Author: MIT News

Seven with MIT ties receive awards from the American Physical Society

by Sandi Miller | Department of Physics |

The American Physical Society (APS) recently honored a number of individuals with ties to MIT with prizes and awards for their contributions to physics. They include: Institute Professor Arup Chakraborty; associate professors Ronald Fernando Garcia Ruiz and Lina Necib; Yuan Cao SM ’16 PhD ’20; Alina Kononov ’14; Elliott H. Lieb ’53; Haocun Yu PhD ’20; and several former MIT postdocs.

Max Delbruck Prize in Biological Physics

Institute Professor Arup Chakraborty, a professor of chemical engineering, physics, and chemistry, received the 2023 Max Delbruck Prize in Biological Physics for his role in “initiating the field of computational immunology, aimed at applying approaches from physical sciences and engineering to unravel the mechanistic underpinnings of the adaptive immune response to pathogens, and to harness this understanding to help design vaccines and therapy.”

The Delbruck Prize is named in honor of the physicist and Nobel Laureate Max Delbruck, whose influential quantitative study of genes and their susceptibility to mutations has inspired generations of physical scientists to work on biology, starting with Erwin Schroedinger’s book “What Is Life?” The annual $10,000 Delbruck Prize recognizes and encourages outstanding achievement in biological physics research.

A chemical engineer by training, Chakraborty’s research at the crossroad of statistical physics and molecular and cellular immunology has led to discoveries regarding the immune response to pathogens, which can be harnessed for the development of potential vaccines for HIV, influenza, and other highly mutable pathogens. Most recently, he has also been studying the role of phase separation in gene regulation. The Chakraborty Group’s theoretical and computational research is distinguished by its impact on experimental and clinical studies, and they collaborate with many experimental and clinical biologists.

Teaching at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, Chakraborty is also a co-author of the 2021 book “Viruses, Pandemics, and Immunity.” He is one of just 12 MIT Institute Professors and is also one of just 25 individuals who are members of all three branches of the U.S. National Academies — National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Medicine, and National Academy of Engineering.

Chakraborty is a core faculty member and the founding director of MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, and a founding member of the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard. He will receive the prize at January’s APS Annual Leadership Meeting in Washington.

George E. Valley Jr. Prize  

Assistant professor of physics Lina Necib PhD ’17 has been selected to receive the George E. Valley Jr. Prize, which recognizes an outstanding scientific contribution to physics by an early-career researcher.

The astroparticle physicist was recognized for the discovery of a massive new stellar structure “that may have shaped the history of the Milky Way,” and for her development of “groundbreaking new methods” to study our galaxy’s dark-matter halo and growth history.

Necib uses cosmological simulations, stellar catalogs, machine learning techniques, and a background of particle physics to build the first map of dark matter in the Milky Way. Specifically, Necib uses the European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft’s optical telescopes to model the kinematics of accreted stars, which are stars born outside our galaxy, the Milky Way. Some of these stars originate from merger events such as the Gaia Sausage/Gaia Enceledus. She also discovered a stellar stream that wraps around the Milky Way galaxy, called Nyx, after the Greek goddess of the night, and is using spectroscopy to identify its properties.

A native of Tunisia, Necib worked with Professor Jesse Thaler to receive her PhD in theoretical physics from MIT in 2017. She rejoined the Institute as a faculty member in 2021.

The award, which recognizes an early-career individual for an outstanding scientific contribution to physics that is deemed to have significant potential for a dramatic impact on the field, provides $10,000, a certificate citing the contribution made by the recipient, an allowance for travel to the APS Medal and Prize Ceremony and Reception in Washington, and an invited talk at an APS March or April meeting. The prize is named after the late MIT professor emeritus of physics who was also an MIT alumnus.

Stuart Jay Freedman Award in Experimental Nuclear Physics  

Assistant professor of physics Ronald Fernando Garcia Ruiz was recognized with the American Physical Society’s Stuart Jay Freedman Award in Experimental Nuclear Physics “for novel studies of exotic nuclei using precision laser spectroscopy measurements, including the first spectroscopy of short-lived radioactive molecules.”

Garcia Ruiz develops laser spectroscopy techniques to investigate the properties of subatomic particles using atoms and molecules made up of short-lived radioactive nuclei. His experimental work provides unique information about the fundamental forces of nature, the properties of nuclear matter at the limits of existence, and the search for new physics beyond the Standard Model of particle physics.

Very recently, his team at MIT and collaborators developed a new laser spectroscopy experiment, the Resonant ionization Spectroscopy Experiments (RiSE), located at the new Department of Energy Facility for Rare Isotope Beams (FRIB) at Michigan State University. “We anticipate the RISE experiment, combined with the unique capabilities of FRIB, is going to provide major breakthroughs in our understanding of nuclei at the extremes of stability, and the use of rare atoms and molecules in fundamental physics over the next decade,” Garcia Ruiz says.

A native of Colombia, Garcia Ruiz joined MIT in 2020. His award, named after distinguished experimental nuclear physicist Stuart J. Freedman, will be presented at the 2022 Fall Meeting of the APS Division of Nuclear Physics Oct. 27-30. The award includes $4,000, a certificate, and travel allowance to give a talk at the awards ceremony.

Richard L. Greene Dissertation Award in Experimental Condensed Matter or Materials Physics

Yuan Cao SM ’16, PhD ’20, now a junior fellow at Harvard University, received the 2022 Richard L. Greene Dissertation Award in Experimental Condensed Matter or Materials Physics “for pioneering discoveries of strongly correlated physics in twisted bilayer graphene.”

