Transparent graphene electrodes might lead to new generation of solar cells

A new way of making large sheets of high-quality, atomically thin graphene could lead to ultra-lightweight, flexible solar cells, and to new classes of light-emitting devices and other thin-film electronics.

The new manufacturing process, which was developed at MIT and should be relatively easy to scale up for industrial production, involves an intermediate “buffer” layer of material that is key to the technique’s success. The buffer allows the ultrathin graphene sheet, less than a nanometer (billionth of a meter) thick, to be easily lifted off from its substrate, allowing for rapid roll-to-roll manufacturing.

The process is detailed in a paper published yesterday in Advanced Functional Materials, by MIT postdocs Giovanni Azzellino and Mahdi Tavakoli; professors Jing Kong, Tomas Palacios, and Markus Buehler; and five others at MIT.

Finding a way to make thin, large-area, transparent electrodes that are stable in open air has been a major quest in thin-film electronics in recent years, for a variety of applications in optoelectronic devices — things that either emit light, like computer and smartphone screens, or harvest it, like solar cells. Today’s standard for such applications is indium tin oxide (ITO), a material based on rare and expensive chemical elements.

Many research groups have worked on finding a replacement for ITO, focusing on both organic and inorganic candidate materials. Graphene, a form of pure carbon whose atoms are arranged in a flat hexagonal array, has extremely good electrical and mechanical properties, yet it is vanishingly thin, physically flexible, and made from an abundant, inexpensive material. Furthermore, it can be easily grown in the form of large sheets by chemical vapor deposition (CVD), using copper as a seed layer, as Kong’s group has demonstrated. However, for device applications, the trickiest part has been finding ways to release the CVD-grown graphene from its native copper substrate.

This release, known as graphene transfer process, tends to result in a web of tears, wrinkles, and defects in the sheets, which disrupts the film continuity and therefore drastically reduces their electrical conductivity. But with the new technology, Azzellino says, “now we are able to reliably manufacture large-area graphene sheets, transfer them onto whatever substrate we want, and the way we transfer them does not affect the electrical and mechanical properties of the pristine graphene.”

The key is the buffer layer, made of a polymer material called parylene, that conforms at the atomic level to the graphene sheets on which it is deployed. Like graphene, parylene is produced by CVD, which simplifies the manufacturing process and scalability.

As a demonstration of this technology, the team made proof-of-concept solar cells, adopting a thin-film polymeric solar cell material, along with the newly formed graphene layer for one of the cell’s two electrodes, and a parylene layer that also serves as a device substrate. They measured an optical transmittance close to 90 percent for the graphene film under visible light.

The prototyped graphene-based solar cell improves by roughly 36 times the delivered power per weight, compared to ITO-based state-of-the-art devices. It also uses 1/200 the amount of material per unit area for the transparent electrode. And, there is a further fundamental advantage compared to ITO: “Graphene comes for almost free,” Azzellino says.

“Ultra-lightweight graphene-based devices can pave the way to a new generation of applications,” he says. “So if you think about portable devices, the power per weight becomes a very important figure of merit. What if we could deploy a transparent solar cell on your tablet that is able to power up the tablet itself?” Though some further development would be needed, such applications should ultimately be feasible with this new method, he says.

The buffer material, parylene, is widely used in the microelectronics industry, usually to encapsulate and protect electronic devices. So the supply chains and equipment for using the material already are widespread, Azzellino says. Of the three existing types of parylene, the team’s tests showed that one of them, which contains more chlorine atoms, was by far the most effective for this application.

The atomic proximity of chlorine-rich parylene to the underlying graphene as the layers are sandwiched together provides a further advantage, by offering a kind of  “doping” for graphene, finally providing a more reliable and nondestructive approach for conductivity improvement of large-area graphene, unlike many others that have been tested and reported so far.

“The graphene and the parylene films are always face-to-face,” Azzellino says. “So basically, the doping action is always there, and therefore the advantage is permanent.”

The research team also included Marek Hempel, Ang-Yu Lu, Francisco Martin-Martinez, Jiayuan Zhao and Jingjie Yeo, all at MIT. The work was supported by Eni SpA through the MIT Energy Initiative, the U.S. Army Research Office through the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, and the Office of Naval Research.

