Two sciences tie the knot

Economics and computer science had always been on friendly terms at MIT. With the growth of cloud computing, e-commerce, machine learning, and online social networks, their relationship grew more serious. Now that these tools and applications have become ubiquitous and gone global, economics and computer science are taking their relationship to the next level.

Starting in the fall of 2017, the two academic departments will offer a joint major — Course 6-14: Computer Science, Economics, and Data Science — because elements of the two fields have become, well, inseparable. The new major aims to prepare students to think at the nexus of economics and computer science, so they can understand and design the kinds of systems that are coming to define modern life. Think Amazon, Uber, eBay, etc.

“This area is super-hot commercially,” says David Autor, the Ford Professor of Economics and associate head of the Department of Economics. “Hiring economists has become really prominent at tech companies because they’re filling market-design positions.”

Because these companies need analysts who can decide which objectives to maximize, what information and choices to offer, what rules to set, and so on, “companies are really looking for this skill set,” he says.

Asu Ozdaglar, the Joseph F. and Nancy P. Keithley Professor of Electrical Engineering and acting head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), says the fields had moved apart in decades prior, but “for the past 10 to 15 years, there’s been a convergence in research areas between economics and facets of computer science, such as optimization and networking.”

“Now, the motivating applications are so vivid, we have to rethink bringing the fields together,” she says.

MIT students agree. In a poll of the introductory economics course 14.01, which all students are required to take, faculty found that a whopping three-quarters of them were interested in the joint major, Ozdaglar says. She believes students are so intrigued because combining engineered systems and economics requires asking profoundly complex human questions, and then creating equally complex technical models to address them.

“If you’re thinking about humans making decisions in large-scale systems, you have to think about incentives,” she says. “How, for example, do you design rewards and costs so that people behave the way you desire?”

These issues will be familiar to any Uber user caught in a downpour. Suddenly, the cost of getting anywhere increases dramatically, which is also an incentive for Uber drivers to move toward the storm of demand. Surge pricing may be a scourge to customers, but it's also a way to match supply with demand — in this case, cars with riders.

The new major is designed to train students to become the unseen game-makers behind these types of virtual markets — people who can exert their skill by making it “blatantly obvious for people how to play, in accordance with the market designer’s goals,” says Costis Daskalakis, an associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering who is one of the faculty leads in the new major’s creation.

This combination of fields, Daskalakis points out, is hardly new. Many venerated economists were also early computer scientists, he says. John von Neumann, a pioneer of game theory, which uses mathematics to predict human behavior, was involved in one of the earliest articulations of the design for an electronic computer: the Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer (EDVAC) report published in 1945. Herb Simon, a key figure in the development of artificial intelligence, won both a Nobel Prize in economics in 1978 and the prestigious Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery in 1975. 

Computer science and economics offer complementary tools, Daskalakis says. For example, a computer science technique like machine learning can reveal patterns in data coming from a social platform. But economics helps pull back the curtain of why such patterns emerge, he says, by offering theories of how people strategized for these patterns to arise.

“You can’t just be a plain economist in this environment, because we’re talking about massive amounts of data and systems implemented on computational platforms,” he says. The new major, he says, will give students a firm footing in both disciplines to create — and understand — virtual markets of the future.

Students should contact Anne Hunter in EECS and Eva Economou in the Department of Economics for more information about Course 6-14.

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Study suggests simple way to predict preterm births

Up to 18 percent of babies born worldwide arrive before they are full-term, defined as 37 weeks of gestation. About 1 million of those babies do not survive, and those who do can face developmental problems such as impaired vision or hearing, defects in the heart or lungs, or cognitive impairments.

Currently there is no reliable way to predict whether a woman with a normal pregnancy will go into labor before 37 weeks. However, a study from MIT offers a new approach to evaluating this risk, by analyzing the properties of cervical mucus. The researchers found that cervical mucus from women who delivered their babies before 37 weeks was very different from that of women who delivered later.

This type of analysis could offer an easy way to calculate the risk of early labor, potentially allowing doctors to try to intervene earlier to prevent preterm births.

