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Building for Ukraine: A hackathon with a mission

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“No cash prizes. But our friends in Kiev are calling in, and they’ll probably say thanks,”​ was the the tagline that drew students and tech professionals to join MIT-Ukraine’s first-ever hackathon this past January.The hackathon was co-sponsored by MIT-Ukraine and Mission Innovation X and was shaped by the efforts of MIT alumni from across the world. It was led by Hosea Siu ’14, SM ’15, PhD ’18, a seasoned hackathon organizer and AI researcher, in collaboration with Phil Tinn MCP ’16, a research engineer now based at SINTEF [Foundation for Industrial and Technical Research] in Norway. The program was designed to prioritize tangible impact: “In a typical hackathon, you might get a weekend of sleepless nights and some flashy but mostly useless prototypes. Here, we stretched it out over four weeks, and we’re expecting real, meaningful outcomes,”​ says Siu, the hackathon director.One week of training, three weeks of project developmentIn the first week, participants attended lectures with leading experts on key challenges Ukraine currently faces, from a talk on mine contamination with Andrew Heafitz PhD ’05 to a briefing on disinformation with Nina Lutz SM ’21. Then, participants formed teams to develop projects addressing these challenges, with mentorship from top MIT specialists including Phil Tinn (AI & defense), Svetlana Boriskina (energy resilience), and Gene Keselman (defense innovation and dual-use technology).“I really liked the solid structure they gave us — walking us through exactly what’s happening in Ukraine, and potential solutions,”​ says Timur Gray, a first-year in engineering at Olin College.The five final projects spanned demining, drone technology, AI and disinformation, education for Ukraine, and energy resilience. Supporting demining effortsWith current levels of technology, it is estimated that it will take 757 years to fully de-mine Ukraine. Students Timur Gray and Misha Donchenko, who is a sophomore mathematics major at MIT, came together to research the latest developments in demining technology and strategize how students could most effectively support innovations.The team has made connections with the Ukrainian Association of Humanitarian Demining and the HALO Trust to explore opportunities for MIT students to directly support demining efforts in Ukraine. They also explored project ideas to work on tools for civilians to report on mine locations, and the team created a demo web page рішучість757, which includes an interactive database mapping mine locations.“Being able to apply my skills to something that has a real-world impact — that’s been the best part of this hackathon,” says Donchenko.Innovating drone productionDrone technology has been one of Ukraine’s most critical advantages on the battlefield — but government bureaucracy threatens to slow innovation, according to Oleh Deineka, who made this challenge the focus of his hackathon project. Joining remotely from Ukraine, where he studies post-war recovery at the Kyiv School of Economics, Deineka brought invaluable firsthand insight from living and working on the ground, enriching the experience for all participants. Prior to the hackathon, he had already begun developing UxS.AGENCY, a secure digital platform to connect drone developers with independent funders, with the aim of ensuring that the speed of innovations in drone technology is not curbed. He notes that Ukrainian arms manufacturers have the capacity to produce three times more weapons and military equipment than the Ukrainian government can afford to purchase. Promoting private sector development of drone production could help solve this. The platform Deineka is working on also aims to reduce the risk of corruption, allowing developers to work directly with funders, bypassing any bureaucratic interference.Deineka is also working with MIT’s Keselman, who gave a talk during the hackathon on dual-use technology — the idea that military innovations should also have civilian applications. Deineka emphasized that developing such dual-use technology in Ukraine could help not only to win the war, but also to create sustainable civilian applications, ensuring that Ukraine’s 10,000 trained drone operators have jobs after it ends. He pointed to future applications such as drone-based urban infrastructure monitoring, precision agriculture, and even personal security — like a small drone following a child with asthma, allowing parents to monitor their well-being in real time​.“This hackathon has connected me with MIT’s top minds in innovation and security. Being invited to collaborate with Gene Keselman and others has been an incredible opportunity,” says Deineka.Disinformation dynamics on WikipediaWikipedia has long been a battleground for Russian disinformation, from the profiling of artists like Kazimir Malevich to the framing of historical events. The hackathon’s disinformation team worked together on a machine learning-based tool to detect biased edits. They found that Wikipedia’s moderation system is susceptible to reinforcing systemic bias, particularly when it comes to history. Their project laid the groundwork for a potential student-led initiative to track disinformation, propose corrections, and develop tools to improve fact-checking on Wikipedia.Education for Ukraine’s futureRussia’s war against Ukraine is having a detrimental impact on education, with constant air raid sirens disrupting classes, and over 2,000 Ukrainian schools damaged or destroyed. The STEM education team focused on what they could do to support Ukrainian students. They developed a plan for adapting MIT’s Beaver Works Summer Institute in STEM for students still living in Ukraine, or potentially for Ukrainians currently displaced to neighboring countries. “I didn’t realize how many schools had been destroyed and how deeply that could impact kids’ futures. You hear about the war, but the hackathon made it real in a way I hadn’t thought about before,” says Catherine Tang, a senior in electrical engineering and computer science.Vlad Duda, founder of Nomad AI, also contributed to the education track of the hackathon with a focus on language accessibility and learning support. One of the prototypes he presented, MOVA, is a Chrome extension that uses AI to translate online resources into Ukrainian — an especially valuable tool for high school students in Ukraine, who often lack the English proficiency needed to engage with complex academic content. Duda also developed OpenBookLM, an AI-powered tool that helps students turn notes into audio and personalized study guides, similar in concept to Google’s NotebookLM but designed to be open-source and adaptable to different languages and educational contexts.Energy resilience The energy resilience team worked on exploring cheaper, more reliable heating and cooling technologies so Ukrainian homes can be less dependent on traditional energy grids that are susceptible to Russian attacks.The team tested polymer filaments that generate heat when stretched and cool when released, which could potentially offer low-cost, durable home heating solutions in Ukraine. Their work focused on finding the most effective braid structure to enhance durability and efficiency.From hackathon to realityUnlike most hackathons, where projects end when the event does, MIT-Ukraine’s goal is to ensure these ideas don’t stop here. All the projects developed during the hackathon will be considered as potential avenues for MIT’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) and MISTI Ukraine summer internship programs. Last year, 15 students worked on UROP and MISTI projects for Ukraine, contributing in areas such as STEM education and reconstruction in Ukraine. With the many ideas generated during the hackathon, MIT-Ukraine is committed to expanding opportunities for student-led projects and collaborations in the coming year.”The MIT-Ukraine program is about learning by doing, and making an impact beyond MIT’s campus. This hackathon proved that students, researchers, and professionals can work together to develop solutions that matter — and Ukraine’s urgent challenges demand nothing less,” says Elizabeth Wood, Ford International Professor of History at MIT and the faculty director of the MIT-Ukraine Program at the Center for International Studies.  More

