3 Questions: Lisa Barsotti on the new and improved LIGO

The search for infinitely faint ripples in space-time is back in full swing. Today, LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, operated jointly by Caltech and MIT, resumes its hunt for gravitational waves and the immense cosmic phenomena from which they emanate.

Over the past several months, LIGO’s twin detectors, in Washington and Lousiana, have been offline, undergoing upgrades to their lasers, mirrors, and other components, which will enable the detectors to listen for gravitational waves over a far greater range, out to about 550 million light-years away — around 190 million light-years farther out than before.

As the LIGO detectors turn back on, they will be joined by Virgo, the European-based counterpart based in Italy, which also turns on today after undergoing upgrades that doubled its sensitivity. With both LIGO and Virgo back online, scientists anticipate that detections of gravitational waves from the farthest reaches of the universe may be a regular occurrence.

MIT News spoke with LIGO member Lisa Barsotti, principal research scientist at MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, about the potential discoveries that lie ahead.

Q: Give us a sense of the new capabilities that the LIGO detectors now have. What sort of upgrades were made?

A: Both LIGO detectors are coming back online more sensitive than ever before, thanks to a wide range of improvements. In particular, we more than doubled the laser power in the interferometers to reduce one of the LIGO fundamental noise sources — quantum "shot noise,” caused by the uncertainty of the arrival time of photons onto the main photodetector. We also deployed a new technology, "squeezed" light, that uses quantum optics to further reduce shot noise.

Combined with other upgrades to mitigate technical noises (for example noises introduced by the control scheme or from stray light) we improved the sensitivity to binary neutron stars by 40 percent in each detector, with respect to the past observing run.

Q: What do these new capabilities mean for you, as a researcher who will be looking through the data from these upgraded detectors?

A: I am personally very excited to see the LIGO detectors operating with squeezed light! This new technology has been developed here at MIT after many years of research to make it compatible with the very stringent LIGO requirements, and our graduate students have been leading the commissioning of this new system at the observatories. It is particularly rewarding to see that we succeeded in making LIGO better.

Also, operation at high laser power has been enabled by another upgrade developed and built here at MIT — an "acoustic mode damper" glued to the main LIGO optics that mitigates instabilities originating with high laser power. We are looking forward to seeing many years of work in our labs pay off in this observing run!

Q: What new phenomena are you hoping to detect, and how soon could you detect them, with these new capabilities?

A: We hope to detect more binary neutron star systems (so far only one has been detected), and thanks to the improved LIGO sensitivity, we should be able to observe them with high signal-to-noise ratio. And more black holes, obviously! The more sources we detect, the more we can learn about the way these systems form and evolve.

If we are very lucky, we might observe something new, like a neutron star-black hole system, or maybe even something totally unexpected. Not only are the LIGO detectors better than before — the Virgo detector in Italy more than doubled its sensitivity with respect to the last observing run, and this will improve our ability to localize sources in the sky, facilitating the follow-up of telescopes at multiple wavelengths. So, if the last observing run, “O2,” will be remembered as the one that started multimessenger astronomy, I hope the upcoming one, “O3,” will be the one in which multimessenger astronomy becomes the new normal!

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MIT and NASA engineers demonstrate a new kind of airplane wing

A team of engineers has built and tested a radically new kind of airplane wing, assembled from hundreds of tiny identical pieces. The wing can change shape to control the plane’s flight, and could provide a significant boost in aircraft production, flight, and maintenance efficiency, the researchers say.

The new approach to wing construction could afford greater flexibility in the design and manufacturing of future aircraft. The new wing design was tested in a NASA wind tunnel and is described today in a paper in the journal Smart Materials and Structures, co-authored by research engineer Nicholas Cramer at NASA Ames in California; MIT alumnus Kenneth Cheung SM ’07 PhD ’12, now at NASA Ames; Benjamin Jenett, a graduate student in MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms; and eight others.

Instead of requiring separate movable surfaces such as ailerons to control the roll and pitch of the plane, as conventional wings do, the new assembly system makes it possible to deform the whole wing, or parts of it, by incorporating a mix of stiff and flexible components in its structure. The tiny subassemblies, which are bolted together to form an open, lightweight lattice framework, are then covered with a thin layer of similar polymer material as the framework.

The result is a wing that is much lighter, and thus much more energy efficient, than those with conventional designs, whether made from metal or composites, the researchers say. Because the structure, comprising thousands of tiny triangles of matchstick-like struts, is composed mostly of empty space, it forms a mechanical “metamaterial” that combines the structural stiffness of a rubber-like polymer and the extreme lightness and low density of an aerogel.

Jenett explains that for each of the phases of a flight — takeoff and landing, cruising, maneuvering and so on — each has its own, different set of optimal wing parameters, so a conventional wing is necessarily a compromise that is not optimized for any of these, and therefore sacrifices efficiency. A wing that is constantly deformable could provide a much better approximation of the best configuration for each stage.

While it would be possible to include motors and cables to produce the forces needed to deform the wings, the team has taken this a step further and designed a system that automatically responds to changes in its aerodynamic loading conditions by shifting its shape — a sort of self-adjusting, passive wing-reconfiguration process.

“We’re able to gain efficiency by matching the shape to the loads at different angles of attack,” says Cramer, the paper’s lead author. “We’re able to produce the exact same behavior you would do actively, but we did it passively.”

This is all accomplished by the careful design of the relative positions of struts with different amounts of flexibility or stiffness, designed so that the wing, or sections of it, bend in specific ways in response to particular kinds of stresses.

Cheung and others demonstrated the basic underlying principle a few years ago, producing a wing about a meter long, comparable to the size of typical remote-controlled model aircraft. The new version, about five times as long, is comparable in size to the wing of a real single-seater plane and could be easy to manufacture.

While this version was hand-assembled by a team of graduate students, the repetitive process is designed to be easily accomplished by a swarm of small, simple autonomous assembly robots. The design and testing of the robotic assembly system is the subject of an upcoming paper, Jenett says.

The individual parts for the previous wing were cut using a waterjet system, and it took several minutes to make each part, Jenett says. The new system uses injection molding with polyethylene resin in a complex 3-D mold, and produces each part — essentially a hollow cube made up of matchstick-size struts along each edge — in just 17 seconds, he says, which brings it a long way closer to scalable production levels.

“Now we have a manufacturing method,” he says. While there’s an upfront investment in tooling, once that’s done, “the parts are cheap,” he says. “We have boxes and boxes of them, all the same.”

The resulting lattice, he says, has a density of 5.6 kilograms per cubic meter. By way of comparison, rubber has a density of about 1,500 kilograms per cubic meter. “They have the same stiffness, but ours has less than roughly one-thousandth of the density,” Jenett says.

Because the overall configuration of the wing or other structure is built up from tiny subunits, it really doesn’t matter what the shape is. “You can make any geometry you want,” he says. “The fact that most aircraft are the same shape” — essentially a tube with wings — “is because of expense. It’s not always the most efficient shape.” But massive investments in design, tooling, and production processes make it easier to stay with long-established configurations.

Studies have shown that an integrated body and wing structure could be far more efficient for many applications, he says, and with this system those could be easily built, tested, modified, and retested.

"The research shows promise for reducing cost and increasing the performance for large, light weight, stiff structures," says Daniel Campbell, a structures researcher at Aurora Flight Sciences, a Boeing company, who was not involved in this research. "Most promising near-term applications are structural applications for airships and space-based structures, such as antennas."

The new wing was designed to be as large as could be accommodated in NASA’s high-speed wind tunnel at Langley Research Center, where it performed even a bit better than predicted, Jenett says.

The same system could be used to make other structures as well, Jenett says, including the wing-like blades of wind turbines, where the ability to do on-site assembly could avoid the problems of transporting ever-longer blades. Similar assemblies are being developed to build space structures, and could eventually be useful for bridges and other high performance structures.

The team included researchers at Cornell University, the University of California at Berkeley at Santa Cruz, NASA Langley Research Center, Kaunas University of Technology in Lithuania, and Qualified Technical Services, Inc., in Moffett Field, California. The work was supported by NASA ARMD Convergent Aeronautics Solutions Program (MADCAT Project), and the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms.

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Designing vehicles that drive, fly — and swim

When Crystal Winston was in elementary school, she carried around a notebook to jot down her ideas for new tools or machines. She was determined to become an inventor. Her dad nudged her in a more practical direction.

“He was like, ‘Yeah, I don’t know if inventor is a job,’” she laughs. “‘But maybe you could do mechanical engineering.’”

Now, a decade or so later, Winston has taken her dad’s advice to heart. This June, she’ll complete her degree in mechanical engineering. She is also one of five MIT students to receive the prestigious Marshall Scholarship, which provides two years of funding toward a graduate degree in the United Kingdom. And the field she’s going to study is not exactly traditional.

“When I applied for the Marshall, I pitched this whole idea that I was going to make a cool ecosystem of autonomous, flying, swimming cars,” she says.

A robot-driven future

Winston’s thesis, a project she started her sophomore year, was based on a revolutionary idea. She recalls being stuck in traffic on a bus in Atlanta, late for work, lamenting the congestion of motor vehicles. She imagined a world where transportation wasn’t limited to just roads.

“I had this idea for, basically, a flying car,” she says.

She texted a friend studying aerospace engineering, and the two came up with an idea for a small prototype of a car that could drive on the ground or lift off into the air. They are currently seeking a patent for their design.

