The Digital Insider | Category: Technology

Q&A: Transforming research through global collaborations

The MIT Global Seed Funds (GSF) program fosters global research collaborations with MIT faculty and their peers abroad — creating partnerships that tackle complex global issues, from climate change to health-care challenges and beyond. Administered by the MIT Center for International Studies (CIS), the GSF program has awarded more than $26 million to over 1,200 faculty research projects since its inception in 2008. Through its unique funding structure — comprising a general fund for unrestricted geographical use and several specific funds within individual countries, regions, and universities — GSF supports a wide range of projects. The current call for proposals from MIT faculty and researchers with principal investigator status is open until Dec. 10.

CIS recently sat down with faculty recipients Josephine Carstensen and David McGee to discuss the value and impact GSF added to their research. Carstensen, the Gilbert W. Winslow Career Development Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, generates computational designs for large-scale structures with the intent of designing novel low-carbon solutions. McGee, the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), reconstructs the patterns, pace, and magnitudes of past hydro-climate changes.

Q: How did the Global Seed Funds program connect you with global partnerships related to your research?

Carstensen: One of the projects my lab is working on is to unlock the potential of complex cast-glass structures. Through our GSF partnership with researchers at TUDelft (Netherlands), my group was able to leverage our expertise in generative design algorithms alongside the TUDelft team, who are experts in the physical casting and fabrication of glass structures. Our initial connection to TUDelft was actually through one of my graduate students who was at a conference and met TUDelft researchers. He was inspired by their work and felt there could be synergy between our labs. The question then became: How do we connect with TUDelft? And that was what led us to the Global Seed Funds program.

McGee: Our research is based in fieldwork conducted in partnership with experts who have a rich understanding of local environments. These locations range from lake basins in Chile and Argentina to caves in northern Mexico, Vietnam, and Madagascar. GSF has been invaluable for helping foster partnerships with collaborators and universities in these different locations, enabling the pilot work and relationship-building necessary to establish longer-term, externally funded projects.

Q: Tell us more about your GSF-funded work.

Carstensen: In my research group at MIT, we live mainly in a computational regime, and we do very little proof-of-concept testing. To that point, we do not even have the facilities nor experience to physically build large-scale structures, or even specialized structures. GSF has enabled us to connect with the researchers at TUDelft who do much more experimental testing than we do. Being able to work with the experts at TUDelft within their physical realm provided valuable insights into their way of approaching problems. And, likewise, the researchers at TUDelft benefited from our expertise. It has been fruitful in ways we couldn’t have imagined within our lab at MIT.

McGee: The collaborative work supported by the GSF has focused on reconstructing how past climate changes impacted rainfall patterns around the world, using natural archives like lake sediments and cave formations. One particularly successful project has been our work in caves in northeastern Mexico, which has been conducted in partnership with researchers from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and a local caving group. This project has involved several MIT undergraduate and graduate students, sponsored a research symposium in Mexico City, and helped us obtain funding from the National Science Foundation for a longer-term project.

Q: You both mentioned the involvement of your graduate students. How exactly has the GSF augmented the research experience of your students?

Carstensen: The collaboration has especially benefited the graduate students from both the MIT and TUDelft teams. The opportunity presented through this project to engage in research at an international peer institution has been extremely beneficial for their academic growth and maturity. It has facilitated training in new and complementary technical areas that they would not have had otherwise and allowed them to engage with leading world experts. An example of this aspect of the project’s success is that the collaboration has inspired one of my graduate students to actively pursue postdoc opportunities in Europe (including at TU Delft) after his graduation.

McGee: MIT students have traveled to caves in northeastern Mexico and to lake basins in northern Chile to conduct fieldwork and build connections with local collaborators. Samples enabled by GSF-supported projects became the focus of two graduate students’ PhD theses, two EAPS undergraduate senior theses, and multiple UROP [Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program] projects.

Q: Were there any unexpected benefits to the work funded by GSF?

Carstensen: The success of this project would not have been possible without this specific international collaboration. Both the Delft and MIT teams bring highly different essential expertise that has been necessary for the successful project outcome. It allowed both the Delft and MIT teams to gain an in-depth understanding of the expertise areas and resources of the other collaborators. Both teams have been deeply inspired. This partnership has fueled conversations about potential future projects and provided multiple outcomes, including a plan to publish two journal papers on the project outcome. The first invited publication is being finalized now.

McGee: GSF’s focus on reciprocal exchange has enabled external collaborators to spend time at MIT, sharing their work and exchanging ideas. Other funding is often focused on sending MIT researchers and students out, but GSF has helped us bring collaborators here, making the relationship more equal. A GSF-supported visit by Argentinian researchers last year made it possible for them to interact not just with my group, but with students and faculty across EAPS.

