Chris Zegras appointed director and CEO of the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology

Chris Zegras, professor of mobility and urban planning and the current head of the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), has been appointed chief executive officer and director of the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), effective Sept. 1. Zegras succeeds Bruce Tidor, professor of biological engineering and computer science, who has served as interim CEO and director since January 2025.

Established in collaboration with the National Research Foundation of Singapore in 2007, SMART is MIT’s only research center outside the United States​. Housed within the Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise, SMART serves as a key platform for collaboration between MIT and Singapore’s research ecosystem, bringing together leading experts and institutions from the United States, Singapore, and the region for world-class research and innovation.

“Professor Zegras brings a distinguished track record of interdisciplinary leadership and a deep understanding of SMART’s mission and impact,” says Anantha Chandrakasan, MIT’s provost, who announced Zegras’ appointment in a letter to the MIT community today. “His appointment reinforces MIT’s commitment to the alliance, which has advanced innovation and driven global impact, and which remains as important as ever in a time of accelerating technological and global change.” 

Zegras joined the MIT faculty in 2005 and has served as the head of DUSP since 2020. His own research spans interrelated areas critical to tackling metropolitan mobility challenges: leveraging computational technologies for understanding and modeling human behaviors and enhancing strategic planning capabilities.

Zegras brings extensive experience in interdisciplinary research and leadership and a long-standing connection to SMART, where he led collaborative research on next-generation mobility sensing and simulation systems. From 2010 to 2020, he was a principal investigator on the Future Urban Mobility interdisciplinary research group; from 2016 to 2020, he was the group’s lead principal investigator. During this time, the group spearheaded Singapore’s first-ever public autonomous vehicle trials, developed and deployed large-scale urban simulation and visualization systems, and conducted research that evolved into spinoff companies, among other activities. 

“Bringing together leading experts from the U.S., Singapore, and around the world, SMART has established itself as a unique hub for interdisciplinary collaboration and innovation that addresses pressing societal issues,” says Zegras. “Having experienced firsthand what this distinctive model can achieve, I look forward to building on this strong foundation to deepen collaboration, strengthen our innovation ecosystem, and accelerate the translation of research into meaningful real-world impact.”

SMART is built around interdisciplinary research groups, all headed by senior MIT faculty members. At present, there are six groups, focused on antimicrobial resistance; the use of living cells as personalized medicines to treat and prevent diseases; social and institutional challenges arising from the proliferation of AI and emerging technologies; new agricultural technologies; wafer-scale 3D sensing technologies; and wearable ultrasound imaging. SMART is also home to the SMART Innovation Center, which aims to get research ideas from lab to market.

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3D-printed devices could streamline the production of drug-delivery microparticles

MIT researchers have demonstrated a low-cost design of specialized electronic nozzles, called triaxial electrospray emitters, that could be used to manufacture time-release drug-delivery particles or self-healing materials efficiently and at scale.

Triaxial electrospray emitters use electricity to precisely dispense three liquids from microscopic nozzles to generate a steady stream with three distinct fluid layers. The liquid forms multilayered droplets, which can solidify into layered microparticles.

For instance, an array of triaxial electrospray emitters can be used to make three-layer drug-delivery nanoparticles. The outer layer might slowly erode in the stomach, revealing a second material that controls the release of a core material, which delivers medicine to a specific area of the intestines.

Developing a tiny array of electrospray emitters typically requires expensive and time-consuming microfabrication processes inside semiconductor cleanrooms, which limits their use. To overcome these drawbacks, the MIT researchers 3D-printed arrays of triaxial electrospray emitters that have 16 nozzles in an area of about one square centimeter. Each device contains an intricate network of three-dimensional microchannels that uniformly supply liquid to the nozzles. 

Their one-step fabrication process takes only a few hours to produce complex emitter arrays. 

When tested, the 3D-printed arrays generated uniform, three-layered droplets at scale. Such uniformity is key for high-throughput manufacturing of layered microparticles for applications like biosensors that detect chemical substances or artificial cells to aid in tissue regeneration.

