An antidote to “fast fashion”

In today’s world of fast fashion, retailers sell only a fraction of their inventory, and consumers keep their clothes for about half as long as they did 15 years ago. As a result, the clothing industry has become associated with swelling greenhouse gas emissions and wasteful practices.

The startup Armoire is addressing these issues with a clothing rental service designed to increase the utilization of clothes and save customers time. The service is based on machine-learning algorithms that use feedback from users to make better predictions about what they’ll wear.

Customers pay a flat monthly price to get access to a range of high-end styles. Each time they log into Armoire, they get a personalized list of items to choose from. When they don’t want the clothing anymore, they return it to be used by someone else.

“Our whole goal is to help clothes achieve end of life with a customer rather than at the back of your closet or ending up in a landfill,” Armoire co-founder and CEO Ambika Singh MBA ’16 says. “The metric we look at is the utilization of our clothes, and, amazingly, 95 percent of the things we own have been rented — unlike a normal retailer who might sell 35 percent of what they bring in at the beginning of the season.”

The company says its service is tailored toward busy women who don’t have time to browse cluttered clothing aisles or endless webpages for new outfits.

According to Singh, Armoire has grown 300 to 500 percent a year since its founding in 2016. The company now has thousands of customers across the U.S.

“A typical customer response after a while is they feel really happy when they look at their closet instead of overwhelmed,” Singh says. “It’s fun to have this asset-light way of living.”

Leaning on MIT’s community

Singh came to MIT in 2014 with plans to start a company. She had previously spent seven years working in the tech industry, first with Microsoft then as an early hire at two startups.

She says the first thing that struck her about MIT was the integration between its business and engineering schools. The second was how supportive MIT’s community of professors and students were. She quickly took advantage of both attributes.

Singh spoke at length with professors about the potential for machine-learning algorithms to provide personalized recommendations and leaned on classmates for early idea validation and testing.

In fact, when Singh started Armoire, classmates used it as a case study for marketing and analytics research projects. Others became early customers. Singh jokes that by the time she graduated, half of her Sloan class had touched Armoire in some way.

Singh also worked with various entrepreneurial organizations at MIT, receiving support from the MIT Sandbox Innovation Fund and participating in the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship’s delta v summer accelerator.

Singh remembers showing up on the first day of delta v with huge racks of clothes and seeing the small desks each team was given as workspace. Fortunately, someone found a nearby conference room with a closet.

During delta v, Singh and her team bought inventory, got the clothes shipped to the Trust Center, packaged the items, and finally delivered them around campus or to the post office by scooter.

In the fall of 2016, Singh was joined by Armoire co-founder Zachary Owen PhD ’18, who helped build the company’s recommendation systems but is no longer with Armoire.

Armoire’s core algorithm is something called a collaborative filter, which makes predictions about user preferences based on data collected on many other users. Such filters work on the assumption that if two people have similar tastes around one item, they share preferences on others. Armoire’s algorithms also make use of dozens of labels the company manually enters for each item around things like color, fit, and seasonality.

At the heart of Armoire is the idea that a clothing rental company can gather more data about customer preferences than a company that sells clothing to customers once. That data can then be used to deliver better service.

A new model for fashion

Armoire offers customers three tiers of service depending on how many clothes they want to keep at one time. Customers can keep their clothes as long as they like. The company curates selections from thousands of top designers and independent labels, with styles for being comfortable at home, attending formal business events, working out, and more.

The Covid-19 pandemic has slowed the company’s growth trajectory, but Singh says it’s also given Armoire’s leadership team a chance to refocus on their existing customers.

“The good thing about the Covid-19 disruptions is they’ve given us a chance to take a step back and focus on the product,” Singh says. “We’ve focused on our existing base, which is good because with subscription it’s always about adding more value to the customers you have.”

Singh is also proud of the culture Armoire has fostered. All of Armoire’s warehouse workers are women or nonbinary, an uncommon breakdown in warehouses. Singh credits Armoire’s leadership team with creating a welcoming work environment, noting there’s been very little turnover in Armoire’s warehouses.

