Aurelia Butler

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    in Environment

    New tool predicts flood risk from hurricanes in a warming climate

    Coastal cities and communities will face more frequent major hurricanes with climate change in the coming years. To help prepare coastal cities against future storms, MIT scientists have developed a method to predict how much flooding a coastal community is likely to experience as hurricanes evolve over the next decades.

    When hurricanes make landfall, strong winds whip up salty ocean waters that generate storm surge in coastal regions. As the storms move over land, torrential rainfall can induce further flooding inland. When multiple flood sources such as storm surge and rainfall interact, they can compound a hurricane’s hazards, leading to significantly more flooding than would result from any one source alone. The new study introduces a physics-based method for predicting how the risk of such complex, compound flooding may evolve under a warming climate in coastal cities.

    One example of compound flooding’s impact is the aftermath from Hurricane Sandy in 2012. The storm made landfall on the East Coast of the United States as heavy winds whipped up a towering storm surge that combined with rainfall-driven flooding in some areas to cause historic and devastating floods across New York and New Jersey.

    In their study, the MIT team applied the new compound flood-modeling method to New York City to predict how climate change may influence the risk of compound flooding from Sandy-like hurricanes over the next decades.  

    They found that, in today’s climate, a Sandy-level compound flooding event will likely hit New York City every 150 years. By midcentury, a warmer climate will drive up the frequency of such flooding, to every 60 years. At the end of the century, destructive Sandy-like floods will deluge the city every 30 years — a fivefold increase compared to the present climate.

    “Long-term average damages from weather hazards are usually dominated by the rare, intense events like Hurricane Sandy,” says study co-author Kerry Emanuel, professor emeritus of atmospheric science at MIT. “It is important to get these right.”

    While these are sobering projections, the researchers hope the flood forecasts can help city planners prepare and protect against future disasters. “Our methodology equips coastal city authorities and policymakers with essential tools to conduct compound flooding risk assessments from hurricanes in coastal cities at a detailed, granular level, extending to each street or building, in both current and future decades,” says study author Ali Sarhadi, a postdoc in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences.

    The team’s open-access study appears online today in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. Co-authors include Raphaël Rousseau-Rizzi at MIT’s Lorenz Center, Kyle Mandli at Columbia University, Jeffrey Neal at the University of Bristol, Michael Wiper at the Charles III University of Madrid, and Monika Feldmann at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne.

    The seeds of floods

    To forecast a region’s flood risk, weather modelers typically look to the past. Historical records contain measurements of previous hurricanes’ wind speeds, rainfall, and spatial extent, which scientists use to predict where and how much flooding may occur with coming storms. But Sarhadi believes that the limitations and brevity of these historical records are insufficient for predicting future hurricanes’ risks.

    “Even if we had lengthy historical records, they wouldn’t be a good guide for future risks because of climate change,” he says. “Climate change is changing the structural characteristics, frequency, intensity, and movement of hurricanes, and we cannot rely on the past.”

    Sarhadi and his colleagues instead looked to predict a region’s risk of hurricane flooding in a changing climate using a physics-based risk assessment methodology. They first paired simulations of hurricane activity with coupled ocean and atmospheric models over time. With the hurricane simulations, developed originally by Emanuel, the researchers virtually scatter tens of thousands of “seeds” of hurricanes into a simulated climate. Most seeds dissipate, while a few grow into category-level storms, depending on the conditions of the ocean and atmosphere.

    When the team drives these hurricane simulations with climate models of ocean and atmospheric conditions under certain global temperature projections, they can see how hurricanes change, for instance in terms of intensity, frequency, and size, under past, current, and future climate conditions.

    The team then sought to precisely predict the level and degree of compound flooding from future hurricanes in coastal cities. The researchers first used rainfall models to simulate rain intensity for a large number of simulated hurricanes, then applied numerical models to hydraulically translate that rainfall intensity into flooding on the ground during landfalling of hurricanes, given information about a region such as its surface and topography characteristics. They also simulated the same hurricanes’ storm surges, using hydrodynamic models to translate hurricanes’ maximum wind speed and sea level pressure into surge height in coastal areas. The simulation further assessed the propagation of ocean waters into coastal areas, causing coastal flooding.

    Then, the team developed a numerical hydrodynamic model to predict how two sources of hurricane-induced flooding, such as storm surge and rain-driven flooding, would simultaneously interact through time and space, as simulated hurricanes make landfall in coastal regions such as New York City, in both current and future climates.  

    “There’s a complex, nonlinear hydrodynamic interaction between saltwater surge-driven flooding and freshwater rainfall-driven flooding, that forms compound flooding that a lot of existing methods ignore,” Sarhadi says. “As a result, they underestimate the risk of compound flooding.”

    Amplified risk

    With their flood-forecasting method in place, the team applied it to a specific test case: New York City. They used the multipronged method to predict the city’s risk of compound flooding from hurricanes, and more specifically from Sandy-like hurricanes, in present and future climates. Their simulations showed that the city’s odds of experiencing Sandy-like flooding will increase significantly over the next decades as the climate warms, from once every 150 years in the current climate, to every 60 years by 2050, and every 30 years by 2099.

    Interestingly, they found that much of this increase in risk has less to do with how hurricanes themselves will change with warming climates, but with how sea levels will increase around the world.

    “In future decades, we will experience sea level rise in coastal areas, and we also incorporated that effect into our models to see how much that would increase the risk of compound flooding,” Sarhadi explains. “And in fact, we see sea level rise is playing a major role in amplifying the risk of compound flooding from hurricanes in New York City.”

    The team’s methodology can be applied to any coastal city to assess the risk of compound flooding from hurricanes and extratropical storms. With this approach, Sarhadi hopes decision-makers can make informed decisions regarding the implementation of adaptive measures, such as reinforcing coastal defenses to enhance infrastructure and community resilience.

    “Another aspect highlighting the urgency of our research is the projected 25 percent increase in coastal populations by midcentury, leading to heightened exposure to damaging storms,” Sarhadi says. “Additionally, we have trillions of dollars in assets situated in coastal flood-prone areas, necessitating proactive strategies to reduce damages from compound flooding from hurricanes under a warming climate.”

