Author: MIT News

Four MIT scientists honored with 2021 National Academy of Sciences awards

by Laura Carter | School of Science |

Four MIT scientists are among the 20 recipients of the 2021 Academy Honors for major contributions to science, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) announced at its annual meeting. The individuals are recognized for their “extraordinary scientific achievements in a wide range of fields spanning the physical, biological, social, and medical sciences.”

The awards recognize: Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, for contributions to the fields of nanoscience and nanotechnology through his discovery of correlated insulator behavior and unconventional superconductivity in magic-angle graphene superlattices; Aviv Regev, for using interdisciplinary information or techniques to solve a contemporary challenge; Susan Solomon, for contributions to understanding and communicating the causes of ozone depletion and climate change; and Feng Zhang, for pioneering achievements developing CRISPR tools with the potential to diagnose and treat disease.

Pablo Jarillo-Herrero: Award for Scientific Discovery

Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, a Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics, is the recipient of the NAS Award for Scientific Discovery for his pioneering developments in nanoscience and nanotechnology, which is presented to scientists in the fields of astronomy, materials science, or physics. His findings expand nanoscience by demonstrating for the first time that orientation can be used to dramatically control nanomaterial properties and to design new nanomaterials. This work lays the groundwork for developing a whole new family of 2D materials and has had a transformative impact on the field and on condensed-matter physics.

The biannual award recognizes “an accomplishment or discovery in basic research, achieved within the previous five years, that is expected to have a significant impact on one or more of the following fields: astronomy, biochemistry, biophysics, chemistry, materials science, or physics.”

In 2018, his research group discovered that by rotating two layers of graphene relative to each other by a magic angle, the bilayer material can be turned from a metal into an electrical insulator or even a superconductor. This discovery has fostered new theoretical and experimental research, inspiring the interest of technologists in nanoelectronics. The result is a new field in condensed-matter physics that has the potential to result in materials that conduct electricity without resistance at room temperature.

Aviv Regev: James Prize in Science and Technology Integration

Aviv Regev, who is a professor of biology, a core member of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, a member of the Koch Institute, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator has been selected for the inaugural James Prize in Science and Technology Integration, along with Harvard Medical School Professor Allon Kelin, for “their concurrent development of now widely adopted massively parallel single-cell genomics to interrogate the gene expression profiles that define, at the level of individual cells, the distinct cell types in metazoan tissues, their developmental trajectories, and disease states, which integrated tools from molecular biology, engineering, statistics, and computer science.”

The prize recognizes individuals “who are able to adopt or adapt information or techniques from outside their fields” to “solve a major contemporary challenge not addressable from a single disciplinary perspective.”

Regev is credited with forging new ways to unite the disciplines of biology, computational science, and engineering as a pioneer in the field of single-cell biology, including developing some of its core experimental and analysis tools, and their application to discover cell types, states, programs, environmental responses, development, tissue locations, and regulatory circuits, and deploying these to assemble cellular atlases of the human body that illuminate mechanisms of disease with remarkable fidelity.

Susan Solomon: Award for Chemistry in Service to Society

Susan Solomon, the Lee and Geraldine Martin Professor of Environmental Studies in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences who holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Chemistry, is the recipient of the Award for Chemistry in Service to Society for “influential and incisive application of atmospheric chemistry to understand our most critical environmental issues — ozone layer depletion and climate change — and for her effective communication of environmental science to leaders to facilitate policy changes.”

The award is given biannually for “contributions to chemistry, either in fundamental science or its application, that clearly satisfy a societal need.”

Solomon is globally recognized as a leader in atmospheric science, notably for her insights in explaining the cause of the Antarctic ozone “hole.” She and her colleagues have made important contributions to understanding chemistry-climate coupling, including pioneering research on the irreversibility of global warming linked to anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions, and on the influence of the ozone hole on the climate of the southern hemisphere.

Her work has had an enormous effect on policy and society, including the transition away from ozone-depleting substances and to environmentally benign chemicals. The work set the stage for the Paris Agreement on climate, and she continues to educate policymakers, the public, and the next generation of scientists.

Feng Zhang: Richard Lounsbery Award

Feng Zhang, who is the James and Patricia Poitras Professor of Neuroscience at MIT, an investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences and biological engineering at MIT, and a core member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, is the recipient of the Richard Lounsbery Award for pioneering CRISPR-mediated genome editing.

The award recognizes “extraordinary scientific achievement in biology and medicine” as well as stimulating research and encouraging reciprocal scientific exchanges between the United States and France.

Zhang continues to lead the field through the discovery of novel CRISPR systems and their development as molecular tools with the potential to diagnose and treat disease, such as disorders affecting the nervous system. His contributions in genome engineering, as well as his earlier work developing optogenetics, are enabling a deeper understanding of behavioral neural circuits and advances in gene therapy for treating disease.

In addition, Zhang has championed the open sharing of the technologies he has developed through extensive resource sharing. The tools from his lab are being used by thousands of scientists around the world to accelerate research in nearly every field of the life sciences. Even as biomedical researchers around the world adopt Zhang’s discoveries and his tools enter the clinic to treat genetic diseases, he continues to innovate and develop new technologies to advance science.

The National Academy of Sciences is a private, nonprofit society of distinguished scholars, established in 1863 by the U.S. Congress. The NAS is charged with providing independent, objective advice to the nation on matters related to science and technology as well as encouraging education and research, recognize outstanding contributions to knowledge, and increasing public understanding in matters of science, engineering, and medicine. Winners received their awards, which include a monetary prize, during a virtual ceremony at the 158th NAS Annual Meeting.

This story is a modified compilation from several National Academy of Sciences press releases.

Fiercely supporting student welfare and resilient growth

by Ellie Immerman | Office of Graduate Education |

Professors Jesse Kroll and Cathy Drennan are enthusiastic, whether students are sharing exciting early experimental results or raising concerns about public speaking. The two have been honored by a student-driven process as “Committed to Caring” for their dedication to students’ well-being and futures and for their ardent advocacy for student needs.

