Report outlines keys to election security

The most secure form of voting technology remains the familiar, durable innovation known as paper, according to a report authored by a group of election experts, including two prominent scholars from MIT.

The report, issued by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, is a response to the emerging threat of hackers targeting computerized voting systems, and it comes as concerns continue to be aired over the security of the U.S. midterm elections of 2018.

The U.S. has a decentralized voting system, with roughly 9,000 political jurisdictions bearing some responsibility for administering elections. However, for all that variation, and while many questions are swirling around election security, the report identifies some main themes on the topic.

“There are two really important avenues that are emerging,” says Charles Stewart, the Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Political Science and founder of MIT’s Election Data and Science Lab. “One is just securing the election, and the other is building in resilience and fail-safe mechanisms.”

In this context, “securing the election” means keeping voting systems safe from hackers in the first place; fail-safe mechanisms include paper ballots that can be used for audits and recounts.

The other MIT co-author of the report is Ronald L. Rivest, a computer encryption pioneer and Institute Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Given the distinct challenges of combining anonymity at the ballot box with verification of voting, Rivest notes, a paper trail remains a necessary component of secure voting systems.

“I think that the three most important recommendations of the report, at least from a security perspective, are probably: (a) use paper ballots, (b) check the reported election outcomes by performing ‘risk-limiting audits’ of the cast paper ballots, and (c) don’t transmit cast votes over the internet,” Rivest says.

The report, “Securing the Vote: Protecting American Democracy,” was released this month by the National Academies. The co-chairs of the committee releasing the report are Lee C. Bollinger, president of Columbia University, and Michael A. McRobbie, president of Indiana University.

Rivest and Stewart are two of the 12 co-authors of the high-level report, which examines a range of voting issues and contains a series of recommendations. In addition to having a paper trail, the recommendations include securing and updating voter registration databases, robust checks on the security of voting by mail, Congressional funding for security standards developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, and robust auditing of elections to make sure systems are working.

Stewart and Rivest both acknowledge that they are often asked why internet voting is not a reality, given that we conduct other kinds of sensitive activities online, including banking.

“Probably the most common question that I get when I talk to the public about these issues,” Stewart says, “is, ‘Why can’t we vote on the internet?’”

Systems with the right combination of verification and anonymity are hard to develop, however, and as both scholars point out, other online activities such as banking are hardly foolproof. And while banks have systems to compensate customers should fraud occur, a one-time event like an election does not provide the same opportunities for remedies.

The good news, Stewart suggests, is that election officials themselves tend to have a keen awareness of the best practices in their field.

“From my experience I know that every state election official and just about every local election official that I’ve talked to is aware that cybersecurity is a top priority,” Stewart says. However, he adds, election officials do not necessarily control the purse strings and often cannot fund the security measures they value: “Often times, election officials don’t have control over their own destiny.”

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How Earth sheds heat into space

Just as an oven gives off more heat to the surrounding kitchen as its internal temperature rises, the Earth sheds more heat into space as its surface warms up. Since the 1950s, scientists have observed a surprisingly straightforward, linear relationship between the Earth’s surface temperature and its outgoing heat.

But the Earth is an incredibly messy system, with many complicated, interacting parts that can affect this process. Scientists have thus found it difficult to explain why this relationship between surface temperature and outgoing heat is so simple and linear. Finding an explanation could help climate scientists model the effects of climate change.

Now scientists from MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) have found the answer, along with a prediction for when this linear relationship will break down.

They observed that Earth emits heat to space from the planet’s surface as well as from the atmosphere. As both heat up, say by the addition of carbon dioxide, the air holds more water vapor, which in turn acts to trap more heat in the atmosphere. This strengthening of Earth’s greenhouse effect is known as water vapor feedback. Crucially, the team found that the water vapor feedback is just sufficient to cancel out the rate at which the warmer atmosphere emits more heat into space.

The overall change in Earth’s emitted heat thus only depends on the surface. In turn, the emission of heat from Earth’s surface to space is a simple function of temperature, leading to to the observed linear relationship.

Their findings, which appear today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may also help to explain how extreme, hothouse climates in Earth’s ancient past unfolded. The paper’s co-authors are EAPS postdoc Daniel Koll and Tim Cronin, the Kerr-McGee Career Development Assistant Professor in EAPS.

A window for heat

In their search for an explanation, the team built a radiation code — essentially, a model of the Earth and how it emits heat, or infrared radiation, into space. The code simulates the Earth as a vertical column, starting from the ground, up through the atmosphere, and finally into space. Koll can input a surface temperature into the column, and the code calculates the amount of radiation that escapes through the entire column and into space.

The team can then turn the temperature knob up and down to see how different surface temperatures would affect the outgoing heat. When they plotted their data, they observed a straight line — a linear relationship between surface temperature and outgoing heat, in line with many previous works, and over a range of 60 kelvins, or 108 degrees Fahrenheit. 

“So the radiation code gave us what Earth actually does,” Koll says. “Then I started digging into this code, which is a lump of physics smashed together, to see which of these physics is actually responsible for this relationship.”

To do this, the team programmed into their code various effects in the atmosphere, such as convection, and humidity, or water vapor, and turned these knobs up and down to see how they in turn would affect the Earth’s outgoing infrared radiation. 

