OpenAI has announced the release of fine-tuning capabilities for its GPT-4o model, a feature eagerly awaited by developers. To sweeten the deal, OpenAI is providing one million free training tokens per day for every organisation until 23rd September. Tailoring GPT-4o using custom datasets can result in…
Q&A: Undergraduate admissions in the wake of the 2023 Supreme Court ruling
Earlier today, MIT Admissions released demographic data about the undergraduate Class of 2028, the first class of students admitted after the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. Harvard that banned the consideration of race in undergraduate admissions. As Dean of Admissions and Student Financial Services Stu Schmill ’86 anticipated in a blog post last June, the court’s decision has resulted in a decline in the proportion of enrolling first-year students who are members of historically under-represented racial and ethnic groups.
MIT News spoke with Schmill about this change, why diversity matters for the MIT education, and what happens next; Schmill also wrote a personal reflection on the MIT Admissions blog.
Q: What is the impact of the Supreme Court’s decision on MIT’s Class of 2028?
A: Last June, the Supreme Court ruled that colleges and universities that receive federal funding may no longer consider race in undergraduate admissions decisions. As I explained in a blog post at the time, we expected that this would result in fewer students from historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups enrolling at MIT. That’s what has happened.
As a baseline, in recent years around 25% of our enrolling undergraduate students have identified as Black, Hispanic, and/or Native American and Pacific Islander. For the incoming Class of 2028, that number is about 16%. (For comparison, federal data show that 45% of K-12 students in American public schools are classified as members of these groups.)
While this is a substantial change in the demographic composition of the Class of 2028 compared with recent years, I want to be clear that it does not bring any aggregate change in the quantifiable characteristics we use to predict academic success at MIT, such as performance in high school or scores on standardized tests. By these measures, this cohort is no more or less prepared to excel in our curriculum than other recent classes that were more broadly diverse.
I emphasize this essential fact because many people have told me over the years that MIT ought to care only about academic excellence, not diversity. But every student we admit, from any background, is already located at the far-right end of the distribution of academic excellence. In my time as dean, we have considered only applicants who meet our extremely high threshold of academic readiness . Recognizing the substantial educational benefits of diversity, we then worked to assemble from that highly qualified group a class that reflected both breadth and excellence in its collective interests, aptitudes, and experiences.
The evidence of our success in achieving both academic excellence and broad diversity is in our outcomes, both on and beyond our campus. In recent years, as MIT has grown more diverse, collective academic performance has improved, as have retention and graduation rates, which are now at all-time highs for students from all backgrounds. At the same time, according to data from the American Society for Engineering Education, over the last 10 years MIT has graduated more engineers from historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups than any other private college or university (and almost all public universities) in the United States, while at the same time being widely regarded as the world’s leading STEM institution and an important engine of innovation. These simultaneous achievements by our community represent a synthesis of — not a tension between — diversity and excellence.
Q: Why does diversity matter in an MIT education?
A: I am convinced, from empirical data and personal experience, that the MIT education is strongest when our student body is, above a high bar of academic excellence, broadly diverse.
Any MIT alum can tell you that they learned as much from their peers as their professors; certainly that was as true for me as a Course 2 [mechanical engineering major] in the 1980s as it is for my advisees today. When you bring together people with different ideas and experiences who share common interests, aptitudes, and match for MIT’s mission, they contribute their individual talents to collective excellence.
We also need this diversity in order to attract the very best students. As MIT has become more diverse, more of the most talented students in the country from all backgrounds have chosen to enroll at MIT — and they specifically tell us in surveys that attending a diverse institution is important to them and that they value this quality in their MIT experience.
It should not really be surprising that today’s students prefer a diverse campus community: They come from the most multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural generation of Americans that has ever existed. So another reason we care about diversity is that it makes us the strongest magnet of talent for the next generation of scientists, engineers, and knowledge-creators.
Q: Why did MIT need to consider race in the past to achieve diverse classes?
A: As we argued in an amicus brief in the SFFA case, the educational benefits of diversity are well established. Empirical evidence demonstrates that what matters for creativity and innovation is having highly qualified people with a wide variety of experiences and backgrounds working together as a team to generate new solutions to hard problems.
Unfortunately, there remains persistent and profound racial inequality in American K-12 education, and it is most pronounced in STEM. This means that carrying the diversity of American public schools forward into higher ed is difficult from the word go.
