Cures for the health insurance enrollment blues

Some countries with national health insurance plans face a basic problem: Not enough people sign up for those programs, and the ones who do tend to have worse-than-average health. That is a public health matter, but also a fiscal issue. When more healthy people enroll in health care plans, and thus pay premiums, those plans gain a better fiscal footing.

What’s a good way to address this challenge? A recently published study in Indonesia led by MIT economists yields new insights, which could apply globally. The study involves a three-pronged experiment in which people received either encouragement to enroll through subsidies, assistance with the signup process, or information about the program’s benefits.

For starters, full subsidies for program participants increased enrollment by 18.6 percentage points, the experiment revealed.

“We do find that subsidies make a difference,” says Benjamin Olken, an MIT economist and co-author of the paper detailing the experiment’s results.

But the experiment also produced what Olken considers an equally important insight: The sheer challenge of navigating the health insurance signup process is a serious issue. Registration assistance alone increased signups by 3.5 percent, but many more people tried and failed to enroll in the program, underscoring how much the administrative capacity of countries — keeping track of people and helping them with the bureaucracy — makes a difference.

“One of the lessons of this paper is the importance of the infrastructure of the state,” Olken says. “Investments in that underlying infrastructure are not the most exciting thing, but they are really critical.”

The paper, “The Challenges of Universal Health Insurance in Developing Countries: Experimental Evidence from Indonesia’s National Health Insurance,” was published in the September issue of the American Economic Review.

The co-authors are Abhijit Banerjee, the Ford International Professor of Economics at MIT; Amy Finkelstein, the John and Jennie S. MacDonald Professor of Economics at MIT; Rema Hanna, the Jeffrey Cheah Professor of South-East Asia Studies at the Harvard Kennedy School; Olken, the Jane Berkowitz Carlton and Dennis William Carlton Professor of Microeconomics at MIT; Arianna Ornaghi, an assistant professor of economics at the Hertie School in Berlin; and Sudarno Sumarto, an economist with the Indonesian government's National Team for the Acceleration of Poverty Reduction (TNP2K) and a researcher at the SMERU Research Institute in Jakarta, Indonesia.

Temporary subsidies, long-term impact

Indonesia introduced its national health insurance policy in 2014. The program completely subsidizes care for the very poor and counts on better-off citizens to enroll and pay monthly premiums, to fund much of the program. The system resembles those in several other countries, including Ghana, Kenya, the Philippines, and Vietnam.

All these countries, including Indonesia, require that citizens enroll in their health insurance programs, but they only lightly enforce that mandate. One year after Indonesia’s program launched, fewer than 20 percent of targeted citizens had enrolled in it, and the ratio of claims to premiums received was 6.45 to 1.

The genesis of the MIT-driven experiment came from discussions between the research team and Indonesian government officials, in an effort to find ways to spur enrollment. The researchers ultimately conducted their three-part experiment with about 6,000 Indonesian citizens, starting in 2015 and then tracking participants’ enrollment status for about 20 months after the experiment ended.

The first arm of the experiment provided both full- and half-size, year-long subsidies to participants, while comparing the outcomes to a control group. While logic would predict an enrollment boost due to subsidies, as indeed occurred, the experiment produced an intriguing twist — once the subsidies end, people who received them are twice as likely to pay for coverage as people who never received a subsidy.

“One encouraging thing about that result is that temporary subsidies have long-term impacts,” Olken says. “People join the program, get their coverage totally for free for a year, and then have to start paying, and many of them continue paying. ... They recognize there’s value in this program.”

A key related point is that by attracting more premium-paying participants this way, the subsidies draw largely healthier people into the program. This helps limit the problem of “adverse selection,” in which people in generally worse health are more likely to opt into health insurance programs, creating fiscal pressure by incurring relatively more expenses for those programs. Adverse selection is one reason health insurance mandates exist, even if they are not always closely enforced.

“Temporary subsidies can reduce this kind of adverse selection,” Olken says.

When failure is an option

Meanwhile, the second prong of the experiment, which offered in-person assistance to people trying to enroll in the health insurance program online, offered its own revealing data points. The researchers discovered that more than half of all people who attempt to enroll do not ultimately succeed.

“I don’t think that’s something anybody exactly knew, because they hadn’t measured it before,” Olken observes.

That suggests the enrollment process itself matters greatly. More broadly, Olken notes, it also suggests the bureaucratic capacity related to these large national programs is a highly important factor in their success. Governments have to correctly identify citizens while also developing methods to help them enroll more smoothly, the researchers conclude.

“Making it easier for people to [enroll online] at home only works if you have the underlying administrative infrastructure,” Olken says. “These various social protection systems are built on a foundation, and part of that foundation is having information about who’s who, and investments in that infrastructure.”

Perhaps surprisingly, the third part of the Indonesian experiment, in which people were provided with information about the program and its benefits, appeared not to affect enrollment rates — even though many people might not know much about the policy in the first place.

“Experience is different than basic information,” Olken says, acknowledging that the latter did not spur people to obtain coverage.

In all, the success of national health insurance plans depend on many factors, from a government’s ability to bear costs to the effectiveness of a country’s health care system. But given how critical enrollment is to the fiscal firmness of such systems, the Indonesia experiment reveals promising avenues of improvement — and indicates the need to study more about enrollment issues in countries around the world.

“We need to understand what can we do about this piece of it,” Olken says.

The study was funded, in part, by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the Korea International Cooperation Agency.

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Education in Latin America after the pandemic

In early 2020, Covid-19 forced countries across Latin America to take measures to keep children, young people, and adults away from schools. Many countries have declared educational quarantines as part of efforts to stop the pandemic, but more than a year-and-a-half later, governments are already thinking, what is next?

While the pandemic may not be over, three MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI) programs: MIT-Brazil, MIT-Chile, and MIT-Mexico, put together a panel of experts to discuss various solutions, explore opportunities, and learn together.

Priscila Cruz, the executive president of Todos Pela Educação, led the conversation around the challenges of basic education within Brazil and Latin America as a whole. Improvements were seen in some states, but not all, and Cruz recognized the “need to universalize equality.” 

Cruz explained that while it is still undetermined what the full fallout from the pandemic will be, it is clear that only a few states in Brazil were able to institute remote learning in March 2020. Most schools have not found a sustainable way to continue education. Throughout most of Latin America, it is still unknown what the full future effects of these school closings will be. However, the pandemic has set back recent progress, and it looks like Brazil may be returning to levels of education from 10 years ago.

To move forward, Cruz proposed both short- and long-term solutions, including reform, sharing resources, and implementing best practices from more successful states. More specifically, she also called for a focus on professional development for teachers and increasing technical and vocational courses to help provide the motivation and direction students who have dropped out will need to return to school. "Can we build a new renaissance?" Cruz posed in her conclusion. "It can be or not be an opportunity to build, or we can deep dive into a dark age."

Sylvia Schmelkes, academic vice-chancellor at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico, addressed the themes of education equity, school dropouts, and deficits in learning as aspects to consider when returning to the classrooms regularly after the pandemic ends. 

Pre-pandemic education in Mexico was unequally distributed. Schmelkes shared that the past year-and-a-half only added to the inequality, emphasizing layers in disparities such as technological and economic difficulties. Some regions and families have more access to resources, goods, and services, playing a big part in the current situation. Only about 60 percent of the students during this time have been able to follow along with remote classes via television or radio. Between May 2020 and May 2021, poverty levels in Mexico increased from 42 percent to 54 percent of the population — 14.6 million people. As such, the magnitude of the education crisis is enormous.

According to Schmelkes, there are numerous impacts that Covid-19 has had on education not only in Mexico, but across Latin America, from percentages of teachers able to be involved with distance learning to support from educational authorities to increased dropout rates. When considering possible ways forward, Mexico, like Brazil, did not have any schools return to in-person teaching through the 2020-21 academic year. The safety measures put into place will put their own strain on education, from lack of access to running water in rural areas to fewer hours of schooling during the day, making it more challenging to curb long-term effects on education.

Schmelkes recommended possible ways forward based around strategy for ensuring equity, with special attention to areas and communities that had no access to education during this time, a focus on teachers, a re-evaluation of educational assessments, and more.

“This list of ways forward would seem that they are not emergency measures for facing the aftermath of the pandemic, but rather reflect what many of us have always wanted the educational system to be: equitable, inclusive, decentralized, warm and welcoming, centered on significant learning, a system that trusts its teachers and supports them with the training they need to achieve learning results in very diverse realities,” says Schmelkes. “Let’s take advantage of this educational tragedy to profoundly transform our educational systems.”

Paula Louzano, dean, faculty of education at Universidad Diego Portales in Chile, addressed the basic challenges for teachers and educators during this time. In the past couple of decades, Chile focused on the crucial role that teachers play regarding the quality and equity of education by emphasizing the importance of having a well-trained teacher in every classroom. Through policy adjustments, there were efforts to try to attract people to the education profession through improving salaries and working conditions. Like other Latin American countries, Chile saw an increase in demand for teachers as student enrollment increased. However, without national standards or regulations like medical or law professions, this demand was being met with a lower quality of educators.

Louzano highlighted how the pandemic has impacted teachers and educators in two major ways. First, with the transition to online schooling, educator programs were no longer able to have practical training in person. Second, there was a decrease in applications within teacher education programs, while health-related fields saw a spike of interest. Despite the lower status and pay, being able to make a difference in people's lives provided positive value and personal satisfaction. It has become harder for instructors to experience this reward.