Now a team of three, she and her collaborators, seniors Clarissa Sorrells and Noa Yoder, aim to one day add another capability to their flying vehicle: swimming.

“That’s been a longer-term goal. And it has also been the main reason why I applied for the Marshall: to do underwater, flying, swimming robotics research,” Winston says.

When Winston started this project, it was her first real experience with designing a robot start to finish. Now working in the lab of Associate Professor John Hart, she has been building and refining this robot for more than two years, along with her collaborators. She keeps photos of the prototype on her phone, showing the progress her team has made in constructing the potential transportation system of the future. It was while working on this project, she says, that she knew she wanted to be a mechanical engineer.

While the multifunctional car is her main research focus, she also did a robotics-related project through the undergraduate research opportunities program (UROP) in the Mechatronics Research Laboratory during her junior year. In collaboration with PhD student You Wu, she helped to build a rubber robot that could be put into a piping system, propelled by the flowing water, and detect any leaks as it mapped out the piping system.

In her first year, Winston also worked on creating a wearable blood pressure monitor through a UROP in the Research Laboratory of Electronics. More recently, she spent the summer before her senior year working with the team at Google responsible for engineering the StreetView cars. Her research focused on adding an infrared camera system to the cars so they could automatically detect when utility lines or transformers were at risk of going bad.

Engaging others in engineering

Since her first year at MIT, Winston has been involved with the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE), which helps high school students who are members of underrepresented minorities in the Boston area apply for college — and build really cool stuff, like space balloons.

“We launched this giant balloon into near-space altitudes and took some really awesome photos,” she recalls.

In the years after that, during which Winston served as the NSBE’s academic excellence chair and then the programs chair, the students built Rube Goldberg-inspired machines and participated in robotics competitions. Working on programs for NSBE is where she’s spent most of her free time, she says. While she enjoys seeing all the projects and machines in action, for Winston it’s not just about space balloons — it’s about getting kids in the community excited about engineering.

Winston is also a member of MIT’s Black Students’ Union and recently served as a social chair for Tau Beta Pi, the mechanical engineering honor society. For TBP, she has organized events for members to connect and mingle with engineering faculty, as well as informational sessions for graduate students.

Outside of engineering, she loves to draw — and she’s really good at it.

“When I was in high school actually, I thought for a minute that I might go to art school, and write graphic novels,” she says.

In fact, one of Winston’s favorite classes at MIT has been the one she’s in now: 21W.744 (The Art of Comic Book Drawing). For the final project, she’ll have to produce a standard-length comic book about an original idea. She’s not sure what she’ll do yet, but she’s thinking of creating half of a two-part comic that’s like “The Boondocks,” a satirical commentary on the black experience, where her classmate and friend will create the other half.

Robots abroad

In the fall, Winston will start school at Imperial College London to earn a graduate degree in aerospace materials and structures. She’s never lived outside of the country, so the move will be a pretty big change for her. But she’s excited for the new things she’ll get to learn about England.

“I’m a foodie, and so I’m just curious what the food is like there. I’m also curious about what the black experience is like there, because I imagine it’s different from how it is here,” she says.

Winston, an entrepreneurship minor, aims to start her own business after she gets her PhD. One option she’s considering is starting a transportation-related company that designs or creates cars that can both fly and swim. Or, she might start a company that’s involved with search-and-rescue robots. Either way, she wants to stay involved with robotics and transportation. And if we want to find Winston’s network of robots in the future, it’s likely that we’ll only have to look up — or look underwater.

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Celebrating passionate teachers and enthusiastic learners

What skills, ideas, and experiences should students expect to leave college with?

The MIT community explored this question during MacVicar Day on Friday, Mar. 8. The annual celebration of learning is named after the late Margaret MacVicar, the first dean for undergraduate education and the founder of the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP).

Vice Chancellor Ian Waitz hosted the afternoon’s festivities and began by introducing the 2019 MacVicar Faculty Fellows: Ford Professor of Economics Joshua Angrist, computer science professor Erik Demaine, anthropology professor Graham Jones, and comparative media studies professor T.L. Taylor. Each was honored for their contributions to undergraduate education and selected through nominations from their colleagues and students.

The annual symposium followed. This year, four faculty members and three students were asked to present three-minute lightning talks on what is important to today’s learners. While the topics varied, enthusiasm, conviction, and a tangible sense of excitement pervaded the talks and several key ideas surfaced.

Time has compressed

We are able to solve problems at an accelerating rate, said Divya Goel, a senior majoring in Course 6-14 (Computer Science, Economics, and Data Science). In the past, technologists would create something, and then humanists would be tasked with responding to any consequences. Goel believes that this model is no longer sufficient; technologists and humanists must work together from the start. As an example, she cited a seemingly promising program that was created to predict relapses into criminal behavior. The program, however, is fundamentally flawed, overpredicting and underpredicting recidivism rates based on race. “We’re training machines based off of human choices, decisions that we’ve made in the past, and humans are flawed,” Goel explained. An interdisciplinary approach that accounted for systemic biases could have led to a more accurate result.

Fadi Atieh, a junior who studies mathematics, agreed that higher education must react to the rapid rate of change in the 21st century in order to solve these types of complex problems. He suggested a problem-solving class for all students at MIT. While some subjects like this already exist, he noted that they are advanced classes that require a very high level of specialty and skill. Both Goel and Atieh think there is much to be gained from taking the time to look at a given problem from multiple points of view to gain a nuanced understanding of how it might be solved.

Learning as self-preservation

Caspar Hare, professor of philosophy, outlined the two conflicting narratives of work throughout history: work as obligatory and unpleasant, and work as a means to find salvation and meaning in life. While the latter was the dominant strand in the 20th century, the age of work is in decline in the 21st century. How can students prepare themselves for a world without work? “The skill that we really need to imbue in students [for] this new post-work age that they’re going to find themselves in,” Hare said, is the ability to identify what they want and why.

Sanjay Sarma, the Vice President for Open Learning and the Fred Fort Flowers and Daniel Fort Flowers Professor of Mechanical Engineering said he believes “that learning and really understanding what it means to learn is going to be a central skill for us, but also a matter of self-preservation." He explained how humans are helpless when they are born because they have evolved to learn from their environments. In this way, we must become “learning machines,” he said, constantly adapting to the changing world while continuing to follow our natural instincts.

The humanities ... and our shared humanity

Katie O’Nell, a brain and cognitive studies major and self-described “wee nerd” who writes iambic pentameter into lab reports for fun, credited her humanities subjects for doing the most to shape her as a scientist. She recounted how a discussion of feminist epistemology in her literature and philosophy course helped her realize that neuroscience studies were inherently flawed when they only used male mice, which are protected against many genetic disorders by fetal testosterone. “When I tell you that I don’t understand where many of my assumptions about the world come from, this is a good thing,” she concluded. “It means that my time at MIT, and particularly my humanities education here, have forced me to examine the lenses through which I view the world a lot more closely.”

Susan Silbey, the Leon and Anne Goldberg Professor of Humanities, Sociology, and Anthropology and professor of behavioral and policy sciences at the Sloan School of Management, also provided a rousing defense of the humanities. She lamented the trend in higher education to move away from the humanities and emphasized what a contradiction it is for other schools to close humanities departments while championing interdisciplinary studies. “Education is not professional training for a job,” she said. Education should focus on truth, critical thinking, and questioning assumptions, especially as it becomes increasingly unlikely that students will be doing exactly what they learned in college in their careers.

Michael Sipser, the Donner Professor of Mathematics and dean of the School of Science, focused on the importance of human connection in his teaching. His role as a teacher, he said, “goes far beyond just the conveying of information.” For him, it is about nurturing souls and helping students grow. He sees himself as a guide on a journey, and tries to teach students the way he would like to be taught. Human interaction, he believes, is what allows students to thrive.

Hope for the future

“Education is good unto itself. It is better to be educated than not to be,” Silbey said. “Education is better because it makes each moment of living different ... education creates new instincts, habits of looking for new meanings, [and] of questioning old ones.” To her, this understanding of education is nothing new. It is fundamental in explaining who we are now, who we have been, and who we will be.

When asked what made them hopeful for the future of higher education, the student panelists reflected on growth in various forms. Goel has noticed a shift among her peers, whose interests have broadened from their first year to their senior year to include aspirations in law, politics, and economics. O’Nell reflected on how, as a first-year advisor, she has been able to witness “academic humility” and the first time students encounter a problem they cannot solve right away. And Atieh, who grew up in Syria in an education system that was based on “memorization, but not a lot of understanding,” felt optimistic when he came to MIT and for the first time recognized, through the passion of his professors, what learning could be.

The faculty commented on how their students seem more engaged, more thoughtful, more sensible, and more caring every year. “The students have a joy of learning, and it’s just a pleasure to see,” Sipser said.

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Commerce and coercion

Growing up on the Big Island of Hawaii, Kacie Miura says she felt removed from issues roiling the mainland U.S. and the rest of the world. "We were insulated in our own bubble and I wasn't that interested in domestic or international politics," says the fifth-year doctoral candidate. But while serving a two-year Peace Corps mission in China, Miura's view of the world changed dramatically.

In 2010, she was stationed in Chongqing, teaching English to rural teachers and to students of Yangtze Normal University, when tensions flared around the arrest by Japan of a Chinese fishing boat captain.

