Development

Subterms

    Latest story

    38 Shares189 Views

    Food for thought

    by

    MIT graduate student Juana De La O describes herself as a food-motivated organism, so it’s no surprise that she reaches for food and baking analogies when she’s discussing her thesis work in the lab of undergraduate officer and professor of biology Adam Martin. 

    Consider the formative stages of a croissant, she offers, occasionally providing homemade croissants to accompany the presentation: When one is forming the puff pastry, the dough is folded over the butter again and again. Tissues in a developing mouse embryo must similarly fold and bend, creating layers and structures that become the spine, head, and organs — but these tissues have no hands to induce those formative movements. 

    De La O is studying neural tube closure, the formation of the structure that becomes the spinal cord and the brain. Disorders like anencephaly and craniorachischisis occur when the head region fails to close in a developing fetus. It’s a heartbreaking defect, De La O says, because it’s 100 percent lethal — but the fetus fully develops otherwise. 

    “Your entire central nervous system hinges on this one event happening successfully,” she says. “On the fundamental level, we have a very limited understanding of the mechanisms required for neural closure to happen at all, much less an understanding of what goes wrong that leads to those defects.” 

    Hypothetically speaking

    De La O hails from Chicago, where she received an undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago and worked in the lab of Ilaria Rebay. De La O’s sister was the first person in her family to go to and graduate from college — De La O, in turn, is the first person in her family to pursue a PhD. 

    From her first time visiting campus, De La O could see MIT would provide a thrilling environment in which to study.

    “MIT was one of the few places where the students weren’t constantly complaining about how hard their life was,” she says. “At lunch with prospective students, they’d be talking to each other and then just organically slip into conversations about science.”

    The department emails acceptance letters and sends a physical copy via snail mail. De La O’s letter included a handwritten note from department head Amy Keating, then a graduate officer, who had interviewed De La O during her campus visit. 

    “That’s what really sold it for me,” she recalls. “I went to my PI [principal investigator]’s office and said, ‘I have new data’” and I showed her the letter, and there was lots of unintelligible crying.” 

    To prepare her for graduate school, her parents, both immigrants from Mexico, spent the summer teaching De La O to make all her favorite dishes because “comfort food feels like home.”   

    When she reached MIT, however, the Covid-19 pandemic ground the world to a halt and severely limited what students could experience during rotations. Far from home and living alone, De La O taught herself to bake, creating the confections she craved but couldn’t leave her apartment to purchase. De La O didn’t get to work as extensively as she would have liked during her rotation in the Martin lab. 

    Martin had recently returned from a sabbatical that was spent learning a new research model; historically a fly lab, Martin was planning to delve into mouse research. 

    “My final presentation was, ‘Here’s a hypothetical project I would hypothetically do if I were hypothetically going to work with mice in a fly lab,’” De La O says. 

    Martin recalls being impressed. De La O is skilled at talking about science in an earnest and engaging way, and she dug deep into the literature and identified points Martin hadn’t considered. 

    “This is a level of independence that I look for in a student because it is important to the science to have someone who is contributing their ideas and independent reading and research to a project,” Martin says. 

    After agreeing to join the lab — news she shared with Martin via a meme — she got to work. 

    Charting mouse development

    The neural tube forms from a flat sheet whose sides rise and meet to create a hollow cylinder. De La O has observed patterns of actin and myosin changing in space and time as the embryo develops. Actin and myosin are fibrous proteins that provide structure in eukaryotic cells. They are responsible for some cell movement, like muscle contraction or cell division. Fibers of actin and myosin can also connect across cells, forming vast networks that coordinate the movements of whole tissues. By looking at the structure of these networks, researchers can make predictions about how force is affecting those tissues.

    De La O has found indications of a difference in the tension across the tissue during the critical stages of neural tube closure, which contributes to the tissue’s ability to fold and form a tube. They are not the first research group to propose this, she notes, but they’re suggesting that the patterns of tension are not uniform during a single stage of development.

    “My project, on a really fundamental level, is an atlas for a really early stage of mouse development for actin and myosin,” De La O says. “This dataset doesn’t exist in the field yet.” 

    However, De La O has been performing analyses exclusively in fixed samples, so she may be quantifying phenomena that are not actually how tissues behave. To determine whether that’s the case, De La O plans to analyze live samples.

    The idea is that if one could carefully cut tissue and observe how quickly it recoils, like slicing through a taught rubber band, those measurements could be used to approximate force across the tissue. However, the techniques required are still being developed, and the greater Boston area currently lacks the equipment and expertise needed to attempt those experiments. 

