Author: MIT News

MindHandHeart announces a record 24 Community Innovation Fund projects

by MindHandHeart |

The MindHandHeart Innovation Fund has awarded a record 24 projects and has a new name. The newly titled MindHandHeart Community Innovation Fund seeks to leverage the creativity and problem-solving skills of MIT students, staff, and faculty to increase awareness about mental health, build communities of support, promote life skills, foster resiliency, and advance diversity, equity, inclusion, and racial justice at MIT.

Sponsored by the Office of the Chancellor, the fund has supported 162 projects to date. “The MindHandHeart Community Innovation Fund is helping to fuel grassroots projects that are bringing our community together during this challenging time,” says Chancellor Cynthia Barnhart. “It is heartening to see our community’s creativity, compassion, and hard work on full display in all of our Community Innovation Fund projects.”

The MindHandHeart Community Innovation Fund also launched a special summer edition. MIT staff, faculty, students, and students’ spouses are welcome to apply by Aug. 5 with ideas to build community and resilience in light of the Covid-19 pandemic; advance diversity, equity, inclusion, and racial justice at MIT; support mental and physical health; encourage healthy sleep, eating, and exercise; spread humor and joy; and welcome new members of the MIT community virtually. Grants of up to $10,000 are available.

This spring, nine of the newly funded 24 projects aim to build community and promote mental health. Sponsored by the Department of Athletics, Physical Education, and Recreation (DAPER), the 12-session “Fitness and Resiliency: The Power to Thrive” course is teaching the science and application of fitness and resiliency skills so students have the tools to manage life’s stressors and achieve their personal goals.

“Now, more than ever, the importance of maintaining and developing personal resiliency is paramount,” says Sarah Johnson, primary wellness instructor at DAPER and project lead for the course design. “This course is designed to teach resiliency concepts, such as the power of gratitude, growth mindset, identifying and leveraging one’s personal character strengths, and more. It will be an honor to teach and connect with students around these concepts, in addition to learning from and supporting each other, during this time of physical distancing.”

Organized by the Muslim Students’ Association and the Office of Religious, Spiritual, and Ethical Life, “Muslim Mental Health Dialogues” is an event series sparking discussion about Muslim youth and mental health. PhD student and project lead Rabab Haider describes the event series, saying: “The goal of the Muslim Mental Health Dialogues Project is to facilitate honest conversations on mental health, wellness, and spirituality amongst the Muslims at MIT. We hope to create safe spaces within the community and promote meaningful and healthy dialog. Together, we’re working to debunk myths and misconceptions that contribute to the perceived taboo of addressing mental health in our communities, answer questions and concerns, and provide resources to students seeking support or learning how to be better allies.”

Senior Fiona Chen’s “Loneliness and its Effect on Academic Performance” project consists of a research study designed to understand the effects of loneliness on academic outcomes. “The innovation fund has played an invaluable role in advancing my project,” says Chen. “Social science research projects often require substantial amounts of funding, but most funds only have grants available to PhD students or professors. I will be using the funding to recruit and compensate study participants — so without the innovation fund, the project would not be possible.”

This fall, the Department of Chemistry is launching their “Peer Mentoring Program” where current graduate students are matched with new graduate students in order to facilitate peer support and resource sharing. The Department of Biological Engineering (BE) is building out their “belong.mit.edu” website project with the aim of connecting the BE department during the Covid-19 pandemic and beyond. This summer, the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) is bringing a conflict management training to their department as part of their “Conflict Management Training for the MIT-WHOI Joint Program and EAPS Community” project.

Sponsored by the Black Graduate Student Association, the “Self-Care in Community” initiative is sending a variety of care package kits to 50 of its members to support multiple dimensions of self-care, while supporting small Black-owned businesses during this time of economic crisis. “America’s Path Forward, Better Understanding Through Shared Experiences at MIT” is an inclusive civic technology that invites the entire MIT community to share questions and experiences they feel our nation must address, and participate in facilitated group discussions.“Voiceplace” is a student-driven interactive virtual environment where users can work, hold meetings, and connect.

Eight newly funded projects use art and storytelling to build community during the Covid-19 pandemic.

In partnership with the Alumni Association, juniors Emily Han and Amber Shen launched their “Sticker+Together” project to mail positive and affirming stickers to members of the MIT community. Organized by Active Minds, “Virtual Paint Bar” invites undergraduate students to paint images of campus together during a virtual paint night. The “Draw with Me” project consists of an informal weekly hangout for the MIT community to pause and refresh through drawing together online.

The “Calm Down with Coloring” project is bringing coloring books and pencils to the children and adults living in the Eastgate and Westgate residences. The “Happy Working from Home” project is engaging students in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science with virtual coloring events. The “Lumos” project consists of a series of workshops on making digital crafts.

Launching this summer, the “Staying Human Podcast” is a platform where MIT community members and prominent guests explore how to hold on to our collective humanity in this time of physical distancing. The “Stand-Up Comedy Class with Last Comic Standing’s Dan Crohn” is offering two classes in standup comedy to bring humor and joy to MIT.

Other projects include: “Asian Pacific Heritage Month,” a project to raise awareness of Asian American events and milestones through t-shirts and a digital campaign; “The Future is Latina,” a virtual event where a prominent Latina writer will speak to MIT’s Latina community; “Covid-19 Impact on Academic Well-being of Lab-based STEM Doctoral Students at their Research Midpoint,” an interview study that explores the disruption of the Covid-19 pandemic on the academic well-being of 30 lab-based STEM doctoral students; “Diaspora Recipe,” a website with recipes for healthy affordable meals that encourages students to stay connected to their heritages; “CovEd Continuing Education,” a virtual community connecting college students with low-income K-12 students in need of academic support during school shutdowns; “MIT Press Live! Virtual Author Talk Series,” a weekly virtual author talk series aimed at building vibrant online communities; and “Summer Yoga,” a weekly yoga class for members of the Westgate and Eastgate residences.

