Reinforcing the value of human understanding at MIT

At the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) 75th Anniversary Symposium, speakers celebrated the school’s value and contributions, while exploring how artificial intelligence is transforming many aspects of teaching, research, and society.

The symposium was held Sept. 24-25 in the Linde Music Building’s Thomas Tull Concert Hall. Scholars, students, staff, and alumni from across SHASS and MIT gathered for the event, which kicked off with welcoming remarks from MIT leadership. 

“How should we think about MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences? With enthusiastic appreciation and gratitude,” said President Sally Kornbluth.

The school’s origins date back to the Lewis Committee Report, commissioned by MIT and published in 1949, which called for stronger integration between scientific and technical topics and humanistic scholarship and teaching.

Kornbluth noted that, much like when the school was founded just after World War II, the world faces uncertainty as it grapples with the broad implications of artificial intelligence.

“AI has suddenly arrived with enormous consequences for both research and education,” she said. “As we face the challenges of our own time, and our own society, it’s clear that MIT has never needed your particular insight and guidance more than we do now.”

In opening remarks, Provost Anantha Chandrakasan described the importance of a human-centered approach to technology, one that considers both its efficacy and its impacts. He lauded many of the new research projects happening through the MIT Human Insight Collaborative, a strategic initiative launched in 2024.

“Today — a time of rapid, AI-driven change — the arts, humanities, and social sciences are as important as ever,” he said. “To be able to contribute effectively to solving the world’s great challenges, it is not enough to gain technical mastery.”

Chancellor Melissa Nobles recalled how, during her tenure as SHASS dean from 2015 to 2021, reading the positive feedback from students in their SHASS course assessments reinforced the value of the school’s teaching.

“MIT students have a range of interests that draw them to our classes that may be invisible to their STEM professors, but that we very well know our students have,” said Nobles, who is also a professor of political science.

Agustín Rayo, the Kenan Sahin Dean of SHASS and professor of philosophy, noted that, while research in the school plays a key role in addressing global issues such as climate change and AI, the value of the work in SHASS should not be measured by practical application alone.

“Education should also help us ask what is worth doing, what do we owe one another, and what makes a life worth living,” Rayo said. “Some research matters because it helps us understand the histories, cultures, and social structures that have made us who we are. Some things matter because they enrich human life.”

Scholarship from across SHASS and beyond 

Over the symposium’s two days, research presentations, panel discussions, and performances offered attendees opportunities to engage with the role of SHASS in exploring today’s biggest societal questions.

“We gather not so much to look back over the past 75 years, but to showcase where we are now, and share what we urgently aim to tackle together in the years ahead,” said David Kaiser, Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and professor of physics at MIT, who also served as chair of the symposium planning committee.

The first day included a session on teaching and learning innovations. Faculty presented on the success of educational programs housed within SHASS, including the MIT Indigenous Languages Initiative Master's Program, the Master in Data, Economics, and Design of Policy (DEDP), and MISTI, the hub for global experiences for MIT students.

Stephanie Seed, associate professor of literature, spoke about why she and others are working to reintegrate classic books into their teaching.

“MIT, of course, is an institution unusually oriented towards the future,” she said. “Our students are trained to imagine and create worlds that don’t yet exist. And it’s precisely this future orientation that makes reading the past especially important here.”

Eric Klopfer, professor of Comparative Media Studies/Writing and co-author of MIT’s recent report on AI and instruction, said this is a moment when instructors must reassess how courses are taught.

“I don’t know exactly what that looks like, but I do think it means something that’s more than modifying our curriculum. I think it really means rethinking what the educational experience is,” he said.

During a session on computing and society, panelists described different views and research into technology and how it affects humans.

“We project aspects of ourselves onto computational systems,” said MIT Professor D. Fox Harrell during his talk about seeing “selfness” in machines. 

“What makes an AI system is not just the code, not just the programming or the algorithm, it’s the fact that we narrate it as being intentional,” he said.

Program in Science, Technology, and Society Professor Sherry Turkle offered a skeptical view of human-technology interaction, particularly with AI chatbots, which she describes as “intimate machines.” 

“If social media came for our attention, I argue that chatbots are coming for our capacity for attachment, which is deeper and much more troubling,” said Turkle.

Professor David Autor, head of the Department of Economics, said it’s an exciting time to be working at MIT, where scholars are collaborating to explore AI’s impact on society.

“I don’t think there’s a close analogy to a moment when everyone felt the world change so quickly,” he said. “The stakes feel incredibly high.”

