Aurelia Butler

When MIT students walk into the Johnson Athletic Center for fall career fair — or this year, hop onto Zoom — they’re greeted with flashy displays from hundreds of employers vying for some of the top tech and engineering students in the world. Company reps eagerly tell them about salaries, office perks, and opportunities to contribute to cutting-edge work.
Now, thanks to a tool developed by MIT’s Environmental Solutions Initiative (ESI), students can also learn how environmentally responsible their prospective employers are.
Sarah Meyers, ESI’s education program manager, says ESI had heard from students interested in sustainability that the career fair gave them the impression they would have few employment options in that field.
“Even those big companies with sustainability divisions don’t highlight the work they do,” says Meyers. “It’s just not part of the norm.”
Students sometimes say they feel “lured into” lucrative fields like computer science, even if that’s not what they wanted to do, she says. “For years now, we have known that MIT students are interested in working for companies that take environmental challenges seriously,” adds ESI Director John E. Fernández.
So Fernández asked Meyers to explore the development of a resource for the career fair to enable students to find meaningful positions at companies that prioritize sustainability.
Meyers thought a starting point could be rating whether or not companies were environmentally minded using environmental social governance (ESG) ratings. Companies that had high ESG scores would get a green leaf next to their name in career fair handouts.
Sounds easy enough, but the results were puzzling. Exxon Mobil got a green leaf, while the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection did not. Meyers wondered whether this was because larger companies have the resources to hire teams to focus on ESG ratings.
To learn more about what was going on, the ESI team turned to Roberto Rigobon, a professor of applied economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management who had recently authored a paper on issues with ESG ratings. While credit ratings from Moody’s and Standard & Poor correlate at .92 out of 1, meaning the same company would receive a similar score from different agencies, ESG ratings from five of the main agencies only correlate at .54.
Rigobon and his team found that there is too much variety in what categories are included in different ESG ratings and in how those categories are measured for them to be of much use to investors — or MIT students.
“I think that more transparency would be helpful, and more asking the investors (what they value) would be helpful,” Rigobon says.
He advised the ESI team to use emissions data to do their own analysis of the companies coming to career fair. 
Building the database
This summer, computer science, economics, and data science major Christopher Noga set out to do that by finding emissions and financial information from companies that had registered in past years for the career fair. This, too, would prove to be easier said than done.
Noga combed through company websites, financial statements, and reports made to the Carbon Disclosure Project, a nonprofit that encourages companies to report their environmental impacts. But he could only find emissions data for about a third of the companies, and many private companies did not have publicly available financial statements.
Some companies “really do hide what they do, how much they emit, and, in some cases, how much money they’re making and where they’re making it,” Noga says.
For the companies that had data, the ESI team divided total emissions by operating costs to measure each company’s “emissions intensity,” working with MIT Sloan to include historical data from 2011 on. This measurement allows students to better compare companies of different sizes, and see changes in emissions as companies grow, rather than just looking at total emissions.
Mining, fossil fuel, and manufacturing companies have the highest emissions intensity scores, while technology, health care, and government agencies have the lowest scores.
Meyers and Noga both emphasized limitations with the data, noting that they were struck by how little you know about a company just from looking at their emissions and financial statements. For example, the emissions intensity for Salesforce has been going up as they’ve grown, but the company also has plans to purchase 100% renewable electricity by 2022.
Surveying companies about their stance on climate change
To better get at the story behind the data, ESI worked with Oxford University to develop a four-question survey for the 238 companies who signed up for career fair. The answers were revealing: for instance, only 8 percent of companies surveyed have a plan to get to net-zero emissions. Most strikingly, only 60 percent said they recognize the climate crisis and agree with climate science.
“That shocked me, that it wasn’t just an easy ‘yes’,” Meyers says. She adds that this might just reflect that the employees who filled out the surveys were unaware of their company’s stance on these issues, as many responded with “I don’t know” rather than an outright no. Even so, this is a useful result, signaling to these companies that MIT is interested in their stance on climate change and that they should have an answer prepared in future years.
