RNA vaccines and other nucleic acid therapeutics are typically packaged within fatty molecules known as lipid nanoparticles (LNPs). MIT researchers have now come up with a way to produce these particles much more quickly, and with more precise control over their size and shape.

This new process, which can be run automatically without any human intervention, could greatly speed up the development of new RNA and DNA therapeutics, the researchers say.

“This method can help you determine what are the parameters that will generate specific size and shape attributes, before you take those particles and see which one will perform best,” says Cedric Devos, an MIT postdoc and one of the lead authors of the study. “It could be a quite powerful development tool.”

Current methods for designing new lipid nanoparticles often require time-consuming trial-and-error experiments, with limited investigation of desired particle size and shape. Tuning the size and shape of LNPs can open the possibility of targeting different organs and tissues.

“The size and shape of LNPs could not be reliably controlled by any previous production method. The problem may appear simple at first glance, but in reality it requires a deep understanding of lipid nanoparticle assembly,” says Allan Myerson, a professor of the practice in MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering and the senior author of the new study.

MIT postdocs Aniket Udepurkar and Peter Sagmeister are also lead authors of the paper, which appears today in ACS Nano.

More precise control

Vaccines based on mRNA work by delivering instructions to cells to produce a harmless version of a viral protein, which prompts the immune system to generate a response. However, if mRNA is injected on its own, it will be quickly broken down in the body.

“These are really a revolutionary type of therapeutics, but they need some kind of delivery vehicle to bring them to the right cells in the body,” Devos says.

For the mRNA Covid-19 vaccines and other mRNA therapeutics, scientists have used lipid nanoparticles for that packaging. LNPs usually consist of four components — an ionizable lipid, a phospholipid, cholesterol, and a lipid attached to a molecule of polyethylene glycol (PEG), which helps to stabilize the LNP.

To make the particles, two streams of fluid are mixed together at high speed. One consists of lipid molecules suspended in ethanol, and the other contains mRNA dissolved in an acidic buffer.

Those solutions aren’t mixed at equal flow rates, however. Instead, there is about three times more of the mRNA solution than the lipid solution. This unequal ratio helps promote the formation of lipid nanoparticles containing mRNA, but it doesn’t offer precise control over the size or shapes of the particles.

In a study published last year in ACS Nano, the MIT team showed that they could enable much better control of particle size by breaking the mixing process down into two steps.

In the first step, mRNA and lipids are mixed together at equal flow rates. Then, after a short delay, more of the buffer is added, which halts the growth of the particles. Longer delays produce larger particles.

“This gives you the ability to play around with the residence time, which is the time it takes between the first mixer and the second mixer. If you keep that residence time really long, it means your particles will grow a lot. If you keep it really short, you can keep them really small,” Devos says. “It gives you a lever over lipid nanoparticle manufacturing that wasn't available before.”

In that study, the researchers also showed that they could alter the shape of the particles. By changing the concentration of the buffer that they add in the second step, they were able to transform the particles from spheres to elongated particles that resemble avocados.

Both of these interventions — changing the delay residence time and changing the buffer composition — allow the researchers to control particle size and shape without otherwise altering the composition of the LNPs.

An automatic process

In the new ACS Nano paper, the researchers developed a way to automate the two-step mixing process. They also incorporated a commercially available dynamic light scattering device that can measure the sizes of the particles as they are formed.

The project also highlights the impact of MIT’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP). “Through this program, applied mathematics and computer science undergraduates Joy Ren, Sofiya Chubich, and Dylan Nguyen gained hands-on experience, learning how advanced software engineering can be integrated with chemical engineering to develop an automated platform for LNP process development,” Sagmeister says.

With this automated system, the researchers can specify a particle size, and the system will generate that size. It will also measure the resulting particles to make sure they’re the right size, and if not, adjust the delay time and other factors to steer them to the right size.

“The first paper really unlocked the new methodology to make lipid nanoparticles, to truly engineer them by size and shape,” Sagmeister says. “With the second study, we automate the whole process.”

The system can also produce particles of different shapes, but measuring those shapes has to be done outside of the automated system.

Using this approach, the researchers were able to investigate how changing the inputs to the system affects the size and shapes of the particles, on a much faster timescale than currently possible. The researchers then used the data they gathered from these experiments to train a machine-learning model that can predict the combination of factors that will generate a particular size or shape.

With this method, it could be much easier for developers of RNA therapeutics to generate different sizes of particles to test them for a particular application. Controlling the size of a lipid nanoparticle is critical because the particle’s size determines where in the body it is most likely to end up.

“If you make an LNP-based therapeutic with a target size of 150 nanometers, and one that is 70 nanometers, and everything else is the same, they will behave very differently,” Devos says.

