Aurelia Butler

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    in Environment

    Kerry Emanuel: A climate scientist and meteorologist in the eye of the storm

    Kerry Emanuel once joked that whenever he retired, he would start a “hurricane safari” so other people could experience what it’s like to fly into the eye of a hurricane.

    “All of a sudden, the turbulence stops, the sun comes out, bright sunshine, and it’s amazingly calm. And you’re in this grand stadium [of clouds miles high],” he says. “It’s quite an experience.”

    While the hurricane safari is unlikely to come to fruition — “You can’t just conjure up a hurricane,” he explains — Emanuel, a world-leading expert on links between hurricanes and climate change, is retiring from teaching in the Department of Earth Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) at MIT after a more than 40-year career.

    Best known for his foundational contributions to the science of tropical cyclones, climate, and links between them, Emanuel has also been a prominent voice in public debates on climate change, and what we should do about it.

    “Kerry has had an enormous effect on the world through the students and junior scientists he has trained,” says William Boos PhD ’08, an atmospheric scientist at the University of California at Berkeley. “He’s a brilliant enough scientist and theoretician that he didn’t need any of us to accomplish what he has, but he genuinely cares about educating new generations of scientists and helping to launch their careers.”

    In recognition of Emanuel’s teaching career and contributions to science, a symposium was held in his honor at MIT on June 21 and 22, organized by several of his former students and collaborators, including Boos. Research presented at the symposium focused on the many fields influenced by Emanuel’s more than 200 published research papers — on everything from forecasting the risks posed by tropical cyclones to understanding how rainfall is produced by continent-sized patterns of atmospheric circulation.

    Emanuel’s career observing perturbations of Earth’s atmosphere started earlier than he can remember. “According to my older brother, from the age of 2, I would crawl to the window whenever there was a thunderstorm,” he says. At first, those were the rolling thunderheads of the Midwest where he grew up, then it was the edges of hurricanes during a few teenage years in Florida. Eventually, he would find himself watching from the very eye of the storm, both physically and mathematically.

    Emanuel attended MIT both as an undergraduate studying Earth and planetary sciences, and for his PhD in meteorology, writing a dissertation on thunderstorms that form ahead of cold fronts. Within the department, he worked with some of the central figures of modern meteorology such as Jule Charney, Fred Sanders, and Edward Lorenz — the founder of chaos theory.

    After receiving his PhD in 1978, Emanuel joined the faculty of the University of California at Los Angeles. During this period, he also took a semester sabbatical to film the wind speeds of tornadoes in Texas and Oklahoma. After three years, he returned to MIT and joined the Department of Meteorology in 1981. Two years later, the department merged with Earth and Planetary Sciences to form EAPS as it is known today, and where Emanuel has remained ever since.

    At MIT, he shifted scales. The thunderstorms and tornadoes that had been the focus of Emanuel’s research up to then were local atmospheric phenomena, or “mesoscale” in the language of meteorologists. The larger “synoptic scale” storms that are hurricanes blew into Emanuel’s research when as a young faculty member he was asked to teach a class in tropical meteorology; in prepping for the class, Emanuel found his notes on hurricanes from graduate school no longer made sense.

    “I realized I didn’t understand them because they couldn’t have been correct,” he says. “And so I set out to try to find a much better theoretical formulation for hurricanes.”

    He soon made two important contributions. In 1986, his paper “An Air-Sea Interaction Theory for Tropical Cyclones. Part 1: Steady-State Maintenance” developed a new theory for upper limits of hurricane intensity given atmospheric conditions. This work in turn led to even larger-scale questions to address. “That upper bound had to be dependent on climate, and it was likely to go up if we were to warm the climate,” Emanuel says — a phenomenon he explored in another paper, “The Dependence of Hurricane Intensity on Climate,” which showed how warming sea surface temperatures and changing atmospheric conditions from a warming climate would make hurricanes more destructive.

    “In my view, this is among the most remarkable achievements in theoretical geophysics,” says Adam Sobel PhD ’98, an atmospheric scientist at Columbia University who got to know Emanuel after he graduated and became interested in tropical meteorology. “From first principles, using only pencil-and-paper analysis and physical reasoning, he derives a quantitative bound on hurricane intensity that has held up well over decades of comparison to observations” and underpins current methods of predicting hurricane intensity and how it changes with climate.

    This and diverse subsequent work led to numerous honors, including membership to the American Philosophical Society, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

    Emanuel’s research was never confined to academic circles, however; when politicians and industry leaders voiced loud opposition to the idea that human-caused climate change posed a threat, he spoke up.

    “I felt kind of a duty to try to counter that,” says Emanuel. “I thought it was an interesting challenge to see if you could go out and convince what some people call climate deniers, skeptics, that this was a serious risk and we had to treat it as such.”

    In addition to many public lectures and media appearances discussing climate change, Emanuel penned a book for general audiences titled “What We Know About Climate Change,” in addition to a widely-read primer on climate change and risk assessment designed to influence business leaders.

    “Kerry has an unmatched physical understanding of tropical climate phenomena,” says Emanuel’s colleague, Susan Solomon, the Lee and Geraldine Martin Professor of Environmental Studies at EAPS. “But he’s also a great communicator and has generously given his time to public outreach. His book ‘What We Know About Climate Change’ is a beautiful piece of work that is readily understandable and has captivated many a non-expert reader.”

    Along with a number of other prominent climate scientists, Emanuel also began advocating for expanding nuclear power as the most rapid path to decarbonizing the world’s energy systems.

    “I think the impediment to nuclear is largely irrational in the United States,” he says. “So, I’ve been trying to fight that just like I’ve been trying to fight climate denial.”

    One lesson Emanuel has taken from his public work on climate change is that skeptical audiences often respond better to issues framed in positive terms than to doom and gloom; he’s found emphasizing the potential benefits rather than the sacrifices involved in the energy transition can engage otherwise wary audiences.

    “It’s really not opposition to science, per se,” he says. “It’s fear of the societal changes they think are required to do something about it.”

    He has also worked to raise awareness about how insurance companies significantly underestimate climate risks in their policies, in particular by basing hurricane risk on unreliable historical data. One recent practical result has been a project by the First Street Foundation to assess the true flood risk of every property in the United States using hurricane models Emanuel developed.

    “I think it’s transformative,” Emanuel says of the project with First Street. “That may prove to be the most substantive research I’ve done.”

    Though Emanuel is retiring from teaching, he has no plans to stop working. “When I say ‘retire’ it’s in quotes,” he says. In 2011, Emanuel and Professor of Geophysics Daniel Rothman founded the Lorenz Center, a climate research center at MIT in honor of Emanuel’s mentor and friend Edward Lorenz. Emanuel will continue to participate in work at the center, which aims to counter what Emanuel describes as a trend away from “curiosity-driven” work in climate science.

