New device detects heat strain in military trainees

In 2020, more than 2,000 U.S. service members experienced heat stroke or heat exhaustion. Such injuries pose a "significant and persistent threat to both the health of U.S. military members and the effectiveness of military operations," according to a recent military health report. Young or inexperienced recruits are especially vulnerable.

A new device from MIT Lincoln Laboratory can now alert trainees when they are heading toward injury. The device continuously estimates a person's core body temperature to determine their risk level for heat strain as they train. This risk is communicated on a smartwatch display, providing early warning to its wearer. 

"Heat injury is a preventable injury if you know how to look for it," says James Balcius, who leads the program. A biomedical researcher in the Human Health and Performance Systems Group, Balcius joined Lincoln Laboratory following 30 years of military service. "The services have these injuries in the hundreds each year, and annually a number of service members have died from this. Trainers and medics could benefit from tools that provide a warning of an impending heat casualty. That's why we're developing this technology."

The system is made up of a few components. First, an armband sensor measures the trainee's heart rate. Those heart rate data are sent via Bluetooth to a smartwatch. Installed on the watch, a Lincoln Laboratory-developed app runs an algorithm that uses the data to estimate core body temperature. Depending on those results, the smartwatch will display a visual icon (a stop sign, danger sign, or thumbs up) with a colored background (red, yellow, or green) and emit an audible tone to alert users if they are overheating.

"It doesn’t mean that everyone who goes into the red will get injured, but there's a higher probability that they will, so they need to take a break," Balcius says.  

This technology was developed under the sponsorship of the U.S. Army Medical Materiel Development Activity and in partnership with the U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine. In October, the technology was transitioned to the U.S. Marine Corps Training and Education Command, who have so far fielded 170 prototypes at basic training sites. Feedback has been positive, with recommendations to enhance the capability.

Tara Boettcher, also a researcher in the Human Health and Performance Systems Group, was key to coordinating logistics for device components, system assembly, and delivery to field sites. 

"It was nice to get back in the field to see the device being tested, first at Parris Island and then in San Diego," Balcius says. It was also a reminder of how easily heat injuries can occur. "I remember our team was saying, 'Oh, well it's pretty balmy today,' and then we saw three heat cases in just that one day we were there."

The core body temperatures that the device monitors to determine a red, yellow, or green alert are set at "generally lower temperatures," Balcius says, appropriate for recruits who may not yet be acclimated to the demands of military training. In the future, this setting could be modified at the individual level. 

The algorithm this device uses to estimate core body temperature was developed by the U.S. government in 2013. It has since been used in many commercial products. This device, however, is the first use of the algorithm in a form factor as small as a smartwatch.

Nancy DeLosa, a software developer and architect at the laboratory, wrote the code responsible for that successful integration. "We've taken the same concept and have used it in a lot of different form factors," says DeLosa. Similar heat strain technology that she developed software for over the past decade inspired this work, and helped this new device come together in less than a year. That prior technology, now in use by the military, is a more complex physiological monitoring system.

The appeal of this new device is its lightweight and low-cost (under $500). Using commercial equipment was key to meeting those requirements, though updates to the smartwatch's operating system and discontinuation of the armband heart rate monitor model threw last-minute curve balls to the program. Switching to the newer model that used two Bluetooth channels instead of one confused the system; DeLosa worked through these problems by making programming changes.

"It was an interesting experience taking COTS [commercial off-the-shelf] equipment and trying to make it do something that it was never designed to do," she adds.

Now that the program has come to an end, Balcius is pursuing ways to transition this capability beyond the military. Heat stress injuries are reported significantly in humanitarian aid and disaster relief organizations as well.

For Balcius, his personal experience makes preventing these injuries especially meaningful.

