New fellowship to help advance science journalism in Africa and the Middle East

The Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT has announced a new one-semester fellowship — the Fellowship for Advancing Science Journalism in Africa and the Middle East — that will start this year.

The fellowship, developed through a generous gift from the global publishing company Springer Nature, was created in honor of the influential Egyptian science journalist Mohammed Yahia, who died last year at the age of 41.

Yahia worked for Springer Nature for over 13 years, primarily as managing editor of the Nature Portfolio in the Middle East, where he built an award-winning team. He was widely admired for his work advancing the status of science journalism both in that region and throughout Africa. He was president of the World Federation of Science Journalists from 2017 to 2019, working also to help build a network of science journalists around the globe.

Springer Nature, the founding sponsor of the fellowship, is well-known for its standing as a publisher of some the most high-profile and respected research journals and magazines in the world. “Mohammed was known for his unwavering commitment to science and his talent for simplifying complex research,” says Stephen Pincock, vice president in Springer Nature’s Solutions Group. “With this fellowship we want to inspire more to follow in his footsteps, as trusted communicators of evidence-based research.”

The first Fellowship for Advancing Science Journalism in Africa and the Middle East will be hosted by the Knight Science Journalism Program this fall and will continue in subsequent fall semesters. Thanks to a generous grant from Springer Nature, the program will offer a $40,000 stipend for the fellowship period from Aug. 16 to Dec. 31. KSJ will also cover the fellow’s health insurance and a $5,000 housing stipend to help with relocation costs.

The Knight Science Journalism Program, established at MIT in 1983, is the world’s leading science journalism fellowship program. More than 400 leading science journalists from six continents have graduated from the full-year academic program, which offers a course of study at MIT, Harvard University, and other leading institutions in the Boston area, as well as specialized training workshops, seminars, and science-focused field trips for all attendees.

“The Knight Science Journalism Program is honored to partner with Springer Nature in honoring Mohammed Yahia and in creating this new fellowship to help support science journalism in this important part of the world,” says KSJ Director Deborah Blum. “We believe strongly in the global nature of both science and the importance of telling its story in the most helpful and insightful way. We believe this new fellowship is an excellent way to advance that mission.”

Fellows supported by this new program will join the regular KSJ class of journalists for the fall semester in a program of study at MIT and other Cambridge/Boston area universities and in the program’s seminars, training workshops, and field trips throughout the semester. They will also have access to such benefits as MIT’s program of subsidized public transportation and access to libraries, museums, and other Boston-area programs, as well as connections to a thriving community of science journalists.

The program will open an applications process for journalists from Africa and the Middle East on Feb. 1 and submissions will be accepted until March 1. All journalists from the region with at least three years of experience in covering science, health, and the environment are encouraged to apply. The selected fellow will be announced by the end of March.

For further questions about the fellowship or the application process, please write to info@ksj.mit.edu.

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Blood cell family trees trace how production changes with aging

Blood cells make up the majority of cells in the human body. They perform critical functions and their dysfunction is implicated in many important human diseases, from anemias to blood cancers like leukemia. The many types of blood cells include red blood cells that carry oxygen, platelets that promote clotting, as well as the myriad types of immune cells that protect our bodies from threats such as viruses and bacteria.

What these diverse types of blood cells have in common is that they are all produced by hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs). HSCs must keep producing blood cells in large quantities throughout our entire lives in order to continually replenish our bodies’ supply. Researchers want to better understand HSCs and the dynamics of how they produce the many blood cell types, both in order to understand the fundamentals of human blood production and to understand how blood production changes during aging or in cases of disease.

Jonathan Weissman, an MIT professor of biology, member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, and a Howard Hughes Medical Investigator; Vijay Sankaran, a Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School associate professor who is also a Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard associate member and attending physician at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute; and Chen Weng, a postdoc in both of their labs, have developed a new method that provides a detailed look at the family trees of human blood cells and the characteristics of the individual cells, providing new insights into the differences between lineages of HSCs. The research, published in the journal Nature on Jan. 22, answers some long-standing questions about blood cell production and how it changes as we age. The work also demonstrates how this new technology can give researchers unprecedented access to any human cells’ histories and insight into how those histories have shaped their current states. This will render open to discovery many questions about our own biology that were previously unanswerable.

“We wanted to ask questions that the existing tools could not allow us to,” Weng says. “This is why we brought together Jonathan and Vijay’s different expertise to develop a new technology that allows us to ask those questions and more, so we can solve some of the important unknowns in blood production.”

How to trace the lineages of human cells

Weissman and others have previously developed methods to map the family trees of cells, a process called lineage tracing, but typically this has been done in animals or engineered cell lines. Weissman has used this approach to shed light on how cancers spread and on when and how they develop mutations that make them more aggressive and deadly. However, while these models can illuminate the general principles of processes such as blood production, they do not give researchers a full picture of what happens inside of a living human. They cannot capture the full diversity of human cells or the implications of that diversity on health and disease.

The only way to get a detailed picture of how blood cell lineages change through the generations and what the consequences of those changes are is to perform lineage tracing on cells from human samples. The challenge is that in the research models used in the previous lineage tracing studies, Weissman and colleagues edited the cells to add a trackable barcode, a string of DNA that changes a little with each cell division, so that researchers can map the changes to match cells to their closest relatives and reconstruct the family tree. Researchers cannot add a barcode to the cells in living humans, so they need to find a natural one: some string of DNA that already exists and changes frequently enough to allow this family tree reconstruction.

Looking for mutations across the whole genome is cost-prohibitive and destroys the material that researchers need to collect to learn about the cells’ states. A few years ago, Sankaran and colleagues realized that mitochondrial DNA could be a good candidate for the natural barcode. Mitochondria are in all of our cells, and they have their own genome, which is relatively small and prone to mutation. In that earlier research, Sankaran and colleagues identified mutations in mitochondrial DNA, but they could not find enough mutations to build a complete family tree: in each cell, they only detected an average of zero to one mutations.

Now, in work led by Weng, the researchers have improved their detection of mitochondrial DNA mutations 10-fold, meaning that in each cell they find around 10 mutations — enough to serve as an identifying barcode. They achieved this through improvements in how they detect mitochondrial DNA mutations experimentally and how they verify that those mutations are genuine computationally. Their new and improved lineage tracing method is called ReDeeM, an acronym drawing from single-cell "regulatory multi-omics with deep mitochondrial mutation profiling." Using the method, they can recreate the family tree of thousands of blood cells from a human blood sample, as well as gather information about each individual cell’s state: its gene expression levels and differences in its epigenome, or the availability of regions of DNA to be expressed.

Combining cells’ family trees with each individual cell’s state is key for making sense of how cell lineages change over time and what the effects of those changes are. If a researcher pinpoints the place in the family tree where a blood cell lineage, for example, becomes biased toward producing a certain type of blood cell, they can then look at what changed in the cells’ state preceding that shift in order to figure out what genes and pathways drove that change in behavior. In other words, they can use the combination of data to understand not just that a change occurred, but what mechanisms contributed to that change.

“The goal is to relate the cell’s current state to its past history,” Weissman says. “Being able to do that in an unperturbed human sample lets us watch the dynamics of the blood production process and understand functional differences in hematopoietic stem cells in a way that has just not been possible before.”

Using this approach, the researchers made several interesting discoveries about blood production.

Blood cell lineage diversity shrinks with age

The researchers mapped the family trees of blood cells derived from each HSC. Each one of these lineages is called a clonal group. Researchers have had various hypotheses about how clonal groups work: Perhaps they are interchangeable, with each stem cell producing equivalent numbers and types of blood cells. Perhaps they are specialized, with one stem cell producing red blood cells, and another producing white blood cells. Perhaps they work in shifts, with some HSCs lying dormant while others produce blood cells. The researchers found that in healthy, young individuals, the answer is somewhere in the middle: Essentially every stem cell produced every type of blood cell, but certain lineages had biases toward producing one type of cell over another. The researchers took two samples from each test subject four months apart, and found that these differences between the lineages were stable over time.

Next, the researchers took blood samples from people of older age. They found that as humans age, some clonal groups begin to dominate and produce a significantly above-average percent of the total blood cells. When a clonal group outcompetes others like this, it is called expansion. Researchers knew that in certain diseases, a single clonal group containing a disease-related mutation could expand and become dominant. They didn’t know that clonal expansion was pervasive in aging even in seemingly healthy individuals, or that it was typical for multiple clonal groups to expand. This complicates the understanding of clonal expansion but sheds light on how blood production changes with age: The diversity of clonal groups decreases. The researchers are working on figuring out the mechanisms that enable certain clonal groups to expand over others. They are also interested in testing clonal groups for disease markers to understand which expansions are caused by or could contribute to disease.

ReDeeM enabled the researchers to make a variety of additional observations about blood production, many of which are consistent with previous research. This is what they hoped to see: the fact that the tool efficiently identified known patterns in blood production validates its efficacy. Now that the researchers know how well the method works, they can apply it to many different questions about the relationships between cells and what mechanisms drive changes in cell behavior. They are already using it to learn more about autoimmune disorders, blood cancers, and the origins of certain types of blood cells.