ESI also put together a list of questions for students to ask companies to learn more about their environmental and social responsibility practices.
“It seems like a real opportunity for students to become more engaged with the career fair and realize that they’re able to ask questions of companies that they might have been intimidated to ask,” Meyers says.
All this work resulted in the MIT Career Fair Sustainability Initiative website, which students can visit to compare company emissions, and learn how to engage with potential employers about their environmental commitments.
Fernández, director of ESI, says that one of the main goals of this project is to communicate to students that they are an “enormously valuable asset” to employers.
“Companies want MIT students as employees,” says Fernández. “Therefore, our students are in a position to influence a company’s policies toward climate mitigation and their overall approach to sustainability. The career fair is the ideal venue through which MIT students can begin to express their values and interests to industry.”
So far, 359 people have visited the new site. Vivian Song ’20, who worked with ESI to create the site, was surprised to learn that MIT was one of the only universities putting out this type of information about companies that come to career fair.
“I think it would be great if MIT could help lead the way to encourage other universities to do something similar,” she says. More

“Global issues can only be solved with international collaboration and innovative ideas,” states Professor Maggie Dallman, vice president (international) at Imperial College London. “The MIT-Imperial College London Seed Fund provides a platform for scientists to do that.” The fund, managed by MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI) on behalf of the associate provost for international activities, builds on an existing partnership, with an exciting new focus.
This year, the fund is calling on researchers at each institution to submit proposals that address climate solutions and zero pollution. The new theme reflects research priorities already underway at each institution, with Imperial’s Zero Pollution initiative seeking to create a future free from human pollution, and MIT’s Climate Grand Challenges focusing the research community’s efforts on breakthroughs in climate mitigation and adaptation.
“This seed fund marks an exciting new chapter in our collaboration with MIT and will enable our scientists to work more closely together to reduce the impact of pollution on the climate and people’s health,” Dallman says.
“The new focus of the MIT-Imperial seed fund on climate change and environmental sustainability reflects research priorities at both institutions,” says Associate Provost for International Activities and Japan Steel Industry Professor Richard Lester, who drives the fund at MIT. “The world’s leading research universities have a special responsibility to develop science-based solutions to these great challenges, and by working together on these problems, MIT and Imperial can reasonably hope to strengthen their combined impact.”
The UK has emerged as a leader in international efforts to tackle the climate crisis, and faculty at MIT are encouraged that this seed fund will provide more opportunity for experts at both institutions to collaborate on innovative solutions to meet the defining challenge of our age. “The UK was the first major economy to pass binding legislation to meet the ‘net zero’ commitment by 2050,” says MIT Sloan School of Management Professor Fiona Murray, a member of the UK Prime Minister’s Council for Science and Technology (CST) and also co-director of the MIT-UK program at MISTI. “Achieving that goal will require major advances in science, technology, and business practices: To that end, this year’s focus of the MIT-Imperial seed fund to bring their faculty and researchers together is a welcome contribution.”
“The fund’s new focus on climate change is fundamentally important,” agrees Phil Budden, senior lecturer at MIT Sloan and co-director of the MIT-UK program. “Not least as the UK will host the UN’s 26th ‘Conference of the Parties’ (COP26) in Glasgow, in November next year. Collaborations over this academic year — like those seeded by the MIT-Imperial fund — could help shape the way the world comes together at ‘COP26’ for the first ‘global stock-take’ since Paris in 2015, and beyond.”
Professor Mary Ryan, vice dean (research) of the faculty of engineering, and lead of Imperial’s Transition to Zero Pollution program, is also enthusiastic about the possibilities. “If we are to find meaningful solutions to climate change and build a sustainable future, we need to think about how to address pollution at its source and understand the impact of it in the whole life cycle,” says Ryan. “This seed fund will accelerate research in areas such as the way materials are used in manufacturing, how we produce food and energy, and ways to mitigate the impact of air pollution on people’s health.”
