Aerosols from pollution, desert storms, and forest fires may intensify thunderstorms

Observations of Earth’s atmosphere show that thunderstorms are often stronger in the presence of high concentrations of aerosols — airborne particles too small to see with the naked eye.

For instance, lightning flashes are more frequent along shipping routes, where freighters emit particulates into the air, compared to the surrounding ocean. And the most intense thunderstorms in the tropics brew up over land, where aerosols are elevated by both natural sources and human activities.

While scientists have observed a link between aerosols and thunderstorms for decades, the reason for this association is not well-understood.

Now MIT scientists have discovered a new mechanism by which aerosols may intensify thunderstorms in tropical regions. Using idealized simulations of cloud dynamics, the researchers found that high concentrations of aerosols can enhance thunderstorm activity by increasing the humidity in the air surrounding clouds.

This new mechanism between aerosols and clouds, which the team has dubbed the “humidity-entrainment” mechanism, could be incorporated into weather and climate models to help predict how a region’s thunderstorm activity might vary with changing aerosol levels.

“It’s possible that, by cleaning up pollution, places might experience fewer storms,” says Tim Cronin, assistant professor of atmospheric science at MIT. “Overall, this provides a way that humans may have a footprint on the climate that we haven’t really appreciated much in the past.”

Cronin and his co-author Tristan Abbott, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, have published their results today in the journal Science.

Clouds in a box

An aerosol is any collection of fine particles that is suspended in air. Aerosols are generated by anthropogenic processes, such as the burning of biomass, and combustion in ships, factories, and car tailpipes, as well as from natural phenomena such as volcanic eruptions, sea spray, and dust storms. In the atmosphere, aerosols can act as seeds for cloud formation. The suspended particles serve as airborne surfaces on which surrounding water vapor can condense to form individual droplets that hang together as a cloud. The droplets within the cloud can collide and merge to form bigger droplets that eventually fall out as rain.

But when aerosols are highly concentrated, the many tiny particles form equally tiny cloud droplets that don’t easily merge. Exactly how these aerosol-laden clouds generate thunderstorms is an open question, although scientists have proposed several possibilities, which Cronin and Abbott decided to test in high-resolution simulations of clouds.

For their simulations, they used an idealized model, which simulates the dynamics of clouds in a volume representing Earth’s atmosphere over a 128-kilometer-wide square of tropical ocean. The box is divided into a grid, and scientists can observe how parameters like relative humidity change in individual grid cells as they tune certain conditions in the model.

In their case, the team ran simulations of clouds and represented the effects of increased aerosol concentrations by increasing the concentration of water droplets in clouds. They then suppressed the processes thought to drive two previously proposed mechanisms, to see if thunderstorms still increased when they turned up aerosol concentrations.

When these processes were shut off, the simulation still generated more intense thunderstorms with higher aerosol concentrations.

“That told us these two previously proposed ideas weren’t what were producing changes in convection in our simulations,” Abbott says.

In other words, some other mechanism must be at work.

Driving storms

The team dug through the literature on cloud dynamics and found previous work that pointed to a relationship between cloud temperature and the humidity of the surrounding air. These studies showed that as clouds rise they mix with the clear air around them, evaporating some of their moisture and as a result cooling the clouds themselves.

If the surrounding air is dry, it can soak up more of a cloud’s moisture and bring down its internal temperature, such that the cloud, laden with cold air, is slower to rise through the atmosphere. On the other hand, if the surrounding air is relatively humid, the cloud will be warmer as it evaporates and will rise more quickly, generating an updraft that could spin up into a thunderstorm.

Cronin and Abbott wondered whether this mechanism might be at play in aerosols’ effect on thunderstorms. If a cloud contains many aerosol particles that suppress rain, it might be able to evaporate more water to the its surroundings. In turn, this could increase the humidity of the surrounding air, providing a more favorable environment for the formation of thunderstorms. This chain of events, therefore, could explain aerosols’ link to thunderstorm activity.

They put their idea to the test using the same simulation of cloud dynamics, this time noting the temperature and relative humidity of each grid cell in and around clouds as they increased the aerosol concentration in the simulation. The concentrations they set ranged from low-aerosol conditions similar to remote regions over the ocean, to high-aerosol environments similar to relatively polluted air near urban areas. 

They found that low-lying clouds with high aerosol concentrations were less likely to rain out. Instead, these clouds evaporated water to their surroundings, creating a humid layer of air that made it easier for air to rise quickly through the atmosphere as strong, storm-brewing updrafts.

“After you’ve established this humid layer relatively low in the atmosphere, you have a bubble of warm and moist air that can act as a seed for a thunderstorm,” Abbott says. “That bubble will have an easier time ascending to altitudes of 10 to15 kilometers, which is the depth clouds need to grow to to act as thunderstorms.”

This “humidity-entrainment” mechanism, in which aerosol-laden clouds mix with and change the humidity of the surrounding air, seems to be at least one explanation for how aerosols drive thunderstorm formation, particularly in tropical regions where the air in general is relatively humid.

“We’ve provided a new mechanism that should give you a reason to predict stronger thunderstorms in parts of the world with lots of aerosols,” Abbott says.

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

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Professor and astrophysicist Sara Seager appointed officer to the Order of Canada

MIT’s Class of 1941 Professor of Planetary Sciences Sara Seager has been named an officer of the Order of Canada, one of the country’s highest civilian honors. Announced by the governor general of Canada last month, the nomination recognizes Seager “for her multidisciplinary research that has contributed to transforming the study of extrasolar planets into a full-fledged planetary science.”

Raised in Ontario, Canada, Seager holds dual U.S. and Canadian citizenship, as well as academic appointments in MIT’s departments of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences; Physics; and Aeronautics and Astronautics. She joins 114 new appointees to the Order of Canada, which include eight companions, 21 officers, one honorary member, and 84 members.

As a planetary scientist and astrophysicist, Seager is at the forefront of exoplanet research. When Seager began her graduate studies at Harvard University in the mid-1990s, extrasolar planetary research was an emerging field, largely based on theory. However, her cutting-edge work on planetary atmospheres, planetary interiors, and exoplanet transits led to numerous firsts for the little-known field and helped to launch it into existence. Her current research uses theoretical models to examine, in detail, exoplanet atmospheres, their internal structure and composition, potential habitable zones, and gaseous signatures indicating life. 

Her work on exoplanets, and motivation to find the first Earth-like world, has led her to take leading roles in numerous space science missions, including the MIT-led NASA mission Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which launched in April 2018, and the Starshade Rendezvous Mission, a space-based mission concept under technology development for direct imaging discovery and characterization of Earth analogs.

Seager’s work has earned her extensive acclaim, including a MacArthur Fellowship, the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Prize in the Physical Sciences, and election to the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences.

She joins more than 7,000 people, from across all sectors of Canadian society, who have received appointments to the Order of Canada, recognizing “outstanding achievement, dedication to the community and service to the nation.” The incoming class of honorees will be invited to accept the order’s iconic snowflake insignia at a ceremony to be held in the future.

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States of growth: When and where entrepreneurship has thrived

The year 1995 was a good time to be an entrepreneur. Especially a high-tech entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, with the internet boom starting, the economy growing, venture capitalists searching for new investments, and a whole horizon of novel business ideas to explore.

Indeed, a new study co-authored by an MIT professor shows that U.S. startups founded in 1995 enjoyed more growth than startups founded in any other year from 1988 to 2014. Other things being equal, the startups of 1995 were three times as likely to grow significantly as those from 2007, which had to battle through the 2008-2009 Great Recession.

As the study shows more broadly, ambitious startups remain a vital part of the American economy. New business registrations have experienced a long-term drop in the U.S., but the number of startups capable of high-impact growth has risen. Such firms particularly flourished in the mid-1990s and mid-2010s — though even when the ranks of high-growth startups have thinned, including in 2008 and 2009, they have still been founded at higher rates than they were in the 1980s.  

“Entrepreneurship is an economic engine,” says MIT’s Scott Stern, co-author of a new paper detailing the study’s results. “Job growth is disproportionately concentrated in a relatively small number of young firms that then themselves scale up quite quickly.”

But, Stern adds, the study shows how much startup journeys are affected by prevailing economic winds: “We’re able to provide the first real evidence that poor economic times, for example the Great Recession, diminish the quantity of high-quality entrepreneurship. There really was an increase in growth-oriented entrepreneurship in the 1990s, then a decline from the boom — though not as much as people thought. By 2014, we were at near record levels [of entrepreneurship], relative to GDP.”

The study also shows that startups have done particularly well in Silicon Valley, the Boston-Cambridge area, and Austin, among other locations, while lagging notably in Florida.

The paper, “The State of American Entrepreneurship: New Estimates of the Quantity and Quality of Entrepreneurship for 32 U.S. States, 1988–2014,” appears in the latest issue of the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy. The co-authors are Stern, who is the David Sarnoff Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and faculty director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship; and Jorge Guzman MBA ’11 PhD ’17, an assistant professor at the Columbia Business School.

What’s in a name?

