Aurelia Butler

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    Featured video: Investigating our blue ocean planet

    A five-year doctoral degree program, the MIT – Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) Joint Program in Oceanography/Applied Ocean Science and Engineering combines the strengths of MIT and WHOI to create one of the largest oceanographic facilities in the world. Graduate study in oceanography encompasses virtually all the basic sciences as they apply to the marine environment: physics, chemistry, geochemistry, geology, geophysics, and biology.

    “As a species and as a society we really want to understand the planet that we live on and our place in it,” says Professor Michael Follows, who serves as director of the MIT-WHOI Joint Program.

    “The reason I joined the program was because we cannot afford to wait to be able to address the climate crisis,” explains graduate student Paris Smalls. “The freedom to be able to execute on and have your interests come to life has been incredibly rewarding.”

    “If you have a research problem, you can think of the top five people in that particular niche of a topic and they’re either down the hallway or have some association with WHOI,” adds graduate student Samantha Clevenger. “It’s a really incredible place in terms of connections and just having access to really anything you need.”

    Video by: Melanie Gonick/MIT | 5 min, 12 sec More

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    Rescuing small plastics from the waste stream

    As plastic pollution continues to mount, with growing risks to ecosystems and wildlife, manufacturers are beginning to make ambitious commitments to keep new plastics out of the environment. A growing number have signed onto the U.S. Plastics Pact, which pledges to make 100 percent of plastic packaging reusable, recyclable, or compostable, and to see 50 percent of it effectively recycled or composted, by 2025.

    But for companies that make large numbers of small, disposable plastics, these pocket-sized objects are a major barrier to realizing their recycling goals.

    “Think about items like your toothbrush, your travel-size toothpaste tubes, your travel-size shampoo bottles,” says Alexis Hocken, a second-year PhD student in the MIT Department of Chemical Engineering. “They end up actually slipping through the cracks of current recycling infrastructure. So you might put them in your recycling bin at home, they might make it all the way to the sorting facility, but when it comes down to actually sorting them, they never make it into a recycled plastic bale at the very end of the line.”

    Now, a group of five consumer products companies is working with MIT to develop a sorting process that can keep their smallest plastic products inside the recycling chain. The companies — Colgate-Palmolive, Procter & Gamble, the Estée Lauder Companies, L’Oreal, and Haleon — all manufacture a large volume of “small format” plastics, or products less than two inches long in at least two dimensions. In a collaboration with Brad Olsen, the Alexander and I. Michael Kasser (1960) Professor of Chemical Engineering; Desiree Plata, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering; the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative; and the nonprofit The Sustainability Consortium, these companies are seeking a prototype sorting technology to bring to recycling facilities for large-scale testing and commercial development.

    Working in Olsen’s lab, Hocken is coming to grips with the complexity of the recycling systems involved. Material recovery facilities, or MRFs, are expected to handle products in any number of shapes, sizes, and materials, and sort them into a pure stream of glass, metal, paper, or plastic. Hocken’s first step in taking on the recycling project was to tour one of these MRFs in Portland, Maine, with Olsen and Plata.

    “We could literally see plastics just falling from the conveyor belts,” she says. “Leaving that tour, I thought, my gosh! There’s so much improvement that can be made. There’s so much impact that we can have on this industry.”

    From designing plastics to managing them

    Hocken always knew she wanted to work in engineering. Growing up in Scottsdale, Arizona, she was able to spend time in the workplace with her father, an electrical engineer who designs biomedical devices. “Seeing him working as an engineer, and how he’s solving these really important problems, definitely sparked my interest,” she says. “When it came time to begin my undergraduate degree, it was a really easy decision to choose engineering after seeing the day-to-day that my dad was doing in his career.”

    At Arizona State University, she settled on chemical engineering as a major and began working with polymers, coming up with combinations of additives for 3D plastics printing that could help fine-tune how the final products behaved. But even working with plastics every day, she rarely thought about the implications of her work for the environment.

    “And then in the spring of my final year at ASU, I took a class about polymers through the lens of sustainability, and that really opened my eyes,” Hocken remembers. The class was taught by Professor Timothy Long, director of the Biodesign Center for Sustainable Macromolecular Materials and Manufacturing and a well-known expert in the field of sustainable plastics. “That first session, where he laid out all of the really scary facts surrounding the plastics crisis, got me very motivated to look more into that field.”

    At MIT the next year, Hocken sought out Olsen as her advisor and made plastics sustainability her focus from the start.

    “Coming to MIT was my first time venturing outside of the state of Arizona for more than a three-month period,” she says. “It’s been really fun. I love living in Cambridge and the Boston area. I love my labmates. Everyone is so supportive, whether it’s to give me advice about some science that I’m trying to figure out, or just give me a pep talk if I’m feeling a little discouraged.”

    A challenge to recycle

    A lot of plastics research today is devoted to creating new materials — including biodegradable ones that are easier for natural ecosystems to absorb, and highly recyclable ones that hold their properties better after being melted down and recast.

