Shirley Jackson speaks about her career and being an agent for change

On Sept. 26, Shirley Ann Jackson ’68 PhD ’73 returned to campus for a discussion with an audience of students, alumni, and friends about her career highlights and the direction of science education.

Jackson is the president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and an MIT Corporation life member. She received her bachelor’s degree from MIT in 1968, continuing her graduate work, in part, to create opportunities for other underrepresented minorities at MIT. She earned a doctorate in particle physics in 1973, becoming the first African American woman to receive a PhD from MIT and the second African American woman in the United States to earn a doctorate in physics.

Roughly 100 people, including students, alumni, and administrators joined Jackson for the conversation in the Media Lab, while others joined the live Facebook webcast. Paula Hammond, a David H. Koch Professor in Engineering and the head of MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering, facilitated the conversation hosted by MIT School of Science, MIT School of Engineering, and the National Science and Technology Medals Foundation (NSTMF). 

Andy Rathman-Noonan, executive director of NSTMF, opened the event by acknowledging Jackson as one of MIT’s 63 laureates who have received the nation’s highest honor in science or technology and innovation.

“Behind each one of these discoveries, and hundreds more, are extraordinary individuals who have struggled and persevered to answer some of the world’s biggest questions and solve its toughest challenges,” said Rathman-Noonan. “But they were all in your shoes at one point in their lives.”

MIT President L. Rafael Reif then took the podium to introduce the evening’s distinguished alumna.

He spoke about Jackson’s time at MIT, including the “profoundly important role” that she played in the Task Force for Educational Opportunity, a group led by the late Paul Gray, MIT president during Jackson’s time as a student.

Reif said Jackson, Gray, and others on the taskforce “put MIT on the path to become the diverse community we know today. I believe, however, that it’s still worth asking that same question [posed by the taskforce]: ‘How can we together make this place change?’”

Bees, Brown v. Board of Ed, and Sputnik

Hammond began her line of questioning asking who or what inspired Jackson to pursue science. “Bumblebees got me started,” said Jackson who detailed how she would systematically observe and modify their behavior as a budding scientist interested in the natural world.

She also spoke about her parents as “aspirational role models,” specifically her father, an officer who earned a Bronze Star during World War II for an ingenious mechanical solution for amphibious vehicles with malfunctioning rudders.

Jackson said that the confluence of two events in her early education “changed her educational trajectory” toward science and engineering: the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision and the launch of Sputnik, the first satellite to orbit Earth launched by the Soviet Union.

With the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court case decision to desegregate public schools, in practical terms, Jackson said it mean that “instead of traveling miles across town, my sisters and I got to go to school around the corner,” said Jackson. The integration of the schools came with a new tracking system, and Jackson was placed in an accelerated honors track. 

“That coincided with the interest in the country after the Sputnik launch to strengthen math and science in the public schools — and I am a public school product — and so I ended up with a very strong academic background,” Jackson said. “I was my high school valedictorian, and I came to MIT.”

Change agent

Hammond followed with the question: “At the time you decided to attend MIT there were very few people of color visible in the sciences anywhere, including on this campus. What was it like to be a black student entering MIT at that time?” 

“On the one hand, it was exhilarating being at MIT.” Jackson replied. “I wanted to be a scientist and I loved the subject matter. But on the other, it was isolating and rather lonely. I can’t say it was easy. The academics were never the problem.”

Although admitting to being “a bit a nerd,” Jackson said that most of her “social life” happened off-campus, such as her membership in the Delta Sigma Theta sorority, which included friends in the audience such as Jennifer Rudd ’68 and Linda Sharpe ‘69, former president of the MIT Alumni Association. 

In response to Hammond’s question about being a “change agent” to improve the quality of education for underrepresented minorities at MIT, Jackson detailed how she, Rudd, and Sharpe were galvanized by the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. in April of 1968.

“I had been a pretty quiet student before then, focusing on what I was doing: physics, working in the lab,” Jackson said. But after that pivotal event, Jackson gathered Rudd, Sharpe and others to “present some demands. By the time they were written, they were called ‘proposals.’”

The proposals that Jackson and others presented to then MIT President Gray formed the foundation of the Task Force for Educational Opportunity. Jackson described the discussions on financial aid, recruitment, and summer programming, which later became MIT’s Interphase program to boost the numbers of African-American students.

“We did go from having three to five African-American students per year, to 57 the year after we started the task force,” said Jackson. Hammond noted that Jackson was doing this work while a doctoral student in particle physics.

Jackson said completing the academic work was a foregone conclusion. “It’s important to focus on what one is here for. […] I felt that it was important that African-Americans, as I feel it’s important for many [others] to study and become scientists and engineers, and that I become one,” she said in a list of advice that she gave to students.

Vision and leadership

Hammond then switched gears to ask Jackson about her time at Bell Labs, as well as her time as the chair of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) under President Bill Clinton. 

“That was a big change because I had to walk away from my tenured professorship and what I was doing,” said Jackson who joined the NRC in 1995. Jackson talked about how nuclear incidents, such as the accident at Three-Mile Island and the Chernobyl disaster, were informing the nuclear industry and people’s perceptions about the future of nuclear power.

She said that she wanted to provide the NRC with a vision and direction to “reaffirm its fundamental health and safety mission and enhance its effectiveness” as a regulatory body. As chair, she also developed a new licensing and renewal process, as well as established the International Nuclear Regulators Association that still exists today.

In 1999, President Clinton asked Jackson to serve an additional term as NRC chair, but she opted instead to become president of RPI.

Hammond asked, “What was exciting and appealed to you about taking on this new role?”

“First of all, I’m an MIT grad, right?” Jackson said. “So to be able to become the president of another great technological university was a big thing.”

Hammond followed up by asking about Jackson’s thought process in laying out and executing a vision for RPI.

“[RPI] is a place that has turned out people who’ve made some of the greatest impacts, as MIT has, on our lives — not just nationally, but globally,” said Jackson. “The university needed an aspirational vision,” said Jackson, “and that was to become a top-tier, world-class technical research university with global reach and global impact.”

Hammond concluded the formal part of her questions by asking Jackson why, in an already busy schedule, she adds leadership positions such as serving on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, the Secretary of Energy’s advisory board, and, most recently as co-chair of President Obama’s Intelligence Advisory Board.

“[There’s] a unique role that scientists and engineers can play in making a difference in people’s lives,” said Jackson. “Because of that, if I could do it, at the levels that I’ve been asked to do it, that it’s important to serve.”

Hammond then opened the floor to questions, many of which came from students, including one question from junior Anthony Rollins, current events co-chair of MIT’s Black Students Union.

“What made you want to leave tech and industry for administration and policy?” Rollins asked. 

“There are many ways to make contributions. And one can make them directly being in science and engineering, but one may come a point where one feels there are ways to take that knowledge and background and have a broader impact across a broader front,” said Jackson. “But, I’ve never done public policy that doesn’t link to science and technology.”

“What I do today is less about my doing research directly, which is what I did early in my career, but enabling others and bringing along the next generation of scientists and engineers.” 

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Clearing the air

This past June, Grace Li '17 stepped off a plane in Paris ready to spend her summer tracking down a silent killer. Now Li, her former teammates, and the flock of trained pigeons who also contributed to the project are about to get closer to their goal.

Li, then a recent mechanical engineering graduate, is one of seven MIT students who have interned with Plume Labs, a Paris-based startup that builds air quality sensing and forecasting technologies. Over the past three years, Plume Labs has recruited four summer interns from the MIT-France Program, which is part of the MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI), and three one-month interns from the MIT Alumni Association’s Student Externship program to help design, build, and test the Flow tracker, a wearable device that tracks indoor and outdoor air pollution.

Dubbed a "Fitbit for air quality" by TechCruch, the Flow tracker contains customized sensors that detect nearby air pollutants, including nitrogen dioxide, dust, particulate matter, and volatile organic compounds common in household products. While individuals can use the information to create personalized routes and routines that reduce pollution exposure, Flow also crowdsources data when enough users are active, providing maps in real-time of pollution levels throughout a neighborhood or city.

“I’m interested in making products and designing user experiences that really have a significant positive impact on people’s lives. I think that’s very easy to justify with making air quality data more accessible, more available, more transparent,” says Li, who spent her internship building a calibration chamber and running tests on Flow’s air quality sensors, redesigning the leather strap that allows users to attach the product to a bag or bike, and leading package design on the preorder shipments. “This is one of those issues that I feel like sometimes doesn’t get enough attention, even though [air pollution] has become pretty prevalent in many areas and has a significant effect on our health.”

That effect is so great, the World Health Organization (WHO) calls air pollution “the world’s largest single environmental health risk” and links outdoor air pollution to approximately 3 million deaths per year. An estimated 92 percent of the global population lives in areas where air pollution exceeds WHO safety limits, but tracking where these airborne toxins are isn’t always easy, says Romain Lacombe SM '08, founder of Plume Labs and an alumnus of MIT’s Technology and Policy Program. That’s because pollution concentration levels vary significantly depending on weather patterns, time of day, geography, sun exposure, interactions between airborne chemicals, and a host of other variables.

“This means that it's hard for anyone to know what they're really exposed to and so it makes it all the more difficult to take action to try to decrease your end exposure,” Lacombe adds.

