MIT Corporation elects 10 term members, two life members

The MIT Corporation — the Institute’s board of trustees — has elected 10 full-term members, who will serve one-, two-, or five-year terms, and two life members. Corporation Chair Mark P. Gorenberg ’76 announced the election results today.

The full-term members are: Nancy C. Andrews, Dedric A. Carter, David Fialkow, Bennett W. Golub, Temitope O. Lawani, Michael C. Mountz, Anna Waldman-Brown, R. Robert Wickham, Jeannette M. Wing, and Anita Wu. The two life members are: R. Erich Caulfield and David M. Siegel. Gorenberg was also reelected as Corporation chair.

As of July 1, the Corporation will consist of 80 distinguished leaders in education, science, engineering, and industry. Of those, 24 are life members and eight are ex officio. An additional 25 individuals are life members emeritus.

The 10 new term members are:

Nancy C. Andrews PhD ’85, executive vice president and chief scientific officer, Boston Children’s Hospital

Andrews is a biologist and physician noted for her research on iron diseases and her roles in academic administration. She currently serves as executive vice president and chief scientific officer at the Boston Children’s Hospital and professor of pediatrics in residence at Harvard Medical School. She previously served for a decade as the first female dean of the Duke University School of Medicine. After graduating from medical school, she completed residency and fellowship at BCH, joining the faculty at Harvard as an assistant professor in 1993. From 1999 to 2003, Andrews served as director of the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology MD-PhD program, and then was appointed professor of pediatrics and dean for basic sciences and graduate studies at Harvard Medical School. Andrews currently serves on the boards of directors of Novartis, Charles River Laboratories, and Maze Therapeutics.

Dedric A. Carter ’98, MEng ’99, MBA ’14, chief innovation officer, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Carter currently serves as the vice chancellor for innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic development and chief innovation officer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has cabinet-level responsibility for the entrepreneurship, innovation, economic development, and commercialization portfolios at the university through Innovate Carolina and the Innovate Carolina Junction, a new hub for catalyzing innovation and accelerating entrepreneurial invention located in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, among other oversight and engagement roles. Prior to his appointment, he was the vice chancellor for innovation and chief commercialization officer at Washington University in St. Louis. Before that, he served as the senior advisor for strategic initiatives in the Office of the Director at the U.S. National Science Foundation, in addition to serving as the executive secretary to the U.S. National Science Board executive committee.

David Fialkow, co-founder and managing director, General Catalyst Partners

Fialkow currently serves as managing director of General Catalyst Partners, a venture capital firm that makes early-stage and transformational investments in technology and consumer companies. His areas of focus include financial services, digital health, artificial intelligence, and data analytics. With business partner Joel Cutler, Fialkow built and sold several companies prior to founding General Catalyst Partners in 2000. Early in his career, he worked for the investment firm Thomas H. Lee Company and the venture capital firm U.S. Venture Partners. Fialkow studied film at Colgate University and continues to produce documentaries with his wife, Nina, focused on health care and social justice.

Bennett W. Golub ’79, SM ’82, PhD ’84, co-founder and senior policy advisor, BlackRock

In 1988, Golub was one of eight people to start BlackRock, Inc., a global asset management company. In March of 2022, he stepped down from his day-to-day activities at the company to assume a part-time role of senior policy advisor. Formerly, he served as chief risk officer with responsibilities that included investment, counterparty, technology, and operational risk, and he chaired BlackRock’s Enterprise Risk Management Committee. Beginning in 1995, he was co-head and founder of BlackRock Solutions, the company’s risk advisory business. He also served as the acting CEO of Trepp, LLC. a former BlackRock affiliate that pioneered the creation and distribution of data and models for collateralized commercial-backed securities, beginning in 1996. Prior to the founding of BlackRock, Golub served as vice president at The First Boston Corporation (now Credit Suisse).

Temitope O. Lawani ’91, co-founder, Helios Investment Partners, LLP

Lawani, a Nigerian national, is the co-founder and managing partner of Helios Investment Partners, LLP, an Africa-focused private investment firm based in London. He also serves as co-CEO of Helios Fairfax Partners, an investment holding company. Prior to forming Helios in 2004, Lawani was a principal at the San Francisco and London offices of TPG Capital, a global private investment firm. Before that, he worked as a mergers and acquisitions and corporate development analyst at the Walt Disney Company. Lawani serves on the boards of Helios Towers, Pershing Square Holdings, and NBA Africa. He is also a director of the Global Private Capital Association and The END Fund, and has served on the boards of several public and private companies across various sectors.

Michael C. Mountz ’87, principal, Kacchip LLC

Michael “Mick” Mountz is a logistics industry entrepreneur and technologist known for inventing the mobile robotic order fulfillment approach now in widespread use across the material handling industry. In 2003, Mountz, along with MIT classmate Peter Wurman ’87 and Raffaelo D'Andrea co-founded Kiva Systems, Inc., a manufacturer of this mobile robotic fulfillment system. After Kiva, Mountz established Kacchip LLC, a technology incubator and investment entity to support local founders and startups, where Mountz currently serves as principal. Before founding Kiva, Mountz served as a director of business process and logistics at online grocery delivery company Webvan, and before that he served as a product marketing manager for Apple Computer working on the launch of the G3 and G4 series Macintosh desktops. Mountz holds over 40 U.S. technology patents and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2022.

Anna Waldman-Brown ’11, SM ’18, PhD ’23

Through her work with the Fab Lab network, which spun off from the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms, Waldman-Brown has worked with international policymakers and grassroots innovators across more than 60 countries to foster creative problem-solving and sustainable development. She helped build up and connect fab labs across dozens of countries, co-organized two week-long fab lab conferences and developed the ongoing Fab Festival, curated open-source development of an early Maker Map and several lists of academic articles related to the Maker Movement, and finalized an official collaboration with Autodesk and the international Fab Lab network. In addition to providing informal mentorship and support for students across the Institute, Waldman-Brown became involved in the burgeoning MIT Grad Student Union (GSU)/UE Local 256 around 2019 to advocate for practical solutions to improving graduate student life and health and safety. Her current work as an industrial strategy policy analyst is through the Made in America Office, which is part of the Executive Office of the President’s Office of Management and Budget.

R. Robert Wickham ’93, SM ’95, president, MIT Alumni Association

Skilled in building go-to-market teams, strategic planning, operational management, and delivering results, Wickham has held leadership roles at Salesforce and Oracle, and gained foundational experiences in management consulting and entrepreneurship. As the former general manager of Tableau Asia Pacific, a Salesforce business unit, Wickham spearheaded significant growth initiatives. He also served as chief of staff for Asia Pacific and led specialized teams in Platform and Emerging Technologies, which included pivotal technologies such as the Lightning Platform and Einstein Analytics, and drove the launch of Salesforce’s $50M Australian venture fund and its regional program for startups. Before joining Salesforce, Wickham led Oracle’s Engineered Systems business across Australia and New Zealand, and the System Management business in North America. He joined Oracle through its acquisition of Empirix Web Division, where he ran sales for North America.

Jeannette M. Wing ’78, SM ’79, PhD ’83, executive vice president for research, Columbia University

Wing is the executive vice president for research and professor of computer science at Columbia University, and previously served as Avanessians Director of the Data Science Institute. Wing’s current research interests are in trustworthy AI, and her areas of research expertise include security and privacy, formal methods, programming languages, and distributed and concurrent systems. Prior to Columbia, Wing worked at Microsoft, where she served as corporate vice president of Microsoft Research, overseeing research labs worldwide. Before joining Microsoft, she was on the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University, where she was the head of the Department of Computer Science and associate dean for academic affairs of the School of Computer Science. During a leave from Carnegie Mellon, she served at the National Science Foundation as assistant director of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate.

Anita Wu MBA ’16, partner, AlixPartners

Wu is a partner in the retail practice at AlixPartners, a global consultancy specializing in management advisory, business performance improvement, and corporate turnarounds. Outside of client services, she is the global leader for AlixPartners’ Women’s Empowerment Network. Prior to moving to the U.S. for MIT, Wu led smart cities design in Sydney, Australia, and implemented various initiatives that improved commuter usage of public transportation. She has also previously led the operations for a nonprofit, Light the Way, where she fundraised and delivered education curriculum and microfinancing programs for farming villages in Nepal. She currently resides in New York City.

The two life members are:

David M. Siegel SM ’86, PhD ’91, co-founder and co-chairman, Two Sigma

Siegel is a computer scientist, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. Before co-founding the financial sciences company Two Sigma, he was chief technology officer and managing director at Tudor Investment Corporation. Prior to that, he was a senior leader at D.E. Shaw, where he ultimately rose to be the firm’s first chief information officer. Siegel is currently an active investor and advisor, and serves as a board member for Re:Build Manufacturing, a family of industrial businesses. He is co-founder of the Scratch Foundation, with MIT Professor Mitchel Resnick ’88. He founded the Siegel Family Endowment in 2011 to support organizations and leaders that will understand and shape the impact of technology on society, and as the organization’s chairman devotes significant time and energy to actively engaging with this work.

R. Erich Caulfield SM ’01, PhD ’06, founder and president, The Caulfield Consulting Group

Since 2013, Caulfield has served as the founder and president of The Caulfield Consulting Group, a management consulting firm that specializes in improving organizations’ performance through strategic and operational support. Between 2011 and 2013, he was the New Orleans federal team lead for the White House’s Strong Cities, Strong Communities (SC2) Initiative and, from 2010 to 2011, was a White House Fellow at the Domestic Policy Council. Between 2008 and 2010, Caulfield served as chief policy advisor to Newark, New Jersey, Mayor Cory Booker. Before entering government service, Caulfield worked in management consulting as an associate at McKinsey and Company, focusing on process design and public sector-related projects. Caulfield is also a member of the board of directors for the New Orleans Business Alliance.

