Celebrating the opening of the new Graduate Junction residence

Over two choreographed move-in days in August, more than 600 residents unloaded their boxes and belongings into their new homes in Graduate Junction, located at 269 and 299 Vassar Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. With smiling ambassadors standing by to assist, residents were welcomed into a new MIT-affiliated housing option that offers the convenience of on-campus licensing terms, pricing, and location, as well as the experienced building development and management of American Campus Communities (ACC).

With the building occupied and residents settled, the staff has turned their attention to creating connections between new community members and celebrating the years of a collaborative effort between faculty, students, and staff to plan and create a building that expands student choice, enhances neighborhood amenities, and meets sustainability goals. 

Gathering recently for a celebratory block party, residents and their families, staff, and project team members convened in the main lounge space of building W87 to mingle and enjoy the new community. Children twirled around while project managers, architects, staff from MIT and ACC, and residents reflected on the partnership-driven work to bring the new building to fruition. With 351 units, including studios, one-, two-, and four-bedroom apartments, the building added a total of 675 new graduate housing beds and marked the final step in exceeding the Institute’s commitment made in 2017 to add 950 new graduate beds.

The management staff has also planned several other events to help residents feel more connected to their neighbors, including a farmers market in the central plaza, fall crafting workshops, and coffee breaks. “Graduate Junction isn’t just a place to live — it’s a community,” says Kendra Lowery, American Campus Communities’ general manager of Graduate Junction. “Our staff is dedicated to helping residents feel at home, whether through move-in support, building connections with neighbors, or hosting events that celebrate the unique MIT community.” 

Partnership adds a new option for students

Following a careful study of student housing preferences, the Graduate Housing Working Group — composed of students, staff, and faculty — helped inform the design that includes unit styles and amenities that fit the needs of MIT graduate students in an increasingly expensive regional housing market.

“Innovative places struggle to build housing fast enough, which limits who can access them. Building housing keeps our campus’s innovation culture open to all students. Additionally, new housing for students reduces price pressure on the rest of the Cambridge community,” says Nick Allen, a member of the working group and a PhD student in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. He noted the involvement of students from the outset: “A whole generation of graduate students has worked with MIT to match Grad Junction to the biggest gaps in the local housing market.” For example, the building adds affordable four-bed, two-bath apartments, expanded options for private rooms, and new family housing.

Neighborhood feel with sustainability in mind

The location of the residence further enhances the residential feel of West Campus and forms additional connections between the MIT community and neighboring Cambridgeport. Situated on West Campus next to Simmons Hall and across from Westgate Apartments, the new buildings frame a central, publicly accessible plaza and green space. The plaza is a gateway to Fort Washington Park and the newly reopened pedestrian railroad crossing enhances connections between the residences and the surrounding Cambridgeport neighborhood.

Striving for the LEED v4 Multifamily Midrise Platinum certification, the new residence reflects a commitment to energy efficiency through an innovative design approach. The building has efficient heating and cooling systems and a strategy that reclaims heat from the building’s exhaust to pre-condition incoming ventilation air. The building’s envelope and roofing were designed with a strong focus on thermal performance and its materials were chosen to reduce the project’s climate impact. This resulted in an 11 percent reduction of the whole building’s carbon footprint from the construction, transportation, and installation of materials. In addition, the development teams installed an 11,000 kilowatt-hour solar array and green roof plantings.

Bacteria in the human gut rarely update their CRISPR defense systems

Within the human digestive tract are trillions of bacteria from thousands of different species. These bacteria form communities that help digest food, fend off harmful microbes, and play many other roles in maintaining human health.

These bacteria can be vulnerable to infection from viruses called bacteriophages. One of bacterial cells’ most well-known defenses against these viruses is the CRISPR system, which evolved in bacteria to help them recognize and chop up viral DNA.

A study from MIT biological engineers has yielded new insight into how bacteria in the gut microbiome adapt their CRISPR defenses as they encounter new threats. The researchers found that while bacteria grown in the lab can incorporate new viral recognition sequences as quickly as once a day, bacteria living in human gut add new sequences at a much slower rate — on average, one every three years.

The findings suggest that the environment within the digestive tract offers many fewer opportunities for bacteria and bacteriophages to interact than in the lab, so bacteria don’t need to update their CRISPR defenses very often. It also raises the question of whether bacteria have more important defense systems than CRISPR.

“This finding is significant because we use microbiome-based therapies like fecal microbiota transplant to help treat some diseases, but efficacy is inconsistent because new microbes do not always survive in patients. Learning about microbial defenses against viruses helps us to understand what makes a strong, healthy microbial community,” says An-Ni Zhang, a former MIT postdoc who is now an assistant professor at Nanyang Technological University.

Zhang is the lead author of the study, which appears today in the journal Cell Genomics. Eric Alm, director of MIT’s Center for Microbiome Informatics and Therapeutics, a professor of biological engineering and of civil and environmental engineering at MIT, and a member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, is the paper’s senior author.

Infrequent exposure

In bacteria, CRISPR serves as a memory immune response. When bacteria encounter viral DNA, they can incorporate part of the sequence into their own DNA. Then, if the virus is encountered again, that sequence produces a guide RNA that directs an enzyme called Cas9 to snip the viral DNA, preventing infection.

These virus-specific sequences are called spacers, and a single bacterial cell may carry more than 200 spacers. These sequences can be passed onto offspring, and they can also be shared with other bacterial cells through a process called horizontal gene transfer.

Previous studies have found that spacer acquisition occurs very rapidly in the lab, but the process appears to be slower in natural environments. In the new study, the MIT team wanted to explore how often this process happens in bacteria in the human gut.

“We were interested in how fast this CRISPR system changes its spacers, specifically in the gut microbiome, to better understand the bacteria-virus interactions inside our body,” Zhang says. “We wanted to identify the key parameters that impact the timescale of this immunity update.”

To do that, the researchers looked at how CRISPR sequences changed over time in two different datasets obtained by sequencing microbes from the human digestive tract. One of these datasets contained 6,275 genomic sequences representing 52 bacterial species, and the other contained 388 longitudinal “metagenomes,” that is, sequences from many microbes found in a sample, taken from four healthy people.

“By analyzing those two datasets, we found out that spacer acquisition is really slow in human gut microbiome: On average, it would take 2.7 to 2.9 years for a bacterial species to acquire a single spacer in our gut, which is super surprising because our gut is challenged with viruses almost every day from the microbiome itself and in our food,” Zhang says.

The researchers then built a computational model to help them figure out why the acquisition rate was so slow. This analysis showed that spacers are acquired more rapidly when bacteria live in high-density populations. However, the human digestive tract is diluted several times a day, whenever a meal is consumed. This flushes out some bacteria and viruses and keeps the overall density low, making it less likely that the microbes will encounter a virus that can infect them.

