Discovery could lead to brighter, more energy-efficient digital displays

A new study led by MIT researchers could drive the development of more energy-efficient digital displays — such as flat-screen TVs, augmented and virtual reality headsets, smartphone screens, medical imaging devices, and even large-area ambient lighting surfaces — that also generate richer, brighter colors.

The MIT scientists, in collaboration with researchers at Samsung, studied the microscopic changes that occur inside LEDs that utilize electrically excited quantum dots, which are precisely shaped nanoscale semiconductor particles that emit extremely pure colored light. 

Quantum dots are currently used in some of the computer and television displays with the best picture quality available. The efficiency of these displays could be further improved, and their manufacturing process further simplified, if the quantum dots could be electrically excited, as was first demonstrated in the quantum dot LED (QD-LED) structures over 20 years ago. 

But limitations on the operating lifespans of these QD-LEDs have prevented their widespread use in commercial applications.

The new study shows how encapsulating QD-LEDs in an acrylate-based resin can extend their lifespan by minimizing the physical degradation that would otherwise occur during QD-LED operation. 

The researchers demonstrated that encapsulating QD-LEDs with a resin layer using a simple, scalable process boosts stability and performance. In some devices, resin encapsulation enabled a 5,000-fold lifespan improvement. Importantly, their study reveals the fundamental reasons resin encapsulation is effective.

“The insights into how and why quantum dot LEDs get modified during their operation open the possibility of fixing everything that holds back commercialization of QD-LED displays. This technology can provide a light source like never before — pure in color, paper thin, and of large area, transforming how we produce both displays and general lighting,” says Vladimir Bulović, the Fariborz Maseeh (1990) Professor of Emerging Technology, principal investigator in the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), director of MIT.nano, and senior author of this study.

He is joined on the paper by lead author Ruiqi Zhang, an electrical engineering and computer science graduate student; Moungi Bawendi, the Lester Wolfe Professor of Chemistry; and other colleagues at MIT and Samsung SAIT. The research appears today in Science Advances.

A blue bottleneck

This paper draws on foundational work by Bawendi, who shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2023 for discovering and synthesizing quantum dots, and engineering work by Bulović, who joined MIT in 2000, when he began collaborating with Bawendi to make efficient LED displays using quantum dots. 

Conventional LED displays utilize thousands of tiny lightbulbs that generate the red, green, and blue light needed to create the perception of any color on the visible spectrum. More advanced OLED screens, which Bulović was developing through his graduate work at Princeton University, utilize electrically excited, glowing organic molecules instead of light bulbs.

Bulović, Bawendi, and others at MIT sought to replace the organic molecules with quantum dots, which emit purer red, green, and blue light in a more energy-efficient manner.

“With quantum dots, the color quality of the screen would be more visually appealing and more optically flexible. One can mix and match those quantum dot colors more precisely to generate any color that is needed,” says Bulović.

Their collaboration generated a series of inventions on quantum dot LED technologies, leading to the launch of the startup QD Vision, which successfully commercialized the first-ever displays containing quantum dots. In 2016, QD Vision was acquired by Samsung, which incorporated a less efficient form of quantum dot technology into their “QLED” displays.

Although they are more energy-efficient, electrically excited QD-LEDs have still not been commercialized, particularly since the limited lifetime of the blue QD-LED does not meet the requirements of commercial displays.

“The blue quantum dot LEDs are 50 to 100 times less stable than their red and green counterparts. If you use them in an LED display, your TV might last for just a few months before it stops working. We wanted to understand what is different about the blue quantum dot LEDs,” Zhang says.

A nanoscale investigation

He and his collaborators developed a technique to slice a tiny QD-LED in nanoscale-thin slivers, revealing the device cross-section. They examined these cross-sections under extremely powerful microscopes at MIT.nano. This precise method allowed them to see what happens at the nanoscale to the ultrathin layers of materials stacked inside the QD-LED.

They explored the structural and chemical changes that occurred in each layer of red and blue QD-LEDs by comparing cross-sections of freshly made devices to cross-sections of devices that were operated on overdrive. The researchers found that during operation, the three core functional layers that enable blue QD-LEDs to glow are degraded, with modified morphology and reduced thickness. 

The distinct quantum dots also get merged together, losing their shape. This layer thinning and coarsening is caused, in part, by the release of extra hydrogen and oxygen during operation.

“We don’t yet know exactly where these extra elements are coming from — there are so many possibilities. But we definitely don’t want extra hydrogen and oxygen in the device,” Zhang says.

To prevent this degradation, they utilized a technique sometimes adopted by industry. They encapsulated the QD-LEDs with an acrylate-based resin.

They discovered that this encapsulation technique suppresses the release of the hydrogen and oxygen and inhibits some of the degradation that changes the morphology of the layers of the blue QD-LED. 

“For the first time, we have insights into the details of what happens inside these structures of many mixed and layered materials that form the QD-LED. No one knew this before,” Bulović says.

This encapsulation strategy, which is a cost-effective and scalable technique, led to an eightfold improvement in the lifetime of red QD-LEDs and more than a 5,000-fold lifetime improvement in blue QD-LEDs.

The researchers believe the resin prevents the formation of moisture in the cloud of gases that surrounds the quantum dot. That moisture likely causes the QD-LED to degrade. 

However, their experiments revealed that resin encapsulation does not eliminate all sources of degradation. 

The researchers are now exploring the addition of extra layers to QD-LEDs that could further improve efficiency and lifespan. They also plan to build on the lessons learned in this study to increase the stability of QD-LEDs for other applications. 

“This version of quantum dot LEDs would be better than anything that exists now — simpler to make, more efficient, and higher performing. This could open vistas into many more ways of thinking about this technology, not just for the sake of displays or lighting, but also for sensors, lasers, and so on,” says Bulović.

This work was funded by the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology. The research was carried out, in part, using MIT.nano facilities.

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Beyond the pitch: The founder’s journey

The path to launching and growing a startup can be full of twists and turns. For a budding entrepreneur, gaining perspective from those who have already experienced the journey can be incredibly valuable, and highly inspirational. 

“There are so many amazing entrepreneurial stories among our alumni. We want to bring those stories to our students and our community and build networks with our incredible alumni founders,” says John Hart, the Class of 1922 Professor and head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE). “Through the Founder’s Journey class and other new programs, we want to cultivate interest in entrepreneurship among our students and expand opportunities to bring MechE-born technologies to the world.” 

According to a 2015 report on MIT’s global entrepreneurial impact, there are more than 30,000 active companies founded by MIT alumni worldwide, employing some 4.6 million people. Marina Hatsopoulos SM ’93, founding CEO of Z Corp., an early market leader in 3D printing, said one of the aims of the course was to show students they don’t need to reinvent everything. “So much of this has been done before. I want them to understand that this is a well-trod path.” 

Class 2.S977/2.S979 (Founder’s Journey: Launching and Scaling Hardware Startups) explores real-life challenges of startups focused on building and scaling hardware technologies. First held in spring 2025, the inaugural class invited students to “find and activate their entrepreneurial energy” through the lens of challenges faced by founders and their teams at various stages in development of new hardware-focused companies — ranging from fundraising to supply chain development, and much more. 

Each week of the class was structured around a key challenge faced during the development and growth of a hardware startup, presented by the instructors and guest speaker. The speakers were founders of companies in robotics, energy, 3D printing, consumer products, and other frontier technologies. Students engaged through preparing questions for the speakers and participating in follow-on discussions and reflective exercises throughout the semester. 

Ken Zolot, senior lecturer at MIT, and Hatsopoulous co-led the class and developed it along with Hart. Hart, who was among the alumni speakers in the course’s first iteration, also spoke to the class about his experience as a co-founder of VulcanForms, which began through collaboration with fellow co-founder Martin Feldmann MEng ’14. 

The other alumni speakers included Mick Mountz (Kiva/Amazon); Jon Hirschtick (Solidworks/Onshape); Max Lobovsky (Formlabs); Elise Strobach (Aeroshield); Greg Mark (Markforged); Seemantini Nadkarni (Coalesenz); Eran Egozy (Harmonix); Renuka Babu (DOTS Technology); Davide Marini (Inkbit); Loewen Cavill (Amira); and Colin Angle (iRobot).

Colin Angle ’89, SM ’91, co-founder of iRobot

Colin Angle ’89, SM ’91, co-founder and former CEO of iRobot, now CEO and co-founder of Familiar Machines and Magic, identified a passion for building things early on. 

“This idea that you can create something from nothing, that you can have an idea and not just draw it, but build it and make it real, is something I’ve always loved,” he says. “MIT had such a strong, hands-on ethos, and that really, powerfully resonated.”

While living in the Alpha Delta Phi Fraternity house at MIT, Angle watched several companies get their start (by his count, five multimillion-dollar companies were started by his fraternity brothers during his time in the house). Seeing others do it helped to demystify the process. 

