Study explains why the brain can robustly recognize images, even without color

Even though the human visual system has sophisticated machinery for processing color, the brain has no problem recognizing objects in black-and-white images. A new study from MIT offers a possible explanation for how the brain comes to be so adept at identifying both color and color-degraded images.

Using experimental data and computational modeling, the researchers found evidence suggesting the roots of this ability may lie in development. Early in life, when newborns receive strongly limited color information, the brain is forced to learn to distinguish objects based on their luminance, or intensity of light they emit, rather than their color. Later in life, when the retina and cortex are better equipped to process colors, the brain incorporates color information as well but also maintains its previously acquired ability to recognize images without critical reliance on color cues.

The findings are consistent with previous work showing that initially degraded visual and auditory input can actually be beneficial to the early development of perceptual systems.

“This general idea, that there is something important about the initial limitations that we have in our perceptual system, transcends color vision and visual acuity. Some of the work that our lab has done in the context of audition also suggests that there’s something important about placing limits on the richness of information that the neonatal system is initially exposed to,” says Pawan Sinha, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT and the senior author of the study.

The findings also help to explain why children who are born blind but have their vision restored later in life, through the removal of congenital cataracts, have much more difficulty identifying objects presented in black and white. Those children, who receive rich color input as soon as their sight is restored, may develop an overreliance on color that makes them much less resilient to changes or removal of color information.

MIT postdocs Marin Vogelsang and Lukas Vogelsang, and Project Prakash research scientist Priti Gupta, are the lead authors of the study, which appears today in Science. Sidney Diamond, a retired neurologist who is now an MIT research affiliate, and additional members of the Project Prakash team are also authors of the paper.

Seeing in black and white

The researchers’ exploration of how early experience with color affects later object recognition grew out of a simple observation from a study of children who had their sight restored after being born with congenital cataracts. In 2005, Sinha launched Project Prakash (the Sanskrit word for “light”), an effort in India to identify and treat children with reversible forms of vision loss.

Many of those children suffer from blindness due to dense bilateral cataracts. This condition often goes untreated in India, which has the world’s largest population of blind children, estimated between 200,000 and 700,000.

Children who receive treatment through Project Prakash may also participate in studies of their visual development, many of which have helped scientists learn more about how the brain's organization changes following restoration of sight, how the brain estimates brightness, and other phenomena related to vision.

In this study, Sinha and his colleagues gave children a simple test of object recognition, presenting both color and black-and-white images. For children born with normal sight, converting color images to grayscale had no effect at all on their ability to recognize the depicted object. However, when children who underwent cataract removal were presented with black-and-white images, their performance dropped significantly.

This led the researchers to hypothesize that the nature of visual inputs children are exposed to early in life may play a crucial role in shaping resilience to color changes and the ability to identify objects presented in black-and-white images. In normally sighted newborns, retinal cone cells are not well-developed at birth, resulting in babies having poor visual acuity and poor color vision. Over the first years of life, their vision improves markedly as the cone system develops.

Because the immature visual system receives significantly reduced color information, the researchers hypothesized that during this time, the baby brain is forced to gain proficiency at recognizing images with reduced color cues. Additionally, they proposed, children who are born with cataracts and have them removed later may learn to rely too much on color cues when identifying objects, because, as they experimentally demonstrated in the paper, with mature retinas, they commence their post-operative journeys with good color vision.

To rigorously test that hypothesis, the researchers used a standard convolutional neural network, AlexNet, as a computational model of vision. They trained the network to recognize objects, giving it different types of input during training. As part of one training regimen, they initially showed the model grayscale images only, then introduced color images later on. This roughly mimics the developmental progression of chromatic enrichment as babies’ eyesight matures over the first years of life.

Another training regimen comprised only color images. This approximates the experience of the Project Prakash children, because they can process full color information as soon as their cataracts are removed.

The researchers found that the developmentally inspired model could accurately recognize objects in either type of image and was also resilient to other color manipulations. However, the Prakash-proxy model trained only on color images did not show good generalization to grayscale or hue-manipulated images.

“What happens is that this Prakash-like model is very good with colored images, but it’s very poor with anything else. When not starting out with initially color-degraded training, these models just don’t generalize, perhaps because of their over-reliance on specific color cues,” Lukas Vogelsang says.

The robust generalization of the developmentally inspired model is not merely a consequence of it having been trained on both color and grayscale images; the temporal ordering of these images makes a big difference. Another object-recognition model that was trained on color images first, followed by grayscale images, did not do as well at identifying black-and-white objects.

