In nanotube science, is boron nitride the new carbon?

Engineers at MIT and the University of Tokyo have produced centimeter-scale structures, large enough for the eye to see, that are packed with hundreds of billions of hollow aligned fibers, or nanotubes, made from hexagonal boron nitride.

Hexagonal boron nitride, or hBN, is a single-atom-thin material that has been coined “white graphene” for its transparent appearance and its similarity to carbon-based graphene in molecular structure and strength. It can also withstand higher temperatures than graphene, and is electrically insulating, rather than conductive. When hBN is rolled into nanometer-scale tubes, or nanotubes, its exceptional properties are significantly enhanced.

The team’s results, published today in the journal ACS Nano, provide a route toward fabricating aligned boron nitride nanotubes (A-BNNTs) in bulk. The researchers plan to harness the technique to fabricate bulk-scale arrays of these nanotubes, which can then be combined with other materials to make stronger, more heat-resistant composites, for instance to shield space structures and hypersonic aircraft.

As hBN is transparent and electrically insulating, the team also envisions incorporating the BNNTs into transparent windows and using them to electrically insulate sensors within electronic devices. The team is also investigating ways to weave the nanofibers into membranes for water filtration and for “blue energy” — a concept for renewable energy in which electricity is produced from the ionic filtering of salt water into fresh water.

Brian Wardle, professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT, likens the team’s results to scientists’ decades-long, ongoing pursuit of manufacturing bulk-scale carbon nanotubes.

“In 1991, a single carbon nanotube was identified as an interesting thing, but it’s been 30 years getting to bulk aligned carbon nanotubes, and the world’s not even fully there yet,” Wardle says. “With the work we’re doing, we’ve just short-circuited about 20 years in getting to bulk-scale versions of aligned boron nitride nanotubes.”

Wardle is the senior author of the new study, which includes lead author and MIT research scientist Luiz Acauan, former MIT postdoc Haozhe Wang, and collaborators at the University of Tokyo.

A vision, aligned

Like graphene, hexagonal boron nitride has a molecular structure resembling chicken wire. In graphene, this chicken wire configuration is made entirely of carbon atoms, arranged in a repeating pattern of hexagons. For hBN, the hexagons are composed of alternating atoms of boron and nitrogen. In recent years, researchers have found that two-dimensional sheets of hBN exhibit exceptional properties of strength, stiffness, and resilience at high temperatures. When sheets of hBN are rolled into nanotube form, these properties are further enhanced, particularly when the nanotubes are aligned, like tiny trees in a densely packed forest.

But finding ways to synthesize stable, high quality BNNTs has proven challenging. A handful of efforts to do so have produced low-quality, nonaligned fibers.

“If you can align them, you have much better chance of harnessing BNNTs properties at the bulk scale to make actual physical devices, composites, and membranes,” Wardle says.

In 2020, Rong Xiang and colleagues at the University of Tokyo found they could produce high-quality boron nitride nanotubes by first using a conventional approach of chemical vapor deposition to grow a forest of short, few micron-long carbon nanotubes. They then coated the carbon-based forest with “precursors” of boron and nitrogen gas, which when baked in an oven at high temperatures crystallized onto the carbon nanotubes to form high-quality nanotubes of hexagonal boron nitride with carbon nanotubes inside.

Burning scaffolds

In the new study, Wardle and Acauan have extend and scale Xiang’s approach, essentially removing the underlying carbon nanotubes and leaving the long boron nitride nanotubes to stand on their own. The team drew on the expertise of Wardle’s group, which has focused for years on fabricating high-quality aligned arrays of carbon nanotubes. With their current work, the researchers looked for ways to tweak the temperatures and pressures of the chemical vapor deposition process in order to remove the carbon nanotubes while leaving the boron nitride nanotubes intact.

“The first few times we did it, it was completely ugly garbage,” Wardle recalls. “The tubes curled up into a ball, and they didn’t work.”

Eventually, the team hit on a combination of temperatures, pressures, and precursors that did the trick. With this combination of processes, the researchers first reproduced the steps that Xiang took to synthesize the boron-nitride-coated carbon nanotubes. As hBN is resistant to higher temperatures than graphene, the team then cranked up the heat to burn away the underlying black carbon nanotube scaffold, while leaving the transparent, freestanding boron nitride nanotubes intact.

