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    Celebrating five years of MIT.nano

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    There is vast opportunity for nanoscale innovation to transform the world in positive ways — expressed MIT.nano Director Vladimir Bulović as he posed two questions to attendees at the start of the inaugural Nano Summit: “Where are we heading? And what is the next big thing we can develop?”

    “The answer to that puts into perspective our main purpose — and that is to change the world,” Bulović, the Fariborz Maseeh Professor of Emerging Technologies, told an audience of more than 325 in-person and 150 virtual participants gathered for an exploration of nano-related research at MIT and a celebration of MIT.nano’s fifth anniversary.

    Over a decade ago, MIT embarked on a massive project for the ultra-small — building an advanced facility to support research at the nanoscale. Construction of MIT.nano in the heart of MIT’s campus, a process compared to assembling a ship in a bottle, began in 2015, and the facility launched in October 2018.

    Fast forward five years: MIT.nano now contains nearly 170 tools and instruments serving more than 1,200 trained researchers. These individuals come from over 300 principal investigator labs, representing more than 50 MIT departments, labs, and centers. The facility also serves external users from industry, other academic institutions, and over 130 startup and multinational companies.

    A cross section of these faculty and researchers joined industry partners and MIT community members to kick off the first Nano Summit, which is expected to become an annual flagship event for MIT.nano and its industry consortium. Held on Oct. 24, the inaugural conference was co-hosted by the MIT Industrial Liaison Program.

    Six topical sessions highlighted recent developments in quantum science and engineering, materials, advanced electronics, energy, biology, and immersive data technology. The Nano Summit also featured startup ventures and an art exhibition.

    Watch the videos here.

    Seeing and manipulating at the nanoscale — and beyond

    “We need to develop new ways of building the next generation of materials,” said Frances Ross, the TDK Professor in Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE). “We need to use electron microscopy to help us understand not only what the structure is after it’s built, but how it came to be. I think the next few years in this piece of the nano realm are going to be really amazing.”

    Speakers in the session “The Next Materials Revolution,” chaired by MIT.nano co-director for Characterization.nano and associate professor in DMSE James LeBeau, highlighted areas in which cutting-edge microscopy provides insights into the behavior of functional materials at the nanoscale, from anti-ferroelectrics to thin-film photovoltaics and 2D materials. They shared images and videos collected using the instruments in MIT.nano’s characterization suites, which were specifically designed and constructed to minimize mechanical-vibrational and electro-magnetic interference.

    Later, in the “Biology and Human Health” session chaired by Boris Magasanik Professor of Biology Thomas Schwartz, biologists echoed the materials scientists, stressing the importance of the ultra-quiet, low-vibration environment in Characterization.nano to obtain high-resolution images of biological structures.

    “Why is MIT.nano important for us?” asked Schwartz. “An important element of biology is to understand the structure of biology macromolecules. We want to get to an atomic resolution of these structures. CryoEM (cryo-electron microscopy) is an excellent method for this. In order to enable the resolution revolution, we had to get these instruments to MIT. For that, MIT.nano was fantastic.”

    Seychelle Vos, the Robert A. Swanson (1969) Career Development Professor of Life Sciences, shared CryoEM images from her lab’s work, followed by biology Associate Professor Joey Davis who spoke about image processing. When asked about the next stage for CryoEM, Davis said he’s most excited about in-situ tomography, noting that there are new instruments being designed that will improve the current labor-intensive process.

    To chart the future of energy, chemistry associate professor Yogi Surendranath is also using MIT.nano to see what is happening at the nanoscale in his research to use renewable electricity to change carbon dioxide into fuel.

    “MIT.nano has played an immense role, not only in facilitating our ability to make nanostructures, but also to understand nanostructures through advanced imaging capabilities,” said Surendranath. “I see a lot of the future of MIT.nano around the question of how nanostructures evolve and change under the conditions that are relevant to their function. The tools at MIT.nano can help us sort that out.”

    Tech transfer and quantum computing

    The “Advanced Electronics” session chaired by Jesús del Alamo, the Donner Professor of Science in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), brought together industry partners and MIT faculty for a panel discussion on the future of semiconductors and microelectronics. “Excellence in innovation is not enough, we also need to be excellent in transferring these to the marketplace,” said del Alamo. On this point, panelists spoke about strengthening the industry-university connection, as well as the importance of collaborative research environments and of access to advanced facilities, such as MIT.nano, for these environments to thrive.

    The session came on the heels of a startup exhibit in which eleven START.nano companies presented their technologies in health, energy, climate, and virtual reality, among other topics. START.nano, MIT.nano’s hard-tech accelerator, provides participants use of MIT.nano’s facilities at a discounted rate and access to MIT’s startup ecosystem. The program aims to ease hard-tech startups’ transition from the lab to the marketplace, surviving common “valleys of death” as they move from idea to prototype to scaling up.

    When asked about the state of quantum computing in the “Quantum Science and Engineering” session, physics professor Aram Harrow related his response to these startup challenges. “There are quite a few valleys to cross — there are the technical valleys, and then also the commercial valleys.” He spoke about scaling superconducting qubits and qubits made of suspended trapped ions, and the need for more scalable architectures, which we have the ingredients for, he said, but putting everything together is quite challenging.

    Throughout the session, William Oliver, professor of physics and the Henry Ellis Warren (1894) Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, asked the panelists how MIT.nano can address challenges in assembly and scalability in quantum science.

    “To harness the power of students to innovate, you really need to allow them to get their hands dirty, try new things, try all their crazy ideas, before this goes into a foundry-level process,” responded Kevin O’Brien, associate professor in EECS. “That’s what my group has been working on at MIT.nano, building these superconducting quantum processors using the state-of-the art fabrication techniques in MIT.nano.”

    Connecting the digital to the physical

    In his reflections on the semiconductor industry, Douglas Carlson, senior vice president for technology at MACOM, stressed connecting the digital world to real-world application. Later, in the “Immersive Data Technology” session, MIT.nano associate director Brian Anthony explained how, at the MIT.nano Immersion Lab, researchers are doing just that.

    “We think about and facilitate work that has the human immersed between hardware, data, and experience,” said Anthony, principal research scientist in mechanical engineering. He spoke about using the capabilities of the Immersion Lab to apply immersive technologies to different areas — health, sports, performance, manufacturing, and education, among others. Speakers in this session gave specific examples in hardware, pediatric health, and opera.

    Anthony connected this third pillar of MIT.nano to the fab and characterization facilities, highlighting how the Immersion Lab supports work conducted in other parts of the building. The Immersion Lab’s strength, he said, is taking novel work being developed inside MIT.nano and bringing it up to the human scale to think about applications and uses.

    Artworks that are scientifically inspired

    The Nano Summit closed with a reception at MIT.nano where guests could explore the facility and gaze through the cleanroom windows, where users were actively conducting research. Attendees were encouraged to visit an exhibition on MIT.nano’s first- and second-floor galleries featuring work by students from the MIT Program in Art, Culture, and Technology (ACT) who were invited to utilize MIT.nano’s tool sets and environments as inspiration for art.