Let’s start with these troubling facts: According to federal data, among public high schools where 75% or more of students are Black and/or Hispanic:
- nearly two-thirds do not offer calculus;
- more than half do not offer any form of computer science; and
- nearly half do not offer any form of physics.
Research shows that students who do not have the opportunity to build a strong foundation in math and science in high school are much less likely to succeed in graduating with a degree in STEM. Meanwhile, research from Stanford University’s Educational Opportunity Project shows that school segregation — which is strongly associated with achievement gaps — has steadily increased since the early 1990s. By some measures, school segregation now approaches levels not seen since Brown v. Board of Education 70 years ago.
In the everyday work of the MIT Admissions office, we see firsthand the startling extent of ongoing educational inequality in the U.S.: Whether we are out on the road or at home reading applications, we can see differences in opportunity from state to state, district to district, school to school, and even sometimes within schools.
We have tried to help close these gaps by directing prospective students toward free resources to help them better prepare for college-level STEM work, whether at MIT or anywhere else. In my blog post today, I talk about MIT’s long history of broadening access to educational opportunity to students from all backgrounds. I believe MIT can, will, and must do even more to open the aperture of opportunity in the future.
Q: What does all this mean?
A: Well, before the SFFA decision we were able to use race as one factor among many to identify well-prepared students who emerged from the unequal K-12 educational environment. We could see that these students met our high academic standards of excellence, were well-matched to our education, and would thrive at MIT.
Following the SFFA decision, we are unable to use race in the same way, and that change is reflected in the outcome for the Class of 2028. Indeed, we did not solicit race or ethnicity information from applicants this year, so we don’t have data on the applicant pool. But I have no doubt that we left out many well-qualified, well-matched applicants from historically under-represented backgrounds who in the past we would have admitted — and who would have excelled.
I want to emphasize that this change in the composition of our incoming class is not due to our reinstated testing requirement. In fact, the class we admitted last year under the testing requirement had the highest proportion of students from historically underrepresented racial and ethnic backgrounds in MIT history, because universal testing helped us identify objectively well-qualified students who lacked other avenues to demonstrate their preparation. As I explained at the time, standardized tests are certainly imperfect, but they are, in important respects, less unequal than other things we can consider.
We will continue to use the tests to help identify students who could not otherwise demonstrate their preparation for our education; however, the SFFA decision limits our ability to select, from among the well-qualified pool of applicants, a class that purposefully draws from a broad range of backgrounds.
Q: Where does MIT go from here?
A: Given the clear educational benefits, we still consider many kinds of diversity: prospective fields of study and areas of research, extracurricular activities and accomplishments, as well as economic, geographic, and educational background — just not race.
After the decision, we responded with expanded recruitment and financial aid initiatives designed to improve access to MIT for students from all backgrounds. These efforts include a new targeted outreach program to identify and encourage students in rural America to apply to MIT. They also include a new policy under which most families earning less than $75,000 a year pay nothing to attend — the kind of clear commitment that has been shown to lower barriers. It also allowed us to quintuple the number of students we match through QuestBridge, a national talent search program for high-achieving, low-income students of all backgrounds, and represents a continued commitment from MIT leadership to keeping our education affordable for everyone through the $165 million that we devote annually to undergraduate financial aid.
Clearly, we still need to do more to ensure MIT remains a destination for the best talent from all backgrounds. My team has been meeting with faculty, student, and administrative leadership to gather ideas on what we might do going forward. And in her community message today, President Kornbluth underscored her commitment to making an MIT education accessible to those “whose talent and potential have been masked or limited” by structural and social factors, as was the charge of the Task Force on Educational Opportunity chaired by former MIT president Paul Gray back in 1968. Through this ongoing work, we seek to find the best path forward for the Institute of today and for future generations.
To be clear, there is no quick and easy “hack” to solve for racial inequality. But MIT does not shrink from hard problems in science or in society, and we will do what we can, within the bounds of the law, to continue to deliver an exceptionally rigorous and inclusive educational experience that our current, former, and future students can be proud of.
Study reveals the benefits and downside of fasting
Low-calorie diets and intermittent fasting have been shown to have numerous health benefits: They can delay the onset of some age-related diseases and lengthen lifespan, not only in humans but many other organisms.
Many complex mechanisms underlie this phenomenon. Previous work from MIT has shown that one way fasting exerts its beneficial effects is by boosting the regenerative abilities of intestinal stem cells, which helps the intestine recover from injuries or inflammation.