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MIT startup wraps food in silk for better shelf life

Benedetto Marelli, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at MIT, was a postdoc at Tufts University’s Omenetto Lab when he stumbled upon a novel use for silk. Preparing for a lab-wide cooking competition whose one requirement was to incorporate silk into each dish, Marelli accidentally left a silk-dipped strawberry on his bench: “I came back almost one week later, and the strawberries that were coated were still edible. The ones that were not coated with silk were completely spoiled.” Marelli, whose previous research focused on the biomedical applications of silk, was stunned. “That opened up a new world for me,” he adds. Marelli viewed his inadvertent discovery as an opportunity to explore silk’s ability to address the issue of food waste.

Marelli partnered with several Boston-based scientists, including Adam Behrens, then a postdoc in the lab of Institute Professor Robert Langer, to form Cambridge Crops. The company aims to iterate and expand on the initial discovery, using silk as its core ingredient to develop products that extend the shelf life of all sorts of perishable foods. The company’s technology sees broad impact on extending the shelf life of whole and cut produce, meats, fish, and other foods. With support from a startup competition and subsequent venture capital, Cambridge Crops is equipped to increase global access to fresh foods, improve supply chain efficiencies, and even enable new products altogether.

A simple solution for a complex issue

One-third of the global food supply is wasted annually, yet over 10 percent of the population faces hunger.

Food waste has massive social, economic, and health implications that affect developed and developing countries alike. While many technologies have emerged aimed at extending the longevity of fresh foods, they often employ genetic modifications, environmentally harmful packaging materials, or are costly to implement. “So far, the majority of innovation in food- and ag-tech is based on genetic engineering, plant engineering, mechanical engineering, AI, and computer science. There’s a lot of room to innovate using material, like nanomaterials and biomaterials,” explains Marelli. The professor views technology like silk as an opportunity to mitigate many of the issues facing the food industry without changing the innate properties of the foods themselves.

Silk’s strengths stem from the material’s natural simplicity, honed by millennia of evolutionary biology. Cambridge Crops utilizes a proprietary and efficient process using only water and salt to isolate and reform the silk’s natural protein. This makes Cambridge Crops’ silk coatings easy to integrate into existing food-processing lines without the need for costly new equipment or modifications. Once deposited on the surface of food, the silk coating forms a tasteless, odorless, and otherwise imperceptible barrier that slows down the food’s natural degradation mechanisms. Depending on the food item, the result can show up to a 200 percent increase in shelf life. Not only does that enable less food waste, but that also reduces the pressure on cold chains, allowing shippers to reduce greenhouse gases in transportation.

Ties to MIT

Cambridge Crops gained early industry traction after winning first place in the 2017 Rabobank-MIT Food and Agribusiness Innovation Prize, a competition for early-stage startups sponsored by Rabobank and the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) and supported by the student-run MIT Food and Agriculture club. The technical feedback and industry connections Cambridge Crops leveraged through its participation in the competition proved invaluable in identifying key pain points and market opportunities in the food industry that could be addressed through its core technology. “It was great for us,” explains CEO Adam Behrens. “[The prize] was important for doing technical validation in addition to forming early value propositions.”

Cambridge Crops has since raised two rounds of financing, both led or co-led by The Engine, which helps incubate startups working on “tough tech.” These have been combined with awards from AgFunder and multiple Massachusetts Clean Energy Center grants. The initial successes even merited a mention in Bill Gates’ “Gates Notes,” and by a company tackling food waste naturally.

Behrens maintains that investors’ contributions go beyond strictly their monetary value. “Our investors have been an integral part of our early stage success … adding value in all kinds of ways — from brand positioning to overall strategy.”

Next steps

Behrens and Marelli view Cambridge Crops’ technology as a true platform, reaching far beyond just that initial strawberry. Not only can the technology extend the shelf life of whole produce, but it also sees a dramatic effect on cut produce, meats, fish, and processed foods. Cambridge Crops is leveraging its breadth of application to address the broader needs of the food industry through strategic partnerships.

Cambridge Crops is optimistic about silk’s potential to mitigate many of the challenges facing complex food networks. “We think that our technology is one that can actually enable [the elimination of plastic food packaging],” adds Behrens.

In the classroom, Marelli tries to instill a sense of excitement about technology’s role in the future of food and agriculture, such as in his Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering class, Materials in Agriculture, Food Security, and Food Safety. “They see an angle on agriculture and food science that they never thought about,” he explains, “and they see how much it can be a technology-driven sector.” As Cambridge Crops prepares for the commercial launch of its own patented technology, it is poised to tackle some of the most intractable obstacles facing global food networks to reduce waste and make nutritious foods more accessible to all.

