Deep-dive dinners are the norm for tuna and swordfish, MIT oceanographers find

How far would you go for a good meal? For some of the ocean’s top predators, maintaining a decent diet requires some surprisingly long-distance dives.

MIT oceanographers have found that big fish like tuna and swordfish get a large fraction of their food from the ocean’s twilight zone — a cold and dark layer of the ocean about half a mile below the surface, where sunlight rarely penetrates. Tuna and swordfish have been known to take extreme plunges, but it was unclear whether these deep dives were for food, and to what extent the fishes’ diet depends on prey in the twilight zone.

In a study published recently in the ICES Journal of Marine Science, the MIT student-led team reports that the twilight zone is a major food destination for three predatory fish — bigeye tuna, yellowfin tuna, and swordfish. While the three species swim primarily in the shallow open ocean, the scientists found these fish are sourcing between 50 and 60 percent of their diet from the twilight zone.

The findings suggest that tuna and swordfish rely more heavily on the twilight zone than scientists had assumed. This implies that any change to the twilight zone’s food web, such as through increased fishing, could negatively impact fisheries of more shallow tuna and swordfish.

“There is increasing interest in commercial fishing in the ocean’s twilight zone,” says Ciara Willis, the study’s lead author, who was a PhD student in the MIT-Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) Joint Program when conducting the research and is now a postdoc at WHOI. “If we start heavily fishing that layer of the ocean, our study suggests that could have profound implications for tuna and swordfish, which are very reliant on the twilight zone and are highly valuable existing fisheries.”

The study’s co-authors include Kayla Gardener of MIT-WHOI, and WHOI researchers Martin Arostegui, Camrin Braun, Leah Hougton, Joel Llopiz, Annette Govindarajan, and Simon Thorrold, along with Walt Golet at the University of Maine.

Deep-ocean buffet

The ocean’s twilight zone is a vast and dim layer that lies between the sunlit surface waters and the ocean’s permanently dark, midnight zone. Also known as the midwater, or mesopelagic layer, the twilight zone stretches between 200 and 1,000 meters below the ocean’s surface and is home to a huge variety of organisms that have adapted to live in the darkness.

“This is a really understudied region of the ocean, and it’s filled with all these fantastic, weird animals,” Willis says.

In fact, it’s estimated that the biomass of fish in the twilight zone is somewhere close to 10 billion tons, much of which is concentrated in layers at certain depths. By comparison, the marine life that lives closer to the surface, Willis says, is “a thin soup,” which is slim pickings for large predators.

“It’s important for predators in the open ocean to find concentrated layers of food. And I think that’s what drives them to be interested in the ocean’s twilight zone,” Willis says. “We call it the ‘deep ocean buffet.’”

And much of this buffet is on the move. Many kinds of fish, squid, and other deep-sea organisms in the twilight zone will swim up to the surface each night to find food. This twilight community will descend back into darkness at dawn to avoid detection.

Scientists have observed that many large predatory fish will make regular dives into the twilight zone, presumably to feast on the deep-sea bounty. For instance, bigeye tuna spend much of their day making multiple short, quick plunges into the twilight zone, while yellowfin tuna dive down every few days to weeks. Swordfish, in contrast, appear to follow the daily twilight migration, feeding on the community as it rises and falls each day.

“We’ve known for a long time that these fish and many other predators feed on twilight zone prey,” Willis says. “But the extent to which they rely on this deep-sea food web for their forage has been unclear.”

Twilight signal

For years, scientists and fishers have found remnants of fish from the twilight zone in the stomach contents of larger, surface-based predators. This suggests that predator fish do indeed feed on twilight food, such as lanternfish, certain types of squid, and long, snake-like fish called barracudina. But, as Willis notes, stomach contents give just a “snapshot” of what a fish ate that day.

She and her colleagues wanted to know how big a role twilight food plays in the general diet of predator fish. For their new study, the team collaborated with fishermen in New Jersey and Florida, who fish for a living in the open ocean. They supplied the team with small tissue samples of their commercial catch, including samples of bigeye tuna, yellowfin tuna, and swordfish.

Willis and her advisor, Senior Scientist Simon Thorrold, brought the samples back to Thorrold’s lab at WHOI and analyzed the fish bits for essential amino acids — the key building blocks of proteins. Essential amino acids are only made by primary producers, or members of the base of the food web, such as phytoplankton, microbes, and fungi. Each of these producers makes essential amino acids with a slightly different carbon isotope configuration that then is conserved as the producers are consumed on up their respective food chains.

“One of the hypotheses we had was that we’d be able to distinguish the carbon isotopic signature of the shallow ocean, which would logically be more phytoplankton-based, versus the deep ocean, which is more microbially based,” Willis says.

The researchers figured that if a fish sample had one carbon isotopic make-up over another, it would be a sign that that fish feeds more on food from the deep, rather than shallow waters.

“We can use this [carbon isotope signature] to infer a lot about what food webs they’ve been feeding in, over the last five to eight months,” Willis says.

The team looked at carbon isotopes in tissue samples from over 120 samples including bigeye tuna, yellowfin tuna, and swordfish. They found that individuals from all three species contained a substantial amount of carbon derived from sources in the twilight zone. The researchers estimate that, on average, food from the twilight zone makes up 50 to 60 percent of the diet of the three predator species, with some slight variations among species.

“We saw the bigeye tuna were far and away the most consistent in where they got their food from. They didn’t vary much from individual to individual,” Willis says. “Whereas the swordfish and yellowfin tuna were more variable. That means if you start having big-scale fishing in the twilight zone, the bigeye tuna might be the ones who are most at risk from food web effects.”

The researchers note there has been increased interest in commercially fishing the twilight zone. While many fish in that region are not edible for humans, they are starting to be harvested as fishmeal and fish oil products. In ongoing work, Willis and her colleagues are evaluating the potential impacts to tuna fisheries if the twilight zone becomes a target for large-scale fishing.

“If predatory fish like tunas have 50 percent reliance on twilight zone food webs, and we start heavily fishing that region, that could lead to uncertainty around the profitability of tuna fisheries,” Willis says. “So we need to be very cautious about impacts on the twilight zone and the larger ocean ecosystem.”

This work was part of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution’s Ocean Twilight Zone Project, funded as part of the Audacious Project housed at TED. Willis was additionally supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the MIT Martin Family Society of Fellows for Sustainability.

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On a quest for a better football helmet

Next time you’re watching football you might be looking at an important feat of engineering from an MIT alumnus.

For the last year, former MIT middle linebacker and mechanical engineer Kodiak Brush ’17 has been leading the development of football helmets for the California-based sports equipment manufacturer LIGHT Helmets. In December, Brush notched a major achievement in that work: LIGHT Helmets’ new Apache helmet line was ranked the highest-performing helmet ever in safety tests by Virginia Tech’s renowned helmet-testing lab.

The ranking bolsters LIGHT Helmets’ innovative effort to make football helmets lighter and safer.

“We’re trying to lower the overall amount of energy going into each impact by lowering the weight of the helmet,” Brush says. “It’s a balancing act trying to have a complete, polished product with all the bells and whistles while at the same time keeping the mass of the helmet as low as possible.”

No helmet ensures total safety, and the NFL carries out helmet tests of its own, but for Brush, who played football for most of his life, the latest results were a rewarding milestone.

“It’s really cool to work in the football helmet space after playing the sport for so long,” Brush says. “We did this with a fraction of the research and development budget of our competitors. It’s a great feeling to have worked on something that could help so many people.”

From the field to the lab

Brush spent his playing career at middle linebacker, a position often considered the quarterback of the defense. In that role, he got accustomed to helping teammates understand their assignments on the field and making sure everyone was in the right position. At MIT, he quickly realized his role would be different.

“In high school, I was constantly reminding teammates what their job was and helping linemen when they lined up in the wrong spot,” Brush says. “At MIT, I didn’t need to do that at all. Everyone knew exactly what their job was. It was really cool playing football with such an intelligent group.”

Throughout his football career, Brush says concussions hung over the sport. He was only formally diagnosed with one concussion, but he notes how difficult it can be to accurately diagnose concussions during games.

“We did baseline tests before the season so we could take tests after a suspected concussion to see if our cognitively ability was degraded,” Brush explains. “But as a player, you want to get back out there and keep helping your team, so players often try to downplay injuries. The doctors do their best.”

Brush worked as an accident reconstruction expert immediately after graduation before joining a product design firm. It was through that position that he first began working with LIGHT Helmets through a consulting project. He started full time with LIGHT last year.

Since then, Brush has managed research and development along with the production of new helmet lines, working closely with LIGHT’s technology partner, KOLLIDE.

“I’m currently the only engineer at LIGHT, so I wear a lot of different hats,” Brush says.

A safer helmet

Brush led the development of LIGHT’s Apache helmet. His approach harkened back to his favorite class at MIT, 2.009 (Product Engineering Process). In the process of building prototypes, students in that class are often tasked with taking apart other products to study how they’re made. For Apache, Brush started by disassembling competing helmets to try to understand how they work, where they’re limited, and where each ounce of weight comes from.

“That helped us make decisions around what we wanted to incorporate into our helmets and what we thought was unnecessary,” Brush says.

LIGHT’s Apache helmets use an impact-modified nylon shell and a 3D-printed thermoplastic polyurethane liner. The liner can compress up to 80 percent of its thickness under full compression compared to traditional foam, which Brush says may compress 20 to 30 percent at most. The liner is made up of 20 different cylindrical pods, each of which has variable stiffness depending on the location in the helmet.

Brush says the shell is more flexible than traditional helmets, which is part of a broader trend among companies focusing on concussion avoidance.

“The idea with the flexible shell is we’re now able to squish both the inside and outside of the helmet, which lets you extend the length of the impact and lower the severity of the hit,” Brush says.