"In basic training, I had a heat injury. It's very personal for me to want to stop another person from having to go through that," he says. "It's why I served for so long, and its why I came to Lincoln Laboratory — to be part of the mission in a way that I am most useful. Heat injury may not be an injury that comes to mind when thinking of warfighters, but it persistently occurs every year across all the services and needs solving."

de MIT News https://ift.tt/0uYwkpW37

3 Questions: Women’s rights and rising threats to press freedom worldwide

To Ada Petriczko, being born a woman can be a matter of life or death. Hailing from Poland, she reports on sexual violence and gender injustices around the globe. As a human rights journalist, her mission is to amplify the voices of women who have been systematically silenced by their communities and governments. Their stories have to be heard, she argues, in order to reshape our societies. This includes reporting on her home country, where democratic stability and women’s rights are increasingly under threat.  

Petriczko joined the MIT Center for International Studies (CIS) last fall as its Elizabeth Neuffer Fellow. The fellowship is awarded annually by The International Women’s Media Foundation and provides its recipient with research opportunities at MIT and further training at The Boston Globe and The New York Times.

Recently, she sat down to discuss her guiding principles as a journalist, the challenges facing her craft, and the rewarding experiences of this fellowship. She also weighs in on the rise of autocracy in Central and Eastern Europe. On Feb. 3, she will explore this topic and its impact on free media at a CIS Starr Forum event with experts from Poland, Hungary, and Russia.

Q: One of your fields of interest is ethics in journalism. What does it mean to be an ethical journalist to you? And what are some of the challenges that ethical journalism faces today?

A: I don’t believe in objectivity, but I do believe in fairness. Ethical journalism is about being fair to the facts and being fair to the people you’re writing about. Aidan White, an esteemed journalist who founded the Ethical Journalism Network, told me in an interview that there are about 400 different journalism codes of conduct in the world, but if you examine them closely, they all boil down to the same five core principles: accuracy, independence, impartiality, humanity, and accountability. I try to play by these rules.

I report on sexual violence and other human rights violations within vulnerable communities and have been in situations in which people don’t want to share their experiences. I always respect their requests and back out, even if I’ve traveled far for the story. This can be a deal breaker in our current news landscape, which is extremely fast-paced and demanding. Ethical journalism takes more time and more thought. But I’ve found ways to talk about taboos without violating them. And that is oftentimes even more powerful.

We are facing a transitional moment in the information ecosystem. The rise of social media, and the obsolete financial models for media outlets, have negatively impacted ethical journalism. Time and money are needed to support in-depth reportage, which is becoming increasingly limited. 

The global rise of autocracy, of course, is also challenging democratic institutions, including the freedom of press and speech. And the Covid-19 pandemic has provided crumbling democracies the perfect excuse to do just that.

In Poland, for example, we're facing a humanitarian crisis on the Belarussian border where thousands of migrants are seeking refuge from horrific situations. Soon after the Covid-19 outbreak, the Polish government banned reporters from entering the border region to cover the crisis. This is without precedent in the post-war history of Europe. 

NGOs [nongovernmental organizations] and multinational organizations around the globe are starting to address these issues as real threats. Maria Ressa, who received the Nobel Peace Prize for journalism, and whom I’ve recently interviewed for The Boston Globe, is championing an international fund for journalists. So this brings me an element of hope.

Q: You’ve partnered with journalists from other countries for certain projects, including Witch Hunt. Tell us more about this style of work — referred to as cross-border journalism — and why it is important.

A: In the cross-border method, journalists work as partners on one story but remain within their respective countries, cultures, and ethnicities. This kind of reportage allows a journalist to bring a unique perspective and expertise to the story without having to travel hundreds or thousands of miles. The Panama Papers is probably the most famous example of this kind of reporting; a global team worked together to expose the corruption of the offshore finance industry. 

Cross-border journalism provides a cheaper, more culturally sensitive and ecologically conscious alternative to classic foreign reporting. That said, the traditional model has many benefits. There are stories in which the perspective of an outsider is simply priceless. I’ve spent the better part of my career on assignments in India and South America, and as much as I love working on location, I’ve realized over the years that this type of reporting is becoming unsustainable. The climate crisis and the other threats I discussed earlier, will make the traditional style of foreign reporting more and more difficult and rare. 