In microscopic images, the team observed clear crystalline structures — evidence that the boron nitride nanotubes have a high quality. The structures were also dense: Within a square centimeter, the researchers were able to synthesize a forest of more than 100 billion aligned boron nitride nanotubes, that measured about a millimeter in height — large enough to be visible by eye. By nanotube engineering standards, these dimensions are considered to be “bulk” in scale.

“We are now able to make these nanoscale fibers at bulk scale, which has never been shown before,” Acauan says.

To demonstrate the flexibility of their technique, the team synthesized larger carbon-based structures, including a weave of carbon fibers, a mat of “fuzzy” carbon nanotubes, and sheets of randomly oriented carbon nanotubes known as “buckypaper.” They coated each carbon-based sample with boron and nitrogen precursors, then went through their process to burn away the underlying carbon. In each demonstration, they were left with a boron-nitride replica of the original black carbon scaffold.

They also were able to “knock down” the forests of BNNTs, producing horizontally aligned fiber films that are a preferred configuration for incorporating into composite materials.

“We are now working toward fibers to reinforce ceramic matrix composites, for hypersonic and space applications where there are very high temperatures, and for windows for devices that need to be optically transparent,” Wardle says. “You could make transparent materials that are reinforced with these very strong nanotubes.”

This research was supported, in part, by Airbus, ANSYS, Boeing, Embraer, Lockheed Martin, Saab AB, and Teijin Carbon America through MIT’s Nano-Engineered Composite aerospace STructures (NECST) Consortium.

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Community members greet MIT’s 18th president

On a warm, sunny afternoon last Thursday, MIT’s community gathered under a tent on Hockfield Court to meet the Institute’s next president, Sally Kornbluth.

Amid a festive, celebratory atmosphere that included live music and fall treats, Kornbluth soaked in MIT’s culture; chatted with faculty, students, and staff; heard from members of MIT leadership; and took innumerable selfies with community members.

The event featured talks by Kornbluth and MIT Corporation Chair Diane Greene SM ’78, as well as performances by MIT a cappella group the Chorallaries. Following a musical performance including MIT’s school song, Kornbluth traveled through the tent greeting community members, who shared their excitement and ideas with her.

In her remarks, Kornbluth acknowledged she has much to learn about MIT, but Thursday’s event was an early chance to immerse herself in MIT’s community and begin the learning process — what she happily described as “drinking from the firehose.”

“I want to leave you with one standing request,” Kornbluth concluded. “I want to know what you know about MIT. I want to know what you love about MIT, what makes you proud, and where you think that, by working together, we could make MIT even better.”

The lively gathering was accented by upbeat music and aromas from abundant refreshments and snacks, including spreads of apple cider and popular donut walls in every corner of the tent.

“It’s a wonderfully open community that doesn’t put a lot of emphasis on hierarchy,” said David I. Kaiser, the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science, professor of physics, and associate dean of Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing in the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing. “The undergraduates should be rubbing elbows with the provost and the president-elect and everyone in between. That’s what we get to do today, and not every place is like that. I think Dr. Kornbluth saw that about MIT and I think that resonated deeply with her.”

Greene opened her remarks by thanking current President L. Rafael Reif for his 10 years of service to MIT, prompting a standing ovation. She also recognized the presidential search committee, which for the first time included undergraduate and graduate students as well as members of the MIT Corporation, faculty, and staff.

“This committee made unprecedented efforts to seek input from all members of our community as well as the broader higher ed community,” Greene said.

Kornbluth’s appointment marks a notable time in MIT’s history. When she takes office, MIT’s president, provost, and chancellor will all be women.

Members of the search committee expressed an appreciation for Kornbluth’s desire to get to know every corner of the MIT community as she begins supporting its work.

“She speaks all the languages of MIT, from the humanities to social sciences, design, as well as basic science and engineering,” said committee member Nicholas de Monchaux, a professor and head of MIT’s Department of Architecture. “That’s a very rare and unique quality, but more than that, it was clear to us [Dr. Kornbluth] has a complete and total curiosity and humility about ideas and knowledge, which is to say she’s coming in wanting to learn from us, and that’s so much the spirit of MIT.”

