How Greentown Labs became the epicenter of clean tech

Greentown Labs is the largest clean technology incubator in North America, a fact that’s easy to accept when you walk inside. The massive, open entrance of Greentown’s Somerville, Massachusetts, headquarters gives visitors the impression they’ve entered the office of one of Greater Boston’s most successful tech companies.

Beyond the modern entryway are smaller working spaces — some cluttered with startup prototypes, others lined with orderly lab equipment — to enable foundational, company-building experiments.

In addition to the space and equipment, Greentown offers startups equity-free legal, information technology, marketing, and sales support, and a coveted network of corporations and industry investors.

But what many entrepreneurs say they like most about Greentown is the people.

“Greentown offers a lot of different things, but first and foremost among them is a community of entrepreneurs who are striving to solve big challenges in climate, energy, and the environment,” says Greentown Labs CEO Emily Reichert MBA ’12.

Greentown is full of stories of peers bumping into each other in the kitchen only to find they’re struggling with similar problems or, even better, that one of them already grappled with the problem and found a solution.

MIT has played a pivotal role in Greentown’s success since its inception. Reichert estimates about 60 percent of Greentown’s more than 90 current startups were founded by MIT alumni.

The current version of Greentown looks like the result of some well-funded, grand vision set forth long ago. But Greentown’s rise was every bit as spontaneous — and tenuous — as the early days of any startup.

A space for building

In 2010, Sorin Grama SM ’07 and Sam White were looking for office space to work on a new chiller design for their startup, Promethean Power Systems, which still develops off-grid refrigeration systems in India. They needed a place to build the big, leaky refrigeration prototypes they’d thought up. It also needed to be close to MIT, where the company founders connected with advisors and interns.

Eventually, White found “a dilapidated warehouse” on Charles Street in Cambridge for the right price. What the space lacked in beauty it made up for in size, so the founders decided to use an MIT email list to see if other founders would like to join them. Some founders building an app were first to respond. Their first reaction was to ask White and Grama to clean up a bit, and they were politely shown the door.

Without exactly intending to, Grama and White had made their warehouse a builder space. Over the next week, a few more founders came in, including Jason Hanna, the co-founder of building efficiency company Embue; Jeremy Pitts SM ’10, MBA ’10, who was creating more efficient compressor systems for the oil and gas industry as the founder of Oscomp Systems; and Adam Rein MBA ’10 and Ben Glass ’07 SM ’10, whose company Altaeros was building airborne wind turbines. The warehouse looked perfect to them.

“What we all had in common was we just needed a space to prototype and build stuff, where we could spill stuff, make noise, and share tools,” Grama says. “Pretty quickly it became a nice band of startups that appreciated the same thing.”

The winter of 2010-2011 was a freezing one in the warehouse, made worse by icy cement floors, but the founders couldn’t help but notice the benefits of working together. Any time an intern or investor came to see one company, they were introduced to the others. Founders with expertise in areas like grant writing or funding rounds would give lunchtime presentations to help the others.

Rein remembers thinking he was in the perfect environment to succeed despite the sometimes comical dysfunction of the space. One day an official with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) stopped by to evaluate one of the startups for a grant. The visit went well enough — until she got locked in the bathroom. The founders eventually got her out, but they didn’t think the incident boded for their chances of getting that grant.

When the landlord kicked them out of Charles Street, they found a similar space in South Boston, recruiting friends and employees to help strip wires, scrape walls, and paint over the course of a week. Rein recalls his regular duties included ordering toilet paper for the building.

The space was also twice as large as the one in Cambridge, so as Greentown’s reputation spread throughout 2011, five startups became 15, then 20.

“It really took on a life of its own,” Grama says.

Among the curious MIT students who journeyed to Greentown that year was Reichert. Having worked as a chemist for 10 years in spotless, safety-certified labs before coming to MIT, she was shocked to see the condition of Greentown.

“The first time I walked in I had two gut reactions,” Reichert says. “The first was I felt this amazing energy and passion, and kind of a buzzing. If you walk into Greentown today you still feel those things. The second was, ‘Oh my god, this place is a death trap.’”