    But Hocken also sees a huge need for better ways to handle the plastics we’re already making. “While biodegradable and sustainable polymers represent a very important route, and I think they should certainly be further pursued, we’re still a ways away from that being a reality universally across all plastic packaging,” she says. As long as large volumes of conventional plastic are coming out of factories, we’ll need innovative ways to stop it from piling onto the mountain of plastic pollution. In one of her projects, Hocken is trying to come up with new uses for recycled plastic that take advantage of its lost strength to produce a useful, flexible material similar to rubber.

    The small-format recycling project also falls in this category. The companies supporting the project have challenged the MIT team to work with their products exactly as currently manufactured — especially because their competitors use similar packaging materials that will also need to be covered by any solution the MIT team devises.

    The challenge is a large one. To kick the project off, the participating companies sent the MIT team a wide range of small-format products that need to make it through the sorting process. These include containers for lip balm, deodorant, pills, and shampoo, and disposable tools like toothbrushes and flossing picks. “A constraint, or problem I foresee, is just how variable the shapes are,” says Hocken. “A flossing pick versus a toothbrush are very different shapes.”

    Nor are they all made of the same kind of plastic. Many are made of polyethylene terephthalate (PET, type 1 in the recycling label system) or high-density polyethylene (HDPE, type 2), but nearly all of the seven recycling categories are represented among the sample products. The team’s solution will have to handle them all.

    Another obstacle is that the sorting process at a large MRF is already very complex and requires a heavy investment in equipment. The waste stream typically goes through a “glass breaker screen” that shatters glass and collects the shards; a series of rotating rubber stars to pull out two-dimensional objects, collecting paper and cardboard; a system of magnets and eddy currents to attract or repel different metals; and finally, a series of optical sorters that use infrared spectroscopy to identify the various types of plastics, then blow them down different chutes with jets of air. MRFs won’t be interested in adopting additional sorters unless they’re inexpensive and easy to fit into this elaborate stream.

    “We’re interested in creating something that could be retrofitted into current technology and current infrastructure,” Hocken says.

    Shared solutions

    “Recycling is a really good example of where pre-competitive collaboration is needed,” says Jennifer Park, collective action manager at The Sustainability Consortium (TSC), who has been working with corporate stakeholders on small format recyclability and helped convene the sponsors of this project and organize their contributions. “Companies manufacturing these products recognize that they cannot shift entire systems on their own. Consistency around what is and is not recyclable is the only way to avoid confusion and drive impact at scale.

    “Additionally, it is interesting that consumer packaged goods companies are sponsoring this research at MIT which is focused on MRF-level innovations. They’re investing in innovations that they hope will be adopted by the recycling industry to make progress on their own sustainability goals.”

    Hocken believes that, despite the challenges, it’s well worth pursuing a technology that can keep small-format plastics from slipping through MRFs’ fingers.

    “These are products that would be more recyclable if they were easier to sort,” she says. “The only thing that’s different is the size. So you can recycle both your large shampoo bottle and the small travel-size one at home, but the small one isn’t guaranteed to make it into a plastic bale at the end. If we can come up with a solution that specifically targets those while they’re still on the sorting line, they’re more likely to end up in those plastic bales at the end of the line, which can be sold to plastic reclaimers who can then use that material in new products.”

    “TSC is really excited about this project and our collaboration with MIT,” adds Park. “Our project stakeholders are very dedicated to finding a solution.”

    To learn more about this project, contact Christopher Noble, director of corporate engagement at the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative. More

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    MIT Solve announces 2023 global challenges and Indigenous Communities Fellowship

    MIT Solve, an MIT initiative with a mission to drive innovation to solve world challenges, announced today the 2023 Global Challenges and the Indigenous Communities Fellowship. 

    Solve invites anyone from anywhere in the world to submit a solution to this year’s challenges by 12 p.m. EST on May 9. The 40 innovators — including eight new Indigenous Communities Fellows — will form the 2023 Solver Class, and pitch their solutions during Solve Challenge Finals on Sept. 17-18 in New York City. These selected teams will share over $1 million in available funding, take part in a nine-month support program, and join the Solve community made of cross-sector social impact leaders, to scale their solutions.

    Solve’s 2023 Global Challenges are: 

    For its second year, Solve will select a cohort of entrepreneurs among the 2023 Solver Class to join the Black and Brown Innovators in the U.S. Program. The program offers culturally-responsive support and partnership opportunities, and selected teams will participate in Solve’s annual U.S. Equity Summit. 

    In addition to the Global Challenges, Solve is also opening applications for the 2023 Indigenous Communities Fellowship. The fellowship, which looks for Native innovators in the United States and its territories, has now expanded eligibility to Canada. 

    “Every year we are inspired by people’s ingenuity and their determination to solve the most pressing issues of our time,” says Hala Hanna, acting executive director of MIT Solve. “We are excited to shine a spotlight on the most promising ones and grateful for our supporters who will help scale their impact.”