    In his closing remarks, Bulović reflected on the community of people who keep MIT.nano running and who are using the tools to advance their research. “Today we are celebrating the facility and all the work that has been done over the last five years to bring it to where it is today. It is there to function not just as a space, but as an essential part of MIT’s mission in research, innovation, and education. I hope that all of us here today take away a deep appreciation and admiration for those who are leading the journey into the nano age.” More

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      Andrea Lo ’21 draws on ecological lessons for life, work, and education

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      Growing up in Los Angeles about 10 minutes away from the Ballona Wetlands, Andrea Lo ’21 has long been interested in ecology. She witnessed, in real-time, the effects of urbanization and the impacts that development had on the wetlands. 

      “In hindsight, it really helped shape my need for a career — and a life — where I can help improve my community and the environment,” she says.

      Lo, who majored in biology at MIT, says a recurring theme in her life has been the pursuit of balance, valuing both extracurricular and curricular activities. She always felt an equal pull toward STEM and the humanities, toward wet lab work and field work, and toward doing research and helping her community. 

      “One of the most important things I learned in 7.30[J] (Fundamentals of Ecology) was that there are always going to be trade-offs. That’s just the way of life,” she says. “The biology major at MIT is really flexible. I got a lot of room to explore what I was interested in and get a good balance overall, with humanities classes along with technical classes.” 

      Lo was drawn to MIT because of the focus on hands-on work — but many of the activities Lo was hoping to do, both extracurricular and curricular, were cut short because of the pandemic, including her lab-based Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) project. 

      Instead, she pursued a UROP with MIT Sea Grant, working on a project in partnership with Northeastern University and the Charles River Conservancy with funding support from the MIT Community Service fund as part of STEAM Saturday.  

      She was involved in creating Floating Wetland kits, an educational activity directed at students in grades 4 to 6 to help students understand ecological concepts,the challenges the Charles River faces due to urbanization, and how floating wetlands improve the ecosystem. 

      “Our hope was to educate future generations of local students in Cambridge in order for them to understand the ecology surrounding where they live,” she says. 

      In recent years, many bodies of water in Massachusetts have become unusable during the warmer months due to the process of eutrophication: stormwater runoff picks up everything — from fertilizer and silt to animal excrement — and deposits it at the lowest point, which is often a body of water. This leads to an excess of nutrients in the body of water and, when combined with warm temperatures, can lead to harmful algal blooms, making the water sludgy, bright green, and dangerously toxic. 

      The wetland kits Lo worked with were mini ecosystems, replicating a full-sized floating wetland. One such floating wetland can be seen from the Longfellow Bridge at one end of MIT’s campus — the Charles River floating wetland is a patch of grass attached to a buoy like a boat, which is often visited by birds and inhabited by much smaller critters that cannot be seen from the shore.  

      The Charles River floating wetland has a variety of flora, but the kits Lo helped present use only wheat grass because it is easy to grow and has long, dangling roots that could penetrate the watery medium below. A water tray beneath the grass — the Charles river of the mini ecosystem — contains spirulina powder for replicating algae growth and daphnia, which are small, planktonic crustaceans that help keep freshwater clean and usable. 

      “This work was really fulfilling, but it’s also really important, because environmental sustainability relies on future generations to carry on the work that past generations have been doing,” she says. “MIT’s motto is ‘mens et manus’ — education for practical application, and applying theoretical knowledge to what we do in our daily lives. I think this project really helped reinforce that.” 

      Since 2021, Lo has been working in Denmark in a position she learned about through the MIT-Denmark program. 

      She chose Denmark because of its reputation for environmental and sustainability issues and because she didn’t know much about it except for it being one of the happiest countries in the world, often thought of synonymously with the word “hygge,” which has no direct translation but encapsulates coziness and comfort from the small joys in life. 

      “At MIT, we have a very strong work-hard, play-hard culture. I think we can learn a lot from the work-life balance that Denmark has a reputation for,” she says. “I really wanted to take the opportunity in between graduation and whatever came after to explore beyond my bubble. For me, it was important to step back, out of my comfort zone, step into a different environment — and just live.”

      Currently, her personal project is comparing the conditions of two lagoons on the island of Fyn in Denmark. Both are naturally occurring, but in different states of environmental health. 

      She’s been doing a mix of field work and lab work. She collects sediment and fauna samples using a steel corer, or “butter stick” in her lab’s slang. In the same way that one can use a metal tube-shaped tool to remove the core of an apple, she punches the steel corer into the ground, removing a plug of sample. She then sifts the sample through 1 millimeter mesh, preserves the filtered sample in formalin, and takes everything back to the lab. 

      Once there, she looks through the sample to find macrofauna — mollusks, barnacles, and polychaetes, a bristly-looking segmented worm, for example. Collected over time, sediment characteristics like organic matter content, sediment grain size, and the size and abundance of macrofauna, can reveal trends that can help determine the health of the ecosystem. 

      Lo doesn’t have any concrete results yet, but her data could help researchers project the recovery of a lagoon that was rehabilitated using a technique called managed realignment, where water is allowed to reclaim areas where it was once found. She says she’s glad she gets a mix of field work and lab work, even on Denmark’s stormiest days. 

      “Sometimes there are really cold days where it’s windy and I wish I was in the lab, but, at the same time, it’s nice to have a balance where I can be outside and really be hands-on with my work,” she says.  

      Reflecting her dual interests in the technical and the innovative, she will be back in the Greater Boston area in the fall, pursuing a master of science in innovation and management and an MS in civil and environmental engineering at the Tufts Gordon Institute.

      “So much has happened and changed due to the pandemic that it’s easy to dwell on what could’ve been, but I tell myself to be optimistic and take the positive aspects that have come out of the circumstances,” Lo says. “My opportunities with the Sea Grant, MISTI, and Tufts definitely wouldn’t have happened if the pandemic hadn’t happened.” More

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      in Security

      Exploring the links between diet and cancer

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      Every three to five days, all of the cells lining the human intestine are replaced. That constant replenishment of cells helps the intestinal lining withstand the damage caused by food passing through the digestive tract.

      This rapid turnover of cells relies on intestinal stem cells, which give rise to all of the other types of cells found in the intestine. Recent research has shown that those stem cells are heavily influenced by diet, which can help keep them healthy or stimulate them to become cancerous.

      “Low-calorie diets such as fasting and caloric restriction can have antiaging effects and antitumor effects, and we want to understand why that is. On the other hand, diets that lead to obesity can promote diseases of aging, such as cancer,” says Omer Yilmaz, the Eisen and Chang Career Development Associate Professor of Biology at MIT.

      For the past decade, Yilmaz has been studying how different diets and environmental conditions affect intestinal stem cells, and how those factors can increase the risk of cancer and other diseases. This work could help researchers develop new ways to improve gastrointestinal health, either through dietary interventions or drugs that mimic the beneficial effects of certain diets, he says. 

      “Our findings have raised the possibility that fasting interventions, or small molecules that mimic the effects of fasting, might have a role in improving intestinal regeneration,” says Yilmaz, who is also a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.

      A clinical approach

      Yilmaz’s interest in disease and medicine arose at an early age. His father practiced internal medicine, and Yilmaz spent a great deal of time at his father’s office after school, or tagging along at the hospital where his father saw patients.

      “I was very interested in medicines and how medicines were used to treat diseases,” Yilmaz recalls. “He’d ask me questions, and many times I wouldn’t know the answer, but he would encourage me to figure out the answers to his questions. That really stimulated my interest in biology and in wanting to become a doctor.”