“We couldn’t make a device like this in a semiconductor cleanroom. This is only possible because they are 3D-printed,” says Luis Fernando Velásquez-García, a principal research scientist in MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL) and senior author of a paper describing this advance. “The particles these devices generate, whether they are used for a self-healing composite or to deliver medicine, can have a big impact in many applications. We want to democratize this technology so the benefits can touch many more people.”

Velásquez-García is joined on the paper by lead author Bryan Ivan Quintanar-Abarca of the Technological Institute of Monterrey in Mexico. The research appears in Virtual and Physical Prototyping.

A precise process

Electrospray emitters apply a high voltage to a liquid as it exits the device’s nozzle, producing a steady stream of extremely tiny droplets. 

Triaxial devices contain arrays of three concentric nozzles that emit three immiscible, or non-mixable, liquids simultaneously into layered droplets, which can be used to generate compound microparticles with distinct layers.

For instance, one could use a triaxial electrospray emitter to create a biosensing particle that contains three different chemical markers, one in each layer. Electrospray emitters can make smaller microdroplets much faster than other techniques.

Miniaturization is key for electrospray devices, since the smaller the emitter, the lower the voltage required to generate droplets. The output of a single electrospray emitter is modest, so arrays of emitters are required to boost droplet production without sacrificing uniformity. 

Multi-emitter electrospray devices are typically manufactured in semiconductor cleanrooms, but traditional processes limit the shapes and sizes of device components. The researchers could not find any previous reports of a miniaturized triaxial electrospray array in the open literature, highlighting the novelty of this work.

“When you build a triaxial array, you need to find a way to create geometries that have many integrated parts and extremely fine structures in the smallest footprint possible. And you need to ensure the devices will work uniformly,” Velásquez-García explains.

To do this, he and his collaborators used a 3D-printing technique called vat photopolymerization, which utilizes light to solidify extremely thin layers of liquid resin, fabricating a complex device one layer at a time. 

This extremely precise process enabled the researchers to print layers that were only 25 micrometers tall, just a fraction of the width of a human hair. In this way, they could generate the complex internal geometry needed for a triaxial electrospray emitter.

Refining the design

The array, which is slightly larger than a U.S. penny, contains a network of internal coiled channels that carry liquid to 16 nozzles. These helical microchannels help maintain a uniform spray of microdroplets across all nozzles, while keeping the device as compact as possible. 

“In a sense, the emitters in the array never learn they have company, or otherwise there would be cross-talking and causing interference between them. We achieved uniformity because of the work that went into our designs,” Velásquez-García says.

They also needed to fabricate extremely tiny channels without support structures, which could clog the device, and ensure all uncured resin was removed before the array was used.

The microchannels funnel liquid to the concentric nozzles, which must be perfectly aligned to properly emit microdroplets in a consistent manner.

“We were able to aggressively optimize the design because we could iterate in a much timelier manner. This ability to exquisitely refine designs is a key advantage of 3D printing,” Velásquez-García says.

The researchers tested multiple architectures to determine the ideal combination of liquid flow rates to maximize the stability and consistency of emitted microdroplets. They were surprised to find that the viscosity of the middle liquid plays the most important role in achieving stability in a microdroplet, since it preserves the thickness of each layer. 

In addition, the researchers found that by adjusting flow rates and voltages, they could precisely tailor the thickness of each microdroplet layer. This would allow scientists to design drug-delivery particles with ideal layers so medicine releases at exactly the right time.

“By making such intricate devices more practical, we can empower others to pursue entrepreneurial and scientific advances,” Velásquez-García says. 

In the future, the researchers want to continue refining their fabrication process and designs to achieve even smaller dimensions and integrate conductive or dielectric materials to the devices to make more advanced electrospray emitter arrays.

This research was funded, in part, by the Tecnológico de Monterrey – MIT Nanotechnology Program. 

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MIT affiliates win 2026 Breakthrough, New Horizons prizes

A number of MIT affiliates were recently honored for their research by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation.