    This research was supported, in part, by Homesite Insurance. More

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    in Environment

    K. Lisa Yang Global Engineering and Research Center will prioritize innovations for resource-constrained communities

    Billions of people worldwide face threats to their livelihood, health, and well-being due to poverty. These problems persist because solutions offered in developed countries often do not meet the requirements — related to factors like price, performance, usability, robustness, and culture — of poor or developing countries. Academic labs frequently try to tackle these challenges, but often to no avail because they lack real-world, on-the-ground knowledge from key stakeholders, and because they do not have an efficient, reliable means of converting breakthroughs to real-world impact.

    The new K. Lisa Yang Global Engineering and Research (GEAR) Center at MIT, founded with a $28 million gift from philanthropist and investor Lisa Yang, aims to rethink how products and technologies for resource-constrained communities are conceived, designed, and commercialized. A collaboration between MIT’s School of Engineering and School of Science, the Yang GEAR Center will bring together a multidisciplinary team of MIT researchers to assess today’s most pressing global challenges in three critical areas: global health, climate change mitigation and adaptation, and the water-energy-food nexus.

    “As she has shown over and over through her philanthropy, Lisa Yang shares MIT’s passion for connecting fundamental research and real-world data to create positive impact,” says MIT president Sally Kornbluth. “I’m grateful for her powerful vision and incredible generosity in founding the K. Lisa Yang GEAR Center. I can’t imagine a better use of MIT’s talents than working to improve the lives and health of people around the world.”

    Yang’s gift expands her exceptional philanthropic support of human health and basic science research at MIT over the past six years. Yang GEAR Center will join MIT’s Yang Tan Collective, an assemblage of six major research centers focused on accelerating collaboration in basic science, research, and engineering to realize translational strategies that improve human health and well-being at a global scale.

    “Billions of people face daily life-or-death challenges that could be improved with elegant technologies,” says Yang. “And yet I’ve learned how many products and tools created by top engineers don’t make it out of the lab. They may look like clever ideas during the prototype phase, but they are entirely ill-suited to the communities they were designed for. I am very excited about the potential of a deliberate and thoughtful engineering effort that will prioritize the design of technologies for use in impoverished communities.”

    Cost, material availability, cultural suitability, and other market mismatches hinder many major innovations in global health, food, and water from being translated to use in resource-constrained communities. Yang GEAR Center will support a major research and design program with its mission to strategically identify compelling challenges and associated scientific knowledge gaps in resource-constrained communities then address them through academic innovation to create and translate transformative technologies.

    The center will be led by Amos Winter, associate professor of mechanical engineering, whose lab focuses on creating technologies that marry innovative, low-cost design with an in-depth understanding of the unique socioeconomic constraints of emerging markets.

    “Academia has a key role to play in solving the historically unsolvable challenges in resource-constrained communities,” says Winter. “However, academic research is often disconnected from the real-world requirements that must be satisfied to make meaningful change. Yang GEAR Center will be a catalyst for innovation to impact by helping colleagues identify compelling problems and focus their talents on realizing real-world solutions, and by providing mechanisms for commercial dissemination. I am extremely grateful to find in Lisa a partner who shares a vision for how academic research can play a more efficient and targeted role in addressing the needs of the world’s most disadvantaged populations.”

    The backbone of the Yang GEAR Center will be a team of seasoned research scientists and engineers. These individuals will scout real-world problems and distill the relevant research questions then help assemble collaborative teams. As projects develop, center staff will mentor students, build and conduct field pilots, and foster relationships with stakeholders around the world. They will be strategically positioned to translate technology at the end of projects through licensing and startups. Center staff and collaborators will focus on creating products and services for climate-driven migrants, such as solar-powered energy and water networks; technologies for reducing atmospheric carbon and promoting the hydrogen economy; brackish water desalination and irrigation solutions; and high-performance, global health diagnostics and devices.

    For instance, a Yang GEAR Center team focused on creating water-saving and solar-powered irrigation solutions for farmers in the Middle East and North Africa will continue its work in the region. They will conduct exploratory research; build a team of stakeholders, including farmers, agricultural outreach organizations, irrigation hardware manufacturers, retailers, water and agriculture scientists, and local government officials; design, rigorously test, and iterate prototypes both in the lab and in the field; and conduct large-scale field trials to garner user feedback and pave the way to product commercialization.

    “Grounded in foundational scientific research and blended with excellence in the humanities, MIT provides a framework that integrates people, economics, research, and innovation. By incorporating multiple perspectives — and being attentive to the needs and cultures of the people who will ultimately rely on research outcomes — MIT can have the greatest impact in areas of health, climate science, and resource security,” says Nergis Mavalvala, dean of the School of Science and the Curtis and Kathleen Marble Professor of Astrophysics.

    An overarching aim for the center will be to educate graduates who are global engineers, designers, and researchers positioned for a career of addressing compelling, high-impact challenges. The center includes four endowed Hock E. Tan GEAR Center Fellowships that will support graduate students and/or postdoctoral fellows eager to enter the field of global engineering. The fellowships are named for MIT alumnus and Broadcom CEO Hock E. Tan ’75 SM ’75.

    “I am thrilled that the Yang GEAR Center is taking a leading role in training problem-solvers who will rethink how products and inventions can help communities facing the most pressing challenges of our time,” adds Anantha Chandrakasan, dean of the School of Engineering and the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “These talented young students,  postdocs, and staff have the potential to reach across disciplines — and across the globe — to truly transform the impact engineering can have in the future.” More

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    in Environment

    Researchers release open-source space debris model

    MIT’s Astrodynamics, Space Robotics, and Controls Laboratory (ARCLab) announced the public beta release of the MIT Orbital Capacity Assessment Tool (MOCAT) during the 2023 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Space Forum Workshop on Dec. 14. MOCAT enables users to model the long-term future space environment to understand growth in space debris and assess the effectiveness of debris-prevention mechanisms.

    With the escalating congestion in low Earth orbit, driven by a surge in satellite deployments, the risk of collisions and space debris proliferation is a pressing concern. Conducting thorough space environment studies is critical for developing effective strategies for fostering responsible and sustainable use of space resources. 

