Illustrating India’s complex environmental crises

Abhijit Banerjee, the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at MIT, and Sarnath Banerjee (no relation), an MIT Center for Art, Science, and Technology (CAST) visiting artist share a similar background, but have very different ways of thinking. Both were raised for a time in Kolkata before leaving India to pursue divergent careers, Abhijit as an economist who went on to win the 2019 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (an award he shares with MIT Professor Esther Duflo and Harvard University Professor Michael Kremer), and Sarnath as a visual artist and graphic novelist. 

The two collaborated on a pair of short films, “The Land of Good Intentions” and “The Eternal Swamp,” that blend their expertise in a unique and captivating form. Each film addresses a particular environmental crisis facing present-day India by tracing its origins back through the centuries. The films are presented in a kind of lecture style, with Abhijit appearing as the narrator, unraveling historical details, as graphics by Sarnath visualize the story with an often wry and easy wit. The results apply logic and narrative coherence to problems with complex roots in the forces of nature, economics, and local culture. 

“The Land of Good Intentions” explores the conditions and policies that led to mass protests by farmers, in Punjab and elsewhere, following the passage of farming legislation in September 2020. The film begins by providing historical context from multiple angles, including the significance of rice to regional culture, its growing conditions (which require a lot of water), the region’s climate (which produces very little), and previous government subsidies that led to its overproduction. The 2020 Farm Bills were intended to address rice overproduction and its consequences, including the depletion of Punjab’s groundwater supply, pollution from the burning of rice stalks, and a surplus going to waste. But farmers considered that they were being asked to shoulder the costs of a problem the government created. 

“The arguments in the film don’t necessarily align with popular liberal arguments, but it gives subtler shape and layers to them,” Sarnath says. “That dialectical way of thinking is important to the liberal movement, which is driven by passion and a sense of justice. Abhijit is driven by factual analysis, which sometimes makes the argument more complex.”

Their second film, “The Eternal Swamp,” addresses the crisis of flooding in Kolkata and its causes in the geographical and economic development of the city from the start. Because Kolkata was built on very wet land, and real estate has long been one of the only viable industries in the city, it has been developed without regard to proper drainage in a climate that produces more rainfall than it can handle. There is a pervading sense that Kolkata will eventually be entirely below water.

“It was a good collaboration from the beginning,” Sarnath says of working with Abhijit on the CAST Visiting Artist project, a process which began just before Abhijit was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2019 and continued through the pandemic. “Both of us work on instinct, but the way he shapes an argument is very different from me,” Sarnath says. “My work does not follow a linear approach to telling a story; it’s fragmentary, driven by mood and emotion more than narrative, like composing a piece of music.”

Since they first met at a literary conference years ago, Abhijit and Sarnath have been close friends and intellectual sparring partners. Though Sarnath is based in Berlin and Abhijit in Boston, the two often cross paths in different locales and have long, ambling discussions that traverse a wide array of topics. “We spend a lot of time walking together wherever we find ourselves, whether it’s down the Longfellow Bridge in Boston or through Delhi or Kolkata,” Sarnath says. The idea for this project was born out of such conversations, in response to pressing events in their home country. 

Abhijit wrote a proposal to MIT CAST, and the questions they received through the process helped them further shape the project. “It's important, when you have the luxury, just to spend time together. Thanks to MIT, we managed to do that across continents,” Sarnath says of their creative process. “It’s more than just telling a story; Abhijit unpacked what was in his head, and I drew and wrote a bit as well,” Sarnath says. And they worked with the editor and animator Niusha Ramzani, whom Sarnath says lent an Iranian aesthetic to the film’s animations. 

As for the format of the films, they wanted to capture the sense of a serene Bengali afternoon, with Abhijit seated in his home in Kolkata speaking in a relaxed tone. “We wanted it to be a bit like a Royal Society lecture,” Sarnath says, somewhat like a TED Talk but more personable and intimate. The aim was to make their complicated subjects more easily comprehensible, through the language of Abhijit’s narration and with the help of visual metaphors. Still, they did not want to sacrifice complexity.

“Economists are fabulists,” says Abhijit Banerjee. “We tell stories, simple stories, but that tends to get obscured in the telling, often because we like to be very careful about not overstating our case. Irony and the kind of playful humor that Sarnath brings to narration seemed to offer a different way to avoid being too emphatic, while allowing the story to be told in a way that it reaches a much larger audience. What is brilliant about Sarnath’s work is the play between reliable and the unreliable — the readers are happy to be misdirected because they know that it will ultimately lead them where they want to be. I was hoping we could bring a little of that into economics.” 

