Study suggests energy-efficient route to capturing and converting CO2

In the race to draw down greenhouse gas emissions around the world, scientists at MIT are looking to carbon-capture technologies to decarbonize the most stubborn industrial emitters.

Steel, cement, and chemical manufacturing are especially difficult industries to decarbonize, as carbon and fossil fuels are inherent ingredients in their production. Technologies that can capture carbon emissions and convert them into forms that feed back into the production process could help to reduce the overall emissions from these “hard-to-abate” sectors.

But thus far, experimental technologies that capture and convert carbon dioxide do so as two separate processes, that themselves require a huge amount of energy to run. The MIT team is looking to combine the two processes into one integrated and far more energy-efficient system that could potentially run on renewable energy to both capture and convert carbon dioxide from concentrated, industrial sources.

In a study appearing today in ACS Catalysis, the researchers reveal the hidden functioning of how carbon dioxide can be both captured and converted through a single electrochemical process. The process involves using an electrode to attract carbon dioxide released from a sorbent, and to convert it into a reduced, reusable form.

Others have reported similar demonstrations, but the mechanisms driving the electrochemical reaction have remained unclear. The MIT team carried out extensive experiments to determine that driver, and found that, in the end, it came down to the partial pressure of carbon dioxide. In other words, the more pure carbon dioxide that makes contact with the electrode, the more efficiently the electrode can capture and convert the molecule.

Knowledge of this main driver, or “active species,” can help scientists tune and optimize similar electrochemical systems to efficiently capture and convert carbon dioxide in an integrated process.

The study’s results imply that, while these electrochemical systems would probably not work for very dilute environments (for instance, to capture and convert carbon emissions directly from the air), they would be well-suited to the highly concentrated emissions generated by industrial processes, particularly those that have no obvious renewable alternative.

“We can and should switch to renewables for electricity production. But deeply decarbonizing industries like cement or steel production is challenging and will take a longer time,” says study author Betar Gallant, the Class of 1922 Career Development Associate Professor at MIT. “Even if we get rid of all our power plants, we need some solutions to deal with the emissions from other industries in the shorter term, before we can fully decarbonize them. That’s where we see a sweet spot, where something like this system could fit.”

The study’s MIT co-authors are lead author and postdoc Graham Leverick and graduate student Elizabeth Bernhardt, along with Aisyah Illyani Ismail, Jun Hui Law, Arif Arifutzzaman, and Mohamed Kheireddine Aroua of Sunway University in Malaysia.

Breaking bonds

Carbon-capture technologies are designed to capture emissions, or “flue gas,” from the smokestacks of power plants and manufacturing facilities. This is done primarily using large retrofits to funnel emissions into chambers filled with a “capture” solution — a mix of amines, or ammonia-based compounds, that chemically bind with carbon dioxide, producing a stable form that can be separated out from the rest of the flue gas.

High temperatures are then applied, typically in the form of fossil-fuel-generated steam, to release the captured carbon dioxide from its amine bond. In its pure form, the gas can then be pumped into storage tanks or underground, mineralized, or further converted into chemicals or fuels.

“Carbon capture is a mature technology, in that the chemistry has been known for about 100 years, but it requires really large installations, and is quite expensive and energy-intensive to run,” Gallant notes. “What we want are technologies that are more modular and flexible and can be adapted to more diverse sources of carbon dioxide. Electrochemical systems can help to address that.”

Her group at MIT is developing an electrochemical system that both recovers the captured carbon dioxide and converts it into a reduced, usable product. Such an integrated system, rather than a decoupled one, she says, could be entirely powered with renewable electricity rather than fossil-fuel-derived steam.

Their concept centers on an electrode that would fit into existing chambers of carbon-capture solutions. When a voltage is applied to the electrode, electrons flow onto the reactive form of carbon dioxide and convert it to a product using protons supplied from water. This makes the sorbent available to bind more carbon dioxide, rather than using steam to do the same.

Gallant previously demonstrated this electrochemical process could work to capture and convert carbon dioxide into a solid carbonate form.

“We showed that this electrochemical process was feasible in very early concepts,” she says. “Since then, there have been other studies focused on using this process to attempt to produce useful chemicals and fuels. But there’s been inconsistent explanations of how these reactions work, under the hood.”

Solo CO2

In the new study, the MIT team took a magnifying glass under the hood to tease out the specific reactions driving the electrochemical process. In the lab, they generated amine solutions that resemble the industrial capture solutions used to extract carbon dioxide from flue gas. They methodically altered various properties of each solution, such as the pH, concentration, and type of amine, then ran each solution past an electrode made from silver — a metal that is widely used in electrolysis studies and known to efficiently convert carbon dioxide to carbon monoxide. They then measured the concentration of carbon monoxide that was converted at the end of the reaction, and compared this number against that of every other solution they tested, to see which parameter had the most influence on how much carbon monoxide was produced.