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Taking an MIT approach to a return to campus

As MIT continues to consider and refine options for the fall, two questions stand out: how to safely and responsibly welcome people back into the Institute’s physical spaces, and how to ensure the MIT community can excel and thrive during what will likely be an extended and ongoing pandemic.

While several groups work to answer those questions, MIT has also begun to collect data to inform a return to campus. A residence hall study launched earlier this spring has helped MIT researchers understand the prevalence of Covid-19 on campus. And an operational system currently in development builds on the success of that study, with an eye toward limiting the virus’s spread.

Residence hall study

In early April, MIT Medical and the MIT Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) invited all students remaining in MIT residences and on-campus residential life support staff to take voluntary weekly tests, including temperature and oxygen measurements and a nasal swab administered by licensed clinical staff. Two hundred and forty students and staff signed up and remain active in the study. Anyone who tests positive is moved to a separate living area for isolation and treatment.

“Understanding the prevalence of Covid-19 in our community and the rate of transmission within our dorms are critical pieces of information that can help inform how living areas should look and operate whenever students return to campus,” says MIT Medical Director Cecilia Stuopis, who shaped the effort and has overseen its implementation.

The study, which was approved by MIT’s Committee on the Use of Humans as Experimental Subjects (COUHES), has sought to advance epidemiologic understanding of the virus while promoting the safety and health of MIT’s campus community.

“The approach we are taking is classic MIT,” says Elazer Edelman, who is the study’s principal investigator, a physician, and director of IMES. “Create a hypothesis — that opening MIT is safe — and test it with an experiment using emerging innovations. Starting with a limited campus rollout, we are examining progressive phases of population expansion, placing greater stress on the hypothesis until we arrive at a way to reach our ultimate goal: a safe reinvention of the MIT campus in the Covid-19 era.”

MIT Covid-19 response system

The residence hall study paved the way for the nascent MIT Covid-19 Response System (MCRS), an idea MIT President L. Rafael Reif presented to a team of MIT faculty and medical leaders in April. MCRS integrates anonymized data from four existing sources — Covid-19 tests conducted by MIT Medical, campus building badge readers, self-attestations, and cleaning and facilities — and presents it in the form of a dashboard. The dashboard will allow MIT leaders to see where on campus the virus is present, and to make decisions aimed at limiting its spread.

Nick Roy, a professor of aeronautics and astronautics and the director of The Bridge within the MIT Quest for Intelligence; and Deborah Campbell, a senior staff member in Lincoln Laboratory’s Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief Systems Group (HADR), are leading a team developing the system’s architecture. Another team is focused on integrating the data. Both draw on ongoing efforts in education, research, campus planning, residential and student life, contact tracing, health management and care, and data analysis and modeling.

Vice Chancellor for Undergraduate and Graduate Education Ian Waitz, who co-leads MCRS with HADR Group Leader Jonathan Pitts, describes the system as an important component of MIT’s ramp-up strategy: “As we continue to think about how and when to repopulate campus, we need better information about the health state of our physical spaces and enhanced protocols to reduce risk,” Waitz says. “This system will help, and it will give us the flexibility we need to adapt as we go along.”

Among MCRS’ working groups are two that will be vital to MIT’s broader ramp-up strategy: one focused on legal, ethical, and equity issues, and the other forming now to advance solutions by drawing on the knowledge of MIT’s students.

Legal, ethical, and equity considerations

Some of the types of data MIT is gathering to support a return to campus concern sensitive personal information, including health status, and must be treated with special care. Resuming campus operations also presents important questions regarding safety and equity. That’s where the Legal, Ethical, and Equity Committee for MIT Campus Planning (LEE) comes in.

Co-chaired by Julie Shah and David Kaiser, associate deans for the social and ethical responsibilities of computing, and Mark DiVincenzo, vice president and general counsel, LEE ensures that activities related to data collection and use occur in a manner consistent with federal and state law and regulation, Institute policies and procedures, and MIT’s ethical standards and values. The group is also keenly focused on minimizing safety risks and avoiding marginalizing MIT community members who will continue to operate remotely.

“Covid-19 exposes many fault lines in our society by dividing the world into people who can protect themselves and those who cannot,” says Shah. “If we merely pause and wait for things to return to normal, we will end up with a less safe and less equitable society. Instead, it is our responsibility to envision and model a newer, safer, more equitable normal.”