“We needed to break up the whole spectrum of infrared radiation into about 350,000 spectral intervals, because not all infrared is equal,” Koll says.

He explains that, while water vapor does absorb heat, or infrared radiation, it doesn’t absorb it indiscriminately, but at wavelengths that are incredibly specific, so much so that the team had to split the infrared spectrum into 350,000 wavelengths just to see exactly which wavelengths were absorbed by water vapor.

In the end, the researchers observed that as the Earth’s surface temperature gets hotter, it essentially wants to shed more heat into space. But at the same time, water vapor builds up, and acts to absorb and trap heat at certain wavelengths, creating a greenhouse effect that prevents a fraction of heat from escaping.

“It’s like there’s a window, through which a river of radiation can flow to space,” Koll says. “The river flows faster and faster as you make things hotter, but the window gets smaller, because the greenhouse effect is trapping a lot of that radiation and preventing it from escaping.”

Koll says this greenhouse effect explains why the heat that does escape into space is directly related to the surface temperature, as the increase in heat emitted by the atmosphere is cancelled out by the increased absorption from water vapor.

Tipping towards Venus

The team found this linear relationship breaks down when Earth’s global average surface temperatures go much beyond 300 K, or 80 F. In such a scenario, it would be much more difficult for the Earth to shed heat at roughly the same rate as its surface warms. For now, that number is hovering around 285 K, or 53 F. 

“It means we’re still good now, but if the Earth becomes much hotter, then we could be in for a nonlinear world, where stuff could get much more complicated,” Koll says.

To give an idea of what such a nonlinear world might look like, he invokes Venus — a planet that many scientists believe started out as a world similar to Earth, though much closer to the sun.

“Some time in the past, we think its atmosphere had a lot of water vapor, and the greenhouse effect would’ve become so strong that this window region closed off, and nothing could get out anymore, and then you get runaway heating,” Koll says.
“In which case the whole planet gets so hot that oceans start to boil off, nasty things start to happen, and you transform from an Earth-like world to what Venus is today.”

For Earth, Koll calculates that such a runaway effect wouldn’t kick in until global average temperatures reach about 340 K, or 152 F. Global warming alone is insufficient to cause such warming, but other climatic changes, such as Earth’s warming over billions of years due to the sun’s natural evolution, could push Earth towards this limit, “at which point, we would turn into Venus.”

Koll says the team’s results may help to improve climate model predictions. They also may be useful in understanding how ancient hot climates on Earth unfolded.

“If you were living on Earth 60 million years ago, it was a much hotter, wacky world, with no ice at the pole caps, and palm trees and crocodiles in what’s now Wyoming,” Koll says. “One of the things we show is, once you push to really hot climates like that, which we know happened in the past, things get much more complicated.”

This research was funded, in part, by the National Science Foundation, and the James S. McDonnell Foundation.

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Professor Emeritus Bernard Burke, astrophysics pioneer, dies at 90

Bernard F. “Bernie” Burke ’50, PhD ’53, the William A.M. Burden Professor of Astrophysics Emeritus and a principal investigator at the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, was an innovator whose research into radio astronomy stretched our view into the farthest reaches of the universe. He passed away on Aug. 5 at age 90.

A former chair of the Department of Physics’ Astrophysics Division, Burke's most notable achievements included the discovery of decametric radio noise from Jupiter — for which he earned the 1963 Helen B. Warner Prize of the American Astronomical Society — and the first Einstein Ring, the deformation of light in the form of a ring around a massive cosmic object due to gravitational lensing. He played a key role in developing very long baseline interferometry (VLBI), which allows high-resolution imaging of cosmic structures, and the Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope, to aid in his research of gravitational lenses, quasars, and galaxies. Burke is the co-author, along with Francis Graham-Smith, of “Introduction to Radio Astronomy,” now in its 3rd edition. 

“Those of us who have been here a while remember many decades of his humor, energy, intellect, and zest for life,” says Jacqueline Hewitt, director of the MIT Kavli Institute and one of 19 students mentored by Burke. “This is a great personal loss for me, and I know many at MKI who were close to him share my sorrow.” 

A longtime resident of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Bernard Flood Burke was born in Brighton, Massachuetts, on June 7, 1928. His father Vincent was head of the math department at Rindge Technical High School. His mother Clare was a statistical typist who devised her own method to manually type complex math formulas.

When he was young, he would sit for hours doing math problems. At 16, he and a high school friend purchased a large piece of glass to grind it into a telescope’s lens. “They enjoyed the challenge involved to shape it and grind it correctly,” says his sister, Sally Berenson.

After graduating from Lexington High School, he turned down a major conservatory’s full scholarship to study the violin, and chose to study at MIT. With the Cold War was starting, he joined the ROTC’s Signal Corps, where he learned Russian, worked under a decryption specialist, and was promoted to first lieutenant. He also worked on Project Hartwell, a U.S. Navy-MIT collaboration that researched long-range underwater acoustic detection sensors for anti-submarine warfare.

He received his PhD in 1953, studying physics and astrophysics, with a focus on microwave spectroscopy, and joined the Carnegie Institution of Washington’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism (DTM), as a radio astronomer. He designed and constructed radio interferometers, radiometers, and radio telescopes under DTM director Merle Tuve.

