A deep look at how financial markets are designed

Financial markets are fast-moving, complex, and opaque. Even the U.S. stock market is fragmented into an array of competing exchanges and a set of proprietary “dark pools” run by financial firms. Meanwhile, high-frequency traders zoom around buying and selling stocks at speeds other investors cannot match.

Yet stocks represent a relatively transparent investment compared to many types of bonds, derivatives, and commodities. So when the financial sector melted down in 2007-08, it led to a wave of reforms as regulators sought to rationalize markets.

But every financial market, reformed or not, has its quirks, making them all ripe for scholars to scrutinize. That’s what Haoxiang Zhu does. The Gordon Y. Billard Professor of Management and Finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management is an expert on how market design and structure influence asset prices and investors. Over the last decade, his detailed theoretical and empirical studies have illuminated market behavior and gained an audience — scholars, traders, and policymakers — interested in how markets can be structured.

“When we need to reform markets, what should we do?” asks Zhu. “To the extent that something is not done perfectly, how can we refine it? These are very concrete problems and I want my research to shed light directly on them.”

One award-winning paper Zhu co-wrote in 2017 shows how transparent, reliable benchmark prices help investors efficiently identify acceptable costs and dealers in many large markets. For instance, in 2012, LIBOR, the interest-rate benchmark applied to hundreds of trillions of dollars in derivatives, was shown to have had price-manipulation problems. Zhu’s work emphasizes the value of having robust benchmarks (as post-2012 reforms have attempted to address) rather than scrapping them altogether.

Another recent Zhu paper, published this past September, looks at the way the Dodd-Frank banking legislation of 2010 has changed the trading of some credit default swaps in the U.S. — by using centralized mechanisms to connect investors and dealers, instead of the one-on-one “over-the-counter” market. The new design has been working well, the paper finds, but still has room to improve; investors still have no easy ways to trade among themselves without dealer intermediation. Additional market-design changes could address these issues.

Many of Zhu’s results are nuanced: One 2014 paper he wrote about the stock market suggests that privately-run dark pools may unexpectedly help price discovery by siphoning off lower-information traders, while better-informed traders help determine prices on the bigger exchanges. And a 2017 study he co-authored about the optimal trading frequency of stocks finds that when it comes to setting new prices, smaller-cap companies should likely be traded less frequently than bigger firms. Such findings suggest subtle ways to think about structuring stock-markets — and indeed Zhu maintains ongoing dialogues with policy experts.

“I think this sort of analysis does inform policymaking,” Zhu says. “It’s not easy to do evidence-based rulemaking. It’s costly to discover evidence, it takes time.”

Solving one problem at a time

Zhu did not fully develop his interest in finance and markets until after his college days. As an undergraduate at Oxford University, he studied mathematics and computer science, graduating in 2006. Then Zhu got a job for a year at Lehman Brothers, the once-flourishing investment bank. He departed in 2007, a year before Lehman imploded; it had become overleveraged, borrowing massively to fund an array of bad bets.

“Fortunately, I left early,” says Zhu. Still, his short time working in finance revealed a couple of important things to him. Zhu found the daily routine of finance to be “very repetitive.” But he also became convinced there were compelling problems to be addressed in the area of market structures.

“I think part of my interest in the details of market design has to do with my industry experience,” Zhu says. “I came into finance and economics viewing it somewhat from the outside. I looked at it more as an engineer would. That’s why I think MIT’s a perfect fit, because of the engineering way of looking at things. We solve one problem at a time.”

Which is also to say that Zhu’s research is not necessarily intended to produce overarching conclusions about the nature of all markets; he investigates the mechanics of separate markets first and foremost.

“It’s hard to get very deep if you start too broad,” says Zhu, who earned tenure at MIT last year. “I would argue we should start with depth. Once you get to the bottom of something, you see there are connections between many different issues.”

Zhu received his PhD in 2012 from Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, and joined the MIT faculty that same year. Along with his appointment in Sloan, Zhu is a faculty affiliate in the MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering and the MIT Golub Center for Finance and Policy.

Among the honors Zhu has received, his research papers have won several awards. The paper on benchmarks, for one, was granted the Amundi Smith Breeden First Prize by the Journal of Finance; the paper on optimal trading frequency won the Kepos Capital Award for Best Paper on Investments, from the Western Finance Association; and Zhu’s dark pools paper won the Morgan Stanley Prize for Excellence in Financial Markets.

Like a start-up

Much of Zhu’s time and energy is also devoted to teaching, and he is quick to praise the students he works with at MIT Sloan.

“They are smart, they are hard-working,” Zhu says. Of his PhD students, he adds, “It is always a challenge to go from being a good student getting good grades to producing research. Producing research is almost like starting up a company. It’s not easy. We do our best to help them, and I enjoy interacting with them.”

And while continuing to study financial market design, Zhu is expanding his research portfolio. Among other projects, he is currently looking at the impact of new payment systems on the traditional banking industry.

“I think that’s really a fantastic area for research.” Zhu says. “Once you have a [new] payment system, people’s payments get diverted away from the banks. … So we basically look at how financial technology, in this case payment providers, siphons off customers and information away from banks, and how banks will cope.”

At the same time, Zhu’s work on market structures continues to have an audience in the finance industry and among its regulators, both of which he welcomes. Indeed, Zhu has written several comment letters to regulators about proposed rules that could have material impact on the market. For example, he has argued against certain proposals that would reduce the transparency of the corporate bond market, the swaps market, and investment managers’ portfolio holdings. But he is in favor of the U.S. Treasury’s innovation in issuing debt linked to the new U.S. benchmark interest rate that is set to replace LIBOR.

“In market design the message is often nuanced: There are advantages, there are disadvantages,” Zhu says. “But figuring out the tradeoff is what I find very rewarding, in doing this kind of work.”

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🌆 Día Mundial de las Ciudades 【31 Octubre 】

Como resultado de la Exposición Internacional de Shanghai 2010, la Asamblea General de las Naciones Unidas en su resolución 68/239 del 27 de diciembre de 2013, designó cada 31 de octubre como el Día Mundial de las Ciudades (CMR).

El Día Mundial de las Ciudades busca promover el interés global en la urbanización y generar cooperación internacional para abordar los desafíos de la urbanización, contribuyendo así al desarrollo urbano sostenible. 

Más de la mitad de la población mundial vive en ciudades y se espera que esta cifra aumente en tres mil millones para 2050.

El sistema de las Naciones Unidas, en particular ONU-Hábitat, las organizaciones internacionales pertinentes, la sociedad civil y todas las partes interesadas pertinentes observan y crean conciencia sobre el Día. 

El tema general del Día Mundial de las Ciudades es 'Mejor ciudad, mejor vida' mientras que cada año se selecciona un subtema diferente, ya sea para promover el éxito de la urbanización o abordar los desafíos específicos resultantes de la urbanización. 

El tema del Día Mundial de las Ciudades 2020 es:

| Valorar nuestras comunidades y ciudades 

Para finalizar nos gustaría dejaros un timelapse de la ciudad de Nueva York

www.mosingenieros.com

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Activist and scholar Angela Davis addresses racism in MIT webcast

Over 2,000 members of the MIT community tuned in for a live webcast Oct. 21 featuring a Q&A with activist and scholar Angela Y. Davis, whose name, for many, has become synonymous with the struggle for economic, racial, and gender justice.

During the conversation, Davis described the United States today as being in another Reconstruction period akin to that after the Civil War, which, she said, “was not only not completed; it was reversed.”

“We’re doing work now that actually should have happened in the aftermath of the Civil War,” she said.

Throughout the discussion, moderated by MIT Senior Associate Dean for Graduate Education Blanche Staton, Davis emphasized the importance of the many past activists who paved the way for their counterparts today, and who she sees herself as bearing witness for. “The work we did did eventually have a transformative effect, and can allow us to embrace a very different kind of future,” said Davis, a distinguished professor emerita at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

“Hearing Dr. Davis speak about her life and experiences was truly inspiring. One thing that stuck with me was her take on the balance between the urgency that many of us feel to try to make change now and the patience that is often required to see that change through,” said Joseph Maalouf, a chemical engineering graduate student and one of the founders of the student group Diversity in Chemical Engineering (DICE). “I think her most important point was that everyone, no matter where they are, has the opportunity to contribute toward society’s fight for equality. I think this was a particularly important message for the MIT community to hear, and it is something that all of us as researchers and individuals should recognize and act on.”

In response to questions from Staton and audience participants, Davis also gave advice for young activists, talked about activism at research universities, and described how she became an activist in the first place.

A supportive family

Davis grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, “which at the time was the most segregated city in the country,” she said. She was born into a family “that had already embraced activism.” Her mother, for example, was a member and officer of the Southern Negro Youth Congress, and worked with people like civil rights activist and author W. E. B. Du Bois.

