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    Building resiliency

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    Several years ago, the residents of a manufactured-home neighborhood in southeast suburban Houston, not far from the Buffalo Bayou, took a major step in dealing with climate problems: They bought the land under their homes. Then they installed better drainage and developed strategies to share expertise and tools for home repairs. The result? The neighborhood made it through Hurricane Harvey in 2017 and a winter freeze in 2021 without major damage.The neighborhood is part of a U.S. movement toward the Resident Owned Community (ROC) model for manufactured home parks. Many people in manufactured homes — mobile homes — do not own the land under them. But if the residents of a manufactured-home park can form an ROC, they can take action to adapt to climate risks — and ease the threat of eviction. With an ROC, manufactured-home residents can be there to stay.That speaks to a larger issue: In cities, lower-income residents are often especially vulnerable to natural hazards, such as flooding, extreme heat, and wildfire. But efforts aimed at helping cities as a whole withstand these disasters can lead to interventions that displace already-disadvantaged residents — by turning a low-lying neighborhood into a storm buffer, for instance.“The global climate crisis has very differential effects on cities, and neighborhoods within cities,” says Lawrence Vale, a professor of urban studies at MIT and co-author of a new book on the subject, “The Equitably Resilient City,” published by the MIT Press and co-authored with Zachary B. Lamb PhD ’18, an assistant professor at the University of California at Berkeley.In the book, the scholars delve into 12 case studies from around the globe which, they believe, have it both ways: Low- and middle-income communities have driven climate progress through tangible built projects, while also keeping people from being displaced, and indeed helping them participate in local governance and neighborhood decision-making.“We can either dive into despair about climate issues, or think they’re solvable and ask what it takes to succeed in a more equitable way,” says Vale, who is the Ford Professor of Urban Design and Planning at MIT. “This book is asking how people look at problems more holistically — to show how environmental impacts are integrated with their livelihoods, with feeling they can have security from displacement, and feeling they’re not going to be displaced, with being empowered to share in the governance where they live.”As Lamb notes, “Pursuing equitable urban climate adaptation requires both changes in the physical built environment of cities and innovations in institutions and governance practices to address deep-seated causes of inequality.”Twelve projects, four elementsResearch for “The Equitably Resilient City” began with exploration of about 200 potential cases, and ultimately focused on 12 projects from around the globe, including the U.S., Brazil, Thailand, and France. Vale and Lamb, coordinating with locally-based research teams, visited these diverse sites and conducted interviews in nine languages.All 12 projects work on multiple levels at once: They are steps toward environmental progress that also help local communities in civic and economic terms. The book uses the acronym LEGS (“livelihood, environment, governance, and security”) to encapsulate this need to make equitable progress on four different fronts.“Doing one of those things well is worth recognition, and doing all of them well is exciting,” Vale says. “It’s important to understand not just what these communities did, but how they did it and whose views were involved. These 12 cases are not a random sample. The book looks for people who are partially succeeding at difficult things in difficult circumstances.”One case study is set in São Paolo, Brazil, where low-income residents of a hilly favela benefitted from new housing in the area on undeveloped land that is less prone to slides. In San Juan, Puerto Rico, residents of low-lying neighborhoods abutting a water channel formed a durable set of community groups to create a fairer solution to flooding: Although the channel needed to be re-widened, the local coalition insisted on limiting displacement, supporting local livelihoods and improving environmental conditions and public space.“There is a backlash to older practices,” Vale says, referring to the large-scale urban planning and infrastructure projects of the mid-20th century, which often ignored community input. “People saw what happened during the urban renewal era and said, ‘You’re not going to do that to us again.’”Indeed, one through-line in “The Equitably Resilient City” is that cities, like all places, can be contested political terrain. Often, solid solutions emerge when local groups organize, advocate for new solutions, and eventually gain enough traction to enact them.“Every one of our examples and cases has probably 15 or 20 years of activity behind it, as well as engagements with a much deeper history,” Vale says. “They’re all rooted in a very often troubled [political] context. And yet these are places that have made progress possible.”Think locally, adapt anywhereAnother motif of “The Equitably Resilient City” is that local progress matters greatly, for a few reasons — including the value of having communities develop projects that meet their own needs, based on their input. Vale and Lamb are interested in projects even if they are very small-scale, and devote one chapter of the book to the Paris OASIS program, which has developed a series of cleverly designed, heavily tree-dotted school playgrounds across Paris. These projects provide environmental education opportunities and help mitigate flooding and urban heat while adding CO2-harnessing greenery to the cityscape.An individual park, by itself, can only do so much, but the concept behind it can be adopted by anyone.“This book is mostly centered on local projects rather than national schemes,” Vale says. “The hope is they serve as an inspiration for people to adapt to their own situations.”After all, the urban geography and governance of places such as Paris or São Paulo will differ widely. But efforts to make improvements to public open space or to well-located inexpensive housing stock applies in cities across the world.Similarly, the authors devote a chapter to work in the Cully neighborhood in Portland, Oregon, where community leaders have instituted a raft of urban environmental improvements while creating and preserving more affordable housing. The idea in the Cully area, as in all these cases, is to make places more resistant to climate change while enhancing them as good places to live for those already there.“Climate adaptation is going to mobilize enormous public and private resources to reshape cities across the globe,” Lamb notes. “These cases suggest pathways where those resources can make cities both more resilient in the face of climate change and more equitable. In fact, these projects show how making cities more equitable can be part of making them more resilient.”Other scholars have praised the book. Eric Klinenberg, director of New York University’s Institute for Public Knowledge has called it “at once scholarly, constructive, and uplifting, a reminder that better, more just cities remain within our reach.”Vale also teaches some of the book’s concepts in his classes, finding that MIT students, wherever they are from, enjoy the idea of thinking creatively about climate resilience.“At MIT, students want to find ways of applying technical skills to urgent global challenges,” Vale says. “I do think there are many opportunities, especially at a time of climate crisis. We try to highlight some of the solutions that are out there. Give us an opportunity, and we’ll show you what a place can be.” More

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      Designing tiny filters to solve big problems

