What will we eat in the year 2050?

How might climate change alter the global food system by the year 2050? Will diets change to reflect a revamped agriculture designed to adapt to a warming world? MIT Joint Program Principal Research Scientist Erwan Monier and New York University artist Allie Wist grappled with these questions as they developed a dinner menu for the MIT Climate Changed Symposium, a two-day gathering of experts in the sciences, humanities and design focused on the role and impact of models in a changed climate.

Co-sponsored by the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative and the MIT School of Architecture and Planning and organized by Irmak Turan and Jessica Varner, the symposium — along with an ideas competition and multimedia exhibition — examined how past, present, and future climate-related models can enable us to understand and design the built environment as significant changes unfold in the Earth system through and beyond mid-century.

Held at Café ArtScience in Kendall Square, the symposium dinner consisted of four courses, each representing a different landscape. Signifying the forest, the appetizer was a trio of dried, preserved, and foraged mushrooms, fungi known to help the soil store carbon dioxide and thus slow the pace of climate change.

The next two courses included two options — the first symbolizing more comfortable conditions that climate models project will prevail, on average, by the year 2050 under an ambitious greenhouse gas emissions reduction policy; the second suggesting more hardscrabble environments that the models indicate will likely result in the absence of climate action. For the first course, representing the desert, the choice was between a squash tart with sorghum honey or cactus fruit gel with dehydrated fruits. For the second, representing the ocean, all diners got to eat wild striped bass, with one half receiving their fish filleted and the other half having to contend with bones.

Suggesting melting sea ice and glaciers in an Arctic landscape, the dessert was a pine milk parfait infused with pine smoke and topped with fresh berries and a juniper tuile.    

“Our menu selections were designed to reflect the idea that the impact of climate change on various landscapes will vary widely based on the level of climate action that will take place between now and the year 2050,” said Monier.

Prior to the dinner, Monier and Wist delivered a brief presentation on the complexity of modeling the global food system and the visualization of future food landscapes.

Monier noted that to address this complexity, Joint Program researchers integrate a diverse set of models that simulate different aspects of the food system, from atmospheric chemistry to water resource management to crop yields. He then highlighted three key challenges in modeling climate change over the coming decades.

First, how much climate change will we experience? Climate policy scenarios range from business-as-usual to stringent, translated for symposium guests as a more challenging or more comfortable dining experience. Second, how will different regions experience climate change? Monier observed that climate models project crop-yield increases and decreases for different regions of Africa — and that uncertainty in the models can produce a wide range of projections for some regions. This was translated into different landscape storylines for each of the four courses. Finally, how will we adapt to climate change?

“Depending on the severity of climate change, we will either be able to adapt to maintain our current diet,” said Monier, “or need to introduce or intensify the use of different drought-tolerant food sources such as seaweed and cactus.”    

Monier also appears in the Climate Changed Exhibition, a work curated by Jessica Varner, Irmak Turan, and Irina Chernyakova, and produced by artist Rainar Aasrand and designers from Omnivore. The exhibition is a continuous-loop multimedia exploration of how computational models and design practices have enabled people to represent, understand, assess, communicate, and act upon climate change. On view April 6-May 19 in the Keller Gallery (Room 7-408), it shows how the feedback process between climate models and design has evolved since the development of the first general circulation model in the 1960s.

In multiple interview segments, Monier describes how Earth-system models of different resolution are used to assess environmental change at global and regional levels. He explains how the Joint Program’s signature Integrated Global System Modeling (IGSM) framework models different components of the Earth system and how they interact, and projects the impact of global environmental change (including climate change) on both Earth and human systems under different climate policy scenarios and degrees of uncertainty about the climate’s response to atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations.

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MIT Federal Credit Union presents 2018 scholarships, People Helping People Award

Each year, the MIT Federal Credit Union (FCU) presents the People Helping People Award to a credit union member who exemplifies compassion, commitment to helping others, and a sense of social justice within the MIT community. At this year's annual business meeting on April 25, Nick Schwartz, a senior at MIT studying mechanical engineering, was named as the 2018 winner.

“Even after 12 years, I am continuously amazed at the submissions we receive each year. I love learning about the contributions and positive impacts our members have on their communities,” said MIT FCU President and CEO Brian Ducharme. “I am honored to present these students and members of the MIT community with their awards at our annual meeting.”

Schwartz has spent the last four years at MIT dedicating himself to the well-being of the MIT community through all of his actions, from formal endeavors to his day-to-day interactions on campus. Since freshman year, Schwartz has been a volunteer counselor with Camp Kesem at MIT, a student-run organization supporting children touched by a parent’s cancer diagnosis. This year will be Schwartz’s last year as a counselor, but he was recently accepted to be a camp advisor and will work with the national organization to improve Camp Kesem chapters around the country.

In addition to his work with Camp Kesem, Schwartz has mentored others through the Leadership Training Institute and worked with the Practical Education Network in Ghana. He uses his engineering skills to help others as well, working to develop prosthetic devices for use in developing countries through MIT’s D-Lab. Recognized both for his exemplary character and exceptional academics, Schwartz has recently been named a Marshall Scholar and will begin graduate studies at the University College London in the fall and will serve as an ambassador between the United States and United Kingdom.

Given all that he does for the MIT community, it is clear how Schwartz is able to translate his many academic and personal interests into a passion for helping others. Schwartz has pledged to donate his $2,000 award to Camp Kesem – MIT.

In addition to the People Helping People Award, MIT FCU awarded six $1,000 Memorial Scholarships to support members investing in their education. Recipients were selected based on essay content, grades, financial need, and extracurricular and community activities. The 2018 Memorial Scholarship winners are:

• Dianna Gagnon, of Reading, Massachusetts, who is currently finishing her senior year at Reading Memorial High School and plans to attend Wheaton College this fall;
• Jessica Quaye, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, who is currently a sophomore at MIT studying electrical engineering;
• Noam Watt, of Lexington, Massachusetts, who is currently finishing his senior year at Lexington High School and is still deciding between Northwestern and University of Connecticut for the fall;
• Sloan Kanaski, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, who is currently a sophomore at MIT studying physics;
• Talya Klinger, of Cambridge, Massachusetts, who is currently a sophomore at MIT studying physics; and
• Haley Clemons, of West Newbury, Massachusetts, who is currently finishing her senior year at Pentucket Regional High School and plans to attend University of Maine Orono this fall.

MIT Federal Credit Union was founded as a nonprofit financial institution in 1940 to provide basic financial services to employees at MIT. Today, with assets in excess of $500,000 million, the credit union offers traditional savings and checking accounts as well as lending programs for mortgages, autos, personal and student loans. With locations and ATMs in Cambridge and Lexington, along with mobile and, online banking services, MITFCU serves the greater MIT-Kendall Square communities which includes employees of Novartis (Cambridge), Lincoln Laboratory, Draper, Whitehead Institute, The Broad Institute, Phillips, and Forsyth. MITFCU also serves MIT students (graduate and undergraduate) and alumni. MITFCU is a member-owned, cooperative financial institution whose primary mission is to provide quality financial services that meet the needs of its members while ensuring the financial well-being of the organization.

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3 Questions: Melissa Nobles and Craig Steven Wilder on the MIT and Legacy of Slavery project

The first class of the "MIT and Slavery" undergraduate research project ran in the fall of 2017. Set in motion by MIT President L. Rafael Reif with Melissa Nobles, the Kenan Sahin Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, the course was developed and taught by Craig Steven Wilder — the Barton L. Weller Professor of History and the nation’s leading expert on the links between universities and slavery — in collaboration with Nora Murphy, the MIT archivist for Researcher Services.

The findings from the initial class include insights about the MIT's role in the post-Civil War era of Reconstruction; examples of racism in the culture of the early campus; and the fact that MIT’s founder, William Barton Rogers, had six enslaved people in his Virginia household, before he moved to Massachusetts in 1853. The findings also suggest new lines of research that will enable MIT to contribute to a larger national conversation about still hidden legacies of slavery, especially the relationship between the Atlantic slave economies, the fields of science and engineering, and U.S. technical institutions.

As the "MIT and Slavery" research continues over the coming semesters, MIT is also conducting a community dialogue series, MIT and the Legacy of Slavery, led by Dean Melissa Nobles. The dialogues are an opening chapter in MIT's committment to researching this history and making it public. A series of events will create campus-wide and community-wide opportunities for shared discussions of the findings and our responses. The first event in this series was held in February, and the second, The Task of History, takes place Thursday, May 3, 5-7 p.m.

SHASS Communications spoke with Nobles and Wilder to hear their thoughts about the ongoing research project and the community dialogue series. 

Q: MIT’s approach to exploring the Institute’s historical relationship to slavery is unfolding somewhat differently than the process at other universities. Can you describe MIT’s approach, and what it means for the community and the Institute's responses to the research findings?

Wilder: Our undergraduate students are engaged in an ongoing research project examining MIT’s ties to slavery. As I like to note, MIT students are rewriting the history of MIT for MIT. Their focus on the early history of the Institute allows us to explore the connections between engineering, science, and slavery in antebellum America, which will make a significant and new contribution to the work being done by the dozens of universities that are now researching their historical ties to slavery. MIT is uniquely positioned to lead the research on this subject.