Another factor may be the spatial distribution of microbes, which the researchers believe prevents some bacteria from encountering viruses very frequently.

“Sometimes one population of bacteria may never or rarely encounter a phage because the bacteria are closer to the epithelium in the mucus layer and farther away from a potential exposure to viruses,” Zhang says.

Bacterial interactions

Among the populations of bacteria that they studied, the researchers identified one species — Bifidobacteria longum — that had gained spacers much more recently than others. The researchers found that in samples from unrelated people, living on different continents, B. longum had recently acquired up to six different spacers targeting two different Bifidobacteria bacteriophages.

This acquisition was driven by horizontal gene transfer — a process that allows bacteria to gain new genetic material from their neighbors. The findings suggest that there may be evolutionary pressure on B. longum from those two viruses.

“It has been highly overlooked how much horizontal gene transfer contributes to this dynamic. Within communities of bacteria, the bacteria-bacteria interactions can be a main contributor to the development of viral resistance,” Zhang says.

Analyzing microbes’ immune defenses may offer a way for scientists to develop targeted treatments that will be most effective in a particular patient, the researchers say. For example, they could design therapeutic microbes that are able to fend off the types of bacteriophages that are most prevalent in that person’s microbiome, which would increase the chances that the treatment would succeed.

“One thing we can do is to study the viral composition in the patients, and then we can identify which microbiome species or strains are more capable of resisting those local viruses in a person,” Zhang says.

The research was funded, in part, by the Broad Institute and the Thomas and Stacey Siebel Foundation.

Why open secrets are a big problem

Imagine that the head of a company office is misbehaving, and a disillusioned employee reports the problem to their manager. Instead of the complaint getting traction, however, the manager sidesteps the issue and implies that raising it further could land the unhappy employee in trouble — but doesn’t deny that the problem exists.

This hypothetical scenario involves an open secret: a piece of information that is widely known but never acknowledged as such. Open secrets often create practical quandaries for people, as well as backlash against those who try to address the things that the secrets protect.

In a newly published paper, MIT philosopher Sam Berstler contends that open secrets are pervasive and problematic enough to be worthy of systematic study — and provides a detailed analysis of the distinctive social dynamics accompanying them. In many cases, she proposes, ignoring some things is fine — but open secrets present a special problem.

After all, people might maintain friendships better by not disclosing their salaries to each other, and relatives might get along better if they avoid talking politics at the holidays. But these are just run-of-the-mill individual decisions.

By contrast, open secrets are especially damaging, Berstler believes, because of their “iterative” structure. We do not talk about open secrets; we do not talk about the fact that we do not talk about them; and so on, until the possibility of addressing the problems at hand disappears.

“Sometimes not acknowledging things can be very productive,” Berstler says. “It’s good we don’t talk about everything in the workplace. What’s different about open secrecy is not the content of what we’re not acknowledging, but the pernicious iterative structure of our practice of not acknowledging it.  And because of that structure, open secrecy tends to be hard to change.”

Or, as she writes in the paper, “Open secrecy norms are often moral disasters.”

Beyond that, Berstler says, the example of open secrets should enable us to examine the nature of conversation itself in more multidimensional terms; we need to think about the things left unsaid in conversation, too.

Berstler’s paper, “The Structure of Open Secrets,” appears in advance online form in Philosophical Review. Berstler, an assistant professor and the Laurance S. Rockefeller Career Development Chair in MIT’s Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, is the sole author.

Eroding our knowledge

The concept of open secrets is hardly new, but it has not been subject to extensive philosophical rigor. The German sociologist Georg Simmel wrote about them in the early 20th century, but mostly in the context of secret societies keeping quirky rituals to themselves. Other prominent thinkers have addressed open secrets in psychological terms. To Berstler, the social dynamics of open secrets merit a more thorough reckoning.

“It’s not a psychological problem that people are having,” she says. “It’s a particular practice that they’re all conforming to. But it’s hard to see this because it’s the kind of practice that members, just in virtue of conforming to the practice, can’t talk about.”

In Berstler’s view, the iterative nature of open secrets distinguishes them. The employee expecting a candid reply from their manager may feel bewildered about the lack of a transparent response, and that nonacknowledgement means there is not much recourse to be had, either. Eventually, keeping open secrets means the original issue itself can be lost from view.

“Open secrets norms are set up to try to erode our knowledge,” Berstler says.

In practical terms, people may avoid addressing open secrets head-on because they face a familiar quandary: Being a whistleblower can cost people their jobs and more. But Berstler suggests in the paper that keeping open secrets helps people define their in-group status, too.

“It’s also the basis for group identity,” she says.

Berstler avoids taking the position that greater transparency is automatically a beneficial thing. The paper identifies at least one kind of special case where keeping open secrets might be good. Suppose, for instance, a co-worker has an eccentric but harmless habit their colleagues find out about: It might be gracious to spare them simple embarrassment.

That aside, as Berstler writes, open secrets “can serve as shields for powerful people guilty of serious, even criminal wrongdoing. The norms can compound the harm that befalls their victims … [who] find they don’t just have to contend with the perpetrator’s financial resources, political might, and interpersonal capital. They must go up against an entire social arrangement.” As a result, the chances of fixing social or organizational dysfunction diminish.

Two layers of conversation

Berstler is not only trying to chart the dynamics and problems of open secrets. She is also trying to usefully complicate our ideas about the nature of conversations and communication.

Broadly, some philosophers have theorized about conversations and communication by focusing largely on the information being shared among people. To Berstler, this is not quite sufficient; the example of open secrets alerts us that communication is not just an act of making things more and more transparent.

“What I’m arguing in the paper is that this is too simplistic a way to think about it, because actual conversations in the real world have a theatrical or dramatic structure,” Berstler says. “There are things that cannot be made explicit without ruining the performance.”

At an office holiday party, for instance, the company CEO might maintain an illusion of being on equal footing with the rest of the employees if the conversation is restricted to movies and television shows. If the subject turns to year-end bonuses, that illusion vanishes. Or two friends at a party, trapped in an unwanted conversation with a third person, might maneuver themselves away with knowing comments, but without explicitly saying they are trying to end the chat.

Here Berstler draws upon the work of sociologist Erving Goffman — who closely studied the performative aspects of everyday behavior — to outline how a more multi-dimensional conception of social interaction applies to open secrets. Berstler suggests open secrets involve what she calls “activity layering,” which in this case suggests that people in a conversation involving open secrets have multiple common grounds for understanding, but some remain unspoken.

Further expanding on Goffman’s work, Berstler also details how people may be “mutually collaborating on a pretense,” as she writes, to keep an open secret going.