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      For many industrial processes, the typical way to separate gases, liquids, or ions is with heat, using slight differences in boiling points to purify mixtures. These thermal processes account for roughly 10 percent of the energy use in the United States.MIT chemical engineer Zachary Smith wants to reduce costs and carbon footprints by replacing these energy-intensive processes with highly efficient filters that can separate gases, liquids, and ions at room temperature.In his lab at MIT, Smith is designing membranes with tiny pores that can filter tiny molecules based on their size. These membranes could be useful for purifying biogas, capturing carbon dioxide from power plant emissions, or generating hydrogen fuel.“We’re taking materials that have unique capabilities for separating molecules and ions with precision, and applying them to applications where the current processes are not efficient, and where there’s an enormous carbon footprint,” says Smith, an associate professor of chemical engineering.Smith and several former students have founded a company called Osmoses that is working toward developing these materials for large-scale use in gas purification. Removing the need for high temperatures in these widespread industrial processes could have a significant impact on energy consumption, potentially reducing it by as much as 90 percent.“I would love to see a world where we could eliminate thermal separations, and where heat is no longer a problem in creating the things that we need and producing the energy that we need,” Smith says.Hooked on researchAs a high school student, Smith was drawn to engineering but didn’t have many engineering role models. Both of his parents were physicians, and they always encouraged him to work hard in school.“I grew up without knowing many engineers, and certainly no chemical engineers. But I knew that I really liked seeing how the world worked. I was always fascinated by chemistry and seeing how mathematics helped to explain this area of science,” recalls Smith, who grew up near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. “Chemical engineering seemed to have all those things built into it, but I really had no idea what it was.”At Penn State University, Smith worked with a professor named Henry “Hank” Foley on a research project designing carbon-based materials to create a “molecular sieve” for gas separation. Through a time-consuming and iterative layering process, he created a sieve that could purify oxygen and nitrogen from air.“I kept adding more and more coatings of a special material that I could subsequently carbonize, and eventually I started to get selectivity. In the end, I had made a membrane that could sieve molecules that only differed by 0.18 angstrom in size,” he says. “I got hooked on research at that point, and that’s what led me to do more things in the area of membranes.”After graduating from college in 2008, Smith pursued graduate studies in chemical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. There, he continued developing membranes for gas separation, this time using a different class of materials — polymers. By controlling polymer structure, he was able to create films with pores that filter out specific molecules, such as carbon dioxide or other gases.“Polymers are a type of material that you can actually form into big devices that can integrate into world-class chemical plants. So, it was exciting to see that there was a scalable class of materials that could have a real impact on addressing questions related to CO2 and other energy-efficient separations,” Smith says.After finishing his PhD, he decided he wanted to learn more chemistry, which led him to a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California at Berkeley.“I wanted to learn how to make my own molecules and materials. I wanted to run my own reactions and do it in a more systematic way,” he says.At Berkeley, he learned how make compounds called metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) — cage-like molecules that have potential applications in gas separation and many other fields. He also realized that while he enjoyed chemistry, he was definitely a chemical engineer at heart.“I learned a ton when I was there, but I also learned a lot about myself,” he says. “As much as I love chemistry, work with chemists, and advise chemists in my own group, I’m definitely a chemical engineer, really focused on the process and application.”Solving global problemsWhile interviewing for faculty jobs, Smith found himself drawn to MIT because of the mindset of the people he met.“I began to realize not only how talented the faculty and the students were, but the way they thought was very different than other places I had been,” he says. “It wasn’t just about doing something that would move their field a little bit forward. They were actually creating new fields. There was something inspirational about the type of people that ended up at MIT who wanted to solve global problems.”In his lab at MIT, Smith is now tackling some of those global problems, including water purification, critical element recovery, renewable energy, battery development, and carbon sequestration.In a close collaboration with Yan Xia, a professor at Stanford University, Smith recently developed gas separation membranes that incorporate a novel type of polymer known as “ladder polymers,” which are currently being scaled for deployment at his startup. Historically, using polymers for gas separation has been limited by a tradeoff between permeability and selectivity — that is, membranes that permit a faster flow of gases through the membrane tend to be less selective, allowing impurities to get through.Using ladder polymers, which consist of double strands connected by rung-like bonds, the researchers were able to create gas separation membranes that are both highly permeable and very selective. The boost in permeability — a 100- to 1,000-fold improvement over earlier materials — could enable membranes to replace some of the high-energy techniques now used to separate gases, Smith says.“This allows you to envision large-scale industrial problems solved with miniaturized devices,” he says. “If you can really shrink down the system, then the solutions we’re developing in the lab could easily be applied to big industries like the chemicals industry.”These developments and others have been part of a number of advancements made by collaborators, students, postdocs, and researchers who are part of Smith’s team.“I have a great research team of talented and hard-working students and postdocs, and I get to teach on topics that have been instrumental in my own professional career,” Smith says. “MIT has been a playground to explore and learn new things. I am excited for what my team will discover next, and grateful for an opportunity to help solve many important global problems.” More

