Turkey after the Armenian Genocide and the limits of minority belonging in the early Turkish Republic.

It won the Der Mugrdechian Society for Armenian Studies Outstanding Book Award.

Her forthcoming book, “Feminism in Armenian: Lives and Texts Through Empire, Genocide, and Diaspora,” co-authored with Melissa Bilal of the University of California at Los Angeles, continues her long-standing work on Armenian feminist thought, activism, and archives across empire, violence, and dispersion.

Ekmekcioglu is a 2016 recipient of the the James A. and Ruth Levitan Award for excellence in teaching. She also organizes the biannual McMillan-Stewart Lecture Series on women, gender, religion, politics, and law across the Middle East and North Africa.

Ekmekcioglu earned a BA from Boğaziçi University in Istanbul 2002 and a PhD from New York University in 2010.

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Building a scholarly community

On a Wednesday afternoon in April, a cohort of scholars from the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) gathered in MIT’s Lewis Music Library. 

This group of seven professors are the inaugural SHASS Faculty Fellows, a semester-long program launched this past spring. The faculty represent a variety of disciplines across the school. They met biweekly through the spring to connect over lunch and present updates on their respective research projects. 

At this particular meeting, associate professor of music Emily Richmond Pollock presented some of her work — a chapter about an opera festival in Sarasota, Florida — which, she says, started from “my own curiosity about how American institutions relate to opera’s traditions and practices.” 

After Pollock’s presentation, the group discussed and provided a sounding board for her work. It’s precisely the type of scholarly environment the SHASS Faculty Fellows program was designed to foster.

“The fellows program is a recognition of the fact that not only do we benefit from being in conversation with other scholars, but even more so when in conversation with scholars who do things differently than we do, who approach problems with different opening questions and methodologies,” says Anne McCants, the Ann F. Friedlaender Professor of History and Faculty Fellows Program Committee chair.

Along with committee member and literature professor Arthur Bahr, McCants serves as a kind of moderator during the discussions, asking pointed questions and interrogating participants’ assumptions.

“A small group of people coming from diverse scholarly backgrounds meeting regularly to share a meal and sustained conversation can have a truly outsized impact on their scholarship,” McCants adds.

Time to focus and connect

Faculty must apply to take part in the program, and are selected by the program committee. The program is administered by the MIT Human Insight Collaborative (MITHIC). 

Participants take advantage of opportunities to share and discuss ideas with students, too. Volha Charnysh, a Faculty Fellow and the Ford Career Development Associate Professor of Political Science in the Department of Political Science, presented research on the effects of large-scale humanitarian aid to the Burchard Scholars. The Burchard Scholars program connects faculty and promising MIT sophomores and juniors who have demonstrated excellence in some aspect of the humanities, arts, or social sciences.  

Projects can run the gamut. Participants might develop scholarly articles, develop book manuscripts, or dig deeper into existing research. 

“The Faculty Fellows Program has two primary aims: to enrich faculty members’ scholarly programs, and to foster collegial community within the school,” says Heather Paxson, associate dean for faculty in SHASS, the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Anthropology, and MITHIC faculty co-lead. “Participants in the program gain a better sense of the breadth and depth of our school’s scholarly contributions, and some may forge lasting connections with colleagues they might not otherwise have gotten to know.” 

For Pollock, the fellows program this past spring was an opportunity to focus on her current research.

“I’m working on a book about a set of five opera festivals in the United States,” Pollock says of the project, “Opera on Uncommon Ground: Five American Festivals.” 

“These are annual, seasonal opera companies where rare repertoire is often performed alongside canonical works, in places that are outside of major cities, and performed in unusual spaces.” 

“I hope that anyone who loves opera will be able to read and enjoy my book,” she says, including “opera ‘superfans’” Pollock says she has in mind while writing.

Pollock says the program gave her the space she needed to continue her project. “This semester [in the program] has been wonderful so I could get back to drafting and really concentrate on a book I am excited to write.”

“I am so inspired each week when we meet”

Faculty Fellow Richard Nielsen, associate professor of political science, faculty director of the MIT-MENA Program, and a Security Studies Program affiliate, is hard at work on his project, “Fighting War with Divine Intervention,” a book about how combatants’ beliefs affect wars. Using material from a diverse set of cases — the Islamic State, the Confederate States of America, and the current U.S. engagement with Iran — he wants to understand when claims about divine intervention motivate fighters and citizens to fight harder and longer for victory, even when the state of the battlefield strongly suggests they have lost already. 

“We understand a lot about how religion might shape the conditions for war and peace, but religion matters during wars, too, and we understand surprisingly little about how religious claims affect leaders and fighters in combat,” he says. 

