Rebuilding Ukraine

Nearly three years after Russian military forces invaded Ukraine, escalating a decade-long conflict, Ukrainian cities lie in ruin as the war drags on. The seaside city of Mariupol was particularly hard hit. Bombs hollowed out hospitals and homes and leveled banks and playgrounds. Schools sit charred and empty.

The remaining 30 percent of the population still residing in Mariupol, now under Russian occupation, lack reliable electricity, clean water, and medical care. And of the 65,000 Mariupolites in exile across Ukraine and abroad, many have no home to return to. While Ukraine’s future remains uncertain, its mayors and municipal managers are laser-focused on planning for recovery after the war. “Ukrainian communities know we should build back better when the war is finished, so what is that experience?” says Vadym Boichenko, Mariupol mayor and head of development of de-occupied and temporarily occupied communities for the Association of Ukrainian Cities. To secure funding for rebuilding, “leaders need to prepare good projects with vision and innovation for their communities,” he adds.

Success depends on drawing from cutting-edge research and forward-thinking approaches to urban economic development and planning. To expedite learning, the Kyiv-based Association of Ukrainian Cities, Mariupol City Council, and the nonprofit Mariupol Reborn created a virtual Community Recovery Academy that leans on MIT’s expertise. This online training program for Ukrainian officials includes a series of lectures by professors in the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), part of the Institute’s School of Architecture and Planning. Talks include wisdom drawn from case studies coupled with theoretical lessons.

“When I first learned of this opportunity, trying to mobilize a contribution from DUSP was a no-brainer; it’s the very least we can offer,” says Christopher Zegras, DUSP department head and professor of mobility and urban planning. Increasingly destructive weather events and ongoing conflicts worldwide have made post-disaster planning “a global need, and unfortunately probably an increasing global need,” Zegras adds.

An MIT connection

The connection to Ukrainian officials came from Washington-based DUSP alumnus Victor Hoskins MCP ’81. Last spring, the president and CEO of the Fairfax County Economic Development Authority learned about Ukraine’s need from a former colleague he had worked with as deputy mayor of planning and economic development in D.C.

Hoskins has worked internationally, traveling often to Europe and Asia, where his office has branches that work to attract foreign companies to Fairfax County. In prior positions, “a lot of my work has centered around going into jurisdictions that are having trouble and turning them around economically,” Hoskins says.

He set up a call with the vice-mayor of Mariupol, Sergiy Orlov, and staff, who work in exile in the Ukrainian city of Dnipro. “They’re in circumstances unimaginable to us,” Hoskins says. “Anything we can do to help is a good thing.” One strategy Hoskins has used in his own planning and development work is consulting academic institutions for guidance. Orlov asked him to suggest a few schools in the United States. “I said, try the best universities in the world,” says Hoskins. “Try MIT.”

Hoskins connected Orlov and Zegras, who pledged DUSP’s support after learning about the project. Officials from 37 communities across Ukraine, especially small- to medium-sized ones, were eager to learn best practices in urban development and about reconstruction planning and funding strategies to support rebuilding.

From Boichenko’s makeshift office, where air alerts are common and missiles often hum overhead, a small team sketched out the Community Recovery Academy’s modules and curriculum. The academy launched in September 2024 with seven MIT professors on board to give lectures as part of the initiative’s second of four modules: “Economic Modeling, Recovery of Cities and Territories.”

DUSP Lecturer Andrew Stokols, whose ancestors hail from Ukraine, helped Zegras coordinate schedules and calls. “It’s important to think about how planners can respond to ongoing conflicts in the world,” Stokols says. “Scholarly exchange is useful, and it’s nice to know we can do something, however small it is, to help out.”

Planning for the future

Lecture topics included transportation resilience and recovery by Jinhua Zhao, professor of cities and transport and director of MIT Mobility Initiative, and revitalizing main streets and small-town economic development strategies by Jeffrey Levine, associate professor of the practice of economic development and planning.

Andres Sevtsuk, associate professor of urban science and planning, spoke on street commerce and designing to create vibrant urban sidewalks. Former special assistant for manufacturing and economic development at the White House National Economic Council and current DUSP professor of the practice Liz Reynolds also spoke on industrial transformation. Timothy Sturgeon, an affiliate with the MIT Industrial Performance Center, ran a session with a Ukrainian counterpart on integrating Ukraine’s software industry with global value chains.

Talks were simultaneously translated into Ukrainian, and participants had ample time to ask pressing questions.

Mary Anne Ocampo, associate professor of the practice of urban design and planning and principal at Sasaki and Associates, shared insights from her work on Kabul’s 2017 to 2019 reconstruction during her presentation for Ukrainian officials.

She spoke about ways to attract investment and build consensus among key organizations and institutions that can support rebuilding, while encouraging Ukrainian leaders to consider how marginalized Ukrainian populations could influence reconstruction. Small, quick-win projects can be key, she said.

Albert Saiz, the Daniel Rose Associate Professor of Urban Economics and Real Estate, imparted lessons around urban and housing economics plus the economics of master planning. He drew from examples of cities in the U.S. Midwest that had seen sharp declines, including Detroit and Cleveland. He also delved into Japan and Germany’s recoveries after World War II.

A crucial lesson for Ukraine is the vital role external trade plays in recovery, Saiz says. Post WWII, Japan focused on trade with other countries, and it emerged stronger because of it. “In Japan, cities recovered very quickly,” says Saiz. For Ukraine, “it’s important to reestablish firm-based external, international relationships right now.”

