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    “Mens et manus” in Guatemala

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    In a new, well-equipped lab at the University del Valle de Guatemala (UVG) in June 2024, members of two Mayan farmers’ cooperatives watched closely as Rodrigo Aragón, professor of mechanical engineering at UVG, demonstrated the operation of an industrial ultrasound machine. Then he invited each of them to test the device.“For us, it is a dream to be able to interact with technology,” said Francisca Elizabeth Saloj Saloj, a member of the Ija´tz women’s collective, a group from Guatemala’s highlands.After a seven-hour bumpy bus ride, the farmers had arrived in Guatemala City with sacks full of rosemary, chamomile, and thyme. Their objective: to explore processes for extracting essential oils from their plants and to identify new products to manufacture with these oils. Currently, farmers sell their herbs in local markets for medicinal or culinary purposes. With new technology, says Aragón, they can add value to their harvest, using herb oils as the basis for perfumes, syrups, and tinctures that would reach broader markets. These goods could provide much-needed income to the farmers’ households.A strategy for transformationThis collaboration is just one part of a five-year, $15-million project funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and managed by MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering in collaboration with UVG and the Guatemalan Export Association (AGEXPORT). Launched in 2021 and called ASPIRE — Achieving Sustainable Partnerships for Innovation, Research, and Entrepreneurship — the project aims to collaboratively strengthen UVG, and eventually other universities in Central America, as problem-solving powerhouses that research, design, and build solutions with and for the people most in need.“The vision of ASPIRE is that within a decade, UVG researchers are collaborating with community members on research that generates results that are relevant to addressing local development challenges — results that are picked up and used by policymakers and actors in the private sector,” says MIT Research Scientist Elizabeth Hoffecker, a co-principal investigator of ASPIRE at MIT, and leader of the Institute’s Local Innovation Group.UVG, one of Guatemala’s top universities, has embraced ASPIRE as part of its long-term strategic plan, and is now pursuing wide-ranging changes based on a playbook developed at MIT — including at MIT D-Lab, which deploys participatory design, co-creation, low-cost technologies, and capacity building to meet the complex challenges of poverty — and piloted at UVG. The ASPIRE team is working to extend the reach of its research innovation and entrepreneurship activities to its two regional campuses and to other regional universities. The overall program is informed by MIT’s approach to development of research-driven innovation ecosystems.Although lacking the resources (and PhD programs) of a typical U.S. university, UVG has big ambitions for itself, and for Guatemala.“We want to thrive and lead the country in research and teaching, and to accomplish this, we are creating an innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem, based on best practices drawn from D-Lab and other MIT groups,” says Mónica Stein, vice-rector for research and outreach at UVG, who holds a doctorate from Stanford University in plant biology. “ASPIRE can really change the way that development work and local research is done so that it has more impact,” says Stein. “And in theory, if you have more impact, then you improve environmental outcomes, health outcomes, educational outcomes, and economic outcomes.”Local innovation and entrepreneurshipShifting gears at a university and launching novel development initiatives are complex challenges, but with training and workshops conducted by D-Lab-trained collaborators and MIT-based ASPIRE staff, UVG faculty, staff, and students are embracing the change. Programs underway should sound familiar to anyone who has set foot recently on the campus of a U.S. research university: hackathons, makerspaces, pitchapaloozas, entrepreneurship competitions, and spinouts. But at UVG, all of these serve a larger purpose: addressing sustainable development goals.ASPIRE principal investigator Daniel Frey, professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, believes some of these programs are already paying off, particularly a UVG venture mentoring service (VMS), modeled after and facilitated by MIT’s own VMS program. “We’d like to see students building companies and improving their livelihoods and those of people from indigenous and marginalized communities,” says Frey.The ASPIRE project intends to enable the lowest-income communities to share more of Guatemala’s wealth, derived mainly from agricultural goods. In collaborating with AGEXPORT, which enables networking with companies across the country, the team zeroed in on creating or enhancing the value chain for several key crops.“Snow peas offer a great target for both research and innovation,” says Adilia Blandón, ASPIRE research project manager and professor of food engineering at UVG. Many farming communities grow snow peas, which they send along to companies for export to the U.S. Unless these peas are perfect in shape and color, Blandón explains, they don’t make it to market. Nearly a third of Guatemala’s crop is left at processing plants, turned into animal feed, or wasted.An ASPIRE snow pea team located farmers from two cooperatives who wanted to solve this problem. At a series of co-creation sessions, these growers and mechanical engineers at UVG developed a prototype for a low-tech cart for collecting snow peas, made from easily acquired local materials, which can navigate the steep and narrow paths on the hills where the plants grow. This method avoids crushing snow peas in a conventional harvest bag. In addition, the snow pea project has engaged women at a technical school to design a harvest apron for women snow pea farmers. “This could be a business opportunity for them,” Blandón says.Blandón vividly recalls her first ASPIRE workshop, focused on participatory design. “It opened my eyes as a researcher in so many ways,” she says. “I learned that instead of taking information from people, I can learn from them and create things with them that they are really excited about.” It completely changed how she approaches research, she says.Working with Mayan communities that produce snow peas, where malnourishment and illness are rampant, Blandón and ASPIRE researchers found that families don’t eat the protein-packed vegetable because they don’t find it palatable — even though so much of it is left over from harvest. Participatory design sessions with a group of mothers yielded an intriguing possibility: grinding snow peas into flour, which would then be incorporated into traditional bean- and corn-based dishes. The recipes born of this collaboration could land on WhatsApp or TikTok, mobile apps familiar to these families.Building value chainsAdditional research projects are teasing out novel ways of adding value to the products grown or made by Guatemalan hands.These include an educational toolkit developed with government farm extension workers to teach avocado producers how to improve their practices. The long-term goal is to grow and export larger and unblemished fruit for the lucrative U.S. market, currently dominated by Mexico. The kit, featuring simple graphics for growers who can’t read or don’t have the time, offers lessons on soil care, fertilizing, and protecting the fruit post-harvest.ASPIRE UVG Research Director Ana Lucia Solano is especially proud of “an immersive, animated, Monopoly-like game that shows farmers the impact of activities like buying fertilizer on their finances,” she says. “If small producers improve their practices, they will have better opportunities to sell their products at a better price, which may allow them to hire more people, teach others more easily, and offer better jobs and working conditions — and maybe this will help prevent farmworkers from having to leave the country.”Solano has just begun a similar program to educate cocoa producers. “The cocoa of Guatemala is wonderful, but the growers, who have great native knowledge, also need to learn new methods so they can transform their chocolate into the kind of high-quality product expected in European markets, with the help of AGEXPORT,” she says.At the UVG Altiplano campus, Mayan instructor Jeremías Morales, who runs the maker space, trained with Amy Smith, an MIT senior lecturer and founding director of the D-Lab, to facilitate creative capacity-building programs. He is working with nearby villages on a solution for the backbreaking labor of planting broccoli seedlings.“Here in Guatemala, small farm holders don’t have technology to do this task,” says Solano. Through design and prototyping workshops, the village and UVG professors have developed an inexpensive device that accomplishes this painful work. “After their next iteration of this technology, we can support the participants in starting a business,” says Solano.Opportunities to invent solutions to commonplace but vexing problems keep popping up. A small village of 100 families has to share two mills to grind corn for their tortillas. It’s a major household expense. With ASPIRE facilitators, a group of women designed a prototype corn mill for home use. “They were skeptical at first, especially when their initial prototypes didn’t work,” reports Solano, “but when they finally succeeded, there was so much excitement about the results, an energy and happiness that you could feel in the room.”Adopting an MIT mindsetThis feeling of empowerment, a pillar of sustainable development, has great meaning for UVG Professor Victor Hugo Ayerdi, an ASPIRE project manager and director of UVG’s Department of Mechanical Engineering.“In college and after I graduated, I thought since everything came from developed countries, and I was in a developing country, I couldn’t invent products.” With that mindset, he says, he went to work in manufacturing and sales for an international tire manufacturing company.But when he arrived at UVG in 2009, Ayerdi heard from mechanical engineering students who craved practical experience designing and building things. Determined to create maker spaces for the three UVG campuses, he took a field trip to MIT, whose motto is “mens et manus” or “mind and hand.”“The trip changed my life,” he says. “The MIT mindset is to believe in yourself, try things, and fail, but assume there has to be a way to do it.” As a result, he says, he realized UVG faculty and students could also use scientific and engineering knowledge to invent products, become entrepreneurs, spark economic growth; they had the capacity. He and other UVG colleagues were primed for change when the ASPIRE opportunity emerged.As some ASPIRE research projects wind down their initial phases, others are just gearing up, including an effort to fashion a water purification system from the shells of farmed shrimp. “We are only just starting to get results from our research,” says Stein. “But we are totally betting on the ASPIRE model because it works at MIT and other places.”The ASPIRE researchers acknowledge they are looking at long timelines to make significant inroads against environmental, health, educational, and economic challenges.“My greatest hope is that ASPIRE will have planted the seed of this innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem model, and that in a decade, UVG will have optimized the different programs, whether in training, entrepreneurship, or research, enough to actively transfer them to other Central American universities,” says Stein.“We would like to be the hub of this network and we want to stay connected, because, in theory, we can work together on problems that we have in common in our region. That would be really cool.” More