“Our prediction is that we might be able to identify risk for preterm birth ahead of time, before labor sets in,” says Katharina Ribbeck, an associate professor of biological engineering at MIT and the senior author of the study. “Diagnostic tools for this are missing.”

Ribbeck worked on the study with Michael House, an associate professor at Tufts University School of Medicine. MIT postdoc Kathryn Smith-Dupont is the first author of the paper, which appears in the Sept. 4 issue of Scientific Reports.

Barrier to infection

Ribbeck’s lab at MIT investigates the distinctive chemical and mechanical properties of mucus, and how those properties help it to perform many critical roles as part of the body’s first line of defense against infection.

Several years ago, Ribbeck began exploring whether changes in cervical mucus might play a role in preterm births. Between 25 and 40 percent of early births are believed to be caused by infections that occur when microbes reach the uterus through the cervical plug, which is made of mucus and normally blocks access to the uterus.

In a study published in 2013, Ribbeck found that cervical mucus from pregnant women at high risk of early labor was mechanically weaker and more elastic than that of low-risk pregnant women.

For the new study, she and her colleagues decided to investigate the mucus’s permeability to small particles. Mucus is formed from polymers known as mucins, and the composition and arrangement of these mucins determine how porous the gel is.

The researchers collected samples from two groups of patients. The low-risk group included pregnant women who came in to their doctors’ offices for routine visits around 30 weeks and ended up giving birth after 37 weeks. The high-risk group included women who went into labor early, between 24 and 34 weeks. Doctors were able to halt labor in these women, and the samples were taken after they were stabilized. They all ended up giving birth before 37 weeks.

The researchers tested the ability of negatively charged spheres about 1 micron in diameter to travel through the mucus, and found a small but statistically insignificant difference in porosity between the high- and low-risk samples. They then decided to do the same test with charged peptide probes, which are small enough to avoid getting stuck in the mucus network but are sensitive to the biochemical modifications of the mucus. With these peptide probes, the researchers found a significant differences in mucus permeability and adhesiveness: The peptides were able to pass through samples from high-risk women much more easily.

This suggests that cervical mucus from women at high risk for early labor, for reasons not yet known, may be more susceptible to invasion by potentially harmful bacteria and microbes, making it more likely that those women will experience an infection that leads to preterm birth, Ribbeck says. In addition, the altered mucus may be less able to retain helpful immune system components such as antibodies or antimicrobial peptides, which would normally help to combat infection.

“Mucins display all sorts of immunologically active factors that you may also lose when the adhesive properties change,” Ribbeck says.

She suspects that this loss of adhesion might be caused by changes in molecular structure of the mucins, in particular, changes in the number and types of sugar molecules that comprise part of their structure.

Risk analysis

Currently, the most common way to try to predict the risk of preterm birth is to measure the length of the cervix, but although a shortened cervix is correlated with higher risk, there are also many cases where a shortened cervix does not lead to preterm birth. Another test involves measuring levels of fetal fibronectin, a material that essentially “glues” the fetal membranes to the uterine wall, in vaginal secretions. However, this is not a completely reliable predictor, and furthermore, women can deliver preterm when both cervical length and fetal fibronectin are normal.

“There’s no currently well-accepted universal test,” says Smith-Dupont. “The pathophysiology and mechanisms of preterm birth are extremely complex, and what works to assess one patient may not work for another.”

Ribbeck anticipates that cervical mucus testing could be done early in pregnancy, as part of a routine screen that would reveal whether a woman was at high risk of preterm birth. (This test would determine risk from infection, but not from other potential causes of early labor.)

Errol Norwitz, chairman of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Tufts Medical Center, who was not involved in the research, says the new study is an innovative approach to combating a problem that has so far proven intractable. Identifying women at high risk, and potentially giving their babies the chance to remain in utero for even a few extra days, could make a big difference, he says.

“Preterm birth is one of the biggest issues we face in child and baby health care around the world. It’s an enormous burden to individuals and families,” Norwitz says. “We sorely need a way to identify risk because all of the tools that we have now don’t work very well.”

