Co-creating climate futures with real-time data and spatial storytelling

Virtual story worlds and game engines aren’t just for video games anymore. They are now tools for scientists and storytellers to digitally twin existing physical spaces and then turn them into vessels to dream up speculative climate stories and build collective designs of the future. That’s the theory and practice behind the MIT WORLDING initiative.

Twice this year, WORLDING matched world-class climate story teams working in XR (extended reality) with relevant labs and researchers across MIT. One global group returned for a virtual gathering online in partnership with Unity for Humanity, while another met for one weekend in person, hosted at the MIT Media Lab.

“We are witnessing the birth of an emergent field that fuses climate science, urban planning, real-time 3D engines, nonfiction storytelling, and speculative fiction, and it is all fueled by the urgency of the climate crises,” says Katerina Cizek, lead designer of the WORLDING initiative at the Co-Creation Studio of MIT Open Documentary Lab. “Interdisciplinary teams are forming and blossoming around the planet to collectively imagine and tell stories of healthy, livable worlds in virtual 3D spaces and then finding direct ways to translate that back to earth, literally.”

At this year’s virtual version of WORLDING, five multidisciplinary teams were selected from an open call. In a week-long series of research and development gatherings, the teams met with MIT scientists, staff, fellows, students, and graduates, as well as other leading figures in the field. Guests ranged from curators at film festivals such as Sundance and Venice, climate policy specialists, and award-winning media creators to software engineers and renowned Earth and atmosphere scientists. The teams heard from MIT scholars in diverse domains, including geomorphology, urban planning as acts of democracy, and climate researchers at MIT Media Lab.

Mapping climate data

“We are measuring the Earth's environment in increasingly data-driven ways. Hundreds of terabytes of data are taken every day about our planet in order to study the Earth as a holistic system, so we can address key questions about global climate change,” explains Rachel Connolly, an MIT Media Lab research scientist focused in the “Future Worlds” research theme, in a talk to the group. “Why is this important for your work and storytelling in general? Having the capacity to understand and leverage this data is critical for those who wish to design for and successfully operate in the dynamic Earth environment.”

Making sense of billions of data points was a key theme during this year’s sessions. In another talk, Taylor Perron, an MIT professor of Earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences, shared how his team uses computational modeling combined with many other scientific processes to better understand how geology, climate, and life intertwine to shape the surfaces of Earth and other planets. His work resonated with one WORLDING team in particular, one aiming to digitally reconstruct the pre-Hispanic Lake Texcoco — where current day Mexico City is now situated — as a way to contrast and examine the region’s current water crisis.

Democratizing the future

While WORLDING approaches rely on rigorous science and the interrogation of large datasets, they are also founded on democratizing community-led approaches.

MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning graduate Lafayette Cruise MCP '19 met with the teams to discuss how he moved his own practice as a trained urban planner to include a futurist component involving participatory methods. “I felt we were asking the same limited questions in regards to the future we were wanting to produce. We're very limited, very constrained, as to whose values and comforts are being centered. There are so many possibilities for how the future could be.”

Scaling to reach billions

This work scales from the very local to massive global populations. Climate policymakers are concerned with reaching billions of people in the line of fire. “We have a goal to reach 1 billion people with climate resilience solutions,” says Nidhi Upadhyaya, deputy director at Atlantic Council's Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center. To get that reach, Upadhyaya is turning to games. “There are 3.3 billion-plus people playing video games across the world. Half of these players are women. This industry is worth $300 billion. Africa is currently among the fastest-growing gaming markets in the world, and 55 percent of the global players are in the Asia Pacific region.” She reminded the group that this conversation is about policy and how formats of mass communication can be used for policymaking, bringing about change, changing behavior, and creating empathy within audiences.

Socially engaged game development is also connected to education at Unity Technologies, a game engine company. “We brought together our education and social impact work because we really see it as a critical flywheel for our business,” said Jessica Lindl, vice president and global head of social impact/education at Unity Technologies, in the opening talk of WORLDING. “We upscale about 900,000 students, in university and high school programs around the world, and about 800,000 adults who are actively learning and reskilling and upskilling in Unity. Ultimately resulting in our mission of the ‘world is a better place with more creators in it,’ millions of creators who reach billions of consumers — telling the world stories, and fostering a more inclusive, sustainable, and equitable world.”

Access to these technologies is key, especially the hardware. “Accessibility has been missing in XR,” explains Reginé Gilbert, who studies and teaches accessibility and disability in user experience design at New York University. “XR is being used in artificial intelligence, assistive technology, business, retail, communications, education, empathy, entertainment, recreation, events, gaming, health, rehabilitation meetings, navigation, therapy, training, video programming, virtual assistance wayfinding, and so many other uses. This is a fun fact for folks: 97.8 percent of the world hasn't tried VR [virtual reality] yet, actually.”