A graduate of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and former Jarillo-Herrero lab postdoc and Materials Research Laboratory visiting scientist, Cao is mainly focused on the quantum transport in 2D materials, especially moiré superlattices. Cao’s past work has been honored as “Nature’s 10″ and Physics World’s “Physics Breakthrough of the Year,” in 2018.

Nicholas Metropolis Award for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Work in Computational Physics

Alina Kononov ’14, a postdoc at Sandia National Laboratories, received the Nicholas Metropolis Award for Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Work in Computational Physics “for trailblazing contributions to the computational modeling of materials physics, including large-scale simulations of irradiated materials and advances in time-dependent density functional theory.”

Kononov’s research interests span electronic structure theory and its applications, including time-dependent density functional theory, quantum simulation, materials physics, and high-energy density science. A 2014 graduate of MIT in physics, her later doctoral work focused on first-principles modeling of ion-irradiated surfaces and 2D materials, enabling predictive calculations of ion-induced electron emission, uncovering new surface physics, and offering insights for ion beam materials imaging and processing techniques. At Sandia National Labs, she continues to develop and apply cutting-edge methods to model excited electron dynamics.

APS Medal for Exceptional Achievement in Research

Elliott H. Lieb ’53, an alumnus of the MIT Department of Physics and a former MIT professor who is now at Princeton University, has received the 2022 APS Medal for Exceptional Achievement in Research “for major contributions to theoretical physics through obtaining exact solutions to important physical problems, which have impacted condensed matter physics, quantum information, statistical mechanics, and atomic physics.”

As an MIT professor from 1968 to 1974, he became renown for the Lieb-Robinson Bound in condensed matter, which plays a significant role on the topological phases of extensive quantum systems; the “Strong subadditivity of quantum entropy,” with Mary Beth Ruskai, which now forms part of the basis of modern quantum information theory; the first “Brascamp-Lieb inequalities” that date from this period (the final version was constructed by Elliott at Princeton in 1990); and “The proof of stability of matter” with Austrian physicist Walter Thirring — their Lieb-Thirring inequalities opened a new chapter in functional analysis.

Carl E. Anderson Division of Laser Science Dissertation Award

Haocun Yu PhD ’20, who earned her doctorate from the MIT Department of Physics and is now a postdoc at the University of Vienna’s Walther group, received the 2021 Carl E. Anderson Division of Laser Science Dissertation Award “for leading contributions to the Advanced LIGO detectors, achieving unprecedented sensitivity through injection of squeezed stated of light, sensitive enough to observe mirror motion driven by quantum vacuum fluctuations and quantum correlations at the human scale.”

Yu began working with the MIT LIGO scientific team in 2014, with a focus on the enhancement of LIGO sensitivity using quantum techniques, as well as the demonstration of macroscopic quantum phenomena in Advanced LIGO detectors. Her contributions on quantum techniques have taken macroscopic quantum mechanics to the human scale, and Advanced LIGO detectors to unprecedented sensitivity. Her recent research interest lies in the interface of quantum mechanics and gravity.

Other researchers with MIT ties who were honored with APS awards and prizes include: Bernhard Mistlberger, former 2018-20 Pappalardo Fellow, who won the Henry Primakoff Award for Early-Career Particle Physics; Prineha Narang, former MIT physics research scholar, who won the 2023 Maria Goeppert Mayer Award; Itamar Procaccia, former MIT postdoc, who won the 2023 Leo P. Kadanoff Prize; Michael J. Ramsey-Musolf, former MIT postdoc, who won the 2023 Herman Feshbach Prize in Theoretical Nuclear Physics; B. Lee Roberts, former MIT Laboratory for Nuclear Science postdoc, who won the 2023 W.K.H. Panofsky Prize in Experimental Particle Physics; and Vivek Sharma, former mechanical engineering postdoc, who won the 2023 John H. Dillon Medal.

Five with MIT ties elected to the National Academy of Medicine for 2022

by Danielle Doughty | Department of Chemistry |

On October 17, the National Academy of Medicine announced the election of 100 new members to join their esteemed ranks. MIT faculty members Laura L. Kiessling ’83 and Mark Bear were among the new members, along with MIT alumni Krishna Shenoy SM ’92, PhD ’95 and David Tuveson ’87. Martin Burke, a former student in the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology, was also elected.

Election to the National Academy of Medicine is considered one of the highest honors in the fields of health and medicine, and recognizes individuals who have demonstrated outstanding professional achievement and commitment to service, the Academy noted in announcing the election of its new members.

Bear, Professor of Neuroscience, was elected “For his discovery of fundamental mechanisms by which sensory experience and deprivation modify synapses by increasing or decreasing their strength during the development of the brain, and how these mechanisms contribute to, and can be marshalled to treat, developmental brain disorders.”

Kiessling, the Novartis Professor of Chemistry, was recognized “For chemistry-enabled fundamental discoveries regarding protein-glycan interactions pertinent to immunity and inflammation, host-microbe interactions, and human development, and leveraging these findings for new therapeutic strategies.”

Shenoy, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and the Hong Seh and Vivian W M Lim Professor of Engineering at Stanford, earned his Master’s and PhD from the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He was chosen for election due to his “contributions both to basic neuroscience and to translational and clinical research. His work has shown how networks of motor cortical neurons operate as dynamical systems, and he has developed new technologies to provide new means of restoring movement and communication to people with paralysis.”

Tuveson, the Roy J. Zuckerberg Professor and director of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Cancer Center, is an alumnus of the MIT Department of Chemistry. The NAM recognized him “for his transformative leadership in pancreatic cancer biology. His work has led to the development of powerful pancreatic cancer models, which has been fundamental to preclinical studies of understanding targeted therapy and treatment of pancreatic cancer. He most recently has been a leader in organoid-based cancer models.”

