Kimberly Rose Bennett awarded HHMI Gilliam Fellowship

Kimberly Rose Bennett, a PhD candidate in the Medical Engineering and Medical Physics (MEMP) program within the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology (HST), has been selected by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to be one of the 50 Gilliam Fellows for 2023. Bennett is the first HST student to receive this prestigious fellowship.

The Gilliam Fellows are outstanding doctoral students, chosen to recognize exceptional research in their respective scientific fields and their dedication to the advancement of a “more inclusive scientific ecosystem.” Bennett and her thesis advisers Paula Hammond, Institute Professor and MIT vice provost for faculty, and Joelle Straehla, a pediatric oncologist at Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center, will receive an annual award totaling $53,000 for up to three years.

As a Gilliam Fellow, Bennett will meet and network with other fellows and professors at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), which is based in Chevy Chase, Maryland. This talented group of students, who are expected to go on to become the next generation of influential scientists, will offer one another an invaluable support network throughout their years of graduate school. In addition, the program invests not only in the students, but in their advisors as well, in recognition of the important role they play in helping their advisees realize their full potential. Gilliam advisors therefore participate in a year-long course that includes interactive webinars and in-person workshops designed to teach advisors how to listen and engage across cultures. Together, Bennett and her advisors will also receive funds to support diversity and inclusion efforts at MIT.

Bennett, a first-generation honors graduate in bioengineering from the University of California at Riverside, and a first-generation Mexican-American, says she is the first in her family to attend and complete college. She grew up in Hesperia, California, a small desert town that Bennett describes as a “low-resource, medically underserved community” with few STEM opportunities for college prep, including "lacking science camps, physics or computer science classes, or extensive AP/IB [advanced placement/international baccalaureate] curriculum.”

Bennett recalls that as a child, her exposure to science was primarily through a TV show called “MythBusters” — a science entertainment program. When her mother suffered a bout with breast cancer, Bennett recalls this health challenge as a catalyst to see science as a way to change and improve lives, so that “families don’t have to watch a loved one struggle”.

While at UC Riverside, Bennett began to see how the intersection of health sciences and engineering was where she wanted to build a career — ultimately leading her to HST, a program within MIT's Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, or IMES. She now works in the Hammond Lab (chemical engineering) and the Straehla Lab (pediatric neuro-oncology) and says that working in the two labs allows her to approach research “from two different lenses.”

Her current research focuses on tackling drug-delivery problems for treating pediatric brain tumors, including diffuse midline glioma, a disease which primarily affects children aged 2-10 years and which has a 100 percent fatality rate, with most patients succumbing to their tumors within a year of diagnosis. A major obstacle in treating these tumors is that there are currently no approved drug therapies available, such as chemotherapies — largely due to the inability of the drugs to get to the tumors in a high enough quantity to have an impact. Bennett is researching one innovative method to get these drugs to where they need to go: by using layer-by-layer nanoparticles. Layer-by-layer was pioneered in the Hammond Lab and involves the iterative adsorption of multiple layers of polymers, with each layer possessing a different task/function that, in total, creates a nanoparticle system that carries the drug cargo to a desired destination.

Bennett values this research area because she “really wanted to work on something translational and impactful … and the engineering and medicine combination (needed) to accomplish this.”

She adds that her goal is to become a professor in the medical engineering space, interfacing with clinicians in order to develop neuro-oncology technologies. A concurrent goal is to continue to do her part to enhance equity and inclusion in science and engineering, and to work on “improving the representation of Hispanic scientists in academia, primarily those who are also first-generation and low-income graduates, who have had extra barriers in pursuing higher education.”

“It’s so difficult to come from this background and to make it into a college, much less to and through graduate school, and then there is even less chance of joining academia afterwards,” Bennett says. “First-generation and low-income students face so many challenges that persist beyond our undergraduate degree — such as deeply rooted feelings of imposter syndrome with a feeling that you must ‘catch up’ to those around you.”

She cites other challenges first-generation and low-income students face, including lacking generational knowledge of how to navigate these spaces, having additional familial responsibilities or caretaking roles compared to peers, and experiencing financial insecurity, causing students to question whether they can continue their educations.

“Even now I sit in disbelief at how ‘lucky’ I’ve been to make it this far,” she says. “So, trying to make this path more accessible for others is an important goal of mine, and being able to mentor students through that journey is something I have been and want to continue doing.”

As part of this mentoring goal, she is co-founder and co-president of MIT’s First-Generation and/or Low-Income Graduate Student organization (GFLI@MIT) — which she co-founded with fellow HST students Diana Grass and Davy Deng, both MEMP PhD students. “Being able to support each other as a community is essential, as well as the ability to use our platform to advocate for resources to support these students throughout their entire graduate experience,” Bennett says. “I believe that winning the HHMI Gilliam Fellowship, along with two other national fellowships within the same year, really reaffirms that I and other first-generation students can be successful when given a supportive environment to thrive in.”

Bennett says she is “grateful to HST, and for every mentor along the way who has gotten me here” (she is particularly appreciative of her UC Riverside advisors, Victor Rodgers of the Bourns College of Engineering and Byron Ford of the School of Medicine), and she says she is excited about a future that brings together her devotion to translational research and mentorship.

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A bigger, better space-ripple detector

The search for space-shaking ripples in the universe just got a big boost. An MIT-led effort to build a bigger, better gravitational-wave detector will receive $9 million dollars over the next three years from the National Science Foundation. The funding infusion will support the design phase for Cosmic Explorer — a next-generation gravitational-wave observatory that is expected to pick up ripples in space-time from as far back as the early universe. To do so, the observatory’s detectors are planned to span the length of a small city.

The observatory’s conceptual design takes after the detectors of LIGO — the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory that is operated by MIT and Caltech. LIGO “listens” for gravitational waves by measuring the timing of two lasers that travel from the same point, down two separate tunnels, and back again. Any difference in their arrival times can be a signal that a gravitational wave passed through the L-shaped detector. LIGO includes two twin detectors, sited in different locations in the United States. A similar set of detectors, Virgo, operates in Italy, along with a third, KAGRA, in Japan.

Together, this existing network of detectors picks up ripples from gravitational-wave sources, such as merging black holes and neutron stars, every few days. Cosmic Explorer, scientists believe, should bump that rate up to a signal every few minutes. The science coming out of these detections could provide answers to some of the biggest questions in cosmology.

MIT News checked in with Cosmic Explorer’s executive director, Matthew Evans, who is a professor of physics at MIT, and co-principal investigator Salvatore Vitale, associate professor of physics at MIT, about what they hope to hear from the earliest universe.

Q: Walk us through the general idea for Cosmic Explorer — what will make it a “next-generation” detector of gravitational waves?

Evans: Cosmic Explorer is in some sense a giant LIGO. The LIGO detectors are four kilometers long for each arm, and Cosmic Explorer will be 40 kilometers on a side, so 10 times larger. And the signal that we get from a gravitational wave is essentially proportional to the size of our detector, and that’s why these things are so big.

Bigger is better, up to a point. At some point, you’ve matched the length of the detector to the wavelength of the incoming gravitational waves. And then, if you continue making it bigger, there’s really diminishing returns in terms of scientific output. It’s also hard to find sites to build that large of a detector. When you get too big, the curvature of the Earth starts to become an issue because the detector’s laser beam has to travel in a straight line, and that’s less possible when a detector is so large that it has to curve with the Earth.

In terms of looking for possible sites, fortunately now, as opposed to in the 1980s when sites were being looked at for LIGO, there’s a lot of public data that’s available digitally. So we have already first versions of algorithmic searches that can search the U.S. for potential candidate sites. We’re looking for places which are kind of flat but also a little bowl-shaped in terms of altitude because that would avoid some excavation. And we’re looking for places that are not in the middle of cities or lakes, or in the mountains, and that aren’t too far from populated regions so that we could imagine getting scientists in and out. Our first go-around shows there are some potential candidates, especially in the western half of the U.S.

We see Cosmic Explorer as “next-generation” in the sense that it will replace existing observatories. If we were to build two Cosmic Explorer observatories in the U.S., which is our reference concept, then we would presumably shut down the two LIGO observatories. That’s probably mid-2030s, depending on how funding goes. So, it’s still a ways in the future. But we believe it would change the name of the game in terms of the science we can do.

Q: And what might that science be? What new things could you see, and what big questions could it answer?

Vitali: It will allow us to see sources that are farther away. And by sources, I mean things that we are seeing today, such as black holes and neutron stars colliding. Now, with the sensitivity of LIGO, we can see sources in our backyard, cosmologically speaking — about one-and-a-half billion years ago. That seems far away, but compared to the size of the universe, which is about 13 to 14 billion years old, that’s pretty nearby. That means we are missing important steps of the history of the universe, one of which is “Cosmic Noon,” where most of the stars in the universe were formed. That’s when the universe was around 3 billion years old. It would be great to access sources which were formed around that time, because it would teach us a lot about how black holes and neutron stars come from stars.

Going beyond that, when the universe was about a billion years old, during the Epoch of Reionization — that’s when atoms were ionized and galaxies started to form — this is still too far for us to see. Cosmic Explorer would be sensitive to the mergers of black holes and neutron stars up to those distances, and even farther than that.

We’ll also be able to see sources in a much clearer and louder way. Today, LIGO might detect something with a signal-to-noise ratio of 30, where it’s pretty loud but hard to characterize. That same signal, coming through Cosmic Explorer, would have a signal-to-noise of 3,000. So, anything that requires really sensitive measurements, like testing if Einstein’s relativity is correct, which now we can do but with large uncertainties — that would be a more precise test with Cosmic Explorer.