Nobles: It has been 15 years since Brown University launched its three year study of the university’s historical connections to slavery. Since then, several other colleges and universities, including Georgetown, Harvard, and Yale, have taken up similar multi-year studies. Three key features distinguish our project from these earlier efforts — to which we are indebted for the precedents they provide.

The first is that rather than the research project starting unofficially and at the faculty level, in this case President Reif and I initiated the process, consulting with MIT historian Craig Steven Wilder about the best way to respond to inquiries about MIT’s connections to slavery. Neither the president nor I knew the answers to those questions. But we did appreciate our great good fortune in being able to turn to Craig, the nationally recognized expert on the relationship of slavery and American higher education and the author of "Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities." Craig recommended an innovative approach, which he then developed with Archivist Nora Murphy: a new, ongoing MIT undergraduate research class to explore this aspect of MIT's story. President Reif and I provide resources and support.

The second distinctive quality, which flows from the first, has to do with timing. The norm at other universities is that some years of research predate the public release of the findings. By contrast, MIT announced the initial findings only a few months into the project and will continue releasing new findings each term. This means that the MIT community as a whole has the opportunity to be involved in this endeavor in real-time, as the research matures, learning from the emerging findings — and making informed suggestions for potential official Institute responses. We do not know what the research will find in full, nor what it will ask of us, and I envision a fluid process, one that can respond to new findings, as our community and leadership take the measure of this new dimension of MIT history.

The third distinctive aspect is our project’s intellectual scope, which — by virtue of MIT’s expertise in science and technology — also allows us to explore a more far-reaching question: the connections between the development of scientific and technological knowledge and the institution of slavery and its legacies. The Institute’s founding at the start of the Civil War in 1861 involves MIT in one of the earliest such legacies: the reconstruction of America’s southern states, and new social, legal, and economic realities that arose in the transition from slave to free labor, some of which we continue to grapple with today.
 
Q: At President Reif’s request, Dean Nobles is leading a series of community dialogues about the early findings from the "MIT and Slavery" class. What plans are there for this phase, and what do you hope the dialogues will produce?

Wilder: The community dialogues are an effort to bring the early and ongoing research from the "MIT and Slavery" course to the various constituencies on campus, to our alumni, and to people and institutions in the Cambridge-Boston area. Our history can help us make new and lasting connections to communities that neighbor MIT but remain separate from it. Dean Nobles is planning an exceptionally rich and inviting range of events and activities to anchor these community exchanges. The forums will provide opportunities for us to receive feedback on the project and to solicit opinions on how MIT can respond to this history as the research continues to unfold.

Nobles: I envision the community dialogues as fulfilling two purposes. The first, and most important, is to engage and deepen our collective understanding of the history and issues surrounding MIT, slavery, and Reconstruction, which was itself the immediate legacy of slavery. The second is to provide various ways by which the MIT community can engage with the ideas and questions raised by the research.

We will shape the dialogues to reflect and advance these two purposes. We will also organize activities, such as small group gatherings, film screenings, panel discussions, and other creative projects designed to encourage and catalyze conversation and reflection. We envision a number of activities each semester. One hope is that the dialogues will inspire MIT community members to incorporate the research findings, and the questions they raise, into their own thinking, teaching, and endeavors.

For example, during our February event, at which the first group of student-researchers announced their early findings, Alaisha Alexander '18 summoned the audience to a creative investigation. She asked that we all go back to our labs, libraries, and classrooms, and be newly alert for ways in which larger social issues, and specifically, racial issues, may be embedded or reflected in our fields. This strikes me as an extremely important question, one worth asking precisely because now, as in the past, larger social, political, and economic processes are inextricably connected to technological and scientific advances. Examining MIT’s history and its connection to slavery allows us to think in new ways — about our past but also about the present and future.

And, of course, as the research and the dialogue series progresses, we will always be interested in hearing from the MIT community. In addition to responses via emails and participation in scheduled events, we will set up a mechanism so that community members can contribute comments, ideas, suggestions, and insights.

Q: Alongside the MIT and Slavery project, Professor Wilder and others are engaged in creating a consortium of technical universities that will research broader questions of the relationship of the sci/tech fields to the institution of slavery and the U.S. slave economy. Do you envision ways that MIT faculty, students, and staff can participate in this broader research effort?
 
Wilder: The goal of the consortium is to bring several antebellum and Civil War-era engineering and science schools together to produce a more complete history of the rise of these fields in the Atlantic slave economy. The current plan is to have each school establish a research project that draws on its strengths and reflects its institutional needs. The consortium will help coordinate efforts and move resources between universities, and it will host regular conferences where participating faculty, archivists, librarians, and students can share their research.

Nobles: I am really looking forward to this multi-university research project because it will shine a bright light on long understudied dimensions of the historiography of slavery and of science and technology. For example, in most American history classes, we learn that the introduction of the mechanical cotton gin in the early 1800s exponentially transformed the productivity and hence profitability of cotton cultivation. This technological “advance” for productivity also meant, of course, an intensified need for slave labor, to grow and harvest ever-increasing amounts of cotton. Undoubtedly, the connections between science and technology with slavery go far deeper and wider than the cotton gin. The entanglement of the slave economy, science, and technology is a very rich topic area, and one that MIT is uniquely qualified to examine.

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Elazer Edelman named director of Institute for Medical Engineering and Science

Elazer R. Edelman has been named the new director of the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES), effective May 1.

The announcement was made today at a special meeting of the faculty for IMES and the Health Science and Technology (HST) program. “Elazer’s strengths as a researcher, a practitioner of medicine, an innovator, and an educator are a fantastic combination,” says Anantha Chandrakasan, dean of the School of Engineering. “We are fortunate to have such a strong leader in so many domains to direct IMES, and I look forward to working with him.”

Chandrakasan noted that Edelman succeeds Arup Chakraborty, the inaugural director of IMES. “Arup was fundamental to the institute’s creation,” he says. “He initiated a wide range of activities and collaborations that have set IMES up for success moving forward. We are deeply grateful for his many contributions.”

The Thomas D. and Virginia W. Cabot Professor of Health Sciences at MIT, Edelman has been a core faculty member of IMES since its inception and a professor in the HST program since 1991. He is also the director of the Harvard-MIT Biomedical Engineering Center, director of the MIT Clinical Research Center, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, and a coronary care unit cardiologist at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

Edelman and his laboratory have pioneered basic findings in vascular biology and the development and assessment of biotechnology. His research examining the cellular and molecular mechanisms that produce atherosclerosis and coronary artery disease led to the development and optimization of the first bare-metal stents, as well as subsequent iterations on the technology, including drug-eluting stents and, more recently, mechanical organ support and novel heart valves. His most recent publications have focused on how tissue-engineered cells can be used for the local delivery of growth factors and growth inhibitors in the study of the vascular homeostasis and repair, cancer invasiveness and metastases, and the homology between endothelial paracrine and angiocrine regulation in cancer and vascular diseases.  

As a mentor and educator, Edelman has supervised hundreds of undergraduate and graduate students and postdocs. He and members of his research group have authored 680 original scientific publications and he holds some 80 patents.

Edelman is a fellow of, member of, or been honored by the American College of Cardiology, the American Heart Association, the Association of University Cardiologists, the American Society for Clinical Investigation, the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering, the Institute of Medicine/National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Inventors, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among his many international awards is recognition by Spain with the Order of Civil Merit. He also serves as chief scientific advisor for Science: Translational Medicine and was a member of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration Scientific Board.  

Edelman earned his undergraduate degree in bioelectrical engineering and applied biology and a master’s in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT in 1978 and 1979, an MD at Harvard University in 1983, and a PhD in medical engineering and medical physics at MIT in 1984. Edelman is also an avid ice hockey goalie and, with his wife Cheryl SM ’96, is a parent to comedian and writer Alexander, Olympic athlete AJ ’14, and MIT freshman Austin.  
 

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How to assess new solar technologies

Which is a better deal: an established, off-the-shelf type of solar panel or a cutting-edge type that delivers more power for a given area but costs more?

It turns out that’s far from a simple question, but a team of researchers at MIT and elsewhere has come up with a way to figure out the best option for a given location and type of installation. The bottom line is that for household-scale rooftop systems in relatively dry locations, the more efficient but more costly panels would be better, but for grid-scale installations or for those in wetter climates, the established, less efficient but cheaper panels are better.

The costs of solar cells continue to plummet, while the costs of installation and the associated equipment remain relatively constant. So, figuring out the tradeoffs involved in planning a new installation has gotten more complicated. But the new study provides a clear way to estimate the best technology for a given project, the authors say.

The findings are reported today in the journal Nature Energy, in a paper by MIT graduate student Sarah Sofia, associate professor of mechanical engineering Tonio Buonassisi, research scientist I. Marius Peters, and three others at MIT and at First Solar and Siva Power, solar companies in California.

The study compared two basic varieties of solar cells: standard designs that use a single type of photovoltaic material, and advanced designs that combine two different types (called tandem cells) in order to capture more of the energy in sunlight. For the tandem cells, the researchers also compared different varieties: those in which each of the two cells are connected together in series, called two-junction tandem cells, and those where each cell is separately wired, called four-junction tandem cells.

