At a spirited Commencement ceremony, the Class of 2026 is urged to “run toward the hardest problems”

After years of study and instruction, MIT’s Class of 2026 received one last piece of guidance this afternoon en route to picking up their diplomas and starting the next chapter of their lives.

“Run toward the hardest problems,” said Lisa Su ’90, SM ’91, PhD ’94, the chair and CEO of semiconductor powerhouse Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and the featured Commencement speaker at today’s OneMIT ceremony. “Hard problems really teach you what you’re capable of.”

Su’s career as one of the world’s leading technology executives has long been intertwined with MIT. She holds three degrees in electrical engineering from the Institute, along with another distinction: Building 12, home of the MIT.nano facility, was named after her in 2022. 

A central theme of Su’s address involved learning by taking on difficult challenges. At MIT, as she put it, she acquired “not the confidence that I would always know the answer, but the confidence that even when I didn’t know the answer, I could figure it out.”

Speaking before a large and appreciative audience in MIT’s Killian Court, Su also urged MIT’s new class of graduates to lead purposeful lives, with a sense of the greater good and an eye toward addressing societal challenges. 

“The world does not just need people who know how to use powerful tools,” Su said. “It needs people who know what to use them for. People with a sense of purpose. Judgment. Courage.”

Science: Curiosity on a Mission

The OneMIT ceremony is an Institute-wide Commencement event with a featured speaker and other traditional elements. MIT’s Commencement week also includes specific ceremonies in which undergraduates, and graduate students in the Institute’s five schools and the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, walk across stage to receive their diplomas. 

After Su spoke, MIT President Sally A. Kornbluth delivered a charge to the graduates, discussing the Institute’s core values, especially the ideas of excellence and curiosity. She also emphasized MIT’s role in making advances that benefit the nation and society at large, from medicine to energy, agriculture, and other areas of need. 

“A few of those values that will serve you wherever you go,” Kornbluth observed, while noting MIT’s commitment to “the highest standards of intellectual and creative excellence” in its work. She observed that the Institute lives this ethos, by spurning legacy admissions and “back-door” admissions for donors’ families, among other merit-based practices.

“MIT is custom-made for people whose curiosity never sleeps,” Kornbluth said, offering that “curiosity is also our intellectual rocket fuel — and that fact is enormously important for our society as a whole.”

She added: “At MIT, we know that curiosity-driven science is the path to new knowledge,” Kornbluth said. “The kind that spawns world-changing innovations. Curiosity is the force that transforms deadly cancers into treatable conditions. That turns fusion energy from a dream to a reality. That uncovers new ways to grow more food using less of every resource.”

Indeed, Kornbluth emphasized, “We like to say that science is curiosity on a mission.”

“The responsibility to work with others”

MIT students earned a total of 1,165 undergraduate and 2,817 graduate degrees this academic year. 

The OneMIT ceremony began with the annual alumni parade, which has come to feature graduates from the 50th anniversary class. In this case the undergraduate class of 1976 had the honors, entering with processional entry music from the Killian Court Brass Ensemble, conducted by Kenneth Amis. 

In another annual component of the OneMIT ceremony, Thea Keith-Lucas, the Chaplain to the Institute, delivered the invocation. The Chorallaries of MIT sang “The Star Spangled Banner” at the outset of the event. Near the conclusion, they sang the school song, “In praise of MIT,” and another Institute anthem, “Take Me Back to Tech.”

By tradition, speakers at the OneMIT event also included Teddy Warner, president of MIT’s Graduate Student Council, and Heba Hussein, president of the undergraduate class of 2026.

“As MIT graduates, we have the responsibility to work with others to generate, disseminate, and preserve knowledge to bear on the world’s greatest challenges,” Warner said. “We cannot solve global problems without global cooperation or with limited techniques. I implore everyone to apply the cooperative, interdisciplinary skills used every day at MIT to effect positive change in all areas of the global community.”

In her speech, Hussein reflected on the many ways her classmates supported each other during their time at MIT. “As we move forward, I urge you to continue to carry care,” Hussein said. “Care for our work, for each other, and for the people far beyond MIT whose lives are connected by what we choose to do.

Following the students’ remarks, Stephen DeFalco ’83, SM ’88, president of the MIT Alumni Association, issued a welcome to the new graduates. 

MIT: “Where I really learned to solve problems”

For her part, Su recounted that when she first came to campus, she was “pretty sure I was good at math.” Then, drawing laughs from the audience, she recalled stepping into two MIT first-year courses, 6.001 and 6.002. 

“Within about two weeks, I realized there were a lot of people at MIT who were very, very good at math,” Su said. 

She stuck with it, and, as she told the crowd today, “Along the way, I started believing in myself. … What I realize now is that MIT was teaching me something much bigger than semiconductor device physics.” Referring to MIT’s enduring motto of “mens et manus,” or “mind and hand,” Su underscored the importance of both thinking through problems and working to solve them in practical terms. 

“When I was a student, I thought it was just a motto,” Su said. “Now I think it captures exactly what makes MIT so special. MIT teaches you to think deeply. But it also teaches you to build. To test ideas. To keep going when the first experiment — or even the fifth experiment — doesn’t work. And over time, you start believing that you can solve problems that once felt impossible. I carried that feeling with me long after I left campus.”

Su’s remarks specifically credited the mentorship of MIT electrical engineer Dimitri Antoniadis, one of her PhD advisors, who today is the Ray and Maria Stata Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and in whose lab she worked as a doctoral candidate. 

“That was where I really learned how to solve problems,” Su said. 

After receiving her PhD from MIT, Su worked at Texas Instruments; IBM; and Freescale Semiconductor. In 2012, she joined AMD, which she has helped revitalize as a global leader in the semiconductor space. In 2014, she was named president and CEO of the company. Under her guidance, AMD has both grown and diversified its products, with expanding reach in high-performance computing, among other areas. 

Su has received many awards and honors in her career, including the IEEE’s Robert Noyce Medal in 2021; she was the first woman to be awarded the honor. 

