MIT gears up to transform manufacturing

“Manufacturing is the engine of society, and it is the backbone of robust, resilient economies,” says John Hart, head of MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE) and faculty co-director of the MIT Initiative for New Manufacturing (INM). “With manufacturing a lively topic in today’s news, there’s a renewed appreciation and understanding of the importance of manufacturing to innovation, to economic and national security, and to daily lives.”

Launched this May, INM will “help create a transformation of manufacturing through new technology, through development of talent, and through an understanding of how to scale manufacturing in a way that enables imparts higher productivity and resilience, drives adoption of new technologies, and creates good jobs,” Hart says.

INM is one of MIT’s strategic initiatives and builds on the successful three-year-old Manufacturing@MIT program. “It’s a recognition by MIT that manufacturing is an Institute-wide theme and an Institute-wide priority, and that manufacturing connects faculty and students across campus,” says Hart. Alongside Hart, INM’s faculty co-directors are Institute Professor Suzanne Berger and Chris Love, professor of chemical engineering.

The initiative is pursuing four main themes: reimagining manufacturing technologies and systems, elevating the productivity and human experience of manufacturing, scaling up new manufacturing, and transforming the manufacturing base.

Breaking manufacturing barriers for corporations

Amgen, Autodesk, Flex, GE Vernova, PTC, Sanofi, and Siemens are founding members of INM’s industry consortium. These industry partners will work closely with MIT faculty, researchers, and students across many aspects of manufacturing-related research, both in broad-scale initiatives and in particular areas of shared interests. Membership requires a minimum three-year commitment of $500,000 a year to manufacturing-related activities at MIT, including the INM membership fee of $275,000 per year, which supports several core activities that engage the industry members.

One major thrust for INM industry collaboration is the deployment and adoption of AI and automation in manufacturing. This effort will include seed research projects at MIT, collaborative case studies, and shared strategy development.

INM also offers companies participation in the MIT-wide New Manufacturing Research effort, which is studying the trajectories of specific manufacturing industries and examining cross-cutting themes such as technology and financing.

Additionally, INM will concentrate on education for all professions in manufacturing, with alliances bringing together corporations, community colleges, government agencies, and other partners. “We'll scale our curriculum to broader audiences, from aspiring manufacturing workers and aspiring production line supervisors all the way up to engineers and executives,” says Hart.

In workforce training, INM will collaborate with companies broadly to help understand the challenges and frame its overall workforce agenda, and with individual firms on specific challenges, such as acquiring suitably prepared employees for a new factory.

Importantly, industry partners will also engage directly with students. Founding member Flex, for instance, hosted MIT researchers and students at the Flex Institute of Technology in Sorocaba, Brazil, developing new solutions for electronics manufacturing.

“History shows that you need to innovate in manufacturing alongside the innovation in products,” Hart comments. “At MIT, as more students take classes in manufacturing, they’ll think more about key manufacturing issues as they decide what research problems they want to solve, or what choices they make as they prototype their devices. The same is true for industry — companies that operate at the frontier of manufacturing, whether through internal capabilities or their supply chains, are positioned to be on the frontier of product innovation and overall growth.”

“We’ll have an opportunity to bring manufacturing upstream to the early stage of research, designing new processes and new devices with scalability in mind,” he says.

Additionally, MIT expects to open new manufacturing-related labs and to further broaden cooperation with industry at existing shared facilities, such as MIT.nano. Hart says that facilities will also invite tighter collaborations with corporations — not just providing advanced equipment, but working jointly on, say, new technologies for weaving textiles, or speeding up battery manufacturing.

Homing in on the United States

INM is a global project that brings a particular focus on the United States, which remains the world’s second-largest manufacturing economy, but has suffered a significant decline in manufacturing employment and innovation.

One key to reversing this trend and reinvigorating the U.S. manufacturing base is advocacy for manufacturing’s critical role in society and the career opportunities it offers.

“No one really disputes the importance of manufacturing,” Hart says. “But we need to elevate interest in manufacturing as a rewarding career, from the production workers to manufacturing engineers and leaders, through advocacy, education programs, and buy-in from industry, government, and academia.”

MIT is in a unique position to convene industry, academic, and government stakeholders in manufacturing to work together on this vital issue, he points out.

Moreover, in times of radical and rapid changes in manufacturing, “we need to focus on deploying new technologies into factories and supply chains,” Hart says. “Technology is not all of the solution, but for the U.S. to expand our manufacturing base, we need to do it with technology as a key enabler, embracing companies of all sizes, including small and medium enterprises.”

“As AI becomes more capable, and automation becomes more flexible and more available, these are key building blocks upon which you can address manufacturing challenges,” he says. “AI and automation offer new accelerated ways to develop, deploy, and monitor production processes, which present a huge opportunity and, in some cases, a necessity.”

“While manufacturing is always a combination of old technology, new technology, established practice, and new ways of thinking, digital technology gives manufacturers an opportunity to leapfrog competitors,” Hart says. “That’s very, very powerful for the U.S. and any company, or country, that aims to create differentiated capabilities.”

