A new vaccine approach could help combat future coronavirus pandemics

A new experimental vaccine developed by researchers at MIT and Caltech could offer protection against emerging variants of SARS-CoV-2, as well as related coronaviruses, known as sarbecoviruses, that could spill over from animals to humans.

In addition to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, sarbecoviruses — a subgenus of coronaviruses — include the virus that led to the outbreak of the original SARS in the early 2000s. Sarbecoviruses that currently circulate in bats and other mammals may also hold the potential to spread to humans in the future.

By attaching up to eight different versions of sarbecovirus receptor-binding proteins (RBDs) to nanoparticles, the researchers created a vaccine that generates antibodies that recognize regions of RBDs that tend to remain unchanged across all strains of the viruses. That makes it much more difficult for viruses to evolve to escape vaccine-induced antibodies.

“This work is an example of how bringing together computation and immunological experiments can be fruitful,” says Arup K. Chakraborty, the John M. Deutch Institute Professor at MIT and a member of MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science and the Ragon Institute of MIT, MGH and Harvard University.

Chakraborty and Pamela Bjorkman, a professor of biology and biological engineering at Caltech, are the senior authors of the study, which appears today in Cell. The paper’s lead authors are Eric Wang PhD ’24, Caltech postdoc Alexander Cohen, and Caltech graduate student Luis Caldera.

Mosaic nanoparticles

The new study builds on a project begun in Bjorkman’s lab, in which she and Cohen created a “mosaic” 60-mer nanoparticle that presents eight different sarbecovirus RBD proteins. The RBD is the part of the viral spike protein that helps the virus get into host cells. It is also the region of the coronavirus spike protein that is usually targeted by antibodies against sarbecoviruses.

RBDs contain some regions that are variable and can easily mutate to escape antibodies. Most of the antibodies generated by mRNA COVID-19 vaccines target those variable regions because they are more easily accessible. That is one reason why mRNA vaccines need to be updated to keep up with the emergence of new strains.

If researchers could create a vaccine that stimulates production of antibodies that target RBD regions that can’t easily change and are shared across viral strains, it could offer broader protection against a variety of sarbecoviruses.

Such a vaccine would have to stimulate B cells that have receptors (which then become antibodies) that target those shared, or “conserved,” regions. When B cells circulating in the body encounter a vaccine or other antigen, their B cell receptors, each of which have two “arms,” are more effectively activated if two copies of the antigen are available for binding to each arm. The conserved regions tend to be less accessible to B cell receptors, so if a nanoparticle vaccine presents just one type of RBD, B cells with receptors that bind to the more accessible variable regions, are most likely to be activated.

To overcome this, the Caltech researchers designed a nanoparticle vaccine that includes 60 copies of RBDs from eight different related sarbecoviruses, which have different variable regions but similar conserved regions. Because eight different RBDs are displayed on each nanoparticle, it’s unlikely that two identical RBDs will end up next to each other. Therefore, when a B cell receptor encounters the nanoparticle immunogen, the B cell is more likely to become activated if its receptor can recognize the conserved regions of the RBD.

“The concept behind the vaccine is that by co-displaying all these different RBDs on the nanoparticle, you are selecting for B cells that recognize the conserved regions that are shared between them,” Cohen says. “As a result, you’re selecting for B cells that are more cross-reactive. Therefore, the antibody response would be more cross-reactive and you could potentially get broader protection.”

In studies conducted in animals, the researchers showed that this vaccine, known as mosaic-8, produced strong antibody responses against diverse strains of SARS-CoV-2 and other sarbecoviruses and protected from challenges by both SARS-CoV-2 and SARS-CoV (original SARS).

Broadly neutralizing antibodies

After these studies were published in 2021 and 2022, the Caltech researchers teamed up with Chakraborty’s lab at MIT to pursue computational strategies that could allow them to identify RBD combinations that would generate even better antibody responses against a wider variety of sarbecoviruses.

Led by Wang, the MIT researchers pursued two different strategies — first, a large-scale computational screen of many possible mutations to the RBD of SARS-CoV-2, and second, an analysis of naturally occurring RBD proteins from zoonotic sarbecoviruses.

For the first approach, the researchers began with the original strain of SARS-CoV-2 and generated sequences of about 800,000 RBD candidates by making substitutions in locations that are known to affect antibody binding to variable portions of the RBD. Then, they screened those candidates for their stability and solubility, to make sure they could withstand attachment to the nanoparticle and injection as a vaccine.

From the remaining candidates, the researchers chose 10 based on how different their variable regions were. They then used these to create mosaic nanoparticles coated with either two or five different RBD proteins (mosaic-2_COM and mosaic-5_COM).

In their second approach, instead of mutating the RBD sequences, the researchers chose seven naturally occurring RBD proteins, using computational techniques to select RBDs that were different from each other in regions that are variable, but retained their conserved regions. They used these to create another vaccine, mosaic-7_COM.

