Five years, five triumphs in Putnam Math Competition

For the fifth time in the history of the annual William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, and for the fifth year in a row, MIT swept all five of the contest’s top spots.

The top five scorers each year are named Putnam Fellows. Senior Brian Liu and juniors Papon Lapate and Luke Robitaille are now three-time Putnam Fellows, sophomore Jiangqi Dai earned his second win, and first-year Qiao Sun earned his first. Each receives a $2,500 award. This is also the fifth time that any school has had all five Putnam Fellows.

MIT’s team also came in first. The team was made up of Lapate, Robitaille, and Sun (in alphabetical order); Lapate and Robitaille were also on last year’s winning team. This is MIT’s ninth first-place win in the past 11 competitions. Teams consist of the three top scorers from each institution. The institution with the first-place team receives a $25,000 award, and each team member receives $1,000.  

First-year Jessica Wan was the top-scoring woman, finishing in the top 25, which earned her the $1,000 Elizabeth Lowell Putnam Prize. She is the eighth MIT student to receive this honor since the award was created in 1992. This is the sixth year in a row that an MIT woman has won the prize.

In total, 69 MIT students scored within the top 100. Beyond the top five scorers, MIT took nine of the next 11 spots (each receiving a $1,000 award), and seven of the next nine spots (earning $250 awards). Of the 75 receiving honorable mentions, 48 were from MIT. A total of 3,988 students took the exam in December, including 222 MIT students.

This exam is considered to be the most prestigious university-level mathematics competition in the United States and Canada. 

The Putnam is known for its difficulty: While a perfect score is 120, this year’s top score was 90, and the median was just 2. While many MIT students scored well, the Department of Mathematics is proud of everyone who just took the exam, says Professor Michel Goemans, head of the Department of Mathematics. 

“Year after year, I am so impressed by the sheer number of students at MIT that participate in the Putnam competition,” Goemans says. “In no other college or university in the world can one find hundreds of students who get a kick out of thinking about math problems. So refreshing!” 

Adds Professor Bjorn Poonen, who helped MIT students prepare for the exam this year, “The incredible competition performance is just one manifestation of MIT’s vibrant community of students who love doing math and discussing math with each other, students who through their hard work in this environment excel in ways beyond competitions, too.”

While the annual Putnam Competition is administered to thousands of undergraduate mathematics students across the United States and Canada, in recent years around 70 of its top 100 performers have been MIT students. Since 2000, MIT has placed among the top five teams 23 times.  

MIT’s success in the Putnam exam isn’t surprising. MIT’s recent Putnam coaches are four-time Putnam Fellow Bjorn Poonen and three-time Putnam Fellow Yufei Zhao ’10, PhD ’15. 

MIT is also a top destination for medalists participating in the International Mathematics Olympiad (IMO) for high school students. Indeed, over the last decade MIT has enrolled almost every American IMO medalist, and more international IMO gold medalists than the universities of any other single country, according to forthcoming research from the Global Talent Fund (GTF), which offers scholarship and training programs for math Olympiad students and coaches.

IMO participation is a strong predictor of future achievement. According to the International Mathematics Olympiad Foundation, about half of Fields Medal winners are IMO alums — but it’s not the only ingredient.

“Recruiting the most talented students is only the beginning. A top-tier university education — with excellent professors, supportive mentors, and an engaging peer community — is key to unlocking their full potential," says GTF President Ruchir Agarwal. "MIT’s sustained Putnam success shows how the right conditions deliver spectacular results. The catalytic reaction of MIT’s concentration of math talent and the nurturing environment of Building 2 should accelerate advancements in fundamental science for years and decades to come.”

Many MIT mathletes see competitions not only as a way to hone their mathematical aptitude, but also as a way to create a strong sense of community, to help inspire and educate the next generation. 

Chris Peterson SM ’13, director of communications and special projects at MIT Admissions and Student Financial Services, points out that many MIT students with competition math experience volunteer to help run programs for K-12 students including HMMT and Math Prize for Girls, and mentor research projects through the Program for Research in Mathematics, Engineering and Science (PRIMES).

Many of the top scorers are also alumni of the PRIMES high school outreach program. Two of this year’s Putnam Fellows, Liu and Robitaille, are PRIMES alumni, as are four of the next top 11, and six out of the next nine winners, along with many of the students receiving honorable mentions. Pavel Etingof, a math professor who is also PRIMES’ chief research advisor, states that among the 25 top winners, 12 (48 percent) are PRIMES alumni.

“We at PRIMES are very proud of our alumnae’s fantastic showing at the Putnam Competition,” says PRIMES director Slava Gerovitch PhD ’99. “PRIMES serves as a pipeline of mathematical excellence from high school through undergraduate studies, and beyond.”

Along the same lines, a collaboration between the MIT Department of Mathematics and MISTI-Africa has sent MIT students with Olympiad experience abroad during the Independent Activities Period (IAP) to coach high school students who hope to compete for their national teams. 

First-years at MIT also take class 18.A34 (Mathematical Problem Solving), known informally as the Putnam Seminar, not only to hone their Putnam exam skills, but also to make new friends. 

“Many people think of math competitions as primarily a way to identify and recognize talent, which of course they are,” says Peterson. “But the community convened by and through these competitions generates educational externalities that collectively exceed the sum of individual accomplishment.”  

Math Community and Outreach Officer Michael King also notes the camaraderie that forms around the test. 

“My favorite time of the Putnam day is right after the problem session, when the students all jump up, run over to their friends, and begin talking animatedly,” says King, who also took the exam as an undergraduate student. “They cheer each other’s successes, debate problem solutions, commiserate over missed answers, and share funny stories. It’s always amazing to work with the best math students in the world, but the most rewarding aspect is seeing the friendships that develop.”   

A full list of the winners can be found on the Putnam website.

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Rohit Karnik named director of J-WAFS

Rohit Karnik, the Tata Professor in the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering, has been named the new director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS), effective March 1. Karnik, who has served as associate director of J-WAFS since 2023, succeeds founding director John H. Lienhard V, Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Water and Mechanical Engineering.

Karnik assumes the role of director at a pivotal time for J-WAFS, as it celebrates its 10th anniversary. Announcing the appointment today in a letter to the J-WAFS research community, Vice President for Research Ian A. Waitz noted Karnik’s deep involvement with the lab’s research efforts and programming, as well as his accolades as a researcher, teacher, leader, and mentor. “I am delighted that Rohit will bring his talent and vision to bear on the J-WAFS mission, ensuring the program sustains its direct support of research on campus and its important impact around the world,” Waitz wrote.

J-WAFS is the only program at MIT focused exclusively on water and food research. Since 2015, the lab has made grants totaling approximately $25M to researchers across the Institute, including from all five schools and 40 departments, labs, and centers. It has supported 300 faculty, research staff, and students combined. Furthermore, the J-WAFS Solutions Program, which supports efforts to commercialize innovative water and food technologies, has spun out 12 companies and two open-sourced products. 

“We launched J-WAFS with the aim of building a community of water and food researchers at MIT, taking advantage of MIT’s strengths in so many disciplines that contribute to these most essential human needs,” writes Lienhard, who will retire this June. “After a decade’s work, that community is strong and visible. I am delighted that Rohit has agreed to take the reins. He will bring the program to the next level.” 

Lienhard has served as director since founding J-WAFS in 2014, along with executive director Renee J. Robins ’83, who last fall shared her intent to retire as well. 

“It’s a big change for a program to turn over both the director and executive director roles at the same time,” says Robins. “Having worked alongside Rohit as our associate director for the past couple of years, I am greatly assured that J-WAFS will be in good hands with a new and steady leadership team.”

Karnik became associate director of J-WAFS in July 2023, a move that coincided with the start of a sabbatical for Lienhard. Before that time, Karnik was already well engaged with J-WAFS as a grant recipient, reviewer, and community member. As associate director, Rohit has been integral to J-WAFS operations, planning, and grant management, including the proposal selection process. He was instrumental in planning the second J-WAFS Grand Challenge grant and led workshops at which researchers brainstormed proposal topics and formed teams. Karnik also engaged with J-WAFS’ corporate partners, helped plan lectures and events, and offered project oversight. 

“The experience gave me broad exposure to the amazing ideas and research at MIT in the water and food space, and the collaborations and synergies across departments and schools that enable excellence in research,” says Karnik. “The strengths of J-WAFS lie in being able to support principal investigators in pursuing research to address humanity’s water and food needs; in creating a community of students though the fellowship program and support of student clubs; and in bringing people together at seminars, workshops, and other events. All of this is made possible by the endowment and a dedicated team with close involvement in the projects after the grants are awarded.”

J-WAFS was established through a generous gift from Community Jameel, an independent, global organization advancing science to help communities thrive in a rapidly changing world. The lab was named in honor of the late Abdul Latif Jameel, the founder of the Abdul Latif Jameel company and father of MIT alumnus Mohammed Jameel ’78, who founded and chairs Community Jameel. 

J-WAFS’ operations are carried out by a small but passionate team of people at MIT who are dedicated to the mission of securing water and food systems. That mission is more important than ever, as climate change, urbanization, and a growing global population are putting tremendous stress on the world’s water and food supplies. These challenges drive J-WAFS’ efforts to mobilize the research, innovation, and technology that can sustainably secure humankind’s most vital resources. 

As director, Karnik will help shape the research agenda and key priorities for J-WAFS and usher the program into its second decade.