He started iRobot in his living room, beginning at first not with a product concept, but a grand vision. “We’re supposed to have robots. So, if not us, who? And if not now, when? It was a magical day.” 

iRobot may be best known for the Roomba, an autonomous robotic vacuum cleaner, but through the years the company also sent robots to Afghanistan (saving thousands of lives with the Pack Bot tactical mobile robot) and explored the Great Pyramid in Giza live on National Geographic. 

“The joy I have taken from my entrepreneurial journey has been the ability to build bigger things, from building teams to building a company capable of building something far beyond what I could have ever imagined doing myself … we created inventions that no one thought possible, simply because we believed we could.”

Elise Strobach SM ’17, PhD ’20, CEO and co-founder of AeroShield

Elise Strobach SM ’17, PhD ’20 is CEO and co-founder of AeroShield Materials. The company, co-founded with Kyle Wilke PhD ’19 and Aaron Baskerville-Bridges SM ’20, MBA ’20, develops super-insulating transparent window inserts with technology based on transparent silica aerogels developed by Strobach while she was completing her PhD in Professor Evelyn Wang’s lab.

“I wasn’t thinking of myself as an entrepreneur at that time, but looking back, that’s definitely where that seed was planted,” says Strobach. As entrepreneurs, she says, “We have the … freedom to find the best problem to solve and to continue to seek the best way to solve that problem.”

Aerogels, which were first invented almost 100 years ago and were first commercialized by NASA to insulate equipment in space, had a hazy blue tint that limited their use in certain applications. The aerogel material created by Strobach and her team is completely see-through, creating a variety of new everyday applications. The company recently achieved another milestone, with their work on display at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington.

“You don’t have to know everything to start. You just have to know that this is what you want to do and just get started.”

Maxim Lobovsky SM ’11, CEO and co-founder of FormLabs

Maxim Lobovsky SM ’11 was already working on 3D printers when he came to MIT to study at the MIT Media Lab. As he was finishing his master’s degree, he saw an opportunity to build something new.  

Lobovsky, with fellow Media Lab graduates David Cranor SM ’11 and Natan Linder SM ’11, founded Formlabs, a developer and manufacturer of 3D printing technology. The trio set out to build a professional-level 3D printer, but a significant cost reduction and one that would be easier to use than what was then available on the market. At a time when 3D printers could cost $100,000 or more, Formlabs’ product started around $3,000.

“We definitely built Formlabs in a classic, disruptive innovation path,” Lobovsky says. They achieved the cost reduction through several different ways, including replacing technology developed in the 1980s with modern consumer electronics components like the laser diodes that were developed for Blu-ray Disc players, and with “just a lot of clever engineering.” 

It was a long grind to raise the first round of funding, he says. The team participated in MIT’s 100K competition and pitched their idea to many potential investors (with limited success, initially). Their big break came in the form of an overheard conversation. 

“As someone who is naturally introverted, shy engineer … a really important lesson [was] that, sometimes, you can get lucky,” he says. “Sometimes talking loudly at a restaurant is actually a good way to get things going.” 

Lobovsky and one of his co-founders were having dinner with a potential investor at Legal Seafoods in Harvard Square. The pitch to the initial investor didn’t go well, but Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus Software and an early pioneer in the PC industry overheard the conversation, and he ended up leading Formlabs’ first round of funding. 

Today, Formlabs is the largest supplier of professional stereolithography and selective laser sintering 3D printers in the world. 

Jon Hirschtick ’83, SM ’83, co-founder of SolidWorks and Onshape

Jon Hirschtick ’83, SM ’83, co-founder of SolidWorks and Onshape, says the first time he can remember thinking about starting a company was when he was an undergraduate. 

“I had heard about startups, and it sounded like a lot of things that I was drawn to … a sense of being able to realize your vision, express yourself; a sense of excitement, of making money, and even the idea of a chaotic environment,” he says. 

Hirschtick has spent over four decades building computer-aided design (CAD) software, starting as an intern at MIT in 1981 and continuing that work today. “I thought, ‘hey, the world could use this software.’ It’ll be a better place with the software that I envisioned.”

He refers to CAD as a meta product design. “We’re designing a product that other people use to design products, and that’s just really cool to me.” 

“I think startups just fit me,” he says. “The excitement, the idea of trying to solve a lot of problems at the same time. MIT is a place of problem-solving ... and a startup is a place where there’s lots of problems to solve.” He adds that a lot of big companies are doing new things, but “startups are always doing things.”

He says most anything today that is a manufactured product is modeled in CAD first. “If you’re interested and excited by product development, then building a CAD system lets you get involved in the world’s product development.”

“Nobody knows for sure when they start a company whether it’s going to be successful or not. If it were, if there was a way of knowing for sure, then there wouldn’t be all these classes in entrepreneurship. They’d just tell you the secret. There’s always risk. Visions and hallucinations, they look and feel the same. You only find out which is which once you really try to realize them.”

A version of this story appears in the 2026 issue of MechE Connects, the Department of Mechanical Engineering’s magazine. 

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Tiny robot boats build floating structures

Most people think of the waterfront as the edge of the city. A team of MIT researchers sees it as a dynamic, Lego-like construction site.

Their new system, called “FloatForm,” is a swarm of small square robotic boats that assemble themselves into larger structures on the water, break apart, and reassemble into something new, all with minimal human direction. 

Each robot, about the size of a dinner plate at 21 centimeters square, is a self-contained vessel with its own thrusters, sensors, and magnetic latches. Together, they hint at a future in which floating infrastructure could become more adaptive: a temporary platform after an emergency, a market on a canal, or a stage that appears for a festival and dissolves when the crowd goes home.

“Our FloatForm projects envisions a future where the waterfront becomes a programmable extension of the city, where autonomous boats can self-organize into bridges, platforms, and other useful structures on demand,” says Daniela Rus, the Panasonic Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). “This kind of distributed robotics opens new possibilities for mobility, emergency response, public space, and infrastructure on water.”

“With FloatForm, we are essentially turning static water surfaces into dynamic, programmable spaces,” says Wei Wang, lead author of a new paper on the project and a former MIT research scientist who now leads the Marine Robotics Lab at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “Imagine an urban environment where public space isn’t fixed, but can autonomously expand, contract, or reconfigure on demand.” 

“We see it as forming infrastructure on the water, using a modular system to create one larger system,” says Alejandro Gonzalez-Garcia, a former researcher with MIT CSAIL and the Senseable City Lab. “If there’s an emergency, you could form a new bridge to alleviate traffic in the city. Or you could create floating markets and floating stages. If you want a more livable city, you want to use the water, too.”

The open-access work, published today in Nature Communications, comes from the labs of Rus and Carlo Ratti, professor of practice of urban technologies and planning at MIT and director of the Senseable City Lab, and grows out of Roboat, their joint project with the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions that put full-size autonomous vessels on Amsterdam’s canals. Those canals once carried the city’s goods; today, they mostly carry tourists. 

“We explored whether the canals could be used for waste collection, or for transport, to offload some of the stress on the roads back onto the water,” says Niklas Hagemann, an MIT graduate student in architecture, CSAIL affiliate, and former Senseable City Lab researcher who has worked on the project since its early stages. “Urban areas are getting denser, so could you expand public space onto water that’s currently underutilized?”

FloatForm shrinks that vision down to tabletop scale to answer a harder question: How do you get dozens, and eventually thousands, of floating robots to organize themselves?

Lessons from the ant raft

The team found its answer in biology. Fire ants famously survive floods by linking their bodies into living rafts, with no leader choreographing the assembly. Each ant follows simple local rules, and a resilient structure emerges.

“Each ant is an independent agent,” says Gonzalez-Garcia. “We wanted each robot to have its own capabilities, the same way ant colonies form a raft.”

Most existing self-assembling robot systems, on water and elsewhere, rely on a central computer dictating every move. That approach is vulnerable to single points of failure and scales poorly: The planning math balloons as robots are added, and the swarm must assemble sequentially, with most robots idling while they wait their turn. FloatForm flips the balance. A lightweight central planner steps in only sparingly, assigning each robot a final position to perfect the lattice, a level of geometric precision that purely distributed methods struggle to guarantee. Everything else, including navigating toward the target shape, avoiding collisions, and adapting to disturbances, runs on the robots themselves, which coordinate by exchanging positions with their immediate neighbors. The whole swarm moves at once.

That parallelism is what sets the work apart. The planning complexity of FloatForms approach depends only on a robot’s local neighbors, not the total size of the swarm. “What we’re trying to do is to have minimal central intervention, and have them all move together at the same time,” says Gonzalez-Garcia.

In experiments at MIT, a fleet of eight robots repeatedly gathered from random positions into a target shape, latched into a rigid structure, broke apart on command, reassembled into a new configuration, and then drove across the pool as a single vessel, with each run taking four to eight minutes. In that final mode, called collective transport, a planner charts a trajectory for the whole structure and each robot computes its own contribution. “Every robot becomes an actuator,” Gonzalez-Garcia explains. Simulations showed the framework scaling smoothly to swarms of 64.