Celebrating the arts and engaging with the future 

The first day concluded with a rousing Music and Theater Arts performance showcase, which began with an excerpt from Stan Lai’s “A Dream Like A Dream,” a play directed and performed by students and instructors in class 21T.100 (Theater Arts Production).

“Variations on the Theme of SHASS 75,” a piece choreographed by Dan Safer, senior lecturer and director of dance programs, combined movement, lighting, and music in a celebration of both the human body and the school’s milestone anniversary.

Student and faculty musicians from a variety of styles and disciplines shared the stage, including Rambax MIT, MIT Concert Choir, and the MIT All-Star Jazz Combo. The showcase included stirring renditions of “Madrigal,” composed by Vice Provost for the Arts Keeril Makan, and “Prayer for Peace.”

On the second day of the symposium, several alumni presented on their current work and the impact of their SHASS experiences.

Jessica Coon PhD ’10, now a professor of linguistics at McGill University, spoke about the leading role MIT Linguistics plays in preserving endangered languages, and how her studies at MIT prepared her to carry on that work.

“SHASS gives us the tools not just to conduct research, but to communicate the impacts of this research across a variety of different audiences and in different ways,” she said.

Ankita Reddy ’19 double-majored in anthropology and biology and is now an MD/PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania. She highlighted her most impactful SHASS courses, including 21A.308 (Global Mental Health).

“This was the first time I was forced to consider how good health care looks different based on social systems and cultural practices,” she said. “SHASS made me more comfortable with, and more curious about, complexity.”

During the symposium’s final session, panelists engaged in a conversation about AI, art, and the implications for creatives in an era where their art can be co-opted and copied. 

“There’s so much praise for new and upgraded technologies,” remarked associate professor of literature Sandy Alexandre. “The question I consistently have is: What does it mean to be an upgraded human being? How are we innovating as technology is innovating?”

Philosopher Justin Khoo said AI’s role in art could be considered a “giant paint brush you don’t have much control over,” adding he could see the creation of new sub-genres of art that are human-only, AI-infused, and purely AI, for example.

Khoo closed by saying he encourages students to “think broadly, and really take seriously the humanistic education here at MIT.”

“A broad understanding of a set of concepts which are widely applicable, not just narrowly applicable, I think that’s what we need more than ever now,” he said.

As the symposium came to a close, attendee Kent Sahin praised the event.

“I’ve attended every session, and this is a fantastic program and a great celebration of the 75th anniversary,” he said. “Clearly, whether it’s AI impact, the impact of climate change, or the impact of political and social change, SHASS is in the right place at the right time.”

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Gunter Stein, control systems and theory expert, dies at 84

Gunter Stein, an expert on control systems and theory who was a longtime MIT adjunct professor and researcher who also worked at Honeywell Labs, died on July 11 in his home state of Minnesota. He was 84 years old. 

Throughout his career, Stein helped to reconcile competing schools of thought surrounding automated control systems, and he worked helped usher in an era of robust multivariable control.

Born in Germany, Stein emigrated with his family to the United States at a young age. The son of a tool and die maker at Fisher Body Works, Stein earned his BS from the General Motors Institute (now Kettering University) in Flint, Michigan, and his MS and PhD in electrical engineering from Purdue University in 1966 and 1969, respectively. He then joined Honeywell Labs, where he spent a more than 50-year career developing systems including aircraft flight controls, spacecraft altitude and orbit controls, and other navigation and control systems for applications as varied as launch boosters, reentry vehicles, ship positioning systems, torpedo engines and autopilots, and precision guided weapons. 

As an engineer at Honeywell, Stein’s incisive and rigorous way of approaching problem-solving quickly garnered attention, catching the eye of the then-director of the MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), Michael Athans, when the laboratory and Honeywell began cooperating on a NASA contract to design the controls for the F-8 aircraft. Stein’s submission on behalf of Honeywell was, at the time, labeled the “most conservative” of the potential submissions, but eventually became the only control system successfully flight-tested. 

Noting Stein’s talent, Athans approached Stein with a pitch to join MIT in 1977. As Stein’s career and personal life were by that point deeply rooted in Minnesota, he was not interested in relocating full-time, but agreed to an adjunct position with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), where he would spend one week per month giving lectures, helping advise graduate students, reading PhD theses, and acting as a principal investigator in LIDS. This arrangement would continue for the next 30 years, and would deeply shape MIT’s overall approach to control theory. 

“Stein immediately struck me as a brilliant engineer,” says Munther Dahleh, the William A. Coolidge Professor in EECS and a member of LIDS, who at the time of Stein’s arrival was a newly hired junior member of the faculty. “As a naive researcher who was more of an applied mathematician than a real engineer, I was struck by how Gunter could see through the mathematics and distill what was truly essential for applications.” 

