Liang Fu and Patrick Lee receive Larkin Awards in Theoretical Physics

MIT condensed matter theory professors of physics Liang Fu and Patrick A. Lee received the inaugural Larkin Awards in Theoretical Physics, awarded by the William I. Fine Theoretical Physics Institute at the University of Minnesota.

Fu received the 2022 Anatoly Larkin Award for a junior researcher for his work on 3D topological insulators and odd-parity topological superconductors, crystalline topological insulators, and Majorana zero modes, “and for being an intellectual leader of his generation.”

Fu is interested in novel topological phases of matter in solid state physics to predict new phases of matter and topological materials. He works on the theory of topological insulators and topological superconductors, and the potential applications of topological materials, ranging from tunable electronics and spintronics to quantum computation.

He received his BS in physics from the University of Science and Technology of China in 2004 and his PhD in physics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2009. He was a junior fellow at Harvard University before joining the MIT Department of Physics as an assistant professor in 2012.

His previous awards include the 2018 Simons Investigator Award, the 2016 New Horizons in Physics Prize, the 2014 Raymond and Beverly Sackler International Prize in Physics, the 2014 Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering, and the 2013 Department of Energy Early Career Award.

“I am truly honored and grateful to receive the Larkin junior award,” says Fu. “I also thank my mentors, collaborators, and students for their contribution and support over the years.”

Lee, the William & Emma Rogers Professor of Physics, received the 2022 Anatoly Larkin Senior Researcher Award in Theoretical Physics for his influential research in strongly correlated electronic systems, which are materials where the interactions between electrons play a crucial role and lead to novel phenomena not explainable by single electron band structure effects.

The award mentioned his theories of the quantum transport phenomena in mesoscopic and superconducting systems, “and for his standing in the community.”

As a senior researcher in the Condensed Matter Theory Group, Lee’s interests are focused on high-temperature superconductors as well as “mesoscopic physics,” the study of small devices at low temperatures. He has also made important contributions to the theory of disordered electronic systems, including introducing the concept of universal conductance fluctuations to describe such small devices.

A native of Hong Kong, Lee studied physics at MIT, receiving his BS in 1966 and his PhD in 1970. He was a physics instructor at Yale University until 1972, and an assistant professor of physics at the University of Washington until 1974. He was at the Theoretical Physics Department at Bell Laboratories for 10 years until joining the MIT Department of Physics in 1982. Lee was awarded the 2005 Dirac Medal of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics and the 1991 Oliver Buckley Prize of the American Physical Society.  

The award is named after the late Russian-American theoretical physicist Anatoly Larkin. Lee says that he has been a long-time admirer of Larkin, with whom he collaborated on several publications. 

The awardees are invited to deliver a colloquium for the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Minnesota in March 2023.

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Ashton Carter, former U.S. secretary of defense who served in leadership roles at the MIT Corporation and Lincoln Laboratory, dies at 68

Ashton Carter, former U.S. Secretary of Defense and a lifelong advocate of technological innovation who applied his training as a physicist toward public policy, died of a heart attack Oct. 24 in Boston. He was 68.

As secretary of defense in the Obama administration, Carter was best known for opening the way for women in the military to take on combat roles and for transgender people to serve. He engaged with MIT in a variety of roles throughout his career, including as a member of the executive committee of the MIT Corporation, the Institute’s board of trustees, and as a member and chair of the advisory board of MIT Lincoln Laboratory.

“Above all, Ash was a spectacular leader and a citizen-servant,” MIT President L. Rafael Reif says. “When I first met him — years ago, on the Lincoln Lab advisory board — what stood out immediately was his intellect: Ash was brilliant, and that’s saying something at MIT. But what I quickly came to admire most about him is that, in the best MIT tradition, his brilliance was matched by his down-to-earth manner, humility, warmth, and generosity.”

After leaving Washington, Carter became the director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School, a position he held at the time of his death. At MIT, in addition to his service with the MIT Corporation executive committee and Lincoln Laboratory advisory board, Carter’s involvement also included roles as a postdoc, a fellow in the Center for International Studies, and a visiting fellow with the MIT Innovation Initiative.

“Ash Carter made enormous contributions to our nation, our world, and to MIT. I first experienced the extraordinary reach of his mind during our discussions about the cloud and AI,” says Diane Greene, chair of the MIT Corporation. “As part of his service to the MIT Corporation, Ash joined the Executive Committee and we are so grateful for his wisdom, generosity, and his belief in the importance of MIT's research and education missions.”

As an MIT Innovation Fellow, Carter worked with researchers and students from the MIT School of Engineering and MIT Sloan School of Management.

“We were honored to have Ash serve as an innovation fellow at MIT," says Fiona Murray, the William Porter Professor of Entrepreneurship at the MIT Sloan School of Management and co-director of the MIT Innovation Initiative, noting that Carter demonstrated throughout his career the crucial importance of innovation in foreign policy and national security. As a visiting fellow, “Ash shared his commitment to innovating in the service of mission challenges, as well as his broad range of experience, to encourage students to think about their contributions to national and global issues. He led important conversations in small and large groups of students and faculty. His lifetime of service at the highest levels of government will remain an inspiration to us all.”

Carter earned a joint undergraduate degree in physics and medieval history from Yale University and a doctorate in theoretical physics at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar before becoming a fellow at MIT’s Center for International Studies in the 1980s. Around this time, he held a number of short-term posts, including at the Pentagon, before joining the faculty at Harvard University and then directing the Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

In 1993, he began his first tour of duty at the Pentagon as assistant secretary of defense for international security policy, a position he held until 1996. From 2009 to 2011, he served as the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology, and logistics, and from 2011 to 2013, as the deputy secretary of defense. Carter worked directly and indirectly for 11 secretaries of defense in Democratic and Republican administrations, “leveraging his knowledge of science and technology, global strategy, and policy,” according to information from the U.S. Department of Defense.

In 2015, he became the 25th U.S. secretary of defense during the last two years of President Barack Obama’s administration. As defense secretary, Carter changed policies so that women in the military could enter combat and transgender people could serve. He also started DIUx, now known as the Defense Innovation Unit, to strengthen ties between the military and Silicon Valley in order to explore commercial technologies with military applications in his ongoing effort to encourage relationships between the tech world and government.

Obama, in a statement honoring Carter on social media, called him “a leader who left America — and the world — safer through his lifetime of service.”

Over the course of his time at the Department of Defense, Carter worked to negotiate the withdrawal of nuclear weapons from former Soviet Republics, led U.S. policy to push Islamic State terrorists our of most of its territory in Syria and Iraq, and pushed the development of thousands of attack-resistant vehicles, which, according to the Pentagon, “saved countless service members’ lives.”

President Reif reflected this week on what Carter brought to MIT over the years.

“Ash never took a class at MIT, never served on our faculty, nor led one of our centers. But he was of MIT. He understood us. And through his service on advisory boards, visiting committees, and the Corporation, and as a visiting innovation fellow, he found so many ways to make us better. Our country has lost a great public servant and leader, and our community has lost a wonderful friend. We extend our deepest sympathies to his wife, Stephanie, daughter, Ava, and son, William.”

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In nanotube science, is boron nitride the new carbon?

Engineers at MIT and the University of Tokyo have produced centimeter-scale structures, large enough for the eye to see, that are packed with hundreds of billions of hollow aligned fibers, or nanotubes, made from hexagonal boron nitride.

Hexagonal boron nitride, or hBN, is a single-atom-thin material that has been coined “white graphene” for its transparent appearance and its similarity to carbon-based graphene in molecular structure and strength. It can also withstand higher temperatures than graphene, and is electrically insulating, rather than conductive. When hBN is rolled into nanometer-scale tubes, or nanotubes, its exceptional properties are significantly enhanced.

The team’s results, published today in the journal ACS Nano, provide a route toward fabricating aligned boron nitride nanotubes (A-BNNTs) in bulk. The researchers plan to harness the technique to fabricate bulk-scale arrays of these nanotubes, which can then be combined with other materials to make stronger, more heat-resistant composites, for instance to shield space structures and hypersonic aircraft.

As hBN is transparent and electrically insulating, the team also envisions incorporating the BNNTs into transparent windows and using them to electrically insulate sensors within electronic devices. The team is also investigating ways to weave the nanofibers into membranes for water filtration and for “blue energy” — a concept for renewable energy in which electricity is produced from the ionic filtering of salt water into fresh water.

Brian Wardle, professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT, likens the team’s results to scientists’ decades-long, ongoing pursuit of manufacturing bulk-scale carbon nanotubes.

“In 1991, a single carbon nanotube was identified as an interesting thing, but it’s been 30 years getting to bulk aligned carbon nanotubes, and the world’s not even fully there yet,” Wardle says. “With the work we’re doing, we’ve just short-circuited about 20 years in getting to bulk-scale versions of aligned boron nitride nanotubes.”

Wardle is the senior author of the new study, which includes lead author and MIT research scientist Luiz Acauan, former MIT postdoc Haozhe Wang, and collaborators at the University of Tokyo.

A vision, aligned

Like graphene, hexagonal boron nitride has a molecular structure resembling chicken wire. In graphene, this chicken wire configuration is made entirely of carbon atoms, arranged in a repeating pattern of hexagons. For hBN, the hexagons are composed of alternating atoms of boron and nitrogen. In recent years, researchers have found that two-dimensional sheets of hBN exhibit exceptional properties of strength, stiffness, and resilience at high temperatures. When sheets of hBN are rolled into nanotube form, these properties are further enhanced, particularly when the nanotubes are aligned, like tiny trees in a densely packed forest.