Once the researchers produced the RBD-nanoparticles, they evaluated each one in mice. After each mouse received three doses of one of the vaccines, the researchers analyzed how well the resulting antibodies bound to and neutralized seven variants of SARS-CoV-2 and four other sarbecoviruses. 

They also compared the mosaic nanoparticle vaccines to a nanoparticle with only one type of RBD displayed, and to the original mosaic-8 particle from their 2021, 2022, and 2024 studies. They found that mosaic-2_COM and mosaic-5_COM outperformed both of those vaccines, and mosaic-7_COM showed the best responses of all. Mosaic-7_COM elicited antibodies with binding to most of the viruses tested, and these antibodies were also able to prevent the viruses from entering cells.

The researchers saw similar results when they tested the new vaccines in mice that were previously vaccinated with a bivalent mRNA COVID-19 vaccine.

“We wanted to simulate the fact that people have already been infected and/or vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2,” Wang says. “In pre-vaccinated mice, mosaic-7_COM is consistently giving the highest binding titers for both SARS-CoV-2 variants and other sarbecoviruses.”

Bjorkman’s lab has received funding from the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations to do a clinical trial of the mosaic-8 RBD-nanoparticle. They also hope to move mosaic-7_COM, which performed better in the current study, into clinical trials. The researchers plan to work on redesigning the vaccines so that they could be delivered as mRNA, which would make them easier to manufacture.

The research was funded by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, the National Institutes of Health, Wellcome Leap, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, and the Caltech Merkin Institute for Translational Research.

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Steven Strang, literary scholar and leader in writing and communication support at MIT, dies at 77

Steven Strang, a writer and literary scholar who founded MIT’s Writing and Communication Center in 1981 and directed it for 40 years, died with family at his side on Dec. 29, 2024. He was 77.

His vision for the center was ambitious. After an MIT working group identified gaps between the students’ technical knowledge and their ability to communicate it — particularly once in positions of leadership — Strang advocated an even broader approach rarely used at other universities. Rather than student-tutors working with peers, Strang hired instructors with doctorates, subject matter expertise, and teaching experience to help train all MIT community members for the current and future careers becoming increasingly reliant on persuasion and the need to communicate with varied audiences.

“He made an indelible mark on the MIT community,” wrote current director Elena Kallestinova in a message to WCC staff soon after Strang’s death. “He was deeply respected as a leader, educator, mentor, and colleague.”

Beginning his professional life as a journalist with the Bangor Daily News, Strang soon shifted to academia, receiving a PhD in English from Brown University and over the decades publishing countless pieces of fiction, poetry, and criticism, in addition to his pedagogical articles on writing and rhetoric. 

But the Writing and Communication Center is his legacy. At his Jan. 11 memorial, longtime MIT lecturer and colleague Thalia Rubio called the WCC “Steve’s creation,” pointing out that it went on to serve many thousands of students and others. Another colleague, Bob Irwin, described in a note Strang’s commitment to making the WCC “a place that offered both friendliness and the highest professional standards of advice and consultation on all communication tasks and issues. Steve himself was conscientious, a respectful director, and a warm and reliable mentor to me and others. I think he was exemplary in his job.”

MIT recognized Strang’s major contributions with a Levitan Teaching Award, an Infinite Mile Award, and an Excellence Award. In nomination letters and testimonials, students and peers alike told of a “tireless commitment,” that “they might not have graduated, or been hired to the job they have today, or gained admittance to graduate school had it not been for the help of The Writing Center.” 

Strang is also remembered for his work founding the MIT Writers Group, which he first offered as a creative writing workshop for Independent Activities Period in 2002. In yet another example of Strang recognizing and meeting a community need, about 70 people from across the Institute showed up that first year.

Strang is survived by a large extended family, including his wife Ayni and her two children, Elly and Marta, whom Strang adopted as his own. Donations in his memory can be made to The Rhode Island Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

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New general law governs fracture energy of networks across materials and length scales

Materials like car tires, human tissues, and spider webs are diverse in composition, but all contain networks of interconnected strands. A long-standing question about the durability of these materials asks: What is the energy required to fracture these diverse networks? A recently published paper by MIT researchers offers new insights.

“Our findings reveal a simple, general law that governs the fracture energy of networks across various materials and length scales,” says Xuanhe Zhao, the Uncas and Helen Whitaker Professor and professor of mechanical engineering and civil and environmental engineering at MIT. “This discovery has significant implications for the design of new materials, structures, and metamaterials, allowing for the creation of systems that are incredibly tough, soft, and stretchable.”

Despite an established understanding of the importance of failure resistance in design of such networks, no existing physical model effectively linked strand mechanics and connectivity to predict bulk fracture — until now. This new research reveals a universal scaling law that bridges length scales and makes it possible to predict the intrinsic fracture energy of diverse networks.

“This theory helps us predict how much energy it takes to break these networks by advancing a crack,” says graduate student Chase Hartquist, one of the paper’s lead authors. “It turns out that you can design tougher versions of these materials by making the strands longer, more stretchable, or resistant to higher forces before breaking.”

