Three from MIT named 2023 Rhodes Scholars

Jack Cook, Matthew Kearney, and Jupneet Singh have been selected for the 2023 cohort of the prestigious Rhodes Scholarship program. They will begin fully funded postgraduate studies at Oxford University in the U.K. next fall. Each year, Rhodes awards 32 scholarships to U.S. citizens plus additional scholarships for citizens from non-U.S. constituencies.

The students were supported by Associate Dean Kim Benard and the Distinguished Fellowships team in Career Advising and Professional Development, and received additional mentorship from the Presidential Committee on Distinguished Fellowships.

“Our students have worked incredibly hard throughout this process,” says Professor Tamar Schapiro, who co-chairs the committee along with Professor Will Broadhead. “They have been challenged to think deeply about what they want to do and about who they want to be. They have learned to communicate their values and goals in powerful ways. And they have developed confidence presenting themselves to others. We are thrilled that so many of them were recognized this year, as finalists and as winners.” 

Jack Cook ’22

Jack Cook is a MEng student from New York City who recently graduated with a major in computer science and a minor in brain and cognitive sciences. At Oxford, he plans to pursue an MSc in the social science of the internet and an MSc in evidence-based social intervention and policy evaluation. In the future, he plans to apply his technical skills toward solving problems involving misinformation.

As an undergraduate at MIT, Jack was lead author on “There’s Always a Bigger Fish,” a research paper from Mengjia Yan’s lab that demonstrates how machine learning can be weaponized to extract sensitive information from applications such as a web browser. His work on this project won him MIT’s 2022 Robert M. Fano UROP Award. For his master’s thesis, in partnership with Lahey Hospital, Jack is building a digital cognitive assessment for diagnosing patients with neurodegenerative diseases.

Jack also leads natural language processing initiatives at The New York Times R&D, where he built a system that answers questions from readers about breaking news in real time. As a high school student, he was on the founding team of Mixer, a startup focusing on low-latency live-streaming that was acquired by Microsoft in 2016.

Jack was also director of HackMIT, MIT’s premier annual 1,000-person hackathon, for two years. For HackMIT’s first virtual event in September 2020, he led the development of a 3D virtual platform on which hackers could “walk around” and interact with each other while participating remotely.

Matthew Kearney

Matt Kearney from Austin, Texas, is a senior majoring in both electrical engineering and computer science and philosophy. At Oxford, he will pursue a DPhil in computer science and a DPhil in philosophy. His goal is to redesign AI technologies and practices to both address their harms and reimagine them as tools for solutions to pressing societal issues such as climate change and economic inequality.

At MIT, Kearney has researched theoretical quantum computing with the Quanta Research Group, computer vision for 3D scene understanding with the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), probabilistic climate downscaling with the Human Systems Lab, and explainability methods for natural language models with CSAIL. He also interned with Argo AI, an autonomous vehicle company, and Google X, the moonshot factory of Google.

Kearney ran on the MIT Cross Country and Track and Field teams and served as a captain for three years. He also co-founded a project in 2020 with the goal of focusing individual efforts on the most effective solutions to climate change. He and his co-founder were awarded the PKG Fellowship and the IDEAS Fellowship to support this work. Additionally, as part of his studies in the humanities, he was selected as an MIT Burchard Scholar.

In his spare time, Kearney loves spontaneously singing, cooking elaborate meals, and absolutely anything in the outdoors.

Jupneet Singh

Jupneet Singh is a senior from Somis, California, majoring in chemistry with a flex in biomedical engineering and minoring in history. As a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, she intends to study for an MSc in evidence-based social intervention and policy evaluation. Following Rhodes, she plans to attend medical school and then complete residency as an active-duty Air Force Captain.

Singh’s career goals include serving as a trauma surgeon in the Air Force, and then entering the United States Public Health Commissioned Corps to advocate for the representation of minorities and culturally adaptive practices in health care. She currently holds leadership positions in Air Force ROTC, MIT Mock Trial, and Project Sunshine MIT, and is also involved with the PKG Center. She conducts research in the Shalek Lab studying fatty liver disease, and she has also worked in the Nolan Lab on natural products research.  

This past summer, Singh worked in de-addiction centers in India and had an abstract accepted to the American College of Surgeons Southern California Conference. She has worked in California at the Ventura County Family Justice Center and Ventura County Medical Center Trauma Center and published a paper as first author in The American Surgeon. Singh founded a program, Pathways to Promise, to support the health of children in Ventura affected by domestic violence, and has received four fellowships to support it.

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MIT PhD students shed light on important water and food research

One glance at the news lately will reveal countless headlines on the dire state of global water and food security. Pollution, supply chain disruptions, and the war in Ukraine are all threatening water and food systems, compounding climate change impacts from heat waves, drought, floods, and wildfires.