During Kornbluth’s conversations, some community members offered advice and mementos, while others extended a simple welcome message. The exchanges marked the beginning of a learning process Kornbluth and the community seemed eager to begin.

“It was such a privilege to get to know Dr. Kornbluth even a little bit during the search process and I’m excited the rest of the community now gets that same opportunity,” Kaiser said. “She has so much to learn with and from us, but I think people are really going to enjoy getting to know her as well.”

In describing the event, Kornbluth used an analogy from her favorite type of science fiction, when an intrepid explorer makes contact with a new civilization.

“This is kind of like that, except that all of you have gone out of your way to make sure I don’t feel like an alien, so thank you.”

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Helping blockchain communities fix bugs

If the crypto enthusiasts are right, the next decade will see billions of people begin using applications built off distributed, user-owned blockchains. The new paradigm has been dubbed Web 3. But Web 3 still has some significant challenges to overcome if it’s going to replace the digital world as we know it.

Blockchain networks, for instance, are going to need an efficient way of detecting and resolving performance problems. Current analytics tools are built for companies to monitor their websites and apps. Such services need only be designed for one user. In the decentralized world of the blockchains, however, the users are the owners, turning the traditional model of maintenance and bug fixes on its head.

The MIT alumnus-founded company Metrika has developed a suite of tools to help the distributed communities of the blockchain world monitor and improve their networks. The company allows users to create alerts, access reports, and view real-time community dashboards that visualize network performance, problems, and trends over time.

“Metrika is a community-based monitoring and collaboration platform,” founder and CEO Nikos Andrikogiannopoulos SM ’06, MBA ’11 says. “We’re making [blockchain network] telemetry a public good for everyone. These applications are holding billions of dollars in assets, so it's unimaginable that we wouldn't have service assurance and deep visibility of what is happening in real-time.”

Metrika is currently providing services for popular blockchain protocols including Ethereum, Algorand, Flow, and Solana. The company plans to expand that list as other networks grow in popularity in hopes of enabling the much-hyped shift to Web 3.

“Our vision at Metrika is to become a critical layer of the Web 3 world,” Andrikogiannopoulos says. “Ten years from now, kids will be interacting with assets on their mobile phone. The idea of a bank account will be foreign to them. There will be no corner banks. The whole idea of finance will not go through physical stores and bank accounts — you’ll have assets on every application you use. In that world, where everything is happening on a blockchain, how can Metrika help provide the observability, reliability, and visibility of the blockchain network?”

Bouncing ideas off MIT

Andrikogiannopoulos first came to MIT as a graduate student in 2004 and he likes to say he never really left. To this day he lives in Cambridge with his wife, who works at MIT, and returns to campus often.

After earning his second MIT degree, an MBA from the Sloan School of Management, Andrikogiannopoulos began a telecommunications consulting job. During lunch breaks, he’d return to MIT to work with the Venture Mentoring Services (VMS), where entrepreneurs from the MIT community can connect with mentors and receive advice. While kicking around telecommunications startup ideas, a VMS mentor connected him to internet entrepreneur Rubin Gruber, who suggested he explore the blockchain space instead.

It was mid 2018 — what many remember as the “crypto winter” for the lull in blockchain hype and the corresponding crash of crypto prices. But Andrikogiannopoulos began researching the industry and networking with people in the blockchain space, including an MIT alumnus working at the blockchain company Algorand, which was founded by Silvio Micali, the Ford Foundation Professor of Engineering at MIT.

A few months after their initial talk, Andrikogiannopoulos returned to Gruber’s office and told him blockchains were lacking monitoring and operational intelligence.

The problem stems from the decentralized structure of blockchains. Each user operates as a node in the system by creating, receiving, and moving data through their server. When users encounter a problem, they need to figure out if the problem lies within their node or involves the network as a whole.

“They might go on Twitter and Discord and ask other users what they’re experiencing,” Andrikogiannopoulos says. “They’re trying to triangulate the problem, and it takes several hours for them to figure out the issue, coordinate a response, and resolve it.”

To build Metrika, Andrikogiannopoulos set up open-source nodes across the globe that pull data from the nodes and networks, then aggregate those data into easy-to-understand reports and other tools.