“It’s not just the steps of the developmental choreography that are important, but also the order in which they are played out,” Sinha says.

The advantages of limited sensory input

By analyzing the internal organization of the models, the researchers found that those that begin with grayscale inputs learn to rely on luminance to identify objects. Once they begin receiving color input, they don’t change their approach very much, since they’ve already learned a strategy that works well. Models that began with color images did shift their approach once grayscale images were introduced, but could not shift enough to make them as accurate as the models that were given grayscale images first.

A similar phenomenon may occur in the human brain, which has more plasticity early in life, and can easily learn to identify objects based on their luminance alone. Early in life, the paucity of color information may in fact be beneficial to the developing brain, as it learns to identify objects based on sparse information.

“As a newborn, the normally sighted child is deprived, in a certain sense, of color vision. And that turns out to be an advantage,” Diamond says.

Researchers in Sinha’s lab have observed that limitations in early sensory input can also benefit other aspects of vision, as well as the auditory system. In 2022, they used computational models to show that early exposure to only low-frequency sounds, similar to those that babies hear in the womb, improves performance on auditory tasks that require analyzing sounds over a longer period of time, such as recognizing emotions. They now plan to explore whether this phenomenon extends to other aspects of development, such as language acquisition.

The research was funded by the National Eye Institute of NIH and the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity.

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Turning up the heat on next-generation semiconductors

The scorching surface of Venus, where temperatures can climb to 480 degrees Celsius (hot enough to melt lead), is an inhospitable place for humans and machines alike. One reason scientists have not yet been able to send a rover to the planet’s surface is because silicon-based electronics can’t operate in such extreme temperatures for an extended period of time.

For high-temperature applications like Venus exploration, researchers have recently turned to gallium nitride, a unique material that can withstand temperatures of 500 degrees or more.

The material is already used in some terrestrial electronics, like phone chargers and cell phone towers, but scientists don’t have a good grasp of how gallium nitride devices would behave at temperatures beyond 300 degrees, which is the operational limit of conventional silicon electronics.

In a new paper published in Applied Physics Letters, which is part of a multiyear research effort, a team of scientists from MIT and elsewhere sought to answer key questions about the material’s properties and performance at extremely high temperatures.  

They studied the impact of temperature on the ohmic contacts in a gallium nitride device. Ohmic contacts are key components that connect a semiconductor device with the outside world.

The researchers found that extreme temperatures didn’t cause significant degradation to the gallium nitride material or contacts. They were surprised to see that the contacts remained structurally intact even when held at 500 degrees Celsius for 48 hours.

Understanding how contacts perform at extreme temperatures is an important step toward the group’s next goal of developing high-performance transistors that could operate on the surface of Venus. Such transistors could also be used on Earth in electronics for applications like extracting geothermal energy or monitoring the inside of jet engines.

“Transistors are the heart of most modern electronics, but we didn’t want to jump straight to making a gallium nitride transistor because so much could go wrong. We first wanted to make sure the material and contacts could survive, and figure out how much they change as you increase the temperature. We’ll design our transistor from these basic material building blocks,” says John Niroula, an electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) graduate student and lead author of the paper.

His co-authors include Qingyun Xie PhD ’24; Mengyang Yuan PhD ’22; EECS graduate students Patrick K. Darmawi-Iskandar and Pradyot Yadav; Gillian K. Micale, a graduate student in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering; senior author Tomás Palacios, the Clarence J. LeBel Professor of EECS, director of the Microsystems Technology Laboratories, and a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics; as well as collaborators Nitul S. Rajput of the Technology Innovation Institute of the United Arab Emirates; Siddharth Rajan of Ohio State University; Yuji Zhao of Rice University; and Nadim Chowdhury of Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology.

Turning up the heat

While gallium nitride has recently attracted much attention, the material is still decades behind silicon when it comes to scientists’ understanding of how its properties change under different conditions. One such property is resistance, the flow of electrical current through a material.

A device’s overall resistance is inversely proportional to its size. But devices like semiconductors have contacts that connect them to other electronics. Contact resistance, which is caused by these electrical connections, remains fixed no matter the size of the device. Too much contact resistance can lead to higher power dissipation and slower operating frequencies for electronic circuits.