On top of that, the cross-border model provides an opportunity to hear from journalists who are not part of the mainstream, usually Anglo Saxon media. We all read The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Boston Globe, which are amazing outlets with long traditions and high journalistic standards. But there’s also an inherent bias at work there. Even though English is the lingua franca of today, a journalist who is not a native speaker has a very slim chance of getting hired as staff in one of these major outlets.

Q: What have you been working on during your fellowship?

A: I’m using the fellowship to dig deeper into the topics that I’ve been reporting on over the past three years. For example, I’m taking a class on the history of India, which has helped me better understand the impact that colonialism and partition has had on women’s rights and violence in that region. This will provide invaluable context to my most important project — a nonfiction book on the 45 million women who are missing from the Indian population due to wide-spread sex selection. As part of my research in Boston, I interviewed Amartya Sen (forthcoming in The Boston Globe), a Nobel Prize laureate in economics, who was the first person to calculate that over 100 million women are missing from the world population. In my book, I’m trying to understand the implications of this phenomenon. How do communities cope with such a huge absence of women? Why does this scarcity give rise to even more violence against women? How does this impact the future of families in these communities?

At MIT, I’ve also been exploring freedom of speech in my part of the world — the Central European region — where we’ve seen a rise of autocracy.  

At The Boston Globe, I was a member of the editorial board, which was a remarkable experience. And, in addition to interviewing two Nobel Prize laureates, I wrote opinion pieces and editorials on abortion rights in Texas and the humanitarian crisis in Poland. Now I’m preparing for my residency at The New York Times. 

The biggest value for me is the opportunity to train under the mentorship of the finest editors and the academics in the world. This has boosted my confidence as a reporter and will hopefully make me a valuable voice in the public debate of my country, which has found itself at the crossroads between democracy and autocracy. Being in the U.S., where the democratic institutions are still robust, has helped me remember where my values lie.

de MIT News https://ift.tt/arUYdK80e

Engineers develop surgical “duct tape” as an alternative to sutures

A staple on any engineer’s workbench, duct tape is a quick and dependable fix for cracks and tears in many structural materials. MIT engineers have now developed a kind of surgical duct tape — a strong, flexible, and biocompatible sticky patch that can be easily and quickly applied to biological tissues and organs to help seal tears and wounds.

Like duct tape, the new patch is sticky on one side and smooth on the other. In its current formulation, the adhesive is targeted to seal defects in the gastrointestinal tract, which the engineers describe as the body’s own biological ductwork.

In numerous experiments, the team has shown the patch can be quickly stuck to large tears and punctures in the colon, stomach, and intestines of various animal models. The adhesive binds strongly to tissues within several seconds and holds for over a month. It is also flexible, able to expand and contract with a functioning organ as it heals. Once an injury is fully healed, the patch gradually degrades without causing inflammation or sticking to surrounding tissues.

The team envisions the surgical sticky patch could one day be stocked in operating rooms and used as a fast and safe alternative or reinforcement to hand-sewn sutures to repair leaks and tears in the gut and other biological tissues.

“We think this surgical tape is a good base technology to be made into an actual, off-the-shelf product,” says Hyunwoo Yuk, a research scientist in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. “Surgeons could use it as they use duct tape in the nonsurgical world. It doesn’t need any preparation or prior step. Just take it out, open, and use.”

Yuk, the study’s co-lead and co-corresponding author, and his colleagues have published their results today in the journal Science Translational Medicine. Other co-authors include MIT postdoc and lead author Jingjing Wu; project supervisor and co-corresponding author Xuanhe Zhao, who is a professor of mechanical engineering and of civil and environmental engineering at MIT; and collaborators from the Mayo Clinic and the Southern University of Science and Technology.

A gut instinct

The new surgical duct tape builds on the team’s 2019 design for a double-sided tape. That early iteration comprised a single layer that was sticky on both sides and designed to join two wet surfaces together.

The adhesive was made from polyacrylic acid, an absorbent material found in diapers, which starts out dry and absorbs moisture when in contact with a wet surface or tissue, temporarily sticking to the tissue in the process. The researchers mixed into the material NHS esters, chemical compounds that can bind with proteins in the tissue to form stronger bonds. Finally, they reinforced the adhesive with gelatin or chitosan — natural ingredients that kept the tape’s shape.

