Podcast transcript: A tale of two classes 50 years apart

Like this year’s seniors, the Class of 1970 had its final semester disrupted: Fifty years ago, growing unrest over the Vietnam War led to the cancellation of MIT classes. In the podcast and transcript below, Karen Arenson ’70 and senior Bahrudin Trbalic share their experiences.

Karen A.:

My classmates and I do feel a connection to the Class of 2020 and empathize with the way their final semester has been up-ended.

Narrator:

When Class of 1970 president, Karen Arenson, graduated from MIT, the Institute and the world had dramatically changed in a few short years. And like today's graduating seniors, their future felt full of uncertainty.

Karen A.:

We survived and we ultimately found our ways and they will too, even if it doesn't feel that way now. If any college graduates make it, and I know they will, it will be MIT graduates. They have incredible skills as well as tenacity.

Reporter #1:

Well, millions of college students have been sent home during this pandemic.

Reporter #2:

At colleges and universities around Boston, precautions are being taken.

Reporter #3:

That they're canceling classes or they're going to online learning, not just for a couple of weeks, but for the rest of the year.

Narrator:

On March 10th, 2020, MIT took drastic measures in response to the growing concerns over the COVID-19 outbreak. It announced all classes would be transitioning to online instruction for the remainder of the semester and that students should not return to campus after Spring Break.

Narrator:

These steps were clearly going to disrupt the usual patterns of the Spring semester for thousands, but perhaps none more than those who had been working for the past four years to be able to walk onto Killian Court, flip their Brass Rats around and join the ranks of Institute alumni as graduates of MIT.

Bahrudin T.:

I was at the West Coast visiting prospective graduate schools. I went there a week before everything was shut down. It seemed then that nothing would change, but I was wrong.

Narrator:

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Class of 2020 lost the opportunity to experience the remainder of their senior year on campus with their friends and classmates. For senior, Bahrudin Trbalic, watching the beginning of the U.S. quarantine affect the Institute from the West Coast added an extra layer to the unease as he couldn't be there with his peers for mutual support and ultimately, to say goodbye.

Bahrudin T.:

So I was far away from my friends when I learned the news and the worst thing was the fact that I knew that once I'm back on campus, my friends will be gone. That was kind of a heavy experience for all of us.

Narrator:

But, MIT and its students are no strangers to large scale social unrest. In fact, it was exactly 50 years ago when the Spring semester for the Class of 1970 was also disrupted.

Protestors:

Strike! Strike! Strike! Strike! [Crosstalk 00:02:55], Strike! Strike! Strike! Strike!

Speaker 8:

Leave this area immediately.

Karen A.:

On April 30th, 1970, President Nixon announced that the United States, which had been in Vietnam for years was now about to invade Cambodia. That ignited even fiercer anger among those who were against the war.

Karen A.:

Within a couple of days, campuses began to vote to go on strike. At MIT, we were still debating the issue on May 4th when we received word that four student antiwar protesters at Kent State University in Ohio had been shot and killed by the National Guard.

Protestors:

Strike! Strike!

Speaker 9:

And all of a sudden I heard them shooting.

Protestors:

Strike! Strike!

Speaker 10:

The guards will open fire on the students.

Speaker 11:

What the investigators have to determine then is whether indeed there was a sniper and whether the guard was justified in firing its weapons or whether [crosstalk 00:03:57].

Karen A.:

The MIT faculty convened in Kresge Auditorium the following day, and by a large majority voted to cancel classes for the rest of the week. We were fortunate that we were able to remain on campus and we did have a graduation ceremony, although only 60% of my class attended it. And we asked the president not to speak. Instead, we had two minutes of silence.

Narrator:

Commencement at MIT is a special event for all involved, students, their families and friends, faculty and staff, where typically we gather by the thousands, one community on Killian Court, to hear the names of graduates. This year, we come together through our screens to acknowledge the work and singular dedication that a degree from MIT embodies.

Bahrudin T.:

The virtual commencement is the best we can get in the current circumstances. I was hopeful that life would resume by now, but we cannot alter what's not in our hands. This is a challenge we have to go through. Just know that whoever would be proud seeing you at the real graduation ceremony is even more proud to see you right now fighting through the tough times.

Bahrudin T.:

A silver lining of this online commencement is that I will be able to spend the commencement day with my family, which otherwise I would be there without them. Obviously, I will miss my friends, but current technology enables us to chat and see each other on a daily basis and that we will soon see each other in life.

Karen A.:

Our 50th reunion has indeed been disrupted. I do feel sad, but it's a small problem compared to everything else that's taking place. We began to send emails about the irony of our class reunion being knocked off course when our senior year and our final semester had been. But, we have tried to make the best of it.

Bahrudin T.:

It just shows us how little influence do we have on the future. We can do our best and hope for the best, but then who knows what will happen to our generation in 50 years.

Narrator:

But, MIT's ability to think on the fly, to innovate is part of its DNA. It's what MIT is made for. It's part of the Institute's history. It's currently on display in the many projects tackling the COVID-19 pandemic. And it's woven into the fabric of MIT's Class of 2020 as seen in their accomplishments and challenges met thus far.

