Study sheds light on turbulence in astrophysical plasmas

Plasmas, gas-like collections of ions and electrons, make up an estimated 99 percent of the visible matter in the universe, including the sun, the stars, and the gaseous medium that permeates the space in between. Most of these plasmas, including the solar wind that constantly flows out from the sun and sweeps through the solar system, exist in a turbulent state. How this turbulence works remains a mystery; it’s one of the most dynamic research areas in plasma physics.

Now, two researchers have proposed a new model to explain these dynamic turbulent processes.

The findings, by Nuno Loureiro, an associate professor of nuclear science and engineering and of physics at MIT, and Stanislav Boldyrev, a professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, are reported today in the Astrophysical Journal. The paper is the third in a series this year explaining key aspects of how these turbulent collections of charged particles behave.

“Naturally occurring plasmas in space and astrophysical environments are threaded by magnetic fields and exist in a turbulent state,” Loureiro says. “That is, their structure is highly disordered at all scales: If you zoom in to look more and more closely at the wisps and eddies that make up these materials, you’ll see similar signs of disordered structure at every size level.” And while turbulence is a common and widely studied phenomenon that occurs in all kinds of fluids, the turbulence that happens in plasmas is more difficult to predict because of the added factors of electrical currents and magnetic fields.

“Magnetized plasma turbulence is fascinatingly complex and remarkably challenging,” he says.

Simulation conducted by MIT student Daniel Groselj.

Magnetic reconnection is a complicated phenomenon that Loureiro has been studying in detail for more than a decade. To explain the process, he gives a well-studied example: “If you watch a video of a solar flare” as it arches outward and then collapses back onto the sun’s surface, “that’s magnetic reconnection in action. It’s something that happens on the surface of the sun that leads to explosive releases of energy.” Loureiro’s understanding of this process of magnetic reconnection has provided the basis for the new analysis that can now explain some aspects of turbulence in plasmas.

Loureiro and Boldyrev found that magnetic reconnection must play a crucial role in the dynamics of plasma turbulence, an insight that they say fundamentally changes the understanding of the dynamics and properties of space and astrophysical plasmas and “is indeed a conceptual shift in how one thinks about turbulence,” Loureiro says.

Existing hypotheses about the dynamics of plasma turbulence “can correctly predict some aspects of what is observed,” he says, but they “lead to inconsistencies.”

Loureiro worked with Boldyrev, a leading theorist on plasma turbulence, and the two realized “we can fix this by essentially merging the existing theoretical descriptions of turbulence and magnetic reconnection,” Loureiro explains. As a result, “the picture of turbulence gets conceptually modified and leads to results that more closely match what has been observed by satellites that monitor the solar wind, and many numerical simulations.”

Loureiro hastens to add that these results do not prove that the model is correct, but show that it is consistent with existing data. “Further research is definitely needed,” Loureiro says. “The theory makes specific, testable predictions, but these are difficult to check with current simulations and observations.”

He adds, “The theory is quite universal, which increases the possibilities for direct tests.” For example, there is some hope that a new NASA mission, the Parker Solar Probe, which is planned for launch next year and will be observing the sun’s corona (the hot ring of plasma around the sun that is only visible from Earth during a total eclipse), could provide the needed evidence. That probe, Loureiro says, will be going closer to the sun than any previous spacecraft, and it should provide the most accurate data on turbulence in the corona so far.

Collecting this information is well worth the effort, Loureiro says: “Turbulence plays a critical role in a variety of astrophysical phenomena,” including the flows of matter in the core of planets and stars that generate magnetic fields via a dynamo effect, the transport of material in accretion disks around massive central objects such as black holes, the heating of stellar coronae and winds (the gases constantly blown away from the surfaces of stars), and the generation of structures in the interstellar medium that fills the vast spaces between the stars. “A solid understanding of how turbulence works in a plasma is key to solving these longstanding problems,” he says.

“This important study represents a significant step forward toward a deeper physical understanding of magnetized plasma turbulence,” says Dmitri Uzdensky, an associate professor of physics at the University of Colorado, who was not involved in this work. “By elucidating deep connections and interactions between two ubiquitous and fundamental plasma processes — magnetohydrodynamic turbulence and magnetic reconnection — this analysis changes our theoretical picture of how the energy of turbulent plasma motions cascades from large down to small scales.”

He adds, “This work builds on a previous pioneering study published by these authors earlier this year and extends it into a broader realm of collisionless plasmas. This makes the resulting theory directly applicable to more realistic plasma environments found in nature. At the same time, this paper leads to new tantalizing questions about plasma turbulence and reconnection and thus opens new directions of research, hence stimulating future research efforts in space physics and plasma astrophysics.”

The research was supported by a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy through the Partnership in Basic Plasma Science and Engineering.

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Building the hardware for the next generation of artificial intelligence

On a recent Monday morning, Vivienne Sze, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, spoke with enthusiasm about network architecture design. Her students nodded slowly, as if on the verge of comprehension. When the material clicked, the nods grew in speed and confidence. “Everything crystal clear?” she asked with a brief pause and a return nod before diving back in.

This new course, 6.S082/6.888 (Hardware Architecture for Deep Learning), is modest in size — capped at 25 for now — compared to the bursting lecture halls characteristic of other MIT classes focused on machine learning and artificial intelligence. But this course is a little different. With a long list of prerequisites and a heavy base of assumed knowledge, students are jumping into deep water quickly. They blaze through algorithmic design in a few weeks, cover the terrain of computer hardware design in a similar period, then get down to the real work: how to think about making these two fields work together.

The goal of the class is to teach students the interplay between two traditionally separate disciplines, Sze says. “How can you write algorithms that map well onto hardware so they can run faster? And how can you design hardware to better support the algorithm?” she asks rhetorically. “It’s one thing to design algorithms, but to deploy them in the real world you have to consider speed and energy consumption.”

“We are beginning to see tremendous student interest in the hardware side of deep learning,” says Joel Emer, who co-teaches the course with Sze. A professor of the practice in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and a senior distinguished research scientist at the chip manufacturer NVidia, Emer has partnered with Sze before. Together they wrote a journal article that provides a comprehensive tutorial and survey coverage of recent advances toward enabling efficient processing of deep neural networks. It is used as the main reference for the course.

In 2016, their group unveiled a new, energy-efficient computer chip optimized for neural networks, which could enable powerful artificial-intelligence systems to run locally on mobile devices. The groundbreaking chip, called “Eyeriss,” could also help usher in the internet of things.

“I’ve been in this field for more than four decades. I’ve never seen an area with so much excitement and promise in all that time,” Emer says. “The opportunity to have an original impact through building important and specialized architecture is larger than anything I’ve seen before.”

Hardware at the heart of deep learning

Deep learning is a new name for an approach to artificial intelligence called neural networks, a means of doing machine learning in which a computer learns to perform some tasks by analyzing training examples. Today, popular applications of deep learning are everywhere, Emer says. The technique drives image recognition, self-driving cars, medical image analysis, surveillance and transportation systems, and language translation, for instance.

The value of the hardware at the heart of deep learning is often overlooked, says Emer. Practical and efficient neural networks, which computer scientists have researched off and on for 60 years, were infeasible without hardware to support deep learning algorithms. “Many AI accomplishments were made possible because of advances in hardware,” he says. “Hardware is the foundation of everything you can do in software.”

Deep learning techniques are evolving very rapidly, Emer says. “There is a direct need for this sort of hardware. Some of the students coming out of the class might be able to contribute to that hardware revolution.”

Meanwhile, traditional software companies like Google and Microsoft are taking notice, and investing in more custom hardware to speed up the processing for deep learning, according to Sze.

“People are recognizing the importance of having efficient hardware to support deep learning,” she says. “And specialized hardware to drive the research forward. One of the greatest limitations of progress in deep learning is the amount of computation available.”

New hardware architectures

Real-world deployment is key for Skanda Koppula, a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science. He is a member of the MIT Formula SAE Race Car Electronics Team.

“We plan to apply some of these ideas in building the perception systems for a driverless Formula student race car,” he says. “And in the longer term, I see myself working toward a doctorate in related fields.”

Valerie Sarge, also a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science, is taking the course in prepration for a career that involves creating hardware for machine learning applications.

“Deep learning is a quickly growing field, and better hardware architectures have the potential to make a big impact on researchers' ability to effectively train networks,” she says. “Through this class, I'm gaining some of the skills I need to contribute to designing these architectures.”

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Harnessing a “meritocracy of great ideas”

A team of 25 students, faculty, and staff from across the Institute has been working to develop a new design subject with an ambitious goal: to propose and rigorously evaluate potential new curriculum, pedagogies, and policies to advance the educational experience of first-year undergraduate students at MIT.

The subject, Designing the First Year at MIT, will be offered in spring 2018 for MIT undergraduate and graduate students, as well as Harvard University graduate students. “The class will be tasked with leading a community-based design effort that conceptualizes the first year experience (FYE) as a complex system,” says Ian A. Waitz, vice chancellor of the Institute. “It’s a neat opportunity to shape education at MIT, while learning about design methodologies and applying them to a very challenging problem. The subject is being developed and taught by faculty and staff from all five schools. That may be a first.”

The idea bubbled up during conversations last spring between Waitz (then dean of the School of Engineering) and a group of students from the MIT Undergraduate Association (UA). Both he and the students share an interest in improving the undergraduate learning experience.

Enhancing the first-year experience was among the initial charges identified by Chancellor Cynthia Barnhart when she created the Office of the Vice Chancellor in July. Since then, Waitz has met with hundreds of faculty, administrators, and staff to seek advice on the best approach. In each session, he always asks two questions: What are the objectives of the first year? How well are we meeting them? Such intelligence is helping to guide the development of the subject in real-time.

