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    Burning things to make things

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    Around 80 percent of global energy production today comes from the combustion of fossil fuels. Combustion, or the process of converting stored chemical energy into thermal energy through burning, is vital for a variety of common activities including electricity generation, transportation, and domestic uses like heating and cooking — but it also yields a host of environmental consequences, contributing to air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.Sili Deng, the Doherty Chair in Ocean Utilization and associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, is leading research to drive the transition from the heavy dependence on fossil fuels to renewable energy with storage.“I was first introduced to flame synthesis in my junior year in college,” Deng says. “I realized you can actually burn things to make things, [and] that was really fascinating.”

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    Burning Things to Make ThingsVideo: Department of Mechanical Engineering

    Deng says she ultimately picked combustion as a focus of her work because she likes the intellectual challenge the concept offers. “In combustion you have chemistry, and you have fluid mechanics. Each subject is very rich in science. This also has very strong engineering implications and applications.”Deng’s research group targets three areas: building up fundamental knowledge on combustion processes and emissions; developing alternative fuels and metal combustion to replace fossil fuels; and synthesizing flame-based materials for catalysis and energy storage, which can bring down the cost of manufacturing battery materials.One focus of the team has been on low-cost, low-emission manufacturing of cathode materials for lithium-ion batteries. Lithium-ion batteries play an increasingly critical role in transportation electrification (e.g., batteries for electric vehicles) and grid energy storage for electricity that is generated from renewable energy sources like wind and solar. Deng’s team has developed a technology they call flame-assisted spray pyrolysis, or FASP, which can help reduce the high manufacturing costs associated with cathode materials.FASP is based on flame synthesis, a technology that dates back nearly 3,000 years. In ancient China, this was the primary way black ink materials were made. “[People burned] vegetables or woods, such that afterwards they can collect the solidified smoke,” Deng explains. “For our battery applications, we can try to fit in the same formula, but of course with new tweaks.”The team is also interested in developing alternative fuels, including looking at the use of metals like aluminum to power rockets. “We’re interested in utilizing aluminum as a fuel for civil applications,” Deng says, because aluminum is abundant in the earth, cheap, and it’s available globally. “What we are trying to do is to understand [aluminum combustion] and be able to tailor its ignition and propagation properties.”Among other accolades, Deng is a 2025 recipient of the Hiroshi Tsuji Early Career Researcher Award from the Combustion Institute, an award that recognizes excellence in fundamental or applied combustion science research. More

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      Optimizing food subsidies: Applying digital platforms to maximize nutrition

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      Oct. 16 is World Food Day, a global campaign to celebrate the founding of the Food and Agriculture Organization 80 years ago, and to work toward a healthy, sustainable, food-secure future. More than 670 million people in the world are facing hunger. Millions of others are facing rising obesity rates and struggle to get healthy food for proper nutrition. World Food Day calls on not only world governments, but business, academia, the media, and even the youth to take action to promote resilient food systems and combat hunger. This year, the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Laboratory (J-WAFS) is spotlighting an MIT researcher who is working toward this goal by studying food and water systems in the Global South.J-WAFS seed grants provide funding to early-stage research projects that are unique to prior work. In an 11th round of seed grant funding in 2025, 10 MIT faculty members received support to carry out their cutting-edge water and food research. Ali Aouad PhD ’17, assistant professor of operations management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, was one of those grantees. “I had searched before joining MIT what kind of research centers and initiatives were available that tried to coalesce research on food systems,” Aouad says. “And so, I was very excited about J-WAFS.” Aouad gathered more