Lacombe founded Plume Labs in 2014 with a mission to make air pollution data more accessible to both policymakers and the general public. The company released their Air Report app the following year. Air Report is a mobile app that collects pollution data from government sources around the world and uses it to construct models that predict hourly pollutant concentration levels and the best and worst times to be outside. Currently available for more than 200 cities worldwide, these large-scale predictions provide general guidance for how users could avoid air pollution Lacombe says, but didn’t provide granular information on toxins in a specific neighborhood or on a particular street.

Offering that intelligence in real-time would require lots of ground-level data, so the Plume Labs team decided that making a portable, light-weight pollution tracker would require a custom sensor. Since temperature and humidity impact measurement technologies, the sensor would have to not only detect a wide array of pollution levels, but needed to function across a broad spectrum of environmental conditions.

Plume Labs built several prototype sensors. Some of them took to the skies literally on the backs of birds in March 2016, when Plume partnered with Twitter UK and the DigitasLBi marketing agency to raise awareness about local air quality by strapping tiny, internet-ready, sensor-laden backpacks onto a half dozen trained pigeons. As the flock dispersed, curious Londoners could tweet their own location to @PigeonAir and receive data on pollution levels in their area. Media attention of the stunt garnered by the project paved the way for recruiting Flow beta testers.

By the time sophomore mechanical engineering student Annie Dai arrived for her MISTI internship in June 2016, Plume was getting its sensor ready for the commercial market. The research and development team had built prototype printed circuit boards, and Dai split her summer between research work in France and collaboration with a contract design studio in London to help develop the Flow tracker’s physical design. That meant building a series of pollution sensor prototypes, measuring their performance under a wide variety of conditions, and analyzing exactly how much air would need to go through the Flow tracker to get accurate pollution measurements.

“This was probably the best summer I’ve had in my life, and I think that was partially because it’s the most responsibility I’ve been given on a project,” says Dai, now a senior. “After that summer, I kind of fell in love with the whole startup feel. I like how much responsibility you’re given and how much your work impacts the final product.”

The final Flow tracker product debuted at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last January and launched for pre-orders this week. Flow is expected to reach the retail market by June, 2018.

Grace Li and Annie Dai are unsure of exactly what they’ll be doing then, but both credit their MISTI internships as shaping their career plans. After getting a taste of the startup life while working in Plume Labs, Dai co-founded Octant, a startup that curates data for the autonomous vehicles industry. Li says that her internship solidified her desire to work in product development and increased her interest in working internationally. She is currently taking a gap year and investigation positions in Europe.

“I’m really excited to see the work that I did over the summer is actually being launched,” she says. “It’s really exciting.”

MISTI, MIT’s flagship international education program, is a part of the Center for International Studies, a program at the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (SHASS).

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DesignIntelligence ranks MIT graduate architecture program among top in nation

The professional master's of architecture program at MIT has again been ranked among the top five in the nation in the latest DesignIntelligence rankings. MIT's architecture program has consistently appeared among the top 10 in this annual assessment of nationally accredited graduate programs.

In ratings of specific skills areas, MIT’s graduate architecture program ranked second in research.

The 2018 rankings were based on a survey conducted by DesignIntelligence — an architectural research organization — and released by Architectural Record magazine

To arrive at the rankings, DesignIntelligence polled 2,654 hiring professionals at architecture and design firms across the United States to learn about their experiences in hiring architecture graduates. When 215 architecture deans and chairs were asked by DesignIntelligence to name the graduate architecture programs that they most admired, MIT earned the No. 2 spot.

Further details on survey methodology are available on the Architectural Record website. Information about the annual rankings is also published in DesignIntelligence's reports, including lists of the firms and employing organizations participating in the research.

In current global assessments, MIT architecture is rated No. 1 by QS World University Rankings, with MIT as a whole retaining its No. 1 position for the sixth straight year. QS rankings are based on academic reputation, employer reputation, and research accomplishments. The Times Higher Education 2018 World University Rankings named MIT the No. 2 university worldwide for arts and humanities.

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Alex Creely: Bridging the simulation vs. reality gap

“This is probably the stereotypical story, but I always enjoyed building stuff when I was younger, using LEGOs, putting things together, figuring things out.”

In his third year at MIT, Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE) graduate student Alex Creely has figured out enough about the hot, turbulent plasmas necessary for creating fusion energy that his research has been honored with an Innovations in Fuel Cycle Research Award, given by the Office of Nuclear Energy, Nuclear Technology R&D of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Working at the Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC), Creely is using data from the Alcator C-Mod tokamak to validate simulations of fusion plasmas. His effort could provide researchers with confidence that their simulations will accurately predict what will happen in a working fusion device, which could influence the design of future machines.

Tokamaks use magnets to confine plasmas within a vacuum vessel long enough for fusion to take place. Creely’s research examines two different ways of confining the plasma — L-mode and I-mode — in the Alcator C-Mod.

“L-mode is what happens when you turn on the tokamak, add fuel and heat, but don’t do anything special to it. I-mode represents an ‘improved’ regime that helps trap extra energy, so that with the same machine you get a hotter plasma. We are trying to apply our knowledge of simulations, apply all the measurements we can make, to better understand why the plasmas in these two modes are different, and what makes I-mode, in some sense, better than L-mode.”

The research honored by the DOE award is for Creely’s work validating the gyrokinetic code GYRO, which simulates plasma turbulence, and in so doing showing how heat transfers through plasma in a tokamak. Creely describes validation as “the process of looking at a code, comparing it to a bunch of experimental data, and then figuring out if the code is correctly representing reality. Is the answer from the code the same as the answer from real life?”

Creely’s summer was devoted to working in Germany on a tokamak called ASDEX Upgrade at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics. He has spent the last six months building a new diagnostic for this machine that measures temperature fluctuations and turbulence in the plasma.

“I like to say I build fancy thermometers. That’s my job,” he says.

The diagnostic, originally designed with eight channels for measurements, now provides 30 channels, allowing researchers greater flexibility while providing a wider range of data. The long-term goal is to do validation studies on ASDEX Upgrade similar to those done on Alcator C-Mod, which completed its final run in September 2016.

Creely is quick to credit collaborators at the PSFC for the success of his research, including his advisor, Anne White, who is the Cecil and Ida Green Associate Professor in Nuclear Engineering; research scientist Nathan Howard; and other diagnosticians and technicians. His work was been recognized recently with MIT’s 2017 Manson Benedict Award, and in 2016 with a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship.

“The PSFC is such a collaborative environment. We have people from mechanical engineering, NSE, physics, electrical engineering, and computer science,” he says. “As a lab the PSFC combines all these skill sets from different departments, and it allows you to do stuff that no one department could do by itself, which I think is one of our big strengths.”

This sense of collaboration and connection with others pervades his life both inside and outside of the PFSC. As a graduate resident tutor, Creely regularly devises activities to help foster community within his dorm. As a member of the MIT Ballroom Dance Team, he works with his partner and his teammates to continually improve their performances. And in the hallways of NW21, he can often be found guiding a group of high school students to the control room, explaining to them what drew him to study fusion, and what MIT has to offer.

“I want to stay in fusion,” he says about his plans after graduation. “It has interesting problems to solve, interesting physics to learn. But I also feel it is something meaningful I can do to help solve the world’s need for a safe, reliable, carbon-free source of energy. Fusion, when it works, will really make a difference in the world. Working on even one little piece of that means that I’m dedicating myself to making a difference.” 

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MIT to host summit on climate leadership in northeast U.S., eastern Canada

MIT will host a summit this December to highlight the regional leadership of the northeast U.S. and eastern Canada in responding to climate change and to explore strategies for building on that leadership.

The summit, to be held on MIT’s campus on Dec. 7 and 8, will bring together policymakers, researchers, and business and civic leaders from the New England states, Atlantic Canadian provinces, New York, and Québec. Michael R. Bloomberg, the founder of Bloomberg L.P. and Bloomberg Philanthropies, and three-term mayor of New York City, will provide the keynote address at the summit.

The region has a significant history of collaborating on climate and energy policies. In 2001, for example, the New England governors and Eastern Canadian premiers adopted a regional climate change action plan that called for significant long-term reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

Continued leadership at the regional level has become even more important in light of the decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement on climate. The summit will focus on key policy issues confronting states and provinces as they work to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, including improving electricity markets, reducing emissions from transportation, and pricing carbon emissions.

“Now more than ever, state and provincial governments help form the front lines in the fight against climate change,” says Maria T. Zuber, MIT’s vice president for research. “Our goal with this summit is to highlight the important work that is happening in our region, deepen connections between researchers and policymakers, and support the kind of cross-border collaboration that is so critical to making progress.”

Bloomberg is one of the world’s leading voices on the opportunity for subnational governments to lead the effort to address climate change. He serves as the United Nations secretary-general’s special envoy for cities and climate change, and along with California Governor Jerry Brown, in July he launched “America’s Pledge,” an initiative to quantify the actions of states, cities, and businesses in the United States to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions consistent with the goals of the Paris climate agreement.

"Given MIT's commitment to advancing effective, science-based climate policy and action, we are delighted that Michael Bloomberg has agreed to join this summit as our keynote speaker," says L. Rafael Reif, MIT’s president. "No one has a more compelling vision of the pivotal role for state and local governments in confronting climate change, and no one has done more to inspire collaborative action."

Bloomberg’s new book, Climate of Hope, co-authored with former Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope, offers a bottom-up vision for how states, cities, regions, businesses, and organizations can confront the challenge of climate change.