“The course is a really interesting and effective way of getting the entire community involved in this conversation,” says junior Alexa Martin, UA vice president. “It’s more likely to result in actual change than surveys, presentations, and other things that have been done in the past.”

Martin is one of four students on the team planning the subject, along with sophomore Kathryn Jiang, UA secretary; sophomore Noah McDaniel, who chairs the UA Committee on Education; and sophomore Edward Fan, who serves on the Institute’s Committee on Curricula (CoC). This fall, they fanned out across campus to tell students about the class and ask their perceptions of the first year. What they heard revolved around a few themes, such as major exploration, first year advising, and preparing students for the second-year and beyond.

Because community engagement is fundamental for success, students in the class will continue to gather and analyze extensive input and data from stakeholders across campus. “We’d like to put the MIT culture to work — a meritocracy of great ideas,” says Bruce Cameron, director of the System Architecture Lab and one of the subject instructors.

The other instructors are Bryan Moser, academic director and  senior lecturer in the System Design and Management program; Maria Yang, an associate professor of mechanical engineering and engineering systems; Glen Urban, the David Austin Professor in Management (emeritus); and Justin Reich, an assistant professor in comparative media studies and writing.

Using a project-focused approach, the teaching team will lead weekly lectures on ways to think about, frame, research, and design solutions to the problem, along with lab-based workshops, readings, and field work. Groups of students will tackle different aspects of the first year, such as the GIRs or the residential experience, and along the way, develop skills in design, learning science, and communications.

“They’ve done an exceptional job of involving students in all of this,” Martin says about the development of the subject. “I’ve felt like my voice has been heard along the entire way. In almost every decision they make, they’re getting input from students, which is really nice to see and be a part of.”

In that sense, the approach the planning team has taken bodes well for the desired outcome. “We hope to get a lot of ‘user-centered innovation,’” Cameron says. “Who better to guide the first year experience into the 21st century than a group of MIT students who lived it?”

Waitz notes that having experience as an undergraduate at MIT, while valuable, is not required. “I hope graduate students will also take the course, as they are able to look back on their undergraduate experience, and also bring perspectives from other college programs.” 

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MIT issues statement about early-morning fire near Central Square

MIT issued the following statement today, following a fire near Central Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The four-alarm fire broke out at approximately 1:00 a.m. and damaged several buildings, including 22-24 Magazine Street. All residents were safely evacuated.
 
MIT owns the 12-unit apartment building at 22-24 Magazine Street in Cambridge, which houses approximately 50 people, including several members of the MIT community.  
 
We are grateful to all of the first responders who, under the leadership of the Cambridge Fire Department, ensured the evacuation of all residents and quickly contained and extinguished the fire. As far as we know, no serious injuries were reported, thanks in large part to the swift efforts of these first responders, as well as the building’s sprinkler and fire alarm systems. We greatly appreciate the emergency shelter provided by the Red Cross for our residents and those in nearby buildings.
 
MIT staff are working to secure alternative housing for affected residents as quickly as possible, and assessing the extent of the damage and the needed repairs. At this early stage, we anticipate damage to the building and personal property due to a combination of water, smoke and fire.
 
While we believe we are directly in contact with all of the displaced individuals at 22-24 Magazine Street, we encourage any residents and others impacted to call (617) 498-0911 and/or email 22magazineresponse@mit.edu.  
 
We cannot yet confirm the cause of the fire, but are working closely with the Cambridge Fire Department. 

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Vivienne Sze receives Engineering Emmy Award

Vivienne Sze, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science, was a member of the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC), which developed the acclaimed High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard. For its work, the team received an Engineering Emmy Award during the Television Academy’s recent 69th Engineering Emmy Awards ceremony in Hollywood.

In a statement about the award, the Television Academy said HEVC “has enabled efficient delivery in ultra-high-definition (UHD) content over multiple distribution channels.”

“This new compression coding has been adopted, or selected for adoption, by all UHD television distribution channels, including terrestrial, satellite, cable, fiber, and wireless, as well as all UHD viewing devices, including traditional televisions, tablets, and mobile phones,” the Academy stated.

The JCT-VC’s award was one of seven Emmy's given to individuals, companies, or organizations for engineering innovations that significantly improve television transmission, recording, or reception.

“HEVC provides higher compression than previous standards,” says Sze, who also co-edited a 2014 book on the subject. “At the same time, it can operate at the high processing speed necessary for UHD video and at the low power consumption necessary for mobile devices. It was such an honor for the whole team to receive an Emmy from the Television Academy.”

The JCT-VC — which Sze describes as “a group of world-renowned video-coding experts” — consists of engineers from the Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the Moving Pictures Expert Group (MPEG) of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), as well as the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). She served as the primary coordinator of the team’s core experiment on coefficient scanning and coding, and chaired ad hoc groups on topics related to entropy coding and parallel processing.

Sze received a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Toronto and a master’s degree and PhD from MIT. During her PhD studies, she worked on the design of energy-efficient video-coding hardware under the guidance of Anantha Chandrakasan, now Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and dean of the School of Engineering.

She soon realized that the video-coding algorithms limited the amount of energy reduction that could be achieved by the hardware. Accordingly, she started to investigate ways to jointly design the algorithms and hardware to improve the energy efficiency of next-generation video coding systems. She published her results at the 2011 International Solid-State Circuit Conference (ISSCC).

Toward the end of Sze’s PhD work, she participated in VCEG meetings as the group was starting to discuss developing a new video-compression standard. After graduating, she joined the video coding team at Texas Instruments, which had sponsored her PhD research, and actively participated in the development of HEVC.

Once the HEVC standard was finalized, Sze joined the faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS). She heads the Energy-Efficient Multimedia Systems Group at MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE). Her research involves applying the algorithm and hardware co-design approach to a broad set of applications including machine learning, computer vision, robotics, image processing and, of course, video coding. Recent results include energy-efficient algorithms and hardware for deep learning and autonomous navigation for miniature drones. She is also co-teaching a new class at MIT that focuses on the co-design of algorithms and hardware for deep learning.

Her work has earned numerous other awards and honors. She received the EECS Jin-Au Kong Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Prize in 2011 for her thesis on “Parallel Algorithms and Architectures for Low-Power Video Decoding." She also received the 2017 Qualcomm Faculty Award, the 2016 Google Faculty Research Award, the 2016 Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Research Program Award, the 2016 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award, the 2014 DARPA Young Faculty Award, and the 2007 Design Automation Conference/ISSCC Student Design Contest Award. She was also a co-recipient of the 2016 MICRO Top Picks Award and the 2008 Asian-SSCC Outstanding Design Award.

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MIT's AIM Photonics Academy looks to expand

MIT’s AIM Photonics Academy helped organize a gathering of more than 60 people at Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts, earlier this month to explore opportunities in integrated photonics, and discuss possibilities for a large investment to create a Lab for Education and Application Prototypes (LEAP) in integrated photonics there.

Attendees included representatives from companies, colleges, and universities, the Massachusetts Manufacturing Extension Program, the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, and aides to U.S. Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy III. 

Integrated photonics uses complex optical circuits to process and transmit signals of light, similar to the routing of electrical signals in a computer microchip. In contrast to the electrical transmission in a microchip, a photonic integrated circuit can transmit multiple information channels simultaneously using different wavelengths of light with minimal interference and energy loss to enable high-bandwidth, low-power communications. 

“Students need to be prepared for the jobs that are coming,” Cheryl Schnitzer, an associate professor of chemistry at Stonehill College, said at the Nov. 14 event. “It’s our obligation to teach them about the exploding field of photonics and integrated photonics.”

MIT’s AIM Photonics Academy is the education and workforce development arm of the AIM Photonics Institute, one of 14 Manufacturing USA institutes launched as part of a federal initiative to revitalize American manufacturing. The federal government has committed $110 million to the AIM Photonics Institute over five years. At the same time, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts will spend $100 million on projects related to colleges and industry within the state, including $28 million to help launch AIM Photonics projects such as LEAP facilities.  

MIT received funding for the first LEAP facility, with a focus on packaging. The MIT Lab for Education and Application Prototypes is currently housed in Building 35, and will relocate to the fifth floor of MIT.nano in June 2018.  

A second LEAP site in its final stages of planning will be located at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and will also serve nearby Quinsigamond Community College. AIM Photonics Academy and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts are also in discussions to build four more LEAP Labs, including one at Stonehill College, which would serve the southeastern corner of the state.  

Once up and running, these labs will form a training network that helps Massachusetts become a major hub for photonics technology.

The meeting at Stonehill College, which also included the NextFlex Flexible Hybrid Electronics manufacturing innovation institute, generated many plans. The college has already connected with Bridgewater State and Bristol Community Colleges about creating photonic tracks in their programs. A team from AIM Photonics Academy, Stonehill College, and MassTech will begin visiting companies to follow up on how they might get engaged in a LEAP Lab at Stonehill.

Companies were enthusiastic about the opportunity to expand in these areas as well.

“Any time you add high-tech education to an area, you are going to incubate high-tech companies,” noted John Lescinskas of Brockton Electro-Optics. “You’re planting a seed. It can lead to a tree, or even a forest.”

Because integrated photonics “is a technology that originated in Massachusetts, at MIT,” said Lionel Kimerling, AIM Photonics Academy executive director and professor in the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering, the state is an optimal location for this initiative to take place.

“With the help of the state, Massachusetts can be the Silicon Valley for the growth of ultra-high performance communications systems using integrated photonics,” Kimerling said.   