After earning her MBA, Reichert initially helped out as a consultant at Greentown. By February of 2013, she joined Greentown to run it full time. It was a critical time for the growing co-op: White and Grama were getting ready to move to India to work on Promethean, and Hanna, who had primarily led Greentown to that point, was expecting the birth of his first child.

At the same time, real estate prices in South Boston were skyrocketing, and Greentown was again being forced to move.

Reichert, who worked as CEO without a salary for more than a year, remembers those first six months on the job as the most stressful of her life. With no money to put toward a new space, she was able to partner with the City of Somerville to secure some funding and find a new location. Reichert signed a construction contract to renovate the Somerville space before she knew where the money would come from, and began lobbying state and corporate officials for sponsorships.

She still remembers the day Greentown was to be evicted from South Boston, with everyone scrambling to clean out the cluttered warehouse and a few determined founders running one last experiment until 7 p.m. before throwing the last of the equipment in a U-Haul truck and beginning the next phase of Greentown’s journey.

Growing up

Within 15 months of the move to Somerville, Greentown’s 40,000 square feet were completely filled and Reichert began the process of expanding the headquarters.

Today, Greentown’s three buildings make up more than 100,000 square feet of prototyping, office, and event space and feature a wet lab, electronics lab, and machine shop.

Since its inception, Greentown has supported more than 200 startups that have created around 2,800 jobs, many in the Boston area.

The original founders still serve on Greentown’s board of directors, ensuring every dollar Greentown makes goes toward supporting startups.

Of the founding companies, only Promethean and Altaeros are still housed in Greentown, although they’re all still operating in some form.

“We probably should’ve moved out, but it’s important to work in a place you really enjoy,” Rein says of Altaeros.

Grama, meanwhile, has come full circle. After ceding the reigns of Promethean and returning from India, last year he started another company, Transaera, that’s developing efficient, environmentally friendly cooling systems based on research from MIT.

This time, it took him a lot less time to find office space.

de MIT News http://bit.ly/2X7yHtZ

High school students receive 2019 MIT AgeLab OMEGA Scholarships for work with elders

On June 6, the MIT AgeLab, in partnership with AARP, presented the fourth annual OMEGA scholarship awards to three accomplished young adults from New England. Sidonie Brown from Brookline High School in Brookline, Massachusetts, Brook Masse from Mount Greylock Regional High School in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and Jay Park from Newton South High School in Newton, Massachusetts, were each awarded a 2019 OMEGA scholarship. OMEGA scholarships recognize young people who are leading efforts in their schools to foster intergenerational connections within their communities.

The three winners are developers and leaders of programs that support older adults’ needs, utilize their experience and wisdom, and furnish social connections across generations. Brown has led an ongoing Brookline High School program called Brookline SHOP (Students Helping Older People), which recruits students to assist independent-living older adults with grocery shopping, technology use, and other instrumental activities. Masse started a student initiative with a local retirement community in which students converse, play games, garden, and create art with the residents. Park supported a program called Spanish Immersion Jamaica Plain and Brookline, which engages Spanish-speaking older adults as conversation partners with high school students to improve students’ mastery of the Spanish language.

The OMEGA awards were presented at the MIT AgeLab before the recipients’ families, members of the MIT AgeLab’s Lifestyle Leaders Panel, Michael Festa, the director of AARP Massachusetts, AgeLab researchers, and leaders of community organizations serving older adults that collaborated in the recipients’ projects. The OMEGA scholarships will provide $1,000 toward each recipient’s college tuition and an additional $1,000 to each recipient’s school or community partner to continue their outstanding intergenerational efforts.

OMEGA, which stands for Opportunities for Multigenerational Engagement, Growth, and Action, was developed to support the development and growth of student-led programs and clubs that connect high school students with older adults. The MIT AgeLab is a multidisciplinary research organization that works with business, government, and non-governmental organizations to improve the quality of life of older adults and those who care for them.

de MIT News http://bit.ly/2J8AyFd

Graduate students win first place in 2019 Patagonia Case Competition

Patagonia, the outdoor apparel and gear company, organizes an annual case competition as a platform for graduate students across the country to solve pressing challenges in environmental sustainability. This year, teams were asked to propose environmentally-benign alternatives to single-use plastic packaging for apparel and food products that can be implemented at scale by 2025. The pervasive use of single-use plastics, which constitute a significant portion of the 330 million metric tons of plastics produced annually, has become of increasing concern as the material has been found to pollute marine environments and to take centuries to degrade.