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      in Energy

      Unlocking the hidden power of boiling — for energy, space, and beyond

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      Most people take boiling water for granted. For Associate Professor Matteo Bucci, uncovering the physics behind boiling has been a decade-long journey filled with unexpected challenges and new insights.The seemingly simple phenomenon is extremely hard to study in complex systems like nuclear reactors, and yet it sits at the core of a wide range of important industrial processes. Unlocking its secrets could thus enable advances in efficient energy production, electronics cooling, water desalination, medical diagnostics, and more.“Boiling is important for applications way beyond nuclear,” says Bucci, who earned tenure at MIT in July. “Boiling is used in 80 percent of the power plants that produce electricity. My research has implications for space propulsion, energy storage, electronics, and the increasingly important task of cooling computers.”Bucci’s lab has developed new experimental techniques to shed light on a wide range of boiling and heat transfer phenomena that have limited energy projects for decades. Chief among those is a problem caused by bubbles forming so quickly they create a band of vapor across a surface that prevents further heat transfer. In 2023, Bucci and collaborators developed a unifying principle governing the problem, known as the boiling crisis, which could enable more efficient nuclear reactors and prevent catastrophic failures.For Bucci, each bout of progress brings new possibilities — and new questions to answer.“What’s the best paper?” Bucci asks. “The best paper is the next one. I think Alfred Hitchcock used to say it doesn’t matter how good your last movie was. If your next one is poor, people won’t remember it. I always tell my students that our next paper should always be better than the last. It’s a continuous journey of improvement.”From engineering to bubblesThe Italian village where Bucci grew up had a population of about 1,000 during his childhood. He gained mechanical skills by working in his father’s machine shop and by taking apart and reassembling appliances like washing machines and air conditioners to see what was inside. He also gained a passion for cycling, competing in the sport until he attended the University of Pisa for undergraduate and graduate studies.In college, Bucci was fascinated with matter and the origins of life, but he also liked building things, so when it came time to pick between physics and engineering, he decided nuclear engineering was a good middle ground.“I have a passion for construction and for understanding how things are made,” Bucci says. “Nuclear engineering was a very unlikely but obvious choice. It was unlikely because in Italy, nuclear was already out of the energy landscape, so there were very few of us. At the same time, there were a combination of intellectual and practical challenges, which is what I like.”For his PhD, Bucci went to France, where he met his wife, and went on to work at a French national lab. One day his department head asked him to work on a problem in nuclear reactor safety known as transient boiling. To solve it, he wanted to use a method for making measurements pioneered by MIT Professor Jacopo Buongiorno, so he received grant money to become a visiting scientist at MIT in 2013. He’s been studying boiling at MIT ever since.Today Bucci’s lab is developing new diagnostic techniques to study boiling and heat transfer along with new materials and coatings that could make heat transfer more efficient. The work has given researchers an unprecedented view into the conditions inside a nuclear reactor.“The diagnostics we’ve developed can collect the equivalent of 20 years of experimental work in a one-day experiment,” Bucci says.That data, in turn, led Bucci to a remarkably simple model describing the boiling crisis.“The effectiveness of the boiling process on the surface of nuclear reactor cladding determines the efficiency and the safety of the reactor,” Bucci explains. “It’s like a car that you want to accelerate, but there is an upper limit. For a nuclear reactor, that upper limit is dictated by boiling heat transfer, so we are interested in understanding what that upper limit is and how we can overcome it to enhance the reactor performance.”Another particularly impactful area of research for Bucci is two-phase immersion cooling, a process wherein hot server parts bring liquid to boil, then the resulting vapor condenses on a heat exchanger above to create a constant, passive cycle of cooling.“It keeps chips cold with minimal waste of energy, significantly reducing the electricity consumption and carbon dioxide emissions of data centers,” Bucci explains. “Data centers emit as much CO2 as the entire aviation industry. By 2040, they will account for over 10 percent of emissions.”Supporting studentsBucci says working with students is the most rewarding part of his job. “They have such great passion and competence. It’s motivating to work with people who have the same passion as you.”“My students have no fear to explore new ideas,” Bucci adds. “They almost never stop in front of an obstacle — sometimes to the point where you have to slow them down and put them back on track.”In running the Red Lab in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, Bucci tries to give students independence as well as support.“We’re not educating students, we’re educating future researchers,” Bucci says. “I think the most important part of our work is to not only provide the tools, but also to give the confidence and the self-starting attitude to fix problems. That can be business problems, problems with experiments, problems with your lab mates.”Some of the more unique experiments Bucci’s students do require them to gather measurements while free falling in an airplane to achieve zero gravity.“Space research is the big fantasy of all the kids,” says Bucci, who joins students in the experiments about twice a year. “It’s very fun and inspiring research for students. Zero g gives you a new perspective on life.”Applying AIBucci is also excited about incorporating artificial intelligence into his field. In 2023, he was a co-recipient of a multi-university research initiative (MURI) project in thermal science dedicated solely to machine learning. In a nod to the promise AI holds in his field, Bucci also recently founded a journal called AI Thermal Fluids to feature AI-driven research advances.“Our community doesn’t have a home for people that want to develop machine-learning techniques,” Bucci says. “We wanted to create an avenue for people in computer science and thermal science to work together to make progress. I think we really need to bring computer scientists into our community to speed this process up.”Bucci also believes AI can be used to process huge reams of data gathered using the new experimental techniques he’s developed as well as to model phenomena researchers can’t yet study.“It’s possible that AI will give us the opportunity to understand things that cannot be observed, or at least guide us in the dark as we try to find the root causes of many problems,” Bucci says. More

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      in Energy

      Helping students bring about decarbonization, from benchtop to global energy marketplace

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      MIT students are adept at producing research and innovations at the cutting edge of their fields. But addressing a problem as large as climate change requires understanding the world’s energy landscape, as well as the ways energy technologies evolve over time.Since 2010, the course IDS.521/IDS.065 (Energy Systems for Climate Change Mitigation) has equipped students with the skills they need to evaluate the various energy decarbonization pathways available to the world. The work is designed to help them maximize their impact on the world’s emissions by making better decisions along their respective career paths.“The question guiding my teaching and research is how do we solve big societal challenges with technology, and how can we be more deliberate in developing and supporting technologies to get us there?” says Professor Jessika Trancik, who started the course to help fill a gap in knowledge about the ways technologies evolve and scale over time.Since its inception in 2010, the course has attracted graduate students from across MIT’s five schools. The course has also recently opened to undergraduate students and been adapted to an online course for professionals.Class sessions alternate between lectures and student discussions that lead up to semester-long projects in which groups of students explore specific strategies and technologies for reducing global emissions. This year’s projects span several topics, including how quickly transmission infrastructure is expanding, the relationship between carbon emissions and human development, and how to decarbonize the production of key chemicals.The curriculum is designed to help students identify the most promising ways to mitigate climate change whether they plan to be scientists, engineers, policymakers, investors, urban planners, or just more informed citizens.“We’re coming at this issue from both sides,” explains Trancik, who is part of MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society. “Engineers are used to designing a technology to work as well as possible here and now, but not always thinking over a longer time horizon about a technology evolving and succeeding in the global marketplace. On the flip side, for students at the macro level, often studies in policy and economics of technological change don’t fully account for the physical and engineering constraints of rates of improvement. But all of that information allows you to make better decisions.”Bridging the gapAs a young researcher working on low-carbon polymers and electrode materials for solar cells, Trancik always wondered how the materials she worked on would scale in the real world. They might achieve promising performance benchmarks in the lab, but would they actually make a difference in mitigating climate change? Later, she began focusing increasingly on developing methods for predicting how technologies might evolve.“I’ve always been interested in both the macro and the micro, or even nano, scales,” Trancik says. “I wanted to know how to bridge these new technologies we’re working on with the big picture of where we want to go.”Trancik’ described her technology-grounded approach to decarbonization in a paper that formed the basis for IDS.065. In the paper, she presented a way to evaluate energy technologies against climate-change mitigation goals while focusing on the technology’s evolution.“That was a departure from previous approaches, which said, given these technologies with fixed characteristics and assumptions about their rates of change, how do I choose the best combination?” Trancik explains. “Instead we asked: Given a goal, how do we develop the best technologies to meet that goal? That inverts the problem in a way that’s useful to engineers developing these technologies, but also to policymakers and investors that want to use the evolution of technologies as a tool for achieving their objectives.”This past semester, the class took place every Tuesday and Thursday in a classroom on the first floor of the Stata Center. Students regularly led discussions where they reflected on the week’s readings and offered their own insights.“Students always share their takeaways and get to ask open questions of the class,” says Megan Herrington, a PhD candidate in the Department of Chemical Engineering. “It helps you understand the readings on a deeper level because people with different backgrounds get to share their perspectives on the same questions and problems. Everybody comes to class with their own lens, and the class is set up to highlight those differences.”The semester begins with an overview of climate science, the origins of emissions reductions goals, and technology’s role in achieving those goals. Students then learn how to evaluate technologies against decarbonization goals.But technologies aren’t static, and neither is the world. Later lessons help students account for the change of technologies over time, identifying the mechanisms for that change and even forecasting rates of change.Students also learn about the role of government policy. This year, Trancik shared her experience traveling to the COP29 United Nations Climate Change Conference.“It’s not just about technology,” Trancik says. “It’s also about the behaviors that we engage in and the choices we make. But technology plays a major role in determining what set of choices we can make.”From the classroom to the worldStudents in the class say it has given them a new perspective on climate change mitigation.“I have really enjoyed getting to see beyond the research people are doing at the benchtop,” says Herrington. “It’s interesting to see how certain materials or technologies that aren’t scalable yet may fit into a larger transformation in energy delivery and consumption. It’s also been interesting to pull back the curtain on energy systems analysis to understand where the metrics we cite in energy-related research originate from, and to anticipate trajectories of emerging technologies.”Onur Talu, a first-year master’s student in the Technology and Policy Program, says the class has made him more hopeful.“I came into this fairly pessimistic about the climate,” says Talu, who has worked for clean technology startups in the past. “This class has taught me different ways to look at the problem of climate change mitigation and developing renewable technologies. It’s also helped put into perspective how much we’ve accomplished so far.”Several student projects from the class over the years have been developed into papers published in peer-reviewed journals. They have also been turned into tools, like carboncounter.com, which plots the emissions and costs of cars and has been featured in The New York Times.Former class students have also launched startups; Joel Jean SM ’13, PhD ’17, for example, started Swift Solar. Others have drawn on the course material to develop impactful careers in government and academia, such as Patrick Brown PhD ’16 at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Leah Stokes SM ’15, PhD ’15 at the University of California at Santa Barbara.Overall, students say the course helps them take a more informed approach to applying their skills toward addressing climate change.“It’s not enough to just know how bad climate change could be,” says Yu Tong, a first-year master’s student in civil and environmental engineering. “It’s also important to understand how technology can work to mitigate climate change from both a technological and market perspective. It’s about employing technology to solve these issues rather than just working in a vacuum.” More

