Archived: Building 18 Updates

From Thursday, August 27^th through Sunday, August 30^th, MIT Emergency Management posted the following messages on emergency.mit.net regarding an incident at Building 18. As that resource is intended for active issues, these updates, which reflect MIT’s public information on this topic, are archived below. 

Building 18 to reopen at 6 a.m. Monday
Aug. 30, 2026, 10:16 p.m.

Appropriate decontamination protocols have now been completed in the lab space of the student who reported attempting the synthesis of dimethyl mercury. Given the actions we have taken and the information received, as well as consultations with industrial hygienists, medical experts at MIT Health, and outside experts, it is our assessment that it is now safe to reopen Building 18. The building will reopen at 6 a.m. tomorrow, Monday, August 31.

Decontamination of the sealed suite in the impacted residence hall has also been successfully completed. The residence hall, which was never closed, remains open. For a campus map, visit https://whereis.mit.edu.

Building 18 - update— Aug. 29, 2026, 3:36 p.m.

Offices across campus have been responding to a reported hazardous material incident involving a single individual in a chemistry laboratory. The Institute became aware of the matter after the individual, a graduate student, self-reported to a local emergency room and claimed to have synthesized dimethyl mercury, a compound that is not authorized as part of their research program. Emerging information calls into question whether this compound was in fact synthesized. We are also able to disclose, with the student’s permission, that while the student remains under medical supervision, their initial blood test result, which was received today, shows no sign of exposure to mercury.

Building 18 remains closed at least through Sunday as specialized decontamination efforts continue out of an abundance of caution. This work will continue, and the building will remain closed until the work is complete.

Also out of an abundance of caution, high-touch surfaces in the common areas of the individual’s residence hall were professionally cleaned under the supervision of MIT Environmental Health and Safety (EHS), and decontamination of the resident’s sealed unit is ongoing, as has been shared with residents of the building. The residence remains open and in normal operation, and no restrictions have been placed on the building.

With a focus on public health, decontamination efforts have been ongoing and baseline testing was offered to individuals who were in proximity to the student and their work environment on Wednesday, August 26. As the chemistry department, industrial hygienists, MIT Health medical experts, and other resources consulted collect additional information, we continue to believe there is a very low risk of secondary or tertiary exposures. At this time testing is not recommended by MIT Health officials for any members of the community who did not enter the individual’s lab space on Wednesday.

We continue to gather information about this situation and will update this page if we have more to share. For a campus map, visit https://whereis.mit.edu

Building 18 - update— Aug. 28, 2026, 11:21 a.m.

Building 18 remains closed today as specialized decontamination efforts continue out of an abundance of caution. This work will continue throughout the day, and the building will remain closed until the work is complete.

It remains the case that, based on the information available, this was a localized issue with only one student directly exposed, and this student was the individual working with the compound. Their reported use of the material was unauthorized.

As has been shared with those who work in the building, based on the information available to the department, industrial hygienists, MIT Health medical experts, and other resources consulted, the risk of secondary or tertiary exposures is low, given the compound's characteristics and the information available. For a campus map, visit https://whereis.mit.edu

Building 18 closed— Aug. 27, 2026, 1 p.m.

Out of an abundance of caution, Building 18 is closed for the day following notice of an individual exposed to a hazardous material in a second floor laboratory. City emergency responders were on scene overnight, and cleanup is underway. Building occupants will be notified when the building reopens.

An investigation into the incident is ongoing.

Focused outreach is underway for those who access the impacted laboratory. Support resources are available for members of the MIT community. A comprehensive list of student support resources is accessible at https://doingwell.mit.edu/support/. MyLife Services is among the resources available to all others on campus, with more information at https://health.mit.edu/mit-mit/employees/employee-support-programs.

This page will be updated when the building reopens. For a campus map, visit https://whereis.mit.edu

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How architects turned a hulking brick box into MIT’s newest academic hub

It started with a vision: Move MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P) into the Metropolitan Storage Warehouse, an unoccupied, fortress-like brick building on MIT’s campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

After all, SA+P needed more space and new facilities. And here, visible from its old offices across the street, was an unused building the size of an airplane hangar. It could offer bigger studios, more work areas, an auditorium, and galleries for events, and become a campus-wide hub for teaching, research, and public engagement. 

“MIT thrives on this idea that we’re all connected,” says Hashim Sarkis, dean of SA+P and a key proponent of the project.

But that vision required hundreds of design decisions: how to bring light into the building, create workspaces and circulation, encourage communication among the school’s populations, and more.

“The conception of the project was not like an automatic flash,” says Elizabeth Diller, founding partner at Diller Scofido + Renfro (DS+R), the architecture firm that was selected to revamp the Met Warehouse, as it’s now called.

“It was a very challenging building to work with,” says Benjamin Gilmartin, another DS+R partner. “There was a lot of innovation needed.”

Innovation is welcome at MIT, however. 

“They transformed the Met Warehouse toward the things we want, which is to do more collaborative work, and to combine instruction and research,” Sarkis says. 

Here’s how DS+R, working with MIT over several years, created the new Met Warehouse — which has a ceremonial moving-in procession on Sept. 8. 

Five buildings in one 

The Met Warehouse was built in several phases starting in 1894; by 1923 it was a five-story building with 2-foot-thick brick walls and 1,500 storage units inside. It was a fortress used for private storage, with the words “Metropolitan Storage Warehouse Fire Proof” painted on the side, visible from across the river in Boston. 

