A carbon-lite atmosphere could be a sign of water and life on other terrestrial planets, MIT study finds

Scientists at MIT, the University of Birmingham, and elsewhere say that astronomers’ best chance of finding liquid water, and even life on other planets, is to look for the absence, rather than the presence, of a chemical feature in their atmospheres.

The researchers propose that if a terrestrial planet has substantially less carbon dioxide in its atmosphere compared to other planets in the same system, it could be a sign of liquid water — and possibly life — on that planet’s surface.

What’s more, this new signature is within the sights of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). While scientists have proposed other signs of habitability, those features are challenging if not impossible to measure with current technologies. The team says this new signature, of relatively depleted carbon dioxide, is the only sign of habitability that is detectable now.

“The Holy Grail in exoplanet science is to look for habitable worlds, and the presence of life, but all the features that have been talked about so far have been beyond the reach of the newest observatories,” says Julien de Wit, assistant professor of planetary sciences at MIT. “Now we have a way to find out if there’s liquid water on another planet. And it’s something we can get to in the next few years.”

The team’s findings appear today in Nature Astronomy. De Wit co-led the study with Amaury Triaud of the University of Birmingham in the UK. Their MIT co-authors include Benjamin Rackham, Prajwal Niraula, Ana Glidden Oliver Jagoutz, Matej Peč, Janusz Petkowski, and Sara Seager, along with Frieder Klein at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), Martin Turbet of Ècole Polytechnique in France, and Franck Selsis of the Laboratoire d’astrophysique de Bordeaux.

Beyond a glimmer

Astronomers have so far detected more than 5,200 worlds beyond our solar system. With current telescopes, astronomers can directly measure a planet’s distance to its star and the time it takes it to complete an orbit. Those measurements can help scientists infer whether a planet is within a habitable zone. But there’s been no way to directly confirm whether a planet is indeed habitable, meaning that liquid water exists on its surface.

Across our own solar system, scientists can detect the presence of liquid oceans by observing “glints” — flashes of sunlight that reflect off liquid surfaces. These glints, or specular reflections, have been observed, for instance, on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, which helped to confirm the moon’s large lakes.

Detecting a similar glimmer in far-off planets, however, is out of reach with current technologies. But de Wit and his colleagues realized there’s another habitable feature close to home that could be detectable in distant worlds.

“An idea came to us, by looking at what’s going on with the terrestrial planets in our own system,” Triaud says.

Venus, Earth, and Mars share similarities, in that all three are rocky and inhabit a relatively temperate region with respect to the sun. Earth is the only planet among the trio that currently hosts liquid water. And the team noted another obvious distinction: Earth has significantly less carbon dioxide in its atmosphere.

“We assume that these planets were created in a similar fashion, and if we see one planet with much less carbon now, it must have gone somewhere,” Triaud says. “The only process that could remove that much carbon from an atmosphere is a strong water cycle involving oceans of liquid water.”

Indeed, the Earth’s oceans have played a major and sustained role in absorbing carbon dioxide. Over hundreds of millions of years, the oceans have taken up a huge amount of carbon dioxide, nearly equal to the amount that persists in Venus’ atmosphere today. This planetary-scale effect has left Earth’s atmosphere significantly depleted of carbon dioxide  compared to its planetary neighbors.

“On Earth, much of the atmospheric carbon dioxide has been sequestered in seawater and solid rock over geological timescales, which has helped to regulate climate and habitability for billions of years,” says study co-author Frieder Klein.

The team reasoned that if a similar depletion of carbon dioxide were detected in a far-off planet, relative to its neighbors, this would be a reliable signal of liquid oceans and life on its surface.

“After reviewing extensively the literature of many fields from biology, to chemistry, and even carbon sequestration in the context of climate change, we believe that indeed if we detect carbon depletion, it has a good chance of being a strong sign of liquid water and/or life,” de Wit says.

A roadmap to life

In their study, the team lays out a strategy for detecting habitable planets by searching for a signature of depleted carbon dioxide. Such a search would work best for “peas-in-a-pod” systems, in which multiple terrestrial planets, all about the same size, orbit relatively close to each other, similar to our own solar system. The first step the team proposes is to confirm that the planets have atmospheres, by simply looking for the presence of carbon dioxide, which is expected to dominate most planetary atmospheres.

“Carbon dioxide is a very strong absorber in the infrared, and can be easily detected in the atmospheres of exoplanets,” de Wit explains. “A signal of carbon dioxide can then reveal the presence of exoplanet atmospheres.”

Once astronomers determine that multiple planets in a system host atmospheres, they can move on to measure their carbon dioxide content, to see whether one planet has significantly less than the others. If so, the planet is likely habitable, meaning that it hosts significant bodies of liquid water on its surface.

But habitable conditions doesn’t necessarily mean that a planet is inhabited. To see whether life might actually exist, the team proposes that astronomers look for another feature in a planet’s atmosphere: ozone.

On Earth, the researchers note that plants and some microbes contribute to drawing carbon dioxide, although not nearly as much as the oceans. Nevertheless, as part of this process, the lifeforms emit oxygen, which reacts with the sun’s photons to transform into ozone — a molecule that is far easier to detect than oxygen itself.

The researchers say that if a planet’s atmosphere shows signs of both ozone and depleted carbon dioxide, it likely is a habitable, and inhabited world.

“If we see ozone, chances are pretty high that it’s connected to carbon dioxide being consumed by life,” Triaud says. “And if it’s life, it’s glorious life. It would not be just a few bacteria. It would be a planetary-scale biomass that’s able to process a huge amount of carbon, and interact with it.”

The team estimates that NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope would be able to measure carbon dioxide, and possibly ozone, in nearby, multiplanet systems such as TRAPPIST-1 — a seven-planet system that orbits a bright star, just 40 light years from Earth.

“TRAPPIST-1 is one of only a handful of systems where we could do terrestrial atmospheric studies with JWST,” de Wit says. “Now we have a roadmap for finding habitable planets. If we all work together, paradigm-shifting discoveries could be done within the next few years.”

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Does “food as medicine” make a big dent in diabetes?

How much can healthy eating improve a case of diabetes? A new health care program attempting to treat diabetes by means of improved nutrition shows a very modest impact, according to the first fully randomized clinical trial on the subject.

The study, co-authored by MIT health care economist Joseph Doyle of the MIT Sloan School of Management, tracks participants in an innovative program that provides healthy meals in order to address diabetes and food insecurity at the same time. The experiment focused on Type 2 diabetes, the most common form.

The program involved people with high blood sugar levels, in this case an HbA1c hemoglobin level of 8.0 or more. Participants in the clinical trial who were given food to make 10 nutritious meals per week saw their hemoglobin A1c levels fall by 1.5 percentage points over six months. However, trial participants who were not given any food had their HbA1c levels fall by 1.3 percentage points over the same time. This suggests the program’s relative effects were limited and that providers need to keep refining such interventions.

“We found that when people gained access to [got food from] the program, their blood sugar did fall, but the control group had an almost identical drop,” says Doyle, the Erwin H. Schell Professor of Management at MIT Sloan.

Given that these kinds of efforts have barely been studied through clinical trials, Doyle adds, he does not want one study to be the last word, and hopes it spurs more research to find methods that will have a large impact. Additionally, programs like this also help people who lack access to healthy food in the first place by dealing with their food insecurity.

“We do know that food insecurity is problematic for people, so addressing that by itself has its own benefits, but we still need to figure out how best to improve health at the same time if it is going to be addressed through the health care system,” Doyle adds.

The paper, “The Effect of an Intensive Food-as-Medicine Program on Health and Health Care Use: A Randomized Clinical Trial,” is published today in JAMA Internal Medicine.

The authors are Doyle; Marcella Alsan, a professor of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School; Nicholas Skelley, a predoctoral research associate at MIT Sloan Health Systems Initiative; Yutong Lu, a predoctoral technical associate at MIT Sloan Health Systems Initiative; and John Cawley, a professor in the Department of Economics and the Department of Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell University and co-director of Cornell's Institute on Health Economics, Health Behaviors and Disparities.

To conduct the study, the researchers partnered with a large health care provider in the Mid-Atlantic region of the U.S., which has developed food-as-medicine programs. Such programs have become increasingly popular in health care, and could apply to treating diabetes, which involves elevated blood sugar levels and can create serious or even fatal complications. Diabetes affects about 10 percent of the adult population.

The study consisted of a randomized clinical trial of 465 adults with Type 2 diabetes, centered in two locations within the network of the health care provider. One location was part of an urban area, and the other was rural. The study took place from 2019 through 2022, with a year of follow-up testing beyond that. People in the study’s treatment group were given food for 10 healthy meals per week for their families over a six-month period, and had opportunities to consult with a nutritionist and nurses as well. Participants from both the treatment and control groups underwent periodic blood testing.