"Major anti-Japanese protests erupted throughout China," she recalls. "It was the first time I was confronted with the history between these nations, and it made me quite interested in the role of nationalism in politics."

Gripped by this drama, Miura decided to return to academics and study the role and impact of nationalist sentiment in Chinese foreign policy. Today, she is in the midst of writing a dissertation that offers fresh insights on the way economic factors and domestic politics, especially at the local government level, shape China's international relations.

"Those who study China see nationalism as a sort of narrative that the state actively creates, helping to create legitimacy for the [Communist] party," says Miura. She set out to learn whether all Chinese politics followed the central government's nationalist narrative.

In the past decade, several events involving foreign players have served to provoke an official reaction of nationalist outrage in China. For instance, in 2012, Japan procured islands in the East China Sea, a move that China strongly disputed. "There were massive protests throughout China, but not everywhere," she said. "Certain cities appeared surprisingly quiet, and one of them was Dalian — a place with a long history of Japanese investment, and home to many Japanese enterprises."

Reducing friction through trade

For her doctoral research, Miura decided to look closely at local responses to this incident, comparing Dalian with its provincial neighbor Shenyang, which shares geography, politics, and administration, but not the tight commercial connection to Japan. Might economic dependency in Dalian soften any local, antiforeign political protests, she wondered, and would Shenyang prove to be more overtly anti-Japanese, in line with the central government's stance?

To answer these questions, Miura conducted interviews with former officials, local residents and scholars, and scraped data from newspapers in each city to gauge sentiment about Japan during the months-long dispute in 2012. The results reinforced her initial hunch — for the most part.

"At Shenyang, leaders were permissive about anti-Japanese protests, including a huge one outside the Japanese consulate," says Miura. "Protest organizers, who claimed to have the support of the local government, were allegedly so eager for a successful event that they arranged transportation to bring in more people."

In Dalian, leaders found understated ways of supporting Japan. "As a Japanese businessperson put it: They were extending fists above the table, but reaching out under the table to shake hands," she says.

Miura is building an argument that China's central government is not a monolithic authority in determining political responses to international disputes. To bolster this case, she is also researching retaliation against South Korea in Chinese cities with different commercial ties to Seoul, after that nation installed an antiballistic missile defense system China found objectionable.

She is also teasing out the role of the central government's anticorruption crusades on local politics, as well as whether growing unemployment and associated social unrest, viewed with great alarm by Beijing, might factor into local government compliance with the central government's xenophobic policies.

While it's still early for any conclusions, Miura hopes her work will have implications for people eager to understand China's growing influence. "My research might encourage policymakers and businesses to seek allies at the local level, perhaps in cities that already have lots of American firms, where they can expect to be relatively protected even when political tensions are high."

Identity crisis

Miura confesses she is surprised to find herself in the midst of such research, or even pursuing a PhD. In college, she imagined she would remain in Hawaii and become a journalist. But with the 2008 recession, and newsrooms across the state downsizing, she thought her stint in the Peace Corps would buy her some time to figure out next steps.

Her transformative experience in China wasn't just about living far away from home and learning another language. Miura is a fourth-generation Japanese-American, which complicated her interactions with Chinese hosts and students. "I had a full-blown identity crisis," she recalls. "People didn't see me as really American because I didn't have blonde hair and blue eyes."  She says she "blended in," which meant "locals often chose not to acknowledge the Japanese side of me."

This sharpened Miura's sensitivity to the rise of anti-Japanese anger, feeding her concern about nationalism. She pursued a master's degree at Yale in international relations, and interned at the International Crisis Group in Beijing, where she helped draft a report on regional responses to China's actions in the South China Sea. Through this work, she connected with Taylor Fravel, the Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science and an authority on China and international security. When she decided that her depth of interest required an advanced degree, MIT and work with Fravel seemed a natural fit.

She is deeply committed to contributing as a scholar to US-China relations.

"There is so little debate in policy circles, and I worry about the rhetoric — that people have concluded China is a threat," she says. "I would like to provide a voice of reason to persuade decision makers not to overreact to every single thing China does, and to realize that oftentimes what China does is in response to what we do."

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Dark matter experiment finds no evidence of axions

Physicists from MIT and elsewhere have performed the first run of a new experiment to detect axions — hypothetical particles that are predicted to be among the lightest particles in the universe. If they exist, axions would be virtually invisible, yet inescapable; they could make up nearly 85 percent of the mass of the universe, in the form of dark matter.

Axions are particularly unusual in that they are expected to modify the rules of electricity and magnetism at a minute level. In a paper published today in Physical Review Letters, the MIT-led team reports that in the first month of observations the experiment detected no sign of axions within the mass range of 0.31 to 8.3 nanoelectronvolts. This means that axions within this mass range, which is equivalent to about one-quintillionth the mass of a proton, either don’t exist or they have an even smaller effect on electricity and magnetism than previously thought.

“This is the first time anyone has directly looked at this axion space,” says Lindley Winslow, principal investigator of the experiment and the Jerrold R. Zacharias Career Development Assistant Professor of Physics at MIT. “We’re excited that we can now say, ‘We have a way to look here, and we know how to do better!’”

Winslow’s MIT co-authors include lead author Jonathan Ouellet, Chiara Salemi, Zachary Bogorad, Janet Conrad, Joseph Formaggio, Joseph Minervini, Alexey Radovinsky, Jesse Thaler, and Daniel Winklehner, along with researchers from eight other institutions.

Magnetars and munchkins

While they are thought to be everywhere, axions are predicted to be virtually ghost-like, having only tiny interactions with anything else in the universe.

“As dark matter, they shouldn’t affect your everyday life,” Winslow says. “But they’re thought to affect things on a cosmological level, like the expansion of the universe and the formation of galaxies we see in the night sky.”

Because of their interaction with electromagnetism, axions are theorized to have a surprising behavior around magnetars — a type of neutron star that churns up a hugely powerful magnetic field. If axions are present, they can exploit the magnetar’s magnetic field to convert themselves into radio waves, which can be detected with dedicated telescopes on Earth.

In 2016, a trio of MIT theorists drew up a thought experiment for detecting axions, inspired by the magnetar. The experiment was dubbed ABRACADABRA, for the A Broadband/Resonant Approach to Cosmic Axion Detection with an Amplifying B-field Ring Apparatus, and was conceived by Thaler, who is an associate professor of physics and a researcher in the Laboratory for Nuclear Science and the Center for Theoretical Physics, along with Benjamin Safdi, then an MIT Pappalardo Fellow, and former graduate student Yonatan Kahn.

The team proposed a design for a small, donut-shaped magnet kept in a refrigerator at temperatures just above absolute zero. Without axions, there should be no magnetic field in the center of the donut, or, as Winslow puts it, “where the munchkin should be.” However, if axions exist, a detector should “see” a magnetic field in the middle of the donut

After the group published their theoretical design, Winslow, an experimentalist, set about finding ways to actually build the experiment.

“We wanted to look for a signal of an axion where, if we see it, it’s really the axion,” Winslow says. “That’s what was elegant about this experiment. Technically, if you saw this magnetic field, it could only be the axion, because of the particular geometry they thought of.”

In the sweet spot

It is a challenging experiment because the expected signal is less than 20 atto-Tesla. For reference, the Earth’s magnetic field is 30 micro-Tesla and human brain waves are 1 pico-Tesla. In building the experiment, Winslow and her colleagues had to contend with two main design challenges, the first of which involved the refrigerator used to keep the entire experiment at ultracold temperatures. The refrigerator included a system of mechanical pumps whose activity could generate very slight vibrations that Winslow worried could mask an axion signal.

The second challenge had to do with noise in the environment, such as from nearby radio stations, electronics throughout the building turning on and off, and even LED lights on the computers and electronics, all of which could generate competing magnetic fields.

The team solved the first problem by hanging the entire contraption, using a thread as thin as dental floss. The second problem was solved by a combination of cold superconducting shielding and warm shielding around the outside of the experiment.

“We could then finally take data, and there was a sweet region in which we were above the vibrations of the fridge, and below the environmental noise probably coming from our neighbors, in which we could do the experiment.”

The researchers first ran a series of tests to confirm the experiment was working and exhibiting magnetic fields accurately. The most important test was the injection of a magnetic field to simulate a fake axion, and to see that the experiment’s detector produced the expected signal — indicating that if a real axion interacted with the experiment, it would be detected.  At this point the experiment was ready to go.

“If you take the data and run it through an audio program, you can hear the sounds that the fridge makes,” Winslow says. “We also see other noise going on and off, from someone next door doing something, and then that noise goes away. And when we look at this sweet spot, it holds together, we understand how the detector works, and it becomes quiet enough to hear the axions.”

Seeing the swarm

In 2018, the team carried out ABRACADABRA’s first run, continuously sampling between July and August. After analyzing the data from this period, they found no evidence of axions within the mass range of 0.31 to 8.3 nanoelectronvolts that change electricity and magnetism by more than one part in 10 billion.

The experiment is designed to detect axions of even smaller masses, down to about 1 femtoelectronvolts, as well as axions as large as 1 microelectronvolts.

The team will continue running the current experiment, which is about the size of a basketball, to look for even smaller and weaker axions. Meanwhile, Winslow is in the process of figuring out how to scale the experiment up, to the size of a compact car — dimensions that could enable detection of even weaker axions.