Since its launch in 2015, the MIT-Imperial Seed Fund has financed 15 early-stage projects, disbursing over $250,000 to support collaboration between MIT and Imperial faculty. The seed fund is part of a portfolio of collaborations between MIT and Imperial that are managed by the MIT-UK program at MISTI.
Other collaboration areas continue to strengthen links between students and faculty across the Atlantic, despite the pandemic. This summer’s undergraduate research exchange evolved into a virtual experience, with students in materials sciences connecting remotely with faculty at their partner institution to collaborate on Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program-style projects. Meanwhile, this year’s academic exchange has seen MIT (virtually) welcome five Imperial students this fall.
MIT electrical engineering and computer science senior Sharon Lin, who spent fall 2019 at Imperial as part of the academic exchange, is keen to point out the benefits of studying abroad at another world-class institution. “I had a transformative semester at Imperial College London. I was so inspired by the professors and students I met, who were all working on technical challenges with global impact. The breadth of opportunities for students — from hands-on work at Imperial’s cutting-edge lab spaces to travel opportunities throughout Europe — was incredible.”
The MIT-Imperial College London Seed Fund is a part of MISTI Global Seed Funds (GSF). The call for proposals is open through Dec. 14. All general GSF criteria, application, and evaluation procedures apply. More

GPS isn’t waterproof. The navigation system depends on radio waves, which break down rapidly in liquids, including seawater. To track undersea objects like drones or whales, researchers rely on acoustic signaling. But devices that generate and send sound usually require batteries — bulky, short-lived batteries that need regular changing. Could we do without them?
MIT researchers think so. They’ve built a battery-free pinpointing system dubbed Underwater Backscatter Localization (UBL). Rather than emitting its own acoustic signals, UBL reflects modulated signals from its environment. That provides researchers with positioning information, at net-zero energy. Though the technology is still developing, UBL could someday become a key tool for marine conservationists, climate scientists, and the U.S. Navy.
These advances are described in a paper being presented this week at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Hot Topics in Networks workshop, by members of the Media Lab’s Signal Kinetics group. Research Scientist Reza Ghaffarivardavagh led the paper, along with co-authors Sayed Saad Afzal, Osvy Rodriguez, and Fadel Adib, who leads the group and is the Doherty Chair of Ocean Utilization as well as an associate professor in the MIT Media Lab and the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
“Power-hungry”
It’s nearly impossible to escape GPS’ grasp on modern life. The technology, which relies on satellite-transmitted radio signals, is used in shipping, navigation, targeted advertising, and more. Since its introduction in the 1970s and ’80s, GPS has changed the world. But it hasn’t changed the ocean. If you had to hide from GPS, your best bet would be underwater.
Because radio waves quickly deteriorate as they move through water, subsea communications often depend on acoustic signals instead. Sound waves travel faster and further underwater than through air, making them an efficient way to send data. But there’s a drawback.
“Sound is power-hungry,” says Adib. For tracking devices that produce acoustic signals, “their batteries can drain very quickly.” That makes it hard to precisely track objects or animals for a long time-span — changing a battery is no simple task when it’s attached to a migrating whale. So, the team sought a battery-free way to use sound.
Good vibrations
Adib’s group turned to a unique resource they’d previously used for low-power acoustic signaling: piezoelectric materials. These materials generate their own electric charge in response to mechanical stress, like getting pinged by vibrating soundwaves. Piezoelectric sensors can then use that charge to selectively reflect some soundwaves back into their environment. A receiver translates that sequence of reflections, called backscatter, into a pattern of 1s (for soundwaves reflected) and 0s (for soundwaves not reflected). The resulting binary code can carry information about ocean temperature or salinity.
In principle, the same technology could provide location information. An observation unit could emit a soundwave, then clock how long it takes that soundwave to reflect off the piezoelectric sensor and return to the observation unit. The elapsed time could be used to calculate the distance between the observer and the piezoelectric sensor. But in practice, timing such backscatter is complicated, because the ocean can be an echo chamber.
The sound waves don’t just travel directly between the observation unit and sensor. They also careen between the surface and seabed, returning to the unit at different times. “You start running into all of these reflections,” says Adib. “That makes it complicated to compute the location.” Accounting for reflections is an even greater challenge in shallow water — the short distance between seabed and surface means the confounding rebound signals are stronger.