To validate their results, the team 3D-printed a giant, stretchable network, allowing them to demonstrate fracture properties in practice. They found that despite the differences in the networks, they all followed a simple and predictable rule. Beyond the changes to the strands themselves, a network can also be toughened by connecting the strands into larger loops.

“By adjusting these properties, car tires could last longer, tissues could better resist injury, and spider webs could become more durable,” says Hartquist.

Shu Wang, a postdoc in Zhao’s lab and fellow lead author of the paper, called the research findings “an extremely fulfilling moment ... it meant that the same rules could be applied to describe a wide variety of materials, making it easier to design the best material for a given situation.”

The researchers explain that this work represents progress in an exciting and emerging field called “architected materials,” where the structure within the material itself gives it unique properties. They say the discovery sheds light on how to make these materials even tougher, by focusing on designing the segments within the architecture stronger and more stretchable. The strategy is adaptable for materials across fields and can be applied to improve durability of soft robotic actuators, enhance the toughness of engineered tissues, or even create resilient lattices for aerospace technology.

Their open-access paper, “Scaling Law for Intrinsic Fracture Energy of Diverse Stretchable Networks,” is available now in Physical Review X, a leading journal in interdisciplinary physics.

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“Forever grateful for MIT Open Learning for making knowledge accessible and fostering a network of curious minds”

Bia Adams, a London-based neuropsychologist, former professional ballet dancer, and MIT Open Learning learner, has built her career across decades of diverse, interconnected experiences and an emphasis on lifelong learning. She earned her bachelor’s degree in clinical and behavioral psychology, and then worked as a psychologist and therapist for several years before taking a sabbatical in her late 20s to study at the London Contemporary Dance School and The Royal Ballet — fulfilling a long-time dream.

“In hindsight, I think what drew me most to ballet was not so much the form itself,” says Adams, “but more of a subconscious desire to make sense of my body moving through space and time, my emotions and motivations — all within a discipline that is rigorous, meticulous, and routine-based. It’s an endeavor to make sense of the world and myself.”

After acquiring some dance-related injuries, Adams returned to psychology. She completed an online certificate program specializing in medical neuroscience via Duke University, focusing on how pathology arises out of the way the brain computes information and generates behavior.

In addition to her clinical practice, she has also worked at a data science and AI consultancy for neural network research.

In 2022, in search of new things to learn and apply to both her work and personal life, Adams discovered MIT OpenCourseWare within MIT Open Learning. She was drawn to class 8.04 (Quantum Physics I), which specifically focuses on quantum mechanics, as she was hoping to finally gain some understanding of complex topics that she had tried to teach herself in the past with limited success. She credits the course’s lectures, taught by Allan Adams (physicist and principal investigator of the MIT Future Ocean Lab), with finally making these challenging topics approachable.

“I still talk to my friends at length about exciting moments in these lectures,” says Adams. “After the first class, I was hooked.”

Adams’s journey through MIT Open Learning’s educational resources quickly led to a deeper interest in computational neuroscience. She learned how to use tools from mathematics and computer science to better understand the brain, nervous system, and behavior.

She says she gained many new insights from class 6.034 (Artificial Intelligence), particularly in watching the late Professor Patrick Winston’s lectures. She appreciated learning more about the cognitive psychology aspect of AI, including how pioneers in the field looked at how the brain processes information and aimed to build programs that could solve problems. She further enhanced her understanding of AI with the Minds and Machines course on MITx Online, part of Open Learning.

Adams is now in the process of completing Introduction to Computer Science and Programming Using Python, taught by John Guttag; Eric Grimson, former interim vice president for Open Learning; and Ana Bell.

“I am multilingual, and I think the way my brain processes code is similar to the way computers code,” says Adams. “I find learning to code similar to learning a foreign language: both exhilarating and intimidating. Learning the rules, deciphering the syntax, and building my own world through code is one of the most fascinating challenges of my life.”

Adams is also pursuing a master’s degree at Duke and the University College of London, focusing on the neurobiology of sleep and looking particularly at how the biochemistry of the brain can affect this critical function. As a complement to this research, she is currently exploring class 9.40 (Introduction to Neural Computation), taught by Michale Fee and Daniel Zysman, which introduces quantitative approaches to understanding brain and cognitive functions and neurons and covers foundational quantitative tools of data analysis in neuroscience.

In addition to the courses related more directly to her field, MIT Open Learning also provided Adams an opportunity to explore other academic areas. She delved into philosophy for the first time, taking Paradox and Infinity, taught by Professor Agustín Rayo, the Kenan Sahin Dean of the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, and Digital Learning Lab Fellow David Balcarras, which looks at the intersection of philosophy and mathematics. She also was able to explore in more depth immunology, which had always been of great interest to her, through Professor Adam Martin’s lectures on this topic in class 7.016 (Introductory Biology).

“I am forever grateful for MIT Open Learning,” says Adams, “for making knowledge accessible and fostering a network of curious minds, all striving to share, expand, and apply this knowledge for the greater good.”