“You have to emancipate yourself from any one definitive answer,” Sarnath Banerjee says, describing Abhijit’s expansive way of thinking, through which he follows multiple thought processes to their logical conclusions. The result allows for ambiguity and contradiction, though the pathways of thinking are clear. The films illustrate the situations facing farmers in Punjab and the waterlogged streets of Kolkata by tracing their roots and examining the history of cause and effect. The results provide clarity, but no simple answers.

The process was an enriching one for both of them, the kind of advancement in understanding that can only come in dialogue. “With each collaboration, you learn, and learning to me is an artistic form,” Sarnath says. “We are always learning.”

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Scientists develop a low-cost device to make cell therapy safer

A tiny device built by scientists at MIT and the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology could be used to improve the safety and effectiveness of cell therapy treatments for patients suffering from spinal cord injuries.

In cell therapy, clinicians create what are known as induced pluripotent stem cells by reprogramming some skin or blood cells taken from a patient. To treat a spinal cord injury, they would coax these pluripotent stem cells to become progenitor cells, which are destined to differentiate into spinal cord cells. These progenitors are then transplanted back into the patient.

These new cells can regenerate part of the injured spinal cord. However, pluripotent stem cells that don’t fully change into progenitors can form tumors.

This research team developed a microfluidic cell sorter that can remove about half of the undifferentiated cells — those that can potentially become tumors — in a batch, without causing any damage to the fully-formed progenitor cells.

The high-throughput device, which doesn’t require special chemicals, can sort more than 3 million cells per minute. In addition, the researchers have shown that chaining many devices together can sort more than 500 million cells per minute, making this a more viable method to someday improve the safety of cell therapy treatments.

Plus, the plastic chip that contains the microfluidic cell sorter can be mass-produced in a factory at very low cost, so the device would be easier to implement at scale.

“Even if you have a life-saving cell therapy that is doing wonders for patients, if you cannot manufacture it cost-effectively, reliably, and safely, then its impact might be limited. Our team is passionate about that problem — we want to make these therapies more reliable and easily accessible,” says Jongyoon Han, an MIT professor of electrical engineering and computer science and of biological engineering, a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), and co-lead principal investigator of the CAMP (Critical Analytics for Manufacturing Personalized Medicine) research group at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART).

Han is joined on the paper by co-senior author Sing Yian Chew, professor of chemistry, chemical engineering, and biotechnology at the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine and Materials Science and Engineering at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and a CAMP principal investigator; co-lead authors Tan Dai Nguyen, a CAMP researcher; Wai Hon Chooi, a senior research fellow at the Singapore Agency for Science, Technology, and Research (A*STAR); and Hyungkook Jeon, an MIT postdoc; as well as others at NTU and A*STAR. The research appears today in Stem Cells Translational Medicine.

Reducing risk

The cancer risk posed by undifferentiated induced pluripotent stem cells remains one of the most pressing challenges in this type of cell therapy.

“Even if you have a very small population of cells that are not fully differentiated, they could still turn into cancer-like cells,” Han adds.

Clinicians and researchers often seek to identify and remove these cells by looking for certain markers on their surfaces, but so far researchers have not been able to find a marker that is specific to these undifferentiated cells. Other methods use chemicals to selectively destroy these cells, yet the chemical treatment techniques may be harmful to the differentiated cells.

The high-throughput microfluidic sorter, which can sort cells based on size, had been previously developed by the CAMP team after more than a decade of work. It has been previously used for sorting immune cells and mesenchymal stromal cells (another type of stem cell), and now the team is expanding its use to other stem cell types, such as induced pluripotent stem cells, Han says.

“We are interested in regenerative strategies to enhance tissue repair after spinal cord injuries, as these conditions lead to devasting functional impairment. Unfortunately, there is currently no effective regenerative treatment approach for spinal cord injuries,” Chew says. “Spinal cord progenitor cells derived from pluripotent stem cells hold great promise, since they can generate all cell types found within the spinal cord to restore tissue structure and function. To be able to effectively utilize these cells, the first step would be to ensure their safety, which is the aim of our work.”

