Weekly calls keep students connected to the Institute during a pandemic

When the MIT campus is alive, it nearly sings with innovation and excitement. Students sustain one another with activities ranging from building in makerspaces to psetting in residence halls to pick-up soccer games on the fields. But how can they remain connected during a pandemic, where physical distancing is the new normal? What can replace the informal chats with faculty members after class? Throw in remote learning — and the Infinite Corridor seems infinitely far away.

Enter the MIT Student Success Coaching program, a new initiative for keeping students “connected to the Infinite.” The program, launched by the Division of Student Life (DSL) and the Office of the Vice Chancellor (OVC), matches students with volunteer “coaches,” or staff or faculty members from several areas of the Institute. In many cases, the coaches may be already known to students through their “day jobs” as athletic coaches, support professionals, or faculty members.

Coaches are assigned anywhere from one to 20 undergraduate students who they will connect with once a week through the end of the semester to see how they are transitioning to online learning and more generally, how they are doing during the Covid-19 crisis. Participating students receive weekly check-ins conducted over Zoom, FaceTime, or even via phone or email.

The program emerged in response to a request from Suzy Nelson, vice president and dean for student life; Ian Waitz, vice chancellor for undergraduate and graduate education; and Krishna Rajagopal, dean for digital learning. The program’s co-chairs are Lauren Pouchak, director of special projects in the OVC; Gustavo Burkett, senior associate dean for diversity and community Involvement in DSL; and Elizabeth Cogliano Young, associate dean and director of first year advising programs in OVC.

Cogliano Young says there are now more than 500 volunteer coaches matched with approximately 4,400 undergraduate students. The program is also open to MIT’s graduate students but it serves a smaller number “since many graduate students may already have regular meetings with advisors,” Pouchak says. The team worked to identify programs where graduate students could benefit from an opt-in coaches program.

Listening is number one

One of the co-chairs’ first tasks was developing a training for the volunteers. They turned to colleagues across the Institute, including Rajagopal, who spoke at the first hour-long virtual training session. In it, he emphasized that the coaches are not meant to replace academic advisors or the student support professionals who work for Student Support Services and GradSupport.

“The number one thing to do is to listen, listen, and listen,” Rajagopal said.

Susanna Barry, senior program manager at MIT Medical, also spoke at the training, and encouraged coaches to empower students to solve their own problems. To that end, a Slack group was formed where coaches can interact with one another and the program co-chairs can share what they are hearing from students, brainstorm approaches to addressing challenges, and develop new ideas for strengthening student connections to the Institute during this period of remote learning.

Pouchak said the Slack channel feedback has meant that issues that have “bubbled up” can be addressed in real-time. For instance, many students reported having trouble sleeping and managing their time while they are off campus. Working with Barry, the co-chairs and a group of “super coaches”  (staff who have particular expertise and experience and work to support students on a daily basis) introduced several new Zoom workshops on topics such as sleep and time management, which include tips such as don’t hit the snooze button and try to get some sunlight before noon every day.

Rachel Shulman, undergraduate academic coordinator for the MIT Energy Initiative, who has been matched with 18 undergraduate students, was eager to share insights with her fellow coaches. She says after initial conversations with several students, she noticed that many have found it hard to stay focused.

“Everyone is distracted, and everyone is having trouble focusing on their lectures, and some are putting pressure on themselves to do as well as they were doing before,” Shulman says. And while some of Shulman’s students have reported they are doing well with the transition to virtual learning, they still appreciate hearing from someone at MIT.

Shulman tells students that the weekly coaching sessions can be whatever students want them to be.

“I’ve told them that if they have specific goals, I can try to help them figure out how to achieve them, or I can connect them with resources. I had one student ask me about the career fair, and it was so great because there’s a Slack channel for the MIT coaches … and I was able to Slack one of them while I was on a Zoom call with the student [so I could answer the student’s question],” Shulman says.

Having a human node in the network

Luke Hartnett, a senior in mechanical engineering, was skeptical of the coaching initiative at first. But, after his first conversation with his coach, he realized that he appreciated the extra support — especially after his 90-year-old grandmother was diagnosed with Covid-19.

“[My coach] was very helpful in talking me through how to deal with school … and planning out for the rest of the semester. Everyone is dealing with something, so I think it’s nice that MIT thought of this unique way to support students,” Hartnett says.

Junior Alex Encinas, another mechanical engineering major, says time management at his home in Houston has been a struggle. He’s committed to following the same schedule that he would have had if he were still on campus, even though he has the option of watching his lecture recordings any time. He says he’s adjusted well to the new routine, but while speaking with his coach, “things started flowing out that I didn’t even know were bothering me … and we just talked through them. It was calming for me,” he says.

Devan Monroe, assistant dean for professional development programs in the Office of Minority Education, says that students are using the program in the way that suits their needs.

“I’ve heard back from five students so far. Most have felt they were in a good place and don’t need the weekly check-ins. I’ve had others who have opted in and requested biweekly meetings rather than weekly,” he says.

Schools are also implementing coaching programs for their cohorts of students. The MIT Sloan School of Management has called for staff members to voluntarily conduct weekly MBA student check-ins, says Jenifer Marshall, associate director of the MBA and MSMS program office.

Marshall says about 90 MIT Sloan staff members volunteered to be matched with MBA students. The students can opt out if they feel they don’t need the extra support. Although every MBA student is already matched with an MBA program advisor, Marshall says that the closure of physical MIT offices prompted the MBA program office to keep the lines of communication open with weekly check-ins because everyone is now remote.

“Students often meet with their advisors because they have an academic or policy question. Once we start talking about that topic, they may feel more comfortable moving into a more personal conversation, whereas they wouldn’t have necessarily led with that. Since we don’t have that nuanced ability to interact with students during this time, we thought that creating a calling plan was important,” Marshall says.

Marshall also encouraged MIT Sloan volunteers to participate in the Institute-wide Student Success Coaching program and has directed them toward the training and support information that the program provided.

MIT Sloan students are particularly concerned about upcoming summer internships and job offers.

“We can’t always resolve students’ concerns in the moment. But … even if there’s not a concrete solution to a problem, connecting with someone, talking through options, and learning about resources can really help. We are all here to support our students,” Marshall says.

One MIT

One unexpected benefit from the weekly check-ins: Coaches are also reporting that the communication is inspiring them and forging new connections with colleagues. Shulman formed a virtual knitting group on the Student Success Team Slack channel and about a dozen people attended the first two sessions.

“In addition to the advantages to the students, the coaches have found community with one another which has become a tremendous resource,” says program co-chair Burkett. “In my opinion, the program has become a real-life example of the idea of ‘One MIT.’”

The MIT Student Success Coaching program is open to any volunteers from MIT, and there are still some graduate students without coaches. To volunteer, email the co-chairs at studentsuccess@mit.edu.

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A foolproof way to shrink deep learning models

As more artificial intelligence applications move to smartphones, deep learning models are getting smaller to allow apps to run faster and save battery power. Now, MIT researchers have a new and better way to compress models. 

It’s so simple that they unveiled it in a tweet last month: Train the model, prune its weakest connections, retrain the model at its fast, early training rate, and repeat, until the model is as tiny as you want. 

“That’s it,” says Alex Renda, a PhD student at MIT. “The standard things people do to prune their models are crazy complicated.” 

Renda discussed the technique when the International Conference of Learning Representations (ICLR) convened remotely this month. Renda is a co-author of the work with Jonathan Frankle, a fellow PhD student in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), and Michael Carbin, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science — all members of the Computer Science and Artificial Science Laboratory.  

The search for a better compression technique grew out of Frankle and Carbin’s award-winning Lottery Ticket Hypothesis paper at ICLR last year. They showed that a deep neural network could perform with only one-tenth the number of connections if the right subnetwork was found early in training. Their revelation came as demand for computing power and energy to train ever larger deep learning models was increasing exponentially, a trend that continues to this day. Costs of that growth include a rise in planet-warming carbon emissions and a potential drop in innovation as researchers not affiliated with big tech companies compete for scarce computing resources. Everyday users are affected, too. Big AI models eat up mobile-phone bandwidth and battery power.

The Lottery Ticket Hypothesis triggered a series of mostly theoretical follow-on papers. But at a colleague’s suggestion, Frankle decided to see what lessons it might hold for pruning, in which a search algorithm trims the number of nodes evaluated in a search tree. The field had been around for decades, but saw a resurgence after the breakout success of neural networks at classifying images in the ImageNet competition. As models got bigger, with researchers adding on layers of artificial neurons to boost performance, others proposed techniques for whittling them down. 

Song Han, now an assistant professor at MIT, was one pioneer. Building on a series of influential papers, Han unveiled a pruning algorithm he called AMC, or AutoML for model compression, that’s still the industry standard. Under Han’s technique, redundant neurons and connections are automatically removed, and the model is retrained to restore its initial accuracy. 

In response to Han’s work, Frankle recently suggested in an unpublished paper that results could be further improved by rewinding the smaller, pruned model to its initial parameters, or weights, and retraining the smaller model at its faster, initial rate. 

In the current ICLR study, the researchers realized that the model could simply be rewound to its early training rate without fiddling with any parameters. In any pruning regimen, the tinier a model gets, the less accurate it becomes. But when the researchers compared this new method to Han’s AMC or Frankle’s weight-rewinding methods, it performed better no matter how much the model shrank. 

