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    Linzixuan (Rhoda) Zhang wins 2024 Collegiate Inventors Competition

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    Linzixuan (Rhoda) Zhang, a doctoral candidate in the MIT Department of Chemical Engineering, recently won the 2024 Collegiate Inventors Competition, medaling in both the Graduate and People’s Choice categories for developing materials to stabilize nutrients in food with the goal of improving global health.  The annual competition, organized by the National Inventors Hall of Fame and United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), celebrates college and university student inventors. The finalists present their inventions to a panel of final-round judges composed of National Inventors Hall of Fame inductees and USPTO officials. No stranger to having her work in the limelight, Zhang is a three-time winner of the Koch Institute Image Awards in 2022, 2023, and 2024, as well as a 2022 fellow at the MIT Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab.  “Rhoda is an exceptionally dedicated and creative student. Her well-deserved award recognizes the potential of her research on nutrient stabilization, which could have a significant impact on society,” says Ana Jaklenec, one of Zhang’s advisors and a principal investigator at MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. Zhang is also advised by David H. Koch (1962) Institute Professor Robert Langer. Frameworks for global healthIn a world where nearly 2 billion people suffer from micronutrient deficiencies, particularly iron, the urgency for effective solutions has never been greater. Iron deficiency is especially harmful for vulnerable populations such as children and pregnant women, since it can lead to weakened immune systems and developmental delays. The World Health Organization has highlighted food fortification as a cost-effective strategy, yet many current methods fall short. Iron and other nutrients can break down during processing or cooking, and synthetic additives often come with high costs and environmental drawbacks. Zhang, along with her teammate, Xin Yang, a postdoc associate at Koch Institute, set out to innovate new technologies for nutrient fortification that are effective, accessible, and sustainable, leading to the invention nutritional metal-organic frameworks (NuMOFs) and the subsequent launch of MOFe Coffee, the world’s first iron-fortified coffee. NuMOFs not only protect essential nutrients such as iron while in food for long periods of time, but also make them more easily absorbed and used once consumed.The inspiration for the coffee came from the success of iodized salt, which significantly reduced iodine deficiency worldwide. Because coffee and tea are associated with low iron absorption, iron fortification would directly address the challenge.However, replicating the success of iodized salt for iron fortification has been extremely challenging due to the micronutrient’s high reactivity and the instability of iron(II) salts. As researchers with backgrounds in material science, chemistry, and food technology, Zhang and Yang leveraged their expertise to develop a solution that could overcome these technical barriers. The fortified coffee serves as a practical example of how NuMOFs can help people increase their iron intake by engaging in a habit that’s already part of their daily routine, with significant potential benefits for women, who are disproportionately affected by iron deficiency. The team plans to expand the technology to incorporate additional nutrients to address a wider array of nutritional deficiencies and improve health equity globally.Fast-track to addressing global health improvementsLooking ahead, Zhang and Yang in the Jaklenec Group are focused on both product commercialization and ongoing research, refining MOFe Coffee to enhance nutrient stability and ensuring the product remains palatable while maximizing iron absorption.Winning the CIC competition means that Zhang, Yang, and the team can fast-track their patent application with the USPTO. The team hopes that their fast-tracked patent will allow them to attract more potential investors and partners, which is crucial for scaling their efforts. A quicker patent process also means that the team can bring the technology to market faster, helping improve global nutrition and health for those who need it most. “Our goal is to make a real difference in addressing micronutrient deficiencies around the world,” says Zhang.   More

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      Lemelson-MIT awards 2024-25 InvenTeam grants to eight high school teams

