Students research pathways for MIT to reach decarbonization goals

A number of emerging technologies hold promise for helping organizations move away from fossil fuels and achieve deep decarbonization. The challenge is deciding which technologies to adopt, and when.

MIT, which has a goal of eliminating direct campus emissions by 2050, must make such decisions sooner than most to achieve its mission. That was the challenge at the heart of the recently concluded class 4.s42 (Building Technology — Carbon Reduction Pathways for the MIT Campus).

The class brought together undergraduate and graduate students from across the Institute to learn about different technologies and decide on the best path forward. It concluded with a final report as well as student presentations to members of MIT’s Climate Nucleus on May 9.

“The mission of the class is to put together a cohesive document outlining how MIT can reach its goal of decarbonization by 2050,” says Morgan Johnson Quamina, an undergraduate in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “We’re evaluating how MIT can reach these goals on time, what sorts of technologies can help, and how quickly and aggressively we’ll have to move. The final report details a ton of scenarios for partial and full implementation of different technologies, outlines timelines for everything, and features recommendations.”

The class was taught by professor of architecture Christoph Reinhart but included presentations by other faculty about low- and zero-carbon technology areas in their fields, including advanced nuclear reactors, deep geothermal energy, carbon capture, and more.

The students’ work served as an extension of MIT’s Campus Decarbonization Working Group, which Reinhart co-chairs with Director of Sustainability Julie Newman. The group is charged with developing a technology roadmap for the campus to reach its goal of decarbonizing its energy systems.

Reinhart says the class was a way to leverage the energy and creativity of students to accelerate his group’s work.

“It’s very much focused on establishing a vision for what could happen at MIT,” Reinhart says. “We are trying to bring these technologies together so that we see how this [decarbonization process] would actually look on our campus.”

A class with impact

Throughout the semester, every Thursday from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m., around 20 students gathered to explore different decarbonization technology pathways. They also discussed energy policies, methods for evaluating risk, and future electric grid supply changes in New England.

“I love that this work can have a real-world impact,” says Emile Germonpre, a master’s student in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering. “You can tell people aren’t thinking about grades or workload — I think people would’ve loved it even if the workload was doubled. Everyone is just intrinsically motivated to help solve this problem.”

The classes typically began with an introduction to one of 10 different technologies. The introductions covered technical maturity, ease of implementation, costs, and how to model the technology’s impact on campus emissions. Students were then split into teams to evaluate each technology’s feasibility.

“I’ve learned a lot about decarbonization and climate change,” says Johnson Quamina. “As an undergrad, I haven’t had many focused classes like this. But it was really beneficial to learn about some of these technologies I hadn’t even heard of before. It’s awesome to be contributing to the community like this.”

As part of the class, students also developed a model that visualizes each intervention’s effect on emissions, allowing users to select interventions or combinations of interventions to see how they shape emissions trajectories.

“We have a physics-based model that takes into account every building,” says Reinhart. “You can look at variants where we retrofit buildings, where we add rooftop photovoltaics, nuclear, carbon capture, and adopting different types of district underground heating systems. The point is you can start to see how fast we could do something like this and what the real game-changers are.”

The class also designed and conducted a preliminary survey, to be expanded in the fall, that captures the MIT community's attitudes towards the different technologies. Preliminary results were shared with the Climate Nucleus during students’ May 9 presentations.

“I think it’s this unique and wonderful intersection of the forward-looking and innovative nature of academia with real world impact and specificity that you’d typically only find in industry,” Germonpre says. “It lets you work on a tangible project, the MIT campus, while exploring technologies that companies today find too risky to be the first mover on.”

From MIT’s campus to the world

The students recommended MIT form a building energy team to audit and retrofit all campus buildings. They also suggested MIT order a comprehensive geological feasibility survey to support planning regarding shallow and deep borehole fields for harvesting underground heat. A third recommendation was to communicate with the MIT community as well as with regulators and policymakers in the area about the deployment of nuclear batteries and deep geothermal boreholes on campus.

The students’ modeling tool can also help members of the working group explore various decarbonization pathways. For instance, installing rooftop photovoltaics now would effectively reduce emissions, but installing them in a few decades, when the regional electricity grid is expected to be reducing its reliance on fossil fuels anyways, would have a much smaller impact.

“When you have students working together, the recommendations are a little less filtered, which I think is a good thing,” Reinhart says. “I think there’s a real sense of urgency in the class. For certain choices, we have to basically act now.”

