At MIT, learning about the language, history, and art of Arabic

A recent MIT event put into focus the ways in which the Institute is celebrating and supporting the education of Arabic language, art, and history.

On Dec. 9, students had the opportunity to learn about the history and art of Arabic calligraphy from a local expert, Hajj Wafaa. A freelance calligrapher, Wafaa has taught Arabic calligraphy in the Boston area since 2004. 

Originally from Kufa, Iraq, Wafaa taught himself calligraphy using paper, ink, and tools of his own making when he was a refugee in Rafha, Saudi Arabia, in 1991. His presentation described how Arabic calligraphy developed across time and geography, and he demonstrated the characteristics of the various styles.

He also introduced the audience to the basic implements and materials for calligraphy, describing how refugees used found materials to make pens, ink, and paper. Wafaa showed slides of some of his own creations, and made suggestions for students interested in becoming practitioners. He also explained some of the differences between Arabic and Chinese, Japanese, and Latin calligraphy.

The event was held to celebrate the launch of Arabic language classes at MIT and was cosponsored by MIT Global Languages and MIT-Arab World. Joyce Roberge, undergraduate academic administrator for MIT Global Languages, moderated the event and announced the Institute’s new Arabic language offerings: With support from the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences and the MIT-Arab World program, MIT Global Languages is launching a pilot of Arabic this month, with a second course in the spring term.

Professor Emma J. Teng, director of MIT Global Languages, noted, “We are very excited to finally be able to offer Arabic. We have had long-term demand from students for Arabic, and until now MIT students have had to enroll at Harvard or Wellesley to study this language for credit.” She explained that the new pilot was made possible with the support of the Arabic Alumni Association.

The language classes will bolster other subject offerings about the Middle East at the Institute. Associate Provost Philip S. Khoury, the Ford International Professor of History and faculty advisor for Middle Eastern studies at MIT, said, “The new Arabic language pilot will help to prepare MIT students to better understand and engage with Arab culture and society.” 

Nasser Rabbat, Aga Khan Professor in the Department of Architecture and the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture, added, “Arabic is the national language of 22 countries and the mother tongue of more than 400 million people. It is also the language of the Qur’an, recited in the original language by the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims. Arabic has also been the primary language of literature, science, philosophy, law, and liturgy in the entire Islamic world until the 20th century. It is one of the six official languages of the United Nations today.”

When asked if the global prevalence of computers will destroy the calligraphic tradition, Waafa explained that calligraphy is not a mere tool for communication, but rather a profound practice of culture and tradition that continues to attract students to the discipline and artistic expression.

After his talk, he put pen to paper to write students’ names or chosen words in Arabic calligraphy. A station was also set up with materials for students to try their own hands.

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Physicists watch as ultracold atoms form a crystal of quantum tornadoes

The world we experience is governed by classical physics. How we move, where we are, and how fast we’re going are all determined by the classical assumption that we can only exist in one place at any one moment in time.

But in the quantum world, the behavior of individual atoms is governed by the eerie principle that a particle’s location is a probability. An atom, for instance, has a certain chance of being in one location and another chance of being at another location, at the same exact time.

When particles interact, purely as a consequence of these quantum effects, a host of odd phenomena should ensue. But observing such purely quantum mechanical behavior of interacting particles amid the overwhelming noise of the classical world is a tricky undertaking.

Now, MIT physicists have directly observed the interplay of interactions and quantum mechanics in a particular state of matter: a spinning fluid of ultracold atoms. Researchers have predicted that, in a rotating fluid, interactions will dominate and drive the particles to exhibit exotic, never-before-seen behaviors.

In a study published today in Nature, the MIT team has rapidly rotated a quantum fluid of ultracold atoms. They watched as the initially round cloud of atoms first deformed into a thin, needle-like structure. Then, at the point when classical effects should be suppressed, leaving solely interactions and quantum laws to dominate the atoms’ behavior, the needle spontaneously broke into a crystalline pattern, resembling a string of miniature, quantum tornadoes.

“This crystallization is driven purely by interactions, and tells us we’re going from the classical world to the quantum world,” says Richard Fletcher, assistant professor of physics at MIT.