A group of six MIT PhD and MBA students collaborated to develop and hone novel innovations fulfilling the Patagonia Case Competition prompt. Team NourishMIT collectively represented five different programs across the Institute: Audrey Bazerghi, an MBA candidate and master's student in civil and environmental engineering; Cristina Bleicher, an MBA candidate; Ty Christoff-Tempesta, a PhD candidate in materials science and engineering; Cherry Gao, a PhD candidate in biological engineering; Ellena Kim, an MBA candidate; and Jordan Landis, an MBA candidate and master's student in mechanical engineering. The team started working in October 2018 to ultimately devise the winning proposal that focused on cost-effective and timely biodegradation of apparel polybags and everyday food packaging.

One hundred twenty-four teams from across the world entered the competition with written proposals, and the top 10 finalists were invited to pitch their solutions to a panel of judges at the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley in April. Teams competed for cash prizes totaling $22,500, and the top two teams were also invited to travel to Patagonia’s headquarters in Ventura, California, to advance implementation of the proposed solutions and to surf with Patagonia’s employees. The 2019 competition marks the first time that an MIT team has won first place in the Patagonia Case Competition since its inception in 2016.

Team NourishMIT received financial support from the Parsons Laboratory for Environmental Science and Engineering, as well as from the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative.

de MIT News http://bit.ly/2X6BzY3

Chemists discover structure of glucagon fibrils

Patients with type 1 diabetes have to regularly inject themselves with insulin, a hormone that helps their cells absorb glucose from the bloodstream. Another hormone called glucagon, which has the opposite effect, is given to diabetic patients to revive them if they become unconscious due to severe hypoglycemia.

The form of glucagon given to patients is powdered and has to be dissolved in liquid immediately before being injected, because if stored as a liquid, the protein tends to form clumps, also called amyloid fibrils. A new study from MIT reveals the structure of these glucagon fibrils and suggests possible strategies for altering the amino acid sequence so that the protein is less likely to become clumped.

“Insulin in solution is stable for many weeks, and the goal is to achieve the same solution stability with glucagon,” says Mei Hong, an MIT professor of chemistry and one of the senior authors of the study. “Peptide fibrillization is a problem that the pharmaceutical industry has been working for many years to solve.”

Using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, the researchers found that the structure of glucagon fibrils is unlike any other amyloid fibrils whose structures are known.

Yongchao Su, an associate principal scientist at Merck and Co., is also a senior author of the study, which appears in the XX issue of Nature Structural and Molecular Biology. MIT graduate student Martin Gelenter is the lead author of the paper.

Fibril formation

Amyloid fibrils form when proteins fold into a shape that allows them to clump together. These proteins are often associated with disease. For example, the amyloid beta protein forms plaques associated with Alzheimer’s disease, and alpha synuclein forms Lewy bodies in the neurons of Parkinson’s disease patients.

Hong has previously studied the structures of other amyloid peptides, including one that binds to metals such as zinc. After giving a talk on her research at Merck, she teamed up with scientists there to figure out the structure of the fibrillized form of glucagon.

Inside the human body, glucagon exists as an “alpha helix” that binds tightly with a receptor found on liver cells, setting off a cascade of reactions that releases glucose into the bloodstream. However, when glucagon is dissolved in a solution at high concentrations, it begins transforming into a fibril within hours, which is why it has to be stored as a powder and mixed with liquid just before injecting it.

The MIT team used NMR, a technique that analyzes the magnetic properties of atomic nuclei to reveal the structures of the molecules containing those nuclei, to determine the structure of the glucagon fibrils. They found that the glucagon fibril consists of many layers of flat sheets known as beta sheets stacked on top of one another. Each sheet is made up of rows of identical peptides. However, the researchers discovered that, unlike any other amyloid fibril whose structure is known, the peptides run antiparallel to each other. That is, each strand runs in the opposite direction from the two on either side of it.

“All thermodynamically stable amyloid fibrils known so far are parallel packed beta sheets,” Hong says. “A stable antiparallel beta strand amyloid structure has never been seen before.”