A winning formula

Brush says the company’s performance in Virginia Tech’s tests has garnered a lot of excitement in the industry. The Apache helmet is available for use across high school, college, and professional levels, and the company is currently developing a youth version.

“Last year, we sold about 5,000 helmets, but we’re anticipating tenfold growth this year,” Brush says. “Dealers see the opportunity to sell the number-one-rated helmet at the price of a lot of much lower-rated helmets.”

Other helmets from LIGHT are already being used at the highest levels, with players from 30 of the 32 NFL teams choosing a LIGHT Helmet when they suit up, the company says. That traction has changed Brush’s relationship with football.

For instance, he only used to watch NFL games on Sundays occasionally. But now that his helmets are on TV, he finds himself rooting for the players and teams wearing them.

Regardless of who he roots for, when football becomes safer, everyone wins.

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Pattie Maes receives ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award

Pattie Maes, the Germeshausen Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT and head of the Fluid Interfaces research group within the MIT Media Lab, has been awarded the 2025 ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award. She will accept the award at CHI 2025 in Yokohama, Japan this April.

The Lifetime Research Award is given to individuals whose research in human-computer interaction (HCI) is considered both fundamental and influential to the field. Recipients are selected based on their cumulative contributions, influence on the work of others, new research developments, and being an active participant in the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI) community.

Her nomination recognizes her advocacy to place human agency at the center of HCI and artificial intelligence research. Rather than AI replacing human capabilities, Maes has advocated for ways in which human capabilities can be supported or enhanced by the integration of AI.

Pioneering the concept of software agents in the 1990s, Maes’ work has always been situated at the intersection of human-computer interaction and artificial intelligence and has helped lay the foundations for today’s online experience. Her article “Social information filtering: algorithms for automating 'word of mouth'” from CHI 95, co-authored with graduate student Upendra Shardanand, is the second-most-cited paper from ACM SIGCHI.  

Beyond her contributions in desktop-based interaction, she has an extensive body of work in the area of  novel wearable devices that enhance the human experience, for example by supporting memory, learning, decision-making, or health. Through an interdisciplinary approach, Maes has explored accessible and ethical designs while stressing the need for a human-centered approach.

“As a senior faculty member, Pattie is an integral member of the Media Lab, MIT, and larger HCI communities,” says Media Lab Director Dava Newman. “Her contributions to several different fields, alongside her unwavering commitment to enhancing the human experience in her work, is exemplary of not only the Media Lab’s interdisciplinary spirit, but also our core mission: to create transformative technologies and systems that enable people to reimagine and redesign their lives. We all celebrate this well-deserved recognition for Pattie!”

Maes is the second MIT professor to receive this honor, joining her Media Lab colleague Hiroshi Ishii, the Jerome B. Wiesner Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT and head of the Tangible Media research group.

“I am honored to be recognized by the ACM community, especially given that it can be difficult sometimes for researchers doing highly interdisciplinary research to be appreciated, even though some of the most impactful innovations often emerge from that style of research,” Maes comments.

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New Alliance for Data, Evaluation and Policy Training will advance data-driven decision-making in public policy

On March 25, the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at MIT launched the global Alliance for Data, Evaluation, and Policy Training (ADEPT) with Community Jameel at an event in São Paulo, Brazil. 

ADEPT is a network of universities, governments, and other members united by a shared vision: To empower the next generation of policymakers, decision-makers, and researchers with the tools to innovate, test, and scale the most effective social policies and programs. These programs have the potential to improve the lives of millions of people around the world.

Too often, policy decisions in governments and other organizations are driven by ideology or guesswork. This can result in ineffective and inefficient policies and programs that don’t always serve their intended populations. ADEPT will bring a scientific perspective to policymaking, focusing on topics like statistical analysis, data science, and rigorous impact evaluation. 

Together with J-PAL, members will create innovative pathways for learners that include virtual and in-person courses, develop new academic programs on policy evaluation and data analysis, and cultivate a network of evidence-informed policy professionals to drive change globally. 

At the launch event at Insper, a Brazilian higher education institution, MIT economists Esther Duflo, co-founder of J-PAL, and Sara Fisher Ellison, faculty director of ADEPT, spoke about the importance of building a community aligned in support of evidence-informed policymaking. 

“Our aim is to create a vision-driven network of institutions around the world able to equip far more people in far more places with the skills and ambition for evidence-informed policymaking,” said Duflo. “We are excited to welcome Insper to the movement and create new opportunities for learners in Brazil.”

Members of the alliance will also have access to the MITx MicroMasters program in Data, Economics, and Design of Policy (DEDP), which offers online courses taught by MIT Department of Economics faculty through MIT’s Office of Open Learning. The program offers graduate-level courses that combine the tools of economics and policy design with a strong foundation in economic and mathematical principles.

Early members of the alliance include Insper, a leading research and training institution in Brazil; the National School of Statistics and Applied Economics of Abidjan in collaboration with the Cote d’Ivorian government; the Paris School of Economics; and Princeton University. 

“This unprecedented initiative in Latin America reinforces Insper’s commitment to academic excellence and the internationalization of teaching, providing Brazilian students with access to a globally renowned program,” says Cristine Pinto, Insper’s director of research. “Promoting large-scale impact through research and data analysis is a core objective of Insper, and shared by J-PAL and the expansion of ADEPT.”

Learners who obtain the DEDP MicroMasters credential through ADEPT can accelerate their pursuit of a master’s degree by applying to participating universities, including Insper and MIT, opening doors for learners who may not otherwise have access to leading economics programs.

By empowering learners with the tools and ambition to create meaningful change, ADEPT seeks to accelerate data-driven decision-making at every step of the policymaking process. Ultimately, the hope is that ADEPT’s impact will be felt not only by alliance members and their individual learners, but by millions of people reached by better policies and programs worldwide.

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Collaboration between MIT and GE Vernova aims to develop and scale sustainable energy systems

MIT and GE Vernova today announced the creation of the MIT-GE Vernova Energy and Climate Alliance to help develop and scale sustainable energy systems across the globe.

The alliance launches a five-year collaboration between MIT and GE Vernova, a global energy company that spun off from General Electric’s energy business in 2024. The endeavor will encompass research, education, and career opportunities for students, faculty, and staff across MIT’s five schools and the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing. It will focus on three main themes: decarbonization, electrification, and renewables acceleration.

“This alliance will provide MIT students and researchers with a tremendous opportunity to work on energy solutions that could have real-world impact,” says Anantha Chandrakasan, MIT’s chief innovation and strategy officer and dean of the School of Engineering. “GE Vernova brings domain knowledge and expertise deploying these at scale. When our researchers develop new innovative technologies, GE Vernova is strongly positioned to bring them to global markets.”

Through the alliance, GE Vernova is sponsoring research projects at MIT and providing philanthropic support for MIT research fellowships. The company will also engage with MIT’s community through participation in corporate membership programs and professional education.

“It’s a privilege to combine forces with MIT’s world-class faculty and students as we work together to realize an optimistic, innovation-driven approach to solving the world’s most pressing challenges,” says Scott Strazik, GE Vernova CEO. “Through this alliance, we are proud to be able to help drive new technologies while at the same time inspire future leaders to play a meaningful role in deploying technology to improve the planet at companies like GE Vernova.”

“This alliance embodies the spirit of the MIT Climate Project — combining cutting-edge research, a shared drive to tackle today’s toughest energy challenges, and a deep sense of optimism about what we can achieve together,” says Sally Kornbluth, president of MIT. “With the combined strengths of MIT and GE Vernova, we have a unique opportunity to make transformative progress in the flagship areas of electrification, decarbonization, and renewables acceleration.”

The alliance, comprising a $50 million commitment, will operate within MIT’s Office of Innovation and Strategy. It will fund approximately 12 annual research projects relating to the three themes, as well as three master’s student projects in MIT’s Technology and Policy Program. The research projects will address challenges like developing and storing clean energy, as well as the creation of robust system architectures that help sustainable energy sources like solar, wind, advanced nuclear reactors, green hydrogen, and more compete with carbon-emitting sources.

The projects will be selected by a joint steering committee composed of representatives from MIT and GE Vernova, following an annual Institute-wide call for proposals.

The collaboration will also create approximately eight endowed GE Vernova research fellowships for MIT students, to be selected by faculty and beginning in the fall. There will also be 10 student internships that will span GE Vernova’s global operations, and GE Vernova will also sponsor programming through MIT’s New Engineering Education Transformation (NEET), which equips students with career-oriented experiential opportunities. Additionally, the alliance will create professional education programming for GE Vernova employees.

“The internships and fellowships will be designed to bring students into our ecosystem,” says GE Vernova Chief Corporate Affairs Officer Roger Martella. “Students will walk our factory floor, come to our labs, be a part of our management teams, and see how we operate as business leaders. They’ll get a sense for how what they’re learning in the classroom is being applied in the real world.”

Philanthropic support from GE Vernova will also support projects in MIT’s Human Insight Collaborative (MITHIC), which launched last fall to elevate human-centered research and teaching. The projects will allow faculty to explore how areas like energy and cybersecurity influence human behavior and experiences.

In connection with the alliance, GE Vernova is expected to join several MIT consortia and membership programs, helping foster collaborations and dialogue between industry experts and researchers and educators across campus.

With operations across more than 100 countries, GE Vernova designs, manufactures, and services technologies to generate, transfer, and store electricity with a mission to decarbonize the world. The company is headquartered in Kendall Square, right down the road from MIT, which its leaders say is not a coincidence.

“We’re really good at taking proven technologies and commercializing them and scaling them up through our labs,” Martella says. “MIT excels at coming up with those ideas and being a sort of time machine that thinks outside the box to create the future. That’s why this such a great fit: We both have a commitment to research, innovation, and technology.”