Burke, the Ving Lee Professor for Chemical Innovation at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Carle Illinois College of Medicine, was elected “for creating a modular molecular synthesis platform with broad applications in health science and technology, including his pioneering research on molecular prosthetics for cystic fibrosis, and for helping mitigate the spread of COVID-19 with saliva-based testing.”

“This extraordinary class of new members is comprised of exceptional scholars and leaders who have been at the forefront of responding to serious public health challenges, combatting social inequities, and achieving innovative discoveries,” says National Academy of Medicine President Victor J. Dzau. “Their expertise will be vital to informing the future of health and medicine for the benefit of us all.  I am truly honored to welcome these esteemed individuals to the National Academy of Medicine.”

Two winners of 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, K. Barry Sharpless and Carolyn Bertozzi, share MIT roots

by Danielle Doughty | Department of Chemistry |

Two scientists with MIT connections have been awarded a share of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

In an announcement made yesterday in Stockholm, Sweden, Carolyn R. Bertozzi of Stanford University, Morten Meldal of the University of Copenhagen, and K. Barry Sharpless of the Scripps Research Institute were awarded the prize “for the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry.” Both Bertozzi and Sharpless share roots at MIT and the greater Boston area.

Sharpless, who became just the 5th person to ever win a second Nobel Prize, began his independent career at MIT, and was a member of the Department of Chemistry faculty from 1970 to 1977. After moving to his doctoral alma mater, Stanford University, for three years, he returned to the MIT faculty from 1980 to 1990 before trekking west again, this time to Scripps, where he has remained the W.M. Keck Professor of Chemistry ever since.

Krishna Komanduri ’87, a former undergraduate student of Sharpless’ at MIT who is now physician-in-chief at the University of California at San Francisco Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, tweeted yesterday that Sharpless was “an outstanding and funny teacher. … People used to compile lists of ‘Sharplessisms’, like ‘Iodine oribtals are soft and squishy.’”

Sharpless was awarded his first Nobel Prize in 2001, “for his work on chirally catalyzed oxidation reactions.”

Bertozzi, the 8th woman to win a Nobel Prize in Chemistry, grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts, and spent time on the MIT campus as the daughter of Department of Physics Professor Emeritus William Bertozzi. Yesterday, the younger Bertozzi revealed that her father was her first call upon learning that she had been named a Nobel laureate.

“He understands the gravity of a Nobel Prize and what that means,” she explained in an interview with WBUR. “And he was just so overjoyed, just bursting with pride. And I’m so happy that he is still with us [and] that he could enjoy this moment with me.”

Bertozzi boasts another MIT connection: She was the first woman to win the prestigious Lemelson-MIT Prize, in 2010. Bertozzi graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University, earned her PhD at the University of California at Berkeley, and joined their faculty in 1996. She remained there until 2015, when she joined the faculty at Stanford, where she is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences and a professor of chemical and systems biology and of radiology.

The Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded 114 times to 191 Nobel Prize laureates between 1901 and 2022. Sharpless now shares the distinction of having won the Prize in Chemistry twice with one other laureate, Frederick Sanger, who won in 1958 and 1980. The prizes will be awarded in Stockholm, on Dec. 10.

For Danna Freedman, an impasse is an invitation

by Michaela Jarvis | MIT News correspondent |

Asked once about the most difficult part of her research, Danna Freedman could not stop referring to obstacles as opportunities, and to challenges as excitement. “Every time we hit a barrier it enables us to discover new science,” she told an interviewer at Northwestern University in 2017, describing difficulties encountered in her research as among her most “rewarding” moments.

For Freedman, MIT’s F.G. Keyes Professor of Chemistry, focusing on a difficult problem seems to be her idea of nirvana. Currently, her research group is using inorganic chemistry to create molecules for quantum information science, generating a new class of quantum units that can be readily tuned for quantum communication. But at any given time, her idea of a favorite breakthrough is generally the challenge at hand.

“I love the most recent result, the thing I am struggling to understand and improve at a particular moment in time,” Freedman says.

Her determination and enthusiasm for the unsolved problem began as she was growing up in a small town in upstate New York, where early on she showed a strong interest in science and the questions scientists work to answer.

Freedman says her parents “patiently participated in hours of conversation about the best way to drop an egg an arbitrary number of stories without breaking it.”

“Unfortunately, I hear bungee egg drop is no longer a Science Olympiad event,” she jokes.

Referring to her more recent endeavors, Freedman says her lab’s bottom-up design of molecules that can function as tunable, scalable, versatile, and robust qubits is an important step toward full realization of quantum sensing and communication. Such quantum operations could uncover new information about the world around us, sense dark matter, lead to insight in biological systems, or help transmit information across complex messy interfaces in a quantum state.

“We have developed a different approach to such a goal,” Freedman says. “It will take a long, dedicated, interdisciplinary effort to bring these ideas to fruition, and I am incredibly excited to make that happen.”

One of the ways Freedman and her lab are working collaboratively across disciplines is through the Q-NEXT National Quantum Information Science Research Center, which is led by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory. With support from Q-NEXT and others, Freedman and members of her team as well as researchers from the University of Chicago and Columbia University recently published a paper in the Journal of the American Chemical Society demonstrating that a specific group of qubits — in this case molecules designed with a central chromium atom surrounded by four hydrocarbon molecules — could be customized for specific targets within quantum sensing and communication.

“As part of Q-NEXT and other research centers, we are incorporating these molecules into the larger quantum ecosystem,” says Freedman, whose work has garnered her many honors, including Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers through the U.S. Department of Defense and the National Science Foundation.

