Robert Langer reflects on failure, resilience, and making an impact

Robert Langer recalled humming along to the Rolling Stones hit “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” in his MIT apartment, anxiously awaiting the results of his PhD qualifying exam. “It was a very hard test,” he said. “I really thought I had failed, but in the end the Faculty Review Board must have been kind because they passed me.”

Since graduating from MIT in 1974 with a ScD in chemical engineering, Langer has gone on to serve as an Institute Professor at MIT, the highest distinction awarded to an MIT faculty member; preside over the largest academic biomedical engineering lab in the world; conduct research in medicine and biotechnology that has improved the lives of over 2 billion people, become the most cited engineer in history; and garner countless awards and accolades for his work. 

Though it may seem easy to imagine Langer breezing through graduate school with a clear vision of his future accomplishments, he says that uncertainty and failure were very much a part of his college life. Speaking to a group of 50 graduate students at Ashdown House on Oct. 18, Langer discussed his experiences as part of the “Failures in Graduate School” monthly seminar series. Organized by PhD students Stephanie Chen, Malvika Verma, and Seamus Bann, and sponsored by the MindHandHeart Initiative, the series provides an opportunity for students to connect with MIT faculty on a personal level outside of the classroom. 

“We wanted to create a venue to learn about MIT professors’ lives when they were graduate students like us,” Verma said. “For first-year PhDs who are struggling to secure a position in a lab, or adjusting to life in a new country, or feeling overwhelmed by their demanding course load, it’s helpful to hear that failure and self-doubt are normal and happen to everyone.”

“Professor Langer was a great person to kick off the series,” Verma continued. “Despite his vast accomplishments, he faced a lot of rejection early on in his career and is open to discussing these experiences. Being a graduate student at MIT was a part of his life that doesn’t appear in the news, but it helped make him who he is today.”

Making the biggest difference

During his presentation, Langer offered a personal account of his four years as an MIT student, recounting everything from spending late nights in the lab to the disappointments and hard decisions that led him to pursue a career in the medical field. 

“My first year was tough,” Langer began. “I took the required chemical engineering courses — thermodynamics, heat and mass transfer, and industrial chemistry — and they were all really hard for me. The class average for one of my first exams was 20 out of 100, which included the five points everyone received for spelling their name correctly. It was discouraging at times, but I worked really hard and I got through it.” 

Having conducted little research as an undergraduate, Langer struggled to find his place in the laboratory. “I felt like I was a disaster,” he said of having to seek help from postdocs and fellow students to correctly use the equipment and follow standard lab procedures. He also felt a waning interest in his thesis on the enzymatic regeneration of ATP, unable to imagine a practical application for his research.

Though his time in the lab often left him lonely and frustrated, Langer found a rewarding outlet volunteering as a tutor in Roxbury and Cambridge. “At the time, Cambridge had the highest high school dropout rate of any city its size in the U.S.,” said Langer. “It had Harvard and MIT, but it also had several large housing projects and a lot of poverty. I tutored kids from these neighborhoods in math and science, and I was good at it. I enjoyed working with students and seeing them progress — I still do.”

In Langer’s second year at MIT, he was approached by a group of educators to develop a science and math curriculum for a new school in Harvard Square. “The school was very liberal,” Langer said. “There were no required classes and as a result only five out of 40 students signed up for math the first year. It became a real challenge for me to figure out how to make math and science fun for these kids. I incorporated a lot of games and practical problems, and by the second year 45 out of 50 students enrolled in math and almost everyone took chemistry. I was really proud of that.”

Although Langer knew he had a knack for teaching, he recognized the limited influence he would have working as a high school educator. “There was a part of me that wanted something more,” he said. “If I became a high school teacher I would help some people, but it didn’t seem like the way I could make the biggest difference.”

Charting an “unusual” course

During his fourth year at MIT, as many of his classmates were heading off to lucrative jobs in the oil industry amid the 1970s energy crisis, Langer was unsure of his next steps. “Oil companies would recruit on campus and I ended up getting 20 offers — four from Exxon alone. But I wasn’t excited about it. I remember one of the Exxon guys telling me that if I could only increase the yield by 0.1 percent how great that would be — it would be worth billions. I remember thinking to myself, ‘I just don’t want to do this,’ which was a very difficult realization because then I had to consider what was I going to do.”

Langer saw an advertisement for a chemistry professor position at City College of New York that piqued his interest in curriculum development, and he wrote a letter applying for the job. He never heard back. He applied to 40 similar positions and was flatly rejected from each, learning that even though he had done well at MIT, he didn’t have the qualifications to become a chemistry professor. 

A classmate told him about a surgeon at Boston Children’s Hospital named Judah Folkman who was known to hire “unusual people.” Langer met with Folkman and was fascinated by his research on halting the spread of cancerous tumors by blocking the growth of blood vessels. “Even though it was the lowest paying job I could have had; even though I had no background in medicine; and even though I was the only engineer in the entire hospital, I took that job and it changed my life.“

“I ended up learning a tremendous amount about biology and medicine from Dr. Folkman and my colleagues at Children’s Hospital. Because I knew something about engineering and something about medicine, I was able to put those concepts together to come up with new ideas, and I think that’s why I’m an MIT professor today.”

Following his presentation, Langer participated in a Q&A session, fielding questions on choosing a thesis topic, selecting an advisor, and deciding on a career path. When asked what the biggest piece of advice he would give to a student, Langer offered: “When you pick a career, don’t do it because of money or any reason other than you feel in your heart that you’ll love it and it could have an impact on the world.”

For more information on the “Failures in Graduate School” seminar series and upcoming events, visit the MindHandHeart website or contact Malvika Verma at mverma@mit.edu.

To learn more about Robert Langer’s professional journey, watch his presentation from the “Faculty Talks: Getting from Here to There” series on Nov. 30, 2015. Other talks from the series are available here.

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Yidan Prize for Education Research and Education Development announced at MIT

The Office of Digital Learning recently hosted Charles Chen Yidan of Hong Kong, founder of the Yidan Prize Foundation. The visit marked the Yidan Prize Foundation’s first stop on a world tour to announce the new Yidan Prize in Education Research and Education Development. 

The visitors met with Vice President for Open Learning Sanjay Sarma and MIT faculty members John Gabrieli, Parag Pathak, Angela Belcher, and Eric Klopfer, as well as several representatives from the Office of Digital Learning. Chen and colleagues shared news of the prize and listened to faculty presentations on the forward-thinking work MIT is doing in the field of education, in such initiatives as the MIT Integrated Learning Initiative (MITili) and the pK-12 Action Group.

Launched this year, the Yidan Prize Foundation is a $3.9 million education prize awarded to individuals whose work makes profound contributions to education research and development, with the ultimate aim of creating a better world through education. The largest award prize in the field of education, the Yidan Prize is managed by an international judging committee and global advisory board formed by leading experts in education. The prize, which annually gives out $7.7 million in awards, is divided into two categories: Yidan Prize for Education Research, which recognizes outstanding research that amounts to significant contributions in education, and the Yidan Prize for Education Development, which recognizes innovative ideas that tackle pressing challenges in the field of education.

Each Yidan Prize Laureate will receive a gold medal and $3.9 million in awards, including a cash prize of $1.9 million and a project fund of $1.9 million. The Yidan Prize invited MIT to become one of the nominators for the prize. Nominated research or projects must be future-oriented, innovative, and transformative, while achieving sustainable results. The Yidan Prize Laureates will be announced in September 2017 at a ceremony in Hong Kong.

“The Yidan Prize is more than just a competition or award,” Chen said. “Through a series of initiatives — research, events, and multimedia content, alongside our annual financial award — my foundation wants to establish a platform that brings together a cross-section of stakeholders to engage in conversation around education and re-kindle a new and constructive and inclusive dialogue on solutions.”

Chen, one of the founders of Tencent Holdings Ltd., China’s largest and most used Internet service portal, created the Yidan Prize Foundation this year with the mission to create a better world through education. After stepping down as Tencent’s chief administrative officer in 2013, Chen has devoted his time to philanthropy, establishing the Tencent Charity Foundation and investing in Wuhan College, a non-profit university in China. The Yidan Foundation is the result of his vision to “establish a prize that goes beyond religion, race, and nationality” to expand access to and quality of education worldwide.

“It was an honor to have Mr. Chen and his foundation visit MIT,” Sarma said. “His vision for the future of education harmoniously aligns with the work my colleagues are doing in the discovery and development of the science of learning, and its application to school change, curriculum, and learning technologies. We thank Mr. Chen for establishing this important prize to highlight innovative work in education.”

The Foundation later toured the MIT campus and met with MIT Chancellor for Academic Advancement Eric Grimson. “We are pleased that Mr. Chen has invited MIT to nominate projects for consideration by the Yidan Prize,” said Grimson. “It is encouraging to meet with visionary philanthropists who care deeply about innovation in education, especially when their goals align with MIT’s desire to deepen our understanding of learning, and to create new pedagogies and new platforms to transform education at all levels.”  

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Nanobionic spinach plants can detect explosives

Spinach is no longer just a superfood: By embedding leaves with carbon nanotubes, MIT engineers have transformed spinach plants into sensors that can detect explosives and wirelessly relay that information to a handheld device similar to a smartphone.

This is one of the first demonstrations of engineering electronic systems into plants, an approach that the researchers call “plant nanobionics.”