“The beauty of this largely decentralized approach is that the computation doesn’t get bogged down as the swarm grows,” says Wang. “Whether you are working with eight boats or 80, the entire fleet coordinates and moves simultaneously. Because the overall assembly time doesn’t significantly increase in principle, the system remains highly scalable.” 

There's a physical payoff to sticking together, too. “Our boats become more stable by joining together, like the ant raft, if you have waves or currents,” Hagemann says.

An origami handshake

The robots connect through a latching mechanism hidden entirely inside each hull. A single servo motor at the center drives an origami-inspired auxetic structure, a geometry that contracts uniformly in all directions at once, pulling permanent magnets on all four sides inward to release, or pushing them outward to grab a neighbor across gaps of 10 to 15 centimeters. The magnets are arranged with alternating polarities, so the boats reliably click into clean square lattices.

The elegant part is what the mechanism doesn’t do: consume (much) power. A 3D-printed gearbox holds the latch in either state with the motor switched off. “It uses energy to latch and de-latch, but in between those states, it doesn’t use any energy,” says Hagemann. For infrastructure that might hold a configuration for hours, that matters. “Because the robots are so small, you can only have a battery so big,” adds Gonzalez-Garcia. “If they use less energy on latching, they can use more on computation, or on actually moving.”

Getting there took some humbling engineering. Four miniature thrusters arranged in an “X” give each robot omnidirectional motion, including turning in place, but they pack large forces relative to the robots’ tiny inertia, which made early prototypes twitchy and prone to aggressive spins at low speeds. The team added stabilizing fins to increase hydrodynamic drag and tuned the controllers to stay robust across robots that, at this scale, are never quite identical. The magnets posed their own problem: They held on so well that de-latching sometimes required the robots to twist themselves free.

From the tank to the canal

Across 10 trials, the system completed its missions without human intervention 90 percent of the time with four robots and 70 percent with eight. When things did go wrong, the architecture showed its resilience: A robot that briefly lost its bearings could rejoin the structure on its own, without bringing the whole swarm to a halt, and robots stuck in formation deadlocks learned to shake themselves free and retry.

Moving from a controlled indoor tank to a real canal or harbor will take more than confidence. “There’s always a relationship between the size of a boat and the magnitude of the disturbance it can handle,” says Gonzalez-Garcia. “These boats are very small, so in very disturbed water, they cannot work.” Scaling up will mean reinforcing the latches, potentially with mechanical interlocking like the full-size Roboat used, and trading the lab’s ultrasonic indoor positioning for GPS or vision-based sensing. Helpfully, the coordination algorithm was designed to be sensor-agnostic: swap the sensors, keep the logic.

The team envisions applications well beyond city canals, from forming temporary platforms for offshore inspection and maintenance to adaptive sensor networks for studying migratory species to reconfigurable docking stations for emergency response in hard-to-reach areas. There is also potential for offshore and remote operations, from temporary construction platforms to environmental monitoring and scientific expeditions.

And the geography is wide open. “Venice, the Netherlands, Belgium, the fjords and lakes of Norway, really any city with a river can take advantage of this,” says Gonzalez-Garcia. “The project uses spaces where water is already important, but it also raises the question: Where else can water be used for something more?” 

“This is an exciting step forward in realizing distributed collective behaviors on water,” says University of Michigan Assistant Professor Steven Ceron, who wasn’t involved in the research. “Assembly, self-reconfiguration, and collective motion are difficult enough in dry environments, but achieving these behaviors in a predominantly distributed fashion on water represents a serious additional challenge, and this team has credibly overcome it. By shifting the computational burden onto the robots themselves, they have built a more resilient system that in the near future could enable robot collectives like this to be deployed in open-water environments for search operations, environmental monitoring, and reconfigurable marine infrastructure.”

Gonzalez-Garcia, Hagemann, and Wang wrote the paper with senior authors Ratti, who is also a professor at Politecnico di Milano, and Rus. Gonzalez-Garcia is additionally affiliated with the MECO Research Team at KU Leuven. The research was supported by a grant from the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions, with additional support from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. The team thanks MIT Sea Grant and Professor Michael Triantafyllou for providing the test tank.

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Bringing the data to every sideline

With Boston serving as a host city for the FIFA World Cup, the whole Bay State has soccer fever, including Henry Wang. As a child growing up in Dallas, sports were everything to him. Today, Wang is working on research that could impact some of the biggest sporting events in the world, including future World Cups.

The first such event that made a big impression on Wang involved a different form of football.

“The first ever sports game I remember watching was Super Bowl XLII in 2008,” he says. “I was really drawn to the competition, and the way it was presented. It’s this whole big spectacle.”

Wang, a fourth-year PhD candidate in social and engineering systems within MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, studies how data and technology can improve the way sports are played, analyzed, and refereed. Working in the MIT Sports Lab in collaboration with FIFA, he develops systems with the goals of helping referees make faster, more accurate decisions and expanding access to performance analytics across the globe.

Now in the final stretch of his doctoral program and preparing to defend his thesis at the end of this year, Wang has spent nearly a decade at MIT. After earning his undergraduate degree in 2023 with a double major in computer science, economics, and data science and business analytics, he transitioned directly into graduate school. Sports have been a constant throughout that journey.

A competitive swimmer since age 7, Wang says athletics shaped both his identity and his community.

“Athletic competition was always a really big part of my life,” he says. “It’s kind of how I made a lot of friends, around the pool, and now at school, or in the lab and office.”

Ironically, swimming entered his life not because of a burning passion for sports, but because of a doctor’s recommendation.

“I don’t really come from a huge sports family,” Wang says. When he was diagnosed with asthma as a child, his pediatrician suggested swimming to strengthen his lungs. 

His parents, both scientific researchers in radiology and medical physics, supported his growing passion. That support eventually led Wang to MIT, where he served as captain of the men’s swimming and diving team. In tandem, he continued pursuing research opportunities that merged his technical interests with his love of sports.

His first sports analytics project began with a cold email.

As a first-year student, Wang reached out to MIT Sloan School of Management Senior Lecturer Ben Shields to see if he could assist Shields with his research on sports strategy and analytics. Shields later connected Wang with a coach he knew who was interested in analyzing the two-point conversion strategy for MIT’s football team.

The project revealed that MIT could benefit from attempting two-point conversions much more frequently. The experience opened the door to the MIT Sports Lab, where Wang found mentors including Lecturer Christina Chase, Professor Anette “Peko” Hosoi, and former research scientist Ferran Vidal-Codina.

His research now focuses on two central questions: How can technology democratize access to sports data, and how can it help officials make better decisions?

Wang works with FIFA Innovation, the group within soccer’s global governing body that leads the development and testing of match technology used on the field. His research explores automatic event detection and officiating technologies designed to assist referees without disrupting the fan experience.

In one recent project, Wang helped develop a semi-automated system that uses players’ skeletal data and ball tracking to determine which player last touched the ball before it goes out of bounds. The research prototype aims to assist goal kick and corner kick decisions while minimizing interruptions to the game.

For Wang, success means that referees find the tools helpful, and fans barely notice it at all.

“A ball goes out of bounds, and we can immediately tell the referee it’s a corner kick,” he says. “The fans don’t even notice it.”

Alongside his doctoral research, Wang has gained experience across professional sports, spending two years with the Boston Red Sox’s baseball sciences team before accepting a role as a senior data scientist in basketball research and development with the Philadelphia 76ers, where he will continue working after graduation.

Despite his demanding schedule, he says the work rarely feels like work.

“I enjoy it so much,” he says. “I really don’t know what else I would be doing.”

Outside the lab, sports continue to anchor his life. Swimming at MIT provided structure and community during challenging moments.

“MIT can be pretty hard,” Wang says. “Having a consistent 5-to-7 o’clock swim practice every day definitely helped a lot.”

For Wang, sports have always been more than competition. They have shaped his friendships, inspired his research, and guided his career trajectory.

Now, as he works to build technologies that could change how billions of people experience the world’s most popular games, he is still driven by the same sense of love he felt watching sports as a child.

“I want every kid who plays sports to have the best experience possible, because I know how meaningful that can be toward someone’s life journey,” Wang says.

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Separating logic and language

Some people find it useful to talk through their problems — but language isn’t necessary for logical reasoning, cognitive neuroscientists at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research say. 

In research published this week in the journal PNAS, researchers led by MIT associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences Evelina Fedorenko have shown that people can perform well on tasks that require logical reasoning even if their language abilities are severely impaired. What’s more, brain imaging shows that language-processing parts of the brain are not called on for logical reasoning.

Philosophers, linguists, and cognitive scientists have debated the relationship between language and thought for thousands of years, with many arguing that we use language to think. There are good reasons to suspect a close relationship between logic and language, acknowledges Hope Kean, a postdoc and former K. Lisa Yang Integrative Computational Neuroscience (ICoN) Center graduate fellow in Fedorenko’s lab. “Abstract thinking has properties that look a lot like language,” Kean says, pointing to structural similarities. “You can decompose a thought into subcomponents, like little atoms of logical propositions, and you can combine them in a hierarchical manner to make more complex structured rules, very akin to language.”