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Diane Hoskins ’79: How going off-track can lead new SA+P graduates to become integrators of ideas

For the graduating class of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, the advice they received from their highly accomplished Commencement speaker may have come as a surprise.

“The title of this talk is ‘Off Track is On Track,’” said Diane Hoskins ’79, the global co-chair of Gensler, an international architecture, design, and planning firm with 55 offices across the world. “Being ‘off track’ is actually the best way to build a career of impact.”

Before a gathering of family, friends, and MIT faculty and administrators at a full Kresge Auditorium, Hoskins shared how her path from MIT led her to have an impact on spaces that inspire, engage, and support people around the world.

While hard work and perseverance likely paved the way for the Class of 2024 to be accepted to MIT — and begin what many assume is the first step in establishing a career — Hoskins posed that there was no point on her professional journey that felt like a predictable career path.

Instead, less than a year after graduating and landing her “dream job” at an architecture firm — which proved to be disappointing — she found herself working at a Chicago department store perfume counter. There, she happened to connect with a classmate who mentioned that a firm in Chicago was hiring, and that Hoskins should apply. Upon her initial visit to the firm’s offices, she said, something “clicked.”

“I was impressed with the work, the people, and the energy,” said Hoskins. “I liked the scale of the work. These were serious real projects all over the world, multidisciplinary teams, and complex challenges. I dove in 100 percent. The work was hard, and the push was real, but I learned something new every day. I knew that was the type of environment that I needed.”

Hoskins later worked at architecture firms in New York and Los Angeles, and then allowed her curiosity and interests to guide her to a variety of professional venues. Intrigued by the impact design could have on the workforce, she moved to corporate interior design. That work inspired her to go to the University of California Los Angeles, where she earned a master’s degree in business administration and developed an interest in real estate. For three years, she worked for a major real estate developer and explored how business owners and developers impacted the built environment. She then returned to architecture with a more robust understanding of the connectivity between the many disciplines the assembled graduates represented.

“Because of that unconventional, off-track model, I amassed a unique breadth of knowledge and more importantly, I understood how things fit together in the built environment,” said Hoskins. “I became an integrator of ideas. It created an ability to see how design and architecture connect to the world around us in powerful ways. Because of this, I ultimately became CEO of one of the largest design firms in the world.”

Perhaps most important, Hoskins — who is also a trustee of the MIT Corporation and a member of two MIT visiting committees — reminded the graduates that their work will touch the lives of millions of people everywhere and their impact will be “real.”

“Design is not a luxury,” she said. “It’s for everyone, everywhere. I know what it means to touch the lives of millions of people through my work. And you can, too.”

SA+P dean Hashim Sarkis opened the ceremony by welcoming guests and sharing his reflections on the Class of 2024. In preparing for his talk, Sarkis asked faculty and staff to characterize the class. “Diversity,” “self-advocacy,” and “vocal” were the terms repeated across the school. 

“Unhappy with the many circumstances that shaped your world, you took it upon yourselves to point to inadequacies and injustices, to assume your responsibilities, to defend your rights and those of others, and to work to fix things,” said Sarkis, who referenced the loss of innocent lives in ongoing wars, political polarization, climate disasters, and the resulting inequities from these global problems.

“Class of 2024, your outlook toward the world is indispensable, because the world is not in a good place. We have tried our best to deliver it to you better than we have inherited it. In many cases we didn’t. In some other cases, however, we did succeed. For one, we did select the best students … our generation needs the help of your generation. We have learned a lot from your self-advocacy and its power to steer the world to a better place. For that we thank you, Class of 2024.”

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Chancellor Melissa Nobles’ address to MIT’s undergraduate Class of 2024

Below is the text of Chancellor Melissa Nobles' Commencement remarks, as prepared for delivery today.

Thank you, Phoebe and William!

Ok everyone! It's happening! It's your graduation day! Congratulations to you, soon to be graduates, and congratulations to your loved ones! What a day!

To the class of 2024: You are here today, graduating from MIT on beautiful Killian court, thanks in part to the many people who believed in you, who championed you, who boosted you when you needed it.

Many of your loved ones are here with us today, and others around the globe are beaming with happiness as they watch this ceremony online. So, soak up the love and pride of your families and friends and champions here and afar…. It’s a very special day for them, too.

THANK YOU parents, thank you families, thank you friends, thank you to the professors and staff here at MIT, and thank you to everyone who has helped shape our graduates’ journeys to this day.

Now, let's talk about YOU, the graduates of 2024!

Yes, you started at MIT during Covid, and don't worry, we won't dwell on that.

What I do want to highlight is that because the world turned upside down, because you didn't know the "typical rhythms" of MIT and the upper classes couldn't show you all the ropes, you did what MIT students do best — and you did it in overdrive:

You made stuff up. You figured things out. You experimented. You iterated. You engineered. You stretched. You created new traditions. You bonded. You used your heart, and built your communities — first online, and later on campus — because connections to people never felt more important.

And I'm not trying to glamorize this. Surely, starting from scratch can be daunting, rocky, inefficient, exhausting… and filled with dead ends.

But it also creates possibility, which you filled with creativity, strength, persistence, and resilience. And, as a consequence, you built a COMPLETE and fulfilling college experience.

So as you wrap things up, take a moment to pause and be present. Look around you at your classmates, strangers who met on Zoom and became tight friends under tough circumstances.

Think back to the fall of your sophomore year, when things literally opened up on campus and you too opened yourselves up, wholeheartedly, to your fellow students.

What wild adventures you had as sophomores — getting to know each other — and drinking from MIT’s famed firehose — together… I-R-L!

And feel proud of the care you have shown to the classes who follow in your footsteps, by passing along the institutional knowledge that you painstakingly unearthed, that you created and refined, so that future students don’t need to start from scratch as you did.

Think about your houses, your clubs, your mentors inside and outside the classroom, your teams, your performances, your research, your coursework, and your creations.

Think about the intellectual curiosity that you arrived with, plus all that you learned since, and how your passions and ambitions led you to even more complex discoveries.

Remember all the psets you completed and will NEVER NEED TO DO AGAIN!

While you'll soon leave behind your beloved maker spaces and favorite hang out spots and the practice fields where you gave things your all, you'll bring your problem solving skills, your ingenuity, your passions, and your drive to new spaces… new spots… and new fields.

You'll forge new friendships while staying in touch with your MIT besties.

You'll buy bananas at the grocery store and reminisce about when you'd get them for free 24/7 at the Banana Lounge, back in the day.

You'll trek through the unknown with an adventurous and generous spirit. You'll ask for help when you need it, and you’ll continue to inspire and give to others that follow.

And above all, you'll be confident about what is possible, what you can achieve, how you can apply your talents and skills in this complex world — because you have a hard-earned MIT degree!

Your degree is an extra special accomplishment because you faced so many adversities along the way, individually and together... as a class.

But you did it! And all of us here today, and celebrating with you around the globe, are so proud of you!

So now let's listen to some soulful music, and then get those diplomas to you and make things official!

Congratulations MIT Class of 2024!

Adanna, take it away!

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Noubar Afeyan PhD ’87 gives new MIT graduates a special assignment

Biotechnology leader Noubar Afeyan PhD ’87 urged the MIT Class of 2024 to “accept impossible missions” for the betterment of the world, in a rousing keynote speech at the OneMIT Commencement ceremony this afternoon.

Afeyan is chair and co-founder of the biotechnology firm Moderna, whose groundbreaking Covid-19 vaccine has been distributed to billions of people in over 70 countries. In his remarks, Afeyan briefly discussed Moderna’s rapid development of the vaccine but focused the majority of his thoughts on this year’s graduating class — while using the “Mission: Impossible” television show and movies, a childhood favorite of his, as a motif.

“What I do want to talk about is what it takes to accept your own impossible missions and why you, as graduates of MIT, are uniquely prepared to do so,” Afeyan said. “Uniquely prepared — and also obligated. At a time when the world is beset by crises, your mission is nothing less than to salvage what seems lost, reverse what seems inevitable, and save the planet. And just like the agents in the movies, you need to accept the mission — even if it seems impossible.”

Afeyan spoke before an audience of thousands on MIT’s Killian Court, where graduates gathered in attendance along with family, friends, and MIT community members, during an afternoon of brightening weather that followed morning rain.

“Welcome long odds,” Afeyan told the graduates. “Embrace uncertainty, and lead with imagination.”

Afeyan’s speech was followed by an address from MIT President Sally Kornbluth, who described the Institute’s graduating class as a “natural wonder,” in a portion of her remarks directed to family and friends.

“You know how delightful and inspiring and thoughtful they are,” Kornbluth said of this year’s graduates. “It has been our privilege to teach them, and to learn together with them. And we share with you the highest hopes for what they will do next.”

The OneMIT Commencement ceremony is an Institute-wide event serving as a focal point for three days of graduation activities, from May 29 through May 31.

MIT’s Class of 2024 encompasses 3,666 students, earning a total of 1,386 undergraduate and 2,715 graduate degrees. (Some students are receiving more than one degree at a time.) Undergraduate and graduate students also have separate ceremonies, organized by academic units, in which their names are read as they walk across a stage.

Afeyan is a founder and the CEO of Flagship Pioneering, a venture firm started in 2000 that has developed more than 100 companies in the biotechnology industry, which combined have more than 60 drugs in clinical development.

A member of the MIT Corporation who earned his PhD from the Institute in biochemical engineering, Afeyan also served as a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management for 16 years. He is currently on the advisory board of the MIT Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning and has been a featured speaker at events such as MIT Solve. Afeyan is the co-founder of the Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity, among other philanthropic efforts.