“Some of [our workers] are single moms, and they come with a different set of challenges,” Singh says. “Most warehouses don’t allow people to carry their phone because they’re worried about employees slacking off. If you’re a single mom, that makes the job impractical because you can’t be walking around without your phone and then find out something happened to your kid.”

Ultimately, Singh credits many companies with trying to innovate in the fashion industry, citing companies helping to clean up clothing production and increase recycling.

For Armoire, though, meaningful impact will continue to come from helping customers cut down on waste.

“We don’t get 95 percent of our inventory rented because I’m so good at picking out clothes,” Singh says. “We do it because we took all the data our customers gave us and built a model that helped us understand what we should be buying. It shows the capital efficiency of the business, it shows we make good on our sustainability desire, and when I look forward, it’s about what kind of innovations we can achieve that help us better serve our customers and the world.”

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Faculty seed projects grow into pandemic research opportunities

Global partnerships are a fundamental component of research at MIT — even during this time of suspended travel. MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI) supports those connections via MISTI Global Seed Funds (GSF).

GSF enables participating faculty teams to collaborate with international peers, either at MIT or abroad, to develop and launch joint research projects. MISTI GSF is comprised of a general fund open to any country, as well as numerous country, region, or university-specific funds. This year, there are 26 funds across Belgium, Brazil, Chile, China, Colombia, France, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Korea, Mexico, Spain, and the United Kingdom.

“The events of this year have shown exactly how critical it is for our research collaborations to cross international borders,” says Alicia Goldstein-Raun, MISTI assistant director. “The goal of MISTI GSF is to enable our researchers to build lasting collaborations that tackle global problems.”

GSF-funded projects unite teams of faculty and students with international peers, combining their individual strengths to address challenging issues that may have a worldwide impact. Every year, the program gives over $2 million to faculty from every school across the Institute, awarding $20 million to 948 projects since its inception in 2008. Over three-quarters of MIT faculty have submitted at least one MISTI GSF proposal.

Typically, MISTI GSF projects have researchers traveling the globe year-round, with many trips happening during the summer. When Covid-19 spread across the world this spring, it quickly became evident that the GSF projects would be impacted. Consequently, MISTI extended fund availability beyond the typical 20-month window for all current recipients. And while the new GSF cycle typically launches in the spring with a deadline in the fall, MISTI postponed the launch this year to September because of the pandemic. The call for proposals is now open and will close Dec. 14. Applicants will be informed of the results in mid-April 2021.

MISTI seed fund projects often have an impact far beyond their original scope, and a number of MISTI GSF projects have contributed to efforts to combat the pandemic. Hadley Sikes, associate professor of chemical engineering and Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Career Development Professor, translated some of the findings from her funded project to her coronavirus research, developing a rapid Covid-19 test.

“GSF supported two extremely talented students from Tec de Monterrey, Daniela Cavazos-Elizondo and Alejandra Martínez-Dibildox, to come work in my lab over the summer last year. Their research visit resulted in two manuscripts that were finished up for submission to peer-reviewed journals during the academic year. One of the MISTI Mexico students, an undergraduate at the time, is the first author of one,” says Sikes. “We are using what they learned in our paper-based Covid-19 tests now — their contributions are important for enabling manufacturing and scale-up.”

Alex K. Shalek, a core member of the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, an associate professor of chemistry, and an extramural member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, has also leveraged MISTI GSF research to address the pandemic. He and his team are currently looking at how Covid-19 targets cells in the body and have benefited from the jump start they received from their GSF-funded project.

“There are several important considerations [to this research]. A critical one is identifying which host factors the virus uses to infect cells and the cells that express them (and hence are likely targets of infection). This is something that we were able to begin exploring with data in-hand that we had collected thanks, in part, to GSF support,” says Shalek.

“The GSF-supported collaborative work with partners in South Africa, which helped us generate high-resolution single-cell datasets from tuberculosis (TB) infected human lung and HIV-1 infected human gut tissues. This data enabled us to identify cells that express, at the RNA level, ACE2 and TMPRSS2, and thus represent likely viral targets. It also revealed potential associations with co-infections (here, HIV and TB) and provided valuable information pertinent to HIV and TB.”