Reinhart plans to do more activities related to the Working Group and the class’ recommendations in the fall, and he says he’s currently engaged with the Massachusetts Governor's Office to explore doing something similar for the state.

Students say they plan to keep working on the survey this summer and continue studying their technology areas. In the longer term, they believe the experience will help them in their careers.

“Decarbonization is really important, and understanding how we can implement new technologies on campuses or in buildings provides me with a more well-rounded vision for what I could design in my career,” says Johnson Quamina, who wants to work as a structural or environmental engineer but says the class has also inspired her to consider careers in energy.

The students’ findings also have implications beyond MIT campus. In accordance with MIT’s 2015 climate plan that committed to using the campus community as a “test bed for change,” the students’ recommendations also hold value for organizations around the world.

“The mission is definitely broader than just MIT,” Germonpre says. “We don’t just want to solve MIT’s problem. We’ve dismissed technologies that were too specific to MIT. The goal is for MIT to lead by example and help certain technologies mature so that we can accelerate their impact.”

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Improving working environments amid environmental distress

In less than a decade, MIT economist Namrata Kala has produced a corpus of work too rich, inventive, and diverse to be easily summarized. Let’s try anyway.

Kala, an associate professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, often studies environmental problems and their effects on workers and firms, with implications for government policy, corporate managers, and anyone concerned about climate change. She also examines the effects of innovation on productivity, from farms to factories, and scrutinizes firm organization in light of such major changes.

Kala has published papers on topics including the long-term effects of climate change on agriculture in Africa and India; the impact of mechanization on farmers’ incomes; the extent to which linguistic differences create barriers to trade; and even the impact of LED light bulbs on factory productivity. Characteristically, Kala looks at issues of global scale and pinpoints their effects at the level of individuals.

Consider one paper Kala and two colleagues published a couple of years ago, about the effects of air pollution on garment factory workers in India. The scholars examined patterns of particulate-matter pollution and linked that to detailed, worker-level data about how productive workers were along the production line. The study shows that air pollution damages sewing productivity, and that some managers (not all) are adept at recognizing which workers are most affected by it.

What emerges from much of this work is a real-time picture of human adaptation in a time of environmental distress.

“I feel like I’m part of a long tradition of trying to understand resilience and adaptation, but now in the face of a changing world,” Kala says. “Understanding interventions that are good for resilience while the world is changing is what motivates me, along with the fact that the vast majority of the world is vulnerable to events that may impact economic growth.”

For her research and teaching, Kala was awarded tenure at MIT last year.

Joining academia, then staying in it

Kala, who grew up in Punjab, India, was long mindful of big issues pertaining to society, the economy, and the environment.

“Growing up in India, it’s very difficult not to be interested in the some of the questions that are important for development and environmental economics,” Kala says.

However, Kala did not expect that interest to lead her into academia. She attended Delhi University as an undergraduate, earning her degree with honors in economics while expecting to find a job in the area of development. To help facilitate that, Kala enrolled in a one-year master’s program at Yale University, in international and development economics.

Before that year was out, Kala had a new realization: Studying development problems was integral to solving them. Academia is not on the sidelines when it comes to development, but helps generate crucial knowledge to foster better and smarter growth policies.

“I came to Yale for a one-year master’s because I didn’t know if I wanted to be in a university for another two years,” Kala says. “I wanted to work on problems in the world. And that’s when I became enthralled with research. It was this wonderful year where I could study anything, and it completely changed my perspective on what I could do next. So I did the PhD, and that’s how I became an economist.”

After receiving her PhD in 2015, Kala spent the next two years supported by a Prize Fellowship in Economics, History, and Politics at Harvard University and a postdoctoral fellowship at MIT’s own Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). In 2017, she joined the MIT faculty on a full-time basis, and has remained at the Institute since then.

The source material for Kala’s studies varies widely, though in all cases she is looking for ways to construct well-defined empirical studies tackling major questions, with key issues often revealed in policy or firm details.

“I find reading stuff about policy reform strangely interesting,” she quips.

Development, but with environmental quality

Indeed, sometimes the spark for Kala’s studies comes from her own broad knowledge of past policy reforms, combined with an ability to locate data that reveals their effects.

For instance, one working paper Kala and a colleague recently completed looks at an Indian policy to move industrial firms out of Delhi in order to help solve the city’s pollution problems; the policy randomly relocated companies in an industrial belt around the city. But what effect did this have on the firms? After examining the records of 20,000 companies, the researchers found these firms’ survival rate was 8 percent to 20 percent lower than if the policy called for them to be clustered more efficiently.