Fortunately, in recent years, investors have increasingly bought into new manufacturing in the United States. “They see the opportunity to re-industrialize, to build the factories and production systems of the future,” Hart says.

“That said, building new manufacturing is capital-intensive, and takes time,” he adds. “So that’s another area where it’s important to convene stakeholders and to think about how startups and growth-stage companies build their capital portfolios, how large industry can support an ecosystem of small businesses and young companies, and how to develop talent to support those growing companies.”

All these concerns and opportunities in the manufacturing ecosystem play to MIT’s strengths. “MIT’s DNA of cross-disciplinary collaboration and working with industry can let us create a lot of impact,” Hart emphasizes. “We can understand the practical challenges. We can also explore breakthrough ideas in research and cultivate successful outcomes, all the way to new companies and partnerships. Sometimes those are seen as disparate approaches, but we like to bring them together.”

de MIT News https://ift.tt/L5BOQTp

The art and science of being an MIT teaching assistant

“It’s probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done at MIT,” says Haley Nakamura, a second-year MEng student in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS). She’s not reflecting on a class, final exam, or research paper. Nakamura is talking about the experience of being a teaching assistant (TA). “It’s really an art form, in that there is no formula for being a good teacher. It’s a skill, and something you have to continuously work at and adapt to different people.”

Nakamura, like approximately 16 percent of her EECS MEng peers, balances her own coursework with teaching responsibilities. The TA role is complex, nuanced, and at MIT, can involve much more planning and logistics than you might imagine. Nakamura works on a central computer science (CS) course, 6.3900 (Introduction to Machine Learning), which registers around 400-500 students per semester. For that enrollment, the course requires eight instructors at the lecturer/professor level; 15 TAs, between the undergraduate and graduate level; and about 50 lab assistants (LAs). Students are split across eight sections corresponding to each senior instructor, with a group of TAs and LAs for each section of 60-70 students.

To keep everyone moving forward at the same pace, coordination and organization are key. “A lot of the reason I got my initial TA-ship was because I was pretty organized,” Nakamura explains. “Everyone here at MIT can be so busy that it can be difficult to be on top of things, and students will be the first to point out logistical confusion and inconsistencies. If they’re worried about some quirk on the website, or wondering how their grades are being calculated, those things can prevent them from focusing on content.” 

Nakamura's organizational skills made her a good candidate to spot and deal with potential wrinkles before they derailed a course section. “When I joined the course, we wanted someone on the TA side to be more specifically responsible for underlying administrative tasks, so I became the first head TA for the course. Since then, we’ve built that role up more and more. There is now a head TA, a head undergraduate TA, and section leads working on internal documentation such as instructions for how to improve content and how to manage office hours.” The result of this administrative work is consistency across sections and semesters.

The other side of a TA-ship is, of course, teaching. “I was eager to engage with students in a meaningful way,” says Soroush Araei, a sixth-year graduate student who had already fulfilled the teaching requirement for his degree in electrical engineering, but who jumped at the chance to teach alongside his PhD advisor. “I enjoy teaching, and have always found that explaining concepts to others deepens my own understanding.” He was recently awarded the ​MIT School of Engineering’s 2025 Graduate Student Teaching and Mentoring Award, which honors “a graduate student in the School of Engineering who has demonstrated extraordinary teaching and mentoring as a teaching or research assistant.” Araei’s dedication comes at the price of sleep. “Juggling my own research with my TA duties was no small feat. I often found myself in the lab for long hours, helping students troubleshoot their circuits. While their design simulations looked perfect, the circuits they implemented on protoboards didn’t always perform as expected. I had to dive deep into the issues alongside the students, which often required considerable time and effort.”

The rewards for Araei’s work are often intrinsic. “Teaching has shown me that there are always deeper layers to understanding. There are concepts I thought I had mastered, but I realized gaps in my own knowledge when trying to explain them,” he says. Another challenge: the variety of background knowledge between students in a single class. “Some had never encountered transistors, while others had tape-out experience. Designing problem sets and selecting questions for office hours required careful planning to keep all students engaged.” For Araei, some of the best moments have come during office hours. “Witnessing the ‘aha’ moment on a student’s face when a complex concept finally clicked was incredibly rewarding.”

The pursuit of the “aha” moment is a common thread between TAs. “I still struggle with the feeling that you’re responsible for someone’s understanding in a given topic, and, if you’re not doing a good job, that could affect that person for the rest of their life,” says Nakamura. “But the flip side of that moment of confusion is when someone has the ‘aha!’ moment as you’re talking to them, when you’re able to explain something that wasn’t conveyed in the other materials. It was your help that broke through and gave understanding. And that reward really overruns the fear of causing confusion.”

Hope Dargan ’21, MEng ’23, a second-year PhD student in EECS, uses her role as a graduate instructor to try to reach students who may not fit into the stereotype of the scientist. She started her career at MIT planning to major in CS and become a software engineer, but a missionary trip to Sweden in 2016-17 (when refugees from the Syrian civil war were resettling in the region) sparked a broader interest in both the Middle East and in how groups of people contextualized their own narratives. When Dargan returned to MIT, she took on a history degree, writing her thesis on the experiences of queer Mormon women. Additionally, she taught for MEET (the Middle East Entrepreneurs of Tomorrow), an educational initiative for Israeli and Palestinian high school students. “I realized I loved teaching, and this experience set me on a trajectory to teaching as a career.” 