The researchers hope that others will use their method to ask questions about cell dynamics in many scenarios in health and disease. Sankaran, who is a practicing hematologist, also hopes that the method one day revolutionizes the patient data to which clinicians have access.

“In the not-too-distant future, you could look at a patient chart and see that this patient has an abnormally low number of HSCs, or an abnormally high number, and that would inform how you think about their disease risk,” Sankaran says. “ReDeeM provides a new lens through which to understand the clone dynamics of blood production, and how they might be altered in human health and diseases. Ultimately, we will be able to apply those lessons to patient care.”

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Imaging method reveals new cells and structures in human brain tissue

Using a novel microscopy technique, MIT and Brigham and Women’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School researchers have imaged human brain tissue in greater detail than ever before, revealing cells and structures that were not previously visible.

Among their findings, the researchers discovered that some “low-grade” brain tumors contain more putative aggressive tumor cells than expected, suggesting that some of these tumors may be more aggressive than previously thought.

The researchers hope that this technique could eventually be deployed to diagnose tumors, generate more accurate prognoses, and help doctors choose treatments.

“We’re starting to see how important the interactions of neurons and synapses with the surrounding brain are to the growth and progression of tumors. A lot of those things we really couldn’t see with conventional tools, but now we have a tool to look at those tissues at the nanoscale and try to understand these interactions,” says Pablo Valdes, a former MIT postdoc who is now an assistant professor of neuroscience at the University of Texas Medical Branch and the lead author of the study.

Edward Boyden, the Y. Eva Tan Professor in Neurotechnology at MIT; a professor of biological engineering, media arts and sciences, and brain and cognitive sciences; a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator; and a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research and Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research; and E. Antonio Chiocca, a professor of neurosurgery at Harvard Medical School and chair of neurosurgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, are the senior authors of the study, which appears today in Science Translational Medicine.

Making molecules visible

The new imaging method is based on expansion microscopy, a technique developed in Boyden’s lab in 2015 based on a simple premise: Instead of using powerful, expensive microscopes to obtain high-resolution images, the researchers devised a way to expand the tissue itself, allowing it to be imaged at very high resolution with a regular light microscope.

The technique works by embedding the tissue into a polymer that swells when water is added, and then softening up and breaking apart the proteins that normally hold tissue together. Then, adding water swells the polymer, pulling all the proteins apart from each other. This tissue enlargement allows researchers to obtain images with a resolution of around 70 nanometers, which was previously possible only with very specialized and expensive microscopes such as scanning electron microscopes.

In 2017, the Boyden lab developed a way to expand preserved human tissue specimens, but the chemical reagents that they used also destroyed the proteins that the researchers were interested in labeling. By labeling the proteins with fluorescent antibodies before expansion, the proteins’ location and identity could be visualized after the expansion process was complete. However, the antibodies typically used for this kind of labeling can’t easily squeeze through densely packed tissue before it’s expanded.

So, for this study, the authors devised a different tissue-softening protocol that breaks up the tissue but preserves proteins in the sample. After the tissue is expanded, proteins can be labelled with commercially available fluorescent antibodies. The researchers then can perform several rounds of imaging, with three or four different proteins labeled in each round. This labelling of proteins enables many more structures to be imaged, because once the tissue is expanded, antibodies can squeeze through and label proteins they couldn’t previously reach.

“We open up the space between the proteins so that we can get antibodies into crowded spaces that we couldn’t otherwise,” Valdes says. “We saw that we could expand the tissue, we could decrowd the proteins, and we could image many, many proteins in the same tissue by doing multiple rounds of staining.”

Working with MIT Assistant Professor Deblina Sarkar, the researchers demonstrated a form of this “decrowding” in 2022 using mouse tissue.

The new study resulted in a decrowding technique for use with human brain tissue samples that are used in clinical settings for pathological diagnosis and to guide treatment decisions. These samples can be more difficult to work with because they are usually embedded in paraffin and treated with other chemicals that need to be broken down before the tissue can be expanded.

In this study, the researchers labeled up to 16 different molecules per tissue sample. The molecules they targeted include markers for a variety of structures, including axons and synapses, as well as markers that identify cell types such as astrocytes and cells that form blood vessels. They also labeled molecules linked to tumor aggressiveness and neurodegeneration.

Using this approach, the researchers analyzed healthy brain tissue, along with samples from patients with two types of glioma — high-grade glioblastoma, which is the most aggressive primary brain tumor, with a poor prognosis, and low-grade gliomas, which are considered less aggressive.

“We wanted to look at brain tumors so that we can understand them better at the nanoscale level, and by doing that, to be able to develop better treatments and diagnoses in the future. At this point, it was more developing a tool to be able to understand them better, because currently in neuro-oncology, people haven't done much in terms of super-resolution imaging,” Valdes says.

A diagnostic tool

To identify aggressive tumor cells in gliomas they studied, the researchers labeled vimentin, a protein that is found in highly aggressive glioblastomas. To their surprise, they found many more vimentin-expressing tumor cells in low-grade gliomas than had been seen using any other method.

“This tells us something about the biology of these tumors, specifically, how some of them probably have a more aggressive nature than you would suspect by doing standard staining techniques,” Valdes says.

When glioma patients undergo surgery, tumor samples are preserved and analyzed using immunohistochemistry staining, which can reveal certain markers of aggressiveness, including some of the markers analyzed in this study.   

“These are incurable brain cancers, and this type of discovery will allow us to figure out which cancer molecules to target so we can design better treatments. It also proves the profound impact of having clinicians like us at the Brigham and Women’s interacting with basic scientists such as Ed Boyden at MIT to discover new technologies that can improve patient lives,” Chiocca says. 

The researchers hope their expansion microscopy technique could allow doctors to learn much more about patients’ tumors, helping them to determine how aggressive the tumor is and guiding treatment choices. Valdes now plans to do a larger study of tumor types to try to establish diagnostic guidelines based on the tumor traits that can be revealed using this technique.

“Our hope is that this is going to be a diagnostic tool to pick up marker cells, interactions, and so on, that we couldn’t before,” he says. “It’s a practical tool that will help the clinical world of neuro-oncology and neuropathology look at neurological diseases at the nanoscale like never before, because fundamentally it’s a very simple tool to use.”

Boyden’s lab also plans to use this technique to study other aspects of brain function, in healthy and diseased tissue.

“Being able to do nanoimaging is important because biology is about nanoscale things — genes, gene products, biomolecules — and they interact over nanoscale distances,” Boyden says. “We can study all sorts of nanoscale interactions, including synaptic changes, immune interactions, and changes that occur during cancer and aging.”

The research was funded by K. Lisa Yang, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, John Doerr, Open Philanthropy, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Koch Institute Frontier Research Program, the National Institutes of Health, and the Neurosurgery Research and Education Foundation.

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3 Questions: What can graduate students expect from MIT’s newest grad housing option?

In October 2017, MIT made a commitment to add 950 on-campus beds for graduate students as part of the Volpe zoning agreement with the City of Cambridge that allows the Institute to develop a 10-acre parcel in Kendall Square. Since then, MIT opened the Graduate Tower at Site 4 residential community in Kendall Square with about 250 net-new beds for graduate students and families, and reallocated the 135 beds in 70 Amherst Street to graduate students.

In December 2020, MIT entered into a partnership with American Campus Communities (ACC) to build and operate a graduate housing complex on Vassar Street, adjacent to Simmons Hall. Owned by MIT but operated by American Campus Communities, this MIT-affiliated community fulfills the Volpe commitment and introduces a new residential option for graduate students and families. Named “Graduate Junction,” the residence is split between two buildings framing a gateway to Fort Washington Park and the Cambridgeport neighborhood. Flanking a central plaza and green space, the buildings will rise in five- and six-story sections and then progress to a 10-story segment as it extends beyond the park. Housing options will include efficiencies and one-, two-, and four-bedroom units that will be licensed by ACC to individuals, couples, and families.

With the addition of 676 beds at the new Graduate Junction and the beds gained by the reconfiguration of rooms in other buildings, the Institute has now exceeded the original commitment with a total of 1,076 new graduate beds. With Graduate Junction due to open this August, David Friedrich, senior associate dean for housing and residential services, shared some important project updates and perspectives on what potential residents can expect from the newest graduate residence on MIT’s campus.

Q: How is the Graduate Junction project going, and when will it open?

A: You can already see the buildings taking shape on Vassar Street and the construction timeline puts us on target for an August 2024 opening. This is a product of years of collaborative work with students and campus stakeholders, who teamed up to design an option to fill gaps in the student housing market. It is thrilling to see it near completion. 