Jesse Kroll: Congenial community

Jesse Kroll is an associate professor in MIT’s departments of Chemical Engineering and Civil and Environmental Engineering. He joined the MIT faculty in 2009 after completing a PhD at Harvard University, serving as a postdoc at Caltech, and then working as a senior scientist at Aerodyne Research.

Through field sampling and testing as well as reactor-based experiments on oxidation, the Kroll lab studies particulate pollution, characterizing the sources and transformations of organic compounds in the atmosphere. The group aims to better understand which policies could help alleviate the health and climate effects of pollution.

Celebrating the whole student

Core to Kroll’s advising are weekly one-on-one meetings with each advisee. Both Kroll and his advisees eagerly await these meetings. Writes one advisee, Kroll’s “amazing ability to listen and empathize during these frequent meetings has allowed me and multiple labmates to discuss mistakes we have made in research and life.” Kroll creates a comfortable setting to parse and resolve challenges.

Recurring reflection is critical in research. Kroll finds the weekly meetings an excellent opportunity to learn from his students as well as take a step back and collaboratively problem-solve. To Kroll, mentoring is “completely woven into the research process, and you can’t succeed in one without succeeding in the other as well.”

Pointing to the rarity of recognizing students as multifaceted people, Kroll’s advisees express gratitude for his interest and openness about life beyond research. Labmates “openly discuss their other interests in front of Jesse,” according to a nomination letter. Advisees frequently mention how thoroughly Kroll demonstrates that he cares for them as whole people.

Considerate advocacy

Advisees describe Kroll as “selfless … immensely thoughtful, intelligent, compassionate, and encouraging.” Students are comfortable raising difficult topics with Kroll. One of his advisees experienced harassment from another professor based on their religion and sexual orientation. When they raised the issue, the student was grateful for Kroll’s response as well as his support through the process of reporting it.

Disruptions are common during the PhD process. When a professor announced that they were leaving MIT, Kroll emailed their advisees to offer support through the transition. Kroll checked in regularly, offered use of the Kroll lab, and helped ensure the remaining advisees could finish their degrees.

In another instance, a student needed support with accommodations due to a health issue. Kroll advocated for the student, and protected their privacy from the rest of the laboratory. Advocating for advisees is a Mentoring Guidepost identified by the C2C program.

Remarking on moving forward amid the hassles and uncertainty of the pandemic, Kroll emphasizes flexibility. “Everyone’s productivity level has been affected differently,” so he meets people where they are. The weekly individual meetings continue, as a chance to check in and connect.

Cathy Drennan: Compounding caring

Drennan has been a professor at MIT since 1999. She started in the Department of Chemistry and has since also joined the Department of Biology. Drennan’s laboratory focuses on using X-ray crystallography to study the structure and function of enzymes important in remediating damage to the air and water. The lab also investigates metalloprotein biochemistry and the dynamics of environmental modulation of metalloprotein reactivity.

Through 2025, Drennan is serving as a Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellow, a program that recognizes faculty who have made “exemplary and sustained contributions” to undergraduate education at MIT.

Snowballing kindness

Striving to create a lab environment where “one person’s success is everyone’s success” matters greatly to Drennan. Very intentionally, she crafts expectations for the laboratory to discuss. Together, Drennan and her students build a collaborative laboratory family where, according to one nominator, “we all feel welcomed despite our differences.”

Having experienced great mentorship in graduate school, Drennan is keen to extend this practice. In particular, she recalls “the sense of being treated more as a colleague than as a student … feeling like your advisor listens to your scientific ideas and you have a seat at the table where experiments are being designed.” Drennan builds this mentality into her interactions with advisees.

One advisee credits Drennan’s “valuable mentorship and willingness to believe in [them]” as critical to their being at MIT and progressing on experiments. Validating students by demonstrating interest in their ideas and confidence in their abilities is a C2C Mentoring Guidepost.

Thoughtful advising compounds. Drennan emphasizes that people emulate the type of advising they have experienced, for both better and worse. Drennan’s advisees go on to support their students and extend patterns of inclusive, caring advising to the broader biology and chemistry communities. One advisee mentions their aim to work with underserved communities on education and economic mobility, inspired by Drennan’s commitment to community service.

Embracing vulnerability

A fierce support for her advisees, Cathy Drennan creates space for vulnerability. In one instance, a student disclosed to Drennan that they had experienced trauma. Per a nomination letter, Drennan’s response was, “‘My job is to help you achieve your goal of becoming a professor. Putting your health first and dealing with your past now, instead of later down the road when you are trying to launch your career, is part of me best preparing you for success.’” Swiftly, Drennan cancelled several meetings and events to enroll in a two-day workshop on how best to mentor students who have experienced trauma.

In another instance, a student repeatedly felt validated and supported when sharing about a family member’s illness and their own mental health challenges. In the student’s words, Drennan “reminded me that I am capable and deserve to be a graduate student at MIT.” Grappling with imposter syndrome and worries about whether they belong is a common predicament for students.

Drennan is trying to reshape expectations for science, because she finds that narratives about what constitutes success are often inaccurate. Instead, she emphasizes that “when you fail, you’re really pushing the envelope and that’s what great science is.”

More on Committed to Caring

The Committed to Caring program is an initiative of the Office of Graduate Education and contributes to its mission of making graduate education at MIT “empowering, exciting, holistic, and transformative.”

Since 2014, C2C has invited graduate students from across MIT’s campus to nominate professors whom they believe to be outstanding mentors. Selection criteria for the honor include the scope and reach of advisor impact on graduate students’ experience, excellence in scholarship, and demonstrated commitment to diversity and inclusion.

The most recent outgrowth in 2019 took the form of a Faculty Peer Mentorship Program (FPMP) in which C2C faculty act as peer mentors to incoming MIT professors. The program provides one-to-one matches with the goal of fostering strong mentorship practices and providing a network of support.

By recognizing the human element of graduate education, C2C seeks to encourage excellent advising and mentorship across MIT’s campus.

3 Questions: Using fabric to “listen” to space dust

by David L. Chandler | MIT News |

Earlier this month a team of MIT researchers sent samples of various high-tech fabrics, some with embedded sensors or electronics, to the International Space Station. The samples (unpowered for now) will be exposed to the space environment for a year in order to determine a baseline for how well these materials survive the harsh environment of low Earth orbit.