MISTI GSF projects have had a meaningful impact on the trajectory of faculty research. Many of these collaborations have led to published papers, subsequent grants, and lasting connections between MIT and other leading research institutions. On top of supporting faculty, these funds also provide meaningful educational opportunities for students. The majority of MISTI GSF teams include students from MIT and international collaborators, bolstering both their research portfolios and global experience.

“It's a fantastic way to connect with the global scientific community and establish lasting partnerships and friendships,” says Shalek. “And, it's a wonderful learning experience for your team and collaborators.”

For more information or to apply for MISTI Global Seed Funds, please visit the MISTI website.

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Lincoln Laboratory establishes Biotechnology and Human Systems Division

MIT Lincoln Laboratory has established a new research and development division, the Biotechnology and Human Systems Division. The division will address emerging threats to both national security and humanity. Research and development will encompass advanced technologies and systems for improving chemical and biological defense, human health and performance, and global resilience to climate change, conflict, and disasters.

“We strongly believe that research and development in biology, biomedical systems, biological defense, and human systems is a critically important part of national and global security. The new division will focus on improving human conditions on many fronts," says Eric Evans, Lincoln Laboratory director.

The new division unifies four research groups: Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR) Systems, Counter-Weapons of Mass Destruction Systems, Biological and Chemical Technologies, and Human Health and Performance Systems.

"We are in a historic moment in the country, and it is a historic moment for Lincoln Laboratory to create a new division. The nation and laboratory are faced with several growing security threats, and there is a pressing need to focus our research and development efforts to address these challenges," says Edward Wack, who is head of the division.

The laboratory began its initial work in biotechnology in 1995, through several programs that leveraged expertise in sensors and signal processing for chemical and biological defense systems. Work has since grown to include prototyping systems for protecting high-value facilities and transportation systems, architecting integrated early-warning biodefense systems for the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), and applying artificial intelligence and synthetic biology technologies to accelerate the development of new drugs. In recent years, synthetic biology programs have expanded to include complex metabolic engineering for the production of novel materials and therapeutic molecules. 

“The ability to leverage the laboratory’s deep technical expertise to solve today’s challenges has long laid the foundation for the new division,” says Christina Rudzinski, who is an assistant head of the division and formerly led the Counter-Weapons of Mass Destruction Systems Group.

In recent years, the laboratory has also been growing its work for improving the health and performance of service members, veterans, and civilians. Laboratory researchers have applied decades of expertise in human language technology to understand disorders and injuries of the brain. Other programs have used physiological signals captured with wearable devices to detect heat strain, injury, and infection. The laboratory’s AI and robotics expertise has been leveraged to create prototypes of semi-autonomous medical interventions to help medics save lives on the battlefield and in disaster environments.

The laboratory's transition to disaster response technology extends over the past decade. Its rich history developing sensors and decision-support software translated well to the area of emergency response, leading to the development in 2010 of an emergency communications platform now in use worldwide, and the deployment of its advanced laser detection and ranging imaging system to quickly assess earthquake damage in Haiti. In 2015, the HADR Systems Group was established to build on this work.

Today, the group develops novel sensors, communication tools, and decision-support systems to aid national and global responses to disasters and humanitarian crises. Last year, the group launched its climate change initiative to develop new programs to monitor, predict, and address current and future climate change impacts.

Through these initiatives, the laboratory has come to view its work not only in the context of national security, but also global security.

"Pandemics and climate change can cause instability, and that instability can breed conflict,” says Wack. "It benefits the United States to have a stable world. To the degree that we can, mitigating future pandemics and reducing the impacts of climate change would improve global stability and national security."

In anticipation of the growing importance of these global security issues, the laboratory has been significantly increasing program development, strategic hiring, and investment in biotechnology and human systems research over the past few years. Now, that strategic planning and investment in biotechnology research has come to fruition.

