Researchers uncover hidden pore network within nuclear fuel

The moment a nuclear reactor begins operation, a complex chain of events is initiated within the fuel: Heavy atoms split into fission products, knocking other atoms out of place and creating defects that can change how the fuel swells, transfers heat, and reacts chemically over time. 

Understanding those processes is key to understanding how safe and efficient a nuclear reactor will be. But even for some of the most-studied fuel types, the mechanisms controlling those processes are unclear.

Such is the case with a particular kind of metallic fuel, uranium alloyed with 10 percent zirconium by weight, also known as U-10Zr. This fuel was extensively tested in historic sodium-cooled fast reactors such as the Experimental Breeder Reactor-II (EBR-II) in Idaho and the Fast Flux Testing Facility (FFTF) in Washington state, helping establish the foundation for metallic fuel development in the U.S. Today, U-10Zr is again attracting attention for use in next-generation advanced reactors.

But most studies of U-10Zr took place decades ago, leaving unanswered questions about exactly how the fuel changes when it undergoes nuclear fission in a reactor and how it interacts with the protective fuel cladding surrounding it.

Now, together with Idaho National Laboratory (INL), MIT researchers have led one of the most detailed three-dimensional studies of irradiated U-10Zr to date. The researchers used a technique known as high energy synchrotron X-ray computed tomography at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in New York to analyze the pore networks and chemical changes that formed under irradiation during use inside the FFTF reactor, providing new insights into how the material swells, transfers heat, and interacts with the fuel cladding. 

The findings could help keep some nuclear reactors running for longer, while also informing the next generation of nuclear reactor fuel systems.

“This study helps us model the pore distribution in the fuel more accurately,” says senior author Ericmoore Jossou, MIT’s John Clark Hardwick (1986) Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering. “It also helps us design for the safe operation of metallic fuels in reactors by giving us a better understanding of the role of pores and their importance.”

Joining Jossou on the paper are first author and MIT postdoc Anthony Harrup; Riley Moeykens ’25, SM ’25; BNL researchers Michael Drakopoulos and Nghia Vo; and INL researchers Jana Howard, Colby Jensen, and Tiankai Yao.

Understanding nuclear fuel

A class of nuclear reactors known as sodium-cooled fast reactors generate energy from rods of metallic fuels that are sealed inside metal tubes called cladding. In each rod, heat generally moves outward from the center to the edge and then to the cladding, where liquid sodium carries heat away to be harvested into power.

“As you operate the reactor, the contact between the fuel and the cladding material creates chemical interactions that can be problematic,” explains Jossou. “There is a migration of materials from the fuel to the cladding, like fission gases and rare earth elements called lanthanides, which can react with the cladding, cause embrittlement, and damage the fuel system.”

Studies of previously irradiated fuel and its cladding have captured mostly two-dimensional snapshots, preventing scientists from seeing the full scale of the pore networks that influence heat transfer and transport materials like lanthanides. Previous studies also mainly focused on specific sections of the fuel system, such as the fuel center or the fuel cladding interface.

For their study, the MIT researchers used fuel samples from the Fast Flux Testing Facility reactor, a sodium-cooled fast neutron reactor located in Washington state that operated from 1982 to 1992.

The Idaho National Lab managed the samples and prepared the samples. The team studied the prepared samples using high-energy synchrotron X-ray tomography at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. The synchrotron generated high-energy X-rays that allowed the researchers to reconstruct the fuel’s internal pore networks in three dimensions, revealing how porosity, chemistry, and fuel-cladding interactions evolve across the fuel radius.

The researchers found porosity increased modestly from the center of the fuel toward the fuel edge, but pore density jumped by over two orders of magnitude at the fuel’s edge by the cladding. The researchers also characterized the size and shape of pores, finding small pores at the center that turn into larger pore networks pointing outward toward the edge.

“The pores are currently modeled as spheres; however, in reality they are more complex, especially when many pores merged together,” Harrup says. “That’s true from the center all the way to the cladding. It explains why the cladding reacts the way it does, and why we see cladding chemicals in the fuel.”

The pore networks toward the edge allow fission products and lanthanides to move but slow down heat transport, impacting the fuel’s performance and lifetime. The researchers also mapped their microstructural findings with changes in the chemistry of the fuel in different areas.

“With this study, we’ve conducted an in-depth analysis enabled by advanced computational imaging methods that has never been done before, with correlations between local chemical environments and the formation of pores,” Harrup says. “It turns out that whether the environment is uranium rich or zirconium rich impacts the morphology and the channels of the pores. That has never been reported before.”

“The ability to directly visualize pore connectivity and fuel cladding interaction in three dimensions gives us important insight for improving fuel performance for advanced metallic fuel for sodium fast reactors,” says Tiankai Yao of INL.

Informing reactor designs

The experimental findings differed from some models of how pores form and how the fuel system swells, which could improve simulations to help keep reactors running for longer. They also give a more nuanced picture of how pores influence reactor performance and safety.

“This helps optimize the current metallic fuel proposed for sodium fast reactors,” Jossou says. “Now, together with INL, we better understand how pores are influencing the thermal performance of metallic fuel in reactors. At high temperature, the pores are not all bad, because we found they act as pathways for liquid sodium metal to flow through the fuel and sustain thermal conductivity. Connected pores could also serve as releasing channels for fission gases which reduce the internal fuel matrix stress.”

The findings could also be used to design better fuel systems for next generation of sodium fast reactors.