Instead of just looking at the amount of power each kind can deliver, the team analyzed all the associated installation and operational costs over time, to produce a measurement called the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE), a measure that incorporates all the costs and revenues over the lifetime of the system.

“Standard single-junction cells have a maximum efficiency limit of about 30 percent,” Sofia explains, whereas “tandem cells, using two materials, can have much higher efficiency, above 40 percent.” But while higher efficiency is obviously an advantage in principle, “when you make a tandem, you basically have two solar cells instead of one, so it’s more expensive to manufacture. So, we wanted to see if it’s worth it,” she says.

For their analysis, the team looked at three types of environment — arid (Arizona), temperate (South Dakota), and humid (Florida) — because the amount of water vapor in the air can affect how much sunlight reaches the solar cell. In each of these locations, they compared the standard two kinds of single-junction solar cells (cadmium telluride, or CdTe, and copper-indium-gallium-selenide, or CIGS) with two different types of tandem cells, two-junction or four-junction. Thus, a total of four different technologies were studied in each environment. In addition, they studied how the overall LCOE of the installations would be affected depending on whether overall energy prices remain constant or decline over time, as many analysts expect.

The results were somewhat surprising. “For residential systems, we showed that the four-terminal tandem system [the most efficient solar cell available] was the best option, regardless of location,” Sofia says. But for utility-scale installations, the cell with the lowest production costs is the best deal, the researchers found.

The new findings could be significant for those planning new solar installations, Sofia says. “For me, showing that a four-terminal tandem cell had a clear opportunity to succeed was not obvious. It really shows the importance of having a high energy yield in a residential system.”

But because utility-scale systems can spread the costs of the installation and the control systems over many more panels, and because space tends to be less constrained in such installations, “we never saw an opportunity” for the more costly, efficient cells in such settings. In large arrays, “because the installation costs are so cheap, they just want the cheapest cells [per watt of power],” she says.

The study could help to guide research priorities in solar technology, Sofia says. “There’s been a lot of work in this field, without asking this first [whether the economics would actually make sense]. We should be asking the question before we do all the work. … I hope this can serve as a guide to where research efforts should be focused,” she says.

The methodology the team developed for making the comparisons should be applicable to many other comparisons of solar technologies, not just the specific types chose for this study, Sofia says. “For thin-film technologies, this is generalizable,” she says.

Because the materials they studied for the four-terminal case are already commercialized, Sofia says, “if there was a company that had an interest,” practical, affordable four-junction tandem systems for residential applications could potentially be brought to market quite quickly.

The research team also included Jonathan Mailoa at MIT, Dirk Weiss at First Solar Inc., and Billy Stanbery at Siva Power, both companies in Santa Clara, California. The work was supported by the National Research Foundation Singapore through the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), the Bay Area Photovoltaic Consortium, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the National Science Foundation.

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Calcium-based MRI sensor enables more sensitive brain imaging

MIT neuroscientists have developed a new magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) sensor that allows them to monitor neural activity deep within the brain by tracking calcium ions.

Because calcium ions are directly linked to neuronal firing — unlike the changes in blood flow detected by other types of MRI, which provide an indirect signal — this new type of sensing could allow researchers to link specific brain functions to their pattern of neuron activity, and to determine how distant brain regions communicate with each other during particular tasks.

“Concentrations of calcium ions are closely correlated with signaling events in the nervous system,” says Alan Jasanoff, an MIT professor of biological engineering, brain and cognitive sciences, and nuclear science and engineering, an associate member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and the senior author of the study. “We designed a probe with a molecular architecture that can sense relatively subtle changes in extracellular calcium that are correlated with neural activity.”

In tests in rats, the researchers showed that their calcium sensor can accurately detect changes in neural activity induced by chemical or electrical stimulation, deep within a part of the brain called the striatum.

MIT research associates Satoshi Okada and Benjamin Bartelle are the lead authors of the study, which appears in the April 30 issue of Nature Nanotechnology. Other authors include professor of brain and cognitive sciences Mriganka Sur, Research Associate Nan Li, postdoc Vincent Breton-Provencher, former postdoc Elisenda Rodriguez, Wellesley College undergraduate Jiyoung Lee, and high school student James Melican.

Tracking calcium

A mainstay of neuroscience research, MRI allows scientists to identify parts of the brain that are active during particular tasks. The most commonly used type, known as functional MRI, measures blood flow in the brain as an indirect marker of neural activity. Jasanoff and his colleagues wanted to devise a way to map patterns of neural activity with specificity and resolution that blood-flow-based MRI techniques can’t achieve.

“Methods that are able to map brain activity in deep tissue rely on changes in blood flow, and those are coupled to neural activity through many different physiological pathways,” Jasanoff says. “As a result, the signal you see in the end is often difficult to attribute to any particular underlying cause.”

Calcium ion flow, on the other hand, can be directly linked with neuron activity. When a neuron fires an electrical impulse, calcium ions rush into the cell. For about a decade, neuroscientists have been using fluorescent molecules to label calcium in the brain and image it with traditional microscopy. This technique allows them to precisely track neuron activity, but its use is limited to small areas of the brain.

The MIT team set out to find a way to image calcium using MRI, which enables much larger tissue volumes to be analyzed. To do that, they designed a new sensor that can detect subtle changes in calcium concentrations outside of cells and respond in a way that can be detected with MRI.

The new sensor consists of two types of particles that cluster together in the presence of calcium. One is a naturally occurring calcium-binding protein called synaptotagmin, and the other is a magnetic iron oxide nanoparticle coated in a lipid that can also bind to synaptotagmin, but only when calcium is present.

Calcium binding induces these particles to clump together, making them appear darker in an MRI image. High levels of calcium outside the neurons correlate with low neuron activity; when calcium concentrations drop, it means neurons in that area are firing electrical impulses.

Detecting brain activity

To test the sensors, the researchers injected them into the striatum of rats, a region that is involved in planning movement and learning new behaviors. They then gave the rats a chemical stimulus that induces short bouts of neural activity, and found that the calcium sensor reflected this activity.

They also found that the sensor picked up activity induced by electrical stimulation in a part of the brain involved in reward.

This approach provides a novel way to examine brain function, says Xin Yu, a research group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tuebingen, Germany, who was not involved in the research.

“Although we have accumulated sufficient knowledge on intracellular calcium signaling in the past half-century, it has seldom been studied exactly how the dynamic changes in extracellular calcium contribute to brain function, or serve as an indicator of brain function,” Yu says. “When we are deciphering such a complicated and self-adapted system like the brain, every piece of information matters.”

The current version of the sensor responds within a few seconds of the initial brain stimulation, but the researchers are working on speeding that up. They are also trying to modify the sensor so that it can spread throughout a larger region of the brain and pass through the blood-brain barrier, which would make it possible to deliver the particles without injecting them directly to the test site.

With this kind of sensor, Jasanoff hopes to map patterns of neural activity with greater precision than is now possible. “You could imagine measuring calcium activity in different parts of the brain and trying to determine, for instance, how different types of sensory stimuli are encoded in different ways by the spatial pattern of neural activity that they induce,” he says.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the MIT Simons Center for the Social Brain.

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Direct enrollment provides students an individualized option for study abroad

Each year, MIT students engage in study abroad with assistance from MIT’s Global Education Office (GEO). In addition to the Imperial College London Exchange Program and departmental exchange programs with other international universities, including in Japan, Switzerland, South Africa, and France, students can create their own personalized study abroad program through direct enrollment. 

Direct enrollment is a student-initiated global education option that allows students to apply directly to an overseas university. With direct enrollment, students have the opportunity to tailor an international academic experience to match their personal intellectual interests and academic needs. For this option, students work closely with a GEO advisor as well as their departmental academic advisor to select an appropriate university and program, and to prepare for the experience.

Most students choosing direct enrollment coordinate their global studies to occur in a semester during their junior year, but some decide to embark on a course of study during the spring of their sophomore year or fall of their senior year. The timing depends in part on a student’s particular academic plan and progress towards their degree.

Because direct enrollment is flexible and individualized, students can use it in a variety of ways. They may select to dive deep into restricted electives or other subjects related to their major, minor, or HASS (humanities, arts, social sciences)-elective requirements, or they may use their time abroad to explore other areas of academic interest. In addition to academics, students have the opportunity to become involved in an array of extracurricular activities and university clubs.

While studying abroad, students earn transfer credit towards their MIT requirements. This arrangement begins with students bringing a curricular proposal to their department’s faculty transfer credit examiner for pre-approval. Junior Emily Mu found the transfer credit examiners at MIT to be “very open and willing to discuss your options with you.” Mu, who enrolled at St. Peter’s College at Oxford University, notes, “I’m a double major in computer science and math and I’m taking courses that will count towards both of those degrees back home. I wanted to experience a significantly different academic experience and challenge myself. It’s been really rewarding to meet so many new people of such different backgrounds — I hadn’t really spoken to a theology major before coming here!”

GEO staff recommend that students interested in direct enrollment start planning at the end of their freshman year or beginning of their sophomore year to allow time to consider options and share their academic study abroad plan with their MIT departmental advisors. Starting early also allows students adequate time to meet external application deadlines, as international universities differ in their deadlines and academic calendars.