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      Aspiring to sustainable development

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      In a first for both universities, MIT undergraduates are engaged in research projects at the Universidad del Valle de Guatemala (UVG), while MIT scholars are collaborating with UVG undergraduates on in-depth field studies in Guatemala.These pilot projects are part of a larger enterprise, called ASPIRE (Achieving Sustainable Partnerships for Innovation, Research, and Entrepreneurship). Funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, this five-year, $15-million initiative brings together MIT, UVG, and the Guatemalan Exporters Association to promote sustainable solutions to local development challenges.“This research is yielding insights into our understanding of how to design with and for marginalized people, specifically Indigenous people,” says Elizabeth Hoffecker, co-principal investigator of ASPIRE at MIT and director of the MIT Local Innovation Group.The students’ work is bearing fruit in the form of publications and new products — directly advancing ASPIRE’s goals to create an innovation ecosystem in Guatemala that can be replicated elsewhere in Central and Latin America.For the students, the project offers rewards both tangible and inspirational.“My experience allowed me to find my interest in local innovation and entrepreneurship,” says Ximena Sarmiento García, a fifth-year undergraduate at UVG majoring in anthropology. Supervised by Hoffecker, Sarmiento García says, “I learned how to inform myself, investigate, and find solutions — to become a researcher.”Sandra Youssef, a rising junior in mechanical engineering at MIT, collaborated with UVG researchers and Indigenous farmers to design a mobile cart to improve the harvest yield of snow peas. “It was perfect for me,” she says. “My goal was to use creative, new technologies and science to make a dent in difficult problems.”Remote and effectiveKendra Leith, co-principal investigator of ASPIRE, and associate director for research at MIT D-Lab, shaped the MIT-based undergraduate research opportunities (UROPs) in concert with UVG colleagues. “Although MIT students aren’t currently permitted to travel to Guatemala, I wanted them to have an opportunity to apply their experience and knowledge to address real-world challenges,” says Leith. “The Covid pandemic prepared them and their counterparts at UVG for effective remote collaboration — the UROPs completed remarkably productive research projects over Zoom and met our goals for them.”MIT students participated in some of UVG’s most ambitious ASPIRE research. For instance, Sydney Baller, a rising sophomore in mechanical engineering, joined a team of Indigenous farmers and UVG mechanical engineers investigating the manufacturing process and potential markets for essential oils extracted from thyme, rosemary, and chamomile plants.“Indigenous people have thousands of years working with plant extracts and ancient remedies,” says Baller. “There is promising history there that would be important to follow up with more modern research.”Sandra Youssef used computer-aided design and manufacturing to realize a design created in a hackathon by snow pea farmers. “Our cart had to hold 495 pounds of snow peas without collapsing or overturning, navigate narrow paths on hills, and be simple and inexpensive to assemble,” she says. The snow pea producers have tested two of Youssef’s designs, built by a team at UVG led by Rony Herrarte, a faculty member in the department of mechanical engineering.From waste to filterTwo MIT undergraduates joined one of UVG’s long-standing projects: addressing pollution in Guatemala’s water. The research seeks to use chitosan molecules, extracted from shrimp shells, for bioremediation of heavy metals and other water contaminants. These shells are available in abundance, left as waste by the country’s shrimp industry.Sophomores Ariana Hodlewsky, majoring in chemical engineering, and Paolo Mangiafico, majoring in brain and cognitive sciences, signed on to work with principal investigator and chemistry department instructor Allan Vásquez (UVG) on filtration systems utilizing chitosan.“The team wants to find a cost-effective product rural communities, most at risk from polluted water, can use in homes or in town water systems,” says Mangiafico. “So we have been investigating different technologies for water filtration, and analyzing the Guatemalan and U.S. markets to understand the regulations and opportunities that might affect introduction of a chitosan-based product.”“Our research into how different communities use water and into potential consumers and pitfalls sets the scene for prototypes UVG wants to produce,” says Hodlewsky.Lourdes Figueroa, UVG ASPIRE project manager for technology transfer, found their assistance invaluable.“Paolo and Ariana brought the MIT culture and mindset to the project,” she says. “They wanted to understand not only how the technology works, but the best ways of getting the technology out of the lab to make it useful.”This was an “Aha!” moment, says Figueroa. “The MIT students made a major contribution to both the engineering and marketing sides by emphasizing that you have to think about how to guarantee the market acceptance of the technology while it is still under development.”Innovation ecosystemsUVG’s three campuses have served as incubators for problem-solving innovation and entrepreneurship, in many cases driven by students from Indigenous communities and families. In 2022, Elizabeth Hoffecker, with eight UVG anthropology majors, set out to identify the most vibrant examples of these collaborative initiatives, which ASPIRE seeks to promote and replicate.Hoffecker’s “innovation ecosystem diagnostic” revealed a cluster of activity centered on UVG’s Altiplano campus in the central highlands, which serves Mayan communities. Hoffecker and two of the anthropology students focused on four examples for a series of case studies, which they are currently preparing for submission to a peer-reviewed journal.“The caliber of their work was so good that it became clear to me that we could collaborate on a paper,” says Hoffecker. “It was my first time publishing with undergraduates.”The researchers’ cases included novel production of traditional thread, and creation of a 3D phytoplankton kit that is being used to educate community members about water pollution in Lake Atitlán, a tourist destination that drives the local economy but is increasingly being affected by toxic algae blooms. Hoffecker singles out a project by Indigenous undergraduates who developed play-based teaching tools for introducing basic mathematical concepts.“These connect to local Mayan ways of understanding and offer a novel, hands-on way to strengthen the math teaching skills of local primary school teachers in Indigenous communities,” says Hoffecker. “They created something that addresses a very immediate need in the community — lack of training.Both of Hoffecker’s undergraduate collaborators are writing theses inspired by these case studies.“My time with Elizabeth allowed me to learn how to conduct research from scratch, ask for help, find solutions, and trust myself,” says Sarmiento García. She finds the ASPIRE approach profoundly appealing. “It is not only ethical, but also deeply committed to applying results to the real lives of the people involved.”“This experience has been incredibly positive, validating my own ability to generate knowledge through research, rather than relying only on established authors to back up my arguments,” says Camila del Cid, a fifth-year anthropology student. “This was empowering, especially as a Latin American researcher, because it emphasized that my perspective and contributions are important.”Hoffecker says this pilot run with UVG undergrads produced “high-quality research that can inform evidence-based decision-making on development issues of top regional priority” — a key goal for ASPIRE. Hoffecker plans to “develop a pathway that other UVG students can follow to conduct similar research.”MIT undergraduate research will continue. “Our students’ activities have been very valuable in Guatemala, so much so that the snow pea, chitosan, and essential oils teams would like to continue working with our students this year,” says Leith.  She anticipates a new round of MIT UROPs for next summer.Youssef, for one, is eager to get to work on refining the snow pea cart. “I like the idea of working outside my comfort zone, thinking about things that seem unsolvable and coming up with a solution to fix some aspect of the problem,” she says. More

