Stanislaw Olbert, professor emeritus of physics and a pioneering theorist of the space age, dies at 94

Stanislaw “Stan” Olbert PhD ’53, professor emeritus of physics and a distinguished researcher with MIT’s Space Plasma Group, died from a heart attack on Sept. 23. He was 94.

Olbert fought with the Polish underground during World War II, came to MIT on a scholarship to earn his doctorate, and, as a member of MIT’s Space Plasma Group, was one of the pioneer theorists of the space age. He specialized in the understanding of the solar wind, the streams of atomic particles flowing outward from the sun. He participated in, and brought insight to, the measurements of the solar wind with instruments on several NASA space missions, including the Voyager missions to the outer planets and interstellar space.

Born in 1923, Olbert was raised by his widowed mother in a small village in Eastern Poland. He showed early academic promise, and, during the Russian occupation of 1939 to 1941, he concentrated in math and physics under Russian teachers. Under the subsequent German occupation of 1941, however, his studies were interrupted. He was forced to work as a mason, and later, because he spoke German, as a bookkeeper on a German-run farm. He secretly shared information about German-bound food shipments for later interception by the Polish underground.   

In 1944, he fought in the Warsaw uprising and, at the surrender, was taken prisoner by the Germans. At the war’s end, Olbert was declared a "displaced person" and enrolled at the University of Munich to resume his studies in math and physics. He earned a scholarship to the doctoral program of MIT’s Department of Physics in 1949. With the Cosmic Ray Group led by Professor Bruno Rossi, he earned his doctorate in 1953, became an assistant professor in 1957, and became full professor in 1967; he retired in 1988.

Following his thesis research, Olbert studied the properties of high-energy nuclear interactions and the extensive air showers — large cascades of atomic particles propagating through the atmosphere — that are produced by those interactions. This provided the first theoretical framework in which the implications of various assumptions about the basic cascade processes could be worked out for comparison with observed shower phenomena.

Olbert’s research in the field of space plasmas began with a study of the origins of cosmic rays in our galaxy. This work, performed in collaboration with Rossi and Professor Philip Morrison, led Olbert into fundamental investigations of individual and collective behavior of charged particles in the interplanetary environment.

The results of these investigations became the basis of two MIT graduate courses. One of these, taught in collaboration with Rossi, led to the publication of a textbook on the subject, "Introduction to the Physics of Space" (McGraw-Hill, 1970).

“Professor Olbert was the theoretical backbone of MIT’s Space Plasma Group,” said his colleague Hale Bradt, professor emeritus of physics. The group flew instruments in numerous space missions to study the solar wind, beginning with its first in situ measurement with Explorer 10 in 1961, and including the 1977 launches of Voyager I and Voyager II. Even today, the Voyagers continue to send data from in and beyond the heliosphere. Among other contributions, Olbert engaged in theoretical studies of a variety of mechanisms that could be responsible for the generation of stellar winds.

From 1979 to 1986, Olbert undertook two major research projects: the self-consistent solution of the problem of solar wind dynamics, and theoretical studies of radiation generated by solid conductors moving through a magnetized plasma. Olbert maintained contact with many graduate and undergraduate students who have since become well-known in the field of space research.

“He gave me private lessons on the physics of space plasmas, which had not been covered in my coursework,” said Olbert’s last doctoral student, Alan Barnett PhD ’83. “His cheerful and optimistic outlook was infectious.”

In the 1980s, Olbert was a frequent visitor to the University of Rome and the Arcetri Observatory in Florence; and, in 1991, at the Institute for Cosmic Studies in Warsaw, Poland. He collaborated abroad and at home with former students and associates on various projects. One of these papers, in 2003, provides methods for the visualization of the motion of electromagnetic fields that have been used in the teaching of freshman physics both at MIT and around the world. His last first-author paper was published in 2012, at the age of 89. Until late in his life, Olbert kept up with current events with regular reading of newspapers in German, Italian, Polish, and English.

He and his family lived in Melrose, Massachusetts, and later in Cambridge, with summers spent on their New Hampshire farm. Olbert is survived by his wife, Norma (DeVivo), and their two children, Thomas of Cambridge, and Elizabeth of Farmington, Maine, where she is adjunct professor at the University of Maine.