“So I don’t think I really had a choice in [becoming an activist],” Davis said. “From the time I was very, very young, my mother and father pointed out that we had to imagine a different world. That the system of absolute racial segregation in the South was wrong.” She also learned from her mother to “think about possibilities of change, and to always be hopeful. Because sometimes that’s all we have: hope. And I see the work of building movements as being that of creating collective hope.”

Advice for young activists

Davis is always a little reluctant to give advice to younger people because, she said, “I think young people have to have the full experience.” In other words, they have to make mistakes, just like she did. “I think that the mistakes are oftentimes even more important than getting things right the first time because one tends to learn much more from mistakes than one does from events that unfold smoothly.”

However, she suggested that young activists develop a deeper sense of history. “Imagine yourself as being on a historical continuum, with responsibilities to elders who came before [you] and responsibilities to coming generations.”

She also emphasized that activism can be practiced anywhere. “Whatever one is doing, wherever one happens to be situated, there are possibilities of contributing to struggles for equality and justice.”

Davis further encouraged young activists to think more broadly about racism. “What’s perhaps lacking at this moment is a sense of internationalism,” she said. “It’s not simply confining our way of imagining the movement to local situations, or even national, but rather to think about the global situation. People around the world are working against racist police violence, for example; not just those in the United States. Brazil, which “has the largest population of Black people outside of the continent of Africa,” has a long history of fighting against racial injustice.

Finally, she told her audience not to forget about anti-immigrant racism.

The role of the research university

The training that happens at research universities, whether in the field of the humanities, the arts, or the sciences, “is absolutely essential to change,” Davis noted. She encouraged people at universities like MIT to “recognize that they have a political role to play,” particularly now, “when we have political leadership … that completely discounts science, that assumes that science is about one’s opinion.”

She went on to emphasize that the humanities are just as important as science in the development of “individuals who understand the world in a broad sense; who can not only solve the difficult scientific problems, but will have compassion, and will recognize human rights.”

Inspired by “the mouth of a revolutionary”

The Davis webinar was primarily supported by the MIT departments of Chemical Engineering, Materials Science and Engineering, and Biological Engineering.

“Angela Davis has been an icon of activism and engagement, giving a voice to the powerless and drawing attention to injustice for decades,” said Professor Jeff Grossman, head of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, “As an individual, I was grateful to have the opportunity to hear her speak, and as a member of the MIT community, I am hopeful that the words she shared will help us make a better world.”

Professor Paula Hammond, head of the Department of Chemical Engineering, added, “[Angela Davis’s] work has left an imprint on me personally, and has impacted all of us here in some way. She has provided a voice for so many, and reminds us of the importance of community when trying to facilitate change. I look forward to continuing our work to foster inclusion and equity in our MIT community and in our world.”

Davis’ talk also had an impact on students. Asia Hypsher, a senior majoring in chemical engineering, shared, “It was powerful to listen to Dr. Davis speak and give historical context to a movement that seems to be moving much too slow. As a young person, it was encouraging to hear from the mouth of a revolutionary the tangible progress she has seen made in the movement for Black liberation and what she is looking forward to in our future. Her insights on the role of universities and of individuals in this movement was invaluable.”

In introducing Davis, Staton described how Davis personally inspired her and other young Black women in the 1960s and 70s “to have confidence that we too, as a collective, could make a difference. ... On behalf of the many young Black girls ... who were able to find their voices and stand proud because of you, and others like you, we are grateful.”

The discussion was the launch of a diversity series presented by the departments of Chemical Engineering, Biological Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering, based on recommendations from students.  Additional sponsors of the webinar were the MIT Office of Graduate Education, the MIT Office of Minority Education, the MIT Office of Minority Programs, and MindHandHeart.

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Democracy in distress?

When the Cold War ended in the early 1990s, it seemed democracy had triumphed among political systems. But more recently, many democracies have run into a common set of troubles, with authoritarian leaders grasping enough power to create illiberal regimes.

Understanding how this happens was the focus of MIT’s Oct. 23 Starr Forum, an online event hosted by the Center for International Studies (CIS) in which a series of experts evaluated the condition of democracy around the globe.

“Democracies do not die the way they used to die,” said Steven Levitsky, a professor of government at Harvard University, during the virtual event. “Democracies used to die at the hands of men with guns. During the Cold War, three out of every four democratic breakdowns took the form of a classic military coup. … Today democracies die in a much more subtle way. They die at the hands not of generals, but of elected leaders, presidents, prime ministers who use the very institutions of democracy to subvert it.”

Indeed, while in the U.S. democratic difficulties are often expected to create a “constitutional crisis,” this can be an “amorphous term” that fails to address the longer-term political dynamics, noted Susan Hennessey, the executive editor of the Lawfare blog, general counsel of the Lawfare Institute, and a Brookings Fellow in national security law.

“In the United States we often think about it as a discrete precipitating event in which the constitutional order is imperiled and then the constitutional order is restored,” Hennessey said. “The more useful analogy of this moment is constitutional rot. We are unlikely at this point to be faced with a single event that shatters the system. Instead what we’re seeing is a slow erosion over time.”

The Starr Forum is a long-running series of events on global affairs and foreign policy. The discussion was moderated by Richard Samuels, the Ford International Professor of Political Science at MIT and director of CIS.

Friday’s panelists were Levitsky; Hennessey, who is also co-author (with Benjamin Wittes) of the book “Unmaking the Presidency” (2020); Neeti Nair, an associate professor of history at the University of Virginia, who is the author of “Changing Homelands: Hindu Politics and the Partition of India” (2011); and Daniel Ziblatt, also a professor of government at Harvard University and co-author, with Levitsky, of the book “How Democracies Die” (2018).

In his introductory remarks, Samuels noted that “elected leaders routinely have subverted democratic institutions and allowed democracies to slide into authoritarianism. … It behooves us to understand why. And it behooves us to understand how.”

Levitsky suggested that “slide” typically has three stages. First an “elected autocrat” will start “capturing the referees,” that is, changing personnel in law enforcement, courts, intelligence agencies, tax agencies, and more. Then, with loyalists wielding government powers, autocrats sideline opposition figures. Finally, autocrats “change the playing field” of electoral politics, through new rules about gerrymandering, campaign finance, and media access, among other things.

In those polities, what emerges is “competitive authoritarianism,” Levitsky said, where “the playing field is pretty heavily skewed against the opposition.” Looking around the globe, he added, “Hungary is a clear case. Venezuela, maybe Poland, maybe India, hopefully not the United States.” In his view, this outcome usually happens either when populists achieve significant electoral majorities without feeling beholden to democracy — such as current and past regimes in Peru, Venezuela, Turkey, and Ecuador — or when political factions convince themselves they must limit democracy to retain power.

In the latter case, in the U.S. South following Reconstruction, Levitsky noted, states added a wide range of voting restrictions aimed at African-Americans, including poll taxes, literacy taxes, and property requirements; Black turnout in the region fell from 61 percent in 1880 to 2 percent in 1912.

Still, every situation is different, noted Ziblatt, who focused his remarks on the fall of Weimar Germany. While an “extreme case,” he observed, Germany “looms so large over all of our discussions of democracy” and its safeguards.

“The Weimar experience exposed a deep vulnerability of democracy,” Ziblatt said, namely, “that voters can elect an autocrat to power. Democracy can die at the ballot box.” However, he added, elites can be culpable as well: The Nazi party never had support of more than about 30 percent of voters, but German conservatives made a fateful error by forming a coalition with Hitler, in an attempt to marginalize him.

“When authoritarians come to power, they come into office not on their own, but with the enabling aid of political allies from inside the political establishment,” Ziblatt said. “This is a central lesson of the Weimar breakdown. It was an elite miscalculation.” The same applies to Italy in the 1920s, he noted, where Mussolini supposedly grabbed power through his “March on Rome,” but actually a negotiated agreement with King Victor Emmanuel III gave Italy’s fascists seats in parliament.

“I don’t want to minimize the power of fascist and authoritarian social movements,” Ziblatt said. “They were real, they are real today. My point is simply that when extremists first arrive on the scene and appear to threaten democracy, they should be taken seriously, and marginalized … mainstream politicians must do everything possible to form coalitions, even sometimes very uncomfortable coalitions with parties they may disagree with or dislike, but who accept the basic democratic rules of the game, in order to keep extremists out.”

To be sure, sometimes well-established figures gain power and institute substantial changes too — as Nair noted in her remarks about India and prime minister Narendra Modi, who has oriented recent policy around a Hindu nationalist vision.

In this case, Nair said, the prime minister “does not fall into the prototype of the outsider, who was allowed in to lead the political party by gatekeepers of establishment politicians who should have known better.” Nair added that India now has “spaces where the rule of law has been a cover for extreme lawlessness,” but she concluded on a more sanguine note, looking toward the possible 2023 elections as a moment when the country’s politics might shift again.

