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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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      Making solar projects cheaper and faster with portable factories

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      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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      in Security

      Rohit Karnik named director of J-WAFS

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      Rohit Karnik, the Tata Professor in the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering, has been named the new director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS), effective March 1. Karnik, who has served as associate director of J-WAFS since 2023, succeeds founding director John H. Lienhard V, Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Water and Mechanical Engineering.Karnik assumes the role of director at a pivotal time for J-WAFS, as it celebrates its 10th anniversary. Announcing the appointment today in a letter to the J-WAFS research community, Vice President for Research Ian A. Waitz noted Karnik’s deep involvement with the lab’s research efforts and programming, as well as his accolades as a researcher, teacher, leader, and mentor. “I am delighted that Rohit will bring his talent and vision to bear on the J-WAFS mission, ensuring the program sustains its direct support of research on campus and its important impact around the world,” Waitz wrote.J-WAFS is the only program at MIT focused exclusively on water and food research. Since 2015, the lab has made grants totaling approximately $25M to researchers across the Institute, including from all five schools and 40 departments, labs, and centers. It has supported 300 faculty, research staff, and students combined. Furthermore, the J-WAFS Solutions Program, which supports efforts to commercialize innovative water and food technologies, has spun out 12 companies and two open-sourced products. “We launched J-WAFS with the aim of building a community of water and food researchers at MIT, taking advantage of MIT’s strengths in so many disciplines that contribute to these most essential human needs,” writes Lienhard, who will retire this June. “After a decade’s work, that community is strong and visible. I am delighted that Rohit has agreed to take the reins. He will bring the program to the next level.” Lienhard has served as director since founding J-WAFS in 2014, along with executive director Renee J. Robins ’83, who last fall shared her intent to retire as well. “It’s a big change for a program to turn over both the director and executive director roles at the same time,” says Robins. “Having worked alongside Rohit as our associate director for the past couple of years, I am greatly assured that J-WAFS will be in good hands with a new and steady leadership team.”Karnik became associate director of J-WAFS in July 2023, a move that coincided with the start of a sabbatical for Lienhard. Before that time, Karnik was already well engaged with J-WAFS as a grant recipient, reviewer, and community member. As associate director, Rohit has been integral to J-WAFS operations, planning, and grant management, including the proposal selection process. He was instrumental in planning the second J-WAFS Grand Challenge grant and led workshops at which researchers brainstormed proposal topics and formed teams. Karnik also engaged with J-WAFS’ corporate partners, helped plan lectures and events, and offered project oversight. “The experience gave me broad exposure to the amazing ideas and research at MIT in the water and food space, and the collaborations and synergies across departments and schools that enable excellence in research,” says Karnik. “The strengths of J-WAFS lie in being able to support principal investigators in pursuing research to address humanity’s water and food needs; in creating a community of students though the fellowship program and support of student clubs; and in bringing people together at seminars, workshops, and other events. All of this is made possible by the endowment and a dedicated team with close involvement in the projects after the grants are awarded.”J-WAFS was established through a generous gift from Community Jameel, an independent, global organization advancing science to help communities thrive in a rapidly changing world. The lab was named in honor