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      in Environment

      Translating MIT research into real-world results

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      Inventive solutions to some of the world’s most critical problems are being discovered in labs, classrooms, and centers across MIT every day. Many of these solutions move from the lab to the commercial world with the help of over 85 Institute resources that comprise MIT’s robust innovation and entrepreneurship (I&E) ecosystem. The Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) draws on MIT’s wealth of I&E knowledge and experience to help researchers commercialize their breakthrough technologies through the J-WAFS Solutions grant program. By collaborating with I&E programs on campus, J-WAFS prepares MIT researchers for the commercial world, where their novel innovations aim to improve productivity, accessibility, and sustainability of water and food systems, creating economic, environmental, and societal benefits along the way.The J-WAFS Solutions program launched in 2015 with support from Community Jameel, an international organization that advances science and learning for communities to thrive. Since 2015, J-WAFS Solutions has supported 19 projects with one-year grants of up to $150,000, with some projects receiving renewal grants for a second year of support. Solutions projects all address challenges related to water or food. Modeled after the esteemed grant program of MIT’s Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation, and initially administered by Deshpande Center staff, the J-WAFS Solutions program follows a similar approach by supporting projects that have already completed the basic research and proof-of-concept phases. With technologies that are one to three years away from commercialization, grantees work on identifying their potential markets and learn to focus on how their technology can meet the needs of future customers.“Ingenuity thrives at MIT, driving inventions that can be translated into real-world applications for widespread adoption, implantation, and use,” says J-WAFS Director Professor John H. Lienhard V. “But successful commercialization of MIT technology requires engineers to focus on many challenges beyond making the technology work. MIT’s I&E network offers a variety of programs that help researchers develop technology readiness, investigate markets, conduct customer discovery, and initiate product design and development,” Lienhard adds. “With this strong I&E framework, many J-WAFS Solutions teams have established startup companies by the completion of the grant. J-WAFS-supported technologies have had powerful, positive effects on human welfare. Together, the J-WAFS Solutions program and MIT’s I&E ecosystem demonstrate how academic research can evolve into business innovations that make a better world,” Lienhard says.Creating I&E collaborationsIn addition to support for furthering research, J-WAFS Solutions grants allow faculty, students, postdocs, and research staff to learn the fundamentals of how to transform their work into commercial products and companies. As part of the grant requirements, researchers must interact with mentors through MIT Venture Mentoring Service (VMS). VMS connects MIT entrepreneurs with teams of carefully selected professionals who provide free and confidential mentorship, guidance, and other services to help advance ideas into for-profit, for-benefit, or nonprofit ventures. Since 2000, VMS has mentored over 4,600 MIT entrepreneurs across all industries, through a dynamic and accomplished group of nearly 200 mentors who volunteer their time so that others may succeed. The mentors provide impartial and unbiased advice to members of the MIT community, including MIT alumni in the Boston area. J-WAFS Solutions teams have been guided by 21 mentors from numerous companies and nonprofits. Mentors often attend project events and progress meetings throughout the grant period.“Working with VMS has provided me and my organization with a valuable sounding board for a range of topics, big and small,” says Eric Verploegen PhD ’08, former research engineer in MIT’s D-Lab and founder of J-WAFS spinout CoolVeg. Along with professors Leon Glicksman and Daniel Frey, Verploegen received a J-WAFS Solutions grant in 2021 to commercialize cold-storage chambers that use evaporative cooling to help farmers preserve fruits and vegetables in rural off-grid communities. Verploegen started CoolVeg in 2022 to increase access and adoption of open-source, evaporative cooling technologies through collaborations with businesses, research institutions, nongovernmental organizations, and government agencies. “Working as a solo founder at my nonprofit venture, it is always great to have avenues to get feedback on communications approaches, overall strategy, and operational issues that my mentors have experience with,” Verploegen says. Three years after the initial Solutions grant, one of the VMS mentors assigned to the evaporative cooling team still acts as a mentor to Verploegen today.Another Solutions grant requirement is for teams to participate in the Spark program — a free, three-week course that provides an entry point for researchers to explore the potential value of their innovation. Spark is part of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Innovation Corps (I-Corps), which is an “immersive, entrepreneurial training program that facilitates the transformation of invention to impact.” In 2018, MIT received an award from the NSF, establishing the New England Regional Innovation Corps Node (NE I-Corps) to deliver I-Corps training to participants across New England. Trainings are open to researchers, engineers, scientists, and others who want to engage in a customer discovery process for their technology. Offered regularly throughout the year, the Spark course helps participants identify markets and explore customer needs in order to understand how their technologies can be positioned competitively in their target markets. They learn to assess barriers to adoption, as well as potential regulatory issues or other challenges to commercialization. NE-I-Corps reports that since its start, over 1,200 researchers from MIT have completed the program and have gone on to launch 175 ventures, raising over $3.3 billion in funding from grants and investors, and creating over 1,800 jobs.Constantinos Katsimpouras, a research scientist in the Department of Chemical Engineering, went through the NE I-Corps Spark program to better understand the customer base for a technology he developed with professors Gregory Stephanopoulos and Anthony Sinskey. The group received a J-WAFS Solutions grant in 2021 for their microbial platform that converts food waste from the dairy industry into valuable products. “As a scientist with no prior experience in entrepreneurship, the program introduced me to important concepts and tools for conducting customer interviews and adopting a new mindset,” notes Katsimpouras. “Most importantly, it encouraged me to get out of the building and engage in interviews with potential customers and stakeholders, providing me with invaluable insights and a deeper understanding of my industry,” he adds. These interviews also helped connect the team with companies willing to provide resources to test and improve their technology — a critical step to the scale-up of any lab invention.In the case of Professor Cem Tasan’s research group in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, the I-Corps program led them to the J-WAFS Solutions grant, instead of the other way around. Tasan is currently working with postdoc Onur Guvenc on a J-WAFS Solutions project to manufacture formable sheet metal by consolidating steel scrap without melting, thereby reducing water use compared to traditional steel processing. Before applying for the Solutions grant, Guvenc took part in NE I-Corps. Like Katsimpouras, Guvenc benefited from the interaction with industry. “This program required me to step out of the lab and engage with potential customers, allowing me to learn about their immediate challenges and test my initial assumptions about the market,” Guvenc recalls. “My interviews with industry professionals also made me aware of the connection between water consumption and steelmaking processes, which ultimately led to the J-WAFS 2023 Solutions Grant,” says Guvenc.After completing the Spark program, participants may be eligible to apply for the Fusion program, which provides microgrants of up to $1,500 to conduct further customer discovery. The Fusion program is self-paced, requiring teams to conduct 12 additional customer interviews and craft a final presentation summarizing their key learnings. Professor Patrick Doyle’s J-WAFS Solutions team completed the Spark and Fusion programs at MIT. Most recently, their team was accepted to join the NSF I-Corps National program with a $50,000 award. The intensive program requires teams to complete an additional 100 customer discovery interviews over seven weeks. Located in the Department of Chemical Engineering, the Doyle lab is working on a sustainable microparticle hydrogel system to rapidly remove micropollutants from water. The team’s focus has expanded to higher value purifications in amino acid and biopharmaceutical manufacturing applications. Devashish Gokhale PhD ’24 worked with Doyle on much of the underlying science.“Our platform technology could potentially be used for selective separations in very diverse market segments, ranging from individual consumers to large industries and government bodies with varied use-cases,” Gokhale explains. He goes on to say, “The I-Corps Spark program added significant value by providing me with an effective framework to approach this problem … I was assigned a mentor who provided critical feedback, teaching me how to formulate effective questions and identify promising opportunities.” Gokhale says that by the end of Spark, the team was able to identify the best target markets for their products. He also says that the program provided valuable seminars on topics like intellectual property, which was helpful in subsequent discussions the team had with MIT’s Technology Licensing Office.Another member of Doyle’s team, Arjav Shah, a recent PhD from MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering and a current MBA candidate at the MIT Sloan School of Management, is spearheading the team’s commercialization plans. Shah attended Fusion last fall and hopes to lead efforts to incorporate a startup company called hydroGel.  “I admire the hypothesis-driven approach of the I-Corps program,” says Shah. “It has enabled us to identify our customers’ biggest pain points, which will hopefully lead us to finding a product-market fit.” He adds “based on our learnings from the program, we have been able to pivot to impact-driven, higher-value applications in the food processing and biopharmaceutical industries.” Postdoc Luca Mazzaferro will lead the technical team at hydroGel alongside Shah.In a different project, Qinmin Zheng, a postdoc in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, is working with Professor Andrew Whittle and Lecturer Fábio Duarte. Zheng plans to take the Fusion course this fall to advance their J-WAFS Solutions project that aims to commercialize a novel sensor to quantify the relative abundance of major algal species and provide early detection of harmful algal blooms. After completing Spark, Zheng says he’s “excited to participate in the Fusion program, and potentially the National I-Corps program, to further explore market opportunities and minimize risks in our future product development.”Economic and societal benefitsCommercializing technologies developed at MIT is one of the ways J-WAFS helps ensure that MIT research advances will have real-world impacts in water and food systems. Since its inception, the J-WAFS Solutions program has awarded 28 grants (including renewals), which have supported 19 projects that address a wide range of global water and food challenges. The program has distributed over $4 million to 24 professors, 11 research staff, 15 postdocs, and 30 students across MIT. Nearly half of all J-WAFS Solutions projects have resulted in spinout companies or commercialized products, including eight companies to date plus two open-source technologies.Nona Technologies is an example of a J-WAFS spinout that is helping the world by developing new approaches to produce freshwater for drinking. Desalination — the process of removing salts from seawater — typically requires a large-scale technology called reverse osmosis. But Nona created a desalination device that can work in remote off-grid locations. By separating salt and bacteria from water using electric current through a process called ion concentration polarization (ICP), their technology also reduces overall energy consumption. The novel method was developed by Jongyoon Han, professor of electrical engineering and biological engineering, and research scientist Junghyo Yoon. Along with Bruce Crawford, a Sloan MBA alum, Han and Yoon created Nona Technologies to bring their lightweight, energy-efficient desalination technology to the market.“My feeling early on was that once you have technology, commercialization will take care of itself,” admits Crawford. The team completed both the Spark and Fusion programs and quickly realized that much more work would be required. “Even in our first 24 interviews, we learned that the two first markets we envisioned would not be viable in the near term, and we also got our first hints at the beachhead we ultimately selected,” says Crawford. Nona Technologies has since won MIT’s $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, received media attention from outlets like Newsweek and Fortune, and hired a team that continues to further the technology for deployment in resource-limited areas where clean drinking water may be scarce. Food-borne diseases sicken millions of people worldwide each year, but J-WAFS researchers are addressing this issue by integrating molecular engineering, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence to revolutionize food pathogen testing. Professors Tim Swager and Alexander Klibanov, of the Department of Chemistry, were awarded one of the first J-WAFS Solutions grants for their sensor that targets food safety pathogens. The sensor uses specialized droplets that behave like a dynamic lens, changing in the presence of target bacteria in order to detect dangerous bacterial contamination in food. In 2018, Swager launched Xibus Systems Inc. to bring the sensor to market and advance food safety for greater public health, sustainability, and economic security.“Our involvement with the J-WAFS Solutions Program has been vital,” says Swager. “It has provided us with a bridge between the academic world and the business world and allowed us to perform more detailed work to create a usable application,” he adds. In 2022, Xibus developed a product called XiSafe, which enables the detection of contaminants like salmonella and listeria faster and with higher sensitivity than other food testing products. The innovation could save food processors billions of dollars worldwide and prevent thousands of food-borne fatalities annually.J-WAFS Solutions companies have raised nearly $66 million in venture capital and other funding. Just this past June, J-WAFS spinout SiTration announced that it raised an $11.8 million seed round. Jeffrey Grossman, a professor in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, was another early J-WAFS Solutions grantee for his work on low-cost energy-efficient filters for desalination. The project enabled the development of nanoporous membranes and resulted in two spinout companies, Via Separations and SiTration. SiTration was co-founded by Brendan Smith PhD ’18, who was a part of the original J-WAFS team. Smith is CEO of the company and has overseen the advancement of the membrane technology, which has gone on to reduce cost and resource consumption in industrial wastewater treatment, advanced manufacturing, and resource extraction of materials such as lithium, cobalt, and nickel from recycled electric vehicle batteries. The company also recently announced that it is working with the mining company Rio Tinto to handle harmful wastewater generated at mines.But it’s not just J-WAFS spinout companies that are producing real-world results. Products like the ECC Vial — a portable, low-cost method for E. coli detection in water — have been brought to the market and helped thousands of people. The test kit was developed by MIT D-Lab Lecturer Susan Murcott and Professor Jeffrey Ravel of the MIT History Section. The duo received a J-WAFS Solutions grant in 2018 to promote safely managed drinking water and improved public health in Nepal, where it is difficult to identify which wells are contaminated by E. coli. By the end of their grant period, the team had manufactured approximately 3,200 units, of which 2,350 were distributed — enough to help 12,000 people in Nepal. The researchers also trained local Nepalese on best manufacturing practices.“It’s very important, in my life experience, to follow your dream and to serve others,” says Murcott. Economic success is important to the health of any venture, whether it’s a company or a product, but equally important is the social impact — a philosophy that J-WAFS research strives to uphold. “Do something because it’s worth doing and because it changes people’s lives and saves lives,” Murcott adds.As J-WAFS prepares to celebrate its 10th anniversary this year, we look forward to continued collaboration with MIT’s many I&E programs to advance knowledge and develop solutions that will have tangible effects on the world’s water and food systems.Learn more about the J-WAFS Solutions program and about innovation and entrepreneurship at MIT. More

