Author: MIT News

MIT Energy Initiative awards seven Seed Fund grants for early-stage energy research

by Kelley Travers | MIT Energy Initiative |

The MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) has awarded seven Seed Fund grants to support novel, early-stage energy research by faculty and researchers at MIT. The awardees hail from a range of disciplines, but all strive to bring their backgrounds and expertise to address the global climate crisis by improving the efficiency, scalability, and adoption of clean energy technologies.

“Solving climate change is truly an interdisciplinary challenge,” says MITEI Director Robert C. Armstrong. “The Seed Fund grants foster collaboration and innovation from across all five of MIT’s schools and one college, encouraging an ‘all hands on deck approach’ to developing the energy solutions that will prove critical in combatting this global crisis.”

This year, MITEI’s Seed Fund grant program received 70 proposals from 86 different principal investigators (PIs) across 25 departments, labs, and centers. Of these proposals, 31 involved collaborations between two or more PIs, including 24 that involved multiple departments.

The winning projects reflect this collaborative nature with topics addressing the optimization of low-energy thermal cooling in buildings; the design of safe, robust, and resilient distributed power systems; and how to design and site wind farms with consideration of wind resource uncertainty due to climate change.

Increasing public support for low-carbon technologies

One winning team aims to leverage work done in the behavioral sciences to motivate sustainable behaviors and promote the adoption of clean energy technologies.

“Objections to scalable low-carbon technologies such as nuclear energy and carbon sequestration have made it difficult to adopt these technologies and reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” says Howard Herzog, a senior research scientist at MITEI and co-PI. “These objections tend to neglect the sheer scale of energy generation required and the inability to meet this demand solely with other renewable energy technologies.”

This interdisciplinary team — which includes researchers from MITEI, the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, and the MIT Sloan School of Management — plans to convene industry professionals and academics, as well as behavioral scientists, to identify common objections, design messaging to overcome them, and prove that these messaging campaigns have long-lasting impacts on attitudes toward scalable low-carbon technologies.

“Our aim is to provide a foundation for shifting the public and policymakers’ views about these low-carbon technologies from something they, at best, tolerate, to something they actually welcome,” says co-PI David Rand, the Erwin H. Schell Professor and professor of management science and brain and cognitive sciences at MIT Sloan School of Management.

Siting and designing wind farms

Michael Howland, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, will use his seed fund grant to develop a foundational methodology for wind farm siting and design that accounts for the uncertainty of wind resources resulting from climate change.

“The optimal wind farm design and its resulting cost of energy is inherently dependent on the wind resource at the location of the farm,” says Howland. “But wind farms are currently sited and designed based on short-term climate records that do not account for the future effects of climate change on wind patterns.”

Wind farms are capital-intensive infrastructure that cannot be relocated and often have lifespans exceeding 20 years — all of which make it especially important that developers choose the right locations and designs based not only on wind patterns in the historical climate record, but also based on future predictions. The new siting and design methodology has the potential to replace current industry standards to enable a more accurate risk analysis of wind farm development and energy grid expansion under climate change-driven energy resource uncertainty.

Membraneless electrolyzers for hydrogen production

Producing hydrogen from renewable energy-powered water electrolyzers is central to realizing a sustainable and low-carbon hydrogen economy, says Kripa Varanasi, a professor of mechanical engineering and a Seed Fund award recipient. The idea of using hydrogen as a fuel has existed for decades, but it has yet to be widely realized at a considerable scale. Varanasi hopes to change that with his Seed Fund grant.

“The critical economic hurdle for successful electrolyzers to overcome is the minimization of the capital costs associated with their deployment,” says Varanasi. “So, an immediate task at hand to enable electrochemical hydrogen production at scale will be to maximize the effectiveness of the most mature, least complex, and least expensive water electrolyzer technologies.”

To do this, he aims to combine the advantages of existing low-temperature alkaline electrolyzer designs with a novel membraneless electrolyzer technology that harnesses a gas management system architecture to minimize complexity and costs, while also improving efficiency. Varanasi hopes his project will demonstrate scalable concepts for cost-effective electrolyzer technology design to help realize a decarbonized hydrogen economy.

Since its establishment in 2008, the MITEI Seed Fund Program has supported 194 energy-focused seed projects through grants totaling more than $26 million. This funding comes primarily from MITEI’s founding and sustaining members, supplemented by gifts from generous donors.

Recipients of the 2021 MITEI Seed Fund grants are:

  • “Design automation of safe, robust, and resilient distributed power systems” — Chuchu Fan of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics
  • “Advanced MHD topping cycles: For fission, fusion, solar power plants” — Jeffrey Freidberg of the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering and Dennis Whyte of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center
  • “Robust wind farm siting and design under climate-change‐driven wind resource uncertainty” — Michael Howland of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
  • “Low-energy thermal comfort for buildings in the Global South: Optimal design of integrated structural-thermal systems” — Leslie Norford of the Department of Architecture and Caitlin Mueller of the departments of Architecture and Civil and Environmental Engineering
  • “New low-cost, high energy-density boron-based redox electrolytes for nonaqueous flow batteries” — Alexander Radosevich of the Department of Chemistry
  • “Increasing public support for scalable low-carbon energy technologies using behavorial science insights” — David Rand of the MIT Sloan School of Management, Koroush Shirvan of the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, Howard Herzog of the MIT Energy Initiative, and Jacopo Buongiorno of the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering
  • “Membraneless electrolyzers for efficient hydrogen production using nanoengineered 3D gas capture electrode architectures” — Kripa Varanasi of the Department of Mechanical Engineering

Documentary short, “The Uprising,” showcases women in science who pressed for equal rights at MIT in the 1990s

by Kate Silverman Wilson | MIT Press |

The MIT Press today announced the digital release of “The Uprising,” a documentary short about the unprecedented behind-the-scenes effort that amassed irrefutable evidence of differential treatment of men and women on the MIT faculty in the 1990s. Directed by Ian Cheney and Sharon Shattuck, the film premiered on the MIT Press’ YouTube channel, and is now openly distributed.

A 13-minute film, “The Uprising” introduces the story behind the 1999 Study on the Status of Women Faculty in Science at MIT and its impact both at the Institute and around the globe. Featuring Nancy Hopkins, professor emerita of biology at MIT, the film chronicles the experiences of marginalization and discouragement that accompanied Hopkins’ research leading up to the study and further highlights the steps a group of 16 female faculty members took to make science more diverse and equitable.