“We act as public infrastructure, so users get visibility through dashboards, alerting, and reports, and then we add collaboration tools on top of that,” Andrikogiannopoulos explains.

By 2019, Metrika had begun detecting problems with node performance, staking, network latency, and errors like blocks not being produced at the right rate. Andrikogiannopoulos showed his progress to employees at Algorand, who expressed interest, so he continued building out Metrika's suite of tools.

"You can see the idea of Metrika bounced across the entire MIT ecosystem,” Andrikogiannopoulos says. “It’s crucial when you start companies that you have these kinds of insight and resource-rich environments like MIT, where you can iterate on your ideas and find team members to join you.”

Enabling Web 3

Blockchains are no longer a niche technology. Around the world, companies in finance and logistics, as well gamers and other creatives, are adopting the technology.

“The blockchain world up to today has been a large experiment,” Andrikogiannopoulos says. “A lot of this infrastructure just hasn’t been built. But Bitcoin proved this can work outside of the traditional finance world, and Ethereum is bringing it to another level with applications, smart contracts, and by creating essentially a decentralized, smart computer. We think about enabling that world we see coming.”

As Metrika continues building out solutions to monitor blockchains, it also wants to offer services for the many applications being built on top of that infrastructure.

“In the future, if a blockchain transaction doesn’t go through and you’re Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan, you need to know why that transaction didn’t go through and what happened,” Andrikogiannopoulos says. “Or if you’re an application playing a game or buying assets and the transactions are lagging, you need to understand why the user experience is being impacted. In Web 3 these things are every important because of the scale and the flow of value we’re talking about.”

For Nikos, improving blockchain performance is not just about optimizing networks. It’s also about helping to usher in the world of open finance and open applications that Web 3 promises.

“We’ve reached 17 hours of outage on blockchain networks in some cases, but what’s even more important to me is not the outages themselves, but the infrastructure needed to avoid them as the industry continues maturing,” Nikos says. “These problems can compromise trust as we’re onboarding users into the Web 3 world. Metrika’s mission is to enable a compelling Web 3 ecosystem.”

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Pesticide innovation takes top prize at Collegiate Inventors Competition

On Oct. 12, MIT mechanical engineering alumnus Vishnu Jayaprakash SM '19, PhD '22 was named the first-place winner in the graduate category of the Collegiate Inventors Competition. The annual competition, which is organized by the National Inventors Hall of Fame, celebrates college and university student inventors. Jayaprakash won for his pesticide innovation AgZen-Cloak, which he developed while he was a student in the lab of Kripa Varanasi, a professor of mechanical engineering.

Currently, only 2 percent of pesticide spray is retained by crops. Many crops are naturally water-repellent, causing pesticide-laden water to bounce off of them. Farmers are forced to over-spray significantly to ensure proper spray coverage on their crops. Not only does this waste expensive pesticides, but it also comes at an environmental cost.

Runoff from pesticide treatment pollutes soil and nearby streams. Droplets can travel in the air, leading to illness and death in nearby populations. It is estimated that each year, pesticide pollution causes between 20,000 and 200,000 deaths, and up to 385 million acute illnesses like cancer, birth defects, and neurological conditions.   

With his invention AgZen-Cloak, Jayaprakash has found a way to keep droplets of water containing pesticide from bouncing off crops by “cloaking” the droplets in a small amount of plant-derived oil. As a result, farmers could use just one-fifth the amount of spray, minimizing water waste and cost for farmers and eliminating airborne pollution and toxic runoff. It also improves pesticide retention, which can lead to higher crop yield.

“By cloaking each droplet with a minute quantity of a plant-based oil, we promote water retention on even the most water-repellent plant surfaces,” says Jayaprakash. “AgZen-Cloak presents a universal, inexpensive, and environmentally sustainable way to prevent pesticide overuse and waste.”

Farming is in Jayaprakash’s DNA. His family operates a 10-acre farm near Chennai, India, where they grow rice and mangoes. Upon joining the Varanasi Research Group as a graduate student, Jayaprakash was instantly drawn to Varanasi’s work on pesticides in agriculture.

“Growing up, I would spray crops on my family farm wearing a backpack sprayer. So, I’ve always wanted to work on research that made farmer’s lives easier,” says Jayaprakash, who serves as CEO of the startup AgZen.

