The way Morgane König sees it, questioning how we came to be in the universe is one of the most fundamental parts of being human.

When she was 12 years old, König decided the place to find answers was in physics. A family friend was a physicist, and she attributed her interest in the field to him. But it wasn’t until a trip back to her mother’s home country of Côte d’Ivoire that König learned her penchant for the subject had started much younger. No one in Côte d’Ivoire was surprised she was pursuing physics — they told her she’d been peering upward at the stars since she was a small child, wondering how they all had come together. ­

That wonder never left her. “Everyone looks at the stars. Everyone looks at the moon. Everybody wonders about the universe,” says König. “I’m trying to understand it with math.”

König’s observations have led her to MIT, where in 2021 she continued studying theoretical cosmology as a postdoc with physicist and cosmologist Alan Guth and physicist and historian of science David Kaiser. Now, she is a member of MIT’s 2023-24 Martin Luther King (MLK) Visiting Professors and Scholars Program cohort, alongside 11 others. This year, members of the MLK Scholars are researching and teaching diverse subjects including documentary filmmaking, behavioral economics, and writing children’s books.

Once she was set on physics, König finished her undergraduate studies in 2012, double-majoring in mathematics and physics at Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris.

Still compelled by questions about the universe, König narrowed in on cosmology, and graduated with her master’s degree from Pierre and Marie Curie in 2014. The way König describes it, cosmology is like archaeology, just up in space. While astronomers study galaxy formations and mutations — all of the stuff in the universe — cosmologists study everything about the universe, all at once.

“It’s a different scale, a different system,” says König. “Of course, you need to understand stars, galaxies, and how they work, but cosmologists study the universe and its origin and contents as a whole.”

From practice to theory

Throughout her studies, König said, she was often the only woman in the room. She wanted to pursue the theories behind cosmology but wasn’t encouraged to try. “You have to understand that being a woman in this field is super, incredibly difficult,” says König. “I told everyone I wanted to do theory, and they didn’t believe in me. So many people told me not to do it.”

When König had the opportunity to pursue a PhD in observational cosmology in Marseille and Paris, she almost accepted. But she was more drawn to theory. When she was offered a spot with a little more freedom to study cosmology at the University of California at Davis, she took it. Alongside Professor Nemanja Kaloper, König dove into inflation theory, looking all the way back to the universe’s beginning.

It is well-known that the universe is always expanding. Think about inflation as the precursor to that expansion — a quick and dramatic beginning, where the universe grew exponentially fast.

“Inflation is the moment in history that happened right after the beginning of the universe,” says König. “We’re not talking about 1 second, not even a millisecond. We are talking 10 to the negative 32nd seconds.” In other words, it took 0.000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,01 seconds for the universe to go from something minuscule to, well, everything. And today, the universe is only getting bigger.

Only a sliver of the universe’s composition is understandable using current technology — less than 5 percent of the universe is composed of matter we can see. Everything else is dark matter and dark energy.

For decades, cosmologists have been trying to excavate the universe’s mysterious past using photons, the tiny, particle form of light. Since light travels at a fixed speed, light emitted further back in the universe’s history, from objects that are now farther away from us due to the expansion of the universe, takes longer to reach Earth. “If you look at the sun — don’t do it! — but if you did, you’d actually be seeing it eight minutes in the past,” says König. As they carve their way through the universe, photons give cosmologists historical information, acting as messengers across time. But photons can only account for the luminous 4.9 percent of the universe. Everything else is dark.

Since dark matter doesn’t emit or reflect photons like luminous matter, researchers can’t see it. König likens dark matter to an invisible person wearing a tuxedo. She knows something is there because the tuxedo is dancing, swinging its arms and legs around. But she can’t see or study the person inside the suit using the technology at hand. Dark matter has stirred up countless theories, and König is interested in the methods behind those theories. She is asking: How do you study something dark when light particles are necessary for gathering historical information?

According to König and her MIT collaborators — Guth, the forerunner of inflation theory, and Kaiser, the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science — the answer might lie in gravitational waves. König is using her time at MIT to see if she can sidestep light particles entirely by using the ripples in spacetime called gravitational waves. These waves are caused by the collision of massive, dense stellar objects such as neutron stars. Gravitational waves also transmit information across the universe, in essence giving us a new sense, like hearing is to seeing. With data from instruments such as the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) and NANOGrav, “not only can we look at it, now we can hear the cosmos, too,” she says.

Black in physics

Last year, König worked on two all-Black research teams with physicists Marcell Howard and Tatsuya Daniel. “We did great work together,” König says, but she points out how their small group was one of the largest all-Black theoretical physics research teams — ever. She emphasizes how they cultivated creativity and mentorship while doing highly technical science, producing two published papers (Elastic Scattering of Cosmological Gravitational Wave Backgrounds and An SZ-Like Effect on Cosmological Gravitational Wave Backgrounds).

Out of the 69,238 people who have earned doctorates in physics and astronomy since 1981, only 122 of them were Black women, according to the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics. When König finished her PhD in 2021, she became the first Black student at UC Davis to receive a PhD in physics and the ninth Black woman to ever complete a doctorate in theoretical physics in the United States.

This past October, in a presentation at MIT, König ended with an animated slide depicting a young Black girl sitting in a dark meadow, surrounded by warm lights and rustling grass. The girl was looking up at the stars, her eyes full of wonder. “I had to make this with AI,” says König. “I couldn’t find an image online of a young Black girl looking up at the stars. So, I made one.”

In 2017, König went to Côte d’Ivoire, spending time teaching school children about physics and cosmology. “The room was full,” she says. Adults and students alike came to listen to her. Everyone wanted to learn, and everyone echoed the same questions about the universe as König did when she was younger. But, she says, “the difference between them and me is that I was given a chance to study this. I had access to people explaining how incredible and exciting physics is.”

König sees a stark disconnect between physics in Africa and physics everywhere else. She wants universities around the world to make connections with African universities, building efforts to encourage students of all backgrounds to pursue the field of physics.

König explains that ushering in more Black and African physicists means starting at the beginning and encouraging more undergraduates and young students to enter the field. “There is an enormous amount of talent and brilliance there,” König says. She sees an opportunity to connect with students across Africa, building the bridges needed to help everyone pursue the questions that keep them looking up at the stars.

While König loves her research, she knows theoretical cosmology has far to come to as a discipline. “There is so much room to grow in the field. It’s not all figured out.”

From Oct. 23-24, a delegation consisting of 21 MIT students, one MIT postdoc, and four students from the University of the District of Columbia met in Washington for the MIT Science Policy Initiative’s Executive Visit Days (ExVD). Now in its 13th cycle, this trip offers a platform where university students and young researchers can connect with officials and scientists from different federal agencies, discuss issues related to science and technology policy, and learn about the role the federal government plays in addressing these issues.