The researchers found the double-sided tape strongly bonded different tissues together. But when consulting with surgeons, they realized that a single-sided version might make a more practical impact.

“In practical situations, it’s not common to have to stick two tissues together —organs need to be separate from each other,” Wu says. “One suggestion was to use this sticky element to repair leaks and defects in the gut.”

Surgeons typically repair leaks and tears in the gastrointestinal tract with surgical sutures. But sewing the stitches requires precision and training, and following surgery the sutures can trigger scarring around the injury. The tissue between stitches could also tear, causing secondary leakages that could lead to sepsis.

“We thought, maybe we could turn our sticky element into a product to repair gut leaks, similar to sealing pipes with duct tape,” Wu says. “That pushed us toward something more like single-sided tape.”

Same tape, new tricks

The researchers first tuned their adhesive recipe, replacing gelatin and chitosan with a longer-lasting hydrogel — in this case, polyvinyl alcohol. This swap kept the adhesive physically stable for over a month, long enough for a typical gut injury to heal. They also added a second, nonsticky top layer to keep the patch from sticking to surrounding tissue. This layer was made from a biodegradable polyurethane that has about the same stretch and stiffness of natural gut tissue.

“We don’t want the patch to be weaker than tissue because otherwise it would risk bursting,” Yuk says. “We also don’t want it to be stiffer because it would restrict the peristaltic movement in guts that is essential for digestion.”

In initial tests, the patch did stick to tissues, but it also swelled, just as a fully wet, hydrogel-based diaper would. This swelling stretched the tape and the underlying tear it was intended to seal.

“It was almost an impossible problem because hydrogel naturally swells,” Yuk says. “But we did a simple trick: We prestretched the adhesive layer a bit, then introduced the nonadhesive layer, so that when applied to a tissue, that prestretching cancels out the swelling.”

The team then carried out experiments to test the patch’s properties and performance. When the patch was placed in a culture with human epithelial cells, the cells continued to grow, showing that the patch is biocompatible. When implanted under the skin of rats, the patch biodegraded after about 12 weeks, with no toxic effects.

The researchers also applied the patch to defects in the animals’ colons and stomachs, and found it maintained a strong bond as the injuries fully healed. It also produced minimal scarring and inflammation compared with repairs made with conventional sutures.

Finally, the team applied the patch over colon defects in pigs, and observed that the animals continued to feed normally, with no fever, lethargy, or other adverse health effects. After four weeks, the defects fully healed, with no sign of secondary leakage.

Taken together, the experiments suggest that the surgical patch could potentially safely repair gastrointestinal injuries, and could be applied just as easily as commercial duct tape. Yuk and Zhao are further developing the adhesive through a new startup and hope to pursue FDA approval to test the patch in medical settings.

“We are studying a fundamental mechanics problem, adhesion, in an extremely challenging environment, inside the body. There are millions of surgeries worldwide a year to repair gastrointestinal defects, and the leakage rate is up to 20 percent in high-risk patients,” Zhao says. “This tape could solve that problem, and potentially save thousands of lives.”

This work was supported by the MIT Deshpande Center and the Centers for Mechanical Engineering Research and Education at MIT, and SUSTech.

de MIT News https://ift.tt/rJz3XksQW

New lightweight material is stronger than steel

Using a novel polymerization process, MIT chemical engineers have created a new material that is stronger than steel and as light as plastic, and can be easily manufactured in large quantities.

The new material is a two-dimensional polymer that self-assembles into sheets, unlike all other polymers, which form one-dimensional, spaghetti-like chains. Until now, scientists had believed it was impossible to induce polymers to form 2D sheets.

Such a material could be used as a lightweight, durable coating for car parts or cell phones, or as a building material for bridges or other structures, says Michael Strano, the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT and the senior author of the new study.

“We don’t usually think of plastics as being something that you could use to support a building, but with this material, you can enable new things,” he says. “It has very unusual properties and we’re very excited about that.”