Helping droplets stick

Varanasi and his lab at MIT work on what is known as interfacial phenomena — or the study of what happens when different phases come into contact and interact with one another. Understanding how a liquid interacts with a solid or how a liquid reacts to a certain gas has endless applications, which explains the diversity of the research Varanasi has conducted over the years. He and his team have developed solutions for everything from consumer product packaging to power plant emissions.

In 2009, Varanasi gave a talk at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). There, he learned from the USDA just how big of a problem runoff from pesticide spray was for farmers around the world.

He enlisted the help of then-graduate student Maher Damak SM ’15, PhD ’18 to apply their work in interfacial phenomena to pesticide sprays. Over the next several years, the Varanasi Research Group developed a technology that utilized electrically charged polymers to keep droplets from bouncing off hydrophobic surfaces. When droplets containing positively and negatively charged additives meet, their surface chemistry allows them to stick to a plant’s surface.

Using polyelectrolytes, the researchers could reduce the amount of spray needed to cover a crop by tenfold in the lab. This motivated the Varanasi Research Group to pursue three years of field trials with various commercial growers around the world, where they were able to demonstrate significant savings for farmers.

“We got fantastic feedback on our technology from farmers. We are really excited to change the paradigm for agriculture. Not only is it good for the environment, but we’ve heard from farmers that they love it. If we can put money back into farms, it helps society as a whole,” adds Varanasi.

In response to the positive feedback, Varanasi and Jayaprakash co-founded startup AgZen in 2020. 

When field testing their polyelectrolyte technology, Varanasi and Jayaprakash came up with the idea to explore the use of a fully plant-based material to help farmers achieve the same savings. 

Cloaking droplets and engineering nozzles

Jayaprakash found that by cloaking a small amount of plant-derived oil around a water droplet, droplets stick to plant surfaces that would typically repel water. After conducting many studies in the lab, he found that the oil only needs to make up 0.1 percent of a droplet’s total volume to stick to crops and provide total, uniform coverage.

While his cloaking solution worked in the lab, Jayaprakash knew that to have a tangible impact in the real world he needed to find an easy, low-cost way for farmers to coat pesticide spray droplets in oil.

Jayaprakash focused on spray nozzles. He developed a proprietary nozzle that coats each droplet with a small amount of oil as they are being formed. The nozzles can easily be added to any hose or farming equipment.

“What we’ve done is figured out a smart way to cloak these droplets by using a very small quantity of oil on the outside of each drop. Because of that, we get this drastic improvement in performance that can really be a game-changer for farmers,” says Jayaprakash.

In addition to improving pesticide retention in crops, the AgZen-Cloak solves a second problem. Since large droplets are prone to break apart and bounce off crops, historically, farmers have sprayed pesticide in tiny, mist-like droplets. These fine droplets are often carried by the wind, increasing pesticide pollution in nearby areas. 

When AgZen-Cloak is used, the pesticide-laden droplets can be larger and still stick to crops. These larger droplets aren’t carried by the wind, decreasing the risk of pollution and minimizing the health impacts on local populations.  

“We’re actually solving two problems with one solution. With the cloaking technology, we can spray much larger droplets that aren’t prone to wind drift and they can stick to the plant,” Jayaprakash adds.

Bringing AgZen-Cloaks to farmers around the world

This spring, Varanasi encouraged Jayaprakash to submit AgZen-Cloak to the Collegiate Inventors Competition. Out of hundreds of applications, Jayaprakash was one of 25 student inventors to be chosen as a finalist.

On Oct. 12, Jayaprakash presented his technology to a panel of judges composed of National Inventors Hall of Fame inductees and U.S. Patent and Trademark Office officials. Meeting with such an illustrious group of inventors and officials left an impression on Jayaprakash.

“These are people who have invented things that have changed the world. So, to get their feedback on what we’re doing was incredibly valuable,” he says. Jayaprakash received a $10,000 prize for being named the first-place graduate winner.

As full-time CEO of AgZen, Jayaprakash is shifting focus to field testing and commercialization. He and the AgZen team have already conducted field testing across the world at locations including a Prosecco vineyard outside of Venice, a ranch in California, and Ward’s Berry Farm in Sharon, Massachusetts. The University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s vegetable extension program, led by their program director Susan Scheufele, recently concluded a field test that validated AgZen’s on-field performance.