Saiz explained how to structure credit guarantees, which will be essential to helping Ukraine secure international financing. Building temporary structures can be helpful, too, he told officials — for example, constructing FEMA-type homes as an interim solution. Meanwhile, clarity in planning is key.

“I shared that you have to establish a clear path to your stakeholders, but then you have to have flexibility within that path,” Saiz says.

An ongoing collaboration

The Community Recovery Academy is currently underway with the support of the U.K. government under the U.K. International Development and the International Republican Institute (IRI UKRAINE), in collaboration with steel and mining company Metinvest and Ukrainian investment group SCM.

Metinvest and SCM are also supporting planning work that’s been underway through the nonprofit organization Mariupol Reborn. The group’s 2040 urban vision document includes insight from urban planners, architects and other experts. As for the academy, there’s ongoing demand for more lessons. “The request is quite huge,” Boichenko says. Around 100 territorial communities applied to participate in the academy, and the first phase accommodated a few dozen.

Orlov and Zegras hope to produce another set of MIT lectures this spring. Longer term, plans are in the works for a multidisciplinary, multi-departmental fall 2025 MIT practicum during which students would work alongside Ukrainian officials on recovery planning. In the meantime, lectures will be packaged into a free and open-access online learning course.

Zegras says he hopes the learning that’s gone into the work to date helps to provide an initial blueprint for Ukraine’s future, as well as for planning’s potential role in rebuilding in a world where these types of efforts are increasingly needed — whether it be Sudan, Gaza, or Los Angeles.

For Boichenko, the academy has been foundational work. “We are only in the beginning,” he says. “We are building strong relationships, and we are definitely happy to work with MIT.”

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Fiber computer allows apparel to run apps and “understand” the wearer

What if the clothes you wear could care for your health?

MIT researchers have developed an autonomous programmable computer in the form of an elastic fiber, which could monitor health conditions and physical activity, alerting the wearer to potential health risks in real-time. Clothing containing the fiber computer was comfortable and machine washable, and the fibers were nearly imperceptible to the wearer, the researchers report.

Unlike on-body monitoring systems known as “wearables,” which are located at a single point like the chest, wrist, or finger, fabrics and apparel have an advantage of being in contact with large areas of the body close to vital organs. As such, they present a unique opportunity to measure and understand human physiology and health.

The fiber computer contains a series of microdevices, including sensors, a microcontroller, digital memory, bluetooth modules, optical communications, and a battery, making up all the necessary components of a computer in a single elastic fiber.

The researchers added four fiber computers to a top and a pair of leggings, with the fibers running along each limb. In their experiments, each independently programmable fiber computer operated a machine-learning model that was trained to autonomously recognize exercises performed by the wearer, resulting in an average accuracy of about 70 percent.

Surprisingly, once the researchers allowed the individual fiber computers to communicate among themselves, their collective accuracy increased to nearly 95 percent.

“Our bodies broadcast gigabytes of data through the skin every second in the form of heat, sound, biochemicals, electrical potentials, and light, all of which carry information about our activities, emotions, and health. Unfortunately, most — if not all — of it gets absorbed and then lost in the clothes we wear. Wouldn’t it be great if we could teach clothes to capture, analyze, store, and communicate this important information in the form of valuable health and activity insights?” says Yoel Fink, a professor of materials science and engineering at MIT, a principal investigator in the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) and the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies (ISN), and senior author of a paper on the research, which appears today in Nature.

The use of the fiber computer to understand health conditions and help prevent injury will soon undergo a significant real-world test as well. U.S. Army and Navy service members will be conducting a monthlong winter research mission to the Arctic, covering 1,000 kilometers in average temperatures of -40 degrees Fahrenheit. Dozens of base layer merino mesh shirts with fiber computers will be providing real-time information on the health and activity of the individuals participating on this mission, called Musk Ox II.

“In the not-too-distant future, fiber computers will allow us to run apps and get valuable health care and safety services from simple everyday apparel. We are excited to see glimpses of this future in the upcoming Arctic mission through our partners in the U.S. Army, Navy, and DARPA. Helping to keep our service members safe in the harshest environments is a honor and privilege,” Fink says.

He is joined on the paper by co-lead authors Nikhil Gupta, an MIT materials science and engineering graduate student; Henry Cheung MEng ’23; and Syamantak Payra ’22, currently a graduate student at Stanford University; John Joannopoulos, the Francis Wright Professor of Physics at MIT and director of the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies; as well as others at MIT, Rhode Island School of Design, and Brown University.

Fiber focus

The fiber computer builds on more than a decade of work in the Fibers@MIT lab at the RLE and was supported primarily by ISN. In previous papers, the researchers demonstrated methods for incorporating semiconductor devices, optical diodes, memory units, elastic electrical contacts, and sensors into fibers that could be formed into fabrics and garments.

“But we hit a wall in terms of the complexity of the devices we could incorporate into the fiber because of how we were making it. We had to rethink the whole process. At the same time, we wanted to make it elastic and flexible so it would match the properties of traditional fabrics,” says Gupta.

One of the challenges that researchers surmounted is the geometric mismatch between a cylindrical fiber and a planar chip. Connecting wires to small, conductive areas, known as pads, on the outside of each planar microdevice proved to be difficult and prone to failure because complex microdevices have many pads, making it increasingly difficult to find room to attach each wire reliably.