Adherence to the program was very high. Ultimately, however, the reduction in blood sugar levels experienced by people in the treatment group was only marginally bigger than that of people in the control group.

Those results leave Doyle and his co-authors seeking to explain why the food intervention didn’t have a bigger relative impact. In the first place, he notes, there could be some basic reversion to the mean in play — some people in the control group with high blood sugar levels were likely to improve that even without being enrolled in the program.

“If you examine people on a bad health trajectory, many will naturally improve as they take steps to move away from this danger zone, such as moderate changes in diet and exercise,” Doyle says. 

Moreover, because the healthy eating program was developed by a health care provider staying engaged with all the participants, people in the control group may have still benefitted from medical engagement and thus fared better than a control group without such health care access. 

It is also possible the Covid-19 pandemic, unfolding during the experiment’s time frame, affected the outcomes in some way, although results were similar when they examined outcomes prior to the pandemic. Or it could be that the intervention’s effects might appear over a still-longer time frame.

And while the program provided food, it left it to participants to prepare meals, which might be a hurdle for program compliance. Potentially, premade meals might have a bigger impact.

“Experimenting with providing those premade meals seems like a natural next step,” says Doyle, who emphasizes that he would like to see more research about food-as-medicine programs aiming at diabetes, especially if such programs evolve and try to some different formats and features.

“When you find a particular intervention doesn’t improve blood sugar, we don’t just say, we shouldn’t try at all,” Doyle says. “Our study definitely raises questions, and gives us some new answers we haven’t seen before.”

Support for the study came from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL); and the MIT Sloan Health Systems Initiative. Outside the submitted work, Cawley has reported receiving personal fees from Novo Nordisk, Inc, a pharmaceutical company that manufactures diabetes medication and other treatments.

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Engineers develop a vibrating, ingestible capsule that might help treat obesity

When you eat a large meal, your stomach sends signals to your brain that create a feeling of fullness, which helps you realize it’s time to stop eating. A stomach full of liquid can also send these messages, which is why dieters are often advised to drink a glass of water before eating.

MIT engineers have now come up with a new way to take advantage of that phenomenon, using an ingestible capsule that vibrates within the stomach. These vibrations activate the same stretch receptors that sense when the stomach is distended, creating an illusory sense of fullness.

In animals who were given this pill 20 minutes before eating, the researchers found that this treatment not only stimulated the release of hormones that signal satiety, but also reduced the animals’ food intake by about 40 percent. Scientists have much more to learn about the mechanisms that influence human body weight, but if further research suggests this technology could be safely used in humans, such a pill might offer a minimally invasive way to treat obesity, the researchers say.

“For somebody who wants to lose weight or control their appetite, it could be taken before each meal,” says Shriya Srinivasan PhD ’20, a former MIT graduate student and postdoc who is now an assistant professor of bioengineering at Harvard University. “This could be really interesting in that it would provide an option that could minimize the side effects that we see with the other pharmacological treatments out there.”

Srinivasan is the lead author of the new study, which appears today in Science Advances. Giovanni Traverso, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT and a gastroenterologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, is the senior author of the paper.

A sense of fullness

When the stomach becomes distended, specialized cells called mechanoreceptors sense that stretching and send signals to the brain via the vagus nerve. As a result, the brain stimulates production of insulin, as well as hormones such as C-peptide, Pyy, and GLP-1. All of these hormones work together to help people digest their food, feel full, and stop eating. At the same time, levels of ghrelin, a hunger-promoting hormone, go down.

While a graduate student at MIT, Srinivasan became interested in the idea of controlling this process by artificially stretching the mechanoreceptors that line the stomach, through vibration. Previous research had shown that vibration applied to a muscle can induce a sense that the muscle has stretched farther than it actually has.

“I wondered if we could activate stretch receptors in the stomach by vibrating them and having them perceive that the entire stomach has been expanded, to create an illusory sense of distension that could modulate hormones and eating patterns,” Srinivasan says.

As a postdoc in MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, Srinivasan worked closely with Traverso’s lab, which has developed many novel approaches to oral delivery of drugs and electronic devices. For this study, Srinivasan, Traverso, and a team of researchers designed a capsule about the size of a multivitamin, that includes a vibrating element. When the pill, which is powered by a small silver oxide battery, reaches the stomach, acidic gastric fluids dissolve a gelatinous membrane that covers the capsule, completing the electronic circuit that activates the vibrating motor.

In a study in animals, the researchers showed that once the pill begins vibrating, it activates mechanoreceptors, which send signals to the brain through stimulation of the vagus nerve. The researchers tracked hormone levels during the periods when the device was vibrating and found that they mirrored the hormone release patterns seen following a meal, even when the animals had fasted.

The researchers then tested the effects of this stimulation on the animals’ appetite. They found that when the pill was activated for about 20 minutes, before the animals were offered food, they consumed 40 percent less, on average, than they did when the pill was not activated. The animals also gained weight more slowly during periods when they were treated with the vibrating pill.

“The behavioral change is profound, and that’s using the endogenous system rather than any exogenous therapeutic. We have the potential to overcome some of the challenges and costs associated with delivery of biologic drugs by modulating the enteric nervous system,” Traverso says.

The current version of the pill is designed to vibrate for about 30 minutes after arriving in the stomach, but the researchers plan to explore the possibility of adapting it to remain in the stomach for longer periods of time, where it could be turned on and off wirelessly as needed. In the animal studies, the pills passed through the digestive tract within four or five days.

The study also found that the animals did not show any signs of obstruction, perforation, or other negative impacts while the pill was in their digestive tract.

An alternative approach

This type of pill could offer an alternative to the current approaches to treating obesity, the researchers say. Nonmedical interventions such as diet exercise don’t always work, and many of the existing medical interventions are fairly invasive. These include gastric bypass surgery, as well as gastric balloons, which are no longer used widely in the United States due to safety concerns.

Drugs such as GLP-1 agonists can also aid weight loss, but most of them have to be injected, and they are unaffordable for many people. According to Srinivasan, the MIT capsules could be manufactured at a cost that would make them available to people who don’t have access to more expensive treatment options.

“For a lot of populations, some of the more effective therapies for obesity are very costly. At scale, our device could be manufactured at a pretty cost-effective price point,” she says. “I’d love to see how this would transform care and therapy for people in global health settings who may not have access to some of the more sophisticated or expensive options that are available today.”

The researchers now plan to explore ways to scale up the manufacturing of the capsules, which could enable clinical trials in humans. Such studies would be important to learn more about the devices’ safety, as well as determine the best time to swallow the capsule before to a meal and how often it would need to be administered.

Other authors of the paper include Amro Alshareef, Alexandria Hwang, Ceara Byrne, Johannes Kuosmann, Keiko Ishida, Joshua Jenkins, Sabrina Liu, Wiam Abdalla Mohammed Madani, Alison Hayward, and Niora Fabian.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, Novo Nordisk, the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, a Schmidt Science Fellowship, and the National Science Foundation.

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Leveraging language to understand machines

Natural language conveys ideas, actions, information, and intent through context and syntax; further, there are volumes of it contained in databases. This makes it an excellent source of data to train machine-learning systems on. Two master's of engineering students in the 6A MEng Thesis Program at MIT, Irene Terpstra ’23 and Rujul Gandhi ’22, are working with mentors in the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab to use this power of natural language to build AI systems.

As computing is becoming more advanced, researchers are looking to improve the hardware that they run on; this means innovating to create new computer chips. And, since there is literature already available on modifications that can be made to achieve certain parameters and performance, Terpstra and her mentors and advisors Anantha Chandrakasan, MIT School of Engineering dean and the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and IBM’s researcher Xin Zhang, are developing an AI algorithm that assists in chip design.

“I'm creating a workflow to systematically analyze how these language models can help the circuit design process. What reasoning powers do they have, and how can it be integrated into the chip design process?” says Terpstra. “And then on the other side, if that proves to be useful enough, [we’ll] see if they can automatically design the chips themselves, attaching it to a reinforcement learning algorithm.”

To do this, Terpstra’s team is creating an AI system that can iterate on different designs. It means experimenting with various pre-trained large language models (like ChatGPT, Llama 2, and Bard), using an open-source circuit simulator language called NGspice, which has the parameters of the chip in code form, and a reinforcement learning algorithm. With text prompts, researchers will be able to query how the physical chip should be modified to achieve a certain goal in the language model and produced guidance for adjustments. This is then transferred into a reinforcement learning algorithm that updates the circuit design and outputs new physical parameters of the chip.

“The final goal would be to combine the reasoning powers and the knowledge base that is baked into these large language models and combine that with the optimization power of the reinforcement learning algorithms and have that design the chip itself,” says Terpstra.

Rujul Gandhi works with the raw language itself. As an undergraduate at MIT, Gandhi explored linguistics and computer sciences, putting them together in her MEng work. “I’ve been interested in communication, both between just humans and between humans and computers,” Gandhi says.