Chemists make tough plastics recyclable

by Anne Trafton | MIT News Office |

Thermosets, which include epoxies, polyurethanes, and rubber used for tires, are found in many products that have to be durable and heat-resistant, such as cars or electrical appliances. One drawback to these materials is that they typically cannot be easily recycled or broken down after use, because the chemical bonds holding them together are stronger than those found in other materials such as thermoplastics.

MIT chemists have now developed a way to modify thermoset plastics with a chemical linker that makes the materials much easier to break down, but still allows them to retain the mechanical strength that makes them so useful.

In a study appearing today in Nature, the researchers showed that they could produce a degradable version of a thermoset plastic called pDCPD, break it down into a powder, and use the powder to create more pDCPD. They also proposed a theoretical model suggesting that their approach could be applicable to a wide range of plastics and other polymers, such as rubber.

“This work unveils a fundamental design principle that we believe is general to any kind of thermoset with this basic architecture,” says Jeremiah Johnson, a professor of chemistry at MIT and the senior author of the study.

Peyton Shieh, an American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT, is the first author of the paper.

Hard to recycle

Thermosets are one of the two major classes of plastics, along with thermoplastics. Thermoplastics include polyethylene and polypropylene, which are used for plastic bags and other single-use plastics like food wrappers. These materials are made by heating up small pellets of plastic until they melt, then molding them into the desired shape and letting them cool back into a solid.

Thermoplastics, which make up about 75 percent of worldwide plastic production, can be recycled by heating them again until they become liquid, so they can be remolded into a new shape.

Thermoset plastics are made by a similar process, but once they are cooled from a liquid into a solid, it is very difficult to return them to a liquid state. That’s because the bonds that form between the polymer molecules are strong chemical attachments called covalent bonds, which are very difficult to break. When heated, thermoset plastics will typically burn before they can be remolded, Johnson says.

“Once they are set in a given shape, they’re in that shape for their lifetime,” he says. “There is often no easy way to recycle them.”

The MIT team wanted to develop a way to retain the positive attributes of thermoset plastics — their strength and durability — while making them easier to break down after use.

In a paper published last year, with Shieh as the lead author, Johnson’s group reported a way to create degradable polymers for drug delivery, by incorporating a building block, or monomer, containing a silyl ether group. This monomer is randomly distributed throughout the material, and when the material is exposed to acids, bases, or ions such as fluoride, the silyl ether bonds break.

The same type of chemical reaction used to synthesize those polymers is also used to make some thermoset plastics, including polydicyclopentadiene (pDCPD), which is used for body panels in trucks and buses.

Using the same strategy from their 2019 paper, the researchers added silyl ether monomers to the liquid precursors that form pDCPD. They found that if the silyl ether monomer made up between 7.5 and 10 percent of the overall material, pDCPD would retain its mechanical strength but could be broken down into a soluble powder upon exposure to fluoride ions.

“That was the first exciting thing we found,” Johnson says. “We can make pDCPD degradable while not hurting its useful mechanical properties.”

New materials

In the second phase of the study, the researchers tried to reuse the resulting powder to form a new pDCPD material. After dissolving the powder in the precursor solution used to make pDCPD, they were able to make new pDCPD thermosets from the recycled powder.

“That new material has nearly indistinguishable, and in some ways improved, mechanical properties compared to the original material,” Johnson says. “Showing that you can take the degradation products and remake the same thermoset again using the same process is exciting.”

The researchers believe that this general approach could be applied to other types of thermoset chemistry as well. In this study, they showed that using degradable monomers to form the individual strands of the polymers is much more effective than using degradable bonds to “cross-link” the strands together, which has been tried before. They believe that this cleavable strand approach could be used to generate many other kinds of degradable materials.

“This is an exciting advance in engineering thermoset plastics,” says Jeffrey Moore, a professor of chemistry at the University of Illinois, who was not involved in the study. “Chemists have spent most of their effort learning to synthesize better plastics, and far less chemistry research has been invested into the science of polymer deconstruction. Johnson’s work helps to fill this important gap in fundamental knowledge while providing advances of technological significance.”

If the right kinds of degradable monomers can be found for other types of polymerization reactions, this approach could be used to make degradable versions of other thermoset materials such as acrylics, epoxies, silicones, or vulcanized rubber, Johnson says.

The researchers are now hoping to form a company to license and commercialize the technology.

Patrick Casey, a new product consultant at SP Insight and a mentor with MIT’s Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation, has been working with Johnson and Shieh to evaluate the technology, including performing some preliminary economic modeling and secondary market research.

“We have discussed this technology with some leading industry players, who tell us it promises to be good for stakeholders throughout the value chain,” Casey says. “Parts fabricators get a stream of low-cost recycled materials; equipment manufacturers, such as automotive companies, can meet their sustainability objectives; and recyclers get a new revenue stream from thermoset plastics. The consumers see a cost saving, and all of us get a cleaner environment.”

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

In his element in the chem lab and the kickboxing ring

by Sofia Tong | MIT News correspondent |

Before coming to MIT to pursue a PhD in chemistry, Levi Knippel would spend hours after his workdays at Genentech, where he was an associate scientist, training with two world champion kickboxers. “It helped me break out of my shell,” he says of the sport. “This zen state of just me, my body, and my opponent trying to hurt me –– it’s like this chess match.”

In the ring, he has a combined record of one win, one loss, and one draw. “Nice and balanced,” he says with a laugh.

Knippel describes kickboxing as a challenging puzzle that requires creativity and strategy more than brute strength. A similar, though less physical, affinity for such puzzle-solving drew him to organic chemistry in high school, and ultimately to MIT, where he now studies copper-hydride chemistry. Working with molecules also requires a delicate sense of touch and balance, he says.

