Foliage-penetrating ladar technology may improve border surveillance

The United States shares 5,525 miles of land border with Canada and 1,989 miles with Mexico. Monitoring these borders, which is the responsibility of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), is an enormous task. Detecting, and responding to, illegal activity while facilitating lawful commerce and travel is made more difficult by the expansive, rugged, diverse, and thickly vegetated geography that spans both often-crossed borders. To help mitigate the challenges to border surveillance, a group of researchers at MIT Lincoln Laboratory is investigating whether an airborne ladar system capable of imaging objects under a canopy of foliage could aid in the maintenance of border security by remotely detecting illegal activities. Their work will be presented at the 16th Annual IEEE Symposium on Technologies for Homeland Security to be held April 25-26 in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Requisite for effective border protection is timely, actionable information on areas of interest. Leveraging the laboratory’s long experience in building imaging systems that exploit microchip lasers and Geiger-mode avalanche photodiodes, the research team developed and tested two concepts of operations (CONOPS) for using airborne ladar systems to detect human activity in wooded regions.

"For any new technology to be effectively used by CBP, an emerging sensor must bring with it a sensible deployment architecture and concept of operation," said John Aldridge, a technical staff member from the Laboratory's Homeland Protection Systems Group, who has been working with a multidisciplinary, cross-divisional team that includes Marius Albota, Brittany Baker, Daniel Dumanis, Rajan Gurjar, and Lily Lee. The CONOPS that the engineering team focused on were cued examination of a localized area and uncued surveillance of a large area. To demonstrate the approach, the engineering team conducted proof-of-concept experiments with the laboratory's Airborne Optical Systems Testbed (AOSTB), a Twin Otter aircraft outfitted with an onboard ladar sensor.

For cued surveillance, the use of an airborne ladar sensor platform (whether a piloted or unpiloted aircraft system) might be prompted by another persistent sensor that indicates the presence of activity in a localized area at or near the border. "The area of coverage for cued surveillance may be in the 1 km² to 10 km² range, and the laboratory has already developed and demonstrated sensor technology that can achieve this coverage in minutes," Albota said.

Uncued wide-area surveillance sorties might be flown long distances and over timelines of days or weeks to establish typical activity patterns and to discover emerging paths and structures in high-interest regions. "The area coverage required under such a CONOPS may reach as high as 300 to 800 km of border, depending on the Border Patrol Sector and vegetation density," Aldridge explained, adding, "Although the current AOSTB's area coverage rate is limited by the aircraft's airspeed, the sensor can image such a region in a matter of hours in a single sortie."

As a start to their field tests to assess their CONOPS, the team flew data collection runs over several local sites identified as representative of the northern U.S. border environment. The sites contained a variety of low-growing brush, thin ground vegetation, very tall coniferous-trees, and leafy deciduous trees. For the tests, the team positioned vehicles, tents, and other camp equipment in the woods to serve as the targets of interest. "We made 40 passes at an altitude of 7,500 feet to allow for a spatial resolution of about 25 centimeters," Dumanis said. "In between each pass, we moved the concealed items so that we could perform post-process analysis for change and motion detection," Baker added.

In this post-processing stage, the team members enhanced the data captured during the flights so that human analysts could then inspect the ladar imagery. They digitally removed ground-height data to reveal the three-dimensional ladar point cloud above ground and then digitally thresholded the height (erased 3-D points above a certain height) to eliminate the foliage cover. The resulting images gave analysts Gurjar and Lee a starting point for approximating the locations of both the planted objects as well as objects that were already on scene.

Searching through vast quantities of ladar data to spot areas for careful inspection is a labor intensive task even for experienced analysts who can recognize subtle cues that direct them to the possible presence of objects in the imagery. For the ladar data to be efficiently mined, an automated method of identifying areas of interest is needed. "One of the ways to alert analysts to potential targets is to track changes in the 3-D temporal data," Lee explained. "Changes caused by vehicle movements or alterations in a customary scene can indicate uncharacteristic activity."