Meanwhile, new hardware is on its way. The WORLDING group got early insights into the highly anticipated Apple Vision Pro headset, which promises to integrate many forms of XR and personal computing in one device. “They're really pushing this kind of pass-through or mixed reality,” said Dan Miller, a Unity engineer on the poly spatial team, collaborating with Apple, who described the experience of the device as “You are viewing the real world. You're pulling up windows, you're interacting with content. It’s a kind of spatial computing device where you have multiple apps open, whether it's your email client next to your messaging client with a 3D game in the middle. You’re interacting with all these things in the same space and at different times.”

“WORLDING combines our passion for social-impact storytelling and incredible innovative storytelling,” said Paisley Smith of the Unity for Humanity Program at Unity Technologies. She added, “This is an opportunity for creators to incubate their game-changing projects and connect with experts across climate, story, and technology.”

Meeting at MIT

In a new in-person iteration of WORLDING this year, organizers collaborated closely with Connolly at the MIT Media Lab to co-design an in-person weekend conference Oct. 25 - Nov. 7 with 45 scholars and professionals who visualize climate data at NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, planetariums, and museums across the United States.

A participant said of the event, “An incredible workshop that had had a profound effect on my understanding of climate data storytelling and how to combine different components together for a more [holistic] solution.”

“With this gathering under our new Future Worlds banner,” says Dava Newman, director of the MIT Media Lab and Apollo Program Professor of Astronautics chair, “the Media Lab seeks to affect human behavior and help societies everywhere to improve life here on Earth and in worlds beyond, so that all — the sentient, natural, and cosmic — worlds may flourish.” 

“WORLDING’s virtual-only component has been our biggest strength because it has enabled a true, international cohort to gather, build, and create together. But this year, an in-person version showed broader opportunities that spatial interactivity generates — informal Q&As, physical worksheets, and larger-scale ideation, all leading to deeper trust-building,” says WORLDING producer Srushti Kamat SM ’23.

The future and potential of WORLDING lies in the ongoing dialogue between the virtual and physical, both in the work itself and in the format of the workshops.

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Co-creating climate futures with real-time data and spatial storytelling

Virtual story worlds and game engines aren’t just for video games anymore. They are now tools for scientists and storytellers to digitally twin existing physical spaces and then turn them into vessels to dream up speculative climate stories and build collective designs of the future. That’s the theory and practice behind the MIT WORLDING initiative.

Twice this year, WORLDING matched world-class climate story teams working in XR (extended reality) with relevant labs and researchers across MIT. One global group returned for a virtual gathering online in partnership with Unity for Humanity, while another met for one weekend in person, hosted at the MIT Media Lab.

“We are witnessing the birth of an emergent field that fuses climate science, urban planning, real-time 3D engines, nonfiction storytelling, and speculative fiction, and it is all fueled by the urgency of the climate crises,” says Katerina Cizek, lead designer of the WORLDING initiative at the Co-Creation Studio of MIT Open Documentary Lab. “Interdisciplinary teams are forming and blossoming around the planet to collectively imagine and tell stories of healthy, livable worlds in virtual 3D spaces and then finding direct ways to translate that back to earth, literally.”

At this year’s virtual version of WORLDING, five multidisciplinary teams were selected from an open call. In a week-long series of research and development gatherings, the teams met with MIT scientists, staff, fellows, students, and graduates, as well as other leading figures in the field. Guests ranged from curators at film festivals such as Sundance and Venice, climate policy specialists, and award-winning media creators to software engineers and renowned Earth and atmosphere scientists. The teams heard from MIT scholars in diverse domains, including geomorphology, urban planning as acts of democracy, and climate researchers at MIT Media Lab.

Mapping climate data

“We are measuring the Earth's environment in increasingly data-driven ways. Hundreds of terabytes of data are taken every day about our planet in order to study the Earth as a holistic system, so we can address key questions about global climate change,” explains Rachel Connolly, an MIT Media Lab research scientist focused in the “Future Worlds” research theme, in a talk to the group. “Why is this important for your work and storytelling in general? Having the capacity to understand and leverage this data is critical for those who wish to design for and successfully operate in the dynamic Earth environment.”

Making sense of billions of data points was a key theme during this year’s sessions. In another talk, Taylor Perron, an MIT professor of Earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences, shared how his team uses computational modeling combined with many other scientific processes to better understand how geology, climate, and life intertwine to shape the surfaces of Earth and other planets. His work resonated with one WORLDING team in particular, one aiming to digitally reconstruct the pre-Hispanic Lake Texcoco — where current day Mexico City is now situated — as a way to contrast and examine the region’s current water crisis.

