Krishna Rajagopal named dean for digital learning

Krishna Rajagopal, the William A.M. Burden Professor of Physics and former chair of the MIT faculty, has been named dean for digital learning, effective Sept. 1. This new position expands leadership roles for faculty within the Office of the Vice President for Open Learning, which recently launched the MIT Integrated Learning Initiative and the Abdul Latif Jameel World Education Laboratory.

As dean for digital learning, Rajagopal will lead efforts to empower MIT faculty to use digital technologies to augment and transform how they teach. He is charged with building and strengthening connections between academic departments and the Office of Vice President for Open Learning, to facilitate broad-based engagement and bottom-up change. Rajagopal will catalyze, promote, and disseminate faculty innovations in MIT residential education, and, he will continue to support the sharing of a broad range of MIT knowledge and perspectives with learners around the globe.

Within the Office of the Vice President for Open Learning, Residential Education, MITx, OpenCourseWare, and the Digital Learning Lab will report to Rajagopal under the leadership of Sanjay Sarma, vice president for open learning, who made the announcement today. Rajagopal will work with Sarma and Senior Associate Dean of Digital Learning Isaac Chuang on the office’s strategy and organization. As a member of Academic Council, Rajagopal will provide advice and perspectives to MIT President L. Rafael Reif and the senior administration.

“Krishna combines his stellar research career with a passion for improving teaching and learning and a remarkable ability to integrate diverse points of views into a unifying vision,” Sarma says. “In a time of significant changes in education, I am confident that Krishna will offer great guidance for our open learning initiatives. He will work to maintain and enhance MIT’s position as a leader in providing access to high-quality education around the world, and he will continue to improve teaching at MIT.”

As chair of the MIT faculty, Rajagopal distinguished himself as a strong advocate for the faculty. He was known for his listening skills, inclusive style, and ability to help colleagues and departments optimize and achieve their goals, including those involving the development and launch of new educational pathways for MIT’s students.

Some of his accomplishments as former chair of the faculty include joining with Dennis Freeman, then dean of undergraduate education, to assemble a group of faculty from MIT’s five schools, which conducted an in-depth study of the role of algorithmic reasoning and computational thinking in the context of the education of MIT undergraduates. He was also responsible for the charging of the Faculty Policy Committee Sub-Committee on Sub-Term Subjects and the subsequent implementation of many of its recommendations; building a new faculty governance website; and leading efforts in the creation of MIT’s new Master of Applied Science (MASc) degree, an umbrella degree type introduced in fall 2016 for one-year professional master’s degrees that include a capstone project.

Previously, Rajagopal served as associate head for education in the Department of Physics, where he stewarded the department's undergraduate and graduate educational programs and became known for his dedication to students. In that role, he facilitated and supported new MITx activities that improved the on-campus teaching of freshman physics and junior lab, as well as the first massive open online courses (MOOCs) on intermediate quantum mechanics and advanced quantum field theory.

“I am excited about this new challenge, as I will be helping MIT faculty members take their passions for teaching and learning to new levels in ways that can have long-lasting impact across MIT and around the world,” Rajagopal says. “Our digital learning efforts already reach thousands of students in MIT classrooms and millions of learners around the world. What makes this an exciting time for education is that as these technologies, as well as research on how people learn, evolve, they are transforming how we teach today, and will do so in ways that we cannot yet see and must invent.”

Since joining the MIT faculty in 1997, Rajagopal has produced a significant body of research in theoretical physics focused largely on how quarks — ordinarily confined within protons and neutrons — behave in extraordinary conditions such as the hot quark soup that filled the microseconds-old universe, conditions that provide a test bed for understanding how a complex world emerges from simple underlying laws. His work links nuclear and particle physics, condensed matter physics, astrophysics, and string theory.

Rajagopal is the author of about 100 papers that have been cited more than 16,000 times, and has mentored more than two dozen PhD students and postdocs. He was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society in 2004.  He is a Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellow and won the Everett Moore Baker Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 2011 and the Buechner Prize for Excellence in Teaching in 1999.

Rajagopal grew up in suburban Toronto; his family moved there from Munich when he was less than 1 year old. Influenced by an outstanding teacher who brought pioneering advances in recombinant DNA and molecular biology into his public high school biology class, Rajagopal arrived at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, planning to major in biology. His freshman physics class rekindled his earlier interest in physics, and he says he much appreciates the formative educational influences that shaped his own experience.

