Making agriculture more resilient to climate change

As Earth’s temperature rises, agricultural practices will need to adapt. Droughts will likely become more frequent, and some land may no longer be arable. On top of that is the challenge of feeding an ever-growing population without expanding the production of fertilizer and other agrochemicals, which have a large carbon footprint that is contributing to the overall warming of the planet.

Researchers across MIT are taking on these agricultural challenges from a variety of angles, from engineering plants that sound an alarm when they’re under stress to making seeds more resilient to drought. These types of technologies, and more yet to be devised, will be essential to feed the world’s population as the climate changes.

“After water, the first thing we need is food. In terms of priority, there is water, food, and then everything else. As we are trying to find new strategies to support a world of 10 billion people, it will require us to invent new ways of making food,” says Benedetto Marelli, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at MIT.

Marelli is the director of one of the six missions of the recently launched Climate Project at MIT, which focus on research areas such as decarbonizing industry and building resilient cities. Marelli directs the Wild Cards mission, which aims to identify unconventional solutions that are high-risk and high-reward.

Drawing on expertise from a breadth of fields, MIT is well-positioned to tackle the challenges posed by climate change, Marelli says. “Bringing together our strengths across disciplines, including engineering, processing at scale, biological engineering, and infrastructure engineering, along with humanities, science, and economics, presents a great opportunity.”

Protecting seeds from drought

Marelli, who began his career as a biomedical engineer working on regenerative medicine, is now developing ways to boost crop yields by helping seeds to survive and germinate during drought conditions, or in soil that has been depleted of nutrients. To achieve that, he has devised seed coatings, based on silk and other polymers, that can envelop and nourish seeds during the critical germination process.

In healthy soil, plants have access to nitrogen, phosphates, and other nutrients that they need, many of which are supplied by microbes that live in the soil. However, in soil that has suffered from drought or overfarming, these nutrients are lacking. Marelli’s idea was to coat the seeds with a polymer that can be embedded with plant-growth-promoting bacteria that “fix” nitrogen by absorbing it from the air and making it available to plants. The microbes can also make other necessary nutrients available to plants.

For the first generation of the seed coatings, he embedded these microbes in coatings made of silk — a material that he had previously shown can extend the shelf life of produce, meat, and other foods. In his lab at MIT, Marelli has shown that the seed coatings can help germinating plants survive drought, ultraviolet light exposure, and high salinity.

Now, working with researchers at the Mohammed VI Polytechnic University in Morocco, he is adapting the approach to crops native to Morocco, a country that has experienced six consecutive years of drought due a drop in rainfall linked to climate change.

For these studies, the researchers are using a biopolymer coating derived from food waste that can be easily obtained in Morocco, instead of silk.

“We’re working with local communities to extract the biopolymers, to try to have a process that works at scale so that we make materials that work in that specific environment.” Marelli says. “We may come up with an idea here at MIT within a high-resource environment, but then to work there, we need to talk with the local communities, with local stakeholders, and use their own ingenuity and try to match our solution with something that could actually be applied in the local environment.”

Microbes as fertilizers

Whether they are experiencing drought or not, crops grow much better when synthetic fertilizers are applied. Although it’s essential to most farms, applying fertilizer is expensive and has environmental consequences. Most of the world’s fertilizer is produced using the Haber-Bosch process, which converts nitrogen and hydrogen to ammonia at high temperatures and pressures. This energy intensive process accounts for about 1.5 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, and the transportation required to deliver it to farms around the world adds even more emissions.

Ariel Furst, the Paul M. Cook Career Development Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT, is developing a microbial alternative to the Haber-Bosch process. Some farms have experimented with applying nitrogen-fixing bacteria directly to the roots of their crops, which has shown some success. However, the microbes are too delicate to be stored long-term or shipped anywhere, so they must be produced in a bioreactor on the farm.

To overcome those challenges, Furst has developed a way to coat the microbes with a protective shell that prevents them from being destroyed by heat or other stresses. The coating also protects microbes from damage caused by freeze-drying — a process that would make them easier to transport.

The coatings can vary in composition, but they all consist of two components. One is a metal such as iron, manganese, or zinc, and the other is a polyphenol — a type of plant-derived organic compound that includes tannins and other antioxidants. These two components self-assemble into a protective shell that encapsulates bacteria.

“These microbes would be delivered with the seeds, so it would remove the need for fertilizing mid-growing. It also reduces the cost and provides more autonomy to the farmers and decreases carbon emissions associated with agriculture,” Furst says. “We think it’ll be a way to make agriculture completely regenerative, so to bring back soil health while also boosting crop yields and the nutrient density of the crops.”

Furst has founded a company called Seia Bio, which is working on commercializing the coated microbes and has begun testing them on farms in Brazil. In her lab, Furst is also working on adapting the approach to coat microbes that can capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and turn it into limestone, which helps to raise the soil pH.

“It can help change the pH of soil to stabilize it, while also being a way to effectively perform direct air capture of CO₂,” she says. “Right now, farmers may truck in limestone to change the pH of soil, and so you’re creating a lot of emissions to bring something in that microbes can do on their own.”

Distress sensors for plants

Several years ago, Michael Strano, the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT, began to explore the idea of using plants themselves as sensors that could reveal when they’re in distress. When plants experience drought, attack by pests, or other kinds of stress, they produce hormones and other signaling molecules to defend themselves.

Strano, whose lab specializes in developing tiny sensors for a variety of molecules, wondered if such sensors could be deployed inside plants to pick up those distress signals. To create their sensors, Strano’s lab takes advantage of the special properties of single-walled carbon nanotubes, which emit fluorescent light. By wrapping the tubes with different types of polymers, the sensors can be tuned to detect specific targets, giving off a fluorescent signal when the target is present.

For use in plants, Strano and his colleagues created sensors that could detect signaling molecules such as salicylic acid and hydrogen peroxide. They then showed that these sensors could be inserted into the underside of plant leaves, without harming the plants. Once embedded in the mesophyll of the leaves, the sensors can pick up a variety of signals, which can be read with an infrared camera.

These sensors can reveal, in real-time, whether a plant is experiencing a variety of stresses. Until now, there hasn’t been a way to get that information fast enough for farmers to act on it.

“What we’re trying to do is make tools that get information into the hands of farmers very quickly, fast enough for them to make adaptive decisions that can increase yield,” Strano says. “We’re in the middle of a revolution of really understanding the way in which plants internally communicate and communicate with other plants.”

This kind of sensing could be deployed in fields, where it could help farmers respond more quickly to drought and other stresses, or in greenhouses, vertical farms, and other types of indoor farms that use technology to grow crops in a controlled environment.

Much of Strano’s work in this area has been conducted with the support of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and as part of the Disruptive and Sustainable Technologies for Agricultural Precision (DiSTAP) program at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), and sensors have been deployed in tests in crops at a controlled environment farm in Singapore called Growy.

“The same basic kinds of tools can help detect problems in open field agriculture or in controlled environment agriculture,” Strano says. “They both suffer from the same problem, which is that the farmers get information too late to prevent yield loss.”

Reducing pesticide use

Pesticides represent another huge financial expense for farmers: Worldwide, farmers spend about $60 billion per year on pesticides. Much of this pesticide ends up accumulating in water and soil, where it can harm many species, including humans. But, without using pesticides, farmers may lose more than half of their crops.

Kripa Varanasi, an MIT professor of mechanical engineering, is working on tools that can help farmers measure how much pesticide is reaching their plants, as well as technologies that can help pesticides adhere to plants more efficiently, reducing the amount that runs off into soil and water.

Varanasi, whose research focuses on interactions between liquid droplets and surfaces, began to think about applying his work to agriculture more than a decade ago, after attending a conference at the USDA. There, he was inspired to begin developing ways to improve the efficiency of pesticide application by optimizing the interactions that occur at leaf surfaces.

“Billions of drops of pesticide are being sprayed on every acre of crop, and only a small fraction is ultimately reaching and staying on target. This seemed to me like a problem that we could help to solve,” he says.

Varanasi and his students began exploring strategies to make drops of pesticide stick to leaves better, instead of bouncing off. They found that if they added polymers with positive and negative charges, the oppositely charged droplets would form a hydrophilic (water-attracting) coating on the leaf surface, which helps the next droplets applied to stick to the leaf.

Later, they developed an easier-to-use technology in which a surfactant is added to the pesticide before spraying. When this mixture is sprayed through a special nozzle, it forms tiny droplets that are “cloaked” in surfactant. The surfactant helps the droplets to stick to the leaves within a few milliseconds, without bouncing off.

In 2020, Varanasi and Vishnu Jayaprakash SM ’19, PhD ’22 founded a company called AgZen to commercialize their technologies and get them into the hands of farmers. They incorporated their ideas for improving pesticide adhesion into a product called EnhanceCoverage.