In addition, the researchers found that the glucagon beta strand has no disordered segments. Each of the tens of thousands of peptide strands that make up the fibril is held tight in the antiparallel beta sheet conformation. This allows each peptide to form a 10-nanometer-long beta strand.

“This is an extremely stable strand, and is the longest beta strand known so far among any proteins,” Hong says.

Courtesy of the researchers.

Stable structure

One major reason that glucagon fibrils are so stable is that side chains extending from the amino acids making up the glucagon peptides interact strongly with side chains of the peptides above and below them, creating very secure attachment points, also called steric zippers, that help to maintain the overall structure.

While all previously studied amyloid fibrils have a fixed set of residues that form the steric zippers, in glucagon fibrils, even-numbered residues from one strand and odd-numbered residues from the neighboring strand alternately form the steric zipper interface between two beta sheet layers. This conformational duality is another novel feature of the glucagon fibril structure.  

“We can see from this structure why the fibril is so stable, and why it’s so hard to prevent it from forming,” Hong says. “To block it, you really have to change the identity of the amino acid residues. I’m now working with a colleague here to come up with ways to modify the sequence and break those stabilizing interactions, so that the peptide won’t self-assemble to form this fibril.”

Such alternative peptide sequences could remain shelf-stable for a longer period of time in solution, eliminating the need to mix glucagon with liquid before using it.

“Considering the crucial physiological role of glucagon, it is encouraging that new structural data on this polypeptide hormone continue to be collected,” says Kurt Wuthrich, a professor of biophysics at ETH Zurich, who was not involved in the research. “Although the structural data reported here characterize an ‘unwanted’ form of glucagon, the authors point out that it promises to provide novel leads for engineering glucagon analogs which would have improved physico-chemical properties for its administration as a drug, specifically a reduced tendency to form amyloid fibers.”

The research was funded by Merck Sharp and Dohme Corp., a subsidiary of Merck and Co., and the National Institutes of Health.

de MIT News http://bit.ly/2Fvijc5

A better way to encapsulate islet cells for diabetes treatment

When medical devices are implanted in the body, the immune system often attacks them, producing scar tissue around the device. This buildup of tissue, known as fibrosis, can interfere with the device’s function.

MIT researchers have now come up with a novel way to prevent fibrosis from occurring, by incorporating a crystallized immunosuppressant drug into devices. After implantation, the drug is slowly secreted to dampen the immune response in the area immediately surrounding the device.

“We developed a crystallized drug formulation that can target the key players involved in the implant rejection, suppressing them locally and allowing the device to function for more than a year,” says Shady Farah, an MIT and Boston Children’s Hospital postdoc and co-first author of the study, who is soon starting a new position as an assistant professor of the Wolfson Faculty of Chemical Engineering and the Russell Berrie Nanotechnology Institute at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology.

The researchers showed that these crystals could dramatically improve the performance of encapsulated islet cells, which they are developing as a possible treatment for patients with type 1 diabetes. Such crystals could also be applied to a variety of other implantable medical devices, such as pacemakers, stents, or sensors.

Former MIT postdoc Joshua Doloff, now an assistant professor of Biomedical and Materials Science Engineering and member of the Translational Tissue Engineering Center at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, is also a lead author of the paper, which appears in the June 24 issue of Nature Materials. Daniel Anderson, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering and a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES), is the senior author of the paper.

Crystalline drug

Anderson’s lab is one of many research groups working on ways to encapsulate islet cells and transplant them into diabetic patients, in hopes that such cells could replace the patients’ nonfunctioning pancreatic cells and eliminate the need for daily insulin injections.

Fibrosis is a major obstacle to this approach, because scar tissue can block the islet cells’ access to the oxygen and nutrients. In a 2017 study, Anderson and his colleagues showed that systemic administration of a drug that blocks cell receptors for a protein called CSF-1 can prevent fibrosis by suppressing the immune response to implanted devices. This drug targets immune cells called macrophages, which are the primary cells responsible for initiating the inflammation that leads to fibrosis.

“That work was focused on identifying next-generation drug targets, namely which cell and cytokine players were essential for fibrotic response,” says Doloff, who was the lead author on that study, which also involved Farah. He adds, “After knowing what we had to target to block fibrosis, and screening drug candidates needed to do so, we still had to find a sophisticated way of achieving local delivery and release for as long as possible.”