As Dahleh’s career developed — he would eventually become an associate department head of EECS and the founding director of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society — his regard for Stein only grew: “Through Gunter’s work at Honeywell and his collaborations with students and faculty at MIT and other universities, robust control entered virtually every area of control applications. He shaped the direction of our field for decades, and his ideas remain a driving force behind many of today’s control applications.”

“Gunter came to LIDS at a propitious time,” says Nils R. Sandell Jr. SM ’71, EE ’73, PhD ’74, who co-taught class 6.291 (Classical and Modern Methods for Control System Design) with Stein. “With the experience on the NASA project and on others, the emphasis had begun to shift from optimal control to robust control. Gunter was a key part of this evolution, with his keen insight, based on extensive experience, of how classical frequency domain control techniques for single-input, single-output systems dealt with model uncertainty.” 

Over the course of the next decades, Stein would work on systems for the B-2 bomber and F-47 aircraft, and for many years would serve as a member of the U.S. Air Force Scientific Advisory Board. “I can attest that, decades later, the flight control design methodology that Gunter and his colleagues at Honeywell developed is still being applied to our most advanced aircraft,” says Sandell. 

Alan Willsky, the Edwin Sibley Webster Professor of EECS (Emeritus), remembered his colleague at LIDS as both a practical and a theoretical force: “Gunter was one of the giants of automatic control. His work at Honeywell on advanced control systems is legendary, but what is equally impressive is his impact on control theory and his influence on generations of control researchers. The period of years when he split time between Minneapolis and MIT had major influences on how control is taught and researched here at LIDS.” 

Years of working with uncertainty and multivariable systems led Stein to think carefully and deeply about famous failures of engineering, including the nuclear reactor disaster at Chernobyl that captured the world’s attention in 1983. Stein saw the disaster as a stark warning to all designers of control systems, not only for nuclear power plants but for aircraft, spacecraft, and indeed all systems “with automatic controls that cannot be done manually and that, if done improperly, can have dire consequences for property, the environment, and human life.” 

In his highly influential 2003 Bode Lecture and essay for Control Systems Magazine, entitled “Respect the Unstable,” he wrote: “We must place renewed emphasis on stating and teaching the principles of our subject clearly and well. The applications out there are simply too serious for us to hide from responsibility under a cloak of mathematics.” Of that famous lecture, Dahleh muses, “his Bode Lecture, which marked the first time the award was given, solidified my view of his remarkable ability to understand very different applications from a common fundamental perspective ... He showed how the challenges posed by complex control engineering systems, from agile aircraft to the Chernobyl disaster, could be understood through the same fundamental ideas that explain the difficulty of controlling an inverted pendulum. Thirty years later, his lecture remains one of the most-cited Bode Lectures and one that has had a clear impact on our community.”

Among other honors, Stein was elected fellow of the IEEE in 1985; awarded the IEEE Control System Society's first Hendrik Bode Prize in 1989; elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1994; and awarded the International Federation of Automatic Control's Nathaniel Nichols Prize in 1999. 

His impact on the field of control engineering is also measured by the regard of his colleagues, who uniformly remember him as warm, social, and deeply conscientious. 

“Gunter was a great engineer — the greatest I have known — and he was also a great human being,” says Sandell, who notes the great passion with which Stein, in the Bode lecture, enumerated his responsibilities toward society as an engineer. 

“On a personal level, Gunter was incredibly humble and unassuming, and always ready to offer help and support whenever asked,” says Dahleh. “He was a giant in our field and played a major role in shaping it. I am deeply grateful for the opportunity to have learned from him and to have had him as a colleague. He will be dearly missed.”

Predeceased by his parents and wife Nancy, Stein was survived by partner Ann Wynia, siblings Gerry (Lynn) Stein and Gisele Davis, and by many nieces and nephews. A skilled sailor and lifelong outdoorsman, Stein spent much of his life exploring the various coastlines and seas of the world, and the forests and lakes of his native Minnesota. Memorial donations can be made in Stein’s name to the Minnesota Nature Conservancy. 

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Persistence, teamwork, and some healthy competition

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

She would also go on to discover her competitive side.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This design software reimagines everyday objects as self-aware devices

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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MIT’s Kavanaugh Fellowship: From invention to impact

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Learn more about the Kavanaugh Translational Fellows Program.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A new blueprint for nuclear

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Faster, cheaper nuclear

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Building a community around space medicine

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

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

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

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

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

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

Researching the effects of spaceflight on the human body

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

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

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

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

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

Upcoming events

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

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

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

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