The team discovered that pluripotent stem cells tend to be larger than the progenitors derived from them. It is hypothesized that before a pluripotent stem cell differentiates, its nucleus contains a large number of genes that haven’t been turned off, or suppressed. As it differentiates for a specific function, the cell suppresses many genes it will no longer need, significantly shrinking the nucleus.

The microfluidic device leverages this size difference to sort the cells.

Spiral sorting

Microfluidic channels in the quarter-sized plastic chip form an inlet, a spiral, and four outlets that output cells of different sizes. As the cells are forced through the spiral at very high speeds, various forces, including centrifugal forces, act on the cells. These forces counteract to focus the cells in a certain location in the fluid stream. This focusing point will be dependent on the size of the cells, effectively sorting them through separate outlets.

The researchers found they could improve the sorter’s operation by running it twice, first at a lower speed so larger cells stick to the walls and smaller cells are sorted out, then at a higher speed to sort out larger cells.

In a sense, the device operates like a centrifuge, but the microfluidic sorter does not require human intervention to pick out sorted cells, Han adds.

The researchers showed that their device could remove about 50 percent of the larger cells with one pass. They conducted experiments to confirm that the larger cells they removed were, in fact, associated with higher tumor risk.

“While we can’t remove 100 percent of these cells, we still believe this is going to reduce the risk significantly. Hopefully, the original cell type is good enough that we don’t have too many undifferentiated cells. Then this process could make these cells even safer,” he says.

Importantly, the low-cost microfluidic sorter, which can be produced at scale with standard manufacturing techniques, does not use any type of filtration. Filters can become clogged or break down, so a filter-free device can be used for a much longer time.

Now that they have shown success at a small scale, the researchers are embarking on larger studies and animal models to see if the purified cells function better in vivo.

Nondifferentiated cells can become tumors, but they can have other random effects in the body, so removing more of these cells could boost the efficacy of cell therapies, as well as improve safety.

“If we can convincingly demonstrate these benefits in vivo, the future might hold even more exciting applications for this technique,” Han says.

This research is supported, in part, by the National Research Foundation of Singapore and the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology.

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Six MIT students selected as spring 2024 MIT-Pillar AI Collective Fellows

The MIT-Pillar AI Collective has announced six fellows for the spring 2024 semester. With support from the program, the graduate students, who are in their final year of a master’s or PhD program, will conduct research in the areas of AI, machine learning, and data science with the aim of commercializing their innovations.

Launched by MIT’s School of Engineering and Pillar VC in 2022, the MIT-Pillar AI Collective supports faculty, postdocs, and students conducting research on AI, machine learning, and data science. Supported by a gift from Pillar VC and administered by the MIT Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation, the mission of the program is to advance research toward commercialization.

The spring 2024 MIT-Pillar AI Collective Fellows are:

Yasmeen AlFaraj

Yasmeen AlFaraj is a PhD candidate in chemistry whose interest is in the application of data science and machine learning to soft materials design to enable next-generation, sustainable plastics, rubber, and composite materials. More specifically, she is applying machine learning to the design of novel molecular additives to enable the low-cost manufacturing of chemically deconstructable thermosets and composites. AlFaraj’s work has led to the discovery of scalable, translatable new materials that could address thermoset plastic waste. As a Pillar Fellow, she will pursue bringing this technology to market, initially focusing on wind turbine blade manufacturing and conformal coatings. Through the Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation, AlFaraj serves as a lead for a team developing a spinout focused on recyclable versions of existing high-performance thermosets by incorporating small quantities of a degradable co-monomer. In addition, she participated in the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps program and recently graduated from the Clean Tech Open, where she focused on enhancing her business plan, analyzing potential markets, ensuring a complete IP portfolio, and connecting with potential funders. AlFaraj earned a BS in chemistry from University of California at Berkeley.

Ruben Castro Ornelas

Ruben Castro Ornelas is a PhD student in mechanical engineering who is passionate about the future of multipurpose robots and designing the hardware to use them with AI control solutions. Combining his expertise in programming, embedded systems, machine design, reinforcement learning, and AI, he designed a dexterous robotic hand capable of carrying out useful everyday tasks without sacrificing size, durability, complexity, or simulatability. Ornelas’s innovative design holds significant commercial potential in domestic, industrial, and health-care applications because it could be adapted to hold everything from kitchenware to delicate objects. As a Pillar Fellow, he will focus on identifying potential commercial markets, determining the optimal approach for business-to-business sales, and identifying critical advisors. Ornelas served as co-director of StartLabs, an undergraduate entrepreneurship club at MIT, where he earned an BS in mechanical engineering.