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    Building for Ukraine: A hackathon with a mission

    “No cash prizes. But our friends in Kiev are calling in, and they’ll probably say thanks,”​ was the the tagline that drew students and tech professionals to join MIT-Ukraine’s first-ever hackathon this past January.The hackathon was co-sponsored by MIT-Ukraine and Mission Innovation X and was shaped by the efforts of MIT alumni from across the world. It was led by Hosea Siu ’14, SM ’15, PhD ’18, a seasoned hackathon organizer and AI researcher, in collaboration with Phil Tinn MCP ’16, a research engineer now based at SINTEF [Foundation for Industrial and Technical Research] in Norway. The program was designed to prioritize tangible impact: “In a typical hackathon, you might get a weekend of sleepless nights and some flashy but mostly useless prototypes. Here, we stretched it out over four weeks, and we’re expecting real, meaningful outcomes,”​ says Siu, the hackathon director.One week of training, three weeks of project developmentIn the first week, participants attended lectures with leading experts on key challenges Ukraine currently faces, from a talk on mine contamination with Andrew Heafitz PhD ’05 to a briefing on disinformation with Nina Lutz SM ’21. Then, participants formed teams to develop projects addressing these challenges, with mentorship from top MIT specialists including Phil Tinn (AI & defense), Svetlana Boriskina (energy resilience), and Gene Keselman (defense innovation and dual-use technology).“I really liked the solid structure they gave us — walking us through exactly what’s happening in Ukraine, and potential solutions,”​ says Timur Gray, a first-year in engineering at Olin College.The five final projects spanned demining, drone technology, AI and disinformation, education for Ukraine, and energy resilience. Supporting demining effortsWith current levels of technology, it is estimated that it will take 757 years to fully de-mine Ukraine. Students Timur Gray and Misha Donchenko, who is a sophomore mathematics major at MIT, came together to research the latest developments in demining technology and strategize how students could most effectively support innovations.The team has made connections with the Ukrainian Association of Humanitarian Demining and the HALO Trust to explore opportunities for MIT students to directly support demining efforts in Ukraine. They also explored project ideas to work on tools for civilians to report on mine locations, and the team created a demo web page рішучість757, which includes an interactive database mapping mine locations.“Being able to apply my skills to something that has a real-world impact — that’s been the best part of this hackathon,” says Donchenko.Innovating drone productionDrone technology has been one of Ukraine’s most critical advantages on the battlefield — but government bureaucracy threatens to slow innovation, according to Oleh Deineka, who made this challenge the focus of his hackathon project. Joining remotely from Ukraine, where he studies post-war recovery at the Kyiv School of Economics, Deineka brought invaluable firsthand insight from living and working on the ground, enriching the experience for all participants. Prior to the hackathon, he had already begun developing UxS.AGENCY, a secure digital platform to connect drone developers with independent funders, with the aim of ensuring that the speed of innovations in drone technology is not curbed. He notes that Ukrainian arms manufacturers have the capacity to produce three times more weapons and military equipment than the Ukrainian government can afford to purchase. Promoting private sector development of drone production could help solve this. The platform Deineka is working on also aims to reduce the risk of corruption, allowing developers to work directly with funders, bypassing any bureaucratic interference.Deineka is also working with MIT’s Keselman, who gave a talk during the hackathon on dual-use technology — the idea that military innovations should also have civilian applications. Deineka emphasized that developing such dual-use technology in Ukraine could help not only to win the war, but also to create sustainable civilian applications, ensuring that Ukraine’s 10,000 trained drone operators have jobs after it ends. He pointed to future applications such as drone-based urban infrastructure monitoring, precision agriculture, and even personal security — like a small drone following a child with asthma, allowing parents to monitor their well-being in real time​.“This hackathon has connected me with MIT’s top minds in innovation and security. Being invited to collaborate with Gene Keselman and others has been an incredible opportunity,” says Deineka.Disinformation dynamics on WikipediaWikipedia has long been a battleground for Russian disinformation, from the profiling of artists like Kazimir Malevich to the framing of historical events. The hackathon’s disinformation team worked together on a machine learning-based tool to detect biased edits. They found that Wikipedia’s moderation system is susceptible to reinforcing systemic bias, particularly when it comes to history. Their project laid the groundwork for a potential student-led initiative to track disinformation, propose corrections, and develop tools to improve fact-checking on Wikipedia.Education for Ukraine’s futureRussia’s war against Ukraine is having a detrimental impact on education, with constant air raid sirens disrupting classes, and over 2,000 Ukrainian schools damaged or destroyed. The STEM education team focused on what they could do to support Ukrainian students. They developed a plan for adapting MIT’s Beaver Works Summer Institute in STEM for students still living in Ukraine, or potentially for Ukrainians currently displaced to neighboring countries. “I didn’t realize how many schools had been destroyed and how deeply that could impact kids’ futures. You hear about the war, but the hackathon made it real in a way I hadn’t thought about before,” says Catherine Tang, a senior in electrical engineering and computer science.Vlad Duda, founder of Nomad AI, also contributed to the education track of the hackathon with a focus on language accessibility and learning support. One of the prototypes he presented, MOVA, is a Chrome extension that uses AI to translate online resources into Ukrainian — an especially valuable tool for high school students in Ukraine, who often lack the English proficiency needed to engage with complex academic content. Duda also developed OpenBookLM, an AI-powered tool that helps students turn notes into audio and personalized study guides, similar in concept to Google’s NotebookLM but designed to be open-source and adaptable to different languages and educational contexts.Energy resilience The energy resilience team worked on exploring cheaper, more reliable heating and cooling technologies so Ukrainian homes can be less dependent on traditional energy grids that are susceptible to Russian attacks.The team tested polymer filaments that generate heat when stretched and cool when released, which could potentially offer low-cost, durable home heating solutions in Ukraine. Their work focused on finding the most effective braid structure to enhance durability and efficiency.From hackathon to realityUnlike most hackathons, where projects end when the event does, MIT-Ukraine’s goal is to ensure these ideas don’t stop here. All the projects developed during the hackathon will be considered as potential avenues for MIT’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) and MISTI Ukraine summer internship programs. Last year, 15 students worked on UROP and MISTI projects for Ukraine, contributing in areas such as STEM education and reconstruction in Ukraine. With the many ideas generated during the hackathon, MIT-Ukraine is committed to expanding opportunities for student-led projects and collaborations in the coming year.”The MIT-Ukraine program is about learning by doing, and making an impact beyond MIT’s campus. This hackathon proved that students, researchers, and professionals can work together to develop solutions that matter — and Ukraine’s urgent challenges demand nothing less,” says Elizabeth Wood, Ford International Professor of History at MIT and the faculty director of the MIT-Ukraine Program at the Center for International Studies.  More