“I hold that India, because of its many regional political parties that can and have come together in the past, its enormously diverse and strong civil society, most recently in evidence during protests against the citizenship act of 2019, [and] its independent media … and some of its still independent judiciary, can withstand this latest grave crisis to democracy,” Nair said.

Looking at the U.S., Hennessey emphasized the remarkably broad powers the country’s founders had given the presidency, many of which sustain themselves through norms, such as the tradition of largely depoliticized presidential appointments to key law-enforcement positions, and congressional approval of many presidential appointees.

There has been, Hennessey noted, “a really alarming erosion” of these practices recently. As a result, she added, “the institutions still exist, the processes still exist, we still observe the technicalities of the constitutional system, but they’re hollowed out and they’re stripped not just of their legitimacy, but they no longer fulfill their intended constitutional purpose.”

Next week’s general election, Hennessey observed, will therefore matter in terms of way the executive branch functions, the relationship between the branches of government, and the robustness of the U.S. system as generally practiced in recent decades.

“The election is a pretty blunt instrument,” Hennessey said. “It’s a moment in which we either ratify or reject this sort of vision of the presidency.”

Understanding the significance of elections for the trajectory of democracy itself, in this view, is an important part of active citizenship, given that many of today’s consequential changes in governance around the globe come not from having tanks in the streets, but from leveraging results at the ballot box.

“It happens behind a pretty credible façade of democracy,” Levitsky said. “Many citizens aren’t fully aware of what is happening often until it is too late.”

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Angelika Amon, cell biologist who pioneered research on chromosome imbalance, dies at 53

Angelika Amon, professor of biology and a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, died on Oct. 29 at age 53, following a two-and-a-half-year battle with ovarian cancer.

"Known for her piercing scientific insight and infectious enthusiasm for the deepest questions of science, Professor Amon built an extraordinary career – and in the process, a devoted community of colleagues, students and friends," MIT President L. Rafael Reif wrote in a letter to the MIT community.

“Angelika was a force of nature and a highly valued member of our community,” reflects Tyler Jacks, the David H. Koch Professor of Biology at MIT and director of the Koch Institute. “Her intellect and wit were equally sharp, and she brought unmatched passion to everything she did. Through her groundbreaking research, her mentorship of so many, her teaching, and a host of other contributions, Angelika has made an incredible impact on the world — one that will last long into the future.”

A pioneer in cell biology

From the earliest stages of her career, Amon made profound contributions to our understanding of the fundamental biology of the cell, deciphering the regulatory networks that govern cell division and proliferation in yeast, mice, and mammalian organoids, and shedding light on the causes of chromosome mis-segregation and its consequences for human diseases.

Human cells have 23 pairs of chromosomes, but as they divide they can make errors that lead to too many or too few chromosomes, resulting in aneuploidy. Amon’s meticulous and rigorous experiments, first in yeast and then in mammalian cells, helped to uncover the biological consequences of having too many chromosomes. Her studies determined that extra chromosomes significantly impact the composition of the cell, causing stress in important processes such as protein folding and metabolism, and leading to additional mistakes that could drive cancer. Although stress resulting from aneuploidy affects cells’ ability to survive and proliferate, cancer cells — which are nearly universally aneuploid — can grow uncontrollably. Amon showed that aneuploidy disrupts cells’ usual error-repair systems, allowing genetic mutations to quickly accumulate.

Aneuploidy is usually fatal, but in some instances extra copies of specific chromosomes can lead to conditions such as Down syndrome and developmental disorders including those known as Patau and Edwards syndromes. This led Amon to work to understand how these negative effects result in some of the health problems associated specifically with Down syndrome, such as acute lymphoblastic leukemia. Her expertise in this area led her to be named co-director of the recently established Alana Down Syndrome Center at MIT.

“Angelika’s intellect and research were as astonishing as her bravery and her spirit. Her lab’s fundamental work on aneuploidy was integral to our establishment of the center,” say Li-Huei Tsai, the Picower Professor of Neuroscience and co-director of the Alana Down Syndrome Center. “Her exploration of the myriad consequences of aneuploidy for human health was vitally important and will continue to guide scientific and medical research.”

Another major focus of research in the Amon lab has been on the relationship between how cells grow, divide, and age. Among other insights, this work has revealed that once cells reach a certain large size, they lose the ability to proliferate and are unable to reenter the cell cycle. Further, this growth contributes to senescence, an irreversible cell cycle arrest, and tissue aging. In related work, Amon has investigated the relationships between stem cell size, stem cell function, and tissue age. Her lab’s studies have found that in hematopoetic stem cells, small size is important to cells’ ability to function and proliferate — in fact, she posted recent findings on bioRxiv earlier this week — and have been examining the same questions in epithelial cells as well.

Amon lab experiments delved deep into the mechanics of the biology, trying to understand the mechanisms behind their observations. To support this work, she established research collaborations to leverage approaches and technologies developed by her colleagues at the Koch Institute, including sophisticated intestinal organoid and mouse models developed by the Yilmaz Laboratory, and a microfluidic device developed by the Manalis Laboratory for measuring physical characteristics of single cells.

The thrill of discovery

Born in 1967, Amon grew up in Vienna, Austria, in a family of five. Playing outside all day with her three younger siblings, she developed an early love of biology and animals. She could not remember a time when she was not interested in biology, initially wanting to become a zoologist. But in high school, she saw an old black-and-white film from the 1950s about chromosome segregation, and found the moment that the sister chromatids split apart breathtaking. She knew then that she wanted to study the inner workings of the cell and decided to focus on genetics at the University of Vienna in Austria.

After receiving her BS, Amon continued her doctoral work there under Professor Kim Nasmyth at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology, earning her PhD in 1993. From the outset, she made important contributions to the field of cell cycle dynamics. Her work on yeast genetics in the Nasmyth laboratory led to major discoveries about how one stage of the cell cycle sets up for the next, revealing that cyclins, proteins that accumulate within cells as they enter mitosis, must be broken down before cells pass from mitosis to G1, a period of cell growth.

Towards the end of her doctorate, Amon became interested in fruitfly genetics and read the work of Ruth Lehmann, then a faculty member at MIT and a member of the Whitehead Institute. Impressed by the elegance of Lehmann’s genetic approach, she applied and was accepted to her lab. In 1994, Amon arrived in the United States, not knowing that it would become her permanent home or that she would eventually become a professor.

While Amon’s love affair with  fruitfly genetics would prove short, her promise was immediately apparent to Lehmann, now director of the Whitehead Institute. “I will never forget picking Angelika up from the airport when she was flying in from Vienna to join my lab. Despite the long trip, she was just so full of energy, ready to talk science,” says Lehmann. “She had read all the papers in the new field and cut through the results to hit equally on the main points.”

But as Amon frequently was fond of saying, “yeast will spoil you.” Lehmann explains that “because they grow so fast and there are so many tools, ‘your brain is the only limitation.’ I tried to convince her of the beauty and advantages of my slower-growing favorite organism. But in the end, yeast won and Angelika went on to establish a remarkable body of work, starting with her many contributions to how cells divide and more recently to discover a cellular aneuploidy program.”

In 1996, after Lehmann had left for New York University’s Skirball Institute, Amon was invited to become a Whitehead Fellow, a prestigious program that offers recent PhDs resources and mentorship to undertake their own investigations. Her work on the question of how yeast cells progress through the cell cycle and partition their chromosomes would be instrumental in establishing her as one of the world’s leading geneticists. While at Whitehead, her lab made key findings centered around the role of an enzyme called Cdc14 in prompting cells to exit mitosis, including that the enzyme is sequestered in a cellular compartment called the nucleolus and must be released before the cell can exit.

“I was one of those blessed to share with her a ‘eureka moment,’ as she would call it,” says Rosella Visintin, a postdoc in Amon’s lab at the time of the discovery and now an assistant professor at the European School of Molecular Medicine in Milan. “She had so many. Most of us are lucky to get just one, and I was one of the lucky ones. I’ll never forget her smile and scream — neither will the entire Whitehead Institute — when she saw for the first time Cdc14 localization: ‘You did it, you did it, you figured it out!’ Passion, excitement, joy — everything was in that scream.”