“There is a real possibility of a big discovery in the next stages of the experiment,” Winslow says. “What motivates us is the possibility of seeing something which would change the field. It’s high-risk, high-reward physics.”

This research was funded, in part, by the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and the Simons Foundation.

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MIT Muses celebrates 30 years

The MIT Muses, the only all-female a cappella group on campus, have belted beautiful melodies in and around the Institute — be it in the Infinite Corridor, at MIT events, riding in an elevator, and even in McCormick Hall — since 1988.

Susan Quick, founder of MIT Muses, had an idea during her first year on campus to create an a cappella group just for women. The only other groups on campus at the time were the all-male Logarhythms and the co-ed Chorallaries. While Quick majored in chemistry, music continued to be a huge part of her everyday life. “It’s such a wonderful gateway from our studies. Such a wonderful distraction,” says Quick. In true a cappella fashion the name “MIT Muses” is somewhat punny, referring to both the Greek goddesses of the arts and the Greek letter μ (pronounced “mu”) which symbolizes a number of mathematical variables.

Today’s Muses practice six hours a week in the McCormick music room with a number of additional performances each semester. Sophomore Emuna Mokel, president of MIT Muses, sees the group as social, caring, and supportive. “If I’m ever struggling or if I’m having a bad day, it’s another group of people I can turn to that are making sure I’m doing alright. It’s gotten me through rougher days,” Mokel says.

The MIT Muses’ 2018 reunion brought together current members and alumnae from the past 30 years and was a time for them to reconnect. The reaction from founder Quick was emotional. “It brought tears to my eyes,” she says. “They did such an amazing job, they put so much time and effort into arranging this. I was so touched.”

This year, MIT Muses is comprised of 19 female singers, making it one of the biggest groups in Muses’ history. Courtney Guo ’18 has spent five years with the MIT Muses. Guo has taken on many roles within the group including musical director, and she believes that there is magic in music and performing. “There’s something special about making music more than the notes on the page and feeling it more emotionally,” says Guo.

“I started something in a selfish way because I wanted to sing a cappella,” says Quick. “But in the end, it became a giant sisterhood of women who are friends who stay friends and support each other and still love music together.” Even after 30 years, Quick continues to sing with a band and a church choir.

Aspiring Muses can audition for the group each fall, typically in September. And each new class of members will lend their voices to shaping The Muses’ next 30 years of music and memories. 

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Biologists find a way to boost intestinal stem cell populations

Cells that line the intestinal tract are replaced every few days, a high rate of turnover that relies on a healthy population of intestinal stem cells. MIT and University of Tokyo biologists have now found that aging takes a toll on intestinal stem cells and may contribute to increased susceptibility to disorders of the gastrointestinal tract.

The researchers also showed that they could reverse this effect in aged mice by treating them with a compound that helps boost the population of intestinal stem cells. The findings suggest that this compound, which appears to stimulate a pathway that involves longevity-linked proteins known as sirtuins, could help protect the gut from age-related damage, the researchers say.

“One of the issues with aging is organ dysfunction, accompanied by a decline in the activity of the stem cells that nurture and replenish that organ, so this is a potentially very useful intervention point to either slow or reverse aging,” says Leonard Guarente, the Novartis Professor of Biology at MIT.

Guarente and Toshimasa Yamauchi, a professor at the University of Tokyo, are the senior authors of the study, which appears online in the journal Aging Cell on March 28. The lead author of the paper is Masaki Igarashi, a former MIT postdoc who is now at the University of Tokyo.

Population growth

Guarente’s lab has long studied the link between aging and sirtuins, a class of proteins found in nearly all animals. Sirtuins, which have been shown to protect against the effects of aging, can also be stimulated by calorie restriction.

In a paper published in 2016, Guarente and Igarashi found that in mice, low-calorie diets activate sirtuins in intestinal stem cells, helping the cells to proliferate. In their new study, they set out to investigate whether aging contributes to a decline in stem cell populations, and whether that decline could be reversed.

By comparing young (aged 3 to 5 months) and older (aged 2 years) mice, the researchers found that intestinal stem cell populations do decline with age. Furthermore, when these stem cells are removed from the mice and grown in a culture dish, they are less able to generate intestinal organoids, which mimic the structure of the intestinal lining, compared to stem cells from younger mice. The researchers also found reduced sirtuin levels in stem cells from the older mice.

Once the effects of aging were established, the researchers wanted to see if they could reverse the effects using a compound called nicotinamide riboside (NR). This compound is a precursor to NAD, a coenzyme that activates the sirtuin SIRT1. They found that after six weeks of drinking water spiked with NR, the older mice had normal levels of intestinal stem cells, and these cells were able to generate organoids as well as stem cells from younger mice could.

To determine if this stem cell boost actually has any health benefits, the researchers gave the older, NR-treated mice a compound that normally induces colitis. They found that NR protected the mice from the inflammation and tissue damage usually produced by this compound in older animals.

“That has real implications for health because just having more stem cells is all well and good, but it might not equate to anything in the real world,” Guarente says. “Knowing that the guts are actually more stress-resistant if they’re NR- supplemented is pretty interesting.”

Protective effects

Guarente says he believes that NR is likely acting through a pathway that his lab previously identified, in which boosting NAD turns on not only SIRT1 but another gene called mTORC1, which stimulates protein synthesis in cells and helps them to proliferate.

“What we would hypothesize is that the NAD replenishment in old mice is driving this pathway of growth that’s working through SIRT1 and TOR to reverse the decline that has occurred with aging,” he says.

The findings suggest that NAD might have a protective effect against diseases of the gut, such as colitis, in older people, he says. Guarente and his colleagues have previously found that NAD precursors can also stimulate the growth of blood vessels and muscles and boost endurance in aged mice, and a 2016 study from researchers in Switzerland found that boosting NAD can help replenish muscle stem cell populations in aged mice.

In 2014, Guarente started a company called Elysium Health, which sells a dietary supplement containing NR combined with another natural compound called pterostilbene, which is an activator of SIRT1.

The research was funded, in part, by the National Institutes of Health and the Glenn Foundation for Medical Research.

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Whitehead Institute’s David Page to conclude term as director

Whitehead Institute, the world-renowned nonprofit research institution dedicated to improving human health through basic biomedical research, has announced that Institute Director David C. Page — a Whitehead Institute member since 1988 and director since 2004 — will complete his current term as director and president in summer 2020. An international search has been launched for Page’s successor.

“David’s tenure as director has been a period of incredible richness for Whitehead Institute,” says Charles D. Ellis, chair of the Whitehead Institute Board of Directors. “It has been rich in the path-breaking science that our researchers have done; in the intellectual ferment and creative environment that Whitehead members have fostered; and in the sense of community and common purpose that David has nurtured. He has led us with great skill and vision through a dynamic period of growth and continuous exploration, and he will pass to his successor an organization primed to tackle the challenges offered by a swiftly evolving bioscience landscape.”

Since its founding in 1982, Whitehead Institute has been one of the world’s most influential biomedical research centers — producing a continual stream of significant discoveries and new research tools and approaches. Whitehead Institute is a legally and financially independent organization closely affiliated with MIT, and Whitehead Institute members hold MIT faculty appointments. The 17 Whitehead Institute members include two National Medal of Science winners, nine National Academy of Sciences members, four National Academy of Medicine members, and four Investigators of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. In addition, the institute’s prestigious Whitehead Fellows Program has fostered generations of biomedical science leaders — including Harvard Medical School Dean George Daley, celebrated MIT cancer researcher and professor of biology Angelika Amon, Broad Institute President and Founding Director Eric Lander, and NASA astronaut and space biologist Kate Rubins.

Whitehead Institute and MIT have been Page’s professional home since he earned an MD from Harvard Medical School and the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology Program and completed research in David Botstein’s lab at MIT in 1984. After serving as the institute’s first Whitehead Fellow, he became a Whitehead member and MIT faculty member in 1988. Page was appointed associate director of the institute in 2002, interim director in 2004, and director in 2005.

Throughout his 35 years at Whitehead Institute, Page has run a thriving and productive research lab. His groundbreaking studies on the Y chromosome changed the way biomedical science views the function of sex chromosomes. That work earned him wide recognition, including a Macarthur Foundation Fellowship and a Searle Scholar Award; and he has been an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 1990. His research twice earned inclusion in Science magazine’s “Top 10 Breakthroughs of the Year,” first for mapping a human chromosome and then for sequencing the human Y chromosome. Today, his lab is pursuing a deep understanding of the role of sex chromosomes in health and disease — work with the potential to fundamentally change the practice of medicine and improve the quality of care for women and men alike.

As director, Page has made a mark on all facets of the Whitehead Institute organization. During his tenure, he oversaw the creation of the Institute’s Intellectual Property Office; strengthened its core facilities; and established new platforms, such as the Metabolomics Center. He also enhanced the leadership structure by appointing three associate directors; and he supported the creation of the child care center. Perhaps most important for the long run, Page has guided a robust renewal of faculty and has helped to prepare the organization for the eventual retirement of the Institute’s founding generation of members.

