Found Industries aims to strengthen America’s industrial supply chains

Found Industries has gone through several distinct phases in the four years since it was originally formed as Found Energy. There was the scrappy startup stage, in which the company was primarily housed in the basement of founder Peter Godart ’15, SM ’19, PhD ’21. Then there was the demonstration phase, in which the company worked to productize its technology for transforming aluminum into high-density fuel for industrial operations.

Now, after confronting supply chain vulnerabilities related to critical metals in its aluminum fuel business, the company is launching a new division, Found Metals, to extract the critical metal gallium from mineral refineries — a move that builds on its original technology while addressing a major national security need.

Gallium is a critical material in the defense, semiconductor, and energy sectors. In 2024, China produced 99 percent of the world’s primary supply — market dominance the country takes advantage of through export controls.

Godart’s company developed an electrochemical gallium extraction technology for internal use after realizing how dependent it would be on China for the catalyst material at the center of its aluminum fuel reactors. Now, with support from the U.S. Department of Energy, Found is hoping to use that technology to create a new domestic supply chain for gallium and a host of other important metals.

Found Industries is still committed to its aluminum fuel operations, now under its Found Energy division. It is already running a 100-kilowatt-class demonstration plant and is preparing for industrial pilot deployments next year. But with its expansion, which was announced April 21, the company is also working to meet the moment for critical metals production.

“Gallium is the world’s most critical metal, as it’s 99 percent controlled by China,” Godart says. “When you produce 99 percent of something, you also produce 99 percent of the tools required to extract it. We couldn’t get our hands on some of those tools, so we were forced to come up with a new technology. Now we believe we can deploy this at scale to become one the first major Western suppliers of these metals.”

From fuel to metals

Godart focused on robotics as an undergraduate in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Following graduation, he worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he explored systems for tapping into high-density fuels like aluminum on other planets.

“I had this crazy idea that you could use aluminum, which is already a common construction material for aerospace, as a fuel on other planets,” Godart says. “You don’t need most of the aluminum on a spacecraft once you land on another planet. Aluminum is around 40 times more energy-dense than lithium-ion batteries, and if you have an oxidizer, like water on an icy moon for example, then you can react that aluminum with water and extract energy as heat and hydrogen.”

Luckily for people who might spill water on aluminum while cooking, the metal is normally very stable when exposed to air. In order to tap into aluminum’s stored energy, it needs to undergo a chemical reaction. Godart began exploring catalyst materials to create that reaction at NASA. He continued that work with professor of mechanical engineering Douglas Hart when he returned to MIT in 2017, this time for applications a little closer to home.

“If we want to think about moving humanity to other planets, we have some problems to solve here first,” Godart says. “That was the impetus for me to go back to MIT to study using aluminum as a fuel for energy distribution on Earth.”

Around 70 million tons of aluminum are already transported around the globe every year. Godart says that gives aluminum an easier path to scale. During his PhD, he created a process for coating aluminum with a gallium-containing alloy to help tap into aluminum’s embodied energy.

“We found a catalyst that, when mixed with aluminum scraps, enabled aluminum to react with water very rapidly and at orders of magnitude higher power density than what had been possible before,” Godart says. “That meant you could use aluminum as a fuel and get megawatt-scale power from compact reactor systems.”

By the time he finished his PhD in 2021, Godart and his collaborators had developed a system that mixes aluminum fuel with those catalysts to continuously produce electricity at the kilowatt scale through a hydrogen fuel cell.

Godart launched Found Energy in 2022, licensing part of his research from MIT’s Technology License Office and receiving support from MIT’s Venture Mentoring Service. The company received an Activate fellowship, and after quickly outgrowing Godart’s basement, moved into its current 20,000 square foot facility in Charlestown, Massachusetts.

Today, Found Energy is working with industrial companies that have abundant aluminum scrap.

“When you invent a fuel, you then have to invent the engine,” Godart says. “Our engine is called a catalyzed aluminum water reactor. You feed in aluminum that’s been treated with the catalyst and water, and you get a steam-hydrogen gas mixture. We call that our power stream. We use it to cogenerate industrial heat and electricity. The reaction byproduct is a hydrated aluminum oxide that can be sold into various industries or recycled back into aluminum, which is the long-term vision.”

As Godart worked to build more of the systems, he became concerned about Found’s reliance on Chinese supply chains for its catalyst material. So, in 2024, he developed a new way to extract gallium from Bayer liquor, an industrial process stream used to produce aluminum. Traditional methods for extracting gallium rely on foreign-controlled organic chemicals or resins to bind and concentrate the gallium.

Found uses a continuous electrochemical process to recover the gallium directly from Bayer liquor and other industrial feedstocks, even at low concentrations.

“We thought of it as a way to future-proof what we were doing,” Godart says. “Necessity was the mother of invention.”