But finding ways to synthesize stable, high quality BNNTs has proven challenging. A handful of efforts to do so have produced low-quality, nonaligned fibers.

“If you can align them, you have much better chance of harnessing BNNTs properties at the bulk scale to make actual physical devices, composites, and membranes,” Wardle says.

In 2020, Rong Xiang and colleagues at the University of Tokyo found they could produce high-quality boron nitride nanotubes by first using a conventional approach of chemical vapor deposition to grow a forest of short, few micron-long carbon nanotubes. They then coated the carbon-based forest with “precursors” of boron and nitrogen gas, which when baked in an oven at high temperatures crystallized onto the carbon nanotubes to form high-quality nanotubes of hexagonal boron nitride with carbon nanotubes inside.

Burning scaffolds

In the new study, Wardle and Acauan have extend and scale Xiang’s approach, essentially removing the underlying carbon nanotubes and leaving the long boron nitride nanotubes to stand on their own. The team drew on the expertise of Wardle’s group, which has focused for years on fabricating high-quality aligned arrays of carbon nanotubes. With their current work, the researchers looked for ways to tweak the temperatures and pressures of the chemical vapor deposition process in order to remove the carbon nanotubes while leaving the boron nitride nanotubes intact.

“The first few times we did it, it was completely ugly garbage,” Wardle recalls. “The tubes curled up into a ball, and they didn’t work.”

Eventually, the team hit on a combination of temperatures, pressures, and precursors that did the trick. With this combination of processes, the researchers first reproduced the steps that Xiang took to synthesize the boron-nitride-coated carbon nanotubes. As hBN is resistant to higher temperatures than graphene, the team then cranked up the heat to burn away the underlying black carbon nanotube scaffold, while leaving the transparent, freestanding boron nitride nanotubes intact.

In microscopic images, the team observed clear crystalline structures — evidence that the boron nitride nanotubes have a high quality. The structures were also dense: Within a square centimeter, the researchers were able to synthesize a forest of more than 100 billion aligned boron nitride nanotubes, that measured about a millimeter in height — large enough to be visible by eye. By nanotube engineering standards, these dimensions are considered to be “bulk” in scale.

“We are now able to make these nanoscale fibers at bulk scale, which has never been shown before,” Acauan says.

To demonstrate the flexibility of their technique, the team synthesized larger carbon-based structures, including a weave of carbon fibers, a mat of “fuzzy” carbon nanotubes, and sheets of randomly oriented carbon nanotubes known as “buckypaper.” They coated each carbon-based sample with boron and nitrogen precursors, then went through their process to burn away the underlying carbon. In each demonstration, they were left with a boron-nitride replica of the original black carbon scaffold.

They also were able to “knock down” the forests of BNNTs, producing horizontally aligned fiber films that are a preferred configuration for incorporating into composite materials.

“We are now working toward fibers to reinforce ceramic matrix composites, for hypersonic and space applications where there are very high temperatures, and for windows for devices that need to be optically transparent,” Wardle says. “You could make transparent materials that are reinforced with these very strong nanotubes.”

This research was supported, in part, by Airbus, ANSYS, Boeing, Embraer, Lockheed Martin, Saab AB, and Teijin Carbon America through MIT’s Nano-Engineered Composite aerospace STructures (NECST) Consortium.

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Community members greet MIT’s 18th president

On a warm, sunny afternoon last Thursday, MIT’s community gathered under a tent on Hockfield Court to meet the Institute’s next president, Sally Kornbluth.

Amid a festive, celebratory atmosphere that included live music and fall treats, Kornbluth soaked in MIT’s culture; chatted with faculty, students, and staff; heard from members of MIT leadership; and took innumerable selfies with community members.

The event featured talks by Kornbluth and MIT Corporation Chair Diane Greene SM ’78, as well as performances by MIT a cappella group the Chorallaries. Following a musical performance including MIT’s school song, Kornbluth traveled through the tent greeting community members, who shared their excitement and ideas with her.

In her remarks, Kornbluth acknowledged she has much to learn about MIT, but Thursday’s event was an early chance to immerse herself in MIT’s community and begin the learning process — what she happily described as “drinking from the firehose.”

“I want to leave you with one standing request,” Kornbluth concluded. “I want to know what you know about MIT. I want to know what you love about MIT, what makes you proud, and where you think that, by working together, we could make MIT even better.”

The lively gathering was accented by upbeat music and aromas from abundant refreshments and snacks, including spreads of apple cider and popular donut walls in every corner of the tent.

“It’s a wonderfully open community that doesn’t put a lot of emphasis on hierarchy,” said David I. Kaiser, the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science, professor of physics, and associate dean of Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing in the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing. “The undergraduates should be rubbing elbows with the provost and the president-elect and everyone in between. That’s what we get to do today, and not every place is like that. I think Dr. Kornbluth saw that about MIT and I think that resonated deeply with her.”

Greene opened her remarks by thanking current President L. Rafael Reif for his 10 years of service to MIT, prompting a standing ovation. She also recognized the presidential search committee, which for the first time included undergraduate and graduate students as well as members of the MIT Corporation, faculty, and staff.

“This committee made unprecedented efforts to seek input from all members of our community as well as the broader higher ed community,” Greene said.

Kornbluth’s appointment marks a notable time in MIT’s history. When she takes office, MIT’s president, provost, and chancellor will all be women.

Members of the search committee expressed an appreciation for Kornbluth’s desire to get to know every corner of the MIT community as she begins supporting its work.

“She speaks all the languages of MIT, from the humanities to social sciences, design, as well as basic science and engineering,” said committee member Nicholas de Monchaux, a professor and head of MIT’s Department of Architecture. “That’s a very rare and unique quality, but more than that, it was clear to us [Dr. Kornbluth] has a complete and total curiosity and humility about ideas and knowledge, which is to say she’s coming in wanting to learn from us, and that’s so much the spirit of MIT.”

During Kornbluth’s conversations, some community members offered advice and mementos, while others extended a simple welcome message. The exchanges marked the beginning of a learning process Kornbluth and the community seemed eager to begin.

“It was such a privilege to get to know Dr. Kornbluth even a little bit during the search process and I’m excited the rest of the community now gets that same opportunity,” Kaiser said. “She has so much to learn with and from us, but I think people are really going to enjoy getting to know her as well.”

In describing the event, Kornbluth used an analogy from her favorite type of science fiction, when an intrepid explorer makes contact with a new civilization.

“This is kind of like that, except that all of you have gone out of your way to make sure I don’t feel like an alien, so thank you.”

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Helping blockchain communities fix bugs

If the crypto enthusiasts are right, the next decade will see billions of people begin using applications built off distributed, user-owned blockchains. The new paradigm has been dubbed Web 3. But Web 3 still has some significant challenges to overcome if it’s going to replace the digital world as we know it.

Blockchain networks, for instance, are going to need an efficient way of detecting and resolving performance problems. Current analytics tools are built for companies to monitor their websites and apps. Such services need only be designed for one user. In the decentralized world of the blockchains, however, the users are the owners, turning the traditional model of maintenance and bug fixes on its head.

The MIT alumnus-founded company Metrika has developed a suite of tools to help the distributed communities of the blockchain world monitor and improve their networks. The company allows users to create alerts, access reports, and view real-time community dashboards that visualize network performance, problems, and trends over time.

“Metrika is a community-based monitoring and collaboration platform,” founder and CEO Nikos Andrikogiannopoulos SM ’06, MBA ’11 says. “We’re making [blockchain network] telemetry a public good for everyone. These applications are holding billions of dollars in assets, so it's unimaginable that we wouldn't have service assurance and deep visibility of what is happening in real-time.”

Metrika is currently providing services for popular blockchain protocols including Ethereum, Algorand, Flow, and Solana. The company plans to expand that list as other networks grow in popularity in hopes of enabling the much-hyped shift to Web 3.

“Our vision at Metrika is to become a critical layer of the Web 3 world,” Andrikogiannopoulos says. “Ten years from now, kids will be interacting with assets on their mobile phone. The idea of a bank account will be foreign to them. There will be no corner banks. The whole idea of finance will not go through physical stores and bank accounts — you’ll have assets on every application you use. In that world, where everything is happening on a blockchain, how can Metrika help provide the observability, reliability, and visibility of the blockchain network?”

Bouncing ideas off MIT

Andrikogiannopoulos first came to MIT as a graduate student in 2004 and he likes to say he never really left. To this day he lives in Cambridge with his wife, who works at MIT, and returns to campus often.

After earning his second MIT degree, an MBA from the Sloan School of Management, Andrikogiannopoulos began a telecommunications consulting job. During lunch breaks, he’d return to MIT to work with the Venture Mentoring Services (VMS), where entrepreneurs from the MIT community can connect with mentors and receive advice. While kicking around telecommunications startup ideas, a VMS mentor connected him to internet entrepreneur Rubin Gruber, who suggested he explore the blockchain space instead.

