The MIT Press breaks new ground with STEM-themed young-adult graphic fiction

With one of its latest publications, the MIT Press is breaking new ground — and reaching out to new audiences.

“The Curie Society” is a STEM-themed action-adventure graphic novel for young adults, the first publication in this genre in the press's nearly 60-year history.

“You would be forgiven if you didn’t expect to see this book come from an academic publisher,” says Jermey Matthews, acquisitions editor at the MIT Press. “The MIT Press has done fiction before. We publish STEM extensively. And we even recently released two well-received graphic books: 'The Dialogues: Conversations about the Nature of the Universe' and 'A Brief History of Feminism.' Still, publishing a novel for a young adult audience is breaking new ground.” 

Created by Heather Einhorn, Adam Staffaroni, Janet Harvey, and Sonia Liao, “The Curie Society” follows a team of young women recruited by an elite secret society with the mission of supporting the most brilliant female scientists, engineers, and technologists in the world.

“The Curie Society” introduces an entertaining, empowering media universe for fans of all ages, genders, and identities who love a spy thriller. The heroines of the Curie Society use their smarts, gumption, and cutting-edge technology to protect the world from rogue scientists with nefarious plans. Readers can follow recruits Simone, Taj, and Maya as they decipher secret codes, clone extinct animals, develop autonomous robots, and go on high-stakes missions. The science used by the characters in this book is verified and was fact-checked by a real-life society of female-identifying scientists.

The MIT Press views the publication of “The Curie Society” as an important opportunity to engage a new generation of individuals interested in diversity in science and technology.

“Although reaching Gen Z and Millennial fandoms is new territory for us, we are excited about the impact that “The Curie Society” can have on the next, and current, generation of adults,” says Matthews. These young people will be responsible for advancing the push for ethics and equity in STEM.”

Publication of “The Curie Society” was supported, in part, by the MIT Press Fund for Diverse Voices, which aims to increase the press’s publication of books by or about women and other underrepresented people in science and technology.

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Startup improving chemical separations wins MIT $100K competition

In America’s quest to slash greenhouse gas emissions, many have cited the chemical industry as one of the hardest to decarbonize. It’s a significant roadblock: Chemical separation alone is responsible for up to 15 percent of the U.S.’s total energy usage.

Osmoses, a startup trying to dramatically increase the efficiency of chemical separations, got a major boost Thursday when it won the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition. The company has developed a molecular filtration solution containing tiny channels that can be precisely sized to separate even the smallest molecules. The company claims its membranes can form channels that are 1/100,000 the width of a human hair, allowing the separation of molecules that differ in size by a mere fraction of an angstrom — less than the size of an atom.

“This is one of the greatest challenges of the century for our society, but also one of the biggest opportunities for companies that can innovate in this space,” Francesco Maria Benedetti, a postdoc at MIT, said in the winning pitch. The company is also led by PhD candidate Katherine Mizrahi Rodriguez ’17, Zachary P. Smith, the Joseph R. Mares Career Development Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT, and Holden Lai, a postdoc at Penn State University and former researcher in Smith’s lab.

Many chemical separation processes, such as distillation, use huge amounts of energy in the form of heat. Membrane filtration offers a promising alternative form of separation, but Osmoses says most membranes today have poor performance, leading to low adoption rates among chemical plants and higher operating costs.

Osmoses’ membranes come in a module that fits in existing separation systems. The company has tested its lab prototype in industrial-like environments, including in high-pressure, variable temperature conditions. The company says its results show a marked improvement over existing membrane filtration technologies.

“We’ve completely redesigned the materials these membranes are made of, lowering the energy consumption to a minimum and generating unprecedented performance,” Benedetti said.

The company is starting by targeting gas and vapor separations in the traditional and renewable natural gas processing space. Osmoses says by switching to its solution, companies in the market can reduce product loss by 85 percent, generating added fuel that could power 7 million additional homes in the U.S. for a year.

Osmoses also believes it can bring efficiencies to oxygen and nitrogen generation, hydrogen purification, and carbon capture.

The company will use the prize money to purchase equipment and scale its prototype later this year. Next year, it hopes to test an early version of its product with potential customers.