It’s unclear why the pruning technique works as well as it does. The researchers say they will leave that question for others to answer. As for those who wish to try it, the algorithm is as easy to implement as other pruning methods, without time-consuming tuning, the researchers say. 

“It’s the pruning algorithm from the ‘Book,’” says Frankle. “It’s clear, generic, and drop-dead simple.”

Han, for his part, has now partly shifted focus from compression AI models to channeling AI to design small, efficient models from the start. His newest method, Once for All, also debuts at ICLR. Of the new learning rate method, he says: “I’m happy to see new pruning and retraining techniques evolve, giving more people access to high-performing AI applications.” 

Support for the study came from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Google, MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, MIT Quest for Intelligence, and the U.S. Office of Naval Research.

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Life and learning find a way during a pandemic

On March 12, Iain Cheeseman held his final in-person lecture for 7.06 (Cell Biology) before the Covid-19 pandemic prompted MIT to abruptly transition to online learning. A professor of biology and Whitehead Institute member, Cheeseman was five minutes from the end of his talk on actin binding proteins when the fire alarm unexpectedly sounded, and the entire class was forced to evacuate.

“To me, that was a metaphor for the entire semester,” he says. “You have the best-laid plans, and then an alarm sounds, everyone is suddenly forced to flee, and all you can do is hope that they stay safe. I didn’t even get to say goodbye.”

Like many universities, MIT recently emptied its physical campus and established a virtual one, instructing students to return home and community members to work remotely if possible. Despite the short notice and continually-evolving circumstances, the Department of Biology is finding ways to come together while being apart.

Cheeseman and his co-instructor, Becky Lamason, were in a better position than most to move their class online. In the fall, long before the pandemic, the two began working with the department’s digital learning team, MITxBio, to create an online version of 7.06.

Each year, in addition to conducting award-winning educational research, MITxBio teams up with several instructors to devise massive open online courses. These “MOOCs” are replete with recorded lectures, online assessments, discussion forums, and detailed animations. Anyone can take an MITxBio MOOC for free, or pay a small fee to receive a certificate post-completion. MIT students can also use these digital resources through their class websites.

MITxBio’s list of responsibilities expanded almost immediately after MIT announced its plans to go remote. The team became the department’s go-to resource for online learning, and they began meeting with instructors to demonstrate how to record lectures, run recitations via Zoom, hold online office hours, administer exams, and determine a general workflow for the new normal. They also compiled recommendations and instructions for the transition. In addition to 7.06, MITxBio is also assisting with 7.014 (Introductory Biology), 7.05 (General Biochemistry), and 7.28/7.58 (Molecular Biology).

“Normally, it would take us about six months to develop the online resources for a MOOC,” says Mary Ellen Wiltrout, lecturer and MITx digital learning scientist. “But in this case, we didn’t have much advance notice and that really compressed our timeline.” She’s pleased to report that remote learning thus far hasn’t been very exciting, which is a “major success” because it means things are running smoothly — although there were some kinks early on.

Simple tasks that were no-brainers during in-person classes became conundrums in the virtual realm for instructors. Should they hold live lectures at the regularly scheduled time, or record their lectures for easy viewing in multiple time zones? What’s the best way to administer and grade a remote exam? How should teaching assistants conduct their recitations? Even noticing when a student raised their hand in a virtual classroom became a quandary. But perhaps the biggest predicament of all was determining how to proceed with lab classes, which revolve around hands-on experiences.

Technical instructors like Vanessa Cheung and Eric Chu have continued to hold their labs, 7.002 (Fundamentals of Experimental Molecular Biology) and 7.003 (Applied Molecular Biology Laboratory). Cheung and Chu had just three days after students departed before Building 68 was closed to nonessential personnel. They wrapped up as many experiments as they could, and combined those results with data from previous classes for their students to analyze. Cheung and Chu documented many of the techniques through pictures, videos, and diagrams, and then supplemented their own instruction with online content from other sources. Each week, the instructors, students, and teaching assistants gather in a Zoom chat room to discuss additional material and announcements, before breaking into smaller discussion groups.

Luckily, Cheung says, the students had already learned the key lab techniques, and the remaining protocols merely required “pipetting things into tubes, which they already know how to do.” Thanks to all the online supplemental materials, she suspects the students may be getting exposed to more information than they normally would if they were still on campus. “In some ways, they may actually have the opportunity to get more out of the class,” she says.

“The lab instructors have done a phenomenal job transitioning to remote learning,” adds Adam Martin, associate professor of biology and undergraduate officer. “The students may not get to experience the joy of loading a gel for themselves, but they’ll still get the chance to analyze and write about real experimental data.”

Martin oversees his own lab of undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs, and technicians, who evacuated Building 68 shortly after the students left campus. His group studies embryonic development in fruit flies, and has put wet lab experiments on hold in favor of learning computational techniques, conducting literature searches, and composing papers from home.

“We’ve stayed pretty busy,” he says. “The biggest challenge is maintaining our fly stocks.” Some of the flies have remained in Building 68 under the supervision of designated caretakers, while a back-up collection resides safe and sound in Martin’s basement.

As an undergraduate officer, Martin has remained in touch with undergraduates outside his lab as well by setting up one-on-one meetings. “I’ve been trying to be proactive about keeping in touch, and regularly engaging with them to make sure no one is falling through the cracks,” he says.

In addition to continuing existing student services, MIT has also aggregated online teaching and learning resources, and organized a Student Success Team that pairs undergraduates with coaches who provide support.

“MIT is stressful enough in-person,” Cheung says, “but add to that distractions at home, spotty Wi-Fi, and the stress of a pandemic, and it’s a lot for students to manage.”

Through virtual check-ins, online surveys, and unintentional guest appearances by family, members of the MIT biology community have gotten to know each other in new and different ways.

“All the students are realizing that we have lives,” Martin says. “Managing family and work responsibilities has been a balancing act, to say the least.”

Back in 7.06, Cheeseman was preparing for the first online exam by sending a practice quiz with light-hearted questions. In one question, he asked his students for silly social distancing stories. He was touched to receive tales of family bonding, online orders gone awry, and lots of recipes.

“It gave me such a perspective on the undergrads here,” he says. “I really miss them. There’s no way we can pretend this is life as normal, but I respect how the students are doing their best and have continued to have a good attitude.”

Cheung and Martin have been impressed with the high participation rate they’ve witnessed. “It’s heartwarming to see that MIT students genuinely care about learning,” Cheung says, “even when they’re scattered across the globe.”

Even after everyone eventually returns to campus, Wiltrout predicts teaching and learning at MIT will never be the same — and perhaps that’s a good thing.

“Many people were initially hesitant to adopt online learning technology,” she says. “But now they’re realizing that these online tools can really enhance in-person learning, or make some TA duties more efficient.”

While MIT weathers the pandemic, students, instructors, and staff in the department will do their best to continue as normal. “In my case, that means entertaining my students and keeping the dad jokes going,” Cheeseman says. “It isn’t the situation any of us would have wanted, but we’re coping better than we ever thought we could.”

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Q&A: Gregory Rutledge on initial testing of KN95 respirators for public health officials

Across Massachusetts, public health officials and others are working to secure personal protective equipment (PPE) to ensure the safety of health care providers and others working directly with Covid-19 patients. N95 respirators and face masks, which are regulated by the U.S. government, have been in short supply, leading some entities and states, including the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, to secure KN95 respirators as an alternative.

KN95 respirators are regulated by the Chinese government under specifications similar to N95 respirators in the U.S., and have been approved for emergency use in some circumstances by the FDA. (N95 respirators seal against the face and protect the wearer from small-particle aerosols in the environment. Face masks are not form-fitting but protect both the wearer and those around them from splashes and exchanges of large droplets.)

To try to gauge the effectiveness of the respirators in the state’s stockpile, public health officials turned to the Massachusetts Manufacturing Emergency Response Team (M-ERT) initiative for help rapidly analyzing materials and products. At MIT, Professor Gregory Rutledge is part of that initiative; he has donated the services of his lab, which includes specialized equipment to generate and analyze aerosols, to test the filtration efficiency and breathability of materials used, or proposed for use, in respirators or masks.

Rutledge spoke with MIT News about the testing his lab is conducting, why he got involved, and the early gap his testing helped to fill. He described how entities may use this kind of data to inform decision-making and guidance, such as that issued by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (DPH) and the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency (MEMA) on April 24. However, he cautioned against drawing overly broad conclusions, noting that early analyses such as his involve certain limitations.

Q: Governor Charlie Baker referenced MIT’s testing of KN95 respirators in his briefing on Tuesday, and news reports have referred to those tests. Can you describe the testing your lab conducted and what you found?

A: Our lab has long been interested in the fabrication and application of nanofibrous nonwoven materials prepared by a technique called “electrospinning.” One of the most promising applications of such materials is as high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filters. In our research, we had previously shown that such nanofibrous filters could shift the maximum peneterating particle size (MPPS, or size of particle most likely to pass through a filter) below 100 nanometers and remove over 99 percent of  these particulates. To demonstrate this, we generate an airborne aerosol of salt particles between 20 and 300 nanometers, and then measure what percent of them are removed by the filter as the air passes through it, a property called the “filtration efficiency.” At the same time, we measure the pressure drop across the filter, which characterizes the resistance to airflow.