In this new design, the researchers map the 2D pad alignment of each microdevice to a 3D layout using a flexible circuit board called an interposer, which they wrapped into a cylinder. They call this the “maki” design. Then, they attach four separate wires to the sides of the “maki” roll and connected all the components together.

“This advance was crucial for us in terms of being able to incorporate higher functionality computing elements, like the microcontroller and Bluetooth sensor, into the fiber,” says Gupta.

This versatile folding technique could be used with a variety of microelectronic devices, enabling them to incorporate additional functionality.

In addition, the researchers fabricated the new fiber computer using a type of thermoplastic elastomer that is several times more flexible than the thermoplastics they used previously. This material enabled them to form a machine-washable, elastic fiber that can stretch more than 60 percent without failure.

They fabricate the fiber computer using a thermal draw process that the Fibers@MIT group pioneered in the early 2000s. The process involves creating a macroscopic version of the fiber computer, called a preform, that contains each connected microdevice.

This preform is hung in a furnace, melted, and pulled down to form a fiber, which also contains embedded lithium-ion batteries so it can power itself.

“A former group member, Juliette Marion, figured out how to create elastic conductors, so even when you stretch the fiber, the conductors don’t break. We can maintain functionality while stretching it, which is crucial for processes like knitting, but also for clothes in general,” Gupta says.

Bring out the vote

Once the fiber computer is fabricated, the researchers use a braiding technique to cover the fiber with traditional yarns, such as polyester, merino wool, nylon, and even silk.

In addition to gathering data on the human body using sensors, each fiber computer incorporates LEDs and light sensors that enable multiple fibers in one garment to communicate, creating a textile network that can perform computation.

Each fiber computer also includes a Bluetooth communication system to send data wirelessly to a device like a smartphone, which can be read by a user.

The researchers leveraged these communication systems to create a textile network by sewing four fiber computers into a garment, one in each sleeve. Each fiber ran an independent neural network that was trained to identify exercises like squats, planks, arm circles, and lunges.

“What we found is that the ability of a fiber computer to identify human activity was only about 70 percent accurate when located on a single limb, the arms or legs. However, when we allowed the fibers sitting on all four limbs to ‘vote,’ they collectively reached nearly 95 percent accuracy, demonstrating the importance of residing on multiple body areas and forming a network between autonomous fiber computers that does not need wires and interconnects,” Fink says.

Moving forward, the researchers want to use the interposer technique to incorporate additional microdevices.

Arctic insights

In February, a multinational team equipped with computing fabrics will travel for 30 days and 1,000 kilometers in the Arctic. The fabrics will help keep the team safe, and set the stage for future physiological “digital twinning” models.

“As a leader with more than a decade of Arctic operational experience, one of my main concerns is how to keep my team safe from debilitating cold weather injuries — a primary threat to operators in the extreme cold,” says U.S. Army Major Hefner, the commander of Musk Ox II. “Conventional systems just don’t provide me with a complete picture. We will be wearing the base layer computing fabrics on us 24/7 to help us better understand the body’s response to extreme cold and ultimately predict and prevent injury.”

Karl Friedl, U.S. Army senior research scientist of performance physiology, noted that the MIT programmable computing fabric technology may become a “gamechanger for everyday lives.”

“Imagine near-term fiber computers in fabrics and apparel that sense and respond to the environment and to the physiological status of the individual, increasing comfort and performance, providing real-time health monitoring and providing protection against external threats. Soldiers will be the early adopters and beneficiaries of this new technology, integrated with AI systems using predictive physiological models and mission-relevant tools to enhance survivability in austere environments,” Friedl says.

“The convergence of classical fibers and fabrics with computation and machine learning has only begun. We are exploring this exciting future not only through research and field testing, but importantly in an MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering course ‘Computing Fabrics,’ taught with Professor Anais Missakian from the Rhode Island School of Design,” adds Fink.

This research was supported, in part, by the U.S. Army Research Office Institute for Soldier Nanotechnology (ISN), the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Fannie and John Hertz Foundation Fellowship, the Paul and Daisy Soros Foundation Fellowship for New Americans, the Stanford-Knight Hennessy Scholars Program, and the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation.

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A protein from tiny tardigrades may help cancer patients tolerate radiation therapy

About 60 percent of all cancer patients in the United States receive radiation therapy as part of their treatment. However, this radiation can have severe side effects that often end up being too difficult for patients to tolerate.

Drawing inspiration from a tiny organism that can withstand huge amounts of radiation, researchers at MIT, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and the University of Iowa have developed a new strategy that may protect patients from this kind of damage. Their approach makes use of a protein from tardigrades, often also called “water bears,” which are usually less than a millimeter in length.

When the researchers injected messenger RNA encoding this protein into mice, they found that it generated enough protein to protect cells’ DNA from radiation-induced damage. If developed for use in humans, this approach could benefit many cancer patients, the researchers say.

“Radiation can be very helpful for many tumors, but we also recognize that the side effects can be limiting. There’s an unmet need with respect to helping patients mitigate the risk of damaging adjacent tissue,” says Giovanni Traverso, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT and a gastroenterologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

Traverso and James Byrne, an assistant professor of radiation oncology at the University of Iowa, are the senior authors of the study, which appears today in Nature Biomedical Engineering. The paper’s lead authors are Ameya Kirtane, an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School and a visiting scientist at MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, and Jianling Bi, a research scientist at the University of Iowa.

Extreme survival

Radiation is often used to treat cancers of the head and neck, where it can damage the mouth or throat, making it very painful to eat or drink. It is also commonly used for gastrointestinal cancers, which can lead to rectal bleeding. Many patients end up delaying treatments or stopping them altogether.