In addition to its broad faculty representation, LEE includes Associate Provost Tim Jamison, Institute Community and Equity Officer John Dozier, and three student leaders. The GSC welcomes applications to fill a graduate student vacancy on the committee.

As DiVincenzo explains, “In assembling this diverse group, MIT acted quickly and thoughtfully on behalf of our community. My hope and expectation is that LEE’s review process will give the people of MIT some comfort in knowing that we are thinking broadly and carefully about how we return people to campus.”

Kaiser adds: “Operating our campus amid the pandemic presents special challenges. We need clear rules and procedures to minimize safety risks while maintaining the privacy and security of individuals’ personal information. We will remain clear-eyed and vigilant against inadvertent inequities or marginalization. Working with the LEE group has been intense but deeply gratifying, watching these colleagues pull together, share their perspectives, and discuss challenging issues with clarity and empathy.”

Student engagement

The newest addition to MCRS is the Student Solutions Group (SSG), which will help promote communication and engagement with students by organizing student members into “wings,” focused on areas including academics, research safety,  international student support, and campus life. The Undergraduate Association (UA) is selecting undergraduates from among those who have expressed an interest in working on Covid-19 issues. Interested graduate students are encouraged to apply here.

According to UA President Danielle Geathers and Graduate Student Council President Madeleine Sutherland, who serve on LEE, “The UA and GSC are excited to integrate students into these important committees that will shape the future of the Institute.”

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If transistors can’t get smaller, then coders have to get smarter

In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore predicted that the number of transistors that could fit on a computer chip would grow exponentially — and they did, doubling about every two years. For half a century, Moore’s Law has endured: Computers have gotten smaller, faster, cheaper, and more efficient, enabling the rapid worldwide adoption of PCs, smartphones, high-speed internet, and more.

This miniaturization trend has led to silicon chips today that have almost unimaginably small circuitry. Transistors, the tiny switches that implement computer microprocessors, are so small that 1,000 of them laid end-to-end are no wider than a human hair. And for a long time, the smaller the transistors were, the faster they could switch. But today, we’re approaching the limit of how small transistors can get. As a result, over the past decade researchers have been scratching their heads to find other ways to improve performance so that the computer industry can continue to innovate.

While we wait for the maturation of new computing technologies like quantum, carbon nanotubes, or photonics (which may take a while), other approaches will be needed to get performance as Moore’s Law comes to an end. In a recent journal article published in Science, a team from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) identifies three key areas to prioritize to continue to deliver computing speed-ups: better software, new algorithms, and more streamlined hardware.

Senior author Charles E. Leiserson says that the performance benefits from miniaturization have been so great that, for decades, programmers have been able to prioritize making code-writing easier rather than making the code itself run faster. The inefficiency that this tendency introduces has been acceptable, because faster computer chips have always been able to pick up the slack.

“But nowadays, being able to make further advances in fields like machine learning, robotics, and virtual reality will require huge amounts of computational power that miniaturization can no longer provide,” says Leiserson, the Edwin Sibley Webster Professor in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “If we want to harness the full potential of these technologies, we must change our approach to computing.”

Leiserson co-wrote the paper, published this week, with Research Scientist Neil Thompson, Professor Daniel Sanchez, Adjunct Professor Butler Lampson, and research scientists Joel Emer, Bradley Kuszmaul, and Tao Schardl.

No more Moore

The authors make recommendations about three areas of computing: software, algorithms, and hardware architecture.

With software, they say that programmers’ previous prioritization of productivity over performance has led to problematic strategies like “reduction”: taking code that worked on problem A and using it to solve problem B. For example, if someone has to create a system to recognize yes-or-no voice commands, but doesn’t want to code a whole new custom program, they could take an existing program that recognizes a wide range of words and tweak it to respond only to yes-or-no answers.

While this approach reduces coding time, the inefficiencies it creates quickly compound: if a single reduction is 80 percent as efficient as a custom solution, and you then add 20 layers of reduction, the code will ultimately be 100 times less efficient than it could be.

“These are the kinds of strategies that programmers have to rethink as hardware improvements slow down,” says Thompson. “We can’t keep doing ‘business as usual’ if we want to continue to get the speed-ups we’ve grown accustomed to.”

Instead, the researchers recommend techniques like parallelizing code. Much existing software has been designed using ancient assumptions that processors can only do only one operation at a time. But in recent years multicore technology has enabled complex tasks to be completed thousands of times faster and in a much more energy-efficient way. 