“Goffman has not really systematically been brought into the philosophy of language, so I am showing how his ideas illuminate and complicate philosophical views,” Berstler says.

Combined, a close analysis of open secrets and a re-evaluation of the performative components of conversation can help us become more cognizant about communication. What is being said matters; what is left unsaid matters alongside it.

“There are structural features of open secrets that are worrisome,” Berstler says. “And because of that we have to more aware [of how they work].”

Helping students bring about decarbonization, from benchtop to global energy marketplace

MIT students are adept at producing research and innovations at the cutting edge of their fields. But addressing a problem as large as climate change requires understanding the world’s energy landscape, as well as the ways energy technologies evolve over time.

Since 2010, the course IDS.521/IDS.065 (Energy Systems for Climate Change Mitigation) has equipped students with the skills they need to evaluate the various energy decarbonization pathways available to the world. The work is designed to help them maximize their impact on the world’s emissions by making better decisions along their respective career paths.

“The question guiding my teaching and research is how do we solve big societal challenges with technology, and how can we be more deliberate in developing and supporting technologies to get us there?” says Professor Jessika Trancik, who started the course to help fill a gap in knowledge about the ways technologies evolve and scale over time.

Since its inception in 2010, the course has attracted graduate students from across MIT’s five schools. The course has also recently opened to undergraduate students and been adapted to an online course for professionals.

Class sessions alternate between lectures and student discussions that lead up to semester-long projects in which groups of students explore specific strategies and technologies for reducing global emissions. This year’s projects span several topics, including how quickly transmission infrastructure is expanding, the relationship between carbon emissions and human development, and how to decarbonize the production of key chemicals.

The curriculum is designed to help students identify the most promising ways to mitigate climate change whether they plan to be scientists, engineers, policymakers, investors, urban planners, or just more informed citizens.

“We’re coming at this issue from both sides,” explains Trancik, who is part of MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society. “Engineers are used to designing a technology to work as well as possible here and now, but not always thinking over a longer time horizon about a technology evolving and succeeding in the global marketplace. On the flip side, for students at the macro level, often studies in policy and economics of technological change don’t fully account for the physical and engineering constraints of rates of improvement. But all of that information allows you to make better decisions.”

Bridging the gap

As a young researcher working on low-carbon polymers and electrode materials for solar cells, Trancik always wondered how the materials she worked on would scale in the real world. They might achieve promising performance benchmarks in the lab, but would they actually make a difference in mitigating climate change? Later, she began focusing increasingly on developing methods for predicting how technologies might evolve.

“I’ve always been interested in both the macro and the micro, or even nano, scales,” Trancik says. “I wanted to know how to bridge these new technologies we’re working on with the big picture of where we want to go.”

Trancik’ described her technology-grounded approach to decarbonization in a paper that formed the basis for IDS.065. In the paper, she presented a way to evaluate energy technologies against climate-change mitigation goals while focusing on the technology’s evolution.

“That was a departure from previous approaches, which said, given these technologies with fixed characteristics and assumptions about their rates of change, how do I choose the best combination?” Trancik explains. “Instead we asked: Given a goal, how do we develop the best technologies to meet that goal? That inverts the problem in a way that’s useful to engineers developing these technologies, but also to policymakers and investors that want to use the evolution of technologies as a tool for achieving their objectives.”

This past semester, the class took place every Tuesday and Thursday in a classroom on the first floor of the Stata Center. Students regularly led discussions where they reflected on the week’s readings and offered their own insights.

“Students always share their takeaways and get to ask open questions of the class,” says Megan Herrington, a PhD candidate in the Department of Chemical Engineering. “It helps you understand the readings on a deeper level because people with different backgrounds get to share their perspectives on the same questions and problems. Everybody comes to class with their own lens, and the class is set up to highlight those differences.”

The semester begins with an overview of climate science, the origins of emissions reductions goals, and technology’s role in achieving those goals. Students then learn how to evaluate technologies against decarbonization goals.

But technologies aren’t static, and neither is the world. Later lessons help students account for the change of technologies over time, identifying the mechanisms for that change and even forecasting rates of change.

Students also learn about the role of government policy. This year, Trancik shared her experience traveling to the COP29 United Nations Climate Change Conference.

“It’s not just about technology,” Trancik says. “It’s also about the behaviors that we engage in and the choices we make. But technology plays a major role in determining what set of choices we can make.”

From the classroom to the world

Students in the class say it has given them a new perspective on climate change mitigation.

“I have really enjoyed getting to see beyond the research people are doing at the benchtop,” says Herrington. “It’s interesting to see how certain materials or technologies that aren’t scalable yet may fit into a larger transformation in energy delivery and consumption. It’s also been interesting to pull back the curtain on energy systems analysis to understand where the metrics we cite in energy-related research originate from, and to anticipate trajectories of emerging technologies.”

Onur Talu, a first-year master’s student in the Technology and Policy Program, says the class has made him more hopeful.

“I came into this fairly pessimistic about the climate,” says Talu, who has worked for clean technology startups in the past. “This class has taught me different ways to look at the problem of climate change mitigation and developing renewable technologies. It’s also helped put into perspective how much we’ve accomplished so far.”

Several student projects from the class over the years have been developed into papers published in peer-reviewed journals. They have also been turned into tools, like carboncounter.com, which plots the emissions and costs of cars and has been featured in The New York Times.

Former class students have also launched startups; Joel Jean SM ’13, PhD ’17, for example, started Swift Solar. Others have drawn on the course material to develop impactful careers in government and academia, such as Patrick Brown PhD ’16 at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Leah Stokes SM ’15, PhD ’15 at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Overall, students say the course helps them take a more informed approach to applying their skills toward addressing climate change.

“It’s not enough to just know how bad climate change could be,” says Yu Tong, a first-year master’s student in civil and environmental engineering. “It’s also important to understand how technology can work to mitigate climate change from both a technological and market perspective. It’s about employing technology to solve these issues rather than just working in a vacuum.”

Ecologists find computer vision models’ blind spots in retrieving wildlife images

Try taking a picture of each of North America’s roughly 11,000 tree species, and you’ll have a mere fraction of the millions of photos within nature image datasets. These massive collections of snapshots — ranging from butterflies to humpback whales — are a great research tool for ecologists because they provide evidence of organisms’ unique behaviors, rare conditions, migration patterns, and responses to pollution and other forms of climate change.

While comprehensive, nature image datasets aren’t yet as useful as they could be. It’s time-consuming to search these databases and retrieve the images most relevant to your hypothesis. You’d be better off with an automated research assistant — or perhaps artificial intelligence systems called multimodal vision language models (VLMs). They’re trained on both text and images, making it easier for them to pinpoint finer details, like the specific trees in the background of a photo.