The delegation visited seven different agencies, as well as the MIT Washington Office, where the group held virtual calls with personnel from the National Institutes of Health and the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health. Visits to the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy Office of Science, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), Environmental Protection Agency, and National Aeronautics and Space Administration then followed over the course of two days. The series of meetings, facilitated by the MIT Science Policy Initiative (SPI), offered a window into the current activities of each agency and how individuals can engage with science policy through the lens of each particular agency.

The Science Policy Initiative is an organization of students and postdocs whose core goal is not only to grow interest at MIT and in the community at large in science policy, but also to facilitate the exchange of ideas between the policymakers of today and the scientists of tomorrow. One of the various trips organized by SPI every year, ExVD allows students to gain insight into the work of federal agencies, while also offering the chance to meet with representatives from these agencies, many of whom are MIT alumni, and discuss their paths toward careers in science policy. Additionally, ExVD serves as an opportunity for participants to network with students, postdocs, and professionals outside of their fields but united by common interests in science policy. 

“I believe it is critical for students with vital technical expertise to gain a sense of the realities of policymaking,” says Phillip Christoffersen, a PhD student researching AI in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and SPI ExVD 2023 chair. “Due to the many complexities of modern life, we are simultaneously reaching tipping points in many fields — AI, climate change, biotechnology, among many others. For this reason, science and science policy must increasingly move in lockstep for the good of society, and it falls on us as scientists-in-training to make that happen.”

One example of the delegation’s visits was to the White House OSTP, located directly next to the West Wing at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. This special agency of fewer than 200 staff, most of whom are either in rotation or on loan from other federal agencies, directly reports to the president on all matters related to science and policy. The atmosphere at the White House complex and the exchanges with Kei Koizumi, principal deputy director for policy at OSTP, deeply inspired the students and showcased the vast impact science can have on federal policy.

The overall sentiment among the ExVD participants has been that of reborn motivation, having become inspired to participate in policy matters, either as a portion of their graduate research or in their future career. The ExVD 2023 cohort is thankful to the MIT Washington office, whose generous support was crucial to making this trip a reality. Furthermore, the delegation thanks the MIT Science Policy Initiative’s leadership team for organizing this trip, enabling an extremely meaningful experience.

Students fill the glass-walled room and spill out into the common area. They gather around tables and desks cluttered with board games and game pieces. Along the far wall, large screens show students exploring the latest virtual reality experience alongside classmates reliving their favorite retro videogames.

Welcome to an open house of the MIT Game Lab, where play and experimentation are joined by serious inquiry about the gaming industry and its role in society.

In addition to its rollicking open houses, which take place at least once a semester, the Game Lab hosts public events, organizes research projects, and teaches courses through MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing (CMS/W).

The Game Lab’s work is designed to help students think critically about the games they’ve often been playing for years without considering the values they might project, and to prepare them to engage in thoughtful design practices themselves.

“Students come to the Game Lab because it sounds like fun, which is great, but they realize through our research that there’s also something really serious at work in games,” Game Lab Director and Professor T.L. Taylor says. “I think students often have this moment where they realize this thing they’ve been enjoying actually has a lot of stakes in it; these are things that really matter.”

The Game Lab analyzes the gaming industry and its impact, explores new technologies and formats, and creates games that tackle important issues. Many new games are tied to larger research projects.

“There’s a desire from our students to express themselves through games, whether that’s through making educational games or games with specific messages or lessons,” says Game Lab research scientist and lecturer Mikael Jakobsson. “Games are a big part of most people’s lives, so there’s a thirst among our students for not only learning how to make games, but also studying games as social and cultural artefacts.”

Through that research, students come to appreciate the impact of games on the world.

“Game are hugely important in society and culture,” Taylor says. “We’re really trying to always think critically and productively about what we do with this powerful form of media and entertainment, and to think about games as a place in which imagination and stories about the world can be worked over and thought about.”

Learning to play

The MIT Game Lab was founded in cooperation with the Singapore Ministry of Education in 2007. Early on, it would host workshops on game design with students from Singapore in the summer, then conduct teaching and research with MIT students during the school year.

The Singapore collaboration ended in 2012, but the lab continued its work, often partnering with outside companies, private donors, and other groups around campus to explore the influence of games on different aspects of society.

In one project with the Samuel Tak Lee MIT Real Estate Entrepreneurship Lab, students designed a game to explore the basics of real estate development, including managing capital and debt and deciding what sorts of buildings to build and where.

The lab also does work with communities to help them think about civic engagement. It has held workshops around the world with local students and other community members to challenge them to think about issues in their societies through the lens of game design. One such collaboration led to the game Promesa, which Jakobsson created with Puerto Rican graphic artist Rosa Colón Guerra and the design collective Popcicleta to promote what the creators call a “countercolonialist” viewpoint in the context of a game about the island’s debt crisis.

Aside from making games, researchers also consider the influence of historically popular games.

“We’re not making games as much as studying them,” says junior Michelle Liang, who works at the Game Lab as an undergraduate researcher. “It’s so easy to detach entertainment as its own separate world, when in fact media is influenced by a lot of different factors and biases. A lot of the Game Lab’s work is geared toward enhancing that understanding.”

The Game Lab’s organizers say that work distinguishes them from other gaming-focused groups in academia, which often equip students with specific skills to get jobs in the videogame industry.

“We’re not a pipeline program to go work in the gaming industry,” Taylor explains. “Some students do go into the industry, but because we’re doing critical design practice, we’re approaching games with a much broader, critically inflective perspective by thinking about things like equity and representation.”

Liang hadn’t considered the role of games in social and political issues until she discovered the Game Lab. She immediately saw the Lab as a way to combine a number of things she was passionate about.

“It’s funny to talk about my job to people,” Liang says. “Even though we are the Institute of Technology, there’s so much more MIT has to offer.”

Changing the rules

Jakobsson says the perception of games as nothing more than entertainment has led to a lack of introspection.

“The gaming industry has been a bit of a boys club where a lot of social responsibility has been shirked because they say they’re just trying to have fun and don’t have to think about how it affects society,” Jakobsson says. “Now we’re dealing with a lot of the consequences from that mindset.”

For students, involvement in the Game Lab can mean conducting research, enrolling in one of its classes, or just stopping by an open house. Regardless of how they’re exposed to the lab’s work, Taylor hopes they leave with a deeper appreciation of the power of games in our society.

“Games are a hugely important media and entertainment space, but they’re also one of our most culturally relevant and politically active spaces,” Taylor says. “Media spaces are in part where we learn about the world, for good or ill, where we construct imaginaries of the world, where we think about other possibilities. Part of the mission of CMS/W in general is taking media spaces seriously, and games are an increasingly important part of that.”

There is vast opportunity for nanoscale innovation to transform the world in positive ways — expressed MIT.nano Director Vladimir Bulović as he posed two questions to attendees at the start of the inaugural Nano Summit: “Where are we heading? And what is the next big thing we can develop?”