    A big part of her work in the lab has been figuring out how to collect and analyze relevant data. This research has already taken her far and wide, both literally and virtually. 

    “We’ve found that people have been very generous with their time and expertise,” De La O says. “One of the benefits we, as fly people, brought into this field is we don’t know anything — so we’re going to question everything.”

    De La O traveled to the University of Virginia to learn live imaging techniques from associate professor of cell biology Ann Sutherland, and she’s also been in contact with Gabriel Galea at University College London, where Martin and De La O are considering a visit for further training. 

    “There are a lot of reasons why these experiments could go wrong, and one of them is that I’m not trained yet,” she says. “Once you know how to do things on an optimal setup, you can figure out how to make it work on a less-optimal setup.”

    Collaboration and community

    De La O has now expanded her cooking repertoire far beyond her family’s recipes and shares her new creations when she visits home. At MIT, she hosts dinner parties, including one where everything from the savory appetizers to the sweet desserts contained honey, thanks to an Independent Activities Period course about the producers of the sticky substance, and she made and tried apple pie for the first time with her fellow graduate students after an afternoon of apple picking. 

    De La O says she’s still learning how to say no to taking on additional work outside of her regular obligations as a PhD student; she’s found there’s a lot of pressure for underrepresented students to be at the forefront of diversity efforts, and although she finds that work extremely fulfilling, she can, and has, stretched herself too thin in the past. 

    “Every time I see an application that asks ‘How will you work to increase diversity,’ my strongest instinct is just to write ‘I’m brown and around — you’re welcome,’” she jokes. “The greatest amount of diversity work I will do is to get where I’m going. Me achieving my goals increases diversity inherently, but I also want to do well because I know if I do, I will make everything better for people coming after me.”

    De La O is confident her path will be in academia, and troubleshooting, building up protocols, and setting up standards for her work in the Martin Lab has been “an excellent part of my training program.” 

    De La O and Martin embarked on a new project in a new model for the lab for De La O’s thesis, so much of her graduate studies will be spent laying the groundwork for future research. 

    “I hope her travels open Juana’s eyes to science being a larger community and to teach her about how to lead a collaboration,” Martin says. “Overall, I think this project is excellent for a student with aspirations to be a PI. I benefited from extremely open-ended projects as a student and see, in retrospect, how they prepared me for my work today.” More

    More stories

    • 113 Shares199 Views

      in Environment

      Migration Summit addresses education and workforce development in displacement

      by

      “Refugees can change the world with access to education,” says Alnarjes Harba, a refugee from Syria who recently shared her story at the 2022 Migration Summit — a first-of-its-kind, global convening to address the challenges that displaced communities face in accessing education and employment.

      At the age of 13, Harba was displaced to Lebanon, where she graduated at the top of her high school class. But because of her refugee status, she recalls, no university in her host country would accept her. Today, Harba is a researcher in health-care architecture. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Southern New Hampshire University, where she was part of the Global Education Movement, a program providing refugees with pathways to higher education and work.

      Like many of the Migration Summit’s participants, Harba shared her story to call attention not only to the barriers to refugee education, but also to the opportunities to create more education-to-employment pathways like MIT Refugee Action Hub’s (ReACT) certificate programs for displaced learners.

      Organized by MIT ReACT, the MIT Abdul Latif Jameel World Education Lab (J-WEL), Na’amal, Karam Foundation, and Paper Airplanes, the Migration Summit sought to center the voices and experiences of those most directly impacted by displacement — both in narratives about the crisis and in the search for solutions. Themed “Education and Workforce Development in Displacement,” this year’s summit welcomed more than 900 attendees from over 30 countries, to a total of 40 interactive virtual sessions led by displaced learners, educators, and activists working to support communities in displacement.

      Sessions highlighted the experiences of refugees, migrants, and displaced learners, as well as current efforts across the education and workforce development landscape, ranging from pK-12 initiatives to post-secondary programs, workforce training to entrepreneurship opportunities.

      Overcoming barriers to access

      The vision for the Migration Summit developed, in part, out of the need to raise more awareness about the long-standing global displacement crisis. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), 82.4 million people worldwide today are forcibly displaced, a figure that doesn’t include the estimated 12 million people who have fled their homes in Ukraine since February.