Finally, many measurements get better the more sources you have. We think Cosmic Explorer could detect hundreds of thousands of black hole binaries and up to a million neutron star mergers per year.

Evans: Being able to detect more sources lets you detect objects that are in the corners of parameter space, which you wouldn’t otherwise detect — like very large spins of the black hole, or very high mass ratios. If you have hundreds of thousands of sources, you can detect these oddballs.

Q: What’s next for the project going forward?

Evans: Over the next three years, we’ll be doing a full, top-down design, where we pick all the parameters of the instrument and include the infrastructure that goes around it, like the vacuum system, and we end up doing architectural designs for the buildings. And all of this needs to lead to a cost estimate which is fairly sound, both for the construction and the preliminary design. At that point we will have to have identified sites, have solid architectural and infrastructural designs done, and the design of the instrument will be at the nuts and bolts level.

The environment in which we’re doing this is one that includes other next-gen detectors in development, such as the space mission, LISA, being run by the European Space Agency, and expected to launch mid-2030s. There is also the Einstein Telescope in Europe. All these groups are colleagues rather than competitors, who we anticipate working with. In this field, you get farther by working together. It's kind of a global effort to build these next-generation gravitational wave detectors, and it’s global science.

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A system to keep cloud-based gamers in sync

Cloud gaming, which involves playing a video game remotely from the cloud, witnessed unprecedented growth during the lockdowns and gaming hardware shortages that occurred during the heart of the Covid-19 pandemic. Today, the burgeoning industry encompasses a $6 billion global market and more than 23 million players worldwide.

However, interdevice synchronization remains a persistent problem in cloud gaming and the broader field of networking. In cloud gaming, video, audio, and haptic feedback are streamed from one central source to multiple devices, such as a player’s screen and controller, which typically operate on separate networks. These networks aren’t synchronized, leading to a lag between these two separate streams. A player might see something happen on the screen and then hear it on their controller a half second later.

Inspired by this problem, scientists from MIT and Microsoft Research took a unique approach to synchronizing streams transmitted to two devices. Their system, called Ekho, adds inaudible white noise sequences to the game audio streamed from the cloud server. Then it listens for those sequences in the audio recorded by the player’s controller.

Ekho uses the mismatch between these noise sequences to continuously measure and compensate for the interstream delay.

In real cloud gaming sessions, the researchers showed that Ekho is highly reliable. The system can keep streams synchronized to within less than 10 milliseconds of each other, most of the time. Other synchronization methods resulted in consistent delays of more than 50 milliseconds.

And while Ekho was designed for cloud gaming, this technique could be used more broadly to synchronize media streams traveling to different devices, such as in training situations that utilize multiple augmented or virtual reality headsets.  

“Sometimes, all it takes for a good solution to come out is to think outside what has been defined for you. The entire community has been fixed on how to solve this problem by synchronizing through the network. Synchronizing two streams by listening to the audio in the room sounded crazy, but it turned out to be a very good solution,” says Pouya Hamadanian, an electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) graduate student and lead author of a paper describing Ekho.

Hamadanian is joined on the paper by Doug Gallatin, a software developer at Microsoft; Mohammad Alizadeh, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL); and senior author Krishna Chintalapudi, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research. The paper will be presented at the ACM SIGCOMM conference.

Off the clock

At the heart of interstream delay in cloud gaming is a fundamental problem in networking known as clock synchronization.

“If the controller and the screen could look at their watches and at the same time see the same thing, then we could synchronize everything to the clock. But a lot of theoretical work on clock synchronization shows that there are certain bounds you can never overcome,” Hamadanian says.

Many approaches attempt clock synchronization by ping-pong messaging, where a device sends a ping message to the server, which sends a pong message back. The device counts how long it takes the message to return, and cuts that value in half to calculate the network delay.

But the path over the network is likely asymmetric, so it may take more time for the message to reach the server than it does for the return message. Therefore, this method is unreliable and can introduce hundreds of milliseconds of error. Humans can typically perceive interstream delay once it reaches 10 milliseconds. 

“So if something happens on the screen, we want it to happen within 10 milliseconds on the controller, as well,” Hamadanian explains.

He and his collaborators decided to try listening to game audio to synchronize these separate streams.  

In cloud gaming, the microphone on the player’s controller records audio in the room, including game audio played by the speakers on the screen, which it sends back to the server. But using this for synchronization is unreliable because the room audio contains background noise.

So they designed Ekho to add identical sequences of extremely low-volume white noise, known as pseudo noise, to the game audio before it is streamed to the player’s screen. It uses these pseudo-noise segments for synchronization.

Before building Ekho, the researchers conducted a user study to prove that players could not hear the pseudo noise in the game audio. These noise sequences are also resilient to compression, which is important because audio sent from the controller is highly compressed to speed the data transfer.

Pseudo noise, real success

The Ekho-Estimator module adds pseudo-noise sequences to the game audio. When it receives the recorded game audio from the controller, it listens for those markers and tries to line up the streams. This enables it to precisely calculate the inter-stream delay.

The Ekho-Estimator sends that information to the Ekho-Compensator module, which either skips a few milliseconds of sound or adds a few milliseconds of silence to the game audio being sent by the server, which synchronizes the streams.

They tested Ekho on real cloud streaming sessions and found that it was superior to other synchronization methods, even when the microphone quality was poor or background noise was picked up by the recording.

Ekho limited interstream delay to less than 10 milliseconds for nearly 87 percent of the time during streams. No other method the team tested was able to cut that delay to less than 50 milliseconds.

“The traditional way of doing this, which involves trying to measure the synchronization error using the underlying network, the errors are significantly larger. When we started this project, were weren’t sure whether this could even be done. But the accuracy we can get down to with Ekho, at sub-millisecond levels, it is unheard of,” says Chintalapudi.

Impressed by these results, the researchers want to see how well Ekho performs in more complex situations, such as synchronizing five controllers to the same screen device. Also, since Ekho was targeted for cloud gaming, it has range limitations. Future work could seek to enhance Ekho so it can synchronize devices at either end of a very large room, like a concert hall.

“Using inaudible white noise as a sort of ‘timekeeper’ is a great example of how out-of-the-box thinking can produce unexpected results,” says Alizadeh. “The technique could improve user experience, not just in cloud gaming but potentially in any multidevice streaming scenario.”

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Teachers embrace hands-on learning in Materials Genome Camp

Amid the brick furnaces of MIT’s forge and foundry, Mike Tarkanian poured liquid metal into a mold until it filled, then he emptied the rest into a trough. To demonstrate how quickly it solidified in the ambient temperature of the room, the senior lecturer in the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE) kicked the trough over, and a solid chunk of metal fell out.
 
The demonstration was part of the annual Materials Genome Camp, a weeklong workshop to educate grade-school and high-school teachers in materials science and engineering. The camp is run by the multi-institutional Center for Hierarchical Materials Design and the American Society for Metals and at MIT by Greg Olson, the Thermo-Calc Professor of the Practice in DMSE.
 
This year, 12 teachers from throughout the United States and Canada were tasked with creating a “self-healing” metal — which can repair damage it sustains — using tin and bismuth. While not a true steel alloy, the class affectionately dubs its cobbled-together creation Frankensteel.
 
The course is aligned with the Materials Genome Initiative, an Obama-era federal effort to design and manufacture materials faster and cheaper than has traditionally been done. In that vein, the teachers designed their new metal using CALPHAD, a methodology for predicting properties of multicomponent materials such as alloys.
 
Frankensteel is supported by wires made from a shape-memory material, which can revert from one shape to another. If the metal cracks, it can “heal” itself when heated to a certain temperature.
 
“The teachers set the composition and temperature in a way that the material has about 20 percent liquid locally forming during the healing process,” says Julian Rackwitz, a graduate student in Olson’s research group and one of the camp’s coordinators. “The shape-memory wires pull together the crack surfaces, and the liquid heals everything back together — while most of the material is still solid to keep its shape.”
 
Throughout the week the teachers performed experiments, testing structural components in ice and plaster, casting their experimental samples, and doing tensile testing, or measuring the force needed to break the materials.

Using what they learned during the camp, the participants plan to develop new projects for their students back home. “This experience really helped me learn more about materials science — and it gave us a lot of applications we can bring back to our middle school or high school classrooms,” says Yong You, a teacher at Ridgeview Middle School in Gaithersburg, Maryland. She has taught physics, Earth science, and astronomy to eighth-graders and this year will teach life science in the seventh grade.
 
You enjoyed experimenting with various structural reinforcement combinations in plaster. Bamboo, paperclips, paper, and elastics were just some of the items used to strengthen the material. “We tried all kinds of combinations, pieces, and then we tried to see how much force we needed to break the plaster we made,” You says.
 
Such experiments are easily transferred back to the classroom, You says. “You can teach your students about materials. How do you reinforce them? How do you make them stronger?”
 
Another participant, Brenna Toblan, is a science and physics teacher at Central Memorial High School in Calgary, Alberta. Some of her classes are prerequisites, so the students are not particularly interested in science. “They sometimes think of it as just, ‘It’s a course that you’re making me take and I hate it.’”
 
Toblan wants to bring some of her experiences in the MIT camp’s hands-on workshops back to her fellow teachers and help them understand the importance of developing engaging activities motivated by practical application. For example, she’s interested in talking to teachers in her school system’s pre-engineering program, who might have access to the specialized equipment required to do tensile testing.
 