“This excellent piece of work generated by Professor Jossou’s group in collaboration with INL and BNL has elegantly combined the strength of attenuation-based X-ray tomography and focused ion beam lift-outs and produced valuable insights to the location-specific 3D porosity distribution in neutron-irradiated U-10Zr fuel,” says Dong Liu, a professor at Oxford University who was not associated with this work. “What is also impressive is that they correlated 3D porosity to the thermal properties of the fuels: The total volume fraction is not the only parameter that is important, the 3D topology also matters. This is extremely informative for the study of other types of porous nuclear materials.”

The work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Nuclear Energy and utilized resources at BNL and INL. The sample preparation was carried out at INL, which is part of the Nuclear Science User Facilities, through a Rapid Turnaround Award.

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MIT selected to lead new NSF materials research center

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has selected MIT to establish and lead a new Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) focused on materials technologies for medical imaging, sustainable metals production, and next-generation semiconductors, according to an NSF announcement released July 30.

Expected to provide $18 million in research funding over six years, the award brings together 16 research groups from nine departments across four institutions, including five MIT departments, three collaborating universities, and a teaching hospital. The award is pending MIT’s negotiation of a formal research agreement with the NSF.

The MIT Materials Research Science and Engineering Center will be directed by Associate Professor Rafael Jaramillo of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE), with Professor Caroline Ross of DMSE serving as associate director. The center will be housed administratively within the MIT Materials Research Laboratory.

The center will have two main research thrusts. One will engineer specialized materials to advance X-ray detectors used in medical imaging, potentially leading to better cancer diagnosis, lower radiation exposure, and improved industrial and security imaging. The other will explore high-temperature sulfur-based molten materials to transform how metals and semiconductors are made, opening a path to more efficient metal production, improved access to critical materials, and new thin-film semiconductor technologies. 

The expected funding will also support a new shared laboratory for testing magnetic materials and materials under extreme conditions, managed by MIT.nano. This facility will be available to academic and industry users, expanding the nationwide portfolio of NSF-supported research facilities. 

“The long-term goal is for the broader materials and engineering community to see the disruptive potential of bringing researchers together across disciplines to solve complex challenges,” says Jaramillo, the Stavros V. Salapatas Career Development Professor of Materials Science and Engineering. “And that includes specifically in medical diagnostics and metals production, where entirely new things will be possible that aren’t considered possible today.”

A legacy of collaboration

The selection of MIT’s MRSEC is part of a $108 million NSF investment in six research centers that will explore a range of topics, including artificial intelligence-driven experimental laboratories and hybrid quantum materials that combine light and matter. NSF’s MRSEC program brings together interdisciplinary teams of researchers to push the boundaries of materials science and engineering and tackle complex scientific challenges.

The MIT center builds on nearly 60 years of interdisciplinary materials research at the Institute, extending a legacy that began with U.S. Department of Defense-supported laboratories in the 1960s and continued through NSF-funded centers in subsequent decades. Past MRSEC investments helped build research communities that enabled MIT centers of excellence such as the MIT Microphotonics Center and the Microsystems Technology Laboratories.

“We were inspired to continue that legacy of collaborative research in materials science,” Jaramillo says. “It’s mainly the mode of working — the mode of working in a very intentional way as a team across disciplinary boundaries and having this program that brings people together.”

MIT departments involved in the MRSEC include DMSE; Chemistry; Chemical Engineering; Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS); and Physics. Collaborating institutions identified in the MRSEC proposal are Yale University, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the Department of Radiology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. 

The first research group will focus on re-engineering scintillators — materials that convert X-rays into visible light — at the nanoscale, with the goal of improving resolution, speed, and energy sensitivity.

“My vision for that is really Marin and JJ’s vision. So I'm basically cheerleading for them,” Jaramillo says, referring to optical materials experts Professor Marin Soljačić of Physics and Professor Juejun Hu of DMSE, who are expected to lead the effort.

The second group is closer to Jaramillo’s own research in semiconductor and advanced electronic materials. It seeks to develop a deeper understanding of high-temperature sulfur-based liquids to improve the yield and efficiency of producing critical metals such as copper. Expertise in these types of materials has become increasingly rare in U.S. academia, Jaramillo says, and one goal of the center is to rebuild that capability at MIT. “I’m very excited about that being a new intellectual center of gravity.”

Telling stories about materials

Beyond research, the center is also expected to develop outreach activities highlighting the importance of materials science in society, particularly in the Boston region, where Jaramillo said industries need more workers with backgrounds in materials processing.

“For example, our community colleges don’t offer it,” Jaramillo says. “If you were looking at a community college in Michigan, everyone would know what materials science is.”

One initiative, DISASTER! — “with all caps and an exclamation mark,” Jaramillo says — will tell stories of real-world catastrophes and the materials failures that contributed to them.

A major part of materials science over the last century has been understanding why things fail, Jaramillo says. “It’s also a tremendous foot in the door for introducing the field. Because frankly, ‘if it bleeds, it leads.’ If you have giant disasters, then suddenly people are like, ‘Why did the bridge fail?’”

The program will encourage MIT undergraduates to research and tell these stories, illustrating how forensic materials science has helped prevent future failures.

Among the examples Jaramillo cited are the rivets used to assemble the RMS Titanic, whose impurities made the rivets more brittle in the freezing North Atlantic, and the crashes of the world’s first commercial jetliner, the de Havilland Comet, which revealed the dangers of metal fatigue.

“There are so many other stories that need to be told around how a material failed,” Jaramillo said. “It really cost people money and time and lives. And then through forensic materials science, we understood why it failed and we avoided future failures.”

The MRSEC team is planning to stage public outreach events at the MIT Future Fest.