MIT students have directly enrolled in universities around the world. While Oxford University in the U.K. remains a popular choice, students have recently spent semesters at University in Edinburgh in Scotland, University of New South Wales in Australia, University of Hong Kong (HKU), and — thanks to the Chinese Government Scholarship program — Fudan University in Shanghai. “I have learned very much about how the world works outside of a western perspective,” observes civil and environmental engineering junior Grace Melcher, who spent a direct enrollment semester at HKU.

Courses are offered in English in many non-English speaking countries. If students have the appropriate foreign language skills they can also take classes in the host country’s language, or take a combination of classes in English and a foreign language. Students typically enroll in four classes while doing a semester abroad.

Although they may be the only MIT student at an overseas university during their semester there, students who participate in direct enrollment do not have to fear social isolation. Upon arriving on campus, they participate in an international orientation program with other foreign students and have the opportunity to meet and make friends with exchange students from around the world. “I met a lot of international students and had interesting conversations about politics, culture, and more,” says civil and environmental engineering junior Christine Langston who studied last fall at the University of Edinburgh.

Direct enrollment offers motivated students the chance for both intellectual and personal growth by giving them the freedom to design their own academic experience in the country and school of their choosing. Students who participate in direct enrollment speak of discovering new passions, rekindling existing interests, and returning to MIT with a better sense of what they hope to accomplish on campus and in the future.

“I’ve learned so much about the world, myself, and so much more through studying abroad,” affirms electrical engineering and computer science junior Udgam Goyal of his time at St. Catherine’s College at Oxford University. “Studying abroad has been one of the best experiences of my life.” Junior Riley Quinn, who majors in finance and also studied at “Catz” echoes these sentiments: “I have loved challenging myself in a new academic environment and immersing myself in new cultures. I 100 percent recommend that every MIT student should study abroad in some capacity.”

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Featured video: Scootah hockey, the silly sport of Simmons Hall

On a quiet Sunday afternoon in April, pedestrians walking down Vassar Street past Simmons Hall — a.k.a. the Sponge — were treated to a unique look at MIT culture. Unlike the usual snacking students they would normally have seen, passers-by peering through Simmons' dining hall windows witnessed a crowd of undergraduates dressed in pastel tutus, feather boas, and propeller hats. The students cheered and honked — annoyingly — on vuvuzelas as their peers, perched on the kind of plastic scooters most often seen in elementary school gym classes, scuttled after colored hockey pucks.

Welcome to the fifth annual Scootah Hockey World Championship.

The students of Simmons Hall had cleared away the tables in their dining hall to form SimDin Arena, the playing field for their proud sport. As the set up was completed, participants gathered to sing the Simmons Hall anthem, “O Spongey-Sponge” (sung to the tune of “O Canada,” and referencing the building’s unique architecture). Once the dorm’s praises had been sung, the competition began.

Scootah Hockey is simple. Players sit on plastic scooters and use small paddles to hit a hockey puck into the opposing team’s goal. The most important rule of Scootah Hockey is to stay on one’s scooter, which the referees constantly reiterate by shouting, “On your scooter!”

The April 8 championship was organized into brackets, and teams played against each other until the final two were left to compete head-to-head. The prize? A scooter with each year’s winning team memorialized on plaques to be kept until the next championship.

This year’s champs were from C-Tower. Senior Garrison Snyder spoke about the final moments leading up to their win. “It was tied up, overtime, next shot wins it. I saw the puck in my field of vision and I just knew I had to slap it in. It went into the far side of the net and there was the goal, there was the game,” he said. “The championship title for C-Tower. Couldn’t have done it without the team, though.”

Scootah Hockey has been a Simmons Hall tradition since 2014 and has been elaborated on by the residents ever since. In recent years, students have given more structure to the sport, including the founding of the Federation d’International du Scootah Hockey and Sports That Inquire Cool Kids (FISHSTICK), establishing commissioners of Scootah Hockey, and creating the Every Scootah Hockey Person’s Network (ESHPN), which provides highlights and statistics.

Sophomore Nicolas Arons, FISHSTICK’s current commissioner, was inspired by last year’s commissioner, Evan Denmark, to bear the responsibility and honor of organizing the game. “He was one of the absolute funniest people I have ever met,” he said. “He would come out wearing [spandex] in bright neon colors and the shortest shorts you’ve ever seen and he’d just do ridiculous stuff to make people have fun. So that’s something I learned from him — to try to be ridiculous and to let ourselves be kids again.”

Arons said he was immediately drawn into the game’s playful competition during his first year at MIT. “I was pretty involved with Scootah Hockey. That’s sort of why I was chosen to become the next commissioner, because I really liked it and I really enjoyed the atmosphere,” he said. “Everyone is rooting for their section, but they’re all doing it for fun. It’s not super aggressive or competitive, because it’s sort of a ridiculous sport.”

Arons said the best part of Scootah Hockey is the feeling of community the game inspires.

“I think it really brings together the whole dorm,” he said. “You have all of these different groups and you get to make friends with people you might not have gotten to know and have fun with them.”

Submitted by: Isabel Stewart | Video by: Division of Student Life | 1 min, 53 sec

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Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to headline Solve at MIT annual meeting

For months, MIT Solve staff members have been planning their annual meeting, Solve at MIT. On May 16-18, these efforts will come together when 1,000 leaders in philanthropy, business, government, and academia convene on MIT’s campus to discuss some of the world’s most pressing problems.

Solve at MIT celebrates Solver teams — tech entrepreneurs driving social impact — and connects them with the Solve community to build robust partnerships to help pilot, scale, and implement their solutions.

The MIT community will be invited to attend this year's meeting with a forthcoming formal announcement. 

What to expect this year at Solve at MIT

The 2018 meeting will contain a series of thought-provoking conversations facilitated by a host of impressive speakers. These include:

• Mitchell Baker, chairwoman of Mozilla;

• Ursula Burns, chairman of the Supervisory Board at VEON;

• Yo-Yo Ma, cellist and curator of the MIT Solve Arts and Culture Mentorship Prize;

• L. Rafael Reif, president of MIT;

• Eric Schmidt, technical advisor and board member of Alphabet Inc.;

• Reshma Saujani, founder and CEO of Girls Who Code;

• Pita Nikolas Taufatofua, Tongan Olympian; and

• The Right Honorable Justin Trudeau, prime minister of Canada.

In addition to these discussions, Solve at MIT will showcase inspirational Solvers such as:

• Emma Yang, the 13-year old Solver who created Timeless, an app that empowers Alzheimer’s patients by helping them remember friends and family;

• Albert Kwon '08 of AUGMENTx, an augmented reality neurorehabilitation therapy solution for patients living with stroke, phantom limb pain, and other forms of chronic limb pain; and

• Angel Adelaja of Fresh Direct Nigeria, who developed stackable container farms to increase local food production and entice a new generation to become farmers.

MIT Solve’s commitment to open innovation

Each year, Solve issues four challenges across its pillars — Economic Prosperity, Health, Learning, and Sustainability — to find the most promising Solver teams who will drive transformational change. Through its open innovation platform, Solve identifies the best solutions and then builds and convenes a community of leaders to form partnerships Solver teams need to scale their impact.

"We live in a time of tremendous change and face challenges global in scale,” said Prime Minister Trudeau. “Finding solutions shaped across borders, involving every generation, is imperative. I look forward to visiting the United States to speak with graduates and those at the forefront of innovation to look at what we can — and must — do to build a better tomorrow for future generations."

“At Solve, we believe there is talent and ingenuity everywhere,” said Alex Amouyel, executive director of Solve. “There are women in Afghanistan, youth in Bangladesh, innovators in Myanmar, entrepreneurs in Germany with intelligence, passion, and drive. It’s our job to provide a platform that connects them with the resources they need to make an impact on the world.”

Solve’s next round of Challenges is open. They are: Work of the Future, Frontlines of Health, Coastal Communities, and Teachers and Educators. Innovators and entrepreneurs from any industry, country, or background, whether for-profit or non-profit are encouraged to apply. The deadline is July 1.

For more information, view the full Solve at MIT program. To join Solve as a member, including attending Solve at MIT, learn about membership or e-mail membership@solve.mit.edu.

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Making landmark texts in architecture and urban studies accessible to the world

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded a grant of $157,000 to support the digitization and open accessibility of landmark out-of-print architecture and urban studies titles published by the MIT Press. By digitizing a cohesive set of classic architecture and urban studies texts from formative and influential moments in these fields, the MIT Press will be surfacing a significant set of works for discovery and research by the scholarly community.

“Bringing these out-of-print texts to the scholarly community and making them accessible to a wider public reflects their importance as intellectual resources and our mission to re-imagine university-based publishing,” says MIT Press Director Amy Brand. “The MIT Press has a longstanding commitment to architecture and urban studies, and we are honored to have The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation supporting this project under the Humanities Open Book Program.”

The award is jointly sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Mellon Foundation. It provides the MIT Press with a unique opportunity to digitize a collection of image-rich and intellectually prized architecture and urban studies titles with complex and costly third-party permissions requirements. Drawing from the expertise of an advisory board of editors, librarians, and scholars who will finalize the list of titles to be digitized, the MIT Press will also commission new forewords for these distinctive works.