When the Covid-19 crisis first hit the news, there was a lot of concern over the scale of the threat, and the lack of either sufficient stockpiles or domestic manufacturing capacity to meet the demand for PPE, notably N95 respirators, over the coming weeks and months. Almost immediately, hospitals around the area and the nation were scrambling to find enough of these devices to protect their staff and patients. There was a lot of discussion around suitable alternatives, including respirators that had been certified for use elsewhere but not in the U.S., such as KN95 respirators from China.

Like the N95 respirator, KN95s are supposed to remove at least 95 percent of solid particulates below 300 nanometers, exactly the range of aerosols of interest to our lab. Unfortunately, there was also some evidence from Europe, which was a few weeks ahead of the U.S. in the pandemic, that the quality control for some KN95 respirators was not as good as it could be, leading to recalls, such as one in the Netherlands. Nevertheless, the manufacturing capacity for respirators is very strong in China, so in my view it was a logical place for the Commonwealth to look for suitable alternatives. 

It soon became apparent that the Commonwealth wanted to do its own quality control of the KN95s it was receiving. In my lab, we were already testing filtration efficiency and pressure drop for alternative filter materials being considered by hospitals as ways to protect health care workers and patients. With the help of AFFOA [a manufacturing innovation institute headquartered in Cambridge] and the M-ERT, we began testing the materials used in the KN95 respirators procured by the Commonwealth from a variety of manufacturers, donations, etc.

To be clear, a respirator like an N95 or a KN95 has to satisfy a number of criteria, including the ability to form a seal against the face, and we are in no position to certify an N95 or equivalent; that full capacity resides with the federal government. However, high filtration efficiency and low pressure drop are essential properties without which the respirator cannot perform. These two criteria are ones my group has been able to review upon request by the Commonwealth.

Over the past two weeks, our lab has tested — in triplicate — over 40 different KN95s from the MEMA stockpile, at the request of the Department of Public Health. We can compare their performance in our test to that of certified N95 respirators and quickly distinguish those that might pass the N95 certification from those that would not. The latter group is still valuable in noncritical situations, but it is important to know that health care workers and first responders on the front line of the pandemic are getting the best available protection. So far, about a third of the KN95s we’ve tested appear to perform as advertised.

Q: Why is your lab at MIT involved in testing materials?

A: The battle against Covid-19 may be a marathon in the end, but in the first few weeks during which the goal was to “flatten the curve,” it has been a race against time. Everyone wants to do their part, but it is difficult to do the right thing in the absence of reliable information. This is the argument for testing. Unfortunately, the organizations that normally certify respirators for N95 performance are few and far between, and they were already experiencing long lead times due to the national scale of the pandemic. It was within this context that we realized the preliminary information we could provide on filtration efficiency and inhalation resistance could help inform the decision-makers and help them to provide the greatest protection to the largest number of people. 

We felt it was essential that we ramp up as quickly and responsibly as we could to meet demand in a very dynamic situation, while at the same time ensuring that the results we provided were reliable and validated over time. In doing so, I believe we helped buy time while additional testing capacity has come on-line around the state, at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command (CCDC) in Natick, and, very soon, at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. These several labs provide complementary capabilities in testing for filtration efficiency, liquid penetration (for surgical masks), and other requirements of PPE.

I hope to be clear that our testing is not the equivalent of the official national testing conducted by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). Likewise, we do not provide official certification or validation. However, the initial testing data we collect enables public health officials and other decision-makers to proceed with some light while they wait for the NIOSH processes to complete. 

Q: What kind of reports do you provide when asked to conduct tests? How might entities use the data or information you provide?

A: MIT, through my lab’s efforts in coordination with colleagues at AFFOA and Lincoln Laboratory, is donating its testing capabilities in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and the results are provided “as is.” While we cannot reproduce exactly the test protocols specified by NIOSH for filtration efficiency and inhalation resistance, the aerosol generated to challenge the respirator material and the conditions under which the test is performed are designed to mimic as closely as possible that which would be performed by an FDA-approved precertification facility, subject to the constraints of our equipment and the demands of the current crisis.

We only test the filtration material itself, not the design of the respirator or its “fit” to the face, nor any valves or other ancillary components. In the case of fabricated respirators such as the KN95s, our testing serves as a check against faulty or fraudulent materials of construction and offers guidance for the selection, procurement, and distribution of these devices. In other instances, our data have been used by innovation teams to develop new designs for respirators, and by manufacturers to re-engineer their product lines to increase the domestic supply chain for respirators. Such designs often deviate in significant ways from the conventional N95 we know today, and require a longer timeline to develop. We offer the flexibility to analyze such designs under different conditions of use, and we are building a database of materials performance evaluations that may subsequently be mined for filtration and flow resistance characteristics for use by the broader community of PPE developers.

Q: What have you learned from engaging in this voluntary effort over the past couple of weeks?

A: I have been most impressed by the enthusiasm and commitment with which students at MIT and the doctors, clinicians, scientists, and engineers with whom they collaborate dropped what they were doing to address shortfalls in PPE across the board, in very short timeframes. Projects to mass produce components as simple as a face shield or as complex as a ventilator are other examples. The students in the lab, working long hours in uncertain times, are the stars in most of these efforts. This crisis has galvanized a host of grassroots actvities that have moved quickly, often in parallel but toward a common set of goals. To some extent, my role has been to help channel that effort into the most productive avenues.

Q: What do you think public health officials and first responders should be most aware of?

A: Unlike the average academic, those who are on the front lines of this pandemic are trained to make decisions on a daily basis, and to make them quickly. But to make good decisions, they need good information, and they need it rapidly but responsibly. We are here to help inform those decisions as best we can with timely, reliable data.

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During the Covid-19 crisis, student EMTs keep the campus ambulance service running

For senior Alice Lin, joining MIT Emergency Medical Services (EMS) was a calculated risk. “When I started college I was a very shy, insecure freshman. I was scared, I was unsure of myself, and I wanted to be capable in times of emergency.” Lin was interested in medicine, and training to be an emergency medical technician (EMT) seemed like a good way to satisfy both her intellectual curiosity and her desire for a sense of mastery in dealing with tough challenges.

Now a senior, double majoring in bioengineering and neuroscience, Lin is not only an EMT but the current chief of MIT EMS, the student-run, volunteer ambulance service that reports to MIT Emergency Management. She is one of eight MIT students and alumni — out of a group of 40-50 total members — who made the decision, together with their supervisors, to stay on campus during the Covid-19 crisis and keep the service running.

“We volunteered because we thought it would be a great opportunity to give back to the MIT community in a time of necessity,” says junior Nathan Han, a computer science and biology major. He joined MIT EMS after a recruiting poster on campus caught his eye, and he thought EMS would be both meaningful and fun.

Han appreciates the culture of MIT EMS, which he describes as combining the best aspects of professional and student organizations. In normal times, the group enjoys getting together when they’re not on duty. The service has not one, but two social officers, who organize frequent gatherings and events.

Now, of course, the small group of EMTs on campus follows social distancing rules, seeing each other only at shift changes. First and foremost, the mission of EMS is health, safety, and service to the community. From their headquarters in the basement of the Stata Center, the students work in rotating shifts to be able to respond rapidly whenever they’re called. Beds are available for students when they work 24-hour shifts or overnight, and rooms are available in Simmons for any first responders who need housing on campus, including MIT EMS members who do not live in residence halls.

The MIT ambulance waits in a bay on the Stata Center loading dock, to rush the EMTs to medical emergencies ranging from minor injuries and ailments to severe trauma and cardiac arrests — and now, possible cases of Covid-19. EMS crews have been fully trained in the proper protocols for Covid-19 and are taking all the necessary precautions for keeping their patients and the public safe.

Cullen Clairmont ’19, who is continuing regular shifts with MIT EMS while working remotely as a clinical researcher for Massachusetts General Hospital, hopes that in this uncertain time, people will not hesitate to call EMS if they need help. “I hope that people aren’t too scared or too worried to reach out,” he says. “Call MIT Police and we’ll come over right away.”

Stepping up in times of crisis is what the MIT EMS team is trained to do, and their dedication and professionalism are evident in their decision to serve the community during a pandemic that complicates every personal interaction. Lin acknowledges that she and her crew members are taking a risk each time they respond to a call. But, she says, “It’s important to accept the risk, and move forward.”

The real deal

For junior Dillon Powell, an electrical engineering major and the incoming chief of MIT EMS, joining EMS was a natural choice. The son of a retired police officer, he grew up admiring his father’s attitude of running toward danger to help others. And he has been interested in medicine from a young age. “I’ve always wanted to do as much good as I can, but medical school is far off and it’s a long path to get there,” he says. “This is something tangible — I can help people in my community right now.”

Members of the MIT community can call 100 from a campus phone, or 617-253-1212 from any phone, to access the ambulance service. While its primary role is to serve MIT, the service often works in cooperation with local police, fire, and emergency departments. Anyone who wonders if the student EMTs are the “real deal” should be convinced by the fact that the professional ambulance services in Boston and Cambridge trust their expertise. As Powell notes, “Sometimes we’ll get a call into Boston, where somebody has called 911, and we’re the only ones who are able to respond.”

Supporting their local partners is one of the reasons Lin felt compelled to stay on campus. “Knowing that the public health infrastructure might not fully be able to support the sudden rise in the number of cases, we want to help make sure our external partners have an extra ambulance to call on if there are no other ambulances left,” she explains. “We’re really trying to make sure that we all come through in this moment.”