The researchers have filed for a patent on their technology and are now working to commercialize it through a new company called BIZON Labs. Since receiving initial support through the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship’s Researcher 2 Entrepreneur (R2E) program, the team has also been accepted into MIT’s flagship accelerator program, delta v. The research was funded by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Koch Institute Support (core) Grant from the National Cancer Institute. The work was carried out, in part, through the use of MIT.nano’s facilities.

When MIT mechanical engineering student Daphne Wang arrived for her internship at the Muscogee Creek Nation Department of Health in Tulsa, Oklahoma last summer, she expected to be writing code. To her surprise, she found herself analyzing tribal history and the implications for technical innovation.

“I learned so much that I think should be required curriculum for every single person in this country,” says Wang. “I think tech for good is genuinely getting out into communities and learning about people who aren't you, creating worldly perspectives that you ultimately can take into everything else that you do.”

Wang and fellow intern Lucy Sun, who is majoring in artificial intelligence and decision making, spent the summer supporting the development of the Muscogee Nation's first Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS) survey to capture maternal health data specific to Muscogee women. The project required completing literature reviews, analyzing datasets, and drafting survey questions, while considering issues of data sovereignty and governance structures specific to the Muscogee.

“It was this change of pace — 180 [degrees] from MIT, completely,” Wang reflects. At MIT, she says, course instructors routinely prepare students for big technical challenges, but there are fewer opportunities to “work with communities, [learn] how to think about the cultural and historical dimensions of the work, or how to consider the people who will be affected.”

Wang’s supervisor, epidemiologist Breanna McNaughton-Long, was effusive about Wang and Sun’s engagement. “They were instrumental. They did so much work that I don't think we would have been able to do as quickly,” she says. “And they brought this sense that we were doing something that mattered.”

Experiential learning at the confluence of humanities and engineering

Wang was one of 10 MIT undergraduates to participate in the PKG Center for Social Impact’s 2026 Code.Tulsa program. Now in its second year, Code.Tulsa is made possible by support from the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation and the George Kaiser Family Foundation.

Students live at the University of Tulsa for the summer. They intern with the Muscogee and Cherokee nations, as well as local nonprofits Black Tech Street and Urban Coders Guild, completing AI, data science, and other technical projects.

The PKG Center’s assistant dean for community-based programs, Vippy Yee, complements students’ professional experience with education on the historical and cultural significance of tech-based development in the Tulsa region from the perspective of local leaders.

“As with all PKG Center programming, our aim is to help students integrate an engineer’s approach to problem-solving with a humanist lens on the nature of social challenges, and by extension interventions,” says Alison Badgett, the PKG Center’s director.

“Getting to speak to people who were either very educated on the issues or have experienced them has been a massive help in reshaping the way that I think about social issues,” says Chenise Harper, an electrical engineering with computing major who interned with the Urban Coders Guild.

Harper puts this dynamic candidly: “I hated history, but I learned a lot about why it is useful for making social change and how to go about researching it. I now feel a lot more confident that I can make an impact.”

A student’s vision for increasing STEM access

Code.Tulsa was the brainchild of sophomore Jack Carson, an electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) student who approached the PKG Center with the idea for Code.Tulsa as an incoming first-year student. Carson, who is from Tulsa and a member of the Cherokee Nation, saw firsthand that rural Native students who could benefit greatly from STEM education were unlikely to have access to it. Carson proposed developing a weeklong STEM camp for members of federally recognized tribes held at the University of Tulsa, with he and Code.Tulsa interns serving as instructors.

Carson devised a nomination system to attract promising high school students, selecting 25 campers from 10 tribes out of 160 applications representing 25 Native nations.

To develop the curriculum, Carson enlisted Harvard University student Allie Zong, whom he had met at Campus Preview Weekend. The Tulsa Advanced Sciences Camp (TASC) offers intensive, interactive track time in AI engineering, DNA technology, physics, and chemistry and energy. This is complemented by philosophical workshops to help students think more ambitiously and deliberately about what they can and should achieve in the near and long term. As Zong explains, “We teach them not knowledge, but curiosity, and the skills to teach themselves."

The TASC experience “kind of propelled me to self-study calculus,” says Alyssa Theofanidis, a rising high school senior from Houston who is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. Theofanidis participated in the camp’s first year, returning this summer as a teaching assistant. Like many TASC campers, Theofanidis is eager to use her developing STEM expertise to benefit her Native community.

TASC “got us to think 1,000 times more ambitiously about the impact we could have,” said another camper, who was inspired by guest speakers “like the nuclear fusion person at the top of their field,” referring to physicist Alexandra LeViness of MIT spinout Commonwealth Fusion Systems, who helped develop TASC’s chemistry and energy track. Campers were also inspired by “the different worldviews” of MIT interns. “I thought, maybe this is what MIT looks like,” said one camper, with several expressing the intent to apply to MIT as a result of the camp.

Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. also delivered remarks at TASC, encouraging students as future leaders to take a public interest in technology.

“Technology can be used for good, or it can be used for harm. Your generation has the opportunity to bend that arc toward something good,” Hoskin said. “It's a very special relationship that the Cherokee Nation has with MIT. As we reach out a hand in friendship, we have a hand reaching back. We are thankful for Cherokee citizen Jack Carson, a former secretary for the Cherokee Nation tribal youth council, for his leadership role in organizing this effort.”

Making a positive long-term social impact

Like TASC campers, Code.Tulsa interns came away from the experience motivated to make a positive impact. While most MIT students won’t go on to full-time professional roles traditionally associated with social impact, PKG Center programming like Code.Tulsa helps students recognize they can promote the public interest no matter their career. As Elvis Chipiro, a junior in computer science and engineering, reflected after interning with the Cherokee Nation, “Social impact is not separate from mainstream technology; rather, it is embedded in the choices engineers make every day … Ultimately, meaningful social change is not driven by technology alone, but by people willing to design systems with empathy, responsibility, and inclusion at the center.”

For others, Code.Tulsa helps them reconnect with a sense of public purpose. “Remembering that … I could use my MIT education to help others was a big reason I applied to MIT in the first place,” says Harper. “But I forgot my own mission in the stress of school. Code.Tulsa really re-opened my eyes to why I am here.”

David Siegel SM ’86, PhD ’91, a computer scientist, entrepreneur, and philanthropist, will serve as the next MIT Innovation Fellow during the 2026-27 academic year.

“From the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing to the MIT Siegel Family Quest for Intelligence, David has been a superb thought partner for me and other Institute leaders on a range of very significant initiatives, so we're delighted to have him join us now as an MIT Innovation Fellow,” says MIT President Sally Kornbluth. “Our community has long benefited from David's exceptional technical insight, entrepreneurial experience, instinct for connecting people, and infectious love for MIT. We look forward to working with him now as he helps us identify new opportunities at the intersection of AI and scientific discovery.”

“MIT has played a foundational role in shaping how I view technology’s potential to address complex challenges,” says Siegel. “I’m thrilled to return to campus as an Innovation Fellow to collaborate with brilliant students, researchers, and faculty at a pivotal juncture in how technology shapes our world.”

Siegel’s relationship with MIT began during his graduate studies, where he earned a master’s degree in 1986 and PhD in 1991, after earning his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science from Princeton University in 1983. Immersed in the field during a foundational era for computer science, he worked at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab (now the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory) in Professor Tomás Lozano-Pérez’s research group on human-machine interaction, contributing to the development of a pioneering humanlike robotic hand.

Siegel has remained deeply involved with the Institute in the years since. He is a life member of the MIT Corporation, previously served on its Executive Committee, and co-chairs the External Advisory Committee for the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing. Additionally, Siegel was an early champion of the MIT Quest for Intelligence, an Institute-wide initiative studying intelligence in brains and machines, recently renamed the MIT Siegel Family Quest for Intelligence .

Entrepreneurship, philanthropy, and AI leadership

Repeatability in engineering product design ensures that a manufacturing process performs the same way every time and allows for a working prototype to be transformed into a reliable, safe, consistent, and cost-effect...

“[As an engineer], you have an extra responsibility to overlook nothing,” says course instructor Alex Slocum, the Walter M. and A. Hazel May Professor of Mechanical Engineering. “If you miss something, someone could be hurt or die.”

Slocum’s message is serious, but his approach to teaching the material is famously fun — in fact, he prefers the spelling “FUNdaMENTALs” for the first word of the class name. His mother, Mariana Polonsky Slocum, was a mathematics professor at MIT. “She taught me, physics doesn't care about your feelings,” he says. “I want [students] to understand that we are governed by the laws of physics, and that is a catalyst for creativity, not a hindrance. It is a hindrance if you forget that.”

Through the course, students learn deterministic design, selection, and assembly of machine elements to create and manufacture robust precision machines, instruments, and systems. They also apply Slocum’s “Functional Requirements, Ergonomics and Environment, Design Parameters, Analysis, References, Risks, Countermeasures” (FRED PARRC, pronounced like “Fred Park”) model, and engage in peer review and evaluation.

“You get a lot of time working on problems that just pop up in engineering. To me, it felt very [representative] of the grad work that I was doing,” says Mariia Smyk, a graduate student in mechanical engineering.

Some students may describe the course as “creative chaos,” but tend to agree that their learning experience is one that drives home the fundamentals.

At a moment when global alliances are shifting, technological change is accelerating, and the boundaries between science and geopolitics are dissolving, understanding the world demands new ways of thinking.