Among the titles that the press will digitize are sought-after classics like Francoise Choay’s “The Rule and the Model: On the Theory of Architecture and Urbanism,” which bridges classical and Renaissance architecture with modern theory, and John Templer’s two-volume “The Staircase” — the first theoretical, historical, and scientific analysis of one of the most basic and universal building elements: the stair. The press will also make available works by or about leading figures in modern architecture, notably Donald Leslie Johnson’s “Frank Lloyd Wright vs. America: The 1930s,” an examination of a difficult but important decade in the life of the architect; “H.H. Richardson and His Office,” focused on the drawings of the architect by one of the leading Richardson historians; and Grant Hildebrand’s “Designing for Industry: The Architecture of Albert Kahn” and several of his important books on classical architecture, including “On Leon Battista Alberti: His Literary and Aesthetic Theories,” a study of a quintessential man of the Renaissance.

Bridging the MIT Press architecture list with the press’s focus on technology are two important works by professor of architecture and MIT Media Lab co-founder Nicholas Negroponte: “The Architecture Machine: Toward a More Human Environment,” and its companion “Soft Architecture Machines.” These long out-of-print books — which operate at the intersection of architecture, systems theory, and artificial intelligence — are early exemplars of the MIT Press’s interdisciplinary publishing program.

Once the project is complete, MIT Press intends to distribute a minimum of 25-30 titles under Creative Commons licenses via several channels, including its own institutional ebook platform.  

“We are excited by the MIT Press’ vision to make these texts accessible. The press has an excellent list of titles in architectural theory, landscape architecture building on the legacy of Frederick Law Olmstead, and urban studies and planning, to name a few of their strengths,” says Anna Boutin-Cooper, MIT’s librarian for the School of Architecture and Planning and an advisory board member on the project. “The project’s focus on titles of the greatest importance and highest quality in architecture and urban studies, and the fact that image-rich materials will be prominent in this project, is a highly anticipated moment for scholars and students.”

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MIT 24-Hour Challenge reaches tau

The MIT Alumni Association launched its second MIT 24-Hour Challenge on March 14, hoping that once again thousands of alumni and friends would respond to its call to support of the Institute’s most pressing needs. The association set a lofty goal to exceed last year’s inaugural success: If a tau-themed 6,283 people gave to MIT that day, an anonymous alumnus donor would give a pi-themed $314,000 challenge gift.

In true MIT style, when the clock struck midnight in Cambridge on Pi Day, that goal had been surpassed: All told, 8,673 donors had given to MIT. Not only was the challenge gift unlocked, but another anonymous donor offered a $50,000 bonus gift, taking the final fundraising tally for the day to more than $3.4 million.

“This year’s MIT 24-Hour Challenge served as a remarkably strong rallying moment for MIT,” said Whitney Espich, CEO of the MIT Alumni Association. “Alumni, friends, students, parents, MIT administration, faculty, staff — everyone came out on Pi Day to say ‘I support MIT. I support its capacity to make a better world. And I want to be counted in that mission.’”

The challenge generated a 43 percent rise in the number donors over last year, including 2,285 donors who hadn’t made a gift to MIT in many years, or ever. Many of these individuals made their gifts to one of the 53 micro-challenges supporting MIT programs and students; others chose to give to unrestricted funding.

“Unrestricted funding defines the possible at MIT,” said Espich. “These critical dollars support advances in education, research, and innovation that have a serious impact on transforming society. These dollars allow us to be nimble and responsive to the fast-changing world around us.”

Much of the day’s success was attributed to the challenge’s web ambassadors, who took to their social media networks and personal email lists to spread the word to peers.

Although the second MIT 24-Hour Challenge is now history, the funds raised will continue to support MIT students and programs today and in the near future.

This article originally appeared on the Slice of MIT blog.

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MIT Campaign for a Better World arrives in Seattle

Benaroya Hall, the home of the Seattle Symphony, recently hosted the largest gathering to date of Seattle’s MIT community. The event offered more than 450 attendees a closer look at MIT today and the MIT Campaign for a Better World, an historic endeavor to advance the Institute’s mission and serve urgent global needs in the 21st century.

A common theme among the evening’s speakers was creative combinations by MIT innovators, spanning fields from biotech to baseball. Following a piano performance by jazz musician and MIT neuroscientist Stephen Allsop PhD ’16, Monica Alcabin SM ’83, welcomed MIT President L. Rafael Reif and other guests to Seattle. Alcabin is an associate technical fellow at the Boeing Company and traces her career in aeronautics to the night she watched the 1969 moon landing on television, as a young child. Riveted by the MIT professor interviewed that evening, Alcabin decided that she, too, wanted to go to MIT.

Personal interests have also had a shaping effect on the professional accomplishments of Andrew W. Lo, the Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor at MIT Sloan School of Management and director of the MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering. A former Guggenheim Fellow and widely recognized finance scholar, Lo’s research in the financing structures of the drug development process began during his search for experimental cancer therapies for his mother.

This experience inspired Lo to explore new ways to help transform finance from a constraining factor in creating better treatments to an instrument of innovation. Lo has authored numerous books including “Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought” and co-teaches The Science and Business of Biotech, the first course cross-listed by Sloan and the schools of engineering and science.

Health is at the center of Dava Newman’s professional mission, but in Newman’s case, the patient is “Spaceship Earth,” and the time to identify causes and cures is short. Newman is the Apollo Professor of Aeronautics and previously served as NASA deputy administrator. By studying earth and other planets from space, Newman and her colleagues hope to understand the factors that threaten earth’s fragile atmosphere. “It will take all the collaboration and courageous leadership we can muster from universities like MIT, and their partners in industry and government, to heal our world and protect the future of humanity,” Newman said.

Brian Hesslink’s story includes one of the most unusual — and fortuitous — combinations of interests in recent MIT history. Proudly proclaimed the “winningest pitcher in MIT history” by MIT News, Hesslink combined his passion for baseball with his growing skills in programming and analytics to create (along with MIT postdoc Will Cousins) an algorithm that accurately predicted the run total from past major league seasons. He describes his life at MIT as a series of “micro-discoveries,” one inspiration leading to another. To date, Hesslink has applied his analytical prowess as an intern and staff member of three major league baseball teams: the Houston Astros, the Tampa Bay Rays, and now the Seattle Mariners.

As the Feb. 20 program drew to a close, President Reif expressed his pride in the remarkable achievements of the evening’s speakers, and invited attendees to join the MIT Campaign for a Better World, in support of challenging and essential work across many fields. “Through clear-eyed, hands-on problem solving, we will deliver new knowledge,” Reif said, along with “new tools, new industries, new seekers, and new solutions” to put that knowledge to work for a better world. The Campaign is a chance for everyone in the MIT community to carry this exciting mission forward.

For more information on MIT Better World events, visit betterworld.mit.edu/events.

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Improving mid-infrared imaging and sensing

A new way of taking images in the mid-infrared part of the spectrum, developed by researchers at MIT and elsewhere, could enable a wide variety of applications, including thermal imaging, biomedical sensing, and free-space communication.

The mid-infrared (mid-IR) band of electromagnetic radiation is a particularly useful part of the spectrum; it can provide imaging in the dark, trace heat signatures, and provide sensitive detection of many biomolecular and chemical signals. But optical systems for this band of frequencies have been hard to make, and devices using them are highly specialized and expensive. Now, the researchers say they have found a highly efficient and mass-manufacturable approach to controlling and detecting these waves.

The findings are reported in the journal Nature Communications, in a paper by MIT researchers Tian Gu and Juejun Hu, University of Massachusetts at Lowell researcher Hualiang Zhang, and 13 others at MIT, the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, and the East China Normal University.

The new approach uses a flat, artificial material composed of nanostructured optical elements, instead of the usual thick, curved-glass lenses used in conventional optics. These elements provide on-demand electromagnetic responses and are made using techniques similar to those used for computer chips. “This kind of metasurface can be made using standard microfabrication techniques,” Gu says. “The manufacturing is scalable.”

He adds that “there have been remarkable demonstrations of metasurface optics in visible light and near-infrared, but in the mid-infrared it’s moving slowly.” As they began this research, he says, the question was, since they could make these devices extremely thin, “Could we also make them efficient and low-cost?” That’s what the team members say they have now achieved.

The new device uses an array of precisely shaped thin-film optical elements called “meta-atoms” made of chalcogenide alloy, which has a high refractive index that can form high-performance, ultrathin structures called meta-atoms. These meta-atoms, with shapes resembling block letters like I or H, are deposited and patterned on an IR-transparent substrate of fluoride. The tiny shapes have thicknesses that are a fraction of the wavelengths of the light being observed, and collectively they can perform like a lens. They provide nearly arbitrary wavefront manipulation that’s not possible with natural materials at larger scales, but they have  a tiny fraction of the thickness, and thus only a tiny amount of material is needed. “It’s fundamentally different from conventional optics,” he says.

The process “allows us to use very simple fabrication techniques,” Gu explains, by thermally evaporating the material onto the substrate. They have demonstrated the technique on 6-inch wafers with high throughput, a standard in microfabrication, and “we’re looking at even larger-scale manufacturing.”