The alliance is the latest in MIT’s rapidly growing portfolio of research and innovation initiatives around sustainable energy systems, which also includes the Climate Project at MIT. Separate from, but complementary to, the MIT-GE Vernova Alliance, the Climate Project is a campus-wide effort to develop technological, behavioral, and policy solutions to some of the toughest problems impeding an effective global climate response.

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For plants, urban heat islands don’t mimic global warming

It’s tricky to predict precisely what the impacts of climate change will be, given the many variables involved. To predict the impacts of a warmer world on plant life, some researchers look at urban “heat islands,” where, because of the effects of urban structures, temperatures consistently run a few degrees higher than those of the surrounding rural areas. This enables side-by-side comparisons of plant responses.

But a new study by researchers at MIT and Harvard University has found that, at least for forests, urban heat islands are a poor proxy for global warming, and this may have led researchers to underestimate the impacts of warming in some cases. The discrepancy, they found, has a lot to do with the limited genetic diversity of urban tree species.

The findings appear in the journal PNAS, in a paper by MIT postdoc Meghan Blumstein, professor of civil and environmental engineering David Des Marais, and four others.

“The appeal of these urban temperature gradients is, well, it’s already there,” says Des Marais. “We can’t look into the future, so why don’t we look across space, comparing rural and urban areas?” Because such data is easily obtainable, methods comparing the growth of plants in cities with similar plants outside them have been widely used, he says, and have been quite useful. Researchers did recognize some shortcomings to this approach, including significant differences in availability of some nutrients such as nitrogen. Still, “a lot of ecologists recognized that they weren’t perfect, but it was what we had,” he says.

Most of the research by Des Marais’ group is lab-based, under conditions tightly controlled for temperature, humidity, and carbon dioxide concentration. While there are a handful of experimental sites where conditions are modified out in the field, for example using heaters around one or a few trees, “those are super small-scale,” he says. “When you’re looking at these longer-term trends that are occurring over space that’s quite a bit larger than you could reasonably manipulate, an important question is, how do you control the variables?”

Temperature gradients have offered one approach to this problem, but Des Marais and his students have also been focusing on the genetics of the tree species involved, comparing those sampled in cities to the same species sampled in a natural forest nearby. And it turned out there were differences, even between trees that appeared similar.

“So, lo and behold, you think you’re only letting one variable change in your model, which is the temperature difference from an urban to a rural setting,” he says, “but in fact, it looks like there was also a genotypic diversity that was not being accounted for.”

The genetic differences meant that the plants being studied were not representative of those in the natural environment, and the researchers found that the difference was actually masking the impact of warming. The urban trees, they found, were less affected than their natural counterparts in terms of when the plants’ leaves grew and unfurled, or “leafed out,” in the spring.

The project began during the pandemic lockdown, when Blumstein was a graduate student. She had a grant to study red oak genotypes across New England, but was unable to travel because of lockdowns. So, she concentrated on trees that were within reach in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She then collaborated with people doing research at the Harvard Forest, a research forest in rural central Massachusetts. They collected three years of data from both locations, including the temperature profiles, the leafing-out timing, and the genetic profiles of the trees. Though the study was looking at red oaks specifically, the researchers say the findings are likely to apply to trees broadly.

At the time, researchers had just sequenced the oak tree genome, and that allowed Blumstein and her colleagues to look for subtle differences among the red oaks in the two locations. The differences they found showed that the urban trees were more resistant to the effects of warmer temperatures than were those in the natural environment.

“Initially, we saw these results and we were sort of like, oh, this is a bad thing,” Des Marais says. “Ecologists are getting this heat island effect wrong, which is true.” Fortunately, this can be easily corrected by factoring in genomic data. “It’s not that much more work, because sequencing genomes is so cheap and so straightforward. Now, if someone wants to look at an urban-rural gradient and make these kinds of predictions, well, that’s fine. You just have to add some information about the genomes.”

It's not surprising that this genetic variation exists, he says, since growers have learned by trial and error over the decades which varieties of trees tend to thrive in the difficult urban environment, with typically poor soil, poor drainage, and pollution. “As a result, there’s just not much genetic diversity in our trees within cities.”

The implications could be significant, Des Marais says. When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) releases its regular reports on the status of the climate, “one of the tools the IPCC has to predict future responses to climate change with respect to temperature are these urban-to-rural gradients.” He hopes that these new findings will be incorporated into their next report, which is just being drafted. “If these results are generally true beyond red oaks, this suggests that the urban heat island approach to studying plant response to temperature is underpredicting how strong that response is.”

The research team included Sophie Webster, Robin Hopkins, and David Basler from Harvard University and Jie Yun from MIT. The work was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Bullard Fellowship at the Harvard Forest, and MIT.

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For this computer scientist, MIT Open Learning was the start of a life-changing journey

As a college student in Serbia with a passion for math and physics, Ana Trišović found herself drawn to computer science and its practical, problem-solving approaches. It was then that she discovered MIT OpenCourseWare, part of MIT Open Learning, and decided to study a course on Data Analytics with Python in 2012 — something her school didn’t offer.

That experience was transformative, says Trišović, who is now a research scientist at the FutureTech lab within MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

“That course changed my life,” she says. “Throughout my career, I have considered myself a Python coder, and MIT OpenCourseWare made it possible. I was in my hometown on another continent, learning from MIT world-class resources. When I reflect on my path, it’s incredible.”

Over time, Trišović's path led her to explore a range of OpenCourseWare resources. She recalls that, as a non-native English speaker, some of the materials were challenging. But thanks to the variety of courses and learning opportunities available on OpenCourseWare, she was always able to find ones that suited her. She encourages anyone facing that same challenge to be persistent.

“If the first course doesn’t work for you, try another,” she says. “Being persistent and investing in yourself is the best thing a young person can do.”

In her home country of Serbia, Trišović earned undergraduate degrees in computer science and mechanical engineering before going on to Cambridge University and CERN, where she contributed to work on the Large Hadron Collider and completed her PhD in computer science in 2018. She has also done research at the University of Chicago and Harvard University.

“I like that computer science allows me to make an impact in a range of fields, but physics remains close to my heart, and I’m constantly inspired by it,” she says.

MIT FutureTech, an interdisciplinary research group, draws on computer science, economics, and management to identify computing trends that create risk and opportunities for sustainable economic growth. There, Trišović studies the democratization of AI, including the implications of open-source AI and how that will impact science. Her work at MIT is a chance to build on research she has been pursuing since she was in graduate school.

“My work focuses on computational social science. For many years, I’ve been looking at what's known as 'the science of science' — investigating issues like research reproducibility," Trišović explains. “Now, as AI becomes increasingly prevalent and introduces new challenges, I’m interested in examining a range of topics — from AI democratization to its effects on the scientific method and the broader landscape of science.”

Trišović is grateful that, way back in 2012, she made the decision to try something new and learn with an OpenCourseWare course.

“I instantly fell in love with Python the moment I took that course. I have such a soft spot for OpenCourseWare — it shaped my career,” she says. “Every day at MIT is inspiring. I work with people who are excited to talk about AI and other fascinating topics.”

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Preparing for a career at the forefront of the aerospace industry

You’re an aerospace engineer on a tight timeline to develop a component for a rocket engine. No sweat, you think — you know the concepts by heart, and the model looks appropriate in CAD. But you inspect the 3D-printed part that you’ve outsourced for manufacturing, and something is wrong. The impeller blade angle is off, and the diameter is larger than the design intent. The vendor won’t get back to you. Suddenly you’re over budget. Something is leaking. Running the pump test rig, you’re not sure where that vibration is coming from.

Successfully navigating nightmares like this can make or break an engineer, but real-time problem-solving during assembly is something few undergraduates experience as part of their curriculum. Enter class 16.811 (Advanced Manufacturing for Aerospace Engineers), a new communication-intensive laboratory course that allows juniors and seniors to drive a full engineering cycle, gaining experience that mirrors the challenges they’ll face as practicing engineers.

In just 13 weeks, students design, build, and test a laboratory-scale electric turbopump, the type of pump used in liquid rocket propulsion systems to deliver fuel and oxidizer to the combustion chamber under high pressure. Teams of two or three students work through the entire production process while balancing budgets, documenting, and testing.

The course was developed and taught by Zachary Cordero, Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Associate Professor, and Zoltán Spakovszky, the T. Wilson Professor in Aeronautics, along with a team of teaching assistants (TAs), technical instructors, and communication experts. It ran for the first time last fall, open to students who had completed Unified Engineering, the foundational Course 16 curriculum covering the four disciplines at the core of aerospace engineering. It generated so much interest upon its announcement that spots were allocated via lottery.

“Sometimes it’s assumed that students will get hands-on experience through their extracurriculars, but they may not. Students in this class gain that experience through exposure to cutting-edge design and manufacturing tools, like metal 3D printing,” says Cordero. “They don’t just learn how to solve a problem set — they learn how to be an engineer.”

Training for a rapidly evolving field

The course was born out of feedback from participants at an annual workshop that Cordero organizes each summer addressing materials challenges in reusable rocket engines. Attendees representing industry, government, and academic sectors consistently emphasized the need for the next generation of engineers to be familiar with advanced engineering concepts, in addition to having strong fundamentals. Experience with new computational design tools and processes like additive manufacturing is becoming essential for success in the aerospace industry. “Our mission is to train, inspire, and motivate the next generation of aerospace engineers. We have to listen to what our industry partners want from engineers and adapt our curriculum to meet those needs,” says Cordero.

Spakovszky, Cordero, and the team built the course over two years of Independent Activities Period workshops, developing independent modules that teach concepts for constructing the turbopump. The first set of labs focuses on the impellers — the rotating bladed-disk component that draws fluid into the pump to pressurize it. The second lab breaks down the rotor system that supports the pump impeller, and the third covers integration of the rotor assembly into the casing and final testing.

