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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Q&A: What is agentic AI today, and what do we want it to be?

The deployment of automated software systems called AI agents has recently exploded. A November 2025 report by MIT Sloan School of Management and Boston Consulting Group found that 35 percent of surveyed businesses had already deployed AI agents, while another 44 percent planned to implement agentic AI soon. 

To understand the fundamentals and potential impacts of these increasingly popular tools, MIT News spoke with Phillip Isola, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), who studies the intelligence AI agents possess, as well as the underlying models and mechanisms that power agentic AI systems.

Q: What is agentic AI and how is it different from generative AI models like ChatGPT and Claude?

A: Agentic AI is AI that takes actions in the world. These actions could be a physical action, like robotic manipulation, or a digital action, like booking a flight. On the other hand, we think of generative AI as making up stories, poems, art, and images, rather than taking actions for us. 

The word “agent” is just a brand name. It usually means AI that is going to help people interact with an application, a website, or the physical world. Most agents we encounter today are digital agents, like customer service agents you can talk with about product complaints. 

Most companies that offer agents use the same few AI models under the hood and give them the ability to take actions and remember what happened. An agent starts with a fundamental generative AI system, like Claude, at the core. Then companies put different wrappers around that foundation model for their product or application. Those wrappers might be specific tools that agent can use, and those tools depend on the application. Maybe the agent has access to a calculator so it can solve math problems, or maybe it has access to a more complicated hard drive and operating system so it can remember a firm’s financial data and past business negotiations. 

The biggest challenge in developing agentic AI comes from a lack of training data. If I want to create a system that can go online and book a flight for me, that seems pretty simple. But we don’t have a lot of data that spells out exactly how to do that — where to move the mouse, which buttons to click on, what to do if something goes wrong, or how to call somebody and negotiate about the price of the airline ticket. One way to train a system like this is to have the AI agent visit airline websites, try things out, and see what works and what doesn’t work. These environments are hard to model, so often the agent must learn by trial and error.

Q: What are some promising applications of agentic AI?

A: I think the area where we’ve seen the most success has been with coding agents. This is something that evolved from generative AI. People trained language models on code, and then they can predict what a human would do to solve a coding problem. In addition, an agent can learn to do this by going through a feedback loop where it tries out different solutions and checks to see if it got the answer right. As long as it can check the answer, the AI agent can perform this trial-and-error loop until it figures out a good strategy.

But there is always a balance between automating decision making versus simply assisting and informing humans. Analytical AI methods, like the systems that help predict possible outcomes of decisions, are not agentic in nature, but are very informative to human decision-makers. For cases that are either high-stakes or safety-critical, like medicine, security, high-level business policies, etc., the technology might not be ready for AI to completely automate those processes, or we might not even be comfortable with that.

Q: Are there risks we should be thinking about when using AI agents?

A: One big risk area comes from the fact that it is often very easy to get agents to do certain types of work for you. With coding agents, you can “vibe code” and just ask the agent to make a code for you, so you don’t have to do the hard work yourself. There is a big risk that, because it is so easy, people will not put enough effort into verifying that it is doing the right thing. Bugs will be introduced, private data will get leaked — this is already happening.

Agents aren’t perfect, in the sense that they might make mistakes because they are not well-trained and don’t know what to do. But even if they are very competent, if a human doesn’t use them appropriately or gives them an instruction that is too vague, the AI agent could make a mistake because the human made a mistake. If humans are less involved in thinking through all the consequences, I think we might be more prone to making those mistakes. 

An additional aspect is the risk of de-skilling. It is unclear how far this will go, but when we are relying on agents to do our homework, our coding, and our math, we might lose the ability to do that ourselves, and we might lose that ability too soon because the technology is not yet ready to fully automate those processes.

Q: What does the future hold for agentic AI?

A: What we think of now as agentic AI refers to large language models using tools to interact with digital and physical systems. One obvious limitation is that, under the hood, these have the architecture of a language model and are trained on text data. To make even more powerful AI agents, we might need to model videos, physical forces, time series, radar scans, and other modalities. We might need to have models with fundamentally different architectures that can handle continuous data, high-dimensional data, stochastic data, and so on. 