The structure was built in five segments, over time. That became crucial to its transformation. Diller and Gilmartin created a large design studio inside each of the segments. 

“When you start a project like this, there are some big moves that seem very clear and obvious,” Diller says. “There are five buildings that were built basically in succession, making for a 500-foot long building. That is just too big, so how do we break it up into neighborhoods? We decided each building itself would have a stack of floating studios in it.” 

That was essential for SA+P and the components of it that will use the building, such as the MIT Morningside Academy for Design, which was established through a $100 million gift from the Morningside Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the T.H. Chan family. This founding gift from family members Gerald and Beryl Chan and Ronnie and Barbara Chan included support for the Met Warehouse transformation. 

Each building segment features double-height, column-free studios which, thanks to virtuoso engineering, are suspended from roof trusses that bring the weight back down to the existing structure. 

Those spaces will benefit the interdisciplinary work taking place at MIT. 

“In those five spaces, we’re putting the making and the research together,” Sarkis says. “The studio and the lab will become one and the same.”

Bringing in light

For about a century, the Met Warehouse featured tiny window slits as its only apertures. That raised a question: How could natural light be brought inside? 

DS+R produced a dramatic answer, drawn from recent architectural history. Along the long north side of the Met Warehouse, adjacent to a set of railroad tracks, they carved large voids for the studios. Aligned with the studios, large segments of the brick exterior were replaced with glass facades.

This way, natural light pours into the studios and beyond, while occupants look out to a lively Cambridge cityscape.

“The process was like an extraction of the dense mass of the building to create open and light-filled space connecting all,” Diller says. 

Her aesthetic inspiration included the artist Gordon Matta-Clark, known for making bold cuts into New York City buildings in the 1970s. 

“Right from the beginning there was a nod to Gordon Matta-Clark,” Diller says, though she notes that Matta-Clark’s work consisted of building-scale interventions motivated by political and social critique. Whereas, “In our case, we use subtraction to build — to make space for new uses and to expose the anatomy of the building.” 

The living lab

To ensure the huge cuts and windows would work, MIT collaborated with DS+R, as well as Leers Weinzapfel Associates, the project’s associate architects, and Shawmut Design and Construction, to test slab cuts and window arrangements directly in the Met Warehouse itself.

“This hands-on approach allowed us to prove the design concepts through actual construction methodologies and logistics,” says Nicole Bernabei, a senior project manager for campus construction at MIT, who has worked on the Met Warehouse effort since 2018. 

Those slices into the building, needed to create the studios, revealed the Met Warehouse’s original structural features as cross-sections now appearing in walls. The designers envisioned those cuts as features to remain visible, something students can still learn from.

“For a school of architecture and planning, this approach feels especially fitting,” Bernabei says. “The building itself has become a teaching tool — a living laboratory where students, faculty, staff, and visitors experience how rigorous design thinking translates into a built reality. Every detail, from the celebrated slab edges to the transformative light, tells the story of collaboration and precision.”

And while those issues were being addressed, the architects had to grapple with, well, everything else. 

Asymmetry inside

There is another reason the architects placed the huge glass walls on the north side of the Met Warehouse. The Cambridge Historical Commission (CHC) asked MIT to keep the building’s south and east sides essentially intact. The long south facade, the one historically visible from Boston, was particularly significant.

“Changing the building’s surface there [on the north side], bringing in the large glass, wouldn’t impact the character of the building as it would on the south side,” Diller says. For that reason, in the interior, “the big spaces drift to the north.” 

The architects placed smaller spaces, like offices, on the south side. 

“The fabric of the existing Met Warehouse building, with its column grids, offered a lot of opportunities for more serialized smaller spaces where you can have seminars, faculty offices, teaching spaces, research areas, next to and in dialogue with the larger multistory spaces that we introduced,” Gilmartin says. 

So, the Met Warehouse is asymmetric inside: big studios extending from the north side, across much of the building; and smaller rooms on the south side.

It was not obvious how to bring more light into the south-side rooms, however. But an extended dialogue between DS+R, MIT, and the CHC produced an “intersect window” strategy — box frame windows sometimes intersecting with the small apertures already on the south side. The steel frames of the new windows, now at a proper height for looking out, distribute the weight of the brick and stone sills once carried by the solid brick that was removed. 

“This meeting of the old and new satisfied the Cambridge Historical Commission’s desire for a minimal touch, but also created an unexpected and delightfully playful effect on the south facade,” says Morgan Pinney MArch ’10, a senior campus planner at MIT. The project, she adds, “allowed us to step into an exceptionally collaborative working relationship with CHC staff — one MIT is very proud of and will certainly continue to build upon for years to come.”

The unusual layout grants a centrality to the studio areas while ensuring that a full range of other spaces are wrapped around them. 

“The logic of the building is that making things is in the middle,” says Sarkis, referring to the studio spaces. “This is MIT. There is making and research in the studios, with seminar rooms and offices all around.” Referring to the school motto, “mens et manus,” he adds, “That’s our culture. MIT is about mind and hand.” 

Still, Sarkis and the architects wanted another element inside, too: interior passages connecting it all.   

Extending the Infinite Corridor

MIT’s main group of buildings features the Infinite Corridor, a busy walkway spanning one-sixth of a mile indoors, linking many other spaces. MIT leaders thought the Met Warehouse could extend the concept. 

“We conceived of it as having an ‘Infinite Corridor,’” says Sarkis, who hoped the corridor would be “visible and accessible all the way through.”