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      in Energy

      Transforming fusion from a scientific curiosity into a powerful clean energy source

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      If you’re looking for hard problems, building a nuclear fusion power plant is a pretty good place to start. Fusion — the process that powers the sun — has proven to be a difficult thing to recreate here on Earth despite decades of research.“There’s something very attractive to me about the magnitude of the fusion challenge,” Hartwig says. “It’s probably true of a lot of people at MIT. I’m driven to work on very hard problems. There’s something intrinsically satisfying about that battle. It’s part of the reason I’ve stayed in this field. We have to cross multiple frontiers of physics and engineering if we’re going to get fusion to work.”The problem got harder when, in Hartwig’s last year in graduate school, the Department of Energy announced plans to terminate funding for the Alcator C-Mod tokamak, a major fusion experiment in MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center that Hartwig needed to do to graduate. Hartwig was able to finish his PhD, and the scare didn’t dissuade him from the field. In fact, he took an associate professor position at MIT in 2017 to keep working on fusion.“It was a pretty bleak time to take a faculty position in fusion energy, but I am a person who loves to find a vacuum,” says Hartwig, who is a newly tenured associate professor at MIT. “I adore a vacuum because there’s enormous opportunity in chaos.”Hartwig did have one very good reason for hope. In 2012, he had taken a class taught by Professor Dennis Whyte that challenged students to design and assess the economics of a nuclear fusion power plant that incorporated a new kind of high-temperature superconducting magnet. Hartwig says the magnets enable fusion reactors to be much smaller, cheaper, and faster.Whyte, Hartwig, and a few other members of the class started working nights and weekends to prove the reactors were feasible. In 2017, the group founded Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) to build the world’s first commercial-scale fusion power plants.Over the next four years, Hartwig led a research project at MIT with CFS that further developed the magnet technology and scaled it to create a 20-Tesla superconducting magnet — a suitable size for a nuclear fusion power plant.The magnet and subsequent tests of its performance represented a turning point for the industry. Commonwealth Fusion Systems has since attracted more than $2 billion in investments to build its first reactors, while the fusion industry overall has exceeded $8 billion in private investment.The old joke in fusion is that the technology is always 30 years away. But fewer people are laughing these days.“The perspective in 2024 looks quite a bit different than it did in 2016, and a huge part of that is tied to the institutional capability of a place like MIT and the willingness of people here to accomplish big things,” Hartwig says.A path to the starsAs a child growing up in St. Louis, Hartwig was interested in sports and playing outside with friends but had little interest in physics. When he went to Boston University as an undergraduate, he studied biomedical engineering simply because his older brother had done it, so he thought he could get a job. But as he was introduced to tools for structural experiments and analysis, he found himself more interested in how the tools worked than what they could do.“That led me to physics, and physics ended up leading me to nuclear science, where I’m basically still doing applied physics,” Hartwig explains.Joining the field late in his undergraduate studies, Hartwig worked hard to get his physics degree on time. After graduation, he was burnt out, so he took two years off and raced his bicycle competitively while working in a bike shop.“There’s so much pressure on people in science and engineering to go straight through,” Hartwig says. “People say if you take time off, you won’t be able to get into graduate school, you won’t be able to get recommendation letters. I always tell my students, ‘It depends on the person.’ Everybody’s different, but it was a great period for me, and it really set me up to enter graduate school with a more mature mindset and to be more focused.”Hartwig returned to academia as a PhD student in MIT’s Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering in 2007. When his thesis advisor, Dennis Whyte, announced a course focused on designing nuclear fusion power plants, it caught Hartwig’s eye. The final projects showed a surprisingly promising path forward for a fusion field that had been stagnant for decades. The rest was history.“We started CFS with the idea that it would partner deeply with MIT and MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center to leverage the infrastructure, expertise, people, and capabilities that we have MIT,” Hartwig says. “We had to start the company with the idea that it would be deeply partnered with MIT in an innovative way that hadn’t really been done before.”Guided by impactHartwig says the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, and the Plasma Science and Fusion Center in particular, have seen a huge influx in graduate student applications in recent years.“There’s so much demand, because people are excited again about the possibilities,” Hartwig says. “Instead of having fusion and a machine built in one or two generations, we’ll hopefully be learning how these things work in under a decade.”Hartwig’s research group is still testing CFS’ new magnets, but it is also partnering with other fusion companies in an effort to advance the field more broadly.Overall, when Hartwig looks back at his career, the thing he is most proud of is switching specialties every six years or so, from building equipment for his PhD to conducting fundamental experiments to designing reactors to building magnets.“It’s not that traditional in academia,” Hartwig says. “Where I’ve found success is coming into something new, bringing a naivety but also realism to a new field, and offering a different toolkit, a different approach, or a different idea about what can be done.”Now Hartwig is onto his next act, developing new ways to study materials for use in fusion and fission reactors.“I’m already interested in moving on to the next thing; the next field where I’m not a trained expert,” Hartwig says. “It’s about identifying where there’s stagnation in fusion and in technology, where innovation is not happening where we desperately need it, and bringing new ideas to that.” More

