MIT-Kalaniyot program expands, with new cohort of scholars

As a new academic year dawns, the MIT-Kalaniyot program is welcoming its second cohort of scholars to campus, expanding an innovative effort to build new connections between MIT and researchers from Israel. 

In fall 2026, MIT-Kalaniyot has 11 new scholars arriving at MIT to pursue research, collaborating with Institute faculty across a wide variety of disciplines. They consist of seven new Kalaniyot Postdoctoral Fellows and four new Kalaniyot Sabbatical Scholars, who are faculty on leave from institutions in Israel. 

It is another step forward for a program which, less than two years ago was still an idea on a drawing board. The project aims to enhance research and create stronger community ties — not only among those connected to the program, but across the MIT campus.

“The goals of the program are to build academic ties between MIT and Israel, alongside a strong, supportive community,” says Or Hen, an MIT nuclear physicist and a co-founder of MIT-Kalaniyot. “MIT has a mission that revolves around research, education, and entrepreneurship, and MIT-Kalaniyot strengthens MIT, to help meet that mission for the world.”

The scholars will be working on a wide range of topics, including mathematics, materials science, behavioral economics, architecture, modern history, chemistry, quantum computing, and computational methods for examining cellular activity.

“We designed Kalaniyot to strengthen MIT’s research and its community at the same time,” says Ernest Fraenkel, a professor of biological engineering and a co-founder of  MIT-Kalaniyot. “We now have scholars in the program working in each of MIT’s five schools. The academic breadth shows our model is working.” MIT-Kalaniyot will also feature its first teaching fellow at the Institute, hosted by MIT’s History program. 

MIT-Kalaniyot was founded by Hen and Fraenkel as a constructive response to discord over conflict in the Middle East. Hen is the Class of 1956 Associate Professor of Physics and associate director of the Laboratory for Nuclear Science; Fraenkel is the Grover M. Hermann Professor in Health Sciences and Technology.

Fraenkel and Hen credit multiple members of MIT’s community and upper administration for backing the MIT-Kalaniyot idea from the start, making it feasible for the program to launch. 

“When we first shared the idea, we were very encouraged by the response from MIT’s senior leadership,” Fraenkel says. “They understood the value of a faculty-led effort, and their constructive response gave us confidence that our approach could be successful.”

“This would be impossible to do the way we’re doing it without the administration’s support,” Hen says. “The program is faculty-led and institution-backed. That’s what you want.”

Hen adds: “I think MIT today is home to one of the most, if not the most, accepting and welcoming communities for Israelis, and I can stand by that statement very strongly. The way our community grew these past years is remarkable.”

Embedded at MIT

MIT-Kalaniyot, named for a well-known flower that grows in Israel and other parts of the region, welcomed its first cohort of scholars to the MIT campus for the 2025-26 academic year. Hen and Fraenkel also give Tal Cohen, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, substantial credit for developing the concept. 

Scholars at Israel’s nine state-recognized universities are eligible to seek the MIT-Kalaniyot fellowships, which enable research, collaboration, and training at the Institute. The scholars come from a range of academic and personal backgrounds, including both Arab and Jewish citizens of Israel. 

The program is highly competitive, with many more applicants than positions currently available. Applicants are encouraged to identify in advance MIT faculty they would like to work with; accepted applicants then already have a “faculty host” lined up. Many of the new fellows will be working with researchers in established MIT labs, for instance. 

“When they’re here, they are treated exactly like anybody else in an academic unit at MIT and that’s really important,” Fraenkel says. “They’re embedded in these places.”

The program is also intended to generate the kinds of community connections that help scholars flourish, both professionally and personally. MIT-Kalaniyot features weekly lunches, attended by people from the larger community, where scholars can forge connections and friendship. 

The program also features informal academic talks and discussions, with the talks given by MIT researchers both within and outside of MIT-Kalaniyot. Hen, for one, has already seen the benefits of such events; one paper he has recently co-authored directly stemmed from discussions he had at a program event. 

“The range of MIT faculty who stepped forward as hosts has been one of the most gratifying parts of the program,” Fraenkel says. “It shows that this is not confined to one field or one corner of the Institute. It is becoming part of MIT’s broader academic life.”

Adds Hen: “I think it sends a very strong and important message. We’re able to move forward at MIT and build collaborative partnerships with strong ties.”

An additional facet of the program is the potential impact of MIT-based research in practical, tangible ways. One of the 2025 fellows, a leading physician, focused her MIT work on new methods of breast cancer detection, and now, back in Israel, is working to apply those findings in active medical settings. 

Plans for future growth

Having first taken root at MIT, the MIT-Kalaniyot concept is now spreading to other places. In the last two years, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Southern California have implemented the concept, with other universities in the process of adopting it as well. 

“This national movement all started by replicating the MIT model,” Hen says. “Each university then innovated in their own way. They start from the MIT approach, and then they adapt to what’s happening on their campus. They learn from us, we learn from them, and together we support a broad academic network.”

The progress at MIT and elsewhere has led Hen and Fraenkel to feel optimistic about the ongoing evolution of MIT-Kalaniyot. 

“We started at a tense time on our campus, not really knowing what the future would hold, and it’s exceeded our hopes,” Fraenkel says. “Now we want Kalaniyot to become a recognized center at MIT, funding seed grants for research that wouldn’t happen any other way.”  

While Fraenkel and Hen do not yet have a firm timetable for those developments, they regard them as being realistic. 

“Now we see Kalaniyot as a program that helps MIT well beyond our community,” Hen says. After all, he observes, simply as a vehicle for research, the program has the potential to provide added capacity for MIT, as well as the further connections to top scholars being generated by the effort. 

Indeed, Hen reflects, he is motivated the question: “How do we best support MIT in realizing its mission for the world?” Overall, he says, “I think that’s the ultimate goal of Kalaniyot. We do it in one way, other people can do it in other ways, and as long as you do net good, and support the MIT mission, we value and treasure that, and just want to be part of it.”

“I really believe this is the DNA of MIT,” Fraenkel says. “We’re all about finding practical solutions to society’s biggest problems. Kalaniyot brings extraordinary people here to do exactly that, and the whole Institute is stronger for it.”

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MIT student teams win top honors in NASA competition

Three teams comprising 35 students across eight different MIT departments and Wellesley College have been at work since fall 2025, designing critical early infrastructure elements that a moon base would require. This June, their designs were recognized with five awards at NASA’s 2026 Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts — Academic Linkage (RASC-AL) Forum. 

Among 75 submissions and 14 finalists, the MIT teams earned first and second place in the competition, as well as three best-in-theme awards. The Exploration-Class Lunar Integrated Power SystEm (ECLIPSE) team won first place overall and first in its theme category, lunar surface power. The communications and navigation constellation team, MELIORA, won second place overall and first in its theme category on Mars communications, position navigation and timing, which included a strategy for proving the design at the moon. And CHEESEBURGER, a campaign to mine and process lunar regolith into oxygen, metals, and bricks, won first in its theme category, lunar technology demonstrations. 

“NASA spent the spring telling the world what critical early infrastructure their upcoming permanent moon base will need,” says George Lordos, a research scientist and lecturer in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro) and in System Design and Management (SDM), who co-advised all three teams. “Over 30 MIT students spent this academic year designing much of the moon base — systems for generating, storing, and distributing power; robust systems for positioning, navigating, and communicating; and early experiments with essential technologies to live sustainably off the moon’s own dirt.”

A power grid for surviving lunar night and winter

The hardest constraint on NASA’s moon base is staying powered, because a failure in life-support power would doom the crew within hours. ECLIPSE is a reference design for a lunar grid engineered to stay up for more than 99.995 percent of the time — fewer than 27 minutes of downtime a year in the worst-case scenario, the standard demanded of the most critical data centers on Earth. It pairs two power sources that fail in different ways: banks of 20-meter solar masts in the sunlit highlands near the south pole, and, for the roughly 18-day stretch each year when the sun drops below the horizon, a pair of buried 20 kilowatt microreactors the team named CARROT, (Compact Autonomous Regolith-shielded Reactor Operating for Ten years). The CARROT reactor, a novel design developed independently by the ECLIPSE team, ended up being similar in design to NASA’s SR-1 reactor for the 2028 mission to Mars, both aiming to maximize speed-to-deployment. 

“Burying each reactor 1.3 meters down shrinks the keep-out zone from kilometers to meters, so crews can work nearby, and it saves tons on required shielding mass,” says Taylor Hampson, a PhD student in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering and ECLIPSE team co-lead.

The full design delivers an initial 120 kilowatts using a grid of buried aluminum cables and shielded direct-current power equipment. Laser-equipped rovers provide “Frontier Power” capability, beaming up to 10 kilowatts to sites beyond any cable, from a shadowed crater to a new outpost before its own grid exists. Patrick Riley, a graduate student in the Department of AeroAstro and ECLIPSE team co-lead, says the design’s point is to put reliability ahead of mass: “We sized it so the most likely failures never reach the moon base inhabitants, and so it scales from a first crew of six up to industrial demand without interrupting a commercial lunar economy.”

A network for exploring the moon and Mars, and calling home

MELIORA acts as the base’s relay and GPS. Although RASC-AL framed the communications, positioning, navigation, and timing competition sub-theme around Mars, the team also proposed a plan to validate their design in lunar geometry first, in step with the agency’s strategy to prove technology on the moon before extending it to Mars. To find the best design, the team ran a trade study across 5,764 candidate constellation geometries. The result grows from an initial three satellites to 23, returns more than 100 megabits per second to Earth-orbiting data networks over free-space optical links, and pins a user’s position to within 10 meters. For the Mars design, four relay satellites parked at gravitationally stable Lagrange points keep the link alive even during solar conjunction, the weeks when the sun sits between the two worlds and ordinarily cuts communication. On the surface, a user needs only a portable radio terminal and a chip-scale atomic clock — a timekeeper the size of a matchbox. 

“You should never have to think about whether the network is there — it just is, the way you don’t think about a cell tower,” says Ekaterina Tiukhtikova, an undergraduate studying both AeroAstro and electrical engineering and computer science (EECS), and a MELIORA team co-lead. “We put almost all the complexity up in orbit, so everything on the surface stays portable and simple,” adds Clayton Lieberman, a graduate of the SDM program and team co-lead who wrote his thesis on MELIORA.

Making oxygen, metal, and bricks from lunar dirt

After power and communications, the third essential pillar of a lunar base is living off the land. The moon’s own regolith can supply oxygen to breathe and burn, metal to build with, and shielding to hide behind for protection from deadly radiation. CHEESEBURGER is a campaign of five robotic payloads that prove the supply chain one link at a time, followed by integration of the five into the first end-to-end lunar industry. 

The payloads carry a kitchen’s worth of names: SWISS prospects for the richest ore, BRIOCHES digs and sorts the regolith, BACON casts it into bricks, GRILLED MEAT melts it electrically to pull out metal and oxygen, and AVOCADO is the robotic builder that stacks the products into structures, including interlocking Moon BRICCSS that shield a habitat from radiation. The food theme was born during a January team outing at Sandwich, Massachusetts. “Naming the prospector SWISS and the metal extractor GRILLED MEAT turned a wall of acronyms into something the whole team could enjoy,” says Cesar Meza, a graduate student in AeroAstro and CHEESEBURGER co-lead. “It sounds like a joke until you see that each acronym clearly describes a serious piece of hardware doing one job in the pipeline.”