Diller, the architect behind New York City’s High Line, which turned elevated railroad tracks into a wildly popular urban park, knows about getting people walking. She wanted Met Warehouse occupants to “share a circulation system.”

And so every floor of the Met Warehouse has its own “infinite” corridor. Some overlook studio space one floor down, with the cityscape beyond, echoing High Line atmospherics. The off-center circulation spine connects the large studios on the north side and the offices at the south edge of the building. Being flexible about that placement allowed the whole Met Warehouse plan to work. 

“That helps create the space for the large studios,” says John Ochsendorf, director of the MIT Morningside Academy for Design. Besides, he offers, “There’s a happy alignment between historical protection of the south facade, and where the sun is in the sky most of the year. You don’t want direct sunlight on the south side” — where glass walls would create a greenhouse effect — “and the city wanted to protect that view. The architects found this balance.”

A vertical vision

Meanwhile, the architects designed large stairs that pierce through the corridors, helping people access all floors of the building. 

“We didn’t want a layering of the building with horizontal stratification,” Gilmartin says. The stairs will provide “moments of serendipity and exchange with other people.”

The first time Gilmartin drafted stairs for the building, they were “more blade-like and expressive formally” than the final version. But MIT asked for a stripped-down sensibility, so Gilmartin made the design “almost as simple as it could be.”

The stairs still have expansive scope and meeting-place potential.

“That central spine stair is sort of a ceremonial stair,” Diller says. “To see and be seen. I think it will be lively.”

Culture change

The Met Warehouse is very different from the previous quarters of SA+P, a warren of rooms in MIT’s buildings 7 and 9. Many peer institutions have design studios that place all students in a large common space. Not MIT, which has had a different culture, with smaller, specialized design spaces.

Now, the Met Warehouse does feature larger and more visible design areas. 

“We’re trying to give the school the ability to adapt it and change it, and balance the past culture of MIT and a new culture with kinds of spaces where ideas can cross-pollinate and there’s a lot of room for large-scale experimentation,” Gilmartin says. 

Design practice is becoming bigger across MIT, and as more people connect with it, the Met Warehouse will let MIT evolve. 

Gilmartin again: “There’s just a lot of opportunity for smaller groupings of people to be organized in ways that are visible and connected to the larger spaces, but also offer the prospect of a retreat and focused work. I think it is hopefully attuned very well to MIT.” 

The shock of the rebuilt 

It’s unusual to move a major architecture school into an old building. Some of the best-known U.S. universities house their architecture schools in buildings with high-modernist stylings or postwar brutalist aesthetics, heavy on concrete, light on graceful curves. 

“Those buildings come out of the modernist tradition predicated on the shock of the new,” Gilmartin says. “There was something confrontational about those buildings in their material expression and image, and spatial ideas of openness and flexibility, which was quite different from most historic buildings. In their time, they were pretty thrilling.” 

But as the saying goes, that was then, and this is now. 

“The reality of our future is that we can’t tear everything down and build new for every generation,” Gilmartin says. The Met Warehouse “makes a claim about the future of design and what the orientation of that needs to be, in our work,” he adds. 

MIT agrees. 

“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 has said. 

Along with the Morningside Foundation, another key project donor was Sidara (formerly the Dar Group), a global collaborative of specialist design, engineering, and consulting firms, owned by Maha and Talal Shair; they have supported the creation of the building’s Sidara Auditorium and Sidara Gallery space.

Adaptive re-use 

Ultimately, DS+R was ideal for the Met Warehouse project because of their experience transforming structures. Besides the High Line, they transformed a London media center built for the 2012 Olympics into the Victoria and Albert Museum’s new open storage facility, the V&A East Storehouse.

Diller suggests the key is being pragmatic.

“When you have a building that is that thick, that heavy, that present, sometimes it’s more expensive to demolish it than to invent a way of reusing it,” she says.

Besides, she adds, “Because it’s an architecture school, it’s important that the students understand adaptive reuse firsthand, as we share a planet with limited resources. It’s a good thing to repurpose buildings, to change their program, to update their innards where possible, rather than just preserving them in formaldehyde — or destroying them and taking away the character of a city.”

The Met Warehouse was old, is new again, and is ready for the MIT community to make it their own.

“Very often contemporary buildings are so sanitized and clinical, you don’t feel like you can touch anything,” Diller says. “It doesn’t feel like home. Here, we wanted students to feel uninhibited — a place that would feel like home.”

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Assistant Professor Thomas Rose, an expert in archaeometallurgy, dies at 37

MIT Assistant Professor Thomas Rose, an expert in ancient metallurgy, passed away on Sept. 2 due to injuries sustained during a bicycle accident in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The incident, currently under investigation, occurred at the intersection of Memorial Drive and Massachusetts Avenue. Rose was 37.

Rose, who was MIT’s POSCO Professor of Materials Science and a member of MIT’s Center for Materials Research in Archaeology (CMRAE), joined MIT in January of this year and was still putting the finishing touches on his laboratory. But he had already endeared himself to colleagues and students by going the extra mile in mentorship, encouraging others to use his new equipment, and even using a portion of his lab startup funds on things the department needed.

“Everyone can look at his papers and his past and understand why he was such a good fit here technically,” Senior Lecturer Michael Tarkanian says. “But in the time he was here, it was even more impressive how likable, friendly, and open he was. He was everything you could have asked for as a colleague and a person. I thought, ‘What luck to be able to work with this person for the rest of my career.’ He was that good.”

Rose was born in Berlin, Germany. He discovered his life’s passion as a child, through a set of books about ancient Egypt.