Photonic processor could enable ultrafast AI computations with extreme energy efficiency

The deep neural network models that power today’s most demanding machine-learning applications have grown so large and complex that they are pushing the limits of traditional electronic computing hardware.

Photonic hardware, which can perform machine-learning computations with light, offers a faster and more energy-efficient alternative. However, there are some types of neural network computations that a photonic device can’t perform, requiring the use of off-chip electronics or other techniques that hamper speed and efficiency.

Building on a decade of research, scientists from MIT and elsewhere have developed a new photonic chip that overcomes these roadblocks. They demonstrated a fully integrated photonic processor that can perform all the key computations of a deep neural network optically on the chip.

The optical device was able to complete the key computations for a machine-learning classification task in less than half a nanosecond while achieving more than 92 percent accuracy — performance that is on par with traditional hardware.

The chip, composed of interconnected modules that form an optical neural network, is fabricated using commercial foundry processes, which could enable the scaling of the technology and its integration into electronics.

In the long run, the photonic processor could lead to faster and more energy-efficient deep learning for computationally demanding applications like lidar, scientific research in astronomy and particle physics, or high-speed telecommunications.

“There are a lot of cases where how well the model performs isn’t the only thing that matters, but also how fast you can get an answer. Now that we have an end-to-end system that can run a neural network in optics, at a nanosecond time scale, we can start thinking at a higher level about applications and algorithms,” says Saumil Bandyopadhyay ’17, MEng ’18, PhD ’23, a visiting scientist in the Quantum Photonics and AI Group within the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) and a postdoc at NTT Research, Inc., who is the lead author of a paper on the new chip.

Bandyopadhyay is joined on the paper by Alexander Sludds ’18, MEng ’19, PhD ’23; Nicholas Harris PhD ’17; Darius Bunandar PhD ’19; Stefan Krastanov, a former RLE research scientist who is now an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst; Ryan Hamerly, a visiting scientist at RLE and senior scientist at NTT Research; Matthew Streshinsky, a former silicon photonics lead at Nokia who is now co-founder and CEO of Enosemi; Michael Hochberg, president of Periplous, LLC; and Dirk Englund, a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, principal investigator of the Quantum Photonics and Artificial Intelligence Group and of RLE, and senior author of the paper. The research appears today in Nature Photonics.

Machine learning with light

Deep neural networks are composed of many interconnected layers of nodes, or neurons, that operate on input data to produce an output. One key operation in a deep neural network involves the use of linear algebra to perform matrix multiplication, which transforms data as it is passed from layer to layer.

But in addition to these linear operations, deep neural networks perform nonlinear operations that help the model learn more intricate patterns. Nonlinear operations, like activation functions, give deep neural networks the power to solve complex problems.

In 2017, Englund’s group, along with researchers in the lab of Marin Soljačić, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics, demonstrated an optical neural network on a single photonic chip that could perform matrix multiplication with light.

But at the time, the device couldn’t perform nonlinear operations on the chip. Optical data had to be converted into electrical signals and sent to a digital processor to perform nonlinear operations.

“Nonlinearity in optics is quite challenging because photons don’t interact with each other very easily. That makes it very power consuming to trigger optical nonlinearities, so it becomes challenging to build a system that can do it in a scalable way,” Bandyopadhyay explains.

They overcame that challenge by designing devices called nonlinear optical function units (NOFUs), which combine electronics and optics to implement nonlinear operations on the chip.

The researchers built an optical deep neural network on a photonic chip using three layers of devices that perform linear and nonlinear operations.

A fully-integrated network

At the outset, their system encodes the parameters of a deep neural network into light. Then, an array of programmable beamsplitters, which was demonstrated in the 2017 paper, performs matrix multiplication on those inputs.

The data then pass to programmable NOFUs, which implement nonlinear functions by siphoning off a small amount of light to photodiodes that convert optical signals to electric current. This process, which eliminates the need for an external amplifier, consumes very little energy.

“We stay in the optical domain the whole time, until the end when we want to read out the answer. This enables us to achieve ultra-low latency,” Bandyopadhyay says.

Achieving such low latency enabled them to efficiently train a deep neural network on the chip, a process known as in situ training that typically consumes a huge amount of energy in digital hardware.

“This is especially useful for systems where you are doing in-domain processing of optical signals, like navigation or telecommunications, but also in systems that you want to learn in real time,” he says.

The photonic system achieved more than 96 percent accuracy during training tests and more than 92 percent accuracy during inference, which is comparable to traditional hardware. In addition, the chip performs key computations in less than half a nanosecond.