The results are the first direct, in-situ documentation of the evolution of a rapidly-rotating quantum gas. Martin Zwierlein, the Thomas A. Frank Professor of Physics at MIT, says the evolution of the spinning atoms is broadly similar to how Earth’s rotation spins up large-scale weather patterns.

“The Coriolis effect that explains Earth’s rotational effect is similar to the Lorentz force that explains how charged particles behave in a magnetic field,” Zwierlein notes. “Even in classical physics, this gives rise to intriguing pattern formation, like clouds wrapping around the Earth in beautiful spiral motions. And now we can study this in the quantum world.”

The study’s coauthors include Biswaroop Mukherjee, Airlia Shaffer, Parth B. Patel, Zhenjie Yan, Cedric Wilson, and Valentin Crépel, who are all affiliated with the MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms and MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics.

Spinning stand-ins

In the 1980s, physicists began observing a new family of matter known as quantum Hall fluids, which consists of clouds of electrons floating in magnetic fields. Instead of repelling each other and forming a crystal, as classical physics would predict, the particles adjusted their behavior to what their neighbors were doing, in a correlated, quantum way.

“People discovered all kinds of amazing properties, and the reason was, in a magnetic field, electrons are (classically) frozen in place — all their kinetic energy is switched off, and what’s left is purely interactions,” Fletcher says. “So, this whole world emerged. But it was extremely hard to observe and understand.”

In particular, electrons in a magnetic field move in very small motions that are hard to see. Zwierlein and his colleagues reasoned that, as the motion of atoms under rotation occurs at much larger length scales, they might be able to use utracold atoms as stand-ins for electrons, and be able to watch identical physics.

“We thought, let’s get these cold atoms to behave as if they were electrons in a magnetic field, but that we could control precisely,” Zwierlein says. “Then we can visualize what individual atoms are doing, and see if they obey the same quantum mechanical physics.”

Weather in a carousel

In their new study, the physicists used lasers to trap a cloud of about 1 million sodium atoms, and cooled the atoms to temperatures of about 100 nanokelvins. They then used a system of electromagnets to generate a trap to confine the atoms, and collectively spun the atoms around, like marbles in a bowl, at about 100 rotations per second.

The team imaged the cloud with a camera, capturing a perspective similar to a child’s when facing towards the center on a playground carousel. After about 100 milliseconds, the researchers observed that the atoms spun into a long, needle-like structure, which reached a critical, quantum thinness.

“In a classical fluid, like cigarette smoke, it would just keep getting thinner,” Zwierlein says. “But in the quantum world, a fluid reaches a limit to how thin it can get.”

“When we saw it had reached this limit, we had good reason to think we were knocking on the door of interesting, quantum physics,” adds Fletcher, who with Zwierlein, published the results up to this point in a previous Science paper. “Then the question was, what would this needle-thin fluid do under the influence of purely rotation and interactions?”

In their new paper, the team took their experiment a crucial step further, to see how the needle-like fluid would evolve. As the fluid continued to spin, they observed a quantum instability starting to kick in: The needle began to waver, then corkscrew, and finally broke into a string of rotating blobs, or miniature tornadoes — a quantum crystal, arising purely from the interplay of the rotation of the gas, and forces between the atoms.  

“This evolution connects to the idea of how a butterfly in China can create a storm here, due to instabilities that set off turbulence,” Zwierlein explains. “Here, we have quantum weather: The fluid, just from its quantum instabilities, fragments into this crystalline structure of smaller clouds and vortices. And it’s a breakthrough to be able to see these quantum effects directly.”

This research was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Office of Naval Research, the Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship, and DARPA.

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Exploring growth within a confined space

Grow a tomato inside a square box, and you’ll end up with a square tomato. It’s an experiment that shows clearly how confinement can influence a body’s evolving shape.

Now, MIT and Yale University researchers have developed a theoretical framework to explain the mechanics of how growing bodies respond to confinement. To test their theory, a research team led by Tal Cohen, MIT associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and of mechanical engineering, grew cholera bacteria inside a soft gel, observing the architecture of the expanding bacterial biofilms at single-cell resolution as they grew 10,000 times larger.