Democratizing the future

While WORLDING approaches rely on rigorous science and the interrogation of large datasets, they are also founded on democratizing community-led approaches.

MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning graduate Lafayette Cruise MCP '19 met with the teams to discuss how he moved his own practice as a trained urban planner to include a futurist component involving participatory methods. “I felt we were asking the same limited questions in regards to the future we were wanting to produce. We're very limited, very constrained, as to whose values and comforts are being centered. There are so many possibilities for how the future could be.”

Scaling to reach billions

This work scales from the very local to massive global populations. Climate policymakers are concerned with reaching billions of people in the line of fire. “We have a goal to reach 1 billion people with climate resilience solutions,” says Nidhi Upadhyaya, deputy director at Atlantic Council's Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center. To get that reach, Upadhyaya is turning to games. “There are 3.3 billion-plus people playing video games across the world. Half of these players are women. This industry is worth $300 billion. Africa is currently among the fastest-growing gaming markets in the world, and 55 percent of the global players are in the Asia Pacific region.” She reminded the group that this conversation is about policy and how formats of mass communication can be used for policymaking, bringing about change, changing behavior, and creating empathy within audiences.

Socially engaged game development is also connected to education at Unity Technologies, a game engine company. “We brought together our education and social impact work because we really see it as a critical flywheel for our business,” said Jessica Lindl, vice president and global head of social impact/education at Unity Technologies, in the opening talk of WORLDING. “We upscale about 900,000 students, in university and high school programs around the world, and about 800,000 adults who are actively learning and reskilling and upskilling in Unity. Ultimately resulting in our mission of the ‘world is a better place with more creators in it,’ millions of creators who reach billions of consumers — telling the world stories, and fostering a more inclusive, sustainable, and equitable world.”

Access to these technologies is key, especially the hardware. “Accessibility has been missing in XR,” explains Reginé Gilbert, who studies and teaches accessibility and disability in user experience design at New York University. “XR is being used in artificial intelligence, assistive technology, business, retail, communications, education, empathy, entertainment, recreation, events, gaming, health, rehabilitation meetings, navigation, therapy, training, video programming, virtual assistance wayfinding, and so many other uses. This is a fun fact for folks: 97.8 percent of the world hasn't tried VR [virtual reality] yet, actually.”

Meanwhile, new hardware is on its way. The WORLDING group got early insights into the highly anticipated Apple Vision Pro headset, which promises to integrate many forms of XR and personal computing in one device. “They're really pushing this kind of pass-through or mixed reality,” said Dan Miller, a Unity engineer on the poly spatial team, collaborating with Apple, who described the experience of the device as “You are viewing the real world. You're pulling up windows, you're interacting with content. It’s a kind of spatial computing device where you have multiple apps open, whether it's your email client next to your messaging client with a 3D game in the middle. You’re interacting with all these things in the same space and at different times.”

“WORLDING combines our passion for social-impact storytelling and incredible innovative storytelling,” said Paisley Smith of the Unity for Humanity Program at Unity Technologies. She added, “This is an opportunity for creators to incubate their game-changing projects and connect with experts across climate, story, and technology.”

Meeting at MIT

In a new in-person iteration of WORLDING this year, organizers collaborated closely with Connolly at the MIT Media Lab to co-design an in-person weekend conference Oct. 25 - Nov. 7 with 45 scholars and professionals who visualize climate data at NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, planetariums, and museums across the United States.

A participant said of the event, “An incredible workshop that had had a profound effect on my understanding of climate data storytelling and how to combine different components together for a more [holistic] solution.”

“With this gathering under our new Future Worlds banner,” says Dava Newman, director of the MIT Media Lab and Apollo Program Professor of Astronautics chair, “the Media Lab seeks to affect human behavior and help societies everywhere to improve life here on Earth and in worlds beyond, so that all — the sentient, natural, and cosmic — worlds may flourish.” 

“WORLDING’s virtual-only component has been our biggest strength because it has enabled a true, international cohort to gather, build, and create together. But this year, an in-person version showed broader opportunities that spatial interactivity generates — informal Q&As, physical worksheets, and larger-scale ideation, all leading to deeper trust-building,” says WORLDING producer Srushti Kamat SM ’23.

The future and potential of WORLDING lies in the ongoing dialogue between the virtual and physical, both in the work itself and in the format of the workshops.

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Technique could efficiently solve partial differential equations for numerous applications

In fields such as physics and engineering, partial differential equations (PDEs) are used to model complex physical processes to generate insight into how some of the most complicated physical and natural systems in the world function.

To solve these difficult equations, researchers use high-fidelity numerical solvers, which can be very time-consuming and computationally expensive to run. The current simplified alternative, data-driven surrogate models, compute the goal property of a solution to PDEs rather than the whole solution. Those are trained on a set of data that has been generated by the high-fidelity solver, to predict the output of the PDEs for new inputs. This is data-intensive and expensive because complex physical systems require a large number of simulations to generate enough data. 