“This work demonstrates that computing — at its essence, the mapping of inputs to outputs — can be compiled onto new architectures of linear and nonlinear physics that enable a fundamentally different scaling law of computation versus effort needed,” says Englund.

The entire circuit was fabricated using the same infrastructure and foundry processes that produce CMOS computer chips. This could enable the chip to be manufactured at scale, using tried-and-true techniques that introduce very little error into the fabrication process.

Scaling up their device and integrating it with real-world electronics like cameras or telecommunications systems will be a major focus of future work, Bandyopadhyay says. In addition, the researchers want to explore algorithms that can leverage the advantages of optics to train systems faster and with better energy efficiency.

This research was funded, in part, by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and NTT Research.

15+ Best Resume & CV Video Templates – Speckyboy

We often define resumes and CVs as static documents. We print them out or post them online – but that’s the end of the story. Or is it?

Video offers a different way to tell your story. You can use it to show off your skills by adding movement and special effects. And it’s far more memorable than any old document.

If the idea is to capture an employer’s eye, video is the format to achieve it. The challenge is putting together a top-notch presentation. Even experienced videographers may be stretched to their limits.

Not to worry! Our collection of resume and CV video templates will make your task easier. They feature beautiful designs and professional effects. Grab one, customize it, and share it with the world.

The items below include all the features you’ll need. Plus, there are picks for all the top video editing suites, such as After Effects, Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve, and Final Cut Pro. Let’s get started!

You might also like our collection of personal portfolio video templates.

Use this resume template to provide employers with an attractive overview. It comes with seven information-rich slides you can customize to fit your needs. Feature your biography, education, and past projects with this package for Premiere Pro.

Here’s a beautiful After Effects template to turn your resume into a thing of beauty. The silky-smooth animations and transitions will bring your skills to life. Prospective employers won’t be able to take their eyes off you.

This template for Premiere Pro is optimized for mobile screens – perfect for sharing with busy executives on the go. It’s attractive, with creative layouts and modern animations. The result is a high-quality video that checks all the boxes.

Make your CV a modern masterpiece using this Premiere Pro template. It features ten outstanding slides for displaying facts and figures. You can easily change the colors and fonts to match your personal brand.

Do you want a resume with a high-tech aesthetic? Use this After Effects template to give your info a professional touch. It includes a suite of outstanding effects along with dark and light modes.

This template for After Effects features fun animations and razor-sharp design elements. The look is friendly and inviting, with bold type and color choices. You’ll have a beautiful resume that leaves a great impression.

You’ll find plenty of options to list your technical skills with this template. Use the included skills chart to share your areas of expertise. There are also spots for your past projects and contact details.

Unlock your resume’s potential with this After Effects package. The animations are stunning but won’t distract from the details of your CV. It’s also built for easy customization – change colors and fonts with just a few clicks.

Here’s a big and bold way to impress prospective employers. The presentation is seamless and smooth, with bold type and lots of movement. Add your photos and video clips to personalize the viewing experience.

Take advantage of beautiful lighting effects with this resume template for Final Cut Pro. Inside, you’ll find 15 text placeholders and five spots for media. It’s an excellent fit for designers or anyone who wants to present artistic flair.

Put your skills and experience to the forefront using this clean After Effects template. There’s room to highlight your strong points and display past work. It’s a slick package that makes you look your best.

Crisp and colorful, this template will make your personality come through the screen. It features fun shapes and attention-getting transitions. Viewers are sure to take notice with this exciting video resume.

Those who want a modern aesthetic will love this Premiere Pro template. It combines a high-contrast color scheme with minimalistic typography. There’s meticulous attention to detail here that employers will remember.

This DaVinci Resolve template features eye-catching special effects to highlight your skills. Color and movement are everywhere and serve as a fine background for your CV. It’s a great choice for visual artists and content creators.

Bring a cinematic quality to your video resume by customizing this template. It comes packed with six color profiles and incredible animation effects. Choose this one if you want to stand out from the crowd.

Introduce Yourself with a Video Resume

A strong resume is a vital tool for job seekers. So, why not go the extra mile to introduce yourself to prospective employers and clients? A compelling video presentation can be a difference maker.

The templates above will help you make a great first impression. They offer a variety of styles that give your resume a professional touch. What’s not to love?

We hope you found the perfect template to help you land your dream job!

A data designer driven to collaborate with communities

It is fairly common in public discourse for someone to announce, “I brought data to this discussion,” thus casting their own conclusions as empirical and rational. It is less common to ask: Where did the data come from? How was it collected? Why is there data about some things but not others?