Throughout the course, students receive instruction in technical communication and training on the full array of machine shop tools available in the Arthur and Linda Gelb Laboratory. Beyond learning the concepts and tools, the majority of the design and implementation is up to the students.

“They are pushed to learn how to learn on their own,” says Spakovszky. “The key differentiator here is that there is no solution. In other classes, you have a problem, and the instructor has the solution. This is open ended, and every team has a different design.” Project management is left up to each team, with instructors and TAs serving as resources, rather than leads. Each team works with vendors to help bring their designs to life. The students conducted their machinery analysis using the Agile Engineering Design System (AEDS) and Advanced Rotating Machine Dynamics (ARMD) software tools from Concepts NREC. Impellers were printed at the MIT SHED (Safety Health Environmental Discovery lab), with support from Tolga Durak, managing director of environment, health and safety, and by industry collaborators at Desktop Metal.

“A lot of the design questions we were working with don’t have firm answers,” says junior Danishell Destefano. “I learned a lot about how to read technical literature and compare design trade-offs to make my own decisions.”

On the floor

“Making things is really hard,” says Spakovszky. “In addition to manufacturing parts and components, the assembly of rotating machinery requires careful tolerancing of the part dimensions and precision manufacturing of the interfaces to meet design specification.”

At the core of the curriculum is the manufacturing process itself, with its myriad components posing a unique challenge for students who may not have experienced the kind of rapid design cycle that is becoming more and more common in the field. The course uses concurrent engineering as a methodology to emphasize the close connections between fundamental concepts, functional requirements, design, materials, and manufacturing.

Student teams document their lab results in written reports and give regular progress presentations. Lecturer Jessie Stickgold-Sarah instructed the class on professional communication. At the end of the semester, students walk away with the ability to not only create new things, but communicate about their creations.

“I really enjoyed working with this group of students,” says Stickgold-Sarah. “The main paper and presentations required students to express the reasoning using the design-build-test sequence, and to explain and justify their choices based on their technical understanding of core topics. They were incredibly hard-working and dedicated, and the papers and presentations they produced exceeded my expectations.”

The course culminates in a final presentation, where teams showcase their findings and get feedback from their MIT instructors and industry representatives — potential future colleagues and employers.

Whether or not students go directly into a career in rocket or jet propulsion, the breadth of skills they learn in class has applications across disciplines. “The biggest skill I’ve gained is time and project management. To build a pump in a semester is a pretty tough timeline challenge, and learning how to manage my time and work with a team has been a great soft skill to learn,” says Destafano.

The course drives home the reality that the manufacturing process can be just as important as the product. “I hope through this, they gain confidence to explore the unknown and deal with uncertainty in engineering systems,” says Cordero. “In the real world, things are leaking. Things aren’t as you initially anticipated or behaving as you thought they would behave. And the students had to react and respond. That's real life. It's kind of intuitive, kind of common sense, sure — but you can hone that skill, and develop confidence in that skill.”

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Mapping the future of metamaterials

Metamaterials are artificially-structured materials with extraordinary properties not easily found in nature. With engineered three-dimensional (3D) geometries at the micro- and nanoscale, these architected materials achieve unique mechanical and physical properties with capabilities beyond those of conventional materials — and have emerged over the past decade as a promising way to engineering challenges where all other existing materials have lacked success.

Architected materials exhibit unique mechanical and functional properties, but their full potential remains untapped due to challenges in design, fabrication, and characterization. Improvements and scalability in this space could help transform a range of industries, from biomedical implants, sports equipment, automotive and aerospace, and energy and electronics.

“Advances in scalable fabrication, high-throughput testing, and AI-driven design optimization could revolutionize the mechanics and materials science disciplines, enabling smarter, more adaptive materials that redefine engineering and everyday technologies,” says Carlos Portela, the Robert N. Noyce Career Development Professor and assistant professor of mechanical engineering at MIT.

In a Perspective published this month in the journal Nature Materials, Portela and James Surjadi, a postdoc in mechanical engineering, discuss key hurdles, opportunities, and future applications in the field of mechanical metamaterials. The paper is titled “Enabling three-dimensional architected materials across length scales and timescales.”

“The future of the field requires innovation in fabricating these materials across length scales, from nano to macro, and progress in understanding them at a variety of time scales, from slow deformation to dynamic impact,” says Portela, adding that it also demands interdisciplinary collaboration.

A Perspective is a peer-reviewed content type that the journal uses to invite reflection or discussion on matters that may be speculative, controversial, or highly technical, and where the subject matter may not meet the criteria for a Review.

“We felt like our field, following substantial progress over the last decade, is still facing two bottlenecks: issues scaling up, and no knowledge or understanding of properties under dynamic conditions,” says Portela, discussing the decision to write the piece.

Portela and Surjadi’s paper summarizes state-of-the-art approaches and highlights existing knowledge gaps in material design, fabrication, and characterization. It also proposes a roadmap to accelerate the discovery of architected materials with programmable properties via the synergistic combination of high-throughput experimentation and computational efforts, toward leveraging emerging artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques for their design and optimization.

“High-throughput miniaturized experiments, non-contact characterization, and benchtop extreme-condition methods will generate rich datasets for the implementation of data-driven models, accelerating the optimization and discovery of metamaterials with unique properties,” says Surjadi.

The Portela Lab’s motto is “architected mechanics and materials across scales.” The Perspective aims to bridge the gap between fundamental research and real-world applications of next-generation architected materials, and it presents a vision the lab has been working toward for the past four years.

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MIT affiliates named 2024 AAAS Fellows

Six current MIT affiliates and 27 additional MIT alumni have been elected as fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). 

The 2024 class of AAAS Fellows includes 471 scientists, engineers, and innovators, spanning all 24 of AAAS disciplinary sections, who are being recognized for their scientifically and socially distinguished achievements.

Noubar Afeyan PhD ’87, life member of the MIT Corporation, was named a AAAS Fellow “for outstanding leadership in biotechnology, in particular mRNA therapeutics, and for advocacy for recognition of the contributions of immigrants to economic and scientific progress.” Afeyan is the founder and CEO of the venture creation company Flagship Pioneering, which has built over 100 science-based companies to transform human health and sustainability. He is also the chairman and cofounder of Moderna, which was awarded a 2024 National Medal of Technology and Innovation for the development of its Covid-19 vaccine. Afeyan earned his PhD in biochemical engineering at MIT in 1987 and was a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management for 16 years, starting in 2000. Among other activities at the Institute, he serves on the advisory board of the MIT Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning and delivered MIT’s 2024 Commencement address.

Cynthia Breazeal SM ’93, ScD ’00 is a professor of media arts and sciences at MIT, where she founded and directs the Personal Robots group in the MIT Media Lab. At MIT Open Learning, she is the MIT dean for digital learning, and in this role, she leverages her experience in emerging digital technologies and business, research, and strategic initiatives to lead Open Learning’s business and research and engagement units. She is also the director of the MIT-wide Initiative on Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education (raise.mit.edu). She co-founded the consumer social robotics company, Jibo, Inc., where she served as chief scientist and chief experience officer. She is recognized for distinguished contributions in the field of artificial intelligence education, particularly around the use of social robots, and learning at scale.

Alan Edelman PhD ’89 is an applied mathematics professor for the Department of Mathematics and leads the Applied Computing Group of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the MIT Julia Lab. He is recognized as a 2024 AAAS fellow for distinguished contributions and outstanding breakthroughs in high-performance computing, linear algebra, random matrix theory, computational science, and in particular for the development of the Julia programming language. Edelman has been elected a fellow of five different societies — AMS, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, the Association for Computing Machinery, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and AAAS.

Robert B. Millard '73, life member and chairman emeritus of the MIT Corporation, was named a 2024 AAAS Fellow for outstanding contributions to the scientific community and U.S. higher education "through exemplary leadership service to such storied institutions as AAAS and MIT." Millard joined the MIT Corporation as a term member in 2003 and was elected a life member in 2013. He served on the Executive Committee for 10 years and on the Investment Company Management Board for seven years, including serving as its chair for the last four years. He served as a member of the Visiting Committees for Physics, Architecture, and Chemistry. In addition, Millard has served as a member of the Linguistics and Philosophy Visiting Committee, the Corporation Development Committee, and the Advisory Council for the Council for the Arts. In 2011, Millard received the Bronze Beaver Award, the MIT Alumni Association’s highest honor for distinguished service.

Jagadeesh S. Moodera is a senior research scientist in the Department of Physics. His research interests include experimental condensed matter physics: spin polarized tunneling and nano spintronics; exchange coupled ferromagnet/superconductor interface, triplet pairing, nonreciprocal current transport and memory toward superconducting spintronics for quantum technology; and topological insulators/superconductors, including Majorana bound state studies in metallic systems. His research in the area of spin polarized tunneling led to a breakthrough in observing tunnel magnetoresistance (TMR) at room temperature in magnetic tunnel junctions. This resulted in a huge surge in this area of research, currently one of the most active areas. TMR effect is used in all ultra-high-density magnetic data storage, as well as for the development of nonvolatile magnetic random access memory (MRAM) that is currently being advanced further in various electronic devices, including for neuromorphic computing architecture. For his leadership in spintronics, the discovery of TMR, the development of MRAM, and for mentoring the next generation of scientists, Moodera was named a 2024 AAAS Fellow. For his TMR discovery he was awarded the Oliver Buckley Prize (2009) by the American Physical Society (APS), named an American National Science Foundation Competitiveness and Innovation Fellow (2008-10), won IBM and TDK Research Awards (1995-98), and became a Fellow of APS (2000).

Noelle Eckley Selin, the director of the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy and a professor in the Institute for Data, Systems and Society and the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, uses atmospheric chemistry modeling to inform decision-making strategies on air pollution, climate change, and toxic substances, including mercury and persistent organic pollutants. She has also published articles and book chapters on the interactions between science and policy in international environmental negotiations, in particular focusing on global efforts to regulate hazardous chemicals and persistent organic pollutants. She is named a 2024 AAAS Fellow for world-recognized leadership in modeling the impacts of air pollution on human health, in assessing the costs and benefits of related policies, and in integrating technology dynamics into sustainability science.

