Author: MIT News

Applying machine learning to challenges in the pharmaceutical industry

by Stefanie Koperniak, Department of Chemical Engineering |

MIT continues its efforts to transform the process of drug design and manufacturing with a new MIT-industry consortium, the Machine Learning for Pharmaceutical Discovery and Synthesis. The new consortium already includes eight industry partners, all major players in the pharmaceutical field, including Amgen, BASF, Bayer, Lilly, Novartis, Pfizer, Sunovion, and WuXi. A large number of these have a research presence in Cambridge or the surrounding areas, allowing for close cooperation and the creation of a center for artificial intelligence (AI) applications in pharmaceuticals.

The drug discovery process can often be exceedingly expensive and time-consuming, but machine learning offers tremendous opportunities to more efficiently access and understand vast amounts of chemical data — with great potential to improve both processes and outcomes. The consortium aims to break down the divide between machine learning research at MIT and drug discovery research — bringing MIT researchers and industry together to identify and address the most significant problems.

As part of the broader initiative to bring together machine learning and drug research, in April, MIT hosted a summit led by Regina Barzilay, the Delta Electronics Professor of Computer Science, and Dina Katabi, the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. The summit gathered MIT researchers with leaders of technology, biotech, and regulatory agencies to engage in ways digital technologies and artificial intelligence can help address major challenges in the biomedical and health care industries.

The earliest seeds for the consortium began with software and technology funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) “Make-It” program, which has the goal of integrating machine learning with automated systems for chemical synthesis. MIT researchers discussed the potential for a consortium with pharmaceutical industry contacts, initially meeting with company representatives in May 2017 and again in September 2017 — at which time there was great interest from both industry and MIT researchers in working together. Since then, through work with the MIT Office of Sponsored Programs (OSP) and the MIT Technology Licensing Office (TLO), the consortium has been officially formed. A consortium meeting on May 3 brought together industry members and MIT researchers.

“The enthusiasm of the member companies and the potential of machine learning create a tremendous opportunity for advancing the toolbox for medical scientists in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries,” says Klavs Jensen, the Warren K. Lewis Professor of Chemical Engineering and professor of materials science and engineering.

“Machine learning can help plan chemical synthesis pathways and help identify which chemical parts within a molecule contribute to particular properties,” adds Jensen. “Also, this may ultimately lead us to explore new chemical spaces, increase chemical diversity, and give us a larger opportunity to identify suitable compounds that will have specific biological functions.”

The May 3 meeting aimed to introduce the industry members to fundamentals of machine learning through tutorials and joint research projects. Toward this goal, Barzilay taught the first tutorial on the basics of supervised learning; the tutorial covered neural models and focused on representation learning with the goal of preparing participants for technical presentations in the afternoon.

“We are at the beginning of a relatively unexplored field with endless opportunities for new science, which has real impact on people’s lives,” says Barzilay. “Our colleagues from the pharmaceutical industry care about science the way we do at MIT — this is key to successful collaboration. I am continuously learning from them and getting new problems to think about.”

Barzilay says that one of the goals of the consortium is to establish evaluation standards and create benchmark datasets for assessing the accuracy of machine learning methods. Currently, most research groups evaluate their results on proprietary datasets, which prevents comparison across different models — and slows scientific progress. To make the matters worse, many publicly available datasets are not representative of the real complexities that pharma researchers are facing.

“It is for the benefit of everybody — both researchers and users of new technology — to really understand where we stand and what is true capacity of new machine learning technology,” Barzilay says.

MIT principal investigators for the consortium span different areas and departments, bringing expertise in machine learning, chemistry, and chemical engineering. In addition to professors Jensen and Barzilay, PIs include: William H. Green, the Hoyt C. Hottel Professor in Chemical Engineering; Tommi Jaakkola, the Thomas Siebel Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society; and Timothy Jamison, the Robert R. Taylor Professor and head of the Department of Chemistry.

“By marrying chemical insights with modern machine learning concepts and methods, we are opening new avenues for designing, understanding, optimizing, and synthesizing drugs,” says Jaakkola. “The consortium contributes to lifting chemistry to the realm of data science and bringing about a new interdisciplinary area akin to computational biology, with its own key questions and goals. The collaboration also offers a new training ground for students and researchers alike.”