He graduated from Queen’s in 1988 and completed his PhD at Princeton University in 1993. After stints as a junior fellow at Harvard University and a Fairchild Fellow at Caltech he joined the MIT faculty in 1997. Rajagopal has spent one year each at the University of California at Berkeley and at CERN, the physics laboratory outside Geneva, Switzerland. He lives in Arlington, Massachusetts, with his wife and two sons.

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Exploring an unusual metal asteroid

Lindy Elkins-Tanton ’87, SM ’87, PhD ’02 is reaching for the stars — literally. She is the principal investigator for Psyche, a NASA mission that will explore an unusual metal asteroid known as 16 Psyche.

The mission does not launch until 2023, but preparations have begun in collaboration with faculty in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). Professors Benjamin Weiss and Maria Zuber, who also serves as MIT's vice president for research, wrote a paper about the asteroid with Elkins­-Tanton that was the basis for the team’s selection for NASA’s Discovery Program. MIT Professor Richard Binzel is also a team member.

At MIT, Elkins-Tanton earned BS and MS degrees in geology and geochemistry with a concentration on how planets form. Then she detoured from academia to the business world before becoming a college lecturer in mathematics in 1995.

“I realized that in academia, you have this incredible privilege of always being able to ask a harder, bigger question, so you never get bored, and you have the opportunity to inspire students to do more in their lives,” says Elkins-Tanton. She returned to MIT to earn a PhD in geology and geophysics, and for the next decade after completing that degree, she taught, first at Brown University and then at MIT as an EAPS faculty member.

Since 2014, Elkins-­Tanton has been professor and director of the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University. She has been revamping the undergraduate curriculum to give it more of an MIT flavor, bringing current research into the classroom and having students tackle real-world problems. This approach has helped her transmit excitement about the field to her students.

Elkins-Tanton also draws on business skills that she says are quite useful for scientific collaboration: negotiating, making a compelling pitch, and knowing how to build a team that works well. She is applying those skills, along with her management and leadership experience, as the second woman to lead a NASA mission to a major solar system body (after Zuber, who was principal investigator of the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory, or GRAIL, mission).

Psyche represents a compelling target for study because scientists theorize that it was an ordinary asteroid until violent collisions with other objects blasted away most of its outer rock, exposing its metallic core. This core, the first to be studied, could yield insights into the metal interior of rocky planets in the solar system.

“We have no idea what a metal body looks like. The one thing I can be sure of is that it will surprise us,” Elkins-Tanton says. “I love this stuff — there are new discoveries every day.”

A version of this article originally appeared in the July/August 2017 issue of MIT Technology Review.

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Department of Biology welcomes three new faculty members

On July 1, MIT Department of Biology welcomed three new faculty members. Since they were all born outside the continental U.S., these newcomers add to the diversity of cultural experiences and contribute to the global face of science at MIT and its affiliated institutions around Kendall Square. The triad also enhances the department’s diverse array of research initiatives. Their interests are as far-reaching as their roots, and range from investigating genetic diseases and cancer immunotherapy to exploiting parasite vulnerabilities.

“When creative individuals with distinct perspectives and approaches come together in an innovative environment like MIT, the possibilities for scientific collaboration and accomplishment are exceptional,” says Alan Grossman, head of the department. “I couldn’t be more pleased to welcome three such outstanding and accomplished individuals into our research community.”

Eliezer Calo

Eliezer Calo is no stranger to MIT. Although he grew up on a farm more than a thousand miles away in the mountains of Carolina, Puerto Rico, Calo first set foot in MIT's Building 68 11 years ago — and hasn’t wavered in his decision to become a biologist since. In 2006, as part of the MIT Summer Research Program (MSRP), Calo spent 10 weeks studying under Professor Stephen Bell, examining DNA replication. At the time, Calo was a chemistry major at the University of Puerto Rico, but returned post-graduation to MIT’s Department of Biology, earning his PhD while serving as both a teaching assistant for MIT’s course 7.01 (Introduction to Biology) and MSRP program assistant.

“MIT is very unique,” he says. “I’ve done research at multiple institutions, and yet nothing quite compares. Here, the impossible is made possible.”