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      The Lemelson-MIT Program has announced the 2024-25 InvenTeams — eight teams of high school students, teachers, and mentors from across the country. Each team will each receive $7,500 in grant funding and year-long support to build a technological invention to solve a problem of their own choosing. The students’ inventions are inspired by real-world problems they identified in their local communities.The InvenTeams were selected by a respected panel consisting of university professors, inventors, entrepreneurs, industry professionals, and college students. Some panel members were former InvenTeam members now working in industry. The InvenTeams are focusing on problems facing their local communities, with a goal that their inventions will have a positive impact on beneficiaries and, ultimately, improve the lives of others beyond their communities.This year’s teams are:Battle Creek Area Mathematics and Science Center (Battle Creek, Michigan)Cambridge Rindge and Latin School (Cambridge, Massachusetts)Colegio Rosa-Bell (Guaynabo, Puerto Rico)Edison High School (Edison, New Jersey)Massachusetts Academy of Math and Science (Worcester, Massachusetts)Nitro High School (Nitro, West Virginia)Southcrest Christian School (Lubbock, Texas)Ygnacio Valley High School (Concord, California)InvenTeams are comprised of students, teachers and community mentors who pursue year-long invention projects involving creative thinking, problem-solving, and hands-on learning in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The InvenTeams’ prototype inventions will be showcased at a technical review within their home communities in February 2025, and then again as a final prototype at EurekaFest — an invention celebration taking place June 9-11, 2025, at MIT.“The InvenTeams are focusing on solving problems that impact their local communities,” says Leigh Estabrooks, Lemelson-MIT’s invention education officer. “Teams are focusing their technological solutions — their inventions — on health and well-being, environmental issues, and safety concerns. These high school students are not just problem-solvers of tomorrow, they are problem solvers today helping to make our world healthier, greener, and safer.”This year the Lemelson-MIT Program and the InvenTeams grants initiative celebrate a series of firsts in the annual high school invention grant program. For the first time, a team from their home city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, will participate, representing the Cambridge community’s innovative spirit on a national stage. Additionally, the program welcomes the first team from Puerto Rico, highlighting the expanding reach of the InvenTeams grants initiative. The pioneering teams exemplify the diversity and creativity that fuel invention.The InvenTeams grants initiative, now in its 21st year, has enabled 18 teams of high school students to be awarded U.S. patents for their projects. Intellectual property education is combined with invention education offerings as part of the Lemelson-MIT Program’s deliberate efforts to remedy historic inequities among those who develop inventions, protect their intellectual property, and commercialize their creations. The ongoing efforts empower students from all backgrounds, equipping them with invaluable problem-solving skills that will serve them well throughout their academic journeys, professional pursuits, and personal lives. The program has worked with over 4,000 students across 304 different InvenTeams nationwide and has included:partnering with intellectual property (IP) law firms to provide pro bono legal support;collaborating with industry-leading companies that provide technical guidance and mentoring;providing professional development for teachers on invention education and IP;assisting teams with identifying resources within their communities’ innovation ecosystems to support ongoing invention efforts; andpublishing case studies and research to inform the work of invention educators and policy makers to build support for engaging students in efforts to invent solutions to real-world problems, thus fueling the innovation economy in the U.S.The Lemelson-MIT Program is a national leader in efforts to prepare the next generation of inventors and entrepreneurs, focusing on the expansion of opportunities for people to learn ways inventors find and solve problems that matter to improve lives. A commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion aims to remedy historic inequities among those who develop inventions, protect their intellectual property, and commercialize their creations.Jerome H. Lemelson, one of U.S. history’s most prolific inventors, and his wife Dorothy founded the Lemelson-MIT Program in 1994. It is funded by The Lemelson Foundation and administered by the MIT School of Engineering. For more information, contact Leigh Estabrooks.  More

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      Two MIT films nominated for New England Emmy Awards

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      Two films produced by MIT were honored with Emmy nominations by the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Boston/New England Chapter. Both “We Are the Forest” and “No Drop to Spare” illustrate international conversations the MIT community is having about the environment and climate change.“We Are the Forest,” produced by MIT Video Productions (MVP) at MIT Open Learning, was one of six nominees in the Education/Schools category. The documentary highlights the cultural and scientific exchange of the MIT Festival Jazz Ensemble, MIT Wind Ensemble, and MIT Vocal Jazz Ensemble in the Brazilian Amazon. The excursion depicted in the film was part of the ongoing work of Frederick Harris Jr., MIT director of wind and jazz ensembles and senior lecturer in music, to combine Brazilian music and environmental research.“No Drop to Spare,” created by the Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE), was nominated in the Environment/Science and Video Essayist categories. The film, produced by John Freidah, MechE senior producer and creative lead, follows a team of researchers from the K. Lisa Yang Global Engineering and Research (GEAR) Center working in Kenya, Morocco, and Jordan to deploy affordable, user-driven smart irrigation technology.“We Are the Forest” tells the story of 80 MIT student musicians who traveled to Manaus, Brazil in March 2023. Together with Indigenous Brazilian musicians and activists, the students played music, created instruments with found objects from the rainforest, and connected their musical practice to nature and culture. The trip and the documentary culminated with the concert “Hearing Amazônia: Art and Resistance.”“We have an amazing team who are excited to tell the stories of so many great things that happen at MIT,” says Clayton Hainsworth, director for MVP. “It’s a true pleasure when we get to partner with the Institute’s community on these video projects — from Fred [Harris], with his desire for outreach of the music curriculum, giving students new perspectives and getting beyond the lab; to students getting to experience the world and seeing how that affects their next steps as they go out and make an impact.”The documentary was produced by Hainsworth, directed by Jean Dunoyer, staff editor at MVP, and filmed by Myles Lowery, field production videographer at MVP. Hainsworth credits Dunoyer with refining the story’s main themes: the universality of music as a common human language, and the ways that Indigenous communities can teach and inform the rest of the globe about the environment and the challenges we are all facing.“The film highlights the reach of how MIT touches the world and, more importantly, how the world touches MIT,” says Hainsworth, adding that the work was generously supported by A. Neil Pappalardo ’64 and Jane Pappalardo. “No Drop to Spare” evoked a similar sentiment from Freidah. “What I liked about this story was the potential for great impact,” says Freidah, discussing the MechE film’s production process. “It was global, it was being piloted in three different places in the world, with three different end users, and had three different applications. You sort of go in with an idea in mind of what the story might be, then things bubble up. In this story, as with so many stories, what rose to the top was the students and the impact they were having on the real world and end users.” Freidah has worked with Amos Winter SM ’05, PhD ’11, associate professor of mechanical engineering and MIT GEAR Center principal investigator, to highlight other impact global projects in the past, including producing a video in 2016. That film, “Water is Life,” explores the development of low-cost desalination systems in India. While the phrase “it’s an honor to be nominated” might seem cliched, it remains often used because the sentiment almost always rings true. Although neither film triumphed at this year’s awards ceremony, Freidah says there’s much to be celebrated in the final product. “Seeing the effect this piece had, and how it highlighted our students, that’s the success story — but it’s always nice also to receive recognition from outside.”The 47th Boston/New England Emmy Awards Ceremony took place on June 8 at the Marriott Boston Copley Place. A list of nominees and winners can be found on the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Boston/New England Chapter website.  More