of the late Abdul Latif Jameel, the founder of the Abdul Latif Jameel company and father of MIT alumnus Mohammed Jameel ’78, who founded and chairs Community Jameel. J-WAFS’ operations are carried out by a small but passionate team of people at MIT who are dedicated to the mission of securing water and food systems. That mission is more important than ever, as climate change, urbanization, and a growing global population are putting tremendous stress on the world’s water and food supplies. These challenges drive J-WAFS’ efforts to mobilize the research, innovation, and technology that can sustainably secure humankind’s most vital resources. As director, Karnik will help shape the research agenda and key priorities for J-WAFS and usher the program into its second decade.Karnik originally joined MIT as a postdoc in the departments of Mechanical and Chemical Engineering in October 2006. In September 2007, he became an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, before being promoted to associate professor in 2012. His research group focuses on the physics of micro- and nanofluidic flows and applying that to the design of micro- and nanofluidic systems for applications in water, healthcare, energy, and the environment. Past projects include ones on membranes for water filtration and chemical separations, sensors for water, and water filters from waste wood. Karnik has served as associate department head and interim co-department head in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. He also serves as faculty director of the New Engineering Education Transformation (NEET) program in the School of Engineering.Before coming to MIT, Karnik received a bachelor’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay, and a master’s and PhD from the University of California at Berkeley, all in mechanical engineering. He has authored numerous publications, is co-inventor on several patents, and has received awards and honors including the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the U.S. Department of Energy Early Career Award, the MIT Office of Graduate Education’s Committed to Caring award, and election to the National Academy of Inventors as a senior member. Lienhard, J-WAFS’ outgoing director, has served on the MIT faculty since 1988. His research and educational efforts have focused on heat and mass transfer, water purification and desalination, thermodynamics, and separation processes. Lienhard has directly supervised more than 90 PhD and master’s theses, and he is the author of over 300 peer-reviewed papers and three textbooks. He holds more than 40 U.S. patents, most commercialized through startup companies with his students. One of these, the water treatment company Gradiant Corporation, is now valued over $1 billion and employs more than 1,200 people. Lienhard has received many awards, including the 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award of the International Desalination and Reuse Association.Since 1998, Renee Robins has worked on the conception, launch, and development of a number of large interdisciplinary, international, and partnership-based research and education collaborations at MIT and elsewhere. She served in roles for the Cambridge MIT Institute, the MIT Portugal Program, the Mexico City Program, the Program on Emerging Technologies, and the Technology and Policy Program. She holds two undergraduate degrees from MIT, in biology and humanities/anthropology, and a master’s degree in public policy from Carnegie Mellon University. She has overseen significant growth in J-WAFS’ activities, funding, staffing, and collaborations over the past decade. In 2021, she was awarded an Infinite Mile Award in the area of the Offices of the Provost and Vice President for Research, in recognition of her contributions within her role at J-WAFS to help the Institute carry out its mission.“John and Renee have done a remarkable job in establishing J-WAFS and bringing it up to its present form,” says Karnik. “I’m committed to making sure that the key aspects of J-WAFS that bring so much value to the MIT community, the nation, and the world continue to function well. MIT researchers and alumni in the J-WAFS community are already having an impact on addressing humanity’s water and food needs, and I believe that there is potential for MIT to have an even greater positive impact on securing humanity’s vital resources in the future.” More