The researchers have filed for two patents on the process they used to generate the material, which they describe in a paper appearing today in Nature. MIT postdoc Yuwen Zeng is the lead author of the study.

Two dimensions

Polymers, which include all plastics, consist of chains of building blocks called monomers. These chains grow by adding new molecules onto their ends. Once formed, polymers can be shaped into three-dimensional objects, such as water bottles, using injection molding.

Polymer scientists have long hypothesized that if polymers could be induced to grow into a two-dimensional sheet, they should form extremely strong, lightweight materials. However, many decades of work in this field led to the conclusion that it was impossible to create such sheets. One reason for this was that if just one monomer rotates up or down, out of the plane of the growing sheet, the material will begin expanding in three dimensions and the sheet-like structure will be lost.

However, in the new study, Strano and his colleagues came up with a new polymerization process that allows them to generate a two-dimensional sheet called a polyaramide. For the monomer building blocks, they use a compound called melamine, which contains a ring of carbon and nitrogen atoms. Under the right conditions, these monomers can grow in two dimensions, forming disks. These disks stack on top of each other, held together by hydrogen bonds between the layers, which make the structure very stable and strong.

“Instead of making a spaghetti-like molecule, we can make a sheet-like molecular plane, where we get molecules to hook themselves together in two dimensions,” Strano says. “This mechanism happens spontaneously in solution, and after we synthesize the material, we can easily spin-coat thin films that are extraordinarily strong.”

Because the material self-assembles in solution, it can be made in large quantities by simply increasing the quantity of the starting materials. The researchers showed that they could coat surfaces with films of the material, which they call 2DPA-1.

“With this advance, we have planar molecules that are going to be much easier to fashion into a very strong, but extremely thin material,” Strano says.

Light but strong

The researchers found that the new material’s elastic modulus — a measure of how much force it takes to deform a material — is between four and six times greater than that of bulletproof glass. They also found that its yield strength, or how much force it takes to break the material, is twice that of steel, even though the material has only about one-sixth the density of steel.

Matthew Tirrell, dean of the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago, says that the new technique “embodies some very creative chemistry to make these bonded 2D polymers.”

“An important aspect of these new polymers is that they are readily processable in solution, which will facilitate numerous new applications where high strength to weight ratio is important, such as new composite or diffusion barrier materials,” says Tirrell, who was not involved in the study.

Another key feature of 2DPA-1 is that it is impermeable to gases. While other polymers are made from coiled chains with gaps that allow gases to seep through, the new material is made from monomers that lock together like LEGOs, and molecules cannot get between them.

“This could allow us to create ultrathin coatings that can completely prevent water or gases from getting through,” Strano says. “This kind of barrier coating could be used to protect metal in cars and other vehicles, or steel structures.”

Strano and his students are now studying in more detail how this particular polymer is able to form 2D sheets, and they are experimenting with changing its molecular makeup to create other types of novel materials.

The research was funded by the Center for Enhanced Nanofluidic Transport (CENT) an Energy Frontier Research Center sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, and the Army Research Laboratory.

de MIT News https://ift.tt/b08BpTRiq

Reducing methane emissions at landfills

The second-largest driver of global warming is methane, a greenhouse gas 28 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Landfills are a major source of methane, which is created when organic material decomposes underground.

Now a startup that began at MIT is aiming to significantly reduce methane emissions from landfills with a system that requires no extra land, roads, or electric lines to work. The company, Loci Controls, has developed a solar-powered system that optimizes the collection of methane from landfills so more of it can be converted into natural gas.

At the center of Loci’s (pronounced “low-sigh”) system is a lunchbox-sized device that attaches to methane collection wells, which vacuum the methane up to the surface for processing. The optimal vacuum force changes with factors like atmospheric pressure and temperature. Loci’s system monitors those factors and adjusts the vacuum force at each well far more frequently than is possible with field technicians making manual adjustments.

“We expect to reduce methane emissions more than any other company in the world over the next five years,” Loci Controls CEO Peter Quigley ’85 says. The company was founded by Melinda Hale Sims SM ’09, PhD ’12 and Andrew Campanella ’05, SM ’13.