It was mid 2018 — what many remember as the “crypto winter” for the lull in blockchain hype and the corresponding crash of crypto prices. But Andrikogiannopoulos began researching the industry and networking with people in the blockchain space, including an MIT alumnus working at the blockchain company Algorand, which was founded by Silvio Micali, the Ford Foundation Professor of Engineering at MIT.

A few months after their initial talk, Andrikogiannopoulos returned to Gruber’s office and told him blockchains were lacking monitoring and operational intelligence.

The problem stems from the decentralized structure of blockchains. Each user operates as a node in the system by creating, receiving, and moving data through their server. When users encounter a problem, they need to figure out if the problem lies within their node or involves the network as a whole.

“They might go on Twitter and Discord and ask other users what they’re experiencing,” Andrikogiannopoulos says. “They’re trying to triangulate the problem, and it takes several hours for them to figure out the issue, coordinate a response, and resolve it.”

To build Metrika, Andrikogiannopoulos set up open-source nodes across the globe that pull data from the nodes and networks, then aggregate those data into easy-to-understand reports and other tools.

“We act as public infrastructure, so users get visibility through dashboards, alerting, and reports, and then we add collaboration tools on top of that,” Andrikogiannopoulos explains.

By 2019, Metrika had begun detecting problems with node performance, staking, network latency, and errors like blocks not being produced at the right rate. Andrikogiannopoulos showed his progress to employees at Algorand, who expressed interest, so he continued building out Metrika's suite of tools.

"You can see the idea of Metrika bounced across the entire MIT ecosystem,” Andrikogiannopoulos says. “It’s crucial when you start companies that you have these kinds of insight and resource-rich environments like MIT, where you can iterate on your ideas and find team members to join you.”

Enabling Web 3

Blockchains are no longer a niche technology. Around the world, companies in finance and logistics, as well gamers and other creatives, are adopting the technology.

“The blockchain world up to today has been a large experiment,” Andrikogiannopoulos says. “A lot of this infrastructure just hasn’t been built. But Bitcoin proved this can work outside of the traditional finance world, and Ethereum is bringing it to another level with applications, smart contracts, and by creating essentially a decentralized, smart computer. We think about enabling that world we see coming.”

As Metrika continues building out solutions to monitor blockchains, it also wants to offer services for the many applications being built on top of that infrastructure.

“In the future, if a blockchain transaction doesn’t go through and you’re Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan, you need to know why that transaction didn’t go through and what happened,” Andrikogiannopoulos says. “Or if you’re an application playing a game or buying assets and the transactions are lagging, you need to understand why the user experience is being impacted. In Web 3 these things are every important because of the scale and the flow of value we’re talking about.”

For Nikos, improving blockchain performance is not just about optimizing networks. It’s also about helping to usher in the world of open finance and open applications that Web 3 promises.

“We’ve reached 17 hours of outage on blockchain networks in some cases, but what’s even more important to me is not the outages themselves, but the infrastructure needed to avoid them as the industry continues maturing,” Nikos says. “These problems can compromise trust as we’re onboarding users into the Web 3 world. Metrika’s mission is to enable a compelling Web 3 ecosystem.”

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Pesticide innovation takes top prize at Collegiate Inventors Competition

On Oct. 12, MIT mechanical engineering alumnus Vishnu Jayaprakash SM '19, PhD '22 was named the first-place winner in the graduate category of the Collegiate Inventors Competition. The annual competition, which is organized by the National Inventors Hall of Fame, celebrates college and university student inventors. Jayaprakash won for his pesticide innovation AgZen-Cloak, which he developed while he was a student in the lab of Kripa Varanasi, a professor of mechanical engineering.

Currently, only 2 percent of pesticide spray is retained by crops. Many crops are naturally water-repellent, causing pesticide-laden water to bounce off of them. Farmers are forced to over-spray significantly to ensure proper spray coverage on their crops. Not only does this waste expensive pesticides, but it also comes at an environmental cost.

Runoff from pesticide treatment pollutes soil and nearby streams. Droplets can travel in the air, leading to illness and death in nearby populations. It is estimated that each year, pesticide pollution causes between 20,000 and 200,000 deaths, and up to 385 million acute illnesses like cancer, birth defects, and neurological conditions.   

With his invention AgZen-Cloak, Jayaprakash has found a way to keep droplets of water containing pesticide from bouncing off crops by “cloaking” the droplets in a small amount of plant-derived oil. As a result, farmers could use just one-fifth the amount of spray, minimizing water waste and cost for farmers and eliminating airborne pollution and toxic runoff. It also improves pesticide retention, which can lead to higher crop yield.

“By cloaking each droplet with a minute quantity of a plant-based oil, we promote water retention on even the most water-repellent plant surfaces,” says Jayaprakash. “AgZen-Cloak presents a universal, inexpensive, and environmentally sustainable way to prevent pesticide overuse and waste.”

Farming is in Jayaprakash’s DNA. His family operates a 10-acre farm near Chennai, India, where they grow rice and mangoes. Upon joining the Varanasi Research Group as a graduate student, Jayaprakash was instantly drawn to Varanasi’s work on pesticides in agriculture.

“Growing up, I would spray crops on my family farm wearing a backpack sprayer. So, I’ve always wanted to work on research that made farmer’s lives easier,” says Jayaprakash, who serves as CEO of the startup AgZen.

Helping droplets stick

Varanasi and his lab at MIT work on what is known as interfacial phenomena — or the study of what happens when different phases come into contact and interact with one another. Understanding how a liquid interacts with a solid or how a liquid reacts to a certain gas has endless applications, which explains the diversity of the research Varanasi has conducted over the years. He and his team have developed solutions for everything from consumer product packaging to power plant emissions.

In 2009, Varanasi gave a talk at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). There, he learned from the USDA just how big of a problem runoff from pesticide spray was for farmers around the world.

He enlisted the help of then-graduate student Maher Damak SM ’15, PhD ’18 to apply their work in interfacial phenomena to pesticide sprays. Over the next several years, the Varanasi Research Group developed a technology that utilized electrically charged polymers to keep droplets from bouncing off hydrophobic surfaces. When droplets containing positively and negatively charged additives meet, their surface chemistry allows them to stick to a plant’s surface.

Using polyelectrolytes, the researchers could reduce the amount of spray needed to cover a crop by tenfold in the lab. This motivated the Varanasi Research Group to pursue three years of field trials with various commercial growers around the world, where they were able to demonstrate significant savings for farmers.

“We got fantastic feedback on our technology from farmers. We are really excited to change the paradigm for agriculture. Not only is it good for the environment, but we’ve heard from farmers that they love it. If we can put money back into farms, it helps society as a whole,” adds Varanasi.

In response to the positive feedback, Varanasi and Jayaprakash co-founded startup AgZen in 2020. 

When field testing their polyelectrolyte technology, Varanasi and Jayaprakash came up with the idea to explore the use of a fully plant-based material to help farmers achieve the same savings. 

Cloaking droplets and engineering nozzles

Jayaprakash found that by cloaking a small amount of plant-derived oil around a water droplet, droplets stick to plant surfaces that would typically repel water. After conducting many studies in the lab, he found that the oil only needs to make up 0.1 percent of a droplet’s total volume to stick to crops and provide total, uniform coverage.

While his cloaking solution worked in the lab, Jayaprakash knew that to have a tangible impact in the real world he needed to find an easy, low-cost way for farmers to coat pesticide spray droplets in oil.

Jayaprakash focused on spray nozzles. He developed a proprietary nozzle that coats each droplet with a small amount of oil as they are being formed. The nozzles can easily be added to any hose or farming equipment.

“What we’ve done is figured out a smart way to cloak these droplets by using a very small quantity of oil on the outside of each drop. Because of that, we get this drastic improvement in performance that can really be a game-changer for farmers,” says Jayaprakash.

In addition to improving pesticide retention in crops, the AgZen-Cloak solves a second problem. Since large droplets are prone to break apart and bounce off crops, historically, farmers have sprayed pesticide in tiny, mist-like droplets. These fine droplets are often carried by the wind, increasing pesticide pollution in nearby areas. 

When AgZen-Cloak is used, the pesticide-laden droplets can be larger and still stick to crops. These larger droplets aren’t carried by the wind, decreasing the risk of pollution and minimizing the health impacts on local populations.  

“We’re actually solving two problems with one solution. With the cloaking technology, we can spray much larger droplets that aren’t prone to wind drift and they can stick to the plant,” Jayaprakash adds.

Bringing AgZen-Cloaks to farmers around the world

This spring, Varanasi encouraged Jayaprakash to submit AgZen-Cloak to the Collegiate Inventors Competition. Out of hundreds of applications, Jayaprakash was one of 25 student inventors to be chosen as a finalist.

On Oct. 12, Jayaprakash presented his technology to a panel of judges composed of National Inventors Hall of Fame inductees and U.S. Patent and Trademark Office officials. Meeting with such an illustrious group of inventors and officials left an impression on Jayaprakash.

“These are people who have invented things that have changed the world. So, to get their feedback on what we’re doing was incredibly valuable,” he says. Jayaprakash received a $10,000 prize for being named the first-place graduate winner.

As full-time CEO of AgZen, Jayaprakash is shifting focus to field testing and commercialization. He and the AgZen team have already conducted field testing across the world at locations including a Prosecco vineyard outside of Venice, a ranch in California, and Ward’s Berry Farm in Sharon, Massachusetts. The University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s vegetable extension program, led by their program director Susan Scheufele, recently concluded a field test that validated AgZen’s on-field performance.

