MIT students build connections with Black and Indigenous Brazilians to investigate culture and the environment

In January 2024, at the height of Brazil’s summer, a group of 20 MIT undergraduates will arrive in São Paulo, Brazil, for the Independent Activities Period (IAP) course WGS.247/21L.592 (Race, Place, and Modernity in the Americas) jointly offered by the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences’ programs in Women’s and Gender Studies, Literature, and Writing. 

Continuing a program developed in 2019 and launched as a special course in 2020, the three-week course offers students opportunities to study how American and Brazilian Black and Indigenous writers, artists, and filmmakers’ art and cultural activism — particularly women’s — can impact racial justice and environmental issues. 

The class will visit historical sites, cultural centers, nature reserves, and museums while also engaging in conversations with local scholars, activists, religious leaders, community organizers, and artists. 

By mixing classroom discussions with on-site exploration and cross-cultural exchanges, the course offers innovative pedagogy that is experiential (learning by doing), immersive (learning within an environment), and interdisciplinary (learning across different fields).

An immersive course, years in the making

Joaquin Terrones ’99, a lecturer in literature and women’s and gender studies, was already teaching this material when he considered expanding its scope. “It seemed like the natural next step was to take students to Brazil so they could experience its incredible culture, art, and activism for themselves,” he remembers.

In 2019, he and Wyn Kelley, a senior lecturer in literature, received a Higher Education Innovation grant from the MIT Jameel World Education Lab (J-WEL) to develop the course and teach it as a special subject the following year.

Generous support from MIT-Brazil, the Office of Minority Education, and MindHandHeart completed its transformation into a full-fledged course in women’s and gender studies, literature, and writing as part of MIT’s Independent Activities Period (IAP) last January.

Helen Elaine Lee, a professor in MIT’s Comparative Media Studies/Writing program, co-taught the subject in its first full year, sharing her experiences using creative practices to further social justice.  

Undergraduates from across MIT’s five schools, particularly Black, Latino, LGBTQ+, and first-generation college students, have enrolled. This outreach is important because some studies have shown students from these groups are underserved by study abroad programs, participating at significantly lower rates.

“Our students want spaces like the one created by this course to think deeply and collectively about the daunting array of crises we face, from catastrophic climate change to entrenched violence against communities of color,” says Terrones.

No day at the beach … well, maybe one or two

Although a few weeks in South America during January might sound like a vacation, the course is rigorous and intense, packing a semester’s worth of material into three weeks. Students spend mornings in seminar-style discussions, head out across the city for field trips in the afternoon, and return to their residences in the early evening for a few hours of readings or screenings. 

For Tamea Cobb, a senior double majoring in chemical engineering and literature, the class trip to Rio led to an epiphany. “I remember waking up super early to watch the sunrise on the beach, where we saw a man practicing capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian martial art form disguised to look like dancing by enslaved Africans forbidden from practicing martial arts. We had just learned about capoeira the week prior, so it was a beautiful full-circle moment.”

In addition to class outings in São Paulo and Rio, students also organize their own weekend trips within Brazil to places such as Salvador, the unofficial capital of Afro-Brazilian culture, and Inhotim, a vast open-air art museum and botanical garden in the middle of the Atlantic Forest.

Beyond Brazil

The course’s impact continues well after its completion as participants incorporate what they learned into their work and lives. 

“The course was a priceless experience that further revealed the interconnectedness of African experiences in the Americas,” says Afura N. Taylor ’21, who double majored in physics and writing. “It has influenced my writing by providing examples of literature and cultural practices that center ancestral memory.”

Educators also see benefits. “I had no idea it would give me a new research project on the presence of Brazil in Black U.S. print culture from the early national period to the present,” says Kelley. 

In fact, the course’s success has inspired two new IAP subjects in Brazil this year: 21G.S07 (Language Conversation and Brazilian Culture) by Nilma Dominique from the Global Studies and Languages Section, and 10.496/1.096 (Design of Sustainable Polymer Systems in the Amazon) by Professor Bradley Olsen in the Department of Chemical Engineering.