At the recent consortium meeting, Connor Coley, a graduate student in the Department of Chemical Engineering who works in the research groups of professors Green and Jensen, presented an overview and demonstration of synthesis planning software — which could have an especially significant impact in the area of small molecule discovery and development. (Some aspects of this synthesis planning work are summarized in the recent paper, “Machine Learning in Computer-Aided Synthesis Planning.”) Coley says that although synthesis planning software has existed for decades, no system has yet achieved widespread adoption.

“We’re in a unique position now where access to large amounts of chemical data and computing power has enabled new approaches that might finally make these tools useful and appealing to practicing chemists,” says Coley. “Synthesis planning has a clear role in early stage discovery, where rapidly identifying synthetic strategies for novel molecules can decrease the cycle time of design-synthesis-test iterations. We’re looking forward to working closely with the consortium members to help facilitate the work they do and see our methodologies and tools translated into practice.”

Likewise, industry partners see great value and potential in implementing machine learning approaches.

“The application of machine learning tools provides an opportunity to augment and accelerate drug discovery and development — and get new medicines to patients more quickly,” says Shawn Walker, director of process development of pivotal drug substance technologies at Amgen. “Machine learning tools could help to design the best molecules based on binding affinity and minimizing toxicity, design the best and most cost-effective synthetic processes to manufacture these molecules, and extract insights from disparate sources — including chemical literature and company databases. The possibilities are endless, and we hope that partnering top scientific talent with the best machine learning tools will lead to better outcomes for patients.”

“We are excited to participate in this MIT machine learning consortium, along with our other industry partners,” says José Duca, head of computer aided drug discovery in global discovery chemistry at the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research. “This consortium will tackle the challenge of efficient and targeted route-planning using state-of-the-art machine learning approaches. Ultimately, we hope this accelerates our ability to make safer, more potent drugs against human disease.”

Mircea Dincă: Searching for materials that collect and store energy

by David L. Chandler |

Growing up in Romania, Mircea Dincă became fascinated with chemistry at an early age, and by the time he was in high school he was a regular participant — and prizewinner — in chemistry Olympiads there. Those early activities helped him earn a full scholarship to Princeton University, where that interest really took root.

“I got my first taste of chemistry in grade school, and I had six years of chemistry before college,” he recalls. By the age of 15, he had devoured a large tome on general chemistry, and then proceeded to learn as much as he could about all of the natural elements.

When he got to Princeton, he worked with chemistry professor Jeffrey Schwartz, who was “probably the one who had the most influence” on his early career path, says Dincă (pronounced “DINK-uh”), adding, “He had a cynical sense of humor that I enjoyed.” While Dincă had originally set out to work on organic chemistry, Schwartz, who specializes in the interfaces between different materials, “very quietly pushed me more toward materials chemistry.” In the end, “he turned me into a materials chemist,” Dincă says.

After earning his undergraduate degree at Princeton, Dincă moved on to the University of California at Berkeley for his doctoral research, where he worked with chemistry professor Jeffrey Long. “I picked this lab where they were working on fairly new materials,” including unusually porous materials called metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), which were quite new at the time, he says. “I was really interested in working on some materials research that had some environmental impact.”

Ten years ago, that impulse drew him to MIT, where he worked with then-MIT professor Daniel Nocera on developing materials to create an “artificial leaf” as a means to capture solar energy and store it in chemical form so it could be used whenever needed. The proof-of-concept device used the power of sunlight to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, which could be used, for example, to power a fuel-cell car.

From then on, he says, “I stayed in this realm of environmental and energy research.” And, after Nocera moved from MIT to Harvard University, Dincă actually ended up in Nocera’s old office. Working with Nocera, he says, “I didn’t do anything with MOFs, but I learned a lot about the physical properties, the electronic structure of materials.” And in the process, he says, “I realized that there were very few people who were thinking deeply about the electronic structure of MOFs.” Yet those compounds, he was confident, “could lead to interesting materials that people weren’t really looking at.”

He began exploring these exotic materials, which combine in one material the two fundamental types of chemistry: organic chemistry, which involves all compounds that include carbon and form the basis of all biological processes; and inorganic chemistry, which deals with everything else (and mostly with metals, which dominate the periodic table, and their compounds and alloys).

In his explorations of MOFs, he studied ways of making the materials fluorescent, so that they could, for example, detect certain molecules and signal their presence by emitting fluorescent light. He also studied ways of using MOFs as catalysts for very specific kinds of chemical reactions. “All of that came about through a combination of what I had learned about MOFs in grad school, and what I learned in Dan’s lab,” he says.