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      in Energy

      Creating smart buildings with privacy-first sensors

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      Gaining a better understanding of how people move through the spaces where they live and work could make those spaces safer and more sustainable. But no one wants cameras watching them 24/7.Two former Media Lab researchers think they have a solution. Their company, Butlr, offers places like skilled nursing facilities, offices, and senior living communities a way to understand how people are using buildings without compromising privacy. Butlr uses low-resolution thermal sensors and an analytics platform to help detect falls in elderly populations, save energy, and optimize spaces for work.“We have this vision of using the right technology to understand people’s movements and behaviors in space,” says Jiani Zeng SM ’20, who co-founded Butlr with former Media Lab research affiliate Honghao Deng. “So many resources today go toward cameras and AI that take away people’s privacy. We believe we can make our environments safer, healthier, and more sustainable without violating privacy.”To date, the company has sold more than 20,000 of its privacy-preserving sensors to senior living and skilled nursing facilities as well as businesses with large building footprints, including Verizon, Netflix, and Microsoft. In the future, Butlr hopes to enable more dynamic spaces that can understand and respond to the ways people use them.“Space should be like a digital user interface: It should be multi-use and responsive to your needs,” Deng says. “If the office has a big room with people working individually, it should automatically separate into smaller rooms, or lights and temperature should be adjusted to save energy.”Building intelligence, with privacyAs an undergraduate at Tianjin University in China, Deng joined the Media Lab’s City Science Group as a visiting student in 2016. He went on to complete his master’s at Harvard University, but he returned to the Media Lab as a research affiliate and led projects around what he calls responsive architecture: spaces that can understand their users’ needs through non-camera sensors.“My vision of the future of building environments emerged from the Media Lab,” Deng says. “The real world is the largest user interface around us — it’s not the screens. We all live in a three-dimensional world and yet, unlike the digital world, this user interface doesn’t yet understand our needs, let alone the critical situations when someone falls in a room. That could be life-saving.”Zeng came to MIT as a master’s student in the Integrated Design and Management program, which was run jointly out of the MIT Sloan School of Management and the School of Engineering. She also worked as a research assistant at the Media Lab and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL).The pair met during a hackathon at the Media Lab and continued collaborating on various projects. During that time, they worked with MIT’s Venture Mentoring Service (VMS) and the MIT I-Corps Program. When they graduated in 2019, they decided to start a company based on the idea of creating smart buildings with privacy-preserving sensors. Crucial early funding came from the Media Lab-affiliated E14 Fund.“I tell every single MIT founder they should have the E14 Fund in their cap table,” Deng says. “They understand what it takes to go from an MIT student to a founder, and to transition from the ‘scientist brain’ to the ‘inventor brain.’ We wouldn’t be where we are today without MIT.”Ray Stata ’57, SM ’58, the founder of Analog Devices, is also an investor in Butlr and serves as Butlr’s board director.“We would love to give back to the MIT community once we become successful entrepreneurs like Ray, whose advice and mentoring has been invaluable,” Deng says.After launching, the founders had to find the right early customers for their real-time sensors, which can discern rough body shapes but no personally identifiable information. They interviewed hundreds of people before starting with owners of office spaces.“People have zero baseline data on what’s happening in their workplace,” Deng says. “That’s especially true since the Covid-19 pandemic made people hybrid, which has opened huge opportunities to cut the energy use of large office spaces. Sometimes, the only people in these buildings are the receptionist and the cleaner.”Butlr’s multiyear, battery-powered sensors can track daily occupancy in each room and give other insights into space utilization that can be used to reduce energy use. For companies with a lot of office space, the opportunities are immense. One Butlr customer has 40 building leases. Deng says optimizing the HVAC controls based on usage could amount to millions of dollars saved.“We can be like the Google Analytics for these spaces without any concerns in terms of privacy,” Deng says.The founders also knew the problem went well beyond office spaces.“In skilled nursing facilities, instead of office spaces it’s individual rooms, all with people who may need the nurse’s help,” Deng says. “But the nurses have no visibility into what’s happening unless they physically enter the room.”Acute care environments and senior living facilities are another key market for Butlr. The company’s platform can detect falls and instances when someone isn’t getting out of bed to alert staff. The system integrates with nurse calling systems to alert staff when something is wrong.The “nerve cells” of the buildingButlr is continuing to develop analytics that give important insights into spaces. For instance, today the platform can use information around movement in elderly populations to help detect problems like urinary tract infections. Butlr also recently started a collaboration with Harvard Medical School’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Artificial Intelligence and Technology Center for Connected Care in Aging and Alzheimer’s Disease. Through the project, Butlr will try to detect changes in movement that could indicate declining cognitive or physical abilities. Those insights could be used to provide aging patients with more supervision.“In the near term we are preventing falls, but the vision is when you look up in any buildings or homes, you’ll see Butlr,” Deng says. “This could allow older adults to age in place with dignity and privacy.”More broadly, Butlr’s founders see their work as an important way to shape the future of AI technology, which is expected to be a growing part of everyone’s lives.“We’re the nerve cells in the building, not the eyes,” Deng says. “That’s the future of AI we believe in: AI that can transform regular rooms into spaces that understand people and can use that understanding to do everything from making efficiency improvements to saving lives in senior care communities. That’s the right way to use this powerful technology.” More