The goal, Toblan says, is to make science more approachable for students, “to give them ideas, to show them, ‘What’s the point of science?’”
 
Toblan says she saw the week not as work, but as recreation. She tried to convince another teacher at her school that she should go to the camp. “She says, ‘Oh, I’m too busy, I want to have my holiday.’ No, no, you don’t understand. This IS a holiday. This is fun.”
 
In fact, the experience left Toblan feeling invigorated to pursue another degree. She was considering her background in astrophysics and how it can tie into materials science and engineering.
 
“Do I do another engineering degree? Or do I go straight to a master’s/PhD in astrophysics? Or can I combine them somehow? Because this is really fascinating,” says Toblan, who has taught for nearly 30 years, reflecting on what she wants to do in retirement. “Well, I’m not actually going to retire. I’m going to go learn new things and do new things.”

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Apekshya Prasai: Up in arms

Although women’s wartime roles and agency tend to be neglected in conventional discourses on conflict, there are times when women not only take up arms but also shape the practices and policies of insurgent groups they fight for. Apekshya Prasai, a PhD candidate in MIT’s Department of Political Science, studies how rebel groups subvert entrenched patriarchal structures, ideas, and norms, and the role women play in this process.    

“All insurgents operate in, recruit from, and depend on communities where half the population is female,” says Prasai, a member of the Security Studies Program and an International Security Program research fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center. “I find that when organizing rebellion, some insurgents strictly adhere to patriarchal gender norms while others challenge these norms in radical ways.”    

Prasai has conducted extensive interview-based and archival fieldwork on leftist insurgencies across South Asia, especially the People’s War that unfolded in her native country of Nepal. Her work to date has already won significant notice. Most recently, she earned a Harry Frank Guggenheim Emerging Scholars Award, which recognizes promising doctoral work investigating urgent, present-day problems of violence. She has also received a Peace Scholar Dissertation Fellowship from the United States Institute of Peace as well as a grant from the National Science Foundation/American Political Science Association.   

“Rebel groups often regard questions around gender roles and relations to be central to their daily operations and long-term survival,” she says. “And the different ‘gender strategies’ they adopt can have implications for various important outcomes like cohesion, post-conflict gender politics, and effectiveness of rehabilitation and peace-building programs.”    

Grounded in fieldwork   

Advised by MIT political science professors Roger Petersen, Fotini Christia, and Vipin Narang, as well as Dara Kay Cohen, a public policy professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, Prasai is writing a dissertation titled “Gendered Processes of Rebellion: Understanding Strategies for Organizing Violence.” Central to this work are original interviews with men and women who participated in the People’s War in Nepal (1996-2006) led by the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist (CPN-M), which transitioned to civilian politics after laying down arms in 2006.    

“I spent nearly 17 months doing fieldwork, and it was my favorite part of the dissertation,” says Prasai. “I think I am happiest in the field, talking to people and learning from those who have first-hand experiences.”   

Born and raised in the capital city of Kathmandu, Prasai was still a child during the decade-long conflict. Although sheltered from the conflict, which largely unfolded further away from the capital in rural heartlands of country, Prasai’s academic pursuits have been shaped in important ways by her experiences growing up in Nepal.    

“The movement had a very big gender component, with CPN-M defying long-entrenched gender norms to, among other things, mobilize women as fighters and leaders,” she says. “Nepal being a patriarchal society, this was a puzzling outcome.”   

The social and political upheaval Prasai witnessed sparked her interest in the gender dimensions of conflict, first at Bowdoin College, and then at MIT.   

As she began her studies Prasai was perplexed by a contradiction: Social science scholarship that generally portrayed women in conflict as victims of violence, activists of peace, or instrumentally used to serve male rebel leaders’ interests, and the reality of the women who not only participated in the Maoist movement in Nepal but through their engagement in conflict also emerged as key leaders shaping the post-conflict politics of Nepal.   

Conversations in Kathmandu   

Determined to gain a better understanding of these complexities and contradictions, Prasai headed to Nepal to gather data, after just one semester as a graduate student. 

Over the course of her fieldwork, she conducted 184 interviews with elite as well as rank-and-file men and women who participated in the movement in various roles, including combat. Her elite interviewees included the current Prime Minister of Nepal and leader of the armed movement, Pushpa Kamal Dahal (Prachanda), as well as almost all surviving members of the movement leadership and high-ranking female leaders.    

“The men and women I met were incredibly generous with their time and resources, several sharing wartime diaries, magazines, training manuals, songs, and pamphlets with me,” says Prasai. Some of the women she interviewed were post-conflict political leaders, others lived as civilians away from public scrutiny; many remained fierce advocates of gender equality, compelled by a vision of a more equitable world.   

“Female activists fighting for gender equality today were also theorizing about the relationship between gender equality and revolutionary politics and advocating for women during (and even before) the war,” says Prasai. “This internal advocacy work is a very important but overlooked mechanism that shapes the gender politics of  insurgent organizations,” she explains.    

The data Prasai has collected on armed movements in Nepal and across South Asia propels her dissertation’s novel theory — that “female activists’ internal, bottom-up resistance to and advocacy against patriarchal attitudes and practices gradually pushes rebel groups to subvert patriarchal norms in increasingly radical ways.”   

But the emergence and effectiveness of such internal activism varies across contexts. Combined with the Maoist movement in Nepal, Prasai’s analysis of other leftist movements in South and Southeast Asia, especially the ongoing Maoist conflict in India, sheds light on the conditions that facilitate or obstruct such activism. In ideologically similar settings, Prasai finds, interaction among such factors as the type of rebel women’s wing, the extent of rebel dependence on traditional leaders, and the nature of violence deployed during conflict determines whether rebels conform to or radically challenge patriarchal gender norms.   

Policy should account for rebel gender strategies   

Existing research suggests that the gender strategies rebels adopt can affect key conflict and post-conflict outcomes, says Prasai. She believes that the data and insights from her work can be relevant to policymakers seeking to devise more effective conflict management, peace-building, and gender policies and programs.    

She hopes her insights might provide scholars and practitioners with “a more nuanced understanding of how rebel groups operate and how women exercise their agency to shape rebel behavior,” she says.   

“I’d like to see political science scholarship on armed groups treat gender as central to the organization of violence rather than being a peripheral concern or an afterthought, and I’d like to see policymakers develop programs that are more congruent with realities on the ground as opposed to being rooted in whatever simplistic assumptions we may have about how violence operates and who fights and who cooks.”  

As she maps out the final leg of her doctoral journey, Prasai says she looks forward to a career devoted to uncovering the complex ways in which gender, violence, and politics shape the lives of people and trajectories of societies across South Asia. “My goal is to do rigorous research, grounded in fieldwork, reflective of peoples’ lived realities, and to translate what I find to academics and policymakers at a global level.”    

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School of Engineering awards for 2023

Each year, the MIT School of Engineering honors outstanding faculty, students, and staff across its departments, labs, centers, and institutes with a number of awards. Recently, the school announced the following members of the engineering community at MIT as winners of its 2023 awards.

Faculty and teaching awards

William Tisdale, professor of chemical engineering, received the 2023 Bose Award for Excellence in Teaching, given to a faculty member whose contributions have been characterized by dedication, care, and creativity.

Jacob Andreas, the X-Window Consortium Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), and Mingda Li, the Class of 1947 Career Development Professor in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, received the Junior Bose Award, given to a junior faculty member who has made outstanding contributions as an educator.

Elsa Olivetti, Jerry McAfee (1940) Professor in Engineering in Department of Materials Science and Engineering, received the Capers (1976) and Marion McDonald Award for Excellence in Mentoring and Advising, presented to a faculty member in the School of Engineering who — through tireless efforts to engage minds, elevate spirits, and stimulate high-quality work — has advanced the professional and personal development of students and colleagues.

Jayant Sabnis, senior lecturer in aeronautics and astronautics, received the School of Engineering Distinguished Educator Award, presented to a faculty or teaching staff member whose teaching contributions are of significant impact and are consistently characterized by dedication, care, creativity, and inspiration to students and colleagues.

The Ruth and Joel Spira Awards for Excellence in Teaching are awarded annually to four faculty members in the areas of electrical engineering, computer science, mechanical engineering, and nuclear science and engineering to acknowledge “the tradition of high-quality engineering education at MIT.” This year’s recipients include:

• Kevin Chen, the D. Reid Weedon, Jr. Assistant Professor in the Department of EECS;
   
• Carlos Portela, the Brit (1961) and Alex (1949) d'Arbeloff Career Development Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering;
   
• Daniel Sanchez, associate professor of EECS; and
   
• Anne White, associate provost and associate vice president for research administration and a professor of nuclear science and engineering.

Student awards

Toluwalase Asade ’23, who graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering earlier this year, received the Henry Ford II Award, presented to a senior engineering student who has maintained a cumulative average of 5.0 at the end of their seventh term and who has exceptional potential for leadership in the profession of engineering and in society.

Audrey Xie, a rising senior majoring in mathematics and computer science, and Rupert Li, a rising senior majoring in mathematical sciences, received Barry Goldwater Scholarships, given to students who exhibit an outstanding potential and intend to pursue careers in mathematics, the natural sciences, or engineering disciplines that contribute significantly to technological advances in the United States.

Grace Quaratiello ’21, MEng ’23, who earned both her undergraduate and graduate degrees in the Department of EECS, received the Graduate Student Extraordinary Teaching and Mentoring Award, given to a graduate student in the School of Engineering who has demonstrated extraordinary teaching and mentoring as a teaching or research assistant.