The hope is that this work could lead to thermal blankets for spacecraft, that could act as sensitive detectors for impacting micrometeoroids and space debris. Ultimately, another goal is new smart fabrics that allow astronauts to feel touch right through their pressurized suits.

Three members of MIT’s multidisciplinary team, graduate students Juliana Cherston of the Media Lab, Yuchen Sun of the Department of Chemistry, and Wei Yan of the Research Laboratory of Electronics and the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, discussed the experiment’s ambitious aims with MIT News.

Q:​ Can you describe the fabric samples that you sent to the International Space Station, and what kinds of information you are hoping to get from them after their exposure in space?

Cherston: The white color of the International Space Station is actually a protective fabric material called Beta cloth, which is a Teflon-impregnated fiberglass designed to shield spacecraft and spacesuits from the harsh elements of low Earth orbit. For decades, these fabrics have remained electrically passive, despite offering large-area real estate on the exterior of space assets.

We imagine turning this spacecraft skin into an enormous space debris and micrometeoroid impact sensor. The samples that we worked with JAXA, the Japanese space agency, and Space BD to send to the International Space Station incorporate materials like charge-sensitive synthetic fur — an early concept — and vibration-sensitive fiber sensors — our project’s focus — into space-resilient fabrics. The resulting fabric may be useful for detecting cosmic dust of scientific interest, and for damage detection on spacecraft.

It’s easy to assume that since we’re already sending these materials to space, the technology must be very mature. In reality, we are leveraging the space environment  to complement our important ground-testing efforts. All of these fabric sensors will remain unpowered for this first in-space test, and the quilt of samples occupies a total area of 10 by 10 centimeters on the exterior walls of the station.

Our focus is on baselining their resiliency to the space environment. In one year, these samples will return to Earth for postflight analysis. We’ll be able to measure any erosion from atomic oxygen, discoloration from UV radiation, and any changes to fiber sensor performance after one year of thermal cycling. There is some chance that we will also find hints of micron-scale micrometeoroids. We’re also already preparing for an electrically powered deployment currently scheduled for late 2021 or early 2022 (recently awarded to the project by the ISS National Lab). At that point we’ll apply an additional protective coating to the fibers and actually operate them in space.

Yan: The fabric samples contain thermally drawn “acoustic” fibers developed with ISN funding that are capable of converting mechanical vibration energy into electric energy (via the piezoelectric effect). When micrometeoroids or space debris hit the fabric, the fabric vibrates, and the “acoustic” fiber generates an electrical signal. Thermally drawn multimaterial fibers have been developed by our research group at MIT for more than 20 years; what makes these acoustic fibers special is their exquisite sensitivity to mechanical vibrations. The fabric has been shown in ground facilities to detect and measure impact regardless of where the space dust impacted the surface of the fabric.

Q: What is the ultimate goal of the project? What kinds of uses do you foresee for advanced fabrics in the space environment?

Cherston: I am particularly keen to demonstrate that instrumentation useful for fundamental scientific inquiry can be incorporated directly into the fabric skin of persistent spacecraft, which to date is unused and very precious real estate. In particular, I am beginning to evaluate whether these skins are sensitive enough to detect cosmic dust produced in million-year-old supernova explosions tens or hundreds of light-years away from Earth. Just last year, an isotopic signature for this type of interstellar dust was discovered in fresh Antarctic snow, so we believe that some of this dust is still whizzing around the solar system, holding clues about the dynamics of supernova explosions. In-situ characterization of their distribution and kinematics is currently my most ambitious scientific goal.

More generally, I’d love to see advanced fibers and fabrics tackle other questions of fundamental physical interest in space, maybe by leveraging optical fibers or radiation sensitive materials to create large aperture sensors.

Some students in my group have also developed a conceptual prototype in which sensory data on the exterior skin of a pressurized spacesuit armband is mapped to haptic actuators on the wearer’s biological skin. Using this system, astronauts will be able to feel texture and touch right through their spacesuits! This direct experience of a new environment is very central to humanity’s drive to explore.

An impact-sensitive skin can also be used for damage detection on persistent space craft. In practice, the fabric’s ability to localize damage from space debris and micrometeoroids is how we will really sell the concept to aerospace engineers.

Yan: Although the space age began 63 years ago when Soviet Union’s Sputnik 1 was launched into an elliptical low Earth orbit, many unanswered questions remain regarding the effect of the space environment on humans, as well as the safety of astronauts as they operate in the space environment. While our project’s main focus has been on augmenting fabrics used on the exterior of spacecraft, I also envision that future spacesuits will be electrically active and highly multifunctional.

Textiles buried within the suit will be able monitor the health condition of astronauts in real time by interrogating physiological signals over large areas. Fabrics may also serve as  localized heating and cooling systems, radiation dosimeters, and efficient communications infrastructure (via fabric optics and acoustics). They may harvest solar energy as well as small amounts of energy from vibration, and store this energy in fiber batteries or supercapacitors, which would allow the system to be self-powered. Fabrics might even serve as part of an exoskeleton that assists astronauts in maneuvering on planetary bodies and in microgravity. One broad vision at play is to pack an enormous amount of function into space resilient textiles, creating an analogue of “Moore’s law” for space fabrics.

​​​Q: What got you interested in this subject, and what has this experience been like for you in getting the materials ready to be sent into space?

Yan: Space is definitely a new frontier for our research, while lots of terrestrial applications have been envisioned in ambient conditions and even under water. From low Earth orbit to planetary bodies, space is a unique environment with atomic oxygen, radiation, high speed impactors, and extreme temperature cycling. How will the fibers and fabrics perform there and what changes will be induced in the fiber materials? How should electronic fabrics be designed in order to meet demands of aerospace applications? There are so many scientific and technological questions.

Sun: Our group [with professor of chemistry Keith Nelson] strives to push the limits of what is experimentally achievable for impact testing, and we are always excited by a new challenge. Recently, we have been venturing into the area of high-speed mechanics, testing novel materials spanning polymers, thin films, and nanoarchitected materials using a laser accelerator facility designed by our lab to impinge tiny particles on target surfaces at speeds exceeding 1 kilometer per second.