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    Using liquid air for grid-scale energy storage

    As the world moves to reduce carbon emissions, solar and wind power will play an increasing role on electricity grids. But those renewable sources only generate electricity when it’s sunny or windy. So to ensure a reliable power grid — one that can deliver electricity 24/7 — it’s crucial to have a means of storing electricity when supplies are abundant and delivering it later, when they’re not. And sometimes large amounts of electricity will need to be stored not just for hours, but for days, or even longer.Some methods of achieving “long-duration energy storage” are promising. For example, with pumped hydro energy storage, water is pumped from a lake to another, higher lake when there’s extra electricity and released back down through power-generating turbines when more electricity is needed. But that approach is limited by geography, and most potential sites in the United States have already been used. Lithium-ion batteries could provide grid-scale storage, but only for about four hours. Longer than that and battery systems get prohibitively expensive.A team of researchers from MIT and the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) has been investigating a less-familiar option based on an unlikely-sounding concept: liquid air, or air that is drawn in from the surroundings, cleaned and dried, and then cooled to the point that it liquefies. “Liquid air energy storage” (LAES) systems have been built, so the technology is technically feasible. Moreover, LAES systems are totally clean and can be sited nearly anywhere, storing vast amounts of electricity for days or longer and delivering it when it’s needed. But there haven’t been conclusive studies of its economic viability. Would the income over time warrant the initial investment and ongoing costs? With funding from the MIT Energy Initiative’s Future Energy Systems Center, the researchers developed a model that takes detailed information on LAES systems and calculates when and where those systems would be economically viable, assuming future scenarios in line with selected decarbonization targets as well as other conditions that may prevail on future energy grids.They found that under some of the scenarios they modeled, LAES could be economically viable in certain locations. Sensitivity analyses showed that policies providing a subsidy on capital expenses could make LAES systems economically viable in many locations. Further calculations showed that the cost of storing a given amount of electricity with LAES would be lower than with more familiar systems such as pumped hydro and lithium-ion batteries. They conclude that LAES holds promise as a means of providing critically needed long-duration storage when future power grids are decarbonized and dominated by intermittent renewable sources of electricity.The researchers — Shaylin A. Cetegen, a PhD candidate in the MIT Department of Chemical Engineering (ChemE); Professor Emeritus Truls Gundersen of the NTNU Department of Energy and Process Engineering; and MIT Professor Emeritus Paul I. Barton of ChemE — describe their model and their findings in a new paper published in the journal Energy.The LAES technology and its benefitsLAES systems consists of three steps: charging, storing, and discharging. When supply on the grid exceeds demand and prices are low, the LAES system is charged. Air is then drawn in and liquefied. A large amount of electricity is consumed to cool and liquefy the air in the LAES process. The liquid air is then sent to highly insulated storage tanks, where it’s held at a very low temperature and atmospheric pressure. When the power grid needs added electricity to meet demand, the liquid air is first pumped to a higher pressure and then heated, and it turns back into a gas. This high-pressure, high-temperature, vapor-phase air expands in a turbine that generates electricity to be sent back to the grid.According to Cetegen, a primary advantage of LAES is that it’s clean. “There are no contaminants involved,” she says. “It takes in and releases only ambient air and electricity, so it’s as clean as the electricity that’s used to run it.” In addition, a LAES system can be built largely from commercially available components and does not rely on expensive or rare materials. And the system can be sited almost anywhere, including near other industrial processes that produce waste heat or cold that can be used by the LAES system to increase its energy efficiency.Economic viabilityIn considering the potential role of LAES on future power grids, the first question is: Will LAES systems be attractive to investors? Answering that question requires calculating the technology’s net present value (NPV), which represents the sum of all discounted cash flows — including revenues, capital expenditures, operating costs, and other financial factors — over the project’s lifetime. (The study assumed a cash flow discount rate of 7 percent.)To calculate the NPV, the researchers needed to determine how LAES systems will perform in future energy markets. In those markets, various sources of electricity are brought online to meet the current demand, typically following a process called “economic dispatch:” The lowest-cost source that’s available is always deployed next. Determining the NPV of liquid air storage therefore requires predicting how that technology will fare in future markets competing with other sources of electricity when demand exceeds supply — and also accounting for prices when supply exceeds demand, so excess electricity is available to recharge the LAES systems.For their study, the MIT and NTNU researchers designed a model that starts with a description of an LAES system, including details such as the sizes of the units where the air is liquefied and the power is recovered, and also capital expenses based on estimates reported in the literature. The model then draws on state-of-the-art pricing data that’s released every year by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and is widely used by energy modelers worldwide. The NREL dataset forecasts prices, construction and retirement of specific types of electricity generation and storage facilities, and more, assuming eight decarbonization scenarios for 18 regions of the United States out to 2050.The new model then tracks buying and selling in energy markets for every hour of every day in a year, repeating the same schedule for five-year intervals. Based on the NREL dataset and details of the LAES system — plus constraints such as the system’s physical storage capacity and how often it can switch between charging and discharging — the model calculates how much money LAES operators would make selling power to the grid when it’s needed and how much they would spend buying electricity when it’s available to recharge their LAES system. In line with the NREL dataset, the model generates results for 18 U.S. regions and eight decarbonization scenarios, including 100 percent decarbonization by 2035 and 95 percent decarbonization by 2050, and other assumptions about future energy grids, including high-demand growth plus high and low costs for renewable energy and for natural gas.Cetegen describes some of their results: “Assuming a 100-megawatt (MW) system — a standard sort of size — we saw economic viability pop up under the decarbonization scenario calling for 100 percent decarbonization by 2035.” So, positive NPVs (indicating economic viability) occurred only under the most aggressive — therefore the least realistic — scenario, and they occurred in only a few southern states, including Texas and Florida, likely because of how those energy markets are structured and operate.The researchers also tested the sensitivity of NPVs to different storage capacities, that is, how long the system could continuously deliver power to the grid. They calculated the NPVs of a 100 MW system that could provide electricity supply for one day, one week, and one month. “That analysis showed that under aggressive decarbonization, weekly storage is more economically viable than monthly storage, because [in the latter case] we’re paying for more storage capacity than we need,” explains Cetegen.Improving the NPV of the LAES systemThe researchers next analyzed two possible ways to improve the NPV of liquid air storage: by increasing the system’s energy efficiency and by providing financial incentives. Their analyses showed that increasing the energy efficiency, even up to the theoretical limit of the process, would not change the economic viability of LAES under the most realistic decarbonization scenarios. On the other hand, a major improvement resulted when they assumed policies providing subsidies on capital expenditures on new installations. Indeed, assuming subsidies of between 40 percent and 60 percent made the NPVs for a 100 MW system become positive under all the realistic scenarios.Thus, their analysis showed that financial incentives could be far more effective than technical improvements in making LAES economically viable. While engineers may find that outcome disappointing, Cetegen notes that from a broader perspective, it’s good news. “You could spend your whole life trying to optimize the efficiency of this process, and it wouldn’t translate to securing the investment needed to scale the technology,” she says. “Policies can take a long time to implement as well. But theoretically you could do it overnight. So if storage is needed [on a future decarbonized grid], then this is one way to encourage adoption of LAES right away.”Cost comparison with other energy storage technologiesCalculating the economic viability of a storage technology is highly dependent on the assumptions used. As a result, a different measure — the “levelized cost of storage” (LCOS) — is typically used to compare the costs of different storage technologies. In simple terms, the LCOS is the cost of storing each unit of energy over the lifetime of a project, not accounting for any income that results.On that measure, the LAES technology excels. The researchers’ model yielded an LCOS for liquid air storage of about $60 per megawatt-hour, regardless of the decarbonization scenario. That LCOS is about a third that of lithium-ion battery storage and half that of pumped hydro. Cetegen cites another interesting finding: the LCOS of their assumed LAES system varied depending on where it’s being used. The standard practice of reporting a single LCOS for a given energy storage technology may not provide the full picture.Cetegen has adapted the model and is now calculating the NPV and LCOS for energy storage using lithium-ion batteries. But she’s already encouraged by the LCOS of liquid air storage. “While LAES systems may not be economically viable from an investment perspective today, that doesn’t mean they won’t be implemented in the future,” she concludes. “With limited options for grid-scale storage expansion and the growing need for storage technologies to ensure energy security, if we can’t find economically viable alternatives, we’ll likely have to turn to least-cost solutions to meet storage needs. This is why the story of liquid air storage is far from over. We believe our findings justify the continued exploration of LAES as a key energy storage solution for the future.” More