    Interested applicants can learn more and apply online at solve.mit.edu/challenges. 

    To date, the funding available for selected Solver teams and fellows includes:

    MIT Solve Funding — $400,000 with a $10,000 grant to each Solver team and fellow selected
    The GM Prize (supported by General Motors) — up to $150,000 across up to six solutions from the Learning for Civic Action Challenge, the Climate Adaptation & Low-Carbon Housing Challenge, and the 2023 Indigenous Communities Fellowship
    The AI for Humanity Prize (supported by The Patrick J. McGovern Foundation) — up to $150,000 to solutions that leverage data science, artificial intelligence, and/or machine learning to benefit humanity, selected from any of the 2023 Global Challenges
    The GSR Foundation Prize (supported by GSR Foundation) — up to $200,000 to innovative technology solutions from any of the 2023 Global Challenges, with a focus on solutions that use blockchain to improve financial inclusion
    Living Forests Prize (supported by Good Energies Foundation) — up to $100,000 across up to four solutions that help restore ecosystems or increase the use of sustainable forest products, selected from the Climate Adaptation & Low-Carbon Housing Challenge
    Those interested in sponsoring a prize should contact sue.kim@solve.mit.edu.

    Additionally, Solve Innovation Future will offer investment capital to Solver teams selected as a part of the 2023 class. To date, Solve Innovation Future has deployed over $1.3 million to more than 13 for-profit Solver team companies that are driving impact toward UN Sustainable Development Goals, and has catalyzed nearly seven times its investment in additional investment capital toward the Solver teams.

    The Solve community will convene on MIT’s campus for its flagship event Solve at MIT May 4-6 to celebrate the 2022 Solver Class. You may request an invitation here. Press interested in attending the event should contact maya.bingaman@solve.mit.edu. 

    Solve is a marketplace for social impact innovation. Through open innovation challenges, Solve finds incredible tech-based social entrepreneurs all around the world. Solve then brings together MIT’s innovation ecosystem and a community of members to fund and support these entrepreneurs to drive lasting, transformational impact. Solve has catalyzed over $60 million in commitments for Solver teams and entrepreneurs to date. More

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    Chess players face a tough foe: air pollution

    Here’s something else chess players need to keep in check: air pollution.

    That’s the bottom line of a newly published study co-authored by an MIT researcher, showing that chess players perform objectively worse and make more suboptimal moves, as measured by a computerized analysis of their games, when there is more fine particulate matter in the air.

    More specifically, given a modest increase in fine particulate matter, the probability that chess players will make an error increases by 2.1 percentage points, and the magnitude of those errors increases by 10.8 percent. In this setting, at least, cleaner air leads to clearer heads and sharper thinking.

    “We find that when individuals are exposed to higher levels of air pollution, they make more more mistakes, and they make larger mistakes,” says Juan Palacios, an economist in MIT’s Sustainable Urbanization Lab, and co-author of a newly published paper detailing the study’s findings.

    The paper, “Indoor Air Quality and Strategic Decision-Making,” appears today in advance online form in the journal Management Science. The authors are Steffen Künn, an associate professor in the School of Business and Economics at Maastricht University, the Netherlands; Palacios, who is head of research in the Sustainable Urbanization Lab, in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP); and Nico Pestel, an associate professor in the School of Business and Economics at Maastricht University.

    The toughest foe yet?

    Fine particulate matter refers to tiny particles 2.5 microns or less in diameter, notated as PM2.5. They are often associated with burning matter — whether through internal combustion engines in autos, coal-fired power plants, forest fires, indoor cooking through open fires, and more. The World Health Organization estimates that air pollution leads to over 4 million premature deaths worldwide every year, due to cancer, cardiovascular problems, and other illnesses.

    Scholars have produced many studies exploring the effects of air pollution on cognition. The current study adds to that literature by analyzing the subject in a particularly controlled setting. The researchers studied the performance of 121 chess players in three seven-round tournaments in Germany in 2017, 2018, and 2019, comprising more than 30,000 chess moves. The scholars used three web-connected sensors inside the tournament venue to measure carbon dioxide, PM2.5 concentrations, and temperature, all of which can be affected by external conditions, even in an indoor setting. Because each tournament lasted eight weeks, it was possible to examine how air-quality changes related to changes in player performance.

    In a replication exercise, the authors found the same impacts of air pollution on some of the strongest players in the history of chess using data from 20 years of games from the first division of the German chess league. 

    To evaluate the matter of performance of players, meanwhile, the scholars used software programs that assess each move made in each chess match, identify optimal decisions, and flag significant errors.