In a study of mice, MIT researchers have now identified the pathway that enables this enhanced regeneration, which is activated once the mice begin “refeeding” after the fast. They also found a downside to this regeneration: When cancerous mutations occurred during the regenerative period, the mice were more likely to develop early-stage intestinal tumors.
“Having more stem cell activity is good for regeneration, but too much of a good thing over time can have less favorable consequences,” says Omer Yilmaz, an MIT associate professor of biology, a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, and the senior author of the new study.
Yilmaz adds that further studies are needed before forming any conclusion as to whether fasting has a similar effect in humans.
“We still have a lot to learn, but it is interesting that being in either the state of fasting or refeeding when exposure to mutagen occurs can have a profound impact on the likelihood of developing a cancer in these well-defined mouse models,” he says.
MIT postdocs Shinya Imada and Saleh Khawaled are the lead authors of the paper, which appears today in Nature.
Driving regeneration
For several years, Yilmaz’s lab has been investigating how fasting and low-calorie diets affect intestinal health. In a 2018 study, his team reported that during a fast, intestinal stem cells begin to use lipids as an energy source, instead of carbohydrates. They also showed that fasting led to a significant boost in stem cells’ regenerative ability.
However, unanswered questions remained: How does fasting trigger this boost in regenerative ability, and when does the regeneration begin?
“Since that paper, we’ve really been focused on understanding what is it about fasting that drives regeneration,” Yilmaz says. “Is it fasting itself that’s driving regeneration, or eating after the fast?”
In their new study, the researchers found that stem cell regeneration is suppressed during fasting but then surges during the refeeding period. The researchers followed three groups of mice — one that fasted for 24 hours, another one that fasted for 24 hours and then was allowed to eat whatever they wanted during a 24-hour refeeding period, and a control group that ate whatever they wanted throughout the experiment.
The researchers analyzed intestinal stem cells’ ability to proliferate at different time points and found that the stem cells showed the highest levels of proliferation at the end of the 24-hour refeeding period. These cells were also more proliferative than intestinal stem cells from mice that had not fasted at all.
“We think that fasting and refeeding represent two distinct states,” Imada says. “In the fasted state, the ability of cells to use lipids and fatty acids as an energy source enables them to survive when nutrients are low. And then it’s the postfast refeeding state that really drives the regeneration. When nutrients become available, these stem cells and progenitor cells activate programs that enable them to build cellular mass and repopulate the intestinal lining.”
Further studies revealed that these cells activate a cellular signaling pathway known as mTOR, which is involved in cell growth and metabolism. One of mTOR’s roles is to regulate the translation of messenger RNA into protein, so when it’s activated, cells produce more protein. This protein synthesis is essential for stem cells to proliferate.
The researchers showed that mTOR activation in these stem cells also led to production of large quantities of polyamines — small molecules that help cells to grow and divide.
“In the refed state, you’ve got more proliferation, and you need to build cellular mass. That requires more protein, to build new cells, and those stem cells go on to build more differentiated cells or specialized intestinal cell types that line the intestine,” Khawaled says.
Too much of a good thing
The researchers also found that when stem cells are in this highly regenerative state, they are more prone to become cancerous. Intestinal stem cells are among the most actively dividing cells in the body, as they help the lining of the intestine completely turn over every five to 10 days. Because they divide so frequently, these stem cells are the most common source of precancerous cells in the intestine.
In this study, the researchers discovered that if they turned on a cancer-causing gene in the mice during the refeeding stage, they were much more likely to develop precancerous polyps than if the gene was turned on during the fasting state. Cancer-linked mutations that occurred during the refeeding state were also much more likely to produce polyps than mutations that occurred in mice that did not undergo the cycle of fasting and refeeding.
“I want to emphasize that this was all done in mice, using very well-defined cancer mutations. In humans it’s going to be a much more complex state,” Yilmaz says. “But it does lead us to the following notion: Fasting is very healthy, but if you’re unlucky and you’re refeeding after a fasting, and you get exposed to a mutagen, like a charred steak or something, you might actually be increasing your chances of developing a lesion that can go on to give rise to cancer.”
Yilmaz also noted that the regenerative benefits of fasting could be significant for people who undergo radiation treatment, which can damage the intestinal lining, or other types of intestinal injury. His lab is now studying whether polyamine supplements could help to stimulate this kind of regeneration, without the need to fast.