In the face of these additional challenges within the education industry, Louzano highlighted some positives to build toward. She emphasized working on the relationships between universities' education programs and the local schools in order to better connect with the needs of the school communities while strengthening the practical segments of the educators' training. "The pandemic is not used as an excuse to lower the quality of our teacher preparation programs, but on the contrary, we use this crisis to become stronger," Louzano expressed.

"Everybody is agreed that you shouldn't let this pandemic go to waste," said moderator Ben Ross Schneider, Ford International Professor of Political Science and faculty director for MIT-Chile. "We have to take advantage of this crisis in order to try and improve the education systems throughout the [Latin American] region."

MISTI is MIT’s pioneering international education program and is part of the Center for International Studies within the Department of Political Science and the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.

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Study finds indoor air cleaners fall short on removing volatile organic compound

Consumer-grade air cleaners that promise to reduce indoor levels of volatile organic compound (VOC) pollutants using chemical oxidation can be a source of VOCs themselves, according to a new study led by MIT researchers.

What’s more, the effectiveness of VOC removal varied considerably among the four products examined in the study, professor of civil and environmental engineering and chemical engineering Jesse Kroll and colleagues found. 

The chemical reactions that were supposed to remove VOCs played a minor role in the cleaners’ operations, with physical removal of the pollutants through the cleaner’s absorbents or filters doing most of the work. In some cases, the chemical reactions led to byproducts, such as formaldehyde, that added to the overall pollutant level.

“This work shows that, for at least some consumer-grade portable air cleaners that claim to remove VOCs from indoor air, VOC removal may actually be minimal, and the air delivered may contain additional VOCs and/or oxidation byproducts, some of which are known to be harmful to human health,” the researchers write in the journal Environmental Science and Technology Letters.

The popularity of indoor air cleaners has soared in the past year, as most cleaners advertise the ability to remove particles, including those that contain exhaled viruses such as SARS-CoV-2. The MIT researchers did not test how well the cleaners in their study removed particles of any kind from indoor air.

"During the pandemic, air cleaners have appeared like mushrooms after days of rain, and sadly, some of these air cleaners can introduce chemicals to indoor air that are of greater concern than the chemicals that they might remove,” says Charles Weschler, an expert on indoor pollution at Rutgers University and Technical University of Denmark, who was not an author of the MIT study. “The paper by Jesse Kroll and co-workers is an excellent demonstration of this fact. It is carefully executed, and the results are clearly and thoughtfully presented."

Testing the products

VOCs are emitted by thousands of household products, including paints, solvents, glues, cleaning supplies, pesticides, and a variety of cooking and cleaning activities. They are a significant source of indoor air pollution, and repeated exposure to some VOCs can cause long-term health problems such as cancer or lung, liver, or kidney damage.

Most consumer-grade air cleaners contain filters or sorbent materials that can physically trap VOCs, but some products also offer chemical methods of destroying VOCs, such photocatalytic oxidation or ionization using ultraviolet light, plasma technology, or carbon-titanium-dioxide filters.

“Oxidation of VOCs is what leads to a lot of important pollutants in our atmosphere, such as ground-level ozone or secondary fine particulate matter,” Kroll explains. “So there’s this concern in the atmospheric chemistry community that maybe some of these cleaners that claim to be oxidizing away the VOCs are actually generating these harmful byproducts.”

The products are not regulated, and there are few data on their VOC removal rates, the researchers note. Kroll and his colleagues measure oxidation products that form naturally in outdoor air, “so we wanted to bring the same technology to apply to the indoor case, since we have the capability,” he says.

The scientists bought four consumer-grade air cleaners, ranging in price from $65 to $400, that advertised a variety of physical and chemical cleaning technologies. They placed these cleaners in a controlled air chamber to observe the rate at which they cleaned the air of elevated concentrations of two VOCs introduced to the chamber. The VOCs included the relatively nonreactive VOC toluene (often associated with the smell of paint thinners) and a more reactive one called limonene that gives some cleaning products their citrus scent.

“Huge range” in efficacy

Only two of the cleaners removed both VOCs after 60 to 90 minutes running inside the chamber, while the others removed only limonene. The rate at which the machines cleaned the volume of air of the VOCs varied substantially, the research team found. “There was a huge range in efficacy, with some cleaners essentially unable to remove the toluene at all,” Kroll notes.

Further experiments confirmed that in the two cleaners that did the best at removing VOCs, it was the physical or sorbent filters that did the bulk of the successful removal, with oxidation playing a small or negligible role.

As they operated inside the chambers, the cleaners themselves produced extra VOCs in two ways. The researchers detected hundreds of compounds, including formaldehyde and acetone, emitted by slow “outgassing” of the devices. 

“We probably shouldn’t have been that surprised,” Kroll says. “Because with all consumer electronics, you take them out of the box, rip off the plastic, and then there’s that smell, which is from the VOCs outgassing.”

In the cases where oxidation by the cleaner did degrade the introduced VOCs, the process also created hundreds of byproducts, including formaldehyde and other partially oxidizing VOCs. 

To get a better idea of the extent to which the rates of emissions from the cleaners would lead to poor air quality or health problems, he added, “one would really need to put this into a larger model of indoor air … that involves full house volume, air flow, and all sources of VOCs.”

Passive VOC production by the cleaners is likely to lessen over time, Kroll notes. The byproducts created by the machines in operation are more troubling, since those would probably continue to be formed over the whole life of the cleaners. “But luckily, because some of the cleaners don’t appear to oxidize the VOCs away as advertised, they don’t make that many byproducts. Unfortunately, that also means that they just don’t work that well,” he says.

For consumers looking for a way to remove VOCs in their homes and offices, Kroll adds, “air cleaning using activated carbon filters, a tried-and-true technology that doesn't rely on chemical reactions, is still the way to go.”

MIT postdoc Qing Ye was the lead author on the paper. Co-authors include MIT postdocs Victoria P. Barber and Amy I. H. Hrdina; MIT graduate students Erik Helstrom, Lesly J. Franco, Matthew B. Goss, and Nadia Tahsini; Harvard University professor of chemistry and chemical biology Frank N. Keutsch; Harvard graduate students Joshua D. Shutter, Yaowei Li, and Joshua L. Cox; and Aerodyne Research principal scientists Jordan E. Krechmer and Manjula Canagaratna.

The research was funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the U.S. National Science Foundation.

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Women’s Technology Program 2021: The sweet sound of success

Each year, a new cohort of high school students come to MIT’s Cambridge, Massachusetts, campus to learn not only about STEM, but about their own potential to excel. The Women’s Technology Program (WTP), now in its 19th year, brings high school students with little-to-no engineering and computer science experience to Cambridge every summer for an immersive, four-week exploration of all things engineering. But in summer 2021, the unprecedented public health challenge of Covid-19 forced the staff of the summer program to re-imagine WTP — labs, hands-on classes, team-based projects, and all — as an exclusively online offering.

“This was an enormous challenge, and our instructors and tutors in both curriculum tracks of WTP-EECS and WTP-ME rose to that challenge,” says Cynthia Skier, Women's Technology Program director and WTP-EECS track coordinator. Not only did the WTP staff (graduate and undergraduate MIT students, plus several recent MIT grads and a student from nearby Wellesley College) design a fully virtual curriculum, they also sprang into action to create boxes of materials, tools, and equipment that were shipped to every participating student, enabling them to create fun, hands-on lab projects at home.   

Of course, to nascent engineers, fun looks a little different. “One of my favorite parts of WTP is just that you struggle,” says student Hannah, who participated in the summer 2021 WTP. “Whether it’s because of a line in Python that isn’t working just as it’s supposed to or a circuit that you’ve been fighting with, the goal of WTP isn’t to avoid making mistakes. It’s to make those mistakes and then learn from them.”

To support students as they engaged in productive struggle, the WTP-EECS (electrical engineering and computer science) track facilitated Zoom and Slack channels that students could use to bounce ideas off each other, share videos of their work, troubleshoot each other’s code, and even upgrade each other’s projects, as in the case of student Annie’s Arduino piano — a musical circuit that plays a single note per aluminum-foil “key,” and whose programming was adjusted and improved by suggestions from her “lab partner,” another WTP student across the country. Those collaboration sessions, which often extended late into the night, helped make all the students’ socially distanced summer a bit less isolating. “I loved staying up late working through problem sets with other people, taking random Buzzfeed quizzes, and just getting to know each other,” reports student Angelica. Student Nathalie agrees: “I’ve never really talked to many people who share similar interests as me, but through this program I was able to meet a lot of people my age who shared the same interests.”

Those interests included building a wide variety of fun and functional devices, from musical instruments (some kitted out with volume controls, others with a rainbow of LED lights) to a working heartbeat monitor to fully playable games of tic-tac-toe, Concentration, and Minesweeper. “When I first came in, I didn’t think I would be able to build any of this stuff, but now I’m super excited to continue building,” says student Jennifer L.

The final day of WTP culminated in a Zoom show-and-tell with videos the students had made, many with soundtracks and clever editing. The WTP-ME students presented their team Rube Goldberg machines, demonstrating their newly acquired knowledge of a broad range of topics in mechanical engineering. The WTP-EECS students demonstrated various electronic engineering (EE) and computer science (CS) projects they had made over the four weeks, and talked about their learning experiences. One student, Vibha, even assembled a short EE project in real time for the appreciative audience — carefully donning her safety goggles first. “Ta da!” she said, lighting the project. “Here is the lit-up LED, which once would’ve taken me the whole week to build and which now just took me a few seconds.”