The project is also going well thanks to our productive relationship with ACC. ACC is an experienced student housing company and has built or managed more than 100,000 beds on more than 90 campuses across the U.S., including graduate residences at peer institutions. As we add this new MIT-affiliated housing option to our portfolio of residences, we’re actively working with the leadership of ACC to onboard the team that will manage the property. Kendra Lowery, the general manager of Graduate Junction, is a dynamic and thoughtful partner with a breadth of experience managing student housing. She will be an excellent resource for Graduate Junction residents.

We are pleased to meet the recommendations of the 2018 Graduate Housing Working Group to add beds while providing students with additional cost-effective options for their residential experience. The Working Group — composed of students, staff, and faculty — was instrumental in shaping the project and provided substantive data to inform an optimal combination of unit types and amenities desirable to graduate students. In the coming weeks, we will highlight Graduate Junction alongside the Institute’s existing eight graduate residences to help students select the housing option that best suits their needs.

Q: How will living in Graduate Junction differ from living in MIT-operated residences?

A: Graduate Junction offers a new approach that combines apartment-style living with proximity to main campus — an off-campus experience with an on-campus location. Our partner ACC will be responsible for the housing license process, maintenance, building access, and IT infrastructure. While student residents will have access to MIT’s student support resources and can participate in on-campus social events, there will not be a faculty head of house or resident governance structure. Instead, ACC will directly work with Graduate Junction residents to address needs and answer questions. 

Residents of Graduate Junction will enjoy the same flexibility and pricing of an on-campus housing license and will not need to pay first and last months' rent, security deposit, or a broker fee — all upfront costs typical of off-campus properties. Instead, Graduate Junction will have a utility-inclusive rental rate for furnished apartments set by MIT. Since this partnership with ACC provides a different model for managing on-campus residences at the Institute, this approach is also a pilot to test if partners like ACC can help the Institute manage the demand for graduate housing.

Q: What would you say to incoming graduate students considering Graduate Junction or other on-campus residences?

A: The MIT housing system is designed to offer students choices so they can determine their own residential experience. We want to make living on campus the first and best option and do so by careful analysis that prices our units at below market rates. Combined with the Institute’s support for students and families through the Office of Graduate Education, the on-campus experience is tailored to fit graduate student needs. 

Graduate Junction responds to what students say is most important — location, unit configuration, all-inclusive payments, and flexibility in securing or leaving their housing arrangements. Bordering Cambridgeport, Graduate Junction is proximate to Cambridge public schools, local grocery stores, and neighborhood parks and playgrounds.

It joins a range of housing options available to students, and there are residences to fit a diverse array of budgets. With the added benefit of close proximity to labs and classes, student support, campus services, and other amenities, on-campus residences remain a great value. We invite graduate students to review the new rate sheet for 2024-25 and consider living on campus.

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Creating new skills and new connections with MIT’s Quantitative Methods Workshop

Starting on New Year’s Day, when many people were still clinging to holiday revelry, scores of students and faculty members from about a dozen partner universities instead flipped open their laptops for MIT’s Quantitative Methods Workshop, a jam-packed, weeklong introduction to how computational and mathematical techniques can be applied to neuroscience and biology research. But don’t think of QMW as a “crash course.” Instead the program’s purpose is to help elevate each participant’s scientific outlook, both through the skills and concepts it imparts and the community it creates.

“It broadens their horizons, it shows them significant applications they've never thought of, and introduces them to people whom as researchers they will come to know and perhaps collaborate with one day,” says Susan L. Epstein, a Hunter College computer science professor and education coordinator of MIT’s Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines, which hosts the program with the departments of Biology and Brain and Cognitive Sciences and The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory. “It is a model of interdisciplinary scholarship.”

This year 83 undergraduates and faculty members from institutions that primarily serve groups underrepresented in STEM fields took part in the QMW, says organizer Mandana Sassanfar, senior lecturer and director of diversity and science outreach across the four hosting MIT entities. Since the workshop launched in 2010, it has engaged more than 1,000 participants, of whom more than 170 have gone on to participate in MIT Summer Research Programs (such as MSRP-BIO), and 39 have come to MIT for graduate school.

Individual goals, shared experience

Undergraduates and faculty in various STEM disciplines often come to QMW to gain an understanding of, or expand their expertise in, computational and mathematical data analysis. Computer science- and statistics-minded participants come to learn more about how such techniques can be applied in life sciences fields. In lectures; in hands-on labs where they used the computer programming language Python to process, analyze, and visualize data; and in less formal settings such as tours and lunches with MIT faculty, participants worked and learned together, and informed each other’s perspectives.

And regardless of their field of study, participants made connections with each other and with the MIT students and faculty who taught and spoke over the course of the week.

Hunter College computer science sophomore Vlad Vostrikov says that while he has already worked with machine learning and other programming concepts, he was interested to “branch out” by seeing how they are used to analyze scientific datasets. He also valued the chance to learn the experiences of the graduate students who teach QMW’s hands-on labs.

“This was a good way to explore computational biology and neuroscience,” Vostrikov says. “I also really enjoy hearing from the people who teach us. It’s interesting to hear where they come from and what they are doing.”

Jariatu Kargbo, a biology and chemistry sophomore at University of Maryland Baltimore County, says when she first learned of the QMW she wasn’t sure it was for her. It seemed very computation-focused. But her advisor Holly Willoughby encouraged Kargbo to attend to learn about how programming could be useful in future research — currently she is taking part in research on the retina at UMBC. More than that, Kargbo also realized it would be a good opportunity to make connections at MIT in advance of perhaps applying for MSRP this summer.

“I thought this would be a great way to meet up with faculty and see what the environment is like here because I’ve never been to MIT before,” Kargbo says. “It’s always good to meet other people in your field and grow your network.”

QMW is not just for students. It’s also for their professors, who said they can gain valuable professional education for their research and teaching.

Fayuan Wen, an assistant professor of biology at Howard University, is no stranger to computational biology, having performed big data genetic analyses of sickle cell disease (SCD). But she’s mostly worked with the R programming language and QMW’s focus is on Python. As she looks ahead to projects in which she wants analyze genomic data to help predict disease outcomes in SCD and HIV, she says a QMW session delivered by biology graduate student Hannah Jacobs was perfectly on point.

“This workshop has the skills I want to have,” Wen says.

Moreover, Wen says she is looking to start a machine-learning class in the Howard biology department and was inspired by some of the teaching materials she encountered at QMW — for example, online curriculum modules developed by Taylor Baum, an MIT graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science and Picower Institute labs, and Paloma Sánchez-Jáuregui, a coordinator who works with Sassanfar.

Tiziana Ligorio, a Hunter College computer science doctoral lecturer who together with Epstein teaches a deep machine-learning class at the City University of New York campus, felt similarly. Rather than require a bunch of prerequisites that might drive students away from the class, Ligorio was looking to QMW’s intense but introductory curriculum as a resource for designing a more inclusive way of getting students ready for the class.

Instructive interactions

Each day runs from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., including morning and afternoon lectures and hands-on sessions. Class topics ranged from statistical data analysis and machine learning to brain-computer interfaces, brain imaging, signal processing of neural activity data, and cryogenic electron microscopy.

“This workshop could not happen without dedicated instructors — grad students, postdocs, and faculty — who volunteer to give lectures, design and teach hands-on computer labs, and meet with students during the very first week of January,” Saassanfar says.

The sessions surround student lunches with MIT faculty members. For example, at midday Jan. 2, assistant professor of biology Brady Weissbourd, an investigator in the Picower Institute, sat down with seven students in one of Building 46’s curved sofas to field questions about his neuroscience research in jellyfish and how he uses quantitative techniques as part of that work. He also described what it’s like to be a professor, and other topics that came to the students’ minds.

Then the participants all crossed Vassar Street to Building 26’s Room 152, where they formed different but similarly sized groups for the hands-on lab “Machine learning applications to studying the brain,” taught by Baum. She guided the class through Python exercises she developed illustrating “supervised” and “unsupervised” forms of machine learning, including how the latter method can be used to discern what a person is seeing based on magnetic readings of brain activity.

As students worked through the exercises, tablemates helped each other by supplementing Baum’s instruction. Ligorio, Vostrikov, and Kayla Blincow, assistant professor of biology at the University of the Virgin Islands, for instance, all leapt to their feet to help at their tables.

At the end of the class, when Baum asked students what they had learned, they offered a litany of new knowledge. Survey data that Sassanfar and Sánchez-Jáuregui use to anonymously track QMW outcomes, revealed many more such attestations of the value of the sessions. With a prompt asking how one might apply what they’ve learned, one respondent wrote: “Pursue a research career or endeavor in which I apply the concepts of computer science and neuroscience together.”

Enduring connections

While some new QMW attendees might only be able to speculate about how they’ll apply their new skills and relationships, Luis Miguel de Jesús Astacio could testify to how attending QMW as an undergraduate back in 2014 figured into a career where he is now a faculty member in physics at the University of Puerto Rico Rio Piedras Campus. After QMW, he returned to MIT that summer as a student in the lab of neuroscientist and Picower Professor Susumu Tonegawa. He came back again in 2016 to the lab of physicist and Francis Friedman Professor Mehran Kardar. What’s endured for the decade has been his connection to Sassanfar. So while he was once a student at QMW, this year he was back with a cohort of undergraduates as a faculty member.