Every year, MIT's Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) offers fellowships to outstanding MIT graduate students who are working on innovative ways to secure water and food supplies in light of these urgent worldwide threats. J-WAFS announced this year’s fellowship recipients last April. Aditya Ghodgaonkar and Devashish Gokhale were awarded Rasikbhai L. Meswani Fellowships for Water Solutions, which are made possible by a generous gift from Elina and Nikhil Meswani and family. James Zhang, Katharina Fransen, and Linzixuan (Rhoda) Zhang were awarded J-WAFS Fellowships for Water and Food Solutions. The J-WAFS Fellowship for Water and Food Solutions is funded in part by J-WAFS Research Affiliate companies: Xylem, Inc., a water technology company, and GoAigua, a company leading the digital transformation of the water industry.

The five fellows were each awarded a stipend and full tuition for one semester. They also benefit from mentorship, networking connections, and opportunities to showcase their research.

“This year’s cohort of J-WAFS fellows show an indefatigable drive to explore, create, and push back boundaries,” says John H. Lienhard, director of J-WAFS. “Their passion and determination to create positive change for humanity are evident in these unique video portraits, which describe their solutions-oriented research in water and food,” Lienhard adds.

J-WAFS funder Community Jameel recently commissioned video portraitures of each student that highlight their work and their inspiration to solve challenges in water and food. More about each J-WAFS fellow and their research follows.

Katharina Fransen

In Professor Bradley Olsen’s lab in the Department of Chemical Engineering, Katharina Fransen works to develop biologically-based, biodegradable plastics which can be used for food packing that won’t pollute the environment. Fransen, a third-year PhD student, is motivated by the challenge of protecting the most vulnerable global communities from waste generated by the materials that are essential to connecting them to the global food supply. “We can't ensure that all of our plastic waste gets recycled or reused, and so we want to make sure that if it does escape into the environment it can degrade, and that's kind of where a lot of my research really comes in,” says Fransen. Most of her work involves creating polymers, or “really long chains of chemicals,” kind of like the paper rings a lot of us looped into chains as kids, Fransen explains. The polymers are optimized for food packaging applications to keep food fresher for longer, preventing food waste. Fransen says she finds the work “really interesting from the scientific perspective as well as from the idea that [she’s] going to make the world a little better with these new materials.” She adds, “I think it is both really fulfilling and really exciting and engaging.”

Aditya Ghodgaonkar

“When I went to Kenya this past spring break, I had an opportunity to meet a lot of farmers and talk to them about what kind of maintenance issues they face,” says Aditya Ghodgaonkar, PhD candidate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Ghodgaonkar works with Associate Professor Amos Winter in the Global Engineering and Research (GEAR) Lab, where he designs hydraulic components for drip irrigation systems to make them water-efficient, off-grid, inexpensive, and low-maintenance. On his trip to Kenya, Ghodgaonkar gained firsthand knowledge from farmers about a common problem they encounter: clogging of drip irrigation emitters. He learned that clogging can be an expensive technical challenge to diagnose, mitigate, and resolve. He decided to focus his attention on designing emitters that are resistant to clogging, testing with sand and passive hydrodynamic filtration back in the lab at MIT. “I got into this from an academic standpoint,” says Ghodgaonkar. “It is only once I started working on the emitters, spoke with industrial partners that make these emitters, spoke with farmers, that I really truly appreciated the impact of what we're doing.”

Devashish Gokhale

Devashish Gokhale is a PhD student advised by Professor Patrick Doyle in the Department of Chemical Engineering. Gokhale’s commitment to global water security stems from his childhood in Pune, India, where both flooding and drought can occur depending on the time of year. “I've had these experiences where there's been too much water and also too little water” he recalls. At MIT, Gokhale is developing cost-effective, sustainable, and reusable materials for water treatment with a focus on the elimination of emerging contaminants and low-concentration pollutants like heavy metals. Specifically, he works on making and optimizing polymeric hydrogel microparticles that can absorb micropollutants. “I know how important it is to do something which is not just scientifically interesting, but something which is impactful in a real way,” says Gokhale. Before starting a research project he asks himself, “are people going to be able to afford this? Is it really going to reach the people who need it the most?” Adding these constraints in the beginning of the research process sometimes makes the problem more difficult to solve, but Gokhale notes that in the end, the solution is much more promising.

James Zhang

“We don't really think much about it, it's transparent, odorless, we just turn on our sink in many parts of the world and it just flows through,” says James Zhang when talking about water. Yet he notes that “many other parts of the world face water scarcity and this will only get worse due to global climate change.” A PhD student in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Zhang works in the Nano Engineering Laboratory with Professor Gang Chen. Zhang is working on a technology that uses light-induced evaporation to clean water. He is currently investigating the fundamental properties of how light at different wavelengths interacts with liquids at the surface, particularly with brackish water surfaces. With strong theoretical and experimental components, his research could lead to innovations in desalinating water at high energy efficiencies. Zhang hopes that the technology can one day “produce lots of clean water for communities around the world that currently don't have access to fresh water,” and create a new appreciation for this common liquid that many of us might not think about on a day-to-day basis.