That finding suggests how related environmental policies can be designed in the future.

“This environmental policy was important in that it improved air quality in Delhi, but there’s a way to do that which also reduces the cost on firms,” Kala says.

Kala says she expects India to be the locus of many, though hardly all, of her future studies. The country provides a wide range of opportunities for research.

“India currently has both the largest number of poor people in the world as well as 21 of the 30 most polluted cities in the world,” Kala says. “Clearly, the tradeoff between development and environmental quality is extremely salient, and we need progress in understanding industrial policies that are at least environmentally neutral or improving environmental quality.”

Kala will continue to look for new ways to take pressing, large-scale issues and study their effects in daily life. But the fact that her work ranges so widely is not just due to the places she studies; it is also because of the place she studies them from. MIT, she believes, has provided her with an environment of its own, which in this case enhances her own productivity.

“One thing that helps a lot is having colleagues and co-authors to bounce ideas of off,” Kala says. “Sloan is the heart of so much interdisciplinary work. That is one big reason why I’ve had a broad set of interests and continue to work on many things.”

“At Sloan,” she adds, “there are people doing fascinating things that I’m happy to listen to, as well as people in different disciplines working on related things who have a perspective I find extremely enriching. There are excellent economists, but I also go into seminars about work or productivity or the environment and come away with a perspective I don’t think I could have come up with myself.”

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Paying it forward

MIT professors Erik Lin-Greenberg and Tracy Slatyer truly understand the positive impact that advisors have in the life of a graduate student. Two of the most recent faculty members to be named “Committed to Caring,” they attribute their excellence in advising to the challenging experiences and life-changing mentorship they received during their own graduate school journeys.

Tracy Slatyer: Seeing the PhD as a journey

Tracy Slatyer is a professor in the Department of Physics who works on particle physics, cosmology, and astrophysics. Focused on unraveling the mysteries of dark matter, Slatyer investigates potential new physics through the analysis of astrophysical and cosmological data, exploring scenarios involving novel forces and theoretical predictions for photon signals.

One of Slatyer’s key approaches is to prioritize students’ educational journeys over academic accomplishments alone, also acknowledging the prevalence of imposter syndrome.

Having struggled in graduate coursework themselves, Slatyer shares their personal past challenges and encourages students to see the big picture: “I try to remind [students] that the PhD is a marathon, not a sprint, and that once you have your PhD, nobody will care if it took you one year or three to get through all the qualifying exams and required classes.” Many students also expressed gratitude for how  Slatyer offered opportunities to connect outside of work, including invitations to tea-time.

One of Slatyer’s key beliefs is the need for community amongst students, postdocs, and professors. Slatyer encourages students to meet with professors outside of their primary field of interest and helps advisees explore far-ranging topics. They note the importance of connecting with individuals at different career stages, often inviting students to conferences at other institutions, and hosting visiting scientists.

Advisees noted Slatyer’s realistic portrayal of expectations within the field and open discussion of work-life balance. They maintain a document with clear advising guidelines, such as placing new students on projects with experienced researchers. Slatyer also schedules weekly meetings to discuss non-research topics, including career goals and upcoming talks.

In addition, Slatyer does not shy away from the fact that their field is competitive and demanding. They are honest about their experiences in academia, noting that networking may be just as important as academic performance for a successful career.

Erik Lin-Greenberg: Empathy and enduring support

Erik Lin-Greenberg is an assistant professor in the history and culture of science and technology in the Department of Political Science. His research examines how emerging military technology affects conflict dynamics and the use of force.

Lin-Greenberg’s thoughtful supervision of his students underlies his commitment to cultivating the next generation of researchers. Students are grateful for his knack for identifying weak arguments, as well as his guidance through challenging publication processes: “For my dissertation, Erik has mastered the difficult art of giving feedback in a way that does not discourage.”

Lin-Greenberg's personalized approach is further evidence of his exceptional teaching. In the classroom, students praise his thorough preparation, ability to facilitate rich discussions, and flexibility during high-pressure periods. In addition, his unique ability to break down complex material makes topics accessible to the diverse array of backgrounds in the classroom.

His mentorship extends far beyond academics, encompassing a genuine concern for the well-being of his students through providing personal check-ins and unwavering support.

