A mathematical view on cell packing

A key challenge in the embryonic development of complex life forms is the correct specification of cell positions so that organs and limbs grow in the right places. To understand how cells arrange themselves at the earliest stages of development, an interdisciplinary team of applied mathematicians at MIT and experimentalists at Princeton University identified mathematical principles governing the packings of interconnected cell assemblies.

In a paper entitled “Entropic effects in cell lineage tree packings,” published this month in Nature Physics, the team reports direct experimental observations and mathematical modeling of cell packings in convex enclosures, a biological packing problem encountered in many complex organisms, including humans. 

In their study, the authors investigated multi-cellular packings in the egg chambers of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, an important developmental model organism. Each egg chamber contains exactly 16 germline cells that are linked by cytoplasmic bridges, resulting from a series of incomplete cell divisions. The linkages form a branched cell-lineage tree which is enclosed by an approximately spherical hull. At some later stage, one of the 16 cells develops into the fertilizable egg, and the relative positioning of the cells is thought to be important for the biochemical signal exchange during the early stages of development.

The group run by Princeton's Stanislav Y. Shvartsman, a professor of chemical and biological engineering, and the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics at Princeton succeeded in measuring the spatial positions and connectivities between individual cells in more than 100 egg chambers. The experimentalists found it difficult to explain, however, why certain tree configurations occurred much more frequently than others, says Jörn Dunkel, an associate professor in the MIT Department of Mathematics.

So while Shvartsman’s team were able to visualize the cell connections in complex biological systems, Dunkel and postdoc Norbert Stoop, a recent MIT math instructor, began to develop a mathematical framework to describe the statistics of the observed cell packings.  

“This project has been a prime example of an extremely enjoyable interdisciplinary collaboration between cell biology and applied mathematics,” Dunkel says. The experiments were performed by Shvartsman’s PhD student Jasmin Imran Alsous, who will begin a postdoctoral position at Adam Martin’s lab in the MIT Department of Biology this fall. They were analyzed in collaboration with postdoc Paul Villoutreix, who is now at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.

Dunkel points out that while human biology is considerably more complex than a fruit fly’s, the underlying tissue organization processes share many common aspects.

“The cell trees in the egg chamber store the history of the cell divisions, like an ancestry tree in a sense,” he says. “What we were able to do was to map the problem of packing the cell tree into an egg chamber onto a nice and simple mathematical model that basically asks: If you take the fundamental convex polyhedrons with 16 vertices, how many different ways are there to embed 16 cells on them while keeping all the bridges intact?”

The presence of rigid physical connections between cells adds interesting new constraints that make the problem different from the most commonly considered packing problems, such as the question of how to arrange oranges efficiently so that they can be transported in as few containers as possible. The interdisciplinary study of Dunkel and his colleagues, which combined modern biochemical protein labelling techniques, 3-D confocal microscopy, computational image analysis, and mathematical modeling, shows that constrained tree packing problems arise naturally in biological systems.

Understanding the packing principles of cells in tissues at the various stages of development remains a major challenge. Depending on a variety of biological and physical factors, cells originating from a single founder cell can develop in vastly different ways to form muscles, bones, and organs such as the brain. While the developmental process “involves a huge number of degrees of freedom, the end result in many cases is highly complex yet also very reproducible and robust,” Dunkel says.

“This raises the question, which many people asked before, whether such robust complexity can be understood in terms of a basic set of biochemical, physical, and mathematical rules,” he says. “Our study shows that simple physical constraints, like cell-cell bridges arising from incomplete divisions, can significantly affect cell packings. In essence, what we are trying to do is to identify relatively simple tractable models that allow us to make predictions about these complex systems. Of course, to fully understand embryonic development, mathematical simplification must go hand-in-hand with experimental insight from biology.”

Since incomplete cell-divisions have also been seen in amphibians, mollusks, birds, and mammals, Dunkel hopes the modeling approach developed in the paper might be applicable to those systems as well.