Linzixuan (Rhoda) Zhang

“Around the world there are about 2 billion people currently suffering from micronutrient deficiency because they do not have access to very healthy, very fresh food,” says chemical engineering PhD candidate Linzixuan (Rhoda) Zhang. This fact led Zhang to develop a micronutrient delivery platform that fortifies foods with essential vitamins and nutrients. With her advisors, Professor Robert Langer and Research Scientist Ana Jaklenec, Zhang brings biomedical engineering approaches to global health issues. Zhang says that “one of the most serious problems is vitamin A deficiency, because vitamin A is not very stable.” She goes on to explain that although vitamin A is present in different vegetables, when the vegetables are cooked, vitamin A can easily degrade. Zhang helped develop a group of biodegradable polymers that can stabilize micronutrients under cooking and storage conditions. With this technology, vitamin A, for example, could be encapsulated and effectively stabilized under boiling water. The platform has also shown efficient release in a simulation of the stomach environment. Zhang says it is the “little, tiny steps every day that are pushing us forward to the final impactful product.”

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Ensuring AI works with the right dose of curiosity

It’s a dilemma as old as time. Friday night has rolled around, and you’re trying to pick a restaurant for dinner. Should you visit your most beloved watering hole or try a new establishment, in the hopes of discovering something superior? Potentially, but that curiosity comes with a risk: If you explore the new option, the food could be worse. On the flip side, if you stick with what you know works well, you won't grow out of your narrow pathway. 

Curiosity drives artificial intelligence to explore the world, now in boundless use cases — autonomous navigation, robotic decision-making, optimizing health outcomes, and more. Machines, in some cases, use “reinforcement learning” to accomplish a goal, where an AI agent iteratively learns from being rewarded for good behavior and punished for bad. Just like the dilemma faced by humans in selecting a restaurant, these agents also struggle with balancing the time spent discovering better actions (exploration) and the time spent taking actions that led to high rewards in the past (exploitation). Too much curiosity can distract the agent from making good decisions, while too little means the agent will never discover good decisions.

In the pursuit of making AI agents with just the right dose of curiosity, researchers from MIT’s Improbable AI Laboratory and Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) created an algorithm that overcomes the problem of AI being too “curious” and getting distracted by a given task. Their algorithm automatically increases curiosity when it's needed, and suppresses it if the agent gets enough supervision from the environment to know what to do.

When tested on over 60 video games, the algorithm was able to succeed at both hard and easy exploration tasks, where previous algorithms have only been able to tackle only a hard or easy domain alone. With this method, AI agents use fewer data for learning decision-making rules that maximize incentives.  

“If you master the exploration-exploitation trade-off well, you can learn the right decision-making rules faster — and anything less will require lots of data, which could mean suboptimal medical treatments, lesser profits for websites, and robots that don't learn to do the right thing,” says Pulkit Agrawal, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) at MIT, director of the Improbable AI Lab, and CSAIL affiliate who supervised the research. “Imagine a website trying to figure out the design or layout of its content that will maximize sales. If one doesn’t perform exploration-exploitation well, converging to the right website design or the right website layout will take a long time, which means profit loss. Or in a health care setting, like with Covid-19, there may be a sequence of decisions that need to be made to treat a patient, and if you want to use decision-making algorithms, they need to learn quickly and efficiently — you don't want a suboptimal solution when treating a large number of patients. We hope that this work will apply to real-world problems of that nature.” 

It’s hard to encompass the nuances of curiosity’s psychological underpinnings; the underlying neural correlates of challenge-seeking behavior are a poorly understood phenomenon. Attempts to categorize the behavior have spanned studies that dived deeply into studying our impulses, deprivation sensitivities, and social and stress tolerances. 

With reinforcement learning, this process is “pruned” emotionally and stripped down to the bare bones, but it’s complicated on the technical side. Essentially, the agent should only be curious when there’s not enough supervision available to try out different things, and if there is supervision, it must adjust curiosity and lower it. 

Since a large subset of gaming is little agents running around fantastical environments looking for rewards and performing a long sequence of actions to achieve some goal, it seemed like the logical test bed for the researchers’ algorithm. In experiments, researchers divided games like “Mario Kart” and “Montezuma’s Revenge” into two different buckets: one where supervision was sparse, meaning the agent had less guidance, which were considered “hard” exploration games, and a second where supervision was more dense, or the “easy” exploration games. 

Suppose in “Mario Kart,” for example, you only remove all rewards so you don’t know when an enemy eliminates you. You’re not given any reward when you collect a coin or jump over pipes. The agent is only told in the end how well it did. This would be a case of sparse supervision. Algorithms that incentivize curiosity do really well in this scenario. 