Nielsen lauds the collegial atmosphere available in the fellows program, citing the importance of engagement with scholars outside his research area as a significant draw. “The best part has actually been the engagement with a diverse set of fellows,” he notes, “pursuing a dizzying variety of humanist and social science projects. I am so inspired each week we meet, and every single project has me exclaiming ‘I wish I was writing this!’”

“It adds a regular ongoing conversation with scholars not like yourself who will push you, likely accidentally, in unexpected directions,” McCants says of the fellows’ meetings. Conferring with other participants about their projects, meanwhile, helps Nielsen “return to my research with fresh eyes and enthusiasm,” he says.

Pollock appreciates the camaraderie available as a program participant. “I value my colleagues so highly — the other fellows and mentors are people I really admire and respect — and it’s been fun to trade work and get to read work in progress far outside my field,” she says. 

Twelve professors have been named SHASS Faculty Fellows for the 2026-27 academic year, with six taking part in the fall and another six in the spring. 

The inaugural group of fellows included: 

• Héctor Beltrán, the Class of 1957 Career Development Associate Professor of Anthropology; 
• Volha Charnysh, the Ford Career Development Associate Professor of Political Science; 
• Kevin Dorst, associate professor of philosophy;
• Richard Nielsen, associate professor of political science;
• Emily Richmond Pollock, associate professor of music; 
• Jessica Ruffin, assistant professor of literature; and 
• Robin Scheffler, associate professor of science, technology, and society.

Applications for the next cohort of fellows will open this fall.

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Why are some bacterial genes high in purines?

In the study of bacteria, a longstanding dogma held that two molecular machines — RNA polymerase, which leads the way in transcribing DNA into RNA, and ribosomes, which bring up the rear translating RNA into proteins — worked so closely in tandem that they were effectively attached. 

This close coupling of transcription and translation in bacteria was thought to be fundamental to gene expression in part because the trailing ribosome could shield nascent gene products from an effective and omnipresent quality-control protein called Rho. 

In bacteria that exhibit something called runaway transcription, however, the polymerase instead speeds ahead, unhitched from its protective ribosome. Inexplicably, however, in bacteria that exhibit this runaway transcription, such as Bacillus subtilis, Rho targeted primarily noncoding, useless RNA products. 

New research from the Department of Biology reveals that the secret to Rho’s quality-control specificity lies in the sequence composition of nucleotide bases that make up coding strands of DNA. 

“We started with a hypothesis that Rho was regulated by sequence, but the fact that the sequence alone was enough to protect any gene in the entire B. subtilis genome from Rho was really surprising,” says Julia Dierksheide PhD ’26, a graduate student in the Li Lab and first author of a paper recently published in Nature Microbiology. “That’s a really diverse range of sequences — what sequence feature is shared by every single gene in the genome?” 

Barricading with bias

Rho serves as a termination factor, meaning that it is a crucial mechanism for preventing bacteria from wasting precious resources by making RNA transcripts that serve no purpose. 

All the information a bacterial cell needs is encoded in its DNA, which is made up of two strands of nucleic acids. These strands twist together to form a double helix, with genetic information codified in pairs of bases: purines guanine and adenine are matched with pyrimidines cytosine and thymine, respectively. Any sequence that gives rise to RNA transcripts is stored in complement to a parallel, noncoding strand, meaning that a large portion of genetic material is transcriptionally useless. 

Coding DNA strands in certain bacteria were known to be significantly higher in purines guanine and adenine compared to the rest of the bacterial genome. The researchers found that this purine bias alone shields productive mRNA transcripts from Rho-mediated termination.

“I love having a big, complicated dataset and trying to reduce that to biological meaning,” Dierksheide says. “It seems like Rho itself has been broadly shaping the evolution of the B. subtilis genome to create these sequence composition biases.” 

Bacterial species that, over generations, have lost Rho no longer exhibit this strong purine bias. 

Rho also serves as a regulatory factor in bacteria becoming motile, forming biofilms, or sporulating, all of which are critical for biology and survival. The purine bias could also provide a layer of protection against the insertion of foreign DNA, for example, when a viral bacteriophage infects bacteria.

“Bacteria exist as single cells, so everything that they do, they have to do through gene expression,” Dierksheide says. “Understanding the fundamental details about how gene expression works, how a cell encodes all the information it needs to survive in the nucleotide sequence of the genome, is really exciting.”

Future directions

Although the exact mechanism underlying Rho’s specificity remains unclear, these results crack an underlying code in the composition of bacterial genomes. 