Robots or other interactive AI systems are one area where communication needs to be understood by both humans and machines. Researchers often write instructions for robots using formal logic. This helps ensure that commands are being followed safely and as intended, but formal logic can be difficult for users to understand, while natural language comes easily. To ensure this smooth communication, Gandhi and her advisors Yang Zhang of IBM and MIT assistant professor Chuchu Fan are building a parser that converts natural language instructions into a machine-friendly form. Leveraging the linguistic structure encoded by the pre-trained encoder-decoder model T5, and a dataset of annotated, basic English commands for performing certain tasks, Gandhi’s system identifies the smallest logical units, or atomic propositions, which are present in a given instruction.

“Once you’ve given your instruction, the model identifies all the smaller sub-tasks you want it to carry out,” Gandhi says. “Then, using a large language model, each sub-task can be compared against the available actions and objects in the robot’s world, and if any sub-task can’t be carried out because a certain object is not recognized, or an action is not possible, the system can stop right there to ask the user for help.”

This approach of breaking instructions into sub-tasks also allows her system to understand logical dependencies expressed in English, like, “do task X until event Y happens.” Gandhi uses a dataset of step-by-step instructions across robot task domains like navigation and manipulation, with a focus on household tasks. Using data that are written just the way humans would talk to each other has many advantages, she says, because it means a user can be more flexible about how they phrase their instructions.

Another of Gandhi’s projects involves developing speech models. In the context of speech recognition, some languages are considered “low resource” since they might not have a lot of transcribed speech available, or might not have a written form at all. “One of the reasons I applied to this internship at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab was an interest in language processing for low-resource languages,” she says. “A lot of language models today are very data-driven, and when it’s not that easy to acquire all of that data, that’s when you need to use the limited data efficiently.” 

Speech is just a stream of sound waves, but humans having a conversation can easily figure out where words and thoughts start and end. In speech processing, both humans and language models use their existing vocabulary to recognize word boundaries and understand the meaning. In low- or no-resource languages, a written vocabulary might not exist at all, so researchers can’t provide one to the model. Instead, the model can make note of what sound sequences occur together more frequently than others, and infer that those might be individual words or concepts. In Gandhi’s research group, these inferred words are then collected into a pseudo-vocabulary that serves as a labeling method for the low-resource language, creating labeled data for further applications.

The applications for language technology are “pretty much everywhere,” Gandhi says. “You could imagine people being able to interact with software and devices in their native language, their native dialect. You could imagine improving all the voice assistants that we use. You could imagine it being used for translation or interpretation.”

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Carlo Ratti named curator of 2025 Venice Biennale Architecure Exhibition

MIT scholar Carlo Ratti has been named curator of the Venice Biennale’s 19th International Architecture Exhibition, to be held in 2025.

The large-scale exhibition is the world’s best-known showcase for architectural work. It began in 1980 and has normally been held every two years since then.

Ratti is an expert in urban design and planning, who has conducted many innovative studies of city dynamics using mobile sensors and other technologies, revealing insights that can be applied to the built environment on many scales. At the same time, Ratti is an active designer whose work has been displayed previously at the Venice Biennale, along with New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, the Design Museum in Barcelona, and the Museum of Science in London, among other venues.

Currently, Ratti is professor of the practice of urban technologies and planning within MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning.

“We architects like to think we are smart, but real intelligence is everywhere,” Ratti said in a statement released by the Biennale. “The disembodied ingenuity of evolution, the growing power of computers, and the collective wisdom of the crowd. To face a burning world, architecture must harness all the intelligence around us. I am honored and humbled to have the opportunity to curate the Biennale Architettura 2025.”

AT MIT, Ratti also serves as director of the Senseable City Lab, which he founded. In addition to his studies and design projects, Ratti has authored multiple books, including “The Atlas of the Senseable City” (2023), co-authored with Antoine Picon of Harvard University, and “The City of Tomorrow: Sensors, Networks, Hackers, and the Future of Urban Life” (2016), co-authored with Matthew Claudel.

Ratti is a founding partner of the architecture and innovation office CRA-Carlo Ratti Associati, which has office in Turin, New York City, and London. He graduated from the Politecnico di Torino, and the École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées in Paris. He conducted his MPhil and PhD work at the University of Cambridge, and completed his PhD thesis as a Fulbright Scholar at MIT.

Ratti is the second person from MIT selected as curator of the architecture Biennale in recent years. Hashim Sarkis, dean of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, served as curator for the Biennale in 2021 — which was originally scheduled to run in 2020, but got delayed for one year due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

MIT artists have also been well represented at the Venice Biennale’s International Art Exhibition, which also runs every two years. The MIT List Visual Arts Center has presented three exhibitions at the Biennale, featuring Joan Jonas, Fred Wilson, and Ann Hamilton.

The 19th International Architecture Exhibition will run from May 24 through Nov. 23, 2025.

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Institute Professor Emeritus Robert Solow, pathbreaking economist, dies at age 99

MIT Institute Professor Emeritus Robert M. Solow, a groundbreaking economist whose work on technology and economic growth profoundly influenced the field, and whose ethos of engaged teaching and collegial collaboration deeply shaped MIT’s Department of Economics, died on Thursday. He was 99.

Solow’s research, especially a series of papers in the 1950s and 1960s, helped demonstrate at a fundamental level how modern economic growth occurs. As his work shows, technological advances, broadly defined, are responsible for the bulk of modern economic growth, more than simple population growth or capital expansion. This insight opened up a whole new series of research questions within academia, and influenced policymakers in many countries.

For these contributions, Solow was the recipient of the 1987 Nobel Prize in economics, with the citation mentioning his “exceptional contributions” as well as the “dramatic impact” of his work. In 2014, Solow was also awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the U.S., from President Barack Obama.

At MIT, Solow was also celebrated for his commitment to teaching in the classroom, and to engaging in ongoing scholarly discussions with colleagues and students, which he carried out with intellectual rigor, clear expression, and a continually affable, good-humored style. Hired by MIT in 1949, Solow was one of the core figures who helped turn the Department of Economics into a powerhouse program. After retirement, he was an Institute Professor Emeritus.

In all, Solow was affiliated with MIT for a remarkable 74 years.

“Bob Solow, who not only won a Nobel Prize but also saw four of his former students similarly honored, was a path-breaking researcher and extraordinary teacher,” says James Poterba, an economist and former head of MIT’s Department of Economics. “He laid the foundation for the modern study of economic growth and quantified the key role of technological progress in contributing to it. His legendary lectures, often delivered without notes, inspired generations of MIT students. A key architect of the post-war rise of the MIT Department of Economics, he was also a central contributor to its culture of comraderie and public-spiritedness that continues to this day.”

Home from the war, on to MIT

Robert Merton Solow was born on August 23, 1924, and grew up in Brooklyn, New York, where his father was a fur merchant. A standout student from early on, Solow skipped two grades in school, and earned a scholarship to attend Harvard University at age 16, in 1940. Two years later, after the U.S. had entered World War Two, Solow enlisted in the U.S. Army. Having learned some German in college, Solow spent much of his wartime service in Italy in seemingly risky circumstances, working in a company intercepting German radio signals, in specially equipped trucks just behind the front.

When the Allies won the war, he re-entered Harvard in 1945. Late that summer, Solow married Barbara “Bobby” Lewis, a Radcliffe College student whose interest in economics helped spur his own entry into the field. In short order, Solow finished his undergraduate degree and completed Harvard’s PhD program in economics, producing a PhD thesis on new methods of studying income inequality.

When Solow joined the MIT Department of Economics in 1949, it was a small program largely oriented around teaching. However, one faculty member, Paul Samuelson, was in the process of overhauling large portions of economics with his emphasis on mathematical rigor and formal analysis.

Samuelson and Solow, along with many colleagues from these early days — including Charles Kindleberger, Harold Freeman ’31, Cary Brown, Robert Bishop, and George Shultz PhD ’49, the future U.S. secretary of state — helped the program grow and thrive, while it added luminaries such as Franco Modigliani. By 1960, the MIT department was considered to be at the top of the discipline.

It was also considered to be an informal, open, student-friendly place — “the happiest economics department,” as a visiting professor from Harvard termed it. Solow often attributed that to Samuelson’s own lack of airs, telling an MIT interviewer in 2011, on the occasion of MIT’s 150^th anniversary, “if you have the best economist in the world in the department, and he’s not being stuffy about anything it must be hard for anybody else to be stuffy.” But Solow’s personable approach to academic life heavily influenced the emerging departmental culture as well.

A new theory of economic growth

Solow’s own research took flight in the 1950s, when he started publishing his landmark work on technological change and growth, which altered the way economists thought about the subject. His 1956 paper, “A Contribution to the Theory of Economic Growth,” in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, presented a famous model outlining how under certain conditions, even a growing population with growing capital investment will not sustain economic growth. Instead, it is technological progress, considered broadly, that creates such growth over time.