    “Even if there were no such thing as global warming, [climate science] would still be a really, really exciting field,” says Emanuel. “There’s so much to understand about climate, about the climates of the past, about the climates of other planets.”

    In addition to work with the Lorenz Center, he’s become interested once again in tornadoes and severe local storms, and understanding whether climate also controls such local phenomena. He’s also involved in two of MIT’s Climate Grand Challenges projects focused on translating climate hazards to explicit financial and health risks — what will bring the dangers of climate change home to people, he says, is for the public to understand more concrete risks, like agricultural failure, water shortages, electricity shortages, and severe weather events. Capturing that will drive the next few years of his work.

    “I’m going to be stepping up research in some respects,” he says, now living full-time at his home in Maine.

    Of course, “retiring” does mean a bit more free time for new pursuits, like learning a language or an instrument, and “rediscovering the art of sailing,” says Emanuel. He’s looking forward to those days on the water, whatever storms are to come. More

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    in Security

    Could used beer yeast be the solution to heavy metal contamination in water?

    A new analysis by researchers at MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA) has found that inactive yeast could be effective as an inexpensive, abundant, and simple material for removing lead contamination from drinking water supplies. The study shows that this approach can be efficient and economic, even down to part-per-billion levels of contamination. Serious damage to human health is known to occur even at these low levels.

    The method is so efficient that the team has calculated that waste yeast discarded from a single brewery in Boston would enough to treat the city’s entire water supply. Such a fully sustainable system would not only purify the water but also divert what would otherwise be a waste stream needing disposal.

    The findings are detailed today in the journal Nature Communications Earth and Environment, in a paper by MIT Research Scientist Patritsia Statathou; Brown University postdoc and MIT Visiting Scholar Christos Athanasiou; MIT Professor Neil Gershenfeld, the director of CBA; and nine others at MIT, Brown, Wellesley College, Nanyang Technological University, and National Technical University of Athens.

    Lead and other heavy metals in water are a significant global problem that continues to grow because of electronic waste and discharges from mining operations. In the U.S. alone, more than 12,000 miles of waterways are impacted by acidic mine-drainage-water rich in heavy metals, the country’s leading source of water pollution. And unlike organic pollutants, most of which can be eventually broken down, heavy metals don’t biodegrade, but persist indefinitely and bioaccumulate. They are either impossible or very expensive to completely remove by conventional methods such as chemical precipitation or membrane filtration.

    Lead is highly toxic, even at tiny concentrations, especially affecting children as they grow. The European Union has reduced its standard for allowable lead in drinking water from 10 parts per billion to 5 parts per billion. In the U.S., the Environmental Protection Agency has declared that no level at all in water supplies is safe. And average levels in bodies of surface water globally are 10 times higher than they were 50 years ago, ranging from 10 parts per billion in Europe to hundreds of parts per billion in South America.

    “We don’t just need to minimize the existence of lead; we need to eliminate it in drinking water,” says Stathatou. “And the fact is that the conventional treatment processes are not doing this effectively when the initial concentrations they have to remove are low, in the parts-per-billion scale and below. They either fail to completely remove these trace amounts, or in order to do so they consume a lot of energy and they produce toxic byproducts.”

    The solution studied by the MIT team is not a new one — a process called biosorption, in which inactive biological material is used to remove heavy metals from water, has been known for a few decades. But the process has been studied and characterized only at much higher concentrations, at more than one part-per-million levels. “Our study demonstrates that the process can indeed work efficiently at the much lower concentrations of typical real-world water supplies, and investigates in detail the mechanisms involved in the process,” Athanasiou says.

    The team studied the use of a type of yeast widely used in brewing and in industrial processes, called S. cerevisiae, on pure water spiked with trace amounts of lead. They demonstrated that a single gram of the inactive, dried yeast cells can remove up to 12 milligrams of lead in aqueous solutions with initial lead concentrations below 1 part per million. They also showed that the process is very rapid, taking less than five minutes to complete.

    Because the yeast cells used in the process are inactive and desiccated, they require no particular care, unlike other processes that rely on living biomass to perform such functions which require nutrients and sunlight to keep the materials active. What’s more, yeast is abundantly available already, as a waste product from beer brewing and from various other fermentation-based industrial processes.

    Stathatou has estimated that to clean a water supply for a city the size of Boston, which uses about 200 million gallons a day, would require about 20 tons of yeast per day, or about 7,000 tons per year. By comparison, one single brewery, the Boston Beer Company, generates 20,000 tons a year of surplus yeast that is no longer useful for fermentation.

    The researchers also performed a series of tests to determine that the yeast cells are responsible for biosorption. Athanasiou says that “exploring biosorption mechanisms at such challenging concentrations is a tough problem. We were the first to use a mechanics perspective to unravel biosorption mechanisms, and we discovered that the mechanical properties of the yeast cells change significantly after lead uptake. This provides fundamentally new insights for the process.”

    Devising a practical system for processing the water and retrieving the yeast, which could then be separated from the lead for reuse, is the next stage of the team’s research, they say.

    “To scale up the process and actually put it in place, you need to embed these cells in a kind of filter, and this is the work that’s currently ongoing,” Stathatou says. They are also looking at ways of recovering both the cells and the lead. “We need to conduct further experiments, but there is the option to get both back,” she says.

    The same material can potentially be used to remove other heavy metals, such as cadmium and copper, but that will require further research to quantify the effective rates for those processes, the researchers say.

    “This research revealed a very promising, inexpensive, and environmentally friendly solution for lead removal,” says Sivan Zamir, vice president of Xylem Innovation Labs, a water technology research firm, who was not associated with this research. “It also deepened our understanding of the biosorption process, paving the way for the development of materials tailored to removal of other heavy metals.”

    The team also included Marios Tsezos at the National Technical University of Athens, in Greece; John Gross at Wellesley College; Camron Blackburn, Filippos Tourlomousis, and Andreas Mershin at MIT’s CBA; Brian Sheldon, Nitin Padture, Eric Darling at Brown University; and Huajian Gao at Brown University and Nanyang Technological University, in Singapore. More

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    in Environment

    Helping renewable energy projects succeed in local communities

    Jungwoo Chun makes surprising discoveries about sustainability initiatives by zooming in on local communities.

    His discoveries lie in understanding how renewable energy infrastructure develops at a local level. With so many stakeholders in a community — citizens, government officials, businesses, and other organizations — the development process gets complicated very quickly. Chun works to unpack stakeholder relationships to help local renewable energy projects move forward.