Dierksheide said she hoped to perform a similar screen to characterize Rho’s specificity in Escherichia coli, which diverged from B. subtilis on the evolutionary tree an estimated 2 billion years ago and still exhibits coupled transcription-translation, where the transcribing RNA polymerase is closely followed by a translating ribosome.

The high sequence specificity of B. subtilis Rho is crucial for the protection of its runaway RNA polymerase, in which that molecular machine speeds ahead of the ribosome. A systematic comparison to E. coli Rho could help reveal how this heightened stringency arose. 

This information will be critical for engineering diverse bacterial species for applications including the production of therapeutic agents. Other bacterial species, such as B. subtilis, may be better models for this process because they have abundant secretion pathways, according to Dierksheide, making it much easier to produce and isolate proteins in large quantities. 

“Our findings reveal an important criterion for successful sequence design that must be considered in expression engineering,” says associate department head, associate professor of biology, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator Gene-Wei Li, the lead author of the study. “There are so many cryptic messages in the genome, like the purine bias, and we are just beginning to be able to decipher what they mean.”

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How urban design leads to better wellness

A new big-data analysis of the U.S. pinpoints how urban design aids the health of city residents — especially when cities provide walking opportunities, greenery, and mixed-use streets with a blend of commercial and residential activity. 

The study examines tens of thousands of urban census-bureau tracts in the U.S., seeing how city features correlate with population health measures, while accounting for socioeconomic considerations as well. 

“We found that on a very large scale, urban planning and design, such as the availability of different amenities and their spatial arrangement, plays a critical role in population health outomes,” says Winston Yap, a visiting scholar at the MIT Senseable City Lab, a postdoc at Cornell University, and co-author of a new paper outlining the study’s findings. 

While there is not one design template for all locations, short and well-connected blocks with a variety of amenities, as well as the strategic placement of parks, all help well-being — physiologically and psychologically. 

“We usually think about physical health first, but we also found a high correlation between good design and mental health,” says Fabio Duarte, an MIT researcher and co-author of the paper. “If you are walking more, it is not only a matter of physical fitness, but gives people a chance to avoid isolation, have serendipitous meetings with people, and at least see there are others around.”

The paper, “Urban motifs associated with population health,” appears today in Nature Health. The authors are Yap; Duarte, who is associate director and a principal research scientist at MIT Senseable City Lab; postdocs Yu Zheng, Kee Moon Zhang, and Peng Luo, who is also an incoming assistant professor at the University of Iowa; Paolo Vineis, a professor at Imperial College, London; Carlo Ratti, director of the MIT Senseable City Lab; and Filip Biljecki, an associate professor at the National University of Singapore.

Only connect

The researchers say they conducted the analysis not just due to an interest in cities, but out of recognition that health care systems are often swamped, and preventative health measures are ever-more important. 

“We wanted to do this study because health care systems around the world are overloaded,” Yan says. “There’s a lot of burden on health care systems, and there is a need not just for treatment but for prevention as well, for obesity, high cholesterol, depression and other mental health issues, and more.” 

To conduct the study, the researchers analyzed 28,323 census tracts, using data from the U.S. Census Bureau along with health data from the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). They then used geospatial data, including more than 8 million street view images, to see how urban form related to the health status of residents in those areas. The study accounts for socioeconomic factors and other variables in building an assessment of the relationship between design and health. The study confimed that by themselves, socioeconomic factors are associated with urban health disparities; it then examined the relative impact of differences in urban design in those different settings. 

“By bringing together open demographic, health, and environmental data, the study highlights the importance of open data accessibility for planning healthy cities,” says Ratti.

The scholars also applied a graph deep-learning model to the data, an emerging machine-learning technique they used to help understand which key factors in urban design are most connected to health outcomes. 

The research reveals that in some cases, rectangularity in city blocks, and “building spread,” meaning structures that cover the full size of their lots, can enhance wellness. Examples of this include Manhattan or Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood, where mixed-use buildings on relatively short blocks create many amenities and a variety of walking routes. That said, circular and curving street forms can also work, as long as they feature a lot of interconnectedness as well. 

Urban greenery is almost always a significant factor in urban wellness, with parks scoring high as a facet of city design that helps resident health. Beyond that, expanding the tree canopy can also help urban health outcomes. 

The presence of cultural institutions and restaurants are also linked to general health, while access to health care amenities are understandably connected to physical health improvements. In general, access to points of interest, broadly defined, whether cultural or commercial, is a significant factor in abetting better health, in cities across the country. 

“One of the major contributions of the study is that we look at not only one or two cities, but the entire United States,” Yap says. “In a large-scale study, we were trying to find patterns that were consistent across different urban contexts, as well as populations with different characteristics. Just using this data, we can predict very confidently the population health outcomes for a neighborhood.”