In a new paper, “Physics-enhanced deep surrogates for partial differential equations,” published in December in Nature Machine Intelligence, a new method is proposed for developing data-driven surrogate models for complex physical systems in such fields as mechanics, optics, thermal transport, fluid dynamics, physical chemistry, and climate models.

The paper was authored by MIT’s professor of applied mathematics Steven G. Johnson along with Payel Das and Youssef Mroueh of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab and IBM Research; Chris Rackauckas of Julia Lab; and Raphaël Pestourie, a former MIT postdoc who is now at Georgia Tech. The authors call their method "physics-enhanced deep surrogate" (PEDS), which combines a low-fidelity, explainable physics simulator with a neural network generator. The neural network generator is trained end-to-end to match the output of the high-fidelity numerical solver.

“My aspiration is to replace the inefficient process of trial and error with systematic, computer-aided simulation and optimization,” says Pestourie. “Recent breakthroughs in AI like the large language model of ChatGPT rely on hundreds of billions of parameters and require vast amounts of resources to train and evaluate. In contrast, PEDS is affordable to all because it is incredibly efficient in computing resources and has a very low barrier in terms of infrastructure needed to use it.”

In the article, they show that PEDS surrogates can be up to three times more accurate than an ensemble of feedforward neural networks with limited data (approximately 1,000 training points), and reduce the training data needed by at least a factor of 100 to achieve a target error of 5 percent. Developed using the MIT-designed Julia programming language, this scientific machine-learning method is thus efficient in both computing and data.

The authors also report that PEDS provides a general, data-driven strategy to bridge the gap between a vast array of simplified physical models with corresponding brute-force numerical solvers modeling complex systems. This technique offers accuracy, speed, data efficiency, and physical insights into the process.

Says Pestourie, “Since the 2000s, as computing capabilities improved, the trend of scientific models has been to increase the number of parameters to fit the data better, sometimes at the cost of a lower predictive accuracy. PEDS does the opposite by choosing its parameters smartly. It leverages the technology of automatic differentiation to train a neural network that makes a model with few parameters accurate.”

“The main challenge that prevents surrogate models from being used more widely in engineering is the curse of dimensionality — the fact that the needed data to train a model increases exponentially with the number of model variables,” says Pestourie. “PEDS reduces this curse by incorporating information from the data and from the field knowledge in the form of a low-fidelity model solver.”

The researchers say that PEDS has the potential to revive a whole body of the pre-2000 literature dedicated to minimal models — intuitive models that PEDS could make more accurate while also being predictive for surrogate model applications.

"The application of the PEDS framework is beyond what we showed in this study,” says Das. “Complex physical systems governed by PDEs are ubiquitous, from climate modeling to seismic modeling and beyond. Our physics-inspired fast and explainable surrogate models will be of great use in those applications, and play a complementary role to other emerging techniques, like foundation models."

The research was supported by the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab and the U.S. Army Research Office through the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies. 

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Stripes in a flowing liquid crystal suggest a route to “chiral” fluids

Hold your hands out in front of you, and no matter how you rotate them, it’s impossible to superimpose one over the other. Our hands are a perfect example of chirality — a geometric configuration by which an object cannot be superimposed onto its mirror image.

Chirality is everywhere in nature, from our hands to the arrangement of our internal organs to the spiral structure of DNA. Chiral molecules and materials have been the key to many drug therapies, optical devices, and functional metamaterials. Scientists have until now assumed that chirality begets chirality — that is, chiral structures emerge from chiral forces and building blocks. But that assumption may need some retuning.

MIT engineers recently discovered that chirality can also emerge in an entirely nonchiral material, and through nonchiral means. In a study appearing today in Nature Communications, the team reports observing chirality in a liquid crystal — a material that flows like a liquid and has non ordered, crystal-like microstructure like a solid. They found that when the fluid flows slowly, its normally nonchiral microstructures spontaneously assemble into large, twisted, chiral structures. The effect is as if a conveyor belt of crayons, all symmetrically aligned, were to suddenly rearrange into large, spiral patterns once the belt reaches a certain speed.

The geometric transformation is unexpected, given that the liquid crystal is naturally nonchiral, or “achiral.” The team’s study thus opens a new path to generating chiral structures. The researchers envision that the structures, once formed, could serve as spiral scaffolds in which to assemble intricate molecular structures. The chiral liquid crystals could also be used as optical sensors, as their structural transformation would change the way they interact with light.

“This is exciting, because this gives us an easy way to structure these kinds of fluids,” says study co-author Irmgard Bischofberger, associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. “And from a fundamental level, this is a new way in which chirality can emerge.”