Thirty students, eight departments, and three teams for one moon base

More than 30 students contributed across the teams, from AeroAstro, SDM, Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE), EECS, Mechanical Engineering (MechE), the Technology and Policy Program, the MIT Sloan School of Management, and Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), along with a student from Wellesley College. Several student mentors and faculty advisors worked across more than one team, which is why ECLIPSE’s grid is sized to power CHEESEBURGER’s processing, CHEESEBURGER’s regolith handling is used to bury and shield ECLIPSE’s grid, and all three projects are designed to translate moon base lessons for a future mission to Mars. The teams were advised by Olivier de Weck, the Apollo Program Professor of Astronautics and Engineering Systems and interim department head of AeroAstro, who led ECLIPSE; Kerri Cahoy, the Sheila Evans Widnall Professor of Aerospace Engineering, who led MELIORA; Jeffrey Hoffman, professor of the practice in AeroAstro and a former NASA astronaut, who led CHEESEBURGER; Koroush Shirvan, Atlantic Richfield Career Development Professor in Energy Studies in Nuclear Science and Engineering, who co-advised ECLIPSE; and Lordos, who co-advised all three. Much of the day-to-day mentorship work is led by PhD student volunteers and runs through the MIT Space Resources Workshop, which Lordos founded in 2019.

“The winning teams demonstrated how academic innovation can support Artemis mission goals,” says Daniel Mazanek, RASC-AL program sponsor and senior space systems engineer at NASA’s Langley Research Center, in NASA's announcement of the awards. “Their work highlights the important role student research plays in shaping future space exploration.”

NASA expects astronauts living on the lunar surface for months at a time by the early 2030s — the window ECLIPSE, MELIORA, and CHEESEBURGER were designed for. The picture the three teams had worked toward is unified: a crew at the lunar south pole, the lights on through the winter night, the network always up, and the first oxygen and bricks coming out of the ground beneath them. 

“A permanent base is no longer a slide in a strategy deck; NASA begins landing the first elements in 2027,” says de Weck. “Studies like these three let the agency see, before the concrete sets, how its power, communications, and resource choices depend on one another. That is precisely when independent, integrated architecture work has the most influence on the real plan.”

RASC-AL is administered by the National Institute of Aerospace on behalf of NASA. MIT has a long record in NASA’s student design competitions, with recent winning teams including the  HYDRATION Mars water production system, the Pale Red Dot Mars homesteading architecture, the deployable lunar tower MELLTT, the MARTEMIS lunar Mars analog campaign, the MAPLE autonomous lunar robot pathfinding system, the CERBERUZ lunar recycling project, and the THERMOS cryogenic fluid management system. This work was supported in part by NASA, the Massachusetts Space Grant, MIT AeroAstro, and the MIT Space Resources Workshop. One student was supported by a NASA Space Technology Graduate Research Opportunity Fellowship.

The full teams:

ECLIPSE — Team leads: Taylor Hampson (graduate student, Nuclear Science and Engineering) and Patrick Riley (graduate student, AeroAstro). Reactor team: Liliana Arias, Sydney Menne, Julian Rocher and Pavel Shilenko (graduate students, NSE). Power management and distribution team: Evrard Constant and Mary Foxen (graduate students, AeroAstro), Janhavi Joglekar and Asma Patel (undergraduate students, AeroAstro). Solar and architecture team: Zachary Dawson (graduate student, System Design and Management), Sreeja Akula and Ian Jimenez (undergraduate students, AeroAstro; EAPS), Yohan Lim (graduate student, AeroAstro/Technology and Policy Program), CJ Taglienti (graduate student, AeroAstro/MBA). Student co-advisors: Yana Charoenboonvivat, Lanie McKinney (AeroAstro), Palak Patel (MechE). Industry mentor: Sully Marigliano-Crevecoeur (Technetics). Faculty: Olivier de Weck (lead) and Jeffrey Hoffman (AeroAstro), George Lordos (AeroAstro and SDM), and Koroush Shirvan (NSE).

MELIORA — Team leads: Clayton Lieberman and Katiyayni Balachandran (System Design and Management), Ekaterina Tiukhtikova (undergraduate, AeroAstro and EECS), Celvi Lisy (AeroAstro). Team members: Thomas Harrington and Zachary T. Barnes (SDM), Asael Acosta (undergraduate, AeroAstro). Student co-advisor: Lanie McKinnery (AeroAstro). Faculty: Kerri Cahoy (lead), Jeffrey Hoffman and Olivier de Weck (AeroAstro), and George Lordos (AeroAstro and SDM).

CHEESEBURGER — Team leads: Cesar Meza (graduate student, AeroAstro) and Elizabeth Romero (undergraduate, AeroAstro). Team members: Rachel Dunphy, Shreya Kothnur, Hailey Polson (undergraduates, AeroAstro), Christopher Kwon, Jose Soto, Lanie McKinney (graduate students, AeroAstro), Marvin Martinez (undergraduate, MechE), Ananda Santos Figueiredo (graduate student, Technology and Policy Program), Evangeline Haiqi Wang (undergraduate, Computer Science and Psychology, Wellesley College). Faculty: Jeffrey Hoffman (lead) and Olivier de Weck (AeroAstro), and George Lordos (AeroAstro and SDM).

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MIT researchers advance toward greater bandwidth, more energy-efficient communications

An MIT-led research program aimed at creating future microsystems capable of sustainably transmitting data with greater bandwidth and higher efficiency than is possible today has made several significant advances since it was established in 2022. 

These include the invention of devices within systems that can much more easily integrate electronics — manipulating data with electricity — with photonics, which does the same with light. The microsystems, the first of their kind, also promise to be cost-effective because, among other advantages, they can be manufactured using existing equipment in traditional electronics foundries and packaging houses.

“Our disruptive electronic-photonic integrated solutions will enable us to leap from [transmitting data at] hundreds of terabits per second to greater than 1 petabit per second,” said Anu Agarwal, who leads MIT’s FUTUR-IC, at an April webinar titled, “Shaping the Future of Semiconductors: Power, Performance, and Possibility.” The event was sponsored by the MIT Industrial Liaison Program and Startup Exchange.

An advanced system using co-packaged optics can provide improved bandwidth and energy savings compared to what is used today, which is electronics-only or pluggable optics.

Toward sustainability

The microchips behind everything from smartphones to medical imaging can be traced to about 500 megatons of carbon dioxide-equivalent lifetime emissions in 2021, and every year the world produces more than 50 million tons of electronic waste. Further, the huge data centers necessary for complex computations like on-demand video are growing, and will require close to 10 percent of the world’s electricity by 2030.

“This is neither scalable nor sustainable, and cannot continue,” Agarwal has reiterated over the years. FUTUR-IC, funded by the National Science Foundation Convergence Accelerator, was created to address these resource-efficiency issues.

For example, integrating photonics with the electronics that underpin today’s microchips could address energy use because the transmission, or communication of data, using light is much more energy efficient. “Our mantra is to use electronics for computation and photonics for communication to bring this energy crisis under control,” says Agarwal.

Currently, however, it is difficult and expensive to connect electronic chips with their photonic counterparts within a single package. That’s partly because the supply-chain ecosystem for co-packaged optics is still immature.

New devices

Enter two new devices developed through FUTUR-IC aimed at making it easier — and less expensive — to integrate photonic chips with microchips. One, the evanescent coupler, was featured on the cover of Advanced Engineering Materials last year. Another, known as the graded index coupler (GRIN), was reported in the March 2026 print issue of the Journal of Physics: Photonics. 

A third new coupler was developed by an MIT team led by Professor Juejun Hu of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. It was reported in a 2023 issue of Laser & Photonics Reviews. That work was supported by the Department of Energy. 

The three couplers are the first optical equivalents of “solder bumps,” or the tiny dots of metal that allow chip-to-chip or chip-to-substrate connections for electron flow. Until this MIT work, there were no analogous “optical bump” options for photonics.

And if photonics is to be integrated with electronics, “you’ll need both metal bumps and optical bumps, because there are devices on your photonics chip that will require both an electrical signal and an optical signal,” says Drew Weninger PhD ’25, first author of the papers on both the evanescent and GRIN couplers. Weninger is now at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

As with electronics, many options of optical bumps will be necessary, as “each type has substantial trade-offs,” wrote Weninger and colleagues in a review article in Nature about coupler advances published earlier this year.

For example, the GRIN coupler can be used over a wider spectrum of light than is possible with the evanescent coupler, Weninger says. The evanescent coupler, however, is easier to fabricate and can be packed in tighter to form a higher number of connections.

Additional advances

FUTUR-IC is organized into three dimensions: Technology (the coupler work is a good example), Value Chain Innovation, and Workforce. 

Under the Value Chain sector, researchers developed a new tool to support companies’ decisions toward sustainability. Earthster provides a visual model for quickly determining the energy, materials usage, and environmental sustainability across a company’s products. For example, says Agarwal, “looking at [Earthster], a supplier can tell right away their hot spots for carbon emissions, and start working to minimize them.”

FUTUR-IC has also developed several programs aimed at developing a future workforce for next-generation microchips. For example, “it is introducing an online course on semiconductor resource efficiency,” Agarwal says. “We also offer gamified digital learning and problem-based learning, plus a summer academy and a hands-on bootcamp.” For K-12 awareness, FUTUR-IC has created TED-Ed videos.

Agarwal concluded her April webinar by acknowledging the range of industries FUTUR-IC aims to help. “If you’re a packaging vendor, a materials vendor, or you are in the supply chain for data centers, FUTUR-IC can provide value.”

Additional authors of the paper on the GRIN coupler are Agarwal; Lionel Kimerling, the Thomas Lord Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering; Christian Duessel BS ’25, now at SiLC Technologies, a silicon photonics company; and Samuel Serna, professor of physics, photonics, and optical engineering at Bridgewater State University.

Additional authors of the Nature review paper are Serna; Luigi Ranno PhD ’25, now at Ayar Labs; Kimerling; and Agarwal.

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Q&A: What is agentic AI today, and what do we want it to be?

The deployment of automated software systems called AI agents has recently exploded. A November 2025 report by MIT Sloan School of Management and Boston Consulting Group found that 35 percent of surveyed businesses had already deployed AI agents, while another 44 percent planned to implement agentic AI soon. 

To understand the fundamentals and potential impacts of these increasingly popular tools, MIT News spoke with Phillip Isola, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), who studies the intelligence AI agents possess, as well as the underlying models and mechanisms that power agentic AI systems.

Q: What is agentic AI and how is it different from generative AI models like ChatGPT and Claude?

A: Agentic AI is AI that takes actions in the world. These actions could be a physical action, like robotic manipulation, or a digital action, like booking a flight. On the other hand, we think of generative AI as making up stories, poems, art, and images, rather than taking actions for us. 

The word “agent” is just a brand name. It usually means AI that is going to help people interact with an application, a website, or the physical world. Most agents we encounter today are digital agents, like customer service agents you can talk with about product complaints. 

Most companies that offer agents use the same few AI models under the hood and give them the ability to take actions and remember what happened. An agent starts with a fundamental generative AI system, like Claude, at the core. Then companies put different wrappers around that foundation model for their product or application. Those wrappers might be specific tools that agent can use, and those tools depend on the application. Maybe the agent has access to a calculator so it can solve math problems, or maybe it has access to a more complicated hard drive and operating system so it can remember a firm’s financial data and past business negotiations. 

The biggest challenge in developing agentic AI comes from a lack of training data. If I want to create a system that can go online and book a flight for me, that seems pretty simple. But we don’t have a lot of data that spells out exactly how to do that — where to move the mouse, which buttons to click on, what to do if something goes wrong, or how to call somebody and negotiate about the price of the airline ticket. One way to train a system like this is to have the AI agent visit airline websites, try things out, and see what works and what doesn’t work. These environments are hard to model, so often the agent must learn by trial and error.

Q: What are some promising applications of agentic AI?

A: I think the area where we’ve seen the most success has been with coding agents. This is something that evolved from generative AI. People trained language models on code, and then they can predict what a human would do to solve a coding problem. In addition, an agent can learn to do this by going through a feedback loop where it tries out different solutions and checks to see if it got the answer right. As long as it can check the answer, the AI agent can perform this trial-and-error loop until it figures out a good strategy.

But there is always a balance between automating decision making versus simply assisting and informing humans. Analytical AI methods, like the systems that help predict possible outcomes of decisions, are not agentic in nature, but are very informative to human decision-makers. For cases that are either high-stakes or safety-critical, like medicine, security, high-level business policies, etc., the technology might not be ready for AI to completely automate those processes, or we might not even be comfortable with that.