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A concrete solution

Cement materials, including cement paste, mortar, and concrete, are the most widely manufactured materials in the world. Their carbon footprint is similarly hefty: The processes involved in making cement contribute almost 6 percent of global carbon emissions.

The demand for these materials is unlikely to decline any time soon. In the United States, the majority of concrete bridges, buildings, and pavement-lined streets, erected in the 1960s and 1970s, were designed in an era with fewer environmental stresses to infrastructure and built to last 50 years at most.

Now, MIT researchers have discovered the beginnings of a new approach to producing concrete that is inspired by the hierarchical arrangements of simple building blocks in natural materials. The findings could lead to new ways to make concrete stronger and to use more sustainable, local materials as additives, to offset concrete’s greenhouse gas emissions.

In the new study, Oral Buyukozturk, a professor of civil and environmental engineering, and his colleagues analyzed a key property in concrete, at the level of individual atoms, that contributes to its overall strength and durability. The group developed a computer model to simulate the behavior of individual atoms which arrange to form molecular building blocks within a hardening material.

These simulations revealed that an interface within the molecular structure exhibited a “frictional” resistance under sliding deformation. The team then developed a cohesive-frictional force field, or model, that incorporates these atom-to-atom interactions within larger-scale particles, each containing thousands of atoms. The researchers say that accurately describing the forces within these assemblies is critical to understanding the way strength develops in concrete materials.

The team is now examining ways in which the cohesive and frictional forces of groups of atoms, or colloids in cement, are improved by mixing in certain additives such as volcanic ash, refinery slag, and other materials. The team’s computer model may help designers choose local additives based on the molecular interactions of the resulting mixtures. Through careful design at the microscopic level, he says, designers and engineers can ultimately build stronger, more environmentally sustainable structures.

“The conditions of the world are changing,” Buyukozturk says. “There are increased environmental demands, including from earthquakes and floods, and stresses on infrastructure. We need to come up with materials that are sustainable, with much longer design life and better durability. That is a big challenge.”

Buyukozturk and his colleagues, graduate student Steven Palkovic and Sidney Yip, professor emeritus in MIT’s Department of Nuclear Engineering, have published their results in the Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids.

Strength from friction

Buyukozturk’s vision for revamped, locally sourced concrete is inspired, in part, by Roman construction. During the empire’s peak, the Romans erected temples, bath buildings, and amphiteaters in Pompeii, Ostia, and through Spain and the Middle East, including towns in Turkey, Libya, and Morocco. In each far-flung location, archaeologists have found that the Romans constructed their buildings from local materials — a technique that has helped preserve these structures for more than 2,000 years.

“They probably did this through intuition,” Buyukozturk says. “Ours is an effort to hopefully implement that kind of philosophy of using materials that are locally available, by understanding the underlying scientific principles within those materials.”

In their new paper, the scientists describe a computer model that is part of a computational framework that they have developed to analyze how the atomic structure of concrete affects engineering properties. These models simulate the sliding and movement of clusters of particles at molecular scales within concrete.

The researchers used their atomistic model to simulate mixtures containing Portland cement, the most common type of cement used in the world. Specifically, they simulated the mechanical response of the gel-like substance called calcium-silicate-hydrate (C-S-H), the main phase that forms when water reacts with Portland cement. The group modeled the movements of thousands of atoms in a C-S-H molecular building block, noting the influence of cohesive forces that cause particles to stick together, and the presence of a shear resistance as clusters of atoms slide past each other along a water-filled interface.

They then simulated how these molecular-scale properties control larger particles containing thousands of atoms, or colloids, at what they call the “mesoscale.” They discovered that the degree to which frictional properties resist the movement and separation of colloids at the mesoscale was the strongest factor in determining the strength of concrete at the centimeter scale.

Designers often use the properties of cement at the centimeter scale to predict the strength of a final, much larger-scale structure. The researchers thus implemented the results of their atoms-to-colloids simulations within computer models of the hardened microstructure, to allow for comparison with actual, centimeter-sized laboratory experiments. Buyukozturk found the team’s predictions matched with experimental outcomes better than predictions made with simulations that neglect frictional interactions.

“The material science of cement strength is still in its infancy regarding molecular-level descriptions and an ability to perform quantitative predictions,” Yip says.  “The issue of frictional force, addressed in our work, pertains to the mechanical behavior of cement that varies over time. This rate sensitivity is an aspect of the scientific challenges at the mesoscale, which is the research frontier where microscale concepts and models developed in several physical science disciplines are linked to macroscale properties for technological applications.” 

Buyukozturk adds, “We are confident that our new framework is opening a new era in concrete science.”

Additives in the mix

The group is now working on integrating various additives into their model, to investigate the effect of such materials on the atom-to-atom behavior of cement, and the resulting strength of the final, solidified concrete. From preliminary studies, they have observed that there is a chemical dependence of the friction value, or degree to which colloids resist sliding against each other. Future work will investigate how additives influence the chemical composition of these colloidal phases. This information could be used as part of a database to design and optimize new concrete materials with improved strength and deformation behavior.

“We know relatively little of what happens when additives are used in concrete,” Palkovic says. “We would not expect volcanic ash from Saudi Arabia to give the same performance as volcanic ash from Hawaii. So we need this greater understanding of the material, that starts at the atomistic scale and accounts for the chemistry of the material. That can give us greater control and understanding of how we can use additives to create a better material.”

This research was supported, in part, by the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Sciences, as part of the MIT-Kuwait signature project on sustainability of Kuwait’s built environment.

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First open-access data from large collider confirm subatomic particle patterns

In November of 2014, in a first, unexpected move for the field of particle physics, the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment — one of the main detectors in the world’s largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider — released to the public an immense amount of data, through a website called the CERN Open Data Portal.

The data, recorded and processed throughout the year 2010, amounted to about 29 terabytes of information, yielded from 300 million individual collisions of high-energy protons within the CMS detector. The sharing of these data marked the first time any major particle collider experiment had released such an information cache to the general public.

A new study by Jesse Thaler, an associate professor of physics at MIT and a long-time advocate for open access in particle physics, and his colleagues now demonstrates the scientific value of this move. In a paper published in Physical Review Letters, the researchers used the CMS data to reveal, for the first time, a universal feature within jets of subatomic particles, which are produced when high-energy protons collide. Their effort represents the first independent, published analysis of the CMS open data.

“In our field of particle physics, there isn’t the tradition of making data public,” says Thaler. “To actually get data publicly with no other restrictions — that’s unprecedented.”

Part of the reason groups at the Large Hadron Collider and other particle accelerators have kept proprietary hold over their data is the concern that such data could be misinterpreted by people who may not have a complete understanding of the physical detectors and how their various complex properties may influence the data produced.

“The worry was, if you made the data public, then you would have people claiming evidence for new physics when actually it was just a glitch in how the detector was operating,” Thaler says. “I think it was believed that no one could come from the outside and do those corrections properly, and that some rogue analyst could claim existence of something that wasn’t really there.”

“This is a resource that we now have, which is new in our field,” Thaler adds. “I think there was a reluctance to try to dig into it, because it was hard. But our work here shows that we can understand in general how to use this open data, that it has scientific value, and that this can be a stepping stone to future analysis of more exotic possibilities.”

Thaler’s co-authors are Andrew Larkoski of Reed College, Simone Marzani of the State University of New York at Buffalo, and Aashish Tripathee and Wei Xue of MIT’s Center for Theoretical Physics and Laboratory for Nuclear Science.

Seeing fractals in jets

When the CMS collaboration publicly released its data in 2014, Thaler sought to apply new theoretical ideas to analyze the information. His goal was to use novel methods to study jets produced from the high-energy collision of protons.

Protons are essentially accumulations of even smaller subatomic particles called quarks and gluons, which are bound together by interactions known in physics parlance as the strong force. One feature of the strong force that has been known to physicists since the 1970s describes the way in which quarks and gluons repeatedly split and divide in the aftermath of a high-energy collision.

This feature can be used to predict the energy imparted to each particle as it cleaves from a mother quark or gluon. In particular, physicists can use an equation, known as an evolution equation or splitting function, to predict the pattern of particles that spray out from an initial collision, and therefore the overall structure of the jet produced.

“It’s this fractal-like process that describes how jets are formed,” Thaler says. “But when you look at a jet in reality, it’s really messy. How do you go from this messy, chaotic jet you’re seeing to the fundamental governing rule or equation that generated that jet? It’s a universal feature, and yet it has never directly been seen in the jet that’s measured.”

Collider legacy

In 2014, the CMS released a preprocessed form of the detector’s 2010 raw data that contained an exhaustive listing of “particle flow candidates,” or the types of subatomic particles that are most likely to have been released, given the energies measured in the detector after a collision.

The following year, Thaler published a theoretical paper with Larkoski and Marzani, proposing a strategy to more fully understand a complicated jet in a way that revealed the fundamental evolution equation governing its structure.

“This idea had not existed before,” Thaler says. “That you could distill the messiness of the jet into a pattern, and that pattern would match beautifully onto that equation — this is what we found when we applied this method to the CMS data.”

To apply his theoretical idea, Thaler examined 750,000 individual jets that were produced from proton collisions within the CMS open data. He looked to see whether the pattern of particles in those jets matched with what the evolution equation predicted, given the energies released from their respective collisions. 