Unfortunately, both passions have been put on hold for the moment, due to the Covid-19 pandemic and a torn shoulder that’s kept him out of the ring. Instead of managing reactions and purifying materials in the lab, he has been writing manuscripts, submitting abstracts to conferences, and studying for his oral exam, at his home in Allston, Massachusetts. “I miss working with my hands,” he says. “When you get that material you’ve been working on for a couple weeks, and you hold that powder in your hands, it’s really satisfying.”

Wrestling with compounds

As part of the Buchwald Research Group in the Department of Chemistry, Knippel works on taking olefins, chemicals that are relatively easy and cheap to produce, and using copper catalysts to generate new compounds that might someday aid in the design of new drugs and other therapies. These compounds are chiral, having two possible orientations; in many cases, only one of those orientations might be effective in the body.

In the initial few months of his thesis project, it seemed like he was getting 95 percent of the desired chirality, but it would stubbornly turn into a 50-50 mixture over time. Ultimately, he solved this issue, which turned out to be related to his purification method. “You have to every day go to work and continue to have self-confidence to know that you’re doing everything right,” Knippel says. “Sometimes the chemistry just doesn’t work. If it worked, it would have already been discovered.”

Knippel says the chemistry department community gets him through the really difficult moments, which has also motivated him to take on leadership roles within it. As the president of the Chemistry Graduate Student Committee, he’s been liaising with other groups like Women in Chemistry and the Chemistry Alliance for Diversity and Inclusion to make the department more welcoming and inclusive. One event he remembers fondly was a department fall festival last year which marked the first big collaboration between all the student groups. “It’s just a joint effort among all these groups to make it a community that everyone wants to be a part of,” he says.

His department, he says, is the kind of place where, after learning that he had been through a particularly bad day, every member of his 40+ person cohort gave him a hug. “That’s when I knew I was in the right place,” he recalls.

A long way from home

Part of what set Knippel on the path to MIT was his strong mentorship during his undergraduate years at Johns Hopkins University. “Looking back now it was kind of presumptuous,” he says, recalling how he met his mentor, chemistry professor Thomas Lectka. On the very first day of his first year, Knippel boldly knocked on Lectka’s office door, entered, and got a position as a lab researcher. “I wanted to see how the sausage is made, so to speak,” he says. “I ended up loving it. I realized that if I do this as a career, no two days would be the same for the rest of my life.”

But at Hopkins, undergraduate research was unpaid –– and Knippel, even on full scholarship, struggled to make ends meet. Lectka helped him land a teaching assistant position that allowed him to stop working campus jobs and instead to deepen his experience in the field while maintaining a consistent source of income.

“What he did to make me be able to focus on science was huge,” Knippel says. “I just can’t imagine that I’d be where I am now if he hadn’t given me these opportunities to prove myself. I feel like I worked much harder because he was going out of his way to make my life easier.”

Finding the TA position was just one of the ways that Knippel had to navigate college as a low-income student. It had come as a surprise to him, and to many that he grew up with, that top universities had robust financial aid programs that might be open to him. And once at Hopkins, he still struggled financially. “I knew classmates who just got new laptops when theirs broke, but I basically saved everything I had to buy a Chromebook, which couldn’t even run all the programs I needed for class,” he recalls.

“I feel like I need to pay forward all the opportunities and help that have been provided to me,” he says. “That’s why I’ve been involved with programs such the MIT Summer Research Program, which aims to increase diversity in science by bringing students from underrepresented backgrounds to MIT to do research.”

“If you can, you do”

Knippel’s mother has also helped propel him on his path to academia. She had been attending university on a musical scholarship, but ultimately left before graduating, when he was born. With his biological father out of the picture, he lived with his mother and her friend in a trailer for the first years of his life. The friend would provide childcare while his mother took longer shifts at work in order to spend more time with him. Eventually his mother got married and the family settled in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, where he went to middle and high school.

“My education was always the most important thing to her,” he says of his mother. “She chose to stop her education because she had me, and just put all that energy into me.” He recalls how she put a bookshelf in the trailer and would scope out every garage sale in order to fill it with books. She also pushed him to apply to schools out of state, when many students in the area went to the state university. “It’s important that if you can, you do,” he remembers her insisting.

His years as a teaching assistant and his relationship with his mentor drew Knippel into teaching himself. The summer after college, before starting his job at Genentech, he worked as a lecturer at Montgomery College, a community college in Maryland, teaching organic chemistry to underrepresented and nontraditional students. He’s still in contact with some of them –– even helping them apply to graduate schools.

He’s still contemplating teaching as a career, although he’s also intrigued by the possibilities of working at places like Genentech, where the development of a drug could save thousands of lives. But Knippel, who is in the third year of his PhD program, still has some time to decide. “I don’t want to rule anything out,” he says.

Nine MIT School of Science professors receive tenure for 2020

by School of Science |

Beginning July 1, nine faculty members in the MIT School of Science have been granted tenure by MIT. They are appointed in the departments of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Chemistry, Mathematics, and Physics.

Physicist Ibrahim Cisse investigates living cells to reveal and study collective behaviors and biomolecular phase transitions at the resolution of single molecules. The results of his work help determine how disruptions in genes can cause diseases like cancer. Cisse joined the Department of Physics in 2014 and now holds a joint appointment with the Department of Biology. His education includes a bachelor’s degree in physics from North Carolina Central University, concluded in 2004, and a doctoral degree in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, achieved in 2009. He followed his PhD with a postdoc at the École Normale Supérieure of Paris and a research specialist appointment at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus.

Jörn Dunkel is a physical applied mathematician. His research focuses on the mathematical description of complex nonlinear phenomena in a variety of fields, especially biophysics. The models he develops help predict dynamical behaviors and structure formation processes in developmental biology, fluid dynamics, and even knot strengths for sailing, rock climbing and construction. He joined the Department of Mathematics in 2013 after completing postdoctoral appointments at Oxford University and Cambridge University. He received diplomas in physics and mathematics from Humboldt University of Berlin in 2004 and 2005, respectively. The University of Augsburg awarded Dunkel a PhD in statistical physics in 2008.