During the testing for this product, they realized that there weren’t any good ways to measure how many of the droplets were staying on the plant. That led them to develop a product known as RealCoverage, which is based on machine vision. It can be attached to any pesticide sprayer and offer real-time feedback on what percentage of the pesticide droplets are sticking to and staying on every leaf.

RealCoverage was used on 65,000 acres of farmland across the United States in 2024, from soybeans in Iowa to cotton in Georgia. Farmers who used the product were able to reduce their pesticide use by 30 to 50 percent, by using the data to optimize delivery and, in some cases, even change what chemicals were sprayed.

He hopes that the EnhanceCoverage product, which is expected to become available in 2025, will help farmers further reduce their pesticide use.

“Our mission here is to help farmers with savings while helping them achieve better yields. We have found a way to do all this while also reducing waste and the amount of chemicals that we put into our atmosphere and into our soils and into our water,” Varanasi says. “This is the MIT approach: to figure out what are the real issues and how to come up with solutions. Now we have a tool and I hope that it’s deployed everywhere and everyone gets the benefit from it.”

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US Department of Education honors three Lemelson-MIT student affiliates

On Wednesday, Oct. 9, three student inventors affiliated with the Lemelson-MIT Program (LMIT) shared their stories of what inspired them to invent with U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona and employees of the U.S. Department of Education attending a Hispanic Heritage Month celebration. 

The panel discussion, entitled “Spotlight on Latino Student Innovators & Aspiring STEM Leaders,” was part of a larger event (“Creando Futuros Brillantes”) sponsored by the White House Initiative for Hispanics.

Elias Escobar Argueta, a high school junior from Calistoga, California, spoke about his LMIT InvenTeam’s DulceTemperatura, a patent-pending invention designed to help farm workers keep cool and warm when working outdoors, and another device to help cool firefighters. Also participating were two former Lemelson-MIT InvenTeam students: Katia Avila Pinado from Pomona, California, who holds a patent for her team’s invention, Heart and Sole; and Lesly Rojas of Salem, Oregon, whose team developed an adaptive flow rate cup for people with dysphagia. Avila is now pursuing a degree in networks and digital technology at the University of California Santa Cruz. Rojas is pursuing a degree in electrical and computer engineering at Oregon State University.

Cristina Saenz, invention education manager with LMIT, also participated in the celebration and had an opportunity to speak with Secretary Cardona about the students’ achievements. Saenz notes, “We had this incredible opportunity for three young Latino inventors to amplify their experiences and share their inventions with members of the U.S. Department of Education. While this celebration of Hispanic Heritage enabled these three students to shine, one-in-four students in the U.S. school system are Latino who also need access and opportunities to showcase what they bring to their local and national communities. Si se puede!”

LMIT’s executive director, Stephanie Couch, says, “I am incredibly grateful to these students for sharing their stories of the power and promise of invention education. I hope that one day many more young women and people of color will be accessing invention education programs like ours, including learning how to protect their good ideas with a patent. These students offer glimpses into the life-changing nature of participation on an InvenTeam and/or LMIT’s other invention education offerings that are led by Dr. Saenz.” 

The InvenTeams initiative, now in its 21st year, has enabled 18 teams of high school students to earn U.S. patents for their projects. Intellectual property education is combined with invention education offerings as part of the Lemelson-MIT Program’s deliberate efforts to remedy historic inequities among those who develop inventions, protect their intellectual property, and commercialize their creations. LMIT’s ongoing efforts empower students from all backgrounds, equipping them with invaluable problem-solving skills that will serve them well throughout their academic journeys, professional pursuits, and personal lives. Their work with 3,883 students across 296 different teams nationwide these past 21 years includes:

• developing the Inventing Smart Solutions curriculum;
• connecting with intellectual property law firms to provide pro bono legal support;
• collaborating with industry-leading companies that provide technical guidance and mentoring;
• providing professional development for teachers on invention education;
• assisting teams with identifying resources within their communities’ innovation ecosystems to support ongoing invention efforts; and
• publishing case studies and research to inform the work of invention educators and policymakers and build support for engaging students in efforts to invent solutions to real-world problems.

LMIT is a national leader in efforts to prepare the next generation of inventors and entrepreneurs. Its work focuses on the expansion of opportunities for people to learn ways inventors find and solve problems that matter to improve lives. Their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion aims to remedy historic inequities among those who develop inventions, protect their intellectual property, and commercialize their creations.

Jerome H. Lemelson, one of U.S. history’s most prolific inventors, and his wife Dorothy founded the Lemelson-MIT Program at MIT in 1994. It is funded by The Lemelson Foundation and administered by the MIT School of Engineering.

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2024 Math Prize for Girls at MIT sees six-way tie

After 274 young women spent two-and-a-half hours working through 20 advanced math problems for the 16th annual Advantage Testing Foundation/Jane Street Math Prize for Girls (MP4G) contest held Oct. 4-6 at MIT, a six-way tie was announced. 

Hosted by the MIT Department of Mathematics and sponsored by the Advantage Testing Foundation and global trading firm Jane Street, MP4G is the largest math prize for girls in the world. The competitors, who came from across the United States and Canada, had scored high enough on the American Mathematics Competition exam to apply for and be accepted by MP4G. This year, MP4G received 891 applications to solve multistage problems in geometry, algebra, and trigonometry. This year's problems are listed on the MP4G website.

Because of the six-way tie, the $50,000 first-place prize and subsequent awards ($20,000 for second, $10,000 for third, $4,000 apiece for fourth and fifth and $2,000 for sixth place) was instead evenly divided, with each winner receiving $15,000. While each scored 15 out of 20, the winners were actually placed in order of how they answered the most difficult problems. 

In first place was Shruti Arun, 11th grade, Cherry Creek High School, Colorado, who last year placed fourth; followed by Angela Liu, 12th grade, home-schooled, California; Sophia Hou, 11th grade, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, Virginia; Susie Lu, 11th grade, Stanford Online High School, Washington, who last year placed 19th; Katie He, 12th grade, the Frazer School, Florida; and Katherine Liu, 12th grade, Clements High School, Texas — with the latter two having tied for seventh place last year.

The next round of winners, all with a score of 14, took home $1,000 each: Angela Ho, 11th grade, Stevenson High School, Illinois; Hannah Fox, 12th grade, Proof School, California; Selena Ge, 9th grade, Lexington High School, Massachusetts; Alansha Jiang, 12th grade, Newport High School, Washington; Laura Wang, 9th grade, Lakeside School, Washington; Alyssa Chu, 12th grade, Rye Country Day School, New York; Emily Yu, 12th grade, Mendon High School, New York; and Ivy Guo, 12th grade, Blair High School, Maryland.

The $2,000 Youth Prize to the highest-scoring contestant in 9th grade or below was shared evenly by Selena Ge and Laura Wang. In total, the event awards $100,000 in monetary prize to the top 14 contestants (including tie scores). Honorable mention trophies were awarded to the next 25 winners.

“I knew there were a lot of really smart people there, so the chances of me getting first wasn’t particularly high,” Katie He told a Florida newspaper. “When I heard six ways, I was so excited though,” He says, “because that’s just really cool that we all get to be happy about our performances and celebrate together and share the same joy.”

The event featured a keynote lecture by Harvard University professor of mathematics Lauren Williams on the "Combinatorics of Hopping Particles;” talks by Po-Shen Loh, professor of math at Carnegie Mellon University, and Maria Klawe, president of Math for America; and a musical performance by the MIT Logarhythms. Last year’s winner, Jessica Wan, volunteered as a proctor. Now a first-year at MIT, Wan won MP4G in 2022 and 2019. Alumna and doctoral candidate Nitya Mani was on hand to note, during her speech at the awards ceremony, how much bigger the event has grown over the years.

The day before the competition, attendees gathered to attend campus tours, icebreaker events, and networking sessions around MIT, at the Boston Marriott Cambridge, and at Kresge Auditorium, where the awards ceremony took place. Contestants also met MP4G alumnae at the Women in STEM Ask Me Anything event.

Math Community and Outreach Officer Michael King described the event as a “virtuous circle” where alumni return to encourage participants and help to keep the event running. “It’s good for MIT, because it attracts top female students from around the country. The atmosphere, with hundreds of girls excited about math and supported by their families, was wonderful. I thought to myself, ‘This is possible, to have rooms of math people that aren’t 80 percent men.’ The more women in math, the more role models. This is what inspires people to enter a discipline. MP4G creates a community of role models.”

Chris Peterson SM ’13, director of communications and special projects at MIT Admissions and Student Financial Services, agrees. “Everyone sees and appreciates the competitive function that Math Prize performs to identify and celebrate these highly talented young mathematicians. What’s less visible, but equally or even more important, is the crucial community role it plays as an affinity community to build  relationships and a sense of belonging among these young women that will follow and empower them through the rest of their education and careers.”