In the new study, the researchers set out to find a way to load the drug directly into an implantable device, to avoid giving patients drugs that would suppress their entire immune system.

“If you have a small device implanted in your body, you don’t want to have your whole body exposed to drugs that are affecting the immune system, and that’s why we’ve been interested in creating ways to release drugs from the device itself,” Anderson says.

To achieve that, the researchers decided to try crystallizing the drugs and then incorporating them into the device. This allows the drug molecules to be very tightly packed, allowing the drug-releasing device to be miniaturized. Another advantage is that crystals take a long time to dissolve, allowing for long-term drug delivery. Not every drug can be easily crystallized, but the researchers found that the CSF-1 receptor inhibitor they were using can form crystals and that they could control the size and shape of the crystals, which determines how long it takes for the drug to break down once in the body.

“We showed that the drugs released very slowly and in a controlled fashion,” says Farah. “We took those crystals and put them in different types of devices and showed that with the help of those crystals, we can allow the medical device to be protected for a long time, allowing the device to keep functioning.”

Encapsulated islet cells

To test whether these drug crystalline formulations could boost the effectiveness of encapsulated islet cells, the researchers incorporated the drug crystals into 0.5-millimeter-diameter spheres of alginate, which they used to encapsulate the cells. When these spheres were transplanted into the abdomen or under the skin of diabetic mice, they remained fibrosis-free for more than a year. During this time, the mice did not need any insulin injections, as the islet cells were able to control their blood sugar levels just as the pancreas normally would.

“In the past three-plus years, our team has published seven papers in Nature journals — this being the seventh — elucidating the mechanisms of biocompatibility,” says Robert Langer, the David H. Koch Institute Professor at MIT and an author of the paper. “These include an understanding of the key cells and receptors involved, optimal implant geometries and physical locations in the body, and now, in this paper, specific molecules that can confer biocompatibility. Taken together, we hope these papers will open the door to a new generation of biomedical implants to treat diabetes and other diseases.”

The researchers believe that it should be possible to create crystals that last longer than those they studied in these experiments, by altering the structure and composition of the drug crystals. Such formulations could also be used to prevent fibrosis of other types of implantable devices. In this study, the researchers showed that crystalline drug could be incorporated into PDMS, a polymer frequently used for medical devices, and could also be used to coat components of a glucose sensor and an electrical muscle stimulation device, which include materials such as plastic and metal.

“It wasn’t just useful for our islet cell therapy, but could also be useful to help get a number of different devices to work long-term,” Anderson says.

The research was funded by JDRF, the National Institutes of Health, the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust Foundation, and the Tayebati Family Foundation.

Other authors of the paper include MIT Principal Research Scientist Peter Muller; MIT grad students Atieh Sadraei and Malia McAvoy; MIT research affiliate Hye Jung Han; former MIT postdoc Katy Olafson; MIT technical associate Keval Vyas; former MIT grad student Hok Hei Tam; MIT postdoc Piotr Kowalski; former MIT undergraduates Marissa Griffin and Ashley Meng; Jennifer Hollister-Locke and Gordon Weir of the Joslin Diabetes Center; Adam Graham of Harvard University; James McGarrigle and Jose Oberholzer of the University of Illinois at Chicago; and Dale Greiner of the University of Massachusetts Medical School.

de MIT News http://bit.ly/2ZHuOJ8

A data scientist dedicated to social change

Mason Grimshaw grew up on the Rosebud Sioux Indian Reservation in South Dakota but moved to Rapid City during high school to pursue a better education. When it came time to apply to college, he hopped online, typed “best engineering schools” into Google, and applied to two places: MIT and his father’s alma mater, the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. He was admitted to both, but when he got into the Institute, his father insisted that he go.

It wasn’t an easy decision, however. Grimshaw felt guilt about leaving his community, where he says that everyone helps each other get by. The move to Rapid City had been difficult enough for him, given that 90 percent of his family lived back at the reservation. Coming to Cambridge was an even bigger step, but his family encouraged him to take the opportunity.