Bahrudin T.:

This doesn't feel like a proper end. Throughout our studies, we have imagined that we will land on a grand stage in Killian Court in front of our families and friends, not on an emergency flight home. That shouldn't be the end. However, as I like to remind my friends, the graduation ceremony would be only the icing on the cake. We still have the cake. We still have the good memories, the awesome friends and the truly wonderful moments we will cherish for life.

Narrator:

Thanks for listening. You can find more audio content from MIT on Apple Podcast, Google Play Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Physicists measure a short-lived radioactive molecule for first time

Researchers at MIT and elsewhere have combined the power of a super collider with techniques of laser spectroscopy to precisely measure a short-lived radioactive molecule, radium monofluoride, for the first time.

Precision studies of radioactive molecules open up possibilities for scientists to search for new physics beyond the Standard Model, such as phenomena that violate certain fundamental symmetries in nature, and to look for signs of dark matter. The team’s experimental technique could also be used to perform laboratory studies of radioactive molecules produced in astrophysical processes.

“Our results pave the way to high-precision studies of short-lived radioactive molecules, which could offer a new and unique laboratory for research in fundamental physics and other fields,” says the study’s lead author, Ronald Fernando Garcia Ruiz, assistant professor of physics at MIT.

Garcia Ruiz’ colleagues include Alex Brinson, an MIT graduate student, along with an international team of researchers working at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in Geneva. The results are published today in the journal Nature.

Reversing time

The simplest molecule is made from two atoms, each with a nucleus comprising a certain number of protons and neutrons that make one atom heavier than the other. Each nucleus is surrounded by a cloud of electrons. In the presence of an electric field, these electrons can be redistributed to create an extremely large electric field within the molecule.

Physicists have used molecules and their electric fields as miniature laboratories to study the fundamental properties of electrons and other subatomic particles. For instance, when a bound electron interacts with the molecule’s electric field, its energy can change as a result, which scientists can measure to infer the electron’s properties, such as its electrostatic dipole moment, which provides a measurement of its deviation from a spherical shape. 

According to the Standard Model of particle physics, elementary particles should be roughly spherical, or have a negligible electrostatic dipole moment. If, however, a permanent electric dipole moment of a particle or a system exists , this would imply that certain processes in nature are not as symmetrical as physicists had assumed.

For instance, physicists believe that most fundamental laws of physics should remain unchanged with the direction of time — a principle known as time reversal symmetry. That is, regardless of whether time runs forward or backward, gravity, for example, should cause a ball to fall off a cliff, or roll back up, along the same path in velocity and space. If, however, an electron is not perfectly spherical, this would indicate that time reversal symmetry is violate. This violation would provide a much-needed condition for explaining why there is more matter than antimatter in our universe.

By studying an electron’s interactions with very strong electric fields, scientists might have a chance of precisely measuring their electric dipole moments. In certain molecules, the heavier their atoms, the stronger their internal electric field. Radioactive molecules — those containing at least one unstable nuclei — can be tailored to maximize their internal electric fields. Moreover, heavy radioactive nuclei can have pear-like shapes, which can amplify their symmetry-violating properties.

Because of their high electric fields and unique nuclear shapes, radioactive molecules would make natural laboratories in which to probe not only the electron’s structure, but also symmetry-violating nuclear properties. But these molecules are short-lived, and scientists have been unable to pin them down .

“These radioactive molecules are very rare in nature and some of them cannot be found in our planet, but can be abundant in astrophysical processes such as stellar explosions, or neutron star mergers,” Garcia Ruiz says. “So we have to make them artificially, and the main challenges have been that they can only be produced in small quantities at high temperatures, and can be very short-lived.”

A needle in the dark

The team looked for a way to make radium monoflouride, or RaF — a radioactive molecule that contains a very heavy, unstable radium atom, and a fluoride atom. This molecule is of particular interest because certain isotopes of the radium nucleus are themselves asymmetrical, resembling a pear, with more mass on one end of the nucleus than the other.

What’s more, theorists had predicted that the energy structure of radium monofluoride would make the molecule amenable to laser cooling, a technique that uses lasers to bring down the temperature of molecules, and slow them down enough to perform precision studies. While most molecules have many energy states they can occupy, with large numbers of vibrational and rotational states, it turns out that radium monofluoride favors electronic transitions between a few main energy levels — an unusually simple molecule to control, using laser cooling.

The team was able to measure molecules of RaF by first making small quantities of the molecule using CERN’s Isotope mass Separator On-Line, or ISOLDE facility at CERN, which they then manipulated and studied with lasers using the Collinear Resonance Ionization Spectroscopy (CRIS) experiment.

In their experiment, the researchers utilized CERN’s Proton Synchrotron Booster, a series of rings that receives protons from a particle accelerator and accelerates the protons. The team fired these protons at a target made of uranium carbide, at such high energies that the onslaught destroyed uranium, producing a shower of protons and neutrons that mixed to form a mix of radioactive nuclei, including radium.

The researchers then injected a gas of carbon tetrafluoride, which reacted with radium to make charged, or ionic molecules of radium monofluoride, which they separated from the rest of uranium’s byproducts through a system of mass-separating magnets. They then pinned down the molecules in an ion trap and surrounded them with helium gas, which cooled the molecules down enough for the researchers to measure them.

Next, the team measured the molecules by reaccelerating and passing them through the CRIS setup, where the ionic molecules interacted with sodium atoms that gave an electron to each molecule to neutralize the beam of molecules in flight. The neutral molecules then continued through an interaction region, where the researchers also shone two laser beams — one red, the other blue.