Dargan gained her teaching license as an undergrad through the MIT Scheller Teacher Education Program (STEP), then joined the MEng program, in which she designed an educational intervention for students who were struggling in class 6.101 (Fundamentals of Programming). The next step was a PhD. “Teaching is so context-dependent,” says Dargan, who was awarded the Goodwin Medal for her teaching efforts in 2023. “When I taught students for MEET, it was very different from when I was teaching eighth graders at Josiah Quincy Upper School for my teaching license, and very different now when I teach students in 6.101, versus when I teach the LGO [Leaders for Global Operations] students Python in the summers. Each student has their own unique perspective on what’s motivating them, how they learn, and what they connect to … So even if I’ve taught the material for five years (as I have for 6.101, because I was an LA, then a TA, and now an instructor), improving my teaching is always challenging. Getting better at adapting my teaching to the context of the students and their stories, which are ever-evolving, is always interesting.”

Although Dargan considers teaching one of her greatest passions, she is clear-eyed about the cost of the profession. “I think the things that we’re passionate about tell us a lot about ourselves, both our strengths and our weaknesses, and teaching has taught me a lot about my weaknesses,” she says. “Teaching is a tough career, because it tends to take people who care a lot and are perfectionists, and it can lead to a lot of burnout.”

Dargan's students have also expressed enthusiasm and gratitude for her work. “Hope is objectively the most helpful instructor I’ve ever had,” said one anonymous reviewer. Another wrote, “I never felt judged when I asked her questions, and she was great at guiding me through problems by asking motivating questions … I truly felt like she cared about me as a student and person.” Dargan herself is modest about her role, saying, “For me, the trade-off between teaching and research is that teaching has an immediate day-to-day impact, while research has this unknown potential for long-term impact.” 

With the responsibility to instruct an ever-growing percentage of the Institute’s students, the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science relies heavily on dedicated and passionate students like Nakamura, Araei, and Dargan. As their caring and humane influence ripples outward through thousands of new electrical engineers and computer scientists, the day-to-day impact of their work is clear; but the long-term impact may be greater than any of them know.

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

Would you like that coffee with iron?

Around the world, about 2 billion people suffer from iron deficiency, which can lead to anemia, impaired brain development in children, and increased infant mortality.

To combat that problem, MIT researchers have come up with a new way to fortify foods and beverages with iron, using small crystalline particles. These particles, known as metal-organic frameworks, could be sprinkled on food, added to staple foods such as bread, or incorporated into drinks like coffee and tea.

“We’re creating a solution that can be seamlessly added to staple foods across different regions,” says Ana Jaklenec, a principal investigator at MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. “What’s considered a staple in Senegal isn’t the same as in India or the U.S., so our goal was to develop something that doesn’t react with the food itself. That way, we don’t have to reformulate for every context — it can be incorporated into a wide range of foods and beverages without compromise.”

The particles designed in this study can also carry iodine, another critical nutrient. The particles could also be adapted to carry important minerals such as zinc, calcium, or magnesium.

“We are very excited about this new approach and what we believe is a novel application of metal-organic frameworks to potentially advance nutrition, particularly in the developing world,” says Robert Langer, the David H. Koch Institute Professor at MIT and a member of the Koch Institute.

Jaklenec and Langer are the senior authors of the study, which appears today in the journal Matter. MIT postdoc Xin Yang and Linzixuan (Rhoda) Zhang PhD ’24 are the lead authors of the paper.

Iron stabilization

Food fortification can be a successful way to combat nutrient deficiencies, but this approach is often challenging because many nutrients are fragile and break down during storage or cooking. When iron is added to foods, it can react with other molecules in the food, giving the food a metallic taste.

In previous work, Jaklenec’s lab has shown that encapsulating nutrients in polymers can protect them from breaking down or reacting with other molecules. In a small clinical trial, the researchers found that women who ate bread fortified with encapsulated iron were able to absorb the iron from the food.

However, one drawback to this approach is that the polymer adds a lot of bulk to the material, limiting the amount of iron or other nutrients that end up in the food.

“Encapsulating iron in polymers significantly improves its stability and reactivity, making it easier to add to food,” Jaklenec says. “But to be effective, it requires a substantial amount of polymer. That limits how much iron you can deliver in a typical serving, making it difficult to meet daily nutritional targets through fortified foods alone.”

To overcome that challenge, Yang came up with a new idea: Instead of encapsulating iron in a polymer, they could use iron itself as a building block for a crystalline particle known as a metal-organic framework, or MOF (pronounced “moff”).

MOFs consist of metal atoms joined by organic molecules called ligands to create a rigid, cage-like structure. Depending on the combination of metals and ligands chosen, they can be used for a wide variety of applications.