information about J-WAFS at the new faculty orientation session in August 2024, where he spoke to J-WAFS staff and learned about the program’s grant opportunities for water and food research. Later that fall semester, he attended a few J-WAFS seminars on agricultural economics and water resource management. That’s when Aouad knew that his project was perfectly aligned with the J-WAFS mission of securing humankind’s water and food.Aouad’s seed project focuses on food subsidies. With a background in operations research and an interest in digital platforms, much of his work has centered on aligning supply-side operations with heterogeneous customer preferences. Past projects include ones on retail and matching systems. “I started thinking that these types of demand-driven approaches may be also very relevant to important social challenges, particularly as they relate to food security,” Aouad says. Before starting his PhD at MIT, Aouad worked on projects that looked at subsidies for smallholder farmers in low- and middle-income countries. “I think in the back of my mind, I’ve always been fascinated by trying to solve these issues,” he noted.His seed grant project, Optimal subsidy design: Application to food assistance programs, aims to leverage data on preferences and purchasing habits from local grocery stores in India to inform food assistance policy and optimize the design of subsidies. Typical data collection systems, like point-of-sales, are not as readily available in India’s local groceries, making this type of data hard to come by for low-income individuals. “Mom-and-pop stores are extremely important last-mile operators when it comes to nutrition,” he explains. For this project, the research team gave local grocers point-of-sale scanners to track purchasing habits. “We aim to develop an algorithm that converts these transactions into some sort of ‘revelation’ of the individuals’ latent preferences,” says Aouad. “As such, we can model and optimize the food assistance programs — how much variety and flexibility is offered, taking into account the expected demand uptake.” He continues, “now, of course, our ability to answer detailed design questions [across various products and prices] depends on the quality of our inference from  the data, and so this is where we need more sophisticated and robust algorithms.”Following the data collection and model development, the ultimate goal of this research is to inform policy surrounding food assistance programs through an “optimization approach.” Aouad describes the complexities of using optimization to guide policy. “Policies are often informed by domain expertise, legacy systems, or political deliberation. A lot of researchers build rigorous evidence to inform food policy, but it’s fair to say that the kind of approach that I’m proposing in this research is not something that is commonly used. I see an opportunity for bringing a new approach and methodological tradition to a problem that has been central for policy for many decades.” The overall health of consumers is the reason food assistance programs exist, yet measuring long-term nutritional impacts and shifts in purchase behavior is difficult. In past research, Aouad notes that the short-term effects of food assistance interventions can be significant. However, these effects are often short-lived. “This is a fascinating question that I don’t think we will be able to address within the space of interventions that we will be considering. However, I think it is something I would like to capture in the research, and maybe develop hypotheses for future work around how we can shift nutrition-related behaviors in the long run.”While his project develops a new methodology to calibrate food assistance programs, large-scale applications are not promised. “A lot of what drives subsidy mechanisms and food assistance programs is also, quite frankly, how easy it is and how cost-effective it is to implement these policies in the first place,” comments Aouad. Cost and infrastructure barriers are unavoidable to this kind of policy research, as well as sustaining these programs. Aouad’s effort will provide insights into customer preferences and subsidy optimization in a pilot setup, but replicating this approach on a real scale may be costly. Aouad hopes to be able to gather proxy information from customers that would both feed into the model and provide insight into a more cost-effective way to collect data for large-scale implementation.There is still much work to be done to ensure food security for all, whether it’s advances in agriculture, food-assistance programs, or ways to boost adequate nutrition. As the 2026 seed grant deadline approaches, J-WAFS will continue its mission of supporting MIT faculty as they pursue innovative projects that have practical and real impacts on water and food system challenges. More