But she and Fedorenko, who is also a McGovern Institute investigator, suspected that while we largely depend on language to communicate about logical reasoning — from presenting a problem to explaining how we have arrived at conclusions — the brain might use a separate system for the reasoning itself. 

“There are aspects of thinking that seem to go beyond some of the limitations of language,” Kean explains. Logical reasoning demands precision that language often lacks. And language is linear, progressing one word at a time, whereas evaluating available information to reach logical conclusions can require thinking in less linear ways.

Logical reasoning

These observations left Kean curious about how the brain handles logical reasoning. It’s a particularly difficult question to answer scientifically, because it’s hard to take language out of the equation when working with human study participants. But Fedorenko’s team did just that by collaborating with Rosemary Varley, a neuroscientist at University College London who studies acquired language disorders, and her team.

Together, the scientists worked with two patients who had experienced stroke that damaged language-processing parts of their brains, leaving them with severe impairments in both understanding and producing language. They designed language-free logic games in which participants were asked to infer relationships between sets of numbers. Given two lists, they had to figure out the hidden rule that turned one list into the other, such as reversing the digits or removing numbers above a certain value. Once they thought they’d discovered the rule, they had to apply it to new examples. In a second game, participants were presented a set of geometric patterns and asked to identify another pattern to complete the matrix.

As participants solved increasingly difficult puzzles, it became clear that people don’t need language for this kind of reasoning. Patients with language impairments solved the problems as well as a control group, and were even able to communicate the rules they inferred using gestures, or with a sketch. “It really upends a theory that says that symbolic rule induction is not possible without linguistic capacities,” says Kean.

Alongside this part of the study, Kean and colleagues also used functional brain imaging to study what happens in the brains of healthy adults when they are engaged in logical reasoning. Participants in this part of the study visited MIT for a series of MRI scans, which captured images of their brain activity during an array of tasks. In addition to completing different kinds of logic games inside the scanner, participants were asked to engage in tasks designed to map the language-processing parts of their brain. Another set of tasks was used to map each person’s so-called “multiple demand network” — a distributed brain system that supports complex problem-solving.

These neurotypical participants completed logic games similar to those used with the language-impaired patients. They were also presented with problems that required syllogistic reasoning, using “if-then” statements such as “if the ball is red, then it is big. The ball is red. Is the ball big?” The team varied the difficulty of the logic puzzles so they could see which brain areas became more active when the need for logical reasoning intensified. Likewise, they looked for changes in brain activity when participants had to infer a hidden rule, versus simply applying a rule they’d been given.

Here, too, a separation between language and logic was clear: The MRI scans showed the brain’s language system is not engaged for either inductive reasoning (when participants identified hidden rules) or deductive reasoning (when they assessed the validity of syllogistic conclusions). Surprisingly, the multiple demand network, which many scientists had suspected was important for logical reasoning, was engaged during inductive reasoning, but didn’t seem to get involved in deductive reasoning — a finding Kean is building on in her ongoing work.

For Fedorenko and Kean, the findings are strong support for a separation of logic and language in the brain. They add to previous findings from Fedorenko’s lab showing that other types of thinking, such as object categorization and social reasoning, also do not rely on language.

Acquired language impairments and AI

The researchers say these findings have important implications for how we think about acquired language impairments, or aphasia. Specialists who work with people with aphasia have long recognized that loss of language does not mean loss of intelligence. People with aphasia can continue to enjoy playing chess, solving sudoku puzzles, or being in charge of the family’s finances. But it is common for others to confuse their communicative difficulties with thinking difficulties.

“This research adds to a growing body of work establishing that even severely aphasic individuals can preserve their ability for abstract logical thought — a defining feature of our species,” Fedorenko says. “We should continue to educate the public that linguistic difficulties — in aphasia, but also in those with developmental language conditions, such as stuttering, or those who do not speak English natively — are not indicative of how smart or capable someone is.”

There could be implications for artificial intelligence, too. Large language models like ChatGPT and Claude are trained entirely on text and use text as their output — yet they convincingly simulate some kinds of human reasoning. Exploring the differences between these models and the human brain, where language and abstract logical thought are distinct, might offer useful insights to inform future models, Kean says.

When it comes to understanding how the human brain reasons, Kean calls this a new frontier in the geography of thought — and she says it’s one she is eager to explore.

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MIT-designed educational factory embraces modern manufacturing

From the basement of MIT’s Building 35 to Monterrey, Mexico, and now beyond. That is the journey of FrED, a low-cost desktop fiber (Fr) extrusion (E) device (D), designed and assembled by students in an educational factory at MIT.

That factory is transforming how manufacturing is taught — replacing textbook learning with hands-on experience in a space where tinkering is encouraged and information flows continuously. Through a collaboration between MIT and Tecnológico de Monterrey (Tec) managed by MIT.nano, FrED has been refined across dozens of graduate theses and undergraduate research stays. It is used to study manufacturing systems in academic and professional courses, and at FrED factories, first established at MIT and now at Tec’s campuses in Monterrey and Mexico City.

“What does it mean to bring the factory to the learner?” asked Brian W. Anthony, MIT.nano associate director and principal research scientist in the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE) at the second annual FrED summit in Mexico City. “We have FrED as a process that manufactures a fiber, and we also have the FrED factory that’s an education and practice factory where we are manufacturing a real product. It’s not just a learning factory where we tear apart the product when we’re done. We really ship FrEDs to our online learners, to educators at MIT and Tec, and soon, to new partners around the world.”

Designed from the start for multi-node community scaling, FrED and the FrED factory have created a thriving, collaborative ecosystem for current and future manufacturing engineers. The next step is to expand that ecosystem globally. Announced at the FrED summit by Tec professor Pedro Ponce Cruz, a new FrED factory at Tec’s Saltillo campus will be opening in the next academic year. After that, the team plans to expand to other campuses across the United States and Mexico.

“Together, we are helping build a global engineering talent pipeline,” says Adriana Vargas Martinez, executive director of research strategy at Tec. “Through the FrED and FrED factory initiative, nearly 500 students have already been trained in advanced manufacturing automation, moving from Tec classrooms into research laboratories and collaborative projects with MIT.” 

Discussing FrED and FrED factory’s research impact, she notes 25 publications and seven papers in development. “International mobility has also been an important dimension of this partnership,” she says.

A shift toward modern manufacturing deep-tech themes

FrED’s expansion comes at a time when manufacturing at MIT and across industry is shifting toward smart manufacturing, or Industry 4.0, integrating automation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. One of MIT’s strategic priorities, the MIT Initiative for New Manufacturing (INM), is working to support new manufacturing research, development of new courses and workforce training, and building of shared facilities to pilot production lines and immersive manufacturing experiences. FrED and the FrED factory are already designed to support these efforts, and at an international scale.

“FrED and the FrED factory is really, I think, solving at least one problem: how we give real, physically meaningful physical context and production-level data, production-level problems in an academic environment that is directly transferable to the knowledge that you need on the factory floor,” says Anthony. It’s difficult to get data out of a real factory, he adds; what FrED offers is physical context crossed with data science, providing an open platform and open data for learning and experimenting.

FrED naturally generates the multi-modal data required for digital twins, analytics, and AI-driven process improvement, turning abstract AI/manufacturing integration into hands-on practice. The next set of research objectives in the FrED factory will focus on developing a realistic and interactive digital twin of the factory, immersive technology for collaborative learning, integrating agentic controllers. They will include new downstream manufacturing processes and machines that take as input the fiber from FrED — all to enhance smart manufacturing education.

These goals will be worked on by MIT and Tecnológico de Monterrey students as part of a FrED factory research stay. This program brings Tec undergraduates to MIT to work side-by-side with MIT students — not observing, but fully integrated into the research team. The students then take what they’ve learned back to Mexico, to enhance FrED factories at their home institution. 

“Beyond the technical side, FrED gave me memories, friendships, and a lot more confidence in myself than I knew I had,” says Naomi Najera, a Tec undergraduate student who completed a research stay at MIT in 2025. “It also gave me a space where I could make mistakes and learn from them. And also to realize how much I can achieve with my team. That human side of this project really changed my whole experience.”

A recent result from this exchange, announced June 23 by the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), a paper entitled “Hands-On Predictive Maintenance Kit for Manufacturing Education: An Accessible Experiential Learning Approach,” written by Tec and MIT students, received the 2026 ASEE Manufacturing Division Best Paper Award.

Shifting classroom learning to factory operations

At MIT’s campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, passersby can look down into the Building 35 basement windows to see a constant flow of activity, materials, and knowledge in the MIT FrED factory. In Mexico, seven cohorts of students over four years each designed a custom version of FrED and built and operated an automated FrED factory production line. Indeed, FrED has restructured how Tec teaches mechatronics and manufacturing systems. “This collaboration integrates research directly into education,” says Vargas Martinez, “combining learning factories and our manufacturing environments with student-centered research.”

The Tec students’ enthusiasm has led to the launch of an Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program-like curriculum (FRAME: Factory-based Research for All in Mechatronics Education) in Mexico, where first-year undergraduates are working alongside graduate level students in the FrED factory. 