Stuart H. Orkin ’67 shared a Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences with Swee Lay Thein for their research transforming sickle cell disease and beta-thalassemia from incurable to treatable conditions through gene editing therapy. Their work identified the master switch controlling fetal hemoglobin, leading directly to the development of Casgevy – the first CRISPR-based medicine approved for any disease. Orkin, a graduate of the MIT Department of Biology, is currently a professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School.

Shu-Heng Shao, assistant professor of physics at MIT and a researcher in the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics — a Leinweber Institute, was recognized with a 2026 New Horizons in Physics Prize. Shao shared the honor with Clay Córdova from the University of Chicago, Thomas Dumitrescu from the University of California at Los Angeles, and Yifan Wang PhD ’16 from New York University. The four were recognized for “discover[ing] and develop[ing] the theory of ‘generalized symmetries’ in quantum field theory.” 

J. Colin Hill ’08 shared a New Horizons in Physics Prize with Dillon Brout, Mathew Madhavacheril, Maria Vincenzi, Daniel Scolnic, and W. L. Kimmy Wu for their results measuring the expansion and composition of the universe, with Hill’s focus on advancing analyses of data from the cosmic microwave background radiation left over from the Big Bang.

Hong Wang PhD ’19 received a New Horizons in Mathematics Prize for resolving or making advances on a family of notoriously difficult problems in harmonic analysis, a branch of mathematics that studies functions by decomposing them into fundamental components. 

In addition, Bryan Traynor, a former student in the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology, shared a Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences with Rosa Rademakers for discovering the most common genetic cause of both amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and frontotemporal dementia.

Founded by a group of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, the Breakthrough Prizes recognize the world’s top scientists in life sciences, fundamental physics, and mathematics. The laureates were honored at a gala ceremony in Los Angeles on April 18.

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MIT astronomers discover the earliest known flickering quasar

A supermassive black hole lies at the heart of every galaxy, including the Milky Way. When a black hole is active, it pulls material in as a whirpool of high-temperature gas and dust. As this cosmic material piles up and falls onto a black hole, it lights up its vicinity, radiating a huge amount of energy. 

The most energetic supermassive black holes are known as quasars, and they are some of the most active and luminous objects in the universe. These voracious systems take in so much material that the energy they emit can outshine all the light in the surrounding galaxy. The pattern of light from a quasar can give scientists clues to how active supermassive black holes shape the galaxies around them. 

Now astronomers at MIT and elsewhere have detected a quasar flickering from the very early universe. The scientists traced the light from the quasar back to the “cosmic dawn,” just 850 million years after the Big Bang. The discovery represents the earliest flickering quasar detected to date. 

“Although there have been a lot of quasars found in the cosmic dawn, this is the first time we actually see one flickering,” says Gene Leung, a postdoc in the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. 

The quasar’s flicker enabled the researchers to determine that, surprisingly, the ancient quasar’s whirpool of gas and dust, known as an accretion disk, resembled a flat pancake, similar in shape to that of more modern-day quasars. 

Their findings add to a longstanding mystery in cosmology: Why do supermassive black holes exist so early in the universe’s history? Physicists have assumed that a flat accretion disk reflects a relatively mature black hole that is in a calm and stable state. Black holes that are just starting to form, like those in the very early universe, should be more unsettled systems, with accretion disks that appear more puffy and chaotic. 

The flat accretion disk around this very early quasar heightens the mystery of how supermassive black holes can grow and mature in a very short amount of cosmic time. 

“I think what this suggests is that  all the messy, very rapid growth phases that we expect all black holes to go through at some point happen very, very early on, before we see them as these very bright luminous quasars,” says Anna-Christina Eilers, assistant professor of physics at MIT. “That’s the picture that’s emerging.”

Eilers, Leung, and their colleagues report their results in a paper appearing today in Nature Astronomy. Their co-authors include members of MIT Kavli and multiple other institutions. 

Past a pinprick

A supermassive black hole can be billions of times more massive than the sun. These gravitational giants are the central “engines” of most galaxies, helping to regulate a galaxy’s star formation and growth. 