Increased confidence in their own skills is just one of the many benefits these students will take away from their experience in WTP. “Growing up in a school where there’s a lack of STEM opportunities, I was really glad to be part of this great community, and will always regard it as a turning point in my education,” reports student Zainab. “I really appreciate how all the tutors would stay back and help assist well after class.” Her sentiments were echoed by student Tyler: “I can say with 200 percent certainty that my expectations were beyond exceeded. I am so happy that I had the privilege of coming to this program and learning more about CS and EE, which is honestly a newfound passion of mine. I’d like to thank all of the donors at MIT for making this possible.”

Next year, with any luck, students will fill MIT’s classrooms and labs again to discover the joys of engineering in person — in the meanwhile, the students who participated in 2021’s unprecedented WTP will take their friendships, and newfound love of engineering, into the future.

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Solving puzzles of international trade, war, and order

For Mariya Grinberg, the start of a research project often begins with a near-tangible sense of irritation.

“I’d read something, a definition or idea that doesn’t make sense, that seems logically inconsistent — and it prickles,” says Grinberg, who joined the Department of Political Science as an assistant professor on July 1. “I try to fix what doesn’t work, like solving a puzzle.” Her ultimate goal, she says, is to “find patterns I can build a theory around.”
 
As a specialist in security studies, Grinberg’s broad interests “gravitate towards issues of time horizons.” This means, for instance, how long-term planning by states affects their short-term decision-making, and how the anticipated duration of events impacts the way states respond to them. But within this large and sometimes abstract space, Grinberg conducts research on problems situated in discrete domains central to security studies: international order, state decline, and wartime trade.

While she is “all about the theory,” Grinberg’s work taps empirical evidence in archives that amplify her theoretical arguments, and that illuminates contemporary problems of global power jockeying. It is research that challenges some conventional wisdom in her field, and that has yielded provocative findings about how states balance national security concerns against economic self-interest. Her dissertation project on wartime trade between enemies, which she is currently developing as a book, serves as a case in point.

Poking at ideas

Her project was sparked by conversations with fellow graduate students at the University of Chicago about the impact of economic interdependence on the likelihood of conflict between nations. “The basic idea was that if states trade a lot, and war disrupts trade, that states don’t want to fight wars,” she recalls. “Something about that was not working for me, and I began poking at this idea,” she says.

Grinberg was born in Russia to a family of computer scientists. She shares the household aptitude for logical problem-solving, and has translated it into rigorous analysis of questions in her own field. So faced with claims about economically linked states avoiding conflict, she began a methodical interrogation. “There was lots of logic behind the general conception of trade as good, and war disrupting trade as bad.” But, she wondered, “Why should trade not happen during war?”

Grinberg broke this down into a series of related queries: “You don’t want to sell an opponent a gun, which would be bad, because it could shoot me immediately, but what about a vase? While the vase doesn’t have bullets, an opponent could sell it somewhere and maybe buy a gun, which would take longer to do harm. But what if the war ends before the enemy has a chance to buy the gun?”

Working through her arguments, Grinberg established cases where trade could legitimately be conducted during conflict. It was time to turn to the evidence in historical records to find out very specifically what kind of trade occurred in wars, and under what kind of conditions.

Grinberg dug deep in British and French archives, where she found a trove of relevant documents going back to the Crimean War. She found notes from a British advisory committee in World War I that recommended banning the trade of products that could be used immediately in war, as well as banning those that could be used in war before the war was over, and those whose sales generated profits that could be used during war.

Of particular interest to Grinberg: The committee also recommended that if it took longer for the enemy to convert gains from trade into military capability than the war would last, then it made sense to trade with the enemy. “You can trade them something they can turn into a profit over a year to buy a tank, if you think the war will be over in six months,” says Grinberg. “If a state predicts a longer war, then it can add items to the prohibited trade list.”

These wartime trading policies popped up in all the archives she explored. “States do rational things,” says Grinberg. “Trade is mutually beneficial, and it makes sense for both sides to keep trade going, except under certain conditions.” At the start of World War I, for instance, Germany and allied armies frequently repositioned troops as they tried to outflank each other. During this period, merchants from combatant countries were permitted to buy and sell such products as pickaxes, shovels, and spades. But as the war ground on, armies dug into positions, and “all of a sudden, ‘entrenching tools and implements’ as the British called them, were prohibited from trade,” explains Grinberg.

There were more prohibitions for World War II, which participant nations figured would last longer. But Britain and Germany still traded with each other for products they couldn’t get anywhere else: For instance, Britain needed Germany’s precision-manufactured hosiery needles, because the specialized equipment for making the needles was unavailable in Britain for the foreseeable future.

Policy implications

With evidence from this research in hand, Grinberg began thinking through the implications. “The economic interdependence argument relies on the idea that nations don’t trade during war, and with more trading we should see less fighting.” But that’s not how it works at all, says Grinberg. “Given more interdependence and the likelihood of continued trading in conflict, the push is not toward less war, but continued trading during war.”

Her dissertation and a companion paper, “Wartime Commercial Policy and Trade between Enemies” (published in International Security), drive home the argument that “trade cannot be used as a lever to prevent war, because we have too many incentives to trade during war.” This means, for instance, that we should not assume that because the United States trades with another country, there is less possibility of war with that country. Given the tense relations between China and the U.S., two very established trading partners, this seems an important observation.

Aside from this continuing project, Grinberg is fleshing out a paper on state decline, and the strategies states can use to avoid such falls. The project is “Great Britain-centric, with U.S. implications,” she says. Grinberg is also reveling in teaching at MIT, where she can meet colleagues and students face-to-face for the first time since Covid-19 drove instruction online. The academic fit seems perfect to her: “Not that many universities in the U.S. have dedicated security studies programs open to the economic dimensions of the field, and that appreciate both theory and case study methodology,” she says. “I won the lottery here.”

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Study finds the SARS-CoV-2 virus can infect the inner ear

Many Covid-19 patients have reported symptoms affecting the ears, including hearing loss and tinnitus. Dizziness and balance problems can also occur, suggesting that the SARS-CoV-2 virus may be able to infect the inner ear.

A new study from MIT and Massachusetts Eye and Ear provides evidence that the virus can indeed infect cells of the inner ear, including hair cells, which are critical for both hearing and balance. The researchers also found that the pattern of infection seen in human inner ear tissue is consistent with the symptoms seen in a study of 10 Covid-19 patients who reported a variety of ear-related symptoms.

The researchers used novel cellular models of the human inner ear that they developed, as well as hard-to-obtain adult human inner ear tissue, for their studies. The limited availability of such tissue has hindered previous studies of Covid-19 and other viruses that can cause hearing loss.

“Having the models is the first step, and this work opens a path now for working with not only SARS-CoV-2 but also other viruses that affect hearing,” says Lee Gehrke, the Hermann L.F. von Helmholtz Professor in MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, who co-led the study.

Konstantina Stankovic, a former associate professor at Harvard Medical School and former chief of otology and neurotology at Massachusetts Eye and Ear, who is now the Bertarelli Foundation Professor and chair of the Department of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery at Stanford University School of Medicine, co-led the study. Minjin Jeong, a former postdoc in Stankovic’s laboratory at Harvard Medical School, who is now at Stanford Medical School, is the lead author of the paper, which appears today in Communications Medicine.

Models of ear infection

Before the Covid-19 pandemic began, Gehrke and Stankovic began working together on a project to develop cellular models to study infections of the human inner ear. Viruses such as cytomegalovirus, mumps virus, and hepatitis viruses can all cause deafness, but exactly how they do so is not well-understood.

In early 2020, after the SARS-CoV-2 virus emerged, the researchers altered their plans. At Massachusetts Eye and Ear, Stankovic started to see patients who were experiencing hearing loss, tinnitus, and dizziness, who had tested positive for Covid-19. “It was very unclear at the time whether this was causally related or coincidental, because hearing loss and tinnitus are so common,” she recalls.

She and Gehrke decided to use the model system they were working on to study infection of SARS-CoV-2. They created their cellular models by taking human skin cells and transforming them into induced pluripotent stem cells. Then, they were able to stimulate those cells to differentiate into several types of cells found in the inner ear: hair cells, supporting cells, nerve fibers, and Schwann cells, which insulate neurons.

These cells could be grown in a flat, two-dimensional layer or organized into three-dimensional organoids. In addition, the researchers were able to obtain samples of hard-to-obtain inner ear tissue from patients who were undergoing surgery for a disorder that causes severe attacks of vertigo or for a tumor that causes hearing loss and dizziness.

In both the human inner ear samples and the stem-cell-derived cellular models, the researchers found that certain types of cells — hair cells and Schwann cells — express the proteins that are needed for the SARS-CoV-2 virus to enter the cells. These proteins include the ACE2 receptor, which is found on cell surfaces, and two enzymes called furin and transmembrane protease serine 2, which help the virus to fuse with the host cell.

The researchers then showed that the virus can actually infect the inner ear, specifically the hair cells and, to a lesser degree, Schwann cells. They found that the other cell types in their models were not susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 infection.

The human hair cells that the researchers studied were vestibular hair cells, which are involved in sensing head motion and maintaining balance. Cochlear hair cells, which are involved in hearing, are much harder to obtain or generate in a cellular model. However, the researchers showed that cochlear hair cells from mice also have proteins that allow SARS-CoV-2 entry.

Viral connection

The pattern of infection that the researchers found in their tissue samples appears to correspond to the symptoms observed in a group of 10 Covid-19 patients who reported ear-related symptoms following their infection. Nine of these patients suffered from tinnitus, six experienced vertigo, and all experienced mild to profound hearing loss.