For 75 years, the MIT Center for International Studies (CIS) has helped meet that challenge — bringing together engineers, social scientists, and policy practitioners to confront the most pressing global challenges of their time. From developing the foundations of modern international security to redefining how the United States engages with the world, CIS has not only studied global affairs, it has helped shape them.

What distinguishes CIS is not just the scope of its work, but the way it approaches it.

At MIT, international studies does not sit apart from science and technology, it is embedded within it. This proximity has enabled generations of scholars to tackle geopolitical problems with tools and perspectives rarely found in traditional academic and policy environments.

“Being situated within the world’s leading technical institution enables a lot of exciting possibilities,” says Evan Lieberman, the director of CIS and the Total Professor of Political Science and Contemporary Africa. “We focus on critical problems in international development and security — always with an eye towards the challenges and opportunities presented by technological change. Beyond that, a big part of our mission is to provide global perspectives and engagement avenues relevant to scientists and engineers.”

Established during the dawn of the Cold War, CIS pioneered a new understanding of global power: that science, technology, and geopolitics were becoming deeply intertwined. From the beginning, it convened faculty across disciplines — economics, political science, engineering, and beyond — setting a template that has since become a model for institutions around the world. Over the decades, this approach has produced an outsized impact.

Each year, faculty and researchers across the MIT School of Engineering are recognized with prestigious awards for their contributions to research, technology, society, and education.

Faez Ahmed , the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, received a 2025 Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Program Award . The award provides early-career U.S. scientists and engineers with up to $450,000 over three years to support innovative research.

Navid Azizan , the Alfred Henry (1929) and Jean Morrison Hayes Career Development Professor and an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award . The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a foundation-wide activity that offers the NSF’s most prestigious awards in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.

Yet-Ming Chiang , the Kyocera Professor of Materials Science and Engineering in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, was named a Boston Globe Tech Power Player 2026 . The annual list highlights the impact of local leaders on technology and business.

Samantha Coday , an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, received a 2025 ARPA-E IGNIITE Award . The award aims to support early-career innovators seeking to convert disruptive and unconventional ideas into impactful new technologies across the full spectrum of energy applications.

Srini Devadas , the Edwin Sibley Webster Professor and a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, received the 2026 ACM-IEEE CS Eckert-Mauchly Award , which recognizes contributions to computer and digital systems architecture.

Antimicrobial resistance is one of the most pressing global health and development challenges of our time.

Now, an international group of scientists reports the discovery of aminovaleramididine synthetase (AvaS), the first identified pyridoxal phosphate (PLP)-dependent enzyme responsible for producing a chemical modification linked to how bacteria respond to metabolic stress. This discovery sheds new light on how bacteria use RNA modification to control protein production, opening new avenues to study bacterial adaptation and identify future targets and better strategies for developing antimicrobial therapeutics.

The work was led by researchers from the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology ’s Antimicrobial Resistance interdisciplinary research group (SMART AMR), alongside collaborators from MIT, Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and institutions in the United States, Poland, and France.

“While many RNA modifications have been known for decades, researchers are still uncovering the full extent of their roles. The discovery of AvaS opens a previously unknown chapter in RNA biology and is an important step forward in our understanding of processes relevant to antimicrobial resistance,” says Professor Peter Dedon, co-lead principal investigator at SMART AMR, professor of biological engineering at MIT, and co-corresponding author of a new paper on the work. “As we continue to map the RNA modification landscape, we expect many more discoveries with meaningful implications for infectious disease, antimicrobial resistance, and fundamental biology.”

Bacteria can develop resistance to antibiotics using various strategies, many of which depend on the bacteria’s ability to regulate which proteins are made, when they are made, and how accurately they are produced — whether by pumping drugs out of their cell, creating enzymes that break down drugs, or developing new cell processes to avoid the antibiotics’ target.

To build these proteins, bacteria rely on RNA molecules to read genetic instructions and direct protein production. Among these RNA molecules are transfer ribonucleic acid (tRNAs), a specialized class of RNA that acts as molecular delivery vehicles bringing chemical “stickers” to help bacteria control how proteins are made in response to stress and changing conditions such as exposure to antibiotics.

Warming temperatures are fueling more extreme weather-related events — catastrophic floods, severe hurricanes and cyclones, and wildfires exacerbated by drought.

Addressing that shortcoming was one of five research areas selected for MIT’s 2022 Climate Grand Challenges , an ambitious effort to accelerate science-based solutions to climate problems. The area, titled “ Preparing for a New World of Weather and Climate Extremes ,” focuses on tools to help evaluate a location’s vulnerabilities to flooding, cyclones, humid heat waves, or other climate-related events.

