Month: January 2025

Four MIT faculty members are among 23 world-class researchers who have been awarded the nation’s highest honors for scientists and innovators, the White House announced today.

Angela Belcher and Emery Brown were each presented with the National Medal of Science at a White House ceremony this afternoon, and Paula Hammond ’84, PhD ’93, and Feng Zhang were awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.

Belcher, the James Mason Crafts Professor of Biological Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering and a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, was honored for her work designing novel materials for applications that include solar cells, batteries, and medical imaging.

Brown, the Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering and Computational Neuroscience, was recognized for work that has revealed how anesthesia affects the brain. Brown is also a member of MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES).

Hammond, an MIT Institute Professor, vice provost for faculty, and member of the Koch Institute, was honored for developing methods for assembling thin films that can be used for drug delivery, wound healing, and many other applications.

Zhang, the James and Patricia Poitras Professor of Neuroscience at MIT and a professor of brain and cognitive sciences and biological engineering, was recognized for his work developing molecular tools, including the CRISPR genome-editing system, that have the potential to diagnose and treat disease. Zhang is also an investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research and a core member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

Two additional MIT alumni also accepted awards: Richard Lawrence Edwards ’76, a professor at the University of Minnesota, received a National Medal of Science for his work in geochemistry. And Noubar Afeyan PhD ’87 accepted one of two National Medals of Technology and Innovation awarded to an organization. These awards went to the biotechnology companies Moderna, which Afeyan co-founded, and Pfizer, for their development of vaccines for Covid-19.

This year, the White House awarded the National Medal of Science to 14 recipients and named nine individual awardees of the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, along with two organizations. To date, nearly 100 MIT affiliates have won one of these two honors.

“Emery Brown is at the forefront of the Institute’s collaborations among neuroscience, medicine, and patient care. His research has shifted the paradigm for brain monitoring during general anesthesia for surgery. His pioneering approach based on neural oscillations, as opposed to solely monitoring vital signs, promises to revolutionize how anesthesia medications are delivered to patients,” says Nergis Mavalvala, dean of MIT’s School of Science. “Feng Zhang is one of the preeminent researchers in CRISPR technologies that have accelerated the pace of science and engineering, blending entrepreneurship and scientific discovery. These new molecular technologies can modify the cell’s genetic information, engineer vehicles to deliver these tools into the correct cells, and scale to restore organ function. Zhang will apply these life-altering innovations to diseases such as neurodegeneration, immune disorders, and aging.”

Hammond and Belcher are frequent collaborators, and each of them has had significant impact on the fields of nanotechnology and nanomedicine.

“Angela Belcher and Paula Hammond have made tremendous contributions to science and engineering, and I’m thrilled for each of them to receive this well-deserved recognition,” says Anantha Chandrakasan, dean of the School of Engineering and chief innovation and strategy officer at MIT. “By harnessing the processes of nature, Angela’s innovations have impacted fields from energy to the environment to medicine. Her non-invasive imaging system has improved outcomes for patients diagnosed with many types of cancer. Paula’s pioneering research in nanotechnology helped transform the ways in which we deliver and administer drugs within the body — through her technique, therapeutics can be customized and sent directly to specifically targeted cells, including cancer cells.”

Growing materials with viruses

Belcher, who joined the MIT faculty in 2002 and served as head of the Department of Biological Engineering from 2019 to 2023, initially heard that she was being considered for the National Medal of Science in September, and in mid-December, found out she had won.

“It was quite shocking and just a huge honor. It’s an honor to be considered, and then to get the email and the call that I actually was receiving it was humbling,” she says.

Belcher, who earned a bachelor’s degree in creative studies and a PhD in inorganic chemistry from the University of California at Santa Barbara, has focused much of her research on developing ways to use biological systems, such as viruses, to grow materials.

“Since graduate school, I’ve been fascinated with trying to understand how nature makes materials and then applying those processes, whether directly through biological molecules, or through evolving biological molecules or biological organisms, to make materials that are of technological importance,” she says.

Early in her career, she developed a technique for generating materials by engineering viruses to self-assemble into nanoscale scaffolds that can be coated with inorganic materials to form functional devices such as batteries, semiconductors, solar cells, and catalysts. This approach allows for exquisite control over the electronic, optical, and magnetic properties of the material.

In the late 2000s, then-MIT president Susan Hockfield asked Belcher to join the newly formed Koch Institute, whose mission is to bring together scientists and engineers to seek new ways to diagnose and treat cancer. Not knowing much about cancer biology, Belcher was hesitant at first, but she ended up moving her lab to the Koch Institute and applying her work to the new challenge.

One of her first projects, on which she collaborated with Hammond, was a method for using shortwave infrared light to image cancer cells. This technology, eventually commercialized by a company called Cision Vision, is now being used in hospitals to image lymph nodes during cancer surgery, helping them to determine if a tumor has spread.

Belcher is now focused on finding technologies to detect other cancers, especially ovarian cancer, which is difficult to diagnose in early stages, as well as developing cancer vaccines.

Unlocking the mysteries of anesthesia

Brown, who has been on the MIT faculty since 2005, said he was “overjoyed” when he found out he would receive the National Medal of Science.

“I’m extremely excited and quite honored to receive such an award, because it is one of the pinnacles of recognition in the scientific field in the United States,” he says.

Much of Brown’s work has focused on achieving a better understanding of what happens in the human brain under anesthesia. Trained as an anesthesiologist, Brown earned his MD from Harvard Medical School and a PhD in statistics from Harvard University.

Since 1992, he has been a member of the Harvard Medical School faculty and a practicing anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. Early in his research career, he worked on developing methods to characterize the properties of the human circadian clock. These included characterizing the clock’s phase response curve to light, accurately measuring its intrinsic period, and measuring the impact of physiologically designed schedules on shift worker performance. Later, he became interested in developing signal processing methods to characterize how neurons represent signals and stimuli in their ensemble activity.