Keeley Erhardt

Keeley Erhardt is a PhD candidate in media arts and sciences whose research interests lie in the transformative potential of AI in network analysis, particularly for entity correlation and hidden link detection within and across domains. She has designed machine learning algorithms to identify and track temporal correlations and hidden signals in large-scale networks, uncovering online influence campaigns originating from multiple countries. She has similarly demonstrated the use of graph neural networks to identify coordinated cryptocurrency accounts by analyzing financial time series data and transaction dynamics. As a Pillar Fellow, Erhardt will pursue the potential commercial applications of her work, such as detecting fraud, propaganda, money laundering, and other covert activity in the finance, energy, and national security sectors. She has had internships at Google, Facebook, and Apple and held software engineering roles at multiple tech unicorns. Erhardt earned an MEng in electrical engineering and computer science and a BS in computer science, both from MIT.

Vineet Jagadeesan Nair

Vineet Jagadeesan Nair is a PhD candidate in mechanical engineering whose research focuses on modeling power grids and designing electricity markets to integrate renewables, batteries, and electric vehicles. He is broadly interested in developing computational tools to tackle climate change. As a Pillar Fellow, Nair will explore the application of machine learning and data science to power systems. Specifically, he will experiment with approaches to improve the accuracy of forecasting electricity demand and supply with high spatial-temporal resolution. In collaboration with Project Tapestry @ Google X, he is also working on fusing physics-informed machine learning with conventional numerical methods to increase the speed and accuracy of high-fidelity simulations. Nair’s work could help realize future grids with high penetrations of renewables and other clean, distributed energy resources. Outside academics, Nair is active in entrepreneurship, most recently helping to organize the 2023 MIT Global Startup Workshop in Greece. He earned an MS in computational science and engineering from MIT, an MPhil in energy technologies from Cambridge University as a Gates Scholar, and a BS in mechanical engineering and a BA in economics from University of California at Berkeley.

Mahdi Ramadan

Mahdi Ramadan is a PhD candidate in brain and cognitive sciences whose research interests lie at the intersection of cognitive science, computational modeling, and neural technologies. His work uses novel unsupervised methods for learning and generating interpretable representations of neural dynamics, capitalizing on recent advances in AI, specifically contrastive and geometric deep learning techniques capable of uncovering the latent dynamics underlying neural processes with high fidelity. As a Pillar Fellow, he will leverage these methods to gain a better understanding of dynamical models of muscle signals for generative motor control. By supplementing current spinal prosthetics with generative AI motor models that can streamline, speed up, and correct limb muscle activations in real time, as well as potentially using multimodal vision-language models to infer the patients’ high-level intentions, Ramadan aspires to build truly scalable, accessible, and capable commercial neuroprosthetics. Ramadan’s entrepreneurial experience includes being the co-founder of UltraNeuro, a neurotechnology startup, and co-founder of Presizely, a computer vision startup. He earned a BS in neurobiology from University of Washington.

Rui (Raymond) Zhou

Rui (Raymond) Zhou is a PhD candidate in mechanical engineering whose research focuses on multimodal AI for engineering design. As a Pillar Fellow, he will advance models that could enable designers to translate information in any modality or combination of modalities into comprehensive 2D and 3D designs, including parametric data, component visuals, assembly graphs, and sketches. These models could also optimize existing human designs to accomplish goals such as improving ergonomics or reducing drag coefficient. Ultimately, Zhou aims to translate his work into a software-as-a-service platform that redefines product design across various sectors, from automotive to consumer electronics. His efforts have the potential to not only accelerate the design process but also reduce costs, opening the door to unprecedented levels of customization, idea generation, and rapid prototyping. Beyond his academic pursuits, Zhou founded UrsaTech, a startup that integrates AI into education and engineering design. He earned a BS in electrical engineering and computer sciences from University of California at Berkeley.

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MADMEC winner creates “temporary tattoos” for T-shirts

Have you ever gotten a free T-shirt at an event that you never wear? What about a music or sports-themed shirt you wear to one event and then lose interest in entirely? Such one-off T-shirts — and the waste and pollution associated with them — are an unfortunately common part of our society.