Two days after his win at the Collegiate Inventors Competition, Jayaprakash was named the first prize winner of the MIT Abdul Latif Jamel Water and Food Systems Lab World Food Day student video competition. Hours later, he flew across the country to attend an agricultural tech conference in California, eager to meet with farmers and discuss plans for rolling out AgZen’s innovations to farms everywhere.

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Frank Sidney Jones, professor emeritus of urban affairs, dies at 93

Frank Sidney Jones, professor emeritus in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), passed away on Aug. 28 at the age of 93.

In 1971, Jones was named Ford Professor of Urban Affairs and Planning, becoming the first African American to be tenured at MIT. He also taught courses in civil engineering.

From his appointment in 1968 to his retirement in 1992, he focused on issues of race, poverty, and inequality, using his position to advocate for the expanded presence of people of color at the Institute. 

“Professor Jones epitomized so much of what we aspire to here in DUSP in our ongoing efforts in support of an antiracist transformation and the mobilization of our research, teaching, internal culture, and external partnerships toward excellence, justice, and diversity,” says Chris Zegras, professor of mobility and urban planning and DUSP department head. “While the world has lost a pioneer, his legacy lives on in our department, as well as across and beyond the Institute.”

Jones was the youngest son of David Dallas and Susie Williams Jones, the president and first lady of Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina. After spending his early years in Greensboro, he moved to Boston and graduated from Phillips Andover Academy before attending Harvard College. At Harvard he was proud to be named the first African American manager of the Harvard football team in 1949. 

After completing his graduate studies at Harvard Business School (HBS) in 1957, Jones pursued an industry career and served as assistant dean at HBS. He joined MIT as executive director of the Urban Systems Laboratory in 1968.

“Frank Jones was a wonderful colleague,” says professor emeritus and former MIT chancellor Phillip Clay PhD ’75. “He joined the DUSP faculty in the early 1970s, when I was a doctoral student. He was a source of encouragement in my early career. Frank challenged orthodoxy in both the literature and practice of urban planning. He promoted justice and inclusion as core values. He actively engaged students.”

“Frank, together with Ken Manning, was among the first academics to understand the larger meaning of the HIV/AIDS crisis, teaching several courses and seminars to help students draw the meaning of the social impact of the public health crisis. Frank was a major player in the community. He was one of the organizers of The Partnership, an effort to attract Black professionals to the Boston area and provide a networking and professional development platform. The impact of his efforts changed MIT and many other Boston metro-area institutions and corporations.”

Jones was the founding director of the Project on Technology, Race, and Poverty and served on a committee to help select a leader for the newly formed Office of Minority Education (OME), designed to advance the recruitment and education of students of color.

Today, OME facilitates professional development and the building of personal and professional networks, and supports academic excellence for students who are underrepresented, including African American, Native American, and Latinx students across the Institute.

In 1989, Jones was instrumental in creating the Martin Luther King, Jr. Professors and Scholars Program, which continues to bring distinguished visitors to share their wisdom with the MIT community.

“Continuously, forcefully, and successfully, Frank leveled the playing field for African American scholars, reducing the systemic racism and offering paths for scholarship by African Americans at MIT,” says Wesley Harris, the Charles Stark Draper Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics. “Frank’s sage counsel remains.”

In addition to his work at MIT, Jones served on the governing boards of educational and community-focused organizations including: Mount Holyoke College, Phillips Academy, Charles Stark Draper Labs, Greater Roxbury Community Development Corporation, The Center for Creative Leadership, and The Partnership, Inc.

Jones is survived by his two sons, Christopher and David; daughters-in-law Angela Cook-Jones and Sarah Niemczycki; five grandchildren; and eight nieces and nephews.

“Professor Frank Jones cared deeply about excellence and equity and was a fierce advocate for his students. He inspired me, and frankly all his students, to always remember to help those most in need as we aimed to be our best,” says Karen Fulbright-Anderson MCP ’79, PhD ’85.