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For MIT-WHOI Joint Program student Faith Brooks, the sky’s the limit

Faith Brooks, a graduate student in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program, has had a clear dream since the age of 4: to become a pilot.

“At around 8 years old, my neighbor knew I wanted to fly and showed me pictures of her dad landing a jet on an aircraft carrier, and I was immediately captivated,” says Brooks. Further inspired by her grandfather’s experience in the U.S. Navy (USN), and owing to a lifelong fascination with aviation, she knew nothing would stand in her way.

Brooks explored several different paths to becoming a pilot, but she says one conversation with her longtime mentor, Capt. Matt Skone, USN (Ret.), changed the trajectory of her life.

“He asked if I had heard of the Naval Academy,” she recalls. “At the time, I hadn’t … I immediately knew that that was where I wanted to go, and everything else I learned about United States Naval Academy (USNA) reinforced that for me.”

In her “firstie” (senior) year at the USNA, Brooks was selected to go to Pensacola, Florida, and train to become a naval pilot as a student naval aviator, taking her one step closer to her dream. The USNA also helped guide her path to MIT. Her journey to joining the MIT-WHOI Joint Program began with the USNA’s professional knowledge curriculum, where she read about retired Capt. Wendy Lawrence SM ’88, a naval aviator and astronaut.

“Reading her bio prompted me to look into the program, and it sounded like the perfect program for me — where else could you get a better education in ocean engineering than MIT and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution [WHOI]?”

In the MIT-WHOI Joint Program, Brooks is researching the impact of coastal pond breaching on preventing and mitigating harmful algal blooms. Her work focuses on the biannual mechanical breaching of Nantucket’s Sesachacha Pond to the ocean and the resultant impact on the pond’s water quality. This practice aims to improve water quality and mitigate harmful algal blooms (HABs), especially in summer.

Breaching in coastal ponds is a process that was initially used to enhance salinity for herring and shellfish habitats, but has since shifted to address water quality concerns. Traditionally, an excavator creates a breach in the pond, which naturally closes within one to five days, influenced by sediment transport and weather conditions. High winds and waves can accelerate sediment movement, limiting ocean water exchange and potentially increasing eutrophication, where excessive nutrients lead to dense plant growth and depletion of oxygen. In brackish water environments, harmful algal blooms are often driven by elevated nitrogen levels and higher temperatures, with higher nitrogen concentrating leading to more frequent and severe blooms as temperatures rise.

The Nantucket Natural Resources Department (NRD) has been collaborating with local homeowners to investigate the pond breaching process. Existing data are mainly anecdotal evidence and NRD’s monthly sampling since 2022, which has not shown the expected decrease in eutrophication. Brooks’ research will focus on data before, during, and after the breach at two pond sites to assess water changes to evaluate its effectiveness in improving water quality.

When Brooks isn’t knee-deep in the waters of the Sesachacha or training with her MIT Triathlon team, she takes additional opportunities to further her education. Last year, Brooks participated in the MIT-Portugal Marine Robotics Summer School in Faial, Azores, in Portugal, and immersed herself in a combination of a hands-on design projects and lectures on a variety of topics related to oceanography, engineering, and marine robotics.

“My favorite part of the program was how interdisciplinary it was. We had a combination of mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, computer scientists, marine biologists, and oceanographers, and we had teams that included each of these specialties,” she says. “Our project involved designing a lander equipped with an underwater camera connected to a surface buoy that would transmit the footage. Having worked in mostly just engineering teams previously, it was a great experience to work with a more diverse group and I gained a much better understanding of how to design instruments and systems in accordance with what the marine biologists need.”

Brooks also earned her Part 107 Small Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) license to operate the lab’s drone with a multispectral camera for her upcoming fieldwork. When she graduates from the MIT-WHOI Joint Program next September, she’ll report to the Naval Aviation Schools Command in Pensacola, Florida, to begin flight training.

While she says she’ll miss Boston’s charm and history, as well as the Shining Sea Bikeway on crisp fall days in Woods Hole, Brooks is looking forward to putting her uniform back on, and starting her naval career and flight school. The time Brooks has spent at MIT will support her in these future endeavors. She advises others interested in a similar path to focus on research within their areas of interest.

“The biggest lesson that I’ve learned from both research theses is that any research project will change over time, and it’s often a good idea to take a step back and look at how your work fits into the larger picture,” she says. “I couldn’t recommend doing research more; it’s such a great opportunity to dig into something that you’re interested in, and is also very fulfilling.” 

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Student Program for Innovation in Science and Engineering is a launching pad toward possibility

When you ask MIT students to tell you the story of how they came to Cambridge, you might hear some common themes: a favorite science teacher; an interest in computers that turned into an obsession; a bedroom decorated with NASA posters and glow-in-the-dark stars.

