Unique professional development course prepares students for future careers

MIT’s unique Undergraduate Practice Opportunities Program (UPOP) is a yearlong career-development course for second-year students focused on preparing them for a summer experience in industry, research, and public service, as well as for their future careers post-MIT. The program was launched in 2001 by Thomas Magnanti, then dean of the MIT School of Engineering, who recognized that MIT students receive a best-in-class technical education, but hadn’t historically been given the opportunity to develop the softer skills that will help them succeed in the workplace.

“UPOP is a great opportunity for MIT sophomores to develop important skills that will complement what they are learning in the classroom and can help them to effectively communicate and demonstrate their value in a professional setting,” says Kendel Jester, assistant director for early career engagement in MIT Career Advising and Professional Development (CAPD). “Furthermore, the UPOP curriculum allows students to connect with tangible resources, including MIT alumni and staff, to help further their career and personal development.”

UPOP uses experiential learning to bolster students’ professional development and teaches them effective communication, teamwork, and problem-solving skills in an interactive environment. The program begins with career basics, like crafting a resume and cover letter, networking, and interview preparation, and progresses to more complex career readiness skills, such as negotiating a salary, professional communication, and fostering an inclusive environment.

“The biggest benefit of joining UPOP for me was the self-confidence which I gained as a professional,” says rising senior Jehan Ahmed. Ahmed completed UPOP in 2023 and continued on to work as a course assistant for the program. “Before starting my first industry internship, UPOP prepared me for the day-to-day collaboration which I experienced. I learned how to approach my manager from the beginning and set expectations and goals with them which became really helpful, especially as someone new to the industry. I felt more prepared to jump into my project even though I was not completely technically competent in the field as a sophomore.”

UPOP focuses on sophomores because they don’t receive as much support and targeted resources as first-year students. Completing the program gives sophomores a leg-up on summer opportunities, which are typically given precedent to juniors and seniors, by helping them become competitive candidates. The summer after sophomore year is a pivotal time in a career path, and UPOP helps its students get ahead.

“The time commitment of UPOP was low, but I got amazing connections and support systems through the program,” says rising senior Jade Durham. Durham is also a UPOP alum who returned to work for the program.

The UPOP community is a big benefit of joining the program. Students get access to UPOP’s exclusive mentor and employer networks, which opens doors to connections and opportunities that would not have been available to them otherwise. UPOP mentors are industry leaders, many of whom are MIT alumni. Meanwhile, UPOP’s 100-plus employer network members are invested in hiring UPOP students, knowing they are now equipped with skills that many other interns lack. In addition to access to these networks, students receive one-on-one advising with UPOP’s dedicated staff and exclusive opportunities to work with MIT campus partners.

“UPOP helps sophomores figure out what they want to do after graduation by connecting them with professionals in a variety of careers,” says Marianne Olsen, an MIT/UPOP alumna whose company, Chartwell, is part of the employer network. “I personally benefited significantly from meeting operations consultants through UPOP who helped me realize that a job existed that let me apply my engineering degree to manufacturing while having the variety of projects of consulting. Until then, I thought I’d have to pick one or the other.”

UPOP is a course offering three credits for the full year, but it boasts a much lighter workload and more flexibility than other classes at MIT. It consists of three or four hour-long milestone workshops during the fall and spring semesters, which cover the career readiness curriculum described above.

In addition to the milestone workshops, UPOP’s cornerstone event is Team Training Workshop (TTW), a multi-day, intensive experiential learning opportunity that places students in small teams assigned to UPOP mentors. Teams work together on a series of activities focused on building the skills they will need in their future professional endeavors, regardless of what their MIT course is. TTW’s unique programming immerses sophomores in a wide range of practice opportunities, such as project management, negotiations, and presenting professionally, while still prioritizing camaraderie and fun.

“Considering all the networking practice and professional skills that you get to learn from experienced mentors, TTW is definitely worth your time,” says Ahmed. “You get an opportunity to learn more about different fields of work from experts. You also get the chance to learn about the communication and emotional intelligence skills that are necessary to be successful at your job, which we may not get the chance to practice in our academic/technical classes.”

UPOP’s mission puts students’ career readiness needs as a No. 1 priority, and the program is constantly evolving to meet those needs. This year, UPOP started programming earlier than ever before to account for students whose chosen fields have internship application deadlines in the fall. This includes a brand-new First-Year Speed Networking event, which took place on April 23. The event gave prospective UPOP applicants a chance to hone their elevator pitch with each other and members of the MIT and UPOP community, including program alumni and employers within the network.

The UPOP application is now open. Admissions is rolling throughout the summer until it closes on Sept. 13.

“I would tell my first-year self that it was a great opportunity to build up my confidence for networking and a wonderful resource during the internship hunting season,” says Ahmed.

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New technique reveals how gene transcription is coordinated in cells

The human genome contains about 23,000 genes, but only a fraction of those genes are turned on inside a cell at any given time. The complex network of regulatory elements that controls gene expression includes regions of the genome called enhancers, which are often located far from the genes that they regulate.

This distance can make it difficult to map the complex interactions between genes and enhancers. To overcome that, MIT researchers have invented a new technique that allows them to observe the timing of gene and enhancer activation in a cell. When a gene is turned on around the same time as a particular enhancer, it strongly suggests the enhancer is controlling that gene.