The search for Page’s successor will be guided by a committee of noted leaders in education, biomedical research, and nonprofit organizations, including Susan Hockfield (chair), MIT professor of neuroscience and president emerita; Laurie H. Glimcher, president and CEO of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and former dean of Weill Cornell Medical College; Alan Grossman, the Praecis Professor of Biology and head of the MIT Department of Biology; Paul L. Joskow, former president and CEO of Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics Emeritus at MIT; Amy E. Keating, professor in the departments of Biology and Biological Engineering at MIT; David Sabatini, Whitehead Institute member and associate director, and professor of biology at MIT; Phillip A. Sharp, Nobel laureate and MIT Institute professor and professor of biology; and Sarah Williamson, CEO of FCLT Global and former partner at Wellington Management Company (Joskow, Sharp, and Williamson are also members of the Whitehead Institute Board of Directors.)

The committee will be assisted by global executive search firm Russell Reynolds Associates.

“Whitehead Institute is one of the world’s premier research institutions,” says Hockfield. “It possesses an innovative and collaborative culture; rich talent and intellectual capital; a robust relationship with MIT; and a place at the heart of the Kendall Square innovation community. These factors make it an ideal opportunity for a director with vision, scientific courage, and a passion to address basic biomedical science’s most significant challenges.”

“The scientists of Whitehead Institute have helped to drive biomedical research forward and onto exciting new paths,” says Page. “In coming years, the Institute itself will experience a generational evolution, and my successor will help define the organization's future — and by extension, help shape the direction of biomedical research for decades to come.”

The new director will have an impressive line of predecessors: Whitehead Institute’s founding director was Nobel laureate and former Caltech president David Baltimore; he was succeeded by globally respected researcher and science enterprise leader Gerald Fink, and then by National Medal of Science recipient Susan Lindquist — Page’s immediate predecessor.

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Solving for fun (and sometimes prizes)

One early Saturday morning in December, senior Danielle Wang took a seat alongside 164 others taking the 2018 William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition in Walker Memorial.

For six hours she and 4,622 other undergraduates from 568 institutions in the United States and Canada struggled over enigmatic problems involving group theory, set theory, graph theory, lattice theory, and number theory. For some taking the test, the questions are baffling. But each winter since starting at MIT, Wang has taken the exam for fun.

“There are some interesting problems on the test every year,” she says. “Every year I hope I'll do better than the previous year. You get some money if you do well, and I'd say you don't lose anything if you don't.”

She earned Putnam’s honorable mention last year. In her first Putnam exam, she took home the 2015 Elizabeth Lowell Putnam Prize, which is awarded each year to the top-ranking female competitor.

This year, she looked around Walker and could see many familiar faces from her Math Olympiad days. She began Math Olympiads in middle school. Raised by computer scientists in San Jose, California, Wang grew up watching her brother compete in math competitions. One day, she simply decided that she would, too.

“I think it was like, ‘Math is the hardest thing, so I have to do the hardest thing,’” she recalls. “I have become less sure that that's the best reason, but it's a decent reason, I think.”

She joined a weekly math circle and the American Regions Math League team. In seventh grade, she earned honorable mention as a Math Prize for Girls contestant; the next year she took first place, and remained in the top or second-place spot throughout high school. Wang collected top prizes in the USA Mathematical Talent Search, Bay Area Mathematical Olympiad, USA Mathematical Olympiad, the Math Prize Invitational Olympiad, the European Girls’ Mathematical Olympiad, and China's Girls Math Olympiad.

It was her experience with the Math Olympiad Summer Program (MOP) that cemented her decision to pursue a mathematics career, and eventually to apply to MIT. 

“MOP has had a huge effect on my life,” she says. “I think you learn skills from math contests that are useful for other things, including ‘real math.’ Now, that's not something I even cared about back then, but I realize now that it was a great (and one-of-a-kind) opportunity for learning these skills. MOP was a major part of math competitions, and if it wasn't for it I wouldn't have found the opportunity or motivation to do math as much, or at all.”

At MIT, she transitioned into a mentor role for participants in MOP as well as the A-Star Summer Math Camp. She was a runner-up for the 2019 Alice T. Schafer Mathematics Prize from the Association for Women in Mathematics. Last summer, she participated in a prestigious math research program at the University of Minnesota at Duluth, which helped her to publish two papers: as sole author on “The Eulerian distribution on involutions is indeed γ-positive” in the Journal of Combinatorial Theory Series A; and, with MIT doctoral student Aaron Berger, “Modified Erdös–Ginzburg–Ziv Constants for Z/nZ and (Z/nZ)²” in Discrete Mathematics.

A couple of months after she took the Putnam, the results were published. The highest exam score was 114 out of a possible 120 points, with a median score of a mere two points. That means many talented Putnam contestants earned a big zero. Out of 4,622 test-takers, Wang came in 13th place.

As the highest-scoring female, she also earned her second Elizabeth Putnam prize, which comes with a $1,000 award. This prize was introduced in 1992 as a way to encourage more female contestants. Two other MIT Elizabeth Putnam Prize winners are Ruth A. Britto-Pacumio in 1994 and Yinghui Wang in 2010.

“Math competitions, such as the Putnam, have always been a male-dominated scene — which makes Danielle's impressive performance even more so,” says three-time MIT Putnam Fellow Yufei Zhao, who is an assistant professor of mathematics.

Zhao teaches 18.A34 (Mathematical Problem Solving), the Putnam Seminar that discusses methods for solving Putnam problems from previous years. It is also a class that attracts few female participants. “I did not know it existed,” Wang says. “Then I found out that all of my freshman math contest friends were in it, and I was like, ‘Hey, no one told me!’”

Zhao hopes that more female students will take the Putnam exam. “I hope that Danielle's success in math competitions and research can be an encouragement to other female students,” he says.

Sometimes Wang feels the burden of being such a role model. “People might ask you questions like you represent all the other girls who do math, and I have felt, at some points, pressure to do well to prove something about my whole gender.”

However, other sources of encouragement include a growing number of STEM programs and female-centric math competitions, such as the Math Prize for Girls that is held annually at MIT.

Wang, who recently was accepted into MIT’s math PhD program, says that she has always felt supported as a female mathematician at MIT and elsewhere. “In my experience, the math community is totally OK with people being female.”  

Registration for the 2019 Putnam Competition will open on Sept. 1. The contest is open to undergraduate students who must participate through their enrolled college or university.

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Lighting up exoplanets

Ever since the discovery of the first exoplanet, 51 Pegasi b, hidden within the well-known Pegasus constellation in 1995, the burgeoning field of exoplanetary astronomy has taken off. Since then, the field has seen an explosion of related scientific specialties, and scientists have been able to detect more than 3,500 worlds beyond our solar system. People had always dreamed about the secrets other worlds held, now researchers empowered by advances in technology are able to find and study them.

As the 50th anniversary of the first Apollo moon landing approaches, excitement about planetary bodies has been heightened. The growing field of planetary astronomy studies celestial objects both within and beyond our solar system, bridging planetary science and astronomy.

This year, the Heising-Simons Foundation has granted six researchers from around the U.S. 51 Pegasi b fellowships to support the search for this knowledge, and two of those six will conduct their studies at MIT. Clara Sousa-Silva and Benjamin Rackham were selected as some of the most promising astronomers to pursue “innovative independent research ideas, take risks, and tackle challenging questions what will accelerate the field.” They will be conducting their work within MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS).

Hosting life

“I want to study every molecule on every possible exoplanet atmosphere, and then try to recognize under what conditions certain molecules can signify life,” Sousa-Silva says.

Sousa-Silva is a quantum astrochemist and an EAPS postdoc with a desire to understand the mechanisms of the universe, particularly exoplanet habitability — with a focus on the molecules that compose their atmospheres. As a theorist, Sousa-Silva simulates the ways individual molecules interact with light so that they can be identified anywhere in the galaxy. She combines quantum physics and computer calculations to create molecular “fingerprints” that allow scientists to detect remote gases on exoplanet atmospheres, in particular gases that are associated with life.

Sousa-Silva is currently examining molecules that are associated with anaerobic biology in order to detect life on planets without oxygen. Her work has culminated in a new method, Rapid Approximate Spectral Calculations for ALL (RASCALL), that generates simulations of molecules. RASCALL can help scientists make rapid decisions about whether to follow up promising observational data with more detailed study.

“What excites me most is the idea of combining supremely fundamental science with really inspirational, out-of-this-world questions about what life looks like elsewhere,” says Sousa-Silva.

During her fellowship, Sousa-Silva will expand her publicly available database of spectra to ultimately include sixteen thousand molecules, and use those data to completely and accurately interpret exoplanet atmospheres. With these, she’ll be able to rank promising biosignatures by their spectroscopic potential, not limited to Earth-like molecules. The goal is to have the tools to identify any given alien biosphere. She points out that, not only is molecular behavior a fundamental and universal truth, and as such worth knowing, but understanding which molecules are on an exoplanet, and their role within it, is the most promising avenue for detecting life in the galaxy.

To understand the role of molecules in space, Sousa-Silva’s research will straddle astronomy/astrobiology and spectroscopy. She’ll continue to work with the biosignatures group led by Sara Seager, EAPS' Class of 1941 Professor of Planetary Sciences with an appointment in the Department of Physics. She will also work with other MIT atmospheric chemists, and the access to exoplanet data and specialists will provide Sousa-Silva with unparalleled resources. Additionally, collaborations with other groups will help ensure her spectra are of the highest quality and available to scientists: HITRAN at Harvard University, ExoMol at University College London, the Burgasser group at the University of California at San Diego, and McKemmish’s team at the University of New South Wales.