“Physical constraints could play a significant role in determining the preferences for certain types of multicellular organizations, and that may have secondary implications for larger-scale tissue dynamics which are not yet clear to us. A simple way you can think about it is that these cytoplasmic bridges, or other physical connections, can help the organism to localize cells into desired positions,” he says. “This would appear to be a very robust strategy.”

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Cell-sized robots can sense their environment

Researchers at MIT have created what may be the smallest robots yet that can sense their environment, store data, and even carry out computational tasks. These devices, which are about the size of a human egg cell, consist of tiny electronic circuits made of two-dimensional materials, piggybacking on minuscule particles called colloids.

Colloids, which insoluble particles or molecules anywhere from a billionth to a millionth of a meter across, are so small they can stay suspended indefinitely in a liquid or even in air. By coupling these tiny objects to complex circuitry, the researchers hope to lay the groundwork for devices that could be dispersed to carry out diagnostic journeys through anything from the human digestive system to oil and gas pipelines, or perhaps to waft through air to measure compounds inside a chemical processor or refinery.

“We wanted to figure out methods to graft complete, intact electronic circuits onto colloidal particles,” explains Michael Strano, the Carbon C. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT and senior author of the study, which was published today in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. MIT postdoc Volodymyr Koman is the paper’s lead author.

“Colloids can access environments and travel in ways that other materials can’t,” Strano says. Dust particles, for example, can float indefinitely in the air because they are small enough that the random motions imparted by colliding air molecules are stronger than the pull of gravity. Similarly, colloids suspended in liquid will never settle out.

Researchers produced tiny electronic circuits, just 100 micrometers across,on a substrate material which was then dissolved away to leave the individual devices floating freely in solution. These were later attached to tiny colloidal particles. (Courtesy of the researchers)

Strano says that while other groups have worked on the creation of similarly tiny robotic devices, their emphasis has been on developing ways to control movement, for example by replicating the tail-like flagellae that some microbial organisms use to propel themselves. But Strano suggests that may not be the most fruitful approach, since flagellae and other cellular movement systems are primarily used for local-scale positioning, rather than for significant movement. For most purposes, making such devices more functional is more important than making them mobile, he says.

Tiny robots made by the MIT team are self-powered, requiring no external power source or even internal batteries. A simple photodiode provides the trickle of electricity that the tiny robots’ circuits require to power their computation and memory circuits. That’s enough to let them sense information about their environment, store those data in their memory, and then later have the data read out after accomplishing their mission.

The microscopic devices, combining electronic circuits with colloid particles, are aerosolized inside a chamber and then a substance to be analyzed is introduced, where it can interact with the devices. These devices are then collected on microscope slides on a surface so they can be tested. (Courtesy of the researchers)

Such devices could ultimately be a boon for the oil and gas industry, Strano says. Currently, the main way of checking for leaks or other issues in pipelines is to have a crew physically drive along the pipe and inspect it with expensive instruments. In principle, the new devices could be inserted into one end of the pipeline, carried along with the flow, and then removed at the other end, providing a record of the conditions they encountered along the way, including the presence of contaminants that could indicate the location of problem areas. The initial proof-of-concept devices didn’t have a timing circuit that would indicate the location of particular data readings, but adding that is part of ongoing work.

Similarly, such particles could potentially be used for diagnostic purposes in the body, for example to pass through the digestive tract searching for signs of inflammation or other disease indicators, the researchers say.

Most conventional microchips, such as silicon-based or CMOS, have a flat, rigid substrate and would not perform properly when attached to colloids that can experience complex mechanical stresses while travelling through the environment. In addition, all such chips are “very energy-thirsty,” Strano says. That’s why Koman decided to try out two-dimensional electronic materials, including graphene and transition-metal dichalcogenides, which he found could be attached to colloid surfaces, remaining operational even after after being launched into air or water. And such thin-film electronics require only tiny amounts of energy. “They can be powered by nanowatts with subvolt voltages,” Koman says.

As a demonstration of how such particles might be used to test biological samples, the team placed a solution containing the devices on a leaf, and then used the devices’ internal reflectors to locate them for testing by shining a laser at the leaf. (Courtesy of the researchers)

Why not just use the 2-D electronics alone? Without some substrate to carry them, these tiny materials are too fragile to hold together and function. “They can’t exist without a substrate,” Strano says. “We need to graft them to the particles to give them mechanical rigidity and to make them large enough to get entrained in the flow.”