Taking each collision one by one, his team looked at the most prominent jet produced and used previously developed algorithms to trace back and disentangle the energies emitted as particles cleaved again and again. The primary analysis work was carried out by Tripathee, as part of his MIT bachelor's thesis, and by Xue.

“We wanted to see how this jet came from smaller pieces,” Thaler says. “The equation is telling you how energy is shared when things split, and we found when you look at a jet and measure how much energy is shared when they split, they’re the same thing.”

The team was able to reveal the splitting function, or evolution equation, by combining information from all 750,000 jets they studied, showing that the equation — a fundamental feature of the strong force — can indeed predict the overall structure of a jet and the energies of particles produced from the collision of two protons.

While this may not generally be a surprise to most physicists, the study represents the first time this equation has been seen so clearly in experimental data. 

“No one doubts this equation, but we were able to expose it in a new way,” Thaler says. “This is a clean verification that things behave the way you’d expect. And it gives us confidence that we can use this kind of open data for future analyses.”

Thaler hopes his and others’ analysis of the CMS open data will spur other large particle physics experiments to release similar information, in part to preserve their legacies.

“Colliders are big endeavors,” Thaler says. “These are unique datasets, and we need to make sure there’s a mechanism to archive that information in order to potentially make discoveries down the line using old data, because our theoretical understanding changes over time. Public access is a stepping stone to making sure this data is available for future use.”

This research was supported, in part, by the MIT Charles E. Reed Faculty Initiatives Fund, the MIT Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the National Science Foundation.

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Developing sensors to defend aircraft against lasers

Laser strikes, the aiming of high-power laser pointers at aircraft, are a growing safety concern for pilots and aircraft passengers. They pose numerous dangers to pilots, including distraction during crucial moments in flight, temporary flash blindness, and in rare cases, permanent eye damage. Laser strikes have increased steadily in the last decade and can be criminally motivated, but they are more commonly pranks or unintentional incidents.

Although perpetrators of laser strikes can be punished under federal, state, and local laws in the United States, the lack of accurate and timely information for law-enforcement officials means less than 1 percent of them are ever caught. It is difficult for pilots to see where a laser beam is coming from, and even more difficult for police officers to pinpoint the perpetrator's location based on the pilot's report. Certain military aircraft are equipped with sensors that can estimate perpetrators' geographic location, or geolocation, but it is costly and unrealistic to have them installed on every airplane. Other existing defenses against laser strikes are merely passive devices, such as laser-blocking goggles or cockpit window films that can actually degrade the pilots' vision.

The only offensive measure of preventing laser strikes involves baiting perpetrators with police helicopters. In an area where laser strikes are frequent or anticipated, a police helicopter flies at a low altitude to deliberately attract laser strikes. When the helicopter is targeted, its pilots — who are equipped with night vision cameras — locate the perpetrators and alert ground law enforcement. However, this practice is not widely adopted, it requires significant time and effort, and the equipment involved can cost as much as $250,000.

"It's not ideal," says Richard Westhoff from the Laser Technology and Applications Group at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory. "You really have to put people in harm's way to do that."

To address the present lack of effective laser strike mitigation systems, the Laser Technology and Applications and Air Traffic Control Systems groups at Lincoln laboratory have teamed up to develop the Laser Aircraft Strike Suppression Optical System (LASSOS). LASSOS is a ground-based sensor system that can accurately identify the probable location of a perpetrator of a laser strike and immediately notify law enforcement.

"These sensors can provide persistent, automated protection for a high-risk volume of airspace, such as a final approach path, by quickly locating the origin of a laser strike and transmitting the coordinates to local law enforcement," says Tom Reynolds, a member of the development team and the associate leader of the Air Traffic Control Systems Group. "This technology will enable law enforcement to launch a rapid and targeted response to a laser strike event, greatly increasing their chance of apprehending and prosecuting perpetrators."

The system works by capturing side-scattered laser light and tracing it back to the perpetrator's location. When a laser is pointed into the sky, a small fraction of its light is scattered by air molecules and aerosols, forming a residual streak in the laser's path. Two or more high-sensitivity, low-noise, charge-coupled device cameras image the scattered light from different vantage points, providing the geometric diversity needed to digitally reconstruct the laser streak in three dimensions. The geographic coordinates of the laser's origin are calculated by tracing the laser streak down to a topographically accurate model of the Earth's surface.

A feature of LASSOS that makes it particularly effective is its integration with Google Earth. As soon as a laser is detected by the cameras, a digital reconstruction of the streak appears on a Google Earth map in real-time. This image summarizes the detection event, depicting the laser's point-of-origin and most probable path through the night sky. Within 30 seconds of the image being captured, LASSOS provides nearby members of law enforcement with the perpetrator's GPS coordinates, nearest address, and the time of the incident. This information allows officers to rapidly intervene.

LASSOS has the potential to diminish both immediate and future threats of laser strikes. Even if lasers strikes do not directly hit an aircraft's cockpit, police officers can use LASSOS to locate the perpetrators and detain them before they have the chance to cause serious harm. Furthermore, data gathered by LASSOS during an incident can be used as evidence in the prosecutions. The developers of LASSOS hope to increase air traffic safety by deterring future laser strikes.

"This technology will significantly increase laser strike origin detection and perpetrator apprehension," says Brian Saar, principal investigator in the laboratory's LASSOS team and an assistant group leader in the Laser Technology and Applications Group. "As culprits are readily apprehended and prosecuted, the appeal of laser strikes as a crime with low risk of detection will decline."

The system prototype has already demonstrated its speed and accuracy in several tests. For one test trial, LASSOS's geolocation ability was tested at a distance of nine nautical miles, to simulate the typical length of a final approach path when an aircraft is most vulnerable to lasing. One sensor was placed on top of the B Building at Lincoln Laboratory and another on the Flight Test Facility at Hanscom Air Force Base. Testers shone high-power laser beams of the type commonly used during lasing events from a baseball field nine nautical miles away in Tewksbury, Massachusetts, and were geolocated by LASSOS in less than 30 seconds. The system was so accurate that it could distinguish whether the laser beams came from first, second, or third base.

Considering LASSOS's promising performance and versatile capabilities, researchers believe that in the future the system could be used to protect other targets of laser strikes, including ships, automobiles, and even individual people.

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Bug-repair system learns from example

Anyone who’s downloaded an update to a computer program or phone app knows that most commercial software has bugs and security holes that require regular “patching.”

Often, those bugs are simple oversights. For example, the program tries to read data that have already been deleted. The patches, too, are often simple — such as a single line of code that verifies that a data object still exists.

That simplicity has encouraged computer scientists to explore the possibility of automatic patch generation. Several research groups, including that of Martin Rinard, an MIT professor of electrical engineering and computer science, have developed templates that indicate the general forms that patches tend to take. Algorithms can then use the templates to generate and evaluate a host of candidate patches.

Recently, at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, Rinard, his student Fan Long, and Peter Amidon of the University of California at San Diego presented a new system that learns its own templates by analyzing successful patches to real software.

Where a hand-coded patch-generation system might feature five or 10 templates, the new system created 85, which makes it more diverse but also more precise. Its templates are more narrowly tailored to specific types of real-world patches, so it doesn’t generate as many useless candidates. In tests, the new system, dubbed Genesis, repaired nearly twice as many bugs as the best-performing hand-coded template system.

Thinning the herd

“You are navigating a tradeoff,” says Long, an MIT graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science and first author on the paper. “On one hand, you want to generate enough candidates that the set you’re looking through actually contains useful patches. On the other hand, you don’t want the set to include so many candidates that you can’t search through it.”

Every item in the data set on which Genesis was trained includes two blocks of code: the original, buggy code and the patch that repaired it. Genesis begins by constructing pairs of training examples, such that every item in the data set is paired off with every other item.

Genesis then analyzes each pair and creates a generic representation — a draft template — that will enable it to synthesize both patches from both originals. It may synthesize other, useless candidates, too. But the representation has to be general enough that among the candidates are the successful patches.

Next, Genesis tests each of its draft templates on all the examples in the training set. Each of the templates is based on only two examples, but it might work for several others. Each template is scored on two criteria: the number of errors that it can correct and the number of useless candidates it generates. For instance, a template that generates 10 candidates, four of which patch errors in the training data, might score higher than one that generates 1,000 candidates and five correct patches.

On the basis of those scores, Genesis selects the 500 most promising templates. For each of them, it augments the initial two-example training set with each of the other examples in turn, creating a huge set of three-example training sets. For each of those, it then varies the draft template, to produce a still more general template. Then it performs the same evaluation procedure, extracting the 500 most promising templates.

Covering the bases

After four rounds of this process, each of the 500 top-ranking templates has been trained on five examples. The final winnowing uses slightly different evaluation criteria, ensuring that every error in the training set that can be corrected will be. That is, there may be a template among the final 500 that patches only one bug, earning a comparatively low score in the preceding round of evaluation. But if it’s the only template that patches that bug, it will make the final cut.

In the researchers’ experiments, the final winnowing reduced the number of templates from 500 to 85. Genesis works with programs written in the Java programming language, and the MIT researchers compared its performance with that of the best-performing hand-coded Java patch generator. Genesis correctly patched defects in 21 of 49 test cases drawn from 41 open-source programming projects, while the previous system patched 11.

It’s possible that more training data and more computational power — to evaluate more candidate templates — could yield still better results. But a system that allows programmers to spend only half as much time trying to repair bugs in their code would be useful nonetheless.