    MOCAT stands out among orbital modeling tools for its capability to model individual objects, diverse parameters, orbital characteristics, fragmentation scenarios, and collision probabilities. With the ability to differentiate between object categories, generalize parameters, and offer multi-fidelity computations, MOCAT emerges as a versatile and powerful tool for comprehensive space environment analysis and management.

    MOCAT is intended to provide an open-source tool to empower stakeholders including satellite operators, regulators, and members of the public to make data-driven decisions. The ARCLab team has been developing these models for the last several years, recognizing that the lack of open-source implementation of evolutionary modeling tools limits stakeholders’ ability to develop consensus on actions to help improve space sustainability. This beta release is intended to allow users to experiment with the tool and provide feedback to help guide further development.

    Richard Linares, the principal investigator for MOCAT and an MIT associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics, expresses excitement about the tool’s potential impact: “MOCAT represents a significant leap forward in orbital capacity assessment. By making it open-source and publicly available, we hope to engage the global community in advancing our understanding of satellite orbits and contributing to the sustainable use of space.”

    MOCAT consists of two main components. MOCAT-MC evaluates space environment evolution with individual trajectory simulation and Monte Carlo parameter analysis, providing both a high-level overall view for the environment and a fidelity analysis into the individual space objects evolution. MOCAT Source Sink Evolutionary Model (MOCAT-SSEM), meanwhile, uses a lower-fidelity modeling approach that can run on personal computers within seconds to minutes. MOCAT-MC and MOCAT-SSEM can be accessed separately via GitHub.

    MOCAT’s initial development has been supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and NASA’s Office of Technology and Strategy.

    “We are thrilled to support this groundbreaking orbital debris modeling work and the new knowledge it created,” says Charity Weeden, associate administrator for the Office of Technology, Policy, and Strategy at NASA headquarters in Washington. “This open-source modeling tool is a public good that will advance space sustainability, improve evidence-based policy analysis, and help all users of space make better decisions.” More

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    in Security

    Food for thought

    MIT graduate student Juana De La O describes herself as a food-motivated organism, so it’s no surprise that she reaches for food and baking analogies when she’s discussing her thesis work in the lab of undergraduate officer and professor of biology Adam Martin. 

    Consider the formative stages of a croissant, she offers, occasionally providing homemade croissants to accompany the presentation: When one is forming the puff pastry, the dough is folded over the butter again and again. Tissues in a developing mouse embryo must similarly fold and bend, creating layers and structures that become the spine, head, and organs — but these tissues have no hands to induce those formative movements. 

    De La O is studying neural tube closure, the formation of the structure that becomes the spinal cord and the brain. Disorders like anencephaly and craniorachischisis occur when the head region fails to close in a developing fetus. It’s a heartbreaking defect, De La O says, because it’s 100 percent lethal — but the fetus fully develops otherwise. 

    “Your entire central nervous system hinges on this one event happening successfully,” she says. “On the fundamental level, we have a very limited understanding of the mechanisms required for neural closure to happen at all, much less an understanding of what goes wrong that leads to those defects.” 

    Hypothetically speaking

    De La O hails from Chicago, where she received an undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago and worked in the lab of Ilaria Rebay. De La O’s sister was the first person in her family to go to and graduate from college — De La O, in turn, is the first person in her family to pursue a PhD. 

    From her first time visiting campus, De La O could see MIT would provide a thrilling environment in which to study.

    “MIT was one of the few places where the students weren’t constantly complaining about how hard their life was,” she says. “At lunch with prospective students, they’d be talking to each other and then just organically slip into conversations about science.”

    The department emails acceptance letters and sends a physical copy via snail mail. De La O’s letter included a handwritten note from department head Amy Keating, then a graduate officer, who had interviewed De La O during her campus visit. 

    “That’s what really sold it for me,” she recalls. “I went to my PI [principal investigator]’s office and said, ‘I have new data’” and I showed her the letter, and there was lots of unintelligible crying.” 

    To prepare her for graduate school, her parents, both immigrants from Mexico, spent the summer teaching De La O to make all her favorite dishes because “comfort food feels like home.”   

    When she reached MIT, however, the Covid-19 pandemic ground the world to a halt and severely limited what students could experience during rotations. Far from home and living alone, De La O taught herself to bake, creating the confections she craved but couldn’t leave her apartment to purchase. De La O didn’t get to work as extensively as she would have liked during her rotation in the Martin lab. 

    Martin had recently returned from a sabbatical that was spent learning a new research model; historically a fly lab, Martin was planning to delve into mouse research. 

    “My final presentation was, ‘Here’s a hypothetical project I would hypothetically do if I were hypothetically going to work with mice in a fly lab,’” De La O says. 

    Martin recalls being impressed. De La O is skilled at talking about science in an earnest and engaging way, and she dug deep into the literature and identified points Martin hadn’t considered. 

    “This is a level of independence that I look for in a student because it is important to the science to have someone who is contributing their ideas and independent reading and research to a project,” Martin says. 

    After agreeing to join the lab — news she shared with Martin via a meme — she got to work. 

    Charting mouse development

    The neural tube forms from a flat sheet whose sides rise and meet to create a hollow cylinder. De La O has observed patterns of actin and myosin changing in space and time as the embryo develops. Actin and myosin are fibrous proteins that provide structure in eukaryotic cells. They are responsible for some cell movement, like muscle contraction or cell division. Fibers of actin and myosin can also connect across cells, forming vast networks that coordinate the movements of whole tissues. By looking at the structure of these networks, researchers can make predictions about how force is affecting those tissues.

    De La O has found indications of a difference in the tension across the tissue during the critical stages of neural tube closure, which contributes to the tissue’s ability to fold and form a tube. They are not the first research group to propose this, she notes, but they’re suggesting that the patterns of tension are not uniform during a single stage of development.

    “My project, on a really fundamental level, is an atlas for a really early stage of mouse development for actin and myosin,” De La O says. “This dataset doesn’t exist in the field yet.” 

    However, De La O has been performing analyses exclusively in fixed samples, so she may be quantifying phenomena that are not actually how tissues behave. To determine whether that’s the case, De La O plans to analyze live samples.