      Knowing that he wanted to go into medicine, Yilmaz applied and was accepted to an eight-year, combined bachelor’s and MD program at the University of Michigan. As an undergraduate, this gave him the freedom to explore areas of interest without worrying about applying to medical school. While majoring in biochemistry and physics, he did undergraduate research in the field of protein folding.

      During his first year of medical school, Yilmaz realized that he missed doing research, so he decided to apply to the MD/PhD program at the University of Michigan. For his PhD research, he studied blood-forming stem cells and identified new markers that allowed such cells to be more easily isolated from the bone marrow.

      “This was important because there’s a lot of interest in understanding what makes a stem cell a stem cell, and how much of it is an internal program versus signals from the microenvironment,” Yilmaz says.

      After finishing his PhD and MD, he thought about going straight into research and skipping a medical residency, but ended up doing a residency in pathology at Massachusetts General Hospital. During that time, he decided to switch his research focus from blood-forming stem cells to stem cells found in the gastrointestinal tract.

      “The GI tract seemed very interesting because in contrast to the bone marrow, we knew very little about the identity of GI stem cells,” Yilmaz says. “I knew that once GI stem cells were identified, there’d be a lot of interesting questions about how they respond to diet and how they respond to other environmental stimuli.”

      Dietary questions

      To delve into those questions, Yilmaz did postdoctoral research at the Whitehead Institute, where he began investigating the connections between stem cells, metabolism, diet, and cancer.

      Because intestinal stem cells are so long-lived, they are more likely to accumulate genetic mutations that make them susceptible to becoming cancerous. At the Whitehead Institute, Yilmaz began studying how different diets might influence this vulnerability to cancer, a topic that he carried into his lab at MIT when he joined the faculty in 2014.

      One question his lab has been exploring is why low-calorie diets often have protective effects, including a boost in longevity — a phenomenon that has been seen in many studies in animals and humans.

      In a 2018 study, his lab found that a 24-hour fast dramatically improves stem cells’ ability to regenerate. This effect was seen in both young and aged mice, suggesting that even in old age, fasting or drugs that mimic the effects of fasting could have a beneficial effect.

      On the flip side, Yilmaz is also interested in why a high-fat diet appears to promote the development of cancer, especially colorectal cancer. In a 2016 study, he found that when mice consume a high-fat diet, it triggers a significant increase in the number of intestinal stem cells. Also, some non-stem-cell populations begin to resemble stem cells in their behavior. “The upshot of these changes is that both stem cells and non-stem-cells can give rise to tumors in a high-fat diet state,” Yilmaz says.

      To help with these studies, Yilmaz’s lab has developed a way to use mouse or human intestinal stem cells to generate miniature intestines or colons in cell culture. These “organoids” can then be exposed to different nutrients in a very controlled setting, allowing researchers to analyze how different diets affect the system.

      Recently, his lab adapted the system to allow them to expand their studies to include the role of immune cells, fibroblasts, and other supportive cells found in the microenvironment of stem cells. “It would be remiss of us to focus on just one cell type,” Yilmaz says. “We’re looking at how these different dietary interventions impact the entire stem cell neighborhood.”

      While Yilmaz spends most of his time running his lab at MIT, he also devotes six to eight weeks per year to his work at MGH, where he is an associate pathologist focusing on gastrointestinal pathology.

      “I enjoy my clinical work, and it always reminds me about the importance of the research we do,” he says. “Seeing colon cancer and other GI cancers under the microscope, and seeing their complexity, reminds me of the importance of our mission to figure out how we can prevent these cancers from forming.” More

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      in Environment

      Inaugural J-WAFS Grand Challenge aims to develop enhanced crop variants and move them from lab to land

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      According to MIT’s charter, established in 1861, part of the Institute’s mission is to advance the “development and practical application of science in connection with arts, agriculture, manufactures, and commerce.” Today, the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) is one of the driving forces behind water and food-related research on campus, much of which relates to agriculture. In 2022, J-WAFS established the Water and Food Grand Challenge Grant to inspire MIT researchers to work toward a water-secure and food-secure future for our changing planet. Not unlike MIT’s Climate Grand Challenges, the J-WAFS Grand Challenge seeks to leverage multiple areas of expertise, programs, and Institute resources. The initial call for statements of interests returned 23 letters from MIT researchers spanning 18 departments, labs, and centers. J-WAFS hosted workshops for the proposers to present and discuss their initial ideas. These were winnowed down to a smaller set of invited concept papers, followed by the final proposal stage. 

      Today, J-WAFS is delighted to report that the inaugural J-WAFS Grand Challenge Grant has been awarded to a team of researchers led by Professor Matt Shoulders and research scientist Robert Wilson of the Department of Chemistry. A panel of expert, external reviewers highly endorsed their proposal, which tackles a longstanding problem in crop biology — how to make photosynthesis more efficient. The team will receive $1.5 million over three years to facilitate a multistage research project that combines cutting-edge innovations in synthetic and computational biology. If successful, this project could create major benefits for agriculture and food systems worldwide.

      “Food systems are a major source of global greenhouse gas emissions, and they are also increasingly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. That’s why when we talk about climate change, we have to talk about food systems, and vice versa,” says Maria T. Zuber, MIT’s vice president for research. “J-WAFS is central to MIT’s efforts to address the interlocking challenges of climate, water, and food. This new grant program aims to catalyze innovative projects that will have real and meaningful impacts on water and food. I congratulate Professor Shoulders and the rest of the research team on being the inaugural recipients of this grant.”

      Shoulders will work with Bryan Bryson, associate professor of biological engineering, as well as Bin Zhang, associate professor of chemistry, and Mary Gehring, a professor in the Department of Biology and the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. Robert Wilson from the Shoulders lab will be coordinating the research effort. The team at MIT will work with outside collaborators Spencer Whitney, a professor from the Australian National University, and Ahmed Badran, an assistant professor at the Scripps Research Institute. A milestone-based collaboration will also take place with Stephen Long, a professor from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The group consists of experts in continuous directed evolution, machine learning, molecular dynamics simulations, translational plant biochemistry, and field trials.

      “This project seeks to fundamentally improve the RuBisCO enzyme that plants use to convert carbon dioxide into the energy-rich molecules that constitute our food,” says J-WAFS Director John H. Lienhard V. “This difficult problem is a true grand challenge, calling for extensive resources. With J-WAFS’ support, this long-sought goal may finally be achieved through MIT’s leading-edge research,” he adds.

      RuBisCO: No, it’s not a new breakfast cereal; it just might be the key to an agricultural revolution

      A growing global population, the effects of climate change, and social and political conflicts like the war in Ukraine are all threatening food supplies, particularly grain crops. Current projections estimate that crop production must increase by at least 50 percent over the next 30 years to meet food demands. One key barrier to increased crop yields is a photosynthetic enzyme called Ribulose-1,5-Bisphosphate Carboxylase/Oxygenase (RuBisCO). During photosynthesis, crops use energy gathered from light to draw carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere and transform it into sugars and cellulose for growth, a process known as carbon fixation. RuBisCO is essential for capturing the CO2 from the air to initiate conversion of CO2 into energy-rich molecules like glucose. This reaction occurs during the second stage of photosynthesis, also known as the Calvin cycle. Without RuBisCO, the chemical reactions that account for virtually all carbon acquisition in life could not occur.