But just how well can VLMs assist nature researchers with image retrieval? A team from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), University College London, iNaturalist, and elsewhere designed a performance test to find out. Each VLM’s task: locate and reorganize the most relevant results within the team’s “INQUIRE” dataset, composed of 5 million wildlife pictures and 250 search prompts from ecologists and other biodiversity experts. 

Looking for that special frog

In these evaluations, the researchers found that larger, more advanced VLMs, which are trained on far more data, can sometimes get researchers the results they want to see. The models performed reasonably well on straightforward queries about visual content, like identifying debris on a reef, but struggled significantly with queries requiring expert knowledge, like identifying specific biological conditions or behaviors. For example, VLMs somewhat easily uncovered examples of jellyfish on the beach, but struggled with more technical prompts like “axanthism in a green frog,” a condition that limits their ability to make their skin yellow.

Their findings indicate that the models need much more domain-specific training data to process difficult queries. MIT PhD student Edward Vendrow, a CSAIL affiliate who co-led work on the dataset in a new paper, believes that by familiarizing with more informative data, the VLMs could one day be great research assistants. “We want to build retrieval systems that find the exact results scientists seek when monitoring biodiversity and analyzing climate change,” says Vendrow. “Multimodal models don’t quite understand more complex scientific language yet, but we believe that INQUIRE will be an important benchmark for tracking how they improve in comprehending scientific terminology and ultimately helping researchers automatically find the exact images they need.”

The team’s experiments illustrated that larger models tended to be more effective for both simpler and more intricate searches due to their expansive training data. They first used the INQUIRE dataset to test if VLMs could narrow a pool of 5 million images to the top 100 most-relevant results (also known as “ranking”). For straightforward search queries like “a reef with manmade structures and debris,” relatively large models like “SigLIP” found matching images, while smaller-sized CLIP models struggled. According to Vendrow, larger VLMs are “only starting to be useful” at ranking tougher queries.

Vendrow and his colleagues also evaluated how well multimodal models could re-rank those 100 results, reorganizing which images were most pertinent to a search. In these tests, even huge LLMs trained on more curated data, like GPT-4o, struggled: Its precision score was only 59.6 percent, the highest score achieved by any model.

The researchers presented these results at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) earlier this month.

Inquiring for INQUIRE

The INQUIRE dataset includes search queries based on discussions with ecologists, biologists, oceanographers, and other experts about the types of images they’d look for, including animals’ unique physical conditions and behaviors. A team of annotators then spent 180 hours searching the iNaturalist dataset with these prompts, carefully combing through roughly 200,000 results to label 33,000 matches that fit the prompts.

For instance, the annotators used queries like “a hermit crab using plastic waste as its shell” and “a California condor tagged with a green ‘26’” to identify the subsets of the larger image dataset that depict these specific, rare events.

Then, the researchers used the same search queries to see how well VLMs could retrieve iNaturalist images. The annotators’ labels revealed when the models struggled to understand scientists’ keywords, as their results included images previously tagged as irrelevant to the search. For example, VLMs’ results for “redwood trees with fire scars” sometimes included images of trees without any markings.

“This is careful curation of data, with a focus on capturing real examples of scientific inquiries across research areas in ecology and environmental science,” says Sara Beery, the Homer A. Burnell Career Development Assistant Professor at MIT, CSAIL principal investigator, and co-senior author of the work. “It’s proved vital to expanding our understanding of the current capabilities of VLMs in these potentially impactful scientific settings. It has also outlined gaps in current research that we can now work to address, particularly for complex compositional queries, technical terminology, and the fine-grained, subtle differences that delineate categories of interest for our collaborators.”

“Our findings imply that some vision models are already precise enough to aid wildlife scientists with retrieving some images, but many tasks are still too difficult for even the largest, best-performing models,” says Vendrow. “Although INQUIRE is focused on ecology and biodiversity monitoring, the wide variety of its queries means that VLMs that perform well on INQUIRE are likely to excel at analyzing large image collections in other observation-intensive fields.”

Inquiring minds want to see

Taking their project further, the researchers are working with iNaturalist to develop a query system to better help scientists and other curious minds find the images they actually want to see. Their working demo allows users to filter searches by species, enabling quicker discovery of relevant results like, say, the diverse eye colors of cats. Vendrow and co-lead author Omiros Pantazis, who recently received his PhD from University College London, also aim to improve the re-ranking system by augmenting current models to provide better results.

University of Pittsburgh Associate Professor Justin Kitzes highlights INQUIRE’s ability to uncover secondary data. “Biodiversity datasets are rapidly becoming too large for any individual scientist to review,” says Kitzes, who wasn’t involved in the research. “This paper draws attention to a difficult and unsolved problem, which is how to effectively search through such data with questions that go beyond simply ‘who is here’ to ask instead about individual characteristics, behavior, and species interactions. Being able to efficiently and accurately uncover these more complex phenomena in biodiversity image data will be critical to fundamental science and real-world impacts in ecology and conservation.”

Vendrow, Pantazis, and Beery wrote the paper with iNaturalist software engineer Alexander Shepard, University College London professors Gabriel Brostow and Kate Jones, University of Edinburgh associate professor and co-senior author Oisin Mac Aodha, and University of Massachusetts at Amherst Assistant Professor Grant Van Horn, who served as co-senior author. Their work was supported, in part, by the Generative AI Laboratory at the University of Edinburgh, the U.S. National Science Foundation/Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Global Center on AI and Biodiversity Change, a Royal Society Research Grant, and the Biome Health Project funded by the World Wildlife Fund United Kingdom.

Tiny, wireless antennas use light to monitor cellular communication

Monitoring electrical signals in biological systems helps scientists understand how cells communicate, which can aid in the diagnosis and treatment of conditions like arrhythmia and Alzheimer’s.

But devices that record electrical signals in cell cultures and other liquid environments often use wires to connect each electrode on the device to its respective amplifier. Because only so many wires can be connected to the device, this restricts the number of recording sites, limiting the information that can be collected from cells.

MIT researchers have now developed a biosensing technique that eliminates the need for wires. Instead, tiny, wireless antennas use light to detect minute electrical signals.

Small electrical changes in the surrounding liquid environment alter how the antennas scatter the light. Using an array of tiny antennas, each of which is one-hundredth the width of a human hair, the researchers could measure electrical signals exchanged between cells, with extreme spatial resolution.

The devices, which are durable enough to continuously record signals for more than 10 hours, could help biologists understand how cells communicate in response to changes in their environment. In the long run, such scientific insights could pave the way for advancements in diagnosis, spur the development of targeted treatments, and enable more precision in the evaluation of new therapies.