      “Refugees not only leave their countries; they leave behind a thousand memories, their friends, their families,” says Mondiant Dogon, a human rights activist, refugee ambassador, and author who gave the Migration Summit’s opening keynote address. “Education is the most important thing that can happen to refugees. In that way, we can leave behind the refugee camps and build our own independent future.”

      Yet, as the stories of the summit’s participants highlight, many in displacement have lost their livelihoods or had their education disrupted — only to face further challenges when trying to access education or find work in their new places of residence. Obstacles range from legal restrictions, language and cultural barriers, and unaffordable costs to lack of verifiable credentials. UNHCR estimates that only 5 percent of refugees have access to higher education, compared to the global average of 39 percent.

      “There is another problem related to forced displacement — dehumanization of migrants,” says Lina Sergie Attar, the founder and CEO of Karam Foundation. “They are unjustly positioned as enemies, as a threat.”

      But as Blein Alem, an MIT ReACT alum and refugee from Eritrea, explains, “No one chooses to be a refugee — it just occurs. Whether by conflict, war, human rights violations, just because you have refugee status does not mean that you are not willing to make a change in your life and access to education and work.” Several participants, including Alem, shared that, even with a degree in hand, their refugee status limited their ability to work in their new countries of residence.

      Displaced communities face complex and structural challenges in accessing education and workforce development opportunities. Because of the varying and vast effects of displacement, efforts to address these challenges range in scale and focus and differ across sectors. As Lorraine Charles, co-founder and director of Na’amal, noted in the Migration Summit’s closing session, many organizations find themselves working in silos, or even competing with each other for funding and other resources. As a result, solution-making has been fragmented, with persistent gaps between different sectors that are, in fact, working toward the same goals.

      Imagining a modular, digital, collaborative approach

      A key takeaway from the month’s discussions, then, is the need to rethink the response to refugee education and workforce challenges. During the session, “From Intentions to Impact: Decolonizing Refugee Response,” participants emphasized the systemic nature of these challenges. Yet formal responses, such as the 1951 Refugee Convention, have been largely inadequate — in some instances even oppressing the communities they’re meant to support, explains Sana Mustafa, director of partnership and engagement for Asylum Access.

      “We have the opportunity to rethink how we are handling the situation,” Mustafa says, calling for more efforts to include refugees in the design and development of solutions.

      Presenters also agreed that educational institutions, particularly universities, could play a vital role in providing more pathways for refugees and displaced learners. Key to this is rethinking the structure of education itself, including its delivery.

      “The challenge right now is that degrees are monolithic,” says Sanjay Sarma, vice president for MIT Open Learning, who gave the keynote address on “Pathways to Education, Livelihood, and Hope.” “They’re like those gigantic rocks at Stonehenge or in other megalithic sites. What we need is a much more granular version of education: bricks. Bricks were invented several thousand years ago, but we don’t really have that yet formally and extensively in education.”

      “There is no way we can accommodate thousands and thousands of refugees face-to-face,” says Shai Reshef, the founder and president of University of the People. “The only path is a digital one.”

      Ultimately, explains Demetri Fadel of Karam Foundation, “We really need to think about how to create a vision of education as a right for every person all around the world.”

      Underlying many of the Migration Summit’s conclusions is the awareness that there is still much work to be done. However, as the summit’s co-chair Lana Cook said in her closing remarks, “This was not a convening of despair, but one about what we can build together.”

      The summit’s organizers are currently putting together a public report of the key findings that have emerged from the month’s conversations, including recommendations for thematic working groups and future Migration Summit activities. More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Environment

      MIT ReACT welcomes first Afghan cohort to its largest-yet certificate program

      by

      Through the championing support of the faculty and leadership of the MIT Afghan Working Group convened last September by Provost Martin Schmidt and chaired by Associate Provost for International Activities Richard Lester, MIT has come together to support displaced Afghan learners and scholars in a time of crisis. The MIT Refugee Action Hub (ReACT) has opened opportunities for 25 talented Afghan learners to participate in the hub’s certificate program in computer and data science (CDS), now in its fourth year, welcoming its largest and most diverse cohort to date — 136 learners from 29 countries.

      ”Even in the face of extreme disruption, education and scholarship must continue, and MIT is committed to providing resources and safe forums for displaced scholars,” says Lester. “We greatly appreciate MIT ReACT’s work to create learning opportunities for Afghan students whose lives have been upended by the crisis in their homeland.”

      Currently, more than 3.5 million Afghans are internally displaced, while 2.5 million are registered refugees residing in other parts of the world. With millions in Afghanistan facing famine, poverty, and civil unrest in what has become the world’s largest humanitarian crisis, the United Nations predicts the number of Afghans forced to flee their homes will continue to rise. 