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      in Energy

      D-Lab off-grid brooder saves chicks and money using locally manufactured thermal batteries

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      MIT D-Lab students and instructors are improving the efficacy and economics of a brooder technology for newborn chicks that utilizes a practical, local resource: beeswax.Developed through participatory design with agricultural partners in Cameroon, their Off-Grid Brooder is a solution aimed at improving the profitability of the African nation’s small- and medium-scale poultry farms. Since it is common for smallholders in places with poor electricity supply to tend open fires overnight to keep chicks warm, the invention might also let farmers catch up on their sleep.“The target is eight hours. If farmers can sustain the warmth for eight hours, then they get to sleep,” says D-Lab instructor and former student Ahmad (Zak) Zakka SM ’23, who traveled to Cameroon in May to work on implementing brooder improvements tested at the D-Lab, along with D-Lab students, collaborators from African Solar Generation (ASG), and the African Diaspora Council of Switzerland – Branch Cameroon (CDAS–BC).Poultry farming is heavily concentrated in lower- and middle-income countries, where it is an important component of rural economies and provides an inexpensive source of protein for residents. Raising chickens is fraught with economic risk, however, largely because it is hard for small-scale farmers to keep newborn chicks warm enough to survive (33 to 35 degrees Celsius, or 91 to 95 degrees Fahrenheit, depending on age). After the cost of feed, firewood used to heat the chick space is the biggest input for rural poultry farmers.According to D-Lab researchers, an average smallholder in Cameroon using traditional brooding methods spends $17 per month on firewood, achieves a 10 percent profit margin, and experiences chick mortality that can be as high as a total loss due to overheating or insufficient heat. The Off-Grid Brooder is designed to replace open fires with inexpensive, renewable, and locally available beeswax — a phase-change material used to make thermal batteries.ASG initially developed a brooder technology, the SolarBox, that used photovoltaic panels and electric batteries to power incandescent bulbs. While this provided effective heating, it was prohibitively expensive and difficult to maintain. In 2020, students from the D-Lab Energy class took on the challenge of reducing the cost and complexity of the SolarBox heating system to make it more accessible to small farmers in Cameroon. Through participatory design — a collaborative approach that involves all stakeholders in early stages of the design process — the team discovered a unique solution. Beeswax stored in a used glass container (such as a mayonnaise jar) is melted using a double boiler over a fire and then installed inside insulated brooder boxes alongside the chicks. As the beeswax cools and solidifies, it releases heat for several hours, keeping the brooder within the temperature range that chicks need to grow and develop. Farmers can then recharge the cooled wax batteries and repeat the process again and again. “The big challenge was how to get heat,” says D-Lab Research Scientist Daniel Sweeney, who, with Zakka, co-teaches two D-Lab classes, 2.651/EC.711 (Introduction to Energy in Global Development), and 2.652/EC.712 (Applications of Energy in Global Development). “Decoupling the heat supplied by biomass (wood) from the heat the chicks need at night in the brooder, that’s the core of the innovation here.”D-Lab instructors, researchers, and students have tested and tuned the system with partners in Cameroon. A research box constructed during a D-Lab trip to Cameroon in January 2023 worked well, but was “very expensive to build,” Zakka says. “The research box was a proof of concept in the field. The next step was to figure out how to make it affordable,” he continues.A new brooder box, made entirely of locally sourced recycled materials at 5 percent of the cost of the research prototype, was developed during D-Lab’s January 2024 trip to Cameroon. Designed and produced in collaboration with CDAS-BC, the new brooder is much more affordable, but its functionality still needs fine-tuning. From late-May through mid-June, the D-Lab team, led by Zakka, worked with Cameroonian collaborators to improve the system again. This time, they assessed the efficacy of using straw, a readily available and low-cost material, arranged in panels to insulate the brooder box.The MIT team was hosted by CDAS-BC, including its president and founder Carole Erlemann Mengue and secretary and treasurer Kathrin Witschi, who operate an organic poultry farm in Afambassi, Cameroon. “The students will experiment with the box and try to improve the insulation of the box without neglecting that the chicks will need ventilation,” they say.In addition, the CDAS-BC partners say that they hoped to explore increasing the number of chicks that the box can keep warm. “If the system could heat 500 to 1,000 chicks at a time,” they note, “it would help farmers save firewood, to sleep through the night, and to minimize the risk of fire in the building and the risk of stepping on chicks while replacing firewood.” Earlier this spring, Erlemann Mengue and Witschi tested the low-cost Off-Grid Brooder Box, which can hold 30 to 40 chicks in its current design.“They were very interested in partnering with us to evaluate the technology. They are running the tests and doing a lot of technical measurement to track the temperature inside the brooder over time,” says Sweeney, adding that the CDAS-BC partners are amassing datasets that they send to the MIT D-Lab team. Sweeney and Zakka, along with PhD candidate Aly Kombargi, who worked on the research box in Cameroon last year, hope to not only improve the functionality of the Off-Grid Poultry Brooder but also broaden its use beyond Cameroon.“The goal of our trip was to have a working prototype, and the goal since then has been to scale this up,” Kombargi says. “It’s absolutely scalable.”Concurring that “the technology should work across developing countries in small-scale poultry sectors,” Zakka says this spring’s D-Lab trip included workshops for area poultry farmers to teach them about benefits of the Off-Grid Brooder and how to make their own. “I’m excited to see if we can get people excited about pushing this as a business … to see if they would build and sell it to other people in the community,” Zakka says.Adds Sweeney, “This isn’t rocket science. If we have some guidance and some open-source information we could share, I’m pretty sure (farmers) could put them together on their own.”Already, he says, partners identified through MIT’s networks in Zambia and Uganda are building their own brooders based on the D-Lab design.MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS), which supports research, innovation, and cross-disciplinary collaborations involving water and food systems, awarded the Off-Grid Brooder project a $25,000 research and development grant in 2022. The program is “pleased that the project’s approach was grounded in engagement with MIT students and community collaborators,” says Executive Director Renee Robins. “The participatory design process helped produce innovative prototypes that are already making positive impacts for smallholder poultry farmers.”That process and the very real impact on communities in Cameroon is what draws students to the project and keeps them committed.Sweeney says a recent D-Lab design review for the chick brooder highlighted that the project continued to attract the attention and curiosity of students who participated in earlier stages and still want to be involved.“There’s something about this project. There’s this whole tribe of students that are still active on the broader project,” he says. “There’s something about it.” More

