Town halls let students “Solve for Fall”

On May 13, student leaders, heads of house, and the MIT Division of Student Life (DSL) hosted two separate town halls — one for graduate students and one for undergraduates — to engage the student community in identifying and implementing possible solutions to the complex community problem posed by Covid-19. As organizers wrote in their May 4 invitation to students, “We need to ensure that whatever approach we take for the fall, we prioritize and protect community health and capitalize on MIT’s greatest strengths and traditions by creating student learning and research experiences that are intellectually engaging and personally meaningful.”

Graduate student town hall

A panel of MIT senior leaders provided updates on graduate student life and plans for the fall during the graduate student mini town hall, sponsored by the Graduate Student Council (GSC), graduate heads of house, and DSL. The webcast event, which featured questions submitted and upvoted by graduate students, attracted more than 500 viewers.

Madeleine Sutherland, GSC president, welcomed the participants and, along with Naomi Carton, head of house for Westgate, opened the program. “Even while we’re gathering over Zoom, there’s a need for grad student voices to be heard so much in the coming months, and it’s our hope that tonight’s town hall just kicks off a broader set of discussions across campus,” Sutherland said.

Moderator Matthew Bauer, senior director of communications in DSL, asked the panelists questions submitted to the We Solve for Fall idea bank, as well as crowdsourced questions submitted during the hour-long event. Topics centered on preparing the campus for resumed research and instruction, financial concerns, issues impacting international students, and housing.

Vice President for Research Maria Zuber shared plans to return graduate students to labs and ramp up research. For the foreseeable future, she said, research that can be done remotely will continue to be remote. Meanwhile, a ramp-up pilot is beginning for currently-approved research personnel in buildings 76, E17/18/19/25, and 68, employing measures such as restricted access, social distancing, enhanced cleaning, required face coverings, ID swipes, and health checks.

“The question we are being asked most is what steps are we taking to keep people safe in MIT labs,” Zuber said. She stressed that, even as buildings are opened, “coming back is voluntary.”

Associate Provost Krystyn Van Vliet addressed the use of academic spaces when students return. “Labs and classrooms will feel very much like we are used to, except that the population density will be lower on purpose,” she said. Safety measures will likely include face coverings and IDs, and access to buildings will be restricted to defined portals. In addition, her team developed an inventory of campus learning spaces and their capacity to allow instructors and departments, labs, and centers to determine how best to use those resources.

“It’s not that it’s an easy logistical problem, but we understand the principles [involved],” said Van Vliet, including educational excellence, physical distancing, and enhanced cleaning. “We’re figuring that out, layer by layer.” Reflecting after the town hall, she noted that being on campus these days — observing the MIT guidance already in place on distancing and face coverings and building access at specific campus locations — requires more thought and planning for the individual. “It is helpful to be aware that this takes some practice and patience, but soon feels comfortable. This experience highlights the many interdependencies among the wider MIT community on campus, and the great teams who take pride in making that operation possible.”

Questions about financial support for graduate students were fielded by Ian Waitz, vice chancellor for undergraduate and graduate education, who said that several financial resources are already in place, and others are being considered. The recommended stipend level increase of 2.9 percent has been approved, health insurance rates will not increase in the upcoming academic year, and graduating students will receive extended eligibility for the health insurance plan. In addition, the Office of Graduate Education offers emergency hardship funds, and a Summer Opportunities Resources web page has been created to help students find employment opportunities.

“The problem that’s on a lot of people’s minds are the longer-term things,” in the fall and beyond, Waitz noted, like degree extensions or losing industrial sponsorship funding. “Those issues are very much front-of-mind for the provost, the chancellor, the school deans, and now that we’ve gotten the processes in place for the immediate needs of the summer, that’s what we’ll turn our attention to.”

David Elwell, director and associate dean of the International Students Office (ISO), provided updates for international graduate students. “We’re getting a lot of questions regarding maintenance of status for students who had to return home,” he said. Fortunately, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has suspended its temporary absence rule for students outside the United States for more than five months. Elwell’s office can offer guidance for issues like maintaining appropriate employment authorization and obtaining visas as consulates slowly reopen. He encouraged students to visit the ISO website or contact their international student advisor directly for more information.

Questions about graduate housing were top-of-mind during the mini town hall, as well. Senior Associate Dean for Housing & Residential Services (HRS) David Friedrich shared a three-staged approach his office is developing for students who want to return to on-campus graduate housing, as well as steps being implemented to ensure students’ safety. The stages are based on unit type and overall population density, beginning with private apartments, then multi-occupant apartments, and finally dormitory-style housing.

Friedrich noted that, because of the construction moratorium in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the timeline for the new Graduate Tower at Site 4 occupancy is uncertain. Despite the delayed opening, however, HRS will work with students to accommodate their housing needs in the interim.

Friedrich thanked students who remained on campus for their goodwill during a challenging time. “The feedback we’ve been receiving from residents has been very helpful as we work to understand what the experience is like living on campus, and it helps to inform our planning as we look ahead to the fall.”