One of the division's initial goals is to continue to build relationships with MIT partners, including the Department of Biological Engineering, the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, and the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, as well as Harvard University and local hospitals such as Massachusetts General Hospital. These collaborators have helped bring the laboratory's sensor technology and algorithms to clinical applications for Covid-19 diagnostics, lung and liver disorders, bone injury, and spinal surgical tools. “We can have a bigger impact by drawing on some of the great expertise on campus and in our Boston medical ecosystem,” says Wack. 

Another goal is to lead the nation in research surrounding the intersection of AI and biology. This research includes developing advanced AI algorithms for analyzing multimodal biological data, prototyping intelligent autonomous systems, and making AI-enabled biotechnology that is ethical and transparent.

“Because of our extensive experience supporting the DoD, the laboratory is in a unique position to translate this cutting-edge research, including that from the commercial sector, into a government and national security context,” says Bill Streilein, principal staff in the Biotechnology and Human System Division. “This means not only addressing typical AI application issues of data collection and curation, model selection and training, and human-machine teaming, but also issues related to traceability, explainability, and fairness.”

Leadership also sees this new division as an opportunity to continue to shape an innovative, diverse, and inclusive culture at the laboratory. They will be emphasizing the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to solving the complex research challenges the division faces. 

“We want help from the rest of the laboratory,” says Jeffrey Palmer, an assistant head of the division who previously led the Human Health and Performance Systems Group. “I think there are many ways that we can help other divisions in their missions, and we absolutely need them for success in ours. These challenges are too big to face without applying the combined capabilities of the entire laboratory.”

The Biotechnology and Human Systems Division joins Lincoln Laboratory's eight other divisions: Advanced Technology; Air, Missile, and Maritime Defense Technology; Communication Systems; Cyber Security and Information Sciences; Engineering; Homeland Protection and Air Traffic Control; ISR and Tactical Systems; and Space Systems and Technology. Lincoln Laboratory is a federally funded research and development center.

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MIT launches Center for Multi-Cellular Engineered Living Systems

The MIT Center for Multi-Cellular Engineered Living Systems (M-CELS), launched in September 2020, takes a new, multidisciplinary approach to designing purpose-driven living systems.

Under the leadership of Roger Kamm, the Cecil and Ida Green Distinguished Professor of Biological and Mechanical Engineering; Linda Griffith, the School of Engineering Teaching Innovation Professor of Biological and Mechanical Engineering; and Ron Weiss, professor of biological engineering and electrical engineering and computer science, the Center for M-CELS held its launch workshop on Sept. 25. Faculty from 12 departments across three schools at MIT participated in this initial community-forming event. The Center for M-CELS is based in the School of Engineering.

“We plan to coalesce a group at MIT with the common goal of understanding the fundamental processes that underlie and determine the form and function of all multicellular systems,” says Kamm. “New opportunities and capabilities stem from a recently gained appreciation of how biological systems emerge through self-assembly, and how we, as engineers and scientists, can guide this process, drawing upon the unique intrinsic capabilities of individual cells.”

Multicellular engineered living systems (M-CELS) are purpose-driven living systems with multiple interacting living components. They are engineered for specific goals or functions, but take emergence into account during the design process, allowing the final system to emerge through natural and non-natural biological processes. M-CELS research is intended to provide a fundamental understanding that enables a quantitative approach bridging between single cells and organs or organisms. The field is still developing, so M-CELS as a field of research is still rapidly expanding.

The Center for M-CELS will focus on government- and industry-funded research related to microphysiological systems and disease modeling, tissue regeneration, non-medical applications of multicellular living systems, biobots, and basic science. This research will likely have uses in pharmaceutical drug development. In addition to research, the center will have education and workforce development components.

“We were thrilled with the energy and enthusiasm among the faculty at the launch workshop in September,” says Weiss. “There were great discussions, informative talks, and lots of excitement about future opportunities.”