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      in Security

      Sophia Chen: It’s our duty to make the world better through empathy, patience, and respect

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      Sophia Chen, a fifth-year senior double majoring in mechanical engineering and art and design, learned about MIT D-Lab when she was a Florida middle schooler. She drove with her family from their home in Clearwater to Tampa to an MIT informational open house for prospective students. There, she heard about a moringa seed press that had been developed by D-Lab students. Those students, Kwami Williams ’12 and Emily Cunningham (a cross-registered Harvard University student), went on to found MoringaConnect with a goal of increasing Ghanaian farmer incomes. Over the past 12 years, the company has done just that, sometimes by a factor of 10 or more, by selling to wholesalers and establishing their own line of moringa skin and hair care products, as well as nutritional supplements and teas.“I remember getting chills,” says Sophia. “I was so in awe. MIT had always been my dream college growing up, but hearing this particular story truly cemented that dream. I even talked about D-Lab during my admissions interview. Once I came to MIT, I knew I had to take a D-Lab class — and now, at the end of my five years, I’ve taken four.”Taking four D-Lab classes during her undergraduate years may make Sophia exceptional, though not unusual. Of the nearly 4,000 enrollments in D-Lab classes over the past 22 years, as many as 20 percent took at least two classes, and many take three or more by the time the graduate. For Sophia, her D-Lab classes were a logical progression that both confirmed and expanded her career goals in global medicine.Centering the role of project community partnersSophia’s first D-Lab class was 2.722J / EC.720 (D-Lab: Design). Like all D-Lab classes, D-Lab: Design is project-based and centers the knowledge and contributions of each project’s community partner. Her team worked with a group in Uganda called Safe Water Harvesters on a project aimed at creating a solar-powered atmospheric water harvester using desiccants. They focused on early research and development for the desiccant technology by running tests for vapor absorption. Safe Water Harvesters designed the parameters and goals of the project and collaborated with the students remotely throughout the semester.Safe Water Harvesters’ role in the project was key to the project’s success. “At D-Lab, I learned the importance of understanding that solutions in international development must come from the voices and needs of people whom the intervention is trying to serve,” she says. “Some of the first questions we were taught to ask are ‘what materials and manufacturing processes are available?’ and ‘how is this technology going to be maintained by the community?’”The link between water access and gender inequityElecting to join the water harvesting project in Uganda was no accident. The previous summer, Sophia had interned with a startup targeting the spread of cholera in developing areas by engineering a new type of rapid detection technology that would sample from users’ local water sources. From there, she joined Professor Amos Winter’s Global Engineering and Research (GEAR) Lab as an Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program student and worked on a point-of-use desalination unit for households in India. Taking EC.715 (D-Lab: Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene) was a logical next step for Sophia. “This class was life-changing,” she says. “I was already passionate about clean water access and global resource equity, but I quickly discovered the complexity of WASH not just as an issue of poverty but as an issue of gender.” She joined a project spearheaded by a classmate from Nepal, which aimed to address the social taboos surrounding menstruation among Nepalese schoolgirls.“This class and project helped me realize that water insecurity and gender inequality — especially gender-based violence — ​are highly intertwined,” comments Sophia. This plays out in a variety of ways. Where there is poor sanitation infrastructure in schools, girls often miss classes or drop out altogether when menstruating. And where water is scarce, women and girls often walk miles to collect water to accommodate daily drinking, cooking, and hygiene needs. During this trek, they are vulnerable to assault and the pressure to engage in transactional sex at water access points.“It became clear to me that women are disproportionately affected by water insecurity, and that water is key to understanding women’s empowerment,” comments Sophia, “and that I wanted to keep learning about the field of development and how it intersects with gender!”So, in fall 2023, Sophia took both 11.025/EC.701 (D-Lab: Development) and WGS.277/EC.718 (D-Lab: Gender and Development). In D-Lab: Development, her team worked with Tatirano, a nongovernmental organization in Madagascar, to develop a vapor-condensing chamber for a water desalination system, a prototype they were able to test and iterate in Madagascar at the end of the semester.Getting out into the world through D-Lab fieldwork“Fieldwork with D-Lab is an eye-opening experience that anyone could benefit from,” says Sophia. “It’s easy to get lost in the MIT and tech bubble. But there’s a whole world out there with people who live such different lives than many of us, and we can learn even more from them than we can from our psets.”For Sophia’s D-Lab: Gender and Development class, she worked with the Society Empowerment Project in Kenya, ultimately traveling there during MIT’s Independent Activities Period last January. In Kenya, she worked with her team to run a workshop with teen parents to identify risk factors prior to pregnancy and postpartum challenges, in order to then ideate and develop solutions such as social programs. “Through my fieldwork in Kenya and Madagascar,” says Sophia, “it became clear how important it is to create community-based solutions that are led and maintained by community members. Solutions need community input, leadership, and trust. Ultimately, this is the only way to have long-lasting, high-impact, sustainable change. One of my D-Lab trip leaders said that you cannot import solutions. I hope all engineers recognize the significance of this statement. It is our duty as engineers and scientists to make the world a better place while carrying values of empathy, patience, and respect.”Pursuing passion and purpose at the intersection of medicine, technology, and policyAfter graduation in June, Sophia will be traveling to South Africa through MISTI Africa to help with a clinical trial and community outreach. She then intends to pursue a master’s in global health and apply to medical school, with the goal of working in global health at the intersection of medicine, technology, and policy.“It is no understatement to say that D-Lab has played a central role in helping me discover what I’m passionate about and what my purpose is in life,” she says. “I hope to dedicate my career towards solving global health inequity and gender inequality.” ​ More

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      in Environment

      Putting public service into practice

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      Salomé Otero ’23 doesn’t mince words about the social impact internship she had in 2022. “It was transformational for me,” she says.

      Otero, who majored in management with a concentration in education, always felt that education would play some role in her career path after MIT, but she wasn’t sure how. That all changed her junior year, when she got an email from the Priscilla King Gray Public Service Center (PKG Center) about an internship at The Last Mile, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that provides education and technology training for justice-impacted individuals.

      Otero applied and was selected as a web curriculum and re-entry intern at The Last Mile the summer between her junior and senior year — an eye-opening experience that cemented her post-graduation plans. “You hear some amazing stories, like this person was incarcerated before the iPhone had come out. Now he’s a software developer,” she explains. “And for me, the idea of using computer science education for good appealed to me on many fronts. But even if I hadn’t gotten the opportunity to work at The Last Mile, the fact that I saw a job description for this role and learned that companies have the resources to make a difference … I didn’t know that there were people and organizations dedicating their time and energy into this.”

      She was so inspired that, when she returned for her senior year, Otero found work at two education labs at MIT, completed another social impact internship over Independent Activities Period (IAP) at G{Code}, an education nonprofit that provides computer science education to women and nonbinary people of color, and decided to apply to graduate school. “I can tell you with 100 percent certainty that I would not be pursuing a PhD in education policy right now if it weren’t for the PKG Center,” she says. She will begin her doctorate this fall.

      Otero’s experience doesn’t surprise Jill Bassett, associate dean and director of the PKG Center. “MIT students are deeply concerned about the world’s most challenging problems,” she says. “And social impact internships are an incredible way for them to leverage their unique talents and skills to help create meaningful change while broadening their perspectives and discovering potential career paths.”