Then, toward the end of 2024, China began restricting the export of critical metals including gallium.

“We realized we had already developed a technique for producing these restricted metals that could be very quickly adapted,” Godart recalls.

Scaling for national security

On April 14, the Department of Energy’s Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation selected Found as part of its $5.4 million program to recover gallium from domestic feedstocks. The company plans to start extracting gallium, along with other critical metals like indium and germanium, by the end of 2027.

Meanwhile, Found is already running a 100-kilowatt-class aluminum fuel demonstration system in Charlestown and is working through a orders of several megawatts from large public companies.

“For our fuel technology, the vision is to go as big as possible,” Godart says. “We envision major power plants. Aluminum refineries today, for example, consume hundreds of megawatts of continuous thermal power. That’s what we aim to deliver.”

Godart says he spends most of his time now on gallium extraction, but both branches of the business could make supply chains more secure in the future.

“The big focus now is critical metals, because the government needs this,” Godart says. “We’re also making these metals for ourselves, so we’re vertically integrating our own supply chain, which is table stakes now for companies that deal in physical goods. You need to be able to control your inputs. By focusing on metals, it improves the likelihood of success for our aluminum fuel business.”

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MIT affiliates awarded 2026 Guggenheim Fellowships

MIT Research Scientist Afreen Siddiqi ’99, SM ’01, PhD ’06; MIT professors Kathleen Thelen and Vinod Vaikuntanathan SM ’05, PhD ’09; as well as Kate Manne PhD ’11 are among 223 scientists, artists, and scholars awarded 2026 fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Working across 55 disciplines, the fellows were selected from almost 5,000 applicants for “prior career achievement and exceptional promise.”

Each fellow receives a monetary stipend to pursue independent work at the highest level under “the freest possible conditions.” Since its founding in 1925, the Guggenheim Foundation has awarded nearly $450 million in fellowships to more than 19,000 fellows. This year, MIT faculty and staff were recognized in the categories of geography and environmental studies, political science, and computer science.

Afreen Siddiqi is a research scientist in the Engineering Systems Laboratory in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Her expertise is in the development of systems-theoretic analytical methods and quantitative modeling for technical systems in space and on Earth that need to operate and adapt in changing environments. Her work has focused on space exploration, satellite Earth observation for informing decisions, and critical infrastructure planning. She has served as a contributing author to the sixth assessment report of 2022 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on implications of water, energy, and food interconnections for climate change adaptation. Her work has received teaching awards and fellowships including the Amelia Earhart Fellowship, Richard D. DuPont Fellowship, and the Rene H. Miller Prize in Systems Engineering.

Kathleen Thelen is the Ford International Professor of Political Science. Her work focuses on the political economy of the rich democracies, with a current emphasis on the study of American capitalism in comparative perspective. Her most recent book, “Attention Shoppers! American Retail Capitalism and the Origins of the Amazon Economy,” was published by Princeton University Press in 2025. Her awards include the Friedrich Schiedel-Award for Politics and Technology, the Aaron Wildavsky Enduring Contribution Prize, and the Michael Endres Research Prize (2019). She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2015.

Vinod Vaikuntanathan is the Ford Foundation Professor of Engineering in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. A principal investigator at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, his research focuses upon the foundations of cryptography and its applications to theoretical computer science at large. He is known for his work on fully homomorphic encryption (a powerful cryptographic primitive that enables complex computations on encrypted data), as well as lattice-based cryptography (which lays down a new mathematical foundation for cryptography in the post-quantum world). His awards include the Harold E. Edgerton Faculty Award, the Godel Prize, the Simons Investigator Award, the Distinguished Alumnus Award from Indian Institute of Technology Madras, a Best Paper Award from CRYPTO 2024, test of time awards from IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science and CRYPTO conferences, and he was named a MacVicar Faculty Fellow in 2024 and an International Association for Cryptologic Research Fellow in 2026.

Kate Manne, who earned her PhD in philosophy at MIT in 2011, is now a professor at Cornell University.

“Our new class of Guggenheim Fellows is representative of the world’s best thinkers, innovators, and creators in art, science, and scholarship,” says Edward Hirsch, award-winning poet and president of the Guggenheim Foundation. “As the foundation enters its second century and looks to the future, I feel confident that this new class of 223 individuals will do bold and inspiring work, undaunted by the challenges ahead. We are honored to support their visionary contributions.”

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Testing sustainable agriculture in Barcelona

A dozen MIT students recently set out for Barcelona — not just to study climate resilience, but to experience it firsthand. As part of STS.S22 (How to Grow Resilient Futures: Regenerative Agriculture and Economies in Catalunya, Spain), an Independent Activities Period course taught by Kate Brown, the Thomas M. Siebel Distinguished Professor in the History of Science, they stepped beyond the classroom and into living systems of sustainability.