But the 2-D materials “are strong enough, robust enough to maintain their functionality even on unconventional substrates” such as the colloids, Koman says.

The nanodevices they produced with this method are autonomous particles that contain electronics for power generation, computation, logic, and memory storage. They are powered by light and contain tiny retroreflectors that allow them to be easily located after their travels. They can then be interrogated through probes to deliver their data. In ongoing work, the team hopes to add communications capabilities to allow the particles to deliver their data without the need for physical contact.

Other efforts at nanoscale robotics “haven’t reached that level” of creating complex electronics that are sufficiently small and energy efficient to be aerosolized or suspended in a colloidal liquid. These are “very smart particles, by current standards,” Strano says, adding, “We see this paper as the introduction of a new field” in robotics.

The research team, all at MIT, included Pingwei Liu, Daichi Kozawa, Albert Liu, Anton Cottrill, Youngwoo Son, and Jose Lebron. The work was supported by the U.S. Office of Naval Research and the Swiss National Science Foundation.

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School of Science appoints eight faculty members to named professorships

The School of Science announced that eight of its faculty members have been appointed to named professorships. These positions afford the faculty members additional support to pursue their research and develop their careers.

Eliezer Calo, assistant professor in the Department of Biology, has been named the Irwin W. and Helen Sizer Career Development Professor. He focuses on the coordination of RNA metabolism using a combination of genetic, biochemical, and functional genomic approaches. The core of Calo’s research program is to understand how ribosome biogenesis is controlled by specific RNA binding proteins, particularly RNA helicases of the “DEAD box” family, and how disregulation of ribosome biogenesis contributes to various diseases, including cancer. He proposes initially to characterize the functions of specific genes of interest, including the DDX21 RNA helicase and the TCOF1 factor involved in RNA Pol I transcription and rRNA processing, using biochemical, molecular and genome-wide approaches in mouse, Xenopus and Zebrafish models.

Steven Flavell, assistant professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, has been named the Lister Brothers Career Development Professor. He uses Caenorhabditis elegans to examine how neuromodulators coordinate activity in neural circuits to generate locomotion behaviors linked to the feeding or satiety states of an animal. His long-term goal is to understand how neural circuits generate sustained behavioral states, and how physiological and environmental information is integrated into these circuits. Gaining a mechanistic understanding of how these circuits function will be essential to decipher the neural bases of sleep and mood disorders.

Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics, explores quantum transport in novel condensed-matter systems such as graphene, transition metal dichalcogenides and topological insulators. In recent work, he has demonstrated the presence of a bandgap in graphene-based van der Waals heterostructures, novel quantum spin Hall and photothermoelectric effects in graphene, as well as light-emitting diodes, photodetectors and solar cells in the atomically thin tungsten diselenide system. He has also made advances in characterizing and manipulating the properties of other ultrathin materials such as ultrathin graphite and molybdenum disulphide, which lack graphene’s ultrarelativistic properties, but possess other unusual electronic properties.

Becky Lamason, assistant professor in the Department of Biology, has been named the Robert A. Swanson (1969) Career Development Professor of Life Sciences. She investigates how intracellular bacterial pathogens hijack host cell processes to promote infection. In particular, she studies how Rickettsia parkeri and Listeria monocytogenes move through tissues via a process called cell-to-cell spread. She utilizes cellular, molecular, genetic, biochemical, and biophysical approaches to elucidate the mechanisms of spread in order to reveal key aspects of pathogenesis and host cell biology.

Rebecca Saxe, the inaugural John W. Jarve (1978) Professor in Brain and Cognitive Sciences, is best known for her discovery of a brain region that is specialized for "theory of mind," people's ability to think about the thoughts, beliefs, plans, hopes and emotions of other people. Saxe continues to study this region and its role in social cognition, and is exploring the theory-of-mind system as a promising candidate for understanding the biological basis of autism. She also studies brain development in human babies, including her own.

