Origami-based construction method yields lightweight, load-bearing structures on architectural scales

MIT researchers developed a new type of origami-based construction method that could be used to build complex structures that are cheaper and easier to assemble, and use less material than those built with some conventional techniques.

This scalable system simplifies the process of designing lightweight, rigid structural shells from modular components that can be fabricated from flat sheets of material and then folded into shape. 

The units are connected to build a larger lattice structure using simple tools and a foolproof assembly process. They form a strong, load-bearing structural shell that doesn’t need interior support columns.

This method could be particularly well-suited for disaster relief shelters that can be rapidly fabricated and shipped efficiently as flat panels, then set up quickly by workers at the site of an earthquake or flood. It could also be used to develop strong, lightweight components for airplanes or modular robots, or architectural elements like sound-dampening panels and building facades.

The researchers’ technique can generate structures that are many times stiffer than those made using some other forms of structural origami, while requiring only about two-thirds as much material. This could make it a more sustainable form of construction.

In addition to developing small prototypes, the researchers demonstrated the scalability of this approach by fabricating a room-sized folded aluminum sculpture that was recently hung at the Boston Public Library as an exhibition inaugurated for the annual Fab Lab Conference and Symposium.

“This work shows that the power of digital manufacturing can go beyond personal fabrication projects and start touching the real world, enhancing the way we design houses and large structures. We are demonstrating structural origami on building scales,” says Alfonso Parra Rubio, a graduate student in the Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA) at MIT and lead author of a paper on this method.

He is joined on the paper by Riccardo Foschi, a researcher at the University of Bologna in Italy; Rupert Maleczek, a senior scientist at the University of Innsbruck in Austria; Tomohiro Tachi, a professor at the University of Tokyo; and senior author Neil Gershenfeld, an MIT professor and the director of the CBA. The research appears in the International Journal of Solids and Structures.

Lightweight, rigid components

The researchers drew inspiration from the folded tessellations developed by the artist and scientist Ron Resch in the 1960s. Resch employed repeating patterns of polygonal unit cells to create complex 3D structures (like a honeycomb). 

But rather than creating a shape from one folded piece of material, like Resch’s tessellations, the researchers fabricate unit cells that are folded individually and connected to form the 3D structure.

By designing individual building blocks, they can simplify the fabrication process and create more complex shapes.

While working in the Tachi lab, Parra Rubio developed a method for combining two tripod-shaped unit cells from a Resch tessellation into a building block that has zero degrees of freedom, which means it is completely rigid and locked in place. 

These rigid building blocks can be connected into a network of interwoven beams that form a 3D structure with extremely high stiffness and stability, but very light weight.

“This helps us build strong structures while minimizing the amount of material we are using,” Parra Rubio explains.

But it would be enormously challenging to manually design polygonal building blocks that will form a structure that meets a user’s constraints.

To simplify the process, Parra Rubio joined forces with CBA graduate student Erik Strand to develop an automated solver that designs a series of manufacturable unit cells that will form the user’s desired structure. These design files can be fed to a CNC milling machine that automatically cuts the building blocks from flat sheets of material, like aluminum. 

“On the computational part, we break this big problem down into many small subproblems. Now, we solve each cell independently to make sure that it is foldable, and then we globally assemble them after that,” Strand says.

Simplified assembly

Builders fold the individual units into shape and assemble them into a finished structure using only hand tools, like screwdrivers. 

The assembly process does not require any large-scale welding equipment, which could make it simpler, faster, and cheaper than some other forms of construction. In addition, the unit cells are designed so they adjust naturally into their correct shape as the structure is assembled. 

“The way the unit cells are designed, the structure can only exist in one configuration. The connection is the same everywhere, even though each unit cell is different,” Parra Rubio says.

Simulations indicated that this method yields structures about 3.5 times stiffer than those made with some other origami-based techniques, while using less material. In addition, the resulting structures could be strong enough for some architectural applications, Parra Rubio adds. 