    The idea is that if one could carefully cut tissue and observe how quickly it recoils, like slicing through a taught rubber band, those measurements could be used to approximate force across the tissue. However, the techniques required are still being developed, and the greater Boston area currently lacks the equipment and expertise needed to attempt those experiments. 

    A big part of her work in the lab has been figuring out how to collect and analyze relevant data. This research has already taken her far and wide, both literally and virtually. 

    “We’ve found that people have been very generous with their time and expertise,” De La O says. “One of the benefits we, as fly people, brought into this field is we don’t know anything — so we’re going to question everything.”

    De La O traveled to the University of Virginia to learn live imaging techniques from associate professor of cell biology Ann Sutherland, and she’s also been in contact with Gabriel Galea at University College London, where Martin and De La O are considering a visit for further training. 

    “There are a lot of reasons why these experiments could go wrong, and one of them is that I’m not trained yet,” she says. “Once you know how to do things on an optimal setup, you can figure out how to make it work on a less-optimal setup.”

    Collaboration and community

    De La O has now expanded her cooking repertoire far beyond her family’s recipes and shares her new creations when she visits home. At MIT, she hosts dinner parties, including one where everything from the savory appetizers to the sweet desserts contained honey, thanks to an Independent Activities Period course about the producers of the sticky substance, and she made and tried apple pie for the first time with her fellow graduate students after an afternoon of apple picking. 

    De La O says she’s still learning how to say no to taking on additional work outside of her regular obligations as a PhD student; she’s found there’s a lot of pressure for underrepresented students to be at the forefront of diversity efforts, and although she finds that work extremely fulfilling, she can, and has, stretched herself too thin in the past. 

    “Every time I see an application that asks ‘How will you work to increase diversity,’ my strongest instinct is just to write ‘I’m brown and around — you’re welcome,’” she jokes. “The greatest amount of diversity work I will do is to get where I’m going. Me achieving my goals increases diversity inherently, but I also want to do well because I know if I do, I will make everything better for people coming after me.”

    De La O is confident her path will be in academia, and troubleshooting, building up protocols, and setting up standards for her work in the Martin Lab has been “an excellent part of my training program.” 

    De La O and Martin embarked on a new project in a new model for the lab for De La O’s thesis, so much of her graduate studies will be spent laying the groundwork for future research. 

    “I hope her travels open Juana’s eyes to science being a larger community and to teach her about how to lead a collaboration,” Martin says. “Overall, I think this project is excellent for a student with aspirations to be a PI. I benefited from extremely open-ended projects as a student and see, in retrospect, how they prepared me for my work today.” More

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    in Security

    A new way to swiftly eliminate micropollutants from water

    “Zwitterionic” might not be a word you come across every day, but for Professor Patrick Doyle of the MIT Department of Chemical Engineering, it’s a word that’s central to the technology his group is developing to remove micropollutants from water. Derived from the German word “zwitter,” meaning “hybrid,” “zwitterionic” molecules are those with an equal number of positive and negative charges.

    Devashish Gokhale, a PhD student in Doyle’s lab, uses the example of a magnet to describe zwitterionic materials. “On a magnet, you have a north pole and a south pole that stick to each other, and on a zwitterionic molecule, you have a positive charge and a negative charge which stick to each other in a similar way.” Because many inorganic micropollutants and some organic micropollutants are themselves charged, Doyle and his team have been investigating how to deploy zwitterionic molecules to capture micropollutants in water. 

    In a new paper in Nature Water, Doyle, Gokhale, and undergraduate student Andre Hamelberg explain how they use zwitterionic hydrogels to sustainably capture both organic and inorganic micropollutants from water with minimal operational complexity. In the past, zwitterionic molecules have been used as coatings on membranes for water treatment because of their non-fouling properties. But in the Doyle group’s system, zwitterionic molecules are used to form the scaffold material, or backbone within the hydrogel — a porous three-dimensional network of polymer chains that contains a significant amount of water. “Zwitterionic molecules have very strong attraction to water compared to other materials which are used to make hydrogels or polymers,” says Gokhale. What’s more, the positive and negative charges on zwitterionic molecules cause the hydrogels to have lower compressibility than what has been commonly observed in hydrogels. This makes for significantly more swollen, robust, and porous hydrogels, which is important for the scale up of the hydrogel-based system for water treatment.

    The early stages of this research were supported by a seed grant from MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS). Doyle’s group is now pursuing commercialization of the platform for both at-home use and industrial scale applications, with support from a J-WAFS Solutions grant.

    Seeking a sustainable solution

    Micropollutants are chemically diverse materials that can be harmful to human health and the environment, even though they are typically found at low concentrations (micrograms to milligrams per liter) relative to conventional contaminants. Micropollutants can be organic or inorganic and can be naturally-occurring or synthetic. Organic micropollutants are mostly carbon-based molecules and include pesticides and per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), known as “forever chemicals.” Inorganic micropollutants, such as heavy metals like lead and arsenic, tend to be smaller than organic micropollutants. Unfortunately, both organic and inorganic micropollutants are pervasive in the environment.

    Many micropollutants come from industrial processes, but the effects of human-induced climate change are also contributing to the environmental spread of micropollutants. Gokhale explains that, in California, for example, fires burn plastic electrical cables and leech micropollutants into natural ecosystems. Doyle adds that “outside of climate change, things like pandemics can spike the number of organic micropollutants in the environment due to high concentrations of pharmaceuticals in wastewater.”

    It’s no surprise then, that over the past few years micropollutants have become more and more of a concern. These chemicals have garnered attention in the media and led to “significant change in the environmental engineering and regulatory landscape” says Gokhale. In March 2023, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed a strict, federal standard that would regulate six different PFAS chemicals in drinking water. Just last October, the EPA proposed banning the micropollutant trichloroethylene, a cancer-causing chemical that can be found in brake cleaners and other consumer products. And as recently as November, the EPA proposed that water utilities nationwide be required to replace all of their lead pipes to protect the public from lead exposure. Internationally, Gokhale notes the Oslo Paris Convention, whose mission is to protect the marine environment of the northeast Atlantic Ocean, including phasing out the discharge of offshore chemicals from the oil and gas industries. 