Offered as a Global Classroom through MIT International Science and Technology (MISTI), the course reimagined what learning could look like. Instead of working their way through a syllabus containing texts about sustainable farming and the power of cooperatives, Brown’s students got their hands dirty. 

In fact, quite literally: They visited local farms and slaughterhouses; prepped, cooked, and served a cooperative dinner to migrants; and constructed a working greenhouse. In the process, they built a lasting community and forged their own visions about sustainability and how they are compelled to confront climate change — as MIT students now, and eventually as alumni. 

“I wanted the students to think about alternatives to the notion of capitalist development, where the latest technology is seen as the solution to every social problem that emerges. I wanted them to see ways people are solving problems in a place like Barcelona, where communities and ecologies are centered as part of the solution,” Brown says.

Through Brown’s partnerships at the Barcelona Urban Research Institute and Research and Degrowth (R&D)  — and MISTI Spain’s infrastructure — the group of eight undergraduates and four graduate students had the opportunity to examine the historical roots of cooperative movements in the region while simultaneously experiencing today’s iteration of co-op work. 

Brown intentionally designed the three-week syllabus to push students beyond the classroom walls and get them face-to-face with local MISTI Spain collaborators from across the farming and ecology sectors. For example, the class met with Pino Delàs, a pig farmer who left the industrial system to start his own localized, cyclical operation, called Llavora, which supported community farming and generated significantly less waste. 

Rooted in community 

With more than a century of creating cooperatives — both workers and farms — Barcelona and its Catalan roots provided an ideal environment for the students to consider Brown’s questions through fieldwork rooted in community. 

Within their first week on the ground, they collaborated with volunteers at the Agora Squat. The small “pocket park” was initially slated to be developed into a luxury hotel, but a local group of 200 neighborhood residents came together to protest the plan, instead exercising their legal right to use the land, a caveat in Spanish law that allows neighbors to make a case for possessing land that isn’t being used productively. Now, the lush green square boasts a community kitchen and gardens. One night a week, volunteers provide dinner for upward of 60 recent North African migrants, using ingredients sourced from local fruiterias and shops that would have otherwise gone to waste at the close of business. 

On this particular Thursday, Brown’s students became nonprofit managers and chefs, but they also became community members themselves. In just a few hours from start to finish, the students had to source donated produce from the local vendors, come up with a recipe using what they’d gathered, and then prepare a meal in the rudimentary kitchen. “They received a lot of turnips and had to create a recipe to use them,” Brown says. In the end, a flavorful stew simmered in a massive metal pan over propane burners, brought alive with fresh chilies picked from the garden. 

“This was way outside some students’ comfort zones,” Brown says. Yet, that was exactly the point of the activity. By the end of the evening, the students discovered that sometimes the most profound educational moments take shape only after challenging the limits of learning. 

“Many of us do not consider ourselves chefs, so it was empowering to discover that, together, we had the capacity to create a nourishing meal for 70 people, with produce that would have otherwise gone to waste. This meal that we created on the spot, in combination with many of the other workshops during the program, was a strong reminder of how much agency each of us has to effect change within isolating and constraining systems, especially in community with like-minded individuals,” says Sonia Torres Rodriguez, a first-year PhD student in urban studies and planning.

Torres Rodriguez focuses her doctoral research on affordable and climate-resilient housing. She was drawn to the IAP program's exploration of innovative approaches to more equitably distributing the means of producing housing and food, and was excited to be learning in person in Spain. “Cooking together, admiring healthy regenerative soil, foraging, learning traditional methods to braid grass, installing mini solar panels, and hosting poetry circles, would have been impossible to replicate on Zoom,” she says. 

Calvin Macatantan, a senior in computer science and urban studies and planning, was initially drawn to the program because of his interest in resilient economies and how they support the communities they serve. Other than visiting family in the Philippines, he’d never left the United States before. He was especially moved by the group’s stay at La Bruguera, an eco-resort partnered with R&D that serves as a “living laboratory.” The cohort heard from local experts in regenerative agriculture, soil health, and low-tech agroforestry, alongside hands-on activities such as eco-art sessions, weaving lessons, and the rebuilding of a greenhouse. 

As part of a final project for the course, Macatantan and another student wrote and illustrated a children’s book that explains La Bruguera’s work by making the soil come to life as the main protagonist for young readers. 

Brown’s course pushed Sofia Espindola de La Mora to think more critically about everyday systems and their environmental impact. Originally from Puerto Rico, the first-year student has watched helplessly in recent years as climate change has increased the frequency and magnitude of natural disasters at home.