Four years later, collaborations among more than 40 faculty and student researchers on Weather and Climate Extremes projects have yielded 29 published research papers and digital tools and datasets that are already in use or close to deployment. Individual projects cut across forecasting, risk assessment, on-the-ground planning, and resilient infrastructure.

“Communities across the United States and around the world are already confronting the consequences of extreme weather,” says Evelyn Wang, MIT’s vice president for energy and climate, whose office has been funding and supporting all of the Grand Challenges since 2024. “Through the Climate Grand Challenges, an interdisciplinary team at MIT is advancing the science, technologies, and practical strategies needed to help communities anticipate these risks and build greater resilience.”

Paul O’Gorman, the Robert R. Shrock Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at MIT and co-lead of Weather and Climate Extremes, is refining the science behind forecasting extreme weather events, such as last year’s major flooding events in Central Texas and in Pakistan. “There have been a lot of unprecedented, record-breaking events,” he says, “and we want to understand how they are changing as the climate warms, and how they’re changing in different regions.”

One aspect that his group has been examining is the relationship between extreme rainfall events and a warming climate. Climate models predict that extreme rainfall increases less in summer than other seasons in much of the United States and Europe. O’Gorman’s team found that these seasonal shifts stem from not only how much water is in the atmosphere, which is measured by specific humidity, but also how close it is to saturation, which is measured by relative humidity. “We found that changes in relative humidity played a big role, which was something that hadn’t been appreciated before, and something we need to take into account,” he says.

As it marks its 10-year anniversary, MIT Reads is being reimagined for the age of artificial intelligence.

Recognizing the need to foster social connection and a sense of our shared humanity, the popular MIT Libraries’ program will turn its focus to fiction and memoir, and to the particular power of stories to help us understand ourselves and our place in the world.

“At MIT, we spend a great deal of time on imagining and building for the future. Reading fiction prompts us to think about how what we build might change us,” says MIT Libraries Director Chris Bourg. “Reading together also gives us the increasingly rare opportunity for both individual reflection and shared connection.”

MIT Reads is also evolving with MIT as it explores AI’s influence on the education landscape and the social fabric of the Institute. The value of collective reading, reflection, and discussion has never been more relevant.

A recently released report from MIT’s Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training urges strengthening social connection and personal well-being, citing MIT Reads as a way to “engage many more people across campus in conversation about shared norms and why community matters.”

Launched in 2016, MIT Reads was designed to foster empathy, understanding, and belonging within the campus community. Each selected book is accompanied by programming such as talks by the featured author, panel discussions, and small-group conversations facilitated by library staff.

In 2026, five faculty were granted tenure in the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.

Volha Charnysh is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science. She studies the role of identity in state-building and economic development and the effects of violence. Her first book, “Uprooted: How post-WWII Population Transfers Remade Europe” (Cambridge University Press, 2024), focuses on the enduring consequences of mass displacement and resulting cultural heterogeneity. She received her PhD from Harvard University in 2017 and joined the MIT faculty in 2018.

Grisha Coleman is a full professor in the Music and Theater Arts Section. Her research explores tensions between our physiological, technological, and ecological systems; human movement, our machines, and the places we inhabit. Her practice engages an interdisciplinary approach to these explorations. She earned an MFA in music composition and integrated media from California Institute of the Arts. She joined the MIT faculty in 2026.

Tung-Hui Hu is an associate professor in the Comparative Media Studies/Writing program. A poet and a scholar of digital media, he is the author of five books, most recently “Digital Lethargy: Dispatches from an Age of Disconnection” (MIT Press, 2022), “A Prehistory of the Cloud” (MIT Press, 2015), and “Greenhouses, Lighthouses” (Copper Canyon Press, 2013). Hu is interested in how concepts such as race and normal language became measurable, governable objects in the form of datasets. He earned a BA in comparative literature from Princeton University, an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan, and a PhD in film studies from the University of California at Berkeley. He joined the MIT faculty in 2026.

Tobias Salz is an associate professor in the Department of Economics. He works in the field of industrial organization and studies how digital platforms and other intermediaries shape competition and market outcomes. The applications of his research span digital markets, transportation, and artificial intelligence, and often combine economic theory with novel data and field experiments. His recent work examines market power in web search, personalized platform pricing, and how human experts and AI can work together in medical diagnosis. He received his PhD in economics from New York University in 2016 and joined the MIT faculty in 2019.

Christian Wolf is an associate professor in the Department of Economics. His research is primarily concerned with the question of how monetary and fiscal policy can be used to stabilize the economy. A key aim of his work is to learn as much as possible about such stabilization policy directly from micro- and macroeconomic data, rather than through reliance on structural models. Wolf joined the MIT faculty in 2021 after earning his PhD in economics from Princeton University.

When Lanie McKinney was 3 years old, her parents stopped at a massive meteor crater during a road trip through the U.S.