MIT Associate Professor Catherine D’Ignazio SM ’14 does ask those kinds of questions. A scholar with a far-reaching portfolio of work, she has a strong interest in applying data to social issues — often to help the disempowered gain access to numbers, and to help provide a fuller picture of civic problems we are trying to address.

“If we want an educated citizenry to participate in our democracy with data and data-driven arguments, we should think about how we design our data infrastructures to support that,” says D’Ignazio.

Take, for example, the problem of feminicide, the killing of women as a result of gender-based violence. Activists throughout Latin America started tabulating cases about it and building databases that were often more thorough than official state records. D’Ignazio has observed the issue and, with colleagues, co-designed AI tools with human rights defenders to support their monitoring work.

In turn, D’Ignazio’s 2024 book on the subject, “Counting Feminicide,” chronicled the entire process and has helped bring the issue to a new audience. Where there was once a data void, now there are substantial databases helping people recognize the reality of the problem on multiple continents, thanks to innovative citizens. The book outlines how grassroots data science and citizen data activism are generally rising forms of civic participation.

“When we talk about innovation, I think: Innovation for whom? And by whom? For me those are key questions,” says D’Ignazio, a faculty member in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning and director of MIT’s Data and Feminism Lab. For her research and teaching, D’Ignazio was awarded tenure earlier this year.

Out of the grassroots

D’Ignazio has long cultivated an interest in data science, digital design, and global matters. She received her BA in international relations from Tufts University, then became a software developer in the private sector. Returning to her studies, she earned an MFA from the Maine College of Art, and then an MS from the MIT Media Lab, which helped her synthesize her intellectual outlook.

“The Media Lab for me was the place where I was able to converge all those interests I had been thinking about,” D’Ignazio says. “How can we have more creative applications of software and databases? How can we have more socially just applications of AI? And how do we organize our technology and resources for a more participatory and equitable future for all of us?”

To be sure, D’Ignazio did not spend all her time at the Media Lab examining database issues. In 2014 and 2018 she co-organized a feminist hackathon called “Make the Breast Pump Not Suck,” in which hundreds of participants developed innovative technologies and policies to address postpartum health and infant feeding. Still, much of her work has focused on data architecture, data visualization, and the analysis of the relationship between data production and society.

D’Ignazio started her teaching career as a lecturer in the Digital + Media graduate program at Rhode Island School of Design, then became an assistant professor of data visualization and civic media in Emerson College’s journalism department. She joined the MIT faculty as an assistant professor in 2020.

D’Ignazio’s first book, “Data Feminism,” co-authored with Lauren Klein of Emory University and published in 2020, took a wide-ranging look at many ways that everyday data reflects the civic society that it emerges from. The reported rates of sexual assault on college campuses, for instance, could be deceptive because the institutions with the lowest rates might be those with the most problematic reporting climates for survivors.

D’Ignazio’s global outlook — she has lived in France, Argentina, and Uruguay, among other places — has helped her understand the regional and national politics behind these issues, as well as the challenges citizen watchdogs can face in terms of data collection. No one should think such projects are easy.

“So much grassroots labor goes into the production of data,” D’Ignazio says. “One thing that’s really interesting is the huge amount of work it takes on the part of grassroots or citizen science groups to actually make data useful. And oftentimes that’s because of institutional data structures that are really lacking.”

Letting students thrive

Overall, the issue of who participates in data science is, as D’Ignazio and Klein have written, “the elephant in the server room.” As an associate professor, D’Ignazio works to encourage all students to think openly about data science and its social underpinnings. In turn, she also draws inspiration from productive students.

“Part of the joy and privilege of being a professor is you have students who take you in directions you would not have gone in yourself,” D’Ignazio says.

One of D’Ignazio’s graduate students at the moment, Wonyoung So, has been digging into housing data issues. It is fairly simple for property owners to access information about tenants, but less so the other way around; this makes it hard to find out if landlords have abnormally high eviction rates, for example.

“There are all of these technologies that allow landlords to get almost every piece of information about tenants, but there are so few technologies allowing tenants to know anything about landlords,” D’Ignazio explains. The availability of data “often ends up reproducing asymmetries that already exist in the world.” Moreover, even where housing data is published by jurisdictions, she notes, “it’s incredibly fragmented, and published poorly and differently, from place to place. There are massive inequities even in open data.”

In this way housing seems like yet another area where new ideas and better data structures can be developed. It is not a topic she would have focused on by herself, but D’Ignazio also views herself as a facilitator of innovative work by others. There is much progress to be made in the application of data science to society, often by developing new tools for people to use.

“I’m interested in thinking about how information and technology can challenge structural inequalities,” D’Ignazio says. “The question is: How do we design technologies that help communities build power?”