In 1980, Elizabeth created the abstract painting "Jupiter," inspired by the Voyager spacecraft images; it hangs in the headquarters of MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. In 2014, Norma published a biography of Olbert’s early years in Poland and Germany, "The Boy from Lwów" (CreateSpace, 2014), for which Thomas wrote the foreword and Elizabeth designed the cover.

Olbert’s body was cremated, and there will be no funeral service. A memorial gathering will be announced in the near future.

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Nick Diehl joins MIT Ombuds Office

Nick Diehl, an ombudsperson with more than a decade of experience working in corporate, government, and academic sectors, has joined the MIT Ombuds Office. The office provides confidential, neutral assistance to MIT faculty, students, and staff to help resolve issues affecting their work and studies at the Institute.

Diehl began in his role on Aug. 28. He succeeds Ombudsperson Toni Robinson, who retired this summer after 19 years of service to the Institute. Diehl will work alongside MIT’s other ombudsperson, Judi Segall.

The MIT Ombuds Office was established more than 35 years ago and helped develop standards of the practice for the organizational ombudsman field. In addition to providing independent conflict management and communication support to individual students, faculty, and staff, MIT ombudspersons offer systemic feedback to Institute leadership on “how to reinforce the fabric of the MIT community,” as Diehl puts it.

“We’re a confidential resource to help people to examine issues of concern, explore a variety of options, and develop strategies for moving forward constructively,” he says. “Equally important is our role in strengthening the institution. We look for trends in the types of concerns being raised, identify root causes of issues, and make recommendations for systemic improvements.”

Prior to coming to MIT, Diehl was the ombudsperson at the Asian Development Bank in Manila, Philippines. The office served more than 3,000 staff members in headquarters and 30 country offices, representing 57 different nationalities. In this role, Diehl advised bank leadership on emerging organizational issues, worked with staff to resolve individual workplace concerns, and raised awareness of the office’s services across the organization.

Diehl has also served as an ombudsperson for the American Red Cross, the National Institutes of Health, and Princeton University. He has also held positions as a mediator and in corporate communications.

He is pleased to be returning to a university campus, where he says the energetic intellectual environment is similar to what he experienced growing up in a small college town in Vermont, where his parents were music teachers. Many of the themes of his work as an ombudsperson come into clear relief in this setting, Diehl says.

“More now than ever, it’s important to support an environment in which people can disagree constructively. Helping to resolve issues is not necessarily about getting everyone in alignment in their thinking or beliefs; rather it’s about listening, understanding others’ perspectives, and always challenging ourselves to think differently. This is at the core of learning and growth,” he says.

Diehl earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Vermont in 1995, a master’s in conflict analysis in resolution from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 2006, and a master’s in organization development from American University in 2011. He has served as a consultant on projects for the World Bank Group, the Zuidas business district in Amsterdam, and the United Nations in New York. Diehl is a certified organizational ombudsman practitioner and was president of the International Ombudsman Association from 2012 to 2013.

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Exploring the new world of online credentials

Five years ago, at the first annual Online Learning Summit, the question being asked was “can we scale learning” to reach the vast population on the internet, said Sanjay Sarma, MIT’s vice president for open learning, in his introduction to this year’s summit. That’s no longer in question, he continued: “The answer is emphatically yes.”

Now, as the number of people taking online classes around the world has rocketed upward, the questions revolve around issues of how to carry out such online education, how to provide meaningful credentials for online classes, and how to integrate and complement online education with that offered on traditional residential campuses.

Introduced by MIT President L. Rafael Reif, Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker delivered a keynote talk at the summit. The event took place Sept. 27-28 and drew administrators and professors from around the U.S. and elsewhere to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The summit has been jointly convened by MIT, Harvard University, the University of California at Berkeley, and Stanford University every year since 2013. The 2017 program included sessions on scaling various approaches, new types of credentials, diversity and inclusion, and academic integrity.

Baker described an innovative program that matches students from disadvantaged neighborhoods in the Boston area with mentors and a place to study, allowing the students to take classes from Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU), one of the largest providers of online accredited degrees. “I talked with a lot of these kids, and to a person, they said without a program like this, it wouldn’t happen,” Baker said, emphasizing the importance of combining in-person interaction with the online educational experience.

Online courses, combined with extra help for those who have fewer resources available, can be an important way to open up new career opportunities to people who might not be able to afford a traditional college degree, Baker said. For example, online classes allow students to fit classes around their own schedules while working full time or raising a family. For many people, “it’s either going to happen this way or not at all,” he said.

