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High-speed videos show what happens when a droplet splashes into a pool

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Rain can freefall at speeds of up to 25 miles per hour. If the droplets land in a puddle or pond, they can form a crown-like splash that, with enough force, can dislodge any surface particles and launch them into the air.Now MIT scientists have taken high-speed videos of droplets splashing into a deep pool, to track how the fluid evolves, above and below the water line, frame by millisecond frame. Their work could help to predict how spashing droplets, such as from rainstorms and irrigation systems, may impact watery surfaces and aerosolize surface particles, such as pollen on puddles or pesticides in agricultural runoff.The team carried out experiments in which they dispensed water droplets of various sizes and from various heights into a pool of water. Using high-speed imaging, they measured how the liquid pool deformed as the impacting droplet hit the pool’s surface.Across all their experiments, they observed a common splash evolution: As a droplet hit the pool, it pushed down below the surface to form a “crater,” or cavity. At nearly the same time, a wall of liquid rose above the surface, forming a crown. Interestingly, the team observed that small, secondary droplets were ejected from the crown before the crown reached its maximum height. This entire evolution happens in a fraction of a second.

“This cylinder-like wall of rising liquid, and how it evolves in time and space, is at the heart of everything,” Lydia Bourouiba says. GIF has been edited down to 5 frames per second.

Image: Courtesy of the researchers; edited by MIT News

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Scientists have caught snapshots of droplet splashes in the past, such as the famous “Milk Drop Coronet” — a photo of a drop of milk in mid-splash, taken by the late MIT professor Harold “Doc” Edgerton, who invented a photographic technique to capture quickly moving objects.The new work represents the first time scientists have used such high-speed images to model the entire splash dynamics of a droplet in a deep pool, combining what happens both above and below the surface. The team has used the imaging to gather new data central to build a mathematical model that predicts how a droplet’s shape will morph and merge as it hits a pool’s surface. They plan to use the model as a baseline to explore to what extent a splashing droplet might drag up and launch particles from the water pool.“Impacts of drops on liquid layers are ubiquitous,” says study author Lydia Bourouiba, a professor in the MIT departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Mechanical Engineering, and a core member of the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES). “Such impacts can produce myriads of secondary droplets that could act as carriers for pathogens, particles, or microbes that are on the surface of impacted pools or contaminated water bodies. This work is key in enabling prediction of droplet size distributions, and potentially also what such drops can carry with them.”Bourouiba and her mentees have published their results in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics. MIT co-authors include former graduate student Raj Dandekar PhD ’22, postdoc (Eric) Naijian Shen, and student mentee Boris Naar.Above and belowAt MIT, Bourouiba heads up the Fluid Dynamics of Disease Transmission Laboratory, part of the Fluids and Health Network, where she and her team explore the fundamental physics of fluids and droplets in a range of environmental, energy, and health contexts, including disease transmission. For their new study, the team looked to better understand how droplets impact a deep pool — a seemingly simple phenomenon that nevertheless has been tricky to precisely capture and characterize.Bourouiba notes that there have been recent breakthroughs in modeling the evolution of a splashing droplet below a pool’s surface. As a droplet hits a pool of water, it breaks through the surface and drags air down through the pool to create a short-lived crater. Until now, scientists have focused on the evolution of this underwater cavity, mainly for applications in energy harvesting. What happens above the water, and how a droplet’s crown-like shape evolves with the cavity below, remained less understood.“The descriptions and understanding of what happens below the surface, and above, have remained very much divorced,” says Bourouiba, who believes such an understanding can help to predict how droplets launch and spread chemicals, particles, and microbes into the air.Splash in 3DTo study the coupled dynamics between a droplet’s cavity and crown, the team set up an experiment to dispense water droplets into a deep pool. For the purposes of their study, the researchers considered a deep pool to be a body of water that is deep enough that a splashing droplet would remain far away from the pool’s bottom. In these terms, they found that a pool with a depth of at least 20 centimeters was sufficient for their experiments.They varied each droplet’s size, with an average diameter of about 5 millimeters. They also dispensed droplets from various heights, causing the droplets to hit the pool’s surface at different speeds, which on average was about 5 meters per second. The overall dynamics, Bourouiba says, should be similar to what occurs on the surface of a puddle or pond during an average rainstorm.“This is capturing the speed at which raindrops fall,” she says. “These wouldn’t be very small, misty drops. This would be rainstorm drops for which one needs an umbrella.”Using high-speed imaging techniques inspired by Edgerton’s pioneering photography, the team captured videos of pool-splashing droplets, at rates of up to 12,500 frames per second. They then applied in-house imaging processing methods to extract key measurements from the image sequences, such as the changing width and depth of the underwater cavity, and the evolving diameter and height of the rising crown. The researchers also captured especially tricky measurements, of the crown’s wall thickness profile and inner flow — the cylinder that rises out of the pool, just before it forms a rim and points that are characteristic of a crown.“This cylinder-like wall of rising liquid, and how it evolves in time and space, is at the heart of everything,” Bourouiba says. “It’s what connects the fluid from the pool to what will go into the rim and then be ejected into the air through smaller, secondary droplets.”The researchers worked the image data into a set of “evolution equations,” or a mathematical model that relates the various properties of an impacting droplet, such as the width of its cavity and the thickness and speed profiles of its crown wall, and how these properties change over time, given a droplet’s starting size and impact speed.“We now have a closed-form mathematical expression that people can use to see how all these quantities of a splashing droplet change over space and time,” says co-author Shen, who plans, with Bourouiba, to apply the new model to the behavior of secondary droplets and understanding how a splash end-up dispersing particles such as pathogens and pesticides. “This opens up the possibility to study all these problems of splash in 3D, with self-contained closed-formed equations, which was not possible before.”This research was supported, in part, by the Department of Agriculture-National Institute of Food and Agriculture Specialty Crop Research Initiative; the Richard and Susan Smith Family Foundation; the National Science Foundation; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention-National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health; Inditex; and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of the National Institutes of Health. 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    High-speed videos show what happens when a droplet splashes into a pool

    Rain can freefall at speeds of up to 25 miles per hour. If the droplets land in a puddle or pond, they can form a crown-like splash that, with enough force, can dislodge any surface particles and launch them into the air.Now MIT scientists have taken high-speed videos of droplets splashing into a deep pool, to track how the fluid evolves, above and below the water line, frame by millisecond frame. Their work could help to predict how spashing droplets, such as from rainstorms and irrigation systems, may impact watery surfaces and aerosolize surface particles, such as pollen on puddles or pesticides in agricultural runoff.The team carried out experiments in which they dispensed water droplets of various sizes and from various heights into a pool of water. Using high-speed imaging, they measured how the liquid pool deformed as the impacting droplet hit the pool’s surface.Across all their experiments, they observed a common splash evolution: As a droplet hit the pool, it pushed down below the surface to form a “crater,” or cavity. At nearly the same time, a wall of liquid rose above the surface, forming a crown. Interestingly, the team observed that small, secondary droplets were ejected from the crown before the crown reached its maximum height. This entire evolution happens in a fraction of a second.

    “This cylinder-like wall of rising liquid, and how it evolves in time and space, is at the heart of everything,” Lydia Bourouiba says. GIF has been edited down to 5 frames per second.