But now, suppose the agent is provided dense supervision — a reward for jumping over pipes, collecting coins, and eliminating enemies. Here, an algorithm without curiosity performs really well because it gets rewarded often. But if you instead take the algorithm that also uses curiosity, it learns slowly. This is because the curious agent might attempt to run fast in different ways, dance around, go to every part of the game screen — things that are interesting, but do not help the agent succeed at the game. The team’s algorithm, however, consistently performed well, irrespective of what environment it was in. 

Future work might involve circling back to the exploration that’s delighted and plagued psychologists for years: an appropriate metric for curiosity — no one really knows the right way to mathematically define curiosity. 

“Getting consistent good performance on a novel problem is extremely challenging — so by improving exploration algorithms, we can save your effort on tuning an algorithm for your problems of interest, says Zhang-Wei Hong, an EECS PhD student, CSAIL affiliate, and co-lead author along with Eric Chen ’20, MEng ’21 on a new paper about the work. “We need curiosity to solve extremely challenging problems, but on some problems it can hurt performance. We propose an algorithm that removes the burden of tuning the balance of exploration and exploitation. Previously what took, for instance, a week to successfully solve the problem, with this new algorithm, we can get satisfactory results in a few hours.”

“One of the greatest challenges for current AI and cognitive science is how to balance exploration and exploitation — the search for information versus the search for reward. Children do this seamlessly, but it is challenging computationally,” notes Alison Gopnik, professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley, who was not involved with the project. “This paper uses impressive new techniques to accomplish this automatically, designing an agent that can systematically balance curiosity about the world and the desire for reward, [thus taking] another step towards making AI agents (almost) as smart as children.”

“Intrinsic rewards like curiosity are fundamental to guiding agents to discover useful diverse behaviors, but this shouldn’t come at the cost of doing well at the given task. This is an important problem in AI, and the paper provides a way to balance that trade-off,” adds Deepak Pathak, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University, who was also not involved in the work. “It would be interesting to see how such methods scale beyond games to real-world robotic agents.”

Chen, Hong, and Agrawal wrote the paper alongside Joni Pajarinen, assistant professor at Aalto University and research leader at the Intelligent Autonomous Systems Group at TU Darmstadt. The research was supported, in part, by the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, DARPA Machine Common Sense Program, the Army Research Office by the United States Air Force Research Laboratory, and the United States Air Force Artificial Intelligence Accelerator. The paper will be presented at Neural Information and Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2022.

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Lincoln Laboratory launches summer internships for local high schoolers

Every summer, hundreds of students come to Lincoln Laboratory to gain hands-on research experience. Historically, the laboratory’s summer research program has primarily served undergraduate and graduate students, with their internships complementing their fields of study. A few local high school students have participated in this program over the years through AFCEA International, a nonprofit providing educational and networking opportunities. But this summer, as the laboratory reopened its doors for the first time since the Covid-19 pandemic began, the program was officially expanded to offer on-site internships for local high schoolers.

“The internships provide students with an opportunity to explore STEM careers while they're still in high school, before they commit to an area of study in college,” says Gary Hackett, who manages the laboratory’s campus recruiting program, summer research program, and now the new high school internship program, in collaboration with human resources administrator Cheryl Bartolone, K–12 STEM outreach coordinator Chiamaka Agabsi-Porter, and K–12 STEM outreach administrator Daphne-Ann Vessiropoulos. “This opportunity goes beyond engaging in hands-on research to include mentoring on educational and career paths, developing interpersonal skills in a professional workplace environment, and networking with staff across the laboratory. Following their experience, hopefully students will consider the laboratory as a place for future employment.”

Agbasi-Porter and Vessiropoulos helped spread the word about the new opportunity to local-area high schools with which they had already established partnerships through two STEM programs they lead: Lincoln Laboratory Radar Introduction for Student Engineers (LLRISE) and Lincoln Laboratory Cipher (LLCipher). The initial application round was highly competitive; more than 100 high schoolers applied. Ultimately, laboratory staff selected four interns for the inaugural six-week program, which ran from July 6 to Aug. 12. To align the internships with student interests, staff accordingly placed the interns in laboratory research groups.

Inaugural interns

“During the interview process, I explained my interest in helping the environment,” says Chloe Kindangen, now a senior at Philips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. “I grew up in Jakarta, Indonesia, and the skies would always be really dark because of the factories. All the rivers are quite polluted, and it's heartbreaking to see because a lot of people depend on those waters for bathing and cooking. With the privilege of my education, I want to give back to my community.”

This summer, Kindangen interned in the laboratory's Advanced Sensor Systems and Test Beds Group, which develops radar, optical systems, and airborne surveillance platforms. Aggregating data from online sources, she assessed the environmental impacts of drones operating at the Pacific Missile Range Facility at Makaha Ridge in Hawaii. In particular, she researched the impacts on wildlife and considered how to mitigate risks posed by stimuli such as light and noise. Possible mitigations include changing the color of lights the drone uses and avoiding testing during critical times, like bird nesting season, as fledglings are more sensitive to light.