Osmoses’ first customers will be natural gas plants that produce hundreds of millions of standard cubic feet of gas per day. The team believes it can reduce up to 1 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions from each plant of that size.

The MIT $100K is MIT’s largest entrepreneurship competition. It began in 1989 (with a much smaller grand prize value) and is organized by students with support from the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship and the MIT Sloan School of Management. Each team must include at least one current MIT student.

The second place, $25,000 prize went to Mach 9, which is building a suite of tools to help companies locate and analyze underground utilities.

“We’re helping you look at what’s underground right now by creating the Google Maps for subsurface information,” said CEO Alex Baikovitz. “We’re making subsurface mapping as easy as driving a car through the city on a nice summer day — not like right after a Red Sox game.”

Baikovitz says many companies currently rely on painted lines to locate underground utilities, an error-prone solution that leads to billions of dollars in losses.

Mach 9 is developing a digital visualization tool to help utility locators interpret field data and save their results in the cloud for future reference. The solution automatically interprets radar data in real-time without an internet connection. It is also building a complementary tool to simplify ground surveys for large-scale construction projects. The software integrates with commonly used design and mapping tools in the industry.

“We’re creating geospatial postprocessing software that just makes sense and is intuitive,” Baikovitz said. “We create 3-D models of the subsurface environment, where we can overlay ground penetrating radar data for interpretation. We can show a digital twin of utilities identified by the Mach 9 system.”

Mach 9 is already in negotiations with the largest utility locating company in the U.S. and is collecting over 1,000 miles of ground-penetrating radar data from surveying firms. The company has also already acquired over $250,000 worth of mapping equipment to construct a proof of concept. It plans to make its first sales in 2022.

In the future, the Mach 9 team plans to offer underground mapping solutions in agriculture and mining. It estimates subsurface mapping to be a $90 billion industry.

This year’s event was hosted by Carly Chase, a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and Scott Stern, the David Sarnoff Professor of Management and chair of the Technological Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Strategic Management Group at the MIT Sloan School of Management. It also featured an interview with Payal Kadakia ’05, the CEO and founder of exercise scheduling platform ClassPass.

The competition was the culmination of a process that began in the winter with more than 80 applicants from all five of MIT’s schools pitching their ideas. Thursday’s winning teams were two of eight finalists. The other finalist teams were:

Azeki Road, which is building technology solutions to help consumer brands in Africa scale around the world;

Candelytics, an analytics company building solutions to make 3-D data created by technologies like LIDAR sensors more accessible, intelligent, and impactful;

UltraNeuro, which is building a wearable ultrasound transducer to activate damaged nerves and reduce pain caused by a condition called peripheral neuropathy;

Resolute, which is creating a line of natural sunscreens that is suited for people of all skin tones;

Synthera Health, which is developing a testing, analytics, and iron supplement platform to help people maintain optimal iron levels in their blood; and

Volt, which is creating a marketplace for companies to buy and sell printed circuit boards, reducing procurement times and costs.

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Twelve from MIT awarded 2021 Fulbright Fellowships

Twelve MIT student affiliates have won fellowships for the Fulbright 2021-22 grant year. Their host country destinations include Brazil, Iceland, India, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, South Korea, Spain, and Taiwan, where they will conduct research, earn a graduate degree, or teach English.

Sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, the Fulbright U.S. Student Program offers opportunities for American student scholars in over 160 countries. Last fall, Fulbright received a record number of applications, making this the most competitive cycle in the 75-year history of the program.

Jenny Chan is a senior studying mechanical engineering. Growing up in Philadelphia as the child of Vietnamese and Cambodian immigrants gave her an appreciation for how education could be used to uplift others. This led to her joining many activities that would continue to ignite her passion for education, including CodeIt, Global Teaching Labs, Full STEAM Ahead, and DynaMIT. At MIT, Chan also enjoys holding Friday night events with SaveTFP, sailing on the Charles River, and dancing as a member of DanceTroupe. Her Fulbright grant will take her to Taiwan, where she will serve as an English teaching assistant.