    Image: Courtesy of the researchers; edited by MIT News

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    Scientists have caught snapshots of droplet splashes in the past, such as the famous “Milk Drop Coronet” — a photo of a drop of milk in mid-splash, taken by the late MIT professor Harold “Doc” Edgerton, who invented a photographic technique to capture quickly moving objects.The new work represents the first time scientists have used such high-speed images to model the entire splash dynamics of a droplet in a deep pool, combining what happens both above and below the surface. The team has used the imaging to gather new data central to build a mathematical model that predicts how a droplet’s shape will morph and merge as it hits a pool’s surface. They plan to use the model as a baseline to explore to what extent a splashing droplet might drag up and launch particles from the water pool.“Impacts of drops on liquid layers are ubiquitous,” says study author Lydia Bourouiba, a professor in the MIT departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Mechanical Engineering, and a core member of the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES). “Such impacts can produce myriads of secondary droplets that could act as carriers for pathogens, particles, or microbes that are on the surface of impacted pools or contaminated water bodies. This work is key in enabling prediction of droplet size distributions, and potentially also what such drops can carry with them.”Bourouiba and her mentees have published their results in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics. MIT co-authors include former graduate student Raj Dandekar PhD ’22, postdoc (Eric) Naijian Shen, and student mentee Boris Naar.Above and belowAt MIT, Bourouiba heads up the Fluid Dynamics of Disease Transmission Laboratory, part of the Fluids and Health Network, where she and her team explore the fundamental physics of fluids and droplets in a range of environmental, energy, and health contexts, including disease transmission. For their new study, the team looked to better understand how droplets impact a deep pool — a seemingly simple phenomenon that nevertheless has been tricky to precisely capture and characterize.Bourouiba notes that there have been recent breakthroughs in modeling the evolution of a splashing droplet below a pool’s surface. As a droplet hits a pool of water, it breaks through the surface and drags air down through the pool to create a short-lived crater. Until now, scientists have focused on the evolution of this underwater cavity, mainly for applications in energy harvesting. What happens above the water, and how a droplet’s crown-like shape evolves with the cavity below, remained less understood.“The descriptions and understanding of what happens below the surface, and above, have remained very much divorced,” says Bourouiba, who believes such an understanding can help to predict how droplets launch and spread chemicals, particles, and microbes into the air.Splash in 3DTo study the coupled dynamics between a droplet’s cavity and crown, the team set up an experiment to dispense water droplets into a deep pool. For the purposes of their study, the researchers considered a deep pool to be a body of water that is deep enough that a splashing droplet would remain far away from the pool’s bottom. In these terms, they found that a pool with a depth of at least 20 centimeters was sufficient for their experiments.They varied each droplet’s size, with an average diameter of about 5 millimeters. They also dispensed droplets from various heights, causing the droplets to hit the pool’s surface at different speeds, which on average was about 5 meters per second. The overall dynamics, Bourouiba says, should be similar to what occurs on the surface of a puddle or pond during an average rainstorm.“This is capturing the speed at which raindrops fall,” she says. “These wouldn’t be very small, misty drops. This would be rainstorm drops for which one needs an umbrella.”Using high-speed imaging techniques inspired by Edgerton’s pioneering photography, the team captured videos of pool-splashing droplets, at rates of up to 12,500 frames per second. They then applied in-house imaging processing methods to extract key measurements from the image sequences, such as the changing width and depth of the underwater cavity, and the evolving diameter and height of the rising crown. The researchers also captured especially tricky measurements, of the crown’s wall thickness profile and inner flow — the cylinder that rises out of the pool, just before it forms a rim and points that are characteristic of a crown.“This cylinder-like wall of rising liquid, and how it evolves in time and space, is at the heart of everything,” Bourouiba says. “It’s what connects the fluid from the pool to what will go into the rim and then be ejected into the air through smaller, secondary droplets.”The researchers worked the image data into a set of “evolution equations,” or a mathematical model that relates the various properties of an impacting droplet, such as the width of its cavity and the thickness and speed profiles of its crown wall, and how these properties change over time, given a droplet’s starting size and impact speed.“We now have a closed-form mathematical expression that people can use to see how all these quantities of a splashing droplet change over space and time,” says co-author Shen, who plans, with Bourouiba, to apply the new model to the behavior of secondary droplets and understanding how a splash end-up dispersing particles such as pathogens and pesticides. “This opens up the possibility to study all these problems of splash in 3D, with self-contained closed-formed equations, which was not possible before.”This research was supported, in part, by the Department of Agriculture-National Institute of Food and Agriculture Specialty Crop Research Initiative; the Richard and Susan Smith Family Foundation; the National Science Foundation; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention-National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health; Inditex; and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of the National Institutes of Health. More

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    3 Questions: Exploring the limits of carbon sequestration

    As part of a multi-pronged approach toward curbing the effects of greenhouse gas emissions, scientists seek to better understand the impact of rising carbon dioxide (CO2) levels on terrestrial ecosystems, particularly tropical forests. To that end, climate scientist César Terrer, the Class of 1958 Career Development Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) at MIT, and colleague Josh Fisher of Chapman University are bringing their scientific minds to bear on a unique setting — an active volcano in Costa Rica — as a way to study carbon dioxide emissions and their influence. Elevated CO2 levels can lead to a phenomenon known as the CO2 fertilization effect, where plants grow more and absorb greater amounts of carbon, providing a cooling effect. While this effect has the potential to be a natural climate change mitigator, the extent of how much carbon plants can continue to absorb remains uncertain. There are growing concerns from scientists that plants may eventually reach a saturation point, losing their ability to offset increasing atmospheric CO2. Understanding these dynamics is crucial for accurate climate predictions and developing strategies to manage carbon sequestration. Here, Terrer discusses his innovative approach, his motivations for joining the project, and the importance of advancing this research.Q: Why did you get involved in this line of research, and what makes it unique?A: Josh Fisher, a climate scientist and long-time collaborator, had the brilliant idea to take advantage of naturally high CO2 levels near active volcanoes to study the fertilization effect in real-world conditions. Conducting such research in dense tropical forests like the Amazon — where the largest uncertainties about CO2 fertilization exist — is challenging. It would require large-scale CO2 tanks and extensive infrastructure to evenly distribute the gas throughout the towering trees and intricate canopy layers — a task that is not only logistically complex, but also highly costly. Our approach allows us to circumvent those obstacles and gather critical data in a way that hasn’t been done before.Josh was looking for an expert in the field of carbon ecology to co-lead and advance this research with him. My expertise of understanding the dynamics that regulate carbon storage in terrestrial ecosystems within the context of climate change made for a natural fit to co-lead and advance this research with him. This field has been central to my research, and was the focus of my PhD thesis.Our experiments inside the Rincon de la Vieja National Park are particularly exciting because CO2 concentrations in the areas near the volcano are four times higher than the global average. This gives us a rare opportunity to observe how elevated CO2 affects plant biomass in a natural setting — something that has never been attempted at this scale.Q: How are you measuring CO2 concentrations at the volcano?A: We have installed a network of 50 sensors in the forest canopy surrounding the volcano. These sensors continuously monitor CO2 levels, allowing us to compare areas with naturally high CO2 emissions from the volcano to control areas with typical atmospheric CO2 concentrations. The sensors are Bluetooth-enabled, requiring us to be in close proximity to retrieve the data. They will remain in place for a full year, capturing a continuous dataset on CO2 fluctuations. Our next data collection trip is scheduled for March, with another planned a year after the initial deployment.Q: What are the long-term goals of this research?A: Our primary objective is to determine whether the CO2 fertilization effect can be sustained, or if plants will eventually reach a saturation point, limiting their ability to absorb additional carbon. Understanding this threshold is crucial for improving climate models and carbon mitigation strategies.To expand the scope of our measurements, we are exploring the use of airborne technologies — such as drones or airplane-mounted sensors — to assess carbon storage across larger areas. This would provide a more comprehensive view of carbon sequestration potential in tropical ecosystems. Ultimately, this research could offer critical insights into the future role of forests in mitigating climate change, helping scientists and policymakers develop more accurate carbon budgets and climate projections. If successful, our approach could pave the way for similar studies in other ecosystems, deepening our understanding of how nature responds to rising CO2 levels. More