The team tuned the red laser’s frequency up and down, and found that at certain wavelengths the laser resonated with the molecules, exciting an electron in the molecule to another energy level, such that the blue laser then had enough energy to remove the electron from the molecule. The resonantly excited molecules, made ionic again, were deflected and collected onto a particle detector, allowing the researchers to measure, for the first time, their energy levels, and the associated molecular properties which demonstrate that the structure of these molecules is indeed favorable for laser cooling.  

“Previous to our measurements, all the energy levels of these molecules were unknown,” Garcia Ruiz says. “This has been like trying to find a needle in a dark room, many hundreds of meters wide. Now that we’ve found the needle, we can measure the properties of that needle and start playing with it.”

This work was supported by the European Research Council, DFG German Research Foundation, STFC and Ernest Rutherford, the FWO-Vlaanderen, BriX IAP Research Program ENSAR2, the Russian Science Foundation, and the BMBF. A. Brinson was supported by a Henry W. Kendall (1955) Fellowship.

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How often do vaccine trials hit paydirt?

Vaccines are more likely to get through clinical trials than any other type of drug — but have been given relatively little pharmaceutical industry support during the last two decades, according to a new study by MIT scholars.

Over a two-decade span from January 2000 to January 2020, private-sector vaccine-development efforts succeeded in bringing a drug to market 39.6 percent of the time, the researchers found. By contrast, programs to develop anti-infective therapeutics — medicines that lessen the severity of illness, including antibiotics — succeeded 16.3 percent of the time.

“The probability of success for vaccines is reliably higher than for any other drug development area,” says MIT economist Andrew Lo, co-author of a new paper detailing the study.

At a glance, that might seem to augur well for drug-development prospects during the Covid-19 pandemic, since over 100 projects globally are aimed at finding a vaccine for the virus. But scientists may be racing to make up for lost time, in a sense — because as the study also shows, vaccine development for some of the world’s most dangerous diseases has lagged in recent decades.

For instance: Out of nearly 10,000 drug-development projects in the study, just a relative handful have addressed the high-profile, highly problematic contagions of the last 20 years.

“If you look at the most significant diseases outside of Covid-19, like MERS, SARS, Ebola, and Zika, among those diseases, there’s been a total of only 45 nonvaccine programs initiated over the last two decades for them,” Lo notes. “And there’s been only one vaccine approved, for Ebola, in December 2019. That’s worrisome, because we know for a fact that these diseases are real threats, and yet there’s been relatively little attention paid to them.”

The paper, “Estimating Probabilities of Success of Vaccine and Other Anti-Infective Therapeutic Development Programs,” was released on May 18 as part of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper series and has been accepted for publication in the Harvard Data Science Review. The authors are Lo, who is the Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor in the MIT Sloan School of Management and director of MIT’s Laboratory of Financial Engineering; Kien Wei Siah, a PhD candidate in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; and Chi Heem Wong, a PhD candidate in the Computer Science and Artifical Intelligence Laboratory and the Laboratory for Financial Engineering.

Limited big pharma investment

To conduct the study, the scholars examined information collected by Citeline, a firm that maintains proprietary pharmaceutical-industry databases about drug development and clinical trials. The study reviewed 2,544 vaccine programs and 6,829 nonvaccine development programs. After an initial preclinical research and development phase, a drug candidate usually undergoes three formal trial phases in human subjects, the first generally aimed at examining its safety, and the next two more focused on efficacy. 

Among other findings, the scholars identified lower success rates for drug-development programs outside of private industry — such as those led by investigators in academic hospitals. These efforts succeeded 6.8 percent of the time for vaccines and 8.2 percent of the time for therapeutics, something Lo chalks up to the smaller scale of many of the projects.

“Academic medical centers don’t have the resources big pharma does,” says Lo.

Lo also points out that the relatively low success rates for nonvaccine therapeutics, including antibiotics, “jumped out” at him. “I don’t think people realize just how important antibiotics are, and how few of them we currently have in our medical arsenal,” Lo adds. “We’re just not investing enough resources into this critical field.”

The researchers also found widely varying outcomes by types of illnesses. Out of 27 disease categories for which vaccine development efforts occurred, only 12 have seen drugs receive government approval. The disease type with the highest success rate, among those with more than one drug candidate, was rotavirus; in this category 78.7 percent of programs have been successful.

By contrast — and in addition to MERS, SARS, and Zika — HIV is a case with a notable lack of a successful vaccine, after hundreds of projects attempting to develop one.

Lo notes that only four of the top 20 pharmaceutical companies are heavily invested in vaccine development, down considerably from two decades ago — despite the fact that vaccines have easily the best odds of becoming successful drugs.

“This tells me that the economics of vaccines must be really challenging, if fewer and fewer big pharma companies are willing to commit resources to this business,” Lo says. “If there’s a silver lining to this terrible pandemic, it’s that things are going to change in the aftermath of Covid-19.”

Why an “insurance” drug may be less profitable

Indeed, Lo suggests, the specific economic challenge is that vaccines are the equivalent of “insurance,” among medicines: We apply them to limit the cost of disasters, but do not always think to invest in them in advance. Many governments may not have perceived a need to develop and stockpile vaccines, thereby reducing the demand for vaccine research and making it less rewarding for private industry.