“The answer to that puts into perspective our main purpose — and that is to change the world,” Bulović, the Fariborz Maseeh Professor of Emerging Technologies, told an audience of more than 325 in-person and 150 virtual participants gathered for an exploration of nano-related research at MIT and a celebration of MIT.nano’s fifth anniversary.

Over a decade ago, MIT embarked on a massive project for the ultra-small — building an advanced facility to support research at the nanoscale. Construction of MIT.nano in the heart of MIT’s campus, a process compared to assembling a ship in a bottle, began in 2015, and the facility launched in October 2018.

Fast forward five years: MIT.nano now contains nearly 170 tools and instruments serving more than 1,200 trained researchers. These individuals come from over 300 principal investigator labs, representing more than 50 MIT departments, labs, and centers. The facility also serves external users from industry, other academic institutions, and over 130 startup and multinational companies.

A cross section of these faculty and researchers joined industry partners and MIT community members to kick off the first Nano Summit, which is expected to become an annual flagship event for MIT.nano and its industry consortium. Held on Oct. 24, the inaugural conference was co-hosted by the MIT Industrial Liaison Program.

Six topical sessions highlighted recent developments in quantum science and engineering, materials, advanced electronics, energy, biology, and immersive data technology. The Nano Summit also featured startup ventures and an art exhibition.

Watch the videos here.

Seeing and manipulating at the nanoscale — and beyond

“We need to develop new ways of building the next generation of materials,” said Frances Ross, the TDK Professor in Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE). “We need to use electron microscopy to help us understand not only what the structure is after it’s built, but how it came to be. I think the next few years in this piece of the nano realm are going to be really amazing.”

Speakers in the session “The Next Materials Revolution,” chaired by MIT.nano co-director for Characterization.nano and associate professor in DMSE James LeBeau, highlighted areas in which cutting-edge microscopy provides insights into the behavior of functional materials at the nanoscale, from anti-ferroelectrics to thin-film photovoltaics and 2D materials. They shared images and videos collected using the instruments in MIT.nano’s characterization suites, which were specifically designed and constructed to minimize mechanical-vibrational and electro-magnetic interference.

Later, in the “Biology and Human Health” session chaired by Boris Magasanik Professor of Biology Thomas Schwartz, biologists echoed the materials scientists, stressing the importance of the ultra-quiet, low-vibration environment in Characterization.nano to obtain high-resolution images of biological structures.

“Why is MIT.nano important for us?” asked Schwartz. “An important element of biology is to understand the structure of biology macromolecules. We want to get to an atomic resolution of these structures. CryoEM (cryo-electron microscopy) is an excellent method for this. In order to enable the resolution revolution, we had to get these instruments to MIT. For that, MIT.nano was fantastic.”

Seychelle Vos, the Robert A. Swanson (1969) Career Development Professor of Life Sciences, shared CryoEM images from her lab’s work, followed by biology Associate Professor Joey Davis who spoke about image processing. When asked about the next stage for CryoEM, Davis said he’s most excited about in-situ tomography, noting that there are new instruments being designed that will improve the current labor-intensive process.

To chart the future of energy, chemistry associate professor Yogi Surendranath is also using MIT.nano to see what is happening at the nanoscale in his research to use renewable electricity to change carbon dioxide into fuel.

“MIT.nano has played an immense role, not only in facilitating our ability to make nanostructures, but also to understand nanostructures through advanced imaging capabilities,” said Surendranath. “I see a lot of the future of MIT.nano around the question of how nanostructures evolve and change under the conditions that are relevant to their function. The tools at MIT.nano can help us sort that out.”

Tech transfer and quantum computing

The “Advanced Electronics” session chaired by Jesús del Alamo, the Donner Professor of Science in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), brought together industry partners and MIT faculty for a panel discussion on the future of semiconductors and microelectronics. “Excellence in innovation is not enough, we also need to be excellent in transferring these to the marketplace,” said del Alamo. On this point, panelists spoke about strengthening the industry-university connection, as well as the importance of collaborative research environments and of access to advanced facilities, such as MIT.nano, for these environments to thrive.

The session came on the heels of a startup exhibit in which eleven START.nano companies presented their technologies in health, energy, climate, and virtual reality, among other topics. START.nano, MIT.nano’s hard-tech accelerator, provides participants use of MIT.nano’s facilities at a discounted rate and access to MIT’s startup ecosystem. The program aims to ease hard-tech startups’ transition from the lab to the marketplace, surviving common “valleys of death” as they move from idea to prototype to scaling up.

When asked about the state of quantum computing in the “Quantum Science and Engineering” session, physics professor Aram Harrow related his response to these startup challenges. “There are quite a few valleys to cross — there are the technical valleys, and then also the commercial valleys.” He spoke about scaling superconducting qubits and qubits made of suspended trapped ions, and the need for more scalable architectures, which we have the ingredients for, he said, but putting everything together is quite challenging.

Throughout the session, William Oliver, professor of physics and the Henry Ellis Warren (1894) Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, asked the panelists how MIT.nano can address challenges in assembly and scalability in quantum science.

“To harness the power of students to innovate, you really need to allow them to get their hands dirty, try new things, try all their crazy ideas, before this goes into a foundry-level process,” responded Kevin O’Brien, associate professor in EECS. “That’s what my group has been working on at MIT.nano, building these superconducting quantum processors using the state-of-the art fabrication techniques in MIT.nano.”

Connecting the digital to the physical

In his reflections on the semiconductor industry, Douglas Carlson, senior vice president for technology at MACOM, stressed connecting the digital world to real-world application. Later, in the “Immersive Data Technology” session, MIT.nano associate director Brian Anthony explained how, at the MIT.nano Immersion Lab, researchers are doing just that.

“We think about and facilitate work that has the human immersed between hardware, data, and experience,” said Anthony, principal research scientist in mechanical engineering. He spoke about using the capabilities of the Immersion Lab to apply immersive technologies to different areas — health, sports, performance, manufacturing, and education, among others. Speakers in this session gave specific examples in hardware, pediatric health, and opera.

Anthony connected this third pillar of MIT.nano to the fab and characterization facilities, highlighting how the Immersion Lab supports work conducted in other parts of the building. The Immersion Lab’s strength, he said, is taking novel work being developed inside MIT.nano and bringing it up to the human scale to think about applications and uses.

Artworks that are scientifically inspired

The Nano Summit closed with a reception at MIT.nano where guests could explore the facility and gaze through the cleanroom windows, where users were actively conducting research. Attendees were encouraged to visit an exhibition on MIT.nano’s first- and second-floor galleries featuring work by students from the MIT Program in Art, Culture, and Technology (ACT) who were invited to utilize MIT.nano’s tool sets and environments as inspiration for art.

In his closing remarks, Bulović reflected on the community of people who keep MIT.nano running and who are using the tools to advance their research. “Today we are celebrating the facility and all the work that has been done over the last five years to bring it to where it is today. It is there to function not just as a space, but as an essential part of MIT’s mission in research, innovation, and education. I hope that all of us here today take away a deep appreciation and admiration for those who are leading the journey into the nano age.”