The MIT Center for M-CELS grew out of a science and technology center funded by the National Science Foundation called the Center for Emergent Behaviors of Integrated Cellular Systems, which has been headquartered at MIT since 2010, with Georgia Tech and the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign as primary partners.

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3 Questions: Christine Walley on the evolving perception of robots in the US

Christine J. Walley, professor of anthropology at MIT and member of the MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future, explores how robots have often been a symbol for anxiety about artificial intelligence and automation. Walley provides a unique perspective in the recent research brief “Robots as Symbols and Anxiety Over Work Loss.” She highlights the historical context of technology and job displacement and illustrates examples of how other countries approach policies regarding robots, skills, and learning. Here, Walley provides an overview of the brief.

Q: How are robots seen as a symbol when we think about the changing nature of work in the United States? 

A: In the media, there has been a great deal of concern about robots taking people’s jobs, but, as became clear during conversations with robotics experts for MIT’s Task Force on the Work of the Future, the concerns have outstripped what the technologies are at this point actually capable of. For an anthropologist, however, the point is not that people’s concerns are “irrational,” but that robots have become symbolic encapsulations of much broader anxieties about the changing nature of work in the United States. These anxieties are well-founded. In order to put the technology questions into perspective, however, we have to confront more explicitly the dynamics that are creating more precarious forms of employment, particularly for those on the lower end of the economic spectrum, who are most vulnerable to displacement by AI and automation.

Q: What can history and anthropology teach us about job displacement and technology and how this affects current anxiety about AI and automation today?

A: First, we have to remember that technologies are inherently social. How and why they get created or used depends, of course, on what people or corporations want to do with them and what legal, cultural, and institutional frameworks allow or encourage. From the point of view of the companies, they can be used either to complement what workers do in order to increase productivity or be used to displace workers as a cost-cutting measure. There is a need for policies that encourage the former.

My own research uses both history and ethnography to study former industrial communities in the United States. In the late 19th century, mechanization was used in many industries to displace skilled workers, who were more likely to be unionized and have higher wages. Our recent era has had a strong emphasis on shareholder value and what management scholar David Weil calls “the fissured workplace” — settings in which previously in-house work gets externalized through subcontracting and other non-standard work arrangements. Consequently, there is again a strong tendency to view workers primarily as costs to be eliminated. So, there is good reason for people to be anxious. However, we have to keep in mind that these are primarily political and social questions that need to be addressed, rather than anything inevitable about the technology itself.

Earlier ethnographies of industrial workplaces found that even with dangerous and repetitive jobs, workers often managed to find ways to take pride in their work and make those jobs meaningful, often through social relationships forged with co-workers. Ethnographies of deindustrialization have also shown how devastating the effects of job loss can be, including long-term transgenerational or cumulative effects on families and entire regions. These effects are found across ethnic and racial groups, with those of color particularly hard hit. The upshot is two-fold. First, we have to be aware of socially and politically destabilizing long-term effects of job loss. There is a need for policies that are better at minimizing this kind of displacement for emergent forms of automation and AI than what we saw with early rounds of deindustrialization in the 1980s and 1990s — particularly since the new jobs being created due to technological innovation won’t necessarily go to those who are losing their jobs. And, second, we need to be thinking not only about numbers of jobs, but how emergent technologies influence workplace sociality and what makes labor meaningful to workers — realities that are crucial to creating a more vibrant future economy that works for ordinary people, and not just Wall Street and corporations.

Q: What are some of the key takeaways, including policies, that the United States can learn from other countries in the way they think about technology, skills, and learning?

A: Not everyone in the world is as afraid of job displacement by robots or automation as workers are in the United States. This is not surprising, given that among wealthier countries the United States is an outlier in terms of its lack of universal health-care coverage and often in terms of other benefits and protections. Since health-care coverage in the U.S. is often provided through employers, it makes the possibility of being displaced by robots or automation that much more anxiety-provoking (just as it puts companies that provide health care at a disadvantage by saddling them with rising costs, contributing to the desire to save money by replacing workers with automation). In addition, the U.S. public school system is based on local taxes and is highly inequitable along lines of race and class, with relatively little spent on job retraining or vocational education in comparison to many European countries. Given employers’ need for more educated workers and given rapid technological change and job turnover, this puts many Americans at a strong disadvantage. It’s not surprising that we’re seeing declining social mobility rates in the United States in comparison to many other wealthy countries.