Karnik originally joined MIT as a postdoc in the departments of Mechanical and Chemical Engineering in October 2006. In September 2007, he became an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, before being promoted to associate professor in 2012. His research group focuses on the physics of micro- and nanofluidic flows and applying that to the design of micro- and nanofluidic systems for applications in water, healthcare, energy, and the environment. Past projects include ones on membranes for water filtration and chemical separations, sensors for water, and water filters from waste wood. Karnik has served as associate department head and interim co-department head in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. He also serves as faculty director of the New Engineering Education Transformation (NEET) program in the School of Engineering.

Before coming to MIT, Karnik received a bachelor’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay, and a master’s and PhD from the University of California at Berkeley, all in mechanical engineering. He has authored numerous publications, is co-inventor on several patents, and has received awards and honors including the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the U.S. Department of Energy Early Career Award, the MIT Office of Graduate Education’s Committed to Caring award, and election to the National Academy of Inventors as a senior member. 

Lienhard, J-WAFS’ outgoing director, has served on the MIT faculty since 1988. His research and educational efforts have focused on heat and mass transfer, water purification and desalination, thermodynamics, and separation processes. Lienhard has directly supervised more than 90 PhD and master’s theses, and he is the author of over 300 peer-reviewed papers and three textbooks. He holds more than 40 U.S. patents, most commercialized through startup companies with his students. One of these, the water treatment company Gradiant Corporation, is now valued over $1 billion and employs more than 1,200 people. Lienhard has received many awards, including the 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award of the International Desalination and Reuse Association.

Since 1998, Renee Robins has worked on the conception, launch, and development of a number of large interdisciplinary, international, and partnership-based research and education collaborations at MIT and elsewhere. She served in roles for the Cambridge MIT Institute, the MIT Portugal Program, the Mexico City Program, the Program on Emerging Technologies, and the Technology and Policy Program. She holds two undergraduate degrees from MIT, in biology and humanities/anthropology, and a master’s degree in public policy from Carnegie Mellon University. She has overseen significant growth in J-WAFS’ activities, funding, staffing, and collaborations over the past decade. In 2021, she was awarded an Infinite Mile Award in the area of the Offices of the Provost and Vice President for Research, in recognition of her contributions within her role at J-WAFS to help the Institute carry out its mission.

“John and Renee have done a remarkable job in establishing J-WAFS and bringing it up to its present form,” says Karnik. “I’m committed to making sure that the key aspects of J-WAFS that bring so much value to the MIT community, the nation, and the world continue to function well. MIT researchers and alumni in the J-WAFS community are already having an impact on addressing humanity’s water and food needs, and I believe that there is potential for MIT to have an even greater positive impact on securing humanity’s vital resources in the future.”

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Collaborating to advance research and innovation on essential chips for AI

The following is a joint announcement from the MIT Microsystems Technology Laboratories and GlobalFoundries. 

MIT and GlobalFoundries (GF), a leading manufacturer of essential semiconductors, have announced a new research agreement to jointly pursue advancements and innovations for enhancing the performance and efficiency of critical semiconductor technologies. The collaboration will be led by MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL) and GF’s research and development team, GF Labs.

With an initial research focus on artificial intelligence and other applications, the first projects are expected to leverage GF’s differentiated silicon photonics technology, which monolithically integrates radio frequency silicon-on-insulator (RF SOI), CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor), and optical features on a single chip to realize power efficiencies for data centers, and GF’s 22FDX platform, which delivers ultra-low power consumption for intelligent devices at the edge.

“The collaboration between MIT MTL and GF exemplifies the power of academia-industry cooperation in tackling the most pressing challenges in semiconductor research,” says Tomás Palacios, MTL director and the Clarence J. LeBel Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Palacios will serve as the MIT faculty lead for this research initiative.

“By bringing together MIT's world-renowned capabilities with GF's leading semiconductor platforms, we are positioned to drive significant research advancements in GF’s essential chip technologies for AI,” says Gregg Bartlett, chief technology officer at GF. “This collaboration underscores our commitment to innovation and highlights our dedication to developing the next generation of talent in the semiconductor industry. Together, we will research transformative solutions in the industry.”

“Integrated circuit technologies are the core driving a broad spectrum of applications ranging from mobile computing and communication devices to automotive, energy, and cloud computing,” says Anantha P. Chandrakasan, dean of MIT's School of Engineering, chief innovation and strategy officer, and the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “This collaboration allows MIT’s exceptional research community to leverage GlobalFoundries’ wide range of industry domain experts and advanced process technologies to drive exciting innovations in microelectronics across domains — while preparing our students to take on leading roles in the workforce of the future.”

The new research agreement was formalized at a signing ceremony on campus at MIT. It builds upon GF’s successful past and ongoing engagements with the university. GF serves on MTL’s Microsystems Industrial Group, which brings together industry and academia to engage in research. MIT faculty are active participants in GF’s University Partnership Program focused on joint semiconductor research and prototyping. Additionally, GF and MIT collaborate on several workforce development initiatives, including through the Northeast Microelectronics Coalition, a U.S. Department of Defense Microelectronics Commons Hub.

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Will neutrons compromise the operation of superconducting magnets in a fusion plant?

High-temperature superconducting magnets made from REBCO, an acronym for rare earth barium copper oxide, make it possible to create an intense magnetic field that can confine the extremely hot plasma needed for fusion reactions, which combine two hydrogen atoms to form an atom of helium, releasing a neutron in the process.

But some early tests suggested that neutron irradiation inside a fusion power plant might instantaneously suppress the superconducting magnets’ ability to carry current without resistance (called critical current), potentially causing a reduction in the fusion power output.

Now, a series of experiments has clearly demonstrated that this instantaneous effect of neutron bombardment, known as the “beam on effect,” should not be an issue during reactor operation, thus clearing the path for projects such as the ARC fusion system being developed by MIT spinoff company Commonwealth Fusion Systems.

The findings were reported in the journal Superconducting Science and Technology, in a paper by MIT graduate student Alexis Devitre and professors Michael Short, Dennis Whyte, and Zachary Hartwig, along with six others.

“Nobody really knew if it would be a concern,” Short explains. He recalls looking at these early findings: “Our group thought, man, somebody should really look into this. But now, luckily, the result of the paper is: It’s conclusively not a concern.”

The possible issue first arose during some initial tests of the REBCO tapes planned for use in the ARC system. “I can remember the night when we first tried the experiment,” Devitre recalls. “We were all down in the accelerator lab, in the basement. It was a big shocker because suddenly the measurement we were looking at, the critical current, just went down by 30 percent” when it was measured under radiation conditions (approximating those of the fusion system), as opposed to when it was only measured after irradiation.

Before that, researchers had irradiated the REBCO tapes and then tested them afterward, Short says. “We had the idea to measure while irradiating, the way it would be when the reactor’s really on,” he says. “And then we observed this giant difference, and we thought, oh, this is a big deal. It’s a margin you’d want to know about if you’re designing a reactor.”

After a series of carefully calibrated tests, it turned out the drop in critical current was not caused by the irradiation at all, but was just an effect of temperature changes brought on by the proton beam used for the irradiation experiments. This is something that would not be a factor in an actual fusion plant, Short says.

“We repeated experiments ‘oh so many times’ and collected about a thousand data points,” Devitre says. They then went through a detailed statistical analysis to show that the effects were exactly the same, under conditions where the material was just heated as when it was both heated and irradiated.

This excluded the possibility that the instantaneous suppression of the critical current had anything to do with the “beam on effect,” at least within the sensitivity of their tests. “Our experiments are quite sensitive,” Short says. “We can never say there’s no effect, but we can say that there’s no important effect.”

To carry out these tests required building a special facility for the purpose. Only a few such facilities exist in the world. “They’re all custom builds, and without this, we wouldn’t have been able to find out the answer,” he says.

The finding that this specific issue is not a concern for the design of fusion plants “illustrates the power of negative results. If you can conclusively prove that something doesn’t happen, you can stop scientists from wasting their time hunting for something that doesn’t exist.” And in this case, Short says, “You can tell the fusion companies: ‘You might have thought this effect would be real, but we’ve proven that it’s not, and you can ignore it in your designs.’ So that’s one more risk retired.”

That could be a relief to not only Commonwealth Fusion Systems but also several other companies that are also pursuing fusion plant designs, Devitre says. “There’s a bunch. And it’s not just fusion companies,” he adds. There remains the important issue of longer-term degradation of the REBCO that would occur over years or decades, which the group is presently investigating. Others are pursuing the use of these magnets for satellite thrusters and particle accelerators to study subatomic physics, where the effect could also have been a concern. For all these uses, “this is now one less thing to be concerned about,” Devitre says.

The research team also included David Fischer, Kevin Woller, Maxwell Rae, Lauryn Kortman, and Zoe Fisher at MIT, and N. Riva at Proxima Fusion in Germany. This research was supported by Eni S.p.A. through the MIT Energy Initiative.

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An ancient RNA-guided system could simplify delivery of gene editing therapies

A vast search of natural diversity has led scientists at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard to uncover ancient systems with potential to expand the genome editing toolbox. 

These systems, which the researchers call TIGR (Tandem Interspaced Guide RNA) systems, use RNA to guide them to specific sites on DNA. TIGR systems can be reprogrammed to target any DNA sequence of interest, and they have distinct functional modules that can act on the targeted DNA. In addition to its modularity, TIGR is very compact compared to other RNA-guided systems, like CRISPR, which is a major advantage for delivering it in a therapeutic context.  

These findings are reported online Feb. 27 in the journal Science.