“Without supermassive black holes, no galaxy would look the way it does today,” Eilers says. “Black holes play a major role in shaping how galactic ecosystems look.”

It was long assumed that it should take more than a billion years for the first galaxies to settle and mature, so scientists didn’t expect to see supermassive black holes in the very early universe. But observations since the early 2000s showed otherwise. Scientists have spotted more than 200 supermassive black holes in the universe’s first billion years. Such objects were detectable because they were in an extremely active quasar phase, giving off enormous blasts of radiation that could be seen from Earth, 13 billion light years away. 

These earliest quasars were observed as pinpricks of light, which signal the existence of a supermassive black hole at early times. But from these bright and distant dots, scientists aren’t able to tell much more about the black holes and their cosmic dawn environments. To do so, they need to catch a quasar’s “flicker.”

“People have known that quasars in the nearby universe can flicker,” Leung says. “The flickering comes from fluctuations in the way the gas is being fed into the black hole. And how a quasar flickers tells us something about the structure of a black hole’s accretion disk, and the kind of ‘bites’ that the black hole is eating.”

Mapping a flicker

Leung and Eilers looked to detect a flickering quasar from the early universe in hopes of learning more about the shape and structure of the earliest supermassive black holes. To do so would be a technical challenge: The further back in time and space an object is, the more distorted its light appears. This effect is due to the expanding universe, which effectively stretches, or “redshifts” light to redder, longer wavelengths. The same stretching occurs in time: Any flicker that naturally occurs over several weeks, for instance, would appear stretched out, flickering only every few months when seen from billions of light years away. 

To spot a flickering quasar from the cosmic dawn, the team needed to observe the distant universe at redder wavelengths, and specifically within the infrared spectrum, and over long timescales of many years. 

“This was the technical challenge we had to overcome,” Eilers says. “We needed data at longer, infrared wavelengths taken repeatedly over very long timescales.” 

The team ultimately found a flicker in data collected by NASA’s Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) mission — a space-based infrared telescope that scanned the entire sky over a total of about 14 years. Former MIT postdoc Kishalay De, who is now a faculty member at Columbia University, had launched a project to re-process archival data from NEOWISE. Based on the re-processed data, the team unearthed a signal, from just 850 million years after the Big Bang, which was confirmed to be the earliest flickering quasar. 

“We saw the quasar flickering randomly over the 14-year period, much like a candle’s flame flickers without a fixed pattern,” Leung notes. 

They estimate that the quasar is as bright as 12 trillion suns, and it is flickering by about 20 percent, meaning that it fluctuates up and down, by a brightness of about 2 trillion suns. 

The researchers also tracked how the quasar’s light flickered over several different wavelengths. The wavelength of light reflects a certain temperature of the material that is emitting the light. The closer material is to a black hole, the hotter it is. Researchers can therefore use wavelengths of light to map the shape and structure of material within the accretion disk around a black hole. 

Using NEOWISE data, the team analyzed the quasar’s flicker to determine the shape of the accretion disk surrounding the central supermassive black hole. They found that the disk is surprisingly thin and flat — a structure that astronomers mostly see around nearby, older black holes, that have had much longer to settle and mature. 

“This provides direct evidence that the same feeding processes and structures observed in the nearby universe were already in place at very early times, despite very different cosmic environments, which had never been seen before,” Eilers says. 

“This means something happened even earlier on that led to these systems to look so mature,” Leung adds. 

The team hopes to peer even further back in cosmic time to catch a quasar’s earlier, premature development. Then, scientists can start to piece together the conditions that brewed up the first supermassive black holes. 

This research was supported, in part, by NASA.

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Improving the performance of high-power electronics

The silicon that forms the foundation of most computer chips has fundamental limits to how much power it can manage, which constrains the speed and energy-efficiency of wireless communication systems.

A promising solution is to build future wireless electronics out of transistors made from gallium nitride, an advanced material that can handle the speed and energy required for demanding wireless applications like 6G and satellite communications. 