In 1955, he and his colleague Kenneth Franklin set out to map the northern sky using a radio antenna array, with receivers in the rural 96-acre Mills Cross field, near Washington. One night they heard a hissing sound they thought was from a passing vehicle. But when they tested the array and moved it in a southern direction, they detected bursts of radio radiation and realized that they had actually been listening to Jupiter. This was the first detection of non-thermal radio noise from a planet, and led to a new way of exploring the Solar System.

“Suddenly we realized we could start to learn about planets too,” says Jim Thieman of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. The discovery earned Burke the Warner Prize.

Burke's other achievements at DTM included directing the instrumentation of its 60-foot radio telescope; conducting studies of 21-cm line hydrogen radiation from the Milky Way Galaxy; transporting a multichannel receiver to a 300-foot radio telescope at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) at Cornell University; studying the velocity disruption of interstellar hydrogen in the Andromeda Galaxy; and helping discover tidal distortion of the galaxy.

Burke served as chair of DTM’s Radio Astronomy Section from 1962 to 1965. Later, he was a member of DTM’s visiting committee in 1994 and its first Merle A. Tuve Senior Fellow in 1997.

Back to MIT

In 1965, he joined MIT as a professor of physics with tenure, and as a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics. He served as chair of the Astrophysics Division from 1970 to 1983, and was named the William A.M. Burden Professor of Astrophysics in 1981.

“One of his defining characteristics was his huge level of energy and enthusiasm, and his focus on science,“ said Claude Canizares, the Bruno B. Rossi Professor of Physics and associate director of the Chandra X-ray Observatory Center.

Burke joined Professor Alan Barrett in the study of hydroxyl masers using telescopes at Millstone, Haystack Radio Observatory, and the Harvard Observatory. He directed the effort to link these telescopes to be used as interferometers. He showed that the angular sizes of the OH sources were so small that they could not be thermally excited and had to be naturally occurring masers. In 1967, this inteferometry work led to the development of VLBI, in a joint effort with NRAO and Canada’s National Research Council. 

VLBI used atomic frequency standards to synchronize pairs of radio telescopes around the world to study quasars and hydroxyl‐line emitters with an angular resolution 1,000 times better than previous methods. For this achievement, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences awarded him and the other participants the Rumford Prize in 1971.

In 1967 his MIT group was the first to conduct intercontinental VLBI, and in 1970 the first to extend the technique to the 1.35-cm water vapor line, showing that water emission, like hydroxyl emission, came from what he called “extraordinarily energetic and compact sources.”

Burke led the first Russian-U.S. VLBI experiment to measure the angular size of H₂O masers, in 1971. Jim Moran, the Donald H. Menzel Professor of Astrophysics Emeritus at Harvard University, recalled conspiring with Burke to carry a live atomic clock on a flight from Paris to Moscow.

“This was necessary in the Cold War days, and long before the GPS era, in order to synchronize the station clock at the telescope in Russia with its counterpart at the U.S. telescope to an accuracy of better than a microsecond," Moran recalls. “It was a real swashbuckling adventure."

In 1970, Burke began a campaign to extend VLBI methods into space. He was a major participant in the first three successful VLBI space missions where orbiting radio telescopes operated with arrays of telescopes on the ground to produce images of radio sources of unprecedented resolution: The connection of the TDRSS satellite into a ground-based network in the late 1980s, the Japanese-led VSOP/Halca project launched in 1997, and the Russian-led RadioAstron project launched in 2011 and still operating.  

Burke participated in an MIT group that helped develop the Very Large Array (VLA), at the time the largest, most expensive ground-based astronomical instrument ever built when it was completed in 1980. He used the VLA to study gravitational lenses.

Einstein’s theory of general relativity predicted that massive objects could bend light rays passing nearby. The first example of this gravitational lensing effect outside the solar system was found in 1979, when Burke made this a major focus of his research. His team used the VLA to measure the time delay between components of the first known lensing object, 0957+561, to estimate the value of the Hubble Constant, which characterizes the age of the universe. Einstein suggested that if a bright object were positioned precisely behind a massive body, then a perfectly symmetric form of lensing would be produced; however, he predicted that such an event would be highly unlikely. Nonetheless, Burke, Hewitt, and others discovered this effect in 1988, which is now referred to by scientists as an “Einstein ring.” Teaming up with scientists from Princeton University and Caltech, they conducted a huge search for additional Einstein rings with the VLA and created an archive of more than 400 maps from the survey. At the NRAO, he led a series of MIT-Green Bank 5-GHz surveys that compiled thousands of radio sources in the sky using the 300-foot Green Bank telescope in West Virginia and detected gravitational lenses.

As a professor, he challenged his students on and off campus before retiring in the mid-1990s.

“Bernie was my PhD advisor, and he taught me many things,” recalls Hewitt. “Radio astronomy of course, but also sort of how to sail (we did capsize on occasion), and most importantly his superlatively positive approach to life I believe rubbed off on me a bit.”   