Michael Aldarondo-Jeffries, director of academic advancement programs at the University of Central Florida, seconded the value of the networking that takes place at QMW. He has brought students for a decade, including four this year. What he’s observed is that as students come together in settings like QMW or UCF’s McNair program, which helps to prepare students for graduate school, they become inspired about a potential future as researchers.

“The thing that stands out is just the community that’s formed,” he says. “For many of the students, it's the first time that they're in a group that understands what they're moving toward. They don’t have to explain why they’re excited to read papers on a Friday night.”

Or why they are excited to spend a week including New Year’s Day at MIT learning how to apply quantitative methods to life sciences data.

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New MIT.nano equipment to accelerate innovation in “tough tech” sectors

A new set of advanced nanofabrication equipment will make MIT.nano one of the world’s most advanced research facilities in microelectronics and related technologies, unlocking new opportunities for experimentation and widening the path for promising inventions to become impactful new products.

The equipment, provided by Applied Materials, will significantly expand MIT.nano’s nanofabrication capabilities, making them compatible with wafers — thin, round slices of semiconductor material — up to 200 millimeters, or 8 inches, in diameter, a size widely used in industry. The new tools will allow researchers to prototype a vast array of new microelectronic devices using state-of-the-art materials and fabrication processes. At the same time, the 200-millimeter compatibility will support close collaboration with industry and enable innovations to be rapidly adopted by companies and mass produced.

MIT.nano’s leaders say the equipment, which will also be available to scientists outside of MIT, will dramatically enhance their facility’s capabilities, allowing experts in the region to more efficiently explore new approaches in “tough tech” sectors, including advanced electronics, next-generation batteries, renewable energies, optical computing, biological sensing, and a host of other areas — many likely yet to be imagined.

“The toolsets will provide an accelerative boost to our ability to launch new technologies that can then be given to the world at scale,” says MIT.nano Director Vladimir Bulović, who is also the Fariborz Maseeh Professor of Emerging Technology. “MIT.nano is committed to its expansive mission — to build a better world. We provide toolsets and capabilities that, in the hands of brilliant researchers, can effectively move the world forward.”

The announcement comes as part of an agreement between MIT and Applied Materials, Inc. that, together with a grant to MIT from the Northeast Microelectronics Coalition (NEMC) Hub, commits more than $40 million of estimated private and public investment to add advanced nano-fabrication equipment and capabilities at MIT.nano.

“We don’t believe there is another space in the United States that will offer the same kind of versatility, capability, and accessibility, with 8-inch toolsets integrated right next to more fundamental toolsets for research discoveries,” Bulović says. “It will create a seamless path to accelerate the pace of innovation.”

Pushing the boundaries of innovation

Applied Materials is the world’s largest supplier of equipment for manufacturing semiconductors, displays, and other advanced electronics. The company will provide at MIT.nano several state-of-the-art process tools capable of supporting 150- and 200-millimeter wafers and will enhance and upgrade an existing tool owned by MIT. In addition to assisting MIT.nano in the day-to-day operation and maintenance of the equipment, Applied Materials engineers will develop new process capabilities to benefit researchers and students from MIT and beyond.

“This investment will significantly accelerate the pace of innovation and discovery in microelectronics and microsystems,” says Tomás Palacios, director of MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories and the Clarence J. Lebel Professor in Electrical Engineering. “It’s wonderful news for our community, wonderful news for the state, and, in my view, a tremendous step forward toward implementing the national vision for the future of innovation in microelectronics.”

Nanoscale research at universities is traditionally conducted on machines that are less compatible with industry, which makes academic innovations more difficult to turn into impactful, mass-produced products. Jorg Scholvin, associate director for MIT.nano’s shared fabrication facility, says the new machines, when combined with MIT.nano’s existing equipment, represent a step-change improvement in that area: Researchers will be able to take an industry-standard wafer and build their technology on top of it to prove to companies it works on existing devices, or to co-fabricate new ideas in close collaboration with industry partners.

“In the journey from an idea to a fully working device, the ability to begin on a small scale, figure out what you want to do, rapidly debug your designs, and then scale it up to an industry-scale wafer is critical,” Scholvin says. “It means a student can test out their idea on wafer-scale quickly and directly incorporate insights into their project so that their processes are scalable. Providing such proof-of-principle early on will accelerate the idea out of the academic environment, potentially reducing years of added effort. Other tools at MIT.nano can supplement work on the 200-millimeter wafer scale, but the higher throughput and higher precision of the Applied equipment will provide researchers with repeatability and accuracy that is unprecedented for academic research environments. Essentially what you have is a sharper, faster, more precise tool to do your work.”

Scholvin predicts the equipment will lead to exponential growth in research opportunities.

“I think a key benefit of these tools is they allow us to push the boundary of research in a variety of different ways that we can predict today,” Scholvin says. “But then there are also unpredictable benefits, which are hiding in the shadows waiting to be discovered by the creativity of the researchers at MIT. With each new application, more ideas and paths usually come to mind — so that over time, more and more opportunities are discovered.”

Because the equipment is available for use by people outside of the MIT community, including regional researchers, industry partners, nonprofit organizations, and local startups, they will also enable new collaborations.

“The tools themselves will be an incredible meeting place — a place that can, I think, transpose the best of our ideas in a much more effective way than before,” Bulović says. “I’m extremely excited about that.”

Palacios notes that while microelectronics is best known for work making transistors smaller to fit on microprocessors, it’s a vast field that enables virtually all the technology around us, from wireless communications and high-speed internet to energy management, personalized health care, and more.

He says he’s personally excited to use the new machines to do research around power electronics and semiconductors, including exploring promising new materials like gallium nitride, which could dramatically improve the efficiency of electronic devices.

Fulfilling a mission

MIT.nano’s leaders say a key driver of commercialization will be startups, both from MIT and beyond.

“This is not only going to help the MIT research community innovate faster, it’s also going to enable a new wave of entrepreneurship,” Palacios says. “We’re reducing the barriers for students, faculty, and other entrepreneurs to be able to take innovation and get it to market. That fits nicely with MIT’s mission of making the world a better place through technology. I cannot wait to see the amazing new inventions that our colleagues and students will come out with.”

Bulović says the announcement aligns with the mission laid out by MIT’s leaders at MIT.nano’s inception.

"We have the space in MIT.nano to accommodate these tools, we have the capabilities inside MIT.nano to manage their operation, and as a shared and open facility, we have methodologies by which we can welcome anyone from the region to use the tools,” Bulović says. “That is the vision MIT laid out as we were designing MIT.nano, and this announcement helps to fulfill that vision.”

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MIT, Applied Materials, and the Northeast Microelectronics Coalition Hub to bring 200mm advanced research capabilities to MIT.nano

The following is a joint announcement from MIT and Applied Materials, Inc.

MIT and Applied Materials, Inc., announced an agreement today that, together with a grant to MIT from the Northeast Microelectronics Coalition (NEMC) Hub, commits more than $40 million of estimated private and public investment to add advanced nano-fabrication equipment and capabilities to MIT.nano, the Institute’s center for nanoscale science and engineering. The collaboration will create a unique open-access site in the United States that supports research and development at industry-compatible scale using the same equipment found in high-volume production fabs to accelerate advances in silicon and compound semiconductors, power electronics, optical computing, analog devices, and other critical technologies.

The equipment and related funding and in-kind support provided by Applied Materials will significantly enhance MIT.nano’s existing capabilities to fabricate up to 200-millimeter (8-inch) wafers, a size essential to industry prototyping and production of semiconductors used in a broad range of markets including consumer electronics, automotive, industrial automation, clean energy, and more. Positioned to fill the gap between academic experimentation and commercialization, the equipment will help establish a bridge connecting early-stage innovation to industry pathways to the marketplace.

“A brilliant new concept for a chip won’t have impact in the world unless companies can make millions of copies of it. MIT.nano’s collaboration with Applied Materials will create a critical open-access capacity to help innovations travel from lab bench to industry foundries for manufacturing,” says Maria Zuber, MIT’s vice president for research and the E. A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics. “I am grateful to Applied Materials for its investment in this vision. The impact of the new toolset will ripple across MIT and throughout Massachusetts, the region, and the nation.”

Applied Materials is the world’s largest supplier of equipment for manufacturing semiconductors, displays, and other advanced electronics. The company will provide at MIT.nano several state-of-the-art process tools capable of supporting 150 and 200mm wafers and will enhance and upgrade an existing tool owned by MIT. In addition to assisting MIT.nano in the day-to-day operation and maintenance of the equipment, Applied engineers will develop new process capabilities that will benefit researchers and students from MIT and beyond.