To conduct the research, Guzman and Stern examined almost 28 million new business registrations in those 32 states. Their research is based upon the insight that startups have different growth profiles and are distinguished by certain key features at the time of founding, such as intellectual property ownership or even the name of the business.

That is, while entrepreneurship creates employment, not all entrepreneurs have the same goals. Your nearest locally owned businesses — perhaps a pizzeria, gift shop, or second-hand boutique — are all worthy but not necessarily designed to create expanding numbers of jobs. By contrast, a few startups are aiming to reach a bigger scale.

“The vast majority of entrepreneurs are not interested in growth,” Stern says. “They’re interested in building a local business — a plumbing company, a restaurant, a dry cleaners. And those companies, as we see this year, play a vital role in our economy. But new employment growth and economic growth is going to be associated with a small number of outliers.”

With that in mind, Guzman and Stern have found that startups using a person’s name (“Karl’s Plumbing”) on aggregate are 78 percent less likely to grow much, compared to other startups. (Ben and Jerry’s, initially intended to be a one-store business, is a rare counter-example.) Startups with shorter names — think of biotech firms such as Moderna — are three times more likely to grow significantly as those with names longer than three words.

In the past, entrepreneurial activity has often been measured by the sheer number of new business registrations, as tabulated by the U.S. Census Bureau, with little distinction among types of new businesses. But Guzman and Stern have led the way in changing that approach and pinpointing which firms have growth ambitions.

In the study, firms receiving a patent were about 47 times more likely to grow to 1,000 employees than those that did not; those receiving a patent while registering themselves in Delaware, which has business-friendly incorporation policies, were 131 times more likely to have 1,000 employees.

The study, Stern says, addresses “a really central question of economic policy: What is happening in terms of entrepreneurship? We’re trying to provide evidence to a debate between two camps.”

The methods used in the study are among those informing the work of MIT’s Regional Entrepreneurship Acceleration Program (REAP), which Stern also helps lead. REAP works with communities globally to help establish entrepreneurial ecosystems.

Kendall Square: More good shots on goal

The new paper also provides empirical backup for other ideas about entrepreneurship, such as the value of acting quickly to capitalize on technological trends. Many dot-com stocks reached their highest valuations around 1999-2000; but back in 1995, the boom created by the commercial internet was still taking off. Firms founded in the mid-1990s had a head start in locating venture capital, hiring software engineers, and establishing their brands.

“The firms that were founded in 1995 had fabulous results,” Stern says. “Relative to quality, you had your highest chance of success … early in the dot-com boom rather than at the very peak of the dot-com bubble [around 1999-2000]. During the bubble, when the capital dried up, high-quality firms were not established enough to realize their growth potential.”

The research also sheds light on the geography of startup success — and failure. In addition to Silicon Valley and the Boston area, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Seattle, and the Washington suburbs in Northern Virginia all have a significant level of growth-oriented startups. But many other place lag behind on this count.

“There are always those Silicon Valley companies [that grow], and here in Kendall Square, we have some great growth companies,” Stern says. “But it does seem like outside of a few regional pockets, there’s a challenge in scaling up.” Ultimately, he observes, “Having a higher number of high-quality shots on goal allows you to succeed relative to other [geographic] areas.”

In that vein, Guzman and Stern — along with Valentina Tartari, an associate professor at the Copenhagen Business School, and a former visiting scholar at MIT Sloan — are working on another study evaluating the connections between academia and high-growth new firms, a factor associated with the geographic distribution of startups as well.

“Universities have played an ever-more disproportional role in being the spur or at least co-located with these vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystems,” Stern says.

Support for the research was provided, in part, by the Jean Hammond (1986) and Michael Krasner (1974) Entrepreneurship Fund and the Edward B.Roberts (1957) Entrepreneurship Fund at MIT, and by the Kauffman Foundation.

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MIT in the media: 2020 in review

In 2020, with many aspects of our everyday lives turned upside-down, news and views from around the Institute continued to draw a great deal of media interest. Despite the challenges of this unusual and unprecedented year, the MIT community still found ways to grab headlines by breaking barriers, innovating, making discoveries, and taking a stand. Below are just some of the stories that captured the great work of MIT students, faculty, and staff in 2020.

Opinion: Has the coronavirus finally taught us how to listen to science?
After MIT and other area institutions acted swiftly to rearrange how we live and work in response to the coronavirus pandemic, President L. Rafael Reif wrote about how we might confront another big challenge: climate change. “If we can take the right lessons from the crisis, we will find ourselves better prepared to tackle the health of our fevered planet.”  

Full story via The Boston Globe

MIT fast-tracking face shields to country’s busiest hospitals treating coronavirus

Professor Martin Culpepper spoke with Cynthia McFadden of NBC News about his team’s work designing a new face shield that can be rapidly manufactured. “It’s the kind of ingenuity that MIT is known for,” says McFadden, noting that MIT “has long been on the front lines of solving America’s problems.”

Full story via NBC News

Meet MIT’s first Black female student body president

Danielle Geathers, president of the MIT Undergraduate Association, joined Kelly Clarkson to discuss the goals of her presidency. She highlighted the Talented Ten Mentorship program she founded, which aims to help increase matriculation of Black women by pairing Black girls and women in high school with Black women at MIT.

Full story via The Kelly Clarkson Show 

Opinion: The 2020 election meltdown that didn’t happen

Professor Charles Stewart III published numerous opinion pieces examining the administration of the 2020 presidential election. In The Wall Street Journal, Stewart wrote that “the U.S. should be thankful for the heroic — and successful — efforts of election administrators around the country.”

Full story via The Wall Street Journal 

Trump administration rescinds rules on foreign students studying online

In response to a lawsuit filed by MIT and Harvard University, the Department of Homeland Security rescinded a new policy that would have prevented thousands of foreign students from studying in the U.S. “This case made abundantly clear that real lives are at stake in these matters, with the potential for real harm,” said MIT’s president.

Full story via The Wall Street Journal 

Related: “I’m the President of MIT. America needs foreign students” via The New York Times

Karilyn Crockett appointed head of city’s new equity and inclusion office

Karilyn Crockett, a lecturer in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, was named chief of equity for the City of Boston. “Do we have the will and the courage to dream new dreams for populations long denied what we actually deserve?” Crockett asked. “I believe we do.”

Full story via The Boston Globe

Lessons from a study of the digital economy

Three years after answering an “intellectual call to arms” to examine the impact of technology on jobs, the MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future published its final set of recommendations. “In an extraordinarily comprehensive effort, they included labor market analysis, field studies and policy suggestions for changes in skills-training programs, the tax code, labor laws and minimum-wage rates,” wrote reporter Steve Lohr.

Full story via The New York Times

Astronomers find possible sign of life on Venus 

In one of the most talked about discoveries this year, scientists at MIT and elsewhere reported that they have found phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus. 

Full story via CBS This Morning 

Adapting to social media’s disruptions in “The Hype Machine”

Professor Sinan Aral explored the benefits and downfalls posed by social media. “I've been researching social media for 20 years. I've seen its evolution and also the techno utopianism and dystopianism,” said Aral. “I thought it was appropriate to have a book that asks, 'what can we do to really fix the social media morass we find ourselves in?'”

Full story via NPR

Compact nuclear fusion reactor is “very likely to work,” studies suggest

In a series of peer reviewed papers, MIT researchers provided evidence that plans to develop a next-generation compact nuclear fusion reactor, known as SPARC, should be feasible.

Full story via The New York Times 

Community ingenuity in the face of Covid-19

The coronavirus affected many aspects of Institute life, both directly for our community members, and indirectly, as a new challenge needing to be addressed worldwide. MIT students, staff, researchers, and other community members deftly answered the challenge.

MIT out-MITs itself; builds full scale campus replica on Minecraft

MIT community members recreated the MIT campus in Minecraft, providing an opportunity for students to enjoy MIT’s “intensely collaborate culture” from afar. “Being able to meet in a virtual space and have some kind of social interaction, even while being socially distant — it’s just really important to a lot of students,” explained first-year student Shayna Ahteck.

Full story via Boston Magazine

New York needed ventilators. So they developed one in a month.

A team in New York, inspired by the open-source ventilator design from the MIT E-Vent group, developed a lower cost ventilator now in production. The “hurry-up engineering feat” relied on a network of MIT professors, students, and alumni.

Full story via The New York Times

A few MIT students produced one of the best hackathons on Covid-19

A team of MIT students hosted the Africa Takes on Covid-19 virtual hackathon, which brought together participants from around the world to “create tech-driven solutions to address the most critical unmet needs caused by the Covid-19 outbreak across the continent.”

Full story via True Africa 

How MIT, Harvard are managing to keep COVID-19 numbers low

Ian Waitz, vice chancellor for undergraduate and graduate education, and Suzanne Blake, director of MIT Emergency Management, discussed MIT’s work to mitigate Covid-19 transmission on campus this fall.

Full story via Cambridge Chronicle

A pandemic upended their communities, so these teen inventors built apps to make life easier

When the MIT App Inventor team moved its hackathon online due to the coronavirus pandemic, it gave aspiring coders from all over the world an opportunity to enter the competition. “There was a sense of helplessness that was settling down. And a big theme in our workplace is empowerment,” said curriculum developer Selim Tezel. “We wanted to give them a context in which they could be creative and sort of get rid of that feeling of helplessness.”