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Letter regarding MIT's efforts in combating sexual harassment

The following email was sent yesterday to the MIT community by President L. Rafael Reif.

To the members of the MIT community,

In the last several weeks, the nation has once again seen evidence that sexual harassment is pervasive. I am deeply disturbed by the revelations of misconduct elsewhere — and I know it also happens at MIT.

On this question, our community is not an oasis of safety. When it comes to sexual harassment, assault and related misconduct, a community like ours presents a particular set of risks: a 24/7 environment that brings together people across a broad range of ages, incomes and backgrounds, many of whom have power over others — power to make being at MIT miserable, power enough to make or break a career.

I want to use this moment of heightened attention to be clear about why this abuse of power is so disturbing in the context of our community — and to highlight what we must do and are doing about it. I expect we do not yet know the full extent of the problem at MIT. But the fact it exists here at all demands our serious attention.

The MIT community is built on collaboration and mutual respect. Sexual harassment is an act of aggression that belittles, unnerves and controls. It violates our fundamental expectations of respect and equality, and it violates the humanity of the person being harassed.

For many who suffer sexual harassment, the experience seriously damages their lives, their aspirations, their confidence and their careers. In some cases, the “remedy” can be damaging too. It grieves me to know that some of you reading this may have endured sexual misconduct at MIT, sought to take action and felt thwarted, silenced or ignored. As a community and as an administration, we must make sure that seeking help actually helps.

So, what are we doing?

• We start with a baseline of sound policies against harassment, thoughtfully revised just last year. We are now making certain that our procedures for raising complaints and reviewing them are fair to all involved, effective and clear.
• We are also expanding rules regarding consensual relations among community members across lines of authority, such as faculty and graduate students.
• Another vital step is to offer those who experience sexual misconduct the right resources, such as confidential personal support and guidance about options for reporting. In the last three years, MIT has substantially improved these services and expanded our staff. But many who could use such services may not even know they exist; we need to do more to get the word out. Chancellor Barnhart offers more detail on our efforts in this interview.
• All incoming students go through online training to understand what constitutes sexual misconduct, how to intervene against it and how to respond effectively to someone affected by it. Thanks to a two-year development process, now, for the first time, we are including all faculty and staff. This process has already begun with the deans, department heads, and directors of labs and centers. By the end of the academic year, we expect that every member of the community will take part in this training.
• Finally, to make good decisions, we need good data. The training mechanisms for faculty and staff will also provide ways to indicate whether one has experienced sexual misconduct at MIT. And in the next academic year, we will again conduct a survey that will allow students to convey how they may have experienced sexual misconduct here.
• I am conscious, however, that especially on questions around faculty and staff misconduct, we are not where we need to be. I have asked the leaders of Human Resources, the Provost’s Office, the Chancellor's Office, and the Office of the General Counsel — consulting with community members — to study our policies and practices, strengthen them where necessary, increase the community's awareness of them and develop a process so that findings of sexual misconduct are consistently handled in a way that balances fairness and transparency.

In the end, the most important work is up to all of us. We need to actively build a culture that treats sexual harassment, coercion and assault as taboo, absurdly out of bounds — unthinkable for anyone, of any age, in any context. Let me now state the obvious. Most harassers are men. As a result, the men in our community must play a particularly important role in leading and driving the necessary change in culture.

Every member of our community is valuable, and harm to one is harm to all. As long as sexual harassment and assault persist in our community, we fail to live up to our shared potential and to fulfill our aspiration to make a better world.

*          *          *

If the problem seems daunting, we can take inspiration from two MIT giants we lost this year, President Emeritus Paul Gray and Institute Professor Millie Dresselhaus.

In the 1970s and ’80s, Paul and Millie both saw that the MIT they lived and worked in should be better — more fair, more open and more welcoming to talent from every background — and they took deliberate, concerted, strategic action. Their leadership helped to reshape the MIT community — and helped deliver “the future” we inhabit today.

Their progress proves something important and hopeful: that in the life of a community, cultural change and moral growth are possible. Today, the responsibility to sustain that momentum falls to us. So I close with a challenge: that we each strive to define what we can do to invent a better MIT community for those who are here today, and for those who will follow us tomorrow.

I look forward to joining you in this vital work.

Sincerely,
L. Rafael Reif

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3Q: Chancellor Cynthia Barnhart on efforts to combat sexual assault

In the fall of 2014, Chancellor Cynthia Barnhart released the results of the Community Attitudes on Sexual Assault (CASA) survey, an online survey that was sent to all MIT undergraduates and graduate students to better understand the extent and effects of sexual misconduct at MIT. With information and insights from CASA in hand, the administration has been partnering with students, faculty, and staff to raise awareness about what constitutes misconduct and how to prevent it, and making significant investments in resources. Against the recent backdrop of sexual harassment and assault cases in workplaces and at institutions across the country, Barnhart spoke to MIT News about the Institute's work to address this complex problem.

Q: In the three years since the CASA survey results were released, how has MIT responded to what we learned from students about sexual misconduct on campus?

A: The CASA survey has given us a baseline understanding of sexual assault at MIT — it shed a light on painful problems in our community, and it pointed us in the direction of solutions.

The key takeaways were that we needed to do more to educate people about support resources and reporting options, we needed to make it easier for them to get help, and we needed to change attitudes and behaviors. Over the last three years, thanks to investments in new staff, education and community outreach initiatives, and updates to our policies and procedures, we’ve been able to make some meaningful progress.

The Title IX and Violence Prevention and Response (VPR) offices have added education, prevention, community outreach, and investigatory specialists to their teams, enabling us to educate more people about how to prevent sexual misconduct from happening, and to effectively respond when incidents occur. Through these efforts, we have sparked the kind of dialogue and awareness that leads to prevention and changes in culture that get at the root of this problem. Here are just a few examples:

•    Since 2015, nearly 3,000 fraternity members and undergraduates have taken part in Party-Safe Plus training, which teaches students how to host parties responsibly and includes lessons on bystander intervention.
•    In 2016 and 2017, a total of more than 1,200 sorority members completed Sorority Trainings Addressing Risk (STAR), which focuses in part on sexual assault awareness and sexual assault intervention.
•    All new undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, staff, and postdoctoral scholars are required to complete an online sexual misconduct training program so they are aware of campus resources, policies, and reporting options.

According to the CASA survey, 63 percent of respondents who reported experiencing unwanted sexual behavior told someone about it; 90 percent of those students sought support from a friend. To respond to this finding, we’ve made a concerted effort to strengthen our peer-to-peer education and support network. I’m particularly proud about the positive impact of two student-led initiatives:

•    In just over two years, 70 Pleasure@MIT student educators have conducted workshops about components of healthy, respectful relationships in more than 21 residence halls and fraternities, sororities, and independent living groups. They’ve reached more than 1,000 of their peers who continue to spread what they learn.
•    Together with the Title IX Office, our graduate student leaders in Graduate Women at MIT (GWAMIT) are hosting dinners every semester with representatives from many different departments to discuss gender issues and to share best practices about promoting an inclusive, welcoming academic climate.

We’ve also made updates to MIT’s policies and procedures. We have expanded and clarified sexual misconduct policies, including those that address sexual assault and sexual harassment, intimate partner violence, and stalking. Responding to the recommendations of an Institute task force, we implemented more robust procedures to investigate and adjudicate student complaints of sexual misconduct. And the Title IX office now offers a new online reporting form, accepts anonymous reports of misconduct, and publishes annual reports summarizing aggregate statistics on the types of student cases they handle.

Q: How do you know that the efforts you’ve undertaken since the CASA survey are having a positive impact? And what new initiatives can you tell the MIT community to expect to see in the coming weeks and months?

A: I am measuring our progress across three key indicators. The first is that we are seeing more students come forward to seek support for or to report unwanted sexual behavior. VPR is serving more clients and taking more calls to their 24/7 hotline than ever before. The Title IX Office handled 118 and 115 student sexual misconduct cases in academic years 2015-16 and 2016-17 respectively. This represents a roughly 24 percent increase over their 2014-2015 caseload.

We think these increases can be attributed to our education and outreach work: More members of our community know what sexual assault is, understand where they can turn to for help, and trust our support resources to provide critical services.

The second indicator that tells me we are on the right track is the robust level of engagement we’re seeing from all corners of the Institute — more and more students, faculty, and staff are invested in changing attitudes and behaviors and creating a safer, more respectful and inclusive environment on campus. Some examples of this engagement are:

•    VPR and Title IX are seeing an uptick in requests from departments, labs, student organizations, and residential life staff for trainings (to request one, email titleix@mit.edu).
•    MIT’s Interfraternity Council’s (IFC) sexual misconduct committee partnered with VPR and Alcohol and Other Drugs Services (AODS) to launch the Consent Awareness and Prevention (CAP) certification program that incentivizes and recognizes fraternities that prioritize member education and co-sponsor awareness events with VPR.
•    The Department of Chemistry is set to launch a program that will offer every lab group the opportunity to receive training on inclusive environments, sexual harassment, and bystander intervention. We expect that this pilot will be a model that other departments can and will adopt.

The third indicator comes from our students. They are telling us that their peers treat one another with respect. In 2015, 80 percent of undergraduates who responded to the Undergraduate Enrolled Student Survey agreed that “Students at MIT treat one another with respect.” In the 2017 Student Quality of Life Survey, which went to all MIT students, nearly 90 percent of undergraduates and graduate students agreed with the same statement.