To begin a change detection approach to the discovery of potential targets of interest, the research team registered the before and after ladar data and then subtracted the before data from the after dataset. This process allowed some improvement in the visual identification of vehicles that appeared where there had been none before; however, even a skilled human analyst would find it difficult to spot the small changes that signaled the presence of a vehicle.

A change detection approach, therefore, must compensate for the challenge posed by clutter in the ladar data. This clutter comes from the nature of ladar collection in densely foliated environment. As light travels through gaps between foliage, it bounces off a surface of leaves, ground, or human-made objects. The returned light is collected by the ladar sensor to form the 3-D point cloud. Because the motion induced by a flying platform causes each ladar scan to travel through different configurations of gaps between leaves, different parts of the canopy and shrubbery are sensed by the ladar. "Much of the clutter in our change detection output is from the different levels of canopy detected from different ladar scans," explained Gurjar.

To make the ladar change detection data easier for analysts to search, the team looked to automated object detection, a well-established field in computer vision that has been applied to images and radar data. Since ladar data presents in three dimensions and has unique noise characteristics, the team had to enhance the established automated detection approach with a sum of absolute difference (SAD) technique that factors in the height differences used to construct 3-D ladar imagery. Trials of the SAD technique applied to simulated vehicles in a foliated environment demonstrated that the approach yielded high detection rates and has potential as an automated method for reducing the huge amount of ladar data analysts would have to scrutinize to discover objects of interest.

"Looking forward, we hope to improve the capabilities of automated 3-D change detection to be more robust to natural temporal changes in foliage, expand the number of automatically detected object classes, and extend automated detection capability to full 3-D point clouds," said Lee, with Aldridge adding that they are also interested in exploring alternative aircraft for hosting the ladar system.

In its strategic plan "Vision and Strategy 2020," the CBP has expressed the need to apply advanced technology solutions for border management. Continued development of Lincoln Laboratory's automated approach to using a low-cost ladar system for surveillance of foliated regions may in the future offer another tool that the Department of Homeland Security's CBP can deploy to monitor the growing volume of land border activity.

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Taking aim at a key malaria molecule

The iron-containing molecule heme is necessary for life. Cells require heme to perform the chemical reactions that produce energy, among other critical tasks.

Scientists who study the malaria parasite are particularly interested in heme because many malaria drugs interact with this molecule, also known as a cofactor. However, until now researchers have lacked good ways to measure heme levels inside the parasite.

A team of MIT biological engineers has developed a method to do just that. Using a genetically encoded fluorescent protein that interacts with heme, the researchers can image heme within cells and measure how much is present. This could eventually help scientists develop better drugs to combat malaria, says Jacquin Niles, an MIT associate professor of biological engineering.

“One of our long-term goals is to use insights from these studies to understand the pathways that regulate heme and to target these for antimalarial drug discovery purposes,” says Niles, the senior author of the study, which appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of Feb. 27.

James Abshire, a recent MIT PhD recipient, is the paper’s lead author. Other authors are former postdocs Christopher Rowlands and Suresh Ganesan, and professor of biological and mechanical engineering Peter So.

Heme control

Heme is found in nearly all cells and is especially plentiful in red blood cells, which use it to carry oxygen. However, cells need to keep tight control over the cofactor because it is reactive and can damage other molecules in cells. Heme is usually embedded within other proteins that carefully control its activity. If heme levels get too high, the molecule is either broken down by enzymes or put into a storage compartment where it can’t cause cellular damage.

“There’s always a balance between how much of it you make or acquire, and how much of it you need to execute critical functions,” Niles says.

Niles was motivated to explore how the parasite Plasmodium falciparum controls heme levels because of the known interactions between this cofactor and the antimalarial drugs known as quinolones, which include chloroquine. Until recently, when the parasite became resistant to chloroquine, this drug was used widely to treat malaria.

“Many successful antimalarial compounds seem to exert their antimalarial effect through interacting with or somehow disrupting heme homeostasis within the parasite,” Niles says.