Much of this empathy comes from Erik’s own tumultuous beginnings in graduate school at Columbia University, where he struggled to keep up with coursework and seriously considered leaving the program. He points to the care and dedication of mentors, and advisor Tonya Putnam in particular, as having an enormous impact.

“She consistently reassured me that I was doing interesting work, gave amazing feedback on my research, and was always open and transparent,” he recounts. “When I'm advising today, I constantly try to live up to Tonya's example.”

In his own group, Erik chooses creative approaches to mentorship, including taking mentees out for refreshments to navigate difficult dissertation discussions. In his students’ moments of despair, he boosts their mood with photos of his cat, Major General Lansdale.

Ultimately, one nominator credited his ability to continue his PhD to Lin-Greenberg’s uplifting spirit and endless encouragement: “I cannot imagine anyone more deserving of recognition than Erik Lin-Greenberg.”

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Exotic black holes could be a byproduct of dark matter

For every kilogram of matter that we can see — from the computer on your desk to distant stars and galaxies — there are 5 kilograms of invisible matter that suffuse our surroundings. This “dark matter” is a mysterious entity that evades all forms of direct observation yet makes its presence felt through its invisible pull on visible objects.

Fifty years ago, physicist Stephen Hawking offered one idea for what dark matter might be: a population of black holes, which might have formed very soon after the Big Bang. Such “primordial” black holes would not have been the goliaths that we detect today, but rather microscopic regions of ultradense matter that would have formed in the first quintillionth of a second following the Big Bang and then collapsed and scattered across the cosmos, tugging on surrounding space-time in ways that could explain the dark matter that we know today.

Now, MIT physicists have found that this primordial process also would have produced some unexpected companions: even smaller black holes with unprecedented amounts of a nuclear-physics property known as “color charge.”

These smallest, “super-charged” black holes would have been an entirely new state of matter, which likely evaporated a fraction of a second after they spawned. Yet they could still have influenced a key cosmological transition: the time when the first atomic nuclei were forged. The physicists postulate that the color-charged black holes could have affected the balance of fusing nuclei, in a way that astronomers might someday detect with future measurements. Such an observation would point convincingly to primordial black holes as the root of all dark matter today.

“Even though these short-lived, exotic creatures are not around today, they could have affected cosmic history in ways that could show up in subtle signals today,” says David Kaiser, the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and professor of physics at MIT. “Within the idea that all dark matter could be accounted for by black holes, this gives us new things to look for.”

Kaiser and his co-author, MIT graduate student Elba Alonso-Monsalve, have published their study today in the journal Physical Review Letters.

A time before stars

The black holes that we know and detect today are the product of stellar collapse, when the center of a massive star caves in on itself to form a region so dense that it can bend space-time such that anything — even light — gets trapped within. Such “astrophysical” black holes can be anywhere from a few times as massive as the sun to many billions of times more massive.

“Primordial” black holes, in contrast, can be much smaller and are thought to have formed in a time before stars. Before the universe had even cooked up the basic elements, let alone stars, scientists believe that pockets of ultradense, primordial matter could have accumulated and collapsed to form microscopic black holes that could have been so dense as to squeeze the mass of an asteroid into a region as small as a single atom. The gravitational pull from these tiny, invisible objects scattered throughout the universe could explain all the dark matter that we can’t see today.

If that were the case, then what would these primordial black holes have been made from? That’s the question Kaiser and Alonso-Monsalve took on with their new study.

“People have studied what the distribution of black hole masses would be during this early-universe production but never tied it to what kinds of stuff would have fallen into those black holes at the time when they were forming,” Kaiser explains.

Super-charged rhinos

The MIT physicists looked first through existing theories for the likely distribution of black hole masses as they were first forming in the early universe.

“Our realization was, there’s a direct correlation between when a primordial black hole forms and what mass it forms with,” Alonso-Monsalve says. “And that window of time is absurdly early.”

She and Kaiser calculated that primordial black holes must have formed within the first quintillionth of a second following the Big Bang. This flash of time would have produced “typical” microscopic black holes that were as massive as an asteroid and as small as an atom. It would have also yielded a small fraction of exponentially smaller black holes, with the mass of a rhino and a size much smaller than a single proton.

What would these primordial black holes have been made from? For that, they looked to studies exploring the composition of the early universe, and specifically, to the theory of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) — the study of how quarks and gluons interact.