The study’s co-authors include lead author Qing Zhang PhD ’22, Weiqiang Wang and Rui Zhang of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, and Shuang Zhou of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Striking stripes

A liquid crystal is a phase of matter that embodies properties of both a liquid and a solid. Such in-between materials flow like liquid, and are molecularly structured like solids. Liquid crystals are used as the main element in pixels that make up LCD displays, as the symmetric alignment of their molecules can be uniformly switched with voltage to collectively create high-resolution images.

Bischofberger’s group at MIT studies how fluids and soft materials spontaneously form patterns in nature and in the lab. The team seeks to understand the mechanics underlying fluid transformations, which could be used to create new, reconfigurable materials.

In their new study, the researchers focused on a special type of nematic liquid crystal — a water-based fluid that contains microscopic, rod-like molecular structures. The rods normally align in the same direction throughout the fluid. Zhang was initially curious how the fluid would behave under various flow conditions.

“I tried this experiment for the first time at home, in 2020,” Zhang recalls. “I had samples of the fluid, and a small microscope, and one day I just set it to a low flow. When I came back, I saw this really striking pattern.”

She and her colleagues repeated her initial experiments in the lab. They fabricated a microfluidic channel out of two glass slides, separated by a very thin space, and connected to a main reservoir. The team slowly pumped samples of the liquid crystal through the reservoir and into the space between the plates, then took microscopy images of fluid as it flowed through.

Like Zhang’s initial experiments, the team observed an unexpected transformation: The normally uniform fluid began to form tiger-like stripes as it slowly moved through the channel.

“It was surprising that it formed any structure, but even more surprising once we actually knew what type of structure it formed,” Bischofberger says. “That’s where chirality comes in.”

Twist and flow

The team discovered that the fluid’s stripes were unexpectedly chiral, by using various optical and modeling techniques to effectively retrace the fluid’s flow. They observed that, when unmoving, the fluid’s microscopic rods are normally aligned in near-perfect formation. When the fluid is pumped through the channel quickly, the rods are in complete disarray. But at a slower, in-between flow, the structures start to wiggle, then progressively twist like tiny propellers, each one turning slightly more than the next.

If the fluid continues its slow flow, the twisting crystals assemble into large spiral structures that appear as stripes under the microscope.

“There’s this magic region, where if you just gently make them flow, they form these large spiral structures,” Zhang says.

The researchers modeled the fluid’s dynamics and found that the large spiral patterns emerged when the fluid arrived at a balance between two forces: viscosity and elasticity. Viscosity describes how easily a material flows, while elasticity is essentially how likely a material is to deform (for instance, how easily the fluid’s rods wiggle and twist).

“When these two forces are about the same, that’s when we see these spiral structures,” Bischofberger explains. “It’s kind of amazing that individual structures, on the order of nanometers, can assemble into much larger, millimeter-scale structures that are very ordered, just by pushing them a little bit out of equilibrium.”

The team realized that the twisted assemblages have a chiral geometry: If a mirror image was made of one spiral, it would not be possible to superimpose it over the original, no matter how the spirals were rearranged. The fact that the chiral spirals emerged from a nonchiral material, and through nonchiral means, is a first and points to a relatively simple way to engineer structured fluids.

“The results are indeed surprising and intriguing,” says Giuliano Zanchetta, associate professor at the University of Milan, who was not involved with the study. “It would be interesting to explore the boundaries of this phenomenon. I would see the reported chiral patterns as a promising way to periodically modulate optical properties at the microscale.”

“We now have some knobs to tune this structure,” Bischofberger says. “This might give us a new optical sensor that interacts with light in certain ways. It could also be used as scaffolds to grow and transport molecules for drug delivery. We’re excited to explore this whole new phase space.”

This research was supported, in part, by the U.S. National Science Foundation.

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Inhalable sensors could enable early lung cancer detection

Using a new technology developed at MIT, diagnosing lung cancer could become as easy as inhaling nanoparticle sensors and then taking a urine test that reveals whether a tumor is present.

The new diagnostic is based on nanosensors that can be delivered by an inhaler or a nebulizer. If the sensors encounter cancer-linked proteins in the lungs, they produce a signal that accumulates in the urine, where it can be detected with a simple paper test strip.

This approach could potentially replace or supplement the current gold standard for diagnosing lung cancer, low-dose computed tomography (CT). It could have an especially significant impact in low- and middle-income countries that don’t have widespread availability of CT scanners, the researchers say.

“Around the world, cancer is going to become more and more prevalent in low- and middle-income countries. The epidemiology of lung cancer globally is that it’s driven by pollution and smoking, so we know that those are settings where accessibility to this kind of technology could have a big impact,” says Sangeeta Bhatia, the John and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, and a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science.

