Funding

Subterms

    Latest story

    75 Shares153 Views

    Q&A: Transforming research through global collaborations

    by

    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

    More stories

    • 163 Shares139 Views

      in Environment

      J-PAL North America announces new evaluation incubator collaborators from state and local governments

      by

      J-PAL North America recently selected government partners for the 2024-25 Leveraging Evaluation and Evidence for Equitable Recovery (LEVER) Evaluation Incubator cohort. Selected collaborators will receive funding and technical assistance to develop or launch a randomized evaluation for one of their programs. These collaborations represent jurisdictions across the United States and demonstrate the growing enthusiasm for evidence-based policymaking.Launched in 2023, LEVER is a joint venture between J-PAL North America and Results for America. Through the Evaluation Incubator, trainings, and other program offerings, LEVER seeks to address the barriers many state and local governments face around finding and generating evidence to inform program design. LEVER offers government leaders the opportunity to learn best practices for policy evaluations and how to integrate evidence into decision-making. Since the program’s inception, more than 80 government jurisdictions have participated in LEVER offerings.J-PAL North America’s Evaluation Incubator helps collaborators turn policy-relevant research questions into well-designed randomized evaluations, generating rigorous evidence to inform pressing programmatic and policy decisions. The program also aims to build a culture of evidence use and give government partners the tools to continue generating and utilizing evidence in their day-to-day operations.In addition to funding and technical assistance, the selected state and local government collaborators will be connected with researchers from J-PAL’s network to help advance their evaluation ideas. Evaluation support will also be centered on community-engaged research practices, which emphasize collaborating with and learning from the groups most affected by the program being evaluated.Evaluation Incubator selected projectsPierce County Human Services (PCHS) in the state of Washington will evaluate two programs as part of the Evaluation Incubator. The first will examine how extending stays in a fentanyl detox program affects the successful completion of inpatient treatment and hospital utilization for individuals. “PCHS is interested in evaluating longer fentanyl detox stays to inform our funding decisions, streamline our resource utilization, and encourage additional financial commitments to address the unmet needs of individuals dealing with opioid use disorder,” says Trish Crocker, grant coordinator.The second PCHS program will evaluate the impact of providing medication and outreach services via a mobile distribution unit to individuals with opioid use disorders on program take-up and substance usage. Margo Burnison, a behavioral health manager with PCHS, says that the team is “thrilled to be partnering with J-PAL North America to dive deep into the data to inform our elected leaders on the best way to utilize available resources.”The City of Los Angeles Youth Development Department (YDD) seeks to evaluate a research-informed program: Student Engagement, Exploration, and Development in STEM (SEEDS). This intergenerational STEM mentorship program supports underrepresented middle school and college students in STEM by providing culturally responsive mentorship. The program seeks to foster these students’ STEM identity and degree attainment in higher education. YDD has been working with researchers at the University of Southern California to measure the SEEDS program’s impact, but is interested in developing a randomized evaluation to generate further evidence. Darnell Cole, professor and co-director of the Research Center for Education, Identity and Social Justice, shares his excitement about the collaboration with J-PAL: “We welcome the opportunity to measure the impact of the SEEDS program on our students’ educational experience. Rigorously testing the SEEDS program will help us improve support for STEM students, ultimately enhancing their persistence and success.”The Fort Wayne Police Department’s Hope and Recovery Team in Indiana will evaluate the impact of two programs that connect social workers with people who have experienced an overdose, or who have a mental health illness, to treatment and resources. “We believe we are on the right track in the work we are doing with the crisis intervention social worker and the recovery coach, but having an outside evaluation of both programs would be extremely helpful in understanding whether and what aspects of these programs are most effective,” says Police Captain Kevin Hunter.The County of San Diego’s Office of Evaluation, Performance and Analytics, and Planning & Development Services will engage with J-PAL staff to explore evaluation opportunities for two programs that are a part of the county’s Climate Action Plan. The Equity-Driven Tree Planting Program seeks to increase tree canopy coverage, and the Climate Smart Land Stewardship Program will encourage climate-smart agricultural practices. Ricardo Basurto-Davila, chief evaluation officer, says that “the county is dedicated to evidence-based policymaking and taking decisive action against climate change. The work with J-PAL will support us in combining these commitments to maximize the effectiveness in decreasing emissions through these programs.”J-PAL North America looks forward to working with the selected collaborators in the coming months to learn more about these promising programs, clarify our partner’s evidence goals, and design randomized evaluations to measure their impact. More