When asked what makes the course special, Professor Lee describes “[a] unique power [that] derives from rigorous discussions of challenging texts and films that question prevalent assumptions about history and politics, and immersive cultural experiences that open mind and heart, expanding and empowering students who often feel isolated and excluded on MIT’s campus.”  

She adds, “In addition to deepening my intellectual and political understanding, this class gave me a profound experience of ancestral recovery that has fed my artistic work. For our Black, Latinx, and LGBTQ+ students, it was a liberatory experience of community. A re-education. A cultural and personal homecoming.”

Marvel Snap Will “Continue To Operate” Despite Reports Of Publisher Nuverse Restructuring

Chinese company ByteDance is best known for its ownership of TikTok, the international video platform, but it owns a number of other companies as well. One of those companies is Nuverse, a game publisher best known in the West for its work on Marvel Snap. Fans of the superhero card-battler had reason for concern this morning, as an article from Reuters reported that ByteDance had plans to leave the gaming space entirely, with intentions to “divest from titles already launched.” This seemed to spell doom for Marvel Snap.

However, the official Marvel Snap X account issued a statement today that this would not be the case.

Dear SNAPPERS,

Some of our players have expressed their concerns regarding reported structural changes at Nuverse.

We wish to thank you for your concern and assure you that regardless of any changes at Nuverse, SNAP will continue to operate and flourish in the future!

It’s unclear exactly why the PC and mobile game will be exempt from any changes, but we’re happy to hear that one of the best games from 2022 isn’t going anywhere. However, the fates of the workers at Nuverse and the company’s other games are unclear, as Reuters reports that “the decision is likely to impact hundreds of employees.” The report states that ByteDance will announce this restructure sometime today.

[Source: Reuters]

Destiny 2: The Final Shape Delayed To June

Following the round of layoffs that recently hit Bungie, it had been reported that Destiny 2’s next big expansion, The Final Shape, had been internally delayed to the summer. Bungie has now confirmed that to be the case.

Originally slated to launch on February 27, The Final Shape now launches on June 4. In a blog post, Bungie states that the expansion “needs more time to become exactly what we want it to be”.

“The Final Shape is the culmination of the first ten years of Destiny storytelling and, for Guardians everywhere, countless hours spent together,” Bungie writes in the post. “We want to honor that journey, so we’re taking the time we need to deliver an even bigger and bolder vision, one that we hope will be remembered and treasured for years to come.”

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The delay has caused some changes to the content roadmap. Destiny 2’s Season of the Wish begins tomorrow and runs until The Final Shape launches. Guardian Games has been bumped up to March, with Bungie stating it will have a “refreshed focus on class vs. class competition.” Three new PvP maps are slated to arrive in May. 

Lastly, the studio announced Destiny 2: Into the Light, a two-month content update that arrives in April. The post doesn’t provide much details other than stating it will “prepare players for their Guardian’s journey into the Traveler.”

Destiny 2: The Final Shape was revealed in August and is billed as the conclusion of Destiny’s primary storyline that began when the first game launched in 2014. About a month ago, the team laid off over 100 employees, reportedly due to decreased Destiny 2 player engagement and underwhelming pre-orders for The Final Shape as player sentiment reached an all-time low.

Bloomberg initially reported on the rumored delay of The Final Shape while also stating that Bungie’s upcoming extraction shooter Marathon had been pushed to 2025. Marthon’s delay has not been officially confirmed by Bungie (nor did it have a release window to begin with), but today’s confirmation of The Final Shape’s delay certainly adds weight to Bloomberg‘s report. 

Team engineers nanoparticles using ion irradiation to advance clean energy and fuel conversion

MIT researchers and colleagues have demonstrated a way to precisely control the size, composition, and other properties of nanoparticles key to the reactions involved in a variety of clean energy and environmental technologies. They did so by leveraging ion irradiation, a technique in which beams of charged particles bombard a material.