A cognitive neuroscientist, Mehrdad Jazayeri studies the neurobiological underpinnings of mental functions such as planning, inference, and learning by analyzing brain signals in the lab and using theoretical and computational models, including artificial neural networks. He joined the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences in 2013. He achieved a BS in electrical engineering from the Sharif University of Technology in 1994, an MS in physiology at the University of Toronto in 2001, and a PhD in neuroscience from New York University in 2007. Prior to joining MIT, he was a postdoc at the University of Washington. Jazayeri is also an investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research.

Yen-Jie Lee is an experimental particle physicist in the field of proton-proton and heavy-ion physics. Utilizing the Large Hadron Colliders, Lee explores matter in extreme conditions, providing new insight into strong interactions and what might have existed and occurred at the beginning of the universe and in distant star cores. His work on jets and heavy flavor particle production in nuclei collisions improves understanding of the quark-gluon plasma, predicted by quantum chromodynamics (QCD) calculations, and the structure of heavy nuclei. He also pioneered studies of high-density QCD with electron-position annihilation data. Lee joined the Department of Physics in 2013 after a fellowship at CERN and postdoc research at the Laboratory for Nuclear Science at MIT. His bachelor’s and master’s degrees were awarded by the National Taiwan University in 2002 and 2004, respectively, and his doctoral degree by MIT in 2011. Lee is a member of the Laboratory for Nuclear Science.

Josh McDermott investigates the sense of hearing. His research addresses both human and machine audition using tools from experimental psychology, engineering, and neuroscience. McDermott hopes to better understand the neural computation underlying human hearing, to improve devices to assist hearing impaired, and to enhance machine interpretation of sounds. Prior to joining MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, he was awarded a BA in 1998 in brain and cognitive sciences by Harvard University, a master’s degree in computational neuroscience in 2000 by University College London, and a PhD in brain and cognitive sciences in 2006 by MIT. Between his doctoral time at MIT and returning as a faculty member, he was a postdoc at the University of Minnesota and New York University, and a visiting scientist at Oxford University. McDermott is also an associate investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research and an investigator in the Center for Brains, Minds and Machines.

Solving environmental challenges by studying and manipulating chemical reactions is the focus of Yogesh Surendranath’s research. Using chemistry, he works at the molecular level to understand how to efficiently interconvert chemical and electrical energy. His fundamental studies aim to improve energy storage technologies, such as batteries, fuel cells, and electrolyzers, that can be used to meet future energy demand with reduced carbon emissions. Surendranath joined the Department of Chemistry in 2013 after a postdoc at the University of California at Berkeley. His PhD was completed in 2011 at MIT, and BS in 2006 at the University of Virginia. Suendranath is also a collaborator in the MIT Energy Initiative.

A theoretical astrophysicist, Mark Vogelsberger is interested in large-scale structures of the universe, such as galaxy formation. He combines observational data, theoretical models, and simulations that require high-performance supercomputers to improve and develop detailed models that simulate galaxy diversity, clustering, and their properties, including a plethora of physical effects like magnetic fields, cosmic dust, and thermal conduction. Vogelsberger also uses simulations to generate scenarios involving alternative forms of dark matter. He joined the Department of Physics in 2014 after a postdoc at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Vogelsberger is a 2006 graduate of the University of Mainz undergraduate program in physics, and a 2010 doctoral graduate of the University of Munich and the Max Plank Institute for Astrophysics. He is also a principal investigator in the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.

Adam Willard is a theoretical chemist with research interests that fall across molecular biology, renewable energy, and material science. He uses theory, modeling, and molecular simulation to study the disorder that is inherent to systems over nanometer-length scales. His recent work has highlighted the fundamental and unexpected role that such disorder plays in phenomena such as microscopic energy transport in semiconducting plastics, ion transport in batteries, and protein hydration. Joining the Department of Chemistry in 2013, Willard was formerly a postdoc at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and then the University of Texas at Austin. He holds a PhD in chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley, achieved in 2009, and a BS in chemistry and mathematics from the University of Puget Sound, granted in 2003.

Lindley Winslow seeks to understand the fundamental particles shaped the evolution of our universe. As an experimental particle and nuclear physicist, she develops novel detection technology to search for axion dark matter and a proposed nuclear decay that makes more matter than antimatter. She started her faculty position in the Department of Physics in 2015 following a postdoc at MIT and a subsequent faculty position at the University of California at Los Angeles. Winslow achieved her BA in physics and astronomy in 2001 and PhD in physics in 2008, both at the University of California at Berkeley. She is also a member of the Laboratory for Nuclear Science.

Twelve MIT faculty honored as “Committed to Caring” for 2020-2021

by MIT News |

The term “mentor” traces back to the ancient Greek author Homer. When Odysseus sets off for Troy, he entrusts his son Telemachus to a close friend, Mentor. Finding Telemachus floundering, the goddess Athena takes on the guise of Mentor, visiting and counseling Telemachus throughout “The Odyssey.” Athena, as Mentor, embodies this transfer of wisdom, compassion, and guidance; the term “mentor” has gone on to capture these sentiments.

Numerous professors at MIT echo this generosity of attention and care in their mentoring relationships with graduate students. The Committed to Caring (C2C) program recognizes outstanding mentors and promotes thoughtful, engaged mentorship throughout the Institute.

For considerate and humanizing acts such as validating students’ identities, inviting students to join in lab and departmental decision-making, and going to great lengths to ensure continuity in funding for students, 12 MIT faculty members were recently honored by their graduate students as stalwart mentors. These new honorees join 48 previous C2C honorees.