In her remarks, Su referenced the many technology advances of recent decades, and noted the potential for new changes due to artificial intelligence. Su outlined her hope that AI can “accelerate discovery in every field,” including medicine and health care, suggesting it could help assemble more information than ever in valuable ways.

“This I think is the promise of AI at its best,” Su said. “It makes each of us more capable. Medicine. Science. Energy. Climate.”

At the same time, Su observed, “Technology itself does not decide what the future looks like.” Rather, she noted, people do: “For everything AI can do, AI cannot decide which problems are worth solving. It can’t make the hard judgments when the data is not there. It can’t take responsibility for the outcome. These are actually our responsibilities. And they matter more now than ever.”

“The commitment to act ethically”

In her charge to the graduates, Kornbluth also encouraged the MIT class of 2026 to  apply their knowledge and skills in socially beneficial, responsible ways.

“I mentioned excellence and curiosity, two of MIT’s core values,” Kornbluth said. “But I hope we also hold, together, another core value: the commitment to always act ethically, with integrity, and with consideration for our fellow human beings.”

She added: “I have no doubt that … with your uncommon talent, you can do it! And if you keep that goal in sight, I know you will do great things for the world. Congratulations — and warmest best wishes to all of you for a happy life and a fulfilling career.”

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MIT researchers develop a low-cost technique to get lithium out of rocks

Demand for lithium has surged in recent years as lithium-ion batteries power increasingly more of our world. And yet, even as places like the U.S., Europe, and Australia have abundant lithium resources within their borders, China dominates global lithium refining. The biggest hurdle to tapping into the U.S. and Australia’s lithium is getting it out of hard rock minerals in a form that is useful.

Extracting lithium from hard rock today is an energy- and waste-intensive process that is often far more expensive than getting lithium from brine water, which also has major environmental drawbacks. Currently, lithium hard rock extraction involves baking the rock at over 1,000 Celsius and chemically leaching it to extract lithium. The rest of the rock is discarded.

Now, a team of researchers from MIT and elsewhere has developed a low-temperature process for extracting battery-grade lithium from the most common type of lithium-bearing mineral. The process uses a liquid reagent to dissolve the rock into the useful forms of its constituent parts: not just battery-ready lithium salts, but also smelter-grade alumina and cement-ready silica. After the minerals are extracted, the solvent and reagent can be recovered and used again so waste levels approach zero.

The researchers estimate the closed-loop process is half the cost of traditional lithium hard rock extraction and could make it cost-competitive with extracting lithium from brine water.

A paper describing the process was published today in Science. The researchers have already begun commercializing the technology through an MIT spinout, Rock Zero.

“By 2040, we need to quadruple production of lithium globally, which amounts to hundreds of new lithium producing assets,” says author Camden Hunt, a former project manager in MIT’s Center for Electrification and Decarbonization of Industry. “Hard rock is abundant; you can find it everywhere. But most hard rock refining is done in China. Our central thesis is if you can find an easier way to crack the rock, get lithium out, and make battery-grade lithium salts, you can change the lithium market. It aligns with the recent push to onshore production of critical minerals in the U.S.”

Joining Hunt on the paper are former MIT postdoc Benjamin Mowbray; PhD candidate Kalyn Fuelling; MIT undergraduate Jacqueline Prawira; Khashayar Jafari, a former senior research scientist at the MIT green cement spinout Sublime Systems; and Yet-Ming Chiang, MIT’s Kyocera Professor of Materials Science and Engineering.

From bathrooms to batteries

The research has its roots in a bathroom renovation. About 25 years ago, as Chiang made a trip to a hardware store to look for something that would turn clear glass blocks translucent, he stumbled on a glass etching cream that works by “eating away” at the surface of the glass. The active ingredient turned out to be ammonium fluoride.

More recently, as Chiang was brainstorming ways to chemically break apart the most abundant lithium-bearing mineral, spodumene, he thought back to that etching cream. Spodumene, like glass, consists mostly of silica. Conventional chemistry-based methods for extracting metals from ores preferentially dissolve more reactive elements and leave behind a silica-enriched residue because of the strength of silicon-oxygen bonds. By designing their process to use a mixture of water and ammonium fluoride, the researchers are able to dissolve silica first, reversing the process.

The researchers showed they could dissolve spodumene rock at room temperature, which represented a breakthrough over traditional processes requiring extreme heat. But it was still only the first step to a closed-loop system that produced useful materials.

“Dissolving silica is the hard part in mining,” Mowbray says. “The next question was how do we apply it to impactful mineral processing problems?”

The mineral spodumene is mainly made up of three elements: lithium, aluminum, and silica. Mowbray and Hunt, who both have their PhDs in chemistry, began exploring ways to refine those components separately after they were broken apart in the ammonium fluoride solution.

First, the researchers isolated lithium fluoride, a useful input for common electrolyte materials used in batteries. Chiang, who has founded several battery companies over his multi-decade career at MIT, next asked the research team if they could isolate lithium hydroxide and lithium carbonate, two lithium salts useful for making battery cathodes. The researchers went back to the lab and found they could make both by developing new processes, some of which involved adding carbon dioxide or sodium carbonate. Chiang tasked the research team with a similar challenge for the aluminum part of the rock, which was isolated using a high-temperature separation technique, and then silica, which was isolated by precipitation.

“First our goal was to produce these products, then there were additional steps of characterizing their purity and properties and making sure our products met the specifications for target markets,” Mowbray explains. “For the lithium salts, we identified the purity specifications for battery-grade lithium carbonate, the most widely used lithium salt. For the silica, we wanted it to be used as a cement additive, so we did cement reactivity tests and eventually created cubes of cement from it for strength testing using industrial methods. For aluminum, we targeted smelter-grade aluminum. If any product didn’t meet the target specs, you’d end up with a waste stream.”

The researchers then developed a process to reuse the ammonium fluoride and water that starts the reaction.

“We’re able to dissolve the rock with the spodumene in it, and that liberates all the elements, including the aluminum and lithium,” Chiang says. “The silica is in the solution, but on the way to making ammonium fluoride, ammonia gas also comes off. If that ammonia gas is then reapplied, it precipitates the silica again. That sequence gives us back the starting ammonium fluoride. That’s why it’s a circular process.”