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      in Energy

      Puzzling out climate change

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      Shreyaa Raghavan’s journey into solving some of the world’s toughest challenges started with a simple love for puzzles. By high school, her knack for problem-solving naturally drew her to computer science. Through her participation in an entrepreneurship and leadership program, she built apps and twice made it to the semifinals of the program’s global competition.Her early successes made a computer science career seem like an obvious choice, but Raghavan says a significant competing interest left her torn.“Computer science sparks that puzzle-, problem-solving part of my brain,” says Raghavan ’24, an Accenture Fellow and a PhD candidate in MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society. “But while I always felt like building mobile apps was a fun little hobby, it didn’t feel like I was directly solving societal challenges.”Her perspective shifted when, as an MIT undergraduate, Raghavan participated in an Undergraduate Research Opportunity in the Photovoltaic Research Laboratory, now known as the Accelerated Materials Laboratory for Sustainability. There, she discovered how computational techniques like machine learning could optimize materials for solar panels — a direct application of her skills toward mitigating climate change.“This lab had a very diverse group of people, some from a computer science background, some from a chemistry background, some who were hardcore engineers. All of them were communicating effectively and working toward one unified goal — building better renewable energy systems,” Raghavan says. “It opened my eyes to the fact that I could use very technical tools that I enjoy building and find fulfillment in that by helping solve major climate challenges.”With her sights set on applying machine learning and optimization to energy and climate, Raghavan joined Cathy Wu’s lab when she started her PhD in 2023. The lab focuses on building more sustainable transportation systems, a field that resonated with Raghavan due to its universal impact and its outsized role in climate change — transportation accounts for roughly 30 percent of greenhouse gas emissions.“If we were to throw all of the intelligent systems we are exploring into the transportation networks, by how much could we reduce emissions?” she asks, summarizing a core question of her research.Wu, an associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, stresses the value of Raghavan’s work.“Transportation is a critical element of both the economy and climate change, so potential changes to transportation must be carefully studied,” Wu says. “Shreyaa’s research into smart congestion management is important because it takes a data-driven approach to add rigor to the broader research supporting sustainability.”Raghavan’s contributions have been recognized with the Accenture Fellowship, a cornerstone of the MIT-Accenture Convergence Initiative for Industry and Technology. As an Accenture Fellow, she is exploring the potential impact of technologies for avoiding stop-and-go traffic and its emissions, using systems such as networked autonomous vehicles and digital speed limits that vary according to traffic conditions — solutions that could advance decarbonization in the transportation section at relatively low cost and in the near term.Raghavan says she appreciates the Accenture Fellowship not only for the support it provides, but also because it demonstrates industry involvement in sustainable transportation solutions.“It’s important for the field of transportation, and also energy and climate as a whole, to synergize with all of the different stakeholders,” she says. “I think it’s important for industry to be involved in this issue of incorporating smarter transportation systems to decarbonize transportation.”Raghavan has also received a fellowship supporting her research from the U.S. Department of Transportation.“I think it’s really exciting that there’s interest from the policy side with the Department of Transportation and from the industry side with Accenture,” she says.Raghavan believes that addressing climate change requires collaboration across disciplines. “I think with climate change, no one industry or field is going to solve it on its own. It’s really got to be each field stepping up and trying to make a difference,” she says. “I don’t think there’s any silver-bullet solution to this problem. It’s going to take many different solutions from different people, different angles, different disciplines.”With that in mind, Raghavan has been very active in the MIT Energy and Climate Club since joining about three years ago, which, she says, “was a really cool way to meet lots of people who were working toward the same goal, the same climate goals, the same passions, but from completely different angles.”This year, Raghavan is on the community and education team, which works to build the community at MIT that is working on climate and energy issues. As part of that work, Raghavan is launching a mentorship program for undergraduates, pairing them with graduate students who help the undergrads develop ideas about how they can work on climate using their unique expertise.“I didn’t foresee myself using my computer science skills in energy and climate,” Raghavan says, “so I really want to give other students a clear pathway, or a clear sense of how they can get involved.”Raghavan has embraced her area of study even in terms of where she likes to think.“I love working on trains, on buses, on airplanes,” she says. “It’s really fun to be in transit and working on transportation problems.”Anticipating a trip to New York to visit a cousin, she holds no dread for the long train trip.“I know I’m going to do some of my best work during those hours,” she says. “Four hours there. Four hours back.” More