The MIT report is today widely credited with advancing gender equity in universities both nationally and internationally. This ripple effect is highlighted in the film by Hopkins, who says, “Look at the talent of these women. This is what you lose when you do not solve this problem. It’s true not just of women, it’s true of minorities, it’s true of all groups that get excluded. It’s all of that talent that you lose. For me, the success of these women is the reward for the work we did. That’s really what it’s about. It’s about the science.”

“The Uprising” features interviews with leading current and former MIT scientists, including social psychologist Lotte Bailyn, biomedical engineer Sangeeta N. Bhatia, chemist Sylvia Ceyer, ecologist Sallie “Penny” Chisholm, materials engineer Lorna Gibson, biologist Ruth Lehmann, geophysicist and National Academy of Sciences President Marcia McNutt, cognitive scientist Mary Potter, oceanographer Paola Rizzoli, geophysicist Leigh Royden, and biologist Lisa Steiner. “The Uprising” was produced in conjunction with the feature-length documentary film, “Picture a Scientist.”

“The Uprising” was funded by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, as well as support from Nancy Blachman and an anonymous donor. The film was produced by Manette Pottle, in collaboration with the MIT Press. Amy Brand, director and publisher at the MIT Press, served as executive producer.

Seven from MIT receive National Institutes of Health awards for 2021

by School of Science |

On Oct. 5, the National Institutes of Health announced the names of 106 scientists who have been awarded grants through the High-Risk, High-Reward Research program to advance highly innovative biomedical and behavioral research. Seven of the recipients are MIT faculty members.

The High-Risk, High-Reward Research program catalyzes scientific discovery by supporting research proposals that, due to their inherent risk, may struggle in the traditional peer-review process despite their transformative potential. Program applicants are encouraged to pursue trailblazing ideas in any area of research relevant to the NIH’s mission to advance knowledge and enhance health.

“The science put forward by this cohort is exceptionally novel and creative and is sure to push at the boundaries of what is known,” says NIH Director Francis S. Collins. “These visionary investigators come from a wide breadth of career stages and show that groundbreaking science can happen at any career level given the right opportunity.”

New innovators

Four MIT researchers received New Innovator Awards, which recognize “unusually innovative research from early career investigators.” They are:

  • Pulin Li is a member at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and an assistant professor in the Department of Biology. Li combines approaches from synthetic biology, developmental biology, biophysics and systems biology to quantitatively understand the genetic circuits underlying cell-cell communication that creates multicellular behaviors.
  • Seychelle Vos, the Robert A. Swanson (1969) Career Development Professor of Life Sciences in the Department of Biology, studies the interplay of gene expression and genome organization. Her work focuses on understanding how large molecular machineries involved in genome organization and gene transcription regulate each others’ function to ultimately determine cell fate and identity.
  • Xiao Wang, the Thomas D. and Virginia Cabot Assistant Professor of Chemistry and a member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, aims to develop high-resolution and highly-multiplexed molecular imaging methods across multiple scales toward understanding the physical and chemical basis of brain wiring and function.
  • Alison Wendlandt is a Cecil and Ida Green Career Development Assistant Professor of Chemistry. Wendlandt focuses on the development of selective, catalytic reactions using the tools of organic and organometallic synthesis and physical organic chemistry. Mechanistic study plays a central role in the development of these new transformations.

Transformative researchers

Two MIT researchers have received Transformative Research Awards, which “promote cross-cutting, interdisciplinary approaches that could potentially create or challenge existing paradigms.” The recipients are:

  • Manolis Kellis is a professor of computer science at MIT in the area of computational biology, an associate member of the Broad Institute, and a principal investigator with MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He aims to further our understanding of the human genome by computational integration of large-scale functional and comparative genomics datasets.
  • Myriam Heiman is the Latham Family Career Development Associate Professor of Neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and an investigator in the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory. Heiman studies the selective vulnerability and pathophysiology seen in two neurodegenerative diseases of the basal ganglia, Huntington’s disease, and Parkinson’s disease.

Together, Heiman, Kellis and colleagues will launch a five-year investigation to pinpoint what may be going wrong in specific brain cells and to help identify new treatment approaches for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal lobar degeneration with motor neuron disease (FTLD/MND). The project will bring together four labs, including Heiman and Kellis’ labs at MIT, to apply innovative techniques ranging from computational, genomic, and epigenomic analyses of cells from a rich sample of central nervous system tissue, to precision genetic engineering of stem cells and animal models.

Pioneering researchers

  • Polina Anikeeva received a Pioneer Award, which “challenges investigators at all career levels to pursue new research directions and develop groundbreaking, high-impact approaches to a broad area of biomedical, behavioral, or social science.” Anikeeva is an MIT professor of materials science and engineering, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences, and a McGovern Institute for Brain Research associate investigator. She has established a research program that uniquely combines materials synthesis, device fabrication, neurophysiology, and animal models of behavior. Her group carries out projects that understand, invent, and design materials from the level of atoms to functional devices with applications in fundamental neuroscience.

The program is supported by the NIH Common Fund, which oversees programs that pursue major opportunities and gaps throughout the research enterprise that are of great importance to NIH and require collaboration across the agency to succeed. It issues four awards each year: the Pioneer Award, the New Innovator Award, the Transformative Research Award, and the Early Independence Award.

This year, NIH issued 10 Pioneer awards, 64 New Innovator awards, 19 Transformative Research awards (10 general, four ALS-related, and five Covid-19-related), and 13 Early Independence awards for 2021. Funding for the awards comes from the NIH Common Fund, the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, the National Institute of Mental Health, and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

3 Questions: Paula Hammond and Tim Jamison on graduate student advising and mentoring

by MIT News |

Launched in June, the MIT Ad Hoc Committee on Graduate Advising and Mentoring is aimed at delivering a strategic plan to guide and inform the development of effective mentoring policies and programs that would be implemented at the Institute. Made up of 10 graduate students and 11 other members representing staff and faculty, the committee plans to include elements of the recommendations provided in a 2019 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) on the “Science of Effective Mentorship in STEMM.”

Here, committee co-chairs Paula Hammond (Institute Professor and head of the Department of Chemical Engineering) and Tim Jamison (the Robert R. Taylor Professor of Chemistry and associate provost) discuss the committee’s origin and the work already underway across campus, and offer insight into the future of advising and mentoring at MIT.