“Vaccines used to be [more] profitable,” Lo says. “But over the course of the last 15-20 years, I think governments have started cutting budgets and ignoring issues that aren’t clear and present dangers, perhaps expecting private insurers to pick up the slack. Unless there’s an immediate threat to public health, it’s really hard to get people to focus on it. It’s like insurance … You don’t think you’re going to need it, until you do. And then it’s usually too late.”

That fiscal austerity may also have been combined with historical complacency, as past successes against smallpox, polio, and other diseases created a perception that terrible pandemics were a thing of the past.

In any case, Lo says, the data paints a clear picture: Vaccine research is both promising and underfunded.

“The reason we wrote this paper is to bring more awareness to this situation,” Lo says. “Now that we’ve experienced the deadly consequences of a pandemic, the hope is that governments around the world — and it really has to be governments — will pay more attention.”

Lo adds: “As the saying goes, ‘crisis is a terrible thing to waste,’ so we need to take advantage of this opportunity to come up with a more enduring solution, not just for this pandemic, but for all future pandemics, because inevitably another pandemic will emerge, whether its SARS, MERS, or some other pathogen we’ve never encountered. Thanks to a number of recent biomedical breakthroughs, we now have many more ways of creating anti-infectives than ever before — we just need the political will to do so.”

The study drew upon research support from the MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering and funding from The Rockefeller Foundation. Lo also helped found a consulting firm that analyzes drug development data.

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Hacking commencement

In the finest MIT tradition of community-driven innovation, the Commencement Committee and a core group of engineers, technologists, and artists across campus are putting minds and hands to work to create a meaningful, engaging online Commencement experience for the Class of 2020. 

Moving the tradition-rich celebration online without diminishing its significance, and with less than two months to plan, is a complex problem. The organizing team knew from the outset that the challenge would be to achieve the key moments of the Commencement ceremony in an online environment, without trying to recreate the in-person experience. Professor Eric Grimson, chancellor for academic advancement and chair of the Commencement Committee, says, "We are in a fortunate position to adapt to this year’s circumstances. Running Commencement the normal way is a logistical tour de force, involving hundreds of people, many of whom who work all year to make it happen. Moving it online was a different kind of coordination, but thanks to the knowledge embedded in the team, it didn't feel like starting from scratch."

It helps that the Institute is equipped with an extensive toolkit for building online experiences. “We’ve spent the last two decades opening up MIT to the world virtually through online teaching and learning,” says Professor Sanjay Sarma, vice president for open learning. “By combining MIT’s experience in digital technologies with the passion and ingenuity of the MIT community, I knew something amazing would emerge.”

Honoring tradition

The Commencement Committee recognized the challenge in creating a sense of occasion in an all-remote event. In addition to ensuring that the technical elements function effectively, the planning team worked to develop a meaningful experience through which degree candidates become MIT alumni. Student government representatives recommended that the program not exceed one hour, although it will be preceded by an introductory pre-program show co-hosted by graduating seniors Talia Khan and Yaateh Richardson. The pre-program will include greetings to family and friends submitted by students as part of a project organized by MIT Video Productions (MVP).

In addition to the student greetings, MVP has developed a celebratory retrospective that will be part of the pre-program show. “One of the things the planning team has had in mind is balancing a natural feeling of loss and disappointment with the fact that graduating from MIT is a tremendous accomplishment,” says Larry Gallagher, senior producer and advisor to the vice president for open learning. “We don’t want to let the last three months overshadow students’ four to six years at MIT.” 

The Institute has always cherished its traditions, and the online program will incorporate as many as possible, including a digital version of the iconic turning of the Brass Rat class ring as students become alumni. In reimagining the look and feel of Commencement, Institute Events invited Peter Agoos and Andrew Zamore of Agoos D*zines, with whom they had collaborated on the MIT150 and MIT2016 celebrations, to join the planning team. Frederick Harris, lecturer in music and director of wind ensembles, provided artistic guidance.

The speaking portion of the online Commencement program and degree conferral will open with remarks by Robert Millard ’73, chair of the MIT Corporation, who will introduce guest speaker William H. McRaven, retired U.S. Navy admiral and former chancellor of the University of Texas system. Following salutes from Graduate Student Council President Peter Su and Senior Class President Nwanacho Nwana, President L. Rafael Reif will give his charge to the graduates and confer degrees. Esther Duflo PhD ’99, the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics this past autumn, will offer a salute to the advanced degree candidates. The program concludes with the school song, led, as always, by the Chorallaries of MIT — with the finale of “Take Me Back to Tech” as a community-sourced sing-along, incorporating MIT voices submitted via video wherever they are in the world. R. Erich Caulfield SM ’01 PhD ’06, president of the MIT Alumni Association, will offer a welcome to the association and introduce the scroll of graduates’ names. 

Thanks to the pioneering work of Senior Associate Dean Mary Callahan and her team at the Registrar’s Office, MIT’s online Commencement celebration on May 29 will include the delivery of digital diplomas to students who opt in. Although graduates will receive their physical diplomas at a later date, the establishment of the digital program in June 2017 meant that MIT was well prepared to issue diplomas remotely this year. MIT Open Learning is currently expanding the development of the digital diploma technology — built on research that originated in the Media Lab — with the Digital Credentials Consortium, an international network of leading universities.