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      MIT scholars will take commercial break with entrepreneurial scholarship

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      Two MIT scholars, each with a strong entrepreneurial drive, have received 2024 Kavanaugh Fellowship awards, advancing their quest to turn pioneering research into profitable commercial enterprises.The Kavanaugh Translational Fellows Program gives scholars training to lead organizations that will bring their research to market. PhD candidates Grant Knappe and Arjav Shah are this year’s recipients. Knappe is developing a drug delivery platform for an emerging class of medicines called nucleic acid therapeutics. Shah is using hydrogel microparticles to clean up water polluted by heavy metals and other contaminants.Knappe and Shah will begin their fellowship with years of entrepreneurial expertise under their belts. They’ve developed and refined their business plans through MIT’s innovation ecosystem, including the Sandbox, the Legatum Center, the Venture Mentoring Service, the National Science Foundation’s I-Corps Program, and Blueprint by The Engine. Now, the yearlong Kavanaugh Fellowship will give the scholars time to focus exclusively on testing their business plans and exercising decision-making skills — critical to startup success — with the guidance of MIT mentors.“It’s a testament to the support and direction they’ve received from the MIT community that their entrepreneurial aspirations have evolved and matured over time,” says Michael J. Cima, program director for the Kavanaugh program and the David H. Koch Professor of Engineering in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering.Founded in 2016, the Kavanaugh program was instrumental in helping past fellows launch several robust startups, including low-carbon cement manufacturer Sublime Systems and SiTration, which is using a new type of filtration membrane to extract critical materials such as lithium.A safer way to deliver breakthrough medicinesNucleic acid therapeutics, including mRNA and CRISPR, are disrupting today’s clinical landscape thanks to their promise of targeting disease treatment according to genetic blueprints. But the first methods of delivering these molecules to the body used viruses as their transport, raising patient safety concerns.“Humans have figured out how to engineer certain viruses found in nature to deliver specific cargoes [for disease treatment],” says Knappe. “But because they look like viruses, the human immune system sees them as a danger signal and creates an immune reaction that can be harmful to patients.”Given the safety profile issues of viral delivery, researchers turned to non-viral technologies that use lipid nanoparticle technology, a mixture of different lipid-like materials, assembled into particles to protect the mRNA therapeutic from getting degraded before it reaches a cell of interest. “Because they don’t look like viruses there, the immune system generally tolerates them,” adds Knappe.Recent data show lipid nanoparticles can now target the lung, opening the potential for novel treatments of deadly cancers and other diseases.Knappe’s work in MIT’s Bathe BioNanoLab focused on building such a non-viral delivery platform based on a different technology: nucleic acid nanoparticles, which combine the attractive components of both viral and non-viral systems. Knappe will spend his Kavanaugh Fellowship year developing proof-of-concept data for his drug delivery method and building the team and funding needed to commercialize the technology.A PhD candidate in the Department of Chemical Engineering (ChemE), Knappe was initially attracted to MIT because of its intellectual openness. “You can work with any faculty member in other departments. I wasn’t restricted to the chemical engineering faculty,” says Knappe, whose supervisor, Professor Mark Bathe, is in the Department of Biological Engineering.Knappe, who is from New Jersey, welcomes the challenges that will come in his Kavanaugh year, including the need to pinpoint the right story that will convince venture capitalists and other funders to bet on his technology. Attracting talent is also top of mind. “How do you convince really talented people that have a lot of opportunities to work on what you work on? Building the first team is going to be critical,” he says. The network Knappe has been building in his years at MIT is paying dividends now.Targeting “forever chemicals” in waterThat network includes Shah. The two fellows met when they worked on the MIT Science Policy Review, a student-run journal concerned with the intersection of science, technology, and policy. Knappe and Shah did not compete directly academically but used their biweekly coffee walks as a welcome sounding board. Naturally, they were pleased when they found out they had both been chosen for the Kavanaugh Fellowship. So far, they have been too busy to celebrate over a beer.