Petersen also discussed life at MIT and the admissions process at the Art of Problem Solving’s recent free MIT Math Jam, as he has annually for the past decade. He was joined by MIT Math doctoral candidate Evan Chen ’18, a former deputy leader of the USA International Math Olympiad team.

Many alumnae returned to MIT to participate in a panel for attendees and their parents. For one panelist, MP4G is a family affair. Sheela Devadas, MP4G ’10 and ’11, is the sister of electrical engineering and computer science doctoral candidate and fellow MP4G alum Lalita; their mother, Sulochana, is MP4G’s program administrator. 

“One of the goals of MP4G is to inspire young mathematicians,” says Devadas. “Although it is a competition, there is a lot of camaraderie between the contestants as well, and opportunities to meet both current undergraduate STEM majors and older role models who have pursued math-based careers. This aligned with my experience at MIT as a math major, where the atmosphere felt both competitive and collaborative in a way that inspired us.”

“There are many structural barriers and interpersonal issues facing women in STEM-oriented careers,” she adds. “One issue that is sometimes overlooked, which I have sometimes run into, is that both in school and in the workplace, it can be challenging to get your peers to respect your mathematical skill rather than pressuring you to take on tasks like note-taking or scheduling that are seen as more 'female' (though those tasks are also valuable and necessary).” 

Another panelist, Jennifer Xiong ’23, talked about her time at MP4G, MIT, and her current role as a pharmaceutical researcher at Moderna.  

“MP4G is what made me want to attend MIT, where I met my first MIT friend,” she says. Later, as an MIT student, she volunteered with MP4G to help her stay connected with the program. “MP4G is exciting because it brings together young girls who are interested in solving hard problems, to MIT campus, where they can build community and foster their interests in math.”

Volunteer Ranu Boppana ’87, the wife of MP4G founding director and MIT Math Research Affiliate Ravi Boppana PhD ’86, appreciates watching how this program has helped inspire women to pursue STEM education. “I’m most struck by the fact that MIT is now gender-balanced for undergraduates, but also impressed with what a more diverse place it is in every way.”

The Boppanas were inspired to found MP4G because their daughter was a mathlete in middle school and high school, and often the only girl in many regional competitions. “Ravi realized that the girls needed a community of their own, and role models to help them visualize seeing themselves in STEM.”

“Each year, the best part of MP4G is seeing the girls create wonderful networks for themselves, as some are often the only girls they know interested in math at home. This event is also such a fabulous introduction to MIT for them. I think this event helps MIT recruit the most mathematically talented girls in the country.”

Ravi also recently created the YouTube channel Boppana Math, geared toward high school students. “My goal is to create videos that are accessible to bright high school students, such as the participants in the Math Prize for Girls,” says Ravi. “My most recent video, 'Hypergraphs and Acute Triangles,' won an Honorable Mention at this year’s Summer of Math Exposition.”

The full list of winners is posted on the Art of Problem Solving website. The top 45 students are invited to take the 2024 Math Prize for Girls Olympiad at their schools. Canada/USA Mathcamp also provides $500 merit scholarships to the top 35 MP4G students who enroll in its summer program. This reflects a $250 increase to the scholarships. Applications to compete in next year’s MP4G will open in March 2025. 

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Presidential portrait of L. Rafael Reif unveiled

A new portrait marks the legacy of L. Rafael Reif, MIT’s president from 2012 to 2022. Painted by Jon Friedman, the portrait was unveiled at a recent gathering at Gray House, where portraits of many of Reif’s predecessors also adorn the walls.

The unveiling served as something of a reunion for many MIT faculty and staff members who had worked closely with Reif at various points in his four decades at MIT, especially his decade as president. It also featured several generations of the Reif family and special friends such as cellist Yo-Yo Ma. Susan Whitehead, a life member of the MIT Corporation and life board member of the Whitehead Institute, and Ray Stata ’57, SM ’58, co-founder of Analog Devices, gave remarks honoring Reif and his impact at the Institute.

MIT President Sally Kornbluth opened the event by welcoming the audience to the president’s residence on campus.

“As we all know, Gray House belongs to the MIT community, which means that each family who lives here takes responsibility for stewarding the place for the future. Which, in a grander sense, is a pretty good way of describing what it means to be president of MIT,” she said.

Applauding the “many grand things he set in motion,” Kornbluth described several of Reif’s impactful achievements as MIT’s 17th president, such as establishing the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, leading the revitalization of Kendall Square, and envisioning and launching The Engine, MIT’s venture firm for “tough tech.”

“Each of those achievements helped prime MIT for the future, and each one has had powerful positive effects well beyond our community too,” Kornbluth said, noting that the term “tough tech” didn’t even exist before the establishment of The Engine.

“MIT has been an exceptional place from the very start, and it has had quite a few visionary presidents. But there is no question that MIT was more exceptional when Rafael finished than when he began. And we owe him a great debt of gratitude,” Kornbluth said.

More information about the Reif presidency can be found in this article written when Reif announced his decision to step down.

After the portrait was unveiled, Ma performed a short piece by Johann Sebastian Bach on the cello. Afterward, Stata offered a comprehensive personal and historical perspective on Reif’s wide-ranging contributions to MIT and the nation, including his key role in establishing MIT’s footing in the semiconductor landscape, and in demonstrating and advocating for the critical role of academic research in advancing the development of the U.S. semiconductor sector. Whitehead followed, highlighting a range of Reif’s accomplishments during his tenure as MIT president, including establishing the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science and MIT.nano, leading the Campaign for a Better World, overseeing the redevelopment of the Volpe Center in Kendall Square, and more.

“All of the above was made possible because you are a remarkable synthesizer and builder,” she said. “We watched as you grappled with questions, listened carefully, inside and outside of MIT, and then you moved. You were bold once you had synthesized. None of the above initiatives would have happened without your decisive big thinking.”

Whitehead also praised Reif’s kindness and empathy, noting the many decisions he oversaw to promote student wellbeing at MIT and acknowledging his leadership during difficult times, such as the death of MIT Police Officer Sean Collier. She closed by reminding the crowd of the Institute-wide farewell dance party he hosted as he stepped down.

When Reif took to the podium, he thanked the speakers as well as other members of the audience, including Corporation Life Member Fariboz Maseeh ScD ’90; Reif was the inaugural holder of the Fariborz Maseeh Professorship of Emerging Technology before becoming MIT’s president. He also thanked his wife, Christine — whose own portrait, also painted by Friedman, now hangs in the Emma Rogers Room (Room 10-340) — for her support.

Reif recalled some of his favorite memories of living at Gray House, including hosting his grandchildren for sleepovers at what they called “the Castle” and partaking in a snowball fight with students on Killian Court.

“Each and every one of you influenced my thinking, gave me intellectual breadth, suffered my sense of humor, and shaped the person I became,” Reif said. “So, whatever qualities you believe you see captured in Mr. Friedman’s portrait, please realize that all of you are represented there too, in your brilliance and your goodness. It has been a tremendous privilege to be part of the MIT family for all these years.”

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“Wearable” devices for cells

Wearable devices like smartwatches and fitness trackers interact with parts of our bodies to measure and learn from internal processes, such as our heart rate or sleep stages.

Now, MIT researchers have developed wearable devices that may be able to perform similar functions for individual cells inside the body.

These battery-free, subcellular-sized devices, made of a soft polymer, are designed to gently wrap around different parts of neurons, such as axons and dendrites, without damaging the cells, upon wireless actuation with light. By snugly wrapping neuronal processes, they could be used to measure or modulate a neuron’s electrical and metabolic activity at a subcellular level.

Because these devices are wireless and free-floating, the researchers envision that thousands of tiny devices could someday be injected and then actuated noninvasively using light. Researchers would precisely control how the wearables gently wrap around cells, by manipulating the dose of light shined from outside the body, which would penetrate the tissue and actuate the devices.

By enfolding axons that transmit electrical impulses between neurons and to other parts of the body, these wearables could help restore some neuronal degradation that occurs in diseases like multiple sclerosis. In the long run, the devices could be integrated with other materials to create tiny circuits that could measure and modulate individual cells.

“The concept and platform technology we introduce here is like a founding stone that brings about immense possibilities for future research,” says Deblina Sarkar, the AT&T Career Development Assistant Professor in the MIT Media Lab and Center for Neurobiological Engineering, head of the Nano-Cybernetic Biotrek Lab, and the senior author of a paper on this technique.

Sarkar is joined on the paper by lead author Marta J. I. Airaghi Leccardi, a former MIT postdoc who is now a Novartis Innovation Fellow; Benoît X. E. Desbiolles, an MIT postdoc; Anna Y. Haddad ’23, who was an MIT undergraduate researcher during the work; and MIT graduate students Baju C. Joy and Chen Song. The research appears today in Nature Communications Chemistry.

Snugly wrapping cells

Brain cells have complex shapes, which makes it exceedingly difficult to create a bioelectronic implant that can tightly conform to neurons or neuronal processes. For instance, axons are slender, tail-like structures that attach to the cell body of neurons, and their length and curvature vary widely.