“Being able to record the electrical activity of cells with high throughput and high resolution remains a real problem. We need to try some innovative ideas and alternate approaches,” says Benoît Desbiolles, a former postdoc in the MIT Media Lab and lead author of a paper on the devices.

He is joined on the paper by Jad Hanna, a visiting student in the Media Lab; former visiting student Raphael Ausilio; former postdoc Marta J. I. Airaghi Leccardi; Yang Yu, a scientist at Raith America, Inc.; and senior author Deblina Sarkar, the AT&T Career Development Assistant Professor in the Media Lab and MIT Center for Neurobiological Engineering and head of the Nano-Cybernetic Biotrek Lab. The research appears today in Science Advances.

“Bioelectricity is fundamental to the functioning of cells and different life processes. However, recording such electrical signals precisely has been challenging,” says Sarkar. “The organic electro-scattering antennas (OCEANs) we developed enable recording of electrical signals wirelessly with micrometer spatial resolution from thousands of recording sites simultaneously. This can create unprecedented opportunities for understanding fundamental biology and altered signaling in diseased states as well as for screening the effect of different therapeutics to enable novel treatments.”

Biosensing with light

The researchers set out to design a biosensing device that didn’t need wires or amplifiers. Such a device would be easier to use for biologists who may not be familiar with electronic instruments.

“We wondered if we could make a device that converts the electrical signals to light and then use an optical microscope, the kind that is available in every biology lab, to probe these signals,” Desbiolles says.

Initially, they used a special polymer called PEDOT:PSS to design nanoscale transducers that incorporated tiny pieces of gold filament. Gold nanoparticles were supposed to scatter the light — a process that would be induced and modulated by the polymer. But the results weren’t matching up with their theoretical model.

The researchers tried removing the gold and, surprisingly, the results matched the model much more closely.

“It turns out we weren’t measuring signals from the gold, but from the polymer itself. This was a very surprising but exciting result. We built on that finding to develop organic electro-scattering antennas,” he says.

The organic electro-scattering antennas, or OCEANs, are composed of PEDOT:PSS. This polymer attracts or repulses positive ions from the surrounding liquid environment when there is electrical activity nearby. This modifies its chemical configuration and electronic structure, altering an optical property known as its refractive index, which changes how it scatters light.

When researchers shine light onto the antenna, the intensity of the light changes in proportion to the electrical signal present in the liquid.

Six-by-six array of tiny lights that glow brighter as voltage goes from 0 to -0.8.
The brightness of light scattered by the tiny antennas the researchers developed, called OCEANs, changes in response to changing electrical signals in the liquid environment that surrounds them, as shown here. By capturing and measuring the light with an optical microscope, researchers could decode the intricate signals used for cellular communication.

Credit: Courtesy of the researchers

With thousands or even millions of tiny antennas in an array, each only 1 micrometer wide, the researchers can capture the scattered light with an optical microscope and measure electrical signals from cells with high resolution. Because each antenna is an independent sensor, the researchers do not need to pool the contribution of multiple antennas to monitor electrical signals, which is why OCEANs can detect signals with micrometer resolution.

Intended for in vitro studies, OCEAN arrays are designed to have cells cultured directly on top of them and put under an optical microscope for analysis.

“Growing” antennas on a chip

Key to the devices is the precision with which the researchers can fabricate arrays in the MIT.nano facilities.

They start with a glass substrate and deposit layers of conductive then insulating material on top, each of which is optically transparent. Then they use a focused ion beam to cut hundreds of nanoscale holes into the top layers of the device. This special type of focused ion beam enables high-throughput nanofabrication.

“This instrument is basically like a pen where you can etch anything with a 10-nanometer resolution,” he says.

They submerge the chip in a solution that contains the precursor building blocks for the polymer. By applying an electric current to the solution, that precursor material is attracted into the tiny holes on the chip, and mushroom-shaped antennas “grow” from the bottom up.

The entire fabrication process is relatively fast, and the researchers could use this technique to make a chip with millions of antennas.

“This technique could be easily adapted so it is fully scalable. The limiting factor is how many antennas we can image at the same time,” he says.

The researchers optimized the dimensions of the antennas and adjusted parameters, which enabled them to achieve high enough sensitivity to monitor signals with voltages as low as 2.5 millivolts in simulated experiments. Signals sent by neurons for communication are usually around 100 millivolts.

“Because we took the time to really dig in and understand the theoretical model behind this process, we can maximize the sensitivity of the antennas,” he says.

OCEANs also responded to changing signals in only a few milliseconds, enabling them to record electrical signals with fast kinetics. Moving forward, the researchers want to test the devices with real cell cultures. They also want to reshape the antennas so they can penetrate cell membranes, enabling more precise signal detection.

In addition, they want to study how OCEANs could be integrated into nanophotonic devices, which manipulate light at the nanoscale for next-generation sensors and optical devices.

This research is funded, in part, by the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the Swiss National Science Foundation. Research reported in this press release was supported by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) of the National Institutes of Health and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH.

Global MIT At-Risk Fellows Program expands to invite Palestinian scholars

When the Global MIT At-Risk Fellows (GMAF) initiative launched in February 2024 as a pilot program for Ukrainian researchers, its architects expressed hope that GMAF would eventually expand to include visiting scholars from other troubled areas of the globe. That time arrived this fall, when MIT launched GMAF-Palestine, a two-year pilot that will select up to five fellows each year currently either in Palestine or recently displaced to continue their work during a semester at MIT.

Designed to enhance the educational and research experiences of international faculty and researchers displaced by humanitarian crises, GMAF brings international scholars to MIT for semester-long study and research meant to benefit their regions of origin while simultaneously enriching the MIT community.

Referring to the ongoing war and humanitarian crisis in Gaza, GMAF-Palestine Director and MIT Professor Kamal Youcef-Toumi says that “investing in scientists is an important way to address this significant conflict going on in our world.” Youcef-Toumi says it’s hoped that this program “will give some space for getting to know the real people involved and a deeper understanding of the practical implications for people living through the conflict.”

Professor Duane Boning, vice provost for international activities, considers the GMAF program to be a practical way for MIT to contribute to solving the world’s most challenging problems. “Our vision is for the fellows to come to MIT for a hands-on, experiential joint learning and research experience that develops the tools necessary to support the redevelopment of their regions,” says Boning.

“Opening and sustaining connections among scholars around the world is an essential part of our work at MIT,” says MIT President Sally Kornbluth. “New collaborations so often spark new understanding and new ideas; that’s precisely what we aim to foster with this kind of program.”  

Crediting Program Manager Dorothy Hanna with much of the legwork that got the fellowship off the ground, Youcef-Toumi says fellows for the program’s inaugural year will be chosen from early- and mid-career scientists via an open application and nominations from the MIT community. Following submission of applications and interviews in January, five scholars will be selected to begin their fellowships at MIT in September 2025.