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Researchers identify molecular motor that transforms chromosomes

A molecular “motor” that organizes the genome into distinct neighborhoods by forming loops of DNA has been characterized by researchers at MIT and the Pasteur Institute in France.

In a study published in 2016, a team led by Leonid Mirny, a professor of physics in MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Sciences, proposed that molecular motors transform chromosomes from a loosely tangled state into a dynamic series of expanding loops.

The process, known as loop extrusion, is thought to bring regulatory elements together with the genes they control. The team also suggested that DNA is decorated with barriers — akin to stop signs — that limit the process of extrusion.

In this way, loop extrusion divides chromosomes into separate regulatory neighborhoods, known as topologically associating domains (TADs).

However, while the researchers suggested that a ring-like protein complex called cohesin was a likely candidate for these molecular motors, this had yet to be proven.

Now, in a paper published in the journal Nature, a team led by Mirny and Francois Spitz at the Pasteur Institute, have demonstrated that cohesin does indeed play the role of a motor in the loop extrusion process.

“Each of these machines lands on the DNA and starts extruding loops, but there are boundaries on DNA that these motors cannot get through,” Mirny says. “So as a result of this motor activity, the genome is organized into many dynamic loops that do not cross the boundaries, so the genome becomes divided into a series of neighborhoods.”

The researchers also discovered that a different mechanism, that does not use cohesin, is at work organizing active and inactive regions of DNA into separate compartments in the cell’s nucleus.

To determine the role cohesin plays in genome formation, the team first deleted a molecule known as Nipbl, which is responsible for loading cohesin onto DNA.

They then used an experimental technique known as Hi-C, in which parts of DNA that are close to one another in 3-D space are captured and sequenced, in a bid to measure the frequency of physical interactions between different spots along chromosomes.

This technique, which was pioneered by Job Dekker, a professor of biochemistry and molecular pharmacology at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in Worcester, has previously been used to demonstrate the existence of TADs.

The team first used the Hi-C technique to assess the organization of chromosomes before removing the Nipbl molecule from mice. They then removed the molecule and performed the same measurement again.

They found that the neighborhoods had virtually disappeared.

However, the compartmentalization between active and inactive regions of the genome had become even more marked.

The team believes the cohesin motors allow each gene to reach out to its regulatory elements, which control whether genes should be switched on or off.

What’s more, it appears that the cohesin motors are stopped by another protein, CTCF, which demarcates the boundaries of each neighborhood. In a recent study in the journal Cell, the Mirny lab, in collaboration with researchers at the University of California at San Francisco and the University of Massachusetts Medical School has demonstrated that if this demarcating protein is removed, the borders between neighborhoods disappear, allowing genes in one neighborhood to talk to regulatory elements they should not be talking to in another neighborhood, and leading to misregulation of genes in the cell.

“Cohesin is central for gene regulation, and we emphasize that this is a motor function, so it is not just that they (genes and their regulatory elements) find each other somewhere randomly in space, but they were brought together by this motor activity,” Mirny says.

This paper provides important new molecular insights into the mechanisms by which cells fold their chromosomes, according to Dekker, who was not involved in the current study.

“In this work the Mirny and Spitz labs combine mouse models with genomic approaches to study chromosome folding to reveal that the machine that loads the cohesin complex is critical for TAD formation,” Dekker says. “From this and another previous study, a molecular mechanism is coming into view where TADs form by cohesin and Nipbl-dependent chromatin loop extrusion, which is blocked by sites bound by CTCF.”

The researchers are now attempting to characterize how the absence of the molecular motor would affect gene regulation. They are also carrying out computer simulations in a bid to determine how the cohesin-based loop extrusion takes place at the same time as the genome is undergoing the independent process of segregating into active and inactive compartments.

“It’s like two pianists playing on the same piano,” says Nezar Abdennur, a PhD student in the Mirny lab, who took part in the study alongside fellow PhD student Anton Goloborodko. “They interfere and put constraints on each other, but together they can produce a beautiful piece of music.”

Abdennur and Goloborodko are co-first authors of the paper, along with Wibke Schwarzer of EMBL. The research was supported, in part, by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the MIT-France MISTI Fund.

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Letter regarding Campus Sustainability Task Force report

The following email was sent today to the MIT community by Provost Martin Schmidt and Executive Vice President and Treasurer Israel Ruiz.

To the members of the MIT community,

Two years ago we convened the Campus Sustainability Task Force (CSTF), charged to shape a vision and plan of action for campus sustainability at MIT. The CSTF has now drafted its report, Pathway to Sustainability Leadership by MIT, which reflects input from students, faculty, staff, and alumni since the CSTF launch in 2015. In releasing the preliminary report, we are opening a comment period through November, during which we are actively seeking feedback from across the MIT community.

We invite you to attend a campus-wide forum to discuss the report on Tuesday, October 17, 12:00 pm–1:30 pm in the Millikan Room (E53-482). Lunch will be provided. Please RSVP if you would like to attend.

We encourage you to read the report, which lays out the five key elements of the pathway to sustainability leadership. It is important for all voices to be heard as Institute leadership considers the task force’s recommendations. We and task force co-chairs Andrea Campbell and Julie Newman are eager to hear your thoughts, and hope you will attend the open forum. You may also send comments to sustainablemit@mit.edu.

Sincerely,

Marty Schmidt
Provost

Israel Ruiz
Executive Vice President and Treasurer

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Biologists identify possible new strategy for halting brain tumors

MIT biologists have discovered a fundamental mechanism that helps brain tumors called glioblastomas grow aggressively. After blocking this mechanism in mice, the researchers were able to halt tumor growth.

The researchers also identified a genetic marker that could be used to predict which patients would most likely benefit from this type of treatment. Glioblastoma is usually treated with radiation and the chemotherapy drug temozolamide, which may extend patients’ lifespans but in most cases do not offer a cure.

“There are very few specific or targeted inhibitors that are used in the treatment of brain cancer. There’s really a dire need for new therapies and new ideas,” says Michael Hemann, an associate professor of biology at MIT, a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, and a senior author of the study.

Drugs that block a key protein involved in the newly discovered process already exist, and at least one is in clinical trials to treat cancer. However, most of these inhibitors do not cross the blood-brain barrier, which separates the brain from circulating blood and prevents large molecules from entering the brain. The MIT team hopes to develop drugs that can cross this barrier, possibly by packaging them into nanoparticles.

The study, which appears in Cancer Cell on Sept. 28, is a collaboration between the labs of Hemann; Jacqueline Lees, associate director of the Koch Institute and the Virginia and D.K. Ludwig Professor for Cancer Research; and Phillip Sharp, an MIT Institute Professor and member of the Koch Institute. The paper’s lead authors are former MIT postdoc Christian Braun, recent PhD recipient Monica Stanciu, and research scientist Paul Boutz.

Too much splicing

Several years ago, Stanciu and Braun came up with the idea to use a type of screen known as shRNA to seek genes involved in glioblastoma. This test involves using short strands of RNA to block the expression of specific genes. Using this approach, researchers can turn off thousands of different genes, one per tumor cell, and then measure the effects on cell survival.

One of the top hits from this screen was the gene for a protein called PRMT5. When this gene was turned off, tumor cells stopped growing. Previous studies had linked high levels of PRMT5 to cancer, but the protein is an enzyme that can act on hundreds of other proteins, so scientists weren’t sure exactly how it was stimulating cancer cell growth.

Further experiments in which the researchers analyzed other genes affected when PRMT5 was inhibited led them to hypothesize that PRMT5 was using a special type of gene splicing to stimulate tumor growth. Gene splicing is required to snip out portions of messenger RNA known as introns, that are not needed after the gene is copied into mRNA.

In 2015, Boutz and others in Sharp’s lab discovered that about 10 to 15 percent of human mRNA strands still have one to three “detained introns,” even though they are otherwise mature. Because of those introns, these mRNA molecules can’t leave the nucleus.

“What we think is that these strands are basically an mRNA reservoir. You have these unproductive isoforms sitting in the nucleus, and the only thing that keeps them from being translated is that one intron,” says Braun, who is now a physician-scientist at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

In the new study, the researchers discovered that PRMT5 plays a key role in regulating this type of splicing. They speculate that neural stem cells utilize high levels of PRMT5 to guarantee efficient splicing and therefore expression of proliferation genes. “As the cells move toward their mature state, PRMT5 levels drop, detained intron levels rise, and those messenger RNAs associated with proliferation get stuck in the nucleus,” Lees says.

When brain cells become cancerous, PRMT5 levels are typically boosted and the splicing of proliferation-associated mRNA is improved, ultimately helping the cells to grow uncontrollably.

Predicting success

When the researchers blocked PRMT5 in tumor cells, they found that the cells stopped dividing and entered a dormant, nondividing state. PRMT5 inhibitors also halted growth of glioblastoma tumors implanted under the skin of mice, but they did not work as well in tumors located in the brain, because of the difficulties in crossing the blood-brain barrier.

Unlike many existing cancer treatments, the PRMT5 inhibitors did not appear to cause major side effects. The researchers believe this may be because mature cells are not as dependent as cancer cells on PRMT5 function.

The findings shed light on why researchers have previously found PRMT5 to be a promising potential target for cancer treatment, says Omar Abdel-Wahab, an assistant member in the Human Oncology and Pathogenesis Program at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, who was not involved in the study.