“This fascinating study provides insights into the complex interplay between food consumption, stem cell biology, and cancer risk,” says Ophir Klein, a professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, who was not involved in the study. “Their work lays a foundation for testing polyamines as compounds that may augment intestinal repair after injuries, and it suggests that careful consideration is needed when planning diet-based strategies for regeneration to avoid increasing cancer risk.”
The research was funded, in part, by a Pew-Stewart Trust Scholar award, the Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine, the Koch Institute-Dana Farber/Harvard Cancer Center Bridge Project, and the MIT Stem Cell Initiative.
MIT engineers’ new theory could improve the design and operation of wind farms
The blades of propellers and wind turbines are designed based on aerodynamics principles that were first described mathematically more than a century ago. But engineers have long realized that these formulas don’t work in every situation. To compensate, they have added ad hoc “correction factors” based on empirical observations.
Now, for the first time, engineers at MIT have developed a comprehensive, physics-based model that accurately represents the airflow around rotors even under extreme conditions, such as when the blades are operating at high forces and speeds, or are angled in certain directions. The model could improve the way rotors themselves are designed, but also the way wind farms are laid out and operated. The new findings are described today in the journal Nature Communications, in an open-access paper by MIT postdoc Jaime Liew, doctoral student Kirby Heck, and Michael Howland, the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
“We’ve developed a new theory for the aerodynamics of rotors,” Howland says. This theory can be used to determine the forces, flow velocities, and power of a rotor, whether that rotor is extracting energy from the airflow, as in a wind turbine, or applying energy to the flow, as in a ship or airplane propeller. “The theory works in both directions,” he says.
Because the new understanding is a fundamental mathematical model, some of its implications could potentially be applied right away. For example, operators of wind farms must constantly adjust a variety of parameters, including the orientation of each turbine as well as its rotation speed and the angle of its blades, in order to maximize power output while maintaining safety margins. The new model can provide a simple, speedy way of optimizing those factors in real time.
“This is what we’re so excited about, is that it has immediate and direct potential for impact across the value chain of wind power,” Howland says.
Modeling the momentum
Known as momentum theory, the previous model of how rotors interact with their fluid environment — air, water, or otherwise — was initially developed late in the 19th century. With this theory, engineers can start with a given rotor design and configuration, and determine the maximum amount of power that can be derived from that rotor — or, conversely, if it’s a propeller, how much power is needed to generate a given amount of propulsive force.
Momentum theory equations “are the first thing you would read about in a wind energy textbook, and are the first thing that I talk about in my classes when I teach about wind power,” Howland says. From that theory, physicist Albert Betz calculated in 1920 the maximum amount of energy that could theoretically be extracted from wind. Known as the Betz limit, this amount is 59.3 percent of the kinetic energy of the incoming wind.
But just a few years later, others found that the momentum theory broke down “in a pretty dramatic way” at higher forces that correspond to faster blade rotation speeds or different blade angles, Howland says. It fails to predict not only the amount, but even the direction of changes in thrust force at higher rotation speeds or different blade angles: Whereas the theory said the force should start going down above a certain rotation speed or blade angle, experiments show the opposite — that the force continues to increase. “So, it’s not just quantitatively wrong, it’s qualitatively wrong,” Howland says.
The theory also breaks down when there is any misalignment between the rotor and the airflow, which Howland says is “ubiquitous” on wind farms, where turbines are constantly adjusting to changes in wind directions. In fact, in an earlier paper in 2022, Howland and his team found that deliberately misaligning some turbines slightly relative to the incoming airflow within a wind farm significantly improves the overall power output of the wind farm by reducing wake disturbances to the downstream turbines.
In the past, when designing the profile of rotor blades, the layout of wind turbines in a farm, or the day-to-day operation of wind turbines, engineers have relied on ad hoc adjustments added to the original mathematical formulas, based on some wind tunnel tests and experience with operating wind farms, but with no theoretical underpinnings.
Instead, to arrive at the new model, the team analyzed the interaction of airflow and turbines using detailed computational modeling of the aerodynamics. They found that, for example, the original model had assumed that a drop in air pressure immediately behind the rotor would rapidly return to normal ambient pressure just a short way downstream. But it turns out, Howland says, that as the thrust force keeps increasing, “that assumption is increasingly inaccurate.”
And the inaccuracy occurs very close to the point of the Betz limit that theoretically predicts the maximum performance of a turbine — and therefore is just the desired operating regime for the turbines. “So, we have Betz’s prediction of where we should operate turbines, and within 10 percent of that operational set point that we think maximizes power, the theory completely deteriorates and doesn’t work,” Howland says.