Q: What motivated the creation of this committee?

Hammond: Effective graduate advising and mentoring are essential components of our mission as educators at MIT. Our work as a committee is timely and significant as we face a national reckoning on issues of sexual harassment and assault, structural racism, and misogyny. It is a clear opportunity for a change in culture and a shift in power dynamics. It’s with this context in mind that our work will support the imperative that all graduate students exit their programs with technical knowledge and confidence, and ownership of their research skills, and the practical tools they need to advance in the world. Students can achieve these through successful mentorship experiences.

As a department head, faculty often tell me there is a lack of sufficient guidance and uniform messaging on how to provide valuable mentoring experiences for their graduate students. We know faculty need access to tools and other resources to cultivate their mentoring skills and help them address difficult mentoring situations when they arise.

With the development and implementation of programs, resources, and policies that support and incentivize excellence in advising and mentoring, we can successfully create environments that meet our graduate students’ needs so they may prosper. In turn, the knowledge and innovations that stem from our research groups will also thrive. For faculty, their work environments will improve, and they will achieve a greater sense of fulfillment in their roles as advisors and mentors. Overall, effective mentorship benefits everyone, and this has been an expressed need on both sides.

Jamison: Several initiatives across campus have led up to the efforts of this ad hoc committee. For example, the Academic and Organizational Relationships (AOR) Working Group developed a series of recommendations in response to the National Academies report on the “Sexual Harassment of Women: Climate, Culture, and Consequences in Academic Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.” As co-chairs of the AOR Working Group, Paula and I worked with the committee members to develop recommendations to minimize the vulnerabilities in dependent professional relationships such as graduate students and faculty advisors.

In another initiative, the Academic Council approved a revision to Policies and Procedures 3.2, Tenure Process in fall 2020. This revision made excellence in mentoring and advising a criterion of tenure review.

In April 2021, Task Force 2021 and Beyond entered its second phase. One of the Refinement and Implementation Committees of this Task Force issued a proposal to review and recommend ways to enhance graduate advising and mentoring effectiveness.

Also in April, members of the Graduate Student Council (GSC) published a campus climate survey, which provided the Institute with recommendations about improving mentoring experiences, including establishing communication channels for students. We are grateful that two of the graduate students involved in conducting this GSC survey are now serving on this ad hoc committee. In June 2021, shortly after the committee first launched, the Graduate Womxn at MIT (gwaMIT) also issued a report of its findings and recommendations to improve the graduate experiences of women based on a series of focus group discussions among female MIT graduate students.

Q: What has the committee accomplished so far?

Jamison: Since the launch of the committee in June, our efforts have centered on creating the framework that will guide the development of MIT’s Strategic Plan on Graduate Advising and Mentoring. We developed our mission and vision statements and also established the strategic plan’s draft goals and objectives. These elements were informed by the findings of the Graduate Student Council survey and the gwaMIT report, as well as by the recommendations of the 2019 NASEM report on the science of effective mentorship. Recently, we launched a new website, which provides a summary of our charge and committee members, and will be used as one channel to provide updates to and feedback from the MIT community.

Hammond: Much of the strategic plan framework we developed thus far complements many ongoing efforts across the Institute. In 2020, the School of Engineering worked closely with the Center for the Improvement of Mentoring Experiences in Research (CIMER) to offer a pilot workshop using theoretically-grounded, evidence-based, and culturally-responsive training interventions and investigations for new faculty. The school designed the workshop to accelerate the acquisition of mentoring insights, address best practices, and cultivate productive mentee-mentor relationships. The Institute scaled a version of this workshop for all new faculty beginning this fall. The Institute also recently launched a transitional support program for graduate students who wish to change research advisors or groups. And, last but not least, the Office of Graduate Education continually announces their Committed to Caring faculty members in an ongoing celebration of MIT faculty members who go above and beyond to make an impact in the lives of graduate students.

Q: Looking ahead, what do you anticipate will be the most important impacts of this committee?

Hammond: A key focus of our efforts is creating an Institute-wide vision that cultivates a culture of excellence in advising and mentoring at MIT. We need a vision that fosters the well-being of, the high-quality research by, and the professional development of all graduate students and faculty. By establishing the necessary infrastructure to evaluate and improve advising and mentoring at the individual, department, school, and Institute levels, we will successfully support a rewarding mentoring experience for all.

Jamison: Mentoring and advising are fundamental responsibilities of our faculty. The greater their mentoring skills and the more they serve as positive influences and role models, the better the experience and greater the success of our graduate students in their professional pursuits. Moreover, the more successful the graduate students are, the more the faculty will also benefit. I believe firmly that this phenomenon — a “virtuous cycle of mentorship” — can and will be experienced by even more members of our community.  That is, by improving the advising and mentoring of our graduate students, we will surely see powerful, positive long-term impacts on both graduate education and the Institute’s research enterprise.

Lindsey Backman: Biochemist, mentor, and advocate

by Hannah Meiseles | MIT News Office |

Raised in Tampa, Florida, Lindsey Backman takes pride in her family’s history and its role in the vibrant Cuban American community there. She remembers the weekends she would spend as a kid, getting café con leche with her grandparents and dancing in the studio with her friends. The cultural experiences she shared with friends, family, and  neighbors growing up helped her feel comfortable being herself while growing up, and showed her from an early age how valuable a welcoming community could be to a person’s success.

Backman went on to pursue her BS in chemistry at the University of Florida. Surrounded by a diverse community, she felt supported as she leaned deeper into her interest in science. She was soon nominated to a program that matched students from underrepresented backgrounds in STEM with a university professor to pursue a summer research project. Although Backman was still uncertain about going to another university to do lab research, with encouragement from her department she gave the program a chance.

Backman matched with Professor Catherine Drennan at MIT to work on visualizing structural biology and took part in the MIT Summer Research Program in Biology (MSRP-Bio). The research clicked with her immediately and became a turning point; Backman returned to participate in the lab the following summer and then applied to graduate school.

“Getting nominated to the program changed my life. I certainly wouldn’t have applied to MIT otherwise,” says Backman. “At first, I was convinced I wouldn’t fit in, but soon found myself surrounded by people as passionate about science as I was. I knew I was in the right place.”

Uncovering secrets about the human microbiome

Today, Backman is a graduate student in the Drennan lab and researches the chemistry of the human microbiome, a collection of gut microbes essential to sustaining the body. Backman is interested in how certain bacteria can outcompete other strains by producing unique proteins that process abundant nutrients or repair broken enzymes. Her use of X-ray crystallography has helped her produce atomic models that shed light on the structure of these proteins.