As the program drew to a close, Vice President and Dean for Student Life Suzy Nelson urged students to continue to stay involved by working with the GSC and contributing thoughts via the idea bank. “The only way we’re going to figure this out is to figure it out together. I appreciate all the good input tonight and really look forward to future discussions,” she said.

Undergraduate student town hall

More than 400 undergraduates and community members tuned into a webcast panel of faculty, student leaders, and staff to discuss how MIT might open for undergraduates this fall. During the town hall, co-sponsored by the Undergraduate Association (UA), the Dormitory Council (DormCon), Interfraternity Council, Panhellenic Association, and the Living Group Council, participants submitted and upvoted questions live to let panelists know exactly what was most on their minds. Some questions submitted were posed in other forums, and answers are posted MIT’s Covid-19 FAQ.

During introductory remarks, John E. Fernández '85, professor of architecture and head of house for Baker House, shared a range of options that have been proposed for the fall. “That spectrum includes, on the one hand, no one on campus, everyone online in the fall, and on the other side, on the other end of that spectrum, everybody back on campus,” Fernández said. “It's very likely that between these two extremes, there will be some intermediate solution to the fall.”

About engaging students on planning for the fall, Fernández announced a series of charettes on May 26, 27, and 28, followed by smaller group discussions in June. Outgoing UA President Mahi Elango and Interfraternity Council President Nico Salinas reiterated the importance of student engagement in decision-making about the fall.

Raul Radovitzky, professor of aeronautics and astronautics and head of house for McCormick Hall, shared three values developed by heads of house to guide thinking about the fall: Students need to have a meaningful, enriching on-campus educational experience; the residential experience is an invaluable part of an MIT education; and MIT trusts student leaders to engage with MIT to respond to Covid-19 and its impact on residential life.

Peko Hosoi, associate dean of the School of Engineering, shared her team’s research on how the virus spreads and what interventions and policies can help. “[T]esting is not just useful for identifying people who are sick and figuring out what kind of care they need,” she said, citing research from the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society COVID-19 Collaboration (Isolat). “[Testing] is also one of our best levers for controlling the spread of the infection.”

Cecilia Stuopis, director of MIT Medical, discussed testing and contact tracing as well as the importance of essentials such as handwashing, face coverings, and social distancing. MIT is considering digital contact tracing while weighing the technology’s potential impact on privacy. She said that plans for mass testing on campus would be influenced by the quality and speed of tests available at the time. “We want to make sure they are reliable and that we can get good, solid answers back on them in a timely fashion.”

Stuopis also addressed potential disruptions by a future spike in Covid-19 cases. “I think that we have to be open and honest that (future disruption) is certainly a possibility, but it's not something we're going to be able to predict in May 2020,” she said. Fernández added, “We want to be prepared, at the very least, with the protocols, the prepositioned assets, the procedures, so that if we do need to do that again (ramp down), we can do it in a very organized way, and the community is aware that that might be something that might have to happen.”

David Friedrich from HRS talked about the steps that MIT is taking to promote safety in residence halls and in fraternities, sororities, and independent living groups (FSILGs). Based on guidance from MIT Medical, MIT Emergency Management, and Institute leaders, HRS and stakeholders are developing a framework for managing residential spaces that is tailored to on-campus residences and FSILGs. DormCon President Aiyedun Uzamere added that DormCon and HRS are working to sustain the special community connections within residences.

Friedrich added that decisions for how to reopen on-campus housing will be influenced by several factors, including the approach to academics. He added that HRS is working to ensure that any student who plans to return under the fall academic guidance will have a place to live. Friedrich also said that MIT would make every effort to reopen Burton Conner, the undergraduate residence hall slated for renewal, by fall 2022 as previously scheduled. Lastly, Friedrich cited the valuable partnership between MIT and the FSILG system, which houses about 1,000 students. Salinas from the IFC observed that the impact of decisions about the fall on FSILGs must be considered in a different context from the effects on residence halls.

On leaves of absence or delayed matriculation, Vice Chancellor Ian Waitz said that MIT may seek commitments from students about their intentions to be at MIT in the fall earlier than usual. Extra time would allow for more planning around housing needs. With regard to financial aid and tuition, Waitz said that it is too early to tell how Covid-19 might affect the cost of attending MIT. “Right now, our focus is really squarely on supporting our grad and undergrad population now and throughout the summer and really deciding what option best enables us to deliver on MIT's mission through the pandemic,” he said. Discussions of potential financial adjustments will follow decisions about the fall.

Uzamere suggested that students get involved in student government to stay engaged in decision-making beyond Covid. “I encourage you to be active with these branches of student government, DormCon, UA, IFC, Panhel, because that's why we're here,” he said. “We exist to be an extension of you that can directly interface with administrators.”

Nelson followed up on Uzamere’s comments and concluded the town hall by citing the ongoing need for collaborative problem-solving. “What I really liked about Aiyedun's comment is that this whole town hall, this Solve for Fall exercise, the Idea Bank, that was born out of a discussion with student leaders who had asked that, ‘Even if we don't have answers, can you at least share the question so we all know what MIT is grappling with?’ And so that's how this all came about,” she said. “We will absolutely listen to you, but it's going to be a tough year for all of us because it's uncertain. And if there's any group I want to be in this with, it's the group from MIT because this is a community who really does know how to work hard and think analytically about difficult problems.”