Eligible applicants must have held academic or research appointments at a Palestinian university within the past five years; hold a PhD or equivalent degree in a field represented at MIT; have been born in Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, or refugee camps; have a reasonable expectation of receiving a U.S. visa, and be working in a research area represented at MIT. MIT will cover all fellowship expenses, including travel, accommodations, visas, health insurance, instructional materials, and living stipends.

To build strong relationships during their time at MIT, GMAF-Palestine will pair fellows with faculty mentors and keep them connected with other campus communities, including the Ibn Khaldun Fellowship for Saudi Arabian Women, an over 10-year-old program that Youcef-Toumi’s team also oversees. 

“MIT has a special environment and mindset that I think will be very useful. It’s a competitive environment, but also very supportive,” says Youcef-Toumi, a member of the Department of Mechanical Engineering faculty, director of the Mechatronics Research Laboratory, and co-director of the Center for Complex Engineering Systems. “In many other places, if a person is in math, they stay in math. If they are in architecture, they stay in architecture and they are not dealing with other departments or other colleges. In our case, because students’ work is often so interdisciplinary, a student in mechanical engineering can have an advisor in computer science or aerospace, and basically everything is open. There are no walls.”

Youcef-Toumi says he hopes MIT’s collegial environment among diverse departments and colleagues is a value fellows will retain and bring back to their own universities and communities.

“We are all here for scholarship. All of the people who come to MIT … they are coming for knowledge. The technical part is one thing, but there are other things here that are not available in many environments — you know, the sense of community, the values, and the excellence in academics,” Youcef-Toumi says. “These are things we will continue to emphasize, and hopefully these visiting scientists can absorb and benefit from some of that. And we will also learn from them, from their seminars and discussions with them.”

Referencing another new fellowship program launched by MIT, Kalaniyot for Israeli scholars, led by MIT professors Or Hen and Ernest Fraenkel, Youcef-Toumi says, “Getting to know the Kalaniyot team better has been great, and I’m sure we will be helping each other. To have people from that region be on campus and interacting with different people … hopefully that will add a more positive effect and unity to the campus. This is one of the things that we hope these programs will do.”

As with any first endeavor, GMAF-Palestine’s first round of fellowships and the experiences of the fellows, and the observations of the GMAF team, will inform future iterations of the program. In addition to Youcef-Toumi, leadership for the program is provided by a faculty committee representing the breadth of scholarship at MIT. The vision of the faculty committee is to establish a sustainable program connecting the Palestinian community and MIT.

“Longer term,” Youcef-Toumi says, “we hope to show the MIT community this is a really impactful program that is worth sustaining with continued fundraising and philanthropy. We plan to stay in touch with the fellows and collect feedback from them over the first five years on how their time at MIT has impacted them as researchers and educators. Hopefully, this will include ongoing collaborations with their MIT mentors or others they meet along the way at MIT.”

MIT-Kalaniyot launches programs for visiting Israeli scholars

Over the past 14 months, as the impact of the ongoing Israel-Gaza war has rippled across the globe, a faculty-led initiative has emerged to support MIT students and staff by creating a community that transcends ethnicity, religion, and political views. Named for a flower that blooms along the Israel-Gaza border, MIT-Kalaniyot began hosting weekly community lunches that typically now draw about 100 participants. These gatherings have gained the interest of other universities seeking to help students not only cope with but thrive through troubled times, with some moving to replicate MIT’s model on their own campuses.

Now, scholars at Israel’s nine state-recognized universities will be able to compete for MIT-Kalaniyot fellowships designed to allow Israel’s top researchers to come to MIT for collaboration and training, advancing research while contributing to a better understanding of their country.

The MIT-Kalaniyot Postdoctoral Fellows Program will support scholars who have recently graduated from Israeli PhD programs to continue their postdoctoral training at MIT. Meanwhile, the new MIT-Kalaniyot Sabbatical Scholars Program will provide faculty and researchers holding sabbatical-eligible appointments at Israeli research institutions with fellowships for two academic terms at MIT.

Announcement of the fellowships through the association of Israeli university presidents spawned an enthusiastic response. 

“We’ve received many emails, from questions about the program to messages of gratitude. People have told us that, during a time of so much negativity, seeing such a top-tier academic program emerge feels like a breath of fresh air,” says Or Hen, the Class of 1956 Associate Professor of Physics and associate director of the Laboratory for Nuclear Science, who co-founded MIT-Kalaniyot with Ernest Fraenkel, the Grover M. Hermann Professor in Health Sciences and Technology.

Hen adds that the response from potential program donors has been positive, as well.

“People have been genuinely excited to learn about forward-thinking efforts and how they can simultaneously support both MIT and Israeli science,” he says. “We feel truly privileged to be part of this meaningful work.”

MIT-Kalaniyot is “a faculty-led initiative that emerged organically as we came to terms with some of the challenges that MIT was facing trying to keep focusing on its mission during a very difficult period for the U.S., and obviously for Israelis and Palestinians,” Fraenkel says.

As the MIT-Kalaniyot Program gained momentum, he adds, “we started talking about positive things faculty can do to help MIT fulfill its mission and then help the world, and we recognized many of the challenges could actually be helped by bringing more brilliant scholars from Israel to MIT to do great research and to humanize the face of Israelis so that people who interact with them can see them, not as some foreign entity, but as the talented person working down the hallway.”

“MIT has a long tradition of connecting scholarly communities around the world,” says MIT President Sally Kornbluth. “Programs like this demonstrate the value of bringing people and cultures together, in pursuit of new ideas and understanding.”    

Open to applicants in the humanities, architecture, management, engineering, and science, both fellowship programs aim to embrace Israel’s diverse demographics by encouraging applications from all communities and minority groups throughout Israel.

Fraenkel notes that because Israeli universities reflect the diversity of the country, he expects scholars who identify as Israeli Arabs, Palestinian citizens of Israel, and others could be among the top candidates applying and ultimately selected for MIT-Kalaniyot fellowships. 

MIT is also expanding its Global MIT At-Risk Fellows Program (GMAF), which began last year with recruitment of scholars from Ukraine, to bring Palestinian scholars to campus next fall. Fraenkel and Hen noted their close relationship with GMAF-Palestine director Kamal Youcef-Toumi, a professor in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering.  

“While the programs are independent of each other, we value collaboration at MIT and are hoping to find positive ways that we can interact with each other,” Fraenkel says.

Also growing up alongside MIT-Kalaniyot’s fellowship programs will be new Kalaniyot chapters at universities such as the University of Pennsylvania and Dartmouth College, where programs have already begun, and others where activity is starting up. MIT’s inspiration for these efforts, Hen and Fraenkel say, is a key aspect of the Kalaniyot story.