The following faculty members are the 2020-21 Committed to Caring Honorees:

  • Daron Acemoglu, Department of Economics;
  • Alfredo Alexander-Katz, Department of Materials Science and Engineering;
  • Kristin Bergmann, Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences;
  • Kerri Cahoy, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics;
  • Catherine Drennan, departments of Biology and Chemistry;
  • Colette Heald, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering;
  • Caroline Jones, Department of Architecture;
  • Jesse Kroll, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering;
  • Gene-wei Li, Department of Biology;
  • Anna Mikusheva, Department of Economics;
  • Gigliola Staffilani, Department of Mathematics; and
  • Lawrence Susskind, Department of Urban Studies and Planning.

Selecting for generous guidance

Every other year, the Office of Graduate Education invites graduate students to nominate professors for the Committed to Caring honor. A selection committee composed of graduate students and MIT staff members reads the nomination letters, settling on a pool of awardees who devote true attention to their students’ well-being. Selection criteria include the depth and breadth of faculty members’ caring actions, promoting the development of scholarly excellence in students, and the support of diversity, equity, and inclusion within the research groups and the wider community.

This year’s committee included Associate Dean for Graduate Education Suraiya Baluch (chair); Renée Caso (academic programs manager, Department of Architecture); and graduate students Courtney Lesoon (2017-19 C2C graduate community fellow; History, Theory, and Criticism section, Department of Architecture), Ellie Immerman (2019-20 C2C graduate community fellow, departments of History and Science, Technology, and Society), Noam Buckman (Department of Mechanical Engineering), Grace Putka Ahlqvist (Department of Chemistry), and Shayna Hilburg (Department of Materials Science and Engineering).

Baluch writes that she “was deeply moved to read about the many … acts of humanity and compassion that prioritized the well-being of graduate students. So many of the nomination letters spoke to the lasting impact these advisors had on their students’ professional and personal development.” The letters illustrated faculty advisors’ remarkable compassion and eagerness to wholeheartedly support their students.

In particular, these faculty tend to personalize their advising styles to the individual student; work collaboratively with students to navigate distressing life events; reassure students and help renew their love of the discipline when research results go awry; and empower students to guide their own research agendas. In the coming months, each of these honorees will be featured in an MIT News article and an accompanying poster campaign.

Faculty Peer Mentorship Program

During fall 2019, the Office of Graduate Education and Associate Provost Tim Jamison launched a pilot Faculty Peer Mentorship Program (FPMP). Ten of 29 entering untenured faculty members chose to participate. Each was matched with a previous Committed to Caring honoree.

The goal is for pairs to connect regularly throughout the year, discussing how to intentionally craft caring mentoring relationships with graduate students and postdocs. In building mentorship networks, the FPMP will help the Institute enact excellent mentorship as a community value.

Pilot faculty participants come from the schools of Science; Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences; Architecture and Planning; and Engineering. Blanche Staton, senior associate dean for graduate education, is “enthused by the wealth of advising wisdom and the eagerness of faculty members to help build a stronger MIT.”

Amid times of uncertainty and great stress, C2C honorees provide a foundation of support for the community, helping us to weather the strains and take care of each other, as well as ourselves.

Seven from MIT win 2020 Hertz Fellowships

by Office of the Vice Chancellor |

The Fannie and John Hertz Foundation announced that it has awarded seven of its 16 graduate fellowships to MIT students this year — six recent graduates and one graduate student. These prestigious awards provide each student with five years of doctoral-level research funding with “the freedom to pursue innovative ideas, wherever they may lead,” as well as lifelong professional support from previous Hertz Fellows recipients.

This year’s winners are Alexander Alabugin ’20, Alyssa Dayan ’18, Marisa Gaetz ’20, Isaac Metcalf ’20, Nolan Peard ’20, Maya Sankar ’20, and Constantine Tzouanas.

The newly minted MIT Hertz Fellows were selected from a pool of over 800 students, representing 24 universities around the United States.

“The pursuits of our 2020 Hertz Fellows embody the type of bold, risk-taking research that the Hertz Foundation has supported for almost six decades,” says Robbee Baker Kosak, the Fannie and John Hertz Foundation president. “By funding innovative thinkers and connecting visionary researchers across generations, geography, and disciplines, we create the conditions for our fellows to have an exponential impact on the most pressing problems facing our nation and world.”

To date, there are 423 MIT alumni among the 1,200 Hertz Fellows named since the foundation’s inception in 1963, and 299 completed their doctorates at MIT. In fact, more Hertz Fellows have chosen to pursue their PhDs at MIT than any other university.

In addition to the seven fellows from MIT, three Hertz Fellows from other undergraduate institutions will soon join the MIT community as PhD students: Hannah Lawrence (computer science), Vikram Sundar (computational and systems biology), and Nico Valdes Meller (physics).

This year’s MIT recipients represent a broad spectrum of research interests and potential applications, from creating new materials to engineering biological systems.

Alexander Alabugin ’20 plans to pursue chemistry further at the Caltech. Using a range of techniques such as electron resonance, Mössbauer spectroscopy, and X-ray absorption, he aims to better understand inorganic reaction mechanisms. Alabugin is also a fellow of the National Science Foundation.

Alyssa Dayan ’18 completed her bachelor’s degree in mathematics and computer science. She is currently working on simulation and prediction for autonomous vehicles at Uber Advanced Technologies Group. Dayan will begin her PhD this fall at the University of California at Berkeley, focusing on machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Marisa Gaetz ’20 graduated with a major in mathematics and a minor in philosophy. She has been deeply involved in MIT’s Prison Education Initiative and in efforts to improve diversity and inclusivity within the math community. She will remain at the Institute to begin her doctorate in mathematics, building on her work to date on the numerous connections between physics and representation theory.

Isaac Metcalf ’20 graduated as a double major in materials science and physics. He plans to attend Rice University to pursue a PhD in materials science, focusing on increasing the efficiency and stability of two-dimensional perovskite photovoltaics. He’s the co-inventor of a patent-pending design of an electrochemical flow reactor for the carbon-neutral synthesis of calcium hydroxide.