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      in Environment

      Q&A: Transforming research through global collaborations

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      The MIT Global Seed Funds (GSF) program fosters global research collaborations with MIT faculty and their peers abroad — creating partnerships that tackle complex global issues, from climate change to health-care challenges and beyond. Administered by the MIT Center for International Studies (CIS), the GSF program has awarded more than $26 million to over 1,200 faculty research projects since its inception in 2008. Through its unique funding structure — comprising a general fund for unrestricted geographical use and several specific funds within individual countries, regions, and universities — GSF supports a wide range of projects. The current call for proposals from MIT faculty and researchers with principal investigator status is open until Dec. 10. CIS recently sat down with faculty recipients Josephine Carstensen and David McGee to discuss the value and impact GSF added to their research. Carstensen, the Gilbert W. Winslow Career Development Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, generates computational designs for large-scale structures with the intent of designing novel low-carbon solutions. McGee, the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), reconstructs the patterns, pace, and magnitudes of past hydro-climate changes.Q: How did the Global Seed Funds program connect you with global partnerships related to your research?Carstensen: One of the projects my lab is working on is to unlock the potential of complex cast-glass structures. Through our GSF partnership with researchers at TUDelft (Netherlands), my group was able to leverage our expertise in generative design algorithms alongside the TUDelft team, who are experts in the physical casting and fabrication of glass structures. Our initial connection to TUDelft was actually through one of my graduate students who was at a conference and met TUDelft researchers. He was inspired by their work and felt there could be synergy between our labs. The question then became: How do we connect with TUDelft? And that was what led us to the Global Seed Funds program. McGee: Our research is based in fieldwork conducted in partnership with experts who have a rich understanding of local environments. These locations range from lake basins in Chile and Argentina to caves in northern Mexico, Vietnam, and Madagascar. GSF has been invaluable for helping foster partnerships with collaborators and universities in these different locations, enabling the pilot work and relationship-building necessary to establish longer-term, externally funded projects.Q: Tell us more about your GSF-funded work.Carstensen: In my research group at MIT, we live mainly in a computational regime, and we do very little proof-of-concept testing. To that point, we do not even have the facilities nor experience to physically build large-scale structures, or even specialized structures. GSF has enabled us to connect with the researchers at TUDelft who do much more experimental testing than we do. Being able to work with the experts at TUDelft within their physical realm provided valuable insights into their way of approaching problems. And, likewise, the researchers at TUDelft benefited from our expertise. It has been fruitful in ways we couldn’t have imagined within our lab at MIT.McGee: The collaborative work supported by the GSF has focused on reconstructing how past climate changes impacted rainfall patterns around the world, using natural archives like lake sediments and cave formations. One particularly successful project has been our work in caves in northeastern Mexico, which has been conducted in partnership with researchers from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and a local caving group. This project has involved several MIT undergraduate and graduate students, sponsored a research symposium in Mexico City, and helped us obtain funding from the National Science Foundation for a longer-term project.Q: You both mentioned the involvement of your graduate students. How exactly has the GSF augmented the research experience of your students?Carstensen: The collaboration has especially benefited the graduate students from both the MIT and TUDelft teams. The opportunity presented through this project to engage in research at an international peer institution has been extremely beneficial for their academic growth and maturity. It has facilitated training in new and complementary technical areas that they would not have had otherwise and allowed them to engage with leading world experts. An example of this aspect of the project’s success is that the collaboration has inspired one of my graduate students to actively pursue postdoc opportunities in Europe (including at TU Delft) after his graduation.McGee: MIT students have traveled to caves in northeastern Mexico and to lake basins in northern Chile to conduct fieldwork and build connections with local collaborators. Samples enabled by GSF-supported projects became the focus of two graduate students’ PhD theses, two EAPS undergraduate senior theses, and multiple UROP [Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program] projects.Q: Were there any unexpected benefits to the work funded by GSF?Carstensen: The success of this project would not have been possible without this specific international collaboration. Both the Delft and MIT teams bring highly different essential expertise that has been necessary for the successful project outcome. It allowed both the Delft and MIT teams to gain an in-depth understanding of the expertise areas and resources of the other collaborators. Both teams have been deeply inspired. This partnership has fueled conversations about potential future projects and provided multiple outcomes, including a plan to publish two journal papers on the project outcome. The first invited publication is being finalized now.McGee: GSF’s focus on reciprocal exchange has enabled external collaborators to spend time at MIT, sharing their work and exchanging ideas. Other funding is often focused on sending MIT researchers and students out, but GSF has helped us bring collaborators here, making the relationship more equal. A GSF-supported visit by Argentinian researchers last year made it possible for them to interact not just with my group, but with students and faculty across EAPS. More