The researchers overcame the reflection issue with “frequency hopping.” Rather than sending acoustic signals at a single frequency, the observation unit sends a sequence of signals across a range of frequencies. Each frequency has a different wavelength, so the reflected sound waves return to the observation unit at different phases. By combining information about timing and phase, the observer can pinpoint the distance to the tracking device. Frequency hopping was successful in the researchers’ deep-water simulations, but they needed an additional safeguard to cut through the reverberating noise of shallow water.
Where echoes run rampant between the surface and seabed, the researchers had to slow the flow of information. They reduced the bitrate, essentially waiting longer between each signal sent out by the observation unit. That allowed the echoes of each bit to die down before potentially interfering with the next bit. Whereas a bitrate of 2,000 bits/second sufficed in simulations of deep water, the researchers had to dial it down to 100 bits/second in shallow water to obtain a clear signal reflection from the tracker. But a slow bitrate didn’t solve everything.
To track moving objects, the researchers actually had to boost the bitrate. One thousand bits/second was too slow to pinpoint a simulated object moving through deep water at 30 centimeters/second. “By the time you get enough information to localize the object, it has already moved from its position,” explains Afzal. At a speedy 10,000 bits/second, they were able to track the object through deep water.
Efficient exploration
Adib’s team is working to improve the UBL technology, in part by solving challenges like the conflict between low bitrate required in shallow water and the high bitrate needed to track movement. They’re working out the kinks through tests in the Charles River. “We did most of the experiments last winter,” says Rodriguez. That included some days with ice on the river. “It was not very pleasant.”
Conditions aside, the tests provided a proof-of-concept in a challenging shallow-water environment. UBL estimated the distance between a transmitter and backscatter node at various distances up to nearly half a meter. The team is working to increase UBL’s range in the field, and they hope to test the system with their collaborators at the Wood Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod.
They hope UBL can help fuel a boom in ocean exploration. Ghaffarivardavagh notes that scientists have better maps of the moon’s surface than of the ocean floor. “Why can’t we send out unmanned underwater vehicles on a mission to explore the ocean? The answer is: We will lose them,” he says.
UBL could one day help autonomous vehicles stay found underwater, without spending precious battery power. The technology could also help subsea robots work more precisely, and provide information about climate change impacts in the ocean. “There are so many applications,” says Adib. “We’re hoping to understand the ocean at scale. It’s a long-term vision, but that’s what we’re working toward and what we’re excited about.”
This work was supported, in part, by the Office of Naval Research. More

Nacre, the iridescent material that lines mollusk shells such as mother-of-pearl and abalone, has long been a prized find of beachcombers and shell collectors, due to the natural beauty and variety of color that can be found therein. But scientists and engineers have also long marveled at and studied nacre; it’s a tough and strong material, composed of alternating layers of aragonite platelets and organic protein-based film. The natural world contains many materials that have evolved over time to optimize strength, durability, and performance. As researchers and engineers look to develop improved and more sustainable building materials, they are increasingly looking to nature for inspiration.
The physical makeup of nacre allows it to withstand considerable amounts of pressure and damage along the platelets without causing major damage throughout the whole shell. It has been supposed by some that more is at play of the individual platelets that allows them such extraordinary strength and durability, but researchers have lacked the tools and processes to dig deeper into the relationship between the crystal orientation and the mechanical properties — until now.
Over the past two decades, the shells have typically been tested for their strength using techniques such as macroscopic bending test, micro-/nano-indentation, and atomic force microscope. Now, MIT assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering Admir Masic, graduate student Hyun-Chae “Chad” Loh, and five others have combined scanning electron microscopy and micro-indentation with Raman spectroscopy and developed a powerful chemo-mechanical characterization method that allows three-dimensional stress and strain mapping through a technique known as piezo-Raman.