Looking ahead six years, Jaramillo hopes the center will have become a self-sustaining hub for materials research. 

“I hope that we will have rebuilt the muscle memory to come together in an interdisciplinary way around materials science, and that it should have a bit of a self-sustaining element to it. I hope that we then compete successfully for the next center, and lay the groundwork for the next 60 years.”

MIT Research Administration Services supported the MRSEC proposal development through its Research Development team, which specializes in providing substantive assistance for large and complex research proposals, and in supporting early-career faculty.

MIT faculty expected to be involved in the MRSEC are Rafael Jaramillo, Caroline Ross, Juejun Hu, and Antoine Allanore of DMSE; Moungi Bawendi of Chemistry; Martin Bazant of Chemical Engineering; Nicole Nie and Shuhei Ono of EAPS; and Marin Soljačić, Riccardo Comin, Nuh Gedik, and Long Ju of Physics.

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Astronomers discover a brand-new type of astrophysical object: A black hole star

Astronomers at MIT and elsewhere have spotted an extremely bright red spot in the early universe. The object resembles an enormous star, spanning the size of our solar system. But it also is putting out 100 billion times more energy than any known star can physically produce. In fact, such energies are closer to what a black hole might generate.

The curious combination suggests that the red spot is an entirely new type of astrophysical source. The astronomers are calling it a “black hole star.”

In a paper appearing today in the journal Nature, the team presents their analysis of the new object, which they discovered using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The telescope spotted the bright red dot in the very early universe, just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.

The scientists conclude that the most likely explanation for the strange red dot is that it is a mashup of a black hole and a star — a combination that has never been observed until now. The object is likely a hugely dense cloud of gas, powered not by standard nuclear fusion, but by a central black hole.

“Our picture of this object is evolving very rapidly,” says lead author Rohan Naidu, a NASA Hubble Fellow and Pappalardo Fellow at MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research (MKI). “We think there is a central black hole that is 100,000 times as massive as the sun. And around this black hole, there would be this very extended envelope of gas that looks like a star the size of the solar system. It’s huge.”

If the bright red dot is indeed a black hole star, it would help to solve the identity of other mysterious “little red dots” that have appeared in nearly every deep space image JWST has taken to date.

“These little red dots seem to be everywhere in the early universe but essentially disappear by the present day,” Naidu says. “What exactly these objects are has been one of the most debated topics of the JWST era.”

The study’s MIT co-authors are MKI Director Robert Simcoe, the Bruno B. Rossi Professor of Experimental Physics; and Wendy Sun ’26, along with collaborators from multiple other institutions.

A singular source

Naidu and his colleagues didn’t intend to find a black hole star. They were looking for the most distant, earliest galaxies, as part of a survey that they named “Mirage or Miracle” (MoM). The team used the JWST to look into deep space, back when the universe was a few hundred million years old. Their goal was to look for galaxies that actually formed at those early times.

“There’s been this puzzle of many bright galaxies showing up at extremely early times,” Naidu says. “What we found was that what looks like an extremely bright early galaxy, aka a ‘miracle,’ in some cases actually could be a ‘mirage.’”

As they looked through JWST’s images for intriguing sources to target with their survey, they noticed a feature that stood out from the rest: a dot that was very red, and very bright.

“When we see something very red in the universe, we often assume that it is surrounded by dust, like soot or ash,” Simcoe explains. “The same way that the wildfire smoke from Canada recently made the sky in Boston look bright red, astronomical objects can also appear redder than their intrinsic color when you see them through a veil of dust.”

But there were other signatures in the light that didn’t quite match up with what physicists expect from dust. The team also observed another strange pattern: The dot’s light was extremely bright, except below certain wavelengths, where the light completely disappeared. 

This spectral drop-off is known as a “Balmer break” — a signature traditionally associated with dense gas soaking up photons in the atmospheres of stars that are a few hundred millions of years old. Vega, one of the brightest stars in the night sky shows exactly this pattern. 

“The break we observed in this object is the deepest break we have ever observed in any object, ruling out ‘ordinary’ stars as the source,” Naidu says. “But it made us wonder if we were seeing a new kind of ‘stellar atmosphere,’ but on a spectacular scale.” 

What’s more, the red dot’s light contained almost no signature of metals or any elements other than hydrogen and helium. “It was truly singular in so many ways,” Naidu says.

Pure light

To puzzle out what the source of the red dot could be, the team ran simulations of different scenarios to see what combination of astrophysical features could produce the red dot’s distinctive color.

“We started to ask: Could you make something that red using just hydrogen, without any dust?” Simcoe says. “To our surprise, it turns out you can, if you have an extremely dense screen of hydrogen, so dense that it looks more like the surface of an enormous star than a wispy interstellar nebula.”

Their simulations pointed to the red dot possibly being some powerful enshrouded energy source, surrounded by an extremely dense cocoon of hydrogen. If this were the case, it would explain the light-blocking Balmer break and the lack of anything other than hydrogen and helium that the astronomers observed. But it still wouldn’t explain the object’s extreme brightness.

“You have something that looks a bit like a star but is 100 billion times brighter,” Naidu says. “That means you can’t be powering this by nuclear fusion, which is the energy source that sits at the heart of all the stars we have.”

Black holes, however, routinely produce energy at the scales the team observed. Naidu and his colleagues incorporated an active, accreting black hole into their simulations of the hydrogen-cocooned star and varied the black hole’s mass, along with other parameters. They then compared the resulting brightness of the simulated “black hole star” with the brightness that JWST observed from the red dot.