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    Enabling energy innovation at scale

    Enabling and sustaining a clean energy transition depends not only on groundbreaking technology to redefine the world’s energy systems, but also on that innovation happening at scale. As a part of an ongoing speaker series, the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) hosted Emily Knight, the president and CEO of The Engine, a nonprofit incubator and accelerator dedicated to nurturing technology solutions to the world’s most urgent challenges. She explained how her organization is bridging the gap between research breakthroughs and scalable commercial impact.“Our mission from the very beginning was to support and accelerate what we call ‘tough tech’ companies — [companies] who had this vision to solve some of the world’s biggest problems,” Knight said.The Engine, a spinout of MIT, coined the term “tough tech” to represent not only the durability of the technology, but also the complexity and scale of the problems it will solve. “We are an incubator and accelerator focused on building a platform and creating what I believe is an open community for people who want to build tough tech, who want to fund tough tech, who want to work in a tough tech company, and ultimately be a part of this community,” said Knight.According to Knight, The Engine creates “an innovation orchard” where early-stage research teams have access to the infrastructure and resources needed to take their ideas from lab to market while maximizing impact. “We use this pathway — from idea to investment, then investment to impact — in a lot of the work that we do,” explained Knight.She said that tough tech exists at the intersection of several risk factors: technology, market and customer, regulatory, and scaling. Knight highlighted MIT spinout Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) — one of many MIT spinouts within The Engine’s ecosystem that focus on energy — as an example of how The Engine encourages teams to work through these risks.In the early days, the CFS team was told to assume their novel fusion technology would work. “If you’re only ever worried that your technology won’t work, you won’t pick your head up and have the right people on your team who are building the public affairs relationships so that, when you need it, you can get your first fusion reactor sited and done,” explained Knight. “You don’t know where to go for the next round of funding, and you don’t know who in government is going to be your advocates when you need them to be.”“I think [CFS’s] eighth employee was a public affairs person,” Knight said. With the significant regulatory, scaling, and customer risks associated with fusion energy, building their team wisely was essential. Bringing on a public affairs person helped CFS build awareness and excitement around fusion energy in the local community and build the community programs necessary for grant funding.The Engine’s growing ecosystem of entrepreneurs, researchers, institutions, and government agencies is a key component of the support offered to early-stage researchers. The ecosystem creates a space for sharing knowledge and resources, which Knight believes is critical for navigating the unique challenges associated with Tough Tech.This support can be especially important for new entrepreneurs: “This leader that is going from PhD student to CEO — that is a really, really big journey that happens the minute you get funding,” said Knight. “Knowing that you’re in a community of people who are on that same journey is really important.”The Engine also extends this support to the broader community through educational programs that walk participants through the process of translating their research from lab to market. Knight highlighted two climate and energy startups that joined The Engine through one such program geared toward graduate students and postdocs: Lithios, which is producing sustainable, low-cost lithium, and Lydian, which is developing sustainable aviation fuels.The Engine also offers access to capital from investors with an intimate understanding of tough tech ventures. She said that government agency partners can offer additional support through public funding opportunities and highlighted that grants from the U.S. Department of Energy were key in the early funding of another MIT spinout within their ecosystem, Sublime Systems.In response to the current political shift away from climate investments, as well as uncertainty surrounding government funding, Knight believes that the connections within their ecosystem are more important than ever as startups explore alternative funding. “We’re out there thinking about funding mechanisms that could be more reliable. That’s our role as an incubator.”Being able to convene the right people to address a problem is something that Knight attributes to her education at Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration. “My ethos across all of this is about service,” stated Knight. “We’re constantly evolving our resources and how we help our teams based on the gaps they’re facing.”MITEI Presents: Advancing the Energy Transition is an MIT Energy Initiative speaker series highlighting energy experts and leaders at the forefront of the scientific, technological, and policy solutions needed to transform our energy systems. The next seminar in this series will be April 30 with Manish Bapna, president and CEO of the Natural Resources Defense Council. Visit MITEI’s Events page for more information on this and additional events. More

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    Taking the “training wheels” off clean energy

