Three from MIT elected to the National Academy of Sciences for 2019

Three MIT professors — Edward Boyden, Paula Hammond, and Aviv Regev — are among the 100 new members and 25 foreign associates elected to the National Academy of Sciences on April 30. Forty percent of the newly elected members are women, the most ever elected in any one year to date.

Membership to the National Academy of Sciences is considered one of the highest honors that a scientist or engineer can receive. Current membership totals approximately 2,380 members and nearly 485 foreign associates.

Edward S. Boyden is the Y. Eva Tan Professor in Neurotechnology at MIT; leader of the Synthetic Neurobiology Group in the MIT Media Lab; associate professor of biological engineering and of brain and cognitive sciences; a McGovern Institute investigator; co-director of the MIT Center for Neurobiological Engineering; and a member of the MIT Center for Environmental Health Sciences, Computational and Systems Biology Initiative, and Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT.

Boyden develops new tools for probing, analyzing, and engineering brain circuits. He uses a range of approaches, including synthetic biology, nanotechnology, chemistry, electrical engineering, and optics to develop tools capable of revealing fundamental mechanisms underlying complex brain processes. He pioneered the development of optogenetics, a powerful method that enables neuronal activity to be controlled with light. He also led the team that invented expansion microscopy, in which a specimen is embedded in a gel that swells as it absorbs water, thereby expanding nanoscale features to a size where they can be seen using conventional microscopes. He is now seeking to systematically integrate these technologies to create detailed maps and models of brain circuitry.

Paula T. Hammond is the David H. Koch Chair Professor of Engineering and the head of the Department of Chemical Engineering; a founding member of the MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnology; and a member of the MIT Energy Initiative and Koch Institute.

Hammond’s research in nanomedicine encompasses the development of new biomaterials to enable drug delivery from surfaces with spatio-temporal control. She also investigates novel responsive polymer architectures for targeted nanoparticle drug and gene delivery, and has developed self-assembled materials systems for electrochemical energy devices. She has designed multilayered nanoparticles to deliver a synergistic combination of siRNA or inhibitors with chemotherapy drugs in a staged manner to tumors, leading to significant decreases in tumor growth and a great lowering of toxicity.

Aviv Regev is a professor of biology; a core member of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT; and aHoward Hughes Medical Institute investigator.

Regev studies the molecular circuitry that governs the function of mammalian cells in health and disease and has pioneered many leading experimental and computational methods for the reconstruction of circuits, including in single-cell genomics. Her work focuses on dissecting complex molecular networks to determine how they function and evolve in the face of genetic and environmental changes, as well as during differentiation, evolution and disease.

The National Academy of Sciences is a private, non-profit society of distinguished scholars. Established in 1863 by an Act of Congress, signed by President Abraham Lincoln, the academy was charged with “providing independent, objective advice to the nation on matters related to science and technology.” Scientists are elected by their peers to membership for outstanding contributions to research. The NAS is committed to furthering science in America, and its members are active contributors to the international scientific community.

de MIT News http://bit.ly/2J7nX6N

Study: For low-income countries, climate action pays off by 2050

The following announcement was released jointly by MIT and the International Food Policy Research Institute.

Successful global efforts to substantially limit greenhouse gas emissions would likely boost GDP growth of poorer countries over the next 30 years, according to new research published in Climatic Change.

Researchers examined the impact global climate change mitigation would have on the economies of poorer countries — specifically Malawi, Mozambique, and Zambia. Devastation in Mozambique and Malawi recently caused by cyclones Idai and Kenneth vividly demonstrate the crippling impact that extreme weather events can have on these economies. Climate change is widely expected to increase the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events such as extreme heat, droughts, and floods as well as to magnify the destructive power of cyclones like Idai and Kenneth due to sea-level rise.

The study shows that beyond the benefits of reduced extreme weather in the long term, global mitigation efforts would also lower oil prices in coming decades, resulting in a significant economic boon for most poorer countries. 

“It is abundantly clear that many low-income countries will bear the brunt of climate change impacts over the long term, and that successful efforts to rein in emissions will lessen this blow,” said lead author Channing Arndt, director of the Environment and Production Technology Division at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). “Our research now provides another rationale for robust climate action: the economic benefits of mitigation arrive much sooner than previously thought.”