      “There’s a lot more out there”

      Founded 35 years ago, the PKG Center offers a robust portfolio of experiential learning programs broadly focused on four themes: climate change, health equity, racial justice, and tech for social good. The Center’s Social Impact Internship Program provides funded internships to students interested in working with government agencies, nonprofits, and social ventures. Students reap rich rewards from these experiences, including learning ways to make social change, informing their academic journey and career path, and gaining valuable professional skills.

      “It was a really good learning opportunity,” says Juliet Liao ’23, a graduate of MIT’s Naval ROTC program who commissioned as a submarine officer in June. She completed a social impact internship with the World Wildlife Fund, where she researched greenhouse gas emissions related to the salmon industry. “I haven’t had much exposure to what work outside of the Navy looks like and what I’m interested in working on. And I really liked the science-based approach to mitigating greenhouse gas emissions.”

      Amina Abdalla, a rising junior in biological engineering, arrived at MIT with a strong interest in health care and determined to go to medical school. But her internship at MassHealth, the Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program provider for the state of Massachusetts, broadened her understanding of the complexity of the health care system and introduced her to many career options that she didn’t know existed.

      “They did coffee chats between interns and various people who work in MassHealth, such as doctors, lawyers, policy advocates, and consultants. There’s a lot more out there that one can do with the degree that they get and the knowledge they gain. It just depends on your interests, and I came away from that really excited,” she says. The experience inspired her to take a class in health policy before she graduates. “I know I want to be a doctor and I have a lot of interest in science in general, but if I could do some kind of public sector impact with that knowledge, I would definitely be interested in doing that.”

      Social impact internships also provide an opportunity for students to hone their analytical, technical, and people skills. Selma Sharaf ’22 worked on developing a first-ever climate action plan for Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina, one of two all-women’s historically Black colleges and universities in the United States. She conducted research and stakeholder interviews with nonprofits; sustainability directors at similar colleges; local utility companies; and faculty, staff, and students at Bennett.

      “Our external outreach efforts with certain organizations allowed me to practice having conversations about energy justice and climate issues with people who aren’t already in this space. I learned how useful it can be to not only discuss the overall issues of climate change and carbon emissions, but to also zoom in on more relatable personal-level impacts,” she says. Sharaf is currently working in clean energy consulting and plans to pursue a master’s degree at Stanford University’s Atmosphere/Energy Program this fall.

      Working with “all stars”

      Organizations that partner with the PKG Center are often constrained by limited technical and financial resources. Since the program is funded by the PKG Center, these internships help expand their organizational capacity and broaden their impact; MIT students can take on projects that might not otherwise get done, and they also bring fresh skills and ideas to the organization — and the zeal to pursue those ideas.

      Emily Moberg ’11, PhD ’16 got involved with the social impact internship programs in 2020. Moberg, who is the director of Scope 3 Carbon Measurement and Mitigation at the World Wildlife Fund, has worked with 20 MIT students since then, including Liao. The body of work that Liao and several other interns completed has been published in the form of 10 briefs onmitigating greenhouse gas emissions from key commodities, such as soy, beef, coffee, and palm oil.

      “Social impact interns bring technical skills, deep curiosity, and tenacity,” Moberg says. “I’ve worked with students across many majors, including computer and materials science; all of them bring a new, fresh perspective to our problems and often sophisticated quantitative ability. Their presence often helps us to investigate new ideas or expand a project. In some cases, interns have proposed new projects and ideas themselves. The support from the PKG Center for us to host these interns has been critical, especially for these new explorations.”

      Anne Carrington Hayes, associate professor and executive director of the Global Leadership and Interdisciplinary Studies program at Bennett College, calls the MIT interns she’s worked with since 2021 “all stars.” The work Sharaf and three other students performed has culminated in a draft climate action plan that will inform campus renovations and other measures that will be implemented at the college in the coming years.

      “They have been foundational in helping me to research, frame, collect data, and engage with our students and the community around issues of environmental justice and sustainability, particularly from the lens of what would be impactful and meaningful for women of color at Bennett College,” she says.

      Balancing supply and demand

      Bassett says that the social impact internship program has grown exponentially in the past few years. Before the pandemic, the program served five students from summer 2019 to spring 2020; it now serves about 125 students per year. Over that time, funding has become a significant limiting factor; demand for internships was three times the number of available internships in summer 2022, and five times the supply during IAP 2023.

      “MIT students have no shortage of opportunities available to them in the private sector, yet students are seeking social impact internships because they want to apply their skills to issues that they care about,” says Julie Uva, the PKG Center’s program administrator for social impact internships and employment. “We want to ensure every student who wants a social impact internship can access that experience.”

      MIT has taken note of this financial shortfall: the Task Force 2021 report recommended fundraising to alleviate the under-supply of social impact experiential learning opportunities (ELOs), and MIT’s Fast Forward Climate Action Plan called on the Institute to make a climate or clean-energy ELOs available to every undergraduate who wants one. As a result, the Office of Experiential Learning is working with Resource Development to raise new funding to support many more opportunities, which would be available to students not only through the PKG Center but also other offices and programs, such as MIT D-Lab, Undergraduate Research Opportunity Programs, MISTI, and the Environmental Solutions Initiative, among others.

      That’s welcome news to Salomé Otero. She’s familiar with the Institute’s fundraising efforts, having worked as one of the Alumni Association’s Tech Callers. Now, as an alumna herself and a former social impact intern, she has an appreciation for the power of philanthropy.

      “MIT is ahead of the game compared to so many universities, in so many ways,” she says. “But if they want to continue to do that in the most impactful way possible, I think investing in ideas and missions like the PKG Center is the way to go. So when that call comes, I’ll tell whoever is working that night shift, ‘Yeah, I’ll donate to the PKG Center.’” More

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      in Energy

      Addressing food insecurity in arid regions with an open-source evaporative cooling chamber design

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      Anyone who has ever perspired on a hot summer day understands the principle — and critical value — of evaporative cooling. Our bodies produce droplets of sweat when we overheat, and with a dry breeze or nearby fan those droplets will evaporate, absorbing heat in the process creating a welcome cool feeling.

      That same scientific principle, known as evaporative cooling, can be a game-changer for preserving fruits and vegetables grown on smallholder farms, where the wilting dry heat can quickly degrade freshly harvested produce. If those just-picked red peppers and leafy greens are not consumed in short order, or quickly transferred to cold — or at least cool — storage, much of it can go to waste.

      Now, MIT Professor Leon Glicksman of the Building Technology Program within the Department of Architecture, and Research Engineer Eric Verploegen of MIT D-Lab have released their open-source design for a forced-air evaporative cooling chamber that can be built in a used shipping container and powered by either grid electricity or built-in solar panels. With a capacity of 168 produce crates, the chamber offers great promise for smallholder farmers in hot, dry climates who need an affordable method for quickly bringing down the temperature of freshly harvested fruit and vegetables to ensure they stay fresh.

      “Delicate fruits and vegetables are most vulnerable to spoilage if they are picked during the day,” says Verploegen, a longtime proponent of using evaporative cooling to reduce post-harvest waste. “And if refrigerated cold rooms aren’t feasible or affordable,” he continues, “evaporative cooling can make a big difference for farmers and the communities they feed.”

      Verploegen has made evaporative cooling the focus of his work since 2016, initially focusing on small-scale evaporative cooling “Zeer” pots, typically with a capacity between 10 and 100 liters and great for household use, as well as larger double-brick-walled chambers known as zero-energy cooling chambers or ZECCs, which can store between six and 16 vegetable crates at a time. These designs rely on passive airflow. The newly released design for the forced-air evaporative cooling chamber is differentiated from these two more modest designs by the active airflow system, as well as by significantly larger capacity.

      In 2019, Verploegen turned his attention to the idea of building a larger evaporative cooling room and joined forces with Glicksman to explore using forced, instead of passive, airflow to cool fruit and vegetables. After studying existing cold storage options and conducting user research with farmers in Kenya, they came up with the idea to use active evaporative cooling with a used shipping container as the structure of the chamber. As the Covid-19 pandemic was ramping up in 2020, they procured a used 10-foot shipping container, installed it in the courtyard area outside D-Lab near Village Street, and went to work on a prototype of the forced-air evaporative cooling chamber.

      Here’s how it works: Industrial fans draw hot, dry air into the chamber, which is passed through a porous wet pad. The resulting cool and humid air is then forced through the crates of fruits and vegetables stored inside the chamber. The air is then directed through the raised floor and to a channel between the insulation and the exterior container wall, where it flows to the exhaust holes near the top of the side walls.