Quarks and gluons are the fundamental building blocks of protons and neutrons — elementary particles that combined to forge the basic elements of the periodic table. Immediately following the Big Bang, physicists estimate, based on QCD, that the universe was an immensely hot plasma of quarks and gluons that then quickly cooled and combined to produce protons and neutrons.

The researchers found that, within the first quintillionth of a second, the universe would still have been a soup of free quarks and gluons that had yet to combine. Any black holes that formed in this time would have swallowed up the untethered particles, along with an exotic property known as “color charge” — a state of charge that only uncombined quarks and gluons carry.

“Once we figured out that these black holes form in a quark-gluon plasma, the most important thing we had to figure out was, how much color charge is contained in the blob of matter that will end up in a primordial black hole?” Alonso-Monsalve says.

Using QCD theory, they worked out the distribution of color charge that should have existed throughout the hot, early plasma. Then they compared that to the size of a region that would collapse to form a black hole in the first quintillionth of a second. It turns out there wouldn’t have been much color charge in most typical black holes at the time, as they would have formed by absorbing a huge number of regions that had a mix of charges, which would have ultimately added up to a “neutral” charge.

But the smallest black holes would have been packed with color charge. In fact, they would have contained the maximum amount of any type of charge allowed for a black hole, according to the fundamental laws of physics. Whereas such “extremal” black holes have been hypothesized for decades, until now no one had discovered a realistic process by which such oddities actually could have formed in our universe.

The super-charged black holes would have quickly evaporated, but possibly only after the time when the first atomic nuclei began to form. Scientists estimate that this process started around one second after the Big Bang, which would have given extremal black holes plenty of time to disrupt the equilibrium conditions that would have prevailed when the first nuclei began to form. Such disturbances could potentially affect how those earliest nuclei formed, in ways that might some day be observed.

“These objects might have left some exciting observational imprints,” Alonso-Monsalve muses. “They could have changed the balance of this versus that, and that’s the kind of thing that one can begin to wonder about.”

This research was supported, in part, by the U.S. Department of Energy. Alonso-Monsalve is also supported by a fellowship from the MIT Department of Physics. 

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The unexpected origins of a modern finance tool

In the early 1600s, the officials running Durham Cathedral, in England, had serious financial problems. Soaring prices had raised expenses. Most cathedral income came from renting land to tenant farmers, who had long leases so officials could not easily raise the rent. Instead, church leaders started charging periodic fees, but these often made tenants furious. And the 1600s, a time of religious schism, was not the moment to alienate church members.

But in 1626, Durham officials found a formula for fees that tenants would accept. If tenant farmers paid a fee equal to one year’s net value of the land, it earned them a seven-year lease. A fee equal to 7.75 years of net value earned a 21-year lease.

This was a form of discounting, the now-common technique for evaluating the present and future value of money by assuming a certain rate of return on that money. The Durham officials likely got their numbers from new books of discounting tables. Volumes like this had never existed before, but suddenly local church officials were applying the technique up and down England.

As financial innovation stories go, this one is unusual. Normally, avant-garde financial tools might come from, well, the financial avant-garde — bankers, merchants, and investors hunting for short-term profits, not clergymen.

“Most people have assumed these very sophisticated calculations would have been implemented by hard-nosed capitalists, because really powerful calculations would allow you to get an economic edge and increase profits,” says MIT historian William Deringer, an expert in the deployment of quantitative reasoning in public life. “But that was not the primary or only driver in this situation.”

Deringer has published a new research article about this episode, “Mr. Aecroid’s Tables: Economic Calculations and Social Customs in the Early Modern Countryside,” appearing in the current issue of the Journal of Modern History. In it, he uses archival research to explore how the English clergy started using discounting, and where. And one other question: Why?

Enter inflation

Today, discounting is a pervasive tool. A dollar in the present is worth more than a dollar a decade from now, since one can earn money investing it in the meantime. This concept heavily informs investment markets, corporate finance, and even the NFL draft (where trading this year’s picks yields a greater haul of future picks). As the historian William N. Goetzmann has written, the related idea of net present value “is the most important tool in modern finance.” But while discounting was known as far back as the mathematician Leonardo of Pisa (often called Fibonacci) in the 1200s, why were English clergy some of its most enthusiastic early adopters?

The answer involves a global change in the 1500s: the “price revolution,” in which things began costing more, after a long period when prices had been constant. That is, inflation hit the world.