Fulbright-Anderson spearheaded the creation of the Frank S. Jones Student Activities Fund to honor Jones’s legacy of advocacy and compassionate action by supporting students as they work to help others and address some of society's most pressing issues.

Donations honoring Jones's memory may be made to either the fund or Bennett College. A memorial service is planned for Nov. 12 at 2 p.m. in the MIT Chapel.

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Coordinating climate and air-quality policies to improve public health

As America’s largest investment to fight climate change, the Inflation Reduction Act positions the country to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by an estimated 40 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. But as it edges the United States closer to achieving its international climate commitment, the legislation is also expected to yield significant — and more immediate — improvements in the nation’s health. If successful in accelerating the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy alternatives, the IRA will sharply reduce atmospheric concentrations of fine particulates known to exacerbate respiratory and cardiovascular disease and cause premature deaths, along with other air pollutants that degrade human health. One recent study shows that eliminating air pollution from fossil fuels in the contiguous United States would prevent more than 50,000 premature deaths and avoid more than $600 billion in health costs each year.

While national climate policies such as those advanced by the IRA can simultaneously help mitigate climate change and improve air quality, their results may vary widely when it comes to improving public health. That’s because the potential health benefits associated with air quality improvements are much greater in some regions and economic sectors than in others. Those benefits can be maximized, however, through a prudent combination of climate and air-quality policies.

Several past studies have evaluated the likely health impacts of various policy combinations, but their usefulness has been limited due to a reliance on a small set of standard policy scenarios. More versatile tools are needed to model a wide range of climate and air-quality policy combinations and assess their collective effects on air quality and human health. Now researchers at the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change and MIT Institute for Data, Systems and Society (IDSS) have developed a publicly available, flexible scenario tool that does just that.

In a study published in the journal Geoscientific Model Development, the MIT team introduces its Tool for Air Pollution Scenarios (TAPS), which can be used to estimate the likely air-quality and health outcomes of a wide range of climate and air-quality policies at the regional, sectoral, and fuel-based level. 

“This tool can help integrate the siloed sustainability issues of air pollution and climate action,” says the study’s lead author William Atkinson, who recently served as a Biogen Graduate Fellow and research assistant at the IDSS Technology and Policy Program’s (TPP) Research to Policy Engagement Initiative. “Climate action does not guarantee a clean air future, and vice versa — but the issues have similar sources that imply shared solutions if done right.”

The study’s initial application of TAPS shows that with current air-quality policies and near-term Paris Agreement climate pledges alone, short-term pollution reductions give way to long-term increases — given the expected growth of emissions-intensive industrial and agricultural processes in developing regions. More ambitious climate and air-quality policies could be complementary, each reducing different pollutants substantially to give tremendous near- and long-term health benefits worldwide.

“The significance of this work is that we can more confidently identify the long-term emission reduction strategies that also support air quality improvements,” says MIT Joint Program Deputy Director C. Adam Schlosser, a co-author of the study. “This is a win-win for setting climate targets that are also healthy targets.”

TAPS projects air quality and health outcomes based on three integrated components: a recent global inventory of detailed emissions resulting from human activities (e.g., fossil fuel combustion, land-use change, industrial processes); multiple scenarios of emissions-generating human activities between now and the year 2100, produced by the MIT Economic Projection and Policy Analysis model; and emissions intensity (emissions per unit of activity) scenarios based on recent data from the Greenhouse Gas and Air Pollution Interactions and Synergies model.

“We see the climate crisis as a health crisis, and believe that evidence-based approaches are key to making the most of this historic investment in the future, particularly for vulnerable communities,” says Johanna Jobin, global head of corporate reputation and responsibility at Biogen. “The scientific community has spoken with unanimity and alarm that not all climate-related actions deliver equal health benefits. We’re proud of our collaboration with the MIT Joint Program to develop this tool that can be used to bridge research-to-policy gaps, support policy decisions to promote health among vulnerable communities, and train the next generation of scientists and leaders for far-reaching impact.”

The tool can inform decision-makers about a wide range of climate and air-quality policies. Policy scenarios can be applied to specific regions, sectors, or fuels to investigate policy combinations at a more granular level, or to target short-term actions with high-impact benefits.

TAPS could be further developed to account for additional emissions sources and trends.