Learning more about which enhancers control which genes, in different types of cells, could help researchers identify potential drug targets for genetic disorders. Genomic studies have identified mutations in many non-protein-coding regions that are linked to a variety of diseases. Could these be unknown enhancers?

“When people start using genetic technology to identify regions of chromosomes that have disease information, most of those sites don’t correspond to genes. We suspect they correspond to these enhancers, which can be quite distant from a promoter, so it’s very important to be able to identify these enhancers,” says Phillip Sharp, an MIT Institute Professor Emeritus and member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.

Sharp is the senior author of the new study, which appears today in Nature. MIT Research Assistant D.B. Jay Mahat is the lead author of the paper.

Hunting for eRNA

Less than 2 percent of the human genome consists of protein-coding genes. The rest of the genome includes many elements that control when and how those genes are expressed. Enhancers, which are thought to turn genes on by coming into physical contact with gene promoter regions through transiently forming a complex, were discovered about 45 years ago.

More recently, in 2010, researchers discovered that these enhancers are transcribed into RNA molecules, known as enhancer RNA or eRNA. Scientists suspect that this transcription occurs when the enhancers are actively interacting with their target genes. This raised the possibility that measuring eRNA transcription levels could help researchers determine when an enhancer is active, as well as which genes it’s targeting.

“That information is extraordinarily important in understanding how development occurs, and in understanding how cancers change their regulatory programs and activate processes that lead to de-differentiation and metastatic growth,” Mahat says.

However, this kind of mapping has proven difficult to perform because eRNA is produced in very small quantities and does not last long in the cell. Additionally, eRNA lacks a modification known as a poly-A tail, which is the “hook” that most techniques use to pull RNA out of a cell.

One way to capture eRNA is to add a nucleotide to cells that halts transcription when incorporated into RNA. These nucleotides also contain a tag called biotin that can be used to fish the RNA out of a cell. However, this current technique only works on large pools of cells and doesn’t give information about individual cells.

While brainstorming ideas for new ways to capture eRNA, Mahat and Sharp considered using click chemistry, a technique that can be used to join two molecules together if they are each tagged with “click handles” that can react together.

The researchers designed nucleotides labeled with one click handle, and once these nucleotides are incorporated into growing eRNA strands, the strands can be fished out with a tag containing the complementary handle. This allowed the researchers to capture eRNA and then purify, amplify, and sequence it. Some RNA is lost at each step, but Mahat estimates that they can successfully pull out about 10 percent of the eRNA from a given cell.

Using this technique, the researchers obtained a snapshot of the enhancers and genes that are being actively transcribed at a given time in a cell.

“You want to be able to determine, in every cell, the activation of transcription from regulatory elements and from their corresponding gene. And this has to be done in a single cell because that’s where you can detect synchrony or asynchrony between regulatory elements and genes,” Mahat says.

Timing of gene expression

Demonstrating their technique in mouse embryonic stem cells, the researchers found that they could calculate approximately when a particular region starts to be transcribed, based on the length of the RNA strand and the speed of the polymerase (the enzyme responsible for transcription) — that is, how far the polymerase transcribes per second. This allowed them to determine which genes and enhancers were being transcribed around the same time.

The researchers used this approach to determine the timing of the expression of cell cycle genes in more detail than has previously been possible. They were also able to confirm several sets of known gene-enhancer pairs and generated a list of about 50,000 possible enhancer-gene pairs that they can now try to verify.

Learning which enhancers control which genes would prove valuable in developing new treatments for diseases with a genetic basis. Last year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first gene therapy treatment for sickle cell anemia, which works by interfering with an enhancer that results in activation of a fetal globin gene, reducing the production of sickled blood cells.

The MIT team is now applying this approach to other types of cells, with a focus on autoimmune diseases. Working with researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital, they are exploring immune cell mutations that have been linked to lupus, many of which are found in non-coding regions of the genome.

“It’s not clear which genes are affected by these mutations, so we are beginning to tease apart the genes these putative enhancers might be regulating, and in what cell types these enhancers are active,” Mahat says. “This is a tool for creating gene-to-enhancer maps, which are fundamental in understanding the biology, and also a foundation for understanding disease.”

The findings of this study also offer evidence for a theory that Sharp has recently developed, along with MIT professors Richard Young and Arup Chakraborty, that gene transcription is controlled by membraneless droplets known as condensates. These condensates are made of large clusters of enzymes and RNA, which Sharp suggests may include eRNA produced at enhancer sites.

“We picture that the communication between an enhancer and a promoter is a condensate-type, transient structure, and RNA is part of that. This is an important piece of work in building the understanding of how RNAs from enhancers could be active,” he says.

The research was funded by the National Cancer Institute, the National Institutes of Health, and the Emerald Foundation Postdoctoral Transition Award. 

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SPURS Fellowships offer time out to reflect, learn, and connect

Sixteen international mid-career urban planners and public administrators recently bid farewell to the MIT campus, having completed a 10-month exploration of North American education and culture designed to expand their professional networks and infuse their work with new insights as they return to influential positions in government agencies, private firms, and other organizations throughout the developing world.