As he started to think about investigating those interactions, he realized that not much was known about how the parasite controls its heme levels. This is a particularly important task for these organisms because they spend part of their life cycle inside red blood cells, where they take up and degrade substantial quantities of hemoglobin and release heme in the process.

“The first step was to figure out how much labile heme parasites maintain in their cytosolic compartment as they develop within red blood cells, and how those levels might change with certain environmental perturbations — such as exposure to heme-interacting antimalarial drugs,” Niles says.

To achieve this, Niles and his colleagues developed a heme-sensing protein whose fluorescence dims when it binds to heme. This sensor protein can be expressed in the parasite, allowing the researchers to measure heme levels in parasites by measuring changes in fluorescence.

Daniel Goldberg, co-director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at the Washington University School of Medicine, described this as an “elegant” approach to sensing heme.

“It works beautifully and allows measurement of cytoplasmic heme in malaria parasites. This is crucial for understanding parasite metabolism and antimalarial drug mechanism,” says Goldberg, who was not involved in the research.

Drug interactions

Using this sensor, the researchers found that malaria parasites maintain higher labile heme levels than previously estimated. Most scientists studying the parasite had assumed that heme levels would be lower due to the cofactor’s potential to damage cells.

“At this time, we don’t really know the physiological role of these observed labile heme levels in the parasite,” he says. “But what this might do is set the parasite up to be particularly vulnerable to antimalarial drugs that interact with heme.”

One possibility is that drugs such as chloroquine somehow increase heme levels to the point where damage to parts of the cell (such as the cell membrane) cause parasite death. Artemisinin, another potent antimalarial drug, also seems to be dependent on heme within the parasite for its effectiveness. Thus, finding out more about the role of heme in causing parasite toxicity could help researchers develop new drugs that exploit these mechanisms.

“This could provide insights into alternate ways by which we can disrupt heme homeostasis for therapeutic purposes — ideally in a way that circumvents the mechanisms of resistance that parasites have developed to drugs like chloroquine,” Niles says.

Once widely used, chloroquine is now mostly ineffective due to widespread resistance. Artemesinin-based combinations are now standard treatment, but resistance is emerging in parts of Southeast Asia, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

In future studies, Niles plans to adapt the heme sensors so they can be targeted to different compartments of the cell to measure how heme is distributed within the parasite. He also plans to study the sources of heme — whether parasites synthesize it on their own or scavenge most of it from red blood cells — and how those processes might be affected as the parasite moves into later stages of its life cycle.

The research was supported by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, the National Institutes of Health, and the Wellcome Trust.

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3Q: Suzy Nelson on protections for transgender students at MIT

Vice President and Dean for Student Life Suzy Nelson arrived at the Division of Student Life (DSL) on July 1, 2016, bringing with her 32 years of experience building open, effective partnerships with students through her work at Colgate, Harvard, Cornell, and Syracuse. Nelson’s commitment to enhancing all aspects of the student life experience is evident in her recent work to renew residence halls and student spaces, promote student wellbeing, and make MIT a welcoming campus for everyone. Following last week’s federal action related to protections for transgender students, Nelson sat down to reaffirm MIT’s support for all students, reflect on how they give her “hope” in the current political climate, and update the community on efforts to promote diversity and inclusion.

Q: Last week, the U.S. Departments of Justice and Education withdrew guidelines from the Obama administration designed to ensure "transgender students enjoy a supportive and nondiscriminatory school environment.” Will this decision impact MIT students or policies?

A: This is an important question because I know the action has created anxiety for members of our transgender community and their friends and allies. I want them to hear directly from me that we are steadfast in our support for them.

The short answer to whether this decision will impact MIT students or policies is no, it absolutely will not. Our commitment to providing an inclusive, welcoming, and respectful educational, living, and working environment has not changed, and it will not change. Gender identity for students and employees is protected under MIT’s nondiscrimination policies as well as under Massachusetts state law. Additionally, regardless of the federal Departments’ interpretation of Title IX, MIT believes that transgender students’ gender identities should be respected, including when it comes to restroom access. We are also working to streamline the process so that students can more easily change their name and gender in MIT official records.