Citing booming enrollment in online classes, Baker noted, “You’re scratching an itch with this stuff.”

He told the story of a state employee who had worked his way up through the ranks of a state agency over many years, learning every aspect of how the agency functioned from the inside, and ending up as its deputy administrator. But when the administrator’s position opened up, even though everyone agreed this employee was by far the most qualified candidate, state regulations prevented his appointment because he lacked a college degree. For someone working full-time and supporting a family, taking time off for college had been out of the question, but the possibility of earning an accredited degree through online classes, at his own pace, could finally open the path to advancement for people in such situations, Baker said. “If [the Massachusetts state government] had something like a micromasters program available, we’d consider that to be the equivalent” of the required degree, he said.

Paul LeBlanc, president of SNHU, described the growth of that institution’s online education program, which now enrolls 100,000 students online, compared to 3,000 at its Manchester, New Hampshire, campus. “I would argue that now, the best online education is better than most traditionally delivered education,” he said.

For example, he said, while a student struggling with a particular concept in a traditional math class might learn it just well enough to pass a test, or miss it altogether and get a lower grade, an online learner could go back over the lecture as often as needed to really grasp it. Already, he said, “in lots of colleges, students aren’t even going to classes. They’re online learners.”

LeBlanc said that in a recent study comparing 4,000 SNHU online students who had earned 60 online credits — the equivalent of two years of college — with 7,000 students who had earned two-year degrees, the online learners “outperformed in every category” the traditional graduates.

And such education is accessible to anyone, anywhere, as long as they can get to a place with an internet connection, he said.

Yossi Sheffi, the Elisha Gray II Professor of Engineering Systems at MIT, who led MITx’s first online micromasters program, said teaching these online classes “is uplifting. We get people thanking us every morning.” He urged any of his fellow faculty members who hadn’t already done so to try teaching an online class. Most online students, he said, “have a real drive to do this, often under difficult conditions.”

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MIT physicist Rainer Weiss shares Nobel Prize in physics

Rainer Weiss ’55, PhD ’62, professor emeritus of physics at MIT, has won the Nobel Prize in physics for 2017. Weiss wins half the prize, sharing the other half of the award with Kip S. Thorne, professor emeritus of theoretical physics at Caltech, and Barry C. Barish, professor emeritus of physics at Caltech.

The Nobel Foundation, in its announcement this morning, cited the physicists "for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves.”

“We are immensely proud of Rai Weiss, and we also offer admiring best wishes to his chief collaborators and the entire LIGO team,” says MIT President L. Rafael Reif. “The creativity and rigor of the LIGO experiment constitute a scientific triumph; we are profoundly inspired by the decades of ingenuity, optimism, and perseverance that made it possible. It is especially sweet that Rai Weiss not only served on the MIT faculty for 37 years, but is also an MIT graduate. Today’s announcement reminds us, on a grand scale, of the value and power of fundamental scientific research and why it deserves society’s collective support.”

Listening for a wobble

On Sept. 14, 2015, at approximately 5:51 a.m. EDT, a gravitational wave — a ripple from a distant part of the universe — passed through the Earth, generating an almost imperceptible, fleeting wobble in the world that would have gone completely unnoticed save for two massive, identical instruments, designed to listen for such cosmic distortions.

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, or LIGO, consists of two L-shaped interferometers, each 4 kilometers in length, separated by 1,865 miles. On Sept. 14, 2015, scientists picked up a very faint wobble in the instruments and soon confirmed that the interferometers had been infinitesimally stretched — by just one-ten-thousandth the diameter of a proton — and that this miniscule distortion arose from a passing gravitational wave.

The LIGO Scientific Collaboration, with the Caltech-MIT LIGO Laboratory and more than 1,000 scientists at universities and observatories around the world, confirmed the signal as the first direct detection of a gravitational wave by an instrument on Earth. The scientists further decoded the signal to determine that the gravitational wave was the product of a violent collision between two massive black holes 1.3 billion years ago.

The momentous result confirmed the theory of general relativity proposed by Albert Einstein, who almost exactly 100 years earlier had predicted the existence of gravitational waves but assumed that they would be virtually impossible to detect from Earth. Since this first discovery, LIGO has detected three other gravitational wave signals, also generated by pairs of spiraling, colliding black holes; the most announced of a detection came just last week.