To demonstrate the versatility of this approach, the researchers assembled a 23-foot sculpture from pieces of folded aluminum that was hung from the ceiling of the atrium in the Boston Public Library. A team with no professional construction experience built the entire structure in a matter of days, Parra Rubio says.

“It was really fun to work on something at such a quick pace where the theory was really meeting a practical use for it. We had to think a lot about how we could tweak the design to achieve each objective,” Strand says.

In the future, the researchers want to test this approach in larger, architectural structures. They also want to explore the use of unit cells with more complex geometries, which could offer greater strength or stiffness, and develop a user-friendly design interface. 

“This work shows that folding metal is a method that is ready to be used for building structures. We can do it big enough and strong enough, now that we can bring it out of the lab and to the construction site,” Gershenfeld says.

“Within the architecture, engineering, and construction industry, complex structures are often delivered through a fragmented sequence of handoffs between design, engineering, fabrication, and construction teams, with each transition creating opportunities for miscoordination, rework, and loss of design intent. By embedding geometric, structural performance, and assembly intelligence directly into each module, Rubio’s approach maintains a seamless digital thread from design through erection, enabling unprecedented customization while ensuring precise execution,” says James Coleman, SM ’14, MArch ’14, cofounder of SumPoint, a project installation specialty firm. 

Coleman works on design for fabrication and erection of complex architectural projects, and was not involved with this research.

This research was funded, in part, by the Center for Bits and Atoms Research Consortia, the University of Bologna in Italy, and the Austrian Research Agency.

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Hashim Sarkis to step down as dean of the School of Architecture and Planning

Hashim Sarkis will step down as dean of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P) at the end of June 2027. During his 12 years as dean, Sarkis elevated the school’s role and impact by creating new academic centers, adding more support for students, and, quite visibly, moving into a new home in MIT’s renovated Met Warehouse building. 

To an unusual degree, these achievements are interconnected: The Met Warehouse, dedicated this month, features innovative and expanded spaces for education, research, and public engagement. The building enables SA+P to add programs, host interdisciplinary work, and stage events of Institute-wide interest. 

Sarkis, the Elizabeth and James Killian (1926) Professor at MIT, and a professor of architecture and urban planning, also led the Institute’s “One Community = One Campus” planning project from 2016 to 2018, which conceptualized MIT as a contiguous urban space. The report helped MIT add sustainable infrastructure as well as new buildings, from dormitories to the theater arts and music buildings — and now the Met Warehouse. 

For Sarkis, providing more support for SA+P students is as important as any other accomplishment. The school will provide full tuition support in multiyear graduate programs, starting with new students in the fall of 2027. 

“I do believe education is a right for every student,” Sarkis says, when asked to cite the most meaningful changes he has helped enact. 

In a letter to the MIT community, Provost Anantha Chandrakasan wrote that Sarkis had crafted “a remarkable tenure as dean,” one that has “advanced a distinctive role for SA+P within MIT: connecting technology to society through design, planning, making, and creative practice.”

Sarkis, a lauded architect who has published widely and runs an international design practice, became dean in January 2015. He will take a sabbatical in the 2027-28 academic year, then return as a professor and head of the MIT-LUMA Lab. 

In his letter to the community, Chandrakasan also announced the formation of a search committee to identify the next dean of SA+P. The 17-person committee is being chaired by Justin Steil, professor of law and urban planning in DUSP.

The “transformative power of design”

MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning is a broad-ranging place, encompassing the Department of Architecture; the Department of Urban Studies and Planning; the MIT Media Lab, which is home to the graduate program in Media Arts and Sciences; the Center for Real Estate; the program in Art, Culture, and Technology; the Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism; and the Morningside Academy for Design. One of the hallmarks of Sarkis’ tenure has been the growth of existing interdisciplinary programs at SA+P and the development of new ones. In 2016, a gift from the Leventhal family expanded the Center for Advanced Urbanism, established in 2013, and renamed it in honor of Norman B. Leventhal ’38. The center enables research and hands-on projects addressing complex design and planning challenges in cities globally. 