She came to MIT looking for answers and wanting to make a difference, and signed up for Brown’s course as part of that quest. “It was fascinating to see firsthand that the degrowth movement doesn’t mean slowing down is a bad thing, but instead that the constant striving for more is what has led us to many of the predicaments we now face as a society. It forced me to think about whether it would even be possible for me to sustain the life I have now using renewable energy,” Espindola de La Mora says. The course convinced her to focus her studies on climate system science and engineering. 

A climate context

Broadening students’ perspectives was a priority for Brown, whose research lies at the intersection of history, science, technology, and bio-politics. She’s known on campus for courses like STS.038 (Risky Business: Food Production, Environment, and Health). Her 2026 book, “Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present and Future of the Self-Provisioning City,” examines urban systems, including gardens. 

When Brown was designing the Global Classroom — made possible through MISTI, with additional support from the MIT Energy Initiative — she centered a value she considers imperative in any course today: addressing climate and other human-driven environmental challenges.

“I’m focused on training students to approach these problems at the local level, so they see what happens when they’re working through communities, rather than prescribing to them something to scale all over the world,” Brown says.

That localized, individualized approach helped expand on what the students initially believed was possible, and compelled them to become part of the solution through their studies and in their professional lives. 

Since their return to campus, Brown’s students have continued to lean on one another and build community, one meal at a time. Many Tuesday nights, they come together to cook dinner, Barcelona squat style. Each individual brings their ingredients, and together they create a recipe that nourishes and sustains.  

“I was losing a lot of faith in the world before this trip,” Macatantan admits. “We’re constantly surrounded by consumption and the drive to do more. This experience helped me realize that I want to do something that impacts people. For me, that will look like research. I want to become an expert in a subject and become someone who can help communicate that knowledge to people who need it.” 

“MISTI Global Classrooms like this show what happens when learning extends beyond the MIT campus,” says Alicia Goldstein Raun, associate director of MISTI and managing director of the MIT-Spain Program at the Center for International Studies. “I was excited when Professor Brown approached me to help shape this new class, knowing it would resonate with students,” says Raun. “The students tackled global challenges like climate change and explored the degrowth movement while immersing themselves in Spanish communities and culture.”

For faculty interested in designing a MISTI Global Classroom, more information can be found here.

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Beacon Biosignals is mapping the brain during sleep

The human brain remains one of the most fascinating and perplexing mysteries in medicine. Scientists still struggle to match neurological activity with brain function and detect problems early, slowing efforts to treat neurological disorders and other diseases.

Beacon Biosignals is working to make sense of the brain by monitoring its activity while people sleep. The company, which was founded by Jake Donoghue PhD ’19 and former MIT researcher Jarrett Revels, developed a lightweight headband that uses electroencephalogram (EEG) technology to measure brain activity while people enjoy their normal sleep routines at home. Those data are processed by machine-learning algorithms to monitor the effects of novel treatments, find new signs of disease progression, and create patient cohorts for clinical trials.

“There’s a step-change in what becomes possible when you remove the sleep lab and bring clinical-grade EEG into the home,” says Donoghue, who serves as Beacon’s CEO. “It turns sleep from a constrained, facility-based test into a scalable source of high-quality data for diagnostics, drug development, and longitudinal brain health.”

Beacon partners with pharmaceutical companies to accelerate its path to patients. The company’s FDA 510(k)-cleared medical device has already been used in over 40 clinical trials across the globe as part of studies aimed at treating conditions including major depressive disorder, schizophrenia, narcolepsy, idiopathic hypersomnia, Alzheimer’s disease, and Parkinson’s disease.

With each deployment, Beacon learns more about how the brain works — insights it is using to create a “foundation model” of the brain.

“It’s our belief that the dataset that’s going to transform brain health doesn’t exist yet — but we are rapidly creating it,” Donoghue says. “Our platform can characterize the heterogeneity of disease progression, generating dynamic insights that are impossible to fully capture through static modalities like sequencing or imaging. The brain is an electric organ and changes through synaptic plasticity, so tracking brain function across many diseases at scale will allow us to discover novel subgroups of diseases and map them over time.”

Illuminating the brain

Donoghue trained in the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology, completing his PhD in neuroscience at MIT under the guidance of professor of cognitive sciences Earl K. Miller, along with clinical training for an MD. While in the program, Donoghue trained at Massachusetts General Hospital and Boston Children’s Hospital, where he helped care for patients, including in oncology, during the rise of genomic sequencing to guide precision cancer therapies. He later worked in neurology and psychiatry, where care often relied on more iterative approaches — highlighting an opportunity to bring similarly data-driven precision to brain health.

“What struck me most was the inability to measure brain function in the ways that cardiologists can longitudinally monitor cardiac function in patients from home,” Donoghue says. “At MIT, I built this conviction that processing a lot of brain data and working to correlate that with brain function would be transformative to how these neurological diseases are identified and treated.”