But for a few, the road to MIT starts with an invitation to a special summer program: not a camp with canoes or cabins or campgrounds, but instead one taking place in classrooms and labs with discussions of Arduinos, variable scope and aliasing, and Michaelis-Menten enzyme kinetics. The classroom and labs are in Barbados at the Cave Hill campus of the University of the West Indies, and all the students are gifted Caribbean high schoolers, ages 16-18, who’ve been selected for the extremely competitive Student Program for Innovation in Science and Engineering (SPISE). Their summer will not include much time for leisure or lots of sleep; instead, they’ll be tackling a five-week high-intensity curriculum with courses in university-level calculus, physics, biochemistry, computer programming, electronics and entrepreneurship, including hands-on projects in the last three. For several students currently on campus, SPISE was their gateway to MIT.

“The full story is even bigger,” says Cardinal Warde, MIT professor of electrical engineering and founder of SPISE, who is originally from Barbados in the Caribbean. “Over the past 10 years, exactly 30 of the 245 students in total from the SPISE program have attended MIT as undergrads and/or graduate students.”

While many SPISE alumni have gone on to Harvard University, Stanford University, Caltech, Princeton University, Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, and other prestigious schools, the emphasis on science and technology creates a natural pipeline to MIT, whose faculty and instructors volunteered their time and expertise to help Warde design a curriculum that was both challenging and engaging.

Jacob White, the Cecil H. Green Professor in Electrical Engineering, was one of the first of those volunteers. “When Covid forced SPISE to run remotely, Professor Warde felt it was critical to continue having hands-on engineering labs, and sought my help,” White explains. “Kits were cobbled together using EECS-donated microcontroller boards, motors and magnets; Dinah Sah (the SPISE director) got those kits to students spread over half-a-dozen islands.” White, and several of his graduate students, collaborated to write a curriculum that would give the students enough grounding in fundamentals to empower them to create their own designs.

When SPISE returned to in-person education, Steve Leeb, the Emanuel E. Landsman (1958) Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), was inspired by the challenge of teaching electronics remotely.

“SPISE is exactly the kind of opportunity we're looking for in the RLE educational outreach programs: bright, enthusiastic young folks who would benefit from new perspectives on science and engineering — a community of folks where we can bring new perspectives, share energy and excitement, and, ideally, make lifelong connections to our academic programs here at MIT. It's a natural fit that benefits us all,” says Leeb, who, together with his graduate students, adapted the portable “take-home” Electronics FIRST curriculum pioneered at MIT and taught in course 6.2030. “The Electronics FIRST exercises and lectures are designed to connect electronic circuit techniques — digital gates, microcontrollers, and other electronics technologies — that are recognizable as elements of commercial products,” says Leeb. “So the projects naturally engage students in building with components that have a connection to commercial products and product ideas. This flows naturally into a 'final project' that the students create in SPISE, a product of their own conception, for example a music synthesizer.”

Crucially, the curriculum isn’t simplified for the high school students. “We adapted the projects to fit the different program length — SPISE is shorter than a full MIT term,” says Leeb. “We did not reduce the rigor or challenge of the activities, and, in fact, have brought new ideas from the SPISE students back to campus to improve 6.2030.”

Departments beyond EECS pitched in to develop SPISE, with major teaching contributions coming from the Department of Physics, where Lecturer Alex Shvonski, Senior Technical Instructor Caleb Bonyun, and Senior Technical Instructor Joshua Wolfe, who also manages the Physics Instructional Resource Lab, collaborated on developing hands-on projects and on the teaching for both Physics I and Calculus I courses. Additional supplies came from the MIT Sea Grant Program, which supplied underwater robots to SPISE for six consecutive years before the Covid-19 pandemic. (In the wake of the pandemic, the program pivoted to focus on embedded systems.)

But the core inspiration for SPISE doesn’t come from an academic department at all. “SPISE was based on a model that’s proven to work: MITES,” explains Ebony Hearn, executive director of the MIT Introduction to Technology, Engineering, and Science. “The program, which offers access and opportunity to intensive courses in science, technology, engineering, and math for talented high school students in every zip code, has helped thousands of students for nearly 50 years gain admission to top universities and pursue successful careers in STEM while being immersed in a community of caring mentors and leaders in the profession.”

The shared DNA of the two programs is no coincidence. Cardinal Warde has been the faculty director of MITES for the past 27 years, and took the lessons of five decades of the transformative pre-college experience into account when envisioning an equivalent program in the Caribbean. Much like MITES, SPISE encourages its participants to develop a sense of belonging in STEM and to picture the possibilities at top schools; over the years, the program has added sessions with admissions officers from MIT, Columbia, Princeton, and U Penn. “SPISE changed my perspective of myself,” says Chenise Harper, a first-year student at MIT who is currently interested in Course 6-5 (Electrical Engineering With Computing). “It gave me the confidence to apply to universities I thought were completely out of my reach.”