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“I want to wait here for the next one,” she told them.

She didn’t yet understand that another meteor wasn’t likely to land in exactly the same spot. But the story, which her parents still tell, captures a fascination that has remained with McKinney throughout her life.

“I just always remember being captivated by space and what is out there,” she says.

Today, McKinney is entering her fifth year as a PhD candidate at MIT, where she works in the Aerospace Plasma Group with Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Associate Professor Carmen Guerra-Garcia. McKinney’s research focuses on developing technologies that could help humans explore Mars.

Jay Wilcoxson, counsel in the MIT Office of General Counsel (OGC), does not shy away from a crisis.

After attending Boston University School of Law, Wilcoxson joined the Boston law firm Goodwin Procter LLP, specializing in commercial business litigation. While the work was interesting and challenging, there were aspects of law firm life that he didn’t love, and he expected to eventually shift to a role as an in-house lawyer. He had always believed in the mission of higher education, and as universities are complex organizations with many moving parts, he was drawn to the range of issues they present. The challenge was that legal jobs in higher education are rare — people get them and don’t leave.

For several years, Wilcoxson kept his eye on openings and met with general counsels at several universities, who reiterated how competitive these roles can be. One also mentioned something that stuck with him: Being a lawyer in higher education requires a high tolerance for ambiguity, which can be counterintuitive, as legal work is typically focused on applying the law to a set of facts to reach a clear outcome. In 2007, he opened Mass Lawyers Weekly and saw that MIT was looking for a lawyer with a background in litigation and other disputes at his level of seniority, so he applied. He was hired in August of that year as the first new lawyer to join the recently-created OGC. Before the office was established in January 2007, lawyers at MIT were not centralized in one office, but instead spread across several units on campus.

Since joining MIT, Wilcoxson jokes that he is a “reformed litigator” because, unlike in private practice where he was often in court and managing the day-to-day of active lawsuits, much of his work now is focused on avoiding litigation. He works to identify potential friction points and reduce the risk of conflict or legal disputes before they escalate. His work is strategic and collaborative — working with clients across campus to identify and prevent potential areas of conflict and thinking broadly about how a case should be defended and whether there are opportunities to resolve it.

Although Wilcoxson’s practice is very broad, his primary focus is on student life. He works regularly with the Division of Student Life , the Office of the Chancellor , the Office of Graduate Education , and the Institute Discrimination and Harassment Response Office , among other departments, laboratories, centers, and institutes. If an issue comes to the OGC and the client isn’t sure about whom to contact, Wilcoxson and his colleagues confer to ensure that it makes its way to the lawyer best suited to handle it. As he notes, it is not the community’s responsibility to find the right lawyer — the OGC team makes sure each matter lands with the right person.

Wilcoxson credits the team in the OGC for building an office that people want to work with. He believes the community sees him and his colleagues as trusted thought partners and teammates. All members of the MIT community — faculty, staff, and sometimes even students — can reach out for guidance on Institute legal issues. As lawyers, Wilcoxson and his colleagues approach problems differently than engineers, scientists, or those in the humanities, offering a distinct perspective on how to navigate complex issues.

In 2021, MIT set campus decarbonization goals as part of its Fast Forward climate action plan .

“Decarbonizing our campus goes hand-in-hand with MIT playing a leadership role in promoting carbon reduction and climate resilience through its research, innovation, and efforts to inform public policy in this area,” says Glen Shor, executive vice president and treasurer. “Our teams are leveraging that same innovative spirit to meet our campus climate goals.”

Over the past decade, the Institute has decreased energy use per square foot by more than 10 percent, even as the campus has grown and research activity has intensified. Rooftop solar power generation has increased by more than five times in the same period, with installations added to the Stratton Student Center (Building W20), the Dewey Library (Building E53), the New Vassar undergraduate residence hall (Building W46), Graduate Junction (Buildings W87 and W88), and the theater arts building (Building W97). Thirty-three MIT building projects have earned Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification. And in May, the Tina and Hamid Moghadam Building (Building 55) became MIT’s first Living Future Zero Carbon Certified building.

“We’ve completed more than 300 energy-efficiency projects across campus, focusing on our most energy-intensive research buildings, and ultimately touching nearly every corner of MIT,” notes Joe Higgins, vice president for campus services and stewardship.

Case in point: Building 46, home to the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Complex, and the Metropolitan Storage Warehouse (Building W41), newly home to the School of Architecture and Planning.

Building 46 was identified as one of MIT’s biggest energy users and the building with the greatest carbon-reduction potential. In 2024, the Institute completed a lab-by-lab renovation and improved Building 46’s mechanical systems infrastructure. The result: a 35 percent reduction in building energy use and carbon emissions — roughly a 2 percent reduction in overall campus emissions.