Bhatia is the senior author of the paper, which appears today in Science Advances. Qian Zhong, an MIT research scientist, and Edward Tan, a former MIT postdoc, are the lead authors of the study.

Inhalable particles

To help diagnose lung cancer as early as possible, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force recommends that heavy smokers over the age of 50 undergo annual CT scans. However, not everyone in this target group receives these scans, and the high false-positive rate of the scans can lead to unnecessary, invasive tests.

Bhatia has spent the last decade developing nanosensors for use in diagnosing cancer and other diseases, and in this study, she and her colleagues explored the possibility of using them as a more accessible alternative to CT screening for lung cancer.

These sensors consist of polymer nanoparticles coated with a reporter, such as a DNA barcode, that is cleaved from the particle when the sensor encounters enzymes called proteases, which are often overactive in tumors. Those reporters eventually accumulate in the urine and are excreted from the body.

Previous versions of the sensors, which targeted other cancer sites such as the liver and ovaries, were designed to be given intravenously. For lung cancer diagnosis, the researchers wanted to create a version that could be inhaled, which could make it easier to deploy in lower resource settings.

“When we developed this technology, our goal was to provide a method that can detect cancer with high specificity and sensitivity, and also lower the threshold for accessibility, so that hopefully we can improve the resource disparity and inequity in early detection of lung cancer,” Zhong says.

To achieve that, the researchers created two formulations of their particles: a solution that can be aerosolized and delivered with a nebulizer, and a dry powder that can be delivered using an inhaler.

Once the particles reach the lungs, they are absorbed into the tissue, where they encounter any proteases that may be present. Human cells can express hundreds of different proteases, and some of them are overactive in tumors, where they help cancer cells to escape their original locations by cutting through proteins of the extracellular matrix. These cancerous proteases cleave DNA barcodes from the sensors, allowing the barcodes to circulate in the bloodstream until they are excreted in the urine.

In the earlier versions of this technology, the researchers used mass spectrometry to analyze the urine sample and detect DNA barcodes. However, mass spectrometry requires equipment that might not be available in low-resource areas, so for this version, the researchers created a lateral flow assay, which allows the barcodes to be detected using a paper test strip.

The researchers designed the strip to detect up to four different DNA barcodes, each of which indicates the presence of a different protease. No pre-treatment or processing of the urine sample is required, and the results can be read about 20 minutes after the sample is obtained.

“We were really pushing this assay to be point-of-care available in a low-resource setting, so the idea was to not do any sample processing, not do any amplification, just to be able to put the sample right on the paper and read it out in 20 minutes,” Bhatia says.

Accurate diagnosis

The researchers tested their diagnostic system in mice that are genetically engineered to develop lung tumors similar to those seen in humans. The sensors were administered 7.5 weeks after the tumors started to form, a time point that would likely correlate with stage 1 or 2 cancer in humans.

In their first set of experiments in the mice, the researchers measured the levels of 20 different sensors designed to detect different proteases. Using a machine learning algorithm to analyze those results, the researchers identified a combination of just four sensors that was predicted to give accurate diagnostic results. They then tested that combination in the mouse model and found that it could accurately detect early-stage lung tumors.

For use in humans, it’s possible that more sensors might be needed to make an accurate diagnosis, but that could be achieved by using multiple paper strips, each of which detects four different DNA barcodes, the researchers say.

The researchers now plan to analyze human biopsy samples to see if the sensor panels they are using would also work to detect human cancers. In the longer term, they hope to perform clinical trials in human patients. A company called Sunbird Bio has already run phase 1 trials on a similar sensor developed by Bhatia’s lab, for use in diagnosing liver cancer and a form of hepatitis known as nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH).

In parts of the world where there is limited access to CT scanning, this technology could offer a dramatic improvement in lung cancer screening, especially since the results can be obtained during a single visit.

“The idea would be you come in and then you get an answer about whether you need a follow-up test or not, and we could get patients who have early lesions into the system so that they could get curative surgery or lifesaving medicines,” Bhatia says.

The research was funded by the Johnson & Johnson Lung Cancer Initiative, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Koch Institute Support (core) Grant from the National Cancer Institute, and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

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Improving patient safety using principles of aerospace engineering

Approximately 13 billion laboratory tests are administered every year in the United States, but not every result is timely or accurate. Laboratory missteps prevent patients from receiving appropriate, necessary, and sometimes lifesaving care. These medical errors are the third-leading cause of death in the nation. 

To help reverse this trend, a research team from the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro) Engineering Systems Lab and Synensys, a safety management contractor, examined the ecosystem of diagnostic laboratory data. Their findings, including six systemic factors contributing to patient hazards in laboratory diagnostics tests, offer a rare holistic view of this complex network — not just doctors and lab technicians, but also device manufacturers, health information technology (HIT) providers, and even government entities such as the White House. By viewing the diagnostic laboratory data ecosystem as an integrated system, an approach based on systems theory, the MIT researchers have identified specific changes that can lead to safer behaviors for health care workers and healthier outcomes for patients. 