“The goal of plant nanobionics is to introduce nanoparticles into the plant to give it non-native functions,” says Michael Strano, the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT and the leader of the research team.

In this case, the plants were designed to detect chemical compounds known as nitroaromatics, which are often used in landmines and other explosives. When one of these chemicals is present in the groundwater sampled naturally by the plant, carbon nanotubes embedded in the plant leaves emit a fluorescent signal that can be read with an infrared camera. The camera can be attached to a small computer similar to a smartphone, which then sends an email to the user.

“This is a novel demonstration of how we have overcome the plant/human communication barrier,” says Strano, who believes plant power could also be harnessed to warn of pollutants and environmental conditions such as drought.

Strano is the senior author of a paper describing the nanobionic plants in the Oct. 31 issue of Nature Materials. The paper’s lead authors are Min Hao Wong, an MIT graduate student who has started a company called Plantea to further develop this technology, and Juan Pablo Giraldo, a former MIT postdoc who is now an assistant professor at the University of California at Riverside.

Environmental monitoring

Two years ago, in the first demonstration of plant nanobionics, Strano and former MIT postdoc Juan Pablo Giraldo used nanoparticles to enhance plants’ photosynthesis ability and to turn them into sensors for nitric oxide, a pollutant produced by combustion.

Plants are ideally suited for monitoring the environment because they already take in a lot of information from their surroundings, Strano says.

“Plants are very good analytical chemists,” he says. “They have an extensive root network in the soil, are constantly sampling groundwater, and have a way to self-power the transport of that water up into the leaves.”

Strano’s lab has previously developed carbon nanotubes that can be used as sensors to detect a wide range of molecules, including hydrogen peroxide, the explosive TNT, and the nerve gas sarin. When the target molecule binds to a polymer wrapped around the nanotube, it alters the tube’s fluorescence.

In the new study, the researchers embedded sensors for nitroaromatic compounds into the leaves of spinach plants. Using a technique called vascular infusion, which involves applying a solution of nanoparticles to the underside of the leaf, they placed the sensors into a leaf layer known as the mesophyll, which is where most photosynthesis takes place.

They also embedded carbon nanotubes that emit a constant fluorescent signal that serves as a reference. This allows the researchers to compare the two fluorescent signals, making it easier to determine if the explosive sensor has detected anything. If there are any explosive molecules in the groundwater, it takes about 10 minutes for the plant to draw them up into the leaves, where they encounter the detector.

To read the signal, the researchers shine a laser onto the leaf, prompting the nanotubes in the leaf to emit near-infrared fluorescent light. This can be detected with a small infrared camera connected to a Raspberry Pi, a $35 credit-card-sized computer similar to the computer inside a smartphone. The signal could also be detected with a smartphone by removing the infrared filter that most camera phones have, the researchers say.

“This setup could be replaced by a cell phone and the right kind of camera,” Strano says. “It’s just the infrared filter that would stop you from using your cell phone.”

Using this setup, the researchers can pick up a signal from about 1 meter away from the plant, and they are now working on increasing that distance.

Michael McAlpine, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Minnesota, says this approach holds great potential for engineering not only sensors but many other kinds of bionic plants that might receive radio signals or change color.

“When you have manmade materials infiltrated into a living organism, you can have plants do things that plants don’t ordinarily do,” says McAlpine, who was not involved in the research. “Once you start to think of living organisms like plants as biomaterials that can be combined with electronic materials, this is all possible.”

“A wealth of information”

In the 2014 plant nanobionics study, Strano’s lab worked with a common laboratory plant known as Arabidopsis thaliana. However, the researchers wanted to use common spinach plants for the latest study, to demonstrate the versatility of this technique. “You can apply these techniques with any living plant,” Strano says.

So far, the researchers have also engineered spinach plants that can detect dopamine, which influences plant root growth, and they are now working on additional sensors, including some that track the chemicals plants use to convey information within their own tissues.

“Plants are very environmentally responsive,” Strano says. “They know that there is going to be a drought long before we do. They can detect small changes in the properties of soil and water potential. If we tap into those chemical signaling pathways, there is a wealth of information to access.”

These sensors could also help botanists learn more about the inner workings of plants, monitor plant health, and maximize the yield of rare compounds synthesized by plants such as the Madagascar periwinkle, which produces drugs used to treat cancer.

“These sensors give real-time information from the plant. It is almost like having the plant talk to us about the environment they are in,” Wong says. “In the case of precision agriculture, having such information can directly affect yield and margins.”

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Scene at MIT: A nightmare on Ames Street

“People are afraid of artificial intelligence, from autonomous cars making unethical decisions in accidents, to robots taking our jobs and causing mass unemployment, to runaway superintelligent machines obliterating humanity. Engineering pioneer and inventor Elon Musk famously said that as we develop AI, we are 'summoning the demon.'

Halloween is a time when people celebrate the things that terrify them. So it seems like a perfect occasion for an MIT project that explores society's fear of AI. And what better way to do this than have an actual AI literally scare us in an immediate, visceral sense? Postdoc Pinar Yanardhag, visiting scientist Manuel Cebrian, and I used a recently published, open-source deep neural network algorithm to learn features of a haunted house and apply these features to a picture of the Media Lab.

We also launched the Nightmare Machine website, where people can vote on which AI-generated horror images they find scary; these were generated using the same algorithm, combined with another recent algorithm for generating faces. So far, we've collected over 300,000 individual votes, and the results are clear: the AI demon is here, and it can terrify us. Happy Halloween!”

—Iyad Rahwan, AT&T Career Development Professor and an associate professor of media arts and sciences in the MIT Media Lab

Have a creative photo of campus life you'd like to share? Submit to Scene at MIT.

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New faculty, promotions, and leadership roles in the School of Architecture and Planning

The School of Architecture and Planning has announced that seven faculty members have been recognized by being promoted, granted tenure, or given significant new roles.

In addition, four new professors have joined the school in the Department of Architecture and the Program in Media Arts and Sciences. Their research ranges from architectural design to self-assembling materials to genetic engineering.

“This group adds considerable strength to our faculty,” says Hashim Sarkis, dean of the School of Architecture and Planning. “As individual practitioners and researchers, each brings a high level of creativity, imagination, and rigor to our capabilities. As a group, they offer new dimensions to our teaching and research explorations.”

Recently promoted faculty

Azra Akšamija, an artist and architectural historian, has been promoted to associate professor without tenure in the Program in Art, Culture and Technology of the Department of Architecture, where she has taught since 2012. Her artistic work provides a framework for researching, analyzing, and intervening in contested sociopolitical realities. Her academic research focuses on the politics of cultural memory and the 1990s Yugoslav wars. Her book, “Mosque Manifesto,” (Revolver, 2015) explores transcultural aesthetics and cultural mobility in the context of Islam in the West. Akšamija holds master’s degrees from the Technical University Graz and Princeton University, and a PhD from MIT. Her work has been shown in the Generali Foundation Vienna, Liverpool Biennial, Sculpture Center New York, Secession Vienna, Manifesta 7, the Royal Academy of Arts London, Queens Museum, and the 54th Venice Biennale. She received the Aga Khan Award in 2013 for her prayer space design in the Islamic Cemetery in Altach, Austria.

Brent D. Ryan has been promoted to associate professor of urban design and public policy with tenure in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, where he was assistant professor from 2009 and associate professor without tenure from 2013. As head of the City Design and Development Group, he examines the aesthetics and practice of contemporary urban design, particularly in postindustrial cities and neighborhoods. Ryan is author of “Plural Urbanism” (MIT Press, forthcoming) and “Design after Decline: How America Rebuilds Shrinking Cities” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), as well as a number of journal articles and contributions to edited volumes. Ryan taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he was also co-director of the City Design Center. Ryan holds a BS in biology from Yale University, an MArch from Columbia University, and a PhD in urban design and planning from MIT.

Kristel Smentek, a historian of 18th-century European art and design with specializations in the history of collecting, the art market, and the European encounter with Asia, has been named associate professor with tenure in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art Program in the Department of Architecture. An assistant and associate professor at MIT since 2008, Smentek holds a BA from McGill University and an MA and PhD from the University of Delaware, all in art history. She has published extensively, including “Mariette and the Science of the Connoisseur in Eighteenth-Century Europe” (Ashgate, 2014). She has received numerous fellowships and awards, and has curated several exhibitions. Smentek’s teaching includes courses on European art from the Renaissance to the present, 18th- and 19th-century European painting, ornament from the Rococo to the 1920s, the history and theory of the art museum, and the history of design.

Faculty receiving new roles or titles

Alan Berger, co-director of the Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism, has been named the Norman B. and Muriel Leventhal Professor of Advanced Urbanism. The founding director of P-REX lab, a research unit focused on environmental problems caused by urbanization, Berger studies the link between our consumption of natural resources and the waste and destruction of landscapes worldwide. He uses the term “systemic design” to describe the reintegration of waste and disvalued landscapes into our urbanized territories and regional ecologies. His books include “Infinite Suburbia” (forthcoming, 2017) and the award-winning “Drosscape: Wasting Land in Urban America” (2006) and “Reclaiming the American West” (2002), all from Princeton Architectural Press. Prior to coming to MIT in 2008, he was associate professor of landscape architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He holds a BS in agriculture/horticulture from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln and an MLA in landscape architecture from the University of Pennsylvania.