      Unfortunately, RuBisCO has biochemical shortcomings. Notably, the enzyme acts slowly. Many other enzymes can process a thousand molecules per second, but RuBisCO in chloroplasts fixes less than six carbon dioxide molecules per second, often limiting the rate of plant photosynthesis. Another problem is that oxygen (O2) molecules and carbon dioxide molecules are relatively similar in shape and chemical properties, and RuBisCO is unable to fully discriminate between the two. The inadvertent fixation of oxygen by RuBisCO leads to energy and carbon loss. What’s more, at higher temperatures RuBisCO reacts even more frequently with oxygen, which will contribute to decreased photosynthetic efficiency in many staple crops as our climate warms.

      The scientific consensus is that genetic engineering and synthetic biology approaches could revolutionize photosynthesis and offer protection against crop losses. To date, crop RuBisCO engineering has been impaired by technological obstacles that have limited any success in significantly enhancing crop production. Excitingly, genetic engineering and synthetic biology tools are now at a point where they can be applied and tested with the aim of creating crops with new or improved biological pathways for producing more food for the growing population.

      An epic plan for fighting food insecurity

      The 2023 J-WAFS Grand Challenge project will use state-of-the-art, transformative protein engineering techniques drawn from biomedicine to improve the biochemistry of photosynthesis, specifically focusing on RuBisCO. Shoulders and his team are planning to build what they call the Enhanced Photosynthesis in Crops (EPiC) platform. The project will evolve and design better crop RuBisCO in the laboratory, followed by validation of the improved enzymes in plants, ultimately resulting in the deployment of enhanced RuBisCO in field trials to evaluate the impact on crop yield. 

      Several recent developments make high-throughput engineering of crop RuBisCO possible. RuBisCO requires a complex chaperone network for proper assembly and function in plants. Chaperones are like helpers that guide proteins during their maturation process, shielding them from aggregation while coordinating their correct assembly. Wilson and his collaborators previously unlocked the ability to recombinantly produce plant RuBisCO outside of plant chloroplasts by reconstructing this chaperone network in Escherichia coli (E. coli). Whitney has now established that the RuBisCO enzymes from a range of agriculturally relevant crops, including potato, carrot, strawberry, and tobacco, can also be expressed using this technology. Whitney and Wilson have further developed a range of RuBisCO-dependent E. coli screens that can identify improved RuBisCO from complex gene libraries. Moreover, Shoulders and his lab have developed sophisticated in vivo mutagenesis technologies that enable efficient continuous directed evolution campaigns. Continuous directed evolution refers to a protein engineering process that can accelerate the steps of natural evolution simultaneously in an uninterrupted cycle in the lab, allowing for rapid testing of protein sequences. While Shoulders and Badran both have prior experience with cutting-edge directed evolution platforms, this will be the first time directed evolution is applied to RuBisCO from plants.

      Artificial intelligence is changing the way enzyme engineering is undertaken by researchers. Principal investigators Zhang and Bryson will leverage modern computational methods to simulate the dynamics of RuBisCO structure and explore its evolutionary landscape. Specifically, Zhang will use molecular dynamics simulations to simulate and monitor the conformational dynamics of the atoms in a protein and its programmed environment over time. This approach will help the team evaluate the effect of mutations and new chemical functionalities on the properties of RuBisCO. Bryson will employ artificial intelligence and machine learning to search the RuBisCO activity landscape for optimal sequences. The computational and biological arms of the EPiC platform will work together to both validate and inform each other’s approaches to accelerate the overall engineering effort.

      Shoulders and the group will deploy their designed enzymes in tobacco plants to evaluate their effects on growth and yield relative to natural RuBisCO. Gehring, a plant biologist, will assist with screening improved RuBisCO variants using the tobacco variety Nicotiana benthamianaI, where transient expression can be deployed. Transient expression is a speedy approach to test whether novel engineered RuBisCO variants can be correctly synthesized in leaf chloroplasts. Variants that pass this quality-control checkpoint at MIT will be passed to the Whitney Lab at the Australian National University for stable transformation into Nicotiana tabacum (tobacco), enabling robust measurements of photosynthetic improvement. In a final step, Professor Long at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will perform field trials of the most promising variants.

      Even small improvements could have a big impact

      A common criticism of efforts to improve RuBisCO is that natural evolution has not already identified a better enzyme, possibly implying that none will be found. Traditional views have speculated a catalytic trade-off between RuBisCO’s specificity factor for CO2 / O2 versus its CO2 fixation efficiency, leading to the belief that specificity factor improvements might be offset by even slower carbon fixation or vice versa. This trade-off has been suggested to explain why natural evolution has been slow to achieve a better RuBisCO. But Shoulders and the team are convinced that the EPiC platform can unlock significant overall improvements to plant RuBisCO. This view is supported by the fact that Wilson and Whitney have previously used directed evolution to improve CO2 fixation efficiency by 50 percent in RuBisCO from cyanobacteria (the ancient progenitors of plant chloroplasts) while simultaneously increasing the specificity factor. 

      The EPiC researchers anticipate that their initial variants could yield 20 percent increases in RuBisCO’s specificity factor without impairing other aspects of catalysis. More sophisticated variants could lift RuBisCO out of its evolutionary trap and display attributes not currently observed in nature. “If we achieve anywhere close to such an improvement and it translates to crops, the results could help transform agriculture,” Shoulders says. “If our accomplishments are more modest, it will still recruit massive new investments to this essential field.”

      Successful engineering of RuBisCO would be a scientific feat of its own and ignite renewed enthusiasm for improving plant CO2 fixation. Combined with other advances in photosynthetic engineering, such as improved light usage, a new green revolution in agriculture could be achieved. Long-term impacts of the technology’s success will be measured in improvements to crop yield and grain availability, as well as resilience against yield losses under higher field temperatures. Moreover, improved land productivity together with policy initiatives would assist in reducing the environmental footprint of agriculture. With more “crop per drop,” reductions in water consumption from agriculture would be a major boost to sustainable farming practices.

      “Our collaborative team of biochemists and synthetic biologists, computational biologists, and chemists is deeply integrated with plant biologists and field trial experts, yielding a robust feedback loop for enzyme engineering,” Shoulders adds. “Together, this team will be able to make a concerted effort using the most modern, state-of-the-art techniques to engineer crop RuBisCO with an eye to helping make meaningful gains in securing a stable crop supply, hopefully with accompanying improvements in both food and water security.” More

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      in Environment

      Recycling plastics from research labs

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      In 2019, MIT’s Environment, Health, and Safety (EHS) Office collaborated with several research labs in the Department of Biology to determine the feasibility of recycling clean lab plastics. Based on early successes with waste isolation and plastics collection, EHS collaborated with GreenLabs Recycling, a local startup, to remove and recycle lab plastics from campus. It was a huge success.

      Today, EHS spearheads the campus Lab Plastics Recycling Program, and its EHS technicians regularly gather clean lab plastics from 212 MIT labs, transferring them to GreenLabs for recycling. Since its pilot stage, the number of labs participating in the program has grown, increasing the total amount of plastic gathered and recycled. In 2020, EHS collected 170 pounds of plastic waste per week from participating labs. That increased to 250 pounds per week in 2021. In 2022, EHS collected a total of 19,000 pounds, or 280 pounds of plastic per week.