Following the main Commencement program is a post-program comprising video and other content, developed by the MIT Alumni Association to honor its 3,500 new members. Victoria Gonin, executive director for alumni relations, participated with association colleagues in the planning. “This season is a defining experience for the graduates of 2020, and we know that will stay with them,” she says. “We want them to feel immediately welcomed by an alumni community who will benefit from their talents, perspectives, and experiences.”

Comusica: many voices, one MIT

This year’s Commencement music will feature a new element that requires a combination of tech savvy and artistic talent only MIT can offer: a composition made up of individual notes sung by members of the graduating class.

The Comusica project was born of conversations between Sarma; Gayle Gallagher, executive officer for Commencement; Leila Kinney, executive director of Arts Initiatives; and composer Evan Ziporyn, Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Music, who had contacted Gallagher right away to ask how he and his colleagues in the Music and Theater Arts Section could help. Sarma wondered whether MIT’s musical forces might come together in a virtual concert, similar to online performances by orchestras worldwide in past months. Ziporyn was initially skeptical, given the technical challenges, but the more the group talked about creating a musical moment that could bring the community together, the more he committed to making the idea work.

Ziporyn turned to Eran Egozy '95, professor of the practice of music technology, who came up with the idea for Comusica: allowing students at all levels of musical ability to “perform” at Commencement by recording themselves singing individual notes, which would then be arranged like a mosaic into a larger piece.

Though it requires “7 million steps along the way, incorporating a lot of coding and editing on every level,” Ziporyn says, “the basic idea seemed really beautiful to me.” He composed a chorale which provides the structure of the piece, then Egozy charted out how many notes of each type and duration were needed. With help from Arts at MIT, the team started to solicit student participation. 

Professor Isaac “Ike” Chuang, senior associate dean of digital learning, joined the project early on, providing the extensive server infrastructure and coding behind Comusica’s submission website. “Sanjay [Sarma] brought me into the conversation about Commencement when they decided to do some of these interactive, engaging elements,” says Chuang, who brings deep expertise in building platforms for online communities. 

Egozy, whom Ziporyn describes as “an incredible field marshal,” took on the task of directing the project. Working with Media Lab graduate student Nikhil Singh, Egozy has spent the past six weeks tirelessly coordinating the many producers, audiovisual technicians, and web developers from organizations across campus involved in gathering, tuning, normalizing, and assembling the voices that make up the finished piece. On top of the extensive production expertise and support they are lending to the main Commencement program, MIT Video Productions Director Clayton Hainsworth and his team also contributed animations to Comusica.

For Egozy, the collaborative nature of the work is what makes it so compelling. “It just feels like one of these awesome MIT projects,” he remarks. “At first, you don’t know how you’re going to pull it off. But then you join forces with other colleagues who come together to help drive the project forward. I love the energy. I’m both a little nervous and really excited to show off Comusica at Commencement.”

Embracing the moment and looking forward

As engaging a program as this promises to be, the organizers know that nothing compares to being together on campus to celebrate the milestones Commencement represents. MIT has therefore committed to providing the Class of 2020 with an opportunity to celebrate in-person when it is safe to do so.

But for now, there is much to celebrate and much to look forward to in this new online experience — including a few new elements and surprises. Says Grimson, who has chaired the Commencement Committee for more than 20 years, “We’re so grateful for the collaboration of our scattered community: our speakers, the planning and production teams, the student musicians, and the creative faculty. Infinite thanks to everyone who persevered this season to make Commencement a joyful day that will honor our graduates.”

Perhaps the most enduring campus custom represented in this new event is MIT’s commitment to innovation. As Chuang says, “The ideas are based in the long traditions that MIT has for Commencement; we’re just doing them a different way.”

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Meet the MIT bilinguals: Dual materials science and music major Talia Khan

In high school, Talia Khan was passionate about musical theater. So, she was thrilled when she got to go to New York and see one of her idols, Audra McDonald, perform on Broadway in "Lady Day at Emerson's Bar and Grill." She waited at the stage door to meet her after the show, and she told McDonald how much she hoped to be a successful singer, too.

As Khan recounts the conversation, McDonald said, “I won’t tell you not to do that, but get a degree first. You need to follow your passions, but you have to be sure you’re able to support yourself.”

Khan took that to mean she should go on to study science, another subject she enjoyed. “So, when I was looking for a university, I wanted one with access to top-quality music teachers and top-quality science,” she says. “MIT really fit the bill.”

Discovering materials science — and jazz

Khan arrived at the Institute without a firm idea of which science she would study, but she attended a First-Year Pre-Orientation Program that led her to major in materials science and engineering. Dedicated to the study of matter and how it is made, Department of Materials Science and Engineering students and researchers work to understand the creation, properties, and performance of materials — and to derive new, effective, and sustainable alternatives.

Khan also quickly joined the MIT Vocal Jazz Ensemble — an experience that expanded her musical repertoire. “I had never done jazz before college,” says Khan, who ultimately pursued dual majors, in both music and materials science. “Now jazz is my thing. If you had told me that five years ago, I would have laughed. I literally knew nothing about jazz.”