Damage to cochlear hair cells, which can cause hearing loss, is usually evaluated by measuring otoacoustic emissions — sounds given off by sensory hair cells as they respond to auditory stimulation. Among the six Covid-19 patients in the study who underwent this testing, all had reduced or absent otoacoustic emissions.

While this study strongly suggests that Covid-19 can cause auditory and balance problems, the overall percentage of Covid-19 patients who have experienced ear-related issues is not known.

“Initially this was because routine testing was not readily available for patients who were diagnosed with Covid, and also, when patients were having more life-threatening complications, they weren’t paying much attention to whether their hearing was reduced or whether they had tinnitus,” Stankovic says. “We still don't know what the incidence is, but our findings really call for increased attention to audiovestibular symptoms in people with Covid exposure.”

Possible routes for the virus to enter the ears include the Eustachian tube, which connects the nose to the middle ear. The virus may also be able to escape from the nose through small openings surrounding the olfactory nerves, Stankovic says. That would allow it to enter the brain space and infect cranial nerves, including the one that connects to the inner ear.

“This article provides very compelling evidence that Sars-CoV-2 infects the inner ear, and may be causally related to the hearing and balance symptoms in a number of patients with Covid-19 infection,” says Yuri Agrawal, a professor of otolaryngology-head and neck surgery at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, who was not involved in the study. “Another exciting advance for our field is the use of 2D and 3D in vitro organoids to observe Sars-CoV-2 infection of the inner ear.  This provides a powerful platform to study the impact of a number of other exposures, including other infections, toxins, and cancers, on the inner ear.”

The researchers now hope to use their human cellular models to test possible treatments for the inner ear infections caused by SARS-CoV-2 and other viruses.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Remondi Foundation, the Nancy Sayles Day Foundation, and the Barnes Foundation.

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Exploring the human stories behind the data

Shaking in the back of a police cruiser, handcuffs digging into his wrists, Brian Williams was overwhelmed with fear. He had been pulled over, but before he was asked for his name, license, or registration, a police officer ordered him out of his car and into back of the police cruiser, saying into his radio, “Black male detained.” The officer’s explanation for these actions was: “for your safety and mine.”

Williams walked away from the experience with two tickets, a pair of bruised wrists, and a desire to do everything in his power to prevent others from experiencing the utter powerlessness he had felt.

Now an MIT senior majoring in biological engineering and minoring in Black studies, Williams has continued working to empower his community. Through experiences in and out of the classroom, he has leveraged his background in bioengineering to explore interests in public health and social justice, specifically looking at how the medical sector can uplift and support communities of color.

Williams grew up in a close-knit family and community in Broward County, Florida, where he found comfort in the routine of Sunday church services, playing outside with friends, and cookouts on the weekends. Broward County was home to him — a home he felt deeply invested in and indebted to.

“It takes a village. The Black community has invested a lot in me, and I have a lot to invest back in it,” he says.

Williams initially focused on STEM subjects at MIT, but in his sophomore year, his interests in exploring data science and humanities research led him to an Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) project in the Department of Political Science. Working with Professor Ariel White, he analyzed information on incarceration and voting rights, studied the behavior patterns of police officers, and screened 911 calls to identify correlations between how people described events to how the police responded to them.

In the summer before his junior year, Williams also joined MIT’s Civic Data Design Lab, where he worked as a researcher for the Missing Data Project, which uses both journalism and data science to visualize statistics and humanize the people behind the numbers. As the project’s name suggests, there is often much to be learned from seeking out data that aren’t easily available. Using datasets and interviews describing how the pandemic affected Black communities, Williams and a team of researchers created a series called the Color of Covid, which told the stories behind the grim statistics on race and the pandemic.

The following year, Williams undertook a research-and-development internship with the biopharmaceutical company Amgen in San Francisco, working on protein engineering to combat autoimmune diseases. Because this work was primarily in the lab, focusing on science-based applications, he saw it as an opportunity to ask himself: “Do I want to dedicate my life to this area of bioengineering?” He found the issue of social justice to be more compelling.

At the same time, Williams was drawn toward tackling problems the local Black community was experiencing related to the pandemic. He found himself thinking deeply about how to educate the public, address disparities in case rates, and, above all, help people.

Working through Amgen’s Black Employee Resource Group and its Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging Team, Williams crafted a proposal, which the company adopted, for addressing Covid-19 vaccination misinformation in Black and Brown communities in San Mateo and San Francisco County. He paid special attention to how to frame vaccine hesitancy among members of these communities, understanding that a longstanding history of racism in scientific discovery and medicine led many Black and Brown people to distrust the entire medical industry.

“Trying to meet people where they are is important,” Williams says.

This experience reinforced the idea for Williams that he wanted to do everything in his power to uplift the Black community.

“I think it’s only right that I go out and I shine bright because it’s not easy being Black. You know, you have to work twice as hard to get half as much,” he says.

As the current political action co-chair of the MIT Black Students’ Union (BSU), Williams also works to inspire change on campus, promoting and participating in events that uplift the BSU. During his Amgen internship, he also organized the MIT Black History Month Takeover Series, which involved organizing eight events from February through the beginning of spring semester. These included promotions through social media and virtual meetings for students and faculty. For his leadership, he received the “We Are Family” award from the BSU executive board.

Williams prioritizes community in everything he does, whether in the classroom, at a campus event, or spending time outside in local communities of color around Boston.

“The things that really keep me going are the stories of other people,” says Williams, who is currently applying to a variety of postgraduate programs. After receiving MIT endorsement, he applied to the Rhodes and Marshall Fellowships; he also plans to apply to law school with a joint master’s degree in public health and policy.

Ultimately, Williams hopes to bring his fight for racial justice to the policy level, looking at how a long, ongoing history of medical racism has led marginalized communities to mistrust current scientific endeavors. He wants to help bring about new legislation to fix old systems which disproportionately harm communities of color. He says he aims to be “an engineer of social solutions, one who reaches deep into their toolbox of social justice, pulling the levers of activism, advocacy, democracy, and legislation to radically change our world — to improve our social institutions at the root and liberate our communities.” While he understands this is a big feat, he sees his ambition as an asset.

“I’m just another person with huge aspirations, and an understanding that you have to go get it if you want it,” he says. “You feel me? At the end of the day, this is just the beginning of my story. And I’m grateful to everyone in my life that’s helping me write it. Tap in.”

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Creating dynamic symmetry in quantum systems

Physicists and engineers have long been interested in creating new forms of matter, those not typically found in nature. Such materials might find use someday in, for example, novel computer chips. Beyond applications, they also reveal elusive insights about the fundamental workings of the universe. Recent work at MIT both created and characterized new quantum systems demonstrating dynamical symmetry — particular kinds of behavior that repeat periodically, like a shape folded and reflected through time.

“There are two problems we needed to solve,” says Changhao Li, a graduate student in the lab of Paola Cappellaro, a professor of nuclear science and engineering. Li published the work recently in Physical Review Letters, together with Cappellaro and fellow graduate student Guoqing Wang. “The first problem was that we needed to engineer such a system. And second, how do we characterize it? How do we observe this symmetry?”

Concretely, the quantum system consisted of a diamond crystal about a millimeter across. The crystal contains many imperfections caused by a nitrogen atom next to a gap in the lattice — a so-called nitrogen-vacancy center. Just like an electron, each center has a quantum property called a spin, with two discrete energy levels. Because the system is a quantum system, the spins can be found not only in one of the levels, but also in a combination of both energy levels, like Schrodinger’s theoretical cat, which can be both alive and dead at the same time.

The energy level of the system is defined by its Hamiltonian, whose periodic time dependence the researchers engineered via microwave control. The system was said to have dynamical symmetry if its Hamiltonian was the same not only after every time period t but also after, for example, every t/2 or t/3, like folding a piece of paper in half or in thirds so that no part sticks out. Georg Engelhardt, a postdoc at the Beijing Computational Science Research, who was not involved in this work but whose own theoretical work served as a foundation, likens the symmetry to guitar harmonics, in which a string might vibrate at both 100 hertz and 50 Hz.

To induce and observe such dynamical symmetry, the MIT team first initialized the system using a laser pulse. Then they directed various selected frequencies of microwave radiation at it and let it evolve, allowing it to absorb and emit the energy. “What’s amazing is that when you add such driving, it can exhibit some very fancy phenomena,” Li says. “It will have some periodic shake.” Finally, they shot another laser pulse at it and measured the visible light that it fluoresced, in order to measure its state. The measurement was only a snapshot, so they repeated the experiment many times to piece together a kind of flip book that characterized its behavior across time.

“What is very impressive is that they can show that they have this incredible control over the quantum system,” Engelhardt says. “It’s quite easy to solve the equation, but realizing this in an experiment is quite difficult.”

Critically, the researchers observed that the dynamically symmetry of the Hamiltonian — the harmonics of the system’s energy level — dictated which transitions could occur between one state and another. “And the novelty of this work,” Wang says, “is also that we introduce a tool that can be used to characterize any quantum information platform, not just nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamonds. It’s broadly applicable.” Li notes that their technique is simpler than previous methods, those that require constant laser pulses to drive and measure the system’s periodic movement.

One engineering application is in quantum computers, systems that manipulate qubits, bits that can be not only 0 or 1, but a combination of 0 and 1. A diamond’s spin can encode one qubit in its two energy levels.