Hailing from Argentina, Bhutan, China, Egypt, Honduras, India, Kosovo, Mexico, Nepal, Pakistan, Trinidad & Tobago, Yemen, and Zimbabwe, they comprise this year’s group of MIT Special Program for Urban and Regional Studies (SPURS) Fellows. Founded in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning in 1967, SPURS has drawn from 135 countries to host more than 750 mid-career individuals who are or will be shaping policy in their home countries. Along with admitting several fellows directly into SPURS, MIT has competed successfully to be among 13 U.S. universities that also host a larger group of fellows annually selected and funded by the U.S. Department of State’s Hubert H. Humphrey Fellowship Program.

Recipients of the Humphrey Fellowship have their travel to the United States, living expenses, and other costs fully financed by the U.S. State Department. Perhaps equally valuable — and some say unique among international fellowships — is a focus that frees all fellows to explore beyond classroom teachings to learn, and advance their professional development without the pressure of earning a degree.

“This is the best reward of my life, this year at MIT and Cambridge in general,” says Carina Arvizu-Machado of Mexico, former cities director for Mexico and Colombia at the World Resources Institute and Mexico’s former national deputy secretary of urban development and housing, who is sponsored by the Humphrey Fellowship. “I think this year of stepping back and stepping out of the active life that we have as professionals and being able to reflect, to learn, to exchange ideas — it’s very useful.”

Arvizu-Machado’s sentiments are echoed by many past and present fellows, says Bish Sanyal, MIT’s Ford International Professor of Urban Development and Planning and director of SPURS since 2004.

“The fellows mention that this one year has given them a real opportunity to reflect on what they have done in the past and what they are going to do in the future,” he says, adding that the value of developing professional networks with peers in other developing countries can’t be overstated. “Some have never met colleagues from another country before. The program provides the ideal setting to reflect on professional challenges, collectively, without political concerns which stifle frank deliberation in their home countries.”

While some SPURS Fellows might not be well-traveled before coming to MIT, they are nonetheless a uniformly “very highly motivated and politically powerful group,” Sanyal says — movers and shakers in their home countries in fields such as urban planning, economics, governance, and business development. Some notable alumni include the current managing director of the International Monetary Fund, a former CEO of the World Bank, former ambassadors to the United States from Colombia and Haiti, the corporate vice president of strategic programming of Banco de Desarrollo de América Latina or CAF (Latin America’s largest development bank), and a Nepalese Supreme Court justice.

“When the Ebola outbreak happened in Africa, the person who headed the Ebola response team in Liberia was a SPURS Fellow,” Sanyal says.

The benefits of having a such an accomplished and cosmopolitan group of people on campus flow both ways, says Allan Goodman, CEO of the Institute of International Education (IIE), which administers the Humphrey Fellowship for the state department.

“It really enriches MIT … and all the places that are participating,” Goodman says. “The undergraduate and graduate students interact with the fellows, and they wouldn’t ordinarily have that chance. You have a ready-made group of international consultants who are focused on the theme of your department.”

Each university participating in the Humphrey Fellowship program is assigned fellows based on a specific area of expertise. With SPURS housed within the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, the programmatic focus is on urban and regional planning. Sanyal remarks that this focus is deliberate and consistent regardless of whether fellows are sponsored by the U.S. Department of State or other agencies from the fellows’ home countries. One difference, however, is that Humphrey Fellows are required to be professionally affiliated for at least six weeks with U.S.-based organizations in their areas of work or interest — an engagement described as a cross between an internship and pro-bono consultancy that provides fellows the opportunity to develop professional relationships with U.S. practitioners.

Peter Moran, director of the Humphrey program at IIE, says the biggest value to fellows at MIT and other participating universities is the ability to step out of their past professional lives and reflect from a fresh perspective on their professional aspirations to serve their nations in an interconnected world. In the process, they also benefit from the relationships with other fellows and professional partnerships that last years after they return home.

“To say it broadens your perspective really undersells it,” he says. “The diversity of the fellows is remarkable. It’s a lot of the world … and we are putting them all around the table together.”

By continuing to put fellows from diverse corners of the world together for over 50 years, SPURS has sparked lasting partnerships between fellows, as well as among SPURS alumni, MIT faculty and students, and other professionals they encounter during their time in Cambridge.

Two factors are key to maintaining the high quality of the program, Sanyal says.

First, additional funding could strengthen the program, and, to that end, he envisions sponsoring financially sustainable relationships with over a dozen local, national, and international agencies as long-term partners.

The second challenge is to revise the program’s objective in a rapidly changing world. This is harder to surmount. When SPURS was established in 1967, Sanyal says, there was widely held public perception that the United States ought to look outward to help democratic nations of the world.

“I think the challenge now is that many countries, including the U.S., are looking inward,” Sanyal says, adding that this inward turn increases the importance that SPURS develops a diverse portfolio of funding sources.

As Arvizu-Machado prepared to return to Mexico this spring, she recounted myriad positive experiences enabled by her fellowship — from lectures she was invited to give and graduate courses she attended to practicing yoga with her undergraduate dorm mates.

“Most important, I think, is the people I’ve met,” she says. “This includes, foremost, the other fellows. They are just amazing people. They have become part of my family. But also, some of the faculty and the extended network which this fellowship allows you to have access to. I’m very grateful to be part of this program.”