Omer Yilmaz, assistant professor in the Department of Biology, has been named the Eisen and Chang Career Development Professor. He studies how the adult intestine is maintained by stem cells that require a cellular neighborhood, or niche, consisting in part of Paneth cells. Specifically, he investigates the molecular mechanisms of how intestinal stem cells and their Paneth cell niche respond to diverse diets to coordinate intestinal regeneration with organismal physiology and its impact on the formation and growth of intestinal cancers. By better understanding how intestinal stem cells adapt to diverse diets, he hopes to identify and develop new strategies that prevent and reduce the growth of cancers involving the intestinal tract that includes the small intestine, colon, and rectum.

Yufei Zhao, assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics, has been named the Class of 1956 Career Development Professor. He has made significant contributions in combinatorics with applications to computer science. Recently, Zhao and three undergraduates solved an open problem concerning the number of independent sets in an irregular graph, a conjecture first proposed in 2001. Understanding the number of independent sets — subsets of vertices where no two vertices are adjacent — is important to solving many other combinatorial problems. In other research accomplishments, Zhao co-authored a proof with Jacob Fox and David Conlon that contributed to a better understanding of the celebrated Green-Tao theorem that states prime numbers contain arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions. Their work improves our understanding of pseudorandom structures — non-random objects with random-like properties — and has other applications in mathematics and computer science.

Martin Zwierlein, the inaugural Thomas A. Frank (1977) Professor of Physics, studies ultracold gases of atoms and molecules. These gases host novel states of matter and serve as pristine model systems for other systems in nature, such as neutron stars or high-temperature superconductors. In contrast to bulk materials, in experiments with cold gases one can freely tune the interaction between atoms and make it as strong as quantum mechanics allows. This enabled the observation of a novel robust form of superfluidity: Scaled to the density of electrons in solids, superfluidity would in fact occur far above room temperature. Under a novel quantum gas microscope with single-atom resolution, the team recently studied charge and spin correlations and transport in a Fermi-Hubbard lattice gas. This system is believed to hold the key to high-temperature superconductivity in cuprate materials. Using ultracold molecules, Zwierlein’s group also demonstrated coherence times on the order of seconds, spurring hopes for the future use of such molecules in quantum information applications.

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Featured video: Pulling drinking water out of thin air

With droughts plaguing much of the western United States and millions of people across the globe living without access to safe water, the need for technologies that produce clean water is greater than ever. The key, according to Evelyn Wang, the Gail E. Kendall Professor and department head for MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, is in the very air we breathe.

“Water vapor is all around us in the air, even in arid conditions,” explains Wang. She and her team in MIT’s Device Research Laboratory have developed a device that can tap into this abundant resource and literally pull water out of thin air.

The key to the process is a powder that desiccates the air, attracting vapor directly to the porous matrix at the base of the device’s main chamber like a sponge. The vapor is then condensed into liquid and can be collected as usable water – even in dry atmospheres with as low as 20 percent humidity.

The entire process of converting the water vapor found in air into potable water can be done using only the power of the sun. “The device is completely passive,” says Wang. “There is no need to use outside power supplies which can help keep the device low-cost and efficient.”

Keeping costs low and efficiency high is one of Wang’s central goals. “We hope to develop a device that provides relief to the millions of people living in communities that lack the infrastructure needed to provide access to clean drinking water or those living in regions plagued by drought,” adds Wang.

During a field test in Tempe, Arizona earlier this year, a small proof-of-concept prototype of the device extracted a quarter-liter of water per day per kilogram of the absorbent powder. The researchers hope to increase this output by further tailoring the powder and optimizing the device.

If the production capacity of the device can be increased, Wang’s research could have a tangible impact in places experiencing water scarcity — even in the driest of conditions. 

Submitted by: Mary Beth O'Leary / Department of Mechanical Engineering | Video by: John Freidah | 1 min, 23 sec

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Michale Fee receives McKnight Technological Innovations in Neuroscience Award

McGovern Institute investigator Michale Fee has been selected to receive a 2018 McKnight Technological Innovations in Neuroscience Award for his research on “new technologies for imaging and analyzing neural state-space trajectories in freely-behaving small animals.”