“Especially when you go to smaller dimensions, a device’s performance often ends up being limited by contact resistance. People have a relatively good understanding of contact resistance at room temperature, but no one has really studied what happens when you go all the way up to 500 degrees,” Niroula says.

For their study, the researchers used facilities at MIT.nano to build gallium nitride devices known as transfer length method structures, which are composed of a series of resistors. These devices enable them to measure the resistance of both the material and the contacts.

They added ohmic contacts to these devices using the two most common methods. The first involves depositing metal onto gallium nitride and heating it to 825 degrees Celsius for about 30 seconds, a process called annealing.

The second method involves removing chunks of gallium nitride and using a high-temperature technology to regrow highly doped gallium nitride in its place, a process led by Rajan and his team at Ohio State. The highly doped material contains extra electrons that can contribute to current conduction.

“The regrowth method typically leads to lower contact resistance at room temperature, but we wanted to see if these methods still work well at high temperatures,” Niroula says.

A comprehensive approach

They tested devices in two ways. Their collaborators at Rice University, led by Zhao, conducted short-term tests by placing devices on a hot chuck that reached 500 degrees Celsius and taking immediate resistance measurements.

At MIT, they conducted longer-term experiments by placing devices into a specialized furnace the group previously developed. They left devices inside for up to 72 hours to measure how resistance changes as a function of temperature and time.

Microscopy experts at MIT.nano (Aubrey N. Penn) and the Technology Innovation Institute (Nitul S. Rajput) used state-of-the-art transmission electron microscopes to see how such high temperatures affect gallium nitride and the ohmic contacts at the atomic level.

“We went in thinking the contacts or the gallium nitride material itself would degrade significantly, but we found the opposite. Contacts made with both methods seemed to be remarkably stable,” says Niroula.

While it is difficult to measure resistance at such high temperatures, their results indicate that contact resistance seems to remain constant even at temperatures of 500 degrees, for around 48 hours. And just like at room temperature, the regrowth process led to better performance.

The material did start to degrade after being in the furnace for 48 hours, but the researchers are already working to boost long-term performance. One strategy involves adding protective insulators to keep the material from being directly exposed to the high-temperature environment.

Moving forward, the researchers plan to use what they learned in these experiments to develop high-temperature gallium nitride transistors.

“In our group, we focus on innovative, device-level research to advance the frontiers of microelectronics, while adopting a systematic approach across the hierarchy, from the material level to the circuit level. Here, we have gone all the way down to the material level to understand things in depth. In other words, we have translated device-level advancements to circuit-level impact for high-temperature electronics, through design, modeling and complex fabrication. We are also immensely fortunate to have forged close partnerships with our longtime collaborators in this journey,” Xie says.

This work was funded, in part, by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Lockheed Martin Corporation, the Semiconductor Research Corporation through the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the U.S. Department of Energy, Intel Corporation, and the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology.

Fabrication and microscopy were conducted at MIT.nano, the Semiconductor Epitaxy and Analysis Laboratory at Ohio State University, the Center for Advanced Materials Characterization at the University of Oregon, and the Technology Innovation Institute of the United Arab Emirates.

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Using wobbling stellar material, astronomers measure the spin of a supermassive black hole for the first time

Astronomers at MIT, NASA, and elsewhere have a new way to measure how fast a black hole spins, by using the wobbly aftermath from its stellar feasting.

The method takes advantage of a black hole tidal disruption event — a blazingly bright moment when a black hole exerts tides on a passing star and rips it to shreds. As the star is disrupted by the black hole’s immense tidal forces, half of the star is blown away, while the other half is flung around the black hole, generating an intensely hot accretion disk of rotating stellar material.

The MIT-led team has shown that the wobble of the newly created accretion disk is key to working out the central black hole’s inherent spin.

In a study appearing today in Nature, the astronomers report that they have measured the spin of a nearby supermassive black hole by tracking the pattern of X-ray flashes that the black hole produced immediately following a tidal disruption event. The team followed the flashes over several months and determined that they were likely a signal of a bright-hot accretion disk that wobbled back and forth as it was pushed and pulled by the black hole’s own spin.

By tracking how the disk’s wobble changed over time, the scientists could work out how much the disk was being affected by the black hole’s spin, and in turn, how fast the black hole itself was spinning. Their analysis showed that the black hole was spinning at less than 25 percent the speed of light — relatively slow, as black holes go.