At the same time, axons and other cellular components are fragile, so any device that interfaces with them must be soft enough to make good contact without harming them.

To overcome these challenges, the MIT researchers developed thin-film devices from a soft polymer called azobenzene, that don’t damage cells they enfold.

Due to a material transformation, thin sheets of azobenzene will roll when exposed to light, enabling them to wrap around cells. Researchers can precisely control the direction and diameter of the rolling by varying the intensity and polarization of the light, as well as the shape of the devices.

The thin films can form tiny microtubes with diameters that are less than a micrometer. This enables them to gently, but snugly, wrap around highly curved axons and dendrites.

“It is possible to very finely control the diameter of the rolling. You can stop if when you reach a particular dimension you want by tuning the light energy accordingly,” Sarkar explains.

The researchers experimented with several fabrication techniques to find a process that was scalable and wouldn’t require the use of a semiconductor clean room.

Making microscopic wearables

They begin by depositing a drop of azobenzene onto a sacrificial layer composed of a water-soluble material. Then the researchers press a stamp onto the drop of polymer to mold thousands of tiny devices on top of the sacrificial layer. The stamping technique enables them to create complex structures, from rectangles to flower shapes.

A baking step ensures all solvents are evaporated and then they use etching to scrape away any material that remains between individual devices. Finally, they dissolve the sacrificial layer in water, leaving thousands of microscopic devices freely floating in the liquid.

Once they have a solution with free-floating devices, they wirelessly actuated the devices with light to induce the devices to roll. They found that free-floating structures can maintain their shapes for days after illumination stops.

The researchers conducted a series of experiments to ensure the entire method is biocompatible.

After perfecting the use of light to control rolling, they tested the devices on rat neurons and found they could tightly wrap around even highly curved axons and dendrites without causing damage.

“To have intimate interfaces with these cells, the devices must be soft and able to conform to these complex structures. That is the challenge we solved in this work. We were the first to show that azobenzene could even wrap around living cells,” she says.

Among the biggest challenges they faced was developing a scalable fabrication process that could be performed outside a clean room. They also iterated on the ideal thickness for the devices, since making them too thick causes cracking when they roll.

Because azobenzene is an insulator, one direct application is using the devices as synthetic myelin for axons that have been damaged. Myelin is an insulating layer that wraps axons and allows electrical impulses to travel efficiently between neurons.

In non-myelinating diseases like multiple sclerosis, neurons lose some insulating myelin sheets. There is no biological way of regenerating them. By acting as synthetic myelin, the wearables might help restore neuronal function in MS patients.

The researchers also demonstrated how the devices can be combined with optoelectrical materials that can stimulate cells. Moreover, atomically thin materials can be patterned on top of the devices, which can still roll to form microtubes without breaking. This opens up opportunities for integrating sensors and circuits in the devices.

In addition, because they make such a tight connection with cells, one could use very little energy to stimulate subcellular regions. This could enable a researcher or clinician to modulate electrical activity of neurons for treating brain diseases.

“It is exciting to demonstrate this symbiosis of an artificial device with a cell at an unprecedented resolution. We have shown that this technology is possible,” Sarkar says.

In addition to exploring these applications, the researchers want to try functionalizing the device surfaces with molecules that would enable them to target specific cell types or subcellular regions.

The research was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the U.S. National Institutes of Health Brain Initiative.

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MIT to lead expansion of regional innovation network

The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) has selected MIT to lead a new Innovation Corps (I-Corps) Hub to support a partnership of eight New England universities committed to expanding science and technology entrepreneurship across the region, accelerating the translation of discoveries into new solutions that benefit society. NSF announced the five-year cooperative agreement of up to $15 million today.

The NSF I-Corps Hub: New England Region is expected to launch on Jan. 1, 2025. The seven institutions initially collaborating with MIT include Brown University, Harvard University, Northeastern University, Tufts University, University of Maine, University of Massachusetts Amherst, and the University of New Hampshire.

Established by the NSF in 2011, the I-Corps program provides scientists and engineers from any discipline with hands-on educational experiences to advance their research from lab to impact.  There are more than 50,000 STEM researchers at the nearly 100 universities and medical schools in New England. Many of these institutions are located in underserved and rural areas of the region that face resource challenges in supporting deep-tech translational efforts. The eight institutions in the hub will offer I-Corps training while bringing unique strengths and resources to enhance a regional innovation ecosystem that broadens participation in deep-tech innovation.

“Now more than ever we need the innovative solutions that emerge from this type of collaboration to solve society’s greatest and most intractable challenges. Our collective sights are set on bolstering our regional and national innovation networks to accelerate the translation of fundamental research into commercialized technologies. MIT is eager to build on our ongoing work with NSF to further cultivate New England’s innovation hub,” says MIT Provost Cynthia Barnhart, the Abraham J. Siegel Professor of Management Science and professor of operations research, who is the principal investigator on the award.

The hub builds on 10 years of collaboration with other I-Corps Sites at institutions across the region and prior work from the MIT I-Corps Site program launched in 2014 and the I-Corps Node based at MIT established in 2018. More than 3,000 engineers and scientists in New England have participated in regional I-Corps programs. They have formed over 200 companies, which have raised $3.5 billion in grants and investments. 

“The goal of the I-Corps program is to deploy experiential education to help researchers reduce the time necessary to translate promising ideas from laboratory benches to widespread implementation that in turn impacts economic growth regionally and nationally,” said Erwin Gianchandani, NSF assistant director for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships, in NSF’s announcement. “Each regional NSF I-Corps Hub provides training essential in entrepreneurship and customer discovery, leading to new products, startups, and jobs. In effect, we are investing in the next generation of entrepreneurs for our nation.”

One I-Corps success story comes from Shreya Dave PhD ’16, who participated in I-Corps training in 2016 with her colleagues to explore potential applications for a new graphene oxide filter technology developed through her research. Based on their learnings from the program and the evidence collected, they shifted from filters for desalination to applications in chemical processing and gained the confidence to launch Via Separations in 2017, focused on the tough tech challenge of industrial decarbonization. Via Separations, which was co-founded by Morton and Claire Goulder and Family Professor in Environmental Systems Professor of Materials Science and Engineering Jeffrey Grossman and Chief Technical Officer Brent Keller, has reached commercialization and is now delivering products to the pulp and paper industry.

“NSF I-Corps helped us refine our vision, figure out if our technology could be used for different applications, and helped us figure out if we can manufacture our technology in a scalable fashion — taking it from an academic project to a real–scale commercial project,” says Dave, who is the CEO and co-founder of Via Separations. 

New England boasts a “highly developed ecosystem of startup resources, funders, founders, and talent,” says Roman Lubynsky, executive director of MIT’s current NSF I-Corps Node, who will serve as the director of the new hub. “However, innovation and entrepreneurship support has been unevenly distributed across the region. This new hub offers an exciting opportunity to collaborate with seven partner institutions to extend and further scale up this important work throughout the region.”

The I-Corps Hubs across the country form the backbone of the NSF National Innovation Network. This network connects universities, NSF researchers, entrepreneurs, regional communities, and federal agencies to help researchers bring their discoveries to the marketplace. Together, the hubs work to create a more inclusive and diverse innovation ecosystem, supporting researchers nationwide in transforming their ideas into real-world solutions.

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Quantum simulator could help uncover materials for high-performance electronics

Quantum computers hold the promise to emulate complex materials, helping researchers better understand the physical properties that arise from interacting atoms and electrons. This may one day lead to the discovery or design of better semiconductors, insulators, or superconductors that could be used to make ever faster, more powerful, and more energy-efficient electronics.

But some phenomena that occur in materials can be challenging to mimic using quantum computers, leaving gaps in the problems that scientists have explored with quantum hardware.

To fill one of these gaps, MIT researchers developed a technique to generate synthetic electromagnetic fields on superconducting quantum processors. The team demonstrated the technique on a processor comprising 16 qubits.

By dynamically controlling how the 16 qubits in their processor are coupled to one another, the researchers were able to emulate how electrons move between atoms in the presence of an electromagnetic field. Moreover, the synthetic electromagnetic field is broadly adjustable, enabling scientists to explore a range of material properties.

Emulating electromagnetic fields is crucial to fully explore the properties of materials. In the future, this technique could shed light on key features of electronic systems, such as conductivity, polarization, and magnetization.

“Quantum computers are powerful tools for studying the physics of materials and other quantum mechanical systems. Our work enables us to simulate much more of the rich physics that has captivated materials scientists,” says Ilan Rosen, an MIT postdoc and lead author of a paper on the quantum simulator.

The senior author is William D. Oliver, the Henry Ellis Warren professor of electrical engineering and computer science and of physics, director of the Center for Quantum Engineering, leader of the Engineering Quantum Systems group, and associate director of the Research Laboratory of Electronics. Oliver and Rosen are joined by others in the departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and of Physics and at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. The research appears today in Nature Physics.