Following the theory, the biofilms adopt growth paths that optimize their shape in response to confinement and to damage in the surrounding gel as it deforms to contain the biofilm, according to the study published in the Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids.

The study of inclusion problems was revolutionized in the 1950s by British scientist John Eshelby, but the work by Cohen and colleagues is a significant step forward, says Pradeep Sharma, the M.D. Anderson Chair Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Houston.

“One of the key limitations of Eshelby’s work is that it is restricted to materials that deform only slightly. However, we routinely encounter contexts where the deformations are hardly ‘slight,’” explains Sharma, who was not part of the MIT-Yale study. “Cohen and co-workers have ingeniously solved the Eshelby’s inclusion problem for large deformations. Inclusion problems in soft matter like gels, elastomers used in soft robotics, biological membranes, how cells interact in tissues are now accessible thanks to Cohen’s paper.”

Researchers would like to learn more about how biofilms grow, since they can contribute to antibiotic resistance and mechanical fouling of boats and water filtration systems. But the findings by Cohen and colleagues also apply to a variety of confined growth scenarios, from a precipitate forming inside a metallic alloy to a tumor growing in the lung.

Smooshed spheres

Scientists have studied the interplay between growth and environmental stress for confined bodies or inclusions for 70 years. These studies use a linear framework to understand the relationship — the more force the growing body placed on its confining boundaries, the more displacement those boundaries experienced.

But the behavior of materials in the real world is much more complicated, Cohen explains. Pushed by a growing body, the confining boundaries might resist displacement, or might break down. The relationship is always evolving as the changing shape of the inclusion interacts with the changing responses of its enclosing material. Cohen’s lab specializes in studying these nonlinear effects in solid materials. The nonlinear inclusion theory developed by the researchers predicted significant differences in inclusion shapes depending on their growing environments. In the case of the biofilms, bacteria formed an oblate or “smooshed” sphere instead of a regular sphere when the surrounding material was stiffer.

The biofilm experimental system was important for refining their theory, says Cohen. “Actually observing these enormous deformations happening internally in a material in a very controlled way would have been very hard without it.”

The experiments and theory are a starting point, Cohen adds. For instance, the researchers are also curious about how their theory could account for the way nutrients diffuse in a growing system, and whether “that could explain to us even better the coupling between the constraints and the growth itself,” she says.

Understanding how inclusions grow — and maybe how and why they stop growing, or how they cause damage in their surrounding body — could be important for addressing tumor growth, she suggests. The theory could also be applied to metal processing, to better control the growth and stresses created by a precipitate in metal to create alloys with different features.

Different approach to growth

The extreme example of a bacterial biofilm growing 10,000 times bigger is at the heart of what Cohen’s lab works on. She and her students are interested in what happens to materials when they are pushed to their limits. The push could come from extreme loading, or a shock wave, or the stresses related to growth.

Cohen says her lab looks at growth in a different way than most, however. Most people start with an observation. They see a tree, for example, they hypothesize about how it grows, and then create a theory that reproduces the observation.

Cohen and her colleagues instead begin by examining the basics of growth itself. “We dissect a system and try to understand it microscopically,” she says, “and ask, ‘what are the basic mechanisms that are generating growth here?’ And hopefully we can find the physical principles that induce different morphologies.”

The researchers then ask what a system with these principles could grow into. This open-ended approach, Cohen says, makes their theories useful across a variety of problems in biology and physical systems.

This work required a team effort to combine advanced analytical, computational, and experimental tools. The lead authors, Jian Li and Mrityunjay Kothari, both MIT postdocs, spearheaded the computational and analytical efforts, respectively. MIT PhD students Chockalingam Senthilnathan, Thomas Henzel, and Xuanhe Li contributed to the theoretical effort. The experiments were conducted by Qiuting Zhang, a postdoc at Yale University in the group of Assistant Professor Jing Yan.

The research was supported by the Office of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation.

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Professor Emeritus Jerome Milgram, a leader in ship design and hydrodynamics, dies at 83

Jerome Milgram ’61, PhD ’65, professor emeritus of ocean engineering at MIT, passed away at the age of 83 on Dec. 21 with family by his side. Milgram pioneered ship design, hydrodynamics, and applied physical oceanography.