      Joanna Buchthal, a research assistant with the MIT Media Lab, indicates that, prior to joining the EHS Lab Plastics Recycling Program, “our laboratory was continuously troubled by the substantial volume of plastic waste we produced and disheartened by our inability to recycle it. We frequently addressed this issue during our group meetings and explored various ways to repurpose our waste, yet we never arrived at a viable solution.”

      The EHS program now provides a solution to labs facing similar challenges with plastics use. After pickup and removal, the plastics are shredded and sold as free stock for injection mold product manufacturing. Buchthal says, “My entire lab is delighted to recycle our used tip boxes and transform them into useful items for other labs!”

      Recently, GreenLabs presented EHS with a three-gallon bucket that local manufacturers produced from 100 percent recycled plastic gathered from MIT labs. No fillers or additives were used in its production.

      Keeping it clean

      The now-growing EHS service and operation started as a pilot. In June 2019, MIT restricted which lab-generated items could be placed in single-stream recycling. MIT’s waste vendors were no longer accepting possibly contaminated waste, such as gloves, pipette tip boxes, bottles, and other plastic waste typically generated in biological research labs. The waste vendors would audit MIT’s single-stream recycling and reject items if they observed any contamination.

      Facing these challenges, the EHS coordinator for biology, John Fucillo, and several EHS representatives from the department met with EHS staff to brainstorm potential recycling solutions. Ensuring the decontamination of the plastic and coordinating its removal in an efficient way were the primary challenges for the labs, says Fucillo, who shared his and lab members’ concerns about the amount of plastic being thrown away with Mitch Galanek, EHS associate director for the Radiation Protection Program. Galanek says, “I immediately recognized the frustration expressed by John and other lab contacts as an opportunity to collaborate.”

      In July 2019, Galanek and a team of EHS technicians began segregating and collecting clean plastic waste from several labs within the biology department. EHS provided the labs with collection containers, and its technicians managed the waste removal over a four-month period, which produced a snapshot of the volume and type of waste generated. An audit of the waste determined that approximately 80 percent of the clean plastic waste generated was empty pipette tip boxes and conical tube racks.

      Based on these data, EHS launched a lab plastics recycling pilot program in November 2019. Labs from the Department of Biology and the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research were invited to participate by recycling their clean, uncontaminated pipette tip boxes and conical tube racks. In addition to providing these labs with collection boxes and plastic liners, EHS also developed an online waste collection request tool to submit plastic pickup requests. EHS also collected the waste containers once they were full.

      Assistant professor of biology Seychelle Vos joined the pilot program as soon as she started her lab in fall 2019. Vos shares that “we already use pipette tips boxes that produce minimal waste, and this program allows us to basically recycle any part of the box except for tips. Pipette boxes are a significant source of plastic waste. This program helps us to be more environmentally and climate friendly.” 

      Given the increased participation in the program, EHS technician Dave Pavone says that plastic pickup is now a “regular component of our work schedules.”

      Together, the EHS technicians, commonly known as “techs,” manage the pickup of nearly 300 plastic collection containers across campus. Normand Desrochers, one of the EHS techs, shares that each morning he plans his pickup route “to get the job done efficiently.” While weekly pickups are a growing part of their schedules, Desrochers notes that everyone has been “super appreciative in what we do for their labs. And what we do makes their job that much easier, being able to focus on their research.”

      Barbara Karampalas, a lab operations manager within the Department of Biological Engineering, is one of many to express appreciation for the program: “We have a fairly large lab with 35 researchers, so we generate a lot of plastic waste … [and] knowing how many tip boxes we were using concerned me. I really appreciate the effort EHS has made to implement this program to help us reduce our impact on the environment.” The program also “makes people in the lab more aware of the issue of plastic waste and MIT’s commitment to reduce its impact on the environment,” says Karampalas.

      Looking ahead

      MIT labs continue to enthusiastically embrace the EHS Lab Plastics Recycling Program: 112 faculty across 212 labs are currently participating in the program. While only empty pipette tip boxes and conical tube racks are currently collected, EHS is exploring which lab plastics could be manufactured into products for use in the labs and repeatedly recycled. Specifically, the EHS Office is considering whether recycled plastic could be used to produce secondary containers for collecting hazardous waste and benchtop transfer containers used for collecting medical waste. As Seychelle notes, “Most plastics cannot be recycled in the current schemes due to their use in laboratory science.”

      Says Fucillo, “Our hope is that this program can be expanded to include other products which could be recycled from the wet labs.” John MacFarlane, research engineer and EHS coordinator for civil and environmental engineering, echoes this sentiment: “With plastic recycling facing economic constraints, this effort by the Institute deserves to be promoted and, hopefully, expanded.”

      “Having more opportunities to recycle ’biologically clean’ plastics would help us have a smaller carbon footprint,” agrees Vos. “We love this program and hope it expands further!”

      MIT labs interested in participating in the EHS Lab Plastics Recycling Program can contact pipetip@mit.edu to learn more. More

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      in Security

      Scientists uncover the amazing way sandgrouse hold water in their feathers

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      Many birds’ feathers are remarkably efficient at shedding water — so much so that “like water off a duck’s back” is a common expression. Much more unusual are the belly feathers of the sandgrouse, especially Namaqua sandgrouse, which absorb and retain water so efficiently the male birds can fly more than 20 kilometers from a distant watering hole back to the nest and still retain enough water in their feathers for the chicks to drink and sustain themselves in the searing deserts of Namibia, Botswana, and South Africa.

      How do those feathers work? While scientists had inferred a rough picture, it took the latest tools of microscopy, and patient work with a collection of sandgrouse feathers, to unlock the unique structural details that enable the feathers to hold water. The findings appear today in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, in a paper by Lorna Gibson, the Matoula S. Salapatas Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and a professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, and Professor Jochen Mueller of Johns Hopkins University.

      The unique water-carrying ability of sandgrouse feathers was first reported back in 1896, Gibson says, by E.G.B. Meade-Waldo, who was breeding the birds in captivity. “He saw them behaving like this, and nobody believed him! I mean, it just sounded so outlandish,” Gibson says.

      In 1967, Tom Cade and Gordon MacLean reported detailed observations of the birds at watering holes, in a study that proved the unique behavior was indeed real. The scientists found that male sandgrouse feathers could hold about 25 milliliters of water, or about a tenth of a cup, after the bird had spent about five minutes dipping in the water and fluffing its feathers.

      About half of that amount can evaporate during the male bird’s half-hour-long flight back to the nest, where the chicks, which cannot fly for about their first month, drink the remainder straight from the feathers.

      Cade and MacLean “had part of the story,” Gibson says, but the tools didn’t exist at the time to carry out the detailed imaging of the feather structures that the new study was able to do.

      Gibson and Mueller carried out their study using scanning electron microscopy, micro-computed tomography, and video imaging. They borrowed Namaqua sandgrouse belly feathers from Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, which has a collection of specimens of about 80 percent of the world’s birds.