After completing his postdoctoral training at Stanford University, Calo returned to Cambridge, Massachusetts, this past January as an assistant professor and extramural member at the Koch Institute to head his own lab — exploring the ways in which errors in cellular organelles called ribosomes can lead to disease.

Ribosomes are vital to the translation of genetic code into the molecules integral to life, but are far less often acknowledged for their role in embryonic development. Calo suggests that when ribosomes are not constructed correctly, they are unable to carry out their cellular duties, hindering cell growth and causing developmental disorders. Calo is interested in one condition specifically: Treacher Collins syndrome, which stems from a mutation in a single gene that impedes proper ribosomal assembly. He will soon transfer his experiments from cell cultures to a new model system — zebrafish — in order to further unravel the relationship between ribosome structure and disease.

“The research I do now is purely based on my interest in understanding how cells work,” Calo says. “Specifically, how the mechanisms controlling growth and proliferation operate. These are essential processes that led to the emergence of multicellular organisms, and thus to our own existence.”

Sebastian Lourido

Trained as both an artist and a scientist, Sebastian Lourido works to counter an entirely different kind of invader spreading biological mayhem: parasites. Originally from Colombia, he was recently named assistant professor of biology, joining the cohort of 15 faculty members at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research — one of just 28 individuals to ever receive this appointment. The title may be new, but this is familiar turf for Lourido. He became a Whitehead Fellow in 2012, after receiving his PhD in microbiology from Washington University in St. Louis and a bachelor’s in studio art and cell and molecular biology from Tulane University. A pioneer in more ways than one, Lourido formed his own lab as a fellow rather than following a more conventional postdoc path.

Lourido spent much of his childhood exploring his mother’s genetics lab, where he analyzed practically anything he could fit under a microscope. “That experience solidified my excitement for the invisible mechanisms that make up the living world,” he says. “I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know that genetic information was carried in our cells in the form of DNA, and passed from one generation to the next.”

Constantly seeking ways to merge his artistic endeavors with scientific ones, Lourido leverages his creativity to glean insight into the systems and structures that constitute life.  He probes a group of microscopic invaders known as Apicomplexan parasites, revealing their weaknesses in order to devise potential treatments. Lourido’s team was the first to perform a genome-wide functional analysis of an apicomplexan — gaining deeper understanding of the genes and molecules key for the invasion process. In 2013, Lourido received the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s Early Independence Award, and with it a five-year grant to investigate motility in one kind of parasite, Toxoplasma gondii. This same interloper is also the subject of Lourido’s two-year NIH-funded project, for which he is the principal investigator.

Lourido has found the MIT community both welcoming and inclusive. Even as he was interviewing for his new position, he was struck by the collaborative, collegial, and nurturing environment.

“This level of engagement permeates the other elements of our community — students, postdocs, and staff scientists — who drive the exciting research happening every day at MIT,” he says. “There are many forces that shape the diversity of our campus, and we need to be vigilant and work hard to continue to encourage and support scientists from different backgrounds, experiences, and cultures.”

Stefani Spranger

One building over in MIT’s Koch Institute, newly-appointed Assistant Professor Stefani Spranger will work to harness the body’s own defense force to pinpoint and eradicate cancer. Spranger carried her passion for immunotherapy across seas from Munich, Germany. As the daughter of two engineers, Spranger was raised on science. “My parents fostered my curiosity,” she says, “which led to my initial motivation to go into science: to figure out how things work.”

While earning her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich, Spranger discussed publications focusing on two clinical trials that used engineered immune cells to combat malignant melanoma. These publications ignited Spranger’s enthusiasm for immune-based therapies, which in turn spurred her doctoral and postdoctoral training at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Munich in the Institute for Molecular Immunology and the University of Chicago, respectively.

While Spranger’s education helped hone her immunology research skills, she is excited to experience a more varied academic environment encompassing a range of disciplines. “I was drawn to MIT because of its diverse faculty and the breath of research interests,” she says.

Spranger’s lab will employ tumor models in mice to determine how cancer and immune cells interact. In particular, she aims to discern the many factors related to the cells, tissues, and environment that could affect the immune system’s anti-tumor response. Ultimately, Spranger hopes to contribute to new treatments that trigger the body’s defense to thwart cancer.