“This is a very versatile RNA-guided system with a lot of diverse functionalities,” says Feng Zhang, the James and Patricia Poitras Professor of Neuroscience at MIT, who led the research. The TIGR-associated (Tas) proteins that Zhang’s team found share a characteristic RNA-binding component that interacts with an RNA guide that directs it to a specific site in the genome. Some cut the DNA at that site, using an adjacent DNA-cutting segment of the protein. That modularity could facilitate tool development, allowing researchers to swap useful new features into natural Tas proteins.

“Nature is pretty incredible,” says Zhang, who is also an investigator at the McGovern Institute and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a core member of the Broad Institute, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences and biological engineering at MIT, and co-director of the K. Lisa Yang and Hock E. Tan Center for Molecular Therapeutics at MIT. “It’s got a tremendous amount of diversity, and we have been exploring that natural diversity to find new biological mechanisms and harnessing them for different applications to manipulate biological processes,” he says. Previously, Zhang’s team adapted bacterial CRISPR systems into gene editing tools that have transformed modern biology. His team has also found a variety of programmable proteins, both from CRISPR systems and beyond. 

In their new work, to find novel programmable systems, the team began by zeroing in a structural feature of the CRISPR-Cas9 protein that binds to the enzyme’s RNA guide. That is a key feature that has made Cas9 such a powerful tool: “Being RNA-guided makes it relatively easy to reprogram, because we know how RNA binds to other DNA or other RNA,” Zhang explains. His team searched hundreds of millions of biological proteins with known or predicted structures, looking for any that shared a similar domain. To find more distantly related proteins, they used an iterative process: from Cas9, they identified a protein called IS110, which had previously been shown by others to bind RNA. They then zeroed in on the structural features of IS110 that enable RNA binding and repeated their search. 

At this point, the search had turned up so many distantly related proteins that they team turned to artificial intelligence to make sense of the list. “When you are doing iterative, deep mining, the resulting hits can be so diverse that they are difficult to analyze using standard phylogenetic methods, which rely on conserved sequence,” explains Guilhem Faure, a computational biologist in Zhang’s lab. With a protein large language model, the team was able to cluster the proteins they had found into groups according to their likely evolutionary relationships. One group set apart from the rest, and its members were particularly intriguing because they were encoded by genes with regularly spaced repetitive sequences reminiscent of an essential component of CRISPR systems. These were the TIGR-Tas systems.

Zhang’s team discovered more than 20,000 different Tas proteins, mostly occurring in bacteria-infecting viruses. Sequences within each gene’s repetitive region — its TIGR arrays — encode an RNA guide that interacts with the RNA-binding part of the protein. In some, the RNA-binding region is adjacent to a DNA-cutting part of the protein. Others appear to bind to other proteins, which suggests they might help direct those proteins to DNA targets.     

Zhang and his team experimented with dozens of Tas proteins, demonstrating that some can be programmed to make targeted cuts to DNA in human cells. As they think about developing TIGR-Tas systems into programmable tools, the researchers are encouraged by features that could make those tools particularly flexible and precise.

They note that CRISPR systems can only be directed to segments of DNA that are flanked by short motifs known as PAMs (protospacer adjacent motifs). TIGR Tas proteins, in contrast, have no such requirement. “This means theoretically, any site in the genome should be targetable,” says scientific advisor Rhiannon Macrae. The team’s experiments also show that TIGR systems have what Faure calls a “dual-guide system,” interacting with both strands of the DNA double helix to home in on their target sequences, which should ensure they act only where they are directed by their RNA guide. What’s more, Tas proteins are compact — a quarter of the size Cas9, on average — making them easier to deliver, which could overcome a major obstacle to therapeutic deployment of gene editing tools.  

Excited by their discovery, Zhang’s team is now investigating the natural role of TIGR systems in viruses, as well as how they can be adapted for research or therapeutics. They have determined the molecular structure of one of the Tas proteins they found to work in human cells, and will use that information to guide their efforts to make it more efficient. Additionally, they note connections between TIGR-Tas systems and certain RNA-processing proteins in human cells. “I think there’s more there to study in terms of what some of those relationships may be, and it may help us better understand how these systems are used in humans,” Zhang says.

This work was supported by the Helen Hay Whitney Foundation, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, K. Lisa Yang and Hock E. Tan Center for Molecular Therapeutics, Broad Institute Programmable Therapeutics Gift Donors, Pershing Square Foundation, William Ackman, Neri Oxman, the Phillips family, J. and P. Poitras, and the BT Charitable Foundation. 

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Three from MIT named 2025 Gates Cambridge Scholars

MIT senior Markey Freudenburg-Puricelli and alumnae Abigail (“Abbie”) Schipper ’24 and Rachel Zhang ’21 have been selected as Gates Cambridge Scholars and will begin graduate studies this fall in the field of their choice at Cambridge University in the U.K.

Now celebrating its 25th year, the Gates Cambridge program provides fully funded post-graduate scholarships to outstanding applicants from countries outside of the U.K. The mission of Gates Cambridge is to build a global network of future leaders committed to changing the world for the better.

Students interested in applying to Gates Cambridge should contact Kim Benard, associate dean of distinguished fellowships in Career Advising and Professional Development.

Markey Freudenburg-Puricelli

Freudenburg-Puricelli is majoring in Earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences and minoring in Spanish. Her passion for geoscience has led her to travel to different corners of the world to conduct geologic fieldwork. These experiences have motivated her to pursue a career in developing scientific policy and environmental regulation that can protect those most vulnerable to climate change. As a Gates Cambridge Scholar, she will pursue an MPhil in environmental policy.

Arriving at MIT, Freudenburg-Puricelli joined the Terrascope first-year learning community, which focuses on hands-on education relating to global environmental issues. She then became an undergraduate research assistant in the McGee Lab for Paleoclimate and Geochronology, where she gathered and interpreted data used to understand climate features of permafrost across northern Canada.

Following a summer internship in Chile researching volcanoes at the Universidad Católica del Norte, Freudenburg-Puricelli joined the Gehring Lab for Plant Genetics, Epigenetics, and Seed Biology. Last summer, she traveled to Peru to work with the Department of Paleontology at the Universidad Nacional de Piura, conducting fieldwork and preserving and organizing fossil specimens. Freudenburg-Puricelli has also done fieldwork on sedimentology in New Mexico, geological mapping in the Mojave Desert, and field oceanography onboard the SSV Corwith Cramer.

On campus, Freudenburg-Puricelli is an avid glassblower and has been a teaching assistant at the MIT glassblowing lab. She is also a tour guide for the MIT Office of Admissions and has volunteered with the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences’ first-year pre-orientation program.

Abigail “Abbie” Schipper ’24

Originally from Portland, Oregon, Schipper graduated from MIT with a BS in mechanical engineering and a minor in biology. At Cambridge, she will pursue an MPhil in engineering, researching medical devices used in pre-hospital trauma systems in low- and middle-income countries with the Cambridge Health Systems Design group.

At MIT, Schipper was a member of MIT Emergency Medical Services, volunteering on the ambulance and serving as the heartsafe officer and director of ambulance operations. Inspired by her work in CPR education, she helped create the LifeSaveHer project, which aims to decrease the gender disparity in out-of-hospital cardiac arrest survival outcomes through the creation of female CPR mannequins and associated research. This team was the first-place winner of the 2023 PKG IDEAS Competition and a recipient of the Eloranta Research Fellowship.

Schipper’s work has also focused on designing medical devices for low-resource or extreme environments. As an undergraduate, she performed research in the lab of Professor Giovanni Traverso, where she worked on a project designing a drug delivery implant for regions with limited access to surgery. During a summer internship at the University College London Collaborative Center for Inclusion Health, she worked with the U.K.’s National Health Service to create durable, low-cost carbon dioxide sensors to approximate the risk of airborne infectious disease transmission in shelters for people experiencing homelessness.

After graduation, Schipper interned at SAGA Space Architecture through MISTI Denmark, designing life support systems for an underwater habitat that will be used for astronaut training and oceanographic research.

Schipper was a member of the Concourse learning community, Sigma Kappa Sorority, and her living group, Burton 3rd. In her free time, she enjoys fixing bicycles and playing the piano.

Rachel Zhang ’21

Zhang graduated from MIT with a BS in physics in 2021. During her senior year, she was a recipient of the Joel Matthews Orloff Award. She then earned an MS in astronomy at Northwestern University. An internship at the Center for Computational Astrophysics at the Flatiron Institute deepened her interest in the applications of machine learning for astronomy. At Cambridge, she will pursue a PhD in applied mathematics and theoretical physics. 

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Sometimes, when competitors collaborate, everybody wins

One large metropolis might have several different train systems, from local intercity lines to commuter trains to longer regional lines.

When designing a system of train tracks, stations, and schedules in this network, should rail operators assume each entity operates independently, seeking only to maximize its own revenue? Or that they fully cooperate all the time with a joint plan, putting their own interest aside?

In the real world, neither assumption is very realistic.

Researchers from MIT and ETH Zurich have developed a new planning tool that mixes competition and cooperation to help operators in a complex, multiregional network strategically determine when and how they should work together.

Their framework is unusual because it incorporates co-investment and payoff-sharing mechanisms that identify which joint infrastructure projects a stakeholder should invest in with other operators to maximize collective benefits. The tool can help mobility stakeholders, such as governments, transport agencies, and firms, determine the right time to collaborate, how much they should invest in cooperative projects, how the profits should be distributed, and what would happen if they withdrew from the negotiations.