“We thought maybe we could synthesize a metal-organic framework with food-grade ligands and food-grade micronutrients,” Yang says. “Metal-organic frameworks have very high porosity, so they can load a lot of cargo. That’s why we thought we could leverage this platform to make a new metal-organic framework that could be used in the food industry.”

In this case, the researchers designed a MOF consisting of iron bound to a ligand called fumaric acid, which is often used as a food additive to enhance flavor or help preserve food.

This structure prevents iron from reacting with polyphenols — compounds commonly found in foods such as whole grains and nuts, as well as coffee and tea. When iron does react with those compounds, it forms a metal polyphenol complex that cannot be absorbed by the body.

The MOFs’ structure also allows them to remain stable until they reach an acidic environment, such as the stomach, where they break down and release their iron payload.

Double-fortified salts

The researchers also decided to include iodine in their MOF particle, which they call NuMOF. Iodized salt has been very successful at preventing iodine deficiency, and many efforts are now underway to create “double-fortified salts” that would also contain iron.

Delivering these nutrients together has proven difficult because iron and iodine can react with each other, making each one less likely to be absorbed by the body. In this study, the MIT team showed that once they formed their iron-containing MOF particles, they could load them with iodine, in a way that the iron and iodine do not react with each other.

In tests of the particles’ stability, the researchers found that the NuMOFs could withstand long-term storage, high heat and humidity, and boiling water.

Throughout these tests, the particles maintained their structure. When the researchers then fed the particles to mice, they found that both iron and iodine became available in the bloodstream within several hours of the NuMOF consumption.

The researchers are now working on launching a company that is developing coffee and other beverages fortified with iron and iodine. They also hope to continue working toward a double-fortified salt that could be consumed on its own or incorporated into staple food products.

The research was partially supported by J-WAFS Fellowships for Water and Food Solutions.

Other authors of the paper include Fangzheng Chen, Wenhao Gao, Zhiling Zheng, Tian Wang, Erika Yan Wang, Behnaz Eshaghi, and Sydney MacDonald.

de MIT News https://ift.tt/alBz5P0

Planets without water could still produce certain liquids, a new study finds

Water is essential for life on Earth. So, the liquid must be a requirement for life on other worlds. For decades, scientists’ definition of habitability on other planets has rested on this assumption.

But what makes some planets habitable might have very little to do with water. In fact, an entirely different type of liquid could conceivably support life in worlds where water can barely exist. That’s a possibility that MIT scientists raise in a study appearing this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

From lab experiments, the researchers found that a type of fluid known as an ionic liquid can readily form from chemical ingredients that are also expected to be found on the surface of some rocky planets and moons. Ionic liquids are salts that exist in liquid form below about 100 degrees Celsius. The team’s experiments showed that a mixture of sulfuric acid and certain nitrogen-containing organic compounds produced such a liquid. On rocky planets, sulfuric acid may be a byproduct of volcanic activity, while nitrogen-containing compounds have been detected on several asteroids and planets in our solar system, suggesting the compounds may be present in other planetary systems.

Ionic liquids have extremely low vapor pressure and do not evaporate; they can form and persist at higher temperatures and lower pressures than what liquid water can tolerate. The researchers note that ionic liquid can be a hospitable environment for some biomolecules, such as certain proteins that can remain stable in the fluid.

The scientists propose that, even on planets that are too warm or that have atmospheres are too low-pressure to support liquid water, there could still be pockets of ionic liquid. And where there is liquid, there may be potential for life, though likely not anything that resembles Earth’s water-based beings.

“We consider water to be required for life because that is what’s needed for Earth life. But if we look at a more general definition, we see that what we need is a liquid in which metabolism for life can take place,” says Rachana Agrawal, who led the study as a postdoc in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. “Now if we include ionic liquid as a possibility, this can dramatically increase the habitability zone for all rocky worlds.”

The study’s MIT co-authors are Sara Seager, the Class of 1941 Professor of Planetary Sciences in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences and a professor in the departments of Physics and of Aeronautics and Astronautics, along with Iaroslav Iakubivskyi, Weston Buchanan, Ana Glidden, and Jingcheng Huang. Co-authors also include Maxwell Seager of Worcester Polytechnic Institute, William Bains of Cardiff University, and Janusz Petkowski of Wroclaw University of Science and Technology, in Poland.

A liquid leap

The team’s work with ionic liquid grew out of an effort to search for signs of life on Venus, where clouds of sulfuric acid envelope the planet in a noxious haze. Despite its toxicity, Venus’ clouds may contain signs of life — a notion that scientists plan to test with upcoming missions to the planet’s atmosphere.

Agrawal and Seager, who is leading the Morning Star Missions to Venus, were investigating ways to collect and evaporate sulfuric acid. If a mission collects samples from Venus’ clouds, sulfuric acid would have to be evaporated away in order to reveal any residual organic compounds that could then be analyzed for signs of life.