      Bird feathers in general have a central shaft, from which smaller barbs extend, and then smaller barbules extend out from those. Sandgrouse feathers are structured differently, however. In the inner zone of the feather, the barbules have a helically coiled structure close to their base and then a straight extension. In the outer zone of the feather, the barbules lack the helical coil and are simply straight. Both parts lack the grooves and hooks that hold the vane of contour feathers together in most other birds.
      Video of water spreading through the specialized sandgrouse feathers, under magnification, shows the uncoiling and spreading of the feather’s barbules as they become wet. Initially, most barbules in the outer zone of the feather form tubular features.Credit: Specimen #142928, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University © President and Fellows of Harvard College.

      When wetted, the coiled portions of the barbules unwind and rotate to be perpendicular to the vane, producing a dense forest of fibers that can hold water through capillary action. At the same time, the barbules in the outer zone curl inward, helping to hold the water in.

      The microscopy techniques used in the new study allowed the dimensions of the different parts of the feather to be measured. In the inner zone, the barb shafts are large and stiff enough to provide a rigid base about which the other parts of the feather deform, and the barbules are small and flexible enough that surface tension is sufficient to bend the straight extensions into tear-like structures that hold water. And in the outer zone, the barb shafts and barbules are smaller still, allowing them to curl around the inner zone, further retaining water.

      While previous work had suggested that surface tension produced the water retention characteristics, “what we did was make measurements of the dimensions and do some calculations to show that that’s what is actually happening,” Gibson says. Her group’s work demonstrated that the varying stiffnesses of the different feather parts plays a key role in their ability to hold water.

      The study was mostly driven by intellectual curiosity about this unique behavioral phenomenon, Gibson says. “We just wanted to see how it works. The whole story just seemed so interesting.” But she says it might lead to some useful applications. For example, in desert regions where water is scarce but fog and dew regularly occur, such as in Chile’s Atacama Desert, some adaptation of this feather structure might be incorporated into the systems of huge nets that are used to collect water. “You could imagine this could be a way to improve those systems,” she says. “A material with this kind of structure might be more effective at fog harvesting and holding the water.”

      “This fascinating and in-depth study reveals how the different parts of the sandgrouse’s belly feathers — including the microscopic barb shafts and barbules — work together to hold water,” says Mary Caswell Stoddard, an evolutionary biologist at Princeton University, who was not associated with this study. “By using a suite of advanced imaging techniques to describe the belly feathers and estimate their bending stiffnesses, Mueller and Gibson add rich new details to our understanding of the sandgrouse’s water-carrying feathers. … This study may inspire others to take a closer look at diverse feather microstructures across bird species — and to wonder whether these structures, as in sandgrouse, help support unusual or surprising functions.”

      The work was partly supported by the National Science Foundation and the Matoula S. Salapatas Professorship in Materials Science and Engineering at MIT. More

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      in Energy

      New MIT internships expand research opportunities in Africa

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      With new support from the Office of the Associate Provost for International Activities, MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI) and the MIT-Africa program are expanding internship opportunities for MIT students at universities and leading academic research centers in Africa. This past summer, MISTI supported 10 MIT student interns at African universities, significantly more than in any previous year.

      “These internships are an opportunity to better merge the research ecosystem of MIT with academia-based research systems in Africa,” says Evan Lieberman, the Total Professor of Political Science and Contemporary Africa and faculty director for MISTI.

      For decades, MISTI has helped MIT students to learn and explore through international experiential learning opportunities and internships in industries like health care, education, agriculture, and energy. MISTI’s MIT-Africa Seed Fund supports collaborative research between MIT faculty and Africa-based researchers, and the new student research internship opportunities are part of a broader vision for deeper engagement between MIT and research institutions across the African continent.

      While Africa is home to 12.5 percent of the world’s population, it generates less than 1 percent of scientific research output in the form of academic journal publications, according to the African Academy of Sciences. Research internships are one way that MIT can build mutually beneficial partnerships across Africa’s research ecosystem, to advance knowledge and spawn innovation in fields important to MIT and its African counterparts, including health care, biotechnology, urban planning, sustainable energy, and education.

      Ari Jacobovits, managing director of MIT-Africa, notes that the new internships provide additional funding to the lab hosting the MIT intern, enabling them to hire a counterpart student research intern from the local university. This support can make the internships more financially feasible for host institutions and helps to grow the research pipeline.

      With the support of MIT, State University of Zanzibar (SUZA) lecturers Raya Ahmada and Abubakar Bakar were able to hire local students to work alongside MIT graduate students Mel Isidor and Rajan Hoyle. Together the students collaborated over a summer on a mapping project designed to plan and protect Zanzibar’s coastal economy.

      “It’s been really exciting to work with research peers in a setting where we can all learn alongside one another and develop this project together,” says Hoyle.

      Using low-cost drone technology, the students and their local counterparts worked to create detailed maps of Zanzibar to support community planning around resilience projects designed to combat coastal flooding and deforestation and assess climate-related impacts to seaweed farming activities. 

      “I really appreciated learning about how engagement happens in this particular context and how community members understand local environmental challenges and conditions based on research and lived experience,” says Isidor. “This is beneficial for us whether we’re working in an international context or in the United States.”

      For biology major Shaida Nishat, her internship at the University of Cape Town allowed her to work in a vital sphere of public health and provided her with the chance to work with a diverse, international team headed by Associate Professor Salome Maswine, head of the global surgery division and a widely-renowned expert in global surgery, a multidisciplinary field in the sphere of global health focused on improved and equitable surgical outcomes.

      “It broadened my perspective as to how an effort like global surgery ties so many nations together through a common goal that would benefit them all,” says Nishat, who plans to pursue a career in public health.

      For computer science sophomore Antonio L. Ortiz Bigio, the MISTI research internship in Africa was an incomparable experience, culturally and professionally. Bigio interned at the Robotics Autonomous Intelligence and Learning Laboratory at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, led by Professor Benjamin Rosman, where he developed software to enable a robot to play chess. The experience has inspired Bigio to continue to pursue robotics and machine learning.

      Participating faculty at the host institutions welcomed their MIT interns, and were impressed by their capabilities. Both Rosman and Maswime described their MIT interns as hard-working and valued team members, who had helped to advance their own work.  

      Building strong global partnerships, whether through faculty research, student internships, or other initiatives, takes time and cultivation, explains Jacobovits. Each successful collaboration helps to seed future exchanges and builds interest at MIT and peer institutions in creative partnerships. As MIT continues to deepen its connections to institutions and researchers across Africa, says Jacobovits, “students like Shaida, Rajan, Mel, and Antonio are really effective ambassadors in building those networks.” More

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      in Environment

      Divorce is more common in albatross couples with shy males, study finds

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      The wandering albatross is the poster bird for avian monogamy. The graceful glider is known to mate for life, partnering up with the same bird to breed, season after season, between long flights at sea.

      But on rare occasions, an albatross pair will “divorce” — a term ornithologists use for instances when one partner leaves the pair for another mate while the other partner remains in the flock. Divorce rates vary widely across the avian world, and the divorce rate for wandering albatrosses is relatively low.

      Nevertheless, the giant drifters can split up. Scientists at MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) have found that, at least for one particular population of wandering albatross, whether a pair will divorce boils down to one important factor: personality. 