One type of protein Backman and her team have characterized is called a spare part protein. When produced, this protein can help restore a broken enzyme’s ability to catalyze essential reactions. “When fixing a car with a flat tire, you would replace the tire and not the whole car. A similar strategy is being used here. These spare-part proteins act to bind and restore the activity of the enzyme completely,” she says.

Over the years, Backman has seen the depth of questions surrounding the microbiome grow. Scientists have begun to recognize how important the microbiome is to human health. “Ever since my first summer research experience at MIT, I’ve been dedicated to studying this one unique repair mechanism,” says Backman. “We’ve gone from solving the structure of the proteins to now understanding how the mechanism works. But there’s still so much more to learn — we have started to suspect these repair mechanisms speak to a broader motif in other enzymes as well.”

Backman and her team have also been leaders in characterizing how an important enzyme, called hydroxy-L-proline dehydratase (HypD), performs its unusual chemistry. This abundant enzyme takes hydroxyproline, a common nutrient in the gut, and can obtain a competitive advantage by using it as a nutrient and source of energy.

“Only a unique subset of bacteria can process hydroxyproline. On the clinical side, we have seen during infection that virulent bacteria with this ability, such as C. difficile, will start rapidly consuming hydroxyproline to proliferate,” says Backman. “Conversely, we could one day create antibiotics that specifically inhibit HypD without killing our beneficial bacteria.”

Encouraging the future of science

Outside of her research, Backman cares deeply about serving and being a part of the Latinx community on campus. She helped co-found the MIT Latinx Graduate Student Association and has served for four years as a graduate resident assistant for La Casa, the Latinx undergraduate living community at New House. “La Casa is a really tight-knit and familial community,” says Backman. “Some of our original freshmen are now seniors, so it’s been really rewarding to see their whole transition throughout college. I love getting to watch students explore and come to realize what they’re passionate about.”

Backman has also been instrumental in spurring equity initiatives on campus. She is currently a student representative for the MIT Department of Chemistry Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee and has worked to implement programs that support the success of underrepresented groups on campus. Her five years of service as an MIT Chemistry Access Program mentor have encouraged many underrepresented undergraduate students to pursue chemistry graduate programs. For all her hard work at improving MIT’s campus, Backman recently received the Hugh Hampton Young Fellowship.

In the future, Backman aspires to continue researching the microbiome and mentoring students by becoming a professor. She hopes to continue the cycle and inspire more young scientists to recognize their inner potential. “I was never one of those kids that knew I wanted to be a scientist someday. My PI completely changed my life, and I would not be at MIT today without her,” she says. “Having mentors that believe in you at critical points in your life can make all the difference.”

“I think there’s this wrong assumption that diversity initiative work takes away from time that could be spent doing science. In my mind, we need to recognize how these things go hand in hand,” says Backman.

“The only way we’re going to get the best scientists is by creating a healthier, more diverse environment where people of all backgrounds feel welcomed. It’s only when people feel comfortable that they can make their greatest contributions to the field.”

Chemical engineering meets cancer immunotherapy

by Bendta Schroeder | Koch Institute |

Sachin Bhagchandani, a graduate student in the Department of Chemical Engineering currently working at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, has won the National Cancer Institute Predoctoral to Postdoctoral Fellow Transition (F99/K00) Award. Bhagchandani is the first student at MIT to receive the award.

The fellowship is given to outstanding graduate students with high potential and interest in becoming independent cancer researchers. Bhagchandani is one of 24 candidates selected for the fellowship this year. Nominations were limited to one student per institution. The award provides six years of funding, which will support Bhagchandani as he completes his PhD in chemical engineering and help him transition into a mentored, cancer-focused postdoctoral research position — one draws on his wide-ranging interests and newfound experiences in synthetic chemistry and immunology.

Making change

Bhagchandani’s research has evolved since his undergraduate days studying chemical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee. He describes the experience as rigorous, but constraining. While at MIT, he has found more opportunities to explore, leading to highly interdisciplinary projects that allow him to put his training in chemical engineering in service of human health.

Before Bhagchandani arrived at his doctoral project, many pieces had to fall into place. While completing his Master’s thesis, Bhagchandani discovered his interest in the biomedical space while working on a project advised by MIT Institute Professor Robert Langer and Harvard Medical School Professor Jeffrey Karp developing different biomaterials for the sustained delivery of drugs for treating arthritis. As a PhD candidate, he joined the laboratory of chemistry Professor Jeremiah Johnson to learn macromolecular synthesis with a focus on nanomaterials designed for drug delivery. The final piece would fall into place with Bhagchandani’s early forays into immunology — with Darrell Irvine, the Underwood-Prescott Professor of Biological Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering at MIT and Stefani Spranger, the Howard S. (1953) and Linda B. Stern Career Development Professor and assistant professor of biology at MIT.

“When I was exposed to immunology, I learned how relevant the immune system is to our daily life. I found that the biomedical challenges I was working on could be encapsulated by immunology,” Bhagchandani explains. “Drug delivery was my way in, but immunology is my path forward, where I think I will be able to make a contribution to improving human health.”

As a result, his interests have shifted toward cancer immunotherapy — aiming to make these treatments more viable for more patients by making them less toxic. Supported, in part, by the Koch Institute Frontier Research Program, which provides seed funding for high-risk, high-reward/innovative early-stage research, Bhagchandani is focusing on imidazoquinolines, a promising class of drugs that activates the immune system to fight cancer, but can also trigger significant side effects when administered intravenously. In the clinic, topical administration has been shown to minimize these side effects in certain localized cancers, but additional challenges remain for metastatic cancers that have spread throughout the body.

In order to administer imidazoquinolines systemically with minimal toxicity to treat both primary and metastatic tumors, Bhagchandani is adapting a bottlebrush-shaped molecule developed in the Johnson lab to inactivate imidazoquinolines and carry them safely to tumors. Bhagchandani is fine-tuning linking molecules that release as little of the drug as possible while circulating in the blood, and then slowly release the drug once inside the tumor. He is also optimizing the size and architecture of the bottlebrush molecule so that it accumulates in the desired immune cells present in the tumor tissue.