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In online vigil, MIT community shares grief, anger, and hope

“We are suffering from a multigenerational fracture,” rising junior and Undergraduate Association President Danielle Geathers said yesterday, referring to centuries of racism in America. “The bone was never set, and healing never occurred. Today we see the latest inflammation of that initial injury.”

Geathers spoke at an online MIT community vigil held in response to the killing of George Floyd and the loss of other black lives due to racism and police brutality, and to the wave of protests across the country in recent days. Along with 16 others from across the Institute, she expressed her grief at recent events and urged viewers to work for racial justice in the world and at MIT.

“As a black woman my heart is heavy,” Geathers said. “Not only because of the persistent racist attacks on black lives, which are exacerbated by the disproportionate impact of Covid-19, but my heart is further burdened by the abject pain that accompanies the prevalent normalcy surrounding black death and the vulnerability of black lives. Tonight our MIT community gathers together to mourn the brutal deaths of George Floyd, Tony McDade, Ahmaud Aubrey, and Breonna Taylor, the most recent examples of murders with which we are all too familiar.”

Punctuated by poetry, literature, and song, the event featured students, faculty, staff, and MIT President L. Rafael Reif. It was hosted by the Institute Community and Equity Office.

“We come together now because we know, and we insist, that black lives matter,” Reif said. “… And of course, we come together because we know that these truths, and the basic humanity of people of color, are violated in our nation every day.”

A heavy toll

Institute Community and Equity Officer John Dozier spoke from his home in Columbia, South Carolina, where he is working during the Covid-19 pandemic and where five generations of his family have been raised. He said growing up in this setting has given him an appreciation for the history of his home state and the southeastern U.S. He described several examples of brutal killings of black people in the region across several decades, and contrasted them with the police’s treatment of white supremacist and mass murderer Dylann Roof when he was arrested.

“What has happened is not simply the results of a few bad people doing bad things,” Dozier said. “Rather it speakes to the systemic dehumanizing and undervaluing of black lives, borne out of slavery, reinforced by Jim Crow law, and promoted even today by media stereotypes. I’m here as a black man, son, husband, and a father, who is in deep pain from watching history repeat itself over and over again.”

Sandy Alexandre, associate professor of literature, also spoke of the collective harm to black lives caused by racial injustice and violence: “Past and present have proven time and time again that racism is not merely a thorn in a person’s side, it’s also a suffocating knee on a person’s neck,” she said.

Vice President for Human Resources Ramona Allen, who grew up in segregated Boston and rode a school bus that was the target of stones, eggs, and bullets, noted, “These are collective, deep-seated traumas that are manifesting on our streets. It’s exhausting to be a person of color in this country, and quite frankly, we’re tired.”

However, Allen continued, “We convene today as members of a community of teaching, learning, and innovation. I draw strength from knowing that at MIT we continue to be committed to educating students in ways that will serve the nation and the world. … My expectations for this community are extremely high. We have the best and the brightest  minds here, so we need to lead the country from Cambridge the way we do in every other way that makes MIT a place of excellence.”

Calls to action

There are multiple ways to combat racism, said DiOnetta Jones Crayton, associate dean in the Office of the Vice Chancellor and director of the Office of Minority Education. As someone who has worked for change from within institutions, she recalled that she used to feel like she was the “not the right kind of activist” compared to those who led public protests.

However with experience, she said, she has come to understand that “We can all be warriors. We can all be drum majors for justice in our own spaces, in our own spheres of influence. We need those called to serve and change systems from within, and we also need those to called to shake the walls the ceilings the very foundations of oppressive  policies and systems from without.”

She added: “Today we need everyone who says they care, not just to care but to do their part to fight the injustices that threaten to destroy us all, that threaten to destroy people who look like me. … If you say you care about the injustice in this nation and in this world, you have a role to play.” Crayton, who is also an associate minister at a local Baptist church, concluded her remarks with a prayer and led participants in a moment of silence.

PhD student Jaleesa Trapp offered a call to action for those who do not experience antiblack racism: “Are you actively looking for black people to support that do this work all the time — black educators, black health care professionals, black activists that are out on the street? What are you doing to educate yourself every day and not just when [a high-profile black death] happens?”

Recent graduate Kendyll Hicks, an outgoing co-chair of the Black Students Union, urged the MIT administration to do more to protect its black students. “To acknowledge and be informed without concrete effort is to be complicit and to support the police terror that’s occurring,” she said. “…We will never achieve an equitable and just community on campus if our humanity is disregarded everywhere else.”

Emphasizing that for black people, “these moments often trigger things buried levels deep below the surface” that require great emotional labor to process, graduate student Aiyah Josiah-Faeduwor described growing up in communities that were underresourced and overpoliced, and over time watching as all of the male members of his household were arrested and imprisoned. He recalled pushing himself to excel academically and intellectually in order to remain as free and safe as possible. In making individual and collective commitment to racial justice, “Are we all ready to do our individual and collective parts?” he asked. “I’m more hopeful about this than I have ever been, but I am still worried. … The decisions each of us make over the next few days may impact the fate of our world over the next generations. What will you do today?”