Staff awards

The Ellen J. Mandigo Award for Outstanding Service, presented for the first time in 2009, was made possible by a bequest from Ellen Mandigo, a member of the engineering community for nearly five decades. The award is given annually to staff members who have demonstrated, over an extended period of time, the qualities Ellen Mandigo valued and possessed in great abundance: intelligence, skill, hard work, and dedication to MIT. The 2023 Ellen J. Mandigo Awards for Outstanding Service were given to the following staff members:

• Heather Barry, senior administrative assistant and undergraduate administrator in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering;
   
• Rolanda Dudley-Cowans, director of administration and finance in the Department of Biological Engineering;
   
• Janet Fischer, graduate administrator in the Department of EECS; and
   
• Melanie Kaufman, communications officer in the Department of Chemical Engineering.

The Infinite Mile Awards recognize and reward members of the MIT School of Engineering’s administrative, support, sponsored research, and, when appropriate, academic staff. The awards are presented in the categories of excellence, diversity and community, and institutional cooperation. The 2023 Infinite Mile Awards in the School of Engineering were given to the following staff members:

• Dominique Rey Altarejos, fellowship and award administrator in the School of Engineering Dean’s Office;
   
• Dianne Bickford, senior financial officer in the Department of Biological Engineering;
   
• Nick Burns, SRS financial administrator in the Center for Transportation and Logistics;
   
• Nancy Iappini, administrative assistant 3 in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering;
   
• Abigail Ketchen, senior financial officer in the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science;
   
• Jay Matthews, facilities administrator in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering;
   
• Janice McCarthy, administrative assistant 2 in the Department of Mechanical Engineering;
   
• Christopher Monaco, facilities manager in the Department of Chemical Engineering;
   
• Andre Obin, human resources coordinator in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering;
   
• Jessica Sandland, principal lecturer in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering;
   
• Jarina Shrestha, director of administration and finance in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering; and
   
• Tavish Baker, Clara Piloto, and Alexandra Y. Ramos of the Digital Plus Program Team in MIT Professional Education.

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Advancing social studies at MIT Sloan

Around 2010, Facebook was a relatively small company with about 2,000 employees. So, when a PhD student named Dean Eckles showed up to serve an intership at the firm, he landed in a position with some real duties.

Eckles essentially became the primary data scientist for the product manager who was overseeing the platform’s news feeds. That manager would pepper Eckles with questions. How exactly do people influence each other online? If Facebook tweaked its content-ranking algorithms, what would happen? What occurs when you show people more photos?

As a doctoral candidate already studying social influence, Eckles was well-equipped to think about such questions, and being at Facebook gave him a lot of data to study them. 

“If you show people more photos, they post more photos themselves,” Eckles says. “In turn, that affects the experience of all their friends. Plus they’re getting more likes and more comments. It affects everybody’s experience. But can you account for all of these compounding effects across the network?”

Eckles, now an associate professor in the MIT Sloan School of Management and an affiliate faculty member of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, has made a career out of thinking carefully about that last question. Studying social networks allows Eckles to tackle significant questions involving, for example, the economic and political effects of social networks, the spread of misinformation, vaccine uptake during the Covid-19 crisis, and other aspects of the formation and shape of social networks. For instance, one study he co-authored this summer shows that people who either move between U.S. states, change high schools, or attend college out of state, wind up with more robust social networks, which are strongly associated with greater economic success.

Eckles maintains another research channel focused on what scholars call “causal inference,” the methods and techniques that allow researchers to identify cause-and-effect connections in the world.

“Learning about cause-and-effect relationships is core to so much science,” Eckles says. “In behavioral, social, economic, or biomedical science, it’s going to be hard. When you start thinking about humans, causality gets difficult. People do things strategically, and they’re electing into situations based on their own goals, so that complicates a lot of cause-and-effect relationships.”

Eckles has now published dozens of papers in each of his different areas of work; for his research and teaching, Eckles received tenure from MIT last year.

Five degrees and a job

Eckles grew up in California, mostly near the Lake Tahoe area. He attended Stanford University as an undergraduate, arriving on campus in fall 2002 — and didn’t really leave for about a decade. Eckles has five degrees from Stanford. As an undergrad, he received a BA in philosophy and a BS in symbolic systems, an interdisciplinary major combining computer science, philosophy, psychology, and more. Eckles was set to attend Oxford University for graduate work in philosophy but changed his mind and stayed at Stanford for an MS in symbolic systems too. 

“[Oxford] might have been a great experience, but I decided to focus more on the tech side of things,” he says.

After receiving his first master’s degree, Eckles did take a year off from school and worked for Nokia, although the firm’s offices were adjacent to the Stanford campus and Eckles would sometimes stop and talk to faculty during the workday. Soon he was enrolled at Stanford again, this time earning his PhD in communication, in 2012, while receiving an MA in statistics the year before. His doctoral dissertation wound up being about peer influence in networks. PhD in hand, Eckles promptly headed back to Facebook, this time for three years as a full-time researcher.

 “They were really supportive of the work I was doing,” Eckles says.

Still, Eckles remained interested in moving into academia, and joined the MIT faculty in 2017 with a position in MIT Sloan’s Marketing Group. The group consists of a set of scholars with far-ranging interests, from cognitive science to advertising to social network dynamics.

“Our group reflects something deeper about the Sloan school and about MIT as well, an openness to doing things differently and not having to fit into narrowly defined tracks,” Eckles says.

For that matter, MIT has many faculty in different domains who work on causal inference, and whose work Eckles quickly cites — including economists Victor Chernozhukov and Alberto Abadie, and Joshua Angrist, whose book “Mostly Harmless Econometrics” Eckles name-checks as an influence.

“I’ve been fortunate in my career that causal inference turned out to be a hot area,” Eckles says. “But I think it’s hot for good reasons. People started to realize that, yes, causal inference is really important. There are economists, computer scientists, statisticians, and epidemiologists who are going to the same conferences and citing each other’s papers. There’s a lot happening.”

How do networks form?

These days, Eckles is interested in expanding the questions he works on. In the past, he has often studied existing social networks and looked at their effects. For instance: One study Eckles co-authored, examining the 2012 U.S. elections, found that get-out-the-vote messages work very well, especially when relayed via friends.

That kind of study takes the existence of the network as a given, though. Another kind of research question is, as Eckles puts it, “How do social networks form and evolve? And what are the consequences of these network structures?” His recent study about social networks expanding as people move around and change schools is one example of research that digs into the core life experiences underlying social networks.

“I’m excited about doing more on how these networks arise and what factors, including everything from personality to public transit, affect their formation,” Eckles says.

Understanding more about how social networks form gets at key questions about social life and civic structure. Suppose research shows how some people develop and maintain beneficial connections in life; it’s possible that those insights could be applied to programs helping people in more disadvantaged situations realize some of the same opportunities.

“We want to act on things,” Eckles says. “Sometimes people say, ‘We care about prediction.’ I would say, ‘We care about prediction under intervention.’ We want to predict what’s going to happen if we try different things.”

Ultimately, Eckles reflects, “Trying to reason about the origins and maintenance of social networks, and the effects of networks, is interesting substantively and methodologically. Networks are super-high-dimensional objects, even just a single person’s network and all its connections. You have to summarize it, so for instance we talk about weak ties or strong ties, but do we have the correct description? There are fascinating questions that require development, and I’m eager to keep working on them.”  

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New clean air and water labs to bring together researchers, policymakers to find climate solutions

MIT's Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) is launching the Clean Air and Water Labs, with support from Community Jameel, to generate evidence-based solutions aimed at increasing access to clean air and water.

Led by J-PAL’s Africa, Middle East and North Africa (MENA), and South Asia regional offices, the labs will partner with government agencies to bring together researchers and policymakers in areas where impactful clean air and water solutions are most urgently needed.

Together, the labs aim to improve clean air and water access by informing the scaling of evidence-based policies and decisions of city, state, and national governments that serve nearly 260 million people combined.

The Clean Air and Water Labs expand the work of J-PAL’s King Climate Action Initiative, building on the foundational support of King Philanthropies, which significantly expanded J-PAL’s work at the nexus of climate change and poverty alleviation worldwide. 

Air pollution, water scarcity and the need for evidence 

Africa, MENA, and South Asia are on the front lines of global air and water crises. 

“There is no time to waste investing in solutions that do not achieve their desired effects,” says Iqbal Dhaliwal, global executive director of J-PAL. “By co-generating rigorous real-world evidence with researchers, policymakers can have the information they need to dedicate resources to scaling up solutions that have been shown to be effective.”

In India, about 75 percent of households did not have drinking water on premises in 2018. In MENA, nearly 90 percent of children live in areas facing high or extreme water stress. Across Africa, almost 400 million people lack access to safe drinking water. 

Simultaneously, air pollution is one of the greatest threats to human health globally. In India, extraordinary levels of air pollution are shortening the average life expectancy by five years. In Africa, rising indoor and ambient air pollution contributed to 1.1 million premature deaths in 2019. 

There is increasing urgency to find high-impact and cost-effective solutions to the worsening threats to human health and resources caused by climate change. However, data and evidence on potential solutions are limited.

Fostering collaboration to generate policy-relevant evidence 

The Clean Air and Water Labs will foster deep collaboration between government stakeholders, J-PAL regional offices, and researchers in the J-PAL network. 