“Joining FrED as a first-semester university student has been an amazing opportunity for me to get hands-on experience in real-world projects in areas such as coding, manufacturing, and robotics,” says Katherine Lucia McLean. “It’s helped me grow a lot as an engineering student.”

The FrED factory model forces real leadership behaviors: coordinating multi-station systems, managing bottlenecks, building maintenance logic into the student experience, enforcing quality measurement, and iterating system design year after year. As each class graduates and a new one begins, knowledge is transferred, some of it lost, most of it built upon. In this way, FrED never becomes outdated, as each cohort is reimagining manufacturing technologies and systems for a smarter, more productive factory.

FrED and the FrED factory have momentum. Anthony taught the global capstone course at the Monterrey campus last year, and will expand to teach at all five international Tec campuses in 2027. The FrED Factory Conference will take place at MIT in 2027.

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MIT researcher proposes a way to detect nuclear weapons in space

In 2024, a U.S. government official warned that Russia could be developing a new satellite designed to carry nuclear weapons into space. The statement followed the launch of a suspicious Russian satellite into low-Earth orbit in 2022, just a few weeks before the country’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

A nuclear detonation in low-Earth orbit — the region about 100 miles to 1,200 miles above Earth’s surface — would release trillions of highly energetic electrons that would destroy many of the satellites in space, disrupting telecommunications networks, GPS, space-based internet, and more.

The 1967 Outer Space Treaty bans the placement of nuclear weapons in space, but there’s currently no way to verify satellites don’t contain nuclear weapons. In fact, no verification methods have even been proposed in unclassified, peer-reviewed literature.

Now, MIT Professor Areg Danagoulian is proposing a way to determine if a satellite orbiting Earth contains a nuclear weapon. In a new paper published in Nature, Danagoulian describes his idea for a satellite-based sensor system that could orbit close by a suspect satellite and detect neutrons generated by high-energy protons colliding with radioactive material.

In the paper, Danagoulian calculates that a sensor system the size of a large encyclopedia could detect a nuclear weapon with 99 percent accuracy if it orbited within 4,000 meters of the suspect satellite for about a week. He also estimates that the detection time could be cut to a matter of hours if multiple satellite sensors were used or the sensor satellite was able to get within 1,000 meters of the suspect satellite.

“If we eventually have some verification mechanisms for the Outer Space Treaty, that will put pressure on countries to respect the treaty or disclose what they are doing, because they know if they try to violate it, we will find out,” Danagoulian says. “I very much hope this will turn into a real system, or proof-of-concept system, but the goal right now is to get national labs to use this work for their own research, and to get policymakers to seriously consider this technology as a potential part of national technical means.”

Protecting space

In 1962, the U.S. detonated a 1.4-megaton thermonuclear warhead in space, which unintentionally destroyed many of the early satellites of the era. The blast released enormous volumes of highly energized electrons, and many became trapped in Earth’s magnetic field, where they damage any electronics in their path.

“When you have a nuclear detonation in outer space, basically the whole body of the bomb becomes ionized, and nearly every single electron in the weapon’s mass becomes free,” Danagoulian explains. “It gets injected into what’s called the inner Van Allen radiation belt. Once there, the electrons start hitting everything flying through those belts, causing ionization, radiation damage, and more. As you go further out into space, you create these thick belts around Earth populated by highly energetic protons and electrons.”

The 1967 Outer Space Treaty declared space the “province of all mankind” and banned nuclear weapons in space, among other safeguards. It has since been signed by 118 countries including the U.S., China, and Russia.

Monitoring compliance with the treaty has taken on increased urgency since Russia’s 2022 launch of a suspicious satellite, Cosmos2553, which Russia claims is used for surveillance and sensing. However, U.S. authorities believe it may carry components of a nuclear device undergoing testing, with the possible future goal of fielding an actual nuclear anti-satellite weapon. The detonation of a nuclear weapon at that orbit could destroy many of the U.S. reconnaissance satellites, international communication satellite platforms, as well as the Starlink satellites.

“The Russians launched this satellite in a very strange and unusual orbit because it goes through the most hostile environment possible around the planet,” Danagoulian explains. “No one puts satellites there because it’s highly radioactive. Why would you put a satellite in that orbit? Well, that location is likely the best point for trapping electrons if you were to detonate a thermonuclear weapon.”

Danagoulian notes most research on nuclear detection is highly classified, making it hard to know how much progress has been made in national labs. But he wanted to show that scientifically proving the presence of a nuclear weapon in space is possible.

Particle bombardment

The approach Danagoulian developed centers on a reaction known as spallation, caused by highly energetic protons in radioactive environments.

“When an energetic proton slams into elements with a high atomic number, like uranium and plutonium, each proton may knock out something like 40 neutrons,” he explains. “That’s a ridiculously large number. We’re talking about millions of protons per second per square centimeter, with many of them generating 40 neutrons. The question is can you detect some of those neutrons?”

Normal satellites wouldn’t emit nearly as many neutrons, but there are still naturally occurring protons, neutrons, and electrons in the atmosphere, especially in low-Earth orbit. Danagoulian’s concept uses two panels made up of pixels of neutron sensors known as scintillators that interact with radiation and emit light. The panels are sandwiched between synthetic crystal diamond detectors that allow the system to distinguish between neutrons coming from radioactive materials and natural protons and electrons. The two-panel construction then can be used to estimate the direction of the neutron, allowing it to differentiate between natural atmospheric neutrons and those coming from a suspected satellite. 

“Most neutron detectors are very sensitive to protons, so you have to come up with some smart ways to reject protons but keep neutrons,” Danagoulian says. “You also have to tell the difference between naturally occurring neutrons and neutron spallation from the satellite.”

He believes the system, placed inside of an inspector satellite, would be strong enough to survive the harsh environment of low-Earth orbit while also being fast enough to process the protons, electrons, and neutrons that bombard it.

Danagoulian’s calculations on how long the detector satellite would have to be near the suspect satellite give him confidence in the feasibility of the system. If a detector satellite were able to get within 1,000 meters of the suspect satellite, it could accurately detect nuclear weapons in about one hour. That would amount to a single flyby.

Danagoulian calls the paper a feasibility study of the concept.

“I say in the paper this isn’t a completely proven system,” he says. “The purpose of the paper is to show the scientific community that it’s scientifically possible to do this. But there are many more practical considerations to be made to actually build these detectors.”

Danagoulian hopes the study will stimulate further research and development. He is also working with researchers in MIT’s Center for Nuclear Security and Policy (CNSP) to understand the policy landscape around this issue.

If a version of his system is eventually developed, Danagoulian believes it could encourage the nonproliferation that has helped preserve satellites so far. He notes that while adversarial countries are naturally suspicious of each other’s claims, scientific evidence would strengthen trust.

“You can fake intelligence,” he says, “but you can’t fake physics.”

The work was supported, in part, by the National Nuclear Security Administration, the Carnegie Foundation, and Longview Philanthropy.

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How novice coders can develop AI programs for military applications

In today's world, artificial intelligence chatbots such as ChatGPT and Claude can perform many functions, such as composing work emails and planning travel itineraries. These chatbots are systems built around large vision-language models (VLMs): AI trained on a massive dataset that includes books, websites, code, and images. 

The AI algorithms are then refined on massive amounts of human-generated feedback to follow instructions and avoid harmful or unwanted output, and use that "knowledge" to produce text or images based on input from a user. Although chatbots have clear limitations, they can be very helpful for a wide range of tasks, including in some areas that traditionally require specialized skills, like computer programming.

As part of a project for the U.S. Department of the Air Force–MIT AI Accelerator's Phantom Program, U.S. Air Force cadet Joshua Lynch — with the help of his mentor, Laura Niss, a technical staff member in the Embedded and AI Systems Group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory — wanted to determine if, as a complete novice to coding, he could develop a fully functional program. He used a process called "vibe-coding," in which a user relies entirely on prompts to guide a generative AI chatbot to write and refine code. 

His motivation was to empower anyone familiar with the military problem space, regardless of their technical background, to advance their ideas for useful software applications, essentially bypassing the time and cost constraints of the traditional military software development pipeline. Lynch aimed to build his own application while Niss monitored his experience with the technology.

"The Phantom student wanted to see if he could create a useful application through self-identified vibe-coding, without any previous experience," Niss says. "Within this project, I wanted to understand how his perception of AI changed over time with use. We both wanted to understand better where and how AI could be used by nontechnical users in the military."

Lynch set out to see if, starting with no coding skills and using chatbots, he could create an application specific to his type of tactical team to help reduce collateral damage while enhancing survivability in the broader mission. This application would offer capabilities including AI-assisted target recognition; modular intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance; autonomous striking; and communication management on the battlefield. 

During the project, Lynch completed several professional development courses in AI and familiarized himself with both military and nonmilitary uses of the technology. For the basis for his code generation, he used the paid models of three AI chatbots: Anthropic's Claude, OpenAI's ChatGPT, and Google's Gemini. Most of this work was done only through the chatbots' main chat function on a web browser, not as an integrated system within a development environment, as is standard now. The final application was produced using Google AI Studio App, which can create applications that interface with the Gemini application programming interface and has AI integrated in the development environment. 