“The literal astronomical scale of the problems that need to be solved to understand exoplanets is daunting, but very much where I feel at home,” says Sousa-Silva. “As a 51 Pegasi b fellow, I want to bridge the gap between spectroscopy and astronomy, and by doing so create a computational chemistry toolkit to identify life on an exoplanet.”

Dimming stars

Benjamin Rackham is motivated by a similar question — “Are we alone?” — and uses light to study exoplanets and their stars, but in a different way. As a postdoc at the University of Arizona’s Steward Observatory, Rackham examines transmission spectra from transiting exoplanets.

“It’s phenomenal to watch the brightness of a star dim and increase again, telling you that a planet is passing in front of the star. It’s exciting to witness a secret in the sky that’s been going on for billions of years but has taken the invention of telescopes to discover,” Rackham says.

Light that arrives at Earth from extrasolar systems contains a lot of information, both from the stars and their associated transiting exoplanets. Encoded, is data on the planet’s size, the composition of its atmosphere, the type of light emitted from the host star, distance to its star, among other things. But it’s not so straight forward; some signals can mimic or mask others, making them difficult to discern.

One example is the transit light source effect, which happens when a star’s photosphere is not uniform and shows blemishes like starspots due to magnetic activity. This causes the emitted light to vary before, during and after a transit, making it difficult for researchers to understand what the full spectrum of the star is, and if light variations during a transit are caused by a feature of the planet’s atmosphere or originating from the star itself.

Rackham works to disentangle these signals. As an experimentalist, he aims to pilot and refine techniques that lead to more robust observations on the true nature of such exoplanets. Systematically investigating this phenomenon on a diverse range of stars, Rackham’s research has revealed that spots on small, cool stars (red dwarfs), which tend to be more active than Sun-like stars, can produce spectral features that give the appearance of water vapor and other atmospheric traits on transiting planets.

“This is problematic for astrobiology because these are the same types of stars that we would like to focus on to study small, temperate, rocky worlds that might host life,” Rackham says.

In his fellowship at MIT working with EAPS Assistant Professor Julien de Wit, Rackham will address this problem of stars imprinting spectral features on transit depths by refining scientists’ understanding of the properties of active stars that host exoplanets. To do this, he will conduct a series of observational studies of exoplanet host stars and ultimately produce an open-source tool that untangles stellar and planetary signals, taking into account transit observations alongside high-resolution stellar spectra and long-term brightness monitoring data. Using datasets from space missions like Kepler and TESS, he will measure the properties of starspots and how they affect transmission spectra.

This tool will be essential to studying the smallest transiting exoplanets with the James Webb Space Telescope and, in the long run, searching for atmospheric biosignatures with transits. In order to decompose these spectra, Rackham will collect highly-detailed observations and evolution of the brightness of host stars over time using the SPECULOOS telescope network, and the Magellan Telescopes located at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. In addition, his efforts to characterize the star TRAPPIST-1 in detail will support the study of its seven Earth-sized planets. Altogether, these contributions will be critical to catalog exoplanet atmospheres in the search of life elsewhere in the universe.

“With the TESS mission, it’s a particularly great time for exoplanets at MIT,” says Rackham. “I’m really excited to be in the thick of the action now and, in the future, to be part of the team that seeks to find life elsewhere in the universe!”

Other postdocs and their hosting institutions who have also received fellowships are Juliette Becker, who is joining Caltech; Cheng Li, who is joining the University of California at Berkeley; Jessica Spake, who is joining Caltech; and Xinting Yu, who is joining the University of California at Santa Cruz.

The Heising-Simons Foundation is a family foundation based in Los Altos and San Francisco, California. The foundation works with its many partners to advance sustainable solutions in climate and clean energy, enable groundbreaking research in science, enhance the education of our youngest learners, and support human rights for all people. The fellowship not only provides up to $375,000 of support for independent research over three years, but also access to professional networks and mentorship, as well as the time and space to establish distinction and leadership in the field.

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3 Questions: What is linguistics?

For decades, MIT has been widely held to have one of the best linguistics programs in the world. But what is linguistics and what does it teach us about human language? To learn more about the ways linguists help make a better world, SHASS Communications recently spoke with David Pesetsky, the Ferrari P. Ward Professor of Modern Languages and Linguistics at MIT. A Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellow (MIT's highest undergraduate teaching award), Pesetsky focuses his research on syntax and the implications of syntactic theory to language acquisition, semantics, phonology, and morphology (word-structure). He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a fellow of the Linguistic Society of America.

In collaboration with Pesetsky, SHASS Communications also developed a companion piece to his interview, titled "The Building Blocks of Linguistics." This brisk overview of basic information about the field includes entries such as: "Make Your Own Personal Dialect Map," "Know Your Linguistics Subfields," and "Top 10 Ways Linguists Help Make a Better World."

Q: Linguistics, the science of language, is often a challenging discipline for those outside the field to understand. Can you comment on why that might be?

A: Linguistics is the field that tries to figure out how human language works — for example: how the languages of the world differ, how they are the same, and why; how children acquire language; how languages change over time and why; how we produce and understand language in real time; and how language is processed by the brain.

These are all very challenging questions, and the linguistic ideas and hypotheses about them are sometimes intricate and highly structured. Still, I doubt that linguistics is intrinsically more daunting than other fields explored at MIT — though it is certainly just as exciting.

The problems that linguists face in communicating about our discipline mostly arise, I think, from the absence of any foundational teaching about linguistics in our elementary and middle schools. This means that the most basic facts about language — including the building blocks of language and how they combine — remain unknown, even to most well-educated people.

While it's a challenge for scholars in other major fields to explain cutting-edge discoveries to others, they don’t typically have to start by explaining first principles. A biologist or astronomer speaking to educated adults, for example, can assume they know that the heart pumps blood and that the Earth goes around the sun. 

Linguistics has equivalent facts to those examples, among them: how speech sounds are produced by the vocal tract, and the hierarchical organization of words in a sentence. Our research builds on these fundamentals when phonologists study the complex ways in which languages organize their speech sounds, for example; or when semanticists and syntacticians (like me) study how the structure of a sentence constrains its meaning.

Unlike our physicist or biologist colleagues, however, we really have to start from scratch each time we discuss our work. That is a challenge that we will continue to face for a while yet, I fear. But there is one silver lining: watching the eyes of our students and colleagues grow wide with excitement when they do learn what's been going on in their own use of language — in their own linguistic heads — all these years. This reliable phenomenon makes 24.900, MIT’s very popular introductory linguistics undergraduate class, one of my favorite classes to teach. (24.900 is also available via MIT OpenCourseWare.)

Q: Can you describe the kinds of questions linguistic scholars explore and why they are important?

A: Linguists study the puzzles of human language from just about every possible angle — its form, its meanings, sound, gesture, change over time, acquisition by children, processing by the brain, role in social interaction, and much more. Here at MIT Linguistics, our research tends to focus on the structural aspects of language, the logic by which its inner workings are organized.

Our methodologies are diverse. Many of us work closely with speakers of other languages not only to learn about the languages themselves, but also to test hypotheses about language in general. There are also active programs of laboratory research in our department, on language acquisition in children, the online processing of semantics and syntax, phonetics, and more.

My own current work focuses on a fact about language that looks like the most minor of details — until you learn that more or less the same very fact shows up in language after language, all around the globe!

The fact is the strange, obligatory shrinkage in the size of a clause when its subject is extracted to another position in the sentence. In English, for example, the subordinating conjunction "that" — which is normally used to introduce a sentence embedded in a larger sentence (linguists call it a “complementizer") — is omitted when the subject is questioned.

For example, we say “Who are you sure will smile?” not "Who are you sure that will smile?"

Something very similar happens in languages all over the globe. We find it in Bùlì, for example, a language of Ghana; and in dialects of Arabic; and in the Mayan language Kaqchikel. Adding to the significance of this finding: MIT alumnus Colin Phillips PhD '96 has shown that, in English at least, this language protocol is acquired by children without any statistically usable evidence for it from the speech they hear around them.

A phenomenon like this one, found all over the globe and clearly not directly learned from experience, cannot be an accident — but must be a by-product of some deeper general property of the human language faculty, and of the human mind. I am now developing and testing a hypothesis about what this deeper property might be.

This example also points to one reason linguistics research is exciting. Language is the defining property of our species and to understand how language works is to better understand ourselves. Linguistic research sheds light on many dimensions of the human experience.

And yet, for all the great advances that my field has made, there are so many fundamental aspects of the human language capacity that we do not properly understand yet. I do not believe that genuine progress can be made on a whole host of language-related problems until we broaden and deepen our understanding of how language works — whether the problem is teaching computers to understand us, teaching children to read, or figuring out the most effective way to learn a second language.

Q: What is the historical relationship between research in linguistics and artificial intelligence (AI), and what roles might linguistics scholarship play in the next era of AI research?

A: The relation between linguistic research and language-related research on AI has been less close than one might expect. One reason might be the different goals of the scholars involved. Historically, the questions about language viewed as most urgent by linguists and AI researchers have not been the same. Consequently, language-related AI has tended to favor end-runs around the findings of linguistics concerning how human language works.

In recent years, however, the tide has been turning, and one sees more and more interaction and collaboration between the two domains of research, including here at MIT. Under the aegis of the MIT Quest for Intelligence, for example, I've been meeting regularly with a colleague from Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a colleague from Brain and Cognitive Sciences to explore ways in which research on syntax can inform machine learning for languages that lack extensive bodies of textual material — a precondition for training existing kinds of systems.