During Sarkis’ tenure, MIT also introduced an undergraduate minor in design in 2016 and relaunched its bachelor of science in art and design in 2018, expanding opportunities for students across the Institute. The school also established DesignX, an accelerator supporting entrepreneurship in design and the built environment.

In 2020, MIT launched the Mobility Initiative, bringing together researchers from across the Institute to examine the future of transportation and mobility. Led by Professor Jinhua Zhao, now head of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, the initiative connects research in transportation, technology, urban planning, and policy.

In 2022, with support from the Morningside Foundation, the Institute founded the Morningside Academy for Design (MAD), an interdisciplinary design center allowing for campus-wide collaboration. And in 2024, with support from the LUMA Foundation, SA+P launched the MIT-LUMA Lab, which works across a wide range of fields, including design, science, technology, and art, to explore solutions for climate-based and other environmental challenges.

In a different vein, SA+P also collaborated with the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing this year to establish the MIT and HPI AI and Creativity Hub (MHACH), which aims to further work in design and computing at a time of rapid expansion for AI applications. 

Three of these centers — LCAU, MAD, and MIT-LUMA Lab — are located in the transformed Met Warehouse building, a leading example of adaptive reuse in architecture and engineering. The huge brick edifice, which initially had tiny window slits bringing in minimal light, was used for about a century as a storage facility, until 2015, when MIT began exploring other possibilities for the building.

By 2018, the concept of moving SA+P into the Met Warehouse had gained traction, with Sarkis publicly telling MIT News, “It’s about really creating a design hub for MIT on the campus. ... Moving does not address just the school’s aspirations, but MIT’s aspirations.” 

After working with the Cambridge Historical Commission, the project architects, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, replaced large segments of brick wall with glass sheets, added skylights, and reconfigured the interior, which now has multiheight design studios, modular classrooms and common spaces, an auditorium, public galleries, a large entrance lobby with a café, and building-long corridors on all floors. For almost a decade, Sarkis served as the key driver of the project — and was an advocate for adaptive reuse, rather than creating a new building requiring a greater carbon footprint. 

“I think it sends a very good message that this vanguard school of architecture, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is moving into a historic building and adapting it for the future,” Sarkis told MIT News this summer. 

At the building’s formal dedication ceremony on Oct. 1, MIT President Sally Kornbluth called the Met Warehouse “a testament to the transformative power of design, which has been central to MIT from the very beginning.” She also heralded it as a model for education, noting that future learning in many fields may call for “exactly like the kind of hands-on, in-person, collaborative problem-solving the new Met was made for. … It’s also primed to help the rest of MIT meet the moment.”

The many sources of design and democracy

Sarkis grew up in Beirut, Lebanon, with a childhood interest in architecture. His views about the civic applications of design have long had many sources. He received his BA in architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1987, then earned an MA in 1989 and PhD in 1995, in architecture, from Harvard University. At Harvard, his PhD work included political philosophy, as he studied with legal theorist Roberto Mangabeira Unger and philosophers Hilary Putnam and John Rawls, among others. 

Sarkis was a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design from 1998 until he joined MIT in 2015. He has published widely, including the 2003 book “Circa 1958: Lebanon in the Pictures and Plans of Constantinos Doxiadis.” He edited the 2002 volume “CASE: Le Corbusier’s Venice Hospital and the Mat Building Revival,” and co-edited, with Eric Mumford, the 2008 volume “Josep Lluís Sert: The Architect of Urban Design, 1953-1969.” He is also co-author, with Roi Salguiero Barrio and Gabriel Kozlowski, of the 2020 book, “The World as an Architectural Project.” 

In 1998, Sarkis also established his practice, HashimSarkis Studios, which has offices in Lebanon and Massachusetts. Among his best-known works are the Byblos Town Hall in Lebanon, completed in 2016, which features three volumes rising above a glass-enclosed ground floor, to represent and help constitute the transparency needed for democratic government. His first major project, Housing for the Fishermen of Tyre, also in Lebanon, was cited as one of the most significant buildings of the century in the “Phaidon Atlas of 21st-Century World Architecture.”