I want students who have questions or concerns about this federal action to know they can come to me and the members of the LBGTQ@MIT and Title IX teams. We are ready to answer any questions they may have and to support them in any way we can.

Q: Changes in federal policies have prompted strong responses from the MIT student community. What are your impressions of how they have been organizing and speaking out?

A: Many students are speaking out about issues that affect them and others whom they know. In a respectful and thoughtful way, MIT’s students have raised up their concerns about social issues and the recent executive orders. I have been impressed by students’ openness to dialogue, especially when there is profound disagreement and division within our country.

This is the type of level-headed thinking that gives me hope because coming together is what we need to do right now. Moreover, our actions need to be guided by critical thinking and our ability to listen and to empathize with each other. In the end, it is the bond of humanity that unites us. And it’s that bond that often helps us find common ground when we disagree.

Even before the change in administrations, I was impressed by how engaged and involved MIT students are. Students here see the world through a critical lens, and want to make it better. That’s the core of the MIT mission too, and it’s great to see them apply the same lens to their own experience and environment. Their voices are definitely making a difference in the student experience.

Q: A specific example of where MIT students’ voices are making a difference is in efforts to advance diversity and inclusion, issues that are key priorities for you as well. Can you talk about the ways DSL is working with students, faculty, and staff to make MIT a welcoming campus for all?

A: Issues of social justice and equity are important to me personally, and they are part of the reason I wanted to work in higher education. When I came to MIT, one of the first things I did was to learn more about the recommendations outlined by the Black Students’ Union (BSU), Black Graduate Student Association (BGSA), and many others, and the work being done to implement them.

All students who were involved in developing the recommendations deserve to be commended for their leadership. They applied their critical lens to our environment and developed thoughtful, constructive, and specific solutions to make things better. I also admire how they were careful and purposeful about incorporating the views of all underrepresented students into their recommendations. And I am grateful for their willingness to partner with faculty and staff throughout the implementation process.

I am a member of the Academic Council Working Group President Reif established to help make these recommendations a reality, so I am fortunate to have a front row seat to the progress underway.

DSL was very involved in responding to the recommendation calling for a diversity session at orientation for undergraduates. I was one of the 30 faculty and staff who were trained to help facilitate this session for incoming students last August, and it was very thought-provoking and educational for everyone involved. Student feedback on the session was very positive. I am very pleased that this will be an annual event going forward.

Additionally, MIT has doubled down on its commitment to affordability and accessibility. The financial aid budget rose by 10.4 percent in 2016-17 alone.

Dr. Karen Singleton, a recognized leader in providing multicultural mental healthcare, is now leading Mental Health and Counseling Service and, in the last year, MIT Medical has hired three clinicians with expertise in race-based trauma.

Nearly all of our academic departments have responded to the students’ calls for the development and posting of statements that highlight each department’s commitment to health, diversity, and inclusion. And new diversity-related data is being gathered and posted so that we can measure our progress and make informed decisions about next steps.

At DSL, we have identified making a welcoming campus for everyone as a key priority — it’s part of our new mission and agenda. We’ve been approaching this goal from a few different angles:

• First, we formed a committee to look at diversity and inclusion in our division, and between staff and students. This group is drafting a DSL diversity and inclusion statement, and getting input from a range of people. We expect we will have a final draft by the end of the spring term. As important as the result of this work is, the process itself helps us examine our values and expectations about engaging others in a respectful and caring way.
• In the community, DSL and the Institute Community and Equity Office hosted an event last semester with Dr. Mahzarin Banaji from Harvard, who studies hidden bias and co-authored the book, "Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People." The main room in Walker Memorial was almost filled, which I found very encouraging.
• But, because real change comes from sustained education, we are exploring a series of learning opportunities, including unconscious bias training, that will help DSL staff develop the knowledge, skills, and awareness for cultivating a respectful and welcoming campus community for all.

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New technology offers fast peptide synthesis

Manufacturing small proteins known as peptides is usually very time-consuming, which has slowed development of new peptide drugs for diseases such as cancer, diabetes, and bacterial infections.