A child acquiring language does this without the aid of the thousands of annotated sentences that machine systems require. An intriguing question, then, is, can we build machines with some of the capabilities of human children, that might not need such aids?

I am looking forward to seeing what progress we can make together.

Story prepared by MIT SHASS Communications

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MIT receives $30 million to help address energy challenges in Egypt

MIT is the recipient of a $30 million award from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), announced this week at a two-day ceremony in Cairo.

The award will support MIT over the next five years in developing a Center of Excellence in Energy at Ain Shams University, Mansoura University, and Aswan University, in Egypt. The center will serve to connect researchers at the Egyptian universities with experts at MIT, to seek innovative solutions to the country’s energy challenges.  

The Center of Excellence in Energy is one of three centers to be established in Egypt and funded by USAID through a total investment of $90 million. The centers are formal partnerships between Egyptian and American universities and the private sector to foster research, scholarships, and innovation in agriculture, energy, and water. In addition to the MIT-led center, Cornell University will partner with Cairo University, and the American University in Cairo will partner with Alexandria University, to form comparable centers to address challenges in the areas of agriculture and water, respectively.  

“The Centers will facilitate meaningful collaboration between American and Egyptian universities,” said USAID Mission Director Sherry F. Carlin, in a statement. “They will bring together some of the best minds to collectively address shared goals and challenges, spur innovative thinking, encourage private sector engagement, and strengthen government policy in the agricultural, water, and energy sectors.”

Carlin was present at the ceremony, along with USAID Administrator Mark Green and Sahar Nasr, Egypt’s minister of investment and international cooperation, as well as Khaled Abdel Ghaffar, Egypt’s minister of higher education and scientific research.

The Center of Excellence in Energy will be led by Ahmed Ghoniem, the Ronald C. Crane Professor in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, and Daniel Frey, a professor of mechanical engineering and the faculty research director for MIT D-Lab. Over the next five years, the team will work to build the research, education, and entrepreneurial capacity of Ain Shams, Mansoura, and Aswan universities  to address the country’s most pressing energy-related problems.

“Egypt is one of those places that is likely to suffer significantly from climate change,” Ghoniem says. “If we learn how to solve these problems there, we can learn to scale the solutions and use them in many other places that need them as well.”

The USAID award will enable the MIT team to bring faculty and graduate students from Egypt to the Institute, to learn how to approach large, energy-related challenges from an MIT perspective.

“The MIT modus operandi is that we integrate research and education, and translate that into entrepreneurship,” Ghoniem says. “We very much want to make that model available for Egyptian universities to emulate.”

“We’ll bring faculty and graduate students from Egypt to spend time with us, and we’ll solve problems shoulder to shoulder with them. That ‘mens-et-manus’ mentality is transmitted more effectively by immersing themselves here,” Frey adds, referring to MIT’s motto of “mind and hand.”

Ghoniem and Frey will team Egyptian faculty and students with interdisciplinary researchers across MIT, to develop renewable energy solutions to problems such as Egypt’s practice of open-field burning. The country is primarily an agricultural economy, and as such it produces a significant amount of biomass, which is often disposed of by burning the waste in open fields — a practice that generates enormous amounts of pollution and greenhouse gases.

“They call it the “black cloud,” Ghoniem says. “One of our priorities is to work with them in converting this problem into a solution, using biomass as a clean energy source in the country.”

The new center will also work toward advancing and scaling up sustainable projects that are already underway in Egypt. For instance, the country is the fourth largest user of wind energy and is currently building the largest solar parks in the world, with the goal of generating 42 percent of its electricity using renewable energy by 2025. The MIT team plans to facilitate connections between university researchers and key industrial players in the region, to expand the country’s solar, wind, and other forms of clean energy usage.

“It’s a country where so many things are going on in the energy area that match MIT’s interest in promoting and developing renewable energy technologies as well as addressing global climate change problems,” Ghoniem says.

Throughout the five-year collaboration, there will also be a special emphasis on involving Egyptian women and people with disabilities in coming up with energy-related solutions.

“We’ll be working with organizations in the country that [support] these groups, to try to pull them into the activities, and hopefully they can participate equally in education, research, and entrepreneurship,” Ghoniem says.

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Ken Kamrin seeks fundamental behaviors in sand

A rather imposing hourglass is one of the first things people notice in Ken Kamrin’s office. The beautiful timepiece, a gift from Kamrin’s wife, has decorated the space since his first day as a faculty member in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Kamrin will occasionally use the hourglass for its intended purpose — “I have my usual joke: It tells us when our meeting is over,” Kamrin cracks. But more often than not, it’s the perfect prop to demonstrate the peculiarities of his favorite subject, granular material.

“If you look at sand in an hourglass, the top looks like a solid bed, whereas the middle is flowing like a liquid,” Kamrin says. “You also have this stream that’s essentially a gas before it hits the floor and goes back to being a solid. All of this makes grains extremely messy and hard to predict.”

Nevertheless, Kamrin, who recently was granted tenure, has dedicated his research to predicting the behavior of sand and other granular material, with models that are as accurate as possible without being overly time-consuming to run.

Existing models typically simulate every single grain within a flow — an approach that, however precise, can take weeks to achieve. Kamrin’s models instead combine discrete models with a “continuum” approach, which essentially generalizes certain parts of a granular flow, significantly speeding up simulations while maintaining their accuracy.

He hopes his models will have wide-ranging applications, including preventing blockages in grain silos, improving wheel designs over rocky terrain, and predicting the impact of potential avalanches and landslides.

At MIT, Kamrin is happiest when surrounded by creativity and noise.

“I come from a very loud family, and I like the fact that MIT is boisterous and loud,” Kamrin says. “When you walk down the Infinite, there’s always something going on. And if you find yourself getting curious about something new, you know there’s someone here who knows something about it. It’s a great energy.”

Setting the stage

Kamrin grew up in the town of Pleasant Hill, California, in the East Bay of the San Francisco Bay Area. His father is a retired pharmacist, and his mother continues to run a musical theater company, which Kamrin recalls as a vivid backdrop to his childhood.

“Growing up as a kid, it would not be unusual for my mom to come home and say, ‘Oh, there’s going to be a rehearsal tonight,’ and then within the next hour, 30 people would show up at my house, including orchestra members,” Kamrin says. “Or sometimes I’d get home and she’d say, ‘There will be a cast party here,’ and there would be 12 people I didn’t know in my swimming pool. This was my existence, and I just came to accept it as part of the fun.”

Kamrin was cast in many of his mother’s productions, and grew to love the stage. But acting was never his passion, and Kamrin found, rather early on, that he was drawn more to science and math.

“I kind of rebelled in that way,” he jokes. At the University of California at Berkeley, he majored in engineering physics, a subject that allowed him to explore a diverse mix of classes, including radiation detection, semiconductors, and quantum mechanics. As he dove into the sciences, he also found time for the stage; he remains involved in the UC Berkeley Men’s Octet, an a capella group founded in the 1940s that has twice won the International Championship of Collegiate A Cappella.

In 2003, Kamrin ventured cross-country to MIT to begin a PhD in applied mathematics. It was during this time that he really began to drill down into continuum modeling and to explore the behavior of granular materials, not as discrete particles, but as a continuous mass.

“Standard fluids and elastic solids obey classic continuum models,” Kamrin says. “But as you get into more esoteric materials like sand, there’s a lot of work that needs to be done in figuring out how to model those materials.”

Kamrin initially began his PhD work by trying to generalize a drainage model that his advisor, Martin Bazant, had developed to simulate a pebble bed reactor — a type of nuclear reactor consisting of tennis-ball-sized “pebbles,” each filled with thousands of microfuel particles.

“The whole apparatus is essentially a gumball machine, and you have to engineer these things in a way that you can predict the flow,” says Kamrin, who was trying to modify the model to predict the flow of grains in other geometries. “It seemed like such a fundamental problem.”

Midway through his PhD, Kamrin took a class that helped change his perspective on the problem. The class was on plasticity theory, the study of materials that can undergo permanent deformation in response to forces. While scientists have used continuum models to simulate fluids like water, they’ve had much more difficulty modeling granular materials with the same approach. A fundamental difference between fluids and grains is the plastic yield condition: When a force, such as wind, acts on both materials, fluid ultimately sloshes back to its original configuration with a flat surface, whereas grains remain permanently deformed, such as in the dunes of a desert.

Kamrin spent the second half of his PhD  working principles of plasticity and recent ideas in the granular materials community into a general continuum model for granular media.

Riding momentum

After a short stint as a postdoc at Harvard University, Kamrin accepted a junior faculty position in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering in 2011, where he has continued his work in granular materials, and found that he loves to teach.

“It is as much a performance as you want it to be,” says Kamrin, who relishes giving demonstrations as part of 2.002 (Mechanics and Materials). For instance, as a lesson on fracture dynamics, he goes about debunking a classic circus feat, in which a strong person rips a phone book in half.

“There’s a trick to doing that, and if you learn mechanics, you can learn why it works,” Kamrin says. “So I like to yank people out of the audience, teach them how to do it, and make a big show of it.”

To students and junior faculty who are just starting out in their careers, Kamrin has one bit of advice: All the low periods are temporary. While he characterizes his time at MIT as very positive, he remembers one particularly tough funding year.