The researchers successfully processed 17 different spodumene rock sources, showing its widespread applicability using rocks around the world.

“You’ve heard of nose-to-tail eating?” Chiang says. “We refer to this as nose-to-tail mining. Our researchers came to MIT to look for impactful problems to work on in sustainability. With their skill sets, it was just a matter of setting them loose on this problem. We went through all these steps, and for each one, I’d just say, ‘Can you do this next step?’ And a week or two later they’d say, ‘Okay, we’ve shown we can do that.’ That’s how this entire process got built.”

Scaling the process

Chiang further challenged his research team to evaluate the commercial feasibility of their new system.

“Once we had these core operations worked out, Yet encouraged us to do some math,” Mowbray explains. “Is there enough spodumene in the world to supply 100 terrawatt-hours of battery production? The follow up was: If you supply all the world’s batteries with this process, what are the volumes of the co-products? Do they match global commodity markets? Then we started looking at the cost of the reagents, the cost of the energy, equipment. We started gaining conviction that this could have a big impact.”

The work has special significance for Mowbray, who grew up in a historic mining town in rural British Columbia.

The researchers worked with MIT’s Technology Licensing Office to spin out their company, Rock Zero, which is now located at The Engine and scaling up the system.

“We believe this approach is the lowest-energy, lowest-cost way of getting lithium not only out of hard rock, but period,” Chiang says. “That’s what’s motivating us to scale this. It will enable the energy transition through batteries that use lithium. This was one of the goals of The Climate Project at MIT — to work on projects that, within a short number of years, could transition from the lab to commercialization and impact.”

The work was supported, in part, by the Department of Energy Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), the MIT Climate Grant Challenges program, and the National Science Foundation. The work made use of MIT.nano facilities.

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Media Advisory: MIT to establish regional quantum hub

• MIT and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts announced plans to establish the Quantum Systems Laboratory (QSL) at MIT, which will be open to researchers across the region. 
• With the new funding from the state, which will match federal funding for quantum research already underway at MIT, the Institute aims to begin construction on the QSL facility this summer. 
• The QSL will host specialized facilities that will enable Massachusetts scientists to undertake impactful work applying quantum research across practical domains, including life sciences and national defense.

Quantum technologies promise transformative changes in fields from computing, security, and navigation to health sciences, defense technologies, and space exploration. But how do we ensure Massachusetts stays on the leading edge of our nation’s coming quantum leap? Doing so is vital to the prosperity and security of our Commonwealth and country, serving to protect and advance America’s technological leadership in a world that has been upended by geopolitical rivalries.   

On Thursday, May 28, Governor Maura Healey joined President Sally Kornbluth at MIT to announce a new effort aimed at establishing Massachusetts as a national hub for quantum innovation and catalyzing next generation quantum technologies. MIT and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts announced plans to establish the Quantum Systems Laboratory (QSL) at MIT, a new shared-use facility that will serve as a quantum toolbox for the region, aimed at accelerating quantum research, innovation, and growth in this critical field.

The QSL seeks to be the first facility in the world to bring together state‑of‑the‑art quantum computers with quantum sensors and peripherals, joined by quantum interconnects (physical channels that transfer quantum information). The facility will provide researchers from MIT and other institutions hands‑on access to significant quantum hardware and specialized experimental capabilities that are necessary to achieve the full transformative potential of quantum science and engineering. 

Thanks to a $25 million investment from the state, which will match a portion of the federal funding for quantum research already underway at MIT, the Institute is now in a position to move forward as early as this summer with construction on the QSL facility, positioning the region to dominate the next generation of quantum research, according to Institute officials. The Commonwealth’s investment adds to MIT’s own financial commitment, as well as generous philanthropic support from Thomas Tull.

“Greater Boston has the greatest concentration of quantum talent anywhere in the world, working on a range of potential applications. Through the new Quantum Systems Laboratory, we will help position Massachusetts to lead the next era of quantum technologies,” says Kornbluth. “This facility will serve those at the edges of our wildest imaginations in physics and quantum computing, yes. But it will also equip the talent in our region -- and ultimately, our nation -- to push our knowledge to new limits, and new innovations.” 

The QSL will be located at Building 39 on the MIT campus and will serve as a multi-disciplinary quantum hub with modern experimental infrastructure. Because quantum research involves the creation and study of coherent phenomena in systems that are isolated from the rest of the universe, it must take place in a highly controlled environment. Work is already underway in Building 39, with significant investments by MIT, to upgrade the physical infrastructure for these unique demands. The state’s support will supercharge this work and allow for the transformation of the lab into a hub for scientists across the region working on next-generation quantum technologies, startup applications, defense and health tech, and more. 

“Our region has unparalleled strengths in science-intensive innovations and tough tech breakthroughs that combine engineering, science, and computing,” notes Anantha Chandrakasan, MIT’s provost. “With the new Quantum Systems Laboratory, we aim to arm Massachusetts with the compute power and integrated platforms needed to lead the coming era of quantum technologies.”

By the numbers 

The QSL will host specialized facilities that will enable Massachusetts scientists to undertake impactful work applying quantum research across practical domains. As a shared-use facility, the QSL is being developed with the underlying mission of returning broad scientific, workforce, and economic benefit to the public. 

For example, quantum technologies provide significant opportunities in the fields of life sciences and defense technologies, which are $50 billion contributors to the Massachusetts economy, with dozens of startups working in the area. During a time of increased economic anxiety and labor market concerns, investing in foundational quantum facilities will infuse our region with new job opportunities, in academic research institutions, startups and more. Construction on the QSL facility alone is anticipated to create over 150 full-time, on-site construction jobs, plus another 75 to 100 jobs across the Commonwealth in supply chain and professional services supporting the project. 

Startups from MIT are also a key driver of the state’s entrepreneurial ecosystem; in 2015, Sloan Professors Edward Roberts and Fiona Murray published a report detailing how the Institute’s alumni entrepreneurs have created more than 30,000 active companies, employing 4.6 million people, and generating annual global revenues of $1.9 trillion, a figure greater than the gross domestic product (GDP) of the world’s 10th-largest economy, as of 2014. The QSL facility will provide the necessary equipment and facilities for startups working on quantum technologies, thereby strengthening the region’s innovation economy. 