The reason for Quigley’s optimism is the high concentration of landfill methane emissions. Most landfill emissions in the U.S. come from about 1,000 large dumps. Increasing collection of methane at those sites could make a significant dent in the country’s overall emissions.

In one landfill where Loci’s system was installed, for instance, the company says it increased methane sales at an annual rate of 180,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. That’s about the same as removing 40,000 cars from the road for a year.

Loci’s system is currently installed on wells in 15 different landfills. Quigley says only about 70 of the 1,000 big landfills in the U.S. sell gas profitably. Most of the others burn the gas. But Loci’s team believes increasing public and regulatory pressure will help expands its potential customer base.

Uncovering a major problem

The idea for Loci came from a revelation by Sims’ father, serial entrepreneur Michael Hale SM ’85, PhD ’89. The elder Hale was working in wastewater management when he was contacted by a landfill in New York that wanted help using its excess methane gas.

“He realized if he could help that particular landfill with the problem, it would apply to almost any landfill,” Sims says.

At the time, Sims was pursuing her PhD in mechanical engineering at MIT and minoring in entrepreneurship.

Her father didn’t have time to work on the project, but Sims began exploring technology solutions to improve methane capture at landfills in her business classes. The work was unrelated to her PhD, but her advisor, David Hardt, the Ralph E. and Eloise F. Cross Professor in Manufacturing at MIT, was understanding. (Hardt had also served as PhD advisor for Sim’s father, who was, after all, the person to blame for Sim’s new side project.)

Sims partnered with Andrew Campanella, then a master’s student focused on electrical engineering, and the two went through the delta v summer accelerator program hosted by the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship.

Quigley was retired but serving on multiple visiting committees at MIT when he began mentoring Loci’s founders. He’d spent his career commercializing reinforced plastic through two companies, one in the high-performance sporting goods industry and the other in oil field services.

“What captured my imagination was the emissions-reduction opportunity,” Quigley says.

Methane is generated in landfills when organic waste decomposes. Some landfill operators capture the methane by drilling hundreds of collection wells. The vacuum pressure of those wells needs to be adjusted to maximize the amount of methane collected, but Quigley says technicians can only make those adjustments manually about once a month.

Loci’s devices monitor gas composition, temperature, and environmental factors like barometric pressure to optimize vacuum power every hour. The data the controllers collect is aggregated in an analytics platform for technicians to monitor remotely. That data can also be used to pinpoint well failure events, such as flooding during rain, and otherwise improve operations to increase the amount of methane captured.

“We can adjust the valves automatically, but we also have data that allows on-site operators to identify and remedy problems much more quickly,” Quigley explains.

Furthering a high-impact mission

Methane capture at landfills is becoming more urgent as improvements in detection technologies are revealing discrepancies between methane emission estimates and reality in the industry. A new airborne methane sensor deployed by NASA, for instance, found that California landfills have been leaking methane at rates as much as six times greater than estimates from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The difference has major implications for the Earth’s atmosphere.

A reckoning will have to occur to motivate more waste management companies to start collecting methane and to optimize methane capture. That could come in the form of new collection standards or an increased emphasis on methane collection from investors. (Funds controlled by billionaires Bill Gates and Larry Fink are major investors in waste management companies.)

For now, Loci’s team, including co-founder and current senior advisor Sims, believes it’s on the road to making a meaningful impact under current market conditions.

“When I was in grad school, the majority of the focus on emissions was on CO₂,” Sims says. “I think methane is a really high-impact place to be focused, and I think it’s been underestimated how valuable it could be to apply technology to the industry.”

de MIT News https://ift.tt/ZaOnQkLST

OSIRIS-REx mission carrying MIT student experiment wins Space Foundation award

The Space Foundation, a nonprofit organization that advocates for space exploration and space-inspired industries, has awarded NASA’s first-ever asteroid sample return mission, the Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx), with the prestigious 2022 John L. "Jack" Swigert Jr. Award for Space Exploration.