Creating innovative health solutions for individuals and populations

The factors impacting successful patient care are many and varied. Early diagnosis, proper adherence to prescription medication schedules, and effective monitoring and management of chronic disease, for example, all contribute to better outcomes. However, each of these factors can be hindered by outside influences — medication doesn’t work as well if it isn’t taken as prescribed, and disease can be missed or misdiagnosed in early stages if symptoms are mild or not present.

Giovanni Traverso, the Karl Van Tassel Career Development Professor, an associate professor of mechanical engineering, and a gastroenterologist in the Division of Gastroenterology, Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), is working on a variety of innovative solutions to improve patient care. As a physician and an engineer, he brings a unique perspective.

“Bringing those two domains together is what really can help transform and accelerate our capacity to develop new biomedical devices or new therapies for a range of conditions,” he says. “As physicians, we’re extremely fortunate to be able to help individuals. As scientists and engineers, not only can we help individuals … we can help populations.”

Play video

Physician, engineer, innovator
Video: MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering

Traverso found a passion for this work early in life. His family lived in his father’s native Peru through much of his childhood, but left in the late 1980s at the height of the nation’s political instability, emigrating to Canada, where he began high school.

“In high school, I had the incredible opportunity to actually spend time in a lab,” he says. “I really fell in love with molecular genetics. I loved the lab environment and that ability to investigate a very specific problem, with the hopes that those developments would eventually help people.”

He started medical school immediately after high school, attending the University of Cambridge, but paused his medical training to pursue a PhD in medical sciences at Johns Hopkins University before returning to Cambridge. After completing medical school, he completed internal medicine residency at BWH and his gastroenterology fellowship training at Massachusetts General Hospital, both at Harvard Medical School. For his postdoctoral research, he transitioned to the fields of chemical and biomedical engineering in the laboratory of Professor Robert Langer.

Traverso’s research interests today include biomedical device development, ingestible and implantable robotics, and drug delivery for optimal drug adherence. His academic home at MIT is in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, but his work integrates multiple domains, including mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, material science, and synthetic biology.

“The mechanical engineering department is a tremendous place to engage with students, as well as faculty, towards the development of the next generation of medical devices,” he says. “At the core of many of those medical devices are fundamental mechanical principles.”

Traverso’s team in the Laboratory for Translational Engineering is developing pioneering biomedical devices such as drug delivery systems to enable safe, efficient delivery of therapeutics, and novel diagnostic tests to support early detection of diseases.

The heart of his work, he says, is “about trying to help others. Patients, of course, but also students, to help them see the arc of bench-to-bedside and help stimulate their interest in careers applying engineering to help improve human health.”

MIT’s Science Policy Initiative holds 14th annual Executive Visit Days

From Oct. 21 to 22, a delegation of 21 MIT students and one postdoc met in Washington for the 14th Executive Visit Days (ExVD). Organized by the MIT Science Policy Initiative (SPI) and the MIT Washington Office, ExVD enables students to engage with officials and scientists from federal agencies. Students are given a platform to form connections in the capital while learning about the many facets of science policy work and careers.

In two days, the delegation visited eight different agencies. The first day started with meeting the team of the MIT Washington Office. Subsequently, the group held meetings with the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP), White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). On the second day, meetings continued with the Department of Energy (DoE), National Science Foundation (NSF), Institute of Defense Analysis (IDA), and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The meetings offered insights into each agency’s activities and showed how each agency’s work is related to science policy.

One specific example of the delegation’s visits was to the White House OSTP, located directly next to the West Wing at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. This special agency of fewer than 200 staff, mostly in rotation or on loan from other federal agencies, directly reports to the president on all matters related to science and policy. The atmosphere at the White House complex and the exchanges with Kei Koizumi, principal deputy director for policy at OSTP, deeply inspired the students and showcased the impact science can have on federal policy.

The Science Policy Initiative (SPI) is an organization of students and postdocs whose core goal is to foster the discourse of MIT students and the policy community. SPI organizes multiple trips to Washington every year to empower students to connect with federal agencies and policymakers, as well as showcase potential career paths for scientists in the policy. In particular, ExVD offered opportunities to network with officials, many of whom are MIT alums and open to discussing their paths toward careers in science policy.

The impact ExVD has is profound. “It was a fantastic opportunity to learn more about science policy and interact with representatives from several federal agencies. I strongly believe that scientists equipped with policy knowledge can play a crucial role in shaping effective and evidence-based policies that can benefit society,” says Maria Proestaki, a postdoc researching organ-on-a-chip technologies at the Department of Biological Engineering.