Freedman’s lab also works on applying extreme pressure, sometimes comparable to the pressures at the Earth’s core, to synthesize new materials. Her team is exploring one such material, the first iron-bismuth binary compound, for its magnetic properties and potential as a superconductor, both aspects that could have broad ramifications in such areas as energy generation and transport.

Freedman’s characteristic ambition also shines through in her teaching and mentoring. She says that helping young researchers to develop involves “providing them with a foundation to excel and then throwing them into the deep end and asking them to swim.” But if they don’t succeed, she says, then “the foundation isn’t there, and I need to work harder, and try different approaches to prepare them.”

With her determination to seek new and expanding challenges, Freedman came to MIT in 2021, having moved from Northwestern University, where she was a professor of chemistry. She says the potential for collaboration at MIT enhanced her motivation.

“I am about 10 years into my career, and as our research expands in new directions, I wanted to form teams that extend beyond my own research and to connect in different directions,” Freedman says. “When I spoke with faculty at MIT, every idea that I had expanded and became more achievable. The visions of the scientists and engineers at MIT spur me to have better ideas and to be a better scientist.”

She says she is “invigorated by the culture of the Institute. I continue to be impressed with the kindness and dedication and equitable culture that I have observed here. It is incumbent upon me to continue to improve it, but it is a phenomenal starting point.”

And from that starting point, proceeding despite obstacles is obvious. Her great forward momentum is perhaps also evidenced by her great love of walking and running, which she tries to do every day.

“In Boston, I have walked along most train lines,” she says, adding that she also enjoys running “from Harvard Square down North Harvard Street to Coolidge Corner, on to the Chestnut Hill Reservoir and back along Commonwealth. I like running from MIT to the Chestnut Hill Reservoir and back … and in Belmont, running on the Minuteman trail.”

“While walking or running,” Freedman says, “I turn existing thoughts into coherent sentences, create talks and refine ideas.”

When cells’ tiny differences have far-reaching implications

by Anne Trafton | MIT News Office |

Within a given tissue or organ, cells may appear very similar or even identical. But at the molecular level, these cells can have small differences that lead to wide variations in their functions.

Alex K. Shalek, an MIT associate professor of chemistry, relishes the challenge of uncovering those small distinctions. In his lab, researchers develop and deploy technologies such as single-cell RNA-sequencing, which lets them analyze differences in gene expression patterns and allows them to figure out how each cell contributes to a tissue’s function.

“Single-cell RNA-sequencing is an incredibly powerful way to examine what cells are doing at a given moment. By looking at associations among the different mRNAs that cells express, we can identify really important features of a tissue — like what cells are present and what are those cells trying to do,” says Shalek, who is also a core member of MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science and an extramural member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, as well as a member of the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard and an institute member of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT.

While his work focuses on identifying small-scale differences, he hopes that it will have large-scale implications, as he seeks to better understand globally important diseases such as HIV, tuberculosis, and cancer.

“A lot of what we do now is global collaborative work that really focuses on understanding the cellular and molecular basis of human diseases — partnering with people in over 30 countries on six continents,” he says. “I love fundamental work and the precision possible in model systems, but I’ve always been very motivated to connect our science to human health, and to understand what’s happening in different diseases so we can develop better preventions and cures.”

Exploring the physical world

As a student at Columbia University, Shalek bounced between a few different majors before settling on chemical physics. He started out in physics because he wanted to understand the fundamental laws of how the physical world works. However, as he got farther along, he realized that most of the research opportunities available involved detection of high-energy particles, which didn’t appeal to him.

He then took some math courses but didn’t feel a real connection to the material, so he switched to chemistry, where he encountered a course that resonated with him: statistical mechanics, which involves using statistical methods to describe the behavior of large numbers of atoms or molecules.

“I loved it because it helped me understand how all these rules that I’d learned in physics about microscopic particles actually translated to macroscopic things in the world around me,” Shalek says.

Torn as to what he wanted to do after graduating from college, he decided to go to graduate school. At Harvard University, where he earned a PhD in chemical physics, he ended up working with Hongkun Park, a professor of chemistry and of physics. Park, who had just received tenure for his work measuring the optical and electronic properties of single molecules and nanomaterials, was in the midst of building a new program to study the brain. Specifically, he wanted to find ways to make high-precision electrical measurements of many neurons at once.

As the first to join the new effort, Shalek found himself responsible for figuring out how to create computational models, fabricate devices, write software to control the electronics, analyze the data, and many other things that he didn’t know how to do, on top of learning neurobiology.

“It was challenging, to say the least. I got a crash course in how to do a bunch of different things,” he recalls. “It was a very humbling experience, but I learned a lot. By begging my way into various labs around town at Harvard and MIT, I was able to pick things up faster. I got very comfortable taking up new subjects and tackling hard problems by leaning on others and learning from them.”

His efforts led to the development of several new technologies, including arrays of nanowires that could be used to record neuron activity as well as to inject molecules into individual cells without harming them and to remove some of the contents of the cells. This proved especially useful for studying immune cells, which usually resist other delivery methods such as viruses.

An individual approach

Shalek’s work in graduate school stimulated his interest in systems biology, which involves comprehensively measuring many aspects of a biological system using genomics and other techniques, then building models that account for the observed measurements, and finally testing the models in living cells using perturbation techniques. However, to his frustration, he often found that when he tried to test a prediction of a model, not all of the cells in the system would show the expected outcome.

“There was a lot of variability,” he says. “I’d see differences in the level of mRNAs, or in the expression or activity of proteins, or sometimes all my cells wouldn’t differentiate into the same thing.”