But, on the other hand, maybe an extremely good coding model could act as a puppeteer to interface with sensors, actuators, and web APIs? Perhaps, once you have a super-smart reasoning system that understands math, language, and code, you can give it a camera and a keyboard and it will figure out what to do in the spatial domain. Is the next wave of AI just going to be Claude with sensors, actuators, and tools, or is it going to be something built in a new way from the ground up? That’s the big question a lot of people in AI are grappling with right now.

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Scientists find ozone depletion began decades before discovery of ozone hole

The Antarctic ozone hole was discovered in 1985, when scientists observed a severe depletion in the Earth’s protective layer of stratospheric ozone. Industrial chemicals known as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), then widely used as refrigerants, propellants, foam-blowing agents, and solvents, were at the root of the ozone depletion. After concerted global effort to phase out the use of CFCs, ozone today is recovering, especially in the Antarctic. 

The discovery of the ozone hole was possible thanks, in part, to the measurement tools that were available at the time. Advances in those tools, along with satellites and other monitoring technologies, have since allowed scientists to track ozone’s recovery. 

But what if today’s tech was available much earlier? Would scientists have been able to spot even earlier signs of human-induced ozone depletion? And if so, when would those first signs have popped up, and where? 

MIT scientists now have some answers. The team, led by atmospheric chemist Susan Solomon, has carried out a thought experiment in which they consider a hypothetical world where today’s atmospheric monitoring capabilities were available throughout the last century. In this scenario, they simulated the atmosphere’s chemistry through history and discovered not only when the earliest sign of ozone depletion would have been detectable, but also where, and why. 

In a study appearing today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the scientists suggest that the first signs of ozone depletion appeared as early as 1957 — about 30 years before the ozone hole was discovered. And, this first signal of ozone loss popped up not in the Antarctic, but in the upper stratosphere of the tropics. What’s more, the cause of this early depletion was not due to CFCs, but to another industrial chemical: carbon tetrachloride. 

“What we’ve learned from textbooks is that CFCs result in ozone depletion,” says the study’s first author, Jian Guan, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). “It turns out there was another compound that caused ozone depletion much earlier than CFCs. This was a big surprise.”

For Solomon, who was an early pioneer in the study of ozone’s effects on the atmosphere, and who was the first to show that CFCs were the main agent eroding Antarctic ozone, the new results were a complete shock. 

“The fact that ozone depletion would have happened as early as the late 1950s, which is much earlier than I would have thought, just absolutely blew my mind,” says Solomon, the Lee and Geraldine Martin Professor of Environmental Studies and Chemistry at MIT. “This study shows it’s really important to keep monitoring so that we can fully understand how the atmosphere responds and recovers.”

The study’s MIT co-authors include Peidong Wang, Yaowei Li, and Kane Stone; along with Benjamin Santer of the University of East Anglia; Qiang Fu of the University of Washington; Rolando Garcia, Douglas Kinnison, and Jun Zhang of the National Center for Atmospheric Research; Jean-Francois Lamarque of Climate Modeling and Analysis LLC; and Gabriel Chiodo of the Spanish National Research Council. 

Chlorine connection

Ozone is a highly reactive molecule, made from three oxygen atoms, that exists naturally in the upper layers of the atmosphere. In the stratosphere, ozone acts as a shield, absorbing the sun’s rays and reducing the harmful ultraviolet radiation that can reach the Earth’s surface. 

In the late 1980s, after scientists first observed signs of ozone depletion in the Antarctic, Solomon led expeditions to the region to measure the stratosphere’s composition. Those measurements confirmed that ozone’s agent of destruction was CFCs — the chemicals which were used globally in refrigeration, air conditioning, and aerosol propellants, among other uses. 

Specifically, Solomon measured higher-than-expected levels of chlorine dioxide in the Antarctic stratosphere. The presence of this molecule, in the same place where ozone depletion was observed, had only one chemical explanation: Ozone was being broken apart by rogue atoms of chlorine. At the time, chlorine-heavy CFCs were in wide use, and MIT chemist Mario Molina proposed that if CFCs drifted up to the stratosphere, photons from the sun could break apart the molecules and release atoms of chlorine, which would then be free to break apart ozone’s oxygen atoms. 