From these simulations, they found the closest match, and concluded that the most likely scenario to explain the red dot, is a black hole star. Specifically, the object likely contains a central black hole that is about 100,000 times as massive as the sun. This powerful core is surrounded by a dense, star-like cocoon of hydrogen that is roughly the size of the solar system.

The team has named the object MoM-BH*-1, after the survey that detected it, as well as the moniker “black hole star – one,” which implies that the object is the first of others. The researchers suspect that black hole stars could explain many of the other little red dots that appear in JWST images. Those objects are not as bright as MoM-BH*-1. 

“Every little red dot is consistent with being a black hole star, embedded in a generic early galaxy,” Naidu says. “But what is special about MoM-BH*-1 is, the black hole star is essentially completely outshining its surrounding host galaxy, such that we’re seeing pure black hole star light.”

This research was supported, in part, by the MIT Department of Physics, NASA, and the Space Telescope Science Institute.

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Met Warehouse opens as the new home of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning

It is a transformation for the ages: The Metropolitan Storage Warehouse in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is opening as the new home of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, after a makeover turning the century-old storage facility into a light-infused center for teaching, research, and public engagement.

The massive structure is a unique addition to daily life at the Institute. A hulking brick building and local landmark over 500 feet long and five stories high, the Met Warehouse now stands as a remarkable feat of architecture, engineering, and “adaptive reuse.” It includes four segments of glass walls, double-height studio spaces, copious common areas, and building-long walkways overlooking the work areas on all five floors — a 21st-century variation on the Infinite Corridor in MIT’s main group buildings. 

Designed by the architecture studio Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R), the Met Warehouse is intended to serve as a new campus hub. Beyond work studios, offices, and classrooms, there is an auditorium, galleries, and common spaces where MIT scholars and students can learn and design together, and the public can engage in lectures, exhibitions, and other programming.

“Walking through the Met Warehouse, everywhere you look you see the artful melding of the original architecture with the new design. It’s a perfect expression of the historical importance of architecture at MIT and of the creative promise of this new hub,” says MIT President Sally Kornbluth. “The new Met Warehouse will create a central home for design at MIT, and together with the new Linde Music Building, the presence of the Met will create a magnetic new west campus district for arts and design.”

Faculty, staff, and students have started moving into the Met Warehouse this month. The School of Architecture and Planning will stage a ceremonial procession into the building on Sept. 8, with a formal dedication event on Oct. 1, and a day welcoming the general public on Oct. 3 as part of MIT Future Fest. 

The Met Warehouse’s conversion began in the late 2010s, championed by Hashim Sarkis, the dean of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, and his collaborators. They envisioned a new and dedicated space for architecture, design, and planning at MIT — while reusing an existing structure for that purpose.

“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,” says Sarkis, the Elizabeth and James Killian 1926 Professor. “This is a big statement on the part of MIT.” 

Sarkis adds: “We’re expecting the Met to facilitate a very vibrant in-person culture. The vitality of interpersonal connection will be highlighted in the building. The faculty and the students wanted more research space, more space for exhibitions and galleries, and more spaces that enable what we do best, which is to work together. Design is about collaboration, and planning is about community.”

From fortress to studio 

First opened in 1894 and completed in 1923, the building known as the Metropolitan Storage Warehouse long stood as a forbidding, fortress-like facility, with some tiny window slits. Only a few people had reason to venture inside. Visible from across the river in Boston, the Met Warehouse was a landmark, an advertisement of services, and a curiosity. It had about 1,500 storage spaces inside, and few other uses. 

MIT acquired the building in 1962, and by 2015 it was no longer used for storage. That raised a question: What comes next? Over time, the idea of moving the School of Architecture and Planning into the Met Warehouse took hold. That left the hard work of designing and transforming the building into a place that people could inhabit, while respecting the historically designated façade’s monolithic qualities. 

To create such a thoroughgoing transformation, MIT engaged DS+R, known for the design of high-profile cultural and institutional projects, including the Broad Museum in Los Angeles; the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston; the Shed, a nonprofit cultural and performing-arts space in New York City; and, not least, the transformation of a postindustrial rail line into New York City’s High Line. Shawmut Design and Construction managed the renovation, and the entire endeavor was made possible by the generous philanthropic support of MIT alumni, volunteers, and friends. 

Significantly, some of the signature projects of DS+R, including the High Line and the renovation of Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center in New York, involved updating and adaptively reusing existing structures. For the Met Warehouse, this meant a revamping of the interior, creating new workspaces, new ways to help people circulate through the massive building, and new ways to bring light inside the structure. In addition to the glass wall segments, the architects expanded the building’s windows, added a connective staircase, and found additional ways to let light and air permeate throughout. 

“Our thinking was always around trying to bring communities on campus together, knowing there would be a convergence of labs, classrooms, resource spaces, and disciplines,” says Elizabeth Diller, founding partner at DS+R. “The big challenge from the start of the project was the building itself. The building is stubborn and big and heavy, and it was conceived to hold furniture and suitcases and pianos, not humans.”

When thinking through the project, Diller adds, “The first thing was assessing the building itself and its potential, and our ability to perforate it [allowing light] and to create new spaces inside of it. … We saw the potential, because of the structure, that it could endure some surgery.”

“The choice by MIT and Hashim Sarkis to adaptively reuse a building as a center for design represents a bold vision,” says Benjamin Gilmartin, partner at DS+R. “It’s a courageous idea: that the future of design and architecture very much lives in the reuse of structures we already have.”

MIT campus leaders say they are delighted with the outcome. 