“Since Moore's Law will not be handing us improved performance on a silver platter, we will have to deliver performance the hard way,” says Moshe Vardi, a professor in computational engineering at Rice University. “This is a great opportunity for computing research, and the [MIT CSAIL] report provides a road map for such research.” 

As for algorithms, the team suggests a three-pronged approach that includes exploring new problem areas, addressing concerns about how algorithms scale, and tailoring them to better take advantage of modern hardware.

Lastly, in terms of hardware architecture, the team advocates that hardware be streamlined so that problems can be solved with fewer transistors and less silicon. Streamlining includes using simpler processors and creating hardware tailored to specific applications, like the graphics-processing unit is tailored for computer graphics. 

“Hardware customized for particular domains can be much more efficient and use far fewer transistors, enabling applications to run tens to hundreds of times faster,” says Schardl. “More generally, hardware streamlining would further encourage parallel programming, creating additional chip area to be used for more circuitry that can operate in parallel.”

While these approaches may be the best path forward, the researchers say that it won’t always be an easy one. Organizations that use such techniques may not know the benefits of their efforts until after they’ve invested a lot of engineering time. Plus, the speed-ups won’t be as consistent as they were with Moore’s Law: they may be dramatic at first, and then require large amounts of effort for smaller improvements. 

Certain companies have already gotten the memo.

“For tech giants like Google and Amazon, the huge scale of their data centers means that even small improvements in software performance can result in large financial returns,” says Thompson.  “But while these firms may be leading the charge, many others will need to take these issues seriously if they want to stay competitive.”

Getting improvements in the areas identified by the team will also require building up the infrastructure and workforce that make them possible.  

“Performance growth will require new tools, programming languages, and hardware to facilitate more and better performance engineering,” says Leiserson. “It also means computer scientists being better educated about how we can make software, algorithms, and hardware work together, instead of putting them in different silos.”

This work was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation.

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MIT Logarhythms host a virtual concert and release a sneak peek of their new EP

In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, the MIT Logarhythms did not miss a beat in finding new ways to stay connected, make music, and engage with the MIT community. Instead of on-campus a cappella rehearsals or concerts, the Logs took their show online. “We pretty quickly as a group got into the mindset that this is an opportunity to exercise a lot of creative freedom … and to try a lot of new things, because the circumstances are so crazy,” says rising senior Noah Pauls.

For several weeks, the Logs planned Minelogs, a free virtual Minecraft-themed concert. It was the culmination of the group’s spring semester, with remote-recorded songs, skits, speeches, and a celebration for graduating seniors. “We want to show people that quarantine is not going to stop the Logs family from performing music and showing off what we have,” says Quinn Brodsky, a rising junior in Course 8 (physics) and 18 (mathematics) and MIT Logarhythms’s music director.

While dispersed across the country, the group enjoyed the opportunity to continue singing and making music. But, they admit, it wasn't easy. “It's kind of harder to learn by yourself instead of learning with a whole group like linear arrangement,” says Nicholas Garcia, a rising sophomore and MIT Logarhythms’s business manager, noting that it is difficult to replicate online the energy and quality of live performance.

Minelogs also marked the release of an exclusive sneak peek of their new EP titled “Ten to Midnight.” At its heart, however, the concert was another way to connect the whole MIT community and the larger alumni network together for a night of good music, good fun, and MIT spirit.

The EP has been in the works since spring 2019. Luckily, the group had finished their vocal recordings just before students moved off-campus due to the pandemic. Subsequently, the group transitioned from the role of performers to producers, working with Plaid Productions remotely to mix each track and complete the EP.

“Ten to Midnight” will be the group’s eighth release in the 21st century. “I hope that when people hear our EP and listen to the music, that they will be delighted in the fact that things are able to be accomplished in this time period,” says Zander Hodge, a rising junior and MIT Logarhythms’s CD manager. “If you really work at it and are dedicated in what you're doing, then you can still accomplish a lot with limited mobility and physical interaction we can have.”

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Controlling plasma and plasma turbulence

“What are some challenges in controlling plasma and what are your solutions? What is the most effective type of fusion device? What are some difficulties in sustaining fusion conditions? What are some obstacles to receiving fusion funding?”