“This affects a huge number of patients, and it can manifest as something as simple as mouth sores, which can limit a person’s ability to eat because it’s so painful, to requiring hospitalization because people are suffering so terribly from the pain, weight loss, or bleeding. It can be pretty dangerous, and it’s something that we really wanted to try and address,” Byrne says.

Currently, there are very few ways to prevent radiation damage in cancer patients. There are a handful of drugs that can be given to try to reduce the damage, and for prostate cancer patients, a hydrogel can be used to create a physical barrier between the prostate and the rectum during radiation treatment.

For several years, Traverso and Byrne have been working on developing new ways to prevent radiation damage. In the new study, they were inspired by the extraordinary survival ability of tardigrades. Found all over the world, usually in aquatic environments, these organisms are well known for their resilience to extreme conditions. Scientists have even sent them into space, where they were shown to survive extreme dehydration and cosmic radiation.

One key component of tardigrades’ defense systems is a unique damage suppressor protein called Dsup, which binds to DNA and helps protect it from radiation-induced damage. This protein plays a major role in tardigrades’ ability to survive radiation doses 2,000 to 3,000 times higher than what a human being can tolerate.

When brainstorming ideas for novel ways to protect cancer patients from radiation, the researchers wondered if they might be able to deliver messenger RNA encoding Dsup to patient tissues before radiation treatment. This mRNA would trigger cells to transiently express the protein, protecting DNA during the treatment. After a few hours, the mRNA and protein would disappear.

For this to work, the researchers needed a way to deliver mRNA that would generate large amounts of protein in the target tissues. They screened libraries of delivery particles containing both polymer and lipid components, which have been used separately to achieve efficient mRNA delivery. From these screens, they identified one polymer-lipid particle that was best-suited for delivery to the colon, and another that was optimized to deliver mRNA to mouth tissue.

“We thought that perhaps by combining these two systems — polymers and lipids — we may be able to get the best of both worlds and get highly potent RNA delivery. And that’s essentially what we saw,” Kirtane says. “One of the strengths of our approach is that we are using a messenger RNA, which just temporarily expresses the protein, so it’s considered far safer than something like DNA, which may be incorporated into the cells’ genome.”

Protection from radiation

After showing that these particles could successfully deliver mRNA to cells grown in the lab, the researchers tested whether this approach could effectively protect tissue from radiation in a mouse model.

They injected the particles into either the cheek or the rectum several hours before giving a dose of radiation similar to what cancer patients would receive. In these mice, the researchers saw a 50 percent reduction in the amount of double-stranded DNA breaks caused by radiation.

“This study shows great promise and is a really novel idea leveraging natural mechanisms of protection again DNA damage for the purpose of protecting healthy cells during radiation treatments for cancer,” says Ben Ho Park, director of the Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, who was not involved in the study.

The researchers also showed that the protective effect of the Dsup protein did not spread beyond the injection site, which is important because they don’t want to protect the tumor itself from the effects of radiation. To make this treatment more feasible for potential use in humans, the researchers now plan to work on developing a version of the Dsup protein that would not provoke an immune response, as the original tardigrade protein likely would.

If developed for use in humans, this protein could also potentially be used to protect against DNA damage caused by chemotherapy drugs, the researchers say. Another possible application would be to help prevent radiation damage in astronauts in space.

Other authors of the paper include Netra Rajesh, Chaoyang Tang, Miguel Jimenez, Emily Witt, Megan McGovern, Arielle Cafi, Samual Hatfield, Lauren Rosenstock, Sarah Becker, Nicole Machado, Veena Venkatachalam, Dylan Freitas, Xisha Huang, Alvin Chan, Aaron Lopes, Hyunjoon Kim, Nayoon Kim, Joy Collins, Michelle Howard, Srija Manchkanti, and Theodore Hong.

The research was funded by the Prostate Cancer Foundation Young Investigator Award, the U.S. Department of Defense Prostate Cancer Program Early Investigator Award, a Hope Funds for Cancer Research Fellowship, the American Cancer Society, the National Cancer Institute, MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, and the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health. 

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Helping the immune system attack tumors

In addition to patrolling the body for foreign invaders, the immune system also hunts down and destroys cells that have become cancerous or precancerous. However, some cancer cells end up evading this surveillance and growing into tumors.

Once established, tumor cells often send out immunosuppressive signals, which leads T cells to become “exhausted” and unable to attack the tumor. In recent years, some cancer immunotherapy drugs have shown great success in rejuvenating those T cells so they can begin attacking tumors again.

While this approach has proven effective against cancers such as melanoma, it doesn’t work as well for others, including lung and ovarian cancer. MIT Associate Professor Stefani Spranger is trying to figure out how those tumors are able to suppress immune responses, in hopes of finding new ways to galvanize T cells into attacking them.

“We really want to understand why our immune system fails to recognize cancer,” Spranger says. “And I’m most excited about the really hard-to-treat cancers because I think that’s where we can make the biggest leaps.”

Her work has led to a better understanding of the factors that control T-cell responses to tumors, and raised the possibility of improving those responses through vaccination or treatment with immune-stimulating molecules called cytokines.

“We’re working on understanding what exactly the problem is, and then collaborating with engineers to find a good solution,” she says.