Toward the end of his training, Donoghue began developing his ideas further, engaging with mentors including HST and Harvard Medical School professors Sydney Cash and Brandon Westover. He had met Revels, who was working as a research software engineer in MIT’s Julia Lab, during his PhD, and convinced him to co-found Beacon with him in 2019.

“We decided building a business to understand the organ of interest — the brain — would be a great start to understanding heterogeneous neuropsychiatric diseases and building better treatments,” Donoghue recalls.

Beacon began as a computation and analytics company building wearable devices to expand clinical impact and reach. From its early days, Beacon has been partnering with large pharmaceutical companies running clinical trials, offering a less invasive way to watch brain activity and learn how their drugs are impacting the brain as well as how patients sleep.

“It was clear sleep was the right window to understand the brain,” Donoghue says. “Neural activity during sleep can be an order of magnitude higher and more structured, almost like a language. It’s a great surface area for understanding brain function and how different drugs affect the brain.”

Donoghue says Beacon’s devices can collect lab-grade data on each patient for multiple sequential nights, resulting in higher quality assessment. The company uses machine learning to extract insights, such as the time patients spend in different sleep stages and the number of small awakenings that occur throughout the night. It can also detect subtle sleep architecture changes that might lead to cognitive decline.

“We’re starting to take features of sleep activity and link them to outcomes in a way that’s never been done with this level of precision,” Donoghue says.

To date, Beacon has taken part in clinical trials for sleep and psychiatric disorders as well as neurodegenerative diseases, where sleep changes can emerge years before the presentation of symptoms.

“We do a lot of work in areas like Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s, which affected my grandfather,” Donoghue says. “We’re analyzing features of rapid-eye-movement and slow-wave sleep to detect early changes that precede clinical symptoms. It’s an opportunity to move these diseases from late recognition to much earlier, data-driven detection.”

Improving brain treatments for millions

Last year, Beacon acquired an at-home sleep apnea testing company that serves more than 100,000 patients each year across the U.S., accelerating access to high-quality, comprehensive testing in the home and expanding the reach of its platform. Then in November, the company raised $97 million to accelerate that expansion.

“The vision has always been to reach patients and help people at scale,” Donoghue says. “What’s powerful is that we’re building a longitudinal record of brain function over time,” Donoghue says. “A patient might come in for sleep apnea screening, but if they develop Parkinson’s years later, that earlier data becomes a window into the disease before symptoms emerged. That turns routine testing into a foundation for entirely new prognostic biomarkers — and a path to detecting and intervening in brain disease earlier, potentially before symptoms ever begin.”

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A materials scientist’s playground

Scientists and engineers around the world are working to improve quantum bits, or qubits, the minuscule building blocks of the quantum computer. Qubits are incredibly sensitive, making it easy for errors to be introduced, lowering device yield. But a new cluster tool at MIT.nano introduces capabilities that will allow researchers to continue advancements in qubit performance.

Passersby outside MIT.nano may have recently noticed a complex looking piece of equipment being installed on the first-floor cleanroom. What looks like a sci-fi movie prop is actually a state-of-the-art, custom-built molecular beam epitaxy (MBE): a physical vapor deposition system that operates under ultra-high vacuum to produce high-quality thin films. With the ability to grow different crystalline materials on a wafer, the tool will support quantum researchers and materials scientists by allowing them to study how film growth affects the properties of the materials used in making qubits.

“To realize the full promise of quantum computing, we need to build qubits that are robust, reproducible, and extensible,” says William D. Oliver, the Henry Ellis Warren (1894) Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and professor of physics at MIT. “To date, most of the improvements to superconducting qubit performance are traceable to circuit design — essentially, designing qubit circuits that are less sensitive to their environmental noise. However, those improvements have largely run their course. Going forward, we need to address the fundamental materials science and fabrication engineering required to reduce the sources of environmental noise. This multi-chamber, cassette-loaded, 200-millimeter wafer MBE system is exactly the right tool at the right time. And there’s no place better to do this research than at MIT.nano.”

That is because MIT.nano is preconditioned to receive this type of system with physical space, climate controls, policies and procedures for researchers, and expert staff to manage the lab. Through an equipment support plan, Oliver’s Engineering Quantum Systems (EQuS) group is able to install and run the tool inside MIT.nano, a high-performance, safe, and reliable environment.

A controlled environment is essential for the MBE. “Think of this system like an inverted International Space Station (ISS),” explains Patrick Strohbeen, research scientist in the EQuS group. “The ISS is a small chamber of atmosphere surrounded by the vacuum of space. This MBE system is a chamber of space-level vacuum surrounded by atmosphere.” That vacuum of space is kept at a steady negative 90 degrees Celsius, which enables precise growth of thin films on an atomic scale. It is the largest single deposition chamber (1-meter diameter) the manufacturer, DCA, has sold in the United States.