While MOFs were initially discovered about 20 years ago, he says, they rose to the prominence they enjoy today as a result of the realization that these compounds could be made to be extremely porous, with extraordinarily high surface areas in relation to their size. “That’s what propelled them to the prominence they have today. Now, it’s a huge field,” he says.

Among other projects, Dincă and his students found a way to make MOFs, which are usually electrical insulators, into electrical conductors, which enabled them to use the large surface area of these materials to create a new kind of supercapacitors for energy storage.

His decision to come to MIT a decade ago, he recalls, came at a time when “I had a number of different opportunities. In the end, it came down to the people.” Though he had more lucrative offers elsewhere, he chose MIT “not for the money, not for the weather. It’s the students you get. I’ve been to many other places, and I haven’t seen the quality of students that we have here. It’s just the people — and that includes the colleagues.” Last year, he earned tenure as an associate professor of chemistry.

Dincă became a U.S. citizen early this year. He and his wife, Alexandra, who is also from Romania, met while they were both students at Princeton. She is now a lawyer, and they have two children, Amalia and Gruia. His father, a Romanian Orthodox priest, and his mother, a kindergarten teacher, are retired and still live in Romania.

When he is not in the lab or the classroom, he says, “I try to be in nature as much as I can, like hiking up a mountain in the woods.” When his work involves travel, “I like to mix travel with some sightseeing.”

His research continues to expand but remains mostly focused on highly porous materials such as MOFs, though he has recently forayed into research related to one-dimensional materials, a project that is just getting underway.

“I’ve always been driven by a desire to make things,” Dincă says. He follows that approach in his teaching as well. In his classes, he sometimes grades half of the assignments but leaves the other half open and ungraded to encourage exploration. “I’m just grateful for all the students that I have, and have had,” he says. “Everything that I’ve achieved so far is due to them.”

QS ranks MIT the world’s No. 1 university for 2018-19

by MIT News |

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Matthew Shoulders wins Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award

by Danielle Randall, Department of Chemistry |

Whitehead Career Development Associate Professor Matthew D. Shoulders has been named one of 13 young faculty nationwide to be honored with a 2018 Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award by the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation.

“I am humbled to be recognized by this award,” said Shoulders. “As a big believer in the dual roles of faculty as both researchers and teachers, being recognized alongside such a superb group of current and past recipients is a great honor.”

The Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Awards Program supports the research and teaching careers of talented young faculty in the chemical sciences, and, when choosing its Teacher-Scholars, the foundation seeks those who demonstrate leadership in both research and education. As a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar, Shoulders will receive an unrestricted research grant of $75,000. Since its inception in 1970, the Teacher-Scholar program has awarded over $45 million to support emerging young leaders in the chemical sciences.

Following an American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellowship at The Scripps Research Institute under Professor Jeffery Kelly, Shoulders joined the MIT Department of Chemistry faculty as an assistant professor in 2012. He was promoted to associate professor without tenure in July 2017. Shoulders also serves as an associate member of the Broad Institute, an investigator at the Center for Skeletal Research at Massachusetts General Hospital, and a member of the MIT Center for Environmental Health Sciences.

Shoulders graduated summa cum laude from Virginia Tech in 2004, earning a BS in chemistry and minor in biochemistry. He earned a PhD in chemistry at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 2009. Shoulders’ honors include the National Institutes of Health Director’s New Innovator Award, the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the 56th Mallinckrodt Foundation Faculty Scholar Award, the Smith Family Foundation Excellence in Biomedical Research Award, and MIT’s Committed to Caring Award for Student Mentoring.

The goals of the Shoulders Lab are to understand how protein folding problems are solved in living systems and to discover mechanism-based strategies that can correct pathological protein misfolding. In pursuit of these objectives, they develop and apply new chemical genetic and biochemical methods to elucidate important folding challenges and to illuminate how the interplay between biophysics and cellular proteostasis shapes protein evolution.

The Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation is a leading nonprofit organization devoted to the advancement of the chemical sciences. It was established in 1946 by chemist, inventor, and businessman Camille Dreyfus in honor of his brother Henry. The foundation seeks to support the advancement of chemistry, chemical engineering, and related sciences as a means of improving human relations and circumstances around the world.

Chi Zhang wins IUPAC-Solvay International Award for Young Chemists

by Danielle Randall, Department of Chemistry |

Chi Zhang, a postdoc in the MIT Department of Chemistry, has been named one of five winners of the 2018 International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry-Solvay International Award for Young Chemists for his thesis, entitled “Cysteine Arylation.”

Upon winning this award, Zhang expressed his sincere gratitude for his collaborators during his time as a graduate student.