Suzanne Blake, director of MIT Emergency Management, is grateful for the contribution they’re making to the community. “Early on, we had discussions with Pro Ambulance, Cambridge Fire Department, and John DiFava, chief of MIT Police, and we decided it didn’t make sense to take a good ambulance out of service during this time,” she says. “This small group of students wanted to stay on campus, and they are helping out a lot.” Emergency Management aims to provide them with whatever they may need to respond safely, including extensive training in PPE, the personal protective equipment that has become so crucial during the Covid-19 crisis.

The students can also rely on Emergency Management for support in managing the stress and responsibility of EMS work. “No matter what we have going on, the members of MIT EMS are always our first priority,” Blake emphasizes. “We care about their mission to serve the community, but more than that, we care about them as individuals.” To give just one example, on a recent Monday, EMS responded to a call to help a patient in cardiac arrest. The next day, an email message went out to the MIT community: Classes were canceled due to Covid-19, and students had to leave campus. Even in the midst of managing the impacts of the pandemic on the MIT community, Emergency Management was able to hold the customary check-in meeting with the EMTs that follows any particularly difficult or stressful call. Powell is impressed with their dedication to keeping the EMTs healthy and safe. “They were dealing with hundreds of things,” he says, “but they still made time to have that meeting.” 

Communication under pressure

For students who want to join EMS, the journey begins with the free EMT-B class offered during Independent Activities Period, which provides intensive training in Basic Life Support (BLS) and qualifies students for National Registry EMT certification and Massachusetts EMT-B licensure. Pro Ambulance provides licensed instructors for the class, and students learn about physiology, pharmacology, acute medical conditions, and the effects of trauma and shock. They practice patient assessment, bleeding control, how to splint a broken bone, and how to stabilize a patient to a backboard — and of course, driving the ambulance.

But delivering medical care in a classroom setting is one thing; helping people experiencing real-life emergencies is another. To start out, less experienced EMTs spend one or two semesters supporting more senior members, taking on more responsibility as they build confidence and skill. Mentorship is key, and crew members quickly learn to rely on each other, as well as their training.

Lin notes that only about half of the EMTs are pre-med, and the service attracts interest from students with a range of backgrounds and interests. Potential recruits are interviewed by current members, and securing a spot can be competitive. An interest in medicine is considered but not required. Instead, recruits are evaluated for their enthusiasm and genuine interest in MIT EMS.

“A lot of the things you learn in EMS are in the field, and ‘softer’ skills end up being very important,” says Clairmont. He emphasizes the importance of connecting with patients, taking an interest in them as individuals. “When you’re not genuinely interested, you often are not as effective,” he notes. “You miss things.”

Of course, a key skill is remaining calm in stressful situations — although, as Powell points out, “it’s very hard to simulate stress. It’s hard to prepare for it.” He emphasizes the importance of good communication, with patients, crew members, and other partners. He says communication under pressure is the biggest skill he has learned from EMS.

Lin remarks on the confidence and decision-making skills she has developed since taking the initial leap to become an EMT. “When I first joined, I was very cautious and very quiet. I couldn’t really make decisions because I was scared of the possible repercussions. Through EMS I’ve become a much more decisive person. I’m very comfortable making decisions. I know that I’m capable of handling whatever may come at me.”

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Top collegiate inventors awarded 2020 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize

Following a nationwide search for the most inventive undergraduate and graduate college students, the Lemelson-MIT Program has announced the winners of the 2020 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize. The program awarded a total of $75,000 in prizes to three undergraduate teams and three individual graduate student inventors. This year’s inventions range from a compostable, biodegradable single-use plastic bag to a new fuel gauging device that accurately detects fuel levels in spacecraft and airplane tanks.

“We are thrilled by this year’s group of winners. The pandemic has not slowed the progress of these students on their inventions. They all know their work has the ability to improve the world, which is why they are still engaged in testing even with social distancing,” says Lemelson-MIT Program Faculty Director and School of Engineering Associate Dean of Innovation Michael J. Cima.

The Lemelson-MIT Student Prize is supported by The Lemelson Foundation. The prize recognizes young inventors who have dedicated themselves to solving global problems in the fields of health care, transportation and mobility, food/water and agriculture, and consumer devices and products. Recipients were selected from a diverse and highly competitive pool of applicants from colleges and universities across the United States. 

“Congratulations to this year’s prize winners, who clearly demonstrate their collective passion for solving big challenges,” notes Carol Dahl, executive director at The Lemelson Foundation. “Their creativity and accomplishments are an inspiration for all students and show us that the capacity to tackle critical problems can be found across our country.”

2020 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize Winners

The “Use it!” Lemelson-MIT Student Prize rewards technology-based inventions that involve consumer devices and products. Winners are:

• Daniela Blanco of New York University, $15,000 Graduate Winner

Nylon is the underlying material for clothing, car parts, parachutes, fire-fighting gear, and many other products, yet the production process results in the release of significant amounts of greenhouse gas. Blanco’s invention allows for more sustainable nylon production that uses 30 percent less energy and 30 percent less raw material, and produces 30 percent less emissions, which leads to a 20 percent reduction in manufacturing costs. This versatile technology combines machine learning and chemical engineering and can be implemented to improve the production of a multitude of chemical products. 

• Neptune Plastics: Marx Acosta-Rubio, Grant Christensen, and Hal Jones of Brigham Young University, $10,000 Undergraduate Team Winner

The Neptune team invented a biodegradable and compostable plastic film that is made into single-use bags intended for shipping and packaging purposes. Their plastic bags are safe for wildlife to eat, can be used as a fertilizer for soil after decomposition, and leave behind no microplastics.

The “Move it!” Lemelson-MIT Student Prize rewards technology-based inventions that involve transportation and mobility. This year's winners are:

• Modal Propellant Gauging (MPG): Celestine Ananda, Bennett Bartel, Nicholas Bartel, Cassandra Bossong, and Taylor Peterson of Carthage College, $10,000 Undergraduate Team Winner

Fuel gauges on spacecraft and aircraft are notoriously ineffective against things like temperature change, fuel chemistry, or sloshing of fuel due to turbulence. Frequent movement of the fuel makes it difficult for the current technology to accurately read fuel levels, putting pilots and astronauts at risk of unknowingly traveling without enough fuel. The modal propellant gauging, or MPG technology, is a way of gauging the amount of fuel left in a tank by using vibrations and frequencies. MPG uses sensors and software to “listen” to the sounds coming from the tank in order to accurately gauge the remaining amount of fuel.

The “Eat it!” Lemelson-MIT Student Prize rewards technology-based inventions that involve food/water and agriculture. The winner is:

• Tzu-Chieh "Zijay" Tang of MIT, $15,000 Graduate Winner

The field of engineered living materials (ELM) is helping to solve water supply problems, yet it presents challenges for widespread real-world deployment due to scalability, cost, and safety. Tang’s invention, Syn-SCOBY, is a new ELM that is a robust synthetic symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast. This invention allows for the sustainable production of engineered bacterial cellulose-based functional materials without the need for lab equipment, and can be used by anyone at home in their kitchen to safely and inexpensively detect and remove pollutants in water. Tang is a graduate student in the Department of Biological Engineering.

The “Cure it!” Lemelson-MIT Student Prize rewards technology-based inventions that involve health care. The winners are:

• Shriya Srinivasan PhD '20 of MIT, $15,000 Graduate Winner

Amputee patients cannot feel their environment through their prosthetic devices, making it difficult for them to interact with objects around them. Srinivasan’s invention, the Cutaneous Mechanoneural Interface (CMI), is a type of surgical process that would create a new organ-like structure for amputees that would allow them to sense what their prosthesis feels, therefore leading to greater mobility and sensation so that the patient’s independence and productivity are not inhibited. Srinivasan, now a postdoc at the Koch Institute, did her graduate work within the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology and the Biomechatronics group at the MIT Media Lab.

• Augeo: Siddharth Iyer, Jasmine Hu, Mathias Insley, Diane Lee, and Eric Lin of Johns Hopkins University, $10,000 Undergraduate Team Winner

Internal bleeding affects millions of people worldwide, and the only current solution is expensive, difficult to use, and does not universally fit every size of blood vessel. Augeo’s innovative, new material can quickly expand to many times its size by filling with blood, resulting in a low-cost, simple solution that permanently stops bleeding in the many blood vessel sizes throughout the body.

Winners were selected based on the overall inventiveness of their work, the invention’s potential for commercialization or adoption, and youth mentorship experience.

Collegiate inventors interested in applying for the 2021 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize can find more information here. The 2021 Student Prize application will open in May 2020.

MIT K-12 invention resources for parents and teachers

Parents and teachers interested in learning more about the 2020 Student Prize winners and how they can introduce a K-12 audience to invention can visit the new MIT Full STEAM Ahead website for free invention education resources and project-based learning activities based on the prize categories in the Week 6 Package: Inventing Matters! More weekly themed educational packages that center around invention can also be found in the Week 2 Package: Stepping into Invention Education.

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MIT Sloan Executive Education pivots to live online courses

Back in early March, before the Covid-19 outbreak was at full tilt in the United States, MIT Sloan Executive Education was preparing for more than 600 participants, traveling from all over the world, to attend dozens of two-day to week-long open enrollment courses on campus between March and June. Like many other schools and programs across campus and around the globe, administrators were forced to make difficult decisions rapidly, and to adjust the delivery model, wherever possible, from on-campus courses to virtual classrooms.

