SMART launches new Wearable Imaging for Transforming Elderly Care research group

What if ultrasound imaging is no longer confined to hospitals? Patients with chronic conditions, such as hypertension and heart failure, could be monitored continuously in real-time at home or on the move, giving health care practitioners ongoing clinical insights instead of the occasional snapshots — a scan here and a check-up there. This shift from reactive, hospital-based care to preventative, community and home-based care could enable earlier detection and timely intervention, and truly personalized care.

Bringing this vision to reality, the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore, has launched a new collaborative research project: Wearable Imaging for Transforming Elderly Care (WITEC). 

WITEC marks a pioneering effort in wearable technology, medical imaging, research, and materials science. It will be dedicated to foundational research and development of the world’s first wearable ultrasound imaging system capable of 48-hour intermittent cardiovascular imaging for continuous and real-time monitoring and diagnosis of chronic conditions such as hypertension and heart failure. 

This multi-million dollar, multi-year research program, supported by the National Research Foundation (NRF) Singapore under its Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise program, brings together top researchers and expertise from MIT, Nanyang Technological University (NTU Singapore), and the National University of Singapore (NUS). Tan Tock Seng Hospital (TTSH) is WITEC’s clinical collaborator and will conduct patient trials to validate long-term heart imaging for chronic cardiovascular disease management.

“Addressing society’s most pressing challenges requires innovative, interdisciplinary thinking. Building on SMART’s long legacy in Singapore as a hub for research and innovation, WITEC will harness interdisciplinary expertise — from MIT and leading institutions in Singapore — to advance transformative research that creates real-world impact and benefits Singapore, the U.S., and societies all over. This is the kind of collaborative research that not only pushes the boundaries of knowledge, but also redefines what is possible for the future of health care,” says Bruce Tidor, chief executive officer and interim director of SMART, who is also an MIT professor of biological engineering and electrical engineering and computer science.

Industry-leading precision equipment and capabilities

To support this work, WITEC’s laboratory is equipped with advanced tools, including Southeast Asia’s first sub-micrometer 3D printer and the latest Verasonics Vantage NXT 256 ultrasonic imaging system, which is the first unit of its kind in Singapore.

Unlike conventional 3D printers that operate at millimeter or micrometer scales, WITEC’s 3D printer can achieve sub‑micrometer resolution, allowing components to be fabricated at the level of single cells or tissue structures. With this capability, WITEC researchers can prototype bioadhesive materials and device interfaces with unprecedented accuracy — essential to ensuring skin‑safe adhesion and stable, long‑term imaging quality.

Complementing this is the latest Verasonics ultrasonic imaging system. Equipped with a new transducer adapter and supporting a significantly larger number of probe control channels than existing systems, it gives researchers the freedom to test highly customized imaging methods. This allows more complex beamforming, higher‑resolution image capture, and integration with AI‑based diagnostic models — opening the door to long‑duration, real‑time cardiovascular imaging not possible with standard hospital equipment.

Together, these technologies allow WITEC to accelerate the design, prototyping, and testing of its wearable ultrasound imaging system, and to demonstrate imaging quality on phantoms and healthy subjects.

Transforming chronic disease care through wearable innovation 

Chronic diseases are rising rapidly in Singapore and globally, especially among the aging population and individuals with multiple long-term conditions. This trend highlights the urgent need for effective home-based care and easy-to-use monitoring tools that go beyond basic wellness tracking.

Current consumer wearables, such as smartwatches and fitness bands, offer limited physiological data like heart rate or step count. While useful for general health, they lack the depth needed to support chronic disease management. Traditional ultrasound systems, although clinically powerful, are bulky, operator-dependent, can only be deployed episodically within the hospitals, and are limited to snapshots in time, making them unsuitable for long-term, everyday use.

WITEC aims to bridge this gap with its wearable ultrasound imaging system that uses bioadhesive technology to enable up to 48 hours of uninterrupted imaging. Combined with AI-enhanced diagnostics, the innovation is aimed at supporting early detection, home-based pre-diagnosis, and continuous monitoring of chronic diseases.

Beyond improving patient outcomes, this innovation could help ease labor shortages by freeing up ultrasound operators, nurses, and doctors to focus on more complex care, while reducing demand for hospital beds and resources. By shifting monitoring to homes and communities, WITEC’s technology will enable patient self-management and timely intervention, potentially lowering health-care costs and alleviating the increasing financial and manpower pressures of an aging population.

Driving innovation through interdisciplinary collaboration

WITEC is led by the following co-lead principal investigators: Xuanhe Zhao, professor of mechanical engineering and professor of civil and environmental engineering at MIT; Joseph Sung, senior vice president of health and life sciences at NTU Singapore and dean of the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine (LKCMedicine); Cher Heng Tan, assistant dean of clinical research at LKCMedicine; Chwee Teck Lim, NUS Society Professor of Biomedical Engineering at NUS and director of the Institute for Health Innovation and Technology at NUS; and Xiaodong Chen, distinguished university professor at the School of Materials Science and Engineering within NTU. 

“We’re extremely proud to bring together an exceptional team of researchers from Singapore and the U.S. to pioneer core technologies that will make wearable ultrasound imaging a reality. This endeavor combines deep expertise in materials science, data science, AI diagnostics, biomedical engineering, and clinical medicine. Our phased approach will accelerate translation into a fully wearable platform that reshapes how chronic diseases are monitored, diagnosed and managed,” says Zhao, who serves as a co-lead PI of WITEC.

Research roadmap with broad impact across health care, science, industry, and economy

Bringing together leading experts across interdisciplinary fields, WITEC will advance foundational work in soft materials, transducers, microelectronics, data science and AI diagnostics, clinical medicine, and biomedical engineering. As a deep-tech R&D group, its breakthroughs will have the potential to drive innovation in health-care technology and manufacturing, diagnostics, wearable ultrasonic imaging, metamaterials, diagnostics, and AI-powered health analytics. WITEC’s work is also expected to accelerate growth in high-value jobs across research, engineering, clinical validation, and health-care services, and attract strategic investments that foster biomedical innovation and industry partnerships in Singapore, the United States, and beyond.

“Chronic diseases present significant challenges for patients, families, and health-care systems, and with aging populations such as Singapore, those challenges will only grow without new solutions. Our research into a wearable ultrasound imaging system aims to transform daily care for those living with cardiovascular and other chronic conditions — providing clinicians with richer, continuous insights to guide treatment, while giving patients greater confidence and control over their own health. WITEC’s pioneering work marks an important step toward shifting care from episodic, hospital-based interventions to more proactive, everyday management in the community,” says Sung, who serves as co‑lead PI of WITEC.

Led by Violet Hoon, senior consultant at TTSH, clinical trials are expected to commence this year to validate long-term heart monitoring in the management of chronic cardiovascular disease. Over the next three years, WITEC aims to develop a fully integrated platform capable of 48-hour intermittent imaging through innovations in bioadhesive couplants, nanostructured metamaterials, and ultrasonic transducers.

As MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore, SMART is committed to advancing breakthrough technologies that address pressing global challenges. WITEC adds to SMART’s existing research endeavors that foster a rich exchange of ideas through collaboration with leading researchers and academics from the United States, Singapore, and around the world in key areas such as antimicrobial resistance, cell therapy development, precision agriculture, AI, and 3D-sensing technologies.

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New tissue models could help researchers develop drugs for liver disease

More than 100 million people in the United States suffer from metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD), characterized by a buildup of fat in the liver. This condition can lead to the development of more severe liver disease that causes inflammation and fibrosis.

In hopes of discovering new treatments for these liver diseases, MIT engineers have designed a new type of tissue model that more accurately mimics the architecture of the liver, including blood vessels and immune cells.

Reporting their findings today in Nature Communications, the researchers showed that this model could accurately replicate the inflammation and metabolic dysfunction that occur in the early stages of liver disease. Such a device could help researchers identify and test new drugs to treat those conditions.

This is the latest study in a larger effort by this team to use these types of tissue models, also known as microphysiological systems, to explore human liver biology, which cannot be easily replicated in mice or other animals.

In another recent paper, the researchers used an earlier version of their liver tissue model to explore how the liver responds to resmetirom. This drug is used to treat an advanced form of liver disease called metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis (MASH), but it is only effective in about 30 percent of patients. The team found that the drug can induce an inflammatory response in liver tissue, which may help to explain why it doesn’t help all patients.

“There are already tissue models that can make good preclinical predictions of liver toxicity for certain drugs, but we really need to better model disease states, because now we want to identify drug targets, we want to validate targets. We want to look at whether a particular drug may be more useful early or later in the disease,” says Linda Griffith, the School of Engineering Professor of Teaching Innovation at MIT, a professor of biological engineering and mechanical engineering, and the senior author of both studies.

Former MIT postdoc Dominick Hellen is the lead author of the resmetirom paper, which appeared Jan. 14 in Communications Biology. Erin Tevonian PhD ’25 and PhD candidate Ellen Kan, both in the Department of Biological Engineering, are the lead authors of today’s Nature Communications paper on the new microphysiological system.