This semester, students and postdocs across MIT were invited to submit ideas for the first-ever MIT Ignite: Generative AI Entrepreneurship Competition. Over 100 teams submitted proposals for startups that utilize generative artificial intelligence technologies to develop solutions across a diverse range of disciplines including human health, climate change, education, and workforce dynamics.

On Oct. 30, 12 finalists pitched their ideas in front of a panel of expert judges and a packed room in Samberg Conference Center.

“MIT has a responsibility to help shape a future of AI innovation that is broadly beneficial — and to do that, we need a lot of great ideas. So, we turned to a pretty reliable source of great ideas: MIT’s highly entrepreneurial students and postdocs,” said MIT President Sally Kornbluth in her opening remarks at the event. 

The MIT Ignite event is part of a broader focus on generative AI at MIT put forth by Kornbluth. This fall, across the Institute, researchers and students are exploring opportunities to contribute their knowledge on generative AI, identifying new applications, minimizing risks, and employing it for the benefit of society. This event — co-organized by the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab and the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, and supported by MIT’s School of Engineering and the MIT Sloan School of Management — inspired young researchers to contribute to the dialogue and innovate in generative AI.

Serving as co-chairs for the event were Aude Oliva, MIT director of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab and a principal investigator in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL); Bill Aulet, the Ethernet Inventors Professor of the Practice at the MIT Sloan School of Management and director of the Martin Trust Center; and Dina Katabi, the Thuan (1990) and Nicole Pham Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, director of the Center for Wireless Networks and Mobile Computing, and a CSAIL principal investigator.

Twelve teams of students and postdocs were competing for a number of prizes, including five MIT Ignite Flagship Prizes of $15,000 each, a special first-year undergraduate student team Flagship Prize, and runner-up prizes. All prizes were provided by the MIT-IBM AI Watson Lab. Teams were judged on their project’s innovative applications of generative AI, feasibility, potential for real-world impact, and the quality of presentation.

After the 12 teams showcased their technology, its potential to address an issue, and the team’s ability to execute the plan, a panel of judges deliberated. As the audience waited for the results, remarks were made by Mark Gorenberg ’76, chair of the MIT Corporation; Anantha Chandrakasan, dean of the MIT School of Engineering and the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; and David Schmittlein, the John C. Head III Dean and professor of marketing at the MIT Sloan School of Management. The student winners included:

MIT Ignite Flagship Prizes

eMote (Philip Cherner, Julia Sebastien, Caroline Lige Zhang, Daeun Yoo, and Jingwen Shan): Sometimes identifying and expressing emotions is difficult, particularly for those on the alexithymia spectrum; further, therapy can be expensive. eMote’s app allows users to identify their emotions, visualize them as art using the co-creative process of generative AI, and reflect on them through journaling, thereby assisting school counselors and therapists.

LeGT.ai (Julie Shi, Jessica Yuan, and Yubing Cui): Legal processes around immigration can be complicated and costly. LeGT.ai aims to democratize legal knowledge. Using a platform with a large language model, prompt engineering, and semantic search, the team will streamline a chatbot for completion, research, and drafting of documents for firms, as well as improve pre-screening and initial consultations.

Sunona (Emmi Mills, Selin Kocalar, Srihitha Dasari, and Karun Kaushik): About half of a doctor’s day is consumed by medical documentation and clinical notes. To address this, Sunona harnesses audio transcription and a large language model to transform audio from a doctor’s visit into notes and feature extraction, affording providers more time in their day.

UltraNeuro (Mahdi Ramadan, Adam Gosztolai, Alaa Khaddaj, and Samara Khater): For about one in seven adults, spinal cord injury, stroke, or disease will induce motor impairment and/or paralysis. UltraNeuro’s neuroprosthetics will help patients to regain some of their daily abilities without invasive brain implants. Their technology leverages an electroencephalogram, smart sensors, and a multimodal AI system (muscle EMG, computer vision, eye movements) trained on thousands of movements to plan precise limb movements.

UrsaTech (Rui Zhou, Jerry Shan, Kate Wang, Alan He, and Rita Zhang): Education today is marked by disparities and overburdened educators. UrsaTech’s platform uses a multimodal large language model and diffusion models to create lessons, dynamic content, and assessments to assist teachers and learners. The system also has immersive learning with AI agents for active learning for online and offline use.

First-Year Undergraduate Student Team MIT Ignite Flagship Prize

Alikorn (April Ren and Ayush Nayak): Drug discovery accounts for significant biotech costs. Alikorn’s large language model-powered platform aims to streamline the process of creating and simulating new molecules, using a generative adversarial network, a Monte-Carlo algorithm to vet the most promising candidates, and a physics simulation to determine the chemical properties.

Runner-up Prizes

Autonomous Cyber (James “Patrick” O’Brien, Madeline Linde, Rafael Turner, and Bohdan Volyanyuk): Code security audits require expertise and are expensive. “Fuzzing” code — injecting invalid or unexpected inputs to reveal software vulnerabilities — can make software significantly safer. Autonomous Cyber’s system leverages large language models to automatically integrate “fuzzers” into databases.

Gen EGM (Noah Bagazinski and Kristen Edwards): Making informed socioeconomic development policies requires evidence and data. Gen EGM’s large language model system expedites the process by examining and analyzing literature, and then produces an evidence gap map (EGM), suggesting potential impact areas.

Mattr AI (Leandra Tejedor, Katie Chen, and Eden Adler): Datasets that are used to train AI models often have issues of diversity, equity, and completeness. Mattr AI addresses this with generative AI with a large language model and stable diffusion models to augment datasets.

Neuroscreen (Andrew Lu, Chonghua Xue, and Grant Robinson): Screening patients to potentially join a dementia clinical trial is costly, often takes years, and mostly results in an ineligibility. Neuroscreen employs AI to more quickly assess patients’ dementia causes, leading to more successful enrollment in clinical trials and treatment of conditions.

The Data Provenance Initiative (Naana Obeng-Marnu, Jad Kabbara, Shayne Longpre, William Brannon, and Robert Mahari): Datasets that are used to train AI models, particularly large language models, often have missing or incorrect metadata, causing concern for legal and ethical issues. The Data Provenance Initiative uses AI-assisted annotation to audit datasets, tracking the lineage and legal status of data, improving data transparency, legality, and ethical concerns around data.

Theia (Jenny Yao, Hongze Bo, Jin Li, Ao Qu, and Hugo Huang): Scientific research, and online dialogue around it, often occurs in silos. Theia’s platform aims to bring these walls down. Generative AI technology will summarize papers and help to guide research directions, providing a service for scholars as well as the broader scientific community.

After the MIT Ignite competition, all 12 teams selected to present were invited to a networking event as an immediate first step to making their ideas and prototypes a reality. Additionally, they were invited to further develop their ideas with the support of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship through StartMIT or MIT Fuse and the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab.