The devices transmit 80 percent of the mid-IR light with optical efficiencies up to 75 percent, representing significant improvement over existing mid-IR metaoptics, Gu says. They can also be made far lighter and thinner than conventional IR optics. Using the same method, by varying the pattern of the array the researchers can arbitrarily produce different types of optical devices, including a simple beam deflector, a cylindrical or spherical lens, and complex aspheric lenses. The lenses have been demonstated to focus mid-IR light with the maximum theoretically possible sharpness, known as the diffraction limit.

These techniques allow the creation of metaoptical devices, which can manipulate light in more complex ways than what can be achieved using conventional bulk transparent materials, Gu says. The devices can also control polarization and other properties.

Mid-IR light is important in many fields. It contains the characteristic spectral bands of most types of molecules, and penetrates the atmosphere effectively, so it is key to detecting a wide range of substances such as in environmental monitoring, as well as for military and industrial applications, the researchers say. Since most ordinary optical materials used in the visible or near-infrared bands are totally opaque to these wavelengths, mid-IR sensors have been complex and expensive to make. So the new approach could open up entirely new potential applications, including in consumer sensing or imaging products, Gu says.

The research was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), under the Extreme Optics and Imaging Program, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.

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Purdue University joins MITx MicroMasters program

Purdue University is now joining eight other global universities to become a pathway to a master's degree for learners in the MITx MicoMasters in supply chain management program.

Purdue's Krannert School of Management will waive 10 credits towards its master’s in global supply chain management, which has been ranked as the No. 2 supply chain management (SCM) graduate program in the world. Students earn the remaining 20 credit hours by enrolling at the Indiana-based university to complete a master’s degree.

An accelerated pathway to a master’s

The MITx MicroMasters in SCM credential offers online learners from around the globe a foundational understanding of supply chain management. The five courses — delivered on edX —plus a final comprehensive exam represent the equivalent of one semester of coursework at MIT.

“These online courses offer the same rigor and relevance as the material taught on campus through MIT’s world-renowned supply chain management program,” says Sanjay Sarma, vice president for open learning and the Fred Fort Flowers and Daniel Fort Flowers Professor in Mechanical Engineering.

In becoming a pathway for a master’s degree for students with the MITx MicroMasters in Supply Chain Management credential, Purdue now joins the Zaragoza Logistics Center (Spain), the Malaysia Institute for Supply Chain Innovation (Malaysia), Rochester Institute of Technology (USA), Curtin University (Australia), University of Queensland (Australia), Doane University (USA), and Galileo University (Guatemala), as well as MIT. Purdue’s globally-ranked master’s in SCM program builds upon the university’s core strength in operations, supply chain management, and business analytics to prepare students and professionals for a career in managing global supply chains.

“Students and employers need exceptional education delivered with flexibility and modularity, especially in disciplines like global supply chains and operations management,” says Krannert School of Management Dean David Hummels. “We are proud to work with MIT in creating a unique pathway for well-prepared students to complete a highly ranked MS degree in SCM with great access to high-profile faculty expertise, hands-on experience from local company projects, and the state of the art educational technologies.” 

A career-boosting professional and academic credential

Although the credential on its own is regarded as an impressive academic and professional achievement, learners anywhere can take their MITx MicroMasters in SCM credential and then apply to complete a master’s degree at Purdue, MIT, or at a growing number of universities around the globe.

“This hybrid approach to learning is highly-accessible and will accelerate the careers of busy supply chain professionals around the world who wouldn’t otherwise have been able to complete a master’s degree,” says Chris Caplice, director of the SCM MicroMasters program and executive director of the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics.

The average learner in the MITx MicroMasters in SCM already has six full years of work experience, and their average age is 33, which suggests that global learners are taking full advantage of the benefits this blended learning offers to advance their careers in supply chain management. The inaugural cohort of 40 MIT blended master's in supply chain management students were selected from applicants who completed the MicroMasters in SCM in 2017. They are now on campus through May, completing their course work and group projects.

“Blending” convenience with an accelerated, cost-effective approach

Experiential learning is a key part of Purdue’s master’s in SCM program. Teams of three to five master’s students complete a project for a partnering company, while being closely supervised by Purdue/Krannert Operations Management faculty. The learners are responsible for completing all deliverables as specified by the partner company and present final results to management.

An emphasis on real-world, practical learning is also a focus of the MITx MicroMasters.

“We offer a flexible approach to learning that can accommodate the schedules of busy SCM professionals,” says MIT Dean for Digital Learning Krishna Rajagopal. “We also enable them to accelerate their path towards a master’s degree with world-class, MIT-quality SCM content, and we do all this in a cost-effective way that facilitates access. The combination of the learning that can now be delivered online with the magic that happens when you have students working together in one place, as they now can at Purdue, is a powerful career accelerator.”

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Keeping the balance: How flexible nuclear operation can help add more wind and solar to the grid

In the Southwestern United States, the country’s sunniest region, sunlight can shine down for up to 14 hours a day. This makes the location ideal for implementing solar energy — and the perfect test-bed for MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) researcher Jesse Jenkins and his colleagues at Argonne National Laboratory to model the benefits of pairing renewable resources with more flexible operation of nuclear power plants. They report their findings in a new paper published in Applied Energy.

During summer 2015, Jenkins worked as a research fellow with Argonne National Laboratory on two power systems projects: one on the role of energy storage in a low-carbon electricity grid, and the other on the role of nuclear plants. Linking the two projects, he says, is the goal of using new sources of operating flexibility to integrate more renewable resources into the grid.

In power grids, supply and demand hang in a delicate balance on a second-to-second timeframe. Flexible backup energy sources must stay online at all times to maintain this equilibrium by meeting small variations in demand throughout the day or stepping in quickly if a power plant should suddenly go offline. If supply ever gets too far out of step with demand, devices designed to protect transmission lines and sensitive electronics from damage will quickly trip into action, causing blackouts as they work to shed demand or generation and restore the balance. Currently, certain coal, oil, natural gas, and hydro plants take on the important role of providing these standby capacity services, known as frequency regulation and operating reserves.

Nuclear power plants generally operate at full capacity, but they are also technically capable of more flexible operation. This capability lets them respond dynamically to seasonal changes in demand or hourly changes in market prices. Reactors could also provide the standby backup regulation and reserve services needed to balance supply and demand. According to Jenkins, all reactor designs now being licensed or built in the U.S., Canada, and Europe are capable of flexible operation, as are many older reactors now in service.

“We primarily rely on gas and coal plants to meet all those flexibility needs today, while we operate our nuclear plants fixed, or ‘must-run,’ 24/7,” says Jenkins. “The question here is: What would the benefits be if we stopped operating them so inflexibly, if we started using more of their technical capabilities to ‘ramp’ output up and down on different time scales from seconds to hours to seasons?” The answer, he says, is less reliance on the gas and coal plants — and more renewable energy integration.

As markets increasingly incorporate variable renewables like wind and solar, maintaining the supply-demand balance becomes more complicated. Energy demand changes over the course of the day, usually staying low overnight, spiking briefly in the morning, and then peaking in the evening when people come home from work.

“Throughout these daily and seasonal changes in electricity use, there is a constant level of demand, known as the ‘base load,’ which is invariant,” says Jenkins. “Since nuclear plants have very low operating costs and cost a lot up-front to build, they are economically well-suited to operating all the time to meet this base load.” He adds, “That’s why when nuclear plants were originally licensed in the U.S., it wasn’t really necessary for them to play a role in following demand patterns throughout the day, and so nuclear plants in the U.S. weren’t licensed to operate that way.”

However, nuclear power plants were designed for flexibility “because the engineers who designed them envisioned a world in which nuclear took over the whole system,” Jenkins explains. This never really happened, except in France, which gets over 70 percent of its electricity from nuclear and has accordingly operated some of its nuclear plants to follow changing demand for years.

Now, as power grids around the world incorporate more and more variable renewable resources like wind and solar, the value of flexibility is increasing. Nuclear plants in places with increasing renewable energy penetration, like Germany, are therefore also moving toward flexible operation.

Because power systems today have very little energy storage capability, there are a growing number of places, from California and Iowa to Germany and China, where excess renewable energy might be produced on a sunny or windy day and must simply be wasted. Rather than disabling a solar panel or wind turbine, Jenkins points out, it makes more sense to operate the nuclear plant at a lower output and to absorb as much free wind or sun as possible. And operating nuclear plants flexibly has benefits beyond integrating renewable energy and reducing carbon dioxide emissions: By cutting the amount of wasted fuel, flexible operation can increase revenue for reactor owners, enhance system reliability, and reduce electricity costs for consumers.

Optimization models are helpful in simulating the potential economic and environmental benefits of incorporating renewables, but current models for electric power systems still represent nuclear units as inflexible, must-run resources. Jenkins and the research team at Argonne are closing this gap by developing a new approach to modeling flexible nuclear operation and employing this novel technique to study the potential benefits in power systems with relatively high shares of variable renewable energy sources. They simulated six cases in the American Southwest, ranging from inflexible nuclear plants, to plants with moderate flexibility, to those with high flexibility.

Modeling flexible nuclear plant operation poses its own challenges. A nuclear reactor has a range of operating constraints that arise from the physics of nuclear reactors and are distinct from the technical constraints on more conventional coal- or gas-fired power plants. For example, the minimum stable output of a nuclear reactor changes over the course of the fuel irradiation cycle, and production can’t be ramped up or down too quickly without causing a strain on the nuclear fuel rods and the reactor itself. “The task was to try to synthesize the main physical engineering constraints limiting the ability of reactors to change their output on different timescales, and then translate that into the mathematical constraints that we use in modeling and optimization for the power system,” says co-author Audun Botterud, a principal research scientist in Argonne’s Energy Systems Division and in MIT’s Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems.