Fortunately, MIT Sloan Executive Education is well-tuned for disruption. Back in 2013, when Hurricane Sandy prevented numerous participants from attending class on campus, the executive education team reacted quickly and launched a new technology platform that connected remote participants to the live classroom by virtue of avatars and a collaborative, “4D” environment. This hybridization of the online and offline experience was a first in executive education at the time.

The MIT Sloan Office of Executive Education has also employed the use of telepresence robotics units for several years, enabling employees working flexible schedules to attend meetings by way of a roaming tablet interface. The robots have also been used by program participants who could not otherwise attend due to disabilities or travel restrictions.

Of course, the extreme nature of the current crisis meant that the most significant digital transformation to date would be required of administrators and of faculty in order to keep courses running.

“While in many ways we were well-positioned for a transition to virtual learning, there was obviously a lot to do in a very short period of time,” says Kate Anderson, senior director at MIT Sloan Executive Education. “We wanted to make sure we could provide a high-quality remote experience that would rival the in-person classroom experience and provide a path forward, not just in the short term, but well into the future. Thousands of executives from around the world count on us each year to help them upskill and prepare them to solve complex business challenges, and we need to be able to ensure they can continue to progress. Perhaps now more than ever.”

Tapping into MIT’s spirit of experimentation

The team moved quickly to adapt short courses taking place in March and April for a live online experience using the Zoom platform. They let participants know that while there were still many unknowns to be addressed, they were welcome to participate in the experiment.

“As the outbreak worsened and the dates drew closer, I received a notification from MIT that both courses I had enrolled in were pivoting to a remote format,” says James Goodnow, CEO of the law firm Fennemore Craig. “The school asked us if we would be interested in attending live online versions of the programs, utilizing Zoom. I was all-in.”

Despite working 18-hour days as he and his colleagues navigated the current crisis, James wanted to find time to continue his professional development. But with the new format, he wasn’t sure that to expect.

“Communication and Persuasion in the Digital Age was first up, and it was actually the very first MIT Sloan Executive Education course to be presented in this format, so several members of the MIT staff were on the line, observing. Honestly, I thought it was great! Much better than expected.” James says the Zoom platform replicated the classroom experience well, providing ample give-and-take and enabling breakout sessions, where participants were divided into small groups for closer interaction.

“In some ways, the online experience was perhaps better than an in-person experience, in particular for this communication course, which I enrolled in specifically to become a better communicator online. I wanted to learn how to be more effective through tech, Slack, email, and video conferencing. Having the course conducted online forced that issue and made the learning highly relevant.”

James also noted other aspects of the format that worked particularly well. “For example, you can see everyone’s face. You’re able to read the room very effectively. We had immediate access to documents and materials that faculty could send through the chat box.” He subsequently completed a second live online course, a two-day program on platform strategy in which several additional collaborative features were used to handle mathematical equations and group work.

“Despite my initial skepticism, many of these features aided the collaboration significantly,” says James. He also added that the online platform made networking not only feasible, but easy to do. “On the second day of Platform Strategy, we all went around and talked about who we are we and what we do, and we picked those threads back up in the breakout sessions. We bonded around the virus situation. The format was conducive to networking in ways I never thought possible.”

Jumping the curve

While the team at MIT Sloan Executive Education was certainly focused on the participant experience, they also had to ensure the MIT faculty were willing, able, and properly resourced to make the leap to a live online platform.

MIT Sloan Senior Lecturer Hal Gregersen was one of the many faculty members up for the challenge, conducting the April session of his two-day course Innovator's DNA: Mastering Five Skills for Innovative Disruption while sheltering in place.

“Changing in-person courses to ‘live online’ sessions has been a Herculean effort by so many here,” wrote Gregersen in a post about his experience on LinkedIn. “I would not have said that I'm grateful for the chance a few weeks ago, but as it progresses, I'm ‘all in’ to the experience. There is something both creative and disciplined about the process (and the latter is not my strength). It's causing me to rethink how ideas can make an impact in uniquely different ways, and that's been a beautiful experience.”

MIT Sloan Executive Education is currently transitioning the majority of their June program sessions to live online formats. While the team looks forward to getting to the other side of this crisis, there is a lot to learn and to be gained while forging a new path for participants and faculty.

“The entire exec ed team is on board — everyone is pitching in and pulling it off,” says Anderson. “We were already pointed in the direction of developing blended and synchronous online learning experiences that could complement our portfolio of on-campus and asynchronous online programs — in particular so that we could meet the needs of participants who might require disability accommodations or are faced with travel restrictions  —but by no means had we planned to accelerate overnight. We’re jumping the curve — and landing perhaps on an entirely different one, which we're very excited and optimistic about.”

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3 Questions: Michael Yaffe on treating Covid-19 patients with acute respiratory distress

During the Covid-19 pandemic, frontline health care workers have had to adapt rapidly to treating patients with lung failure, not only because of shortages of equipment such as ventilators often used to treat severe cases, but also because such approaches are not always effective due to the unique and still imperfectly understood pathology of Covid-19 infections.

Michael Yaffe, the David H. Koch Professor in Science, normally divides his time among his roles as a researcher and professor of biology and biological engineering at MIT, an intensivist/trauma surgeon at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), and a colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve Medical Corps. Currently, he is developing treatments for Covid-19 infections in his laboratory at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT. Additionally, he runs one of the Covid-19 Intensive Care Units at BIDMC and serves as co-director of the acute care and ICU section of Boston Hope, the 500-bed pop-up hospital organized by the City of Boston, Massachusetts in the Boston Convention and Exposition Center. Yaffe shares how he is working to improve outcomes for Covid-19 patients and offers his perspective on how emergency care for acute respiratory distress will need to evolve during this crisis and beyond.

Q: What are the special considerations for Covid-19 patients receiving treatment for respiratory failure?

A: We have known about acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) for decades. It was first recognized in battlefield casualties during the Vietnam War, and was initially called “Da-Nang Lung,” but later was understood to be the result of many different diseases. In ARDS, fluid builds up in the tiny air sacs, or alveoli, preventing the lungs from filling up with enough air, and in severe cases is treated by putting patients on ventilators or other devices that support breathing.

The type of lung injury we are seeing in Covid-19 patients behaves very differently from the traditional type of ARDS, and seems to involve early damage to the cells that line the lungs, followed by intense inflammation. The inflammation leads to a massive increase in blood clotting that affects all of the blood vessels in the body, but particularly the blood vessels in the lungs. As a consequence, even if we can force air into the lungs, it does not get delivered very efficiently into the bloodstream.

In ICUs in Boston, New York, and Colorado, we have started a clinical trial using a clot-busting drug called tPA that we think will help rescue patients whose lungs are failing despite maximal support with a mechanical ventilator. This approach has gathered a lot of attention from other hospitals, both nationally and internationally, who are also trying this approach. The work has now led to FDA approval for this drug as an Investigational New Drug, meaning that it is now approved for use in CIVID-19 ARDS in the setting of clinical trials.

Q: How has your wide-ranging expertise equipped you to address new challenges that you face in the ICU?

A: I have been very fortunate to be well-prepared to help out in this crisis. First, my training as an intensive care physician and trauma surgeon makes me comfortable in a crisis situation. The clinical problems that we are dealing with here  — ARDS, kidney failure, etc. — are exactly within the scope of my regular clinical practice. Second, my Army deployment experience as a surgeon and critical care doctor in Afghanistan and in Central America has made me very comfortable having to make decisions in resource-limited situations. Finally, it has been incredibly fortuitous that much of my lab's work has been in the area of cell injury, particularly cancer treatment-related cell injury, but also in the setting of a condition called systemic inflammatory response syndrome, which is essentially exactly what Covid-19 is. In this area, my lab has been studying the link between inflammation and blood clotting for over a decade, and the basic science insights from that work have now become central to our understanding of Covid-19 lung failure, which no one could have foreseen when we first started that research.

Q: What implications do you think the Covid-19 pandemic will have for emergency care after it is over?

A: I think the implications of Covid-19 for the future are immense. First, I hope the lessons learned from this pandemic lead to a complete re-thinking of our national public health policy (or lack of one, really) and a re-engagement with World Health Organization officials for monitoring the outbreak of emerging diseases.

Second, I think that this crisis may fuel additional research funding in the area of critical care medicine. Before the Covid-19 crisis, very few people had heard of ARDS, or even critical care as a field of medicine, since it does not have the glamour of conditions like cancer medicine or cardiovascular disease. Historically, research in this area has been underfunded, but now that ARDS has taken the spotlight in the news, I am hopeful that the recognition that some patients with Covid-19 are dying because of critical illness and lung failure will lead to new efforts to better understand the link between inflammation, lung function, and innate immunity, including blood coagulation. The Covid-19 crisis will not end when this first wave subsides, but will re-visit us again in the fall. Additionally, other coronavirus diseases as well as viral epidemics are likely to continue to plague us in the future.