“You already have a head start, quite a significant one,” Afeyan told MIT’s graduates. “You graduate today from MIT, and that says volumes about your knowledge, talent, vision, passion, and perseverance — all essential attributes of the elite 21st-century agent.” He then drew laughs by quipping, “Oh, and I forgot to mention our relaxed, uncompetitive nature, outstanding social skills, and the overall coolness that characterizes us MIT grads.”

Afeyan also heralded the Institute itself, citing it as a place crucial to the development of the “telephone, digital circuits, radar, email, internet, the Human Genome Project, controlled drug delivery, magnetic confinement fusion energy, artificial intelligence and all it is enabling — these and many more breakthroughs emerged from the work of extraordinary change agents tied to MIT.”

Long before Afeyan himself came to MIT, he grew up in an immigrant Armenian family in Beirut. After civil war came to Lebanon in 1975, he spent long hours in the family apartment watching “Mission: Impossible” re-runs on television.

As Afeyan noted, the special agents in the show always received a message beginning, “Your mission, should you choose to accept it … ” He added: “No matter how long the odds, or how great the risk, the agents always took the assignment. In the 50 years since, I have been consistently drawn to impossible missions, and today I hope to convince each and every one of you that you should be too.”

To accomplish difficult tasks, Afeyan said, people often do three things: imagine, innovate, and immigrate, with the latter defined broadly, not just as a physical relocation but an intellectual exploration.

“Imagination, to my mind, is the foundational building block of breakthrough science,” Afeyan said. “At its best, scientific research is a profoundly creative endeavor.”

Breakthroughs also deploy innovation, which Afeyan defined as “imagination in action.” To make innovative leaps, he added, requires a kind of “paranoid optimism. This means toggling back and forth between extreme optimism and deep-seated doubt,” in a way that “often starts with an act of faith.”

Beyond that, Afeyan said, “you will also need the courage of your convictions. Make no mistake, you leave MIT as special agents in demand. As you consider your many options, I urge you to think hard about what legacy you want to leave, and to do this periodically throughout your life. … You are far more than a technologist. You are a moral actor. The choice to maximize solely for profits and power will in the end leave you hollow. To forget this is to fail the world — and ultimately to fail yourself.”

Finally, Afeyan noted, to make great innovative leaps, it is often necessary to “immigrate,” something that can take many forms. Afeyan himself, as an Armenian from Lebanon who came to the U.S., has experienced it as geographic and social relocation, and also as the act of changing things while remaining in place.

“Here’s the really interesting thing I’ve learned over the years,” Afeyan said. “You don’t need to be from elsewhere to immigrate. If the immigrant experience can be described as leaving familiar circumstances and being dropped into unknown territory, I would argue that every one of you also arrived at MIT as an immigrant, no matter where you grew up. And as MIT immigrants, you are all at an advantage when it comes to impossible missions. You’ve left your comfort zone, you’ve entered unchartered territory, you’ve foregone the safety of the familiar.”

Synthesizing these points, Afeyan suggested, “If you imagine, innovate, and immigrate, you are destined to a life of uncertainty. Being surrounded by uncertainty can be unnerving, but it’s where you need to be. This is where the treasure lies. It’s ground zero for breakthroughs. Don’t conflate uncertainty and risk — or think of it as extreme risk. Uncertainty isn’t high risk; it’s unknown risk. It is, in essence, opportunity.”

Afeyan also noted that many people are “deeply troubled by the conflicts and tragedies we are witnessing” in the world today.

“I wish I had answers for all of us, but of course, I don’t,” Afeyan said. “But I do know this: Having conviction should not be confused with having all the answers. Over my many years engaged in entrepreneurship and humanitarian philanthropy, I have learned that there is enormous benefit in questioning what you think you know, listening to people who think differently, and seeking common ground,” a remark that drew an ovation from the audience.

In conclusion, Afeyan urged the Class of 2024 to face up to the world’s many challenges while getting used to a life defined by tackling tough tasks.

“Graduates, set forth on your impossible missions,” Afeyan said. “Accept them. Embrace them. The world needs you, and it’s your turn to star in the action-adventure called your life.”

Next, Kornbluth, issuing the president’s traditional “charge to the graduates,” lauded the Class of 2024 for being “a community that runs on an irrepressible combination of curiosity and creativity and drive. A community in which everyone you meet has something important to teach you. A community in which people expect excellence of themselves — and take great care of one another.”

As Kornbluth noted, most of the seniors in the undergraduate Class of 2024 had to study through, and work around, the Covid-19 pandemic. MIT, Kornbluth said, is a place where people “fought the virus with the tools of measurement and questioning and analysis and self-discipline — and was therefore able to pursue its mission almost undeterred.”

The campus community, she added, “understands, in a deep way, that the vaccines were not some ‘overnight miracle’ — but rather the final flowering of decades of work by thousands of people, pushing the boundaries of fundamental science.”

And while the Class of 2024 has acquired a great deal of knowledge in the classroom and lab, Kornbluth thanked its members for what they have given to MIT, as well.

“The Institute you are graduating from is — thanks in part to you — always reflecting and always changing,” Kornbluth said. “And I take that as your charge to us.”

The OneMIT Commencement event started with a parade for alumni from the class of 1974, back on campus for their 50th anniversary reunion. The MIT Police Honor Guard entered next as part of the ceremonial procession, followed by administration and faculty. The MIT Wind Ensemble, conducted by Fred Harris, Jr., provided the accompanying music.

Mark Gorenberg ’76, chair of the MIT Corporation, formally opened the ceremony, and Thea Keith-Lucas, chaplain to the Institute, gave an invocation. The Chorallaries of MIT sang the national anthem.

Afeyan’s remarks followed, but were delayed for several minutes by protesters holding signs. After his speech, Lieutenant Mikala Nicole Molina, president of the Graduate Student Council, delivered remarks as well.

“Let us step forward from today with a commitment not only to further our own goals, but also to use our skills and knowledge to contribute positively to our communities and the world,” Molina said. “Our actions reflect the excellence and integrity that MIT has instilled in us.”

Penny Brant, president of the undergraduate Class of 2024, then offered a salute to her classmates, saying “I know I would not be graduating here today if not for all of you who have helped me along the way. You all have had such a profound and positive impact on me, our community, and the world.”

Kornbluth’s speech, which followed, was momentarily interrupted by shouting from an audience member, before students and other audience members gave Kornbluth a sustained ovation and ceremonies resumed as planned.

R. Robert Wickham ’93, SM ’95, president of the MIT Alumni Association and chief marshal of the Commencement ceremony, also offered a traditional greeting for graduates saying he was “welcoming you into our alumni family, your infinite connection to MIT.” There are now almost 147,000 MIT alumni worldwide.

The Chorallaries sang the school song, “In praise of MIT,” as well as another Institute anthem, “Take Me Back to Tech,” moments after Gorenburg formally closed the ceremony.

Preceding Afeyan, recent MIT Commencement speakers have been engineer and YouTuber Mark Rober, in 2023; Director-General of the World Trade Organization Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, in 2022; lawyer and activist Bryan Stevenson, in 2021; and retired U.S. Navy four-star admiral William McRaven, in 2020.

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President Sally Kornbluth’s charge to the Class of 2024

Below is the text of President Sally Kornbluth’s Commencement remarks, as prepared for delivery today.

Penny, and Mikala ­— thank you both, for your reflections today, and for your leadership in our community.

Good afternoon, everyone.

It’s customary, on this day of celebration, for the president to deliver a “charge” to the graduating class. In a year when there has been so much campus turmoil, I may not be able to offer you either advice or inspiration. But I would like to acknowledge a few things that I’ve learned since I came to MIT 17 months ago.

And I want to start by addressing your parents and families.

As all of you know, the education we offer our students is famous for its depth and rigor — and we’re proud of the bursting satchel of skills and knowledge that every MIT graduate carries out into the world.

But the truth is that the young people you sent to us, whom you trusted us to educate, and care for, were remarkable before we even met them.

You certainly know this about them as individuals. And you know the specific challenges they had to overcome. For some of you, the young person whose graduation you’re here to celebrate is the first in your family to go to college. For some, coming here meant leaving home many thousands of miles away. For some, it meant overcoming language barriers or personal hardships. Some faced all the normal rigors of the MIT curriculum, on top of family responsibilities and even tragic losses. 

You also know their individual achievements — how much they learned, and grew, and stretched, and pushed themselves ­– long before they came to MIT. You know how delightful and inspiring and thoughtful they are.

And I expect at least most of you know the particular thrill of the day you realized that they now understood things that you just cannot understand — the day when it would no longer be possible for you, even theoretically, to “help them with their homework.”

So you know them well, as exceptional individuals.

But at MIT, we also get to see them all together.  Taken together, in their critical mass, they are a natural wonder — as awe-inspiring as a visitation of 17-year-cicadas, as miraculous as a total eclipse of the sun.

It has been our privilege to teach them, and to learn together with them. And we share with you the highest hopes for what they will do next.

Now, to those of you graduating today:

With the exception of a few masters’ students, nearly all of you have been part of the MIT community longer than I have. You know its culture and qualities so well that they may not stand out to you anymore. But I’ve spent my whole career in higher education — and I have never seen a community quite like this one.

A community founded on wonder — and wondering why. A community whose version of March Madness is 1000 people staring upward, spontaneously sharing the wondrous sight of a solar eclipse — (and actually being able to explain it). A community that runs on an irrepressible combination of curiosity and creativity and drive. A community in which everyone you meet has something important to teach you. A community in which people expect excellence of themselves — and take great care of one another.

I have no doubt that you’re tired of hearing how “resilient” you are, because of the pandemic.

But I mention that long, drawn-out challenge as another illustration of what it means to be part of this particular community. A community that fought the virus with the tools of measurement and questioning and analysis and self-discipline — and was therefore able to pursue its mission almost undeterred. A community that understands, in a deep way, that the vaccines were not some “overnight miracle” — but rather the final flowering of decades of work by thousands of people, pushing the boundaries of fundamental science. A place that does not shy from complexity. A place that embraces the hardest problems.