A quantum emulator

Companies like IBM and Google are striving to build large-scale digital quantum computers that hold the promise of outperforming their classical counterparts by running certain algorithms far more rapidly.

But that’s not all quantum computers can do. The dynamics of qubits and their couplings can also be carefully constructed to mimic the behavior of electrons as they move among atoms in solids.

“That leads to an obvious application, which is to use these superconducting quantum computers as emulators of materials,” says Jeffrey Grover, a research scientist at MIT and co-author on the paper.

Rather than trying to build large-scale digital quantum computers to solve extremely complex problems, researchers can use the qubits in smaller-scale quantum computers as analog devices to replicate a material system in a controlled environment.

“General-purpose digital quantum simulators hold tremendous promise, but they are still a long way off. Analog emulation is another approach that may yield useful results in the near-term, particularly for studying materials. It is a straightforward and powerful application of quantum hardware,” explains Rosen. “Using an analog quantum emulator, I can intentionally set a starting point and then watch what unfolds as a function of time.”

Despite their close similarity to materials, there are a few important ingredients in materials that can’t be easily reflected on quantum computing hardware. One such ingredient is a magnetic field.

In materials, electrons “live” in atomic orbitals. When two atoms are close to one another, their orbitals overlap and electrons can “hop” from one atom to another. In the presence of a magnetic field, that hopping behavior becomes more complex.

On a superconducting quantum computer, microwave photons hopping between qubits are used to mimic electrons hopping between atoms. But, because photons are not charged particles like electrons, the photons’ hopping behavior would remain the same in a physical magnetic field.

Since they can’t just turn on a magnetic field in their simulator, the MIT team employed a few tricks to synthesize the effects of one instead.

Tuning up the processor

The researchers adjusted how adjacent qubits in the processor were coupled to each other to create the same complex hopping behavior that electromagnetic fields cause in electrons.

To do that, they slightly changed the energy of each qubit by applying different microwave signals. Usually, researchers will set qubits to the same energy so that photons can hop from one to another. But for this technique, they dynamically varied the energy of each qubit to change how they communicate with each other.

By precisely modulating these energy levels, the researchers enabled photons to hop between qubits in the same complex manner that electrons hop between atoms in a magnetic field.

Plus, because they can finely tune the microwave signals, they can emulate a range of electromagnetic fields with different strengths and distributions.

The researchers undertook several rounds of experiments to determine what energy to set for each qubit, how strongly to modulate them, and the microwave frequency to use.

“The most challenging part was finding modulation settings for each qubit so that all 16 qubits work at once,” Rosen says.

Once they arrived at the right settings, they confirmed that the dynamics of the photons uphold several equations that form the foundation of electromagnetism. They also demonstrated the “Hall effect,” a conduction phenomenon that exists in the presence of an electromagnetic field.

These results show that their synthetic electromagnetic field behaves like the real thing.

Moving forward, they could use this technique to precisely study complex phenomena in condensed matter physics, such as phase transitions that occur when a material changes from a conductor to an insulator.

“A nice feature of our emulator is that we need only change the modulation amplitude or frequency to mimic a different material system. In this way, we can scan over many materials properties or model parameters without having to physically fabricate a new device each time.” says Oliver.

While this work was an initial demonstration of a synthetic electromagnetic field, it opens the door to many potential discoveries, Rosen says.

“The beauty of quantum computers is that we can look at exactly what is happening at every moment in time on every qubit, so we have all this information at our disposal. We are in a very exciting place for the future,” he adds.

This work is supported, in part, by the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the U.S. Army Research Office, the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, NASA, and the National Science Foundation. 

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MIT Schwarzman College of Computing launches postdoctoral program to advance AI across disciplines

The MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing has announced the launch of a new program to support postdocs conducting research at the intersection of artificial intelligence and particular disciplines. 

The Tayebati Postdoctoral Fellowship Program will focus on AI for addressing the most challenging problems in select scientific research areas, and on AI for music composition and performance. The program will welcome an inaugural cohort of up to six postdocs for a one-year term, with the possibility of renewal for a second term. 

Supported by a $20 million gift from Parviz Tayebati, an entrepreneur and executive with a broad technical background and experience with startup companies, the program will empower top postdocs by providing an environment that facilitates their academic and professional development and enables them to pursue ambitious discoveries. “I am proud to support a fellowship program that champions interdisciplinary research and fosters collaboration across departments. My hope is that this gift will inspire a new generation of scholars whose research advances knowledge and nurtures innovation that transcends traditional boundaries,” says Tayebati.

"Artificial intelligence holds tremendous potential to accelerate breakthroughs in science and ignite human creativity," says Dan Huttenlocher, dean of the Schwarzman College of Computing and Henry Ellis Warren Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “This new postdoc program is a remarkable opportunity to cultivate exceptional bilingual talent combining AI and another discipline. The program will offer fellows the chance to engage in research at the forefront of both AI and another field, collaborating with leading experts across disciplines. We are deeply thankful to Parviz for his foresight in supporting the development of researchers in this increasingly important area.”

Candidates accepted into the program will work on projects that encompass one of six disciplinary areas: biology/bioengineering, brain and cognitive sciences, chemistry/chemical engineering, materials science and engineering, music, and physics. Each fellow will have a faculty mentor in the disciplinary area as well as in AI.

The Tayebati Postdoctoral Fellowship Program is a key component of a larger focus of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing aimed at fostering innovative research in computing. As part of this focus, the college has three postdoctoral programs, each of which provides training and mentorship to fellows, broadens their research horizons, and helps them develop expertise in computing, including its intersection with other disciplines.

Other programs include MEnTorEd Opportunities in Research (METEOR), which was established by the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 2021. Recently expanded to span MIT through the college, the goal of METEOR is to support exceptional scholars in computer science and AI and to broaden participation in the field.

In addition, the Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC), a cross-cutting initiative of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, offers researchers exploring how computing is reshaping society the opportunity to participate as a SERC postdoc. SERC postdocs engage in a number of activities throughout the year, including leading interdisciplinary teams of MIT undergraduate and graduate students, known as SERC Scholars, to work on research projects investigating such topics as generative AI and democracy, combating deepfakes, examining data ownership, and the societal impact of gamification, among others.

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Rallying around graduate student parents

Last month, the MIT Office of Graduate Education celebrated National Student Parent Month with features on four MIT graduate student parents. These students’ professional backgrounds, experiences, and years at MIT highlight aspects of diversity in our student parent population.

Diana Grass is one of MIT’s most involved graduate student parents. Grass is a third-year PhD student in medical engineering and medical physics in the joint Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology program, and the mother of two children. As co-founder and co-president of MIT’s Graduate First Generation and Low-Income student group (GFLI@MIT), Grass is a strong advocate for first-generation grad students and student parents.

Fifth-year civil and environmental engineering PhD student Fabio Castro is a new father. Prior to MIT, he was an engineer and logistics manager at an energy firm in Brazil, and volunteered with Doctors without Borders in South Sudan. He and his wife, Amanda, welcomed their daughter, Sofia, last fall.

First-year MIT Sloan MBA student Elizabeth Doherty shared her experience as a career changer and mother of two young children. Doherty began her career as a lower elementary school teacher, working in both public and private schools. After switching gears to work as a senior digital learning specialist at Bain & Co., she recognized the importance of company culture, which led her to pursue a master’s degree in business administration.

Matthew Webb is working on his second MIT degree as a second-year PhD student in the Center for Transportation and Logistics. He shared the ways in which his grad student experience is different now as a father of three, than when he was a master’s student in the Operations Research program without children.

All four student parents came from different professional backgrounds and departments, but one theme was consistent in all their stories: the support of the MIT families community. From pitching in to help new parents to coordinating play dates and sharing information, MIT’s student parents are there for one another.

For Doherty, family-friendliness was a top priority when she selected an MBA program. MIT stood out to her because of the family housing, the on-campus childcare, and the opportunities to meet other student families. Doherty felt affirmed in her decision to attend MIT when she enrolled and the MIT Sloan School of Management reached out with a welcoming note and a gift. “It highlighted how thoughtful MIT has been about creating a strong infrastructure for student parents,” she says.

Grass points to the importance her family placed on moving into an on-campus residence, as her family lacked community in their previous off-campus home. This move to MIT’s campus added convenience to the family’s daily routine, and helped them meet other student families.

Before returning to MIT for his PhD, Webb was unaware of the support offered to graduate student families. He was pleasantly surprised to discover the Office of Graduate Education’s resources and programming for families through an email his first semester. His wife Rachel and their three children also take advantage of the activities hosted by MIT Spouses and Partners Connect while Webb goes to class. Some favorites have included ice cream and bubble tea outings, “crafternoons,” and going on a tour of Fenway Park.