Full story via CNN

In effort to fight Covid-19, MIT robot gets to work disinfecting The Greater Boston Food Bank

A robotic system developed by CSAIL researchers in collaboration with Ava Robotics uses UV-C light to kill viruses and bacteria on surfaces and aerosols.

Full story via TechCrunch

Media moments for math

The people of MIT were frequently recognized and profiled in the media, but one department in particular saw a number of stories that inspire: mathematics.

From NFL to MIT: John Urschel looking to increase diversity in mathematics
Graduate student John Urschel, a trustee of the National Museum of Mathematics (MoMath), spoke with ESPN about his efforts aimed at empowering and encouraging more Black students to pursue careers in STEM fields.

Full story via ESPN

A math problem stumped experts for 50 years. This grad student solved it in days.

Assistant Professor Lisa Piccirillo, who solved the Conway knot problem as a graduate student, reflected on what drew her to math.

Full story via The Boston Globe Magazine

Undergraduate math student pushes the frontier of graph theory
In a profile of graduate student Ashwin Sah, Quanta Magazine reported that he “produced a body of work that senior mathematicians say is nearly unprecedented for a college student.”

Full story via Quanta Magazine

More of the latest MIT In the Media summaries, with links to the original reporting, are available at news.mit.edu/in-the-media.

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3 Questions: Rona Oran and Benjamin Weiss on the ancient moon’s missing magnetism

Today, the moon lacks a global magnetic field, but this wasn’t always the case. Spacecraft measurements of the moon’s crust and lunar rocks retrieved by the Apollo missions contain remnant magnetization that formed 4 to 3.5 billion years ago in a magnetic field comparable in strength to that of the Earth. Scientists have argued that the source of this was a dynamo — a magnetic field generated by the moon’s churning, molten, metal core. However, research indicates that the moon’s suspected small core may not have been able to generate enough energy to sustain the ancient magnetic field that planetary scientists have inferred from in its rocks.

In a recent Science Advances paper, research scientist Rona Oran and professor of planetary sciences Ben Weiss of the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences examined the plausibility of an alternative hypothesis that has been around since the 1980s that could produce the remnant magnetization in the lunar crust: transient plasmas generated by meteoroid impacts. Here, they describe some of their findings.

Q: What is the “impact plasmas” hypothesis, and why is it still being considered as a potential mechanism to explain the moon’s ancient magnetism?

Oran: There are two main hypotheses that have been put forward to explain the moon's ancient magnetic field. One is that the moon once generated a dynamo. The primary challenge for this theory was that the moon is much smaller than the Earth, and it doesn't have enough energy to generate a surface magnetic field with the high intensity inferred from the analyses of the Apollo samples and crust.

Weiss: A longstanding alternative hypothesis is that the source of the field was not the moon’s interior itself but rather meteoroid impacts on the surface. In particular, it was proposed that impact plasmas — highly conductive fluids produced by vaporization of the lunar surface — expanded around and engulfed the moon. As they did so, the plasmas would compress and amplify the interplanetary magnetic field, known as the solar wind. The fields would then be induced into the moon’s crust, and the enhanced field signal would then be seen in the soil on the other side of the moon. This hypothesis is supported, in part, by observations of four young, large craters that have strong and large magnetic signals on the opposite site of the moon.

Q: Looking at the impact plasmas model, how did you examine its plausibility, and why were you able to rule it out as a primary suspect?

Weiss: We tested this idea by conducting the first simulations of impact plasmas that self-consistently consider the physics governing the generation and decay of the magnetic field.

Oran: One of the reasons this hypothesis was not yet tested in this way was that the tools that we used belong to the discipline of space sciences; nobody actually applied them to this problem before. Then, Ben, who researches paleomagnetism, and I joined forces to work on this together and showed that the impact plasmas hypothesis cannot work.

The evolution of magnetized plasmas is a complex process where the flow of plasma and the electromagnetic fields change in response to each other. It’s only by simultaneously simulating the plasmas and the magnetic field that you can get a realistic view of the process.

We found that whatever you do, however you play with it in terms of impact location, direction, and the direction of the initial field, you cannot create enough magnetic energy from these impact plasmas. That’s because we can think of the lunar body like this gigantic spherical resistor that basically kills off all the currents that these magnetic fields are trying to induce into it. Then, instead of having strong magnetic fields in the crust caused by the impact, we generate those fields, but they dissipate within minutes, so you end up heating the rock. So, we saw this completely opposite effect of what we originally set out to find.

Q: What does your finding tell us about the evolution of the moon, its magnetism and similar planetary bodies? And what questions remain?

Weiss: If the impact fields hypothesis were correct, it would mean that the remnant magnetization we find on the surface of the moon would essentially tell us nothing about the geophysical and thermal evolution of its interior. This would in turn have had profound implications for tracing out the magnetic history of the moon, and even for understanding the record of remnant magnetization found on other airless bodies like Mercury, which has cratering, and asteroids, which meteorites suggest could have crustal magnetization. Now that we have shown that the impact fields hypothesis is not likely to explain most of the lunar magnetism, this supports the core dynamo hypothesis for magnetism on the moon and other bodies.

Oran: Given that we now favor a lunar dynamo, the strong fields we see on the moon still demand an explanation, because a dynamo like the one we have on Earth, in which the core churns due to its own cooling, may not be sufficient. In recent years, some alternative dynamo theories were developed that might generate stronger fields, for example, stirring of the core by the wobbling of the overlying solid mantle.

Our most immediate followup study is to repeat the same type of simulations but, instead of a non-magnetically active body, we would allow the moon to generate its own core dynamo and then examine how impact plasmas would interact with such a field. Another issue to look at is if you can create an imprint at the impact site itself. One of those scenarios might give us a better match for the magnetizations that we see on the moon’s surface.

Also involved in the study were former MIT visiting professor Yuri Shprits of GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, former EAPS postdoc Katarina Miljković of Curtin University, and Gábor Tóth of the University of Michigan.

This research was funded, in part, by the NASA Solar System Workings Program, the NASA Solar System Exploration Virtual Institute, and the Skoltech Faculty Development Program for support.

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MIT community in 2020: A year in review

We’ve reached a reflective time in an especially reflective year for the MIT community. The challenges of 2020 have been unique, shaped in countless ways by the Covid-19 pandemic, renewed calls for social justice, an unprecedented election cycle, and more. Here are some of the top stories in the MIT community this year.

Adapting to Covid-19

Like everyone else, the Institute was forced to reckon with the Covid-19 pandemic — though it accomplished this with a distinctive MIT flair that included high-impact Covid-19 research; faculty creating new modes of teaching; heroic efforts from MIT Medical, including the development of unique testing facilities; the virtualization of everything from Campus Preview Weekend to Commencement to the Great Glass Pumpkin Patch; MIT-affiliated startups working to solve challenges brought on by the pandemic; and creative community-building efforts from students and others, including MIT Minecraft and a revamped first-year orientation.

The Institute recommits itself to supporting racial justice

Shortly after MIT hired a new Institute Community and Equity Officer, John Dozier, the community mourned together in the aftermath of high-profile killings of Black Americans at the hands of law enforcement. President Reif followed up with renewed commitments to address systemic racism at the Institute, and activist and scholar Angela Davis spoke with community members about the work ahead.

Nergis Mavalvala appointed dean of School of Science

Astrophysicist and Professor Nergis Mavalvala is renowned for her pioneering work in gravitational-wave detection, which she conducted as a leading member of LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. In September, Mavalvala was appointed to serve as dean of the MIT School of Science, becoming the first woman in this role.

MIT and Harvard University take legal action against visa policy affecting foreign students

MIT and Harvard University filed a lawsuit challenging a policy that would have had the effect of banning any international student with an F-1 student visa if their classes were fully online as a result of Covid-19. The policy, which was issued by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Department of Homeland Security, was rescinded shortly after the lawsuit was filed.

MIT ends contract negotiations with Elsevier

Standing by its commitment to provide equitable and open access to scholarship, MIT ended negotiations with Elsevier for a new journals contract. Elsevier was not able to present a proposal that aligned with the principles of the MIT Framework for Publisher Contracts, which is grounded in the conviction that openly sharing research and educational materials is key to the Institute’s mission of advancing knowledge and bringing that knowledge to bear on the world’s greatest challenges.

Andrea Ghez ’87 wins Nobel Prize in Physics

Astronomer and Department of Physics alumna Andrea Ghez ’87 shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics “for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the center of our galaxy.” Ghez is known for her pioneering work using high spatial-resolution imaging techniques to study star-forming regions and the supermassive black hole known as Sagittarius A* at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. She is the fourth woman to win a Nobel Prize in the physics category and the second MIT alumna to win a Nobel.