“PRMT5 has a lot of roles, and until now, it has not been clear what is the pathway that is really important for its contributions to cancer,” says Abdel-Wahab. “What they have found is that one of the key contributions is in this RNA splicing mechanism, and furthermore, when RNA splicing is disrupted, that key pathway is disabled.”

The researchers also discovered a biomarker that could help identify patients who would be most likely to benefit from a PRMT5 inhibitor. This marker is a ratio of two proteins that act as co-factors for PRMT5’s splicing activity, and reveals whether PRMT5 in those tumor cells is involved in splicing or some other cell function.

“This becomes really important when you think about clinical trials, because if 50 percent or 25 percent of tumors are going to have some response and the others are not, you may not have a way to target it toward those patients that may have a particular benefit. The overall success of the trial may be damaged by lack of understanding of who’s going to respond,” Hemann says.

The MIT team is now looking into the potential role of PRMT5 in other types of cancer, including lung tumors. They also hope to identify other genes and proteins involved in the splicing process they discovered, which could also make good drug targets.

Spearheaded by students and postdocs from several different labs, this project offers a prime example of the spirit of collaboration and “scientific entrepreneurship” found at MIT and the Koch Institute, the researchers say.

“I think it really is a classic example of how MIT is a sort of bottom-up place,” Lees says. “Students and postdocs get excited about different ideas, and they sit in on each other’s seminars and hear interesting things and pull them together. It really is an amazing example of the creativity that young people at MIT have. They’re fearless.”

The research was funded by the Ludwig Center for Molecular Oncology at MIT, the Koch Institute Frontier Research Program through the Kathy and Curt Marble Cancer Research Fund, the National Institutes of Health, and the Koch Institute Support (core) Grant from the National Cancer Institute.

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Letter regarding Campus Sustainability Task Force report

The following email was sent today to the MIT community by Provost Martin Schmidt and Executive Vice President and Treasurer Israel Ruiz.

To the members of the MIT community,

Two years ago we convened the Campus Sustainability Task Force (CSTF), charged to shape a vision and plan of action for campus sustainability at MIT. The CSTF has now drafted its report, Pathway to Sustainability Leadership by MIT, which reflects input from students, faculty, staff, and alumni since the CSTF launch in 2015. In releasing the preliminary report, we are opening a comment period through November, during which we are actively seeking feedback from across the MIT community.

We invite you to attend a campus-wide forum to discuss the report on Tuesday, October 17, 12:00 pm–1:30 pm in the Millikan Room (E53-482). Lunch will be provided. Please RSVP if you would like to attend.

We encourage you to read the report, which lays out the five key elements of the pathway to sustainability leadership. It is important for all voices to be heard as Institute leadership considers the task force’s recommendations. We and task force co-chairs Andrea Campbell and Julie Newman are eager to hear your thoughts, and hope you will attend the open forum. You may also send comments to sustainablemit@mit.edu.

Sincerely,

Marty Schmidt
Provost

Israel Ruiz
Executive Vice President and Treasurer

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John Durant plans a new era for the MIT Museum

In the 12 years since John Durant took the helm at the MIT Museum, he has opened up the ground floor to gain street-level visibility, launched the Cambridge Science Festival, and grown attendance from around 50,000 to nearly 150,000 visitors a year.

Now, as he makes plans for a new, purpose-built museum in MIT's burgeoning gateway location in Kendall Square, Durant says he is looking forward to offering the public deeper insights into the research under way at MIT.

"This is the big opportunity for the MIT Museum to be something like what MIT and the public deserve," says Durant, who is both the Mark R. Epstein Director of the MIT Museum and a member of the faculty in MIT's School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS). “In our new location, we can anchor and mediate MIT's relationship with the wider community.”

Engaging with the public is more critical than ever today, Durant says, because the value of science and of evidence-based reasoning has been called into question by some segments of society. “We have suddenly plunged into a situation — briefly, I hope — where it's fashionable in some groups to believe that facts can be as you'd like them to be,” he says.

Yet, understanding science is necessary to make informed decisions on issues both private and public — from individual health care to national defense, says Durant, who received his PhD in the history and philosophy of science. “There are a multitude of ways in which science is relevant to our daily lives whether people know it or not,” he says. “Much of public policy has scientific aspects and dimensions.”

The human world at the core of MIT's mission

Durant's faculty home is in the SHASS-based Program in Science, Technology, and Society (STS), whose humanities and social science researchers explore science, technology, and medicine to understand the human challenges at the core of MIT's mission. STS is one of several programs that make SHASS the hub of the Institute’s major initiatives focused on furthering public engagement with science and technology. The school also trains some of the world's finest science journalists via the Graduate Program in Science Writing as well as the Knight Science Journalism Fellowship (KSJ) program. Undark Magazine, KSJ's digital offering published by KSJ Director Deborah Blum, explores ideas and endeavors at the intersection of science with political, cultural, and economic realities.

“Creative expression and the critical examination of ideas in their social and historical contexts are also essential to the work of any museum, and particularly to the work of the MIT Museum," says Durant. "This is why we are always looking for ways to incorporate the work of MIT faculty in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. A great example is our forthcoming special exhibition, 'The Enemy."

This exhibition, opening in October, emerges from collaboration between photojournalist Ben Khelifa and Fox Harrell, an MIT faculty member with a joint appointment in Comparative Media Studies and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. "'The Enemy' uses virtual reality technology to stretch visitors' senses as well as their emotional and moral imaginations," Durants says, "and we hope that it will foster more understanding in one of the places where it is most needed — in situations of human conflict.”

Wider conversations

Durant notes that the MIT Museum is also a place where visitors can get an inside look at the work that takes place at a world-class research institute. “People can understand a bit about MIT by engaging with the ideas and theories that MIT folks engage with,” he says, in research that ranges broadly across many fields. 

“MIT's humanistic disciplines — history, philosophy, cultural studies — and the social sciences all bring distinctive, analytic voices to bear on questions to do with science and its place in the wider society," says Durant. "They allow us to have wider conversations. They provide context, illuminating the broader implications of scientific research."

The contributions of artists, composers, and playwrights are equally important. “You get radically different conversations when you bring the sensibilities of accomplished artists to the table,” Durant observes. “If you want to understand Einstein's theory of relativity, you can take a class or read a textbook. Or, you could see a production of ‘Einstein's Dreams’ [a play based on the novel of the same name by SHASS Professor Alan Lightman]. ... This play takes you into the world of Einstein's thought experience — as only an imaginative writer can do.”

Einstein's theory of relativity can be difficult to understand, but making such material accessible to all is one of the key goals of the MIT Museum, Durant says. “We're trying to find ways to engage people in science that's legendarily hard — like quantum mechanics,” he says. “We aim to make even conceptually tough science accessible to more people.”

An experimental space

For example, this past February, the MIT Museum hosted an evening of live theater and conversation based around a current research project in quantum mechanics that is co-led by Professor David Kaiser, a physicist and historian of science. Durant says he expects the museum will find even more ways to bring scientists and other MIT researchers together with the public in the Kendall Square location, where it will have 57,000+ square feet of galleries, classrooms, and state-of-the-art program and performance spaces. The new museum is expected to open toward the end of 2020.

“Our new museum will be an experimental place,” says Durant, who is committed to the idea that the MIT Museum can operate along the same principles as the Institute as a whole. “We want to practice what we preach as a research university: Try new ideas, test them, and report our findings.”
 

Story prepared by MIT SHASS Communications
Editorial and Design Director: Emily Hiestand
Senior Writer: Kathryn O'Neill

 

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The Committee on Animal Care solicits feedback

The Committee on Animal Care (CAC) and the vice president for research welcome any information which would aid our efforts to assure the humane care of research animals used at MIT and the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.

Established to ensure that MIT researchers working with animals comply with federal, state, local and institutional regulations on animal care, the CAC inspects animals, animal facilities, and laboratories, and reviews all research and teaching exercises that involve animals before experiments are performed.

If you have concerns about animal welfare, please contact the Committee on Animal Care (CAC) by calling 617-324-6892, or send your concern in writing to the CAC Office (Room 16-408), or email cacpo@mit.edu. The issue will be forwarded to the chair of the CAC and the attending veterinarian.

You may also contact any of the following:

•          Vice president for research: 617-253-3206, mtz@mit.edu

•          Director of the Division of Comparative Medicine: 617-253-1735, jgfox@mit.edu

•          CAC chair: 617-253-9436, opra@med.mit.edu

•          Attending veterinarian: 617-253-9425, mwhary@mit.edu

All concerns about animal welfare will remain confidential; the identity of individuals who contact the CAC with concerns will be treated as confidential and individuals will be protected against reprisal and discrimination consistent with MIT policies. The Committee on Animal Care will report its findings and actions to correct the issue to the vice president for research, the director of comparative medicine, the individual who reported the concern (if not reported anonymously), and oversight agencies as applicable.

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Celebrating the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, a pioneer in melding art, science, and tech

In March 1968, on the same weekend that MIT dedicated its Center for Theoretical Physics, the Institute also inaugurated the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS). The juxtaposition was no coincidence. Founded by artist and MIT Professor György Kepes in 1967, CAVS was created as a fellowship program that brought cutting-edge visual artists into contact with scientists and engineers in the MIT community. The joint dedications were a declaration of MIT’s commitment to the arts, and its conviction that art and science are complementary and indispensable mission partners.