“I didn’t really want to leave home, because that is such a strong community for me. I thought if I did leave, it was only going to be worth it if I could get the best education possible,” he says.

Now a graduate student at the MIT Sloan School of Management working toward a Master of Business Analytics (MBAn) degree, Grimshaw hopes to eventually bring the skills and knowledge he acquires at MIT back home to the reservation.

Looking at the big picture, Grimshaw has aspirations to bring programming to Rosebud. The ultimate dream would be to open a software or web development consulting firm where he could teach community members computer science skills that they could, in turn, teach others. He hopes that through this business, he can equip people in the community with enough technical skills to be able to sustain the company on their own without his help. It’s a long-term goal, but Grimshaw aims high.

Discovering data

After earning his bachelor’s in business analytics at MIT, Grimshaw saw the MBAn as a natural next step. The program teaches students to apply the techniques of data science, programming, machine learning, and optimization to come up with business solutions.

“Because I did it as an undergrad, I thought this stuff was so cool. You can kind of predict the future and help anyone make a better decision. If I was going to be that person to help people make decisions that are important and change people’s lives, I wanted to make sure that I was as prepared as possible,” Grimshaw says.

Surprisingly, Grimshaw did not touch a line of code before coming to MIT. In fact, he entered college intending to study mechanical engineering. But in his first year, his friend was having issues with an assignment for a computer science class, so he decided to help him take a crack at the problem.

The work was fun, Grimshaw says, and coding came naturally for him. Eventually, he dropped his mechanical engineering pursuits and started studying computer science. He later switched majors and applied his computer science education to business analytics.

As a part of his MBAn program, he must complete an analytics capstone project, in which students work with a sponsor organization to create data-driven solutions to specific problems. Grimshaw, along with his program partner Amal Rar, will be working with the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) this summer to make The Ride, MBTA’s door-to-door paratransit service, more efficient.

Bringing business to invisible places

Grimshaw is also currently assisting MIT Sloan Senior Lecturer Anjali Sastry in writing a case study for South African nonprofit RLabs. RLabs seeks to inspire hope by providing business training and consulting to underprivileged South African communities. Grimshaw liked the organization’s mission, and he hopes that working on the RLabs case could give him some ideas about how to bring hope and innovation to his own community back home.

The nonprofit has, in part, inspired some of Grimshaw’s future aspirations for Rosebud. It has also gotten him to think about alternative ways to invest in or give back to communities that don’t necessarily focus on money. Some people, he says, need a place to stay or food more immediately than they need money.

Evaluating those circumstances and developing business models that address those more immediate needs as a form of payment can be a unique alternative to traditional compensation. Grimshaw stresses that monetary compensation is still important, but that being responsive to the specific areas of need within a community also has value.

“There’s a fine line. You can’t just say, ‘These people have nothing so they should just be happy to have a roof over their heads.’ I’m certainly not trying to do that, but there’s a difference in values and in what people place value on. Using that to make your business a little more sustainable is interesting,” Grimshaw says.

The reservation that Grimshaw is from lies within Todd County, an area that was previously listed as one of the poorest in America. He hopes to demonstrate to businesses that it is possible and worthwhile to invest in overlooked areas. He says that a lot of case studies in his field don’t feature stories from the emerging world or rural areas. He wants to show that through creative thinking and problem-solving, companies can work in these places, create jobs, and help lift people out of poverty.

Family forward

Outside of his studies, Grimshaw mostly spends time with his wife and 5-month-old son, Augustine. His face lights up as he speaks about them.

His wife, Julia, also has a passion for helping people and works as the assistant activities director at Hale House, an assisted senior living facility in Boston. The two of them grew up together and hope to move their family closer to home after Grimshaw finishes his MBAn. For now, their favorite things to do in Boston are going to the Public Gardens (Augustine loves the grass, Grimshaw says), getting a bite at Tasty Burger in Fenway, and watching the “Great British Bake Off” at home.

He also continues to participate in the American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES), which he joined as an undergraduate. There were very few members when he arrived at MIT in 2014, and while the number is still small, Grimshaw is enthusiastic about its growth.

“It was pretty cool because when I came here there were four, and on a good day five, of us. I still go to meetings. As I go now, there’s always 10 people, sometimes up to 12 or 15, and it’s awesome to see how much it’s growing,” he says.