Gretchen Eggers ’20 graduated with double majors in brain and cognitive sciences and computer science. As a Fulbright student in Brazil, Eggers will head to the Arts and Artificial Intelligence group at the University of São Paulo to research graffiti, street art, and the design of creative artificial intelligence. With a lifelong passion for painting and the arts, Eggers is excited to spend time with and learn about mural painting from local artists in São Paulo. Upon completing her Fulbright, Eggers plans to pursue a PhD in human-computer interaction.

Miki Hansen is a senior majoring in mechanical engineering. As the winner of the Delft University of Technology’s Industrial Design Engineering Award, she will pursue a MS in integrated product design at TU Delft in the Netherlands. In tandem with her studies, she hopes to conduct research into sustainable product design for a circular economy. At MIT, Hansen was involved in Design for America, Pi Tau Sigma (MechE Honor Society), DanceTroupe, the MissBehavior dance team, and Alpha Chi Omega. After completing Fulbright, Hansen plans on working as a product designer focused on sustainable materials and packaging.

Olivia Wynne Houck is a doctoral student in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture program. She focuses on urban planning in the 20th century, with an interest in the intersections of transportation, economic, and diplomatic policies in Iceland, the United States, and Sweden. She also conducts research on infrastructure in the Arctic. As a Fulbright National Science Foundation Arctic Research Award recipient, Houck will be hosted by the political science department at the University of Iceland, where she will pursue archival research on Route 1, the ring road that encircles Iceland. Houck has also received a fellowship from the American-Scandinavian Foundation. 

Laura Huang is a senior majoring in mechanical engineering. At the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Huang will combine engineering and art to develop an assistive calligraphy robot to better understand human-computer interaction. At MIT, she has done research with the Human Computer Interaction Engineering group in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and has helped run assistive technology workshops in India and Saudi Arabia. Outside of research, Huang creates art, plays with the women's volleyball club, and leads STEM educational outreach through MIT CodeIt and Global Teaching Labs. While in Taiwan, she hopes to continue STEM outreach, explore the culinary scene, and learn calligraphy.

Teis Jorgensen graduates in June with an MS from the Integrated Design and Management program. He is a designer, researcher, and behavioral scientist with seven years’ experience designing products and services with a social mission. His passion is designing games that inspire and challenge players to be the best version of themselves. For his Fulbright research grant in Kerala, India, Teis will interview women about their challenges balancing home and professional responsibilities. His goal is to use these interviews as the inspiration for the design of a board game that shares their stories and ultimately helps remove barriers to female employment.

Meghana Kamineni will graduate this spring with a major in computer science and engineering and a minor in biology. At the University of Oslo in Norway, Kamineni will implement statistical models to understand and predict the impact of vaccinations and other interventions on the spread of Covid-19. At MIT, she pursued interests in computational research for health care through work on the bacterial infection C. difficile in the laboratory of Professor John Guttag. Outside of research, she has been involved with STEM educational outreach for middle school students through dynaMIT and MIT CodeIt, and hopes to continue outreach in Norway. After Fulbright, Kamineni plans to attend medical school.

Andrea Shinyoung Kim will graduate in June with an MS in comparative media studies. Her master's thesis looks at the relation between digital avatars and personhood in social virtual reality, advised by D. Fox Harrell. Her Fulbright research in South Korea will investigate how virtual reality can facilitate cross-cultural learning and live performance art. Kim will observe Korean mask dances and its craft to better inform the design of online virtual worlds. She will collaborate with her hosts at the Seoul Arts Institute and CultureHub. After Fulbright, she plans to pursue a PhD to further explore her interdisciplinary interests and arts praxis.

Kevin Lujan Lee is a PhD candidate in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. In Aotearoa/New Zealand, he will study the transnational processes shaping how low-wage Pacific Islander workers navigate the institutions of labor market regulation. This will comprise one-half of his broader dissertation project — a comparative study of Indigenous Pacific Islanders and low-wage work in 21st-century empires. His research is only made possible by activists in the U.S. immigrant labor movement and global LANDBACK movement, who envision a world beyond labor precarity and Indigenous dispossession. Lee hopes to pursue an academic career to support the work of these movements.