    Renewable power sources have seen unprecedented levels of investment in recent years. But with political uncertainty clouding the future of subsidies for green energy, these technologies must begin to compete with fossil fuels on equal footing, said participants at the 2025 MIT Energy Conference.“What these technologies need less is training wheels, and more of a level playing field,” said Brian Deese, an MIT Institute Innovation Fellow, during a conference-opening keynote panel.The theme of the two-day conference, which is organized each year by MIT students, was “Breakthrough to deployment: Driving climate innovation to market.” Speakers largely expressed optimism about advancements in green technology, balanced by occasional notes of alarm about a rapidly changing regulatory and political environment.Deese defined what he called “the good, the bad, and the ugly” of the current energy landscape. The good: Clean energy investment in the United States hit an all-time high of $272 billion in 2024. The bad: Announcements of future investments have tailed off. And the ugly: Macro conditions are making it more difficult for utilities and private enterprise to build out the clean energy infrastructure needed to meet growing energy demands.“We need to build massive amounts of energy capacity in the United States,” Deese said. “And the three things that are the most allergic to building are high uncertainty, high interest rates, and high tariff rates. So that’s kind of ugly. But the question … is how, and in what ways, that underlying commercial momentum can drive through this period of uncertainty.”A shifting clean energy landscapeDuring a panel on artificial intelligence and growth in electricity demand, speakers said that the technology may serve as a catalyst for green energy breakthroughs, in addition to putting strain on existing infrastructure. “Google is committed to building digital infrastructure responsibly, and part of that means catalyzing the development of clean energy infrastructure that is not only meeting the AI need, but also benefiting the grid as a whole,” said Lucia Tian, head of clean energy and decarbonization technologies at Google.Across the two days, speakers emphasized that the cost-per-unit and scalability of clean energy technologies will ultimately determine their fate. But they also acknowledged the impact of public policy, as well as the need for government investment to tackle large-scale issues like grid modernization.Vanessa Chan, a former U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) official and current vice dean of innovation and entrepreneurship at the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, warned of the “knock-on” effects of the move to slash National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding for indirect research costs, for example. “In reality, what you’re doing is undercutting every single academic institution that does research across the nation,” she said.During a panel titled “No clean energy transition without transmission,” Maria Robinson, former director of the DoE’s Grid Deployment Office, said that ratepayers alone will likely not be able to fund the grid upgrades needed to meet growing power demand. “The amount of investment we’re going to need over the next couple of years is going to be significant,” she said. “That’s where the federal government is going to have to play a role.”David Cohen-Tanugi, a clean energy venture builder at MIT, noted that extreme weather events have changed the climate change conversation in recent years. “There was a narrative 10 years ago that said … if we start talking about resilience and adaptation to climate change, we’re kind of throwing in the towel or giving up,” he said. “I’ve noticed a very big shift in the investor narrative, the startup narrative, and more generally, the public consciousness. There’s a realization that the effects of climate change are already upon us.”“Everything on the table”The conference featured panels and keynote addresses on a range of emerging clean energy technologies, including hydrogen power, geothermal energy, and nuclear fusion, as well as a session on carbon capture.Alex Creely, a chief engineer at Commonwealth Fusion Systems, explained that fusion (the combining of small atoms into larger atoms, which is the same process that fuels stars) is safer and potentially more economical than traditional nuclear power. Fusion facilities, he said, can be powered down instantaneously, and companies like his are developing new, less-expensive magnet technology to contain the extreme heat produced by fusion reactors.By the early 2030s, Creely said, his company hopes to be operating 400-megawatt power plants that use only 50 kilograms of fuel per year. “If you can get fusion working, it turns energy into a manufacturing product, not a natural resource,” he said.Quinn Woodard Jr., senior director of power generation and surface facilities at geothermal energy supplier Fervo Energy, said his company is making the geothermal energy more economical through standardization, innovation, and economies of scale. Traditionally, he said, drilling is the largest cost in producing geothermal power. Fervo has “completely flipped the cost structure” with advances in drilling, Woodard said, and now the company is focused on bringing down its power plant costs.“We have to continuously be focused on cost, and achieving that is paramount for the success of the geothermal industry,” he said.One common theme across the conference: a number of approaches are making rapid advancements, but experts aren’t sure when — or, in some cases, if — each specific technology will reach a tipping point where it is capable of transforming energy markets.“I don’t want to get caught in a place where we often descend in this climate solution situation, where it’s either-or,” said Peter Ellis, global director of nature climate solutions at The Nature Conservancy. “We’re talking about the greatest challenge civilization has ever faced. We need everything on the table.”The road aheadSeveral speakers stressed the need for academia, industry, and government to collaborate in pursuit of climate and energy goals. Amy Luers, senior global director of sustainability for Microsoft, compared the challenge to the Apollo spaceflight program, and she said that academic institutions need to focus more on how to scale and spur investments in green energy.“The challenge is that academic institutions are not currently set up to be able to learn the how, in driving both bottom-up and top-down shifts over time,” Luers said. “If the world is going to succeed in our road to net zero, the mindset of academia needs to shift. And fortunately, it’s starting to.”During a panel called “From lab to grid: Scaling first-of-a-kind energy technologies,” Hannan Happi, CEO of renewable energy company Exowatt, stressed that electricity is ultimately a commodity. “Electrons are all the same,” he said. “The only thing [customers] care about with regards to electrons is that they are available when they need them, and that they’re very cheap.”Melissa Zhang, principal at Azimuth Capital Management, noted that energy infrastructure development cycles typically take at least five to 10 years — longer than a U.S. political cycle. However, she warned that green energy technologies are unlikely to receive significant support at the federal level in the near future. “If you’re in something that’s a little too dependent on subsidies … there is reason to be concerned over this administration,” she said.World Energy CEO Gene Gebolys, the moderator of the lab-to-grid panel, listed off a number of companies founded at MIT. “They all have one thing in common,” he said. “They all went from somebody’s idea, to a lab, to proof-of-concept, to scale. It’s not like any of this stuff ever ends. It’s an ongoing process.” More

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    Surprise discovery could lead to improved catalysts for industrial reactions