Modeling drug response

In the Communications Biology paper, Griffith’s lab worked with a microfluidic device that she originally developed in the 1990s, known as the LiverChip. This chip offers a simple scaffold for growing 3D models of liver tissue from hepatocytes, the primary cell type in the liver.

This chip is widely used by pharmaceutical companies to test whether their new drugs have adverse effects on the liver, which is an important step in drug development because most drugs are metabolized by the liver.

For the new study, Griffith and her students modified the chip so that it could be used to study MASLD.

Patients with MASLD, a buildup of fat in the liver, can eventually develop MASH, a more severe disease that occurs when scar tissue called fibrosis forms in the liver. Currently, resmetirom and the GLP-1 drug semaglutide are the only medications that are FDA-approved to treat MASH. Finding new drugs is a priority, Griffith says.

“You’re never declaring victory with liver disease with one drug or one class of drugs, because over the long term there may be patients who can’t use them, or they may not be effective for all patients,” she says.

To create a model of MASLD, the researchers exposed the tissue to high levels of insulin, along with large quantities of glucose and fatty acids. This led to a buildup of fatty tissue and the development of insulin resistance, a trait that is often seen in MASLD patients and can lead to type 2 diabetes.

Once that model was established, the researchers treated the tissue with resmetirom, a drug that works by mimicking the effects of thyroid hormone, which stimulates the breakdown of fat.

To their surprise, the researchers found that this treatment could also lead to an increase in immune signaling and markers of inflammation.

“Because resmetirom is primarily intended to reduce hepatic fibrosis in MASH, we found the result quite paradoxical,” Hellen says. “We suspect this finding may help clinicians and scientists alike understand why only a subset of patients respond positively to the thyromimetic drug. However, additional experiments are needed to further elucidate the underlying mechanism.”

A more realistic liver model

In the Nature Communications paper, the researchers reported a new type of chip that allows them to more accurately reproduce the architecture of the human liver. The key advance was developing a way to induce blood vessels to grow into the tissue. These vessels can deliver nutrients and also allow immune cells to flow through the tissue.

“Making more sophisticated models of liver that incorporate features of vascularity and immune cell trafficking that can be maintained over a long time in culture is very valuable,” Griffith says. “The real advance here was showing that we could get an intimate microvascular network through liver tissue and that we could circulate immune cells. This helped us to establish differences between how immune cells interact with the liver cells in a type two diabetes state and a healthy state.”

As the liver tissue matured, the researchers induced insulin resistance by exposing the tissue to increased levels of insulin, glucose, and fatty acids.

As this disease state developed, the researchers observed changes in how hepatocytes clear insulin and metabolize glucose, as well as narrower, leakier blood vessels that reflect microvascular complications often seen in diabetic patients. They also found that insulin resistance leads to an increase in markers of inflammation that attract monocytes into the tissue. Monocytes are the precursors of macrophages, immune cells that help with tissue repair during inflammation and are also observed in the liver of patients with early-stage liver disease.

“This really shows that we can model the immune features of a disease like MASLD, in a way that is all based on human cells,” Griffith says.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship program, NovoNordisk, the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center, and the Siebel Scholars Foundation.

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Young and gifted

James Baldwin was a prodigy. That is not the first thing most people associate with a writer who once declared that he “had no childhood” and whose work often elides the details of his early life in New York, in the 1920s and 1930s. Still, by the time Baldwin was 14, he was a successful church preacher, excelling in a role otherwise occupied by adults.

Throw in the fact that Baldwin was reading Dostoyevsky by the fifth grade, wrote “like an angel” according to his elementary school principal, edited his middle school periodical, and wrote for his high school magazine, and it’s clear he was a precocious wordsmith.

These matters are complicated, of course. To MIT scholar Joshua Bennett, Baldwin’s writings reveal enough for us to conclude that his childhood was marked by a “relentless introspection” as he sought to come to terms with the world. Beyond that, Bennett thinks, some of Baldwin’s work, and even the one children’s book he wrote, yields “messages of persistence,” recognizing the need for any child to receive encouragement and education.

And if someone as precocious as Baldwin still needed cultivation, then virtually everyone does. If we act is if talent blossoms on its own, we are ignoring the vital role communities, teachers, and families play in helping artists — or anyone — develop their skills.

“We talk as if these people emerged ex nihilo,” Bennett says. “When all along the way, there were people who cultivated them, and our children deserve the same — all of the children of the world. We have a dominant model of genius that is fundamentally flawed, in that it often elides the role of communities and cultural institutions.”

Bennett explores these issues in a new book, “The People Can Fly: American Promise, Black Prodigies, and the Greatest Miracle of All Time,” published this week by Hachette. A literary scholar and poet himself, Bennett is the Distinguished Chair of the Humanities at MIT and a professor of literature.

“The People Can Fly” accomplishes many kinds of work at once: Bennett offers a series of profiles, carefully wrought to see how some prominent figures were able to flourish from childhood forward. And he closely reads their works for indications about how they understood the shape of their own lives. In so doing, Bennett underscores the significance of the social settings that prodigious talents grow up in. For good measure, he also offers reflections on his own career trajectory and encounters with these artists, driving home their influence and meaning.

Reading about these many prodigies, one by one, helps readers build a picture of the realities, and complications, of trying to sustain early promise.

“It’s part of what I tell my students — the individual is how you get to the universal,” Bennett says. “It doesn’t mean I need to share certain autobiographical impulses with, say, Hemingway. It’s just that I think those touchpoints exist in all great works of art.”

Space odyssey

For Bennett, the idea of writing about prodigies grew naturally from his research and teaching, which ranges broadly in American and global literature. Bennett began contemplating “the idea of promise as this strange, idiosyncratic quality, this thing we see through various acts, perhaps something as simple as a little riff you hear a child sing, an element of their drawings, or poems.” At the same time, he notes, people struggle with “the weight of promise. There is a peril that can come along with promise. Promise can be taken away.”

Ultimately, Bennett adds, “I started thinking a little more about what promise has meant in African American communities,” in particular. Ranging widely in the book, Bennett consistently loops back to a core focus on the ideals, communities, and obstacles many Black artists grew up with. These artists and intellectuals include Malcolm X, Gwendolyn Brooks, Stevie Wonder, and the late poet and scholar Nikki Giovanni.

Bennett’s chapter on Giovanni shows his own interest in placing an artist’s life in historical context, and picks up on motifs relating back to childhood and personal promise.

Giovanni attended Fisk University early, enrolling at 17. Later she enrolled in Columbia University’s Masters of Fine Arts program, where poetry students were supposed to produce publishable work in a two-year program. In her first year, Giovanni’s poetry collection, “Black Feeling, Black Talk,” not only got published but became a hit, selling 10,000 copies. She left the program early — without a degree, since it required two years of residency. In short, she was always going places.

Giovanni went on to become one of the most celebrated poets of her time, and spent decades on the faculty at Virginia Tech. One idea that kept recurring in her work: dreams of space exploration. Giovanni’s work transmitted a clear enthusiasm for exploring the stars.

“Looking through her work, you see space travel everywhere,” Bennett says. “Even in her most prominent poem, ‘Ego trippin (there may be a reason why),’ there is this sense of someone who’s soaring over the landscape — ‘I’m so hip even my errors are correct.’ There is this idea of an almost divine being.”

That enthusiasm was accompanied by the recognition that astronauts, at least at one time, emerged from a particular slice of society. Indeed, Giovanni at many times publicly called for more opportunities for more Americans to become astronauts. A pressing issue, for her, was making dreams achievable for more people.

“Nikki Giovanni is very invested in these sorts of questions, as a writer, as an educator, and as a big thinker,” Bennett says. “This kind of thinking about the cosmos is everywhere in her work. But inside of that is a critique, that everyone should have a chance to expand the orbit of their dreaming. And dream of whatever they need to.”

And as Bennett draws out in “The People Can Fly,” stories and visions of flying have run deep in Black culture, offering a potent symbolism and a mode of “holding on to a deeper sense that the constraints of this present world are not all-powerful or everlasting. The miraculous is yet available. The people could fly, and still can.”

Children with promise, families with dreams

Other artists have praised “The People Can Fly.” The actor, producer, and screenwriter Lena Waithe has said that “Bennett’s poetic nature shines through on every page. … This book is a masterclass in literature and a necessary reminder to cherish the child in all of us.”

Certainly Bennett brings a vast sense of scope to “The People Can Fly,” ranging across centuries of history. Phillis Wheatley, a former enslaved woman whose 1773 poetry collection was later praised by George Washington, was an early American prodigy, studying the classics as a teenager and releasing her work at age 20. Mae Jemison, the first Black female astronaut, enrolled in Stanford University at age 16, spurred by family members who taught her about the stars. All told, Bennett weaves together a scholarly tapestry about hope, ambition, and, at times, opportunity.

Often, that hope and ambition belong to whole families, not just one gifted child. As Nikki Giovanni herself quipped, while giving the main address at MIT’s annual Martin Luther King convocation in 1990, “the reason you go to college is that it makes your mother happy.”