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    J-WAFS: Supporting food and water research across MIT

    MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) has transformed the landscape of water and food research at MIT, driving faculty engagement and catalyzing new research and innovation in these critical areas. With philanthropic, corporate, and government support, J-WAFS’ strategic approach spans the entire research life cycle, from support for early-stage research to commercialization grants for more advanced projects.Over the past decade, J-WAFS has invested approximately $25 million in direct research funding to support MIT faculty pursuing transformative research with the potential for significant impact. “Since awarding our first cohort of seed grants in 2015, it’s remarkable to look back and see that over 10 percent of the MIT faculty have benefited from J-WAFS funding,” observes J-WAFS Executive Director Renee J. Robins ’83. “Many of these professors hadn’t worked on water or food challenges before their first J-WAFS grant.” By fostering interdisciplinary collaborations and supporting high-risk, high-reward projects, J-WAFS has amplified the capacity of MIT faculty to pursue groundbreaking research that addresses some of the world’s most pressing challenges facing our water and food systems.Drawing MIT faculty to water and food researchJ-WAFS open calls for proposals enable faculty to explore bold ideas and develop impactful approaches to tackling critical water and food system challenges. Professor Patrick Doyle’s work in water purification exemplifies this impact. “Without J-WAFS, I would have never ventured into the field of water purification,” Doyle reflects. While previously focused on pharmaceutical manufacturing and drug delivery, exposure to J-WAFS-funded peers led him to apply his expertise in soft materials to water purification. “Both the funding and the J-WAFS community led me to be deeply engaged in understanding some of the key challenges in water purification and water security,” he explains.Similarly, Professor Otto Cordero of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) leveraged J-WAFS funding to pivot his research into aquaculture. Cordero explains that his first J-WAFS seed grant “has been extremely influential for my lab because it allowed me to take a step in a new direction, with no preliminary data in hand.” Cordero’s expertise is in microbial communities. He was previous unfamiliar with aquaculture, but he saw the relevance of microbial communities the health of farmed aquatic organisms.Supporting early-career facultyNew assistant professors at MIT have particularly benefited from J-WAFS funding and support. J-WAFS has played a transformative role in shaping the careers and research trajectories of many new faculty members by encouraging them to explore novel research areas, and in many instances providing their first MIT research grant.Professor Ariel Furst reflects on how pivotal J-WAFS’ investment has been in advancing her research. “This was one of the first grants I received after starting at MIT, and it has truly shaped the development of my group’s research program,” Furst explains. With J-WAFS’ backing, her lab has achieved breakthroughs in chemical detection and remediation technologies for water. “The support of J-WAFS has enabled us to develop the platform funded through this work beyond the initial applications to the general detection of environmental contaminants and degradation of those contaminants,” she elaborates. Karthish Manthiram, now a professor of chemical engineering and chemistry at Caltech, explains how J-WAFS’ early investment enabled him and other young faculty to pursue ambitious ideas. “J-WAFS took a big risk on us,” Manthiram reflects. His research on breaking the nitrogen triple bond to make ammonia for fertilizer was initially met with skepticism. However, J-WAFS’ seed funding allowed his lab to lay the groundwork for breakthroughs that later attracted significant National Science Foundation (NSF) support. “That early funding from J-WAFS has been pivotal to our long-term success,” he notes. These stories underscore the broad impact of J-WAFS’ support for early-career faculty, and its commitment to empowering them to address critical global challenges and innovate boldly.Fueling follow-on funding J-WAFS seed grants enable faculty to explore nascent research areas, but external funding for continued work is usually necessary to achieve the full potential of these novel ideas. “It’s often hard to get funding for early stage or out-of-the-box ideas,” notes J-WAFS Director Professor John H. Lienhard V. “My hope, when I founded J-WAFS in 2014, was that seed grants would allow PIs [principal investigators] to prove out novel ideas so that they would be attractive for follow-on funding. And after 10 years, J-WAFS-funded research projects have brought more than $21 million in subsequent awards to MIT.”Professor Retsef Levi led a seed study on how agricultural supply chains affect food safety, with a team of faculty spanning the MIT schools Engineering and Science as well as the MIT Sloan School of Management. The team parlayed their seed grant research into a multi-million-dollar follow-on initiative. Levi reflects, “The J-WAFS seed funding allowed us to establish the initial credibility of our team, which was key to our success in obtaining large funding from several other agencies.”Dave Des Marais was an assistant professor in the Department of CEE when he received his first J-WAFS seed grant. The funding supported his research on how plant growth and physiology are controlled by genes and interact with the environment. The seed grant helped launch his lab’s work addressing enhancing climate change resilience in agricultural systems. The work led to his Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the NSF, a prestigious honor for junior faculty members. Now an associate professor, Des Marais’ ongoing project to further investigate the mechanisms and consequences of genomic and environmental interactions is supported by the five-year, $1,490,000 NSF grant. “J-WAFS providing essential funding to get my new research underway,” comments Des Marais.Stimulating interdisciplinary collaborationDes Marais’ seed grant was also key to developing new collaborations. He explains, “the J-WAFS grant supported me to develop a collaboration with Professor Caroline Uhler in EECS/IDSS [the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science/Institute for Data, Systems, and Society] that really shaped how I think about framing and testing hypotheses. One of the best things about J-WAFS is facilitating unexpected connections among MIT faculty with diverse yet complementary skill sets.”Professors A. John Hart of the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Benedetto Marelli of CEE also launched a new interdisciplinary collaboration with J-WAFS funding. They partnered to join expertise in biomaterials, microfabrication, and manufacturing, to create printed silk-based colorimetric sensors that detect food spoilage. “The J-WAFS Seed Grant provided a unique opportunity for multidisciplinary collaboration,” Hart notes.Professors Stephen Graves in the MIT Sloan School of Management and Bishwapriya Sanyal in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) partnered to pursue new research on agricultural supply chains. With field work in Senegal, their