One of Arvizu-Machado’s co-fellows, Tenzin Jamtsho, agrees that the opportunity for personal connections with other fellows as well as with faculty highly respected in their fields is the aspect of SPURS that will continue to resonate when he returns to his native Bhutan. Jamtsho, director of administration and finance at Bhutan’s Druk Gyalpo’s Institute (formerly the Royal Academy), who is sponsored by the Humphrey Fellowship, says he pursued the fellowship after colleagues at home told him it would be “life changing.” His actual experience at MIT affirmed this expectation.

Jamtsho says the MIT campus offers fellows a “free-flowing environment” for learning, with opportunities to take whatever classes they’re interested in. During his fellowship, Jamtsho says he came to appreciate different ways to approach challenges — viewing problems through a “systems lens,” which he calls “a valuable skill that I am taking back home.”

Also returning to Bhutan with Jamtsho are some less-tangible aspects of his time at MIT.

“I’ve been fortunate to interact with people who are very intelligent and passionate,” he says. “What I’m going to take home is the kindness and humility of these people.”

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All in the family

It’s no news that companies use money to influence politics. But it may come as a surprise to learn that many family-owned firms — the most common form of business in the world — do not play by the same rules. New research by political science PhD candidate Sukrit Puri reveals that “family businesses depart from the political strategy of treating campaign donations as short-term investments intended to maximize profitmaking.”

Studying thousands of such firms in India, Puri finds that when it comes to politics, an important influence on political behavior is ethnic identity. This in turn can make a big impact on economic development.

“If family businesses actually think about politics differently, and if they are the most common economic actors in an economy, then you break channels of accountability between a business and the government,” says Puri. “Elected officials may be less likely to deliver effective policies for achieving economic growth.”

Puri believes his insights suggest new approaches for struggling economies in some developing countries. “I’d like to get governments to think carefully about the importance of family firms, and how to incentivize them through the right kinds of industrial policies.”

Pushing past caricatures

At the heart of Puri’s doctoral studies is a question he says has long interested him: “Why are some countries rich and other countries poor?” The son of an Indian diplomat who brought his family from Belgium and Nepal to the Middle East and New York City, Puri focused on the vast inequalities he witnessed as he grew up.

As he studied economics, political science, and policy as an undergraduate at Princeton University, Puri came to believe “that firms play a very important role” in the economic development of societies. But it was not always clear from these disciplines how businesses interacted with governments, and how that affected economic growth.

“There are two canonical ways of thinking about business in politics, and they have become almost like caricatures,” says Puri. One claims government is in the pocket of corporations, or that at the least they wield undue influence. The other asserts that businesses simply do governments’ bidding and are constrained by the needs of the state. “I found these two perspectives to be wanting, because neither side gets entirely what it desires,” he says. “I set out to learn more about how business actually seeks to influence, and when it is successful or not.”

So much political science literature on business and politics is “America-centric,” with publicly listed, often very large corporations acting on behalf of shareholders, notes Puri. But this is not the paradigm for many other countries. The major players in countries like South Korea and India are family firms, big and small. “There has been so little investigation of how these family businesses participate in politics,” Puri says. “I wanted to know if we could come up with a political theory of the family firm, and look into the nature of business and politics in developing economies and democracies where these firms are so central.”

Campaign donation differences

To learn whether family businesses think about politics differently, Puri decided to zero in on one of the most pervasive forms of influence all over the world: campaign donations. “In the U.S., firms treat these donations as short-term investments, backing the incumbent and opportunistically switching parties when political actors change,” he says. “These companies have no ideology.” But family firms in India, Puri’s empirical setting, prove to operate very differently.

Puri compiled a vast dataset of all donations to Indian political parties from 2003 to 2021, identifying 7,000 unique corporate entities donating a cumulative $1 billion to 36 parties participating in national and state-level elections. He identified which of these donations came from family firms by identifying family members sitting on boards of these companies. Puri found evidence that firms with greater family involvement on these boards overwhelmingly donate loyally to a single party of their choice, and “do not participate in politics out of opportunistic, short-term profit maximizing impulse.”

Puri believes there are sociological explanations for this unexpected behavior. Family firms are more than just economic actors, but social actors as well — embedded in community networks that then shape their values, preferences, and strategic choices. In India, communities often form around caste and religious networks. So for instance, some economic policies of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have hurt its core supporters of small and medium-sized businesses, says Puri. Yet, these businesses have not abandoned their financial support of the BJP. Similarly, Muslim-majority communities and family firms stick with their candidates, even when it is not in their short-term economic best interest. Their behavior is more like that of an individual political donor — more ideological and expressive than strategic.

Engaged by debate

As a college first-year, Puri was uncertain of his academic direction. Then he learned of a debate playing out between two schools of economic thought on how to reduce poverty in India and other developing nations: On one side, Amartya Sen advocated for starting with welfare, and on the other, Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya argued that economic growth came first.

“I wanted to engage with this debate, because it suggested policy actions — what is feasible, what you can actually do in a country,” recalls Puri. “Economics was the tool for understanding these trade-offs.”

After graduation, Puri worked for a few years in investment management, specializing in emerging markets. “In my office, the conversation each day among economists was just basically political,” he says. “We were evaluating a country’s economic prospects through a kind of unsophisticated political analysis, and I decided I wanted to pursue more rigorous training in political economy.”