“The new QSL will introduce modern experimental infrastructure to quantum research at MIT and beyond, allowing us to scale experiments and expand into critical domains in disciplines such as biology and chemistry, where we see enormous innovative potential,” explains Ian Waitz, MIT’s vice president for research. “As the new physical home of the MIT Quantum Initiative (or QMIT), the QSL will serve not only as an on-campus incubator, but more broadly, a regional hub to catalyze quantum innovation, growth, and investment in this critical R&D sector for the Commonwealth.” 

One floor of the facility will allow for development of radio-frequency (RF) electronics for controlling and interfacing with quantum systems. The QSL will also support researchers in the creation of customized quantum experiments with advanced high-frequency packages, which are required to protect quantum data in real-world applications. The facility will also develop the associated THz electronics needed by advanced quantum systems. 

A history of future-focused plays

Nearly a decade ago, MIT made a similarly big bet on nanotechnology, developing MIT.nano — a state-of-the-art, shared-use facility with more than 200 tools and instruments that support nanoscale discovery and innovation through imaging, fabrication, characterization, and prototyping. Set in the heart of campus in the Lisa T. Su Building, MIT.nano is home to a thriving research community, an industry consortium, and a startup accelerator. More than a fifth of the 1,500 users of MIT.nano come from outside of MIT, and half of the companies in its START.nano accelerator have had non-MIT founders.

The QSL will also complement the capabilities of MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s SQUILL Foundry, a quantum fabrication hub for superconducting qubit systems that serves researchers across Massachusetts and the nation free of charge.

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MIT Corporation elects 10 term members, two life members for 2026

The MIT Corporation — the Institute’s board of trustees — has elected 10 full-term members, who will serve five-year terms, and two life members. Corporation Chair Mark P. Gorenberg ’76 announced the election results today.

The full-term members are: Kate A. Bergeron, Elizabeth Choe, Kevin B. Churchwell, Stephen P. DeFalco, Bennett W. Golub, Pearl S. Huang, Steve Isakowitz, Adrianna C. Ma, Pamela Melroy, and Alex Morcos. The life members are Eran Broshy and Ray A. Rothrock. Gorenberg was also re-elected as Corporation chair.

David L. Fung ’85, the 2026-2027 president of the Association of Alumni and Alumnae of MIT, will also join the Corporation as an ex officio member. He succeeds Stephen P. DeFalco ’83, SM ’88.

As of July 1, 2026, the Corporation will consist of 75 distinguished leaders in education, science, engineering, and industry. Of those, 22 are life members and eight are ex officio. An additional 33 individuals are life members emeritus.

The 10 new term members are:

Kate A. Bergeron ’93, MBA ’13, vice president of hardware engineering at Apple, Inc.

Bergeron joined Apple in 2002 as a senior mechanical engineer and has served as vice president of hardware engineering since 2014. Previously, she was senior director for ecosystem products and technologies and senior director of Macintosh product design. Bergeron co-developed the course MIT D-Lab: Design for Scale, which she co-taught from 2013 to 2017. Earlier in her career, she worked as a mechanical engineer at EM Designs and at the Palo Alto Design Group (now Flextronics International Ltd.). She has regularly been named by Business Insider as one of the most powerful female engineers in the world and was elected to the National Academy of Engineers in 2022.

Elizabeth Choe ’13, PhD ’25, director of AI strategy for translational medicine at AstraZeneca 

At AstraZeneca, Choe oversees the deployment of biomedical deep-learning models for cancer drug development and leads upskilling programs for biologists and clinicians. As an MIT PhD student, she worked on brain cancer therapies at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. Between her undergraduate and graduate studies, she worked in digital media in several roles: leading MIT+K12 Videos, producing media for National Geographic and the National Institutes of Health, designing global online teacher training programs at the MIT Media Lab’s Learning Initiative, and serving as assistant director of communications in the Office of Undergraduate Admissions. Throughout her graduate studies, she was actively involved in campus leadership, serving as a graduate resident advisor and participating in the Graduate Student Council, the Presidential Search Committee, and other groups.

Kevin B. Churchwell ’83, CEO of Boston Children’s Hospital

At Boston Children’s Hospital, Churchwell leads an organization dedicated to advancing child health through clinical care, research and innovation, medical education, and community engagement. Since joining the hospital in 2013 as chief operating officer and executive vice president of health affairs, he led a transformation that significantly reduced safety events affecting patients and employees. Earlier, Churchwell served as CEO of Nemours/Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children in Wilmington and CEO and executive director of Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville. He is currently a professor of pediatric anesthesia and the Robert and Dana Smith Professor of Anesthesia at Harvard Medical School.

Stephen P. DeFalco ’83, SM ’88, executive chair of Creation Technologies

Before assuming his current role, DeFalco served as chairman and CEO at Creation Technologies, an electronics manufacturing services provider, for six years. Prior to that, he was a partner at Lindsay Goldberg Private Equity, following a role as president and CEO of Crane Currency. DeFalco has also held CEO roles at MDS, a global life sciences company; Senseonics, a diabetes care company, where he is still chairman; and PathoGenetix. He was also president of PerkinElmer Instruments, a strategy consultant at McKinsey and Company, and a product development leader at IBM.

Bennett W. Golub ’79, SM ’82, PhD ’84, co-founder of and senior advisor at BlackRock

In 1988, Golub was one of eight people to start the global asset management company BlackRock, Inc; he stepped down from his day-to-day activities in 2022 to assume a part-time role of senior policy advisor. Formerly, he served as chief risk officer with responsibilities that included investment, counterparty, technology, and operational risk, and he chaired BlackRock’s Enterprise Risk Management Committee. Beginning in 1995, he was co-head and founder of BlackRock Solutions, the company’s risk advisory business. He also served as the acting CEO of Trepp, LLC. and as vice president at The First Boston Corporation (now Credit Suisse).