The researchers were using their custom, low-pressure system designed to evaporate away excess sulfuric acid, to test evaporation of a solution of the acid and an organic compound, glycine. They found that in every case, while most of the liquid sulfuric acid evaporated, a stubborn layer of liquid always remained. They soon realized that sulfuric acid was chemically reacting with glycine, resulting in an exchange of hydrogen atoms from the acid to the organic compound. The result was a fluid mixture of salts, or ions, known as an ionic liquid, that persists as a liquid across a wide range of temperatures and pressures.

This accidental finding kickstarted an idea: Could ionic liquid form on planets that are too warm and host atmospheres too thin for water to exist?

“From there, we took the leap of imagination of what this could mean,” Agrawal says. “Sulfuric acid is found on Earth from volcanoes, and organic compounds have been found on asteroids and other planetary bodies. So, this led us to wonder if ionic liquids could potentially form and exist naturally on exoplanets.”

Rocky oases

On Earth, ionic liquids are mainly synthesized for industrial purposes. They do not occur naturally, except for in one specific case, in which the liquid is generated from the mixing of venoms produced by two rival species of ants.

The team set out to investigate what conditions ionic liquid could be naturally produced in, and over what range of temperatures and pressures. In the lab, they mixed sulfuric acid with various nitrogen-containing organic compounds. In previous work, Seager’s team had found that the compounds, some of which can be considered ingredients associated with life, are surprisingly stable in sulfuric acid.

“In high school, you learn that an acid wants to donate a proton,” Seager says. “And oddly enough, we knew from our past work with sulfuric acid (the main component of Venus’ clouds) and nitrogen-containing compounds, that a nitrogen wants to receive a hydrogen. It’s like one person’s trash is another person’s treasure.”

The reaction could produce a bit of ionic liquid if the sulfuric acid and nitrogen-containing organics were in a one-to-one ratio — a ratio that was not a focus of the prior work. For their new study, Seager and Agrawal mixed sulfuric acid with over 30 different nitrogen-containing organic compounds, across a range of temperatures and pressures, then observed whether ionic liquid formed when they evaporated away the sulfuric acid in various vials. They also mixed the ingredients onto basalt rocks, which are known to exist on the surface of many rocky planets.

“We were just astonished that the ionic liquid forms under so many different conditions,” Seager says. “If you put the sulfuric acid and the organic on a rock, the excess sulfuric acid seeps into the rock pores, but you’re still left with a drop of ionic liquid on the rock. Whatever we tried, ionic liquid still formed.”

The team found that the reactions produced ionic liquid at temperatures up to 180 degrees Celsius and at extremely low pressures — much lower than that of the Earth’s atmosphere. Their results suggest that ionic liquid could naturally form on other planets where liquid water cannot exist, under the right conditions.

“We’re envisioning a planet warmer than Earth, that doesn’t have water, and at some point in its past or currently, it has to have had sulfuric acid, formed from volcanic outgassing,” Seager says. “This sulfuric acid has to flow over a little pocket of organics. And organic deposits are extremely common in the solar system.”

Then, she says, the resulting pockets of liquid could stay on the planet’s surface, potentially for years or millenia, where they could theoretically serve as small oases for simple forms of ionic-liquid-based life. Going forward, Seager’s team plans to investigate further, to see what biomolecules, and ingredients for life, might survive, and thrive, in ionic liquid.

“We just opened up a Pandora’s box of new research,” Seager says. “It’s been a real journey.”

This research was supported, in part, by the Sloan Foundation and the Volkswagen Foundation.

de MIT News https://ift.tt/5aWgGcD

Surprisingly diverse innovations led to dramatically cheaper solar panels

The cost of solar panels has dropped by more than 99 percent since the 1970s, enabling widespread adoption of photovoltaic systems that convert sunlight into electricity.

A new MIT study drills down on specific innovations that enabled such dramatic cost reductions, revealing that technical advances across a web of diverse research efforts and industries played a pivotal role.

The findings could help renewable energy companies make more effective R&D investment decisions and aid policymakers in identifying areas to prioritize to spur growth in manufacturing and deployment.

The researchers’ modeling approach shows that key innovations often originated outside the solar sector, including advances in semiconductor fabrication, metallurgy, glass manufacturing, oil and gas drilling, construction processes, and even legal domains.

“Our results show just how intricate the process of cost improvement is, and how much scientific and engineering advances, often at a very basic level, are at the heart of these cost reductions. A lot of knowledge was drawn from different domains and industries, and this network of knowledge is what makes these technologies improve,” says study senior author Jessika Trancik, a professor in MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society.

Trancik is joined on the paper by co-lead authors Goksin Kavlak, a former IDSS graduate student and postdoc who is now a senior energy associate at the Brattle Group; Magdalena Klemun, a former IDSS graduate student and postdoc who is now an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University; former MIT postdoc Ajinkya Kamat; as well as Brittany Smith and Robert Margolis of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. The research appears today in PLOS ONE.

Identifying innovations

This work builds on mathematical models that the researchers previously developed that tease out the effects of engineering technologies on the cost of photovoltaic (PV) modules and systems.

In this study, the researchers aimed to dig even deeper into the scientific advances that drove those cost declines.

They combined their quantitative cost model with a detailed, qualitative analysis of innovations that affected the costs of PV system materials, manufacturing steps, and deployment processes.