When the idea emerged to test a material capable of detecting impact signatures in low Earth orbit and beyond, there was immediate interest on our side since it is fundamentally different from our previous research focus. These experiments are certainly more difficult and complex than what we are used to, with many more active parts to maintain. I think we were all quite pleasantly surprised when our preliminary impact experiments were successful and encouraging.

Cherston: While space launches are exciting, in reality some of our most convincing data to date has come from impact testing on the ground. Initially, it was not at all obvious that a fabric sensor with sparsely integrated sensing elements could actually detect such small and fast particles. There were a really great few minutes at our first serious impact testing campaign during which Yuchen gradually increased the number of particles accelerated onto our sensor, while holding all other aspects of the experiment constant. The growing signal was a smoking gun indication that we were seeing a true impact signature.

On a personal level, I’m really fascinated by the idea of leveraging very unconventional technology like fabric for questions of scientific significance. And I think the idea of feeling right through a pressurized spacesuit is delightful!

Six MIT faculty elected 2020 AAAS Fellows

by MIT News Office |

Six MIT faculty members have been elected as fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

The new fellows are among a group of 489 AAAS members elected by their peers in recognition of their scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science.

A virtual induction ceremony for the new fellows will be held on Feb. 13, 2021.

Nazli Choucri is a professor of political science, a senior faculty member at the Center of International Studies (CIS), and a faculty affiliate at the Institute for Data, Science, and Society (IDSS). She works in the areas of international relations, conflict and violence, and the international political economy, with a focus on cyberspace and the global environment. Her current research is on cyberpolitics in international relations, focusing on linking integrating cyberspace into the fabric of international relations.

Catherine Drennan is a professor in the departments of Biology and Chemistry. Her research group seeks to understand how nature harnesses and redirects the reactivity of enzyme metallocenters in order to perform challenging reactions. By combining X-ray crystallography with other biophysical methods, the researchers’ goal is to “visualize” molecular processes by obtaining snapshots of enzymes in action.

Peter Fisher is a professor in the Department of Physics and currently serves as department head. He carries out research in particle physics in the areas of dark matter detection and the development of new kinds of particle detectors. He is also interested in compact energy supplies and wireless energy transmission.

Neil Gershenfeld is the director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, which works to break down boundaries between the digital and physical worlds, from pioneering quantum computing to digital fabrication to the “internet of things.” He is the founder of a global network of over 1,000 fab labs, chairs the Fab Foundation, and leads the Fab Academy.

Ju Li is the Battelle Energy Alliance Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering and a professor of materials science and engineering. He studies how atoms and electrons behave and interact, to inform the design new materials from the atomic level on up. His research areas include overcoming timescale challenges in atomistic simulations, energy storage and conversion, and materials in extreme environments and far from equilibrium.

Daniela Rus is the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT. Her research interests include robotics, mobile computing, and data science. Rus is a Class of 2002 MacArthur Fellow, a fellow of ACM, AAAI and IEEE, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy for Arts and Science.

This year’s fellows will be formally announced in the AAAS News and Notes section of Science on Nov. 27.

Mary Frances Wagley, dedicated educator and the first woman to join the MIT Corporation, dies at 93

by Michaela Jarvis | MIT News correspondent |

Mary Frances Wagley ’47, a trailblazer for women and a lifelong educator, died Nov. 1 at her home in Cockeysville, Maryland. She was 93.

Having attended MIT at a time when there were few female students — only 12 in her class — Wagley became the first woman to be an MIT Corporation member and the first woman to serve as president of the MIT Alumni Association.

“Mary Frances Wagley was a force for a better world and a pioneer for women in science and technology. She set an example with both her intellect and her leadership across an inspiring and impactful life. Everyone at MIT is fortunate to be benefitting from her path-breaking footsteps,” says MIT Corporation Chair Diane Greene, who is the first woman to serve in this role.

Wagley was born in New York City to Caroline and James Cash Penney, the founder of JC Penney. She grew up in White Plains on a small farm, often working outdoors with her father or riding her horse. Her skill as an equestrienne brought her as far as Madison Square Garden, where she competed at the National Horse Show.

Applying to MIT, one of the deans tried in an interview to talk her out of attending, saying he was sure she wouldn’t like it, Wagley told “MIT Infinite History” in 2009.

“Well, I proved him wrong,” Wagley told the interviewer. “I was happy from the moment I stepped foot in the Institute. … I was just ready to soak up all I could learn, and from the day I walked in those doors at 77 Mass. Avenue, it just seemed to me this is the place I belong.”

Wagley represented the first generation in her family to attend college. Wagley and a friend, Emily “Paddy” Wade ’45, lived off campus and cooked for themselves because there were no dormitories or dining facilities for women. Nor did athletic facilities exist for women at the Institute. Starting out as a chemical engineering major, Wagley was not able to participate in the required chemical engineering summer camp because of her gender, and she was asked to change her major to chemistry, which she did. Despite the challenges associated with being one of very few women at MIT, however, she flourished, says her son, Jay Wagley SM ’89.

“My mom was a force. I think it was hard to be one of only 12 in her class, but she never shied away from a challenge,” he says. “She had a spectacular mind and enormous intellectual curiosity. I think having gone to MIT and having done well there gave my mom tremendous confidence.”

MIT also imbued Wagley with a sense of the importance of science and engineering in society. Speaking with a reporter for the “MIT News” section of MIT Technology Review, she recalled how on V-E Day, May 8, 1945, MIT President Karl Compton celebrated the Allied victory with students but then sent them back to class, telling them their skills were needed for the continued fighting in the Pacific and for reconstruction after the war.

“I guess this was the first time I felt important,” Wagley was quoted as saying.

After graduating from MIT, Wagley went directly to Oxford University, earning a doctoral degree there in physical chemistry. At the time of her return to the United States, she had two employment offers, in research at Princeton University and teaching at Smith College. She chose Smith and discovered that she loved teaching, delighting in finding ways to make concepts clear to students.

“I was earnest about trying to get what I knew across to the students in a way that they could grasp onto it,” Wagley said in the “Infinite History” interview.