“Kepes and his colleagues, the people who founded CAVS, had lived through one or even two world wars,” says Gediminas Urbonas, director of the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT), which was created when CAVS merged with MIT’s Visual Arts Program in 2009. “They had witnessed how a certain segment of mankind had used technology to cause destruction on an almost unimaginable scale. They believed in the arts, and in their potential to humanize those technologies so they might be used to help the human species thrive.”

This May, with the opening of an exhibition of artworks by renowned MIT alumni titled “In Our Present Condition,” the School of Architecture and Planning launched a yearlong celebration to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the founding of CAVS. “We adhere to the idea that art has its place alongside science and technology,” says Laura Knott, a CAVS alumna who co-curated the “In Our Present Condition” show, which is on view at the Dean’s Office Gallery through April 2018. “CAVS was the first program of its kind. And while it has since sparked similar programs around the world, MIT’s leadership in the field remains unsurpassed.”

Scheduled through spring 2018, the 50th anniversary celebration will include exhibitions on campus — including at the MIT Museum — a symposium, several publications, site-specific art installations, a fall lecture series, and the Oct. 25 launch of a "Virtual Museum" that will make CAVS archival materials available to researchers and the public.

“Fifty years ago, the founders of this initiative showed remarkable conviction and foresight in its creation,” says Urbonas, an internationally-recognized artist who came to MIT in 2009. “But what is even more remarkable is how the work and ideas that their initiative produced are still relevant to our present world. We are living in the future that they imagined. And that work, which was so avant-garde that it is only now being assessed by art historians, can help us address many of the crises that have and will emerge.”

CAVS owed much of its early prominence and character to Kepes, the Hungarian-born and educated painter, designer, photographer, and educator who founded the initiative in 1967. Kepes came to MIT in 1946 after a stint as head of the Light and Color Department at the Institute of Design in Chicago, which was then known as the New Bauhaus. He served as director at CAVS until 1974. He passed away in 2001.

“György Kepes was the greatest pioneer in the marriage of art and technology in America,” playwright Alan Brody, then the associate provost for Arts at MIT, said at the time of Kepes’s death. “He was a visionary, a towering intellect, and a breathtaking artist. He single-handedly created the Center for Advanced Visual Studies and turned it into an internationally acclaimed program for the development of the finest in late 20th century art.”

To honor Kepes and his legacy, the MIT Museum will host two exhibitions of his photographs. The first, “György Kepes Photographs: From Berlin to Chicago, 1930-1946,” opens on Sept. 21 and will feature work from the artist’s time in Europe and Chicago. The second show, “The MIT Years, 1946-1974,” which will run from March 16 through Aug. 31 of 2018, concentrating on the body of work he created while at MIT. Many of the works that will be on display in both shows have never been shown in public.

A third exhibition on view at the MIT Museum, beginning in February, will present a historical overview of CAVS through selected works by research fellows, students, and faculty. Installations will be located throughout the museum and draw from a range of media and methods.   

Another anniversary project — one of the most ambitious and intriguing — is “Futurity Island,” a large-scale land-based outdoor art installation. Two years in the making and the recent recipient of an Art Works Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Futurity Island project will address vital questions about how artists function under changing climatic conditions, how cities imagine new possibilities for waterfronts, and how the making and teaching of art will adjust to the new realities of rising sea and water levels. The installation will be presented to the public in 2018.

In addition to promoting collaborations between visual artists, scientists, and engineers at MIT, CAVS encouraged its visiting fellows to experiment with emerging technologies such as laser, video, and holography, and to devise novel applications of existing technologies like steam power. Early CAVS fellows included composer Maryanne Amacher, avant-garde filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek, artist and educator Lowry Burgess, video artist Peter Campus, performance artist Charlotte Moorman, artist Nam June Paik, and Otto Piene, the artist who directed CAVS from 1974 to 1994.

During its first two decades, many CAVS projects examined humanity’s relationship with the planet, and its environment. The center also pursued a mandate in civic art. In 1977, the “documenta 6” exhibition in Kassel, Germany, commissioned CAVS to create Centerbeam, a massive multimedia structure that was later mounted on the National Mall in Washington.

Later, in the 1990s and early 2000s, the work shifted toward questions of geopolitics, identity, and environmental citizenship. Artists used film, sculptural and digital interventions, and installations to explore the conditions of humans living in repressive or totalitarian societies, or recovering from natural disasters. Artist Krzysztof Wodiczko, the last director of CAVS, was instrumental in this shift.

Today, the heirs to CAVS broaden their legacy by engaging and testing the limits of the technologies of communication. “Art can hack and subvert technologies,” says Urbonas. “But what art ultimately does is try to understand technology, to propose new spaces in our collective imagination so we can come up with better answers and uses for it. We are pleased to be able to celebrate CAVS and its glorious past. But we are even more determined to apply what these artists have created and will create to the urgencies of our time.”

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Gravitational waves from a binary black hole merger observed by LIGO and Virgo

The following news article is adapted from a press release issued by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) Laboratory, in partnership with the LIGO Scientific Collaboration and Virgo Collaboration. LIGO is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and operated by MIT and Caltech, which conceived and built the project.

The LIGO Scientific Collaboration and the Virgo collaboration report the first joint detection of gravitational waves with both the LIGO and Virgo detectors. This is the fourth announced detection of a binary black hole system and the first significant gravitational-wave signal recorded by the Virgo detector, and highlights the scientific potential of a three-detector network of gravitational-wave detectors.

The three-detector observation was made on Aug. 14 at 10:30:43 UTC. The two Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors, located in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, and funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the Virgo detector, located near Pisa, Italy, detected a transient gravitational-wave signal produced by the coalescence of two stellar mass black holes.

A paper about the event, known as GW170814, has been accepted for publication in the journal Physical Review Letters.

The detected gravitational waves — ripples in space and time — were emitted during the final moments of the merger of two black holes with masses about 31 and 25 times the mass of the sun and located about 1.8 billion light years away. The newly produced spinning black hole has about 53 times the mass of our sun, which means that about three solar masses were converted into gravitational-wave energy during the coalescence.

“This is just the beginning of observations with the network enabled by Virgo and LIGO working together,” says David Shoemaker of MIT, who is the spokesperson for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. “With the next observing run planned for fall 2018 we can expect such detections weekly or even more often.”

“It is wonderful to see a first gravitational-wave signal in our brand new Advanced Virgo detector only two weeks after it officially started taking data,” says Jo van den Brand of Nikhef and VU University Amsterdam, who is spokesperson for the Virgo collaboration. “That’s a great reward after all the work done in the Advanced Virgo project to upgrade the instrument over the past six years.”

“Little more than a year and a half ago, NSF announced that its Laser Gravitational-wave Observatory had made the first-ever detection of gravitational waves resulting from the collision of two black holes in a galaxy a billion light-years away," says France Córdova, NSF director. "Today, we are delighted to announce the first discovery made in partnership between the Virgo Gravitational-Wave Observatory and the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, the first time a gravitational-wave detection was observed by these observatories, located thousands of miles apart. This is an exciting milestone in the growing international scientific effort to unlock the extraordinary mysteries of our universe.”  

Advanced LIGO is a second-generation gravitational-wave detector consisting of the two identical interferometers in Hanford and Livingston, and uses precision laser interferometry to detect gravitational waves. Beginning operation in September 2015, Advanced LIGO has conducted two observing runs. The second “O2” observing run began on Nov. 30, 2016 and ended on Aug. 25, 2017. 

Advanced Virgo is a second-generation instrument built and operated by the Virgo collaboration to search for gravitational waves. With the end of observations with the initial Virgo detector in October 2011, the integration of the Advanced Virgo detector began. The new facility was dedicated this past February, while its commissioning was ongoing. In April, the control of the detector at its nominal working point was achieved for the first time.

The Virgo detector joined the O2 run on Aug. 1, at 10:00 UTC. The real-time detection on Aug. 14 was triggered with data from all three LIGO and Virgo instruments. Virgo is, at present, less sensitive than LIGO, but two independent search algorithms based on all the information available from the three detectors demonstrated the evidence of a signal in the Virgo data as well.

Overall, the volume of universe that is likely to contain the source shrinks by more than a factor of 20 when moving from a two-detector network to a three-detector network. The sky region for GW170814 has a size of only 60 square degrees, less than one-tenth the region size with data from the two LIGO interferometers alone; in addition, the accuracy with which the source distance is measured benefits from the addition of Virgo.

“This increased precision will allow the entire astrophysical community to eventually make even more exciting discoveries, including multimessenger observations,” says Georgia Tech Professor Laura Cadonati, the deputy spokesperson for the LSC. “A smaller search area enables follow-up observations with telescopes and satellites for cosmic events that produce gravitational waves and emissions of light, such as the collision of neutron stars.”

“As we increase the number of observatories in the international gravitational wave network, we not only improve the source location, but we also recover improved polarization information that provides better information on the orientation of the orbiting objects as well as enabling new tests of Einstein’s theory,” says Fred Raab, LIGO associate director for observatory operations.

LIGO and Virgo’s partner electromagnetic facilities around the world didn’t identify a counterpart for GW170814, which was similar to the three prior LIGO observations of black hole mergers. Black holes produce gravitational waves but not light.  

“With this first joint detection by the Advanced LIGO and Virgo detectors, we have taken one step further into the gravitational-wave cosmos,” says Caltech’s David H. Reitze, the executive director of the LIGO Laboratory. “Virgo brings a powerful new capability to detect and better locate gravitational-wave sources, one that will undoubtedly lead to exciting and unanticipated results in the future.”  