    With each new, necessary regulation to protect the safety of our water resources, the need for effective water treatment processes grows. Compounding this challenge is the need to make water treatment processes that are sustainable and energy-efficient. 

    The benchmark method to treat micropollutants in water is activated carbon. However, making filters with activated carbon is energy-intensive, requiring very high temperatures in large, centralized facilities. Gokhale says approximately “four kilograms of coal are needed to make one kilogram of activated carbon, so you lose a significant amount of carbon dioxide to the environment.” According to the World Economic Forum, global water and wastewater treatment accounts for 5 percent of annual emissions. In the U.S. alone, the EPA reports that drinking water and wastewater systems account for over 45 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions annually.

    “We need to develop methods which have smaller climate footprints than methods which are being used industrially today,” says Gokhale.

    Supporting a “high-risk” project

    In September 2019, Doyle and his lab embarked on an initial project to develop a microparticle-based platform to remove a broad range of micropollutants from water. Doyle’s group had been using hydrogels in pharmaceutical processing to formulate drug molecules into pill format. When he learned about the J-WAFS seed grant opportunity for early-stage research in water and food systems, Doyle realized his pharmaceutical work with hydrogels could be applied to environmental issues like water treatment. “I would never have gotten funding for this project if I went to the NSF [National Science Foundation], because they would just say, ‘you’re not a water person.’ But the J-WAFS seed grant offered a way for a high-risk, high-reward kind of project,” Doyle says.

    In March 2022, Doyle, Gokhale, and MIT undergraduate Ian Chen published findings from the seed grant work, describing their use of micelles within hydrogels for water treatment. Micelles are spherical structures that form when molecules called surfactants (found in things like soap), come in contact with water or other liquids. The team was able to synthesize micelle-laden hydrogel particles that soak up micropollutants from water like a sponge. Unlike activated carbon, the hydrogel particle system is made from environmentally friendly materials. Furthermore, the system’s materials are made at room temperature, making them exceedingly more sustainable than activated carbon.

    Building off the success of the seed grant, Doyle and his team were awarded a J-WAFS Solutions grant in September 2022 to help move their technology from the lab to the market. With this support, the researchers have been able to build, test, and refine pilot-scale prototypes of their hydrogel platform. System iterations during the solutions grant period have included the use of the zwitterionic molecules, a novel advancement from the seed grant work.  

    Rapid elimination of micropollutants is of special importance in commercial water treatment processes, where there is a limited amount of time water can spend inside the operational filtration unit. This is referred to as contact time, explains Gokhale. In municipal-scale or industrial-scale water treatment systems, contact times are usually less than 20 minutes and can be as short as five minutes. 

    “But as people have been trying to target these emerging micropollutants of concern, they realized they can’t get to sufficiently low concentrations on the same time scales as conventional contaminants,” Gokhale says. “Most technologies focus only on specific molecules or specific classes of molecules. So, you have whole technologies which are focusing only on PFAS, and then you have other technologies for lead and metals. When you start thinking about removing all of these contaminants from water, you end up with designs which have a very large number of unit operations. And that’s an issue because you have plants which are in the middle of large cities, and they don’t necessarily have space to expand to increase their contact times to efficiently remove multiple micropollutants,” he adds.

    Since zwitterionic molecules possess unique properties that confer high porosity, the researchers have been able to engineer a system for quicker uptake of micropollutants from water. Tests show that the hydrogels can eliminate six chemically diverse micropollutants at least 10 times faster than commercial activated carbon. The system is also compatible with a diverse set of materials, making it multifunctional. Micropollutants can bind to many different sites within the hydrogel platform: organic micropollutants bind to the micelles or surfactants while inorganic micropollutants bind to the zwitterionic molecules. Micelles, surfactants, zwitterionic molecules, and other chelating agents can be swapped in and out to essentially tune the system with different functionalities based on the profile of the water being treated. This kind of “plug-and-play” addition of various functional agents does not require a change in the design or synthesis of the hydrogel platform, and adding more functionalities does not take away from existing functionality. In this way, the zwitterionic-based system can rapidly remove multiple contaminants at lower concentrations in a single step, without the need for large, industrial units or capital expenditure. 

    Perhaps most importantly, the particles in the Doyle group’s system can be regenerated and used over and over again. By simply soaking the particles in an ethanol bath, they can be washed of micropollutants for indefinite use without loss of efficacy. When activated carbon is used for water treatment, the activated carbon itself becomes contaminated with micropollutants and must be treated as toxic chemical waste and disposed of in special landfills. Over time, micropollutants in landfills will reenter the ecosystem, perpetuating the problem.

    Arjav Shah, a PhD-MBA candidate in MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering and the MIT Sloan School of Management, respectively, recently joined the team to lead commercialization efforts. The team has found that the zwitterionic hydrogels could be used in several real-world contexts, ranging from large-scale industrial packed beds to small-scale, portable, off-grid applications — for example, in tablets that could clean water in a canteen — and they have begun piloting the technology through a number of commercialization programs at MIT and in the greater Boston area.

    The combined strengths of each member of the team continue to drive the project forward in impactful ways, including undergraduate students like Andre Hamelberg, the third author on the Nature Water paper. Hamelberg is a participant in MIT’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP). Gokhale, who is also a J-WAFS Fellow, provides training and mentorship to Hamelberg and other UROP students in the lab.

    “We see this as an educational opportunity,” says Gokhale, noting that the UROP students learn science and chemical engineering through the research they conduct in the lab. The J-WAFS project has also been “a way of getting undergrads interested in water treatment and the more sustainable aspects of chemical engineering,” Gokhale says. He adds that it’s “one of the few projects which goes all the way from designing specific chemistries to building small filters and units and scaling them up and commercializing them. It’s a really good learning opportunity for the undergrads and we’re always excited to have them work with us.”

    In four years, the technology has been able to grow from an initial idea to a technology with scalable, real-world applications, making it an exemplar J-WAFS project. The fruitful collaboration between J-WAFS and the Doyle lab serves as inspiration for any MIT faculty who may want to apply their research to water or food systems projects.