      “Forced displacement is on the rise, fueled not only by constant political, economical, and social turmoil worldwide, but also by the ongoing climate change crisis, which threatens costly disruptions to society and has potential to create unprecedented displacement internationally,” says associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and ReACT’s faculty founder Admir Masic. During the orientation for the new CDS cohort in January, Masic emphasized the great need for educational programs like ReACT’s that address the specific challenges refugees and displaced learners face.

      A former Bosnian refugee, Masic spent his teenage years in Croatia, where educational opportunities were limited for young people with refugee status. His experience motivated him to found ReACT, which launched in 2017. Housed within Open Learning, ReACT is an MIT-wide effort to deliver global education and professional development programs to underserved communities, including refugees and migrants. ReACT’s signature program, CDS is a year-long, online program that combines MITx courses in programming and data science, personal and professional development workshops including MIT Bootcamps, and opportunities for practical experience.

      ReACT’s group of 25 learners from Afghanistan, 52 percent of whom are women, joins the larger CDS cohort in the program. They will receive support from their new colleagues as well as members of ReACT’s mentor and alumni network. While the majority of the group are residing around the world, including in Europe, North America, and neighboring countries, several still remain in Afghanistan. With the support of the Afghan Working Group, ReACT is working to connect with communities from the region to provide safe and inclusive learning environments for the cohort. ​​

      Building community and confidence

      Selected from more than 1,000 applicants, the new CDS cohort reflected on their personal and professional goals during a weeklong orientation.

      “I am here because I want to change my career and learn basics in this field to then obtain networks that I wouldn’t have got if it weren’t for this program,” said Samiullah Ajmal, who is joining the program from Afghanistan.

      Interactive workshops on topics such as leadership development and virtual networking rounded out the week’s events. Members of ReACT’s greater community — which has grown in recent years to include a network of external collaborators including nonprofits, philanthropic supporters, universities, and alumni — helped facilitate these workshops and other orientation activities.

      For instance, Na’amal, a social enterprise that connects refugees to remote work opportunities, introduced the CDS learners to strategies for making career connections remotely. “We build confidence while doing,” says Susan Mulholland, a leadership and development coach with Na’amal who led the networking workshop.

      Along with the CDS program’s cohort-based model, ReACT also uses platforms that encourage regular communication between participants and with the larger ReACT network — making connections a critical component of the program.

      “I not only want to meet new people and make connections for my professional career, but I also want to test my communication and social skills,” says Pablo Andrés Uribe, a learner who lives in Colombia, describing ReACT’s emphasis on community-building. 

      Over the last two years, ReACT has expanded its geographic presence, growing from a hub in Jordan into a robust global community of many hubs, including in Colombia and Uganda. These regional sites connect talented refugees and displaced learners to internships and employment, startup networks and accelerators, and pathways to formal undergraduate and graduate education.

      This expansion is thanks to the generous support internally from the MIT Office of the Provost and Associate Provost Richard Lester and external organizations including the Western Union Foundation. ReACT will build new hubs this year in Greece, Uruguay, and Afghanistan, as a result of gifts from the Hatsopoulos family and the Pfeffer family.

      Holding space to learn from each other

      In addition to establishing new global hubs, ReACT plans to expand its network of internship and experiential learning opportunities, increasing outreach to new collaborators such as nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), companies, and universities. Jointly with Na’amal and Paper Airplanes, a nonprofit that connects conflict-affected individuals with personal language tutors, ReACT will host the first Migration Summit. Scheduled for April 2022, the month-long global convening invites a broad range of participants, including displaced learners, universities, companies, nonprofits and NGOs, social enterprises, foundations, philanthropists, researchers, policymakers, employers, and governments, to address the key challenges and opportunities for refugee and migrant communities. The theme of the summit is “Education and Workforce Development in Displacement.”

      “The MIT Migration Summit offers a platform to discuss how new educational models, such as those employed in ReACT, can help solve emerging challenges in providing quality education and career opportunities to forcibly displaced and marginalized people around the world,” says Masic. 

      A key goal of the convening is to center the voices of those most directly impacted by displacement, such as ReACT’s learners from Afghanistan and elsewhere, in solution-making. More

    • 50 Shares189 Views

      in Energy

      Energizing communities in Africa

      by

      Growing up in Lagos, Nigeria, Ayomikun Ayodeji enjoyed the noisy hustle and bustle of his neighborhood. The cacophony included everything from vendors hawking water sachets and mini sausages, to commuters shouting for the next bus.