In the end, they found that what mattered most was not the type of amine used to initially capture carbon dioxide, as many have suspected. Instead, it was the concentration of solo, free-floating carbon dioxide molecules, which avoided bonding with amines but were nevertheless present in the solution. This “solo-CO2” determined the concentration of carbon monoxide that was ultimately produced.

“We found that it’s easier to react this ‘solo’ CO2, as compared to CO2 that has been captured by the amine,” Leverick offers. “This tells future researchers that this process could be feasible for industrial streams, where high concentrations of carbon dioxide could efficiently be captured and converted into useful chemicals and fuels.”

“This is not a removal technology, and it’s important to state that,” Gallant stresses. “The value that it does bring is that it allows us to recycle carbon dioxide some number of times while sustaining existing industrial processes, for fewer associated emissions. Ultimately, my dream is that electrochemical systems can be used to facilitate mineralization, and permanent storage of CO2 — a true removal technology. That’s a longer-term vision. And a lot of the science we’re starting to understand is a first step toward designing those processes.”

This research is supported by Sunway University in Malaysia.

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Devices offers long-distance, low-power underwater communication

MIT researchers have demonstrated the first system for ultra-low-power underwater networking and communication, which can transmit signals across kilometer-scale distances.

This technique, which the researchers began developing several years ago, uses about one-millionth the power that existing underwater communication methods use. By expanding their battery-free system’s communication range, the researchers have made the technology more feasible for applications such as aquaculture, coastal hurricane prediction, and climate change modeling.

“What started as a very exciting intellectual idea a few years ago — underwater communication with a million times lower power — is now practical and realistic. There are still a few interesting technical challenges to address, but there is a clear path from where we are now to deployment,” says Fadel Adib, associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and director of the Signal Kinetics group in the MIT Media Lab.

Underwater backscatter enables low-power communication by encoding data in sound waves that it reflects, or scatters, back toward a receiver. These innovations enable reflected signals to be more precisely directed at their source.

Due to this “retrodirectivity,” less signal scatters in the wrong directions, allowing for more efficient and longer-range communication.

When tested in a river and an ocean, the retrodirective device exhibited a communication range that was more than 15 times farther than previous devices. However, the experiments were limited by the length of the docks available to the researchers.

To better understand the limits of underwater backscatter, the team also developed an analytical model to predict the technology’s maximum range. The model, which they validated using experimental data, showed that their retrodirective system could communicate across kilometer-scale distances.

The researchers shared these findings in two papers which will be presented at this year’s ACM SIGCOMM and MobiCom conferences. Adib, senior author on both papers, is joined on the SIGCOMM paper by co-lead authors Aline Eid, a former postdoc who is now an assistant professor at the University of Michigan, and Jack Rademacher, a research assistant; as well as research assistants Waleed Akbar and Purui Wang, and postdoc Ahmed Allam. The MobiCom paper is also written by co-lead authors Akbar and Allam.

Communicating with sound waves

Underwater backscatter communication devices utilize an array of nodes made from “piezoelectric” materials to receive and reflect sound waves. These materials produce an electric signal when mechanical force is applied to them.

When sound waves strike the nodes, they vibrate and convert the mechanical energy to an electric charge. The nodes use that charge to scatter some of the acoustic energy back to the source, transmitting data that a receiver decodes based on the sequence of reflections.

But because the backscattered signal travels in all directions, only a small fraction reaches the source, reducing the signal strength and limiting the communication range.

To overcome this challenge, the researchers leveraged a 70-year-old radio device called a Van Atta array, in which symmetric pairs of antennas are connected in such a way that the array reflects energy back in the direction it came from.

But connecting piezoelectric nodes to make a Van Atta array reduces their efficiency. The researchers avoided this problem by placing a transformer between pairs of connected nodes. The transformer, which transfers electric energy from one circuit to another, allows the nodes to reflect the maximum amount of energy back to the source.

“Both nodes are receiving and both nodes are reflecting, so it is a very interesting system. As you increase the number of elements in that system, you build an array that allows you to achieve much longer communication ranges,” Eid explains.

In addition, they used a technique called cross-polarity switching to encode binary data in the reflected signal. Each node has a positive and a negative terminal (like a car battery), so when the positive terminals of two nodes are connected and the negative terminals of two nodes are connected, that reflected signal is a “bit one.”

But if the researchers switch the polarity, and the negative and positive terminals are connected to each other instead, then the reflection is a “bit zero.”

“Just connecting the piezoelectric nodes together is not enough. By alternating the polarities between the two nodes, we are able to transmit data back to the remote receiver,” Rademacher explains.

When building the Van Atta array, the researchers found that if the connected nodes were too close, they would block each other’s signals. They devised a new design with staggered nodes that enables signals to reach the array from any direction. With this scalable design, the more nodes an array has, the greater its communication range.

They tested the array in more than 1,500 experimental trials in the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Falmouth, Massachusetts, in collaboration with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The device achieved communication ranges of 300 meters, more than 15 times longer than they previously demonstrated.

However, they had to cut the experiments short because they ran out of space on the dock.