Q: Are there risks we should be thinking about when using AI agents?

A: One big risk area comes from the fact that it is often very easy to get agents to do certain types of work for you. With coding agents, you can “vibe code” and just ask the agent to make a code for you, so you don’t have to do the hard work yourself. There is a big risk that, because it is so easy, people will not put enough effort into verifying that it is doing the right thing. Bugs will be introduced, private data will get leaked — this is already happening.

Agents aren’t perfect, in the sense that they might make mistakes because they are not well-trained and don’t know what to do. But even if they are very competent, if a human doesn’t use them appropriately or gives them an instruction that is too vague, the AI agent could make a mistake because the human made a mistake. If humans are less involved in thinking through all the consequences, I think we might be more prone to making those mistakes. 

An additional aspect is the risk of de-skilling. It is unclear how far this will go, but when we are relying on agents to do our homework, our coding, and our math, we might lose the ability to do that ourselves, and we might lose that ability too soon because the technology is not yet ready to fully automate those processes.

Q: What does the future hold for agentic AI?

A: What we think of now as agentic AI refers to large language models using tools to interact with digital and physical systems. One obvious limitation is that, under the hood, these have the architecture of a language model and are trained on text data. To make even more powerful AI agents, we might need to model videos, physical forces, time series, radar scans, and other modalities. We might need to have models with fundamentally different architectures that can handle continuous data, high-dimensional data, stochastic data, and so on. 

But, on the other hand, maybe an extremely good coding model could act as a puppeteer to interface with sensors, actuators, and web APIs? Perhaps, once you have a super-smart reasoning system that understands math, language, and code, you can give it a camera and a keyboard and it will figure out what to do in the spatial domain. Is the next wave of AI just going to be Claude with sensors, actuators, and tools, or is it going to be something built in a new way from the ground up? That’s the big question a lot of people in AI are grappling with right now.

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Scientists find ozone depletion began decades before discovery of ozone hole

The Antarctic ozone hole was discovered in 1985, when scientists observed a severe depletion in the Earth’s protective layer of stratospheric ozone. Industrial chemicals known as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), then widely used as refrigerants, propellants, foam-blowing agents, and solvents, were at the root of the ozone depletion. After concerted global effort to phase out the use of CFCs, ozone today is recovering, especially in the Antarctic. 

The discovery of the ozone hole was possible thanks, in part, to the measurement tools that were available at the time. Advances in those tools, along with satellites and other monitoring technologies, have since allowed scientists to track ozone’s recovery. 

But what if today’s tech was available much earlier? Would scientists have been able to spot even earlier signs of human-induced ozone depletion? And if so, when would those first signs have popped up, and where? 

MIT scientists now have some answers. The team, led by atmospheric chemist Susan Solomon, has carried out a thought experiment in which they consider a hypothetical world where today’s atmospheric monitoring capabilities were available throughout the last century. In this scenario, they simulated the atmosphere’s chemistry through history and discovered not only when the earliest sign of ozone depletion would have been detectable, but also where, and why. 

In a study appearing today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the scientists suggest that the first signs of ozone depletion appeared as early as 1957 — about 30 years before the ozone hole was discovered. And, this first signal of ozone loss popped up not in the Antarctic, but in the upper stratosphere of the tropics. What’s more, the cause of this early depletion was not due to CFCs, but to another industrial chemical: carbon tetrachloride. 

“What we’ve learned from textbooks is that CFCs result in ozone depletion,” says the study’s first author, Jian Guan, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). “It turns out there was another compound that caused ozone depletion much earlier than CFCs. This was a big surprise.”

For Solomon, who was an early pioneer in the study of ozone’s effects on the atmosphere, and who was the first to show that CFCs were the main agent eroding Antarctic ozone, the new results were a complete shock. 

“The fact that ozone depletion would have happened as early as the late 1950s, which is much earlier than I would have thought, just absolutely blew my mind,” says Solomon, the Lee and Geraldine Martin Professor of Environmental Studies and Chemistry at MIT. “This study shows it’s really important to keep monitoring so that we can fully understand how the atmosphere responds and recovers.”

The study’s MIT co-authors include Peidong Wang, Yaowei Li, and Kane Stone; along with Benjamin Santer of the University of East Anglia; Qiang Fu of the University of Washington; Rolando Garcia, Douglas Kinnison, and Jun Zhang of the National Center for Atmospheric Research; Jean-Francois Lamarque of Climate Modeling and Analysis LLC; and Gabriel Chiodo of the Spanish National Research Council. 

Chlorine connection

Ozone is a highly reactive molecule, made from three oxygen atoms, that exists naturally in the upper layers of the atmosphere. In the stratosphere, ozone acts as a shield, absorbing the sun’s rays and reducing the harmful ultraviolet radiation that can reach the Earth’s surface. 

In the late 1980s, after scientists first observed signs of ozone depletion in the Antarctic, Solomon led expeditions to the region to measure the stratosphere’s composition. Those measurements confirmed that ozone’s agent of destruction was CFCs — the chemicals which were used globally in refrigeration, air conditioning, and aerosol propellants, among other uses. 

Specifically, Solomon measured higher-than-expected levels of chlorine dioxide in the Antarctic stratosphere. The presence of this molecule, in the same place where ozone depletion was observed, had only one chemical explanation: Ozone was being broken apart by rogue atoms of chlorine. At the time, chlorine-heavy CFCs were in wide use, and MIT chemist Mario Molina proposed that if CFCs drifted up to the stratosphere, photons from the sun could break apart the molecules and release atoms of chlorine, which would then be free to break apart ozone’s oxygen atoms. 

Molina’s work, and Solomon’s measurements, were key in showing that CFCs could deplete ozone — a discovery that earned Molina a share of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Soon after, nearly every country in the world signed the Montreal Protocol, which ultimately led to the successful phase-out of CFCs and other ozone-depleting substances. In recent years, as a result of that global cooperation, scientists have observed initial signs of ozone recovery.

“We know what we have now, and ozone is starting to recover,” Solomon says. “But no one has ever really documented where and when and why the first ozone depletion would have happened.”

Signal over noise

For their new study, Solomon, Guan, and their colleagues took a “what-if” approach, posing the question: What if the past had the monitoring capabilities of the present? When would we have been able to detect the earliest sign of human-induced ozone depletion? 

Today’s monitoring tools are sensitive to a certain signal to noise, meaning they can identify patterns of ozone loss that are more likely a “signal” of human-induced depletion (such as from CFCs), versus ozone loss that is due to “noise,” such as random fluctuations from weather and natural phenomena. 

With this in mind, the team looked to reproduce the chemistry of the atmosphere over the last century to see whether they could see a signal over the noise, based on the sensitivity of today’s monitoring tools. 

The team used 16 different model runs, each of which simulates varying conditions and dynamics of the atmosphere at various latitudes and altitudes, as well as the concentrations and interactions of ozone and other molecules. Ozone is affected by not only human-caused chemicals but also natural phenomena such as volcanic eruptions and El Niño weather patterns. Each model run simulates ozone’s response to these natural phenomena, which the team combined to establish a range of “noise,” or ozone depletion that likely is due to natural variability.

They added to each model the various industrial chemicals that were known to have been produced at various times over the last century. 

“Year by year, we have estimates from industry of how much of these chemicals were made and sold globally, and the emissions of all these chemicals, which the models include,” Solomon explains. “And in the case of carbon tetrachloride, the really cool thing is, we also have ice core data.”

Ice cores are drilled-out cylinders of deeply buried ice, that had formed in the Antarctic and Arctic from the falling and layering of snow over hundreds of years. Ice cores contain the remnants of snow, as well as whatever trace chemicals in the atmosphere the snow originally fell through. Scientists can therefore use ice cores to estimate the composition of the atmosphere through history. 

“We actually see in the ice cores that carbon tetrachloride starts increasing already by the 1940s,” Solomon notes. 

The team incorporated industrial and ice core data into their models, then looked to see whether a signal of human-induced ozone loss stood out from the noise of natural fluctuations. Their analysis revealed that a signal did appear, as early as 1957. Not only did they see when the signal appeared, but also where: in the tropics, rather than the Antarctic. 

The researchers say that human-induced ozone loss was likely occurring globally, but was easier to spot in the tropical upper stratosphere, since that is the region where the range of natural fluctuations is the smallest, and therefore where a signal can stand out better.

Finally, the analysis indicated that carbon tetrachloride, and not CFCs, was the cause of the earliest ozone depletion. 

“That’s the only ozone-depleting substance that was increasing that early,” Solomon says. “We started using carbon tetrachloride in the 1930s as a dry-cleaning agent, and as a degreasing solvent. We didn’t start using CFCs until quite a bit later.”

Carbon tetrachloride has since been phased out of use in most of the world, initially due to its health concerns; the chemical can cause nervous system disorders with prolonged exposure and is a suspected carcinogen. Since the Montreal Protocol began to tightly limit its use in the 1990s, the molecule’s concentrations in the atmosphere have been on a decline. Still, Solomon says the new study highlights the need for vigilance in monitoring carbon tetrachloride, CFCs, and other ozone-depleting substances that may have been phased out but can still linger for decades.

“We’ve gone through a big effort to get rid of these chemicals,” Solomon says. “Don’t we have an obligation to keep monitoring to make sure the atmosphere responds the way we think it should?”

This research was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the European Commission.

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3 Questions: Beyond data-driven aesthetics

“Beyond Data-Driven Aesthetics,” by MIT Architecture alumnus and researcher Alexandros Haridis, on view at the MIT Keller Gallery through June 30, examines 20th- and 21st-century efforts to transform computing into a medium for creative production and aesthetic judgment in architecture and the applied arts. Drawing on philosophy, mathematics, computer science, and design computation, the exhibition translates algorithms, theories, and machine-learning systems into physical installations and interactive visualizations.

Q: What inspired “Beyond Data-Driven Aesthetics,” and what questions does it explore?

A: The conceptual origins of “Beyond Data-Driven Aesthetics” emerged from three intersecting lines of research.

First, while completing my PhD in design and computation in the MIT Department of Architecture around 2022, I observed in real time how advances in data-driven machine learning — systems such as ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion — were rapidly entering public discussions about creativity, aesthetic judgment, design, and even high-profile art auctions.

At the same time, my own research was already focused on aesthetic judgment and evaluation, and it became increasingly clear to me that many of the questions presented publicly as “new” in relation to AI actually have a much longer history across the 20th century. For example, in the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project, a foundational event for the field of AI, creation and evaluation processes were identified as one of seven key dimensions of human intelligence that future AI research should address.

Second, the exhibition was influenced by research in design computation and shape grammars that investigates relationships between human insight and computation through rule-based methods, rather than purely data-driven learning. More recent interpretative studies of aesthetic theories — drawing from figures such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Oscar Wilde, and even John von Neumann — have been especially important to me. These studies examine whether theories of aesthetic value and comparison articulated in philosophical and literary texts may reveal possibilities or limitations in contemporary models of digital computation and AI in architecture and design.

Finally, the exhibition was motivated by the use of design, fabrication, and data visualization as methods for interpreting mathematical concepts, algorithms, and “black box” machine-learning systems. Across disciplines, researchers increasingly use reconstruction and visualization techniques to make computational systems more tangible and interpretable — from neural network visualization in computer science to software reconstruction and digital fabrication in architecture and curatorial practice.

Q: How do you translate research on computation and aesthetics into an exhibition?

A: The approach of the exhibition is to ask what exactly in a particular research paper or book captures its most salient idea, and then use design to interpret that idea in a visual, spatial, and experiential format. Drawing on design techniques such as software reconstruction, physical making, and data visualization, the exhibition takes written sources that are dense with algorithmic ideas, abstract concepts, and mathematical formulas, and translates them into stories in space that include interaction, material form, and digital visualization.