Lowering greenhouse gas emissions creates two sources of economic gain for poorer countries. First, effective global mitigation policies would reduce changes in local weather patterns and lower the odds of damaging extreme events, allowing for more economic growth than if climate change is unimpeded and more extreme weather damages economic activity. 

Second, successful mitigation policies would cause oil prices to drop due to a reduction in oil demand. If richer nations take the lead in restraining their oil use, lower-income countries will be able to transition somewhat later while benefiting from much lower oil prices during the transition period. Since nearly all low-income countries are net oil importers, such price drops would represent a significant economic windfall.

The research suggests that by 2050 these two sources of economic benefit together could increase the average GDP of Malawi, Mozambique, and Zambia by between 2 and 6 percentage points — gains that cannot occur if greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated.

“Previous research into the economic impacts of global climate mitigation has tended to group oil exporters, such as Nigeria and Angola, and oil importers, such as Malawi and Zambia, together in a single aggregate region that both exports and imports oil,” said Sergey Paltsev, deputy director of the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change. “When you look at the impacts on a country level though, most low-income countries benefit not only from having a more stable climate but also from lower fuel prices, because they are net fuel importers and the import volumes are large relative to the size of their economies.”

How emissions policies should be structured globally remains an open question. The models producing these results assume that low-income countries are afforded space to transition more slowly because their contributions to global emissions are relatively low and such exemption allows low-income countries to proceed with the benefit of experience accumulated elsewhere. But the researchers caution that for climate mitigation to be effective, some developing countries cannot be exempted for long — many middle-income countries will soon need to adhere to required emissions reductions.

“The impact of climate change is not likely to be distributed equally across the planet, and neither are any costs associated with reducing emissions,” said Arndt. “We want to limit the deleterious effects of climate change on the environment and on people, particularly poor people, while avoiding harming development prospects in the process. The gains from effective mitigation shown by this research could help us achieve this goal.”

de MIT News http://bit.ly/2J7ZUVi

MIT Solve announces $1.25 million in funding for 2019 Solver teams

MIT Solve, an MIT initiative that advances solutions from tech entrepreneurs to address the world’s most pressing issues, has announced a prize pool of $1.25 million for its next class of Solver teams. Prize sponsors include General Motors, Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, Vodafone Americas Foundation, Schmidt Futures, Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund, the Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Court, and the Andan Foundation. The prize sponsors will convene at Solve at MIT from May 7-9 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with the rest of the Solve community, including 2018 Solver teams, members, sponsors, and MIT faculty, staff, and students.

Solve seeks solutions from tech innovators around the world for its 2019 Global Challenges: Circular Economy, Community-Driven Innovation, Early Childhood Development, and Healthy Cities. Anyone can submit a solution and apply for the $1.25 million in prize funding by July 1. Finalists will be invited to pitch their solutions at Solve Challenge Finals during United Nations General Assembly Week in New York City on Sept. 22. At the event, leading cross-sector experts will select 35 of the most promising tech-based innovators to become Solver teams. They will work with Solve for the next year to scale their solutions with the support of funding, networking, mentorship, marketing, and more from the Solve community.

2019 MIT Solve Prizes available for selected Solver teams include:

• Solver Funding: MIT Solve will award a $10,000 grant to all Solver teams selected during Solve Challenge Finals in September by the cross-sector judging panels of each of Solve’s four Global Challenges.

• GM Prizes, supported by General Motors:

  • Solutions that foster prosperity and social mobility for underrepresented community members — including through STEM education — are eligible for the GM Prize on Community-Driven Innovation. Up to $50,000 will be granted to two recipients.

  • Solutions that help communities shift towards a more circular economy through zero waste and zero carbon — including through STEM education for new design and manufacturing techniques — are eligible for the GM Prize on Circular Economy. Up to $50,000 will be granted to two recipients.

• AI Innovations Prize, supported by the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation and Schmidt Futures: Solutions that are propelled by advanced computing techniques or that leverage artificial intelligence to address any of the four challenges are eligible for a prize up to $500,000, granted across several recipients.

• Innovation for Women Prize, supported by the Vodafone Americas Foundation: Solutions that use technology to empower and enrich the lives of women and girls are eligible for up to $75,000 across up to three Solver teams addressing any of Solve’s Global Challenges.