In recent years he continued to attend division and department events, scientific talks, and coffees. As a member of the National Academy of Science and several of its committees, he guided National Science Foundation and NASA funding for the astrophysics community. He was appointed to the National Science Board by President George H.W. Bush and continued to serve under President Barack Obama, and participated on a NASA committee that reviewed the history and future of space travel. At NASA, he was chair of the Toward Other Planetary Systems Science Working Group, and was a member on its Astronomy Missions Board, Physical Sciences Committee, and the Space Science Advisory Committee. He held leadership and editorial positions on many astronomy-focused councils and societies.

Princeton Astrophysics Professor Neta A. Bahcall calls him “one of the giants of astrophysics — a pioneering radio astronomer whose research has extended over many topics.

"The astronomical community lost a star,” says Bahcall, though his work lives on. “His scientific legacy will continue to shine.” 

He is survived by his wife Elizabeth “Betsy” Platt; his sister Sarah “Sally” Berenson; his daughter, Elizabeth Kahn, and her husband, Cory; two sons, Mark and Matt, and Matt’s wife, Sarah; eight grandchildren and one great-grandchild; Betsy’s children Will Balliett, Blue Balliett, and Julie Rose; and her eight grandchildren. He was predeceased by his first wife, Jane Pann Burke, his son Geoffrey, and his sister Clare Molloy. A funeral mass was held Aug. 11 at St. Paul’s in Cambridge.

There will be a memorial for Professor Burke at the MIT Chapel on Nov. 10 at 3 p.m., followed by a reception.

In lieu of flowers, gifts may be made to MIT, in memory of Bernard Burke, to support the Alumni Fellowship Fund in Physics #2738023. Checks may be made payable to MIT and mailed to: Memorial Gifts Office, 600 Memorial Drive, W98-500, Cambridge, MA 02139.    

More information about Burke’s life is available at the Department of Physics website.

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Professor Emeritus Bernard Burke, astrophysics pioneer, dies at 90

Bernard F. “Bernie” Burke ’50, PhD ’53, the William A.M. Burden Professor of Astrophysics Emeritus and a principal investigator at the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, was an innovator whose research into radio astronomy stretched our view into the farthest reaches of the universe. He passed away on Aug. 5 at age 90.

A former chair of the Department of Physics’ Astrophysics Division, Burke's most notable achievements included the discovery of decametric radio noise from Jupiter — for which he earned the 1963 Helen B. Warner Prize of the American Astronomical Society — and the first Einstein Ring, the deformation of light in the form of a ring around a massive cosmic object due to gravitational lensing. He played a key role in developing very long baseline interferometry (VLBI), which allows high-resolution imaging of cosmic structures, and the Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope, to aid in his research of gravitational lenses, quasars, and galaxies. Burke is the co-author, along with Francis Graham-Smith, of “Introduction to Radio Astronomy,” now in its 3rd edition. 

“Those of us who have been here a while remember many decades of his humor, energy, intellect, and zest for life,” says Jacqueline Hewitt, director of the MIT Kavli Institute and one of 19 students mentored by Burke. “This is a great personal loss for me, and I know many at MKI who were close to him share my sorrow.” 

A longtime resident of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Bernard Flood Burke was born in Brighton, Massachuetts, on June 7, 1928. His father Vincent was head of the math department at Rindge Technical High School. His mother Clare was a statistical typist who devised her own method to manually type complex math formulas.

When he was young, he would sit for hours doing math problems. At 16, he and a high school friend purchased a large piece of glass to grind it into a telescope’s lens. “They enjoyed the challenge involved to shape it and grind it correctly,” says his sister, Sally Berenson.

After graduating from Lexington High School, he turned down a major conservatory’s full scholarship to study the violin, and chose to study at MIT. With the Cold War was starting, he joined the ROTC’s Signal Corps, where he learned Russian, worked under a decryption specialist, and was promoted to first lieutenant. He also worked on Project Hartwell, a U.S. Navy-MIT collaboration that researched long-range underwater acoustic detection sensors for anti-submarine warfare.

He received his PhD in 1953, studying physics and astrophysics, with a focus on microwave spectroscopy, and joined the Carnegie Institution of Washington’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism (DTM), as a radio astronomer. He designed and constructed radio interferometers, radiometers, and radio telescopes under DTM director Merle Tuve.

In 1955, he and his colleague Kenneth Franklin set out to map the northern sky using a radio antenna array, with receivers in the rural 96-acre Mills Cross field, near Washington. One night they heard a hissing sound they thought was from a passing vehicle. But when they tested the array and moved it in a southern direction, they detected bursts of radio radiation and realized that they had actually been listening to Jupiter. This was the first detection of non-thermal radio noise from a planet, and led to a new way of exploring the Solar System.

“Suddenly we realized we could start to learn about planets too,” says Jim Thieman of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. The discovery earned Burke the Warner Prize.

Burke's other achievements at DTM included directing the instrumentation of its 60-foot radio telescope; conducting studies of 21-cm line hydrogen radiation from the Milky Way Galaxy; transporting a multichannel receiver to a 300-foot radio telescope at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) at Cornell University; studying the velocity disruption of interstellar hydrogen in the Andromeda Galaxy; and helping discover tidal distortion of the galaxy.

Burke served as chair of DTM’s Radio Astronomy Section from 1962 to 1965. Later, he was a member of DTM’s visiting committee in 1994 and its first Merle A. Tuve Senior Fellow in 1997.