He began to wonder if it would be worthwhile to try to study each individual cell within a system, instead of the traditional approach of doing pooled sequencing of their mRNA. During his postdoc, he worked with Park and Aviv Regev, an MIT professor of biology and member of the Broad Institute, to develop technologies for sequencing all of the mRNA found in large sets of individual cells. This information can then be used to classify cells into distinct types and reveal the state they’re in at a given moment in time.

In his lab at MIT, Shalek now uses improvements he’s helped make to this approach to analyze many types of cells and tissues, and to study how their identities are shaped by their environments. His recent work has included studies of how cancer cell state impacts response to chemotherapy, the cellular targets of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, analysis of cell types involved in lactation, and identification of T cells primed to produce inflammation during allergic responses.

An overarching theme of this work is how cells maintain homeostasis, or the steady state of physical and chemical conditions within living organisms.

“We know how important homeostasis is because we know that imbalances can lead to autoimmune diseases and immunodeficiencies, or to the growth of cancers,” Shalek says. “We want to really define at a cellular level, what is balance, how do you maintain balance, and how do various environmental factors like exposures to different infections or diets alter that balance?”

Shalek says he appreciates the many opportunities he has to work with other researchers around MIT and the Boston area, in addition to his many international collaborators. As his lab works on problems of human disease, he makes sure to help nurture the next generation of scientists, the same way that he was able to receive training and mentoring as a graduate student and postdoc.

“If you put together the collective brain trust of this community, as well as partner with people all around the world, you can do incredible things,” Shalek says. “My experience taught me the importance of supporting and empowering scientists and of trying to uplift the community, which is a lot of what I’ve focused on. I recognize that a lot of my success has depended upon people opening their labs and giving me time and supporting me, and so I’ve tried to pay that forward.”

MIT welcomes eight MLK Visiting Professors and Scholars for 2022-23

by Beatriz Cantada | Institute Community and Equity Office |

From space traffic to virus evolution, community journalism to hip-hop, this year’s cohort in the Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) Visiting Professors and Scholars Program will power an unprecedented range of intellectual pursuits during their time on the MIT campus.

“MIT is so fortunate to have this group of remarkable individuals join us,” says Institute Community and Equity Officer John Dozier. “They bring a range and depth of knowledge to share with our students and faculty, and we look forward to working with them to build a stronger sense of community across the Institute.”

Since its inception in 1990, the MLK Scholars Program has hosted more than 135 visiting professors, practitioners, and intellectuals who enhance and enrich the MIT community through their engagement with students and faculty. The program, which honors the life and legacy of MLK by increasing the presence and recognizing the contributions of underrepresented scholars, is supported by the Office of the Provost with oversight from the Institute Community and Equity Office.

In spring 2022, MIT President Rafael Reif committed to MIT to adding two new positions in the MLK Visiting Scholars Program, including an expert in Native American studies. Those additional positions will be filled in the coming year.  

The 2022-23 MLK Scholars:

Daniel Auguste is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Florida Atlantic University and is hosted by Roberto Fernandez in MIT Sloan School of Management. Auguste’s research interests include social inequalities in entrepreneurship development. During his visit, Auguste will study the impact of education debt burden and wealth inequality on business ownership and success, and how these consequences differ by race and ethnicity.

Tawanna Dillahunt is an associate professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan, where she also holds an appointment with the electrical engineering and computer science department. Catherine D’Ignazio in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning and Fotini Christia in the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society are her faculty hosts. Dillahunt’s scholarship focuses on equitable and inclusive computing. She identifies technological opportunities and implements tools to address and alleviate employment challenges faced by marginalized people. Dillahunt’s visiting appointment begins in September 2023.

Javit Drake ’94 is a principal scientist in modeling and simulation and measurement sciences at Proctor & Gamble. His faculty host is Fikile Brushett in the Department of Chemical Engineering. An industry researcher with electrochemical energy expertise, Drake is a Course 10 (chemical engineering) alumnus, repeat lecturer, and research affiliate in the department. During his visit, he will continue to work with the Brushett Research Group to deepen his research and understanding of battery technologies while he innovates from those discoveries.

Eunice Ferreira is an associate professor in the Department of Theater at Skidmore College and is hosted by Claire Conceison in Music and Theater Arts. This fall, Ferreira will teach “Black Theater Matters,” a course where students will explore performance and the cultural production of Black intellectuals and artists on Broadway and in local communities. Her upcoming book projects include “Applied Theatre and Racial Justice: Radical Imaginings for Just Communities” (forthcoming from Routledge) and “Crioulo Performance: Remapping Creole and Mixed Race Theatre” (forthcoming from Vanderbilt University Press).

Wasalu Jaco, widely known as Lupe Fiasco, is a rapper, record producer, and entrepreneur. He will be co-hosted by Nick Montfort of Comparative Media Studies/Writing and Mary Fuller of Literature. Jaco’s interests lie in the nexus of rap, computing, and activism. As a former visiting artist in MIT’s Center for Art, Science and Technology (CAST), he will leverage existing collaborations and participate in digital media and art research projects that use computing to explore novel questions related to hip-hop and rap. In addition to his engagement in cross-departmental projects, Jaco will teach a spring course on rap in the media and social contexts.

Moribah Jah is an associate professor in the Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics Department at the University of Texas at Austin. He is hosted by Danielle Wood in Media Arts and Sciences and the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and Richard Linares in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Jah’s research interests include space sustainability and space traffic management; as a visiting scholar, he will develop and strengthen a joint MIT/UT-Austin research program to increase resources and visibility of space sustainability. Jah will also help host the AeroAstro Rising Stars symposium, which highlights graduate students, postdocs, and early-career faculty from backgrounds underrepresented in aerospace engineering.