But even in the best transistors, a very large fraction of that energy becomes heat. As researchers pack more gallium nitride transistors into a smaller area on a silicon chip, localized hot spots degrade reliability and hamper performance.

Now, a team from MIT and elsewhere has broken through this bottleneck by embedding gallium nitride transistors into an ultrathin layer of diamond. The diamond acts as a heat spreader that normalizes the temperature and allows the transistors to approach peak performance without reducing reliability.

The researchers used this technique to manufacture a power amplifier for wireless communications, which outperformed every similar amplifier they found in the literature. 

While their fabrication technique is extremely precise and requires the integration of different material systems, it can be performed at the scale needed for commercial applications.

“No single material can do everything well in a wireless device, so these 3D heterogeneously integrated systems are here to stay. The key challenge left has been reliability and thermal management, and we might have now unlocked the final step we need to make these systems operate at scale and high volume,” says Pradyot Yadav, an electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) graduate student at MIT and lead author of a paper on this advance.

Yadav is joined on the paper by Tomás Palacios, the Clarence J. LeBel Professor of EECS, director of the Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL), and the MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnology; and Ruonan Han, a professor in EECS and a member of MTL and the Research Laboratory of Electronics; as well as others at Georgia Tech and Penn State University. The research was presented at the Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits Symposium, part of the IEEE International Microwave Symposium.

A multimaterial method

To build faster and more energy-efficient electronics, researchers are studying heterogeneously integrated systems in which multiple materials are stacked into a unified package to leverage the beneficial properties of each one. 

For instance, MIT researchers previously stacked gallium nitride (GaN) on top of silicon as well as on top of glass to create higher-performance chips.

But in a heterogeneously integrated chip, each material has a different operating temperature, which can degrade the reliability of an electronic device. 

“If we can incorporate a material that manages the heat so the GaN and silicon are at the same temperature, then the reliability of the entire 3D chip will improve. The best material for that is diamond,” Yadav explains.

The researchers use lab-grown, jewelry-grade diamond — the same type one would find in some engagement rings. Diamond has the highest thermal conductivity of any known material. 

Advances in the growth process have significantly reduced the cost of single-crystal diamond wafers, making their use in computer chips more feasible.

In prior work, scientists have grown ultrathin, single-crystal layers of diamond on top of GaN transistors to manage heat. 

But this growth process, which is not easy to scale up, introduces unwanted capacitances in the chip. These store energy flowing through the circuit, diverting it from the transistors and slowing down their operations. 

The MIT researchers developed a completely different approach that reduces these unwanted capacitive effects. They embedded extremely tiny GaN transistors, known as dielets, into an ultrathin interposer, or substrate, made of single-crystal diamond. This diamond layer spreads and manages the heat, so the GaN and silicon operate at the same temperature without the unwanted capacitances.

“By putting these GaN transistors into a diamond interposer, we are actually able to improve the performance of the device, as opposed to degrading it. We can get the best of both worlds,” Yadav says.

Meticulous manufacturing

The fabrication process begins with the use of a lightning-fast femtosecond laser to cut prepared gallium nitride dielets out of a wafer. 

The researchers use the laser to drill precisely sized cavities into the diamond substrate. They carefully place a die attach film, which is only 20 microns thick, at the bottom of the cavity and drop a dielet on top of the film. 

Once the dielet is in place, they apply heat and pressure to mold it with the film and diamond substrate.

“That interface is key. If you don’t have that thermal die attach film placed just right, then the heat flow through the diamond to the GaN transistor will not be good enough. So you really need to have a very smooth, clean surface,” Yadav says.

The researchers then stack additional dielectric and metal layers on top of the GaN and diamond to build a working circuit.

They used this technique to fabricate a power amplifier, which is one of the key building blocks of any wireless system. Power amplifiers convert small electrical signals into larger ones that can then be transmitted long distances.

The amplifier they developed achieved higher output power, efficiency, and gain than any similar device the researchers are aware of, including an amplifier they designed in prior work.