Through studies of the chemical composition of the altered mucus, Ribbeck also hopes to develop new ways to restore the normal function of the mucus. “If the mucus is thinner or less adhesive than it naturally is, then we can begin to think about factors to add so that we improve its barrier properties,” she says.

The research was funded, in part, by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Preterm Birth Initiative, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

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Featured video: 47 years, and still going strong

At age 24, Peter Hicks began his employment here at MIT. Now, with over 47 years of service to the Institute, Hicks has the longest tenure within the Department of Facilities.

Over his time at MIT, Hicks has held a variety of positions — everything from bulb-snatching across campus to his current position collecting and delivering packages for MIT Mail Services. “I just love MIT as a place to work,” says Hicks. “And I hope that anyone else who comes along has the same feelings.”

Hicks is in no rush to slow down. Even now, with almost five decades of work at MIT, he says he has no plans for retirement in sight. “I’m just going to give it day by day and year by year, and see what happens,” he says. “If I’m here longer than I expect, that’ll be good too.” 

This Labor Day we honor Hicks, and all those who work hard each day to keep MIT running.

Video by: Melanie Gonick/MIT News | 3 min 20 sec

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Glassy carbon, now with less heat

Last winter, MIT researchers discovered that a phenol-formaldehyde polymer transformed into a glassy carbon material in a process similar to baking reaches its best combination of high strength and low density at 1,000 degrees Celsius (1,832 degrees Fahrenheit). Now they have determined that, they can achieve a similar glassy transformation, but at a more industrially-accessible temperature of 800 C by adding a small fraction of carbon nanotubes to this material.

As the starting polymeric hydrocarbon, known as a phenol-formaldehyde polymeric resin, is heated from 600 C, the size of its crystallites grows until it reaches a plateau at 1,000 C. Postdoc Itai Y. Stein says scientific literature shows that this plateau holds until well above 2,000 C. The addition of 1 percent by volume of aligned carbon nanotubes to the starting material allows it to reach the plateau crystallite size at a termperature 200 C lower.

“What we’re showing is that by adding carbon nanotubes, we reach this plateau region earlier,” Stein says. The findings were reported Aug. 22 in the Journal of Materials Science online. The co-authors were Stein, former Materials Processing Center-Center for Materials Science and Engineering (MPC-CMSE) Summer Scholars Ashley L. Kaiser (2016) and Alexander J. Constable (2015), postdoc Luiz Acauan, and the senior author, professor of aeronautics and astronautics Brian L. Wardle. Kaiser is now a graduate student in Wardle’s lab.

Improving manufacturability

“This work has the interesting finding that nanostructures assist in fabricating [and] manufacturing the glassy carbon composites,” Wardle says. “Early lessons with nano-materials broadly showed that nanostructures impede manufacturing, however, we are finding a theme across several research areas that when controlled, the nanostructures can be utilized to enhance manufacturing, sometime significantly. While the nanostructures — here, aligned carbon nanotubes — are valuable as reinforcement to the glassy carbon, they can also be utilized to improve the manufacturability. Ashley and Itai are taking this work even further to test the limits.”

Crystallite size is strongly tied to hardness, which is a measure of mechanical performance such as strength and toughness. It is one of the most important properties of the glassy carbon material.

“If you look at the hardness normalized by the density, we previously found that the first point in the plateau region is the best point, because there the glassy carbon material is the least dense and hardest,” Stein says.

The primary finding of the earlier paper was that more disorder in the arrangement of carbon crystallites led to greater hardness and lower density in the glassy carbon material, which was obtained by baking a phenol-formaldehyde polymer in the absence of oxygen. The transformed material is also called pyrolytic carbon or PyC.

Although the polymer transforms into a graphite-like material, it never reaches the more highly ordered structure of graphite. This difference is confirmed by X-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis of samples baked with, and without, carbon nanotubes and compared to a standard indicator for graphite known as the Bernal stacking order. The type of disorder among crystallites here is called turbostratic stacking, where the planes that comprise the crystallites are randomly rotated with respect to one another due to holes (or vacancies) and curvature. XRD studies carried out at the Center for Materials Science and Engineering’s shared experimental facilities also validated the crystallite size evolution in relation to baking temperature.