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      in Energy

      MIT spinout Gradiant reduces companies’ water use and waste by billions of gallons each day

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      When it comes to water use, most of us think of the water we drink. But industrial uses for things like manufacturing account for billions of gallons of water each day. For instance, making a single iPhone, by one estimate, requires more than 3,000 gallons.Gradiant is working to reduce the world’s industrial water footprint. Founded by a team from MIT, Gradiant offers water recycling, treatment, and purification solutions to some of the largest companies on Earth, including Coca Cola, Tesla, and the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. By serving as an end-to-end water company, Gradiant says it helps companies reuse 2 billion gallons of water each day and saves another 2 billion gallons of fresh water from being withdrawn.The company’s mission is to preserve water for generations to come in the face of rising global demand.“We work on both ends of the water spectrum,” Gradiant co-founder and CEO Anurag Bajpayee SM ’08, PhD ’12 says. “We work with ultracontaminated water, and we can also provide ultrapure water for use in areas like chip fabrication. Our specialty is in the extreme water challenges that can’t be solved with traditional technologies.”For each customer, Gradiant builds tailored water treatment solutions that combine chemical treatments with membrane filtration and biological process technologies, leveraging a portfolio of patents to drastically cut water usage and waste.“Before Gradiant, 40 million liters of water would be used in the chip-making process. It would all be contaminated and treated, and maybe 30 percent would be reused,” explains Gradiant co-founder and COO Prakash Govindan PhD ’12. “We have the technology to recycle, in some cases, 99 percent of the water. Now, instead of consuming 40 million liters, chipmakers only need to consume 400,000 liters, which is a huge shift in the water footprint of that industry. And this is not just with semiconductors. We’ve done this in food and beverage, we’ve done this in renewable energy, we’ve done this in pharmaceutical drug production, and several other areas.”Learning the value of waterGovindan grew up in a part of India that experienced a years-long drought beginning when he was 10. Without tap water, one of Govindan’s chores was to haul water up the stairs of his apartment complex each time a truck delivered it.“However much water my brother and I could carry was how much we had for the week,” Govindan recalls. “I learned the value of water the hard way.”Govindan attended the Indian Institute of Technology as an undergraduate, and when he came to MIT for his PhD, he sought out the groups working on water challenges. He began working on a water treatment method called carrier gas extraction for his PhD under Gradiant co-founder and MIT Professor John Lienhard.Bajpayee also worked on water treatment methods at MIT, and after brief stints as postdocs at MIT, he and Govindan licensed their work and founded Gradiant.Carrier gas extraction became Gradiant’s first proprietary technology when the company launched in 2013. The founders began by treating wastewater created by oil and gas wells, landing their first partner in a Texas company. But Gradiant gradually expanded to solving water challenges in power generation, mining, textiles, and refineries. Then the founders noticed opportunities in industries like electronics, semiconductors, food and beverage, and pharmaceuticals. Today, oil and gas wastewater treatment makes up a small percentage of Gradiant’s work.As the company expanded, it added technologies to its portfolio, patenting new water treatment methods around reverse osmosis, selective contaminant extraction, and free radical oxidation. Gradiant has also created a digital system that uses AI to measure, predict, and control water treatment facilities.“The advantage Gradiant has over every other water company is that R&D is in our DNA,” Govindan says, noting Gradiant has a world-class research lab at its headquarters in Boston. “At MIT, we learned how to do cutting-edge technology development, and we never let go of that.”The founders compare their suite of technologies to LEGO bricks they can mix and match depending on a customer’s water needs. Gradiant has built more than 2,500 of these end-to-end systems for customers around the world.“Our customers aren’t water companies; they are industrial clients like semiconductor manufacturers, drug companies, and food and beverage companies,” Bajpayee says. “They aren’t about to start operating a water treatment plant. They look at us as their water partner who can take care of the whole water problem.”Continuing innovationThe founders say Gradiant has been roughly doubling its revenue each year over the last five years, and it’s continuing to add technologies to its platform. For instance, Gradiant recently developed a critical minerals recovery solution to extract materials like lithium and nickel from customers’ wastewater, which could expand access to critical materials essential to the production of batteries and other products.“If we can extract lithium from brine water in an environmentally and economically feasible way, the U.S. can meet all of its lithium needs from within the U.S.,” Bajpayee says. “What’s preventing large-scale extraction of lithium from brine is technology, and we believe what we have now deployed will open the floodgates for direct lithium extraction and completely revolutionized the industry.”The company has also validated a method for eliminating PFAS — so-called toxic “forever chemicals” — in a pilot project with a leading U.S. semiconductor manufacturer. In the near future, it hopes to bring that solution to municipal water treatment plants to protect cities.At the heart of Gradiant’s innovation is the founders’ belief that industrial activity doesn’t have to deplete one of the world’s most vital resources.“Ever since the industrial revolution, we’ve been taking from nature,” Bajpayee says. “By treating and recycling water, by reducing water consumption and making industry highly water efficient, we have this unique opportunity to turn the clock back and give nature water back. If that’s your driver, you can’t choose not to innovate.” More