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      in Energy

      Catherine Wolfram: High-energy scholar

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      In the mid 2000s, Catherine Wolfram PhD ’96 reached what she calls “an inflection point” in her career. After about a decade of studying U.S. electricity markets, she had come to recognize that “you couldn’t study the energy industries without thinking about climate mitigation,” as she puts it.At the same time, Wolfram understood that the trajectory of energy use in the developing world was a massively important part of the climate picture. To get a comprehensive grasp on global dynamics, she says, “I realized I needed to start thinking about the rest of the world.”An accomplished scholar and policy expert, Wolfram has been on the faculty at Harvard University, the University of California at Berkeley — and now MIT, where she is the William Barton Rogers Professor in Energy. She has also served as deputy assistant secretary for climate and energy economics at the U.S. Treasury.Yet even leading experts want to keep learning. So, when she hit that inflection point, Wolfram started carving out a new phase of her research career.“One of the things I love about being an academic is, I could just decide to do that,” Wolfram says. “I didn’t need to check with a boss. I could just pivot my career to being more focused to thinking about energy in the developing world.”Over the last decade, Wolfram has published a wide array of original studies about energy consumption in the developing world. From Kenya to Mexico to South Asia, she has shed light on the dynamics of economics growth and energy consumption — while spending some of that time serving the government too. Last year, Wolfram joined the faculty of the MIT Sloan School of Management, where her work bolsters the Institute’s growing effort to combat climate change.Studying at MITWolfram largely grew up in Minnesota, where her father was a legal scholar, although he moved to Cornell University around the time she started high school. As an undergraduate, she majored in economics at Harvard University, and after graduation she worked first for a consultant, then for the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities, the agency regulating energy rates. In the latter job, Wolfram kept noticing that people were often citing the research of an MIT scholar named Paul Joskow (who is now the Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics Emeritus in MIT’s Department of Economics) and Richard Schmalensee (a former dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management and now the Howard W. Johnson Professor of Management Emeritus). Seeing how consequential economics research could be for policymaking, Wolfram decided to get a PhD in the field and was accepted into MIT’s doctoral program.“I went into graduate school with an unusually specific view of what I wanted to do,” Wolfram says. “I wanted to work with Paul Joskow and Dick Schmalensee on electricity markets, and that’s how I wound up here.”At MIT, Wolfram also ended up working extensively with Nancy Rose, the Charles P. Kindleberger Professor of Applied Economics and a former head of the Department of Economics, who helped oversee Wolfram’s thesis; Rose has extensively studied market regulation as well.Wolfram’s dissertation research largely focused on price-setting behavior in the U.K.’s newly deregulated electricity markets, which, it turned out, applied handily to the U.S., where a similar process was taking place. “I was fortunate because this was around the time California was thinking about restructuring, as it was known,” Wolfram says. She spent four years on the faculty at Harvard, then moved to UC Berkeley. Wolfram’s studies have shown that deregulation has had some medium-term benefits, for instance in making power plants operate more efficiently.Turning on the ACBy around 2010, though, Wolfram began shifting her scholarly focus in earnest, conducting innovative studies about energy in the developing world. One strand of her research has centered on Kenya, to better understand how more energy access for people without electricity might fit into growth in the developing world.In this case, Wolfram’s perhaps surprising conclusion is that electrification itself is not a magic ticket to prosperity; people without electricity are more eager to adopt it when they have a practical economic need for it. Meanwhile, they have other essential needs that are not necessarily being addressed.“The 800 million people in the world who don’t have electricity also don’t have access to good health care or running water,” Wolfram says. “Giving them better housing infrastructure is important, and harder to tackle. It’s not clear that bringing people electricity alone is the single most useful thing from a development perspective. Although electricity is a super-important component of modern living.”Wolfram has even delved into topics such as air conditioner use in the developing world — an important driver of energy use. As her research shows, many countries, with a combined population far bigger than the U.S., are among the fastest-growing adopters of air conditioners and have an even greater need for them, based on their climates. Adoption of air conditioning within those countries also is characterized by marked economic inequality.From early 2021 until late 2022, Wolfram also served in the administration of President Joe Biden, where her work also centered on global energy issues. Among other things, Wolfram was part of the team working out a price-cap policy for Russian oil exports, a concept that she thinks could be applied to many other products globally. Although, she notes, working with countries heavily dependent on exporting energy materials will always require careful engagement.“We need to be mindful of that dependence and importance as we go through this massive effort to decarbonize the energy sector and shift it to a whole new paradigm,” Wolfram says.At MIT againStill, she notes, the world does need a whole new energy paradigm, and fast. Her arrival at MIT overlaps with the emergence of a new Institute-wide effort, the Climate Project at MIT, that aims to accelerate and scale climate solutions and good climate policy, including through the new Climate Policy Center at MIT Sloan. That kind of effort, Wolfram says, matters to her.“It’s part of why I’ve come to MIT,” Wolfram says. “Technology will be one part of the climate solution, but I do think an innovative mindset, how can we think about doing things better, can be productively applied to climate policy.” On being at MIT, she adds: “It’s great, it’s awesome. One of the things that pleasantly surprised me is how tight-knit and friendly the MIT faculty all are, and how many interactions I’ve had with people from other departments.”Wolfram has also been enjoying her teaching at MIT, and will be offering a large class in spring 2025, 15.016 (Climate and Energy in the Global Economy), that she debuted this past academic year.“It’s super fun to have students from around the world, who have personal stories and knowledge of energy systems in their countries and can contribute to our discussions,” she says.When it comes to tackling climate change, many things seem daunting. But there is still a world of knowledge to be acquired while we try to keep the planet from overheating, and Wolfram has a can-do attitude about learning more and applying those lessons.“We’ve made a lot of progress,” Wolfram says. “But we still have a lot more to do.” More