Back to MIT

In 1965, he joined MIT as a professor of physics with tenure, and as a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics. He served as chair of the Astrophysics Division from 1970 to 1983, and was named the William A.M. Burden Professor of Astrophysics in 1981.

“One of his defining characteristics was his huge level of energy and enthusiasm, and his focus on science,“ said Claude Canizares, the Bruno B. Rossi Professor of Physics and associate director of the Chandra X-ray Observatory Center.

Burke joined Professor Alan Barrett in the study of hydroxyl masers using telescopes at Millstone, Haystack Radio Observatory, and the Harvard Observatory. He directed the effort to link these telescopes to be used as interferometers. He showed that the angular sizes of the OH sources were so small that they could not be thermally excited and had to be naturally occurring masers. In 1967, this inteferometry work led to the development of VLBI, in a joint effort with NRAO and Canada’s National Research Council. 

VLBI used atomic frequency standards to synchronize pairs of radio telescopes around the world to study quasars and hydroxyl‐line emitters with an angular resolution 1,000 times better than previous methods. For this achievement, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences awarded him and the other participants the Rumford Prize in 1971.

In 1967 his MIT group was the first to conduct intercontinental VLBI, and in 1970 the first to extend the technique to the 1.35-cm water vapor line, showing that water emission, like hydroxyl emission, came from what he called “extraordinarily energetic and compact sources.”

Burke led the first Russian-U.S. VLBI experiment to measure the angular size of H₂O masers, in 1971. Jim Moran, the Donald H. Menzel Professor of Astrophysics Emeritus at Harvard University, recalled conspiring with Burke to carry a live atomic clock on a flight from Paris to Moscow.

“This was necessary in the Cold War days, and long before the GPS era, in order to synchronize the station clock at the telescope in Russia with its counterpart at the U.S. telescope to an accuracy of better than a microsecond," Moran recalls. “It was a real swashbuckling adventure."

In 1970, Burke began a campaign to extend VLBI methods into space. He was a major participant in the first three successful VLBI space missions where orbiting radio telescopes operated with arrays of telescopes on the ground to produce images of radio sources of unprecedented resolution: The connection of the TDRSS satellite into a ground-based network in the late 1980s, the Japanese-led VSOP/Halca project launched in 1997, and the Russian-led RadioAstron project launched in 2011 and still operating.  

Burke participated in an MIT group that helped develop the Very Large Array (VLA), at the time the largest, most expensive ground-based astronomical instrument ever built when it was completed in 1980. He used the VLA to study gravitational lenses.

Einstein’s theory of general relativity predicted that massive objects could bend light rays passing nearby. The first example of this gravitational lensing effect outside the solar system was found in 1979, when Burke made this a major focus of his research. His team used the VLA to measure the time delay between components of the first known lensing object, 0957+561, to estimate the value of the Hubble Constant, which characterizes the age of the universe. Einstein suggested that if a bright object were positioned precisely behind a massive body, then a perfectly symmetric form of lensing would be produced; however, he predicted that such an event would be highly unlikely. Nonetheless, Burke, Hewitt, and others discovered this effect in 1988, which is now referred to by scientists as an “Einstein ring.” Teaming up with scientists from Princeton University and Caltech, they conducted a huge search for additional Einstein rings with the VLA and created an archive of more than 400 maps from the survey. At the NRAO, he led a series of MIT-Green Bank 5-GHz surveys that compiled thousands of radio sources in the sky using the 300-foot Green Bank telescope in West Virginia and detected gravitational lenses.

As a professor, he challenged his students on and off campus before retiring in the mid-1990s.

“Bernie was my PhD advisor, and he taught me many things,” recalls Hewitt. “Radio astronomy of course, but also sort of how to sail (we did capsize on occasion), and most importantly his superlatively positive approach to life I believe rubbed off on me a bit.”   

In recent years he continued to attend division and department events, scientific talks, and coffees. As a member of the National Academy of Science and several of its committees, he guided National Science Foundation and NASA funding for the astrophysics community. He was appointed to the National Science Board by President George H.W. Bush and continued to serve under President Barack Obama, and participated on a NASA committee that reviewed the history and future of space travel. At NASA, he was chair of the Toward Other Planetary Systems Science Working Group, and was a member on its Astronomy Missions Board, Physical Sciences Committee, and the Space Science Advisory Committee. He held leadership and editorial positions on many astronomy-focused councils and societies.

Princeton Astrophysics Professor Neta A. Bahcall calls him “one of the giants of astrophysics — a pioneering radio astronomer whose research has extended over many topics.

"The astronomical community lost a star,” says Bahcall, though his work lives on. “His scientific legacy will continue to shine.” 

He is survived by his wife Elizabeth “Betsy” Platt; his sister Sarah “Sally” Berenson; his daughter, Elizabeth Kahn, and her husband, Cory; two sons, Mark and Matt, and Matt’s wife, Sarah; eight grandchildren and one great-grandchild; Betsy’s children Will Balliett, Blue Balliett, and Julie Rose; and her eight grandchildren. He was predeceased by his first wife, Jane Pann Burke, his son Geoffrey, and his sister Clare Molloy. A funeral mass was held Aug. 11 at St. Paul’s in Cambridge.