Phillip L. Clay, retired professor in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), has been named advisor to the Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning, where he was a faculty member since 1976. A graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Clay holds a doctorate from MIT. He served as MIT Chancellor from 2001 to 2011 and held other leadership positions at the Institute; he was also department head of DUSP, where he taught courses in housing policy and poverty. Clay is widely known for his work in U.S. housing policy and urban development. His current interests include organizational capacity in community-based nonprofits as well as the role of anchor institutions. Based on his work on MIT international strategies, he is also interested in the increasing role higher education can play in national development planning in less developed and emerging nations. His work now focuses on higher education in Africa.   

Dennis Frenchman has been named the Class of 1922 Professor of Urban Design and Planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning and is the inaugural SA+P faculty director of the DesignX entrepreneurship accelerator. He is also on the faculty of the Center for Real Estate, where he founded (with David Geltner and Andrea Chegut) the new Real Estate Innovation Lab.  Frenchman is a registered architect and founder of ICON architecture in Boston, an international architecture and urban design firm. His practice and research focuses on the transformation of cities; he is an expert on the application of digital technology to city design and led MIT research efforts to develop new models for clean energy urbanization in China. Frenchman holds a BA in architecture from the University of Cincinnati and an MArch and MCP from MIT, where he has taught since 1983.

James Wescoat has been appointed co-director of the Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism. Since arriving at MIT in 2008, he has served as the Aga Khan Professor in the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture, within the Department of Architecture. His research has concentrated on water systems in South Asia and the United States, including water research with the Tata Center for Technology and Design. His publications include “Water for Life: Water Management and Environmental Policy” (with Gilbert F. White, Cambridge University Press, 2003). Wescoat has also conducted research on historical waterworks of Mughal gardens and cities in India and Pakistan. He previously headed the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and has taught at the University of Colorado and the University of Chicago. He earned a BA in landscape architecture from Louisiana State University and an MA and PhD in geography from the University of Chicago.

New faculty members

Brandon Clifford has been appointed assistant professor in the Department of Architecture, where as Belluschi Lecturer since 2012 he has taught and conducted research, including the recent McKnelly Megalith and Buoy Stone projects. He received a BS in architecture from Georgia Tech and an MArch from Princeton University. From 2006 to 2009, he worked as project manager at Office dA in Boston and New York. Clifford was the 2011-2012 LeFevre Emerging Practitioner Fellow at The Ohio State University’s Knowlton School of Architecture. In 2008 he founded the award-winning practice Matter Design with Wes McGee. His work has garnered inclusion in the Design Biennial Boston and won the Architectural League Prize for Young Architects and Designers as well as the prestigious SOM Prize, which launched his ongoing research into volumetric architecture. Clifford’s work is focused on reimagining the role of the architect in the digital era.

Kevin Esvelt has been named assistant professor of media arts and sciences. He leads the MIT Media Lab’s Sculpting Evolution research group, which invents new ways to study and influence the evolution of ecosystems for the benefit of humanity and the natural world. Before joining the Media Lab in January, Esvelt wove many areas of science into novel approaches to ecological engineering. He invented phage-assisted continuous evolution (PACE), a synthetic microbial ecosystem for rapidly evolving biomolecules, in the laboratory of David R. Liu at Harvard University. At the Wyss Institute, he worked with George Church to develop the CRISPR system, including its use for gene drive and safeguards. He received BA degrees in biology and chemistry from Harvey Mudd College and a PhD in biochemistry from Harvard. He is a winner of the Harold M. Weintraub Award, the Hertz Foundation Thesis Prize, and the NIH K99, and was among the MIT Technology Review 35 Innovators Under 35 in 2016.

Sheila Kennedy has been appointed professor in the Department of Architecture. Kennedy received a BA in history, philosophy, and literature from Wesleyan University and studied architecture at the Ecole National Supérieure des Beaux Arts in Paris. She received her masters of architecture from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, where she graduated with distinction — the school’s highest academic honor — and received the SOM National Traveling Fellowship. With her partner Juan Frano Violich, Kennedy is a founding principal of KVA Matx, an interdisciplinary professional practice that is widely recognized for innovation in architecture, research on the evolving culture of materials, and the design of resilient, “soft” infrastructure and public space. Kennedy’s work in practice has received Progressive Architecture Awards and American Institute of Architects National Design Excellence Awards for built work in the United States and abroad. Kennedy received a 2014 Holcim Foundation Design Award, the 2014 Design Innovator Award, and the 2014 Berkeley-Rupp Award Prize of $100,000. She is a recipient of the inaugural 2016 American Architecture Award for her design work with digital brick in the Tozzer Anthropology Building. Kennedy’s design work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, MoMA, the National Design Museum, the Rotterdam Biennale, the Vitra Design Museum, and the TED conference in California. Her work has been widely published and is featured on National Public Radio, BBC World News, CBS News, The Discovery Channel, CNN Principal Voices, Wired, The Economist, and The New York Times.

Skylar Tibbits has been named assistant professor in the Department of Architecture, where he has been a lecturer and research scientist since 2010, teaching graduate and undergraduate design studios and co-teaching MAS.863/4.140 (How to Make (Almost) Anything), a seminar at MIT’s Media Lab. He directs the MIT Self-Assembly Lab, which focuses on programmable material technologies for novel manufacturing, products, and construction processes. Tibbits has a professional degree in architecture with a minor in experimental computation from Philadelphia University. At MIT, he received an SMArchS in design and computation and an MS in computer science. Tibbits has worked at design offices including Zaha Hadid Architects, Asymptote Architecture, and Point b Design. He has designed and built large-scale installations at galleries around the world, and his work has been published extensively. In 2007, Tibbits founded a multidisciplinary design practice, SJET. He was awarded a 2013 Architectural League Prize, among other honors.

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Taking the life-cycle perspective: Report addresses critical issues in building practices

What elements determine how much impact a building has on the environment? If things like roofing, insulation, and energy-efficient windows are among the first things that come to mind, you’re not wrong — but you also don’t have the complete picture. Unfortunately, decision-makers, including architects and builders, may not always have the full picture up front either.

While there have been promising advances in building methods and technologies designed to increase energy efficiency and lower the environmental impact of buildings, most building codes and energy efficiency standards address just the use phase of the building — this could inadvertently encourage manufacturing activities with higher long-term environmental impacts.

“Buildings are complex,” says MIT Professor Jeremy Gregory, executive director of the MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub (CSHub). “To understand the full environmental impact of a structure over decades of use, all phases — starting before construction and continuing on to the very end of the structure’s life — must be considered.”

A new report from the CSHub entitled “Critical Issues When Comparing Whole Building and Building Product Environmental Performance” addresses important concepts in quantifying the environmental impact of buildings and the products that comprise them. The report also makes recommendations for current and future building practices using life cycle assessment (LCA) and offers suggestions for research to advance future study and practice in this area. 

“One of the key takeaways is that there are many factors that must be considered before evaluating claims that one or another building type or product offers a better environmental return,” says Gregory, who is one of the authors of the new report. “Decision-makers must take a life-cycle perspective when evaluating impacts. One material may have a higher impact at the outset but result in a much lower impact across a structure’s lifespan.”

Building sector guides, product category rules, and environmental product declarations that use LCA to evaluate environmental impacts, including guidelines set forth by the leadership in energy and environmental design (LEED) rating system, have certainly moved the industry forward. However, the prevailing methods have limitations; for example, they lack consistency in their approach, and they do not allow whole buildings or even building products to be compared against alternatives.

“The ability to compare one building type to another, or one product choice with another, is extremely important so that decision-makers fully understand the benefits or consequences of shifting building designs and technologies,” said Gregory.

This report, like past CSHub research (including a 2011 Building LCA report), advocates for the development of a standardized buildings LCA framework, which researchers feel is essential in order to increase the accuracy of the LCA approach. It also adds a call for comparability. The new research is part of ongoing work by the CSHub, which has undertaken a series of projects quantifying the full life cycle impacts of buildings. The team also published a revised literature review and gap analysis on the topic earlier this month.

“There is significant inconsistency in the way that many life-cycle assessment studies consider, or in some cases ignore, the life-cycle stages of buildings,” said Randy Kirchain, co-director of the CSHub and principal research scientist in the Materials Systems Laboratory. "This report tries to highlight where inconsistencies often are found and identifies best practices to address those aspects of buildings LCA.” 

Kirchain added, “Work both here at the hub and by many other LCA experts has made it clear that without a full life-cycle assessment, the picture is incomplete.”

MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub research is supported by the Portland Cement Association and the Ready Mixed Concrete Research and Education Foundation.

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Revving up The Engine for global change

At yesterday’s launch event for The Engine — MIT’s new enterprise that aims to support local startups working on transformative technologies — MIT President L. Rafael Reif and other speakers discussed the numerous benefits the initiative promises for innovation in the region, and for society as a whole.

“At MIT, it is our duty to bring transformative innovation to the world,” MIT President L. Rafael Reif said, opening the event for a capacity crowd of entrepreneurs, business leaders, investors, and MIT community members gathered at The Engine’s new headquarters at 501 Massachusetts Avenue, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Announced Wednesday, The Engine is a startup accelerator and innovation hub that will support 60 locally based companies at any one time, with a focus on “tough” technologies — breakthrough ideas that require time to commercialize — in a range of sectors including biotechnology, robotics, manufacturing, medical devices, and energy.