One final lesson we are learning from this terrible pandemic is how important it is to treat all of the different parts of the body as a complex interacting unit, and to apply what we know from systems biology and other fields of study to understand how those parts are integrated into one coherent system. The lung failure, kidney failure, and inflammation of the heart that are the hallmarks of Covid-19 critical illness directly reflect how different inflammatory molecules in the blood alter the function of each of these different organ systems. Our traditional medical approach of having separate specialists in infectious disease, pulmonary medicine, renal medicine, and hematology does not work well when all the organ systems are cross-talking to each other. The job of the intensive care physician is to integrate all of the relevant basic biology and pathology of these organs into a comprehensive holistic treatment approach for the patient. Covid-19 has made that need to think across multiple disciplines and connect basic science to clinical care even more apparent.

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CRISPR-based diagnostic chips perform thousands of tests simultaneously to detect viruses

The following press release was issued today by the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

Researchers have developed a new technology that flexibly scales up CRISPR-based molecular diagnostics, using microfluidics chips that can run thousands of tests simultaneously. A single chip’s capacity ranges from detecting a single type of virus in more than 1,000 samples at a time to searching a small number of samples for more than 160 different viruses, including the Covid-19 virus.

Called Combinatorial Arrayed Reactions for Multiplexed Evaluation of Nucleic acids (CARMEN), this technology — validated on patient samples — provides same-day results and could someday be harnessed for broad public-health efforts.

The work appears in Nature, led by co-first authors Cheri Ackerman and Cameron Myhrvold, both postdoctoral fellows at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Paul Blainey, core member of the Broad Institute and associate professor in the Department of Biological Engineering at MIT, and Pardis Sabeti, institute member at Broad, professor at Harvard University, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, are co-senior authors.

“The current pandemic has only underscored that rapid and sensitive tools are critical for diagnosing, surveilling, and characterizing an infection within a population,” said Sabeti. “The need for innovative diagnostics that can be applied broadly in communities has never been more urgent.”

“CRISPR-based diagnostics are an attractive tool for their programmability, sensitivity, and ease of use,” said Myhrvold. “Now, with a way to scale up these diagnostics, we can explore their potential for comprehensive approaches — for example, enabling clinicians to see if patients are harboring multiple infections, to rule out a whole panel of diseases very quickly, or to test a large population of patients for a serious infection.”

Miniaturizing CRISPR diagnostics

To build a testing platform with this capacity, the team turned to microfluidics, adapting and improving on technology developed in 2018 by Blainey's lab. The researchers created rubber chips, slightly larger than a smartphone, with tens of thousands of “microwells” — small compartments designed to each hold a pair of nanoliter-sized droplets. One droplet contains viral genetic material from a sample, and the other contains virus-detection reagents.

“The microwell chips are made like a stamp — it's rubber poured over a mold,” explained Ackerman. “We're easily able to replicate and share this technology with collaborators.”

The detection approach used on the chips is adapted from the CRISPR-based diagnostic SHERLOCK, first described in 2017 and developed by team of scientists from the Broad Institute, the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, the Institute for Medical Engineering & Science at MIT, and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University.

To use the CARMEN platform, researchers first extract viral RNA from samples and make copies of this genetic material, similar to the preparation process for RT-qPCR diagnostics currently used for suspected COVID-19 cases. The researchers then add a unique fluorescent color dye to each prepared sample and divide the mixture into tiny droplets.

The detection mixtures, on the other hand, contain the CRISPR protein Cas13, a guide RNA that looks for a specific viral sequence, and molecules to report the results. These mixtures are also color-coded and separated into droplets.

Thousands of droplets from the samples and detection mixtures are then pooled together and loaded onto a chip in a single pipetting step. Each microwell in the chip catches two droplets. When a detection droplet finds its target — a specific viral genetic sequence — in a sample droplet in the same microwell, a signal is produced and detected by a fluorescence microscope. The entire protocol, from RNA extraction to results, takes under eight hours.

“Uniting these two technologies in a single platform gives us exciting new capabilities to investigate clinical and epidemiological questions,” said co-author Gowtham Thakku, an MIT graduate student in Broad’s Infectious Disease and Microbiome Program.

CARMEN enables more than 4,500 tests on a single microfluidics chip, which can apply to patient samples in a variety of ways using the available fluorescent codes. For example, a single chip could simultaneously test 1,048 samples for a single virus, or five samples for 169 viruses. The capacity can be easily scaled up further by adding more chips: “We normally run four or five chips in a single day,” noted Ackerman.

Multiplexing capabilities

To showcase the platform's multi-diagnostic capabilities, the team developed a strategy for rapidly testing dozens of samples for the 169 human-associated viruses that have more than 10 published genome sequences. The researchers tested this detection panel against 58 patient samples, using multiple chips. They additionally applied CARMEN on patient samples to differentiate between subtypes of influenza A strains and to detect drug-resistance mutations in HIV.

The team also incorporated detection mixtures for SARS-CoV-2 — the virus that causes Covid-19 — and other respiratory pathogens to demonstrate, using synthetic viral sequences, how the assay can be rapidly adapted to detect emerging viruses.

“CARMEN offers both impressive throughput and flexibility in diagnostic testing,” said co-author Catherine Freije, a Harvard graduate student in the Sabeti lab.

The researchers report that the platform's sensitivity is comparable to previously published SHERLOCK assays, and they are continuing to improve and validate CARMEN using additional clinical samples. Coupled with the successful testing data from patient samples described in Nature today, this approach could be readily translatable in the clinic, according to the team.

“This miniaturized approach to diagnostics is resource-efficient and easy to implement,” said Blainey. “New tools require creativity and innovation, and with these advances in chemistry and microfluidics, we’re enthusiastic about the potential for CARMEN as the community works to beat back both COVID-19 and future infectious disease threats.”

Support for this study was provided in part by Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research Bridge Project, an MIT Deshpande Center Innovation Award, the Merkin Institute for Transformative Technologies in Healthcare, a Burroughs Wellcome Fund CASI Award, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) grant D18AC00006, and the NIH (F32CA236425).

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How growth of the scientific enterprise influenced a century of quantum physics

Austrian quantum theorist Erwin Schrödinger first used the term “entanglement,” in 1935, to describe the mind-bending phenomenon in which the actions of two distant particles are bound up with each other. Entanglement was the kind of thing that could keep Schrödinger awake at night; like his friend Albert Einstein, he thought it cast doubt on quantum mechanics as a viable description of the world. How could it be real?  

And yet, evidence keeps accumulating that entanglement exists. Two years ago MIT Professor David Kaiser and an international team used lasers, single-photon detectors, atomic clocks, and huge telescopes collecting light that had been released by distant quasars 8 billion years ago to further refine tests of quantum entanglement. The researchers thus effectively ruled out a potential objection, that the appearance of entanglement might derive from some correlation between the selection of measurements to perform and the behavior of the particles being tested.

Yes, entanglement defies our intuition, but at least scientists can keep learning about it, Kaiser notes.

“Schrödinger could only stay up all night,” says Kaiser, meaning that theorists in the 1930s just had “pencil and paper and very hard-thought calculations and compelling analogies” to guide them, but little physical evidence. Today, by contrast, “we have instruments to study these questions in ways that weren’t even possible experimentally or empirically until recently.”

Now Kaiser, a professor of physics at MIT and the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science in MIT’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society, has written a new history of the subject, “Quantum Legacies: Dispatches from an Uncertain World,” published this month by the University of Chicago Press. Moving between vignettes of key physicists, original research about the growth of the field, and accounts of his own work in cosmology, Kaiser emphasizes the vast changes in the field over time.

“There have been really quite dramatic shifts in the fortunes of the discipline,” says Kaiser, who says he aimed to present readers with “a different kind of story, with different through-lines, over a very turbulent century.”

The physics boom and the crash

Indeed, many histories of quantum physics have been telescopic in form, focusing on the field’s most well-known stars: the foundational quantum theorists Niels Bohr, Paul Dirac, Werner Heisenberg, and Schrödinger, with Einstein usually featured as a famous quantum skeptic. Before the physics community was thrown into turmoil by world war, these scientists developed quantum mechanics and identified its most baffling features — including entanglement and the uncertainty principle (the trade-off in accuracy when measuring things like the position and momentum of a particle).

We still struggle to interpret these concepts, but much else has changed. In particular, Kaiser emphasizes, physics witnessed a quarter-century of unprecedented growth starting in the 1940s, especially when students flooded back into America’s universities after World War II.

“We trained more people in physics in that quarter-century after the war than had previously been trained, cumulatively, since the dawn of time,” Kaiser says of this growth phase.

Meanwhile, massive particle colliders changed the methods of physics and yielded new knowledge about subatomic structures. Huge teams collaborated on experiments, strictly intent on grinding out empirical advances. More people than ever were becoming physicists, but seemingly fewer than ever pondered the “philosophical” problems raised by quantum physics, which became unfashionable.

“It was more than a pendulum swing,” Kaiser says. “Physics saw these quite dramatic shifts in what even counted as a real question.”

Kaiser carefully documents this shift through close readings of physics textbooks, showing how an ethos of pragmatic calculation became dominant. Textbook authors, he adds, are “always making a range of value judgements: What’s an appropriate topic, what’s an appropriate method? What should we be asking questions about? What is ‘merely’ philosophical?”

And then the physics bubble burst: Funding, enrollment numbers, and jobs in the field all dropped precipitously in the early 1970s, due to a slowing economy and decreased federal funding.  

“Those numbers crashed for virtually every field of study across the academy, but none fell faster than physics,” Kaiser says.