“People up to that point lived with the expectation that prices would stay the same,” Deringer says. “The idea that prices changed in a systematic way was shocking.”

For Durham Cathedral, inflation meant the organization had to pay more for goods while three-quarters of its revenues came from tenant rents, which were hard to alter. Many leases were complex, and some were locked in for a tenant’s lifetime. The Durham leaders did levy intermittent fees on tenants, but that led to angry responses and court cases.

Meanwhile, tenants had additional leverage against the Church of England: religious competition following the Reformation. England’s political and religious schisms would lead it to a midcentury civil war. Maybe some private landholders could drastically increase fees, but the church did not want to lose followers that way.

“Some individual landowners could be ruthlessly economic, but the church couldn’t, because it’s in the midst of incredible political and religious turmoil after the Reformation,” Deringer says. “The Church of England is in this precarious position. They’re walking a line between Catholics who don’t think there should have been a Reformation, and Puritans who don’t think there should be bishops. If they’re perceived to be hurting their flock, it would have real consequences. The church is trying to make the finances work but in a way that’s just barely tolerable to the tenants.”

Enter the books of discounting tables, which allowed local church leaders to finesse the finances. Essentially, discounting more carefully calibrated the upfront fees tenants would periodically pay. Church leaders could simply plug in the numbers as compromise solutions.

In this period, England’s first prominent discounting book with tables was published in 1613; its most enduring, Ambrose Acroyd’s “Table of Leasses and Interest,” dated to 1628-29. Acroyd was the bursar at Trinity College at Cambridge University, which as a landholder (and church-affiliated institution) faced the same issues concerning inflation and rent. Durham Cathedral began using off-the-shelf discounting formulas in 1626, resolving decades of localized disagreement as well.

Performing fairness

The discounting tables from books did not only work because the price was right. Once circulating clergy had popularized the notion throughout England, local leaders could justify using the books because others were doing it. The clergy were “performing fairness,” as Deringer puts it.

“Strict calculative rules assured tenants and courts that fines were reasonable, limiting landlords’ ability to maximize revenues,” Deringer writes in the new article.

To be sure, local church leaders in England were using discounting for their own economic self-interest. It just wasn’t the largest short-term economic self-interest possible. And it was a sound strategy.

“In Durham they would fight with tenants every 20 years [in the 1500s] and come to a new deal, but eventually that evolves into these sophisticated mechanisms, the discounting tables,” Deringer adds. “And you get standardization. By about 1700, it seems like these procedures are used everywhere.”

Thus, as Deringer writes, “mathematical tables for setting fines were not so much instruments of a capitalist transformation as the linchpin holding together what remained of an older system of customary obligations stretched nearly to breaking by macroeconomic forces.”

Once discounting was widely introduced, it never went away. Deringer’s Journal of Modern History article is part of a larger book project he is currently pursuing, about discounting in many facets of modern life.

Deringer was able to piece together the history of discounting in 17th-century England thanks in part to archival clues. For instance, Durham University owns a 1686 discounting book self-described as an update to Acroyd’s work; that copy was owned by a Durham Cathedral administrator in the 1700s. Of the 11 existing copies of Acroyd’s work, two are at Canterbury Cathedral and Lincoln Cathedral.

Hints like that helped Deringer recognize that church leaders were very interested in discounting; his further research helped him see that this chapter in the history of discounting is not merely about finance; it also opens a new window into the turbulent 1600s.

“I never expected to be researching church finances, I didn’t expect it to have anything to do with the countryside, landlord-tenant relationships, and tenant law,” Deringer says. “I was seeing this as an interesting example of a story about bottom-line economic calculation, and it wound up being more about this effort to use calculation to resolve social tensions.” 

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Advocating for science funding on Capitol Hill

This spring, 26 MIT students and postdocs traveled to Washington to meet with congressional staffers to advocate for increased science funding for fiscal year 2025. These conversations were impactful given the recent announcement of budget cuts for several federal science agencies for FY24. 

The participants met with 85 congressional offices representing 30 states over two days April 8-9. Overall, the group advocated for $89.46 billion in science funding across 11 federal scientific agencies. 

Every spring, the MIT Science Policy Initiative (SPI) organizes the Congressional Visit Days (CVD). The trip exposes participants to the process of U.S. federal policymaking and the many avenues researchers can use to advocate for scientific research. The participants also meet with Washington-based alumni and members of the MIT Washington Office and learn about policy careers.