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      in Energy

      Fighting for the health of the planet with AI

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      For Priya Donti, childhood trips to India were more than an opportunity to visit extended family. The biennial journeys activated in her a motivation that continues to shape her research and her teaching.Contrasting her family home in Massachusetts, Donti — now the Silverman Family Career Development Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), a shared position between the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and EECS, and a principal investigator at the MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) — was struck by the disparities in how people live.“It was very clear to me the extent to which inequity is a rampant issue around the world,” Donti says. “From a young age, I knew that I definitely wanted to address that issue.”That motivation was further stoked by a high school biology teacher, who focused his class on climate and sustainability.“We learned that climate change, this huge, important issue, would exacerbate inequity,” Donti says. “That really stuck with me and put a fire in my belly.”So, when Donti enrolled at Harvey Mudd College, she thought she would direct her energy toward the study of chemistry or materials science to create next-generation solar panels.Those plans, however, were jilted. Donti “fell in love” with computer science, and then discovered work by researchers in the United Kingdom who were arguing that artificial intelligence and machine learning would be essential to help integrate renewables into power grids.“It was the first time I’d seen those two interests brought together,” she says. “I got hooked and have been working on that topic ever since.”Pursuing a PhD at Carnegie Mellon University, Donti was able to design her degree to include computer science and public policy. In her research, she explored the need for fundamental algorithms and tools that could manage, at scale, power grids relying heavily on renewables.“I wanted to have a hand in developing those algorithms and tool kits by creating new machine learning techniques grounded in computer science,” she says. “But I wanted to make sure that the way I was doing the work was grounded both in the actual energy systems domain and working with people in that domain” to provide what was actually needed.While Donti was working on her PhD, she co-founded a nonprofit called Climate Change AI. Her objective, she says, was to help the community of people involved in climate and sustainability — “be they computer scientists, academics, practitioners, or policymakers” — to come together and access resources, connection, and education “to help them along that journey.”“In the climate space,” she says, “you need experts in particular climate change-related sectors, experts in different technical and social science tool kits, problem owners, affected users, policymakers who know the regulations — all of those — to have on-the-ground scalable impact.”When Donti came to MIT in September 2023, it was not surprising that she was drawn by its initiatives directing the application of computer science toward society’s biggest problems, especially the current threat to the health of the planet.“We’re really thinking about where technology has a much longer-horizon impact and how technology, society, and policy all have to work together,” Donti says. “Technology is not just one-and-done and monetizable in the context of a year.”Her work uses deep learning models to incorporate the physics and hard constraints of electric power systems that employ renewables for better forecasting, optimization, and control.“Machine learning is already really widely used for things like solar power forecasting, which is a prerequisite to managing and balancing power grids,” she says. “My focus is, how do you improve the algorithms for actually balancing power grids in the face of a range of time-varying renewables?”Among Donti’s breakthroughs is a promising solution for power grid operators to be able to optimize for cost, taking into account the actual physical realities of the grid, rather than relying on approximations. While the solution is not yet deployed, it appears to work 10 times faster, and far more cheaply, than previous technologies, and has attracted the attention of grid operators.Another technology she is developing works to provide data that can be used in training machine learning systems for power system optimization. In general, much data related to the systems is private, either because it is proprietary or because of security concerns. Donti and her research group are working to create synthetic data and benchmarks that, Donti says, “can help to expose some of the underlying problems” in making power systems more efficient.“The question is,” Donti says, “can we bring our datasets to a point such that they are just hard enough to drive progress?”For her efforts, Donti has been awarded the U.S. Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship and the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. She was recognized as part of MIT Technology Review’s 2021 list of “35 Innovators Under 35” and Vox’s 2023 “Future Perfect 50.”Next spring, Donti will co-teach a class called AI for Climate Action with Sara Beery, EECS assistant professor, whose focus is AI for biodiversity and ecosystems, and Abigail Bodner, assistant professor in the departments of EECS and Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, whose focus is AI for climate and Earth science.“We’re all super-excited about it,” Donti says.Coming to MIT, Donti says, “I knew that there would be an ecosystem of people who really cared, not just about success metrics like publications and citation counts, but about the impact of our work on society.” More