Her interest in education also led her to teaching positions at Johns Hopkins University and Goucher College. Then, in 1966, she became head of St. Paul’s School for Girls, experimenting with a variety of new math courses and helping the school develop a reputation for strong math and science preparation.

In 1970, around the time that MIT started making some of the boys’ dorms co-ed, Wagley became the first female member of the MIT Corporation. Once referring to the group as “formidable,” she nonetheless managed to serve on visiting committees ranging from chemistry to biology, philosophy, libraries, nuclear engineering, psychology, sponsored research, and the humanities. She also participated on the search committees that selected two of MIT presidents, Paul Gray and Charles Vest.

“I’ve tried to do a good job,” said Wagley, “thinking that that paved the way for women who came after me.”

It was MIT’s athletics, which had been completely unavailable to her as one of the first women at the Institute, that became a particular focus for Wagley as a Corporation member. She was instrumental in getting the Zesiger Sports and Fitness Center built, and she later established a Mary Frances Wagley Fund, an endowment supporting the head coach position for varsity men and women’s swimming and diving.

Wagley was working as the executive director of Episcopal Social Ministries of the Diocese of Maryland, where she ran a food bank and a homeless shelter, when she became the president of the MIT Alumni Association in 1984. Again, it was a first for women.

“As the first female president, obviously my topic was women at MIT,” Wagley told “Infinite History.”

She became a life member of the MIT Corporation in 1988 and a life member emerita in 2002.

“My mom loved MIT, she loved her time there,” says Jay Wagley. “MIT was a good fit for her, and since she loved it there, she wanted to give back to the Institute.”

Wagley’s husband, physician Philip Franklin Wagley, died in 2000. She is survived by her three children — Anne Paxton Wagley of Berkeley, California; Mary Frances Kemper Wagley Copp of Providence, Rhode Island; and James “Jay” Franklin Penney Wagley of Dallas — as well as seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Donations in Wagley’s memory can be made to St. Paul’s School for Girls in Brooklandville, Maryland, or Immanuel Episcopal Church in Sparks Glencoe, Maryland. The Wagley family plans to hold a virtual service in the coming weeks. For information on the memorial service, please email mfpwservice@gmail.com.

Chemists discover the structure of a key coronavirus protein

by Anne Trafton | MIT News Office |

MIT chemists have determined the molecular structure of a protein found in the SARS-CoV-2 virus. This protein, called the envelope protein E, forms a cation-selective channel and plays a key role in the virus’s ability to replicate itself and stimulate the host cell’s inflammation response.

If researchers could devise ways to block this channel, they may be able to reduce the pathogenicity of the virus and interfere with viral replication, says Mei Hong, an MIT professor of chemistry. In this study, the researchers investigated the binding sites of two drugs that block the channel, but these drugs bind only weakly, so they would not be effective inhibitors of the E protein.

“Our findings could be useful for medicinal chemists to design alternative small molecules that target this channel with high affinity,” says Hong, who is the senior author of the new study.

MIT graduate student Venkata Mandala is the lead author of the paper, which appears in Nature Structural and Molecular Biology. Other authors include MIT postdoc Matthew McKay, MIT graduate students Alexander Shcherbakov and Aurelio Dregni, and Antonios Kolocouris, a professor of pharmaceutical chemistry at the University of Athens.

Structural challenges

Hong’s lab specializes in studying the structures of proteins that are embedded in cell membranes, which are often challenging to analyze because of the disorder of the lipid membrane. Using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, she has previously developed several techniques that allow her to obtain accurate atomic-level structural information about these membrane-embedded proteins.

When the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak began earlier this year, Hong and her students decided to focus their efforts on one of the novel coronavirus proteins. She narrowed in on the E protein partly because it is similar to an influenza protein called the M2 proton channel, which she has previously studied. Both viral proteins are made of bundles of several helical proteins.

“We determined the influenza B M2 structure after about 1.5 years of hard work, which taught us how to clone, express, and purify a virus membrane protein from scratch, and what NMR experimental strategies to take to solve the structure of a homo-oligomeric helical bundle,” Hong says. “That experience turned out to be the perfect training ground for studying SARS-CoV-2 E.”

The researchers were able to clone and purify the E protein in two and half months. To determine its structure, the researchers embedded it into a lipid bilayer, similar to a cell membrane, and then analyzed it with NMR, which uses the magnetic properties of atomic nuclei to reveal the structures of the molecules containing those nuclei. They measured the NMR spectra for two months, nonstop, on the highest-field NMR instrument at MIT, a 900-megahertz spectrometer, as well as on 800- and 600-megahertz spectrometers.

Hong and her colleagues found that the part of the E protein that is embedded in the lipid bilayer, known as the transmembrane domain, assembles into a bundle of five helices. The helices remain largely immobile within this bundle, creating a tight channel that is much more constricted than the influenza M2 channel.

The researchers also identified several amino acids at one end of the channel that may attract positively charged ions such as calcium into the channel. They believe that the structure they report in this paper is the closed state of the channel, and they now hope to determine the structure of the open state, which should shed light on how the channel opens and closes.

Fundamental research

The researchers also found that two drugs — amantadine, used to treat influenza, and hexamethylene amiloride, used to treat high blood pressure — can block the entrance of the E channel. However, these drugs only bind weakly to the E protein. If stronger inhibitors could be developed, they could be potential drug candidates to treat Covid-19, Hong says.

The study demonstrates that basic scientific research can make important contributions toward solving medical problems, she adds.

“Even when the pandemic is over, it is important that our society recognizes and remembers that fundamental scientific research into virus proteins or bacterial proteins must continue vigorously, so we can preempt pandemics,” Hong says. “The human cost and economic cost of not doing so are just too high.”

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health and the MIT School of Science Sloan Fund.

Universities should lead the way on climate action, MIT panelists say

by Becky Ham | MIT News Office |

Under its Plan for Action on Climate Change, MIT has a goal of reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by at least 32 percent below its 2014 emission levels, by 2030. Those reductions are now at 24 percent, and the Institute is track to meet or exceed the goal, said Joe Higgins, vice president for campus services and stewardship, thanks to Institute-wide efforts that benefit from connecting research and operations.