From her experience, Kindangen realized she enjoys conducting this kind of research, as opposed to hands-on lab-based projects. She remains interested in continuing on the environmental path, with plans to register for her school's environmental science class in the upcoming school year. Kindangen also took advantage of other opportunities at the laboratory, including its introduction to radar course, which sparked her interest in deriving math equations that represent real-world situations. 

“Coming out of this experience, I know I definitely want to do something STEM-related that involves reading through reports, understanding what they mean, and seeing where and how I can fill in the gaps,” says Kindangen. “In talking to some college interns on site, I realized I had this misconception that as a senior I should know exactly what major I want to declare and how it translates to a professional field. I now plan to attend a college with a core curriculum so I can expose myself to different fields and make sure I enjoy my major.”

Kindangen's mentor, Robert Natividad, sees the benefit of offering internships at this educational stage: “High school is an ideal time for students to have informative experiences that help them refine their understanding of where they would like to go in the future.”

Even for students who have already been exposed to a field of interest through classes or extracurricular activities, the internships enable them to experience the field in a professional workplace setting.

“I've been wanting to get more into electrical engineering,” says Mya Gordon, now a senior at Lexington High School in Lexington, Massachusetts. “I've taken one robotics class, participate in a robotics club outside of school, and do programming independently. The laboratory's internship program allowed me to apply these things to real projects and expose myself to different subfields and applications of electrical engineering.”

This summer, Gordon interned in the Tactical Networks Group, where researchers develop communication systems capable of effectively operating in congested and contested environments. She programmed a receiver for a wireless communications-based Battleship-like game, which the group demonstrated at the laboratory's open house event in September. Her two mentors, YaYa Brown and Nicholas Smith, provided a general overview of what she needed to do, but it was up to Gordon to structure and write the code. As Gordon explains, the game is a version of Battleship, but instead of ships existing at a certain location on a grid, their location is translated into a particular frequency and time. If an opponent sends a signal at that same frequency and time, they'll jam any messages coming from the ship.

“I've learned a lot about software-defined radios and object-oriented programming,” says Gordon. “My experience this summer solidified my desire to go to a college that offers internships and co-ops and pursue a STEM degree involving both hardware and software elements.”

The internship similarly pointed Ryan Wempen, now a junior at King School in Stamford, Connecticut, toward a college degree path. Mentored by Robert Palladino and Elisheva Shuter, Wempen interned in the Interceptor and Sensor Technology Group, which develops technologies that enable air and missile defense systems to identify, track, and intercept potential threats.

“The internship opened my eyes to aerospace engineering,” says Wempen, who for his project simulated the physics of hypersonic vehicle flight. Able to travel five times faster than the speed of sound, hypersonic vehicles could transform space exploration, military defense, and commercial air travel. But, as Palladino explains, vehicles traveling at hypersonic speeds experience extreme heat, making their design an engineering challenge.

With a grandfather who worked on NASA's Apollo mission, Wempen has long been drawn to aerospace. He applied to the internship through his school's engineering program, in which students pursue research opportunities and compete in science fairs. His interest in hypersonics took off through a wind tunnel project for a science fair. During his internship, he toured the laboratory's shock tube, a type of wind tunnel for exciting gases to the temperature and pressure conditions relevant to hypersonic flight.

“In researching my science fair project, I learned a lot about physics and math laws,” says Wempen, who is continuing to receive mentorship this school year and will come back to the laboratory next summer to continue his research. “As an intern, I was able to apply these theories to real-world scenarios relevant to an expanding field with lots of unanswered science questions. My mentors were quick to jump in when I didn't have the technical knowledge about specific subjects such as advanced calculus. The lab moves at a fast pace, even for interns, and it was exciting to see how quickly me and the other interns were able to learn and develop our projects.”

Veronica Cheng, now a senior at Westford Academy in Westford, Massachusetts, also felt proud about what she accomplished in a short amount of time. She came into her internship in the Advanced Concepts and Technologies Group — whose expertise is developing radar, electronic warfare, and system-of-systems technologies for air and missile defense — with limited knowledge of radars and not having taken any calculus courses. Mentor Kristan Tuttle helped bring her up to speed, and, on her own, Cheng read technical documentation on radars and user manuals for assembling evaluation boards with the firmware necessary for testing a thumb-size car radar. Armed with this knowledge, Cheng performed calculations needed to test the range of this radar. A corner reflector — a structure made of perpendicular, intersecting flat surfaces — served as the test target.

“I moved the corner reflector away from the radar at different distances to see when and where it would show up,” explains Cheng. “I had to figure out the dimensions of the reflector that would be compatible with the radar and interpret my results from the radar graphs I generated. I really like math and figuring out how things work based on calculations.”

For Cheng, the internship confirmed electrical engineering is the major she intends to pursue in college. Like Gordon, she had some exposure to the field through her participation on a robotics team, but she didn't know what it would entail in the real world.