In a 1957 follow-up paper, “Technical Change and the Aggregate Production Function,” in The Review of Economics and Statistics, Solow added new historical economic data showing this process at work, based on the U.S. economy in the first half of the 20th century. Here, Solow concluded that “Total factor productivity” — the term he created, encompassing all technological, cultural, educational, and other factors beyond population increases and basic capital investment — accounted for a whopping 80 percent of growth.

Beyond that, in 1960 Solow extended his analysis in a third paper, “Investment and Technical Progress,” modeling a scenario in which capital investment becomes more technologically sophisticated over time. All three papers were mentioned in the citation for Solow’s Nobel Prize — technically the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel — and together provided a framework for decades of continued research in economics.

Understanding the drivers of economic growth, Solow said during the 2011 interview, was an issue that “was in the air. It was sort of one of the outstanding problems.”

Before doing his research, Solow added, “I had taken it for granted like everybody else, that the main thing that pushed an economy to grow was the increase in population and the accumulation of capital goods … And I found that if you looked at the data with all of the theory you could bring to bear, you could not make that story hold water. And the only way of accounting for what we’d seen in the U.S. between 1909 and 1950-something was if the main driving force for growth had been what I chose to call technical progress. Meaning what was in my mind was improving technology, but also included improving skills.”

Solow’s work was quickly recognized as a breakthrough in the field. In 1961, he was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal, given by the American Economic Association to the best economist under the age of 40. Much later, in 2000, Solow was awarded the National Medal of Science. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the British Academy.

Solow had terms as president of the American Economic Association, and the Econometric Society. He also spent time working in the policy sphere. In the 1970s, Solow served as member and chairman of the Board of Directors of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. And from 1961 to 1962, Solow served on the Council of Economic Advisors in the Kennedy administration, along with prominent economists such as Kenneth Arrow and James Tobin.

“We thought we had one of the best economics departments in the country, sitting there in the Old Executive Office Building,” Solow quipped to MIT News in 2019.

Devoted to teaching

For all of his research accomplishments and policy service, Solow also thrived in the classroom, and as a committed, encouraging advisor to students.

“You only have really good ideas once in a while,” Solow told MIT News. “I would rather teach a really bright student than write a mildly interesting paper.”

When it came to teaching undergraduates, Solow would annually tear up his old lecture notes, and force himself to re-examine how he was presenting material to them. He came to believe he did his best teaching by the third time he lectured on a particular subject.

As a graduate advisor, Solow would put in long hours providing detailed feedback to students about their research papers, often reading their work in the evenings, across the living room from Barbara Solow — who also received a PhD from Harvard, and taught at Brandeis and Boston University, as a scholar of Irish economic history, as well as the Carribean slave trade.

Over time, Solow served as principal advisor to over 70 doctoral students, many of whom became highly accomplished economists. Four doctoral students for whom Solow was the main advisor — George Akerlof PhD ’66, Peter Diamond PhD ’63, William Nordhaus PhD ’67, and Joseph Stiglitz PhD ’67 —eventually won the Nobel Prize themselves. (One student who wrote an undergraduate economics thesis for Solow, H. Robert Horvitz ’68, also won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.)

“He was extremely generous with both his time and his ideas,” Akerlof told MIT News in 2019. As a graduate student, Akerlof found, “the faculty were there to greet students on the first day we arrived at MIT, and to give us advice. I mean, you would not expect the most distinguished professor at the best economics department to be there, waiting for you. That was extraordinary.”

Solow’s intellectual and professional commitment to his students, and his active mentorship, earned him life-long admiration from those who had studied with him.

“Paul Samuelson was royalty, but Bob was very much the prime minister running the country,” the economist Avinash Dixit PhD ’68 recalled, in remarks for a 90th-birthday gathering for Solow, in 2014.

As it happens, Samuelson and Solow worked for decades in the same common suite of offices, talking economics at length. Engaging with colleagues, Solow strongly felt, was one of the best ways to produce better scholarship.

“More than being pleasurable, I think it makes for good work,” Solow told MIT News. “Talking to your colleagues — or, in my case, standing at a blackboard with them and talking and scribbling — improves the product.”

For those fortunate enough to have been both students and colleagues of Solow, the remarkable economist’s passing evoked both sadness, and gratitude for all he contributed.

“I was fortunate to see many phases of the Bob Solow experience — to have him as an undergraduate teacher, where his class was widely viewed as the highlight of the economics curriculum, to see him as a dedicated thesis advisor, to have insightful research conversations, and to work with him as an external policy expert,” says Jonathan Gruber, current head of the MIT Department of Economics. “In every phase, Bob was amazing — always thoughtful, well-spoken, clear and kind. He is a role model for all economists.”

This article will be updated throughout the day.

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MIT in the media: 2023 in review

It was an eventful trip around the sun for MIT this year, from President Sally Kornbluth’s inauguration and Mark Rober’s Commencement address to Professor Moungi Bawendi winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 2023 MIT researchers made key advances, detecting a dying star swallowing a planet, exploring the frontiers of artificial intelligence, creating clean energy solutions, inventing tools aimed at earlier detection and diagnosis of cancer, and even exploring the science of spreading kindness. Below are highlights of some of the uplifting people, breakthroughs, and ideas from MIT that made headlines in 2023.

The gift: Kindness goes viral with Steve Hartman
Steve Hartman visited Professor Anette “Peko” Hosoi to explore the science behind whether a single act of kindness can change the world.
Full story via CBS News

Trio wins Nobel Prize in chemistry for work on quantum dots, used in electronics and medical imaging
“The motivation really is the basic science. A basic understanding, the curiosity of ‘how does the world work?’” said Professor Moungi Bawendi of the inspiration for his research on quantum dots, for which he was co-awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Full story via the Associated Press

How MIT’s all-women leadership team plans to change science for the better
President Sally Kornbluth, Provost Cynthia Barnhart, and Chancellor Melissa Nobles emphasized the importance of representation for women and underrepresented groups in STEM.
Full story via Radio Boston

MIT via community college? Transfer students find a new path to a degree
Undergraduate Subin Kim shared his experience transferring from community college to MIT through the Transfer Scholars Network, which is aimed at helping community college students find a path to four-year universities.
Full story via the Christian Science Monitor

MIT president Sally Kornbluth doesn’t think we can hit the pause button on AI
President Kornbluth discussed the future of AI, ethics in science, and climate change with columnist Shirley Leung on her new “Say More” podcast. “I view [the climate crisis] as an existential issue to the extent that if we don’t take action there, all of the many, many other things that we’re working on, not that they’ll be irrelevant, but they’ll pale in comparison,” Kornbluth said.
Full story via The Boston Globe 

It’s the end of a world as we know it
Astronomers from MIT, Harvard University, Caltech and elsewhere spotted a dying star swallowing a large planet. Postdoc Kishalay De explained that: “Finding an event like this really puts all of the theories that have been out there to the most stringent tests possible. It really opens up this entire new field of research.”
Full story via The New York Times

Frontiers of AI

Hey, Alexa, what should students learn about AI?
The Day of AI is a program developed by the MIT RAISE initiative aimed at introducing and teaching K-12 students about AI. “We want students to be informed, responsible users and informed, responsible designers of these technologies,” said Professor Cynthia Breazeal, dean of digital learning at MIT.
Full story via The New York Times

AI tipping point
Four faculty members from across MIT — Professors Song Han, Simon Johnson, Yoon Kim and Rosalind Picard — described the opportunities and risks posed by the rapid advancements in the field of AI.
Full story via Curiosity Stream 

A look into the future of AI at MIT’s robotics laboratory
Professor Daniela Rus, director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, discussed the future of artificial intelligence, robotics, and machine learning, emphasizing the importance of balancing the development of new technologies with the need to ensure they are deployed in a way that benefits humanity.
Full story via Mashable

Health care providers say artificial intelligence could transform medicine
Professor Regina Barzilay spoke about her work developing new AI systems that could be used to help diagnose breast and lung cancer before the cancers are detectable to the human eye.
Full story via Chronicle

Is AI coming for your job? Tech experts weigh in: “They don’t replace human labor”
Professor David Autor discussed how the rise of artificial intelligence could change the quality of jobs available.
Full story via CBS News

Big tech is bad. Big AI will be worse.
Institute Professor Daron Acemoglu and Professor Simon Johnson made the case that “rather than machine intelligence, what we need is ‘machine usefulness,’ which emphasizes the ability of computers to augment human capabilities.”
Full story via The New York Times

Engineering excitement

MIT’s 3D-printed hearts could pump new life into customized treatments
MIT engineers developed a technique for 3D printing a soft, flexible, custom-designed replica of a patient’s heart.
Full story via WBUR

Mystery of why Roman buildings have survived so long has been unraveled, scientists say
Scientists from MIT and other institutions discovered that ancient Romans used lime clasts when manufacturing concrete, giving the material self-healing properties.
Full story via CNN