Jumpstarting T cells

As a student in Germany, where students often have to choose their college major while still in high school, Spranger envisioned going into the pharmaceutical industry and chose to major in biology. At Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich, her course of study began with classical biology subjects such as botany and zoology, and she began to doubt her choice. But, once she began taking courses in cell biology and immunology, her interest was revived and she continued into a biology graduate program at the university.

During a paper discussion class early in her graduate school program, Spranger was assigned to a Science paper on a promising new immunotherapy treatment for melanoma. This strategy involves isolating tumor-infiltrating T-cells during surgery, growing them into large numbers, and then returning them to the patient. For more than 50 percent of those patients, the tumors were completely eliminated.

“To me, that changed the world,” Spranger recalls. “You can take the patient’s own immune system, not really do all that much to it, and then the cancer goes away.”

Spranger completed her PhD studies in a lab that worked on further developing that approach, known as adoptive T-cell transfer therapy. At that point, she still was leaning toward going into pharma, but after finishing her PhD in 2011, her husband, also a biologist, convinced her that they should both apply for postdoc positions in the United States.

They ended up at the University of Chicago, where Spranger worked in a lab that studies how the immune system responds to tumors. There, she discovered that while melanoma is usually very responsive to immunotherapy, there is a small fraction of melanoma patients whose T cells don’t respond to the therapy at all. That got her interested in trying to figure out why the immune system doesn’t always respond to cancer the way that it should, and in finding ways to jumpstart it.

During her postdoc, Spranger also discovered that she enjoyed mentoring students, which she hadn’t done as a graduate student in Germany. That experience drew her away from going into the pharmaceutical industry, in favor of a career in academia.

“I had my first mentoring teaching experience having an undergrad in the lab, and seeing that person grow as a scientist, from barely asking questions to running full experiments and coming up with hypotheses, changed how I approached science and my view of what academia should be for,” she says.

Modeling the immune system

When applying for faculty jobs, Spranger was drawn to MIT by the collaborative environment of MIT and its Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, which offered the chance to collaborate with a large community of engineers who work in the field of immunology.

“That community is so vibrant, and it’s amazing to be a part of it,” she says.

Building on the research she had done as a postdoc, Spranger wanted to explore why some tumors respond well to immunotherapy, while others do not. For many of her early studies, she used a mouse model of non-small-cell lung cancer. In human patients, the majority of these tumors do not respond well to immunotherapy.

“We build model systems that resemble each of the different subsets of non-responsive non-small cell lung cancer, and we’re trying to really drill down to the mechanism of why the immune system is not appropriately responding,” she says.

As part of that work, she has investigated why the immune system behaves differently in different types of tissue. While immunotherapy drugs called checkpoint inhibitors can stimulate a strong T-cell response in the skin, they don’t do nearly as much in the lung. However, Spranger has shown that T cell responses in the lung can be improved when immune molecules called cytokines are also given along with the checkpoint inhibitor.

Those cytokines work, in part, by activating dendritic cells — a class of immune cells that help to initiate immune responses, including activation of T cells.

“Dendritic cells are the conductor for the orchestra of all the T cells, although they’re a very sparse cell population,” Spranger says. “They can communicate which type of danger they sense from stressed cells and then instruct the T cells on what they have to do and where they have to go.”

Spranger’s lab is now beginning to study other types of tumors that don’t respond at all to immunotherapy, including ovarian cancer and glioblastoma. Both the brain and the peritoneal cavity appear to suppress T-cell responses to tumors, and Spranger hopes to figure out how to overcome that immunosuppression.

“We’re specifically focusing on ovarian cancer and glioblastoma, because nothing’s working right now for those cancers,” she says. “We want to understand what we have to do in those sites to induce a really good anti-tumor immune response.”

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MIT engineers prepare to send three payloads to the moon

Three MIT payloads will soon hitch a ride to the moon in a step toward establishing a permanent base on the lunar surface.

In the coming days, weather permitting, MIT engineers and scientists will send three payloads into space, on a course set for the moon’s south polar region. Scientists believe this area, with its permanently shadowed regions, could host hidden reservoirs of frozen water, which could serve to sustain future lunar settlements and fuel missions beyond the moon.

NASA plans to send astronauts to the moon’s south pole in 2027 as part of the Artemis III mission, which will be the first time humans touch down on the lunar surface since the Apollo era and the first time any human sets foot on its polar region. In advance of that journey, the MIT payloads will provide data about the area that can help prepare Artemis astronauts for navigating the frozen terrain.

The payloads include two novel technologies — a small depth-mapping camera and a thumb-sized mini-rover — along with a wafer-thin “record,” etched with the voices of people from around the world speaking in their native languages. All three payloads will be carried by a larger, suitcase-sized rover built by the space contractor Lunar Outpost.

As the main rover drives around the moon’s surface, exploring the polar terrain, the MIT camera, mounted on the front of the rover, will take the first ever 3D images of the lunar landscape captured from the surface of the Moon using time of flight technology. These images will beam back to Earth, where they can be used to train Artemis astronauts in visual simulations of the polar terrain and can be incorporated into advanced spacesuits with synthetic vision helmets.

Meanwhile, the mini-rover, dubbed “AstroAnt,” will wheel around the roof of the main rover and take temperature readings to monitor the larger vehicle’s operation. If it’s successful, AstroAnt could work as part of a team of miniature helper bots, performing essential tasks in future missions, such as clearing dust from solar panels and checking for cracks in lunar habitats and infrastructure.