The study’s lead author, MIT Research Scientist Dheeraj “DJ” Pasham, says the new method could be used to gauge the spins of hundreds of black holes in the local universe in the coming years. If scientists can survey the spins of many nearby black holes, they can start to understand how the gravitational giants evolved over the history of the universe.

“By studying several systems in the coming years with this method, astronomers can estimate the overall distribution of black hole spins and understand the longstanding question of how they evolve over time,” says Pasham, who is a member of MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.

The study’s co-authors include collaborators from a number of institutions, including NASA, Masaryk University in the Czech Republic, the University of Leeds, the University of Syracuse, Tel Aviv University, the Polish Academy of Sciences, and elsewhere.

Shredded heat

Every black hole has an inherent spin that has been shaped by its cosmic encounters over time. If, for instance, a black hole has grown mostly through accretion — brief instances when some material falls onto the disk, this causes the black hole to spin up to quite high speeds. In contrast, if a black hole grows mostly by merging with other black holes, each merger could slow things down as one black hole’s spin meets up against the spin of the other.

As a black hole spins, it drags the surrounding space-time around with it. This drag effect is an example of Lense-Thirring precession, a longstanding theory that describes the ways in which extremely strong gravitational fields, such as those generated by a black hole, can pull on the surrounding space and time. Normally, this effect would not be obvious around black holes, as the massive objects emit no light.

But in recent years, physicists have proposed that, in instances such as during a tidal disruption event, or TDE, scientists might have a chance to track the light from stellar debris as it is dragged around. Then, they might hope to measure the black hole’s spin.

In particular, during a TDE, scientists predict that a star may fall onto a black hole from any direction, generating a disk of white-hot, shredded material that could be tilted, or misaligned, with respect to the black hole’s spin. (Imagine the accretion disk as a tilted donut that is spinning around a donut hole that has its own, separate spin.) As the disk encounters the black hole’s spin, it wobbles as the black hole pulls it into alignment. Eventually, the wobbling subsides as the disk settles into the black hole’s spin. Scientists predicted that a TDE’s wobbling disk should therefore be a measurable signature of the black hole’s spin.

“But the key was to have the right observations,” Pasham says. “The only way you can do this is, as soon as a tidal disruption event goes off, you need to get a telescope to look at this object continuously, for a very long time, so you can probe all kinds of timescales, from minutes to months.”

A high-cadence catch

For the past five years, Pasham has looked for tidal disruption events that are bright enough, and near enough, to quickly follow up and track for signs of Lense-Thirring precession. In February of 2020, he and his colleagues got lucky, with the detection of AT2020ocn, a bright flash, emanating from a galaxy about a billion light years away, that was initially spotted in the optical band by the Zwicky Transient Facility.

From the optical data, the flash appeared to be the first moments following a TDE. Being both bright and relatively close by, Pasham suspected the TDE might be the ideal candidate to look for signs of disk wobbling, and possibly measure the spin of the black hole at the host  galaxy’s center. But for that, he would need much more data.

“We needed quick and high-cadence data,” Pasham says. “The key was to catch this early on because this precession, or wobble, should only be present early on. Any later, and the disk would not wobble anymore.”

The team discovered that NASA’s NICER telescope was able to catch the TDE and continuously keep an eye on it over months at a time. NICER — an abbreviation for Neutron star Interior Composition ExploreR — is an X-ray telescope on the International Space Station that measures X-ray radiation around black holes and other extreme gravitational objects.

Pasham and his colleagues looked through NICER’s observations of AT2020ocn over 200 days following the initial detection of the tidal disruption event. They discovered that the event emitted X-rays that appeared to peak every 15 days, for several cycles, before eventually petering out. They interpreted the peaks as times when the TDE’s accretion disk wobbled face-on, emitting X-rays directly toward NICER’s telescope, before wobbling away as it continued to emit X-rays (similar to waving a flashlight toward and away from someone every 15 days).

The researchers took this pattern of wobbling and worked it into the original theory for Lense-Thirring precession. Based on estimates of the black hole’s mass, and that of the disrupted star, they were able to come up with an estimate for the black hole’s spin — less than 25 percent the speed of light.

Their results mark the first time that scientists have used observations of a wobbling disk following a tidal disruption event to estimate the spin of a black hole.

"Black holes are fascinating objects and the flows of material that we see falling onto them can generate some of the most luminous events in the universe,” says study co-author Chris Nixon, associate professor of theoretical physics at the University of Leeds. “While there is a lot we still don’t understand, there are amazing observational facilities that keep surprising us and generating new avenues to explore. This event is one of those surprises.”