Alexandra Cabanelas, a PhD student of biological oceanography at the MIT-Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Joint Program, adds: “It was interesting to see common themes across the agencies, especially the importance of having individuals from diverse fields and expertise in federal roles, highlighting that even if you are not pursuing a science policy-specific degree, you can still succeed in these roles.”

Joachim Schaeffer, a PhD student working on machine learning for batteries and SPI ExVD chair, concludes: “Science and technology are fundamental pillars of our society, and in particular now, it is more important than ever that scientists engage with policymakers to work on solving great challenges, such as biosecurity, AI safety, and climate change. Neither science nor policy can solve these challenges alone. We need strong science and policies informed by science to thrive.”

The overall sentiment among the ExVD participants has been motivation. Participants have expressed feeling more informed and inspired to integrate policy in their future careers or in their graduate research, aware that a scientific background is a great asset in the policy world.

Is there enough land on Earth to fight climate change and feed the world?

Capping global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius is a tall order. Achieving that goal will not only require a massive reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from human activities, but also a substantial reallocation of land to support that effort and sustain the biosphere, including humans. More land will be needed to accommodate a growing demand for bioenergy and nature-based carbon sequestration while ensuring sufficient acreage for food production and ecological sustainability.

The expanding role of land in a 1.5 C world will be twofold — to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and to produce clean energy. Land-based carbon dioxide removal strategies include bioenergy with carbon capture and storage; direct air capture; and afforestation/reforestation and other nature-based solutions. Land-based clean energy production includes wind and solar farms and sustainable bioenergy cropland. Any decision to allocate more land for climate mitigation must also address competing needs for long-term food security and ecosystem health.

Land-based climate mitigation choices vary in terms of costs — amount of land required, implications for food security, impact on biodiversity and other ecosystem services — and benefits — potential for sequestering greenhouse gases and producing clean energy.

Now a study in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Science provides the most comprehensive analysis to date of competing land-use and technology options to limit global warming to 1.5 C. Led by researchers at the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy (CS3), the study applies the MIT Integrated Global System Modeling (IGSM) framework to evaluate costs and benefits of different land-based climate mitigation options in Sky2050, a 1.5 C climate-stabilization scenario developed by Shell.

Under this scenario, demand for bioenergy and natural carbon sinks increase along with the need for sustainable farming and food production. To determine if there’s enough land to meet all these growing demands, the research team uses the global hectare (gha) — an area of 10,000 square meters, or 2.471 acres — as the standard unit of measurement, and current estimates of the Earth’s total habitable land area (about 10 gha) and land area used for food production and bioenergy (5 gha).

The team finds that with transformative changes in policy, land management practices, and consumption patterns, global land is sufficient to provide a sustainable supply of food and ecosystem services throughout this century while also reducing greenhouse gas emissions in alignment with the 1.5 C goal. These transformative changes include policies to protect natural ecosystems; stop deforestation and accelerate reforestation and afforestation; promote advances in sustainable agriculture technology and practice; reduce agricultural and food waste; and incentivize consumers to purchase sustainably produced goods.

If such changes are implemented, 2.5–3.5 gha of land would be used for NBS practices to sequester 3–6 gigatonnes (Gt) of CO₂ per year, and 0.4–0.6 gha of land would be allocated for energy production — 0.2–0.3 gha for bioenergy and 0.2–0.35 gha for wind and solar power generation.

“Our scenario shows that there is enough land to support a 1.5 degree C future as long as effective policies at national and global levels are in place,” says CS3 Principal Research Scientist Angelo Gurgel, the study’s lead author. “These policies must not only promote efficient use of land for food, energy, and nature, but also be supported by long-term commitments from government and industry decision-makers.”

Troy Van Voorhis to step down as department head of chemistry

Troy Van Voorhis, the Robert T. Haslam and Bradley Dewey Professor of Chemistry, will step down as department head of the Department of Chemistry at the end of this academic year. Van Voorhis has served as department head since 2019, previously serving the department as associate department head since 2015.

“Troy has been an invaluable partner and sounding board who could always be counted on for a wonderful mix of wisdom and pragmatism,” says Nergis Mavalvala, the Kathleen and Curtis Marble professor of astrophysics and dean of the MIT School of Science. “While department head, Troy provided calm guidance during the Covid pandemic, encouraging and financially supporting additional programs to improve his community’s quality of life.”

“I have had the pleasure of serving as head of our department for the past five-plus years. It has been a period of significant upheaval in our world,” says Van Voorhis. “Throughout it all, one of my consistent joys has been the privilege of working within the chemistry department and across the wider MIT community on research, education, and community building.”