All three MIT payloads, along with the Lunar Outpost rover, will launch to the moon aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and touch down in the moon’s south polar region in a lander built by space company Intuitive Machines. The mission as a whole, which includes a variety of other payloads in addition to MIT’s, is named IM-2, for Intuitive Machines’ second trip to the moon. IM-2 aims to identify the presence and amount of water-ice on the moon’s south pole, using a combination of instruments, including an ice drill mounted to the lander, and a robotic “hopper” that will bounce along the surface to search for water in hard-to-reach regions.

The lunar landing, which engineers anticipate will be around noon on March 6, will mark the first time MIT has set active technology on the moon’s surface since the Apollo era, when MIT’s Instrumentation Laboratory, now the independent Draper Laboratory, provided the landmark Apollo Guidance Computer that navigated astronauts to the moon and back.

MIT engineers see their part in the new mission, which they’ve named “To the Moon to Stay,” as the first of many on the way to establishing a permanent presence on the lunar surface.

“Our goal is not just to visit the moon but to build a thriving ecosystem that supports humanity’s expansion into space,” says Dava Newman, Apollo Program Professor of Astronautics at MIT, director of the MIT Media Lab, and former NASA deputy administrator.

Institute’s roots

MIT’s part in the lunar mission is led by the Space Exploration Initiative (SEI), a research collaborative within the Media Lab that aims to enable a “sci-fi future” of space exploration. The SEI, which was founded in 2016 by media arts and sciences alumna Ariel Ekblaw SM ’17, PhD ’20, develops, tests, and deploys futuristic space-grade technologies that are intended to help humans establish sustainable settlements in space.

In the spring of 2021, SEI and MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro) offered a course, MAS.839/16.893 (Operating in the Lunar Environment), that tasked teams of students to design payloads that meet certain objectives related to NASA’s Artemis missions to the moon. The class was taught by Ekblaw and AeroAstro’s Jeffrey Hoffman, MIT professor of the practice and former NASA astronaut, who helped students test their payload designs in the field, including in remote regions of Norway that resemble the moon’s barren landscape, and in parabolic flights that mimic the moon’s weak gravity.

Out of that class, Ekblaw and Hoffman chose to further develop two payload designs: a laser-based 3D camera system and the AstroAnt — a tiny, autonomous inspection robot. Both designs grew out of prior work. AstroAnt was originally a side project as part of Ekblaw’s PhD, based on work originally developed by Artem Dementyev in the Media Lab’s Responsive Environments group, while the 3D camera was a PhD focus for AeroAstro alumna Cody Paige ’23, who helped develop and test the camera design and implement VR/XR technology with Newman, in collaboration with NASA Ames Research Center.

As both designs were fine-tuned, Ekblaw raised funds and established a contract with Lunar Outpost (co-founded by MIT AeroAstro alumnus Forrest Meyen SM ’13, PhD ’17) to pair the payloads with the company’s moon-bound rover. SEI Mission Integrator Sean Auffinger oversaw integration and test efforts, together with Lunar Outpost, to support these payloads for operation in a novel, extreme environment.

“This mission has deep MIT roots,” says Ekblaw, who is the principal investigator for the MIT arm of the IM-2 mission, and a visiting scientist at the Media Lab. “This will be historic in that we’ve never landed technology or a rover in this area of the lunar south pole. It’s a really hard place to land — there are big boulders, and deep dust. So, it’s a bold attempt.”

Systems on

The site of the IM-2 landing is Mons Mouton Plateau — a flat-topped mountain at the moon’s south pole that lies just north of Shackleton Crater, which is a potential landing site for NASA’s Artemis astronauts. After the Intuitive Machines lander touches down, it will effectively open its garage door and let Lunar Outpost’s rover drive out to explore the polar landscape. Once the rover acclimates to its surroundings, it will begin to activate its instruments, including MIT’s 3D camera.

“It will be the first time we’re using this specific imaging technology on the lunar surface,” notes Paige, who is the current SEI director.

The camera, which will be mounted on the front of the main rover, is designed to shine laser light onto a surface and measure the time it takes for the light to bounce back to the camera. This “time-of-flight” is a measurement of distance, which can also be translated into surface topography, such as the depth of individual craters and crevices.

“Because we’re using a laser light, we can look without using sunlight,” Paige explains. “And we don’t know exactly what we’ll find. Some of the things we’re looking for are centimeter-sized holes, in areas that are permanently shadowed or frozen, that might contain water-ice. Those are the kinds of landscapes we’re really excited to see.”

Paige expects that the camera will send images back to Earth in next-day data packets, which the MIT science team will process and analyze as the rover traverses the terrain.

As the camera maps the moon’s surface, AstroAnt — which is smaller and lighter than an airpod case — will deploy from a tiny garage atop the main rover’s roof. The AstroAnt will drive around on magnetic wheels that allow it to stick to the rover’s surface without falling off. To the AstroAnt’s undercarriage, Ekblaw and her team, led by Media Lab graduate student Fangzheng Liu, fixed a thermopile — a small sensor that takes measurements of the main rover’s temperature, which can be used to monitor the vehicle’s thermal performance. 

“If we can test this one AstroAnt on the moon, then we imagine having these really capable, roving swarms that can help astronauts do autonomous repair, inspection, diagnostics, and servicing,” Ekblaw says. “In the future, we could put little windshield wipers on them to help clear dust from solar panels, or put a pounding bar on them to induce tiny vibrations to detect defects in a habitat. There’s a lot of potential once we get to swarm scale.”