Modeling the maximum

That inspired the researchers to build an analytical model to determine the theoretical and practical communication limits of this new underwater backscatter technology.

Building off their group’s work on RFIDs, the team carefully crafted a model that captured the impact of system parameters, like the size of the piezoelectric nodes and the input power of the signal, on the underwater operation range of the device.

“It is not a traditional communication technology, so you need to understand how you can quantify the reflection. What are the roles of the different components in that process?” Akbar says.

For instance, the researchers needed to derive a function that captures the amount of signal reflected out of an underwater piezoelectric node with a specific size, which was among the biggest challenges of developing the model, he adds.

They used these insights to create a plug-and-play model into a which a user could enter information like input power and piezoelectric node dimensions and receive an output that shows the expected range of the system.

They evaluated the model on data from their experimental trials and found that it could accurately predict the range of retrodirected acoustic signals with an average error of less than one decibel.

Using this model, they showed that an underwater backscatter array can potentially achieve kilometer-long communication ranges.

“We are creating a new ocean technology and propelling it into the realm of the things we have been doing for 6G cellular networks. For us, it is very rewarding because we are starting to see this now very close to reality,” Adib says.

The researchers plan to continue studying underwater backscatter Van Atta arrays, perhaps using boats so they could evaluate longer communication ranges. Along the way, they intend to release tools and datasets so other researchers can build on their work. At the same time, they are beginning to move toward commercialization of this technology.

“Limited range has been an open problem in underwater backscatter networks, preventing them from being used in real-world applications. This paper takes a significant step forward in the future of underwater communication, by enabling them to operate on minimum energy while achieving long range,” says Omid Abari, assistant professor of computer science at the University of California at Los Angeles, who was not involved with this work. “The paper is the first to bring Van Atta Reflector array technique into underwater backscatter settings and demonstrate its benefits in improving the communication range by orders of magnitude. This can take battery-free underwater communication one step closer to reality, enabling applications such as underwater climate change monitoring and coastal monitoring.”

This research was funded, in part, by the Office of Naval Research, the Sloan Research Fellowship, the National Science Foundation, the MIT Media Lab, and the Doherty Chair in Ocean Utilization.

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Molecule reduces inflammation in Alzheimer’s models

Though drug developers have achieved some progress in treating Alzheimer’s disease with medicines that reduce amyloid-beta protein, other problems of the disease, including inflammation, continue unchecked. In a new study, scientists at The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT describe a candidate drug that in human cell cultures and Alzheimer’s mouse models reduced inflammation and improved memory.

The target of the new “A11” molecule is a genetic transcription factor called PU.1. Prior research has shown that amid Alzheimer’s disease, PU.1 becomes an overzealous director of inflammatory gene expression in the brain’s microglia immune cells. A11 suppresses this problematic PU.1 activity, the new research shows, by recruiting other proteins that repress the inflammatory genes PU.1 works to express. But because A11 concentrates mostly in the brain and does not reduce PU.1 levels, it does not appear to disrupt PU.1’s other job, which is to ensure the production of a wide variety of blood cells.

“Inflammation is a major component of Alzheimer’s disease pathology that has been especially hard to treat,” says study senior author Li-Huei Tsai, Picower Professor of Neuroscience at MIT and director of The Picower Institute and MIT’s Aging Brain Initiative. “This preclinical study demonstrates that A11 reduces inflammation in human microglia-like cells, as well as in multiple mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease, and significantly improves cognition in the mice. We believe A11 therefore merits further development and testing.”

Tsai and Elizabeta Gjoneska of the National Institutes of Health are co-corresponding authors of the study published Aug. 29 in the Journal of Experimental Medicine.

As a postdoc, Gjoneska co-led a 2015 study that implicated PU.1 as a regulator of errant microglia inflammation in a mouse model of Alzheimer’s disease. That research was a collaboration between Tsai’s lab and that of MIT computer science professor Manolis Kellis, co-led by former postdoc Andreas Pfenning, now a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University. Ever since then, Tsai has been seeking a safe way to restore PU.1 activity to healthier levels.

The work described in the new paper, led by Picower Institute research scientist William Ralvenius, starts with experiments to further validate that PU.1 would be a therapeutically meaningful target. To do that, the scientists compared gene expression in immune cells of postmortem brain samples from Alzheimer’s patients and mouse models and matching non-Alzheimer’s controls. The comparisons showed that Alzheimer’s effects major changes in microglial gene expression and that an increase in PU.1 binding to inflammatory gene targets was a significant component of that change. Moreover, they showed that reducing PU.1 activity in a mouse model of Alzheimer’s reduced inflammation and neurodegeneration, the death of neurons.

Screening success

Genetically knocking down PU.1 in the body is not a viable therapeutic strategy given its importance in normal healthy function. The team therefore screened more than 58,000 small molecules from libraries of FDA-approved drugs and novel chemicals to see if any could safely and significantly reduce key inflammation and Alzheimer’s-related genes regulated by by PU.1 in cell cultures. After several rounds of increasingly stringent screening, they narrowed the field down to six chemicals. A11 was by far the most potent among them.