Under Van Voorhis’ leadership, the Department of Chemistry implemented a department-wide statement of values that launched the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee, a Future Faculty Symposium that showcases rising stars in chemistry, and the Creating Bonds in Chemistry program that partners MIT faculty with chemistry faculty at select historically Black colleges and universities and minority-serving institutions.

Van Voorhis also oversaw a time of tremendous faculty growth in the department with the addition of nine new faculty. During his tenure as head, he also guided the department through a period of significant growth of interest in chemistry with the number of undergraduate majors, enrolled students, graduate students, and graduate student yields all up significantly.

Van Voorhis also had the honor of celebrating with the entire Institute for Professor Moungi Bawendi’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry — the department’s first win in 18 years, since Professor Richard R. Schrock’s win in 2005.

In addition to his service to the department within the School of Science, Van Voorhis had also co-chaired the Working Group on Curricula and Degrees for the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing. This service relates to Van Voorhis’ own research interests and programs.

Van Voorhis’ research lies at the nexus of chemistry and computation, and his work has impact on renewable energy and quantum computing. His lab is focused on developing new methods that provide an accurate description of electron dynamics in molecules and materials. Over the years, his research has led to advances in light-emitting diodes, solar cells, and other devices and technologies crucial to addressing 21st-century energy concerns.

Van Voorhis received his bachelor’s degree in chemistry and mathematics from Rice University and his PhD in chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley in 2001. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University, he joined the faculty of MIT in 2003 and was promoted to professor of chemistry in 2012.

He has received many honors and awards, including being named an Alfred P. Sloan research fellow, a fellow of the David and Lucille Packard Foundation, and a recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER award. He has also received the MIT School of Science’s award for excellence in graduate teaching.

Decarbonizing heavy industry with thermal batteries

Whether you’re manufacturing cement, steel, chemicals, or paper, you need a large amount of heat. Almost without exception, manufacturers around the world create that heat by burning fossil fuels.

In an effort to clean up the industrial sector, some startups are changing manufacturing processes for specific materials. Some are even changing the materials themselves. Daniel Stack SM ’17, PhD ’21 is trying to address industrial emissions across the board by replacing the heat source.

Since coming to MIT in 2014, Stack has worked to develop thermal batteries that use electricity to heat up a conductive version of ceramic firebricks, which have been used as heat stores and insulators for centuries. In 2021, Stack co-founded Electrified Thermal Solutions, which has since demonstrated that its firebricks can store heat efficiently for hours and discharge it by heating air or gas up to 3,272 degrees Fahrenheit — hot enough to power the most demanding industrial applications.

Achieving temperatures north of 3,000 F represents a breakthrough for the electric heating industry, as it enables some of the world’s hardest-to-decarbonize sectors to utilize renewable energy for the first time. It also unlocks a new, low-cost model for using electricity when it’s at its cheapest and cleanest.

“We have a global perspective at Electrified Thermal, but in the U.S. over the last five years, we’ve seen an incredible opportunity emerge in energy prices that favors flexible offtake of electricity,” Stack says. “Throughout the middle of the country, especially in the wind belt, electricity prices in many places are negative for more than 20 percent of the year, and the trend toward decreasing electricity pricing during off-peak hours is a nationwide phenomenon. Technologies like our Joule Hive Thermal Battery will enable us to access this inexpensive, clean electricity and compete head to head with fossil fuels on price for industrial heating needs, without even factoring in the positive climate impact.”

A new approach to an old technology

Stack’s research plans changed quickly when he joined MIT’s Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering as a master’s student in 2014.

“I went to MIT excited to work on the next generation of nuclear reactors, but what I focused on almost from day one was how to heat up bricks,” Stack says. “It wasn’t what I expected, but when I talked to my advisor, [Principal Research Scientist] Charles Forsberg, about energy storage and why it was valuable to not just nuclear power but the entire energy transition, I realized there was no project I would rather work on.”

Firebricks are ubiquitous, inexpensive clay bricks that have been used for millennia in fireplaces and ovens. In 2017, Forsberg and Stack co-authored a paper showing firebricks’ potential to store heat from renewable resources, but the system still used electric resistance heaters — like the metal coils in toasters and space heaters — which limited its temperature output.

For his doctoral work, Stack worked with Forsberg to make firebricks that were electrically conductive, replacing the resistance heaters so the bricks produced the heat directly.

“Electric heaters are your biggest limiter: They burn out too fast, they break down, they don’t get hot enough,” Stack explains. “The idea was to skip the heaters because firebricks themselves are really cheap, abundant materials that can go to flame-like temperatures and hang out there for days.”