Through the labs, J-PAL will work with policymakers to:

• co-diagnose the most pressing air and water challenges and opportunities for policy innovation;
• expand policymakers’ access to and use of high-quality air and water data;
• co-design potential solutions informed by existing evidence;
• co-generate evidence on promising solutions through rigorous evaluation, leveraging existing and new data sources; and
• support scaling of air and water policies and programs that are found to be effective through evaluation. 

A research and scaling fund for each lab will prioritize resources for co-generated pilot studies, randomized evaluations, and scaling projects. 

The labs will also collaborate with C40 Cities, a global network of mayors of the world’s leading cities that are united in action to confront the climate crisis, to share policy-relevant evidence and identify opportunities for potential new connections and research opportunities within India and across Africa.

This model aims to strengthen the use of evidence in decision-making to ensure solutions are highly effective and to guide research to answer policymakers' most urgent questions. J-PAL Africa, MENA, and South Asia’s strong on-the-ground presence will further bridge research and policy work by anchoring activities within local contexts. 

“Communities across the world continue to face challenges in accessing clean air and water, a threat to human safety that has only been exacerbated by the climate crisis, along with rising temperatures and other hazards,” says George Richards, director of Community Jameel. “Through our collaboration with J-PAL and C40 in creating climate policy labs embedded in city, state, and national governments in Africa and South Asia, we are committed to innovative and science-based approaches that can help hundreds of millions of people enjoy healthier lives.”

J-PAL Africa, MENA, and South Asia will formally launch Clean Air and Water Labs with government partners over the coming months. J-PAL is housed in the MIT Department of Economics, within the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.

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Incoming MIT students surprise President Kornbluth with “Barbis” installation

On the first day of fall class registration, MIT President Sally Kornbluth entered her office to find a life-sized Barbie-themed phone booth sitting in the reception area.

Intrigued, she opened the pink phone booth door and stepped inside, where she discovered a complex web of mirrors and lights that give the illusion of infinite space travel.

After enjoying a good laugh, she was greeted by the six incoming first-year students behind the project. “This exemplifies the creativity, the innovation, and the technical know-how of MIT students and I’m amazed they created this in their first hour,” Kornbluth shared. “They’ve already internalized the real vibe of MIT.”

“Barbis” consists of four walls constructed from polystyrene that are embedded with two infinity mirrors each, a roof, and a floor. “The hardest part of this project, and the feature we’re proudest of, is that the entire structure can be completely disassembled and quickly reassembled,” says Huda Abdelghani, one of the project’s student creators.

“The new ‘Barbie’ movie sparked a massive cultural phenomenon,” shares first-year Diego Del Rio. “This brought attention to the problematic history associated with Mattel's creation of Barbie dolls. On the outside, ‘Barbis’ appears as an imposing structure, a box filled with society's beauty expectations and pressures. Stepping inside, however, our goal was to disrupt this narrative.”

The team challenged Mattel’s beauty standards by merging Barbie with the concept of the TARDIS, a time- and space-traveling vehicle in the shape of a British police call box that appears in the “Doctor Who” television series. “Similar to how the image propagated by Mattel has spanned across time and space, teaching young girls and other users around the world that this specific image is the epitome of beauty,” Del Rio explains.

Del Rio discovered a talent for computer science when he taught himself how to code the circuit for the intricate web of lights. The infinity mirror is composed of an opaque mirror and a two-way mirror. In between the two mirrors there are strips of LED lights. As the light bounces between the mirror, small amounts of light are let through, which allows us to see a light tunnel traveling to infinity.

“Mirrors symbolize self-reflection; they remind us that the power to challenge societal norms rests with the viewers — the consumers of media — rather than those who shape it,” Del Rio says. “Lights, too, reinforce this notion by creating an environment that illuminates and empowers. The infinity element signifies that without active intervention to change this corporate-driven stigma, the cycle of perpetuating an unattainable beauty standard will persist across time and space. The experience fosters a sense of empowerment, encouraging all to contribute to dismantling these ingrained beauty standards and embrace the inherent beauty that resides within us all.”

Barbis was constructed during an eight-week course at the MIT Edgerton Center, in collaboration with the Office of Minority Education, as part of the Interphase EDGE/x program, in which students self-divide into project teams and envision and complete a project, while gaining hands-on engineering skills and making new friends.

“An essential part of the MIT education is imagination and creativity,” says Edgerton instructor Ed Moriarty. “We need to be able to imagine the better world before we can build it.” The Edgerton Center’s approach to education is based on its namesake, the late Harold “Doc” Edgerton, who, believing in the irreplaceable need for hands-on learning experiences for students, one said, “The trick to education is to teach people in such a way that they don't realize they're learning until it's too late."

Accordingly, each student took away their own lessons from building Barbis.

“I draw a lot of Barbis's meaning, personally, to how her building process felt,” shares first-year Amber Brown. “I felt like the entire time it was ever-changing. It was constantly evolving. And I remember early in the project, I said ‘every time someone says, “what if,” I want to die, because I know I'm going to have to redesign everything.’ And I feel like that's reflective of pretty much the country as a whole, or every issue that we're ever challenged with. Every time that there is a problem, and you have to solve it, you have to solve it by almost always complete redesign of the issue. And the complete redesign is like an overhaul that people are afraid of, or people don't want to engage in. I could feel that fear myself. Now when I go out into the world and I see people with similar issues, whether it be lawmakers or engineers, I understand their fear as well, because I have been in that position.”

Del Rio hopes that Barbis’s meaning is applied in a broader perspective as well. “I think there are so many issues in modern day society that have been taken as facts, and that I think that everyone needs to continuously question whether it’s the system of government that we have in the United States, whether we have the racial injustice that is embedded into our society, whether it’s like the gender and the beauty standard. I think that people really do need to challenge the system,” Del Rio says.

For first-year Isa Ortiz, Barbis represents hope. “Where I came from, there would have been no place where I would have had an opportunity like this to just work on a project that I enjoy, or to try something new,” Ortiz shares. “The Edgerton Center puts a lot of faith in us because we had never really done this before. Even when we weren't confident in ourselves, the Edgerton Center staff were confident in us, like we could do it. And because of that, I felt like we could do anything.”

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Ms. Nuclear Energy is winning over nuclear skeptics

First-year MIT nuclear science and engineering (NSE) doctoral student Kaylee Cunningham is not the first person to notice that nuclear energy has a public relations problem. But her commitment to dispel myths about the alternative power source has earned her the moniker “Ms. Nuclear Energy” on TikTok and a devoted fan base on the social media platform.

Cunningham’s activism kicked into place shortly after a week-long trip to Iceland to study geothermal energy. During a discussion about how the country was going to achieve its net zero energy goals, a representative from the University of Reykjavik balked at Cunnigham’s suggestion of including a nuclear option in the alternative energy mix. “The response I got was that we’re a peace-loving nation, we don’t do that,” Cunningham remembers. “I was appalled by the reaction, I mean we’re talking energy not weapons here, right?” she asks. Incredulous, Cunningham made a TikTok that targeted misinformation. Overnight she garnered 10,000 followers and “Ms. Nuclear Energy” was off to the races. Ms. Nuclear Energy is now Cunningham’s TikTok handle.

A theater and science nerd

TikTok is a fitting platform for a theater nerd like Cunningham. Born in Melrose, Massachusetts, Cunningham’s childhood was punctuated by moves to places where her roofer father’s work took the family. She moved to North Carolina shortly after fifth grade and fell in love with theater. “I was doing theater classes, the spring musical, it was my entire world,” Cunningham remembers. When she moved again, this time to Florida halfway through her first year of high school, she found the spring musical had already been cast. But she could help behind the scenes. Through that work, Cunningham gained her first real exposure to hands-on tech. She was hooked.

Soon Cunningham was part of a team that represented her high school at the student Astronaut Challenge, an aerospace competition run by Florida State University. Statewide winners got to fly a space shuttle simulator at the Kennedy Space Center and participate in additional engineering challenges. Cunningham’s team was involved in creating a proposal to help NASA’s Asteroid Redirect Mission, designed to help the agency gather a large boulder from a near-earth asteroid. The task was Cunningham’s induction into an understanding of radiation and “anything nuclear.” Her high school engineering teacher, Nirmala Arunachalam, encouraged Cunningham’s interest in the subject.

The Astronaut Challenge might just have been the end of Cunningham’s path in nuclear engineering had it not been for her mother. In high school, Cunningham had also enrolled in computer science classes and her love of the subject earned her a scholarship at Norwich University in Vermont where she had pursued a camp in cybersecurity. Cunningham had already laid down the college deposit for Norwich.

But Cunningham’s mother persuaded her daughter to pay another visit to the University of Florida, where she had expressed interest in pursuing nuclear engineering. To her pleasant surprise, the department chair, Professor James Baciak, pulled out all the stops, bringing mother and daughter on a tour of the on-campus nuclear reactor and promising Cunningham a paid research position. Cunningham was sold and Backiak has been a mentor throughout her research career.

Merging nuclear engineering and computer science

Undergraduate research internships, including one at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where she could combine her two loves, nuclear engineering and computer science, convinced Cunningham she wanted to pursue a similar path in graduate school.

Cunningham’s undergraduate application to MIT had been rejected but that didn’t deter her from applying to NSE for graduate school. Having spent her early years in an elementary school barely 20 minutes from campus, she had grown up hearing that “the smartest people in the world go to MIT.” Cunningham figured that if she got into MIT, it would be “like going back home to Massachusetts” and that she could fit right in.