The exhibition itself is organized around five thematic areas: Aesthetic Measure, Aesthetic Guidelines, Algorithmic Aesthetics, Aesthetic Appropriation, and Aesthetic Novelty. Each theme functions as a selective “window” into a distinct computational approach to aesthetic judgment drawn from a specific publication — a book or research paper. The titles of these themes are derived from concepts central to each publication. For example, “measure” refers to mathematician George Birkhoff’s work in the 1930s to quantify aesthetic value mathematically, while “novelty” examines how the machine learning system AICAN judges generated images according to a theory in cognitive aesthetics that balances familiarity and deviation from known artistic styles.

Across all five cases, the key insight is that design itself can function as a method of interpretative translation — a way of making visible, tangible, and experiential what traditional academic scholarship in technical domains typically communicates only through words and word-like representational devices, such as scientific diagrams and tables.

Q: What questions are you hoping to explore next?

A: “Beyond Data-Driven Aesthetics” is conceived both as a research exhibition and as an ongoing platform for investigating how computational systems participate in processes of aesthetic judgment, generation, and transformation across architecture and the applied arts.

One of the central questions of the exhibition — and one that researchers across architecture, design, and engineering are increasingly focusing on — is computational evaluation beyond purely performative or functional requirements. This applies to many different design spaces, whether buildings, structural forms, or everyday products. The exhibition’s case studies suggest that many of these questions long predate current interest in computing and AI, and have been approached through a range of computational and theoretical models of evaluation since at least the early 20th century.

At the same time, I’m increasingly interested in how these ideas can move into broader applications related to the built environment. In particular, I am interested in how research connected to “Beyond Data-Driven Aesthetics” can help designers and engineers better understand how computation — whether rule-based or data-driven — can inform us about what contributes positively to human experience in relation to the spaces and objects people inhabit and use.

Finally, a direction I continue to explore is the methodological role of design itself as an interpretative device. Through software reconstruction, visualization, and physical making, the exhibition uses design to translate opaque computational systems into more legible, tangible, and experiential artifacts. More broadly, this opens questions not only about mechanizing “beauty” or “taste” (the traditional preoccupation of aesthetic formalism in the 20th century), but also about how traditional forms of research scholarship and communication may evolve through spatial, visual, and public-facing formats.

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Graphene can hold multiple states of superconductivity, a new study finds

The ordinary graphite in pencil lead is proving to be surprisingly multifaceted at the microscale. 

In a study appearing today in the journal Nature, MIT researchers report that a certain microscopic structure found in natural graphite can host multiple superconducting states. Superconductivity is an electronic state of matter in which electrons pair up and glide through a material with zero resistance. 

While there are thousands of materials that are known to be superconductors, it is rare for one material to host multiple forms of superconductivity. 

The researchers discovered the multiple superconducting states in atomically thin exfoliations of graphite, known as graphene. Specifically, graphene is a single-atom-thin sheet of carbon atoms arranged precisely in a microscopic lattice. The team made its discoveries in samples of rhombohedral graphene, which is a natural structure within graphite consisting of a stack of four or five graphene layers. 

Interestingly, the researchers found that several of the new superconducting states in rhombohedral graphene are able to persist in the presence of a magnetic field, which normally kills superconductivity. 

And in a further surprise, these superconducting states even get stronger when exposed to a magnetic field. 

Overall, the findings reveal a new family of unconventional superconducting states in one seemingly simple material. 

“People might assume that this is a simple, boring carbon material,” says Long Ju, the Lawrence C. and Sarah W. Biedenharn Associate Professor of Physics at MIT. “But we can control this material by tuning certain experimental ‘knobs,’ such as electrical voltages. This is how a simple physical material can exhibit so many different superconducting properties.” 

It’s still unclear exactly how each of the multiple superconducting states arise, or how they are able to persist under a magnetic field, when normally superconductivity should fade.

“From a fundamental physics point of view, it’s very exotic that a magnetic field doesn’t kill superconductivity, and instead it boosts it,” Ju says. “We have provided a lot of experimental results and provided the nutrition that people can absorb to try to think about what’s going on here.” 

The study’s MIT co-authors include co-first authors Junseok Seo and Shenyong Ye, together with Tonghang Han, Zhenghan Wu, Wei Xu, Jixiang Yang, Emily Aitken, Prayoga Liong, Phatthanon Pattanakanvijit, Zach Hadjri, and Mingda Li. External collaborators are co-first author Armel Cotten and members of Dominik Zumbuhl’s group at the University of Basel in Switzerland, plus others at Florida State University, the University of Florida, Gainesville, and the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan. 

Natural steps

Graphene and other atomically thin, two-dimensional materials can exhibit unexpected electronic, magnetic, thermal, and physical properties. And when two or more sheets of graphene are stacked and twisted at precise orientations, the “magic-angle” structure can suddenly host weird and exotic phenomena. 

Ju’s group has been probing the exceptional properties of graphene. But rather than artificially stacking and twisting layers, they have looked for interesting behavior in naturally occurring graphene structures. In recent years, they have unearthed surprising electronic properties in rhombohedral graphene. This particular configuration consists of graphene layers stacked on top of each other, each one slightly offset from the last, similar to the steps in a staircase. 

Rhombohedral graphene can be found naturally in ordinary graphite. But to find it first requires exfoliating a block of graphite (usually with Scotch tape), then searching the exfoliated sample for the telltale staircase-like pattern, which researchers can then isolate for further experimentation. 

Using this approach, Ju and his colleagues have been able to isolate and probe samples of four- and five-layer rhombohedral graphene. They have so far discovered that the structure can host a rare, “chiral” form of superconductivity, as well as fractional electron charge, among other behavior. 

In the flow

For their new study, the team took a slightly different approach in studying rhombohedral graphene. Previously, they electrically “doped” their samples, progressively adding electrons as they passed a separate electric current into the material. They then measured the voltage, or essentially the force that pushes the current through the material, and looked for instances when the voltage dropped to zero, indicating that the current was passing through without resistance.

In this way, the team has observed superconductivity when adding electrons to rhombohedral graphene. So they wondered: What might happen if they did the opposite, and took electrons away? 

In their new study, the team looked for signs of superconductivity as they carefully removed electrons from rhombohedral graphene, progressively lowering the material’s electron density, as they applied a separate, external electric current to measure the electrical resistance. In these experiments, they also applied external magnetic field along directions parallel and perpendicular to the graphene plane. These experiments were carried out in collaboration with Zumbuhl’s group in Switzerland, who provided access to a laboratory setup in which graphene samples could be exposed to high magnetic fields and ultracold temperatures. 

In these experiments, the researchers found that at certain electron densities, four different superconducting states emerged. What’s more, three of the states persisted in the presence of a relatively high magnetic field. 

Normally, magnets destroy superconductivity by severing the bond between the paired electrons gliding through the material. 

But in Ju’s experiments, the team observed three superconducting states that survived in a magnetic field up to around 9 tesla, which is about 180,000 times stronger than the Earth’s magnetic field. In these instances, the magnetic field they applied was in a parallel orientation with respect to the plane of the material. When they switched the magnetic field to a perpendicular orientation, they discovered another surprise: At a certain electron density, superconductivity not only persisted, but increased. The material was able to continue superconducting, at higher temperatures than predicted. 

Every superconducting material has a critical temperature below which electrons can conduct without resistance, and above which superconductivity cannot persist. But the team found that, at a certain electron density, and in the presence of a perpendicular magnetic field, superconductivity in rhombohedral graphene was able to survive beyond the material’s critical temperature that corresponds to zero magnetic field. 

“The superconductivity actually is enhanced, as in, the transition temperature goes from 55 millikelvin to probably 90 millikelvin,” Ju explains. “At the same time, the material can take another 50 or 60 percent extra current before superconductivity gets destroyed. And that is very unusual.”

The researchers are unsure of what microscopic behavior is enabling multiple and unconventional superconducting states, though they propose one idea. Conventional superconductivity emerges when electrons pair up. These “Cooper pairs” consist of electrons with opposite spin, and it’s thought that a magnetic field can pull the spins out of their opposite configurations, and as a result, break up superconductivity. 

Instead, the team proposes that perhaps in rhombohedral graphene, and at certain electron densities, electrons can pair up with aligned spins. Any magnetic field would still pull on the spins, but in the same direction, preserving their alignment, and their superconductivity. 

The researchers acknowledge that the idea needs much more investigation, both experimentally and theoretically. For now, they see the results as a demonstration of what new and exotic phenomena can emerge in a seemingly simple material, with the right measurements and controls. 

“We can control the simplest of chemicals — carbon — and structurally alter the material, which is part of our fun,” says lead author Junseok Seo, who is a graduate student in Ju’s group. “We’re not only dealing with what nature gives us, but we’re applying additional controls to change it to something that nature does not give us, but that can exist in the same material.”

This work was supported, in part, by the U.S. Office of Naval Research. Device fabrication was carried out, in part, at MIT.nano.

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Students from across the Northeast step inside MIT.nano’s cleanroom

“Illuminating.” “Spectacular.” “Compelling.” This is how community college students described the two days they spent at MIT.nano learning about the complex tools inside the cleanroom and building and packaging their own functional photonic chips.

“Integrated photonics is an essential part of semiconductor packaging today,” says Anu Agarwal, principal research scientist in the Materials Research Laboratory at MIT. “But there is no single, standardized university curriculum for integrated electronics-photonics packaging. We need to create educational materials to teach this subject across the talent pipeline from K-12 and beyond, which is exactly what we’re doing at the Initiative for Knowledge and Innovation in Manufacturing (IKIM) and MIT.nano.”

As leader of the Lab for Education and Application Prototypes (LEAP) facility located on MIT.nano’s fifth floor, Agarwal stresses the importance of hands-on learning when studying integrated photonics, the science of guiding and manipulating light on a semiconductor chip. Through the Northeast Consortia for Advanced Integrated Silicon Technologies (NCAIST) program, she’s bringing community and four-year college students to MIT.nano for experimental boot camps that teach how to use semiconductor tools for electronic-photonic packaging and testing.

“Having a workforce skilled in resource-efficient semiconductor manufacturing, including electronic-photonic packaging, is critical to maintain the exponential growth of the chip industry and build national security,” says Agarwal. “MIT.nano, through programs like NCAIST, are helping to train more people in STEM.”

Working closely with AIM Photonics, a U.S. Manufacturing Innovation Institute, NCAIST coordinates and accelerates the transition of technician education content and teaching methodologies from key AIM-affiliated U.S. universities to community, technical, and four-year colleges in the Northeast. Through NCAIST, in Massachusetts, the Massachusetts Bay Community College (MBCC) is paired with MIT, North Shore Community College (NSCC) with Stonehill College, and Springfield Technical Community College (STCC) with Western New England University.

“The NCAIST program offers a transformative opportunity for our community college students to experience hands-on training at MIT.nano’s LEAP facility,” says Marina Bograd, professor and chair of the engineering department at MassBay Community College. “For many of them, this is their first time stepping into a cleanroom or seeing semiconductor manufacturing up close. The experience helps open doors that might otherwise feel out of reach, builds confidence, and inspires our students to see themselves pursuing careers in emerging technologies.”

The most recent MIT.nano boot camp, held on May 20-21, expanded participation to include not only those from MBCC, but also students from NSCC, Stonehill College, and SUNY Polytechnic Institute, where NCAIST is headquartered. Twelve students spent two full days at MIT.nano operating a die saw, die bonder, wire bonder, and flip chip tool to build and test a packaged chip.

“I found the combination of hands-on activities, lectures, and informal discussion with the MIT.nano team and fellow students fostered an awesome learning environment,” says Cari Caudill, a student at NSCC. “As a mechanical engineering student, I was most interested in packaging and the machines themselves, so I loved getting direct experience with the tools and discussing with our instructors how procedural and technological development has impacted precision, efficiency, and scalability in the semiconductor industry.”

"The NCAIST boot camp was an exciting and illuminating experience!” adds MassBay Community College student Wyatt Maurer. “I really appreciated getting the chance to work with semiconductor manufacturing tools and to learn about the future of photonics from leaders in the field.”