To imagine this disorder compared to the perfect hexagonal structure of graphene or repeating layered structure of graphite, Stein suggests thinking of a stack of flat square pieces of paper. The papers easily stack into a perfect square with minimal space between each sheet. But if each piece of paper is taken out, crumpled, and then lightly flattened it out again, it would be frustrating trying to reorder the sheets into a neat stack.

Similar disorder occurs in the molecular structure of the glassy carbon, because the precursor phenol-formaldehyde polymer begins with a complicated mix of carbon-rich compounds and the baking temperature isn’t high enough to break down all of them into simpler carbon structures. Raman spectroscopy results confirmed the presence of these defects in the carbon structure. Another technique, Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy, confirmed the presence of oxygen and hydrogen groups within the crystallites.

“It originates from the polymeric precursor that we use, the phenol-formaldehyde, and they’re just stuck; they can’t leave,” Stein explains. 

The researcher’s earlier paper showed that the presence of these more complex carbon compounds in the material strengthens it by leading to three-dimensional connections that are hard to break. The new work shows that the carbon nanotubes have no effect on these oxygen or hydrogen substructures in the material.

Stein says that, for the current study, the goal was to explore what happens when carbon nanotubes are added and the baking temperature is increased; specifically, what effect, if any, the nanotubes have on crystallite growth. They found that the nanotubes influence the crystallite formation process on the meso-scale, which is measured in tens of nanometers, while everything else remains unchanged. Importantly, only the crystallite size is affected by the addition of the carbon nanotubes.

“We were surprised to see no change in the graphitic nature of our polymer as it is being baked in the presence of carbon nanotubes," he says. "Nonetheless, that is a very interesting finding because we can reduce the processing temperature without affecting the structure of the resulting glassy carbon. Since the properties of the glassy carbon depend on its structure, this finding could allow an industrial process of this technology to realize significant energy savings.”

Faster structural evolution

“The carbon nanotubes allow the composite’s structure to evolve faster at the meso-scale, so it reaches its final state at a lower processing temperature,” Kaiser adds. “These nanotubes also decrease the overall weight of the material. This way, we are able to produce our composite at a lower temperature while decreasing its density and maintaining its excellent properties.”

Stein notes that in the earlier work the researchers also showed that increasing processing temperature above 1,000 C resulted in a weaker material.

“So we are essentially reducing the temperature you need to go to reach the best properties,” Stein says of the new report. “If you look at the hardness normalized by the density, this [800 degrees C] is the best point, because this is where the glassy carbon is expected to be the least dense and hardest.” 

Stein says the lower processing temperature may also make these phenolic materials more compatible with metals whose melting points are below 1,000 C, which in turn may be useful for 3-D printing.

“The application we specifically thought of using this in is meta-materials,” he says. “If you can use nanotubes to reduce the temperature you bake at, if you want to convert it to carbon, just pure carbon, then that could make it more accessible. That 200 degrees Celsius is a big difference for many processes.”

In the new findings, the researchers experimented on a material with just 1 percent carbon nanotubes by volume. They plan to follow up by studying the impact of increasing the proportion of carbon nanotubes to 20 percent by volume. “We just want to see if the nanotubes make it stronger, “ Stein says. They’ll also look at the effect on size and thickness of the crystallites from the added carbon nanotubes.

Next-generation nano-structures

“A whole range of structural composites would benefit from this study, particularly next-generation ultra-lightweight nano-structures,” says Piran R. Kidambi, assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Vanderbilt University, who was not involved in this research.

“The study found that aligned carbon nanotube-glassy carbon matrix nanocomposites at the meso-scale evolved much faster with a plateau in crystallite sizes (an important quality metric) at a temperature up to 200 degrees Celsius lower compared to having a pure glassy carbon matrix,” Kidambi says. “Lower temperatures are good news for manufacturing to minimize heating costs in processing, and recent models tell us that slender crystallites are desirable since they increase glassy carbon hardness. Hence a combination of a plateau in crystallite sizes and lower temperatures is very interesting from a manufacturing perspective. This is high-quality research that uses fundamental insights to inform and guide manufacturing/synthesis routes for superior composites.”