      Leon Glicksman, a professor of building technology and mechanical engineering, drew on his previous research in natural ventilation and airflow in buildings to come up with the vertical forced-air design pattern for the chamber. “The key to the design is the close control of the airflow strength, and its direction,” he says. “The strength of the airflow passing directly through the crates of fruits and vegetables, and the airflow pathway itself, are what makes this system work so well. The design promotes rapid cooling of a harvest taken directly from the field.”

      In addition to the novel and effective airflow system, the forced-air evaporative cooling chamber represents so much of what D-Lab is known for in its work in low-resourced and off-grid communities: developing low-cost and low-carbon-footprint technologies with partners. Evaporative cooling is no different. Whether connected to the electrical grid or run from solar panels, the forced-air chamber consumes one-quarter the power of refrigerated cold rooms. And, as the chamber is designed to be built in a used shipping container — ubiquitous the world over — the project is a great example of up-cycling.

      Piloting the design

      As with earlier investigations, Verploegen, Glicksman, and their colleagues have worked closely with farmers and community members. For the forced-air system, the team engaged with community partners who are living the need for better cooling and storage conditions for their produce in the climate conditions where evaporative cooling works best. Two partners, one in Kenya and one in India, each built a pilot chamber, testing and informing the process alongside the work being done at MIT.

      In Kenya, where smallholder farms produce 63 percent of total food consumed and over 50 percent of smallholder produce is lost post-harvest, they worked with Solar Freeze, a cold storage company located in in Kibwezi, Kenya. Solar Freeze, whose founder Dysmus Kisilu was a 2019 MIT D-Lab Scale-Ups Fellow, built an off-grid forced-air evaporative cooling chamber at a produce market between Nairobi and Mombasa at a cost of $15,000, powered by solar photovoltaic panels. “The chamber is offering a safety net against huge post-harvest losses previously experienced by local smallholder farmers,” comments Peter Mumo, an entrepreneur and local politician who oversaw the construction of the Solar Freeze chamber in Makuni County, Kenya.

      As much as 30 percent of fruits and vegetables produced in India are wasted each year due to insufficient cold storage capacity, lack of cold storage close to farms, poor transportation infrastructure, and other gaps in the cold chain. Although the climate varies across the subcontinent, the hot desert climate there, such as in Bhuj where the Hunnarshala Foundation is headquartered, is perfect for evaporative cooling. Hunnarshala signed on to build an on-grid system for $8,100, which they located at an organic farm near Bhuj. “We have really encouraging results,” says Mahavir Acharya, executive director of Hunnarshala Foundation. “In peak summer, when the temperature is 42 [Celsius] we are able to get to 26 degrees [Celsius] inside and 95 percent humidity, which is really good conditions for vegetables to remain fresh for three, four, five, six days. In winter we tested [and saw temperatures reduced from] 35 degrees to 24 degrees [Celsius], and for seven days the quality was quite good.”

      Getting the word out

      With the concept validated and pilots well established, the next step is spreading the word.

      “We’re continuing to test and optimize the system, both in Kenya and India, as well as our test chambers here at MIT,” says Verploegen. “We will continue piloting with users and deploying with farmers and vendors, gathering data on the thermal performance, the shelf life of fruits and vegetables in the chamber, and how using the technology impacts the users. And, we’re also looking to engage with cold storage providers who might want to build this or others in the horticulture value chain such as farmer cooperatives, individual farmers, and local governments.”

      To reach the widest number of potential users, Verploegen and the team chose not to pursue a patent and instead set up a website to disseminate the open-source design with detailed guidance on how to build a forced-air evaporative cooling chamber. In addition to the extensive printed documentation, well-illustrated with detailed CAD drawings and video, the team has created instructional videos.

      As co-principal investigator in the early stages of the project, MIT professor of mechanical engineering Dan Frey contributed to the market research phase of the project and the initial conception of chamber design. “These forced-air evaporative cooling chambers have great potential, and the open-source approach is an excellent choice for this project,” says Frey. “The design’s release is a significant milestone on the path to positive impacts.”

      The forced-air evaporative cooling chamber research and design have been supported by the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab through an India Grant, Seed Grant, and a Solutions Grant. More

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      in Energy

      Responsive design meets responsibility for the planet’s future

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      MIT senior Sylas Horowitz kneeled at the edge of a marsh, tinkering with a blue-and-black robot about the size and shape of a shoe box and studded with lights and mini propellers.

      The robot was a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) — an underwater drone slated to collect water samples from beneath a sheet of Arctic ice. But its pump wasn’t working, and its intake line was clogged with sand and seaweed.

      “Of course, something must always go wrong,” Horowitz, a mechanical engineering major with minors in energy studies and environment and sustainability, later blogged about the Falmouth, Massachusetts, field test. By making some adjustments, Horowitz was able to get the drone functioning on site.

      Through a 2020 collaboration between MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI), Horowitz had been assembling and retrofitting the high-performance ROV to measure the greenhouse gases emitted by thawing permafrost.

      The Arctic’s permafrost holds an estimated 1,700 billion metric tons of methane and carbon dioxide — roughly 50 times the amount of carbon tied to fossil fuel emissions in 2019, according to climate research from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. WHOI scientists wanted to understand the role the Arctic plays as a greenhouse gas source or sink.

      Horowitz’s ROV would be deployed from a small boat in sub-freezing temperatures to measure carbon dioxide and methane in the water. Meanwhile, a flying drone would sample the air.

      An MIT Student Sustainability Coalition leader and one of the first members of the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative’s Rapid Response Group, Horowitz has focused on challenges related to clean energy, climate justice, and sustainable development.

      In addition to the ROV, Horowitz has tackled engineering projects through D-Lab, where community partners from around the world work with MIT students on practical approaches to alleviating global poverty. Horowitz worked on fashioning waste bins out of heat-fused recycled plastic for underserved communities in Liberia. Their thesis project, also initiated through D-Lab, is designing and building user-friendly, space- and fuel-efficient firewood cook stoves to improve the lives of women in Santa Catarina Palopó in northern Guatemala.

      Through the Tata-MIT GridEdge Solar Research program, they helped develop flexible, lightweight solar panels to mount on the roofs of street vendors’ e-rickshaws in Bihar, India.

      The thread that runs through Horowitz’s projects is user-centered design that creates a more equitable society. “In the transition to sustainable energy, we want our technology to adapt to the society that we live in,” they say. “Something I’ve learned from the D-Lab projects and also from the ROV project is that when you’re an engineer, you need to understand the societal and political implications of your work, because all of that should get factored into the design.”

      Horowitz describes their personal mission as creating systems and technology that “serve the well-being and longevity of communities and the ecosystems we exist within.

      “I want to relate mechanical engineering to sustainability and environmental justice,” they say. “Engineers need to think about how technology fits into the greater societal context of people in the environment. We want our technology to adapt to the society we live in and for people to be able, based on their needs, to interface with the technology.”

      Imagination and inspiration

      In Dix Hills, New York, a Long Island suburb, Horowitz’s dad is in banking and their mom is a speech therapist. The family hiked together, but Horowitz doesn’t tie their love for the natural world to any one experience. “I like to play in the dirt,” they say. “I’ve always had a connection to nature. It was a kind of childlike wonder.”

      Seeing footage of the massive 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico caused by an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig — which occurred when Horowitz was around 10 — was a jarring introduction to how human activity can impact the health of the planet.

      Their first interest was art — painting and drawing portraits, album covers, and more recently, digital images such as a figure watering a houseplant at a window while lightning flashes outside; a neon pink jellyfish in a deep blue sea; and, for an MIT-wide Covid quarantine project, two figures watching the sun set over a Green Line subway platform.

      Art dovetailed into a fascination with architecture, then shifted to engineering. In high school, Horowitz and a friend were co-captains of an all-girls robotics team. “It was just really wonderful, having this community and being able to build stuff,” they say. Horowitz and another friend on the team learned they were accepted to MIT on Pi Day 2018.

      Art, architecture, engineering — “it’s all kind of the same,” Horowitz says. “I like the creative aspect of design, being able to create things out of imagination.”

      Sustaining political awareness

      At MIT, Horowitz connected with a like-minded community of makers. They also launched themself into taking action against environmental injustice.

      In 2022, through the Student Sustainability Coalition (SSC), they encouraged MIT students to get involved in advocating for the Cambridge Green New Deal, legislation aimed at reducing emissions from new large commercial buildings such as those owned by MIT and creating a green jobs training program.

      In February 2022, Horowitz took part in a sit-in in Building 3 as part of MIT Divest, a student-led initiative urging the MIT administration to divest its endowment of fossil fuel companies.

      “I want to see MIT students more locally involved in politics around sustainability, not just the technology side,” Horowitz says. “I think there’s a lot of power from students coming together. They could be really influential.”