At MIT, Puri has finally found a way of merging his lifelong interests in economic development with policy-minded research. He believes that the behavior of family firms should be of keen concern to many governments.

“Family firms can be very insular, sticking with old practices and rewarding loyalty to co-ethnic partners,” he says. There are barriers to outside hires who might bring innovations. “These businesses are often just not interested in taking up growth opportunities,” says Puri. “There are millions of family firms but they do not provide the kind of dynamism they should.” 

In the next phase of his dissertation research Puri will survey not just the political behaviors, but the investment and management practices of family firms as well. He believes larger firms more open to outside ideas are expanding at the expense of smaller and mid-size family firms. In India and other nations, governments currently make wasteful subsidies to family firms that cannot rise to the challenge of, say, starting a new microchip fabricating plant. Instead, says Puri, governments must figure out the right kind of incentives to encourage openness and entrepreneurship in businesses that make up its economy, which are instrumental to unlocking broader economic growth.

After MIT, Puri envisions an academic life for himself studying business and politics around the world, but with a focus on India. He would like to write about family firms for a more general audience — following in the footsteps of authors who got him interested in political economy in the first place. “I’ve always believed in making knowledge more accessible; it’s one of the reasons I enjoy teaching,” he says. “It is really rewarding to lecture or write and be able to introduce people to new ideas.” 

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Ultrasound offers a new way to perform deep brain stimulation

Deep brain stimulation, by implanted electrodes that deliver electrical pulses to the brain, is often used to treat Parkinson’s disease and other neurological disorders. However, the electrodes used for this treatment can eventually corrode and accumulate scar tissue, requiring them to be removed.

MIT researchers have now developed an alternative approach that uses ultrasound instead of electricity to perform deep brain stimulation, delivered by a fiber about the thickness of a human hair. In a study of mice, they showed that this stimulation can trigger neurons to release dopamine, in a part of the brain that is often targeted in patients with Parkinson’s disease.

“By using ultrasonography, we can create a new way of stimulating neurons to fire in the deep brain,” says Canan Dagdeviren, an associate professor in the MIT Media Lab and the senior author of the new study. “This device is thinner than a hair fiber, so there will be negligible tissue damage, and it is easy for us to navigate this device in the deep brain.”

In addition to offering a potentially safer way to deliver deep brain stimulation, this approach could also become a valuable tool for researchers seeking to learn more about how the brain works.

MIT graduate student Jason Hou and MIT postdoc Md Osman Goni Nayeem are the lead authors of the paper, along with collaborators from MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Boston University, and Caltech. The study appears today in Nature Communications.

Deep in the brain

Dagdeviren’s lab has previously developed wearable ultrasound devices that can be used to deliver drugs through the skin or perform diagnostic imaging on various organs. However, ultrasound cannot penetrate deeply into the brain from a device attached to the head or skull.

“If we want to go into the deep brain, then it cannot be just wearable or attachable anymore. It has to be implantable,” Dagdeviren says. “We carefully customize the device so that it will be minimally invasive and avoid major blood vessels in the deep brain.”

Deep brain stimulation with electrical impulses is FDA-approved to treat symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. This approach uses millimeter-thick electrodes to activate dopamine-producing cells in a brain region called the substantia nigra. However, once implanted in the brain, the devices eventually begin to corrode, and scar tissue that builds up surrounding the implant can interfere with the electrical impulses.

The MIT team set out to see if they could overcome some of those drawbacks by replacing electrical stimulation with ultrasound. Most neurons have ion channels that are responsive to mechanical stimulation, such as the vibrations from sound waves, so ultrasound can be used to elicit activity in those cells. However, existing technologies for delivering ultrasound to the brain through the skull can’t reach deep into the brain with high precision because the skull itself can interfere with the ultrasound waves and cause off-target stimulation.

“To precisely modulate neurons, we must go deeper, leading us to design a new kind of ultrasound-based implant that produces localized ultrasound fields,” Nayeem says. To safely reach those deep brain regions, the researchers designed a hair-thin fiber made from a flexible polymer. The tip of the fiber contains a drum-like ultrasound transducer with a vibrating membrane. When this membrane, which encapsulates a thin piezoelectric film, is driven by a small electrical voltage, it generates ultrasonic waves that can be detected by nearby cells.

“It’s tissue-safe, there’s no exposed electrode surface, and it’s very low-power, which bodes well for translation to patient use,” Hou says.

In tests in mice, the researchers showed that this ultrasound device, which they call ImPULS (Implantable Piezoelectric Ultrasound Stimulator), can provoke activity in neurons of the hippocampus. Then, they implanted the fibers into the dopamine-producing substantia nigra and showed that they could stimulate neurons in the dorsal striatum to produce dopamine.

“Brain stimulation has been one of the most effective, yet least understood, methods used to restore health to the brain. ImPULS gives us the ability to stimulate brain cells with exquisite spatial-temporal resolution and in a manner that doesn’t produce the kind of damage or inflammation as other methods. Seeing its effectiveness in areas like the hippocampus opened an entirely new way for us to deliver precise stimulation to targeted circuits in the brain,” says Steve Ramirez, an assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences at Boston University, and a faculty member at B.U.’s Center for Systems Neuroscience, who is also an author of the study.