Since then, Khan’s musical achievement has earned her an Emerson Fellowship every year of her time at MIT. This Emerson program, a conservatory-level track in MIT Music, has provided her with private vocal lessons and enabled her to take a weekly performance and music composition class with John H. Harbison, a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and Institute Professor of Music. “You can’t get any better than that,” she says.

Awards, honors, and fellowships

The Emerson Fellowship is just one of many awards Khan has garnered at MIT. Last year, she was named a 2019 Burchard Scholar, an honor bestowed by the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) for demonstrated excellence in one or more of MIT’s humanistic disciplines. This year she won the Suzanne Berger Award for Future Global Leaders, a prize given out by the MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI), the renowned SHASS-based program in applied international studies.

This spring Khan also earned a prestigious Fulbright Fellowship, which she will use to conduct materials science research in Brazil next year. The highly competitive scholarship is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State and was established to increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and other countries.

Combining material science, sustainability, and music

This year Khan got the chance to combine her passion for both material science and music during 21M.500 (Advanced Seminar in Music), which centers on helping students develop analytic and research skills in music.

“I wanted to combine knowledge from both material sustainability and music,” says Khan, who wrote her final paper on the guitar manufacturing industry. She learned about the destruction of old-growth forests and the wood waste generated by the guitar-making industry practices, and she looked at guitars from a materials lifecycle analysis perspective, drawing on lessons from her materials science classes.

“You have this amazing irony," she notes, “when you have someone playing a beautiful old-growth Brazilian rosewood guitar, and saying, ‘save the planet' — since the over-harvesting of this tonewood is contributing to the deforestation of the Amazon.”

Khan says the 21M.500 course highlighted the benefits of exploring a topic using different disciplinary lenses, an approach that is also integral to MIT's materials science program. Based on those experiences, she encourages more musicologists and scientists to "take it upon themselves to do interdisciplinary work with one another."

National and international internships

Khan has also been busy outside of class during her time at MIT. She worked at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, thanks to the MIT in Washington Summer Internship Program. Through the MISTI program, she traveled to Brazil and Israel. In Brazil, she researched a resin used locally to caulk boats — work that cemented her interest in ethnobotany, the study of indigenous people and how they use plants for medicine, building materials, and more.

“I’m interested in learning from indigenous people,” says Khan, who plans to use her Fulbright scholarship to conduct additional research into how local people use the Amazon’s plants. “They have hundreds of years of history and testing of countless plants, but the knowledge is sustained by an oral tradition that’s now being lost.” (For more on Khan’s work in the Amazon, watch her TEDxMIT talk.)

Another extracurricular highlight for Khan was her role as interviewer on “Tea with Teachers,” a popular YouTube show which features chats with MIT faculty members and guests — including Audra McDonald. “It was one of the most amazing things I’ve done in my life,” she says.

Reflecting on her MIT education, Khan emphasizes how grateful she is for the time she had to work with MIT’s music and materials science faculties and for the full range of disciplines in an MIT education.

“At MIT,” she observes, “we have the same quality of music education as conservatories, and you also have the rest of the MIT education. You can’t get more perfect than that.”
 
 

Profile prepared by SHASS Communications
Editorial and design director: Emily Hiestand
Senior writer: Kathryn O'Neill

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Undergraduates develop next-generation intelligence tools

The coronavirus pandemic has driven us apart physically while reminding us of the power of technology to connect. When MIT shut its doors in March, much of campus moved online, to virtual classes, labs, and chatrooms. Among those making the pivot were students engaged in independent research under MIT’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP). 

With regular check-ins with their advisors via Slack and Zoom, many students succeeded in pushing through to the end. One even carried on his experiments from his bedroom, after schlepping his Sphero Bolt robots home in a backpack. “I’ve been so impressed by their resilience and dedication,” says Katherine Gallagher, one of three artificial intelligence engineers at MIT Quest for Intelligence who works with students each semester on intelligence-related applications. “There was that initial week of craziness and then they were right back to work.” Four projects from this spring are highlighted below.

Learning to explore the world with open eyes and ears

Robots rely heavily on images beamed through their built-in cameras, or surrogate “eyes,” to get around. MIT senior Alon Kosowsky-Sachs thinks they could do a lot more if they also used their microphone “ears.” 

From his home in Sharon, Massachusetts, where he retreated after MIT closed in March, Kosowsky-Sachs is training four baseball-sized Sphero Bolt robots to roll around a homemade arena. His goal is to teach the robots to pair sights with sounds, and to exploit this information to build better representations of their environment. He's working with Pulkit Agrawal, an assistant professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, who is interested in designing algorithms with human-like curiosity.

While Kosowsky-Sachs sleeps, his robots putter away, gliding through an object-strewn rink he built for them from two-by-fours. Each burst of movement becomes a pair of one-second video and audio clips. By day, Kosowsky-Sachs trains a “curiosity” model aimed at pushing the robots to become bolder, and more skillful, at navigating their obstacle course.

“I want them to see something through their camera, and hear something from their microphone, and know that these two things happen together,” he says. “As humans, we combine a lot of sensory information to get added insight about the world. If we hear a thunder clap, we don’t need to see lightning to know that a storm has arrived. Our hypothesis is that robots with a better model of the world will be able to accomplish more difficult tasks.”

Training a robot agent to design a more efficient nuclear reactor 

One important factor driving the cost of nuclear power is the layout of its reactor core. If fuel rods are arranged in an optimal fashion, reactions last longer, burn less fuel, and need less maintenance. As engineers look for ways to bring down the cost of nuclear energy, they are eying the redesign of the reactor core.