Qubits are delicate: they easily break down into simple bit, a 1 or a 0. Or the qubit might become the wrong combination of 0 and 1. “These tools for measuring dynamical symmetries,” Engelhardt says, “can be used to as a sanity check that your experiment is tuned correctly — and with a very high precision.” He notes the problem of outside perturbations in quantum computers, which he likens to a de-tuned guitar. By tuning the tension of the strings — adjusting the microwave radiation — such that the harmonics match some theoretical symmetry requirements, one can be sure that the experiment is perfectly calibrated. 

The MIT team already has their sights set on extensions to this work. “The next step is to apply our method to more complex systems and study more interesting physics,” Li says. They aim for more than two energy levels — three, or 10, or more. With more energy levels they can represent more qubits. “When you have more qubits, you have more complex symmetries,” Li says. “And you can characterize them using our method here.”

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

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OMEGA scholarships awarded to high school students who fostered multigenerational connections

In a virtual ceremony, the MIT AgeLab awarded five $5,000 OMEGA scholarships to U.S. high school students who have demonstrated leadership in developing intergenerational programs in their communities. The scholarship winners stewarded programs that forged social connections with older adults and aided in their use of technology.

Established in 2015, the AgeLab’s OMEGA program aims to foster and encourage multigenerational connections through scholarships and programming for younger adults. The OMEGA scholarship is sponsored by AARP and Five Star Senior Living.

Since spring 2020, the OMEGA program has conducted its activities virtually due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite these challenges, OMEGA has grown significantly. “The ushering in of our virtual presence over the past two years has really expanded OMEGA’s reach,” says AgeLab researcher Taylor Patskanick, who manages the program. OMEGA has expanded its scholarship nationally and begun offering programming that is accessible worldwide, including the annual OMEGA Summit that took place via Zoom on Oct. 23.

Amid the pandemic, the students who received the scholarship used both high- and low-tech methods to continue connecting with older adults in their communities.

Sabine Arndt, a former student at Aliso Niguel High School in California, led a tech tutoring program with her local senior center that pairs high school student volunteers with older adults. The program became phone-based during the Covid-19 shutdowns, which Arndt says posed challenges for the participants. “We had to teach them how to use technology using technology,” she says. Arndt is currently a first-year student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Alli Brophy, a former student of Gilbert High School, South Carolina, now a first-year student at Winthrop University, developed a program called Generations Connections, a partnership between her high school and her local senior center. As part of the program, student volunteers exchange letters or make calls with older adults in the community. Brophy says she founded the program in response to reports of high levels of isolation and depression among older adults in her community during the Covid-19 pandemic. “At first I felt nervous we wouldn’t have anything to talk about,” she says about conversing with an older member of her community. “What started out as five-minute phone calls turned into 35-to-40-minute conversations. The person I talk with says my calls make his day. It’s meant a lot to me over the past year.”

Darren Tran and Armaan Tipirneni, students at Lexington High School in Massachusetts, are co-founders of a program called the Lexington Intergenerational Outreach Club, which deploys students to perform jobs on behalf of older adults in the community, including manual labor and technology support. Tran and Tipirneni have also launched Project Wisdom, which collects interviews with older adults in Lexington. The Lexington Historical Society plans to archive those interviews as part of the community’s oral histories.

C’Lannye James, a former student at John D. O’Bryant School of Mathematics and Sciences in Massachusetts, participated in and led a program at the Center for Community Health Education Research and Service (CCHERS) called Community Voices, designed to equip young people with the knowledge and skills to address racial health disparities. The program focuses on older adults who dwell in Roxbury, a Boston neighborhood that is predominantly comprised of people of color.

For last year’s research, volunteers focused on check-ins and addressing participants’ feelings of loneliness and isolation, James says, while this year the program is more focused on addressing technological disparities. Finding a lack of access to the internet in the communities with which they worked, Community Voices partnered with the greater Boston Housing Authority to fund internet access through mobile hot spots for four congregate subsidized housing developments for older adults in the greater Roxbury area. James is currently a first-year student at Union College.

“I think it's fair to say that you are the best of the thinking we have around how to do work intergenerationally,” says AARP Massachusetts Director Michael E Festa to the winning students. “The future of all we hold dear is fundamentally tied to how the generations pass on their insights, their challenges, and their opportunities.”

The MIT AgeLab was created in 1999 within the MIT Center for Transportation & Logistics in order to invent new ideas and creatively translate technologies into practical solutions that improve people's health and enable them to “do things” throughout their lifespan. Equal to the need for ideas and new technologies is the belief that innovations in how products are designed, services are delivered, or policies are implemented are of critical importance to our quality of life tomorrow.

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3 Questions: Investigating a long-standing neutrino mystery

Neutrinos are one of the most mysterious members of the Standard Model, a framework for describing fundamental forces and particles in nature. While they are among the most abundant known particles in the universe, they interact very rarely with matter, making their detection a challenging experimental feat. One of the long-standing puzzles in neutrino physics comes from the Mini Booster Neutrino Experiment (MiniBooNE), which ran from 2002 to 2017 at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab, in Illinois. MiniBooNE observed significantly more neutrino interactions that produce electrons than one would expect given our best knowledge of the Standard Model — and physicists are trying to understand why.

In 2007, researchers developed the idea for a follow-up experiment, MicroBooNE, which recently finished collecting data at Fermilab. MicroBooNE is an ideal test of the MiniBooNE excess thanks to its use of a novel detector technology known as the liquid argon time projection chamber (LArTPC), which yields high-resolution pictures of the particles that get created in neutrino interactions.  

Physics graduate students Nicholas Kamp and Lauren Yates, along with Professor Janet Conrad, all within the MIT Laboratory for Nuclear Science, have played a leading role in MicroBooNE’s deep-learning-based search for an excess of neutrinos in the Fermilab Booster Neutrino Beam. In this interview, Kamp discusses the future of the MiniBooNE anomaly within the context of MicroBooNE’s latest findings.

Q: Why is the MiniBooNE anomaly a big deal?

A: One of the big open questions in neutrino physics concerns the possible existence of a hypothetical particle called the “sterile neutrino.” Finding a new particle would be a very big deal because it can give us clues to the larger theory that explains the many particles we see. The most common explanation of the MiniBooNE excess involves the addition of such a sterile neutrino to the Standard Model. Due to the effects of neutrino oscillations, this sterile neutrino would manifest itself as an enhancement of electron neutrinos in MiniBooNE.

There are many additional anomalies seen in neutrino physics that indicate this particle might exist. However, it is difficult to explain these anomalies along with MiniBooNE through a single sterile neutrino — the full picture doesn’t quite fit. Our group at MIT is interested in new physics models that can potentially explain this full picture.

Q: What is our current understanding of the MiniBooNE excess?

A: Our understanding has progressed significantly of late thanks to developments in both the experimental and theoretical realms.

Our group has worked with physicists from Harvard, Columbia, and Cambridge universities to explore new sources of photons that can appear in a theoretical model that also has a 20 percent electron signature. We developed a “mixed model” that involves two types of exotic neutrinos — one which morphs to electron flavor and one which decays to a photon. This work is forthcoming in Physical Review D.

On the experimental end, more recent MicroBooNE results — including a deep-learning-based analysis in which our MIT group played an important role — observed no excess of neutrinos that produce electrons in the MicroBooNE detector. Keeping in mind the level at which MicroBooNE can make the measurement, this suggests that the MiniBooNE excess cannot be attributed entirely to extra neutrino interactions. If it isn’t electrons, then it must be photons, because that is the only particle that can produce a similar signature in MiniBooNE. But we are sure it is not photons produced by interactions that we know about because those are restricted to a low level. So, they must be coming from something new, such as the exotic neutrino decay in the mixed model. Next, MicroBooNE is working on a search that could isolate and identify these additional photons. Stay tuned!

Q: You mentioned that your group is involved in deep-learning-based MicroBooNE analysis. Why use deep learning in neutrino physics?

A: When humans look at images of cats, they can tell the difference between species without much difficulty. Similarly, when physicists look at images coming from a LArTPC, they can tell the difference between the particles produced in neutrino interactions without much difficulty. However, due to the nuance of the differences, both tasks turn out to be difficult for conventional algorithms.

MIT is a nexus of deep-learning ideas. Recently, for example, it became the site of the National Science Foundation AI Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions. It made sense for our group to build on the extensive local expertise in the field. We have also had the opportunity to work with fantastic groups at SLAC, Tufts University, Columbia University, and IIT, each with a strong knowledge base in the ties between deep learning and neutrino physics.

One of the key ideas in deep learning is that of a “neutral network,” which is an algorithm that makes decisions (such as identifying particles in a LArTPC) based on previous exposure to a suite of training data. Our group produced the first paper on particle identification using deep learning in neutrino physics, proving it to be a powerful technique. This is a major reason why the recently-released results of MicroBooNE’s deep learning-based analysis place strong constraints on an electron neutrino interpretation of the MiniBooNE excess.

All in all, it's very fortunate that much of the groundwork for this analysis was done in the AI-rich environment at MIT.

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Engineers devise a way to selectively turn on RNA therapies in human cells

Researchers at MIT and Harvard University have designed a way to selectively turn on gene therapies in target cells, including human cells. Their technology can detect specific messenger RNA sequences in cells, and that detection then triggers production of a specific protein from a transgene, or artificial gene.

Because transgenes can have negative and even dangerous effects when expressed in the wrong cells, the researchers wanted to find a way to reduce off-target effects from gene therapies. One way of distinguishing different types of cells is by reading the RNA sequences inside them, which differ from tissue to tissue.