The research team created a “mixed integer linear programming” (MILP) formulation that accounts for the specific operating constraints on ramp maneuvers of nuclear power plants. “It’s a mathematical program that minimizes the cost of operating the power grid over the whole year while respecting the engineering constraints that power system operators and individual power plants have to maintain,” Jenkins explains. The simulation works in two stages, optimizing for demand predicted one day in advance and then in real time — matching the way the electricity markets work in the U.S.

The MILP formulation has applications beyond the specific region studied. “The general findings would hold in other places with similar shares of these two resources [nuclear and renewables],” says Jenkins. And, importantly, the study demonstrates how one of the world’s biggest sources of low-carbon energy (nuclear) and the world’s fastest growing energy source (renewables) can work together rather than replace each other.

“What this study shows is that rather than shut down nuclear plants, you can operate them in a way that makes room for renewables,” says Jenkins. “It shows that flexible nuclear plants can play much better with variable renewables than many people think, which might lead to reevaluations of the role of these two resources together.”

“Bridging the different knowledge bases, between folks who do power system modeling at the grid level and nuclear engineers and physicists who understand the details of nuclear reactor dynamics, was the most challenging but also the most interesting and productive aspect of this project,” says Jenkins. “These are two communities that don’t always talk to each other, and they speak different languages and have different backgrounds and expertise. This kind of collaboration is an example of the unique interdisciplinary work that can happen at a place like a national laboratory or the MIT Energy Initiative.”

This research was supported by Argonne National Laboratory and the National Science Foundation.

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Introducing a user-friendly, step-by-step guide to conducting comparative product evaluations

According to the World Bank, over 1.1 billion people have lifted themselves from extreme poverty since 1990. But even as the global outlook on extreme poverty improves, billions of people continue to struggle to access basic human needs, like water, food, shelter, health care and energy. In response to these challenges, innovators around the world have developed a preponderance of cost-effective, locally implemented solutions, from solar lanterns and water filters to improved cookstoves and refugee shelters.

With such a dizzying array of products on the market, development professionals often struggle to cut through the hype associated with novel technologies, and many are hesitant to pursue innovative approaches to stubborn development challenges, given the high stakes of working with economically vulnerable populations.

MIT researchers are now seeking to help development professionals overcome these challenges by using design thinking, together with a methodology for comparative technology evaluation that is five years in the making.

A Practitioner's Guide to Technology Evaluation in Global Development offers a user-friendly, step-by-step framework to help organizations identify development solutions that are most likely to succeed in a given context. Co-authored by the MIT Comprehensive Initiative on Technology Evaluation (CITE), a program supported by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Technology Exchange Lab, a Cambridge-based non-governmental organization, the Practitioner’s Guide builds upon five years of research and over 12 comparative evaluations conducted by CITE across eight countries.

A methodology for all

CITE was founded in 2013 as a leading member of USAID’s Higher Education Solutions Network, a coalition of seven universities seeking to leverage the talent of students, researchers, and faculty towards solving major global development challenges. Since then, CITE has evaluated "hardware solutions" — like solar lanterns, solar-powered water pumps, and water test kits — while also evaluating systems-level solutions, such as how distribution models affect the uptake of malaria-diagnostics, and how food-aid packaging impacts the quality and quantity of international food assistance through complex supply chains.

Throughout this work, CITE researchers from across the Institute — from MIT D-Lab, the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), Center for Transporation and Logistics (CTL), and Sociotechnical Systems Research Center (SSRC) — developed and iterated upon a multi-disciplinary evaluation methodology known as ‘3S’ framework, which evaluates technologies from three vantages including: suitability (how well products perform technically), scalability (how effective products are at reaching consumers at scale), and sustainability (how products are adopted and used over time).

While CITE effectively applied its methodology across multiple sectors, past evaluations included rigorous lab testing, and support from faculty, graduate students and additional partners. According to CITE Associate Director Joanne Mathias, “through the Practitioner’s Guide we aim to empower practitioners and smaller-scale NGOs with the tools required to find solutions that work, regardless of the resources or facilities they have at their disposal.”

From lab to field

Translating five years of academic research into a user-friendly toolkit is no small task. By teaming up with the Technology Exchange Lab (TEL) to co-author the guide, CITE sought out a partner capable of articulating their evaluation methodology to a non-academic audience, while also weaving concepts of human-centered design into the evaluation process. Founded by two MIT Sloan School of Management alumni, TEL works with community-based organizations around the world to implement innovative solutions to problems of poverty.

“Partnering with CITE to develop the Practitioner’s Guide was a natural fit,” says TEL Programs Director Brennan Lake.  “So much emphasis is made on driving innovation and research through universities, which is fantastic, but there is a bottleneck when it comes to putting research into practice, and making innovative approaches and development solutions as accessible as possible to communities on the ground.”

Indeed, the Practitioner’s Guide includes real-world examples of everyday challenges faced by development practitioners — such as how to make data-driven trade-offs between a product’s quality, affordability, and time to implement — as well as case studies based off of past CITE evaluations. The Practitioner’s Guide was also designed to be modular, so that organizations at various stages of project development could make use of CITE’s methodology.

“Most aid agencies and international NGOs already have strict procurement protocols in place,” Lake notes. “The Practitioner’s Guide provides program officers with discrete tools for evidence-based decision making, while also offering a more comprehensive framework for NGOs and community-based organizations looking to build programs from the ground up.”

A Practitioner’s Guide for Technology Evaluation in Global Development is now available on the CITE and TEL websites. CITE’s research is funded by the USAID U.S. Global Development Lab. CITE is led by principal investigator Bishwapriya Sanyal of MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning, and supported by MIT faculty and staff from D-Lab, the Priscilla King Gray Public Service Center, Sociotechnical Systems Research Center, the Center for Transportation and Logistics, School of Engineering, and Sloan School of Management.

In addition to Lake, co-authors of the guide include Jennifer Green, CITE evaluation lead, and Éadaoin Ilten of the Technology Exchange Lab. Additional support was provided by Joanne Mathias.

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Featured video: Making music with the Chorallaries of MIT

How do you transform emotion from the soul, through the body, to the voice, and elicit a physiological response from the audience? Mechanical engineering senior Isabel "Izzy" Lloyd and fellow members of the MIT Chorallaries a capella group figure out this complex transformation every time they get together and sing.

One of only 20 groups worldwide to be selected to appear on the prestigious Best of College Acappella (BOCA) album for 2018, the Chorallaries are a force to be reckoned with in the a cappella community. For Lloyd, music is a way to relax, reset, and release — to switch off the mathematical equations and tune in to the art and connections of music.

"I think it's important to realize the value that lies at the intersection of art and science and how it pertains to society and life and culture all around us," Lloyd says. "The ability relax and reset with music, to make something beautiful together, and to be able to share it with others, inspires me, and helps me parse out my life a little bit so I can focus on my work as an engineer."

Submitted by: School of Engineering | Video by: Lillie Paquette | 5 min, 26 sec

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Implantable islet cells come with their own oxygen supply

Since the 1960s, researchers have been interested in the possibility of treating type 1 diabetes by transplanting islet cells — the pancreatic cells that are responsible for producing insulin when blood glucose concentration increases.

Implementing this approach has proven challenging, however. One obstacle is that once the islets are transplanted, they will die if they don’t receive an adequate supply of oxygen. Now, researchers at MIT, working with a company called Beta-O₂ Technologies, have developed and tested an implantable device that furnishes islet cells with their own supply of oxygen, via a chamber that can be replenished every 24 hours.

“Getting oxygen to these cells is a difficult problem,” says Clark Colton, an MIT professor of chemical engineering and the senior author of the study. “The benefits of this approach are: you keep the islets alive to perform their function, you don’t need as much tissue, and you reduce the ability of the implants to provoke an immune response.”

Tests of these implants in rats showed that nearly 90 percent of the islets remained viable for several months, and most of the rats maintained normal blood glucose levels throughout that time.

Yoav Evron of Beta-O₂ Technologies is the lead author of the study, which appears in the April 25 issue of Scientific Reports.

Protecting islets

Type 1 diabetes occurs when a patient’s own immune system destroys pancreas’ islet cells, so the patient can no longer produce insulin, which is necessary for the body to absorb sugar from the bloodstream. Early attempts to treat patients by transplanting islets from cadavers were unsuccessful because the islets didn’t survive after transplantation.

One of the reasons the transplanted islets failed is that they were attacked by the patients’ immune systems. To protect the transplanted cells, researchers have begun developing implants in which the islets are encapsulated in a material such as a polymer. However, a remaining challenge is making sure that the islets receive enough oxygen, Colton says.

In a healthy pancreas, all islet cells come into contact with capillaries, allowing them to receive oxygen-rich blood, at an oxygen partial pressure of about 100 millimeters of mercury (mm Hg). (Partial pressure is a measure of the concentration of an individual gas within a mixture of gases). When doctors first tried to transplant islets into diabetic patients, many of the cells did not have any direct contact with capillaries, so their oxygen supply was too low.