Two days after his win at the Collegiate Inventors Competition, Jayaprakash was named the first prize winner of the MIT Abdul Latif Jamel Water and Food Systems Lab World Food Day student video competition. Hours later, he flew across the country to attend an agricultural tech conference in California, eager to meet with farmers and discuss plans for rolling out AgZen’s innovations to farms everywhere.

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Frank Sidney Jones, professor emeritus of urban affairs, dies at 93

Frank Sidney Jones, professor emeritus in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), passed away on Aug. 28 at the age of 93.

In 1971, Jones was named Ford Professor of Urban Affairs and Planning, becoming the first African American to be tenured at MIT. He also taught courses in civil engineering.

From his appointment in 1968 to his retirement in 1992, he focused on issues of race, poverty, and inequality, using his position to advocate for the expanded presence of people of color at the Institute. 

“Professor Jones epitomized so much of what we aspire to here in DUSP in our ongoing efforts in support of an antiracist transformation and the mobilization of our research, teaching, internal culture, and external partnerships toward excellence, justice, and diversity,” says Chris Zegras, professor of mobility and urban planning and DUSP department head. “While the world has lost a pioneer, his legacy lives on in our department, as well as across and beyond the Institute.”

Jones was the youngest son of David Dallas and Susie Williams Jones, the president and first lady of Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina. After spending his early years in Greensboro, he moved to Boston and graduated from Phillips Andover Academy before attending Harvard College. At Harvard he was proud to be named the first African American manager of the Harvard football team in 1949. 

After completing his graduate studies at Harvard Business School (HBS) in 1957, Jones pursued an industry career and served as assistant dean at HBS. He joined MIT as executive director of the Urban Systems Laboratory in 1968.

“Frank Jones was a wonderful colleague,” says professor emeritus and former MIT chancellor Phillip Clay PhD ’75. “He joined the DUSP faculty in the early 1970s, when I was a doctoral student. He was a source of encouragement in my early career. Frank challenged orthodoxy in both the literature and practice of urban planning. He promoted justice and inclusion as core values. He actively engaged students.”

“Frank, together with Ken Manning, was among the first academics to understand the larger meaning of the HIV/AIDS crisis, teaching several courses and seminars to help students draw the meaning of the social impact of the public health crisis. Frank was a major player in the community. He was one of the organizers of The Partnership, an effort to attract Black professionals to the Boston area and provide a networking and professional development platform. The impact of his efforts changed MIT and many other Boston metro-area institutions and corporations.”

Jones was the founding director of the Project on Technology, Race, and Poverty and served on a committee to help select a leader for the newly formed Office of Minority Education (OME), designed to advance the recruitment and education of students of color.

Today, OME facilitates professional development and the building of personal and professional networks, and supports academic excellence for students who are underrepresented, including African American, Native American, and Latinx students across the Institute.

In 1989, Jones was instrumental in creating the Martin Luther King, Jr. Professors and Scholars Program, which continues to bring distinguished visitors to share their wisdom with the MIT community.

“Continuously, forcefully, and successfully, Frank leveled the playing field for African American scholars, reducing the systemic racism and offering paths for scholarship by African Americans at MIT,” says Wesley Harris, the Charles Stark Draper Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics. “Frank’s sage counsel remains.”

In addition to his work at MIT, Jones served on the governing boards of educational and community-focused organizations including: Mount Holyoke College, Phillips Academy, Charles Stark Draper Labs, Greater Roxbury Community Development Corporation, The Center for Creative Leadership, and The Partnership, Inc.

Jones is survived by his two sons, Christopher and David; daughters-in-law Angela Cook-Jones and Sarah Niemczycki; five grandchildren; and eight nieces and nephews.

“Professor Frank Jones cared deeply about excellence and equity and was a fierce advocate for his students. He inspired me, and frankly all his students, to always remember to help those most in need as we aimed to be our best,” says Karen Fulbright-Anderson MCP ’79, PhD ’85.

Fulbright-Anderson spearheaded the creation of the Frank S. Jones Student Activities Fund to honor Jones’s legacy of advocacy and compassionate action by supporting students as they work to help others and address some of society's most pressing issues.

Donations honoring Jones's memory may be made to either the fund or Bennett College. A memorial service is planned for Nov. 12 at 2 p.m. in the MIT Chapel.

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Coordinating climate and air-quality policies to improve public health

As America’s largest investment to fight climate change, the Inflation Reduction Act positions the country to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by an estimated 40 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. But as it edges the United States closer to achieving its international climate commitment, the legislation is also expected to yield significant — and more immediate — improvements in the nation’s health. If successful in accelerating the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy alternatives, the IRA will sharply reduce atmospheric concentrations of fine particulates known to exacerbate respiratory and cardiovascular disease and cause premature deaths, along with other air pollutants that degrade human health. One recent study shows that eliminating air pollution from fossil fuels in the contiguous United States would prevent more than 50,000 premature deaths and avoid more than $600 billion in health costs each year.

While national climate policies such as those advanced by the IRA can simultaneously help mitigate climate change and improve air quality, their results may vary widely when it comes to improving public health. That’s because the potential health benefits associated with air quality improvements are much greater in some regions and economic sectors than in others. Those benefits can be maximized, however, through a prudent combination of climate and air-quality policies.

Several past studies have evaluated the likely health impacts of various policy combinations, but their usefulness has been limited due to a reliance on a small set of standard policy scenarios. More versatile tools are needed to model a wide range of climate and air-quality policy combinations and assess their collective effects on air quality and human health. Now researchers at the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change and MIT Institute for Data, Systems and Society (IDSS) have developed a publicly available, flexible scenario tool that does just that.

In a study published in the journal Geoscientific Model Development, the MIT team introduces its Tool for Air Pollution Scenarios (TAPS), which can be used to estimate the likely air-quality and health outcomes of a wide range of climate and air-quality policies at the regional, sectoral, and fuel-based level. 

“This tool can help integrate the siloed sustainability issues of air pollution and climate action,” says the study’s lead author William Atkinson, who recently served as a Biogen Graduate Fellow and research assistant at the IDSS Technology and Policy Program’s (TPP) Research to Policy Engagement Initiative. “Climate action does not guarantee a clean air future, and vice versa — but the issues have similar sources that imply shared solutions if done right.”

The study’s initial application of TAPS shows that with current air-quality policies and near-term Paris Agreement climate pledges alone, short-term pollution reductions give way to long-term increases — given the expected growth of emissions-intensive industrial and agricultural processes in developing regions. More ambitious climate and air-quality policies could be complementary, each reducing different pollutants substantially to give tremendous near- and long-term health benefits worldwide.

“The significance of this work is that we can more confidently identify the long-term emission reduction strategies that also support air quality improvements,” says MIT Joint Program Deputy Director C. Adam Schlosser, a co-author of the study. “This is a win-win for setting climate targets that are also healthy targets.”

TAPS projects air quality and health outcomes based on three integrated components: a recent global inventory of detailed emissions resulting from human activities (e.g., fossil fuel combustion, land-use change, industrial processes); multiple scenarios of emissions-generating human activities between now and the year 2100, produced by the MIT Economic Projection and Policy Analysis model; and emissions intensity (emissions per unit of activity) scenarios based on recent data from the Greenhouse Gas and Air Pollution Interactions and Synergies model.

“We see the climate crisis as a health crisis, and believe that evidence-based approaches are key to making the most of this historic investment in the future, particularly for vulnerable communities,” says Johanna Jobin, global head of corporate reputation and responsibility at Biogen. “The scientific community has spoken with unanimity and alarm that not all climate-related actions deliver equal health benefits. We’re proud of our collaboration with the MIT Joint Program to develop this tool that can be used to bridge research-to-policy gaps, support policy decisions to promote health among vulnerable communities, and train the next generation of scientists and leaders for far-reaching impact.”

The tool can inform decision-makers about a wide range of climate and air-quality policies. Policy scenarios can be applied to specific regions, sectors, or fuels to investigate policy combinations at a more granular level, or to target short-term actions with high-impact benefits.

TAPS could be further developed to account for additional emissions sources and trends.

“Our new tool could be used to examine a large range of both climate and air quality scenarios. As the framework is expanded, we can add detail for specific regions, as well as additional pollutants such as air toxics,” says study supervising co-author Noelle Selin, professor at IDSS and the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, and director of TPP.    

This research was supported by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and its Science to Achieve Results (STAR) program; Biogen; TPP’s Leading Technology and Policy Initiative; and TPP’s Research to Policy Engagement Initiative.

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Two first-year students named Rise Global Winners for 2022

In 2019, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife, Wendy, launched a $1 billion philanthropic commitment to identify global talent. Part of that effort is the Rise initiative, which selects 100 young scholars, ages 15-17, from around the world who show unusual promise and a drive to serve others. This year’s cohort of 100 Rise Global Winners includes two MIT first-year students, Jacqueline Prawira and Safiya Sankari.

Rise intentionally targets younger-aged students and focuses on identifying what the program terms “hidden brilliance” in any form, anywhere in the world, whether it be in a high school or a refugee camp. Another defining aspect of the program is that Rise winners receive sustained support — not just in secondary school, but throughout their lives.