“We formed a new model of faculty-led communities,” Hen says. “As faculty, our roles typically center on teaching, mentoring, and research. After October 7 happened, we saw what was happening around campus and across the nation and realized that our roles had to expand. We had to go beyond the classroom and the lab to build deeper connections within the community that transcends traditional academic structures. This faculty-led approach has become the essence of MIT-Kalaniyot, and is now inspiring similar efforts across the nation.”

Once the programs are at scale, MIT plans to bring four MIT-Kalaniyot Postdoctoral Fellows to campus annually (for three years each), as well as four MIT-Kalaniyot Sabbatical Scholars, for a total of 16 visiting Israeli scholars at any one time.

“We also hope that when they go back, they will be able to maintain their research ties with MIT, so we plan to give seed grants to encourage collaboration after someone leaves,” Fraenkel says. “I know for a lot of our postdocs, their time at MIT is really critical for making networks, regardless of where they come from or where they go. Obviously, it’s harder when you’re across the ocean in a very challenging region, and so I think for both programs it would be great to be able to maintain those intellectual ties and collaborate beyond the term of their fellowships.”

A common thread between the new Kalaniyot programs and GMAF-Palestine, Hen says, is to rise beyond differences that have been voiced post-Oct. 7 and refocus on the Institute’s core research mission.

“We’re bringing in the best scholars from the region — Jews, Israelis, Arabs, Palestinians — and normalizing interactions with them and among them through collaborative research,” Hen says. “Our mission is clear: to focus on academic excellence by bringing outstanding talent to MIT and reinforcing that we are here to advance research in service of humanity.”

Startup’s autonomous drones precisely track warehouse inventories

Whether you’re a fulfillment center, a manufacturer, or a distributor, speed is king. But getting products out the door quickly requires workers to know where those products are located in their warehouses at all times. That may sound obvious, but lost or misplaced inventory is a major problem in warehouses around the world.

Corvus Robotics is addressing that problem with an inventory management platform that uses autonomous drones to scan the towering rows of pallets that fill most warehouses. The company’s drones can work 24/7, whether warehouse lights are on or off, scanning barcodes alongside human workers to give them an unprecedented view of their products.

“Typically, warehouses will do inventory twice a year — we change that to once a week or faster,” says Corvus co-founder and CTO Mohammed Kabir ’21. “There’s a huge operational efficiency you gain from that.”

Corvus is already helping distributors, logistics providers, manufacturers, and grocers track their inventory. Through that work, the company has helped customers realize huge gains in the efficiency and speed of their warehouses.

The key to Corvus’s success has been building a drone platform that can operate autonomously in tough environments like warehouses, where GPS doesn’t work and Wi-Fi may be weak, by only using cameras and neural networks to navigate. With that capability, the company believes its drones are poised to enable a new level of precision for the way products are produced and stored in warehouses around the world.

A new kind of inventory management solution

Kabir has been working on drones since he was 14.

“I was interested in drones before the drone industry even existed,” Kabir says. “I’d work with people I found on the internet. At the time, it was just a bunch of hobbyists cobbling things together to see if they could work.”

In 2017, the same year Kabir came to MIT, he received a message from his eventual Corvus co-founder Jackie Wu, who was a student at Northwestern University at the time. Wu had seen some of Kabir’s work on drone navigation in GPS-denied environments as part of an open-source drone project. The students decided to see if they could use the work as the foundation for a company.

Kabir started working on spare nights and weekends as he juggled building Corvus’ technology with his coursework in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. The founders initially tried using off-the-shelf drones and equipping them with sensors and computing power. Eventually they realized they had to design their drones from scratch, because off-the-shelf drones did not provide the kind of low-level control and access they needed to build full-lifecycle autonomy.

Kabir built the first drone prototype in his dorm room in Simmons Hall and took to flying each new iteration in the field out front.

“We’d build these drone prototypes and bring them out to see if they’d even fly, and then we’d go back inside and start building our autonomy systems on top of them,” Kabir recalls.

While working on Corvus, Kabir was also one of the founders of the MIT Driverless program that built North America’s first competition-winning driverless race cars.

“It’s all part of the same autonomy story,” Kabir says. “I’ve always been very interested in building robots that operate without a human touch.”

From the beginning, the founders believed inventory management was a promising application for their drone technology. Eventually they rented a facility in Boston and simulated a warehouse with huge racks and boxes to refine their technology.

By the time Kabir graduated in 2021, Corvus had completed several pilots with customers. One customer was MSI, a building materials company that distributes flooring, countertops, tile, and more. Soon MSI was using Corvus every day across multiple facilities in its nationwide network.

The Corvus One drone, which the company calls the world’s first fully autonomous warehouse inventory management drone, is equipped with 14 cameras and an AI system that allows it to safely navigate to scan barcodes and record the location of each product. In most instances, the collected data are shared with the customer’s warehouse management system (typically the warehouse’s system of record), and any discrepancies identified are automatically categorized with a suggested resolution. Additionally, the Corvus interface allows customers to select no-fly zones, choose flight behaviors, and set automated flight schedules.

“When we started, we didn’t know if lifelong vision-based autonomy in warehouses was even possible,” Kabir says. “It turns out that it’s really hard to make infrastructure-free autonomy work with traditional computer vision techniques. We were the first in the world to ship a learning-based autonomy stack for an indoor aerial robot using machine learning and neural network based approaches. We were using AI before it was cool.”

To set up, Corvus’ team simply installs one or more docks, which act as a charging and data transfer station, on the ends of product racks and completes a rough mapping step using tape measurers. The drones then fill in the fine details on their own. Kabir says it takes about a week to be fully operational in a 1-million-square-foot facility.

“We don’t have to set up any stickers, reflectors, or beacons,” Kabir says. “Our setup is really fast compared to other options in the industry. We call it infrastructure-free autonomy, and it’s a big differentiator for us.”

From forklifts to drones

A lot of inventory management today is done by a person using a forklift or a scissor lift to scan barcodes and make notes on a clipboard. The result is infrequent and inaccurate inventory checks that sometimes require warehouses to shut down operations.

“They’re going up and down on these lifts, and there are all of these manual steps involved,” Kabir says. “You have to manually collect data, then there’s a data entry step, because none of these systems are connected. What we’ve found is many warehouses are driven by bad data, and there’s no way to fix that unless you fix the data you’re collecting in the first place.”

Corvus can bring inventory management systems and processes together. Its drones also operate safely around people and forklifts every day.

“That was a core goal for us,” Kabir says. “When we go into a warehouse, it’s a privilege the customer has given us. We don’t want to disrupt their operations, and we build a system around that idea. You can fly it whenever you need to, and the system will work around your schedule.”