“Chips are becoming increasingly complex, and there is tremendous need for continued advancements in 200mm devices, particularly compound semiconductors like silicon carbide and gallium nitride,” says Aninda Moitra, corporate vice president and general manager of Applied Materials’ ICAPS Business. “Applied is excited to team with MIT.nano to create a unique, open-access site in the U.S. where the chip ecosystem can collaborate to accelerate innovation. Our engagement with MIT expands Applied’s university innovation network and furthers our efforts to reduce the time and cost of commercializing new technologies while strengthening the pipeline of future semiconductor industry talent.”

The NEMC Hub, managed by the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative (MassTech), will allocate $7.7 million to enable the installation of the tools. The NEMC is the regional “hub” that connects and amplifies the capabilities of diverse organizations from across New England, plus New Jersey and New York. The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) selected the NEMC Hub as one of eight Microelectronics Commons Hubs and awarded funding from the CHIPS and Science Act to accelerate the transition of critical microelectronics technologies from lab-to-fab, spur new jobs, expand workforce training opportunities, and invest in the region’s advanced manufacturing and technology sectors.

The Microelectronics Commons program is managed at the federal level by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering and the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Crane Division, and facilitated through the National Security Technology Accelerator (NSTXL), which organizes the execution of the eight regional hubs located across the country. The announcement of the public sector support for the project was made at an event attended by leaders from the DoD and NSTXL during a site visit to meet with NEMC Hub members.

“The installation and operation of these tools at MIT.nano will have a direct impact on the members of the NEMC Hub, the Massachusetts and Northeast regional economy, and national security. This is what the CHIPS and Science Act is all about,” says Ben Linville-Engler, deputy director at the MassTech Collaborative and the interim director of the NEMC Hub. “This is an essential investment by the NEMC Hub to meet the mission of the Microelectronics Commons.”

MIT.nano is a 200,000 square-foot facility located in the heart of the MIT campus with pristine, class-100 cleanrooms capable of accepting these advanced tools. Its open-access model means that MIT.nano’s toolsets and laboratories are available not only to the campus, but also to early-stage R&D by researchers from other academic institutions, nonprofit organizations, government, and companies ranging from Fortune 500 multinationals to local startups. Vladimir Bulović, faculty director of MIT.nano, says he expects the new equipment to come online in early 2025.

“With vital funding for installation from NEMC and after a thorough and productive planning process with Applied Materials, MIT.nano is ready to install this toolset and integrate it into our expansive capabilities that serve over 1,100 researchers from academia, startups, and established companies,” says Bulović, who is also the Fariborz Maseeh Professor of Emerging Technologies in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “We’re eager to add these powerful new capabilities and excited for the new ideas, collaborations, and innovations that will follow.”

As part of its arrangement with MIT.nano, Applied Materials will join the MIT.nano Consortium, an industry program comprising 12 companies from different industries around the world. With the contributions of the company’s technical staff, Applied Materials will also have the opportunity to engage with MIT’s intellectual centers, including continued membership with the Microsystems Technology Laboratories.

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DNA particles that mimic viruses hold promise as vaccines

Using a virus-like delivery particle made from DNA, researchers from MIT and the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard have created a vaccine that can induce a strong antibody response against SARS-CoV-2.

The vaccine, which has been tested in mice, consists of a DNA scaffold that carries many copies of a viral antigen. This type of vaccine, known as a particulate vaccine, mimics the structure of a virus. Most previous work on particulate vaccines has relied on protein scaffolds, but the proteins used in those vaccines tend to generate an unnecessary immune response that can distract the immune system from the target.

In the mouse study, the researchers found that the DNA scaffold does not induce an immune response, allowing the immune system to focus its antibody response on the target antigen.

“DNA, we found in this work, does not elicit antibodies that may distract away from the protein of interest,” says Mark Bathe, an MIT professor of biological engineering. “What you can imagine is that your B cells and immune system are being fully trained by that target antigen, and that’s what you want — for your immune system to be laser-focused on the antigen of interest.”

This approach, which strongly stimulates B cells (the cells that produce antibodies), could make it easier to develop vaccines against viruses that have been difficult to target, including HIV and influenza, as well as SARS-CoV-2, the researchers say. Unlike T cells, which are stimulated by other types of vaccines, these B cells can persist for decades, offering long-term protection.

“We’re interested in exploring whether we can teach the immune system to deliver higher levels of immunity against pathogens that resist conventional vaccine approaches, like flu, HIV, and SARS-CoV-2,” says Daniel Lingwood, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and a principal investigator at the Ragon Institute. “This idea of decoupling the response against the target antigen from the platform itself is a potentially powerful immunological trick that one can now bring to bear to help those immunological targeting decisions move in a direction that is more focused.”

Bathe, Lingwood, and Aaron Schmidt, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and principal investigator at the Ragon Institute, are the senior authors of the paper, which appears today in Nature Communications. The paper’s lead authors are Eike-Christian Wamhoff, a former MIT postdoc; Larance Ronsard, a Ragon Institute postdoc; Jared Feldman, a former Harvard University graduate student; Grant Knappe, an MIT graduate student; and Blake Hauser, a former Harvard graduate student. 

Mimicking viruses

Particulate vaccines usually consist of a protein nanoparticle, similar in structure to a virus, that can carry many copies of a viral antigen. This high density of antigens can lead to a stronger immune response than traditional vaccines because the body sees it as similar to an actual virus. Particulate vaccines have been developed for a handful of pathogens, including hepatitis B and human papillomavirus, and a particulate vaccine for SARS-CoV-2 has been approved for use in South Korea.

These vaccines are especially good at activating B cells, which produce antibodies specific to the vaccine antigen.

“Particulate vaccines are of great interest for many in immunology because they give you robust humoral immunity, which is antibody-based immunity, which is differentiated from the T-cell-based immunity that the mRNA vaccines seem to elicit more strongly,” Bathe says.

A potential drawback to this kind of vaccine, however, is that the proteins used for the scaffold often stimulate the body to produce antibodies targeting the scaffold. This can distract the immune system and prevent it from launching as robust a response as one would like, Bathe says.

“To neutralize the SARS-CoV-2 virus, you want to have a vaccine that generates antibodies toward the receptor binding domain portion of the virus’ spike protein,” he says. “When you display that on a protein-based particle, what happens is your immune system recognizes not only that receptor binding domain protein, but all the other proteins that are irrelevant to the immune response you’re trying to elicit.”

Another potential drawback is that if the same person receives more than one vaccine carried by the same protein scaffold, for example, SARS-CoV-2 and then influenza, their immune system would likely respond right away to the protein scaffold, having already been primed to react to it. This could weaken the immune response to the antigen carried by the second vaccine.

“If you want to apply that protein-based particle to immunize against a different virus like influenza, then your immune system can be addicted to the underlying protein scaffold that it’s already seen and developed an immune response toward,” Bathe says. “That can hypothetically diminish the quality of your antibody response for the actual antigen of interest.”

As an alternative, Bathe’s lab has been developing scaffolds made using DNA origami, a method that offers precise control over the structure of synthetic DNA and allows researchers to attach a variety of molecules, such as viral antigens, at specific locations.

In a 2020 study, Bathe and Darrell Irvine, an MIT professor of biological engineering and of materials science and engineering, showed that a DNA scaffold carrying 30 copies of an HIV antigen could generate a strong antibody response in B cells grown in the lab. This type of structure is optimal for activating B cells because it closely mimics the structure of nano-sized viruses, which display many copies of viral proteins in their surfaces.

“This approach builds off of a fundamental principle in B-cell antigen recognition, which is that if you have an arrayed display of the antigen, that promotes B-cell responses and gives better quantity and quality of antibody output,” Lingwood says.

“Immunologically silent”

In the new study, the researchers swapped in an antigen consisting of the receptor binding protein of the spike protein from the original strain of SARS-CoV-2. When they gave the vaccine to mice, they found that the mice generated high levels of antibodies to the spike protein but did not generate any to the DNA scaffold.

In contrast, a vaccine based on a scaffold protein called ferritin, coated with SARS-CoV-2 antigens, generated many antibodies against ferritin as well as SARS-CoV-2.

“The DNA nanoparticle itself is immunogenically silent,” Lingwood says. “If you use a protein-based platform, you get equally high titer antibody responses to the platform and to the antigen of interest, and that can complicate repeated usage of that platform because you’ll develop high affinity immune memory against it.”

Reducing these off-target effects could also help scientists reach the goal of developing a vaccine that would induce broadly neutralizing antibodies to any variant of SARS-CoV-2, or even to all sarbecoviruses, the subgenus of virus that includes SARS-CoV-2 as well as the viruses that cause SARS and MERS.

To that end, the researchers are now exploring whether a DNA scaffold with many different viral antigens attached could induce broadly neutralizing antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 and related viruses. 

The research was primarily funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Fast Grants program.

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Middle-school students meet a beam of electrons, and excitement results

Want to get middle-school kids excited about science? Let them do their own experiments on MIT.nano’s state-of-the-art microscopes — with guidelines and adult supervision, of course. That was the brainchild of Carl Thrasher and Tao Cai, MIT graduate students who spearheaded the Electron Microscopy Elevating Representation and Growth in Education (EMERGE) program.