In 1999, Amon’s work as a Whitehead Fellow earned her a faculty position in the MIT Department of Biology and the MIT Center for Cancer Research, the predecessor to the Koch Institute. A full professor since 2007, she also became the Kathleen and Curtis Marble Professor in Cancer Research, associate director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research at MIT, a member of the Ludwig Center for Molecular Oncology at MIT, and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Her pathbreaking research was recognized by several awards and honors, including the 2003 National Science Foundation Alan T. Waterman Award, the 2007 Paul Marks Prize for Cancer Research, the 2008 National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Award in Molecular Biology, and the 2013 Ernst Jung Prize for Medicine. In 2019, she won the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences and the Vilcek Prize in Biomedical Science, and was named to the Carnegie Corporation of New York’s annual list of Great Immigrants, Great Americans. This year, she was given the Human Frontier Science Program Nakasone Award. She was also a member of the NAS and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Lighting the way forward

Amon’s perseverance, deep curiosity, and enthusiasm for discovery served her well in her roles as teacher, mentor, and colleague. She has worked with many labs across the world and developed a deep network of scientific collaboration and friendships. She was a sought-after speaker for seminars and the many conferences she attended. In over 20 years as a professor at MIT, she has mentored more than 80 postdocs, graduate students, and undergraduates, and received the School of Science’s undergraduate teaching prize.

“Angelika was an amazing, energetic, passionate, and creative scientist, an outstanding mentor to many, and an excellent teacher,” says Alan Grossman, the Praecis Professor of Biology and head of MIT’s Department of Biology. “Her impact and legacy will live on and be perpetuated by all those she touched.”

“Angelika existed in a league of her own,” explains Kristin Knouse, one of Amon’s former graduate students and a current Whitehead Fellow. “She had the energy and excitement of someone who picked up a pipette for the first time, but the brilliance and wisdom of someone who had been doing it for decades. Her infectious energy and brilliant mind were matched by a boundless heart and tenacious grit. She could glance at any data and immediately deliver a sharp insight that would never have crossed any other mind. Her positive attributes were infectious, and any interaction with her, no matter how transient, assuredly left you feeling better about yourself and your science.”

Taking great delight in helping young scientists find their own “eureka moments,” Amon was a fearless advocate for science and the rights of women and minorities and inspired others to fight as well. She was not afraid to speak out in support of the research and causes she believed strongly in. She was a role model for young female scientists and spent countless hours mentoring and guiding them in a male-dominated field. While she graciously accepted awards for women in science, including the Vanderbilt Prize and the Women in Cell Biology Senior Award, she questioned the value of prizes focused on women as women, rather than on their scientific contributions.

“Angelika Amon was an inspiring leader,” notes Lehmann, “not only by her trailblazing science but also by her fearlessness to call out sexism and other -isms in our community. Her captivating laugh and unwavering mentorship and guidance will be missed by students and faculty alike. MIT and the science community have lost an exemplary leader, mentor, friend, and mensch.” 

Amon’s wide-ranging curiosity led her to consider new ideas beyond her own field. In recent years, she has developed a love for dinosaurs and fossils, and often mentioned that she would like to study terraforming, which she considered essential for a human success to life on other planets.

“It was always amazing to talk with Angelika about science, because her interests were so deep and so broad, her intellect so sharp, and her enthusiasm so infectious,” remembers Vivian Siegel, a lecturer in the Department of Biology and friend since Amon’s postdoctoral days. “Beyond her own work in the lab, she was fascinated by so many things, including dinosaurs — dreaming of taking her daughters on a dig — lichen, and even life on Mars.”

“Angelika was brilliant; she illuminated science and scientists,” says Frank Solomon, professor of biology and member of the Koch Institute. “And she was intense; she warmed the people around her, and expanded what it means to be a friend.” 

Amon is survived by her husband Johannes Weis, and her daughters Theresa and Clara Weis, and her three siblings and their families.

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Technique reveals deeper insights into the makeup of nacre, a natural material

Nacre, the iridescent material that lines mollusk shells such as mother-of-pearl and abalone, has long been a prized find of beachcombers and shell collectors, due to the natural beauty and variety of color that can be found therein. But scientists and engineers have also long marveled at and studied nacre; it’s a tough and strong material, composed of alternating layers of aragonite platelets and organic protein-based film. The natural world contains many materials that have evolved over time to optimize strength, durability, and performance. As researchers and engineers look to develop improved and more sustainable building materials, they are increasingly looking to nature for inspiration.

The physical makeup of nacre allows it to withstand considerable amounts of pressure and damage along the platelets without causing major damage throughout the whole shell. It has been supposed by some that more is at play of the individual platelets that allows them such extraordinary strength and durability, but researchers have lacked the tools and processes to dig deeper into the relationship between the crystal orientation and the mechanical properties — until now.

Over the past two decades, the shells have typically been tested for their strength using techniques such as macroscopic bending test, micro-/nano-indentation, and atomic force microscope. Now, MIT assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering Admir Masic, graduate student Hyun-Chae “Chad” Loh, and five others have combined scanning electron microscopy and micro-indentation with Raman spectroscopy and developed a powerful chemo-mechanical characterization method that allows three-dimensional stress and strain mapping through a technique known as piezo-Raman.

“We developed a methodology to extract important chemo-mechanical information from a biological system that is very well known and studied,” explains Masic, whose findings were recently published in Communications Materials. “Correlating micro-indentation and piezo-Raman results allowed us to evaluate and quantify the amount of stress dissipated through the hierarchical structure.”

The new approach to quantifying the mechanical performance of the material is enough to be big news on its own, but during the process, Masic and fellow researchers — whom he credits with much of the work in this collaborative effort — were surprised by the results.

“We first applied these tools to study the strain-hardening mechanism in a few microns scale. However, we noticed that the dissipation of energy was not confined to the brick-and-mortar structure, but was affecting a much larger area than we expected. We expanded our scope of study to a larger scale and found this new toughening mechanism that is related to a mesostructure on a scale of 20 microns,” says Loh. What the researchers found is that stacks of co-oriented aragonite platelets constitute another hierarchical level of structure, which toughens the material as it is stressed.

Polarized Raman, another technique used in this study, helped the team observe what’s known as the crystallographic orientation of the aragonite bricks. Through the investigation of the orientation patterns, researchers were able to elucidate the characteristic length scale of the aragonite stacks and relate it to the crack propagation patterns. The cracks propagated between the aragonite stacks, evincing their mechanical contribution to nacre’s toughness.

“This gave us an opening for potentially explaining what is causing this toughening at the larger scales. Systematic arrangements of crystals can be found within other biomineral materials, such as our teeth, and the micro-texture of the materials directly impacts their function.” says Masic.

Mimicking natural materials like nacre has been a popular strategy for designing new materials. The small scale of their structures, however, poses a challenge for replicating and manufacturing the natural morphologies. “With our discovery, we propose a new biomimicry strategy of simulating nacre’s structure on a 10-micron or bigger scale, instead of the nano level.” says Masic.

It's exciting news for researchers who are exploring new possibilities for synthetic materials inspired by natural design.

This research was funded, in part, by Kwanjeong Educational Foundation.

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3Q: Update on MIT’s Task Force 2021 and Beyond

MIT’s Task Force 2021 and Beyond, charged by President L. Rafael Reif in May and officially launched in July, has been working steadily since the summer to position MIT for a post-Covid future. The 180-member task force is led by Rick Danheiser, chair of the faculty and Arthur C. Cope Professor of Chemistry, and Sanjay Sarma, vice president for open learning and Fred Fort Flowers and Daniel Fort Flowers Professor of Mechanical Engineering.

Danheiser and Sarma spoke with MIT News about the task force’s activities to date.

Q: Why is the work of Task Force 2021 and Beyond urgent — especially at a time when MIT is already so busy responding and adjusting to Covid-19?

Sarma: We know that the world will be different post-Covid — generally, and in higher education in particular. The pandemic has required us to reassess how we teach, how we learn, how we work, what we research, and how we fund it all. 

It has also caused many students and families to reconsider the costs and benefits of in-person education. Finally, it has raised this question: When we are all back on campus, how will we best take advantage of the privilege of being together?

MIT can either lead in shaping this new world, or have it thrust upon us. We choose to lead. To do so, MIT needs to consider with some care the effects, and the opportunities, created by the pandemic.

Danheiser: Covid-19 has forced MIT, like other educational institutions, to rethink its processes and priorities. As part of the Institute’s response, many of us are getting a deep look at systems and practices that were put in place decades ago. 

Faculty are teaching remotely, and as part of that we have discovered what works and what doesn’t. They’ve mailed kits to students’ homes for lab work, created videos to inspire learning on a variety of topics, conducted virtual field trips, and leveraged tools and teaching methods to create new ways to build community. 

Students are interacting remotely — with each other, with faculty, and with other instructors. They’ve created online study groups and a host of ways to connect through Discord and other tools.

What parts of the above should we keep, even when they’re no longer imposed upon us by the pandemic? The task force is considering these questions.

Sarma: A year ago, most MIT staff and faculty came to campus five days a week. Now we’ve realized that much of our work can be done from home. 