    While his interests today are in local communities around the U.S., Chun comes from a global background. Growing up, his family moved frequently due to his dad’s work. He lived in Seoul, South Korea until elementary school and then hopped from city to city around Asia, spending time in China, Hong Kong, and Singapore. When it was time for college, he returned to South Korea, majoring in international studies at Korea University and later completing his master’s there in the same field.

    After graduating, Chun wanted to leverage his international expertise to tackle climate change. So, he pursued a second master’s in international environmental policy with William Moomaw at Tufts University.

    During that time, Chun came across an article on climate change by David Victor, a professor in public policy at the University of California at San Diego. Victor argued that while international efforts to fight climate change are necessary, more tangible progress can be made through local efforts catered to each country. That prompted Chun to think a step further: “What can we do in the local community to make a little bit of a difference, which could add up to something big in the long term?”

    With a renewed direction for his goals, Chun arrived at the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning, specializing in environmental policy and planning. But he was still missing that final inspirational spark to proactively pursue his goals — until he began working with his primary advisor, Lawrence Susskind, the Ford Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning and director of the Science Impact Collaborative.

    For previous research projects, “I would just do what I was told,” Chun says, but his new advisor “really opened [his] eyes” to being an active member of the community. From the start, Susskind has encouraged Chun to share his research ideas and has shown him how to leverage his research skills for public service. Over the past few years, Chun has also taught several classes with Susskind, learning to approach education thoughtfully for an engaging and equitable classroom. Because of their relationship, Chun now always searches for ways to make a difference through research, teaching, and public service.

    Understanding renewable energy projects at a local level

    For his main dissertation project with Susskind, Chun is studying community-owned solar energy projects, working to understand what makes them successful.

    Often, communities don’t have the required expertise to carry out these projects on their own and instead look to advisory organizations for help. But little research has been done on these organizations and the roles that they play in developing solar energy infrastructure.

    Through over 200 surveys and counting, Chun has discovered that these organizations act as life-long collaborators to communities and are critical in getting community-owned solar projects up and running. At the start of these projects, they walk communities through a mountain of logistics for setting up solar energy infrastructure, including permit applications, budgeting, and contractor employment. After the infrastructure is in place, the organizations stay involved, serving as consultants when needed and sometimes even becoming partners.

    Because of these roles, Chun calls these organizations “intermediaries,” drawing a parallel with roles in in conflict resolution. “But it’s much more than that,” he adds. Intermediaries help local communities “build a movement [for community-owned solar energy projects] … and empower them to be independent and self-sustaining.”

    Chun is also working on another project with Susskind, looking at situations where communities are opposed to renewable energy infrastructure. For this project, Chun is supervising and mentoring a group of five undergraduates. Together, they are trying to pinpoint the reasons behind local opposition to renewable energy projects.

    The idea for this project emerged two years ago, when Chun heard in the news that many solar and wind projects were being delayed or cancelled due to local opposition. But the reasons for this opposition weren’t thoroughly researched.

    “When we started to dig a little deeper, [we found that] communities oppose these projects even though they aren’t opposed to renewable energy,” Chun says. The primary reasons for opposition lie in land use concerns, including financial challenges, health and safety concerns, and ironically, environmental consequences. By better understanding these concerns, Chun hopes to help more renewable energy projects succeed and bring society closer to a sustainable future.

    Bringing research to the classroom and community

    Right now, Chun is looking to bring his research insights on renewable energy infrastructure into the classroom. He’s developing a course on renewable energy that will act as a “clinic” where students will work with communities to understand their concerns for potential renewable energy projects. The students’ findings will then be passed onto project leaders to help them address these concerns.

    This new course is modeled after 11.074/11.274 (Cybersecurity Clinic), which Chun has helped develop over the past few years. In this clinic, students work with local governments in New England to assess potential cybersecurity vulnerabilities in their digital systems. At first, “a lot of city governments were very skeptical, like ‘students doing service for us…?’” Chun says. “But in the end, they were all very satisfied with the outcome” and found the assessments “impactful.”

    Since the Cybersecurity Clinic has kicked off, other universities have approached Chun and his co-instructors about developing their own regional clinics. Now, there are cybersecurity clinics operating around the world. “That’s been a huge success,” Chun says. Going forward, “we’d like to expand the benefit of this clinic [to address] communities opposing renewable energy [projects].” The new course will be a philosophical trifecta for Chun, combining his commitments to research, teaching, and public service.

    Chun plans to wrap up his PhD at the end of this summer and is currently writing his dissertation on community-owned solar energy projects. “I’m done with all the background work — working the soil and throwing the seeds in the right place,” he says, “It’s now time to gather all the crops and present the work.” More

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    in Environment

    Study finds natural sources of air pollution exceed air quality guidelines in many regions

    Alongside climate change, air pollution is one of the biggest environmental threats to human health. Tiny particles known as particulate matter or PM2.5 (named for their diameter of just 2.5 micrometers or less) are a particularly hazardous type of pollutant. These particles are produced from a variety of sources, including wildfires and the burning of fossil fuels, and can enter our bloodstream, travel deep into our lungs, and cause respiratory and cardiovascular damage. Exposure to particulate matter is responsible for millions of premature deaths globally every year.

    In response to the increasing body of evidence on the detrimental effects of PM2.5, the World Health Organization (WHO) recently updated its air quality guidelines, lowering its recommended annual PM2.5 exposure guideline by 50 percent, from 10 micrograms per meter cubed (μm3) to 5 μm3. These updated guidelines signify an aggressive attempt to promote the regulation and reduction of anthropogenic emissions in order to improve global air quality.

    A new study by researchers in the MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering explores if the updated air quality guideline of 5 μm3 is realistically attainable across different regions of the world, particularly if anthropogenic emissions are aggressively reduced. 

    The first question the researchers wanted to investigate was to what degree moving to a no-fossil-fuel future would help different regions meet this new air quality guideline.

    “The answer we found is that eliminating fossil-fuel emissions would improve air quality around the world, but while this would help some regions come into compliance with the WHO guidelines, for many other regions high contributions from natural sources would impede their ability to meet that target,” says senior author Colette Heald, the Germeshausen Professor in the MIT departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. 

    The study by Heald, Professor Jesse Kroll, and graduate students Sidhant Pai and Therese Carter, published June 6 in the journal Environmental Science and Technology Letters, finds that over 90 percent of the global population is currently exposed to average annual concentrations that are higher than the recommended guideline. The authors go on to demonstrate that over 50 percent of the world’s population would still be exposed to PM2.5 concentrations that exceed the new air quality guidelines, even in the absence of all anthropogenic emissions.

    This is due to the large natural sources of particulate matter — dust, sea salt, and organics from vegetation — that still exist in the atmosphere when anthropogenic emissions are removed from the air. 