“The way the building is structured, the architects, Liz Diller, Ben Gilmartin, and their team, have been unbelievably shrewd in understanding our culture and respecting it while transforming the building,” Sarkis says. “That transformation enables the things we want, which include collaborative work, while also combining instruction and research.”

The makeover of the building also represents a collaboration between the City of Cambridge and MIT. Because the Metropolitan Storage Warehouse is a historically listed building, the city had to approve the substantial exterior renovations — such as on the north side, where several glass walls now cascade from the top of the Met to ground level. On the south side, the architects preserved many of the small storage units, redesigning them as offices with an innovative “skin” of new windows.

“That was one of the big decisions, based on light and the sensitivities of the history, that the large studios would be facing the north, and extracted from the north side of the building,” Diller explains. “Which left a lot of peripheral areas to act as small-scale and more intimate spaces, offices, and other types of spaces as needed.”

Indeed, the architects emphasize, the redesign of the Met Warehouse is not simply an overhaul; the plan significantly reflects the longtime interior structure of the building, too. 

“It wasn’t just about converting the shell,” Gilmartin says. “It was about trying to find a balance and determining how much was already there [structurally] that we could use as a fabric.” 

That historical fabric is evident through one of the building’s signature features: The old brick structure in key places is exposed to view, next to many places where the architects made dramatic cuts to create platforms for light-filled studio spaces. Students, designers, and visitors can see both how the old Met Warehouse was built and how the new version of it was created.

“The building itself can be a teaching tool,” Diller says. “When we did those extractions from the building, we left our intervention exposed, so there’s a kind of conversation between a contemporary strategy and the historical building. The traces are all there; they’re all revealed.”

Educators at the Institute view the building in a similar manner as they think about architectural teaching broadly.

“Our move to the Met is an exciting physical transition for the school, and an occasion for us to articulate the shifts in architectural education we have been undertaking,” says Ana Miljački, the Francis White Davis Professor at MIT and head of the Department of Architecture. “Making our home in the building will be part of our rethinking of the discipline, the profession, and our pedagogical tasks.” 

Five stories, five blocks, one vision

As originally constructed, the Met Warehouse had five contiguous segments. Given that it is also five stories high, the building has 25 natural segments, in a sense. A wide range of activity will be housed inside it, including several core parts of the School of Architecture and Planning: the Department of Architecture, the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), and the Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism. (The MIT Media Lab, the Art, Culture, and Technology Program, and the Center for Real Estate, all part of the School of Architecture and Planning, will remain in their existing locations on campus.)

The MIT Morningside Academy for Design (MAD), a campus-wide center promoting interdisciplinary design work, will also be located in the Met Warehouse, helping to further establish the building as the essential hub of design and planning work on campus.

Many MIT scholars say they welcome the opportunity to bring so many related programs into greater proximity with each other, along with all the physical assets the Met Warehouse will provide. 

“At MIT we have fewer boundaries, less conventions, and we bump into each other on campus,” says Jinhua Zhao, the Class of 1941 Professor and head of DUSP. “I have always appreciated this spirit since I first came here as a student and walked along the Infinite Corridor. A lot of places value interdisciplinary research. At MIT, you can’t help it happening. I believe the new Met Warehouse will expand that custom.”

Those who saw the inside of the building in its old days as a storage space, and are moving into it now, are deeply impressed by the complete readaptation of the Met Warehouse and the provision of new “commons” spaces for the campus.

“It’s almost inconceivable that this brick box, which was not designed for human habitation but to store objects, has been opened up, through the work of Diller Scofidio + Renfro,” says John Ochsendorf, the Class of 1942 Professor and director of MAD. “Our hope is you will find vibrant cross-fertilization across disciplines, across the School of Architecture and Planning, but also across all of MIT. That’s really important.”

Indeed, as Ochsendorf and others have noted, the building figures to produce its own urban dynamics within its monumental walls. 

“As you go up into the building, you will find different neighborhoods concerned with different aspects of design,” Ochsendorf says. “These are all areas pushing frontiers in research and education and design of the built environment, which interact with so many of the pressing issues facing humanity. We’re excited to create new neighborhoods of inquiry with the building.”

That is certainly part of the intention, the architects say. 

“There are a lot of opportunities for smaller groupings of people to be organized in ways that are visible and connected to the larger shared spaces but also offer the prospect of retreat in different places to work,” Gilmartin observes. 

“The challenges facing cities cannot be addressed by any one discipline,” says Sarah Williams, director of the Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism. “Innovation comes from bringing together all the fields that shape — and are shaped by — the built environment. The Met Warehouse gives us a place to work across those boundaries, inspiring new ways to imagine and build the future of our cities.”

Sarkis, for his part, professes some happy relief that the long-held conception of the Met Warehouse is finally becoming reality. The building, he thinks, will influence the flow of people through MIT’s campus, bringing a transformative multiuse space into the daily lives of students, faculty, staff, and the public.

“It is going to be a new center of gravity for the campus,” Sarkis says. 

MIT News will offer a further look at the Met Warehouse’s transformative architecture in concert with the Sept. 8 procession, as well as coverage of events from the formal dedication weekend in October. 

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How to design a space habitat that supports its residents’ mental health

In extreme environments, habitats are built for survival. Submarines, Antarctic bases, and postdisaster dwellings are designed to prioritize health and safety. This is especially the case for habitats in space, where room is at a minimum, contact with Earth is remote, and hazards are numerous. 

But as humans plan for longer journeys to the moon and eventually Mars, designing habitats where crews can not only survive but also thrive will be essential to a mission’s success.