There will be a memorial for Professor Burke at the MIT Chapel on Nov. 10 at 3 p.m., followed by a reception.

In lieu of flowers, gifts may be made to MIT, in memory of Bernard Burke, to support the Alumni Fellowship Fund in Physics #2738023. Checks may be made payable to MIT and mailed to: Memorial Gifts Office, 600 Memorial Drive, W98-500, Cambridge, MA 02139.    

More information about Burke’s life is available at the Department of Physics website.

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3Q: Reverend Kirstin Boswell-Ford on religion, ethics, and the role of the chaplain at MIT

In July 2017, the Reverend Kirstin C. Boswell-Ford arrived at MIT as the new chaplain to the Institute and director of the newly renamed Office of Religious, Spiritual, and Ethical Life (ORSEL). On Friday, Sept. 28, Boswell-Ford will be installed officially as chaplain at a ceremony in the Wong Auditorium (E51). The 3:00 p.m. ceremony will be followed by a reception in the Ting Foyer. The ceremony will feature remarks from President L. Rafael Reif, Chancellor Cynthia Barnhart, Vice President and Dean for Student Life Suzy Nelson, and a number of guests. Boswell-Ford will offer a benediction.

Ordained by the American Baptist Churches USA, Boswell-Ford is a graduate of the University of Virginia and holds a master of divinity from the University of Chicago Divinity School. She is currently working to complete her doctoral dissertation — which she wishes was “done yesterday” — also at Chicago. Her work examines issues of homeland (which she refers to as “homeplace”) in the context of the historical African-American church and descendants of enslaved people who have found refuge there.

Boswell-Ford is married to the Reverend Paul Robeson Ford, senior pastor at The First Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and the couple has three children. Before joining MIT, she was associate university chaplain at Brown University, where she ministered to and represented over 20 Protestant denominational and parachurch organizations for five years.

Q: You've been at MIT for a full academic year and a summer. From a spiritual and religious perspective, what has surprised you about the MIT community?

A: I am surprised every day by how religious and spiritual life vibrate just under the surface of MIT. I’ve heard a misperception that MIT students are not religious, or that the MIT community is not friendly to religion. I’ve found just the opposite: The religious community is active here, and a great many students and community members are committed to their faith traditions.

We have vibrant Christian communities, and a very active, award-winning Hillel chapter. Our Muslim community fills the prayer room to capacity. In fact, we occasionally have students praying in the hallways because they want to be connected to their faith community.

But it’s not just about practicing one’s faith tradition. We have groups of students who passionately support different political and social ideologies, but together, they are committed to sharing an open dialogue on persistently challenging issues. Our interfaith programs draw many students from across faiths, and some who do not follow a religious tradition.

So, though it may be surprising, religion and faith, and exploring meaning-making and ethical perspectives are an important part of the MIT experience for many students.

Q: As chaplain to the Institute, you support individuals as well as all of MIT. How do you balance those responsibilities?

A: Honestly, they are complementary. All interactions — individual and communal — are human interactions. I find balance in remembering each person's humanity, trying always to come from a place of empathy, concern, and respect, and remaining clear about also expressing my own humanity. Those characteristics can bridge any sort of differences: racial, gender, religious, political, whatever those differences might be. That’s how I operate in all of my interactions, whether it be supporting an individual or working with the entire community.

As chaplain to the Institute, I want to be a strong advocate for our community and a strong source of support to our community. This support extends not only to people who identify as religious or who follow a particular faith tradition, but to anyone and everyone. The advocacy role is not just for our students, faculty, and staff who are religious, but for all students, faculty, and staff. The chaplain to the Institute — and all of the chaplains in the ORSEL — are here to help guide the MIT community toward being more inclusive, more caring, more supportive, and more ethically minded.

There's been a shift in how we're engaging the interior life. Our chaplains are working more closely with staff who support student mental health and wellness, for example. Partnerships with such colleagues across the MIT community is helping us to better support students, faculty, and staff who are in distress.

Q: MIT charges our students to change the world in tangible ways through science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. That can seem to be dissociated from spiritual or religious concerns. What do you hope our students take away from their experience of religious life at MIT?

A: I hope the chaplains and I impart to students that whatever amazing things they go on to do with their lives after MIT should be grounded in social and ethical responsibility that is strengthened by a solid sense of themselves as members of a global community. We hope they will act consciously, thinking about how they’re acting, why they’re acting, and who is going to be affected by their actions. All of those questions are crucial, and never more so than today. We recently decided as a department to change our name to the Office of Religious, Spiritual, and Ethical Life because it more accurately reflects our mission and how we hope to serve the MIT community.

In the end, I hope that we can help students recognize the humanity in themselves and others that we share this world with, and to inspire them to greater self-awareness, kindness, empathy, and responsibility. If we can do that by the time they leave MIT, then we will be have fulfilled our goal.

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A big new home for the ultrasmall

Nanotechnology, the cutting-edge research field that explores ultrasmall materials, organisms, and devices, has now been graced with the largest, most sophisticated, and most accessible university research facility of its kind in the U.S.: It is the new $400 million MIT.nano building, which will have its official opening ceremonies next week.