These are all positive signs, but I know that our work is not done. We have to sustain the momentum we’ve created on student support and education, and constantly evaluate the impact we’re having. And we must increase the attention we’re paying to what our students, faculty, and staff are experiencing in their classrooms, labs, and offices. Here are some of the ways we plan to do that:

•    By the end of this academic year, all current faculty, staff, and postdocs will be expected to complete sexual harassment and misconduct training to increase their understanding about how to prevent and respond to these issues.
•    A new consensual relationships in workplace or academic environment policy will address relationships that may raise concerns of conflict of interest, abuse of authority, favoritism, and unfair treatment.
•    MindHandHeart has launched the new Department Support Project in several academic departments to help share best practices and coordinate climate enhancements, with a focus on gender bias and discrimination issues.
•    We will administer a sexual assault survey to students in the 2018-19 academic year so that we can measure and effectively respond to shifts in attitudes, behaviors, and culture since our 2014 survey.

Q: A wave of national sexual harassment and abuse cases has come to light in recent months. How do you think this moment will influence MIT’s education and prevention efforts?

A: First, I think what’s been reported nationally and locally is deeply disturbing, and underscores that sexual misconduct affects individuals, workplaces, and institutions everywhere in our country.

I think, though, that good can come out of this moment: People at MIT and across the nation are talking about these problems, and that’s the start of finding the solutions we urgently need. Against the backdrop of the national dialogue that’s happening right now, I believe we can double down on our commitment to addressing all types of sexual misconduct at MIT. With partners from other offices, I’m prepared to continue this vital work, and I know that there are many students, faculty, and staff who are as well.

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AeroAstro announces graduate fellowships for women and other underrepresented students

With the goal of increasing diversity in the next generation of aerospace engineers, the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro) has created a pool of graduate fellowships designated for women and other underrepresented students. The fellowships will be available starting with the 2017-2018 academic year.

“The fellowships are the first of a series of initiatives the department will roll out in coming months,” says Professor Nick Roy, AeroAstro graduate admissions chair and member of the department’s Diversity and Inclusion Committee. “Our first step is to guarantee funding for the best female and underrepresented graduate students."

Both current MIT undergraduates and students from other universities are encouraged to apply. “As the research in our department is wide-ranging, we encourage applications from students with undergraduate degrees in mechanical and electrical engineering, computer and environmental science, mathematics, and physics, in addition to, of course, aerospace engineering,” Roy says.

Graduate student Alexa Aguilar, a first-year master’s candidate in the Space Telecommunications, Astronomy and Radiation Laboratory, was selected this year to receive an AeroAstro fellowship. Aguilar says, “Coming from an electrical engineering background, I was nervous about diving head-first into an aerospace program, but having a fellowship has given me the freedom and flexibility to get up to speed with the current research, discover what resonates with my interests, and brainstorm what I want to pursue.”

Aguilar said that fellowships let students concentrate on their work without the specter of tuition finance looking over their shoulder. “Fellowships alleviate stress for both you and your advisor when it comes to covering all tuition and housing costs here at MIT,“ she noted. “They also allow you the time to explore your research interests through your allotted funding.”

Cadence Payne, who, like Aguilar, is a graduate student with a fellowship in the department, encourages others to seek AeroAstro fellowships. “Since my arrival, I’ve been immersed in a world of technological prosperity that’s nothing short of inspiring,” Payne says. “AeroAstro allows students an insane amount of hands-on, real-world experience. Students in my lab are leading missions and designing entire systems to be integrated on projects that will one day physically reside in space!”

The fellowships will be offered to students after admissions decisions are made.

For information about applying, visit the AeroAstro website’s graduate admission section and funding page.

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Monitoring activity in the geosynchronous belt

In the darkness of 2 a.m. on Aug. 26, the sky over Cape Canaveral, Florida, lit up with the bright plume of a Minotaur rocket lifting off from its launch pad. Aboard the rocket, a satellite developed by the MIT Lincoln Laboratory for the U.S. Air Force's Operationally Responsive Space (ORS) Office awaited its deployment into low Earth orbit.

The ORS-5 SensorSat spacecraft is on a 3-year mission to continually scan the geosynchronous belt, which at about 36,000 kilometers above Earth is home to a great number of satellites indispensable to the national economy and security. Data collected by SensorSat will help the United States keep a protective eye on the movements of satellites and space debris in the belt.  

"There was nothing like seeing the massive Minotaur IV blast our creation into orbit, and then getting those familiar telemetry messages to indicate that it's really up there and operating just as it did in thermal vacuum testing," says Andrew Stimac, the SensorSat program manager and assistant leader of the Lincoln Laboratory's Integrated Systems and Concepts Group.

In the months that SensorSat has been in orbit, it has undergone a complete checkout process, opened the cover of its optical system, and collected the first imagery of objects in the geosynchronous belt. The quality of the initial images has demonstrated that SensorSat utilizes a highly capable optical system that is able to conduct its required mission.

The 226-pound SensorSat is small in comparison to current U.S. satellites that monitor activity in the geosynchronous belt. SensorSat's size and its optical system design, which uses a smaller aperture, make it a lower-cost, faster-built option for space surveillance missions than the large systems designed for missions of 10 years or more.

"SensorSat is essentially a simple design, but it is a highly sensitive instrument that is one-tenth the size and one-tenth the cost of today's large satellites," says Grant Stokes, head of the Lincoln Laboratory's Space Systems and Technology Division, which collaborated with the Engineering Division to develop and build the satellite.

Traditional large surveillance satellites are designed to collect data on objects known to be in the geosynchronous belt. The optical systems on those satellites are mounted on gimbals so that they can turn their focus toward the targeted objects. SensorSat works on a different concept: Its fixed optical system surveys each portion of the belt that is within its current field of view as the satellite orbits Earth.

SensorSat makes approximately 14 passes around Earth each day, providing up-to-date views of activity in the geosynchronous belt. Stokes compared SensorSat's surveillance process to that of airport radars that continuously rotate to visualize a local airspace. Because SensorSat is not aimed at specific known objects, a secondary benefit to its concept of operations is that it may see new objects that pose threats to satellites within the belt.

The adoption of SensorSat-like systems that can be cost-effectively built on short timelines could also make it practical for the United States to more frequently deploy new satellites to keep pace with evolving technology.

SensorSat development and testing were accomplished in just three years, a period about one-third of that needed to develop and field large surveillance satellites. The SensorSat engineering effort involved the design, fabrication, and testing of the satellite structure and cover mechanism, lens optomechanics, telescope baffle, charge-coupled device packaging, electrical cabling, and thermal control.

The assembly, integration, and testing were conducted in Lincoln Laboratory's cleanroom facilities and its Engineering Test Laboratory. According to Mark Bury, assistant leader of the Laboratory's Structural and Thermal-Fluids Engineering Group, the shock, vibration, attitude control system, and thermal-vacuum testing performed were critical in validating SensorSat against the expected launch and space conditions it would need to endure.

"Perhaps the most important events occurred during thermal-vacuum testing," Bury says. "The satellite is exposed to conditions similar to those on orbit, and we used that test to validate our thermal design. Even more important, the thermal-vacuum test enabled us to get significant runtime on the avionics and components within the spacecraft, emulating the communication cadence and data streams that we would eventually see on orbit."

On July 7, less than two months before launch, SensorSat was shipped to Florida for installation on Orbital ATK's Minotaur IV inside a large cleanroom facility at Astrotech Space Operations, locatedjust outside the Kennedy Space Center. A team from the Lincoln Laboratory performed final assembly steps and prepared the satellite with the software uploads needed initially on orbit.

Joint operations were then conducted with Orbital ATK to complete the mechanical and electrical integration prior to encapsulation with the rocket fairing. The integrated assembly was then transported from Astrotech to the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station launch pad 46 in mid-August.

SensorSat, which resides directly above the equator, orbits at an inclination of zero degrees, an orientation that Stokes says required very precise deployment of the satellite. The Minotaur IV, modified from a 25-year-old Air Force rocket design and now operated by Orbital ATK, was up to the challenge, using two new rocket motors to provide the extra lift needed to reach the equatorial orbit.

SensorSat is now orbiting Earth and collecting data to fulfill its space surveillance mission.

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Revealing an imperfect actor in plant biotechnology

A research team led by MIT's Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research has harnessed metabolomic technologies to unravel the molecular activities of a key protein that enables plants to withstand a common herbicide.

Their findings reveal how the protein — a kind of catalyst or enzyme first isolated in bacteria and introduced into plants such as corn and soybeans in the 1990s — can sometimes act imprecisely, and how it can be successfully re-engineered to be more precise. The new study, which appears online in the journal Nature Plants, raises the standards for bioengineering in the 21st century.

“Our work underscores a critical aspect of bioengineering that we are now becoming technically able to address,” says senior author Jing-Ke Weng, a member of the Whitehead Institute and an assistant professor of biology at MIT. “We know that enzymes can behave indiscriminately. Now, we have the scientific capabilities to detect their molecular side effects, and we can leverage those insights to design smarter enzymes with enhanced specificity.”

Plants provide an extraordinary model for scientists to study how metabolism changes over time. Because they cannot escape from predators or search for new food sources when supplies run low, plants must often grapple with an array of environmental insults using what is readily available — their own internal biochemistry.

“Although they appear to be stationary, plants have rapidly evolving metabolic systems,” Weng explains. “Now, we can gain an unprecedented view of these changes because of cutting-edge techniques like metabolomics, allowing us to analyze metabolites and other biochemicals on a broad scale.”  

Key players in this evolutionary process, and a major focus of research in Weng’s laboratory, are enzymes. Traditionally, these naturally occurring catalysts have been viewed as mini-machines, taking the proper starting material (or substrate) and flawlessly converting it to the correct product. But Weng and other scientists now recognize that they make mistakes, often by latching on to an unintended substrate.