“What truly sets The Engine apart,” Reif added, “is its emphasis on impact. In assessing candidate companies, it will prioritize breakthrough answers to big questions and to big problems, over early profits.”

Reif penned an op-ed in the Boston Globe discussing The Engine’s mission to solve the world’s most pressing challenges. 

The Engine’s support for entrepreneurs will include a “distinctive package of resources,” Reif said: “patient” capital, affordable local space, access to highly specialized equipment, streamlined business services, and expertise. The Engine will also connect entrepreneurs to MIT alumni, like-minded entrepreneurs, and major corporations in the region and beyond.

The Engine seeks to raise $150 million for a first investment fund; MIT will invest $25 million in that fund as a limited partner. The Engine will also offer 26,000 square feet at its headquarters, with aims to make available to entrepreneurs more than 200,000 square feet in Kendall Square and nearby neighborhoods. The new initiative also includes The Engine Room, an online marketplace that will enable entrepreneurs to use or rent specialized resources from each other and from MIT, including office and conference spaces, clean rooms, and other facilities and equipment.

Reif and the event’s other speakers — including entrepreneurs, MIT professors, venture capitalists, and industry representatives — said The Engine promises to foster new collaborations between entrepreneurs and industry, create a more attractive regional innovation ecosystem, and promote venture capital investment in transformative technologies. The Engine’s primary goal, Reif said, is to help innovators tackle the world’s toughest challenges, such as climate change, clean energy, water and food issues, cancer, autism, Alzheimer’s disease, and infectious diseases.

“Innovators are finding it very difficult to secure funding, space, equipment, expertise, and networks to fully develop their technologies. Many of them are working on solutions to humanity’s most pressing problems, so if they cannot get their ideas to market, society loses as well,” he said. “The Engine will help deliver important answers for addressing such intractable problems — answers that may otherwise never leave the lab.”

In closing the event, MIT Executive Vice President and Treasurer Israel Ruiz, who led the launch of The Engine, said MIT will begin recruiting knowledgeable leadership, among other tasks, to get The Engine running efficiently by next spring. “We want to make sure that what we have is an engine that runs for the long run,” he said.

Regional impact, global change

In a discussion moderated by MIT Media Lab Director Joi Ito, panelists discussed how the initiative could benefit their work and the region, and offered advice on fine-tuning The Engine.  

Venture capitalist Antonio Rodriguez, a general partner at Matrix Partners, said that giving startups resources to validate their transformative — and sometimes risky — technologies early on could encourage more venture capitalists to invest. Moreover, he added, The Engine could help keep startups in Boston.

Venture capitalist firms are like hammers seeking nails that sometimes aren’t there, Rodriguez said: “I think the thing an organization like this can do is make sure those nails are there to be hit … across industries that are going to solve these big, hard problems.”

Jay Bradner, president of the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research, said Novartis could be a “powerful neighbor” for The Engine, noting some of Novartis’ previous collaborations with MIT in developing new therapeutics. Addressing MIT leadership, he said, “We really need to organize around how we plan to use this sandbox together.”

Echoing Bradner’s sentiments about stronger collaboration was Sue Siegel, CEO of GE Ventures, who said her firm could find ways to potentially support The Engine’s startups with expertise, capital, and methods of distribution. “It’s a remarkable overlap in terms of the innovation possibilities that we can have with MIT and The Engine,” she said.

Panelist Leslie Dewan ’06, PhD ’13, founder and CEO of MIT spinout Transatomic Power, which is developing an advanced reactor that generates clean and low-cost nuclear power, said The Engine could help bring related startups to Boston, where few are located. “One of the things I’m so excited about … is the prospect of having more peers,” she said. “Cambridge is uniquely positioned to be a hub of advanced nuclear reactor development.”

When asked what advice they’d offer to The Engine’s organizers, panelists suggested removing financial and legal barriers for entering the market, ensuring Boston becomes an attractive settling place for startups, and better utilizing existing MIT facilities for startups — “like MIT’s nuclear reactor,” Dewan remarked.

Institute Professor Phillip Sharp, co-founder of Biogen, which launched in Kendall Square in the 1970s, told MIT leadership to “take on the challenge of being the meeting place, of bringing the entrepreneurs, the venture capitalists, the students, the postdocs together in a form where you can talk about entrepreneurship, creativity, finance, all the other issues. That’s very hard to do on a campus. But it is something The Engine could use in creating the future.”

Panelist Guru Banavar, vice president and chief science officer for cognitive computing at IBM, also spoke about the potential for collaboration between his company and The Engine.

Impact for startups

Six startups founded by MIT students, alumni, and professors delivered brief presentations about their businesses, which could benefit from The Engine. They were: Raptor Maps, Spyce, Confer Health, Humon, Cambridge Mobile Telematics, and Transatomic Power.

Nikhil Vadhavkar, co-founder and CEO of Raptor Maps, told MIT News that The Engine’s value is bringing MIT’s “financial support and intellectual capital” to young startups. Raptor Maps did most of its research and development out of the co-founders’ dorm room. “So having a place like this would have been remarkable early on,” Vadhavkar said.

In a video announcing The Engine Room, Natalya Brikner PhD ’15, co-founder and CEO of MIT spinout Accion Systems, which is developing molten-salt thrusters for satellites, praised the online marketplace, which they plan to use. “We’re excited to have a resource like this going forward,” she said. “Because as we grow our product line, we’re going to venture into new areas of R&D. We’re only going to need more access to tools, and prototyping, and experts.”

David Garber, a first-year student in the MIT Sloan School of Management, hopes to launch a company based on a transformative technology, while in school. After the event, he told MIT News that the most exciting part of The Engine for him was the concept of patient capital. “It’s great to have investors and the Institute willing to take a risk on a technology that may not [yet] have a market [or] business viability, but could be something transformative,” he said.

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Susan Lindquist, pioneering biologist and former director of Whitehead Institute, dies at 67

MIT Professor Susan Lee Lindquist, a member and former director of the Whitehead Institute, and one of the nation’s most lauded scientists, yesterday succumbed to cancer at age 67. Her nearly 40-year career was defined by intellectually courageous, boundary-defying research and a passion for nurturing new generations of scientific talent.

“Sue has meant so much to Whitehead as an institution of science, and as a community of scientists, and her passing leaves us diminished in so many ways,” reflects David C. Page, director of Whitehead Institute and a professor of biology at MIT. “She was a risk-taker and an innovator. She believed that if we were not reaching for things beyond our grasp, we were not doing our job as researchers; if we were not constantly striving for that which we could only imagine, we were not fulfilling our obligations to society as scientists.”

A cornerstone of the Whitehead Institute community, a professor of biology at MIT, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, Lindquist was a widely respected researcher with a global reputation for biomedical innovation. She made numerous, invaluable contributions to the study of protein folding, demonstrating that alternative protein conformations can have profound and unexpected influences. Lindquist’s research transformed budding yeast into a model organism for studying human disease, evolution, and biomaterials.

She was best known for her work on prions — proteins that exhibit an unusual ability to exist in multiple stable structural states, with altered functions depending on the state. Using yeast, she and her colleagues demonstrated that prions have the capacity to drive change in an organism’s inherited characteristics without changing its DNA or RNA — relying instead on an ability to change how proteins fold. In a seminal breakthrough in evolutionary biology, her laboratory showed that prions can help activate many previously hidden (inactive) biophysical interactions, producing new traits that are passed on to subsequent generations. In other words, by uncovering (activating) previously hidden genetic variation that can help cells survive changes in their environment, prions provide a mechanism for the evolution of beneficial new traits.

In humans, devastating neurological illnesses such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Creutzfeldt-Jakob, and Huntington’s diseases involve proteins that change their conformation and thereby spur pathological processes. Among the many technical innovations created by her lab, Lindquist imported several of these disease-causing proteins into yeast, creating a platform with which to study disease-causing changes in protein folding in action and to test potential therapies for the ability to prevent the protein’s toxicity.

A committed teacher and dedicated mentor to generations of biomedical and basic research scientists, Lindquist served as a professor at the University of Chicago for 23 years and then at MIT, where she had taught concurrent with her Whitehead Institute appointment since 2001. During her 15-year career at Whitehead alone, she supervised 115 fellows, graduate students, and undergraduates.

“Inspired by Susan’s seminal work on the role of protein folding in evolutionary processes, I came to her laboratory at the Whitehead on a sabbatical from my role as a professor of pediatric oncology,” remembers Luke Whitesell, a senior research scientist in the Lindquist lab at Whitehead Institute. “Breaking traditional boundaries, we sought to learn whether some of the same basic mechanisms she had discovered in yeast might fuel the malignant progression of cancers and enable them to acquire drug resistance. The nurturing, extraordinarily cross-disciplinary research environment that she had created for her students and postdocs was captivating. Over a dozen years later, I am still here, privileged to have assisted her in training a new generation of physicians and scientists who share her conviction that deep biological insight is essential to improving the treatment of human diseases. We are all devastated by her loss, but determined to carry her vision forward.” 

Brooke Bevis, manager of the Lindquist lab, observes that, “Sue was the most creative, out-of-the-box scientific thinker I’ve known. She had a unique biological intuition — an instinct for the way things worked and the right questions to ask. And she was indefatigable, seeming to draw strength and stamina from the science itself.”