“I am delighted to get support from the McKnight Foundation,” says Fee, who is also the Glen V. and Phyllis F. Dorflinger Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Neurosciences at MIT. “We’re very excited about this project which aims to develop technology that will be a great help to the broader neuroscience community.”

Fee studies the neural mechanisms by which the brain, specifically that of juvenile songbirds, learns complex sequential behaviors. The way that songbirds learn a song through trial and error is analogous to humans learning complex behaviors, such as riding a bicycle. While it would be insightful to link such learning to neural activity, current methods for monitoring neurons can only monitor a limited field of neurons, a big issue since such learning and behavior involve complex interactions between larger circuits. While a wider field of view for recordings would help decipher neural changes linked to this learning paradigm, current microscopy equipment is large relative to a juvenile songbird, and microscopes that can record neural activity generally constrain the behavior of small animals. Ideally, technologies need to be lightweight (about 1 gram) and compact in size (the size of a dime), a far cry from current larger microscopes that weigh in at 3 grams. Fee hopes to be able to break these technical boundaries and miniaturize the recording equipment thus allowing recording of more neurons in naturally behaving small animals.

“We are thrilled that the McKnight Foundation has chosen to support this project. The technology that Michale’s developing will help to better visualize and understand the circuits underlying learning,” says Robert Desimone, director of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research.

In addition to development and miniaturization of the microscopy hardware itself, the award will support the development of technology that helps analyze the resulting images, so that the neuroscience community at large can more easily deploy and use the technology.

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3Q: Barry Posen on the NATO Summit and state of the alliance

Heads of state and heads of government recently attended the 2018 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Summit held in Brussels, Belgium. There, President Donald Trump created controversy by criticizing Germany and calling other allies “delinquent.” Yet, he deemed the meetings a “success.”

Barry Posen, a leading national security expert and Cold War historian, offers in-depth scholarship on the historic meetings. Posen, the Ford International Professor of Political Science and director of the MIT Security Studies Program,  discusses the role of NATO today, and whether the alliance is “stronger than ever,” as President Trump stated in a post-summit press conference. And he provides historical context on defense spending, which was a chief criticism of the U.S. president.

Q: A core argument of President Trump’s going into the NATO Summit was that the defense spending by our allies is significantly imbalanced and needs to be increased. This issue has also been cited as an issue by earlier U.S. presidents. Do our allies “owe” us money?

A: For many years, U.S. officials, including past presidents, have registered their displeasure with the level of defense spending by the NATO allies. It has been a guideline, perhaps since 2006, reaffirmed at the NATO Wales summit in 2014, that each ally would endeavor to spend 2 percent of its GDP on defense. At Wales the allies further set 2024 as the year when this objective should be achieved. The fact is that NATO's own figures — which differ slightly from national figures as a result of an accounting system that tries to ensure that each member's overall efforts are measured identically — show that the U.S. will devote 3.5 percent of its economy to defense in 2018, while the European average is expected to be 1.5 percent; and that follows four years of European increases.

If one subscribes to the argument advanced by alliance supporters on both sides of the Atlantic, that NATO is an alliance of liberal democracies, which constitutes the foundation of a liberal world order from which all benefit, then all should contribute, and thus this is a very significant gap. It must be remembered that Europe as a whole is a very wealthy region; European nations can afford to invest more for their own security. Thus, the Europeans are cheap-riding on the U.S.  

That said, the allies don't "owe" the U.S. money in a legal or even an administrative sense. Other than a small budget for NATO infrastructure, there is no gigantic pool of NATO military funding to which we and the Europeans are meant to contribute. There is no official military account in deficit on anyone's books, awaiting European checks.  

If one looks into what the European spending does buy, there is a further difficulty: European defense spending is inefficient. Some of this inefficiency reflects the fact that the spending is distributed across 26 independent countries, some of them very small. But even the large countries are often inefficient. Germany, the most productive economy in European NATO, seems to get much less than it should for the money it does spend, which the president fairly points out is only about 1.25 percent of its GDP. For example, at best a third of its military equipment is in working condition.