In the fifth of six symposia in the Climate Action series, held Oct. 20, an online panel of MIT experts including Higgins discussed the role of research universities in tackling climate change. Research universities like MIT provide critical technology and policy innovations, the speakers said, but can also act as role models for other institutions.

“Higher education has a responsibility, an opportunity to set their sights on being an exemplar organization and community in how to face, respond to, and address the climate change issue,” said Professor Paula Hammond, head of the Department of Chemical Engineering and a co-chair of the symposium.

The 170 acres of the MIT campus and its affiliate programs are a kind of living laboratory and testbed for climate solutions, “to demonstrate the technology and the choices that we as people make to move the campus forward,” said Krystyn Van Vliet, associate provost and professor of materials science and engineering and of biological engineering.

In one effort to connect research and operations, Higgins and his colleagues asked participants at the 2018 MIT Energy Hack to find ways of using machine learning to reduce emissions in large buildings. The MIT Sustainability DataPool, a portal of campus sustainability data open to the MIT community, is another way the Institute encourages its researchers “to use the campus as a testbed to generate game-changing solutions” to climate challenges, said Julie Newman, director of sustainability and lecturer in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning.

Having this model in place was a tremendous help when the Covid-19 pandemic created a new influx of personal protective equipment (PPE) and single-use plastic items to manage within the campus’ consumption and waste sustainability plan, said Newman, also a symposium co-chair. “When all of a sudden the challenge of Covid comes and we notice that we’re going to have to grapple with supply chain and use and disposal of PPE, it didn’t take but a couple of weeks to reach out and pull together a research team, an operations team, a finance team, and say let’s study this in MIT style.”

Research universities must be a source of innovations to address global climate change, said Associate Provost Richard Lester, “because our existing government-led innovation system is falling short, even relative to the inadequate benchmarks set by governments themselves.”

Among the efforts to encourage these innovations is MIT Climate Grand Challenges, a program launched in July 2020 that encourages all MIT researchers to develop and implement climate mitigation and adaptation solutions. The program already has received more than 100 letters of interest from more 300 faculty and senior researchers, Lester said.

Technological breakthroughs are still needed urgently to stop the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, despite the talk among some experts that the technological solutions are already available, said Maria Zuber, MIT vice president for research and the E.A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics.

“I wish these individuals who think we have the technology were right. But they’re not. We do not currently have the technology we need to rapidly and adequately make the needed energy transition,” Zuber said. “This is why our work at MIT matters so much.”

Climate solutions must include more than just advanced science and technology capabilities, said Melissa Nobles, the Kenan Sahin Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, and professor of political science. At MIT, she notes, classes on the ethics of climate change, the J-PAL King Climate Action Initiative, and Charlotte Brathwaite’s “Bee Boy” theater project are some examples of how the social sciences and arts can be brought to bear on climate issues.

“As I see it, the more that research institutions can invent practical ways for these various forms of knowledge to intersect, blend, and become mutually informing, the more quickly we can generate effective climate solutions,” Nobles said.

At the same time, universities should remember that climate change policy is only one of several issues, including global health, poverty, and racism, “which deserve and command our attention,” said Institute Professor Emeritus John Deutch. He also sounded a note of caution about how universities should engage in policy discussions. “They cannot speak out with one voice, or should do so very rarely,” he said, because members of the university community often hold diverse opinions and points of view.

The final symposium in the series, “What is the World Waiting For? Policies to Fight Climate Change” will take place online Nov. 16.

Yogesh Surendranath wants to decarbonize our energy systems

by Anne Trafton | MIT News Office |

Electricity plays many roles in our lives, from lighting our homes to powering the technology and appliances we rely on every day. Electricity can also have a major impact at the molecular scale, by powering chemical reactions that generate useful products.

Working at that molecular level, MIT chemistry professor Yogesh Surendranath harnesses electricity to rearrange chemical bonds. The electrochemical reactions he is developing hold potential for process such as splitting water into hydrogen fuel, creating more efficient fuel cells, and converting waste products like carbon dioxide into useful fuels.

“All of our research is about decarbonizing the energy ecosystem,” says Surendranath, who recently earned tenure in MIT’s Department of Chemistry and serves as the associate director of the Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage Center, one of the Low-Carbon Energy Centers run by the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI).

Although his work has many applications in improving energy efficiency, most of the research projects in Surendranath’s group have grown out of the lab’s fundamental interest in exploring, at a molecular level, the chemical reactions that occur between the surface of an electrode and a liquid.

“Our goal is to uncover the key rate-limiting processes and the key steps in the reaction mechanism that give rise to one product over another, so that we can, in a rational way, control a material’s properties so that it can most selectively and efficiently carry out the overall reaction,” he says.

Energy conversion

Born in Bangalore, India, Surendranath moved to Kent, Ohio, with his parents when he was 3 years old. Bangalore and Kent happen to have the world’s leading centers for studying liquid crystal materials, the field that Surendranath’s father, an organic chemist, specialized in.

“My dad would often take me to the laboratory, and although my parents encouraged me to pursue medicine, I think my interest in science and chemistry probably was sparked at an early age, by those experiences,” Surendranath recalls.

Although he was interested in all of the sciences, he narrowed his focus after taking his first college chemistry class at the University of Virginia, with a professor named Dean Harman. He decided on a double major in chemistry and physics and ended up doing research in Harman’s inorganic chemistry lab.

After graduating from UVA, Surendranath came to MIT for graduate school, where his thesis advisor was then-MIT professor Daniel Nocera. With Nocera, he explored using electricity to split water as a way of renewably generating hydrogen. Surendranath’s PhD research focused on developing methods to catalyze the half of the reaction that extracts oxygen gas from water.

He got even more involved in catalyst development while doing a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California at Berkeley. There, he became interested in nanomaterials and the reactions that occur at the interfaces between solid catalysts and liquids.

“That interface is where a lot of the key processes that are involved in energy conversion occur in electrochemical technologies like batteries, electrolyzers, and fuel cells,” he says.

In 2013, Surendranath returned to MIT to join the faculty, at a time when many other junior faculty members were being hired.