“This concept, known as enzyme promiscuity, has a variety of implications, both in enzyme evolution and more broadly, in human disease,” Weng says.

It also has implications for bioengineering, as Bastien Christ, a postdoctoral fellow in Weng’s laboratory, and his colleagues recently discovered.

Christ, then a graduate student in Stefan Hörtensteiner’s lab at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, was studying a particular strain of the flowering plant Arabidopsis thaliana as part of a separate project when he made a puzzling observation. He found that two biochemical compounds were present at unusually high levels in the plant's leaves.

Strangely, these compounds (called acetyl-aminoadipate and acetyl-tryptophan) weren’t present in any of the normal, so-called wild type plants. As he and his colleagues searched for an explanation, they narrowed in on the source: an enzyme, called BAR, that was engineered into the plants as a kind of chemical beacon, enabling scientists to more readily study them.

But BAR is more than just a tool for scientists. It is also one of the most commonly deployed traits in genetically modified crops such as soybeans, corn, and cotton, enabling them to withstand a widely-used herbicide (known as phosphinothricin or glufosinate).

For decades, scientists have known that BAR, originally isolated from bacteria, can render the herbicide inactive by tacking on a short string of chemicals, made of two carbons and one oxygen (also called an acetyl group). As the researchers describe in their Nature Plants paper, BAR has a promiscuous side, and can work on other substrates, too, such as the amino acids tryptophan and aminoadipate (a lysine derivative).

That explains why they can detect the unintended products (acetyl-tryptophan and acetyl-aminoadipate) in crops genetically engineered to carry BAR, such as soybeans and canola.

Their research included detailed studies of the BAR protein, including crystal structures of the protein bound to its substrates. This provided them with a blueprint for how to strategically modify BAR to make it less promiscuous, and favor only the herbicide as a substrate and not the amino acids. Christ and his colleagues created several versions that lack the non-specific activity of the original BAR protein.

“These are natural catalysts, so when we borrow them from an organism and put them into another, they may not necessarily be perfect for our purposes,” Christ says. “Gathering this kind of fundamental knowledge about how enzymes work and how their structure influences function can teach us how to select the best tools for bioengineering.”

There are other important lessons, too. When the BAR trait was first evaluated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1995 for use in canola, and in subsequent years for other crops, metabolomics was largely non-existent as a technology for biomedical research. Therefore, it could not be applied toward the characterization of genetically engineered plants and foods, as part of their regulatory review. Nevertheless, acetyl-aminoadipate and acetyl-tryptophan, which are normally present in humans, have been reviewed by the FDA and are safe for human and animal consumption.

Weng and his colleagues believe their study makes a strong case for considering metabolomics analyses as part of the review process for future genetically engineered crops.

“This is a cautionary tale,” Weng says.

The work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation, the EU-funded Plant Fellows program, the Pew Scholar Program in the Biomedical Sciences, and the Searle Scholars Program.

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Scientists demonstrate one of largest quantum simulators yet, with 51 atoms

Physicists at MIT and Harvard University have demonstrated a new way to manipulate quantum bits of matter. In a paper published today in the journal Nature, they report using a system of finely tuned lasers to first trap and then tweak the interactions of 51 individual atoms, or quantum bits.

The team’s results represent one of the largest arrays of quantum bits, known as qubits, that scientists have been able to individually control. In the same issue of Nature, a team from the University of Maryland reports a similarly sized system using trapped ions as quantum bits.

In the MIT-Harvard approach, the researchers generated a chain of 51 atoms and programmed them to undergo a quantum phase transition, in which every other atom in the chain was excited. The pattern resembles a state of magnetism known as an antiferromagnet, in which the spin of every other atom or molecule is aligned.

The team describes the 51-atom array as not quite a generic quantum computer, which theoretically should be able to solve any computation problem posed to it, but a “quantum simulator” — a system of quantum bits that can be designed to simulate a specific problem or solve for a particular equation, much faster than the fastest classical computer.

For instance, the team can reconfigure the pattern of atoms to simulate and study new states of matter and quantum phenomena such as entanglement. The new quantum simulator could also be the basis for solving optimization problems such as the traveling salesman problem, in which a theoretical salesman must figure out the shortest path to take in order to visit a given list of cities. Slight variations of this problem appear in many other areas of research, such as DNA sequencing, moving an automated soldering tip to many soldering points, or routing packets of data through processing nodes.

“This problem is exponentially hard for a classical computer, meaning it could solve this for a certain number of cities, but if I wanted to add more cities, it would get much harder, very quickly,” says study co-author Vladan Vuletić, the Lester Wolfe Professor of Physics at MIT. “For this kind of problem, you don’t need a quantum computer. A simulator is good enough to simulate the correct system. So we think these optimization algorithms are the most straightforward tasks to achieve.”

The work was performed in collaboration with Harvard professors Mikhail Lukin and Markus Greiner; MIT visiting scientist Sylvain Schwartz is also a co-author.

Separate but interacting

Quantum computers are largely theoretical devices that could potentially carry out immensely complicated computations in a fraction of the time that it would take for the world’s most powerful classical computer. They would do so through qubits — data processing units which, unlike the binary bits of classical computers, can be simultaneously in a position of 0 and 1. This quantum property of superposition allows a single qubit to carry out two separate streams of computation simultaneously. Adding additional qubits to a system can exponentially speed up a computer’s calculations.

But major roadblocks have prevented scientists from realizing a fully operational quantum computer. One such challenge: how to get qubits to interact with each other while not engaging with their surrounding environment.

“We know things turn classical very easily when they interact with the environment, so you need [qubits] to be super isolated,” says Vuletić, who is a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics and the MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms. “On the other hand, they need to strongly interact with another qubit.”

Some groups are building quantum systems with ions, or charged atoms, as qubits. They trap or isolate the ions from the rest of the environment using electric fields;  once trapped, the ions strongly interact with each other. But many of these interactions are strongly repelling, like magnets of similar orientation, and are therefore difficult to control, particularly in systems with many ions.

Other researchers are experimenting with superconducting qubits — artificial atoms fabricated to behave in a quantum fashion. But Vuletić says such manufactured qubits have their disadvantages compared with those based on actual atoms.

“By definition, every atom is the same as every other atom of the same species,” Vuletić says. “But when you build them by hand, then you have fabrication influences, such as slightly different transition frequencies, couplings, et cetera.”

Setting the trap

Vuletić and his colleagues came up with a third approach to building a quantum system, using neutral atoms — atoms that hold no electrical charge — as qubits. Unlike ions, neutral atoms do not repel each other, and they have inherently identical properties, unlike fabricated superconducting qubits.

In previous work, the group devised a way to trap individual atoms, by using a laser beam to first cool a cloud of rubidium atoms to close to absolute zero temperatures, slowing their motion to a near standstill. They then employ a second laser, split into more than 100 beams, to trap and hold individual atoms in place. They are able to image the cloud to see which laser beams have trapped an atom, and can switch off certain beams to discard those traps without an atom. They then rearrange all the traps with atoms, to create an ordered, defect-free array of qubits.

With this technique, the researchers have been able to build a quantum chain of 51 atoms, all trapped at their ground state, or lowest energy level.

In their new paper, the team reports going a step further, to control the interactions of these 51 trapped atoms, a necessary step toward manipulating individual qubits. To do so, they temporarily turned off the laser frequencies that originally trapped the atoms, allowing the quantum system to naturally evolve.

They then exposed the evolving quantum system to a third laser beam to try and excite the atoms into what is known as a Rydberg state — a state in which one of an atom’s electrons is excited to a very high energy compared with the rest of the atom’s electrons. Finally, they turned the atom-trapping laser beams back on to detect the final states of the individual atoms.

“If all the atoms start in the ground state, it turns out when we try to put all the atoms in this excited state, the state that emerges is one where every second atom is excited,” Vuletić says. “So the atoms make a quantum phase transition to something similar to an antiferromagnet.”

The transition takes place only in every other atom due to the fact that atoms in Rydberg states interact very strongly with each other, and it would take much more energy to excite two neighboring atoms to Rydberg states than the laser can provide.

Vuletić says the researchers can change the interactions between atoms by changing the arrangement of trapped atoms, as well as the frequency or color of the atom-exciting laser beam. What’s more, the system may be easily expanded.

“We think we can scale it up to a few hundred,” Vuletić says. “If you want to use this system as a quantum computer, it becomes interesting on the order of 100 atoms, depending on what system you’re trying to simulate.”

For now, the researchers are planning to test the 51-atom system as a quantum simulator, specifically on path-planning optimization problems that can be solved using adiabatic quantum computing — a form of quantum computing first proposed by Edward Farhi, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics at MIT.

Adiabatic quantum computing proposes that the ground state of a quantum system describes the solution to the problem of interest. When that system can be evolved to produce the problem itself, the end state of the system can confirm the solution.

“You can start by preparing the system in a simple and known state of lowest energy, for instance all atoms in their ground states, then slowly deform it to represent the problem you want to solve, for instance, the traveling salesman problem,” Vuletić says. “It’s a slow change of some parameters in the system, which is exactly what we do in this experiment. So our system is geared toward these adiabatic quantum computing problems.”

This research was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation, the Army Research Office, and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

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Celebrating Millie

They came from around the globe to commemorate a beloved mentor, collaborator, teacher, and world-renowned pioneer in solid-state physics and nanoscale engineering.

On Sunday, Nov. 26, the MIT community welcomed family, colleagues, friends, former students, and other associates of the late MIT Institute Professor Emerita Mildred “Millie” Dresselhaus to a daylong symposium celebrating her life.

