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    Engineering for social impact

    A desire to make meaningful contributions to society has influenced Runako Gentles’ path in life. Gentles grew up in Jamaica with a supportive extended family that instilled in him his connection to his faith and his aspiration to aim for greatness.

    “While growing up, I was encouraged to live a life that could potentially bring about major positive changes in my family and many other people’s lives,” says the MIT junior.

    One of those pathways his parents encouraged is pursuing excellence in academics.

    Gentles attended Campion College, a Jesuit high school in Jamaica for academically high-achieving students. Gentles was valedictorian and even won an award “for the member of the valedictory class who most closely resembles the ideal of intellectual competence, openness to growth, and commitment to social justice.”

    Although he did well in all subjects, he naturally gravitated toward biology and chemistry. “There are certain subjects people just make sense of material much faster, and high school biology and chemistry were those subjects for me,” he says. His love of learning often surprised friends and classmates when he could recall science concepts and definitions years later.  

    For several years Gentles wanted to pursue the field of medicine. He remembers becoming more excited about the career of a surgeon after reading a book on the story of retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson. During his advanced studies at Campion, he attended a career event and met with a neurosurgeon who invited him and other classmates to watch a surgical procedure. Gentles had the unique learning experience to observe a spinal operation. Around that same time another learning opportunity presented itself. His biology teacher recommended he apply to a Caribbean Science Foundation initiative called Student Program for Innovation, Science, and Engineering (SPISE) to explore careers in science, technology, engineering, and math. The intensive residential summer program for Caribbean students is modeled after the Minority Introduction to Engineering and Science (MITES) program at MIT. Cardinal Warde, a professor of electrical engineering at MIT who is also from the Caribbean, serves as the faculty director for both MITES and SPISE. The program was Gentles’ first major exposure to engineering.

    “I felt like I was in my first year of college at SPISE. It was an amazing experience and it helped me realize the opportunities that an engineering career path offers,” Gentles says. He excelled in the SPISE program, even winning one of the program’s highest honors for demonstrating overall excellence and leadership.

    SPISE was profoundly impactful to Gentles and he decided to pursue engineering at MIT. While further exploring his engineering interests before his first year at MIT, he remembers reading an article that piqued his interest in industry sectors that met basic human and societal needs.

    “I started thinking more about engineering and ethics,” says Gentles. He wanted to spend his time learning how to use science and engineering to make meaningful change in society.  “I think back to wanting to be a doctor for many years to help sick people, but I took it a step further. I wanted to get closer to addressing some of the root causes of deaths, illnesses, and the poor quality of life for billions of people,” he says of his decision to pursue a degree in civil and environmental engineering.

    Gentles spent his first semester at MIT working as a remote student when the Covid pandemic shut down in-person learning. He participated in 1.097 (Introduction to Civil and Environmental Engineering Research) during the January Independent Activities Period, in which undergraduates work one-on-one with graduate students or postdoc mentors on research projects that align with their interests. Gentles worked in the lab of Ruben Juanes exploring the use of machine learning to analyze earthquake data to determine whether different geologic faults in Puerto Rico resulted in distinguishable earthquake clusters. He joined the lab of Desiree Plata in the summer of his sophomore year on another undergraduate research opportunity (UROP) project, analyzing diesel range organic compounds in water samples collected from shallow groundwater sources near hydraulic fracking sites in West Virginia. The experience even led Gentles to be a co-author in his graduate student mentor’s abstract proposal for the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting 2022 conference.  

    Gentles says he found the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering a place for him to have the big-picture mindset of thinking about how technology is going to affect the environment, which ultimately affects society. “Choosing this department was not just about gaining the technical knowledge that most interested me. I wanted to be in a space where I would significantly develop my mindset of using innovation to bring more harmony between society and the environment,” says Gentles.

    Outside of the classroom, learning acoustic guitar is a passion for Gentles. He plays at social events for Cru, a Christian community at MIT, where he serves as a team leader. He credits Cru with helping him feel connected to a lot of different people, even outside of MIT.

    He’s also a member of the Bernard M. Gordon-MIT Engineering Leadership Program, which helps undergraduates gain and hone leadership skills to prepare them for careers in engineering. After learning and exploring more UROPs and classes in civil and environmental engineering, he aspires to hold a position of leadership where he can use his environmental knowledge to impact human lives.

    “Mitigating environmental issues can sometimes be a very complicated endeavor involving many stakeholders,” Gentles says. “We need more bright minds to be thinking of creative ways to address these pressing problems. We need more leaders helping to make society more harmonious with our planet.” More

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    MIT student club Engineers Without Borders works with local village in Tanzania

    Four students from the MIT club Engineers Without Borders (EWB) spent part of their summer in Tanzania to begin assessment work for a health and sanitation project that will benefit the entire village, and an irrigated garden for the Mkutani Primary School.