Under the advisement of Professor Michael Short, Cunningham is looking to pursue her passions in both computer science and nuclear engineering in her doctoral studies.

The activism continues

Simultaneously, Cunningham is determined to keep her activism going.

Her ability to digest “complex topics into something understandable to people who have no connection to academia” has helped Cunningham on TikTok. “It’s been something I’ve been doing all my life with my parents and siblings and extended family,” she says.

Punctuating her video snippets with humor — a Simpsons reference is par for the course — helps Cunningham break through to her audience who love her goofy and tongue-in-cheek approach to the subject matter without compromising accuracy. “Sometimes I do stupid dances and make a total fool of myself, but I’ve really found my niche by being willing to engage and entertain people and educate them at the same time.”

Such education needs to be an important part of an industry that’s received its share of misunderstandings, Cunningham says. “Technical people trying to communicate in a way that the general people don’t understand is such a concerning thing,” she adds. Case in point: the response in the wake of the Three Mile Island accident, which prevented massive contamination leaks. It was a perfect example of how well our safety regulations actually work, Cunningham says, “but you’d never guess from the PR fallout from it all.”

As Ms. Nuclear Energy, Cunningham receives her share of skepticism. One viewer questioned the safety of nuclear reactors if “tons of pollution” was spewing out from them. Cunningham produced a TikTok that addressed this misconception. Pointing to the “pollution” in a photo, Cunningham clarifies that it’s just water vapor. The TikTok has garnered over a million views. “It really goes to show how starving for accurate information the public really is,” Cunningham says, “ in this age of having all the information we could ever want at our fingertips, it’s hard to sift through and decide what’s real and accurate and what isn’t.”

Another reason for her advocacy: doing her part to encourage young people toward a nuclear science or engineering career. “If we’re going to start putting up tons of small modular reactors around the country, we need people to build them, people to run them, and we need regulatory bodies to inspect and keep them safe,” Cunningham points out. “ And we don’t have enough people entering the workforce in comparison to those that are retiring from the workforce,” she adds. “I’m able to engage those younger audiences and put nuclear engineering on their radar,” Cunningham says. The advocacy has been paying off: Cunningham regularly receives — and responds to — inquiries from high school junior girls looking for advice on pursuing nuclear engineering.

All the activism is in service toward a clear end goal. “At the end of the day, the fight is to save the planet,” Cunningham says, “I honestly believe that nuclear power is the best chance we’ve got to fight climate change and keep our planet alive.”

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A warm welcome to the Class of 2027

On a bright August day accented by a distinctly fall breeze, the newest members of MIT’s student community gathered with their families on the Kresge Oval and received a warm welcome from President Sally Kornbluth and several faculty members.

The MIT Convocation ceremony served as a way to introduce the Institute’s Class of 2027 to the community and culture, even as Kornbluth explained that the first-years will play an important role in defining that culture.

“If you’re out there feeling pretty lucky to be joining this incredible community, I want you to know that we feel even more lucky,” Kornbluth said. “We’re so delighted and so grateful that you chose to bring your talent, energy, curiosity, creativity, and drive here.”

The occasion also marked a milestone in Kornbluth’s new career at MIT, as it was her first Convocation, making the Class of 2027 the first she’ll see all the way through to graduation.

In her opening remarks, Kornbluth talked about her own career, from her discovery of her love of biology as an undergraduate student to her decision to leave her position as Duke University’s provost to come to MIT.

“MIT was irresistible — the opportunities to make an impact, the amazing hands-on nature of an MIT education, the reverence for science,” Kornbluth said. “Just like you, I thought: I have to be here.”

Kornbluth encouraged first-years to take advantage of undergraduate research opportunities and the hundreds of student organizations on campus. She also reminded them to take some time away from work to have some fun.

“Even if it feels a bit risky, you can join a group that sounds interesting, practice a new skill, or volunteer to serve others in the communities beyond campus,” Kornbluth said. “When you come back to the problem that’s been vexing you, you may have some new ideas for solutions, and you’ll probably have made a few new friends.”

Student well-being was a theme of Kornbluth’s remarks, and she emphasized the importance of seeking help if students are feeling frustrated or stuck.

“You’re surrounded by a community of caring people,” Kornbluth told the audience. “So, at any time, if you feel like you could use some support — academic, professional, personal — don’t hesitate to ask.”

Joining Kornbluth on stage were three MIT faculty members, each with multiple degrees from MIT themselves, who also shared some encouragement and words of advice.

Jinhua Zhao MCP ’04, SM ’04, PhD ’09, MIT’s Professor of City and Transportation Planning, took the moment to run an experiment. Zhao asked the audience to consider first the amount of time and money their most recent dinner cost. Then he asked them how much carbon dioxide the dinner was responsible for emitting.

“Society has a precise accounting for all the activities you do [in terms of] money and time, but not carbon — why?” Zhao asked before laying out his vision for time, money, and carbon to become the fundamental units of a new form of social accounting.

Zhao contrasted MIT’s culture with other colleges by sharing a hypothetical scenario: At other schools, when students tell their professors they want to change the world, the professors say, “Great. First finish your homework.” At MIT, when students say they want to change the world, professors ask, “Which part of the world do you want to change?” and help them turn a vague mission into a solvable problem.

“To solve climate change, we need to know what’s in our dinner,” Zhao said. “We need to ask the technical question: Which part of the world do you want to change? And finally, we need the humility to listen and the pride to act.”

Following Zhao was Bonnie Berger SM ’86, PhD ’90, the Simons Professor of Mathematics, who has experienced MIT’s convocation as both a student and a parent of a (now graduated) MIT student.

“Today is the beginning of an exciting, mind-expanding, and life-changing journey,” she announced.

Berger asked students to imagine that they’re standing at the base of a huge mountain range.

“This is the start of your climb,” Berger said. “This is not a solo climb. You have classmates, faculty, staff, and advisors who are hiking and climbing with. You will learn about your strengths and weaknesses, and you’ll also learn you’re connected to your fellow climbers. These will become your lifelong friends and future colleagues.”

As in any challenging climb, there will be times when students struggle, Berger said. But she encouraged students to ask “stupid” questions and seek support when they need it. She also asked students to embrace the fact that their path is not yet defined.

“These are the years to open your eyes, expand your horizons, develop and explore new interests, test innovative ideas, embrace new challenges, take advantage of the amazing range of courses that this great university offers,” Berger said.

Amos Winter ’05, PhD ’11, the Ratan N. Tata Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering, was the final faculty member to speak.

Winter discussed his work in water purification and accessibility, including his project designing a better wheel chair for people in rural areas of the developing world. Winter has worked with many undergraduate students on the wheelchair project over the years, and the project has led to the distribution of thousands of wheelchairs around the world.

“The ability to synthesize a myriad of real-world factors with deep knowledge of your technical area is what you are going to learn at MIT and what you will leverage to impact the world when you leave MIT,” Winter told the audience.

He encouraged students to be confident and think big.

“You all represent the smartest, most creative, and driven members of your generation,” Winter said. “In the next four years — and for the rest of my life — I can’t wait to see what you can do.”

Kornbluth concluded the ceremony by joining the student a cappella group The Chorallaries of MIT for a performance of the school song, “In Praise of MIT.”

The event kicked off what is sure to be a whirlwind week for new students, but Kornbluth’s message was clear: “Set your mind at ease,” she told the Class of 2027. “You belong here.”

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Explained: The 1.5 C climate benchmark

The summer of 2023 has been a season of weather extremes.

In June, uncontrolled wildfires ripped through parts of Canada, sending smoke into the U.S. and setting off air quality alerts in dozens of downwind states. In July, the world set the hottest global temperature on record, which it held for three days in a row, then broke again on day four.

From July into August, unrelenting heat blanketed large parts of Europe, Asia, and the U.S., while India faced a torrential monsoon season, and heavy rains flooded regions in the northeastern U.S. And most recently, whipped up by high winds and dry vegetation, a historic wildfire tore through Maui, devastating an entire town.

These extreme weather events are mainly a consequence of climate change driven by humans’ continued burning of coal, oil, and natural gas. Climate scientists agree that extreme weather such as what people experienced this summer will likely grow more frequent and intense in the coming years unless something is done, on a persistent and planet-wide scale, to rein in global temperatures.

Just how much reining-in are they talking about? The number that is internationally agreed upon is 1.5 degrees Celsius. To prevent worsening and potentially irreversible effects of climate change, the world’s average temperature should not exceed that of preindustrial times by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).

As more regions around the world face extreme weather, it’s worth taking stock of the 1.5-degree bar, where the planet stands in relation to this threshold, and what can be done at the global, regional, and personal level, to “keep 1.5 alive.”

Why 1.5 C?

In 2015, in response to the growing urgency of climate impacts, nearly every country in the world signed onto the Paris Agreement, a landmark international treaty under which 195 nations pledged to hold the Earth’s temperature to “well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels,” and going further, aim to “limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.”

The treaty did not define a particular preindustrial period, though scientists generally consider the years from 1850 to 1900 to be a reliable reference; this time predates humans’ use of fossil fuels and is also the earliest period when global observations of land and sea temperatures are available. During this period, the average global temperature, while swinging up and down in certain years, generally hovered around 13.5 degrees Celsius, or 56.3 degrees Fahrenheit.