The program also included remarks from Madeleine Sutherland, a PhD student and president of the Graduate Student Council; Malick Ghachem, a history professor and criminal defense lawyer who works in the area of race and criminal justice; and Chevy Cleaves, the chief diversity and inclusion officer at Lincoln Laboratory.

Art and literature were also part of the program. Rising senior AudreyRose Wooden and PhD student Corban Swain read poems they had written. Rising senior Kelvin Green II read a passage from Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” and Office of Graduate Education Communications Officer Heather Konar concluded the vigil with a performance of “Cry No More” by Rhiannon Giddens, which Konar sang accompanied by family members. The song ended with this verse:

Our legacy is mighty
We can’t carry this alone
You have to help us fight it
And together we’ll be home
 

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Associate Professor Amah Edoh receives Baker Award for undergraduate teaching

Amah Edoh, associate professor in anthropology, has received the Everett Moore Baker Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. This Institute-wide award, named in honor of Everett Moore Baker, dean of students from 1947 to 1950, is given every year to an MIT faculty member, recognizing an “exceptional interest and ability in the instruction of undergraduates.” As the prize parameters specify, “this is the only teaching award in which the nomination and selection of the recipients is done entirely by the students.”

As William Tinsdale, associate professor of chemical engineering, MacVicar Faculty Fellow, and faculty advisor to the Baker Foundation Advisory Committee communicated to Edoh, “The student selection committee was highly impressed with the multiple nomination letters we received extolling your teaching in 'Africa and the Politics of Knowledge.' Even more, every student letter went beyond the way you challenged them to rethink the world through teaching and to describe the individual impact you have made in their lives. You are widely regarded by our undergraduate students as a mentor, a role model, and someone who is truly making a difference in their lives. For that, we celebrate you.”
 
Africa and the politics of knowledge

Edoh, who studied political science as an undergraduate at MIT and then moved to graduate study in MIT’s doctoral program in History/Anthropology/Science, Technology, and Society, centers her research on how Africa as a place, concept, object of knowledge, and site of identity formation is created in everyday as well as global material practice.

She is at work on a book entitled “Our Grandmothers’ Cloth: Materiality, Class, and Global Membership in the Age of 'The New Africa,'” which draws on extensive anthropological fieldwork in the Netherlands, the United States, and Togo, as well as on Edoh’s experience as a dual Togolese and American citizen. The in-progress book tracks how Dutch Wax cloth (a.k.a. African print cloth) circulates as a symbol, material, and commodity in those global circuits in which visions of Africa’s future are articulated. The class for which Edoh won the Baker Prize, “Africa and the Politics of Knowledge,” is deeply informed by Edoh’s research.

A role model

Students noted that Edoh’s teaching, like her research, compellingly brings together intellectual and biographical elements.

One student noted that she first came to know Edoh outside the classroom, through work with the African Studies Association and MISTI-Africa, and that once she took Edoh’s class, she was affirmed in her “passion to teach and establish new educational systems in sub-Saharan Africa.” This student also saw Edoh as a scholarly and personal role model: “as one of the only two black female faculty I know, she has been a true reflection of myself occupying space that I want to be in, paving the way for young black women like me.”

Inclusion and respect

Other students remarked upon Edoh’s vital work to bring together the academic, the personal, and the political, with one telling the committee that “learning is not just about having a professor transfer knowledge but also about the lifelong lessons that you pick up from teachers in the process. I believe Professor Edoh is a great example of a teacher who teaches students for life. The entire African and African-American student population has appreciated her support and representation here at MIT.”

Inclusion of and respect for student points of view was a recurring theme. Edoh was celebrated as “an engaging instructor who sources input from all students during discussions and creates an inclusive environment.” Another student agreed, writing that Edoh “validates our opinions and points of view while still asking us questions and making comments to help us think about things critically.”

Edoh also won praise for helping her students through the difficult first months of the current coronavirus pandemic: “Edoh’s efforts to help us with the transition to virtual learning this semester …  recognized the various levels of hardship that come with living as a student in a pandemic, and just that amount of acknowledgment made all the difference.” Even across the embodied to the remote experience, the student wrote, "This is hands down one of my favorite classes I have taken in college.”

“As an alumnus of MIT,” another student observed, Edoh “really understands how difficult things can get … She makes it her mission to help students navigate the difficulties of academia. The more people who can be exposed to her teaching style and genuine nature,” the student concluded, “the better off MIT as a whole will be!”

Continuing a tradition of mentors

When Edoh learned of this prize, she wrote to the committee, “What a tremendous honor. I am deeply touched and humbled by this recognition. I so treasure working with our students, it means everything to hear them reflect on our time together as they did.”

She wrote, too, to her students, reflecting on the life of learning and teaching: “Having teachers and mentors who have believed in me and who inspire me and remind me when I forget that I have something worthwhile to offer has had an immeasurable impact on my own life path; this award honors them also, for modeling for me what a good, kind, human teacher is. I hope I can do for my students even a small fraction of what these role models have done for me.