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      in Energy

      Decarbonizing heavy industry with thermal batteries

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      Whether you’re manufacturing cement, steel, chemicals, or paper, you need a large amount of heat. Almost without exception, manufacturers around the world create that heat by burning fossil fuels.In an effort to clean up the industrial sector, some startups are changing manufacturing processes for specific materials. Some are even changing the materials themselves. Daniel Stack SM ’17, PhD ’21 is trying to address industrial emissions across the board by replacing the heat source.Since coming to MIT in 2014, Stack has worked to develop thermal batteries that use electricity to heat up a conductive version of ceramic firebricks, which have been used as heat stores and insulators for centuries. In 2021, Stack co-founded Electrified Thermal Solutions, which has since demonstrated that its firebricks can store heat efficiently for hours and discharge it by heating air or gas up to 3,272 degrees Fahrenheit — hot enough to power the most demanding industrial applications.Achieving temperatures north of 3,000 F represents a breakthrough for the electric heating industry, as it enables some of the world’s hardest-to-decarbonize sectors to utilize renewable energy for the first time. It also unlocks a new, low-cost model for using electricity when it’s at its cheapest and cleanest.“We have a global perspective at Electrified Thermal, but in the U.S. over the last five years, we’ve seen an incredible opportunity emerge in energy prices that favors flexible offtake of electricity,” Stack says. “Throughout the middle of the country, especially in the wind belt, electricity prices in many places are negative for more than 20 percent of the year, and the trend toward decreasing electricity pricing during off-peak hours is a nationwide phenomenon. Technologies like our Joule Hive Thermal Battery will enable us to access this inexpensive, clean electricity and compete head to head with fossil fuels on price for industrial heating needs, without even factoring in the positive climate impact.”A new approach to an old technologyStack’s research plans changed quickly when he joined MIT’s Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering as a master’s student in 2014.“I went to MIT excited to work on the next generation of nuclear reactors, but what I focused on almost from day one was how to heat up bricks,” Stack says. “It wasn’t what I expected, but when I talked to my advisor, [Principal Research Scientist] Charles Forsberg, about energy storage and why it was valuable to not just nuclear power but the entire energy transition, I realized there was no project I would rather work on.”Firebricks are ubiquitous, inexpensive clay bricks that have been used for millennia in fireplaces and ovens. In 2017, Forsberg and Stack co-authored a paper showing firebricks’ potential to store heat from renewable resources, but the system still used electric resistance heaters — like the metal coils in toasters and space heaters — which limited its temperature output.For his doctoral work, Stack worked with Forsberg to make firebricks that were electrically conductive, replacing the resistance heaters so the bricks produced the heat directly.“Electric heaters are your biggest limiter: They burn out too fast, they break down, they don’t get hot enough,” Stack explains. “The idea was to skip the heaters because firebricks themselves are really cheap, abundant materials that can go to flame-like temperatures and hang out there for days.”Forsberg and Stacks were able to create conductive firebricks by tweaking the chemical composition of traditional firebricks. Electrified Thermal’s bricks are 98 percent similar to existing firebricks and are produced using the same processes, allowing existing manufacturers to make them inexpensively.Toward the end of his PhD program, Stack realized the invention could be commercialized. He started taking classes at the MIT Sloan School of Management and spending time at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship. He also entered the StartMIT program and the I-Corps program, and received support from the U.S. Department of Energy and MIT’s Venture Mentoring Service (VMS).“Through the Boston ecosystem, the MIT ecosystem, and with help from the Department of Energy, we were able to launch this from the lab at MIT,” Stack says. “What we spun out was an electrically conductive firebrick, or what we refer to as an e-Brick.”Electrified Thermal contains its firebrick arrays in insulated, off-the-shelf metal boxes. Although the system is highly configurable depending on the end use, the company’s standard system can collect and release about 5 megawatts of energy and store about 25 megawatt-hours.The company has demonstrated its system’s ability to produce high temperatures and has been cycling its system at its headquarters in Medford, Massachusetts. That work has collectively earned Electrified Thermal $40 million from various the Department of Energy offices to scale the technology and work with manufacturers.“Compared to other electric heating, we can run hotter and last longer than any other solution on the market,” Stack says. “That means replacing fossil fuels at a lot of industrial sites that couldn’t otherwise decarbonize.”Scaling to solve a global problemElectrified Thermal is engaging with hundreds of industrial companies, including manufacturers of cement, steel, glass, basic and specialty chemicals, food and beverage, and pulp and paper.“The industrial heating challenge affects everyone under the sun,” Stack says. “They all have fundamentally the same problem, which is getting their heat in a way that is affordable and zero carbon for the energy transition.”The company is currently building a megawatt-scale commercial version of its system, which it expects to be operational in the next seven months.“Next year will be a huge proof point to the industry,” Stack says. “We’ll be using the commercial system to showcase a variety of operating points that customers need to see, and we’re hoping to be running systems on customer sites by the end of the year. It’ll be a huge achievement and a first for electric heating because no other solution in the market can put out the kind of temperatures that we can put out.”By working with manufacturers to produce its firebricks and casings, Electrified Thermal hopes to be able to deploy its systems rapidly and at low cost across a massive industry.“From the very beginning, we engineered these e-bricks to be rapidly scalable and rapidly producible within existing supply chains and manufacturing processes,” Stack says. “If you want to decarbonize heavy industry, there will be no cheaper way than turning electricity into heat from zero-carbon electricity assets. We’re seeking to be the premier technology that unlocks those capabilities, with double digit percentages of global energy flowing through our system as we accomplish the energy transition.” More

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      in Environment

      Startup turns mining waste into critical metals for the U.S.