Beyond the technical knowledge they acquired, the high schoolers developed a new set of social skills, particularly in networking with other interns and staff and presenting their research. Like the college summer research interns, the high schoolers were invited to several events, including presentations from the laboratory’s research divisions; a National Intern Day celebration; the I3C (for Intern Innovative Idea Challenge) shark tank, where teams of summer research students at the college level present their ideas to a judging panel of laboratory leadership; and an end-of-summer breakfast to engage with fellow interns. Their mentors also took them on tours of facilities and hosted lunch get-togethers with other group staff. 

Mentor reflections

Students weren't the only ones who benefited from the experience. The mentors note how mentoring enabled them to enhance their communication skills, reignite their passion for their respective field, and consider problems from new perspectives.

“It's been rewarding to learn how to define a problem for someone in a way that makes sense for them,” says Brown.

“Serving as mentors challenged us to make topics we work on, which almost always require a college education, accessible to a high schooler,” says Palladino.

“Seeing our work through an intern's eyes is a good reminder of how exciting and interesting it is,” adds Shuter. “It's cool to hear ideas totally out of the box and be asked questions that get us thinking, too.”

Though the internships have concluded, they are only the beginning of what the laboratory hopes will be long-term interaction and engagement.

“We aim to maintain relationships with the students over time, with groups encouraged to keep in touch with their mentees,” says Hackett.

In future years, the goal is to expand the program, recruiting more mentors across all of the laboratory's R&D areas to serve more students. For information about the summer 2023 program, contact Gary Hackett.

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3 Questions: Supporting student veterans at MIT

Last spring, Liam Gale joined the MIT Office of the Vice Chancellor’s staff in a newly created role to provide services geared for student veterans and their families. As the program administrator for the Student Veteran Success (SVS) office, he helps them navigate the MIT and United States Veterans Affairs landscapes and develops programming to create community among this cohort. Gale knows the student veteran experience firsthand; he served in the U.S. Air Force for eight years before attending the University of Massachusetts at Lowell as an undergraduate. He also holds a master’s degree in social work from Simmons University.

Q: Can you paint a picture of the student veteran population that you serve?

A: It’s a small but diverse population. We have over 100 student veterans at MIT. This is in addition to the community of veterans who are staff, faculty, and instructors, and alumni across all schools and DLCs [departments, labs, and centers]. Some are serving right now in the National Guard, reserves, or are on active duty. And, we have over 100 military families, meaning spouses or children of those in the military, or veterans who are actually studying at MIT.

Many of our student veterans are in graduate programs, mostly MBA students at MIT Sloan. There are just a handful of undergraduates. In fact, I think one of the unique opportunities here at MIT is to figure out how we can increase veterans and active military on the undergrad side, and that's something that I am working on with the admissions office.

Our student veterans come from all branches and career fields in the military, from being a pilot to special operations to administrative. So it’s a wide range of career fields, which gives us a great mix of experiences that students bring to the table.

The diversity of backgrounds and experiences that these veterans bring to the classroom, to the lab, and to research and other academic pursuits, is incredibly valuable. And their ethos of service to the nation jibes perfectly with MIT’s own institutional aspirations.

Q: What is the student veteran experience like, and how is it unique? What kinds of issues do student veterans have to navigate?

A: I can say from my own experience that there is inevitably a little bit of anxiety and uncertainty when you are starting as a student veteran. You’re going into this new environment, and there are a lot of transitions involved in starting school. You’re starting off in a new career, adjusting to civilian life, and separating from the military, which has been your home base for at least several years. Some of our students are undergraduate students coming in after having served for four years. So they are, say, 23 years old, and they haven’t been in a classroom since high school. And now they’re at MIT, where it’s a whole different universe. Graduate student veterans have their own distinct issues to navigate, as they are typically older, are more likely to have families or other close ties, and have been away from a higher education and non-military environment for some time.

Also, it may take some time to make connections and find community, so it’s helpful to meet other student veterans who are going through the same thing. From my own experience, I wasn’t aware of other student veterans in my classes until a few weeks into the semester. So for me that adjustment took a little while but I did find my circle, my network, and that was a good resource for me. I think it gives students a lot of peace of mind to know that there is a group of people — whether it’s maybe a student organization like the Student Veterans Association or my office — that can help them manage and make that transition a little bit smoother.

Q: Your role is new at MIT. Can you explain the kinds of support and resources your office provides and why they are important?

A: Our office provides a range of services, such as helping students coordinate with student financial services, or interfacing with Veterans Affairs. And then there are other processes that student veterans may have to navigate. Some could get activated for deployment or disaster response, which requires taking certain steps like submitting a leave of absence and coordinating with the deans. And then to come back, you have to pause your education benefits. So there are moving parts to all of these scenarios, and we help students work through them.

One of our priorities is trying to increase visibility and recognition on campus for our student veteran population. One example of that is a Veterans Day program we are planning, which will be held on the evening of Nov. 10. MIT observes Veterans Day every year with the assistance of MIT’s ROTC program. But this year we’re planning a larger, more formal event and program, and we are excited to have Secretary of the Massachusetts Department of Veterans Services Cheryl Poppe and U.S.S. Constitution Commanding Officer Billie Farrell joining us. November is also a military family appreciation month, so one idea we are considering is printing out veteran-specific postcards that students can send home, to express appreciation for their families.