      Another common sound was the cry of “Up NEPA!” — an acronym for the Nigerian Electrical Power Authority — which Ayodeji would chant in unison with other neighborhood children when power had been restored after an outage. He remembers these moments fondly because, despite the difficulties of the frequent outages, the call also meant that people finally did have long-awaited electricity in their homes.

      “I grew up without reliable electricity, so power is something I’ve always been interested in,” says Ayodeji, who is now a senior studying chemical engineering. He hopes to use the knowledge he has gained during his time at MIT to expand energy access in his home country and elsewhere in Africa.

      Before coming to MIT, Ayodeji spent two years in Italy at United World College, where he embarked on chemistry projects, specifically focusing on dye-sensitized solar cells. He then transferred to the Institute, seeking a more technical grounding. He hoped that the knowledge gained in and out of the classroom would equip him with the tools to help combat the energy crisis in Lagos.

      “The questions that remained in the back of my mind were: How can I give back to the community I came from? How can I use the resources around me to help others?”  he says.

      This community-oriented mindset led Ayodeji to team up with a group of friends and brainstorm ideas for how they could help communities close to them. They eventually partnered with the Northeast Children’s Trust (NECT), an organization that helps children affected by the extremist group Boko Haram. Ayodeji and his friends looked at how to expand NECT’s educational program, and decided to build an offline, portable classroom server with a repository of books, animations, and activities for students at the primary and secondary education levels. The project was sponsored by Davis Projects for Peace and MIT’s PKG Center.

      Because of travel restrictions, Ayodeji was the only member of his team able to fly to Nigeria in the summer of 2019 to facilitate installing the servers. He says he wished his team could have been there, but he appreciated the opportunity to speak with the children directly, inspired by their excitement to learn and grow. The experience reaffirmed Ayodeji’s desire to pursue social impact projects, especially in Nigeria.

      “We knew we hadn’t just taken a step in providing the kids with a well-rounded education, but we also supported the center, NECT, in raising the next generation of future leaders that would guide that region to a sustainable, peaceful future,” he says.

      Ayodeji has also sought out energy-related opportunities on campus, pursuing an undergraduate research program (UROP) in the Buonassisi Lab in his sophomore year. He was tasked with testing perovskite solar cells, which have the potential to reach high efficiencies at low production costs. He characterized the cells using X-ray diffraction, studying their stability and degradation pathways. While Ayodeji enjoyed his first experience doing hands-on energy research, he found he was more curious about how energy technologies were implemented to reach various communities. “I wanted to see how things were being done in the industry,” he says.

      In the summer after his sophomore year, Ayodeji interned with Pioneer Natural Resources, an independent oil and gas company in Texas. Ayodeji worked as part of the completions projects team to assess the impact of design changes on cluster efficiency, that is, how evenly fluid is distributed along the wellbore. By using fiberoptic and photographic data to analyze perforation erosion, he discovered ways to lower costs while maintaining environmental stability during completions. The experience taught Ayodeji about the corporate side of the energy industry and enabled him to observe how approaches to alternative energy sources differ across countries, especially in the U.S. and Nigeria.

      “Some developing economies don’t have the capacity to pour resources into expanding renewable energy infrastructure at the rate that most developed economies do. While it is important to think sustainably for the long run, it is also important for us to understand that a clean energy transition is not something that can be done overnight,” he says.

      Ayodeji also employs his community-oriented mindset on campus. He is currently the vice president of the African Students’ Association (ASA), where he formerly chaired the African Learning Circle, a weekly discussion panel spotlighting key development and innovation events taking place on the African continent. He is also involved with student outreach, both within the ASA and as an international orientation student coordinator for the International Students Office.

      As a member of Cru, a Christian community on campus, Ayodeji helps lead a bible study and says the group supports him as he navigates college life. “It is a wonderful community of people I explore faith with and truly lean on when things get tough,” he says.

      After graduating, Ayodeji plans to start work at Boston Consulting Group, where he interned last summer. He expects he’ll have opportunities to engage with private equity issues and tackle energy-related cases while learning more about where the industry is headed.

      His long-term goal is to help expand renewable energy access and production across the African continent.

      “A key element of what the world needs to develop and grow is access to reliable energy. I hope to keep expanding my problem-solving toolkit so that, one day, it can be useful in electrifying communities back home,” he says. More