    “The J-WAFS project serves as a way to demystify what a chemical engineer does,” says Doyle. “I think that there’s an old idea of chemical engineering as working in just oil and gas. But modern chemical engineering is focused on things which make life and the environment better.” More

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    in Environment

    Co-creating climate futures with real-time data and spatial storytelling

    Virtual story worlds and game engines aren’t just for video games anymore. They are now tools for scientists and storytellers to digitally twin existing physical spaces and then turn them into vessels to dream up speculative climate stories and build collective designs of the future. That’s the theory and practice behind the MIT WORLDING initiative.

    Twice this year, WORLDING matched world-class climate story teams working in XR (extended reality) with relevant labs and researchers across MIT. One global group returned for a virtual gathering online in partnership with Unity for Humanity, while another met for one weekend in person, hosted at the MIT Media Lab.

    “We are witnessing the birth of an emergent field that fuses climate science, urban planning, real-time 3D engines, nonfiction storytelling, and speculative fiction, and it is all fueled by the urgency of the climate crises,” says Katerina Cizek, lead designer of the WORLDING initiative at the Co-Creation Studio of MIT Open Documentary Lab. “Interdisciplinary teams are forming and blossoming around the planet to collectively imagine and tell stories of healthy, livable worlds in virtual 3D spaces and then finding direct ways to translate that back to earth, literally.”

    At this year’s virtual version of WORLDING, five multidisciplinary teams were selected from an open call. In a week-long series of research and development gatherings, the teams met with MIT scientists, staff, fellows, students, and graduates, as well as other leading figures in the field. Guests ranged from curators at film festivals such as Sundance and Venice, climate policy specialists, and award-winning media creators to software engineers and renowned Earth and atmosphere scientists. The teams heard from MIT scholars in diverse domains, including geomorphology, urban planning as acts of democracy, and climate researchers at MIT Media Lab.

    Mapping climate data

    “We are measuring the Earth’s environment in increasingly data-driven ways. Hundreds of terabytes of data are taken every day about our planet in order to study the Earth as a holistic system, so we can address key questions about global climate change,” explains Rachel Connolly, an MIT Media Lab research scientist focused in the “Future Worlds” research theme, in a talk to the group. “Why is this important for your work and storytelling in general? Having the capacity to understand and leverage this data is critical for those who wish to design for and successfully operate in the dynamic Earth environment.”

    Making sense of billions of data points was a key theme during this year’s sessions. In another talk, Taylor Perron, an MIT professor of Earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences, shared how his team uses computational modeling combined with many other scientific processes to better understand how geology, climate, and life intertwine to shape the surfaces of Earth and other planets. His work resonated with one WORLDING team in particular, one aiming to digitally reconstruct the pre-Hispanic Lake Texcoco — where current day Mexico City is now situated — as a way to contrast and examine the region’s current water crisis.

    Democratizing the future

    While WORLDING approaches rely on rigorous science and the interrogation of large datasets, they are also founded on democratizing community-led approaches.

    MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning graduate Lafayette Cruise MCP ’19 met with the teams to discuss how he moved his own practice as a trained urban planner to include a futurist component involving participatory methods. “I felt we were asking the same limited questions in regards to the future we were wanting to produce. We’re very limited, very constrained, as to whose values and comforts are being centered. There are so many possibilities for how the future could be.”

    Scaling to reach billions

    This work scales from the very local to massive global populations. Climate policymakers are concerned with reaching billions of people in the line of fire. “We have a goal to reach 1 billion people with climate resilience solutions,” says Nidhi Upadhyaya, deputy director at Atlantic Council’s Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center. To get that reach, Upadhyaya is turning to games. “There are 3.3 billion-plus people playing video games across the world. Half of these players are women. This industry is worth $300 billion. Africa is currently among the fastest-growing gaming markets in the world, and 55 percent of the global players are in the Asia Pacific region.” She reminded the group that this conversation is about policy and how formats of mass communication can be used for policymaking, bringing about change, changing behavior, and creating empathy within audiences.

    Socially engaged game development is also connected to education at Unity Technologies, a game engine company. “We brought together our education and social impact work because we really see it as a critical flywheel for our business,” said Jessica Lindl, vice president and global head of social impact/education at Unity Technologies, in the opening talk of WORLDING. “We upscale about 900,000 students, in university and high school programs around the world, and about 800,000 adults who are actively learning and reskilling and upskilling in Unity. Ultimately resulting in our mission of the ‘world is a better place with more creators in it,’ millions of creators who reach billions of consumers — telling the world stories, and fostering a more inclusive, sustainable, and equitable world.”

    Access to these technologies is key, especially the hardware. “Accessibility has been missing in XR,” explains Reginé Gilbert, who studies and teaches accessibility and disability in user experience design at New York University. “XR is being used in artificial intelligence, assistive technology, business, retail, communications, education, empathy, entertainment, recreation, events, gaming, health, rehabilitation meetings, navigation, therapy, training, video programming, virtual assistance wayfinding, and so many other uses. This is a fun fact for folks: 97.8 percent of the world hasn’t tried VR [virtual reality] yet, actually.”

    Meanwhile, new hardware is on its way. The WORLDING group got early insights into the highly anticipated Apple Vision Pro headset, which promises to integrate many forms of XR and personal computing in one device. “They’re really pushing this kind of pass-through or mixed reality,” said Dan Miller, a Unity engineer on the poly spatial team, collaborating with Apple, who described the experience of the device as “You are viewing the real world. You’re pulling up windows, you’re interacting with content. It’s a kind of spatial computing device where you have multiple apps open, whether it’s your email client next to your messaging client with a 3D game in the middle. You’re interacting with all these things in the same space and at different times.”

    “WORLDING combines our passion for social-impact storytelling and incredible innovative storytelling,” said Paisley Smith of the Unity for Humanity Program at Unity Technologies. She added, “This is an opportunity for creators to incubate their game-changing projects and connect with experts across climate, story, and technology.”

    Meeting at MIT

    In a new in-person iteration of WORLDING this year, organizers collaborated closely with Connolly at the MIT Media Lab to co-design an in-person weekend conference Oct. 25 – Nov. 7 with 45 scholars and professionals who visualize climate data at NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, planetariums, and museums across the United States.