A report of the study, which was conducted by AeroAstro Professor Nancy Leveson, who serves as head of the System Safety and Cybersecurity group, along with Research Engineer John Thomas and graduate students Polly Harrington and Rodrigo Rose, was submitted to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration this past fall. Improving the infrastructure of laboratory data has been a priority for the FDA, who contracted the study through Synensis.

Hundreds of hazards, six causes

In a yearlong study that included more than 50 interviews, the Leveson team found the diagnostic laboratory data ecosystem to be vast yet fractured. No one understood how the whole system functioned or the totality of substandard treatment patients received. Well-intentioned workers were being influenced by the system to carry out unsafe actions, MIT engineers wrote.  

Test results sent to the wrong patients, incompatible technologies that strain information sharing between the doctor and lab technician, and specimens transported to the lab without guarantees of temperature control were just some of the hundreds of hazards the MIT engineers identified. The sheer volume of potential risks, known as unsafe control actions (UCAs), should not dissuade health care stakeholders from seeking change, Harrington says. 

“While there are hundreds of UCAs, there are only six systemic factors that are causing these hazards,” she adds. “Using a system-based methodology, the medical community can address many of these issues with one swoop.” 

Four of the systemic factors — decentralization, flawed communication and coordination, insufficient focus on safety-related regulations, and ambiguous or outdated standards — reflect the need for greater oversight and accountability. The two remaining systemic factors — misperceived notions of risk and lack of systems theory integration — call for a fundamental shift in perspective and operations. For instance, the medical community, including doctors themselves, tends to blame physicians when errors occur. Understanding the real risk levels associated with laboratory data and HIT might prompt more action for change, the report’s authors wrote. 

“There’s this expectation that doctors will catch every error,” Harrington says. “It’s unreasonable and unfair to expect that, especially when they have no reason to assume the data they're getting is flawed.”

Think like an engineer

Systems theory may be a new concept to the medical community, but the aviation industry has used it for decades. 

“After World War II, there were so many commercial aviation crashes that the public was scared to fly,” says Leveson, a leading expert in system and software safety. In the early 2000s, she developed the System-Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA), a technique based on systems theory that offers insights into how complex systems can become safer. Researchers used STPA in its report to the FDA. “Industry and government worked together to put controls and error reporting in place. Today, there are nearly zero crashes in the U.S. What’s happening in health care right now is like having a Boeing 787 crash every day.” 

Other engineering principles that work well in aviation, such as control systems, could be applied to health care as well, Thomas says. For instance, closed-loop controls solicit feedback so a system can change and adapt. Having laboratories confirm that physicians received their patients’ test results or investigating all reports of diagnostic errors are examples of closed-loop controls that are not mandated in the current ecosystem, Thomas says. 

“Operating without controls is like asking a robot to navigate a city street blindfolded,” Thomas says. “There’s no opportunity for course correction. Closed-loop controls help inform future decision-making, and, at this point in time, it’s missing in the U.S. health-care system.” 

The Leveson team will continue working with Synensys on behalf of the FDA. Their next study will investigate diagnostic screenings outside the laboratory, such as at a physician’s office (point of care) or at home (over the counter). Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, nonclinical lab testing has surged in the country. About 600 million Covid-19 tests were sent to U.S. households between January and September 2022, according to Synensys. Yet, few systems are in place to aggregate these data or report findings to public health agencies.  

“There’s a lot of well-meaning people trying to solve this and other lab data challenges,” Rose says. “If we can convince people to think of health care as an engineered system, we can go a long way in solving some of these entrenched problems.”

The Synensys research contract is art of the Systemic Harmonization and Interoperability Enhancement for Laboratory Data (SHIELD) campaign, an agency initiative that seeks assistance and input in using systems theory to address this challenge. 

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Inclusive research for social change

Pair a decades-old program dedicated to creating research opportunities for underrepresented minorities and populations with a growing initiative committed to tackling the very issues at the heart of such disparities, and you’ll get a transformative partnership that only MIT can deliver. 

Since 1986, the MIT Summer Research Program (MSRP) has led an institutional effort to prepare underrepresented students (minorities, women in STEM, or students with low socioeconomic status) for doctoral education by pairing them with MIT labs and research groups. For the past three years, the Initiative on Combatting Systemic Racism (ICSR), a cross-disciplinary research collaboration led by MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), has joined them in their mission, helping bring the issue full circle by providing MSRP students with the opportunity to use big data and computational tools to create impactful changes toward racial equity.