The most interesting startup in America is in Massachusetts. You’ve probably never heard of it.
VulcanForms, an MIT startup, is at the “leading edge of a push to transform 3D printing from a niche technology — best known for new-product prototyping and art-class experimentation — into an industrial force.”
Full story via The Boston Globe

Catalyzing climate innovations

Can Boston’s energy innovators save the world?
Boston Magazine reporter Rowan Jacobsen spotlighted how MIT faculty, students, and alumni are leading the charge in clean energy startups. “When it comes to game-changing breakthroughs in energy, three letters keep surfacing again and again: MIT,” writes Jacobsen.
Full story via Boston Magazine

MIT research could be game changer in combating water shortages
MIT researchers discovered that a common hydrogel used in cosmetic creams, industrial coatings, and pharmaceutical capsules can absorb moisture from the atmosphere even as the temperature rises. “For a planet that’s getting hotter, this could be a game-changing discovery.”
Full story via NBC Boston

Energy-storing concrete could form foundations for solar-powered homes
MIT engineers uncovered a new way of creating an energy supercapacitor by combining cement, carbon black, and water that could one day be used to power homes or electric vehicles.
Full story via New Scientist

MIT researchers tackle key question of EV adoption: When to charge?
MIT scientists found that delayed charging and strategic placement of EV charging stations could help reduce additional energy demands caused by more widespread EV adoption.
Full story via Fast Company

Building better buildings
Professor John Fernández examined how to reduce the climate footprints of homes and office buildings, recommending creating airtight structures, switching to cleaner heating sources, using more environmentally friendly building materials, and retrofitting existing homes and offices.
Full story via The New York Times

They’re building an “ice penetrator” on a hillside in Westford
Researchers from MIT’s Haystack Observatory built an “ice penetrator,” a device designed to monitor the changing conditions of sea ice.
Full story via The Boston Globe

Healing health solutions

How Boston is beating cancer
MIT researchers are developing drug-delivery nanoparticles aimed at targeting cancer cells without disturbing healthy cells. Essentially, the nanoparticles are “engineered for selectivity,” explained Professor Paula Hammond, head of MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering.
Full story via Boston Magazine

A new antibiotic, discovered with artificial intelligence, may defeat a dangerous superbug
Using a machine-learning algorithm, researchers from MIT discovered a type of antibiotic that’s effective against a particular strain of drug-resistant bacteria.
Full story via CNN

To detect breast cancer sooner, an MIT professor designs an ultrasound bra
MIT researchers designed a wearable ultrasound device that attaches to a bra and could be used to detect early-stage breast tumors.
Full story via STAT

The quest for a switch to turn on hunger
An ingestible pill developed by MIT scientists can raise levels of hormones to help increase appetite and decrease nausea in patients with gastroparesis.
Full story via Wired

Here’s how to use dreams for creative inspiration
MIT scientists found that the earlier stages of sleep are key to sparking creativity and that people can be guided to dream about specific topics, further boosting creativity.
Full story via Scientific American

Astounding art

An AI opera from 1987 reboots for a new generation
Professor Tod Machover discussed the restaging of his opera “VALIS” at MIT, which featured an artificial intelligence-assisted musical instrument developed by Nina Masuelli ’23.
Full story via The Boston Globe

Surfacing the stories hidden in migration data
Associate Professor Sarah Williams discussed the Civic Data Design Lab’s “Motivational Tapestry,” a large woven art piece that uses data from the United Nations World Food Program to visually represent the individual motivations of 1,624 Central Americans who have migrated to the U.S.
Full story via Metropolis

Augmented reality-infused production of Wagner’s “Parsifal” opens Bayreuth Festival
Professor Jay Scheib’s augmented reality-infused production of Richard Wagner’s “Parsifal” brought “fantastical images” to audience members.
Full story via the Associated Press

Understanding our universe

New image reveals violent events near a supermassive black hole
Scientists captured a new image of M87*, the black hole at the center of the Messier 87 galaxy, showing the “launching point of a colossal jet of high-energy particles shooting outward into space.”
Full story via Reuters

Gravitational waves: A new universe
MIT researchers Lisa Barsotti, Deep Chatterjee, and Victoria Xu explored how advances in gravitational wave detection are enabling a better understanding of the universe.
Full story via Curiosity Stream 

Nergis Mavalvala helped detect the first gravitational wave. Her work doesn’t stop there
Professor Nergis Mavalvala, dean of the School of Science, discussed her work searching for gravitational waves, the importance of skepticism in scientific research, and why she enjoys working with young people.
Full story via Wired

Hitting the books

“The Transcendent Brain” review: Beyond ones and zeroes
In his book “The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science,” Alan Lightman, a professor of the practice of humanities, displayed his gift for “distilling complex ideas and emotions to their bright essence.”
Full story via The Wall Street Journal

What happens when CEOs treat workers better? Companies (and workers) win.
Professor of the practice Zeynep Ton published a book, “The Case for Good Jobs,” and is “on a mission to change how company leaders think, and how they treat their employees.”
Full story via The Boston Globe

How to wage war on conspiracy theories
Professor Adam Berinsky’s book, “Political Rumors: Why We Accept Misinformation and How to Fight it,” examined “attitudes toward both politics and health, both of which are undermined by distrust and misinformation in ways that cause harm to both individuals and society.”
Full story via Politico

What it takes for Mexican coders to cross the cultural border with Silicon Valley
Assistant Professor Héctor Beltrán discussed his new book, “Code Work: Hacking across the U.S./México Techno-Borderlands,” which explores the culture of hackathons and entrepreneurship in Mexico.
Full story via Marketplace

Cultivating community

The Indigenous rocketeer
Nicole McGaa, a fourth-year student at MIT, discussed her work leading MIT’s all-Indigenous rocket team at the 2023 First Nations Launch National Rocket Competition.
Full story via Nature

“You totally got this,” YouTube star and former NASA engineer Mark Rober tells MIT graduates
During his Commencement address at MIT, Mark Rober urged graduates to embrace their accomplishments and boldly face any challenges they encounter.
Full story via The Boston Globe

MIT Juggling Club going strong after half century
After almost 50 years, the MIT Juggling Club, which was founded in 1975 and then merged with a unicycle club, is the oldest drop-in juggling club in continuous operation and still welcomes any aspiring jugglers to come toss a ball (or three) into the air.
Full story via Cambridge Day

Volpe Transportation Center opens as part of $750 million deal between MIT and feds
The John A. Volpe National Transportation Systems Center in Kendall Square was the first building to open in MIT’s redevelopment of the 14-acre Volpe site that will ultimately include “research labs, retail, affordable housing, and open space, with the goal of not only encouraging innovation, but also enhancing the surrounding community.”
Full story via The Boston Globe

Sparking conversation

The future of AI innovation and the role of academics in shaping it
Professor Daniela Rus emphasized the central role universities play in fostering innovation and the importance of ensuring universities have the computing resources necessary to help tackle major global challenges.
Full story via The Boston Globe

Moving the needle on supply chain sustainability
Professor Yossi Sheffi examined several strategies companies could use to help improve supply chain sustainability, including redesigning last-mile deliveries, influencing consumer choices and incentivizing returnable containers.
Full story via The Hill

Expelled from the mountain top?
Sylvester James Gates Jr. ’73, PhD ’77 made the case that “diverse learning environments expose students to a broader range of perspectives, enhance education, and inculcate creativity and innovative habits of mind.”
Full story via Science

Marketing magic of “Barbie” movie has lessons for women’s sports
MIT Sloan Lecturer Shira Springer explored how the success of the “Barbie” movie could be applied to women’s sports.
Full story via Sports Business Journal

We’re already paying for universal health care. Why don’t we have it?
Professor Amy Finkelstein asserted that the solution to health insurance reform in the U.S. is “universal coverage that is automatic, free and basic.”
Full story via The New York Times 

The internet could be so good. Really.
Professor Deb Roy described how “new kinds of social networks can be designed for constructive communication — for listening, dialogue, deliberation, and mediation — and they can actually work.”
Full story via The Atlantic

Fostering educational excellence

MIT students give legendary linear algebra professor standing ovation in last lecture
After 63 years of teaching and over 10 million views of his online lectures, Professor Gilbert Strang received a standing ovation after his last lecture on linear algebra. “I am so grateful to everyone who likes linear algebra and sees its importance. So many universities (and even high schools) now appreciate how beautiful it is and how valuable it is,” said Strang.
Full story via USA Today

“Brave Behind Bars”: Reshaping the lives of inmates through coding classes
Graduate students Martin Nisser and Marisa Gaetz co-founded Brave Behind Bars, a program designed to provide incarcerated individuals with coding and digital literacy skills to better prepare them for life after prison.
Full story via MSNBC

Melrose TikTok user “Ms. Nuclear Energy” teaching about nuclear power through social media
Graduate student Kaylee Cunningham discussed her work using social media to help educate and inform the public about nuclear energy.
Full story via CBS Boston 

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Minicourse open to the MIT community gives context to the Middle East crisis

MIT community members can learn more about the Israel-Hamas conflict through a recently developed online course organized by Middle East and North Africa (MENA)/MIT at MIT’s Center for International Studies.