This opens new possibilities: Once the pandemic ends, we won’t return exactly to how we had worked before. We have an opportunity now to rethink how we learn and work. We’ll enjoy being together, and be more thoughtful about how we use that time together.  

If we don’t do this work now, we risk returning to our old routines out of habit, rather than consciously creating new practices that leverage all that we’ve learned.

Q: How has the task force been gathering information and formulating proposals? What are the next steps in its work?

Danheiser: The roughly 180 faculty, students, and staff from throughout the Institute and Lincoln Lab are divided into four workstreams: academic, administrative, finance and data, and community and culture. We also have two advisory groups, one composed of alumni and one composed of students. All of these teams are meeting regularly, usually weekly, to discuss ideas. A lot of work has gone into idea generation at this point.

We launched an idea bank over the summer; dozens of ideas have been submitted by members of the community. We also held a community forum on July 23 to solicit community input.

Finally, task force members have engaged in a number of workshops and plenary sessions, hearing from visionary leaders with a variety of backgrounds. Some have been from other academic institutions, such a team that spoke with us about a satellite campus that Stanford University opened last year, as well as leaders of innovative organizations such as Olin College and Coursera. We’ve also heard from presenters who offered forward-looking perspectives from outside of academia.

Sarma: The workstreams’ initial ideas are due in early November. We’ll spend a few weeks assessing those ideas, before sharing with the community specific ideas that have been surfaced. We plan to follow up with additional forums to solicit feedback.

We’ll then enter a review period during which we’ll weigh the community’s input and refine and prioritize the ideas. We’ll consider questions like: What can MIT afford to do, and how can we raise any additional resources that may be needed? What impacts will the proposed ideas have on MIT? How do they align with our mission?

Starting around February, we’ll focus on developing implementation plans for those ideas that have emerged from this full process as priority items.

Q: What are some emerging themes that are guiding the proposals under development by the Task Force? 

Sarma: We’re preparing for a future that looks different than the past — one where the pace of change and information creation continues to accelerate, and where we need to combine our historic strengths in rigor and innovation with new strengths in interdisciplinary connections, agility, and continuous learning. 

We’re rethinking our use of space, leveraging what we’ve learned about remote teaching, learning, and working during the pandemic — what can be done well remotely, and what needs to be done in person — and examining a revamping of our uses of precious space on campus. And we’re looking at updates to our data, systems, and processes, to serve us well in the 21st century.

Danheiser: We’re looking for ways to continue to strengthen our community, even as it is geographically dispersed. How do we celebrate and transmit the best parts of our culture, while improving our equity and inclusion? How do we promote and institutionalize practices that value differences, recognize contributions, support equity, and unite us all in the mission of MIT?

Finally, we’re looking at ways to broaden the scope and intensity of our holistic education and training. We will emerge stronger from the current disruptions if we can cultivate in each member of the MIT community the ability and passion to work wisely, creatively, and effectively for the better world that we all seek.

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Saudi Arabia faces increased heat, humidity, precipitation extremes by mid-century

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) is at a crossroads. Recent long-term studies of the area indicate that rising temperatures and evaporation rates will likely further deplete scarce water resources critical to meeting the nation’s agricultural, industrial, and domestic needs; more extreme flooding events could endanger lives, economic vitality, and infrastructure; and a combination of increasing heat and humidity levels may ultimately render the kingdom uninhabitable. Facing a foreboding future, how might the nation adapt to changing climatic conditions and become more resilient to climate extremes?

Due to the KSA’s distinctive natural and artificial features, from coastal landscapes to river beds to agricultural areas, decision-makers seeking to design actionable plans for regional and local adaptation and resilience will require projections of the KSA’s mean climate and extreme events at a higher spatial resolution than what previous studies have produced.     

To that end, a team of researchers from the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change and the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology’s Center for Complex Engineering Systems used a high-resolution, regional climate modeling approach to generate mid-21st century (2041–2050) projections under a high-emissions, high-climate-impact scenario. The climate projections carry an unprecedented four-kilometer horizontal resolution and cover the entire KSA, and focus exclusively on the months of August and November. During these months, which represent, respectively, the KSA’s dry-hot and wet seasons, extreme events have been observed more frequently.

Applying this modeling approach, the team projected increasing temperatures by mid-century across the KSA, including five strategic locations — the capital city of Riyadh, religious tourism destinations Makkah and Madinah, the designated future tourist site of Tabuk, and the port city of Jeddah — in both August and November, and a rising August heat index (high heat and humidity) that particularly threatens regional habitability in Jeddah due to an increasing frequency of extreme heat index days.

The researchers also found an increase in the intensity and frequency of precipitation events in August by mid-century, particularly along the nation’s mountainous western coast, suggesting a potential for water harvesting — that could replenish local aquifers and supplement water supplies elsewhere — as a regional climate adaptation strategy to avert future water scarcity. The projections also showed a significant decline in precipitation rates in a sizeable stretch of desert extending from the southern portion of the country known as the Empty Quarter. 

The study appears in the journal Atmosphere.

“The intent of our research was to highlight the potential use of our modeling approach not only to generate high-resolution climate projections that capture the effects of unique local spatial features, but also to enable local solutions for climate adaption and resilience in the region,” says Muge Komurcu, the study’s lead author and a research scientist at the MIT Joint Program.  

The study was funded by MIT and the Center for Complex Engineering Systems at the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology.

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An interdisciplinary approach to sustainable PPE

“Crisis moments can be the best time for collective trust building,” says Jarrod Goentzel, principal research scientist and lecturer for the Center for Transportation and Logistics (CTL) and director of the MIT Humanitarian Supply Chain Lab. “People’s minds are open in unique ways during crisis, so it’s a good time to shape our mindset for moving forward.”

Goentzel is referring to the double crisis that struck the United States earlier this year: the Covid-19 pandemic and the resulting personal protective equipment (PPE) shortage. In response, MIT was agile — collecting, fundraising, and facilitating the purchase of PPE donations (i.e., gloves, face masks, face coverings, gowns, face shields, sanitizing wipes) for front-line workers at MIT and beyond. Now, as campus repopulates with a percentage of students, staff, faculty, and researchers, Goentzel is part of an interdisciplinary research team convened by the MIT Office of Sustainability (MITOS) to “shape mindsets” and identify sustainable procurement and sourcing strategies for PPE going forward. 

The team was brought together as part of the newest campus-as-a-test bed research project through the Campus Sustainability Incubator Fund, administered by MITOS, which seeks to enable MIT community members to use the campus itself for research in sustainable operations, management, and design. By testing ideas on campus, the project uniquely connects researchers and operational staff, allowing for immediate feedback and application of findings at MIT.

“It has been immensely valuable to have the incredible response, support, and partnership of MIT’s research community during this time of crisis,” says Christina Lo, director of strategic sourcing and contracts in the Office of the Vice President for Finance (VPF). “The work of the cross functional PPE donation team led by [Director of Institute for Medical Engineering and Science Edward J. Poitras Professor in Medical Engineering and Science] Elazer Edelman was the impetus that helped kick off a timely decision to centrally source, procure, and provide PPE and other essential supplies to our entire campus community,” Lo explains.

That partnership quickly connected Lo and VPF with the Sustainability Incubator Fund team, who began offering data-driven approaches for strategically securing and distributing products needed by the MIT community. “By sharing knowledge, information and data, we have established a collaborative framework that we hope will continue beyond this current crisis. By bringing together dedicated individuals and experts from across our administrative and research units, we are building community to better serve our community,” she adds.

This operational/research partnership has also allowed the team to work across different scales and time frames. “The beginning of this idea was ‘What are the challenges MIT is going to face due to Covid-19?’ There is the reopening of campus in the near term, but in the long term we need to look at the sustainability dimensions more broadly,” says MIT Sloan School of Management visiting Associate Professor Valerie Karplus, also an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University since September. She, along with Goentzel and CTL Research Scientist and Director of MIT Sustainable Supply Chains Alexis Bateman; graduate research assistant Molly McGuigan; Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS) PhD candidate Mandy Wu; master of applied science in supply chain management students Song Gao and Kelly Sorel; and MITOS faculty fellow and Concrete Sustainability Hub Executive Director Jeremy Gregory round out the research team.

The challenge the team faces is common: In times of crisis, cost and speed of procurement take precedence over the environmental and human health impacts of essential items like PPE. With their forthcoming strategy suggestions, the team hopes to change that. “The real opportunity coming out of this is that by doing all this pre-work, when we go into another emergency, the sustainability impact of a product can be considered a priority without affecting performance,” explains McGuigan.

McGuigan, like the rest of the team, is uniquely skilled at addressing issues related to PPE — her research has focused on supply chains, and as an Army service member she worked on PPE sourcing in Liberia during the Ebola outbreak. Goentzel also supported PPE procurement during that outbreak and, along with Bateman, was most recently focused on supply chains impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic. Karplus, meanwhile, has been active in MIT working groups for both PPE donations and policy.