“We believe that the answers to the world’s toughest problems lie in the imagination of the world's brightest minds,” says Eric Braverman, CEO of Schmidt Futures, which manages Rise along with the Rhodes Trust. “Rise is an integral part of our mission to create the best, largest, and most enduring pipeline of exceptional talent globally and match it to opportunities to serve others for life.”

The Rise program creates this enduring pipeline by providing a lifetime of benefits, including funding, programming, and mentoring opportunities. These resources can be tailored to each person as they evolve throughout their career. In addition to a four-year college scholarship, winners receive mentoring and career services; networking opportunities with other Rise recipients and partner organizations; technical equipment such as laptops or tablets; courses on topics like leadership and human-centered design; and opportunities to apply for graduate scholarships and for funding throughout their careers to support their innovative ideas, such as grants or seed money to start a social enterprise.

Prawira and Sankari’s winning service projects focus on global sustainability and global medical access, respectively. Prawira invented a way to use upcycled fish-scale waste to absorb heavy metals in wastewater. She first started experimenting with fish-scale waste in middle school to try to find a bio-based alternative to plastic. More recently, she discovered that the calcium salts and collagen in fish scales can absorb up to 82 percent of heavy metals from water, and 91 percent if an electric current is passed through the water. Her work has global implications for treating contaminated water at wastewater plants and in developing countries.

Prawiri published her research in 2021 and has won awards from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and several other organizations. She’s planning to major in Course 3 (materials science and engineering), perhaps with an environmentally related minor. “I believe that sustainability and solving environmental problems requires a multifaced approach,” she says. “Creating greener materials for use in our daily lives will have a major impact in solving current environmental issues.”

For Sankari’s service project, she developed an algorithm to analyze data from electronic nano-sensor devices, or e-noses, which can detect certain diseases from a patient’s breath. The devices are calibrated to detect volatile organic compound biosignatures that are indicative of diseases like diabetes and cancer. “E-nose disease detection is much faster and cheaper than traditional methods of diagnosis, making medical care more accessible to many,” she explains. The Python-based algorithm she created can translate raw data from e-noses into a result that the user can read.

Sankari is a lifetime member of the American Junior Academy of Science and has been a finalist in several prestigious science competitions. She is considering a major in Course 6-7 (computer science and molecular biology) at MIT and hopes to continue to explore the intersection between nanotechnology and medicine.

While the 2022 Rise recipients share a desire to tackle some of the world’s most intractable problems, their ideas and interests, as reflected by their service projects, are broad, innovative, and diverse. A winner from Belarus used bioinformatics to predict the molecular effect of a potential Alzheimer’s drug. A Romanian student created a magazine that aims to promote acceptance of transgender bodies. A Vietnamese teen created a prototype of a toothbrush that uses a nano chip to detect cancerous cells in saliva. And a recipient from the United States designed modular, tiny homes for the unhoused that are affordable and sustainable, as an alternative to homeless shelters.

This year’s winners were selected from over 13,000 applicants from 47 countries, from Azerbaijan and Burkina Faso to Lebanon and Paraguay. The selection process includes group interviews, peer and expert review of each applicant’s service project, and formal talent assessments.

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Seven with MIT ties receive awards from the American Physical Society

The American Physical Society (APS) recently honored a number of individuals with ties to MIT with prizes and awards for their contributions to physics. They include: Institute Professor Arup Chakraborty; associate professors Ronald Fernando Garcia Ruiz and Lina Necib; Yuan Cao SM ’16 PhD ’20; Alina Kononov ’14; Elliott H. Lieb ’53; Haocun Yu PhD ’20; and several former MIT postdocs.

Max Delbruck Prize in Biological Physics

Institute Professor Arup Chakraborty, a professor of chemical engineering, physics, and chemistry, received the 2023 Max Delbruck Prize in Biological Physics for his role in “initiating the field of computational immunology, aimed at applying approaches from physical sciences and engineering to unravel the mechanistic underpinnings of the adaptive immune response to pathogens, and to harness this understanding to help design vaccines and therapy.”

The Delbruck Prize is named in honor of the physicist and Nobel Laureate Max Delbruck, whose influential quantitative study of genes and their susceptibility to mutations has inspired generations of physical scientists to work on biology, starting with Erwin Schroedinger’s book “What Is Life?” The annual $10,000 Delbruck Prize recognizes and encourages outstanding achievement in biological physics research. 

A chemical engineer by training, Chakraborty’s research at the crossroad of statistical physics and molecular and cellular immunology has led to discoveries regarding the immune response to pathogens, which can be harnessed for the development of potential vaccines for HIV, influenza, and other highly mutable pathogens. Most recently, he has also been studying the role of phase separation in gene regulation. The Chakraborty Group’s theoretical and computational research is distinguished by its impact on experimental and clinical studies, and they collaborate with many experimental and clinical biologists.

Teaching at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, Chakraborty is also a co-author of the 2021 book “Viruses, Pandemics, and Immunity.” He is one of just 12 MIT Institute Professors and is also one of just 25 individuals who are members of all three branches of the U.S. National Academies — National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Medicine, and National Academy of Engineering.

Chakraborty is a core faculty member and the founding director of MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, and a founding member of the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard. He will receive the prize at January’s APS Annual Leadership Meeting in Washington.

George E. Valley Jr. Prize  

Assistant professor of physics Lina Necib PhD ’17 has been selected to receive the George E. Valley Jr. Prize, which recognizes an outstanding scientific contribution to physics by an early-career researcher.

The astroparticle physicist was recognized for the discovery of a massive new stellar structure “that may have shaped the history of the Milky Way,” and for her development of “groundbreaking new methods” to study our galaxy's dark-matter halo and growth history.

Necib uses cosmological simulations, stellar catalogs, machine learning techniques, and a background of particle physics to build the first map of dark matter in the Milky Way. Specifically, Necib uses the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft’s optical telescopes to model the kinematics of accreted stars, which are stars born outside our galaxy, the Milky Way. Some of these stars originate from merger events such as the Gaia Sausage/Gaia Enceledus. She also discovered a stellar stream that wraps around the Milky Way galaxy, called Nyx, after the Greek goddess of the night, and is using spectroscopy to identify its properties.

A native of Tunisia, Necib worked with Professor Jesse Thaler to receive her PhD in theoretical physics from MIT in 2017. She rejoined the Institute as a faculty member in 2021.

The award, which recognizes an early-career individual for an outstanding scientific contribution to physics that is deemed to have significant potential for a dramatic impact on the field, provides $10,000, a certificate citing the contribution made by the recipient, an allowance for travel to the APS Medal and Prize Ceremony and Reception in Washington, and an invited talk at an APS March or April meeting. The prize is named after the late MIT professor emeritus of physics who was also an MIT alumnus.

Stuart Jay Freedman Award in Experimental Nuclear Physics  

Assistant professor of physics Ronald Fernando Garcia Ruiz was recognized with the American Physical Society’s Stuart Jay Freedman Award in Experimental Nuclear Physics "for novel studies of exotic nuclei using precision laser spectroscopy measurements, including the first spectroscopy of short-lived radioactive molecules.” 

Garcia Ruiz develops laser spectroscopy techniques to investigate the properties of subatomic particles using atoms and molecules made up of short-lived radioactive nuclei. His experimental work provides unique information about the fundamental forces of nature, the properties of nuclear matter at the limits of existence, and the search for new physics beyond the Standard Model of particle physics. 

Very recently, his team at MIT and collaborators developed a new laser spectroscopy experiment, the Resonant ionization Spectroscopy Experiments (RiSE), located at the new Department of Energy Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) at Michigan State University. "We anticipate the RISE experiment, combined with the unique capabilities of FRIB, is going to provide major breakthroughs in our understanding of nuclei at the extremes of stability, and the use of rare atoms and molecules in fundamental physics over the next decade," Garcia Ruiz says.

A native of Colombia, Garcia Ruiz joined MIT in 2020. His award, named after distinguished experimental nuclear physicist Stuart J. Freedman, will be presented at the 2022 Fall Meeting of the APS Division of Nuclear Physics Oct. 27-30. The award includes $4,000, a certificate, and travel allowance to give a talk at the awards ceremony.

Richard L. Greene Dissertation Award in Experimental Condensed Matter or Materials Physics

Yuan Cao SM ’16, PhD ’20, now a junior fellow at Harvard University, received the 2022 Richard L. Greene Dissertation Award in Experimental Condensed Matter or Materials Physics "for pioneering discoveries of strongly correlated physics in twisted bilayer graphene."

A graduate of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and former Jarillo-Herrero lab postdoc and Materials Research Laboratory visiting scientist, Cao is mainly focused on the quantum transport in 2D materials, especially moiré superlattices. Cao’s past work has been honored as "Nature's 10" and Physics World’s “Physics Breakthrough of the Year," in 2018.

Nicholas Metropolis Award for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Work in Computational Physics

Alina Kononov ’14, a postdoc at Sandia National Laboratories, received the Nicholas Metropolis Award for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Work in Computational Physics “for trailblazing contributions to the computational modeling of materials physics, including large-scale simulations of irradiated materials and advances in time-dependent density functional theory."

Kononov’s research interests span electronic structure theory and its applications, including time-dependent density functional theory, quantum simulation, materials physics, and high-energy density science. A 2014 graduate of MIT in physics, her later doctoral work focused on first-principles modeling of ion-irradiated surfaces and 2D materials, enabling predictive calculations of ion-induced electron emission, uncovering new surface physics, and offering insights for ion beam materials imaging and processing techniques. At Sandia National Labs, she continues to develop and apply cutting-edge methods to model excited electron dynamics.