The three-session course, titled “Israel, Palestine, Gaza before and after October 7: Understanding historical context and contrasting narratives,” was first held between Nov. 29 and Dec. 13. More than 500 community members attended those sessions, including students, faculty, staff, and alumni.

The course instructor is Peter Krause PhD ’11, an associate professor of political science at Boston College who is also a research affiliate in MIT’s Security Studies Program and an expert on Middle East politics. Krause spent multiple years living in the region to conduct interviews with Israelis and Palestinians for his dissertation and first book, which focused on the history of the Zionist and Palestinian national movements.

“We wanted to create a jumping off point for constructive discussions in the MIT community,” Krause says. “I want people in the community to be able to have more engaging and informed discussions with each other. Providing this knowledge can allow people to understand each other better.”

“We all could use more understanding”

The sessions were split up into the history of Israelis, Palestinians, and their national movements; conflicts and peace in the region between 1948 and 2023; and a look at the current conflict and the future of Israeli-Palestinian relations.

The next session of the course will feature recordings of the first three sessions as well as a live Q&A with Krause, and will run between Dec. 18 and Jan. 3. Community members can register with their MIT email address.

More than 1,100 community members registered for the first session, including many alumni and faculty members.

“I don’t worry too much about headcount; I think even if we impact a small number of people, but impact them deeply, that can change the world,” says Associate Professor Richard Nielsen, MENA/MIT Faculty Director who is also member of the Security Studies Program and was involved in creating the course. “That said, a sizeable portion of the MIT community is seeking more information on these topics. We all could use more understanding and more ideas about this conflict. MIT is all ideas. When we think about making an impact at MIT, it has to be through education.”

Krause says he sought to provide context to the daily news updates on the conflict and to counter what he calls the “junk food information” snippets common on social media.

Building empathy

“One of the most important things that I hope comes out of these sessions is the building of empathy,” Krause says, which is why he focused the sessions on the narratives of Palestinian and Israelis, not just events. “I think if you have the ability to put yourself in other people’s shoes and in some small way understand what they’re experiencing and how they see things, that’s the basis for more positive engagement, not just in the MIT community but at large.”

Krause acknowledged that many community members aren’t able to take a semester-length course on this complex subject. The condensed course tries to accurately depict not just one Israeli perspective or one Palestinian perspective, but the range of opinions within each of those communities.

“When you start to break it down and show the diversity of opinion and experiences on each side, not only does that deepen understanding, but you also start to see the real stakes and the real people behind the news headlines,” Krause says. “I think that’s really important.”

Additional sessions with new updates are also being planned in February. The course is one of the Institute’s many initiatives aimed at bringing a deeper level of understanding to the MIT community.

“I hope whatever attendees’ political preferences are, they can learn from this, which will ground whatever feelings they have in greater knowledge,” Krause explains. “I believe greater knowledge is going to lead to not just greater understanding, but also better research, better policy, and then hopefully better relationships with people around us, because we understand each other more.”

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Paul Parravano, longtime liaison to elected leaders and MIT’s neighbors, dies at 71

Paul Parravano, who worked for 33 years to build enduring MIT connections with elected officials and the local community, died at his home in Arlington, Massachusetts on Dec. 9.

Parravano, who was 71, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer shortly after retiring in January from his full-time work as co-director of MIT’s Office of Government and Community Relations — a role that earned him a reference last year as the “Mayor of MIT.”

“‘So, tell me about yourself’ was an invitation Paul would work into every conversation he had,” says Sarah Eusden Gallop, who served alongside Parravano as co-director for more than 25 years. “Perhaps he might discover a mutual love of soccer, a Michigan connection, a passion for Italian food, a similar taste in music, or simply a shared joy in being a parent. Paul was masterful in his desire and ability to make connections with people. It was his job to do so, after all. But he came at it naturally, with a deep authenticity.”

The son of Italian immigrants, Parravano grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where his father was a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Michigan. He went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in political science and government from Harvard University and a law degree from Northeastern University. Before joining MIT, he worked for several organizations in support of special education and civil rights, utilizing his legal training to assist in navigating federal regulations.

Parravano joined MIT in 1990 as assistant for government and community relations, joining Gallop in 1997 as co-directors of what is now the Office of Government and Community Relations. During his 33 years at MIT, he served as a liaison between the Institute and all levels of government and the local community in an effort to foster communication and understanding.

“Everyone who knew Paul also knew that his approach to being a ‘liaison’ was uniquely his own,” says Gallop, who continues as MIT’s director of government and community relations.

At MIT, Parravano worked closely with public officials, advocacy groups, and nonprofit organizations at the local, state, and national levels. On behalf of three MIT presidents, he established and participated in regular visits with government leaders in Washington to help advance the cause of science and research. He arranged countless campus visits for dignitaries, community leaders, and schoolchildren.

“Somehow, he seemed to know everyone, and everyone everywhere knew him,” President Emeritus L. Rafael Reif says. “Paul would arrange the itineraries of our Washington, D.C., trips with tremendous preparation. We would meet with members of Congress or the administration to discuss federal policy positions impacting science and technology research and higher education, and everywhere we went people would greet Paul warmly. I have so many wonderful memories of our visits, filled with moments of great seriousness about national issues, shared delight in MIT’s accomplishments, and beautiful personal interactions. I will always remember the sight of him walking down the Infinite Corridor, whistling some Italian tune, as it always lifted my spirits.”

Parravano was a strong advocate for research and education at the national level — and was also committed to providing access to science, technology, engineering, and math for young Cambridge learners. At MIT, he was fully comfortable in the world of science, and would often team up with classes to explore advancements in assistive technology and health care.

“For over 20 years, Paul would come to our classroom and share his life and experiences influenced by retinal cancer, which caused him to lose his sight before the age of 2,” says David Housman, professor of biology. “His passion and openness created a crucial experience for students destined to be caregivers as physicians and pioneers in medical research. Paul taught them in a memorable way the importance of understanding the medical challenges they would face from a human point of view. My students recall decades later the impact Paul has had on them as they try to make a positive difference in the world.”

Unimpeded by physical barriers, Parravano diligently sought to improve his life and the lives of others by helping make the world more accessible for those with disabilities. A longtime board member of National Braille Press, he advocated for the greater use of Braille in public spaces and on everything from restaurant menus to voting booths to utility bills. He became an expert at finding ways to modify and use newer technologies. 

On campus, Parravano also supported participation in voting and elections, served as secretary for MIT’s Community Service Fund, acted as an advocate and a research participant in the field of assistive technology, and was a longtime committee member (and chair) of the Institute’s annual MLK Jr. Celebration.

“Paul was a staple within the MLK Celebration Committee and was always loved and respected for all that he did here at MIT and in the Cambridge community,” says former MIT staff member Zina Queen, who served as co-chair of MIT’s Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration Committee.

In Cambridge, Parravano attended thousands of community events, proudly served on many nonprofit boards, promoted support for local agencies through MIT’s Community Service Fund, reveled in frequenting local restaurants, and was a regular on the No. 1 bus between MIT and Harvard. His knowledge of the City of Cambridge, and the greater Boston region, impressed many, and his keen interest was always in trying to help others.

“Paul had a great fealty to MIT, but was imbued with the love of Cambridge,” former Mayor Kenneth E. Reeves says. “He knew that it was a complicated relationship, but he could walk the tightrope between the two and represent the best of both with honor and integrity. He held a very special place in the hearts of the citizens in Cambridge. I think he will forever be there. He’s in the DNA of the city now.”

From delivering pastries to election workers at MIT’s polling location to gifting his beloved Michigan-based Sayklly’s chocolates to colleagues during the holidays, Parravano had an uncanny ability to recognize voices, which was helpful to him as a blind individual. He hardly ever had to wait for people to say their names; he knew who they were and quickly greeted them with a personal reflection or a humorous observation. He made everyone feel good, Gallop says.

“Paul wove deep connections between MIT and the larger world it exists to serve, driven by his belief in this institution’s mission and abilities,” adds Executive Vice President and Treasurer Glen Shor. “We long enjoyed his good cheer and were inspired by his personal resilience. He leaves a lasting legacy of positive impact.”

For his work in supporting the Cambridge community, Parravano received many awards in gratitude for his advocacy, including the Cambridge NAACP’s Lifetime Achievement Award and the Cambridge Community Center’s Reverend E.K. Nichols Founder’s Award.

In June 2022, Parravano became the inaugural recipient of the MIT Staff Award for Distinction in Service. At the award ceremony, former president Reif referred to Parravano as the “Mayor of MIT.”