    A participant said of the event, “An incredible workshop that had had a profound effect on my understanding of climate data storytelling and how to combine different components together for a more [holistic] solution.”

    “With this gathering under our new Future Worlds banner,” says Dava Newman, director of the MIT Media Lab and Apollo Program Professor of Astronautics chair, “the Media Lab seeks to affect human behavior and help societies everywhere to improve life here on Earth and in worlds beyond, so that all — the sentient, natural, and cosmic — worlds may flourish.” 

    “WORLDING’s virtual-only component has been our biggest strength because it has enabled a true, international cohort to gather, build, and create together. But this year, an in-person version showed broader opportunities that spatial interactivity generates — informal Q&As, physical worksheets, and larger-scale ideation, all leading to deeper trust-building,” says WORLDING producer Srushti Kamat SM ’23.

    The future and potential of WORLDING lies in the ongoing dialogue between the virtual and physical, both in the work itself and in the format of the workshops. More

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    in Environment

    Climate action, here and now

    A few years ago, David Hsu started taking a keen interest in some apartment buildings in Brooklyn and the Bronx — but not because he was looking for a place to live. Hsu, an associate professor at MIT, works on urban climate change solutions. The property owners were retrofitting their buildings to make them net-zero emitters of carbon dioxide via better insulation, ventilation, and electric heating and appliances. They also wanted to see the effect on interior air quality.

    In the process, the owners started working with Hsu and an MIT team to assess the results using top-grade air quality sensors. They found that beyond its climate benefits, retrofitting lowered indoor pollutants from high levels to almost-undetectable levels. It is a win-win outcome.

    “Not only are those buildings cleaner and use less energy and do not emit greenhouse gases, they also have better air quality,” Hsu says. “The hopeful thing is that as we remake our buildings for decarbonization, a lot of technologies are so superior that our lives will be better, too.”

    Hsu’s projects frequently yield practical, concrete steps for climate action. In New York City, Hsu found, mandating the measurement of energy use lowered consumption 13 to 14 percent over four years. In a 2017 paper, he and his co-authors studied which climate actions would most reduce carbon emissions in 11 major U.S. cities. Cleveland and Denver can greatly reduce use of fossil fuels, for example, while better energy efficiency in new homes would make a big difference in Houston and Phoenix.

    “You have to figure out what works and doesn’t work,” Hsu says. “I try to figure out how we can have cleaner and healthier cities that will be more sustainable, equitable, and more just.”

    Significantly, Hsu does not just prescribe climate action elsewhere, he also works for change at MIT. He helped create a zero-emissions roadmap for MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning as well as the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, where he is an associate professor of urban and environmental planning and is part of Fast Forward: MIT’s Climate Action Plan for the Decade, serving in the Climate Education Working Group.

    “People can get depressed about how you tackle this large, civilization-wide problem, and then you realize lots of other people care about this. Lots of smart people at MIT and other places are working on it, and there are lots of things we can do, individually and collectively,” Hsu says.

    And as Hsu’s work shows, lots of people tackle the climate crisis by working on local issues. For his research and teaching, Hsu was granted tenure at MIT this year.

    Urban planning by way of Amherst

    Hsu studies cities, but is not from one. Growing up in the college town of Amherst, Massachusetts, Hsu could walk out of his home and “be in the woods in a minute.” He attended Yale University as an undergraduate, majoring in physics, and started venturing into New York City with friends. After graduation, Hsu moved there and got a job.

    Or three jobs, really. Over the next 10 years, Hsu worked as an engineer, in real estate finance, and for the New York City government as a vice president at the NYC Economic Development Corporation, where he helped manage the city’s post-September 11 redevelopment of the East River waterfront. Eventually, he decided to pursue graduate studies in urban planning, building on his experience.

    “Engineering, finance, and government, you put those three things together and they’re basically urban planning,” Hsu says. “It took me a decade after school to realize urban planning is a thing I could do. I say to students, ‘You’re lucky, you have this major. I never had this in college.’”

    As a graduate student, Hsu received an MS from Cornell University in applied and engineering physics, then an MSc from the London School of Economics and Political Science in city design and social science, before getting his PhD in urban design and planning at the University of Washington in Seattle. He served on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania before moving to MIT in 2015.

    Hsu studies an array of topics involving local governments and climate policy. He has published multiple papers on Philadelphia’s attempts to refurbish its stormwater infrastructure, for example. His studies about retrofitted apartment buildings are forthcoming as three papers. A 2022 Hsu paper, “Straight out of Cape Cod,” looked at the origins of Community Choice Aggregation, an approach to purchasing clean energy that started in a few Massachusetts communities and now involves 11 percent of the U.S. population.

    “I joke that the ideal reader of my articles is not a mayor and it’s not an academic, it’s a midcareer bureaucrat trying to implement a policy,” Hsu says.

    Actually, that’s no mere joke. At MIT, City of Cambridge officials have contacted Hsu to discuss his studies of New York and Philadelphia, something he welcomes. Even if not in local government himself, Hsu says, “I know I can do research that might move some of those projects along. It’s my way of trying to contribute to the world outside of academia.”

    “It’s all important”

    There is still another way Hsu contributes to climate action: by influencing what MIT does. He helped craft the climate policies of the School of Architecture and Planning and the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, which aim to produce net zero emissions for the department through the use of tools like carbon offsets for travel. As part of the Institute-wide Climate Education Working Group convened under the Fast Forward plan, Hsu is busy thinking about how to integrate climate studies into MIT education.

    “Our Fast Forward team does great work together. David McGee, Lisa Ghaffari, Kate Trimble, Antje Danielson, Curt Newton, they’re so engaged,” says Hsu. “Our students are terrifically hard-working and skilled and care about climate change, but don’t know how to affect it necessarily. We want to give them on-ramps and skills.”

    He is also chair of the fast-growing 11-6 major that combines urban studies and planning with computer science.

    “Climate change is happening so fast, and is so big, that every job could be climate-change related,” Hsu says. “If people leave MIT with a higher base understanding of climate change, then you can be a lawyer or consultant or work in finance or computer science and address the unsolved problems.”