“The power amplifier is the beating heart of a wireless device front end. Its performance will dictate the entire performance of your communication system. Our amplifier is powerful enough to ensure that a signal can be propagated for miles,” Yadav says.

These results show how their technique could be well-suited for demanding applications, like high-power radars, space communications, and industrial drones. 

It could also be used to manage heat in systems that perform power conversions inside data centers, improving energy-efficiency. 

Yadav hopes other researchers will build on these advances as they develop more complex heterogeneously integrated systems, opening the door to new possibilities with next-generation electronics.

“When I started my PhD, we wondered if any of this was even doable. It seemed like science fiction. Now we’ve shown all these systems that have outperformed anything that exists on the market today. GaN and 3D heterogeneous systems are going to be at the forefront of so many future applications. It is rewarding to know that we contributed a little bit to that space,” he says.

This research was funded, in part, by the Department of War, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, and the Qualcomm Innovation Fellowships. Device fabrication and microscopy were conducted at MIT.nano and the Georgia Tech Institute for Matter and Systems. 

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How Artemis II livestreamed hi-def videos and images from the moon to Earth

This April, humanity had front-row seats to space as the Artemis II Orion spacecraft transmitted crystal-clear footage of its historic journey around the moon over more than 250,000 miles back to Earth at speeds on par with those of home internet connections. 

The livestreaming of high-definition videos and high-resolution photos of the moon and Earth was made possible through the Orion Artemis II Optical Communications System (O2O). Developed by MIT Lincoln Laboratory in collaboration with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, the onboard O2O payload was the space end of a high-speed laser communications (lasercom) link. 

This link reached Earth when Orion had a line of sight with primary optical ground stations located at NASA’s White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico and Caltech/NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Table Mountain Facility in California, or an experimental ground station at Australian National University’s Mount Stromlo Observatory. 

Together with terrestrial networks, O2O formed an internet backbone between the Artemis II Orion spacecraft and the Mission Control Center at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Texas.

Toward a high-speed internet in space

"Our goal was to demonstrate O2O's operational utility for human spaceflight, extending the high-bandwidth connections that internet users enjoy on Earth to astronauts in deep space," says lead systems engineer Farzana Khatri, a senior staff member in Lincoln Laboratory's Optical and Quantum Communications Group. "We not only demonstrated the first use of lasercom on a crewed mission beyond low Earth orbit, but also attracted massive public engagement as the astronauts shared multimedia from their journey in near-real time."

During the last missions to the moon in the late 1960s and early '70s, astronauts relied on radio-frequency systems to communicate. But radio waves can only carry so much data per second because of their low carrier frequency; the grainy, poor-quality video and images of the moon from that time speak to this limited bandwidth. 

With its much higher carrier frequency, infrared laser light can transmit 10 to 100 times more data per second than can radio waves. The switch from Apollo-era radios to Artemis-era lasers is analogous to the move from dial-up to high-speed internet. And a high-speed internet is rapidly becoming a key requirement for NASA missions as they collect more high-resolution data and push humans farther into deep space.

Lasering in on unprecedented views

During the Artemis II mission, from April 1 to 11, O2O downlinked nearly half a terabyte of data at speeds up to 260 megabits per second. This data trove contained never-before-seen views of the basins and craters on the far side of the moon, a crescent Earth setting behind the moon, a nearly hour-long total solar eclipse with other planets scattered across a star-filled sky, and flashes of light from tiny meteoroids striking the lunar surface.

"O2O was able to downlink all the data stored on multiple onboard cameras, allowing mission control to erase the memory cards and refill them with new photos and videos," explains Khatri. "For any space mission, scientists and spacecraft engineers are concerned that data not sent down during the mission can become corrupted or get destroyed. And, when the spacecraft capsule returns, downloading the data can sometimes take months. The lasercom capability provided by O2O ensured the data were preserved and immediately available for analysis."

O2O is based on the laboratory's R&D 100 Award–winning Modular, Agile, and Scalable Optical Terminal (MAScOT), which contains subassembly modules for pointing the laser beams, establishing a communications link with ground stations, and maintaining this link despite atmospheric conditions. MAScOT made its debut in space on the International Space Station in 2023, demonstrating NASA's first LEO user for their lasercom relay system.