Harper’s trajectory is exactly what the designers of the program hoped for. “We have been very successful with the shorter-term goal of increasing the numbers of Caribbean students pursuing advanced degrees in STEM and grooming the next generation of STEM and business leaders in the Region,” says Dinah Sah ’81, director of the program (and wife of Cardinal Warde). “We have SPISE graduates who have, or are currently pursuing, graduate degrees at the top universities around the world, including (but not limited to) MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, Dartmouth, Yale, Johns Hopkins, Carnegie Mellon, and Oxford, including a Rhodes Scholar. We fully believe that SPISE graduates represent part of the next generation of STEM and business leaders in the Caribbean and that SPISE has played a significant role in their trajectories.”

Notably, the SPISE program also includes an element of entrepreneurship, encouraging students to envision tech-based solutions to problems in their own backyards. Keonna Simon, who hails from St. Vincent and the Grenadines, developed a business pitch with other SPISE participants for an innovative “reverse vending machine.” “In the Caribbean, tourism is a key contributor to the economy, but littering is an issue that detracts from the beauty of our islands and harms our abundant marine life,” explains Simon, now a junior majoring in Course 6-7 (Computer Science and Molecular Biology). “Our project aimed to tackle this by placing reverse vending machines in heavily polluted areas. People could deposit recyclable plastic bottles, and the machine would convert the weight of the plastic into cash rewards on a card, redeemable for discounts at supermarkets.”

One SPISE alum, Quilee Simeon, decided to work on a renewable energy system at SPISE as a way of addressing global warming’s effects on his homeland of St. Lucia. “I chose to work on the renewable energy project, where we designed and built a prototype wind turbine using low-resource materials like PVC pipes. It was exciting because I thought it had real applications to developing island states like ours, where we don’t have an abundance of the manufacturing materials used in larger countries, and we are disproportionately affected by climate change,” says Simeon. “So building cheap and effective renewable energy resources was, in my view, an important problem to tackle.”

As Simeon worked on his prototype turbine and tackled late nights with his new classmates at SPISE, he realized how different the experience was from his prior schooling. For most students, the summer program is a first time away from home — but for all, it is the first exposure to the firehose-like experience of tackling multiple college-level courses with simultaneous assignments and problem sets. “It was honestly a primer to MIT,” says Simeon. “They not only challenged us with rigorous math and science, but also provided guidance on college applications and explained the vast opportunities a STEM degree could unlock. SPISE changed my view of myself as a scholar, though probably in an unexpected way. I thought I was smart before attending SPISE, but I realized how much I didn’t know and how many things were lacking or wrong with the style of education I had grown used to (rote learning, memorization, etc.). SPISE made me realize that being a scholar isn’t just about consuming knowledge — it's about creating and applying it.”

The difficulty of the SPISE curriculum is a deliberate choice, made to aid students in preparing for higher education, confirms Sah. “When we started SPISE in 2012, [we decided] to focus on teaching the fundamentals in each of the courses … The homework problems and the quizzes would require the application of these fundamentals to solving challenging problems. This is in distinct contrast to rote memorization of facts, which is the method of learning these students had generally been exposed to. So, yes, this was in fact a very deliberate choice, and a critical change that we wanted to bring to these very high-potential students in their approach to learning and thinking.”

MIT’s emphasis on creative, outside-the-box thinking was just the beginning of the culture shocks that awaited SPISE students who made the transition to an American university from the summer program. Many are surprised by the American students’ habit of referring to their professors by first name, which would be considered disrespectful at home. Conversely, small daily interactions in the Northeast can feel remote and chilly to Caribbean students. “Moving from a small island with just around 100,000 people to Harvard was initially jarring,” says Gerard Porter, who participated in SPISE in 2017 before attending Harvard for his undergraduate degree. “In my first year, I was often met with puzzled stares when I greeted strangers in an elevator or students in my dorm whom I did not know personally. I quickly learned that politeness meant something very different in the Northeastern United States compared to the warm Caribbean.”

Other SPISE alumni report experiencing similar chilliness — literally. Quilee Simeon’s first winter in Cambridge was jarring. “I knew about the concept of winter and was told to expect cold weather, but I never actually knew how cold 'cold' was until I felt it myself,” says Simeon. “That was terrible!” Ronaldo Lee, a first-year from Jamaica interested in computer science and electrical engineering, found warmth among fellow SPISE alumni here at MIT. “Nothing beats the tropical climate! But honestly, the community at MIT has been amazing. I was surprised by how quickly I felt comfortable, thanks to the incredible people around me. The Black and Caribbean community especially made me feel at home; I’ve met some truly fascinating, driven, and like-minded people who’ve become close friends. One of the biggest surprises was discovering how similar we all are, despite our different cultural backgrounds. Everyone here is incredibly smart and shares a common drive to make the world a better place and pursue exciting STEM projects.”

The common drive to improve the world through STEM is evident in the paths the SPISE alumni have taken.

Gerard Porter, now a graduate student in the Kiessling Group within the Department of Chemistry at MIT, conducts research “focusing on unraveling the biological roles of glycans that cover all cells on Earth. I work on developing chemical tools to study critical regions of the bacterial cell wall that have been relatively unexplored.” Porter hopes that learning more about the molecular mechanisms at play within cell walls will open the doorway to the development of novel antibiotics.