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      At the heart of the energy transition is a metal transition. Wind farms, solar panels, and electric cars require many times more copper, zinc, and nickel than their gas-powered alternatives. They also require more exotic metals with unique properties, known as rare earth elements, which are essential for the magnets that go into things like wind turbines and EV motors.Today, China dominates the processing of rare earth elements, refining around 60 percent of those materials for the world. With demand for such materials forecasted to skyrocket, the Biden administration has said the situation poses national and economic security threats.Substantial quantities of rare earth metals are sitting unused in the United States and many other parts of the world today. The catch is they’re mixed with vast quantities of toxic mining waste.Phoenix Tailings is scaling up a process for harvesting materials, including rare earth metals and nickel, from mining waste. The company uses water and recyclable solvents to collect oxidized metal, then puts the metal into a heated molten salt mixture and applies electricity.The company, co-founded by MIT alumni, says its pilot production facility in Woburn, Massachusetts, is the only site in the world producing rare earth metals without toxic byproducts or carbon emissions. The process does use electricity, but Phoenix Tailings currently offsets that with renewable energy contracts.The company expects to produce more than 3,000 tons of the metals by 2026, which would have represented about 7 percent of total U.S. production last year.Now, with support from the Department of Energy, Phoenix Tailings is expanding the list of metals it can produce and accelerating plans to build a second production facility.For the founding team, including MIT graduates Tomás Villalón ’14 and Michelle Chao ’14 along with Nick Myers and Anthony Balladon, the work has implications for geopolitics and the planet.“Being able to make your own materials domestically means that you’re not at the behest of a foreign monopoly,” Villalón says. “We’re focused on creating critical materials for the next generation of technologies. More broadly, we want to get these materials in ways that are sustainable in the long term.”Tackling a global problemVillalón got interested in chemistry and materials science after taking Course 3.091 (Introduction to Solid-State Chemistry) during his first year at MIT. In his senior year, he got a chance to work at Boston Metal, another MIT spinoff that uses an electrochemical process to decarbonize steelmaking at scale. The experience got Villalón, who majored in materials science and engineering, thinking about creating more sustainable metallurgical processes.But it took a chance meeting with Myers at a 2018 Bible study for Villalón to act on the idea.“We were discussing some of the major problems in the world when we came to the topic of electrification,” Villalón recalls. “It became a discussion about how the U.S. gets its materials and how we should think about electrifying their production. I was finally like, ‘I’ve been working in the space for a decade, let’s go do something about it.’ Nick agreed, but I thought he just wanted to feel good about himself. Then in July, he randomly called me and said, ‘I’ve got [$7,000]. When do we start?’”Villalón brought in Chao, his former MIT classmate and fellow materials science and engineering major, and Myers brought Balladon, a former co-worker, and the founders started experimenting with new processes for producing rare earth metals.“We went back to the base principles, the thermodynamics I learned with MIT professors Antoine Allanore and Donald Sadoway, and understanding the kinetics of reactions,” Villalón says. “Classes like Course 3.022 (Microstructural Evolution in Materials) and 3.07 (Introduction to Ceramics) were also really useful. I touched on every aspect I studied at MIT.”The founders also received guidance from MIT’s Venture Mentoring Service (VMS) and went through the U.S. National Science Foundation’s I-Corps program. Sadoway served as an advisor for the company.After drafting one version of their system design, the founders bought an experimental quantity of mining waste, known as red sludge, and set up a prototype reactor in Villalón’s backyard. The founders ended up with a small amount of product, but they had to scramble to borrow the scientific equipment needed to determine what exactly it was. It turned out to be a small amount of rare earth concentrate along with pure iron.Today, at the company’s refinery in Woburn, Phoenix Tailings puts mining waste rich in rare earth metals into its mixture and heats it to around 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit. When it applies an electric current to the mixture, pure metal collects on an electrode. The process leaves minimal waste behind.“The key for all of this isn’t just the chemistry, but how everything is linked together, because with rare earths, you have to hit really high purities compared to a conventionally produced metal,” Villalón explains. “As a result, you have to be thinking about the purity of your material the entire way through.”From rare earths to nickel, magnesium, and moreVillalón says the process is economical compared to conventional production methods, produces no toxic byproducts, and is completely carbon free when renewable energy sources are used for electricity.The Woburn facility is currently producing several rare earth elements for customers, including neodymium and dysprosium, which are important in magnets. Customers are using the materials for things likewind turbines, electric cars, and defense applications.The company has also received two grants with the U.S. Department of Energy’s ARPA-E program totaling more than $2 million. Its 2023 grant supports the development of a system to extract nickel and magnesium from mining waste through a process that uses carbonization and recycled carbon dioxide. Both nickel and magnesium are critical materials for clean energy applications like batteries.The most recent grant will help the company adapt its process to produce iron from mining waste without emissions or toxic byproducts. Phoenix Tailings says its process is compatible with a wide array of ore types and waste materials, and the company has plenty of material to work with: Mining and processing mineral ores generates about 1.8 billion tons of waste in the U.S. each year.“We want to take our knowledge from processing the rare earth metals and slowly move it into other segments,” Villalón explains. “We simply have to refine some of these materials here. There’s no way we can’t. So, what does that look like from a regulatory perspective? How do we create approaches that are economical and environmentally compliant not just now, but 30 years from now?” More