Knowing where to intervene

The research also provides a kind of road map for urban planners and city officials when it comes to policy decisions and local improvements. Among other things, the study suggests where cities might see the greatest return on investment in urban improvements, in health terms. Improvements in lower-income neighborhoods, on aggregate, may generate about four times the added health benefits than the same level of investment in better-off areas that already realize the benefits of good urban amenities. 

“It’s important to know where to intervene,” Yan says. 

“I think for me it shows how intertwined different policies are,” Duarte adds. “Some funding for urban development could have a direct influence on health, and could be more inexpensive than [direct spending on health].”

The researchers regard the study as just one empirical step in this domain. As they note, additional studies could observe changes over time, to further enhance our picture of the connection between urban design and health. Still, as the authors write in the paper, “we believe that our broad picture provides an overarching scaffolding for the understanding of the social and material determinants of health and can guide [further] analytical studies.” 

The research received support from the Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise (CREATE) program of the National Research Foundation Singapore; the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART); and the MIT Senseable City Lab consortium. It is part of the Largescale 3D Geospatial Data for Urban Analytics project, supported by the National University of Singapore.

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MIT-Kalaniyot program expands, with new cohort of scholars

As a new academic year dawns, the MIT-Kalaniyot program is welcoming its second cohort of scholars to campus, expanding an innovative effort to build new connections between MIT and researchers from Israel. 

In fall 2026, MIT-Kalaniyot has 11 new scholars arriving at MIT to pursue research, collaborating with Institute faculty across a wide variety of disciplines. They consist of seven new Kalaniyot Postdoctoral Fellows and four new Kalaniyot Sabbatical Scholars, who are faculty on leave from institutions in Israel. 

It is another step forward for a program which, less than two years ago was still an idea on a drawing board. The project aims to enhance research and create stronger community ties — not only among those connected to the program, but across the MIT campus.

“The goals of the program are to build academic ties between MIT and Israel, alongside a strong, supportive community,” says Or Hen, an MIT nuclear physicist and a co-founder of MIT-Kalaniyot. “MIT has a mission that revolves around research, education, and entrepreneurship, and MIT-Kalaniyot strengthens MIT, to help meet that mission for the world.”

The scholars will be working on a wide range of topics, including mathematics, materials science, behavioral economics, architecture, modern history, chemistry, quantum computing, and computational methods for examining cellular activity.

“We designed Kalaniyot to strengthen MIT’s research and its community at the same time,” says Ernest Fraenkel, a professor of biological engineering and a co-founder of  MIT-Kalaniyot. “We now have scholars in the program working in each of MIT’s five schools. The academic breadth shows our model is working.” MIT-Kalaniyot will also feature its first teaching fellow at the Institute, hosted by MIT’s History program. 

MIT-Kalaniyot was founded by Hen and Fraenkel as a constructive response to discord over conflict in the Middle East. Hen is the Class of 1956 Associate Professor of Physics and associate director of the Laboratory for Nuclear Science; Fraenkel is the Grover M. Hermann Professor in Health Sciences and Technology.

Fraenkel and Hen credit multiple members of MIT’s community and upper administration for backing the MIT-Kalaniyot idea from the start, making it feasible for the program to launch. 

“When we first shared the idea, we were very encouraged by the response from MIT’s senior leadership,” Fraenkel says. “They understood the value of a faculty-led effort, and their constructive response gave us confidence that our approach could be successful.”

“This would be impossible to do the way we’re doing it without the administration’s support,” Hen says. “The program is faculty-led and institution-backed. That’s what you want.”

Hen adds: “I think MIT today is home to one of the most, if not the most, accepting and welcoming communities for Israelis, and I can stand by that statement very strongly. The way our community grew these past years is remarkable.”

Embedded at MIT

MIT-Kalaniyot, named for a well-known flower that grows in Israel and other parts of the region, welcomed its first cohort of scholars to the MIT campus for the 2025-26 academic year. Hen and Fraenkel also give Tal Cohen, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, substantial credit for developing the concept. 

Scholars at Israel’s nine state-recognized universities are eligible to seek the MIT-Kalaniyot fellowships, which enable research, collaboration, and training at the Institute. The scholars come from a range of academic and personal backgrounds, including both Arab and Jewish citizens of Israel. 

The program is highly competitive, with many more applicants than positions currently available. Applicants are encouraged to identify in advance MIT faculty they would like to work with; accepted applicants then already have a “faculty host” lined up. Many of the new fellows will be working with researchers in established MIT labs, for instance. 