Quilee Simeon has discovered an affinity for computational neuroscience, and is currently developing a computational model of the C. elegans nervous system. “My hope is that this model organism will prove fruitful for computational neuroscience research as it has for biology,” says Simeon, who plans to work in industry after graduation.

Computational biology has also captured the attention of junior Keonna Simon, who is excited to take courses such as 6.8711 (Computational Systems Biology: Deep Learning in the Life Sciences), saying, “This nexus holds a lot of potential for solving complex biological problems through computational methods, and I’m eager to dive deeper into that space!”

Chenise Harper found SPISE’s emphasis on bringing tech entrepreneurship home inspiring. “Living in the Caribbean has stimulated a dream of a future where robots are partners in rebuilding our community after natural disasters,” she says. “There are also so many issues that I would like to one day contribute to, like climate change issues and even cybersecurity. Electrical Engineering with Computing is the kind of major that will allow me to at least touch on the areas I am interested in, and allow me to explore both software and hardware concepts that excite me and will inspire me to develop a concrete way to give back to the community that has lifted me up to where I am now.”

Ronaldo Lee also found his academic home in computer science and electrical engineering, fabricating and characterizing perovskite solar cells in his Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program project and building a small offshore wind turbine for the Collegiate Wind Competition as part of the MIT WIND team. “I’d love to focus on the energy sector, particularly in improving the grid system and integrating renewable energy sources to ensure more reliable access,” says Lee. “I want to help make energy access more sustainable and inclusive, driving development for the region as a whole.”

Lee’s plans are perfectly in line with the long-term goals set by Warde and Sah as they planned SPISE. “Diversifying the economies of the region and raising the standard of living by stimulating more technology-based entrepreneurship will take time,” says Sah. “We are optimistic that our SPISE graduates will, with time, change the world to make it a better place for all, including the Caribbean.”

de MIT News https://ift.tt/lyrVG6t

For clean ammonia, MIT engineers propose going underground

Ammonia is the most widely produced chemical in the world today, used primarily as a source for nitrogen fertilizer. Its production is also a major source of greenhouse gas emissions — the highest in the whole chemical industry.

Now, a team of researchers at MIT has developed an innovative way of making ammonia without the usual fossil-fuel-powered chemical plants that require high heat and pressure. Instead, they have found a way to use the Earth itself as a geochemical reactor, producing ammonia underground. The processes uses Earth’s naturally occurring heat and pressure, provided free of charge and free of emissions, as well as the reactivity of minerals already present in the ground.

The trick the team devised is to inject water underground, into an area of iron-rich subsurface rock. The water carries with it a source of nitrogen and particles of a metal catalyst, allowing the water to react with the iron to generate clean hydrogen, which in turn reacts with the nitrogen to make ammonia. A second well is then used to pump that ammonia up to the surface.

The process, which has been demonstrated in the lab but not yet in a natural setting, is described today in the journal Joule. The paper’s co-authors are MIT professors of materials science and engineering Iwnetim Abate and Ju Li, graduate student Yifan Gao, and five others at MIT.

“When I first produced ammonia from rock in the lab, I was so excited,” Gao recalls. “I realized this represented an entirely new and never-reported approach to ammonia synthesis.’”

The standard method for making ammonia is called the Haber-Bosch process, which was developed in Germany in the early 20th century to replace natural sources of nitrogen fertilizer such as mined deposits of bat guano, which were becoming depleted. But the Haber-Bosch process is very energy intensive: It requires temperatures of 400 degrees Celsius and pressures of 200 atmospheres, and this means it needs huge installations in order to be efficient. Some areas of the world, such as sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, have few or no such plants in operation.  As a result, the shortage or extremely high cost of fertilizer in these regions has limited their agricultural production.

The Haber-Bosch process “is good. It works,” Abate says. “Without it, we wouldn’t have been able to feed 2 out of the total 8 billion people in the world right now, he says, referring to the portion of the world’s population whose food is grown with ammonia-based fertilizers. But because of the emissions and energy demands, a better process is needed, he says.

Burning fuel to generate heat is responsible for about 20 percent of the greenhouse gases emitted from plants using the Haber-Bosch process. Making hydrogen accounts for the remaining 80 percent.  But ammonia, the molecule NH₃, is made up only of nitrogen and hydrogen. There’s no carbon in the formula, so where do the carbon emissions come from? The standard way of producing the needed hydrogen is by processing methane gas with steam, breaking down the gas into pure hydrogen, which gets used, and carbon dioxide gas that gets released into the air.

Other processes exist for making low- or no-emissions hydrogen, such as by using solar or wind-generated electricity to split water into oxygen and hydrogen, but that process can be expensive. That’s why Abate and his team worked on developing a system to produce what they call geological hydrogen. Some places in the world, including some in Africa, have been found to naturally generate hydrogen underground through chemical reactions between water and iron-rich rocks. These pockets of naturally occurring hydrogen can be mined, just like natural methane reservoirs, but the extent and locations of such deposits are still relatively unexplored.