The world needs more homes.

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Atlas Building Composites, a spinout of MIT, is on a mission to address both problems with a single solution. The company has developed an AI-powered robotic manufacturing platform capable of turning single-use plastics into durable building materials.

The company emerged from MIT HAUS, a research effort in the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering that’s short for “Home Architecture for Universal Sustainability.” Atlas uses waterless plastic recycling and large-scale composite additive manufacturing technology to make parts like home foundations, decks, and trusses for walls, floors, and roofs.

“Our mission is to convert waste plastic pollution into durable composites to build 1 billion homes,” says Atlas chair and co-founder A.J. Perez ’13, MNG ’14, PhD ’23, who is also an MIT research scientist. “You can’t divorce these things from each other. We’re not here just to build homes, and we’re not here just to recycle plastic. The conventional way of building homes involves cutting down trees, mining, refining, and a bunch of other dirty activities. We want to avoid all that and address all the plastic bound for our oceans and landfills. We’re turning bottles into buildings.”

Atlas’ parts are already being used to support barns, sheds, decks, and docks. Most recently, the company supplied the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers with American-made recycled composite trusses to construct a 40-foot bridge in a Massachusetts wetland.

MIT researchers have developed a new technique that helps generative artificial intelligence models find solutions to high-stakes problems.

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In these settings, a plausible answer is not enough: The output often must also satisfy nonnegotiable safety, physical, or task-specific requirements, known as hard constraints.

The researchers developed a method that helps generative models meet these strict requirements without sacrificing the quality of their outputs.

The key to their technique is to give the model more freedom during the generation process and enforce hard constraints on the final output, rather than at every intermediate step.

In experiments spanning robotics, control of physical processes, and computer vision, the new method consistently satisfied the required constraints while identifying better solutions than existing techniques.

The brain cancer glioblastoma is one of the most aggressive and treatment-resistant cancers known to medicine, carrying a median survival of just 12-15 months, even with the best available care.

“In laboratory and animal studies, this approach significantly reduced tumor growth and extended survival without detectable side effects, highlighting its potential as a precise and safe brain cancer therapy,” says Deblina Sarkar , associate professor and AT&T Career Development Chair at the MIT Media Lab and head of the Nano-Cybernetic Biotrek group .

The researchers named their technology “HITMAN” — short for highly-localized electric-field-induced tumor therapy using magnetically actuated nanoantennas.

An open-access paper describing this technology published today in Science Advances .

To test HITMAN against the most clinically realistic version of this disease, the research team worked with tumor tissue obtained from patients diagnosed with aggressive and chemotherapy-resistant glioblastoma at Mayo Clinic. Using cells derived from this tissue in the laboratory, the researchers demonstrated that HITMAN eliminated 52.2 percent of these drug-resistant cancer cells — more than five times than that achieved by the standard chemotherapy drug temozolomide (TMZ) — while leaving healthy neurons and brain-supporting astrocytes unharmed.

The team then implanted those patient-derived tumor cells into the brains of mice to recreate the disease in a living system. In these orthotopic animal models — widely regarded as the gold standard for preclinical brain tumor research — HITMAN substantially inhibited tumor growth, extending median survival by more than 50 percent with no detectable toxicity to major organs or surrounding healthy tissue.

This summer, the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing welcomed faculty from colleges and universities across Greater Boston, South Carolina, West Virginia, and Texas to campus for the inaugural AI Educators Pilot, a we...

“The broader goal is to expand AI education to more students by investing in training for instructors,” says Dan Huttenlocher, dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and the Panasonic Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS).

“We want to empower students to become critical thinkers about AI, not just users of the technology,” says Asu Ozdaglar, deputy dean of academics for the MIT Schwarzman College and department head of EECS.

A collaborative model for expanding AI education

Bringing the program to life required broad collaboration across the college, including support from leadership, staff, and contributions from more than half a dozen instructors in fields ranging from finance and computer science to sustainability. Together, they helped shape a workshop that paired core technical concepts with examples and teaching materials adaptable to a range of classroom settings.

“I have not seen an effort quite like it — this many dedicated instructors assembling materials of this richness, all to equip the educators who serve their students,” says Saurabh Amin, the Edmund K. Turner Professor in Civil Engineering and faculty director of the AI Educators Pilot. Amin is also co-director of the Operations Research Center, which is jointly housed within the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and MIT Sloan School of Management.

The Federal Laboratory Consortium (FLC) selected AI-GUIDE, a medical device developed by MIT Lincoln Laboratory and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), for its 2026 Excellence in Technology Transfer Award.