You may never find another community like it.

But I hope you’ll keep us in mind as you design and invent creative communities of your own!

All of you graduating today have been tested. By the repercussions of a relentless virus. By societal upheaval here, and by violent conflict and the most terrible human suffering abroad.

And of course, you have also been tested — many, many times — by the faculty of MIT.

An MIT education is a test of endurance. A grand p-set made of p-sets! A test made of tests!

MIT is famous for testing its students — but you have tested us too — from the moment you arrived, to the present. You’ve tested our systems. Our assumptions. Our practices.

You’ve revealed places where our understanding may fall short. You’ve shown us that we need to reflect more deeply and be willing to assess and reconsider long-held beliefs.

In short, the Institute you are graduating from is — thanks in part to you — always reflecting and always changing. And I take that as your charge to us.

So thank you! Congratulations! And best wishes to each of you for a wonderful future!

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Microscopic defects in ice influence how massive glaciers flow, study shows

As they seep and calve into the sea, melting glaciers and ice sheets are raising global water levels at unprecedented rates. To predict and prepare for future sea-level rise, scientists need a better understanding of how fast glaciers melt and what influences their flow.

Now, a study by MIT scientists offers a new picture of glacier flow, based on microscopic deformation in the ice. The results show that a glacier’s flow depends strongly on how microscopic defects move through the ice.

The researchers found they could estimate a glacier’s flow based on whether the ice is prone to microscopic defects of one kind versus another. They used this relationship between micro- and macro-scale deformation to develop a new model for how glaciers flow. With the new model, they mapped the flow of ice in locations across the Antarctic Ice Sheet.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, they found, the ice sheet is not a monolith but instead is more varied in where and how it flows in response to warming-driven stresses. The study “dramatically alters the climate conditions under which marine ice sheets may become unstable and drive rapid rates of sea-level rise,” the researchers write in their paper.

“This study really shows the effect of microscale processes on macroscale behavior,” says Meghana Ranganathan PhD ’22, who led the study as a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) and is now a postdoc at Georgia Tech. “These mechanisms happen at the scale of water molecules and ultimately can affect the stability of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.”

“Broadly speaking, glaciers are accelerating, and there are a lot of variants around that,” adds co-author and EAPS Associate Professor Brent Minchew. “This is the first study that takes a step from the laboratory to the ice sheets and starts evaluating what the stability of ice is in the natural environment. That will ultimately feed into our understanding of the probability of catastrophic sea-level rise.”

Ranganathan and Minchew’s study appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Micro flow

Glacier flow describes the movement of ice from the peak of a glacier, or the center of an ice sheet, down to the edges, where the ice then breaks off and melts into the ocean — a normally slow process that contributes over time to raising the world’s average sea level.

In recent years, the oceans have risen at unprecedented rates, driven by global warming and the accelerated melting of glaciers and ice sheets. While the loss of polar ice is known to be a major contributor to sea-level rise, it is also the biggest uncertainty when it comes to making predictions.

“Part of it’s a scaling problem,” Ranganathan explains. “A lot of the fundamental mechanisms that cause ice to flow happen at a really small scale that we can’t see. We wanted to pin down exactly what these microphysical processes are that govern ice flow, which hasn’t been represented in models of sea-level change.”

The team’s new study builds on previous experiments from the early 2000s by geologists at the University of Minnesota, who studied how small chips of ice deform when physically stressed and compressed. Their work revealed two microscopic mechanisms by which ice can flow: “dislocation creep,” where molecule-sized cracks migrate through the ice, and “grain boundary sliding,” where individual ice crystals slide against each other, causing the boundary between them to move through the ice.

The geologists found that ice’s sensitivity to stress, or how likely it is to flow, depends on which of the two mechanisms is dominant. Specifically, ice is more sensitive to stress when microscopic defects occur via dislocation creep rather than grain boundary sliding.

Ranganathan and Minchew realized that those findings at the microscopic level could redefine how ice flows at much larger, glacial scales.

“Current models for sea-level rise assume a single value for the sensitivity of ice to stress and hold this value constant across an entire ice sheet,” Ranganathan explains. “What these experiments showed was that actually, there’s quite a bit of variability in ice sensitivity, due to which of these mechanisms is at play.”

A mapping match

For their new study, the MIT team took insights from the previous experiments and developed a model to estimate an icy region’s sensitivity to stress, which directly relates to how likely that ice is to flow. The model takes in information such as the ambient temperature, the average size of ice crystals, and the estimated mass of ice in the region, and calculates how much the ice is deforming by dislocation creep versus grain boundary sliding. Depending on which of the two mechanisms is dominant, the model then estimates the region’s sensitivity to stress.

The scientists fed into the model actual observations from various locations across the Antarctic Ice Sheet, where others had previously recorded data such as the local height of ice, the size of ice crystals, and the ambient temperature. Based on the model’s estimates, the team generated a map of ice sensitivity to stress across the Antarctic Ice Sheet. When they compared this map to satellite and field measurements taken of the ice sheet over time, they observed a close match, suggesting that the model could be used to accurately predict how glaciers and ice sheets will flow in the future.

“As climate change starts to thin glaciers, that could affect the sensitivity of ice to stress,” Ranganathan says. “The instabilities that we expect in Antarctica could be very different, and we can now capture those differences, using this model.” 

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Modeling the threat of nuclear war

It’s a question that occupies significant bandwidth in the world of nuclear arms security: Could hypersonic missiles, which fly at speeds of least five times the speed of sound, increase the likelihood of nuclear war?

Eli Sanchez, who recently completed his doctoral studies at MIT's Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE), explored these harrowing but necessary questions under the guidance of Scott Kemp, associate professor at NSE and director of the MIT Laboratory for Nuclear Security and Policy.

A well-rounded interest in science

Growing up in the small railroad town of Smithville, Texas, Sanchez fell in love with basic science in high school. He can’t point to any one subject — calculus, anatomy, physiology — they were all endlessly fascinating. But physics was particularly appealing early on because you learned about abstract models and saw them play out in the real world, Sanchez says. “Even the smallest cellular functions playing out on a larger scale in your own body is cool,” he adds, explaining his love of physiology.

Attending college at the University of Texas in Dallas was even more rewarding, as he could soak in the sciences and feed an insatiable appetite. Electricity and magnetism drew Sanchez in, as did quantum mechanics. “The reality underlying quantum is so counterintuitive to what we expect that the subject was fascinating. It was really cool to learn these very new and sort of foreign rules,” Sanchez says.

Stoking his interest in science in his undergraduate years, Sanchez learned about nuclear engineering outside of the classroom, and was especially intrigued by its potential for mitigating climate change. A professor with a specialty in nuclear chemistry fueled this interest and it was through a class in radiation chemistry that Sanchez learned more about the field.

Graduating with a major in chemistry and a minor in physics, Sanchez married his love of science with another interest, computational modeling, when he pursued an internship at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. At Oak Ridge, Sanchez worked on irradiation studies on humans by using computational models of the human body.

Work on nuclear weapons security at NSE

After Oak Ridge, Sanchez was pretty convinced he wanted to work on computational research in the nuclear field in some way. He appreciates that computational models, when done well, can yield accurate forecasts of the future. One can use models to predict failures in nuclear reactors, for example, and prevent them from happening.

After test-driving a couple of research options at NSE, Sanchez worked in the field of nuclear weapons security.

Experts in the field have long believed that the weapons or types of delivery systems like missiles and aircraft will affect the likelihood that states will feel compelled to start a nuclear war. The canonical example is a multiple independently-targetable reentry vehicle (MIRV) system, which deploys multiple warheads on the same missile. If one missile can take out one warhead, it can destroy five or 10 warheads with just one MRV system. Such a weapons capability, Sanchez points out, is very destabilizing because there’s a strong incentive to attack first.

Similarly, experts in nuclear arms control have been suggesting that hypersonic weapons are destabilizing, but most of the reasons have been speculative, Sanchez says. “We’re putting these claims to technical scrutiny to see if they hold up.”

One way to test these claims is by focusing on flight paths. Hypersonic missiles have been considered destabilizing because it’s impossible to determine their trajectories. Hypersonic missiles can turn as they fly, so they have destination ambiguity. Unlike ballistic missiles, which have a fixed trajectory, it’s not always apparent where hypersonic missiles are going. When the final target of a missile is unclear it is easy to assume the worst: “They could be mistaken for attacks against nuclear weapons or nuclear command-and-control structures or against national capitals,” Sanchez says, “it could look much more serious than it is, so it could prompt the nation that’s being attacked to respond in a way that will escalate the situation.”

Sanchez’s doctoral work included modeling the flights of hypersonic weapons to quantify the ambiguities that could lead to escalation. The key was to evaluate the area of ambiguity for missiles with given sets of properties. Part of the work also involved making recommendations that prevent hypersonic weapons from being used in destabilizing ways. A couple of these suggestions included arming hypersonic missiles with conventional (rather than nuclear) warheads and to create no-fly zones around world capitals.

Helping underserved students

Sanchez’s work at NSE was not limited to his doctoral studies alone. Along with NSE postdoc Rachel Bielajew PhD ’24, he started the Graduate Application Assistance Program (GAAP), which helps mitigate some of the disadvantages that underrepresented students are likely to encounter.

The son of a Latino father and middle-class parents who were themselves the first in their families to graduate from college, Sanchez considers himself fortunate. But he admits that unlike many of his peers, he found graduate school difficult to navigate. “That gave me an appreciation for the position that a lot of people coming from different backgrounds where there’s less higher education in the family might face,” Sanchez says.

GAAP’s purpose is to lessen some of these barriers and to connect potential applicants to current NSE graduate students so they can ask questions whose answers might paint a clearer picture of the landscape. Sanchez stepped down after two years of co-chairing the initiative but he continues as mentor. Questions he fields range from finding a research/lab fit to funding opportunities.