    “If you live in parts of India or northern Africa that are exposed to large amounts of fine dust, it can be challenging to reduce PM2.5 exposures below the new guideline,” says Sidhant Pai, co-lead author and graduate student. “This study challenges us to rethink the value of different emissions abatement controls across different regions and suggests the need for a new generation of air quality metrics that can enable targeted decision-making.”

    The researchers conducted a series of model simulations to explore the viability of achieving the updated PM2.5 guidelines worldwide under different emissions reduction scenarios, using 2019 as a representative baseline year. 

    Their model simulations used a suite of different anthropogenic sources that could be turned on and off to study the contribution of a particular source. For instance, the researchers conducted a simulation that turned off all human-based emissions in order to determine the amount of PM2.5 pollution that could be attributed to natural and fire sources. By analyzing the chemical composition of the PM2.5 aerosol in the atmosphere (e.g., dust, sulfate, and black carbon), the researchers were also able to get a more accurate understanding of the most important PM2.5 sources in a particular region. For example, elevated PM2.5 concentrations in the Amazon were shown to predominantly consist of carbon-containing aerosols from sources like deforestation fires. Conversely, nitrogen-containing aerosols were prominent in Northern Europe, with large contributions from vehicles and fertilizer usage. The two regions would thus require very different policies and methods to improve their air quality. 

    “Analyzing particulate pollution across individual chemical species allows for mitigation and adaptation decisions that are specific to the region, as opposed to a one-size-fits-all approach, which can be challenging to execute without an understanding of the underlying importance of different sources,” says Pai. 

    When the WHO air quality guidelines were last updated in 2005, they had a significant impact on environmental policies. Scientists could look at an area that was not in compliance and suggest high-level solutions to improve the region’s air quality. But as the guidelines have tightened, globally-applicable solutions to manage and improve air quality are no longer as evident. 

    “Another benefit of speciating is that some of the particles have different toxicity properties that are correlated to health outcomes,” says Therese Carter, co-lead author and graduate student. “It’s an important area of research that this work can help motivate. Being able to separate out that piece of the puzzle can provide epidemiologists with more insights on the different toxicity levels and the impact of specific particles on human health.”

    The authors view these new findings as an opportunity to expand and iterate on the current guidelines.  

    “Routine and global measurements of the chemical composition of PM2.5 would give policymakers information on what interventions would most effectively improve air quality in any given location,” says Jesse Kroll, a professor in the MIT departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Chemical Engineering. “But it would also provide us with new insights into how different chemical species in PM2.5 affect human health.”

    “I hope that as we learn more about the health impacts of these different particles, our work and that of the broader atmospheric chemistry community can help inform strategies to reduce the pollutants that are most harmful to human health,” adds Heald. More

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    in Environment

    Migration Summit addresses education and workforce development in displacement

    “Refugees can change the world with access to education,” says Alnarjes Harba, a refugee from Syria who recently shared her story at the 2022 Migration Summit — a first-of-its-kind, global convening to address the challenges that displaced communities face in accessing education and employment.

    At the age of 13, Harba was displaced to Lebanon, where she graduated at the top of her high school class. But because of her refugee status, she recalls, no university in her host country would accept her. Today, Harba is a researcher in health-care architecture. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Southern New Hampshire University, where she was part of the Global Education Movement, a program providing refugees with pathways to higher education and work.

    Like many of the Migration Summit’s participants, Harba shared her story to call attention not only to the barriers to refugee education, but also to the opportunities to create more education-to-employment pathways like MIT Refugee Action Hub’s (ReACT) certificate programs for displaced learners.

    Organized by MIT ReACT, the MIT Abdul Latif Jameel World Education Lab (J-WEL), Na’amal, Karam Foundation, and Paper Airplanes, the Migration Summit sought to center the voices and experiences of those most directly impacted by displacement — both in narratives about the crisis and in the search for solutions. Themed “Education and Workforce Development in Displacement,” this year’s summit welcomed more than 900 attendees from over 30 countries, to a total of 40 interactive virtual sessions led by displaced learners, educators, and activists working to support communities in displacement.

    Sessions highlighted the experiences of refugees, migrants, and displaced learners, as well as current efforts across the education and workforce development landscape, ranging from pK-12 initiatives to post-secondary programs, workforce training to entrepreneurship opportunities.

    Overcoming barriers to access

    The vision for the Migration Summit developed, in part, out of the need to raise more awareness about the long-standing global displacement crisis. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 82.4 million people worldwide today are forcibly displaced, a figure that doesn’t include the estimated 12 million people who have fled their homes in Ukraine since February.

    “Refugees not only leave their countries; they leave behind a thousand memories, their friends, their families,” says Mondiant Dogon, a human rights activist, refugee ambassador, and author who gave the Migration Summit’s opening keynote address. “Education is the most important thing that can happen to refugees. In that way, we can leave behind the refugee camps and build our own independent future.”

    Yet, as the stories of the summit’s participants highlight, many in displacement have lost their livelihoods or had their education disrupted — only to face further challenges when trying to access education or find work in their new places of residence. Obstacles range from legal restrictions, language and cultural barriers, and unaffordable costs to lack of verifiable credentials. UNHCR estimates that only 5 percent of refugees have access to higher education, compared to the global average of 39 percent.

    “There is another problem related to forced displacement — dehumanization of migrants,” says Lina Sergie Attar, the founder and CEO of Karam Foundation. “They are unjustly positioned as enemies, as a threat.”

    But as Blein Alem, an MIT ReACT alum and refugee from Eritrea, explains, “No one chooses to be a refugee — it just occurs. Whether by conflict, war, human rights violations, just because you have refugee status does not mean that you are not willing to make a change in your life and access to education and work.” Several participants, including Alem, shared that, even with a degree in hand, their refugee status limited their ability to work in their new countries of residence.

    Displaced communities face complex and structural challenges in accessing education and workforce development opportunities. Because of the varying and vast effects of displacement, efforts to address these challenges range in scale and focus and differ across sectors. As Lorraine Charles, co-founder and director of Na’amal, noted in the Migration Summit’s closing session, many organizations find themselves working in silos, or even competing with each other for funding and other resources. As a result, solution-making has been fragmented, with persistent gaps between different sectors that are, in fact, working toward the same goals.

    Imagining a modular, digital, collaborative approach

    A key takeaway from the month’s discussions, then, is the need to rethink the response to refugee education and workforce challenges. During the session, “From Intentions to Impact: Decolonizing Refugee Response,” participants emphasized the systemic nature of these challenges. Yet formal responses, such as the 1951 Refugee Convention, have been largely inadequate — in some instances even oppressing the communities they’re meant to support, explains Sana Mustafa, director of partnership and engagement for Asylum Access.