      User-oriented design

      The Arctic underwater ROV Horowitz worked on had to be waterproof and withstand water temperatures as low as 5 degrees Fahrenheit. It was tethered to a computer by a 150-meter-long cable that had to spool and unspool without tangling. The pump and tubing that collected water samples had to work without kinking.

      “It was cool, throughout the project, to think, ‘OK, what kind of needs will these scientists have when they’re out in these really harsh conditions in the Arctic? How can I make a machine that will make their field work easier?’

      “I really like being able to design things directly with the users, working within their design constraints,” they say.

      Inevitably, snafus occurred, but in photos and videos taken the day of the Falmouth field tests, Horowitz is smiling. “Here’s a fun unexpected (or maybe quite expected) occurrence!” they reported later. “The plastic mount for the shaft collar [used in the motor’s power transmission] ripped itself apart!” Undaunted, Horowitz jury-rigged a replacement out of sheet metal.

      Horowitz replaced broken wires in the winch-like device that spooled the cable. They added a filter at the intake to prevent sand and plants from clogging the pump.

      With a few more tweaks, the ROV was ready to descend into frigid waters. Last summer, it was successfully deployed on a field run in the Canadian high Arctic. A few months later, Horowitz was slated to attend OCEANS 2022 Hampton Roads, their first professional conference, to present a poster on their contribution to the WHOI permafrost research.

      Ultimately, Horowitz hopes to pursue a career in renewable energy, sustainable design, or sustainable agriculture, or perhaps graduate studies in data science or econometrics to quantify environmental justice issues such as the disproportionate exposure to pollution among certain populations and the effect of systemic changes designed to tackle these issues.

      After completing their degree this month, Horowitz will spend six months with MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI), which fosters partnerships with industry leaders and host organizations around the world.

      Horowitz is thinking of working with a renewable energy company in Denmark, one of the countries they toured during a summer 2019 field trip led by the MIT Energy Initiative’s Director of Education Antje Danielson. They were particularly struck by Samsø, the world’s first carbon-neutral island, run entirely on renewable energy. “It inspired me to see what’s out there when I was a sophomore,” Horowitz says. They’re ready to see where inspiration takes them next.

      This article appears in the Winter 2023 issue of Energy Futures, the magazine of the MIT Energy Initiative. More

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      in Environment

      Nonabah Lane, Navajo educator and environmental sustainability specialist with numerous ties to MIT, dies at 46

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      Nonabah Lane, a Navajo educator and environmental sustainability specialist with numerous MIT ties to MIT, passed away in October. She was 46.

      Lane had recently been an MIT Media Lab Director’s Fellow; MIT Solve 2019 Indigenous Communities Fellow; Department of Urban Studies and Planning guest lecturer and community partner; community partner with the PKG Public Service Center, Terrascope, and D-Lab; and a speaker at this year’s MIT Energy Week.

      Lane was a passionate sustainability specialist with experience spearheading successful environmental civic science projects focused in agriculture, water science, and energy. Committed to mitigating water pollutants and environmental hazards in tribal communities, she held extensive knowledge of environmental policy and Indigenous water rights. 

      Lane’s clans were Ta’neezahnii (Tangled People), born for Tł’izíłání (Manygoats People), and her maternal grandfathers are the Kiiyaa’aanii (Towering House People), and paternal grandfathers are Bįįh Bitoo’nii (Deer Spring People).

      Lane was a member of the Navajo Nation, Nenahnezad Chapter. At Navajo Power, she worked as the lead developer for solar and energy storage projects to benefit tribal communities on the Navajo Nation and other tribal nations in New Mexico. Prior to joining Navajo Power, Lane co-founded Navajo Ethno-Agriculture, a farm that teaches Navajo culture through traditional farming and bilingual education. Lane also launched a campaign to partner with local Navajo schools and tribal colleges to create their own water-testing capabilities and translate data into information to local farmers.

      “I had the opportunity to collaborate closely with Nonabah on a range of initiatives she was championing on energy, food, justice, water, Indigenous leadership, youth STEM, and more. She was innovative, entrepreneurial, inclusive, heartfelt, and positively impacted MIT on every visit to campus. She articulated important things that needed saying and expanded people’s thinking constantly. We will all miss her insights and teamwork,” says Megan Smith ’86, SM ’88, MIT Corporation life member; third U.S. chief technology officer and assistant to the president in the Office of Science and Technology Policy; and founder and CEO of shift7.

      In March 2019, Lane and her family — parents Gloria and Harry and brother Bruce — welcomed students and staff of the MIT Terrascope first-year learning community to their farm, where they taught unique, hands-on lessons about traditional Diné farming and spirituality. She then continued to collaborate with Terrascope, helping staff and students develop community-based work with partners in Navajo Nation. 

      Terrascope associate director and lecturer Ari Epstein says, “Nonabah was an inspiring person and a remarkable collaborator; she had a talent for connecting and communicating across disciplinary, organizational, and cultural differences, and she was generous with her expertise and knowledge. We will miss her very much.”

      Lane came to MIT in May 2019 for the MIT Solve Indigenous Communities Fellowship and Solve at MIT event, representing Navajo Ethno-Agriculture with her mother, Gloria Lane, and brother, Bruce Lane, and later serving as a Fellow Leadership Group member. 

      “Nonabah was an incredible individual who worked tirelessly to better all of her communities, whether it was back home on the Navajo Nation, here at MIT Solve, or supporting her family and friends,” says Alex Amouyel, executive director of MIT Solve. “More than that, Nonabah was a passionate mentor and caring friend of so many, carefully tending the next generation of Indigenous innovators, entrepreneurs, and change-makers. Her loss will be felt deeply by the MIT community, and her legacy of heartfelt service will not be forgotten.”

      She continued to be heavily involved across the MIT campus — named as a 2019 Media Lab Director’s Fellow, leading a workshop at the 2020 MIT Media Lab Festival of Learning on modernizing Navajo foods using traditional food science and cultural narrative, speaking at the 2022 MIT Energy Conference “Accelerating the Clean Energy Transition,” and taking part in the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA) innovation weekly co-working groups for Covid-response related innovations. 

      “My CBA colleagues and I enjoyed working with Nonabah on rapid-prototyping for the Covid response, on expanding access to digital fabrication, and on ambitious proposals for connecting emerging technology with Indigenous knowledge,” says Professor Neil Gershenfeld, director, MIT Center for Bits and Atoms.

      Nonabah also guest lectured for the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning’s Indigenous Environmental Planning class in Spring 2022. Professors Lawrence Susskind and Gabriella Carolini and teaching assistant Dení López led the class in cooperation with Elizabeth Rule, Chickasaw Nation member and professor at American University. 

      Carolini shares, on behalf of Susskind and the class, “During this time, our teaching team and students from a broad range of fields at MIT had the deep honor of learning from and with the inimitable Nonabah Lane. Nonabah was a dedicated and critical partner to our class, representing in this instance Navajo Power — but of course, also so much more. Her broad experiences and knowledge — working with fellow Navajo members on energy and agriculture sovereignty, as well as in advancing entrepreneurship and innovation — reflected the urgency Nonabah saw in meeting the challenges and opportunities for sustainable and equitable futures in Navajo nation and beyond. She was a pure life force, running on all fires, and brought to our class a dedicated drive to educate, learn, and extend our reference points beyond current knowledge frontiers.” 

      Three MIT students — junior Isabella Gandara, Alexander Gerszten ’22, and Paul Picciano MS ’22 — who worked closely with Lane on a project with Navajo Power, recalled how she shared herself with them in so many ways, through her truly exceptional work ethic, stories about herself and her family, and the care and thought that she put into her ventures. They noted there was always something new to feel inspired by when in her presence. 

      “The PKG Public Service Center mourns the passing of Nonabah Lane. Navajo Ethno-Agriculture is a valued PKG Center partner that offers MIT undergraduate students the opportunity to support community-led projects with the Diné Community on Navajo Nation. Nonabah inspired students to examine broad social and technical issues that impact Indigenous communities in Navajo Nation and beyond, in many cases leaving an indelible mark on their personal and professional paths,” says Jill S. Bassett, associate dean and director of the PKG Public Service Center.

      Lane was a Sequoyah Fellow of the American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES) and remained actively engaged in the AISES community by mentoring young people interested in the fields of science, engineering, agriculture, and energy. Over the years, Lane collaborated with leaders across tribal lands and beyond on projects related to agriculture, energy, sustainable chemicals, and finance. Lane had an enormous positive impact on many through her accomplishments and also the countless meaningful connections she helped to form among people in diverse fields.

      Donations may be made to a memorial fund organized by Navajo Power, PBC in honor of Nonabah Lane, in support of Navajo Ethno-Agriculture, the Native American nonprofit she co-founded and cared deeply for. More