To help speed up the manufacturing process, MIT researchers have designed a machine that can rapidly produce large quantities of customized peptides. Their new tabletop machine can form links between amino acids, the buildings blocks of proteins, in about 37 seconds, and it takes less than an hour to generate complete peptide molecules containing up to 60 amino acids.

“You can dial in whatever amino acids you want, and the machine starts printing off these peptides faster than any machine in the world,” says Bradley Pentelute, the Pfizer-Laubach Career Development Associate Professor of Chemistry at MIT.

This technology could help researchers rapidly generate new peptide drugs to test on a variety of diseases, and it also raises the possibility of easily producing customized cancer vaccines for individual patients.

Pentelute is the senior author of a paper describing the new system in the Feb. 27 issue of Nature Chemical Biology. The paper’s lead authors are graduate students Alexander Mijalis and Dale Thomas; other authors are graduate student Mark Simon, research associate Andrea Adamo, Ryan Beaumont, and Warren K. Lewis Professor of Chemical Engineering Klavs Jensen.

Fast flow

Using traditional peptide manufacturing techniques, which were developed more than 20 years ago, it takes about an hour to perform the chemical reactions needed to add each amino acid to a peptide chain.

Pentelute, Jensen, and their colleagues set out several years ago to devise a faster method based on a newer manufacturing approach known as flow chemistry. Under this strategy, chemicals flow through a series of modules that each perform one step of the overall synthesis.

The team’s first version of a flow-based peptide synthesis machine, reported in 2014, sped up the process to about three minutes per peptide bond. In their latest effort, the researchers hoped to make the synthesis even faster by automating more of the process. In the earlier version, the person running the machine had to manually pump amino acids out of their storage bottles, but the new machine automates that step as well.

“Our focus when we were setting out to design the automated machine was to have all the steps controlled by computer, and that would eliminate a lot of the human error and unreliability that’s associated with someone doing this process by hand,” Mijalis says.

Once a user enters the desired amino acid sequence, the amino acids are pumped, in the correct order, into a module where they are briefly heated to about 90 degrees Celsius to make them more chemically reactive. After being activated, the amino acids flow into a chamber where they are added to the growing peptide chains.

“It’s a very iterative process, where you’re building up this molecular chain, one piece by one piece,” Mijalis says.

As each amino acid is added to the chain, the researchers can measure how much was correctly incorporated by analyzing the waste products that flow into the final chamber of the device. The current machine attaches each amino acid to the chain with about 99 percent efficiency.

“In my view, this approach opens up the field to the generation of peptide libraries that enable more complete structure-activity relationships of bioactive peptides in a matter of days, as well as extending this chemical approach to the synthesis of small proteins and protein domains,” says Paul Alewood, a research group leader in chemistry and structural biology at the University of Queensland Institute for Molecular Bioscience.

“It will be used in both academia and industry when commercially available instruments for this chemistry become widely available,” says Alewood, who was not involved in the research.

Personalized chemistry

Once synthesized, small peptides can be joined together to form larger proteins. So far, the researchers have made proteins produced by HIV, a fragment of an antifreeze protein (which helps organisms survive extreme cold), and a toxin secreted by snails. They are also working on replicating toxins from other animals, which have potential uses as painkillers, blood thinners, or blood clotting agents. They have also made antimicrobial peptides, which scientists are exploring as a possible new class of antibiotic drugs.

Another possible application for the new machine is generating peptides that could be used as personalized cancer vaccines targeting unique proteins found in individual patients’ tumors. “That’s exactly what our machine makes, and it makes them at scales that are all ready to meet this demand for personalized cancer vaccines,” Pentelute says.

The MIT team is also interested in adapting this technology to make other molecules in which building blocks are strung together in long chains, such as polymers and oligonucleotides (strands of RNA or DNA).

“We can start thinking about a personalized chemistry machine,” Pentelute says. “It’s modular and it’s adaptable to all sorts of other chemistries.”