Bennett can relate, having come from a family where his mother was the only prior relative to have attended college. As a kid in the 1990s, growing up in Yonkers, New York, he had a Princeton University sweatshirt, inspired by his love of the television program “The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.” The program featured a character named Phillip Banks — popularly known as “Uncle Phil” — who was, within the world of the show, a Princeton alumnus.

“I would ask my Mom, ‘How do I get into Princeton?’” Bennett recalls. “She would just say, ‘Study hard, honey.’ No one but her had even been to college in my family. No one had been to Princeton. No one had set foot on Princeton University’s campus. But the idea that was possible in the country we lived in, for a woman who was the daughter of two sharecroppers, and herself grew up in a tenement with her brothers and sister, and nonetheless went on to play at Carnegie Hall and get a college degree and buy her mother a color TV — it’s fascinating to me.”

The postscript to that anecdote is that Bennett did go on to earn his PhD from Princeton. Behind many children with promise are families and communities with dreams for those kids.

“There’s something to it I refuse to relinquish,” Bennett says. “My mother’s vision was a powerful and persistent one — she believed that the future also belonged to her children.”

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How a unique class of neurons may set the table for brain development

The way the brain develops can shape us throughout our lives, so neuroscientists are intensely curious about how it happens. A new study by researchers in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT that focused on visual cortex development in mice reveals that an important class of neurons follows a set of rules that, while surprising, might just create the right conditions for circuit optimization.

During early brain development, multiple types of neurons emerge in the visual cortex (where the brain processes vision). Many are “excitatory,” driving the activity of brain circuits, and others are “inhibitory,” meaning they control that activity. Just like a car needs not only an engine and a gas pedal, but also a steering wheel and brakes, a healthy balance between excitation and inhibition is required for proper brain function. During a “critical period” of development in the visual cortex, soon after the eyes first open, excitatory and inhibitory neurons forge and edit millions of connections, or synapses, to adapt nascent circuits to the incoming flood of visual experience. Over many days, in other words, the brain optimizes its attunement to the world.

In the new study in The Journal of Neuroscience, a team led by MIT research scientist Josiah Boivin and Professor Elly Nedivi visually tracked somatostatin (SST)-expressing inhibitory neurons forging synapses with excitatory cells along their sprawling dendrite branches, illustrating the action before, during, and after the critical period with unprecedented resolution. Several of the rules the SST cells appeared to follow were unexpected — for instance, unlike other cell types, their activity did not depend on visual input — but now that the scientists know these neurons’ unique trajectory, they have a new idea about how it may enable sensory activity to influence development: SST cells might help usher in the critical period by establishing the baseline level of inhibition needed to ensure that only certain types of sensory input will trigger circuit refinement.

“Why would you need part of the circuit that’s not really sensitive to experience? It could be that it’s setting things up for the experience-dependent components to do their thing,” says Nedivi, the William R. and Linda R. Young Professor in the Picower Institute and MIT’s departments of Biology and Brain and Cognitive Sciences.

Boivin adds: “We don’t yet know whether SST neurons play a causal role in the opening of the critical period, but they are certainly in the right place at the right time to sculpt cortical circuitry at a crucial developmental stage.”

A unique trajectory

To visualize SST-to-excitatory synapse development, Nedivi and Boivin’s team used a genetic technique that pairs expression of synaptic proteins with fluorescent molecules to resolve the appearance of the “boutons” SST cells use to reach out to excitatory neurons. They then performed a technique called eMAP, developed by Kwanghun Chung’s lab in the Picower Institute, that expands and clears brain tissue to increase magnification, allowing super-resolution visualization of the actual synapses those boutons ultimately formed with excitatory cells along their dendrites. Co-author and postdoc Bettina Schmerl helped lead the eMAP work.

These new techniques revealed that SST bouton appearance and then synapse formation surged dramatically when the eyes opened, and then as the critical period got underway. But while excitatory neurons during this time frame are still maturing, first in the deepest layers of the cortex and later in its more superficial layers, the SST boutons blanketed all layers simultaneously, meaning that, perhaps counterintuitively, they sought to establish their inhibitory influence regardless of the maturation stage of their intended partners.

Many studies have shown that eye opening and the onset of visual experience sets in motion the development and elaboration of excitatory cells and another major inhibitory neuron type (parvalbumin-expressing cells). Raising mice in the dark for different lengths of time, for instance, can distinctly alter what happens with these cells. Not so for the SST neurons. The new study showed that varying lengths of darkness had no effect on the trajectory of SST bouton and synapse appearance; it remained invariant, suggesting it is preordained by a genetic program or an age-related molecular signal, rather than experience.

Moreover, after the initial frenzy of synapse formation during development, many synapses are then edited, or pruned away, so that only the ones needed for appropriate sensory responses endure. Again, the SST boutons and synapses proved to be exempt from these redactions. Although the pace of new SST synapse formation slowed at the peak of the critical period, the net number of synapses never declined, and even continued increasing into adulthood.

“While a lot of people think that the only difference between inhibition and excitation is their valence, this demonstrates that inhibition works by a totally different set of rules,” Nedivi says.

In all, while other cell types were tailoring their synaptic populations to incoming experience, the SST neurons appeared to provide an early but steady inhibitory influence across all layers of the cortex. After excitatory synapses have been pruned back by the time of adulthood, the continued upward trickle of SST inhibition may contribute to the increase in the inhibition to excitation ratio that still allows the adult brain to learn, but not as dramatically or as flexibly as during early childhood.

A platform for future studies

In addition to shedding light on typical brain development, Nedivi says, the study’s techniques can enable side-by-side comparisons in mouse models of neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism or epilepsy, where aberrations of excitation and inhibition balance are implicated.

Future studies using the techniques can also look at how different cell types connect with each other in brain regions other than the visual cortex, she adds.

Boivin, who will soon open his own lab as a faculty member at Amherst College, says he is eager to apply the work in new ways.

“I’m excited to continue investigating inhibitory synapse formation on genetically defined cell types in my future lab,” Boivin says. “I plan to focus on the development of limbic brain regions that regulate behaviors relevant to adolescent mental health.”

In addition to Nedivi, Boivin and Schmerl, the paper’s other authors are Kendyll Martin and Chia-Fang Lee.

Funding for the study came from the National Institutes of Health, the Office of Naval Research, and the Freedom Together Foundation.

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How generative AI can help scientists synthesize complex materials

Generative artificial intelligence models have been used to create enormous libraries of theoretical materials that could help solve all kinds of problems. Now, scientists just have to figure out how to make them.

In many cases, materials synthesis is not as simple as following a recipe in the kitchen. Factors like the temperature and length of processing can yield huge changes in a material’s properties that make or break its performance. That has limited researchers’ ability to test millions of promising model-generated materials.

Now, MIT researchers have created an AI model that guides scientists through the process of making materials by suggesting promising synthesis routes. In a new paper, they showed the model delivers state-of-the-art accuracy in predicting effective synthesis pathways for a class of materials called zeolites, which could be used to improve catalysis, absorption, and ion exchange processes. Following its suggestions, the team synthesized a new zeolite material that showed improved thermal stability.

The researchers believe their new model could break the biggest bottleneck in the materials discovery process.

“To use an analogy, we know what kind of cake we want to make, but right now we don’t know how to bake the cake,” says lead author Elton Pan, a PhD candidate in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE). “Materials synthesis is currently done through domain expertise and trial and error.”

The paper describing the work appears today in Nature Computational Science. Joining Pan on the paper are Soonhyoung Kwon ’20, PhD ’24; DMSE postdoc Sulin Liu; chemical engineering PhD student Mingrou Xie; DMSE postdoc Alexander J. Hoffman; Research Assistant Yifei Duan SM ’25; DMSE visiting student Thorben Prein; DMSE PhD candidate Killian Sheriff; MIT Robert T. Haslam Professor in Chemical Engineering Yuriy Roman-Leshkov; Valencia Polytechnic University Professor Manuel Moliner; MIT Paul M. Cook Career Development Professor Rafael Gómez-Bombarelli; and MIT Jerry McAfee Professor in Engineering Elsa Olivetti.

Learning to bake

Massive investments in generative AI have led companies like Google and Meta to create huge databases filled with material recipes that, at least theoretically, have properties like high thermal stability and selective absorption of gases. But making those materials can require weeks or months of careful experiments that test specific reaction temperatures, times, precursor ratios, and other factors.

“People rely on their chemical intuition to guide the process,” Pan says. “Humans are linear. If there are five parameters, we might keep four of them constant and vary one of them linearly. But machines are much better at reasoning in a high-dimensional space.”

The synthesis process of materials discovery now often takes the most time in a material’s journey from hypothesis to use.

To help scientists navigate that process, the MIT researchers trained a generative AI model on over 23,000 material synthesis recipes described over 50 years of scientific papers. The researchers iteratively added random “noise” to the recipes during training, and the model learned to de-noise and sample from the random noise to find promising synthesis routes.

The result is DiffSyn, which uses an approach in AI known as diffusion.