“It might seem counterintuitive, but sometimes you want to invest in your opponent so that, at some point, this investment will come back to you. Thanks to game theory, one can formalize this intuition to give rise to an interesting class of problems,” says Gioele Zardini, the Rudge and Nancy Allen Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT, a principal investigator in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), an affiliate faculty with the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), and senior author of a paper on this planning framework.

Numerical analysis shows that, by investing a portion of their budget into some shared infrastructure projects, independent operators can earn more revenue than if they operated completely noncooperatively.

In the example of the rail operators, the researchers demonstrate that co-investment also benefits users by improving regional train service. This win-win situation encourages more people to take the train, boosting revenues for operators and reducing emissions from automobiles, says Mingjia He, a graduate student at ETH Zurich and lead author.

“The key point here is that transport network design is not a zero-sum game. One operator’s gain doesn’t have to mean the others’ loss. By shifting the perception from isolated, self-optimization to strategic interaction, cooperation can create greater value for everyone involved,” she says.

Beyond transportation, this planning framework could help companies in a crowded industry or governments of neighboring countries test co-investment strategies.

He and Zardini are joined on the paper by ETH Zurich researchers Andrea Censi and Emilio Frazzoli. The research will be presented at the 2025 American Control Conference (ACC), and the paper has been selected as a Student Best Paper Award finalist.

Mixing cooperation and competition

Building transportation infrastructure in a multiregional network typically requires a huge investment of time and resources. Major infrastructure projects have an outsized impact that can stretch far beyond one region or operator.

Each region has its own priorities and decision-makers, such as local transportation authorities, which often results in the failure of coordination.

“If local systems are designed separately, regional travel may be more difficult, making the whole system less efficient. But if self-interested stakeholders don’t benefit from coordination, they are less likely to support the plan,” He says.

To find the best mix of cooperation and competition, the researchers used game theory to build a framework that enables operators to align interests and improve regional cooperation in a way that benefits all.

For instance, last year the Swiss government agreed to invest 50 million euros to electrify and expand part of a regional rail network in Germany, with the goal of creating a faster rail connection between three Swiss cities.

The researchers’ planning framework could help independent entities, from regional governments to rail operators, identify when and how to undertake such collaborations.

The first step involves simulating the outcomes if operators don’t collaborate. Then, using the co-investment and payoff-sharing mechanisms, the decision-maker can explore cooperative approaches.

To identify a fair way to split revenues from shared projects, the researchers design a payoff-sharing mechanism based on a game theory concept known as the Nash bargaining solution. This technique will determine how much benefit operators would receive in different cooperative scenarios, taking into account the benefits they would achieve with no collaboration.

The benefits of co-investment

Once they had designed the planning framework, the researchers tested it on a simulated transportation network with multiple competing rail operators. They assessed various co-investment ratios across multiple years to identify the best decisions for operators.

In the end, they found that a semicooperative approach leads to the highest returns for all stakeholders. For instance, in one scenario, by co-investing 50 percent of their total budgets into shared infrastructure projects, all operators maximized their returns.

In another scenario, they show that by investing just 3.3 percent of their total budget in the first year of a multiyear cooperative project, operators can boost outcomes by 30 percent across three metrics: revenue, reduced costs for customers, and lower emissions.

“This proves that a small, up-front investment can lead to significant long-term benefits,” He says.

When they applied their framework to more realistic multiregional networks where all regions weren’t the same size, this semicooperative approach achieved even better results.

However, their analyses indicate that returns don’t increase in a linear way — sometimes increasing the co-investment ratio does not increase the benefit for operators.

Success is a multifaceted issue that depends on how much is invested by all operators, which projects are chosen, when investment happens, and how the budget is distributed over time, He explains.

“These strategic decisions are complex, which is why simulations and optimization are necessary to find the best cooperation and negotiation strategies. Our framework can help operators make smarter investment choices and guide them through the negotiation process,” she says.

The framework could also be applied to other complex network design problems, such as in communications or energy distribution.

In the future, the researchers want to build a user-friendly interface that will allow a stakeholder to easily explore different collaborative options. They also want to consider more complex scenarios, such as the role policy plays in shared infrastructure decisions or the robust cooperative strategies that handle risks and uncertainty.

This work was supported, in part, by the ETH Zurich Mobility Initiative and the ETH Zurich Foundation.

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Rebuilding Ukraine

Nearly three years after Russian military forces invaded Ukraine, escalating a decade-long conflict, Ukrainian cities lie in ruin as the war drags on. The seaside city of Mariupol was particularly hard hit. Bombs hollowed out hospitals and homes and leveled banks and playgrounds. Schools sit charred and empty.

The remaining 30 percent of the population still residing in Mariupol, now under Russian occupation, lack reliable electricity, clean water, and medical care. And of the 65,000 Mariupolites in exile across Ukraine and abroad, many have no home to return to. While Ukraine’s future remains uncertain, its mayors and municipal managers are laser-focused on planning for recovery after the war. “Ukrainian communities know we should build back better when the war is finished, so what is that experience?” says Vadym Boichenko, Mariupol mayor and head of development of de-occupied and temporarily occupied communities for the Association of Ukrainian Cities. To secure funding for rebuilding, “leaders need to prepare good projects with vision and innovation for their communities,” he adds.

Success depends on drawing from cutting-edge research and forward-thinking approaches to urban economic development and planning. To expedite learning, the Kyiv-based Association of Ukrainian Cities, Mariupol City Council, and the nonprofit Mariupol Reborn created a virtual Community Recovery Academy that leans on MIT’s expertise. This online training program for Ukrainian officials includes a series of lectures by professors in the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), part of the Institute’s School of Architecture and Planning. Talks include wisdom drawn from case studies coupled with theoretical lessons.

“When I first learned of this opportunity, trying to mobilize a contribution from DUSP was a no-brainer; it’s the very least we can offer,” says Christopher Zegras, DUSP department head and professor of mobility and urban planning. Increasingly destructive weather events and ongoing conflicts worldwide have made post-disaster planning “a global need, and unfortunately probably an increasing global need,” Zegras adds.

An MIT connection

The connection to Ukrainian officials came from Washington-based DUSP alumnus Victor Hoskins MCP ’81. Last spring, the president and CEO of the Fairfax County Economic Development Authority learned about Ukraine’s need from a former colleague he had worked with as deputy mayor of planning and economic development in D.C.

Hoskins has worked internationally, traveling often to Europe and Asia, where his office has branches that work to attract foreign companies to Fairfax County. In prior positions, “a lot of my work has centered around going into jurisdictions that are having trouble and turning them around economically,” Hoskins says.

He set up a call with the vice-mayor of Mariupol, Sergiy Orlov, and staff, who work in exile in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro. “They’re in circumstances unimaginable to us,” Hoskins says. “Anything we can do to help is a good thing.” One strategy Hoskins has used in his own planning and development work is consulting academic institutions for guidance. Orlov asked him to suggest a few schools in the United States. “I said, try the best universities in the world,” says Hoskins. “Try MIT.”

Hoskins connected Orlov and Zegras, who pledged DUSP’s support after learning about the project. Officials from 37 communities across Ukraine, especially small- to medium-sized ones, were eager to learn best practices in urban development and about reconstruction planning and funding strategies to support rebuilding.

From Boichenko’s makeshift office, where air alerts are common and missiles often hum overhead, a small team sketched out the Community Recovery Academy’s modules and curriculum. The academy launched in September 2024 with seven MIT professors on board to give lectures as part of the initiative’s second of four modules: “Economic Modeling, Recovery of Cities and Territories.”

DUSP Lecturer Andrew Stokols, whose ancestors hail from Ukraine, helped Zegras coordinate schedules and calls. “It’s important to think about how planners can respond to ongoing conflicts in the world,” Stokols says. “Scholarly exchange is useful, and it’s nice to know we can do something, however small it is, to help out.”

Planning for the future

Lecture topics included transportation resilience and recovery by Jinhua Zhao, professor of cities and transport and director of MIT Mobility Initiative, and revitalizing main streets and small-town economic development strategies by Jeffrey Levine, associate professor of the practice of economic development and planning.

Andres Sevtsuk, associate professor of urban science and planning, spoke on street commerce and designing to create vibrant urban sidewalks. Former special assistant for manufacturing and economic development at the White House National Economic Council and current DUSP professor of the practice Liz Reynolds also spoke on industrial transformation. Timothy Sturgeon, an affiliate with the MIT Industrial Performance Center, ran a session with a Ukrainian counterpart on integrating Ukraine’s software industry with global value chains.

Talks were simultaneously translated into Ukrainian, and participants had ample time to ask pressing questions.

Mary Anne Ocampo, associate professor of the practice of urban design and planning and principal at Sasaki and Associates, shared insights from her work on Kabul’s 2017 to 2019 reconstruction during her presentation for Ukrainian officials.

She spoke about ways to attract investment and build consensus among key organizations and institutions that can support rebuilding, while encouraging Ukrainian leaders to consider how marginalized Ukrainian populations could influence reconstruction. Small, quick-win projects can be key, she said.

Albert Saiz, the Daniel Rose Associate Professor of Urban Economics and Real Estate, imparted lessons around urban and housing economics plus the economics of master planning. He drew from examples of cities in the U.S. Midwest that had seen sharp declines, including Detroit and Cleveland. He also delved into Japan and Germany’s recoveries after World War II.