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3Q: Maria Zuber, daughter of coal country

Maria T. Zuber, vice president for research and the E.A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics, recently published an op-ed in The Washington Post that described her personal history growing up in eastern Pennsylvania’s coal country and argued for a strategy to support coal industry workers as the world transitions to new, clean energy sources. Zuber spoke with MIT News to share her thoughts on how we can address climate change while also improving the economic fortunes of coal communities.

Q: You grew up in Carbon County, Pennsylvania, a place that got its name because of the discovery of anthracite coal there in the late 18th century. Can you tell us about your experience growing up in coal country and what inspired you to write about it?

A: Both of my grandfathers were coal miners. They both contracted black lung disease, one dying much too young and the other living longer but suffering mightily from both health problems and underemployment. My grandfathers worked in the mines at a time when the coal industry in eastern Pennsylvania was in the midst of a long decline. My home town, Summit Hill, Pennsylvania, was a place where prosperity and economic opportunity vanished with the decline of the anthracite industry.

During the recent presidential campaign and subsequent to the election, I’ve read a lot about how the intellectual elite doesn’t understand the plight of blue collar workers who have lost well-paying jobs and, with that, their hope for the future. And I thought, “Wait a minute, that’s the story of my family.” The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I was in a position to shine a light on this issue and maybe even contribute to improving the situation.

Q: How does this personal history you’ve described affect the way that you think about climate change?

A: On the one hand, I can really understand why we hear so much about the “war on coal.” That’s a product of the deep anxiety that people feel when they experience such seismic changes caused by things like changes in the global supply and demand for coal, or automation in mining that makes it possible to get more coal with fewer workers. People do feel like they are under attack, that their way of life is under attack. We need to really try to recognize that.

On the other hand, my life’s passion, and my career focus, has been science. And as I’ve said many times, the scientific evidence is overwhelming: If we keep emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, then global temperatures are going to continue to rise, and that carries with it unacceptable risks — disruptions to food and water supplies, rising sea levels that could put coastal cities at risk, and so on. 

So the way I look at it is that we have two responsibilities: We need to take urgent action to address climate change by moving to clean energy, and we also need to take care of the people who do difficult and dangerous work so that we can power our modern economy and enjoy our standard of living.

Q: With this dual challenge in mind, what do you think we should we do for coal communities?

A: The good news is that, in the long run, transforming our energy system so that it emits zero carbon will create more jobs than it destroys. But if we don’t plan this transformation in an orderly way, then we will see avoidable negative economic impacts on coal communities.

As a start, I propose three things we can do. First, we should aggressively pursue carbon capture and storage technology, which catches carbon dioxide from coal power plants before it is released into the atmosphere and stores it underground. We’ll need to improve capture efficiency, lower the deployment costs, and better understand the environmental impacts. The MIT Energy Initiative has launched a low-carbon energy center focused on these challenges.

Second, we should expand the use of coal for things that, unlike combustion and steel production, do not produce significant carbon emissions. About nine-tenths of coal production is used for electric power. But researchers here at MIT and at other research institutions around the country are exploring whether coal can be used more widely as a material for the production of carbon fiber, batteries, electronics, and even solar panels.

Third, though, we have to recognize that even if carbon capture becomes practicable and we expand other uses for coal, the industry’s fortunes will never fully revive, because of factors like cheap natural gas and the rapidly declining costs of wind and solar energy. So we need to support policies that would promote economic development; help coal workers find employment in other industries, including renewables; and preserve healthcare and retirement benefits for retired coal miners. Fortunately, these are all policies with bipartisan support.

The risks of climate change make it clear that we have to stop burning fossil fuels, especially without the use of carbon capture and storage technologies. But we do have choices to make about how we transition to clean energy. We can choose to do it fast enough to head off some of the worst risks of climate change, and we can choose to do it as fairly as possible for communities that have long depended on fossil fuels. These are not impossible challenges, but they do require that we all work together. I think this is the kind of problem that we at MIT are attracted to tackle. We won’t solve the climate change problem without solving the jobs problem.