“When they’re here, they are treated exactly like anybody else in an academic unit at MIT and that’s really important,” Fraenkel says. “They’re embedded in these places.”

The program is also intended to generate the kinds of community connections that help scholars flourish, both professionally and personally. MIT-Kalaniyot features weekly lunches, attended by people from the larger community, where scholars can forge connections and friendship. 

The program also features informal academic talks and discussions, with the talks given by MIT researchers both within and outside of MIT-Kalaniyot. Hen, for one, has already seen the benefits of such events; one paper he has recently co-authored directly stemmed from discussions he had at a program event. 

“The range of MIT faculty who stepped forward as hosts has been one of the most gratifying parts of the program,” Fraenkel says. “It shows that this is not confined to one field or one corner of the Institute. It is becoming part of MIT’s broader academic life.”

Adds Hen: “I think it sends a very strong and important message. We’re able to move forward at MIT and build collaborative partnerships with strong ties.”

An additional facet of the program is the potential impact of MIT-based research in practical, tangible ways. One of the 2025 fellows, a leading physician, focused her MIT work on new methods of breast cancer detection, and now, back in Israel, is working to apply those findings in active medical settings. 

Plans for future growth

Having first taken root at MIT, the MIT-Kalaniyot concept is now spreading to other places. In the last two years, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Southern California have implemented the concept, with other universities in the process of adopting it as well. 

“This national movement all started by replicating the MIT model,” Hen says. “Each university then innovated in their own way. They start from the MIT approach, and then they adapt to what’s happening on their campus. They learn from us, we learn from them, and together we support a broad academic network.”

The progress at MIT and elsewhere has led Hen and Fraenkel to feel optimistic about the ongoing evolution of MIT-Kalaniyot. 

“We started at a tense time on our campus, not really knowing what the future would hold, and it’s exceeded our hopes,” Fraenkel says. “Now we want Kalaniyot to become a recognized center at MIT, funding seed grants for research that wouldn’t happen any other way.”  

While Fraenkel and Hen do not yet have a firm timetable for those developments, they regard them as being realistic. 

“Now we see Kalaniyot as a program that helps MIT well beyond our community,” Hen says. After all, he observes, simply as a vehicle for research, the program has the potential to provide added capacity for MIT, as well as the further connections to top scholars being generated by the effort. 

Indeed, Hen reflects, he is motivated the question: “How do we best support MIT in realizing its mission for the world?” Overall, he says, “I think that’s the ultimate goal of Kalaniyot. We do it in one way, other people can do it in other ways, and as long as you do net good, and support the MIT mission, we value and treasure that, and just want to be part of it.”

“I really believe this is the DNA of MIT,” Fraenkel says. “We’re all about finding practical solutions to society’s biggest problems. Kalaniyot brings extraordinary people here to do exactly that, and the whole Institute is stronger for it.”

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MIT student teams win top honors in NASA competition

Three teams comprising 35 students across eight different MIT departments and Wellesley College have been at work since fall 2025, designing critical early infrastructure elements that a moon base would require. This June, their designs were recognized with five awards at NASA’s 2026 Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts — Academic Linkage (RASC-AL) Forum. 

Among 75 submissions and 14 finalists, the MIT teams earned first and second place in the competition, as well as three best-in-theme awards. The Exploration-Class Lunar Integrated Power SystEm (ECLIPSE) team won first place overall and first in its theme category, lunar surface power. The communications and navigation constellation team, MELIORA, won second place overall and first in its theme category on Mars communications, position navigation and timing, which included a strategy for proving the design at the moon. And CHEESEBURGER, a campaign to mine and process lunar regolith into oxygen, metals, and bricks, won first in its theme category, lunar technology demonstrations. 

“NASA spent the spring telling the world what critical early infrastructure their upcoming permanent moon base will need,” says George Lordos, a research scientist and lecturer in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro) and in System Design and Management (SDM), who co-advised all three teams. “Over 30 MIT students spent this academic year designing much of the moon base — systems for generating, storing, and distributing power; robust systems for positioning, navigating, and communicating; and early experiments with essential technologies to live sustainably off the moon’s own dirt.”

A power grid for surviving lunar night and winter

The hardest constraint on NASA’s moon base is staying powered, because a failure in life-support power would doom the crew within hours. ECLIPSE is a reference design for a lunar grid engineered to stay up for more than 99.995 percent of the time — fewer than 27 minutes of downtime a year in the worst-case scenario, the standard demanded of the most critical data centers on Earth. It pairs two power sources that fail in different ways: banks of 20-meter solar masts in the sunlit highlands near the south pole, and, for the roughly 18-day stretch each year when the sun drops below the horizon, a pair of buried 20 kilowatt microreactors the team named CARROT, (Compact Autonomous Regolith-shielded Reactor Operating for Ten years). The CARROT reactor, a novel design developed independently by the ECLIPSE team, ended up being similar in design to NASA’s SR-1 reactor for the 2028 mission to Mars, both aiming to maximize speed-to-deployment. 