“Diffusion models are basically a generative AI model like ChatGPT, but more like the DALL-E image generation model,” Pan says. “During inference, it converts noise into meaningful structure by subtracting a little bit of noise at each step. In this case, the ‘structure’ is the synthesis route for a desired material.”

When a scientist using DiffSyn enters a desired material structure, the model offers some promising combinations of reaction temperatures, reaction times, precursor ratios, and more.

“It basically tells you how to bake your cake,” Pan says. “You have a cake in mind, you feed it into the model, the model spits out the synthesis recipes. The scientist can pick whichever synthesis path they want, and there are simple ways to quantify the most promising synthesis path from what we provide, which we show in our paper.”

To test their system, the researchers used DiffSyn to suggest novel synthesis paths for a zeolite, a material class that is complex and takes time to form into a testable material.

“Zeolites have a very high-dimensional synthesis space,” Pan says. “Zeolites also tend to take days or weeks to crystallize, so the impact [of finding the best synthesis pathway faster] is much higher than other materials that crystallize in hours.”

The researchers were able to make the new zeolite material using synthesis pathways suggested by DiffSyn. Subsequent testing revealed the material had a promising morphology for catalytic applications.

“Scientists have been trying out different synthesis recipes one by one,” Pan says. “That makes them very time-consuming. This model can sample 1,000 of them in under a minute. It gives you a very good initial guess on synthesis recipes for completely new materials.”

Accounting for complexity

Previously, researchers have built machine-learning models that mapped a material to a single recipe. Those approaches do not take into account that there are different ways to make the same material.

DiffSyn is trained to map material structures to many different possible synthesis paths. Pan says that is better aligned with experimental reality.

“This is a paradigm shift away from one-to-one mapping between structure and synthesis to one-to-many mapping,” Pan says. “That’s a big reason why we achieved strong gains on the benchmarks.”

Moving forward, the researchers believe the approach should work to train other models that guide the synthesis of materials outside of zeolites, including metal-organic frameworks, inorganic solids, and other materials that have more than one possible synthesis pathway.

“This approach could be extended to other materials,” Pan says. “Now, the bottleneck is finding high-quality data for different material classes. But zeolites are complicated, so I can imagine they are close to the upper-bound of difficulty. Eventually, the goal would be interfacing these intelligent systems with autonomous real-world experiments, and agentic reasoning on experimental feedback to dramatically accelerate the process of materials design.”

The work was supported by MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI), the National Science Foundation, Generalitat Vaslenciana, the Office of Naval Research, ExxonMobil, and the Agency for Science, Technology and Research in Singapore.

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A portable ultrasound sensor may enable earlier detection of breast cancer

For people who are at high risk of developing breast cancer, frequent screenings with ultrasound can help detect tumors early. MIT researchers have now developed a miniaturized ultrasound system that could make it easier for breast ultrasounds to be performed more often, either at home or at a doctor’s office.

The new system consists of a small ultrasound probe attached to an acquisition and processing module that is a little larger than a smartphone. This system can be used on the go when connected to a laptop computer to reconstruct and view wide-angle 3D images in real-time.

“Everything is more compact, and that can make it easier to be used in rural areas or for people who may have barriers to this kind of technology,” says Canan Dagdeviren, an associate professor of media arts and sciences at MIT and the senior author of the study.

With this system, she says, more tumors could potentially be detected earlier, which increases the chances of successful treatment.

Colin Marcus PhD ’25 and former MIT postdoc Md Osman Goni Nayeem are the lead authors of the paper, which appears in the journal Advanced Healthcare Materials. Other authors of the paper are MIT graduate students Aastha Shah, Jason Hou, and Shrihari Viswanath; MIT summer intern and University of Central Florida undergraduate Maya Eusebio; MIT Media Lab Research Specialist David Sadat; MIT Provost Anantha Chandrakasan; and Massachusetts General Hospital breast cancer surgeon Tolga Ozmen.

Frequent monitoring

While many breast tumors are detected through routine mammograms, which use X-rays, tumors can develop in between yearly mammograms. These tumors, known as interval cancers, account for 20 to 30 percent of all breast cancer cases, and they tend to be more aggressive than those found during routine scans.

Detecting these tumors early is critical: When breast cancer is diagnosed in the earliest stages, the survival rate is nearly 100 percent. However, for tumors detected in later stages, that rate drops to around 25 percent.

For some individuals, more frequent ultrasound scanning in addition to regular mammograms could help to boost the number of tumors that are detected early. Currently, ultrasound is usually done only as a follow-up if a mammogram reveals any areas of concern. Ultrasound machines used for this purpose are large and expensive, and they require highly trained technicians to use them.

“You need skilled ultrasound technicians to use those machines, which is a major obstacle to getting ultrasound access to rural communities, or to developing countries where there aren’t as many skilled radiologists,” Viswanath says.

By creating ultrasound systems that are portable and easier to use, the MIT team hopes to make frequent ultrasound scanning accessible to many more people.

In 2023, Dagdeviren and her colleagues developed an array of ultrasound transducers that were incorporated into a flexible patch that can be attached to a bra, allowing the wearer to move an ultrasound tracker along the patch and image the breast tissue from different angles.

Those 2D images could be combined to generate a 3D representation of the tissue, but there could be small gaps in coverage, making it possible that small abnormalities could be missed. Also, that array of transducers had to be connected to a traditional, costly, refrigerator-sized processing machine to view the images.

In their new study, the researchers set out to develop a modified ultrasound array that would be fully portable and could create a 3D image of the entire breast by scanning just two or three locations.

The new system they developed is a chirped data acquisition system (cDAQ) that consists of an ultrasound probe and a motherboard that processes the data. The probe, which is a little smaller than a deck of cards, contains an ultrasound array arranged in the shape of an empty square, a configuration that allows the array to take 3D images of the tissue below.

This data is processed by the motherboard, which is a little bit larger than a smartphone and costs only about $300 to make. All of the electronics used in the motherboard are commercially available. To view the images, the motherboard can be connected to a laptop computer, so the entire system is portable.

“Traditional 3D ultrasound systems require power expensive and bulky electronics, which limits their use to high-end hospitals and clinics,” Chandrakasan says. “By redesigning the system to be ultra-sparse and energy-efficient, this powerful diagnostic tool can be moved out of the imaging suite and into a wearable form factor that is accessible for patients everywhere.”

This system also uses much less power than a traditional ultrasound machine, so it can be powered with a 5V DC supply (a battery or an AC/DC adapter used to plug in small electronic devices such as modems or portable speakers).

“Ultrasound imaging has long been confined to hospitals,” says Nayeem. “To move ultrasound beyond the hospital setting, we reengineered the entire architecture, introducing a new ultrasound fabrication process, to make the technology both scalable and practical.”

Earlier diagnosis

The researchers tested the new system on one human subject, a 71-year-old woman with a history of breast cysts. They found that the system could accurately image the cysts and created a 3D image of the tissue, with no gaps.

The system can image as deep as 15 centimeters into the tissue, and it can image the entire breast from two or three locations. And, because the ultrasound device sits on top of the skin without having to be pressed into the tissue like a typical ultrasound probe, the images are not distorted.

“With our technology, you simply place it gently on top of the tissue and it can visualize the cysts in their original location and with their original sizes,” Dagdeviren says.

The research team is now conducting a larger clinical trial at the MIT Center for Clinical and Translational Research and at MGH.

The researchers are also working on an even smaller version of the data processing system, which will be about the size of a fingernail. They hope to connect this to a smartphone that could be used to visualize the images, making the entire system smaller and easier to use. They also plan to develop a smartphone app that would use an AI algorithm to help guide the patient to the best location to place the ultrasound probe.

While the current version of the device could be readily adapted for use in a doctor’s office, the researchers hope that the future, a smaller version can be incorporated into a wearable sensor that could be used at home by people at high risk for developing breast cancer.

Dagdeviren is now working on launching a company to help commercialize the technology, with assistance from an MIT HEALS Deshpande Momentum Grant, the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, and the MIT Media Lab WHx Women’s Health Innovation Fund.

The research was funded by a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, a 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award, the Lyda Hill Foundation, and the MIT Media Lab Consortium.

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The philosophical puzzle of rational artificial intelligence

To what extent can an artificial system be rational?

A new MIT course, 6.S044/24.S00 (AI and Rationality), doesn’t seek to answer this question. Instead, it challenges students to explore this and other philosophical problems through the lens of AI research. For the next generation of scholars, concepts of rationality and agency could prove integral in AI decision-making, especially when influenced by how humans understand their own cognitive limits and their constrained, subjective views of what is or isn’t rational.

This inquiry is rooted in a deep relationship between computer science and philosophy, which have long collaborated in formalizing what it is to form rational beliefs, learn from experience, and make rational decisions in pursuit of one's goals.

“You’d imagine computer science and philosophy are pretty far apart, but they’ve always intersected. The technical parts of philosophy really overlap with AI, especially early AI,” says course instructor Leslie Kaelbling, the Panasonic Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at MIT, calling to mind Alan Turing, who was both a computer scientist and a philosopher. Kaelbling herself holds an undergraduate degree in philosophy from Stanford University, noting that computer science wasn’t available as a major at the time.