Summer Scholar work

Kaiser’s work as a 2016 MPC-CMSE Summer Scholar makes up the bulk of the paper’s experimental results, except for the Raman spectroscopy results. “It is a very robust and focused contribution,” Stein says.

“I was thrilled to be involved in this research when I was a Summer Scholar,” Kaiser says. “Now, being able to come back to MIT as a graduate student, rejoin the Wardle group, and publish this work is very exciting. I’m eager to continue working on composites as I pursue my PhD here in materials science and engineering.”

This work received support from the Department of Defense, National Science Foundation MRSEC Program, and the MIT Materials Processing Center. Airbus, Embraer, Lockheed Martin, Saab AB, ANSYS, Hexcel, Saertex, and TohoTenax also provided partial support through MIT's Nano-Engineered Composite Aerospace Structures Consortium. Stein was supported in part by a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship.

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Fikile Brushett and Florence Wagner named to Chemical and Engineering News “Talented 12”

Professor Fikile Brushett of the MIT Department of Chemical Engineering and Florence Wagner, institute scientist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, have been selected as two of 2017's “Talented 12” by Chemical and Engineering News (C&EN), the weekly magazine of the American Chemical Society. Brushett is recognized for his innovative approach to economical and sustainable energy storage and the magazine calls him the “Baron of Batteries.” Wagner is the “Drug Discovery Dynamo,” as her work in targeted psychiatric therapies has shown potential to upend the field of psychiatric drug discovery.

Brushett, the Raymond A. (1921) and Helen E. St. Laurent Career Development Professor of Chemical Engineering, is developing new ways of storing energy from sustainable sources such as wind and sunlight. He is particularly interested in understanding and controlling the fundamental processes that define the performance, cost, and lifetime of present day and next-generation electrochemical systems. His laboratory is presently pursuing research on redox flow batteries for grid storage and on electrochemical upgrading of low-value feedstocks. As described by C&EN, “a major focus of his lab is understanding how chemical structure affects the function of redox active molecules, with the goal of expanding the toolbox for engineering batteries. In addition, his lab is developing new electrochemical reactors to improve battery performance.”

Wagner, director of the medicinal chemistry group in the Broad’s Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research, focuses on designing and implementing strategies that will enable development of novel therapeutic strategies for central nervous system-related psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, autism, and neurodevelopmental disorders. These strategies include the rational design and development of novel, potent, and highly selective small molecules suitable for clinical development and the development of translatable biomarkers. C&EN explains, “Recently, Wagner and her colleagues developed molecules that can selectively inhibit each of the two forms of an enzyme called glycogen synthase kinase 3 (GSK3), a possible target of the bipolar disorder treatment lithium. Previous inhibitors out of industry hit both forms of GSK3 and caused serious side effects in human studies. Wagner and her colleagues showed that selectively inhibiting either of the two forms avoided that toxicity in cells.”

To find its annual Talented 12, C&EN called on a panel of industry advisers, C&EN’s advisory board, and Talented 12 alumni to nominate prospects aged 42 or younger who are pushing the boundaries in their fields. They also accepted nominations from readers through an online form. Finally, they researched and evaluated the more than 150 candidates amassed during this process to zero in on the 12 most "path-paving" individuals.

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3 Questions: Brent Ryan on Hurricane Harvey’s implications for U.S. cities

Flying through Texas last weekend on his way to a workshop in Mexico, Brent Ryan found himself stranded at a hotel near Houston’s Bush International Airport as a result of Hurricane Harvey’s catastrophic flooding. An associate professor of urban design and planning at MIT, Ryan and two of his graduate students watched the waters rise and considered the implications of the disaster unfolding around them.