Nolan Peard ’20 completed dual degrees in physics and music in May and will begin his doctorate in applied physics at Stanford University this fall. He is especially interested exploring the use of optical techniques to control quantum states of molecules and their interactions, with the goal of creating materials and molecules with new capabilities.

Maya Sankar ’20 graduated with bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and computer science, and a minor in music. Her passion for mathematics began at an early age, doing math problems with her dad, and she went on to participate in prestigious math competitions in high school. She will continue her studies at Stanford University, with a particular focus on combinatorics.

Constantine Tzouanas is currently a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow in the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology. He plans pursue a PhD in medical engineering and medical physics at MIT. Ultimately, he hopes to engineer biological systems with applications such as environmentally responsible chemical production and organ transplants.

QS ranks MIT the world’s No. 1 university for 2020-21

by MIT News Office |

MIT has again been named the world’s top university by the QS World University Rankings, which were announced today. This is the ninth year in a row MIT has received this distinction.

The full 2019-20 rankings — published by Quacquarelli Symonds, an organization specializing in education and study abroad — can be found at topuniversities.com. The QS rankings were based on academic reputation, employer reputation, citations per faculty, student-to-faculty ratio, proportion of international faculty, and proportion of international students. MIT earned a perfect overall score of 100.

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

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

MIT also placed second in five subject areas: Accounting and Finance; Biological Sciences; Earth and Marine Sciences; Economics and Econometrics; and Environmental Sciences.

New technology enables fast protein synthesis

by Anne Trafton | MIT News Office |

Many proteins are useful as drugs for disorders such as diabetes, cancer, and arthritis. Synthesizing artificial versions of these proteins is a time-consuming process that requires genetically engineering microbes or other cells to produce the desired protein.

MIT chemists have devised a protocol to dramatically reduce the amount of time required to generate synthetic proteins. Their tabletop automated flow synthesis machine can string together hundreds of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, within hours. The researchers believe their new technology could speed up the manufacturing of on-demand therapies and the development of new drugs, and allow scientists to design artificial proteins by incorporating amino acids that don’t exist in cells.

“You could design new variants that have superior biological function, enabled by using non-natural amino acids or specialized modifications that aren’t possible when you use nature’s apparatus to make proteins,” says Brad Pentelute, an associate professor of chemistry at MIT and the senior author of the study.

In a paper appearing today in Science, the researchers showed that they could chemically produce several protein chains up to 164 amino acids in length, including enzymes and growth factors. For a handful of these synthetic proteins, they performed a detailed analysis showing their function is comparable to that of their naturally occurring counterparts.

The lead authors of the paper are former MIT postdoc Nina Hartrampf, who is now an assistant professor at the University of Zurich, MIT graduate student Azin Saebi, and former MIT technical associate Mackenzie Poskus.

Rapid production

The majority of proteins found in the human body are up to 400 amino acids long. Synthesizing large quantities of these proteins requires delivering genes for the desired proteins into cells that act as living factories. This process is used to program bacterial or yeast cells to produce insulin and other drugs such as growth hormones.

“This is a time-consuming process,” says Thomas Nielsen, head of research chemistry at Novo Nordisk, who is also an author of the study. “First you need the gene available, and you need to know something about the cellular biology of the organism so you can engineer the expression of your protein.”

An alternative approach for protein production, first proposed in the 1960s by Bruce Merrifield, who was later awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work on solid-phase peptide synthesis, is to chemically string amino acids together in a stepwise fashion. There are 20 amino acids that living cells use to build proteins, and using the techniques pioneered by Merrifield, it takes about an hour to perform the chemical reactions needed to add one amino acid to a peptide chain.

In recent years, Pentelute’s lab has invented a more rapid method to perform these reactions, based on a technology known as flow chemistry. In their machine, chemicals are mixed using mechanical pumps and valves, and at every step of the overall synthesis they cycle through a heated reactor containing a resin bed. In the optimized protocol, forming each peptide bond takes on average 2.5 minutes, and peptides up to 25 amino acids long can be assembled in less than an hour.

Following the development of this technology, Novo Nordisk, which makes several protein drugs, became interested in working with Pentelute’s lab to synthesize longer peptides and proteins. To achieve that, the researchers needed to improve the efficiency of the reactions that form peptide bonds between amino acids in the chain. For each reaction, their previous efficiency rate was between 95 and 98 percent, but for longer proteins, they needed it to be over 99 percent.

“The rationale was if we got really good at making peptides, we could expand the technology to make proteins,” Pentelute says. “The idea is to have a machine that a user could walk up to and put in a protein sequence, and it would string together these amino acids in such an efficient manner that at the end of the day, you can get the protein you want. It’s been very challenging because if the chemistry is not close to 100 percent for every single step, you will not get any of the desired material.”

To boost their success rate and find the optimal recipe for each reaction, the researchers performed amino-acid-specific coupling reactions under many different conditions. In this study, they assembled a universal protocol that achieved an average efficiency greater than 99 percent for each reaction, which makes a significant difference when so many amino acids are being linked to form large proteins, the researchers say.

“If you want to make proteins, this extra 1 percent really makes all the difference, because byproducts accumulate and you need a high success rate for every single amino acid incorporated,” Hartrampf says.

Using this approach, the researchers were able to synthesize a protein that contains 164 amino acids — Sortase A, a bacterial protein. They also produced proinsulin, an insulin precursor with 86 amino acids, and an enzyme called lysozyme, which has 129 amino acids, as well as a few other proteins. The desired protein has to be purified and then folded into the correct shape, which adds a few more hours to the overall synthesis process. All of the purified synthesized proteins were obtained in milligram quantities, making up between 1 and 5 percent of the overall yield.

Medicinal chemistry

The researchers also tested the biological functions of five of their synthetic proteins and found that they were comparable to those of the biologically expressed variants.

The ability to rapidly generate any desired protein sequence should enable faster drug development and testing, the researchers say. The new technology also allows amino acids other than the 20 encoded by the DNA of living cells to be incorporated into proteins, greatly expanding the structural and functional diversity of potential protein drugs that could be created.