“We are incredibly proud of Rai and his colleagues for their vision and courage that led to this great achievement,” says Michael Sipser, the Donner Professor of Mathematics and dean of the School of Science at MIT. “It is a wonderful day for them, for MIT, for risk-taking and boldness, and for all of science.”

A gravitational blueprint

The detection was an especially long-awaited payoff for Weiss, who came up with the initial design for LIGO some 50 years ago. He has since been instrumental in shaping and championing the idea as it developed from a desktop prototype to LIGO’s final, observatory-scale form.

In 1967, Weiss, then an assistant professor of physics at MIT, was asked by his department to teach an introductory course in general relativity — a subject he knew little about. A few years earlier, the American physicist Joseph Weber had claimed to have made the first detection of gravitational waves, using resonant bars — long, aluminum cylinders that should ring at a certain frequency in response to a gravitational wave. When his students asked him to explain how these Weber bars worked, Weiss found that he couldn’t.

No one in the scientific community had been able to replicate Weber’s results. Weiss had a very different idea for how to do it, and assigned the problem to his students, instructing them to design the simplest experiment they could to detect a gravitational wave. Weiss himself came up with a design: Build an L-shaped interferometer and shine a light down the length of each arm, at the end of which hangs a free-floating mirror. The lasers should bounce off the mirrors and head back along each arm, arriving where they started at the exact same time. If a gravitational wave passes through, it should “stretch” or displace the mirrors ever so slightly, and thus change the lasers’ arrival times.

Weiss refined the idea over a summer in MIT’s historic Building 20, a wooden structure built during World War II to develop radar technology. The building, meant to be temporary and known to many as the “Plywood Palace,” lived on to germinate and support innovative, high-risk projects. During that time, Weiss came to the conclusion that his design could indeed detect gravitational waves, if built to large enough dimensions. His design would serve as the essential blueprint for LIGO.

An observatory takes shape

To test his idea, Weiss initially built a 1.5-meter prototype. But to truly detect a gravitational wave, the instrument would have to be several thousand times longer: The longer the interferometer’s arms, the more sensitive its optics are to minute displacements.

To realize this audacious design, Weiss teamed up in 1976 with noted physicist Kip Thorne, who, based in part on conversations with Weiss, soon started a gravitational wave experiment group at Caltech. The two formed a collaboration between MIT and Caltech, and in 1979, Scottish physicist Ronald Drever, then of Glasgow University, joined the effort at Caltech. The three scientists — who became the co-founders of LIGO — worked to refine the dimensions and scientific requirements for an instrument sensitive enough to detect a gravitational wave.

Barry Barish soon joined the team as first a principal investigator, then director of the project, and was instrumental in securing funding for the audacious project, and bringing the detectors to completion.

After years of fits and starts in research and funding, the project finally received significant and enthusiastic backing from the National Science Foundation, and in the mid-1990s, LIGO broke ground, erecting its first interferometer in Hanford, Washington, and its second in Livingston, Louisiana.

Prior to making their seminal detection two years ago, LIGO’s detectors required years of fine-tuning to improve their sensitivity. During this time, Weiss not only advised on scientific quandaries but also stepped in to root out problems in the detectors themselves. Weiss is among the few to have walked the length of the interferometers’ tunnels in the space between LIGO’s laser beam tube and its encasement. Inspecting the detectors in this way, Weiss would often discover minute cracks, tiny shards of glass, and even infestations of wasps, mice, and black widow spiders, which he would promptly deal with.

A cosmic path

Weiss was born in 1932 in tumultuous Berlin. When his mother, Gertrude Loesner, was pregnant with Weiss, his father, neurologist Frederick Weiss, was abducted by the Nazis for testifying against a Nazi doctor. He was eventually released with the help of Loesner’s family. The young family fled to Prague and then emigrated to New York City, where Weiss grew up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, cultivating a love for classical music and electronics, and making a hobby of repairing radios.

After graduating high school, he went to MIT to study electrical engineering, in hopes of finding a way to quiet the hiss heard in shellac records. He later switched to physics, but then dropped out of school in his junior year, only to return shortly after, taking a job as a technician in Building 20. There, Weiss met physicist Jerrold Zacharias, who is credited with developing the first atomic clock. Zacharias encouraged and supported Weiss in finishing his undergraduate degree in 1955 and his PhD in 1962.