“ICSR has further enabled our direct engagement with undergrads, both within and outside of MIT,” says Fotini Christia, the Ford International Professor of the Social Sciences, associate director of IDSS, and co-organizer for the initiative. “We've found that this line of research has attracted students interested in examining these topics with the most rigorous methods.”

The initiative fits well under the IDSS banner, as IDSS research seeks solutions to complex societal issues through a multidisciplinary approach that includes statistics, computation, modeling, social science methodologies, human behavior, and an understanding of complex systems. With the support of faculty and researchers from all five schools and the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, the objective of ICSR is to work on an array of different societal aspects of systemic racism through a set of verticals including policing, housing, health care, and social media.

Where passion meets impact

Grinnell senior Mia Hines has always dreamed of using her love for computer science to support social justice. She has experience working with unhoused people and labor unions, and advocating for Indigenous peoples’ rights. When applying to college, she focused her essay on using technology to help Syrian refugees.

“As a Black woman, it's very important to me that we focus on these areas, especially on how we can use technology to help marginalized communities,” Hines says. “And also, how do we stop technology or improve technology that is already hurting marginalized communities?”   

Through MSRP, Hines was paired with research advisor Ufuoma Ovienmhada, a fourth-year doctoral student in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT. A member of Professor Danielle Wood’s Space Enabled research group at MIT’s Media Lab, Ovienmhada received funding from an ICSR Seed Grant and NASA's Applied Sciences Program to support her ongoing research measuring environmental injustice and socioeconomic disparities in prison landscapes. 

“I had been doing satellite remote sensing for environmental challenges and sustainability, starting out looking at coastal ecosystems, when I learned about an issue called ‘prison ecology,’” Ovienmhada explains. “This refers to the intersection of mass incarceration and environmental justice.”

Ovienmhada’s research uses satellite remote sensing and environmental data to characterize exposures to different environmental hazards such as air pollution, extreme heat, and flooding. “This allows others to use these datasets for real-time advocacy, in addition to creating public awareness,” she says.

Focused especially on extreme heat, Hines used satellite remote sensing to monitor the fluctuation of temperature to assess the risk being imposed on prisoners, including death, especially in states like Texas, where 75 percent of prisons either don't have full air conditioning or have none at all.

“Before this project I had done little to no work with geospatial data, and as a budding data scientist, getting to work with and understanding different types of data and resources is really helpful,” Hines says. “I was also funded and afforded the flexibility to take advantage of IDSS’s Data Science and Machine Learning online course. It was really great to be able to do that and learn even more.”

Filling the gap

Much like Hines, Harvey Mudd senior Megan Li was specifically interested in the IDSS-supported MSRP projects. She was drawn to the interdisciplinary approach, and she seeks in her own work to apply computational methods to societal issues and to make computer science more inclusive, considerate, and ethical. 

Working with Aurora Zhang, a grad student in IDSS’s Social and Engineering Systems PhD program, Li used county-level data on income and housing prices to quantify and visualize how affordability based on income alone varies across the United States. She then expanded the analysis to include assets and debt to determine the most common barriers to home ownership.

“I spent my day-to-day looking at census data and writing Python scripts that could work with it,” reports Li. “I also reached out to the Census Bureau directly to learn a little bit more about how they did their data collection, and discussed questions related to some of their previous studies and working papers that I had reviewed.” 

Outside of actual day-to-day research, Li says she learned a lot in conversations with fellow researchers, particularly changing her “skeptical view” of whether or not mortgage lending algorithms would help or hurt home buyers in the approval process. “I think I have a little bit more faith now, which is a good thing.”

“Harvey Mudd is undergraduate-only, and while professors do run labs here, my specific research areas are not well represented,” Li says. “This opportunity was enormous in that I got the experience I need to see if this research area is actually something that I want to do long term, and I got more mirrors into what I would be doing in grad school from talking to students and getting to know faculty.”

Closing the loop

While participating in MSRP offered crucial research experience to Hines, the ICSR projects enabled her to engage in topics she's passionate about and work that could drive tangible societal change.

“The experience felt much more concrete because we were working on these very sophisticated projects, in a supportive environment where people were very excited to work with us,” she says.

A significant benefit for Li was the chance to steer her research in alignment with her own interests. “I was actually given the opportunity to propose my own research idea, versus supporting a graduate student's work in progress,” she explains. 

For Ovienmhada, the pairing of the two initiatives solidifies the efforts of MSRP and closes a crucial loop in diversity, equity, and inclusion advocacy. 

“I've participated in a lot of different DEI-related efforts and advocacy and one thing that always comes up is the fact that it’s not just about bringing people in, it's also about creating an environment and opportunities that align with people’s values,” Ovienmhada says. “Programs like MSRP and ICSR create opportunities for people who want to do work that’s aligned with certain values by providing the needed mentoring and financial support.”

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