“Burying each reactor 1.3 meters down shrinks the keep-out zone from kilometers to meters, so crews can work nearby, and it saves tons on required shielding mass,” says Taylor Hampson, a PhD student in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering and ECLIPSE team co-lead.

The full design delivers an initial 120 kilowatts using a grid of buried aluminum cables and shielded direct-current power equipment. Laser-equipped rovers provide “Frontier Power” capability, beaming up to 10 kilowatts to sites beyond any cable, from a shadowed crater to a new outpost before its own grid exists. Patrick Riley, a graduate student in the Department of AeroAstro and ECLIPSE team co-lead, says the design’s point is to put reliability ahead of mass: “We sized it so the most likely failures never reach the moon base inhabitants, and so it scales from a first crew of six up to industrial demand without interrupting a commercial lunar economy.”

A network for exploring the moon and Mars, and calling home

MELIORA acts as the base’s relay and GPS. Although RASC-AL framed the communications, positioning, navigation, and timing competition sub-theme around Mars, the team also proposed a plan to validate their design in lunar geometry first, in step with the agency’s strategy to prove technology on the moon before extending it to Mars. To find the best design, the team ran a trade study across 5,764 candidate constellation geometries. The result grows from an initial three satellites to 23, returns more than 100 megabits per second to Earth-orbiting data networks over free-space optical links, and pins a user’s position to within 10 meters. For the Mars design, four relay satellites parked at gravitationally stable Lagrange points keep the link alive even during solar conjunction, the weeks when the sun sits between the two worlds and ordinarily cuts communication. On the surface, a user needs only a portable radio terminal and a chip-scale atomic clock — a timekeeper the size of a matchbox. 

“You should never have to think about whether the network is there — it just is, the way you don’t think about a cell tower,” says Ekaterina Tiukhtikova, an undergraduate studying both AeroAstro and electrical engineering and computer science (EECS), and a MELIORA team co-lead. “We put almost all the complexity up in orbit, so everything on the surface stays portable and simple,” adds Clayton Lieberman, a graduate of the SDM program and team co-lead who wrote his thesis on MELIORA.

Making oxygen, metal, and bricks from lunar dirt

After power and communications, the third essential pillar of a lunar base is living off the land. The moon’s own regolith can supply oxygen to breathe and burn, metal to build with, and shielding to hide behind for protection from deadly radiation. CHEESEBURGER is a campaign of five robotic payloads that prove the supply chain one link at a time, followed by integration of the five into the first end-to-end lunar industry. 

The payloads carry a kitchen’s worth of names: SWISS prospects for the richest ore, BRIOCHES digs and sorts the regolith, BACON casts it into bricks, GRILLED MEAT melts it electrically to pull out metal and oxygen, and AVOCADO is the robotic builder that stacks the products into structures, including interlocking Moon BRICCSS that shield a habitat from radiation. The food theme was born during a January team outing at Sandwich, Massachusetts. “Naming the prospector SWISS and the metal extractor GRILLED MEAT turned a wall of acronyms into something the whole team could enjoy,” says Cesar Meza, a graduate student in AeroAstro and CHEESEBURGER co-lead. “It sounds like a joke until you see that each acronym clearly describes a serious piece of hardware doing one job in the pipeline.”

Thirty students, eight departments, and three teams for one moon base

More than 30 students contributed across the teams, from AeroAstro, SDM, Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE), EECS, Mechanical Engineering (MechE), the Technology and Policy Program, the MIT Sloan School of Management, and Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), along with a student from Wellesley College. Several student mentors and faculty advisors worked across more than one team, which is why ECLIPSE’s grid is sized to power CHEESEBURGER’s processing, CHEESEBURGER’s regolith handling is used to bury and shield ECLIPSE’s grid, and all three projects are designed to translate moon base lessons for a future mission to Mars. The teams were advised by Olivier de Weck, the Apollo Program Professor of Astronautics and Engineering Systems and interim department head of AeroAstro, who led ECLIPSE; Kerri Cahoy, the Sheila Evans Widnall Professor of Aerospace Engineering, who led MELIORA; Jeffrey Hoffman, professor of the practice in AeroAstro and a former NASA astronaut, who led CHEESEBURGER; Koroush Shirvan, Atlantic Richfield Career Development Professor in Energy Studies in Nuclear Science and Engineering, who co-advised ECLIPSE; and Lordos, who co-advised all three. Much of the day-to-day mentorship work is led by PhD student volunteers and runs through the MIT Space Resources Workshop, which Lordos founded in 2019.