“A lot of students work on interdisciplinary projects as part of a larger team, but Sachin is a one-man crew, able to synthesize new polymers using cutting edge chemistry, characterize these materials, and then test them in animal models of cancer and evaluate their effects on the immune system,” said Irvine. “His knowledge spans polymer chemistry to cancer modeling to immunology.”

Significant figures

Prior to enrolling at MIT, Bhagchandani already had a personal connection to cancer, both through his grandfather, who passed away from prostate cancer, and through working at a children’s hospital in his hometown of Mumbai, spending time with children with cancer. Once on campus, he discovered that working in the biomedical space would allow him to put his skills as a chemical engineer in service of addressing unmet medical needs. In addition, he found that the interdisciplinary nature of the work offered a variety of perspectives on which to build his career.

His doctoral project sits at the nexus of polymer chemistry, drug delivery, and immunology, and requires the collaboration of several laboratories, all members of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT. In addition to the Johnson lab, Bhagchandani is working with the Irvine lab for its expertise in immune engineering and the Langer lab for its expertise in drug delivery, and collaborating with the Spranger lab for its expertise in cancer immunology.

“For me, working at the Koch Institute has been one of the most formative experiences of my life, because I’ve gone from traditional chemical engineering training to being exposed to experts in all these different fields with many different perspectives,” said Bhagchandani. When working from the perspective of chemical engineering alone, Bhagchandani said he could not always find solutions to problems that arose.

“I was making the materials and testing them in mouse models, however I couldn’t understand why my experiments weren’t working,” he says. “But by having scientists and engineers who understand immunology, immune engineering, and drug delivery together in the same room, looking at the problem from different angles, that’s when you get that ‘a-ha’ moment, when a project actually works.”

“It is wonderful having brilliant, interdisciplinary scientists like Sachin in my group,” said Johnson. “He was the first student from the Chemical Engineering department to join my group in the Department of Chemistry for their PhD studies, and his ability to bring new perspectives to our work has been highly impactful. Now, led by Sachin, and through our collaborations with Darrell Irvine, Bob Langer, Stefani Spranger, and many others in the Koch Institute, we are able to translate our chemistry in ways we couldn’t have imagined before.”

In his postdoctoral training, Bhagchandani plans to dive deeper into the regulation of the immune system, particularly how different dosing regimens change the body’s response to immunotherapies. Ultimately, he hopes to continue his work as a faculty member leading his own immunology lab — one that focuses on understanding and harnessing early immune responses in cancer therapies.

“I would love to get to a point where I can recreate a lab environment for chemists, engineers, and immunologists to come together and interact and work on interdisciplinary problems. For cancer especially, you need to attack the problem on all different fronts.”

As well as advancing his work in the biomedical space, Bhagchandani hopes to serve as a mentor for future students figuring out their own paths.

“I feel like a lot of people at MIT, myself included, face challenges throughout their PhD where they start to lose belief: ‘Am I the right person, am I good enough for this?’ Having overcome a lot of challenging times when the project wasn’t working as we hoped it would, I think it is important to share these experiences with young trainees to empower them to pursue careers in research. Winning this award helps me look back at those challenges, and persevere, and know, yes, I’m still on the right path. Because I genuinely felt that this is what I want to do with my life and I’ve always felt really passionate coming in to work, that this is where I belong.”

MIT welcomes nine MLK Visiting Professors and Scholars for 2021-22

by Rachel Ornitz | Institute Community and Equity Office |

In its 31st year, the Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) Visiting Professors and Scholars Program will host nine outstanding scholars from across the Americas. The flagship program honors the life and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. by increasing the presence and recognizing the contributions of underrepresented minority scholars at MIT. Throughout the year, the cohort will enhance their scholarship through intellectual engagement with the MIT community and enrich the cultural, academic, and professional experience of students.

The 2021-22 scholars

Sanford Biggers is an interdisciplinary artist hosted by the Department of Architecture. His work is an interplay of narrative, perspective, and history that speaks to current social, political, and economic happenings while examining their contexts. His diverse practice positions him as a collaborator with the past through explorations of often-overlooked cultural and political narratives from American history. Through collaboration with his faculty host, Brandon Clifford, he will spend the year contributing to projects with Architecture; Art, Culture and Technology; the Transmedia Storytelling initiatives; and community workshops and engagement with local K-12 education.

Kristen Dorsey is an assistant professor of engineering at Smith College. She will be hosted by the Program in Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Lab. Her research focuses on the fabrication and characterization of microscale sensors and microelectromechanical systems. Dorsey tries to understand “why things go wrong” by investigating device reliability and stability. At MIT, Dorsey is interested in forging collaborations to consider issues of access and equity as they apply to wearable health care devices.

Omolola “Lola” Eniola-Adefeso is the associate dean for graduate and professional education and associate professor of chemical engineering at the University of Michigan. She will join MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering (ChemE). Eniola-Adefeso will work with Professor Paula Hammond on developing electrostatically assembled nanoparticle coatings that enable targeting of specific immune cell types. A co-founder and chief scientific officer of Asalyxa Bio, she is interested in the interactions between blood leukocytes and endothelial cells in vessel lumen lining, and how they change during inflammation response. Eniola-Adefeso will also work with the Diversity in Chemical Engineering (DICE) graduate student group in ChemE and the National Organization of Black Chemists and Chemical Engineers.

Robert Gilliard Jr. is an assistant professor of chemistry at the University of Virginia and will join the MIT chemistry department, working closely with faculty host Christopher Cummins. His research focuses on various aspects of group 15 element chemistry. He was a founding member of the National Organization of Black Chemists and Chemical Engineers UGA section, and he has served as an American Chemical Society (ACS) Bridge Program mentor, ACS Project Seed mentor. Gilliard has also collaborated with the Cleveland Public Library to expose diverse young scholars to STEM fields.

Valencia Joyner Koomson ’98, MNG ’99 will return for the second semester of her appointment this fall in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Based at Tufts University, where she is an associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Koomson has focused her research on microelectronic systems for cell analysis and biomedical applications. In the past semester, she has served as a judge for the Black Alumni/ae of MIT Research Slam and worked closely with faculty host Professor Akintunde Akinwande.

Luis Gilberto Murillo-Urrutia will continue his appointment in MIT’s Environmental Solutions Initiative. He has 30 years of experience in public policy design, implementation, and advocacy, most notably in the areas of sustainable regional development, environmental protection and management of natural resources, social inclusion, and peace building. At MIT, he has continued his research on environmental justice, with a focus on carbon policy and its impacts on Afro-descendant communities in Colombia.