A crucial lesson for Ukraine is the vital role external trade plays in recovery, Saiz says. Post WWII, Japan focused on trade with other countries, and it emerged stronger because of it. “In Japan, cities recovered very quickly,” says Saiz. For Ukraine, “it’s important to reestablish firm-based external, international relationships right now.”

Saiz explained how to structure credit guarantees, which will be essential to helping Ukraine secure international financing. Building temporary structures can be helpful, too, he told officials — for example, constructing FEMA-type homes as an interim solution. Meanwhile, clarity in planning is key.

“I shared that you have to establish a clear path to your stakeholders, but then you have to have flexibility within that path,” Saiz says.

An ongoing collaboration

The Community Recovery Academy is currently underway with the support of the U.K. government under the U.K. International Development and the International Republican Institute (IRI UKRAINE), in collaboration with steel and mining company Metinvest and Ukrainian investment group SCM.

Metinvest and SCM are also supporting planning work that’s been underway through the nonprofit organization Mariupol Reborn. The group’s 2040 urban vision document includes insight from urban planners, architects and other experts. As for the academy, there’s ongoing demand for more lessons. “The request is quite huge,” Boichenko says. Around 100 territorial communities applied to participate in the academy, and the first phase accommodated a few dozen.

Orlov and Zegras hope to produce another set of MIT lectures this spring. Longer term, plans are in the works for a multidisciplinary, multi-departmental fall 2025 MIT practicum during which students would work alongside Ukrainian officials on recovery planning. In the meantime, lectures will be packaged into a free and open-access online learning course.

Zegras says he hopes the learning that’s gone into the work to date helps to provide an initial blueprint for Ukraine’s future, as well as for planning’s potential role in rebuilding in a world where these types of efforts are increasingly needed — whether it be Sudan, Gaza, or Los Angeles.

For Boichenko, the academy has been foundational work. “We are only in the beginning,” he says. “We are building strong relationships, and we are definitely happy to work with MIT.”

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Fiber computer allows apparel to run apps and “understand” the wearer

What if the clothes you wear could care for your health?

MIT researchers have developed an autonomous programmable computer in the form of an elastic fiber, which could monitor health conditions and physical activity, alerting the wearer to potential health risks in real-time. Clothing containing the fiber computer was comfortable and machine washable, and the fibers were nearly imperceptible to the wearer, the researchers report.

Unlike on-body monitoring systems known as “wearables,” which are located at a single point like the chest, wrist, or finger, fabrics and apparel have an advantage of being in contact with large areas of the body close to vital organs. As such, they present a unique opportunity to measure and understand human physiology and health.

The fiber computer contains a series of microdevices, including sensors, a microcontroller, digital memory, bluetooth modules, optical communications, and a battery, making up all the necessary components of a computer in a single elastic fiber.

The researchers added four fiber computers to a top and a pair of leggings, with the fibers running along each limb. In their experiments, each independently programmable fiber computer operated a machine-learning model that was trained to autonomously recognize exercises performed by the wearer, resulting in an average accuracy of about 70 percent.

Surprisingly, once the researchers allowed the individual fiber computers to communicate among themselves, their collective accuracy increased to nearly 95 percent.

“Our bodies broadcast gigabytes of data through the skin every second in the form of heat, sound, biochemicals, electrical potentials, and light, all of which carry information about our activities, emotions, and health. Unfortunately, most — if not all — of it gets absorbed and then lost in the clothes we wear. Wouldn’t it be great if we could teach clothes to capture, analyze, store, and communicate this important information in the form of valuable health and activity insights?” says Yoel Fink, a professor of materials science and engineering at MIT, a principal investigator in the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) and the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies (ISN), and senior author of a paper on the research, which appears today in Nature.

The use of the fiber computer to understand health conditions and help prevent injury will soon undergo a significant real-world test as well. U.S. Army and Navy service members will be conducting a monthlong winter research mission to the Arctic, covering 1,000 kilometers in average temperatures of -40 degrees Fahrenheit. Dozens of base layer merino mesh shirts with fiber computers will be providing real-time information on the health and activity of the individuals participating on this mission, called Musk Ox II.

“In the not-too-distant future, fiber computers will allow us to run apps and get valuable health care and safety services from simple everyday apparel. We are excited to see glimpses of this future in the upcoming Arctic mission through our partners in the U.S. Army, Navy, and DARPA. Helping to keep our service members safe in the harshest environments is a honor and privilege,” Fink says.

He is joined on the paper by co-lead authors Nikhil Gupta, an MIT materials science and engineering graduate student; Henry Cheung MEng ’23; and Syamantak Payra ’22, currently a graduate student at Stanford University; John Joannopoulos, the Francis Wright Professor of Physics at MIT and director of the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies; as well as others at MIT, Rhode Island School of Design, and Brown University.

Fiber focus

The fiber computer builds on more than a decade of work in the Fibers@MIT lab at the RLE and was supported primarily by ISN. In previous papers, the researchers demonstrated methods for incorporating semiconductor devices, optical diodes, memory units, elastic electrical contacts, and sensors into fibers that could be formed into fabrics and garments.

“But we hit a wall in terms of the complexity of the devices we could incorporate into the fiber because of how we were making it. We had to rethink the whole process. At the same time, we wanted to make it elastic and flexible so it would match the properties of traditional fabrics,” says Gupta.

One of the challenges that researchers surmounted is the geometric mismatch between a cylindrical fiber and a planar chip. Connecting wires to small, conductive areas, known as pads, on the outside of each planar microdevice proved to be difficult and prone to failure because complex microdevices have many pads, making it increasingly difficult to find room to attach each wire reliably.

In this new design, the researchers map the 2D pad alignment of each microdevice to a 3D layout using a flexible circuit board called an interposer, which they wrapped into a cylinder. They call this the “maki” design. Then, they attach four separate wires to the sides of the “maki” roll and connected all the components together.

“This advance was crucial for us in terms of being able to incorporate higher functionality computing elements, like the microcontroller and Bluetooth sensor, into the fiber,” says Gupta.

This versatile folding technique could be used with a variety of microelectronic devices, enabling them to incorporate additional functionality.

In addition, the researchers fabricated the new fiber computer using a type of thermoplastic elastomer that is several times more flexible than the thermoplastics they used previously. This material enabled them to form a machine-washable, elastic fiber that can stretch more than 60 percent without failure.

They fabricate the fiber computer using a thermal draw process that the Fibers@MIT group pioneered in the early 2000s. The process involves creating a macroscopic version of the fiber computer, called a preform, that contains each connected microdevice.

This preform is hung in a furnace, melted, and pulled down to form a fiber, which also contains embedded lithium-ion batteries so it can power itself.

“A former group member, Juliette Marion, figured out how to create elastic conductors, so even when you stretch the fiber, the conductors don’t break. We can maintain functionality while stretching it, which is crucial for processes like knitting, but also for clothes in general,” Gupta says.

Bring out the vote

Once the fiber computer is fabricated, the researchers use a braiding technique to cover the fiber with traditional yarns, such as polyester, merino wool, nylon, and even silk.

In addition to gathering data on the human body using sensors, each fiber computer incorporates LEDs and light sensors that enable multiple fibers in one garment to communicate, creating a textile network that can perform computation.

Each fiber computer also includes a Bluetooth communication system to send data wirelessly to a device like a smartphone, which can be read by a user.

The researchers leveraged these communication systems to create a textile network by sewing four fiber computers into a garment, one in each sleeve. Each fiber ran an independent neural network that was trained to identify exercises like squats, planks, arm circles, and lunges.

“What we found is that the ability of a fiber computer to identify human activity was only about 70 percent accurate when located on a single limb, the arms or legs. However, when we allowed the fibers sitting on all four limbs to ‘vote,’ they collectively reached nearly 95 percent accuracy, demonstrating the importance of residing on multiple body areas and forming a network between autonomous fiber computers that does not need wires and interconnects,” Fink says.

Moving forward, the researchers want to use the interposer technique to incorporate additional microdevices.

Arctic insights

In February, a multinational team equipped with computing fabrics will travel for 30 days and 1,000 kilometers in the Arctic. The fabrics will help keep the team safe, and set the stage for future physiological “digital twinning” models.

“As a leader with more than a decade of Arctic operational experience, one of my main concerns is how to keep my team safe from debilitating cold weather injuries — a primary threat to operators in the extreme cold,” says U.S. Army Major Hefner, the commander of Musk Ox II. “Conventional systems just don’t provide me with a complete picture. We will be wearing the base layer computing fabrics on us 24/7 to help us better understand the body’s response to extreme cold and ultimately predict and prevent injury.”

Karl Friedl, U.S. Army senior research scientist of performance physiology, noted that the MIT programmable computing fabric technology may become a “gamechanger for everyday lives.”

“Imagine near-term fiber computers in fabrics and apparel that sense and respond to the environment and to the physiological status of the individual, increasing comfort and performance, providing real-time health monitoring and providing protection against external threats. Soldiers will be the early adopters and beneficiaries of this new technology, integrated with AI systems using predictive physiological models and mission-relevant tools to enhance survivability in austere environments,” Friedl says.

“The convergence of classical fibers and fabrics with computation and machine learning has only begun. We are exploring this exciting future not only through research and field testing, but importantly in an MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering course ‘Computing Fabrics,’ taught with Professor Anais Missakian from the Rhode Island School of Design,” adds Fink.

This research was supported, in part, by the U.S. Army Research Office Institute for Soldier Nanotechnology (ISN), the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Fannie and John Hertz Foundation Fellowship, the Paul and Daisy Soros Foundation Fellowship for New Americans, the Stanford-Knight Hennessy Scholars Program, and the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation.