• Everytown for Gun Safety Prize, supported by Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund: Holistic, community-based Healthy Cities solutions that use technology to make cities safer are eligible for up to $100,000 in grant funding.

• Innovating Together for Healthy Cities Prize, supported by Abu Dhabi Crown Prince Court: This prize of $75,000 will be awarded to one prize recipient, and is open to projects that focus on preventing or managing infectious disease or vector-borne illness in cities or slums.

• Innovation for Refugee Inclusion Prize, supported by the Andan Foundation: Solutions that use innovation to advance economic, financial, and political inclusion of refugees in their hosting communities are eligible for this prize of up to $50,000. Eligible Solver teams will be selected from the Community-Driven Innovation Challenge.

“We are thrilled to work with such a diverse array of leading organizations to secure much needed funding for solutions to the world’s most intractable challenges,” said Alex Amouyel, executive director at MIT Solve. “There are innovators solving world challenges all around the world, but too few of them have access to the capital and expertise they need to scale. At Solve, we’re helping to bridge the pioneer gap in social impact, which is critical to achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals.”

MIT Solve invites the MIT community to attend Tech for Equality, the opening plenary of Solve at MIT 2019, on May 7 from 4 to 5:30 p.m. at Kresge Auditorium. Tickets are free and those interested can RSVP here. Media interested in attending can apply for media credentials by emailing press@solve.mit.edu.

Solve issues four Global Challenges each year to find the most promising Solver teams who will drive transformational change. Solve then deploys its global community of private, public, and nonprofit leaders to form the partnerships these Solver teams need to scale their impact. In the last two years, Solve has brokered more than $7.5 million in grant funding to Solver teams, in addition to in-kind support. Last year, more than 1,150 people from 110 countries submitted solutions to Solve’s four Global Challenges.

de MIT News http://bit.ly/2IQXbjT

A comprehensive map of how Alzheimer’s affects the brain

MIT researchers have performed the first comprehensive analysis of the genes that are expressed in individual brain cells of patients with Alzheimer’s disease. The results allowed the team to identify distinctive cellular pathways that are affected in neurons and other types of brain cells.

This analysis could offer many potential new drug targets for Alzheimer’s, which afflicts more than 5 million people in the United States.

“This study provides, in my view, the very first map for going after all of the molecular processes that are altered in Alzheimer’s disease in every single cell type that we can now reliably characterize,” says Manolis Kellis, a professor of computer science and a member of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. “It opens up a completely new era for understanding Alzheimer’s.”

The study revealed that a process called axon myelination is significantly disrupted in patients with Alzheimer’s. The researchers also found that the brain cells of men and women vary significantly in how their genes respond to the disease.

Kellis and Li-Huei Tsai, director of MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, are the senior authors of the study, which appears in the May 1 online edition of Nature. MIT postdocs Hansruedi Mathys and Jose Davila-Velderrain are the lead authors of the paper.

Single-cell analysis

The researchers analyzed postmortem brain samples from 24 people who exhibited high levels of Alzheimer’s disease pathology and 24 people of similar age who did not have these signs of disease. All of the subjects were part of the Religious Orders Study, a longitudinal study of aging and Alzheimer’s disease. The researchers also had data on the subjects’ performance on cognitive tests.

The MIT team performed single-cell RNA sequencing on about 80,000 cells from these subjects. Previous studies of gene expression in Alzheimer’s patients have measured overall RNA levels from a section of brain tissue, but these studies don’t distinguish between cell types, which can mask changes that occur in less abundant cell types, Tsai says.

“We wanted to know if we could distinguish whether each cell type has differential gene expression patterns between healthy and diseased brain tissue,” she says. “This is the power of single-cell-level analysis: You have the resolution to really see the differences among all the different cell types in the brain.”

Using the single-cell sequencing approach, the researchers were able to analyze not only the most abundant cell types, which include excitatory and inhibitory neurons, but also rarer, non-neuronal brain cells such as oligodendrocytes, astrocytes, and microglia. The researchers found that each of these cell types showed distinct gene expression differences in Alzheimer’s patients.