By finding a way to produce transgene only after “reading” specific RNA sequences inside cells, the researchers developed a technology that could fine-tune gene therapies in applications ranging from regenerative medicine to cancer treatment. For example, researchers could potentially create new therapies to destroy tumors by designing their system to identify cancer cells and produce a toxic protein just inside those cells, killing them in the process.

“This brings new control circuitry to the emerging field of RNA therapeutics, opening up the next generation of RNA therapeutics that could be designed to only turn on in a cell-specific or tissue-specific way,” says James Collins, the Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering and Science in MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) and Department of Biological Engineering and the senior author of the study.

This highly targeted approach, which is based on a genetic element used by viruses to control gene translation in host cells, could help to avoid some of the side effects of therapies that affect the entire body, the researchers say.

Evan Zhao, a research fellow at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, and Angelo Mao, an MIT postdoc and technology fellow at the Wyss Institute, are the lead authors of the study, which appears today in Nature Biotechnology.

RNA detection

Messenger RNA (mRNA) molecules are sequences of RNA that encode the instructions for building a particular protein. Several years ago, Collins and his colleagues developed a way to use RNA detection as a trigger to stimulate cells to produce a specific protein in bacterial cells. This system works by introducing an RNA molecule called a “toehold,” which binds to the ribosome-binding site of an mRNA molecule that codes for a specific protein. (The ribosome is where proteins are assembled based on mRNA instructions.) This binding prevents the mRNA from being translated into protein, because it can’t attach to a ribosome.

The RNA toehold also contains a sequence that can bind to a different mRNA sequence that serves as a trigger. If this target mRNA sequence is detected, the toehold releases its grip, and the mRNA that had been blocked is translated into protein. This mRNA can encode any gene, such as a fluorescent reporter molecule. That fluorescent signal gives researchers a way to visualize whether the target mRNA sequence was detected.

In the new study, the researchers set out to try to create a similar system that could be used in eukaryotic (non-bacterial) cells, including human cells.

Because gene translation is more complex in eukaryotic cells, the genetic components that they used in bacteria couldn’t be imported into human cells. Instead, the researchers took advantage of a system that viruses use to hijack eukaryotic cells to translate their own viral genes. This system consists of RNA molecules called internal ribosome entry sites (IRES), which can recruit ribosomes and initiate translation of RNA into proteins.

“These are complicated folds of RNA that viruses have developed to hijack ribosomes because viruses need to find some way to express protein,” Zhao says.

The researchers started with naturally occurring IRES from different types of viruses and engineered them to include a sequence that binds to a trigger mRNA. When the engineered IRES is inserted into a human cell in front of an output transgene, it blocks translation of that gene unless the trigger mRNA is detected inside the cell. The trigger causes the IRES to recover and allows the gene to be translated into protein.

Targeted therapeutics

The researchers used this technique to develop toeholds that could detect a variety of different triggers inside human and yeast cells. First, they showed that they could detect mRNA encoding viral genes from Zika virus and the SARS-CoV-2 virus. One possible application for this could be designing T cells that detect and respond to viral mRNA during infection, the researchers say.

They also designed toehold molecules that can detect mRNA for proteins that are naturally produced in human cells, which could help to reveal cell states such as stress. As an example, they showed they could detect expression of heat shock proteins, which cells make when they are exposed to high temperatures.

Lastly, the researchers showed that they could identify cancer cells by engineering toeholds that detect mRNA for tyrosinase, an enzyme that produces excessive melanin in melanoma cells. This kind of targeting could enable researchers to develop therapies that trigger production of a protein that initiates cell death when cancerous proteins are detected in a cell.

“The idea is that you would be able to target any unique RNA signature and deliver a therapeutic,” Mao says. “This could be a way of limiting expression of the biomolecule to your target cells or tissue.”

The new technique represents “a conceptual quantum leap in controlling and programming mammalian cell behavior,” says Martin Fussenegger, a professor of biotechnology and bioengineering at ETH Zurich, who was not involved in the research. “This novel technology sets new standards by which human cells could be treated to sense and react to viruses such as Zika and SARS-CoV-2.”

All of the studies done in this paper were performed in cells grown in a lab dish. The researchers are now working on delivery strategies that would allow the RNA components of the system to reach target cells in animal models.

The research was funded by BASF, the National Institutes of Health, an American Gastroenterological Association Takeda Pharmaceuticals Research Scholar Award in Inflammatory Bowel Disease, and the Schmidt Science Fellows program.

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Making machine learning more useful to high-stakes decision makers

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that one in seven children in the United States experienced abuse or neglect in the past year. Child protective services agencies around the nation receive a high number of reports each year (about 4.4 million in 2019) of alleged neglect or abuse. With so many cases, some agencies are implementing machine learning models to help child welfare specialists screen cases and determine which to recommend for further investigation.

But these models don’t do any good if the humans they are intended to help don’t understand or trust their outputs.

Researchers at MIT and elsewhere launched a research project to identify and tackle machine learning usability challenges in child welfare screening. In collaboration with a child welfare department in Colorado, the researchers studied how call screeners assess cases, with and without the help of machine learning predictions. Based on feedback from the call screeners, they designed a visual analytics tool that uses bar graphs to show how specific factors of a case contribute to the predicted risk that a child will be removed from their home within two years.

The researchers found that screeners are more interested in seeing how each factor, like the child’s age, influences a prediction, rather than understanding the computational basis of how the model works. Their results also show that even a simple model can cause confusion if its features are not described with straightforward language.

These findings could be applied to other high-risk fields where humans use machine learning models to help them make decisions, but lack data science experience, says senior author Kalyan Veeramachaneni, principal research scientist in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) and senior author of the paper.

“Researchers who study explainable AI, they often try to dig deeper into the model itself to explain what the model did. But a big takeaway from this project is that these domain experts don’t necessarily want to learn what machine learning actually does. They are more interested in understanding why the model is making a different prediction than what their intuition is saying, or what factors it is using to make this prediction. They want information that helps them reconcile their agreements or disagreements with the model, or confirms their intuition,” he says.

Co-authors include electrical engineering and computer science PhD student Alexandra Zytek, who is the lead author; postdoc Dongyu Liu; and Rhema Vaithianathan, professor of economics and director of the Center for Social Data Analytics at the Auckland University of Technology and professor of social data analytics at the University of Queensland. The research will be presented later this month at the IEEE Visualization Conference.

Real-world research

The researchers began the study more than two years ago by identifying seven factors that make a machine learning model less usable, including lack of trust in where predictions come from and disagreements between user opinions and the model’s output.

With these factors in mind, Zytek and Liu flew to Colorado in the winter of 2019 to learn firsthand from call screeners in a child welfare department. This department is implementing a machine learning system developed by Vaithianathan that generates a risk score for each report, predicting the likelihood the child will be removed from their home. That risk score is based on more than 100 demographic and historic factors, such as the parents’ ages and past court involvements.

“As you can imagine, just getting a number between one and 20 and being told to integrate this into your workflow can be a bit challenging,” Zytek says.

They observed how teams of screeners process cases in about 10 minutes and spend most of that time discussing the risk factors associated with the case. That inspired the researchers to develop a case-specific details interface, which shows how each factor influenced the overall risk score using color-coded, horizontal bar graphs that indicate the magnitude of the contribution in a positive or negative direction.

Based on observations and detailed interviews, the researchers built four additional interfaces that provide explanations of the model, including one that compares a current case to past cases with similar risk scores. Then they ran a series of user studies.

The studies revealed that more than 90 percent of the screeners found the case-specific details interface to be useful, and it generally increased their trust in the model’s predictions. On the other hand, the screeners did not like the case comparison interface. While the researchers thought this interface would increase trust in the model, screeners were concerned it could lead to decisions based on past cases rather than the current report.   

“The most interesting result to me was that, the features we showed them — the information that the model uses — had to be really interpretable to start. The model uses more than 100 different features in order to make its prediction, and a lot of those were a bit confusing,” Zytek says.

Keeping the screeners in the loop throughout the iterative process helped the researchers make decisions about what elements to include in the machine learning explanation tool, called Sibyl.

As they refined the Sibyl interfaces, the researchers were careful to consider how providing explanations could contribute to some cognitive biases, and even undermine screeners’ trust in the model.

For instance, since explanations are based on averages in a database of child abuse and neglect cases, having three past abuse referrals may actually decrease the risk score of a child, since averages in this database may be far higher. A screener may see that explanation and decide not to trust the model, even though it is working correctly, Zytek explains. And because humans tend to put more emphasis on recent information, the order in which the factors are listed could also influence decisions.

Improving interpretability

Based on feedback from call screeners, the researchers are working to tweak the explanation model so the features that it uses are easier to explain.

Moving forward, they plan to enhance the interfaces they’ve created based on additional feedback and then run a quantitative user study to track the effects on decision making with real cases. Once those evaluations are complete, they can prepare to deploy Sibyl, Zytek says.

“It was especially valuable to be able to work so actively with these screeners. We got to really understand the problems they faced. While we saw some reservations on their part, what we saw more of was excitement about how useful these explanations were in certain cases. That was really rewarding,” she says.

This work is supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation.

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One autonomous taxi, please

If you don’t get seasick, an autonomous boat might be the right mode of transportation for you. 

Scientists from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Senseable City Laboratory, together with Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS Institute) in the Netherlands, have now created the final project in their self-navigating trilogy: a full-scale, fully autonomous robotic boat that’s ready to be deployed along the canals of Amsterdam. 