    The club has been working with the Boston Professional Chapter of Engineers Without Borders (EWB-BPC) since 2019. The Boston chapter finds projects in underserved communities in the developing world and helped connect the MIT students with local government and school officials.

    Juniors Fiona Duong, female health and sanitation team lead, and Lai Wa Chu, irrigation team lead, spent two weeks over the summer in Mkutani conducting research for their projects. Chu was faced with finding more water supplies and a way to get water from the nearby river to the school to use in the gardens they were planting. Duong was charged with assessing the needs of the people who visit The Mkutani Dispensary, which serves as a local medical clinic. Juniors Hung Huynh, club president, and Vivian Cheng, student advisor, also made the trip to work on the projects.

    Health and sanitation project

    Duong looked into ways to help pregnant women with privacy issues as the facility they give birth in — The Mkutani Dispensary — is very small, with just two beds, and is in need of repairs and upgrades. Before leaving Cambridge, Duong led FaceTime meetings with government officials and facilities managers in the village. Once on the ground, she began collecting information and conducted focus groups with the local women and other constituents. She learned that one in three women were not giving birth in the dispensary due to privacy concerns and the lack of modern equipment needed for high-risk pregnancies.

    “The women said that the most pressing need there was water. The women were expected to bring their own water to their deliveries. The rain-catching system there was not enough to fulfill their needs and the river water wasn’t clean. When in labor, they relied on others to gather it and bring it to the dispensary by bike,” Duong says. “With broken windows, the dispensary did not allow for privacy or sanitary conditions.”

    Duong will also analyze the data she collected and share it with others before more MIT students head to Mkutani next summer.

    Farming, sustainability, and irrigation projectBefore heading to Mkutani, Chu conducted research regarding irrigation methods and water collection methods. She confirmed that the river water still contained E.coli and advised the teachers that it would need to be boiled or placed in the sun for a few hours before it could be used. Her technical background in fluid dynamics was helpful for the project.

    “We also found that there was a need for supplemental food for the school, as many children lived too far away to walk home for lunch. The headmaster reached out to us about building the garden, as the garden provides supplemental fruit and vegetables for many of the 600 students to eat. They needed water from the river that was quite far away from the school. We looked at ways to get the water to the garden,” Chu says.

    The group is considering conducting an ecological survey of the area to see if there is another source of water so they could drill another borehole. They will complete their analysis and then decide the best solution to implement.

    “Watching the whole team’s hard work pay off when the travel team got to Mkutani was so amazing,” says second-year student Maria Hernandez, club internal relations chair. “Now, we’re ready to get to work again so we can go back next year. I love being a part of Engineers Without Borders because it’s such a unique way to apply technical skills outside of the classroom and see the impact you make on the community. It’s a beautiful project that truly impacts so many people, and I can’t wait to go back to Mkutani next year.”

    Both Duong and Chu hope they’ll return to the school and the dispensary in summer 2023 to work on the implementation phase of their projects. “This project is one of the reasons I came to MIT. I wanted to work on a social impact project to help improve the world,” Chu says.

    “I hope to go back next summer and implement the project,” adds Duong. “If I do, we’ll go during the two most crucial weeks of the project — after the contractors have started the repair work on the dispensary, so we can see how things are going and then help with anything else related to the project.”

    Duong and Chu said students don’t have to be engineers to help with the EWB’s work — any MIT student interested in joining the club may do so. Both agree that fundraising is a priority, but there are numerous other roles students can help with.

    “MIT students shouldn’t be afraid to just dive right in. There’s a lot that needs to be done there, and even if you don’t have experience in a certain area, don’t let that be a barrier. It’s very rewarding work and it’s also great to get international work experience,” Duong says.

    Chu added, “The project may not seem flashy now, but the rewards are great. Students will get new technical skills and get to experience a new culture as well.” More

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    MIT Energy Night 2021: Connecting global innovators to local talent

    On Oct. 29, leading clean technology innovators from around the world convened virtually and in-person on the MIT campus for the MIT Energy and Climate (MITEC) Club’s Energy Night 2021.

    The event featured an array of participants and attendees — from MIT students and faculty to investors, engineers, and established and early-stage companies — all committed to developing cutting-edge technologies to address climate and energy challenges.   

    The event began with a series of virtual presentations and panels that featured speakers from premier players in the climate and technology spheres. Those presenting included policymakers and market enablers, such as ARPA-E and Actuate, investors and accelerators, like TDK Ventures and Prime Coalition, along with numerous startups, including Commonwealth Fusion Systems and Infinite Cooling. The goal was to discuss how nascent technologies could crystalize into viable solutions.