From 2001 to 2004, Lindquist served as director of Whitehead Institute — becoming one of the first women in the nation to lead a major independent research organization. In 2004, she resumed her research focus as an Institute member, an associate member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and an associate member of the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT. 

“Sue was a terrific scientist, colleague, and friend to many of us,” says Alan Grossman, the Praecis Professor of Biology and head of MIT’s Department of Biology. “She will be deeply missed at MIT and in the scientific community. Our thoughts and wishes go out to her family and loved ones.”

“Sue's bold strategies and unique ideas to understand neurodegenerative disease were recognized by her peers and supported by generous partners, including the JPB Foundation and the Belfer Family Foundation,” observes Li-Huei Tsai, professor of neuroscience and director of the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT. “She was a titan in the field and a genuine luminary, appreciated for her candor, friendship, thoughtful behavior, and superb communication skills. Her work and influence will continue to accelerate the fight against diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, as well as inspire and educate upcoming generations of scientific leaders.”

“I met Sue when I arrived at the University of Chicago in 1980, and we’ve been close friends ever since. I was Sue’s maid of honor at her wedding; she introduced me to my husband,” recalls Elaine Fuchs, the Rebecca C. Lancefield Professor and Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator at The Rockefeller University. “In Chicago, we taught together and shared our HHMI labs. Throughout these past 35 years, we’ve fueled each other’s science through many discussions and dinners together. I’ve never met another scientist as creative and visionary as Sue, nor a person so caring and loving. She was the gentle giant of science, and her work will continue to shape research and medicine — and inspire her family, friends, colleagues, students, and postdocs — long into the future.”   

An insightful leader with an incomparable perspective on the intersection of academic and commercial medical research, Lindquist served as an elected member of the Johnson & Johnson Board of Directors since 2004, chairing its Science, Technology and Sustainability Committee and sitting on its Regulatory, Compliance and Government Affairs Committee. A biomedical entrepreneur in her own right, she co-founded FoldRx Pharmaceuticals and founded Yumanity Therapeutics and REVOLUTION Medicines.

“Sue’s global reputation in biomedical innovation and entrepreneurial spirit, her courageous leadership and her commitment to teaching are an inspiration for all of us and for generations to come,” says Alex Gorsky, chairman and chief executive officer of Johnson & Johnson. “With her keen perspectives, Sue’s made invaluable contributions to Johnson & Johnson and consistently challenged us to deliver more innovation and enhance our commitment to scientific excellence and to patients worldwide.”

Lindquist received many awards for her extraordinarily productive research, including the President’s National Medal of Science — the highest scientific honor bestowed by the United States — as well as the Dickson Prize in Medicine, the Otto-Warburg Prize, the Genetics Society of America Medal, the FASEB Excellence in Science Award, the Max Delbrück Medal, the Mendel Medal, the E.B. Wilson Medal, a Vallee Visiting Professorship, the Vanderbilt Prize for Women’s Excellence in Science and Mentorship, and the Albany Prize. She was elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the British Royal Society.

“Sue was not only a superb basic scientist, but also a committed leader,” says Erin O’Shea, president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. “She served as a role model for women in science, including me. Sue purposefully worked to mentor numerous students and postdocs, who have since gone on to successful careers. She will be deeply missed.”

Born on June 5, 1949, Lindquist earned an undergraduate degree in microbiology from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a PhD in biology from Harvard University. She is survived by her husband, Edward Buckbee; two daughters, Alana Buckbee and Nora Buckbee; and Nora’s husband, Christopher Mannion; as well as her brothers and sisters-in-law Alan Lindquist and Stephanie Russell, and John Lindquist and Janice Moore.

Gifts in honor and memory of Susan Lindquist may be made to the Whitehead Institute Fund to Encourage Women in Science (lindquistfund@wi.mit.edu).

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Making computers explain themselves

In recent years, the best-performing systems in artificial-intelligence research have come courtesy of neural networks, which look for patterns in training data that yield useful predictions or classifications. A neural net might, for instance, be trained to recognize certain objects in digital images or to infer the topics of texts.

But neural nets are black boxes. After training, a network may be very good at classifying data, but even its creators will have no idea why. With visual data, it’s sometimes possible to automate experiments that determine which visual features a neural net is responding to. But text-processing systems tend to be more opaque.

At the Association for Computational Linguistics’ Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) will present a new way to train neural networks so that they provide not only predictions and classifications but rationales for their decisions.

“In real-world applications, sometimes people really want to know why the model makes the predictions it does,” says Tao Lei, an MIT graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science and first author on the new paper. “One major reason that doctors don’t trust machine-learning methods is that there’s no evidence.”

“It’s not only the medical domain,” adds Regina Barzilay, the Delta Electronics Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Lei’s thesis advisor. “It’s in any domain where the cost of making the wrong prediction is very high. You need to justify why you did it.”

“There’s a broader aspect to this work, as well,” says Tommi Jaakkola, an MIT professor of electrical engineering and computer science and the third coauthor on the paper. “You may not want to just verify that the model is making the prediction in the right way; you might also want to exert some influence in terms of the types of predictions that it should make. How does a layperson communicate with a complex model that’s trained with algorithms that they know nothing about? They might be able to tell you about the rationale for a particular prediction. In that sense it opens up a different way of communicating with the model.”

Virtual brains

Neural networks are so called because they mimic — approximately — the structure of the brain. They are composed of a large number of processing nodes that, like individual neurons, are capable of only very simple computations but are connected to each other in dense networks.

In a process referred to as “deep learning,” training data is fed to a network’s input nodes, which modify it and feed it to other nodes, which modify it and feed it to still other nodes, and so on. The values stored in the network’s output nodes are then correlated with the classification category that the network is trying to learn — such as the objects in an image, or the topic of an essay.

Over the course of the network’s training, the operations performed by the individual nodes are continuously modified to yield consistently good results across the whole set of training examples. By the end of the process, the computer scientists who programmed the network often have no idea what the nodes’ settings are. Even if they do, it can be very hard to translate that low-level information back into an intelligible description of the system’s decision-making process.

In the new paper, Lei, Barzilay, and Jaakkola specifically address neural nets trained on textual data. To enable interpretation of a neural net’s decisions, the CSAIL researchers divide the net into two modules. The first module extracts segments of text from the training data, and the segments are scored according to their length and their coherence: The shorter the segment, and the more of it that is drawn from strings of consecutive words, the higher its score.

The segments selected by the first module are then passed to the second module, which performs the prediction or classification task. The modules are trained together, and the goal of training is to maximize both the score of the extracted segments and the accuracy of prediction or classification.

One of the data sets on which the researchers tested their system is a group of reviews from a website where users evaluate different beers. The data set includes the raw text of the reviews and the corresponding ratings, using a five-star system, on each of three attributes: aroma, palate, and appearance.

What makes the data attractive to natural-language-processing researchers is that it’s also been annotated by hand, to indicate which sentences in the reviews correspond to which scores. For example, a review might consist of eight or nine sentences, and the annotator might have highlighted those that refer to the beer’s “tan-colored head about half an inch thick,” “signature Guinness smells,” and “lack of carbonation.” Each sentence is correlated with a different attribute rating.

Validation

As such, the data set provides an excellent test of the CSAIL researchers’ system. If the first module has extracted those three phrases, and the second module has correlated them with the correct ratings, then the system has identified the same basis for judgment that the human annotator did.

In experiments, the system’s agreement with the human annotations was 96 percent and 95 percent, respectively, for ratings of appearance and aroma, and 80 percent for the more nebulous concept of palate.

In the paper, the researchers also report testing their system on a database of free-form technical questions and answers, where the task is to determine whether a given question has been answered previously.

In unpublished work, they’ve applied it to thousands of pathology reports on breast biopsies, where it has learned to extract text explaining the bases for the pathologists’ diagnoses. They’re even using it to analyze mammograms, where the first module extracts sections of images rather than segments of text.

“There’s a lot of hype now — and rightly so — around deep learning, and specifically deep learning for natural-language processing,” says Byron Wallace, an assistant professor of computer and information science at Northeastern University. “But a big drawback for these models is that they’re often black boxes. Having a model that not only makes very accurate predictions but can also tell you why it’s making those predictions is a really important aim.”

“As it happens, we have a paper that’s similar in spirit being presented at the same conference,” Wallace adds. “I didn’t know at the time that Regina was working on this, and I actually think hers is better. In our approach, during the training process, while someone is telling us, for example, that a movie review is very positive, we assume that they’ll mark a sentence that gives you the rationale. In this way we train the deep-learning model to extract these rationales. But they don’t make this assumption, so their model works without using direct annotations with rationales, which is a very nice property.”

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Scene at MIT: Stata-o'-lantern

MIT Linguistics has celebrated the Halloween season with an annual pumpkin carving party since 2010, the year that Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine PhD ’14 dazzled his fellow scholars with this Stata-o’-lantern. It was created in the likeness of Building 32, MIT's iconic Ray and Maria Stata Center, designed by renowned architect Frank Gehry and home to the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and more.

“I somehow had the idea of trying to carve the Stata Center,” says Erlewine, now an assistant professor of linguistics at the National University of Singapore. “Of course, this would require a deconstruction of the pumpkin form itself!”

Other notable designs over the years have included a Noam-o’-lantern in the likeness of Professor Emeritus Noam Chomsky; a pumpkin sporting the Chinese character for language; and a carving of Professor Norvin Richards with his trademark Davis Square t-shirt.