“We are good collaborators with research, as well,” says Shah. “Now we’re going on this entrepreneurial journey together. It’s been exciting.”Shah is a PhD candidate in ChemE’s Chemical Engineering Practice program. He got interested in the global imperative for cleaner water at a young age. His hometown of Surat is the heart of India’s textile industry. “Growing up, it wasn’t hard to see the dye-colored water flowing into your rivers and streams,” Shah says. “Playing a role in fostering positive change in water treatment fills me with a profound sense of purpose.”Shah’s work, broadly, is to clean toxic chemicals called micropollutants from water in an efficient and sustainable manner. “It’s humanly impossible to turn a blind eye to our water problems,” he says, which can be categorized as accessibility, availability, and quality. Water problems are global and complex, not just because of the technological challenges but also sociopolitical ones, he adds.Manufactured chemicals called per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), or “forever chemicals,” are in the news these days. PFAS, which go into making nonstick cookware and waterproof clothing, are just one of more than 10,000 such emerging contaminants that have leached into water streams. “These are extremely difficult to remove using existing systems because of their chemical diversity and low concentrations,” Shah says. “The concentrations are akin to dropping an aspirin tablet in an Olympic-sized swimming pool.” But no less toxic for that.In the lab at MIT, Shah is working with Devashish Gokhale, a fellow PhD student, and Patrick S. Doyle, the Robert T. Haslam (1911) Professor of Chemical Engineering, to commercialize an innovative microparticle technology, hydroGel, to remove these micropollutants in an effective, facile, and sustainable manner. Hydrogels are a broad class of polymer materials that can hold large quantities of water.“Our materials are like Boba beads. We are trying to save the world with our Boba beads,” says Shah with a laugh. “And we have functionalized these particles with tunable chemistries to target different micropollutants in a single unit operation.”Due to its outsized environmental impact, industrial water is the first application Shah is targeting. Today, wastewater treatment emits more than 3 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, which is more than the shipping industry’s emissions, for example. The current state of the art for removing micropollutants in the industry is to use activated carbon filters. “[This technology] comes from coal, so it’s unsustainable,” Shah says. And the activated carbon filters are hard to reuse. “Our particles are reusable, theoretically infinitely.”“I’m very excited to be able to take advantage of the mentorship we have from the Kavanaugh team to take this technology to its next inflection point, so that we are ready to go out in the market and start making a huge impact,” he says.A dream communityShah and Knappe have become adept at navigating the array of support and mentorship opportunities MIT has to offer. Shah worked with a small team of seasoned professionals in the water space from the MIT Venture Mentoring Service. “They’ve helped us every step of the way as we think about commercializing the technology,” he says.Shah worked with MIT Sandbox, which provides a seed grant to help find the right product-market fit. He is also a fellow with the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship, which focuses on entrepreneurship in emerging countries in growth markets.“We’re exploring the potential for this technology and its application in a lot of different markets, including India. Because that’s close to my heart,” Shah says. “The Legatum community has been unique, where you can have those extremely hard conversations, confront yourself with those fears, and then talk it out with the group of fellows.”The Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab, or J-WAFS, has been an integral part of Shah’s journey with research and commercialization support through its Solutions Grant and a travel award to the Stockholm World Water Week in August 2023.Knappe has also taken advantage of many innovation programs, including MIT’s Blueprint by the Engine, which helps researchers explore commercial opportunities of their work, plus programs outside of MIT but with strong on-campus ties such as Nucleate Activator and Frequency Bio.It was during one of these programs that he was inspired by two postdocs working in Bathe’s lab and spinning out biotech startups from their research, Floris Engelhardt and James Banal. Engelhardt helped spearhead Kano Therapeutics, and Banal launched Cache DNA.“I was passively absorbing and watching everything that they were going through and what they were excited about and challenged with. I still talk to them pretty regularly to this day,” Knappe says. “It’s been really great to have them as continual mentors, throughout my PhD and as I transition out of the lab.”Shah says he is grateful not only for being selected for the Kavanaugh Fellowship but to MIT as a community. “MIT has been more than a dream come true,” he says. He will have the opportunity to explore a different side of the institution as he enters the MBA program at MIT Sloan School of Management this fall. Shah expects this program, along with his Kavanaugh training, will supply the skills he needs to scale the business so it can make a difference in the world.“I always keep coming back to the question ‘How does what I do matter to the person on the street?’ This guides me to look at the bigger picture, to contextualize my research to solving important problems,” Shah says. “So many great technologies are being worked on each day, but only a minuscule fraction make it to the market.”Knappe is equally dedicated to serving a larger purpose. “With the right infrastructure, between basic fundamental science, conducted in academia, funded by government, and then translated by companies, we can make products that could improve everyone’s life across the world,” he says.Past Kavanaugh Fellows are credited with spearheading commercial outfits that have indeed made a difference. This year’s fellows are poised to follow their lead. But first they will have that beer together to celebrate. More