The Media Lab charts a course for the future

Today, the Media Lab announced the appointment of its new director, Dava Newman. The move serves as an important step in the lab’s plans to rebuild a culture of trust and support while retaining its culture of creativity. Earlier in January, a third-party review of MIT’s engagements with Jeffrey Epstein shed light on the Institute’s actions pertaining to Epstein donations that MIT received between 2002 and 2017, as well as visits that Epstein made to campus. MIT subsequently made donations totaling $850,000 to nonprofits supporting survivors of sexual abuse, while the Media Lab took initial steps toward establishing a supportive culture through self-examination and group discourse.

MIT adds important voices to the 2020 election discourse

Charles Stewart, Ariel White, Adam Berinsky, and others from around the Institute provided important viewpoints on this year’s historic elections — from the election process to voting rights to assessing voter intent — while students and others around the community led civic engagement efforts, including nonpartisan get-out-the-vote campaigns.

Students win an impressive number of distinguished fellowships

Despite a number of extraordinary pressures this year, MIT students continued to shine. Undergraduates were awarded two Rhodes Scholarships, two Marshall Scholarships, one Mitchell Scholarship, and four Schwarzman Scholarships.

Remembering those we’ve lost

Among community members who died this year were Angelika Amon, Arnold Demain, Michael Hawley, Tunney Lee, Mario Molina, Arthur Samberg, Judith Jarvis Thomson, Mary Frances Wagley, and Daniel Wang. A longer list of 2020 obituaries is available on MIT News.

In case you missed it…

Additional top community stories of 2020 include the MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future final report; a warning about deepfakes using art and artificial intelligence; the selection of four MIT-connected astronauts as the next possible moon walkers; a new approach to sustainable buildings in Boston; and MIT students (again!) dominating the Putnam Math Competition.

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Top MIT research stories of 2020

Although 2020 has been a year most of us would prefer to forget, it still featured a number of research breakthroughs worth celebrating. Despite the new challenges brought on by Covid-19 — and sometimes because of them — MIT’s community achieved important milestones on the frontiers of science and engineering.

The following 10 research-related stories published in the previous 12 months received top views on MIT News. (We’ve also rounded up the year’s top MIT community-related stories.)

10. How quarantines impact Covid-19’s spread. A team of MIT engineers developed a model that uses data from the Covid-19 pandemic in conjunction with a neural network to determine the efficacy of quarantine measures and better predict the spread of the virus. The researchers say their model is the first to have integrated machine learning with epidemiology.

9. A flat fisheye lens. Engineers at MIT and elsewhere designed the first flat lens that can produce crisp, 180-degree panoramic images similar to those produced by the curved glass of traditional fisheye lenses. The design consists of a single flat, millimeter-thin piece of glass covered on one side with tiny structures that precisely scatter incoming light to produce panoramic images.

8. Blocking coronaviruses’ ability to enter human cells. MIT chemists designed a drug candidate that can bind to the viral protein coronaviruses use to enter human cells, potentially disarming it. The potential drug is a short protein fragment, or peptide, that mimics a protein found on the surface of human cells.

7. Why motivation to learn declines with age. MIT neuroscientists found that aging negatively affects a brain circuit critical for maintaining motivation to learn new things and engage in everyday activities. They also showed they could boost older mice’s motivation to engage in certain learning activities by reactivating this circuit.

6. A black hole’s corona plays peekaboo. In a first, astronomers at MIT and elsewhere watched a supermassive black hole’s corona — the ring of high-energy particles that encircles a black hole’s horizon — disappear and then reappear. Although the cause of the transformation is unclear, the researchers guess it may have been caused by a star caught in the black hole’s gravitational pull.

5. Simple, solar-powered water desalination. Researchers at MIT and in China developed a completely passive, solar-powered water desalination system that achieves a new level of efficiency in turning seawater into fresh, potable water using the energy of sunlight. The system could provide more than 1.5 gallons of fresh drinking water per hour for every square meter of solar collecting area.

4. Model identifies a powerful new antibiotic. An MIT-developed deep learning model identified a new drug compound capable of killing many species of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. In lab tests, the compound killed many of the world’s most problematic disease-causing bacteria, including some strains that are resistant to all known antibiotics.

3. Deploying an open-source, low-cost ventilator. A team including MIT engineers, physicians, and computer scientists designed an inexpensive, open-source ventilator to address a global shortage of the life-saving machines brought by the Covid-19 pandemic. The team’s ventilator can be produced using common materials to enable rapid deployment. The team also published details on their website to facilitate parallel efforts by other experts.

2. A signature of life on Venus. Astronomers from MIT and elsewhere found evidence of phosphine, a gas associated with living organisms, in the habitable region of Venus’ atmosphere. If their observation is indeed associated with life, it must be some sort of “aerial” life-form in Venus’ clouds, the team concluded.

1. Covid-19 detection through cough recordings. MIT researchers trained an artificial intelligence model to distinguish asymptomatic people infected with Covid-19 from healthy individuals through forced-cough recordings. In experiments, the model accurately identified 98.5 percent of participants who were confirmed to have Covid-19, based on the recordings they submitted.

In case you missed it…

Additional top research stories of 2020 include a study of economic recovery after the 1918 flu pandemic; a look at the “blue shift” and vote-counting in presidential elections; a progress report on the new MIT-designed fusion experiment; a prototype for a reusable silicone rubber face mask; and an answer to why shaving dulls even the sharpest of razors.

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Dava Newman named director of MIT Media Lab

Dava Newman SM ’89, SM ’89, PhD ’92, an MIT professor of aeronautics and astronautics whose groundbreaking work has advanced human performance in space with the goal of interplanetary reach, has been named the new director of the MIT Media Lab, effective July 1, 2021.

“Leading the legendary Media Lab is a dream for me, and I can’t wait to help write the next chapter of this uniquely creative, impactful, compassionate community,” Newman says. Currently she is the Apollo Program Professor of Astronautics in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and a faculty member in the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology.

Newman brings a boldly interdisciplinary perspective to a lab famous for its free-ranging approach to technological innovation. Her work has integrated engineering, design, and biomedical research to better understand and facilitate human adaptation to low-gravity environments. Her career interests also encompass educational innovation and access, climate change, the performing arts, and science and technology policy.

Newman’s unusually broad range of interests combined with disciplinary expertise and talent for invention fit with the Media Lab’s approach of combining diverse perspectives to build more productive, equitable, and satisfying societies.

“I really see the MIT Media Lab as the best place in the world to bring together science, engineering, art, and design, to creatively deal with the huge challenges humanity is facing,” Newman says. “The magic of the Media Lab — which I hope to help build on — is to provide a trusted, open-minded, stimulating space where each person can contribute extraordinary expertise while being stretched beyond their comfort zone to collectively imagine a better, bolder future.”

The selection was announced today in a letter to the School of Architecture and Planning community from Dean Hashim Sarkis.

“In a field of outstanding candidates, Professor Newman stood out for her pioneering research, wide range of multidisciplinary engagements, and exemplary leadership,” Sarkis wrote. “She is a designer, a thinker, a maker, an engineer, an educator, a mentor, a convener, a communicator, a futurist, a humanist and, importantly, an optimist.”

The Media Lab conducted an extensive worldwide search for a new director, ultimately identifying 60 candidates, 13 of whom interviewed with the search committee.

“The irony was not lost on us that the global search culminated in the selection of a member of the MIT community,” says Pattie Maes, professor of Media Arts and Sciences, and chair of the search committee.

“But Dava emerged as an exceptional and exciting candidate whose interest in how science, design, and technology can intersect in truly novel ways aligns well with the core mission of the Lab, as does her infectious optimism, playful, can-do attitude, and fearless approach to big and challenging problems.

“I am especially excited about her personal passion for advancing climate research, education and the arts, which are all areas that the Media Lab hopes to strengthen in the coming years,” add Maes, who also chairs the five-member executive committee that has led the Media Lab since the resignation 15 months ago of former director Joi Ito.

Newman has served as principal investigator on four space missions, developing new experiments and techniques for measuring the dynamics of astronaut activity on the Space Shuttle, the Mir space station, and the International Space Station. She has developed four advanced suit concepts for intravehicular and extravehicular activity in space and has broken new ground in studying the control of astronaut motion.

Among her innovations, Newman is well-known for developing the BioSuit, a 2007 TIME Best Invention, which is a supple, “second-skin” space suit that would allow astronauts greater flexibility while providing the pressure needed to function well in a low-gravity environment. First designed — and still intended — for future Moon and Mars exploration, Newman’s BioSuit research has generated another potential application, as an assistive device for people with long-term medical challenges.

Beyond its technical applications, the aesthetically striking BioSuit design has also been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, the American Museum of Natural History, London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In addition to her distinctive intellectual interests, Newman brings a significant leadership portfolio to the director’s position. Nominated by President Obama, she served as deputy administrator of NASA from 2015 to 2017, the first female engineer in this high-ranking role, and helped to develop the Human Journey to Mars plan. Newman also directed MIT’s Technology and Policy Program from 2003 to 2015 and has served as director of the MIT Portugal program from 2011 to 2015, and from 2017 until the present. A longtime advocate for STEM education and for women in science and engineering, Newman also co-chairs a National Academies committee on biological and physical sciences, and serves on a number of for-profit and nonprofit boards.