During his upcoming sabbatical, Sarkis will work on a variety of projects in locations including Venice, Egypt, and Armenia. 

In addition to his many duties as dean, Sarkis served as the curator of the Venice Biennale’s 2021 International Architecture Exposition. The exhibition’s theme was a question Sarkis has long contemplated: “How Will We Live Together?” Featuring work conceptualized at many scales, the exhibition displayed projects by 112 designers from 46 countries and was critically acclaimed; The New York Times called it “a case study for how to begin to tackle such questions.”

A dose of optimism

Sarkis’ seriousness of purpose as SA+P dean has long meshed with what he has called a “quirky” sense of humor, in the MIT vein. In 2016 he served as a judge for the “Crossing the Charles” competition, in which dozens of inventive MIT-designed watercraft floated across the Charles River to mark the 100th anniversary of MIT’s move from Boston to Cambridge. A parade also unfolded on the bridge carrying Massachusetts Avenue across the river. 

In an echo of those events, last month SA+P organized its own procession into the Met Warehouse, complete with costumes gesturing at the Bucentaur, the boat that in 1916 carried MIT’s charter across the river. The procession was conceptualized and directed by MIT Professor Azra Akšamija, and developed in collaboration with many students, faculty, and staff. 

Meanwhile, when it comes to the experience of having other architects redesign the Met Warehouse, Sarkis quips, “I learned to be a client.” 

More seriously, talking about high points of his tenure as dean, Sarkis quickly calls the organized visioning process for the Met Warehouse “inspiring,” adding, “We needed a common framework, and faculty were able to project forward and identify it.” The building, Sarkis emphasizes, helps reinforce what he believes is central and distinctive about design work at the Institute: “the MIT model of conducting research and education at the same time.” 

In the face of current challenges confronting education, Sarkis steadfastly stuck with the Met Warehouse project, helping complete it while continuing to build up the School of Architecure and Planning and solidifying MIT’s place at the leading edge of design. That may be a larger sign that such progress remains possible. 

“Optimism is integral to our fields,” Sarkis says. 

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At New York Climate Week 2026, MIT connects with a global network

Each year, Climate Week NYC brings together more than 100,000 people in more than 1,000 events across the city to discuss climate challenges, explore solutions, and spur action. Participants come from industry, academia, philanthropy, nonprofits, government, and finance and venture capital. And this year, the mix included a strong, cross-campus presence from MIT.

The MIT community could be seen multiple days during Climate Week, with appearances by Evelyn Wang, vice president for energy and climate, at the official opening ceremony discussing artificial intelligence and the climate equation; an event co-hosted by MIT and the Bezos Earth Fund on climate innovation; and 14 sessions organized by the MIT Climate Project and eight MIT departments, labs, centers, and initiatives — including the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS), the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative, the Center for Transportation and Logistics (CTL), MIT Lincoln Laboratory, MIT Open Learning, the MIT Initiative for New Manufacturing (INM), the MIT Climate Policy Center, and the Priscilla King Gray (PKG) Center for Social Impact.

“The MIT Climate Project is a whole-of-MIT mobilization, but no single institution can deliver the climate solutions the world needs — from reducing greenhouse gas emissions to adapting to a changing climate and building more-resilient communities and systems,” said Wang, who is also the Ford Professor of Engineering in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. “Climate Week New York is important because it convenes the range of stakeholders and sectors that must work together to confront these challenges. When we connect the MIT community with this global network, we uncover powerful possibilities to strengthen not only our own efforts, but the world’s capacity for change.”

One location, numerous events

Climate Week NYC was held Sept. 21-27 at venues across Manhattan and other New York boroughs. Utilizing multiple spaces at the Dream Downtown Hotel in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, the MIT coalition attracted more than 700 attendees for events ranging from small, private conversations to workshops and panel presentations.