A customizable device

All of the components of the device are biocompatible, including the piezoelectric layer, which is made of a novel ceramic called potassium sodium niobate, or KNN. The current version of the implant is powered by an external power source, but the researchers envision that future versions could be powered a small implantable battery and electronics unit.

The researchers developed a microfabrication process that enables them to easily alter the length and thickness of the fiber, as well as the frequency of the sound waves produced by the piezoelectric transducer. This could allow the devices to be customized for different brain regions.

“We cannot say that the device will give the same effect on every region in the brain, but we can easily and very confidently say that the technology is scalable, and not only for mice. We can also make it bigger for eventual use in humans,” Dagdeviren says.

The researchers now plan to investigate how ultrasound stimulation might affect different regions of the brain, and if the devices can remain functional when implanted for year-long timescales. They are also interested in the possibility of incorporating a microfluidic channel, which could allow the device to deliver drugs as well as ultrasound.

In addition to holding promise as a potential therapeutic for Parkinson’s or other diseases, this type of ultrasound device could also be a valuable tool to help researchers learn more about the brain, the researchers say.

“Our goal to provide this as a research tool for the neuroscience community, because we believe that we don’t have enough effective tools to understand the brain,” Dagdeviren says. “As device engineers, we are trying to provide new tools so that we can learn more about different regions of the brain.”

The research was funded by the MIT Media Lab Consortium and the Brain and Behavior Foundation Research (BBRF) NARSAD Young Investigator Award.

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Helping robots grasp the unpredictable

When robots come across unfamiliar objects, they struggle to account for a simple truth: Appearances aren’t everything. They may attempt to grasp a block, only to find out it’s a literal piece of cake. The misleading appearance of that object could lead the robot to miscalculate physical properties like the object’s weight and center of mass, using the wrong grasp and applying more force than needed.

To see through this illusion, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) researchers designed the Grasping Neural Process, a predictive physics model capable of inferring these hidden traits in real time for more intelligent robotic grasping. Based on limited interaction data, their deep-learning system can assist robots in domains like warehouses and households at a fraction of the computational cost of previous algorithmic and statistical models.

The Grasping Neural Process is trained to infer invisible physical properties from a history of attempted grasps, and uses the inferred properties to guess which grasps would work well in the future. Prior models often only identified robot grasps from visual data alone.

Typically, methods that infer physical properties build on traditional statistical methods that require many known grasps and a great amount of computation time to work well. The Grasping Neural Process enables these machines to execute good grasps more efficiently by using far less interaction data and finishes its computation in less than a tenth of a second, as opposed seconds (or minutes) required by traditional methods.

The researchers note that the Grasping Neural Process thrives in unstructured environments like homes and warehouses, since both house a plethora of unpredictable objects. For example, a robot powered by the MIT model could quickly learn how to handle tightly packed boxes with different food quantities without seeing the inside of the box, and then place them where needed. At a fulfillment center, objects with different physical properties and geometries would be placed in the corresponding box to be shipped out to customers.

Trained on 1,000 unique geometries and 5,000 objects, the Grasping Neural Process achieved stable grasps in simulation for novel 3D objects generated in the ShapeNet repository. Then, the CSAIL-led group tested their model in the physical world via two weighted blocks, where their work outperformed a baseline that only considered object geometries. Limited to 10 experimental grasps beforehand, the robotic arm successfully picked up the boxes on 18 and 19 out of 20 attempts apiece, while the machine only yielded eight and 15 stable grasps when unprepared.

While less theatrical than an actor, robots that complete inference tasks also have a three-part act to follow: training, adaptation, and testing. During the training step, robots practice on a fixed set of objects and learn how to infer physical properties from a history of successful (or unsuccessful) grasps. The new CSAIL model amortizes the inference of the objects’ physics, meaning it trains a neural network to learn to predict the output of an otherwise expensive statistical algorithm. Only a single pass through a neural network with limited interaction data is needed to simulate and predict which grasps work best on different objects.

Then, the robot is introduced to an unfamiliar object during the adaptation phase. During this step, the Grasping Neural Process helps a robot experiment and update its position accordingly, understanding which grips would work best. This tinkering phase prepares the machine for the final step: testing, where the robot formally executes a task on an item with a new understanding of its properties.

“As an engineer, it’s unwise to assume a robot knows all the necessary information it needs to grasp successfully,” says lead author Michael Noseworthy, an MIT PhD student in electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) and CSAIL affiliate. “Without humans labeling the properties of an object, robots have traditionally needed to use a costly inference process.” According to fellow lead author, EECS PhD student, and CSAIL affiliate Seiji Shaw, their Grasping Neural Process could be a streamlined alternative: “Our model helps robots do this much more efficiently, enabling the robot to imagine which grasps will inform the best result.” 

“To get robots out of controlled spaces like the lab or warehouse and into the real world, they must be better at dealing with the unknown and less likely to fail at the slightest variation from their programming. This work is a critical step toward realizing the full transformative potential of robotics,” says Chad Kessens, an autonomous robotics researcher at the U.S. Army’s DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory, which sponsored the work.