APS Medal for Exceptional Achievement in Research

Elliott H. Lieb ’53, an alumnus of the MIT Department of Physics and a former MIT professor who is now at Princeton University, has received the 2022 APS Medal for Exceptional Achievement in Research “for major contributions to theoretical physics through obtaining exact solutions to important physical problems, which have impacted condensed matter physics, quantum information, statistical mechanics, and atomic physics."

As an MIT professor from 1968 to 1974, he became renown for the Lieb-Robinson Bound in condensed matter, which plays a significant role on the topological phases of extensive quantum systems; the “Strong subadditivity of quantum entropy,” with Mary Beth Ruskai, which now forms part of the basis of modern quantum information theory; the first “Brascamp-Lieb inequalities” that date from this period (the final version was constructed by Elliott at Princeton in 1990); and “The proof of stability of matter” with Austrian physicist Walter Thirring — their Lieb-Thirring inequalities opened a new chapter in functional analysis.
 

Carl E. Anderson Division of Laser Science Dissertation Award

Haocun Yu PhD ’20, who earned her doctorate from the MIT Department of Physics and is now a postdoc at the University of Vienna’s Walther group, received the 2021 Carl E. Anderson Division of Laser Science Dissertation Award "for leading contributions to the Advanced LIGO detectors, achieving unprecedented sensitivity through injection of squeezed stated of light, sensitive enough to observe mirror motion driven by quantum vacuum fluctuations and quantum correlations at the human scale."

Yu began working with the MIT LIGO scientific team in 2014, with a focus on the enhancement of LIGO sensitivity using quantum techniques, as well as the demonstration of macroscopic quantum phenomena in Advanced LIGO detectors. Her contributions on quantum techniques have taken macroscopic quantum mechanics to the human scale, and Advanced LIGO detectors to unprecedented sensitivity. Her recent research interest lies in the interface of quantum mechanics and gravity.   

Other researchers with MIT ties who were honored with APS awards and prizes include: Bernhard Mistlberger, former 2018-20 Pappalardo Fellow, who won the Henry Primakoff Award for Early-Career Particle Physics; Prineha Narang, former MIT physics research scholar, who won the 2023 Maria Goeppert Mayer Award; Itamar Procaccia, former MIT postdoc, who won the 2023 Leo P. Kadanoff Prize; Michael J. Ramsey-Musolf, former MIT postdoc, who won the 2023 Herman Feshbach Prize in Theoretical Nuclear Physics; B. Lee Roberts, former MIT Laboratory for Nuclear Science postdoc, who won the 2023 W.K.H. Panofsky Prize in Experimental Particle Physics; and Vivek Sharma, former mechanical engineering postdoc, who won the 2023 John H. Dillon Medal.

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Building with nanoparticles, from the bottom up

Researchers at MIT have developed a technique for precisely controlling the arrangement and placement of nanoparticles on a material, like the silicon used for computer chips, in a way that does not damage or contaminate the surface of the material.

The technique, which combines chemistry and directed assembly processes with conventional fabrication techniques, enables the efficient formation of high-resolution, nanoscale features integrated with nanoparticles for devices like sensors, lasers, and LEDs, which could boost their performance.

Transistors and other nanoscale devices are typically fabricated from the top down — materials are etched away to reach the desired arrangement of nanostructures. But creating the smallest nanostructures, which can enable the highest performance and new functionalities, requires expensive equipment and remains difficult to do at scale and with the desired resolution.

A more precise way to assemble nanoscale devices is from the bottom up. In one scheme, engineers have used chemistry to “grow” nanoparticles in solution, drop that solution onto a template, arrange the nanoparticles, and then transfer them to a surface. However, this technique also involves steep challenges. First, thousands of nanoparticles must be arranged on the template efficiently. And transferring them to a surface typically requires a chemical glue, large pressure, or high temperatures, which could damage the surfaces and the resulting device.  

The MIT researchers developed a new approach to overcome these limitations. They used the powerful forces that exist at the nanoscale to efficiently arrange particles in a desired pattern and then transfer them to a surface without any chemicals or high pressures, and at lower temperatures. Because the surface material remains pristine, these nanoscale structures can be incorporated into components for electronic and optical devices, where even minuscule imperfections can hamper performance.

“This approach allows you, through engineering of forces, to place the nanoparticles, despite their very small size, in deterministic arrangements with single-particle resolution and on diverse surfaces, to create libraries of nanoscale building blocks that can have very unique properties, whether it is their light-matter interactions, electronic properties, mechanical performance, etc.,” says Farnaz Niroui, the EE Landsman Career Development Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at MIT, a member of the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics, and senior author on a new paper describing the work. “By integrating these building blocks with other nanostructures and materials we can then achieve devices with unique functionalities that would not be readily feasible to make if we were to use the conventional top-down fabrication strategies alone.”

The research is published today in Science Advances. Niroui’s co-authors are lead author Weikun “Spencer” Zhu, a graduate student in the Department of Chemical Engineering, as well as EECS graduate students Peter F. Satterthwaite, Patricia Jastrzebska-Perfect, and Roberto Brenes.

Use the forces

To begin their fabrication method, known as nanoparticle contact printing, the researchers use chemistry to create nanoparticles with a defined size and shape in a solution. To the naked eye, this looks like a vial of colored liquid, but zooming in with an electron microscope would reveal millions of cubes, each just 50 nanometers in size. (A human hair is about 80,000 nanometers wide.)

The researchers then make a template in the form of a flexible surface covered with nanoparticle-sized guides, or traps, that are arranged in the shape they want the nanoparticles to take. After adding a drop of nanoparticle solution to the template, they use two nanoscale forces to move the particles into the right position. The nanoparticles are then transferred onto arbitrary surfaces.

At the nanoscale, different forces become dominant (just like gravity is a dominant force at the macroscale). Capillary forces are dominant when the nanoparticles are in liquid and van der Waals forces are dominant at the interface between the nanoparticles and the solid surface they are in contact with. When the researchers add a drop of liquid and drag it across the template, capillary forces move the nanoparticles into the desired trap, placing them precisely in the right spot. Once the liquid dries, van der Waals forces hold those nanoparticles in position.

“These forces are ubiquitous and can often be detrimental when it comes to the fabrication of nanoscale objects as they can cause the collapse of the structures. But we are able to come up with ways to control these forces very precisely to use them to control how things are manipulated at the nanoscale,” says Zhu.

They design the template guides to be the right size and shape, and in the precisely proper arrangement so the forces work together to arrange the particles. The nanoparticles are then printed onto surfaces without a need for any solvents, surface treatments, or high temperatures. This keeps the surfaces pristine and properties intact while allowing yields of more than 95 percent. To promote this transfer, the surface forces need to be engineered so that the van der Waals forces are strong enough to consistently promote particles to release from the template and attach to the receiving surface when placed in contact.

Unique shapes, diverse materials, scalable processing

The team used this technique to arrange nanoparticles into arbitrary shapes, such as letters of the alphabet, and then transferred them to silicon with very high position accuracy. The method also works with nanoparticles that have other shapes, such as spheres, and with diverse material types. And it can transfer nanoparticles effectively onto different surfaces, like gold or even flexible substrates for next-generation electrical and optical structures and devices.

Their approach is also scalable, so it can be extended to be used toward fabrication of real-world devices.

Niroui and her colleagues are now working to leverage this approach to create even more complex structures and integrate it with other nanoscale materials to develop new types of electronic and optical devices.

This work was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program.

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A faster experiment to find and study topological materials

Topological materials, an exotic class of materials whose surfaces exhibit different electrical or functional properties than their interiors, have been a hot area of research since their experimental realization in 2007 — a finding that sparked further research and precipitated a Nobel Prize in Physics in 2016. These materials are thought to have great potential in a variety of fields, and might someday be used in ultraefficient electronic or optical devices, or key components of quantum computers.

But there are many thousands of compounds that may theoretically have topological characteristics, and synthesizing and testing even one such material to determine its topological properties can take months of experiments and analysis. Now a team of researchers at MIT and elsewhere have come up with a new approach that can rapidly screen candidate materials and determine with more than 90 percent accuracy whether they are topological.

Using this new method, the researchers have produced a list candidate materials. A few of these were already known to have topological properties, but the rest are newly predicted by this approach.

The findings are reported in the journal Advanced Materials in a paper by Mingda Li, the Class ’47 Career Development Professor at MIT, graduate students (and twin sisters) Nina Andrejevic at MIT and Jovana Andrejevic at Harvard University, and seven others at MIT, Harvard, Princeton University, and Argonne National Laboratory.

Topological materials are named after a branch of mathematics that describes shapes based on their invariant characteristics, which persist no matter how much an object is continuously stretched or squeezed out of its original shape. Topological materials, similarly, have properties that remain constant despite changes in their conditions, such as external perturbations or impurities.

There are several varieties of topological materials, including semiconductors, conductors, and semimetals, among others. Initially, it was thought that there were only a handful of such materials, but recent theory and calculations have predicted that in fact thousands of different compounds may have at least some topological characteristics. The hard part is figuring out experimentally which compounds may be topological.