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A protein from tiny tardigrades may help cancer patients tolerate radiation therapy

About 60 percent of all cancer patients in the United States receive radiation therapy as part of their treatment. However, this radiation can have severe side effects that often end up being too difficult for patients to tolerate.

Drawing inspiration from a tiny organism that can withstand huge amounts of radiation, researchers at MIT, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and the University of Iowa have developed a new strategy that may protect patients from this kind of damage. Their approach makes use of a protein from tardigrades, often also called “water bears,” which are usually less than a millimeter in length.

When the researchers injected messenger RNA encoding this protein into mice, they found that it generated enough protein to protect cells’ DNA from radiation-induced damage. If developed for use in humans, this approach could benefit many cancer patients, the researchers say.

“Radiation can be very helpful for many tumors, but we also recognize that the side effects can be limiting. There’s an unmet need with respect to helping patients mitigate the risk of damaging adjacent tissue,” says Giovanni Traverso, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT and a gastroenterologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Traverso and James Byrne, an assistant professor of radiation oncology at the University of Iowa, are the senior authors of the study, which appears today in Nature Biomedical Engineering. The paper’s lead authors are Ameya Kirtane, an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School and a visiting scientist at MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, and Jianling Bi, a research scientist at the University of Iowa.

Extreme survival

Radiation is often used to treat cancers of the head and neck, where it can damage the mouth or throat, making it very painful to eat or drink. It is also commonly used for gastrointestinal cancers, which can lead to rectal bleeding. Many patients end up delaying treatments or stopping them altogether.

“This affects a huge number of patients, and it can manifest as something as simple as mouth sores, which can limit a person’s ability to eat because it’s so painful, to requiring hospitalization because people are suffering so terribly from the pain, weight loss, or bleeding. It can be pretty dangerous, and it’s something that we really wanted to try and address,” Byrne says.

Currently, there are very few ways to prevent radiation damage in cancer patients. There are a handful of drugs that can be given to try to reduce the damage, and for prostate cancer patients, a hydrogel can be used to create a physical barrier between the prostate and the rectum during radiation treatment.

For several years, Traverso and Byrne have been working on developing new ways to prevent radiation damage. In the new study, they were inspired by the extraordinary survival ability of tardigrades. Found all over the world, usually in aquatic environments, these organisms are well known for their resilience to extreme conditions. Scientists have even sent them into space, where they were shown to survive extreme dehydration and cosmic radiation.

One key component of tardigrades’ defense systems is a unique damage suppressor protein called Dsup, which binds to DNA and helps protect it from radiation-induced damage. This protein plays a major role in tardigrades’ ability to survive radiation doses 2,000 to 3,000 times higher than what a human being can tolerate.

When brainstorming ideas for novel ways to protect cancer patients from radiation, the researchers wondered if they might be able to deliver messenger RNA encoding Dsup to patient tissues before radiation treatment. This mRNA would trigger cells to transiently express the protein, protecting DNA during the treatment. After a few hours, the mRNA and protein would disappear.

For this to work, the researchers needed a way to deliver mRNA that would generate large amounts of protein in the target tissues. They screened libraries of delivery particles containing both polymer and lipid components, which have been used separately to achieve efficient mRNA delivery. From these screens, they identified one polymer-lipid particle that was best-suited for delivery to the colon, and another that was optimized to deliver mRNA to mouth tissue.

“We thought that perhaps by combining these two systems — polymers and lipids — we may be able to get the best of both worlds and get highly potent RNA delivery. And that’s essentially what we saw,” Kirtane says. “One of the strengths of our approach is that we are using a messenger RNA, which just temporarily expresses the protein, so it’s considered far safer than something like DNA, which may be incorporated into the cells’ genome.”

Protection from radiation

After showing that these particles could successfully deliver mRNA to cells grown in the lab, the researchers tested whether this approach could effectively protect tissue from radiation in a mouse model.

They injected the particles into either the cheek or the rectum several hours before giving a dose of radiation similar to what cancer patients would receive. In these mice, the researchers saw a 50 percent reduction in the amount of double-stranded DNA breaks caused by radiation.

“This study shows great promise and is a really novel idea leveraging natural mechanisms of protection again DNA damage for the purpose of protecting healthy cells during radiation treatments for cancer,” says Ben Ho Park, director of the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, who was not involved in the study.

The researchers also showed that the protective effect of the Dsup protein did not spread beyond the injection site, which is important because they don’t want to protect the tumor itself from the effects of radiation. To make this treatment more feasible for potential use in humans, the researchers now plan to work on developing a version of the Dsup protein that would not provoke an immune response, as the original tardigrade protein likely would.

If developed for use in humans, this protein could also potentially be used to protect against DNA damage caused by chemotherapy drugs, the researchers say. Another possible application would be to help prevent radiation damage in astronauts in space.

Other authors of the paper include Netra Rajesh, Chaoyang Tang, Miguel Jimenez, Emily Witt, Megan McGovern, Arielle Cafi, Samual Hatfield, Lauren Rosenstock, Sarah Becker, Nicole Machado, Veena Venkatachalam, Dylan Freitas, Xisha Huang, Alvin Chan, Aaron Lopes, Hyunjoon Kim, Nayoon Kim, Joy Collins, Michelle Howard, Srija Manchkanti, and Theodore Hong.

The research was funded by the Prostate Cancer Foundation Young Investigator Award, the U.S. Department of Defense Prostate Cancer Program Early Investigator Award, a Hope Funds for Cancer Research Fellowship, the American Cancer Society, the National Cancer Institute, MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, and the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health. 

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Helping the immune system attack tumors

In addition to patrolling the body for foreign invaders, the immune system also hunts down and destroys cells that have become cancerous or precancerous. However, some cancer cells end up evading this surveillance and growing into tumors.

Once established, tumor cells often send out immunosuppressive signals, which leads T cells to become “exhausted” and unable to attack the tumor. In recent years, some cancer immunotherapy drugs have shown great success in rejuvenating those T cells so they can begin attacking tumors again.

While this approach has proven effective against cancers such as melanoma, it doesn’t work as well for others, including lung and ovarian cancer. MIT Associate Professor Stefani Spranger is trying to figure out how those tumors are able to suppress immune responses, in hopes of finding new ways to galvanize T cells into attacking them.

“We really want to understand why our immune system fails to recognize cancer,” Spranger says. “And I’m most excited about the really hard-to-treat cancers because I think that’s where we can make the biggest leaps.”

Her work has led to a better understanding of the factors that control T-cell responses to tumors, and raised the possibility of improving those responses through vaccination or treatment with immune-stimulating molecules called cytokines.

“We’re working on understanding what exactly the problem is, and then collaborating with engineers to find a good solution,” she says.

Jumpstarting T cells

As a student in Germany, where students often have to choose their college major while still in high school, Spranger envisioned going into the pharmaceutical industry and chose to major in biology. At Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, her course of study began with classical biology subjects such as botany and zoology, and she began to doubt her choice. But, once she began taking courses in cell biology and immunology, her interest was revived and she continued into a biology graduate program at the university.

During a paper discussion class early in her graduate school program, Spranger was assigned to a Science paper on a promising new immunotherapy treatment for melanoma. This strategy involves isolating tumor-infiltrating T-cells during surgery, growing them into large numbers, and then returning them to the patient. For more than 50 percent of those patients, the tumors were completely eliminated.

“To me, that changed the world,” Spranger recalls. “You can take the patient’s own immune system, not really do all that much to it, and then the cancer goes away.”

Spranger completed her PhD studies in a lab that worked on further developing that approach, known as adoptive T-cell transfer therapy. At that point, she still was leaning toward going into pharma, but after finishing her PhD in 2011, her husband, also a biologist, convinced her that they should both apply for postdoc positions in the United States.

They ended up at the University of Chicago, where Spranger worked in a lab that studies how the immune system responds to tumors. There, she discovered that while melanoma is usually very responsive to immunotherapy, there is a small fraction of melanoma patients whose T cells don’t respond to the therapy at all. That got her interested in trying to figure out why the immune system doesn’t always respond to cancer the way that it should, and in finding ways to jumpstart it.

During her postdoc, Spranger also discovered that she enjoyed mentoring students, which she hadn’t done as a graduate student in Germany. That experience drew her away from going into the pharmaceutical industry, in favor of a career in academia.

“I had my first mentoring teaching experience having an undergrad in the lab, and seeing that person grow as a scientist, from barely asking questions to running full experiments and coming up with hypotheses, changed how I approached science and my view of what academia should be for,” she says.

Modeling the immune system

When applying for faculty jobs, Spranger was drawn to MIT by the collaborative environment of MIT and its Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, which offered the chance to collaborate with a large community of engineers who work in the field of immunology.

“That community is so vibrant, and it’s amazing to be a part of it,” she says.

Building on the research she had done as a postdoc, Spranger wanted to explore why some tumors respond well to immunotherapy, while others do not. For many of her early studies, she used a mouse model of non-small-cell lung cancer. In human patients, the majority of these tumors do not respond well to immunotherapy.

“We build model systems that resemble each of the different subsets of non-responsive non-small cell lung cancer, and we’re trying to really drill down to the mechanism of why the immune system is not appropriately responding,” she says.

As part of that work, she has investigated why the immune system behaves differently in different types of tissue. While immunotherapy drugs called checkpoint inhibitors can stimulate a strong T-cell response in the skin, they don’t do nearly as much in the lung. However, Spranger has shown that T cell responses in the lung can be improved when immune molecules called cytokines are also given along with the checkpoint inhibitor.