“We developed a methodology to extract important chemo-mechanical information from a biological system that is very well known and studied,” explains Masic, whose findings were recently published in Communications Materials. “Correlating micro-indentation and piezo-Raman results allowed us to evaluate and quantify the amount of stress dissipated through the hierarchical structure.”
The new approach to quantifying the mechanical performance of the material is enough to be big news on its own, but during the process, Masic and fellow researchers — whom he credits with much of the work in this collaborative effort — were surprised by the results.
“We first applied these tools to study the strain-hardening mechanism in a few microns scale. However, we noticed that the dissipation of energy was not confined to the brick-and-mortar structure, but was affecting a much larger area than we expected. We expanded our scope of study to a larger scale and found this new toughening mechanism that is related to a mesostructure on a scale of 20 microns,” says Loh. What the researchers found is that stacks of co-oriented aragonite platelets constitute another hierarchical level of structure, which toughens the material as it is stressed.
Polarized Raman, another technique used in this study, helped the team observe what’s known as the crystallographic orientation of the aragonite bricks. Through the investigation of the orientation patterns, researchers were able to elucidate the characteristic length scale of the aragonite stacks and relate it to the crack propagation patterns. The cracks propagated between the aragonite stacks, evincing their mechanical contribution to nacre’s toughness.
“This gave us an opening for potentially explaining what is causing this toughening at the larger scales. Systematic arrangements of crystals can be found within other biomineral materials, such as our teeth, and the micro-texture of the materials directly impacts their function.” says Masic.
Mimicking natural materials like nacre has been a popular strategy for designing new materials. The small scale of their structures, however, poses a challenge for replicating and manufacturing the natural morphologies. “With our discovery, we propose a new biomimicry strategy of simulating nacre’s structure on a 10-micron or bigger scale, instead of the nano level.” says Masic.
It’s exciting news for researchers who are exploring new possibilities for synthetic materials inspired by natural design.
This research was funded, in part, by Kwanjeong Educational Foundation. More

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) is at a crossroads. Recent long-term studies of the area indicate that rising temperatures and evaporation rates will likely further deplete scarce water resources critical to meeting the nation’s agricultural, industrial, and domestic needs; more extreme flooding events could endanger lives, economic vitality, and infrastructure; and a combination of increasing heat and humidity levels may ultimately render the kingdom uninhabitable. Facing a foreboding future, how might the nation adapt to changing climatic conditions and become more resilient to climate extremes?
Due to the KSA’s distinctive natural and artificial features, from coastal landscapes to river beds to agricultural areas, decision-makers seeking to design actionable plans for regional and local adaptation and resilience will require projections of the KSA’s mean climate and extreme events at a higher spatial resolution than what previous studies have produced.     
To that end, a team of researchers from the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change and the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology’s Center for Complex Engineering Systems used a high-resolution, regional climate modeling approach to generate mid-21st century (2041–2050) projections under a high-emissions, high-climate-impact scenario. The climate projections carry an unprecedented four-kilometer horizontal resolution and cover the entire KSA, and focus exclusively on the months of August and November. During these months, which represent, respectively, the KSA’s dry-hot and wet seasons, extreme events have been observed more frequently.
Applying this modeling approach, the team projected increasing temperatures by mid-century across the KSA, including five strategic locations — the capital city of Riyadh, religious tourism destinations Makkah and Madinah, the designated future tourist site of Tabuk, and the port city of Jeddah — in both August and November, and a rising August heat index (high heat and humidity) that particularly threatens regional habitability in Jeddah due to an increasing frequency of extreme heat index days.
The researchers also found an increase in the intensity and frequency of precipitation events in August by mid-century, particularly along the nation’s mountainous western coast, suggesting a potential for water harvesting — that could replenish local aquifers and supplement water supplies elsewhere — as a regional climate adaptation strategy to avert future water scarcity. The projections also showed a significant decline in precipitation rates in a sizeable stretch of desert extending from the southern portion of the country known as the Empty Quarter. 
The study appears in the journal Atmosphere.