J-WAFS-supported project brought together international development specialists and operations management experts to study how small firms and government agencies influence access to and uptake of irrigation technology by poorer farmers. “We used J-WAFS to spur a collaboration that would have been improbable without this grant,” they explain. Being part of the J-WAFS community also introduced them to researchers in Professor Amos Winter’s lab in the Department of Mechanical Engineering working on irrigation technologies for low-resource settings. DUSP doctoral candidate Mark Brennan notes, “We got to share our understanding of how irrigation markets and irrigation supply chains work in developing economies, and then we got to contrast that with their understanding of how irrigation system models work.”Timothy Swager, professor of chemistry, and Rohit Karnik, professor of mechanical engineering and J-WAFS associate director, collaborated on a sponsored research project supported by Xylem, Inc. through the J-WAFS Research Affiliate program. The cross-disciplinary research, which targeted the development of ultra-sensitive sensors for toxic PFAS chemicals, was conceived following a series of workshops hosted by J-WAFS. Swager and Karnik were two of the participants, and their involvement led to the collaborative proposal that Xylem funded. “J-WAFS funding allowed us to combine Swager lab’s expertise in sensing with my lab’s expertise in microfluidics to develop a cartridge for field-portable detection of PFAS,” says Karnik. “J-WAFS has enriched my research program in so many ways,” adds Swager, who is now working to commercialize the technology.Driving global collaboration and impactJ-WAFS has also helped MIT faculty establish and advance international collaboration and impactful global research. By funding and supporting projects that connect MIT researchers with international partners, J-WAFS has not only advanced technological solutions, but also strengthened cross-cultural understanding and engagement.Professor Matthew Shoulders leads the inaugural J-WAFS Grand Challenge project. In response to the first J-WAFS call for “Grand Challenge” proposals, Shoulders assembled an interdisciplinary team based at MIT to enhance and provide climate resilience to agriculture by improving the most inefficient aspect of photosynthesis, the notoriously-inefficient carbon dioxide-fixing plant enzyme RuBisCO. J-WAFS funded this high-risk/high-reward project following a competitive process that engaged external reviewers through a several rounds of iterative proposal development. The technical feedback to the team led them to researchers with complementary expertise from the Australian National University. “Our collaborative team of biochemists and synthetic biologists, computational biologists, and chemists is deeply integrated with plant biologists and field trial experts, yielding a robust feedback loop for enzyme engineering,” Shoulders says. “Together, this team will be able to make a concerted effort using the most modern, state-of-the-art techniques to engineer crop RuBisCO with an eye to helping make meaningful gains in securing a stable crop supply, hopefully with accompanying improvements in both food and water security.”Professor Leon Glicksman and Research Engineer Eric Verploegen’s team designed a low-cost cooling chamber to preserve fruits and vegetables harvested by smallholder farmers with no access to cold chain storage. J-WAFS’ guidance motivated the team to prioritize practical considerations informed by local collaborators, ensuring market competitiveness. “As our new idea for a forced-air evaporative cooling chamber was taking shape, we continually checked that our solution was evolving in a direction that would be competitive in terms of cost, performance, and usability to existing commercial alternatives,” explains Verploegen. Following the team’s initial seed grant, the team secured a J-WAFS Solutions commercialization grant, which Verploegen say “further motivated us to establish partnerships with local organizations capable of commercializing the technology earlier in the project than we might have done otherwise.” The team has since shared an open-source design as part of its commercialization strategy to maximize accessibility and impact.Bringing corporate sponsored research opportunities to MIT facultyJ-WAFS also plays a role in driving private partnerships, enabling collaborations that bridge industry and academia. Through its Research Affiliate Program, for example, J-WAFS provides opportunities for faculty to collaborate with industry on sponsored research, helping to convert scientific discoveries into licensable intellectual property (IP) that companies can turn into commercial products and services.J-WAFS introduced professor of mechanical engineering Alex Slocum to a challenge presented by its research affiliate company, Xylem: how to design a more energy-efficient pump for fluctuating flows. With centrifugal pumps consuming an estimated 6 percent of U.S. electricity annually, Slocum and his then-graduate student Hilary Johnson SM ’18, PhD ’22 developed an innovative variable volute mechanism that reduces energy usage. “Xylem envisions this as the first in a new category of adaptive pump geometry,” comments Johnson. The research produced a pump prototype and related IP that Xylem is working on commercializing. Johnson notes that these outcomes “would not have been possible without J-WAFS support and facilitation of the Xylem industry partnership.” Slocum adds, “J-WAFS enabled Hilary to begin her work on pumps, and Xylem sponsored the research to bring her to this point … where she has an opportunity to do far more than the original project called for.”Swager speaks highly of the impact of corporate research sponsorship through J-WAFS on his research and technology translation efforts. His PFAS project with Karnik described above was also supported by Xylem. “Xylem was an excellent sponsor of our research. Their engagement and feedback were instrumental in advancing our PFAS detection technology, now on the path to commercialization,” Swager says.Looking forwardWhat J-WAFS has accomplished is more than a collection of research projects; a decade of impact demonstrates how J-WAFS’ approach has been transformative for many MIT faculty members. As Professor Mathias Kolle puts it, his engagement with J-WAFS “had a significant influence on how we think about our research and its broader impacts.” He adds that it “opened my eyes to the challenges in the field of water and food systems and the many different creative ideas that are explored by MIT.” This thriving ecosystem of innovation, collaboration, and academic growth around water and food research has not only helped faculty build interdisciplinary and international partnerships, but has also led to the commercialization of transformative technologies with real-world applications. C. Cem Taşan, the POSCO Associate Professor of Metallurgy who is leading a J-WAFS Solutions commercialization team that is about to launch a startup company, sums it up by noting, “Without J-WAFS, we wouldn’t be here at all.”  As J-WAFS looks to the future, its continued commitment — supported by the generosity of its donors and partners — builds on a decade of success enabling MIT faculty to advance water and food research that addresses some of the world’s most pressing challenges. More