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      Two MIT PhD students awarded J-WAFS fellowships for their research on water

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      Since 2014, the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) has advanced interdisciplinary research aimed at solving the world’s most pressing water and food security challenges to meet human needs. In 2017, J-WAFS established the Rasikbhai L. Meswani Water Solutions Fellowship and the J-WAFS Graduate Student Fellowship. These fellowships provide support to outstanding MIT graduate students who are pursuing research that has the potential to improve water and food systems around the world. Recently, J-WAFS awarded the 2024-25 fellowships to Jonathan Bessette and Akash Ball, two MIT PhD students dedicated to addressing water scarcity by enhancing desalination and purification processes. This work is of important relevance since the world’s freshwater supply has been steadily depleting due to the effects of climate change. In fact, one-third of the global population lacks access to safe drinking water. Bessette and Ball are focused on designing innovative solutions to enhance the resilience and sustainability of global water systems. To support their endeavors, J-WAFS will provide each recipient with funding for one academic semester for continued research and related activities.“This year, we received many strong fellowship applications,” says J-WAFS executive director Renee J. Robins. “Bessette and Ball both stood out, even in a very competitive pool of candidates. The award of the J-WAFS fellowships to these two students underscores our confidence in their potential to bring transformative solutions to global water challenges.”2024-25 Rasikbhai L. Meswani Fellowship for Water SolutionsThe Rasikbhai L. Meswani Fellowship for Water Solutions is a doctoral fellowship for students pursuing research related to water and water supply at MIT. The fellowship is made possible by Elina and Nikhil Meswani and family. Jonathan Bessette is a doctoral student in the Global Engineering and Research (GEAR) Center within the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, advised by Professor Amos Winter. His research is focused on water treatment systems for the developing world, mainly desalination, or the process in which salts are removed from water. Currently, Bessette is working on designing and constructing a low-cost, deployable, community-scale desalination system for humanitarian crises.In arid and semi-arid regions, groundwater often serves as the sole water source, despite its common salinity issues. Many remote and developing areas lack reliable centralized power and water systems, making brackish groundwater desalination a vital, sustainable solution for global water scarcity. “An overlooked need for desalination is inland groundwater aquifers, rather than in coastal areas,” says Bessette. “This is because much of the population lives far enough from a coast that seawater desalination could never reach them. My work involves designing low-cost, sustainable, renewable-powered desalination technologies for highly constrained situations, such as drinking water for remote communities,” he adds.To achieve this goal, Bessette developed a batteryless, renewable electrodialysis desalination system. The technology is energy-efficient, conserves water, and is particularly suited for challenging environments, as it is decentralized and sustainable. The system offers significant advantages over the conventional reverse osmosis method, especially in terms of reduced energy consumption for treating brackish water. Highlighting Bessette’s capacity for engineering insight, his advisor noted the “simple and elegant solution” that Bessette and a staff engineer, Shane Pratt, devised that negated the need for the system to have large batteries. Bessette is now focusing on simplifying the system’s architecture to make it more reliable and cost-effective for deployment in remote areas.Growing up in upstate New York, Bessette completed a bachelor’s degree at the State University of New York at Buffalo. As an undergrad, he taught middle and high school students in low-income areas of Buffalo about engineering and sustainability. However, he cited his junior-year travel to India and his experience there measuring water contaminants in rural sites as cementing his dedication to a career addressing food, water, and sanitation challenges. In addition to his doctoral research, his commitment to these goals is further evidenced by another project he is pursuing, funded by a J-WAFS India grant, that uses low-cost, remote sensors to better understand water fetching practices. Bessette is conducting this work with fellow MIT student Gokul Sampath in order to help families in rural India gain access to safe drinking water.2024-25 J-WAFS Graduate Student Fellowship for Water and Food SolutionsThe J-WAFS Graduate Student Fellowship is supported by the J-WAFS Research Affiliate Program, which offers companies the opportunity to engage with MIT on water and food research. Current fellowship support was provided by two J-WAFS Research Affiliates: Xylem, a leading U.S.-based provider of water treatment and infrastructure solutions, and GoAigua, a Spanish company at the forefront of digital transformation in the water industry through innovative solutions. Akash Ball is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Chemical Engineering, advised by Professor Heather Kulik. His research focuses on the computational discovery of novel functional materials for energy-efficient ion separation membranes with high selectivity. Advanced membranes like these are increasingly needed for applications such as water desalination, battery recycling, and removal of heavy metals from industrial wastewater. “Climate change, water pollution, and scarce freshwater reserves cause severe water distress for about 4 billion people annually, with 2 billion in India and China’s semiarid regions,” Ball notes. “One potential solution to this global water predicament is the desalination of seawater, since seawater accounts for 97 percent of all water on Earth.”Although several commercial reverse osmosis membranes are currently available, these membranes suffer several problems, like slow water permeation, permeability-selectivity trade-off, and high fabrication costs. Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are porous crystalline materials that are promising candidates for highly selective ion separation with fast water transport due to high surface area, the presence of different pore windows, and the tunability of chemical functionality.In the Kulik lab, Ball is developing a systematic understanding of how MOF chemistry and pore geometry affect water transport and ion rejection rates. By the end of his PhD, Ball plans to identify existing, best-performing MOFs with unparalleled water uptake using machine learning models, propose novel hypothetical MOFs tailored to specific ion separations from water, and discover experimental design rules that enable the synthesis of next-generation membranes.  Ball’s advisor praised the creativity he brings to his research, and his leadership skills that benefit her whole lab. Before coming to MIT, Ball obtained a master’s degree in chemical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay and a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Jadavpur University in India. During a research internship at IIT Bombay in 2018, he worked on developing a technology for in situ arsenic detection in water. Like Bessette, he noted the impact of this prior research experience on his interest in global water challenges, along with his personal experience growing up in an area in India where access to safe drinking water was not guaranteed. More

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      Letting the Earth answer back: Designing better planetary conversations

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      For Chen Chu MArch ’21, the invitation to join the 2023-24 cohort of Morningside Academy for Design Design Fellows has been an unparalleled opportunity to investigate the potential of design as an alternative method of problem-solving.

      After earning a master’s degree in architecture at MIT and gaining professional experience as a researcher at an environmental nongovernmental organization, Chu decided to pursue a PhD in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. “I discovered that I needed to engage in a deeper way with the most difficult ethical challenges of our time, especially those arising from the fact of climate change,” he explains. “For me, MIT has always represented this wonderful place where people are inherently intellectually curious — it’s a very rewarding community to be part of.”

      Chu’s PhD research, guided by his doctoral advisor Delia Wendel, assistant professor of urban studies and international development, focuses on how traditional practices of floodplain agriculture can inform local and global strategies for sustainable food production and distribution in response to climate change. 

      Typically located alongside a river or stream, floodplains arise from seasonal flooding patterns that distribute nutrient-rich silt and create connectivity between species. This results in exceptionally high levels of biodiversity and microbial richness, generating the ideal conditions for agriculture. It’s no accident that the first human civilizations were founded on floodplains, including Mesopotamia (named for its location poised between two rivers, the Euphrates and Tigris), the Indus River Civilization, and the cultures of Ancient Egypt based around the Nile. Riverine transportation networks and predictable flooding rhythms provide a framework for trade and cultivation; nonetheless, floodplain communities must learn to live with risk, subject to the sudden disruptions of high waters, drought, and ecological disequilibrium. 