The journey of a wafer

The system, which in total takes up 600 square feet, is made up of six chambers. First is the load lock, where the wafer is placed into the system and brought down from atmospheric pressure to near the vacuum level of space. Then, the wafer enters the distribution center. This space acts like a central hub, transferring the wafers to other chambers. Next is the deposition, or “growth,” chamber. This is where the system’s primary function takes place — depositing materials, specifically atoms of superconducting metal, onto a substrate, typically silicon. From there, it moves to the oxidation chamber, which facilitates the growth of key ceramic materials for qubits. A fifth storage chamber can hold an additional 10 wafers within the vacuum.

A unique aspect of this system is its sixth chamber, designed for X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). Using this chamber, researchers can shoot a photon in the form of X-rays at the surface and, when it hits the surface, it will excite the electron inside the material so that the electron jumps out and is picked up by a sensor that then tells the researcher about the environment the electron came from. As individual layers of atoms are put down in the growth chamber, scientists can move the wafer to the XPS chamber to measure changes in the material structure of the film and back again, all while keeping it inside the vacuum space.

Why is this important? “The quantum community has excellent device physicists and device engineers,” said Strohbeen. “The last piece of the puzzle is: We need to understand the materials platform that we’re using for these devices.” The buried interfaces, so far, have been understudied due to the difficulty in probing them, he explained.

For those of us who are not MBE experts, think of the snow that fell in Massachusetts this winter. How can you tell how much ice is on the pavement without removing all of the snow on top of it? And without changing the natural setting where the snow, ice, and pavement meet? With this system, specifically the XPS chamber, scientists can study the interfaces of buried materials without disturbing the physical or chemical environments. “It is a materials scientist’s playground,” jokes Strohbeen — a controlled space where researchers can learn about and explore materials’ interactions within layers of atoms.

Why MIT.nano?

When Oliver, who is also the director of the MIT Center for Quantum Engineering, secured the MBE Quantum, the next question was where to put it. Enter MIT.nano. Housing 45,000 square feet of cleanroom, this facility exists at MIT to support complex, sensitive equipment with both the infrastructure and the staff needed to maintain it.

“MIT.nano’s ultra-stable building utilities and lab environment are exactly what is needed to support a system that demands extreme repeatability and purity,” says Nick Menounos, MIT.nano associate director of infrastructure. “The success of this installation grew from the early collaboration. Professor Oliver engaged the MIT.nano team in the procurement process almost two years in advance. That foresight, combined with the infrastructure momentum we gained from the recent CHIPS Act project, meant that we could prepare the cleanroom perfectly. We compressed the installation process that normally takes several months and had this extraordinary machine running in under three weeks.”

“From the very beginning, the MIT.nano staff were helpful, knowledgeable, and willing to go above and beyond to make this happen,” says Oliver. “While the MIT.nano facility is certainly an infrastructural crown jewel at MIT, it’s the MIT.nano staff who make it the national treasure it is today.”

Positioning the MBE Quantum in the cleanroom helps the team focus on scalability and device yield. Humidity and particle count, two things carefully measured and maintained at MIT.nano, can affect the output of the device. Minimizing as many variables as possible is key to improving qubit performance. The cleanroom also allows for new device research because an array of fabrication and metrology tools are available without having to leave the clean environment.

“We’re really excited to see what we can do with it,” says Strohbeen. “We bought it as a materials science tool, and it will also be a device development tool due to the flexibility of having it in the cleanroom.”

The MBE system was purchased through a combination of grants from the Army Research Office (ARO) and from the Laboratory for Physical Sciences (LPS). The ARO grant, a Defense University Research Instrumentation Program grant, is the premier grant from ARO for funding large capital equipment purchases that should prove disruptive in technologically relevant areas. It arrives at an important time on campus, as one of MIT’s strategic initiatives — the MIT Quantum Initiative — aims to apply quantum breakthroughs to the most consequential challenges in science, technology, industry, and national security.

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Making the case for curiosity-driven science

“The thing that really struck me when I came to MIT and strikes me every single day is the stuff that’s going on here is amazing. The science, the engineering… every day I hear something that makes my jaw drop,” remarked President Sally Kornbluth during a live discussion with Lizzie O’Leary of Slate’s “What Next: TBD” podcast.

Kornbluth spoke about everything from the importance of curiosity-driven science and why basic science is critical to our nation’s future, to AI and education, and even bravely joined O’Leary in a rendition of the Williams College song, “The Mountains,” in honor of their shared alma mater.

“We are in this time of incredible uncertainty,” said Kornbluth of the current state of higher education and funding for scientific research. “What we are trying to do is keep the science robust.”