Ryan, who heads the City Design and Development Group in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), is no stranger to cities and natural disasters. He has studied coastal development in China, co-led an interdisciplinary team exploring strategies for Boston’s adaptation to climate change, and this summer taught a graduate practicum focused on disaster-resilient communities and housing in India. Last January, a team including Ryan and other MIT faculty were winners in a design competition to envision how policy changes, new investments, and innovative thinking could reshape the coasts of New York and New Jersey and prepare them for the next 25 years.

After safely departing from Houston, Ryan shared his account of what he observed during the hurricane, offered his thoughts on human decisions that contributed to the scale of the destruction — and explained why he believes the disaster ought to prompt soul-searching about where and how we build communities.

Q. How did you get caught up in the hurricane in Houston and what did you see there?

A: I flew into Houston last week with the weather worsening. And I think none of us — whether it was the news agencies or the airports or travelers — had any idea that we should have left as soon as we could have. By Saturday afternoon it started raining really hard and it just didn't stop raining. Our flight was cancelled, so we rebooked from Dallas. I had rented a car preemptively on Saturday, which was really lucky. But on Sunday morning, we got up to leave and realized the roads in all directions were closed off by floods. Together with two master’s students, I was more or less trapped for 48 hours. Nobody panicked, but when you think, “I'm cut off by floodwaters and I don’t know for how long,” it starts to get really scary.

We were all sitting there on Sunday thinking about the storm’s impact, asking ourselves, “How did things get this way? What went wrong?” In a sense, it really was a perfect storm because you have a city that's sprawling, hasn't been carefully constructed, and lacks environmental sensitivity in its development patterns — and it got the heaviest storm that you could possibly imagine.

Houston is a very wet area. It’s low lying, it has clay soils, it’s poorly drained. We realized as we were looking at the map — thinking, How did these airport roads get flooded? — that, essentially, what we were seeing was the runoff from the airport runways draining into what are called bayous in Houston. We realized that the airport access roads had cut across the drainage routes for these bayous in a very casual way. They had not been engineered to really confront any substantial amount of flooding. That's what trapped us at the airport. Regionally, we noticed that even interstate highways were flooded because the engineering of the roadway system wasn't enough to accommodate the degree of water that was generated.

Part two of Houston's problems is the region’s absolutely sprawling, auto-oriented development. You have parking lots, wide roads, impervious surfaces, and uncontrolled development that more or less ignores environmentally sensitive areas. With an event like this, it becomes viscerally evident which residential areas are absolutely not safe from even moderate flooding. Driving out, it was so sad: We were driving past all this water, stretching for as far as the eye could see with houses poking out of it.

Q. How does Houston recover and plan for the future?

A: I think you need to start at the regional level first, from a life-safety perspective and from a critical regional infrastructure perspective. It’s absolutely unacceptable that both airports shut down and major interstate highways closed. Once that happens, the area is essentially closed to the outside world. I think Houston needs to generate a whole new set of engineering standards in conjunction with environmental engineering analysis of the area that says, “We can't build this way anymore, and we have to rebuild a lot of places that we thought were okay.”

A secondary priority for life safety is either discouraging or prohibiting settlement in low-lying areas — and there's so much of that in Houston. There are a lot of residential neighborhoods that are getting flooded two, three, four, five times a year. These are areas in flood-prone zones and they're not going to be safe from future flooding. There’s no doubt about it.

But Houston is famous for having no zoning. They're not going to tell people how they can build or where; it's all up to the market. And the market has made a lot of decisions that are absolutely not in context and not sensitive to the environmental needs of the area. I think Houston really needs to do some soul searching about how they govern land use and residential development.

Whether or not you think that climate change is an issue, there's not anyone out there who doesn't see that Hurricane Harvey just came in and destroyed or damaged half of the city of Houston. Whatever the cause of Harvey’s strength, I think serious provisions need to be made for ensuring that the city doesn't shut down in this type of storm again. But that serious commitment is going to have to go up against a lot of anti-government ideology, and a lot of skepticism about regional planning and regional governance. In that sense Houston is going to face real dilemmas — ideological and practical — as it faces the future.