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      in Energy

      Ensuring a durable transition

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      To fend off the worst impacts of climate change, “we have to decarbonize, and do it even faster,” said William H. Green, director of the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) and Hoyt C. Hottel Professor, MIT Department of Chemical Engineering, at MITEI’s Annual Research Conference.“But how the heck do we actually achieve this goal when the United States is in the middle of a divisive election campaign, and globally, we’re facing all kinds of geopolitical conflicts, trade protectionism, weather disasters, increasing demand from developing countries building a middle class, and data centers in countries like the U.S.?”Researchers, government officials, and business leaders convened in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Sept. 25-26 to wrestle with this vexing question at the conference that was themed, “A durable energy transition: How to stay on track in the face of increasing demand and unpredictable obstacles.”“In this room we have a lot of power,” said Green, “if we work together, convey to all of society what we see as real pathways and policies to solve problems, and take collective action.”The critical role of consensus-building in driving the energy transition arose repeatedly in conference sessions, whether the topic involved developing and adopting new technologies, constructing and siting infrastructure, drafting and passing vital energy policies, or attracting and retaining a skilled workforce.Resolving conflictsThere is “blowback and a social cost” in transitioning away from fossil fuels, said Stephen Ansolabehere, the Frank G. Thompson Professor of Government at Harvard University, in a panel on the social barriers to decarbonization. “Companies need to engage differently and recognize the rights of communities,” he said.Nora DeDontney, director of development at Vineyard Offshore, described her company’s two years of outreach and negotiations to bring large cables from ocean-based wind turbines onshore.“Our motto is, ‘community first,’” she said. Her company works to mitigate any impacts towns might feel because of offshore wind infrastructure construction with projects, such as sewer upgrades; provides workforce training to Tribal Nations; and lays out wind turbines in a manner that provides safe and reliable areas for local fisheries.Elsa A. Olivetti, professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT and the lead of the Decarbonization Mission of MIT’s new Climate Project, discussed the urgent need for rapid scale-up of mineral extraction. “Estimates indicate that to electrify the vehicle fleet by 2050, about six new large copper mines need to come on line each year,” she said. To meet the demand for metals in the United States means pushing into Indigenous lands and environmentally sensitive habitats. “The timeline of permitting is not aligned with the temporal acceleration needed,” she said.Larry Susskind, the Ford Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning in the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning, is trying to resolve such tensions with universities playing the role of mediators. He is creating renewable energy clinics where students train to participate in emerging disputes over siting. “Talk to people before decisions are made, conduct joint fact finding, so that facilities reduce harms and share the benefits,” he said.Clean energy boom and pressureA relatively recent and unforeseen increase in demand for energy comes from data centers, which are being built by large technology companies for new offerings, such as artificial intelligence.“General energy demand was flat for 20 years — and now, boom,” said Sean James, Microsoft’s senior director of data center research. “It caught utilities flatfooted.” With the expansion of AI, the rush to provision data centers with upwards of 35 gigawatts of new (and mainly renewable) power in the near future, intensifies pressure on big companies to balance the concerns of stakeholders across multiple domains. Google is pursuing 24/7 carbon-free energy by 2030, said Devon Swezey, the company’s senior manager for global energy and climate.“We’re pursuing this by purchasing more and different types of clean energy locally, and accelerating technological innovation such as next-generation geothermal projects,” he said. Pedro Gómez Lopez, strategy and development director, Ferrovial Digital, which designs and constructs data centers, incorporates renewable energy into their projects, which contributes to decarbonization goals and benefits to locales where they are sited. “We can create a new supply of power, taking the heat generated by a data center to residences or industries in neighborhoods through District Heating initiatives,” he said.The Inflation Reduction Act and other legislation has ramped up employment opportunities in clean energy nationwide, touching every region, including those most tied to fossil fuels. “At the start of 2024 there were about 3.5 million clean energy jobs, with ‘red’ states showing the fastest growth in clean energy jobs,” said David S. Miller, managing partner at Clean Energy Ventures. “The majority (58 percent) of new jobs in energy are now in clean energy — that transition has happened. And one-in-16 new jobs nationwide were in clean energy, with clean energy jobs growing more than three times faster than job growth economy-wide”In this rapid expansion, the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) is prioritizing economically marginalized places, according to Zoe Lipman, lead for good jobs and labor standards in the Office of Energy Jobs at the DoE. “The community benefit process is integrated into our funding,” she said. “We are creating the foundation of a virtuous circle,” encouraging benefits to flow to disadvantaged and energy communities, spurring workforce training partnerships, and promoting well-paid union jobs. “These policies incentivize proactive community and labor engagement, and deliver community benefits, both of which are key to building support for technological change.”Hydrogen opportunity and challengeWhile engagement with stakeholders helps clear the path for implementation of technology and the spread of infrastructure, there remain enormous policy, scientific, and engineering challenges to solve, said multiple conference participants. In a “fireside chat,” Prasanna V. Joshi, vice president of low-carbon-solutions technology at ExxonMobil, and Ernest J. Moniz, professor of physics and special advisor to the president at MIT, discussed efforts to replace natural gas and coal with zero-carbon hydrogen in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in such major industries as steel and fertilizer manufacturing.“We have gone into an era of industrial policy,” said Moniz, citing a new DoE program offering incentives to generate demand for hydrogen — more costly than conventional fossil fuels — in end-use applications. “We are going to have to transition from our current approach, which I would call carrots-and-twigs, to ultimately, carrots-and-sticks,” Moniz warned, in order to create “a self-sustaining, major, scalable, affordable hydrogen economy.”To achieve net zero emissions by 2050, ExxonMobil intends to use carbon capture and sequestration in natural gas-based hydrogen and ammonia production. Ammonia can also serve as a zero-carbon fuel. Industry is exploring burning ammonia directly in coal-fired power plants to extend the hydrogen value chain. But there are challenges. “How do you burn 100 percent ammonia?”, asked Joshi. “That’s one of the key technology breakthroughs that’s needed.” Joshi believes that collaboration with MIT’s “ecosystem of breakthrough innovation” will be essential to breaking logjams around the hydrogen and ammonia-based industries.MIT ingenuity essentialThe energy transition is placing very different demands on different regions around the world. Take India, where today per capita power consumption is one of the lowest. But Indians “are an aspirational people … and with increasing urbanization and industrial activity, the growth in power demand is expected to triple by 2050,” said Praveer Sinha, CEO and managing director of the Tata Power Co. Ltd., in his keynote speech. For that nation, which currently relies on coal, the move to clean energy means bringing another 300 gigawatts of zero-carbon capacity online in the next five years. Sinha sees this power coming from wind, solar, and hydro, supplemented by nuclear energy.“India plans to triple nuclear power generation capacity by 2032, and is focusing on advancing small modular reactors,” said Sinha. “The country also needs the rapid deployment of storage solutions to firm up the intermittent power.” The goal is to provide reliable electricity 24/7 to a population living both in large cities and in geographically remote villages, with the help of long-range transmission lines and local microgrids. “India’s energy transition will require innovative and affordable technology solutions, and there is no better place to go than MIT, where you have the best brains, startups, and technology,” he said.These assets were on full display at the conference. Among them a cluster of young businesses, including:the MIT spinout Form Energy, which has developed a 100-hour iron battery as a backstop to renewable energy sources in case of multi-day interruptions;startup Noya that aims for direct air capture of atmospheric CO2 using carbon-based materials;the firm Active Surfaces, with a lightweight material for putting solar photovoltaics in previously inaccessible places;Copernic Catalysts, with new chemistry for making ammonia and sustainable aviation fuel far more inexpensively than current processes; andSesame Sustainability, a software platform spun out of MITEI that gives industries a full financial analysis of the costs and benefits of decarbonization.The pipeline of research talent extended into the undergraduate ranks, with a conference “slam” competition showcasing students’ summer research projects in areas from carbon capture using enzymes to 3D design for the coils used in fusion energy confinement.“MIT students like me are looking to be the next generation of energy leaders, looking for careers where we can apply our engineering skills to tackle exciting climate problems and make a tangible impact,” said Trent Lee, a junior in mechanical engineering researching improvements in lithium-ion energy storage. “We are stoked by the energy transition, because it’s not just the future, but our chance to build it.” More