“Our quantitative cost model guided the qualitative analysis, allowing us to look closely at innovations in areas that are hard to measure due to a lack of quantitative data,” Kavlak says.

Building on earlier work identifying key cost drivers — such as the number of solar cells per module, wiring efficiency, and silicon wafer area — the researchers conducted a structured scan of the literature for innovations likely to affect these drivers. Next, they grouped these innovations to identify patterns, revealing clusters that reduced costs by improving materials or prefabricating components to streamline manufacturing and installation. Finally, the team tracked industry origins and timing for each innovation, and consulted domain experts to zero in on the most significant innovations.

All told, they identified 81 unique innovations that affected PV system costs since 1970, from improvements in antireflective coated glass to the implementation of fully online permitting interfaces.

“With innovations, you can always go to a deeper level, down to things like raw materials processing techniques, so it was challenging to know when to stop. Having that quantitative model to ground our qualitative analysis really helped,” Trancik says.

They chose to separate PV module costs from so-called balance-of-system (BOS) costs, which cover things like mounting systems, inverters, and wiring.

PV modules, which are wired together to form solar panels, are mass-produced and can be exported, while many BOS components are designed, built, and sold at the local level.

“By examining innovations both at the BOS level and within the modules, we identify the different types of innovations that have emerged in these two parts of PV technology,” Kavlak says.

BOS costs depend more on soft technologies, nonphysical elements such as permitting procedures, which have contributed significantly less to PV’s past cost improvement compared to hardware innovations.

“Often, it comes down to delays. Time is money, and if you have delays on construction sites and unpredictable processes, that affects these balance-of-system costs,” Trancik says.

Innovations such as automated permitting software, which flags code-compliant systems for fast-track approval, show promise. Though not yet quantified in this study, the team’s framework could support future analysis of their economic impact and similar innovations that streamline deployment processes.

Interconnected industries

The researchers found that innovations from the semiconductor, electronics, metallurgy, and petroleum industries played a major role in reducing both PV and BOS costs, but BOS costs were also impacted by innovations in software engineering and electric utilities.

Noninnovation factors, like efficiency gains from bulk purchasing and the accumulation of knowledge in the solar power industry, also reduced some cost variables.

In addition, while most PV panel innovations originated in research organizations or industry, many BOS innovations were developed by city governments, U.S. states, or professional associations.

“I knew there was a lot going on with this technology, but the diversity of all these fields and how closely linked they are, and the fact that we can clearly see that network through this analysis, was interesting,” Trancik says.

“PV was very well-positioned to absorb innovations from other industries — thanks to the right timing, physical compatibility, and supportive policies to adapt innovations for PV applications,” Klemun adds.

The analysis also reveals the role greater computing power could play in reducing BOS costs through advances like automated engineering review systems and remote site assessment software.

“In terms of knowledge spillovers, what we've seen so far in PV may really just be the beginning,” Klemun says, pointing to the expanding role of robotics and AI-driven digital tools in driving future cost reductions and quality improvements.

In addition to their qualitative analysis, the researchers demonstrated how this methodology could be used to estimate the quantitative impact of a particular innovation if one has the numerical data to plug into the cost equation.

For instance, using information about material prices and manufacturing procedures, they estimate that wire sawing, a technique which was introduced in the 1980s, led to an overall PV system cost decrease of $5 per watt by reducing silicon losses and increasing throughput during fabrication.

“Through this retrospective analysis, you learn something valuable for future strategy because you can see what worked and what didn’t work, and the models can also be applied prospectively. It is also useful to know what adjacent sectors may help support improvement in a particular technology,” Trancik says.

Moving forward, the researchers plan to apply this methodology to a wide range of technologies, including other renewable energy systems. They also want to further study soft technology to identify innovations or processes that could accelerate cost reductions.

“Although the process of technological innovation may seem like a black box, we’ve shown that you can study it just like any other phenomena,” Trancik says.

This research is funded, in part, by the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Energies Technology Office.

de MIT News https://ift.tt/OtrmgX1

Better public service with data

Davi Augusto Oliveira Pinto’s career in Brazil’s foreign service took him all over the world. His work as a diplomat for more than two decades exposed him to the realities of life for all kinds of people, which informed his interest in economics and public policy. 

Oliveira Pinto is now focused on strengthening his diplomatic work through his MIT education. He completed the MITx MicroMasters program in Data, Economics, and Design of Policy (DEDP), which is jointly administered by MIT Open Learning and the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), and then applied and was accepted to the DEDP master’s program within MIT’s Department of Economics. 

“I think governments should be able to provide data-driven, research-supported services to their constituents,” he says. “Returning to my role as a diplomat, I hope to use the tools I acquired in the DEDP program to enhance my contributions as a public servant.”

Oliveira Pinto was one of Brazil’s representatives to the World Trade Organization (WTO), helped Brazilian citizens and companies abroad, and worked to improve relationships with governments in South Africa, Argentina, Italy, Spain, and Uruguay. He observed firsthand how economic disparities could influence laws and lives. He believes in a nonpartisan approach to public service, producing and sharing policy based on peer-reviewed data and research that can help as many people as possible. 