Q: You’ve studied disaster preparedness and resilient urban design around the globe. Are you able to draw any lessons from Houston based on your experience in different regions and contexts?

A: Yes, a significant lesson, for better or worse, is that top-down planning allows you to make decisions and to fund those decisions more easily with respect to resilience.

China is not a democratic country, but it has top-down planning. The central government allocates the funding and local government essentially falls in line and does what the central government says. There’s no disagreement in the Netherlands that large-scale governance is critical to providing protection from water. It’s a country that has become a leading example in how you can use design, planning, and engineering in concert to plan effectively for these types of problems. The Dutch are the classic example, but I think once China decides to confront sea-level rise directly, it's going to do so swiftly.

It's a lot more complicated in the United States. The New York region we studied after Hurricane Sandy has something like 250 separate municipalities. Each of these municipalities is facing its financial future more or less on its own. Each is responsive to its own citizens, who may be skeptical of relocation. Each governs its own land-use pattern. America's local governance and lack of regional planning really doesn't serve the United States well with respect to this kind of problem, whereas I think European and Asian governments — where there's a lot more trust in the higher levels of government and a tradition of central government abundantly funding planning and design decisions — are better prepared to deal with this.

I don’t want to label the Harvey disaster a wake-up call, because we've had a few wake-up calls already. But it's a reminder that the manifestation of climate change or climate severity can affect different cities in different ways. It's a reminder of how many of our cities and regions are vulnerable. And it’s an absolute reminder of the imperative for us to think hard about what types of measures we can generate to create more resilient regions.

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Letter regarding MIT's support of its DACA students

The following email was sent yesterday to the MIT community by Chancellor Cynthia Barnhart.

To the members of the MIT community,

In an op-ed published today in The Boston Globe, President Reif writes why the possible repeal of the federal Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program is at direct odds with our national interests and our American principles. He urges President Trump and Congress to find a legislative solution to prevent young people who have been protected by DACA for more than five years – including the thousands of students studying at institutions of higher education across the United States – from losing "the opportunities they earned, the communities they think of as home, and the nation they love."

I write in the midst of this uncertainty to assure you that MIT is stepping up for our DACA students. Just as we mobilized last January to help members of our community stranded overseas by executive orders restricting certain individuals from entering the United States, we are standing by our DACA students now. Here's what we're doing, and how you can help:

• In December, I shared that we were in direct, frequent contact with our DACA students. We told them that, no matter what happens to DACA, our commitment to them and to their education will not change. Early next week, I will be meeting with these students again, including new members of the Class of 2021, to reaffirm our steadfast support, and discuss a new free, on-campus immigration attorney resource available to help them.
• In concert with our partners in higher education and industry, MIT is actively advocating for the passage of comprehensive immigration reform. There are several bipartisan bills that aim to achieve sensible solutions to support our undocumented students. You can learn more about these potential legislative remedies here, and, if you feel inspired to do so, you can call your elected representatives to urge them to vote on a bill as soon as possible.
• The post-election working group I established last winter will continue its important work in the new academic year. I am grateful that Chair Christopher Capozzola and the other faculty, student, and staff members will be monitoring federal policy and advising us on potential changes that could negatively affect the student experience here at MIT. Last year, they helped organize an informative community briefing on immigration law and policy, and they will be planning another one this fall. I have also asked the group to work with student leaders to think about ways we can, here at MIT, counteract the political polarization gripping our country, and to identify more opportunities and platforms for the respectful, free exchange of all political viewpoints.
• When I last wrote to you about post-election issues in December, I noted that we had launched a review of our bias reporting procedures to ensure they are easy to access, coordinated, and responsive to community members' needs. After months of community conversations and consultation with our peer institutions, I am pleased to share that our Title IX Office will now be a central location to report all bias incidents involving students and student groups. More information about how Title IX – now called Title IX & Bias Response (T9BR) – can help those who might be subject to a bias incident is here.

Every MIT student deserves the same opportunities to study, to work, to travel—in short, to thrive here. Today and always, we are one MIT.

Sincerely,

Cynthia Barnhart
Chancellor

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