Newman received her bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Notre Dame in 1986, a master’s in aerospace engineering from MIT in 1989, a master’s in technology and policy from MIT in 1989, and a PhD in aerospace biomedical engineering from MIT in 1992; she was also elected to the MIT Corporation as the alumni member that year. After a year on the faculty at the University of Houston, she joined the MIT faculty in 1993, and has been a member of the faculty ever since.

Among honors from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), the Explorer’s Club, and numerous other organizations, Newman has been awarded the NASA Distinguished Service Medal and is an AIAA Fellow. In 2000, she was named a Margaret MacVicar Faculty fellow, a 10-year MIT chair granted for excellence in undergraduate teaching and innovation in education. Newman was also head of house from 2005 to 2015 at Baker House, an undergraduate residence hall.

Of Newman’s time at NASA, she says it “was an incredible honor to serve and lead, with a portfolio across exploration, science, technology, and innovation. It was also an extraordinary opportunity to work closely with the White House, Congress, various governmental agencies, and international partners, all of which provided invaluable lessons in how to balance the nurturing of individual talents and personalities with the development of collective vision and mission to achieve great things on a national and global scale.” Newman also stressed the importance of diversity among innovators: “It’s absolutely a highest priority for academia, government, industry, and the arts to make a dramatic sea change. I think of diversity, inclusion, innovation, and expression working together to reach our goals of dynamic equity and radical reinvention.”

Since its founding in 1985, the Media Lab has promoted an interdisciplinary culture to create technologies and experiences that enable people to understand and transform their lives, communities, and environments. It blends a broad research agenda and a graduate degree program in media arts and sciences. The lab has 22 research groups ranging across robotics, smart prostheses, cognitive enhancement, innovative learning, music, and more. Lab researchers have developed Scratch, a programming language used by around 50 million kids worldwide, as well as influential technology that exposed racial biases in facial recognition systems, and have pioneered research fields such as wearable computing, tangible interfaces, and affective computing. Currently the Media Lab community includes some 400 faculty, researchers, students, and staff.

Globally, the Media Lab’s reach has been extended through more than 100 companies founded by Media Lab faculty, alumni, and research staff. There are also more than 100 Media Lab graduates who have gone on to faculty positions at top institutions worldwide.

“I plan to start by doing a lot of listening and learning,” Newman says. “I like to meet people where they are, and to encourage them to put all their great ideas on the table. I think that’s the best way to go forward, working with the whole community — faculty, students and staff — to tap into everyone’s creativity. I can’t wait to get started. There is so much exciting, important work to do ... together.”

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Task Force 2021 and Beyond shares its initial compilation of ideas

MIT’s Task Force 2021 and Beyond has released an initial menu of more than 50 ideas to reimagine and reposition the Institute for the post-Covid world.

Now, members of the MIT community are urged to review the proposals and weigh in — helping the task force and Institute leadership to focus, in the coming months, on beginning work to implement viable ideas that have broad support and impact.

The ideas are wide-ranging, touching upon reshaping the physical campus to harness the power of in-person interactions; helping students, faculty, and staff find rewarding paths at MIT; building equity and camaraderie as the full community prepares to reunite on campus; and expanding the Institute’s beneficial reach in the world.

Today’s public sharing of the proposals marks the end of the task force’s first phase. The group was charged by President L. Rafael Reif in May, and began its work in June under co-chairs Rick Danheiser and Sanjay Sarma.

Danheiser, chair of the faculty and Arthur C. Cope Professor of Chemistry, and Sarma, vice president for open learning and Fred Fort Flowers and Daniel Fort Flowers Professor of Mechanical Engineering, announced the release of the 50-some ideas in an email today to the MIT community. They invited further community feedback to help in continuing to refine and winnow the proposals.

Danheiser and Sarma wrote that the ideas emerged from a six-month, community-wide process that included over 100 meetings, consideration of more than 60 ideas submitted via a community idea bank, a community forum, presentations and discussions with various Institute committees and groups, and eight task force plenary sessions.

A broad range of proposals

The more than 50 ideas were submitted last month by the four workstreams and 11 working groups that make up the task force. Various submissions — any of which may or may not move forward into actual implementation — propose to:

• implement more flexible schedules and work arrangements for all employees, so on-campus time becomes less essential to working at MIT;
• improve staff onboarding, training, and development, making MIT a workplace known for offering strong career paths for all employees;
• reimagine graduate student advising, and take steps to help all students find their path at MIT and access all of its resources and opportunities;
• redesign classroom spaces to foster interactive learning during in-person instruction;
• integrate concern with social responsibility, racial justice, and equity more fully into the curriculum and other aspects of life at MIT;
• develop a plan to make MIT a leader in postgraduate education, including coordination of resources and efforts in this area and new experimentation with lifelong learning; and
• take steps to reduce the internal financial inequities inherent in research overhead underrecovery.

The above is only a sampling of the full range of ideas now under consideration; the full list is available on the task force’s website.

Setting the stage for next steps

Beginning now and continuing through January, the task force will review and consider community feedback on the dozens of ideas released today.

This input will inform an in-depth review, in January and February, of the full range of proposals by President Reif, other Institute leaders, and key stakeholders, with an eye to focusing effort on those ideas that are likeliest to put MIT in a position of strength heading into a new post-Covid world.

This review and winnowing process will set the stage for a second phase of the task force’s work, which will involve developing implementation structures and processes for the subset of ideas that are prioritized by the Institute’s leadership. The task force expects to enter that next phase in February.

From our “new normal,” a “thriving new future”

Task Force 2021 and Beyond was charged by President Reif in May to “explore how MIT might invent a thriving new future,” starting in the new year. It arose from the realization that Covid-19 will force profound changes in how we all live, work, and learn — and that there may be no full return to the pre-Covid world.

Indeed, the global spread of Covid-19 during 2020 has quickly created a “new normal”: The pandemic has led to profound economic dislocations; rapidly accelerated the growth of telemedicine; forced a reconsideration of sustainability; and prompted sharp shifts in work and education, with billions worldwide now working and learning from home.

At MIT, Covid-19 holds the potential for lasting impacts on the endowment, government and industry support, and private philanthropy. The pandemic could have ongoing repercussions on the financial well-being of MIT’s students and their families, on the job market for MIT graduates, and on research directions and funding. Finally, the current state of affairs could have long-term effects on how MIT employees approach their work, and could launch higher education into a next phase of digital transformation, with profound impacts on both education and student life on residential campuses like MIT’s.

In his May 4 letter announcing the formation of Task Force 2021 and Beyond, President Reif likened the deep uncertainty of 2020 to that of World War II — a period of global disruption when the Institute underwent a spectacular transformation.

“As MIT helped the United States respond to the immediate threats of war, it invented a new future for itself,” he wrote. “By framing a productive new relationship between the federal government and research universities, MIT helped the nation come to see the advance of fundamental science as a core US strength ­— and established a lead role for itself in that work. World War II also turned MIT from a technical college with a handful of graduate students to a great research university. … In other words, the painful demands of that terrible war ultimately delivered much of what we now love about MIT.”

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A new approach to studying religion and politics

Associate Professor Richard Nielsen is an MIT political scientist with an innovative research program: He studies clerics in the Islamic world, combining textual analysis, ethnographic insights, on-the-ground research in the Middle East, and a big-data approach to charting online tracts.

This method has generated novel conclusions about religious doctrine and authority — although Nielsen, who has graduate degrees in both government and statistics and does his primary research in Arabic, downplays his versatility.

“I basically tell people that I’m not the best in the world at any of the things I do,” Nielsen says. “It’s just that there’s a real dearth of people who are trying to do all of them.”

Nielsen’s first book, “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad,” published in 2017, drew praise for both its insights and methods. After scrutinizing the online writings of about 200 radical clerics, Nielsen concluded that a substantial portion of these clerics had come from academic backgrounds, but found their career paths blocked. Disenchanted, many became jihadists, preaching war against their perceived enemies.

Nielsen’s follow-up book project, in progress now, looks at authority in the Islamic world, with an increasing focus on women who have become online preachers.

“Most people don’t think of Islam as having female preachers,” Nielsen says. However, he notes, “They’re helping this movement expand. These people help reach new audiences on the Internet. So the question is … how do women gain authority in these conservative religious spaces?”

As with his first book, this project combines a close study of society with large-scale analysis of textual trends. Nielsen has refined many of those analytical techniques over time, and has published numerous papers about data and research methods as well. 

“The ethnographic type of approach is not often combined with the statistical approach,” Nielsen observes. “My personal view is that’s where a lot of scientific discovery happens, from people who are willing to try multiple things.”

For his research and teaching, Nielsen was granted tenure at MIT in 2020.

No place like home

Long before he became a professor, Nielsen spent some quality time at MIT. Nielsen’s father received a PhD in chemistry from MIT and lived in campus graduate housing along with his young family.

“It’s really a homecoming for me to be here, because my earliest memories are of living in Eastgate and Westgate [apartment buildings] as a toddler,” Nielsen says. Another memory: “The MIT boathouse master taking my mom and me out in one of the motorboats, which I thought was an amazing thing. They let me hold the steering wheel, and that’s the first thing I think I remember.”