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    Pivot Bio is using microbial nitrogen to make agriculture more sustainable

    The Haber-Bosch process, which converts atmospheric nitrogen to make ammonia fertilizer, revolutionized agriculture and helped feed the world’s growing population, but it also created huge environmental problems. It is one of the most energy-intensive chemical processes in the world, responsible for 1-2 percent of global energy consumption. It also releases nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas that harms the ozone layer. Excess nitrogen also routinely runs off farms into waterways, harming marine life and polluting groundwater.In place of synthetic fertilizer, Pivot Bio has engineered nitrogen-producing microbes to make farming more sustainable. The company, which was co-founded by Professor Chris Voigt, Karsten Temme, and Alvin Tamsir, has engineered its microbes to grow on plant roots, where they feed on the root’s sugars and precisely deliver nitrogen in return.Pivot’s microbial colonies grow with the plant and produce more nitrogen at exactly the time the plant needs it, minimizing nitrogen runoff.“The way we have delivered nutrients to support plant growth historically is fertilizer, but that’s an inefficient way to get all the nutrients you need,” says Temme, Pivot’s chief innovation officer. “We have the ability now to help farmers be more efficient and productive with microbes.”Farmers can replace up to 40 pounds per acre of traditional nitrogen with Pivot’s product, which amounts to about a quarter of the total nitrogen needed for a crop like corn.Pivot’s products are already being used to grow corn, wheat, barley, oats, and other grains across millions of acres of American farmland, eliminating hundreds of thousands of tons of CO2 equivalent in the process. The company’s impact is even more striking given its unlikely origins, which trace back to one of the most challenging times of Voigt’s career.A Pivot from despairThe beginning of every faculty member’s career can be a sink-or-swim moment, and by Voigt’s own account, he was drowning. As a freshly minted assistant professor at the University of California at San Francisco, Voigt was struggling to stand up his lab, attract funding, and get experiments started.Around 2008, Voigt joined a research group out of the University of California at Berkeley that was writing a grant proposal focused on photovoltaic materials. His initial role was minor, but a senior researcher pulled out of the group a week before the proposal had to be submitted, so Voigt stepped up.“I said ‘I’ll finish this section in a week,’” Voigt recalls. “It was my big chance.”For the proposal, Voigt detailed an ambitious plan to rearrange the genetics of biologic photosynthetic systems to make them more efficient. He barely submitted it in time.A few months went by, then the proposal reviews finally came back. Voigt hurried to the meeting with some of the most senior researchers at UC Berkeley to discuss the responses.“My part of the proposal got completely slammed,” Voigt says. “There were something like 15 reviews on it — they were longer than the actual grant — and it’s just one after another tearing into my proposal. All the most famous people are in this meeting, future energy secretaries, future leaders of the university, and it was totally embarrassing. After that meeting, I was considering leaving academia.”A few discouraging months later, Voigt got a call from Paul Ludden, the dean of the School of Science at UC Berkeley. He wanted to talk.“As I walk into Paul’s office, he’s reading my proposal,” Voigt recalls. “He sits me down and says, ‘Everybody’s telling me how terrible this is.’ I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God.’ But then he says, ‘I think there’s something here. Your idea is good, you just picked the wrong system.’”Ludden went on to explain to Voigt that he should apply his gene-swapping idea to nitrogen fixation. He even offered to send Voigt a postdoc from his lab, Dehua Zhao, to help. Voigt paired Zhao with Temme, and sure enough, the resulting 2011 paper of their work was well-received by the nitrogen fixation community.“Nitrogen fixation has been a holy grail for scientists, agronomists, and farmers for almost a century, ever since somebody discovered the first microbe that can fix nitrogen for legumes like soybeans,” Temme says. “Everybody always said that someday we’ll be able to do this for the cereal crops. The excitement with Pivot was this is the first time that technology became accessible.”Voigt had moved to MIT in 2010. When the paper came out, he founded Pivot Bio with Temme and another Berkeley researcher, Alvin Tamsir. Since then, Voigt, who is the Daniel I.C. Wang Professor at MIT and the head of the Department of Biological Engineering, has continued collaborating with Pivot on things like increasing nitrogen production, making strains more stable, and making them inducible to different signals from the plant. Pivot has licensed technology from MIT, and the research has also received support from MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS).Pivot’s first goals were to gain regulatory approval and prove themselves in the marketplace. To gain approval in the U.S., Pivot’s team focused on using DNA from within the same organism rather than bringing in totally new DNA, which simplified the approval process. It also partnered with independent corn seed dealers to get its product to farms. Early deployments occurred in 2019.Farmers apply Pivot’s product at planting, either as a liquid that gets sprayed on the soil or as a dry powder that is rehydrated and applied to the seeds as a coating. The microbes live on the surface of the growing root system, eating plant sugars and releasing nitrogen throughout the plant’s life cycle.“Today, our microbes colonize just a fraction of the total sugars provided by the plant,” Temme explains. “They’re also sharing ammonia with the plant, and all of those things are just a portion of what’s possible technically. Our team is always trying to figure out how to make those microbes more efficient at getting the energy they need to grow or at fixing nitrogen and sharing it with the crop.”In 2023, Pivot started the N-Ovator program to connect companies with growers who practice sustainable farming using Pivot’s microbial nitrogen. Through the program, companies buy nitrogen credits and farmers can get paid by verifying their practices. The program was named one of the Inventions of the Year by Time Magazine last year and has paid out millions of dollars to farmers to date.Microbial nitrogen and beyondPivot is currently selling to farmers across the U.S. and working with smallholder farmers in Kenya. It’s also hoping to gain approval for its microbial solution in Brazil and Canada, which it hopes will be its next markets.”How do we get the economics to make sense for everybody — the farmers, our partners, and the company?” Temme says of Pivot’s mission. “Because this truly can be a deflationary technology that upends the very expensive traditional way of making fertilizer.”Pivot’s team is also extending the product to cotton, and Temme says microbes can be a nitrogen source for any type of plant on the planet. Further down the line, the company believes it can help farmers with other nutrients essential to help their crops grow.“Now that we’ve established our technology, how can Pivot help farmers overcome all the other limitations they face with crop nutrients to maximize yields?” Temme asks. “That really starts to change the way a farmer thinks about managing the entire acre from a price, productivity, and sustainability perspective.” More

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    in Environment

    Cleaning up critical minerals and materials production, using microwave plasma

    The push to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. is running up against an unfortunate truth: The processes for making many critical materials today create toxic byproducts and other environmental hazards. That’s true for commonly used industrial metals like nickel and titanium, as well as specialty minerals, materials, and coatings that go into batteries, advanced electronics, and defense applications.Now 6K, founded by former MIT research scientist Kamal Hadidi, is using a new production process to bring critical materials production back to America without the toxic byproducts.The company is actively scaling its microwave plasma technology, which it calls UniMelt, to transform the way critical minerals are processed, creating new domestic supply chains in the process. UniMelt uses beams of tightly controlled thermal plasma to melt or vaporize precursor materials into particles with precise sizes and crystalline phases.The technology converts metals, such as titanium, nickel, and refractory alloys, into particles optimized for additive manufacturing for a range of industrial applications. It is also being used to create battery materials for electric vehicles, grid infrastructure, and data centers.“The markets and critical materials we are focused on are important for not just economic reasons but also U.S. national security, because the bulk of these materials are manufactured today in nonfriendly countries,” 6K CEO Saurabh Ullal says. “Now, the [U.S. government] and our growing customer base can leverage this technology invented at MIT to make the U.S. less dependent on these nonfriendly countries, ensuring supply chain independence now and in the future.”Named after the 6,000-degree temperature of its plasma, 6K is currently selling its high-performance metal powders to parts manufacturers as well as defense, automotive, medical, and oil and gas companies for use in applications from engine components and medical implants to rockets. To scale its battery materials business, 6K is also building a 100,000-square-foot production facility in Jackson, Tennessee, which will begin construction later this year.A weekend projectBetween 1994 and 2007, Hadidi worked at the Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PFSC), where he developed plasma technologies for a range of applications, including hydrogen production, fuel reforming, and detecting environmental toxins. His first company was founded in 2000 out of the PFSC to detect mercury in coal-fired power plants’ smokestacks.“I loved working at MIT,” Hadidi says. “It’s an amazing place that really challenges you. Just being there is so stimulating because everyone’s trying to come up with new solutions and connect dots between different fields.”Hadidi also began using high-frequency microwave plasmas to create nanomaterials for use in optical applications. He wasn’t a materials expert, so he collaborated with Professor Eric Jordan, a materials synthesis expert from the University of Connecticut, and the researchers started working on nights and weekends in the PSFC to develop the idea further, eventually patenting the technology.Hadidi officially founded the company as Amastan in 2007, exploring the use of his microwave plasma technology, later named UniMelt for “uniform melt state process,” to make a host of different materials as part of a government grant he and Jordan received.The researchers soon realized the microwave plasma technology had several advantages over traditional production techniques for certain materials. For one, it could eliminate several high-energy steps of conventional processes, reducing production times from days to hours in some cases. For batteries and certain critical minerals, the process also works with recycled feedstocks. Amastan was renamed 6K in 2019.Early on, Hadidi produced metal powders used in additive manufacturing through a process called spheroidization, which results in dense, spherical powders that flow well and make high-performance 3D-printed parts.Following another grant, Hadidi explored methods for producing a type of battery cathode made from lithium, nickel, manganese, and cobalt (NMC). The standard process for making NMCs involved chemical synthesis, precipitation, heat treatment, and a lot of water. 6K is able to reduce many of those steps, speeding up production and lowering costs while also being more sustainable.“Our technology completely eliminates toxic waste and recycles all of the byproducts back through the process to utilize everything, including water,” Ullal says.Scaling domestic productionToday, 6K’s additive manufacturing arm operates out of a factory in Pennsylvania. The company’s critical minerals processing, refining, and recycling systems can produce about 400 tons of material per year and can be used to make more than a dozen types of metal powders. The company also has 33,000-square-foot battery center in North Andover, Massachusetts, where it produces battery cathode materials for its energy storage and mobility customers.The Tennessee facility will be used to produce battery cathode materials and represents a massive step up in throughput. The company says it will be able to produce 13,000 tons of material annually when construction is complete next year.“I’m happy if what I started brings something positive to society, and I’m extremely thankful to all the people that helped me,” says Hadidi, who left the company in 2019. “I’m an entrepreneur at heart. I like to make things. But that doesn’t mean I always succeed. It’s personally very satisfying to see this make an impact.”The 6K team says its technology can also create a variety of specialty ceramics, advanced coatings, and nanoengineered materials. They say it may also be used to eliminate PFAS, or “forever chemicals,” though that work is at an early stage.The company recently received a grant to demonstrate a process for recycling critical materials from military depots to produce aerospace and defense products, creating a new value stream for these materials that would otherwise deteriorate or go to landfill. That work is consistent with the company’s motto, “We take nothing from the ground and put nothing into the ground.”The company’s additive division recently received a $23.4 Defense Production Act grant “that will enable us to double processing capacity in the next three years,” Ullal says. “The next step is to scale battery materials production to the tens of thousands of tons per year. At this point, it’s a scale-up of known processes, and we just need to execute. The idea of creating a circular economy is near and dear to us because that’s how we’ve built this company and that’s how we generate value: addressing our U.S. national security concerns and protecting the planet as well.” More