As for opportunities Sanchez himself will follow: a postdoctoral fellowship in the Security Studies Program in the Department of Political Science at MIT.

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Modular, scalable hardware architecture for a quantum computer

Quantum computers hold the promise of being able to quickly solve extremely complex problems that might take the world’s most powerful supercomputer decades to crack.

But achieving that performance involves building a system with millions of interconnected building blocks called qubits. Making and controlling so many qubits in a hardware architecture is an enormous challenge that scientists around the world are striving to meet.

Toward this goal, researchers at MIT and MITRE have demonstrated a scalable, modular hardware platform that integrates thousands of interconnected qubits onto a customized integrated circuit. This “quantum-system-on-chip” (QSoC) architecture enables the researchers to precisely tune and control a dense array of qubits. Multiple chips could be connected using optical networking to create a large-scale quantum communication network.

By tuning qubits across 11 frequency channels, this QSoC architecture allows for a new proposed protocol of “entanglement multiplexing” for large-scale quantum computing.

The team spent years perfecting an intricate process for manufacturing two-dimensional arrays of atom-sized qubit microchiplets and transferring thousands of them onto a carefully prepared complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) chip. This transfer can be performed in a single step.

“We will need a large number of qubits, and great control over them, to really leverage the power of a quantum system and make it useful. We are proposing a brand new architecture and a fabrication technology that can support the scalability requirements of a hardware system for a quantum computer,” says Linsen Li, an electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) graduate student and lead author of a paper on this architecture.

Li’s co-authors include Ruonan Han, an associate professor in EECS, leader of the Terahertz Integrated Electronics Group, and member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE); senior author Dirk Englund, professor of EECS, principal investigator of the Quantum Photonics and Artificial Intelligence Group and of RLE; as well as others at MIT, Cornell University, the Delft Institute of Technology, the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, and the MITRE Corporation. The paper appears today in Nature.

Diamond microchiplets

While there are many types of qubits, the researchers chose to use diamond color centers because of their scalability advantages. They previously used such qubits to produce integrated quantum chips with photonic circuitry.

Qubits made from diamond color centers are “artificial atoms” that carry quantum information. Because diamond color centers are solid-state systems, the qubit manufacturing is compatible with modern semiconductor fabrication processes. They are also compact and have relatively long coherence times, which refers to the amount of time a qubit’s state remains stable, due to the clean environment provided by the diamond material.

In addition, diamond color centers have photonic interfaces which allows them to be remotely entangled, or connected, with other qubits that aren’t adjacent to them.

“The conventional assumption in the field is that the inhomogeneity of the diamond color center is a drawback compared to identical quantum memory like ions and neutral atoms. However, we turn this challenge into an advantage by embracing the diversity of the artificial atoms: Each atom has its own spectral frequency. This allows us to communicate with individual atoms by voltage tuning them into resonance with a laser, much like tuning the dial on a tiny radio,” says Englund.

This is especially difficult because the researchers must achieve this at a large scale to compensate for the qubit inhomogeneity in a large system.

To communicate across qubits, they need to have multiple such “quantum radios” dialed into the same channel. Achieving this condition becomes near-certain when scaling to thousands of qubits. To this end, the researchers surmounted that challenge by integrating a large array of diamond color center qubits onto a CMOS chip which provides the control dials. The chip can be incorporated with built-in digital logic that rapidly and automatically reconfigures the voltages, enabling the qubits to reach full connectivity.

“This compensates for the in-homogenous nature of the system. With the CMOS platform, we can quickly and dynamically tune all the qubit frequencies,” Li explains.

Lock-and-release fabrication

To build this QSoC, the researchers developed a fabrication process to transfer diamond color center “microchiplets” onto a CMOS backplane at a large scale.

They started by fabricating an array of diamond color center microchiplets from a solid block of diamond. They also designed and fabricated nanoscale optical antennas that enable more efficient collection of the photons emitted by these color center qubits in free space.

Then, they designed and mapped out the chip from the semiconductor foundry. Working in the MIT.nano cleanroom, they post-processed a CMOS chip to add microscale sockets that match up with the diamond microchiplet array.

They built an in-house transfer setup in the lab and applied a lock-and-release process to integrate the two layers by locking the diamond microchiplets into the sockets on the CMOS chip. Since the diamond microchiplets are weakly bonded to the diamond surface, when they release the bulk diamond horizontally, the microchiplets stay in the sockets.

“Because we can control the fabrication of both the diamond and the CMOS chip, we can make a complementary pattern. In this way, we can transfer thousands of diamond chiplets into their corresponding sockets all at the same time,” Li says.

The researchers demonstrated a 500-micron by 500-micron area transfer for an array with 1,024 diamond nanoantennas, but they could use larger diamond arrays and a larger CMOS chip to further scale up the system. In fact, they found that with more qubits, tuning the frequencies actually requires less voltage for this architecture.

“In this case, if you have more qubits, our architecture will work even better,” Li says.

The team tested many nanostructures before they determined the ideal microchiplet array for the lock-and-release process. However, making quantum microchiplets is no easy task, and the process took years to perfect.

“We have iterated and developed the recipe to fabricate these diamond nanostructures in MIT cleanroom, but it is a very complicated process. It took 19 steps of nanofabrication to get the diamond quantum microchiplets, and the steps were not straightforward,” he adds.

Alongside their QSoC, the researchers developed an approach to characterize the system and measure its performance on a large scale. To do this, they built a custom cryo-optical metrology setup.

Using this technique, they demonstrated an entire chip with over 4,000 qubits that could be tuned to the same frequency while maintaining their spin and optical properties. They also built a digital twin simulation that connects the experiment with digitized modeling, which helps them understand the root causes of the observed phenomenon and determine how to efficiently implement the architecture.

In the future, the researchers could boost the performance of their system by refining the materials they used to make qubits or developing more precise control processes. They could also apply this architecture to other solid-state quantum systems.

This work was supported by the MITRE Corporation Quantum Moonshot Program, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the U.S. Army Research Office, the Center for Quantum Networks, and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Program.

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Looking for a specific action in a video? This AI-based method can find it for you

The internet is awash in instructional videos that can teach curious viewers everything from cooking the perfect pancake to performing a life-saving Heimlich maneuver.

But pinpointing when and where a particular action happens in a long video can be tedious. To streamline the process, scientists are trying to teach computers to perform this task. Ideally, a user could just describe the action they’re looking for, and an AI model would skip to its location in the video.

However, teaching machine-learning models to do this usually requires a great deal of expensive video data that have been painstakingly hand-labeled.

A new, more efficient approach from researchers at MIT and the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab trains a model to perform this task, known as spatio-temporal grounding, using only videos and their automatically generated transcripts.

The researchers teach a model to understand an unlabeled video in two distinct ways: by looking at small details to figure out where objects are located (spatial information) and looking at the bigger picture to understand when the action occurs (temporal information).

Compared to other AI approaches, their method more accurately identifies actions in longer videos with multiple activities. Interestingly, they found that simultaneously training on spatial and temporal information makes a model better at identifying each individually.

In addition to streamlining online learning and virtual training processes, this technique could also be useful in health care settings by rapidly finding key moments in videos of diagnostic procedures, for example.

“We disentangle the challenge of trying to encode spatial and temporal information all at once and instead think about it like two experts working on their own, which turns out to be a more explicit way to encode the information. Our model, which combines these two separate branches, leads to the best performance,” says Brian Chen, lead author of a paper on this technique.

Chen, a 2023 graduate of Columbia University who conducted this research while a visiting student at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, is joined on the paper by James Glass, senior research scientist, member of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, and head of the Spoken Language Systems Group in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL); Hilde Kuehne, a member of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab who is also affiliated with Goethe University Frankfurt; and others at MIT, Goethe University, the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, and Quality Match GmbH. The research will be presented at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition.

Global and local learning

Researchers usually teach models to perform spatio-temporal grounding using videos in which humans have annotated the start and end times of particular tasks.

Not only is generating these data expensive, but it can be difficult for humans to figure out exactly what to label. If the action is “cooking a pancake,” does that action start when the chef begins mixing the batter or when she pours it into the pan?

“This time, the task may be about cooking, but next time, it might be about fixing a car. There are so many different domains for people to annotate. But if we can learn everything without labels, it is a more general solution,” Chen says.

For their approach, the researchers use unlabeled instructional videos and accompanying text transcripts from a website like YouTube as training data. These don’t need any special preparation.

They split the training process into two pieces. For one, they teach a machine-learning model to look at the entire video to understand what actions happen at certain times. This high-level information is called a global representation.

For the second, they teach the model to focus on a specific region in parts of the video where action is happening. In a large kitchen, for instance, the model might only need to focus on the wooden spoon a chef is using to mix pancake batter, rather than the entire counter. This fine-grained information is called a local representation.

The researchers incorporate an additional component into their framework to mitigate misalignments that occur between narration and video. Perhaps the chef talks about cooking the pancake first and performs the action later.

To develop a more realistic solution, the researchers focused on uncut videos that are several minutes long. In contrast, most AI techniques train using few-second clips that someone trimmed to show only one action.

A new benchmark

But when they came to evaluate their approach, the researchers couldn’t find an effective benchmark for testing a model on these longer, uncut videos — so they created one.

To build their benchmark dataset, the researchers devised a new annotation technique that works well for identifying multistep actions. They had users mark the intersection of objects, like the point where a knife edge cuts a tomato, rather than drawing a box around important objects.

“This is more clearly defined and speeds up the annotation process, which reduces the human labor and cost,” Chen says.

Plus, having multiple people do point annotation on the same video can better capture actions that occur over time, like the flow of milk being poured. All annotators won’t mark the exact same point in the flow of liquid.