    • 63 Shares189 Views

      in Security

      “Mens et manus” in Guatemala

      by

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

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in Environment

      Lemelson-MIT awards 2024-25 InvenTeam grants to eight high school teams

      by

      The Lemelson-MIT Program has announced the 2024-25 InvenTeams — eight teams of high school students, teachers, and mentors from across the country. Each team will each receive $7,500 in grant funding and year-long support to build a technological invention to solve a problem of their own choosing. The students’ inventions are inspired by real-world problems they identified in their local communities.The InvenTeams were selected by a respected panel consisting of university professors, inventors, entrepreneurs, industry professionals, and college students. Some panel members were former InvenTeam members now working in industry. The InvenTeams are focusing on problems facing their local communities, with a goal that their inventions will have a positive impact on beneficiaries and, ultimately, improve the lives of others beyond their communities.This year’s teams are:Battle Creek Area Mathematics and Science Center (Battle Creek, Michigan)Cambridge Rindge and Latin School (Cambridge, Massachusetts)Colegio Rosa-Bell (Guaynabo, Puerto Rico)Edison High School (Edison, New Jersey)Massachusetts Academy of Math and Science (Worcester, Massachusetts)Nitro High School (Nitro, West Virginia)Southcrest Christian School (Lubbock, Texas)Ygnacio Valley High School (Concord, California)InvenTeams are comprised of students, teachers and community mentors who pursue year-long invention projects involving creative thinking, problem-solving, and hands-on learning in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The InvenTeams’ prototype inventions will be showcased at a technical review within their home communities in February 2025, and then again as a final prototype at EurekaFest — an invention celebration taking place June 9-11, 2025, at MIT.“The InvenTeams are focusing on solving problems that impact their local communities,” says Leigh Estabrooks, Lemelson-MIT’s invention education officer. “Teams are focusing their technological solutions — their inventions — on health and well-being, environmental issues, and safety concerns. These high school students are not just problem-solvers of tomorrow, they are problem solvers today helping to make our world healthier, greener, and safer.”This year the Lemelson-MIT Program and the InvenTeams grants initiative celebrate a series of firsts in the annual high school invention grant program. For the first time, a team from their home city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, will participate, representing the Cambridge community’s innovative spirit on a national stage. Additionally, the program welcomes the first team from Puerto Rico, highlighting the expanding reach of the InvenTeams grants initiative. The pioneering teams exemplify the diversity and creativity that fuel invention.The InvenTeams grants initiative, now in its 21st year, has enabled 18 teams of high school students to be awarded U.S. patents for their projects. Intellectual property education is combined with invention education offerings as part of the Lemelson-MIT Program’s deliberate efforts to remedy historic inequities among those who develop inventions, protect their intellectual property, and commercialize their creations. The ongoing efforts empower students from all backgrounds, equipping them with invaluable problem-solving skills that will serve them well throughout their academic journeys, professional pursuits, and personal lives. The program has worked with over 4,000 students across 304 different InvenTeams nationwide and has included:partnering with intellectual property (IP) law firms to provide pro bono legal support;collaborating with industry-leading companies that provide technical guidance and mentoring;providing professional development for teachers on invention education and IP;assisting teams with identifying resources within their communities’ innovation ecosystems to support ongoing invention efforts; andpublishing case studies and research to inform the work of invention educators and policy makers to build support for engaging students in efforts to invent solutions to real-world problems, thus fueling the innovation economy in the U.S.The Lemelson-MIT Program is a national leader in efforts to prepare the next generation of inventors and entrepreneurs, focusing on the expansion of opportunities for people to learn ways inventors find and solve problems that matter to improve lives. A commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion aims to remedy historic inequities among those who develop inventions, protect their intellectual property, and commercialize their creations.Jerome H. Lemelson, one of U.S. history’s most prolific inventors, and his wife Dorothy founded the Lemelson-MIT Program in 1994. It is funded by The Lemelson Foundation and administered by the MIT School of Engineering. For more information, contact Leigh Estabrooks.  More