      In a study appearing today in the journal Biology Letters, the team reports that an albatross couple’s chance of divorce is highly influenced by the male partner’s “boldness.” The bolder and more aggressive the male, the more likely the pair is to stay together. The shyer the male, the higher the chance that the pair will divorce.

      The researchers say their study is the first to link personality and divorce in a wild animal species.

      “We thought that bold males, being more aggressive, would be more likely to divorce, because they would be more likely to take the risk of switching partners to improve future reproductive outcomes,” says study senior author Stephanie Jenouvrier, an associate scientist and seabird ecologist in WHOI’s FLEDGE Lab. “Instead we find the shy divorce more because they are more likely to be forced to divorce by a more competitive intruder. We expect personality may impact divorce rates in many species, but in different ways.”

      Lead author Ruijiao Sun, a graduate student in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program and MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, says that this new evidence of a link between personality and divorce in the wandering albatross may help scientists predict the resilience of the population.

      “The wandering albatross is a vulnerable species,” Sun says. “Understanding the effect of personality on divorce is important because it can help researchers predict the consequences for population dynamics, and implement conservation efforts.”

      The study’s co-authors include Joanie Van de Walle of WHOI, Samantha Patrick of the University of Liverpool, and Christophe Barbraud, Henri Weimerskirch, and Karine Delord of CNRS- La Rochelle University in France.

      Repeat divorcées

      The new study concentrates on a population of wandering albatross that return regularly to Possession Island in the Southern Indian Ocean to breed. This population has been the focus of a long-term study dating back to the 1950s, in which researchers have been monitoring the birds each breeding season and recording the pairings and breakups of individuals through the years.

      This particular population is skewed toward more male individuals than females because the foraging grounds of female albatrosses overlap with fishing vessels, where they are more prone to being accidentally caught in fishing lines as bycatch.  

      In earlier research, Sun analyzed data from this long-term study and picked up a curious pattern: Those individuals that divorced were more likely to do so again and again.

      “Then we wanted to know, what drives divorce, and why are some individuals divorcing more often,” Jenouvrier says. “In humans, you see this repetitive divorce pattern as well, linked to personality. And the wandering albatross is one of the rare species for which we have both demographic and personality data.”

      That personality data comes from an ongoing study that began in 2008 and is led by co-author Patrick, who has been measuring the personality of individuals among the same population of wandering albatross on Possession Island. In the study of animal behavior, personality is defined as a consistent behavioral difference displayed by an individual. Biologists mainly measure personality in animals as a gradient between shy and bold, or less to more aggressive.

      In Patrick’s study, researchers have measured boldness in albatrosses by gauging a bird’s reaction to a human approaching its nest, from a distance of about 5 meters. A bird is assigned a score depending on how it reacts (a bird that does not respond scores a zero, being the most shy, while a bird that lifts its head, and even stands up, can score higher, being the most bold).

      Patrick has made multiple personality assessments of the same individuals over multiple years. Sun and Jenouvrier wondered: Could an individual’s personality have anything to do with their chance to divorce?

      “We had seen this repetitive divorce pattern, and then talked with Sam (Patrick) to see, could this be related to personality?” Sun recalls. “We know that personality predicts divorce in human beings, and it would be intuitive to make the link between personality and divorce in wild populations.”

      Shy birds

      In their new study, the team used data from both the demographic and personality studies to see whether any patterns between the two emerged. They applied a statistical model to both datasets, to test whether the personality of individuals in an albatross pair affected the fate of that pair.

      They found that for females, personality had little to do with whether the birds divorced. But in males, the pattern was clear: Those that were identified as shy were more likely to divorce, while bolder males stayed with their partner.

      “Divorce does not happen very often,” Jenouvrier says. “But we found that the shyer a bird is, the more likely they are to divorce.”

      But why? In their study, the team puts forth an explanation, which ecologists call “forced divorce.” They point out that, in this particular population of wandering albatross, males far outnumber females and therefore are more likely to compete with each other for mates. Males that are already partnered up, therefore, may be faced with a third “intruder” — a male who is competing for a place in the pair.

      “When there is a third intruder that competes, shy birds could step away and give away their mates, where bolder individuals are aggressive and will guard their partner and secure their partnership,” Sun explains. “That’s why shyer individuals may have higher divorce rates.”

      The team is planning to extend their work to examine how the personality of individuals can affect how the larger population changes and evolves. 

      “Now we’re talking about a connection between personality and divorce at the individual level,” Sun says. “But we want to understand the impact at the population level.”

      This research was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation. More

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      in Energy

      MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium announces recipients of inaugural MCSC Seed Awards

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      The MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium (MCSC) has awarded 20 projects a total of $5 million over two years in its first-ever 2022 MCSC Seed Awards program. The winning projects are led by principal investigators across all five of MIT’s schools.

      The goal of the MCSC Seed Awards is to engage MIT researchers and link the economy-wide work of the consortium to ongoing and emerging climate and sustainability efforts across campus. The program offers further opportunity to build networks among the awarded projects to deepen the impact of each and ensure the total is greater than the sum of its parts.

      For example, to drive progress under the awards category Circularity and Materials, the MCSC can facilitate connections between the technologists at MIT who are developing recovery approaches for metals, plastics, and fiber; the urban planners who are uncovering barriers to reuse; and the engineers, who will look for efficiency opportunities in reverse supply chains.

      “The MCSC Seed Awards are designed to complement actions previously outlined in Fast Forward: MIT’s Climate Action Plan for the Decade and, more specifically, the Climate Grand Challenges,” says Anantha P. Chandrakasan, dean of the MIT School of Engineering, Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and chair of the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium. “In collaboration with seed award recipients and MCSC industry members, we are eager to engage in interdisciplinary exploration and propel urgent advancements in climate and sustainability.” 

      By supporting MIT researchers with expertise in economics, infrastructure, community risk assessment, mobility, and alternative fuels, the MCSC will accelerate implementation of cross-disciplinary solutions in the awards category Decarbonized and Resilient Value Chains. Enhancing Natural Carbon Sinks and building connections to local communities will require associations across experts in ecosystem change, biodiversity, improved agricultural practice and engagement with farmers, all of which the consortium can begin to foster through the seed awards.

      “Funding opportunities across campus has been a top priority since launching the MCSC,” says Jeremy Gregory, MCSC executive director. “It is our honor to support innovative teams of MIT researchers through the inaugural 2022 MCSC Seed Awards program.”

      The winning projects are tightly aligned with the MCSC’s areas of focus, which were derived from a year of highly engaged collaborations with MCSC member companies. The projects apply across the member’s climate and sustainability goals.

      The MCSC’s 16 member companies span many industries, and since early 2021, have met with members of the MIT community to define focused problem statements for industry-specific challenges, identify meaningful partnerships and collaborations, and develop clear and scalable priorities. Outcomes from these collaborations laid the foundation for the focus areas, which have shaped the work of the MCSC. Specifically, the MCSC Industry Advisory Board engaged with MIT on key strategic directions, and played a critical role in the MCSC’s series of interactive events. These included virtual workshops hosted last summer, each on a specific topic that allowed companies to work with MIT and each other to align key assumptions, identify blind spots in corporate goal-setting, and leverage synergies between members, across industries. The work continued in follow-up sessions and an annual symposium.