Additional MIT alumni honored as 2024 AAAS Fellows include: Danah Boyd SM ’02 (Media Arts and Sciences); Michael S. Branicky ScD ’95 (EECS); Jane P. Chang SM ’95, PhD ’98 (Chemical Engineering); Yong Chen SM '99 (Mathematics); Roger Nelson Clark PhD '80 (EAPS); Mark Stephen Daskin ’74, PhD ’78 (Civil and Environmental Engineering); Marla L. Dowell PhD ’94 (Physics); Raissa M. D’Souza PhD ’99 (Physics); Cynthia Joan Ebinger SM '86, PhD '88 (EAPS/WHOI); Thomas Henry Epps III ’98, SM ’99 (Chemical Engineering); Daniel Goldman ’94 (Physics); Kenneth Keiler PhD ’96 (Biology); Karen Jean Meech PhD '87 (EAPS); Christopher B. Murray PhD ’95 (Chemistry); Jason Nieh '89 (EECS); William Nordhaus PhD ’67 (Economics); Milica Radisic PhD '04 (Chemical Engineering); James G. Rheinwald PhD ’76 (Biology); Adina L. Roskies PhD ’04 (Philosophy); Linda Rothschild (Preiss) PhD '70 (Mathematics); Soni Lacefield Shimoda PhD '03 (Biology); Dawn Y. Sumner PhD ’95 (EAPS); Tina L. Tootle PhD ’04 (Biology); Karen Viskupic PhD '03 (EAPS); Brant M. Weinstein PhD ’92 (Biology); Chee Wei Wong SM ’01, ScD ’03 (Mechanical Engineering; and Fei Xu PhD ’95 (Brain and Cognitive Sciences). 

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Making higher education more accessible to students in Pakistan

Taking out a loan to attend college is an investment in your future. But unlike in the United States, students in Pakistan don’t have easy access to college loans. Instead, most families must stomach higher interest rates for personal loans that can require collateral like land or homes. As a result, college is inaccessible for many students. It’s one reason why only about 13 percent of Pakistani students attend college.

Now EduFi, founded by Aleena Nadeem ’16, is offering low-interest student loans to a broader swath of Pakistanis. EduFi, which is short for “education finance,” uses an artificial intelligence-based credit scoring system to qualify borrowers and pay colleges directly. The borrowers then make monthly payments to EduFi along with a service fee of 1.4 percent — far lower than what is available for most students today.

“The fees for college are extremely unaffordable for the average middle-class person right now,” Nadeem explains. “With our ‘Study Now, Pay Later’ system, we’re breaking that big upfront cost into installments, which makes it more affordable for both existing college students and a new group of people that never thought higher education was possible.”

EduFi was incorporated in 2021, and after gaining regulatory approval, the company began disbursing loans to people across Pakistan last year. In the first six months, EduFi disbursed more than half a million dollars in loans. Since then, the company’s inclusive approach to qualifying applicants has been validated: Today, less than 1 in 10,000 of those loans are not being repaid.

As awareness about EduFi grows, Nadeem believes the company can contribute to Pakistan’s modernization and development more broadly.

“We are accepting so many more people that would not have been able to get a bank loan,” Nadeem says. “That gets more people to go to college. The impact of directing cheap and fast credit to the educational sector on a developing country like Pakistan is huge.”

Better credit

At the British international high school Nadeem attended, no one had ever gotten into an Ivy League school. That made her acceptance into MIT a big deal.

“It was my first choice by far,” Nadeem says.

When she arrived on campus, Nadeem took classes at MIT that taught her about auctions, risk, and credit.

“In the work I’m doing with EduFi now, I’m applying what I learned in my classes in the real world,” Nadeem says.

Nadeem worked in the credit division at Goldman Sachs in London after graduation, but barriers to accessing higher education in her home country still bothered her.

In Pakistan, some targeted programs offer financial support for students with exceptionally high grades who can’t afford college, but the vast majority of families must find other ways to finance college.

“Most students and their families have to get personal loans from standard banks, but that requires them to open a bank account, which could take two months,” Nadeem explains. “Fees in Pakistan’s education sector must be paid soon after the requests are sent, and by the time banks accept or reject you, the payment could already be late.”

Private loans in Pakistan come with much higher interest rates than student loans in America. Many loans also require borrowers to put up property as collateral. Those challenges prevent many promising students from attending college at all.

EduFi is using technology to improve the loan qualification process. In Pakistan, the parent is the primary borrower. EduFi has developed an algorithmic credit scoring system that considers the borrower’s financial history then makes payments directly to the college on their behalf. EduFi also works directly with colleges to consider the students’ grades and payment history to the school.

Borrowers pay back the loan in monthly installments with a 1.4 percent service fee. No collateral is required.

“We are the first movers in student lending and currently hold the largest student loan portfolio in the country,” Nadeem says. “We’re offering extremely subsidized rates to a lot of people. Our rates are way cheaper than the bank alternatives. We still make a profit, but we’re impact-focused, so we make profit through disbursing to a larger number of people rather than increasing the margin per person.”

Nadeem says EduFi’s approach qualifies far more people for loans compared to banks and does so five times faster. That makes college more accessible for students across Pakistan.

“Banks charge high interest rates to the people with the best credit scores,” Nadeem says. “By not taking collateral, we really open up the credit space to new people who would not have been able to get a bank loan. Easier credit gives the average middle-class individual the ability to change their families’ lives.”

Helping countries by helping people

EduFi received its non-banking financial license in February 2024. The company gained early traction last year through word of mouth and soon opened to borrowers across the country. Since then, Nadeem says many people have traveled long distances to EduFi’s headquarters to confirm they’re a credible operation. Nadeem also regularly receives messages from students across Pakistan thanking EduFi for helping them attend college.

After further proving out its model this year, EduFi plans to expand to Saudi Arabia. Eventually, it plans to offer its loans to students throughout the Middle East, and Nadeem believes the global student loan system could be improved using EduFi’s approach.

“EduFi is modeled after SoFi in San Francisco,” Nadeem says of the large finance company that started by offering student loans and expanded to mortgages, credit cards, and other banking services. “I’m trying to build the SoFi of Pakistan and the Middle East. But it’s really a combination of SoFi and Grameen Bank [in Bangladesh], which extends credit to lower-income people to lift them out of poverty.”

By helping people extend their education and reach their full potential, Nadeem believes EduFi will one day accelerate the development of entire nations.

“Education is the core pillar from which a country stands,” Nadeem says. “You can’t progress as a country without making education as accessible and affordable as possible. EduFi is achieving that by directing capital at what is frankly a starving education sector.”

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Professor Emeritus Earle Lomon, nuclear theorist, dies at 94

Earle Leonard Lomon PhD ’54, MIT professor emeritus of physics, died on March 7 in Newton, Massachusetts, at the age of 94.  

A longtime member of the Center for Theoretical Physics, Lomon was interested primarily in the forces between protons and neutrons at low energies, where the effects of quarks and gluons are hidden by their confinement.

His research focused on the interactions of hadrons — protons, neutrons, mesons, and nuclei — before it was understood that they were composed of quarks and gluons. 

“Earle developed an R-matrix formulation of scattering theory that allowed him to separate known effects at long distance from then-unknown forces at short distances,” says longtime colleague Robert Jaffe, the Jane and Otto Morningstar Professor of Physics.

“When QCD [quantum chromodynamics] emerged as the correct field theory of hadrons, Earle moved quickly to incorporate the effects of quarks and gluons at short distance and high energies,” says Jaffe. “Earle’s work can be interpreted as a precursor to modern chiral effective field theory, where the pertinent degrees of freedom at low energy, which are hadrons, are matched smoothly onto the quark and gluon degrees of freedom that dominate at higher energy.”

“He was a truly cosmopolitan scientist, given his open mind and deep kindness,” says Bruno Coppi, MIT professor emeritus of physics.

Early years

Born Nov. 15, 1930, in Montreal, Quebec, Earle was the only son of Harry Lomon and Etta Rappaport. At Montreal High School, he met his future wife, Ruth Jones. Their shared love for classical music drew them both to the school's Classical Music Club, where Lomon served as president and Ruth was an accomplished musician.

While studying at McGill University, he was a research physicist for the Canada Defense Research Board from 1950 to 1951. After graduating in 1951, he married Jones, and they moved to Cambridge, where he pursued his doctorate at MIT in theoretical physics, mentored by Professor Hermann Feshbach.

Lomon spent 1954 to 1955 at the Institute for Theoretical Physics (now the Niels Bohr Institute) in Copenhagen. “With the presence of Niels Bohr, Aage Bohr, Ben Mottelson, and Willem V.R. Malkus, there were many physicists from Europe and elsewhere, including MIT’s Dave Frisch, making the Institute for Physics an exciting place to be,” recalled Lomon.

In 1956-57, he was a research associate at the Laboratory for Nuclear Studies at Cornell University. He received his PhD from MIT in 1954, and did postdoctoral work at the Institute of Theoretical Physics in Denmark, the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, and Cornell. He was an associate professor at McGill from 1957 until 1960, when he joined the MIT faculty.

In 1965, Lomon was awarded a Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and was a visiting scientist at CERN. In 1968, he joined the newly formed MIT Center for Theoretical Physics. He became a full professor in 1970 and retired in 1999.

Los Alamos and math theory

From 1968 to 2015, Lomon was an affiliate researcher at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. During this time, he collaborated with Fred Begay, a Navajo nuclear physicist and medicine man. New Mexico became the Lomon family’s second home, and Lomon enjoyed the area hiking trails and climbing Baldy Mountain.   