Students attended lectures on cleanroom safety by Kristofor Payer, assistant director of operations at MIT.nano; electronic-photonic packaging by Agarwal; and photonic integrated circuit sensing by Department of Materials Science and Engineering graduate student Lizzie Gower. They were also offered virtual reality (VR) simulation exercises by Sajan Saini, the director of education at IKIM, to help build intuition about photonic devices and semiconductor packaging tools. These VR simulations serve as a foundational tool to help students visualize photonic devices and complex tool mechanics, as well as run digital process steps and deepen their technical understanding. By bridging physical fabrication with advanced simulation resources, the LEAP students are mastering highly specialized manufacturing, assembly, and testing pipelines required to build the future of electronic-photonic integration.

“The experience at this boot camp not only strengthens our student technical skills, it helps them see themselves as future contributors to a rapidly evolving field,” says Mary Beth Steigerwald, professor and engineering department chair at North Shore Community College. “It also enriches their professional portfolios and gives them a stronger, more compelling story to share during internship and transfer interviews.”

The students will use this training to secure summer internships at hard technology companies. Several have also been accepted to four-year degree programs to continue their education in the fall.

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Past participants are now the leaders of MIT’s dynaMIT Club

Every summer for the past 13 years, students in MIT’s club dynaMIT have taught STEM principles to Boston-area middle school students at no cost, all in an effort to inspire the next generation of innovators.

In August, dynaMIT will welcome two cohorts of budding scientists and engineers to campus. First, 40 middle schoolers in grades 6–7 will dive into hands-on STEM learning through creative activities like solar s'mores and paper rockets. The following week, another 40 students in grades 8–9 will join in, exploring innovative experiments that spark curiosity and creative problem-solving. Each day, a new topic is covered, exposing attendees to chemistry, machine learning, physics, math, biology, and earth and space science.

Several of the program's attendees have gone on to apply and be accepted to MIT, including the club’s co-director, Dominique Dang. When the Quincy, Massachusetts, native saw the club’s table at the Midway Fair, she knew she wanted to join to give back.

“I didn’t receive a lot of STEM exposure in middle school, but then I saw online about the STEM program offered by dynaMIT, and I was really interested. I had so much fun, and it introduced me to creating things, and not just reading about them in a textbook. I knew I wanted to be a scientist, but I didn’t know what type of science I wanted to study, so having dynaMIT expose me to a different STEM topic each day was a transformative experience,” says Dang, who is now studying computer science and molecular biology.

Megan Zhu, the club’s other co-director, was immediately drawn to the organization’s educational mission. A biology major with plans to pursue an MD/PhD program, Zhu is passionate about advancing science education and aspires to teach at the university level upon completing her degree.

“I happened to stop by the dynaMIT table at the club fair, and it seemed really cool. I spoke to a couple of the club leaders, and they talked about how they help support education in the Boston area. Education has always been something that I was passionate about in my hometown in Rapid City, South Dakota, and I wanted to emphasize giving back to the community,” says Zhu.

Lukeman Nouri, who grew up in Saugus, Massachusetts, attended dynaMIT as a sixth grader. “I barely knew what MIT was, or even what STEM meant, so I wasn't particularly excited to go. However, that changed after the very first day of the program! I remember extracting DNA from a strawberry, making elephant toothpaste, and gathering fingerprints from various surfaces. However, my biggest highlight was learning Scratch and creating my very first game,” says Nouri, who is majoring in computer science and engineering. “After dynaMIT, MIT became my dream college, and I spent the next six years learning more about STEM and MIT.”

Erick Liang, who grew up in Boston’s Chinatown and Roslindale neighborhoods and is now majoring in nuclear science and engineering and physics, had a similar experience after attending dynaMIT. “As a first-generation, low-income student, having a meaningful and engaging program like dynaMIT to participate in over the summer was really important for me. DynaMIT exposed me to different fields of science I had not encountered yet in elementary or middle school and helped spark my interest in STEM,” says Liang.

Zhu says this year they are adding a new activity related to climate change and clean water that they hope will create an interest in these two important areas. “This summer, one of our activities is called Sponge City. It’s about runoff water and clean, reusable water. We’ll have the students build a city that can withstand a storm. They will be given a budget and have to decide how to spend the resources after we pour water all over the tray containing their city — all in an effort to show them how important climate change and clean drinking water are.”

The club is also partnering with the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT and will tour lab space and work on a fun experiment about cell heterogeneity and cancer tumor formation. Attendees will then be able to talk to scientists and ask them questions.

“I’m looking forward to giving this cohort the same great experience that I had six summers ago. DynaMIT was so much fun, and I learned so much from it that I feel a responsibility to help make it just as impactful for future students,” says Nouri.

Liang adds, “I am excited to return and help set up the plasma demo kits for the program’s physics day!”

“It’s a great full-circle moment,” says Dang. “That’s just one of the reasons why I joined the club.”

“Watching the students work on the activities is always the most rewarding part of the two weeks, and that makes the entire year of planning worth it,” says Zhu, adding, “the club is also an excellent community at MIT.”

Students interested in joining dynaMIT or volunteering for this summer’s program can find more information on the club’s website.

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LLMs help robots understand vague instructions and focus on key details

Imagine working at a warehouse or office sometime in the near future, and you’re asked to help a new trainee learn the basics of their job. The catch: It’s a robot. To teach them, you might want to play a game of “show and tell” — that is, physically showing how to do something a few different ways, while also explaining what you’re doing.

Let’s say you asked the robot to place some coffee on your desk without disturbing you during a Zoom call. You’ll prefer that the robot doesn’t get too close to you and the laptop so that it doesn’t interrupt your meeting. To enable this behavior, the robot should be trained with data that clearly demonstrates the full task. Computer scientists have attempted to explain manipulation tasks to robots by recording lots of physical demonstrations or writing extensive directions. But if you don’t have both, the machine is likely to misunderstand what it needs to do.

It’s laborious for humans to do all that showing and telling, so researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have automated the process of teaching a robot, while clarifying instructions automatically and using nearly five times less demonstration data. Their “Masked Inverse Reinforcement Learning” (Masked IRL) approach uses a large language model (LLM) to elaborate on ambiguous prompts based on the data collected from a user’s demo. Another LLM then narrows down which details an algorithm should incorporate into a motion plan, so that a robot can safely complete chores in homes, offices, and factories.

“Our approach could come in handy when a human interacts with a robot but doesn’t want to spell out all the details of a task,” says MIT PhD student and CSAIL researcher Minyoung Hwang, who is a lead author on a paper presenting the project. “We’re minimizing human effort by enabling machines to get to the bottom of what users really want.”

According to Hwang, Masked IRL can help robots safely maneuver in settings where there are elements a human might not describe in a prompt, but that are crucial nonetheless. For example, a machine grabbing you a snack from the kitchen may not know to avoid bumping into your laptop. Likewise, a factory robot placing items into different boxes must carefully navigate around shelves.

To learn new tasks in these situations, Masked IRL uses the robot’s sensors to capture information about its surroundings. These components also log each movement of a kinesthetic demonstration — a training approach where a human physically moves a robot to do a specific action. It’s sort of like being the machine’s physical therapist, bending joints in a particular direction to show a robot how to grab, move, and place objects.

MIT’s system then calls on an LLM to compare this sequence of motions (called a trajectory) to the shortest possible path. The model also elaborates on what might be unclear in a prompt, turning a request like “stay close” into “stay close to the surface of the table.” Using the trajectory comparison and clarified directions, the LLM begins to understand why the motions it was trained on are important to the task. 

A second LLM then evaluates details of the environment, such as the position of obstacles and the shape of the robot’s target object. During this process, it “masks” (in other words, ignores) the elements it deems irrelevant to the task at hand, scoring each one as either a “1” (important) or “0” (not so much). For example, whether or not a user was leaning on a table during a demonstration would be a “0,” making it irrelevant. Any detail considered a “1” is incorporated into the final action plan by an algorithm.

These masks gave Masked IRL a key advantage over comparable baselines in both 3D and real-world demos because it taught a robot which information to prioritize. Thanks to the researchers’ system, virtual and real robots alike were able to skillfully maneuver objects around obstacles, such as moving a coffee mug around a laptop to different spots on a table. In these tasks, Masked IRL correctly identified users’ preferences, which they didn’t explicitly state in their prompts, up to 15 percent more often than comparable baselines.

During simulation experiments, CSAIL researchers also found that Masked IRL was a fast learner. It required fewer demos to understand how to move the mug than its baselines. They also found that the robots performed better when an LLM cleared up instructions, instead of having the machine try to follow a vague request.

This more focused approach also translated well to a real robotic arm, executing prompts the system hadn’t seen during its training phase. After being trained on 50 kinesthetic demonstrations, the robot carefully moved a cup toward a human while avoiding colliding with a user’s computer — an obstacle it learned to avoid by elaborating on a more general request to “stay away.” It also wiped a table down while “staying close” to it, and handed a user a bag of chips while “staying away” from both a human and a table.

Masked IRL senses and explains what users leave unsaid, but soon, it might “see” it too. CSAIL researchers plan to make their approach more dynamic by equipping it with cameras, allowing a robot to take images of its surroundings. Then it could highlight and focus on specific elements nearby. For example, if you asked the machine to pick up a toy, it might see some bananas nearby and ignore them before handling its target object.

Hwang wrote the paper with three CSAIL colleagues: PhD student Alexandra Forsey-Smerek ’20, SM ’22; postdoc Nathaniel Dennler; and MIT Assistant Professor Andreea Bobu, who is a member of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and CSAIL. Their work was supported, in part, by the Tata Group via the MIT Generative AI Impact Consortium Award, and the Department of Defense. They’ll present the project at the 2026 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in June.

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Listening for the echoes of black holes

Black holes are often misunderstood to be just that: dark and mysterious voids that are somehow akin to Alice in Wonderland’s mind-bending rabbit hole. 

But rather than a tunnel of nothing, a black hole is actually something — and a lot of it. The densest objects in the universe, black holes exert tremendous gravitational pull, gathering in the surrounding fabric of space and time, and generating huge disks of matter that whirl toward a black hole before falling in, past the point of no return. 

In recent years, as astronomers have been able to train more telescopes on the sky, for longer stretches of time, they have captured a surprising range of black hole behavior.

“It used to be that we didn’t have eyes on systems all the time,” says Erin Kara, an associate professor of physics at MIT. “Now we’re seeing that they can turn on and off at rates that are much faster than we ever thought possible. We see things are getting sucked in toward black holes faster than we thought, perhaps due to stars whipping around and getting trapped in a black hole’s accretion disk.”

Kara and her group in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrphysics and Space Research are at the forefront of black hole physics. She is using data from telescopes in space and on the ground to study the properties of black holes, especially supermassive black holes — the ultradense giants at the centers of galaxies. Supermassive black holes are the engines of galaxy formation. Kara, who recently earned tenure at MIT, seeks to connect the extreme physics of black holes with how galaxies such as our own Milky Way come to be.

“It’s amazing that we as humans can know anything about what’s happening billions of light years away,” Kara says. “There’s a lot of new open puzzles about supermassive black holes that I’m excited about.” 

Early impact

Kara was born and raised in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, as the youngest of four. Her mother was a nurse, and her father a doctor, so it felt only natural for Kara to follow their lead. She set out on a premed track at Barnard College of Columbia University. As part of the program that first year, she took an introductory physics class and was instantly drawn to the subject’s concrete, fundamental descriptions of the physical world, from the quantum to cosmic scales. 

“Physics was always the class that explained things at the ground level,” Kara recalls. “And I thought, wow, this is cool. I have to keep going with this.”

In class, she kept asking questions and wanting to know more. Her professor, astronomer Reshmi Mukherjee, took note and invited Kara to join her research group as a summer intern. The team would be working on new data from a telescope that was readying for launch. That summer, in June 2008, NASA launched the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope into low-Earth orbit, with the purpose of surveying the sky for sources of gamma rays — high-energy radiation that is produced by black holes, neutron stars, and other extreme astrophysical objects. 