The treaty was informed by a fact-finding report which concluded that, even global warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius above the preindustrial average, over an extended, decades-long period, would lead to high risks for “some regions and vulnerable ecosystems.” The recommendation then, was to set the 1.5 degrees Celsius limit as a “defense line” — if the world can keep below this line, it potentially could avoid the more extreme and irreversible climate effects that would occur with a 2 degrees Celsius increase, and for some places, an even smaller increase than that.

But, as many regions are experiencing today, keeping below the 1.5 line is no guarantee of avoiding extreme, global warming effects.

“There is nothing magical about the 1.5 number, other than that is an agreed aspirational target. Keeping at 1.4 is better than 1.5, and 1.3 is better than 1.4, and so on,” says Sergey Paltsev, deputy director of MIT’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change. “The science does not tell us that if, for example, the temperature increase is 1.51 degrees Celsius, then it would definitely be the end of the world. Similarly, if the temperature would stay at 1.49 degrees increase, it does not mean that we will eliminate all impacts of climate change. What is known: The lower the target for an increase in temperature, the lower the risks of climate impacts.”

How close are we to 1.5 C?

In 2022, the average global temperature was about 1.15 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. According to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the cyclical weather phenomenon La Niña recently contributed to temporarily cooling and dampening the effects of human-induced climate change. La Niña lasted for three years and ended around March of 2023.

In May, the WMO issued a report that projected a significant likelihood (66 percent) that the world would exceed the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold in the next four years. This breach would likely be driven by human-induced climate change, combined with a warming El Niño — a cyclical weather phenomenon that temporarily heats up ocean regions and pushes global temperatures higher.

This summer, an El Niño is currently underway, and the event typically raises global temperatures in the year after it sets in, which in this case would be in 2024. The WMO predicts that, for each of the next four years, the global average temperature is likely to swing between 1.1 and 1.8 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.

Though there is a good chance the world will get hotter than the 1.5-degree limit as the result of El Niño, the breach would be temporary, and for now, would not have failed the Paris Agreement, which aims to keep global temperatures below the 1.5-degree limit over the long term (averaged over several decades rather than a single year).

“But we should not forget that this is a global average, and there are variations regionally and seasonally,” says Elfatih Eltahir, the H.M. King Bhumibol Professor and Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT. “This year, we had extreme conditions around the world, even though we haven’t reached the 1.5 C threshold. So, even if we control the average at a global magnitude, we are going to see events that are extreme, because of climate change.”

More than a number

To hold the planet’s long-term average temperature to below the 1.5-degree threshold, the world will have to reach net zero emissions by the year 2050, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This means that, in terms of the emissions released by the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas, the entire world will have to remove as much as it puts into the atmosphere.

“In terms of innovations, we need all of them — even those that may seem quite exotic at this point: fusion, direct air capture, and others,” Paltsev says.

The task of curbing emissions in time is particularly daunting for the United States, which generates the most carbon dioxide emissions of any other country in the world.

“The U.S.’s burning of fossil fuels and consumption of energy is just way above the rest of the world. That’s a persistent problem,” Eltahir says. “And the national statistics are an aggregate of what a lot of individuals are doing.”

At an individual level, there are things that can be done to help bring down one’s personal emissions, and potentially chip away at rising global temperatures.

“We are consumers of products that either embody greenhouse gases, such as meat, clothes, computers, and homes, or we are directly responsible for emitting greenhouse gases, such as when we use cars, airplanes, electricity, and air conditioners,” Paltsev says. “Our everyday choices affect the amount of emissions that are added to the atmosphere.”

But to compel people to change their emissions, it may be less about a number, and more about a feeling.

“To get people to act, my hypothesis is, you need to reach them not just by convincing them to be good citizens and saying it’s good for the world to keep below 1.5 degrees, but showing how they individually will be impacted,” says Eltahir, who specializes on the study of regional climates, focusing on how climate change impacts the water cycle and frequency of extreme weather such as heat waves.

“True climate progress requires a dramatic change in how the human system gets its energy,” Paltsev says. “It is a huge undertaking. Are you ready personally to make sacrifices and to change the way of your life? If one gets an honest answer to that question, it would help to understand why true climate progress is so difficult to achieve.”

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Study connects neural gene expression differences to functional distinctions

Figuring out how hundreds of different kinds of brain cells develop from their unique expression of thousands of genes promises to not only advance understanding of how the brain works in health, but also what goes wrong in disease. A new MIT study that precisely probes this “molecular logic” in two neuron types of the Drosophila fruit fly shows that even similar cells push and pull many levers to develop distinct functions.

In the study in Neuron, a team of neurobiologists at The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory found that the two closely related neuronal subtypes differed from each other in how they expressed more than 800 genes, or about 5 percent of the total genes encoded in the fly genome. By manipulating genes whose expression differed most prominently, the scientists were then able to show how they produced several of the observable differences between the cells.

“There is a global effort in neuroscience to identify all the different types of neurons to define their unique properties and their gene expression profiles,” says study senior author Troy Littleton, Menicon Professor of Neuroscience in MIT’s departments of Biology and Brain and Cognitive Sciences. “That information can be used as a toolkit for studying how newly found disease genes map onto those particular neurons to indicate which ones might be most affected in specific brain disorders.

“We wanted to use Drosophila as a way to see whether we can, in fact, determine how the transcriptome of two similar neurons is differentially used to understand which key genes specify their unique structural and functional properties.”

Under the microscope

The two neuron types compared in the study both emerge from the fly’s analog of a spinal cord to control muscles by releasing the neurotransmitter glutamate at connections called synapses. The neurons’ main functional differences are that “phasic” neurons connect to many muscles and emit big, occasional bursts of glutamate, while “tonic” neurons each connect to only one muscle and provide more of a constant drip of the chemical. This duality, which is also found in neurons of the human brain, provides a flexible range of control.

Picower Institute postdoc Suresh Jetti led the effort in Littleton’s lab to determine how these two neurons develop their differences. The team began with an unusually deep characterization of how the two cell types differ in form and function and then took a highly precise look at the gene expression profiles, or transcriptomes.

On close examination, the tonic and phasic cells showed a variety of important differences. Phasic neurons make fewer synapses on an individual muscle than tonic ones do, but because they innervate so many more muscles, phasic neurons have to make about four times as many synapses in total. The tonic neurons have more inputs from other neurons thanks to more widely reaching dendrites (the branches that lead into the cell). On the output side of things, the phasic neurons produced much more powerful signals when stimulated and were more likely to send them than tonic neurons were. Analysis showed that the synaptic sites that prompt glutamate release, called active zones (AZs), took in more calcium ions in phasic neurons than tonic ones.

A particularly new and intriguing finding was that the AZs in tonic and phasic neurons took on different shapes. Tonic AZs were round, like donuts, while phasic ones were more triangular or star-shaped. Littleton hypothesizes that this difference could allow for more calcium ions to crowd into the phasic active zones, perhaps explaining their greater bursts of glutamate release compared to tonic neurons.

Expressing their differences

To assess gene expression, Jetti employed a technique called “isoform patchseq,” in which he identified the exact same tonic and phasic neurons in hundreds of flies and extracted RNA from their individual nuclei and cell bodies. The technique, while very hard work, provided the team with an unusually rich vein of transcriptomic information from precisely the cells of interest, Littleton says, including not only how gene expression differed between the two cell types, but also how gene splicing and RNA editing were different.

In all, the expression of 822 genes was significantly different between the two neuron types. About 35 of the genes were known to help guide the growth of the axon branches that neurons extend to forge their connections with muscle — a set of differences pertinent to why tonic neurons innervate only one muscle while phasic ones innervate many. Other differentially expressed genes related to the structure and function of synapses, while more than 20 others suggested differences in the neuromodulatory chemicals each neuron was sensitive to as inputs.

The team found that transport proteins were more prominently expressed in phasic neurons, perhaps explaining how they keep up with the greater demand to forge more synapses across many muscles. The team also found that while tonic neurons express “sialylation” genes to attach sugars to proteins on their synaptic membrane, phasic ones expressed unique “ubiquitin” genes that break down proteins.

After documenting which genes were most prominently different, the team set out to determine what they do by disrupting their function and seeing how that affected the cells.

For instance, Jetti, Littleton, and colleagues found that interfering with specific ubiquitination genes caused phasic neurons to overgrow synapses. Disrupting sialylation, meanwhile, caused synaptic undergrowth in tonic neurons. Tonic neurons also expressed 40 times more of a gene called Wnt4, and disrupting Wnt4 reduced synaptic growth in this population of neurons.

The scientists had also found that phasic neurons express a calcium-ion buffering gene over 30-fold more than tonic ones. When they mutated that gene to disrupt its function, they found that phasic neurons, which normally have lower baseline calcium levels, now display higher resting calcium similar to the tonic neurons.

And in another experiment they showed they could distinctly disrupt each cell’s AZ shapes by interfering with cytoskeletal genes that each neuron expressed especially highly. When the team reduced a gene that phasic neurons express a lot, their AZs became elongated, but tonic AZs were unaffected. When the team reduced a gene that phasic neurons highly express, their AZs became less round without affecting AZs in phasic cells.

In all, the analysis enabled the team to begin constructing a model of the molecular differences that make the two cells differ, though Littleton said they still have more work to understand how the full repertoire of gene expression differences define the unique properties of the two neuronal subtypes.

In addition to Littleton and Jetti, the paper’s other authors are Andres Crane, Yulia Akbergenova, Nicole Aponte-Santiago, Karen Cunningham, and Charles Whittaker.

The JPB Foundation, The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, and the National Institutes of Health funded the research.