“Thomas had a strong interest in archaeology already from a young age and participated in an excavation before he began his studies of archaeology,” Katrin Westner of the Deutsches Bergbau Museum Bochum and Professor Sabine Klein of the Ruhr University of Bochum wrote in a joint email tribute. “He was an incredibly inspired and enthusiastic researcher and was always bursting with new research ideas. We remember Thomas not only as a brilliant and dedicated researcher but also as a very close friend. We miss him deeply.”

Rose received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Goethe University Frankfurt and earned his PhD in archaeology through a joint doctoral program at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel and Sapienza University of Rome in Italy. Before coming to MIT, Rose held research and coordination roles in Germany at the Deutsches Bergbau Museum Bochum and Goethe University Frankfurt.

Rose’s research focused on ancient metallurgy and pyrotechnology that shaped early human societies, including how copper and its alloys were produced, transformed, and circulated.

The work integrated geochemistry, mineralogy, experimental archaeology, and materials science, making Rose an excellent fit in MIT’s tight-knit CMRAE group, which merges materials science with archaeology.

“The field of archaeometallurgy is unique,” explains Professor Polina Anikeeva, head of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. “We had been looking for a faculty with the right skill set for at least 20 years. We needed someone who was world class in archaeology and materials science. We were looking for a unicorn, and we found him.”

Following the announcement of Rose’s hiring, a group from CMRAE traveled to a conference in Italy and heard from scholars based around the world about how lucky they were to have him.

“Thomas was an exceptionally talented and versatile scientist,” says University of Tuebingen Professor Silvia Amicone. “His ability to bring together archaeology, archaeometallurgy, geoscience, and materials science was remarkable. He was also committed to developing digital tools and promoting open, accessible, and reusable archaeological data. This combination of scientific rigor, methodological creativity, and engagement with broader archaeological questions made his work especially valuable. I was always impressed by Thomas’s brilliant intellect, collegial spirit, enthusiasm, and dedication to his work. Above all, he was a genuinely kind and good person.”

Rose had never taught before coming to MIT, but he was excited to begin his first courses this fall. His lab’s first batch of graduate researchers just arrived at MIT, but Rose had already begun mentoring students.

“He was the kindest person you could meet,” says Assistant Professor Tania Lopez-Silva, whose office was close to Rose’s. “He was always smiling. He really cared about his students, and he had a lot of momentum here. He was here first thing in the morning and late into the night.”

Several colleagues recalled the energy and enthusiasm he brought to work.

“He was so excited every day,” Anikeeva says. “Every day was a dream come true for Thomas. He was at the right place at the right time. He was so excited to collaborate and learn. He felt like he got his dream job, and everything he’d ever imagined was about to happen. It’s an unrealized vision.”

Tarkanian had recently restarted weekly meetings among researchers in CMRAE, which Rose attended consistently. Forging connections was a theme of Rose’s career.

“He had a long reach with both young and established scholars, and he inspired his friends and colleagues to show up,” says postdoc Benjamin Sabatini. “His work in archaeometry was paramount, and it showed in the people who gathered around him.”

Rose was also the co-founder of the Young Researchers in Archaeometry workshop, which brought together early-career researchers from around the world to present work and connect.

“Since [its founding], he accompanied every year’s workshop organizing meeting, always with immense kindness and support, making a lasting impact on each of us,” researchers Sinem Haciosmanoglu and Baptiste Solard wrote together in an email. “He was an exceptionally talented and dedicated researcher. Even at an early stage of his career, he brought new ideas and perspectives to the field. For many of us, he also played an important role in bringing together all fields of archaeological sciences, natural sciences, and cultural heritage.”

Outside of research, Rose was fond of rowing on the Charles River and was an avid member of MIT’s Archery Club. He loved manga Japanese comics and dancing. Lopez-Silva described Rose as humble and sometimes reserved, but on a recent recruitment outing with students, he fully committed himself to a very memorable karaoke performance.

“The students loved him,” Tarkanian says. “You could see that he cared about them, and they cared about him. He was going to be that kind of mentor.”

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Fabrication platform could enable flexible, transparent next-generation photonic chips

The field of silicon photonics, which uses light rather than electricity to transmit and process data on semiconductor chips, has enabled optical systems to evolve from bulky setups to compact and advanced systems. Typically, however, these silicon-photonics chips are rigid and opaque.

MIT scientists have now figured out a scalable way to make silicon-photonics chips flexible and transparent, opening a route to advanced microchips that could be used in applications such as discreet health monitors that conform to the body or transparent augmented-reality displays that fit the curve of a pilot’s helmet.

While scientists have recently performed lab demonstrations of chips that were flexible or transparent, they could only fabricate a few devices at a time.

The MIT researchers, in close collaboration with engineers at NY Creates at the Albany NanoTech Complex, created a fabrication process that uses standard semiconductor manufacturing techniques to generate flexible and transparent silicon-photonics chips on large-scale wafers.

To validate this platform, the researchers bent a single chip thousands of times around cylinders with various diameters — down to the width of a small screw — with no drop in performance. They also determined that looking through the chips would not cause much haze or distortion. 

“We’ve now developed a wafer-scale process that produces wafers that are mechanically flexible and optically transparent, enabling novel applications that weren’t previously possible with silicon photonics. We hope that, by working closely with our colleagues at NY Creates and using the foundry at the Albany NanoTech Complex, there’s the potential for us to make the platform accessible to other groups within our research community and open these new application areas to the field of silicon photonics as a whole,” says Jelena Notaros, the Robert J. Shillman Career Development Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at MIT, a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics, and senior author of a paper on this fabrication platform.