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From football to physics

Zachary Hulcher was once set on becoming a lawyer. In high school, he took part in mock trials and competed in youth judicial, playing the role of legal counsel and presenting cases in front of a student jury. He says his inspiration came partly from the television show Law and Order: “There’s drama, there’s action, you send people to jail, and you get to argue with people — and I loved arguing with people.”

But all that changed one day, sometime during his junior year, when he happened to flip through his physics textbook. In an idle moment at school, he turned to the very back of the book and started to read the chapter about special relativity.

Physics, he discovered, put mathematics and science into an almost fantastical perspective. “Ideas that come out of that one chapter are time travel, atomic bombs, things warping when they go really fast, and all these things that shouldn’t be real, but are,” Hulcher says.

Hulcher is currently a senior at MIT, majoring in physics as well as computer science and electrical engineering, with a minor in math. “I love the creative process and figuring out how elegant solutions to real problems arise out of seeming chaos,” he says.

He is a recipient of the 2017 Marshall Scholarship, awarded each year to up to 40 U.S. students who will pursue graduate degrees at universities in the United Kingdom. Next year, Hulcher will be working toward a PhD in high energy physics at Cambridge University, where he hopes to work on both experimental and theoretical problems of the Standard Model of particle physics, which governs every aspect of the known universe except for gravity.

“Beautiful math”

Hulcher was born and raised in Montgomery, Alabama. His mother and father are managers for Alabama’s environmental management agency. Hulcher grew up playing basketball with his younger brother in the family’s backyard. The brothers, who towered over their classmates — Hulcher is 6 feet 4 inches tall and his “little” brother, Jacob, is 6 feet 8 inches — joined their church league, and eventually played for their middle and high school teams.  

Along with basketball, Hulcher played football and was on the track and field team, balancing an unrelenting schedule of games and practices with an increasingly challenging course load. Hulcher attended the Montgomery Catholic Preparatory School System from kindergarten through high school in Montgomery, where he was valedictorian and a National Merit Scholar. In his freshman year he began taking math and physics classes with Joe Profio, a teacher who, recognizing that Hulcher was one of the top students in his class, urged him to join the school’s math teams.

Hulcher soon found himself taking long drives to math competitions across the state with Profio and his classmates. During those drives, Profio would talk about math at a deeper level than he could present in class, and Hulcher credits his passion for physics and math to these inspiring talks.

“Our conversations obliterated the idea that the only beauty in the world is found in an imaginary place in a book — beauty was all around me, if I would only look through the right lens,” Hulcher says.

It was around that time that Hulcher says “the wheels started cranking to do science.” The answer to how and where to direct this newfound momentum came from an unlikely source, another TV show.

“I was watching NCIS one day, and one of the characters is from MIT, and I thought, ‘I’m starting to like more science. I should apply there,’ and I did,” Hulcher recalls.

Computing, a physics problem

When Hulcher set foot on the campus for the first time — also the first time he had been anywhere north of Washington, D.C. — he was immediately drawn to the physics seminars held during Campus Preview Weekend.

“I remember an event called something like ‘physics til you drop,’ and two students were standing at a blackboard, doing physics until 5 or 6 am, long past when I could stay awake,” Hulcher says. “People would ask them questions about quantum mechanics, string theory, general relativity, anything, and they would try to answer them on the board. I was pretty hooked.”

He quickly landed on physics as a major but also chose computer science and electrical engineering, a decision based largely on conversations with his roommate, who was also majoring in the subject. When Hulcher took classes that explored quantum computing — the idea that quantum elements such as elementary particles can perform certain calculations vastly more efficiently than classical computers — he realized “all of computing is not just a computer science problem. It’s a physics problem. That’s just cool.”

Seeing through plasma

In the summer following his sophomore year, Hulcher traveled to Geneva, Switzerland, to work at the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment (CMS) at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator. There, he helped to implement an alarm system that monitors the accelerator’s major systems and distributes information to key people in the event of a failure.

He returned again the following summer, this time as a theorist. The LHC uses giant magnets to steer beams of atoms, such as lead ions, toward each other at close to the speed of light. Hulcher, working as a research assistant with Krishna Rajagopal of MIT's Department of Physics and the Center for Theoretical Physics, was interested in the hot plasma of quarks and gluons produced when two lead ions collide.