Eyes on the moon

The third MIT payload that will be affixed to the main rover is dubbed the Humanity United with MIT Art and Nanotechnology in Space, or HUMANS project. Led by MIT AeroAstro alumna Maya Nasr ’18, SM ’21, PhD ’23, HUMANS is a 2-inch disc made from a silicon wafer engraved with nanometer-scale etchings using technology provided by MIT.nano. The engravings are inspired by The Golden Record, a phonograph record that was sent into space with NASA’s Voyager probes in 1977. The HUMANS record is engraved with recordings of people from around the world, speaking in their native languages about what space exploration and humanity mean to them.

“We are carrying the hopes, dreams, and stories of people from all backgrounds,” Nasr says. “(It’s a) powerful reminder that space is not the privilege of a few, but the shared legacy of all.”

The MIT Media Lab plans to display the March 6 landing on a screen in the building’s atrium for the public to watch in real-time. Researchers from MIT’s Department of Architecture, led by Associate Professor Skylar Tibbits, have also built a lunar mission control room — a circular, architectural space where the engineers will monitor and control the mission’s payloads. If all goes well, the MIT team see the mission as the first step toward putting permanent boots on the surface of the moon, and even beyond.

“Our return to the Moon is not just about advancing technology — it’s about inspiring the next generation of explorers who are alive today and will travel to the moon in their lifetime,” Ekblaw says. “This historic mission for MIT brings students, staff and faculty together from across the Institute on a foundational mission that will support a future sustainable lunar settlement.”

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Student Spotlight: Titus Roesler

The following is part of a series of short interviews from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) featuring a student describing themselves and life at MIT. Today’s interviewee, Titus Roesler, is a senior majoring in electrical science and engineering. As a first-year at MIT, Roesler joined the Experimental Study Group (ESG), a learning community that offers new MIT students the general Institute requirements (GIRs) in a small, tight-knit class setting. Roesler stuck around as an associate advisor in subsequent years for new cohorts of first-year ESG students, as a teaching assistant for classes on calculus and group theory, and as an instructor for special seminars in electrical engineering that he designed from scratch and then taught. Roesler’s commitment to his academic community also goes deep. Besides his teaching work, for which he was recently honored with the EECS Undergraduate Teaching Award, he is a member of the Undergraduate Student Advisory Group in EECS (USAGE), which provides student feedback to the department. 

Q: Tell us about one teacher from your past who had an influence on the person you’ve become.

A: While a student in ESG, I took ES.1801 (Single-Variable Calculus), ES.1802 (Multivariable Calculus), and ES.1803 (Differential Equations), all with Gabrielle Stoy. One morning in late spring, Gabrielle asked me to stick around after class to speak with her. (I wondered which course policy I had violated, and worried throughout the lecture.) Instead, Gabrielle asked me if I would apply to be a teaching assistant for an ESG math class the next semester. I was ecstatic — and thus began my “teaching career” at MIT! Gabrielle formally retired from teaching mathematics in ESG in 2024, but we teamed up again to offer a special seminar on group theory over IAP [Independent Activities Period] 2025.

Q: What is one conversation that changed the trajectory of your life?

A: I’m grateful for all the conversations I’ve had with Prof. Denny Freeman. I appreciate his kindness, wisdom, and willingness to find time to discuss career plans, research, and education with me. I’ve always left his office feeling more ambitious and optimistic than I did when I walked in.

Q: Do you have a bucket list? If so, share one or two of the items on it.

A: Running the Boston Marathon was on my bucket list for a few years, and I checked that off in 2024. Beyond that, I would love to explore Antarctica — perhaps by living and working at a research station for a year.

Q: What’s your favorite key on a standard computer keyboard, and why?

A: The backslash ( \ ) key is my favorite. I use it often for TEX commands when typesetting.

Q: If you suddenly won the lottery, what would you spend some of the money on?

A: A bulk order of Hagoromo chalk — the so-called “Rolls-Royce of chalk!”

Q: If you had to teach a really in-depth class about a niche topic, what would you pick?

A: In the context of signal processing, filters sift out desired frequency bands while attenuating others. I’d be interested in teaching a class on the theory and practice behind filter design — constructing a filter that satisfies a set of specifications. For example, analog or digital? Finite impulse response or infinite impulse response? Group delay? Causality? Stability? Practical implementation? I’m not an expert in filter design myself, but I’d appreciate the opportunity to consolidate what I’ve learned so far and study the topic in greater depth.

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An “All-American” vision of service to others

Spencer Paysinger has already been many things in his life, including a Super Bowl-winning linebacker, a writer and producer of the hit television series “All-American,” and local-business entrepreneur. But as he explained during his keynote speech at MIT’s 51st annual event celebrating the life and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., Paysinger would prefer to think about his journey in additional terms: whether he has been able to serve others along the way.

“As I stand up here today talking about Dr. King’s mission, Dr. King’s dream, why we’re all here today, to me it all leans back into community,” Paysinger said. “I want to be judged by what I have done for others.”

Being able to reach out to others, in good times and bad, was a theme of the annual event, which took place in MIT’s Walker Memorial (Building 50), on Thursday. As Paysinger noted, his own career is marked by being a “team player” and finding reward in shared endeavors.

“For me, I’m at my best when I have people on the right and on the left of me attempting to reach the same dream,” Paysinger said. “We can have different ideologies, we can come from different backgrounds, of race, socioeconomic backgrounds. … At the end of the day it comes back to the mindset we need to have. It’s rooted in community, it’s rooted in togetherness.”