Sonya T. Smith was the first female professor of mechanical engineering at Howard University. She will join the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT. Her research involves computational fluid dynamics and thermal management of electronics for air and space vehicles. She is looking forward to serving as a mentor to underrepresented students across MIT and fostering new research collaborations with her home lab at Howard.

Lawrence Udeigwe is an associate professor of mathematics at Manhattan College and will join MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. He plans to co-teach a graduate seminar course with Professor James DiCarlo to explore practical and philosophical questions regarding the use of simulations to build theories in neuroscience. Udeigwe also leads the Lorens Chuno group; as a singer-songwriter, his work tackles intersectionality issues faced by contemporary Africans.

S. Craig Watkins is an internationally recognized expert in media and a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He will join MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society to assist in researching the role of big data in enabling deep structural changes with regard to systemic racism. He will continue to expand on his work as founding director of the Institute for Media Innovation at the University of Texas at Austin, exploring the intersections of critical AI studies, critical race studies, and design. He will also work with MIT’s Center for Advanced Virtuality to develop computational systems that support social perspective-taking.

Community engagement

Throughout the 2021-22 academic year, MLK professors and scholars will be presenting their research at a monthly speaker series. Events will be held in an in-person/Zoom hybrid environment. All members of the MIT community are encouraged to attend and hear directly from this year’s cohort of outstanding scholars. To hear more about upcoming events, subscribe to their mailing list.

On Sept. 15, all are invited to join the Institute Community and Equity Office in welcoming the scholars to campus by attending a welcome luncheon.

School of Science welcomes new faculty

by School of Science |

This fall, MIT welcomes new faculty members — five assistant professors and two tenured professors — to the departments of Biology; Chemistry; Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences; and Physics.

A physicist, Soonwon Choi is interested in dynamical phenomena that occur in strongly interacting quantum many-body systems far from equilibrium and designing their applications for quantum information science. He takes a variety of interdisciplinary approaches from analytic theory and numerical computations to collaborations on experiments with controlled quantum degrees of freedom. Recently, Choi’s research has encompassed studying the phenomenon of a phase transition in the dynamics of quantum entanglement and information, drawing on machine learning to introduce a quantum convolutional neural network that can recognize quantum states associated with a one-dimensional symmetry-protected topological phase, and exploring a range of quantum applications of the nitrogen-vacancy color center of diamond.

After completing his undergraduate study in physics at Caltech in 2012, Choi received his PhD degree in physics from Harvard University in 2018. He then worked as a Miller Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California at Berkeley before joining the Department of Physics and the Center for Theoretical Physics as an assistant professor in July 2021.

Olivia Corradin investigates how genetic variants contribute to disease. She focuses on non-coding DNA variants — changes in DNA sequence that can alter the regulation of gene expression — to gain insight into pathogenesis. With her novel outside-variant approach, Corradin’s lab singled out a type of brain cell involved in multiple sclerosis, increasing total heritability identified by three- to five-fold. A recipient of the Avenir Award through the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award Program, Corradin also scrutinizes how genetic and epigenetic variation influence susceptibility to substance abuse disorders. These critical insights into multiple sclerosis, opioid use disorder, and other diseases have the potential to improve risk assessment, diagnosis, treatment, and preventative care for patients.

Corradin completed a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry from Marquette University in 2010 and a PhD in genetics from Case Western Reserve University in 2016. A Whitehead Institute Fellow since 2016, she also became an institute member in July 2021. The Department of Biology welcomes Corradin as an assistant professor.

Arlene Fiore seeks to understand processes that control two-way interactions between air pollutants and the climate system, as well as the sensitivity of atmospheric chemistry to different chemical, physical, and biological sources and sinks at scales ranging from urban to global and daily to decadal. Combining chemistry-climate models and observations from ground, airborne, and satellite platforms, Fiore has identified global dimensions to ground-level ozone smog and particulate haze that arise from linkages with the climate system, global atmospheric composition, and the terrestrial biosphere. She also investigates regional meteorology and climate feedbacks due to aerosols versus greenhouse gases, future air pollution responses to climate change, and drivers of atmospheric oxidizing capacity. A new research direction involves using chemistry-climate model ensemble simulations to identify imprints of climate variability on observational records of trace gases in the troposphere.

After earning a bachelor’s degree and PhD from Harvard University, Fiore held a research scientist position at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory and was appointed as an associate professor with tenure at Columbia University in 2011. Over the last decade, she has worked with air and health management partners to develop applications of satellite and other Earth science datasets to address their emerging needs. Fiore’s honors include the American Geophysical Union (AGU) James R. Holton Junior Scientist Award, Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (the highest honor bestowed by the United States government on outstanding scientists and engineers in the early stages of their independent research careers), and AGU’s James B. Macelwane Medal. The Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences welcomes Fiore as the first Peter H. Stone and Paola Malanotte Stone Professor.

With a background in magnetism, Danna Freedman leverages inorganic chemistry to solve problems in physics. Within this paradigm, she is creating the next generation of materials for quantum information by designing spin-based quantum bits, or qubits, based in molecules. These molecular qubits can be precisely controlled, opening the door for advances in quantum computation, sensing, and more. She also harnesses high pressure to synthesize new emergent materials, exploring the possibilities of intermetallic compounds and solid-state bonding. Among other innovations, Freedman has realized millisecond coherence times in molecular qubits, created a molecular analogue of an NV center featuring optical read-out of spin, and discovered the first iron-bismuth binary compound.

Freedman received her bachelor’s degree from Harvard University and her PhD from the University of California at Berkeley, then conducted postdoctoral research at MIT before joining the faculty at Northwestern University as an assistant professor in 2012, earning an NSF CAREER Award, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the ACS Award in Pure Chemistry, and more. She was promoted to associate professor in 2018 and full professor with tenure in 2020. Freedman returns to MIT as the Frederick George Keyes Professor of Chemistry.

Kristin Knouse PhD ’17 aims to understand how tissues sense and respond to damage, with the goal of developing new approaches for regenerative medicine. She focuses on the mammalian liver — which has the unique ability to completely regenerate itself — to ask how organisms react to organ injury, how certain cells retain the ability to grow and divide while others do not, and what genes regulate this process. Knouse creates innovative tools, such as a genome-wide CRISPR screening within a living mouse, to examine liver regeneration from the level of a single-cell to the whole organism.