They tested the effects of A11 doses on the function of human microglia-like cells cultured from patient stem cells. When they exposed the microglia-like cells to immune molecules that typically trigger inflammation, cells dosed with A11 exhibited reduced expression and secretion of inflammatory cytokines and less of the cell body shape changes associated with microglia inflammatory responses. The cells also showed less accumulation of lipid molecules, another sign of inflammatory activation. Looking at gene expression patterns, the scientists observed that A11-treated cells exposed to inflammatory triggers behaved much like unperturbed microglia, suggesting that A11 helps prevent microglia from overreacting to inflammatory cues.

Two more lab tests aimed at understanding how A11 exerts its effects revealed that it doesn’t change PU.1 levels. Instead it counteracts PU.1 activity by recruiting several proteins including MECP2, HDAC1, SIN3A and DMNT3A, known to repress expression of its targets. Essentially, amid Alzheimer’s disease, A11 tamps down what PU.1 amps up.

“A11 represents a first-in-class molecule that converts PU.1 from a transcriptional activator to a transcriptional repressor, resulting in a controlled state of microglial inflammation,” the authors write.

Mice in mazes

Having established that A11 reduced inflammatory activity in microglia and determined how that happens, the team focused on whether it worked as a medicine in mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease.

Pharmacological tests indicated that A11 is readily cleared from tissues and is capable of reaching brain cells. Moreover, in healthy mice the chemical successfully crossed the blood-brain barrier and remained in brain cells much longer than anywhere else.

Finally, the team tested the effects of the drugs on Alzheimer’s disease pathology and symptoms in three mouse strains that each model different aspects of Alzheimer’s disease: CK-p25 mice (severe neurodegeneration), Tau P301S transgenic mice (tauopathy), and 5XFAD mice (amyloid pathology).

Male and female CK-p25 mice dosed with A11 showed less inflammatory response among microglia and astrocyte cells and lost fewer neurons than untreated controls. TauP301S Tg mice responded similarly, also exhibiting a significant reduction of phosphorylated tau protein in the hippocampus region of the brain, which is an essential area for memory. In 5XFAD mice, amyloid was significantly reduced.

The team subjected the Tau P301S Tg and CK-p25 mice to mazes designed to test their short-term working memory and longer-term learning. In both models and on both tests, A11-treated mice performed significantly better than untreated controls. For example, in the “Morris Water Maze,” where mice have to learn the location of a submerged platform that allows them to rest, treated CK-p25 mice learned much faster than untreated ones.

Much more testing needs to be done before A11 could become an approved medicine, Tsai says, but she notes that it could complement the new treatments that target amyloid.

“Given that A11 acts via a distinct mechanism from existing AD [Alzheimer's disease] therapeutics, A11 could be used alone or in combination with approved therapeutics to provide improved treatment options for neurodegenerative diseases,” the authors conclude.

In addition to Tsai, Gjoneska, and Ralvenius, the paper’s other authors are Alison E. Mungenast, Hannah Woolf, Margaret M. Huston, Tyler Z. Gillingham, Stephen K. Godin, Jay Penney, Hugh P. Cam, Fan Gao, Celia G. Fernandez, Barbara Czako, Yaima Lightfoot, William J. Ray, Adrian Beckmann, Alison M. Goate, Edoardo Marcora, Carmen Romero-Molina, Pinar Ayata, and Anne Schaefer.

The Robert A. and Renee E. Belfer Family Foundation and the National Institutes of Health funded the research. Additional support came from The JPB Foundation and The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, The Halis Family Foundation, Lester A. Gimpelson and Jay L. and Caroll Miller.

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3 Questions: How are cities managing record-setting temperatures?

July 2023 was the hottest month globally since humans began keeping records. People all over the U.S. experienced punishingly high temperatures this summer. In Phoenix, there were a record-setting 31 consecutive days with a high temperature of 110 degrees Fahrenheit or more. July was the hottest month on record in Miami. A scan of high temperatures around the country often yielded some startlingly high numbers: Dallas, 110 F; Reno, 108 F; Salt Lake City, 106 F; Portland, 105 F.

Climate change is a global and national crisis that cannot be solved by city governments alone, but cities suffering from it can try to enact new policies reducing emissions and adapting its effects. MIT’s David Hsu, an associate professor of urban and environmental planning, is an expert on metropolitan and regional climate policy. In one 2017 paper, Hsu and some colleagues estimated how 11 major U.S. cities could best reduce their carbon dioxide emissions, through energy-efficient home construction and retrofitting, improvements in vehicle gas mileage, more housing density, robust transit systems, and more. As we near the end of this historically hot summer, MIT News talked to Hsu about what cities are now doing in response to record heat, and the possibilities for new policy measures.

Q: We’ve had record-setting temperatures in many cities across the U.S. this summer. Dealing with climate change certainly isn’t just the responsibility of those cities, but what have they been doing to make a difference, to the extent they can?