    During the tournaments, PM2.5 concentrations ranged from 14 to 70 micrograms per cubic meter of air, levels of exposure commonly found in cities in the U.S. and elsewhere. The researchers examined and ruled out alternate potential explanations for the dip in player performance, such as increased noise. They also found that carbon dioxide and temperature changes did not correspond to performance changes. Using the standardized ratings chess players earn, the scholars also accounted for the quality of opponents each player faced. Ultimately, the analysis using the plausibly random variation in pollution driven by changes in wind direction confirms that the findings are driven by the direct exposure to air particles.

    “It’s pure random exposure to air pollution that is driving these people’s performance,” Palacios says. “Against comparable opponents in the same tournament round, being exposed to different levels of air quality makes a difference for move quality and decision quality.”

    The researchers also found that when air pollution was worse, the chess players performed even more poorly when under time constraints. The tournament rules mandated that 40 moves had to be made within 110 minutes; for moves 31-40 in all the matches, an air pollution increase of 10 micrograms per cubic meter led to an increased probability of error of 3.2 percent, with the magnitude of those errors increasing by 17.3 percent.

    “We find it interesting that those mistakes especially occur in the phase of the game where players are facing time pressure,” Palacios says. “When these players do not have the ability to compensate [for] lower cognitive performance with greater deliberation, [that] is where we are observing the largest impacts.”

    “You can live miles away and be affected”

    Palacios emphasizes that, as the study indicates, air pollution may affect people in settings where they might not think it makes a difference.

    “It’s not like you have to live next to a power plant,” Palacios says. “You can live miles away and be affected.”

    And while the focus of this particular study is tightly focused on chess players, the authors write in the paper that the findings have “strong implications for high-skilled office workers,” who might also be faced with tricky cognitive tasks in conditions of variable air pollution. In this sense, Palacios says, “The idea is to provide accurate estimates to policymakers who are making difficult decisions about cleaning up the environment.”

    Indeed, Palacios observes, the fact that even chess players — who spend untold hours preparing themselves for all kinds of scenarios they may face in matches — can perform worse when air pollution rises suggests that a similar problem could affect people cognitively in many other settings.

    “There are more and more papers showing that there is a cost with air pollution, and there is a cost for more and more people,” Palacios says. “And this is just one example showing that even for these very [excellent] chess players, who think they can beat everything — well, it seems that with air pollution, they have an enemy who harms them.”

    Support for the study was provided, in part, by the Graduate School of Business and Economics at Maastricht, and the Institute for Labor Economics in Bonn, Germany. More

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    Sensing with purpose

    Fadel Adib never expected that science would get him into the White House, but in August 2015 the MIT graduate student found himself demonstrating his research to the president of the United States.

    Adib, fellow grad student Zachary Kabelac, and their advisor, Dina Katabi, showcased a wireless device that uses Wi-Fi signals to track an individual’s movements.

    As President Barack Obama looked on, Adib walked back and forth across the floor of the Oval Office, collapsed onto the carpet to demonstrate the device’s ability to monitor falls, and then sat still so Katabi could explain to the president how the device was measuring his breathing and heart rate.

    “Zach started laughing because he could see that my heart rate was 110 as I was demoing the device to the president. I was stressed about it, but it was so exciting. I had poured a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into that project,” Adib recalls.

    For Adib, the White House demo was an unexpected — and unforgettable — culmination of a research project he had launched four years earlier when he began his graduate training at MIT. Now, as a newly tenured associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Media Lab, he keeps building off that work. Adib, the Doherty Chair of Ocean Utilization, seeks to develop wireless technology that can sense the physical world in ways that were not possible before.

    In his Signal Kinetics group, Adib and his students apply knowledge and creativity to global problems like climate change and access to health care. They are using wireless devices for contactless physiological sensing, such as measuring someone’s stress level using Wi-Fi signals. The team is also developing battery-free underwater cameras that could explore uncharted regions of the oceans, tracking pollution and the effects of climate change. And they are combining computer vision and radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to build robots that find hidden items, to streamline factory and warehouse operations and, ultimately, alleviate supply chain bottlenecks.

    While these areas may seem quite different, each time they launch a new project, the researchers uncover common threads that tie the disciplines together, Adib says.

    “When we operate in a new field, we get to learn. Every time you are at a new boundary, in a sense you are also like a kid, trying to understand these different languages, bring them together, and invent something,” he says.

    A science-minded child

    A love of learning has driven Adib since he was a young child growing up in Tripoli on the coast of Lebanon. He had been interested in math and science for as long as he could remember, and had boundless energy and insatiable curiosity as a child.

    “When my mother wanted me to slow down, she would give me a puzzle to solve,” he recalls.

    By the time Adib started college at the American University of Beirut, he knew he wanted to study computer engineering and had his sights set on MIT for graduate school.

    Seeking to kick-start his future studies, Adib reached out to several MIT faculty members to ask about summer internships. He received a response from the first person he contacted. Katabi, the Thuan and Nicole Pham Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), and a principal investigator in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the MIT Jameel Clinic, interviewed him and accepted him for a position. He immersed himself in the lab work and, as the end of summer approached, Katabi encouraged him to apply for grad school at MIT and join her lab.