Over three months, Lynch worked with these models to build his application, called the Remote Operating Modular Augmentation Device (ROMAD-AI). During this time, he learned several methods to improve the code output. For example, he often encountered difficulties with the AI chatbots lacking hierarchical focus and modifying unrelated code sections. He discovered it was important to break problems into small parts, frame questions clearly, and steer conversations back on topic when they stray too far from the objective. 

Learning to recognize the chatbots' limitations and effectively work around them took up most of the project timeline. As Lynch gained more experience with the chatbots, limitations in the AI capabilities and time for development caused him to re-scope the project, moving it from an application that could assist on the battlefield to one that could perform basic document processing, such as analyzing tactical maps of battlefields and generating mission-planning documents through an interface with a VLM-powered chatbot. While the resulting prototype did not perform all capabilities Lynch originally set out to include (and in its current iteration was not secure for the desired use case), it proved the capability and usefulness of such an application for service members.

"I was quite impressed with this final product, and it showed me how powerful these systems can be at prototyping designs from nonexperts," Niss says. "I'm now of the opinion that these can be powerful tools for nontechnical experts to convey problems and possible solutions to technical experts, and aid in communicating desired outcomes."

Niss observed the change in Lynch's perspective of AI language models during his experience. After starting with an impressive goal, Lynch gained understanding of the capabilities of current technology and significantly scoped down his expectations by the end of the project period. Measures of his perceptions of the different AI systems over time and across system updates were particularly interesting to Lynch and Niss, with Claude showing more stability than ChatGPT across traits such as likeability, anthropomorphism, and perceived intelligence. Lynch found AI to be a helpful tutor, but noted its inaccuracies on topics he knew well.

The project showed that AI chatbots can empower nontechnical service members to produce viable software applications for their unique problems, although it works better as a prototyping assistant than as a full production tool when handling sensitive information and for critical applications. Improper vetting of code may lead to security risks, as demonstrated by an instance where Lynch didn't realize that the final application was sending the input documents to a Gemini AI model to analyze, rather than parsing the documents locally on his computer. Although AI can generate significant amounts of functional code, code review remains a bottleneck in this space.

"For me, this project reinforced the expanse between experts in different fields," Niss says. "No matter how good AI gets, I think we'll always need to collaborate to get to the best solutions for the most important problems."

Research was sponsored by the Department of the Air Force Artificial Intelligence Accelerator and was accomplished under Cooperative Agreement Number FA8750-19-2-1000.

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Many black holes had past lives, new research shows

When a star dies, a black hole is born. This has been the textbook origin story for most black holes. At the end of a massive star’s life, its outer layers blast away in a brilliant supernova, and its core collapses into a gravitationally tight and dense region, forming a black hole.

Recent discoveries from gravitational-wave detectors have revealed hundreds of merging black holes across the universe. Many of them have been thought to come directly from exploding stars. But black holes can also come from other, smaller black holes. The products of previous black hole mergers can, in principle, merge again, creating a more massive black hole. This alternative, black-holes-birthing-black-holes pathway is known as “hierarchical merging.”

Now MIT scientists are finding that a good number of merging black holes may have indeed merged before. They carried out a new analysis of recent data from the LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA observatories, containing 155 pairs of binary black holes, and found about 14 percent of merging black holes in the universe may in fact be second-generation black holes that formed from the previous merging of two smaller black holes. 

The results, which the team reports this week in Physical Review Letters, suggest that repeated hierarchical merging is a significant pathway by which black holes form. 

“We’re finding that, for some of these merging black holes, it’s not their first rodeo,” says the study’s first author, Cailin Plunkett, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Physics. “Overall in the universe, black holes are merging all the time. The question of how often are they repeatedly merging was pretty uncertain. Now we’re seeing a relatively consistent picture where there’s a decent percentage of black holes that are coming from this repeated pathway.”

The study’s co-authors are Salvatore Vitale, associate professor of physics at MIT; Thomas Callister of Williams College; and Michael Zevin of Adler Planetarium and Northwestern University.

Lopsided pairs

When a massive star collapses and dies, the resulting black hole should have very little spin. In addition to losing a huge amount of mass when it explodes, the star should also lose much of its inherent spin, or angular momentum. The black hole left over should then have little to no spin. 

In contrast, when two black holes merge, the collision should create a new, wildly spinning second-generation black hole. 

“They would be spinning very fast, at about 70 percent their maximum possible spin,” Vitale says. 

Scientists suspect that hierarchical mergers occur in dense stellar environments, where stars are so tightly packed together that multiple neighboring stars could die and collapse to form black holes that are then close enough to merge with each other to form second-generation black holes. 

“You might have a ton of stars whizzing around each other, and if some are massive and explode, they become black holes. The black holes continue to whizz around, and can capture each other and merge,” Plunkett says. “This process can repeat potentially ad infinitum, by virtue of the fact that you have a ton of stars and black holes in this really dense environment.”

One sign of a hierarchical merger is that one black hole in a pair of merging black holes has a much higher spin, and higher mass, than the other. Such a lopsided duo would signal that at least one of the black holes came from the collision of two previous black holes. 

In 2024, scientists detected two such lopsided mergers in signals recorded by the LIGO, Virgo, and KAGRA observatories. The observatories detect incoming gravitational waves — incredibly small wobbles in the fabric of space and time — that are the reverberations from distant cosmic phenomena, such as colliding black holes. 

The observatories detected two gravitational-wave signals, labeled GW241011 and GW241110, each of which likely contain a black hole spinning much faster than its partner. The hierarchical mergers were discovered by analyzing each signal in detail to tease out the specific masses and spins of the black holes involved in each merger.

That work inspired Plunkett and Vitale to do a search of similar hierarchical mergers using all the gravitational-wave signals that the observatories have captured to date. 

A pattern of wobbles

For their new study, the team analyzed the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Gravitational Wave Transient Catalog 4.0 (GWTC-4.0), which comprises gravitational-wave detections from the observatories’ fourth observing run. Rather than analyze each gravitational-wave signal one by one, which is what scientists did for GW241011 and GW241110, Plunkett and Vitale searched for a characteristic pattern of hierarchical mergers across the data overall, to see if any matching signals popped out.

The pattern they searched for represents a range of orbital “wobbles.” Just before they merge, two black holes spiral toward each other in a disk-like, orbital plane. When the spins of the pair are perpendicular to the plane, this remains relatively steady. But when one or both spins are not perpendicular to the plane, the disk will wobble. The degree to which the whole plane wobbles, or “precesses,” can tell scientists about the balance of masses and spins between the two spiraling black holes. 

Plunkett and Vitale developed a model for the range of wobbling that should be a sign of a hierarchical merger, specifically between a first-generation and a second-generation black hole. 

The team applied the model to the entire GWTC-4.0 catalog, which comprises gravitational-wave signals from 153 black hole mergers, in addition to the signals from GW241011 and GW241110. Their analysis revealed that a number of mergers fit the pattern for orbital wobbling that was likely caused by the colliding of first- and second-generation black holes. 

Specifically, they found that roughly 14 percent of merging black holes in the universe may have merged before, and that these second-generation black holes had very particular masses: Black holes of around 10 solar masses (10 times the mass of the sun) and 30 solar masses were run-of-the-mill star-born black holes, while second-generation black holes had masses of around 20 solar masses or 40 solar masses and above. 

“One of the reasons why the 40-and-above regime is interesting is, stellar evolution theory predicts you shouldn’t be able to form black holes in that mass range at all from just a supernova,” Plunkett says. “We think supernovae from really massive stars end up being so violent that they leave no black holes at all above roughly 45 solar masses. Yet we have seen black holes that are that massive. And the question is: Where did they come from?”

The team’s new analysis provides support for the idea that black holes can form from the repeated merging of other black holes, and that this alternate origin story could explain some of the curious black holes that we can detect today. 

This work was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation, and the Brinson Foundation.

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Jesse Thaler named director of the Laboratory for Nuclear Science

Professor Jesse Thaler has been named director of the MIT Laboratory for Nuclear Science (LNS), effective Aug. 1. He succeeds Professor Bolek Wyslouch, who directed LNS for the past decade. Thaler is a theoretical particle physicist who combines techniques from quantum field theory and machine learning to address outstanding questions in fundamental physics. 

“In his research, Jesse has done pioneering work on particle jets at the Large Hadronic Collider and is a leader in combining AI and machine learning with fundamental particle physics,” says Nergis Mavalvala, dean of the MIT School of Science and the Curtis and Kathleen Marble Professor of Astrophysics. “The collaborative nature of his research programs will serve the Laboratory for Nuclear Science as science enters a new era of AI-driven discovery.”