Pearl S. Huang ’80, CEO and president of Dunad Therapeutics, Inc.

Huang has decades of experience spanning the biotech and pharmaceutical industries, with oversight across early drug discovery and development, translational research, and alliance management. Prior to Dunad, she was CEO and president of Cygnal Therapeutics, founded by Flagship Pioneering, where she was also a venture partner. Earlier, she held leadership roles as senior vice president of therapeutic modalities at Roche; vice president and global head of discovery partnerships with academia at GSK; and vice president, oncology franchise integrator, at Merck. She was also a founder and acting chief scientific officer of Beigene. 

Steve Isakowitz ’83, SM ’84, former CEO and president of the Aerospace Corporation

Throughout his career, Isakowitz has worked across the public and private sectors to advance U.S. leadership in space. At the Aerospace Corporation, he led a strategic transformation of the organization to address the rapid commercialization of the space sector, the emergence of space as a warfighting domain, and the need for faster, more agile technical execution. Before that, he held leadership positions as chief technology officer at Virgin Galactic, and later president of the company’s space ventures business; chief financial officer at the U.S. Department of Energy; and deputy associate administrator for exploration at NASA. He also served in roles at the Central Intelligence Agency and the White House Office of Management and Budget. 

Adrianna C. Ma ’95, MEng ’96, operating partner at Index Ventures

At Index Ventures, Ma oversees operations, facilitates the investment process, and is responsible for fundraising and capital partnering. Previously, she was a managing partner of the investment firm the Fremont Group, a managing director of General Atlantic, and a technology mergers and acquisitions banker at Morgan Stanley. At the Fremont Group, she oversaw a portfolio of actively managed funds, public securities, and private co-investments; chaired the investment committee; and assisted with Fremont’s direct private equity investments. During her 10 years at General Atlantic, she led investments in, and served on the boards of, growth-stage technology companies around the world. At Morgan Stanley, she focused on technology-related mergers and acquisitions.

Pamela Melroy SM ’84, president and managing partner of Melroy and Hollett Technology Partners

As deputy administrator of NASA, Melroy was responsible for laying the agency’s vision and representing NASA to the executive office of the president and others. Before retiring from the U.S. Air Force in 2007, she logged more than 6,000 flight hours as a co-pilot, aircraft commander, instructor pilot, and test pilot. She is a veteran of Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm and Operation Just Cause. As a NASA astronaut, Melroy served as pilot on two space shuttle missions and was the mission commander on a third. She later took on a number of leadership roles, including at Lockheed Martin, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and Nova Systems, and as an advisor to the Australian Space Agency.

Alex Morcos ’97, ’98, MEng ’98, co-founder of Chaincode Labs

Morcos co-founded Hudson River Trading in 2002, where he spent 10 years helping to build the quantitative trading firm. In 2014, he and fellow co-founder Suhas Daftuar started Chaincode Labs, a research and development center for Bitcoin, with a focus on open-source software and education. Recently, he applied his interest in emerging technologies to help found Fulcrum Science, a public good initiative to use AI to accelerate scientific research.

The two new life members are:

Eran Broshy ’79, former CEO and chair of Syneos Health

Broshy has spent more than 35 years as a health care executive, building high-growth public and private health care businesses as CEO, board chair, director, strategist, and investor. He served for over a decade as CEO and chairman of Syneous Health (formerly inVentiv Health), taking the company public and turning it into the leading global provider of outsourced clinical and commercial services to pharmaceutical and life sciences companies. Before that, he served as the CEO of the biotechnology platform company Coelacanth Corp, and as a managing partner at The Boston Consulting Group. Since 2010, Broshy has worked in private equity across the health care space globally.

Ray A. Rothrock SM ’78, partner emeritus at Venrock

A philanthropist, venture capitalist, and advocate for clean energy, Rothrock spent 25 years at the venture capital firm Venrock, focusing on early-stage investments related to information technology, cybersecurity, and energy. He served as chair of the National Venture Capital Association and as CEO of the cybersecurity technology startup RedSeal, and he previously held management positions at Sun Microsystems. Earlier in his career, Rothrock held various engineering positions at Yankee Atomic Electric, Exxon Minerals, and Sagus. Today, he is a venture partner with Shield Capital and advisor to numerous venture capital firms. He was a member of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Nuclear Energy Advisory Committee, and in the last decade he co-produced several documentary films.

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Brighter MRI signals

When doctors and scientists want to see inside a body, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a powerful tool. MRI can noninvasively capture detailed images of the body’s muscles, organs, and bones. It can monitor blood flow to generate a map of brain activity. And with new sensors developed by bioengineers at MIT, MRI can track the kinds of molecules that make our brains and bodies work.

In the May 13 issue of the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering, a team led by Alan Jasanoff, the Eugene McDermott Professor in the Brain Sciences and Human Behavior at MIT, reports on their new sensors, which can brighten or dim MRI signals in response to specific molecular targets. The probes are designed to amplify the effect that each target molecule has on MRI signal, dramatically improving sensitivity over previous small-molecule sensors. Jasanoff, who is also an associate investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, says the approach his team used should enable the development of MRI sensors that detect neurotransmitters and other important molecules in the brain.

“We want to be able to measure distinct chemical signals like neurotransmitters, neuropeptides, and metabolites as they fluctuate across the whole brain,” Jasanoff says. “These chemicals are important ingredients in neural computations, and we want to use the types of probes that we developed to detect these signals dynamically.”

Jasanoff explains that researchers have struggled to use MRI to sensitively detect small molecules in the brain because the amount of any given neurochemical is low. Sensors can be designed to change the brightness of an MRI signal in the presence of specific molecules — but it takes a lot of contrast agent to achieve this. If every molecule of contrast agent needs its own target molecule to activate it, low concentrations of the target molecule limit the sensors’ visibility in an MRI scan. “The signal change that you see in the imaging will be very modest,” Jasanoff says. “It won’t let us detect physiological events.”

The Jasanoff team’s new sensors, whose development was led by postdoc Sayani Das and graduate student Jacob Cyert Simon, overcome this problem. To generate a greater signal change in response to target molecules, the researchers designed probes in which a single target molecule impacts not one contrast agent, but many.