Anjali Nambrath is a senior double majoring in physics and mathematics. She has worked on projects related to nuclear structure, neutrino physics, and dark matter detection at MIT and at two national labs. At MIT, she was president of the Society for Physics Students, a member of the MIT Shakespeare Ensemble, an organizer of HackMIT, and a teacher for the MIT Educational Studies Program. For her Fulbright grant to India, Nambrath will be based at the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research in Mumbai, where she will work on models of neutrino production and interaction in supernovae. After Fulbright, Nambrath will begin graduate school in physics at the University of California at Berkeley. 

Abby Stein will graduate in June with a double major in physics and electrical engineering. At MIT, she researched communication theory in the Research Laboratory of Electronics, and optical network hardware at Lincoln Laboratory. Stein discovered an interest in international research and education through her MISTI experience in Chile, where she studied optics for astronomy, and through teaching engineering workshops in Israel with MIT's Global Teaching Labs. For her Fulbright, Stein will conduct research on quantum optical satellite networks at the Institute of Photonic Sciences in Barcelona, Spain. After completing Fulbright, Stein will head to Stanford University to pursue a PhD in applied physics. 

Tony Terrasa is a senior majoring in mechanical engineering and music. As a Fulbright English teaching assistant in Spain, he will be teaching in Galicia. Previously, Terrasa taught English, math, and physics to secondary school students in Lübeck, Germany as part of the MIT Global Teaching Labs program. He also taught for three years in the English as a Second Language Program for MIT Facilities Department employees. An MIT Emerson Fellow of Jazz Saxophone, he looks forward to listening to and learning about Galician music traditions while sharing some of his own.

MIT students and recent alumni interested in applying to the Fulbright U.S. Student Program should contact Julia Mongo in the Office of Distinguished Fellowships at MIT Career Advising and Professional Development. Students are also supported in the process by the Presidential Committee on Distinguished Fellowships.

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Astronaut Michael Fincke ’89 offers students out-of-this-world advice

Life was very different in 1989. A trip to the movie theater cost less than $4, Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” was newly released, and the World Wide Web had just been invented.

That year, Michael Fincke, a recent MIT grad who had just completed a BS in aeronautics and astronautics and Earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences, set foot for the first time in Moscow. It was one of the last summers before the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Fincke had seen a poster written in Russian hanging in a hall on campus. “If you could read it, you know what it said and you could show up at the meeting,” he recalls. The poster advertised a new exchange program at the Moscow Aviation Institute, a program Fincke went on to attend.

Now, more than 30 years later, Fincke is a decorated NASA astronaut, and the American with the greatest number of Russian spacewalks –– six. He’s clocked more than a year in orbit on three space flights (and soon, a fourth). He’s earned two NASA distinguished service medals, three NASA spaceflight medals, the International Space Station Leadership Award, and many other recognitions.

In a virtual event hosted jointly by the MIT-Russia Program and the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics on April 20, Fincke had a lively conversation with Piper Sigrest ’18 about his time as a student on campus, his experiences in both Russian and American space missions, and his advice for students interested in pursuing a similar career. Sigrest, an aspiring astronaut, is currently pursuing a PhD in aerospace engineering at the University of Michigan.

The event came a week after another MIT-Russia panel, entitled “Soviet and Russian Space Exploration: Celebrity and Propaganda, 1957-Present,” in which historians Andrew Jenks and Victoria Smolkin discussed with Professor Kate Brown how exploration of the cosmos played a symbolic and political role in the USSR.

“April was a banner month for celebrating Russian space efforts and Russian-American cooperation,” Professor Elizabeth Wood, faculty co-director of the MIT-Russia program, says.

In their conversation, Fincke and Sigrest highlighted the integral role of international collaboration in space exploration, and the importance of MIT’s motto “mens et manus,” Latin for “mind and hand.” They shared their excitement about spaceflight and the Russian language as a bridge to better communication.  

His first model rocket

The United States and the Soviet Union had a long, complicated relationship on the ground and in space. Beginning in 1957 with the Soviet launch of Sputnik, the two nations engaged in an extended “Space Race” that lasted for decades. For the first several years, they launched satellites into orbit and to the moon. Then astronauts entered the scene.

On April 12, 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin launched into orbit from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in modern-day Kazakhstan. Only a few weeks later, on May 5, 1961, Alan Shepard became the first American in space. In 1969, the United States landed the first humans on the moon.