Q: Some scholars have argued that NATO is obsolete. What role does it play today?

A: Rather than ask whether NATO is obsolete, one should ask whether its benefits to the U.S. are commensurate with its costs to the U.S. This is a matter that should be debated. 

The original U.S. strategic reason for joining NATO was to ensure that the damaged but still productive post-World War II European economies would not fall into the hands of the Soviet Union and be turned against us. The U.S. never wishes to compete with a hegemonic power that controls all the wealth of western Eurasia. The elimination of this security threat was achieved with the Soviet collapse in 1991. Russia today is a mere shadow of the Soviet Union; France and Germany together have vastly more economic potential than Russia, and they even spend more in absolute terms on defense. So the great threat to Europe is no more. Russia is a pain in the neck, not a candidate for continental hegemony. NATO still does provide the U.S. with bases in Europe, troop contributions to various campaigns of the global war on terror, and some intelligence cooperation. NATO has also drawn the U.S. into three strategically unnecessary, if small, wars — Bosnia, Kosovo, and Libya.

On the cost side of the ledger, the U.S. spends a great deal to be prepared to defend the European allies. Journalistic coverage and expert commentary on the NATO summit have been misleading on this score. Some like to count only the cost of the U.S. forces based in Europe, some 70,000 people in uniform, which is significant but not gigantic. This is absurd: Those forces enjoy their deterrent and combat power due to the logistics and training base, and more importantly the reinforcements, and even the nuclear deterrent force, based in the U.S.  It may be hard to estimate the costs accurately, but we should try. For most of the Cold War, the U.S. built its forces to deal with two nearly simultaneous wars, one each in Europe and Asia. In the post cold war world, we amended this to two "major regional" wars against a variety of possible middle power challengers. The Pentagon's recently released "National Defense Strategy" redirects U.S. military planning toward great power rivalry, which among other things means deterring Russia in Europe. Presuming that the "two major war" standard persists, it is reasonable to attribute half of current U.S. defense spending to the NATO commitment. Interestingly, this gets us to 1.75 percent of U.S. GDP, which is close to the 2 percent that we have asked the allies to achieve, and to which they aspire.  

So the question citizens of the U.S. should ask, is what strategic benefits does this vast expenditure attain? If the most serious threat to the U.S. is gone, and the Europeans are rich enough to defend themselves against the threats that remain, should NATO continue to enjoy the priority is has had in U.S. national security policy? The U.S. foreign policy establishment has turned its attention to Asia, and the rise of China, which will likely prove a more formidable competitor than the Soviet Union ever was. This will require significant resources. Beyond security matters, if one day the U.S. begins to focus again on the ballooning national debt, the country will need to find the money somewhere.  

Q: At a post-NATO Summit press conference, President Trump announced that “NATO is much stronger now” than it was before. Do you agree? 

A: NATO is neither stronger nor particularly weaker than it was before. The Europeans concluded four years ago that they needed to increase their defense spending. They have made some increases since 2014, and plan for further increases. Some alliance members seem on track to hit 2 percent of GDP fairly soon; unfortunately most of the richer and potentially more capable allies are not quite on track, though they are increasing their spending. For the sake of calming the president, at the recent Brussels summit they may have verbally re-committed to their efforts, but as the president likes to say, "we will see what happens." 

It is also critically important how the additional funds are spent. Decades of underfunding have left European militaries in woeful shape. It will take focused management attention to ensure that new money is not simply spread like butter across projects that may contribute little to the solution of key military problems.   

I am dubious that all the allies will reach 2 percent of GDP allocated to defense. In the past, allied efforts of this kind have often started strong and then petered out. The basic structure of the alliance causes this.  The U.S. is a very great power, and aside from President Trump, the foreign policy establishment views the U.S. as the guardian of (the) world order. So long as the U.S. is strongly committed to NATO, the allies know that if they do a little less, we will fill any important gaps. Economists call this the free rider problem. In his way, the president may understand this, and could count it a political victory if, as a result of his targeted truculence, no slackening of European efforts happens on his watch.