      For Chu, the “unstable and ungovernable” status of floodplains makes them fertile ground for thinking about. “I’m drawn to these so-called ‘wet landscapes’ — edge conditions that act as transitional spaces between land and water, between humans and nature, between city and river,” he reflects. “The development of extensively irrigated agricultural sites is typically a collective effort, which raises intriguing questions about how communities establish social organizations that simultaneously negotiate top-down state control and adapt to the uncertainty of nature.”

      Chu is in the process of honing the focus of his dissertation and refining his data collection methods, which will include archival research and fieldwork, as well as interviews with floodplain inhabitants to gain an understanding of sociopolitical nuances. Meanwhile, his role as a design fellow gives him the space to address the big questions that fire his imagination. How can we live well on shared land? How can we take responsibility for the lives of future generations? What types of political structures are required to get everyone on board? 

      These are just a few of the questions that Chu recently put to his cohort in a presentation. During the weekly seminars for the fellowship, he has the chance to converse with peers and mentors of multiple disciplines — from researchers rethinking the pedagogy of design to entrepreneurs applying design thinking to new business models to architects and engineers developing new habitats to heal our relationship with the natural world. 

      “I’ll admit — I’m wary of the human instinct to problem-solve,” says Chu. “When it comes to the material conditions and lived experience of people and planet, there’s a limit to our economic and political reasoning, and to conventional architectural practice. That said, I do believe that the mindset of a designer can open up new ways of thinking. At its core, design is an interdisciplinary practice based on the understanding that a problem can’t be solved from a narrow, singular perspective.” 

      The stimulating structure of a MAD Fellowship — free from immediate obligations to publish or produce, fellows learn from one another and engage with visiting speakers via regular seminars and events — has prompted Chu to consider what truly makes for generative conversation in the contexts of academia and the private and public sectors. In his opinion, discussions around climate change often fail to take account of one important voice; an absence he describes as “that silent being, the Earth.”

      “You can’t ask the Earth, ‘What does justice mean to you?’ Nature will not respond,” he reflects. To bridge the gap, Chu believes it’s important to combine the study of specific political and social conditions with broader existential questions raised by the environmental humanities. His own research draws upon the perspectives of thinkers including Dipesh Chakrabarty, Donna Haraway, Peter Singer,  Anna Tsing, and Michael Watts, among others. He cites James C. Scott’s lecture “In Praise of Floods” as one of his most important influences.

      In addition to his instinctive appreciation for theory, Chu’s outlook is grounded by an attention to innovation at the local level. He is currently establishing the parameters of his research, examining case studies of agricultural systems and flood mitigation strategies that have been sustained for centuries. 

      “One example is the polder system that is practiced in the Netherlands, China, Bangladesh, and many parts of the world: small, low-lying tracts of land submerged in water and surrounded by dykes and canals,” he explains. “You’ll find a different but comparable strategy in the colder regions of Japan. Crops are protected from the winter winds by constructing a spatial unit with the house at the center; trees behind the house serve as windbreakers and paddy fields for rice are located in front of the house, providing an integrated system of food and livelihood security.”

      Chu observes that there is a tendency for international policymakers to overlook local solutions in favor of grander visions and ambitious climate pledges — but he is equally keen not to romanticize vernacular practices. “Realistically, it’s always a two-way interaction. Unless you already have a workable local system in place, it’s difficult to implement a solution without top-down support. On the other hand, the large-scale technocratic dreams are empty if ignorant of local traditions and histories.” 

      By navigating between the global and the local, the theoretical and the practical, the visionary and the cautionary, Chu has hope in the possibility of gradually finding a way toward long-term solutions that adapt to specific conditions over time. It’s a model of ambition and criticality that Chu sees played out during dialogue at MAD and within his department; at root, he’s aware that the outcome of these conversations depends on the ethical context that shapes them.

      “I’ve been fortunate to have many mentors who have taught me the power of humility; a respect for the finitude, fragility,  and uncertainty of life,” he recalls. “It’s a mindset that’s barely apparent in today’s push for economic growth.” The flip-side of hubristic growth is an assumption that technological ingenuity will be enough to solve the climate crisis, but Chu’s optimism arises from a different source: “When I feel overwhelmed by the weight of the problems we’re facing, I just need to look around me,” he says. “Here on campus — at MAD, in my home department, and increasingly among the new generations of students — there’s a powerful ethos of political sensitivity, ethical compassion, and an attention to clear and critical judgment. That always gives me hope for the planet.” More

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      in Environment

      Gosha Geogdzhayev and Sadhana Lolla named 2024 Gates Cambridge Scholars

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      This article was updated on April 23 to reflect the promotion of Gosha Geogdzhayev from alternate to winner of the Gates Cambridge Scholarship.

      MIT seniors Gosha Geogdzhayev and Sadhana Lolla have won the prestigious Gates Cambridge Scholarship, which offers students an opportunity to pursue graduate study in the field of their choice at Cambridge University in the U.K.

      Established in 2000, Gates Cambridge offers full-cost post-graduate scholarships to outstanding applicants from countries outside of the U.K. The mission of Gates Cambridge is to build a global network of future leaders committed to improving the lives of others.