“I wish I could have thanked and celebrated with you in person at the Awards Convocation. But, even at a distance, know that you have my deepest gratitude. Thank you for being the brilliant, inspiring, impressive humans that you are. I am excited to watch as you grow into teachers and mentors yourselves. It is entirely my privilege to follow you on your journeys.”

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Letter from MIT police chief John DiFava: Protecting and serving at a time of great pain

The following letter was sent to the MIT community today by MIT Chief of Police and Director of Public Safety John DiFava.

To the members of the MIT community,

In my 46 years of policing, I have seen the good and bad, the brave and cowardly, but what we saw in Minneapolis last week with the brutal killing of George Floyd left me shaken and angry. It breaks my heart to see such cruel violence against another human being, and to know the shame it casts on the vast majority of law enforcement officers who are trying to do a good job.

Like everyone in our community, our officers are struggling to process this terrible and senseless killing. We have great respect for the peaceful protests that have followed, and we know that this tragic event is one of many injustices African Americans have suffered at the hands of police over time. We support the need for change.  

Last week, President Reif described MIT as “a community where we aspire always to treat one another with sympathy, humility, decency, respect and kindness.” Those values — and a culture built on trust, diversity, fairness and inclusion — are ingrained in everything we do at MITPD. We continually make efforts to self-assess and to listen, to better understand and anticipate the needs of those we serve and protect. And from new recruits to veteran officers, we train constantly to build and reinforce the habits and values of good policing.

I know I speak for every officer in our department when I say that we stand together with the MIT community on the side of justice and human decency. Our job — one we take very seriously — is to keep our community safe. That means every member of our community, without exception and with absolute respect for the dignity of all.

As we start the gradual process of coming back to campus, I am eager to continue working with student, staff and faculty leaders to make sure our community is a safe and welcoming place, always, for all the people of MIT.

Sincerely,

John DiFava

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Citizen scientists spot closest young brown dwarf disk yet

Brown dwarfs are the middle child of astronomy, too big to be a planet yet not big enough to be a star. Like their stellar siblings, these objects form from the gravitational collapse of gas and dust. But rather than condensing into a star’s fiery hot nuclear core, brown dwarfs find a more zen-like equilibrium, somehow reaching a stable, milder state compared to fusion-powered stars.

Brown dwarfs are considered to be the missing link between the most massive gas giant planets and the smallest stars, and because they glow relatively dimly they have been difficult to spot in the night sky. Like stars, some brown dwarfs can retain the disk of swirling gas and dust left over from their initial formation. This material can collide and accumulate to form planets, though it’s unclear exactly what kind of planets brown dwarfs can generate.

Now researchers at MIT, the University of Oklahoma, and elsewhere, with the help of citizen scientists, have identified a brown dwarf with a disk that is the youngest of its kind within about 100 parsecs of Earth. The brown dwarf, named W1200-7845, appears to have the kind of disk that could potentially form planets. It is about 3.7 million years old and sits at a nearby 102 parsecs, or about 332 light years from Earth.

At this proximity, scientists may be able to zoom in on the young system with future high-powered telescopes, to examine the earliest conditions of a brown dwarf’s disk and perhaps learn more about the kind of planets brown dwarfs might support.

The new system was discovered through Disk Detective, a crowdsourced project funded by NASA and hosted by Zooniverse that provides images of objects in space for the public to classify, with the aim of picking out objects that are likely stars with disks that could potentially host planets.

The researchers are presenting their findings, as well as announcing a new version of the Disk Detective website, this week at the all-virtual meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

“Within our solar neighborhood”

Users of Diskdetective.org, which first launched in 2014, can look through “flipbooks” — images of the same object in space, taken by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, which detects infrared emissions such as thermal radiation given off by the gas and dust debris in stellar disks. A user could classify an object based on certain criteria such as whether the object appears oval — a shape that more resembles a galaxy — or round —a sign that the object is more likely a disk-hosting star.

“We have multiple citizen scientists look at each object and give their own independent opinion, and trust the wisdom of the crowd to decide what things are probably galaxies and what things are probably stars with disks around them,” says study co-author Steven Silverberg, a postdoc in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.

From there, a science team including Silverberg follows up on crowd-classified disks, using more sophisticated methods and telescopes to determine if indeed they are disks, and what characteristics the disks may have.

In the case of the newly discovered W1200-7845, citizen scientists first classified the object as a disk in 2016. The science team, including Silverberg and Maria Schutte, a graduate student at the University of Oklahoma, then looked more closely at the source with an infrared instrument on the Magellan 6.5-meter telescopes at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile.

With these new observations, they determined that the source was indeed a  disk around a brown dwarf that lived within a “moving group” — a cluster of stars that tend to move as one across the night sky. In astronomy, it’s far easier to determine the age of a group of objects rather than one alone. Because the brown dwarf was part of a moving group of about 30 stars, previous researchers were able to estimate an average age for the group, about 3.7 million years old, that was likely also the age of the brown dwarf.