“This is paving the way for a new field of protein medicinal chemistry,” Nielsen says. “This technology really complements what is available to the pharmaceutical industry, providing new opportunities for rapid discovery of peptide- and protein-based biopharmaceuticals.”

The researchers are now working on further improving the technology so that it can assemble protein chains up to 300 amino acids long. They are also working on automating the entire manufacturing process, so that once the protein is synthesized, the cleavage, purification, and folding steps also occur without any human intervention required.

Pentelute is a co-founder of a company called Amide Technologies that has licensed aspects of the peptide synthesis technology for possible commercial development. The research was funded by Novo Nordisk, a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, and an MIT Dean of Science Fellowship.

Inside the new world of online dissertation defenses

by Peter Dizikes | MIT News Office |

Call it another MIT innovation. When PhD student Jesse Tordoff passed her dissertation defense this month, she learned about the outcome in a new way: Her professors sent a thumbs-up emoji on the Zoom screen they were all sharing.

Welcome to the new world of the online dissertation defense, one of many changes academia is making during the Covid-19 pandemic. For generations, dissertation defenses have been crowning moments for PhD candidates, something they spend years visualizing. At a defense, a student presents work and fields questions; the professors on the dissertation committee then confer privately, and render their verdict to the student.

Which, in Tordoff’s case, was delivered in good humor, via a familiar little symbol.

“That was my most 2020 moment, learning I passed my defense by Zoom emoji,” says Tordoff, a biological engineer specializing in self-assembling structures.

With the pandemic limiting activity on the MIT campus from mid-March onward, moving dissertation defenses to Zoom has been a necessary adjustment. MIT students who defended dissertations this spring say they have had a variety of reactions to the change: They appreciated that family members could suddenly watch their defenses online, and some felt more relaxed in the format. But students also felt it was more challenging to engage with their audiences on Zoom.

And, inevitably, social distancing meant students could not gather in person with advisors, friends, and family to rejoice, as per the usual MIT tradition.

“That feeling of celebration — it is not something you generate by yourself,” says André Snoeck, who in late March defended his dissertation on last-mile issues in supply chains, for MIT’s Center for Transportation and Logistics.

On Zoom, grandparents in the room

Dissertation defenses are typically quasipublic events, where an audience can attend the student’s presentation but then leaves before faculty tell a student if the defense was successful. Many MIT departments stage parties afterward.

A defense on Zoom means the circle of attendees is no longer restricted by geography — something students appreciated.

“My mom logged on in South Africa from her retirement village and watched online,”  says Ian Ollis, from the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, who in May defended his dissertation about public perceptions of mass transit in the Boston area. “She wouldn’t have been able to do that if it was done in person.”

Julia Zhao, a Department of Chemistry PhD student in Professor Jeremiah Johnson‘s group, says the defense was a unique opportunity for family and friends to watch her in a professional setting.

“It was nice to see all my friends, and my family could attend too,” Zhao says, whose research focuses on polymers that have both metal and organic components. “They were going to fly in for graduation but not attend my defense, so they got to sit in on that and listen to me talk about what I’ve been doing the last five years. So that was really cool.”

Tordoff also felt that on Zoom, she could focus more easily on her remarks.

“I was less nervous than if I had been standing up there in front of a group of people,” Tordoff says. “I was sitting on my couch.” One reason for that good feeling, Tordoff adds, is that when she logged on to Zoom before the defense, the only other people already there were her grandparents, watching from England.

“I was so happy,” Tordoff says. “That never would have happened in person.”

And in Snoeck’s case, his advisors did orchestrate a virtual toast after the defense, so they could celebrate simultaneously, if not in the same room.

Kudos from strangers

At the same time, MIT students note, being on Zoom limited their interaction with the audience, compared with the nature of an in-person talk.

“You can’t read the room,” Ollis says, adding: “It’s different. You don’t have a complete perspective on the audience — you see squares of people’s faces, whereas if you do it live, you get a sense of who you’re talking to by seeing faces you recognize.”

The slightly mysterious nature of Ollis’ audience became apparent to him almost immediately after he wrapped up his online defense.

“There were quite a few people watching, who, well, I didn’t know who they were,” Ollis says. “I’ve been staying in the Ashdown grad dorm, and I was walking to the elevator after doing the defense, and somebody walked past who I didn’t recognize, and said, ‘Hey! Good job! I enjoyed that!’ I had no idea who the person was.”

Overall, Ollis says, “I thought it was a good experience. I got good feedback from people.” Even so, he adds, “I prefer being in a room with people.”

For his part, Snoeck, who has accepted a job with Amazon, felt his defense was somewhat “more like a series of Q&As, rather than a conversation” — simply due to the dynamics of the format, like the segmented nature of Zoom and its slight delays in audio transmission.

“It is weird to have a conversation with some lag in it,” notes Zhao, who will soon begin a job with a Boston-area startup, developing hydrophobic coatings. “But I made an effort to say, ‘If I interrupted, please continue.’ It is a little awkward.”

The blended defense

That said, for years now, academic faculty have sometimes been participating in dissertation defenses via Skype, Zoom, and other platforms. That typically happens when dissertation committee members are located at multiple universities, or when a professor is traveling for research or a conference. In Snoeck’s case, one of his committee members was already going to join remotely from the Netherlands anyway.

Zhao noticed a student in her department webcasting their defense last year, which seemed “a little out of the ordinary” in 2019, she recalls. But from 2020 onward, it may become standard.

“It’s kind of nice to have an extra component of people who aren’t in town but want to participate in the closing of your degree,” Zhao says. “It will definitely be more normalized, I think.”

Not all MIT PhD students defend dissertations. In MIT’s Department of Economics, the thesis consists of three papers that must be approved, and there is no formal defense, although finishing students do give fall-term presentations. Still, even for economics students, this year seems different.