But what if you could change the designs on shirts after each use? The winners of this year's MADMEC competition developed biodegradable "temporary tattoos" for T-shirts to make one-wear clothing more sustainable.

Members of the winning team, called Me-Shirts, got their inspiration from the MADMEC event itself, which ordinarily makes a different T-shirt each year.

“If you think about all the textile waste that’s produced for all these shirts, it’s insane,” team member and PhD candidate Isabella Caruso said in the winning presentation. “The main markets we are trying to address are for one-time T-shirts and custom T-shirts.”

The problem is a big one. According to the team, the custom T-shirt market is a $4.3 billion industry. That doesn’t include trends like fast fashion that contribute to the 17 million tons of textile waste produced each year.

“Our proposed solution is a temporary shirt tattoo made from biodegradable, nontoxic materials,” Caruso explained. “We wanted designs that are fully removable through washing, so that you can wear your T-shirt for your one-time event and then get a nice white T-shirt back afterward.”

The team’s scalable design process mixes three simple ingredients: potato starch, glycerin, and water. The design can be imprinted on the shirt temporarily through ironing.

The Me-Shirt team, which earned $10,000 with the win, plans to continue exploring material combinations to make the design more flexible and easier for people to apply at home. Future iterations could allow users to decide if they want the design to stay on the shirt during washes based on the settings of the washing machine.

Hosted by MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE), the competition was the culmination of team projects that began in the fall and included a series of design challenges throughout the semester. Each team received guidance, access to equipment and labs, and up to $1,000 in funding to build and test their prototypes.

“The main goal is that they gained some confidence in their ability to design and build devices and platforms that are different from their normal experiences,” Mike Tarkanian, a senior lecturer in DMSE and coordinator of MADMEC, said at the event. “If it’s a departure from their normal research and coursework activities that’s a win, I think, to make them better engineers.”

The second-place, $6,000 prize went to Alkalyne, which is creating a carbon-neutral polymer for petrochemical production. The company is developing approaches for using electricity and inorganic carbon to generate a high-energy hydrocarbon precursor. If developed using renewable energy, the approach could be used to achieve carbon negative petrochemical production.

“A lot of our research, and a lot of the research around MIT in general, has to do with sustainability, so we wanted to try an angle that we think looks promising but doesn’t seem to be investigated enough,” PhD candidate Christopher Mallia explained.

The third-place prize went to Microbeco, which is exploring the use of microbial fuel cells for continuous water quality monitoring. Microbes have been proposed as a way to detect and measure contaminants in water for decades, but the team believes the varying responses of microbes to different contaminants has limited the effectiveness of the approach.

To overcome that problem, the team is working to isolate microbial strains that respond more regularly to specific contaminants.

Overall, Tarkanian believes this year’s program was a success not only because of the final results presented at the competition, but because of the experience the students got along the way using equipment like laser cutters, 3D printers, and soldering irons. Many participants said they had never used that type of equipment before. They also said by working to build physical prototypes, the program helped make their coursework come to life.

“It was a chance to try something new by applying my skills to a different environment,” PhD candidate Zachary Adams said. “I can see a lot of the concepts I learn in my classes through this work.”

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Remembering MIT Copytech Director Casey Harrington

Casey Harrington, who led MIT Copytech’s recovery from pandemic-era disruptions and built close friendships across campus, passed away unexpectedly on Jan. 13. He was 49.

Copytech’s director since 2022, Harrington modernized the department’s equipment and services to improve its financial outlook, and led his staff with a personal touch.

“Casey was beloved by our team,” says Alfred Ironside, MIT’s vice president for communications. “He was a great manager, had a vision for the future, spent time with his co-workers, cared for them, and loved MIT. He turned around Copytech’s fortunes, too, setting it on an upward trajectory that reflected his wonderful abilities as a leader. His loss is enormous — for his wife, his children, his family, and for us.”

Although Harrington’s time at MIT was brief, he left a lasting impression on his team at Copytech and the people he worked with every day.

“Casey was a great leader, with a rare combination of vision, approachability, and genuine care and appreciation for our team,” Financial Officer Suha Bekdash says. “Since he joined two years ago, he made an immediate impact steering Copytech toward a more successful future after the pandemic.”

For those who knew Harrington well, he will be remembered for his numerous “Casey-isms,” which included “Be grateful” and “Do the next right thing.”