Dresselhaus, an MIT faculty member for more than half a century, passed away at age 86 on Feb. 20, after a career in which she led in the development of numerous fields within materials science and engineering, particularly those related to the electronic structure of carbon. For her many accomplishments, Dresselhaus earned copious national and international accolades — including the National Medal of Science, the Kavli Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and worldwide recognition as the “Queen of Carbon.”

But Dresselhaus’ support of others, especially of women and underrepresented minorities; her service to local and national science and engineering societies; and her devotion to students and family were evidenced in equal measure at Sunday’s event, which drew a capacity crowd to Room 10-250 and to sessions in the lobbies of buildings 10 and 13.

“The first thing Millie taught me was the power of noticing,” MIT President L. Rafael Reif, who began at the Institute as a young professor in Dresselhaus’ home department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, said in his opening remarks. “Noticing patterns that others don’t see is essential to becoming and being a great scientist, and Millie surely had that gift.”

“But she used her amazing mind and heart to notice people, too,” Reif added. Dresselhaus, who as a student received guidance and encouragement from eminent physicists Rosalyn Yalow and Enrico Fermi, understood that “being noticed by the right person at the right time” could change the course of one’s career. And so, Reif explained, “Millie made part of her life’s work to notice others.”

Guests from various periods of Dresselhaus’ life filled the day with stories of her impact as a researcher and as a member of numerous communities, both at MIT and beyond.

In one session, colleagues from Mexico, Japan, Belgium, and elsewhere described Dresselhaus’ seminal contributions to the development of carbon science — from her work with graphite in the 1970s and 80s, to fullerines in the 1990s, to nanotubes in the 2000s, and back to graphite and two-dimensional graphene in the 2010s. Another session concentrated on her pioneering research developing nanomaterials in thermoelectrics, an area focused on turning temperature differences in materials into electricity.

One presentation slide depicted Dresselhaus’ extensive “family tree” of academic influence, which, based on publication citations, included some 900 collaborations over a half-century of research. A printed timeline, several dozen feet long, of life events and key scientific activities compiled by Dresselhaus’ granddaughter Shoshi Cooper gave attendees a visceral sense of the Institute Professor’s myriad travels, connections, and influences around the world.

But collaborators were often much more than just research partners; in many cases, they became lifelong friends — or family members. This began in the late 1950s with Dresselhaus’ partner in science and in life, husband and MIT staff researcher Gene Dresselhaus, who co-authored many papers and, as President Reif noted, four children. But it continued with her mentoring of dozens of graduate students and her connections to individuals across many realms of science research and education.

“What Millie and Gene gave me was deep encouragement,” said MIT colleague Jing Kong, a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “I’m so thankful for what Millie has taught me and shown me. … I hope we can carry on [her] legacy.”

Dresselhaus’ service to society — whether as director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science or as president of the American Physical Society (APS) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, was also on display, as was her devotion to improving conditions for women and underrepresented minorities in science and engineering, both at MIT and elsewhere. Laurie McNeil, a former postdoc who is now a professor of physics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, described Dresselhaus’ leadership in developing for the APS a nationwide Climate for Women Site Visit Program, which represented a critical step in helping physics departments improve support for female students and faculty.

Closer to home, Institute Professor Sheila Widnall of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, who spoke to attendees via prerecorded video, described some of the many positive changes Dresselhaus helped to bring about for women at MIT, who comprised just 4 percent of the student body when Dresselhaus first joined the Lincoln Laboratory in 1960. Later that decade, after becoming only the third woman (after Emily Wick and Widnall) to join MIT’s faculty in science or engineering, Dresselhaus felt a strong responsibility to advocate on behalf of female students and colleagues, and to be available for them in various supporting roles. “We all owe Millie a debt of gratitude,” Widnall said.

Looking forward, MIT Professor and Associate Dean for Innovation Vladimir Bulovic spoke of the many ways MIT hopes to extend Dresselhaus’ legacy in years to come. He noted that her personal papers would soon be donated to MIT’s Institute Archives for future generations to explore, and that her spirit would continue on in a series of Rising Stars workshops that bring young women in science and engineering to MIT for career development and networking. Bulovic was especially enthusiastic about Dresselhaus’ mark on MIT.nano, the state-of-the-art nanoscience and nanotechnology facility rising in the middle of campus. In a nod to her assertion that “My background is so improbable — that I’d be here from where I started,” Bulovic announced that a key courtyard between MIT.nano and the Infinite Corridor will be named “the Improbability Walk” in her honor.

The final session of the evening concluded with inspiration and song. As a lifelong violinist, Dresselhaus cherished orchestral and chamber music, and would play regularly in groups and in impromptu performances with family and friends. In tribute, loved ones including daughter Marianne and granddaughters Elizabeth and Clara capped the day’s presentations with pieces by Bach, Schumann, and Brahms.

MIT Corporation Life Member Shirley Ann Jackson ’68, PhD ’73, the president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a former student of Dresselhaus (who long held a joint appointment in the Department of Physics), also provided a warm tribute to her mentor via prerecorded video. “She was a woman of extraordinary focus, and always found opportunity within adversity and constraint,” Jackson said. “Her graceful adaptability and optimism offered me an important model as I encountered and stepped through my own unexpected windows of opportunity in industry, academia, and government. … Her unwillingness to allow struggling students to quit, and her efforts to break down institutional barriers for young women in science — including me — were a call to action for all of us who followed. … I am forever grateful to Millie Dresselhaus.”

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New 3-D printer is 10 times faster than commercial counterparts

MIT engineers have developed a new desktop 3-D printer that performs up to 10 times faster than existing commercial counterparts. Whereas the most common printers may fabricate a few Lego-sized bricks in one hour, the new design can print similarly sized objects in just a few minutes.

The key to the team’s nimble design lies in the printer’s compact printhead, which incorporates two new, speed-enhancing components: a screw mechanism that feeds polymer material through a nozzle at high force; and a laser, built into the printhead, that rapidly heats and melts the material, enabling it to flow faster through the nozzle.

The team demonstrated its new design by printing various detailed, handheld 3-D objects, including small eyeglasses frames, a bevel gear, and a miniature replica of the MIT dome — each, from start to finish, within several minutes.

Anastasios John Hart, associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, says the new printer demonstrates the potential for 3-D printing to become a more viable production technique.

“If I can get a prototype part, maybe a bracket or a gear, in five to 10 minutes rather than an hour, or a bigger part over my lunch break rather than the next day, I can engineer, build, and test faster,” says Hart, who is also director of MIT’s Laboratory for Manufacturing and Productivity and the Mechanosynthesis Group. “If I’m a repair technician and I could have a fast 3-D printer in my vehicle, I could 3-D-print a repair part on-demand after I figure out what’s broken. I don’t have to go to a warehouse and take it out of inventory.”  

Hart adds that he envisions “applications in emergency medicine, and for a variety of needs in remote locations. Fast 3-D printing creates valuable new ways of working and enables new market opportunities.”

Hart and Jamison Go SM ’15, a former graduate researcher in Hart’s lab, have published their results in the journal Additive Manufacturing.

Slow flow

In a previous paper, Hart and Go set out to identify the underlying causes limiting the speed of the most common desktop 3-D printers, which extrude plastic, layer by layer, in a process referred to in the industry as “fused filament fabrication.”

“Every year now, hundreds of thousands of desktop printers that use this process are sold around the world,” Hart says. “One of the key limitations to the viability of 3-D printing is the speed at which you can print something.”

Hart and Go had previously determined that commercial desktop extrusion 3-D printers, on average, print at a rate of about 20 cubic centimeters, or several Lego bricks’ worth of structures, per hour. “That’s really slow,” Hart notes.

The team identified three factors limiting a printer’s speed: how fast a printer can move its printhead, how much force a printhead can apply to a material to push it through the nozzle, and how quickly the printhead can transfer heat to melt a material and make it flow.

“Then, given our understanding of what limits those three variables, we asked how do we design a new printer ourselves that can improve all three in one system,” Hart says. “And now we’ve built it, and it works quite well.”

Getting a grip

In most desktop 3-D printers, plastic is fed through a nozzle via a “pinch-wheel” mechanism, in which two small wheels within the printhead rotate and push the plastic, or filament, forward. This works well at relatively slow speeds, but if more force were applied to speed up the process, at a certain point the wheels would lose their grip on the material — a “mechanical disadvantage,” as Hart puts it, that limits how fast the printhead can push material through.

Hart and Go chose to do away with the pinchwheel design, replacing it with a screw mechanism that turns within the printhead. The team fed a textured plastic filament onto the screw, and as the screw turned, it gripped onto the filament’s textured surface and was able to feed the filament through the nozzle at higher forces and speeds.

“Using this screw mechanism, we have a lot more contact area with the threaded texture on the filament,” Hart says. “Therefore we can get a much higher driving force, easily 10 times greater force.”

The team added a laser downstream of the screw mechanism, which heats and melts the filament before it passes through the nozzle. In this way, the plastic is more quickly and thoroughly melted, compared with conventional 3-D printers, which use conduction to heat the walls of the nozzle to melt the extruding plastic.

Hart and Go found that, by adjusting the laser’s power and turning it quickly on and off, they could control the amount of heat delivered to the plastic. They integrated both the laser and the screw mechanism into a compact, custom-built printhead about the size of a computer mouse.

Finally, they devised a high-speed gantry mechanism — an H-shaped frame powered by two motors, connected to a motion stage that holds the printhead. The gantry was designed and programmed to move nimbly between multiple positions and planes. In this way, the entire printhead was able to move fast enough to keep up with the extruding plastic’s faster feeds.