Molina’s work, and Solomon’s measurements, were key in showing that CFCs could deplete ozone — a discovery that earned Molina a share of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Soon after, nearly every country in the world signed the Montreal Protocol, which ultimately led to the successful phase-out of CFCs and other ozone-depleting substances. In recent years, as a result of that global cooperation, scientists have observed initial signs of ozone recovery.

“We know what we have now, and ozone is starting to recover,” Solomon says. “But no one has ever really documented where and when and why the first ozone depletion would have happened.”

Signal over noise

For their new study, Solomon, Guan, and their colleagues took a “what-if” approach, posing the question: What if the past had the monitoring capabilities of the present? When would we have been able to detect the earliest sign of human-induced ozone depletion? 

Today’s monitoring tools are sensitive to a certain signal to noise, meaning they can identify patterns of ozone loss that are more likely a “signal” of human-induced depletion (such as from CFCs), versus ozone loss that is due to “noise,” such as random fluctuations from weather and natural phenomena. 

With this in mind, the team looked to reproduce the chemistry of the atmosphere over the last century to see whether they could see a signal over the noise, based on the sensitivity of today’s monitoring tools. 

The team used 16 different model runs, each of which simulates varying conditions and dynamics of the atmosphere at various latitudes and altitudes, as well as the concentrations and interactions of ozone and other molecules. Ozone is affected by not only human-caused chemicals but also natural phenomena such as volcanic eruptions and El Niño weather patterns. Each model run simulates ozone’s response to these natural phenomena, which the team combined to establish a range of “noise,” or ozone depletion that likely is due to natural variability.

They added to each model the various industrial chemicals that were known to have been produced at various times over the last century. 

“Year by year, we have estimates from industry of how much of these chemicals were made and sold globally, and the emissions of all these chemicals, which the models include,” Solomon explains. “And in the case of carbon tetrachloride, the really cool thing is, we also have ice core data.”

Ice cores are drilled-out cylinders of deeply buried ice, that had formed in the Antarctic and Arctic from the falling and layering of snow over hundreds of years. Ice cores contain the remnants of snow, as well as whatever trace chemicals in the atmosphere the snow originally fell through. Scientists can therefore use ice cores to estimate the composition of the atmosphere through history. 

“We actually see in the ice cores that carbon tetrachloride starts increasing already by the 1940s,” Solomon notes. 

The team incorporated industrial and ice core data into their models, then looked to see whether a signal of human-induced ozone loss stood out from the noise of natural fluctuations. Their analysis revealed that a signal did appear, as early as 1957. Not only did they see when the signal appeared, but also where: in the tropics, rather than the Antarctic. 

The researchers say that human-induced ozone loss was likely occurring globally, but was easier to spot in the tropical upper stratosphere, since that is the region where the range of natural fluctuations is the smallest, and therefore where a signal can stand out better.

Finally, the analysis indicated that carbon tetrachloride, and not CFCs, was the cause of the earliest ozone depletion. 

“That’s the only ozone-depleting substance that was increasing that early,” Solomon says. “We started using carbon tetrachloride in the 1930s as a dry-cleaning agent, and as a degreasing solvent. We didn’t start using CFCs until quite a bit later.”

Carbon tetrachloride has since been phased out of use in most of the world, initially due to its health concerns; the chemical can cause nervous system disorders with prolonged exposure and is a suspected carcinogen. Since the Montreal Protocol began to tightly limit its use in the 1990s, the molecule’s concentrations in the atmosphere have been on a decline. Still, Solomon says the new study highlights the need for vigilance in monitoring carbon tetrachloride, CFCs, and other ozone-depleting substances that may have been phased out but can still linger for decades.

“We’ve gone through a big effort to get rid of these chemicals,” Solomon says. “Don’t we have an obligation to keep monitoring to make sure the atmosphere responds the way we think it should?”

This research was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the European Commission.

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3 Questions: Beyond data-driven aesthetics

“Beyond Data-Driven Aesthetics,” by MIT Architecture alumnus and researcher Alexandros Haridis, on view at the MIT Keller Gallery through June 30, examines 20th- and 21st-century efforts to transform computing into a medium for creative production and aesthetic judgment in architecture and the applied arts. Drawing on philosophy, mathematics, computer science, and design computation, the exhibition translates algorithms, theories, and machine-learning systems into physical installations and interactive visualizations.

Q: What inspired “Beyond Data-Driven Aesthetics,” and what questions does it explore?