      Gosha Geogdzhayev

      Originally from New York City, Geogdzhayev is a senior majoring in physics with minors in mathematics and computer science. At Cambridge, Geogdzhayev intends to pursue an MPhil in quantitative climate and environmental science. He is interested in applying these subjects to climate science and intends to spend his career developing novel statistical methods for climate prediction.

      At MIT, Geogdzhayev researches climate emulators with Professor Raffaele Ferrari’s group in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences and is part of the “Bringing Computation to the Climate Challenge” Grand Challenges project. He is currently working on an operator-based emulator for the projection of climate extremes. Previously, Geogdzhayev studied the statistics of changing chaotic systems, work that has recently been published as a first-author paper.

      As a recipient of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) Hollings Scholarship, Geogdzhayev has worked on bias correction methods for climate data at the NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. He is the recipient of several other awards in the field of earth and atmospheric sciences, notably the American Meteorological Society Ward and Eileen Seguin Scholarship.

      Outside of research, Geogdzhayev enjoys writing poetry and is actively involved with his living community, Burton 1, for which he has previously served as floor chair.

      Sadhana Lolla

      Lolla, a senior from Clarksburg, Maryland, is majoring in computer science and minoring in mathematics and literature. At Cambridge, she will pursue an MPhil in technology policy.

      In the future, Lolla aims to lead conversations on deploying and developing technology for marginalized communities, such as the rural Indian village that her family calls home, while also conducting research in embodied intelligence.

      At MIT, Lolla conducts research on safe and trustworthy robotics and deep learning at the Distributed Robotics Laboratory with Professor Daniela Rus. Her research has spanned debiasing strategies for autonomous vehicles and accelerating robotic design processes. At Microsoft Research and Themis AI, she works on creating uncertainty-aware frameworks for deep learning, which has impacts across computational biology, language modeling, and robotics. She has presented her work at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) conference and the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML). 

      Outside of research, Lolla leads initiatives to make computer science education more accessible globally. She is an instructor for class 6.s191 (MIT Introduction to Deep Learning), one of the largest AI courses in the world, which reaches millions of students annually. She serves as the curriculum lead for Momentum AI, the only U.S. program that teaches AI to underserved students for free, and she has taught hundreds of students in Northern Scotland as part of the MIT Global Teaching Labs program.

      Lolla was also the director for xFair, MIT’s largest student-run career fair, and is an executive board member for Next Sing, where she works to make a cappella more accessible for students across musical backgrounds. In her free time, she enjoys singing, solving crossword puzzles, and baking. More

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      in Energy

      Local journalism is a critical “gate” to engage Americans on climate change

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      Last year, Pew Research Center data revealed that only 37 percent of Americans said addressing climate change should be a top priority for the president and Congress. Furthermore, climate change was ranked 17th out of 21 national issues included in a Pew survey. 

      But in reality, it’s not that Americans don’t care about climate change, says celebrated climate scientist and communicator MIT Professor Katharine Hayhoe. It’s that they don’t know that they already do. 

      To get Americans to care about climate change, she adds, it’s imperative to guide them to their gate. At first, it might not be clear where that gate is. But it exists. 

      That message was threaded through the Connecting with Americans on Climate Change webinar last fall, which featured a discussion with Hayhoe and the five journalists who made up the 2023 cohort of the MIT Environmental Solutions Journalism Fellowship. Hayhoe referred to a “gate” as a conversational entry point about climate impacts and solutions. The catch? It doesn’t have to be climate-specific. Instead, it can focus on the things that people already hold close to their heart.

      “If you show people … whether it’s a military veteran or a parent or a fiscal conservative or somebody who is in a rural farming area or somebody who loves kayaking or birds or who just loves their kids … how they’re the perfect person to care [about climate change], then it actually enhances their identity to advocate for and adopt climate solutions,” said Hayhoe. “It makes them a better parent, a more frugal fiscal conservative, somebody who’s more invested in the security of their country. It actually enhances who they already are instead of trying to turn them into someone else.”

      The MIT Environmental Solutions Journalism Fellowship provides financial and technical support to journalists dedicated to connecting local stories to broader climate contexts, especially in parts of the country where climate change is disputed or underreported. 

      Climate journalism is typically limited to larger national news outlets that have the resources to employ dedicated climate reporters. And since many local papers are already struggling — with the country on track to lose a third of its papers by the end of next year, leaving over 50 percent of counties in the United States with just one or no local news outlets — local climate beats can be neglected. This makes the work executed by the ESI’s fellows all the more imperative. Because for many Americans, the relevance of these stories to their own community is their gate to climate action. 

      “This is the only climate journalism fellowship that focuses exclusively on local storytelling,” says Laur Hesse Fisher, program director at MIT ESI and founder of the fellowship. “It’s a model for engaging some of the hardest audiences to reach: people who don’t think they care much about climate change. These talented journalists tell powerful, impactful stories that resonate directly with these audiences.”

      From March to June, the second cohort of ESI Journalism Fellows pursued local, high-impact climate reporting in Montana, Arizona, Maine, West Virginia, and Kentucky. 