Jerome, also known as Jerry, was born in Melrose Park, Pennsylvania, on Sept. 23, 1938. His love of sailing began at the very early stages of his life. Milgram received his undergraduate degree from MIT in 1961, where he also served as captain of the sailing team. In 1965, he earned his PhD with a thesis that laid the basis for the analytical method of sail design that is standard today.

In 1967, Milgram joined the faculty at MIT, where he would spend the remainder of his career. As the W.I. Koch Professor of Marine Technology, Milgram taught courses such as 2.20 (Marine Hydrodynamics) and 2.25 (Fluid Mechanics) in mechanical engineering in addition to 6.003 (Signals and Systems) in electrical engineering for over 50 years.

Milgram also worked closely with the United States Navy and the Coast Guard. His research focused heavily on ship development, the behavior of oil spills in the marine involvement and cleanup technology (for which he holds 12 patents), the behavior of sea waves, the dynamics of underwater vehicles, and other topics. In 1992, he was the design director and chief computer modeler for America3, which won the America’s Cup. Milgram was instrumental to the team’s victory.

Over the course of his career, Milgram had more than 100 publications. A recent project detecting small plant and animal life forms in the ocean by computer-enhanced holography exemplifies the breadth of his interests.

Milgram is a life fellow of the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers and a life member of the National Academy of Engineering. In 2017 the National Academy of Science awarded Milgram the Gibbs Brothers Medal for outstanding naval architecture and marine engineering contributions.

Milgram is survived by his wife, Robin; his stepson and daughter-in-law, Eben and Uromi Manage Goodale; his grandson, David Parakrama Goodale; his sister Linda (Milgram) Becker; his nephew Eric Ring and his wife Melissa Wallen; his late nephew Steven Ring and his wife Mary Ring; and their children, Andrew and Melissa.

In lieu of flowers, donations can be made in Milgram’s name to Oceana, the largest international ocean conservation organization, or to MIT. There will be an online memorial service on Saturday, Jan. 8, at 10 a.m.; see postings on legacy.com for details.

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Meet the 2021-22 Accenture Fellows

Launched in October of 2020, the MIT and Accenture Convergence Initiative for Industry and Technology underscores the ways in which industry and technology come together to spur innovation. The five-year initiative aims to achieve its mission through research, education, and fellowships. To that end, Accenture has once again awarded five annual fellowships to MIT graduate students working on research in industry and technology convergence who are underrepresented, including by race, ethnicity, and gender.

This year’s Accenture Fellows work across disciplines including robotics, manufacturing, artificial intelligence, and biomedicine. Their research covers a wide array of subjects, including: advancing manufacturing through computational design, with the potential to benefit global vaccine production; designing low-energy robotics for both consumer electronics and the aerospace industry; developing robotics and machine learning systems that may aid the elderly in their homes; and creating ingestible biomedical devices that can help gather medical data from inside a patient’s body.

Student nominations from each unit within the School of Engineering, as well as from the four other MIT schools and the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, were invited as part of the application process. Five exceptional students were selected as fellows in the initiative’s second year.

Xinming (Lily) Liu is a PhD student in operations research at MIT Sloan School of Management. Her work is focused on behavioral and data-driven operations for social good, incorporating human behaviors into traditional optimization models, designing incentives, and analyzing real-world data. Her current research looks at the convergence of social media, digital platforms, and agriculture, with particular attention to expanding technological equity and economic opportunity in developing countries. Liu earned her BS from Cornell University, with a double major in operations research and computer science.

Caris Moses is a PhD student in electrical engineering and computer science specializing in
artificial intelligence. Moses’ research focuses on using machine learning, optimization, and electromechanical engineering to build robotics systems that are robust, flexible, intelligent, and can learn on the job. The technology she is developing holds promise for industries including flexible, small-batch manufacturing; robots to assist the elderly in their households; and warehouse management and fulfillment. Moses earned her BS in mechanical engineering from Cornell University and her MS in computer science from Northeastern University.