While their model can help a robot infer hidden static properties efficiently, the researchers would like to augment the system to adjust grasps in real time for multiple tasks and objects with dynamic traits. They envision their work eventually assisting with several tasks in a long-horizon plan, like picking up a carrot and chopping it. Moreover, their model could adapt to changes in mass distributions in less static objects, like when you fill up an empty bottle.

Joining the researchers on the paper is Nicholas Roy, MIT professor of aeronautics and astronautics and CSAIL member, who is a senior author. The group recently presented this work at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

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MIT Corporation elects 10 term members, two life members

The MIT Corporation — the Institute’s board of trustees — has elected 10 full-term members, who will serve one-, two-, or five-year terms, and two life members. Corporation Chair Mark P. Gorenberg ’76 announced the election results today.

The full-term members are: Nancy C. Andrews, Dedric A. Carter, David Fialkow, Bennett W. Golub, Temitope O. Lawani, Michael C. Mountz, Anna Waldman-Brown, R. Robert Wickham, Jeannette M. Wing, and Anita Wu. The two life members are: R. Erich Caulfield and David M. Siegel. Gorenberg was also reelected as Corporation chair.

As of July 1, the Corporation will consist of 80 distinguished leaders in education, science, engineering, and industry. Of those, 24 are life members and eight are ex officio. An additional 25 individuals are life members emeritus.

The 10 new term members are:

Nancy C. Andrews PhD ’85, executive vice president and chief scientific officer, Boston Children’s Hospital

Andrews is a biologist and physician noted for her research on iron diseases and her roles in academic administration. She currently serves as executive vice president and chief scientific officer at the Boston Children’s Hospital and professor of pediatrics in residence at Harvard Medical School. She previously served for a decade as the first female dean of the Duke University School of Medicine. After graduating from medical school, she completed residency and fellowship at BCH, joining the faculty at Harvard as an assistant professor in 1993. From 1999 to 2003, Andrews served as director of the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology MD-PhD program, and then was appointed professor of pediatrics and dean for basic sciences and graduate studies at Harvard Medical School. Andrews currently serves on the boards of directors of Novartis, Charles River Laboratories, and Maze Therapeutics.

Dedric A. Carter ’98, MEng ’99, MBA ’14, chief innovation officer, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Carter currently serves as the vice chancellor for innovation, entrepreneurship, and economic development and chief innovation officer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has cabinet-level responsibility for the entrepreneurship, innovation, economic development, and commercialization portfolios at the university through Innovate Carolina and the Innovate Carolina Junction, a new hub for catalyzing innovation and accelerating entrepreneurial invention located in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, among other oversight and engagement roles. Prior to his appointment, he was the vice chancellor for innovation and chief commercialization officer at Washington University in St. Louis. Before that, he served as the senior advisor for strategic initiatives in the Office of the Director at the U.S. National Science Foundation, in addition to serving as the executive secretary to the U.S. National Science Board executive committee.

David Fialkow, co-founder and managing director, General Catalyst Partners

Fialkow currently serves as managing director of General Catalyst Partners, a venture capital firm that makes early-stage and transformational investments in technology and consumer companies. His areas of focus include financial services, digital health, artificial intelligence, and data analytics. With business partner Joel Cutler, Fialkow built and sold several companies prior to founding General Catalyst Partners in 2000. Early in his career, he worked for the investment firm Thomas H. Lee Company and the venture capital firm U.S. Venture Partners. Fialkow studied film at Colgate University and continues to produce documentaries with his wife, Nina, focused on health care and social justice.

Bennett W. Golub ’79, SM ’82, PhD ’84, co-founder and senior policy advisor, BlackRock

In 1988, Golub was one of eight people to start BlackRock, Inc., a global asset management company. In March of 2022, he stepped down from his day-to-day activities at the company to assume a part-time role of senior policy advisor. Formerly, he served as chief risk officer with responsibilities that included investment, counterparty, technology, and operational risk, and he chaired BlackRock’s Enterprise Risk Management Committee. Beginning in 1995, he was co-head and founder of BlackRock Solutions, the company’s risk advisory business. He also served as the acting CEO of Trepp, LLC. a former BlackRock affiliate that pioneered the creation and distribution of data and models for collateralized commercial-backed securities, beginning in 1996. Prior to the founding of BlackRock, Golub served as vice president at The First Boston Corporation (now Credit Suisse).

Temitope O. Lawani ’91, co-founder, Helios Investment Partners, LLP

Lawani, a Nigerian national, is the co-founder and managing partner of Helios Investment Partners, LLP, an Africa-focused private investment firm based in London. He also serves as co-CEO of Helios Fairfax Partners, an investment holding company. Prior to forming Helios in 2004, Lawani was a principal at the San Francisco and London offices of TPG Capital, a global private investment firm. Before that, he worked as a mergers and acquisitions and corporate development analyst at the Walt Disney Company. Lawani serves on the boards of Helios Towers, Pershing Square Holdings, and NBA Africa. He is also a director of the Global Private Capital Association and The END Fund, and has served on the boards of several public and private companies across various sectors.