Applications for such materials span a wide range, including devices that could perform computational and data storage functions similarly to silicon-based devices but with far less energy loss, or devices to harvest electricity efficiently from waste heat, for example in thermal power plants or in electronic devices. Topological materials can also have superconducting properties, which could potentially be used to build the quantum bits for topological quantum computers.

But all of this relies on developing or discovering the right materials. “To study a topological material, you first have to confirm whether the material is topological or not,” Li says, “and that part is a hard problem to solve in the traditional way.” A method called density functional theory is used to perform initial calculations, which then need to be followed with complex experiments that require cleaving a piece of the material to atomic-level flatness and probing it with instruments under high-vacuum conditions. “Most materials cannot even be measured due to various technical difficulties,” Nina Andrejevic says. But for those that can, the process can take a long time. “It’s a really painstaking procedure,” she says.

Whereas the traditional approach relies on measuring the material’s photoemissions or tunneling electrons, Li explains, the new technique he and his team developed relies on absorption, specifically, the way the material absorbs X-rays. Unlike the expensive apparatus needed for the conventional tests, X-ray absorption spectrometers are readily available and can operate at room temperature and atmospheric pressure, with no vacuum needed. Such measurements are widely conducted in biology, chemistry, battery research, and many other applications, but they had not previously been applied to identifying topological quantum materials.

X-ray absorption spectroscopy provides characteristic spectral data from a given sample of material. The next challenge is to interpret that data and how it relates to the topological properties. For that, the team turned to a machine-learning model, feeding in a collection of data on the X-ray absorption spectra of known topological and nontopological materials, and training the model to find the patterns that relate the two. And it did indeed find such correlations.

“Surprisingly, this approach was over 90 percent accurate when tested on more than 1500 known materials,” Nina Andrejevic says, adding that the predictions take only seconds. “This is an exciting result given the complexity of the conventional process.”

Though the model works, as with many results from machine learning, researchers don’t yet know exactly why it works or what the underlying mechanism is that links the X-ray absorption to the topological properties. “While the learned function relating X-ray spectra to topology is complex, the result may suggest that certain attributes the measurement is sensitive to, such as local atomic structures, are key topological indicators,” Jovana Andrejevic says.

The team has used the model to construct a periodic table that displays the model’s overall accuracy on compounds made from each of the elements. It serves as a tool to help researchers home in on families of compounds that may offer the right characteristics for a given application. The researchers have also produced a preliminary study of compounds that they have used this X-ray method on, without advance knowledge of their topological status, and compiled a list of 100 promising candidate materials — a few of which were already known to be topological.

“This work represents one of the first uses of machine learning to understand what experiments are trying to tell us about complex materials,” says Joel Moore, the Chern-Simons Professor of Physics at the University of California at Berkeley, who was not associated with this research. “Many kinds of topological materials are well-understood theoretically in principle, but finding material candidates and verifying that they have the right topology of their bands can be a challenge. Machine learning seems to offer a new way to address this challenge: Even experimental data whose meaning is not immediately obvious to a human can be analyzed by the algorithm, and I am excited to see what new materials will result from this way of looking.”

Anatoly Frenkel, a professor in the Department of Materials Science and Chemical Engineering at Stony Brook University and a senior chemist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, further commented that “It was a really nice idea to consider that the X-ray absorption spectrum may hold a key to the topological character in the measured sample.”

The research team included Andrei Bernevig and Nicolas Regnault at Princeton University, Fei Han and Thanh Nguyen and Nathan Drucker at MIT, Chris Rycroft at Harvard University, and Gilberto Fabbris at Argonne National Laboratory. The work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy and National Science Foundation.

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A “door” into the mitochondrial membrane

Mitochondria — the organelles responsible for energy production in human cells — were once free-living organisms that found their way into early eukaryotic cells over a billion years ago. Since then, they have merged seamlessly with their hosts in a classic example of symbiotic evolution, and now rely on many proteins made in their host cell’s nucleus to function properly.

Proteins on the outer membrane of mitochondria are especially important; they allow the mitochondria to communicate with the rest of the cell, and play a role in immune functions and a type of programmed cell death called apoptosis. Over the course of evolution, cells evolved a specific mechanism by which to insert these proteins — which are made in the cell’s cytoplasm — into the mitochondrial membrane. But what that mechanism was, and what cellular players were involved, has long been a mystery. 

A new paper from the labs of MIT Professor Jonathan Weissman and Caltech Professor Rebecca Voorhees provides a solution to that mystery. The work, published Oct. 21 in the journal Science, reveals that a protein called mitochondrial carrier homolog 2, or MTCH2 for short, which has been linked to many cellular processes and even diseases such as cancer and Alzheimer’s, is responsible for acting as a “door” for a variety of proteins to access the mitochondrial membrane. 

“Until now, no one knew what MTCH2 was really doing — they just knew that when you lose it, all these different things happen to the cell,” says Weissman, who is also member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. “It was sort of a mystery why this one protein affects so many different processes. This study gives a molecular basis for understanding why MTCH2 was implicated in Alzheimer's and lipid biosynthesis and mitochondrial fission and fusion: because it was responsible for inserting all these different types of proteins in the membrane.”

“The collaboration between our labs was essential in understanding the biochemistry of this interaction, and has led to a really exciting new understanding of a fundamental question in cell biology,” Voorhees says. 

The search for a door 

In order to find out how proteins from the cytoplasm — specifically a class called tail-anchored proteins — were being inserted into the outer membranes of mitochondria, Weismann Lab postdoc and first author of the study Alina Guna, alongside Voorhees Lab graduate student Taylor Stevens and postdoc Alison Inglis, decided to use a technique called used the CRISPR interference (or CRISPRi) screening approach, which was invented by Weissman and collaborators.

“The CRISPR screen let us systematically get rid of every gene, and then look and see what happened [to one specific tail-anchored protein],” says Guna. “We found one gene, MTCH2, where when we got rid of it there was a huge decrease in how much of our protein got to the mitochondrial membrane. So we thought, maybe this is the doorway to get in.”

To confirm that MTCH2 was acting as a doorway into the mitochondrial membrane, the researchers performed additional experiments to observe what happened when MTCH2 was not present in the cell. They found that MTCH2 was both necessary and sufficient to allow tail-anchored membrane proteins to move from the cytoplasm into the mitochondrial membrane. 

MTCH2’s ability to shuttle proteins from the cytoplasm into the mitochondrial membrane is likely due to its specialized shape. The researchers ran the protein’s sequence through Alpha Fold, an artificial intelligence system that predicts a protein’s structure through its amino acid sequence, which revealed that it is a hydrophobic protein — perfect for inserting into the oily membrane — but with a single hydrophilic groove where other proteins could enter.

“It's basically like a funnel,” Guna says. “Proteins come from the cytosol, they slip into that hydrophilic groove and then move from the protein into the membrane.”

To confirm that this groove was important in the protein’s function, Guna and her colleagues designed another experiment. “We wanted to play around with the structure to see if we could change its behavior, and we were able to do that,” Guna says. “We went in and made a single point mutation, and that point mutation was enough to really change how the protein behaved and how it interacted with substrates. And then we went on and found mutations that made it less active and mutations that made it super active.”

The new study has applications beyond answering a fundamental question of mitochondria research. “There's a whole lot of things that come out of this,” Guna says. 

For one thing, MTCH2 inserts proteins key to a type of programmed cell death called apoptosis, which researchers could potentially harness for cancer treatments. “We can make leukemia cells more sensitive to a cancer treatment by giving them a mutation that changes the activity of MTCH2,” Guna says. “The mutation makes MTCH2 act more ‘greedy’ and insert more things into the membrane, and some of those things that have inserts are like pro-apoptotic factors, so then those cells are more likely to die, which is fantastic in the context of a cancer treatment.”

The work also raises questions about how MTCH2 developed its function over time. MTCH2 evolved from a family of proteins called the solute carriers, which shuttle a variety of substances across cellular membranes. “We're really interested in this evolution question of, how do you evolve a new function from an old, ubiquitous class of proteins?” Weissman says.

And researchers still have much to learn about how mitochondria interact with the rest of the cell, including how they react to stress and changes within the cell, and how proteins find their way to mitochondria in the first place. “I think that [this paper] is just the first step,” Weissman says. “This only applies to one class of membrane proteins — and it doesn't tell you all of the steps that happen after the proteins are made in the cytoplasm. For example, how are they ferried to mitochondria? So stay tuned — I think we'll be learning that we now have a very nice system for opening up this fundamental piece of cell biology.”

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Designing the cities of tomorrow

Reflecting on the mission and approach of SENSEable City Lab at MIT and his role as its director, Carlo Ratti quotes the Nobel laureate Herbert Simon, who said, “The engineer, and more generally the designer, is concerned with how things ought to be — how they ought to be in order to attain goals, and to function.” Simon was a political scientist and economist, but his groundbreaking research on decision-making within organizations was informed by disparate disciplines including computer science and cognitive science.  

Ratti, too, recognizes that, given the scope of his work, relying on the methodologies of a single field would be limiting. Our urban spaces are multifaceted constructions, a complex web of evolving systems, and collaboration between disciplines is essential to make sense of them. “The city is a universe,” says Ratti, a professor of the practice in the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning. “It can be viewed through the lens of economics or sociology or architecture and design. But a lab focused on cities truly requires an omni-disciplinary approach.”  