The event featured an array of talks delivered by students, campus leaders, and guests, along with musical interludes, and drew hundreds from the MIT community.

In opening remarks, MIT President Sally A. Kornbluth praised Paysinger, saying his “perseverance and tenacity are a fantastic example to us all.”

Kornbluth also spoke about the values, and value, of MIT itself. American universities and colleges, she noted, have long “been a point of national pride and a source of international envy. … They and we have always been valued as centers of excellence creativity, innovation, and an infinitely renewable source of leadership.”

Moving forward, Kornbluth noted, the MIT community will continue to pursue excellence and provide mutual respect for others.

“MIT is in the talent business,” Kornbluth said. “Our success, and living up to our great mission, depends on our ability to attract extraordinarily talented people and to create a community in which everyone earns a place here to do their very best work. … Everyone at MIT is here because they deserve to be here. Every staff member, every faculty member, every postdoc, every student, every one of us. Every one of us is a full member of this community, and every member of our community is valued as a human being, and valued for what they contribute to our mission.”

Paysinger lauded the array of speakers as well as the friendly atmosphere at the event, where attendees sat around luncheon tables, talking and getting to know each other before and after the slate of talks.

“You guys actively and literally in 45 minutes have changed my view of what MIT is,” Paysinger said.

In his NFL career, Paysinger was a linebacker who played with the New York Giants, Miami Dolphins, and Carolina Panthers, from 2011 through 2017, appearing in 94 regular-season games and five playoff games. He saw action in Super Bowl XLVI, when the Giants beat the New England Patriots, 22-17, something he joked about a few times for his Massachusetts audience. Paysinger’s former New York Giants teammate, fellow linebacker Mark Herzlich, was also in attendance on Thursday.

Paysinger grew up in South Central Los Angeles, long perceived from the outside as a place of danger and deprivation. And while he experienced those things, Paysinger said, his home neighborhood also had its “all-American” side, as kids raced bikes down the block and grew to know each other. Paysinger attended Beverly Hills High School, starring as a wide receiver, then signed with the University of Oregon, where he converted to linebacker. Oregon and Paysinger reached college football’s national championship game in his senior season, 2010.

In his talk, Paysinger emphasized the twists and turns of his journey through football, from changing positions on the field to changing teams. He noted that, in sports as in life, moving beyond our comfort zone can help us thrive in the long run.

“I was scared, I wasn’t sure of myself, when my coaches decided to make that change for me,” Paysinger said. However, he added, “I knew that [from] leaning into the uncomfortableness of the moment, the other side could be greater for me.”

The NFL soon beckoned, along with a Super Bowl ring. But Paysinger received a jolt beyond the boundaries of sports in 2015, when his former Giants teammate and close friend Tyler Sash died suddently at age 27. Among other things, Paysinger began thinking about life after football more systematically and began his screenwriting efforts in earnest, even as his football career was still ongoing.

“All-American,” now entering its 7th season on the CW Network, is loosely based on his own background, capturing the dynamics of his experiences as a player and team member. It has become one of the longest-running sports-based shows on television. Paysinger is also an entrepreneur who founded Hilltop Kitchen and Coffee, a chain of eateries in underserved areas around Los Angeles, and has helped develop other local businesses as well.

And while every new venture is a fresh challenge, Paysinger said, we can often accomplish more than we realize: “I’m not coming from a mindset of deciding whether I can or can’t do something, but if I want to or not.”

Sophomore Michael Ewing provided welcoming remarks and introduced Paysinger. He read aloud a quote from King chosen as a central motif of this year’s celebration: “We must come to see that the end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience.”

For his own part, Ewing said, “When I read these words, I think of a society that aspires to improve its circumstances, address existing issues, and create a more positive and just environment for all.” At MIT, Ewing added, there is “a community where students, professors, and others come together to achieve at the highest levels, united by a shared desire to learn and grow. … The process of collaborating, disagreeing, building with others who are different — this is the key to growth and development.”

The annual MLK Celebration featured further reflections from students, including second-year undergraduate Siddhu Pachipala, a political science and economics double-major. Pachipala began his remarks by recounting a social media exchange he once had with a congressional account, the tenor of which he soon regretted.

“Looking back, I think it was a missed opportunity,” Pachipala said. “Why was my first instinct … to turn it into a battle? … We train ourselves to believe that if we’re not scoring hits, we’re losing, and gestures of decency are traps, that an extended hand must be slapped away. Martin Luther King Jr. took politics to be something more substantial. He had a serious vision of justice, one we’ve gathered today to honor. But he knew that justice had a prerequisite: friendship.”

Elshareef Kabbashi, a graduate student in architecture, offered additional remarks, noting that “Dr. King’s dream was never confined to a single movement, nation, or moment in history,” but rather aimed at creating “human dignity everywhere.”

E. Denise Simmons, mayor of the City of Cambridge, also spoke, and lauded “the entire MIT community for keeping this tradition alive for 51 years.” She added: “It’s Dr. King’s wisdom, his courage, his moral clarity, that helped light the path forward. And I ask each of you to continue to shine that light.”

The luncheon included the presentation of the annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Leadership Awards Recipients, given this year to Cordelia Price ’78, SM ’80; Pouya Alimagham; Ciarra Ortiz; Sahal Ahmed; William Gibbs; and Maxine Samuels.

On a day full of thoughts about King and his vision, Paysinger underscored the salience of community by highlighting another of his favorite King passages: “Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness. This is the judgment. Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’” 

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