“We need public policy informed by evidence and science, rather than by politics and ideology,” he says. “My experience at MIT reinforced my conviction that diplomacy should be used to gather people from different backgrounds and develop joint solutions to our collective challenges.”

As someone responsible for dealing with international trade issues and who understands the potential negative, far-reaching impacts of poorly researched and instituted policies, Oliveira Pinto saw MIT and its world-class economics programs as potentially world-altering tools to help him advance his work. 

Advocacy and economics

Growing up in Minas Gerais, Brazil, Oliveira Pinto learned about the country’s past of economic cycles driven by exporting commodities like minerals and coffee. He also witnessed what he described as Brazil’s “eternal state of development,” one in which broad swaths of the population suffered, and very soon became aware of the impact that issues like inflation and unemployment had on the country. 

“I thought studying economics could help solve issues I observed when growing up,” he says.

Oliveira Pinto earned an undergraduate degree in economics from Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais and a master’s degree in public policy from Escola Nacional de Administração Pública.

Oliveira Pinto’s personal experiences and his commitment to understanding and improving the lives of his fellow Brazilians led him to enroll in the Instituto Rio Branco, Brazil’s diplomatic academy, where he was trained in a variety of disciplines. “I was drawn to investigate inequality between countries, which led to my diplomatic career,” he says. “I worked to help Brazilian migrants abroad, promoted Brazilian companies’ exports, represented Brazil at the WTO, and helped pandemic-era assistance efforts for people in Brazil’s poor border towns.”

During the pandemic, Oliveira Pinto found himself drawn to the DEDP MicroMasters program. He was able to review foundational economics concepts, improve his ability to synthesize and interpret data, and refine his analytical skills. “My favorite course, Data Analysis for Social Scientists, reinforced the critical importance of interpreting data correctly in a world where information is increasingly abundant,” he recalls. 

The online program also offered an opportunity for him to apply to study in person. Now at MIT, Oliveira Pinto is finishing his degree with a capstone project focused on how J-PAL works with governments to support the scaling of evidence-informed policies.  

J-PAL’s research center and network have built long-term partnerships with government agencies around the world to generate evidence from randomized evaluations and incorporate the findings into policy decisions. They work closely with policymakers to inform anti-poverty programs to improve their effectiveness, an area of particular interest to the Brazilian diplomat. 

“I’m trying to understand how J-PAL’s partnerships in these places are working, any lessons we can learn from successes, challenges faced, and how we can most effectively scale the successful programs,” he says.

Inside and beyond MIT

Oliveira Pinto was welcomed into a thriving, diverse community in Cambridge, a journey that was both edifying and challenging. “My family and I found a home,” he notes, observing that many Brazilians live in the area, “and it’s sobering to see so many people from my country working hard to build their lives in the U.S.”

Oliveira Pinto says working closely with members of the MIT community was one of the DEDP master’s program’s big draws. “The ability to forge connections with students and faculty while learning from Nobel laureates and accomplished researchers and practitioners is amazing,” he says. Collaborating with people from a variety of professional, experiential, and backgrounds, he notes, was especially satisfying. 

Oliveira Pinto offered special praise for MIT’s support for his family, describing it as “particularly rewarding.” “MIT offers so many different activities for families,” he says. “My wife and three daughters benefited from the support the Institute provides.” While taking advantage of his time in the States to visit Canada and Washington, D.C., they also made the most of their time in Cambridge. The family enjoyed sailing, swimming, yoga, sports, pottery, lectures, and more while Davi pursued his studies. “The facilities are awesome,” he continues.

Assessing and quantifying impact

Oliveira Pinto’s investigations have yielded some fascinating findings. “Data can be misused,” he notes. “I learned how easily data can tell all kinds of stories, so it’s important to be careful and rigorous when assessing different claims.” He recalls how, during an econometrics class, he learned about parties on opposite sides of a health insurance divide pursuing radically different ends using the same data, each side promoting different views. 

Oliveira Pinto believes his studies have improved his abilities as a diplomat, one of the reasons he’s excited about his eventual return to the public service. “I’ll return to government service armed with the skills the DEDP program and the research conducted during my capstone project have provided,” he says. “My job as a diplomat is to seek opportunities to connect with different people, investigate carefully, and find common ground,” work for which his DEDP MicroMasters and master’s studies have helped prepare him.

Completing his capstone, Oliveira Pinto hopes to draw lessons from J-PAL’s work with governments to improve constituents' quality of life. He’s helping generate case studies that may foster future collaborations between researchers and the public sector. 

“Work like this can be a good opportunity for governments interested in a research-supported, data-driven approach to policymaking,” he says. 

de MIT News https://ift.tt/pLlw7qQ

Building a lifeline for family caregivers across the US

There are 63 million people caring for family members with an illness or disability in the U.S. That translates to one in four adults devoting their time to helping loved ones with things like transportation, meals, prescriptions, and medical appointments.