Now, engineers at MIT and elsewhere are exploring ways that habitats in extreme environments can support a person’s mental, emotional, and social wellbeing. They have assembled a resource that relates habitat design features with behavioral health outcomes such as stress, anxiety, and feelings of isolation. 

Going a step further, the team has visualized these relationships in the form of an interactive online platform. Users can click through to explore connections between design and behavior, such as how a habitat’s layout affects social connection and team cohesion, and how a reconfigurable space can minimize homesickness. 

“The awareness has been there for some time that living in space is difficult,” says Mich Lin, a PhD candidate in the Human Systems Lab and the Engineering Systems Lab at MIT. “We’ve come a long way from the human in a tin can. As our priorities shift toward long-duration exploration missions, making sure a crew is safe, healthy, happy, and productive becomes even more important.”

The insights that Lin’s team presents, which appear today in the journal npj Microgravity, were assembled after an extensive literature search and expert interviews. They identified many studies on habitat design and its influence on specific behaviors, such as how levels of lighting affect an astronaut’s quality of sleep. But this is the first time that anyone has brought such information together, visualizing the relationships and risks associated with a habitat’s design and an inhabitant’s wellbeing. 

Lin notes that the work can be applied to designing habitats in not only space but also  other extreme, isolated, and confined environments. 

“Submarines, oil rigs, polar expeditions, and even refugee camps or war zones are incredibly stressful environments,” says Lin, who is the study’s lead author. “We try to make this work applicable to a lot of scenarios and identify points of intervention in habitat design to reduce stress in those extreme environments.”

The study’s co-authors include former MIT undergraduate Lu Chen and Professor Katya Arquilla of the University of Colorado at Boulder. Other key contributors to the work include Lauren Blackwell Landon at KBR/NASA, Jeffrey Montes of the space architecture firm Different Systems, and MIT undergraduate Kara Chou. 

Emotional design

The researchers modeled their new design tool after a risk mapping format used by NASA. When designing a spacecraft or habitat for astronauts in space, the agency maps out the associated risks in the form of “directed acyclic graphs.” A DAG resembles a large web of relationships that illustrate how certain habitat or mission features can affect certain mission-relevant outcomes. 

A typical NASA DAG depicts one-way connections between mission constraints, such as “distance from Earth,” to an astronaut’s physical health outcome, such as quality of sleep, cardiovascular impacts, cognitive function, and so forth. 

“By mapping risks, we can identify points of intervention to characterize and mitigate them,” Lin explains. “NASA uses DAGs as a countermeasure to the risky business that is human spaceflight.”

The researchers looked to create a similar DAG format to map risks associated with habitat design, and less tangible behavioral health outcomes, such as stress, boredom, trust, nostalgia, curiosity, and kinship with crewmates. 

“The connection between habitat and behavioral health has not been made in this format before,” Lin emphasizes. “So we made those connections for the first time.”

To do so, the team first identified habitat design factors and behavioral health outcomes that would be specifically relevant for living in extreme environments. The researchers looked to multiple resources across aerospace and human factors fields. To prioritize a human-centered perspective, they referenced the “Atlas of the Heart,” written by author, social work researcher, and University of Houston Professor Brené Brown. In the book, Brown identifies 87 emotions and experiences that define what makes us human. 

“From there, we did a down-selection of which emotions would be the most impactful in our scenario of habitat design in extreme environments,” Lin explains. 

The team zeroed in on 14 main emotions or experiences that they considered behavioral outcomes that could be influenced by habitats in extreme environments. These include anxiety, autonomy, nostalgia, curiosity, fatigue, and kinship.

They then carried out a wide-ranging search through the scientific literature to identify studies relating to habitability in extreme environments. For instance, NASA has carried out extensive research on the effects of lighting on sleep, the resetting of circadian rhythms, and productivity. Other studies have investigated circulation and habitat layout and their effects on privacy, social connection, and crew performance. 

Lin and their colleagues assembled connections and conclusions from numerous studies to create a DAG, or a web of habitat design features, and their downstream effects on aspects of mental, emotional, and social wellbeing. They also solicited feedback from experts across industry, academia, and NASA to evaluate and strengthen the DAG.

They then developed an online platform, dubbed the Human-Environment Connection and Interaction Atlas, or HECIA, as an interactive tool for habitat designers. 

Click and connect

When using the atlas, the team envisions that designers can take either a forward or backward approach. The atlas lays out habitat design elements, and their downstream behavioral connections, in roughly the order in which decisions are made in designing a mission. 

For instance, in designing a spacecraft to journey to Mars, a designer might take a forward approach, and first click on a feature associated with an early design stage, such as “distance from Earth,” knowing that this would be a significant consideration. The atlas would automatically display risks associated with being far from Earth, such as limits to resources such as “food,” “medical capability,” and “family and friends,” and to behavioral health outcomes such as “nostalgia/homesickness.” 

A designer could then take a backward approach. If, for instance, they want to prioritize minimizing nostalgia/homesickness, they could click on the term to reveal design features and ideas that affect and could potentially improve it, such as in this case, “place attachment,” or feeling emotionally attached to a place. Clicking on this term would in turn reveal upstream elements such as “reconfigurability” and “privacy” — design elements that could be put in place to encourate place attachment, and reduce homesickness. 

For every term that a designer clicks on, Lin and their colleagues provide a summary, based on empirical research, that explains both the term in the context of extreme habitats, and provides examples of design interventions. For instance, a designer who is looking for ideas to minimize social isolation on long-duration missions may click on the term, to reveal a description. 