Thaler is the William and Emma Rogers Professor of Physics in the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics — a Leinweber Institute (CTP-LI). Since 2020, he has served as inaugural director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) AI Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions, or IAIFI, which was recently renewed for another five years. Mike Williams, professor of physics, will succeed Thaler as IAIFI director. LNS is also poised to pursue new research projects through the Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission, which has a focus on AI-enabled scientific discovery.

“In my own field of particle physics, researchers are developing cutting-edge AI algorithms to handle the data deluge from collider experiments and to perform heroic theoretical calculations. This work has direct implications for discovering new physics, but the algorithms themselves turn out to be valuable well beyond our field,” says Thaler. “I’m excited to bring LNS into the next wave of discoveries supported by AI-driven capabilities.”

At IAIFI, Thaler has championed education and research activities at the intersection of physics and AI. With the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, IAIFI leadership created a doctoral program in physics, statistics, and data science. IAIFI also created dedicated postdoctoral fellowships to give early-career researchers the freedom to pursue interdisciplinary work. 

“Giving young scientists space to build connections across domains, universities, and career stages has been transformative within IAIFI,” says Thaler, who hopes to bring this type of framework to LNS. Established in 1946 to support nuclear and particle physics, LNS now encompasses research spanning cosmology, gravity, field theory, and quantum information science.

As head of LNS, Thaler will also oversee his home center of CTP-LI, which last year received a donation from the Leinweber Foundation to establish a network of theoretical physics research institutes. According to the Science Philanthropy Alliance, a nonprofit organization that promotes philanthropy for science, this constitutes the largest philanthropic commitment ever for this field.

Thaler received his PhD in physics from Harvard University in 2006, and his BS in math/physics from Brown University in 2002. From 2006 to 2009, he was a fellow at the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science at the University of California at Berkeley. He joined the MIT faculty in 2010.

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Toward a future that preserves benefits of neurotechnology for all

As advanced medical technology gets closer to hitting consumer markets, the need for guardrails on protected usage should increase. What might begin as a neural implant to aid in communication could become a device used to police one’s innermost thoughts.

Intrigued by the far-reaching benefits and risks of neural implants, Rachel Sava, a PhD candidate in the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology, explores how a life-changing medical device can become a tool for surveillance by corporations and government entities in her winning submission, “Superintelligence, Superintimate,” for the fourth annual Envisioning the Future of Computing Prize. 

Sava’s concept was inspired by an internship at IBM, where she worked on a project with the PACE Center in London. “A mentor on the project was Kevin Brown, who had himself designed one of the earliest brain decoders — an EEG-based system he built for a colleague who had suffered a stroke that left him with locked-in syndrome,” she says. “It was this patient population for whom the body has become an unreliable vehicle for the mind that motivated my writing about neuroprostheses some six years later.”

Sava explains that research and applications right now are at a “watershed moment in neurotechnology.” Using examples like companies taking advantage of neural implants to monitor mental productivity, or authorities policing a population for “thought crimes,” Sava said that as this tech hits consumer markets, there is a genuine fear that what starts as a revolutionary medical device could transition into more dystopian usages.

Presented by the Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC), a cross-campus initiative of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, in collaboration with the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences and with support from MAC3 Philanthropies, the competition invited MIT students to identify, in 3,000 words or fewer, which sector stands to gain the highest net positive impact from artificial intelligence. Students were encouraged to explore realistic technological deployments while considering potential risks and ethical concerns. All submissions were eligible for cash awards with the grand prize set at $10,000.

During a live awards ceremony hosted by Caspar Hare, former associate dean of SERC and professor of philosophy, who founded the prize in 2023, three finalists each gave a 20-minute presentation on their concepts and took questions from a panel of judges and audience members.

“SERC and the donors who make this prize possible year after year are asking us, the next generation of scientists: ‘what world do you want to see?’ I think it’s worth taking the time to ask yourself the same,” Sava said. “And if, as it did for me, the sentiment grows bright enough to motivate further action — then it’s worth giving yourself permission to explore it as deeply as you do your other academic work.”

Each year, the Envisioning the Future of Computing Prize asks students to look beyond technological advancement and consider the societal benefits and costs of their work from the outset. From its inception, the competition has consistently attracted undergraduate and graduate students from across a wide range of disciplines.

“This year’s submissions were amazing and included essays on brain-computer interfaces, AI and religion, AI for scientific discovery, finding efficiencies in the power grid, and many more,” says Brian Hedden, co-associate dean of SERC and a professor of philosophy, who holds an MIT Schwarzman College of Computing shared position with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “They showed the breadth and depth of thinking going on at MIT on the social and ethics impacts of technologies.”

Nikos Trichakis, co-associate dean of SERC and the J.C. Penney Professor of Management, adds “what is most striking about these essays is the breadth of imagination they display: the students move fluidly across medicine, neurotechnology, law, ethics, and public institutions, while keeping human agency at the center. Their work is creative, rigorous, and deeply thoughtful, showing a remarkable ability to envision not only what AI can do, but what it should do.”

In addition to awarding Sava the $10,000 grand prize, the judges recognized two runners-up with $5,000 each: Cordiana Cozier, a PhD candidate in the Department of Chemistry, for her paper on the use of AI as a cognitive buffer for public defenders; and Strahinja Janjusevic, a graduate student in the Technology and Policy Program in the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, for his submission on agency and ownership in the field of neural-controlled prosthetics. The judges also named four honorable mentions, each of whom received a $500 cash prize.

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Discovery helps explain why solid-state batteries often fail

Next generation batteries that use new electrolyte materials could achieve far higher energy density than today’s lithium-ion batteries, without many of the safety concerns. But advanced batteries, such as those that use solid or almost-solid electrolytes, have been plagued by the formation of tiny spikes of lithium metal called dendrites that cause the batteries to lose efficiency and fail.

Exactly how those dendrites form is still up for debate. While the interface between the battery’s electrolyte and electrodes has been the focus of most research, another culprit is the boundary where two grains of electrolyte in a solid material meet. Researchers know these boundaries can seed dendrites within electrolytes, although the effects have been difficult to study.

Now researchers at MIT and the Technical University of Munich have uncovered why such boundaries can lead to dendrites: Hidden electrical imbalances across the boundaries affect how the electrolyte conducts electrical charges, which influences how the ions and electrons move through the material during battery operation. In a paper published today in Nature Nanotechnology, the researchers characterized the electrical and chemical behavior of the boundaries and showed that adjusting how the electrolyte is processed enhances the movement of ions while reducing electron leakage. This adjustment can increase critical current density by more than 300 percent, which could enable solid-state batteries that charge faster and last longer.

“Grain boundaries are like the weather: Everyone talks about it, but nobody does anything about it,” says senior author Harry Tuller, a professor in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering. “In this paper, we’ve decided to do something about grain boundaries, and by doing something we’ve shown improved performance and demonstrated the importance of grain boundaries more broadly.”

Joining Tuller on the paper are first author Hyunwon Chu PhD ’25; former MIT professor Jennifer Rupp, the Electrochemical Material Professor at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), who led the study; TUM researchers Waldemar Kaiser, Lukas Wolz, Fran Kurnia, Kun Joong Kim, David Egger, and Johanna Eichhorn; Thomas Defferriere PhD ’22; Willis O’Leary PhD ’24; and University of Antwerp researchers Proloy Nandi, Johan Verbeeck, Sara Bals, and Thomas Altantzis.

Investigating grain boundaries

Rupp’s research group, which moved from MIT to TUM during this research, has spent years studying the behavior of next-generation electrolyte materials. Electrolytes in solid-state batteries are made of many tiny crystals of material packed together.

“What we call a grain, like a grain of salt, is actually a single crystal, but it might only be on the order of 1 micron in size,” explains Tuller. “Under high temperature processes, the best materials essentially consolidate to be void or pore-free and can be nearly 100 percent dense, but each of those crystallites is separated from its neighbor by a grain boundary.”

Solid-state battery researchers have increasingly focused on grain boundaries as the source of the lithium metal dendrites that cause them to short circuit. It’s been suspected that grain boundaries have different chemical and electrical properties from the grains, which interact with the ions and electrons shuttling between electrodes during battery charging and discharging. However, the exact mechanisms by which the boundaries slowed the ions down, leaked electrons, and led to dendrites was unknown.

“Grain boundaries are like defects,” Tuller says. “The boundaries have a higher level of defects than in the grains themselves, and generally that means as carriers of charge approach the boundary, whether electrons or ions, there’s some kind of blockage to overcome.”

To better understand that interference, the researchers developed a model to explain how local electrical imbalances at grain boundaries change the movement of lithium ions and electronic charge carriers. They tested the model in a common solid electrolyte material called lithium lanthanum zirconate, or LLZO, using techniques including electron microscopy, machine learning modeling, and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy, which measures how easily a charge moves through a material.

They found the cores of the boundaries carry a local electrical charge, building up local electric fields that lead to enhanced ionic resistance while causing a build-up of electrons in the boundary region, where they can reduce lithium ions, leading to lithium metal dendrite formation.