Brian Hedden, a professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, holding an MIT Schwarzman College of Computing shared position with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), who teaches the class with Kaelbling, notes that the two disciplines are more aligned than people might imagine, adding that the “differences are in emphasis and perspective.”

Tools for further theoretical thinking

Offered for the first time in fall 2025, Kaelbling and Hedden created AI and Rationality as part of the Common Ground for Computing Education, a cross-cutting initiative of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing that brings multiple departments together to develop and teach new courses and launch new programs that blend computing with other disciplines.

With over two dozen students registered, AI and Rationality is one of two Common Ground classes with a foundation in philosophy, the other being 6.C40/24.C40 (Ethics of Computing).

While Ethics of Computing explores concerns about the societal impacts of rapidly advancing technology, AI and Rationality examines the disputed definition of rationality by considering several components: the nature of rational agency, the concept of a fully autonomous and intelligent agent, and the ascription of beliefs and desires onto these systems.

Because AI is extremely broad in its implementation and each use case raises different issues, Kaelbling and Hedden brainstormed topics that could provide fruitful discussion and engagement between the two perspectives of computer science and philosophy.

“It's important when I work with students studying machine learning or robotics that they step back a bit and examine the assumptions they’re making,” Kaelbling says. “Thinking about things from a philosophical perspective helps people back up and understand better how to situate their work in actual context.”

Both instructors stress that this isn’t a course that provides concrete answers to questions on what it means to engineer a rational agent.

Hedden says, “I see the course as building their foundations. We’re not giving them a body of doctrine to learn and memorize and then apply. We’re equipping them with tools to think about things in a critical way as they go out into their chosen careers, whether they’re in research or industry or government.”

The rapid progress of AI also presents a new set of challenges in academia. Predicting what students may need to know five years from now is something Kaelbling sees as an impossible task. “What we need to do is give them the tools at a higher level — the habits of mind, the ways of thinking — that will help them approach the stuff that we really can’t anticipate right now,” she says.

Blending disciplines and questioning assumptions

So far, the class has drawn students from a wide range of disciplines — from those firmly grounded in computing to others interested in exploring how AI intersects with their own fields of study.

Throughout the semester’s reading and discussions, students grappled with different definitions of rationality and how they pushed back against assumptions in their fields.

On what surprised her about the course, Amanda Paredes Rioboo, a senior in EECS, says, “We’re kind of taught that math and logic are this golden standard or truth. This class showed us a variety of examples that humans act inconsistently with these mathematical and logical frameworks. We opened up this whole can of worms as to whether, is it humans that are irrational? Is it the machine learning systems that we designed that are irrational? Is it math and logic itself?”

Junior Okoroafor, a PhD student in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, was appreciative of the class’s challenges and the ways in which the definition of a rational agent could change depending on the discipline. “Representing what each field means by rationality in a formal framework, makes it clear exactly which assumptions are to be shared, and which were different, across fields.”

The co-teaching, collaborative structure of the course, as with all Common Ground endeavors, gave students and the instructors opportunities to hear different perspectives in real-time.

For Paredes Rioboo, this is her third Common Ground course. She says, “I really like the interdisciplinary aspect. They’ve always felt like a nice mix of theoretical and applied from the fact that they need to cut across fields.”

According to Okoroafor, Kaelbling and Hedden demonstrated an obvious synergy between fields, saying that it felt as if they were engaging and learning along with the class. How computer science and philosophy can be used to inform each other allowed him to understand their commonality and invaluable perspectives on intersecting issues.

He adds, “philosophy also has a way of surprising you.”

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Designing the future of metabolic health through tissue-selective drug delivery

New treatments based on biological molecules like RNA give scientists unprecedented control over how cells function. But delivering those drugs to the right tissues remains one of the biggest obstacles to turning these promising yet fragile molecules into powerful new treatments.

Now Gensaic, founded by Lavi Erisson MBA ’19; Uyanga Tsedev SM ’15, PhD ’21; and Jonathan Hsu PhD ’22, is building an artificial intelligence-powered discovery engine to develop protein shuttles that can deliver therapeutic molecules like RNA to specific tissues and cells in the body. The company is using its platform to create advanced treatments for metabolic diseases and other conditions. It is also developing treatments in partnership with Novo Nordisk and exploring additional collaborations to amplify the speed and scale of its impact.

The founders believe their delivery technology — combined with advanced therapies that precisely control gene expression, like RNA interference (RNAi) and small activating RNA (saRNA) — will enable new ways of improving health and treating disease.

“I think the therapeutic space in general is going to explode with the possibilities our approach unlocks,” Erisson says. “RNA has become a clinical-grade commodity that we know is safe. It is easy to synthesize, and it has unparalleled specificity and reversibility. By taking that and combining it with our targeting and delivery, we can change the therapeutic landscape.”

Drinking from the firehose

Erisson worked on drug development at the large pharmaceutical company Teva Pharmaceuticals before coming to MIT for his Sloan Fellows MBA in 2018.

“I came to MIT in large part because I was looking to stretch the boundaries of how I apply critical thinking,” Erisson says. “At that point in my career, I had taken about 10 drug programs into clinical development, with products on the market now. But what I didn’t have were the intellectual and quantitative tools for interrogating finance strategy and other disciplines that aren’t purely scientific. I knew I’d be drinking from the firehose coming to MIT.”

Erisson met Hsu and Tsedev, then PhD students at MIT, in a class taught by professors Harvey Lodish and Andrew Lo. The group started holding weekly meetings to discuss their research and the prospect of starting a business.

After Erisson completed his MBA program in 2019, he became chief medical and business officer at the MIT spinout Iterative Health, a company using AI to improve screening for colorectal cancer and inflammatory bowel disease that has raised over $200 million to date. There, Erisson ran a 1,400-patient study and led the development and clearance of the company’s software product.

During that time, the eventual founders continued to meet at Erisson’s house to discuss promising research avenues, including Tsedev’s work in the lab of Angela Belcher, MIT’s James Mason Crafts Professor of Biological Engineering. Tsedev’s research involved using bacteriophages, which are fast-replicating protein particles, to deliver treatments into hard-to-drug places like the brain.

As Hsu and Tsedev neared completion of their PhDs, the team decided to commercialize the technology, founding Gensaic at the end of 2021. Gensaic’s approach uses a method called unbiased directed evolution to find the best protein scaffolding to reach target tissues in the body.

“Directed evolution means having a lot of different species of proteins competing together for a certain function,” Erisson says. “The proteins are competing for the ability to reach the right cell, and we are then able to look at the genetic code of the protein that has ‘won’ that competition. When we do that process repeatedly, we find extremely adaptable proteins that can achieve the function we’re looking for.”

Initially, the founders focused on developing protein scaffolds to deliver gene therapies. Gensaic has since pivoted to focus on delivering molecules like siRNA and RNAi, which have been hard to deliver outside of the liver.

Today Gensaic has screened more than 500 billion different proteins using a process called phage display and directed evolution. It calls its platform FORGE, for Functional Optimization by Recursive Genetic Evolution.

Erisson says Gensaic’s delivery vehicles can also carry multiple RNA molecules into cells at the same time, giving doctors a novel and powerful set of tools to treat and prevent diseases.

“Today FORGE is built into the idea of multifunctional medicines,” Erisson says. “We are moving into a future where we can extract multiple therapeutic mechanisms from a single molecule. We can combine proteins with multiple tissue selectivity and multiple molecules of siRNA or other therapeutic modalities, and affect complex disease system biology with a single molecule.”

A “universe of opportunity”

The founders believe their approach will enable new ways of improving health by delivering advanced therapies directly to new places in the body. Precise delivery of drugs to anywhere in the body could not only unlock new therapeutic targets but also boost the effectiveness of existing treatments and reduce side effects.

“We’ve found we can get to the brain, and we can get to specific tissues like skeletal and adipose tissue,” Erisson says. “We’re the only company, to my knowledge, that has a protein-based delivery mechanism to get to adipose tissue.”

Delivering drugs into fat and muscle cells could be used to help people lose weight, retain muscle, and prevent conditions like fatty liver disease or osteoporosis.

Erisson says combining RNA therapeutics is another differentiator for Gensaic.

“The idea of multiplexed medicines is just emerging,” Erisson says. “There are no clinically approved drugs using dual-targeted siRNAs, especially ones that have multi-tissue targeting. We are focused on metabolic indications that have two targets at the same time and can take on unique tissues or combinations of tissues.”

Gensaic’s collaboration with Novo Nordisk, announced last year, targets cardiometabolic diseases and includes up to $354 million in upfront and milestone payments per disease target.

“We already know we can deliver multiple types of payloads, and Novo Nordisk is not limited to siRNA, so we can go after diseases in ways that aren’t available to other companies,” Erisson says. “We are too small to try to swallow this universe of opportunity on our own, but the potential of this platform is incredibly large. Patients deserve safer medicines and better outcomes than what are available now.”