Castro remembers how his family housing neighbors showed up for him and his family when they needed it most. In anticipation of their first child’s birth, Castro and his wife, Amanda, arranged for Amanda’s parents to come to Cambridge to help them in the early weeks as first-time parents. When these plans unexpectedly fell through, their community in Westgate stepped up. For weeks, other MIT families came by to teach them how to care for their newborn, and dropped off meals at their door.

He was touched by these gestures — the support was a huge benefit of choosing to live on campus, and something that would not have happened had he lived in an off-campus apartment. “It’s something I’ll never forget,” Castro says. 

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Oceanographers record the largest predation event ever observed in the ocean

There is power in numbers, or so the saying goes. But in the ocean, scientists are finding that fish that group together don’t necessarily survive together. In some cases, the more fish there are, the larger a target they make for predators.

This is what MIT and Norwegian oceanographers observed recently when they explored a wide swath of ocean off the coast of Norway during the height of spawning season for capelin — a small Arctic fish about the size of an anchovy. Billions of capelin migrate each February from the edge of the Arctic ice sheet southward to the Norwegian coast, to lay their eggs. Norway’s coastline is also a stopover for capelin’s primary predator, the Atlantic cod. As cod migrate south, they feed on spawning capelin, though scientists have not measured this process over large scales until now.

Reporting their findings today in Nature Communications Biology, the MIT team captured interactions between individual migrating cod and spawning capelin, over a huge spatial extent. Using a sonic-based wide-area imaging technique, they watched as random capelin began grouping together to form a massive shoal spanning tens of kilometers. As the capelin shoal formed a sort of ecological “hotspot,” the team observed individual cod begin to group together in response, forming a huge shoal of their own. The swarming cod overtook the capelin, quickly consuming over 10 million fish, estimated to be more than half of the gathered prey.

The dramatic encounter, which took place over just a few hours, is the largest such predation event ever recorded, both in terms of the number of individuals involved and the area over which the event occurred.

This one event is unlikely to weaken the capelin population as a whole; the preyed-upon shoal represents 0.1 percent of the capelin that spawn in the region. However, as climate change causes the Arctic ice sheet to retreat, capelin will have to swim farther to spawn, making the species more stressed and vulnerable to natural predation events such as the one the team observed. As capelin sustains many fish species, including cod, continuously monitoring their behavior, at a resolution approaching that of individual fish and across large scales spanning tens of thousands of square kilometers, will help efforts to maintain the species and the health of the ocean overall.

“In our work we are seeing that natural catastrophic predation events can change the local predator prey balance in a matter of hours,” says Nicholas Makris, professor of mechanical and ocean engineering at MIT. “That’s not an issue for a healthy population with many spatially distributed population centers or ecological hotspots. But as the number of these hotspots deceases due to climate and anthropogenic stresses, the kind of natural ‘catastrophic’ predation event we witnessed of a keystone species could lead to dramatic consequences for that species as well as the many species dependent on them.”

Makris’ co-authors on the paper are Shourav Pednekar and Ankita Jain at MIT, and Olav Rune Godø of the Institute of Marine Research in Norway.

Bell sounds

For their new study, Makris and his colleagues reanalyzed data that they gathered during a cruise in February of 2014 to the Barents Sea, off the coast of Norway. During that cruise, the team deployed the Ocean Acoustic Waveguide Remote Sensing (OAWRS) system — a sonic imaging technique that employs a vertical acoustic array, attached to the bottom of a boat, to send sound waves down into the ocean and out in all directions. These waves can travel over large distances as they bounce off any obstacles or fish in their path.

The same or a second boat, towing an array of acoustic receivers, continuously picks up the scattered and reflected waves, from as far as many tens of kilometers away. Scientists can then analyze the collected waveforms to create instantaneous maps of the ocean over a huge areal extent.

Previously, the team reconstructed maps of individual fish and their movements, but could not distinguish between different species. In the new study, the researchers applied a new “multispectral” technique to differentiate between species based on the characteristic acoustic resonance of their swim bladders.

“Fish have swim bladders that resonate like bells,” Makris explains. “Cod have large swim bladders that have a low resonance, like a Big Ben bell, whereas capelin have tiny swim bladders that resonate like the highest notes on a piano.”

By reanalyzing OAWRS data to look for specific frequencies of capelin versus cod, the researchers were able to image fish groups, determine their species content, and map the movements of each species over a huge areal extent.

Watching a wave

The researchers applied the multi-spectral technique to OAWRS data collected on Feb. 27, 2014, at the peak of the capelin spawning season. In the early morning hours, their new mapping showed that capelin largely kept to themselves, moving as random individuals, in loose clusters along the Norwegian coastline. As the sun rose and lit the surface waters, the capelin began to descend to darker depths, possibly seeking places along the seafloor to spawn.

The team observed that as the capelin descended, they began shifting from individual to group behavior, ultimately forming a huge shoal of about 23 million fish that moved in a coordinated wave spanning over ten kilometers long.

“What we’re finding is capelin have this critical density, which came out of a physical theory, which we have now observed in the wild,” Makris says. “If they are close enough to each other, they can take on the average speed and direction of other fish that they can sense around them, and can then form a massive and coherent shoal.”

As they watched, the shoaling fish began to move as one, in a coherent behavior that has been observed in other species but never in capelin until now. Such coherent migration is thought to help fish save energy over large distances by essentially riding the collective motion of the group.

In this instance, however, as soon as the capelin shoal formed, it attracted increasing numbers of cod, which quickly formed a shoal of their own, amounting to about 2.5 million fish, based on the team’s acoustic mapping. Over a few short hours, the cod consumed 10.5 million capelin over tens of kilometers before both shoals dissolved and the fish scattered away. Makris suspects that such massive and coordinated predation is a common occurrence in the ocean, though this is the first time that scientists have been able to document such an event.

“It’s the first time seeing predator-prey interaction on a huge scale, and it’s a coherent battle of survival,” Makris says. “This is happening over a monstrous scale, and we’re watching a wave of capelin zoom in, like a wave around a sports stadium, and they kind of gather together to form a defense. It’s also happening with the predators, coming together to coherently attack.”

“This is a truly fascinating study that documents complex spatial dynamics linking predators and prey, here cod and capelin, at scales previously unachievable in marine ecosystems,” says George Rose, professor of fisheries at the University of British Columbia, who studies the ecology and productivity of cod in the North Atlantic, and was not involved in this work. “Simultaneous species mapping with the OAWRS system…enables insight into fundamental ecological processes with untold potential to enhance current survey methods.”

Makris hopes to deploy OAWRS in the future to monitor the large-scale dynamics among other species of fish.

“It’s been shown time and again that, when a population is on the verge of collapse, you will have that one last shoal. And when that last big, dense group is gone, there’s a collapse,” Makris says. “So you’ve got to know what’s there before it’s gone, because the pressures are not in their favor.”

This work was supported, in part, by the U.S. Office of Naval Research and the Institute of Marine Research in Norway. 

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Fusing science and culture through metalsmithing

As the metal artist in residence and technical instructor in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE), Rhea Vedro operates in a synthesis of realms that broadens and enriches the student experience at MIT.

“Across MIT,” she says, “people in the arts, humanities, and sciences come together, and as soon as there’s opportunity to talk, sparks fly with all of the cross-pollination that is possible. It’s a rich place to be, and an exciting opportunity to work with our students in that way.”

In 2022, when Vedro read the job description for her current position at MIT, she says it resonated deeply with her interests and experiences. An outgrowth of MIT’s strong tradition of “mens et manus” (“mind and hand”), the position fused seamlessly with her own background.

“It was like I had written it myself. I couldn’t believe the position existed,” Vedro says.

Vedro’s relationship with metals had begun early. Even as a child growing up in Madison, Wisconsin, she collected minerals and bits of metal — and was in heaven when her godmother in New York City would take her to the Garment District, where she delightedly dug through wholesale bins of jewelry elements.

“I believe that people are called to different mediums,” she says. “Artists are often called to work with wood or clay or paper. And while I love all of those, metal has always been my home.”

After earning a master of fine arts in metals at the State University of New York at New Paltz, Vedro combined her art practice over the years with community work, as well as with an academic pursuit into metalsmithing history. “Through material culture, anthropology, and archeology, you can trace civilizations by how they related to this material.”

Vedro teaches classes 3.093 (Metalsmithing: Objects and Power), 3.095 (Introduction to Metalsmithing), and 4:A02 (DesignPlus: Exploring Design), where students learn techniques like soldering, casting, and etching, and explore metalsmithing through a cultural lens.

“In my class, we look at objects like the tool, the badge, the ring, the crown, the amulet, armor in relationship to the body and power,” Vedro says.

Vedro also supports the lab sections of class 3.094 (Materials in Human Experience), an experiential investigation into early techniques for developing cementitious materials and smelting iron, with an eye toward the future of these technologies.