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New insights into the early universe’s galaxy clusters

Molecular gas is the raw material which fuels star formation throughout the universe. Now, using the revolutionary Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) telescope, an international team of scientists has conducted one of the largest studies of molecular gas in distant galaxy clusters — rare conglomerations containing hundreds of galaxies, trillions of stars, and dark matter.  

Scientists from the Spitzer Adaptation of the Red-sequence Cluster Survey (SpARCS) collaboration observed the galaxies within these distant clusters as they were when the universe was only 4 billion years old. They found that they harbor larger molecular gas reservoirs compared to galaxies in found in more typical isolated environments with fewer galaxy neighbors, known as field galaxies.

“We expected to find molecular gas deficiencies in these cluster galaxies compared to the field,” says lead author Allison Noble, a postdoc at the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. “Galaxies in nearby clusters are dead, lacking star formation activity and with little to no molecular gas. In these distant clusters, we are instead detecting gas-rich galaxies, but their star formation rates are on par with field galaxies.” 

The results were recently published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Noble is a member of the research group of Kavli Institute astronomer and assistant professor of physics Michael McDonald, who is the second author on the paper.  

Gillian Wilson, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of California at Riverside and the leader of the SpARCS collaboration, says that while the current study "does not answer the question of which physical process is primarily responsible for causing the higher amounts of molecular gas, it provides the most accurate measurement yet of how much molecular gas exists in galaxies in clusters in the early universe.” 

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Defiance: Disobedience for the good of all

The mood was electric at the MIT Media Lab on July 21 when more than 500 people gathered for its annual summer event, this year called Defiance. Attendees were buzzing with news that had broken on the eve of the symposium: The Media Lab had not only chosen the winners of its new Disobedience Award, it had also selected several honorable mentions because the pool of more than 7,800 nominations was so rich with achievements that deserved recognition.

“We wanted to honor the people who found ways to say, ‘The systems aren’t working for us — we really need to step outside them and do something radically different,’” said Ethan Zuckerman, director of the MIT Center for Civic Media and a member of the award selection committee. Zuckerman said that the panel also wanted to recognize those working for good within institutions. “They’re taking brave steps and actions to make sure those institutions live up to their values and to their higher purpose, not just to the rules behind them.”

In selecting the honorees, Zuckerman, Media Lab Director Joi Ito, and 10 other committee members focused on work that impacts society in positive ways, and is consistent with a set of key principles, including nonviolence, creativity, courage, and responsibility for one’s actions. Nominees had to be a living person or group engaged in “extraordinary disobedience for the benefit of society.”

The creation of the award was announced at Forbidden Research, the lab’s 2016 summer event. Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, provided the funds after he and Ito came up with the idea last year. “The prize shines a light on the voices we should be listening to,” Hoffman said at Defiance. “On what examples we should be setting for ourselves and for our future selves. Some of the most important human progress comes when you are essentially speaking truth to power.”

Disobedience Award winners

The committee decided that’s exactly what Michigan pediatrician Mona Hanna-Attisha and Virginia Tech professor of engineering Marc Edwards did in investigating lead-tainted water in Flint, Michigan, and exposing official misconduct in the crisis. Both Hanna-Attisha and Edwards decided to donate their shares of the $250,000 prize to the people of Flint.

“It’s those kids who need these resources,” said Hanna-Attisha. “My activism today is to make sure that we don’t sit back and ignore the consequences of lead exposure. We know what it does to children. My commitment is to turn this around.” Edwards called himself a “serial troublemaker,” having exposed scientific misconduct by federal agencies connected to lead-contaminated water in Washington in 2004. “We were destined to see it repeated, and we knew something like Flint was going to happen. Ultimately, I got a call from a Flint mom who saw all the signs and then we started working with Flint residents so that they could save their own day.” Edwards and Hanna-Attisha persevered in the face of harassment and academic sanctions.    

Honorable mentions

James Hansen said his work also got him “in a lot of trouble.” He was one of three award finalists who received a $10,000 honorable mention. Hansen, widely recognized as a pioneer of climate change research, said he’s had “some differences with the scientific community, and I still do. There are many issues where we need to stand up and tell what we think is the truth even if the powers that be don’t like it.”

The co-founders of Freedom University Georgia, which offers free classes and college prep to undocumented students and were also recognized as finalists, faced pressure as well. “Freedom U initially emerged in 2011 as an act of defiance against our employer [the state’s higher education board],” said Lorgia García-Peña. She and three other professors also at the University of Georgia at that time — Betina Kaplan, Bethany Moreton, and Pamela Voekel — established the school in collaboration with a coalition of undocumented students and immigrants’ rights activists. Now one-fifth of Freedom University students win full merit scholarships to traditional colleges.