Through their modeling, the researchers also found a way to compensate for the original formula’s reliance on a one-dimensional modeling that assumed the rotor was always precisely aligned with the airflow. To do so, they used fundamental equations that were developed to predict the lift of three-dimensional wings for aerospace applications.
The researchers derived their new model, which they call a unified momentum model, based on theoretical analysis, and then validated it using computational fluid dynamics modeling. In followup work not yet published, they are doing further validation using wind tunnel and field tests.
Fundamental understanding
One interesting outcome of the new formula is that it changes the calculation of the Betz limit, showing that it’s possible to extract a bit more power than the original formula predicted. Although it’s not a significant change — on the order of a few percent — “it’s interesting that now we have a new theory, and the Betz limit that’s been the rule of thumb for a hundred years is actually modified because of the new theory,” Howland says. “And that’s immediately useful.” The new model shows how to maximize power from turbines that are misaligned with the airflow, which the Betz limit cannot account for.
The aspects related to controlling both individual turbines and arrays of turbines can be implemented without requiring any modifications to existing hardware in place within wind farms. In fact, this has already happened, based on earlier work from Howland and his collaborators two years ago that dealt with the wake interactions between turbines in a wind farm, and was based on the existing, empirically based formulas.
“This breakthrough is a natural extension of our previous work on optimizing utility-scale wind farms,” he says, because in doing that analysis, they saw the shortcomings of the existing methods for analyzing the forces at work and predicting power produced by wind turbines. “Existing modeling using empiricism just wasn’t getting the job done,” he says.
In a wind farm, individual turbines will sap some of the energy available to neighboring turbines, because of wake effects. Accurate wake modeling is important both for designing the layout of turbines in a wind farm, and also for the operation of that farm, determining moment to moment how to set the angles and speeds of each turbine in the array.
Until now, Howland says, even the operators of wind farms, the manufacturers, and the designers of the turbine blades had no way to predict how much the power output of a turbine would be affected by a given change such as its angle to the wind without using empirical corrections. “That’s because there was no theory for it. So, that’s what we worked on here. Our theory can directly tell you, without any empirical corrections, for the first time, how you should actually operate a wind turbine to maximize its power,” he says.
Because the fluid flow regimes are similar, the model also applies to propellers, whether for aircraft or ships, and also for hydrokinetic turbines such as tidal or river turbines. Although they didn’t focus on that aspect in this research, “it’s in the theoretical modeling naturally,” he says.
The new theory exists in the form of a set of mathematical formulas that a user could incorporate in their own software, or as an open-source software package that can be freely downloaded from GitHub. “It’s an engineering model developed for fast-running tools for rapid prototyping and control and optimization,” Howland says. “The goal of our modeling is to position the field of wind energy research to move more aggressively in the development of the wind capacity and reliability necessary to respond to climate change.”
The work was supported by the National Science Foundation and Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy.
Engineering and matters of the heart
Before she had even earned her bachelor’s degree, MIT professor and biomedical engineer Ellen Roche was gaining research experience in the medical device industry. In her third year at the National University of Ireland at Galway, Roche participated in a biomedical engineering program in which students worked at companies developing new devices for patient care.
“I worked on cardiovascular implants during my placement and loved it,” says Roche, an associate professor at MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) and Department of Mechanical Engineering. “For me, early experience in the medical device industry was very influential because it showed me the elaborate process of what happens from the time a technology is designed at the bench, as it is developed into a meticulously tested and reliable device that will actually be implanted in a human.”
In graduate school, a similar program led Roche first to Mednova Ltd. in Galway and then to its sister company, Abbott Vascular in California, initially for a six-month stay. Roche enjoyed the work so much that she ended up staying three and a half years. While at Mednova and Abbott, she worked on a carotid artery filter designed to prevent stroke during the procedure when a stent is implanted. She also investigated coating parts of the stents with drugs that prevent arteries from becoming occluded.
Roche, who earned tenure at MIT in July 2023, directs the Therapeutic Technology Design and Development Lab, which incorporates soft robotics, advanced fabrication methods, and computational analysis tools to develop novel devices that help to heal the heart, lungs, and other tissues. Some of the devices her team designs are intended for implantation into patients, such as a soft robotic ventilator, while others, such as a 3D-printed replica of a patient’s heart, enable research and testing of other therapies.
She encourages her students to find ways to collaborate and be flexible — and to get some kind of industry experience while still in school. She says she tells them, “Be open to accepting good opportunities as they arise, work with like-minded people, and work hard at what you are doing, but readapt when you need to.”