A: I think this is a very top-of-mind question because even 10 or 15 years ago, we talked about adapting to a changed climate future, which seemed further off. But literally every week this summer we can refer to [dramatic] things that are already happening, clearly linked to climate change, and are going to get worse. We had wildfire smoke in the Northeast and throughout the Eastern Seaboard in June, this tragic wildfire in Hawaii that led to more deaths than any other wildfire in the U.S., [plus record high temperatures]. A lot of city leaders face climate challenges they thought were maybe 20 or 30 years in the future, and didn’t expect to see happen with this severity and intensity.

One thing you’re seeing is changes in governance. A lot of cities have recently appointed a chief heat officer. Miami and Phoenix have them now, and this is someone responsible for coordinating response to heat waves, which turn out to be one of the biggest killers among climatological effects. There is an increasing realization not only among local governments, but insurance companies and the building industry, that flooding is going to affect many places. We have already seen flooding in the seaport area in Boston, the most recently built part of our city. In some sense just the realization among local governments, insurers, building owners, and residents, that some risks are here and now, already is changing how people think about those risks.

Q: To what extent does a city being active about climate change at least signal to everyone, at the state or national level, that we have to do more? At the same time, some states are reacting against cities that are trying to institute climate initiatives and trying to prevent clean energy advances. What is possible at this point?

A: We have this very large, heterogeneous and polarized country, and we have differences between states and within states in how they’re approaching climate change. You’ve got some cities trying to enact things like natural gas bans, or trying to limit greenhouse gas emissions, with some state governments trying to preempt them entirely. I think cities have a role in showing leadership. But one thing I harp on, having worked in city government myself, is that sometimes in cities we can be complacent. While we pride ourselves on being centers of innovation and less per-capita emissions — we’re using less than rural areas, and you’ll see people celebrating New York City as the greenest in the world — cities are responsible for consumption that produces a majority of emissions in most countries. If we’re going to decarbonize society, we have to get to zero altogether, and that requires cities to act much more aggressively.

There is not only a pessimistic narrative. With the Inflation Reduction Act, which is rapidly accelerating the production of renewable energy, you see many of those subsidies going to build new manufacturing in red states. There’s a possibility people will see there are plenty of better paying, less dangerous jobs in [clean energy]. People don’t like monopolies wherever they live, so even places people consider fairly conservative would like local control [of energy], and that might mean greener jobs and lower prices. Yes, there is a doomscrolling loop of thinking polarization is insurmountable, but I feel surprisingly optimistic sometimes.

Large parts of the Midwest, even in places people think of as being more conservative, have chosen to build a lot of wind energy, partly because it’s profitable. Historically, some farmers were self-reliant and had wind power before the electrical grid came. Even now in some places where people don’t want to address climate change, they’re more than happy to have wind power.

Q: You’ve published work on which cities can pursue which policies to reduce emissions the most: better housing construction, more transit, more fuel-efficient vehicles, possibly higher housing density, and more. The exact recipe varies from place to place. But what are the common threads people can think about?

A: It’s important to think about what the status quo is, and what we should be preparing for. The status quo simply doesn’t serve large parts of the population right now. Heat risk, flooding, and wildfires all disproportionately affect populations that are already vulnerable. If you’re elderly, or lack access to mobility, information, or warnings, you probably have a lower risk of surviving a wildfire. Many people do not have high-quality housing, and may be more exposed to heat or smoke. We know the climate has already changed, and is going to change more, but we have failed to prepare for foreseeable changes that already here. Lots of things that are climate-related but not only about climate change, like affordable housing, transportation, energy access for everyone so they can have services like cooking and the internet — those are things that we can change going forward. The hopeful message is: Cities are always changing and being built, so we should make them better. The urgent message is: We shouldn’t accept the status quo.

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“We don’t give assignments here”

For 85 years, MIT’s Hobby Shop has provided a space for MIT’s community members to build their passion projects. For the last 65 of those years, that work has taken place in a low-ceilinged, windowless room in the basement of Building W31. Now the Hobby Shop is opening in a new location on Massachusetts Avenue that’s sure to increase its visibility — not to mention the sun exposure of its users.

The new MIT Hobby Shop, which officially opens tomorrow in Building N51, features new and upgraded machinery as well as an additional 1,000 square feet of workspace. In fact, if not for some durable equipment and the familiar faces of Hobby Shop Director Hayami Arakawa and Technical Instructor Coby Unger, the shop would be virtually unrecognizable.

“It’s super different,” says MIT Space Administrator Greg Raposa, who helped orchestrate the move. “The floor plan before was sort of a narrow rectangle. The new floor plan is a large, wide-open space with an office in the center. It’s more visible from the street, and it’s much brighter. They’ve got everything they need now, including a new welding setup, and we’re collecting sawdust in the back of the building. It’s what you would build if you’re going to build a hobby shop from scratch.”