    “To me, that was a shock because I felt this imposter syndrome. I thought I was moving like a turtle with my research, but I did not realize that with research itself, because you are at the boundary of human knowledge, you are expected to progress iteratively and slowly,” he says.

    As an MIT grad student, he began contributing to a number of projects. But his passion for invention pushed him to embark into unexplored territory. Adib had an idea: Could he use Wi-Fi to see through walls?

    “It was a crazy idea at the time, but my advisor let me work on it, even though it was not something the group had been working on at all before. We both thought it was an exciting idea,” he says.

    As Wi-Fi signals travel in space, a small part of the signal passes through walls — the same way light passes through windows — and is then reflected by whatever is on the other side. Adib wanted to use these signals to “see” what people on the other side of a wall were doing.

    Discovering new applications

    There were a lot of ups and downs (“I’d say many more downs than ups at the beginning”), but Adib made progress. First, he and his teammates were able to detect people on the other side of a wall, then they could determine their exact location. Almost by accident, he discovered that the device could be used to monitor someone’s breathing.

    “I remember we were nearing a deadline and my friend Zach and I were working on the device, using it to track people on the other side of the wall. I asked him to hold still, and then I started to see him appearing and disappearing over and over again. I thought, could this be his breathing?” Adib says.

    Eventually, they enabled their Wi-Fi device to monitor heart rate and other vital signs. The technology was spun out into a startup, which presented Adib with a conundrum once he finished his PhD — whether to join the startup or pursue a career in academia.

    He decided to become a professor because he wanted to dig deeper into the realm of invention. But after living through the winter of 2014-2015, when nearly 109 inches of snow fell on Boston (a record), Adib was ready for a change of scenery and a warmer climate. He applied to universities all over the United States, and while he had some tempting offers, Adib ultimately realized he didn’t want to leave MIT. He joined the MIT faculty as an assistant professor in 2016 and was named associate professor in 2020.

    “When I first came here as an intern, even though I was thousands of miles from Lebanon, I felt at home. And the reason for that was the people. This geekiness — this embrace of intellect — that is something I find to be beautiful about MIT,” he says.

    He’s thrilled to work with brilliant people who are also passionate about problem-solving. The members of his research group are diverse, and they each bring unique perspectives to the table, which Adib says is vital to encourage the intellectual back-and-forth that drives their work.

    Diving into a new project

    For Adib, research is exploration. Take his work on oceans, for instance. He wanted to make an impact on climate change, and after exploring the problem, he and his students decided to build a battery-free underwater camera.

    Adib learned that the ocean, which covers 70 percent of the planet, plays the single largest role in the Earth’s climate system. Yet more than 95 percent of it remains unexplored. That seemed like a problem the Signal Kinetics group could help solve, he says.

    But diving into this research area was no easy task. Adib studies Wi-Fi systems, but Wi-Fi does not work underwater. And it is difficult to recharge a battery once it is deployed in the ocean, making it hard to build an autonomous underwater robot that can do large-scale sensing.

    So, the team borrowed from other disciplines, building an underwater camera that uses acoustics to power its equipment and capture and transmit images.

    “We had to use piezoelectric materials, which come from materials science, to develop transducers, which come from oceanography, and then on top of that we had to marry these things with technology from RF known as backscatter,” he says. “The biggest challenge becomes getting these things to gel together. How do you decode these languages across fields?”

    It’s a challenge that continues to motivate Adib as he and his students tackle problems that are too big for one discipline.

    He’s excited by the possibility of using his undersea wireless imaging technology to explore distant planets. These same tools could also enhance aquaculture, which could help eradicate food insecurity, or support other emerging industries.

    To Adib, the possibilities seem endless.

    “With each project, we discover something new, and that opens up a whole new world to explore. The biggest driver of our work in the future will be what we think is impossible, but that we could make possible,” he says. More

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    Preparing to be prepared

    The Kobe earthquake of 1995 devastated one of Japan’s major cities, leaving over 6,000 people dead while destroying or making unusable hundreds of thousands of structures. It toppled elevated freeway segments, wrecked mass transit systems, and damaged the city’s port capacity.

    “It was a shock to a highly engineered, urban city to have undergone that much destruction,” says Miho Mazereeuw, an associate professor at MIT who specializes in disaster resilience.

    Even in a country like Japan, with advanced engineering, and policies in place to update safety codes, natural forces can overwhelm the built environment.

    “There’s nothing that’s ever guaranteed safe,” says Mazereeuw, an associate professor of architecture and urbanism in MIT’s Department of Architecture and director of the Urban Risk Lab. “We [think that] through technology and engineering we can solve things and fight nature. Whereas it’s really that we’re living with nature. We’re part of this natural ecosystem.”