Over the moon for O2O

Leading up to the launch of Artemis II, operations teams from the laboratory traveled to NASA's White Sands Test Facility and Mission Control Center (MCC) to conduct monthly maintenance on ground hardware and simulate different mission stages. During the 10-day mission, laboratory teams provided 24/7 coverage. 

At mission control, one laboratory team, along with NASA Goddard colleagues, interfaced with a mission flight controller to command the O2O payload, coordinated with U.S. and Australian ground terminals to bring up the O2O physical link, assessed whether overall O2O mission requirements were being met, and analyzed data to ensure payload health and optimize performance. Another laboratory team oversaw subsystems of the optical ground terminal at White Sands, while staff at the laboratory's main campus in Massachusetts offered subject-matter expertise.

Initially, O2O had a scheduled operational window of one hour per day, with the onboard radio system set to downlink most data. However, mission operators found O2O so useful that they maximized its operational time as the mission progressed. On the fly, mission operators adjusted Orion's attitude — how the spacecraft is oriented in space — so that O2O could have line-of-sight access with the ground.

"One special aspect of this mission that enabled our technology to be so impactful was the flexibility built into the planning process to account for the fact that humans hadn't been to the moon in more than 50 years, and it would be the first time sending astronauts on Orion," says Bryan Robinson, leader of the Optical and Quantum Communications Group. "An established process for making real-time changes to the plan and the willingness of operators to try out this new technology had a huge impact, even for this short mission. This impact was tangible by everyone in mission operations and by the public watching from home."

With Artemis II completed, engineers, scientists, and mission specialists are analyzing mission data. Their analyses will provide insights into spacecraft and subsystem performance and moon geology, which will inform lunar landings and deep-space exploration. While the laboratory team is still processing O2O performance data, they believe the system could downlink at least 10 times more data by improving the efficiency of the downlink process and by addressing data-flow bottlenecks in space and ground networks.

The laboratory team is now evaluating how lasercom could support future moon plans for Artemis and Ignition. Aligning with the National Space Policy to secure U.S. leadership in space, Ignition is a recently announced initiative to establish a permanent lunar base with a sustainable human presence.

"Participating in this historic mission from the MCC and having O2O be useful, I couldn't have asked for anything more amazing in my career," Khatri says.

"When I came home, I was floored by the response of people who engaged with the mission while it was happening. Much of that engagement was enabled by the technology we developed. That's a rare moment in a career doing what we do," Robinson adds. 

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Startup helps retailers track their products in real-time

When you picture a worker at a retail store, you probably think of someone at a cash register or helping a customer. But employees also spend a lot of their time combing through stockrooms and shop floors, fulfilling requests or online orders and generally trying to keep track of all their inventory.

Keeping track of inventory takes so much time, in part, because retailers don’t always know where everything is located. That’s why when you ask a store associate to check if they have a shirt in your size, it may take them 20 minutes to get back to you.

Cartesian is helping retailers keep track of inventory with a technology invented at MIT. The system uses wireless signals from radio frequency identification (RFID) tags attached to items to find their precise location in a store, from the stockroom to the shop floor.

Last year, Cartesian did a study with a retailer and found its platform delivered meaningful annual savings at the store level by streamlining inventory tracking, optimizing workflows, and improving customer experiences.

“The big problem we’re solving is that about 50 percent of working hours in retail stores go to managing inventory,” says co-founder Fadel Adib SM ’13, PhD ’17, an associate professor at MIT. “That is roughly a $15 billion problem in the U.S. alone. We use algorithms to decipher indoor locations using wireless signals. The core technology enables a new level of indoor localization.”

Cartesian is already deployed in more than 700 stores across 15 countries and is working with one of the world’s largest fashion groups, Inditex, which is the parent company to brands like ZARA, Pull&Bear, and Oysho.

Beyond retailers and warehouses, Cartesian’s platform could also improve indoor location tracking for manufacturers, logistics operators, and robotics companies.