“Our new tool could be used to examine a large range of both climate and air quality scenarios. As the framework is expanded, we can add detail for specific regions, as well as additional pollutants such as air toxics,” says study supervising co-author Noelle Selin, professor at IDSS and the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, and director of TPP.    

This research was supported by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and its Science to Achieve Results (STAR) program; Biogen; TPP’s Leading Technology and Policy Initiative; and TPP’s Research to Policy Engagement Initiative.

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Two first-year students named Rise Global Winners for 2022

In 2019, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife, Wendy, launched a $1 billion philanthropic commitment to identify global talent. Part of that effort is the Rise initiative, which selects 100 young scholars, ages 15-17, from around the world who show unusual promise and a drive to serve others. This year’s cohort of 100 Rise Global Winners includes two MIT first-year students, Jacqueline Prawira and Safiya Sankari.

Rise intentionally targets younger-aged students and focuses on identifying what the program terms “hidden brilliance” in any form, anywhere in the world, whether it be in a high school or a refugee camp. Another defining aspect of the program is that Rise winners receive sustained support — not just in secondary school, but throughout their lives.

“We believe that the answers to the world’s toughest problems lie in the imagination of the world's brightest minds,” says Eric Braverman, CEO of Schmidt Futures, which manages Rise along with the Rhodes Trust. “Rise is an integral part of our mission to create the best, largest, and most enduring pipeline of exceptional talent globally and match it to opportunities to serve others for life.”

The Rise program creates this enduring pipeline by providing a lifetime of benefits, including funding, programming, and mentoring opportunities. These resources can be tailored to each person as they evolve throughout their career. In addition to a four-year college scholarship, winners receive mentoring and career services; networking opportunities with other Rise recipients and partner organizations; technical equipment such as laptops or tablets; courses on topics like leadership and human-centered design; and opportunities to apply for graduate scholarships and for funding throughout their careers to support their innovative ideas, such as grants or seed money to start a social enterprise.

Prawira and Sankari’s winning service projects focus on global sustainability and global medical access, respectively. Prawira invented a way to use upcycled fish-scale waste to absorb heavy metals in wastewater. She first started experimenting with fish-scale waste in middle school to try to find a bio-based alternative to plastic. More recently, she discovered that the calcium salts and collagen in fish scales can absorb up to 82 percent of heavy metals from water, and 91 percent if an electric current is passed through the water. Her work has global implications for treating contaminated water at wastewater plants and in developing countries.

Prawiri published her research in 2021 and has won awards from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and several other organizations. She’s planning to major in Course 3 (materials science and engineering), perhaps with an environmentally related minor. “I believe that sustainability and solving environmental problems requires a multifaced approach,” she says. “Creating greener materials for use in our daily lives will have a major impact in solving current environmental issues.”

For Sankari’s service project, she developed an algorithm to analyze data from electronic nano-sensor devices, or e-noses, which can detect certain diseases from a patient’s breath. The devices are calibrated to detect volatile organic compound biosignatures that are indicative of diseases like diabetes and cancer. “E-nose disease detection is much faster and cheaper than traditional methods of diagnosis, making medical care more accessible to many,” she explains. The Python-based algorithm she created can translate raw data from e-noses into a result that the user can read.

Sankari is a lifetime member of the American Junior Academy of Science and has been a finalist in several prestigious science competitions. She is considering a major in Course 6-7 (computer science and molecular biology) at MIT and hopes to continue to explore the intersection between nanotechnology and medicine.

While the 2022 Rise recipients share a desire to tackle some of the world’s most intractable problems, their ideas and interests, as reflected by their service projects, are broad, innovative, and diverse. A winner from Belarus used bioinformatics to predict the molecular effect of a potential Alzheimer’s drug. A Romanian student created a magazine that aims to promote acceptance of transgender bodies. A Vietnamese teen created a prototype of a toothbrush that uses a nano chip to detect cancerous cells in saliva. And a recipient from the United States designed modular, tiny homes for the unhoused that are affordable and sustainable, as an alternative to homeless shelters.

This year’s winners were selected from over 13,000 applicants from 47 countries, from Azerbaijan and Burkina Faso to Lebanon and Paraguay. The selection process includes group interviews, peer and expert review of each applicant’s service project, and formal talent assessments.

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