When he was about 10 years old, in the mid-1970s, Fincke launched his first model rocket while at summer camp –– a model Russian Vostok, an early rocket designed for human spaceflight. “Thirty-something years later, I was in the great big brother of the Vostok: the Soyuz launch craft,” Fincke said.

The Soviet Union’s achievements in space motivated Fincke to study Russian as a foreign language at MIT, and to study in Moscow after his graduation in 1989. In his MIT years, he studied in the Foreign Languages and Literatures section within the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. Today, that program is called Global Languages and has a program in Russian language and literature headed by Maria Khotimsky and Wood.

Fincke’s career takes flight

In the early 1990s, the United States and Russia became partners in space, Fincke said.

After his time in Moscow, Fincke went on to earn a master's degree in aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford University and a master's in physics from the University of Houston at Clearlake, and to become a top graduate of the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School. Those experiences, in tandem with his proficiency in the Russian language, made him a strong candidate when he applied and was accepted to NASA in 1996.

“The more you know, the more opportunity you have,” Fincke said. “Because I could speak Russian, and there was an opportunity to go to the Soviet Union and be an exchange student, it opened the door for NASA.”

Fincke was involved in designing and launching the International Space Station (ISS) in the late 1990s and early 2000s –– a feat which required a high level of collaboration between Russian and American astronauts. The ISS has since hosted 243 people from 19 countries. Because he could speak and understand Russian, Fincke next went to Star City near Moscow, where Russian cosmonauts train.

Then, the shocking 2003 Columbia disaster led to a pause in the American space shuttle program. “My friends were on board, my classmates. I still miss them terribly,” Fincke said. “We Americans were without a way to get to space. Our Russian partners stepped up as true partners and they offered us rides on Soyuz.”

In both 2004 and 2009, Fincke rode aboard the Soyuz rockets to get to the ISS. His Russian language skills qualified him to serve as co-pilot.

“When I was growing up and when I was at the Institute, there was no way that Americans and Soviets were ever going to get along and do these things,” Fincke said. “Now we’re great partners in space.”

Infinity and beyond

Fincke has worked with NASA’s commercial crew program on two spacecraft, the SpaceX Crew Dragon and the Boeing CST-100 Starliner. He will be serving as joint operations commander on the first crewed experimental test flight of the Starliner, scheduled for later this year.

Fincke said his career has taught him the importance of collaboration across barriers.

“It's all teamwork. This idea of a scientist or engineer working in her laboratory late at night and making all the discoveries is a fallacy,” Fincke said. “Spaceflight is definitely the world's biggest team sport.”

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Jeremy Kepner named SIAM Fellow

Jeremy Kepner, a Lincoln Laboratory Fellow in the Cyber Security and Information Sciences Division and a research affiliate of the MIT Department of Mathematics, was named to the 2021 class of fellows of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). The fellow designation honors SIAM members who have made outstanding contributions to the 17 mathematics-related research areas that SIAM promotes through its publications, conferences, and community of scientists. Kepner was recognized for "contributions to interactive parallel computing, matrix-based graph algorithms, green supercomputing, and big data."

Since joining Lincoln Laboratory in 1998, Kepner has worked to expand the capabilities of computing at the laboratory and throughout the computing community. He has published broadly, served on technical committees of national conferences, and contributed to regional efforts to provide access to supercomputing.

"Jeremy has had two decades of contributing to the important field of high performance computing, including both supercomputers and embedded systems. He has also made a seminal impact to supercomputer system research. He invented a unique way to do signal processing on sparse data, critically important for parsing through social networks and leading to more efficient use of parallel computing environments," says David Martinez, now a Lincoln Laboratory fellow and previously a division head who hired and then worked with Kepner for many years.

At Lincoln Laboratory, Kepner originally led the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) High Performance Embedded Computing Software Initiative that created the Vector, Signal and Image Processing Library standard that many DoD sensor systems have utilized. In 1999, he invented the MatlabMPI software and in 2001 was the architect of pMatlab (Parallel Matlab Toolbox) that has been used by thousands of Lincoln Laboratory staff and scientists and engineers worldwide. In 2011, the Parallel Vector Tile Optimizing Library (PVTOL), developed under Kepner's direction, won an R&D 100 Award.