Knouse received a bachelor’s degree in biology from Duke University in 2010 and then enrolled in the Harvard and MIT MD-PhD Program, where she earned a PhD through the MIT Department of Biology in 2016 and an MD through the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology in 2018. In 2018, she established her independent laboratory at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and was honored with the NIH Director’s Early Independence Award. Knouse joins the Department of Biology and the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research as an assistant professor.

Lina Necib PhD ’17 is an astroparticle physicist exploring the origin of dark matter through a combination of simulations and observational data that correlate the dynamics of dark matter with that of the stars in the Milky Way. She has investigated the local dynamic structures in the solar neighborhood using the Gaia satellite, contributed to building a catalog of local accreted stars using machine learning techniques, and discovered a new stream called Nyx, after the Greek goddess of the night. Necib is interested in employing Gaia in conjunction with other spectroscopic surveys to understand the dark matter profile in the local solar neighborhood, the center of the galaxy, and in dwarf galaxies.

After obtaining a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and physics from Boston University in 2012 and a PhD in theoretical physics from MIT in 2017, Necib was a Sherman Fairchild Fellow at Caltech, a Presidential Fellow at the University of California at Irvine, and a fellow in theoretical astrophysics at Carnegie Observatories. She returns to MIT as an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and a member of the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.

Andrew Vanderburg studies exoplanets, or planets that orbit stars other than the sun. Conducting astronomical observations from Earth as well as space, he develops cutting-edge methods to learn about planets outside of our solar system. Recently, he has leveraged machine learning to optimize searches and identify planets that were missed by previous techniques. With collaborators, he discovered the eighth planet in the Kepler-90 solar system, a Jupiter-like planet with unexpectedly close orbiting planets, and rocky bodies disintegrating near a white dwarf, providing confirmation of a theory that such stars may accumulate debris from their planetary systems.

Vanderburg received a bachelor’s degree in physics and astrophysics from the University of California at Berkeley in 2013 and a PhD in Astronomy from Harvard University in 2017. Afterward, Vanderburg moved to the University of Texas at Austin as a NASA Sagan Postdoctoral Fellow, then to the University of Wisconsin at Madison as a faculty member. He joins MIT as an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and a member of the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.

Climate and sustainability classes expand at MIT

by Aaron Krol | Environmental Solutions Initiative |

In fall 2019, a new class, 6.S898/12.S992 (Climate Change Seminar), arrived at MIT. It was, at the time, the only course in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) to tackle the science of climate change. The class covered climate models and simulations alongside atmospheric science, policy, and economics.

Ron Rivest, MIT Institute Professor of Computer Science, was one of the class’s three instructors, with Alan Edelman of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and John Fernández of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. “Computer scientists have much to contribute to climate science,” Rivest says. “In particular, the modeling and simulation of climate can benefit from advances in computer science.”

Rivest is one of many MIT faculty members who have been working in recent years to bring topics in climate, sustainability, and the environment to students in a growing variety of fields. And students have said they want this trend to continue.

“Sustainability is something that touches all disciplines,” says Megan Xu, a rising senior in biological engineering and advisory chair of the Undergraduate Association Sustainability Committee. “As students who have grown up knowing that climate change is real and witnessed climate disaster after disaster, we know this is a huge problem that needs to be addressed by our generation.”

Expanding the course catalog

As education program manager at the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative, Sarah Meyers has repeatedly had a hand in launching new sustainability classes. She has steered grant money to faculty, brought together instructors, and helped design syllabi — all in the service of giving MIT students the same world-class education in climate and sustainability that they get in science and engineering.

Her work has given Meyers a bird’s-eye view of MIT’s course offerings in this area. By her count, there are now over 120 undergraduate classes, across 23 academic departments, that teach climate, environment, and sustainability principles.

“Educating the next generation is the most important way that MIT can have an impact on the world’s environmental challenges,” she says. “MIT students are going to be leaders in their fields, whatever they may be. If they really understand sustainable design practices, if they can balance the needs of all stakeholders to make ethical decisions, then that actually changes the way our world operates and can move humanity towards a more sustainable future.”

Some sustainability classes are established institutions at MIT. Success stories include 2.00A (Fundamentals of Engineering Design: Explore Space, Sea and Earth), a hands-on engineering class popular with first-year students; and 21W.775 (Writing About Nature and Environmental Issues), which has helped undergraduates fulfill their HASS-H (humanities distribution subject) and CI-H (Communication Intensive subject in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences) graduation requirements for 15 years.

Expanding this list of classes is an institutional priority. In the recently released Climate Action Plan for the Decade, MIT pledged to recruit at least 20 additional faculty members who will teach climate-related classes.

“I think it’s easy to find classes if you’re looking for sustainability classes to take,” says Naomi Lutz, a senior in mechanical engineering who helped advise the MIT administration on education measures in the Climate Action Plan. “I usually scroll through the titles of the classes in courses 1, 2, 11, and 12 to see if any are of interest. I also have used the Environment & Sustainability Minor class list to look for sustainability-related classes to take.

“The coming years are critical for the future of our planet, so it’s important that we all learn about sustainability and think about how to address it,” she adds.

Working with students’ schedules

Still, despite all this activity, climate and sustainability are not yet mainstream parts of an MIT education. Last year, a survey of over 800 MIT undergraduates, taken by the Undergraduate Association Sustainability Committee, found that only one in four had ever taken a class related to sustainability. But it doesn’t seem to be from lack of interest in the topic. More than half of those surveyed said that sustainability is a factor in their career planning, and almost 80 percent try to practice sustainability in their daily lives.

“I’ve often had conversations with students who were surprised to learn there are so many classes available,” says Meyers. “We do need to do a better job communicating about them, and making it as easy as possible to enroll.”

A recurring challenge is helping students fit sustainability into their plans for graduation, which are often tightly mapped-out.

“We each only have four years — around 32 to 40 classes — to absorb all that we can from this amazing place,” says Xu. “Many of these classes are mandated to be GIRs [General Institute Requirements] and major requirements. Many students recognize that sustainability is important, but might not have the time to devote an entire class to the topic if it would not count toward their requirements.”

This was a central focus for the students who were involved in forming education recommendations for the Climate Action Plan. “We propose that more sustainability-related courses or tracks are offered in the most common majors, especially in Course 6 [EECS],” says Lutz. “If students can fulfill major requirements while taking courses that address environmental problems, we believe more students will pursue research and careers related to sustainability.”