“One of the most attractive features of the department is its balanced composition of early career and senior faculty. This has created a nurturing and vibrant atmosphere that is highly collaborative,” he says. “But more than anything else, it was the phenomenal students at MIT that drew me back. Their intensity and enthusiasm is what drives the science.”

Fuel decarbonization

Among the many electrochemical reactions that Surendranath’s lab is trying to optimize is the conversion of carbon dioxide to simple chemical fuels such as carbon monoxide, ethylene, or other hydrocarbons. Another project focuses on converting methane that is burned off from oil wells into liquid fuels such as methanol.

“For both of those areas, the idea is to convert carbon dioxide and low-carbon feedstocks into commodity chemicals and fuels. These technologies are essential for decarbonizing the chemistry and fuels sector,” Surendranath says.

Other projects include improving the efficiency of catalysts used for water electrolysis and fuel cells, and for producing hydrogen peroxide (a versatile disinfectant). Many of those projects have grown out of his students’ eagerness to chase after difficult problems and follow up on unexpected findings, Surendranath says.

“The true joy of my time here, in addition to the science, has been about seeing students that I’ve mentored grow and mature to become independent scientists and thought leaders, and then to go off and launch their own independent careers, whether it be in industry or in academia,” he says. “That role as a mentor to the next generation of scientists in my field has been extraordinarily rewarding.”

Although they take their work seriously, Surendranath and his students like to keep the mood light in their lab. He often brings mangoes, coconuts, and other exotic fruits in to share, and enjoys flying stunt kites — a type of kite that has multiple lines, allowing them to perform acrobatic maneuvers such as figure eights. He can also occasionally be seen making balloon animals or blowing extremely large soap bubbles.

“My group has really cultivated an extraordinarily positive, collaborative, uplifting environment where we go after really hard problems, and we have a lot of fun along the way,” Surendranath says. “I feel blessed to work with people who have invested so much in the research effort and have built a culture that is such a pleasure to work in every day.”

Forging ahead with care and compassion

by Ellie Immerman | Office of Graduate Education |

Amidst the uncertainty and stressors of the dual scourges of Covid-19 and structural racism, a number of MIT professors are forging thoughtful ways to support students’ well-being and scholarly development. Several Committed to Caring honorees shared their approaches for being proactive and including their research groups in decision-making, including Associate Professor Gene-Wei Li, Professor Paola Cappellaro, Professor Cathy Drennan, Professor Colette Heald, Professor Warren Seering, Associate Professor Anna Mikusheva, and Associate Professor Kerri Cahoy.

Transparency and collaborative approaches — at every level — are deeply beneficial in empowering students and building resilience in the face of considerable challenges.

Providing a roadmap

Weeks before shutdown orders in Massachusetts, Professor Gene-Wei Li emailed his lab, outlining the likely course of the coming weeks, both in terms of infectious disease progression and public health efforts. On March 1, Li encouraged students to begin gathering the supplies they needed to work from home.

Attending to the financial precarity of some graduate students, Li offered to help students who could not afford to stockpile a month’s worth of groceries and household supplies. Vitally, Li notes, “acting early is important to ensure research continuity and reduce emotional impact when an avalanche of restrictions are implemented.”

Professor Paola Cappellaro reached out to students in her classes and laboratory to offer support and advice as local Covid-19 cases emerged in March. She helped students weigh their options and access financial support as they made hurried decisions about their living situations. Cappellaro’s laboratory had transitioned to Zoom group meetings prior to MIT’s ramping down of research, which enabled them to be intentional with their discussions of research continuity.

Participatory decision-making guided by principles

Collaborative decision-making is helping Li’s lab weather the crisis. The group was among the first laboratories to begin to return to campus in June. In talking with his advisees, Li provided two principles to guide their decision-making: “safety cannot be sacrificed,” and “your careers must advance.”

He then sought their input on what a research ramp-up should look like for their lab. Providing clear structures for student involvement in decision-making was very helpful in ameliorating the high level of uncertainty and lack of control the disruptions engendered.

Li also paid attention to the little things, inviting his students to help build a “system (and not Poisson statistics) to ensure that there [was] at most one person per room at any given time.” Based on these conversations, he installed convex mirrors in shared spaces so students would know if someone else was already in a room they were about to enter. Li also installed iPads: the first few students who returned to lab are now recording and streaming their experiments, providing a resource to students who are at an earlier point in their graduate careers.

Creating deliberate interactions

Unplanned meetings are lost with remote work. Li observes, “the very nature of scheduled meetings makes them more formalized and less personal.” He has sought to address this by offering regular open Zoom hours. Being responsive and adapting communication patterns to students’ needs has been very effective in building a cohesive remote lab group.

With the loss of spontaneity, Professor Cathy Drennan is finding that problems often escalate before students raise them with her. In the past, a simple hallway interaction or tagging along on a dog walk offered informal mechanisms for students to express challenges to her before they had worsened.

Drennan is reflecting on past instances where she was annoyed with herself for working on a time-sensitive project in her office, where she could be easily interrupted. Now, she realizes that the informal lab interactions were a critical piece of her role as a principal investigator, ensuring stability and well-being within the lab group. Presently, she works to build in more availability to lower the threshold for students to raise obstacles.

Reaching out

For many, advising has turned in a more personal direction. Professor Warren Seering writes that “our students are facing unusual difficulties … We need to be on call for our students, and conversations need to include wellness check-ins to give students the chance to ask for help or guidance.”

Professor Colette Heald has made more time available for meeting with students and has introduced Zoom tea and coffee breaks, for unstructured conversation. She is very intentional about fostering the human side of mentorship. Heald finds it effective to spend “much more time sharing stories about how we are all adapting to this new normal and discussing issues in the news.”

Concurring, Professor Anna Mikusheva empathizes with the challenges students face. She writes, “in isolation, it’s very hard to stay focused and to maintain a connection with your community, peers, and advisors.” Mikusheva urges advisors to be “proactive” in checking in on students and maintaining regular meetings.

Building connections within a research group can be pivotal in persevering amid the torrent of upsetting news. “I try to nudge people to reach out to each other even in lockdown,” Cappellaro notes, “and indeed there’s been new collaborations among the group sprouting from this situation.”