Held in November, EMERGE invited 18 eighth-grade students to the pilot event at MIT.nano, an interdisciplinary facility for nanoscale research, to get hands-on experience in microscopy and materials science.

The highlight of the two-hour workshop: Each student explored mystery samples of everyday materials using one of two scanning electron microscopes (SEMs), which scan material samples using a beam of electrons to form an image. Though highly sophisticated, the instruments generated readily understandable data — images of intricate structures in a butterfly wing or a strand of hair, for example.

The students had an immediate, tangible sense of success, says Thrasher, from MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE). He led the program along with Cai, also from DMSE, and Collette Gordon, a grad student in the Department of Chemistry.

“This experience helped build a sense of agency and autonomy around this area of science, nurturing budding self-confidence among the students,” Thrasher says. “We didn’t give the students instructions, just empowered them to solve problems. When you don’t tell them the solution, you get really surprised with what they come up with.”

Unlocking interest in the infinitesimal

The students were part of a multi-year science and engineering exploration program called MITES Saturdays, run by MIT Introduction to Technology, Engineering, and Science, or MITES. A team of volunteers was on hand to help students follow the guidance set out by Thrasher, ensuring the careful handling of the SEMs — worth roughly $500,000 each.

MITES Saturdays program administrator Lynsey Ford was thrilled to observe the students’ autonomous exploration and enthusiasm.

“Our students got to meet real scientists who listened to them, cared about the questions they were asking, and welcomed them into a world of science,” Ford says. “A supportive learning environment can be just as powerful for science discovery as a half-million-dollar microscope.”

The pilot workshop was the first step for Thrasher and his team in their goal to build EMERGE into a program with broad impact, engaging middle-to-high school students from a variety of communities.

The partnership with MITES Saturdays is crucial for this endeavor, says Thrasher, providing a platform to reach a wider audience. “Seeing students from diverse backgrounds participating in EMERGE reinforces the profound difference science education can have.”

MITES Saturdays students are high-achieving Massachusetts seventh through 12th graders from Boston, MIT’s hometown of Cambridge, and nearby Lawrence.

“The majority of students who participate in our programs would be the first person in their family to go to college. A lot of them are from families balancing some sort of financial hardship, and from populations that are historically underrepresented in STEM,” Ford says.

Experienced SEM users set up the instruments and prepared test samples so students could take turns exploring specimens such as burrs, butterfly wings, computer chips, hair, and pollen by operating the microscope to adjust magnification, focus, and stage location.

Students left the EMERGE event with copies of the electron microscope images they generated. Thrasher hopes they will use these materials in follow-up projects, ideally integrating them into existing school curricula so students can share their experiences.

EMERGE co-director Cai says students were excited with their experimentation, both in being able to access such high-end equipment and in seeing what materials like Velcro look like under an SEM (spoiler alert: it’s spaghetti).

“We definitely saw a spark,” Cai says. “The subject matter was complex, but the students always wanted to know more.” And the after-program feedback was positive, with most saying the experience was fun and challenging. The volunteers noted how engaged the students were with the SEMs and subject matter. One volunteer overheard students say, “I felt like a real scientist!”

Inspiring tomorrow’s scientists

EMERGE is based on the Scanning Electron Microscopy Educators program, a long-running STEM outreach program started in 1991 by the Air Force Research Laboratory and adopted by Michigan State University. As an Air Force captain stationed at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, Thrasher participated in the program as a volunteer SEM expert.

“I thought it was an incredible opportunity for young students and wanted to bring it here to MIT,” he says.

The pilot was made possible thanks to support from the MITES Saturdays team and the Graduate Materials Council (GMC), the DMSE graduate student organization. Cai and DMSE grad student Jessica Dong, who are both GMC outreach chairs, helped fund, organize, and coordinate the event.

The MITES Saturdays students included reflections on their experience with the SEMs in their final presentations at the MITES Fall Symposium in November.

“My favorite part of the semester was using the SEM as it introduced me to microscopy at the level of electrons,” said one student.

“Our students had an incredible time with the EMERGE team. We’re excited about the possibility of future partnerships with MIT.nano and other departments at MIT, giving our scholars exposure to the breadth of opportunities as future scientists,” says Eboney Hearn, MITES executive director.

With the success of the pilot, the EMERGE team is looking to offer more programs to the MITES students in the spring. Anna Osherov is excited to give students more access to the cumulative staff knowledge and cutting-edge equipment at MIT.nano, which opened in 2018. Osherov is associate director for Characterization.nano, a shared experimental facility for advanced imaging and analysis.

“Our mission is to support mature researchers — and to help inspire the future PhDs and professors who will come to MIT to learn, research, and innovate,” Osherov says. “Designing and offering such programs, aimed at fostering natural curiosity and creativity of young minds, has a tremendous long-term benefit to our society. We can raise tomorrow’s generation in a better way.”

For her part, Ford is still coasting on the students’ excitement. “They come into the program so curious and hungry for knowledge. They remind me every day how amazing the world is.”

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Benchtop test quickly identifies extremely impact-resistant materials

An intricate, honeycomb-like structure of struts and beams could withstand a supersonic impact better than a solid slab of the same material. What’s more, the specific structure matters, with some being more resilient to impacts than others.

That’s what MIT engineers are finding in experiments with microscopic metamaterials — materials that are intentionally printed, assembled, or otherwise engineered with microscopic architectures that give the overall material exceptional properties.

In a study appearing today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the engineers report on a new way to quickly test an array of metamaterial architectures and their resilience to supersonic impacts.

In their experiments, the team suspended tiny printed metamaterial lattices between microscopic support structures, then fired even tinier particles at the materials, at supersonic speeds. With high-speed cameras, the team then captured images of each impact and its aftermath, with nanosecond precision.

Their work has identified a few metamaterial architectures that are more resilient to supersonic impacts compared to their entirely solid, nonarchitected counterparts. The researchers say the results they observed at the microscopic level can be extended to comparable macroscale impacts, to predict how new material structures across length scales will withstand impacts in the real world.

“What we’re learning is, the microstructure of your material matters, even with high-rate deformation,” says study author Carlos Portela, the Brit and Alex d’Arbeloff Career Development Professor in Mechanical Engineering at MIT. “We want to identify impact-resistant structures that can be made into coatings or panels for spacecraft, vehicles, helmets, and anything that needs to be lightweight and protected.”

Other authors on the study include first author and MIT graduate student Thomas Butruille, and Joshua Crone of DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory.

Pure impact

The team’s new high-velocity experiments build off their previous work, in which the engineers tested the resilience of an ultralight, carbon-based material. That material, which was thinner than the width of a human hair, was made from tiny struts and beams of carbon, which the team printed and placed on a glass slide. They then fired microparticles toward the material, at velocities exceeding the speed of sound.  

Those supersonic experiments revealed that the microstructured material withstood the high-velocity impacts, sometimes deflecting the microparticles and other times capturing them.

“But there were many questions we couldn’t answer because we were testing the materials on a substrate, which may have affected their behavior,” Portela says.

In their new study, the researchers developed a way to test freestanding metamaterials, to observe how the materials withstand impacts purely on their own, without a backing or supporting substrate.

In their current setup, the researchers suspend a metamaterial of interest between two microscopic pillars made from the same base material. Depending on the dimensions of the metamaterial being tested, the researchers calculate how far apart the pillars must be in order to support the material at either end while allowing the material to respond to any impacts, without any influence from the pillars themselves.

“This way, we ensure that we’re measuring the material property and not the structural property,” Portela says.

Once the team settled on the pillar support design, they moved on to test a variety of metamaterial architectures. For each architecture, the researchers first printed the supporting pillars on a small silicon chip, then continued printing the metamaterial as a suspended layer between the pillars.

“We can print and test hundreds of these structures on a single chip,” Portela says.

Punctures and cracks

The team printed suspended metamaterials that resembled intricate honeycomb-like cross-sections. Each material was printed with a specific three-dimensional microscopic architecture, such as a precise scaffold of repeating octets, or more faceted polygons. Each repeated unit measured as small as a red blood cell. The resulting metamaterials were thinner than the width of a human hair.

The researchers then tested each metamaterial’s impact resilience by firing glass microparticles toward the structures, at speeds of up to 900 meters per second (more than 2,000 miles per hour) — well within the supersonic range. They caught each impact on camera and studied the resulting images, frame by frame, to see how the projectiles penetrated each material. Next, they examined the materials under a microscope and compared each impact’s physical aftermath.

“In the architected materials, we saw this morphology of small cylindrical craters after impact,” Portela says. “But in solid materials, we saw a lot of radial cracks and bigger chunks of material that were gouged out.”

Overall, the team observed that the fired particles created small punctures in the latticed metamaterials, and the materials nevertheless stayed intact. In contrast, when the same particles were fired at the same speeds into solid, nonlatticed materials of equal mass, they created large cracks that quickly spread, causing the material to crumble. The microstructured materials, therefore, were more efficient in resisting supersonic impacts as well as protecting against multiple impact events. And in particular, materials that were printed with the repeating octets appeared to be the most hardy.