Lomon also developed educational materials for mathematical theory. He developed textbooks, educational tools, research, and a creative problem-solving curriculum for the Unified Science and Mathematics for Elementary Schools. His children recall when Earle would review the educational tools with them at the dinner table. From 2001 to 2013, he was program director for mathematical theory for the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Theoretical Physics research hub.

Lomon was an American Physical Society Fellow and a member of the Canadian Association of Physicists.

Husband of the late Ruth Lomon, he is survived by his daughters Glynis Lomon and Deirdre Lomon; his son, Dylan Lomon; grandchildren Devin Lomon, Alexia Layne-Lomon, and Benjamin Garner; and six great-grandchildren. There will be a memorial service at a later date; instead of flowers, please consider donating to the Los Alamos National Laboratory Foundation. 

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MIT Maritime Consortium sets sail

Around 11 billion tons of goods, or about 1.5 tons per person worldwide, are transported by sea each year, representing about 90 percent of global trade by volume. Internationally, the merchant shipping fleet numbers around 110,000 vessels. These ships, and the ports that service them, are significant contributors to the local and global economy — and they’re significant contributors to greenhouse gas emissions.

A new consortium, formalized in a signing ceremony at MIT last week, aims to address climate-harming emissions in the maritime shipping industry, while supporting efforts for environmentally friendly operation in compliance with the decarbonization goals set by the International Maritime Organization.

“This is a timely collaboration with key stakeholders from the maritime industry with a very bold and interdisciplinary research agenda that will establish new technologies and evidence-based standards,” says Themis Sapsis, the William Koch Professor of Marine Technology at MIT and the director of MIT’s Center for Ocean Engineering. “It aims to bring the best from MIT in key areas for commercial shipping, such as nuclear technology for commercial settings, autonomous operation and AI methods, improved hydrodynamics and ship design, cybersecurity, and manufacturing.” 

Co-led by Sapsis and Fotini Christia, the Ford International Professor of the Social Sciences; director of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS); and director of the MIT Sociotechnical Systems Research Center, the newly-launched MIT Maritime Consortium (MC) brings together MIT collaborators from across campus, including the Center for Ocean Engineering, which is housed in the Department of Mechanical Engineering; IDSS, which is housed in the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing; the departments of Nuclear Science and Engineering and Civil and Environmental Engineering; MIT Sea Grant; and others, with a national and an international community of industry experts.

The Maritime Consortium’s founding members are the American Bureau of Shipping (ABS), Capital Clean Energy Carriers Corp., and HD Korea Shipbuilding and Offshore Engineering. Innovation members are Foresight-Group, Navios Maritime Partners L.P., Singapore Maritime Institute, and Dorian LPG.

“The challenges the maritime industry faces are challenges that no individual company or organization can address alone,” says Christia. “The solution involves almost every discipline from the School of Engineering, as well as AI and data-driven algorithms, and policy and regulation — it’s a true MIT problem.”

Researchers will explore new designs for nuclear systems consistent with the techno-economic needs and constraints of commercial shipping, economic and environmental feasibility of alternative fuels, new data-driven algorithms and rigorous evaluation criteria for autonomous platforms in the maritime space, cyber-physical situational awareness and anomaly detection, as well as 3D printing technologies for onboard manufacturing. Collaborators will also advise on research priorities toward evidence-based standards related to MIT presidential priorities around climate, sustainability, and AI.

MIT has been a leading center of ship research and design for over a century, and is widely recognized for contributions to hydrodynamics, ship structural mechanics and dynamics, propeller design, and overall ship design, and its unique educational program for U.S. Navy Officers, the Naval Construction and Engineering Program. Research today is at the forefront of ocean science and engineering, with significant efforts in fluid mechanics and hydrodynamics, acoustics, offshore mechanics, marine robotics and sensors, and ocean sensing and forecasting. The consortium’s academic home at MIT also opens the door to cross-departmental collaboration across the Institute.

The MC will launch multiple research projects designed to tackle challenges from a variety of angles, all united by cutting-edge data analysis and computation techniques. Collaborators will research new designs and methods that improve efficiency and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, explore feasibility of alternative fuels, and advance data-driven decision-making, manufacturing and materials, hydrodynamic performance, and cybersecurity.

“This consortium brings a powerful collection of significant companies that, together, has the potential to be a global shipping shaper in itself,” says Christopher J. Wiernicki SM ’85, chair and chief executive officer of ABS. 

“The strength and uniqueness of this consortium is the members, which are all world-class organizations and real difference makers. The ability to harness the members’ experience and know-how, along with MIT’s technology reach, creates real jet fuel to drive progress,” Wiernicki says. “As well as researching key barriers, bottlenecks, and knowledge gaps in the emissions challenge, the consortium looks to enable development of the novel technology and policy innovation that will be key. Long term, the consortium hopes to provide the gravity we will need to bend the curve.”

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Credit where it’s due

When most people buy cars, the sticker price is only part of the cost. The other part involves the loan, since folks usually borrow money for auto purchases. Therefore the interest rate, monthly payment size, and total repayment cost all matter too.

And yet, on aggregate, people do more comparison shopping about car prices than about lenders, and they frequently settle for relatively expensive loans. What happens when the financing costs more? The answer is, people buy older cars with lower sticker prices.

“The car they’re driving right now could be a year older because of that,” says Christopher Palmer PhD ’14, an associate professor of finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management, who helped discover this phenomenon through a study examining millions of U.S. car loans. That research is like much of Palmer’s work: grounded in hard data and shining new light on issues, even familiar ones, about personal money management.

“I study household financial decision-making,” Palmer says. “Both how households make decisions and how those decisions are influenced by external factors. That covers a lot of things.”

It sure does. Palmer, often working with co-authors, has also discovered that people prefer to make monthly payments that are multiples of $100 — which can lead them to agree to worse financing terms. And since household finance includes housing, Palmer co-authored a high-profile study showing that people are remarkably more likely to use housing vouchers and move to another neighborhood when they have a modest amount of assistance from a “navigator” who helps with the move.

But he isn’t just looking for behavioral quirks: Another Palmer study found that the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing efforts after the financial crisis of 2008 helped cash-strapped people refinance their mortgages — though mostly those who had been able to make a down payment of 20 percent or more in the first place.

Overall, Palmer looks at big-picture economic scenarios in which people feel a financial crunch, and at consumer behavior, especially involving credit.

“If you look at whether someone can make a monthly payment, you need to understand their labor market, their expectations for the future, and more,” Palmer says. “Credit markets are interconnected to almost everything you might care about. Part of the reason I’m trying to shine a light on consumer credit markets is that they affect all kinds of human outcomes.”

For his research and teaching, Palmer earned tenure at MIT last year.

Useful intuition

Palmer grew up in the Boston area and enjoyed math in school, while always being interested in how people made financial decisions, especially about real estate. As an undergraduate at Brigham Young University, he soon recognized that he wanted to use his math skills to analyze everyday phenomena.

“I like the way you can take your intuition and have it be useful as you work through problems, along with this element of being able to observe what’s happening around you and being a listener in the world,” Palmer says.

As a student, though, that didn’t mean Palmer narrowed his interests. If anything, he saw the value in widening his studies.

“I also pretty quickly realized in college that I wanted to double major in econ and math,” Palmer says. “And that became the pipeline to get a PhD.”

After graduating from BYU, Palmer entered the doctoral program at MIT in 2008. In addition to taking classes, he immediately started working as a research assistant on a study of rent control along with professors David Autor — his eventual advisor — and Parag Pathak. That research eventually turned into a couple of high-profile papers. But while rent control is a kind of household-finance issue, the subject of household finance wasn’t really an established subdiscipline at the time.

It soon would be, however. Indeed, Palmer’s graduate-school career is almost a case study in how academic research broadens and evolves over time. Just as Palmer enrolled at MIT, the subprime-lending implosion helped generate the financial-markets crash of 2008, and both became greater focal points for academic research. Suddenly the topics that had been percolating around in Palmer’s mind were in pressing need of academic research.

“All of a sudden mortgages and household finance were front and center,” Palmer says. “That allowed me the space to write a dissertation about how distressed income households make mortgage decisions. There was an appetite for that.”

After receiving his PhD, Palmer joined the faculty at the University of California at Berkeley, at the Haas School of Business, and then moved back to MIT in 2017.

“Household finance as a field is small, so you have to intersect it with something else if you want your question to make a difference in the world,” Palmer says. “For me, that might be macroeconomics, labor economics, corporate finance, or banking. This is partly why MIT is an amazing place to be, because it’s so easy to get exposure to all of those fields.”

Keeping a list of questions at hand

With a wide-ranging research portfolio, Palmer has to be nimble about identifying topics he can study in depth. That means looking for good data related to household finance and consumer credit, and shaping his studies around meaningful questions.

“I think a good microeconomist is always on the hunt for things,” Palmer says.

“I’ve always wanted to be question-driven,” he adds. “I try to have a list of questions in mind, so that if somebody says, ‘I have an interesting data set, what can we do with it?’ I might have ideas about what in the data we can look at.”

Take the massive study on auto loans, which arose after a co-author approached Palmer and said, more or less, that he had identified an interesting data set and was wondering what to do with it. One unresolved question was: How much do people search for the best car price or the best loan terms?

As a graduate student, Palmer recalls, “I remembered [MIT professor] Glenn Ellison once saying in class that the subject of search is a really juicy topic. Consumers face tricky decisions, and companies do not want to make it easy for people to comparison-shop. And no one had done much about search in household finance.”

So, Palmer and his colleagues based the auto-loan study partly around the search issue. The work analyzes the geographic locations of millions of buyers, and the number of lenders within 20-minute drive of them, and examines how thoroughly consumers hunt for the best deals. The study includes credit scores, auto prices, and loan terms, illuminating the complete dynamics involving credit and auto purchases. 