To achieve this, Das and Simon packaged an MRI contrast agent inside tiny sacs called liposomal nanoparticles. Each nanoparticle is packed with many molecules of gadolinium, a magnetic material that brightens the MRI signal that arises from hydrogen atoms in water. Inside their protective sacs, gadolinium has no effect on MRI signal, unless water molecules can easily get in and out.

Das and Simon built water channels into the walls of their gadolinium-filled nanoparticles, engineering them so that their opening depends on the presence or absence of a target molecule. When the channels open, more water enters and the gadolinium brightens the local MRI signal, lighting up that spot in a scan.

The researchers call their target-responsive sensors liposomal nanoparticle reporters, or LisNRs (pronounced “listeners”). They designed LisNRs that let water in only in the presence of their target molecule. The water channels in these nanoparticles stay blocked until they encounter their target, which can knock aside a channel-blocking bit of protein. 

Once the channel blocker is displaced, water enters and MRI signal brightens. They also made LisNRs that dim the MRI signal in the presence of the molecule they are designed to detect. These have a channel that stays open until the target molecule comes along and blocks it, keeping water out. Jasanoff lab members Vinay Sharma, Samira Abozeid, and Gregory Thiabaud played key roles in understanding and optimizing these interactions, and collaborators in the laboratory of Masayuki Inoue at the University of Tokyo helped the group engineer channels with higher potency.

In experiments led by postdoc Miranda Dawson, Jasanoff’s team used their LisNRs to detect a molecule called biotin in the brains and bodies of living rats, illustrating the probe’s amplifying effects. “We showed that we could detect micromolar-scale levels of biotin with about tenfold greater sensitivity than we would have if we’d used a more conventional, one-to-one type sensing approach,” Jasanoff says. He adds that the team’s modeling suggests that with further development, they may be able to achieve even greater sensitivity gains.

The group showed that the new sensors can be delivered systemically, reaching various organs and spreading throughout the brain. This makes them promising tools for brain-wide imaging, as well as imaging targets in the peripheral nervous system or other tissues.

A next step will be engineering LisNRs that respond to the specific neurochemicals that Jasanoff and his team hope to study. “There are something like 100 neurochemicals in the brain that we’d love to detect, in principle,” he says. They’ll start with dopamine and glutamate — two important and relatively abundant molecules that mediate communications between neurons.

This research, including support for postdoctoral fellows and graduate students involved in the work, was funded, in part, by Lore Harp McGovern, the Yang Tan Collective at MIT, the K. Lisa Yang Brain-Body Center at MIT, the Hock E. Tan and K. Lisa Yang Center for Autism Research at MIT, and the K. Lisa Yang and Hock E. Tan Center for Molecular Therapeutics at MIT.

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Place-based pathways to a viable future

Aiming to transition away from fossil fuels and avert the worst consequences of climate change, world leaders aspire to achieve net zero global greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 and cap global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius. But actions to meet such targets and minimize adverse impacts on lives, livelihoods, and infrastructure are not one-size-fits-all; they will require different approaches in different places. 

To better understand the patchwork causes and effects of the climate crisis and elements of viable solutions to it, researchers in MIT’s Living Climate Futures (LCF) initiative — 20 MIT faculty and affiliates from across the Institute — collaborate with frontline communities in diverse physical and socioeconomic landscapes around the world. 

Funded by the MIT Human Insight Collaborative (MITHIC) and based at the MIT School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (SHASS), LCF is a multi-disciplinary research hub and community of practice; focuses on how climate change impacts people’s everyday lives; and creates knowledge and research collaborations with community organizations. 

At MIT on April 23-25 — just after Earth Day — LCF showcased several of these collaborations at its second Living Climate Futures Symposium, which brought together community environmental organizations with MIT researchers and students to explore how climate change challenges and responses to them are playing out in locations from New England to Mongolia. 

“Across the next two days, we’ll have conversations about community-based work and scholarly research that’s aimed at understanding the structural causes and social effects of climate change as it’s experienced in people’s everyday lives,” said MIT professor of anthropology and MITHIC faculty co-lead Heather Paxson in remarks at the start of the first full day of the conference. “I’m really excited for this symposium, and for where Living Climate Futures can go from here.”

Resisting environmental harm: confronting data centers

A session on data centers, energy concerns, and community health in Greene County in Western Pennsylvania highlighted how stakeholders are attempting to proactively avert long-term threats to the environment and public health in and beyond their neighborhoods. Nicholas Hood, senior organizer at the Center for Coalfield Justice (CCJ), which has worked to improve policy and regulations on fossil fuel extraction and use in the region since 1994, described local environmental and health impacts of these activities, including fracking, which has increased water pollution, asthma, and lymphoma. “We have coal mines, these old oil wells, and fracking on top of that, and now we’re going to add data centers,” he said. “So, ask yourself, do you think we want that?”

CCJ community advocate Jason Capello noted that market forces compel data center developers to build as cheaply as possible in places where they believe the population is unlikely to raise concerns about adverse environmental and health impacts. These impacts include pollution from on-site water-based cooling systems, diesel generators and mini-power plants that run on natural gas, and fine particulate matter-linked illnesses such as childhood asthma, heart attacks, stroke, and lung disease. But in a subsequent presentation, Livia Garofalo, a cultural and medical anthropologist on Data and Society’s Trustworthy Infrastructures team in Philadelphia, showed that many communities have pushed back against data center project proposals. “Through protests, canvassing, petitions, and public hearings, communities have been able to resist and even stop data center projects,” she said. 

To help communities resist or limit the impact of proposed data center projects, Michael Cork, a postdoc in biostatistics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, described a tool he has developed to estimate emissions, model how pollution would spread, estimate who will be exposed, and assess likely health and economic impacts. To further explore how communities can respond to such projects, MIT associate professor of anthropology Amy Moran-Thomas and Stanford University postdoc Anjuli Jain Figueroa facilitated an educational game conceived by Northeastern University associate professor of sociology and health science Sara Wylie. 