“The biggest challenge has been a feeling of a lack of closure,” says Ryan Hill, a graduating MIT PhD in economics, who studies the dynamics of scientific research. “It’s been a long road.” In that vein, Hill adds, “I was really looking forward to commencement, and the doctoral hooding ceremony.” Those events will take place on May 29, online, with an in-person ceremony to be held at a later date.

To be sure, Hill is keeping matters in perspective. “In the grand scheme, it’s not bad,” says Hill, who will spend a year as a Northwestern University postdoc, and has accepted a tenure-track job at Brigham Young University.

For any new PhD, crossing that academic finish line is a huge achievement — and relief. Zhao, for instance, had to scramble to complete her lab research before MIT shuttered, and then finish writing the thesis, before the dissertation defense could occur.

“It’s been a pretty crazy two months,” Zhao reflects. “I’m just happy to be done with it.”

Susan Solomon earns Killian Award, MIT’s highest faculty honor

by Jennifer Chu | MIT News Office |

Atmospheric chemist Susan Solomon, whose pioneering scientific and environmental policy work has helped to shape international agreements for healing the ozone layer and mitigating climate change, has been named the recipient of the 2020-2021 James R. Killian Jr. Faculty Achievement Award.

The Killian Award is the highest honor the MIT faculty can give to one of its members, to recognize “outstanding contributions to their fields, to MIT, and to society.”

“I am truly very, very touched,” Solomon says. “I feel humbled, knowing how wonderful the MIT faculty is. I am overwhelmed, and I’ll do my best to live up to it.”

Solomon is the Lee and Geraldine Martin Professor of Environmental Studies in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences and holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Chemistry. She joined the MIT faculty in 2012, following an influential 30-year career at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Aeronomy Laboratory, in Boulder, Colorado.

Throughout her career, Solomon has strived to both meticulously study the interactions of the Earth’s climate system and communicate key scientific findings to international negotiators, policymakers, and the general public.

“It is our great pleasure to have this opportunity to honor Professor Susan Solomon for the inestimable value of the discoveries she has contributed to atmospheric science and for the inspiring example of her engagement and leadership in working toward real-world solutions to address the global climate crisis,” the award citation states.

Solomon is renowned for having identified the link between chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs — the chemicals given off by now-obsolete refrigerators, air conditioners, and building insulation — and the depletion of Antarctic ozone. Ozone is the layer in the stratosphere that normally protects the Earth from harmful ultraviolet radiation. Solomon was the first to show through theoretical work that human-made CFCs react with cold polar stratospheric clouds to eat away at ozone. She then led expeditions to Antarctica, where she collected the first direct measurements of reactive atmospheric chlorine compounds, which showed that CFCs were indeed the cause of the widening ozone hole there.

Her findings helped to shape the Montreal Protocol, an international agreement signed by nearly every country in the world that pledged to end the production and use of CFCs worldwide. In 2016, her research group at MIT identified the first encouraging signs of ozone recovery over Antarctica, as a direct result of international cooperation to phase out the ozone-depleting chemicals.

Solomon has also turned her focus to climate change, and has taken leadership roles in shaping international climate policies. From 2002 to 2008, she was co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Working Group 1, where she played a leading role in communicating to international policymakers key scientific findings that helped inform the language of the Paris Agreement, the global treaty that commits participating nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

“The process of scientific input to climate negotiations is essentially about rephrasing the science in ways that are still accurate, and in my opinion, understandable to a wider range of people,” Solomon says. “If the policy people can understand the science, then lots more people will be able to understand it than if you had written it in your turgid scientific prose. And that’s a good thing.”

For their efforts, the IPCC, in equal part with Al Gore, was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

At MIT, Solomon and her research group continue to explore questions related to the ozone layer, including the ways in which particles in that part of the stratosphere interact in tropical regions. They are also looking into the links between changes in stratosphere and and changes in climate at the surface, particularly on sea ice in the Arctic.

In addition to her research and teaching at MIT, which the award citation states “combines rigorous examination of the fundamentals with practice in engineering, policy, economics, and the history of science,” Solomon has played a key role in shaping the Institute’s new undergraduate minor in environment and sustainability, which was launched during her tenure as the founding director of MIT’s Environmental Solutions Initiative.

Solomon is currently on sabbatical in Boulder, where she is writing a new, optimistic book that will explore the ways in which the world has successfully dealt with environmental issues in the past, ranging from eliminating lead from gasoline, to reducing smog, and of course, curbing ozone depletion.

“I think it’s a message of hope for our environmental future,” says Solomon, who notes that a key contributor to each of these successes was an interested, invested public.

“The level of public attention to climate change has increased incredibly in the last two to three years, and I attribute some of that to how perceptible the problem has become,” Solomon says. “A whole sequence of events, such as the record-breaking temperatures in the European heat wave of 2019, just slapped us in the face in the last several years, and people are starting to pay attention. And that’s step one. Nothing happens without public understanding.”

She credits her MIT colleagues, and the Institute as a whole, for supporting cooperation, rather than competition, between researchers.

“MIT institutionally is unmatched in how it encourages collaboration between faculty members, which fosters tremendous amounts of creative thinking,” Solomon says. “Scientists worldwide are a joy to work with. They’re after the truth, they’re after the best future, and the best facts that we can provide to people.”

Solomon earned her BS in chemistry from the Illinois Institute of Technology, and an MS and PhD in chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley. She has received numerous awards in recognition of her science and international policy work, among them, the U.S. National Medal of Science in 1999, and in 2010 the Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur from the French government — an honor typically reserved for French citizens.

“Professor Solomon has received even more awards and honors — more than can be recounted here,” the award citation goes on. “But we must include one of the most unusual and certainly the coolest, both figuratively and literally: In 1994, both Solomon Glacier (78°23’S, 162°30’E) and Solomon Saddle (78°23’S, 162°39’E) were named in honor of Professor Solomon’s leadership in Antarctic research.”