Louis Massiah SM ’82 is a documentary filmmaker and the founder and director of community media of Scribe Video Center, a nonprofit organization that uses media as a tool for social change. His work focuses on empowering Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) filmmakers to tell the stories of/by BIPOC communities. Massiah is hosted by Vivek Bald in Creative Media Studies/Writing. Massiah’s first project will be the launch of a National Community Media Journalism Consortium, a platform to share local news on a broader scale across communities.

Brian Nord, a scientist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, will join the Laboratory for Nuclear Science, hosted by Jesse Thaler in the Department of Physics. Nord’s research interests include the connection between ethics, justice, and scientific discovery. His efforts will be aimed at introducing new insights into how we model physical systems, design scientific experiments, and approach the ethics of artificial intelligence. As a lead organizer of the Strike for Black Lives in 2020, Nord will engage with justice-oriented members of the MIT physics community to strategize actions for advocacy and activism.

Brandon Ogbunu, an assistant professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University, will be hosted by Matthew Shoulders in the Department of Chemistry. Ogbunu’s research focus is on implementing chemistry and materials science perspectives into his work on virus evolution. In addition to serving as a guest lecturer in graduate courses, he will be collaborating with the Office of Engineering Outreach Programs on their K-12 outreach and recruitment efforts.

For more information about these scholars and the program, visit mlkscholars.mit.edu.

Ancient African smelting technique sparks anew at MIT

by MIT News |

The plumes of smoke that rose from East Campus one sunny May day could easily have been mistaken for a barbecue taking place in the courtyard. And indeed, burgers were on the grill. But the smoke was coming from a much rarer sight on MIT’s campus — or, in fact, anywhere outside West Africa: a mud-and-straw furnace for smelting iron.

For two months, students in class 3.094 (Materials in Human Experience) had been building the furnace, or bloomery, in the traditional style of the Mossi people of Burkina Faso. The furnace was a five-foot-high cylinder. From the top end came dancing orange flames and billowing gray smoke; from an opening on the lower third of the cylinder extended two tubes, each into a large pot topped with goatskin and pumped by students and volunteers in T-shirts and polo shirts.

“The idea of this class in general is to teach people about materials through archeological materials,” says Mike Tarkanian, senior lecturer in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. The first half of the class, taught by associate professor of civil and environmental engineering Admir Masic, focused on Roman concrete, the material used to construct ancient landmarks such as the Pantheon in Rome.

In the second half, Tarkanian and lecturer James Hunter taught about the long history of smelting iron in Africa, how iron helped fight people fight wars and till fields, and some of the current problems with iron and steel production — it’s one of the biggest producers of carbon dioxide. “And today they’re learning about how difficult this thousands-year-old process actually is.”

Old practice, new hands

In class, held in MIT’s foundry, students got practice pumping the bellows. They’d sit in front of two pots, grabbing a folded piece of goatskin in each hand and then making vigorous up and down motions, alternating between left and right. Pulling up unseals a flap in the goatskin, taking in air; pushing down closes the flap, expelling the air from the tubes and into the furnace, feeding the flames. But instead of a fire at the other end of the bellows was a plastic garbage bag, to give a sense of how much airflow students could produce. For the actual smelting, in the courtyard, students planned on pumping for 15-minute intervals.

“I came in very confident that I was going to be able to do it for 15 minutes straight because I did it for one minute in class. And it was incredibly exhausting,” says 3.094 student Sreya Vangara ’22, an electrical engineering and mechanical engineering major who graduated in May. She spoke above the “thwump, thwump” sound of the bellows in the background. “When we have a real-fire at the other end of the bellows rather than an inflatable bag, the heat changes your ability to work, because all of a sudden, when you open up the flap, your knuckles get scorched.”

The project was inspired by a 2005 documentary video describing the traditional practice of smelting iron from iron ore in Burkina Faso. The video follows a family of smiths reviving the 2,000-year-old method, which had not been done for decades. It follows the men through every painstaking stage of the process, from making charcoal from the burnt remains of wood to mining iron ore — the rocks and minerals iron can be extracted from — to digging up clay, moistening it with water, and adding fresh hay to shape the furnace.

Tarkanian and the class used the video as a sort of manual to build the furnace. It’s made of terracotta clay bought from art supply store Blick Art Materials in Boston and grass harvested from Waltham, Massachusetts.

“We built the closest facsimile that we could to what we saw them doing in Burkina Faso,” Tarkanian says. “We had to make some guesses, but it looks pretty good.”

All the materials needed for smelting — charcoal, iron ore, and sand — were bought from stores and suppliers. The process works this way: a fire is lit in the furnace opening at the bottom, and charcoal and iron ore are layered into the top of the tube. As the charcoal burns, it reduces the ore to iron. Sand is added as flux — a material that melts into a fluid. “It basically reacts with the iron and can bring the iron down to the bottom,” Tarkanian says.

“Slag and junk”

Much later — the process documented in the video took 10 hours, while the MIT team smelted for about eight — the ore is pulled out from the furnace, “kind of like a sponge,” Tarkanian says, along with slag, a byproduct of iron smelting, which is thrown out. The metal is then banged and smacked into shape with hammers. Then that refined block of metal can be forged into tools or grates or whatever else. In the video, smiths turned the iron they got from the smelting into hand-held garden hoes.

Tarkanian and the class used 60 pounds of iron ore throughout the day. The output, in the best-case scenario, would be about 18 to 20 pounds of iron. The result was much less: just a few pellets, or prills, as they’re known in metallurgy.

“The rest was just slag and junk,” or glass and other non-metal materials, Tarkanian says. The likely reason was the fire didn’t reach the optimum temperature for a long-enough time to convert the ore into iron.