Some of the most significant changes occurred in genes related to axon regeneration and myelination. Myelin is a fatty sheath that insulates axons, helping them to transmit electrical signals. The researchers found that in the individuals with Alzheimer’s, genes related to myelination were affected in both neurons and oligodendrocytes, the cells that produce myelin.

Most of these cell-type-specific changes in gene expression occurred early in the development of the disease. In later stages, the researchers found that most cell types had very similar patterns of gene expression change. Specifically, most brain cells turned up genes related to stress response, programmed cell death, and the cellular machinery required to maintain protein integrity.

Bruce Yankner, a professor of genetics and neurology at Harvard Medical School, described the study as “a tour de force of molecular pathology.”

“This is the first comprehensive application of single-cell RNA sequencing technology to Alzheimer’s disease,” says Yankner, who was not involved in the research. “I anticipate this will be a very valuable resource for the field and will advance our understanding of the molecular basis of the disease.”

Sex differences

The researchers also discovered correlations between gene expression patterns and other measures of Alzheimer’s severity such as the level of amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles, as well as cognitive impairments. This allowed them to identify “modules” of genes that appear to be linked to different aspects of the disease.

“To identify these modules, we devised a novel strategy that involves the use of an artificial neural network and which allowed us to learn the sets of genes that are linked to the different aspects of Alzheimer’s disease in a completely unbiased, data-driven fashion,” Mathys says. “We anticipate that this strategy will be valuable to also identify gene modules associated with other brain disorders.”

The most surprising finding, the researchers say, was the discovery of a dramatic difference between brain cells from male and female Alzheimer’s patients. They found that excitatory neurons and other brain cells from male patients showed less pronounced gene expression changes in Alzheimer’s than cells from female individuals, even though those patients did show similar symptoms, including amyloid plaques and cognitive impairments. By contrast, brain cells from female patients showed dramatically more severe gene-expression changes in Alzheimer’s disease, and an expanded set of altered pathways.

“That’s when we realized there’s something very interesting going on. We were just shocked,” Tsai says.

So far, it is unclear why this discrepancy exists. The sex difference was particularly stark in oligodendrocytes, which produce myelin, so the researchers performed an analysis of patients’ white matter, which is mainly made up of myelinated axons. Using a set of MRI scans from 500 additional subjects from the Religious Orders Study group, the researchers found that female subjects with severe memory deficits had much more white matter damage than matched male subjects. 

More study is needed to determine why men and women respond so differently to Alzheimer’s disease, the researchers say, and the findings could have implications for developing and choosing treatments.

“There is mounting clinical and preclinical evidence of a sexual dimorphism in Alzheimer’s predisposition, but no underlying mechanisms are known. Our work points to differential cellular processes involving non-neuronal myelinating cells as potentially having a role. It will be key to figure out whether these discrepancies protect or damage the brain cells only in one of the sexes — and how to balance the response in the desired direction on the other,” Davila-Velderrain says.

The researchers are now using mouse and human induced pluripotent stem cell models to further study some of the key cellular pathways that they identified as associated with Alzheimer’s in this study, including those involved in myelination. They also plan to perform similar gene expression analyses for other forms of dementia that are related to Alzheimer’s, as well as other brain disorders such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, psychosis, and diverse dementias.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the JBP Foundation, and the Swiss National Science Foundation.

de MIT News http://bit.ly/2WjvGCj

Quantum measurement could improve gravitational wave detection sensitivity

Minutes before dawn on Sept. 14, 2015, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) became the first-ever instrument on Earth to directly detect a gravitational wave. This work, led by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration with prominent roles from MIT and Caltech, was the first confirmation of this consequence of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity — 100 years after he first predicted it. The groundbreaking detection represented an enormous step forward in the field of astrophysics. In the years since, scientists have striven to achieve even greater sensitivity in the LIGO detectors.

New research has taken investigators one step closer to this goal. Nergis Mavalvala, the Curtis and Kathleen Marble Professor of Astrophysics at MIT, postdoc Robert Lanza, graduate student Nancy Aggarwal, and their collaborators at Louisiana State University (LSU) recently conducted experiments that could help overcome a future limitation in Advanced LIGO. In their laboratory study, the team successfully measured a type of noise that will soon hold the LIGO instruments back from detecting gravitational waves with greater sensitivity.