These are just a few examples. Since our office is new, our plans and priorities are still evolving. When I first started, I sent out a needs assessment to get a sense from the student veteran community of what kinds of programs and activities they’d like to see. I think a lot of the community would like more camaraderie-building activities, like maybe a river cruise or a sporting event — ways that we can get off campus and meet other veterans. I’m also working with students on professional development workshops and opportunities to engage with outside partners like Home Base at Mass General Hospital, a first-of-its-kind program in the United States that integrates clinical care, education, and research to heal the invisible wounds of war. It’s a great example of a community resource we can access, particularly in terms of mental health and mindfulness practices, that can help with the transition from the military to life as a student veteran.

I believe SVS is going to shift yearly, depending on the student population and what they need. So I plan to conduct surveys at the beginning of each academic year, to really get the pulse of the students and what they want and need.

I have to say, I’m really lucky to be able to partner with, and bounce ideas off of, other offices and programs here at MIT, like the Student Veterans Association and MIT’s Army, Navy, and Air Force ROTC programs. And since one-third of our population are dependents, I also collaborate with Spouses and Partners Connect and the Graduate Families program. All in all, I think SVS is off to a promising start. It’s a really exciting time to be here, because there are so many possibilities, and the work is very rewarding. I am also thankful for the supportive community at MIT; everyone who I have engaged with is determined to make the Institute a better place for our veterans, service members, and military family members.

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Inspiration at the atomic scale

To explain why he loves electron microscopy, Associate Professor James LeBeau uses an analogy: He likens the technique, which uses beams of electrons to illuminate materials at a scale thousands of times smaller than conventional microscopes, to the inverse of astronomy.

“It’s discovering things that no human has ever seen before that really captures the imagination,” LeBeau says. “There is a beauty to the way atoms are arranged in materials, particularly at defects, which give rise to all sorts of material behavior.”

LeBeau has used that passion to develop new techniques for collecting and interpreting data in electron microscopy that can be used to describe materials more comprehensively. He’s applied those techniques to explain materials’ behavior in fields from electronics and optics to energy storage, quantum computing, and more.

“Beyond explaining material properties, there’s also a significant computational component to electron microscopy as it’s used to analyze data that may have been overlooked previously and to make conclusions about the data in new ways. And, with the creation of the college of computing, it’s an exciting time to be at MIT,” he says.

Discovering a passion

LeBeau became interested in engineering while helping his father build and repair things around the house, and he discovered a love for science at a young age.

“Science can provide an explanation of the world around us beyond supernatural beliefs,” LeBeau says. “For me, science was about making sense of the world.”

LeBeau first learned about materials science through the technical high school he attended in Indiana. But it wasn’t until he was an undergraduate at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York that a few pivotal experiences helped set his course in life.

During his first year, he participated in a project using data science to predict material properties.

“After that I was hooked, and at that point I knew I wanted to go the academic route,” he recalls. “Just being able to explore things and have that academic freedom really appealed to me.”

A few years later, in 2005, LeBeau participated in a summer research program for undergraduates at what is now the Materials Research Laboratory at MIT. The experience, in which he integrated biopolymers into a casting process, stoked his interest in using materials science for sustainability. The passion of the researchers around MIT also left a lasting impression on him.

Finally, as a senior, LeBeau got his first taste of electron microscopy.

“We'd be in the lab in the middle of the night analyzing these materials, and that excitement caught my attention pretty early on,” LeBeau says. “It didn't really matter how much I was working — I loved doing it, and that set the stage for the rest of my career.”

During his PhD at the University of California at Santa Barbara, LeBeau was part of a team that showed that scanning transmission electron microscopy theory and experiment are in very good agreement and, in turn, that attograms (one millionth of a trillionth of a gram) of material could be weighed directly from electron microscopy images without the need for external microscope calibration standards.

LeBeau also discovered a passion for cycling through the mountains near UC Barbara’s campus, an activity he continues by biking thousands of miles a year, including to MIT nearly every day regardless of the weather.

After his PhD, LeBeau accepted a faculty position at North Carolina State University, where he worked for eight years before a similar position opened up at MIT in 2019.

Since his move to MIT, LeBeau has helped the Institute adopt state-of-the-art electron microscopy equipment that researchers from across campus have taken advantage of in MIT.nano and elsewhere.

“As an electron microscopist, the equipment I use is extremely expensive to maintain and necessitates that it becomes a shared resource. I’m happy that’s the case because ultimately users from across campus benefit from these tools and advance their science through this shared infrastructure,” LeBeau says. “More broadly, the microscope routinely challenges what people thought they knew about the materials they are studying. The results are always exciting.”