But the objective of the project wasn’t, strictly, to produce iron. Neither was it to seek out a more environmentally friendly smelting process than current ones; the Burkina Faso-inspired method generated carbon dioxide emissions that are the same or worse, because of the “excess” of charcoal burned, Tarkanian says — about 20 kilograms, or 44 pounds. The objective instead was to gain experience and insight into how an ancient society transformed natural materials into objects of material culture.

“Looking at material from an archeological point of view, you’re able to better dissect the underlying science, because the people who originally came up with this technology started with nothing, no scientific knowledge. And they worked their way up into developing the system,” Vangara says. “So every step of the way they were discovering something new. They were experimenting and realizing, ‘OK, we actually need to start with this ratio of charcoal.’ Or, ‘This is the temperature we need to bring it up to. Why?’”

Vin Armelin, a rising senior in chemistry and biology and biological engineering, took 3.094 as part of his humanities requirement. For him, both the class and the smelting project offered a fresh perspective.

“In science, everything you do needs to be incredibly precise. So you’re adding exactly a certain percentage, or there’s exactly this much volume,” Armelin says.

Making the clay-and-grass furnace was much different. When Armelin asked his instructors what measure of grass should be used, “they’re like, ‘Yeah, just keep shoving it in until it won’t take anymore,’” he says. “It helps give some idea of how precise you really need to be depending on what you’re trying to achieve — and a different, more building-focused perspective that I didn’t really have before.”

How a shape-shifting receptor influences cell growth

by Anne Trafton | MIT News Office |

Receptors found on cell surfaces bind to hormones, proteins, and other molecules, helping cells respond to their environment. MIT chemists have now discovered how one of these receptors changes its shape when it binds to its target, and how those changes trigger cells to grow and proliferate.

This receptor, known as epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR), is overexpressed in many types of cancer and is the target of several cancer drugs. These drugs often work well at first, but tumors can become resistant to them. Understanding the mechanism of these receptors better may help researchers design drugs that can evade that resistance, says Gabriela Schlau-Cohen, an associate professor of chemistry at MIT.

“Thinking about more general mechanisms to target EGFR is an exciting new direction, and gives you a new avenue to think about possible therapies that may not evolve resistance as easily,” she says.

Schlau-Cohen and Bin Zhang, the Pfizer-Laubach Career Development Assistant Professor of Chemistry, are the senior authors of the study, which appears today in Nature Communications. The paper’s lead authors are MIT graduate student Shwetha Srinivasan and former MIT postdoc Raju Regmi.

Shape-changing receptors

The EGF receptor is one of many receptors that help control cell growth. Found on most types of mammalian epithelial cells, which line body surfaces and organs, it can respond to several types of growth factors in addition to EGF. Some types of cancer, especially lung cancer and glioblastoma, overexpress the EGF receptor, which can lead to uncontrolled growth.

Like most cell receptors, the EGFR spans the cell membrane. An extracellular region of the receptor interacts with its target molecule (also called a ligand); a transmembrane section is embedded within the membrane; and an intracellular section interacts with cellular machinery that controls growth pathways.

The extracellular portion of the receptor has been analyzed in detail, but the transmembrane and intracellular sections have been difficult to study because they are more disordered and can’t be crystallized.

About five years ago, Schlau-Cohen set out to try to learn more about those lesser-known structures. Her team embedded the proteins in a special type of self-assembling membrane called a nanodisc, which mimics the cell membrane. Then, she used single molecule FRET (fluorescence resonance energy transfer) to study how the conformation of the receptor changes when it binds to EGF.

FRET is commonly used to measure tiny distances between two fluorescent molecules. The researchers labeled the nanodisc membrane and the end of the intracellular tail of the protein with two different fluorophores, which allowed them to measure the distance between the protein tail and the cell membrane, under a variety of circumstances.

To their surprise, the researchers found that EGF binding led to a major change in the conformation of the receptor. Most models of receptor signaling involve interaction of multiple transmembrane helices to bring about large-scale conformational changes, but the EGF receptor, which has only a single helical segment within the membrane, appears to undergo such a change without interacting with other receptor molecules.

“The idea of a single alpha helix being able to transduce such a large conformational rearrangement was really surprising to us,” Schlau-Cohen says.

Molecular modeling

To learn more about how this shape change would affect the receptor’s function, Schlau-Cohen’s lab teamed up with Zhang, whose lab does computer simulations of molecular interactions. This kind of modeling, known as molecular dynamics, can model how a molecular system changes over time.

The modeling showed that when the receptor binds to EGF, the extracellular segment of the receptor stands up vertically, and when the receptor is not bound, it lies flat against the cell membrane. Similar to a hinge closing, when the receptor falls flat, it tilts the transmembrane segment and pulls the intracellular segment closer to the membrane. This blocks the intracellular region of the protein from being able to interact with the machinery needed to launch cell growth. EGF binding makes those regions more available, helping to activate growth signaling pathways.

The researchers also used their model to discover that positively charged amino acids in the intracellular segment, near the cell membrane, are key to these interactions. When the researchers mutated those amino acids, switching them from charged to neutral, ligand binding no longer activated the receptor.

“There’s a nice consistency we can see between the simulation and experiment,” Zhang says. “With the molecular dynamics simulations, we can figure out what are the amino acids that are essential for the coupling, and quantify the role of different amino acids. Then Gabriela showed that those predictions turned out to be correct.”

The researchers also found that cetuximab, a drug that binds to the EGF receptor, prevents this conformational change from occurring. Cetuximab has shown some success in treating patients with colorectal or head and neck cancer, but tumors can become resistant to it. Learning more about the mechanism of how EGFR responds to different ligands could help researchers to design drugs that might be less likely to lead to resistance, the researchers say.

The research was funded, in part, by the National Institutes of Health, including a Directors New Innovator Award.