Her co-authors include lead author Tal Sneh and Andres Garcia Coleto, EECS graduate students; Thomas Dyer and Kevin Fealey of the New York Center for Research, Economic Advancement, Technology, Engineering, and Science (NY Creates); and Milica Notaros PhD ’23. The paper appears in the journal Optica.

Flexible and transparent

Over the past decade, researchers have developed techniques to fabricate precise and highly reliable silicon-photonics devices at scale. 

They use advanced microelectronics foundry processes to produce 300-millimeter-diameter wafers with billions of nanoscale optical devices. But these methods yield silicon-photonics chips that are rigid and opaque.

“We realized that there are a lot of applications that would benefit from having a chip that is flexible and transparent,” Notaros says.

Scientists have previously made single silicon-photonics chips that were either transparent or flexible, but these techniques weren’t scalable. To address this scaling challenge, Notaros’ group recently demonstrated a foundry-scale process for making silicon-photonics chips on a flexible substrate.

Now, the team pushed these innovations even farther with a scalable process that produces 300-millimeter silicon-photonics wafers that are both transparent and flexible. 

Their fabrication process begins as if they were making a traditional, rigid silicon wafer. The researchers carefully deposit and pattern tiny optical wires known as waveguides onto this rigid silicon substrate. 

Then they bond a temporary silicon wafer on top. They flip the wafer over and remove all of the original silicon substrate from what is now the top of the wafer. They are then left with a flat layer of material with a thickness less than a tenth of a human hair.

“Thanks to the fact that we added that rigid temporary support before we flipped the wafer over, we can go all the way down so we are just left with the oxide and waveguiding layers,” Sneh says.

They use an adhesive to stick a thin, transparent polyester film on top of these ultrathin layers and “de-bond” the temporary silicon wafer from the bottom to remove it. 

This leaves them with a flexible, transparent wafer only a few microns thick that contains the oxide and waveguide layers needed to capture and transport light for silicon photonics.

“Because we are using stable 300-millimeter foundry fabrication tools, we can design systems with a very large number of devices and feel confident that they are going to perform up to specifications, which is extremely important,” Sneh adds.

The biggest challenge in developing this fabrication process was removing enough material from a large 300-millimeter-diameter silicon wafer to leave only a few microns of material behind.

During fabrication, stress on the wafer typically causes it to bow slightly, making this silicon removal process especially challenging. 

“As we were flipping the wafers over on these substrates, if the strain isn’t properly managed and the wafer isn’t perfectly flat, it is going to get ripples across its surface or even shatter in the fabrication line,” Dyer says.

The researchers carefully managed that stress by sticking to low temperature processes at or below 500 degrees Celsius.

They also had to find the right ordering and combination of removal methods. 

They used industrial processes to thin the silicon layer, but switched to a more precise selective chemical etch for the last bit. This ensured they would not damage the ultrathin layers left behind.

An eye on performance

The researchers performed three experiments to test different functionalities of these flexible, transparent silicon-photonics wafers.

First, they tested the optical performance of chips with integrated waveguides of different lengths to determine their waveguiding properties. 

Then they tested flexibility by bending a chip thousands of times around cylinders with different diameters. These experiments showed no degradation in performance even when they bent it around a cylinder about the size of a small screw. The device didn’t start to degrade until the researchers bent it around a toothpick several times.

“This experiment validated that the platform can be used for our proposed applications, performing even well beyond the metrics required for these intended systems,” Garcia Coleto says.

They also evaluated transparency by setting up a bionic eye and testing whether the chip would distort the user’s vision when placed in front of the eye. They found that the chip causes only minimal haze for the viewer and would not noticeably distort images the eye perceives when looking through it.

These characteristics could make these chips especially well-suited for enabling silicon-photonics systems for applications like curved augmented-reality displays that conform to a heads-up-display windshield or airplane pilot’s visor. In a pilot’s visor, for instance, such an augmented-reality display could replace the heavy bulk-optical systems that currently provide real-time information to help the pilot react to dangerous conditions.

In the future, the researchers want to add more complex components and functionality to the chips as they move toward enabling these and other new applications. They also want to refine the design to further improve waveguide efficiency and boost transparency performance.

This research was funded, in part, by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and a MathWorks Fellowship. Wafer processing was performed at NY Creates, and chip dicing was conducted at MIT.nano.

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Giving farmers a more sustainable way to protect crops

Each year, farmers around the world spend $80 billion on pesticides for their crops. Those pesticides impact not only harmful insects but also bees and beneficial bacteria in the soil. They can also run off into waterways and harm the environment. And, they are increasingly being linked to human diseases like Parkinson’s and cancer.

Amid growing awareness of those problems, pesticides made from living microbes are gaining popularity. Unfortunately, such microbial pesticides are often less effective, forcing farmers to choose between potential environmental damage and higher crop yields.

Now, Robigo is equipping naturally occurring microbes with more potent pest-fighting capabilities. The company, which was co-founded by Andee Wallace PhD ’20, uses technologies more commonly associated with medical applications, like RNA interference and CRISPR, to engineer self-replicating microbes that target plant pathogens more precisely than chemical pesticides and more effectively than other biologically based solutions.

“Chemical pesticides have been a cornerstone of agricultural production for the past 70 years, to the point that it’s nearly impossible to envision an agricultural system without them,” Wallace says. “But that’s the long-term vision we have: providing growers new tools to enable a food system that is in balance with the environment, and that is productive, resilient, and safe.”