Best behavior

Some of Palmer’s work, meanwhile, takes the form of experiments. The paper he co-authored about what helps people move was one such case. It was set in Seattle, and the research team collaborated with local policymakers to construct an experiment on the subject.

It turns out that in Seattle, among people granted housing vouchers to move to new neighborhoods, the percentage actually utilizing the vouchers jumped from 15 percent to 53 percent — an eye-opening change — when they were given slightly more information and resources, and most of all a “navigator” helping with basic logistics.

Studying how people manage money means Palmer’s work yields plenty of insights in the mode of behavioral economics, the subfield that studies irrationalities — or lack thereof — in finance. Palmer thinks such findings are important, while emphasizing that he is not principally on a hunt for irrationality. Instead he always seeks to link the study of behavior to major economic and policy matters: how we borrow, what we can afford, and how we respond to economic stress.

“When a study of behavior is motivated by a tight connection to public policy, it satisfies the is-this-important hurdle right away,” Palmer says. “I’m always aiming to produce work that a large community of scholars would find important and that the broader world would find impactful.”

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Technology developed by MIT engineers makes pesticides stick to plant leaves

Reducing the amount of agricultural sprays used by farmers — including fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides — could cut down the amount of polluting runoff that ends up in the environment while at the same time reducing farmers’ costs and perhaps even enhancing their productivity. A classic win-win-win.

A team of researchers at MIT and a spinoff company they launched has developed a system to do just that. Their technology adds a thin coating around droplets as they are being sprayed onto a field, greatly reducing their tendency to bounce off leaves and end up wasted on the ground. Instead, the coated droplets stick to the leaves as intended.

The research is described today in the journal Soft Matter, in a paper by recent MIT alumni Vishnu Jayaprakash PhD ’22 and Sreedath Panat PhD ’23, graduate student Simon Rufer, and MIT professor of mechanical engineering Kripa Varanasi.

A recent study found that if farmers didn’t use pesticides, they would lose 78 percent of fruit, 54 percent of vegetable, and 32 percent of cereal production. Despite their importance, a lack of technology that monitors and optimizes sprays has forced farmers to rely on personal experience and rules of thumb to decide how to apply these chemicals. As a result, these chemicals tend to be over-sprayed, leading to runoff and chemicals ending up in waterways or building up in the soil.

Pesticides take a significant toll on global health and the environment, the researchers point out. A recent study found that 31 percent of agricultural soils around the world were at high risk from pesticide pollution. And agricultural chemicals are a major expense for farmers: In the U.S., they spend $16 billion a year just on pesticides.

Making spraying more efficient is one of the best ways to make food production more sustainable and economical. Agricultural spraying essentially boils down to mixing chemicals into water and spraying water droplets onto plant leaves, which are often inherently water-repellent. “Over more than a decade of research in my lab at MIT, we have developed fundamental understandings of spraying and the interaction between droplets and plants — studying when they bounce and all the ways we have to make them stick better and enhance coverage,” Varanasi says.

The team had previously found a way to reduce the amount of sprayed liquid that bounces away from the leaves it strikes, which involved using two spray nozzles instead of one and spraying mixtures with opposite electrical charges. But they found that farmers were reluctant to take on the expense and effort of converting their spraying equipment to a two-nozzle system. So, the team looked for a simpler alternative.

They discovered they could achieve the same improvement in droplet retention using a single-nozzle system that can be easily adapted to existing sprayers. Instead of giving the droplets of pesticide an electric charge, they coat each droplet with a vanishingly thin layer of an oily material.

In their new study, they conducted lab experiments with high-speed cameras. When they sprayed droplets with no special treatment onto a water-repelling (hydrophobic) surface similar to that of many plant leaves, the droplets initially spread out into a pancake-like disk, then rebounded back into a ball and bounced away. But when the researchers coated the surface of the droplets with a tiny amount of oil — making up less than 1 percent of the droplet’s liquid — the droplets spread out and then stayed put. The treatment improved the droplets’ “stickiness” by as much as a hundredfold.

“When these droplets are hitting the surface and as they expand, they form this oil ring that essentially pins the droplet to the surface,” Rufer says. The researchers tried a wide variety of conditions, he says, explaining that they conducted hundreds of experiments, “with different impact velocities, different droplet sizes, different angles of inclination, all the things that fully characterize this phenomenon.” Though different oils varied in their effectiveness, all of them were effective. “Regardless of the impact velocity and the oils, we saw that the rebound height was significantly lower,” he says.

The effect works with remarkably small amounts of oil. In their initial tests they used 1 percent oil compared to the water, then they tried a 0.1 percent, and even .01. The improvement in droplets sticking to the surface continued at a 0.1 percent, but began to break down beyond that. “Basically, this oil film acts as a way to trap that droplet on the surface, because oil is very attracted to the surface and sort of holds the water in place,” Rufer says.

In the researchers’ initial tests they used soybean oil for the coating, figuring this would be a familiar material for the farmers they were working with, many of whom were growing soybeans. But it turned out that though they were producing the beans, the oil was not part of their usual supply chain for use on the farm. In further tests, the researchers found that several chemicals that farmers were already routinely using in their spraying, called surfactants and adjuvants, could be used instead, and that some of these provided the same benefits in keeping the droplets stuck on the leaves.

“That way,” Varanasi says, “we’re not introducing a new chemical or changed chemistries into their field, but they’re using things they’ve known for a long time.”

Varanasi and Jayaprakash formed a company called AgZen to commercialize the system. In order to prove how much their coating system improves the amount of spray that stays on the plant, they first had to develop a system to monitor spraying in real time. That system, which they call RealCoverage, has been deployed on farms ranging in size from a few dozen acres to hundreds of thousands of acres, and many different crop types, and has saved farmers 30 to 50 percent on their pesticide expenditures, just by improving the controls on the existing sprays. That system is being deployed to 920,000 acres of crops in 2025, the company says, including some in California, Texas, the Midwest, France and Italy. Adding the cloaking system using new nozzles, the researchers say, should yield at least another doubling of efficiency.

“You could give back a billion dollars to U.S. growers if you just saved 6 percent of their pesticide budget,” says Jayaprakash, lead author of the research paper and CEO of AgZen. “In the lab we got 300 percent of extra product on the plant. So that means we could get orders of magnitude reductions in the amount of pesticides that farmers are spraying.”

Farmers had already been using these surfactant and adjuvant chemicals as a way to enhance spraying effectiveness, but they were mixing it with a water solution. For it to have any effect, they had to use much more of these materials, risking causing burns to the plants. The new coating system reduces the amount of these materials needed, while improving their effectiveness.

In field tests conducted by AgZen, “we doubled the amount of product on kale and soybeans just by changing where the adjuvant was,” from mixed in to being a coating, Jayaprakash says. It’s convenient for farmers because “all they’re doing is changing their nozzle. They’re getting all their existing chemicals to work better, and they’re getting more product on the plant.”

And it’s not just for pesticides. “The really cool thing is this is useful for every chemistry that’s going on the leaf, be it an insecticide, a herbicide, a fungicide, or foliar nutrition,” Varanasi says. This year, they plan to introduce the new spray system on about 30,000 acres of cropland.

Varanasi says that with projected world population growth, “the amount of food production has got to double, and we are limited in so many resources, for example we cannot double the arable land. … This means that every acre we currently farm must become more efficient and able to do more with less.” These improved spraying technologies, for both monitoring the spraying and coating the droplets, Varanasi says, “I think is fundamentally changing agriculture.”

AgZen has recently raised $10 million in venture financing to support rapid commercial deployment of these technologies that can improve the control of chemical inputs into agriculture. “The knowledge we are gathering from every leaf, combined with our expertise in interfacial science and fluid mechanics, is giving us unparalleled insights into how chemicals are used and developed — and it’s clear that we can deliver value across the entire agrochemical supply chain,” Varanasi says  “Our mission is to use these technologies to deliver improved outcomes and reduced costs for the ag industry.” 

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Basketball analytics investment is key to NBA wins and other successes

If you filled out a March Madness bracket this month, you probably faced the same question with each college match-up: What gives one team an edge over another? Is it a team’s record through the regular season? Or the chemistry among its players? Maybe it’s the experience of its coaching staff or the buzz around a top scorer.

All of these factors play some role in a team’s chance to advance. But according to a new study by MIT researchers, there’s one member who consistently boosts their team’s performance: the data analyst.

The new study, which was published this month in the Journal of Sports Economics, quantifies the influence of basketball analytics investment on team performance. The study’s authors looked in particular at professional basketball and compared the  investment in data analytics on each NBA team with the team’s record of wins over 12 seasons. They found that indeed, teams that hired more analytics staff, and invested more in data analysis in general, tended to win more games.

Analytics department headcount had a positive and statistically significant effect on team wins even when accounting for other factors such as a team’s roster salary, the experience and chemistry among its players, the consistency of its coaching staff, and player injuries through each season. Even with all of these influences, the researchers found that the depth of a team’s data analytics bench, so to speak, was a consistent predictor of the team’s wins.

What’s more, they were able to quantify basketball analytics’ value, based on their impact on team wins. They found that for every four-fifths of one data analyst, a team gains one additional win in a season. Interestingly, a team can also gain one additional win by increasing its roster salary by $9.6 million. One way to read this is that one data analyst’s impact is worth at least $9 million.

“I don’t know of any analyst who’s being paid $9 million,” says study author Henry Wang, a graduate student in the MIT Sports Lab. “There is still a gap between how the player is being valued and how the analytics are being valued."

While the study focuses on professional basketball, the researchers say the findings are relevant beyond the NBA. They speculate that college teams that make use of data analytics may have an edge over those who don’t. (Take note, March Madness fans.) And the same likely goes for sports in general, along with any competitive field.