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      in Security

      Matthew Shoulders named head of the Department of Chemistry

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      Matthew D. Shoulders, the Class of 1942 Professor of Chemistry, a MacVicar Faculty Fellow, and an associate member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, has been named head of the MIT Department of Chemistry, effective Jan. 16, 2026. “Matt has made pioneering contributions to the chemistry research community through his research on mechanisms of proteostasis and his development of next-generation techniques to address challenges in biomedicine and agriculture,” says Nergis Mavalvala, dean of the MIT School of Science and the Curtis and Kathleen Marble Professor of Astrophysics. “He is also a dedicated educator, beloved by undergraduates and graduates alike. I know the department will be in good hands as we double down on our commitment to world-leading research and education in the face of financial headwinds.”Shoulders succeeds Troy Van Voorhis, the Robert T. Haslam and Bradley Dewey Professor of Chemistry, who has been at the helm since October 2019.“I am tremendously grateful to Troy for his leadership the past six years, building a fantastic community here in our department. We face challenges, but also many exciting opportunities, as a department in the years to come,” says Shoulders. “One thing is certain: Chemistry innovations are critical to solving pressing global challenges. Through the research that we do and the scientists we train, our department has a huge role to play in shaping the future.”Shoulders studies how cells fold proteins, and he develops ​and applies novel protein engineering techniques to challenges in biotechnology. His work across chemistry and biochemistry fields including proteostasis, extracellular matrix biology, virology, evolution, and synthetic biology is yielding not just important insights into topics like how cells build healthy tissues and how proteins evolve, but also influencing approaches to disease therapy and biotechnology development.“Matt is an outstanding researcher whose work touches on fundamental questions about how the cell machinery directs the synthesis and folding of proteins. His discoveries about how that machinery breaks down as a result of mutations or in response to stress has a fundamental impact on how we think about and treat human diseases,” says Van Voorhis.In one part of Matt’s current research program, he is studying how protein folding systems in cells — known as chaperones — shape the evolution of their clients. Amongst other discoveries, his lab has shown that viral pathogens hijack human chaperones to enable their rapid evolution and escape from host immunity. In related recent work, they have discovered that these same chaperones can promote access to malignancy-driving mutations in tumors. Beyond fundamental insights into evolutionary biology, these findings hold potential to open new therapeutic strategies to target cancer and viral infections.“Matt’s ability to see both the details and the big picture makes him an outstanding researcher and a natural leader for the department,” says Timothy Swager, the John D. MacArthur Professor of Chemistry. “MIT Chemistry can only benefit from his dedication to understanding and addressing the parts and the whole.” Shoulders also leads a food security project through the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS). Shoulders, along with MIT Research Scientist Robbie Wilson, assembled an interdisciplinary team based at MIT to enhance climate resilience in agriculture by improving one of the most inefficient aspects of photosynthesis, the carbon dioxide-fixing plant enzyme RuBisCO. J-WAFS funded this high-risk, high-reward MIT Grand Challenge project in 2023, and it has received further support from federal research agencies and the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment. “Our collaborative team of biochemists and synthetic biologists, computational biologists, and chemists is deeply integrated with plant biologists, creating a robust feedback loop for enzyme engineering,” Shoulders says. “Together, this team is making a concerted effort using state-of-the-art techniques to engineer crop RuBisCO with an eye to helping make meaningful gains in securing a stable crop supply, hopefully with accompanying improvements in both food and water security.”In addition to his research contributions, Shoulders has taught multiple classes for Course V, including 5.54 (Advances in Chemical Biology) and 5.111 (Principles of Chemical Science), along with a number of other key chemistry classes. His contributions to a 5.111 “bootcamp” through the MITx platform served to address gaps in the classroom curriculum by providing online tools to help undergraduate students better grasp the material in the chemistry General Institute Requirement (GIR). His development of Guided Learning Demonstrations to support first-year chemistry courses at MIT has helped bring the lab to the GIR, and also contributed to the popularity of 5.111 courses offered regularly via MITx.“I have had the pleasure of teaching with Matt on several occasions, and he is a fantastic educator. He is an innovator both inside and outside the classroom and has an unwavering commitment to his students’ success,” says Van Voorhis of Shoulders, who was named a 2022 MacVicar Faculty Fellow, and who received a Committed to Caring award through the Office of Graduate Education.Shoulders also founded the MIT Homeschool Internship Program for Science and Technology, which brings high school students to campus for paid summer research experiences in labs across the Institute.He is a founding member of the Department of Chemistry’s Quality of Life Committee and chair for the last six years, helping to improve all aspects of opportunity, professional development, and experience in the department: “countless changes that have helped make MIT a better place for all,” as Van Voorhis notes, including creating a peer mentoring program for graduate students and establishing universal graduate student exit interviews to collect data for department-wide assessment and improvement.At the Institute level, Shoulders has served on the Committee on Graduate Programs, Committee on Sexual Misconduct Prevention and Response (in which he co-chaired the provost’s working group on the Faculty and Staff Sexual Misconduct Survey), and the Committee on Assessment of Biohazards and Embryonic Stem Cell Research Oversight, among other roles.Shoulders graduated summa cum laude from Virginia Tech in 2004, earning a BS in chemistry with a minor in biochemistry. He earned a PhD in chemistry at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 2009 under Professor Ronald Raines. Following an American Cancer Society Postdoctoral Fellowship at Scripps Research Institute, working with professors Jeffery Kelly and Luke Wiseman, Shoulders joined the MIT Department of Chemistry faculty as an assistant professor in 2012. Shoulders also serves as an associate member of the Broad Institute and an investigator at the Center for Musculoskeletal Research at Massachusetts General Hospital.Among his many awards, Shoulders has received a NIH Director’s New Innovator Award under the NIH High-Risk, High-Reward Research Program; an NSF CAREER Award; an American Cancer Society Research Scholar Award; the Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award; and most recently the Ono Pharma Foundation Breakthrough Science Award. More