“We designed the printhead to have high force, high heating capacity, and the ability to be moved quickly by the printer, faster than existing desktop printers are able to,” Hart says. “All three factors enable the printer to be up to 10 times faster than the commercial printers that we benchmarked.”

A 3-D view

The researchers printed several complex parts with their new printer, each produced within five to 10 minutes, compared with an hour for conventional printers. However, they ran up against a small glitch in their speedier design: The extruded plastic is fed through the nozzle at such high forces and temperatures that a printed layer can still be slightly molten by the time the printer is extruding a second layer.

“We found that when you finish one layer and go back to begin the next layer, the previous layer is still a little too hot. So we have to cool the part actively as it prints, to retain the shape of the part so it doesn’t get distorted or soften,” Hart says.

That’s a design challenge that the researchers are currently taking on, in combination with the mathematics by which the path of the printhead can be optimized. They will also explore new materials to feed through the printer.

“We’re interested in applying this technique to more advanced materials, like high strength polymers, composite materials. We are also working on larger-scale 3-D printing, not just printing desktop-scale objects but bigger structures for tooling, or even furniture,” Hart says. “The capability to print fast opens the door to many exciting opportunities.”

This research was supported by Lockheed Martin Corporation.

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Turning emissions into fuel

MIT researchers have developed a new system that could potentially be used for converting power plant emissions of carbon dioxide into useful fuels for cars, trucks, and planes, as well as into chemical feedstocks for a wide variety of products.

The new membrane-based system was developed by MIT postdoc Xiao-Yu Wu and Ahmed Ghoniem, the Ronald C. Crane Professor of Mechanical Engineering, and is described in a paper in the journal ChemSusChem. The membrane, made of a compound of lanthanum, calcium, and iron oxide, allows oxygen from a stream of carbon dioxide to migrate through to the other side, leaving carbon monoxide behind. Other compounds, known as mixed ionic electronic conductors, are also under consideration in their lab for use in multiple applications including oxygen and hydrogen production.

Carbon monoxide produced during this process can be used as a fuel by itself or combined with hydrogen and/or water to make many other liquid hydrocarbon fuels as well as chemicals including methanol (used as an automotive fuel), syngas, and so on. Ghoniem’s lab is exploring some of these options. This process could become part of the suite of technologies known as carbon capture, utilization, and storage, or CCUS, which if applied to electicity production could reduce the impact of fossil fuel use on global warming.

The membrane, with a structure known as perovskite, is “100 percent selective for oxygen,” allowing only those atoms to pass, Wu explains. The separation is driven by temperatures of up to 990 degrees Celsius, and the key to making the process work is to keep the oxygen that separates from carbon dioxide flowing through the membrane until it reaches the other side. This could be done by creating a vacuum on side of the membrane opposite the carbon dioxide stream, but that would require a lot of energy to maintain.

In place of a vacuum, the researchers use a stream of fuel such as hydrogen or methane. These materials are so readily oxidized that they will actually draw the oxygen atoms through the membrane without requiring a pressure difference. The membrane also prevents the oxygen from migrating back and recombining with the carbon monoxide, to form carbon dioxide all over again. Ultimately, and depending on the application, a combination of some vaccum and some fuel can be used to reduce the energy required to drive the process and produce a useful product.

The energy input needed to keep the process going, Wu says, is heat, which could be provided by solar energy or by waste heat, some of which could come from the power plant itself and some from other sources. Essentially, the process makes it possible to store that heat in chemical form, for use whenever it’s needed. Chemical energy storage has very high energy density — the amount of energy stored for a given weight of material — as compared to many other storage forms.

At this point, Wu says, he and Ghoniem have demonstrated that the process works. Ongoing research is examining how to increase the oxygen flow rates across the membrane, perhaps by changing the material used to build the membrane, changing the geometry of the surfaces, or adding catalyst materials on the surfaces. The researchers are also working on integrating the membrane into working reactors and coupling the reactor with the fuel production system. They are examining how this method could be scaled up and how it compares to other approaches to capturing and converting carbon dioxide emissions, in terms of both costs and effects on overall power plant operations.

In a natural gas power plant that Ghoniem’s group and others have worked on previously, Wu says the incoming natural gas could be split into two streams, one that would be burned to generate electricity while producing a pure stream of carbon dioxide, while the other stream would go to the fuel side of the new membrane system, providing the oxygen-reacting fuel source. That stream would produce a second output from the plant, a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide known as syngas, which is a widely used industrial fuel and feedstock. The syngas can also be added to the existing natural gas distribution network.

The method may thus not only cut greenhouse emissions; it could also produce another potential revenue stream to help defray its costs.

The process can work with any level of carbon dioxide concentration, Wu says — they have tested it all the way from 2 percent to 99 percent — but the higher the concentration, the more efficient the process is. So, it is well-suited to the concentrated output stream from conventional fossil-fuel-burning power plants or those designed for carbon capture such as oxy-combustion plants.

“It is important to use carbon dioxide to produce carbon monoxide for the conversion of sustainable thermal energies to chemical energy,” says Xuefeng Zhu, a professor of chemical physics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in Dalian, China, who was not involved in this work. “Using an oxygen-permeable membrane can significantly reduce the reaction temperature, from 1,500 C to less than 1,000 C, indicating a great energy saving compared to the traditional carbon dioxide decomposition process,” he says. “I think their work is important to the field of sustainable energy and membrane processes.”

The research was funded by Shell Oil and the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology.

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Making others’ voices heard through education and journalism

Before senior Drew Bent began his undergraduate studies at MIT, he considered his interests in education to be “side projects.” He had worked at the educational platform Khan Academy and at Sony Ericsson while he was a high school student, employing what he had considered his main skill set since he was a child: programming.

“Basically, programming is all I did,” Bent says, “I used to be very much a technocrat.”

At MIT, Bent opted to double major in physics and electrical engineering and computer science. But he also dipped his toes in writing, as a journalist for MIT’s undergraduate newspaper, The Tech.

By the end of his first year, Bent had a revelation: “The stuff that I was doing that I was most passionate about — the work that could have the most positive impact — was actually the side projects,” Bent recalls. “It’s the MIT education that can actually help me and enable me to do really powerful things in these areas.”

Semesters later, Bent can further describe his vision.

“I’m very interested in leveling the playing field with education. I see education as a way to give everyone their own unique voice,” Bent says. “Journalism is making sure that voice is actually heard in a democratic process. Successful democracy requires an educated populace whose voices are all heard.”

Newshound

Since his freshman year, Bent has written over 35 articles for The Tech, covering campus news and research developments. Between his shorter news stories, Bent undertakes investigative journalism projects, some of which involve months of research.

“There are many aspects of journalism that are interesting, but the one that is most interesting to me is holding powerful actors accountable,” Bent says.

Bent’s reporting has spanned a wide variety of topics. His stories have included an investigation of an advertisement in The Tech that solicited an egg donor, a piece about the effects of a reorganization in MIT’s Information Services and Technology department, a profile of a student who was an Israeli military commander, and award-winning coverage of the trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev for his role in the Boston Marathon bombing. Other topics have included the closing of a fraternity, the discovery of gravitational waves, and other developments in student and residential life on campus.

“The [stories] that interest me are the ones that have someone whose voice wouldn’t have been heard otherwise and can actually lead to some change in policy,” Bent says, “Maybe [my writing] could start a conversation that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.”

Education across America

In the summer of 2015, Bent traveled with a group of MIT and Harvard students to 11 towns across America by bicycle, through Spokes America, a student-run educational initiative founded in 2013 by Turner Bohlen ’14.

As part of the initiative, Bent helped plan and organize learning festivals in urban and rural towns, which featured workshops on computer science, mechanical engineering, and electrical engineering. Bent liked the out-of-the-classroom approach of the program, which is geared towards middle and high school students.

“[Spokes America] really lets the students take the initiative, giving them the environment to build rockets, computer programs, and robots,” Bent says, “Science and engineering don’t have to be learned from a textbook.”

During his travels from festival to festival, Bent saw how interested the attendees  were in learning about engineering. Families who lived hours out of town would travel to festivals to partake in the Spokes America workshops.

“Everyone wants to bring everyone. Even parents want to go,” Bent says.

By using computer programming languages such as Scratch, which was developed by the MIT Media Lab’s Lifelong Kindergarten Group, participants were able to interact with engineering in a manner they hadn’t before.

Sometimes, Bent recalls, even children who hadn’t yet learned to read wanted to participate: “We weren’t going to say no to that.”

Tutoring and beyond

During the academic year, Bent regularly volunteers at the East End House, a Cambridge community center that holds educational programs for all ages.

Bent has worked at the East End House with second- through fourth-graders since 2014. Students are bused after school to the community center, where they then work with Bent.

“First, they grab snacks, then you work with them for an hour on math and reading,” Bent says, “Then, you encourage them to go beyond.”

Sometimes, beyond isn’t much farther than the local playground.

“It goes beyond tutoring. You’re really becoming their buddy,” Bent says. What’s important to him is “the stuff that happens in the hours outside of the classroom.”

His volunteer work at the East End House is “usually the most rewarding part of the week, but also the most challenging part.”

“Students can tell if you’re not giving your best effort,” Bent says, “So you need to set a good example.”

Building learning environments

In November 2017, Bent had a conversation with one of his tutoring students about college.

“Somehow she thought that intelligence is what got people to universities like MIT,” Bent says, “It’s largely the hard work that gets you there. She was genuinely surprised that it was hard work, and not just some predetermined ability.”

Bent says that students “need to realize they’re capable of anything.”

Beyond MIT, he hopes to foster environments in which this kind of learning and realization is common. Bent envisions being what his journalism professor Ethan Zuckerman calls a “public interest technologist” and wants to use his technical and investigative background to reform education. 