    That’s why Mazereeuw’s work on disaster resilience focuses on plans, people, and policies, well as technology and design to prepare for the future. In the Urban Risk Lab, which Mazereeuw founded, several projects are based on the design of physical objects, spaces, and software platforms, but many others involve community-level efforts, so that local governments have workable procedures in case of emergency.

    “What we can do for ourselves and each other is have plans in place so that if something does happen, the level of chaos and fear can be reduced and we can all be there to help each other through,” Mazereeuw says. When it comes to disaster preparedness, she adds, “Definitely a lot of it is on the built environment side of things, but a lot of it is also social, making sure that in our communities, we know who would need help, and we have those kinds of relationships beforehand.”

    The Kobe earthquake was a highly influential event for Mazereeuw. She has researched the response to it and has a book coming out about natural disasters, policies, and design in Japan. Beyond that, the Kobe event helped reinforce her sense that when it comes to disaster preparedness, progress can be made many ways. For her research, teaching, and innovative work at the Urban Risk Lab, Mazereeuw was granted tenure at MIT last year.

    Two cultures grappling with nature

    Mazereeuw has one Dutch parent and one Japanese parent, and both cultures helped produce her interest in managing natural forces. On her Dutch side, many family friends were involved with local government and water management — practically an existential issue in a country that sits largely below sea level.

    Mazereeuw’s parents, however, were living in Japan in 1995. And while they happened to be away while the Kobe earthquake hit, her Japanese links helped spur her interest in studying the event and its aftermath.

    “I think that was a wake-up call for me, too, about how we need to plan and design cities to reduce the impact of chaos at the time of disasters,” Mazereeuw says.

    Mazereeuw earned her undergraduate degree from Wesleyan University, majoring in earth and environmental sciences and in studio art. After working in an architectural office in Tokyo, she decided to attend graduate school, receiving her dual masters from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, with a thesis about Kobe and disaster readiness. She then worked in architecture offices, including the Office of Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam, but returned to academia to work on climate change and disaster resilience.   

    Mazereeuw’s book, “Design Before Disaster,” explores this subject in depth, from urban planning to coastal-safety strategies to community-based design frameworks, and is forthcoming from the University of Virginia Press.

    Since joining the MIT faculty, Mazereeuw has also devoted significant time to the launch and growth of the Urban Risk Lab, an interdisciplinary group working on an array of disaster-preparedness efforts. One such project has seen lab members work with local officials from many places — including Massachusetts, California, Georgia, and Puerto Rico — to add to their own disaster-preparedness planning.

    A plan developed by local officials with community input, Mazereeuw suggests, will likely function better than one produced by, say, consultants from outside a community, as she has seen happen many times: “A report on a dusty shelf isn’t actionable,” she says. “This way it’s a decision-making process by the people involved.”

    In a project based on physical design, the Urban Risk Lab has also been working with the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency on an effort to produce temporary postdisaster housing for the OCONUS region (Alaska, Hawaii, and other U.S. overseas territories). The lab’s design, called SEED (Shelter for Emergency Expansion Design), features a house that is compact enough to be shipped anywhere and unfolds on-site, while being sturdy enough to withstand follow-up events such as hurricanes, and durable enough to be incorporated into longer-term housing designs.

    “We felt it had to be really, really good quality, so it would be a resource, rather than something temporary that disintegrates after five years,” Mazereeuw says. “It’s built to be a small safety shelter but also could be part of a permanent house.”

    A grand challenge, and a plethora of projects

    Mazereeuw is also a co-lead of one of the five multiyear projects selected in 2022 to move forward as part of MIT’s Climate Grand Challenges competition. Along with Kerry Emanuel and Paul O’Gorman, of MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, Mazereeuw will help direct a project advancing climate modeling by quantifying the risk of extreme weather events for specific locations. The idea is to help vulnerable urban centers and other communities prepare for such events.

    The Urban Risk Lab has many other kinds of projects in its portfolio, following Mazereeuw’s own interest in conceptualizing disaster preparedness broadly. In collaboration with officials in Japan, and with support from Google, lab members worked on interactive, real-time flood-mapping software, in which residents can help officials know where local flooding has reached emergency levels. The researchers also created an AI module to prioritize the information.

    “Residents really have the most localized information, which you can’t get from a satellite,” Mazereeuw says. “They’re also the ones who learn about it first, so they have a lot of information that emergency managers can use for their response. The program is really meant to be a conduit between the efforts of emergency managers and residents, so that information flow can go in both directions.”

    Lab members in the past have also mapped the porosity of the MIT campus, another effort that used firsthand knowledge. Additionally, lab members are currently engaging with a university in Chile to design tsunami response strategies; developing a community mapping toolkit for resilience planning in Thailand and Vietnam; and working with Mass Audubon to design interactive furniture for children to learn about ecology.  

    “Everything is tied together with this interest in raising awareness and engaging people,” Mazereeuw says.

    That also describes Mazereeuw’s attitude about participation in the Urban Risk Lab, a highly cross-disciplinary place with members who have gravitated to it from around MIT.