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Taking the heat out of industrial chemical separations

The modern world runs on chemicals and fuels that require a huge amount of energy to produce: Industrial chemical separation accounts for 10 to 15 percent of the world’s total energy consumption. That’s because most separations today rely on heat to boil off unwanted materials and isolate compounds.

The MIT spinout Osmoses is making industrial chemical separations more efficient by reducing the need for all that heat. The company, founded by former MIT postdoc Francesco Maria Benedetti; Katherine Mizrahi Rodriguez ’17, PhD ’22; Professor Zachary Smith; and Holden Lai, has developed a polymer technology capable of filtering gases with unprecedented selectivity.

Gases — consisting of some of the smallest molecules in the world — have historically been the hardest to separate. Osmoses says its membranes enable industrial customers to increase production, use less energy, and operate in a smaller footprint than is possible using conventional heat-based separation processes.

Osmoses has already begun working with partners to demonstrate its technology’s performance, including its ability to upgrade biogas, which involves separating CO₂ and methane. The company also has projects in the works to recover hydrogen from large chemical facilities and, in a partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy, to pull helium from underground hydrogen wells.

“Chemical separations really matter, and they are a bottleneck to innovation and progress in an industry where innovation is challenging, yet an existential need,” Benedetti says. “We want to make it easier for our customers to reach their revenue targets, their decarbonization goals, and expand their markets to move the industry forward.”

Better separations

Benedetti joined Smith’s lab in MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering in 2017. He was joined by Mizrahi Rodriguez the following year, and the pair spent the next few years conducting fundamental research into membrane materials for gas separations, collaborating with chemists at MIT and beyond, including Lai as he conducted his PhD at Stanford University with Professor Yan Xia.

“I was fascinated by the projects [Smith] was thinking about,” Benedetti says. “It was high-risk, high-reward, and that’s something I love. I had the opportunity to work with talented chemists, and they were synthesizing amazing polymers. The idea was for us chemical engineers at MIT to study those polymers, support chemists in taking next steps, and find an application in the separations world.”

The researchers slowly iterated on the membranes, gradually achieving better performance until, in 2020, a group including Lai, Benedetti, Xia, and Smith broke records for gas separation selectivity with a class of three-dimensional polymers whose structural backbone could be tuned to optimize performance. They filed patents with Stanford and MIT over the next two years, publishing their results in the journal Science in 2022.

“We were facing a decision of what to do with this incredible innovation,” Benedetti recalls. “By then, we’d published a lot of papers where, as the introduction, we described the huge energy footprint of thermal gas separations and the potential of membranes to solve that. We thought rather than wait for somebody to pick up the paper and do something with it, we wanted to lead the effort to commercialize the technology.”

Benedetti joined forces with Mizrahi Rodriguez, Lai, and industrial advisor Xinjin Zhao PhD ’92 to go through the National Science Foundation’s I-Corps Program, which challenges researchers to speak to potential customers in industry. The researchers interviewed more than 100 people, which confirmed for them the huge impact their technology could have.

Benedetti received grants from the MIT Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation and was a fellow with the MIT Energy Initiative. Osmoses also won the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition in 2021, the same year they founded the company.

“I spent a lot of time talking to stakeholders of companies, and it was a window into the challenges the industry is facing,” Benedetti says. “It helped me determine this was a problem they were facing, and showed me the problem was massive. We realized if we could solve the problem, we could change the world.”

Today, Benedetti says more than 90 percent of energy in the chemicals industry is used to thermally separate gases. One study in Nature found that replacing thermal distillation could reduce annual U.S. energy costs by $4 billion and save 100 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions.

Made up of a class of molecules with tunable structures called hydrocarbon ladder polymers, Osmoses’ membranes are capable of filtering gas molecules with high levels of selectivity, at scale. The technology reduces the size of separation systems, making it easier to add to existing spaces and lowering upfront costs for customers.

“This technology is a paradigm shift with respect to how most separations are happening in industry today,” Benedetti says. “It doesn’t require any thermal processes, which is the reason why the chemical and petrochemical industries have such high energy consumption. There are huge inefficiencies in how separations are done today because of the traditional systems used.”

From the lab to the world

In the lab, the founders were making single grams of their membrane polymers for experiments. Since then, they’ve scaled up production dramatically, reducing the cost of the material with an eye toward producing potentially hundreds of kilograms in the future.

The company is currently working toward its first pilot project upgrading biogas at a landfill operated by a large utility in Canada. It is also planning a pilot at a dairy farm in Canada. Mizrahi Rodriguez says waste gas from landfills and agricultural make up over 80 percent of the biogas upgrading market overall and represent a promising alternative source of renewable methane for customers.

“Over the next year or two, our goal is to validate this technology at scale,” Benedetti says, noting Osmoses aims to scale up its pilot projects. “It has been a big accomplishment to secure funded pilots in all of the verticals that will serve as a springboard for our next commercial phase.”

Osmoses’ other two pilot projects focus on recovering valuable gas, including helium with the Department of Energy.

“Helium is a scarce resource that we need for a variety of applications, like MRIs, and our membranes’ high performance can be used to extract small amounts of it from underground wells,” Mizrahi Rodriguez explains. “Helium is very important in the semiconductor industry to build chips and graphical processing units that are powering the AI revolution. It’s a strategic resource that the U.S. has a growing interest to produce domestically.”

Benedetti says further down the line, Osmoses’ technology could be used in carbon capture, gas “sweetening” to remove acid gases from natural gas, to separate oxygen and nitrogen, to reuse refrigerants, and more.

“There will be a progressive expansion of our capabilities and markets to deliver on our mission of redefining the backbone of the chemical, petrochemical, and energy industries,” Benedetti says. “Separations should not be a bottleneck to innovation and progress anymore.”

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Rhea Vedro brings community wishes to life in Boston sculpture

Boston recently got its own good luck charm, “Amulet,” a 19-foot-tall tangle of organic spires installed in City Hall Plaza and embedded with the wishes, hopes, and prayers of residents from across the city.

The public artwork, by artist Rhea Vedro — also a lecturer and metals artist-in-residence in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE) — was installed on the north side of City Hall, in a newly renovated stretch of the plaza along Congress Street, in October and dedicated with a ribbon cutting on Dec. 19.

“I’m really interested in this idea of protective objects worn on the skin by humans across cultures, across time,” said Vedro at the event in the Civic Pavilion, across the plaza from the sculpture. “And then, how do you take those ideas off the body and turn them into a blown-up version — a stand-in for the body?”

Vedro started exploring that question in 2021, when she was awarded a Boston Triennial Public Art Accelerator fellowship and later commissioned by the city to create the piece — the first artwork installed in the refurbished section of the plaza. She invited people to workshops and community centers to create hundreds of “wishmarks” — steel panels with hammered indentations and words, each representing a personal wish or reflection.

The plates were later used to form the metal skin of the sculpture — three bird-like forms designed to be, in Vedro’s words, a “protective amulet for the landscape.”

“I didn’t ask anyone to share what their actual wishes were, but I met people going into surgery, people who were homeless and looking for housing, people who had just lost a loved one, people dealing with immigration issues,” Vedro said. She asked participants to meditate on the idea of a journey and safe passage. “That could be a literal journey with ideas around immigration and migration,” she said, “or it could be your own internal journey.”

Large-scale art, fine-scale detail

Vedro, who has several public artworks to her name, said in a video about making “Amulet” that the project was “the biggest thing I’ve ever done.” While artworks of this scale are often handed off to fabrication teams, she handled the construction herself, starting on her driveway until zoning rules forced her to move to her father-in-law’s warehouse. Sections were also welded at Artisans Asylum, a community workshop in Boston, where she was an artist in residence, and then moved to a large industrial studio in Rhode Island.

At the ribbon-cutting event, Vedro thanked friends, family members, and city officials who helped bring the project to life. The celebration ended with a concert by musician Veronica Robles and her mariachi band. Robles runs the Veronica Robles Cultural Center in East Boston, which served as the main site for wishmark workshops. The sculpture is expected to remain in City Hall Plaza for up to five years.

Vedro’s background is in fine arts metalsmithing, a discipline that involves shaping and manipulating metals like silver, gold, and copper through forging, casting, and soldering. She began working at a very different scale, making jewelry, and then later moved primarily to welded steel sculpture — both techniques she now teaches at MIT. When working with steel, Vedro applies the same sensitivity a jeweler brings to small objects, paying close attention to small undulations and surface texture.

She loves working with steel, Vedro says — “shaping and forming and texturing and fighting with it” — because it allows her to engage physically with the material, with her hands involved in every millimeter.

The sculpture’s fluid design began with loose, free-form bird drawings on a cement floor and rubber panels with soapstone, oil pastels, and paint sticks. Vedro then built the forms in metal, welding three-dimensional armatures from round steel bars. The organic shapes and flourishes emerged through a responsive, intuitive process.

“I’m someone who works in real-time, changing my mind and responding to the material,” Vedro says. She likens her process to making a patchwork quilt of steel pieces: forming patterns in a shapeable material like tar paper, transferring them to steel sheets, cutting and shaping and texturing the pieces, and welding them together. “So I can get lots of curvatures that way that are not at all modular.”