For the past four years, graduate student Norman Cao '15 PhD '20 has been the Plasma Science and Fusion Center’s (PSFC's) go-to “answer man,” replying to questions like these emailed by students and members of the general public interested in getting a deeper understanding of fusion and its potential as a future energy source.

Lately, Cao has had questions of his own to answer, and scientific “lore” to debunk, in a PhD thesis that seeks to correct a popularly held and intuitive belief about plasma turbulence. And as he prepares to start a postdoc instructorship at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences he questions, in a world affected by Covid-19, exactly where will he be living, and how will he be performing his duties as teacher and researcher.

Cao arrived at MIT an undergraduate nine years ago. Originally majoring in aerospace engineering, he changed course as he neared the end of his senior year. Having interned at several industries, he realized his passion was for research, rather than for engineering or applied work.

“These aerospace industries had less of a focus on fundamental science,” he explains. “It didn’t interest me to figure out how to get a couple percent better performance on an airplane wing. But I’d always had a passing interest in fusion from reading science fiction, where it is always the energy source used in future worlds,” he continues. “How do you power these spaceships? It’s got to be fusion, of course.”

A senior-year course in plasma science taught by Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE) Professor Anne White helped stir that interest into something more profound. When he was accepted into the NSE graduate program at MIT, he was ready to focus on fusion at the PSFC.

There, with the guidance of senior research scientist John Rice, Cao was able to experiment on the Alcator C-Mod tokamak, the center’s signature fusion device until it was shut down in September 2016. The data gathered on this device are the basis for his thesis on plasma turbulence.

Tokamaks like Alcator C-Mod use magnetic coils wrapped around a toroidal vacuum chamber to confine hot plasma, with the goal of making it hot and dense enough for fusion to occur. Turbulence in the plasma works against this, transporting intense heat from the center of the tokamak to the cooler edge, frustrating attempts to maintain fusion reactions. Cao wanted to assess whether or not certain assumptions about the behavior of plasma turbulence actually held up to experiment.

The misconception is an easy one to embrace. Since the plasma can be shown to be unstable, it seems logical to link calculations of stability to the observed plasma transport. “In this case,” says Cao, “a common intuition arises that changes in the observed turbulent transport can be traced back to changes in the characteristics of the linear instabilities present in the plasma.”

To challenge this belief, Cao performed so-called “rotation reversal hysteresis” experiments. Hysteresis is the dependence of a system’s observable state on its history, such as a magnet “remembering” the previous direction of the applied magnetic field during the process of magnetization, even when the applied magnetic field is removed or reversed. For his experiments, this hysteresis implied that there was a range of densities where the turbulent flows could make the plasma rotate, like a tire spinning around an axle, in either the same direction as the plasma current or the opposite direction. Taking advantage of the coexistence of different states of rotation at the same mean plasma density and temperatures, Cao was able to show a change in turbulence that occurred without a concurrent change in linear instability characteristics.

“Part of my research was testing this gut feeling people have and showing that ‘No, it’s only a gut feeling.’ It does not end up matching the reality of what the experiment shows. The second part was trying to fill in the blanks. Now that we know that this assumption is conclusively invalid, we’d like to replace it with something better. What sort of intuition should we replace that previous intuition with?”

Cao defended his thesis via Zoom, the first at the PSFC to do so. He credits the NSE department for walking him through the process, making it “surprisingly smooth.” Although he’s adjusted to Zoom, he found working remotely on his thesis presentation a challenge.

“It feels lonely working on your own and not seeing others. It’s one of those things you don’t realize you miss until you don’t have it. Not being able to pop in and say hi to my advisor. I think not having that same level of community support is something that made it difficult to personally go through the process.”

He looks forward to teaching at Courant, though uncertain how virtual his first semester will be. His experience with PSFC outreach, not only answering questions online but in person, giving tours and performing hands-on demonstrations, has fostered his versatility as a teacher.

“Long term, for the health of academia, for the health of science, for the health of human progress in general, it’s important to get people involved in the frontiers of science. I personally have a lot of people to thank who supported me through their efforts — like high school teachers, my parents, others I’ve met who have really gone above and beyond in mentoring and tutoring and sparking interest in doing these things. I think it’s important to pay this effort forward and get other people excited, to help them realize it’s OK to be excited about math and science; it’s OK to be passionate about doing something that is difficult, but at the same time fun and rewarding.” 

No question.

Cao's research is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Fusion Energy Sciences.