She also recommends that students look into the dozens of climate and sustainability classes that fulfill GIRs. “It’s really easy to take sustainability-related courses that fulfill HASS [Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences] requirements,” she says. For example, students can meet their HASS-S (social sciences sistribution subject) requirement by taking 21H.185 (Environment and History), or fulfill their HASS-A requirement with CMS.374 (Transmedia Art, Extraction and Environmental Justice).

Classes with impact

For those students who do seek out sustainability classes early in their MIT careers, the experience can shape their whole education.

“My first semester at MIT, I took Environment and History, co-taught by professors Susan Solomon and Harriet Ritvo,” says Xu. “It taught me that there is so much more involved than just science and hard facts to solving problems in sustainability and climate. I learned to look at problems with more of a focus on people, which has informed much of the extracurricular work that I’ve gone on to do at MIT.”

And the faculty, too, sometimes find that teaching in this area opens new doors for them. Rivest, who taught the climate change seminar in Course 6, is now working to build a simplified climate model with his co-instructor Alan Edelman, their teaching assistant Henri Drake, and Professor John Deutch of the Department of Chemistry, who joined the class as a guest lecturer. “I very much enjoyed meeting new colleagues from all around MIT,” Rivest says. “Teaching a class like this fosters connections between computer scientists and climate scientists.”

Which is why Meyers will continue helping to get these classes off the ground. “We know students think climate is a huge issue for their futures. We know faculty agree with them,” she says. “Everybody wants this to be part of an MIT education. The next step is to really reach out to students and departments to fill the classrooms. That’s the start of a virtuous cycle where enrollment drives more sustainability instruction in every part of MIT.”

Energy storage from a chemistry perspective

by Daniel de Wolff | MIT Startup Exchange |

The transition toward a more sustainable, environmentally sound electrical grid has driven an upsurge in renewables like solar and wind. But something as simple as cloud cover can cause grid instability, and wind power is inherently unpredictable. This intermittent nature of renewables has invigorated the competitive landscape for energy storage companies looking to enhance power system flexibility while enabling the integration of renewables.

“Impact is what drives PolyJoule more than anything else,” says CEO Eli Paster. “We see impact from a renewable integration standpoint, from a curtailment standpoint, and also from the standpoint of transitioning from a centralized to a decentralized model of energy-power delivery.”

PolyJoule is a Billerica, Massachusetts-based startup that’s looking to reinvent energy storage from a chemistry perspective. Co-founders Ian Hunter of MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and Tim Swager of the Department of Chemistry are longstanding MIT professors considered luminaries in their respective fields. Meanwhile, the core team is a small but highly skilled collection of chemists, manufacturing specialists, supply chain optimizers, and entrepreneurs, many of whom have called MIT home at one point or another.

“The ideas that we work on in the lab, you’ll see turned into products three to four years from now, and they will still be innovative and well ahead of the curve when they get to market,” Paster says. “But the concepts come from the foresight of thinking five to 10 years in advance. That’s what we have in our back pocket, thanks to great minds like Ian and Tim.”

PolyJoule takes a systems-level approach married to high-throughput, analytical electrochemistry that has allowed the company to pinpoint a chemical cell design based on 10,000 trials. The result is a battery that is low-cost, safe, and has a long lifetime. It’s capable of responding to base loads and peak loads in microseconds, allowing the same battery to participate in multiple power markets and deployment use cases.

In the energy storage sphere, interesting technologies abound, but workable solutions are few and far between. But Paster says PolyJoule has managed to bridge the gap between the lab and the real world by taking industry concerns into account from the beginning. “We’ve taken a slightly contrarian view to all of the other energy storage companies that have come before us that have said, ‘If we build it, they will come.’ Instead, we’ve gone directly to the customer and asked, ‘If you could have a better battery storage platform, what would it look like?’”

With commercial input feeding into the thought processes behind their technological and commercial deployment, PolyJoule says they’ve designed a battery that is less expensive to make, less expensive to operate, safer, and easier to deploy.

Traditionally, lithium-ion batteries have been the go-to energy storage solution. But lithium has its drawbacks, including cost, safety issues, and detrimental effects on the environment. But PolyJoule isn’t interested in lithium — or metals of any kind, in fact. “We start with the periodic table of organic elements,” says Paster, “and from there, we derive what works at economies of scale, what is easy to converge and convert chemically.”

Having an inherently safer chemistry allows PolyJoule to save on system integration costs, among other things. PolyJoule batteries don’t contain flammable solvents, which means no added expenses related to fire mitigation. Safer chemistry also means ease of storage, and PolyJoule batteries are currently undergoing global safety certification (UL approval) to be allowed indoors and on airplanes. Finally, with high power built into the chemistry, PolyJoule’s cells can be charged and discharged to extremes, without the need for heating or cooling systems.

“From raw material to product delivery, we examine each step in the value chain with an eye towards reducing costs,” says Paster. It all starts with designing the chemistry around earth-abundant elements, which allows the small startup to compete with larger suppliers, even at smaller scales. Consider the fact that PolyJoule’s differentiating material cost is less than $1 per kilogram, whereas lithium carbonate sells for $20 per kilogram.

On the manufacturing side, Paster explains that PolyJoule cuts costs by making their cells in old paper mills and warehouses, employing off-the-shelf equipment previously used for tissue paper or newspaper printing. “We use equipment that has been around for decades because we don’t want to create a cutting-edge technology that requires cutting-edge manufacturing,” he says. “We want to create a cutting-edge technology that can be deployed in industrialized nations and in other nations that can benefit the most from energy storage.”

PolyJoule’s first customer is an industrial distributed energy consumer with baseline energy consumption that increases by a factor of 10 when the heavy machinery kicks on twice a day. In the early morning and late afternoon, it consumes about 50 kilowatts for 20 minutes to an hour, compared to a baseline rate of 5  kilowatts. It’s an application model that is translatable to a variety of industries. Think wastewater treatment, food processing, and server farms — anything with a fluctuation in power consumption over a 24-hour period.

By the end of the year, PolyJoule will have delivered its first 10 kilowatt-hour system, exiting stealth mode and adding commercial viability to demonstrated technological superiority. “What we’re seeing, now is massive amounts of energy storage being added to renewables and grid-edge applications,” says Paster. “We anticipated that by 12-18 months, and now we’re ramping up to catch up with some of the bigger players.”