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    in Environment

    Streamlining data collection for improved salmon population management

    Sara Beery came to MIT as an assistant professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) eager to focus on ecological challenges. She has fashioned her research career around the opportunity to apply her expertise in computer vision, machine learning, and data science to tackle real-world issues in conservation and sustainability. Beery was drawn to the Institute’s commitment to “computing for the planet,” and set out to bring her methods to global-scale environmental and biodiversity monitoring.In the Pacific Northwest, salmon have a disproportionate impact on the health of their ecosystems, and their complex reproductive needs have attracted Beery’s attention. Each year, millions of salmon embark on a migration to spawn. Their journey begins in freshwater stream beds where the eggs hatch. Young salmon fry (newly hatched salmon) make their way to the ocean, where they spend several years maturing to adulthood. As adults, the salmon return to the streams where they were born in order to spawn, ensuring the continuation of their species by depositing their eggs in the gravel of the stream beds. Both male and female salmon die shortly after supplying the river habitat with the next generation of salmon. Throughout their migration, salmon support a wide range of organisms in the ecosystems they pass through. For example, salmon bring nutrients like carbon and nitrogen from the ocean upriver, enhancing their availability to those ecosystems. In addition, salmon are key to many predator-prey relationships: They serve as a food source for various predators, such as bears, wolves, and birds, while helping to control other populations, like insects, through predation. After they die from spawning, the decomposing salmon carcasses also replenish valuable nutrients to the surrounding ecosystem. The migration of salmon not only sustains their own species but plays a critical role in the overall health of the rivers and oceans they inhabit. At the same time, salmon populations play an important role both economically and culturally in the region. Commercial and recreational salmon fisheries contribute significantly to the local economy. And for many Indigenous peoples in the Pacific northwest, salmon hold notable cultural value, as they have been central to their diets, traditions, and ceremonies. Monitoring salmon migrationIncreased human activity, including overfishing and hydropower development, together with habitat loss and climate change, have had a significant impact on salmon populations in the region. As a result, effective monitoring and management of salmon fisheries is important to ensure balance among competing ecological, cultural, and human interests. Accurately counting salmon during their seasonal migration to their natal river to spawn is essential in order to track threatened populations, assess the success of recovery strategies, guide fishing season regulations, and support the management of both commercial and recreational fisheries. Precise population data help decision-makers employ the best strategies to safeguard the health of the ecosystem while accommodating human needs. Monitoring salmon migration is a labor-intensive and inefficient undertaking.Beery is currently leading a research project that aims to streamline salmon monitoring using cutting-edge computer vision methods. This project fits within Beery’s broader research interest, which focuses on the interdisciplinary space between artificial intelligence, the natural world, and sustainability. Its relevance to fisheries management made it a good fit for funding from MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS). Beery’s 2023 J-WAFS seed grant was the first research funding she was awarded since joining the MIT faculty.  Historically, monitoring efforts relied on humans to manually count salmon from riverbanks using eyesight. In the past few decades, underwater sonar systems have been implemented to aid in counting the salmon. These sonar systems are essentially underwater video cameras, but they differ in that they use acoustics instead of light sensors to capture the presence of a fish. Use of this method requires people to set up a tent alongside the river to count salmon based on the output of a sonar camera that is hooked up to a laptop. While this system is an improvement to the original method of monitoring salmon by eyesight, it still relies significantly on human effort and is an arduous and time-consuming process. Automating salmon monitoring is necessary for better management of salmon fisheries. “We need these technological tools,” says Beery. “We can’t keep up with the demand of monitoring and understanding and studying these really complex ecosystems that we work in without some form of automation.”In order to automate counting of migrating salmon populations in the Pacific Northwest, the project team, including Justin Kay, a PhD student in EECS, has been collecting data in the form of videos from sonar cameras at different rivers. The team annotates a subset of the data to train the computer vision system to autonomously detect and count the fish as they migrate. Kay describes the process of how the model counts each migrating fish: “The computer vision algorithm is designed to locate a fish in the frame, draw a box around it, and then track it over time. If a fish is detected on one side of the screen and leaves on the other side of the screen, then we count it as moving upstream.” On rivers where the team has created training data for the system, it has produced strong results, with only 3 to 5 percent counting error. This is well below the target that the team and partnering stakeholders set of no more than a 10 percent counting error. Testing and deployment: Balancing human effort and use of automationThe researchers’ technology is being deployed to monitor the migration of salmon on the newly restored Klamath River. Four dams on the river were recently demolished, making it the largest dam removal project in U.S. history. The dams came down after a more than 20-year-long campaign to remove them, which was led by Klamath tribes, in collaboration with scientists, environmental organizations, and commercial fishermen. After the removal of the dams, 240 miles of the river now flow freely and nearly 800 square miles of habitat are accessible to salmon. Beery notes the almost immediate regeneration of salmon populations in the Klamath River: “I think it was within eight days of the dam coming down, they started seeing salmon actually migrate upriver beyond the dam.” In a collaboration with California Trout, the team is currently processing new data to adapt and create a customized model that can then be deployed to help count the newly migrating salmon.One challenge with the system revolves around training the model to accurately count the fish in unfamiliar environments with variations such as riverbed features, water clarity, and lighting conditions. These factors can significantly alter how the fish appear on the output of a sonar camera and confuse the computer model. When deployed in new rivers where no data have been collected before, like the Klamath, the performance of the system degrades and the margin of error increases substantially to 15-20 percent. The researchers constructed an automatic adaptation algorithm within the system to overcome this challenge and create a scalable system that can be deployed to any site without human intervention. This self-initializing technology works to automatically calibrate to the new conditions and environment to accurately count the migrating fish. In testing, the automatic adaptation algorithm was able to reduce the counting error down to the 10 to 15 percent range. The improvement in counting error with the self-initializing function means that the technology is closer to being deployable to new locations without much additional human effort. Enabling real-time management with the “Fishbox”Another challenge faced by the research team was the development of an efficient data infrastructure. In order to run the computer vision system, the video produced by sonar cameras must be delivered via the cloud or by manually mailing hard drives from a river site to the lab. These methods have notable drawbacks: a cloud-based approach is limited due to lack of internet connectivity in remote river site locations, and shipping the data introduces problems of delay. Instead of relying on these methods, the team has implemented a power-efficient computer, coined the “Fishbox,” that can be used in the field to perform the processing. The Fishbox consists of a small, lightweight computer with optimized software that fishery managers can plug into their existing laptops and sonar cameras. The system is then capable of running salmon counting models directly at the sonar sites without the need for internet connectivity. This allows managers to make hour-by-hour decisions, supporting more responsive, real-time management of salmon populations.Community developmentThe team is also working to bring a community together around monitoring for salmon fisheries management in the Pacific Northwest. “It’s just pretty exciting to have stakeholders who are enthusiastic about getting access to [our technology] as we get it to work and having a tighter integration and collaboration with them,” says Beery. “I think particularly when you’re working on food and water systems, you need direct collaboration to help facilitate impact, because you’re ensuring that what you develop is actually serving the needs of the people and organizations that you are helping to support.”This past June, Beery’s lab organized a workshop in Seattle that convened nongovernmental organizations, tribes, and state and federal departments of fish and wildlife to discuss the use of automated sonar systems to monitor and manage salmon populations. Kay notes that the workshop was an “awesome opportunity to have everybody sharing different ways that they’re using sonar and thinking about how the automated methods that we’re building could fit into that workflow.” The discussion continues now via a shared Slack channel created by the team, with over 50 participants. Convening this group is a significant achievement, as many of these organizations would not otherwise have had an opportunity to come together and collaborate. Looking forwardAs the team continues to tune the computer vision system, refine their technology, and engage with diverse stakeholders — from Indigenous communities to fishery managers — the project is poised to make significant improvements to the efficiency and accuracy of salmon monitoring and management in the region. And as Beery advances the work of her MIT group, the J-WAFS seed grant is helping to keep challenges such as fisheries management in her sights.  “The fact that the J-WAFS seed grant existed here at MIT enabled us to continue to work on this project when we moved here,” comments Beery, adding “it also expanded the scope of the project and allowed us to maintain active collaboration on what I think is a really important and impactful project.” As J-WAFS marks its 10th anniversary this year, the program aims to continue supporting and encouraging MIT faculty to pursue innovative projects that aim to advance knowledge and create practical solutions with real-world impacts on global water and food system challenges.  More