The Tao of large colliders

Perhaps surprisingly, that 1970s job-market crunch helped revive interest in the quantum curiosities of the 1930s. As Kaiser detailed in his 2011 book “How the Hippies Saved Physics” — which grew out of this book project — some key advances toward understanding entanglement came from then-marginal physicists who, lacking fast-track research opportunities, had relative freedom to explore neglected issues. 

Such unconventional thinking soon began to influence teaching as well, Kaiser notes in “Quantum Legacies.” Fritjof Capra’s period bestseller “The Tao of Physics,” linking Eastern religion and quantum mysteries, is known today as a New Age staple — but it landed on academic syllabi in the 1970s, thanks to physics professors eager to lure students back to their classrooms.

Since the 1970s, quantum physics has seen multiple mini-eras zip by. Defense spending spurred a 1980s recovery in physics, but when U.S. Congress killed the Superconducting Supercollider project in 1993, physicists in some branches of the discipline could not generate many new experimental results — until the Large Hadron Collider came online in 2008. Multiple recent academic generations have thus experienced physics as a turbulent discipline, with its fortunes tied to distant politics.

“Sometimes people got caught out of sync, they entered physics during boom times and, through no fault of their own, the opportunities vanished before they got their degrees,” Kaiser says. “And we’ve seen that happen twice in this country in the last half-century.”

So while the likes of Schrödinger could make progress with a pencil and paper, the material conditions of physics matter immensely as far as contemporary progress in the discipline goes.

“The ideas matter a great deal,” Kaiser says. “But the ideas are embedded in a changing world.”

“Quantum Legacies” has drawn praise from scholars; Nobel-winning physicist Kip Thorne of Caltech praises the book’s “remarkable set of vignettes about major developments in physics and cosmology of the past century,” which “beautifully integrate science with human history.” Award-winning novelist Nell Freudenberger notes Kaiser’s “talent for uncovering connections between otherworldly ideas and the social and political worlds in which they take shape,” which, she continues, makes for “a simply spellbinding guide to the mysteries of the universe."

For his part, Kaiser hopes readers will ponder the “doubleness” of scientists — they hope to find eternal answers, despite being bound by their era’s tools and assumptions. And while “Quantum Legacies” explores the lives of some individual physicists, such as Dirac, Kaiser also hopes readers will appreciate how thoroughly quantum physics has been a collaborative enterprise.

“In science there is a tradition of writing about the single genius, but quantum mechanics from day one has required an ensemble cast,” Kaiser says, adding, “When we study institutions, generations, and cohorts, I find that more valuable than thinking about these unattainable geniuses on the mountaintop — which is always a fable, but it’s an especially poor-fitting fable for this set of developments.”

Consider, he says, that more than 15,000 physicists published papers relating to the Higgs Boson — exploring how subatomic particles acquire mass — over a 50-year span. But only after the Large Hadron Collider started running could scientists find evidence for it.

“It makes me think about my own [work] in a different way,” Kaiser says. “What have I not been able to think of, that the next generation will open up? I find that much more exciting, as a human story, as a conceptual story, than focusing on a single lone genius.”

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Studying the brain and supporting the mind

“I’ve always been interested in science from a very young age, and my grandmother was actually a really big influence in that regard,” says Tarun Kamath, when asked about his academic inspirations. “She was a big believer in being very passionate and very good at what you might want to do.”

Kamath is a senior majoring in brain and cognitive sciences as well as a master’s student in biological engineering. As a child, he did sudoku puzzles with his grandmother in the mornings. He received a big sudoku book from her for his eighth birthday, along with encouragement to watch videos of sudoku champions in order to learn from the very best.

But when Kamath was in high school, his grandmother was diagnosed with atypical Parkinson’s disorder, and the “harrowing experience” of caring for a formerly vigorous and passionate woman became inspiration of a different sort, he says.

“My family and I struggled to get access to the care she needed, spending months navigating the Medicaid system to afford her medications. Her doctors prescribed her more pills and patches, and yet when I talked to her she still confused me with my brother, her brother, even her neighbor,” Kamath wrote in a recent scholarship essay. “Maddeningly, from a glance, she seemed healthy, but internally, her mind, her independence, even her personality, was slipping away. I was shocked and frustrated by the inadequacy of available medical options and the difficulty we had accessing them. What was the point of medicine if it couldn’t help the people I loved?”

At MIT, Kamath’s research has focused on neurogenerative disease biology in Bradley Hyman’s Lab at Massachusetts General Hospital, looking at toxic aggregations of the tau protein in Alzheimer’s disease. He has been working in the lab since the end of his first year. The 20-minute bike ride up the river to Mass General has been worth it, he says. “There’s a ton of amazing biomedical research happening around Boston, but what’s really special about a lab is the culture. It’s not just about what work you’re doing but it’s about the people that you do it with.”

The lab has provided him with mentorship, the independence to start new projects, and most importantly, the ability to fail. “Especially as a student, it’s important to be in a place that not only encourages results but is accepting of failure, because 99 percent of science is failure,” Kamath explains. “I got lucky with this lab, and with what I’ve been able to learn about a field that is very personally relevant to me.”

Since leaving campus in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Kamath has been writing his master’s thesis and wrapping up some of his research projects, along with trying to keep his mind and body active. “I've been trying to watch videos to learn about topics I've been interested in but never had time to fully explore. I’m also video-calling and messaging many of my friends who are now scattered, to check in and see how they are all doing,” he says.

Kamath is considering an MD/PhD program after graduation, in part because he wants to continue in research and because working closely with the neuropathology department at Mass General has helped him realize the “importance of the interplay between science and medicine.”

His experiences with his grandmother, along with a key first-year class at MIT, also opened his eyes to the important role of health policy alongside the lab and the clinic. In the class 17.309 (Science, Technology and Public Policy), “we talked about a lot of case studies, and in lots of them people are not communicating effectively,” Kamath explains. “What was really fascinating was learning that yes, there is science, but science doesn’t translate into tangible things that can help people until the policy aspect happens.”

“That’s sort of been a continuing theme of my MIT education, that you come into college with this preconceived notion of how systems work,” he adds, “and that can be small-scale, like how cells work, or it could be macroscale, like how countries work. And then you take classes and you realize that things are just way more complicated.”

Over the summer of 2018, Kamath was an intern in the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Ways and Means, as part of the MIT Washington, D.C. Summer Internship Program. He helped analyze bills and draft memos on methods to reduce fraud, waste, and abuse in Medicare, among other tasks.

“There’s the old joke, that the opposite of progress is Congress, but there are a ton of things happening there. It was very encouraging, the constant back and forth and refining of ideas,” he says. “And from that I’m more willing to hear multiple sides of an argument in general, after that.”

From 2017 to 2019, Kamath served as president of the MIT chapter of Active Minds, a national mental health organization. There had been a chapter of the group at his high school, and he sought it out when he came to MIT “because I resonated a lot with their goal,” he says. Other peer support groups on campus “are sort of first aid for mental health. Somebody has a really stressful day and the peer supporter is there to help them through or to help them find a counselor if the stress is chronic,” he explains. “Active Minds is trying to prevent that day from happening in the first place. We try to encourage an environment in which people are less stressed or if they are stressed, to go talk to somebody.”

College-age students have high rates of mental health disorders but one of the lowest rates of seeking help for those disorders, he adds. “There’s this huge disparity between what people are experiencing and what they tell other people they are experiencing, and so Active Minds tries to bridge that gap.”

Kamath has never forgotten the support he received as a first-year from his Zeta Beta Tau fraternity class father, when he was having a “meltdown” over a differential equations assignment. “I didn’t even have to think about it, I just went to my class father’s room,” he recalls, “We chatted for a while and walked to the 24/7 Star Market to buy a couple of cold brew coffees. That had a big influence on me.”

“I feel supported and encouraged by everybody here and there’s not a barrier to me asking for help. And that’s a culture that I wanted to continue and cultivate my junior year,” by becoming class father himself, Kamath says.

One of the new things Kamath tried out when he first came to MIT was bhangra, the high-energy and competitive Punjabi folk dance. When he came up to the campus for a preview weekend in high school, a member of Mirchi, MIT’s Bollywood fusion dance team, invited Kamath to one of his workshops. Kamath attended, although he had never danced before, and was hooked. He became a member of the MIT Bhangra Dance team for two years.

“I had been kind of afraid of performing, but it’s super-liberating, because in bhangra, it’s all about those seven minutes,” he says. “Win or lose, you put everything you’ve got into those seven minutes that you have on stage to perform, and you have to leave it all behind there. It’s an adrenaline rush!”

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Workforce Education Project details how Covid-19 upends assumptions

A reformed workforce education system might be the key to reversing growing income inequality, according to a new report from the MIT Open Learning Workforce Education Project.

Led by Vice President for Open Learning Sanjay Sarma and Senior Director of Special Projects William Bonvillian, the Workforce Education Project is a research effort to study the workforce education landscape in the United States. Megan Perdue from MIT Open Learning and the MIT Sloan School of Management’s Jenna Meyers co-led the project, which received foundation support from Schmidt Futures. The preliminary report — a second, more detailed report will follow — examines the problems in the current U.S. workforce education system, including disinvestment from the government and employers, as well as a lack of coordination across existing programs, and suggests new models for meeting 21st-century workforce needs. The report also includes working papers that provide backup studies to these findings.