After MIT, the Nielsen family moved around a bit. They lived in upstate New York and eventually San Jose, California, where Nielsen attended high school and became an avid surfer, finding some overlooked breaks on the Northern California coast.

Nielsen attended college at Brigham Young University, and after watching the terrorist attacks of September 2001 unfold on television became interested in studying the politics of the Islamic world. That alone might not have led him into academia. But one summer, when Nielsen was working part-time as a campus security guard, a professor of his stopped by a campus event, saw Nielsen monitoring the door, and asked him, “Would you like another job?”

That professor — Daniel Nielson, an expert in international politics — had a National Science Foundation grant to study foreign aid; he encouraged Nielsen to jump into serious research. By the time Nielsen graduated from college, he had presented work at conferences and helped co-author a paper that would be published in the American Journal of Political Science.

“That was a huge break for me, and really when I cut my teeth on research,” Nielsen says. “He [Nielson] gave me and a couple other people really meaningful opportunities.”

That also helped Nielsen get accepted into Harvard University for graduate school. Nielsen received a master’s degree in statistics in 2010 and his PhD in government in 2013. He made two trips to Egypt during his dissertation research, starting by grasping the dynamics of a prominent teaching mosque.

“On the ground, watching students interact with their teachers is where I had the core insight of my first book, that these people, who I had thought were so different from me, were really just students and professors,” Nielsen says. “The story I was hearing about the folks who got more extreme in their beliefs was that they weren’t making the connections they needed to, so they got frustrated, [leading to] more extreme religious and political beliefs. I took that insight which I’d had qualitatively, back to this very large corpus of [textual] data, and could confirm that pattern was indeed happening.”

Nielsen joined the MIT faculty in 2013; his dissertation research became the basis of “Deadly Clerics.”

Riding the waves

At the Institute, Nielsen teaches a range of graduate and undergraduate classes, and describes his students as “the sharpest” people imaginable.

“I teach a fairly large undergraduate class on introduction to international relations,” Nielsen says, “and every time I get up at the beginning, I say, ‘All of you are smarter than me, I’ve just been doing this for longer.’ And every time, it’s true.”

While teaching, Nielsen is continuing with the second book project, which was also helped by a prestigious Carnegie Foundation fellowship in 2017. Nielsen’s new work took shape in part because he noticed that some online female preachers had larger audiences than their male counterparts; those female preachers, Nielsen says, generate “a lot of positive reactions and fairly minimal negative reactions.”

Nielsen adds that there clearly is “a broader segment of the Islamic world that is interested in women’s authority. And I think that is because people do things on the internet that they would feel awkward about if meeting in public. … Women are asserting their authority to speak to women’s experiences and more generally to a broad Islamic experience that commenters are not aware of. I’m not saying this a bastion of classic liberal feminism. It isn’t. But I do think there are the seeds of new perspectives happening in the preaching of these women.”

If that were not enough, Nielsen is also working on an additional project, about female white nationalists in the U.S., analyzing some 15,000 videos to better understand how and why women join the movement.

“I love working on multiple projects,” Nielsen says. “I think it’s a creative stew for myself. And I’m really glad MIT sees the promise in the whole stew.”

When Nielsen is not teaching, doing research, or at home with his family, he is likely doing one other thing: surfing. Having learned to surf in California, Nielsen still seeks out good waves in Massachusetts. To this day, Nielsen says, surfing clears his mind of everyday worries, including the Covid-19 pandemic.

“During the shutdown it was almost the only reason I was leaving the house,” Nielsen says, adding: “It’s been my sanity outlet all the way through grad school, and the tenure track. … It’s one time when my mind stops thinking about work.”

And when he’s back on land, Nielsen recognizes how well his distinctive brand of political science fits the interdisciplinary ethos of the Institute he again calls home.

“MIT is a special place to me and has given me opportunities I couldn’t have imagined almost anywhere else,” Nielsen says.

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Making smart thermostats more efficient

Buildings account for about 40 percent of U.S. energy consumption, and are responsible for one-third of global carbon dioxide emissions. Making buildings more energy-efficient is not only a cost-saving measure, but a crucial climate change mitigation strategy. Hence the rise of “smart” buildings, which are increasingly becoming the norm around the world.

Smart buildings automate systems like heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC); lighting; electricity; and security. Automation requires sensory data, such as indoor and outdoor temperature and humidity, carbon dioxide concentration, and occupancy status. Smart buildings leverage data in a combination of technologies that can make them more energy-efficient.

Since HVAC systems account for nearly half of a building’s energy use, smart buildings use smart thermostats, which automate HVAC controls and can learn the temperature preferences of a building’s occupants.

In a paper published in the journal Applied Energy, researchers from the MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), in collaboration with Skoltech scientists, have designed a new smart thermostat which uses data-efficient algorithms that can learn optimal temperature thresholds within a week.

“Despite recent advances in internet-of-things technology and data analytics, implementation of smart buildings is impeded by the time-consuming process of data acquisition in buildings,” says co-author Munther Dahleh, professor of electrical engineering and computer science and director of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS). Smart thermostat algorithms use building data to learn how to operate optimally, but the data can take months to collect.

To speed up the learning process, the researchers used a method called manifold learning, where complex and “high-dimensional” functions are represented by simpler and lower-dimensional functions called “manifolds.” By leveraging manifold learning and knowledge of building thermodynamics, the researchers replaced a generic control method, which can have many parameters, with a set of “threshold” policies that each have fewer, more interpretable parameters. Algorithms developed to learn optimal manifolds require fewer data, so they are more data-efficient.

The algorithms developed for the thermostat employ a methodology called reinforcement learning (RL), a data-driven sequential decision-making and control approach that has gained much attention in recent years for mastering games like backgammon and Go. 

“We have efficient simulation engines for computer games that can generate abundant data for the RL algorithms to learn a good playing strategy,” says Ashkan Haji Hosseinloo, a postdoc at LIDS and the lead author of the paper. “However, we do not have the luxury of big data for microclimate control in buildings.”

With a background in mechanical engineering and training in methods like RL, Hosseinloo can apply insights from statistics and state-of-the-art computing to real-world physical systems. “My main motivation is to slow down, and even prevent, an energy and environmental crisis by improving the efficiency of these systems,” he says.

The smart thermostat’s new RL algorithms are “event-triggered,” meaning they make decisions only when certain events occur, rather than on a predetermined schedule. These “events” are defined by certain conditions reaching a threshold — such as the temperature in a room dropping out of optimal range. “This enables less-frequent learning updates and makes our algorithms computationally less expensive,” Hosseinloo says. 

Computational power is a potential constraint for learning algorithms, and computational resources depend on whether algorithms run in the cloud or on a device itself — such as a smart thermostat. “We need learning algorithms that are both computationally efficient and data-efficient,” says Hosseinloo.

Energy-efficient buildings offer additional advantages beyond reducing emissions and cutting costs. A building’s “microclimate” and air quality can directly affect the productivity and decision-making performance of building occupants. Considering the many large-scale economic, environmental, and societal impacts, microclimate control has become an important issue for governments, building managers, and even homeowners.

“The new generation of smart buildings aims to learn from data how to operate autonomously and with minimum user interventions,” says co-author Henni Ouerdane, a professor on the Skoltech side of the collaboration. “A learning thermostat can potentially learn how to adjust its set-point temperatures in coordination with other HVAC devices, or based on its prediction of electricity tariffs in order to save energy and cost.”

Hosseinloo also believes their methodology and algorithms apply to a diverse range of other physics-based control problems in areas including robotics, autonomous vehicles, and transportation, where data- and computational efficiency are of paramount importance.

This research was a Skoltech-MIT Joint Project conducted as part of the MIT Skoltech Next Generation Program.

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To boost emissions reductions from electric vehicles, know when to charge

Transportation-related emissions are increasing globally. Currently, light-duty vehicles — namely passenger cars, such as sedans, SUVs, or minivans — contribute about 20 percent of the net greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. But studies have shown that switching out your conventional gas-guzzling car for a vehicle powered by electricity can make a significant dent in reducing these emissions.

A recent study published in Environmental Science and Technology takes this a step further by examining how to reduce the emissions associated with the electricity source used to charge an electric vehicle (EV). Taking into account regional charging patterns and the effect of ambient temperature on car fuel economy, researchers at the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) find that the time of day when an EV is charged significantly impacts the vehicle’s emissions.

“If you facilitate charging at particular times, you can really boost the emissions reductions that result from growth in renewables and EVs,” says Ian Miller, the lead author of the study and a research associate at MITEI. “So how do we do this? Time-of-use electricity rates are spreading, and can dramatically shift the time of day when EV drivers charge. If we inform policymakers of these large time-of-charging impacts, they can then design electricity rates to discount charging when our power grids are renewable-heavy. In solar-heavy regions, that’s midday. In wind-heavy regions, like the Midwest, it’s overnight.”

According to their research, in solar-heavy California, charging an electric vehicle overnight produces 70 percent more emissions than if it were charged midday (when more solar energy powers the grid). Meanwhile, in New York, where nuclear and hydro power constitute a larger share of the electricity mix during the night, the best charging time is the opposite. In this region, charging a vehicle overnight actually reduces emissions by 20 percent relative to daytime charging.