“At the same velocity, we see the octet architecture is harder to fracture, meaning that the metamaterial, per unit mass, can withstand impacts up to twice as much as the bulk material,” Portela says. “This tells us that there are some architectures that can make a material tougher which can offer better impact protection.”

Going forward, the team plans to use the new rapid testing and analysis method to identify new metamaterial designs, in hopes of tagging architectures that can be scaled up to stronger and lighter protective gear, garments, coatings, and paneling.

“What I’m most excited about is showing we can do a lot of these extreme experiments on a benchtop,” Portela says. “This will significantly accelerate the rate at which we can validate new, high-performing, resilient materials.”

This work was funded, in part, by DEVCOM ARL Army Research Office through the MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies.

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Astronomers spot 18 black holes gobbling up nearby stars

Star-shredding black holes are everywhere in the sky if you just know how to look for them. That’s one message from a new study by MIT scientists, appearing today in the Astrophysical Journal.

The study’s authors are reporting the discovery of 18 new tidal disruption events (TDEs) — extreme instances when a nearby star is tidally drawn into a black hole and ripped to shreds. As the black hole feasts, it gives off an enormous burst of energy across the electromagnetic spectrum.

Astronomers have detected previous tidal disruption events by looking for characteristic bursts in the optical and X-ray bands. To date, these searches have revealed about a dozen star-shredding events in the nearby universe. The MIT team’s new TDEs more than double the catalog of known TDEs in the universe.

The researchers spotted these previously “hidden” events by looking in an unconventional band: infrared. In addition to giving off optical and X-ray bursts, TDEs can generate infrared radiation, particularly in “dusty” galaxies, where a central black hole is enshrouded with galactic debris. The dust in these galaxies normally absorbs and obscures optical and X-ray light, and any sign of TDEs in these bands. In the process, the dust also heats up, producing infrared radiation that is detectable. The team found that infrared emissions, therefore, can serve as a sign of tidal disruption events.

By looking in the infrared band, the MIT team picked out many more TDEs, in galaxies where such events were previously hidden. The 18 new events occurred in different types of galaxies, scattered across the sky.

“The majority of these sources don’t show up in optical bands,” says lead author Megan Masterson, a graduate student in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. “If you want to understand TDEs as a whole and use them to probe supermassive black hole demographics, you need to look in the infrared band.”

Other MIT authors include Kishalay De, Christos Panagiotou, Anna-Christina Eilers, Danielle Frostig, and Robert Simcoe, and MIT assistant professor of physics Erin Kara, along with collaborators from multiple institutions including the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany.

Heat spike

The team recently detected the closest TDE yet, by searching through infrared observations. The discovery opened a new, infrared-based route by which astronomers can search for actively feeding black holes.

That first detection spurred the group to comb for more TDEs. For their new study, the researchers searched through archival observations taken by NEOWISE — the renewed version of NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer. This satellite telescope launched in 2009 and after a brief hiatus has continued to scan the entire sky for infrared “transients,” or brief bursts.

The team looked through the mission’s archived observations using an algorithm developed by co-author Kishalay De. This algorithm picks out patterns in infrared emissions that are likely signs of a transient burst of infrared radiation. The team then cross-referenced the flagged transients with a catalog of all known nearby galaxies within 200 megaparsecs, or 600 million light years. They found that infrared transients could be traced to about 1,000 galaxies.

They then zoomed in on the signal of each galaxy’s infrared burst to determine whether the signal arose from a source other than a TDE, such as an active galactic nucleus or a supernova. After ruling out these possibilities, the team then analyzed the remaining signals, looking for an infrared pattern that is characteristic of a TDE — namely, a sharp spike followed by a gradual dip, reflecting a process by which a black hole, in ripping apart a star, suddenly heats up the surrounding dust to about 1,000 kelvins before gradually cooling down.

This analysis revealed 18 “clean” signals of tidal disruption events. The researchers took a survey of the galaxies in which each TDE was found, and saw that they occurred in a range of systems, including dusty galaxies, across the entire sky.

“If you looked up in the sky and saw a bunch of galaxies, the TDEs would occur representatively in all of them,” Masteron says. “It’s not that they’re only occurring in one type of galaxy, as people thought based only on optical and X-ray searches.”

“It is now possible to peer through the dust and complete the census of nearby TDEs,” says Edo Berger, professor of astronomy at Harvard University, who was not involved with the study. “A particularly exciting aspect of this work is the potential of follow-up studies with large infrared surveys, and I’m excited to see what discoveries they will yield.”

A dusty solution

The team’s discoveries help to resolve some major questions in the study of tidal disruption events. For instance, prior to this work, astronomers had mostly seen TDEs in one type of galaxy — a “post-starburst” system that had previously been a star-forming factory, but has since settled. This galaxy type is rare, and astronomers were puzzled as to why TDEs seemed to be popping up only in these rarer systems. It so happens that these systems are also relatively devoid of dust, making a TDE’s optical or X-ray emissions naturally easier to detect.

Now, by looking in the infrared band, astronomers are able to see TDEs in many more galaxies. The team’s new results show that black holes can devour stars in a range of galaxies, not only post-starburst systems.

The findings also resolve a “missing energy” problem. Physicists have theoreticially predicted that TDEs should radiate more energy than what has been actually observed. But the MIT team now say that dust may explain the discrepancy. They found that if a TDE occurs in a dusty galaxy, the dust itself could absorb not only optical and X-ray emissions but also extreme ultraviolet radiation, in an amount equivalent to the presumed “missing energy.”

The 18 new detections also are helping astronomers estimate the rate at which TDEs occur in a given galaxy. When they figure the new TDEs in with previous detections, they estimate a galaxy experiences a tidal disruption event once every 50,000 years. This rate comes closer to physicists’ theoretical predictions. With more infrared observations, the team hopes to resolve the rate of TDEs, and the properties of the black holes that power them.

“People were coming up with very exotic solutions to these puzzles, and now we’ve come to the point where we can resolve all of them,” Kara says. “This gives us confidence that we don’t need all this exotic physics to explain what we’re seeing. And we have a better handle on the mechanics behind how a star gets ripped apart and gobbled up by a black hole. We’re understanding these systems better.”

This research was supported, in part, by NASA.

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Opening the doorway to drawing

On the first Friday in November, the students of 21A.513 (Drawing Human Experience) were greeted by two unfamiliar figures: a bespectacled monkey holding a heart-shaped message (“I’m so glad you are here”) and the person who drew that monkey on the whiteboard: award-winning cartoonist and educator Lynda Barry, whose “Picture This” was a central text on the new interdisciplinary course’s syllabus.

As the afternoon’s guest speaker, Barry welcomed each arrival, her long gray braids swinging, pens dangling from her neck. Within minutes, she had everyone — even the course’s instructors, anthropologist Graham Jones and visual artist Seth Riskin — settled around tables with their eyes closed, drawing giraffes.

When Barry asked participants to open their eyes and hold up their giraffes, the room filled with laughter over the menagerie of stubby legs, irregular necks, and erratic spots.

“It came out better than I thought!” one student exclaimed.

“Watching people draw with their eyes closed is fantastic,” Barry beamed. “It’s like being in the room with everyone dreaming.”

“Picture This” contends that everyone can draw; children do it unselfconsciously up to a certain age, Barry writes, but all too often conventional qualms put a stop to this expressive and deeply human practice. Jones saw evidence of this when the class convened in September.

“When we went around the room asking students what they wanted to get out of the class, about two-thirds said something like ‘I used to make art, but I don’t have time to do it anymore,’ or ‘I didn’t feel like I was good enough at it,’” he recalls. “For some students, we’ve been opening up a doorway to a set of experiences that’s been shut for a long time.” 

Senior Charles Williams, a computer engineering major, counts himself among that group. “This class breathes back into you the creative and artistic expression that is too often lost as we grow up and mature,” he says.

What it means to be human

Newly offered last fall, Drawing Human Experience was supported by a cross-disciplinary class development grant from the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST). It was co-presented by MIT Anthropology and the MIT Museum Studio and Compton Gallery.

It is the second CAST grant shared by Jones and Riskin. In 2019 they co-taught 21A.S01 (Paranormal Machines), which explored how humans can use interactive technologies to create experiences beyond everyday life. That course left them eager to delve further into the intersection of their disciplines at the most essential level.

“Drawing is deceptively simple,” Jones notes. “You can do extraordinarily complicated things with the kind of media that everybody has immediately at hand.”

The course’s syllabus opens with a declaration — “We do not accept distinctions between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ drawing” — and a hint of what students would work toward: “We draw to give our inner world outer form, to create a zone of communication between both us and ourselves, and ourselves and others.”

The course bases students’ grades on their sincere investment in investigating that zone of communication — developing their own visual language along the way — rather than a mastery of photorealistic representation.