“They may read that research has found ‘access paths, stairs, entrances, contribute to the formation of friendships and social cohesion,’” Lin offers. “So that would give them an idea of connecting public spaces in the habitat, via the private spaces, so people have to mingle, essentially.”

They emphasize that the new platform and the ideas informing it are not a one-size-fits-all for how to design any extreme habitat. That depends on a particular habitat’s specifications and constraints. 

“Rather, this helps you think about connections that might be important, but that aren’t immediately obvious,” Lin says. “As we envision truly becoming an off-planet species, or creating places we want to live in in space, there is so much potential for us to reimagine habitats that make us happy and productive.”

This research was supported, in part, by NASA.

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3 Questions: MIT Sloan launches Evening MBA

The MIT Sloan School of Management is launching an Evening MBA program designed for high-performing individuals who want to earn an MBA while continuing to work. Beginning with its first cohort in August 2027, the 22-month program will offer the same academic rigor, admissions standards, and world-class faculty as MIT Sloan's existing MBA programs, providing a primarily in-person, cohort-based experience tailored to working professionals. In this interview, MIT Sloan Dean Richard M. Locke speaks about the new program, why now is the right time to launch it, and what it means for the Greater Boston region.

Q: Who is the new MIT Sloan Evening MBA designed for?

A: We created the Evening MBA for talented, ambitious professionals who want to earn an MBA from MIT Sloan during the week, but prefer to remain in their current jobs while pursuing their degree. We know there is a growing population of professionals who want to accelerate their careers, who want the intellectual challenge, leadership development, and network that come with a world-class MBA, but who are also building momentum in their organizations and don't want to step away from their careers to attend a full-time program. This program allows them to continue contributing to their organizations and immediately apply what they learn in the classroom to their work.

Students in the Evening MBA will be held to the same high academic standards, learn from the same world-class faculty, and benefit from the same commitment to rigorous, innovation-driven management education that defines our existing MBA programs. The difference is the format. 

Q: What sets the Evening MBA apart from other MBA programs for working professionals?

A: Several things make this program distinctive. First, it combines MIT Sloan's academic rigor and strengths in innovation, analytics, technology, and applied management. It connects students to a high-caliber, technically sophisticated peer network inside the broader MIT ecosystem. Maintaining the school's high standards was a foundational principle in the program's design, so students can expect the same level of excellence that characterizes all MIT Sloan MBA offerings.

Second, the program is primarily in-person and cohort-based. Students will spend two evenings each week learning together, developing strong relationships with a group of high-performing peers, and also participating in week-long intensive components of the program together. We believe those personal connections, classroom interactions, and opportunities for collaboration are an essential, and distinctive, part of the MIT Sloan experience.

Finally, students will have the opportunity to put their learning into practice immediately. Because they remain active in their organizations throughout the program, they can bring new ideas, frameworks, and skills directly back to their workplaces and see the impact in real time.

Q: How do you see the program impacting Greater Boston and the region?

A: We see a strong connection between the Evening MBA and Greater Boston's vibrant technology and innovation economy. The region is home to leading organizations across life sciences, health care, finance, energy, engineering, and entrepreneurship, and many of the professionals driving those industries are looking for opportunities to continue developing their management skills and knowledge, as well as leadership capabilities, without having to pause their careers or leave their organizations.

Because students will remain in their current jobs throughout the program, the benefits of this program also extend beyond the individual. Employers benefit from the upskilling and retention of these individuals, and this program accelerates participants’ careers and increases their value to their organizations. 

The Evening MBA will also strengthen MIT Sloan's relationships with employers across Greater Boston and New England, expand our alumni network, and create new opportunities for collaboration among students, alumni, industry partners, and organizations throughout the region. Ultimately, it will help us advance MIT Sloan's mission of developing principled, innovative leaders who improve the world, while also contributing to the continued growth and success of one of the world's most dynamic innovation ecosystems.

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The mystery of the Chinese tea chest label

When MIT historian Tristan Brown first examined a Chinese tea chest label displayed as a relic of the Boston Tea Party, he had no reason to doubt its story.

Descendants of Boston blacksmith Thomas Wells had donated the label to the Old South Meeting House in 1987, saying it had been recovered during the destruction of British tea in 1773. Because so few objects from the protest survive, the label appeared to offer a rare material connection to the event.

But after a year of archival and linguistic research, Brown reached a different conclusion: The label was made nearly a century later.

The decisive clue lay hidden in its Chinese text. Earlier researchers had approached the text through Mandarin, but Brown found that one sequence of characters was being used phonetically. Read in Cantonese, it rendered the name “Smith, Archer,” identifying Smith, Archer & Co., an American trading firm active in East Asia during the 1860s and 1870s.

The discovery does not make the label historically insignificant. Instead, it reveals a different story — one connecting Chinese migration, Pacific commerce, family memory, and the ways Americans constructed the history of the Revolution.

Brown presents his open-access findings in “Tea Chest Label,” published July 3 in the June 2026 issue of the American Historical Review. What began as an inquiry into a supposed Boston Tea Party relic became a study of how ordinary objects acquire historical authority, and how historical memory itself is made.

The project began in 2024, when the American Historical Review issued a call for essays on 76 objects connected to 1776, the year the United States declared independence from Britain.

“I’m a historian of China and don’t usually work in American history, but the idea of taking on one of 76 artifacts for the 250th anniversary of the U.S. sounded like a fun challenge,” Brown says.

As he considered which object to study, Brown recalled seeing the intriguing Chinese label during a visit to the Old South Meeting House, a major site of public debate in Revolutionary-era Boston and the place where colonists gathered before the Tea Party.