In field trials across five states, the company has already shown its microbes offer comparable results to chemical pesticides. In one trial comparing Robigo’s product with another commercial microbial product last summer, Robigo’s system led to a 250 percent increase in crop yield.

“Many crops, like lettuce, are harvested by hand, and the grower told me if a disease reduces yield even by just 25 percent, it’s not economical for them to pay workers to harvest the field at all,” Wallace says. “Growers are just trying to produce enough food to feed everyone. That’s why they use pesticides in the first place. We’re trying to give them a better choice.”

Engineered biology for agriculture

Wallace did her PhD in the lab of Chris Voigt, MIT’s Daniel I.C. Wang Professor and the head of the Department of Biological Engineering. She joined the lab after working at Bolt Threads, a startup spun out of the Voigt lab that was designing a material for the fashion industry inspired by spider silk.

“I came into MIT knowing that I wanted to join Voigt’s lab,” Wallace says. “I was really enamored with biomaterials in general. There are so many examples of animals and organisms that make incredible materials that we humans can’t replicate.”

Wallace’s PhD focused on engineering microbes in an attempt to replicate intricate glass nanostructures produced by single-cell algae called diatoms.

Wallace enjoyed her startup experience and explored entrepreneurship throughout her time at MIT. But it wasn’t until after graduation that she reconnected with two MIT students, Jai Padmakumar PhD ’23 and Connor Sweeney ’21, and decided to start her own company.

The founders’ initial idea was to engineer microbes to deliver CRISPR to target and kill bacteria that are harmful to crops. They used a number of MIT resources to get the company off the ground, including the Venture Mentoring Service, MIT Sandbox, delta v, and the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition. Sweeney was involved in the venture for about a year. Padmakumar left Robigo in 2022.

Today Robigo is addressing a problem of growing importance to the agriculture industry.

“Chemical pesticides are under incredible pressures: increasing scrutiny from consumers and regulators, and increasing pesticide resistance among pests, diseases, and weeds,” Wallace explains. “Over the past 40 years, only two new herbicide chemistry modes of action have been commercialized, so people are understandably worried. If we can’t develop new solutions, resistance is only going to grow and will leave growers without effective tools to protect their crops. I think biotechnology has the potential to solve that problem.”

Farmers hope so, too: In an attempt to address environmental and health concerns, they have increasingly turned to so-called biological pesticide solutions, which are mostly made from natural sources like plant extracts, microbe-derived natural products, and increasingly biotechnology solutions like peptides and RNA.

“They are safer and better for the environment, but currently they just don’t perform as well or as reliably as synthetic chemistry pesticides, so there’s a big distrust among growers,” Wallace says. “Growers are being asked to choose between high performance or safety and sustainability. Robigo is trying to solve that problem by giving them products that do both.”

Robigo’s ARGO biotechnology platform combines synthetic biology and proprietary computational design processes to engineer microbes that perform at a similar level to chemical pesticides, but with improved safety profiles for people and the planet. A key part of that approach is leveraging microbes’ self-replicating abilities to continuously produce and deliver bioactive molecules in the field over the course of the growing season.

The company has moved in recent years from delivering CRISPR to RNA-interference, or RNAi, which inhibits key functions in the pathogens they want to target.

Robigo also differs from other microbial pesticide companies in its approach. Wallace says other companies screen to discover new microbes with the properties they want, then cultivate those for sprays and other modes of applications. But these specialized microbes may not be able to thrive in, say, the microbiome of California farm soil where they’re needed. That means they may die off soon after being deployed. Robigo, conversely, focuses on equipping robust, industry-proven microbes with the ability to target specific pests and diseases.

“Our starting point is ‘What crops will this be used for? and ‘What diseases do we want to control?’” Wallace says. “To design safer products, we need to be direct in how we’re designing RNAi to target different diseases. Another layer of our technology is what we call RNAi stacking, where we combine multiple RNAi into a single microbe to broaden the spectrum of pathogens we can control with a single product.”

Lab to farm to table

Last year, Robigo ran field trials for its two lead products, with soybeans and lettuce across the U.S. Midwest and West. Working with third-party testing companies, they showed a single application of their microbes offered protection for crops over the entire growing season and matched the performance of the leading chemical pesticide at a fraction of the cost. 

“That’s very unusual for biological products, and even many chemical products, so we’re really optimistic about engineered microbes being a new solution that disrupts the conventional chemical pesticide paradigm,” Wallace says.

Wallace says Robigo is expanding fourfold this year and plans to expand even faster next year with the help of major agrochemical companies interested in more sustainable solutions. The company is also partnering to expand to other crops as it helps farmers around the world.

“There are a lot of opportunities we’re excited about, and we’re working with a number of partners as we scale,” Wallace says. “Over the past nine months, we’ve systematically used our ARGO platform to tackle new opportunities, and we have a number of products in the pipeline we’re working to bring to growers around the world.”

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Building foundations that last

How do you build something that lasts? For MIT Assistant Professor Iwnetim "Tim" Abate, the answer is the same whether he’s reimagining how the materials beneath our feet can store energy and manufacture essential chemicals, or mentoring MIT’s future researchers: focus on the foundation.

Rocks provide an unexpected thread connecting Abate’s research and his approach to mentorship. His research brings together electrochemistry, materials science, and Earth sciences to explore how the materials that make up our planet can be harnessed to address some of society’s most pressing challenges in energy and sustainable manufacturing.