Parravano is survived by his wife, Martha, and by his daughters Emily and Ellie, whom he referred to as the greatest gifts in his life. He is also survived by three brothers and a large extended family of nieces, nephews, and cousins both in the U.S. and Italy.

A memorial gathering will be held at MIT in early spring 2024. The Parravano family has established the Paul Parravano Memorial Fund at MIT in support of student research in the field of assistive technology.

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Using AI, MIT researchers identify a new class of antibiotic candidates

Using a type of artificial intelligence known as deep learning, MIT researchers have discovered a class of compounds that can kill a drug-resistant bacterium that causes more than 10,000 deaths in the United States every year.

In a study appearing today in Nature, the researchers showed that these compounds could kill methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) grown in a lab dish and in two mouse models of MRSA infection. The compounds also show very low toxicity against human cells, making them particularly good drug candidates.

A key innovation of the new study is that the researchers were also able to figure out what kinds of information the deep-learning model was using to make its antibiotic potency predictions. This knowledge could help researchers to design additional drugs that might work even better than the ones identified by the model.

“The insight here was that we could see what was being learned by the models to make their predictions that certain molecules would make for good antibiotics. Our work provides a framework that is time-efficient, resource-efficient, and mechanistically insightful, from a chemical-structure standpoint, in ways that we haven’t had to date,” says James Collins, the Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering and Science in MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) and Department of Biological Engineering.

Felix Wong, a postdoc at IMES and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and Erica Zheng, a former Harvard Medical School graduate student who was advised by Collins, are the lead authors of the study, which is part of the Antibiotics-AI Project at MIT. The mission of this project, led by Collins, is to discover new classes of antibiotics against seven types of deadly bacteria, over seven years.

Explainable predictions

MRSA, which infects more than 80,000 people in the United States every year, often causes skin infections or pneumonia. Severe cases can lead to sepsis, a potentially fatal bloodstream infection.

Over the past several years, Collins and his colleagues in MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health (Jameel Clinic) have begun using deep learning to try to find new antibiotics. Their work has yielded potential drugs against Acinetobacter baumannii, a bacterium that is often found in hospitals, and many other drug-resistant bacteria.

These compounds were identified using deep learning models that can learn to identify chemical structures that are associated with antimicrobial activity. These models then sift through millions of other compounds, generating predictions of which ones may have strong antimicrobial activity.

These types of searches have proven fruitful, but one limitation to this approach is that the models are “black boxes,” meaning that there is no way of knowing what features the model based its predictions on. If scientists knew how the models were making their predictions, it could be easier for them to identify or design additional antibiotics.

“What we set out to do in this study was to open the black box,” Wong says. “These models consist of very large numbers of calculations that mimic neural connections, and no one really knows what's going on underneath the hood.”

First, the researchers trained a deep learning model using substantially expanded datasets. They generated this training data by testing about 39,000 compounds for antibiotic activity against MRSA, and then fed this data, plus information on the chemical structures of the compounds, into the model.

“You can represent basically any molecule as a chemical structure, and also you tell the model if that chemical structure is antibacterial or not,” Wong says. “The model is trained on many examples like this. If you then give it any new molecule, a new arrangement of atoms and bonds, it can tell you a probability that that compound is predicted to be antibacterial.”

To figure out how the model was making its predictions, the researchers adapted an algorithm known as Monte Carlo tree search, which has been used to help make other deep learning models, such as AlphaGo, more explainable. This search algorithm allows the model to generate not only an estimate of each molecule’s antimicrobial activity, but also a prediction for which substructures of the molecule likely account for that activity.

Potent activity

To further narrow down the pool of candidate drugs, the researchers trained three additional deep learning models to predict whether the compounds were toxic to three different types of human cells. By combining this information with the predictions of antimicrobial activity, the researchers discovered compounds that could kill microbes while having minimal adverse effects on the human body.

Using this collection of models, the researchers screened about 12 million compounds, all of which are commercially available. From this collection, the models identified compounds from five different classes, based on chemical substructures within the molecules, that were predicted to be active against MRSA.

The researchers purchased about 280 compounds and tested them against MRSA grown in a lab dish, allowing them to identify two, from the same class, that appeared to be very promising antibiotic candidates. In tests in two mouse models, one of MRSA skin infection and one of MRSA systemic infection, each of those compounds reduced the MRSA population by a factor of 10.

Experiments revealed that the compounds appear to kill bacteria by disrupting their ability to maintain an electrochemical gradient across their cell membranes. This gradient is needed for many critical cell functions, including the ability to produce ATP (molecules that cells use to store energy). An antibiotic candidate that Collins’ lab discovered in 2020, halicin, appears to work by a similar mechanism but is specific to Gram-negative bacteria (bacteria with thin cell walls). MRSA is a Gram-positive bacterium, with thicker cell walls.

“We have pretty strong evidence that this new structural class is active against Gram-positive pathogens by selectively dissipating the proton motive force in bacteria,” Wong says. “The molecules are attacking bacterial cell membranes selectively, in a way that does not incur substantial damage in human cell membranes. Our substantially augmented deep learning approach allowed us to predict this new structural class of antibiotics and enabled the finding that it is not toxic against human cells.”

The researchers have shared their findings with Phare Bio, a nonprofit started by Collins and others as part of the Antibiotics-AI Project. The nonprofit now plans to do more detailed analysis of the chemical properties and potential clinical use of these compounds. Meanwhile, Collins’ lab is working on designing additional drug candidates based on the findings of the new study, as well as using the models to seek compounds that can kill other types of bacteria.

“We are already leveraging similar approaches based on chemical substructures to design compounds de novo, and of course, we can readily adopt this approach out of the box to discover new classes of antibiotics against different pathogens,” Wong says.

In addition to MIT, Harvard, and the Broad Institute, the paper’s contributing institutions are Integrated Biosciences, Inc., the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, and the Leibniz Institute of Polymer Research in Dresden, Germany. The research was funded by the James S. McDonnell Foundation, the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Swiss National Science Foundation, the Banting Fellowships Program, the Volkswagen Foundation, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the U.S. National Institutes of Health, and the Broad Institute. The Antibiotics-AI Project is funded by the Audacious Project, Flu Lab, the Sea Grape Foundation, the Wyss Foundation, and an anonymous donor.

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The science and art of complex systems

As a high school student, Gosha Geogdzhayev attended Saturday science classes at Columbia University, including one called The Physics of Climate Change. “They showed us a satellite image of the Earth’s atmosphere, and I thought, ‘Wow, this is so beautiful,’” he recalls. Since then, climate science has been one of his driving interests.

With the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences and the BC3 Climate Grand Challenges project, Geogdzhayeva is creating climate model “emulators” in order to localize the large-scale data provided by global climate models (GCMs). As he explains, GCMs can make broad predictions about climate change, but they are not proficient at analyzing impacts in localized areas. However, simpler “emulator” models can learn from GCMs and other data sources to answer specialized questions. The model Geogdzhayev is currently working on will project the frequency of extreme heat events in Nigeria.

A senior majoring in physics, Geogdzhayev hopes that his current and future research will help reshape the scientific approach to studying climate trends. More accurate predictions of climate conditions could have benefits far beyond scientific analysis, and affect the decisions of policymakers, businesspeople, and truly anyone concerned about climate change.

“I have this fascination with complex systems, and reducing that complexity and picking it apart,” Geogdzhayev says.

His pursuit of discovery has led him from Berlin, Germany, to Princeton, New Jersey, with stops in between. He has worked with Transsolar KlimaEngineering, NASA, NOAA, FU Berlin, and MIT, including through the MIT Climate Stability Consortium’s Climate Scholars Program, in research positions that explore climate science in different ways. His projects have involved applications such as severe weather alerts, predictions of late seasonal freezes, and eco-friendly building design. 

The written word

Originating even earlier than his passion for climate science is Geogdzhayev’s love of writing. He recently discovered original poetry dating back all the way to middle school. In this poetry he found a coincidental throughline to his current life: “There was one poem about climate, actually. It was so bad,” he says, laughing. “But it was cool to see.”

As a scientist, Geogdzhayev finds that poetry helps quiet his often busy mind. Writing provides a vehicle to understand himself, and therefore to communicate more effectively with others, which he sees as necessary for success in his field.

“A lot of good work comes from being able to communicate with other people. And poetry is a way for me to flex those muscles. If I can communicate with myself, and if I can communicate myself to others, that is transferable to science,” he says.

Since last spring Geogdzhayev has attended poetry workshop classes at Harvard University, which he enjoys partly because it nudges him to explore spaces outside of MIT.

He has contributed prolifically to platforms on campus as well. Since his first year, he has written as a staff blogger for MIT Admissions, creating posts about his life at MIT for prospective students. He has also written for the yearly fashion publication “Infinite Magazine.”