“I want his legacy to be, ‘Do the next right thing,’” his wife Marilyn Harrington says. “Coming to MIT was the next right thing for our family, and he always did the next right thing for our family. There was no way for us to predict this tragedy. He did the next right thing for his staff and for MIT leadership. He always did his best. He left this world very loved, very respected, and he left a hole that will never be filled.”

Leading Copytech by building friendships

Harrington came to MIT with big shoes to fill. His predecessor, Steven Dimond, had worked at Copytech for 50 years. When Dimond retired in 2020, most staff members in Copytech had never had another boss and were unsure of what to expect.

On top of that, Copytech was emerging from a pandemic that caused business to stall as people left campus and more events went online.

“That had been an extremely difficult number of years for Copytech, both financially and also just for the morale of people,” says Danyel Barnard, MIT's executive director of digital, brand, and internal communications. “He took a job that was a challenge. We needed someone who could come in and help turn things around. He was really excited about the opportunity, and about being at MIT, and he was eager to the organization through those challenges.”

Harrington came to MIT with deep expertise about the print industry. Prior to MIT, he had worked at large private companies, global health care groups, and Vanderbilt University.

“He could take the transcript of a book and say, ‘It needs to be this size book print with this size paper and this many pages,’” Marilyn Harrington recalls.

At MIT, he hit the ground running by working out new service contracts and pitching ideas for new equipment, including a new, large-format printing machine.

“In his two years here, he did amazing things with the operation,” says Barnard. “He led a big turnaround financially, a lot of which I credit to his management and leadership. He had great foresight and truly exceeded expectations."

Most importantly, Harrington established personal connections with the Copytech team and his colleagues across the Institute.

“Casey was a great leader,” Administrative Assistant Taj Dickson says. “He loved Copytech and he loved MIT. When he came, he fit right in with us. People have been in Copytech for so long, and when they leave there’s always trepidation that the new person is not going to understand how to deal with the department. But he came in and figured it out, and the transition was really smooth because of his emotional intelligence as a leader. I think that was one of his hallmarks: He was a very emotionally intelligent leader.”

It was perhaps an unlikely match. Harrington’s southern accent was a stark contrast with many of the Bostonians in Copytech. But their different backgrounds served as a conversation piece more than a point of difference.

“The staff universally loved him,” Barnard says. “He was a perfect fit and a perfect leader for them. He really cared about them, and that is so important at Copytech, where they consider themselves a family.”

His wife describes MIT as Harrington’s “dream job” and says he was grateful to Copytech’s staff for embracing him.

“He left MIT in a better place than he found it because of the support he got from the team and from MIT leadership,” she says.

A strong leader

Harrington was born in Nashville and was a proud graduate of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. He was also deeply devoted to his family. He met Marilyn when he was 13, and their friendship blossomed into a 27-year marriage.

Casey moved to Boston while his family figured out where their youngest child would attend high school, but they made a point to see each other as much as possible — Marilyn estimates they spent well over 400 days together in his first two years living in Boston.

“Once, I texted him that I wasn’t doing well and I needed to see him, and he was on my doorstep four hours later,” Marilyn recalls. “He didn’t even have a bag, only his laptop. That was the kind of person he was.”

“You could really have honest conversations with Casey,” Dickson says. “He would have no problem talking about his experiences, good and bad, and it was up to you to find the lesson in those stories.”

When news of Harrington’s passing got around MIT, Barnard heard from people in disparate departments who she didn’t even realize knew Harrington explaining they had become friends.

“He found ways to connect with people,” Barnard says. “I was amazed by his reach.”

In honor of Harrington and in a nod to his love for University of Tennessee football, the Copytech team wore orange shirts and blue jeans to work on Jan. 29. They say they’ll continue to honor Harrington through their work.

“He was a strong leader who was full of life, and he still had so much to offer Copytech,” Dickson says. “His ability to communicate, his unique sense of humor, and his love for our department were just a few of the highlights that made Casey shine.”

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MIT-led team receives funding to pursue new treatments for metabolic disease

A team of MIT researchers will lead a $65.67 million effort, awarded by the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), to develop ingestible devices that may one day be used to treat diabetes, obesity, and other conditions through oral delivery of mRNA. Such devices could potentially be deployed for needle-free delivery of mRNA vaccines as well.