Caregiving exacts a huge toll on the people responsible, and ianacare is seeking to lessen the burden. The company, founded by Steven Lee ’97, MEng ’98 and Jessica Kim, has built a platform that helps caregivers navigate available tools and local resources, build a network of friends and family to assist with everyday tasks, and coordinate meals, rides, and care shifts.

The name ianacare is short for “I am not alone care.” The company’s mission is to equip and empower the millions of people who perform a difficult and underappreciated role in our society.

“Family caregivers are the invisible backbone of the health care system,” Lee says. “Without them, the health care system would literally collapse, but they are still largely unrecognized. Ianacare acts as the front door for family caregivers. These caregivers are often thrust into this role untrained and unguided. But the moment they start, they have to become experts. Ianacare fills that gap.”

The company has partnered with employers and health care providers to serve more than 50,000 caregivers to date. And thanks to a partnerships with organizations like Elevance Health, the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), and Medicare providers, its coordination and support tools are available to family caregivers across the country.

“Ultimately we want to make the biggest impact possible,” Lee says. “From a business standpoint, the 50,000 caregivers we’ve served is a huge number. But from the overall universe of caregivers that could use our help, it’s relatively small. We’re on a mission to help all 63 million caregivers.”

From ad tech to ianacare

As an electrical engineering and computer science student at MIT in the 1990s, Lee conducted research on early speech-recognition technology as part of the Spoken Language Systems group in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

Following graduation, Lee started a company with Waikit Lau ’97 that optimized video advertising placement within streams. The company has gone through several mergers and acquisitions, but is now part of the public company Magnite, which places the ads on platforms like Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+.

Lee left the company in 2016 and began advising startups through programs including MIT’s Venture Mentoring Service as he looked to work on something he would find more meaningful.

“Over the years, the MIT network has been invaluable for connecting with customers, recruiting top talent, and engaging investors,” Lee says. “So much innovation flows out of MIT, and I’ve loved giving back, especially working alongside [VMS Venture Mentor] Paul Bosco ’95 and the rest of the VMS team. It’s deeply rewarding to share the best practices I’ve learned with the next generation of innovators.”

In 2017, Lee met Kim, who was caregiving for her mother with pancreatic cancer. Hearing about her experience brought him back to his own family’s challenges caring for his grandfather with Parkinson’s disease when Lee was a child.

“We realized the gaps that existed in caregiving support three decades ago still exist,” Lee says. “Nothing has changed.”

Officially launched in 2018, ianacare may seem far-removed from speech recognition or ad technologies, but Lee sees the work as an extension of his previous experiences.

“In my mind, AI got its start in speech recognition, and the intelligence we use to surface recommendations and create care plans for family caregivers uses a lot of the same statistical modeling techniques I used in speech recognition and ad placement,” Lee says. “It all goes back to the foundation I got at MIT.”

The founders first launched a free solution that allowed caregivers to connect with friends and family members to coordinate caregiving tasks.

“In our app, you can coordinate with anyone who’s interested in helping,” Lee says. “When you share a struggle with a friend or co-worker, they always say, ‘How can I help?’ But caregivers rarely go back to them and actually ask. In our platform, you can add those people to your informal care team and ask the team for help with something instead of having to text someone directly, which you’re less likely to do.”

Next, the founders built an enterprise solution so businesses could help employee caregivers, adding features like resource directories and ways to find and select various caregiving tools.

“An immense amount of local resources are available, but nobody knows about them,” Lee says. “For instance, every county in the country has an Area Agency on Aging, but these agencies aren’t marketing experts, and caregivers don’t know where to get guidance.”

Last year, ianacare began working with AARP and health care providers participating in the nationwide GUIDE model (for “Guiding an Improved Dementia Experience”) to improve the quality of life for dementia patients and their caregivers. Through the voluntary program, participants can use ianacare’s platform to coordinate care, access educational resources, and access free respite care up to $2,500 each year.

Lee says the CMS partnership gives ianacare a pathway to reach millions of people caring for dementia patients across the country.

“This is already a crisis, and it will get worse because we have an aging population and a capacity-constraint in our health care system,” Lee says. “The population above 65 is set to double between 2000 and 2040. We aren’t going to have three times the hospitals or three times the doctors or nurse practitioners. So, we can either make clinicians more efficient or move more health care into the home. That’s why we have empower family caregivers.”

Aging with dignity

Lee recalls one family who used ianacare after their son was born with a severe disease. The child only lived eight months, but for those eight months, the parents had meals delivered to them in the hospital by friends and family.

“It was not something they had to worry about the entire time their son was alive,” Lee says. “It’s been rewarding to help these people in so much need.”

Other ianacare users say the platform has helped them keep their parents out of the hospital and lessen their depression and anxiety around caregiving.

“Nobody wants to die in a hospital, so we’ve worked hard to honor the wishes of loved ones who want to age in the home,” Lee says. “We have a lot of examples of folks who, if our support was not there, their loved one would have had to enter a nursing home or institution. Ianacare is there to ensure the home is safe and that the caregiver can manage the care burden. It’s a win-win for everybody because it’s also less costly for the health care system.”

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