As new telescopes such as the Rubin Observatory come online in the coming years, Pasham foresees more opportunities to pin down black hole spins.

“The spin of a supermassive black hole tells you about the history of that black hole,” Pasham says. “Even if a small fraction of those that Rubin captures have this kind of signal, we now have a way to measure the spins of hundreds of TDEs. Then we could make a big statement about how black holes evolve over the age of the universe.”

This research was funded, in part, by NASA and the European Space Agency.

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AEROS CubeSat launches to study ocean health

A new CubeSat orbiting Earth represents a multinational academic-industry collaboration and an important milestone in Portugal’s space program, marking the country’s return to space after its first satellite launch 30 years ago. The small satellite, called AEROS-MH1, was developed entirely in Portugal through a four-year collaboration between the MIT Portugal Program and researchers at several Portuguese universities and private companies. MIT’s participation in the project, known as AEROS Constellation, was financially supported by the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation).

Professors Dava Newman, Kerri Cahoy, and Richard Linares served as co-principal investigators on the project at MIT, and grad students Madeline Anderson, Cadence Payne, and Annika Thomas served as key contributors along with researchers from University of Minho, CEiiA, Edisoft, and more. AEROS Constellation’s objectives support Portugal’s multinational “Atlantic interactions” research efforts and are aligned with the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals.

Launched in March, AEROS-MH1 is now orbiting Earth every 90 minutes at an altitude of almost 137 miles. AEROS will apply spectroscopic techniques to measure and monitor ocean health while using a software-defined radio to bridge connectivity between the spacecraft, aerial drones, and bio-logged marine life such as sharks and rays. The satellite will collect hyperspectral imaging data of the coastline and oceans around Portugal, and collect information from the software-defined radio from tags to help understand biodiversity and the environment around Portugal. The satellite’s command center is at the Santa Maria Island Teleport in the Azores, where the spectroscopic imagery will be recorded, and then processed in Matosinhos.

“AEROS was a tremendously valuable experience for our students, both in terms of the research and technical elements and the collaboration itself,” says Cahoy. “The full team had weekly meetings virtually, and it did get interesting when there were changes in the time zones for daylight savings that were different in each country, along with understanding holidays and special event times of the year, as well as when the academic team members would have a higher workload due to projects and exams. The students really enjoyed that MIT Portugal regularly provided opportunities to get together and present their work in Portugal.”

The project’s development process began in 2020 with the mission concept, focused on maritime priorities and ocean characterization around Portugal. The research team selected instruments like the hyperspectral visible imager to characterize the ocean’s colors, and software-defined radio to flexibly support collecting data from small transmitters on the Earth for sensing environment and monitoring biodiversity. The team worked for years to make sure these instruments were fully functional in hardware and software, as well as with a spacecraft platform that supported the mission power and communication needs.

The MIT students supported the project with analyses and simulations to help understand if the mission would meet requirements. Annika Thomas focused on thermal management; Cadence Payne focused on the hyperspectral imager instrument performance; and Madi Anderson worked on using AI for both change detection in the instrument data and to help identify any anomalies in the onboard telemetry. Other MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics students who supported AEROS include Miles Lifson, Patrick McKeen, Joey Murphy, and Alvin Harvey.

“The partnership between the Portuguese institutions and our international universities such as MIT must be maintained. It results in high-quality training, new jobs, and a new generation of students who are multidisciplinary systems leaders of our space future and our future here on Earth,” said Newman in a congratulatory video. “We’re educating these future leaders in important sectors such as climate, space, oceans, urban mobility, and energy.”

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Making steel with electricity

Steel is one of the most useful materials on the planet. A backbone of modern life, it’s used in skyscrapers, cars, airplanes, bridges, and more. Unfortunately, steelmaking is an extremely dirty process.

The most common way it’s produced involves mining iron ore, reducing it in a blast furnace through the addition of coal, and then using an oxygen furnace to burn off excess carbon and other impurities. That’s why steel production accounts for around 7 to 9 percent of humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, making it one of the dirtiest industries on the planet.

Now Boston Metal is seeking to clean up the steelmaking industry using an electrochemical process called molten oxide electrolysis (MOE), which eliminates many steps in steelmaking and releases oxygen as its sole byproduct.