“Roboat” has come a long way since the team first started prototyping small vessels in the MIT pool in late 2015. Last year, the team released their half-scale, medium model that was 2 meters long and demonstrated promising navigational prowess. 

This year, two full-scale Roboats were launched, proving more than just proof-of-concept: these craft can comfortably carry up to five people, collect waste, deliver goods, and provide on-demand infrastructure. 

The boat looks futuristic — it’s a sleek combination of black and gray with two seats that face each other, with orange block letters on the sides that illustrate the makers' namesakes. It’s a fully electrical boat with a battery that’s the size of a small chest, enabling up to 10 hours of operation and wireless charging capabilities. 

“We now have higher precision and robustness in the perception, navigation, and control systems, including new functions, such as close-proximity approach mode for latching capabilities, and improved dynamic positioning, so the boat can navigate real-world waters,” says Daniela Rus, MIT professor of electrical engineering and computer science and director of CSAIL. “Roboat’s control system is adaptive to the number of people in the boat.” 

To swiftly navigate the bustling waters of Amsterdam, Roboat needs a meticulous fusion of proper navigation, perception, and control software. 

Using GPS, the boat autonomously decides on a safe route from A to B, while continuously scanning the environment to  avoid collisions with objects, such as bridges, pillars, and other boats.

To autonomously determine a free path and avoid crashing into objects, Roboat uses lidar and a number of cameras to enable a 360-degree view. This bundle of sensors is referred to as the “perception kit” and lets Roboat understand its surroundings. When the perception picks up an unseen object, like a canoe, for example, the algorithm flags the item as “unknown.” When the team later looks at the collected data from the day, the object is manually selected and can be tagged as “canoe.” 

The control algorithms — similar to ones used for self-driving cars — function a little like a coxswain giving orders to rowers, by translating a given path into instructions toward the “thrusters,” which are the propellers that help the boat move.  

If you think the boat feels slightly futuristic, its latching mechanism is one of its most impressive feats: small cameras on the boat guide it to the docking station, or other boats, when they detect specific QR codes. “The system allows Roboat to connect to other boats, and to the docking station, to form temporary bridges to alleviate traffic, as well as floating stages and squares, which wasn’t possible with the last iteration,” says Carlo Ratti, professor of the practice in the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) and director of the Senseable City Lab. 

Roboat, by design, is also versatile. The team created a universal “hull” design — that’s the part of the boat that rides both in and on top of the water. While regular boats have unique hulls, designed for specific purposes, Roboat has a universal hull design where the base is the same, but the top decks can be switched out depending on the use case.

“As Roboat can perform its tasks 24/7, and without a skipper on board, it adds great value for a city. However, for safety reasons it is questionable if reaching level A autonomy is desirable,” says Fabio Duarte, a principal research scientist in DUSP and lead scientist on the project. “Just like a bridge keeper, an onshore operator will monitor Roboat remotely from a control center. One operator can monitor over 50 Roboat units, ensuring smooth operations.”

The next step for Roboat is to pilot the technology in the public domain. "The historic center of Amsterdam is the perfect place to start, with its capillary network of canals suffering from contemporary challenges, such as mobility and logistics,” says Stephan van Dijk, director of innovation at AMS Institute. 

Previous iterations of Roboat have been presented at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. The boats will be unveiled on Oct. 28 in the waters of Amsterdam. 

Ratti, Rus, Duarte, and Dijk worked on the project alongside Andrew Whittle, MIT’s Edmund K Turner Professor in civil and environmental engineering; Dennis Frenchman, professor at MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning; and Ynse Deinema of AMS Institute. The full team can be found at Roboat's website. The project is a joint collaboration with AMS Institute. The City of Amsterdam is a project partner.

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3 Questions: Administering elections in a hyper-partisan era

Charles Stewart III is the Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Political Science at MIT and a renowned expert on U.S. election administration. A founding member of the influential Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project, Stewart also founded MIT’s Election Data and Science Lab, which recently teamed up with the American Enterprise Institute to release a major report: Lessons Learned from the 2020 Election. MIT SHASS Communications asked Stewart to share some additional insights on the state of U.S. elections in advance of November voting.

Q: The United States has a decentralized system of election administration, which means local jurisdictions have a lot of control over how votes are collected and counted. What are the pros and cons of this system — particularly at this moment, when partisan political efforts are highly focused on election administration?

A: The advantage of the American decentralized system is that the basic parameters of how people vote get decided locally. This has helped create a great deal of trust among voters about how their own votes are counted. Historically, the greatest disadvantage has been that the anti-democratic pockets of America — think of the pre-Voting Rights Act Deep South — have been able to suppress voting, sometimes brutally.

At present, however, all issues of consequence have become nationalized, and all policy choices — including those around voting — are therefore seen through the lens of the national parties, not local needs. This nationalization of politics has left little room for local election officials to experiment with new technologies and methodologies, and it has made election administration particularly toxic. Now, even those who trust how votes are counted in their own backyards are often deeply distrustful of how votes are counted elsewhere.

Thus, the question about what is best for Arizona or Georgia or California is not left simply to residents of those states, as in the past; today, it is the subject of attention from (often angry) partisan zealots elsewhere in the country. In such an environment, America’s decentralized — and thus naturally inconsistent — system can be a liability.

Another way that the decentralization of the system hurts election administration is often overlooked. Because each state is autonomous and often devolves authority down to the local level, it has been difficult to create standardized voting systems. This means there is no national market for technology and business solutions to the challenges of election administration — and yet, innovation is sorely needed. The American system of election administration was designed for voting in the 1880s, but the 2020s present a very different set of problems.

Many other policies that used to be hyper-local — public education, water and sewer service, public health, etc. — have often been consolidated into larger government units and there has been greater cooperation across towns and counties. States and the federal government have taken on a bigger role in funding them. But not elections. The result is that election administration often throws antiquated solutions at modern problems or, as in the case of the cybersecurity threat, is slow to react.

The reaction to the challenges of voting during the pandemic saw some movements toward a more modern and coordinated management of election administration. States stepped in and provided centralized services, such as printing and processing mail ballots or developing online portals for voters to track mail ballots. The federal government provided nearly half-a-billion dollars to shore up security and meet the many demands on election managers as they quickly pivoted to new election modalities. One hopes that this momentum will carry into the near future, but efforts to re-litigate the 2020 election are a major distraction.

Q: What safeguards exist to ensure that future elections remain free of interference — particularly from those at the top echelons of political power?

A: The 2020 election showed the resilience of the fact-based part of the election administration system — election administrators, judges, and research institutions (including universities) — that have stood for the rule of law in the face of illiberal attacks on election administration. Opponents of fair elections recognize this and have attacked all parts of this fact-based bulwark. They are physically threatening election workers, trying to remove judicial oversight of election administration, and creating so-called “election integrity” think tanks to perpetuate disinformation about elections in America.

The fact-based part of election administration is robust, but we can’t be complacent about its health. The federal government is stepping up the protection of election workers and officials; states should do this as well. Unfortunately, some states have taken action that is less than helpful by passing laws that try to strip authority from local election officials and empower state legislatures to overturn the results of free and fair elections. I think there’s every reason to be concerned about these laws, but not because I think they will achieve these worrisome ends. The biggest worry is that such laws encourage doubt about outcomes and give those who lost elections a platform to sow that doubt.
 
It’s important to keep in mind that the first principles of election laws have not been overturned in these states, nor have constitutional guarantees. There is a judicial principle that says that if an election has been run under a set of rules established before the election, that election’s results must stand even if some of the rules may have been contestable beforehand. If partisan election officials or state legislatures want to throw out an election result because they don’t like the outcome, or on a pretext of unproven fraud, the courts will intervene.

Similarly, if local election officials are replaced for pretextual reasons, it’s hard to imagine a state or federal court letting this stand. Still, democracy will be damaged regardless of the outcomes of such disputes. Politicians will be given more opportunities to denigrate the voting process, and baseless conspiracy theories will be given a megaphone.

For now, I’m more worried about the culture of democracy than I am about whether winners will be properly certified. That can change if the assaults on neutral election administration continues.

One of the final challenges facing the free conduct of elections is how to stanch the stream of disinformation about elections that is the source of the populist energy centered on attacking the system. Even when the clown-show of a ballot review in Arizona had to conclude that Joe Biden legitimately won that state in the 2020 presidential election, the release of the reviewers’ report was used by an array of manipulative pundits to continue to sow doubt.

This is a misinformation problem that infects American public life generally: It’s not confined to election administration alone, or even to politics. Insisting on responsible behavior by the social media platforms is a necessary first step toward addressing the plague of misinformation, but it’s not likely to be enough. I think we are seeing the consequences of the half-century-long destruction of responsibly curated news sources in the name of economic disruption, and that problem and its consequences extend far beyond the administration of elections.

Q: Can you suggest some efforts — either by citizens, legislators, scholars, and/or pro-democracy organizations — that could effectively protect and strengthen democracy at this moment in the nation’s history?

A: The greatest effort to protect and strengthen democracy is voting itself. The consensus on the ground in states like North Carolina and Texas, where efforts have been made in the recent past to raise barriers to voting, is that the efforts of state legislatures in these states have actually served to mobilize pro-election forces. Donating to candidates who are pro-democracy and working for their election is probably the most important thing citizens can do.