From steel plates to soaring form

The sculpture’s outer skin is made from thin, 20-gauge mild steel — a low-carbon steel that’s relatively soft and easy to work with — used for the wishmarks. Those plates were fitted over an internal armature constructed from heavier structural steel.

Because there were more wishmark panels than surface area, Vedro slipped some of them into the hollow space inside the sculpture before welding the piece closed. She compares them to treasures in a locket, “loose, rattling around, which freaked out the team when they were installing.” Any written text on the panels was burned off when the pieces were welded together.

“I believe the stuff’s all alchemized up into smoke, which to me is wonderful because it traverses realms just like a bird,” she says.

The surface of the sculpture is coated with a sealant — necessary because the outer skin material is prone to rust — along with spray paints, patinas, and accents including gold leaf. Its appearance will change over time, something Vedro embraces.

“The idea of transformation is actually integral to my work,” she says.

Standing outside the warmth of the Civic Pavilion on a windy, rainy day, artist Matt Bajor described the sculpture as “gorgeous,” attributing its impact in part to Vedro’s fluency in working across vastly different scales.

“The attention to detail — paying attention to the smaller things so that as it comes together as a whole, you have that fineness throughout the whole sculpture,” he said. “To do that at such a large scale is just crazy. It takes a lot of skill, a lot of effort, and a lot of time.”

Suveena Sreenilayam, a DMSE graduate student who has worked closely with Vedro, said her understanding of the relationship between art and craft brings a unique dimension to her work.

“Metal is hard to work with — and to build that on such small and large scales indicates real versatility,” Sreenilayam said. “To make something so artistic at this scale reflects her physical talent, and also her eye for detail and expression.”

Bajor said “Amulet” is a striking addition to the plaza, where the clean lines of City Hall’s Brutalist architecture contrast with the sculpture’s sinuous curves — and to Boston itself.

“I’m looking forward to seeing it in different conditions — in snow and bright sun — as the metal changes over time and as the patina develops,” he said. “It’s just a really great addition to the city.”

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“MIT Open Learning has opened doors I never imagined possible”

Through the MITx MicroMasters Program in Data, Economics, and Design of Policy, Munip Utama strengthened the skills he was already applying in his work with Baitul Enza, a nonprofit helping students in need via policy-shaping research and hands-on assistance. 

Utama’s commitment to advancing education for underprivileged students stems from his own background. His father is an elementary school teacher in a remote area and his mother has passed away. While financial hardship has always been a defining challenge, he says it has also been the driving force behind his pursuit of education. With the assistance of special programs for high-achieving students, Utama attended top schools and completed his bachelor’s degree in economics at UIN Jakarta — becoming the second person in his family to earn a university degree.

Utama joined Baitul Enza two months before graduation, through a faculty-led research project, and later became its manager, leading its programs and future development. In this interview, he describes how his experiences with the MicroMasters Program in Data, Economics, and Design of Policy (DEDP), offered by the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) and MIT Open Learning, are shaping his education, career, and personal mission.

Q: What motivated you to pursue the MITx MicroMasters Program in Data, Economics, and Design of Policy?

A: I was seeking high-quality, evidence-based courses in economics and development. I needed rigorous training in data analysis, economic reasoning, and policy design to strengthen our interventions at Baitul Enza. The MITx MicroMasters Program in Data, Economics, and Design of Policy offered exactly that: a curriculum grounded in real-world problem-solving, aligned with the challenges I face in Indonesia.

I deeply admire MIT’s commitment to transforming teaching and learning not only through innovation, but also through empathy. The DEDP program exemplifies this mission: It connects theory with practice, allowing learners like me to apply analytical tools directly to real development challenges. This approach has inspired me to adopt the same philosophy in my own teaching and mentoring, encouraging students to use data and critical thinking to solve problems in their communities.

Q: What have you gained from the MITx DEDP program? 

A: The DEDP courses have provided me with rigorous analytical and quantitative training in data analysis, economics, and policy design. They have strengthened both my research and mentorship abilities by teaching me to approach poverty and inequality through evidence-based frameworks. My experience conducting independent and collaborative research projects has informed how I mentor students, guiding them to carry out their own evidence-based research projects. I continue to seek further academic dialogue to broaden my understanding and prepare for future graduate studies.

Another key component has been the program’s financial assistance offers. Even with DEDP’s personalized income-based course pricing, financial constraints remain a significant challenge for me, and Baitul Enza operates entirely on donations and volunteer support. The scholarships administered by DEDP have been crucial in enabling me to continue my studies. It has allowed me to focus on learning without the constant burden of financial insecurity, while staying committed to my mission of breaking cycles of poverty through education. 

Q: How are you applying what you’ve learned from MIT Open Learning’s MITx programs, and how will you use what you’ve learned going forward?

A: The DEDP program has transformed how I lead Baitul Enza. I now apply data-driven and evidence-based approaches to program design, monitoring, and evaluation — enhancing cost-effectiveness and long-term impact. The program has enabled me to design case-based learning modules for students, where they analyze real-world data on poverty and education; mentor youth researchers to conduct small-scale projects using evidence-based methods; and improve program cost-effectiveness and outcome measurement to attract collaborators and government support.

Coming from a lower-middle-class family with limited access to education, MIT Open Learning has opened doors I never imagined possible. It has reaffirmed my belief that education, grounded in data and empathy, can break the cycle of poverty. The DEDP program continues to inspire me to mentor young researchers, empower disadvantaged students, and build a community rooted in evidence-based decision-making.

With the foundation built by MITx, I aim to produce policy-relevant research and scale up Baitul Enza’s impact. My long-term vision is to generate experimental evidence in Indonesia on scalable education interventions, inform national policy, and empower marginalized youth to thrive. MITx has not only prepared me academically, but has also strengthened my resolve to lead with clarity, design with evidence, and act with purpose. Beyond my own growth, MITx has multiplied its impact by empowering the next generation of students to use data and evidence in solving local development challenges.

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MIT engineers design structures that compute with heat

MIT researchers have designed silicon structures that can perform calculations in an electronic device using excess heat instead of electricity. These tiny structures could someday enable more energy-efficient computation.

In this computing method, input data are encoded as a set of temperatures using the waste heat already present in a device. The flow and distribution of heat through a specially designed material forms the basis of the calculation. Then the output is represented by the power collected at the other end, which is thermostat at a fixed temperature.      

The researchers used these structures to perform matrix vector multiplication with more than 99 percent accuracy. Matrix multiplication is the fundamental mathematical technique machine-learning models like LLMs utilize to process information and make predictions.

While the researchers still have to overcome many challenges to scale up this computing method for modern deep-learning models, the technique could be applied to detect heat sources and measure temperature changes in electronics without consuming extra energy. This would also eliminate the need for multiple temperature sensors that take up space on a chip.

“Most of the time, when you are performing computations in an electronic device, heat is the waste product. You often want to get rid of as much heat as you can. But here, we’ve taken the opposite approach by using heat as a form of information itself and showing that computing with heat is possible,” says Caio Silva, an undergraduate student in the Department of Physics and lead author of a paper on the new computing paradigm.

Silva is joined on the paper by senior author Giuseppe Romano, a research scientist at MIT’s Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies and a member of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab. The research appears today in Physical Review Applied.

Turning up the heat

This work was enabled by a software system the researchers previously developed that allows them to automatically design a material that can conduct heat in a specific manner.

Using a technique called inverse design, this system flips the traditional engineering approach on its head. The researchers define the functionality they want first, then the system uses powerful algorithms to iteratively design the best geometry for the task.

They used this system to design complex silicon structures, each roughly the same size as a dust particle, that can perform computations using heat conduction. This is a form of analog computing, in which data are encoded and signals are processed using continuous values, rather than digital bits that are either 0s or 1s.

The researchers feed their software system the specifications of a matrix of numbers that represents a particular calculation. Using a grid, the system designs a set of rectangular silicon structures filled with tiny pores. The system continually adjusts each pixel in the grid until it arrives at the desired mathematical function.

Heat diffuses through the silicon in a way that performs the matrix multiplication, with the geometry of the structure encoding the coefficients.

“These structures are far too complicated for us to come up with just through our own intuition. We need to teach a computer to design them for us. That is what makes inverse design a very powerful technique,” Romano says.

But the researchers ran into a problem. Due to the laws of heat conduction, which impose that heat goes from hot to cold regions, these structures can only encode positive coefficients. 

They overcame this problem by splitting the target matrix into its positive and negative components and representing them with separately optimized silicon structures that encode positive entries. Subtracting the outputs at a later stage allows them to compute negative matrix values.

They can also tune the thickness of the structures, which allows them to realize a greater variety of matrices. Thicker structures have greater heat conduction.

“Finding the right topology for a given matrix is challenging. We beat this problem by developing an optimization algorithm that ensures the topology being developed is as close as possible to the desired matrix without having any weird parts,” Silva explains.

Microelectronic applications

The researchers used simulations to test the structures on simple matrices with two or three columns. While simple, these small matrices are relevant for important applications, such as fusion sensing and diagnostics in microelectronics.     