The company, which was founded by MIT Professor Emeritus Donald Sadoway, Professor Antoine Allanore, and James Yurko PhD ’01, is already using MOE to recover high-value metals from mining waste at its Brazilian subsidiary, Boston Metal do Brasil. That work is helping Boston Metal’s team deploy its technology at commercial scale and establish key partnerships with mining operators. It has also built a prototype MOE reactor to produce green steel at its headquarters in Woburn, Massachusetts.

And despite its name, Boston Metal has global ambitions. The company has raised more than $370 million to date from organizations across Europe, Asia, the Americas, and the Middle East, and its leaders expect to scale up rapidly to transform steel production in every corner of the world.

“There’s a worldwide recognition that we need to act rapidly, and that’s going to happen through technology solutions like this that can help us move away from incumbent technologies,” Boston Metal Chief Scientist and former MIT postdoc Guillaume Lambotte says. “More and more, climate change is a part of our lives, so the pressure is on everyone to act fast.”

To the moon and back

The origins of Boston Metal’s technology start on the moon. In the mid 2000s, Sadoway, who is the John F. Elliott Professor Emeritus of Materials Chemistry in MIT’s Department of Materials Science, received a grant from NASA to explore ways to produce oxygen for future lunar bases. Sadoway and other MIT researchers explored the idea of sending an electric current through the iron oxide rock on the moon’s surface, using rock from an old asteroid in Arizona for their experiments. The reaction produced oxygen, with metal as a byproduct.

The research stuck with Sadoway, who noticed that down here on Earth, that metal byproduct would be of interest. To help make the electrolysis reaction he studied more viable, he joined forces with Allanore, who is a professor of metallurgy at MIT and the Lechtman Chair in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. The professors were able to identify a less expensive anode and partnered with Yurko, a former student, to found Boston Metal.

“All of the fundamental studies and the initial technologies came out of MIT,” Lambotte says. “We spun out of research that was patented at MIT and licensed from MIT’s Technology Licensing Office.”

Lambotte joined the company shortly after Boston Metal’s team published a 2013 paper in Nature describing the MOE platform.

“That’s when it went from the lab, with a coffee cup-sized experiment to prove the fundamentals and produce a few grams, to a company that can produce hundreds of kilograms, and soon, tons of metal,” Lambotte says.

Boston Metal’s molten oxide electrolysis process takes place in modular MOE cells the size of a school bus. Iron ore rock is fed into the cell, which contains the cathode (the negative terminal of the MOE cell) and an anode immersed in a liquid electrolyte. The anode is inert, meaning it doesn’t dissolve in the electrolyte or take part in the reaction other than serving as the positive terminal. When electricity runs between the anode and cathode and the cell reaches around 1,600 degrees Celsius, the iron oxide bonds in the ore are split, producing pure liquid metal at the bottom that can be tapped. The byproduct of the reaction is oxygen, and the process doesn’t require water, hazardous chemicals, or precious-metal catalysts.

The production of each cell depends on the size of its current. Lambotte says with about 600,000 amps, each cell could produce up to 10 tons of metal every day. Steelmakers would license Boston Metal’s technology and deploy as many cells as needed to reach their production targets.

Boston Metal is already using MOE to help mining companies recover high-value metals from their mining waste, which usually needs to undergo costly treatment or storage. Lambotte says it could also be used to produce many other kinds of metals down the line, and Boston Metal was recently selected to negotiate grant funding to produce chromium metal — critical for a number of clean energy applications — in West Virginia.

“If you look around the world, a lot of the feedstocks for metal are oxides, and if it’s an oxide, then there’s a chance we can work with that feedstock,” Lambotte says. “There’s a lot of excitement because everyone needs a solution capable of decarbonizing the metal industry, so a lot of people are interested to understand where MOE fits in their own processes.”

Gigatons of potential

Boston Metal’s steel decarbonization technology is currently slated to reach commercial-scale in 2026, though its Brazil plant is already introducing the industry to MOE.

“I think it’s a window for the metal industry to get acquainted with MOE and see how it works,” Lambotte says. “You need people in the industry to grasp this technology. It’s where you form connections and how new technology spreads.”

The Brazilian plant runs on 100 percent renewable energy.

“We can be the beneficiary of this tremendous worldwide push to decarbonize the energy sector,” Lambotte says. “I think our approach goes hand in hand with that. Fully green steel requires green electricity, and I think what you’ll see is deployment of this technology where [clean electricity] is already readily available.”