    Indeed, Hsu thinks many students, who he believes increasingly recognize the severity of climate change, need to prioritize the battle against it when shaping their careers.

    “Our fight against climate change is not going to be over by 2050, but 25 years from now, we’re going to know if we transitioned to a net-zero-emitting society for the sake of humanity,” Hsu says. “The students are more aware than ever that climate change is going to dominate their lives. I want students to look back with satisfaction that they helped society.”

    More bluntly, he says: “Are you going to say, ‘Oh, I made some money and enhanced my career, but the planet’s going to be destroyed? Or ideally will you find a job that’s satisfying and can support your future hopes for yourself and your family, and also save the planet? Because I think there are a lot of [job] options like that out there.”

    Hsu adds, “We’re going to need people pulling in different directions. It’s all important. That’s the message to our students. Go find something you think is important and use your skills. We’re going to need that many people to work on climate change.” More

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    in Security

    Engineers develop a vibrating, ingestible capsule that might help treat obesity

    When you eat a large meal, your stomach sends signals to your brain that create a feeling of fullness, which helps you realize it’s time to stop eating. A stomach full of liquid can also send these messages, which is why dieters are often advised to drink a glass of water before eating.

    MIT engineers have now come up with a new way to take advantage of that phenomenon, using an ingestible capsule that vibrates within the stomach. These vibrations activate the same stretch receptors that sense when the stomach is distended, creating an illusory sense of fullness.

    In animals who were given this pill 20 minutes before eating, the researchers found that this treatment not only stimulated the release of hormones that signal satiety, but also reduced the animals’ food intake by about 40 percent. Scientists have much more to learn about the mechanisms that influence human body weight, but if further research suggests this technology could be safely used in humans, such a pill might offer a minimally invasive way to treat obesity, the researchers say.

    “For somebody who wants to lose weight or control their appetite, it could be taken before each meal,” says Shriya Srinivasan PhD ’20, a former MIT graduate student and postdoc who is now an assistant professor of bioengineering at Harvard University. “This could be really interesting in that it would provide an option that could minimize the side effects that we see with the other pharmacological treatments out there.”

    Srinivasan is the lead author of the new study, which appears today in Science Advances. Giovanni Traverso, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT and a gastroenterologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, is the senior author of the paper.

    A sense of fullness

    When the stomach becomes distended, specialized cells called mechanoreceptors sense that stretching and send signals to the brain via the vagus nerve. As a result, the brain stimulates production of insulin, as well as hormones such as C-peptide, Pyy, and GLP-1. All of these hormones work together to help people digest their food, feel full, and stop eating. At the same time, levels of ghrelin, a hunger-promoting hormone, go down.

    While a graduate student at MIT, Srinivasan became interested in the idea of controlling this process by artificially stretching the mechanoreceptors that line the stomach, through vibration. Previous research had shown that vibration applied to a muscle can induce a sense that the muscle has stretched farther than it actually has.

    “I wondered if we could activate stretch receptors in the stomach by vibrating them and having them perceive that the entire stomach has been expanded, to create an illusory sense of distension that could modulate hormones and eating patterns,” Srinivasan says.

    As a postdoc in MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, Srinivasan worked closely with Traverso’s lab, which has developed many novel approaches to oral delivery of drugs and electronic devices. For this study, Srinivasan, Traverso, and a team of researchers designed a capsule about the size of a multivitamin, that includes a vibrating element. When the pill, which is powered by a small silver oxide battery, reaches the stomach, acidic gastric fluids dissolve a gelatinous membrane that covers the capsule, completing the electronic circuit that activates the vibrating motor.

    In a study in animals, the researchers showed that once the pill begins vibrating, it activates mechanoreceptors, which send signals to the brain through stimulation of the vagus nerve. The researchers tracked hormone levels during the periods when the device was vibrating and found that they mirrored the hormone release patterns seen following a meal, even when the animals had fasted.

    The researchers then tested the effects of this stimulation on the animals’ appetite. They found that when the pill was activated for about 20 minutes, before the animals were offered food, they consumed 40 percent less, on average, than they did when the pill was not activated. The animals also gained weight more slowly during periods when they were treated with the vibrating pill.

    “The behavioral change is profound, and that’s using the endogenous system rather than any exogenous therapeutic. We have the potential to overcome some of the challenges and costs associated with delivery of biologic drugs by modulating the enteric nervous system,” Traverso says.

    The current version of the pill is designed to vibrate for about 30 minutes after arriving in the stomach, but the researchers plan to explore the possibility of adapting it to remain in the stomach for longer periods of time, where it could be turned on and off wirelessly as needed. In the animal studies, the pills passed through the digestive tract within four or five days.

    The study also found that the animals did not show any signs of obstruction, perforation, or other negative impacts while the pill was in their digestive tract.

    An alternative approach

    This type of pill could offer an alternative to the current approaches to treating obesity, the researchers say. Nonmedical interventions such as diet exercise don’t always work, and many of the existing medical interventions are fairly invasive. These include gastric bypass surgery, as well as gastric balloons, which are no longer used widely in the United States due to safety concerns.

    Drugs such as GLP-1 agonists can also aid weight loss, but most of them have to be injected, and they are unaffordable for many people. According to Srinivasan, the MIT capsules could be manufactured at a cost that would make them available to people who don’t have access to more expensive treatment options.

    “For a lot of populations, some of the more effective therapies for obesity are very costly. At scale, our device could be manufactured at a pretty cost-effective price point,” she says. “I’d love to see how this would transform care and therapy for people in global health settings who may not have access to some of the more sophisticated or expensive options that are available today.”

    The researchers now plan to explore ways to scale up the manufacturing of the capsules, which could enable clinical trials in humans. Such studies would be important to learn more about the devices’ safety, as well as determine the best time to swallow the capsule before to a meal and how often it would need to be administered.

    Other authors of the paper include Amro Alshareef, Alexandria Hwang, Ceara Byrne, Johannes Kuosmann, Keiko Ishida, Joshua Jenkins, Sabrina Liu, Wiam Abdalla Mohammed Madani, Alison Hayward, and Niora Fabian.

    The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, Novo Nordisk, the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, a Schmidt Science Fellowship, and the National Science Foundation. More