    “Our lab is extremely interdisciplinary,” Mazereeuw says. “We have students coming in from all over, from different parts of campus. We have computer science and engineering students coming into the lab and staying to get their graduate degrees alongside many architecture and planning students.” The lab also has five full-time researchers — Aditya Barve, Larisa Ovalles, Mayank Ojha, Eakapob Huangthananpan, and Saeko Baird — who lead their own projects and research groups.

    What those lab members have in common is a willingness to think proactively about reducing disaster impacts. Being prepared for those events itself requires preparation.

    Even in the design world, Mazereeuw says, “People are reactive. Because something has happened, that’s when they go in to help. But I think we can have a larger impact by anticipating and designing for these issues beforehand.” More

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    in Environment

    Study: Extreme heat is changing habits of daily life

    Extreme temperatures make people less likely to pursue outdoor activities they would otherwise make part of their daily routine, a new study led by MIT researchers has confirmed.

    The data-rich study, set in China, shows that when hourly temperatures reach 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit), people are 5 percent less likely to go to public parks, and when hourly temperatures hit 35 C (95 F), people are 13 percent less likely to go to those parks.

    “We did observe adaptation,” says Siqi Zheng, an MIT professor and co-author of a new paper detailing the study’s findings. She adds: “Environmental hazards hurt the daily quality of life. Yes, people protect themselves [by limiting activity], but they lose the benefit of going out to enjoy themselves in nature, or meeting friends in parks.”

    The research adds to our knowledge about the effects of a warming climate by quantifying the effects of hot temperatures on the activity of people within a given day — how they shift their activities from hotter to cooler time periods — and not just across longer periods of time.

    “We found that if we take into account this within-day adaptation, extreme temperatures actually have a much larger effect on human activity than the previous daily or monthly estimations [indicate],” says Yichun Fan, an MIT doctoral candidate and another of the paper’s co-authors.

    The paper, “Intraday Adaptation to Extreme Temperatures in Outdoor Activity,” is published this week in Nature Scientific Reports. The authors are Fan, a doctoral student in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP); Jianghao Wang, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences; Nick Obradovich, chief scientist at Project Regeneration; and Zheng, who is the STL Champion Professor of Urban and Real Estate Sustainability at MIT’s Center for Real Estate and DUSP, and faculty director of the MIT Center for Real Estate.

    To conduct the study, the researchers used anonymized data for 900 million cellphone users in China in 2017, studying a total of 60 billion separate cellphone location queries per day available through the technology firm Tencent. With this data, the scholars also examined activity in 10,499 parks across the country, comparing useage totals across a range of conditions. And they obtained temperature data from about 2,000 weather stations in China.

    Ultimately, as the scholars write in the paper, they were able to “document large and significant activity-depressing and activity-delaying effects” on park visits as a result of ultrahot temperatures.

    “People have intraday adaptation patterns that hadn’t been documented in the previous literature,” Fan says. “These have important implications about people’s heat exposure and how future climate change will affect people’s activity and health.”

    As Zheng points out, altered use of public spaces affects daily routines not only in terms of individual activity and exercise, but also in terms of social and community life.

    “Extreme climates will reduce people’s opportunities to socialize in cities, or just watch kids playing basketball or soccer, which is not good,” she says. “We want people to have a wide-ranging urban life. There is a social cost to this adaptation.”

    As the research indicates, people clearly adapt to temperature spikes. The data also show that evening use of parks increases on extremely hot days, but only after conditions have cooled down. While that seems like a beneficial adaptation to very hot weather, the scholars citing existing research suggest people may sleep less as a result of making this kind of change to their daily routines.

    “Adaptation also has its own cost,” Fan says. “People significantly increased their nighttime outdoor activity, which means they delayed their nighttime, which will have a significant health implication, when you consider the potential sleep disruption.”

    All told, the study provides data, and a method, for better characterizing the effects on climate change on human activity in detail.

    “If we have more and more granular data about future climate scenarios, they support better predictions about these scenarios, reflecting people’s dynamic behaviors, and the health implications,” says Fan, whose doctoral research incorporates this work and other related studies on climate and urban activity.

    The researchers also note that the research methods used in this study could be applied to additional future studies of many other aspects of urban life, including street-level retail activities, and other things with implications for economic activity, real estate, and urban planning.

    “This relates to many other issues,” Zheng says.

    Jianghao Wang received funding from the National Key Research and Development Program of China, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and the Youth Innovation Promotion Association of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. More

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    in Environment

    Moving water and earth

    As a river cuts through a landscape, it can operate like a conveyer belt, moving truckloads of sediment over time. Knowing how quickly or slowly this sediment flows can help engineers plan for the downstream impact of restoring a river or removing a dam. But the models currently used to estimate sediment flow can be off by a wide margin.

    An MIT team has come up with a better formula to calculate how much sediment a fluid can push across a granular bed — a process known as bed load transport. The key to the new formula comes down to the shape of the sediment grains.