“One of the strengths of MITOS is the ability to work with partners across campus in sourcing sustainability solutions. Because of this, we can see opportunities for collaboration that might be missed. This was a great opportunity to connect three distinct research groups that consider PPE supply chain to distribution to disposal and pair them with operational partners to develop a baseline understanding and future sustainability solution for MIT. Ultimately, we will share their findings to inform similar PPE procurement to disposal at other campuses,” says Director of Sustainability Julie Newman.

While the team works to identify and craft a strategy for future sustainable PPE procurement policies, they continue to offer real-time feedback and insight to the operational side of MIT. Working with procurement, facilities, and maintenance, the team has applied insights to the newly established MIT Covid-19 Store, a centralized database that allows departments, labs, and centers (DLCs) to order and receive the PPE they need to maintain their operations safely from within MIT. As DLCs request supplies, the team is carefully tracking data, forecasting, and working to generate suggested amounts to help purchasers — many of whom never purchased PPE before — make decisions. “Everyone in procurement has been working at lightning speed to get everything as fast as possible. But we’re able to do analysis for them and to feed that back into the Covid-19 Store to say ‘Do we have enough?’ ‘What projects should we be focused on?’” explains McGuigan.

This process of helping DLCs identify how much PPE they need, the team hopes, will impact behavior as well. “Some of this process is about building trust. It’s designed so that everyone is going through this similar process for purchasing PPE, so those buying can believe others are acting a way that is fair and equitable by design,” explains Goentzel, noting that this behavioral approach allows better allocation of scarce resources while avoiding over-ordering and waste.

Gregory is careful to add that one caveat of providing future strategies is that the challenges of behavior go beyond sheer volume: “We can go through a bunch of research and identify the most sustainable options in this space, but there is a whole other challenge around actually getting people to make those selections,” he says. As the team continues their work, the hope is that findings from this research and the tests in practice will be used to inform decisions on campus as well as far beyond, offering insight to government and institutions at all levels.

The research in the project is ongoing with a final report delivery date in 2021. Students are encouraged to apply to work with the team and further the research via UROP. For campus inquiries about how to participate in this work and/or general questions about this research project, please contact Alexis Bateman.

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3Q: Evaluating skills, education, and workforce training in the US

As part of the MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future’s recent series of research briefs, MIT professors Paul Osterman and Kathleen Thelen highlight the critical role skills, education, and workforce training play in providing pathways to employment for low- and moderate-skilled workers and young adults. The briefs explore the highly fragmented U.S. workforce training system and comparable programs in Europe, in which the private sector is significantly engaged in both the classroom and the workplace. 

In the brief, “Skill Training for Adults,” Osterman, professor of human resources and management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, shares findings from a new original survey describing how working adults obtain their job skills. He identifies significant inequalities and disparities in the job market that an effective training policy can address. Thelen, the Ford Professor of Political Science at MIT, teamed with Christian Lyhne Ibsen, associate professor at Michigan State University School of Human Resources and Labor Relations, for the brief, “Growing Apart: Efficiency and Equality in the German and Danish VET Systems.” They explore examples of Europe’s vocational education and training (VET) systems and compare recent developments in Germany and Denmark, two of the most successful systems of firm-sponsored VET.

Osterman and Thelen speak here on their recent work.

Q: In your brief, you share findings from a survey about how adults obtain their job skills. What does the survey tell us about how skills are acquired and the role of the public and private sectors in training for these skills?

Osterman: The survey you refer to was executed in January 2020, and provides the most complete data available on training provided to adults by their employers and on training that people undertake on their own. Overall, 56 percent of adults received formal employer training in the year prior to the survey and 19 percent sought out skills training on their own.

Whether these rates are high or low is somewhat in the eyes of the beholder, but what is clearly unacceptable is that the rates for non-whites are well below those of whites, and the training obtained by those with less than a college degree is below that of people with a four-year degree. Additionally, people who received employer training were more likely than others to seek out training on their own, and so the disparities were reinforced.

Q: What are the critical elements of the European training model? What are some key lessons the United States can learn from Europe’s vocational education and training systems?

Thelen: Vocational training in many European countries takes place within companies, typically accompanied by a compulsory school-based component offering more theoretical content. Trainees thus acquire skills that are very close to labor-market needs — and apprenticeships sometimes segue directly into employment. At the same time, however, employers who take apprentices are not allowed to train narrowly for their own needs alone. Rather, they are required to train broadly and to standards and occupational profiles decided nationally by committees composed of representatives of business, unions, and the state. These systems are also subject to monitoring and oversight to enforce nationally defined standards in terms of both the content and the quality of training. Such systems ensure smooth school-to-work transitions, while also providing trainees with skills that are certified and portable across the labor market. 

Many U.S. employers are afraid that if they invest in worker training, other companies will simply poach their talented workers. European countries have avoided this problem through soft obligations to train or financial incentives through which companies receive support for their training efforts. In Europe, such solutions are sometimes established at the industry level through business associations that collect levies from their members. In the U.S., one could envision the state playing a stronger role in establishing and financing collective training funds to support firms that invest in training workers.

U.S. companies could also learn from their European peers when it comes to providing input to educational providers about what skills they need. State or local governments could establish forums to bring together educational providers, employers, and trade unions to make sure that local skills demands are met and that trainees acquire the skills they need to secure stable, well-paid employment.

Q: What are some key examples of creative skill-training initiatives that have been successful in the United States, and what policies should we consider to scale these programs?

Osterman: A central argument in my brief is that successful best-practice training models exist. In many respects, we know what works, and hence the issue is how to go to scale. In terms of what works, we know that people who obtain a degree or certificate from community colleges experience significant earnings gains. We also have good models of job training programs such as Project QUEST in San Antonio and JVS in Boston. The core characteristics of these training programs is that they have relationships with employers such that they know what is needed to fill jobs, and they provide support services to trainees for transportation costs, childcare, etc., so that they can complete the training and succeed.

The core challenge is how to diffuse these models at scale. Too many community college enrollees fail to complete their programs, and the job-training programs I describe are small relative to the size of their labor markets. Additionally, many employers do not take either community colleges or high-quality training programs seriously as a source of employees. In the brief, I argue that, in part, the problem is resources: public support for community colleges and training programs has fallen or stagnated in recent years. In part, the challenge is organizational reform, notably encouraging community colleges to adopt best practices and expanding quality training programs and weeding out weak ones. But the deepest challenge is building regional compacts of employers, governments, community colleges, and community groups that come together with a shared commitment to build a real skill development system in their region. I describe good starts in several regions around the country.

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“The Age of Living Machines” honored by the American Institute of Physics

Balance has always been important to MIT President Emerita Susan Hockfield. Whether navigating the administrative challenges of a world-class research university or championing new models of interdisciplinary research — and often both at the same time — Hockfield has a keen appreciation for bringing disparate elements together for the greater good.

Her book, “The Age of Living Machines,” published in April 2019 by W.W. Norton & Company, celebrates the people and science stories behind the “convergence revolution,” which integrated the life sciences with engineering and the physical sciences to reshape the scientific enterprise. The American Institute of Physics honored her writing with a 2020 Science Communication Award, citing the narrative’s breadth of experience and optimism as key elements in “speaking against anti-science and reaching the public.”

“The abiding interest of non-scientists and non-engineers, my target audience, to understand why they might have confidence in a better future was a powerful inspiration,” Hockfield says.

“At a time when it’s easy to feel that confidence in science is at a low point, the enthusiasm of non-scientists and non-engineers for the possible future technologies motivated me to write technology stories they could understand.”

“The Age of Living Machines” describes how researchers from many disciplines, at MIT and elsewhere, are transforming elements of the natural world, such as proteins, viruses, and biological signaling pathways, into “living” solutions for some of the most important — and challenging — needs of the 21st century, such as providing sufficient energy, food, water, and health care for the world’s growing population. The AIP judges note that Hockfield provides “a balance of information without overloading the reader” and call it a “joy to read, both interesting and entertaining.”

AIP has presented its Science Communication Awards every year since 1968 to recognize the best science writing of the previous year. The award recognizes the writers' efforts to improve the general public's appreciation of the physical sciences, astronomy, math, and related scientific fields.

Hockfield is president emerita, a professor of neuroscience, and a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. From 2004 to 2012, she served as the 16th president of MIT, the first life scientist and first woman in that role. As a biologist, she pioneered the use of monoclonal antibody technology in brain research, identifying proteins that affect brain development through neural activity early in life.

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Podcast series from J-PAL North America shares stories behind the impact of summer jobs in the US

The inaugural season of J-PAL Voices: The Impact and Promise of Summer Jobs in the United States highlights the stories behind the impact of a program that has enabled communities across the country to lower violent crime, reduce incarceration, and save lives.