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Recent political science graduates see brighter days ahead

Blindsided by a pandemic and hunkering down at home instead of celebrating spring on campus, MIT seniors might reasonably have felt blue. But a group of new political science alumni glimpse brighter days ahead, as they springboard from rewarding academic programs into meaningful careers.

“I feel prepared for the life in policy work I have been planning, one that's focused on energy and climate mitigation,” says Michelle Bai '20, a double major in economics and political science with a minor in energy studies. Bai spent last summer interning at the Council of Economic Advisors. Her first job out of college will be with Charles River Associates, a global consulting firm.

Nwanacho Nwana '20, a double major in business and political science, will be working on economic litigation cases at Analysis Group. “I'm happy to have found a position perfectly at the intersection of things I like doing, involving quantitative, data-driven work,” he says. Nwana interned in MIT's Washington office after receiving the Jeffrey L. Pressman Award — a prize (and $6,500 stipend) given to talented undergraduates to support summer projects in American politics.

Suited for political science

Some of these recent graduates landed on political science rather late in their academic journeys. Adelaide Oh '20, whose primary focus is electrical engineering and computer science, added the political science major in early spring of her senior year. A debater in high school with an interest in political philosophy, she had been taking Course 17 classes since her first year at MIT.

“I really like how MIT political science is both rigorous and technical, which makes it possible to apply things I learn in political science to computer science,” says Oh, who will be working with the San Francisco-based tech company, Foursquare. “I'm interested in security and privacy issues, and found my classes with Nazli Choucri [professor of political science, who specializes in cyber security] to be really relevant.”

While Oh will start her tech career doing software engineering, she is already angling for project management positions, which she believes are suitable based in part on a skills set gained at MIT. “In my political science classes, I learned to facilitate and lead group discussions — the kind of soft skills that shaped me to be more of a project manager,” she says.

Passion versus interest

Frances Parker-Hale spent her first two years at MIT as a biology major, interning at the Whitehead Institute for Biological Research and at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. She co-authored an article in Molecular Cell in March 2019. “Then I realized that while I found biology interesting, I wasn't passionate about it,” says Parker-Hale.

A top competitive rower at MIT, Parker-Hale had begun volunteering with Amphibious Achievement, MIT's dual mentorship program that teaches under-resourced high school students how to row and tutors them in academic subjects. “Working with these students and seeing how the education system failed some people and lifted others up depending on where they live and who they are, was something I felt passionate about.”

Parker-Hale says the issues Amphibious Achievement highlighted for her triggered a change of heart. “I thought the way to solve these problems was through policy-making, and research about policy," she says. “It became obvious that political science was right for me, and that I should focus on social policy and policy-making.”

Parker-Hale has not regretted this choice, feeding her passion not merely through classwork, but with an internship at the World Bank focused on education that started the summer after junior year, and continued through fall of her senior year. “I was working on a flagship report on education reform in Europe and Central Asia, and from this experience, I knew I had chosen the right field for sure.”

Before heading into a policy-focused career though, Parker-Hale will be working in a Baltimore middle school as a math instructor, with Teach for America. “In order to know how policy works, you need to see how it gets implemented in classrooms,” she adds.

Mind-broadening internships

Nwanacho Nwana describes his first several years at MIT as “quite a roller coaster.” He found economics too theoretical and computer science not relevant to his interests, before settling on a business major. He didn't add political science until late in his junior year, after taking a class with Evan Lieberman on engineering democratic development in Africa (17.571). “We had to propose an actual startup idea for the class, and it wasn't what I expected at all — it felt dynamic and real-world,” says Nwana.

Nwana has become keenly interested in the problem of government corruption, and more recently, how to promote authentic dialogue between citizens during partisan times. His exposure to the D.C. political scene through his internship gave him a sense for the first time that he might be able to contribute. So after his consulting job, he is contemplating law school. “This opportunity really broadened my mindset about a potential political career,” he says.

Unlike her classmates, Michelle Bai arrived at MIT “knowing exactly what I wanted to study,” she says. “I wanted a scientific understanding of energy and the environment, but I also wanted a foundational background in economics and political science.” She is completing a thesis, under her primary advisor, associate professor of political science In Song Kim, on international trade, a subject she became interested in during her time at the Council of Economic Advisors.

“This internship highlighted the importance of becoming expert in a field to become an important player, and that really shaped the way I viewed my future education steps,” she says. “I really wanted to make an impact, and that shaped everything I've done in college.”

de MIT News https://ift.tt/2A1lOY8