When they used this benchmark to test their approach, the researchers found that it was more accurate at pinpointing actions than other AI techniques.

Their method was also better at focusing on human-object interactions. For instance, if the action is “serving a pancake,” many other approaches might focus only on key objects, like a stack of pancakes sitting on a counter. Instead, their method focuses on the actual moment when the chef flips a pancake onto a plate.

Next, the researchers plan to enhance their approach so models can automatically detect when text and narration are not aligned, and switch focus from one modality to the other. They also want to extend their framework to audio data, since there are usually strong correlations between actions and the sounds objects make.

This research is funded, in part, by the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab.

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Q&A: The power of tiny gardens and their role in addressing climate change

To address the climate crisis, one must understand environmental history. MIT Professor Kate Brown’s research has typically focused on environmental catastrophes. More recently, Brown has been exploring a more hopeful topic: tiny gardens.

Brown is the Thomas M. Siebel Distinguished Professor in History of Science in the MIT Program in Science, Technology, and Society. In this Q&A, Brown discusses her research, and how she believes her current project could help put power into the hands of everyday people.

This is part of an ongoing series exploring how the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences is addressing the climate crisis.

Q: You have created an unusual niche for yourself as an historian of environmental catastrophes. What drew you to such a dismal beat?

A: Historians often study New York, Warsaw, Moscow, Berlin, but if you go to these little towns that nobody's ever heard of, that's where you see the destruction in the wake of progress. This is likely because I grew up in a manufacturing town in the Midwestern Rust Belt, watching stores go bankrupt and houses sit empty. I became very interested in the people who were the last to turn off the lights.

Q: Did this interest in places devastated by technological and economic change eventually lead to your investigation of Chernobyl?

A: I first studied the health and environmental consequences of radioactive waste on communities near nuclear weapons facilities in the U.S. and Russia, and then decided to focus on the health and environmental impacts of fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear energy plant disaster. After gaining access to the KGB records in Kiev, I realized that there was a Klondike of records describing what Soviet officials at the time called a “public health disaster.” People on the ground recognized the saturation of radioactivity into environments and food supplies not with any with sensitive devices, but by noticing the changes in ecologies and on human bodies. I documented how Moscow leaders historically and decades later engaged in a coverup, and that even international bodies charged with examining nuclear issues were reluctant to acknowledge this ongoing public health disaster due to liabilities in their own countries from the production and testing of nuclear weapons during the Cold War.

Q: Why did you turn from detailed studies of what you call “modernist wastelands” to the subject of climate change?

A: Journalists and scholars have worked hard in the last two decades to get people to understand the scope and the scale and the verisimilitude of climate change. And that’s great, but some of these catastrophic stories we tell don’t make people feel very safe or secure. They have a paralyzing effect on us. Climate change is one of many problems that are too big for any one person to tackle, or any one entity, whether it’s a huge nation like the United States or an international body like the U.N.

So I thought I would start to work on something that is very small scale that puts action in the hands of just regular people to try to tell a more hopeful story. I am finishing a new book about working-class people who got pushed off their farms in the 19th century, and ended up in mega cities like London, Berlin, Amsterdam, and Washington D.C., find land on the periphery of the cities. They start digging, growing their own food, cooperating together. They basically recreated forms of the commons in cities. And in so doing, they generate the most productive agriculture in recorded history.

Q: What are some highlights of this extraordinary city-based food generation?

A: In Paris circa 1900, 5,000 urban farmers grew fruits and vegetables and fresh produce for 2 million Parisians with a surplus left over to sell to London. They would plant three to six crops a year on one tract of land using horse manure to heat up soils from below to push the season and grow spring crops in winter and summer crops in spring.

An agricultural economist looked at the inputs and the outputs from these Parisian farms. He found there was no comparison to the Green Revolution fields of the 1970s. These urban gardeners were producing far more per acre, with no petroleum-based fertilizers.

Q: What is the connection between little gardens like these and the global climate crisis, where individuals can feel at loss facing the scale of the problems?

A: You can think of a tiny city garden like a coral reef, where one little worm comes and builds its cave. And then another one attaches itself to the first, and so on. Pretty soon you have a great coral reef with a platform to support hundreds of different species — a rich biodiversity. Tiny gardens work that way in cities, which is one reason cities are now surprising hotspots of biodiversity.

Transforming urban green space into tiny gardens doesn’t take an act of God, the U.N., or the U.S. Congress to make a change. You could just go to your municipality and say, “Listen, right now we have a zoning code that says every time there's a new condo, you have to have one or two parking spaces, but we’d rather see one or two garden spaces.”

And if you don't want a garden, you’ll have a neighbor who does. So people are outside and they have their hands in the soil and then they start to exchange produce with one another. As they share carrots and zucchini, they exchange soil and human microbes as well. We know that when people share microbiomes, they get along better, have more in common. It comes as no surprise that humans have organized societies around shaking hands, kissing on the cheek, producing food together and sharing meals. That’s what I think we've lost in our remote worlds.

Q: So can we address or mitigate the impacts of climate change on a community-by-community basis?

A: I believe that’s probably the best way to do it. When we think of energy we often imagine deposits of oil or gas, but, as our grad student Turner Adornetto points out, every environment has energy running through it. Every environment has its own best solution. If it’s a community that lives along a river, tap into hydropower; or if it’s a community that has tons of organic waste, maybe you want to use microbial power; and if it’s a community that has lots of sun then use different kinds of solar power. The legacy of midcentury modernism is that engineers came up with one-size-fits-all solutions to plug in anywhere in the world, regardless of local culture, traditions, or environment. That is one of the problems that has gotten us into this fix in the first place.

Politically, it’s a good idea to avoid making people feel they’re being pushed around by one set of codes, one set of laws in terms of coming up with solutions that work. There are ways of deriving energy and nutrients that enrich the environment, ways that don’t drain and deplete. You see that so clearly with a plant, which just does nothing but grow and contribute and give, whether it’s in life or in death. It’s just constantly improving its environment.

Q: How do you unleash creativity and propagate widespread local responses to climate change?

A: One of the important things we are trying to accomplish in the humanities is communicating in the most down-to-earth ways possible to our students and the public so that anybody — from a fourth grader to a retired person — can get engaged.

There’s “TECHNOLOGY” in uppercase letters, the kind that is invented and patented in places like MIT. And then there’s technology in lowercase letters, where people are working with things readily at hand. That is the kind of creativity we don’t often pay enough attention to.

Keep in mind that at the end of the 19th century, scientists were sure that the earth was cooling and the earth would all under ice by 2020. In the 1950s, many people feared nuclear warfare. In the 1960s the threat was the “population bomb.” Every generation seems to have its apocalyptic sense of doom. It is helpful to take climate change and the Anthropocene and put them in perspective. These are problems we can solve.

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In international relations, it’s the message, not the medium

Over 180 world leaders maintain social media accounts, and some of them issue policy warnings to rivals and the public on these platforms rather than relying on traditional government statements. How seriously do people take such social media postings?

A new study suggests the general public and policymakers alike take leaders’ social media posts just as seriously as they take formal government statements. The research, by MIT political scientists, deploys novel surveys of both the public and experienced foreign policy specialists.

“What we find, which is really surprising, across both expert audiences and public audiences, is that tweets are not necessarily seen as this form of cheap talk,” says Erik Lin-Greenberg, an MIT faculty member and co-author of a new paper detailing the results. “They’re viewed as the same type of signal as that being offered through more formal and traditional communications.”

The findings suggest that people have become so fully acclimatized to social media that they regard the medium as a vehicle for messages that have just as much credibility as those generated through the old-school method, in which official statements are released in formal language on official government documents.

“One clue that sheds some light on our unexpected findings is that a slight majority of our survey respondents who read a tweet identified what they read as a White House press release,” says Benjamin Norwood Harris, an MIT doctoral candidate and co-author of the paper. “Respondents really seemed to believe that tweets were just another way presidents communicate in their official capacity.”

The paper, “Cheap Tweets?: Crisis Signaling in the Age of Twitter,” appears in the June issue of International Studies Quarterly. Greenberg is the Leo Marx Career Development Assistant Professor of the History and Culture of Science and Technology at MIT; Harris is a PhD candidate in MIT’s Department of Political Science who specializes in security studies and international relations.

The study fits into a larger body of political science research in the area of “crisis signaling” — the way words and actions in international relations are interpreted, which is often critical to diplomacy. However, when it comes to the use of social media, “There’s been very little research that looks at the credibility of public signals,” Lin-Greenberg notes.

The research consisted of a multilayered set of surveys, conducted in 2021. Using the survey platform Lucid, the scholars surveyed 977 members of the general public about a hypothetical confrontation between the U.S. and Iran, using facsimiles of messages on Twitter (now known as X) and formal White House statements that might have been sent by U.S. President Joe Biden during such a scenario. Separately, the scholars also recruited foreign policy experts from the U.S., India, and Singapore, which all have active English-language think tank spheres, to take the same survey.

Asked to rate the credibility of tweets and official statements on a five-point scale, the public rated official press releases at 3.30 and tweets at 3.22. The policy experts gave a 3.10 rating to the official statement, and a 3.11 rating to the tweets.

“No matter how we cut the data, we just don’t see much difference in how respondents rated Tweets versus official statements,” Harris says. “Even when we vary the formality of the tweet language — including things like all caps and lots of exclamation points — we don’t find an effect.”

A follow-up layer of the survey then asked respondents about a related hypothetical conflict between the U.S. and Iran in 2026, with facsimile tweets and White House statements attributed to both Biden and former president Donald Trump, given that either could be president then. The aim was to see if different leaders influenced perceptions of the two forms of statements.

But in this instance, the public and policy experts regarded tweets and official statements virtually equally seriously. Trump’s statements were given slightly more credibility overall, but with a strong partisan divide: Liberals took Biden’s statements to have more credibility, and conservatives took Trump’s statements to have more credibility.