“The prize is a great honor for recognizing my thesis performed under Professor Brad Pentelute’s supervision,” said Zhang. “I wouldn’t have had a chance to win this prize without Brad’s support and encouragement throughout my years in graduate school, and, in addition, my thesis chair, Professor JoAnne Stubbe, has been instrumental in providing me with advice and help for my science and career. I am also very fortunate to have worked with exceptional collaborators from the groups of Professor Steve Buchwald, Professor Troy Van Voorhis, Professor Mei Hong, and Professor Dane Wittrup. MIT’s highly collaborative environment is one of my best experiences in graduate research.”

The IUPAC-Solvay International Award recognizes the best PhD theses in the chemical sciences. Zhang was selected from a pool of 45 applications from individuals receiving their PhD degrees from institutions in 15 countries. The award selection committee, chaired by Professor Natalia Tarasova, IUPAC past president, comprised members of the IUPAC Bureau and a senior science advisor from Solvay, all of whom have a wide range of experience in chemistry.

Zhang will receive a cash prize of $1,000, in addition to travel expenses to the 47th IUPAC World Chemistry Congress, July 7-12, 2019, in Paris. Along with his fellow winners, Zhang will also be invited to present a poster at the IUPAC Congress describing his award-winning work and to submit a short critical review on aspects of his research topic, to be published in Pure and Applied Chemistry. The awards will be presented to the winners of the 2018 and 2019 competitions during the opening ceremony of the congress.

Research in the Pentelute lab entails the use of new chemistry and platforms to solve important problems in chemical biology. The group focuses on the use of cysteine arylation to generate abiotic macromolecular proteins, the precision delivery of biomolecules into cells, and the development of fast flow platforms to rapidly produce polypeptides.

Brad Pentelute: In search of novel proteins

by Anne Trafton |

Scientists who want to treat disease by delivering large proteins such as antibodies or enzymes to cells have struggled to overcome one major bottleneck: getting the proteins to cross cell membranes so they can enter the target cells. In the search for new ways to deliver such drugs, MIT associate professor of chemistry Brad Pentelute has turned to an unlikely ally — the anthrax toxin.

The bacterium Bacillus anthracis has very efficient machinery for penetrating cell membranes and injecting toxic proteins into cells. Pentelute, who has studied this process since his years as a postdoc at Harvard Medical School, decided to enlist this toxin, which he renders harmless by modifying two of the three proteins that form the toxin.

“We disarm it and remove all of its toxic functionality, but still maintain the delivery mechanism. Then we hijack that system to deliver proteins, peptides, and other molecules into specific cell types,” Pentelute says.

Using this and other innovative approaches to crossing cell membranes, Pentelute hopes to devise new ways to deliver not only large proteins but also nucleic acids such as RNA and DNA, which could be used to correct genetic mutations or reduce expression of a disease-causing gene. His lab also designs novel proteins that could be utilized to treat disease, using a variety of chemical modifications.

“We’re a lab that really tries to use chemistry to solve problems in biotechnology,” he says. “We can use a variety of techniques to change the chemistry of these proteins so they have different structures and functionalities.”

Unexpected discoveries

A native of San Diego, Pentelute began his undergraduate career at the University of Southern California as a psychology major. However, after taking some chemistry courses, he decided to add a chemistry major and began working in an organometallic chemistry lab. After graduating from USC, he went to the University of Chicago to study bioorganic chemistry, a field that employs chemical methods to study biological phenomena.

As a graduate student, Pentelute studied a subset of proteins called antifreeze proteins, which inhibit ice formation and help organisms such as the snow flea survive in subfreezing temperatures. At the time, no one had discovered the structure of these proteins, but Pentelute found a way to crystallize them so that he could use X-ray crystallography to analyze their structure.

In doing so, he made an unexpected discovery. Amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, can exist in two different configurations, known as L and D. The L and D versions of a particular amino acid have the same chemical composition but are mirror images of each other. Cells use only proteins made from L amino acids, but Pentelute found that if he synthesized the L and D configurations of the antifreeze protein, the resulting mixture was much more likely to crystallize.

“In some cases, proteins are difficult to crystallize, so we found a little bit of a trick: If you could chemically synthesize the mirror image form, then you’re more likely to get crystal formation than if you have the pure L form alone, just because of the packing considerations of how the crystal can form,” Pentelute says. “That turned out to be a fun, unexpected path of the research program.”