“In the months since I’ve arrived [at MIT], I’ve learned a lot about how MIT folks think about entrepreneurship and how it’s really built into everything that everyone at the Institute does, from first-year students to faculty to alumni — they are really motivated to get their ideas out into the world,” said President Kornbluth. “Entrepreneurship is an essential element for our goal of organizing for positive impact.”

For Professor Elsa Olivetti, tackling a problem as large and complex as climate change requires not only lab research but also understanding the systems of production that power the global economy.

Her career path reflects a quest to investigate materials at scales ranging from the microscopic to the mass-manufactured.

“I’ve always known what questions I wanted to ask, and then set out to build the tools to help me ask those questions,” says Olivetti, the Jerry McAfee Professor in Engineering.

Olivetti, who earned tenure in 2022 and was recently appointed associate dean of engineering, has sought to equip students with similar skills, whether in the classroom, in her lab group, or through the interdisciplinary programs she leads at MIT. Those efforts have earned her accolades including the Bose Award for Excellence in Teaching, a MacVicar Faculty Fellowship in 2021, and the McDonald Award for Excellence in Mentoring and Advising in 2023.

“I think to make real progress in sustainability, materials scientists need to think in interdisciplinary, systems-level ways, but at a deep technical level,” Olivetti says. “Supporting my students so that’s something that a lot more people can do is very rewarding for me.”

Her mission to make materials more sustainable also makes Olivetti grateful [EAO1] she’s at MIT, which has a long tradition of both interdisciplinary collaboration and technical know-how.

“MIT’s core competencies are well-positioned for bold achievements in climate and sustainability — the deep expertise on the economics side, the frontier knowledge in science, the computational creativity,” Olivetti says. “It’s a really exciting time and place where the key ingredients for progress are simmering in transformative ways.”

Answering the call

The moment that set Olivetti on her life’s journey began when she was 8, with a knock at her door. Her parents were in the other room, so Olivetti opened the door and met an organizer for Greenpeace, a nonprofit that works to raise awareness of environmental issues.

“I had a chat with that guy and got hooked on environmental concerns,” Olivetti says. “I still remember that conversation.”

The interaction changed the way Olivetti thought about her place in the world, and her new perspective manifested itself in some unique ways. Her elementary school science fair projects became elaborate pursuits of environmental solutions involving burying various items in the backyard to test for biodegradability. There was also an awkward attempt at natural pesticide development, which lead to a worm hatching in her bedroom.

As an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, Olivetti gravitated toward classes in environmentalism and materials science.

“There was a link between materials science and a broader, systems way of framing design for environment, and that just clicked for me in terms of the way I wanted to think about environmental problems — from the atom to the system,” Olivetti recalls.

That interest led Olivetti to MIT for a PhD in 2001, where she studied the feasibility of new materials for lithium-ion batteries.

“I really wanted to be thinking of things at a systems level, but I wanted to ground that in lab-based research,” Olivetti says. “I wanted an experiential experience in grad school, and that’s why I chose MIT’s program.”

Whether it was her undergraduate studies, her PhD, or her ensuing postdoc work at MIT, Olivetti sought to learn new skills to continue bridging the gap between materials science and environmental systems thinking.

“I think of it as, ‘Here’s how I can build up the ways I ask questions,’” Olivetti explains. “How do we design these materials while thinking about their implications as early as possible?”

Since joining MIT’s faculty in 2014, Olivetti has developed computational models to measure the cost and environmental impact of new materials, explored ways to adopt more sustainable and circular supply chains, and evaluated potential materials limitations as lithium-ion battery production is scaled. That work helps companies increase their use of greener, recyclable materials and more sustainably dispose of waste.

Olivetti believes the wide scope of her research gives the students in her lab a more holistic understanding of the life cycle of materials.

“When the group started, each student was working on a different aspect of the problem — like on the natural language processing pipeline, or on recycling technology assessment, or beneficial use of waste — and now each student can link each of those pieces in their research,” Olivetti explains.

Beyond her research, Olivetti also co-directs the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium, which has established a set of eight areas of sustainability that it organizes coalitions around. Each coalition involves technical leaders at companies and researchers at MIT that work together to accelerate the impact of MIT’s research by helping companies adopt innovative and more sustainable technologies.

“Climate change mitigation and resilience is such a complex problem, and at MIT we have practice in working together across disciplines on many challenges,” Olivetti says. “It’s been exciting to lean on that culture and unlock ways to move forward more effectively.”

Bridging divides

Today, Olivetti tries to maximize the impact of her and her students’ research in materials industrial ecology by maintaining close ties to applications. In her research, this means working directly with aluminum companies to design alloys that could incorporate more scrap material or with nongovernmental organizations to incorporate agricultural residues in building products. In the classroom, that means bringing in people from companies to explain how they think about concepts like heat exchange or fluid flow in their products.

“I enjoy trying to ground what students are learning in the classroom with what’s happening in the world,” Olivetti explains.

Exposing students to industry is also a great way to help them think about their own careers. In her research lab, she’s started using the last 30 minutes of meetings to host talks from people working in national labs, startups, and larger companies to show students what they can do after their PhDs. The talks are similar to the Industry Seminar series Olivetti started that pairs undergraduate students with people working in areas like 3D printing, environmental consulting, and manufacturing.

“It’s about helping students learn what they’re excited about,” Olivetti says.

Whether in the classroom, lab, or at events held by organizations like MCSC, Olivetti believes collaboration is humanity’s most potent tool to combat climate change.

“I just really enjoy building links between people,” Olivetti says. “Learning about people and meeting them where they are is a way that one can create effective links. It’s about creating the right playgrounds for people to think and learn.”

Since its launch on the heels of the Entrepreneurship 101 massive open online course, MIT Bootcamps has inspired thousands of global innovators to search for solutions to meaningful problems, including in the patient care and wellness space.

“Once you find the right problem to work on, it really becomes your life’s mission,” shares Nicky Agahari, a former combat medic in the Australian Army, whose passion for improving patients’ lives comes from caring for his grandfather.

While suffering from incontinence, Agahari’s grandfather fractured a hip and almost died after falling at night on his way to the bathroom. This widespread problem, which affects an estimated 423 million people worldwide, was the reason Agahari enrolled in the MIT Innovation and Leadership Bootcamp while pursuing an MBA at the University of Macquarie in Sydney in 2017.

During the MIT Bootcamp in Brisbane, Australia, he rallied a team to work on improving the lives of patients with urinary incontinence. Agahari says he’s still inspired by the moment when the entire class sought refuge from the passing hurricane while Bill Aulet, managing director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship and professor of the practice at MIT Sloan, gave a lecture on primary market research in the basement of the Hilton hotel.

“We were learning from experienced entrepreneurs that have executed,” Agahari recalls. “They have walked the walk, so they could talk the talk.”