Policy differences make a substantial difference in how technologies are taken up and the impact they have, or will have, on workers. Some European countries, like Germany and Sweden, have policies in which workers select representatives who participate in decision-making on shop floors or even on management boards, increasing worker input into how new technologies will be used. Some countries, particularly Nordic ones, have also made social benefits more flexible, just as corporations have become more flexible, and are emphasizing continuing education and job retraining as technological transformation creates more job turnover. Although we have seen economic inequality on the rise in many parts of the world, it’s been particularly severe in the U.S. — and emergent technologies are poised to contribute to that. So, it is key for the U.S. to look seriously at what policies are working better in other countries and what we might learn from them.

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Resolute anchors amid adversity

Graduate students credit MIT associate professors Anna Mikusheva and Kerri Cahoy for their uplifting and fierce support, which buttresses them during the trials of the PhD process. The faculty members have been honored as “Committed to Caring” (C2C) for their compassion and staunch advocacy for graduate advisees. They steadfastly guide students in developing research capabilities and launching careers.

Anna Mikusheva: respect first

Anna Mikusheva is an associate professor in the Department of Economics. As an econometrician, Mikusheva's research focuses on improving the reliability of estimation techniques that economists use. In particular, she develops new methods of statistical estimation and inferences. These methods work robustly even when the data have a low signal-to-noise ratio with regard to structural economic models.

Mikusheva is a past recipient of the Elaine Bennett Research Prize, which recognizes outstanding research in economics by a woman at the beginning of her career. She holds PhDs from both Harvard and Moscow State universities.

Dedicating time

Students attest to Mikusheva’s remarkable generosity with meetings and mentorship. One student mentions Mikusheva devoting considerable time and energy to preparing them for the job market. “She went with me from the place where I could not combine two sentences to a coherent 30-page draft. She does that [for] everyone who asks her for help.”

In preparing students for an academic lifestyle, she is also is committed to accurately conveying to her students what to expect. Mikusheva writes, “it is crucial to share the challenges and questions I am facing in my academic life … with students, as they tend to put a lot of pressure on themselves to be perfect or do exceptionally well.”

Further, Mikusheva helps explicate norms about the field to those who may face obstacles. According to a nominator, Mikusheva “demonstrates how women can excel in this male-dominated field … [while being] honest about the challenges [women] face.” In particular, Mikusheva prepares students for “delicate questions” they may encounter during job searches. Providing informal advising about the system of academia is a C2C Mentoring Guidepost.

Confidence in student capabilities

Mikusheva has a deep regard for her students, describing them as “wicked smart … very, very talented.” She acknowledges their expertise and “trust[s] their judgment,” according to her nominators. This comes through clearly to students. They mention feeling validated and having renewed energy to pursue their research based on Mikusheva’s support.  

Mikusheva is keen to advance student ideas. She writes, “I prioritize independence and creativity.” Her emphasis is on positive feedback, finding students are remarkably capable, though often lack confidence. “It’s important to have a trusting mentor who believes in you,” she says.

Empathetic about the difficulties of working in isolation during the Covid-19 pandemic, Mikusheva habitually reaches out to students. She recognizes the difficulty of maintaining focus and connection. As a result, Mikusheva thinks it is incumbent on advisors to “be proactive” in connecting with students and meeting regularly. She opines, “checking in about how life goes is very valuable and maintains a positive relationship.”

Kerri Cahoy: launching kindness

Cahoy is an associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics, with a joint appointment in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences. She leads the Space Telecommunications, Astronomy, and Radiation (STAR) Laboratory.

The STAR lab develops satellite instruments and technologies for applications such as observing weather systems on Earth, imaging exoplanets, optical communication, and understanding the effects of space radiation. The lab’s research often involves technology demonstrations on shoebox-sized satellites called CubeSats.