“The parts of education that I’m interested in are building learning environments —the more informal parts of education,” Bent says, “Whether it’s outside of school or bringing it into school.”

Bent believes his MIT education will be crucial in his pursuit.

“We often think of MIT as a place that develops technologies, but it also cultivates mindsets that are useful elsewhere in society,” Bent says. “The MIT education enables us to give back in more ways than we can imagine.”

Bent has also served as a member of the MIT OpenCourseWare Faculty Advisory Committee and has collaborated with Institute committees on developing an educational pilot program for students to do semester-long internships while taking online MIT courses. Along with senior Gabriel Ginorio, he has worked closely with Sanjay Sarma, MIT’s vice president for open learning. He has interned with the World Bank and spent this past summer working in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy helping to draft national technology policy. He was also a high school physics teacher with the MISTI Global Teaching Labs in Italy.

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MIT senior awarded Mitchell Scholarship

Anjali Misra, from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, has been named a winner of the prestigious George J. Mitchell Scholarship. Misra, an MIT senior majoring in brain and cognitive sciences with a minor in music, will spend the 2018-2019 academic year pursuing a master's degree in public health from University College Cork in Cork, Ireland. She then plans on returning to the U.S. to attend medical school, with the goal of widely implementing preventative medicine in rural settings and promoting cardiovascular health.

Misra was one of 12 students selected in the nationwide competition, which attracted over 300 applicants. She is the second MIT student to win the award, and the first in over a decade. Now in its 20th year, the Mitchell Scholarship program is sponsored by the U.S.-Ireland Alliance with additional support from Ireland’s Department of Education and Skills, Morgan Stanley, Pfizer, and the American Ireland Fund. The scholarship honors U.S. Senator George Mitchell and his contributions to the Northern Ireland peace process. Mitchell Scholars are selected on the basis of academic merit, leadership, and commitment to community and public service. They are awarded a year of postgraduate study in any field at participating Irish universities.

Misra’s Iowa upbringing gave her insights as to how rural locations are medically underserved, and instilled in her a commitment to helping these communities and their residents. As a Mitchell Scholar, she hopes to explore how mobile health clinics and community paramedicine (having EMTs and paramedics deliver primary care medicine in remote areas) can enhance access to primary healthcare. Misra is particularly interested in living and studying in Ireland because of the country’s commitment to innovatively combatting preventable disease.

Since her freshman year, Misra has been active in community healthcare through her work as an EMT with MIT Emergency Medical Services, which serves the campus and surrounding neighborhoods. In addition to staffing the ambulance and responding to emergency calls, as a HeartSafe Officer she has facilitated the training of over 1,000 community members in first aid and CPR techniques. She regularly teaches high-demand courses on infant and child emergency medical response. This past summer, Misra was awarded a Priscilla King Gray Public Service Fellowship to work with the Harvard Family Van, which works to reduce incidence of preventable disease in vulnerable communities.

In addition to Misra’s strong involvement in health-related activities, she has dedicated significant time to mentorship and peer support. Since 2014, Misra has been a member, and now serves as co-president, of SHINE for Girls, a middle-school mentorship program that combines dance with after-school math education to encourage more young women to consider STEM fields. Her efforts led her to be selected as an MIT Women’s Initiative Presenter, which provided funding for Misra to travel to Union County, North Carolina, to give 15 presentations in public schools to promote STEM education for middle-school girls. Misra has also led the MIT South Asian Association of Students as co-president, and has been a coordinator for the MIT Freshman Urban Program, which introduces freshmen to volunteering opportunities and social issues in the Cambridge area.

Misra has conducted research in the Edelman Laboratory at the Harvard-MIT Biomedical Engineering Center where she used biomedical engineering techniques to analyze the impact of cardiac pathology on blood flow. She is currently an undergraduate research assistant at the Laboratory for Quantitative Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School where, under the supervision of Peter Czarnecki, she seeks to increase understanding of the cellular basis of human disease by examining the biochemistry of signal transduction in primary cilia.

Misra was supported by MIT’s Office of Distinguished Fellowships and the Presidential Committee on Distinguished Fellowships. “Anjali’s commitment to service with and for others is palpable,” notes Kimberly Benard, assistant dean of distinguished fellowships. “Her deep empathy and dedication to improving people’s lives are inspiring to us all.”

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Recycling air pollution to make art

On a break from his studies in the MIT Media Lab, Anirudh Sharma SM ’14 traveled home to Mumbai, India. While there, he noticed that throughout the day his T-shirts were gradually accumulating something that resembled dirt.

“I realized this was air pollution, or sooty particulate matter, made of black particles released from exhaust of vehicles,” Sharma says. “This is a major health issue.”

Soot comprises tiny black particles, about 2.5 micrometers or smaller, made of carbon produced by incomplete combustion of fossil fuels. Breathing in the particles can lead to lung damage, cancers, and other conditions.

A 2015 conference paper presented at a meeting for the American Association for the Advancement of Science estimated that in 2013 more than 5.5 million people worldwide died prematurely from air pollution. In India alone, air pollution has been linked to anywhere from 1.1 million to 1.4 million premature deaths over the past few years, according to various studies.

Back at MIT, Sharma set out to help solve this dire air-pollution issue. After years of research and development, Sharma’s startup Graviky Labs has developed technology that attaches to exhaust systems of diesel generator chimneys to capture particulate matter. Scientists at Graviky then treat the soot to turn it into ink, called Air-Ink, for artists around the world.

So far, the startup, which is commercially piloting its KAALINK devices for use on diesel generators across India, has captured 1.6 billion micrograms of particulate matter, which equates to cleaning roughly 1.6 trillion liters of outdoor air. More than 200 gallons of Air-Ink have been harvested for a growing community of more than 1,000 artists, from Bangalore to Boston, Hong Kong, and London.

“Less pollution, more art. That’s what we’re going for,” Sharma says.

Recycling soot

KAALINK is a cylindrical device that retrofits to the exhaust systems of vehicles or diesel generators and relies on static electricity, a phenomenon in which energized materials attract particles. Inside the device are cartridges filled with a high-energy plasma. An applied voltage triggers the plasma to attract soot particles flying by, ridding the air of roughly 85 to 95 percent of particles without affecting the exhaust system.

A KAALINK device can stay on an exhaust system for about 15 to 20 days. Users then empty the disposable cartridges into special Graviky Labs collection units, where they are sent straight to the startup’s lab for treatment. This system — co-invented by Nitesh Kadyan and Nikhil Kaushik — removes heavy metals and toxins to create usable Air-Ink.

Similar soot-capturing processes exist, Sharma says, but they capture the soot by dissolving it in liquids, which makes the treatment process complex and expensive. Graviky, on the other hand, captures the particulate matter in its basic dry form. “Other processes convert air pollution into water pollution, and essentially generate more waste,” Sharma says. “We minimize the process and create a recycling stream from particulate matter waste that would have otherwise gone into our lungs.”

Currently, KAALINK isn’t a consumer product. Graviky primarily sells the filter to companies and organizations in India for capturing soot from the diesel generators that help power hospitals, malls, schools, apartment complexes, and other buildings. Companies have also sought to retrofit diesel generators with KAALINK to make them carbon neutral. Graviky later buys back the captured particulate matter from the owners of these engines to incentivize pollution capture.

Spreading the message

Posted all over Graviky Lab’s Facebook page today are photos of art made from the Air-Ink and paint, including portraits, street murals, body art, sketches, and clothing prints. In London, an Air-Ink mural was featured for several weeks in Piccadilly Circus, and the city’s Museum of Writing has a permanent exhibit on Air-Ink.

A successfully funded Kickstarter campaign over the summer sold out on various Air-Ink markers and decorated T-shirts, postcards, motorcycle helmets, and shoes. According to Graviky, each ounce of Air-Ink — about enough to make one marker — offsets 45 minutes of air pollution generated by a vehicle.

But the aim wasn’t always to create art. “I started with the general question, ‘What are the things you can do with carbon that’s collected?’” Sharma says of his early days designing the technology in the Media Lab’s Fluid Interfaces Group with Pattie Maes, a professor of media technology and academic head of the Program in Media Arts and Sciences.

The initial prototype for the device, developed in 2012, was actually a printer that sucked in carbon and filled an ink cartridge, and would be used strictly for paper printing. But the printer wasn’t scalable, so Sharma refined the bulky device into an exhaust retrofit that could go “beyond the lab and have real-world impact,” he says.

In 2013, Sharma launched Graviky headquarters, ready to release the product in heavily polluted India. “It’s pretty dire here,” Sharma says. “Primary schools have been shut down because of air pollution. It’s a catastrophe. I wanted to create technologies that are new and can have a large social impact, and that brought me back here.”

At first, there was still no specific application for the ink. Then, about a year ago, the startup decided to find new ways to further spread its mission. It chose to do so through art. “Art helps us raise awareness about where the ink and paint comes from. Artists are spreading the word that this is a very special ink that makes a difference,” Sharma says.

In March, Tiger Beer reached out to Graviky to create a large campaign against air pollution. For the project, Graviky gave 150 liters of Air-Ink — or, roughly 2,500 hours of air pollution, according to Graviky — to artists in Hong Kong, known for its high air pollution, to create murals. This effort won the startup several awards, including a Gold at Cannes Lions for outdoor impact innovation.

Now, as the community of artists using Air-Ink grows, Sharma hopes Graviky’s message gets heard worldwide. “Air pollution knows no borders,” he says. “It’s in India, Boston, and places all over the world. Our ink sends a message that pollution is one of the resources in our world that’s the hardest to capture and use. But it can be done.”

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