    The process of catalysis — in which a material speeds up a chemical reaction — is crucial to the production of many of the chemicals used in our everyday lives. But even though these catalytic processes are widespread, researchers often lack a clear understanding of exactly how they work.A new analysis by researchers at MIT has shown that an important industrial synthesis process, the production of vinyl acetate, requires a catalyst to take two different forms, which cycle back and forth from one to the other as the chemical process unfolds.Previously, it had been thought that only one of the two forms was needed. The new findings are published today in the journal Science, in a paper by MIT graduate students Deiaa Harraz and Kunal Lodaya, Bryan Tang PhD ’23, and MIT professor of chemistry and chemical engineering Yogesh Surendranath.There are two broad classes of catalysts: homogeneous catalysts, which consist of dissolved molecules, and heterogeneous catalysts, which are solid materials whose surface provides the site for the chemical reaction. “For the longest time,” Surendranath says, “there’s been a general view that you either have catalysis happening on these surfaces, or you have them happening on these soluble molecules.” But the new research shows that in the case of vinyl acetate — an important material that goes into many polymer products such as the rubber in the soles of your shoes — there is an interplay between both classes of catalysis.“What we discovered,” Surendranath explains, “is that you actually have these solid metal materials converting into molecules, and then converting back into materials, in a cyclic dance.”He adds: “This work calls into question this paradigm where there’s either one flavor of catalysis or another. Really, there could be an interplay between both of them in certain cases, and that could be really advantageous for having a process that’s selective and efficient.”The synthesis of vinyl acetate has been a large-scale industrial reaction since the 1960s, and it has been well-researched and refined over the years to improve efficiency. This has happened largely through a trial-and-error approach, without a precise understanding of the underlying mechanisms, the researchers say.While chemists are often more familiar with homogeneous catalysis mechanisms, and chemical engineers are often more familiar with surface catalysis mechanisms, fewer researchers study both. This is perhaps part of the reason that the full complexity of this reaction was not previously captured. But Harraz says he and his colleagues are working at the interface between disciplines. “We’ve been able to appreciate both sides of this reaction and find that both types of catalysis are critical,” he says.The reaction that produces vinyl acetate requires something to activate the oxygen molecules that are one of the constituents of the reaction, and something else to activate the other ingredients, acetic acid and ethylene. The researchers found that the form of the catalyst that worked best for one part of the process was not the best for the other. It turns out that the molecular form of the catalyst does the key chemistry with the ethylene and the acetic acid, while it’s the surface that ends up doing the activation of the oxygen.They found that the underlying process involved in interconverting the two forms of the catalyst is actually corrosion, similar to the process of rusting. “It turns out that in rusting, you actually go through a soluble molecular species somewhere in the sequence,” Surendranath says.The team borrowed techniques traditionally used in corrosion research to study the process. They used electrochemical tools to study the reaction, even though the overall reaction does not require a supply of electricity. By making potential measurements, the researchers determined that the corrosion of the palladium catalyst material to soluble palladium ions is driven by an electrochemical reaction with the oxygen, converting it to water. Corrosion is “one of the oldest topics in electrochemistry,” says Lodaya, “but applying the science of corrosion to understand catalysis is much newer, and was essential to our findings.”By correlating measurements of catalyst corrosion with other measurements of the chemical reaction taking place, the researchers proposed that it was the corrosion rate that was limiting the overall reaction. “That’s the choke point that’s controlling the rate of the overall process,” Surendranath says.The interplay between the two types of catalysis works efficiently and selectively “because it actually uses the synergy of a material surface doing what it’s good at and a molecule doing what it’s good at,” Surendranath says. The finding suggests that, when designing new catalysts, rather than focusing on either solid materials or soluble molecules alone, researchers should think about how the interplay of both may open up new approaches.“Now, with an improved understanding of what makes this catalyst so effective, you can try to design specific materials or specific interfaces that promote the desired chemistry,” Harraz says. Since this process has been worked on for so long, these findings may not necessarily lead to improvements in this specific process of making vinyl acetate, but it does provide a better understanding of why the materials work as they do, and could lead to improvements in other catalytic processes.Understanding that “catalysts can transit between molecule and material and back, and the role that electrochemistry plays in those transformations, is a concept that we are really excited to expand on,” Lodaya says.Harraz adds: “With this new understanding that both types of catalysis could play a role, what other catalytic processes are out there that actually involve both? Maybe those have a lot of room for improvement that could benefit from this understanding.”This work is “illuminating, something that will be worth teaching at the undergraduate level,” says Christophe Coperet, a professor of inorganic chemistry at ETH Zurich, who was not associated with the research. “The work highlights new ways of thinking. … [It] is notable in the sense that it not only reconciles homogeneous and heterogeneous catalysis, but it describes these complex processes as half reactions, where electron transfers can cycle between distinct entities.”The research was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation as a Phase I Center for Chemical Innovation; the Center for Interfacial Ionics; and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. More

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    Collaboration between MIT and GE Vernova aims to develop and scale sustainable energy systems