Hosted by J-PAL North America’s Senior Research and Policy Manager Rohit Naimpally, the six-episode podcast explores how summer jobs programs fit into the broader goals of fostering mobility from poverty in the United States.

Summer youth employment programs place youths — many of whom come from low-income families — in part-time, minimum-wage jobs with local government agencies, community organizations, or businesses for the summer. Through these programs, youths can access mentorship, life-skills training, and other services.

Many of these programs are supported by state and federal grants and philanthropic support, and are run in most large cities in the United States. Randomized evaluations in several major cities, including Boston, Chicago, and New York City, have shown that participation in summer jobs programs reduces arrests for violent crime, incarceration, and premature deaths. 

In the podcast, Lawrence Katz, co-scientific director of J-PAL North America and an economics professor at Harvard University, tells us, “Mobility from poverty is broader than one’s income. It also encompasses the opportunity to do something meaningful, to have dignity, and to be respected as a valued member of the community.” 

Over the past year, Naimpally conducted more than 20 interviews with advocates, program coordinators, researchers, and the participants themselves about the impact that summer jobs programs have had on their lives and communities.

“Through this podcast producing process, I’ve been fascinated by the commonalities and parallels across individuals, places, and programs. During my conversation with Angela Rudolph of Chicago’s Department of Family and Support Services, for instance, so much of what she said resonated with what her counterpart Julia Breitman in New York City’s Department of Youth and Community Development had told me,” says Naimpally. “As we build a comprehensive picture of what we know about summer jobs across locations, I am excited to try and link perspectives across jurisdictions to each other.”

“J-PAL Voices is our first foray into podcasting and an opportunity for us to tell the stories behind the research,” says Mary Ann Bates, executive director of J-PAL North America. “Rohit’s conversations with participants, program implementers, and other stakeholders will provide listeners with a holistic sense of what summer jobs represent to communities across the United States. These are the perspectives that are often not as accessible through research papers. We’re incredibly excited to explore this new medium and grateful that so many people were willing to talk to us.” 

Dave Lishansky is the sound engineer and producer of J-PAL Voices.

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GANADOR FAMELAB 2020

Desde que tenemos el blog somos unos fans de FAMELAB, el mayor Concurso Internacional de Monólogos Científicos y que este año va ya por su octava edición 👏👏👏

Y cómo no, no podía faltar nuestro artículo para traeros los mejores  monólogos científicos de este 2020 . 

Un jurado experto en comunicación de la ciencia ha sido el encargado para dar a conocer el ganador. Este año ha estado compuesto por Marián García (Boticaria García), doctora en Farmacia, el matemático Santiago García Cremades y el microbiólogo en la Universidad de Navarra Ignacio López-Goñi.

GANADOR FAMELAB 2020

El ganador de esta edición y que representará a España en la  gran final internacional organizada por el British Council (este año virtualmente por el Covid-19) fue  para el ingeniería Aeroespacial en la Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Alejandro Sánchez, con su monólogo "Marineros del siglo XXI", en el que explica cómo funciona el sistema GPS.

Actualmente vive en Toulouse y está realizado Máster en Navegación por Satélite y Telecomunicaciones.

A continuación os traemos su monólogo ganador:

SEGUNDO FAMELAB 2020

El segundo lugar del certamen Famelab 2020 ha sido para Alicia Peregrina que estudió Ciencias Ambientales en la Universidad de Granada (UGR). Actualmente trabaja como responsable de la Oficina Técnica SO-IAA, que da soporte al proyecto Severo Ochoa y a la actividad científica del Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía. 

Su monólogo se llama “¡Queremos ver las estrellas!” y trata sobre la contaminación lumínica. 

A continuación os dejamos con su monólogo:

TERCERO FAMELAB 2020

El monólogo que nos presenta es “To bet or not to bet”  y trata de un concepto denominado esperanza matemática de un suceso aleatorio, que puede ser útil para valorar por sí mismo que la gran mayoría de los juegos de azar no son más que un timo.El tercer lugar corresponde al matemático por la Universidad de Zaragoza Victor Manero Víctor Manero, que actualmente trabaja como investigador en el Instituto Universitario de Matemáticas y Aplicaciones (I.U.M.A.). 

FINALISTAS

A continuación os mencionamos el resto de finalistas y el certamen completo para que lo podáis ver:

• Laura Díaz estudió Biología en la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid y actualmente está terminando su tesis doctoral sobre la relación intestino-cerebro después del ictus. Su monólogo es  “Tolerando la intolerancia” y nos explica que las intolerancias alimentarias tienen solución.
• Javier Fernández es el más joven de los finalistas con 21 años y estudia Ciencias Políticas y Estudios Internacionales en la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Su monólogo se llama “¿Jornada de reflexión?” y habla sobre los factores que determinan el voto.
• Araceli García es otra bióloga que estudió Biología en la Universidad de Alicante d y actualmente trabaja como investigadora posdoctoral en el grupo de Neuroendocrinología y Patología Hipofisaria en el Instituto de Investigación Sanitaria y Biomédica de Alicante. Su monólogo se llama “Del tamaño de un guisante”donde nos explica la hipófisis.
• Inés Mármol estudió Biotecnología y un Máster en Biología Molecular y Celular en la Universidad de Zaragoza y su monólogo se titula “Réquiem por una célula” donde nos habla, aunque parezca mentira, de dos tipos de muerte celular
• Jorge A. Martín también es otro biólogo Biología y Máster en Investigación en Ciencias en la Universidad de Alcalá. Actualmente estudia el doctorado y se centra en el ámbito de la Entomología Forense.  Su monólogo es “Sexología para insectos” y explica las estrategias reproductivas de los insectos.
• Ramón Nogueras estudió Psicología en la Universidad de Granada tiene una consulta y es profesor de Psicología en la Escuela Universitaria de Turismo Mediterrani y en el Instituto Químico de Sarriá. Su monólogo se titula “El porqué de tu (no) suerte” y habla de la suerte y si ésta existe realmente.
• Daniel Pellicer estudió Biotecnología y un Máster en Biotecnología Biomédica en la Universidad Politécnica de Valencia. Actualmente estudia el doctorado sobre fisiología de enfermedades raras respiratorias en la Universidad de Valencia  y es miembro de la junta directiva de Asociación de Biotecnólogos de la Comunidad Valenciana (ABiVa). Su monólogo se llama “Un baile de narices” donde nos habla de los cilios, unas estructuras celulares que se caracterizan por tener pelos y ser capaces de moverlos.
• Pablo Tristán estudió Bioquímica y un Máster en Inmunología Molecular y Celular en la Universidad de Granada. Actualmente prepara su tesis doctoral con una investigación que lleva a cabo en el centro de Genómica y Oncología (GENYO). Su monólogo se llama “La chica del maíz”y explica cómo nuestras células controlan unas secuencias que hay en nuestro ADN.
• Maja Wrzesien estudió Psicología en la Universidad de París (Francia), es doctora en Psicología Clínica por la Universidad Jaume I de Castellón y estuvo varios años como Marie Sklodowska-Curie reseach fellow en la Universidad de Ámsterdam (Países Bajos). El monólogo que nos trae es “Emociones bajo control”  y habla de la regulación emocional.

Ya, para finalizar nos gustaría despedirnos con una frase que mencionan al inicio del evento:

Sin Ciencia no hay Futuro

Coméntanos cual fue el monólogo que más te gustó!!! 😊👇📃💭

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Artificial intelligence model detects asymptomatic Covid-19 infections through cellphone-recorded coughs

Asymptomatic people who are infected with Covid-19 exhibit, by definition, no discernible physical symptoms of the disease. They are thus less likely to seek out testing for the virus, and could unknowingly spread the infection to others.

But it seems those who are asymptomatic may not be entirely free of changes wrought by the virus. MIT researchers have now found that people who are asymptomatic may differ from healthy individuals in the way that they cough. These differences are not decipherable to the human ear. But it turns out that they can be picked up by artificial intelligence.

In a paper published recently in the IEEE Journal of Engineering in Medicine and Biology, the team reports on an AI model that distinguishes asymptomatic people from healthy individuals through forced-cough recordings, which people voluntarily submitted through web browsers and devices such as cellphones and laptops.

The researchers trained the model on tens of thousands of samples of coughs, as well as spoken words. When they fed the model new cough recordings, it accurately identified 98.5 percent of coughs from people who were confirmed to have Covid-19, including 100 percent of coughs from asymptomatics — who reported they did not have symptoms but had tested positive for the virus.

The team is working on incorporating the model into a user-friendly app, which if FDA-approved and adopted on a large scale could potentially be a free, convenient, noninvasive prescreening tool to identify people who are likely to be asymptomatic for Covid-19. A user could log in daily, cough into their phone, and instantly get information on whether they might be infected and therefore should confirm with a formal test.