A: The conceptual origins of “Beyond Data-Driven Aesthetics” emerged from three intersecting lines of research.

First, while completing my PhD in design and computation in the MIT Department of Architecture around 2022, I observed in real time how advances in data-driven machine learning — systems such as ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion — were rapidly entering public discussions about creativity, aesthetic judgment, design, and even high-profile art auctions.

At the same time, my own research was already focused on aesthetic judgment and evaluation, and it became increasingly clear to me that many of the questions presented publicly as “new” in relation to AI actually have a much longer history across the 20th century. For example, in the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project, a foundational event for the field of AI, creation and evaluation processes were identified as one of seven key dimensions of human intelligence that future AI research should address.

Second, the exhibition was influenced by research in design computation and shape grammars that investigates relationships between human insight and computation through rule-based methods, rather than purely data-driven learning. More recent interpretative studies of aesthetic theories — drawing from figures such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Oscar Wilde, and even John von Neumann — have been especially important to me. These studies examine whether theories of aesthetic value and comparison articulated in philosophical and literary texts may reveal possibilities or limitations in contemporary models of digital computation and AI in architecture and design.

Finally, the exhibition was motivated by the use of design, fabrication, and data visualization as methods for interpreting mathematical concepts, algorithms, and “black box” machine-learning systems. Across disciplines, researchers increasingly use reconstruction and visualization techniques to make computational systems more tangible and interpretable — from neural network visualization in computer science to software reconstruction and digital fabrication in architecture and curatorial practice.

Q: How do you translate research on computation and aesthetics into an exhibition?

A: The approach of the exhibition is to ask what exactly in a particular research paper or book captures its most salient idea, and then use design to interpret that idea in a visual, spatial, and experiential format. Drawing on design techniques such as software reconstruction, physical making, and data visualization, the exhibition takes written sources that are dense with algorithmic ideas, abstract concepts, and mathematical formulas, and translates them into stories in space that include interaction, material form, and digital visualization.

The exhibition itself is organized around five thematic areas: Aesthetic Measure, Aesthetic Guidelines, Algorithmic Aesthetics, Aesthetic Appropriation, and Aesthetic Novelty. Each theme functions as a selective “window” into a distinct computational approach to aesthetic judgment drawn from a specific publication — a book or research paper. The titles of these themes are derived from concepts central to each publication. For example, “measure” refers to mathematician George Birkhoff’s work in the 1930s to quantify aesthetic value mathematically, while “novelty” examines how the machine learning system AICAN judges generated images according to a theory in cognitive aesthetics that balances familiarity and deviation from known artistic styles.

Across all five cases, the key insight is that design itself can function as a method of interpretative translation — a way of making visible, tangible, and experiential what traditional academic scholarship in technical domains typically communicates only through words and word-like representational devices, such as scientific diagrams and tables.

Q: What questions are you hoping to explore next?

A: “Beyond Data-Driven Aesthetics” is conceived both as a research exhibition and as an ongoing platform for investigating how computational systems participate in processes of aesthetic judgment, generation, and transformation across architecture and the applied arts.

One of the central questions of the exhibition — and one that researchers across architecture, design, and engineering are increasingly focusing on — is computational evaluation beyond purely performative or functional requirements. This applies to many different design spaces, whether buildings, structural forms, or everyday products. The exhibition’s case studies suggest that many of these questions long predate current interest in computing and AI, and have been approached through a range of computational and theoretical models of evaluation since at least the early 20th century.

At the same time, I’m increasingly interested in how these ideas can move into broader applications related to the built environment. In particular, I am interested in how research connected to “Beyond Data-Driven Aesthetics” can help designers and engineers better understand how computation — whether rule-based or data-driven — can inform us about what contributes positively to human experience in relation to the spaces and objects people inhabit and use.

Finally, a direction I continue to explore is the methodological role of design itself as an interpretative device. Through software reconstruction, visualization, and physical making, the exhibition uses design to translate opaque computational systems into more legible, tangible, and experiential artifacts. More broadly, this opens questions not only about mechanizing “beauty” or “taste” (the traditional preoccupation of aesthetic formalism in the 20th century), but also about how traditional forms of research scholarship and communication may evolve through spatial, visual, and public-facing formats.

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