“For the last 30 years, the world has been dominated by lithium-ion batteries, but there is a growing recognition that other battery types are needed for batteries used in a variety of uses,” Rupp explains. “This work gives us the fundamental understanding of the space charge interface at the grain boundary. If understood properly, we can come up with engineering concepts to increase cycle life, transference of ions over electrons at these interfaces, and ultimately a better battery.”

Better battery materials

The researchers used their observations to adjust the material processing conditions of the LLZO electrolyte material and minimize the negative charges at the boundaries, finding they could ease the movement of lithium ions and reduce the leakage of electrons.

The modifications allowed them to create an electrolyte that had a critical current density more than 300 percent higher than a baseline sample. Higher current density allows for faster charging and discharging. It should also delay short circuiting to extend the life of batteries.

“Fires are currently a huge issue in the battery industry,” Rupp says. “By showing how to engineer these space charges in a controlled way, which is new in the field, we can have a strong impact on safety. It’s a new way to turn up the notch and get these batteries to charge faster and last longer before they break.”

The findings, along with the researchers’ engineering work, present a roadmap for battery researchers to accelerate the development of high-performance, longer lasting solid-state batteries.

“We showed we can control the initiation of these dendrites to maximize solid state batteries’ high performance,” Chu says. “In this paper, we started with a theory for how these dendrites form, then we did the material characterization to support that theory, then we did the engineering to apply the findings and actually improve battery performance.”

The work was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

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Lerna Ekmekcioglu named head of MIT's History Section

Lerna Ekmekcioglu, the McMillan-Stewart Professor of History, has been named head of the History Section, effective July 1. 

“Lerna is an exceptional scholar and a proven leader. I am confident that she will guide the unit with thoughtfulness, wisdom, and a deep commitment to its continued success. I very much look forward to working with her in the years ahead,” says Agustín Rayo, the Kenan Sahin Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.

Ekmekcioglu, who joined the MIT faculty in 2011, is a historian of the modern Middle East, the Ottoman Empire, and Turkey, Armenian history, gender, feminism, genocide, and minority politics. She served as director of the Program in Women’s and Gender Studies from 2022 to 2025, where she remains an affiliated faculty member.

Ekmekciouglu succeeds Malick Ghachem, who was named head of the History Section on July 1, 2023. 

“As I begin this new role, my first priority is to sustain and expand the remarkable momentum already underway in the unit. It is truly an exciting moment to be head of History,” says Ekmekciouglu. “We have ambitious new initiatives, extraordinary faculty work, and — this is not a small thing — a group of colleagues who actually like and trust one another.”

She cites the History of Now, launched in 2025, as one of several exciting initiatives underway, adding that her role will be ensuring the section’s projects are sustainable, visible, and intellectually fruitful.

“The work ahead is both practical and intellectual: supporting faculty research and teaching, sustaining new initiatives, expanding public engagement, and demonstrating why historical inquiry is indispensable to MIT’s mission,” she says.

Ekmekcioglu’s first monograph, “Recovering Armenia: The Limits of Belonging in Post-Genocide Turkey” (Stanford University Press, 2016), explored the Armenian community in Turkey after the Armenian Genocide and the limits of minority belonging in the early Turkish Republic.

It won the Der Mugrdechian Society for Armenian Studies Outstanding Book Award.

Her forthcoming book, “Feminism in Armenian: Lives and Texts Through Empire, Genocide, and Diaspora,” co-authored with Melissa Bilal of the University of California at Los Angeles, continues her long-standing work on Armenian feminist thought, activism, and archives across empire, violence, and dispersion.

Ekmekcioglu is a 2016 recipient of the the James A. and Ruth Levitan Award for excellence in teaching. She also organizes the biannual McMillan-Stewart Lecture Series on women, gender, religion, politics, and law across the Middle East and North Africa.

Ekmekcioglu earned a BA from Boğaziçi University in Istanbul 2002 and a PhD from New York University in 2010.

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Building a scholarly community

On a Wednesday afternoon in April, a cohort of scholars from the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) gathered in MIT’s Lewis Music Library. 

This group of seven professors are the inaugural SHASS Faculty Fellows, a semester-long program launched this past spring. The faculty represent a variety of disciplines across the school. They met biweekly through the spring to connect over lunch and present updates on their respective research projects. 

At this particular meeting, associate professor of music Emily Richmond Pollock presented some of her work — a chapter about an opera festival in Sarasota, Florida — which, she says, started from “my own curiosity about how American institutions relate to opera’s traditions and practices.” 

After Pollock’s presentation, the group discussed and provided a sounding board for her work. It’s precisely the type of scholarly environment the SHASS Faculty Fellows program was designed to foster.

“The fellows program is a recognition of the fact that not only do we benefit from being in conversation with other scholars, but even more so when in conversation with scholars who do things differently than we do, who approach problems with different opening questions and methodologies,” says Anne McCants, the Ann F. Friedlaender Professor of History and Faculty Fellows Program Committee chair.

Along with committee member and literature professor Arthur Bahr, McCants serves as a kind of moderator during the discussions, asking pointed questions and interrogating participants’ assumptions.

“A small group of people coming from diverse scholarly backgrounds meeting regularly to share a meal and sustained conversation can have a truly outsized impact on their scholarship,” McCants adds.

Time to focus and connect

Faculty must apply to take part in the program, and are selected by the program committee. The program is administered by the MIT Human Insight Collaborative (MITHIC). 

Participants take advantage of opportunities to share and discuss ideas with students, too. Volha Charnysh, a Faculty Fellow and the Ford Career Development Associate Professor of Political Science in the Department of Political Science, presented research on the effects of large-scale humanitarian aid to the Burchard Scholars. The Burchard Scholars program connects faculty and promising MIT sophomores and juniors who have demonstrated excellence in some aspect of the humanities, arts, or social sciences.  

Projects can run the gamut. Participants might develop scholarly articles, develop book manuscripts, or dig deeper into existing research. 

“The Faculty Fellows Program has two primary aims: to enrich faculty members’ scholarly programs, and to foster collegial community within the school,” says Heather Paxson, associate dean for faculty in SHASS, the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Anthropology, and MITHIC faculty co-lead. “Participants in the program gain a better sense of the breadth and depth of our school’s scholarly contributions, and some may forge lasting connections with colleagues they might not otherwise have gotten to know.” 

For Pollock, the fellows program this past spring was an opportunity to focus on her current research.

“I’m working on a book about a set of five opera festivals in the United States,” Pollock says of the project, “Opera on Uncommon Ground: Five American Festivals.” 

“These are annual, seasonal opera companies where rare repertoire is often performed alongside canonical works, in places that are outside of major cities, and performed in unusual spaces.” 

“I hope that anyone who loves opera will be able to read and enjoy my book,” she says, including “opera ‘superfans’” Pollock says she has in mind while writing.

Pollock says the program gave her the space she needed to continue her project. “This semester [in the program] has been wonderful so I could get back to drafting and really concentrate on a book I am excited to write.”

“I am so inspired each week when we meet”

Faculty Fellow Richard Nielsen, associate professor of political science, faculty director of the MIT-MENA Program, and a Security Studies Program affiliate, is hard at work on his project, “Fighting War with Divine Intervention,” a book about how combatants’ beliefs affect wars. Using material from a diverse set of cases — the Islamic State, the Confederate States of America, and the current U.S. engagement with Iran — he wants to understand when claims about divine intervention motivate fighters and citizens to fight harder and longer for victory, even when the state of the battlefield strongly suggests they have lost already. 

“We understand a lot about how religion might shape the conditions for war and peace, but religion matters during wars, too, and we understand surprisingly little about how religious claims affect leaders and fighters in combat,” he says. 

Nielsen lauds the collegial atmosphere available in the fellows program, citing the importance of engagement with scholars outside his research area as a significant draw. “The best part has actually been the engagement with a diverse set of fellows,” he notes, “pursuing a dizzying variety of humanist and social science projects. I am so inspired each week we meet, and every single project has me exclaiming ‘I wish I was writing this!’”

“It adds a regular ongoing conversation with scholars not like yourself who will push you, likely accidentally, in unexpected directions,” McCants says of the fellows’ meetings. Conferring with other participants about their projects, meanwhile, helps Nielsen “return to my research with fresh eyes and enthusiasm,” he says.

Pollock appreciates the camaraderie available as a program participant. “I value my colleagues so highly — the other fellows and mentors are people I really admire and respect — and it’s been fun to trade work and get to read work in progress far outside my field,” she says. 

Twelve professors have been named SHASS Faculty Fellows for the 2026-27 academic year, with six taking part in the fall and another six in the spring. 

The inaugural group of fellows included: 

• Héctor Beltrán, the Class of 1957 Career Development Associate Professor of Anthropology; 
• Volha Charnysh, the Ford Career Development Associate Professor of Political Science; 
• Kevin Dorst, associate professor of philosophy;
• Richard Nielsen, associate professor of political science;
• Emily Richmond Pollock, associate professor of music; 
• Jessica Ruffin, assistant professor of literature; and 
• Robin Scheffler, associate professor of science, technology, and society.

Applications for the next cohort of fellows will open this fall.

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