Bouncing back to her time at Duke and her love of college basketball, she noted it’s a combination of zone coverage and man-to-man defense when trying to address skepticism about higher education in Washington, D.C. She emphasized: “As one of the top institutions in the world it’s part of our responsibility to articulate the importance of science. Behind the scenes, I am – along with many other [university] presidents – I am in D.C. all the time now. I want to speak to Congressmen and women, Senators, people in the executive branch to explain the importance of what we are doing.”

Kornbluth emphasized that the pipeline of basic science that flows from U.S. universities is a critical asset for our country, cautioning that to keep straining this pipeline could have enormous negative ramifications for the U.S. down the line.

“If you think about research done in this country, it’s done in in universities, it’s done in national labs, and it’s done in industry,” said Kornbluth. Universities are where most of the science with a long pathway to impact, requiring patience, starts. She pointed to immunotherapy for cancer, which began 30-40 years ago in basic immunotherapy research, as an example. With that pipeline being drained, what does the future hold for new cancer therapies or new AI and quantum technologies?

Kornbluth also underscored that uncertainty and lost funding are having a “huge impact on the talent pipeline,” delving into the unique role universities play in training graduate students, who are the next generation of scientific researchers. “We hear, ‘Oh it would be okay if research was more in industry.’ I say, ‘Would you fly on a plane with a pilot who had never flown?’ How do they think people learn how to do research? We are training the next generation… and we are losing funding for them.” She added: “I think we are going to see reverberations for many decades if we don’t rectify that issue.”

When asked how she and her colleagues are working to keep research moving forward, Kornbluth explained that at MIT, “we have tried to find alternative ways to elevate the science. We have a series of presidential initiatives that cut across the whole campus in things like health and life sciences, quantum, humanities and social sciences. The notion is that we are trying to create new opportunities.”

Still, she acknowledged that losses from the endowment tax and diminished federal funding are painful. “There are only four schools right now that are subject to the 8% endowment tax, which is a tax on our earnings. For us, that means $240 million dollars a year plus other losses in grants. So, let’s say the whole thing is, we budgeted for a loss of $300 million a year on a $1.7 billion budget… That has definitely had an impact on us. No question about it. 

“The other thing about it is again there’s all this uncertainty. Our investigators are writing a ton of grants. They don’t know if they’re going off into the void or they really have the sort of competitive opportunities they’ve always had in the past.”

Asked why universities did not see this moment coming, Kornbluth offered a few thoughts. “Look at MIT – 30,000 companies have come from MIT. When you look at something like that, why would you think any government that wants economic flourishing in their country would come after MIT?” she reflected. “It just never would have occurred to us.”

Turning towards the rapid advances in AI, and how the field is impacting education, Kornbluth noted that at MIT and other universities, “we have to focus on the human element, we have to educate our students, they need to know how to write and do mathematics…they have to view AI as a tool to augment their capabilities. That is how we are thinking about it.”

In the course of the conversation, Kornbluth also expressed her unwavering support for international students, noting that most want the opportunity to stay and contribute to research in the U.S. after graduation. “The talent brought to us through our international community is unbelievable. We can attract the very best in the world. You can bet when they talk about competitiveness with China, for example, in AI, quantum, etc., they are not sitting around in China saying, ‘Oh it’s great America is taking all our students.’ They’re thinking, ‘It’s great that America doesn’t want to take as many of our students anymore because we can train them.’ It’s a competitive issue that we really should lean into.”

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

An engineer’s guide to birds

Feathers give birds their dazzling colors. They repel water and trap heat, keeping them warm and dry. They can even stifle sound, allowing species such as owls to hunt in virtual silence.

All of these functions come from the remarkable structure of feathers, explored in two chapters in “Birds Up Close,” by MIT materials engineer and lifelong birder Lorna J. Gibson. The book takes a microscopic look at birds’ feathers, bones, bills, eggs, and the mechanics of flight to explain their extraordinary abilities — how they can hover in place, silently swoop down on prey, and fly hundreds of miles without tiring.

Gibson spent four decades studying the mechanical behavior of materials — examining their underlying structure to determine what makes them hard or soft, supple or brittle. She specialized in cellular materials, such as engineered honeycombs and foams, as well as natural ones such as wood and bamboo.

Now a post-tenure professor, she’s turned her materials engineering perspective to birds, a subject that has long fascinated her. She’s given talks on the properties of feathers, including the Department of Materials Science and Engineering’s Wulff Lecture in 2017, and studied how sandgrouse carry water in their feathers to their young and how woodpeckers avoid brain damage despite their constant battering.

As a graduate student, she recalls, a colleague told her that woodpeckers have foam between their skulls and brains to cushion the blows of pecking. Intrigued, she dug into the topic and discovered a 1976 study in which neurologists dissected a woodpecker’s head and found no foam at all. So how do woodpeckers avoid brain injury?