    “We have the opportunity to rethink how we are handling the situation,” Mustafa says, calling for more efforts to include refugees in the design and development of solutions.

    Presenters also agreed that educational institutions, particularly universities, could play a vital role in providing more pathways for refugees and displaced learners. Key to this is rethinking the structure of education itself, including its delivery.

    “The challenge right now is that degrees are monolithic,” says Sanjay Sarma, vice president for MIT Open Learning, who gave the keynote address on “Pathways to Education, Livelihood, and Hope.” “They’re like those gigantic rocks at Stonehenge or in other megalithic sites. What we need is a much more granular version of education: bricks. Bricks were invented several thousand years ago, but we don’t really have that yet formally and extensively in education.”

    “There is no way we can accommodate thousands and thousands of refugees face-to-face,” says Shai Reshef, the founder and president of University of the People. “The only path is a digital one.”

    Ultimately, explains Demetri Fadel of Karam Foundation, “We really need to think about how to create a vision of education as a right for every person all around the world.”

    Underlying many of the Migration Summit’s conclusions is the awareness that there is still much work to be done. However, as the summit’s co-chair Lana Cook said in her closing remarks, “This was not a convening of despair, but one about what we can build together.”

    The summit’s organizers are currently putting together a public report of the key findings that have emerged from the month’s conversations, including recommendations for thematic working groups and future Migration Summit activities. More

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    in Environment

    Cracking the case of Arctic sea ice breakup

    Despite its below-freezing temperatures, the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet. As Arctic sea ice melts, fewer bright surfaces are available to reflect sunlight back into space. When fractures open in the ice cover, the water underneath gets exposed. Dark, ice-free water absorbs the sun’s energy, heating the ocean and driving further melting — a vicious cycle. This warming in turn melts glacial ice, contributing to rising sea levels.

    Warming climate and rising sea levels endanger the nearly 40 percent of the U.S. population living in coastal areas, the billions of people who depend on the ocean for food and their livelihoods, and species such as polar bears and Artic foxes. Reduced ice coverage is also making the once-impassable region more accessible, opening up new shipping lanes and ports. Interest in using these emerging trans-Arctic routes for product transit, extraction of natural resources (e.g., oil and gas), and military activity is turning an area traditionally marked by low tension and cooperation into one of global geopolitical competition.

    As the Arctic opens up, predicting when and where the sea ice will fracture becomes increasingly important in strategic decision-making. However, huge gaps exist in our understanding of the physical processes contributing to ice breakup. Researchers at MIT Lincoln Laboratory seek to help close these gaps by turning a data-sparse environment into a data-rich one. They envision deploying a distributed set of unattended sensors across the Arctic that will persistently detect and geolocate ice fracturing events. Concurrently, the network will measure various environmental conditions, including water temperature and salinity, wind speed and direction, and ocean currents at different depths. By correlating these fracturing events and environmental conditions, they hope to discover meaningful insights about what is causing the sea ice to break up. Such insights could help predict the future state of Arctic sea ice to inform climate modeling, climate change planning, and policy decision-making at the highest levels.

    “We’re trying to study the relationship between ice cracking, climate change, and heat flow in the ocean,” says Andrew March, an assistant leader of Lincoln Laboratory’s Advanced Undersea Systems and Technology Group. “Do cracks in the ice cause warm water to rise and more ice to melt? Do undersea currents and waves cause cracking? Does cracking cause undersea waves? These are the types of questions we aim to investigate.”

    Arctic access

    In March 2022, Ben Evans and Dave Whelihan, both researchers in March’s group, traveled for 16 hours across three flights to Prudhoe Bay, located on the North Slope of Alaska. From there, they boarded a small specialized aircraft and flew another 90 minutes to a three-and-a-half-mile-long sheet of ice floating 160 nautical miles offshore in the Arctic Ocean. In the weeks before their arrival, the U.S. Navy’s Arctic Submarine Laboratory had transformed this inhospitable ice floe into a temporary operating base called Ice Camp Queenfish, named after the first Sturgeon-class submarine to operate under the ice and the fourth to reach the North Pole. The ice camp featured a 2,500-foot-long runway, a command center, sleeping quarters to accommodate up to 60 personnel, a dining tent, and an extremely limited internet connection.

    At Queenfish, for the next four days, Evans and Whelihan joined U.S. Navy, Army, Air Force, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard members, and members of the Royal Canadian Air Force and Navy and United Kingdom Royal Navy, who were participating in Ice Exercise (ICEX) 2022. Over the course of about three weeks, more than 200 personnel stationed at Queenfish, Prudhoe Bay, and aboard two U.S. Navy submarines participated in this biennial exercise. The goals of ICEX 2022 were to assess U.S. operational readiness in the Arctic; increase our country’s experience in the region; advance our understanding of the Arctic environment; and continue building relationships with other services, allies, and partner organizations to ensure a free and peaceful Arctic. The infrastructure provided for ICEX concurrently enables scientists to conduct research in an environment — either in person or by sending their research equipment for exercise organizers to deploy on their behalf — that would be otherwise extremely difficult and expensive to access.

    In the Arctic, windchill temperatures can plummet to as low as 60 degrees Fahrenheit below zero, cold enough to freeze exposed skin within minutes. Winds and ocean currents can drift the entire camp beyond the reach of nearby emergency rescue aircraft, and the ice can crack at any moment. To ensure the safety of participants, a team of Navy meteorological specialists continually monitors the ever-changing conditions. The original camp location for ICEX 2022 had to be evacuated and relocated after a massive crack formed in the ice, delaying Evans’ and Whelihan’s trip. Even the newly selected site had a large crack form behind the camp and another crack that necessitated moving a number of tents.

    “Such cracking events are only going to increase as the climate warms, so it’s more critical now than ever to understand the physical processes behind them,” Whelihan says. “Such an understanding will require building technology that can persist in the environment despite these incredibly harsh conditions. So, it’s a challenge not only from a scientific perspective but also an engineering one.”

    “The weather always gets a vote, dictating what you’re able to do out here,” adds Evans. “The Arctic Submarine Laboratory does a lot of work to construct the camp and make it a safe environment where researchers like us can come to do good science. ICEX is really the only opportunity we have to go onto the sea ice in a place this remote to collect data.”

    A legacy of sea ice experiments

    Though this trip was Whelihan’s and Evans’ first to the Arctic region, staff from the laboratory’s Advanced Undersea Systems and Technology Group have been conducting experiments at ICEX since 2018. However, because of the Arctic’s remote location and extreme conditions, data collection has rarely been continuous over long periods of time or widespread across large areas. The team now hopes to change that by building low-cost, expendable sensing platforms consisting of co-located devices that can be left unattended for automated, persistent, near-real-time monitoring. 