Previous research in Colton’s laboratory discovered that the outer surface of islets needs to be exposed to at least 50 mm Hg of oxygen to remain viable and produce insulin normally. Through a series of experiments, the MIT team, working with researchers at Beta-O₂ Technologies, determined the operating conditions of the device needed for islets to stay alive and function for long periods of time while assembled in a compact form small enough to be implanted in human patients.

In the device tested in the Scientific Reports paper, islets are encapsulated in a slab of alginate, a polysaccharide produced by algae, about 600 microns thick. A membrane on one side of slab keeps out immune cells and large proteins but allows insulin, nutrients, and oxygen  through. Below the slab is the gas chamber, about 5 millimeters thick, which carries atmospheric gases such as nitrogen and carbon dioxide in addition to oxygen. Oxygen flows from the chamber, across the semipermeable membrane, and into the islets embedded in the alginate slab.

As oxygen diffuses through the slab, it is gradually consumed, so the oxygen partial pressure continually drops. To ensure that the partial pressure remains at least 50 mm Hg for 24 hours, the researchers found that they needed to begin with an oxygen partial pressure of 500 mm Hg in the gas chamber. 

After 24 hours, the oxygen supply is replenished through a port — a device implanted under the skin and connected to a catheter that leads to the encapsulated islets, which are also implanted under the skin.

Long-term survival

In tests in diabetic mice without immunosuppression, the researchers showed that nearly 90 percent of the islets survived the entire transplant period, which ranged from 11 weeks to eight months. They also found that most of these animals’ blood sugar levels remained normal while the devices were implanted, then rebounded to diabetic levels after they were removed.

Another benefit of this approach is that, because most of the islet cells remain alive, they are less likely to provoke an immune response. When cells die, they break down, and the resulting fragments of protein and DNA are more likely to attract the attention of the immune system.

“By keeping the cells alive, you minimize the immune response,” Colton says.

James Shapiro, a professor of surgery, medicine, and surgical oncology at the University of Alberta, who has been running an islet transplantation program there for the past 20 years, says he believes this approach holds great promise and could help to eliminate the need to give islet transplantation patients drugs to suppress their immune system.

“This kind of device can protect the cells from immune attack and deliver oxygen in a way that allows more cells to survive,” says Shapiro, who was not involved in the study. “This would allow islet cells to be transplanted in patients without antirejection drugs, which would dramatically improve the safety of what we’re doing today with islet cell transplantation.”

Researchers at Beta-O₂ Technologies are now working on new versions of the device in which an oxygen storage chamber is implanted below the skin, separate from the islets. This version would only need to be replenished once a week, which could be more appealing for patients.

The research was funded, in part, by the Israeli Ministry of Sciences.

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Nancy Kanwisher receives 2018 Heineken Prize

Nancy Kanwisher, the Walter A. Rosenblith Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT, has been named a recipient of the 2018 Heineken Prize — the Netherlands' most prestigious scientific prize — for her work on the functional organization of the human brain.
 
Kanwisher, who is a professor of brain and cognitive sciences and a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, uses neuroimaging to study the functional organization of the human brain. Over the last 20 years her lab has played a central role in the identification of regions of the human brain that are engaged in particular components of perception and cognition. Many of these regions are very specifically engaged in a single mental function such as perceiving faces, places, bodies, or words, or understanding the meanings of sentences or the mental states of others. These regions form a “neural portrait of the human mind,” according to Kanwisher, who has assembled dozens of videos for the general public on her website, NancysBrainTalks.  
 
“Nancy Kanwisher is an exceptionally innovative and influential researcher in cognitive neuropsychology and the neurosciences,” according to the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the organization that selects the prizewinners. “She is being recognized with the 2018 C.L. de Carvalho-Heineken Prize for Cognitive Science for her highly original, meticulous and cogent research on the functional organization of the human brain.”
 
Kanwisher is among five international scientists who have been recognized by the academy with the biennial award. The other winners include biomedical scientist Peter Carmeliet  of the University of Leuven, biologist Paul Hebert of the University of Guelph, historian John R. McNeill of Georgetown University, and biophysicist Xiaowei Zhuang of Harvard University.
 
The Heineken Prizes, each worth $200,000, are named after Henry P. Heineken (1886-1971); Alfred H. Heineken (1923-2002) and Charlene de Carvalho-Heineken (1954), chair of the Dr H.P. Heineken Foundation and the Alfred Heineken Fondsen Foundation, which fund the prizes. The laureates are selected by juries assembled by the academy and made up of leading Dutch and foreign scientists and scholars.
 
The Heineken Prizes will be presented at an award ceremony on Sept. 27 in Amsterdam.
 

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Building AI systems that make fair decisions

A growing body of research has demonstrated that algorithms and other types of software can be discriminatory, yet the vague nature of these tools makes it difficult to implement specific regulations. Determining the existing legal, ethical and philosophical implications of these powerful decision-making aides, while still obtaining answers and information, is a complex challenge.

Harini Suresh, a PhD student at MITs Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), is investigating this multilayered puzzle: how to create fair and accurate machine learning algorithms that let users obtain the data they need. Suresh studies the societal implications of automated systems in MIT Professor John Guttag’s Data-Driven Inference Group, which uses machine learning and computer vision to improve outcomes in medicine, finance, and sports. Here, she discusses her research motivations, how a food allergy led her to MIT, and teaching students about deep learning.

Q: What led you to MIT?

A: When I was in eighth grade, my mom developed an allergy to spicy food, which, coming from India, was truly bewildering to me. I wanted to discover the underlying reason. Luckily, I grew up next to Purdue University in Indiana, and I met with a professor there who eventually let me test my allergy-related hypotheses. I was fascinated with being able to ask and answer my own questions, and continued to explore this realm throughout high school.

When I came to MIT as an undergraduate, I intended to focus solely on biology, until I took my first computer science class. I learned how computational tools could profoundly affect biology and medicine, since humans can’t process massive amounts of data in the way that machines can.

Towards the end of my undergrad, I started doing research with [professor of computer science and engineering] Peter Szolovits, who focuses on utilizing big medical data and machine learning to come up with new insights. I stayed to get my master’s degree in computer science, and now I’m in my first year as a PhD student studying personalized medicine and societal implications of machine learning.

Q: What are you currently working on?

A: I’m studying how to make machine learning algorithms more understandable and easier to use responsibly. In machine learning, we typically use historical data and train a model to detect patterns in the data and make new predictions.

If the data we use is biased in a particular way, such as “women tend to receive less pain treatment”, then the model will learn that. Even if the data isn’t biased, if we just have way less data on a certain group, predictions for that group will be worse. If that model is then integrated into a hospital (or any other real-world system), it’s not going to perform equally across all groups of people, which is problematic.

I’m working on creating algorithms that utilize data effectively but fairly. This involves both detecting bias or underrepresentation in the data as well as figuring out how to mitigate it at different points in the machine learning pipeline. I’ve also worked on using predictive models to improve patient care.

Q: What effect do you think your area of work will have in the next decade?

A: Machine learning is everywhere. Companies are going to use these algorithms and integrate them into their products, whether they’re fair or not. We need to make it easier for people to use these tools responsibly so that our predictions on data are made in a way that we as a society are okay with.

Q: What is your favorite thing about doing research at CSAIL?

A: When I ask for help, whether it's related to a technical detail, a high-level problem, or general life advice, people are genuinely willing to lend support, discuss problems, and find solutions, even if it takes a long time.

Q: What is the biggest challenge you face in your work?

A: When we think about machine learning problems with real-world applications, and the goal of eventually getting our work in the hands of real people, there’s a lot of existing legal, ethical, and philosophical considerations that arise. There’s variability in the definition of “fair,” and it’s important not to reduce our research down to a simple equation, because it’s much more than that. It's definitely challenging to balance thinking about how my work fits in with these broader frameworks while also carving out a doable computer science problem to work on.

Q: What is something most people would be surprised to learn about you?

A: I love creative writing, and for most of my life before I came to MIT I thought I would be an author. I really enjoy art and creativity. Along those lines, I painted a full-wall mural in my room a while ago, I frequently spend hours at MIT's pottery studio, and I love making up recipes and taking photos.

Q: If you could tell your younger self one thing what would it be?

A: If you spend time on something, and it doesn't directly contribute to a paper or thesis, don't think of it as a waste of time. Accept the things that don't work out as a part of the learning process and be honest about when to move on to something new without feeling guilty.

If you’d rather be doing something else, sooner is better to just go do it. Things that seem like huge consequences at the time, like taking an extra class or graduating slightly later, aren't actually an issue when the time rolls around, and a lot of people do it. Honestly, my future self could probably use this advice too!

Q: What else have you been involved with at MIT?

A: During Independent Activity Period 2017, I organized a class called Intro to Deep Learning. I think machine learning gets a reputation of being a very difficult, expert-only endeavor, which scares people away and creates a pretty homogenous group of “experts.”

I wanted to create a low-commitment introduction to an area of machine learning that might help ease the initial barrier to entry. My co-organizer and I tried to keep our goals of accessibility and inclusivity at the forefront when making decisions about the course. Communicating complex ideas in an accessible way was a challenge, but a very fun one.

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