Larger sessions included “The Future of Data Centers: Technologies to Change the Paradigm.” “Data centers are at an inflection point, facing interconnected technical, operational, economic, and community constraints that demand cross-sector dialogue and innovation,” says Gang Chen, the Carl Richard Soderberg Professor of Power Engineering and faculty director of the Climate Project at MIT.

Chen, who leads the Data Centers of the Future frontier for the Climate Project, convened a panel of experts across research and industry to address technologies that can change the paradigm. “Technology can't solve all the challenges we’re facing with data centers, but technology has a significant role to play in shaping a future role that is more sustainable and better for the communities that are home to these facilities,” Chen says. “This session was a productive conversation on data center challenges and the potential solutions to overcome them.” 

The workshop “Next-Generation Super Pollutant Solutions: Challenges and Opportunities,” hosted by Jesse Kroll, a faculty director and lead for the Super Pollutants frontier for the Climate Project, convened speakers from the Environmental Defense Fund, Spark Climate Solutions, and across MIT labs and initiatives. 

Accounting for nearly half of all global anthropogenic warming to date, super pollutants currently lack viable solutions for adequate abatement. Many super pollutants have shorter atmospheric lifespans than carbon dioxide, with solutions providing an “emergency brake” to decrease peak warming in our lifetimes. Investments in tackling super pollutants can generate economic benefits, including lowering health-care costs and increasing productivity, and require cross-disciplinary teams to develop and advance the next-generation solutions to meaningfully address super pollutant emissions. 

“Super pollutant mitigation is getting a lot of attention as an ‘emergency brake’ for near-term climate warming. But a huge fraction of our super pollutant emissions simply cannot be mitigated with current technologies and approaches,” said Kroll, the Peter de Florez Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “Our session focused on the innovation — technical and otherwise — needed to tackle these hard-to-abate pollutants.”

Other events included:

• “2026 State of Supply Chain Sustainability Report” with the MIT CTL
• “Building Flood Resilience” with MIT Lincoln Laboratory
• “Climate Communication for Impact” from the MIT Climate Project
• “Climate Impact Founder and Funder Connect” with the PKG Center for Social Impact
• “Educating Tomorrow's Climate Leaders: An MIT Perspective” from the MIT Climate Project
• “Trading for Food Security in a Changing Climate” with J-WAFS 
• “Industrial Decarbonization: Pathways to Productivity and Growth” with MIT INM
• “Mobilizing Climate Knowledge for Action” with MIT Open Learning
• “Rethinking Climate Innovation” from the MIT Climate Project
• “What is Sectoral Acceleration and How Do We Fund It” with the Sloan Sustainability Initiative
   

Rethinking the climate innovation pipeline with the Bezos Earth Fund

A critical climate challenge is moving from breakthrough technology to real-world impact at scale. MIT and the Bezos Earth Fund brought together leaders from industry, venture capital, government, academia, philanthropy, and startups to explore solutions for a stronger innovation pipeline. 

A panel of MIT faculty and alumni spinout leaders Asegun Henry, Seonghoon Woo, Ariel Furst, and Assil Halimi, moderated by Ray Rothrock, venture capitalist and life member of the MIT Corporation, explored the period between a promising scientific invention and commercial deployment. For many breakthroughs that can benefit climate and nature, that journey requires more early-stage science and engineering research, specialized testing infrastructure, validation, patient capital, and pathways to demonstration and pilot projects.

“A breakthrough in the lab is not yet impact in the world. For climate and energy technologies, we need to think about the entire journey — from discovery and invention through validation, commercialization, and deployment — and build better pathways through the gaps along the way,” Wang said in a conversation with Tom Taylor, Bezos Earth Fund president and CEO. 

Tapping into global nexus to find and scale solutions

New York Climate Week is a global nexus for climate, where the connections required to develop, test, and scale potential solutions form. Across the board, MIT sessions addressed the need for solutions to be large in magnitude, technically feasible, and contextually realistic. 