The structures performed computations with more than 99 percent accuracy in many cases.

However, there is still a long way to go before this technique could be used for large-scale applications such as deep learning, since millions of structures would need to be tiled together. As the matrices become more complicated, the structures become less accurate, especially when there is a large distance between the input and output terminals. In addition, the devices have limited bandwidth, which would need to be greatly expanded if they were to be used for deep learning.

But because the structures rely on excess heat, they could be directly applied for tasks like thermal management, as well as heat source or temperature gradient detection in microelectronics.

“This information is critical. Temperature gradients can cause thermal expansion and damage a circuit or even cause an entire device to fail. If we have a localized  heat source where we don’t want a heat source, it means we have a problem. We could directly detect such heat sources with these structures, and we can just plug them in without needing any digital components,” Romano says.

Building on this proof-of-concept, the researchers want to design structures that can perform sequential operations, where the output of one structure becomes an input for the next. This is how machine-learning models perform computations. They also plan to develop programmable structures, enabling them to encode different matrices without starting from scratch with a new structure each time.

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Keeril Makan named vice provost for the arts

Keeril Makan has been appointed vice provost for the arts at MIT, effective Feb. 1. In this role, Makan, who is the Michael (1949) and Sonja Koerner Music Composition Professor at MIT, will provide leadership and strategic direction for the arts across the Institute.

Provost Anantha Chandrakasan announced Makan’s appointment in an email to the MIT community today.

“Keeril’s record of accomplishment both as an artist and an administrative leader makes him exceedingly qualified to take on this important role,” Chandrakasan wrote, noting that Makan “has repeatedly taken on new leadership assignments with skill and enthusiasm.”

Makan’s appointment follows the publication last September of the final report of the Future of the Arts at MIT Committee. At MIT, the report noted, “the arts thrive as a constellation of recognized disciplines while penetrating and illuminating countless aspects of the Institute’s scientific and technological enterprise.” Makan will build on this foundation as MIT continues to strengthen the role of the arts in research, education, and community life.

As vice provost for the arts, Makan will provide Institute-wide leadership and strategic direction for the arts, working in close partnership with academic leaders, arts units, and administrative colleagues across MIT, including the Office of the Arts; the MIT Center for Art, Science and Technology; the MIT Museum; the List Visual Arts Center; and the Council for the Arts at MIT. His role will focus on strengthening connections between artistic practice, research, education, and community life, and on supporting public engagement and interdisciplinary collaboration.

“At MIT, the arts are a vital way of thinking, making, and convening,” Makan says. “As vice provost, my priority is to support and strengthen the extraordinary artistic work already happening across the Institute, while listening carefully to faculty, students, and staff as we shape what comes next. I’m excited to build on MIT’s distinctive, only-at-MIT approach to the arts and to help ensure that artistic practice remains central to MIT’s intellectual and community life.”

Makan says he will begin his new role with a period of listening and learning across MIT’s arts ecosystem, informed by the Future of the Arts at MIT report. His initial focus will be on understanding how artistic practice intersects with research, education, and community life, and on identifying opportunities to strengthen connections, visibility, and coordination across MIT’s many arts activities.

Over time, Makan says he will work with the arts community to advance MIT’s long-standing commitment to artistic excellence and experimentation, while supporting student participation and public engagement in the arts. He said his approach will “emphasize collaboration, clarity, and sustainability, reflecting MIT’s distinctive integration of the arts with science and technology.”

Makan came to MIT in 2006 as an assistant professor of music. From 2018 to 2024, he served as head of the Music and Theater Arts (MTA) Section in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS). In 2023, he was appointed associate dean for strategic initiatives in SHASS, where he helped guide the school’s response to recent fiscal pressures and led Institute-wide strategic initiatives.

With colleagues from MTA and the School of Engineering, Makan helped launch a new, multidisciplinary graduate program in music technology and computation. He was intimately involved in the project to develop the new Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building (Building 18), a state-of-the-art facility that opened in 2025. 

Makan was a member of the Future of the Arts at MIT Committee and chaired a working group on the creation of a center for the humanities, which ultimately became the MIT Human Insight Collaborative (MITHIC), one of the Institute’s strategic initiatives. Since last year, he has served as MITHIC’s faculty lead. Under his leadership, MITHIC has awarded $4.7 million in funding to 56 projects across 28 units at MIT, supporting interdisciplinary, human-centered research and teaching.

Trained initially as a violinist, Makan earned undergraduate degrees in music composition and religion from Oberlin and a PhD in music composition from the University of California at Berkeley.

A critically-acclaimed composer, Makan is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Luciano Berio Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. His music has been recorded by the Kronos Quartet, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, and the International Contemporary Ensemble, and performed at Carnegie Hall, the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, and Tanglewood. His opera, “Persona,” premiered at National Sawdust and was performed at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and by the Los Angeles Opera. The Los Angeles Times described the music from “Persona” as “brilliant.”

Makan succeeds Philip Khoury, the Ford International Professor of History, who served as vice provost for the arts from 2006 before stepping down in 2025. Khoury will return to the MIT faculty following a sabbatical.

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Welcome to the “most wicked” apprentice program on campus

The Pappalardo Apprentice program pushes the boundaries of the traditional lab experience, inviting a selected group of juniors and seniors to advance their fabrication skills while also providing mentor training and peer-to-peer mentoring opportunities in an environment fueled by creativity, safety, and fun.

“This apprenticeship was largely born of my need for additional lab help during our larger sophomore-level design course, and the desire of third- and fourth-year students to advance their fabrication knowledge and skills,” says Daniel Braunstein, senior lecturer in mechanical engineering (MechE) and director of the Pappalardo Undergraduate Teaching Laboratories. “Though these needs and wants were nothing particularly new, it had not occurred to me that we could combine these interests into a manageable and meaningful program.”

Apprentices serve as undergraduate lab assistants for class 2.007 (Design and Manufacturing I), joining lab sessions and assisting 2.007 students with various aspects of the learning experience including machining, hand-tool use, brainstorming, and peer support. Apprentices also participate in a series of seminars and clinics designed to further their fabrication knowledge and hands-on skills, including advancing understanding of mill and lathe use, computer-aided design and manufacturing (CAD/CAM) and pattern-making.

Putting this learning into practice, junior apprentices fabricate Stirling engines (a closed-cycle heat engine that converts thermal energy into mechanical work), while returning senior apprentices take on more ambitious group projects involving casting. Previous years’ projects included an early 20th-century single-cylinder marine engine and a 19th-century torpedo boat steam engine, on permanent exhibit at the MIT Museum. This spring will focus on copper alloys and fabrication of a replica of an 1899 anchor windlass from the Herreshoff Manufacturing Co., used on the famous New York 70 class sloops.

The sloops, designed by MIT Class of 1870 alumnus Nathanael Greene Herreshoff for wealthy New York Yacht Club members, were a short-lived, single-design racing vessels meant for exclusive competition. The historic racing yachts used robust manual windlasses — mechanical devices used to haul large loads — to manage their substantial anchors.

“The more we got into casting, I was modestly surprised that [the students’] exposure to metals was very limited. So that really launched not just a project, but also a more specific curriculum around metallurgy,” says Braunstein.

Metallurgy is not a traditional part of the curriculum. “I think [the project] really opened up my eyes to how much material choice is an important thing for engineering in general,” says apprentice Jade Durham.

In casting the windlasses, students are working from century-old drawings. “[Looking at these old drawings,] we don't know how they made [the parts],” says Braunstein. “So, there is an element of the discovery of what they may or may not have done. It’s like technical archaeology.”

“You’re really just relying on your knowledge of the windlass system, how it’s meant to work, which surfaces are really critical, and kind of just applying your intuition,” says apprentice Saechow Yap. “I learned a lot about applying my art skills and my ability to judge and shape aesthetic.”

Learning by doing is an important hallmark of an MIT MechE education. The Pappalardo Apprentice Program, which celebrated its 10th year last spring, is housed in the Pappalardo Lab. The lab, established through a gift from Neil Pappalardo ’64, is the self-proclaimed “most wicked labs on campus” — “wicked,” for readers outside of Greater Boston, is slang used in a variety of ways, but generally meaning something is pretty awesome.

“Pappalardo is my favorite place on campus, I had never set foot in any sort of like makerspace or lab before I came to MIT,” says apprentice Wilhem Hector. “I did not just learn how to make things. I got empowered ... [to] make anything.”

Braunstein developed the Pappalardo Apprentice program to reinforce the learning of the older students while building community. In a 2023 interview, he said he called the seminar an apprenticeship to emphasize MIT’s relationship with the art — and industrial character — of engineering.

“I did want to borrow from the language of the trades,” Braunstein said. “MIT has a strong heritage in industrial work; that’s why we were founded. It was not a science institution; it was about the mechanical arts. And I think the blend of the industrial, plus the academic, is what makes this lab particularly meaningful.”

Today, he says the most enjoyable part of the program, for him, is watching relationships develop. “They come in, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and then to see them go to people who are capable of pouring iron, tramming mills, teaching other people how to do it and having this tight group of friends … that's fun to watch.”

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