Their study, reported recently in Nature, was the first to measure an important source of quantum noise at room temperature and at frequencies relevant to gravitational wave detectors. Funded by the National Science Foundation, this work could enable researchers to understand this limiting noise source and test ideas for circumventing it to further increase LIGO’s sensitivity to gravitational waves.

In addition to future applications for improving LIGO’s detection abilities, Mavalvala says these observations of quantum effects at room temperature could help scientists learn more about how quantum mechanics can disturb the precision of measurements generally — and how best to get around these quantum noise limits.

“This result was important for the gravitational wave community,” says Mavalvala. “But more broadly, this is essentially a room-temperature quantum resource, and that's something that many communities should care about.”

Sensitivity upgrade

LIGO has undergone upgrades since its first gravitational wave searches in 2002; the currently operating version of the instrumentation is called Advanced LIGO following major upgrades in 2015. But to get LIGO to its maximum design sensitivity, Mavalvala says her team needs to be able to conduct experiments and test improvement strategies in the laboratory rather than on the LIGO instruments themselves. LIGO’s astrophysical detection work is too important to interfere with, so she and her collaborators have developed instruments in the lab that can mimic the sensitivity of the real thing. In this case, the team aimed to reproduce processes that occur in LIGO to measure a type of noise called quantum radiation pressure noise (QRPN).

In LIGO, gravitational waves are detected by using lasers to probe the motion of mirrors. The mirrors are suspended as pendulums, allowing them to have periodic motion similar to a mass on a spring. When laser beams hit the movable mirrors, the momentum carried by the light applies pressure on the mirror and causes them to move slightly.

“I like to think of it like a pool table,” says Aggarwal. “When your white cue ball strikes the ball in front of it, the cue ball comes back but it still moves the other ball. When a photon that was traveling forward then travels backwards, the momentum went somewhere; [in this case] that momentum went into the mirror.”

The quantum nature of light, which is made up of photons, dictates that there are quantum fluctuations in the number of photons hitting the mirrors, creating an uncertain amount of force on the mirrors at any given moment. This uncertainty results in random perturbations of the mirror. When the laser power is high enough, this QRPN can interfere with gravitational wave detection. At Advanced LIGO’s full design sensitivity, with many hundreds of kilowatts of laser power hitting 40-kilogram mirrors, QRPN will become a dominant limitation.

Minuscule mirrors

To address this imminent issue, Mavalvala, Aggarwal, and their collaborators designed an experiment to recreate the effects of QRPN in a laboratory setting. One challenge was that the team could not use lasers as powerful as those in Advanced LIGO in their lab experiments. The greater the laser power and the lighter the mass of the mirror oscillator, the stronger the radiation pressure-driven motion. To be able to detect this motion with less laser power, they needed to create an extremely low-mass mirror oscillator. They scaled down the 40-kilogram mirrors of Advanced LIGO with a 100-nanogram mirror oscillator (less than the mass of a grain of salt).

The team also faced the significant challenge of designing a mirror oscillator that could exhibit quantum behavior at room temperature. Previously, observing quantum effects like QRPN required cryogenic cooling so that the motion due to heat energy of the oscillator would not mask the QRPN. In addition to being challenging and impractical, vibrations associated with cryogenic cooling interferes with LIGO’s operation, so conducting experiments at room temperature would be more readily applicable to LIGO itself. After many iterations of design and testing, Mavalvala and her MIT colleagues designed a mirror oscillator that allowed the team to reach a low enough level of thermally driven fluctuations that the mirror motion was dominated by QRPN at room temperature — the first-ever study to do so.

“It’s really pretty mind-boggling that we can observe this room-temperature, macroscopic object — you can see it with the naked eye if you squint enough — being pushed around by quantum fluctuations,” Mavalvala says. “Its thermal jitter is small enough that it’s being tickled ever-so-slightly by quantum fluctuations, and we can measure that.”

This was also the first study to detect QRPN at frequencies relevant to gravitational wave detectors. Their success means that they can now design additional experiments that reflect the radiation pressure conditions in Advanced LIGO itself.

“This experiment mimics an important noise source in Advanced LIGO,” says Mavalvala. “It's now a test bed where we can try out new ideas for improving Advanced LIGO without impinging on the instrument’s own operating time.”