After finishing his PhD, Pentelute joined a startup company that was designing new peptides for treating diabetes. During the nine months he spent there, he decided that academic research was a better fit for him. “I realized I had a passion for academic-based research, where you have the freedom to do basic science, and when unexpected discoveries come up you can pursue them,” he says.

Seeking solutions

Pentelute returned to the academic world as a postdoc at Harvard Medical School, where he first began working on the anthrax toxin. Working with John Collier, Pentelute helped to discover how the anthrax toxin is able to penetrate cell membranes.

Since joining the MIT faculty in 2011, Pentelute has continued working on anthrax, hoping to develop it as a possible vehicle for delivering drugs across not only cell membranes but also the blood-brain barrier. This barrier, which separates circulating blood from the brain, makes it very difficult to deliver drugs to the brain.

Pentelute’s lab is also developing novel proteins not found in nature, by stringing together amino acids of the D configuration, including some novel amino acids not used by cells. Using this approach, Pentelute and his students can create libraries of millions of proteins that they then screen for effectiveness against a range of diseases.

To help with the large-scale protein production needed for all of these projects, Pentelute’s lab has also invented a new tabletop machine that can string together amino acids using chemistry, to synthesize the desired proteins within minutes. He recently launched a company called Amide Technologies, located in Kendall Square, that is working toward commercializing the peptide synthesis technology.

Being in such close proximity to the biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies surrounding MIT is one of the major features that drew Pentelute to the Institute.

“For people interested in biotech, MIT is like Disneyland,” he says. “You can walk across the street and talk to the world leaders in the development of antibody-based therapeutics, or you can go down the street and talk to other people that are really excited about delivery of oligonucleotides into cells, and other kinds of therapeutics.”

Celebrating great mentorship for graduate students

by Office of Graduate Education |

“When we talk about our experiences as graduate students at MIT, my colleagues and I tend to use words like ‘challenging,’ ‘rewarding,’ ‘inspiring,’ or ‘stressful’,” says Courtney Lesoon, the 2017-2018 Graduate Community Fellow for the Committed to Caring Program and a PhD student in the History, Theory and Criticism Section of the Department of Architecture. “Usually our discussions center around our research interests, new findings in our field, or upcoming deadlines.”

The conversation about challenges and stresses at MIT, though, is arguably shifting. A number of new programs have been initiated across campus that prioritize emotional and mental health not just as supplementary to the lives of students, but as integral to them. Such programs include MindHandHeart, the campus coalition to support community wellness; work of the Institute Community and Equity Office (ICEO); Active Minds, the student-led initiative for better health and wellness; and Committed to Caring (C2C), which honors caring faculty on campus.

In recent years, a growing body of research has highlighted the importance of advising and mentorship to graduate students’ academic experience and well-being. The Committed to Caring program recognizes that in graduate school, advisors and mentors set the tone for student experiences, and positive faculty support has the ability to shape student research and lives for the better. C2C honors professors who build inclusive cultures in their labs and classrooms, who support their students’ mental and emotional health, and who actively support their students’ scholarly pursuits. Selected faculty members are showcased via a broad campus poster campaign, individual profiles housed on the Office of Graduate Education website, and MIT News articles.

A celebration of caring

On April 11, a celebration was held to honor all past Committed to Caring awardees, as well as the 28 new awardees listed below. Profiles for the first two slates of C2C awardees may be found on the Committed to Caring website.

The event, held in the Samberg Conference Center, was hosted by Vice Chancellor Ian Waitz and included remarks by Provost Martin Schmidt and Senior Associate Dean for Graduate Education Blanche Staton. Formal recognition of these new awardees will be ongoing throughout the 2018-2019 academic year, as pairs of posters and profiles are released each month.

The following faculty members are the 2017-2018 recipients of the Committed to Caring Award:

Emilio Baglietto, Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering

Cullen Buie, Department of Mechanical Engineering

Paola Cappellaro, Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering

Gabriella Carolini , Department of Urban Studies and Planning

Anna Frebel, Department of Physics

Paula Hammond, Department of Chemical Engineering

Wesley Harris, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics

Erin Kelly, Sloan School of Management

Tom Kochan, Sloan School of Management

Ju Li, Department of Materials Science and Engineering

John Lienhard, Department of Mechanical Engineering

Eytan Modiano, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics

Susan Murcott, Department of Urban Studies and Planning

Bradley Olsen, Department of Chemical Engineering

Agustin Rayo, Department of Linguistics and Philosophy

Rebecca Saxe, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences

Warren Seering, Department of Mechanical Engineering

Julie Shah, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics

Matthew Shoulders, Department of Chemistry

Hadley Sikes, Department of Chemical Engineering

Justin Steil, Department of Urban Studies and Planning

David Trumper, Department of Mechanical Engineering

Lily Tsai, Department of Political Science

Harry Tuller, Department of Materials Science and Engineering

Evelyn Wang, Department of Mechanical Engineering

Kamal Youcef-Toumi, Department of Mechanical Engineering

Jinhua Zhao, Department of Urban Studies and Planning

Ezra Zuckerman, Sloan School of Management

Student centered, student driven

Graduate students from across MIT’s campus are invited by the Office of Graduate Education (OGE) to nominate professors whom they believe to be outstanding mentors for the Committed to Caring Award. The nominations are then parsed by a selected committee composed primarily of graduate students, with additional representation by staff and faculty in the form of a prior recipient.

Selection criteria for C2C include the scope and reach of advisor impact on the experience of graduate students, excellence in scholarship, and demonstrated commitment to diversity and inclusion. By recognizing the human element of graduate education, C2C aims to encourage good advising and mentorship across MIT’s campus. The C2C Program was conceived in 2014 by Monica Orta, then-OGE assitant director for diverisity initiatives, and implemented by Orta and OGE Communications officer Heather Konar.

The work is driven each year by one graduate student who serves as the C2C Graduate Community Fellow and works closely with Konar. This year’s selection committee included Assistant Dean for Graduate Education Suraiya Baluch (chair), Professor Amy Glasmeier (previous C2C honoree), and graduate students Courtney Lesoon (2017-18 C2C Graduate Community Fellow), Claire Duvallet, Danielle Olson, and Jennifer Cherone (2016-17 C2C Graduate Community Fellow).

A process of affirmation

The C2C Program contributes to OGE’s mission of making graduate education at MIT “empowering, exciting, holistic, and transformative.” The opening of nominations in 2014 received a strong response, and the number and richness of nominations in subsequent rounds has only grown.

Baluch remarked of the most recent selection round, “It was heartwarming to read the numerous accounts regarding acts of compassion, kindness and generosity of spirit in our community. It speaks to the power and impact acts of caring have that so many students felt compelled to participate in the nominating process. These acts were often simple, every day actions such as regularly inquiring about someone’s wellbeing or sharing a meal as well as responding with humanity to life’s struggles.”

In 2017, the OGE received 114 nominations for 72 faculty members across campus. Committee members expressed being deeply moved by the thoughtful, sincere, and touching nominations that were submitted. Blanche Staton, senior associate dean for graduate education, says “I am grateful to our students for recognizing the caring and positive spirit and the contributions of our faculty, and I join them in applauding the professors who, by their example, show us all what it truly means to ‘advance a caring and respectful community’.”

Guideposts for strong mentoring

As the committee reviewed this past year’s nominations, a number of striking themes emerged. Supported by numerous personal quotes, fellow Courtney Lesoon and the C2C team developed a list of “Mentoring Guideposts” that reflect acts of mentorship that seem to be the most meaningful and formative.

MIT graduate students were moved to nominate mentors who:

  • actively show empathy for students’ personal experiences;
  • advocate for students both academically and personally;
  • validate students by demonstrating interest in their research and ideas;
  • encourage and support students in developing a healthy work/life balance;
  • have courageous conversations about issues that impact students outside of MIT, such as political developments, personal loss, or housing needs;
  • initiate contact with students, check in consistently, and provide extra support as needed;
  • provide a channel for students to express their difficulties, including the means to do so anonymously;
  • foster a friendly and inclusive work environment;
  • emphasize learning, development, and practice over achievement and goals; and
  • advise informally, teaching students about the system of academia, the importance of networking, and professional development skills.

The C2C team is exploring ideas to disseminate the guideposts widely across campus.

Marvelous Molecules in Play delights at Campus Preview Weekend

by Department of Chemistry |

On Thursday, April 12, 2018, admitted members of the MIT undergraduate class of 2022 were invited to experience a thrilling hour of chemistry magic presented by Dr. John Dolhun (PhD ’72), Instructor in the Department of Chemistry Undergraduate Labs.

Dr. Dolhun, assisted by Chemistry graduate student Alex Shcherbakov, gave a spectacular demonstration, and engaged the group of future freshmen with visually dazzling experiments, including magical polymers, flaming vapors, chemiluminescence, the trial of a gummy bear, and other celebrations of chemical reactions. Over the course of the hour, several audience members enthusiastically volunteered to participate in the experiments.