When he introduced the third finalist to be honored — the Water Protectors of Standing Rock, who launched the massive protest against the Dakota Access Pipeline — Ito pointed out that many successful movements don’t have clear leadership. LaDonna Brave Bull Allard, a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, said she doesn’t see herself as a leader. “Everything just happened because we stood in prayer and nonviolent resistance.” Allard mesmerized the audience as she related how the Standing Rock protest gained momentum. “It was all the people who came together. It was all the people who understood that water was important. It was all the people of the world who know that we have to change now. And we cannot back down.”

“We have been defiant for 500 years,” said Phyllis Young, a fellow protector of Standing Rock and longtime Lakota activist who shared the honorable mention with Allard, Jasilyn Charger, and Joseph White Eyes. Like Allard, Young also captivated the crowd as she chronicled the history of resistance by her ancestors. “We are the people on the edge,” she said, adding that she’d like to collaborate with MIT.

Young’s wish resonated with Megan Smith ’86, SM ’88, former White House CTO and a member of the Media Lab advisory council. Smith was so moved by the stories of Standing Rock that, together with MIT’s Vice President for Research Maria Zuber, she suggested a Dakota-MIT summit on green energy. That announcement drew loud applause, especially when Young said “Yes, we could coordinate with the brass ring.”

A nod to the past

“Defiance is a celebration of the highest instance in human nature,” said the event’s emcee, Farai Chidaya. The veteran journalist and analyst, who recently joined the Media Lab as a Director’s Fellow, said that defiant work allows us “to transcend unjust rules and restrictions, and to surface the love of humanity in ways that are brave and risky.”

Another new Director’s Fellow, Jamila Raqib, picked up on that theme. She’s executive director of the Albert Einstein Institution and a Nobel Prize nominee in the peace category. The Einstein Institution is based on the legendary physicist’s belief, said Raqib, “that strategically applied nonviolent defiance offers humanity the best hope for bringing about a world with more peace and justice.”  

Past achievements laid the groundwork for the Disobedience Award winners and finalists, stressed another speaker, Gregg Pascal Zachary, author and Arizona State University professor. “Your legitimacy as rebels and dissenters today in part depends upon the legitimacy gained by dissenters and rebels. History can show you patterns, how they play out, so you can anticipate what you might face in your struggle.” Fellow presenter Julia Reda agreed. She represents the European Pirate Party, a movement to defend freedoms online, and said that progress will only happen “if somebody has planted the seed for change of thinking in society. This is what defiant people actually do.” Reda went on to talk about her unconventional path to politics, as an outsider now making the most of having “a seat at the table.”  

Echoing that sentiment was Ed You, a supervisory special agent in the FBI’s Biological Countermeasures Unit. He thinks the agency would benefit from bringing biohackers to the table as well. “What a fantastic act of defiance that would be. Members of the hacker community can come up with solutions for the FBI, and it’s important for everyone to push their comfort level.” Adam Foss, a former prosecutor who is working to reform the criminal justice system, also talked about bringing more people — and greater diversity — to the table. Foss told the audience that “the seats in this room that are not filled could be representative of black and brown bodies that could be here sharing their ideas. The lack of those ideas is impacting all of us.”

Engagement with other people is critical, said journalist and author Masha Gessen. “It is really important to talk with people who affirm your reality. But if that’s all you’re getting, then you’re not actually engaging with reality. I think we have to accept a level of discomfort for ourselves, too.”

Giving voice to underrepresented people

Esra’a Al Shafei, another Defiance speaker, is a Bahraini activist and founder of Majal.org, a network of online platforms that amplify marginalized voices. “Defiance goes beyond dissent,” she said. “It’s creating avenues for self-expression. If you keep lowering the barriers through music, for instance, it makes censorship much harder, and encourages young people to develop their own identity and feel more in charge of their own voices.” Speaking of music, Al Shafei somehow found a way to weave singers Céline Dion and Meatloaf into her presentation, cracking up the audience throughout her time on the stage. Jose Antonio Vargas also had them laughing. “Humor is so important,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, filmmaker, and media entrepreneur said. “If I didn’t laugh about my own circumstances, I don’t know where I’d be.” He shared the stories of his life as an undocumented immigrant in the U.S., his home for almost 24 years. “The reality now though is when you have privilege like I did, like I do, is … what are you doing to risk it? What does it mean to stand up for your undocumented neighbors, classmates, and co-workers?”