When the telescope started sending back data, Mukherjee assigned Kara a project: to characterize two of the telescope’s unidentified gamma-ray signals. Both signals were bright, and the question was whether they came from nearby, within the Milky Way galaxy, or much further away. If the latter was the case, it would mean the sources were possibly quasars — a type of extremely active supermassive black hole that at the time was a rarity in astronomy observations. 

Kara got to work on the data and soon confirmed that both sources were indeed quasars. 

“It was a small discovery, but it felt awesome,” Kara says. “And I love that about astronomy, that there are so many unanswered questions, and even early on in your career, you can make an impact.”

Needless to say, Kara caught the astronomy bug, and soon opted to switch from premed to physics, though the new path was not always smooth. On Barnard’s all-women’s campus, introductory classes in physics were small, and professors were encouraging and approachable. In contrast, upper-level courses were held at Columbia, where Kara was one of a much larger, co-ed cohort. 

“It’s a very unique experience to be with all women in a physics environment, and then to see how my feelings about my own abilities changed, just based on the environment,” Kara reflects. “I went to Columbia and all of a sudden felt like I couldn’t do this. All these guys were much more confident and outwardly understanding of the material. In the end, I did well there too. And that juxtaposition helped me gain confidence and know, yeah, I belong here.”

Black hole reverb

After graduating with a major in physics and a minor in art history, Kara went abroad, to the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge University. She earned a scholarship there to pursue a one-year master’s degree in physics, but she ended up staying to complete a PhD on a topic that was just starting to grow roots: black hole X-ray reverberation. 

In 2009, her thesis advisor, Andy Fabian, and his team were looking through archival data from an X-ray telescope and noticed curious time delays in signals coming from around a black hole. They interpreted the signals as X-ray echoes, or reverberations. It was the first evidence of X-ray echoes around a black hole, and it helped to resolve a debate in the field over the source of the radiation. 

Her advisor determined that the reverb was a result of X-rays generated from the black hole’s corona — a crown-shaped aura of high-energy radiation immediately surrounding the black hole — that then bounced, or reverberated, off the swirling disk of gas and dust that circles a black hole, known as an accretion disk. 

“They had only found these echoes in one black hole. But the archive was full of data of these reverberation signals that no one had analyzed in this particular way,” Kara explains. “So I had my whole PhD to kind of play with this archive, and it felt very discovery-driven.”

Since that initial exploration, Kara has worked to advance the study of X-ray reverberation as a technique to map regions around black holes and other extreme astrophysical objects. 

A pivotal disruption

After earning a PhD in physics, Kara returned to the U.S. for postdoctoral work at the University of Maryland and NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. She intended to work on data from a new satellite, Hitomi — a Japanese mission that would detect far-off X-rays to help scientists map the large-scale structure and evolution of the universe. After 40 days, the scientists lost control of the satellite, which ultimately began spinning uncontrollably and broke apart in orbit. Before it failed, the telescope sent back one clean signal.

“It got one really good observation, which was unlike any spectrum we had ever seen before,” Kara recalls. 

The data confirmed that the satellite’s detector — a microcalorimeter that was developed at NASA — was sound. That technology is now at the heart of Hitomi’s successor, the X-ray Imaging and Spectroscopy Mission, or XRISM, which has been successfully taking data since its launch in 2023. Today, Kara leads a science group as part of the XRISM mission to analyze X-ray signals from supermassive black holes. 

Back then, however, with the end of Hitomi, she had to pivot. She started working with a new group at NASA Goddard that was gearing up for the launch of another telescope — the Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer, or NICER. In 2017, the telescope, which was developed and built by MIT researchers, was launched and attached to the International Space Station, where it measured the timing of incoming X-rays from astrophysical sources in deep space. 

The group Kara joined was analyzing NICER data for signs of tidal disruption events, which are instances when a black hole tears apart a nearby star. This was some of her earliest work on these dynamic sources, and she has since incorporated tidal disruption events — and data from NICER — as a main research area. 

At the hub

In 2019, Kara accepted a junior faculty position in MIT’s Department of Physics — a decision that to her was a “no-brainer.” 

“X-ray astronomy has its history at MIT,” Kara says. “Bruno Rossi, Hale Bradt, George Clark, Claude Canizares — it all started here. It was always a place that felt like a hub. And that was the draw.”

Today, she and her students regularly analyze data from various satellites and telescopes such as XRISM and NICER to better understand black holes and how they grow, evolve, and affect the galaxies around them. She continues to advance X-ray reverberation mapping, which has helped scientists map the extreme regions immediately surrounding a black hole. Her group is also studying signals from other extreme X-ray sources, including tidal disruption events, quasiperiodic eruptions, and galactic black hole outbursts. 

Kara also plans to explore data from future observatories, including the Ultraviolet Transiet Astronomy Satellite (ULTRASAT), which will continuously scan the entire sky for hot, ultraviolet sources; and the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), a space telescope that will detect low-frequency gravitational waves from sources such as pairs of lopsided, David-and-Goliath black holes. 

And she’s also found time for a bit of black hole fun: In 2022, Kara collaborated with educators and music anthropologists at MIT to convert a black hole’s X-ray echoes to audible sound. As a musician herself — she sings and plays the violin — she was curious how a black hole’s cosmic energy might “sound.” The effect was otherworldly, to say the least. 

“One of the reasons that I love black holes is that they are very extreme, and feel very sci-fi crazy, and things don’t make sense, and physics breaks down around them. And at the same time, they’re super foundational to even why we’re here,” Kara says. “For reasons we don’t fully understand, the distribution of stars and gas and dust in a galaxy is dictated in part by the supermassive black hole at its center. Our sun is one of those stars. It’s all intertwined. And untangling some of that is what motivates me.”

de MIT News https://ift.tt/8VmIH16

MIT in the media: Exploring how curiosity-driven science is an essential ingredient in America’s success

Over the past 80 years, America’s bold, sustained investment in scientific research, and the discoveries, ideas and innovations that flowed from it made America a world leader. The nation’s scientific leadership has been essential to our shared prosperity and national security, and delivered real benefits for all Americans.

On June 16, Scientific American released a special section, “The Young American Scientists,” which celebrates early-career professionals actively engaged in scientific research, and features commentary from MIT faculty on why they continue to be so devoted to curiosity-driven science, demonstrating how their hard work and dedication make Americans safer, healthier, and more prosperous. Among the section’s profiles are many MIT faculty, students, and alumni, who share their advice for young scientists and their reasons for optimism in uncertain times.

President Sally Kornbluth emphasizes the importance of curiosity-driven research, noting that discovery “is part of our American DNA and has yielded vast returns to the citizens of this country and the world.” She adds, “what’s needed is a rededication to public investment in American science. Even if I were not the leader of a premier scientific institution, this is what I’d say. Investing in American science is not a gamble; if you look back in time, there is no question about the benefits.”

Adds Institute Prof. Robert Langer: “What American science has done over the past 50, 100 years has been remarkable.”

Scientific American notes that at MIT, that commitment to discovery is reflected in initiatives such as Curiosity on a Mission and the Generative AI Impact Consortium, which are aimed at finding “solutions to real-world problems in a way that is beneficial to society.” “On one hand, we’re at a time, technologically, where things could not be more exciting [and] our science [could not be] more cutting-edge. At the same time, we’ve never seen a situation where people felt so uncertain about the continuity of science funding, particularly when it comes to the basic discovery science that fuels the economy and will fuel societal impact a decade or two from now,” says Kornbluth.

The first sparks

Witnessing invention can spark a lifelong fascination with science. After the launch of Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite, Prof. Alan Lightman “became entranced with the idea of building a rocket” of his own. In his essay “My childhood in science,” Lightman describes how these early scientific memories and experiments have shaped him to be a well-rounded writer and physicist.

“Now more than ever, when much of the world, including the U.S., has lost its moral compass, leading to a dog-eat-dog mentality, we need science combined with literature, philosophy, history and art. We need to discover not only the physical world but also our own humanity,” writes Lightman.

Likewise, Prof. John Urschel, a former NFL player, emphasizes the importance of collaboration and having a wide range of interests. 

“A lot of good research happens when people can draw on tools, techniques and insights from different areas, disciplines and even fields. I hope we can encourage promising young scientists to establish strong, broad backgrounds and to communicate frequently with those outside their particular areas,” says Urschel.

Invention and discovery

Scientific American highlights students and alumni looking to better the world by doing everything from investigating neurological disease to securing our energy future. 

At MIT, Visiting Scientist Alice Stanton developed miBrain, a 3D tissue model of the human brain, to help scientists develop personalized treatments for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Stanton has developed a miniature version of miBrain, a brain-on-a-chip, to better test therapeutics.

Stanton notes “the road to effective treatments is long and bumpy,” compounded by cuts to federal funding. “When we have a loved one who gets sick, we want a treatment—we want something to cure them. It doesn’t come out of thin air,” she explains.

Bob Mumgaard PhD ‘08, CEO of Commonwealth Fusion Systems is working to commercialize fusion power. “Whether in areas such as fusion—or in drugs by design for diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s or in [the creation of] materials we never thought possible—our ability to use new tools to tackle some of these big, meaty problems is super exciting,” Mumgaard emphasizes. 

Graduate student Alex Zhang tackles context rot: the phenomenon when AI language models degrade as they produce more information. To solve this issue, Zhang develops recursive language models (RLMs) that enable the model to work with itself to reevaluate reasoning.

“The types of research that I want to work on are things that I think should be shared for the benefit of people in general,” says Zhang. 

The benefits of scientific collaboration 

What happens when scientific disciplines join forces at MIT?

Prof. Emery Brown highlighted the MIT Health and Life Sciences Collaborative (HEALS), noting that the effort brings together scientists and engineers from a variety of backgrounds to tackle the most pressing health challenges of our times.  

Brown explains that with President Kornbluth’s support, HEALS encourages “faculty to look more deeply into solving health care problems. The enthusiasm for HEALS has been contagious across the campus.”  

MIT alumna Lucy Jones PhD ‘81, who is known for her work advancing public safety during earthquakes and for developing the first American earthquake drill called the Great ShakeOut, shared the necessity of collaboration in developing scientific solutions for pressing real-world problems.

 “Solutions have to be done in collaboration, which means spending time with policymakers,” says Jones. 

Jones also shares how scientific advances in computing have helped make Americans around the country safer when the ground starts to shake.

“My first year in grad school, I was reading paper seismograms. Now everything is computerized. We used to do field deployments; now we have permanent networks. We’re starting to use fiber‑optic cables as seismometers,” says Jones. “Computers have changed everything, including science.”

The state of American science 

Within the profiles, interviewees were asked what needs to change in American science right now. Many expressed concerns with federal funding. 

“I’m fortunate to work with extraordinary students and postdocs, but the infrastructure that lets them do their best work is under real stress: funding instability at the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, immigration uncertainty for international scientists and an erosion of public trust in expertise,” says Prof. Feng Zhang.

Zhang developed CRISPR-based genome editing tools, which could increase our understanding human diseases and lead to new treatments. “We can lose the lead rapidly if we do not protect our innovation ecosystem,” he says.

Positive developments include the progress Prof. Alan Guth has witnessed in cosmology. 

“With new techniques, we’re able to unravel, to make sense out of, what we’re observing,” says Guth. “A lot of progress has been made on those lines, so in terms of the physics of the field, I think things are going great. But to me, the real problem is the prospects for future funding.”

Langer shares his faith in the durability and strength of America’s science and innovation ecosystem. 

“I look at the history of American innovation and education over the past 250 years, and it’s been spectacular,” says Langer. “Plenty of times there’ve been setbacks. We’ve had world wars, you know, we’ve had depressions, and people keep persisting and keep learning. They keep discovering and they keep inventing. So that gives me a lot of cause for hope. This is not the worst time by any means.”

de MIT News https://ift.tt/KRsy6YJ

Summer 2026 recommended reading from MIT

Summer is the perfect time to curl up with a good book — and MIT authors have had much to offer in the past year. The following titles represent a selection of books published in the past 12 months by MIT faculty and staff.