    MIT and GE Vernova today announced the creation of the MIT-GE Vernova Energy and Climate Alliance to help develop and scale sustainable energy systems across the globe.The alliance launches a five-year collaboration between MIT and GE Vernova, a global energy company that spun off from General Electric’s energy business in 2024. The endeavor will encompass research, education, and career opportunities for students, faculty, and staff across MIT’s five schools and the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing. It will focus on three main themes: decarbonization, electrification, and renewables acceleration.“This alliance will provide MIT students and researchers with a tremendous opportunity to work on energy solutions that could have real-world impact,” says Anantha Chandrakasan, MIT’s chief innovation and strategy officer and dean of the School of Engineering. “GE Vernova brings domain knowledge and expertise deploying these at scale. When our researchers develop new innovative technologies, GE Vernova is strongly positioned to bring them to global markets.”Through the alliance, GE Vernova is sponsoring research projects at MIT and providing philanthropic support for MIT research fellowships. The company will also engage with MIT’s community through participation in corporate membership programs and professional education.“It’s a privilege to combine forces with MIT’s world-class faculty and students as we work together to realize an optimistic, innovation-driven approach to solving the world’s most pressing challenges,” says Scott Strazik, GE Vernova CEO. “Through this alliance, we are proud to be able to help drive new technologies while at the same time inspire future leaders to play a meaningful role in deploying technology to improve the planet at companies like GE Vernova.”“This alliance embodies the spirit of the MIT Climate Project — combining cutting-edge research, a shared drive to tackle today’s toughest energy challenges, and a deep sense of optimism about what we can achieve together,” says Sally Kornbluth, president of MIT. “With the combined strengths of MIT and GE Vernova, we have a unique opportunity to make transformative progress in the flagship areas of electrification, decarbonization, and renewables acceleration.”The alliance, comprising a $50 million commitment, will operate within MIT’s Office of Innovation and Strategy. It will fund approximately 12 annual research projects relating to the three themes, as well as three master’s student projects in MIT’s Technology and Policy Program. The research projects will address challenges like developing and storing clean energy, as well as the creation of robust system architectures that help sustainable energy sources like solar, wind, advanced nuclear reactors, green hydrogen, and more compete with carbon-emitting sources.The projects will be selected by a joint steering committee composed of representatives from MIT and GE Vernova, following an annual Institute-wide call for proposals.The collaboration will also create approximately eight endowed GE Vernova research fellowships for MIT students, to be selected by faculty and beginning in the fall. There will also be 10 student internships that will span GE Vernova’s global operations, and GE Vernova will also sponsor programming through MIT’s New Engineering Education Transformation (NEET), which equips students with career-oriented experiential opportunities. Additionally, the alliance will create professional education programming for GE Vernova employees.“The internships and fellowships will be designed to bring students into our ecosystem,” says GE Vernova Chief Corporate Affairs Officer Roger Martella. “Students will walk our factory floor, come to our labs, be a part of our management teams, and see how we operate as business leaders. They’ll get a sense for how what they’re learning in the classroom is being applied in the real world.”Philanthropic support from GE Vernova will also support projects in MIT’s Human Insight Collaborative (MITHIC), which launched last fall to elevate human-centered research and teaching. The projects will allow faculty to explore how areas like energy and cybersecurity influence human behavior and experiences.In connection with the alliance, GE Vernova is expected to join several MIT consortia and membership programs, helping foster collaborations and dialogue between industry experts and researchers and educators across campus.With operations across more than 100 countries, GE Vernova designs, manufactures, and services technologies to generate, transfer, and store electricity with a mission to decarbonize the world. The company is headquartered in Kendall Square, right down the road from MIT, which its leaders say is not a coincidence.“We’re really good at taking proven technologies and commercializing them and scaling them up through our labs,” Martella says. “MIT excels at coming up with those ideas and being a sort of time machine that thinks outside the box to create the future. That’s why this such a great fit: We both have a commitment to research, innovation, and technology.”The alliance is the latest in MIT’s rapidly growing portfolio of research and innovation initiatives around sustainable energy systems, which also includes the Climate Project at MIT. Separate from, but complementary to, the MIT-GE Vernova Alliance, the Climate Project is a campus-wide effort to develop technological, behavioral, and policy solutions to some of the toughest problems impeding an effective global climate response. More

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    Making solar projects cheaper and faster with portable factories

    As the price of solar panels has plummeted in recent decades, installation costs have taken up a greater share of the technology’s overall price tag. The long installation process for solar farms is also emerging as a key bottleneck in the deployment of solar energy.Now the startup Charge Robotics is developing solar installation factories to speed up the process of building large-scale solar farms. The company’s factories are shipped to the site of utility solar projects, where equipment including tracks, mounting brackets, and panels are fed into the system and automatically assembled. A robotic vehicle autonomously puts the finished product — which amounts to a completed section of solar farm — in its final place.“We think of this as the Henry Ford moment for solar,” says CEO Banks Hunter ’15, who founded Charge Robotics with fellow MIT alumnus Max Justicz ’17. “We’re going from a very bespoke, hands on, manual installation process to something much more streamlined and set up for mass manufacturing. There are all kinds of benefits that come along with that, including consistency, quality, speed, cost, and safety.”Last year, solar energy accounted for 81 percent of new electric capacity in the U.S., and Hunter and Justicz see their factories as necessary for continued acceleration in the industry.The founders say they were met with skepticism when they first unveiled their plans. But in the beginning of last year, they deployed a prototype system that successfully built a solar farm with SOLV Energy, one of the largest solar installers in the U.S. Now, Charge has raised $22 million for its first commercial deployments later this year.From surgical robots to solar robotsWhile majoring in mechanical engineering at MIT, Hunter found plenty of excuses to build things. One such excuse was Course 2.009 (Product Engineering Processes), where he and his classmates built a smart watch for communication in remote areas.After graduation, Hunter worked for the MIT alumni-founded startups Shaper Tools and Vicarious Surgical. Vicarious Surgical is a medical robotics company that has raised more than $450 million to date. Hunter was the second employee and worked there for five years.“A lot of really hands on, project-based classes at MIT translated directly into my first roles coming out of school and set me up to be very independent and run large engineering projects,” Hunter says, “Course 2.009, in particular, was a big launch point for me. The founders of Vicarious Surgical got in touch with me through the 2.009 network.”As early as 2017, Hunter and Justicz, who majored in mechanical engineering and computer science, had discussed starting a company together. But they had to decide where to apply their broad engineering and product skillsets.“Both of us care a lot about climate change. We see climate change as the biggest problem impacting the greatest number of people on the planet,” Hunter says. “Our mentality was if we can build anything, we might as well build something that really matters.”In the process of cold calling hundreds of people in the energy industry, the founders decided solar was the future of energy production because its price was decreasing so quickly.“It’s becoming cheaper faster than any other form of energy production in human history,” Hunter says.When the founders began visiting construction sites for the large, utility-scale solar farms that make up the bulk of energy generation, it wasn’t hard to find the bottlenecks. The first site they traveled to was in the Mojave Desert in California. Hunter describes it as a massive dust bowl where thousands of workers spent months repeating tasks like moving material and assembling the same parts, over and over again.“The site had something like 2 million panels on it, and every single one was assembled and fastened the same way by hand,” Hunter says. “Max and I thought it was insane. There’s no way that can scale to transform the energy grid in a short window of time.”Hunter says he heard from each of the largest solar companies in the U.S. that their biggest limitation for scaling was labor shortages. The problem was slowing growth and killing projects.Hunter and Justicz founded Charge Robotics in 2021 to break through that bottleneck. Their first step was to order utility solar parts and assemble them by hand in their backyards.“From there, we came up with this portable assembly line that we could ship out to construction sites and then feed in the entire solar system, including the steel tracks, mounting brackets, fasteners, and the solar panels,” Hunter explains. “The assembly line robotically assembles all those pieces to produce completed solar bays, which are chunks of a solar farm.”

    Charge Robotics’ machine transports an autonomously assembled portion of solar farm to its final place in a solar farm.