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    in Environment

    Seeking climate connections among the oceans’ smallest organisms

    Andrew Babbin tries to pack light for work trips. Along with the travel essentials, though, he also brings a roll each of electrical tape, duct tape, lab tape, a pack of cable ties, and some bungee cords.“It’s my MacGyver kit: You never know when you have to rig something on the fly in the field or fix a broken bag,” Babbin says.The trips Babbin takes are far out to sea, on month-long cruises, where he works to sample waters off the Pacific coast and out in the open ocean. In remote locations, repair essentials often come in handy, as when Babbin had to zip-tie a wrench to a sampling device to help it sink through an icy Antarctic lake.Babbin is an oceanographer and marine biogeochemist who studies marine microbes and the ways in which they control the cycling of nitrogen between the ocean and the atmosphere. This exchange helps maintain healthy ocean ecosystems and supports the ocean’s capacity to store carbon.By combining measurements that he takes in the ocean with experiments in his MIT lab, Babbin is working to understand the connections between microbes and ocean nitrogen, which could in turn help scientists identify ways to maintain the ocean’s health and productivity. His work has taken him to many coastal and open-ocean regions around the globe.“You really become an oceanographer and an Earth scientist to see the world,” says Babbin, who recently earned tenure as the Cecil and Ida Green Career Development Professor in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. “We embrace the diversity of places and cultures on this planet. To see just a small fraction of that is special.”A powerful cycleThe ocean has been a constant presence for Babbin since childhood. His family is from Monmouth County, New Jersey, where he and his twin sister grew up playing along the Jersey shore. When they were teenagers, their parents took the kids on family cruise vacations.“I always loved being on the water,” he says. “My favorite parts of any of those cruises were the days at sea, where you were just in the middle of some ocean basin with water all around you.”In school, Babbin gravitated to the sciences, and chemistry in particular. After high school, he attended Columbia University, where a visit to the school’s Earth and environmental engineering department catalyzed a realization.“For me, it was always this excitement about the water and about chemistry, and it was this pop of, ‘Oh wow, it doesn’t have to be one or the other,’” Babbin says.He chose to major in Earth and environmental engineering, with a concentration in water resources and climate risks. After graduating in 2008, Babbin returned to his home state, where he attended Princeton University and set a course for a PhD in geosciences, with a focus on chemical oceanography and environmental microbiology. His advisor, oceanographer Bess Ward, took Babbin on as a member of her research group and invited him on several month-long cruises to various parts of the eastern tropical Pacific.“I still remember that first trip,” Babbin recalls. “It was a whirlwind. Everyone else had been to sea a gazillion times and was loading the boat and strapping things down, and I had no idea of anything. And within a few hours, I was doing an experiment as the ship rocked back and forth!”Babbin learned to deploy sampling cannisters overboard, then haul them back up and analyze the seawater inside for signs of nitrogen — an essential nutrient for all living things on Earth.As it turns out, the plants and animals that depend on nitrogen to survive are unable to take it up from the atmosphere themselves. They require a sort of go-between, in the form of microbes that “fix” nitrogen, converting it from nitrogen gas to more digestible forms. In the ocean, this nitrogen fixation is done by highly specialized microbial species, which work to make nitrogen available to phytoplankton — microscopic plant-like organisms that are the foundation of the marine food chain. Phytoplankton are also a main route by which the ocean absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.Microorganisms may also use these biologically available forms of nitrogen for energy under certain conditions, returning nitrogen to the atmosphere. These microbes can also release a byproduct of nitrous oxide, which is a potent greenhouse gas that also can catalyze ozone loss in the stratosphere.Through his graduate work, at sea and in the lab, Babbin became fascinated with the cycling of nitrogen and the role that nitrogen-fixing microbes play in supporting the ocean’s ecosystems and the climate overall. A balance of nitrogen inputs and outputs sustains phytoplankton and maintains the ocean’s ability to soak up carbon dioxide.“Some of the really pressing questions in ocean biogeochemistry pertain to this cycling of nitrogen,” Babbin says. “Understanding the ways in which this one element cycles through the ocean, and how it is central to ecosystem health and the planet’s climate, has been really powerful.”In the lab and out to seaAfter completing his PhD in 2014, Babbin arrived at MIT as a postdoc in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.“My first feeling when I came here was, wow, this really is a nerd’s playground,” Babbin says. “I embraced being part of a culture where we seek to understand the world better, while also doing the things we really want to do.”In 2017, he accepted a faculty position in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. He set up his laboratory space, painted in his favorite brilliant orange, on the top floor of the Green Building.His group uses 3D printers to fabricate microfluidic devices in which they reproduce the conditions of the ocean environment and study microbe metabolism and its effects on marine chemistry. In the field, Babbin has led research expeditions to the Galapagos Islands and parts of the eastern Pacific, where he has collected and analyzed samples of air and water for signs of nitrogen transformations and microbial activity. His new measuring station in the Galapagos is able to infer marine emissions of nitrous oxide across a large swath of the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. His group has also sailed to southern Cuba, where the researchers studied interactions of microbes in coral reefs.Most recently, Babbin traveled to Antarctica, where he set up camp next to frozen lakes and plumbed for samples of pristine ice water that he will analyze for genetic remnants of ancient microbes. Such preserved bacterial DNA could help scientists understand how microbes evolved and influenced the Earth’s climate over billions of years.“Microbes are the terraformers,” Babbin notes. “They have been, since life evolved more than 3 billion years ago. We have to think about how they shape the natural world and how they will respond to the Anthropocene as humans monkey with the planet ourselves.”Collective actionBabbin is now charting new research directions. In addition to his work at sea and in the lab, he is venturing into engineering, with a new project to design denitrifying capsules. While nitrogen is an essential nutrient for maintaining a marine ecosystem, too much nitrogen, such as from fertilizer that runs off into lakes and streams, can generate blooms of toxic algae. Babbin is looking to design eco-friendly capsules that scrub excess anthropogenic nitrogen from local waterways. He’s also beginning the process of designing a new sensor to measure low-oxygen concentrations in the ocean. As the planet warms, the oceans are losing oxygen, creating “dead zones” where fish cannot survive. While others including Babbin have tried to map these oxygen minimum zones, or OMZs, they have done so sporadically, by dropping sensors into the ocean over limited range, depth, and times. Babbin’s sensors could potentially provide a more complete map of OMZs, as they would be deployed on wide-ranging, deep-diving, and naturally propulsive vehicles: sharks.“We want to measure oxygen. Sharks need oxygen. And if you look at where the sharks don’t go, you might have a sense of where the oxygen is not,” says Babbin, who is working with marine biologists on ways to tag sharks with oxygen sensors. “A number of these large pelagic fish move up and down the water column frequently, so you can map the depth to which they dive to, and infer something about the behavior. And my suggestion is, you might also infer something about the ocean’s chemistry.”When he reflects on what stimulates new ideas and research directions, Babbin credits working with others, in his own group and across MIT.“My best thoughts come from this collective action,” Babbin says. “Particularly because we all have different upbringings and approach things from a different perspective.”He’s bringing this collaborative spirit to his new role, as a mission director for MIT’s Climate Project. Along with Jesse Kroll, who is a professor of civil and environmental engineering and of chemical engineering, Babbin co-leads one of the project’s six missions: Restoring the Atmosphere, Protecting the Land and Oceans. Babbin and Kroll are planning a number of workshops across campus that they hope will generate new connections, and spark new ideas, particularly around ways to evaluate the effectiveness of different climate mitigation strategies and better assess the impacts of climate on society.“One area we want to promote is thinking of climate science and climate interventions as two sides of the same coin,” Babbin says. “There’s so much action that’s trying to be catalyzed. But we want it to be the best action. Because we really have one shot at doing this. Time is of the essence.” More