The need to train and upskill American workers will only grow as the country and the world continues to grapple with the effects of Covid-19. The pandemic has impacted every aspect of life for individuals and communities across the United States and the world, and will have far-reaching consequences for the economy, education, and work. It has underscored economic inequality, raised new discussions about what defines an essential worker, and — in a very short time — changed what was considered possible for remote learning and work. Key sectors facing critical transformations in the current crisis, including manufacturing and education, are a focus of the Workforce Education Report, and the coronavirus has sharply accelerated evolutions already underway in each. New sets of workforce skills will be required as a result of these changes; the authors of the report believe that the post-pandemic world will reinforce the challenges and potential solutions identified by their research.

Reforming workforce education

As cited in the report, the chief factor that has contributed to America’s economic inequality is the decline of manufacturing jobs. Between 2000 and 2011, the United States lost a third, or 5.8 million, of its manufacturing jobs. This has closed off a major route to the middle class for those with a high school education or less. “At the same time, the overall workforce is up-skilling as new technologies incrementally enter the economy,” the authors add, noting that quality jobs tend to go to those with college educations. 

But a strong 21st-century skills training system could close this education divide, giving workers the education and opportunities to move into better paying jobs requiring higher skill levels. While colleges and universities have long been considered “largely divorced from the workforce fray,” the Workforce Education Project finds that higher education institutions can, in fact, play a significant role in reforming workforce education. Universities are well-positioned to organize new kinds of delivery mechanisms across secondary schools, community colleges, and other four-year institutions of higher education. They also have the resources to invest in learning science research and develop optimal teaching approaches, making them indispensable to the development of lifelong learning systems. 

The Covid-19 pandemic has forced a massive education experiment: nearly all teaching and learning in America, from K-12 through higher ed, shifted online in the space of a few weeks, and for an indefinite period of time. While this unprecedented moment has presented serious challenges, from outdated technology to mediocre material, the simple fact that instruction has been able to continue is a hopeful sign. 

“Online education has been shown to be our resilient system — there is no substitute now for it,” says Bill Bonvillian. “The coronavirus has given us an opportunity to optimize.” As different sectors begin to grapple with the long-term ramifications of the current crisis, the possibility of enhancing and diversifying workforce skills through remote learning options remains a stabilizing constant — and the need for more robust and coordinated efforts is greater than ever.

High schools and community colleges may provide new models

New models coming from community colleges could play a key role. For example, the report examines a Connecticut school that uses its high-tech manufacturing center not only to train community college students but area incumbent workers and high school students as well, and a Florida school that has developed a short-term certificate program that quickly moves workers from lower-end services jobs into much better-paying higher skilled jobs. 

The Workforce Education Report also examines the possibility of apprenticeships to “create a direct line between the stovepipes of education and work,” particularly for high school and community college students. The success of apprenticeship programs in states like Kentucky, Michigan, North Carolina, Wisconsin, and South Carolina indicates that close collaboration between employers, educators, and the government is crucial to making apprenticeships work in the United States. 

Bonvillian notes that “The American dream promised if you worked hard you could move up into the middle class. That’s a lot less true today. A new workforce education system, which we’ve tried to outline here, is a critical step in restoring that dream.”

With many stakeholders and moving parts, the report concludes, the scale of the workforce education task is immense. However, new technologies and advances in online education — including much of what Open Learning has been developing in recent years, like MITx courses, MicroMasters and other microcredential certificate programs, MIT Bootcamps, and xPRO courses developed with employers — make now the ideal time to begin the work of giving the workforce more agile options. 

Sarma adds, “New online technologies and the new learning science that goes with them let us reimagine workforce education. They can help us democratize education, and workforce training is a leading candidate for change.”

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How could Covid-19 and the body’s immune response affect the brain?

Although the most immediately threatening symptoms of Covid-19 are respiratory, neuroscientists are intently studying the pandemic from the perspective of the central nervous system. Clinical research and case reports provide mounting evidence of impacts on the brain.

To get ahead of the possible long-term neurological problems from infection, multiple labs in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT have begun pursuing research to determine whether and how it affects the brain, either directly or via the body’s heightened immune response. If it indeed does, that would be consistent with a history of reports that infections and immune system activity elsewhere in the body may have long-term impacts on mental health.

While some scientists, for instance, suspect a role for infectious diseases in neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson’s disease or dementias, Picower Institute Member Gloria Choi and Harvard University immunologist Jun Huh have meticulously traced the pathway by which infection in a pregnant mother can lead to autism-like symptoms in her child and how, counterintuitively, infection in people with some autism spectrum disorders can temporarily mitigate behavioral symptoms. With deep expertise in neuro-immune interactions, as well as in the neural systems underlying the sense of smell, which is reported to be lost in some Covid-19 patients, Choi is planning several collaborative coronavirus studies.

“With these various suspected neurological symptoms, if we can determine the underlying mechanisms by which the immune system affects the nervous system upon the infection with SARS-CoV-2 or related viruses, then the next time the pandemic comes we can be prepared to intervene,” says Choi, Samuel A. Goldblith Career Development Assistant Professor of Applied Biology in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.

Like Choi, Picower Professor Li-Huei Tsai is also planning studies of the neurological impact of Covid-19. Tsai’s studies of Alzheimer’s disease include investigation of the blood-brain barrier, which tightly gates what goes into and out of the brain through the circulatory system. Technologies that her lab is developing with collaborators including MIT Institute Professor Robert Langer put the team in a unique position to assess whether and how coronavirus infection might overrun or evade that safeguard.

“It is critical to know how the coronavirus might affect the brain,” Tsai says. “We are eager to bring our technology to bear on that question.”

Neuro-immune interactions

Choi is considering three lines of coronavirus research. Together with Picower Institute colleagues Newton Professor Mriganka Sur and Assistant Professor Kwanghun Chung, she hopes to tackle the question of anosmia, the loss of smell. Choi has studied the olfactory system in mice since her graduate and postdoc days. Moreover, a key finding of her neuroimmunology research is that because neurons express receptors for some of the signaling molecules, called cytokines, emitted by immune system cells, those interactions can directly affect neural development and activity. Working in mouse models, the team plans to ask whether such an impact, amid the immune system’s heightened response to Covid-19, is occurring in the olfactory system.

Based on her and Huh’s studies of how maternal infection leads to autism-like symptoms in their offspring, they are concerned about two other aspects of coronavirus infection. One builds on the finding that the risk of offspring developing neurological problems depended strongly on the composition of the pregnant mother’s gut microbiome, the populations of bacteria that everyone harbors within their body. Given the wide range of outcomes seen among coronavirus patients, Choi and Huh wonder whether microbiome composition may play a role in addition to factors such as age or underlying health conditions. If that turns out to be the case, then tweaking the microbiome, perhaps with diet or probiotics, could improve outcomes. Working with colleagues in Korea and Japan, they are embarking on studies that will correlate microbiome composition in patients with their coronavirus outcomes.

Over the longer term, Choi and Huh also hope to study whether Covid-19 infection among pregnant mothers presents an elevated risk of their offspring developing neurodevelopmental disorders like autism. In their research in mice, they have showed that given a particular maternal microbiome composition, immune cells in pregnant mice expressed elevated levels of the cytokine IL-17a. The molecule directly influenced fetal brain development, causing neural circuits governing autism-like behavioral symptoms to develop improperly. The pair aim to assess whether that could happen with coronavirus.

Covid-19 access to the brain

A major question is whether and how the SARS-CoV-2 virus can reach the central nervous system. Tsai’s lab may be able to find out using an advanced laboratory model of the blood-brain barrier (BBB), whose development has been led by postdoc Joel Blanchard. In a study in press, he has shown that the model made of human astrocytes, brain endothelial cells, and pericytes cultured from induced pluripotent stem cells closely mirrors properties of the natural BBB, such as permeability. In collaboration with Langer, the team is integrating the model with induced pluripotent stem cell-derived cultures of neurons and other crucial brain support cells, like microglia and oligodendrocytes, on a chip (called a “miBrain” chip) to provide a sophisticated and integrated testbed of brain cell and cerebral vascular interaction.

With the miBrain chip platform Tsai’s lab plans several experiments to better understand how the virus may put the brain at risk. In one, they can culture miBrain chips from a variety of individuals to see whether the virus is able to permeate the BBB equally or differently in those personalized models. They can also test another means of viral entry into the brain — whether the body’s immune system response (a so-called “cytokine storm”) increases the BBB’s permeability — by using blood serum from Covid-19 patients in the miBrainChip model.

Yet another way the virus might spread in the nervous system is from neuron to neuron via their connections called synapses. With cultures of thousands of neurons, the miBrain chip platform could help them determine whether that’s the case, and whether specific kinds of neurons are more susceptible to becoming such conduits.

Finally, there may be genetic differences that increase susceptibility to viral entry to the brain. Using technologies like CRISPR/Cas9, the team can engineer such candidate risk genes into the BBBs to test whether permeability varies. In their Alzheimer’s disease research, for example, they study whether variations in a gene called ApoE causes different degrees of amyloid proteins plaque buildup in the BBB model.

The potential interactions among the virus, the microbiome, the immune system, and the central nervous system are likely to be highly complex, but with the expertise, the tools, and strong collaborations, Picower Institute researchers see ways to help illuminate the possible neurological effects of coronavirus infection.

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