The five-year project also aims to develop electroceuticals, a new form of ingestible therapies based on electrical stimulation of the body’s own hormones and neural signaling. If successful, this approach could lead to new treatments for a variety of metabolic disorders.

“We know that the oral route is generally the preferred route of administration for both patients and health care providers,” says Giovanni Traverso, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT and a gastroenterologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. “Our primary focus is on disorders of metabolism because they affect a lot of people, but the platforms we’re developing could be applied very broadly.”

Traverso is the principal investigator for the project, which also includes Robert Langer, MIT Institute Professor, and Anantha Chandrakasan, dean of the MIT School of Engineering and the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. As part of the project, the MIT team will collaborate with investigators from Brigham and Women’s Hospital, New York University, and the University of Colorado School of Medicine.

Over the past several years, Traverso’s and Langer’s labs have designed many types of ingestible devices that can deliver drugs to the GI tract. This approach could be especially useful for protein drugs and nucleic acids, which typically can’t be given orally because they break down in the acidic environment of the digestive tract.

Messenger RNA has already proven useful as a vaccine, directing cells to produce fragments of viral proteins that trigger an immune response. Delivering mRNA to cells also holds potential to stimulate production of therapeutic molecules to treat a variety of diseases. In this project, the researchers plan to focus on metabolic diseases such as diabetes.

“What mRNA can do is enable the potential for dosing therapies that are very difficult to dose today, or provide longer-term coverage by essentially creating an internal factory that produces a therapy for a prolonged period,” Traverso says.

In the mRNA portion of the project, the research team intends to identify lipid and polymer nanoparticle formulations that can most effectively deliver mRNA to cells, using machine learning to help identify the best candidates. They will also develop and test ingestible devices to carry the mRNA-nanoparticle payload, with the goal of running a clinical trial in the final year of the five-year project.

The work will build on research that Traverso’s lab has already begun. In 2022, Traverso and his colleagues reported that they could deliver mRNA in capsules that inject mRNA-nanoparticle complexes into the lining of the stomach.

The other branch of the project will focus on ingestible devices that can deliver a small electrical current to the lining of the stomach. In a study published last year, Traverso’s lab demonstrated this approach for the first time, using a capsule coated with electrodes that apply an electrical current to cells of the stomach. In animal studies, they found that this stimulation boosted production of ghrelin, a hormone that stimulates appetite.

Traverso envisions that this type of treatment could potentially replace or complement some of the existing drugs used to prevent nausea and stimulate appetite in people with anorexia or cachexia (loss of body mass that can occur in patients with cancer or other chronic diseases). The researchers also hope to develop ways to stimulate production of GLP-1, a hormone that is used to help manage diabetes and promote weight loss.

“What this approach starts to do is potentially maximize our ability to treat disease without administering a new drug, but instead by simply modulating the body’s own systems through electrical stimulation,” Traverso says.

At MIT, Langer will help to develop nanoparticles for mRNA delivery, and Chandrakasan will work on ways to reduce energy consumption and miniaturize the electronic functions of the capsules, including secure communication, stimulation, and power generation.

The Brigham and Women’s Hospital’s portion of the project will be co-led by Traverso, Ameya Kirtane, Jason Li, and Peter Chai, who will amplify efforts on the formulation and stabilization of the mRNA nanoparticles, engineering of the ingestible devices, and running of clinical trials. At NYU, the effort will be led by assistant professor of bioengineering Khalil Ramadi SM ’16, PhD ’19, focusing on biological characterization of the effects of electrical stimulation. Researchers at the University of Colorado, led by Matthew Wynia and Eric G. Campbell of the CU Center for Bioethics and Humanities, will focus on exploring the ethical dimensions and public perceptions of these types of biomedical interventions.

“We felt like we had an opportunity here not only to do fundamental engineering science and early-stage clinical trials, but also to start to understand the data behind some of the ethical implications and public perceptions of these technologies through this broad collaboration,” Traverso says.

The project described here is supported by ARPA-H under award number D24AC00040-00. The content of this announcement does not necessarily represent the official views of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health.

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MIT researchers map the energy transition’s effects on jobs

A new analysis by MIT researchers shows the places in the U.S. where jobs are most linked to fossil fuels. The research could help policymakers better identify and support areas affected over time by a switch to renewable energy.