The Hobby Shop is arguably MIT’s most democratic makerspace on campus: Students, professors, alumni, and staff can begin booking time on machines as soon as they’re finished with safety training. The reservations are first come, first served, in contrast to other makerspaces on campus that prioritize class projects or are only open to students from specific departments.

“The shop was founded by students who wanted to work on their hobbies and projects of their own personal interest as opposed to academic work,” Arakawa says. “By and large we’ve kept that spirit. Whatever your personal interests, we provide the space, machinery, and materials needed to refine your idea and work on it without time restraints or grades. We don’t give assignments here.”

Most projects make use of the shop’s woodworking equipment, although it also has metal working tools, CNC machines, a welding room, and 3D printers. Arakawa says many people build pieces of furniture that serve as gifts.

“MIT’s motto is ‘mind and hand’; we add heart into that,” Arakawa says. “It’s not just about getting something hacked together to show proof of concept. It’s about building something a little more refined, so it’s a much more finished product at the end of the day.”

People who frequent the shop say its welcoming mantra gives it a more supportive, community feel.

“Because it’s not tied to a class or school it has the widest range of people of any makerspace on campus,” says Robin Willis SM ’23, who frequented the old space and helped the Hobby Shop design its new orientation process this summer. “Some shops are only available to mechanical engineering or architecture students, but the Hobby Shop is for everyone: staff, students, alumni, anyone who needs it. It’s also a really friendly environment. If you have questions or want to know what someone’s working on, they’re usually really excited to tell you about it, because it’s a personal project.”

The Hobby Shop’s move was first conceived of about three years ago and came to fruition as after the MIT Museum moved to a new building in Kendall Square last year, opening up the first floor of its old home in N-51, which had served as the museum store.

“We had always dreamed of moving the Hobby Shop out of there when there was an opportunity,” Raposa says. “We were also looking to get someone into the [old museum’s] first floor to keep that area of campus a vital part of community.”

“The architects really wanted to make this a very lively space as far as visuals go,” Arakawa says. “I think they accomplished a good 90 percent of what we suggested.”

Some pieces of equipment were simply moved into the new space, but most were either refurbished or replaced, including five machines in the wood shop. In some cases, the Hobby Shop was able to trade equipment with other labs and departments in MIT. They also received donated equipment as other groups were upgrading and were able to purchase equipment through funds raised from an enthusiastic donor base.

“Having been around for 85 years, I wanted to build a shop that would last another 100 years,” Arakawa says. “Some of the machines were completely rebuilt. They can’t make them like they used to.”

The Hobby Shop should also benefit from its proximity to other shops. Makers will be a short walk or a flight of stairs away from the School of Architecture’s wood shop as well as makerspaces run by D-Lab, the Edgerton Center, the MIT Morningside Academy for Design, the MIT Electronics Research Society (MITERS), and MIT’s Integrated Design and Management program.

Nowadays everyone involved in the move is excited to welcome MIT’s community to its new maker home — and everyone is talking about the natural light of the new space.

“There were days in the winter where I’d go into work in the dark and I’d come out and it’s dark again — Not anymore!” Arakawa says. “We’ll definitely be more high-profile. We have a lot of people already from the general population of Cambridge coming through asking, ‘What’s this?’”

The shop holds 30-minute tours on Tuesdays at 1 p.m. It will also host a celebration of its new location on Saturday, Sept. 30. Beyond that, Arakawa is simply excited to get back to work.

“The students keep us going, and there’s really never a dull moment here,” Arakawa says. “There’s never a day without at least half a dozen or a dozen projects going on. Whether they’re old members or brand new, I am 100 percent confident people will love this space.”

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Fast-tracking fusion energy’s arrival with AI and accessibility

As the impacts of climate change continue to grow, so does interest in fusion’s potential as a clean energy source. While fusion reactions have been studied in laboratories since the 1930s, there are still many critical questions scientists must answer to make fusion power a reality, and time is of the essence. As part of their strategy to accelerate fusion energy’s arrival and reach carbon neutrality by 2050, the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) has announced new funding for a project led by researchers at MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) and four collaborating institutions.

Cristina Rea, a research scientist and group leader at the PSFC, will serve as the primary investigator for the newly funded three-year collaboration to pilot the integration of fusion data into a system that can be read by AI-powered tools. The PSFC, together with scientists from the College of William & Mary, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Auburn University, and the nonprofit HDF Group, plan to create a holistic fusion data platform, the elements of which could offer unprecedented access for researchers, especially underrepresented students. The project aims to encourage diverse participation in fusion and data science, both in academia and the workforce, through outreach programs led by the group’s co-investigators, of whom four out of five are women. 

The DoE’s award, part of a $29 million funding package for seven projects across 19 institutions, will support the group’s efforts to distribute data produced by fusion devices like the PSFC’s Alcator C-Mod, a donut-shaped “tokamak” that utilized powerful magnets to control and confine fusion reactions. Alcator C-Mod operated from 1991 to 2016 and its data are still being studied, thanks in part to the PSFC’s commitment to the free exchange of knowledge.