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MIT European Club leads in giving back

The MIT European Club has donated $40,000 to fund 10 new MISTI European Fellows this summer. Not only is it of the most substantial gifts given by a student group to the MIT community, it also marks the 10th anniversary of a successful partnership.

“The students of the MIT European Club have shown outstanding leadership by enabling their fellow MIT students to benefit from MISTI internships in Europe,” says Richard K. Lester,  the Japan Steel Industry Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering and associate provost for international activities. “This is a wonderful example of MIT students looking out for each other.”

Alicia Goldstein Raun, managing director of MISTI’s MIT-Spain, MIT-Portugal, and MIT-UK programs, says she finds pride in the strong partnership that the MIT European Club and MISTI European country programs have built. “As a result, more MIT students will have the opportunity to practice the 'mens-et-manus' approach in the European context and contribute towards solving the world’s greatest challenges,” she says, referring to the Institute's motto of "mind and hand."

As strong supporters of MISTI programs in Europe, the club has allocated the gift to fund ten MISTI fellows this summer in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. The student projects include:

• promoting innovation and action plans in the public sphere through a multidisciplinary endeavor within the Innovation in Policy Leaders Program in France;
• identifying genes and markers for drug response in the neuroblastoma cell line using CRISPR sgRNA libraries in Germany;
• interning at TU Delft Center for Systems and Control within the Department of Mechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineering in the Netherlands;
• modeling the mouse brain and learning processes under the Neuromorphic Cognitive Robotics group at the Institute for Neuroinformatics in Switzerland;
• researching topology and geometry of algebraic varieties, singularities, and D-modules at KU Leuven in Belgium;
• using confidential Italian social security data to study the impact of governmental subsidies on company hiring through the National Institute for Social Protection in Italy;
• developing disaster risk management procedures on the Peace and Stability team within the Space, Security, and Migration Directorate of the European Union Joint Research Center in Italy;
• working at McLaren Automotive on the suspension, engine testing and rear frame teams in the United Kingdom; and
• generating joint forces and applying a deep learning model to the human body to prevent injuries and optimize treatments for patients recovering from surgery in Spain with the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya.

Giulio Alighieri, the president of the MIT European Club, says MISTI fellowships “allow MIT students to do research while experiencing firsthand European culture. Because of that, the partnership with MISTI is the cornerstone of the plan to fulfill our mission to connect MIT students with Europe.”

The funds for the MISTI-European Club fellowships were raised in part through the yearly European Career Fair (ECF), which Alighieri, a PhD candidate in cancer research at the MIT Department of Chemical Engineering, calls a “tremendous and unique opportunity.” Alighieri praises the MISTI officers and network that helps the club recruit more companies for the ECF, and the dedication of the members of the MIT European Club who organize it.

Each year, MISTI matches over 1,000 students with internship, research, and teaching opportunities at leading companies, research institutes, and universities around the world. Based in the Center for International Studies within the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS), MISTI is MIT’s pioneering international education initiative and collaborates with departments, programs and clubs across the Institute.

The MIT European Club is a student activity club of over 2,700 postdocs, graduate students, undergraduates, and visiting scientists. The club’s current executive board members are president Giulio Alighieri, vice president Susanna Bächle, treasurer Karine Ip Kiun Chong, secretary Katrin Michel, social chair Xiaoyu Wu, and events chairs Saviz Mowlavi and Jane Hung.

Lea Morical, a freshman in mechanical engineering who is currently interning in Spain, says the European Career Fair and MISTI help effectively realize the MIT European Club's mission of fostering cross-cultural collaborations.

“The programs enable MIT students of all levels to work and live in Europe,” Morical says.

Leah Flynn Gallant, associate dean and director for student leadership and engagement programs at MIT, speaks highly of the club’s current board and president.

“Giulio Alighieri has worked tirelessly with his board to think of new and innovative ways to recruit students and connect with European student community networks in and outside of MIT to continue the success of the European Career Fair,” Gallant says. “It has been a pleasure to work with and see the European Club grow over the past few years.”

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