“Someone had even written me in as a co-investigator on a grant without telling me, but didn’t get it,” Kamrin recalls. “So I lost a grant I didn’t even apply for. At that moment, I looked at myself in the mirror and thought, ‘I can only laugh at this.’”

Things have turned around significantly since then, and today Kamrin leads a group of graduate students and postdocs in running lab experiments and developing continuum models and methods for various materials but still focuses on granular material. He’s applied his models to grain flow in various configurations, from seeds funneling through an industrial hopper, to wheels driving through a bed of sand. He’s currently working on a model that will predict the behavior of wet grains, such as cement flowing down a chute or mud sliding down a hillside.

“The topic of granular media has many open questions, but we’re making progress in understanding the ways these material work.” Kamrin says. “Granular materials are the second most handled material by weight, after water. Transporting grains is a huge part of industry, not just in agriculture, but in pharmaceuticals, and food, and we think our techniques could be useful in modeling many of these processes.”

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Facebook is free, but should it count toward GDP anyway?

For several decades, gross domestic product (GDP), a sum of the value of purchased goods, has been a ubiquitous yardstick of economic activity. More recently, some observers have suggested that GDP falls short because it doesn’t include the value of free online goods such as social media, search engines, maps, videos, and more.

A new study by MIT researchers puts a dollar value on all those free digital goods people use, and builds the case that online activity can and should become part of GDP some day.

For instance, Facebook is worth about $40 to $50 per month for U.S. consumers, according to a series of surveys the researchers conducted. In Europe, digital maps on phones are valued at 59 euros (currently about $67) per month. And the free messaging tool WhatsApp, used most widely outside the U.S., is worth a whopping 536 euros ($611) per month, the survey indicates. 

“The magnitude of the numbers was really striking,” says Avinash Collis, a doctoral candidate in information technologies at the MIT Sloan School of Management, who helped develop the new study.

Or, as the scholars write in a new paper summarizing the results, “digital goods have created large gains in well-being that are not reflected in conventional measures of GDP and productivity.”

The paper, “Using massive online choice experiments to measure changes in well-being,” appears today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In addition to Collis, the authors are Erik Brynjolfsson, the Schussel Family Professor of Management at MIT Sloan, and Felix Eggers, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Gronigen in the Netherlands.

Ask the people what they want

To conduct the study, the researchers used three large-scale online surveys in which consumers were asked to put a price tag on the free online services they consume. In many cases, respondents were asked whether they would prefer to keep using a free online good, or to name a price that would compensate for losing access to that product. All told, the surveys drew about 65,000 responses.

“The best way to value these digital goods is to go to people directly and ask them,” Collis says.

The study produced a number of distinctive findings regarding online services and specific companies. For instance, consumers placed an average annual value of $1,173 on online video streaming services such as YouTube and Netflix. To be sure, these video platforms, among others, do charge fees to some consumers — although those are typically $10 to $20 per month.

Either way — free or with modest charges — the surveys reveal that online video use generates a significant amount of “consumer surplus,” that is, the value for consumers beyond the prices they pay. In these cases, online video providers “create a lot more value then they capture,” Collis says.

The study also revealed the huge value that consumers place on certain categories of online goods. For instance, people valued search engines at an average of $17,530 per year, and email at $8,414. Collis suggests those numbers may appear so high because many people use search engines and email both at work and in leisure time, and use both factors to assess the overall value.

Regarding specific companies and products, the surveys found that consumers who use YouTube or Instagram place a lower value on Facebook. Women place a higher value on Facebook than men do, while households with an income between $100,000 and $150,000 place less value on Facebook than both lower-income and higher-income households.

Mend it, don’t end it

The current study is the latest serious effort to reassess the common use of GDP. Critics have long suggested we rely too heavily on GDP as an indicator of overall well-being, since there is more to life than economic production.

In a separate but related critique, some observers — and many Silicon Valley technologists — have been contending in recent years that free online products were neglected by GDP. Those free goods can also be thought to add to our overall “well-being,” in theory.

Certainly there are good reasons to think a refinement of GDP along the study’s lines could be an improvement. Even as the use of computing technology has grown massively, the information sector has remained between 4 percent and 5 percent of U.S. GDP from the early 1980s until 2016.

For their part, the authors regard the current paper as just one part of a bigger research program concerning GDP. As part of their ongoing work, they are attempting to arrive at a large-scale number summarizing the value of products currently overlooked by standard GDP measures, and produce an alternate version of GDP. That new figure, Collis says, could usefully supplement our measuring tools for national economies.

“GDP is a great measure of production,” Collis says. “We should not replace it.” However he adds, “In parallel, we should also be measuring economic well-being [in ways that] account for new and free goods.”

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Women in mathematics aim for an equals sign

Ten years had passed since 2008's Women in Mathematics: A Celebration when a few graduate students in the Department of Mathematics approached a female faculty mentor to revitalize a Women in Mathematics group.

The group designed and relaunched the MIT Women in Mathematics website last fall. It became both a resource and a starting point of their efforts to organize and build a supportive community in mathematics at MIT and beyond. Graduate student Juncal Arbelaiz Mugica, a third-year doctoral student in mathematics, said she realized more was needed to promote and enable peer support.

“A doctoral program is a long and convoluted journey,” Arbelaiz says. “Graduate students can be greatly impacted by a sense of a belonging to a community, which can be more difficult for minority students to find. As a result, I wanted to make the women in mathematics aware that a network of peers is available to them, which the department has been very supportive of.”

Her idea: Form an active, student-led group for students already present and provide resources for women in mathematics who are interested in applying to MIT.

"It is crucial to recruit and attract more women at all levels in the department, but also that more of our women math majors consider going into graduate school in mathematics,” says Michel Goemans, department head and professor of mathematics. “Last year only 13 percent of our graduate applicants were women, and this is clearly not enough. The department is happy to support the activities of the MIT Women in Mathematics, and this group helps create a vibrant, supportive community in which more and more female students might pursue or continue a career in mathematics."

Starting with a base unit

In the summer of 2018, Arbelaiz recruited fellow PhD students Boya Song and Kristin Kurianski, and approached Professor Gigliola Staffilani, an advocate for women in mathematics, a role model, and the founder of the original Women in Mathematics group and website.

They realized the first step was to provide a central source of information. A website already existed, but it was dated and inaccessible to mobile users. They recruited the help of Becky Ecung, who has been the webmaster for the Department of Mathematics for more than five years, to revitalize the website for mobile accessibility with a clean, fresh look. Ecung focused on two major goals the students proposed: The website must be a welcoming resource for prospective female mathematicians at MIT, and it must provide a central and easy-to-use location to post and advertise community events. 

Their new website displays images from one such event, a dinner to kick-off the spring 2019 semester, and a calendar featuring upcoming opportunities. The simple pizza dinner hosted in the graduate student lounge on campus is an example of the group activities, which are the future focus of the group now that they have a solid foundation upon which to build.

Caesar Duarte, special projects administrator in the department, and Kristin Kurianski, another doctoral student in mathematics, designed the group's logo.

Adding to their numbers

Staffilani first founded the Women in Mathematics group and created the original website with the help of former MIT Assistant Professor Katrin Wehrheim. Together they also initiated the Weeks lectures, named after Dorothy Weeks, the first woman to receive a doctorate from the Department of Mathematics in 1930.

Staffilani and Wehrheim invited any visiting female professors to join them for lunch with female members of the department. However, the lectures were sporadic and attendance was low, Staffiliani says. The events have now been converted into monthly lunch seminars with female faculty, graduate students, postdocs and, recently, undergraduate students as well. Turn out has been strong with 10-15 undergraduate students joining regularly.

Arbelaiz says she hopes to continue cultivating a relationship between the graduate students and undergraduates, who have a group called USWIM: the Undergraduate Society for Women in Mathematics. Last fall, WIM hosted a dinner, at which they candidly discussed aspects of continuing in a path of higher education, such as how to apply to graduate school and find the right graduate mentor. Professors, Arbelaiz noted with a laugh, were strictly forbidden from attending.

With their expanding group, they are now turning their attention toward inclusivity of anyone who might identify with the group. They also hope to collaborate with other local colleges, such as Harvard University.

Oscillating progress

Although their efforts are rapidly building a close-knit family of women in mathematics, there remains a lot of work ahead to establish equality for women in mathematics.

"Currently about 35 percent of our math majors at MIT are women, but unfortunately the percentage among our graduate students is only 18, comparable to the national average for similar universities," Goemans says. The most recent data released earlier this year from the National Science Foundation showed 28.5 percent of the doctoral recipients in mathematics and statistics were awarded to women.

Staffilani recalls that when she invited female mathematicians to speak with MIT women, sometimes the offer was declined. Invited academics preferred to be seen as “mathematicians” rather than be singled out as “female mathematicians,” separate from men. It's a dilemma Staffilani says she understands; gaining extra notice as a woman — or any underrepresented group in a particular field — doesn’t feel like “equality,” she says. Others might feel that spending the extra time on affinity groups would be time better spent on research and their own careers.

Reminiscing about a workshop on gender parity at a conference she attended, Arbelaiz recalled that she was surprised when a female physicist asked the room, “Why do we want diversity?”

Hearing this, Staffilani responded without hesitation: “Because talent is everywhere and you want to cast your net wide.”

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