The state-of-the-art facility includes two large floors of connected clean-room spaces that are open to view from the outside and available for use by an extraordinary number and variety of researchers across the Institute. It also features a whole floor of undergraduate chemistry teaching labs, and an ultrastable basement level dedicated to electron microscopes and other exquisitely sensitive imaging and measurement tools.

“In recent decades, we have gained the ability to see into the nanoscale with breathtaking precision. This insight has led to the development of tools and instruments that allow us to design and manipulate matter like nature does, atom by atom and molecule by molecule,” says Vladimir Bulović, the Fariborz Maseeh Professor in Emerging Technology and founding director of MIT.nano. “MIT.nano has arrived on campus at the dawn of the Nano Age. In the decades ahead, its open-access facilities for nanoscience and nanoengineering will equip our community with instruments and processes that can further harness the power of nanotechnology in service to humanity’s greatest challenges.”

“In terms of vibrations and electromagnetic noise, MIT.nano may be the quietest space on campus. But in a community where more than half of recently tenured faculty do work at the nanoscale, MIT.nano’s superb shared facilities guarantee that it will become a lively center of community and collaboration, says MIT President L. Rafael Reif. "I am grateful to the exceptional team — including Provost Martin Schmidt, Founding Director Vladimir Bulovic, and many others — that delivered this extraordinarily sophisticated building on an extraordinarily inaccessible construction site, making a better MIT so we can help to make a better world.”

Accessible and flexible

The 214,000-square-foot building, with its soaring glass facades, sophisticated design and instrumentation, and powerful air-exchange systems, lies at the heart of campus and just off the Infinite Corridor. It took shape during six years of design and construction, and was delivered exactly on schedule and on budget, a rare achievement for such a massive and technologically complex construction project.

“MIT.nano is a game-changer for the MIT research enterprise,” says Vice President for Research Maria Zuber. “It will provide measurement and imaging capabilities that will dramatically advance science and technology in disciplines across the Institute.”

At the heart of the building are two levels of clean rooms — research environments in which the air is continuously scrubbed and replaced to maintain a standard that allows no more than 100 particles of  0.5 microns or larger within a cubic foot of air. To achieve such cleanliness, work on the building has included strict filtration measures and access restrictions for more than a year, and at the moment, with the spaces not yet in full use, they far exceed that standard.

All of the lab and instrumentation spaces in the building will be used as shared facilities, accessible to any MIT researcher who needs the specialized tools that will be installed there over the coming months and years. The tools will be continually upgraded, as the building is designed to be flexible and ready for the latest advances in equipment for making, studying, measuring, and manipulating nanoscale objects — things measured in billionths of a meter, whether they be technological, biological, or chemical.

Many of the tools and instruments to be installed in MIT.nano are so costly and require so much support in services and operations that they would likely be out of reach for a single researcher or team. One of the instruments now installed and being calibrated in the basement imaging and metrology suites — sitting atop a 5-million-pound slab of concrete to provide the steadiest base possible — is a cryogenic transmission electron microscope. This multimillion dollar instrument is hosted in an equally costly room with fine-tuned control of temperature and humidity, specialized features to minimize the mechanical and electromagnetic interference, and a technical support team. The device, one of two currently being installed in MIT.nano, will enable detailed 3-D observations of cells or materials held at very low liquid-nitrogen temperatures, giving a glimpse into the exquisite nanoscale features of the soft-matter world.

Almost half of the MIT.nano’s footage is devoted to lab space — 100,000 square feet of it — which is about 100 times larger in size than the typical private lab space of a young experimental research group at MIT, Bulović says. Private labs typically take a few years to build out, and once in place often house valuable equipment that is idle for at least part of the time. It will similarly take a few years to fully build out MIT.nano’s shared labs, but Bulović expects that the growing collection of advanced instruments will rarely be idle. The instrument sets will be selected and designed to drastically improve a researcher’s ability to hit the ground running with access to the best tools from the start, he says.

Principal investigators often “find there’s a benefit to contributing tools to the community so they can be shared and perfected through their use,” Bulović says. “They recognize that as these tools are not needed for their own work 24/7, attracting additional instrument users can generate a revenue stream for the tool, which supports maintenance and future upgrades while also enhancing the research output of labs that would not have access to those tools otherwise.”

A facility sized to meet demand

Once MIT.nano is fully outfitted, over 2,000 MIT faculty and researchers are expected to use the new facilities every year, according to Bulović. Besides its clean-room floors, instrumentation floor, chemistry labs, and the top-floor prototyping labs, the new building also houses a unique facility at MIT: a two-story virtual-reality and visualization space called the Immersion Lab. It could be used by researchers studying subcellular-resolution images of biological tissues or complex computer simulations, or planetary scientists walking through a reproduced Martian surface looking for geologically interesting sites; it may even lend itself to artistic creations or performances, he says. “It’s a unique space. The beauty of it is it will connect to the huge datasets” coming from instruments such as the cryoelectron microscopes, or from simulations generated by artificial intelligence labs, or from other external datasets.

The chemistry labs on the building’s fifth floor, which can accommodate a dozen classes of a dozen students each, are already fully outfitted and in full use for this fall. The labs allow undergraduate chemistry students an exceptionally full and up-to-date experience of lab processes and tools.