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      in Energy

      Working to make fusion a viable energy source

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      George Tynan followed a nonlinear path to fusion.Following his undergraduate degree in aerospace engineering, Tynann’s work in the industry spurred his interest in rocket propulsion technology. Because most methods for propulsion involve the manipulation of hot ionized matter, or plasmas, Tynan focused his attention on plasma physics.It was then that he realized that plasmas could also drive nuclear fusion. “As a potential energy source, it could really be transformative, and the idea that I could work on something that could have that kind of impact on the future was really attractive to me,” he says.That same drive, to realize the promise of fusion by researching both plasma physics and fusion engineering, drives Tynan today. It’s work he will be pursuing as the Norman C. Rasmussen Adjunct Professor in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE) at MIT.An early interest in fluid flowTynan’s enthusiasm for science and engineering traces back to his childhood. His electrical engineer father found employment in the U.S. space program and moved the family to Cape Canaveral in Florida.“This was in the ’60s, when we were launching Saturn V to the moon, and I got to watch all the launches from the beach,” Tynan remembers. That experience was formative and Tynan became fascinated with how fluids flow.“I would stick my hand out the window and pretend it was an airplane wing and tilt it with oncoming wind flow and see how the force would change on my hand,” Tynan laughs. The interest eventually led to an undergraduate degree in aerospace engineering at California State Polytechnic University in Pomona.The switch to a new career would happen after work in the private sector, when Tynan discovered an interest in the use of plasmas for propulsion systems. He moved to the University of California at Los Angeles for graduate school, and it was here that the realization that plasmas could also anchor fusion moved Tynan into this field.This was in the ’80s, when climate change was not as much in the public consciousness as it is today. Even so, “I knew there’s not an infinite amount of oil and gas around, and that at some point we would have to have widespread adoption of nuclear-based sources,” Tynan remembers. He was also attracted by the sustained effort it would take to make fusion a reality.Doctoral workTo create energy from fusion, it’s important to get an accurate measurement of the “energy confinement time,” which is a measure of how long it takes for the hot fuel to cool down when all heat sources are turned off. When Tynan started graduate school, this measure was still an empirical guess. He decided to focus his research on the physics of observable confinement time.It was during this doctoral research that Tynan was able to study the fundamental differences in the behavior of turbulence in plasma as compared to conventional fluids. Typically, when an ordinary fluid is stirred with increasing vigor, the fluid’s motion eventually becomes chaotic or turbulent. However, plasmas can act in a surprising way: confined plasmas, when heated sufficiently strongly, would spontaneously quench the turbulent transport at the boundary of the plasmaAn experiment in Germany had unexpectedly discovered this plasma behavior. While subsequent work on other experimental devices confirmed this surprising finding, all earlier experiments lacked the ability to measure the turbulence in detail.Brian LaBombard, now a senior research scientist at MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC), was a postdoc at UCLA at the time. Under LaBombard’s direction, Tynan developed a set of Langmuir probes, which are reasonably simple diagnostics for plasma turbulence studies, to further investigate this unusual phenomenon. It formed the basis for his doctoral dissertation. “I happened to be at the right place at the right time so I could study this turbulence quenching phenomenon in much more detail than anyone else could, up until that time,” Tynan says.As a PhD student and then postdoc, Tynan studied the phenomenon in depth, shuttling between research facilities in Germany, Princeton University’s Plasma Physics Laboratory, and UCLA.Fusion at UCSDAfter completing his doctorate and postdoctoral work, Tynan worked at a startup for a few years when he learned that the University of California at San Diego was launching a new fusion research group at the engineering school. When they reached out, Tynan joined the faculty and built a research program focused on plasma turbulence and plasma-material interactions in fusion systems. Eventually, he became associate dean of engineering, and later, chair of the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, serving in these roles for nearly a decade.Tynan visited MIT on sabbatical in 2023, when his conversations with NSE faculty members Dennis Whyte, Zach Hartwig, and Michael Short excited him about the challenges the private sector faces in making fusion a reality. He saw opportunities to solve important problems at MIT that complemented his work at UC San Diego.Tynan is excited to tackle what he calls, “the big physics and engineering challenges of fusion plasmas” at NSE: how to remove the heat and exhaust generated by burning plasma so it doesn’t damage the walls of the fusion device and the plasma does not choke on the helium ash. He also hopes to explore robust engineering solutions for practical fusion energy, with a particular focus on developing better materials for use in fusion devices that will make them longer-lasting, while  minimizing the production of radioactive waste.“Ten or 15 years ago, I was somewhat pessimistic that I would ever see commercial exploitation of fusion in my lifetime,” Tynan says. But that outlook has changed, as he has seen collaborations between MIT and Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) and other private-sector firms that seek to accelerate the timeline to the deployment of fusion in the real world.In 2021, for example, MIT’s PSFC and CFS took a significant step toward commercial carbon-free power generation. They designed and built a high-temperature superconducting magnet, the strongest fusion magnet in the world.The milestone was especially exciting because the promise of realizing the dream of fusion energy now felt closer. And being at MIT “seemed like a really quick way to get deeply connected with what’s going on in the efforts to develop fusion energy,” Tynan says.In addition, “while on sabbatical at MIT, I saw how quickly research staff and students can capitalize on a suggestion of a new idea, and that intrigued me,” he adds.Tynan brings his special blend of expertise to the table. In addition to extensive experience in plasma physics, he has spent a lot more time on hardcore engineering issues like materials, as well. “The key is to integrate the whole thing into a workable and viable system,” Tynan says. More