In collaboration with Matt Wilson, an MIT professor of neuroscience, Brown devised algorithms to decode the position of an animal in its environment by reading the activity of a small group of place cell neurons in the animal’s brain. Other applications of these methods included characterizing learning, controlling brain-machine interfaces, and controlling brain states such as medically induced coma.

“I was practicing anesthesia at the time, and as I saw more and more of what the neuroscientists were doing, it occurred to me we could use their paradigms to study anesthesia, and we should, because we weren’t doing that,” he says. “Anesthesia was not being looked at as a neuroscience subdiscipline. It was looked at as a subdiscipline of pharmacology.”

Over the past two decades, Brown’s work has revealed how anesthesia drugs induce unconsciousness in the brain, along with other altered arousal states. Anesthesia drugs such as propofol dramatically alter the brain’s intrinsic oscillations. These oscillations can be seen with electroencephalography (EEG). During the awake state, these oscillations usually have high frequency and low amplitude, but as anesthetic drugs are given, they shift generally to low frequency, high amplitude. Working with MIT professors Earl Miller and Ila Fiete, as well as collaborators at Massachusetts General Hospital and Boston University, Brown has shown that these changes disrupt normal communication between different brain regions, leading to loss of consciousness.

Brown has also shown that these EEG oscillations can be used to monitor whether a patient is too deeply unconscious, and he has developed a closed-loop anesthesia delivery system that can maintain a patient’s anesthesia state at precisely desired levels. Brown and colleagues have also developed methods to accelerate recovery from anesthesia. More precise control and accelerated recovery could help to prevent the cognitive impairments that often affect patients after they emerge from anesthesia. Accelerating recovery from anesthesia has also suggested ways to accelerate recovery from coma.

Building multifunctional materials

Hammond, who earned both her bachelor’s degree and PhD in chemical engineering from MIT, has been a member of the faculty since 1995 and was named an Institute Professor in 2021. She was also the 2023-24 recipient of MIT’s Killian Award, the highest honor that the faculty bestows.

Early in her career, Hammond developed a novel technique for generating functional thin-film materials by stacking layers of charged polymeric materials. This approach can be used to build polymers with highly controlled architectures by alternately exposing a surface to positively and negatively charged particles.

She initially used this layer-by-layer assembly technique to build ultrathin batteries and fuel cell electrodes, before turning her attention to biomedical applications. To adapt the films for drug delivery, she came up with ways to incorporate drug molecules into the layers of the film. These molecules are then released when the particles reach their targets.

“We began to look at bioactive materials and how we could sandwich them into these layers and use that as a way to deliver the drug in a very controlled fashion, at the right time and in the right place,” she says. “We are using the layering as a way to modify the surface of a nanoparticle so that there is a very high and selective affinity for the cancer cells we’re targeting.”

Using this technique, she has created drug-delivery nanoparticles that are coated with molecules that specifically target cancer cells, with a particular focus on ovarian cancer. These particles can be tailored to carry chemotherapy drugs such as cisplatin, immunotherapy agents, or nucleic acids such as messenger RNA.

Working with colleagues around MIT, she has also developed materials that can be used to promote wound healing, blood clotting, and tissue regeneration.

“What we have found is that these layers are very versatile. They can coat a very broad range of substrates, and those substrates can be anything from a bone implant, which can be quite large, down to a nanoparticle, which is 100 nanometers,” she says.

Designing molecular tools

Zhang, who earned his undergraduate degree from Harvard University in 2004, has contributed to the development of multiple molecular tools to accelerate the understanding of human disease. While a graduate student at Stanford University, from which he received his PhD in 2009, Zhang worked in the lab of Professor Karl Deisseroth. There, he worked on a protein called channelrhodopsin, which he and Deisseroth believed held potential for engineering mammalian cells to respond to light.

The resulting technique, known as optogenetics, is now used widely used in neuroscience and other fields. By engineering neurons to express light-sensitive proteins such as channelrhodopsin, researchers can either stimulate or silence the cells’ electrical impulses by shining different wavelengths of light on them. This has allowed for detailed study of the roles of specific populations of neurons in the brain, and the mapping of neural circuits that control a variety of behaviors.

In 2011, about a month after joining the MIT faculty, Zhang attended a talk by Harvard Medical School Professor Michael Gilmore, who studies the pathogenic bacterium Enteroccocus. The scientist mentioned that these bacteria protect themselves from viruses with DNA-cutting enzymes known as nucleases, which are part of a defense system known as CRISPR.

“I had no idea what CRISPR was, but I was interested in nucleases,” Zhang told MIT News in 2016. “I went to look up CRISPR, and that’s when I realized you might be able to engineer it for use for genome editing.”

In January 2013, Zhang and members of his lab reported that they had successfully used CRISPR to edit genes in mammalian cells. The CRISPR system includes a nuclease called Cas9, which can be directed to cut a specific genetic target by RNA molecules known as guide strands.

Since then, scientists in fields from medicine to plant biology have used CRISPR to study gene function and investigate the possibility of correcting faulty genes that cause disease. More recently, Zhang’s lab has devised many enhancements to the original CRISPR system, such as making the targeting more precise and preventing unintended cuts in the wrong locations.

The National Medal of Science was established in 1959 and is administered for the White House by the National Science Foundation. The medal recognizes individuals who have made outstanding contributions to science and engineering.

The National Medal of Technology and Innovation was established in 1980 and is administered for the White House by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Patent and Trademark Office. The award recognizes those who have made lasting contributions to America’s competitiveness and quality of life and helped strengthen the nation’s technological workforce.