    “A lot of project ideas have the potential to be commercialized,” explains Anne Liu, a research assistant at the MIT Materials Systems Lab and the event’s co-managing director. “So, the goal of our virtual session was to explore the business side of the energy ecosystem by inviting leaders to discuss how to turn ideas into successful companies.”

    While the virtual session explored commercialization, the poster session presented early-stage innovation. It featured more than 70 posters by scientists, startups, and engineers from across the MIT community and far beyond.

    “The poster session is one of the most exciting parts of Energy Night,” says Naomi Lutz, a fourth-year undergraduate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. “It provides a great opportunity to step back and learn more about what others are doing in specific areas of energy.”

    The work featured spanned the climate and energy sphere, ranging from nuclear fusion to carbon capture — and even included a proposal for solar smokestacks.

    “There are so many topics in energy and climate. And, yet it’s common to only connect with those in your specific track,” says Alexandra Steckmest, one of the event’s organizers and an MBA candidate at MIT Sloan School of Management. “So, we designed the poster session as a platform for people to connect with those from different realms of the energy sector.”

    To the MITEC team, presenting this broader spectrum of research isn’t just exciting — it’s necessary.

    “This is such a rapidly changing industry,” says Steckmest. “So, it’s important to have so many industry experts share information about the changes that are going on in it.”

    The event’s hybrid format, therefore, responded to more than just the Covid-19 pandemic: it also catered to the global, collaborative, and continuously evolving nature of the energy and cleantech industries.

    “After some discussion, we decided on this hybrid format,” explains Liu. “We wanted to ensure that we could have the interactivity of an in-person event while also reaching the much broader audience we had cultivated during last year’s entirely remote format.”

    The new hybrid format helped the team cast a wide net. In total, 400 people attended the in-person poster session while nearly an additional 400 people attended virtually from around the world.

    Yet, despite an increasingly global scope, Energy Night still retained a distinctly local composition. Numerous companies present at the virtual session hailed from across Greater Boston, and, quite often, near MIT: Commonwealth Fusion Systems and Infinite Cooling retain offices within Somerville or Cambridge, and each spawned from MIT.

    “There are so many companies coming out of [MIT] that go on to establish themselves in Boston and Cambridge,” notes Steckmest. “That makes [Energy Night] well-positioned to build connections and generate value for local accelerators.”

    MITEC continues to cultivate these local connections while also contributing to Boston’s unique cleantech culture.

    “What sets Boston apart is its emphasis on long-term solutions that are not always easily achievable through conventional venture capital,” says Liu.

    When planning Energy Night, she and her team sought to invite both short- and long-term solutions to showcase Boston’s aspirational culture while also offering a venue for established investors to seek new, more readily deployable technologies.

    Perhaps the greatest testament to Energy Night’s ongoing success is its tendency to come full circle.

    “Over the past few years, we’ve featured serial presenters from MIT that have gone on to found their own companies,” explains Liu. “So, for a lot of projects, we see a transition from an idea to a successful business.”

    Form Energy, for instance, is an MIT spinoff founded in 2017 with the mission of creating low-cost, long-term energy storage. Its stature grew greatly following its presence at Energy Night in 2019, after which it attracted $40 million in venture capital funding.

    “Whether you’re a first-year undergraduate or a long-time member of the energy and cleantech industries, we want Energy Night to generate these driving connections that lead to professional growth, as well as successful partnerships,” says Steckmest. More

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    MIT Solar Electric Vehicle Team wins 2021 American Solar Challenge

    After three years of hard work, the MIT Solar Electric Vehicle Team took first place at the 2021 American Solar Challenge (ASC) on August 7 in the Single Occupancy Vehicle (SOV) category. During the five-day race, their solar car, Nimbus — designed and built entirely by students — beat eight other SOVs from schools across the country, traversing 1,109 miles and maintaining an average speed of 38.4 miles per hour.

    Held every two years, the ASC has traditionally been a timed event. This year, however, the race was based on the total distance traveled. Each team followed the same prescribed route, from Independence, Missouri, to Las Vegas, New Mexico. But teams could drive additional miles within each of the three stages — if their battery had enough juice to continue. Nimbus surpassed the closest runner-up, the University of Kentucky, by over 100 miles.

    “It’s still a little surreal,” says SEVT captain Aditya Mehrotra, a rising senior in electrical engineering and computer science. “We were all hopeful, but I don’t think you ever go into racing like, ‘We got this.’ It’s more like, ‘We’re going to do our best and see how we fare.’ In this case, we were fortunate enough to do really well. The car worked beautifully, and — more importantly — the team worked beautifully and we learned a lot.”