"Jeremy has been a world leader in moving the state of high performance computing forward for the past two decades," says Stephen Rejto, head of Lincoln Laboratory's Cyber Security and Information Sciences Division. "His vision and drive have been invaluable to the laboratory’s mission."

Kepner led a consortium to pioneer the Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing Center, the world's largest and, because of its use of hydropower, “greenest" open research data center, which is enabling a dramatic increase in MIT's computing capabilities while reducing its CO₂ footprint. He led the establishment of the current Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center, which boasts New England’s most powerful supercomputer. In 2019, he helped found the U.S. Air Force-MIT AI Accelerator, which leverages the expertise and resources of MIT and the Air Force to advance research in artificial intelligence.

"These individual honors are a recognition of the achievements of our entire Lincoln team to whom I am eternally indebted," Kepner says.

Kepner's recent work has been in graph analytics and big data. He created a novel database management language and schema (Dynamic Distributed Dimensional Data Model, or D4M), which is widely used in both Lincoln Laboratory and government big data systems.

His publications range across many fields — data mining, databases, high performance computing, graph algorithms, cybersecurity, visualization, cloud computing, random matrix theory, abstract algebra, and bioinformatics. Among his works are two SIAM bestselling books, "Parallel MATLAB for Multicore and Multinode Computers" and "Graph Algorithms in the Language of Linear Algebra." In 2018, he and coauthor Hayden Jananthan published "Mathematics of Big Data" as one of the books in the MIT Lincoln Laboratory series put out by MIT Press.

Kepner, who joined SIAM during his graduate days at Princeton University, has not only published books and articles through SIAM but also been involved with the SIAM community's activities. He has served as vice chair of the SIAM International Conference on Data Mining; advises a SIAM student section; and enlisted SIAM's affiliation with the High Performance Extreme (originally Embedded) Computing (HPEC) conference, in which he has had "an instrumental role in bringing together the high performance embedded computing community and which under his leadership became an IEEE conference in 2012," according to Martinez, who founded the Lincoln Laboratory-hosted HPEC conference in 1997.

Kepner is the first Lincoln Laboratory researcher to attain the rank of SIAM Fellow and the ninth from MIT.

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Inhabiting 21st-century science fiction

In March, literary heavyweights Kazuo Ishiguro and Neil Gaiman — a Nobel laureate, and the beloved author of "American Gods," "Sandman," and "Good Omens," respectively — convened at an independent bookstore event to discuss genre and science fiction.

They arrived at twin conclusions: one, that rigid genre distinctions between literary works promote an unproductive and false hierarchy of worth, and two, that the 21st century is a very tricky time to attempt to define “science fiction” at all. Gaiman said that he increasingly feels genre “slippage where science fiction is concerned” because, he says, “the world has become science fiction.” The hacking exploits in William Gibson’s novel "Neuromancer" or the sequencing of an entire genome overnight no longer belong to the realm of fantasy.

For MIT students, the permeable relationship between reality and science fiction is often familiar territory. In their labs and research projects, students and faculty experience personally the process by which imaginative ideas turn into new techniques, possibilities, medicines, tools, and technologies. (And they learn that many such new realities actually have had their origins in speculative literature.)

Students in the MIT Literature course 21L.434 (21st Century Science Fiction), taught by Assistant Professor Laura Finch, also discover that science fiction is a powerful, useful way to think about and understand the world we currently inhabit. The course, which deals with the imaginative flexibility and speculative potential in science fiction and fantasy, explores how we could inhabit worlds seen through lenses of sci-fi books such as N.K. Jemison’s “The Fifth Season,” Jeff VanderMeer’s “Annihilation,” and China Miéville’s “The City and The City” — all books explored in the class.

Seeing the world in new ways

Arriving at MIT, Finch knew contemporary science fiction would be natural fit for MIT education — which combines perspectives across a wide range of science, technology, humanities, arts, and social science fields. “All literature classes are about seeing the world a different way,” Finch says, “whether it’s Shakespeare or Milton or realist novels.” The 21st-century science fiction course explores a range of worldviews that are free of conventional boundaries.  As students consider seemingly fantastical stories, they rise to the challenge of recognizing characteristics, problems, and potentials that exist in their own societies.