“The winning teams demonstrated how academic innovation can support Artemis mission goals,” says Daniel Mazanek, RASC-AL program sponsor and senior space systems engineer at NASA’s Langley Research Center, in NASA's announcement of the awards. “Their work highlights the important role student research plays in shaping future space exploration.”

NASA expects astronauts living on the lunar surface for months at a time by the early 2030s — the window ECLIPSE, MELIORA, and CHEESEBURGER were designed for. The picture the three teams had worked toward is unified: a crew at the lunar south pole, the lights on through the winter night, the network always up, and the first oxygen and bricks coming out of the ground beneath them. 

“A permanent base is no longer a slide in a strategy deck; NASA begins landing the first elements in 2027,” says de Weck. “Studies like these three let the agency see, before the concrete sets, how its power, communications, and resource choices depend on one another. That is precisely when independent, integrated architecture work has the most influence on the real plan.”

RASC-AL is administered by the National Institute of Aerospace on behalf of NASA. MIT has a long record in NASA’s student design competitions, with recent winning teams including the  HYDRATION Mars water production system, the Pale Red Dot Mars homesteading architecture, the deployable lunar tower MELLTT, the MARTEMIS lunar Mars analog campaign, the MAPLE autonomous lunar robot pathfinding system, the CERBERUZ lunar recycling project, and the THERMOS cryogenic fluid management system. This work was supported in part by NASA, the Massachusetts Space Grant, MIT AeroAstro, and the MIT Space Resources Workshop. One student was supported by a NASA Space Technology Graduate Research Opportunity Fellowship.

The full teams:

ECLIPSE — Team leads: Taylor Hampson (graduate student, Nuclear Science and Engineering) and Patrick Riley (graduate student, AeroAstro). Reactor team: Liliana Arias, Sydney Menne, Julian Rocher and Pavel Shilenko (graduate students, NSE). Power management and distribution team: Evrard Constant and Mary Foxen (graduate students, AeroAstro), Janhavi Joglekar and Asma Patel (undergraduate students, AeroAstro). Solar and architecture team: Zachary Dawson (graduate student, System Design and Management), Sreeja Akula and Ian Jimenez (undergraduate students, AeroAstro; EAPS), Yohan Lim (graduate student, AeroAstro/Technology and Policy Program), CJ Taglienti (graduate student, AeroAstro/MBA). Student co-advisors: Yana Charoenboonvivat, Lanie McKinney (AeroAstro), Palak Patel (MechE). Industry mentor: Sully Marigliano-Crevecoeur (Technetics). Faculty: Olivier de Weck (lead) and Jeffrey Hoffman (AeroAstro), George Lordos (AeroAstro and SDM), and Koroush Shirvan (NSE).

MELIORA — Team leads: Clayton Lieberman and Katiyayni Balachandran (System Design and Management), Ekaterina Tiukhtikova (undergraduate, AeroAstro and EECS), Celvi Lisy (AeroAstro). Team members: Thomas Harrington and Zachary T. Barnes (SDM), Asael Acosta (undergraduate, AeroAstro). Student co-advisor: Lanie McKinnery (AeroAstro). Faculty: Kerri Cahoy (lead), Jeffrey Hoffman and Olivier de Weck (AeroAstro), and George Lordos (AeroAstro and SDM).

CHEESEBURGER — Team leads: Cesar Meza (graduate student, AeroAstro) and Elizabeth Romero (undergraduate, AeroAstro). Team members: Rachel Dunphy, Shreya Kothnur, Hailey Polson (undergraduates, AeroAstro), Christopher Kwon, Jose Soto, Lanie McKinney (graduate students, AeroAstro), Marvin Martinez (undergraduate, MechE), Ananda Santos Figueiredo (graduate student, Technology and Policy Program), Evangeline Haiqi Wang (undergraduate, Computer Science and Psychology, Wellesley College). Faculty: Jeffrey Hoffman (lead) and Olivier de Weck (AeroAstro), and George Lordos (AeroAstro and SDM).

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MIT researchers advance toward greater bandwidth, more energy-efficient communications

An MIT-led research program aimed at creating future microsystems capable of sustainably transmitting data with greater bandwidth and higher efficiency than is possible today has made several significant advances since it was established in 2022. 