QS ranks MIT the world’s No. 1 university for 2022-23

by MIT News Office |

MIT has again been named the world’s top university by the QS World University Rankings, which were announced today. This is the 11th year in a row MIT has received this distinction. Additionally, the Department of Chemistry received a No. 1 ranking from the organization.

The full 2022 edition of the rankings — published by Quacquarelli Symonds, an organization specializing in education and study abroad — can be found at TopUniversities.com. The QS rankings were based on academic reputation, employer reputation, citations per faculty, student-to-faculty ratio, proportion of international faculty, and proportion of international students.

MIT was also ranked the world’s top university in 12 of the subject areas ranked by QS, as announced in April of this year.

The Institute received a No. 1 ranking in the following QS subject areas: Architecture/Built Environment; Chemistry; Computer Science and Information Systems; Chemical Engineering; Civil and Structural Engineering; Electrical and Electronic Engineering; Materials Science; Mechanical, Aeronautical, and Manufacturing Engineering; Linguistics; Mathematics; Physics and Astronomy; and Statistics and Operational Research.

MIT also placed second in two subject areas: Biological Sciences; and Economics and Econometrics.

New light-powered catalysts could aid in manufacturing

by Anne Trafton | MIT News Office |

Chemical reactions that are driven by light offer a powerful tool for chemists who are designing new ways to manufacture pharmaceuticals and other useful compounds. Harnessing this light energy requires photoredox catalysts, which can absorb light and transfer the energy to a chemical reaction.

MIT chemists have now designed a new type of photoredox catalyst that could make it easier to incorporate light-driven reactions into manufacturing processes. Unlike most existing photoredox catalysts, the new class of materials is insoluble, so it can be used over and over again. Such catalysts could be used to coat tubing and perform chemical transformations on reactants as they flow through the tube.

“Being able to recycle the catalyst is one of the biggest challenges to overcome in terms of being able to use photoredox catalysis in manufacturing. We hope that by being able to do flow chemistry with an immobilized catalyst, we can provide a new way to do photoredox catalysis on larger scales,” says Richard Liu, an MIT postdoc and the joint lead author of the new study.

The new catalysts, which can be tuned to perform many different types of reactions, could also be incorporated into other materials including textiles or particles.

Timothy Swager, the John D. MacArthur Professor of Chemistry at MIT, is the senior author of the paper, which appears today in Nature Communications. Sheng Guo, an MIT research scientist, and Shao-Xiong Lennon Luo, an MIT graduate student, are also authors of the paper.

Hybrid materials

Photoredox catalysts work by absorbing photons and then using that light energy to power a chemical reaction, analogous to how chlorophyll in plant cells absorbs energy from the sun and uses it to build sugar molecules.

Chemists have developed two main classes of photoredox catalysts, which are known as homogenous and heterogenous catalysts. Homogenous catalysts usually consist of organic dyes or light-absorbing metal complexes. These catalysts are easy to tune to perform a specific reaction, but the downside is that they dissolve in the solution where the reaction takes place. This means they can’t be easily removed and used again.

Heterogenous catalysts, on the other hand, are solid minerals or crystalline materials that form sheets or 3D structures. These materials do not dissolve, so they can be used more than once. However, these catalysts are more difficult to tune to achieve a desired reaction.

To combine the benefits of both of these types of catalysts, the researchers decided to embed the dyes that make up homogenous catalysts into a solid polymer. For this application, the researchers adapted a plastic-like polymer with tiny pores that they had previously developed for performing gas separations. In this study, the researchers demonstrated that they could incorporate about a dozen different homogenous catalysts into their new hybrid material, but they believe it could work more many more.

“These hybrid catalysts have the recyclability and durability of heterogeneous catalysts, but also the precise tunability of homogeneous catalysts,” Liu says. “You can incorporate the dye without losing its chemical activity, so, you can more or less pick from the tens of thousands of photoredox reactions that are already known and get an insoluble equivalent of the catalyst you need.”

The researchers found that incorporating the catalysts into polymers also helped them to become more efficient. One reason is that reactant molecules can be held in the polymer’s pores, ready to react. Additionally, light energy can easily travel along the polymer to find the waiting reactants.

“The new polymers bind molecules from solution and effectively preconcentrate them for reaction,” Swager says. “Also, the excited states can rapidly migrate throughout the polymer. The combined mobility of the excited state and partitioning of the reactants in the polymer make for faster and more efficient reactions than are possible in pure solution processes.”

Higher efficiency

The researchers also showed that they could tune the physical properties of the polymer backbone, including its thickness and porosity, based on what application they want to use the catalyst for.

As one example, they showed that they could make fluorinated polymers that would stick to fluorinated tubing, which is often used for continuous flow manufacturing. During this type of manufacturing, chemical reactants flow through a series of tubes while new ingredients are added, or other steps such as purification or separation are performed.

Currently, it is challenging to incorporate photoredox reactions into continuous flow processes because the catalysts are used up quickly, so they have to be continuously added to the solution. Incorporating the new MIT-designed catalysts into the tubing used for this kind of manufacturing could allow photoredox reactions to be performed during continuous flow. The tubing is clear, allowing light from an LED to reach the catalysts and activate them.

“The idea is to have the catalyst coating a tube, so you can flow your reaction through the tube while the catalyst stays put. In that way, you never get the catalyst ending up in the product, and you can also get a lot higher efficiency,” Liu says.

The catalysts could also be used to coat magnetic beads, making them easier to pull out of a solution once the reaction is finished, or to coat reaction vials or textiles. The researchers are now working on incorporating a wider variety of catalysts into their polymers, and on engineering the polymers to optimize them for different possible applications.

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation and the KAUST Sensor Initiative.