After leading commercial teams at Medtronic, Johnson & Johnson, Boston Scientific, and completing a Harvard HealthTech Fellowship, Agahari has launched InConfidence to transform the lives of people suffering from overactive bladders with a minimally invasive therapy at-home. Agahari admits that it would have been hard to get here without the Bootcamps network. His lead investor and two of his co-founders — Helena Franco and Mihir Shanker — have also attended MIT Bootcamps.

Championing women’s reproductive health care

A personal health crisis ignited the passion for patient experience in another MIT Bootcamps participant, Adonica Shaw. In 2017, while pregnant with her son, Shaw was diagnosed with preeclampsia, which disproportionately impacts women of color, and was forced to deliver six weeks early. She also suffered an eclamptic crisis after delivery. In addition to advocacy work with the Preeclampsia Foundation, this experience eventually led her to apply to the online MIT-Harvard Medical School Healthcare Innovation Bootcamp in 2021, in the heat of the pandemic. 

“The spirit of the Bootcamp is to come ready to learn and … do the work that’s required to be a strong participant in the program but also with your team,” says Shaw.

Raised by a single parent, Shaw never dreamt of being on the same team with doctors and top medical professionals. One case study that stuck with her from the MIT Bootcamp was about a team of scientists who raised $15 million to resurrect the woolly mammoth. Shaw admits that examples like this empowered her to dream big.

This year, Shaw is launching her first brick and mortar clinic in the Seaport area of Boston with Paul Bergerad. The clinic is part of the greater vision to champion women’s reproductive health from the first pap smear visit through perimenopause.

Shaw is also the youngest person globally and the only person of color to make a patent attempt on the vaginal speculum, which will be used in her practice. This device has a controversial history, with many iterations from the early 1900s tested on women without consent or anesthesia. Her patent attempt is aimed at improving the process of pelvic exams and pap smears and empowering patient’s voices, particularly those historically excluded from design and development of medical devices.

Creating space for mental and physical fitness

Jitendra Chouksey, another MIT Bootcamps alumnus, founded India-based FITTR to simplify the experience of getting healthy. Growing up, Chouksey was considered unfit until he seriously took up bodybuilding while working in the IT sector in Pune. His transformation prompted others to seek his advice. To share it at scale, Chouksey published a free e-book called “Get Shredded,” and so FITTR was born.

In 2019, FITTR had a $5 million run rate, but Chouksey was struggling to lead the company that he inadvertently started. He traveled to the MIT Innovation Leadership Bootcamp in Japan, searching for a short reputable program that would teach him the essentials of entrepreneurship. What he also found was a supportive Bootcamps community that helped Chouksey confront the mental health challenges of running a fast-growing company.

“It is a great way for busy entrepreneurs to learn a lot in a short span of time,” Chouksey says of the MIT Innovation Leadership Bootcamp. 

Startup founders experience a high rate of mental health challenges, while having to constantly make decisions that can be life-altering for themselves and their teams. Chouksey, for example, had to make a solo decision to take his company out of Y Combinator, one of the most reputable incubating programs, which he had worked hard to join. He realized that the timing of the program did not align with company priorities.

Today, FITTR boasts 6 million users who use it to access customized online coaching, even supporting individuals with Type 2 diabetes management. With $15 million in recurrent annual sales, FITTR is funded by top local and global investors including Sequoia Surge, Elysian Park, and Dream Capital. Chouksey wants to spread his awareness of mental health issues with other founders in India and the region by creating a venue where these conversations would be possible. Whether acting as a CEO or peer, he says he’s focused on putting both the physical and mental health of his communities first. 

The power of community

What unites these innovators is their passion for improving patients’ health and experience, their trust in the MIT entrepreneurship method, and the community they encountered at MIT Bootcamps.

A former contestant on Australia’s Masterchef show, Agahari believes that sharing meals is the best way to unite the team and speed up its transition from norming and storming to performing. Shaw treasures her Bootcamp team’s encouragement for her nonlinear career path, including pursuing a midwifery degree in her late 30s. And Chouksey, who has attended three MIT Bootcamps to date, draws inspiration from MIT Professor Sanjay Sarma’s quote “the future of work is learning.”

Willard R. Johnson, a professor emeritus in the MIT Department of Political Science who focused his scholarly research on the political development of Africa, died in late October at age 87. Johnson served as a member of the MIT faculty for nearly 60 years, while also founding and participating in numerous civic initiatives aimed at making political and social advances in Africa and the U.S., and building engagement between the two regions.

Johnson joined the political science faculty in 1964 as an assistant professor. He was the first Black faculty member at MIT to rise through the ranks and achieve tenure from within, and he created a broad portfolio of accomplishments. Johnson conducted extensive fieldwork in Africa, published important contributions to the study of African political institutions and independence movements, advocated for the inclusion of more Black scholars in the MIT community, and served as a leading voice at MIT and in the Boston area against South Africa’s apartheid.

Johnson also held visiting positions at Harvard Business School, Boston University, and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts, in addition to his time as a faculty member and emeritus professor at MIT.

Johnson was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1935 and moved to Pasadena, California, where he graduated from Muir High School. He earned his AA from Pasadena City College in 1955, and a BA in international relations from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), in 1957. At UCLA, he served as student body president, and also helped to found the campus’ chapter of the NAACP. Notably, he was also responsible for bringing W.E.B. Dubois to campus as a speaker. Johnson later received his MA degree in African studies with distinction from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, in 1961, and his PhD in political science from Harvard University, in 1965.

Johnson’s Harvard dissertation, “Cameroon Reunification: The Political Union of Several Africas,” formed the basis of his first book, published as “The Cameroon Federation” by Princeton University Press in 1970. In a review of the book in the Journal of Modern African Studies, W. Norman Haupt wrote, “This carefully prepared book is based upon a sound, objective understanding of local facts and preferences,” while noting that it “is filled with those minute details of history which make for exciting reading.”

Johnson himself would say that his most important accomplishment while at UCLA was meeting his wife, Vivian Johnson. They not only formed a lasting bond in marriage, but also became scholarly collaborators and jointly published “West African Governments and Volunteer Development Organizations: Priorities for Partnership” (University Press of America, 1990). Political scientist Pearl T. Robinson of Tufts University called it “required reading for anyone seeking insights into the struggles that are being waged to promote increased political pluralism and alternative development strategies in contemporary Africa.”

Johnson remained impressively active in politics and public service throughout his life. From 1968 to 1970, he took a leave from MIT to serve as executive director of Circle, a Roxbury, Massachusetts-based community development organization. In 1972, he directed the Africa Policy Task Force for the George McGovern for President committee, and served on the Democratic Party Advisory Council’s Foreign Affairs Study Group. He also served on the U.S. National Committee for the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

Johnson later became a leading voice at MIT, and nationally, in the anti-apartheid movement. He led the Boston chapter of TransAfrica’s Free South Africa Movement. As Johnson noted, in an interview for the Department of Political Science’s 50th anniversary celebration, he was arrested, along with Nobel laureate George Wald of Harvard and other local luminaries, at an anti-apartheid rally in Boston. Johnson was proud to be actively involved in Nelson Mandela’s visit to Boston in 1990, part of the anti-apartheid leader’s momentous trip to the U.S.