“I was immediately drawn to the opportunity to discuss issues of race, gender, and colonialism through a range of speculative fiction,” says Meriam Soltan, a master's student in architecture studies, recalling what attracted her to the class. “Right from the start, Professor Finch framed the genre in a way that really spoke to a whole range of social justice issues that we are attempting to navigate today.”

The course has an explicit social justice bent to it: Rather than space operas or extreme-tech science fiction, the focus is on authors who rethink the contemporary moment and its various perils, uncertainties, and injustices; authors who use a future space to re-imagine potentials for the present.

The inspiration for the course grew out of Finch’s sense that a cultural atmosphere of despair and turmoil — especially in American politics — was weighing on college students. She thought that the unbounded imagination and fresh avenues of science fiction would enable students to better see that “the present reality is not here forever — and that we have the power to change things.”

Especially in the face of the pandemic, keystone books like “The Fifth Season” give necessary reminders of possibility and resistance, of human and beyond-human nature working in a subtle alliance for positive change. “This isn’t about utopia,” Finch says. “It’s about pushing back in solidarity against a historical, overarching oppressive power.”

“Sci-fi enables us to world-build a more-just world, outside of the constraints of what is ‘feasible’ in our current political constraints,” says Jocelyn Ting, a materials science and engineering with electrical engineering major. “As an engineer who will help shape our world in the next decades of the climate crisis, it feels vital that I world-build with others, that we listen to each other's thoughts as we dream of a better system together.”   

Beyond the human

Works in the genre of “Indigenous futurism” are specifically pushing back against the settler colonial narrative that Indigenous people belong to the past, and that if an Indigenous person behaves in “contemporary” or “modern” ways they are no longer (so goes the white settler culture critique) being “authentically” Indigenous. Against that background, Indigenous futurism is a way for Indigenous writers, artists, and musicians to counter such violent historicizing. “Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™” by Rebecca Roanhorse opens the course with the question of who gets to shape and share cultural histories, and who gets to consume them — through the lens of futuristic virtual technology in an otherwise-realistic world.

“The City and The City,” for instance, tells the noir-ish detective story in a city that shares the same space with another, separate city. Each minute of each day, the citizens of one city have to consciously un-see the denizens of the other, ignoring smells and sounds that no societal taboos or boundaries can prevent, as each city continues on in its own distinct habits and cultures. It is deeply prohibited to acknowledge the other city or its people, a measure enforced by a terrifying and omnipresent police force called Breach.

The conceit may seem fantastic, until the reader begins to do the difficult work of parsing how this is already the reality in the United States. Experimental architect Olalekan Jeyifous reflects on his own understanding of “The City and The City” in one class reading, especially in regard to gentrification: “Walking up and down the street every day, I see such a complete disconnect between the two communities of the Black folks sitting on the steps chilling, and then newer gentrifying folks spilling out of bars. They may walk into the same bodega, but there’s zero acknowledgment.”
 
Soltan reflects that the critical class discussions relate to her own research in architecture, as the course grapples with “liberating” discussions of urban form, space, and planning. “I’m always interested in how fictions are formalized into the built environment,” she says. “I think the class material and discussions really help reclaim that process. We’re introduced to a whole toolkit of methods that might expand our thinking and make space for other possible futures.”

Such coded, reframed analyses open up fresh perspectives. For instance, in the unit focused on Jeff VanderMeer’s “Annihilation,” students look “beyond the human” to ask how eco-critical narratives push back against continual, capitalistic growth and work to account for the messy and natural processes of our planet. That reading is couched in dense, rich sentences in the fairly short novel — and as they read, the students hone their skills in deciphering those intricacies.    

“I really want students to come out of this class knowing how to do close reading,” says Finch, “because that’s a skill in life that’s so translatable and important — in everything from political discourse and rhetoric to thinking about your relationship to your own mind.”

The course helps students develop fundamental literary skills — from close reading to essay writing to imaginative world-building — all of which serve problem-solvers well. And it does so with a hopeful, imaginative bent, sharing works that ask, even in times of crisis and uncertainty: what can flourish?