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      in Energy

      Smart handling of neutrons is crucial to fusion power success

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      In fall 2009, when Ethan Peterson ’13 arrived at MIT as an undergraduate, he already had some ideas about possible career options. He’d always liked building things, even as a child, so he imagined his future work would involve engineering of some sort. He also liked physics. And he’d recently become intent on reducing our dependence on fossil fuels and simultaneously curbing greenhouse gas emissions, which made him consider studying solar and wind energy, among other renewable sources.Things crystallized for him in the spring semester of 2010, when he took an introductory course on nuclear fusion, taught by Anne White, during which he discovered that when a deuterium nucleus and a tritium nucleus combine to produce a helium nucleus, an energetic (14 mega electron volt) neutron — traveling at one-sixth the speed of light — is released. Moreover, 1020 (100 billion billion) of these neutrons would be produced every second that a 500-megawatt fusion power plant operates. “It was eye-opening for me to learn just how energy-dense the fusion process is,” says Peterson, who became the Class of 1956 Career Development Professor of nuclear science and engineering in July 2024. “I was struck by the richness and interdisciplinary nature of the fusion field. This was an engineering discipline where I could apply physics to solve a real-world problem in a way that was both interesting and beautiful.”He soon became a physics and nuclear engineering double major, and by the time he graduated from MIT in 2013, the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) had already decided to cut funding for MIT’s Alcator C-Mod fusion project. In view of that facility’s impending closure, Peterson opted to pursue graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin. There, he acquired a basic science background in plasma physics, which is central not only to nuclear fusion but also to astrophysical phenomena such as the solar wind.When Peterson received his PhD from Wisconsin in 2019, nuclear fusion had rebounded at MIT with the launch, a year earlier, of the SPARC project — a collaborative effort being carried out with the newly founded MIT spinout Commonwealth Fusion Systems. He returned to his alma mater as a postdoc and then a research scientist in the Plasma Science and Fusion Center, taking his time, at first, to figure out how to best make his mark in the field.Minding your neutronsAround that time, Peterson was participating in a community planning process, sponsored by the DoE, that focused on critical gaps that needed to be closed for a successful fusion program. In the course of these discussions, he came to realize that inadequate attention had been paid to the handling of neutrons, which carry 80 percent of the energy coming out of a fusion reaction — energy that needs to be harnessed for electrical generation. However, these neutrons are so energetic that they can penetrate through many tens of centimeters of material, potentially undermining the structural integrity of components and damaging vital equipment such as superconducting magnets. Shielding is also essential for protecting humans from harmful radiation.One goal, Peterson says, is to minimize the number of neutrons that escape and, in so doing, to reduce the amount of lost energy. A complementary objective, he adds, “is to get neutrons to deposit heat where you want them to and to stop them from depositing heat where you don’t want them to.” These considerations, in turn, can have a profound influence on fusion reactor design. This branch of nuclear engineering, called neutronics — which analyzes where neutrons are created and where they end up going — has become Peterson’s specialty.It was never a high-profile area of research in the fusion community — as plasma physics, for example, has always garnered more of the spotlight and more of the funding. That’s exactly why Peterson has stepped up. “The impacts of neutrons on fusion reactor design haven’t been a high priority for a long time,” he says. “I felt that some initiative needed to be taken,” and that prompted him to make the switch from plasma physics to neutronics. It has been his principal focus ever since — as a postdoc, a research scientist, and now as a faculty member.A code to design byThe best way to get a neutron to transfer its energy is to make it collide with a light atom. Lithium, with an atomic number of three, or lithium-containing materials are normally good choices — and necessary for producing tritium fuel. The placement of lithium “blankets,” which are intended to absorb energy from neutrons and produce tritium, “is a critical part of the design of fusion reactors,” Peterson says. High-density materials, such as lead and tungsten, can be used, conversely, to block the passage of neutrons and other types of radiation. “You might want to layer these high- and low-density materials in a complicated way that isn’t immediately intuitive” he adds. Determining which materials to put where — and of what thickness and mass — amounts to a tricky optimization problem, which will affect the size, cost, and efficiency of a fusion power plant.To that end, Peterson has developed modelling tools that can make analyses of these sorts easier and faster, thereby facilitating the design process. “This has traditionally been the step that takes the longest time and causes the biggest holdups,” he says. The models and algorithms that he and his colleagues are devising are general enough, moreover, to be compatible with a diverse range of fusion power plant concepts, including those that use magnets or lasers to confine the plasma.Now that he’s become a professor, Peterson is in a position to introduce more people to nuclear engineering, and to neutronics in particular. “I love teaching and mentoring students, sharing the things I’m excited about,” he says. “I was inspired by all the professors I had in physics and nuclear engineering at MIT, and I hope to give back to the community in the same way.”He also believes that if you are going to work on fusion, there is no better place to be than MIT, “where the facilities are second-to-none. People here are extremely innovative and passionate. And the sheer number of people who excel in their fields is staggering.” Great ideas can sometimes be sparked by off-the-cuff conversations in the hallway — something that happens more frequently than you expect, Peterson remarks. “All of these things taken together makes MIT a very special place.” More