"This recognition reflects what effective technology transfer looks like — aligning the Army's operational need with Mass General's clinical expertise and Lincoln Laboratory's engineering capabilities to deliver a solution with a clear path to impact. The transition to AutonomUS underscores how strong partnerships can carry a technology from development into real-world adoption," says Asha Rajagopal, Lincoln Laboratory's chief technology transfer officer.

AI-GUIDE's transition to industry promises improved health outcomes for injured service members and civilians. Unlike ultrasound devices typically found in hospitals, AI-GUIDE is small and portable, making it ideal for use in pre-hospital settings. Pairing custom-developed AI software with commercial handheld ultrasound technology, AI-GUIDE helps the user insert a guidewire and catheter into a patient's blood vessel. This capability is especially important for U.S. military medics, who must keep injured soldiers alive in the field — sometimes for days — before they can be evacuated to a hospital. AI-GUIDE allows medics with minimal specialized training to administer medical interventions that would otherwise be impossible outside of the hospital, drastically improving patients’ chances of survival.

The AI-GUIDE project has served as a framework for effective technology development and transfer. Within just three years, AI-GUIDE went from an idea proposed by CCC to a fully working proof-of-concept technology with its own startup company. Once the prototype was developed, clinical testing at MGH proved its viability, and Lincoln Laboratory and MGH staff then founded AutonomUS Medical Technologies to facilitate the commercialization process. With support from the MIT Technology Licensing Office, Lincoln Laboratory Technology Transfer Office, and CCC, the company secured U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Breakthrough Device Designation, a regulatory fast-track pathway that is only granted to highly innovative technologies with lifesaving potential, as well as a Small Business Innovation Research grant from the U.S. Department of the Air Force and funding from private investors, the Department of War, and the National Institutes of Health.

These strong technology transfer collaborations are designed to streamline the transfer process, ensuring that lifesaving capabilities can be made available to military personnel and civilians as quickly as possible. While much of the initial work on vascular access has already been transferred, the AI-GUIDE team continues to develop and transition additional capabilities, including peripheral nerve block technology for trauma care and pain management. AI-GUIDE has previously been recognized with a Lincoln Laboratory Best Invention Award and an R&D 100 Award.

"Lincoln Laboratory has a long record of transferring technology to industry. We are honored and proud to be recognized for the transfer of AI‑GUIDE and look forward to seeing the technology commercialized and saving lives in the field. This achievement reflects the strength of the partnership among the Defense Health Agency, Lincoln Laboratory, Massachusetts General Hospital, and AutonomUS Medical Technologies," says Samuel Kesner, a technical staff member in the Systems Engineering Group, who currently oversees the AI-GUIDE program at Lincoln Laboratory.

Today, anyone with a large enough artificial intelligence model can generate millions of new material designs in minutes.

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One reason for the translation gap is that current models don’t reliably factor in the chemical stability of the materials they generate, and unstable materials aren’t very useful in the real world. That forces industries to allocate huge computational budgets to screening out all the unstable materials they generate, in some cases leaving behind a tiny fraction of usable options.

Now, MIT researchers have developed a framework that can be applied at the beginning of the materials generation process to vastly improve the stability rate while achieving targeted material properties. It works by ensuring every design satisfies certain key rules of chemistry relating to the electrons around the materials’ atoms before the expensive generation step begins. The researchers call their approach “crystal generator with valence-constrained design, or CrysVCD.

In a paper published today in Nature Computational Science , the researchers show how CrysVCD allowed several commonly used material models to meet those valence shell rules more often, and used it to achieve high lattice-dynamics stability — a stringent stability test — in nearly 70 percent of computational material generations. They also showed the approach could support the creation of materials with specific desired properties, like high thermal conductivity or high dielectric constant, which is important for computer chips and data centers.

A hint of how the researchers envision people using their system is in the name.

A Colorado native who originally planned to attend college close to home, Sydney Baller decided to come to MIT for the strong academic community.

McCormick Hall opened in 1963 as MIT’s first women’s residence — a move that provided women the first real opportunity to attend the Institute in significant numbers. To support continuity of the McCormick community through its first renovation in its 63-year existence, MIT has established a dedicated McCormick lounge in the Stratton Student Center (Building W20), funded efforts to maintain dorm traditions, and more.

Now a rising senior in mechanical engineering, Baller is a year-round athlete (basketball and outdoor track), crafting enthusiast, and co-president of McCormick’s student government. With construction underway to renovate the residence, Baller is taking time to help support future MIT women so they can have the same powerful residential experience she’s had.

McCormick is scheduled to open again in August 2028 — well after Baller graduates. In this interview, she describes how she is working to maintain a sense of community among the dorm’s residents and incoming first-year students during the transition and while updates are ongoing.

Q: Why did you choose to live in McCormick?

A: I was recruited to play basketball in college, and other schools were pressing me for a decision. MIT was like, “Well, you got in. It’s up to you what you want to do.”