    “The laboratory’s extensive expertise in rapid prototyping, seismo-acoustic signal processing, remote sensing, and oceanography make us a natural fit to build this sensor network,” says Evans.

    In the months leading up to the Arctic trip, the team collected seismometer data at Firepond, part of the laboratory’s Haystack Observatory site in Westford, Massachusetts. Through this local data collection, they aimed to gain a sense of what anthropogenic (human-induced) noise would look like so they could begin to anticipate the kinds of signatures they might see in the Arctic. They also collected ice melting/fracturing data during a thaw cycle and correlated these data with the weather conditions (air temperature, humidity, and pressure). Through this analysis, they detected an increase in seismic signals as the temperature rose above 32 F — an indication that air temperature and ice cracking may be related.

    A sensing network

    At ICEX, the team deployed various commercial off-the-shelf sensors and new sensors developed by the laboratory and University of New Hampshire (UNH) to assess their resiliency in the frigid environment and to collect an initial dataset.

    “One aspect that differentiates these experiments from those of the past is that we concurrently collected seismo-acoustic data and environmental parameters,” says Evans.

    The commercial technologies were seismometers to detect the vibrational energy released when sea ice fractures or collides with other ice floes; a hydrophone (underwater microphone) array to record the acoustic energy created by ice-fracturing events; a sound speed profiler to measure the speed of sound through the water column; and a conductivity, temperature, and depth (CTD) profiler to measure the salinity (related to conductivity), temperature, and pressure (related to depth) throughout the water column. The speed of sound in the ocean primarily depends on these three quantities. 

    To precisely measure the temperature across the entire water column at one location, they deployed an array of transistor-based temperature sensors developed by the laboratory’s Advanced Materials and Microsystems Group in collaboration with the Advanced Functional Fabrics of America Manufacturing Innovation Institute. The small temperature sensors run along the length of a thread-like polymer fiber embedded with multiple conductors. This fiber platform, which can support a broad range of sensors, can be unspooled hundreds of feet below the water’s surface to concurrently measure temperature or other water properties — the fiber deployed in the Arctic also contained accelerometers to measure depth — at many points in the water column. Traditionally, temperature profiling has required moving a device up and down through the water column.

    The team also deployed a high-frequency echosounder supplied by Anthony Lyons and Larry Mayer, collaborators at UNH’s Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping. This active sonar uses acoustic energy to detect internal waves, or waves occurring beneath the ocean’s surface.

    “You may think of the ocean as a homogenous body of water, but it’s not,” Evans explains. “Different currents can exist as you go down in depth, much like how you can get different winds when you go up in altitude. The UNH echosounder allows us to see the different currents in the water column, as well as ice roughness when we turn the sensor to look upward.”

    “The reason we care about currents is that we believe they will tell us something about how warmer water from the Atlantic Ocean is coming into contact with sea ice,” adds Whelihan. “Not only is that water melting ice but it also has lower salt content, resulting in oceanic layers and affecting how long ice lasts and where it lasts.”

    Back home, the team has begun analyzing their data. For the seismic data, this analysis involves distinguishing any ice events from various sources of anthropogenic noise, including generators, snowmobiles, footsteps, and aircraft. Similarly, the researchers know their hydrophone array acoustic data are contaminated by energy from a sound source that another research team participating in ICEX placed in the water. Based on their physics, icequakes — the seismic events that occur when ice cracks — have characteristic signatures that can be used to identify them. One approach is to manually find an icequake and use that signature as a guide for finding other icequakes in the dataset.

    From their water column profiling sensors, they identified an interesting evolution in the sound speed profile 30 to 40 meters below the ocean surface, related to a mass of colder water moving in later in the day. The group’s physical oceanographer believes this change in the profile is due to water coming up from the Bering Sea, water that initially comes from the Atlantic Ocean. The UNH-supplied echosounder also generated an interesting signal at a similar depth.

    “Our supposition is that this result has something to do with the large sound speed variation we detected, either directly because of reflections off that layer or because of plankton, which tend to rise on top of that layer,” explains Evans.  

    A future predictive capability

    Going forward, the team will continue mining their collected data and use these data to begin building algorithms capable of automatically detecting and localizing — and ultimately predicting — ice events correlated with changes in environmental conditions. To complement their experimental data, they have initiated conversations with organizations that model the physical behavior of sea ice, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Ice Center. Merging the laboratory’s expertise in sensor design and signal processing with their expertise in ice physics would provide a more complete understanding of how the Arctic is changing.

    The laboratory team will also start exploring cost-effective engineering approaches for integrating the sensors into packages hardened for deployment in the harsh environment of the Arctic.

    “Until these sensors are truly unattended, the human factor of usability is front and center,” says Whelihan. “Because it’s so cold, equipment can break accidentally. For example, at ICEX 2022, our waterproof enclosure for the seismometers survived, but the enclosure for its power supply, which was made out of a cheaper plastic, shattered in my hand when I went to pick it up.”

    The sensor packages will not only need to withstand the frigid environment but also be able to “phone home” over some sort of satellite data link and sustain their power. The team plans to investigate whether waste heat from processing can keep the instruments warm and how energy could be harvested from the Arctic environment.

    Before the next ICEX scheduled for 2024, they hope to perform preliminary testing of their sensor packages and concepts in Arctic-like environments. While attending ICEX 2022, they engaged with several other attendees — including the U.S. Navy, Arctic Submarine Laboratory, National Ice Center, and University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) — and identified cold room experimentation as one area of potential collaboration. Testing can also be performed at outdoor locations a bit closer to home and more easily accessible, such as the Great Lakes in Michigan and a UAF-maintained site in Barrow, Alaska. In the future, the laboratory team may have an opportunity to accompany U.S. Coast Guard personnel on ice-breaking vessels traveling from Alaska to Greenland. The team is also thinking about possible venues for collecting data far removed from human noise sources.

    “Since I’ve told colleagues, friends, and family I was going to the Arctic, I’ve had a lot of interesting conversations about climate change and what we’re doing there and why we’re doing it,” Whelihan says. “People don’t have an intrinsic, automatic understanding of this environment and its impact because it’s so far removed from us. But the Arctic plays a crucial role in helping to keep the global climate in balance, so it’s imperative we understand the processes leading to sea ice fractures.”