While most people going into his field may opt for Silicon Valley or somewhere else on the coasts, Grimshaw would rather take his skill set closer to home. He won’t necessarily move back to Rosebud itself; somewhere within a reasonable driving-distance is more likely. He’s thinking about Denver, with its up-and-coming tech scene, but nothing is set in stone. Wherever he ends up, if a company is interested in helping others through data, Mason Grimshaw is here to help.

de MIT News http://bit.ly/2Y8hLjq

Caring for grads and guests at Commencement

It might be stretching it a bit to call it “MIT Medical-Killian Court,” but MIT Medical’s once-a-year, tent-based “satellite facility” stands ready to provide an amazing range of medical services during each year’s MIT Commencement. This year was no different, as the tent went up in the southeast corner of Killian Court during the first week of June, and MIT Medical clinicians prepared to care for the Institute’s 2,454 graduates and more than 10,000 family members and guests. In addition, the change in venue this year for Thursday’s doctoral hooding ceremony, from the Johnson Athletics Center Ice Rink to Killian Court, meant two days of staffing the medical tent, rather than the usual one.

While the tent might not be a full-fledged medical facility, much thought goes into equipping it with everything from basic first-aid items to medical supplies that might be needed to respond to more serious emergencies, explains Colleen Collins, chief of MIT Medical’s Urgent Care Service. The tent has a stainless-steel sink with its own water supply, multiple cots with privacy screens, and two dedicated porta-potties, including — new this year — one that is wheelchair-accessible.

“After every Commencement, we make note of additional supplies we might stock or things we could do differently,” Collins says. “This year, we were very cognizant of the fact that our PhD grads often have young children, so, before the hooding ceremony on Thursday, we held a briefing that focused on some of the medical emergencies young children might face.” Collins adds that she made a conscious effort to staff the tent both days with nurses and physicians who have experience with children, including some who are certified in pediatric advanced life support.

The 3,000-plus attendees at Thursday’s hooding ceremony enjoyed comfortable temperatures with overcast skies. It was a relatively quiet day in the tent for Collins and nurse Anne Marcoux — “mostly Band-Aid requests from women with new shoes and blisters,” notes Collins.

On Friday morning, the sun came out, the temperature rose, and the number of people in Killian Court swelled to more than 10,000. Marcoux was back for a second day, accompanied by sports medicine physician Angie Elliott in the morning, Associate Medical Director for Primary Care Patrick Egan in the afternoon, and family physician Jen Nohrden, who staffed the tent all day. Chief of Student Health Shawn Ferullo accompanied the long line of graduating seniors from their point of assembly at Rockwell Cage to Killian Court and then joined his colleagues in the medical tent. Also on hand were paramedics from the Cambridge Fire Department and Pro-EMS, an advanced life-support ambulance service, along with a large contingent of emergency medical technicians (EMTs) from MIT’s student-run Emergency Medical Services (MIT EMS), who were stationed throughout Killian Court, enabling them to respond promptly to any medical need.

Along with bandaging new-shoe-related blisters and responding to requests for sunscreen and ibuprofen, a few people came in with heat-related symptoms, sunburns, or symptoms of dehydration. But while clinicians in the tent were often busy, the only serious medical problem involved a guest who was transported to the hospital with symptoms of stroke.

“It was great to see students that we have worked with and assisted during their years at MIT realize their goal on such a beautiful sunny day,” says Ferullo.

Elliott and Nohrden, working the medical tent at Commencement for the first time, echo Ferullo’s sentiments. “It was exciting to see the happiness that graduation brings forth in the graduates and their family members,” Elliot says, “The teamwork of all the campus departments is another remarkable aspect of the day.”

Nohrden also came away from the experience with a new respect for the teamwork involved in creating MIT’s biggest day of the year. “Having attended a graduation as a visitor, I can say that I ‘took for granted’ all the work and prep that goes into making it a successful experience,” she says.

“I now realize what an accomplishment it is for people to ‘take it for granted.’” She continues. “For if everything goes off without a hitch, and there are no hiccups, and people only notice the stage and graduates, that is the ultimate sign of success. Onward to 2020!”

de MIT News http://bit.ly/2KvKNXm