They went on to show that nanoparticles created this way have superior performance over their conventionally made counterparts.

“The materials we have worked on could advance several technologies, from fuel cells to generate CO2-free electricity to the production of clean hydrogen feedstocks for the chemical industry [through electrolysis cells],” says Bilge Yildiz, leader of the work and a professor in MIT’s departments of Nuclear Science and Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering.

Critical catalyst

Fuel and electrolysis cells both involve electrochemical reactions through three principal parts: two electrodes (a cathode and anode) separated by an electrolyte. The difference between the two cells is that the reactions involved run in reverse.

The electrodes are coated with catalysts, or materials that make the reactions involved go faster. But a critical catalyst made of metal-oxide materials has been limited by challenges including low durability. “The metal catalyst particles coarsen at high temperatures, and you lose surface area and activity as a result,” says Yildiz, who is also affiliated with the Materials Research Laboratory and is an author of an open-access paper on the work published in the journal Energy & Environmental Science.

Enter metal exsolution, which involves precipitating metal nanoparticles out of a host oxide onto the surface of the electrode. The particles embed themselves into the electrode, “and that anchoring makes them more stable,” says Yildiz. As a result, exsolution has “led to remarkable progress in clean energy conversion and energy-efficient computing devices,” the researchers write in their paper.

However, controlling the precise properties of the resulting nanoparticles has been difficult. “We know that exsolution can give us stable and active nanoparticles, but the challenging part is really to control it. The novelty of this work is that we’ve found a tool — ion irradiation — that can give us that control,” says Jiayue Wang PhD ’22, first author of the paper. Wang, who conducted the work while earning his PhD in the MIT Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, is now a postdoc at Stanford University.

Sossina Haile ’86, PhD ’92, the Walter P. Murphy Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern University, who was not involved in the current work, says:

“Metallic nanoparticles serve as catalysts in a whole host of reactions, including the important reaction of splitting water to generate hydrogen for energy storage. In this work, Yildiz and colleagues have created an ingenious method for controlling the way that nanoparticles form.”

Haile continues, “the community has shown that exsolution results in structurally stable nanoparticles, but the process is not easy to control, so one doesn’t necessarily get the optimal number and size of particles. Using ion irradiation, this group was able to precisely control the features of the nanoparticles, resulting in excellent catalytic activity for water splitting.”

What they did

The researchers found that aiming a beam of ions at the electrode while simultaneously exsolving metal nanoparticles onto the electrode’s surface allowed them to control several properties of the resulting nanoparticles.

“Through ion-matter interactions, we have successfully engineered the size, composition, density, and location of the exsolved nanoparticles,” the team writes in Energy & Environmental Science.

For example, they could make the particles much smaller — down to 2 billionths of a meter in diameter — than those made using conventional thermal exsolution methods alone. Further, they were able to change the composition of the nanoparticles by irradiating with specific elements. They demonstrated this with a beam of nickel ions that implanted nickel into the exsolved metal nanoparticle. As a result, they demonstrated a direct and convenient way to engineer the composition of exsolved nanoparticles.

“We want to have multi-element nanoparticles, or alloys, because they usually have higher catalytic activity,” Yildiz says. “With our approach, the exsolution target does not have to be dependent on the substrate oxide itself.” Irradiation opens the door to many more compositions. “We can pretty much choose any oxide and any ion that we can irradiate with and exsolve that,” says Yildiz.

The team also found that ion irradiation forms defects in the electrode itself. And these defects provide additional nucleation sites, or places for the exsolved nanoparticles to grow from, increasing the density of the resulting nanoparticles.

Irradiation could also allow extreme spatial control over the nanoparticles. “Because you can focus the ion beam, you can imagine that you could ‘write’ with it to form specific nanostructures,” says Wang. “We did a preliminary demonstration [of that], but we believe it has potential to realize well-controlled micro- and nano-structures.”

The team also showed that the nanoparticles they created with ion irradiation had superior catalytic activity over those created by conventional thermal exsolution alone.