In 1991, a few years before stepping down from his faculty position, Johnson founded the Kansas Institute for African American and Native American Family History, which promotes the preservation and documentation of family identity, traditions, and accomplishments of members of the African American and Native American communities of the Midwest.

Johnson’s 2001 paper published in the Black History Bulletin, “Tracing Trails of Blood on Ice: Commemorating ‘The Great Escape’ of 1861-62 of Indians and Blacks into Kansas,” chronicled a significant episode in this underexplored regional history. He remained active with the Kansas Institute for African American and Native American Family History until his passing.

Johnson also founded the Boston Pan-African Forum, a group promoting mutually beneficial relations between the United States and the people of Africa, and remained an active part of it throughout his later years. 

Throughout his time at MIT, Johnson was an active voice in support of diversifying the Institute faculty and student community, and pushing for greater opportunities for Black faculty and students alike. Johnson was proud of the accomplishments of Institute students such as Georgia Persons PhD ’78, a political scientist who is now a professor in the School of Public Policy at Georgia Tech; and Marsha Coleman-Adebayo PhD ’82, a leading advocate against workplace discrimination whose experiences helped generate passage of the Notification and Federal Employee Anti-discrimination and Retaliation Act, signed into federal law in 2002. 

In seeking to build stronger ties between scholarly communities, Johnson also initiated a joint seminar in political science between MIT and Howard University, in the mid-1970s, an effort concluding with combined class session for all the participating students from both institutions.

Johnson remained a visible presence in the political science department following his transition to professor emeritus in 1996. Colleagues fortunate enough to cross paths with him were greeted with a tremendously warm smile. Those who knew him during his time on the faculty have fond memories of him stopping by their offices to check in, inquire about family members, and give the distinctive encouragement and kind understanding which, through his extraordinary experience and character, only he could offer.

Several years ago, MIT anthropologist Héctor Beltrán ’07 attended an event in Mexico billed as the first all-women’s hackathon in Latin America. But the programmers were not the only women there. When the time came for the hackathon pitches, a large number of family members arrived to watch.

“Grandmothers and mothers showed up to cheer up the hackathon participants,” Beltrán says. “That’s something I had never seen in the U.S. It was inspiring. It felt good to see people who are usually excluded from these spaces being welcomed as part of this infrastructure of innovation.”

In a sense, the grandmothers hacked the hackathon. After all, hackathons started as male-dominated code-writing marathons, often inaccessible to women — who, even when they join tech or other professions, also handle much of the “second shift,” the unpaid family work women have been doing for generations. As one of the hackers told Beltrán, her grandmother “helps with everything in the day to day. She is the one that is in charge of everything.”

But having so many women in the hackathon audience, Beltrán observes, made visible an often-ignored point: All that unpaid work by women is part of the “infrastructure” that has let men code and innovate and build their own careers.

“Things people normally don’t think about, even like the structure of a hackathon, being there the whole weekend with your buddies, is something that has not been feasible for many women,” Beltrán says.

Now, in a new book, “Code Work: Hacking Across the US/México Techno-Borderlands,” published today by Princeton University Press, Beltrán closely explores the relationship between computer culture and society in Mexico. In it, he finds that coding is more than writing code: It’s an activity generating fruitful reflection by the coders — about themselves, their political and economic circumstances, and what roles they can play in society.

“A core concept of the book is precisely that as you’re coding and participating in these events, you’re also constructing a sense of yourself and how you fit into these larger societal structures and engines of difference,” says Beltrán, who is the Class of 1957 Career Development Assistant Professor in MIT’s anthropology program.

Breaking into the field

“Code Work” builds on field research Beltrán conducted in Mexico, attending hackathons, conducting interviews, and scrutinizing the country’s politics and economy. However, the roots of the project go back to Beltrán’s undergraduate days at MIT, where he majored in computer science and engineering. After graduating, Beltrán worked in consulting; a trip to Mexico City helped spur his interest in the differences between the tech sectors in Mexico and in the U.S.

“I saw that there was really a disconnect between different cultures,” Beltrán says.

As such, “Code Work” is an exploration of coding both as it is practiced within Mexico and in its relationship to U.S. computing culture. The book focuses extensively on hackathons, as events where the enjoyment and promise of tech innovation are evident, along with the tensions in the field.

In contrast to the U.S., where hackers have often gained cachet as “disruptors” shaking up the civic order, in Mexico coders are often trying to enter the established economic order — while also trying to use technology for social innovations.

“Usually we think about hacking in the Global North as a way to break out of certain constraints,” Beltrán says. “But in the Global South, there are people who have been excluded from these global cultures of innovation and computing. Their hacking work [is a means of] trying to break in to these larger cultures of computing.”

To be sure, Beltrán notes, tech culture in the U.S. has not always been enormously inclusive either. Referring to one Latino MIT student he observed who went to Mexico to participate in hackathons, Beltrán says, “I see this kind of move to go the Global South as a way to present yourself as someone from an innovative culture and be respected as an expert — to break out of the Global North’s own hierarchies.”

In studying matters of gender and tech culture, Beltrán examines issues involving masculinity and coding as well. The sheer hard work of coding can drive people to great accomplishments, but at times coders can be “outworking other people to the point of exploitation,” he notes. And while “the information technology economy wants you to think,” the labor of coding “complicates the divison of mind and hand.”

In the book, Beltrán also locates hackers who question the value of the hackathons they are participating in, noting that the winning entries rarely seem to become widely used applications; some hackathons function more as advertisements for innovation than engines of it. The tension between hacker independence and the larger corporate structures they perceive is a key motif in the book.

Such observations underscore Beltrán’s view that hackers, while producing code, are highly reflective as well, actively thinking about their place in society, their political economy, and more. These hackers, Beltrán finds, often apply the intellectual concepts of coding to the world in illuminating ways. One hacker Beltrán meets views his own career as a series of “loosely coupled” jobs — borrowing a computing term for marginally connected components. In the hacker’s view, this has a positive aspect, in contrast to a career dedicated to working only for one firm of subjectively questionable value.

Thought piece

“Code Work” has earned praise from other scholars in the field. Gabriella Coleman, a professor of anthropology at Harvard University who also studies hackers, has called the book “lucid, well-written, and lively,” and adds that by “deftly hitching ethnographic material to literature in anthropology, Latinx studies, science and technology studies, and Mexican studies and history, Beltrán has enlarged and enlivened the scope and direction of hacker studies.”

For his part, Beltrán says he hopes readers will undertand his book as a work that is not only about Mexico but distinctly international in scope, exploring how cultures evolve in relationship to each other, while meshed in a global economy. The issues raised in “Code Work” could apply to many countries, he believes.

These are topics Beltrán is also examining in an undergraduate class, “Hacking from the South,” which he is currently teaching.