 “Even when a technology is low-cost, it doesn’t mean it will diffuse naturally or get widely adopted,” said Claire Walsh, global director of policy and communications at MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab. “Frontier technologies are often more expensive to start, so that means it’s even more important for scientists and engineers to think about end user adoption, and their incentives and constraints, from the start.”

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Implantable device uses ultrasound to improve drug delivery to the brain

Patients with glioblastoma, an aggressive type of brain tumor, usually undergo surgery to remove the tumor. However, it’s difficult for surgeons to remove all of the cancer cells, and the tumor often recurs.

MIT researchers have now designed an implantable drug-delivery device that they hope could help prevent recurrence of glioblastoma. Their device contains a reservoir that can release drugs over an extended period, along with ultrasound transducers that use sound waves to help drugs spread farther through the brain and bypass the blood-brain barrier.

Such a device could be implanted in the brain during surgery, then gradually release drugs that would help kill the remaining tumor cells. After implantation, a wireless controller can be used to program the exact ultrasound dosages to be delivered, enhancing the reach of the delivered therapy.

“We have 24 transducers in one ultrasound array, which can help a given drug bypass the blood-brain barrier and enhance the drug infusion. The device also gives doctors options in terms of the size, the length, and the number of infusions,” says Canan Dagdeviren, an associate professor of media arts and sciences at MIT and the senior author of the study.

In a paper appearing today in the journal Device, the researchers showed that their ultrasound device allowed molecules to spread further after being released, in tissue models and in a mouse study. 

MIT graduate student Sarah Ornellas and Jason Hou PhD ’26 are the lead authors of the study.

Enhanced by ultrasound

Glioblastoma is a rare but deadly cancer, with a little more than 10,000 cases diagnosed in the United States per year. On average, patients survive 12 to 15 months after diagnosis. Patients typically undergo surgery to remove as much of the tumor as possible, followed by radiation and chemotherapy.

Chemotherapy drugs are usually given either as pills or an intravenous infusion, but in recent years, scientists have developed drug-delivery wafers and hydrogels that can be implanted directly in the skull. That can help to eliminate the side effects of chemotherapy and ensure that a higher concentration of the drug reaches the brain.

Those devices work by passive diffusion of drugs, but the MIT team wanted to design a new device that would allow for greater control of the timing of drug release. They also wanted to incorporate ultrasound arrays to enhance the distribution of drug molecules. 

Previous research has shown that ultrasound helps drug molecules to disperse more widely, by creating convective flows that help travel them longer distances. The mechanical oscillations generated by ultrasound waves also temporarily increase the permeability of the blood-brain barrier, helping drug molecules get into the brain.

Dagdeviren had previously designed a tiny cannula, about as thin as a human hair, that could be implanted in the brain to deliver drugs. She also built an implant called ImPULS, which uses tiny ultrasound transducers to deliver deep brain stimulation.

In the new study, her lab combined these technologies to create LUCID (Long-term Ultrasound-enhanced Convective Injection Device) — a flexible implant as thin as a sheet of cardstock. A drug-delivery cannula is 3D-printed directly onto an array of 24 miniature ultrasound transducers. These transducers generate ultrasound waves right at the tip of the needle, helping drug molecules to diffuse farther into tissue after they are released.

“Getting a drug into the brain is only part of the challenge. It also needs to spread through the surrounding tissue. We brought a delivery channel and a tiny ultrasound array together in one implant to help molecules reach a larger area, even during slow infusion,” says Hou.

The implant’s reservoir carries about 100 microliters of fluid, and infusion is supplied by a passive osmotic pump, while ultrasound can be controlled wirelessly through Bluetooth. The device also contains a small battery that can be recharged wirelessly. 

In tests in a “tissue phantom” — a gel-like material engineered to mimic human tissue — the researchers showed that ultrasound-aided delivery spread drug molecules much farther than when the drugs were delivered without ultrasound. 

“By enhancing that distribution locally and programmably with ultrasound, you can reduce systemic toxicity in nontarget organs, while the therapy that you’re using has a better chance of reaching whatever tumor cells are within the affected area,” Ornellas says.