Additional MIT authors of the paper are Kevin B. Woller, a principal research scientist at the Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC), home to the equipment used for ion irradiation; Abinash Kumar PhD ’22, who received his PhD from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE) and is now at Oak Ridge National Laboratory; and James M. LeBeau, an associate professor in DMSE. Other authors are Zhan Zhang and Hua Zhou of Argonne National Laboratory, and Iradwikanari Waluyo and Adrian Hunt of Brookhaven National Laboratory.

This work was funded by the OxEon Corp. and MIT’s PSFC. The research also used resources supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, MIT’s Materials Research Laboratory, and MIT.nano. The work was performed, in part, at Harvard University through a network funded by the National Science Foundation.

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A green hydrogen innovation for clean energy

Renewable energy today — mainly derived from the sun or wind — depends on batteries for storage. While costs have dropped in recent years, the pursuit of more efficient means of storing renewable power continues.

“All of these technologies, unfortunately, have a long way to go,” said Sossina Haile SB ’86, PhD ’92, the Walter P. Murphy Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern University, at recent talk at MIT. She was the speaker of the fall 2023 Wulff Lecture, an event hosted by the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE) to ignite enthusiasm for the discipline.

To add to the renewable energy mix — and help quicken the pace to a sustainable future — Haile is working on an approach based on hydrogen in fuel cells, particularly for eco-friendly fuel in cars. Fuel cells, like batteries, produce electricity from chemical reactions but don’t lose their charge so long as fuel is supplied.

To generate power, the hydrogen must be pure — not attached to another molecule. Most methods of producing hydrogen today require burning fossil fuel, which generates planet-heating carbon emissions. Haile proposes a “green” process using renewable electricity to extract the hydrogen from steam.

When hydrogen is used in a fuel cell, “you have water as the product, and that’s the beautiful zero emissions,” Haile said, referring to the renewable energy production cycle that is set in motion.

Ammonia fuels hydrogen’s potential

Hydrogen is not yet widely used as a fuel because it’s difficult to transport. For one, it has low energy density, meaning a large volume of hydrogen gas is needed to store a large amount of energy. And storing it is challenging because hydrogen’s tiny molecules can infiltrate metal tanks or pipes, causing cracks and gas leakage.

Haile’s solution for transporting hydrogen is using ammonia to “carry” it. Ammonia is three parts hydrogen and one part nitrogen, so the hydrogen needs to be separated from the nitrogen before it can be used in the kind of fuel cells that can power cars.

Ammonia has some advantages, including using existing pipelines and a high transmission capacity, Haile said — so more power can be transmitted at any given time.

To extract the hydrogen from ammonia, Haile has built devices that look a lot like fuel cells, with cesium dihydrogen phosphate as an electrolyte. The “superprotonic” material displays high proton conductivity — it allows protons, or positively charged particles, to move through it. This is important for hydrogen, which has just a proton and an electron. By letting only protons through the electrolyte, the device strips hydrogen from the ammonia, leaving behind the nitrogen.

The material has other benefits, too, Haile said: “It’s inexpensive, nontoxic, earth-abundant — all these good things that you want to have when you think about a sustainable energy technology.”

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2023 Fall Wulff Lecture
Video: Department of Materials Science and Engineering

Sparking interest — and hope

Haile’s talk piqued interest in the audience, which nearly filled the 6-120 auditorium at MIT, which seats about 150 people.

Materials science and engineering major Nikhita Law heard hope in Haile’s talk for a more sustainable future.

“A major problem in making our energy system sustainable is finding ways to store energy from renewables,” Law says. Even if hydrogen-powered cars are not as wide-scale as lithium-battery-powered electric cars, “a permanent energy storage station where we convert electricity into hydrogen and convert it back seems like it makes more sense than mining more lithium.”

Another DMSE student, senior Daniel Tong, learned about the challenges involved in transporting hydrogen at another seminar and was curious to learn more. “This was something I hadn’t thought of: Can you carry hydrogen more effectively in a different form? That’s really cool.”