The brown dwarf is also very close to the Earth, at about 102 parsecs away, making it the closest, young brown dwarf detected yet. For comparison, our nearest star, Alpha Centauri, is 1 parsec from Earth.

“When it’s this close, we consider it to be within the solar neighborhood,” Schutte says. “That proximity is really important, because brown dwarfs are lower in mass and inherently less bright than other objects like stars. So the closer these objects are to us, the more detail we’ll be able to see.”

Looking for Peter Pan

The team plans to zoom further in on W1200-7845 with other telescopes, such as ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile, comprising 66 huge radio dishes that work together as one powerful telescope to observe the universe between the radio and infrared bands. At this range and precision, the researchers hope to see the brown dwarf’s disk itself, to measure its mass and radius.

“A disk’s mass just tells you how much stuff is in the disk, which would tell us if planet formation happens around these systems, and what sorts of planets you’d be able to produce,” Silverberg says. “You could also use that data to determine what kinds of gas are in the system which would tell you about the disk’s composition.”

In the meantime, the researchers are launching a new version of Disk Detective. In April 2019, the website went on hiatus, as its hosting platform, the popular citizen scientist portal Zooniverse, briefly retired its previous software platform in favor of an updated version. The updated platform has prompted Silverberg and his colleagues to revamp Disk Detective. The new version, launching this week, will include images from a full-sky survey, PanSTARRS, that observes most of the sky in high-resolution optical bands.

“We’re getting more current images with different telescopes with better spatial resolution this time around,” says Silverberg, who will be managing the new site at MIT.

Where the site’s previous version was aimed at finding any disks around stars and other objects, the new site is designed to pick out “Peter Pan” disks — disks of gas and dust that should be old enough to have formed planets, but for some reason haven’t quite yet.

“We call them Peter Pan disks because they seem to never grow up,” Silverberg says.

The team identified its first Peter Pan disk with Disk Detective in 2016. Since then, seven others have been found, each at least 20 million years old. With the new site, they hope to identify and study more of these disks, which could help to nail down conditions under which planets, and possibly life, may form.

“The disks we find will be excellent places to look for exoplanets,” Silverberg says.

“If planets take longer to form than we previously thought, the star they orbit will have fewer gigantic flares when the planets finally form. If the planet receives fewer flares than it would around a younger star, that could significantly impact our expectations for discovering life there.”

This research was funded, in part, by NASA.

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Study: Reflecting sunlight to cool the planet will cause other global changes

How can the world combat the continued rise in global temperatures? How about shading the Earth from a portion of the sun’s heat by injecting the stratosphere with reflective aerosols? After all, volcanoes do essentially the same thing, albeit in short, dramatic bursts: When a Vesuvius erupts, it blasts fine ash into the atmosphere, where the particles can linger as a kind of cloud cover, reflecting solar radiation back into space and temporarily cooling the planet.

Some researchers are exploring proposals to engineer similar effects, for example by launching reflective aerosols into the stratosphere — via planes, balloons, and even blimps — in order to block the sun’s heat and counteract global warming. But such solar geoengineering schemes, as they are known, could have other long-lasting effects on the climate.

Now scientists at MIT have found that solar geoengineering would significantly change extratropical storm tracks — the zones in the middle and high latitudes where storms form year-round and are steered by the jet stream across the oceans and land. Extratropical storm tracks give rise to extratropical cyclones, and not their tropical cousins, hurricanes. The strength of extratropical storm tracks determines the severity and frequency of storms such as nor’easters in the United States.

The team considered an idealized scenario in which solar radiation was reflected enough to offset the warming that would occur if carbon dioxide were to quadruple in concentration. In a number of global climate models under this scenario, the strength of storm tracks in both the northern and southern hemispheres weakened significantly in response.

Weakened storm tracks would mean less powerful winter storms, but the team cautions that weaker storm tracks also lead to stagnant conditions, particularly in summer, and less wind to clear away air pollution. Changes in winds could also affect the circulation of ocean waters and, in turn, the stability of ice sheets.

“About half the world’s population lives in the extratropical regions where storm tracks dominate weather,” says Charles Gertler, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). “Our results show that solar geoengineering will not simply reverse climate change. Instead, it has the potential itself to induce novel changes in climate.”

Gertler and his colleagues have published their results this week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. Co-authors include EAPS Professor Paul O’Gorman, along with Ben Kravitz of Indiana State University, John Moore of Beijing Normal University, Steven Phipps of the University of Tasmania, and Shingo Watanabe of the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology

A not-so-sunny picture

Scientists have previously modeled what Earth’s climate might look like if solar geoengineering scenarios were to play out on a global scale, with mixed results. On the one hand, spraying aerosols into the stratosphere would reduce incoming solar heat and, to a degree, counteract the warming caused by carbon dioxide emissions. On the other hand, such cooling of the planet would not prevent other greenhouse gas-induced effects such as regional reductions in rainfall and ocean acidification.

There have also been signs that intentionally reducing solar radiation would shrink the temperature difference between the Earth’s equator and poles or, in climate parlance, weaken the planet’s meridional temperature gradient, cooling the equator while the poles continue to warm. This last consequence was especially intriguing to Gertler and O’Gorman.