Michael C. Mountz ’87, principal, Kacchip LLC

Michael “Mick” Mountz is a logistics industry entrepreneur and technologist known for inventing the mobile robotic order fulfillment approach now in widespread use across the material handling industry. In 2003, Mountz, along with MIT classmate Peter Wurman ’87 and Raffaelo D'Andrea co-founded Kiva Systems, Inc., a manufacturer of this mobile robotic fulfillment system. After Kiva, Mountz established Kacchip LLC, a technology incubator and investment entity to support local founders and startups, where Mountz currently serves as principal. Before founding Kiva, Mountz served as a director of business process and logistics at online grocery delivery company Webvan, and before that he served as a product marketing manager for Apple Computer working on the launch of the G3 and G4 series Macintosh desktops. Mountz holds over 40 U.S. technology patents and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2022.

Anna Waldman-Brown ’11, SM ’18, PhD ’23

Through her work with the Fab Lab network, which spun off from the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms, Waldman-Brown has worked with international policymakers and grassroots innovators across more than 60 countries to foster creative problem-solving and sustainable development. She helped build up and connect fab labs across dozens of countries, co-organized two week-long fab lab conferences and developed the ongoing Fab Festival, curated open-source development of an early Maker Map and several lists of academic articles related to the Maker Movement, and finalized an official collaboration with Autodesk and the international Fab Lab network. In addition to providing informal mentorship and support for students across the Institute, Waldman-Brown became involved in the burgeoning MIT Grad Student Union (GSU)/UE Local 256 around 2019 to advocate for practical solutions to improving graduate student life and health and safety. Her current work as an industrial strategy policy analyst is through the Made in America Office, which is part of the Executive Office of the President’s Office of Management and Budget.

R. Robert Wickham ’93, SM ’95, president, MIT Alumni Association

Skilled in building go-to-market teams, strategic planning, operational management, and delivering results, Wickham has held leadership roles at Salesforce and Oracle, and gained foundational experiences in management consulting and entrepreneurship. As the former general manager of Tableau Asia Pacific, a Salesforce business unit, Wickham spearheaded significant growth initiatives. He also served as chief of staff for Asia Pacific and led specialized teams in Platform and Emerging Technologies, which included pivotal technologies such as the Lightning Platform and Einstein Analytics, and drove the launch of Salesforce’s $50M Australian venture fund and its regional program for startups. Before joining Salesforce, Wickham led Oracle’s Engineered Systems business across Australia and New Zealand, and the System Management business in North America. He joined Oracle through its acquisition of Empirix Web Division, where he ran sales for North America.

Jeannette M. Wing ’78, SM ’79, PhD ’83, executive vice president for research, Columbia University

Wing is the executive vice president for research and professor of computer science at Columbia University, and previously served as Avanessians Director of the Data Science Institute. Wing’s current research interests are in trustworthy AI, and her areas of research expertise include security and privacy, formal methods, programming languages, and distributed and concurrent systems. Prior to Columbia, Wing worked at Microsoft, where she served as corporate vice president of Microsoft Research, overseeing research labs worldwide. Before joining Microsoft, she was on the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University, where she was the head of the Department of Computer Science and associate dean for academic affairs of the School of Computer Science. During a leave from Carnegie Mellon, she served at the National Science Foundation as assistant director of the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate.

Anita Wu MBA ’16, partner, AlixPartners

Wu is a partner in the retail practice at AlixPartners, a global consultancy specializing in management advisory, business performance improvement, and corporate turnarounds. Outside of client services, she is the global leader for AlixPartners’ Women’s Empowerment Network. Prior to moving to the U.S. for MIT, Wu led smart cities design in Sydney, Australia, and implemented various initiatives that improved commuter usage of public transportation. She has also previously led the operations for a nonprofit, Light the Way, where she fundraised and delivered education curriculum and microfinancing programs for farming villages in Nepal. She currently resides in New York City.

The two life members are:

David M. Siegel SM ’86, PhD ’91, co-founder and co-chairman, Two Sigma

Siegel is a computer scientist, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. Before co-founding the financial sciences company Two Sigma, he was chief technology officer and managing director at Tudor Investment Corporation. Prior to that, he was a senior leader at D.E. Shaw, where he ultimately rose to be the firm’s first chief information officer. Siegel is currently an active investor and advisor, and serves as a board member for Re:Build Manufacturing, a family of industrial businesses. He is co-founder of the Scratch Foundation, with MIT Professor Mitchel Resnick ’88. He founded the Siegel Family Endowment in 2011 to support organizations and leaders that will understand and shape the impact of technology on society, and as the organization’s chairman devotes significant time and energy to actively engaging with this work.

R. Erich Caulfield SM ’01, PhD ’06, founder and president, The Caulfield Consulting Group

Since 2013, Caulfield has served as the founder and president of The Caulfield Consulting Group, a management consulting firm that specializes in improving organizations’ performance through strategic and operational support. Between 2011 and 2013, he was the New Orleans federal team lead for the White House’s Strong Cities, Strong Communities (SC2) Initiative and, from 2010 to 2011, was a White House Fellow at the Domestic Policy Council. Between 2008 and 2010, Caulfield served as chief policy advisor to Newark, New Jersey, Mayor Cory Booker. Before entering government service, Caulfield worked in management consulting as an associate at McKinsey and Company, focusing on process design and public sector-related projects. Caulfield is also a member of the board of directors for the New Orleans Business Alliance.

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