    This work is funded through Lincoln Laboratory’s internally administered R&D portfolio on climate. More

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    in Environment

    “The world needs your smarts, your skills,” Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala tells MIT’s Class of 2022

    On a clear warm day, the MIT graduating class of 2022 gathered in Killian Court for the first in-person commencement exercises in three years, after two years of online ceremonies due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

    Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala MCP ’78, PhD ’81, director-general of the World Trade Organization, delivered the Commencement address, stressing the global need for science-informed policy to address problems of climate change, pandemics, international security, and wealth disparities. She told the graduates: “In these uncertain times, in this complex world in which you are entering, you need not be so daunted, if you can search for the opportunities hidden in challenges.” She urged them to go “into the world to embrace the opportunities to serve.”

    An expert in global finance, economics, and international development, Okonjo-Iweala is the first woman and first African to lead the WTO. She earned a master’s degree in city planning from MIT in 1978, and a PhD in regional economics and development in 1981.

    Okonjo-Iweala began her address by paying tribute to MIT President L. Rafael Reif, who earlier this semester announced plans to end his decade-long tenure in that role. Calling this a “bittersweet day” because of his departure, she honored “his academic, institutional, and thought leadership of these past 10 years.”

    She spoke warmly of the way MIT had helped her while she was a graduate student struggling to pay the bills. She was assured that the Institute would do whatever was needed to make sure she could complete her studies, she recalled, saying, “They had my back.” Noting that this year’s graduating class had their own educational journeys challenged by the global pandemic, she described how her own early education was interrupted for three years by civil war in her home country of Nigeria. She also noted the recent tragic shootings in Uvalde, Texas, saying that “I feel grief as a mother and a grandmother.”

    “MIT has helped make me who I am today,” she said. “My parents made it clear to me that education was a privilege, and that with that privilege comes responsibility — the responsibility to use it for others, not just for yourself.”

    She said that what the world needs in this time of multiple global challenges, including Covid-19, climate change, public health, and international security, is an approach “combining science, social science, and public policy, to meet the challenges of our future.”

    Friday’s Commencement ceremony celebrated the 1,099 undergraduate and 2,590 graduate students receiving MIT diplomas this year.

    Photo: Gretchen Ertl

    MIT President L. Rafael Reif walked near the head of the procession to Killian Court, followed by Commencement speaker Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, MIT Chancellor Melissa Nobles, and others.

    Photo: Adam Glanzman

    Temiloluwa Omitoogun, president of the Class of 2022, told his classmates, “MIT is hard. MIT during an unprecedented pandemic is even harder, but we did it.”

    Photo: Adam Glanzman

    In a longstanding MIT Commencement ritual, graduates turn over their class ring, the “brass rat.” The ring’s image of the Boston skyline faces students until they graduate, and thereafter they will see the Cambridge skyline, in effect looking back at campus.

    Photo: Adam Glanzman

    Members of the Class of 2022 celebrated on Killian Court.

    Photo: Adam Glanzman

    Fifty years after their own graduation, members of the Class of 1972 attended the ceremony as special guests, wearing signature red jackets. Members of the Classes of ’70 and ’71 also joined the festivities.

    Photo: Gretchen Ertl

    Members of the Class of 2022 celebrated on Killian Court.

    Photo: Gretchen Ertl

    President Reif urged the assembled graduates to shout out a loud “thank you!” to all family, professors, friends, and others who helped them reach today’s milestone.

    Photo: Gretchen Ertl

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    Okonjo-Iweala, who was formerly head of the World Bank, said that “a common thread running through many of these challenges is the central role for science,” and she stressed the need for technological innovation to address the global problems facing humanity. “New inventions and new ways of doing things will have an impact, mainly to the extent they are scaled up across the dividing lines of income and geography,” she said.

    “We don’t just need vaccines,” she continued. “We need shots in arms across the world, to be safe. We need new renewable technologies diffused not just in rich countries to fight climate change, but also in poor ones. We need new agricultural technologies built to local conditions and culture, if we’re to fight hunger. In other words, we need innovation. But we also need access, equity, diffusion.”

    In the case of the global response to the pandemic, she noted that only 17 percent of people in Africa and 13 percent of people in low-income countries have been fully vaccinated, compared to 75 percent of people in high income countries. “Since we all know that no one is safe until everyone is safe, the risk of more dangerous variants and pathogens remains real because of this public policy lapse and the lack of timely international cooperation,” she said.

    As for climate change, she pointed out that the world somehow managed to come up with $14 trillion to address the Covid-19 pandemic but has not managed to fulfill the pledges nations made to provide $100 billion to help less-developed nations build renewable energy solutions.

    To address these global challenges, she told the new graduates, “the world needs your smarts, your skills, your adaptability, and the great training you have received here at MIT. The world needs you for innovation, for policymaking, for connecting the dots so that implementation can actually happen.”

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    President Reif, in his charge to the graduates, urged the assembled crowd to shout out a loud “thank you!” to all family, professors, friends, and other who helped them reach today’s milestone. He pointed out that research, including from MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, shows that “simply expressing gratitude does wonderful things to your brain. It gets different parts of your brain to act in a synchronized way. It lights up reward pathways!”

    “All of us could use a reliable device for feeling better. So now, thanks to brain science, Course 9, you have one! The Gratitude Amplifier is unbreakable. Its battery never dies, it will never try to sell you anything, you can use it every day, forever — and it’s free!”

    He recalled the example of the way students banded together to create a new space for relaxation on campus, now known as the Banana Lounge, a central location where students could relax with free coffee and bananas. “The students have done this all essentially themselves, applying their skills and the most delightful MIT values.” The project has already distributed a half-million bananas, he said, and produced a “wonderful, tropical, perfectly improbable new MIT institution.”

    He urged the graduating students to work to “make the world a little more like MIT. More daring and more passionate. More rigorous, inventive and ambitious. More humble, more respectful, more generous, more kind.” And, he added, “try always to share your bananas!”

    Adam Joseph “AJ” Miller, president of the Graduate Student Council, said, “Today marks the end of a chapter, the culmination of so many late nights, to forge lifelong friendships, to hold onto new experiences, to shape our dreams.” He added that “Something I heard a lot about when I first got here was all the doubt so many of us had in ourselves. I can say unequivocally today though, there are no impostors before me. Nobody sits where you sit by accident. You’re all now graduates of MIT, carrying on an incredibly impressive history.”

    Miller urged his fellow students to “stay confident in yourselves because of the challenges you’ve overcome. Be courageous in trying, because failure is learning and investing in each other.”

    Temiloluwa Omitoogun, president of the Class of 2022, told his classmates, “MIT is hard. MIT during an unprecedented pandemic is even harder, but we did it. Even if you don’t realize it, this is a huge accomplishment.” He added that “it’s sad that we’re all parting ways at the moment, but I’m even more excited than sad. I’m excited to see what more you all will accomplish. I look out and I don’t just see friends and classmates. I see future leaders, people who will change the world. I’m going to try my best to keep up and change the world too.”