Sergio Rodriguez Aponte is a PhD student in biological engineering. He is working on the convergence of computational design and manufacturing practices, which have the potential to impact industries such as biopharmaceuticals, food, and wellness/nutrition. His current research aims to develop strategies for applying computational tools, such as multiscale modeling and machine learning, to the design and production of manufacturable and accessible vaccine candidates that could eventually be available globally. Rodriguez Aponte earned his BS in industrial biotechnology from the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez.

Soumya Sudhakar SM '20 is a PhD student in aeronautics and astronautics. Her work is focused on the
co-design of new algorithms and integrated circuits for autonomous low-energy robotics that could have novel applications in aerospace and consumer electronics. Her contributions bring together the emerging robotics industry, integrated circuits industry, aerospace industry, and consumer electronics industry. Sudhakar earned her BSE in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Princeton University and her MS in aeronautics and astronautics from MIT.

So-Yoon Yang is a PhD student in electrical engineering and computer science. Her work on the development of low-power, wireless, ingestible biomedical devices for health care is at the intersection of the medical device, integrated circuit, artificial intelligence, and pharmaceutical fields. Currently, the majority of wireless biomedical devices can only provide a limited range of medical data measured from outside the body. Ingestible devices hold promise for the next generation of personal health care because they do not require surgical implantation, can be useful for detecting physiological and pathophysiological signals, and can also function as therapeutic alternatives when treatment cannot be done externally. Yang earned her BS in electrical and computer engineering from Seoul National University in South Korea and her MS in electrical engineering from Caltech.

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Predator interactions chiefly determine where Prochlorococcus thrive

Prochlorococcus are the smallest and most abundant photosynthesizing organisms on the planet. A single Prochlorococcus cell is dwarfed by a human red blood cell, yet globally the microbes number in the octillions and are responsible for a large fraction of the world’s oxygen production as they turn sunlight into energy.

Prochlorococcus can be found in the ocean’s warm surface waters, and their population drops off dramatically in regions closer to the poles. Scientists have assumed that, as with many marine species, Prochlorococcus’ range is set by temperature: The colder the waters, the less likely the microbes are to live there.

But MIT scientists have found that where the microbe lives is not determined primarily by temperature. While Prochlorococcus populations do drop off in colder waters, it’s a relationship with a shared predator, and not temperature, that sets the microbe’s range. These findings, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could help scientists predict how the microbes’ populations will shift with climate change.

“People assume that if the ocean warms up, Prochlorococcus will move poleward. And that may be true, but not for the reason they’re predicting,” says study co-author Stephanie Dutkiewicz, senior research scientist in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). “So, temperature is a bit of a red herring.”

Dutkiewicz’s co-authors on the study are lead author and EAPS Research Scientist Christopher Follett, EAPS Professor Mick Follows, François Ribalet and Virginia Armbrust of the University of Washington, and Emily Zakem and David Caron of the University of Southern California at Los Angeles.

Temperature’s collapse

While temperature is thought to set the range of Prochloroccus and other phytoplankton in the ocean, Follett, Dutkiewicz, and their colleagues noticed a curious dissonance in data.

The team examined observations from several research cruises that sailed through the northeast Pacific Ocean in 2003, 2016, and 2017. Each vessel traversed different latitudes, sampling waters continuously and measuring concentrations of various species of bacteria and phytoplankton, including Prochlorococcus. 

The MIT team used the publicly archived cruise data to map out the locations where Prochlorococcus noticeably decreased or collapsed, along with each location’s ocean temperature. Surprisingly, they found that Prochlorococcus’ collapse occurred in regions of widely varying temperatures, ranging from around 13 to 18 degrees Celsius. Curiously, the upper end of this range has been shown in lab experiments to be suitable conditions for Prochlorococcus to grow and thrive.

“Temperature itself was not able to explain where we saw these drop-offs,” Follett says.

Follett was also working out an alternate idea related to Prochlorococcus and nutrient supply. As a byproduct of its photosynthesis, the microbe produces carbohydrate — an essential nutrient for heterotrophic bacteria, which are single-celled organisms that do not photosynthesize but live off the organic matter produced by phytoplankton.