“Nuclear power emits very little carbon and is surprisingly safe compared to other energy sources, even solar or wind,” says third-year student Isaac Wolverton. “We wanted to see if we could use AI to make it more efficient.” 

In a project with Josh Joseph, an AI engineer at the MIT Quest, and Koroush Shirvan, an assistant professor in MIT’s Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, Wolverton spent the year training a reinforcement learning agent to find the best way to lay out fuel rods in a reactor core. To simulate the process, he turned the problem into a game, borrowing a machine learning technique for producing agents with superhuman abilities at chess and Go.

He started by training his agent on a simpler problem: arranging colored tiles on a grid so that as few tiles as possible of the same color would touch. As Wolverton increased the number of options, from two colors to five, and four tiles to 225, he grew excited as the agent continued to find the best strategy. “It gave us hope we could teach it to swap the cores into an optimal arrangement,” he says.

Eventually, Wolverton moved to an environment meant to simulate a 36-rod reactor core, with two enrichment levels and 2.1 million possible core configurations. With input from researchers in Shirvan’s lab, Wolverton trained an agent that arrived at the optimal solution.

The lab is now building on Wolverton's code to try to train an agent in a life-sized 100-rod environment with 19 enrichment levels. “There’s no breakthrough at this point,” he says. “But we think it’s possible, if we can find enough compute resources.”

Making more livers available to patients who need them

About 8,000 patients in the United States receive liver transplants each year, but that’s only half the number who need one. Many more livers might be made available if hospitals had a faster way to screen them, researchers say. In a collaboration with Massachusetts General Hospital, MIT Quest is evaluating whether automation could help to boost the nation’s supply of viable livers.  

In approving a liver for transplant, pathologists estimate its fat content from a slice of tissue. If it’s low enough, the liver is deemed ready for transplant. But there are often not enough qualified doctors to review tissue samples on the tight timeline needed to match livers with recipients. A shortage of doctors, coupled with the subjective nature of analyzing tissue, means that viable livers are inevitably discarded.

This loss represents a huge opportunity for machine learning, says third-year student Kuan Wei Huang, who joined the project to explore AI applications in health care. The project involves training a deep neural network to pick out globules of fat on liver tissue slides to estimate the liver’s overall fat content.

One challenge, says Huang, has been figuring out how to handle variations in how various pathologists classify fat globules. “This makes it harder to tell whether I’ve created the appropriate masks to feed into the neural net,” he says. “However, after meeting with experts in the field, I received clarifications and was able to continue working.”

Trained on images labeled by pathologists, the model will eventually learn to isolate fat globules in unlabeled images on its own. The final output will be a fat content estimate with pictures of highlighted fat globules showing how the model arrived at its final count. “That’s the easy part — we just count up the pixels in the highlighted globules as a percentage of the overall biopsy and we have our fat content estimate,” says the Quest’s Gallagher, who is leading the project.

Huang says he’s excited by the project’s potential to help people. “Using machine learning to address medical problems is one of the best ways that a computer scientist can impact the world.”

Exposing the hidden constraints of what we mean in what we say

Language shapes our understanding of the world in subtle ways, with slight variations in the words we use conveying sharply different meanings.The sentence, “Elephants live in Africa and Asia,” looks a lot like the sentence “Elephants eat twigs and leaves.” But most readers will conclude that the elephants in the first sentence are split into distinct groups living on separate continents but not apply the same reasoning to the second sentence, because eating twigs and eating leaves can both be true of the same elephant in a way that living on different continents cannot.

Karen Gu is a senior majoring in computer science and molecular biology, but instead of putting cells under a microscope for her SuperUROP project, she chose to look at sentences like the ones above. “I’m fascinated by the complex and subtle things that we do to constrain language understanding, almost all of it subconsciously,” she says.

Working with Roger Levy, a professor in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and postdoc MH Tessler, Gu explored how prior knowledge guides our interpretation of syntax and ultimately, meaning. In the sentences above, prior knowledge about geography and mutual exclusivity interact with syntax to produce different meanings.

After steeping herself in linguistics theory, Gu built a model to explain how, word by word, a given sentence produces meaning. She then ran a set of online experiments to see how human subjects would interpret analogous sentences in a story. Her experiments, she says, largely validated intuitions from linguistic theory.

One challenge, she says, was having to reconcile two approaches for studying language. “I had to figure out how to combine ‘formal linguistics, which applies an almost mathematical approach to understanding how words combine, and probabilistic semantics-pragmatics, which has focused more on how people interpret whole utterances.’ "

After MIT closed in March, she was able to finish the project from her parents’ home in East Hanover, New Jersey. “Regular meetings with my advisor have been really helpful in keeping me motivated and on track,” she says. She says she also got to improve her web-development skills, which will come in handy when she starts work at Benchling, a San Francisco-based software company, this summer.

Spring semester Quest UROP projects were funded, in part, by the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab and Eric Schmidt, technical advisor to Alphabet Inc., and his wife, Wendy.

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Search-and-rescue algorithm identifies hidden “traps” in ocean waters

The ocean is a messy and turbulent space, where winds and weather kick up waves in all directions. When an object or person goes missing at sea, the complex, constantly changing conditions of the ocean can confound and delay critical search-and-rescue operations.