2018 Change Makers honored for their work to combat sexual misconduct

by Office of the Chancellor |

On April 4, Institute leaders, faculty, students, and staff came together to honor the individuals, student groups, and departments who have made outstanding contributions to preventing and responding to sexual misconduct at MIT in the 2017-18 academic year. Dubbed “Change Makers,” award recipients were recognized by MIT Violence Prevention and Response (VPR) and the Title IX and Bias Response Office for their efforts to reflect the values and mission of the Institute; challenge harmful attitudes, language, and behaviors; and help bring about important changes in culture.

“The wave of national sexual assault cases that came to light this year served as a painful reminder that sexual misconduct is pervasive, and underscored that, at MIT, we all have a responsibility as individuals and as a community to be forces for positive change,” said Chancellor Cynthia Barnhart during welcoming remarks at the ceremony. “That’s exactly what our 2018 Change Makers are doing — taking responsibility for raising awareness, increasing education, and making clear that sexual misconduct has no place at MIT. I am impressed by and thankful for the example set by our students, student groups, and departments and the excellent work they do to make our community more safe, respectful, and welcoming to all.”

The 2018 Change Maker honorees are:

  • Graduate Women at MIT (GWAMIT) was recognized in the student group category for their efforts to raise awareness about sexual harassment and gender equity at MIT and other colleges. GWAMIT has hosted community discussions throughout the year, and partnered with the Title IX and Bias Response Office and various graduate women’s groups across campus to promote collaboration and the sharing of best practices. This work resulted in the development of several department-based climate surveys at MIT, a New England-area survey of graduate students, and a recent Title IX summit with local institutions of higher education.
  • The Department of Chemistry’s efforts to enhance education and training for faculty, students, and staff were selected and highlighted as a model for other MIT departments to follow. Spearheaded by former chemistry graduate student Michelle Macleod and enthusiastically endorsed by department head Timothy F. Jamison, the Department of Chemistry now requires all principal investigators to host workshops on a bi-annual basis that focus on preventing sexual harassment and creating an inclusive learning and work environment.
  • Senior David Dellal was selected in the undergraduate student category for his leadership on the InterFraternity Council (IFC) to confront and change harmful attitudes that perpetuate sexual misconduct. As the IFC risk manager, IFC president, and chair of the IFC Sexual Misconduct Committee, Dellal has used these different platforms to start important conversations, initiate partnerships with VPR, MIT’s Panhellenic Association, and Boston Area Rape Crisis Center, and launch new training and certification programs to educate fraternity members about resources that prevent sexual misconduct and lead to important changes in attitudes and behaviors.
  • Graduate student Clair Webb was recognized for her work with the Title IX Office to reimagine educational materials and redesign the office’s website. Webb is committed to ensuring that students can easily find the education, support, and reporting resources they need, and she spent countless hours researching other college’s outreach materials and websites to help design new tools for MIT to raise awareness and serve the community.
  • Senior Nolan O’Brien was selected as the Distinguished PLEASURE Educator this year to honor consistent and inclusive leadership in the student-led group that, through community workshops and dialogues in residence halls and FSILGs, promotes healthy relationships and aims to eliminate sexual violence at MIT. For the past two years, Nolan has been one of PLEASURE’s most reliable peer educators, always among the first to sign up for trainings and to accept more responsibility on PLEASURE’s executive team. Nolan’s mindfulness of inclusivity makes others feel at-ease, and Nolan’s fearlessness inspires others to take on new challenges as well.

2018 Change Maker spotlight: Department of Chemistry

“This award is greatly appreciated,” said department head and Robert R. Taylor professor Timothy F. Jamison. “It recognizes the collective effort of our department to effect positive change and to enhance the quality of life of our entire community.”

Jamison accelerated the conversation about harassment in laboratory environments this past fall by distributing a Chemical & Engineering News (C&E News) article by Linda Wang and Andrea Widener, “Confronting sexual harassment in chemistry,” first to his research group, and then, after they were receptive to it, to the entire department. The article appeared in C&E News on Sept. 18, 2017, mere weeks before The New York Times published a report detailing sexual assault allegations against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. The Times reporting helped to spark the #MeToo Movement, a hashtag used on social media to demonstrate the prevalence of sexual assault and harassment, especially in the workplace. The national dialogue enabled the department to have an even more open forum about this pervasive societal problem, and served to reinforce how crucial departmental education and prevention efforts are.