“These are complex problems with a lot of moving parts,” Beltrán says. “It’s also very empowering for students themselves to make these connections.” Many students, he thinks, thrive when they have the opportunity to think across disciplines, and take those tools and perspectives out into the world.

“As an undergrad, I thought I was learning something at MIT in order to go out and get a job,” Beltrán says. “I wanted to come back to academia because it’s a place where we get to think deeply about the structures we’re entangled in, and question who we’re becoming and how to intervene in the world. Especially MIT students, who can potentially intervene by changing systems in a powerful way.”

In 2023, 11 faculty were granted tenure in the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.

Isaiah Andrews PhD ’14 is a professor in the Department of Economics. He is an econometrician who develops reliable and broadly applicable methods of statistical inference to address key challenges in economics, social science, and medicine. He is the recipient of the prestigious John Bates Clark Medal, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Sloan Research Fellowship. Andrews earned his PhD in economics from MIT and served as an assistant and associate professor in the Department of Economics from 2016 to 2018. He returned to MIT as a full professor in 2023 after spending five years at Harvard University.

Joshua Bennett is a professor in the MIT Literature Section and Distinguished Chair of the Humanities. He is the author of five books of poetry, criticism, and narrative nonfiction, including most recently “Spoken Word: A Cultural History” (Knopf, 2023) and “The Study of Human Life” (Penguin, 2022), which is being adapted for television in collaboration with Warner Brothers Studios. He earned his PhD in English from Princeton University, and an MA in theater and performance studies from the University of Warwick, where he was a Marshall Scholar. For his creative writing and scholarship, Bennett has received fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Society of Fellows at Harvard University.

Megan Black is an associate professor in the MIT History Section. She is a historian of U.S. environmental management and foreign relations in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Her interests span the fields of environmental history, foreign relations history, history of capitalism, science and technology studies, and histories of the U.S. West. She is the author of “The Global Interior: Mineral Frontiers and American Power,” which analyzes the surprising role of the U.S. Department of the Interior in pursuing minerals around the world — in Indigenous lands, formal territories, foreign nations, the oceans, and outer space. The work garnered four prizes in different subfields. Professor Black previously taught at the London School of Economics and completed postdoctoral fellowships at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University and the John Sloane Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth College. She earned her BA from the University of Nebraska and her PhD from George Washington University.

William Deringer is an associate professor in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society. His research examines the history of those techniques and technologies of calculation that organize modern economic, financial, and political life. His work ranges widely across time, from early compound-interest tables and changing social relations in the English countryside in the early 1600s to the place of computer spreadsheets in the culture of Wall Street in the “go-go” 1980s. Deringer received his BA summa cum laude in history from Harvard University in 2006, and his MA (2009) and PhD (2012) in history of science from Princeton University. Before graduate school, he was an investment banking analyst at the Blackstone Group in New York. At Princeton, he was awarded the Porter Ogden Jacobus Fellowship, Princeton’s highest honor for graduate students. From 2012 to 2015, he was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University, before joining the MIT faculty in 2015.

E.J. Green is an associate professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy and the Class of 1948 Career Development Chair. He joined the MIT faculty in 2017. He received his PhD from Rutgers University in 2016, then spent a year as a postdoc at New York University before arriving at MIT. His research interests are in the philosophy of mind and philosophy of cognitive science, with a primary focus on perception.

Nathaniel Hendren PhD ’12 is a professor in the Department of Economics. His research quantifies the differences in economic mobility and opportunity for people of different backgrounds, explores why private markets often fail to provide economic opportunity, and offers new tools for government policymakers evaluating the effectiveness of social programs. Hendren founded and co-directs Policy Impacts and Opportunity Insights. He has received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers and a Sloan Research Fellowship. Hendren earned his PhD in economics from MIT and returned as a full professor in 2023.

Caley Horan is an associate professor in the History Section. She is an historian of the 20th century United States interested in the social life of economic ideas. Her research and teaching focus on business history and the history of capitalism, risk and uncertainty, and American culture in the post-1945 era. Her first book “Insurance Era: Risk, Governance, and the Privatization of Security in Postwar America,” won the 2022 Hagley Prize for best book in business history. “Insurance Era” examines the role of the insurance industry in shaping social, political, and economic life in the United States during the second half of the 20th century. Horan is currently at work on a new project on the history of astrology and uncertainty in the modern United States. She earned her BA from Stanford University in 2003, and her PhD from the University of Minnesota in 2011. 

Robin Wolfe Scheffler is an associate professor in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society. He is an historian of the modern biological and biomedical sciences and their intersections with developments in American history. The common aim of his projects is to show the mutual influence of society on science and science on society. His first book, “A Contagious Cause: The American Hunt for Cancer Viruses and the Rise of Molecular Medicine,” follows the history of cancer virus research from laboratory to legislature, showing the intimate connections between health policy and the emergence of a molecular vision of life. He is currently at work on a National Science Foundation-supported project to write the first history of the Boston-area biotechnology cluster and the spatial relationships between technological innovation and the production of inequality. He earned undergraduate degrees in history and chemistry from the University of Chicago, an M.Phil in the history and philosophy of science from the University of Cambridge, and a doctorate from Yale University in 2014.

Frank Schilbach is an associate professor in the Department of Economics. He researches the relationship between poverty and economic behavior by investigating factors such as mental distress, sleep deprivation, and substance use. He also studies behavioral barriers to the diffusion of information in developing countries. Schilbach is an affiliate at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), the Centre for Economic Policy Research, and the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development, and he helps lead the Behavioral Development Lab in India. Schilbach joined the Department of Economics in 2015 after earning his PhD in economics from Harvard University.

Caitlin Talmadge PhD ’11 is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science. She also serves as a senior nonresident fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution; a member of the Defense Policy Board at the U.S. Department of Defense; and a series editor for Cornell Studies in Security Affairs at Cornell University Press. During the academic year 2023-24, she is on leave from MIT as a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars in Washington. Talmadge’s research and teaching focus on nuclear deterrence and escalation, U.S. military operations and strategy, and security issues in Asia and the Persian Gulf. Talmadge is a graduate of Harvard University (BA, government, summa cum laude) and MIT (PhD, political science). Previously, she has worked as a researcher at the Center for Strategic and International Studies; a consultant to the Office of Net Assessment at the U.S. Department of Defense; and a professor at the George Washington University and Georgetown University.

Leslie Tilley is an associate professor in the Music and Theater Arts Section. She is a music analyst and ethnomusicologist whose interests in musical transformation span a wide spectrum of areas and approaches, from ethnographically-based music analyses of collective improvisations in Bali, Indonesia, to comparative, multi-modal analyses of cover songs. Her book, “Making it up Together: The Art of Collective Improvisation in Balinese Music and Beyond,” (University of Chicago Press) presents close analyses of the Balinese improvised forms reyong norot and kendang arja while offering broad-reaching analytical frameworks for examining improvisation and collective creativity across genres and cultures. The book won the Society for Music Theory Emerging Scholar Award in 2022.