"It is humbling to join the list of so many amazing award recipients. Recognition in this case is across a very large NASA team, and we are honored to have had a role in the OSIRIS-REx mission,” says Richard Binzel, a co-investigator on the project and professor post-tenure in the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS).

Launched in 2016, OSIRIS-REx traveled to near-Earth asteroid Bennu, arriving in 2018, where it successfully harvested a piece of the asteroid. Currently, the spacecraft is en route back to Earth carrying this small sample, slated to return in 2023. Together with Harvard College Observatory, MIT provided the student-built Regolith X-ray Imaging Spectrometer (REXIS) instrument, a joint effort across multiple units of MIT, including EAPS, the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro), the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, and MIT Lincoln Laboratory. The goal of REXIS is to analyze the effect of the sun’s X-rays on the asteroid’s soil, identifying chemical elements on Bennu’s surface.

“Being a part of the OSIRIS-REx mission has been an amazing experience for the entire REXIS team, which is composed of many talented engineers and scientists,” says Rebecca Masterson, principal research scientist in AeroAstro who served as program manager and co-principal investigator on the REXIS project. “It has been an honor to work with everyone involved. Now, we are all waiting anxiously to see what new discoveries arise from the analysis of the sample.”

The John L. “Jack” Swigert Jr., Award for Space Exploration was created in memory of NASA astronaut Jack Swigert, a Colorado native who served on the Apollo 13 lunar mission. In 1982, Swigert was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives but died of cancer before taking the oath of office. The Space Foundation created the Swigert Award in 2004 in tribute to his legacy of space exploration.

According to Binzel, not only will the OSIRIS-REx mission provide invaluable scientific knowledge, but it provided a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a generation of MIT students who worked on the project.

“Within the REXIS project and its interplanetary flight aboard NASA'S OSIRIS-REx spacecraft, nearly 100 MIT students received hands-on experience in designing, building, testing, and operating space hardware over a 10-year period,” says Binzel. “REXIS is the first MIT student experiment to fly in interplanetary space.”

de MIT News https://ift.tt/9Zd8n1yVe

2021-22 Takeda Fellows: Leaning on AI to advance medicine for humans

In fall 2020, MIT’s School of Engineering and Takeda Pharmaceuticals Company Limited launched the MIT-Takeda Program, a collaboration to support members of the MIT community working at the intersection of artificial intelligence and human health. Housed at the Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health, the collaboration aims to use artificial intelligence to both benefit human health and aid in drug development. Combining technology with cutting-edge health research, the program’s participants hope to improve health outcomes across the world.

Thus far, the partnership has supported joint research efforts focused on topics such as automated inspection in sterile pharmaceutical manufacturing and machine learning for liver phenotyping.

Every year, the program also funds graduate fellowships to support students pursuing research on a broad range of issues tied to health and AI. This year’s Takeda fellows, described below, are working on research involving electronic health record algorithms, remote sensing data as it relates to environmental health risk, and neural networks for the development of antibiotics.

Monica Agrawal

Agrawal is a PhD student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS). Her research focuses on the development of machine learning algorithms that could unlock the potential of electronic health records to power personalized, real-world studies of comparative effectiveness. She is tackling the issue from three interconnected angles: understanding the basic building blocks of clinical text, enabling the structuring of clinical timelines with only minimal labeled data, and redesigning clinical documentation to incentivize high-quality structured data at the time of creation. Agrawal earned both a BS and an MS in computer science from Stanford University.

Peng Cao

A PhD student in EECS, Peng Cao's research is focused on developing a new approach to monitoring oxygen saturation by analyzing the radio frequency signals that bounce off a person’s body. To this end, she is extracting respiration signals from the radio signals and then training a neural network to infer oxygen levels from it. Peng earned a BS in computer science from Peking University in China.

Bianca Lepe

A PhD student in biological engineering, Bianca Lepe is working to benchmark existing and defining next-generation vaccine candidates for tuberculosis. She is using publicly available data combined with machine learning algorithms to identify the Mtb proteins that are well-suited as subunit vaccine antigens across the diversity of the human leukocyte antigen alleles. Lepe earned a BS in biological engineering and business from Caltech; an MS in systems and synthetic biology from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland; and an MPhil in technology policy from the University of Cambridge in England.