Now researchers at MIT, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), and Virginia Tech have developed a technique that they hope will help first responders quickly zero in on regions of the sea where missing objects or people are likely to be.

The technique is a new algorithm that analyzes ocean conditions such as the strength and direction of ocean currents, surface winds, and waves , and identifies in real-time the most attracting regions of the ocean where floating objects are likely to converge.

The team demonstrated the technique in several field experiments in which they deployed drifters and human-shaped manikins in various locations in the ocean. They found that over the course of a few hours, the objects migrated to the regions that the algorithm predicted would be strongly attracting, based on the present ocean conditions.

The algorithm can be applied to existing models of ocean conditions in a way that allows rescue teams to quickly uncover hidden “traps” where the ocean may be steering missing people at a given time.

“This new tool we’ve provided can be run on various models to see where these traps are predicted to be, and thus the most likely locations for a stranded vessel or missing person,” says Thomas Peacock, professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. “This method uses data in a way that it hasn’t been used before, so it provides first responders with a new perspective.”

Peacock and Pierre Lermusiaux, also a professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, who oversaw the project, and their colleagues report their results in a study published today in the journal Nature Communications. Their coauthors are lead author Mattia Serra and corresponding author George Haller of ETH Zurich, Irina Rypina and Anthony Kirincich of WHOI, Shane Ross of Virginia Tech, Arthur Allen of the U.S. Coast Guard, and Pratik Sathe of the University of California at Los Angeles.

Hidden traps

Today’s search-and-rescue operations combine weather forecasts with models of both ocean dynamics and the ways in which objects can drift through the ocean, to map out a search plan, or regions where teams should concentrate their search.

But the ocean is a complicated space of unsteady, ever-changing flow patterns. Coupled with the fact that a missing person has likely been continuously floating through this unsteady flow field for some time, Peacock and his colleagues say that significant errors can accumulate in predicting where to look first, when using a simple approach that directly predicts the trajectories of a few drifting objects.

Instead, the team developed a method to interpret the ocean’s complex flows using advanced, data-driven ocean modeling and prediction systems. They used a novel “Eulerian” approach, in contrast to more commonly used “Lagrangian” approaches — mathematical techniques that involve integrating snapshots of the ocean velocity due to waves and currents to slowly generate an uncertain trajectory for where a missing person or object may have been carried.

The new Eulerian approach uses the most reliable velocity forecast snapshots, close to the point where a missing person or object was last seen, and quickly uncovers the most attracting regions of the ocean at a given time. These Eulerian predictions are then continuously updated when the next batch of updated velocity information becomes available.

The team has named their approach TRAPS, for its goal of identifying TRansient Attracting Profiles, or short-lived regions where water may converge and be likely to pull objects or people. The method is based on a recent mathematical theory,

developed by Serra and Haller at ETH Zurich, to uncover hidden attracting structures in highly unsteady flow data.

“We were a bit skeptical whether a mathematical theory like this would work out on a ship, in real time,” Haller says. “We were all pleasantly surprised to see how well it repeatedly did.”

“We can think of these ‘traps’ as moving magnets, attracting a set of coins thrown on a table. The Lagrangian trajectories of coins are very uncertain, yet the strongest Eulerian magnets predict the coin positions over short times,” Serra says.

“The key thing is, the traps may not have any signature in the ocean current field,” Peacock adds. “If you do this processing for the traps, they might pop up in very different places from where you’re seeing the ocean current projecting where you might go. So you have to do this other level of processing to pull out these structures. They’re not immediately visible.”

Out at sea

Led by WHOI sea-going experts, the researchers tested the TRAPS approach in several experiments out at sea. “As with any new theoretical technique, it is important to test how well it works in the real ocean,” Rypina says.

In 2017 and 2018, the team sailed a small research vessel several hours out off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, where they deployed at various locations, an array of small round buoys, and manikins.

“These objects tend to travel differently relative to the ocean because different shapes feel the wind and currents differently,” Peacock says. “Even so, the traps are so strongly attracting and robust to uncertainties that they should overcome these differences and pull everything onto them.”

The team ran their modeling and prediction systems, forecasting the ocean’s behavior and currents, and used the TRAPS algorithm to map out strongly attracting regions over the course of the experiment. The researchers let the objects drift freely with the currents for a few hours, and recorded their positions via GPS trackers, before retrieving the objects at the end of the day.

“With the GPS trackers, we could see where everything was going, in real-time,” Peacock says. “So we laid out this initial, widespread pattern of the drifters, and saw that, in the end, they converged on these traps.”

The researchers are planning to share the TRAPS method with first responders such as the U.S. Coast Guard, as a way to speed up search-and-rescue algorithms, and potentially save many more people lost at sea.

“People like Coast Guard are constantly running simulations and models of what the ocean currents are doing at any particular time and they’re updating them with the best data that inform that model,” Peacock says. “Using this method, they can have knowledge right now of where the traps currently are, with the data they have available. So if there’s an accident in the last hour, they can immediately look and see where the sea traps are. That’s important for when there’s a limited time window in which they have to respond, in hopes of a successful outcome.”

This research was primarily funded by the National Science Foundation’s Hazards SEES program, with additional support from the Office of Naval Research and the German National Science Foundation.

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