“I entered the program in 2011 and I think the carving began spontaneously a year before me,” says Snejana Iovtcheva, current PhD student who has organized the annual event since 2013. “It became an MIT Linguistics tradition. We now have also candies, cookies, cakes, too! It is fun for all the students, but especially so for international students who are new to pumpkin carving.”

Submitted by: Emily Hiestand/School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences | Photo by: Daniel Pritchard.

Have a creative photo of campus life you'd like to share? Submit it to Scene at MIT.

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MIT launches Institute-wide survey on commuting behaviors

Today, MIT distributed the 2016 Transportation Survey to members of the student body, faculty, and staff. The survey, which is jointly sponsored by the Parking and Transportation Office, the Environment, Health, and Safety Office, and the Office of the Provost, is given every two years as required by the State of Massachusetts and the City of Cambridge.

The survey is designed to collect data on how the MIT community travels to campus every day and covers a wide breadth of commuter interests and concerns, including subsidized T-passes, parking access, accessibility to bike racks, length of commute, and more. This survey provides MIT the opportunity to receive feedback on whether the programs in place meet the satisfaction of its community while working to create more efficient and innovative transportation solutions, building upon the Institute’s commitment to sustainability and climate action.

The Transportation Survey has a long standing history of impacting crucial decisions regarding MIT commuter and parking services and plans, including the recent implementation of the Access MIT program, providing free local public transit to benefits-eligible MIT employees, a program that is the first of its kind at any Boston and Cambridge area university. This survey will aid in the evaluation of this program, along with many others to better serve MIT students, faculty, and staff.

The survey takes about 10 minutes to complete. Those who have received an email invitation to take the survey are encouraged to share their thoughts.

To review results from past MIT Transportation Surveys, please see http://ift.tt/2eLobSh.

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This is how we row

“Expect the heaviest headwind at the start,” says Chloe Thacker, the coxswain for an MIT boat competing in the 52nd Head of the Charles Regatta. Eight rowers in the lightweight women’s rowing program are preparing a shell for launch. The number 39 is stenciled on the bow and its white oars feature a maroon T. “Take advantage of the crosswind in the powerhouse stretch before the Weeks Footbridge. At the curve toward the Eliot Bridge, as we close in on the finish line, it’ll get choppy,” says Thacker, a second-year student.

Weather conditions are unpleasant for the largest two-day regatta in the world. The day started in the mid-40's (Fahrenheit), and winds on the Charles River are blowing at 15 miles per hour, with gusts up to 30. White-capped waves fill the expanse of the river in front to the MIT boathouse. Head Coach Claire Martin-Doyle comes by to rally the group. In her 11th season at the helm of one of MIT’s four crew programs, the only Division I sport on campus, her team regularly ranks among the top 10 in the nation. A longtime rower, she waves an arm as she shouts over the din of the visiting teams converging on the boathouse: “You just got to row tough. Be on task, be on target, and go hard,” she says.

Start time is fast approaching. The young women in the Varsity 8 lineup look confident. Dawn and dusk practices and deep camaraderie have paid off. On the water, the team is a powerful force. The 39, in fact, will soon be one of two lightweight women’s boats to make program history. Bow 29, with a total of four rowers, all first-year students, will be the other.

By mid-afternoon, the MIT boats are by the Boston University boathouse, which is the starting point of a 5-kilometer course that ends by the Eliot Bridge. Senior Prianca Tawde, the coxswain for 29, leads her “young boat” in a ritual collective fist bump. “You are ready for this,” she says to the crew on the verge of their first collegiate race on the Charles. “Row clean and row well.”

Thacker’s voice raises to a shout as her rowers build to race pace and cross the start line to the official yell: “ROW!” Among the third-year students in the boat are Michelle Lauer, Annika Rollock, and Sylvia Sarnik. They share a singular focus. The crew is family, the boathouse a second home, and this race, for the next 18 minutes, is the only thing in the world.

Earlier in the day, the three chatted with Tawde about why the grueling training is worth it. At practice, they say, you leave everything on land and enter a different state of being. “It brings a clarity of mind. Out on the water, solutions come to me,” says Lauer. Indeed, they feel rowing can be transcendent. “I love when it’s nighttime, and the water is like glass, and you just feel like you are flying along effortlessly,” says Rollock. Sarnik jumps in: “It’s like the boat just moves on its own.” Tawde smiles, and quips, “For me it does.”

Bow 39 is passing the Riverside Boat Club. “Stay calm and stay aggressive,” shouts Thacker. The crew is racing at 34 strokes per minute, led by seniors and co-captains Priya Veeraraghavan and Sharon Wu, who set a powerful rhythm from the stern. They are competing against eight boats, including crews from Boston University, Harvard University, and Princeton University. Sarnik, in the bow, is giving it her all. She wants to execute well, as the coach says, and meet her own potential. And it wouldn’t hurt, she thinks, to beat Princeton.

As bow 39 nears the Weeks Footbridge, the crowd erupts. Rachel Osmundsen and other members of the crew team not competing this afternoon had timed a run from the MIT boathouse so they would be on hand to cheer. They join relatives from the U.S. and Canada — grandmothers, parents, cousins, siblings — and channel goodwill and energy into a single phrase: “Go MIT!”

Just ahead flash the orange and black oars of the Princeton crew. Bow 39 is gaining steadily. Their strokes are strong and even. “There is a weird difference between being in synch and really being in synch,” Rollock says. They are really in synch now. At the final stretch, Thacker screams, “Get us across the finish line!” And the 39 pulls by Princeton, crossing the finish line at 18 minutes and 34 seconds. The Engineers place third, the highest ever finish for an eight-rower boat in the lightweight women’s division at the Head of the Charles in MIT history. Lauer, to her own surprise, bursts into tears.

The crew in 39 wasn’t the only boat to make history. In their earlier race, the women in bow 29 pulled from fifth to third place in the final 500 meters, securing the best finish for a four-rower team in program history. “We walked up during the last stretch despite the weather conditions,” says Tawde. Same for 39, says Sarnik. “In the final stretch, as we passed Princeton, we had it all together,” she says. “It didn’t even hurt to pull literally as hard as I could because I knew we were all in it together.”

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New engineering faculty for 2016-2017

The School of Engineering will welcome 13 new faculty members to its departments, institutes, labs, and centers during the 2016-17 academic year. With research and teaching activities ranging from nuclear fusion to computational complexity theory, they are poised to make vast contributions to new directions across the school and to a range of labs and centers across the Institute.

“We are pleased to welcome such a talented group of faculty to engineering at MIT this year,” says Ian A. Waitz, dean of the School of Engineering. “Every year we broaden the scope and the scale of what we can do, and of how we think about engineering. Our new faculty are often the ones who show us the way forward.”

The new School of Engineering faculty members are:

Adam Belay will join the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science as an assistant professor in July 2017. He holds a PhD in computer science from Stanford University, where he was a member of the secure computer systems group and the multiscale architecture and systems team. Previously, he worked on storage virtualization at VMware Inc. and contributed substantial power-management code to the Linux Kernel project. Belay’s research area is operating systems and networking. Much of his work has focused on restructuring computer systems so that developers can more easily reach the full performance potential of hardware. He received a Stanford graduate fellowship, a VMware graduate fellowship, and an OSDI Jay Lepreau best paper award.

Matteo Bucci will join the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE) faculty as an assistant professor in the fall of 2016. He received his PhD in nuclear engineering from the University of Pisa in Italy in 2009. A research scientist in NSE since 2015, Bucci was previously at Commissariat à l’énergie atomique in France, where he led several research projects in experimental and computational thermal-hydraulics for light water reactors and sodium fast reactors. His research will focus in two main areas: heat transfer nanoengineering innovations to improve the safety and economic competitiveness of nuclear reactors, and advanced diagnostics and intelligent systems to improve situational awareness, fault detection and diagnostics, and anticipated failures in nuclear power plants. Bucci is an active member of the Consortium for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems, one of the MIT’s eight Low-Carbon Energy Centers.

Tal Cohen will join the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering as an assistant professor in November 2016. After she received her PhD in aerospace engineering in 2013 from Technion University in Israel, she came to MIT for a two-year postdoctoral position in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. She is currently a postdoc at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. Cohen works in mechanics, especially the mechanics of structures subjected to extreme loading conditions and shock wave propagation. Her work on the mechanics of stretchable materials that can undergo extreme deformations up to loss of stability, and on the mechanics of growth in both biology and engineering, exploits analogies with related fields. By employing complex nonlinear material models, Cohen’s research group will focus on deriving theoretical models that can significantly affect our understanding of observed phenomena but are still simple enough to be applied in design or characterization of materials.

Zachary Hartwig will join the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering in January 2017 as an assistant professor. He will also receive a co-appointment at the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC). He received his PhD from MIT in 2014 for the development of a novel accelerator-based technique that advanced the ability to study the dynamic interaction of confined plasmas and the surrounding solid materials — known as plasma-material interactions — in fusion devices. Since 2014, he has been a postdoc at the PSFC, continuing to develop diagnostic techniques for plasma-material interactions, leading the establishment of a new laboratory for accelerator-based nuclear science, and leading the design of high-magnetic field net energy gain fusion devices that leverage new superconducting magnet technology. Hartwig’s research will focus on the development and application of particle accelerators, radiation detectors, and computational radiation transport simulations to magnetic fusion energy, nuclear security, and radiation damage in nuclear materials. He presently holds a U.S. Department of Energy ORISE Fellowship in the fusion energy sciences and is the recipient of the Del Favero doctoral thesis prize.