“Somewhere along the way, I wondered, what would happen if this food source Prochlorococcus was producing increased? What if we took that knob and spun it?” Follett says.

In other words, how would the balance of Prochlorococcus and bacteria shift if the bacteria’s food increased as a result of, say, an increase in other carbohydrate-producing phytoplankton? The team also wondered: If the bacteria in question were about the same size as Prochlorococcus, the two would likely share a common grazer, or predator. How would the grazer’s population also shift with a change in carbohydrate supply?

“Then we went to the whiteboard and started writing down equations and solving them for various cases, and realized that as soon as you reach an environment where other species add carbohydrates to the mix, bacteria and grazers grow up and annihilate Prochlorococcus,” Dutkiewicz says.

Nutrient shift

To test this idea, the researchers employed simulations of ocean circulation and marine ecosystem interactions. The team ran the MITgcm, a general circulation model that simulates, in this case, the ocean currents and regions of upwelling waters around the world. They overlaid a biogeochemistry model that simulates how nutrients are redistributed in the ocean. To all of this, they linked a complex ecosystem model that simulates the interactions between many different species of bacteria and phytoplankton, including Prochlorococcus.

When they ran the simulations without incorporating a representation of bacteria, they found that Prochlorococcus persisted all the way to the poles, contrary to theory and observations. When they added in the equations outlining the relationship between the microbe, bacteria, and a shared predator, Prochlorococcus’ range shifted away from the poles, matching the observations of the original research cruises.

In particular, the team observed that Prochlorococcus thrived in waters with very low nutrient levels, and where it is the dominant source of food for bacteria. These waters also happen to be warm, and Prochlorococcus and bacteria live in balance, along with their shared predator. But in more nutrient-rich enviroments, such as polar regions, where cold water and nutrients are upwelled from the deep ocean, many more species of phytoplankton can thrive. Bacteria can then feast and grow on more food sources, and in turn feed and grow more of its shared predator. Prochlorococcus, unable to keep up, is quickly decimated. 

The results show that a relationship with a shared predator, and not temperature, sets Prochlorococcus’ range. Incorporating this mechanism into models will be crucial in predicting how the microbe — and possibly other marine species — will shift with climate change.

“Prochlorococcus is a big harbinger of changes in the global ocean,” Dutkiewicz says. “If its range expands, that’s a canary — a sign that things have changed in the ocean by a great deal.”

“There are reasons to believe its range will expand with a warming world,” Follett adds.” But we have to understand the physical mechanisms that set these ranges. And predictions just based on temperature will not be correct.”

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Kerstin Perez is searching the cosmos for signs of dark matter

Kerstin Perez is searching for imprints of dark matter. The invisible substance embodies 84 percent of the matter in the universe and is thought to be a powerful cosmic glue, keeping whole galaxies from spinning apart. And yet, the particles themselves leave barely a trace on ordinary matter,  thwarting all efforts at detection thus far.

Perez, a particle physicist at MIT, is hoping that a high-altitude balloon experiment, to be launched into the Antarctic stratosphere in late 2022, will catch indirect signs of dark matter, in the particles that it leaves behind. Such a find would significantly illuminate dark matter’s elusive nature.

The experiment, which Perez co-leads, is the General AntiParticle Spectrometer, or GAPS, a NASA-funded mission that aims to detect products of dark matter annihilation. When two dark matter particles collide, it’s thought that the energy of this interaction can be converted into other particles, including antideuterons — particles that then ride through the galaxy as cosmic rays which can penetrate Earth’s stratosphere. If antideuterons exist, they should come from all parts of the sky, and Perez and her colleagues are hoping GAPS will be at just the right altitude and sensitivity to detect them.  

“If we can convince ourselves that’s really what we’re seeing, that could help point us in the direction of what dark matter is,” says Perez, who was awarded tenure this year in MIT’s Department of Physics.

In addition to GAPS, Perez’ work centers on developing methods to look for dark matter and other exotic particles in supernova and other astrophysical phenomena captured by ground and space telescopes.

“We measure so much about the universe, but we also know we’re completely missing huge chunks of what the universe is made of,” she says. “There need to be more building blocks than the ones we know about. And I’ve chosen different experimental methods to go after them.”