      “We are excited to see how the seed award efforts will help our member companies reach or even exceed their ambitious climate targets, find new cross-sector links among each other, seek opportunities to lead, and ripple key lessons within their industry, while also deepening the Institute’s strong foundation in climate and sustainability research,” says Elsa Olivetti, the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Associate Professor in Materials Science and Engineering and MCSC co-director.

      As the seed projects take shape, the MCSC will provide ongoing opportunities for awardees to engage with the Industry Advisory Board and technical teams from the MCSC member companies to learn more about the potential for linking efforts to support and accelerate their climate and sustainability goals. Awardees will also have the chance to engage with other members of the MCSC community, including its interdisciplinary Faculty Steering Committee.

      “One of our mantras in the MCSC is to ‘amplify and extend’ existing efforts across campus; we’re always looking for ways to connect the collaborative industry relationships we’re building and the work we’re doing with other efforts on campus,” notes Jeffrey Grossman, the Morton and Claire Goulder and Family Professor in Environmental Systems, head of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and MCSC co-director. “We feel the urgency as well as the potential, and we don’t want to miss opportunities to do more and go faster.”

      The MCSC Seed Awards complement the Climate Grand Challenges, a new initiative to mobilize the entire MIT research community around developing the bold, interdisciplinary solutions needed to address difficult, unsolved climate problems. The 27 finalist teams addressed four broad research themes, which align with the MCSC’s focus areas. From these finalist teams, five flagship projects were announced in April 2022.

      The parallels between MCSC’s focus areas and the Climate Grand Challenges themes underscore an important connection between the shared long-term research interests of industry and academia. The challenges that some of the world’s largest and most influential companies have identified are complementary to MIT’s ongoing research and innovation — highlighting the tremendous opportunity to develop breakthroughs and scalable solutions quickly and effectively. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry underscored the importance of developing these scalable solutions, including critical new technology, during a conversation with MIT President L. Rafael Reif at MIT’s first Climate Grand Challenges showcase event last month.

      Both the MCSC Seed Awards and the Climate Grand Challenges are part of MIT’s larger commitment and initiative to combat climate change; this was underscored in “Fast Forward: MIT’s Climate Action Plan for the Decade,” which the Institute published in May 2021.

      The project titles and research leads for each of the 20 awardees listed below are categorized by MCSC focus area.

      Decarbonized and resilient value chains

      “Collaborative community mapping toolkit for resilience planning,” led by Miho Mazereeuw, associate professor of architecture and urbanism in the Department of Architecture and director of the Urban Risk Lab (a research lead on Climate Grand Challenges flagship project) and Nicholas de Monchaux, professor and department head in the Department of Architecture
      “CP4All: Fast and local climate projections with scientific machine learning — towards accessibility for all of humanity,” led by Chris Hill, principal research scientist in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences and Dava Newman, director of the MIT Media Lab and the Apollo Program Professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics
      “Emissions reductions and productivity in U.S. manufacturing,” led by Mert Demirer, assistant professor of applied economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management and Jing Li, assistant professor and William Barton Rogers Career Development Chair of Energy Economics in the MIT Sloan School of Management
      “Logistics electrification through scalable and inter-operable charging infrastructure: operations, planning, and policy,” led by Alex Jacquillat, the 1942 Career Development Professor and assistant professor of operations research and statistics in the MIT Sloan School of Management
      “Powertrain and system design for LOHC-powered long-haul trucking,” led by William Green, the Hoyt Hottel Professor in Chemical Engineering in the Department of Chemical Engineering and postdoctoral officer, and Wai K. Cheng, professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and director of the Sloan Automotive Laboratory
      “Sustainable Separation and Purification of Biochemicals and Biofuels using Membranes,” led by John Lienhard, the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Water in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab, and director of the Rohsenow Kendall Heat Transfer Laboratory; and Nicolas Hadjiconstantinou, professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, co-director of the Center for Computational Science and Engineering, associate director of the Center for Exascale Simulation of Materials in Extreme Environments, and graduate officer
      “Toolkit for assessing the vulnerability of industry infrastructure siting to climate change,” led by Michael Howland, assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

      Circularity and Materials

      “Colorimetric Sulfidation for Aluminum Recycling,” led by Antoine Allanore, associate professor of metallurgy in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering
      “Double Loop Circularity in Materials Design Demonstrated on Polyurethanes,” led by Brad Olsen, the Alexander and I. Michael Kasser (1960) Professor and graduate admissions co-chair in the Department of Chemical Engineering, and Kristala Prather, the Arthur Dehon Little Professor and department executive officer in the Department of Chemical Engineering
      “Engineering of a microbial consortium to degrade and valorize plastic waste,” led by Otto Cordero, associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Desiree Plata, the Gilbert W. Winslow (1937) Career Development Professor in Civil Engineering and associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
      “Fruit-peel-inspired, biodegradable packaging platform with multifunctional barrier properties,” led by Kripa Varanasi, professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering
      “High Throughput Screening of Sustainable Polyesters for Fibers,” led by Gregory Rutledge, the Lammot du Pont Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering, and Brad Olsen, Alexander and I. Michael Kasser (1960) Professor and graduate admissions co-chair in the Department of Chemical Engineering
      “Short-term and long-term efficiency gains in reverse supply chains,” led by Yossi Sheffi, the Elisha Gray II Professor of Engineering Systems, professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and director of the Center for Transportation and Logistics
      The costs and benefits of circularity in building construction, led by Siqi Zheng, the STL Champion Professor of Urban and Real Estate Sustainability at the MIT Center for Real Estate and Department of Urban Studies and Planning, faculty director of the MIT Center for Real Estate, and faculty director for the MIT Sustainable Urbanization Lab; and Randolph Kirchain, principal research scientist and co-director of MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub

      Natural carbon sinks

      “Carbon sequestration through sustainable practices by smallholder farmers,” led by Joann de Zegher, the Maurice F. Strong Career Development Professor and assistant professor of operations management in the MIT Sloan School of Management, and Karen Zheng the George M. Bunker Professor and associate professor of operations management in the MIT Sloan School of Management
      “Coatings to protect and enhance diverse microbes for improved soil health and crop yields,” led by Ariel Furst, the Raymond A. (1921) And Helen E. St. Laurent Career Development Professor of Chemical Engineering in the Department of Chemical Engineering, and Mary Gehring, associate professor of biology in the Department of Biology, core member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, and graduate officer
      “ECO-LENS: Mainstreaming biodiversity data through AI,” led by John Fernández, professor of building technology in the Department of Architecture and director of MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative
      “Growing season length, productivity, and carbon balance of global ecosystems under climate change,” led by Charles Harvey, professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and César Terrer, assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

      Social dimensions and adaptation

      “Anthro-engineering decarbonization at the million-person scale,” led by Manduhai Buyandelger, professor in the Anthropology Section, and Michael Short, the Class of ’42 Associate Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering
      “Sustainable solutions for climate change adaptation: weaving traditional ecological knowledge and STEAM,” led by Janelle Knox-Hayes, the Lister Brothers Associate Professor of Economic Geography and Planning and head of the Environmental Policy and Planning Group in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, and Miho Mazereeuw, associate professor of architecture and urbanism in the Department of Architecture and director of the Urban Risk Lab (a research lead on a Climate Grand Challenges flagship project) More