Weiss spent some time at Princeton University as a postdoc, where he developed experiments to test gravity, before returning to MIT as an assistant professor in 1964. In the midst of his work in gravitational wave detection, Weiss also investigated and became a leading researcher in cosmic microwave background radiation — thermal radiation, found in the microwave band of the radio spectrum, that is thought to be a diffuse afterglow from the Big Bang.

In 1976, Weiss was appointed to oversee a scientific working group for NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite, which launched in 1989 and went on to precisely measure microwave radiation and its tiny, quantum fluctuations. Weiss was co-founder and chair of the science working group for the mission, whose measurements helped support the Big Bang theory of the universe. COBE’s findings earned two of its principal investigators the Nobel Prize in physics in 2006.

Weiss has received numerous awards and honors, including the Medaille de l’ADION, the 2006 Gruber Prize in Cosmology, and the 2007 Einstein Prize of the American Physical Society. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Physical Society, as well as a member of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2016, Weiss received a Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, the Gruber Prize in Cosmology, the Shaw Prize in Astronomy, and the Kavli Prize in Astrophysics, all shared with Drever and Thorne. Most recently, Weiss shared the Princess of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research with Thorne, Barry Barish of Caltech, and the LIGO Scientific Collaboration.

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How philosophy can solve your midlife crisis

A few years ago, a man experienced a midlife crisis. He was professionally successful and had a rewarding family life, but still had a “hollow” feeling. Could he grind away at the same job indefinitely? Would he have to abandon his older hopes and dreams? And wasn’t it disheartening to think his life might be halfway over?

Fortunately, this person didn’t quit his job, blow his life’s savings on sports cars, or sabotage his personal relationships. Instead, he went to his office and pondered matters.

“I was doing the things I had always wanted,” explains MIT philosophy professor Kieran Setiya, the fellow suffering through the midlife malaise. “I wasn’t wrong to think that teaching and writing and thinking about philosophy was worth doing, but nevertheless, something was amiss. The thing that gripped me first was a sense of hollowness in pursuit of projects. You can be aiming to get things done and have an absence of satisfaction.”

Then again, existential doubt in midlife can have other sources. “There are many midlife crises,” Setiya acknowledges. “There’s a sense of constraint and limitation and regret. Death is closer.”

Now Setiya has woven these strands into a new book, “Midlife: A Philosophical Guide,” published by Princeton University Press. In it, he examines the problems of middle-aged happiness, reaches some unusual conclusions — he thinks we should embrace our regrets — and explores how philosophy can help people find peace of mind.

Indeed, “Midlife” has a clear prescription for living well. Setiya believes “atelic” activities — things we enjoy for their own sake — make us fulfilled. Too often, he states, we are consumed with “telic” activities: goal-driven projects that leave us unsatisfied in the present. (The terms derive from “telos,” the Greek word for “goal.”)

“What really matters is that some important things in your life, things you regard as sources of meaning, are atelic,” Setiya says. “Reading, or walking, or thinking about philosophy, or parenting, or spending time with your friends or family are activities that don’t have an endpoint built in. There isn’t a sense that in doing it you’re exhausting it, as if you could complete the project of hanging out with your friends.”

Trust the process

As Setiya chronicles in the new book, the concept of the midlife crisis did not really develop until the 1960s, and it has largely been the province of psychologists, not philosophers. Still, writings about the middle stage of life extend back to ancient times, and two famous 19th-century philosophers figure prominently in Setiya’s book: John Stuart Mill and Arthur Schopenhauer.

Both Mill and Schopenhauer questioned the project-driven life, with Schopenhauer arriving at the bleak conclusion that a life of finite goals would leave us perpetually reliving the past or focused on the future, but never satisfied in the present.

“I think Schopenauer missed or didn’t see the value of atelic activities — the process, not the project,” Setiya says.

But as Setiya notes, designing your life purely around atelic activities isn’t realistic either. Most of us cannot indulge in endless hobbies: “When the demands of life are pressing, too urgent to be ignored, it would be a mistake to devote all day to contemplation, reading Wordsworth, or playing golf,” Setiya writes in the book.

Moreover, the distinction between atelic and telic activities is not total. A goal-oriented project can still be intrinsically fun — think of a teacher who helps students learn certain things but aims for everyone to enjoy the classroom. That experience is both atelic and telic.