Ali Jadbabaie joined the MIT faculty as a full professor with dual appointments in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society in July 2016. He is currently the JR East Professor of Engineering, the director of the Sociotechnical Systems Research Center, and the associate director of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society at MIT. He is also a principal investigator in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems. Jadbabaie received his BS from Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, Iran, his MS in electrical and computer engineering from the University of New Mexico, and his PhD in control and dynamical systems from Caltech. After a year as a postdoc at Yale University, he joined the faculty at University of Pennsylvania in July 2002. At Penn he was named an associate professor with tenure in 2008, a full professor in 2011, and the Alfred Fitler Moore Professor of Network Science in 2013. He also held appointments in computer and information science and operations as well as information and decisions in the Wharton School of Business. Jadbabaie is the inaugural editor-in-chief of IEEE Transactions on Network Science and Engineering, an interdisciplinary journal sponsored by several IEEE societies. He is a recipient of a National Science Foundation Career Award, an Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award. In 2015, he received the Vannevar Bush Fellowship (formerly known as National Security Science and an Engineering Faculty Fellowship) from the office of Secretary of Defense. Jadbabaie’s students have won and been finalists of numerous best paper awards at various ACC and CDC conferences. He is also an IEEE fellow. He has made foundational contributions to the field of collective autonomy and opinion dynamics, and his current research interests include the interplay of dynamic systems and networks with specific emphasis on multi-agent coordination and control, distributed optimization, network science, and network economics.

Carmen Guerra-Garcia will join the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics as an assistant professor in the fall of 2017. Graduating from the Universidad Politecnica de Madrid with an aeronautical engineering degree in 2007, Guerra-Garcia then matriculated in the Space Propulsion Laboratory at MIT. She completed her PhD with a concentration in plasma physics and propulsion and a minor in numerical methods in 2014. Following a one-year postdoctoral position with Professor Paulo Lozano, Guerra-Garcia relocated to Boeing Madrid for a year. Her research will focus on the study of plasmas for aerospace applications, including plasma-assisted combustion, space propulsion, and lightning strikes on aircraft.

Stefanie Mueller will join the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science as an assistant professor in January 2017. She received her PhD in human-computer interaction (HCI) from the Hasso Plattner Institute in 2016, where she also received an MS in IT-systems engineering. In her research, Mueller develops novel interactive hardware and software systems that advance personal fabrication technologies. Her work has been published at the most selective HCI venues — Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Conference for Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), and User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) — and received a best paper award and two best-paper nominees. Mueller is an associate chair of the program committees at ACM, CHI, and UIST, and is a general co-chair for the ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Computational Fabrication that will take place at MIT in June 2017. She has been an invited speaker at MIT, Stanford, the University of California at Berkeley, Harvard, Carnegie Mellon University, Cornell University, Microsoft Research, Disney Research, Adobe Research, and others. In addition, her work has been covered widely in New Scientist, BBC, The Atlantic, and The Guardian. Mueller will head the HCI engineering group at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, which works at the intersection of human-computer interaction, computer graphics, computer vision, and robotics.

Jennifer Rupp will join the Department of Materials Science and Engineering as an assistant professor in January 2017. She studied at the University of Vienna before receiving a PhD in Materials at ETH Zurich. Rupp is a French and German native and is currently an assistant professor of electrochemical materials at ETH Zurich in Switzerland. She was a researcher at the National Institute of Materials Science in Tsukuba, Japan, in 2011, and previously collaborated with MIT professors Tuller and Yildiz. Her research is primarily in solid-state information memory systems, energy storage, and energy harvesting devices. She has worked on new material architectures and ionic transport-structure relations for solid-state ionic conductor thin films, electrochemistry and system aspects for memristors, solid-state batteries, solar-to-fuel conversion, and micro-fuel cells. Rupp’s awards include “top 40 scientist speaker under the age of 40” at the World Economic Forum, Spark Award for most innovative and economic invention by ETH Zurich, and Kepler Award for New Energy Materials by the European Academy of Science.

Max Shulaker joined the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science as an assistant professor in July. He received his BS, master’s, and PhD in electrical engineering at Stanford, where he was a Fannie and John Hertz Fellow and a Stanford Graduate Fellow. Shulaker’s research focuses on the broad area of nanosystems. His Novel Electronic Systems Group aims to understand and optimize multidisciplinary interactions across the entire computing stack — from low-level synthesis of nanomaterials, to fabrication processes and circuit design for emerging nanotechnologies, up to new architectures — to enable the next generation of high performance and energy-efficient computing systems.

Zachary P. Smith will join the Department of Chemical Engineering as an assistant professor in January, 2017. Smith earned his bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Pennsylvania State’s Schreyer Honors College, and completed his PhD in chemical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, where he worked under the guidance of Benny Freeman and Don Paul. While at UT Austin, Smith developed structure/property relationships for gas diffusion and sorption in polymer membranes. His postdoctoral training with Jeffrey Long at the UC Berkeley examined the design of coordination solid (i.e. metal-organic frameworks) for selective adsorption based separations. His research focuses on the molecular-level design, synthesis, and characterization of polymers and inorganic materials for applications in membrane and adsorption-based separations. These efforts are promising for gas-phase separations critical to the energy industry and to the environment, such as the purification of olefins and the capture of CO₂ from flue stacks at coal-fired power plants. Smith has co-authored over 20 peer-reviewed papers and been recognized with several awards, including the DoE Office of Science Graduate Fellowship. He was also selected as a U.S. delegate to the Lindau Nobel Laureate meeting on Chemistry in 2013.

David Sontag will join the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in January 2017 as an assistant professor. He earned his bachelor’s degree in computer science at UC Berkeley and his PhD in computer science at MIT, where he worked in Professor Tommi Jaakola’s group on approximate inference and learning in probabilistic models. Sontag is currently an assistant professor of computer science and data science at New York University. Previously, he was a postdoc at Microsoft Research New England. At MIT, his research will focus on machine learning and probabilistic inference, with a particular focus on applications to clinical medicine. He is currently developing algorithms to learn probabilistic models for medical diagnosis directly from unstructured clinical data, automatically discovering and predicting latent (hidden) variables.

Ryan Williams will join MIT as an associate professor (with tenure) in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in January 2017, pending the approval of his tenure case by the Executive Committee. He received an BA in computer science and mathematics from Cornell, and a PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon. Following postdoctoral appointments at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton) and IBM Almaden, he was an assistant professor of computer science at Stanford for five years. Williams’s research interests are in the theoretical design and analysis of efficient algorithms and in computational complexity theory, focusing mainly on new connections (and consequences) forged between algorithm design and logical circuit complexity. Along with some best paper awards, Williams has received a Sloan Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, a Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship, and was an invited speaker at the 2014 International Congress of Mathematicians.

Virginia Vassilevska Williams will join electrical engineering and computer science as an associate professor in January 2017, pending the approval of her case by Academic Council. She received a BS in mathematics and engineering and applied science from Caltech and a PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), UC Berkeley, and Stanford. Prior to joining MIT, she spent three and a half years as an assistant professor at Stanford. Her research interests are broadly in theoretical computer science, focusing on the design and analysis of algorithms and fine-grained complexity. Her work on matrix multiplication algorithms was covered by the press and is the most cited paper in algorithms and complexity in the last five years.

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Sculpture in the Student Center encourages help-seeking

On Sept. 28, the lobby of MIT’s normally bustling Student Center (Building W20) fell quiet. Students stood up from their laptops and lounge chairs and drifted toward the center stairwell, where Maryanne Kirkbride, MIT Medical’s clinical director for campus sife, announced the unveiling of a new sculpture and interactive project on campus. Onlookers wondered: What was this small glass sculpture and wood tank, entitled “Helping You, Helping Others,” and how might it help the MIT community?

Jared Berezin, lecturer in MIT Comparative Media Studies and Writing, who received a grant from the MindHandHeart Innovation Fund to design the sculpture, was happy to explain. “Seeking help is often a private interaction between two people, rather than a community-wide event. The ‘Helping You, Helping Others’ project aims to take one small step in making the hidden more visible.” 

According to Berezin’ s research, “An estimated 2,000 undergraduate and graduate students visit Mental Health and Counseling (MH&C) at MIT Medical each year. Student Support Services (S3) has well above 5,000 student visits each year.” He hopes the interactive sculpture will tangibly share that data with the community. “When a student visits Mental Health and Counseling, Student Support Services, the MIT Chapel, and other resources at MIT to seek support of any kind, the student can take a wooden marble from a bowl in the department’s waiting room, and deposit it in the installation. As marbles accumulate over time, the sculpture will provide a visible reminder of how common help-seeking behavior is, and students who are struggling may be inspired to reach out for help when they need it,” he told the crowd.

Berezin then introduced four students whose personal challenges, or concern for others, led them to seek help at MIT. Each student dropped a marble into the sculpture and shared their own story of reaching out to friends and the supportive services available at MIT. Each story described how asking for led to growth — personally and academically.

Flora Liu, a senior in mechanical engineering, began by sharing: “I learned that rather than waiting for someone else to notice that I might need help that I need to treat myself like I am worth taking the time to get help.” Lorraine Wong, a major in brain and cognitive studies and women's and gender studies — who is also Berezin’s co-chair on the MindHandHeart Help-Seeking Working Group and head of special projects at Active Minds at MIT — shared that “Everyone can feel better by talking to someone, whether it’s a clinician, a friend, or any of the support resources we have on campus.”