“The broad vision for what we are doing is spatial AI,” says Adib. “Today, AI does extremely well in the digital world. Now it has to move into the physical world. That means allowing machines to perceive their environment in such a way that they can interact with it. That’s where spatial AI comes in and where Cartesian sits.”

From technology to product

Adib, who holds a joint appointment in MIT’s Media Lab and Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, has been studying wireless signals at the Institute for more than 15 years, dating back to research during his master’s degree.

“My group today researches how to use wireless signals to sense the world in ways that were not possible before,” Adib says. “We develop the fundamental technology and then we build systems around them. Our goal is to see these systems deployed in the real world for impact.”

When Adib joined MIT’s faculty, the first project he worked on was indoor localization using RFID tags. Isaac Perper ’20, MEnG ’21 later joined his lab as a student, and together they developed machine-learning algorithms to process RFID data to translate them into location patterns, with an initial focus on helping robots locate RFIDs indoors.

In 2021, Adib went through the National Science Foundation’s I-Corps program, which challenges researchers to interview potential customers to find the right problems to solve with their technologies. That’s when he realized how big of a problem inventory management is for retailers.

Cartesian was officially founded by Adib and Perper in the beginning of 2023, after they received a small business award from the National Science Foundation. The pair worked with MIT’s Technology Licensing Office to license patents from Adib’s lab. They also received support from MIT’s Venture Mentoring Service.

“Our goal was to reduce the cost of the technology to make it scalable,” Adib recalls. “Isaac focused on simplifying the product, leveraging progress in machine learning, and making it fast. It was a lot of iterating and testing early on.”

Retail workers spend much of their time locating items for a number of reasons. They might get an online order to fulfill, need to restock store shelves, or get a customer inquiry about items in the back.

Stores differ in how they organize their inventory. Most separate items by categories in specific shelves and bins then use barcodes or inventory systems that tend to get outdated fast.

“It’s a big problem for stores because customers may just leave before asking an employee to look for their size, or customers may get frustrated and leave if it takes too long,” Adib says. “The associate also wastes time looking for items they could spend doing higher-value work.”

Cartesian’s platform works with retailers’ existing handheld RFID readers, which store associates already use to manage inventory. Each store installs Cartesian’s software into their existing inventory apps or uses a custom app for employees to access directly.

“The RFID readers are how stores tell what’s in stock and what’s out of stock,” Perper says. “We figured out a way to leverage the same scans they’re already using with the reader, put the data they generate into our machine-learning algorithms, and generate maps of where all the items are.”

Customers can build analytics on top of Cartesian’s technology to keep track of inventory levels, show customers maps of where each item is located, and create other services.

“They use our location intelligence platform and build different products on top,” Adib says. “We can work with any device, any store, any type of RFID. It’s a simple interface. All the sophisticated location algorithms sit in the cloud.”

Beyond retail

Cartesian signed its first big contract in 2025 and soon expanded to several hundred stores. One of Cartesian’s advantages is its ability to quickly scale. Perper says they can add a store in about one minute. Cartesian’s team doesn’t even have to travel to a new store to turn on its system if it’s already working with the company.

“It’s as simple as flipping a switch, preparing the data, and sending it to our customers,” Perper says. “One of our first big bets was, ‘Can we build this entirely on existing hardware?’ That bet is starting to pay off.”

Cartesian’s models can also work with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth signals, which the company plans to use with customers in other verticals.

“Right now, we’re focused on applications in retail, but this technology has a lot of value in manufacturing, warehouses, and other locations,” Adib says.

Cartesian’s team aims to be deployed in tens of thousands of stores over the next year and then begin expanding beyond retail into industries like manufacturing and robotics.

“What’s most exciting about Cartesian to me is we’ve built a lot of the technology foundation, and now that we have the fundamentals in place, we hope to build specific application layers,” Perper says. “Then we can ask customers in different verticals about their problems and apply our technology in different ways to solve it.”

de MIT News https://ift.tt/m3eoMuP