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      in Environment

      Study links rising temperatures and declining moods

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      Rising global temperatures affect human activity in many ways. Now, a new study illuminates an important dimension of the problem: Very hot days are associated with more negative moods, as shown by a large-scale look at social media postings.Overall, the study examines 1.2 billion social media posts from 157 countries over the span of a year. The research finds that when the temperature rises above 95 degrees Fahrenheit, or 35 degrees Celsius, expressed sentiments become about 25 percent more negative in lower-income countries and about 8 percent more negative in better-off countries. Extreme heat affects people emotionally, not just physically.“Our study reveals that rising temperatures don’t just threaten physical health or economic productivity — they also affect how people feel, every day, all over the world,” says Siqi Zheng, a professor in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) and Center for Real Estate (CRE), and co-author of a new paper detailing the results. “This work opens up a new frontier in understanding how climate stress is shaping human well-being at a planetary scale.”The paper, “Unequal Impacts of Rising Temperatures on Global Human Sentiment,” is published today in the journal One Earth. The authors are Jianghao Wang, of the Chinese Academy of Sciences; Nicolas Guetta-Jeanrenaud SM ’22, a graduate of MIT’s Technology and Policy Program (TPP) and Institute for Data, Systems, and Society; Juan Palacios, a visiting assistant professor at MIT’s Sustainable Urbanization Lab (SUL) and an assistant professor Maastricht University; Yichun Fan, of SUL and Duke University; Devika Kakkar, of Harvard University; Nick Obradovich, of SUL and the Laureate Institute for Brain Research in Tulsa; and Zheng, who is the STL Champion Professor of Urban and Real Estate Sustainability at CRE and DUSP. Zheng is also the faculty director of CRE and founded the Sustainable Urbanization Lab in 2019.Social media as a windowTo conduct the study, the researchers evaluated 1.2 billion posts from the social media platforms Twitter and Weibo, all of which appeared in 2019. They used a natural language processing technique called Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), to analyze 65 languages across the 157 countries in the study.Each social media post was given a sentiment rating from 0.0 (for very negative posts) to 1.0 (for very positive posts). The posts were then aggregated geographically to 2,988 locations and evaluated in correlation with area weather. From this method, the researchers could then deduce the connection between extreme temperatures and expressed sentiment.“Social media data provides us with an unprecedented window into human emotions across cultures and continents,” Wang says. “This approach allows us to measure emotional impacts of climate change at a scale that traditional surveys simply cannot achieve, giving us real-time insights into how temperature affects human sentiment worldwide.”To assess the effects of temperatures on sentiment in higher-income and middle-to-lower-income settings, the scholars also used a World Bank cutoff level of gross national income per-capita annual income of $13,845, finding that in places with incomes below that, the effects of heat on mood were triple those found in economically more robust settings.“Thanks to the global coverage of our data, we find that people in low- and middle-income countries experience sentiment declines from extreme heat that are three times greater than those in high-income countries,” Fan says. “This underscores the importance of incorporating adaptation into future climate impact projections.”In the long runUsing long-term global climate models, and expecting some adaptation to heat, the researchers also produced a long-range estimate of the effects of extreme temperatures on sentiment by the year 2100. Extending the current findings to that time frame, they project a 2.3 percent worsening of people’s emotional well-being based on high temperatures alone by then — although that is a far-range projection.“It’s clear now, with our present study adding to findings from prior studies, that weather alters sentiment on a global scale,” Obradovich says. “And as weather and climates change, helping individuals become more resilient to shocks to their emotional states will be an important component of overall societal adaptation.”The researchers note that there are many nuances to the subject, and room for continued research in this area. For one thing, social media users are not likely to be a perfectly representative portion of the population, with young children and the elderly almost certainly using social media less than other people. However, as the researchers observe in the paper, the very young and elderly are probably particularly vulnerable to heat shocks, making the response to hot weather possible even larger than their study can capture.The research is part of the Global Sentiment project led by the MIT Sustainable Urbanization Lab, and the study’s dataset is publicly available. Zheng and other co-authors have previously investigated these dynamics using social media, although never before at this scale.“We hope this resource helps researchers, policymakers, and communities better prepare for a warming world,” Zheng says.The research was supported, in part, by Zheng’s chaired professorship research fund, and grants Wang received from the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.  More

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      in Energy

      Jessika Trancik named director of the Sociotechnical Systems Research Center

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      Jessika Trancik, a professor in MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, has been named the new director of the Sociotechnical Systems Research Center (SSRC), effective July 1. The SSRC convenes and supports researchers focused on problems and solutions at the intersection of technology and its societal impacts.Trancik conducts research on technology innovation and energy systems. At the Trancik Lab, she and her team develop methods drawing on engineering knowledge, data science, and policy analysis. Their work examines the pace and drivers of technological change, helping identify where innovation is occurring most rapidly, how emerging technologies stack up against existing systems, and which performance thresholds matter most for real-world impact. Her models have been used to inform government innovation policy and have been applied across a wide range of industries.“Professor Trancik’s deep expertise in the societal implications of technology, and her commitment to developing impactful solutions across industries, make her an excellent fit to lead SSRC,” says Maria C. Yang, interim dean of engineering and William E. Leonhard (1940) Professor of Mechanical Engineering.Much of Trancik’s research focuses on the domain of energy systems, and establishing methods for energy technology evaluation, including of their costs, performance, and environmental impacts. She covers a wide range of energy services — including electricity, transportation, heating, and industrial processes. Her research has applications in solar and wind energy, energy storage, low-carbon fuels, electric vehicles, and nuclear fission. Trancik is also known for her research on extreme events in renewable energy availability.A prolific researcher, Trancik has helped measure progress and inform the development of solar photovoltaics, batteries, electric vehicle charging infrastructure, and other low-carbon technologies — and anticipate future trends. One of her widely cited contributions includes quantifying learning rates and identifying where targeted investments can most effectively accelerate innovation. These tools have been used by U.S. federal agencies, international organizations, and the private sector to shape energy R&D portfolios, climate policy, and infrastructure planning.Trancik is committed to engaging and informing the public on energy consumption. She and her team developed the app carboncounter.com, which helps users choose cars with low costs and low environmental impacts.As an educator, Trancik teaches courses for students across MIT’s five schools and the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing.“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?” Trancik said in an article about course IDS.521/IDS.065 (Energy Systems for Climate Change Mitigation).Trancik received her undergraduate degree in materials science and engineering from Cornell University. As a Rhodes Scholar, she completed her PhD in materials science at the University of Oxford. She subsequently worked for the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, and the Earth Institute at Columbia University. After serving as an Omidyar Research Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, she joined MIT in 2010 as a faculty member.Trancik succeeds Fotini Christia, the Ford International Professor of Social Sciences in the Department of Political Science and director of IDSS, who previously served as director of SSRC. More