Currently, there are nearly 50 public experimental magnetic confinement-type fusion devices; however, both historical and current data from these devices can be difficult to access. Some fusion databases require signing user agreements, and not all data are catalogued and organized the same way. Moreover, it can be difficult to leverage machine learning, a class of AI tools, for data analysis and to enable scientific discovery without time-consuming data reorganization. The result is fewer scientists working on fusion, greater barriers to discovery, and a bottleneck in harnessing AI to accelerate progress.

The project’s proposed data platform addresses technical barriers by being FAIR — Findable, Interoperable, Accessible, Reusable — and by adhering to UNESCO’s Open Science (OS) recommendations to improve the transparency and inclusivity of science; all of the researchers’ deliverables will adhere to FAIR and OS principles, as required by the DoE. The platform’s databases will be built using MDSplusML, an upgraded version of the MDSplus open-source software developed by PSFC researchers in the 1980s to catalogue the results of Alcator C-Mod’s experiments. Today, nearly 40 fusion research institutes use MDSplus to store and provide external access to their fusion data. The release of MDSplusML aims to continue that legacy of open collaboration.

The researchers intend to address barriers to participation for women and disadvantaged groups not only by improving general access to fusion data, but also through a subsidized summer school that will focus on topics at the intersection of fusion and machine learning, which will be held at William and Mary for the next three years.

Of the importance of their research, Rea says, “This project is about responding to the fusion community’s needs and setting ourselves up for success. Scientific advancements in fusion are enabled via multidisciplinary collaboration and cross-pollination, so accessibility is absolutely essential. I think we all understand now that diverse communities have more diverse ideas, and they allow faster problem-solving.”

The collaboration’s work also aligns with vital areas of research identified in the International Atomic Energy Agency’s “AI for Fusion” Coordinated Research Project (CRP). Rea was selected as the technical coordinator for the IAEA’s CRP emphasizing community engagement and knowledge access to accelerate fusion research and development. In a letter of support written for the group’s proposed project, the IAEA stated that, “the work [the researchers] will carry out […] will be beneficial not only to our CRP but also to the international fusion community in large.”

PSFC Director and Hitachi America Professor of Engineering Dennis Whyte adds, “I am thrilled to see PSFC and our collaborators be at the forefront of applying new AI tools while simultaneously encouraging and enabling extraction of critical data from our experiments.”

“Having the opportunity to lead such an important project is extremely meaningful, and I feel a responsibility to show that women are leaders in STEM,” says Rea. “We have an incredible team, strongly motivated to improve our fusion ecosystem and to contribute to making fusion energy a reality.”

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Putting public service into practice

Salomé Otero ’23 doesn’t mince words about the social impact internship she had in 2022. “It was transformational for me,” she says.

Otero, who majored in management with a concentration in education, always felt that education would play some role in her career path after MIT, but she wasn’t sure how. That all changed her junior year, when she got an email from the Priscilla King Gray Public Service Center (PKG Center) about an internship at The Last Mile, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that provides education and technology training for justice-impacted individuals.

Otero applied and was selected as a web curriculum and re-entry intern at The Last Mile the summer between her junior and senior year — an eye-opening experience that cemented her post-graduation plans. “You hear some amazing stories, like this person was incarcerated before the iPhone had come out. Now he’s a software developer,” she explains. “And for me, the idea of using computer science education for good appealed to me on many fronts. But even if I hadn’t gotten the opportunity to work at The Last Mile, the fact that I saw a job description for this role and learned that companies have the resources to make a difference ... I didn’t know that there were people and organizations dedicating their time and energy into this.”

She was so inspired that, when she returned for her senior year, Otero found work at two education labs at MIT, completed another social impact internship over Independent Activities Period (IAP) at G{Code}, an education nonprofit that provides computer science education to women and nonbinary people of color, and decided to apply to graduate school. “I can tell you with 100 percent certainty that I would not be pursuing a PhD in education policy right now if it weren’t for the PKG Center,” she says. She will begin her doctorate this fall.

Otero’s experience doesn’t surprise Jill Bassett, associate dean and director of the PKG Center. “MIT students are deeply concerned about the world’s most challenging problems,” she says. “And social impact internships are an incredible way for them to leverage their unique talents and skills to help create meaningful change while broadening their perspectives and discovering potential career paths.”

“There’s a lot more out there”

Founded 35 years ago, the PKG Center offers a robust portfolio of experiential learning programs broadly focused on four themes: climate change, health equity, racial justice, and tech for social good. The Center’s Social Impact Internship Program provides funded internships to students interested in working with government agencies, nonprofits, and social ventures. Students reap rich rewards from these experiences, including learning ways to make social change, informing their academic journey and career path, and gaining valuable professional skills.

“It was a really good learning opportunity,” says Juliet Liao ’23, a graduate of MIT’s Naval ROTC program who commissioned as a submarine officer in June. She completed a social impact internship with the World Wildlife Fund, where she researched greenhouse gas emissions related to the salmon industry. “I haven’t had much exposure to what work outside of the Navy looks like and what I’m interested in working on. And I really liked the science-based approach to mitigating greenhouse gas emissions.”