“Charging infrastructure is another big determinant when it comes to facilitating charging at specific times — during the day especially,” adds Emre Gençer, co-author and a research scientist at MITEI. “If you need to charge your EV midday, then you need to have enough charging stations at your workplace. Today, most people charge their vehicles in their garages overnight, which is going to produce higher emissions in places where it is best to charge during the day.”

In the study, Miller, Gençer, and Maryam Arbabzadeh, a postdoc at MITEI, make these observations in part by calculating the percentage of error in two common EV emission modeling approaches, which ignore hourly variation in the grid and temperature-driven variation in fuel economy. Their results find that the combined error from these standard methods exceeds 10 percent in 30 percent of the cases, and reaches 50 percent in California, which is home to half of the EVs in the United States.

“If you don’t model time of charging, and instead assume charging with annual average power, you can mis-estimate EV emissions,” says Arbabzadeh. “To be sure, it’s great to get more solar on the grid and more electric vehicles using that grid. No matter when you charge your EV in the U.S., its emissions will be lower than a similar gasoline-powered car; but if EV charging occurs mainly when the sun is down, you won’t get as much benefit when it comes to reducing emissions as you think when using an annual average.”

Seeking to lessen this margin of error, the researchers use hourly grid data from 2018 and 2019 — along with hourly charging, driving, and temperature data — to estimate emissions from EV use in 60 cases across the United States. They then introduce and validate a novel method (with less than 1 percent margin of error) to accurately estimate EV emissions. They call it the “average day” method.

“We found that you can ignore seasonality in grid emissions and fuel economy, and still accurately estimate yearly EV emissions and charging-time impacts,” says Miller. “This was a pleasant surprise. In Kansas last year, daily grid emissions rose about 80 percent between seasons, while EV power demand rose about 50 percent due to temperature changes. Previous studies speculated that ignoring such seasonal swings would hurt accuracy in EV emissions estimates, but never actually quantified the error. We did — across diverse grid mixes and climates — and found the error to be negligible.”

This finding has useful implications for modeling future EV emissions scenarios. “You can get accuracy without computational complexity,” says Arbabzadeh. “With the average-day method, you can accurately estimate EV emissions and charging impacts in a future year without needing to simulate 8,760 values of grid emissions for each hour of the year. All you need is one average-day profile, which means only 24 hourly values, for grid emissions and other key variables. You don’t need to know seasonal variance from those average-day profiles.”

The researchers demonstrate the utility of the average-day method by conducting a case study in the southeastern United States from 2018 to 2032 to examine how renewable growth in this region may impact future EV emissions. Assuming a conservative grid projection from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the results show that EV emissions decline only 16 percent if charging occurs overnight, but more than 50 percent if charging occurs midday. In 2032, compared to a similar hybrid car, EV emissions per mile are 30 percent lower if charged overnight, and 65 percent lower if charged midday.

The model used in this study is one module in a larger modeling program called the Sustainable Energy Systems Analysis Modeling Environment (SESAME). This tool, developed at MITEI, takes a systems-level approach to assess the complete carbon footprint of today’s evolving global energy system.

“The idea behind SESAME is to make better decisions for decarbonization and to understand the energy transition from a systems perspective,” says Gençer. “One of the key elements of SESAME is how you can connect different sectors together — ‘sector coupling’ — and in this study, we are seeing a very interesting example from the transportation and electric power sectors. Right now, as we’ve been claiming, it’s impossible to treat these two sector systems independently, and this is a clear demonstration of why MITEI’s new modeling approach is really important, as well as how we can tackle some of these impending issues.”

In ongoing and future research, the team is expanding their charging analysis from individual vehicles to whole fleets of passenger cars in order to develop fleet-level decarbonization strategies. Their work seeks to answer questions such as how California’s proposed ban of gasoline car sales in 2035 would impact transportation emissions. They are also exploring what fleet electrification could mean — not only for greenhouse gases, but also the demand for natural resources such as cobalt — and whether EV batteries could provide significant grid energy storage.

“To mitigate climate change, we need to decarbonize both the transportation and electric power sectors,” says Gençer. “We can electrify transportation, and it will significantly reduce emissions, but what this paper shows is how you can do it more effectively.”

This research was sponsored by ExxonMobil Research and Engineering through the MIT Energy Initiative Low-Carbon Energy Centers.

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With campus as a test bed, climate action starts and continues at MIT

In 2015, MIT set a goal to reduce its annual greenhouse gas emissions by a minimum of 32 percent by the year 2030. Five years later, the Institute has reduced emissions by 24 percent, remaining on track to meet its goal over the next several years.

These most recent reduction data mark a 6 percent decrease — nearly 11,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions (MTCO₂e) — from fiscal year 2019 to fiscal year 2020. This year-over-year reduction was driven in part by gains in building-level energy efficiency investments, operational efficiency of the Central Utilities Plant (CUP), a reduction in carbon intensity of the electricity purchased from the New England power grid, a less-intense heating season, and a temporary de-densification of campus due to Covid-19 resulting in lower energy demand.

Cumulative efforts to reduce emissions

The net 24 percent reduction over five years accounts for a decrease of over 50,000 MTCO₂e annually since the launch of the Plan for Action on Climate Change in 2015. The plan is guided by five pillars to address the global challenge of climate change through research, technology, education, and outreach, as well as calling on MIT to use its campus operations and community as a test bed for change.

This campus-as-a-test bed methodology empowers MIT to leverage faculty, students, and staff to test and demonstrate strategies for mitigating its own emissions. Strategies have focused on minimizing emissions through reducing the overall energy use, reducing the use of fossil fuels in campus buildings and vehicles, increasing the use of renewable energy sources, and minimizing the release of fugitive gases from campus operation. Marked improvement and investment has been seen in these areas over the past five years — from the CUP renewal to energy standards for an increasingly LEED-certified campus. Along with these efforts, research and coursework supports new cohorts of sustainability thinkers and doers making an impact on campus while working alongside staff, and priming MIT for an eventual goal of carbon neutrality.

This unique research-staff partnership has enabled MIT to make significant progress in reducing its emissions, explains Joe Higgins, vice president for campus services and stewardship: “We are fortunate to have so many dedicated and creative operational staff engaged in achieving our carbon reduction goal,” he says. “They continuously seek opportunities to collaborate with students, faculty and researchers who are tackling the climate challenges of our world.”

Mitigating campus emissions

MIT’s buildings account for the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions on campus, comprising 97 percent of all emissions tracked. To lessen the emissions of existing campus buildings, the Institute prioritized deep energy audits to identify those spaces that have high levels of energy consumption and the greatest potential for emissions reductions. These efforts, led by the Department of Facilities and supported by the Office of Campus Planning; Environment, Health, and Safety; and the the Office of Sustainability (MITOS), follow a process of study, design, and implementation of retrofits with features such as heat recovery, lighting upgrades, and enhanced building systems controls to reduce energy use and associated emissions — a process that is ongoing. “As buildings are regularly identified for these audits, energy enhancements and energy reductions are continually being realized across campus,” explains Carlo Fanone, director of facilities engineering. “These reductions are often not fully realized until one to two fiscal years after completing a project, so we remain on a cycle of launching new projects and seeing the impact completed projects have on reduced emissions.”

To mitigate the emissions impact of new buildings, the Institute adopted guidelines in 2016 that required all newly constructed campus buildings to achieve a minimum of LEED Gold certification (version 4). To date, more than 18 buildings and spaces at MIT are LEED certified, with two LEED Platinum buildings  — the highest possible rating offered by the U.S. Green Building Council, which certifies LEED projects. Additional reductions on campus have been achieved through eliminating the use of fuel oil in the existing power plant, as well as investments in its operational efficiency. With the significant capital renewal of the CUP coming online in 2021, its increased capacity and efficiency is expected to further reduce greenhouse gas emissions by approximately 10 percent.

As ongoing campus efforts in a dense urban environment contribute to incremental emissions reductions, Institute leaders recognize the need for rapid global mitigation efforts that deploy strategies both on and off campus. To advance this, MIT entered into a power purchase agreement, or PPA, in 2016 that enabled the construction of Summit Farms, a 650-acre, 60-megawatt solar farm in North Carolina. Since then, MIT has benefited annually from the Institute’s 25-year commitment to purchase electricity generated through the PPA and in 2020 alone purchased 87,320 megawatt-hours of solar power, which offset over 28,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions from on-campus operations.

Future forward

In utilizing the campus to test innovative ideas for local climate action, operational staff, researchers, students, and faculty all play a role. Through teaching 11.S938 / 2.S999 (Solving for Carbon Neutrality at MIT) and 11.S196 / 11.S946 (Exploring Sustainability at Different Scales) Director of Sustainability Julie Newman and mechanical engineering Professor Tim Gutowski have guided classes of graduate and undergraduate students in developing solutions for real-world sustainability challenges that tie back to campus. “This coursework has allowed us to engage students in thinking about climate change solutions through the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals — addressing a truly global challenge — and then taking that thinking and problem-solving approach to challenges and opportunities in our own backyard at MIT,” explains Newman, who also serves as a lecturer with the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. “Students start to think about climate action and carbon neutrality at different scales, which is the model we follow in the Office of Sustainability.”