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      in Environment

      School of Architecture and Planning welcomes new faculty for 2025

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      Four new faculty members join the School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P) this fall, offering the MIT community creativity, knowledge, and scholarship in multidisciplinary roles.“These individuals add considerable strength and depth to our faculty,” says Hashim Sarkis, dean of the School of Architecture and Planning. “We are excited for the academic vigor they bring to research and teaching.”Karrie G. Karahalios ’94, MEng ’95, SM ’97, PhD ’04 joins the MIT Media Lab as a full professor of media arts and sciences. Karahalios is a pioneer in the exploration of social media and of how people communicate in environments that are increasingly mediated by algorithms that, as she has written, “shape the world around us.” Her work combines computing, systems, artificial intelligence, anthropology, sociology, psychology, game theory, design, and infrastructure studies. Karahalios’ work has received numerous honors including the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, SIGMOD Best Paper Award, and recognition as an ACM Distinguished Member.Pat Pataranutaporn SM ’18, PhD ’20 joins the MIT Media Lab as an assistant professor of media arts and sciences. A visionary technologist, scientist, and designer, Pataranutaporn explores the frontier of human-AI interaction, inventing and investigating AI systems that support human thriving. His research focuses on how personalized AI systems can amplify human cognition, from learning and decision-making to self-development, reflection, and well-being. Pataranutaporn will co-direct the Advancing Humans with AI Program.Mariana Popescu joins the Department of Architecture as an assistant professor. Popescu is a computational architect and structural designer with a strong interest and experience in innovative ways of approaching the fabrication process and use of materials in construction. Her area of expertise is computational and parametric design, with a focus on digital fabrication and sustainable design. Her extensive involvement in projects related to promoting sustainability has led to a multilateral development of skills, which combine the fields of architecture, engineering, computational design, and digital fabrication. Popescu earned her doctorate at ETH Zurich. She was named a “Pioneer” on the MIT Technology Review global list of “35 innovators under 35” in 2019.Holly Samuelson joins the Department of Architecture as an associate professor in the Building Technology Program at MIT, teaching architectural technology courses. Her teaching and research focus on issues of building design that impact human and environmental health. Her current projects harness advanced building simulation to investigate issues of greenhouse gas emissions, heat vulnerability, and indoor environmental quality while considering the future of buildings in a changing electricity grid. Samuelson has co-authored over 40 peer-reviewed papers, winning a best paper award from the journal Energy and Building. As a recognized expert in architectural technology, she has been featured in news outlets including The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, the BBC, and The Wall Street Journal. Samuelson earned her doctor of design from Harvard University Graduate School of Design. More