The game helped teach participants how often-overlooked community stakeholders can negotiate community benefit agreements (CBAs), or plans that specify project developers’ commitments to address their concerns and provide local improvements such as jobs and affordable housing. Gathered around several tables, symposium participants worked together to identify potential pros, cons, and trade-offs of allowing a data center to be built in a fictitious community. Offering another avenue for community advocacy, Moran-Thomas also moderated a workshop led by public anthropologist Ieva Jusionyte on how to write op-eds that inspire change.

Repairing environmental harm: more than a matter of money

A session on global perspectives and methodologies for potential climate reparations focused on the context for and definition of the term. Veronica Coptis, senior advisor at Taproot Earth, a U.S.-based nongovernmental organization, described her view of climate justice as a movement about reducing not only excessive greenhouse gas emissions, but also changing the systems that have produced them, all while building a world where everyone can live, rest, and thrive in the places they love. “[Taproot Earth’s] mission is building power and cultivating solutions with frontline communities to advance climate justice through Black liberation, Indigenous sovereignty, and democracy,” said Coptis.

Eliane Lakam, global policy and partnerships specialist at Taproot Earth, described a two-decades-long process, sparked by Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of marginalized communities on the U.S. Gulf Coast, that led to a Global Climate Reparations Working Statement at the Global Climate Reparations Governance Assembly of 200 climate leaders in Nairobi, Kenya, in 2024.

Urban agriculture: Reclaiming and revitalizing degraded land

A session on advancing urban agriculture in a changing climate featured a panel of four organizational representatives of various growing spaces in Greater Boston, many of which were formerly vacant lots and garbage dumps that were repurposed as farms and gardens. The panel included Sabrina Pilet-Jones, urban farm manager at Haley House; Cecilia Del Cid, director of food justice and youth programs at GreenRoots; Olivia Golden, urban agriculture educator at UMass Extension; and Matthew Ellison, assistant farm manager at the Urban Farming Institute. 

The panelists showed how their efforts to grow food locally in an urban setting are challenging past and ongoing environmental inequality in myriad ways. These include preserving and expanding green spaces, increasing access to fresh produce, empowering their communities to become actively engaged in how their food is grown, building community connection and pride, and inspiring young people to grow food in their neighborhoods. They framed their organizations’ youth education programs as gateways for enabling the transfer of knowledge from elders to young people, promoting a strong work ethic and healthy lifestyles, and identifying pathways to livelihoods that address food access and sustainability. To provide participants with an opportunity to learn about urban agriculture and do some volunteer farm labor, the symposium offered a field trip to The Food Project in Roxbury. 

Rural and urban adaptation: Responding to a changing climate

A session on climate change as a place-based phenomenon explored how communities are responding to a changing climate on Mongolian grasslands, in the greater Southwestern United States, and along the Boston Harbor. 

Munkh-Erdene Gantulga, a PhD candidate in geography at the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford, described his studies at the National University of Mongolia on how pastoralists at two field sites are protecting their livelihoods as more-frequent severe weather events increase livestock mortality and pasture degradation. Perceiving climate change as a lack of rainfall, hotter temperatures, and inadequate grass growth, herders at the two sites are either migrating to greener pastures or applying three strategies: not milking their animals so as to boost survival of mothers and their offspring; selling off parts of their herds; or specializing in more climate-resilient animals, such as camels. A separate screening of the film “If Only I Could Hibernate” dramatized the environmental and economic obstacles faced by youth in Mongolia. 

Breanna Lameman, an Indigenous data sovereignty doctoral scholar and graduate research associate at the University of Arizona, and Nekai Eversole, wildlife biologist and program lead with Climate Change Program - Navajo Nation Department of Fish and Wildlife, described how traditional Diné ecological knowledge and innovative technologies are helping Navajo Nation communities to adapt to hotter temperatures, long droughts, and harsher soil conditions. Lameman cited Diné concepts of restoring balance and maintaining kinship with the natural world as essential to the local response. “This reminds us that the plants, animals, water, and soils are relatives, not resources, and that we all need to work together,” she said. “Watching the stars, observing the winds, the plant cycles, and animal behaviors, really helps us predict seasonal shifts better than any app out there.” Eversole noted that this mindset is combined with innovative technologies ranging from hydroponics to wetland restoration structures. A separate screening of the film “Climate Voices” and Q&A with director Leslie Jonas, MLK Jr. Visiting Scholar and Elder Eel Clan member of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe, explored perspectives from Native experts and climate scientists working on the front lines.

Elisa Guerrero, community engagement manager at the Stone Living Lab and Sustainable Solutions Lab at the University of Massachusetts Boston, highlighted two examples of adaptation measures to protect vulnerable Boston Harbor infrastructure from sea-level rise, coastal storms, and storm surges: testing seawalls designed to mimic natural habitat for how well they slow down wave action and preserve marine biodiversity, and monitoring salt marshes to better understand the factors that degrade and promote their health. A separate Stone Living Lab tour enabled symposium participants to visit a living seawall, nature-based flood protection infrastructures, and a community-based flood sensor project as Boston tries to address rising sea levels.

Training the next generation in community-oriented research

In addition to highlighting LCF’s role as a research hub linking MIT researchers and students with community organizations in the United States and around the world, the symposium also sought to draw attention to efforts to train the next generation in this approach. The Saturday session “Experiential Learning, ‘Anthro-Engineering,’ and Learning to Do Community-Oriented Research” showcased some of the interdisciplinary classes that LCF supports. MIT students who participated in these classes engaged in activities ranging from building chicken coops with a Boston farming collective while learning about urban agriculture to exploring how to decarbonize the steel industry in Pittsburgh and Southeast Chicago while creating well-paying green jobs to spending time in Ulaanbaatar’s ger districts (informal residential areas) while working with Mongolian collaborators on non-coal methods for heating homes. 

Student panelists shared highlights from their learning experiences through presentations, activities, artwork, and written accounts from their travel notebooks.