    Credit: Courtesy of Charge Robotics

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    Each bay represents a 40-foot piece of the solar farm and weighs about 800 pounds. A robotic vehicle brings it to its final location in the field. Hunter says Charge’s system automates all mechanical installation except for the process of pile driving the first metal stakes into the ground.Charge’s assembly lines also have machine-vision systems that scan each part to ensure quality, and the systems work with the most common solar parts and panel sizes.From pilot to productWhen the founders started pitching their plans to investors and construction companies, people didn’t believe it was possible.“The initial feedback was basically, ‘This will never work,’” Hunter says. “But as soon as we took our first system out into the field and people saw it operating, they got much more excited and started believing it was real.”Since that first deployment, Charge’s team has been making its system faster and easier to operate. The company plans to set up its factories at project sites and run them in partnership with solar construction companies. The factories could even run alongside human workers.“With our system, people are operating robotic equipment remotely rather than putting in the screws themselves,” Hunter explains. “We can essentially deliver the assembled solar to customers. Their only responsibility is to deliver the materials and parts on big pallets that we feed into our system.”Hunter says multiple factories could be deployed at the same site and could also operate 24/7 to dramatically speed up projects.“We are hitting the limits of solar growth because these companies don’t have enough people,” Hunter says. “We can build much bigger sites much faster with the same number of people by just shipping out more of our factories. It’s a fundamentally new way of scaling solar energy.” More

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    Developing materials for stellar performance in fusion power plants

    When Zoe Fisher was in fourth grade, her art teacher asked her to draw her vision of a dream job on paper. At the time, those goals changed like the flavor of the week in an ice cream shop — “zookeeper” featured prominently for a while — but Zoe immediately knew what she wanted to put down: a mad scientist.When Fisher stumbled upon the drawing in her parents’ Chicago home recently, it felt serendipitous because, by all measures, she has realized that childhood dream. The second-year doctoral student at MIT’s Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE) is studying materials for fusion power plants at the Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) under the advisement of Michael Short, associate professor at NSE. Dennis Whyte, Hitachi America Professor of Engineering at NSE, serves as co-advisor.On track to an MIT educationGrowing up in Chicago, Fisher had heard her parents remarking on her reasoning abilities. When she was barely a preschooler she argued that she couldn’t have been found in a purple speckled egg, as her parents claimed they had done.Fisher didn’t put together just how much she had gravitated toward science until a high school physics teacher encouraged her to apply to MIT. Passionate about both the arts and sciences, she initially worried that pursuing science would be very rigid, without room for creativity. But she knows now that exploring solutions to problems requires plenty of creative thinking.It was a visit to MIT through the Weekend Immersion in Science and Engineering (WISE) that truly opened her eyes to the potential of an MIT education. “It just seemed like the undergraduate experience here is where you can be very unapologetically yourself. There’s no fronting something you don’t want to be like. There’s so much authenticity compared to most other colleges I looked at,” Fisher says. Once admitted, Campus Preview Weekend confirmed that she belonged. “We got to be silly and weird — a version of the Mafia game was a hit — and I was like, ‘These are my people,’” Fisher laughs.Pursuing fusion at NSEBefore she officially started as a first-year in 2018, Fisher enrolled in the Freshman Pre-Orientation Program (FPOP), which starts a week before orientation starts. Each FPOP zooms into one field. “I’d applied to the nuclear one simply because it sounded cool and I didn’t know anything about it,” Fisher says. She was intrigued right away. “They really got me with that ‘star in a bottle’ line,” she laughs. (The quest for commercial fusion is to create the energy equivalent of a star in a bottle). Excited by a talk by Zachary Hartwig, Robert N. Noyce Career Development Professor at NSE, Fisher asked if she could work on fusion as an undergraduate as part of an Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) project. She started with modeling solders for power plants and was hooked. When Fisher requested more experimental work, Hartwig put her in touch with Research Scientist David Fischer at the Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC). Fisher eventually moved on to explore superconductors, which eventually morphed into research for her master’s thesis.For her doctoral research, Fisher is extending her master’s work to explore defects in ceramics, specifically in alumina (aluminum oxide). Sapphire coatings are the single-crystal equivalent of alumina, an insulator being explored for use in fusion power plants. “I eventually want to figure out what types of charge defects form in ceramics during radiation damage so we can ultimately engineer radiation-resistant sapphire,” Fisher says.When you introduce a material in a fusion power plant, stray high-energy neutrons born from the plasma can collide and fundamentally reorder the lattice, which is likely to change a range of thermal, electrical, and structural properties. “Think of a scaffolding outside a building, with each one of those joints as a different atom that holds your material in place. If you go in and you pull a joint out, there’s a chance that you pulled out a joint that wasn’t structurally sound, in which case everything would be fine. But there’s also a chance that you pull a joint out and everything alters. And [such unpredictability] is a problem,” Fisher says. “We need to be able to account for exactly how these neutrons are going to alter the lattice property,” Fisher says, and it’s one of the topics her research explores.The studies, in turn, can function as a jumping-off point for irradiating superconductors. The goals are two-fold: “I want to figure out how I can make an industry-usable ceramic you can use to insulate the inside of a fusion power plant, and then also figure out if I can take this information that I’m getting with ceramics and make it superconductor-relevant,” Fisher says. “Superconductors are the electromagnets we will use to contain the plasma inside fusion power plants. However, they prove pretty difficult to study. Since they are also ceramic, you can draw a lot of parallels between alumina and yttrium barium copper oxide (YBCO), the specific superconductor we use,” she adds. Fisher is also excited about the many experiments she performs using a particle accelerator, one of which involves measuring exactly how surface thermal properties change during radiation.Sailing new pathsIt’s not just her research that Fisher loves. As an undergrad, and during her master’s, she was on the varsity sailing team. “I worked my way into sailing with literal Olympians, I did not see that coming,” she says. Fisher participates in Chicago’s Race to Mackinac and the Melges 15 Series every chance she gets. Of all the types of boats she has sailed, she prefers dinghy sailing the most. “It’s more physical, you have to throw yourself around a lot and there’s this immediate cause and effect, which I like,” Fisher says. She also teaches sailing lessons in the summer at MIT’s Sailing Pavilion — you can find her on a small motorboat, issuing orders through a speaker.Teaching has figured prominently throughout Fisher’s time at MIT. Through MISTI, Fisher has taught high school classes in Germany and a radiation and materials class in Armenia in her senior year. She was delighted by the food and culture in Armenia and by how excited people were to learn new ideas. Her love of teaching continues, as she has reached out to high schools in the Boston area. “I like talking to groups and getting them excited about fusion, or even maybe just the concept of attending graduate school,” Fisher says, adding that teaching the ropes of an experiment one-on-one is “one of the most rewarding things.”She also learned the value of resilience and quick thinking on various other MISTI trips. Despite her love of travel, Fisher has had a few harrowing experiences with tough situations and plans falling through at the last minute. It’s when she tells herself, “Well, the only thing that you’re gonna do is you’re gonna keep doing what you wanted to do.”That eyes-on-the-prize focus has stood Fisher in good stead, and continues to serve her well in her research today. More