Those cytokines work, in part, by activating dendritic cells — a class of immune cells that help to initiate immune responses, including activation of T cells.

“Dendritic cells are the conductor for the orchestra of all the T cells, although they’re a very sparse cell population,” Spranger says. “They can communicate which type of danger they sense from stressed cells and then instruct the T cells on what they have to do and where they have to go.”

Spranger’s lab is now beginning to study other types of tumors that don’t respond at all to immunotherapy, including ovarian cancer and glioblastoma. Both the brain and the peritoneal cavity appear to suppress T-cell responses to tumors, and Spranger hopes to figure out how to overcome that immunosuppression.

“We’re specifically focusing on ovarian cancer and glioblastoma, because nothing’s working right now for those cancers,” she says. “We want to understand what we have to do in those sites to induce a really good anti-tumor immune response.”

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MIT engineers prepare to send three payloads to the moon

Three MIT payloads will soon hitch a ride to the moon in a step toward establishing a permanent base on the lunar surface.

In the coming days, weather permitting, MIT engineers and scientists will send three payloads into space, on a course set for the moon’s south polar region. Scientists believe this area, with its permanently shadowed regions, could host hidden reservoirs of frozen water, which could serve to sustain future lunar settlements and fuel missions beyond the moon.

NASA plans to send astronauts to the moon’s south pole in 2027 as part of the Artemis III mission, which will be the first time humans touch down on the lunar surface since the Apollo era and the first time any human sets foot on its polar region. In advance of that journey, the MIT payloads will provide data about the area that can help prepare Artemis astronauts for navigating the frozen terrain.

The payloads include two novel technologies — a small depth-mapping camera and a thumb-sized mini-rover — along with a wafer-thin “record,” etched with the voices of people from around the world speaking in their native languages. All three payloads will be carried by a larger, suitcase-sized rover built by the space contractor Lunar Outpost.

As the main rover drives around the moon’s surface, exploring the polar terrain, the MIT camera, mounted on the front of the rover, will take the first ever 3D images of the lunar landscape captured from the surface of the Moon using time of flight technology. These images will beam back to Earth, where they can be used to train Artemis astronauts in visual simulations of the polar terrain and can be incorporated into advanced spacesuits with synthetic vision helmets.

Meanwhile, the mini-rover, dubbed “AstroAnt,” will wheel around the roof of the main rover and take temperature readings to monitor the larger vehicle’s operation. If it’s successful, AstroAnt could work as part of a team of miniature helper bots, performing essential tasks in future missions, such as clearing dust from solar panels and checking for cracks in lunar habitats and infrastructure.

All three MIT payloads, along with the Lunar Outpost rover, will launch to the moon aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and touch down in the moon’s south polar region in a lander built by space company Intuitive Machines. The mission as a whole, which includes a variety of other payloads in addition to MIT’s, is named IM-2, for Intuitive Machines’ second trip to the moon. IM-2 aims to identify the presence and amount of water-ice on the moon’s south pole, using a combination of instruments, including an ice drill mounted to the lander, and a robotic “hopper” that will bounce along the surface to search for water in hard-to-reach regions.

The lunar landing, which engineers anticipate will be around noon on March 6, will mark the first time MIT has set active technology on the moon’s surface since the Apollo era, when MIT’s Instrumentation Laboratory, now the independent Draper Laboratory, provided the landmark Apollo Guidance Computer that navigated astronauts to the moon and back.

MIT engineers see their part in the new mission, which they’ve named “To the Moon to Stay,” as the first of many on the way to establishing a permanent presence on the lunar surface.

“Our goal is not just to visit the moon but to build a thriving ecosystem that supports humanity’s expansion into space,” says Dava Newman, Apollo Program Professor of Astronautics at MIT, director of the MIT Media Lab, and former NASA deputy administrator.

Institute’s roots

MIT’s part in the lunar mission is led by the Space Exploration Initiative (SEI), a research collaborative within the Media Lab that aims to enable a “sci-fi future” of space exploration. The SEI, which was founded in 2016 by media arts and sciences alumna Ariel Ekblaw SM ’17, PhD ’20, develops, tests, and deploys futuristic space-grade technologies that are intended to help humans establish sustainable settlements in space.

In the spring of 2021, SEI and MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro) offered a course, MAS.839/16.893 (Operating in the Lunar Environment), that tasked teams of students to design payloads that meet certain objectives related to NASA’s Artemis missions to the moon. The class was taught by Ekblaw and AeroAstro’s Jeffrey Hoffman, MIT professor of the practice and former NASA astronaut, who helped students test their payload designs in the field, including in remote regions of Norway that resemble the moon’s barren landscape, and in parabolic flights that mimic the moon’s weak gravity.

Out of that class, Ekblaw and Hoffman chose to further develop two payload designs: a laser-based 3D camera system and the AstroAnt — a tiny, autonomous inspection robot. Both designs grew out of prior work. AstroAnt was originally a side project as part of Ekblaw’s PhD, based on work originally developed by Artem Dementyev in the Media Lab’s Responsive Environments group, while the 3D camera was a PhD focus for AeroAstro alumna Cody Paige ’23, who helped develop and test the camera design and implement VR/XR technology with Newman, in collaboration with NASA Ames Research Center.

As both designs were fine-tuned, Ekblaw raised funds and established a contract with Lunar Outpost (co-founded by MIT AeroAstro alumnus Forrest Meyen SM ’13, PhD ’17) to pair the payloads with the company’s moon-bound rover. SEI Mission Integrator Sean Auffinger oversaw integration and test efforts, together with Lunar Outpost, to support these payloads for operation in a novel, extreme environment.

“This mission has deep MIT roots,” says Ekblaw, who is the principal investigator for the MIT arm of the IM-2 mission, and a visiting scientist at the Media Lab. “This will be historic in that we’ve never landed technology or a rover in this area of the lunar south pole. It’s a really hard place to land — there are big boulders, and deep dust. So, it’s a bold attempt.”

Systems on

The site of the IM-2 landing is Mons Mouton Plateau — a flat-topped mountain at the moon’s south pole that lies just north of Shackleton Crater, which is a potential landing site for NASA’s Artemis astronauts. After the Intuitive Machines lander touches down, it will effectively open its garage door and let Lunar Outpost’s rover drive out to explore the polar landscape. Once the rover acclimates to its surroundings, it will begin to activate its instruments, including MIT’s 3D camera.

“It will be the first time we’re using this specific imaging technology on the lunar surface,” notes Paige, who is the current SEI director.

The camera, which will be mounted on the front of the main rover, is designed to shine laser light onto a surface and measure the time it takes for the light to bounce back to the camera. This “time-of-flight” is a measurement of distance, which can also be translated into surface topography, such as the depth of individual craters and crevices.

“Because we’re using a laser light, we can look without using sunlight,” Paige explains. “And we don’t know exactly what we’ll find. Some of the things we’re looking for are centimeter-sized holes, in areas that are permanently shadowed or frozen, that might contain water-ice. Those are the kinds of landscapes we’re really excited to see.”

Paige expects that the camera will send images back to Earth in next-day data packets, which the MIT science team will process and analyze as the rover traverses the terrain.

As the camera maps the moon’s surface, AstroAnt — which is smaller and lighter than an airpod case — will deploy from a tiny garage atop the main rover’s roof. The AstroAnt will drive around on magnetic wheels that allow it to stick to the rover’s surface without falling off. To the AstroAnt’s undercarriage, Ekblaw and her team, led by Media Lab graduate student Fangzheng Liu, fixed a thermopile — a small sensor that takes measurements of the main rover’s temperature, which can be used to monitor the vehicle’s thermal performance. 

“If we can test this one AstroAnt on the moon, then we imagine having these really capable, roving swarms that can help astronauts do autonomous repair, inspection, diagnostics, and servicing,” Ekblaw says. “In the future, we could put little windshield wipers on them to help clear dust from solar panels, or put a pounding bar on them to induce tiny vibrations to detect defects in a habitat. There’s a lot of potential once we get to swarm scale.”

Eyes on the moon

The third MIT payload that will be affixed to the main rover is dubbed the Humanity United with MIT Art and Nanotechnology in Space, or HUMANS project. Led by MIT AeroAstro alumna Maya Nasr ’18, SM ’21, PhD ’23, HUMANS is a 2-inch disc made from a silicon wafer engraved with nanometer-scale etchings using technology provided by MIT.nano. The engravings are inspired by The Golden Record, a phonograph record that was sent into space with NASA’s Voyager probes in 1977. The HUMANS record is engraved with recordings of people from around the world, speaking in their native languages about what space exploration and humanity mean to them.

“We are carrying the hopes, dreams, and stories of people from all backgrounds,” Nasr says. “(It’s a) powerful reminder that space is not the privilege of a few, but the shared legacy of all.”

The MIT Media Lab plans to display the March 6 landing on a screen in the building’s atrium for the public to watch in real-time. Researchers from MIT’s Department of Architecture, led by Associate Professor Skylar Tibbits, have also built a lunar mission control room — a circular, architectural space where the engineers will monitor and control the mission’s payloads. If all goes well, the MIT team see the mission as the first step toward putting permanent boots on the surface of the moon, and even beyond.

“Our return to the Moon is not just about advancing technology — it’s about inspiring the next generation of explorers who are alive today and will travel to the moon in their lifetime,” Ekblaw says. “This historic mission for MIT brings students, staff and faculty together from across the Institute on a foundational mission that will support a future sustainable lunar settlement.”