Boston Metal’s team is excited about MOE’s application across the metals industry but is focused first and foremost on eliminating the gigatons of emissions from steel production.

“Steel produces around 10 percent of global emissions, so that is our north star,” Lambotte says. “Everyone is pledging carbon reductions, emissions reductions, and making net zero goals, so the steel industry is really looking hard for viable technology solutions. People are ready for new approaches.”

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2024 MAD Design Fellows announced

Since its launch in 2022, the MIT Morningside Academy for Design (MAD) has supported MIT graduate students with a fellowship, allowing recipients to pursue design research and projects while creating community. Pulling from different corners of design, they explore solutions in fields such as sustainability, health, architecture, urban planning, engineering, and social justice. 

On May 1, MAD announced the 2024 cohort of Design Fellows at the MIT Museum.

Sofia Chiappero, MCP student in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning and MITdesignX affiliate: Chiappero is working around the intersection of community development and technology, aiming to address the challenges faced by underserved communities at risk of displacement in Latin America. Through a blend of social science and digital inclusion, she seeks to design a new approach to researching human interactions and replicating them in virtual settings, with the ultimate goal of preserving the identity of these communities and giving them visibility for resilient growth.

Clemence Couteau, MBA candidate in the MIT Sloan School of Management: Couteau is tackling the rise of postpartum depression among U.S. mothers by aiming to develop a digital solution empowering at-risk pregnant women to improve mental health outcomes. This involves a self-directed therapy chatbot in a mobile app, based on the “ROSE” protocol.

Mateo Fernandez, MArch student in the Department of Architecture: Fernandez explores how to depart from the current construction industry, designing alternatives such as growing buildings with biomaterials, and deploying advanced 3D printing technologies for building.

Charlotte Folinus, PhD candidate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering: Folinus creates new methods for designing soft robots, using these tools to design soft robots for gentle interactions, uncertain environments, and long mechanical lifetimes. “I am really excited to be surrounded by people who can do things I cannot. That's when I'm the best version of myself. I think that's the community I'll find here,” she says.

Alexander Htet Kyaw, master's student in the Department of Architecture and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and MITdesignX affiliate: Htet Kyaw's current research utilizes robotic assembly, multimodal interaction, and generative AI to challenge conventional manufacturing and fabrication practices. He is working on an AI-driven workflow that translates design intent into tangible objects through robotic assembly.

Dení López PhD candidate in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning: As a Design Fellow, López uses design research to evaluate and extend the scope of Bicheeche Diidxa’, a long-standing Participatory Action Research initiative for disaster resilience focused on five Zapotec communities along the Los Perros River in Oaxaca, Mexico.

Caitlin Morris, PhD candidate in media arts and sciences: Morris’s research explores the role of multisensory influences on cognition and learning, and seeks to find and build the bridges between digital and computational interfaces and hands-on, community-centered learning and teaching practices.

Maxine Perroni-Scharf, PhD candidate in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science: Perroni-Scharf is currently working on developing techniques that enable the discovery and design of extremal metamaterials — 3D printed materials that exhibit extreme properties arising not from their chemical composition, but rather from their structure. These can be applied to a variety of tasks, from battery design to accessibility.

Lyle Regenwetter, PhD candidate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering: Regenwetter develops methods to incorporate design requirements, such as safety constraints and performance objectives, into the training process of generative AI models.

Zane Schemmer, PhD candidate in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering: Schemmer's research aims to minimize the carbon footprint of the built environment by designing efficient structures that consider the availability of local materials.

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From NASA to MIT to Formlabs

MIT senior Audrey Chen lives by the philosophy that “a lot of opportunities only present themselves if you ask for them.” This approach has served her well, from becoming a NASA intern at 15 to running MIT’s autonomous boat team Arcturus to entering a leadership position at 3D printing technology company Formlabs right out of undergrad.

Growing up in Los Angeles, Chen showed a strong aptitude and passion for engineering at a young age and skipped several grades in math. In her first year of high school, she saw a posting about the Lab Space Academy at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. Though the program was for juniors and seniors, she inquired if they would make an exception for her and they agreed. By her junior year she was helping run the program as deputy.

But Chen didn’t stop there: She had dreams of interning at NASA. She asked her mentor and became a drone air traffic control researcher at NASA at 15. “I was not old enough to drive,” Chen says. “High school would end, the bell would ring, and I would put on my backpack and I would run down the street to JPL. Can you imagine you're the security guard at the gate of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a kid shows up for work?”