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    in Environment

    David McGee named head of the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences

    David McGee, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at MIT, was recently appointed head of the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), effective Jan. 15. He assumes the role from Professor Robert van der Hilst, the Schlumberger Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences, who led the department for 13 years.McGee specializes in applying isotope geochemistry and geochronology to reconstruct Earth’s climate history, helping to ground-truth our understanding of how the climate system responds during periods of rapid change. He has also been instrumental in the growth of the department’s community and culture, having served as EAPS associate department head since 2020.“David is an amazing researcher who brings crucial, data-based insights to aid our response to climate change,” says dean of the School of Science and the Curtis (1963) and Kathleen Marble Professor of Astrophysics Nergis Mavalvala. “He is also a committed and caring educator, providing extraordinary investment in his students’ learning experiences, and through his direction of Terrascope, one of our unique first-year learning communities focused on generating solutions to sustainability challenges.”   “I am energized by the incredible EAPS community, by Rob’s leadership over the last 13 years, and by President Kornbluth’s call for MIT to innovate effective and wise responses to climate change,” says McGee. “EAPS has a unique role in this time of reckoning with planetary boundaries — our collective path forward needs to be guided by a deep understanding of the Earth system and a clear sense of our place in the universe.”McGee’s research seeks to understand the Earth system’s response to past climate changes. Using geochemical analysis and uranium-series dating, McGee and his group investigate stalagmites, ancient lake deposits, and deep-sea sediments from field sites around the world to trace patterns of wind and precipitation, water availability in drylands, and permafrost stability through space and time. Armed with precise chronologies, he aims to shed light on drivers of historical hydroclimatic shifts and provide quantitative tests of climate model performance.Beyond research, McGee has helped shape numerous Institute initiatives focused on environment, climate, and sustainability, including serving on the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium Faculty Steering Committee and the faculty advisory board for the MIT Environment and Sustainability Minor.McGee also co-chaired MIT’s Climate Education Working Group, one of three working groups established under the Institute’s Fast Forward climate action plan. The group identified opportunities to strengthen climate- and sustainability-related education at the Institute, from curricular offerings to experiential learning opportunities and beyond.In April 2023, the working group hosted the MIT Symposium for Advancing Climate Education, featuring talks by McGee and others on how colleges and universities can innovate and help students develop the skills, capacities, and perspectives they’ll need to live, lead, and thrive in a world being remade by the accelerating climate crisis.“David is reimagining MIT undergraduate education to include meaningful collaborations with communities outside of MIT, teaching students that scientific discovery is important, but not always enough to make impact for society,” says van der Hilst. “He will help shape the future of the department with this vital perspective.”From the start of his career, McGee has been dedicated to sharing his love of exploration with students. He earned a master’s degree in teaching and spent seven years as a teacher in middle school and high school classrooms before earning his PhD in Earth and environmental sciences from Columbia University. He joined the MIT faculty in 2012, and in 2018 received the Excellence in Mentoring Award from MIT’s Undergraduate Advising and Academic Programming office. In 2015, he became the director of MIT’s Terrascope first-year learning community.“David’s exemplary teaching in Terrascope comes through his understanding that effective solutions must be found where science intersects with community engagement to forge ethical paths forward,” adds van der Hilst. In 2023, for his work with Terrascope, McGee received the school’s highest award, the School of Science Teaching Prize. In 2022, he was named a Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellow, the highest teaching honor at MIT.As associate department head, McGee worked alongside van der Hilst and student leaders to promote EAPS community engagement, improve internal supports and reporting structures, and bolster opportunities for students to pursue advanced degrees and STEM careers. More