Explaining her own artistic journey, which has taken her all over the world, Vedro says the “through-line” of her practice involves the idea of transformation, via the physical process of her hands-on work as a metalsmith, a fascination with materiality, and her community work to “transform lives through the art of making something.”

Such transformation is demonstrated in her ongoing commission by the City of Boston Mayor’s Office of Arts and Culture, entitled Amulet, which invited the public to community workshops, and to Vedro’s “Workbench” positioned by the waterfront in East Boston, to use metal tools of the trade. Each participant made their own mark on sheets of metal, asked to act with an intention or wish for safe passage of a loved one or for one’s own journey. Vedro will fashion the sheets, bearing the “wishmarks” of so many community members into several 16-to-17-foot birds, positioning them to stand guard at Boston City Hall Plaza.

At MIT, students come to the DMSE’s Merton C. Flemings Materials Processing Laboratory to work on creative projects in fine metals and steel, and also to craft parts for highly technical research in a wide range of fields, from mechanical engineering to aeronautics and astronautics.

“Students will come proposing to make a custom battery housing, a coil for a project going into outer space, a foundry experiment, or to etch and polish one crystal of aluminum,” Vedro says. “These are very specific requests that are not artistic in their origin and rely upon the hands-on metalsmithing of my team, including Mike Tarkanian [DMSE senior lecturer], James Hunter, [DMSE lecturer], and Shaymus Hudson [DSME technical instructor]."

Whatever the students’ inspiration, Vedro says she is struck by how motivated they are to do their best work — even despite the setbacks and time required that are part of developing a new skill.

“Everyone here is intensely driven,” she says, adding that many students, perhaps because of their familiarity with the scientific process, “are really good at taking quote-unquote failures as part of their learning process.”

Throughout their exploration in the lab, otherwise known as the Forge/Foundry, many students discover the power of working with their hands.

“There is a zone you get into, where you are becoming one with what you’re doing and lose track of time, and you are only paying attention to how material is behaving under your hand,” Vedro says.

Sometimes the zone produces not only a fine piece of metalwork, but an inspiration about something unrelated, such as a new approach to a research project.

“It frees up the mind, just like when you’re sleeping and you process things you studied the night before,” Vedro says. “You can be working with your hands on something, and many other ideas come together.”

Asked whether 15 years ago she would have thought she’d be working at MIT, Vedro says, “Oh, no. My path has been such an incredible braid of different experiences. It’s a reminder to stay true to your unique path, because you can be like me — in a place I would never have anticipated, where I feel energized every day to come in and see what will cross my path.”

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Brains, fashion, alien life, and more: Highlights from the Cambridge Science Festival

What is it like to give birth on Mars? Can bioengineer TikTok stars win at the video game “Super Smash Brothers” while also answering questions about science? How do sheep, mouse, and human brains compare? These questions and others were asked last month when more than 50,000 visitors from across Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Greater Boston participated in the MIT Museum’s annual Cambridge Science Festival, a week-long celebration dedicated to creativity, ingenuity, and innovation. Running Monday, Sept. 23 through Sunday, Sept. 29, the 2024 edition was the largest in its history, with a dizzyingly diverse program spanning more than 300 events presented in more than 75 different venues, all free and open to the public.

Presented in partnership with the City of Cambridge and more than 250 collaborators across Greater Boston, this year’s festival comprised a wide range of interactive programs for adults, children, and families, including workshops, demos, keynote lectures, walking tours, professional networking opportunities, and expert panels. Aimed at scientists and non-scientists alike, the festival also collaborated with several local schools to offer visits from an astronaut for middle- and high-school students.

With support from dozens of local organizations, the festival was the first iteration to happen under the new leadership of Michael John Gorman, who was appointed director of the MIT Museum in January and began his position in July.

“A science festival like this has an incredible ability to unite a diverse array of people and ideas, while also showcasing Cambridge as an internationally recognized leader in science, technology, engineering, and math,” says Gorman. “I'm thrilled to have joined an institution that values producing events that foster such a strong sense of community, and was so excited to see the enthusiastic response from the tens of thousands of people who showed up and made the festival such a success.”

The 2024 Cambridge Science Festival was broad in scope, with events ranging from hands-on 3D-printing demos to concerts from the MIT Laptop Ensemble to participatory activities at the MIT Museum’s Maker Hub. This year’s programming also highlighted three carefully curated theme tracks that each encompassed more than 25 associated events:

1. “For the Win: Games, Puzzles, and the Science of Play” (Thursday) consisted of multiple evening events clustered around Kendall Square.
2. “Frontiers: A New Era of Space Exploration” (Friday and Saturday) featured programs throughout Boston and was co-curated by The Space Consortium, organizers of Massachusetts Space Week.
3. “Electric Skin: Wearable Tech and the Future of Fashion” (Saturday) offered both day and evening events at the intersection of science, fabric, and fashion, taking place at The Foundry and co-curated by Boston Fashion Week and Advanced Functional Fabrics of America.

One of the discussions tied to the games-themed “For the Win” track involved artist Jeremy Couillard speaking with MIT Lecturer Mikael Jakobsson about the larger importance of games as a construct for encouraging interpersonal interaction and creating meaningful social spaces. Starting this past summer, the List Visual Arts Center has been the home of Couillard’s first-ever institutional solo exhibition, which centers around “Escape from Lavender Island,” a dystopian third-person, open-world exploration game he released in 2023 on the Steam video-game platform.

For the “Frontiers” space theme, one of the headlining events, “Is Anyone Out There?”, tackled the latest cutting-edge research and theories related to the potential existence of extraterrestrial life. The panel of local astronomers and astrophysicists included Sara Seager, the Class of 1941 Professor of Planetary Science, professor of physics, and professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT; Kim Arcand, an expert in astronomic visualization at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics; and Michael Hecht, a research scientist and associate director of research management at MIT’s Haystack Observatory. The researchers spoke about the tools they and their peers use to try to search for extraterrestrial life, and what discovering life beyond our planet might mean for humanity.

For the “Electric Skin” fashion track, events spanned a range of topics revolving around the role that technology will play in the future of the field, including sold-out workshops where participants learned how to laser-cut and engineer “structural garments.” A panel looking at generative technologies explored how designers are using AI to spur innovation in their companies. Onur Yüce Gün, director of computational design at New Balance, also spoke on a panel with Ziyuan “Zoey” Zhu from IDEO, MIT Media Lab research scientist and architect Behnaz Farahi, and Fiorenzo Omenetto, principal investigator and director of The Tufts Silk Lab and the Frank C. Doble Professor of Engineering at Tufts University and a professor in the Biomedical Engineering Department and in the Department of Physics at Tufts.

Beyond the three themed tracks, the festival comprised an eclectic mix of interactive events and panels. Cambridge Public Library hosted a “Science Story Slam” with high-school students from 10 different states competing for $5,000 in prize money. Entrants shared 5-minute-long stories about their adventures in STEM, with topics ranging from probability to “astro-agriculture.” Judges included several MIT faculty and staff, as well as New York Times national correspondent Kate Zernike.

Elsewhere, the MIT Museum’s Gorman moderated a discussion on AI and democracy that included Audrey Tang, the former minister of digital affairs of Taiwan. The panelists explored how AI tools could combat the polarization of political discourse and increase participation in democratic processes, particularly for marginalized voices. Also in the MIT Museum, the McGovern Institute for Brain Research organized a “Decoding the Brain” event with demos involving real animal brains, while the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard ran a “Discovery After Dark” event to commemorate the institute’s 20th anniversary. Sunday’s Science Carnival featured more than 100 demos, events, and activities, including the ever-popular “Robot Petting Zoo.”

When it first launched in 2007, the Cambridge Science Festival was by many accounts the first large-scale event of its kind across the entire United States. Similar festivals have since popped up all over the country, including the World Science Festival in New York City, the USA Science and Engineering Festival in Washington, the North Carolina Science Festival in Chapel Hill, and the San Diego Festival of Science and Engineering.  

More information about the festival is available online, including opportunities to participate in next year’s events. 

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Implantable microparticles can deliver two cancer therapies at once

Patients with late-stage cancer often have to endure multiple rounds of different types of treatment, which can cause unwanted side effects and may not always help.

In hopes of expanding the treatment options for those patients, MIT researchers have designed tiny particles that can be implanted at a tumor site, where they deliver two types of therapy: heat and chemotherapy.

This approach could avoid the side effects that often occur when chemotherapy is given intravenously, and the synergistic effect of the two therapies may extend the patient’s lifespan longer than giving one treatment at a time. In a study of mice, the researchers showed that this therapy completely eliminated tumors in most of the animals and significantly prolonged their survival.

“One of the examples where this particular technology could be useful is trying to control the growth of really fast-growing tumors,” says Ana Jaklenec, a principal investigator at MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. “The goal would be to gain some control over these tumors for patients that don't really have a lot of options, and this could either prolong their life or at least allow them to have a better quality of life during this period.”