“The intent of our research was to highlight the potential use of our modeling approach not only to generate high-resolution climate projections that capture the effects of unique local spatial features, but also to enable local solutions for climate adaption and resilience in the region,” says Muge Komurcu, the study’s lead author and a research scientist at the MIT Joint Program.  
The study was funded by MIT and the Center for Complex Engineering Systems at the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology. More

Under its Plan for Action on Climate Change, MIT has a goal of reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by at least 32 percent below its 2014 emission levels, by 2030. Those reductions are now at 24 percent, and the Institute is track to meet or exceed the goal, said Joe Higgins, vice president for campus services and stewardship, thanks to Institute-wide efforts that benefit from connecting research and operations.
In the fifth of six symposia in the Climate Action series, held Oct. 20, an online panel of MIT experts including Higgins discussed the role of research universities in tackling climate change. Research universities like MIT provide critical technology and policy innovations, the speakers said, but can also act as role models for other institutions.
“Higher education has a responsibility, an opportunity to set their sights on being an exemplar organization and community in how to face, respond to, and address the climate change issue,” said Professor Paula Hammond, head of the Department of Chemical Engineering and a co-chair of the symposium.
The 170 acres of the MIT campus and its affiliate programs are a kind of living laboratory and testbed for climate solutions, “to demonstrate the technology and the choices that we as people make to move the campus forward,” said Krystyn Van Vliet, associate provost and professor of materials science and engineering and of biological engineering.
In one effort to connect research and operations, Higgins and his colleagues asked participants at the 2018 MIT Energy Hack to find ways of using machine learning to reduce emissions in large buildings. The MIT Sustainability DataPool, a portal of campus sustainability data open to the MIT community, is another way the Institute encourages its researchers “to use the campus as a testbed to generate game-changing solutions” to climate challenges, said Julie Newman, director of sustainability and lecturer in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning.
Having this model in place was a tremendous help when the Covid-19 pandemic created a new influx of personal protective equipment (PPE) and single-use plastic items to manage within the campus’ consumption and waste sustainability plan, said Newman, also a symposium co-chair. “When all of a sudden the challenge of Covid comes and we notice that we’re going to have to grapple with supply chain and use and disposal of PPE, it didn’t take but a couple of weeks to reach out and pull together a research team, an operations team, a finance team, and say let’s study this in MIT style.”
Research universities must be a source of innovations to address global climate change, said Associate Provost Richard Lester, “because our existing government-led innovation system is falling short, even relative to the inadequate benchmarks set by governments themselves.”
Among the efforts to encourage these innovations is MIT Climate Grand Challenges, a program launched in July 2020 that encourages all MIT researchers to develop and implement climate mitigation and adaptation solutions. The program already has received more than 100 letters of interest from more 300 faculty and senior researchers, Lester said.
Technological breakthroughs are still needed urgently to stop the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, despite the talk among some experts that the technological solutions are already available, said Maria Zuber, MIT vice president for research and the E.A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics.
“I wish these individuals who think we have the technology were right. But they’re not. We do not currently have the technology we need to rapidly and adequately make the needed energy transition,” Zuber said. “This is why our work at MIT matters so much.”
Climate solutions must include more than just advanced science and technology capabilities, said Melissa Nobles, the Kenan Sahin Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, and professor of political science. At MIT, she notes, classes on the ethics of climate change, the J-PAL King Climate Action Initiative, and Charlotte Brathwaite’s “Bee Boy” theater project are some examples of how the social sciences and arts can be brought to bear on climate issues.
“As I see it, the more that research institutions can invent practical ways for these various forms of knowledge to intersect, blend, and become mutually informing, the more quickly we can generate effective climate solutions,” Nobles said.
At the same time, universities should remember that climate change policy is only one of several issues, including global health, poverty, and racism, “which deserve and command our attention,” said Institute Professor Emeritus John Deutch. He also sounded a note of caution about how universities should engage in policy discussions. “They cannot speak out with one voice, or should do so very rarely,” he said, because members of the university community often hold diverse opinions and points of view.