      Collectively, their 26 stories had over 70,000 direct visits on their host outlets’ websites as of August 2023, gaining hundreds of responses from local voters, lawmakers, and citizen groups. Even though they targeted local audiences, they also had national appeal, as they were republished by 46 outlets — including Vox, Grist, WNYC, WBUR, the NPR homepage, and three separate stories on NPR’s “Here & Now” program, which is broadcast by 45 additional partner radio stations across the country — with a collective reach in the hundreds of thousands. 

      Micah Drew published an eight-part series in The Flathead Beacon titled, “Montana’s Climate Change Lawsuit.” It followed a landmark case of 16 young people in Montana suing the state for violating their right to a “clean and healthful environment.” Of the plaintiffs, Drew said, “They were able to articulate very clearly what they’ve seen, what they’ve lived through in a pretty short amount of life. Some of them talked about wildfires — which we have a lot of here in Montana — and [how] wildfire smoke has canceled soccer games at the high school level. It cancels cross-country practice; it cancels sporting events. I mean, that’s a whole section of your livelihood when you’re that young that’s now being affected.”

      Joan Meiners is a climate news reporter for the Arizona Republic. Her five-part series was situated at the intersection of Phoenix’s extreme heat and housing crises. “I found that we are building three times more sprawling, single-family detached homes … as the number of apartment building units,” she says. “And with an affordability crisis, with a climate crisis, we really need to rethink that. The good news, which I also found through research for this series … is that Arizona doesn’t have a statewide building code, so each municipality decides on what they’re going to require builders to follow … and there’s a lot that different municipalities can do just by showing up to their city council meetings [and] revising the building codes.”

      For The Maine Monitor, freelance journalist Annie Ropeik generated a four-part series, called “Hooked on Heating Oil,” on how Maine came to rely on oil for home heating more than any other state. When asked about solutions, Ropeik says, “Access to fossil fuel alternatives was really the central equity issue that I was looking at in my project, beyond just, ‘Maine is really relying on heating oil, that obviously has climate impacts, it’s really expensive.’ What does that mean for people in different financial situations, and what does that access to solutions look like for those different communities? What are the barriers there and how can we address those?”

      Energy and environment reporter Mike Tony created a four-part series in The Charleston Gazette-Mail on West Virginia’s flood vulnerabilities and the state’s lack of climate action. On connecting with audiences, Tony says, “The idea was to pick a topic like flooding that really affects the whole state, and from there, use that as a sort of an inroad to collect perspectives from West Virginians on how it’s affecting them. And then use that as a springboard to scrutinizing the climate politics that are precluding more aggressive action.”

      Finally, Ryan Van Velzer, Louisville Public Media’s energy and environment reporter, covered the decline of Kentucky’s fossil fuel industry and offered solutions for a sustainable future in a four-part series titled, “Coal’s Dying Light.” For him, it was “really difficult to convince people that climate change is real when the economy is fundamentally intertwined with fossil fuels. To a lot of these people, climate change, and the changes necessary to mitigate climate change, can cause real and perceived economic harm to these communities.” 

      With these projects in mind, someone’s gate to caring about climate change is probably nearby — in their own home, community, or greater region. 

      It’s likely closer than they think. 

      To learn more about the next fellowship cohort — which will support projects that report on climate solutions being implemented locally and how they reduce emissions while simultaneously solving pertinent local issues — sign up for the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative newsletter. Questions about the fellowship can be directed to Laur Hesse Fisher at climate@mit.edu. More

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      in Environment

      Susan Solomon wins VinFuture Award for Female Innovators

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      Lee and Geraldine Martin Professor of Environmental Studies Susan Solomon has been awarded the 2023 VinFuture Award for Female Innovators. Solomon was picked out of almost 1,400 international nominations across four categories for “The discovery of the ozone depletion mechanism in Antarctica, contributing to the establishment of the Montreal Protocol.” The award, which comes with a $500,000 prize, highlights outstanding female researchers and innovators that can serve as role models for aspiring scientists.

      “I’m tremendously humbled by that, and I’ll do my best to live up to it,” says Solomon, who attended the ceremony in Hanoi, Vietnam, on Dec. 20.

      The VinFuture Awards are given annually to “honor scientific research and breakthrough technological innovations that can make a significant difference” according to their site. In addition to Female Innovators, the award has two other special categories, Innovators from Developing Countries and Innovators with Outstanding Achievements in Emerging Fields, as well as their overall grand prize. The awards have been given out by the Vietnam-based VinFuture Foundation since 2021.

      “Countries all around the world are part of scientific progress and innovation, and that a developing country is honoring that is really very lovely,” says Solomon, whose career as an atmospheric chemist has brought her onto the international stage and has shown her firsthand how important developing countries are in crafting global policy.

      In 1986 Solomon led an expedition of 16 scientists to Antarctica to measure the degradation of the ozone layer; she was the only woman on the team. She and her collaborators were able to figure out the atmospheric chemistry of chlorofluorocarbons and other similar chemicals that are now known as ozone-depleting substances. This work became foundational to the creation of the Montreal Protocol, an international agreement that banned damaging chemicals and has allowed the ozone to recover.

      Solomon joined the MIT faculty in 2012 and holds joint appointments in the departments of Chemistry and Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. The success of the Montreal Protocol demonstrates the ability for international cooperation to enact effective environmental agreements; Solomon sees it as a blueprint for crafting further policy when it comes to addressing global climate change.

      “Women can do anything, even help save the ozone layer and solve other environmental problems,” she says. “Today’s problem of climate change is for all of us to be involved in solving.” More