Story prepared by MIT SHASS Communications
Editorial and Design Director: Emily Hiestand
Staff Writer: Alison Lanier

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Study: Culture influences mask wearing

Around the world and within the U.S., the percentage of people wearing masks during the Covid-19 pandemic has varied enormously. What explains this? A new study co-authored by an MIT faculty member finds that a public sense of “collectivism” clearly predicts mask usage, adding a cultural and psychological perspective to the issue.

The study uses a series of datasets about mask usage and public attitudes, along with well-established empirical indices of collectivism, to evaluate the impact of those cultural differences on this element of the pandemic response.

“Our data both within the United States and across the world shows that collectivism is a strong and important predictor of whether people in a region wear masks or not,” says Jackson G. Lu, an assistant professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and co-author of a new paper detailing the results.

Collectivism broadly refers to the inclination to prioritize a group’s needs over an individual’s concerns, and social scientists have often worked to measure its presence among different populations. The researchers found a culture of collectivism to be a key driver of mask use even after accounting for many other factors, including political orientation, state policies, the severity of Covid-19 outbreaks, and more.

“In collectivistic cultures, people consider wearing masks not only a responsibility or duty, but also, a symbol of solidarity — that we’re standing together and fighting this pandemic together,” Lu says.

The paper, “Collectivism Predicts Mask Use During COVID-19,” appears today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The authors are Lu, who is the Mitsui Career Development Professor at MIT Sloan; Peter Jin, a research associate at MIT Sloan; and Alexander S. English, a researcher in the Department of Psychology and Behaviorial Sciences at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China.

To conduct the study, the researchers analyzed four datasets. The first, collected in July 2020, was a one-question survey about mask usage in the U.S., collected by The New York Times and research firm Dynata, and including 248,941 Americans across all 3,141 U.S. counties. The second dataset was a survey of 16,737 Americans across all 50 U.S. states about mask usage, from April through September 2020, run by YouGov and the Institute for Global Health Innovation.

Analyzing both datasets, the researchers examined how strongly mask wearing correlated with the measures of collectivism in the 50 U.S. states. A U.S. state’s collectivism can be graded based on survey responses by representative samples of the population.

“Collectivism versus individualism is one of the most established cultural dimensions in psychology,” Lu says.

In analyzing the results, the researchers controlled for a large set of other factors that might influence mask wearing, including the severity of Covid-19 outbreaks in states, government policies, political affiliations across the public, education levels, population density, per-capita income, age, and gender.

They found that a U.S. state’s collectivism rating is a strong and consistent predictor of mask usage no matter what. For example, Hawaii, has the highest collectivism rating in the U.S., and the second-highest level of mask usage (slightly behind Rhode Island). On the other end of the spectrum, a handful of states from the Great Plains and Mountain West have both low collectivism scores and low levels of mask wearing, including Wyoming, South Dakota, Montana, and Kansas.

“The patterns across the two U.S. datasets are so strikingly similar, which made us feel confident of the link between collectivism and mask use,” Lu says.

The researchers also used two global datasets to apply the same method to a set of countries. The first dataset was based on the same 2020 survey conducted by YouGov and the Institute for Global Health Innovation, this time generating data on mask usage from 367,109 people from 29 countries and territories.

The second global dataset is one the MIT researchers developed in collaboration with Facebook, creating a weighted survey on mask use that generated responses from 277,219 participants in 67 countries and territories.

In countries around the world, as in the U.S., the results were the same: Collectivism scores again predict which countries tended to have high levels of mask wearing.

The research also uncovered other factors that influenced mask wearing. For instance, in the U.S., party affiliation was also a strong predictor of mask wearing, with Democrats more likely to wear masks than Republicans.

Lu suggests there are multiple kinds of future research that could stem from the current study. For one thing, the role of collectivism could be studied in other crises, such as wildfires or hurricanes. Beyond that, the authors suggest, it would be important to study whether or not the pandemic itself has affected the sense of collectivism or individualism that has previously been measured in countries and U.S. states. Both of those things could be useful knowledge for public officials and policymakers, whether to curb the current pandemic or save lives in the future.

“Understanding cultural differences not only provides insight into the pandemic, but helps the world prepare for future crises,” Lu says.

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