The final symposium in the series, “What is the World Waiting For? Policies to Fight Climate Change” will take place online Nov. 16. More

We have all faced new and greater challenges this year. The Covid-19 pandemic has spared no country, family, or individual, but it has not impacted us all equally. It is those most disadvantaged and most underserved who have been hit the hardest. The team at MIT Solve felt an immediate responsibility to use its work and privilege to take action in this historic moment, to mobilize its community to address the problems aggravated by the pandemic. The Solve Global Challenges that had launched in February 2020 suddenly became all the more pressing. And, for the first time in its history, Solve launched a rapid-response Challenge on Health Security and Pandemics on March 5. 
Then, something amazing happened: Solve received over 2,600 solutions from 135 countries — an 86 percent increase in applications year-over-year. It is no coincidence that, in this year of great upheaval and disruption, problem-solvers around the world leaped to the call. It tells an inspiring and hopeful story about our ability as human beings to see an opportunity, and fix challenges.
Solve Challenge Finals was a celebration of that spirit. Of all those submissions, the Solve team showcased the solutions that its judges selected as the most promising, inventive, and impactful from all around the world. While it’s hard to beat the energy that comes from meeting in person, one silver lining of coming together virtually was that all of the finalists were able to attend without the extra stress of visas, plane tickets, and jet lag. 
Some 90 finalists from across the world spoke on solutions like Biometrics for Vaccine Delivery, which uses contactless biometrics to ensure vaccines reach every intended beneficiary at the frontline in Africa and Asia; ShockTalk, a telebehavioral app for Indigenous users, made more crucial by the rise of mental health struggles in the pandemic; and The Last Mile, which provides in-prison tech education and post-incarceration mentorship to combat the problem of recidivism in the U.S. Ultimately, Solve’s expert judges selected 35 new Solver teams — including Yiya AirScience, co-founded by Erin Fitzgerald ’09, which provides rural African girls access to interactive learning experiences through simple keypad phones — and eight new Indigenous Communities Fellows.
Sal Khan ’98, MNG ’98, who has singularly shaped remote learning, joined the proceedings from the very closet where he founded Khan Academy. Speaking with NPR’s Anya Kamanetz, he shared insights from his own entrepreneurial journey and advised aspiring innovators that one secret to success is “to always have a side project.” After all, Khan Academy first started out as Khan’s post-work passion project.
One of the Indigenous Communities finalists stressed the importance of community in powering innovation: “It takes a community, it takes a community, it takes a community! It is necessary for our people and for our earth to be able to connect together. It starts in this kind of competition — to be able to look each other in the eye and say let’s go. And how far can we go? Endless possibilities!” This was the energizing message of Tiana Henderson, founder of Hale Unfolded.
Two speakers spoke to the cultural moment we are in today. Phillip Atiba Goff, co-founder and CEO of the Center for Policing Equity, emphasized that in order to truly solve a problem, we must first correctly diagnose it. He shared this crucial message when discussing the Breonna Taylor tragedy, and how racism in policing is just one symptom of broader racism in society. Goff called on finalists to dig deeply into the issues they are trying to solve. He remarked: “As technologists and problem-solvers, if we fail to diagnose the problem correctly, we will build a suite of tech toys instead of tools. If we get the diagnosis wrong, the set of solutions we build will be entirely unable to speak to the scale of the problem. In the context of policing, if we don’t recognize that it is part of a broader issue and not the issue itself, we are going to be creating tools that are too small to make a difference.”
Artist and gender liberation activist Madame Gandhi delivered two powerful musical performances and a message of defiance: “I don’t want our identity to be defined by how oppressed we are.” She called for more voices like hers in the music industry. With only 2 percent of music producers identifying as women, the narrative in too much of the music we consume is still perpetuating myths that hold us back. “I — like many of you — am here to design and provide the alternative.”  
Speakers including Harry Moseley, Global CIO of Zoom, also discussed the pivot to remote work and schooling resulting from this pandemic, and how to  find opportunities for greater inclusion as we reshape the status quo we’ve taken for granted for so long.
MIT Solve will work closely with its newly selected Solver teams to scale their work and impact across all of the 2020 Challenges. More