While Vargas focused on issues of today, the next session again drew from examples of defiance in history, and also considered the tensions between science and faith. In a discussion between Dominican priest Eric Salobir and Maria Zuber, moderated by Berkman Klein Center co-founder and Harvard Law Professor Jonathan Zittrain, Zuber said that “we should always be looking at what the data is telling us. If it tells us we should change our idea, then we should change our idea. In the process of change, one thing to learn is having a good enough dialogue and trying to get enough explanations that you can get buy-in to allow change to proceed.”

The audacity of disobedience

Lab director Joi Ito gave a special shout-out to Zuber. She took a risk, he said, in being part of the Disobedience Award selection committee, because she has a position on the National Science Board, which is an advisory body to the U.S. President and Congress. But Ito said that the committee was “very careful to not allow fear or lack of courage to enter the selection process. We were checking each other to make sure there was no kowtowing.” In the end, he said, they were all pleased with their choices.

Reid Hoffman agreed, and announced that he would continue to fund the Disobedience Award. “These are the things that matter. These are the issues that we should surface. This is the light we should point this beacon at. This was a well-validated ‘seed experiment’ that was totally awesome.”

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David Gordon Wilson's lifelong love of the bicycle

For David Gordon Wilson, emeritus professor of mechanical engineering, there is only one way to get to work — on his beloved bike. Cycling has been his preferred mode of transportation since he first rode on two wheels at the age of nine in his native England. His passion for the bicycle helped inspire his decision to pursue a career in engineering.

Over the course of six decades, Wilson’s career has been peppered with many achievements, including inventing the fee-plus-rebate progressive energy tax policy and designing jet engines. But wherever his career has taken him, his hobby of cycling has followed. Wilson was recently invited to work on a fourth edition of “Bicycling Science,” which is not only the MIT Press' best-selling book but also regarded as the premiere authority on bicycle design.

Q: When did your passion for the bicycle turn into an academic pursuit?

A: In 1967, I organized an international competition in collaboration with the journal Engineering for the best design in human-powered land transport. To my amazement, 78 people from 64 countries entered, and it was a great success. At the time I was passionate about getting people interested in different types of bikes, particularly recumbent bicycles. So as the competition carried on, I worked on my own designs for a recumbent bicycle.

Q: What made you interested in designing recumbent bicycles over traditional upright bicycles?

A: Well, recumbents are faster and safer than regular bikes. Cycling in a reclined position also helps distribute weight more evenly, giving better and safer braking with no danger of going over the handlebars. In the 1970s, I started designing recumbents after [Berkeley, California inventor] Fred Willkie asked for designs. This culminated in the Wilson-Willkie Recumbent in 1975. Our bike became extremely popular in Europe and got some great visibility when it was featured by Mobil for its “Imagination” series [of television commercials].

Q: One of the recumbent bicycles you designed broke the world record for speed. How did you go about designing a recumbent for speed?

A: It was important to make the bicycle more aerodynamic to achieve top speeds. In the late '70s, the Fomac corporation built the Avatar 1000 and Avatar 2000 recumbent bicycles to my designs. The Avatar 2000 was then streamlined in 1982 with a lightweight fairing called Bluebell to make the bike more aerodynamic. That same year, ridden by an Australian lawyer, it broke the world record at the International Human Powered Vehicle Association trials by traveling 51.9 miles per hour. That record has increased greatly in recent years using the flat Highway 305 at an altitude of 4,511 feet in Battle Mountain, Nevada. In 2013, a team from the Netherlands achieved 83.1 miles per hour.

Q: What do you think has been the biggest advance in bicycle design since publishing the first edition of “Bicycling Science” in 1974?

A: Advances in brake and transmission designs have really improved cycling. Gears have a far wider range than had the old three-speeds and ten-speeds. My wife actually rode 4,000 miles across the country last summer. She also works for the visiting nurses and cycles to her patients, often carrying large loads using a 14-speed hub gear that has a gear range over 500 percent. Another development that has made a big difference in modern bikes is the use of carbon fiber. It makes the structure lighter and stiffer than the steel, aluminum, or titanium used for most bikes. One of my students, David Kindler, made the first fiber wheel for bicycles.