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Student Spotlight: Titus Roesler

The following is part of a series of short interviews from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) featuring a student describing themselves and life at MIT. Today’s interviewee, Titus Roesler, is a senior majoring in electrical science and engineering. As a first-year at MIT, Roesler joined the Experimental Study Group (ESG), a learning community that offers new MIT students the general Institute requirements (GIRs) in a small, tight-knit class setting. Roesler stuck around as an associate advisor in subsequent years for new cohorts of first-year ESG students, as a teaching assistant for classes on calculus and group theory, and as an instructor for special seminars in electrical engineering that he designed from scratch and then taught. Roesler’s commitment to his academic community also goes deep. Besides his teaching work, for which he was recently honored with the EECS Undergraduate Teaching Award, he is a member of the Undergraduate Student Advisory Group in EECS (USAGE), which provides student feedback to the department. 

Q: Tell us about one teacher from your past who had an influence on the person you’ve become.

A: While a student in ESG, I took ES.1801 (Single-Variable Calculus), ES.1802 (Multivariable Calculus), and ES.1803 (Differential Equations), all with Gabrielle Stoy. One morning in late spring, Gabrielle asked me to stick around after class to speak with her. (I wondered which course policy I had violated, and worried throughout the lecture.) Instead, Gabrielle asked me if I would apply to be a teaching assistant for an ESG math class the next semester. I was ecstatic — and thus began my “teaching career” at MIT! Gabrielle formally retired from teaching mathematics in ESG in 2024, but we teamed up again to offer a special seminar on group theory over IAP [Independent Activities Period] 2025.

Q: What is one conversation that changed the trajectory of your life?

A: I’m grateful for all the conversations I’ve had with Prof. Denny Freeman. I appreciate his kindness, wisdom, and willingness to find time to discuss career plans, research, and education with me. I’ve always left his office feeling more ambitious and optimistic than I did when I walked in.

Q: Do you have a bucket list? If so, share one or two of the items on it.

A: Running the Boston Marathon was on my bucket list for a few years, and I checked that off in 2024. Beyond that, I would love to explore Antarctica — perhaps by living and working at a research station for a year.

Q: What’s your favorite key on a standard computer keyboard, and why?

A: The backslash ( \ ) key is my favorite. I use it often for TEX commands when typesetting.

Q: If you suddenly won the lottery, what would you spend some of the money on?

A: A bulk order of Hagoromo chalk — the so-called “Rolls-Royce of chalk!”

Q: If you had to teach a really in-depth class about a niche topic, what would you pick?

A: In the context of signal processing, filters sift out desired frequency bands while attenuating others. I’d be interested in teaching a class on the theory and practice behind filter design — constructing a filter that satisfies a set of specifications. For example, analog or digital? Finite impulse response or infinite impulse response? Group delay? Causality? Stability? Practical implementation? I’m not an expert in filter design myself, but I’d appreciate the opportunity to consolidate what I’ve learned so far and study the topic in greater depth.

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An “All-American” vision of service to others

Spencer Paysinger has already been many things in his life, including a Super Bowl-winning linebacker, a writer and producer of the hit television series “All-American,” and local-business entrepreneur. But as he explained during his keynote speech at MIT’s 51st annual event celebrating the life and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., Paysinger would prefer to think about his journey in additional terms: whether he has been able to serve others along the way.

“As I stand up here today talking about Dr. King’s mission, Dr. King’s dream, why we’re all here today, to me it all leans back into community,” Paysinger said. “I want to be judged by what I have done for others.”

Being able to reach out to others, in good times and bad, was a theme of the annual event, which took place in MIT’s Walker Memorial (Building 50), on Thursday. As Paysinger noted, his own career is marked by being a “team player” and finding reward in shared endeavors.

“For me, I’m at my best when I have people on the right and on the left of me attempting to reach the same dream,” Paysinger said. “We can have different ideologies, we can come from different backgrounds, of race, socioeconomic backgrounds. … At the end of the day it comes back to the mindset we need to have. It’s rooted in community, it’s rooted in togetherness.”

The event featured an array of talks delivered by students, campus leaders, and guests, along with musical interludes, and drew hundreds from the MIT community.

In opening remarks, MIT President Sally A. Kornbluth praised Paysinger, saying his “perseverance and tenacity are a fantastic example to us all.”

Kornbluth also spoke about the values, and value, of MIT itself. American universities and colleges, she noted, have long “been a point of national pride and a source of international envy. … They and we have always been valued as centers of excellence creativity, innovation, and an infinitely renewable source of leadership.”

Moving forward, Kornbluth noted, the MIT community will continue to pursue excellence and provide mutual respect for others.

“MIT is in the talent business,” Kornbluth said. “Our success, and living up to our great mission, depends on our ability to attract extraordinarily talented people and to create a community in which everyone earns a place here to do their very best work. … Everyone at MIT is here because they deserve to be here. Every staff member, every faculty member, every postdoc, every student, every one of us. Every one of us is a full member of this community, and every member of our community is valued as a human being, and valued for what they contribute to our mission.”

Paysinger lauded the array of speakers as well as the friendly atmosphere at the event, where attendees sat around luncheon tables, talking and getting to know each other before and after the slate of talks.

“You guys actively and literally in 45 minutes have changed my view of what MIT is,” Paysinger said.

In his NFL career, Paysinger was a linebacker who played with the New York Giants, Miami Dolphins, and Carolina Panthers, from 2011 through 2017, appearing in 94 regular-season games and five playoff games. He saw action in Super Bowl XLVI, when the Giants beat the New England Patriots, 22-17, something he joked about a few times for his Massachusetts audience. Paysinger’s former New York Giants teammate, fellow linebacker Mark Herzlich, was also in attendance on Thursday.

Paysinger grew up in South Central Los Angeles, long perceived from the outside as a place of danger and deprivation. And while he experienced those things, Paysinger said, his home neighborhood also had its “all-American” side, as kids raced bikes down the block and grew to know each other. Paysinger attended Beverly Hills High School, starring as a wide receiver, then signed with the University of Oregon, where he converted to linebacker. Oregon and Paysinger reached college football’s national championship game in his senior season, 2010.

In his talk, Paysinger emphasized the twists and turns of his journey through football, from changing positions on the field to changing teams. He noted that, in sports as in life, moving beyond our comfort zone can help us thrive in the long run.

“I was scared, I wasn’t sure of myself, when my coaches decided to make that change for me,” Paysinger said. However, he added, “I knew that [from] leaning into the uncomfortableness of the moment, the other side could be greater for me.”

The NFL soon beckoned, along with a Super Bowl ring. But Paysinger received a jolt beyond the boundaries of sports in 2015, when his former Giants teammate and close friend Tyler Sash died suddently at age 27. Among other things, Paysinger began thinking about life after football more systematically and began his screenwriting efforts in earnest, even as his football career was still ongoing.

“All-American,” now entering its 7th season on the CW Network, is loosely based on his own background, capturing the dynamics of his experiences as a player and team member. It has become one of the longest-running sports-based shows on television. Paysinger is also an entrepreneur who founded Hilltop Kitchen and Coffee, a chain of eateries in underserved areas around Los Angeles, and has helped develop other local businesses as well.

And while every new venture is a fresh challenge, Paysinger said, we can often accomplish more than we realize: “I’m not coming from a mindset of deciding whether I can or can’t do something, but if I want to or not.”

Sophomore Michael Ewing provided welcoming remarks and introduced Paysinger. He read aloud a quote from King chosen as a central motif of this year’s celebration: “We must come to see that the end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience.”

For his own part, Ewing said, “When I read these words, I think of a society that aspires to improve its circumstances, address existing issues, and create a more positive and just environment for all.” At MIT, Ewing added, there is “a community where students, professors, and others come together to achieve at the highest levels, united by a shared desire to learn and grow. … The process of collaborating, disagreeing, building with others who are different — this is the key to growth and development.”

The annual MLK Celebration featured further reflections from students, including second-year undergraduate Siddhu Pachipala, a political science and economics double-major. Pachipala began his remarks by recounting a social media exchange he once had with a congressional account, the tenor of which he soon regretted.

“Looking back, I think it was a missed opportunity,” Pachipala said. “Why was my first instinct … to turn it into a battle? … We train ourselves to believe that if we’re not scoring hits, we’re losing, and gestures of decency are traps, that an extended hand must be slapped away. Martin Luther King Jr. took politics to be something more substantial. He had a serious vision of justice, one we’ve gathered today to honor. But he knew that justice had a prerequisite: friendship.”

Elshareef Kabbashi, a graduate student in architecture, offered additional remarks, noting that “Dr. King’s dream was never confined to a single movement, nation, or moment in history,” but rather aimed at creating “human dignity everywhere.”

E. Denise Simmons, mayor of the City of Cambridge, also spoke, and lauded “the entire MIT community for keeping this tradition alive for 51 years.” She added: “It’s Dr. King’s wisdom, his courage, his moral clarity, that helped light the path forward. And I ask each of you to continue to shine that light.”

The luncheon included the presentation of the annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Leadership Awards Recipients, given this year to Cordelia Price ’78, SM ’80; Pouya Alimagham; Ciarra Ortiz; Sahal Ahmed; William Gibbs; and Maxine Samuels.

On a day full of thoughts about King and his vision, Paysinger underscored the salience of community by highlighting another of his favorite King passages: “Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness. This is the judgment. Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’” 

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