“Storm tracks feed off of meridional temperature gradients, and storm tracks are interesting because they help us to understand weather extremes,” Gertler says. “So we were interested in how geoengineering affects storm tracks.”  

The team looked at how extratropical storm tracks might change under a scenario of solar geoengineering known to climate scientists as experiment G1 of the Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project (GeoMIP), a project that provides various geoengineering scenarios for scientists to run on climate models to assess their various climate effects.

The G1 experiment assumes an idealized scenario in which a solar geoengineering scheme blocks enough solar radiation to counterbalance the warming that would occur if carbon dioxide concentrations were to quadruple.

The researchers used results from various climate models run forward in time under the conditions of the G1 experiment. They also used results from a more sophisticated geoengineering scenario with doubling of carbon dioxide concentrations and aerosols injected into the stratosphere at more than one latitude. In each model they recorded the day-to-day change in air pressure at sea level pressure at various locations along the storm tracks. These changes reflect the passage of storms and measure a storm track’s energy.

“If we look at the variance in sea level pressure, we have a sense of how often and how strongly cyclones pass over each area,” Gertler explains. “We then average the variance across the whole extratropical region, to get an average value of storm track strength for the northern and southern hemispheres.”

An imperfect counterbalance

Their results, across climate models, showed that solar geoengineering would weaken storm tracks in both Northern and Southern hemispheres. Depending on the scenario they considered, the storm track in the Northern Hemisphere would be 5 to 17 percent weaker than it is today.

“A weakened storm track, in both hemispheres, would mean weaker winter storms but also lead to more stagnant weather, which could affect heat waves,” Gertler says. “Across all seasons, this could affect ventilation of air pollution. It also may contribute to a weakening of the hydrological cycle, with regional reductions in rainfall. These are not good changes, compared to a baseline climate that we are used to.”

The researchers were curious to see how the same storm tracks would respond to just global warming alone, without the addition of social geoengineering, so they ran the climate models again under several warming-only scenarios. Surprisingly, they found that, in the northern hemisphere, global warming would also weaken storm tracks, by the same magnitude as with the addition of solar geoengineering. This suggests solar geoengineering, and efforts to cool the Earth by reducing incoming heat, would not do much to alter global warming’s effects, at least on storm tracks — a puzzling outcome that the researchers are unsure how to explain.

In the Southern Hemisphere, there is a slightly different story. They found that global warming alone would strengthen storm tracks there, whereas the addition of solar geoengineering would prevent this strengthening, and even further, would weaken the storm tracks there.

“In the Southern Hemisphere, winds drive ocean circulation, which in turn could affect uptake of carbon dioxide, and  the stability of the Antarctic ice sheet,” O’Gorman adds. “So how storm tracks change over the Southern Hemisphere is quite important.”

The team also observed that the weakening of storm tracks was strongly correlated with changes in temperature and humidity. Specifically, the climate models showed that in response to reduced incoming solar radiation, the equator cooled significantly as the poles continued to warm. This reduced temperature gradient appears to be sufficient to explain the weakening storm tracks — a result that the group is the first to demonstrate.

“This work highlights that solar geoengineering is not reversing climate change, but is substituting one unprecedented climate state for another,” Gertler says. “Reflecting sunlight isn’t a perfect counterbalance to the greenhouse effect.”

Adds O’Gorman: “There are multiple reasons to avoid doing this, and instead to favor reducing emissions of CO₂ and other greenhouse gases.”

This research was funded, in part, by the National Science Foundation, NASA, and the Industry and Foundation sponsors of the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change.

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Counting your antigens

Normally, the immune system is able to differentiate between healthy and abnormal cells. Peptides, fragments created by the synthesis and breakdown of proteins inside each cell, are presented on the surface as antigens and act as signals to immune cells whether the cell should be left alone or flagged for destruction and removal.

Because cancer cells display a small number of tumor-associated antigens and antigens that result from genetic mutations, they can be targeted by the immune system. However, cancer cells can develop strategies for evading detection by the immune system. Cancer immunotherapies counteract those strategies, but only for some cancers and only in some patients. Those that do work produce powerful results.

Researchers and clinicians are exploring how to improve the success rate of immunotherapies for more cancer types and patients. In this effort, they are combining immunotherapies with targeted therapies, small molecules designed to inhibit selected protein targets in the cell. To design effective combinations, a better understanding of how targeted therapies change the immunopeptidome — the repertoire of surface-presenting peptide antigens — is needed.

A team of researchers including Koch Institute members Forest White, the Ned C. and Janet Bemis Rice Professor and member of the MIT Center for Precision Cancer Medicine, and Douglas Lauffenburger, Ford Professor of Biological Engineering, Chemical Engineering, and Biology, developed a technique for accurately quantifying changes in the immunopeptidome.