This year, CVD was jointly co-organized by Marie Floryan and Andrew Fishberg, two PhD students in the departments of Mechanical Engineering and Aeronautics and Astronautics, respectively. Before the trip, the participants attended two training sessions organized by SPI, the MIT Washington Office, and the MIT Policy Lab. The participants learned how funding is appropriated at the federal level, the role of elected congressional officials and their staffers in the legislative process, and how academic researchers can get involved in advocating for policies for science.

Julian Ufert, a doctoral student in chemical engineering, says, “CVD was a remarkable opportunity to share insights from my research with policymakers, learn about U.S. politics, and serve the greater scientific community. I thoroughly enjoyed the contacts I made both on Capitol Hill and with MIT students and postdocs who share an interest in science policy.”

In addition to advocating for increased science funding, the participants advocated for topics pertaining to their research projects. A wide variety of topics were discussed, including AI, cybersecurity, energy production and storage, and biotechnology. Naturally, the recent advent of groundbreaking AI technologies, like ChatGPT, brought the topic of AI to the forefront of many offices interested, with multiple offices serving on the newly formed bipartisan AI Task Force.

These discussions were useful for both parties: The participants learned about the methods and challenges associated with enacting legislation, and the staffers directly heard from academic researchers about what is needed to promote scientific progress and innovation.

“It was fascinating to experience the interest and significant involvement of Congressional offices in policy matters related to science and technology. Most staffers were well aware of the general technological advancements and eager to learn more about how our research will impact society,” says Vipindev Vasudevan, a postdoc in electrical and computer engineering.

Dina Sharon, a PhD student in chemistry, adds, “The offices where we met with Congressional staffers were valuable classrooms! Our conversations provided insights into policymakers’ goals, how science can help reach these goals, and how scientists can help cultivate connections between the research and policy spheres.”

Participants also shared how science funding has directly impacted them, discussing how federal grants have supported their graduate education and for the need for open access research.

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Ten with MIT connections win 2024 Hertz Foundation Fellowships

The Fannie and John Hertz Foundation announced that it has awarded fellowships to 10 PhD students with ties to MIT. The prestigious award provides each recipient with five years of doctoral-level research funding (up to a total of $250,000), which allows them the flexibility and autonomy to pursue their own innovative ideas.

Fellows also receive lifelong access to Hertz Foundation programs, such as events, mentoring, and networking. They join the ranks of over 1,300 former Hertz Fellows who are leaders and scholars in a range of fields in science, engineering, and technology. Connections among fellows over the years have sparked collaborations in startups, research, and technology commercialization.

The 10 MIT recipients are among a total of 18 Hertz Foundation Fellows scholars selected this year from across the country. Five of them received their undergraduate degrees at the Institute and will pursue their PhDs at other schools. Two are current MIT graduate students, and four will begin their studies here in the fall.

“For more than 60 years, Hertz Fellows have led scientific and technical innovation in national security, applied biological sciences, materials research, artificial intelligence, space exploration, and more. Their contributions have been essential in advancing U.S. competitiveness,” says Stephen Fantone, chair of the Hertz Foundation board of directors and founder and president of Optikos Corp. “I’m excited to watch our newest Hertz Fellows as they pursue challenging research and continue the strong tradition of applying their work for the greater good.”

This year’s MIT-affiliated awardees are:

Owen Dugan ’24 graduated from MIT in just two-and-a-half years with a degree in physics, and he plans to pursue a PhD in computer science at Stanford University. His research interests lie at the intersection of AI and physics. As an undergraduate, he conducted research in a broad range of areas, including using physics concepts to enhance the speed of large language models and developing machine learning algorithms that automatically discover scientific theories. He was recognized with MIT’s Outstanding Undergraduate Research Award and is a U.S. Presidential Scholar, a Neo Scholar, and a Knight-Hennessy Scholar. Dugan holds multiple patents, co-developed an app to reduce food waste, and co-founded a startup that builds tools to verify the authenticity of digital images.

Kaylie Hausknecht will begin her physics doctorate at MIT in the fall, having completing her undergraduate degree in physics and astrophysics at Harvard University. While there, her undergraduate research focused on developing new machine learning techniques to solve problems in a range of fields, such as fluid dynamics, astrophysics, and condensed matter physics. She received the Hoopes Prize for her senior thesis, was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa as a junior, and won two major writing awards. In addition, she completed five NASA internships. As an intern, she helped identify 301 new exoplanets using archival data from the Kepler Space Telescope. Hausknecht served as the co-president of Harvard’s chapter of Science Club for Girls, which works to encourage girls from underrepresented backgrounds to pursue STEM.