Merging both science and writing, a peer-reviewed publication by Geogdzhayev will soon be published in the journal “Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena.” The piece explores the validity of climate statistics under climate change through an abstract mathematical system.

Leading with heart

Geogdzhayev enjoys being a collaborator, but also excels in leadership positions. When he first arrived at MIT, his dorm, Burton Conner, was closed for renovation, and he could not access that living community directly. Once his sophomore year arrived however, he was quick to volunteer to streamline the process to get new students involved, and eventually became floor chair for his living community, Burton 1.

Following the social stagnation caused by the Covid-19 pandemic and the dorm renovation, he helped rebuild a sense of community for his dorm by planning social events and governmental organization for the floor. He now regards the members of Burton 1 as his closest friends and partners in “general tomfoolery.”

This sense of leadership is coupled with an affinity for teaching. Geogdzhayev is a peer mentor in the Physics Mentorship Program and taught climate modeling classes to local high school students as a part of SPLASH. He describes these experiences as “very fun” and can imagine himself as a university professor dedicated to both teaching and research.

Following graduation, Geogdzhayev intends to pursue a PhD in climate science or applied math. “I can see myself working on research for the rest of my life,” he says.

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Study: Colon cancer screenings are more effective than previously understood

Screening for colon cancer reduces cancer rates by substantially more than previous analyses of randomized trials suggest, according to a study co-authored by an MIT economist that takes a new look at data from five trials.

Roughly 1 percent of participants in a given trial get colon cancer in the decade following the trial. The new findings, based on data from trials in half a dozen countries, show that screening reduces this rate by about 0.5 percent. That is twice the impact previously estimated; earlier studies placed the screening effect at around a quarter of a percentage point.

“The effect of actually getting screened is about half a percentage point, double previously published results which focus on the effect of being invited to screen,” says MIT econometrician Josh Angrist. The large size of this effect relative to the baseline enhances the case for colorectal (CRC) screening, he adds.

The findings are important, Angrist says, because many trial subjects offered the chance to screen via colonoscopy or sigmoidoscopy decide to skip it. Prior studies fail to properly account for such “nonadherence” to the intended treatment. 

“Nonadherence is widespread in randomized clinical trials, especially those offering relatively unpleasant interventions like CRC screening,” Angrist says. “Offers of a free colonoscopy are not always taken up with enthusiasm.”

This poses a problem for trial analysis because, while offers to screen are randomly assigned in randomized screening trials, the decision to screen may be far from random.

The paper, “Instrumental Variable Methods Reconcile Intention-To-Screen Effects Across Pragmatic Cancer Screening Trials,” was published Friday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The authors are Angrist, the Ford Professor of Economics at MIT, and Peter Hull PhD ’17, a professor of economics at Brown University.

Getting screened, not just being invited to screen

The effectiveness of cancer screening is the focus of an active research literature. It might seem that getting screened for cancer is always important, but many complicating factors, including the potential for false positives and consequent overtreatment, motivate research into the benefits and costs of such procedures.

The Angrist and Hull study examines data from five major randomized clinical trials of screenings for colorectal cancer. Four of the screenings used sigmoidoscopies (partial colonoscopies), while one offered full colonoscopies. All the trials were randomized, with a randomly selected treatment group offered screening and a control group that remained mostly screened.

In each trial, however, the number of participants in the treatment group who actually got screened varied widely, from 42 percent to 87 percent, well below the number offered the chance to screen.

“In many clinical trials, there can be quite a few people who aren’t treated as planned,” Angrist says. “Cancer screening trials are a setting where that’s especially problematic.”

Earlier studies focus on comparisons based on randomly assigned screening offers, with no proper adjustment for how many people actually got screened. The core of the new analysis adjusts intention-to-screen effects to produce valid measures of the effect on people who were actually screened.

The adjustment uses an econometric method called “instrumental variables” — “IV,” to economists — that in this case captures the effect of screening on those who were screened.

“Cancer screening trials, with their substantial nonadherence to the treatment protocol, are really an ideal scenario for IV,” Angrist says.

The new analysis also resolves a key puzzle in the earlier studies: the variablility in findings across trials. Angrist and Hull found that IV estimates from the five trials align remarkably well, showing a fairly consistent 0.5 percentage point decrease in cancer incidence among those who were screened.

“Across five different trials and a bunch of subgroups, the results do fall on a line, even though the ITS effects were quite different across the trials” Angrist says, referring to estimates focusing on effects of screening offers. “Once you do the adherence adjustment, they cluster around half a percent.”

Using the tool kit

Angrist is a longtime econometrician who has worked to upgrade the tools social scientists use to estimate causal effects in wide-ranging domains including education, labor economics, health care, and more. His methods have also been adopted by some biostatisticians.

“But not enough,” Angrist says. “Peter Hull and I set out to show the power of IV to generate new findings in this important area.”

Angrist shared the 2021 Nobel Prize in Economics with David Card of the University of California at Berkeley and Guido Imbens of Stanford University for their work on econometric tools. Angrist’s Nobel citation describes his theoretical work with Imbens on IV, which showed for the first time that IV methods capture something called a “local average treatment effects.” In the context of CRC screening trials, this is simply the average effect of screening on the screened.  

Angrist and Hull conclude their paper with a call to make IV analysis a routine part of clinical research.

“If you want to encourage a reluctant colonoscopy patient, you shouldn’t tell them the effect of being invited to screen, you should tell them the effect of actually being screened,” Angrist says. “And that’s a much bigger number.”

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Navy officer deepens her engineering and leadership skills at MIT

Trained to be a leader even as a child, U.S. Navy Lieutenant Asia Allison is acquiring a new level of expertise as a graduate student at MIT — and a new approach to technical leadership in the Daniel J. Riccio Graduate Engineering Leadership (GradEL) program.

“The Navy has a need for engineering leaders,” Allison says. “The critical-thinking skills that I am developing in GradEL will be very helpful in the workforce as we tackle a myriad of challenges and bring new ideas to the Navy.”

Allison was born in Norfolk, Virginia. Her father is also in the Navy, and the family moved every few years. Already at age 4, she was given her “first opportunity to lead,” she says, when her first sibling was born, and her mother made it clear that Allison, as the oldest child, would “set the standard.”

“My mom was laying down the foundation for me, showing me what it truly meant to lead by example,” she says.

While studying mathematics at Spelman College, which Allison paid for by joining the Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps (NROTC), she became a battalion operations officer, responsible for giving direction to about 20 other NROTC students. And in her first tour of duty right out of college, Allison led a division of sailors — while she was learning what their duties entailed.

“I began by shadowing my sailors so that I could learn their skillset and be able to advocate for them as their leader,” she says.

In 2020, Allison had an experience that shook the foundations of her career and perhaps allowed her to build something stronger and more balanced.

“Failing my Prospective Nuclear Engineering Officer course was a pivotal moment in my life,” Allison says. “It meant I would have to reevaluate my career. It was also the first time I really failed at something.”

The experience was crushing to her at first, but in time, it would bring Allison to a world-renowned engineering program and a process of self-discovery at MIT.

Allison realized that she had grown passionate about engineering during the time she had spent in the Navy’s nuclear program. She switched “communities” to engineering duty officer in July 2020 and applied to the graduate program in naval construction and engineering at MIT in September of that year. In summer 2021, she began a three-year program to earn a naval engineer degree and a master’s degree in mechanical engineering.

In spring 2023, Allison was selected to participate in GradEL, a program that aims to cultivate leaders of exceptional skill and character who can inspire teams and drive technical efforts that change the world for the better. A main aspect of the program puts participants through an extensive process of self-reflection, with the underlying idea that good leaders need to know themselves first — in effect, they must learn how to manage themselves before attempting to manage others.

It was in GradEL that Allison developed a deeper understanding of her own background and profile as a leader. She identified strengths that dated back to her early childhood and areas where she would benefit by changing her perspective.

Reflecting on failure, she says that since having taken a GradEL class that focuses heavily on self-discovery, she knows she was previously “in more of a fixed mindset. I was choosing to look at my mistake as an absolute rather than as an opportunity to improve.”

Allison says the self-reflection aspect of the GradEL program has provided her with clarity. “It helps to know where you want to go based on where you have been.”

Industry leaders who spoke to the GradEL students about the challenges faced in their careers were also very helpful to Allison. “Hearing how the guest speakers overcame those challenges is something that I plan to apply in my career,” she says.

Her graduate studies in engineering are culminating in a master’s thesis project involving the design of a refueling infrastructure for an offshore nuclear electricity-generation platform.

“I really liked the concept with my prior nuclear engineering experience, as well as having taken a sustainability course here at MIT. I found the idea of investing in an alternate source of electricity generation to be worth exploring,” she says.

Bolstered with advanced engineering and leadership training, Allison still leans on the early lessons provided by her mother.

“I hold dearly to the lessons she taught me,” Allison says, “and continue to push myself with her as my motivation and my ‘North Star.’”

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