    Later in the day, in a separate ceremony on Briggs Field, each of the members of the undergraduate Class of 2022 had a chance to hear their names read aloud as they walked across the stage to receive their diplomas. Right before this presentation, senior and physics and mathematics major Quinn Brodsky performed a heartful rendition of “Hypotheticals” by Lake Street Dive.

    Addressing the graduating seniors, Chancellor Melissa Nobles urged them to “absorb and relish this celebration of what you’ve achieved during your transformative time at MIT. How much you have grown, academically, professionally and personally!” She added that “the lifelong friends and mentors you found here are the people who I know will continue to be sources of encouragement, support, and inspiration as you make your way in the world.”

    Recalling the way the pandemic altered their academic careers, she said “you should know now that you can handle whatever life throws your way. Never forget that you are stronger and more resilient than you think you are.” She added, “hold on to the way this pandemic has put certain things into perspective. Time with people we care about is precious. So are our health and wellbeing, and the health and wellbeing of the ones we love. Looking out for others and feeling a sense of shared responsibility for the common good are paramount.”

    Nobles concluded that “your journey into the future holds countless possibilities, risks, joys, rewards, sometimes failures, and always surprises. … We wish you well on the road ahead.” More

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    in Environment

    Lama Willa Baker challenges MIT audience to look beyond technology to solve the climate crises

    Buddhist teacher Willa Blythe Baker called for an “embodied revolution,” in speaking to an MIT audience on May 5, to create a world in which we realize we are connected and interdependent with each other and with our natural environment. She envisioned a world in which we always ask of every question: “How will this affect our bodies, trees, plants, mosses, water, air around us?”

    Authorized as a dharma teacher and lineage holder (lama) in the Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, Baker holds a PhD in religion form Harvard University and is founder and spiritual co-director of the Natural Dharma Fellowship in Boston. As experts warn of warming oceans, rising sea levels, turbulent weather, mass extinctions, droughts, hunger, and global pandemics, she said, “Much is made of what we must do, but little is made of how we must live and who we must become”

    The climate crisis has been “framed as a set of problems that need to be solved through intellectual ingenuity, engineering, and technology. These solutions are critical, but they do not require grappling with the underlying issue … They do not look beyond doing, to being.’“

    Part of the problem, Baker pointed out, is that in discussing climate change, we frequently approach it in terms of what we must give up to live more sustainably — but not in terms of what we gain by living simply and mindfully.

    Disembodiment

    Baker outlined her view that “disembodiment” is a key underlying cause of the global environmental crisis. This disembodied state causes us to feel separate from our ecosystem, and from one another, and from our own bodies, leading to a state of constant worry about the past or the future, and to a constant desire or ambition for more. Disembodiment  is the state of being “up in the head” and out of touch with the body, and being disconnected from the here and now.

    The climate crisis, Baker put forward, is in part a result of society’s long journey away from the embodied ways of being in earlier agrarian societies in which there was a more intimate relationship between humans and their natural world.

    The contemplative tradition

    Baker said the contemplative perspective, and the practices of meditation and mindfulness, have much to offer climate activists. Rather than viewing meditation, prayer, or contemplation as passive acts, these practices are active pursuits, according to Baker, as “engagements of attention and embodiment that steward novel ways of knowing and being.”

    She explained further how an “embodied contemplative perspective” re-frames the climate crisis. Instead of viewing the crisis as external, the climate crisis calls for us to look inward to our motivations and values. “It is asking us to inquire into who and what we are, not just what we do.” Rather than seeing ourselves as “stewards” of the planet, we should see ourselves as part of the planet.

    “The idea of embodiment gets us to explore who we are in the deepest sense … Embodiment is a journey from our isolated sense of separateness, our sense of limited cognitive identity, back to the body and senses, back to our animal wisdom, back to the earthly organic identity of being bound by gravity.”

    Baker pointed to the central Buddhist tenet that we live with the illusion of separateness, and, she said, “the task of this human life is to see beyond the veil of that illusion.”

    Embodiment will bring us “back to the body and senses; back to our animal wisdom; back to the earthly organic identity of being bound by gravity. These wisdoms remind us of who we are — that we are of the Earth.”

    How much is enough?

    A lively discussion was held following the presentation. One audience member asked how to reconcile the idea of looking to the body for wisdom, when some of the climate crisis is fueled by our need for bodily comfort. Baker replied, “We have started to associate comfort with plenty … That’s a point of reflection. How much is enough?” She said that part of the Buddhist path is the cultivation of knowing that whatever you have is enough.

    One MIT student studying mechanical engineering asked how to reconcile these ideas with a capitalistic society. He pointed out that “a lot of industry is driven by the need to accumulate more capital … Every year, you want to increase your balance sheet … How do you tell companies that what you have is enough?”

    Baker agreed that that our current economic system constantly encourages us to want “more.” “Human happiness is at stake, in addition to our planet’s survival. If we’re told that the ‘next thing’ will make us happy, we will be seeking happiness externally. I think the system will change eventually. I don’t think we have any choice. The planet cannot sustain a world where we’re producing and producing more and more stuff for us to need and want.”

    One audience member asked how to meet the challenge of being embodied in our busy world. Baker said that “embodiment and disembodiment is a continuum. Sometimes we have to be in our head. We’re taking a test, or writing a paper. But we can get ‘up there’ so much that we forget we have a body.” She called for ‘bringing your attention down. Pausing and bring attention all the way down, and feeling the Earth below your feet … There’s a calming and centering that comes with coming down and connecting with the Earth below. Being present and grounded and in tune.”

    Baker said the body can show us, “Just here. Just now. Just this.”

    The speaker was introduced by Professor Emma J. Teng, the T.T. and Wei Fong Chao Professor of Asian Civilizations at MIT. This spring, Teng introduced a new class 21G.015 (Introduction to Buddhism, Mindfulness, and Meditation), a half-term subject that met with the class PE.0534 (Fitness and Meditation), taught by Sarah Johnson, so that students learned basic ideas of Buddhism and its history while having a chance to learn and practice mindfulness and meditation techniques.

    This event was the latest in the T.T. and W.F. Chao Distinguished Buddhist Lecture Series. This series engages the rich history of Buddhist thought and ethical action to advance critical dialogues on ethics, humanity, and MIT’s mission “to develop in each member of the MIT community the ability and passion to work wisely, creatively, and effectively for the betterment of humankind.”

    Baker’s books include “Essence of Ambrosia” (2005), “Everyday Dharma”(2009), “The Arts of Contemplative Care” (2012) and “The Wakeful Body” (2021). Her guided meditations can be found here. More