Advanced LIGO does not yet run its lasers at strong enough power for QRPN to be a limiting factor in gravitational wave detections. But, as the instruments become more sensitive, this type of noise will soon become a problem and limit Advanced LIGO’s capabilities. When Mavalvala and her collaborators recognized QRPN as an imminent issue, they strove to recreate its effects in the laboratory so that they can start exploring ways to overcome this challenge.

“We've known for a long time that this QRPN would be a limitation for Advanced LIGO,” says Mavalvala. “Now that we are able to reproduce that effect in a laboratory setting, we can start to test ideas for how to improve that limit.”

Mavalvala’s primary collaborator at LSU was Thomas Corbitt, an associate professor of physics and astronomy. Corbitt was formerly a graduate student and post-doctoral scholar in Mavalvala’s lab at MIT. They have since collaborated for many years.

“This is the first time this effect has been observed in a system similar to gravitational wave interferometers and in LIGO’s frequency band,” says Corbitt. “While this work was motivated by the imperative to make ever-more-sensitive gravitational wave detectors, it is of wide interest.”

New directions

Since the original detection of a binary black hole merger in 2015, LIGO has also captured signals from collisions of neutron stars, as well as additional black hole collisions. These waves ripple outward from interactions that can take place more than a billion light years away. While LIGO’s capabilities are impressive, Mavalvala and her team plan to continue finding ways to make LIGO even more powerful.

Before they collide, black holes, for example, orbit each other slowly and at lower frequencies. As the two black holes get closer, their orbits speed up and they swirl around each other at high speeds and high frequencies. If Advanced LIGO becomes sensitive enough to pick up lower frequencies, Mavalvala says we may someday detect these systems earlier in the process, before the pair collides, allowing us to draw an ever-clearer picture of these distant spacetime phenomena. She and her team aim to make sure that factors such as QRPN don’t limit Advanced LIGO’s growing power.

“At this moment in time, Advanced LIGO is the best it can be at its job: to look out at the sky and detect gravitational wave events,” says Mavalvala. “In parallel, we have all of these ideas for making it better, and we have to be able to try those out in laboratories. This measurement allows that to happen with QRPN for the first time.”

de MIT News http://bit.ly/2IV4lng

VP for Research Maria Zuber urges outward-facing collaborations at MIT Climate Night

MIT’s Plan for Action on Climate Change, released by President L. Rafael Reif in October 2015, has already begun to catalyze new research on climate issues at the Institute and a tighter focus on building a sustainable campus here in Kendall Square. But MIT will be passing up important opportunities to make an impact on climate change if it does not look beyond its own borders and forge partnerships far outside the realm of academic research.

That was the message MIT Vice President for Research Maria Zuber brought to MIT Climate Night as the university’s environment and sustainability groups gathered on April 25 to discuss climate issues on campus.

“One of the pillars of MIT’s Climate Action Plan,” said Zuber at the event, “is that we’ve decided that we should engage with all comers. Climate change represents a global problem, and the only way that we can really address it is to partner with as many organizations and people as we can.”

Zuber appeared with John Fernández, director of the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative (ESI), and Robert Armstrong, director of the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI), to discuss their personal experiences working on climate issues and where they believe the Institute can be most influential. All three agreed that, while MIT’s role as a powerhouse of basic research is important, it has been equally energizing to delve into practical, policy-based engagement with unexpected partners.

Fernández, for example, pointed to ESI’s collaboration with the nonprofit Center for Coalfield Justice in Greene County, Pennsylvania, a region where the coal industry has long been the dominant employer. While residents of Greene County can be resistant to environmental groups, he said, it’s not because they refuse to accept that their economy is changing. Instead, they can see keenly that more prodding to abandon coal is not the help they need.

“Everyone knows there’s going to be a transition,” said Fernández. “In fact, maybe they know better than anyone, because they’ve seen companies go bankrupt and pull up and move.” Coalfield Justice and ESI have been able to work constructively with residents because their research centers on finding paths to a humane economic transition, and communicating those paths to help the county weather the decline of its major industry.