Profound warmth

In the words of one of her nominators, Cahoy “launches more space missions than any other AeroAstro professor, yet remembers the needs of all her graduate students,” which have included such challenges as mental blocks around research, deviated septum surgeries, engagements, housing issues, miscarriages, infertility struggles, and many more. Nominators emphasize the manifold ways Cahoy uplifts her students.

Cahoy demonstrates remarkable compassion when students are struggling. On occasion, Cahoy has encouraged international students to visit home in particularly wearing times. In one case, Cahoy even funded a student’s trip home after their father suffered a serious car accident.

One nominator remarks on support at a particularly vulnerable moment. The student had been “hiding her pregnancy because of potential negative reactions” from male colleagues. Cahoy guided the student through her parental leave options, “what the first few months [would] be like … and even threw … a surprise baby shower.”

Achieving balance

Transparency matters to Cahoy. She emphasizes, “I don’t try to hide that I’m a real person with conflicting priorities.” In doing so, Cahoy provides a model for how to balance work and life priorities, a C2C Mentoring Guidepost. When a student is overwhelmed, she works with them to redistribute and lower their workload, according to nominators.

In the midst of Covid-19, Cahoy works with students to build resilience and is empathetic around the stress they are experiencing. Cahoy emphasizes “celebrating what we can get done and not dwelling on what has to go on the back burner” as well as trying to focus on smaller, more manageable tasks.  

Nominators describe Cahoy as a “staunch advocate.” She devotes considerable time and attention to helping students network to advance their research and careers, recommending them for awards and opportunities, and encouraging students interested in industry to take summer internships.

Cahoy also speaks of her appreciation for neurodiversity, recognizing people’s varying needs and talents. She writes, “truly there are an infinite number of possible combinations of skills that individuals have and different ways that we communicate and process.” With the wealth of talent and the pace of research efforts at MIT, many “get saturated and [do] not have or maintain the buffers we need to appreciate different people's capabilities and perspectives.”

To that end, Cahoy advises that each person cherish interactions across neurodiverse boundaries.

Committed to caring for MIT graduate students

The Committed to Caring program is an initiative of the Office of Graduate Education and contributes to its mission of making graduate education at MIT “empowering, exciting, holistic, and transformative.”

Since 2014, C2C has invited graduate students from across MIT’s campus to nominate professors whom they believe to be outstanding mentors. Selection criteria for the honor include the scope and reach of advisor impact on graduate students’ experiences, excellence in scholarship, and demonstrated commitment to diversity and inclusion.

The most recent outgrowth in 2019 took the form of a Faculty Peer Mentorship Program, in which C2C faculty act as peer mentors to incoming MIT professors. The program provides one-to-one matches with the goal of fostering strong mentorship practices and providing a network of support.  

By recognizing the human element of graduate education, C2C seeks to encourage excellent advising and mentorship across MIT’s campus.

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Imaging method reveals a “symphony of cellular activities”

Within a single cell, thousands of molecules, such as proteins, ions, and other signaling molecules, work together to perform all kinds of functions — absorbing nutrients, storing memories, and differentiating into specific tissues, among many others.

Deciphering these molecules, and all of their interactions, is a monumental task. Over the past 20 years, scientists have developed fluorescent reporters they can use to read out the dynamics of individual molecules within cells. However, typically only one or two such signals can be observed at a time, because a microscope cannot distinguish between many fluorescent colors.

MIT researchers have now developed a way to image up to five different molecule types at a time, by measuring each signal from random, distinct locations throughout a cell. This approach could allow scientists to learn much more about the complex signaling networks that control most cell functions, says Edward Boyden, the Y. Eva Tan Professor in Neurotechnology and a professor of biological engineering, media arts and sciences, and brain and cognitive sciences at MIT.

“There are thousands of molecules encoded by the genome, and they’re interacting in ways that we don’t understand. Only by watching them at the same time can we understand their relationships,” says Boyden, who is also a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research and Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.