Amina Abdalla, a rising junior in biological engineering, arrived at MIT with a strong interest in health care and determined to go to medical school. But her internship at MassHealth, the Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program provider for the state of Massachusetts, broadened her understanding of the complexity of the health care system and introduced her to many career options that she didn’t know existed.

“They did coffee chats between interns and various people who work in MassHealth, such as doctors, lawyers, policy advocates, and consultants. There’s a lot more out there that one can do with the degree that they get and the knowledge they gain. It just depends on your interests, and I came away from that really excited,” she says. The experience inspired her to take a class in health policy before she graduates. “I know I want to be a doctor and I have a lot of interest in science in general, but if I could do some kind of public sector impact with that knowledge, I would definitely be interested in doing that.”

Social impact internships also provide an opportunity for students to hone their analytical, technical, and people skills. Selma Sharaf ’22 worked on developing a first-ever climate action plan for Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina, one of two all-women’s historically Black colleges and universities in the United States. She conducted research and stakeholder interviews with nonprofits; sustainability directors at similar colleges; local utility companies; and faculty, staff, and students at Bennett.

“Our external outreach efforts with certain organizations allowed me to practice having conversations about energy justice and climate issues with people who aren’t already in this space. I learned how useful it can be to not only discuss the overall issues of climate change and carbon emissions, but to also zoom in on more relatable personal-level impacts,” she says. Sharaf is currently working in clean energy consulting and plans to pursue a master’s degree at Stanford University’s Atmosphere/Energy Program this fall.

Working with “all stars”

Organizations that partner with the PKG Center are often constrained by limited technical and financial resources. Since the program is funded by the PKG Center, these internships help expand their organizational capacity and broaden their impact; MIT students can take on projects that might not otherwise get done, and they also bring fresh skills and ideas to the organization — and the zeal to pursue those ideas.

Emily Moberg ’11, PhD ’16 got involved with the social impact internship programs in 2020. Moberg, who is the director of Scope 3 Carbon Measurement and Mitigation at the World Wildlife Fund, has worked with 20 MIT students since then, including Liao. The body of work that Liao and several other interns completed has been published in the form of 10 briefs on mitigating greenhouse gas emissions from key commodities, such as soy, beef, coffee, and palm oil.

“Social impact interns bring technical skills, deep curiosity, and tenacity,” Moberg says. “I’ve worked with students across many majors, including computer and materials science; all of them bring a new, fresh perspective to our problems and often sophisticated quantitative ability. Their presence often helps us to investigate new ideas or expand a project. In some cases, interns have proposed new projects and ideas themselves. The support from the PKG Center for us to host these interns has been critical, especially for these new explorations.”

Anne Carrington Hayes, associate professor and executive director of the Global Leadership and Interdisciplinary Studies program at Bennett College, calls the MIT interns she’s worked with since 2021 “all stars.” The work Sharaf and three other students performed has culminated in a draft climate action plan that will inform campus renovations and other measures that will be implemented at the college in the coming years.

“They have been foundational in helping me to research, frame, collect data, and engage with our students and the community around issues of environmental justice and sustainability, particularly from the lens of what would be impactful and meaningful for women of color at Bennett College,” she says.

Balancing supply and demand

Bassett says that the social impact internship program has grown exponentially in the past few years. Before the pandemic, the program served five students from summer 2019 to spring 2020; it now serves about 125 students per year. Over that time, funding has become a significant limiting factor; demand for internships was three times the number of available internships in summer 2022, and five times the supply during IAP 2023.

“MIT students have no shortage of opportunities available to them in the private sector, yet students are seeking social impact internships because they want to apply their skills to issues that they care about,” says Julie Uva, the PKG Center’s program administrator for social impact internships and employment. “We want to ensure every student who wants a social impact internship can access that experience.”

MIT has taken note of this financial shortfall: the Task Force 2021 report recommended fundraising to alleviate the under-supply of social impact experiential learning opportunities (ELOs), and MIT’s Fast Forward Climate Action Plan called on the Institute to make a climate or clean-energy ELOs available to every undergraduate who wants one. As a result, the Office of Experiential Learning is working with Resource Development to raise new funding to support many more opportunities, which would be available to students not only through the PKG Center but also other offices and programs, such as MIT D-Lab, Undergraduate Research Opportunity Programs, MISTI, and the Environmental Solutions Initiative, among others.

That’s welcome news to Salomé Otero. She’s familiar with the Institute’s fundraising efforts, having worked as one of the Alumni Association’s Tech Callers. Now, as an alumna herself and a former social impact intern, she has an appreciation for the power of philanthropy.

“MIT is ahead of the game compared to so many universities, in so many ways,” she says. “But if they want to continue to do that in the most impactful way possible, I think investing in ideas and missions like the PKG Center is the way to go. So when that call comes, I’ll tell whoever is working that night shift, ‘Yeah, I’ll donate to the PKG Center.’”

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