In a study led by graduate student Lauren Stopfer and appearing in Nature Communications, researchers used the platform to analyze the effect of CDK4/6 inhibitors, a class of known anticancer agents, on the immunopeptidome of melanoma cell lines. In addition to identifying  potential antigen targets for drug development, their results highlighted the potential of CDK4/6 inhibitors to make an effective partner for certain kinds of immunotherapies. Ultimately, the platform could help cancer researchers design new targeted drugs and immunotherapies or clinical trials for combinations of these types of therapies.

High-quality quantification

Currently, in order to examine how a cell changes its immunopeptidome in response to exposure to a drug or other perturbation, researchers perform a technique known as mass spectrometry to quantify the foldchange, or relative change in magnitude between subsequent measurements, of the expression of peptide antigens. However, most current mass spectrometry-based methods do not provide a complete — or even reliably accurate — picture of immunopeptidome dynamics.

The process of preparing a sample for mass spectrometry analysis can result in substantial losses of antigens. In isolating the relatively small number of antigen peptides from the entire contents of cells, there can be significant variation in the proportion of peptide antigens recovered from sample to sample or from peptide to peptide. Existing methods for accounting for how many antigens are lost are laborious and have limited effectiveness.

Foldchange alone does not indicate the magnitude of a change in peptide antigen levels. For example, a three-fold increase in antigens may mean an increase from 10 to 30 antigens, or it may mean an increase of 1,000 to 3,000. Because different drugs require different antigens to be present at different quantities in order to be effective, an accurate count of the change in antigen is needed to identify drugs that elicit the optimal response in the cell. Furthermore, the measurement may be undermined by underlying “noise” in the sample — data that can cloud the relative proportion of observable “signal” produced by the antigen of interest.

“People will say that you need a certain number of a peptide antigen in order for an immunotherapy to work, but, right now, that number is typically based on anecdotal evidence,” says White. “To make truly informed decisions about immunotherapy options, there needs to be a way to quantify antigens very accurately and very reliably.”

The new platform enables the accurate quantification of peptide antigens presented at the cell surface, accounting for variation in sample processing and giving an absolute number of detectable peptides. Using a widely available ultraviolet light-based technology, the method inserts peptides loaded with heavy isotopes into genetically engineered versions of the molecules that present the antigens on the cell surface, class I major histocompatibility complexes (MHCs). The labeled peptide-MHC (pMHC) complexes are then added to samples of the contents of whole cells. When the antigen peptides are extracted, the heavy isotope labeled peptides can be used to account for how many antigens have been lost to processing.

To determine how many of a specific antigen are presented on cells, heavy isotope labeled pMHCs can be added to samples of cell contents at different concentrations. The resulting standard curve, or graph, can be used to extrapolate the number of peptide antigens.

Making antigens count

The researchers used the new platform to quantify how CDK4/6 inhibitors change the repertoire of antigens presented on the surface of melanoma cells.

Melanoma can be treated effectively with a class of immunotherapy called immune checkpoint blockade inhibitors, but as many as 40 percent of patients do not respond to these therapies. Recent studies have suggested that checkpoint blockade immunotherapies may be more effective in more patients when combined with other anticancer agents, particularly those that stimulate an immune response, such as CDK4/6 inhibitors. CDK4/6 inhibitors are thought to strengthen the immune system’s response to cancer in part by increasing expression of MHCs, thereby rendering cancer cells more visible to the immune system.

Researchers profiled peptide antigen repertoires in four cell lines of melanoma treated with the CDK4/6 inhibitor palbociclib at low and high doses, finding that low doses of the palbociclib resulted in a larger increase of MHC presentation than the higher-dose therapy. At lower doses, the immunopeptidome showed increases in tumor-associated peptide antigens derived from intracellular pathways known to be affected by the inhibition of CDK4 and CDK6. These results add to a growing body of evidence that CDK4/6 could be used together with checkpoint blockade to increase the immune system’s ability to respond to tumors, and suggest that CDK4/6 inhibitors and other treatments like them could be used to tune which peptides are presented to the immune system.

The researchers were also able to identify an antigen, a serine-phosphorylated IRS2 peptide, that occurs exclusively in malignant tumors. They found that it was expressed at high levels, demonstrating that the platform could also be used to help cancer researchers identify immunotherapy targets.

Because of its sensitivity and speed, the new platform could be used in the clinic to develop treatment strategies on a patient-specific basis. The multiplexed platform can analyze many samples in tandem, allowing for the short time scale critical to clinical trials. Its sensitivity allows it to be used on small samples, including samples from individual patients’ tumors. Analysis of peptide antigen repertoire changes could be used to optimize the order and timing of therapies for the greatest impact, in addition to calibrating cancer cells’ antigen presentation for targeting by immunotherapies.

“One of the most promising applications for this tool is to better understand how much of some of these peptide antigen targets are presented, not just on cell lines, but in real tumors,” says Stopfer. “Knowing how much antigen is present in tumor cells could inform what kind of therapies we develop and our ability to make informed decisions about immunotherapy options.”

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, a Melanoma Research Alliance Team Science Award, the MIT Center for Precision Cancer Medicine, the Koch Institute Frontier Research Program through the Kathy and Curt Marble Cancer Research Fund, and the Takeda Pharmaceuticals Immune Oncology Research Fund.

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