LIGO is funded by NSF and operated by Caltech and MIT, which conceived and built the project. Financial support for the Advanced LIGO project was led by NSF with Germany (Max Planck Society), the U.K. (Science and Technology Facilities Council) and Australia (Australian Research Council) making significant commitments and contributions to the project. More than 1,200 scientists from around the world participate in the effort through the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, which includes the GEO Collaboration. Additional partners are listed at http://ift.tt/2ruwBDk.

The Virgo collaboration consists of more than 280 physicists and engineers belonging to 20 different European research groups: six from Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in France; eight from the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) in Italy; two in The Netherlands with Nikhef; the MTA Wigner RCP in Hungary; the POLGRAW group in Poland; Spain with the University of Valencia; and EGO, the laboratory hosting the Virgo detector near Pisa in Italy.

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“Superhero” robot wears different outfits for different tasks

From butterflies that sprout wings to hermit crabs that switch their shells, many animals must adapt their exterior features in order to survive. While humans don’t undergo that kind of metamorphosis, we often try to create functional objects that are similarly adaptive — including our robots.

Despite what you might have seen in “Transformers” movies, though, today’s robots are still pretty inflexible. Each of their parts usually has a fixed structure and a single defined purpose, making it difficult for them to perform a wide variety of actions.

Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) are aiming to change that with a new shape-shifting robot that’s something of a superhero: It can transform itself with different “outfits” that allow it to perform different tasks.

Dubbed “Primer,” the cube-shaped robot can be controlled via magnets to make it walk, roll, sail, and glide. It carries out these actions by wearing different exoskeletons, which start out as sheets of plastic that fold into specific shapes when heated. After Primer finishes its task, it can shed its “skin” by immersing itself in water, which dissolves the exoskeleton.

“If we want robots to help us do things, it’s not very efficient to have a different one for each task,” says Daniela Rus, CSAIL director and principal investigator on the project. “With this metamorphosis-inspired approach, we can extend the capabilities of a single robot by giving it different ‘accessories’ to use in different situations.”

Primer’s various forms have a range of advantages. For example, “Wheel-bot” has wheels that allow it to move twice as fast as “Walk-bot.” “Boat-bot” can float on water and carry nearly twice its weight. “Glider-bot” can soar across longer distances, which could be useful for deploying robots or switching environments.

Primer can even wear multiple outfits at once, like a Russian nesting doll. It can add one exoskeleton to become “Walk-bot,” and then interface with another, larger exoskeleton that allows it to carry objects and move two body lengths per second. To deploy the second exoskeleton, “Walk-bot” steps onto the sheet, which then blankets the bot with its four self-folding arms.

“Imagine future applications for space exploration, where you could send a single robot with a stack of exoskeletons to Mars,” says postdoc Shuguang Li, one of the co-authors of the study. “The robot could then perform different tasks by wearing different ‘outfits.’”

The project was led by Rus and Shuhei Miyashita, a former CSAIL postdoc who is now director of the Microrobotics Group at the University of York. Their co-authors include Li and graduate student Steven Guitron. An article about the work appears in the journal Science Robotics on Sept. 27.

Robot metamorphosis

Primer builds on several previous projects from Rus’ team, including magnetic blocks that can assemble themselves into different shapes and centimeter-long microrobots that can be precisely customized from sheets of plastic.

While robots that can change their form or function have been developed at larger sizes, it’s generally been difficult to build such structures at much smaller scales.

“This work represents an advance over the authors' previous work in that they have now demonstrated a scheme that allows for the creation of five different functionalities,” says Eric Diller, a microrobotics expert and assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Toronto, who was not involved in the paper. “Previous work at most shifted between only two functionalities, such as ‘open’ or ‘closed’ shapes.”

The team outlines many potential applications for robots that can perform multiple actions with just a quick costume change. For example, say some equipment needs to be moved across a stream. A single robot with multiple exoskeletons could potentially sail across the stream and then carry objects on the other side.

“Our approach shows that origami-inspired manufacturing allows us to have robotic components that are versatile, accessible, and reusable,” says Rus, the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT.

Designed in a matter of hours, the exoskeletons fold into shape after being heated for just a few seconds, suggesting a new approach to rapid fabrication of robots.

“I could envision devices like these being used in ‘microfactories’ where prefabricated parts and tools would enable a single microrobot to do many complex tasks on demand,” Diller says.

As a next step, the team plans to explore giving the robots an even wider range of capabilities, from driving through water and burrowing in sand to camouflaging their color. Guitron pictures a future robotics community that shares open-source designs for parts much the way 3-D-printing enthusiasts trade ideas on sites such as Thingiverse.

“I can imagine one day being able to customize robots with different arms and appendages,” says Rus. “Why update a whole robot when you can just update one part of it?”

This project was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation.

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New test rapidly diagnoses Zika

MIT researchers have developed a paper-based test that can diagnose Zika infection within 20 minutes. Unlike existing tests, the new diagnostic does not cross-react with Dengue virus, a close relative of the Zika virus that can produce false positives on many Zika tests.

This test could offer an easy-to-use, cheap, and portable diagnostic in countries where Zika and Dengue are both prevalent and the gold-standard test that measures viral RNA in the bloodstream is not available.

“It’s important to have a single test that can differentiate between the four serotypes of Dengue and Zika, because they co-circulate. They’re spread by the same mosquito,” says Kimberly Hamad-Schifferli, an associate professor of engineering at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, a visiting scientist in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, and a co-senior author of the paper.

The researchers worked with scientists around the world to test the new device on patient samples and confirmed that it can accurately distinguish Zika virus from related viruses.

Lee Gehrke, the Hermann L.F. von Helmholtz Professor in MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES), is also a senior author of the study, which appears in the Sept. 27 issue of Science Translational Medicine. The paper’s first authors are IMES research scientist Irene Bosch and Department of Mechanical Engineering postdoc Helena de Puig.

No more false positives

One of the biggest challenges in diagnosing Zika is that many of the tests are based on antibodies that interact with a viral protein called NS1, which is found in the bloodstream of infected patients. Unfortunately, many other viruses from the same family, known as flaviviruses, have similar versions of NS1 and can produce a false positive. Flaviviruses include West Nile virus and the virus that causes yellow fever, as well as Dengue virus.

In an effort to create a more precise diagnostic, the MIT team set out to find antibodies that would interact exclusively with NS1 protein produced by the Zika virus, as well as antibodies specific to NS1 from each of the four different strains of the Dengue virus.

To achieve this, the researchers exposed mice to Zika and Dengue viruses and then screened the resulting antibodies, in pairs, against every flavivirus’ version of the NS1 protein. This allowed them to identify pairs of antibodies that react only with one version of NS1 and not any of the others.

“We knew by informatics analysis that if we looked enough, and we teased out the repertoire of the B cells of these animals, we would eventually find those antibodies,” Bosch says. “We were able to tease out the very few antibodies within the repertoire that would give you uniqueness in the detection.”

The researchers used these pairs to create five separate tests, one for each virus. They coated strips of paper with one antibody from each pair, while the second antibody was attached to gold nanoparticles. After adding the patient’s blood sample to a solution of these nanoparticles, the paper strip is dipped into the solution. If the target NS1 protein is present, it attaches to the antibodies on the paper strip as well as the nanoparticle-bound antibodies, and a colored spot appears on the strip within 20 minutes.

This approach requires five test strips per sample to test for each virus, but the researchers are now working on a version that would test for all five with one strip.

Most countries where Zika and Dengue are prevalent do not allow patient samples to be shipped out of the country, so the researchers traveled to several countries, including Mexico, Colombia, India, and Brazil, to test their devices with patient samples.

They found that their results were comparable to those obtained by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests, which detect viral RNA in the bloodstream. PCR tests are not widely used in areas where Zika virus is found because they require trained personnel and lab equipment that are not available everywhere.

“Since conventional methods require a great deal of time for sample collection and diagnostics, this inexpensive, paper-based, rapid diagnostic will be very useful for the diagnosis of many infectious diseases,” says Luke Lee, an associate president of the National University of Singapore and director of the Biomedical Institute for Global Health Research and Technology in Singapore.

Emerging viruses

Dengue infects hundreds of millions of people annually, mostly in tropical regions. It is usually not fatal, but in areas where there is more than one serotype circulating, it is more likely to produce a severe, potentially life-threatening illness. A diagnostic that can distinguish between all four serotypes of Dengue fever could give doctors a way to discover early on when a new serotype has entered their region.

“When we have traveled to the places where these viruses are problems, the people there unanimously say that they need more surveillance. They need to know which viruses are circulating in their environments,” Gehrke says.

The researchers believe that their approach should also enable them to quickly develop diagnostic tests for other related viruses that might emerge in the future.

“By already screening this group of antibodies that we have against all these antigens we have, like West Nile, we already know how well they react. So that’s information we could use in the future to develop additional tests that can be used to detect other emerging viruses,” Gehrke says.

They are now working on a diagnostic for the emerging Powassan virus, which is carried by the same tick that spreads Lyme disease. Powassan, found mainly in the northeastern United States and the Great Lakes region, causes a severe form of encephalitis.

The research was funded by the U.S. Public Health Service and the Science, Technology and Innovation Fund of Colombia.

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