In one line of inquiry, his group uses Earth-abundant elements found in rocks, such as manganese and iron, to develop high-energy, low-cost, and more sustainable batteries. In another, they are exploring how the Earth’s subsurface itself could function as a chemical factory. By harnessing naturally reactive rocks, geothermal heat, and injected fluids, they seek to pioneer new ways of producing valuable fuels and chemicals underground, with lower external energy requirements and emissions than conventional industrial processes.

Although batteries and subsurface chemical manufacturing operate at vastly different scales, they share a common philosophy: understanding the intrinsic chemistry of Earth’s materials deeply enough to harness it for useful transformations.

While Abate's research spans a broad range of scientific disciplines, his approach to mentorship is guided by a simple principle: helping students lay the groundwork for their careers after graduate school. Rather than measuring success solely through publications or technical accomplishments, he strives to equip students with the scientific skills, resilience, curiosity, and perspective needed to navigate any path their career may take.

"I often think about mentorship through the image of a rock," Abate explains. "A structure built on rock can withstand storms and the test of time. In the same way, I believe the most important role of a mentor is not simply to help students complete a project or publish papers, but to help them build a strong foundation."

Abate puts this philosophy into practice through his investment in his students' growth as researchers, professionals, and individuals.

In celebration of his exemplary mentorship, Abate has been recognized through MIT's Committed to Caring initiative, a student-driven program that honors graduate mentors who foster supportive and inclusive research environments.

Building holistic relationships

Students often arrive at graduate school with different ambitions. Whether they hope to pursue academia, industry, entrepreneurship, or public service, Abate begins by learning about each person's long-term goals.

Each time a new student joins his group, he meets with them individually to discuss their aspirations and helps tailor aspects of their PhD experience accordingly. Students say these conversations continue throughout their time in the lab, with regular one-on-one meetings focused on both research progress and career development, homing in on their opportunities beyond MIT.

For students interested in entrepreneurship, Abate leverages his own network, introducing them to venture capital firms, philanthropic organizations, and collaborators working across academia and industry. He encourages his students to pursue internships, recognizing that experiences outside the university can strengthen both their research perspective and their future careers.

Students also emphasize his ability to connect them with the expertise they need to push research forward. Whether facilitating access to specialized instrumentation or identifying researchers with complementary knowledge, Abate actively builds the relationships that allow his students and their projects to thrive.

Despite leading a growing research group while balancing teaching responsibilities and launching a startup, nominators wrote that Abate "consistently [shows] up for his students."

He makes time for individual chats with students, subgroup discussions, and weekly lab meetings, all while actively seeking their perspectives on research challenges. "Tim is often curious [to hear] our point of view on research problems and actively looks for our feedback," reflected one nominator. 

This openness creates a synergistic environment where students are encouraged to help shape the direction of the group's work.

Creating space for ambitious ideas

Innovation, Abate believes, depends on more than technical expertise.

"Students need to know that it is OK to pursue ideas that may not work, and that setbacks are part of discovery, rather than signs of failure," he says. "My goal is to create an environment where ambitious ideas are welcomed, careful thinking is valued, and students know they have someone who believes in them through both successes and disappointments."

Students say this philosophy is reflected in the way that Abate approaches advising. Rather than directing every decision, he encourages them to think independently, remaining available whenever guidance is needed. His vast professional network often becomes an extension of that mentorship, opening doors to partnerships and expertise that help students tackle increasingly ambitious research questions.

This commitment to building strong foundations extends beyond his own research group. Since graduate school, Abate has worked to expand access to STEM education through his nonprofit Sci-Fro, which supports educational outreach across Africa. He has also contributed to broader efforts to strengthen scientific infrastructure and research institutions across the continent. 

For Abate, these efforts reflect the same philosophy that guides his mentorship: lasting scientific progress depends not only on individual discoveries, but also on investing in people, communities, and institutions that enable future generations of scientists to thrive.

Supporting the person behind the PhD

Abate regularly checks in during one-on-one meetings, asking how his students are doing and what support they need. He believes these conversations are an essential part of advising.

"Graduate school is one of the most formative periods of a person's life," he says. "While research is important, I don't think success should come at the expense of health, relationships, or personal growth."

He encourages students to build lives that remain meaningful beyond the laboratory, recognizing that the habits, friendships, and perspectives developed during graduate school often shape them just as much as their scientific accomplishments.

Through steady guidance, meaningful connections, and genuine care for each student's well-being, Abate demonstrates a passion for developing exceptional researchers.

"I hope they leave MIT with a strong foundation — both scientifically and personally — that enables them to navigate future challenges, lead with integrity, and build fulfilling lives wherever their careers take them."

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From MIT to IBM, expediting AI and quantum deployment

The experience of transitioning from research based in theory to focusing on real-world application can vary significantly for different researchers. However, for two former MIT graduate students and a former postdoc, all now at IBM, working with the MIT-IBM Computing Research Lab (formerly the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab) during their formative years enabled them to not only close the gap between education and employment, but also to generate ideas promising to business impact. 

Despite pursuing varied careers in quantum machine learning, reinforcement learning and artificial intelligence agents,and trustworthy and fair AI, respectively, Srinivasan Arunachalam, Zhang-Wei Hong PhD ’25, and Irene Ko PhD ’24 have consistently found ways to tackle problems defined by novelty and rigor, and translate them to systems with real constraints. Here, the MIT-IBM Computing Research Lab served as a conduit for research relationship building and the flow of their expertise to industry applications.