“People have always been part of why I chose to study engineering,” said nuclear engineering PhD student Alina Jugan. “But learning how to integrate a human perspective, and one that accounts for multitudes of realities, is essential. The first step in making a solution is learning what the real problem is and how people experience it. This is what ‘Anthro-Engineering’ teaches us.”

Panel and symposium co-organizer Laura Frye-Levine, a research scientist at the MIT Anthropology Section and affiliate of the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy, concurred. “In building relationships in place-based contexts, the students on this panel demonstrate the value of engaging with social and cultural expertise in addressing climate change,” she said. “These projects are fantastic examples of collaborations that hold promise for MIT’s approach to developing climate solutions.”

Lessons in resilience from frontline community groups 

In a session entitled “Xa xah Xechnging: A Sacred Obligation in a Time of Climate Chaos,” panelists from Se’Si’Le and Children of the Setting Sun Productions — two Indigenous-led environmental organizations from the U.S Pacific Northwest that have collaborated with LCF on experiential learning activities — described how they draw upon cultural, spiritual, scientific, legal, and other resources in their efforts to heal and restore the planet amid political and corporate opposition. At the core of their work is a perspective in which everything has a spirit, and is thus worthy of love, honor, respect, dignity, pride, and compassion.

Sundance chief Rueben George, a board member of Se’Si’Le, recounted how this perspective energized the campaign he led against the development of the Trans Mountain Pipeline, a fossil fuel megaproject on Tsleil-Waututh Nation territories in British Columbia. “We just shared facts about what it is, and we led with our culture,” said George, who is also chair of Salish Elements, an Indigenous-run company that produces green hydrogen. “That’s the biggest, most important thing, is we always led with our culture.”

At an earlier session, representatives of organizations that participated in the 2022 Living Climate Futures symposium, ranging from GreenRoots to Se’Si’Le, said that they draw strength from the wisdom of ancestors, a growth mindset, and communal bonds among people who seek a better future for the places they call home. “I come back to the indomitability of the human spirit,” said Kurt Russo, co-executive director of Se’Si’Le.

Additional photos can be viewed here.

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Designing a career, on and off the track, at MIT

You will never catch Krystal Montgomery running to class. Literally. She is that fast.

The MIT senior — a Course 6-3 (Computer Science and Engineering) major and Course 4 (Design) minor — was recently named the New England Women’s and Men’s Athletic Conference Women’s Track Athlete of the Week — for the second time. Montgomery ran a national top 10 time in the 800 meters at the Friar Invitational in Providence, Rhode Island, in April. Her time of 2:10.67 was the fastest Division III runner in the field, ranking her eighth nationally. She beat that time with a personal best (2:09.51) at the FIRE Meet hosted by Williams College in early May. 

Montgomery also runs the 400 meters or 800 meters on the relay team; last year, she and her teammates were national champions in the 4x400m race, which helped MIT win its first NCAA Division III Outdoor National Championship. 

Her success running at MIT was hard-fought. After a stellar undergraduate first year and earning a place at the NCAA Division III finals, she suffered an injury at the NCAA Division III Indoor Championships. Unable to compete at the start of her second year, the increasing demands of her coursework and interviewing for internships took a toll.

“Sophomore year was super tough, academically,” says Montgomery. “I think the mental load affected my athletic performance. I was thinking that I would quit after my sophomore year and just focus on school. Then I started dropping times and thought that maybe I could improve if I just stuck it out.”

What Montgomery found was a new way to focus on herself that positively impacted her work on and off the track.

“It’s definitely been a journey of learning how to be more mentally tough throughout the last four years,” she says. “I think that has kind of helped both my academic and athletic performances. My junior year was great. I just kept pushing myself and continued to drop my times. I kind of learned how to balance my life. I prioritized sleeping and eating and tried not to be too stressed about schoolwork so I could lock in on race day.”

Supporting creative energy

Montgomery says she was a “pretty crafty person” before attending MIT. The former president of her high school’s chapter of Girls Who Code, she knew she was going to major in computer science. It was her love for building, making, and creating that led her to explore design courses. In her first year, Montgomery took her first design class 4.021 (Design Studio: How to Design), with Paul Pettigrew. 

“That was an amazing experience because I got to use the workshops and the labs in the architecture department,” she says. “It was just crazy to have all these materials at my fingertips that I could build with. I learned how to laser cut; spray paint; powder coat; and cut metal, wood, and fabric. I found it all really interesting, and what I made encouraged me to take more of these classes.”

Montgomery says she realized that pursuing her interest in design while majoring in computer science would allow her to foster her “creative energy” throughout her time at MIT.

In her junior year, Montgomery took class 4.031 (Design Studio: Objects and Interaction) with associate professor of the practice in architecture Marcelo Coelho. She enjoyed it so much she took another of Coelho’s courses, 4.043 (Design Studio: Interaction Intelligence) — twice.

The course provides a foundation in technical skills such as physical prototyping, coding, collecting data, and deploying neural network models. The end result is developing interactive prototypes that can be deployed and experienced by real users. Montgomery enjoyed the process of working with a new group of classmates and partnering to create a prototype in each class. 

“[Coelho’s] classes have been a great combination of designing a physical object and learning how to code, which brought in my computer science background,” says Montgomery. “It gave me the opportunity to combine both fields creatively.”

Moving forward

Montgomery says she hasn’t fully wrapped her head around the fact that her time at MIT is ending. It’s all been good: friends, clubs, courses. 

“My last two years, I chose to focus on memories instead of being stressed over a lot of things,” she says. “I feel like I chose each of the things I did intentionally, so I put my time in things that I’ll carry with me past college.”

Before Commencement, Montgomery will join her teammates in her final meet: the NCAA Division III Outdoor Track and Field Championships. At last year’s championships, Montgomery and her teammates took first place in the women’s 4x400m relay. 

After Commencement, Montgomery will move to Austin, Texas to work as a software developer at Apple, and she will keep competing in track as an unattached athlete, potentially transitioning to marathons later in her career. 

“I’ve seen a lot of post-grads from MIT continue to train and compete in track meets and perform even better than they did in college,” says Montgomery. “I don’t know when I’ll make the switch to longer-distance running. For now, the sweet spot is the 800 meters.”

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