Abate realized this process could be created or enhanced by pumping water, laced with copper and nickel catalyst particles to speed up the process, into the ground in places where such iron-rich rocks were already present. “We can use the Earth as a factory to produce clean flows of hydrogen,” he says.

He recalls thinking about the problem of the emissions from hydrogen production for ammonia: “The ‘aha!’ moment for me was thinking, how about we link this process of geological hydrogen production with the process of making Haber-Bosch ammonia?”

That would solve the biggest problem of the underground hydrogen production process, which is how to capture and store the gas once it’s produced. Hydrogen is a very tiny molecule — the smallest of them all — and hard to contain. But by implementing the entire Haber-Bosch process underground, the only material that would need to be sent to the surface would be the ammonia itself, which is easy to capture, store, and transport.

The only extra ingredient needed to complete the process was the addition of a source of nitrogen, such as nitrate or nitrogen gas, into the water-catalyst mixture being injected into the ground. Then, as the hydrogen gets released from water molecules after interacting with the iron-rich rocks, it can immediately bond with the nitrogen atoms also carried in the water, with the deep underground environment providing the high temperatures and pressures required by the Haber-Bosch process. A second well near the injection well then pumps the ammonia out and into tanks on the surface.

“We call this geological ammonia,” Abate says, “because we are using subsurface temperature, pressure, chemistry, and geologically existing rocks to produce ammonia directly.”

Whereas transporting hydrogen requires expensive equipment to cool and liquefy it, and virtually no pipelines exist for its transport (except near oil refinery sites), transporting ammonia is easier and cheaper. It’s about one-sixth the cost of transporting hydrogen, and there are already more than 5,000 miles of ammonia pipelines and 10,000 terminals in place in the U.S. alone. What’s more, Abate explains, ammonia, unlike hydrogen, already has a substantial commercial market in place, with production volume projected to grow by two to three times by 2050, as it is used not only for fertilizer but also as feedstock for a wide variety of chemical processes.

For example, ammonia can be burned directly in gas turbines, engines, and industrial furnaces, providing a carbon-free alternative to fossil fuels. It is being explored for maritime shipping and aviation as an alternative fuel, and as a possible space propellant.

Another upside to geological ammonia is that untreated wastewater, including agricultural runoff, which tends to be rich in nitrogen already, could serve as the water source and be treated in the process. “We can tackle the problem of treating wastewater, while also making something of value out of this waste,” Abate says.

Gao adds that this process “involves no direct carbon emissions, presenting a potential pathway to reduce global CO2 emissions by up to 1 percent.” To arrive at this point, he says, the team “overcame numerous challenges and learned from many failed attempts. For example, we tested a wide range of conditions and catalysts before identifying the most effective one.”

The project was seed-funded under a flagship project of MIT’s Climate Grand Challenges program, the Center for the Electrification and Decarbonization of Industry. Professor Yet-Ming Chiang, co-director of the center, says “I don’t think there’s been any previous example of deliberately using the Earth as a chemical reactor. That’s one of the key novel points of this approach.”  Chiang emphasizes that even though it is a geological process, it happens very fast, not on geological timescales. “The reaction is fundamentally over in a matter of hours,” he says. “The reaction is so fast that this answers one of the key questions: Do you have to wait for geological times? And the answer is absolutely no.”

Professor Elsa Olivetti, a mission director of the newly established Climate Project at MIT, says, “The creative thinking by this team is invaluable to MIT’s ability to have impact at scale. Coupling these exciting results with, for example, advanced understanding of the geology surrounding hydrogen accumulations represent the whole-of-Institute efforts the Climate Project aims to support.”

“This is a significant breakthrough for the future of sustainable development,” says Geoffrey Ellis, a geologist at the U.S. Geological Survey, who was not associated with this work. He adds, “While there is clearly more work that needs to be done to validate this at the pilot stage and to get this to the commercial scale, the concept that has been demonstrated is truly transformative.  The approach of engineering a system to optimize the natural process of nitrate reduction by Fe²⁺ is ingenious and will likely lead to further innovations along these lines.”

The initial work on the process has been done in the laboratory, so the next step will be to prove the process using a real underground site. “We think that kind of experiment can be done within the next one to two years,” Abate says. This could open doors to using a similar approach for other chemical production processes, he adds.

The team has applied for a patent and aims to work towards bringing the process to market.

“Moving forward,” Gao says, “our focus will be on optimizing the process conditions and scaling up tests, with the goal of enabling practical applications for geological ammonia in the near future.”

The research team also included Ming Lei, Bachu Sravan Kumar, Hugh Smith, Seok Hee Han, and Lokesh Sangabattula, all at MIT. Additional funding was provided by the National Science Foundation and was carried out, in part, through the use of MIT.nano facilities.

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