He adds that talks like the Wulff Lecture are helpful in keeping people up to date in a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary field such as materials science and engineering, which spans chemistry, physics, engineering, and other disciplines. “This is a really good way to get exposed to different parts of materials science. There are so many more facets than you know of.”

In her talk, Haile encouraged audience members to get involved in sustainability research.

“There’s lots of room for further insight and materials discovery,” she said.

Haile concluded by underscoring the challenges faced by developing countries in dealing with climate change impacts, particularly those near the equator where there isn’t adequate infrastructure to deal with big swings in precipitation and temperature. For the people who aren’t driven to solve problems that affect people on the other side of the world, Haile offered some extra motivation.

“I’m sure many of you enjoy coffee. This is going to put the coffee crops in jeopardy as well,” she said.

Richard Fletcher named a 2023 Packard Fellow

The David and Lucile Packard Foundation has announced that atomic physicist Richard Fletcher, assistant professor of physics and a researcher at MIT-Harvard Center for Ultracold Atoms (CUA) and the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), has been named a 2023 Packard Fellow for Science and Engineering. The Packard Foundation Fellowships are one of the most prestigious and well-funded nongovernmental awards for early-career scientists.

Fletcher is one of 20 innovative early-career scientists and engineers named to the 2023 class of Packard Fellows for Science and Engineering. Two MIT alumni were also named: Ritchie Chen SM ’13, PhD ’16 and Yang Yang PhD ’16, both now at the University of California at San Francisco. Each fellow receives $875,000 over five years to pursue their research.

“It’s a tremendous honor to be awarded a Packard Fellowship, and I’m very grateful to the foundation for their support of our work,” says Fletcher. “It’s quite inspiring to look down the list of alumni, and I hope that we will live up to the same high standards.” 

Fletcher and his lab use precisely controlled gases of atoms at ultracold temperatures to create and study exciting types of quantum matter. He uses atomic vapors, which are a million times thinner than air and a million times colder than interstellar space, which in turn are manipulated by laser beams and magnetic fields, he says.

“In many systems in nature, the behavior of many particles is qualitatively different to the underlying single-particle physics,” he explains. “For example, superconductivity is the frictionless flow of electrical current, which occurs in many low-temperature materials, but you can’t understand it from the physics of a single electron. In turns out that in general, describing the emergence of macroscopic phenomena from microscopic ingredients is really hard once the rule book is quantum mechanical.

“We approach this problem by building little tailor-made quantum worlds, formed by very cold gases of atoms, a million times colder than deep space, controlled and manipulated by laser beams and magnetic fields. In particular, since these platforms are free from many of the constraints imposed by real materials, we can use them to create states of matter that nature has simply never allowed to exist before. And honestly, some of the time we just use these exquisite tools we’ve developed to simply play around and have fun in the lab, and see what surprises experiments throw our way. That’s what I love most about experimental science!”

A native of Chester, U.K., he earned his undergraduate degree in 2010 and his PhD in 2015 from Cambridge University, and in between those degrees he was a Frank Knox Fellow at Harvard University. His thesis focused on the interplay of superfluidity and Bose-Einstein condensation in two dimensions. In 2016, he arrived at MIT as a Pappalardo Fellow, working with Martin Zwierlein on quantum fluids in artificial magnetic fields, and joined the MIT faculty in 2020. In 2022 he was awarded the AFOSR Young Investigator Award.

Past Packard fellows have gone on to receive such honors as the Nobel Prize in chemistry and physics, the Fields Medal, Alan T. Waterman Awards, Breakthrough Prizes, Kavli Prizes, and elections to the national academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine.

Each year, the foundation invites 50 universities to nominate two faculty members for consideration. The Packard Fellowships Advisory Panel, a group of 12 internationally recognized scientists and engineers, evaluates the nominations and recommends fellows for approval by the Packard Foundation Board of Trustees. The Packard Foundation also continues to support fellows as they undertake a variety of self-directed initiatives to support diversity, equity, and inclusion in STEM through additional targeted grants.