“The Department of Chemistry is delighted to move into our new state-of-the-art Undergraduate Teaching Laboratories (UGTL) in MIT.nano,” says department head Timothy Jamison. “The synergy between our URIECA curriculum and this new space enables us to provide an even stronger educational foundation in experimental chemistry to our students. Vladimir Bulović and the MIT.nano team have been wonderful partners at all stages — throughout the design, construction, and move — and we look forward to other opportunities resulting from this collaboration and the presence of our UGTL in MIT.nano.”

The building itself was designed to be far more open and accessible than any comparable clean-room facility in the world. Those outside the labs can watch through MIT.nano’s many windows and see the use of these specialized devices and how such labs work. Meanwhile, researchers themselves can more easily interact with each other and see the sunshine and the gently waving bamboo plants outdoors as a reminder of the outside world that they are working to benefit.

A courtyard path on the south side of the building is named the Improbability Walk, in honor of the late MIT Institute Professor Emerita Mildred “Millie” Dresselhaus. The name is a nod to a statement by the beloved mentor, collaborator, teacher, and world-renowned pioneer in solid-state physics and nanoscale engineering, who once said, “My background is so improbable — that I’d be here from where I started.”

Those who walk through the building’s sunlight-soaked corridors and galleries will notice walls surfaced with panels of limestone from the Yangtze Platform of southwestern China. The limestone’s delicate patterns of fine horizontal lines are made up of tiny microparticles, such as bits of ancient microorganisms, laid down at the bottom of primeval waters before dinosaurs roamed the Earth. The very newest marvels to emerge in nanotechnology will thus be coming into existence right within view of some of their most ancient minuscule precursors.

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New learning opportunities for displaced persons

This week, the MIT Refugee Action Hub (ReACT) announced that it is now accepting applications for the second offering of the Certificate Program in Computer and Data Science. The one-year course of study is designed for refugees and other displaced people around the world, and offers them the opportunity to earn a certificate in a rigorous, yet accessible program that allows young adults to reactivate their potential and restart careers.

The inaugural group of students will be completing their studies in January 2019. The blended program will continue to offer a core online curriculum of the edX catalogue along with an immersive set of in-person workshops and classes offered by MIT faculty and staff. These offerings include an entrepreneurship program, led by the MIT Bootcamps and a MakerLab run by the Little Devices Lab.

Admir Masic, faculty lead and the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Career Development Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, founded ReACT in 2017 with a mission to provide blended learning opportunities to refugees around the world. 

“I’m very excited that ReACT and the MIT community are able to offer this program again. In the past year, we have been learning along with our students, and tuned and tweaked the program to make it better and more impactful,” Masic says. “This year we look forward to accepting more refugees from around the world and activating their talents and potential, so they can learn more, do more on the global stage, and inspire their communities as well.”

In June 2018, ReACT partnered with the MITx MicroMasters program in data, economics, and development policy (DEDP) and the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) to offer refugee learners the opportunity to receive scholarships for DEDP courses, participate in skills-building workshops, and connect with top organizations and companies in the competitive field of development economics and data analysis. ReACT is now sponsoring eight students from three different continents currently enrolled in its pilot cohort.

ReACT Executive Director Robert Fadel says ReACT, MITx, and MIT Open Learning are “actively extending the range of learning engagements available for displaced people.”

“Together with our partners we can begin to construct a narrative of opportunities that includes bridging programs, higher education, and graduate education,” he says. “Building stable pathways for careers and prosperity is our goal.”

Such stability was important for Muhammad Enjari, a 39-year-old petroleum engineer from Homs, Syria. He fled Homs with his wife and three children at the beginning of the Syrian revolution before settling in Jordan. “I have a degree in petroleum engineering but in Jordan I could not find a job,” he says.

Enjari enrolled in the 6.00.1x MOOC (Introduction to Computer Science using Python) through ReACT’s year-long Computer and Data Science Program (CDSP) curriculum and received a 100 percent on the final exam and final grade. With the skills he learned through this coursework, Enjari began a new job as a paid intern in computer engineering with Edraak, a MOOC platform similar to edX for Arabic-speaking students.

Another ReACT CDSP student, 23-year-old Manda Awad, enrolled in 6.00.1x while living in Jordan as a refugee from Palestine and learned that some of the online course material was not included in her computer science curriculum at the University of Jordan. This, coupled with a lack of support for women in tech, inspired Awad to propose an update to the University of Jordan engineering department’s computer science curricula by integrating the 6.00 series coursework

“I want to take what I have learned and teach other students, particularly women,” she says. Awad is currently setting up a programming club with a weekly instructional segment and her goal is to launch a “Women who Code” group to the Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan early next year.

ReACT is a part of MIT Open Learning, which looks to extend and expand educational and development opportunities worldwide, with ReACT focusing on adult refugee learners globally. ReACT seeks to design, develop, and deliver new curricula and hybrid learning models to specifically address the needs and expectations of displaced learners and workers, as well as their communities.

“The important work that ReACT is doing to provide training and opportunities for displaced people fits perfectly into the Open Learning mission of making education more accessible to all,” says Sanjay Sarma, Vice President for Open Learning. “We’re proud to welcome ReACT to Open Learning and can’t wait to see how this next cohort of learners grows and thrives.” 

Masic encourages organizations that are interested in sponsoring an internship for students in the program to contact ReACT.

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