“Among all the industrial labs, I think MIT-IBM has way better academic collaboration policy and opportunity [than the others],” says Hong, an IBM research staff member with the MIT-IBM Computing Research Lab who began his PhD at MIT in 2020 in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS).

Hong has been captivated with reinforcement learning since discovering that DeepMind could play Atari and learn from raw screen pixels via feature engineering. During his graduate work with EECS Associate Professor Pulkit Agrawal, who is also a principal investigator with the lab, Hong sought to build on this: improving value function learning for reinforcement learning in video games, using “Montezuma’s Revenge” in Atari, in order to predict and optimize the policy performance of an agent. With the lab, Hong developed techniques to ground AI for more realistic applications and provide better reward feedback, which he applied to domains such as robotics, large language models (LLMs), and reinforcement learning for science. 

“I’m very excited about curiosity-driven exploration,” says Hong of the MIT-IBM graduate work that helped propel him into his profession. This, he says, allows agents to be inquisitive about new data, like humans, and perform a variety of tasks — from generating test cases to stress-test LLMs to exploring new environments. Now, as a mentor for students of his own, Hong continues to pursue similar lines of open-ended reinforcement learning research, leading him to investigate test-time training for agents and foundation models, and develop infrastructure for IBM’s agentic framework for enterprise tasks like chart reading and tool calling for database queries. This includes evolutionary computing to drive better optimization for exploration and leveraging neuroscience to inform deployment time model improvement. 

“If successful, I think that it would be a very useful system and framework for all of the practitioners in reinforcement learning, because it will be the first framework that enables a model to improve — self-evolve their model weights online at a deployment time,” says Hong.

Irene Ko’s research has also been value-driven, from a personal and professional standpoint. “I started to work [on trustworthy AI] with IBM researchers from day 1 in my PhD, because it was funded by MIT-IBM,” says Ko. This, she says, was particularly advantageous since her goals to develop frontier-safe, robust, accurate, and fair AI also align with that of MIT and IBM, closing the gap between development and real-world deployment. “That really strikes a balance between pure research and something that’s of industry standard or value.” 

Further, her MIT-IBM collaboration through her advisor in EECS, Joseph F. and Nancy P. Keithley Professor Luca Daniel, and IBM Principal Research Scientist Pin-Yu Chen, helped define the direction and parameters of her work to maximize impact, first in neural networks and later with foundation models and LLMs. After graduating in 2024, Ko joined IBM Research to continue her work on trustworthy AI as a research scientist. 

“The reason I chose to go into industry after my PhD, and IBM specifically, is that I found great joy in the collaboration during my PhD. That process, those five years, gave me very high rewards in personal fulfillment,” says Ko. “I wanted to continue the momentum.” 

Her current project focuses on finding pain points in current trustworthy methods that are not widely deployed in AI inference platforms. Unlike using low-rank adapters, which add extra steps to monitor and modify model behavior, her work on vLLM Hook provides a way to access internal model signals, like hidden states or activations, for decoding LLMs. This vector acts on transformer modules to analyze safety scores, such as identifying the likelihood of prompt-injection and hallucination. Here, Ko has developed a lightweight vLLM inference engine plugin framework to program the model internals that could provide significant cost savings over other methods. “I’m very proud of this project because this is really, as far as we know, the first bridge between the deployment and development in trustworthy AI with the inference engines.”

While Srinivasan Arunachalam has always dabbled in quantum research, he constantly explores other areas of theory, seeking to find quantum insights and deep math in unexpected lines of inquiry and papers. “Right off the bat, you don’t see it. You think, maybe this is just a vanilla problem, and then once you start investigating it further, you find some really interesting math that comes out of it, which I think is pretty cool,” he says. 

This drew Arunachalam to MIT as a postdoc in 2018 in the group of Professor Aram Harrow in the Department of Physics. With a learning theory-first perspective, Arunachalam looked for target algorithms, subroutines, and circuits where quantum speed-ups might be possible. Conversations with Isaac Chuang, the Julius A. Stratton Professor in Electrical Engineering and Physics and an MIT-IBM PI, led him to collaborate with the lab and IBM researcher Kristan Temme. 

With a seamless transition to IBM, Arunachalam more closely involved himself with problems that are potentially implementable on a near-term quantum device, keeping in mind constraints like nearest-neighbor architecture, noise, and simpler observable measurements. During this time, Arunachalam focused on quantum machine learning and areas where quantum computing would be superior to classical computing, increasingly prioritizing provability grounded in theory to heuristics. That MIT-IBM connection helped turn theoretical questions into concrete research directions, shaping work that culminated in two prominent papers: one on Hamiltonian learning, which gave rigorous guarantees for learning the dynamics of quantum systems, and another on quantum kernels, which provided theoretical evidence that quantum feature spaces can offer advantages over classical kernels under widely believed hardness assumptions.

Arunachalam also continued to expand his knowledge base by pouring himself into different branches of computer science to uncover structure in problems others may have missed. “One thing which I’ve been a huge fan of is exposing connections between different fields.” This has allowed him to explore learning quantum states — from completely classically simulatable quantum objects to the extremely complicated quantum objects.

Although Hong, Arunachalam, and Ko navigate different domains, they share an instinct: to move ideas across the space between what is possible in principle and what is useful in practice. In their own way, each is applying knowledge gained from collaborations, like that of MIT-IBM Computing Research Lab, to develop “killer applications” — a real-world use case that proves the underlying research can matter beyond the lab.

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