“The plasma doesn’t last very long before it returns to some other state of matter,” Hulcher says. “You don’t even have time to blast it with light to see it; it would just disappear before the light got there. So you need to use events inside it to study it.”

Those events involve jets of particles that spew out from the plasma following a collision between two lead ions. Hulcher worked with Rajagopal and Daniel Pablos, a University of Barcelona graduate student, to help implement a model for how these jets of particles propagate through the resulting plasma. Hulcher recently helped to present the team’s results at a workshop in Paris and is finishing up a paper to submit to a journal — his first publication.

The prism of physics

In addition to his research work, Hulcher has racked up a good amount of teaching experience. As a teaching assistant for MIT’s Department of Physics, he has graded weekly problem sets for classes in classical mechanics and electricity and magnetism. He tutors fellow students in electrical engineering and computer science subjects, and he has spent the last year as eligibles chair of the MIT chapter of the engineering honor society Tau Beta Pi. Through the MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI), Hulcher has traveled around the world, to Italy, Mexico, and most recently, Israel, teaching students subjects including physics, electrical engineering, and entrepreneurship.

Of all the relationships he’s developed through his time at MIT, he counts those with most of his teammates as some of the strongest. Hulcher joined MIT’s football team as a freshman offensive lineman; he says he will remember hanging out on long nights, p-setting with his friends from the football team. He will also remember MIT as a really long rollercoaster, he says.

As for what’s next, Hulcher says the plan for now is “to keep liking physics.” If that happens, he hopes to become a researcher and professor, to help students see the world through physics.

“I fell in love with physics,” Hulcher says. “I appreciate light bouncing off a mirror, and smoke billowing up, and light moving through it in a different way. I appreciate looking up at the stars and thinking about what’s out there. The small things I took for granted when I didn’t know much about them, I appreciate now. Everything is just a little prettier.”

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Participamos en los Premios 20 Blogs 2016

Ya han llegado los Premios 20blogs y un año más la participación ha sido masiva al superar la cifra de los 8.000 blogs inscritos en su undécima edición. Actualmente está abierta la fecha para realizar las votaciones a los blogs participantes que durará hasta el próximo 10 de marzo. Será difícil ganar al haber tanto nivel; pero MOSingenieros intentará ganar al menos la categoría y por eso os pedimos a todos nuestros lectores, como simpatizantes, el voto para que seamos el referente en la categoría Blogosfera.

Los premios a los que podemos optar son: 

- Mejor blog 2016: Mejor blog 2016, elegido por los miembros del jurado.

- Mejor blog por votación: Será determinado por los votos de los usuarios de 20minutos.

- Mejor blog por categoría: Los ganadores de cada una de las categorías recibirán una estatuilla del concurso. Nosotros participamos en BLOGOSFERA.

El proceso de votar es muy sencillo y rápido. Tenéis que registraros en “20 minutos” ya que si accedéis por primera vez os dirá:

"Debes identificarte como usuario de 20minutos.es para participar en la votación".

Hay dos posibilidades de registrarse:

- Clásica: rellenar los campos obligatorios

- Facebook, Twitter o Google: en el que tu nombre, correo y datos serán completados de forma automática, rápida y fácil.

Puedes acceder al registro desde aquí:

- PINCHA EN LA IMAGEN -

Una vez finalizado los campos requeridos... 

                                      

¡¡ YA PUEDES VOTAR !!

Pero, para hacerlo más rápido, te facilito el enlace donde puedes votar a MOSingenieros:

- PINCHA EN LA IMAGEN PARA ACCEDER A LA PÁGINA -

Ya lo sabes, si decides votarnos, estaremos muy agradecidos porque esto sería una gran recompensa al esfuerzo de tener activo tantos años el blog y seguir trabajando duro para mejorarlo día a día.

Muchas gracias.
Jorge Sánchez Mosquete

de MOS INGENIEROS - BLOG DE INGENIERÍA http://ift.tt/2lQZM0D