Looking for more literary works from the MIT community? Enjoy our book lists from 2025,  2024, 2023, 2022, and 2021.

Happy reading!

Fiction and poetry

“We (the People of the United States)” (Penguin Books, 2026)
By Joshua Bennett, the Distinguished Chair of the Humanities at MIT and professor of literature

Bennett marks the 250th anniversary of the founding of the U.S. with a book-length work of poetry about the country and some of its distinctive figures. The piece features remarkable people or inventions from each of the 50 states, meditating on their place in the nation’s cultural fabric.

“The Race for Daphne” (Finishing Line Press, 2026)
By Sarah C. Beckmann, communications and marketing associate in the MIT Media Lab

A poetry collection structured as a crew race exploring girlhood, womanhood, and motherhood through the experiences of a rower and writer. These poems subvert the historical dominance of male heroes by celebrating ordinary female heroism, while examining love, home, and what it means to be an American woman today.

“Jezelle: Thief of Forks” (Self-published, 2026)
By Scott Austin Tirrell, director of administration and finance in the Art, Technology, and Culture Program

Abandoned by her father and raised by the streets of Grafton Notch, Jezelle survives by trusting no one. When a strange magic awakens within her, it offers more than escape — it offers power. But in a city that preys on broken children, power makes her valuable, dangerous, and hunted. To claim the life stolen from her, Jezelle must decide what she is willing to become.

Science and Engineering

“Phenomenal Moments: Revealing the Hidden Science Around Us” (Candlewick Press, 2025)
By Felice Frankel, research scientist in the Department of Chemical Engineering

Enlisting readers to “be the scientist” through vivid fine-art photographs, science photographer Felice Frankel zooms in and out on beautiful and brilliant moments all around us to reveal the chemical, natural, or physical processes — from viscosity and venation to chlorophyll and capillary action — behind scientific phenomena.

“Syntax: A Cognitive Approach” (MIT Press, 2025)
By Edward A. F. Gibson, professor of brain and cognitive sciences

This book lays out the grammar of a language from the perspective of a cognitive scientist, outlining the components of language structure and the model of syntax that Gibson advocates: dependency grammar, in which a word is connected to another word via a dependency arc to form a larger compositional meaning. This formalism can explain numerous aspects of word order universals across languages.

“Birds Up Close: An Engineer Explores Their Hidden Wonders” (MIT Press, 2026)
By Lorna J. Gibson, professor post-tenure in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering 

A renowned engineer and lifelong birder, Gibson explores the hidden microscopic structures and engineering principles that keep birds aloft and alive — how an egg forms, how a bird generates lift, how woodpeckers safely drill their holes, and much more. She also considers the longer view of birds in their habitats and natural history. Her up-close look at avian mysteries provides a perspective like no other, for the expert ornithologist and curious observer alike.

“Carbon Renewal” (MIT Press, 2025)
By Howard J. Herzog, senior research engineer at the MIT Energy Initiative, and Niall Mac Dowell

In “Carbon Renewal,” Herzog and MacDowell discuss how technology and policy can come together to help us reach “net-zero” climate targets. The authors explore the rapidly evolving world of carbon dioxide removal (CDR), presenting the technological pathways of enhancing the land sink, biomass-based carbon capture and storage, engineered removal methods, and ocean-based carbon removal. They also discuss barriers facing CDR as well as ethical implications of this process. 

“Climate Change, Drinking Water Security, and Public Health: Global Challenges and Solutions” (Springer Nature, 2026)
Chapters by Libby Hsu, associate director of academics at MIT D-Lab

In her chapter, “Drinking Water Status Around the World and Its Effect on Health,” Hsu discusses the Earth’s water resources, which are found in a variety of settings. In her chapter, “Waterless and Low-Water Sanitation Technologies that Improve Quality of Life and Conserve Water Resources,” she shares her experience with sanitation challenges in the Global South and how that has reinforced the value of waterless and low-water sanitation technologies that are suitable for scaling around the world.

“A Pox on Fools: The True Believers, Grifters, and Cynics Who Convinced Us to Reject Vaccines” (Penguin Random House, 2026)
By Thomas Levenson, professor of science writing in MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing

In his latest book, Levenson searches for the origins of the most common arguments against vaccines: that they are unnatural; that they are more dangerous than the illnesses they claim to prevent; and that they are an affront to freedom. “A Pox on Fools” explores the human impulse to question and wonder — sometimes past the point at which the very act of questioning turns deadly.

“The Shape of Wonder: How Scientists Think, Work, and Live” (Penguin Random House, 2025)
By Alan Lightman, professor of the practice of the humanities in MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing, and Martin Rees

Lightman and Rees pull back the curtain on the field of science, revealing that scientists are driven by the same sense of curiosity, wonder, and responsibility toward a future that shapes us all. They guide us through the fascinating lives and minds of scientists around the world and throughout time, and provide an inside peek at what makes scientists tick — their daily lives, passions, and concerns about the societies they live in.

“Uncertainty in Climate Change Research: An Integrated Approach” (Springer Nature, 2025)
Chapter by Jennifer Morris, principal research scientist at the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy and the MIT Energy Initiative, and John Reilly, senior lecturer in the MIT Sloan School of Management

Understanding future emissions scenarios is essential for preparing for climate change. The chapter “Emissions and Concentration Scenarios” examines how socioeconomic uncertainty contributes to overall climate change projections, and identifies key drivers of greenhouse gas emissions. It reviews the history of emissions scenarios and compares various approaches, including IPCC methods and formal uncertainty analysis techniques. The chapter concludes with lessons learned from over 40 years of socioeconomic scenario development for climate research.

“The Headache: The Science of a Most Confounding Affliction — and a Search for Relief” (Harper Collins, 2025)
By Tom Zeller Jr., managing editor of Undark, published by the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT

From blinding migraines to severe headache disorders known as “clusters,” chronic head pain affects 40 percent of the population, many of them suffering in silence. Finally, “The Headache” reveals the science behind a group of disorders that is as much a curse as a cultural punchline, and leads to key insights into the nature of pain itself. Guided by his own decades-long struggle with cluster headaches, Zeller’s journey into headache science is at once intimate and panoramic.

Culture, humanities, and social sciences

“The People Can Fly: American Promise, Black Prodigies, and the Greatest Miracle of All Time” (Little, Brown, and Company, 2026)
By Joshua Bennett, the Distinguished Chair of the Humanities at MIT and professor of literature

In this work, Bennett offers a series of profiles, carefully wrought to see how some prominent figures were able to flourish from childhood forward. He closely reads their works for indications about how they understood the shape of their own lives. In so doing, Bennett underscores the significance of the social settings that prodigious talents grow up in. He also offers reflections on his own career trajectory and encounters with these artists, driving home their influence and meaning.

“Thinking Historically: A Guide to Statecraft and Strategy” (Yale University Press, 2025)
By Francis J. Gavin, research affiliate of the MIT Security Studies Program 

It seems obvious that we should use history to improve policy. If we have a good understanding of the past, it should enable better decisions in the present, especially in the highly consequential worlds of statecraft and strategy. But how do we gain that knowledge? How should history be used? In this book, Gavin explains the many ways historical knowledge can help us understand and navigate the complex, often confusing world around us. 

“The Economic Consequences of the Second Trump Administration: A Preliminary Assessment” (Centre for Economic Policy Research, 2025)
Edited by Gary Gensler, professor of the practice of global economics and management and finance in the MIT Sloan School of Management; Simon Johnson, the Ronald A. Kurtz (1954) Professor of Entrepreneurship and professor of global economics and management at MIT Sloan; Ugo Panizza; and Beatrice Weder di Mauro

How might the economic and geopolitical positions of the Trump administration affect growth, trade, investment, inflation, stability, and the role of the U.S. dollar? This volume offers evidence-based, expert analysis to help decision makers understand the impact of tariffs, breaks in global alliances, government downsizing, deregulation, threats to the rule of law, and more.

“The Colony and the Company: Haiti after the Mississippi Bubble” (Princeton University Press, 2025)
By Malick W. Ghachem, professor of history

Many things account for Haiti’s modern troubles. A good perspective on them comes from going back in time to 1715 or so — and grappling with a far-flung narrative involving the French monarchy, a financial speculator named John Law, and a stock-market crash called the “Mississippi Bubble.” In "The Colony and the Company," Ghachem examines the economic transformations and multi-sided power struggles of that time.

“Retrench, Defend, Compete: Securing America’s Future Against a Rising China” (Cornell University Press, 2025)
By Charles L. Glaser, senior fellow in the MIT Security Studies Program 

Many believe China’s ascent will drive it to war with the United States. Yet this is far from inevitable; geography and nuclear weapons should ensure U.S. security. The real danger, Glaser contends, lies in East Asia’s territorial disputes, especially over Taiwan. To reduce the risk of war, Glaser makes a bold case for ending U.S. security commitments to Taiwan and carefully calibrating its policies on protecting South China Sea maritime features. 

“Trade in War: Economic Cooperation Across Enemy Lines” (Cornell University Press, 2025)
By Mariya Grinberg, associate professor of political science and MIT Security Studies Program affiliate

“Trade in War” is an urgent, insightful study of a puzzling wartime phenomenon: states doing business with their enemies. To explain why states trade with their enemies, Grinberg examines the wartime commercial policies of major powers during the Crimean War, the two World Wars, and several post-1989 wars.

“Constructing Economic Nationalisms in Brazil and India” (Cambridge University Press, 2026)
By Jason Jackson, associate professor in political economy and urban planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning

Conventional approaches cite India’s leftist “socialism” and Brazil’s right-wing authoritarianism to explain why India resisted foreign direct investment (FDI) while Brazil welcomed foreign firms. However, this ignores puzzling industry-level variation: India restricted FDI in auto manufacturing but allowed multinationals in oil, while Brazil welcomed foreign auto companies but prohibited FDI in oil. This book argues that FDI policies were shaped by contrasting colonial experiences that generated distinct economic nationalisms and patterns of industrialization in both countries. 

“Traders, Speculators, and Captains of Industry: How Capitalist Legitimacy Shaped Foreign Investment Policy in India” (Harvard University Press, 2025)
By Jason Jackson, associate professor in political economy and urban planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning

Is foreign capital an agent of economic growth in developing countries or a vehicle of extraction? Examining how Indian elites wrestled with this question in the late colonial and postcolonial periods, Jackson argues that it reflects a false binary. Instead of simply choosing between domestic and foreign capital, Indian policymakers have long considered the business ethics of individual firms. Indian economic nationalism, in other words, has never been characterized by a straightforward preference for domestic over foreign capital.

“The Handbook of Social Protection: Evidence and New Directions for Low- and Middle-Income Countries” (MIT Press, 2026)
Edited by Benjamin A. Olken, the TEPCO Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics, and Rema Hanna

Over the past several decades, social protection programs that provide financial assistance to the poor and insure against shocks for the vulnerable have become widespread in low- and middle-income countries. These programs can play a critical role in society. This book provides an overview of what we know about the differing aspects of social protection and highlights the open questions for research for the future. 

“Argumentation: The Key Concepts” (Routledge, 2026)
By Edward Schiappa, the John E. Burchard Professor of Humanities in MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing

In this book, Schiappa delves into the identification and analysis of fallacies, the evaluation of evidence, and the crucial roles of context, audience adaptation, and argumentative style. It explores the ethical dimensions of argument, the impact of cognitive bias, and the influence of cultural and discourse communities.

“American Independence in verse” (Pentameter Press, 2025)
By Brad Skow, the Laurence S. Rockefeller Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy

“American Independence in verse,” published by Pentameter Press, traces a story of America’s origins through a collection of vignettes featuring some well-known characters, like politician and orator Patrick Henry, alongside some lesser-known but no less important ones, like royalist and former chief justice of North Carolina Martin Howard. Each is rendered in blank verse, a nursery-style rhyme, or free verse.