Building up

Born and raised in West Philadelphia, Perez was a self-described “indoor kid,” mostly into arts and crafts, drawing and design, and building.

“I had two glue guns, and I remember I got into building dollhouses, not because I cared about dolls so much, but because it was a thing you could buy and build,” she recalls.

Her plans to pursue fine arts took a turn in her junior year, when she sat in on her first physics class. Material that was challenging for her classmates came more naturally to Perez, and she signed up the next year for both physics and calculus, taught by the same teacher with infectious wonder.

“One day he did a derivation that took up two-thirds of the board, and he stood back and said, ‘Isn’t that so beautiful? I can’t erase it.’ And he drew a frame around it and worked for the rest of the class in that tiny third of the board,” Perez recalls. “It was that kind of enthusiasm that came across to me.”

So buoyed, she set off after high school for Columbia University, where she pursued a major in physics. Wanting experience in research, she volunteered in a nanotechnology lab, imaging carbon nanotubes.

“That was my turning point,” Perez recalls. “All my background in building, creating, and wanting to design things came together in this physics context. From then on, I was sold on experimental physics research.”

She also happened to take a modern physics course taught by MIT’s Janet Conrad, who was then a professor at Columbia. The class introduced students to particle physics and the experiments underway to detect dark matter and other exotic particles. The detector generating the most buzz was CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. The LHC was to be the largest particle accelerator in the world, and was expected imminently to come online.

After graduating from Columbia, Perez flew west to Caltech, where she had the opportunity to go to CERN as part of her graduate work. That experience was invaluable, as she helped to calibrate one of the LHC’s pixel detectors, which is designed to measure ordinary, well-known particles.

“That experience taught me, when you first turn on your instrument, you have to make sure you can measure the things you know are there, really well, before you can claim you’re looking at anything new,” Perez says.

Front of the class

After finishing up her work at CERN, she began to turn over a new idea. While the LHC was designed to artificially smash particles together to look for dark matter, smaller projects were going after the same particles in space, their natural environment.

“All the evidence we have of dark matter comes from astrophysical observations, so it makes sense to look out there for clues,” Perez says. “I wanted the opportunity to, from scratch, fundamentally design and build an experiment that could tell us something about dark matter.”

With this idea, she returned to Columbia, where she joined the core team that was working to get the balloon experiment GAPS off the ground. As a postdoc, she developed a cost-effective method to fabricate the experiment’s more than 1,000 silicon detectors, and has since continued to lead the experiment’s silicon detector program. Then in 2015, she accepted a faculty position at Haverford College, close to her hometown.

“I was there for one-and-a-half years, and absolutely loved it,” Perez says.

While at Haverford, she dove into not only her physics research, but also teaching. The college offered a program for faculty to help improve their lectures, with each professor meeting weekly with an undergraduate who was trained to observe and give feedback on their teaching style. Perez was paired with a female student of color, who one day shared with her a less than welcoming experience she had experienced in an introductory course, that ultimately discouraged her from declaring a computer science major.

Listening to the student, Perez, who has often been the only woman of color in advanced physics classes, labs, experimental teams, and faculty rosters, recognized a kinship, and a calling. From that point on, in addition to her physics work, she began to explore a new direction of research: belonging.

She reached out to social psychologists to understand issues of diversity and inclusion, and the systemic factors contributing to underrepresentation in physics, computer science, and other STEM disciplines. She also collaborated with educational researchers to develop classroom practices to encourage belonging among students, with the motivation of retaining underrepresented students.

In 2016, she accepted an offer to join the MIT physics faculty, and brought with her the work on inclusive teaching that she began at Haverford. At MIT, she has balanced her research in particle physics with teaching and with building a more inclusive classroom.

“It’s easy for instructors to think, ‘I have to completely revamp my syllabus and flip my classroom, but I have so much research, and teaching is a small part of my job that frankly is not rewarded a lot of the time,’” Perez says. “But if you look at the research, it doesn’t take a lot. It’s the small things we do, as teachers who are at the front of the classroom, that have a big impact.”

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