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Q&A: Three Tata Fellows on the program’s impact on themselves and the world

The Tata Fellowship at MIT gives graduate students the opportunity to pursue interdisciplinary research and work with real-world applications in developing countries. Part of the MIT Tata Center for Technology and Design, this fellowship contributes to the center’s goal of designing appropriate, practical solutions for resource-constrained communities. Three Tata Fellows — Serena Patel, Rameen Hayat Malik, and Ethan Harrison — discuss the impact of this program on their research, perspectives, and time at MIT.

Serena Patel

Serena Patel graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a degree in energy engineering and a minor in energy and resources. She is currently pursuing her SM in technology and policy at MIT and is a Tata Fellow focusing on decarbonization in India using techno-economic modeling. Her interest in the intersection of technology, policy, economics, and social justice led her to attend COP27, where she experienced decision-maker and activist interactions firsthand.

Q: How did you become interested in the Tata Fellowship, and how has it influenced your time at MIT?

A: The Tata Center appealed to my interest in searching for creative, sustainable energy technologies that center collaboration with local-leading organizations. It has also shaped my understanding of the role of technology in sustainable development planning. Our current energy system disproportionately impacts marginalized communities, and new energy systems have the potential to perpetuate and/or create inequities. I am broadly interested in how we can put people at the core of our technological solutions and support equitable energy transitions. I specifically work on techno-economic modeling to analyze the potential for an early retirement of India’s large coal fleet and conversion to long-duration thermal energy storage. This could mitigate job losses from rapid transitions, support India’s energy system decarbonization plan, and provide a cost-effective way to retire stranded assets.

Q: Why is interdisciplinary study important to real-world solutions for global communities, and how has working at the intersection of technology and policy influenced your research?

A: Technology and policy work together in mediating and regulating the world around us. Technological solutions can be disruptive in all the good ways, but they can also do a lot of harm and perpetuate existing inequities. Interdisciplinary studies are important to mitigate these interrelated issues so innovative ideas in the ivory towers of Western academia do not negatively impact marginalized communities. For real-world solutions to positively impact individuals, marginalized communities need to be centered within the research design process. I think the research community’s perspective on real-world, global solutions is shifting to achieve these goals, but much work remains for resources to reach the right communities.

The energy space is especially fascinating because it impacts everyone’s quality of life in overt or nuanced ways. I’ve had the privilege of taking classes that sit at the intersection of energy technology and policy, involving land-use law, geographic representation, energy regulation, and technology policy. In general, working at the intersection of technology and policy has shaped my perspective on how regulation influences widespread technology adoption and the overall research directions and assumptions in our energy models.

Q: How has your experience at COP27 influenced your approach to your research?

A: Attending COP27 at Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, last November influenced my understanding of the role of science, research, and activism in climate negotiations and action. Science and research are often promoted as necessary for sharing knowledge at the higher levels, but they were also used as a delay tactic by negotiators. I heard how institutional bodies meant to support fair science and research often did not reach intended stakeholders. Lofty goals or financial commitments to ensure global climate stability and resilience still lacked implementation and coordination with deep technology transfer and support. On the face of it, these agreements have impact and influence, but I heard many frustrations over the lack of tangible, local support. This has driven my research to be as context-specific as possible, to provide actionable insights and leverage different disciplines.

I also observed the role of activism in the negotiations. Decision-makers are accountable to their country, and activists are spreading awareness and bringing transparency to the COP process. As a U.S. citizen, I suddenly became more aware of how political engagement and awareness in the country could push the boundaries of international climate agreements if the government were more aligned on climate action.

Rameen Hayat Malik

Rameen Hayat Malik graduated from the University of Sydney with a bachelor’s degree in chemical and biomolecular engineering and a Bachelor of Laws. She is currently pursuing her SM in technology and policy and is a Tata Fellow researching the impacts of electric vehicle (EV) battery production in Indonesia. Originally from Australia, she first became interested in the geopolitical landscape of resources trade and its implications for the clean energy transition while working in her native country’s Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water.

Q: How did you become interested in the Tata Fellowship, and how has it influenced your time at MIT?

A: I came across the Tata Fellowship while looking for research opportunities that aligned with my interest in understanding how a just energy transition will occur in a global context, with a particular focus on emerging economies. My research explores the techno-economic, social, and environmental impacts of nickel mining in Indonesia as it seeks to establish itself as a major producer of EV batteries. The fellowship’s focus on community-driven research has given me the freedom to guide the scope of my research. It has allowed me to integrate a community voice into my work that seeks to understand the impact of this mining on forest-dependent communities, Indigenous communities, and workforce development.

Q: Battery technology and production are highly discussed in the energy sector. How does your research on Indonesia’s battery production contribute to the current discussion around batteries, and what drew you to this topic?

A: Indonesia is one of the world’s largest exporters of coal, while also having one of the largest nickel reserves in the world — a key mineral for EV battery production. This presents an exciting opportunity for Indonesia to be a leader in the energy transition, as it both seeks to phase out coal production and establish itself as a key supplier of critical minerals. It is also an opportunity to actually apply principles of a just transition to the region, which seeks to repurpose and re-skill existing coal workforces, to bring Indigenous communities into the conversation around the future of their lands, and to explore whether it is actually possible to sustainably and ethically produce nickel for EV battery production.

I’ve always seen battery technologies and EVs as products that, at least today, are accessible to a small, privileged customer base that can afford such technologies. I’m interested in understanding how we can make such products more widely affordable and provide our lowest-income communities with the opportunities to actively participate in the transition — especially since access to transportation is a key driver of social mobility. With nickel prices impacting EV prices in such a dramatic way, unlocking more nickel supply chains presents an opportunity to make EV batteries more accessible and affordable.

Q: What advice would you give to new students who want to be a part of real-world solutions to the climate crisis?

A: Bring your whole self with you when engaging these issues. Quite often we get caught up with the technology or modeling aspect of addressing the climate crisis and forget to bring people and their experiences into our work. Think about your positionality: Who is your community, what are the avenues you have to bring that community along, and what privileges do you hold to empower and amplify voices that need to be heard? Find a piece of this complex puzzle that excites you, and find opportunities to talk and listen to people who are directly impacted by the solutions you are looking to explore. It can get quite overwhelming working in this space, which carries a sense of urgency, politicization, and polarization with it. Stay optimistic, keep advocating, and remember to take care of yourself while doing this important work.

Ethan Harrison

After earning his degree in economics and applied science from the College of William and Mary, Ethan Harrison worked at the United Nations Development Program in its Crisis Bureau as a research officer focused on conflict prevention and predictive analysis. He is currently pursuing his SM in technology and policy at MIT. In his Tata Fellowship, he focuses on the impacts of the Ukraine-Russia conflict on global vulnerability and the global energy market.

Q: How did you become interested in the Tata Fellowship, and how has it influenced your time at MIT?

A: Coming to MIT, one of my chief interests was figuring out how we can leverage gains from technology to improve outcomes and build pro-poor solutions in developing and crisis contexts. The Tata Fellowship aligned with many of the conclusions I drew while working in crisis contexts and some of the outstanding questions that I was hoping to answer during my time at MIT, specifically: How can we leverage technology to build sustainable, participatory, and ethically grounded interventions in these contexts?

My research currently examines the secondary impacts of the Ukraine-Russia conflict on low- and middle-income countries — especially fragile states — with a focus on shocks in the global energy market. This includes the development of a novel framework that systematically identifies factors of vulnerability — such as in energy, food systems, and trade dependence — and quantitatively ranks countries by their level of vulnerability. By identifying the specific mechanisms by which these countries are vulnerable, we can develop a map of global vulnerability and identify key policy solutions that can insulate countries from current and future shocks.

Q: I understand that your research deals with the relationship between oil and gas price fluctuation and political stability. What has been the most surprising aspect of this relationship, and what are its implications for global decarbonization?

A: One surprising aspect is the degree to which citizen grievances regarding price fluctuations can quickly expand to broader democratic demands and destabilization. In Sri Lanka last year and in Egypt during the Arab spring, initial protests around fuel prices and power outages eventually led to broader demands and the loss of power by heads of state. Another surprising aspect is the popularity of fuel subsidies despite the fact that they are economically regressive: They often comprise a large proportion of GDP in poor countries, disproportionately benefit higher-income populations, and leave countries vulnerable to fiscal stress during price spikes.

Regarding implications for global decarbonization, one project we are pursuing examines the implications of directing financing from fuel subsidies toward investments in renewable energy. Countries that rely on fossil fuels for electricity have been hit especially hard 
by price spikes from the Ukraine-Russia conflict, especially since many were carrying costly fuel subsidies to keep the price of fuel and energy artificially low. Much of the international community is advocating for low-income countries to invest in renewables and reduce their fossil fuel burden, but it’s important to explore how global decarbonization can align with efforts to end energy poverty and other Sustainable Development Goals.

Q: How does your research impact the Tata Center’s goal of transforming policy research into real-world solutions, and why is this important?

A: The crisis in Ukraine has shifted the international community’s focus away from other countries in crisis, such as Yemen and Lebanon. By developing a global map of vulnerability, we’re building a large evidence base on which countries have been most impacted by this crisis. Most importantly, by identifying individual channels of vulnerability for each country, we can also identify the most effective policy solutions to insulate vulnerable populations from shocks. Whether that’s advocating for short-term social protection programs or identifying more medium-term policy solutions — like fuel banks or investment in renewables — we hope providing a detailed map of sources of vulnerability can help inform the global response to shocks imposed by the Russia-Ukraine conflict and post-Covid recovery.

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