Kabir already believes Corvus offers the most comprehensive inventory management solution available. Moving forward, the company will offer more end-to-end solutions to manage inventory the moment it arrives at warehouses.

“Drones actually only solve a part of the inventory problem,” Kabir says. “Drones fly around to track rack pallet inventory, but a lot of stuff gets lost even before it makes it to the racks. Products arrive, they get taken off a truck, and then they are stacked on the floor, and before they are moved to the racks, items have been lost. They’re mislabelled, they’re misplaced, and they’re just gone. Our vision is to solve that.”

MIT affiliates receive 2025 IEEE honors

The IEEE recently announced the winners of their 2025 prestigious medals, technical awards, and fellowships. Four MIT faculty members, one staff member, and five alumni were recognized.

Regina Barzilay, the School of Engineering Distinguished Professor for AI and Health within the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at MIT, received the IEEE Frances E. Allen Medal for “innovative machine learning algorithms that have led to advances in human language technology and demonstrated impact on the field of medicine.” Barzilay focuses on machine learning algorithms for modeling molecular properties in the context of drug design, with the goal of elucidating disease biochemistry and accelerating the development of new therapeutics. In the field of clinical AI, she focuses on algorithms for early cancer diagnostics. She is also the AI faculty lead within the MIT Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health and an affiliate of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, and Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. Barzilay is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has earned the MacArthur Fellowship, MIT’s Jamieson Award for excellence in teaching, and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence’s $1 million Squirrel AI Award for Artificial Intelligence for the Benefit of Humanity. Barzilay is a fellow of AAAI, ACL, and AIMBE.

James J. Collins, the Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering and Science, professor of biological engineering at MIT, and member of the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology faculty, earned the 2025 IEEE Medal for Innovations in Healthcare Technology for his work in “synthetic gene circuits and programmable cells, launching the field of synthetic biology, and impacting healthcare applications.” He is a core founding faculty member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University and an Institute Member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Collins is known as a pioneer in synthetic biology, and currently focuses on employing engineering principles to model, design, and build synthetic gene circuits and programmable cells to create novel classes of diagnostics and therapeutics. His patented technologies have been licensed by over 25 biotech, pharma, and medical device companies, and he has co-founded several companies, including Synlogic, Senti Biosciences, Sherlock Biosciences, Cellarity, and the nonprofit Phare Bio. Collins’ many accolades are the MacArthur “Genius” Award, the Dickson Prize in Medicine, and election to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

Roozbeh Jafari, principal staff member in MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s Biotechnology and Human Systems Division, was elected IEEE Fellow for his “contributions to sensors and systems for digital health paradigms.” Jafari seeks to establish impactful and highly collaborative programs between Lincoln Laboratory, MIT campus, and other U.S. academic entities to promote health and wellness for national security and public health. His research interests are wearable-computer design, sensors, systems, and AI for digital health, most recently focusing on digital twins for precision health. He has published more than 200 refereed papers and served as general chair and technical program committee chair for several flagship conferences focused on wearable computers. Jafari has received a National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award (2012), the IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium Best Paper Award (2011), the IEEE Andrew P. Sage Best Transactions Paper Award (2014), and the Association for Computing Machinery Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems Best Paper Award (2019), among other honors.

William Oliver, the Henry Ellis Warren (1894) Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and professor of physics at MIT, was elected an IEEE Fellow for his “contributions to superconductive quantum computing technology and its teaching.” Director of the MIT Center for Quantum Engineering and associate director of the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics, Oliver leads the Engineering Quantum Systems (EQuS) group at MIT. His research focuses on superconducting qubits, their use in small-scale quantum processors, and the development of cryogenic packaging and control electronics. The EQuS group closely collaborates with the Quantum Information and Integrated Nanosystems Group at Lincoln Laboratory, where Oliver was previously a staff member and a Laboratory Fellow from 2017 to 2023. Through MIT xPRO, Oliver created four online professional development courses addressing the fundamentals and practical realities of quantum computing. He is member of the National Quantum Initiative Advisory Committee and has published more than 130 journal articles and seven book chapters. Inventor or co-inventor on more than 10 patents, he is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Physical Society; serves on the U.S. Committee for Superconducting Electronics; and is a lead editor for the IEEE Applied Superconductivity Conference.

Daniela Rus, director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory,  MIT Schwarzman College of Computing deputy dean of research, and the Andrew (1956) and Erna Viterbi Professor within the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, was awarded the IEEE Edison Medal for “sustained leadership and pioneering contributions in modern robotics.” Rus’ research in robotics, artificial intelligence, and data science focuses primarily on developing the science and engineering of autonomy, where she envisions groups of robots interacting with each other and with people to support humans with cognitive and physical tasks. Rus is a Class of 2002 MacArthur Fellow, a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and of IEEE, and a member of the National Academy of Engineers and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Five MIT alumni were also recognized.

Steve Mann PhD ’97, a graduate of the Program in Media Arts and Sciences, received the Masaru Ibuka Consumer Technology Award “for contributions to the advancement of wearable computing and high dynamic range imaging.” He founded the MIT Wearable Computing Project and is currently professor of computer engineering at the University of Toronto as well as an IEEE Fellow.

Thomas Louis Marzetta ’72 PhD ’78, a graduate of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, received the Eric E. Sumner Award “for originating the Massive MIMO technology in wireless communications.” Marzetta is a distinguished industry professor at New York University’s (NYU) Tandon School of Engineering and is director of NYU Wireless, an academic research center within the department. He is also an IEEE Life Fellow.

Michael Menzel ’81, a graduate of the Department of Physics, was awarded the Simon Ramo Medal “for development of the James Webb Space Telescope [JWST], first deployed to see the earliest galaxies in the universe,” along with Bill Ochs, JWST project manager at NASA, and Scott Willoughby, vice president and program manager for the JWST program at Northrop Grumman. Menzel is a mission systems engineer at NASA and a member of the American Astronomical Society.

Jose Manuel Fonseca Moura ’73, SM ’73, ScD ’75, a graduate of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, received the Haraden Pratt Award “for sustained leadership and outstanding contributions to the IEEE in education, technical activities, awards, and global connections.” Currently, Moura is the Philip L. and Marsha Dowd University Professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He is also a member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineers, fellow of the U.S. National Academy of Inventors, a member of the Portugal Academy of Science, an IEEE Fellow, and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Marc Raibert PhD ’77, a graduate of the former Department of Psychology, now a part of the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, received the Robotics and Automation Award “for pioneering and leading the field of dynamic legged locomotion.” He is founder of Boston Dynamics, an MIT spinoff and robotics company, and The AI Institute, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he also serves as the executive director. Raibert is an IEEE Member.