In a new study, Boyden and his colleagues used this technique to identify two populations of neurons that respond to calcium signals in different ways, which may influence how they encode long-term memories, the researchers say.

Boyden is the senior author of the study, which appears today in Cell. The paper’s lead authors are MIT postdoc Changyang Linghu and graduate student Shannon Johnson.

Fluorescent clusters

To make molecular activity visible within a cell, scientists typically create reporters by fusing a protein that senses a target molecule to a protein that glows. “This is similar to how a smoke detector will sense smoke and then flash a light,” says Johnson, who is also a fellow in the Yang-Tan Center for Molecular Therapeutics. The most commonly used glowing protein is green fluorescent protein (GFP), which is based on a molecule originally found in a fluorescent jellyfish.

“Typically a biologist can see one or two colors at the same time on a microscope, and many of the reporters out there are green, because they’re based on the green fluorescent protein,” Boyden says. “What has been lacking until now is the ability to see more than a couple of these signals at once.”

“Just like listening to the sound of a single instrument from an orchestra is far from enough to fully appreciate a symphony,” Linghu says, “by enabling observations of multiple cellular signals at the same time, our technology will help us understand the ‘symphony’ of cellular activities.”

To boost the number of signals they could see, the researchers set out to identify signals by location instead of by color. They modified existing reporters to cause them to accumulate in clusters at different locations within a cell. They did this by adding two small peptides to each reporter, which helped the reporters form distinct clusters within cells.

“It’s like having reporter X be tethered to a LEGO brick, and reporter Z tethered to a K’NEX piece — only LEGO bricks will snap to other LEGO bricks, causing only reporter X to be clustered with more of reporter X,” Johnson says.

With this technique, each cell ends up with hundreds of clusters of fluorescent reporters. After measuring the activity of each cluster under a microscope, based on the changing fluorescence, the researchers can identify which molecule was being measured in each cluster by preserving the cell and staining for peptide tags that are unique to each reporter.  The peptide tags are invisible in the live cell, but they can be stained and seen after the live imaging is done. This allows the researchers to distinguish signals for different molecules even though they may all be fluorescing the same color in the live cell.

Using this approach, the researchers showed that they could see five different molecular signals in a single cell. To demonstrate the potential usefulness of this strategy, they measured the activities of three molecules in parallel — calcium, cyclic AMP, and protein kinase A (PKA). These molecules form a signaling network that is involved with many different cellular functions throughout the body. In neurons, it plays an important role in translating a short-term input (from upstream neurons) into long-term changes such as strengthening the connections between neurons — a process that is necessary for learning and forming new memories.

Applying this imaging technique to pyramidal neurons in the hippocampus, the researchers identified two novel subpopulations with different calcium signaling dynamics. One population showed slow calcium responses. In the other population, neurons had faster calcium responses. The latter population had larger PKA responses. The researchers believe this heightened response may help sustain long-lasting changes in the neurons.

Imaging signaling networks

The researchers now plan to try this approach in living animals so they can study how signaling network activities relate to behavior, and also to expand it to other types of cells, such as immune cells. This technique could also be useful for comparing signaling network patterns between cells from healthy and diseased tissue.

In this paper, the researchers showed they could record five different molecular signals at once, and by modifying their existing strategy, they believe they could get up to 16. With additional work, that number could reach into the hundreds, they say.

“That really might help crack open some of these tough questions about how the parts of a cell work together,” Boyden says. “One might imagine an era when we can watch everything going on in a living cell, or at least the part involved with learning, or with disease, or with the treatment of a disease.”

The research was funded by the Friends of the McGovern Institute Fellowship; the J. Douglas Tan Fellowship; Lisa Yang; the Yang-Tan Center for Molecular Therapeutics; John Doerr; the Open Philanthropy Project; the HHMI-Simons Faculty Scholars Program; the Human Frontier Science Program; the U.S. Army Research Laboratory; the MIT Media Lab; the Picower Institute Innovation Fund; the National Institutes of Health, including an NIH Director’s Pioneer Award; and the National Science Foundation.

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