    It may seem intuitive: A smooth, round stone should skip across a river bed faster than an angular pebble. But flowing water also pushes harder on the angular pebble, which could erase the round stone’s advantage. Which effect wins? Existing sediment transport models surprisingly don’t offer an answer, mainly because the problem of measuring grain shape is too unwieldy: How do you quantify a pebble’s contours?

    The MIT researchers found that instead of considering a grain’s exact shape, they could boil the concept of shape down to two related properties: friction and drag. A grain’s drag, or resistance to fluid flow, relative to its internal friction, the resistance to sliding past other grains, can provide an easy way to gauge the effects of a grain’s shape.

    When they incorporated this new mathematical measure of grain shape into a standard model for bed load transport, the new formula made predictions that matched experiments that the team performed in the lab.

    “Sediment transport is a part of life on Earth’s surface, from the impact of storms on beaches to the gravel nests in mountain streams where salmon lay their eggs,” the team writes of their new study, appearing today in Nature. “Damming and sea level rise have already impacted many such terrains and pose ongoing threats. A good understanding of bed load transport is crucial to our ability to maintain these landscapes or restore them to their natural states.”

    The study’s authors are Eric Deal, Santiago Benavides, Qiong Zhang, Ken Kamrin, and Taylor Perron of MIT, and Jeremy Venditti and Ryan Bradley of Simon Fraser University in Canada.

    Figuring flow

    Video of glass spheres (top) and natural river gravel (bottom) undergoing bed load transport in a laboratory flume, slowed down 17x relative to real time. Average grain diameter is about 5 mm. This video shows how rolling and tumbling natural grains interact with one another in a way that is not possible for spheres. What can’t be seen so easily is that natural grains also experience higher drag forces from the flowing water than spheres do.

    Credit: Courtesy of the researchers

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    Bed load transport is the process by which a fluid such as air or water drags grains across a bed of sediment, causing the grains to hop, skip, and roll along the surface as a fluid flows through. This movement of sediment in a current is what drives rocks to migrate down a river and sand grains to skip across a desert.

    Being able to estimate bed load transport can help scientists prepare for situations such as urban flooding and coastal erosion. Since the 1930s, one formula has been the go-to model for calculating bed load transport; it’s based on a quantity known as the Shields parameter, after the American engineer who originally derived it. This formula sets a relationship between the force of a fluid pushing on a bed of sediment, and how fast the sediment moves in response. Albert Shields incorporated certain variables into this formula, including the average size and density of a sediment’s grains — but not their shape.

    “People may have backed away from accounting for shape because it’s one of these very scary degrees of freedom,” says Kamrin, a professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. “Shape is not a single number.”

    And yet, the existing model has been known to be off by a factor of 10 in its predictions of sediment flow. The team wondered whether grain shape could be a missing ingredient, and if so, how the nebulous property could be mathematically represented.

    “The trick was to focus on characterizing the effect that shape has on sediment transport dynamics, rather than on characterizing the shape itself,” says Deal.

    “It took some thinking to figure that out,” says Perron, a professor of geology in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. “But we went back to derive the Shields parameter, and when you do the math, this ratio of drag to friction falls out.”

    Drag and drop

    Their work showed that the Shields parameter — which predicts how much sediment is transported — can be modified to include not just size and density, but also grain shape, and furthermore, that a grain’s shape can be simply represented by a measure of the grain’s drag and its internal friction. The math seemed to make sense. But could the new formula predict how sediment actually flows?

    To answer this, the researchers ran a series of flume experiments, in which they pumped a current of water through an inclined tank with a floor covered in sediment. They ran tests with sediment of various grain shapes, including beds of round glass beads, smooth glass chips, rectangular prisms, and natural gravel. They measured the amount of sediment that was transported through the tank in a fixed amount of time. They then determined the effect of each sediment type’s grain shape by measuring the grains’ drag and friction.

    For drag, the researchers simply dropped individual grains down through a tank of water and gathered statistics for the time it took the grains of each sediment type to reach the bottom. For instance, a flatter grain type takes a longer time on average, and therefore has greater drag, than a round grain type of the same size and density.

    To measure friction, the team poured grains through a funnel and onto a circular tray, then measured the resulting pile’s angle, or slope — an indication of the grains’ friction, or ability to grip onto each other.

    For each sediment type, they then worked the corresponding shape’s drag and friction into the new formula, and found that it could indeed predict the bedload transport, or the amount of moving sediment that the researchers measured in their experiments.

    The team says the new model more accurately represents sediment flow. Going forward, scientists and engineers can use the model to better gauge how a river bed will respond to scenarios such as sudden flooding from severe weather or the removal of a dam.

    “If you were trying to make a prediction of how fast all that sediment will get evacuated after taking a dam out, and you’re wrong by a factor of three or five, that’s pretty bad,” Perron says. “Now we can do a lot better.”

    This research was supported, in part, by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory. More