While many of the places most potentially affected have intensive drilling and mining operations, the study also measures how areas reliant on other industries, such as heavy manufacturing, could experience changes. The research examines the entire U.S. on a county-by-county level.

“Our result is that you see a higher carbon footprint for jobs in places that drill for oil, mine for coal, and drill for natural gas, which is evident in our maps,” says Christopher Knittel, an economist at the MIT Sloan School of Management and co-author of a new paper detailing the findings. “But you also see high carbon footprints in areas where we do a lot of manufacturing, which is more likely to be missed by policymakers when examining how the transition to a zero-carbon economy will affect jobs.”

So, while certain U.S. areas known for fossil-fuel production would certainly be affected — including west Texas, the Powder River Basin of Montana and Wyoming, parts of Appalachia, and more — a variety of industrial areas in the Great Plains and Midwest could see employment evolve as well.

The paper, “Assessing the distribution of employment vulnerability to the energy transition using employment carbon footprints,” is published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The authors are Kailin Graham, a master’s student in MIT’s Technology and Policy Program and graduate research assistant at MIT’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research; and Knittel, who is the George P. Shultz Professor at MIT Sloan.

“Our results are unique in that we cover close to the entire U.S. economy and consider the impacts on places that produce fossil fuels but also on places that consume a lot of coal, oil, or natural gas for energy,” says Graham. “This approach gives us a much more complete picture of where communities might be affected and how support should be targeted.”

Adjusting the targets

The current study stems from prior research Knittel has conducted, measuring carbon footprints at the household level across the U.S. The new project takes a conceptually related approach, but for jobs in a given county. To conduct the study, the researchers used several data sources measuring energy consumption by businesses, as well as detailed employment data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

The study takes advantage of changes in energy supply and demand over time to estimate how strongly a full range of jobs, not just those in energy production, are linked to use of fossil fuels. The sectors accounted for in the study comprise 86 percent of U.S. employment, and 94 percent of U.S. emissions apart from the transportation sector.

The Inflation Reduction Act, passed by Congress and signed into law by President Joe Biden in August 2022, is the first federal legislation seeking to provide an economic buffer for places affected by the transition away from fossil fuels. The act provides expanded tax credits for economic projects located in “energy community” areas — defined largely as places with high fossil-fuel industry employment or tax revenue and with high unemployment. Areas with recently closed or downsized coal mines or power plants also qualify.

Graham and Knittel measured the “employment carbon footprint” (ECF) of each county in the U.S., producing new results. Out of more than 3,000 counties in the U.S., the researchers found that 124 are at the 90th percentile or above in ECF terms, while not qualifying for Inflation Reduction Act assistance. Another 79 counties are eligible for Inflation Reduction Act assistance, while being in the bottom 20 percent nationally in ECF terms.

Those may not seem like colossal differences, but the findings identify real communities potentially being left out of federal policy, and highlight the need for new targeting of such programs. The research by Graham and Knittel offers a precise way to assess the industrial composition of U.S. counties, potentially helping to target economic assistance programs.

“The impact on jobs of the energy transition is not just going to be where oil and natural gas are drilled, it’s going to be all the way up and down the value chain of things we make in the U.S.,” Knittel says. “That’s a more extensive, but still focused, problem.”

Graham adds: “It’s important that policymakers understand these economy-wide employment impacts. Our aim in providing these data is to help policymakers incorporate these considerations into future policies like the Inflation Reduction Act.”

Adapting policy

Graham and Knittel are still evaluating what the best policy measures might be to help places in the U.S. adapt to a move away from fossil fuels.

“What we haven’t necessarily closed the loop on is the right way to build a policy that takes account of these factors,” Knittel says. “The Inflation Reduction Act is the first policy to think about a [fair] energy transition because it has these subsidies for energy-dependent counties.” But given enough political backing, there may be room for additional policy measures in this area.

One thing clearly showing through in the study’s data is that many U.S. counties are in a variety of situations, so there may be no one-size-fits-all approach to encouraging economic growth while making a switch to clean energy. What suits west Texas or Wyoming best may not work for more manufacturing-based local economies. And even among primary energy-production areas, there may be distinctions, among those drilling for oil or natural gas and those producing coal, based on the particular economics of those fuels. The study includes in-depth data about each county, characterizing its industrial portfolio, which may help tailor approaches to a range of economic situations.

“The next step is using this data more specifically to design policies to protect these communities,” Knittel says.

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