“Eventually I recognized that because woodpeckers have such tiny brains, they don’t need the kind of protection that larger animals would need,” Gibson writes in the preface. That understanding led to talks for birders — and eventually to the idea for a whole book explaining how birds work through the lens of materials science and mechanics.

Engineering meets birding

Gibson describes “Birds Up Close,” published by the MIT Press, as a book by an engineer for anyone interested in birds, drawing largely on published research. Readers need no scientific or engineering background; sidebars include calculations for those who want more detail.

“I wasn’t writing it for engineers; I was writing it for birders — people who are curious about natural history,” she says. “I think engineers will enjoy it because there are engineering pieces to it, but I really wrote it for birders.”

Birding has surged in popularity in the United States; 96 million people — about one in three Americans — consider themselves birders, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Those readers will find no shortage of memorable facts. Two chapters on feathers, titled “Fantastic Feathers,” explore striking features such as the wood duck’s brilliant colors and hummingbirds’ iridescence. Gibson explains both the science behind feather colors and how we perceive them.

“The color we see comes from light that is reflected from a surface,” she writes, describing the pigments responsible for the blacks and grays of seagulls as well as the vibrant reds and greens of the African turaco. But the blue jay in your backyard gets its color another way: blue is not a pigment at all, but a structural color, produced by the interaction of light with microscopic structures within the feathers.

Using photography, sketches, and microscope images, Gibson examines the microscopic structures of feathers. The contour feathers covering a bird’s body, for example, are branched structures with connecting barbs and parallel barbules. Scanning electron microscope images reveal details invisible to the naked eye, including the foamy core of a feather shaft.

She uses the same approach to explore how male hummingbirds produce high-pitched buzzing sounds with their tail feathers during dramatic courtship dives. The sound comes from the fluttering edges of the outermost tail feathers — like blowing across a blade of grass.

Gibson also shows how barn owl feathers enable stealthy flight. Comb-like serrations on the wing break up airflow and reduce noise.

Richard Prum, an ornithologist at Yale University who contributed images to the book, says Gibson’s engineering perspective deepens how we think about birds and evolution. Prum, author of “The Evolution of Beauty,” notes that her approach helps explain not just how birds survive, but how their unique features evolve and function.

“The public has absorbed generations of statements about survival and adaptation and ecology,” Prum says. “But that really sweeps under the rug, how do birds do it?”

Each chapter focuses on a different feature and can be read independently — readers can skip to the second feathers chapter to learn how water literally rolls off a duck’s back, or to the bills chapter to explore the bristles on a woodpecker’s tongue that help it capture insects inside a tree.

The final chapters focus on flight — how raptors soar thousands of feet and glide effortlessly, and how geese gain energy efficiency flying in V formations. Gibson is frank: These chapters are more technical, focusing on forces like lift and drag. “The reward is that you’ll learn some of the secrets of bird flight,” she writes.

The human side of the science

It’s not just natural history and science that fill “Birds Up Close.” In her preface, Gibson recalls childhood walks along the Niagara River in Ontario and a summer trip watching breeding colonies of puffins and guillemots in the Farne Islands in her parents’ native England.

In the epilogue, she reflects on writing an earlier version of the book while her wife, Jeannie, faced an aggressive brain cancer in 2019 and died a year later, as the world shut down amid the Covid-19 pandemic. Unable to visit friends and family in Canada — or host them in Boston — Gibson found solace exploring local green spaces, such as Jamaica Pond and the Arnold Arboretum.

On difficult days, “I would be out on a walk, spot something — the kingfisher cackling from its perch on a branch overhanging Leverett Pond, or a wood duck paddling on Jamaica Pond or a hawk circling overhead — and stop in awe and think: Oh, wow, I love seeing that. And for that moment, the grief would disappear.”

Returning to the manuscript, she noticed it was missing something critical. “I had all the science there, but I felt it was too much like a textbook,” she said. She consulted friends, colleagues, and an editor who helped turn “this textbook-y thing into something people would enjoy reading.”

The mix of the scientific and personal stood out to Scott Edwards, professor of organismic and evolutionary biology at Harvard University.

“That’s what science is,” Edwards says. “Science is done by humans. It’s not like we can morph into some ultra-objective person when we’re being a scientist. We bring to science our whole selves.”

He also praises the clear writing and illustrations, which “cuts through all the noise and gets right to the core of the message.” He plans to use the book in his class on birds at Harvard.

“Birds Up Close” goes on sale May 5. Gibson is scheduled to discuss the work at the MIT Museum on May 6. She will also appear at other events; a full list is available on the book’s website. She reflects on the book’s reach:

“Part of it was my own sense of awe and wonder. I couldn’t believe the things that I found out about birds,” Gibson says. “I think a lot of birders are into what’s called listing — seeing lots of species and keeping track of how many different species of birds they see. That’s great, if that’s what you want to do. But this book is really a different way of looking at birds.”

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