“Most of the things you’ll be doing at any given time will be describable in both ways,” Setiya agrees. “You don’t necessarily need to shift what you’re doing, but just try to find the atelic in it, and find the value in that. I’m not going to stop writing philosophy articles, but the point is to be doing philosophy, not just to get the article done.”

Why you should embrace regret

More provocatively, Setiya contends in the book that the perceived narrowing of life’s possibilities, often a big part of the midlife crisis, should be regarded as a good thing, not a source of regret.

True, most of us will never become movie stars or famous athletes or try all the careers we once found intriguing. We will never visit all the places we want to see or befriend everyone we wanted to know better. However, Setiya suggests, this is just “a recognition of the richness of valuable things in the world.” Feeling regret in this sense is better than feeling nothing.

Or, as Setiya elaborates: “It’s tempting to complain about how even when things go well, there are all kinds of things you’ll never do. But there is a certain consolation in thinking why that is. It’s because the world offers up many different things worth doing and worth wanting. And it’s true you can’t do all of them. But to live a life where you don’t miss out, you’d have to be utterly blinkered, and narrow your focus so much there’s only one thing you care about. And that really isn’t a preferable life.”

In this vein, Setiya cites Plato’s observation in the “Philebus,” that to live with no unsatisfied wishes, “You would thus not live a human life, but the life of a mollusk or of one of those creatures in shells that live in the sea.”

U can make the U-turn

Not every chapter of “Midlife” offers clear consolations. After weighing various philosophical arguments that we should not fear death, Setiya concludes that our concerns about it are, in logical terms, well-founded. On the bright side, he also emphasizes recent psychological research indicating that the midlife crisis is not an irreversible change, but a temporary phase.

Happiness often follows a U-curve in which middle age is uniquely stressful, with a heavy dose of responsibilities. That’s all the more reason to seek out atelic activites when the midlife blues hit: meditation, music, running, or almost anything that brings inner peace. But self-reported happiness does increase later in life.

Oddly, as Setiya observes, many of the most consequential choices we make occur in our 20s and early 30s: careers, partners, families, and more. The midlife crisis is a delayed reaction, hitting when we feel more weighted down by those choices. So the challenge is not necessarily to change everything, he says, but to ask, “How do I appreciate properly what I now am doing?”

In this sense, Setiya believes, “Midlife” is about middle age, but middle age just represents a more acute stage of existential insecurity that is always present.

“The book is about midlife in the sense of how to cope with being in the middle of this constantly ongoing process of life, that involves a past that you have to deal with, a future that’s getting shorter, and projects that get completed and replaced,” Setiya says. “I hope it will be of use to a wider range of people than just 40- or 50-somethings.”

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Tackling the world’s challenges in the field

MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI) — MIT’s pioneering international education program — asked the 700-plus students who studied and worked abroad this summer to submit photos and short videos showcasing the ways in which MIT is making the world a better place through the MISTI program.

From Chile to China, current MISTI students submitted one-minute videos and photographs focusing on their international projects and their experiences with different cultures. MISTI announced the contest winners via social media in the midst of its yearly information sessions. Video winners received $300 and photo winners received $50. MISTI received 25 video submissions and over 125 photographs this summer.

Winning videos:

MIT-Netherlands Better World Story: Yara Azouni

At MX3D, Yara Azoni, now a senior in mechanical engineering, worked on the first 3-D-printed steel bridge in the world. The bridge will be "intelligent" with a smart sensor network to monitor the structure's health in response to environmental changes.

MIT-India Better World Story: Wan Chantavilasvong

Chantavilasvong, a master's in city planning candidate, interned with the Aga Khan Agency for Habitat (AKAH) under the Aga Khan Development Network to address the increasing threats to rural towns posed by natural disasters and climate change.

Winning photos:

Prosthetics in India (top left): Max Freitas and his D-Lab project partner Hope Chen (both juniors in biological engineering) developed and field tested prosthetics with Rise Legs through MIT-India.

Entrepreneurship in Jerusalem (top right): Dou Dou '17 brought over 80 Israeli and Palestinian high school students together by teaching them computer science and entrepreneurship through MIT-MEET (Middle East Entrepreneurs of Tomorrow).