Change Maker honoree Michelle MacLeod took charge as the #MeToo Movement unfolded. “As scientists, we observe problems and try to solve them. I — and others — observed and experienced issues surrounding harassment and identified the need for discussion and training,” MacLeod explained. “Our concerns and calls for action were bolstered by the #MeToo movement both on a global scale and within the scientific community.” MacLeod went on to spearhead the development of enhanced education and training for members of the Department of Chemistry.

“The workshops that we have created in collaboration with Title IX and VPR will not only raise awareness, but also provide all current and future members of [the department] important knowledge and skills,” said Jamison. “I also anticipate that these workshops will enable our students and postdocs to be role models in their future occupations and communities.”

April: National Sexual Assault Awareness Month

The Change Makers Awards take place in April every year as part of MIT’s efforts to participate in national Sexual Assault Awareness Month (SAAM). Throughout the month, Violence Prevention and Response and the Title IX and Bias Response Office will be partnering with the MIT community to host different events, including:

  • A photographer will be campus for several days so that MIT community members can have their pictures taken with props and signs that support SAAM. The photos, along with pledges that people will sign in support of SAAM and preventing sexual violence, will be used to create a mural, which will be on display in the Student Center at the end of the month.
  • A series of coffee breaks for MIT students and community members to meet with staff from Violence Prevention and Response and PLEASURE peer educators.
  • Workshops delivered by PLEASURE peer educators, including “Personal Boundaries: Finding, Communicating, and Respecting with PLEASURE” and “Media Literacy with PLEASURE”.
  • Workshops hosted by staff from Violence Prevention and Response, including “Gender Roles and Pizza Rolls Redux”, “Barrier Reduction and Creating a Community of Support”, and “Consent: It’s just a conversation!”

To show support for preventing and responding to sexual misconduct, MIT community members are encouraged to take part in these events and others planned across campus.

Timothy Swager receives Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship

by Danielle Randall, Department of Chemistry |

Timothy Manning Swager, the John D. MacArthur Professor of Chemistry, has been named a 2018 Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellow by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD).

The Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship program is sponsored by the Basic Research Office in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. It is administered by the Office of Naval Research. The program seeks outstanding researchers to conduct transformative basic research in topic areas of interest to the DoD. Through the program, select university researchers and students learn about DoD’s current and future challenges, and are introduced to some of the ongoing critical research. The program fosters long-term relationships between DoD and university researchers, and prepares them for possible entry into the defense and national security workforce.

“Although translating science to near-term applications is very important, perusing longer range blue sky concepts is something that I enjoy and funding for these types of activities has always been limited,” said Swager, who was awarded the fellowship for his project, Complex Smart Colloids. “This fellowship is really a game changer for me, and will help us to push some high-risk, untested designs that could potentially have a powerful, lasting impact.”

The fellowship commemorates Vannevar Bush, director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development during WWII and a former vice president of MIT. Following his example, the DoD invests in basic research to probe the limits of today’s technologies and discover new phenomena and know-how that ultimately leads to future technologies and helps prevent capability surprise. These investments have led to broad and game-changing capabilities such as the global positioning satellite (GPS) system, magnetic random access memory, and stealth technology, to name a few.

Fellows are currently conducting basic research in the areas of quantum information science, neuroscience, nanoscience, novel engineered materials, applied mathematics, and statistics that could revolutionize a wide variety of DoD capabilities such as artificial intelligence, position-navigation-timing in denied environments, autonomous system design, decision support tools, and sensor development. In addition to conducting this innovative, blue sky research, the fellows have opportunities to directly engage with the larger DoD research enterprise and to share their knowledge and insights with DoD military and civilian leaders, researchers in DoD laboratories, and the national security science and engineering community.

The Swager Group’s research is broadly focused on synthetic, supramolecular, analytical, and materials chemistry. They are interested in a spectrum of topics with an emphasis on the synthesis and construction of functional assemblies. Molecular recognition pervades a great deal of the group’s research. Chemosensors require recognition elements to discriminate chemical signals.

Electronic polymers are one of the areas that the group is well known for having made many innovations and the researchers are constantly developing new electronic structures, properties, and uses for these materials. Recently they have launched an effort to create functionalized carbon nanotubes and graphenes, and have advanced new chemical methods for their functionalization and utilization in electrocatalysis and chemical and radiation sensing. In the area of liquid crystals, the group makes use of molecular complimentarity and receptor-ligand interactions to provide novel organizations.