Research solutions to campus challenges are also supported through the Campus Sustainability Incubator Fund — administered by MITOS — which has enabled more than a dozen MIT community members to use the campus itself for research in sustainable operations, management, and design. Past funded projects include on-site renewable energy storage systems, water capture and reuse at the CUP, and life-cycle impacts on building designs on campus. Currently, a team of researchers supported by the fund is focused on short- and long-term sustainable procurement, sourcing, and disposal strategies for personal protective equipment at MIT, with a focus on solutions scalable beyond campus.

Data and future work

As MIT looks to meet its reduction goal, data collection and analysis remain key to measuring and mitigating emissions. MIT continually works to collect the full picture of this impact and in 2019 began developing a preliminary analysis of the Institute’s Scope 3, or indirect, greenhouse gas emissions. This is done to inform MIT’s total greenhouse gas emissions activities — in addition to Scopes 1 and 2 — and explore where strategic opportunities may exist to reduce emissions beyond what MIT is currently tracking. Through this effort, MIT has been collecting available emissions data, including those of purchased goods and services, MIT-sponsored travel, commuting, and capital goods (furniture, fixtures, tools, etc.) using the World Resources Institute/ World Business Council for Sustainable Development GHG Protocol for Scope 3 framework. 

The effort to capture a complete emissions picture reflects the ongoing work of MIT to rapidly understand and address its own contributions to climate change. As MIT looks to 2030 and its continued climate action work, Vice President for Research Maria Zuber says the MIT community will remain an important part of the work and envisioning the future, which includes a new climate action plan. “MIT is ahead of the schedule we set for ourselves to reduce net carbon emissions,” says Zuber, who oversees MIT’s Plan for Action on Climate Change. “But the climate crisis demands that we make even faster progress. Our new climate plan will set a more ambitious goal that everyone in our community will have a role in meeting.”

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On planetary change and human health

When anthropologist Amy Moran-Thomas first went to Belize to begin ethnographic research in 2008, she planned to chronicle human health concerns, focusing on diabetes. Then she learned that local diets contributing to such chronic conditions were changing, in part due to losses in ocean food webs, and kept hearing stories about how local plants were in trouble.

“Listening and trying to learn from what people were saying, over the years I came to see human health and planetary health as deeply interconnected,” says Moran-Thomas, the Morrison Hayes Career Development Associate Professor of Anthropology at MIT. “When I think of health now, I think of disarray in bigger ecosystems and infrastructures that’s also landing in human bodies.”

Moran-Thomas chronicled the impacts of diabetes in her 2019 book “Traveling with Sugar” (now open access at MIT Libraries), but she says that story — of a global epidemic estimated to kill somewhere between 1.5 and 4.2 million people a year (a telling gap in our basic knowledge) — is just a small piece of a larger narrative.

“Changing weather makes it harder to grow food and vegetables. Fish populations dwindling also changes human nutrition. The chemicals used to stretch depleted soil or to help sick agricultural plants survive can contribute to later chronic diseases like cancer and diabetes in humans,” Moran-Thomas explains. “Clinical medicine treats cancer risk by screening our genes, but not by also monitoring our water and air that are increasingly saturated with carcinogens.”

Complex interdependencies

This spring, Moran-Thomas launched a new course, 21A.312 (Planetary Change and Human Health), to give students a chance to explore such complex interdependencies. As the Covid-19 pandemic escalated, students read about the viral ecologies that connect human lives and animal health. In the second term of the class this fall, students discussed the implications of California’s wildfires — and Moran-Thomas added a new unit on the anthropology of mental health and climate change.

“In addition to worrying about the physical safety of going outside, or whether breathing in smoke can worsen respiratory disease,” she says, “there can be such a psychic toll to wondering if you’ll need to evacuate, or looking at the sky’s strange color.”

Addressing all these interlinked problems demands an approach that does not treat people as an afterthought, Moran-Thomas says. “Climate change is not solely, or even fundamentally, a technological problem,” she observes. “It’s a societal problem that requires reckoning with the role of human decisions over time and their uneven consequences for people.

“There can be a tendency to counter climate denialism with more data, and I don’t think that’s what the problem is about,” she says. “Data is not wisdom; its value depends on how it is gathered, interpreted, and framed.”
 
Thinking with communities

As Moran-Thomas worked on “Traveling with Sugar,” she kept returning to Belize over time, gaining insights into slow processes of change — including for people, some of whom have lost loved ones and limbs to diabetes over the years, and for the country’s land, which has been affected by erosion and sea-level rise.

“In one spot in southern Belize where I did my first interview more than a decade ago, the whole front street and over 20 houses have gone into ocean,” she says, noting that the maintenance of bodies and infrastructures are often connected. When a road or bridge goes underwater during flooding, for example, it can have a big impact on whether people can reach the hospital during a moment of crisis, or whether they can access preventative care. “Still, I’ve seen people repairing and remaking again and again. I wonder what might be possible if designers centered their insights about how health and climate erosions are entwined?”

In many ways, Moran-Thomas says, chronic wear on both the planet and on people is accumulating like a gathering storm. The painting in the slideshow above by Belizean artist Pen Delvin Cayetano, which also appeared in her book, depicts the effects of Hurricane Hattie, a storm that ravaged Belize in 1961; the artwork shows the souls of those who died among the waves. In Belize, Hurricane Hattie was at times used as a metaphor to talk about diabetes emergencies and losses, Moran-Thomas says, by people trying to convey how slow changes can suddenly erupt into crisis.

“It’s also a reminder how long people have been dealing with these entwined struggles around climate and health,” she says, “that many experts elsewhere are just starting to notice.”

Co-envisioned design and climate adaptation

Adaptation has become an increasingly popular keyword among those working to address climate impacts, but Moran-Thomas notes these efforts could do more to learn from the insights people are trying to offer from the places most impacted already. “Whose definition of ‘adaption’ gets enacted?” Moran-Thomas asks. “For example, climate adaptation is often used in policy to mean raising buildings, a style that has been used in the Caribbean for a long time,” she says, referencing the hurricane stairs are often built so that houses can withstand flooding.

However, now that many communities and families include someone with mobility issues related to a diabetes amputation, such steep steps present their own problems. “So before state policies and insurance companies incentivize climate adaptations for homes and buildings around the world, it matters to think about what designs do that in a way that isn’t a huge setback to disability rights,” Moran-Thomas says.

“People are trying to imagine future designs that hurricane-proof houses while allowing for wheelchair access, and prosthetics that enable basic use in the ecologies where their families live, for example, walking across sand between houses. Organizations crafting policies and designs for adaptation should be listening to what impacted people are trying to share about the use-issues they see.”

Co-envisioned design in such cases is especially important, she notes, given how often the unequal effects of climate change, chronic health weathering, and other racial inequities converge. “That’s why I appreciate the social perspective that starts with the questions: What work is already being done at grassroots levels that might be invisible from a distance? What visions are people cultivating, and what do they say would support that work? What would any technology being proposed mean in local lives?” she says.

Community ecologies across generations

To grapple with the societal dilemmas emerging around climate change, Moran-Thomas says anthropology can also engage impasses closer to home. Thinking with communities can be a way to shed light on why some U.S. citizens don’t see climate change as real. Borrowing an idea from Émile Durkheim, she explains: “He said science didn’t get credibility from the fact that it was true, but from the community that created it. And that people could lose faith in science if they lose that community connection.”

Community ecologies across generations are again at the heart of Moran-Thomas’ current project, which focuses on the intertwined histories of fossil fuels and social worlds linked to coal, oil, and gas legacies in her home state of Pennsylvania. With support from the 2020 Levitan Prize in the Humanities, she is exploring the legacy of the carbon economy, the notions of heritage that have arisen from it, and the region’s long histories of segregations and place-making — which continue to influence health and politics today.
 
Future paths

Forging a path forward will take effort from everyone, which is why Moran-Thomas is heartened by the lively conversations happening around MIT’s Climate Grand Challenges Initiative, the multidisciplinary effort to accelerate the next phase of climate research at the Institute.

A number of the presenters in recent public panels proposed ways for MIT to model ethically and socially attuned responses to climate issues. Brainstorming to build climate research communities at MIT included the idea of a new center for humanities, arts, and sciences focused on climate and society, a proposal to which Moran-Thomas contributed along with many others in MIT-SHASS. Whatever happens next, she hopes that research working toward co-envisioned responses will shed further light on the connections between planetary change and human health.

“People often forget that MIT co-founded the country’s first graduate program in public health, together with Harvard, back in 1913,” she says. “Then MIT narrowed later to focus on technologies. But so much in this moment reminds us how health research can be stronger when it is transdisciplinary — when science and technologies unfold in dialogue with social input from broader publics. I hope that the growing climate health conversations around MIT can be part of reclaiming a more multi-dimensional, humanistic vision of health.”

Prepared by MIT SHASS Communications
Editorial and design director: Emily Hiestand
Senior writer: Kathryn O'Neill

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