Overall, the study suggests that many people are simply unaffected by the medium in which a global leader might choose to issue a warning to leaders of other nations. In the surveys, participants were given the opportunity to describe qualitatively what shaped their responses; only about 2 percent cited the medium as an issue.

As Harris notes, the survey data also indicate that slightly more than 51 percent of respondents believed a tweet constituted an officially released government statement. Additionally, about 73 percent of respondents thought tweets were generated in the same way as statements that have the official imprint of a national government.

“People who see a tweet don’t really differentiate it in their minds. They don’t think the tweet is not an official statement,” Lin-Greenberg says. “About three-quarters of the population think it’s coordinated, whether it’s a tweet or an official statement.”

In the paper, the scholars suggest there is considerable room for follow-up research in this area. Among other things, future studies might compare the effect of social media statements to other types of communication, such as speeches. Scholars might also study other social media platforms or broaden the set of countries being studied. Such research, Lin-Greenberg and Harris conclude in the paper, “will further enrich our understanding of the interactions between emerging technology and international politics.”

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A modest intervention that helps low-income families beat the poverty trap

Many low-income families might desire to move into different neighborhoods — places that are safer, quieter, or have more resources in their schools. In fact, not many do relocate. But it turns out they are far more likely to move when someone is on hand to help them do it.

That’s the outcome of a high-profile experiment by a research team including MIT economists, which shows that a modest amount of logistical assistance dramatically increases the likelihood that low-income families will move into neighborhoods providing better economic opportunity.

The randomized field experiment, set in the Seattle area, showed the number of families using vouchers for new housing jumped from 15 percent to 53 percent when they had more information, some financial support, and, most of all, a “navigator” who helped them address logistical challenges.

“The question we were after is really what drives residential segregation,” says Nathaniel Hendren, an MIT economist and co-author of the paper detailing the results. “Is it due to preferences people have, due to having family or jobs close by? Or are there constraints on the search process that make it difficult to move?” As the study clearly shows, he says, “Just pairing people with [navigators] broke down search barriers and created dramatic changes in where they chose to live. This was really just a very deep need in the search process.”

The study’s results have prompted U.S. Congress to twice allocate $25 million in funds allowing eight other U.S. cities to run their own versions of the experiment and measure the impact.

That is partly because the result “represented a bigger treatment effect than any of us had really ever seen,” says Christopher Palmer, an MIT economist and a co-author of the paper. “We spend a little bit of money to help people take down the barriers to moving to these places, and they are happy to do it.”

Having attracted attention when the top-line numbers were first aired in 2019, the study is now in its final form as a peer-reviewed paper, “Creating Moves to Opportunity: Experimental Evidence on Barriers to Neighborhood Choice,” published in this month’s issue of the American Economic Review.

The authors are Peter Bergman, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin; Raj Chetty, a professor at Harvard University; Stefanie DeLuca, a professor at Johns Hopkins University; Hendren, a professor in MIT’s Department of Economics; Lawrence F. Katz, a professor at Harvard University; and Palmer, an associate professor in the MIT Sloan School of Management.

New research renews an idea

The study follows other prominent work about the geography of economic mobility. In 2018, Chetty and Hendren released an “Opportunity Atlas” of the U.S., a comprehensive national study showing that, other things being equal, some areas provide greater long-term economic mobility for people who grow up there. The project brought renewed attention to the influence of place on economic outcomes.

The Seattle experiment also follows a 1990s federal government program called Moving to Opportunity, a test in five U.S. cities helping families seek new neighborhoods. That intervention had mixed results: Participants who moved reported better mental health, but there was no apparent change in income levels.

Still, in light of the Opportunity Atlas data, the scholars decided revisit the concept, with a program they call Creating Moves to Opportunity (CMTO). This provides housing vouchers along with a bundle of other things: Short-term financial assistance of about $1,000 on average, more information, and the assistance of a “navigator,” a caseworker who would help troubleshoot issues that families encountered.   

The experiment was implemented by the Seattle and King County Housing Authorities, along with MDRC, a nonprofit policy research organization, and J-PAL North America. The latter is one of the arms of the MIT-based Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), a leading center promoting randomized, controlled trials in the social sciences.

The experiment had 712 families in it, and two phases. In the first, all participants were issued housing vouchers worth a little more than $1,500 per month on average, and divided into treatment and control groups. Families in the treatment group also received the CMTO bundle of services, including the navigator.

In this phase, lasting from 2018 to 2019, 53 percent of families in the treatment group used the housing vouchers, while only 15 percent of those in the control group used the vouchers. Families who moved dispersed to 46 different neighborhoods, defined by U.S. Census Bureau tracts, meaning they were not just shifting en masse from one location to one other.

Families who moved were very likely to want to renew their leases, and expressed satisfaction with their new neighborhoods. All told, the program cost about $2,670 per family. Additional research scholars in the group have conducted about changes in income suggest the program’s direct benefits are 2.5 times greater than its costs.

“Our sense is that’s a pretty reasonable return for the money compared to other strategies we have to combat intergenerational poverty,” Hendren says.

Logistical and emotional support

In the second phase of the experiment, lasting from 2019 to 2020, families in a treatment group received individual components of the CMTO support, while the control group again only received the housing vouchers. This way, the researchers could see which parts of the program made the biggest difference. The vast majority of the impact, it turned out, came from receiving the full set of services, especially the “customized” help of navigators.

“What came out of the phase two results was that the customized search assistance was just invaluable to people,” Palmer says. “The barriers are so heterogenous across families.” Some people might have trouble understanding lease terms; others might want guidance about schools; still others might have no experience renting a moving truck.

The research turned up a related phenomenon: In 251 follow-up interviews, families often emphasized that the navigators mattered partly because moving is so stressful.

“When we interviewed people and asked them what was so valuable about that, they said things like, ‘Emotional support,’” Palmer observes. He notes that many families participating in the program are “in distress,” facing serious problems such as the potential for homelessness.

Moving the experiment to other cities

The researchers say they welcome the opportunity to see how the Creating Moves to Opportunity program, or at least localized replications of it, might fare in other places. Congress allocated $25 million in 2019, and then again in 2022, so the program could be tried out in eight metro areas: Cleveland, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Nashville, New Orleans, New York City, Pittsburgh, and Rochester. With the Covid-19 pandemic having slowed the process, officials in those places are still examing the outcomes.

“It’s thrilling to us that Congress has appropriated money to try this program in different cities, so we can verify it wasn’t just that we had really magical and dedicated family navigators in Seattle,” Palmer says. “That would be really useful to test and know.”

Seattle might feature a few particularities that helped the program succeed. As a newer city than many metro areas, it may contain fewer social roadblocks to moving across neighborhoods, for instance.

“It’s conceivable that in Seattle, the barriers for moving to opportunity are more solvable than they might be somewhere else.” Palmer says. “That’s [one reason] to test it in other places.”

Still, the Seattle experiment might translate well even in cities considered to have entrenched neighborhood boundaries and racial divisions. Some of the project’s elements extend earlier work applied in the Baltimore Housing Mobility Program, a voucher plan run by the Baltimore Regional Housing Partnership. In Seattle, though, the researchers were able to rigorously test the program as a field experiment, one reason it has seemed viable to try replicate it elsewhere.

“The generalizable lesson is there’s not a deep-seated preference for staying put that’s driving residential segregation,” Hendren says. “I think that’s important to take away from this. Is this the right policy to fight residential segregation? That’s an open question, and we’ll see if this kind of approach generalizes to other cities.”

The research was supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, the Surgo Foundation, the William T. Grant Foundation, and Harvard University.

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Understanding why autism symptoms sometimes improve amid fever

Scientists are catching up to what parents and other caregivers have been reporting for many years: When some people with autism spectrum disorders experience an infection that sparks a fever, their autism-related symptoms seem to improve.

With a pair of new grants from The Marcus Foundation, scientists at MIT and Harvard Medical School hope to explain how this happens in an effort to eventually develop therapies that mimic the “fever effect” to similarly improve symptoms.

“Although it isn’t actually triggered by the fever, per se, the ‘fever effect’ is real, and it provides us with an opportunity to develop therapies to mitigate symptoms of autism spectrum disorders,” says neuroscientist Gloria Choi, associate professor in the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and affiliate of The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory.

Choi will collaborate on the project with Jun Huh, associate professor of immunology at Harvard Medical School. Together the grants to the two institutions provide $2.1 million over three years.

“To the best of my knowledge, the ‘fever effect’ is perhaps the only natural phenomenon in which developmentally determined autism symptoms improve significantly, albeit temporarily,” Huh says. “Our goal is to learn how and why this happens at the levels of cells and molecules, to identify immunological drivers, and produce persistent effects that benefit a broad group of individuals with autism.”

The Marcus Foundation has been involved in autism work for over 30 years, helping to develop the field and addressing everything from awareness to treatment to new diagnostic devices.

“I have long been interested in novel approaches to treating and lessening autism symptoms, and doctors Choi and Huh have honed in on a bold theory,” says Bernie Marcus, founder and chair of The Marcus Foundation. “It is my hope that this Marcus Foundation Medical Research Award helps their theory come to fruition and ultimately helps improve the lives of children with autism and their families.”

Brain-immune interplay

For a decade, Huh and Choi have been investigating the connection between infection and autism. Their studies suggest that the beneficial effects associated with fever may arise from molecular changes in the immune system during infection, rather than on the elevation of body temperature, per se.

Their work in mice has shown that maternal infection during pregnancy, modulated by the composition of the mother’s microbiome, can lead to neurodevelopmental abnormalities in the offspring that result in autism-like symptoms, such as impaired sociability. Huh’s and Choi’s labs have traced the effect to elevated maternal levels of a type of immune-signaling molecule called IL-17a, which acts on receptors in brain cells of the developing fetus, leading to hyperactivity in a region of the brain’s cortex called S1DZ. In another study, they’ve shown how maternal infection appears to prime offspring to produce more IL-17a during infection later in life.