Courageous conversations

Li is catalyzing conversations in his laboratory to process the traumatic histories of structural racism and sexism in this country and renew efforts to combat them. The Li lab has introduced “critical, structured social engagement” as part of their regular interactions, focusing on topics such as “racial bias in science and higher education” and “deepened gender bias in the pandemic.”

As Li notes, such conversations have always been a part of their lab’s culture, though they have become “more structured in light of our increasingly unstructured society.” Providing a trusted and safe forum in which to discuss these topics can help students as individuals as well as help advance the reforms that are vitally needed in academia.

Modeling self care

Adaptations to advising have required concerted thinking regarding needs and limitations. Vitally, faculty members are facing unusual burdens from the public health crisis as well.

Like many faculty parents, professors Kerri Cahoy and Gene-Wei Li’s hours have stretched considerably with the need to care for their young kids as well as support their advisees. They try to make transparency and self-care a regular practice, demonstrating humility with advisees.

“I don’t try to hide that I’m a real person with conflicting priorities,” Cahoy says.

Li shared with his lab that he was feeling burnt out, and took a short break in April. Their openness normalizes struggles, which is conducive to students sharing their own difficulties, and enables conversations about accommodations.

Grappling with the uncertainty of the pandemic and the ongoing harms of structural racism is a considerable burden for many graduate students. Having the support of professors who are Committed to Caring provides students with the resources and tools to rise to the challenge.

Technique recovers lost single-cell RNA-sequencing information

by Anne Trafton | MIT News Office |

Sequencing RNA from individual cells can reveal a great deal of information about what those cells are doing in the body. MIT researchers have now greatly boosted the amount of information gleaned from each of those cells, by modifying the commonly used Seq-Well technique.

With their new approach, the MIT team could extract 10 times as much information from each cell in a sample. This increase should enable scientists to learn much more about the genes that are expressed in each cell, and help them to discover subtle but critical differences between healthy and dysfunctional cells.

“It’s become clear that these technologies have transformative potential for understanding complex biological systems. If we look across a range of different datasets, we can really understand the landscape of health and disease, and that can give us information as to what therapeutic strategies we might employ,” says Alex K. Shalek, an associate professor of chemistry, a core member of the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES), and an extramural member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT. He is also a member of the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard and an institute member of the Broad Institute.

In a study appearing this week in Immunity, the research team demonstrated the power of this technique by analyzing approximately 40,000 cells from patients with five different skin diseases. Their analysis of immune cells and other cell types revealed many differences between the five diseases, as well as some common features.

“This is by no means an exhaustive compendium, but it’s a first step toward understanding the spectrum of inflammatory phenotypes, not just within immune cells, but also within other skin cell types,” says Travis Hughes, an MD/PhD student in the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology and one of the lead authors of the paper.

Shalek and J. Christopher Love, the Raymond A. and Helen E. St. Laurent Professor of Chemical Engineering and a member of the Koch Institute and Ragon Institute, are the senior authors of the study. MIT graduate student Marc Wadsworth and former postdoc Todd Gierahn are co-lead authors of the paper with Hughes.

Recapturing information

A few years ago, Shalek, Love, and their colleagues developed a method called Seq-Well, which can rapidly sequence RNA from many single cells at once. This technique, like other high-throughput approaches, doesn’t pick up as much information per cell as some slower, more expensive methods for sequencing RNA. In their current study, the researchers set out to recapture some of the information that the original version was missing.

“If you really want to resolve features that distinguish diseases, you need a higher level of resolution than what’s been possible,” Love says. “If you think of cells as packets of information, being able to measure that information more faithfully gives much better insights into what cell populations you might want to target for drug treatments, or, from a diagnostic standpoint, which ones you should monitor.”

To try to recover that additional information, the researchers focused on one step where they knew that data was being lost. In that step, cDNA molecules, which are copies of the RNA transcripts from each cell, are amplified through a process called polymerase chain reaction (PCR). This amplification is necessary to get enough copies of the DNA for sequencing. Not all cDNA was getting amplified, however. To boost the number of molecules that made it past this step, the researchers changed how they tagged the cDNA with a second “primer” sequence, making it easier for PCR enzymes to amplify these molecules.

Using this technique, the researchers showed they could generate much more information per cell. They saw a fivefold increase in the number of genes that could be detected, and a tenfold increase in the number of RNA transcripts recovered per cell. This extra information about important genes, such as those encoding cytokines, receptors found on cell surfaces, and transcription factors, allows the researchers to identify subtle differences between cells.

“We were able to vastly improve the amount of per cell information content with a really simple molecular biology trick, which was easy to incorporate into the existing workflow,” Hughes says.

Signatures of disease

Using this technique, the researchers analyzed 19 patient skin biopsies, representing five different skin diseases — psoriasis, acne, leprosy, alopecia areata (an autoimmune disease that causes hair loss), and granuloma annulare (a chronic degenerative skin disorder). They uncovered some similarities between disorders — for example, similar populations of inflammatory T cells appeared active in both leprosy and granuloma annulare.

They also uncovered some features that were unique to a particular disease. In cells from several psoriasis patients, they found that cells called keratinocytes express genes allow them to proliferate and drive the inflammation seen in that disease.

The data generated in this study should also offer a valuable resource to other researchers who want to delve deeper into the biological differences between the cell types studied.

“You never know what you’re going to want to use these datasets for, but there’s a tremendous opportunity in having measured everything,” Shalek says. “In the future, when we need to repurpose them and think about particular surface receptors, ligands, proteases, or other genes, we will have all that information at our fingertips.”

The technique could also be applied to many other diseases and cell types, the researchers say. They have begun using it to study cancer and infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria, HIV, and Ebola, and they are also using it to analyze immune cells involved in food allergies. They have also made the new technique available to other researchers who want to use it or adapt the underlying approach for their own single-cell studies.

The research was funded by the Koch Institute Support (core) Grant from the National Institutes of Health, the Bridge Project of the Koch Institute and the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center, the Food Allergy Science Initiative at the Broad Institute, the National Institutes of Health, a Beckman Young Investigator Award, a Sloan Research Fellowship in Chemistry, the Pew-Stewart Scholar Award, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.