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      in Environment

      Admir Masic: Using lessons from the past to build a better future

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      As a teenager living in a small village in what was then Yugoslavia, Admir Masic witnessed the collapse of his home country and the outbreak of the Bosnian war. When his childhood home was destroyed by a tank, his family was forced to flee the violence, leaving their remaining possessions to enter a refugee camp in northern Croatia.It was in Croatia that Masic found what he calls his “magic.”“Chemistry really forcefully entered my life,” recalls Masic, who is now an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “I’d leave school to go back to my refugee camp, and you could either play ping-pong or do chemistry homework, so I did a lot of homework, and I began to focus on the subject.”Masic has never let go of his magic. Long after chemistry led him out of Croatia, he’s come to understand that the past holds crucial lessons for building a better future. That’s why he started the MIT Refugee Action Hub (now MIT Emerging Talent) to provide educational opportunities to students displaced by war. It’s also what led him to study ancient materials, whose secrets he believes have potential to solve some of the modern world’s most pressing problems.“We’re leading this concept of paleo-inspired design: that there are some ideas behind these ancient materials that are useful today,” Masic says. “We should think of these materials as a source of valuable information that we can try to translate to today. These concepts have the potential to revolutionize how we think about these materials.”One key research focus for Masic is cement. His lab is working on ways to transform the ubiquitous material into a carbon sink, a medium for energy storage, and more. Part of that work involves studying ancient Roman concrete, whose self-healing properties he has helped to illuminate.At the core of each of Masic’s research endeavors is a desire to translate a better understanding of materials into improvements in how we make things around the world.“Roman concrete to me is fascinating: It’s still standing after all this time and constantly repairing,” Masic says. “It’s clear there’s something special about this material, so what is it? Can we translate part of it into modern analogues? That’s what I love about MIT. We are put in a position to do cutting-edge research and then quickly translate that research into the real world. Impact for me is everything.”Finding a purposeMasic’s family fled to Croatia in 1992, just as he was set to begin high school. Despite excellent grades, Masic was told Bosnian refugees couldn’t enroll in the local school. It was only after a school psychologist advocated for Masic that he was allowed to sit in on classes as a nonmatriculating student.Masic did his best to be a ghost in the back of classrooms, silently absorbing everything he could. But in one subject he stood out. Within six months of joining the school, in January of 1993, a teacher suggested Masic compete in a local chemistry competition.“It was kind of the Olympiads of chemistry, and I won,” Masic recalls. “I literally floated onto the stage. It was this ‘Aha’ moment. I thought, ‘Oh my god, I’m good at chemistry!’”In 1994, Masic’s parents immigrated to Germany in search of a better life, but he decided to stay behind to finish high school, moving into a friend’s basement and receiving food and support from local families as well as a group of volunteers from Italy.“I just knew I had to stay,” Masic says. “With all the highs and lows of life to that point, I knew I had this talent and I had to make the most of it. I realized early on that knowledge was the one thing no one could take away from me.”Masic continued competing in chemistry competitions — and continued winning. Eventually, after a change to a national law, the high school he was attending agreed to give him a diploma. With the help of the Italian volunteers, he moved to Italy to attend the University of Turin, where he entered a five-year joint program that earned him a master’s degree in inorganic chemistry. Masic stayed at the university for his PhD, where he studied parchment, a writing material that’s been used for centuries to record some of humanity’s most sacred texts.With a classmate, Masic started a company that helped restore ancient documents. The work took him to Germany to work on a project studying the Dead Sea Scrolls, a set of manuscripts that date as far back as the third century BCE. In 2008, Masic joined the Max Planck Institute in Germany, where he also began to work with biological materials, studying water’s interaction with collagen at the nanoscale.Through that work, Masic became an expert in Raman spectroscopy, a type of chemical imaging that uses lasers to record the vibrations of molecules without leaving a trace, which he still uses to characterize materials.“Raman became a tool for me to contribute in the field of biological materials and bioinspired materials,” Masic says. “At the same time, I became the ‘Raman guy.’ It was a remarkable period for me professionally, as these tools provided unparalleled information and I published a lot of papers.”After seven years at Max Planck, Masic joined the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) at MIT.“At MIT, I felt I could truly be myself and define the research I wanted to do,” Masic says. “Especially in CEE, I could connect my work in heritage science and this tool, Raman spectroscopy, to tackle our society’s big challenges.”From labs to the worldRaman spectroscopy is a relatively new approach to studying cement, a material that contributes significantly to carbon dioxide emissions worldwide. At MIT, Masic has explored ways cement could be used to store carbon dioxide and act as an energy-storing supercapacitor. He has also solved ancient mysteries about the lasting strength of ancient Roman concrete, with lessons for the $400 billion cement industry today.“We really don’t think we should replace ordinary Portland cement completely, because it’s an extraordinary material that everyone knows how to work with, and industry produces so much of it. We need to introduce new functionalities into our concrete that will compensate for cement’s sustainability issues through avoided emissions,” Masic explains. “The concept we call ‘multifunctional concrete’ was inspired by our work with biological materials. Bones, for instance, sacrifice mechanical performance to be able to do things like self-healing and energy storage. That’s how you should imagine construction over next 10 years or 20 years. There could be concrete columns and walls that primarily offer support but also do things like store energy and continuously repair themselves.”Masic’s work across academia and industry allows him to apply his multifunctional concrete research at scale. He serves as a co-director of the MIT ec3 hub, a principal investigator within MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub, and a co-founder and advisor at the technology development company DMAT.“It’s great to be at the forefront of sustainability but also to be directly interacting with key industry players that can change the world,” Masic says. “What I appreciate about MIT is how you can engage in fundamental science and engineering while also translating that work into practical applications. The CSHub and ec3 hub are great examples of this. Industry is eager for us to develop solutions that they can help support.”And Masic will never forget where he came from. He now lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, with his wife Emina, a fellow former refugee, and their son, Benjamin, and the family shares a deep commitment to supporting displaced and underserved communities. Seven years ago, Masic founded the MIT Refugee Action Hub (ReACT), which provides computer and data science education programs for refugees and displaced communities. Today thousands of refugees apply to the program every year, and graduates have gone on to successful careers at places like Microsoft and Meta. The ReACT program was absorbed by MIT’s Emerging Talent program earlier this year to further its reach.“It’s really a life-changing experience for them,” Masic says. “It’s an amazing opportunity for MIT to nurture talented refugees around the world through this simple certification program. The more people we can involve, the more impact we will have on the lives of these truly underserved communities.” More