Forsberg and Stacks were able to create conductive firebricks by tweaking the chemical composition of traditional firebricks. Electrified Thermal’s bricks are 98 percent similar to existing firebricks and are produced using the same processes, allowing existing manufacturers to make them inexpensively.

Toward the end of his PhD program, Stack realized the invention could be commercialized. He started taking classes at the MIT Sloan School of Management and spending time at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship. He also entered the StartMIT program and the I-Corps program, and received support from the U.S. Department of Energy and MIT’s Venture Mentoring Service (VMS).

“Through the Boston ecosystem, the MIT ecosystem, and with help from the Department of Energy, we were able to launch this from the lab at MIT,” Stack says. “What we spun out was an electrically conductive firebrick, or what we refer to as an e-Brick.”

Electrified Thermal contains its firebrick arrays in insulated, off-the-shelf metal boxes. Although the system is highly configurable depending on the end use, the company’s standard system can collect and release about 5 megawatts of energy and store about 25 megawatt-hours.

The company has demonstrated its system’s ability to produce high temperatures and has been cycling its system at its headquarters in Medford, Massachusetts. That work has collectively earned Electrified Thermal $40 million from various the Department of Energy offices to scale the technology and work with manufacturers.

“Compared to other electric heating, we can run hotter and last longer than any other solution on the market,” Stack says. “That means replacing fossil fuels at a lot of industrial sites that couldn’t otherwise decarbonize.”

Scaling to solve a global problem

Electrified Thermal is engaging with hundreds of industrial companies, including manufacturers of cement, steel, glass, basic and specialty chemicals, food and beverage, and pulp and paper.

“The industrial heating challenge affects everyone under the sun,” Stack says. “They all have fundamentally the same problem, which is getting their heat in a way that is affordable and zero carbon for the energy transition.”

The company is currently building a megawatt-scale commercial version of its system, which it expects to be operational in the next seven months.

“Next year will be a huge proof point to the industry,” Stack says. “We’ll be using the commercial system to showcase a variety of operating points that customers need to see, and we’re hoping to be running systems on customer sites by the end of the year. It’ll be a huge achievement and a first for electric heating because no other solution in the market can put out the kind of temperatures that we can put out.”

By working with manufacturers to produce its firebricks and casings, Electrified Thermal hopes to be able to deploy its systems rapidly and at low cost across a massive industry.

“From the very beginning, we engineered these e-bricks to be rapidly scalable and rapidly producible within existing supply chains and manufacturing processes,” Stack says. “If you want to decarbonize heavy industry, there will be no cheaper way than turning electricity into heat from zero-carbon electricity assets. We’re seeking to be the premier technology that unlocks those capabilities, with double digit percentages of global energy flowing through our system as we accomplish the energy transition.”

The MIT Press releases report on the future of open access publishing and policy

The MIT Press has released a comprehensive report that addresses how open access policies shape research and what is needed to maximize their positive impact on the research ecosystem.

The report, entitled “Access to Science and Scholarship 2024: Building an Evidence Base to Support the Future of Open Research Policy,” is the outcome of a National Science Foundation-funded workshop held at the Washington headquarters of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on Sept. 20.

While open access aims to democratize knowledge, its implementation has been a factor in the consolidation of the academic publishing industry, an explosion in published articles with inconsistent review and quality control, and new costs that may be hard for researchers and universities to bear, with less-affluent schools and regions facing the greatest risk. The workshop examined how open access and other open science policies may affect research and researchers in the future, how to measure their impact, and how to address emerging challenges.

The event brought together leading experts to discuss critical issues in open scientific and scholarly publishing. These issues include:

the impact of open access policies on the research ecosystem;
the enduring role of peer review in ensuring research quality;
the challenges and opportunities of data sharing and curation; and
the evolving landscape of scholarly communications infrastructure.

The report identifies key research questions in order to advance open science and scholarship. These include:

How can we better model and anticipate the consequences of government policies on public access to science and scholarship?
How can research funders support experimentation with new and more equitable business models for scientific publishing? and
If the dissemination of scholarship is decoupled from peer review and evaluation, who is best suited to perform that evaluation, and how should that process be managed and funded?

“This workshop report is a crucial step in building a data-driven roadmap for the future of open science publishing and policy,” says Phillip Sharp, Institute Professor and professor of biology emeritus at MIT, and faculty lead of the working group behind the workshop and the report. “By identifying key research questions around infrastructure, training, technology, and business models, we aim to ensure that open science practices are sustainable and that they contribute to the highest quality research.”

The full report is available for download, along with video recordings of the workshop.

The MIT Press is a leading academic publisher committed to advancing knowledge and innovation. It publishes significant books and journals across a wide range of disciplines spanning science, technology, design, humanities, and social science.

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