Caroline McCue

Caroline McCue is a PhD student in mechanical engineering who is developing a system that could simplify and speed up the process of cell passaging. More specifically, she is designing and testing a platform that triggers cell detachment in response to simple external stimuli, such as a change in voltage or in mechanical properties. She plans to test the efficacy of this platform by applying machine learning to quantify the adhesion of Chinese hamster ovary cells to these surfaces. McCue earned a BS in mechanical engineering from the University of Maryland.

Somesh Mohapatra

A PhD student in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Somesh Mohapatra is also pursuing an MBA at the MIT Sloan School of Management as part of the Leaders for Global Operations Program. His doctoral research, in close collaboration with experimentalists at MIT, focuses on designing biomacromolecules using interpretable machine learning and simulations. Specifically, Mohapatra leverages macromolecule graph representations to develop machine learning models for quantitative prediction, optimization, and attribution methods. He then applies these tools to elucidate design principles and to improve performance and synthetic accessibility of functionality macromolecules, ranging from peptides and glycans to electrolytes and thermosets. Mohapatra earned his BTech in metallurgical and materials engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee in India.

Luke Murray

Luke Murray is a PhD student in EECS. He is developing MedKnowts, a system that combines machine learning and human computer interaction techniques to reduce the effort required to synthesize knowledge for medical decision-making, and author high-quality, structured, clinical documentation. MedKnowts unifies these two currently splintered workflows by providing a seamless interface that re-imagines documentation as a natural byproduct of clinical reasoning, rather than as a compliance requirement. Murray earned his BS in computer science from Brown University.

Ufuoma Ovienmhada

Ufuoma Ovienmhada SM '20 is a PhD student in aeronautics and astronautics. Her research employs a mixed-methods approach (community-centered design, systems engineering, and machine learning) to satellite remote sensing data to create tools that evaluate how human health risk relates to environmental hazards. Ovienmhada earned her BS in mechanical engineering from Stanford University and her SM in media arts and sciences from MIT.​

Lagnajit Pattanaik

Lagnajit “Lucky” Pattanaik is a PhD student in chemical engineering. He seeks to shift the paradigm of predictive organic chemistry from qualitative to quantitative. More specifically, his research is focused on the development of machine learning techniques for predicting 3D structures of molecules and reactions, including transition state geometries and the geometrical conformations that molecules take in solution. He earned a BS in chemical engineering from Ohio State University.

Na Sun 

A PhD student in EECS, Na Sun is working in the emerging field of neuro-immuno-genomics. More specifically, she is developing machine learning methods to better understand the interactions between two extremely complex systems: the human brain and its dozens of cell types, and the human immune system and the dozens of biological processes that it integrates across cognition, pathogen response, diet-exercise-obesity, and synaptic pruning. Sun earned her BS in life sciences from Linyi University in China and an MS in developmental biology from the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences in China.

Jacqueline Valeri

Jacqueline Valeri is a PhD student in biological engineering who utilizes neural networks for antibiotics discovery. Her efforts include the recycling of compounds from existing compound libraries and the computationally assisted design of novel therapeutics. She is also excited by broader applications of machine learning and artificial intelligence in the fields of health care and biomedicine. Valeri earned her BSE and MSE in bioengineering from the University of Pennsylvania.

Clinton Wang

A PhD student in EECS, Clinton Wang SM '20 has developed a new type of conditional generative adversarial network based on spatial-intensity transforms. It achieves high image fidelity, is robust to artifacts in training data, and generalizes to held-out clinical sites. Wang now aims to extend his model to even more challenging applications, including visualizing transformations of focal pathologies, such as lesions, where it could serve as a powerful tool for characterizing biomarkers of malignancy and treatment response. Wang earned a BS in biomedical engineering from Yale University and an SM in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT.

de MIT News https://ift.tt/14cEmNT89