Elijah Lew-Smith majored in physics at Brown University and plans to pursue a doctoral degree in physics at MIT. He is a theoretical physicist with broad intellectual interests in effective field theory (EFT), which is the study of systems with many interacting degrees of freedom. EFT reveals how to extract the relevant, long-distance behavior from complicated microscopic rules. In 2023, he received a national award to work on applying EFT systematically to non-equilibrium and active systems such as fluctuating hydrodynamics or flocking birds. In addition, Lew-Smith received a scholarship from the U.S. State Department to live for a year in Dakar, Senegal, and later studied at ’École Polytechnique in Paris, France.

Rupert Li ’24 earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at MIT in mathematics as well as computer science, data science, and economics, with a minor in business analytics.He was named a 2024 Marshall Scholar and will study abroad for a year at Cambridge University before matriculating at Stanford University for a mathematics doctorate. As an undergraduate, Li authored 12 math research articles, primarily in combinatorics, but also including discrete geometry, probability, and harmonic analysis. He was recognized for his work with a Barry Goldwater Scholarship and an honorable mention for the Morgan Prize, one of the highest undergraduate honors in mathematics.

Amani Maina-Kilaas is a first-year doctoral student at MIT in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, where he studies computational psycholinguistics. In particular, he is interested in using artificial intelligence as a scientific tool to study how the mind works, and using what we know about the mind to develop more cognitively realistic models. Maina-Kilaas earned his bachelor’s degree in computer science and mathematics from Harvey Mudd College. There, he conducted research regarding intention perception and theoretical machine learning, earning the Astronaut Scholarship and Computing Research Association’s Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award.

Zoë Marschner ’23 is a doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon University working on geometry processing, a subfield of computer graphics focused on how to represent and work with geometric data digitally; in her research, she aims to make these representations capable of enabling fundamentally better algorithms for solving geometric problems across science and engineering. As an undergraduate at MIT, she earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science and math and pursued research in geometry processing, including repairing hexahedral meshes and detecting intersections between high-order surfaces. She also interned at Walt Disney Animation Studios, where she worked on collision detection algorithms for simulation. Marschner is a recipient of the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship and the Goldwater Scholarship.

Zijian (William) Niu will start a doctoral program in computational and systems biology at MIT in the fall. He has a particular interest in developing new methods for imaging proteins and other biomolecules in their native cellular environments and using those data to build computational models for predicting their dynamics and molecular interactions. Niu received his bachelor’s degree in biochemistry, biophysics, and physics from the University of Pennsylvania. His undergraduate research involved developing novel computational methods for biological image analysis. He was awarded the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship for creating a deep-learning algorithm for accurately detecting tiny diffraction-limited spots in fluorescence microscopy images that outperformed existing methods in quantifying spatial transcriptomics data.

James Roney received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Harvard University in computer science and statistics, respectively. He is currently working as a machine learning research engineer at D.E. Shaw Research. His past research has focused on interpreting the internal workings of AlphaFold and modeling cancer evolution. Roney plans to pursue a PhD in computational biology at MIT, with a specific interest in developing computational models of protein structure, function, and evolution and using those models to engineer novel proteins for applications in biotechnology.

Anna Sappington ’19 is a student in the Harvard University-MIT MD-PhD Program, currently in the first year of her doctoral program at MIT in electrical engineering and computer science. She is interested in building methods to predict evolutionary events, especially connections among machine learning, biology, and chemistry to develop reinforcement learning models inspired by evolutionary biology. Sappington graduated from MIT with a bachelor’s degree in computer science and molecular biology. As an undergraduate, she was awarded a 2018 Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and selected as a Burchard Scholar and an Amgen Scholar. After graduating, she earned a master’s degree in genomic medicine from the University of Cambridge, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar, as well as a master’s degree in machine learning from University College London.

Jason Yang ’22 received his bachelor’s degree in biology with a minor in computer science from MIT and is currently a doctoral student in genetics at Stanford University. He is interested in understanding the biological processes that underlie human health and disease. At MIT, and subsequently at Massachusetts General Hospital, Yang worked on the mechanisms involved in neurodegeneration in repeat expansion diseases, uncovering a novel molecular consequence of repeat protein aggregation.

de MIT News https://ift.tt/x75b9KU