For scholars, we need to be laser-focused on what we do uniquely best, which is documenting the actual consequences of election laws on participation. Legislators who support barriers to voting often mis-estimate the consequences of such laws. Citizen groups who are hypervigilant about threats to democracy also may overestimate the power of some election laws to suppress or expand the vote. As scholars, we need to be independent voices in identifying the worst of the barriers, and we need to act to redress anti-democratic efforts, either through our publications or through litigation. If we don’t ground advocacy in science, those of us who study the workings of our democracy squander what we have to offer that is distinct.

Finally, I think we all have to be clear that the illiberal wind is blowing at a gale force in just one of the political parties. This is not a partisan statement, but a fact. Working to isolate the illiberal fringe of the Republican Party and protect those in the party who value open elections and political competition may be the most important thing of all, although how to do that is still not clear. My liberal friends, of whom I have hundreds, don’t like to hear it, but I think that saving the Republican Party from extreme illiberalism may be the most important pro-democracy activity in America. 

At the moment, it’s not clear how that might happen, but ideas are being suggested. In a recent New York Times op-ed, Miles Taylor and Christine Todd Whitman, both strong Republicans, argued that the best path to change is for Republicans to vote for Democrats in 2022. They also alluded to the possibility of creating a conservative third party based on more traditional Republican values, not anti-democratic ones. Changes to election laws that discourage victory by extreme candidates of the left and the right might also work. (Rank-choice voting is one such popular reform.) 

To be clear, changing voting rules to box out extremists or withholding votes from illiberal candidates will not purge the country of extreme anti-democratic movements. But, if we think that the biggest threat to upholding democratic values is the fact that political leaders believe they must appeal to anti-democratic elements, at least we can work to reduce the payoff to appealing to the fringes.

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Chronicles of the epic mission to deliver Covid vaccines to the world

The race to deliver a Covid-19 vaccine has been likened to a moonshot, but in several ways landing a man on the moon was easier. In his new book, “A Shot in the Arm: How Science, Engineering, and Supply Chains Converged to Vaccinate the World” (MIT CTL Media, 2021), MIT Professor Yossi Sheffi recounts the vaccine’s extraordinary journey from scientific breakthroughs to coronavirus antidote and mass vaccination. And he explores how the mission could transform the fight against deadly diseases and other global-scale challenges.

“The historic Apollo moonshots built a dozen or so rockets to carry astronauts to a single location. In contrast, vaccine mission teams mass-produced billions of doses of a complex medication from a standing start, and delivered them to billions of individuals across the globe,” says Sheffi. This is a story of bold innovation and risk-taking he notes, “and interdisciplinary teamwork that involved experts vital to the mission’s success, such as manufacturing engineers and supply chain managers.” 

Like previous moonshot quests, this one was founded on revolutionary science. The book describes how the effort built on decades of biochemistry and microbiology research to develop Covid mRNA vaccines. The vaccines teach the human body how to recognize coronavirus invaders and neutralize them before they convert the body’s cells into virus factories.

However, a weapon is impotent without the means to make and distribute it. The book explains how governments joined forces with the scientific community and industry to fund, produce, and deliver the vaccine to a world in danger of losing the battle against the pandemic. The author characterizes this monumental endeavor as the greatest product launch in history. Along the way, the mission teams broke new ground in their respective fields.

The teams also made mistakes, and the book shows how these failures will inform future campaigns. Other obstacles in the way included disinformation, public mistrust of science and government, and political opportunism. Sheffi explores the root causes of these opposing forces and the societal implications.

“Yossi Sheffi offers strategic lessons behind the record-breaking development, production, and global delivery of the Covid vaccines and what they mean for the future,” says Bob Langer, the David H. Koch Institute Professor at MIT and co-founder of Moderna.

"A Shot in the Arm" ends on an optimistic note with a look at the Covid vaccine mission’s formidable legacy. In addition to providing templates for fighting pandemics, the effort has advanced immunology and highlighted the breathtaking potential of mRNA-based vaccines. Future vaccines could cure life-threatening illnesses including cancer, and when combined with other technologies, spur innovations in other fields such as agriculture. The book argues that the convergence of multiple disciplines, industries, and sectors — which resulted in the vaccine — provides a blueprint for humanity for tackling global challenges. These include poverty, food and water security, and climate change, particularly in getting from R&D and lab work to scaling innovations addressing such challenges.

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MIT Energy Initiative awards seven Seed Fund grants for early-stage energy research

The MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) has awarded seven Seed Fund grants to support novel, early-stage energy research by faculty and researchers at MIT. The awardees hail from a range of disciplines, but all strive to bring their backgrounds and expertise to address the global climate crisis by improving the efficiency, scalability, and adoption of clean energy technologies.

“Solving climate change is truly an interdisciplinary challenge,” says MITEI Director Robert C. Armstrong. “The Seed Fund grants foster collaboration and innovation from across all five of MIT’s schools and one college, encouraging an ‘all hands on deck approach’ to developing the energy solutions that will prove critical in combatting this global crisis.”

This year, MITEI’s Seed Fund grant program received 70 proposals from 86 different principal investigators (PIs) across 25 departments, labs, and centers. Of these proposals, 31 involved collaborations between two or more PIs, including 24 that involved multiple departments.

The winning projects reflect this collaborative nature with topics addressing the optimization of low-energy thermal cooling in buildings; the design of safe, robust, and resilient distributed power systems; and how to design and site wind farms with consideration of wind resource uncertainty due to climate change.

Increasing public support for low-carbon technologies

One winning team aims to leverage work done in the behavioral sciences to motivate sustainable behaviors and promote the adoption of clean energy technologies.

“Objections to scalable low-carbon technologies such as nuclear energy and carbon sequestration have made it difficult to adopt these technologies and reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” says Howard Herzog, a senior research scientist at MITEI and co-PI. “These objections tend to neglect the sheer scale of energy generation required and the inability to meet this demand solely with other renewable energy technologies.”

This interdisciplinary team — which includes researchers from MITEI, the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, and the MIT Sloan School of Management — plans to convene industry professionals and academics, as well as behavioral scientists, to identify common objections, design messaging to overcome them, and prove that these messaging campaigns have long-lasting impacts on attitudes toward scalable low-carbon technologies.

“Our aim is to provide a foundation for shifting the public and policymakers’ views about these low-carbon technologies from something they, at best, tolerate, to something they actually welcome,” says co-PI David Rand, the Erwin H. Schell Professor and professor of management science and brain and cognitive sciences at MIT Sloan School of Management.

Siting and designing wind farms

Michael Howland, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, will use his seed fund grant to develop a foundational methodology for wind farm siting and design that accounts for the uncertainty of wind resources resulting from climate change.

“The optimal wind farm design and its resulting cost of energy is inherently dependent on the wind resource at the location of the farm,” says Howland. “But wind farms are currently sited and designed based on short-term climate records that do not account for the future effects of climate change on wind patterns.”

Wind farms are capital-intensive infrastructure that cannot be relocated and often have lifespans exceeding 20 years — all of which make it especially important that developers choose the right locations and designs based not only on wind patterns in the historical climate record, but also based on future predictions. The new siting and design methodology has the potential to replace current industry standards to enable a more accurate risk analysis of wind farm development and energy grid expansion under climate change-driven energy resource uncertainty.

Membraneless electrolyzers for hydrogen production

Producing hydrogen from renewable energy-powered water electrolyzers is central to realizing a sustainable and low-carbon hydrogen economy, says Kripa Varanasi, a professor of mechanical engineering and a Seed Fund award recipient. The idea of using hydrogen as a fuel has existed for decades, but it has yet to be widely realized at a considerable scale. Varanasi hopes to change that with his Seed Fund grant.

“The critical economic hurdle for successful electrolyzers to overcome is the minimization of the capital costs associated with their deployment,” says Varanasi. “So, an immediate task at hand to enable electrochemical hydrogen production at scale will be to maximize the effectiveness of the most mature, least complex, and least expensive water electrolyzer technologies.”

To do this, he aims to combine the advantages of existing low-temperature alkaline electrolyzer designs with a novel membraneless electrolyzer technology that harnesses a gas management system architecture to minimize complexity and costs, while also improving efficiency. Varanasi hopes his project will demonstrate scalable concepts for cost-effective electrolyzer technology design to help realize a decarbonized hydrogen economy.

Since its establishment in 2008, the MITEI Seed Fund Program has supported 194 energy-focused seed projects through grants totaling more than $26 million. This funding comes primarily from MITEI’s founding and sustaining members, supplemented by gifts from generous donors.

Recipients of the 2021 MITEI Seed Fund grants are:

• “Design automation of safe, robust, and resilient distributed power systems” — Chuchu Fan of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics
• “Advanced MHD topping cycles: For fission, fusion, solar power plants” — Jeffrey Freidberg of the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering and Dennis Whyte of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center
• “Robust wind farm siting and design under climate-change‐driven wind resource uncertainty” — Michael Howland of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
• “Low-energy thermal comfort for buildings in the Global South: Optimal design of integrated structural-thermal systems” — Leslie Norford of the Department of Architecture and Caitlin Mueller of the departments of Architecture and Civil and Environmental Engineering
• “New low-cost, high energy-density boron-based redox electrolytes for nonaqueous flow batteries” — Alexander Radosevich of the Department of Chemistry
• “Increasing public support for scalable low-carbon energy technologies using behavorial science insights” — David Rand of the MIT Sloan School of Management, Koroush Shirvan of the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, Howard Herzog of the MIT Energy Initiative, and Jacopo Buongiorno of the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering
• “Membraneless electrolyzers for efficient hydrogen production using nanoengineered 3D gas capture electrode architectures” — Kripa Varanasi of the Department of Mechanical Engineering

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