Which is why SENSEable City Lab fills its ranks with researchers with diverse specialties. It thrives, in no small part, due to collaborative effort, uniting urban planners and designers with engineers and physicists, systems mathematicians with economists and sociologists. Together they find a common language to engage with each other, industry partners, metropolitan governments, individual citizens, and disadvantaged communities to shape the future. 

In 2011, for example, the sharing economy was in full bloom, but offerings like Uber pool (UberXshare), Lyftline (Lyft Shared), and Ola did not yet exist. Nobody had quantified the viability of shared trips for passengers heading in the same direction until Ratti and SENSEable City introduced a novel concept they called “shareability networks” via the HubCab Project. Among other things, this led to the first collaboration between the Institute and Uber. Analyzing the movements of all 13,500 medallion taxis in New York City, they assembled a dataset containing the GPS coordinates of the pickup and drop-off points and corresponding times of over 170 million taxi trips. Subsequently, this dataset helped them develop a new tool that allowed for efficient modeling and optimization of trip-sharing opportunities. Their analysis showed that taxi sharing could reduce the number of trips taken by 40 percent, thereby reducing congestion, energy consumption, and pollution. 

More recently, on the social sustainability front, Ratti and his lab put big data to work on a project they call Proximate. To understand connectivity and how remote work affects innovation, they analyzed the email exchange network at MIT before and after the Institute-wide lockdown due to Covid-19. The endeavor draws on the work of sociologist and Stanford University professor Mark Granovetter, who is perhaps best known for his theory that “weak ties” — looser relationships outside of our core network of friends, family, and colleagues — are crucial bridges between social groups that encourage societal diversity, innovation, and creativity. Ratti’s examination of communications among 2,834 MIT faculty and postdocs showed a clear disintegration of “weak ties” when interactions became purely digital in nature. In other words, digital networks, for all their benefits, cannot replace in-person interactions — not if we hope to continue innovating. “The physical space accommodates and encourages the unexpected, the serendipitous, in a manner that doesn't happen, or hasn’t happened yet, in a virtual setting,” Ratti explains. 

And, in an effort to expand the impact of his lab at MIT, Ratti has established a series of satellite labs around the globe. The SENSEable Amsterdam Lab (SAL) is involved in an ongoing collaboration with the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions to help the Dutch capital become carbon neutral by 2050. The first SAL project is a multifunctional autonomous mobility solution befitting a city with more than 60 miles of canals. The Roboat platform has the power to transform urban waterways: it can be used to transport people, deliver goods, or for services like waste collection. It could even be used to create on-demand infrastructure, such as a floating bridge or a concert stage. 

Meanwhile, in Sweden, through a partnership with KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Ratti and his colleagues are leveraging big data to examine integration and segregation in Stockholm. Their findings: these days people tend to self-segregate by socioeconomic strata whether moving through the city or connecting online, creating what Ratti calls “liminal ghettos.” “These are not the ghettos of the past, but they are insidious, invisible fault lines,” he explains. “Once we understand those fault lines, we can take actions to bridge them so that cities fulfill their primordial function, ensuring that together we are more than each of us individually.” 

To effectively run a lab focused on cities requires stepping out of the lab and physically inhabiting urban spaces, says Ratti. But he’s also looking beyond earthbound innovations. In a truly cross-disciplinary effort that demonstrates diversity of thought and creativity, he has begun exploring the feasibility of fabricating and deploying a raft of silicon bubbles roughly the size of Brazil into outer space. The goal: reverse global warming by deflecting solar radiation before it hits our planet. The Space Bubbles project is intended as an emergency intervention should current efforts to reduce emissions fail. Joining him is a team of experts from MIT including Charles Primmerman (MIT Lincoln Laboratory), Professor Daniela Rus (MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory), Professor Gareth McKinley (MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering), and Professor Markus Buehler (MIT departments of Mechanical Engineering and Civil and Environmental Engineering). 

Emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, combined with the rise of big data, have transformed nearly every aspect of our daily lives and how we interact with each other and our built environment; consider the maturation of the internet of things and its profound effect on urban spaces. In the hands of Carlo Ratti and his SENSEable City Lab at MIT, technological advancements become tools to understand our cities and ourselves, gain new insights, and explore opportunities to redesign the future. “The convergence between the digital and physical world is radically changing the way we can understand and design cities, and ultimately how we can live in urban spaces in a different, better way,” says Ratti.

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Magnetic sensors track muscle length

Using a simple set of magnets, MIT researchers have come up with a sophisticated way to monitor muscle movements, which they hope will make it easier for people with amputations to control their prosthetic limbs.

In a new pair of papers, the researchers demonstrated the accuracy and safety of their magnet-based system, which can track the length of muscles during movement. The studies, performed in animals, offer hope that this strategy could be used to help people with prosthetic devices control them in a way that more closely mimics natural limb movement.

“These recent results demonstrate that this tool can be used outside the lab to track muscle movement during natural activity, and they also suggest that the magnetic implants are stable and biocompatible and that they don’t cause discomfort,” says Cameron Taylor, an MIT research scientist and co-lead author of both papers.

In one of the studies, the researchers showed that they could accurately measure the lengths of turkeys’ calf muscles as the birds ran, jumped, and performed other natural movements. In the other study, they showed that the small magnetic beads used for the measurements do not cause inflammation or other adverse effects when implanted in muscle.

“I am very excited for the clinical potential of this new technology to improve the control and efficacy of bionic limbs for persons with limb-loss,” says Hugh Herr, a professor of media arts and sciences, co-director of the K. Lisa Yang Center for Bionics at MIT, and an associate member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research.

Herr is a senior author of both papers, which appear today in the journal Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology. Thomas Roberts, a professor of ecology, evolution, and organismal biology at Brown University, is a senior author of the measurement study.

Tracking movement

Currently, powered prosthetic limbs are usually controlled using an approach known as surface electromyography (EMG). Electrodes attached to the surface of the skin or surgically implanted in the residual muscle of the amputated limb measure electrical signals from a person’s muscles, which are fed into the prosthesis to help it move the way the person wearing the limb intends.

However, that approach does not take into account any information about the muscle length or velocity, which could help to make the prosthetic movements more accurate.

Several years ago, the MIT team began working on a novel way to perform those kinds of muscle measurements, using an approach that they call magnetomicrometry. This strategy takes advantage of the permanent magnetic fields surrounding small beads implanted in a muscle. Using a credit-card-sized, compass-like sensor attached to the outside of the body, their system can track the distances between the two magnets. When a muscle contracts, the magnets move closer together, and when it flexes, they move further apart.

In a study published last year, the researchers showed that this system could be used to accurately measure small ankle movements when the beads were implanted in the calf muscles of turkeys. In one of the new studies, the researchers set out to see if the system could make accurate measurements during more natural movements in a nonlaboratory setting.

To do that, they created an obstacle course of ramps for the turkeys to climb and boxes for them to jump on and off of. The researchers used their magnetic sensor to track muscle movements during these activities, and found that the system could calculate muscle lengths in less than a millisecond.

They also compared their data to measurements taken using a more traditional approach known as fluoromicrometry, a type of X-ray technology that requires much larger equipment than magnetomicrometry. The magnetomicrometry measurements varied from those generated by fluoromicrometry by less than a millimeter, on average.

“We’re able to provide the muscle-length tracking functionality of the room-sized X-ray equipment using a much smaller, portable package, and we’re able to collect the data continuously instead of being limited to the 10-second bursts that fluoromicrometry is limited to,” Taylor says.

Seong Ho Yeon, an MIT graduate student, is also a co-lead author of the measurement study. Other authors include MIT Research Support Associate Ellen Clarrissimeaux and former Brown University postdoc Mary Kate O’Donnell.

Biocompatibility

In the second paper, the researchers focused on the biocompatibility of the implants. They found that the magnets did not generate tissue scarring, inflammation, or other harmful effects. They also showed that the implanted magnets did not alter the turkeys’ gaits, suggesting they did not produce discomfort. William Clark, a postdoc at Brown, is the co-lead author of the biocompatibility study.

The researchers also showed that the implants remained stable for eight months, the length of the study, and did not migrate toward each other, as long as they were implanted at least 3 centimeters apart. The researchers envision that the beads, which consist of a magnetic core coated with gold and a polymer called Parylene, could remain in tissue indefinitely once implanted.

“Magnets don’t require an external power source, and after implanting them into the muscle, they can maintain the full strength of their magnetic field throughout the lifetime of the patient,” Taylor says.

The researchers are now planning to seek FDA approval to test the system in people with prosthetic limbs. They hope to use the sensor to control prostheses similar to the way surface EMG is used now: Measurements regarding the length of muscles will be fed into the control system of a prosthesis to help guide it to the position that the wearer intends.

“The place where this technology fills a need is in communicating those muscle lengths and velocities to a wearable robot, so that the robot can perform in a way that works in tandem with the human,” Taylor says. “We hope that magnetomicrometry will enable a person to control a wearable robot with the same comfort level and the same ease as someone would control their own limb.”

In addition to prosthetic limbs, those wearable robots could include robotic exoskeletons, which are worn outside the body to help people move their legs or arms more easily.

The research was funded by the Salah Foundation, the K. Lisa Yang Center for Bionics at MIT, the MIT Media Lab Consortia, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Science Foundation.

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