Wider distribution

The researchers also tested their system in mice, using it to deliver an MRI contrast agent. When the ultrasound array was activated, the contrast agent spread further through the brain than when ultrasound was not used.

If developed for use in patients, the drug cannula and ultrasound array would be placed inside the skull, while the part of the device containing the battery and other electronics could sit outside the skull, the researchers say.

In addition to delivering small-molecule drugs, this technology could also be used to deliver immunotherapies or nucleic acids, including gene therapies. It could also be potentially used in organs other than the brain.

“We started with the brain as a follow-up to our ImPULS technology, but eventually this can be used for other soft tissue treatments for different types of drugs, different types of interventions in deep body tissue,” Dagdeviren says. “We are showing that we can make any kind of payload be distributed in a better way.”

Other authors of the paper include Michal Nowicki, a research associate at Massachusetts General Hospital; Jerry Li, a recent graduate of Harvard University; Heloise Leblanc, a graduate student at Boston University; Betul Serra Tulu, an MIT undergraduate; David Sadat, a research specialist at MIT; Marco Mineo, an instructor in neurosurgery at Harvard Medical School; Steve Ramirez, an associate professor of psychological and brain sciences; and E. Antonio Chiocca, a professor of neurosurgery at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. 

The research was funded by the MIT Media Lab Consortium and the National Institutes of Health.

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Watch the universe emerge from the dark ages, with Lumina

With the Big Bang, the universe burst into existence as a hot and dense soup of electrons and subatomic particles. This primordial ionized plasma, initially smaller than a single atom, rapidly expanded and cooled. In the process, particles in the soup slowed enough to bind with electrons, forming electrically neutral hydrogen. 

As this neutral hydrogen accumulated, the effect was like a shroud, preventing light and other forms of radiation from freely passing through. Around 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe was plunged into a cosmic “dark age.” 

Now, a new computer simulation is giving scientists a detailed view of how the first galaxies, stars, and other structures could have unfolded from that time, to eventually pull the universe out of its dark age. 

In a paper appearing today in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS), physicists from MIT, Harvard University, and elsewhere present Lumina — a large-volume, high-resolution simulation that follows the early universe from the dark ages through the next 2 billion years of cosmic evolution. 

Two pivotal transformations

Lumina covers a huge patch of the early universe that spans 500 megaparsecs, or about 1.6 billion light-years wide. In that space, the simulation tracks the evolution of dark matter, gas, stars, and radiation (such as photons), across enormous cosmic scales and also zooming down to the detail of an individual developing galaxy. 

Over the 2 billion years that Lumina simulates, it captures the emergence of two huge transformations in cosmic history: hydrogen re-ionization and helium re-ionization.

Hydrogen re-ionization is a period when early stars were able to push out enough ultraviolet light to interact with neutral hydrogen and strip it of its electron. This “re-ionizing” prevented the hydrogen from absorbing photons, instead allowing light to travel freely. Hydrogen re-ionization helped to lift the veil of neutral hydrogen — a process that Lumina captures in detail for the first time. 

The simulation also tracks helium re-ionization, a process similar to its hydrogen counterpart, in which much higher-energy light breaks apart neutral helium. 

In its detailed simulations, Lumina revealed that hydrogen re-ionization was likely driven by light from early galaxies and stars. In contrast, helium re-ionization was fueled by much more energetic early supermassive black holes in their active, accreting phases. Together, this represents the first time a simulation has captured both hydrogen and helium re-ionization.

“Lumina does everything from small-scale star and galaxy formation to large-scale re-ionization of hydrogen and helium, in a volume that is 100 times larger than previous best simulations,” says study author Mark Vogelsberger, a professor of physics at MIT. 

He and his colleagues are making Lumina available to the scientific community so that scientists can compare its detailed simulations of the evolution of early cosmic structures with snapshots taken by new and future telescopes. Then, they might begin to piece together the processes that shaped the first galaxies, stars, and structures in the universe. 