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      in Energy

      Confronting the AI/energy conundrum

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      The explosive growth of AI-powered computing centers is creating an unprecedented surge in electricity demand that threatens to overwhelm power grids and derail climate goals. At the same time, artificial intelligence technologies could revolutionize energy systems, accelerating the transition to clean power.“We’re at a cusp of potentially gigantic change throughout the economy,” said William H. Green, director of the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) and Hoyt C. Hottel Professor in the MIT Department of Chemical Engineering, at MITEI’s Spring Symposium, “AI and energy: Peril and promise,” held on May 13. The event brought together experts from industry, academia, and government to explore solutions to what Green described as both “local problems with electric supply and meeting our clean energy targets” while seeking to “reap the benefits of AI without some of the harms.” The challenge of data center energy demand and potential benefits of AI to the energy transition is a research priority for MITEI.AI’s startling energy demandsFrom the start, the symposium highlighted sobering statistics about AI’s appetite for electricity. After decades of flat electricity demand in the United States, computing centers now consume approximately 4 percent of the nation’s electricity. Although there is great uncertainty, some projections suggest this demand could rise to 12-15 percent by 2030, largely driven by artificial intelligence applications.Vijay Gadepally, senior scientist at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, emphasized the scale of AI’s consumption. “The power required for sustaining some of these large models is doubling almost every three months,” he noted. “A single ChatGPT conversation uses as much electricity as charging your phone, and generating an image consumes about a bottle of water for cooling.”Facilities requiring 50 to 100 megawatts of power are emerging rapidly across the United States and globally, driven both by casual and institutional research needs relying on large language programs such as ChatGPT and Gemini. Gadepally cited congressional testimony by Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, highlighting how fundamental this relationship has become: “The cost of intelligence, the cost of AI, will converge to the cost of energy.”“The energy demands of AI are a significant challenge, but we also have an opportunity to harness these vast computational capabilities to contribute to climate change solutions,” said Evelyn Wang, MIT vice president for energy and climate and the former director at the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) at the U.S. Department of Energy.Wang also noted that innovations developed for AI and data centers — such as efficiency, cooling technologies, and clean-power solutions — could have broad applications beyond computing facilities themselves.Strategies for clean energy solutionsThe symposium explored multiple pathways to address the AI-energy challenge. Some panelists presented models suggesting that while artificial intelligence may increase emissions in the short term, its optimization capabilities could enable substantial emissions reductions after 2030 through more efficient power systems and accelerated clean technology development.Research shows regional variations in the cost of powering computing centers with clean electricity, according to Emre Gençer, co-founder and CEO of Sesame Sustainability and former MITEI principal research scientist. Gençer’s analysis revealed that the central United States offers considerably lower costs due to complementary solar and wind resources. However, achieving zero-emission power would require massive battery deployments — five to 10 times more than moderate carbon scenarios — driving costs two to three times higher.“If we want to do zero emissions with reliable power, we need technologies other than renewables and batteries, which will be too expensive,” Gençer said. He pointed to “long-duration storage technologies, small modular reactors, geothermal, or hybrid approaches” as necessary complements.Because of data center energy demand, there is renewed interest in nuclear power, noted Kathryn Biegel, manager of R&D and corporate strategy at Constellation Energy, adding that her company is restarting the reactor at the former Three Mile Island site, now called the “Crane Clean Energy Center,” to meet this demand. “The data center space has become a major, major priority for Constellation,” she said, emphasizing how their needs for both reliability and carbon-free electricity are reshaping the power industry.Can AI accelerate the energy transition?Artificial intelligence could dramatically improve power systems, according to Priya Donti, assistant professor and the Silverman Family Career Development Professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems. She showcased how AI can accelerate power grid optimization by embedding physics-based constraints into neural networks, potentially solving complex power flow problems at “10 times, or even greater, speed compared to your traditional models.”AI is already reducing carbon emissions, according to examples shared by Antonia Gawel, global director of sustainability and partnerships at Google. Google Maps’ fuel-efficient routing feature has “helped to prevent more than 2.9 million metric tons of GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions reductions since launch, which is the equivalent of taking 650,000 fuel-based cars off the road for a year,” she said. Another Google research project uses artificial intelligence to help pilots avoid creating contrails, which represent about 1 percent of global warming impact.AI’s potential to speed materials discovery for power applications was highlighted by Rafael Gómez-Bombarelli, the Paul M. Cook Career Development Associate Professor in the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering. “AI-supervised models can be trained to go from structure to property,” he noted, enabling the development of materials crucial for both computing and efficiency.Securing growth with sustainabilityThroughout the symposium, participants grappled with balancing rapid AI deployment against environmental impacts. While AI training receives most attention, Dustin Demetriou, senior technical staff member in sustainability and data center innovation at IBM, quoted a World Economic Forum article that suggested that “80 percent of the environmental footprint is estimated to be due to inferencing.” Demetriou emphasized the need for efficiency across all artificial intelligence applications.Jevons’ paradox, where “efficiency gains tend to increase overall resource consumption rather than decrease it” is another factor to consider, cautioned Emma Strubell, the Raj Reddy Assistant Professor in the Language Technologies Institute in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Strubell advocated for viewing computing center electricity as a limited resource requiring thoughtful allocation across different applications.Several presenters discussed novel approaches for integrating renewable sources with existing grid infrastructure, including potential hybrid solutions that combine clean installations with existing natural gas plants that have valuable grid connections already in place. These approaches could provide substantial clean capacity across the United States at reasonable costs while minimizing reliability impacts.Navigating the AI-energy paradoxThe symposium highlighted MIT’s central role in developing solutions to the AI-electricity challenge.Green spoke of a new MITEI program on computing centers, power, and computation that will operate alongside the comprehensive spread of MIT Climate Project research. “We’re going to try to tackle a very complicated problem all the way from the power sources through the actual algorithms that deliver value to the customers — in a way that’s going to be acceptable to all the stakeholders and really meet all the needs,” Green said.Participants in the symposium were polled about priorities for MIT’s research by Randall Field, MITEI director of research. The real-time results ranked “data center and grid integration issues” as the top priority, followed by “AI for accelerated discovery of advanced materials for energy.”In addition, attendees revealed that most view AI’s potential regarding power as a “promise,” rather than a “peril,” although a considerable portion remain uncertain about the ultimate impact. When asked about priorities in power supply for computing facilities, half of the respondents selected carbon intensity as their top concern, with reliability and cost following. More