For today's graduates of MIT, the ability to connect with, learn from and collaborate with people from different countries is essential. Interning, researching and teaching in over 30 countries around the world, MISTI students develop these practical intercultural skills working alongside international colleagues. An embodiment of MIT's "mens-et-manus" ("mind-and-hand") learning culture, MISTI provides students professional opportunities to take their education abroad and apply it to real world problems.

Each year, MISTI — a program of the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences within the Center for International Studies — matches nearly 1,000 students with internship, teaching, and research opportunities in leading labs, companies, and schools around the world. At graduation, MISTI students report a higher level of self-confidence and an improved ability to adapt to new situations and to communicate effectively with international peers.

Are you an MIT undergrad or graduate student? Get involved early by reviewing student opportunities and requirements; reading more about MISTI students abroad; and attending MISTI country-specific info sessions this fall.

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Developing new magnetic device materials

Assistant professor of electrical engineering Luqiao Liu is developing new magnetic materials, known as antiferromagnets, that can be operated at room temperature by reversing their electron spin and can serve as the basis for long-lasting, spintronic computer memory. Stephanie Bauman, an intern in the Materials Processing Center and Center for Materials Science and Engineering Summer Scholars program, spent her internship making and testing these new materials, which include manganese gallium samples.

“In our project we're working on the area of spintronics, anti-ferromagnetic devices that switch electron spin controlled by a current,” said Bauman, a University of South Florida physics major. “I'm working with a lot of new equipment like the vibrating sample magnetometer and the sputterer to lay down thin films.”

“I’ve been working on a daily basis with Joe Finley, who is a graduate student here, and he’s been a explaining a lot of things to me,” Bauman said. “It’s a very dense subject matter. And he does help me out a lot when we go to things like the X-ray diffraction room, and he shows me how the graphs can interpret how thick each layer of the thin layers of the devices are. He’s really helpful and easy to work with.”

During a visit to the lab, where she synthesizes these thin films with a special machine called a sputter deposition chamber, Bauman said she always refers to a checklist to make sure she's doing everything in the right order. In order to take out a sample from the machine, she follows a complicated set of steps, making sure its parts are correctly lined up and unhooking the sample holder in the main chamber. Because the chamber is pressurized, she must bring it back to everyday atmospheric pressure before taking it out. “Now that I can see that it disengaged, I go ahead and move it all the way back up,” she said. With the sample holder on a moveable arm, she is able to rotate it out.

The sample moved across a gear arm out of the main chamber into transfer chamber known as a load lock. “A very, very important part of this is to make sure you close the transfer valve again, otherwise you mess up the pressure in the main chamber,” she said. After double-checking the transfer valve is closed, she brought the load lock back to sea level pressure of 760 torr. Then she took out the sample holder.

“As you can see the sample is really tiny. It's half a centimeter by a half a centimeter, which is what we're working with right now,” Bauman said. As she loosened the screws on the arms holding the sample in place, she noted that she had to be careful not to scratch the sample with the arms. Once safely removed, she placed the sample in a special holder, labeled based on when each sample was made, which sample of the day it is and its thickness. That way, she noted, “we can refer back to that in our data so that we know what thickness levels that we’re testing.”

“Sometimes you end up playing tiddlywinks. I know that some younger people don't really know what that game is, but it's what it looks like when you push down on the arm, and the sample goes flying,” she cautioned.

Bauman then demonstrated how a new sample is loaded into the sputterer device. “Carefully tighten the screw, making sure not to torque it too much, then you move the other arm into place,” she said. Once both arms were tightened on the sample holder, she was able to put the sample into the load lock. “Very simple just make sure it's lined up correctly. It's also important to make sure the O-ring is clean, and so is the lid before you put it back on. That way there's a very good seal. So that's really it for the loading, and then you just turn the vacuum pumps back on and wait until it reaches the appropriate pressure and then load it into the main chamber.”

“I'm actually a non-traditional student, which means I'm a little bit older,” Bauman explained. “I have been in the military for 20 years, and I also had a civilian career for a long time in aviation contracts. I decided to go back to school for physics, and it's really been rewarding, especially this internship.”

Bauman’s internship is supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation’s Materials Research Science and Engineering Centers program. Participants in the Research Experience for Undergraduates, co-sponsored by the Materials Processing Center and the Center for Materials Science and Engineering, presented their results at a poster session during the last week of the program. The program ran from June 15 to Aug. 5 on the Cambridge campus.

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