Chen worked on the Orbiting Arid Subsurfaces and Ice Sheet Sounder (OASIS) project, whose goal is to find and examine freshwater aquifers and ice sheets. “It was very early in the mission, so I was doing system and objective definition,” Chen says.

Next stop: MIT

After graduating high school, Chen ventured across the country to explore her eclectic interests at MIT. When she wasn’t fulfilling the requirements for her mechanical engineering degree, she could be found leather crafting, glass blowing, or table welding in one of MIT’s makerspaces, documenting MIT student life with her camera (garnering the acclimation “The Eyes of MIT” by MIT Admissions), working as a researcher sampling deep-sea sediment, or notably, running the award-winning autonomous boat team Arcturus.

“Arcturus has been the highlight of my MIT career,” Chen says. She founded the team at MIT Sea Grant in 2022 along with a group of equally impassioned students who elected Chen as captain.

“I didn't have any background in marine autonomy, so we pushed very hard to institute trainings and have lots of workshops so that they would feel comfortable coming in and contributing as soon as possible,” she recalls. Seeking additional funding and support, the team found a home at the MIT Edgerton Center.

Launching Arcturus

“Whenever I think about how Arcturus started and how it somehow still continues, I think it’s a miracle,” Chen says. “Our very first year, there were five of us at the Roboboat competition, and if any individual one of us had not decided to join the team, we either would not have a boat, we would not have electronics, we would not have code to run the boat, or we wouldn’t have funding to run the team.”

Chen’s first year as captain was a tremendous amount of work because the team was so small. In addition to managing the team and assuring they met their goals on time, Chen also acted as the team’s business lead, treasurer, media lead, and photographer. “I was juggling a lot of things. Since then, those roles have further split amongst more people within the team,” she says.

Recruiting isn’t easy for an autonomous boat team, as many students don’t get marine robotics experience in high school. To keep their recruitment pool wide, Chen didn’t expect students to have background in autonomy or in marine systems. “Creating an environment that’s welcoming and friendly and supportive of people’s learning is crucial, because otherwise you won’t have a team. We’ve really pushed hard to recruit from a large body of people. We make sure to emphasize that we’re open to all majors, all years. As an industry, marine robotics, like most engineering, is very male-dominated. We work hard to recruit people of all genders and ethnicities.”

With Chen’s skillful recruiting, Arcturus increased from five to 74 members in 2024. Arcturus flourished under Chen’s leadership, winning First Place Design Overall at the Roboboat competition in 2023.

The challenges with autonomous boats

Chen was drawn to autonomous boats because the field is so full of potential. “You leave a robot on land and you turn it off, it doesn't move by itself, versus you put it in a body of water and you don't do anything, then it still moves because of the currents. It needs to be constantly taking in that input and trying to localize where it is,” Chen says.

Chen sees a lot of potential in the marine biotics industry to gather crucial data about our environment. “Autonomy in the marine space is not as well researched as land autonomy is. There’s immense potential for marine autonomy to benefit the world. You think about mapping ocean topology or looking for endangered species or habitat protection or surveying bleached coral reefs. As a vehicle, you have more flexibility to move around versus a buoy. That gives you the ability to take water and sediment samples across a wider spread of area. And by making it autonomous, you eliminate high labor costs, so the price per sample for a researcher would go down. These are different ways in which autonomy has potential to benefit the research sphere, but also, more broadly, the world.”

Chen graduated early this past February and passed Arcturus on to captains and rising juniors Ami Shi and Karen Guo. “They’re rock stars. The team is in good hands,” Chen says.

Becoming a project manager at Formlabs

Chen graduated a semester early and accepted a project manager position at Formlabs. She brings many lessons from MIT to her work. “The biggest thing that I’ve learned is that I don’t need to know everything. Part of being successful is knowing what you don’t know. So I’m always aware that in every Arcturus meeting, and probably every technical meeting that I’ll be in at Formlabs, that I will not be the smartest person in the room. And that’s fine. I don’t need to be the smartest person ever because that’s not my job. My job is to bring these projects together and know enough about all the systems to integrate them.”

Chen is thrilled to stay near MIT after graduation, allowing her the opportunity to visit her friends and continue mentoring Arcturus. Upon announcing her new job, she remarked, “To my friends at MIT, I’ll be just down the street, so you won’t be able to get rid of me that easily!”

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