“There’s so much that’s very hard to even imagine until you spend some time in industry, including regulatory submissions, quality control, clinical studies, manufacturing considerations, sterilization, reliability, packaging, labeling, distribution, and sales. It really is a concerted effort of many teams with many skills to get a device to first-in-human studies,” Roche says. “Having said that, it’s one of the most rewarding.”
Born in Galway, the daughter of a civil engineer father and a mother who was a radiographer, Roche always loved math, science, and building things, and was drawn to medicine as well. She says she chose biomedical engineering because of its interdisciplinary nature and its potential for impacting society.
Roche says her mother had a “huge influence” on her career choices.
“She brought me to the hospital to meet with people using various medical devices, and introduced me to one of my mentors in industry,” she says. “She had taught herself, as the local girls’ school she attended did not teach advanced (or honors) math.”
After working at Abbott, Roche says she found she wanted to expand her studies and learn new technologies that could be applied to medical devices. She returned to school, enrolling in a bioengineering master’s program at Trinity College in Dublin. While earning her degree, she also worked at Medtronic, where she helped develop a replacement valve for the aorta that was brought all the way from conception to clinical application in humans, a process she says she was fortunate to experience firsthand.
She also studied medicine at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland before being awarded at Fulbright Scholarship to pursue her PhD.
“Receiving the Fulbright Science and Technology award solidified my plans to pursue graduate study in the U.S.,” she says. She chose as PhD advisors David Mooney, a professor of bioengineering, and Conor Walsh, a professor of engineering and applied sciences, at Harvard University. “They were (and still are) amazingly supportive of my personal and professional development,” she says.
Roche has worked on a number of medical devices, including the soft, implantable ventilator; a mechanism that prevents the buildup of scar tissue; and the robotic heart, created by using 3D printing. For the robotic heart, Roche and her team start with an MRI scan of a patient’s heart and, using a soft material, print a replica of the heart, matching the anatomy, including any defects. With such a realistic model, the researchers can then apply different treatments, such as prosthetic valves or other implantable devices, in order to test them and learn more about the biomechanics that are involved.
“We can look at various devices and tune the heart, depending on what we’re trying to test,” Roche said in the “Curiosity Unbounded” podcast with MIT President Sally Kornbluth.
The 3D-printed heart, and other medical simulators Roche has worked on, greatly facilitate and improve the testing of patient interventions — and may one day also be used as implantable devices in humans.
“You can envision the people who are at end-stage heart failure, who are waiting for a transplant and on these long lists, could actually have a printed, entirely synthetic, beating heart,” Roche told Kornbluth.
Roche’s work has garnered many awards, including a National Science Foundation CAREER award in 2019, and boosts to her entrepreneurship. Her medical device startup, Spheric Bio, which is developing a minimally invasive heart implant aimed at preventing strokes, won the Faculty Founders Initiative Grand Prize in 2022 and the Lab Central Ignite Golden Ticket, which supports startup founders from traditionally underrepresented groups in biotechnology.
Meanwhile, in a dual faculty appointment in mechanical and medical engineering, Roche won the Thomas McMahon Mentoring Award in 2020, which each year goes to a person who “through the warmth of their personality, inspires and nurtures [Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology] students in their scientific and personal growth.” She also received the Harold E. Edgerton Faculty Achievement Award in 2023, in recognition of exceptional teaching, research, and service.
The current research advances that excite Roche most, she says, include treatments and devices that can be customized to be patient-specific, such as in silico trials and digital twins where computational approaches can facilitate the investigation various interventions and prediction of their outcomes.
Roche’s expanding research on physical biorobotic simulators and computational models has attracted interest from industry and clinical teams. She was recently approached by a local hospital to build models for training heart surgeons on how to select which pump or ventricular assist device to use depending on a patient’s particular case. The models allow the surgeons to explore the efficacy of the assist devices at work.
Roche has three young daughters, whom she often brings to work, where “they love the environment, the students, and the lab,” she says.
Somehow, she also finds time to do triathlons, travel, and sample some of the local brews of New England. She’s currently planning to participate in a triathlon with her two PhD co-advisors, Mooney and Walsh. Luckily, she says she does her best thinking while running, biking, or swimming — or late at night.
Active and successful in so many realms, Roche provides seemingly simple advice to her students who want to have an impact on the world: “Find a way to combine what you love, what you are good at, and what will help others.”
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