Building on these studies, a 2020 paper clarified the fever effect in the setting of autism. This research showed that mice that developed autism symptoms as a result of maternal infection while in utero would exhibit improvements in their sociability when they had infections — a finding that mirrored observations in people. The scientists discovered that this effect depended on over-expression of IL-17a, which in this context appeared to calm affected brain circuits. When the scientists administered IL-17a directly to the brains of mice with autism-like symptoms whose mothers had not been infected during pregnancy, the treatment still produced improvements in symptoms.

New studies and samples

This work suggested that mimicking the “fever effect” by giving extra IL-17a could produce similar therapeutic effects for multiple autism-spectrum disorders, with different underlying causes. But the research also left wide-open questions that must be answered before any clinically viable therapy could be developed. How exactly does IL-17a lead to symptom relief and behavior change in the mice? Does the fever effect work in the same way in people?

In the new project, Choi and Huh hope to answer those questions in detail.

“By learning the science behind the fever effect and knowing the mechanism behind the improvement in symptoms, we can have enough knowledge to be able to mimic it, even in individuals who don’t naturally experience the fever effect,” Choi says.

Choi and Huh will continue their work in mice seeking to uncover the sequence of molecular, cellular and neural circuit effects triggered by IL-17a and similar molecules that lead to improved sociability and reduction in repetitive behaviors. They will also dig deeper into why immune cells in mice exposed to maternal infection become primed to produce IL-17a.

To study the fever effect in people, Choi and Huh plan to establish a “biobank” of samples from volunteers with autism who do or don’t experience symptoms associated with fever, as well as comparable volunteers without autism. The scientists will measure, catalog, and compare these immune system molecules and cellular responses in blood plasma and stool to determine the biological and clinical markers of the fever effect.

If the research reveals distinct cellular and molecular features of the immune response among people who experience improvements with fever, the researchers could be able to harness these insights into a therapy that mimics the benefits of fever without inducing actual fever. Detailing how the immune response acts in the brain would inform how the therapy should be crafted to produce similar effects.

"We are enormously grateful and excited to have this opportunity," Huh says. "We hope our work will ‘kick up some dust’ and make the first step toward discovering the underlying causes of fever responses. Perhaps, one day in the future, novel therapies inspired by our work will help transform the lives of many families and their children with ASD [autism spectrum disorder]."

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School of Engineering welcomes new faculty

The School of Engineering welcomes 15 new faculty members across six of its academic departments. This new cohort of faculty members, who have either recently started their roles at MIT or will start within the next year, conduct research across a diverse range of disciplines.

Many of these new faculty specialize in research that intersects with multiple fields. In addition to positions in the School of Engineering, a number of these faculty have positions at other units across MIT. Faculty with appointments in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) report into both the School of Engineering and the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing. This year, new faculty also have joint appointments between the School of Engineering and the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences and the School of Science.

“I am delighted to welcome this cohort of talented new faculty to the School of Engineering,” says Anantha Chandrakasan, chief innovation and strategy officer, dean of engineering, and Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “I am particularly struck by the interdisciplinary approach many of these new faculty take in their research. They are working in areas that are poised to have tremendous impact. I look forward to seeing them grow as researchers and educators.”

The new engineering faculty include:

Stephen Bates joined the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science as an assistant professor in September 2023. He is also a member of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS). Bates uses data and AI for reliable decision-making in the presence of uncertainty. In particular, he develops tools for statistical inference with AI models, data impacted by strategic behavior, and settings with distribution shift. Bates also works on applications in life sciences and sustainability. He previously worked as a postdoc in the Statistics and EECS departments at the University of California at Berkeley (UC Berkeley). Bates received a BS in statistics and mathematics at Harvard University and a PhD from Stanford University.

Abigail Bodner joined the Department of EECS and Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences as an assistant professor in January. She is also a member of the LIDS. Bodner’s research interests span climate, physical oceanography, geophysical fluid dynamics, and turbulence. Previously, she worked as a Simons Junior Fellow at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. Bodner received her BS in geophysics and mathematics and MS in geophysics from Tel Aviv University, and her SM in applied mathematics and PhD from Brown University.

Andreea Bobu ’17 will join the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics as an assistant professor in July. Her research sits at the intersection of robotics, mathematical human modeling, and deep learning. Previously, she was a research scientist at the Boston Dynamics AI Institute, focusing on how robots and humans can efficiently arrive at shared representations of their tasks for more seamless and reliable interactions. Bobu earned a BS in computer science and engineering from MIT and a PhD in electrical engineering and computer science from UC Berkeley.

Suraj Cheema will join the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, with a joint appointment in the Department of EECS, as an assistant professor in July. His research explores atomic-scale engineering of electronic materials to tackle challenges related to energy consumption, storage, and generation, aiming for more sustainable microelectronics. This spans computing and energy technologies via integrated ferroelectric devices. He previously worked as a postdoc at UC Berkeley. Cheema earned a BS in applied physics and applied mathematics from Columbia University and a PhD in materials science and engineering from UC Berkeley.

Samantha Coday joins the Department of EECS as an assistant professor in July. She will also be a member of the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics. Her research interests include ultra-dense power converters enabling renewable energy integration, hybrid electric aircraft and future space exploration. To enable high-performance converters for these critical applications her research focuses on the optimization, design, and control of hybrid switched-capacitor converters. Coday earned a BS in electrical engineering and mathematics from Southern Methodist University and an MS and a PhD in electrical engineering and computer science from UC Berkeley.

Mitchell Gordon will join the Department of EECS as an assistant professor in July. He will also be a member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. In his research, Gordon designs interactive systems and evaluation approaches that bridge principles of human-computer interaction with the realities of machine learning. He currently works as a postdoc at the University of Washington. Gordon received a BS from the University of Rochester, and MS and PhD from Stanford University, all in computer science.

Kaiming He joined the Department of EECS as an associate professor in February. He will also be a member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). His research interests cover a wide range of topics in computer vision and deep learning. He is currently focused on building computer models that can learn representations and develop intelligence from and for the complex world. Long term, he hopes to augment human intelligence with improved artificial intelligence. Before joining MIT, He was a research scientist at Facebook AI. He earned a BS from Tsinghua University and a PhD from the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Anna Huang SM ’08 will join the departments of EECS and Music and Theater Arts as assistant professor in September. She will help develop graduate programming focused on music technology. Previously, she spent eight years with Magenta at Google Brain and DeepMind, spearheading efforts in generative modeling, reinforcement learning, and human-computer interaction to support human-AI partnerships in music-making. She is the creator of Music Transformer and Coconet (which powered the Bach Google Doodle). She was a judge and organizer for the AI Song Contest. Anna holds a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at Mila, a BM in music composition, and BS in computer science from the University of Southern California, an MS from the MIT Media Lab, and a PhD from Harvard University.

Yael Kalai PhD ’06 will join the Department of EECS as a professor in September. She is also a member of CSAIL. Her research interests include cryptography, the theory of computation, and security and privacy. Kalai currently focuses on both the theoretical and real-world applications of cryptography, including work on succinct and easily verifiable non-interactive proofs. She received her bachelor’s degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a master’s degree at the Weizmann Institute of Science, and a PhD from MIT.

Sendhil Mullainathan will join the departments of EECS and Economics as a professor in July. His research uses machine learning to understand complex problems in human behavior, social policy, and medicine. Previously, Mullainathan spent five years at MIT before joining the faculty at Harvard in 2004, and then the University of Chicago in 2018. He received his BA in computer science, mathematics, and economics from Cornell University and his PhD from Harvard University.

Alex Rives will join the Department of EECS as an assistant professor in September, with a core membership in the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. In his research, Rives is focused on AI for scientific understanding, discovery, and design for biology. Rives worked with Meta as a New York University graduate student, where he founded and led the Evolutionary Scale Modeling team that developed large language models for proteins. Rives received his BS in philosophy and biology from Yale University and is completing his PhD in computer science at NYU.

Sungho Shin will join the Department of Chemical Engineering as an assistant professor in July. His research interests include control theory, optimization algorithms, high-performance computing, and their applications to decision-making in complex systems, such as energy infrastructures. Shin is a postdoc at the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at Argonne National Laboratory. He received a BS in mathematics and chemical engineering from Seoul National University and a PhD in chemical engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Jessica Stark joined the Department of Biological Engineering as an assistant professor in January. In her research, Stark is developing technologies to realize the largely untapped potential of cell-surface sugars, called glycans, for immunological discovery and immunotherapy. Previously, Stark was an American Cancer Society postdoc at Stanford University. She earned a BS in chemical and biomolecular engineering from Cornell University and a PhD in chemical and biological engineering at Northwestern University.

Thomas John “T.J.” Wallin joined the Department of Materials Science and Engineering as an assistant professor in January. As a researcher, Wallin’s interests lay in advanced manufacturing of functional soft matter, with an emphasis on soft wearable technologies and their applications in human-computer interfaces. Previously, he was a research scientist at Meta’s Reality Labs Research working in their haptic interaction team. Wallin earned a BS in physics and chemistry from the College of William and Mary, and an MS and PhD in materials science and engineering from Cornell University.

Gioele Zardini joined the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering as an assistant professor in September. He will also join LIDS and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society. Driven by societal challenges, Zardini’s research interests include the co-design of sociotechnical systems, compositionality in engineering, applied category theory, decision and control, optimization, and game theory, with society-critical applications to intelligent transportation systems, autonomy, and complex networks and infrastructures. He received his BS, MS, and PhD in mechanical engineering with a focus on robotics, systems, and control from ETH Zurich, and spent time at MIT, Stanford University, and Motional.

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