Creativity and quantification

When it’s his group’s turn on the microscope, LeBeau says they try to go after hard problems that require new ways of collecting and interpreting data.

“We choose questions that are not easy to answer through other methods and that require new ways to extract information from our datasets to make conclusions,” LeBeau says.

One type of material LeBeau has studied is relaxor ferroelectrics, which are used for applications including ultrasounds, actuators, and energy storage. The materials have been studied for decades but are extremely heterogeneous at the nanoscale, making it difficult to explain their electromechanical properties. By analyzing the materials’ structure using new electron microscopy techniques, LeBeau’s group was able to explain its properties in a way that could help create more sustainable versions of the material, which currently contain lead.

“Impact is always at the forefront of everything we do,” LeBeau explains. “When we go after problems, the application space is very important because it tells us if the insights can change the way an entire space operates.”

One area of LeBeau’s research explores ways to use machine learning to help the microscope collect data more quickly than a human could.

“Transmission electron microscopy in general is often a very slow technique,” LeBeau explains. “But you can imagine a case where a self-driving microscope is able to align a microscope and sample much faster, and in a much more reproducible way, than a human can. Doing so would enable us to collect a full statistical description of the material. That's where machine learning can play a role: in pulling more data out of what we've already acquired but also in the acquisition itself.”

Indeed, making electron microscopy more quantitative and reproducible has been a theme of LeBeau’s career. But he doesn’t believe quantifying something comes at the expense of creativity.

“Science is truly a creative outlet,” LeBeau says. “The creativity comes from not only creating new experiment design or theories, but also from deciding how to present your data in visually appealing and informative ways. There’s a major creative element to what we do.”

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New research collaboration aims to tackle global societal challenges through design

At a signing ceremony last week, leaders from the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, the MIT Morningside Academy for Design (MAD) and the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) announced the Hasso Plattner Institute-MIT Research Program on Designing for Sustainability. This research collaboration, funded by the Hasso Plattner Foundation, is an eight-year program to drive joint scientific research at both institutes in sustainable design, innovation, and digital technologies, as well as in translating research results into practice.

Through this engagement, MIT and HPI aim to tackle global challenges as expressed in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The program will connect faculty and students from both institutions, with the intention of having the most significant possible societal impact.

“We are very pleased to embark on this significant research initiative with the Hasso Plattner Institute,” says Hashim Sarkis, dean of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning. “Addressing the world’s large-scale societal challenges requires work across disciplines and institutions, and we welcome the opportunity to engage with this leading research center. We are grateful to the Hasso Plattner Foundation for making this collaboration possible.”

The MIT Morningside Academy for Design, a new Institute-wide hub for cross-disciplinary education, research, and innovation, will administer the collaboration and ensure the program's reach across MIT. Faculty leaders at MAD and HPI will oversee the research funding application process as well as other activities of the program.

The Hasso Plattner Institute, based in Potsdam, Germany, is an international center for digital engineering, advancing research and education in IT systems engineering, data engineering, cyber security, entrepreneurship, and digital health.

The HPI School of Design Thinking is Europe’s first innovation school for university students. PhD candidates conduct research at the HPI Research Schools in Potsdam and its branches in Cape Town, Haifa, Irvine, and Nanjing.

“This cooperation brings new opportunities for research and our students,” says Christoph Meinel, professor and managing director at HPI, and head of the department of Internet Technologies and Systems. “It will give impulses to academia as well as into practice. At the same time, it will closely connect PhD students of both institutions through joint research in workshops and exchange programs.”

Program participants will conduct research in basic and applied design thinking and innovation. Design is understood broadly to include design research and thinking, as well as the use of creativity in addressing challenges in disciplines such as computer science and entrepreneurship, all with consideration of human and social impacts.

Funded researchers study the complex interaction between members of multidisciplinary teams challenged to deliver breakthrough product, service, and business-model sustainable design innovations. Applied design thinking research will focus primarily on topics from among the 17 SDGs, including health, education, energy, and climate action. Innovation research is targeted on the creation of high-impact products and startups (product and venture design) that translate research into practice.

“We are thrilled to collaborate with HPI to apply the power of design to sustainability and digital technologies,” says John Ochsendorf, the Class of 1942 Professor and a professor of architecture and of civil and environmental engineering at MIT, and director of the Morningside Academy. “By working together, the research talents of students and other researchers at HPI and MIT can accelerate design innovations for a low-carbon economy.”

“Alongside artificial intelligence, design research is a key driver for innovation in sustainability,” says Ralf Herbrich, professor and managing director of HPI. He also serves as head of the department of AI and Sustainability at HPI and a steering committee member. “Bringing talented PhD students of our two institutions together that are committed to the SDGs will foster breakthroughs in this societally very important area.”

The Hasso Plattner Foundation supports the research collaboration that is set up over eight years, with an interim evaluation after four years. The funded program will entail semi-annual research workshops, quarterly virtual seminars, and student exchanges between both institutes.

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