Armstrong, meanwhile, discussed MITEI’s work with developing countries through the Tata Center for Technology and Design, to bring energy solutions to areas without energy access, including in India and sub-Saharan Africa. “These regions are in energy poverty and in desperate need of getting energy in a carbon-free way so that they can engage in the global economy,” Armstrong said. Here, innovations in financing small grids can have a triple benefit: improving quality of life, bringing in new work opportunities, and adding carbon-free energy in countries where the dirtiest fossil fuels might otherwise expand.

Armstrong also takes heart from MITEI’s ongoing conversations with established energy companies, some of which are beginning to make large investments in carbon-free power. “Part of the Plan for Climate Action has been engaging with industry,” he said, citing cement, chemicals, and metals as important energy-intensive sectors to decarbonize. “This has to be economy-wide,” he said. “We’re working to engage a broader range of industries.”

MIT Climate Night was co-sponsored by ESI and MITEI and brought together representatives from more than a dozen departments, centers, and student and alumni groups whose missions include climate action on campus and beyond. It was the first real-world event to grow out of the MIT Climate Portal, an online community for engagement on climate science and solutions.

Attendees joined discussions on topics that encompassed both a global context and actions MIT can take on its own, including the energy transition, climate finance, and carbon offsets. They also took in the three headline speakers’ thoughts about how the Institute can not only advance research, but also inspire change in the wider world. As Zuber recalled, the flourishing environmental movement of the 1970s needed both scientific discovery and a mass change in consciousness, inspired by moments like the Apollo space missions, to succeed.

Zuber projected a single slide for her talk at Climate Night: the famous “Earthrise” image taken from the Apollo 8 spacecraft in December of 1968 — seven months before the Apollo 11 lunar landing and just over a year before the first Earth Day in April 1970. “Images are important, and I spend a lot of time thinking about, ‘What is the image, what is the message, that it’s going to take to globally change opinion … so that we’re all taking better care of our Earth?’” she said. “This image of actually seeing the fragile Earth from space and everything that we know and love sitting out there in space, alone, was one of the things that really inspired the environmental movement.”

MIT’s climate community may need little encouragement to look outside their own silos, as the diverse attendees who came to Climate Night to meet new allies on campus can attest. “I think that’s fundamentally in the DNA at MIT,” noted Armstrong in his opening remarks. “I’ve found that to be extraordinarily stimulating [at MITEI], both because of the enthusiasm across campus for addressing energy, but also because of the enthusiasm for working together across disciplines.

“I don’t know anywhere else among universities where there’s this low a barrier to collaboration.”

The audience at MIT Climate Night submitted more questions than the speakers could answer during the event. For responses to more audience questions from the offices of the Vice President for Research, ESI, and MITEI, visit climate.mit.edu over the coming weeks.

de MIT News http://bit.ly/2USyLrq

J-Clinic names 18 grant recipients from across Institute

The Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health (J-Clinic) has announced more than $2.3 million in funding for 18 projects involving principal investigators from departments and labs within engineering, architecture and planning, science, and management. J-Clinic received a total of 43 proposals.

Launched this fall, J-Clinic is the fourth major collaborative effort between MIT and Community Jameel, the social enterprise organization founded by Mohammed Abdul Latif Jameel ’78. J-Clinic aims to create high-precision, affordable, and scalable machine learning technologies in areas of health care ranging from diagnostics to pharmaceuticals.

The projects will harness the power of artificial intelligence technologies to optimize early detection and prevention of ailments including cancer, epilepsy, mental health, cognitive impairment, and congestive heart failure. Other projects include repurposing existing drugs and optimizing electronic health records. In addition, a $50,000 grant funded by J-Clinic in collaboration with the MIT Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation will support AI-focused research into the rapid diagnosis of bacterial infection.

“We were impressed by the depth, creativity, and scope of the proposals we received,” says Anantha P. Chandrakasan, dean of the School of Engineering and the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, who chairs J-Clinic.

“We are excited to be taking this important step with the inaugural round of J-Clinic research funding,” says Fady Jameel, president of international operations at Community Jameel. “Through the research funded by these grants, J-Clinic is harnessing the power of machine learning and taking the fight to cancer, Alzheimer’s, and other diseases that affect the lives of people around the world.”

The technologies and solutions will be applied to numerous health care systems and clinical settings around the globe, in developed and developing countries alike, to prevent and detect disease regardless of resources.

de MIT News http://bit.ly/2UOnHfb