These include the invention of devices within systems that can much more easily integrate electronics — manipulating data with electricity — with photonics, which does the same with light. The microsystems, the first of their kind, also promise to be cost-effective because, among other advantages, they can be manufactured using existing equipment in traditional electronics foundries and packaging houses.

“Our disruptive electronic-photonic integrated solutions will enable us to leap from [transmitting data at] hundreds of terabits per second to greater than 1 petabit per second,” said Anu Agarwal, who leads MIT’s FUTUR-IC, at an April webinar titled, “Shaping the Future of Semiconductors: Power, Performance, and Possibility.” The event was sponsored by the MIT Industrial Liaison Program and Startup Exchange.

An advanced system using co-packaged optics can provide improved bandwidth and energy savings compared to what is used today, which is electronics-only or pluggable optics.

Toward sustainability

The microchips behind everything from smartphones to medical imaging can be traced to about 500 megatons of carbon dioxide-equivalent lifetime emissions in 2021, and every year the world produces more than 50 million tons of electronic waste. Further, the huge data centers necessary for complex computations like on-demand video are growing, and will require close to 10 percent of the world’s electricity by 2030.

“This is neither scalable nor sustainable, and cannot continue,” Agarwal has reiterated over the years. FUTUR-IC, funded by the National Science Foundation Convergence Accelerator, was created to address these resource-efficiency issues.

For example, integrating photonics with the electronics that underpin today’s microchips could address energy use because the transmission, or communication of data, using light is much more energy efficient. “Our mantra is to use electronics for computation and photonics for communication to bring this energy crisis under control,” says Agarwal.

Currently, however, it is difficult and expensive to connect electronic chips with their photonic counterparts within a single package. That’s partly because the supply-chain ecosystem for co-packaged optics is still immature.

New devices

Enter two new devices developed through FUTUR-IC aimed at making it easier — and less expensive — to integrate photonic chips with microchips. One, the evanescent coupler, was featured on the cover of Advanced Engineering Materials last year. Another, known as the graded index coupler (GRIN), was reported in the March 2026 print issue of the Journal of Physics: Photonics. 

A third new coupler was developed by an MIT team led by Professor Juejun Hu of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. It was reported in a 2023 issue of Laser & Photonics Reviews. That work was supported by the Department of Energy. 

The three couplers are the first optical equivalents of “solder bumps,” or the tiny dots of metal that allow chip-to-chip or chip-to-substrate connections for electron flow. Until this MIT work, there were no analogous “optical bump” options for photonics.

And if photonics is to be integrated with electronics, “you’ll need both metal bumps and optical bumps, because there are devices on your photonics chip that will require both an electrical signal and an optical signal,” says Drew Weninger PhD ’25, first author of the papers on both the evanescent and GRIN couplers. Weninger is now at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

As with electronics, many options of optical bumps will be necessary, as “each type has substantial trade-offs,” wrote Weninger and colleagues in a review article in Nature about coupler advances published earlier this year.

For example, the GRIN coupler can be used over a wider spectrum of light than is possible with the evanescent coupler, Weninger says. The evanescent coupler, however, is easier to fabricate and can be packed in tighter to form a higher number of connections.

Additional advances

FUTUR-IC is organized into three dimensions: Technology (the coupler work is a good example), Value Chain Innovation, and Workforce. 

Under the Value Chain sector, researchers developed a new tool to support companies’ decisions toward sustainability. Earthster provides a visual model for quickly determining the energy, materials usage, and environmental sustainability across a company’s products. For example, says Agarwal, “looking at [Earthster], a supplier can tell right away their hot spots for carbon emissions, and start working to minimize them.”

FUTUR-IC has also developed several programs aimed at developing a future workforce for next-generation microchips. For example, “it is introducing an online course on semiconductor resource efficiency,” Agarwal says. “We also offer gamified digital learning and problem-based learning, plus a summer academy and a hands-on bootcamp.” For K-12 awareness, FUTUR-IC has created TED-Ed videos.

Agarwal concluded her April webinar by acknowledging the range of industries FUTUR-IC aims to help. “If you’re a packaging vendor, a materials vendor, or you are in the supply chain for data centers, FUTUR-IC can provide value.”

Additional authors of the paper on the GRIN coupler are Agarwal; Lionel Kimerling, the Thomas Lord Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering; Christian Duessel BS ’25, now at SiLC Technologies, a silicon photonics company; and Samuel Serna, professor of physics, photonics, and optical engineering at Bridgewater State University.

Additional authors of the Nature review paper are Serna; Luigi Ranno PhD ’25, now at Ayar Labs; Kimerling; and Agarwal.

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