Q: What do you see as the next big thing in bicycle design?

A: Somebody sent me a wonderful video about the launch of a self-driving bicycle. Of course they sent it on April 1, so it ended up being an April Fool’s joke. What I would really like to see is for companies to make bikes safer. If any element of the design fails, for example a fork or chainstay breaks, then the cyclist is put in danger. It’s crucial to make safe, lightweight bicycles, especially in sports. The Dutch have taken the leadership in producing enclosed or semi-enclosed cycles called “velomobiles,” giving enhanced safety and weather protection.

Q: Do you see a place for recumbent bicycles in professional cycling?

A: Absolutely! Something I’ve recommended is for the Tour de France to have recumbents start prior to the regular upright bicycles. It would be very exciting to add this element, since recumbents are not only faster, but safer, so you wouldn’t see the domino-style pile-ups that often occur in the Tour de France.

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Second annual MIT Teaching with Digital Technology Awards recipients selected

The MIT Teaching with Digital Technology Awards were established in 2016 to celebrate innovations in digital technology and the faculty who develop them. Co-sponsored by the Office of Digital Learning (ODL), the Dean of Undergraduate Education (DUE) and the Office of the Dean for Graduate Education (ODGE), the awards serve to inspire the MIT community to embrace digital technologies and develop new applications that improve classroom teaching and learning.

In June, six faculty members received awards for their work. The second annual Digital Technology Awards winners are:

• For work in ESD.411/412/413 (Foundations of System Design and Management): Edward Crawley, the Ford Professor of Engineering in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics; Bruce Cameron, director of the System Architecture Lab and lecturer in the System Design and Management Program; Bryan Moser, lecturer in the System Design and Management Program; and Olivier de Weck, professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
• For work in 21M.051 (Fundamentals of Music) and 21M.220 (Medieval and Renaissance Music): Michael Scott Cuthbert, associate professor of music.
• For work in 8.033 (Relativity) and 8.323 (Relativistic Quantum Field Theory): Tracy Robyn Slatyer, the Jerrold R. Zacharias CD Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics.

This year, 133 nominations were received for 80 different faculty members and instructors. A committee consisting of Dean Dennis Freeman of the DUE, Dean Blanche Staton of the ODGE, and Vice President for Open Learning Sanjay Sarma of the ODL, as well as five undergraduate and graduate students, evaluated the submissions and chose the winners.

"There is so much innovative teaching going on at MIT and these awards effectively gather those stories from students, celebrate the faculty innovators, and inspire other faculty in similar directions," says Sheryl Barnes, director of digital learning in residential education.

In keeping with last year’s methodology, students were asked to articulate why their nominee deserved an award and provide details about the technologies used and how they were applied. Excerpts from winning nominations, edited for clarity and length, appear below.

"Professor Slatyer's use of MITx in 8.033 was great: It was used to give students a chance to familiarize themselves with concepts prior to lecture, holding us accountable to the readings for the class and allowing us to ask questions earlier in the week.”

"Professor Cuthbert uses an interactive approach to teach the fundamentals of music. Artusi offers a variety of exercises on music theories, and we used it during the class to see if we understood the materials he just went over; it was incredibly helpful for us to absorb the theories.”

"Dr. Moser used many different digital tools to aid in classroom learning, the most impactful of which was his engagement on Piazza forums. I've never seen a professor who's been as actively engaged outside the classroom in discussions as he has been. He clearly cares about the students and what he's teaching."

The annual MIT Teaching with Digital Technology Awards highlight the strides faculty are taking to actively engage students and facilitate communication by bringing digital technologies to bear on traditional classroom instruction. Awards winners were quick to point out that although students tended to nominate lead faculty, there are many postdocs and educators who deserve recognition for the critical roles they played in bringing these digital innovations to fruition.

Faculty should visit Residential MITx for more information on incorporating digital tools and pedagogies into their classrooms. Based on open edX, Residential MITx is an online learning system that provides the ability to author and distribute videos, text, assessments, interactive elements, and sophisticated automatic grading.

Individuals can request a Residential MITx course site and explore digital tools for the classroom on the ODL website.

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