“This paper hits nicely not just in sports but beyond, with this question of: What is the tangible impact of big data analytics?” says co-author Arnab Sarker PhD ’25, a recent doctoral graduate of MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems and Society (IDSS). “Sports are a really nice, controlled place for analytics. But we’re also curious to what extent we can see these effects in general organizational performance.”

The study is also co-authored by Anette “Peko” Hosoi, the Pappalardo Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT.

Data return

Across the sports world, data analysts have grown in number and scope over the years. Sports analytics’ role in using data and stats to improve team performance was popularized in 2011 with the movie “Moneyball,” based on the 2003 book “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game” by Michael Lewis, who chronicled the 2002 Oakland Athletics and general manager Billy Beane’s use of baseball analytics to win games against wealthier Major League Baseball teams.

Since then, data analysis has expanded to many other sports, in an effort to make use of the varied and fast-paced sources of data, measurements, and statistics available today. In basketball, analysts can take on many roles, using data, for instance, to optimize a player’s health and minimize injury risk, and to predict a player’s performance to inform draft selection, free agency acquisition, and contract negotiations.

A data analyst’s work can also influence in-game strategy. Case in point: Over the last decade, NBA teams have strategically chosen to shift to shooting longer-range three-pointers, since Philadelphia 76ers President of Basketball Operations Daryl Morey SM ’00 determined that statistically, shooting more three-pointers wins more games. Today, each of the 30 NBA teams employs at least one basketball analytics staffer. And yet, while a data analyst’s job is entirely based on data, there is not much data on the impact of analysts themselves.

“Teams and leagues are spending millions of dollars on embracing analytical tools without a real sense of return-on-investment,” Wang notes.

Numbers value

The MIT researchers aimed in their new study to quantify the influence of NBA team analysts, specifically on winning games. To do so, they looked to major sources of sports data such as ESPN.com, and NBAstuffer.com, a website that hosts a huge amount of stats on NBA games and team stats, including hired basketball analytics staff, that the website’s managers compile based on publicly available data, such as from official team press releases and staff directories, as well as LinkedIn and X profiles, and news and industry reports.

For their new study, Wang and his colleagues gathered data on each of the 30 NBA teams, over a period from 2009 to 2023, 2009 being the year that NBAstuffer.com started compiling team data. For every team in each season during this period, the researchers recorded an “analyst headcount,” meaning the number of basketball operations analytics staff employed by a team. They considered an analyst to be data analysts, software engineers, sports scientists, directors of research, and other technical positions by title, but also staff members who aren’t formally analysts but may be known to be particularly active in the basketball analytics community. In general, they found that in 2009, a total of 10 data analysts were working across the NBA. In 2023, that number ballooned to 132, with some teams employing more analysts than others.

“What we’re trying to measure is a team’s level of investment in basketball analytics,” Wang explains. “The best measure would be if every team told us exactly how much money they spent every year on their R&D and data infrastructure and analysts. But they’re not going to do that. So headcount is the next best thing.”

In addition to analytics headcount, the researchers also compiled data on other win-influencing variables, such as roster salary (Does a higher-paid team win more games?), roster experience (Does a team with more veterans win more games?), consistent coaching (Did a new coach shake up a team’s win record?) and season injuries (How did a team’s injuries affect its wins?). The researchers also noted “road back-to-backs,” or the number of times a team had to play consecutive away games (Does the wear and tear of constant travel impact wins?).

The researchers plugged all this data into a “two-way fixed effects” model to estimate the relative effect that each variable has on the number of additional games a team can win in a season.

“The model learns all these effects, so we can see, for instance, the tradeoff between analyst and roster salary when contributing to win total,” Wang explains.

Their finding that teams with a higher analytics headcount tended to win more games wasn’t entirely surprising.

“We’re still at a point where the analyst is undervalued,” Wang says. “There probably is a sweet spot, in terms of headcount and wins. You can’t hire 100 analysts and expect to go in 82-and-0 next season. But right now a lot of teams are still below that sweet spot, and this competitive advantage that analytics offers has yet to be fully harvested.”

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Mathematicians uncover the logic behind how people walk in crowds

Next time you cross a crowded plaza, crosswalk, or airport concourse, take note of the pedestrian flow. Are people walking in orderly lanes, single-file, to their respective destinations? Or is it a haphazard tangle of personal trajectories, as people dodge and weave through the crowd?

MIT instructor Karol Bacik and his colleagues studied the flow of human crowds and developed a first-of-its-kind way to predict when pedestrian paths will transition from orderly to entangled. Their findings may help inform the design of public spaces that promote safe and efficient thoroughfares.

In a paper appearing this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers consider a common scenario in which pedestrians navigate a busy crosswalk. The team analyzed the scenario through mathematical analysis and simulations, considering the many angles at which individuals may cross and the dodging maneuvers they may make as they attempt to reach their destinations while avoiding bumping into other pedestrians along the way.

The researchers also carried out controlled crowd experiments and studied how real participants walked through a crowd to reach certain locations. Through their mathematical and experimental work, the team identified a key measure that determines whether pedestrian traffic is ordered, such that clear lanes form in the flow, or disordered, in which there are no discernible paths through the crowd. Called “angular spread,” this parameter describes the number of people walking in different directions.

If a crowd has a relatively small angular spread, this means that most pedestrians walk in opposite directions and meet the oncoming traffic head-on, such as in a crosswalk. In this case, more orderly, lane-like traffic is likely. If, however, a crowd has a larger angular spread, such as in a concourse, it means there are many more directions that pedestrians can take to cross, with more chance for disorder.

In fact, the researchers calculated the point at which a moving crowd can transition from order to disorder. That point, they found, was an angular spread of around 13 degrees, meaning that if pedestrians don’t walk straight across, but instead an average pedestrian veers off at an angle larger than 13 degrees, this can tip a crowd into disordered flow.

“This all is very commonsense,” says Bacik, who is a instructor of applied mathematics at MIT. “The question is whether we can tackle it precisely and mathematically, and where the transition is. Now we have a way to quantify when to expect lanes — this spontaneous, organized, safe flow — versus disordered, less efficient, potentially more dangerous flow.”

The study’s co-authors include Grzegorz Sobota and Bogdan Bacik of the Academy of Physical Education in Katowice, Poland, and Tim Rogers at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom.

Right, left, center

Bacik, who is trained in fluid dynamics and granular flow, came to study pedestrian flow during 2021, when he and his collaborators looked into the impacts of social distancing, and ways in which people might walk among each other while maintaining safe distances. That work inspired them to look more generally into the dynamics of crowd flow.

In 2023, he and his collaborators explored “lane formation,” a phenomenon by which particles, grains, and, yes, people have been observed to spontaneously form lanes, moving in single-file when forced to cross a region from two opposite directions. In that work, the team identified the mechanism by which such lanes form, which Bacik sums up as “an imbalance of turning left versus right.” Essentially, they found that as soon as something in a crowd starts to look like a lane, individuals around that fledgling lane either join up, or are forced to either side of it, walking parallel to the original lane, which others can follow. In this way, a crowd can spontaneously organize into regular, structured lanes.

“Now we’re asking, how robust is this mechanism?” Bacik says. “Does it only work in this very idealized situation, or can lane formation tolerate some imperfections, such as some people not going perfectly straight, as they might do in a crowd?”

Lane change

For their new study, the team looked to identify a key transition in crowd flow: When do pedestrians switch from orderly, lane-like traffic, to less organized, messy flow? The researchers first probed the question mathematically, with an equation that is typically used to describe fluid flow, in terms of the average motion of many individual molecules.

“If you think about the whole crowd flowing, rather than individuals, you can use fluid-like descriptions,” Bacik explains. “It’s this art of averaging, where, even if some people may cross more assertively than others, these effects are likely to average out in a sufficiently large crowd. If you only care about the global characteristics like, are there lanes or not, then you can make predictions without detailed knowledge of everyone in the crowd.”

Bacik and his colleagues used equations of fluid flow, and applied them to the scenario of pedestrians flowing across a crosswalk. The team tweaked certain parameters in the equation, such as the width of the fluid channel (in this case, the crosswalk), and the angle at which molecules (or people) flowed across, along with various directions that people can “dodge,” or move around each other to avoid colliding.

Based on these calculations, the researchers found that pedestrians in a crosswalk are more likely to form lanes, when they walk relatively straight across, from opposite directions. This order largely holds until people start veering across at more extreme angles. Then, the equation predicts that the pedestrian flow is likely to be disordered, with few to no lanes forming.

The researchers were curious to see whether the math bears out in reality. For this, they carried out experiments in a gymnasium, where they recorded the movements of pedestrians using an overhead camera. Each volunteer wore a paper hat, depicting a unique barcode that the overhead camera could track.

In their experiments, the team assigned volunteers various start and end positions along opposite sides of a simulated crosswalk, and tasked them with simultaneously walking across the crosswalk to their target location without bumping into anyone. They repeated the experiment many times, each time having volunteers assume different start and end positions. In the end, the researchers were able to gather visual data of multiple crowd flows, with pedestrians taking many different crossing angles.

When they analyzed the data and noted when lanes spontaneously formed, and when they did not, the team found that, much like the equation predicted, the angular spread mattered. Their experiments confirmed that the transition from ordered to disordered flow occurred somewhere around the theoretically predicted 13 degrees. That is, if an average person veered more than 13 degrees away from straight ahead, the pedestrian flow could tip into disorder, with little lane formation. What’s more, they found that the more disorder there is in a crowd, the less efficiently it moves.

The team plans to test their predictions on real-world crowds and pedestrian thoroughfares.

“We would like to analyze footage and compare that with our theory,” Bacik says. “And we can imagine that, for anyone designing a public space, if they want to have a safe and efficient pedestrian flow, our work could provide a simpler guideline, or some rules of thumb.”

This work is supported, in part, by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council of UK Research and Innovation.

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