“The difference between an ordinary drawing class and this class is that it puts the quality of mind before technical skills,” says Riskin, manager of the MIT Museum Studio and Compton Gallery (where the course met), as well as co-instructor of a long-running class on vision in art and neuroscience.

Jones is a professor of anthropology who researches how people use language and other media to perform and interact.

“On the deepest level, anthropology asks the question ‘what does it mean to be human?’” he says. “What we’re trying to do in this class is allow the students to ask this fundamental anthropological question by going very deeply into their own experience.”

The instructors divided the course into three modules: abstraction, figuration, and diagrams. In the third unit, Jones lectured on the use of diagrams in anthropology to visualize complex social structures such as kinship and gift-giving networks. “Diagrams organize thinking,” Jones told the class, “and they organize people around that thought process. They’re one of the most profound inventions in human history.”

While diagrams the students encounter elsewhere in their studies might aim for the precise presentation of facts, Riskin urged them to consider the term more expansively. “Ambiguity is a very powerful vehicle in art,” he reminded them. “If there’s not ambiguity, maybe it’s not art anymore because there’s no role for the viewer’s imagination.”

Students discussed the work of artist Christine Sun Kim, who uses infographics for social commentary, as in her series of pie charts on “Deaf Rage” that have been exhibited at the MIT List Visual Arts Center and internationally. Then they partnered up for an exercise, documenting their changing relationship with a classmate before, during, and after a getting-to-know-you conversation. The resulting diagrams resembled swirling plasma, mushrooms releasing spores, spiky plants emerging from seeds — nary an x- or y-axis in sight.

The essence of drawing

Between classes, students completed “D-Sets” (drawing-based problem sets) in the hardbound sketchbooks they’d received at the start of the semester. D-Set number four, for example, had them practice gesture drawing — employing rapid, broad strokes — while observing passersby in a public space. The goal, explains Riskin, was “not to capture the many details that accurately represent the human form, but rather in two or three seconds to capture the whole, the gestalt, of a human figure.” He and Jones designed several such exercises for “training immediacy” — an antidote to the self-critical, goal-oriented attitudes that turn many adults away from the act of drawing.

“The assignments helped me think more about drawing to convey, rather than to represent,” says junior Jaclyn Thi, a computer science and engineering major. “They made drawing much more enjoyable overall.”

While students were urged not to overthink the process of putting marks on paper, class meetings provided a social, supportive space to reflect on the results.

“The second class was kind of a shock,” Jones remembers. “We had come up with this whole plan about how they were going to exchange their sketchbooks, and we had prepared all of these prompts. But as soon as I said, ‘OK, turn to somebody next to you who hasn’t seen your work,’ the room immediately erupted in conversation. They talked for half-an-hour about the drawings, and we had to cut it off. It was like the floodgates opened.”

During a peer feedback session in week six, the students clustered around the studio’s plain wooden tables, which had been pushed together to form a large surface. They gazed down at nearly two dozen sketchbooks splayed open to the latest D-Set: gesture drawings conveying emotional connections to important figures in their lives. Some pages were covered in thick, moody smudges, while others crawled with wispy lines, and a few clean white pages bore only a few bold marks.

Several students singled out a classmate’s drawing, remarking how its confident charcoal strokes — suggesting short hair, glasses, the slight curve of a smile — managed to evoke a sense of lightness and joy. Riskin addressed the artist: “Maybe the drawing surprised you a bit because it was easy? You were just with the person and the drawing came out as an expression of that,” he guessed, eliciting a nod of recognition. “That, to me, is the essence of drawing.”

Sophomore Kanna Pichappan, a brain and cognitive sciences major and anthropology minor, looks back on that assignment as one of her most challenging. “I chose to depict Goddess Durga, a deity from the Hindu tradition who motivates me to live with courage, inner strength, and a commitment to righteousness,” says Pichappan. “I was apprehensive that my drawing might not turn out the way I envisioned. Until this class, I hadn’t even realized that a depiction of a figure’s form is not the same as experiencing the feelings the figure inspires. That D-Set helped me establish new habits: drawing what I feel, rather than what something should look like.”

Weeks later, when choosing a subject for her final project, Pichappan decided to return to exploring the goddess’s role in her life “from a place of creativity and freedom.” The course, she says, made that possible: “It helped me shift from the belief that art is created to represent something, towards the understanding that drawing can be a powerful way of deepening and enriching our understanding of our personal human life experiences.”

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School of Engineering fourth quarter 2024 awards

Faculty and researchers across MIT’s School of Engineering receive many awards in recognition of their scholarship, service, and overall excellence. The School of Engineering periodically recognizes their achievements by highlighting the honors, prizes, and medals won by faculty and research scientists working in our academic departments, labs, and centers.

• Daniel G. Anderson in the Department of Chemical Engineering and the Institute for Medical Science and Engineering was elected to the National Academy of Medicine on Oct. 9, and to the National Academy of Inventors on Dec. 19.
   
• Regina Barzilay in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Institute for Medical Science and Engineering was elected to the National Academy of Medicine on Oct. 9.
   
• Sangeeta Bhatia in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science was selected as a Foreign Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering on Oct. 11.
   
• Michael Birnbaum in the Department of Biological Engineering was selected as a Pew 2023 Innovation Fund investigator on Oct. 24.
   
• Vincent Chan in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science received an IEEE Edison Medal on Dec. 13.
   
• Yet-Ming Chiang in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering was selected to Time’s 100 on Climate on Nov. 16.
   
• Connor W. Coley in the Department of Chemical Engineering was named a Samsung AI Researcher of the Year Awardee on Nov. 14.
   
• James J. Collins in the Department of Biological Engineering and the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science received the 2023 Feynman Prize on Oct. 27.
   
• James Fujimoto in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation on Oct. 24.
   
• Ariel Furst in the Department of Chemical Engineering received the National Institutes of Health New Innovator Award on Oct. 5.
   
• Marzyeh Ghassemi in the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science received the 2023 MIT Prize for Open Data on Oct. 24.
   
• Jack Hare in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering received a National Science Foundation Career Award on Nov. 11.
   
• Darrell J. Irvine in the Department of Biological Engineering was elected to the National Academy of Medicine on Oct. 9.
   
• Jesse Kroll in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering received the Award for Excellence in Postdoctoral Mentoring on Oct. 13.
   
• Robert Langer, Institute Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Department of Biological Engineering, received the 2023 Dr. Paul Janssen Award on Dec. 19.
   
• Bradley Olsen in the Department of Chemical Engineering was named a 2023 Advancing Physics Society Fellow on Oct. 20.
   
• Ritu Raman in the Department of Mechanical Engineering received a 2024 Young Investigator Award from the Office of Naval Research on Oct. 10.
   
• Jessica Stark in the Department of Biological Engineering received the Steven A. Rosenberg Scholars Award on Nov. 3.
   
• Caroline Uhler in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science received a National Institutes of Health New Innovator Award on Oct. 4.

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Susan Solomon wins VinFuture Award for Female Innovators

Lee and Geraldine Martin Professor of Environmental Studies Susan Solomon has been awarded the 2023 VinFuture Award for Female Innovators. Solomon was picked out of almost 1,400 international nominations across four categories for “The discovery of the ozone depletion mechanism in Antarctica, contributing to the establishment of the Montreal Protocol.” The award, which comes with a $500,000 prize, highlights outstanding female researchers and innovators that can serve as role models for aspiring scientists.

“I'm tremendously humbled by that, and I'll do my best to live up to it,” says Solomon, who attended the ceremony in Hanoi, Vietnam, on Dec. 20.

The VinFuture Awards are given annually to “honor scientific research and breakthrough technological innovations that can make a significant difference” according to their site. In addition to Female Innovators, the award has two other special categories, Innovators from Developing Countries and Innovators with Outstanding Achievements in Emerging Fields, as well as their overall grand prize. The awards have been given out by the Vietnam-based VinFuture Foundation since 2021.

“Countries all around the world are part of scientific progress and innovation, and that a developing country is honoring that is really very lovely,” says Solomon, whose career as an atmospheric chemist has brought her onto the international stage and has shown her firsthand how important developing countries are in crafting global policy.

In 1986 Solomon led an expedition of 16 scientists to Antarctica to measure the degradation of the ozone layer; she was the only woman on the team. She and her collaborators were able to figure out the atmospheric chemistry of chlorofluorocarbons and other similar chemicals that are now known as ozone-depleting substances. This work became foundational to the creation of the Montreal Protocol, an international agreement that banned damaging chemicals and has allowed the ozone to recover.

Solomon joined the MIT faculty in 2012 and holds joint appointments in the departments of Chemistry and Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. The success of the Montreal Protocol demonstrates the ability for international cooperation to enact effective environmental agreements; Solomon sees it as a blueprint for crafting further policy when it comes to addressing global climate change.

“Women can do anything, even help save the ozone layer and solve other environmental problems,” she says. “Today's problem of climate change is for all of us to be involved in solving.”

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