“Rwanda’s Genocide Heritage: Between Justice and Sovereignty” (Duke University Press, 2025)
By Delia Wendel, associate professor of urban studies and international development in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning

Drawing from oral histories and a visual archive of memory work after the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, Wendel explores the human rights and government priorities that preserved killing sites and victims’ remains for public display. Rwanda’s genocide memorials exemplify a global phenomenon that Wendel terms “trauma heritage,” wherein hidden or unrecognized violence is made visible in public space to demand justice and recognition. Wendel argues that trauma heritage innovates on the form histories take by “writing” them into landscapes, constituting a reparative historiography from the Global South. 

Technology and society 

“Computing in the Age of Decolonization: India’s Lost Technological Revolution” (Princeton University Press, 2026)
By Dwaipayan Banerjee, associate professor of science, technology, and society

In this book, Banerjee examines India’s pursuit of technological self-sufficiency, and the global forces that prevailed against this vision. He describes why the nation is “the world’s leading provider of inexpensive outsourcing and offshoring services, yet enjoys minimal benefits from more profitable advances in research, manufacturing, and development.”

“Auditing AI” (MIT Press, 2026)
By Karrie G. Karahalios, professor of media arts and sciences at the MIT Media Lab; Marc Aidinoff PhD ’22; Nathan Matias SM ’13, PhD ’17; Christian Sandvig; Alondra Nelson; Kristen Vaccaro; Esha Bhandari; Ellery Roberts Biddle; Lena Armstrong; Motahhare Eslami; and Danaé Metaxa

This book serves as a first-of-its-kind roadmap for auditing artificial intelligence systems to prevent decision-making failures in health care, policing, and employment. Using canonical examples of AI gone wrong — from misidentified facial recognition to biased hiring algorithms — this book explains why robust audits are essential and how they drive concrete policy and corporate change.

“Shape Computation: Fifty Years, 1972-2022” (Springer Nature, 2025)
Edited by Sotirios Kotsopoulos SM ’00, PhD ’05, a research affiliate in the Department of Architecture, with a chapter by Terry W. Knight, the William and Emma Rogers Professor of Design and Computation in the Department of Architecture

This book provides a panorama of “shape computation” and “shape grammars,” a computational theory that has, from its inception 50 years ago, been directed toward the “how” of design. Knight’s chapter, “How is that? Computing the Temporality of Drawing,” describes how process and time are key to studying, appreciating, designing, and making things. She notes that in creative production it is not only important to ask, “What is that?” but also “How is that?” — in other words, how did or how can a thing come to be? As a process carried out over time, computation offers a means for rethinking, representing, and elevating the “how” in designing and making activities. 

“The Remote Revolution: Drones and Modern Statecraft” (Cornell University Press, 2025)
By Erik Lin-Greenberg, associate professor in the Department of Political Science

In “The Remote Revolution,” Erik Lin-Greenberg shows that drones are rewriting the rules of international security — but not in ways one would expect. Leveraging diverse types of evidence from original wargames, survey experiments, and cases of U.S. and Israeli drone operations, Lin-Greenberg explores how drone operations lower risks of escalation. 

“The Comedy of Computation: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obsolescence” (Stanford University Press, 2025)
By Benjamin Mangrum, associate professor of literature

We often deal with our doubts and fears about computing through humor, whether reconciling ourselves to machines or critiquing them. In fact, this dynamic turns up throughout modern culture, in movies, television, fiction, and the theater. Mangrum analyzes this phenomenon in “The Comedy of Computation,” digging into several facets of modern culture and technology.

“Rubrique Technologie / Tech Section” (Printed Matter, 2026)
By Nick Montfort, professor of digital media in MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing, and Patsy Baudoin

This work is based on a text generator that produces French and English news items that imagine some of the ways technology will impact us in the near future. Most of the generated news involves people getting struck by autonomous vehicles or even aircraft. Others describe labor disputes, hostile takeover attempts, inventions, and the termination of online services. What is imagined in “RT/TS” is not apocalyptic or discontinuous but actually features many of the same problems we face today; the methods of producing the texts are today’s as well.

“Shared Wisdom: Cultural Evolution in the Age of AI” (MIT Press, 2025)
By Alex “Sandy” Pentland, the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences and professor of information technology in the MIT Media Lab

How can we build a flourishing society by using human nature to design technology rather than letting technology shape society? Pentland explores how cultural inventions — from civilizations to the Enlightenment — accelerated innovation and collective wisdom. He argues that understanding these key factors in cultural evolution is essential for solving global challenges like climate change and pandemics, and shows how AI and digital media can aid rather than replace human deliberation.

“Priority Technologies: Ensuring US Security and Shared Prosperity” (MIT Press, 2026)
Edited by Elisabeth B. Reynolds, professor of the practice of urban studies and planning, with a foreword by Simon Johnson, the Ronald A. Kurtz (1954) Professor of Entrepreneurship and professor of global economics and management

A new world order is emerging, and within it, U.S. priorities are shifting. For the country to flourish as well as defend and secure its interests, it must build on its decades of experience in developing frontier technologies and globally competitive industries through investments into priority technologies for the 21st century. This volume presents an introduction to some of the key areas where the U.S. must lead in order to ensure both national and economic security: critical minerals, semiconductors, biomanufacturing, quantum computing, drones, and advanced manufacturing.

Education, work, finance, and social impact

“The Meritocracy Paradox: Where Talent Management Strategies Go Wrong and How to Fix Them” (Columbia University Press, 2025)
By Emilio J. Castilla, the NTU Professor of Management and professor of work and organization studies in the MIT Sloan School of Management

Organizations often hail meritocracy as a fair and efficient way to identify, advance, and reward talent. But efforts to create a level playing field can be held back by talent management systems that confer rewards based on individual performance evaluations. In practice, these merit-based systems “may actually reinforce or create advantages for certain groups,” Castilla contends.

“The Art of Monetary Policy: Lessons from Sun Tzu for Central Banks” (MIT Press, 2026)
By Kristin J. Forbes, the Jerome and Dorothy Lemelson Professor of Management and professor of global economics and management in the MIT Sloan School of Management

Central banks are navigating a world of higher debt, tightly interconnected markets, and rising geopolitical tensions. How might they respond effectively? In “The Art of Monetary Policy,” Forbes draws on the writings of Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu to suggest modern principles for central banks, including preparing for the next financial battle, establishing a strong tactical position, combining weapons and methods, and modifying and varying tactics to maintain flexibility.

“Launching from the Lab: Building a Deep-Tech Startup” (MIT Press, 2026)
By Lita Nelsen, former director of the MIT Technology Licensing Office, and Maureen Stancik Boyce, mentor for the MIT Sandbox program

“Launching from the Lab” provides a much-needed framework for new entrepreneurs who are founding companies based on “deep technology” — groundbreaking innovations rising from new discoveries in fundamental research. Nelsen and Stancik Boyce cover the steps to launch and fund such companies, beginning with emergence from the laboratory and acquiring intellectual property through the intensive research of customer needs, building a team, and raising capital.

“There’s Got to Be a Better Way: How to Deliver Results and Get Rid of the Stuff That Gets in the Way of Real Work” (Hachette, 2025)
By Nelson Repenning, professor of management, and Donald Kieffer

The chaos of everyday business forces people into an exhausting, ineffective, seemingly never-ending cycle of work-arounds, firefighting, and Whac-a-Mole. The irritatingly urgent crowds out the lastingly important. In this book, Repenning and Kieffer describe the game-changing discipline of dynamic work design, which improves productivity, reduces costs, and increases efficiency, ensuring that all parts of a company can work in concert.

“Bayesian Entrepreneurship” (MIT Press, 2026)
Edited by Erin L. Scott, senior lecturer of technological innovation, entrepreneurship, and strategic management in the MIT Sloan School of Management; and Scott Stern, the David Sarnoff Professor of Management of Technology and professor of technological innovation, entrepreneurship, and strategic management at MIT Sloan

This edited volume introduces and explores the concept of Bayesian entrepreneurship, a novel framework for understanding entrepreneurial decision-making under uncertainty. It brings together contributions from leading scholars to examine how entrepreneurs form beliefs about opportunities, learn through experimentation, and make strategic decisions.

“Disciplined Entrepreneurship for Climate and Energy Ventures: 24 Steps to Build Solutions for People and the Planet” (Wiley, 2025)
By Ben Soltoff, entrepreneur in residence at MIT Sloan; Bill Aulet, Ethernet Inventors Professor of the Practice; Tod Hynes, senior lecturer of climate and energy ventures; Francis O’Sullivan, senior lecturer in technological innovation, entrepreneurship, and strategic management; and Libby Wayman, senior lecturer of climate and energy ventures

Climate and energy entrepreneurs face challenges that traditional startup playbooks don’t address. Their ventures can require massive capital and take years to reach market, all while striving to achieve a positive impact on people, planet, and profit. This book adapts the MIT-born “Disciplined Entrepreneurship” framework specifically for climate and energy ventures, recognizing that founders in this space need their own approach.

Arts and design, architecture, urban studies and planning

“Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present, and Future of the Self-Provisioning City” (W.W. Norton, 2026)
By Kate Brown, the Thomas M. Siebel Distinguished Professor in History of Science

Nurturing health, hope, and community, gardeners in cities and suburbs are reclaiming lost commons, transforming vacant lots into vibrant plots, turning waste into compost, and recreating what was once the most productive agriculture in recorded human history. In a book with global scope, ranging from Estonia to Amsterdam and Washington, Brown contends that urban gardening has many positive spillover effects, from health and environmental benefits to community-building — apart from periods of pushback when others are trying to eliminate it.

“Small-Town Renaissance: Bridging Technology, Heritage, and Planning in Shrinking Italy” (Springer Nature, 2025)
Edited by Brent D. Ryan, vice provost and professor of urban design and public policy in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning; Carmelo Ignaccolo PhD ’24; and Giovanna Fossa

This book explores the transformative power of digitization in rural regions — where technology isn’t just a tool, but a lifeline for local culture, economic resilience, and future development. Born from a unique research collaboration between the MIT and Politecnico di Milano, this book brings together scholarly work on shrinking towns, economic development, and digital innovation. The project tackled some of the most pressing challenges facing rural Italy — from population decline to economic stagnation — through the lens of digital transformation. 

“Blanking: An Annotated Archive of Projects and Thoughts on Architecture” (Park Books / University of Chicago Press, 2026)
By Rosalyn Shieh, assistant professor in the Department of Architecture, and Troy Schaum

Based on the work and vision of their architecture firm Schaum/Shieh, this book shares what is said and what can be heard in a studio. So much of architectural thinking and knowledge is presented, formulated, and traded in spoken words: pinups, meetings, walkthroughs. Those exchanges inform this book, in which ideas and knowledge that are usually only spoken are made accessible to readers.

“Design Before Disaster: Japan’s Culture of Preparedness” (University of Virginia Press, 2026)
By Miho Mazereeuw, associate professor in the departments of Architecture and Urban Studies and Planning

Few countries have faced as many environmental disasters as Japan, which has endured typhoons, cyclones, floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and tsunamis. Japanese residents have responded to their precarious circumstances by developing a unique culture of disaster preparedness, equipping the island nation to plan for future emergencies and to greatly reduce their impact. Mazereeuw offers a detailed framework to design and prepare for anticipated disasters and describes effective interventions in urban landscape and architecture. 

“Reconstruction as Violence in Assad’s Syria” (American University in Cairo Press, 2025)
Edited by Nasser Rabbat, professor of architecture and director of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT, and Deen Sharp, with a foreword by Hashim Sarkis, dean of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning

This book delves into the complex interplay of post-conflict reconstruction in Syria, challenging the traditionally held dichotomy between the end of violence and the commencement of rebuilding. The contributors to this volume — architects, urbanists, geographers, and historians — employ critical concepts such as urbicide, domicide, and “civilian crisis architecture” to argue against the conventional theoretical frameworks that support a neat separation of phases.

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