    Team work makes the dream work

    Two weeks before the ASC race, each solar car was put through its paces in the Formula Sun Grand Prix at Heartland Motorsports Park in Topeka, Kansas. First, vehicles had to perform a series of qualifying challenges, called “scrutineering.” Cars that passed could participate in a track race in hopes of qualifying for ASC. Nimbus placed second, completing a total of 239 laps around the track over three days (equivalent to 597.5 miles).

    In the process, SEVT member and rising junior in mechanical engineering Cameron Kokesh tied the Illinois State driver for the fastest single lap time around the track, clocking in at three minutes and 19 seconds. She’s not one to rest on her laurels, though. “It would be fun to see if we could beat that time at the next race,” she says with a smile.

    Nimbus’s performance at the Formula Sun Grand Prix and ASC is a manifestation of team’s proficiency in not only designing and building a superior solar vehicle, but other skills, as well, including managing logistics, communications, and teamwork. “It’s a huge operation,” says Mehrotra. “It’s not like we drive the car straight down the highway during the race.”

    Indeed, Nimbus travels with an impressive caravan of seven vehicles manned by about two dozen SEVT members. A scout vehicle is at the front, monitoring road and weather conditions, followed by a lead car that oversees navigation. Nimbus is third in the caravan, trailed by a chase vehicle, in which the strategy team manages tasks like monitoring telemetry data, calculating how much power the solar panels are generating and the remaining travel distance, and setting target speeds. Bringing up the rear are the transport truck and trailer, a media car, and “Cupcake,” a support vehicle with food, supplies, and camping gear.

    Leading up to the three-week event, the team devoted three years to designing, building, refining, and testing Nimbus. (The ASC was scheduled for 2020, but it was postponed until this year due to the Covid-19 pandemic.) They spent countless hours in the MIT Edgerton Center’s machine shop in Building N51, making, building, and iterating. They drove the car in the greater-Boston area, up to Salem, Massachusetts, and to Cape Cod. In the spring, they traveled to Palmer Motorsports Park in Palmer, Massachusetts, to practice various components of the race. They performed scrutineering tasks like the slalom test and figure eight test, conducted team operations training to optimize the caravan’s performance, and, of course, the “shakedown.” 

    “Shakedown is just, you drive the car around the track and you basically see what falls off and then you know what you need to fix,” Mehrotra explains. “Hopefully nothing too major falls off!”

    The road ahead

    At the conclusion of the race, Mehotra officially stepped down and handed SEVT’s reins to its new leaders: Kotesh will take the helm as team captain, and rising sophomore Sydney Kim, an ocean engineering major, will serve as vice-captain. The long drive back from the Midwest gave them time to reflect on the win and future plans.

    Although Nimbus performed well, there were a few instructive glitches here and there, mostly during scrutineering. But there was nothing the team couldn’t handle. For example, the canopy latch didn’t always hold, so the clear acrylic bubble covering the driver would pop open. (A little spring adjustment and tape did the trick.) In addition, Nimbus had a tendency to skid when the driver slammed on the brakes. (Driver training, and letting some air out of the tires, improved the traction.)

    Then there were the unpredictable variables, beyond the team’s control. On one day, with little sun, Nimbus had to chug along the highway at a mere 15 miles per hour. And there was the time that the Kansas State Police pulled the entire caravan over. “They didn’t realize we were coming through,” Mehrotra explains.

    Kim thinks one of the keys to the team’s success is that Nimbus is quite reliable. “We didn’t have wheels falling off on the road. Once we got the car rolling, things didn’t go wrong mechanically or electrically. Also, it’s very energy efficient because it’s lightweight and the shape of the vehicle is very aerodynamic. On a nice sunny day, it allows us to drive 40 miles per hour energy-neutral — the battery stays at the same amount of charge as we drive,” she says.

    The next ASC will take place in 2022, so this year the team will focus on refining Nimbus to race it again next summer. Also, they’ve set their sights on building a car to enter in the Multiple Occupancy Vehicle (MOV) class in the 2024 race — something the team has never done. “It will definitely take the three years to build a good car to compete,” Kotesh muses. “But it’s a really good transition period, after doing so well on this race, so our team is excited about it.”

    “It will be challenging for them, but I wouldn’t put it anything past them,” says Patrick McAtamney, the Edgerton Center technical instructor and shop manager who works with all the student clubs and teams, from solar vehicles to Formula race cars to rockets. He attended ASC, too, and has the utmost admiration for SEVT. “It’s totally student-run. They do all the designing and machining themselves. I always tell people that sometimes I feel like my only job is to make sure they have 10 fingers when they leave the shop.”

    In the meantime, before the school year begins, SEVT has another challenge: deciding where to put the trophy. “It’s huge,” McAtamney says. “It’s about the size of the Stanley Cup!” More