Juliana Kerrest, an MBA candidate in the MIT Sloan School of Management in a dual degree program with the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, told her story of struggling with depression and balancing a demanding course load. Juliana explained, “When I started to get sick, things changed and I began to fall behind in my academics. I spoke with the Disabilities Services Office, [Office for the Dean of Graduate Education], and MIT Medical, and I got advice on how to talk with my teachers. They helped me to express that I was committed to my schoolwork, but that I had something very serious going on. The resource professionals that I talked to helped me be able to attend the Kennedy School because I had so many advocates.”

Kathy Dieppa, a senior in civil and environmental engineering who is also vice president of Active Minds at MIT, spoke last and shared what it was like to switch from the class of 2016 to 2017 after taking a semester off. “Taking a leave from MIT turned out to be the best decision I ever made. Coming back was scary, but I was careful. Since then, I’ve felt I had a responsibility to my peers to make sure they know about the resources here.”

Berezin emphasized that each of the speakers displayed “exactly the kind of behavior that we as teachers, staff, and administrators should be proud of, model, and celebrate for our students.” Though seeking help may feel like a solitary action, it is one that connects the entire campus community. In addition to students, the crowd represented a cross-section of the community, including Chancellor Cynthia Barnhart; Senior Associate Dean of Student Support and Wellbeing David Randall; Office of Minority Education Director DiOnetta Jones Crayton; Assistant Dean of Graduate Support and Advising Jason McKnight; counselors from MH&C; MIT Chaplains; and members of the Department of Facilities. Also in the crowd and eager to participate were various faculty members, about 200 students, and representatives from MIT Libraries, the Alumni Association, and the Department of Athletics Physical Education and Recreation (DAPER).

Berezin then thanked the artisans who crafted the sculpture’s glass and wood elements at Fiamma Glass in Waltham, Massachusetts, and Mark Ferioli Woodworking in West Bridgewater, Massachusetts. Berezin also expressed his gratitude to his wife, Laurie Berezin, who helped design the sculpture; the MindHandHeart Initiative, which supported the project; and Campus Activities Complex Associate Director Mike Foley, who found space in W20 for the sculpture.

Less than a month since its launch, the sculpture in W20 has started to amass a ground coat of marbles. Glass bowls filled with marbles can now be found in MH&C, S-cubed, the Office of the Chancellor, the Office for the Dean of Graduate Education, the MIT Chapel, the Division of Student Life, the Undergraduate Advising and Academic Programming Office, MIT Community Wellness, various MIT Libraries, the School of Architecture and Planning, School of Engineering, and a growing list of others. Departments services, or individual staff, faculty, and students interested in distributing marbles, should contact berezin@mit.edu. The “Helping You, Helping Others” sculpture will remain beside the stairwell in W20 throughout 2016-2017, collecting marbles.

MindHandHeart Initiative’s Innovation Fund grants, like the one that supported “Helping You, Helping Others,” are currently available. Now through Oct. 31, MIT students, staff, and faculty can submit project ideas in an easy and automated online application.

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Retracing the origins of a massive, multi-ring crater

Scientists from MIT and elsewhere have reconstructed the extreme collision that created one of the moon’s largest craters, 3.8 billion years ago. The team has retraced the moon’s dramatic response in the first hours following the massive impact, and identified the processes by which large, multi-ring basins can form in the aftermath of such events.

The findings, published today in two papers in the journal Science, may shed light on how giant impacts shaped the evolution of the moon, and even life on Earth, shortly after the planets formed.

The team’s results pertain to the moon’s Orientale basin, an expansive, bull’s eye-shaped depression on the southwestern edge of the moon, just barely visible from Earth. The basin is surrounded by three concentric rings of rock, the largest one stretching 580 miles across — about three times as wide as the state of Massachusetts. Until now, it’s been unclear how such massive, multi-ring basins materialized.

Using data collected by NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission, the researchers determined that the 3.8-billion-year-old basin was created by a huge impactor that punched an initial, transient crater into the lunar surface, measuring up to 285 miles in diameter — about as wide as the state of New York.

This impact, the researchers calculated, sent at least 816,000 cubic miles of pulverized lunar crust flying out from the impact site — an amount equivalent to 135 times the combined volume of the Great Lakes.

The ejected material, which the team modeled in computer simulations, rose up like a tidal wave, then crashed down to the lunar surface, creating giant faults through the entire crust and forming two concentric walls of rock on the surface, each rising several kilometers high. Most of the action, according to simulations, occurred over just a couple of hours.  

If such massive, violent impacts were pummeling the moon, they must have been doing the same, if not more, to the Earth, says Maria Zuber, vice president for research and the E.A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics at MIT.

“What’s interesting is, this was during the time when the first life forms were starting to emerge on the Earth,” says Zuber, who is the principal investigator for GRAIL and lead author on one of the Science papers. “These very large impacts probably came in, sterilizing the surface, and goodness knows how many times nascent life may have started and stopped and had to start again. It’s just amazing how catastrophic these impacts were.”

Above is the most realistic animation of the Orientale crater collapse and ring formation. Colors denote temperature, from hot, red crustal material to cooler material, in blue. Over a little more than 2 hours, the animation shows the moon’s initially cool surface as it responds to a very large impact. Instantly, the energy from the collision heats up the material closest to the impact, and the crust surges more than 100 km above the lunar surface, before crashing back down. The pulverized material oscillates back and forth for 2 hours before settling into the pattern of the present-day basin. (Courtesy of the researchers. Animation has been sped up.)

Flying low

The team’s results are based on gravity field measurements taken by GRAIL’s twin spacecraft, which orbited the moon from January to mid-December in 2012. In the waning days of the mission, the GRAIL probes were programmed to fly over the Orientale basin, dropping their altitude to just 1.2 miles above the basin’s rings — even lower than the altitude at which commercial jets fly over the Earth. Flying so close to the ground, the probes were able to take measurements of the basin’s gravity field at high spatial resolution, providing scientists with a precise map of the moon’s interior mass distribution.

Zuber, who directed the mission and led the planning of the probes’ route, notes that the Orientale basin is the best-preserved large impact basin on the moon, having undergone very little transformation since it first formed. For this reason, the basin is considered a relatively pristine example of what the moon and the Earth experienced during a period in which the solar system was dominated by large, catastrophic impacts.

“The interesting thing is, if you look up at the moon, you see all these craters, and Earth used to look like that — it went through a very similar bombardment history,” Zuber says. “In trying to reconstruct the extreme environmental conditions that existed during this period of time, we have a clearer window into the past through studying basins on the moon, because the record of those impacts isn’t preserved on the Earth.”

Measured impact

In one of two papers in Science, Zuber and her colleagues analyzed GRAIL’s gravity field measurements and were able to solve a key mystery, namely, the size and location of the basin’s transient crater, which is the initial depression created when an asteroid blasts material out from the lunar surface. In smaller impacts, the transient crater is largely preserved. But in very large collisions, the transient crater collapses due to loss of strength in the target crust, erasing any hint of the impactor’s size.

In the case of the Orientale basin, many scientists had thought that one of its three rings might represent the transient crater. But the new measurements of the basin’s gravity field show that the transient crater may have been somewhere between the two inner rings, spanning around 200 to 300 miles across. From the size of the transient crater, the team estimated that the initial impact blasted away about 816,000 cubic miles of lunar crust. The gravity signal also showed that two huge faults exist beneath the basin’s two outer rings.

“One of the really exciting results in this paper is, the outer two basin rings correspond to massive faults,” Zuber says. “And we were able to detect that these faults appear to have penetrated entirely through the crust and into the mantle, which is quite something.”

Making a bull’s-eye

In the second paper, led by Brandon Johnson, a former MIT postdoc in Zuber’s group and now an assistant professor at Brown University, the team created a computer simulation to reconstruct the first hours following the initial impact that created the Orientale basin. The team ran the simulation multiple times, with varying conditions, until the final basin and its concentric rings matched the observations made by GRAIL.

Based on these simulations, the team estimated that the basin was carved out by a 40-mile-wide object that collided with the moon at about 9 miles per second, or 32,400 miles per hour. The impact pulverized the underlying crust, and the propagation and subsequent unloading of the shockwave caused material to rise up, then crash back down, sloshing back and forth in a wave-like fashion for the next two hours. The material eventually settled back to the surface in the pattern of the basin’s two outermost rings, each rising several kilometers high. This entire process obliterated any trace of the initial crater.

The simulations showed that the basin’s innermost ring was formed by a different process. While smaller impacts can cause material in a crater to flow inward, forming a mound in the middle, Orientale’s central mound was so large that it was unstable. The material eventually collapsed, forming the basin’s innermost ring.

“Ultimately, what this tells us is that the early history of the planets, at the time life was developing on Earth, was an extraordinarily hostile environment,” Zuber says. “There were extreme, energetic events that produced remarkably difficult environmental conditions. Maybe that’s why life is as tenacious as it is, because life forms somehow developed in the time subsequent to these catastrophic events. They were tough little buggers.”

This research was supported by the NASA Discovery Program. The papers’ authors from MIT include David Smith, Katarina Miljković, and Jason Soderblom.

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