The object had stayed with him.

Following the evidence

The label offered Brown an unusual point of entry into the history of the Boston Tea Party. Its apparent significance was heightened by the scarcity of surviving objects from the event.

That scarcity reflects the nature of the protest itself. The destruction of the tea was a criminal act, and participants had strong reasons to conceal their identities and avoid punishment by the British Crown. Even today, no completely definitive list exists of the people who took part.

“That is one reason why the event remains shrouded in a degree of mystery,” Brown says.

With that uncertainty a given, Brown pursued two lines of investigation simultaneously: establishing the label’s provenance, and deciphering the label’s wording.

At the outset, he learned that scholars associated with the British Museum and Harvard University had examined the label. Their assessments had not definitively authenticated the label as a Tea Party relic, but neither had they ruled out an 18th-century origin.

“I believed it was real,” Brown says. “None of the parties who had previously assessed the label’s provenance concluded definitively that it wasn’t from the Boston Tea Party. And frankly, it was hard to imagine how an American family with no ties to China could have possessed a label written in formal Chinese listing the exact teas that were traded in the region.”

Brown spent months interviewing Wells descendants and searching for original documents that might connect the label to the 1773 protest. At the same time, he began tracing how the family tradition surrounding the object had developed.

Because claims of family participation in the Tea Party are often difficult to verify, Brown worked closely with members of the Wells family throughout the project, and found in them willing and generous partners. As the evidence began pointing away from the Revolutionary era, the research required both scholarly rigor and personal sensitivity.

“The Wells family, especially Charles Wells, were extraordinary collaborators,” Brown says. “They cared deeply about their ancestor’s legacy and the label’s history, and they wanted the truth as much as I did. This is their discovery as much as mine.”

Cracking the label

The Chinese wording on the label presented a separate challenge.

Brown could see that part of the text did not function like ordinary Chinese prose, but its meaning remained elusive. The breakthrough came when he revisited the way earlier scholars had pronounced the characters.

Previous translations and interpretations had relied on Mandarin, China’s official language rooted in the northern part of the country. Brown gradually recognized that one sequence of characters was being used phonetically to represent a foreign company name. When pronounced in Cantonese — the dominant language of the 19th-century commercial networks in which the label circulated — the characters reproduced the name “Smith, Archer.”

That reading identified Smith, Archer & Co., a New York-based import-export firm with offices in East Asia during the 1860s and 1870s. The company acquired Chinese and Japanese teas for shipment to American markets.

The label also named Yuan Tianbo, a Cantonese merchant connected to that trading network, whom Brown later traced to Yokohama, Japan in the 1860s.

The linguistic clue therefore did more than reveal a company name. It established that the label belonged to the world of 19th-century Pacific commerce, not the tightly controlled Canton trading system of the 1770s.

“That was the moment the entire story changed,” Brown says. “Once we could date the label, we finally knew where to look.”

From East Asia to the American Midwest

Once Brown had identified the company, he could begin reconstructing the label’s likely route into the Wells family’s possession.

The trail led to John Milton Wells, a relative who traveled from Michigan to the San Francisco Bay Area during the Gold Rush era from 1848 to 1855. Although John Milton did not strike gold, his years in California changed the course of his life. After returning to Michigan, he worked as a grocer and operated a business recorded in commercial directories as the “California Tea Store.”

A surviving trade card associated with Wells advertised imported Asian teas. Together with family letters, census records, and local business directories, it points to the commercial world through which a label produced for an East Asian tea merchant could have entered the Midwestern family’s collection. The label was therefore likely acquired through the family’s 19th-century tea business, rather than during the Boston Tea Party.

Brown argues that its Revolutionary pedigree probably developed later, amid the centennial commemorations of the 1870s, when many American families were emphasizing their connections to the nation’s founding era.

By the early 1900s, the story had appeared in a local newspaper, which reported that the label had been taken from a tea chest during the Boston Tea Party. Repetition in family accounts, newspapers, commemorative culture, and eventually museum interpretation helped transform an unverified tradition into an apparently authoritative history.

“The label shows how 19th-century global trade, Asian migration, and family storytelling together reconfigured American revolutionary memory by manufacturing the very relics that seemed to authenticate that memory,” Brown writes.

A different kind of historical artifact

Brown’s investigation also demonstrates how new research tools are allowing historians to revisit questions that once appeared settled.

Digitized commercial directories made it possible to trace Smith, Archer & Co. across East Asian ports. Searchable newspapers helped Brown follow the development of the Wells family story. Attention to Cantonese, rather than Mandarin, unlocked a company name that had gone unrecognized in earlier interpretations.

“Though the tea chest label is not from the Revolutionary War era, it’s still an important educational artifact documenting China’s long-standing trade with the Americas and the ways Americans have long looked to China to tell stories about their own country’s past,” Brown says.

The discovery changes the label’s historical significance, rather than diminishing it. The object’s value lies not in what it was reported to have witnessed in 1773, but in what it reveals about how later generations used globally circulating objects to construct memories of the American Revolution.

The label also preserves an important truth beneath the mistaken family tradition: The tea destroyed in Boston Harbor came from China. Its journey from an East Asian commercial network to a Midwestern family and finally to a Boston museum illustrates how American revolutionary memory became intertwined with Pacific trade and migration.

For Brown, the project offers a broader lesson about historical scholarship as an ongoing process of questioning, debate, and discovery.

“History is never finished,” Brown says. “Even objects that have sat in museums for decades can reveal entirely new stories when we ask new questions.”

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