Jaklenec is one of the senior authors of the new study, along with Angela Belcher, the James Mason Crafts Professor of Biological Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering and a member of the Koch Institute, and Robert Langer, an MIT Institute Professor and member of the Koch Institute. Maria Kanelli, a former MIT postdoc, is the lead author of the paper, which appears today in the journal ACS Nano.

Dual therapy

Patients with advanced tumors usually undergo a combination of treatments, including chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation. Phototherapy is a newer treatment that involves implanting or injecting particles that are heated with an external laser, raising their temperature enough to kill nearby tumor cells without damaging other tissue.

Current approaches to phototherapy in clinical trials make use of gold nanoparticles, which emit heat when exposed to near-infrared light.

The MIT team wanted to come up with a way to deliver phototherapy and chemotherapy together, which they thought could make the treatment process easier on the patient and might also have synergistic effects. They decided to use an inorganic material called molybdenum sulfide as the phototherapeutic agent. This material converts laser light to heat very efficiently, which means that low-powered lasers can be used.

To create a microparticle that could deliver both of these treatments, the researchers combined molybdenum disulfide nanosheets with either doxorubicin, a hydrophilic drug, or violacein, a hydrophobic drug. To make the particles, molybdenum disulfide and the chemotherapeutic are mixed with a polymer called polycaprolactone and then dried into a film that can be pressed into microparticles of different shapes and sizes.

For this study, the researchers created cubic particles with a width of 200 micrometers. Once injected into a tumor site, the particles remain there throughout the treatment. During each treatment cycle, an external near-infrared laser is used to heat up the particles. This laser can penetrate to a depth of a few millimeters to centimeters, with a local effect on the tissue.

“The advantage of this platform is that it can act on demand in a pulsatile manner,” Kanelli says. “You administer it once through an intratumoral injection, and then using an external laser source you can activate the platform, release the drug, and at the same time achieve thermal ablation of the tumor cells.”

To optimize the treatment protocol, the researchers used machine-learning algorithms to figure out the laser power, irradiation time, and concentration of the phototherapeutic agent that would lead to the best outcomes.

That led them to design a laser treatment cycle that lasts for about three minutes. During that time, the particles are heated to about 50 degrees Celsius, which is hot enough to kill tumor cells. Also at this temperature, the polymer matrix within the particles begins to melt, releasing some of the chemotherapy drug contained within the matrix.

“This machine-learning-optimized laser system really allows us to deploy low-dose, localized chemotherapy by leveraging the deep tissue penetration of near-infrared light for pulsatile, on-demand photothermal therapy. This synergistic effect results in low systemic toxicity compared to conventional chemotherapy regimens,” says Neelkanth Bardhan, a Break Through Cancer research scientist in the Belcher Lab, and second author of the paper.

Eliminating tumors

The researchers tested the microparticle treatment in mice that were injected with an aggressive type of cancer cells from triple-negative breast tumors. Once tumors formed, the researchers implanted about 25 microparticles per tumor, and then performed the laser treatment three times, with three days in between each treatment.

“This is a powerful demonstration of the usefulness of near-infrared-responsive material systems,” says Belcher, who, along with Bardhan, has previously worked on near-infrared imaging systems for diagnostic and treatment applications in ovarian cancer. “Controlling the drug release at timed intervals with light, after just one dose of particle injection, is a game changer for less painful treatment options and can lead to better patient compliance.”

In mice that received this treatment, the tumors were completely eradicated, and the mice lived much longer than those that were given either chemotherapy or phototherapy alone, or no treatment. Mice that underwent all three treatment cycles also fared much better than those that received just one laser treatment.

The polymer used to make the particles is biocompatible and has already been FDA-approved for medical devices. The researchers now hope to test the particles in larger animal models, with the goal of eventually evaluating them in clinical trials. They expect that this treatment could be useful for any type of solid tumor, including metastatic tumors.

The research was funded by the Bodossaki Foundation, the Onassis Foundation, a Mazumdar-Shaw International Oncology Fellowship, a National Cancer Institute Fellowship, and the Koch Institute Support (core) Grant from the National Cancer Institute.

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A faster, better way to train general-purpose robots

In the classic cartoon “The Jetsons,” Rosie the robotic maid seamlessly switches from vacuuming the house to cooking dinner to taking out the trash. But in real life, training a general-purpose robot remains a major challenge.

Typically, engineers collect data that are specific to a certain robot and task, which they use to train the robot in a controlled environment. However, gathering these data is costly and time-consuming, and the robot will likely struggle to adapt to environments or tasks it hasn’t seen before.

To train better general-purpose robots, MIT researchers developed a versatile technique that combines a huge amount of heterogeneous data from many of sources into one system that can teach any robot a wide range of tasks.

Their method involves aligning data from varied domains, like simulations and real robots, and multiple modalities, including vision sensors and robotic arm position encoders, into a shared “language” that a generative AI model can process.

By combining such an enormous amount of data, this approach can be used to train a robot to perform a variety of tasks without the need to start training it from scratch each time.

This method could be faster and less expensive than traditional techniques because it requires far fewer task-specific data. In addition, it outperformed training from scratch by more than 20 percent in simulation and real-world experiments.

“In robotics, people often claim that we don’t have enough training data. But in my view, another big problem is that the data come from so many different domains, modalities, and robot hardware. Our work shows how you’d be able to train a robot with all of them put together,” says Lirui Wang, an electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) graduate student and lead author of a paper on this technique.

Wang’s co-authors include fellow EECS graduate student Jialiang Zhao; Xinlei Chen, a research scientist at Meta; and senior author Kaiming He, an associate professor in EECS and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). The research will be presented at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems.

Inspired by LLMs

A robotic “policy” takes in sensor observations, like camera images or proprioceptive measurements that track the speed and position a robotic arm, and then tells a robot how and where to move.

Policies are typically trained using imitation learning, meaning a human demonstrates actions or teleoperates a robot to generate data, which are fed into an AI model that learns the policy. Because this method uses a small amount of task-specific data, robots often fail when their environment or task changes.

To develop a better approach, Wang and his collaborators drew inspiration from large language models like GPT-4.

These models are pretrained using an enormous amount of diverse language data and then fine-tuned by feeding them a small amount of task-specific data. Pretraining on so much data helps the models adapt to perform well on a variety of tasks.

“In the language domain, the data are all just sentences. In robotics, given all the heterogeneity in the data, if you want to pretrain in a similar manner, we need a different architecture,” he says.

Robotic data take many forms, from camera images to language instructions to depth maps. At the same time, each robot is mechanically unique, with a different number and orientation of arms, grippers, and sensors. Plus, the environments where data are collected vary widely.

The MIT researchers developed a new architecture called Heterogeneous Pretrained Transformers (HPT) that unifies data from these varied modalities and domains.

They put a machine-learning model known as a transformer into the middle of their architecture, which processes vision and proprioception inputs. A transformer is the same type of model that forms the backbone of large language models.

The researchers align data from vision and proprioception into the same type of input, called a token, which the transformer can process. Each input is represented with the same fixed number of tokens.

Then the transformer maps all inputs into one shared space, growing into a huge, pretrained model as it processes and learns from more data. The larger the transformer becomes, the better it will perform.

A user only needs to feed HPT a small amount of data on their robot’s design, setup, and the task they want it to perform. Then HPT transfers the knowledge the transformer grained during pretraining to learn the new task.

Enabling dexterous motions

One of the biggest challenges of developing HPT was building the massive dataset to pretrain the transformer, which included 52 datasets with more than 200,000 robot trajectories in four categories, including human demo videos and simulation.

The researchers also needed to develop an efficient way to turn raw proprioception signals from an array of sensors into data the transformer could handle.

“Proprioception is key to enable a lot of dexterous motions. Because the number of tokens is in our architecture always the same, we place the same importance on proprioception and vision,” Wang explains.

When they tested HPT, it improved robot performance by more than 20 percent on simulation and real-world tasks, compared with training from scratch each time. Even when the task was very different from the pretraining data, HPT still improved performance.

“This paper provides a novel approach to training a single policy across multiple robot embodiments. This enables training across diverse datasets, enabling robot learning methods to significantly scale up the size of datasets that they can train on. It also allows the model to quickly adapt to new robot embodiments, which is important as new robot designs are continuously being produced,” says David Held, associate professor at the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute, who was not involved with this work.

In the future, the researchers want to study how data diversity could boost the performance of HPT. They also want to enhance HPT so it can process unlabeled data like GPT-4 and other large language models.

“Our dream is to have a universal robot brain that you could download and use for your robot without any training at all. While we are just in the early stages, we are going to keep pushing hard and hope scaling leads to a breakthrough in robotic policies, like it did with large language models,” he says.

This work was funded, in part, by the Amazon Greater Boston Tech Initiative and the Toyota Research Institute.

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