“The effective implementation of this group diagnostic tool could diminish the spread of the pandemic if everyone uses it before going to a classroom, a factory, or a restaurant,” says co-author Brian Subirana, a research scientist in MIT’s Auto-ID Laboratory.

Subirana’s co-authors are Jordi Laguarta and Ferran Hueto, of MIT’s Auto-ID Laboratory.

 New AI model detects asymptomatic Covid-19 infections through device-recorded coughs

Vocal sentiments

Prior to the pandemic’s onset, research groups already had been training algorithms on cellphone recordings of coughs to accurately diagnose conditions such as pneumonia and asthma. In similar fashion, the MIT team was developing AI models to analyze forced-cough recordings to see if they could detect signs of Alzheimer’s, a disease associated with not only memory decline but also neuromuscular degradation such as weakened vocal cords.

They first trained a general machine-learning algorithm, or neural network, known as ResNet50, to discriminate sounds associated with different degrees of vocal cord strength. Studies have shown that the quality of the sound “mmmm” can be an indication of how weak or strong a person’s vocal cords are. Subirana trained the neural network on an audiobook dataset with more than 1,000 hours of speech, to pick out the word “them” from other words like “the” and “then.”

The team trained a second neural network to distinguish emotional states evident in speech, because Alzheimer’s patients — and people with neurological decline more generally — have been shown to display certain sentiments such as frustration, or having a flat affect, more frequently than they express happiness or calm. The researchers developed a sentiment speech classifier model by training it on a large dataset of actors intonating emotional states, such as neutral, calm, happy, and sad.

The researchers then trained a third neural network on a database of coughs in order to discern changes in lung and respiratory performance.

Finally, the team combined all three models, and overlaid an algorithm to detect muscular degradation. The algorithm does so by essentially simulating an audio mask, or layer of noise, and distinguishing strong coughs — those that can be heard over the noise — over weaker ones.

With their new AI framework, the team fed in audio recordings, including of Alzheimer’s patients, and found it could identify the Alzheimer’s samples better than existing models. The results showed that, together, vocal cord strength, sentiment, lung and respiratory performance, and muscular degradation were effective biomarkers for diagnosing the disease.

When the coronavirus pandemic began to unfold, Subirana wondered whether their AI framework for Alzheimer’s might also work for diagnosing Covid-19, as there was growing evidence that infected patients experienced some similar neurological symptoms such as temporary neuromuscular impairment.

“The sounds of talking and coughing are both influenced by the vocal cords and surrounding organs. This means that when you talk, part of your talking is like coughing, and vice versa. It also means that things we easily derive from fluent speech, AI can pick up simply from coughs, including things like the person’s gender, mother tongue, or even emotional state. There’s in fact sentiment embedded in how you cough,” Subirana says. “So we thought, why don’t we try these Alzheimer’s biomarkers [to see if they’re relevant] for Covid.”

“A striking similarity”

In April, the team set out to collect as many recordings of coughs as they could, including those from Covid-19 patients. They established a website where people can record a series of coughs, through a cellphone or other web-enabled device. Participants also fill out a survey of symptoms they are experiencing, whether or not they have Covid-19, and whether they were diagnosed through an official test, by a doctor’s assessment of their symptoms, or if they self-diagnosed. They also can note their gender, geographical location, and native language.

To date, the researchers have collected more than 70,000 recordings, each containing several coughs, amounting to some 200,000 forced-cough audio samples, which Subirana says is “the largest research cough dataset that we know of.” Around 2,500 recordings were submitted by people who were confirmed to have Covid-19, including those who were asymptomatic.

The team used the 2,500 Covid-associated recordings, along with 2,500 more recordings that they randomly selected from the collection to balance the dataset. They used 4,000 of these samples to train the AI model. The remaining 1,000 recordings were then fed into the model to see if it could accurately discern coughs from Covid patients versus healthy individuals.

Surprisingly, as the researchers write in their paper, their efforts have revealed “a striking similarity between Alzheimer’s and Covid discrimination.”

Without much tweaking within the AI framework originally meant for Alzheimer’s, they found it was able to pick up patterns in the four biomarkers — vocal cord strength, sentiment, lung and respiratory performance, and muscular degradation — that are specific to Covid-19. The model identified 98.5 percent of coughs from people confirmed with Covid-19, and of those, it accurately detected all of the asymptomatic coughs.

“We think this shows that the way you produce sound, changes when you have Covid, even if you’re asymptomatic,” Subirana says.

Asymptomatic symptoms

The AI model, Subirana stresses, is not meant to diagnose symptomatic people, as far as whether their symptoms are due to Covid-19 or other conditions like flu or asthma. The tool’s strength lies in its ability to discern asymptomatic coughs from healthy coughs.  

The team is working with a company to develop a free pre-screening app based on their AI model. They are also partnerning with several hospitals around the world to collect a larger, more diverse set of cough recordings, which will help to train and strengthen the model’s accuracy.

As they propose in their paper, “Pandemics could be a thing of the past if pre-screening tools are always on in the background and constantly improved.”

Ultimately, they envision that audio AI models like the one they’ve developed may be incorporated into smart speakers and other listening devices so that people can conveniently get an initial assessment of their disease risk, perhaps on a daily basis.

This research was supported, in part, by Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Limited.

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Testing sewage to home in on Covid-19

Covid-19 is a respiratory illness that spreads when infected individuals shed the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) that causes it. While this seems to happen chiefly through close contact and respiratory droplets, evidence has mounted that the disease can also spread through airborne transmission. Distancing, masks, and improved ventilation are all critical interventions to interrupt this spread.

Many suffering from Covid-19 also shed the virus in their stool. With adequate plumbing, this is an unlikely source of virus transmission — but with the right tools, it can also be an unlikely source of virus detection. Viral traces of the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 can be detected in sewage up to a week before physical symptoms occur. This means that wastewater can serve as an early warning signal that Covid is present in a community. In larger communities, however, it can be difficult to further narrow down where infections are occurring. 

A recent paper co-authored by Richard Larson, a professor with the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society at MIT, details two “tree-searching” algorithms that can dynamically and adaptively select which maintenance holes in a community to test to lead to sources of potential outbreak. “The algorithms rely strongly on the structure of the sewage pipeline network,” says Larson. “It’s a 'tree network,' where sewage flows in one direction from its source through a unique path to the wastewater treatment plant.”

Leveraging this tree graph structure, Larson and his co-authors — Oded Berman of the University of Toronto and Mehdi Nourinejad of York University — developed two algorithms. The first is designed for a community that initially has zero infections, and the second for a community known to have many infections. 

Several wastewater treatment plants around the world are testing for coronavirus to estimate the extent of community infection. The first algorithm is designed to respond when wastewater at a treatment plant has just revealed traces of SARS-CoV-2, indicating existence of a new infection in the community. That algorithm usually identifies the city block or even portion of a city block in which the infected person resides.

In the case of more widespread infection, the second algorithm homes in on the most infected neighborhoods or “hot zones,” usually several city blocks.

MIT has recently begun to test wastewater to help detect Covid-19 on campus, with sampling ports collecting sewage from the exit pipes of several buildings. Dorms house dozens, though, and treatment plants serve thousands. With a dorm, a positive result could mean targeted follow-up measures like individual testing and quarantining. With wastewater treatment plants, results can be a useful indicator of community infection, but are often too broad for localized responses. 

Larson thinks the next step could be sequential testing of wastewater from a fraction of a community’s many maintenance holes. “With hundreds of manholes, we could test about six to 10 and find a source area of 100 people or less,” says Larson. “The group to be tested is now the set of individuals resident in the source manhole’s immediate ‘catchment area.’”

Larson’s research could make up for shortfalls in widespread community testing, which continue to be a challenge in many places. Testing thousands of people requires equipment, labor, and other resources, not to mention buy-in from affected communities. Finding newly-infected people can be like looking for a needle in a haystack. “Successful implementation of this algorithm could greatly reduce the size of that haystack,” Larson says.

While the mathematics of the algorithm have been developed and tested with numerous datasets, the operational implementation of the method awaits the invention of a fast, accurate, and inexpensive SARS-CoV-2 test to be done at the maintenance holes. Current viral detection research at MIT and elsewhere is close to developing such a test, at which point the method could be tested in the field. 

“In-field testing may also identify other issues involving the flows of infected sewage in pipeline systems,” warns Larson, “issues to be worked out before reliable implementation can be achieved.”

Still, the algorithm-driven wastewater testing could provide single neighborhoods with an early warning sign of coronavirus infection, triggering targeted follow-up via testing and distancing. This could help minimize disease spread, ease the strain on health systems — and even save lives.

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