The study’s MIT co-authors are Xuejian (Jacob) Shen and Teodora-Elena Bluichi. Additional authors include first author Oliver Zier (a former postdoc in the Vogelsberger Lab), Rongrong Liu, Sonja Koehler, and Lars Hernquist of the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics; Aaron Smith of the University of Texas at Dallas; Rahul Kannan of York University in Canada, and Volker Springel and Rüdiger Pakmor of Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Germany.

Cosmic computation

Lumina takes its name from the Latin word meaning “lights.” At the heart of Lumina is IllustrisTNG, which was previously developed by scientists at MIT and elsewhere, including members of the Lumina team. IllustrisTNG is a large-scale simulation that tracks the interactions of dark matter, gas, and other processes involved in forming galaxies, from the Big Bang to the present day. 

In building Lumina, the team refined IllustrisTNG’s code to enable the simulation to track the formation of galaxies with the same level of detail but throughout a much larger volume. They combined this leveled-up galaxy model with a model of radiation transport, which simulates how different forms of radiation such as ultraviolet light interact at extremely large, cosmic scales to capture processes such as hydrogen re-ionization. 

The new and improved simulation resolves extremely fine details across huge scales. In practice, the simulation encompasses half a trillion individual elements, including dark matter particles and gas cells, which is about 30 times higher-resolution than IllustrisTNG. Lumina captures all this detail and evolves it forward in time, across an enormous patch of about 500 megaparsecs, which is 100 times larger in volume than previous simulations. 

Running the calculations for every single cell over 2 billions years of cosmic time, and across extremely large and very small scales, involves a significant amount of computing power. The team ran Lumina on Frontier, one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, based at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. 

“At peak scale, the calculation brings together the equivalent of more than 100,000 CPU cores and around 15,000 GPUs,” says Shen. “Making all of those processors communicate efficiently while continuously evolving trillions of interacting pieces of information is itself an extraordinary feat of computer engineering.”

Full zoom

Lumina begins its simulations at around 45 million years after the Big Bang, in the midst of the dark ages, when neutral hydrogen dominated the early universe. The researchers set the simulation with initial conditions approximating what physicists theorize should have existed in such a dark cosmic period. 

They then let Lumina run to calculate how matter at those times, in the form of gas and dark matter, interacts across the simulation’s half-a-trillion cells. Simultaneously, the simulation calculates where and how radiation, such as ultraviolet light from stars, emerges and interacts with its surroundings.

On the project website, the team provides a number of videos that depict the various scales, time periods, physical processes, and layers of cosmic structures that Lumina simulates. Examples include a “zoom-in” from the full, large-scale patch of the universe to a single, disk-shaped galaxy; and a time-lapse of the full volume, over 2 billion years, that captures the pattern of hydrogen as it is re-ionized over time. 

“On the one hand, it’s evolving dark matter as well as the gas in the universe, and on the other, it’s also tracking how radiation travels,” Zier explains. “We see dark matter and gas start to clump in these over-densities. And when we zoom in, we can see gas is falling into these dark matter haloes. Zooming in more, we see this is where the first galaxies form. And the first stars form in those first galaxies. Those stars then create radiation. The simulation then tracks that radiation, and we can zoom way out to see how that radiation travels out from stars, through the universe, until at some point it ionizes some neutral hydrogen.”

“Other simulations cannot zoom in as far as this,” Vogelsberger notes. “The difference between the smallest and largest scales that we simulate is larger than in any other simulation.”

Looking ahead, the team plans to apply Lumina to map the large-scale structure of the early universe. The simulation can also help to predict the gravitational-wave patterns that early galaxies and black holes might produce. Whatever Lumina simulates could soon be compared with actual observations from new and upcoming telescopes.

“One of Lumina's major advantages is its sheer size,” Shen says. “It produces enormous populations of simulated galaxies, finally allowing us to make comparisons with the very large galaxy samples that upcoming surveys will observe.”

This research was supported, in part, by NASA and the National Science Foundation, and used resources of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is supported by the Advanced Scientific Computing Research programs in the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy.

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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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