    • 75 Shares159 Views

      in Environment

      Translating MIT research into real-world results

      by

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

    • 75 Shares169 Views

      in Security

      Pioneering the future of materials extraction

      by

      The next time you cook pasta, imagine that you are cooking spaghetti, rigatoni, and seven other varieties all together, and they need to be separated onto 10 different plates before serving. A colander can remove the water — but you still have a mound of unsorted noodles. Now imagine that this had to be done for thousands of tons of pasta a day. That gives you an idea of the scale of the problem facing Brendan Smith PhD ’18, co-founder and CEO of SiTration, a startup formed out of MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE) in 2020. SiTration, which raised $11.8 million in seed capital led by venture capital firm 2150 earlier this month, is revolutionizing the extraction and refining of copper, cobalt, nickel, lithium, precious metals, and other materials critical to manufacturing clean-energy technologies such as electric motors, wind turbines, and batteries. Its initial target applications are recovering the materials from complex mining feed streams, spent lithium-ion batteries from electric vehicles, and various metals refining processes. The company’s breakthrough lies in a new silicon membrane technology that can be adjusted to efficiently recover disparate materials, providing a more sustainable and economically viable alternative to conventional, chemically intensive processes. Think of a colander with adjustable pores to strain different types of pasta. SiTration’s technology has garnered interest from industry players, including mining giant Rio Tinto. Some observers may question whether targeting such different industries could cause the company to lose focus. “But when you dig into these markets, you discover there is actually a significant overlap in how all of these materials are recovered, making it possible for a single solution to have impact across verticals,” Smith says.Powering up materials recoveryConventional methods of extracting critical materials in mining, refining, and recycling lithium-ion batteries involve heavy use of chemicals and heat, which harm the environment. Typically, raw ore from mines or spent batteries are ground into fine particles before being dissolved in acid or incinerated in a furnace. Afterward, they undergo intensive chemical processing to separate and purify the valuable materials. “It requires as much as 10 tons of chemical input to produce one ton of critical material recovered from the mining or battery recycling feedstock,” says Smith. Operators can then sell the recaptured materials back into the supply chain, but suffer from wide swings in profitability due to uncertain market prices. Lithium prices have been the most volatile, having surged more than 400 percent before tumbling back to near-original levels in the past two years. Despite their poor economics and negative environmental impact, these processes remain the state of the art today. By contrast, SiTration is electrifying the critical-materials recovery process, improving efficiency, producing less chemical waste, and reducing the use of chemicals and heat. What’s more, the company’s processing technology is built to be highly adaptable, so it can handle all kinds of materials. The core technology is based on work done at MIT to develop a novel type of membrane made from silicon, which is durable enough to withstand harsh chemicals and high temperatures while conducting electricity. It’s also highly tunable, meaning it can be modified or adjusted to suit different conditions or target specific materials. SiTration’s technology also incorporates electro-extraction, a technique that uses electrochemistry to further isolate and extract specific target materials. This powerful combination of methods in a single system makes it more efficient and effective at isolating and recovering valuable materials, Smith says. So depending on what needs to be separated or extracted, the filtration and electro-extraction processes are adjusted accordingly. “We can produce membranes with pore sizes from the molecular scale up to the size of a human hair in diameter, and everything in between. Combined with the ability to electrify the membrane and separate based on a material’s electrochemical properties, this tunability allows us to target a vast array of different operations and separation applications across industrial fields,” says Smith. Efficient access to materials like lithium, cobalt, and copper — and precious metals like platinum, gold, silver, palladium, and rare-earth elements — is key to unlocking innovation in business and sustainability as the world moves toward electrification and away from fossil fuels.“This is an era when new materials are critical,” says Professor Jeffrey Grossman, co-founder and chief scientist of SiTration and the Morton and Claire Goulder and Family Professor in Environmental Systems at DMSE. “For so many technologies, they’re both the bottleneck and the opportunity, offering tremendous potential for non-incremental advances. And the role they’re having in commercialization and in entrepreneurship cannot be overstated.”SiTration’s commercial frontierSmith became interested in separation technology in 2013 as a PhD student in Grossman’s DMSE research group, which has focused on the design of new membrane materials for a range of applications. The two shared a curiosity about separation of critical materials and a hunger to advance the technology. After years of study under Grossman’s mentorship, and with support from several MIT incubators and foundations including the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab’s Solutions Program, the Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation, the Kavanaugh Fellowship, MIT Sandbox, and Venture Mentoring Service, Smith was ready to officially form SiTration in 2020. Grossman has a seat on the board and plays an active role as a strategic and technical advisor. Grossman is involved in several MIT spinoffs and embraces the different imperatives of research versus commercialization. “At SiTration, we’re driving this technology to work at scale. There’s something super exciting about that goal,” he says. “The challenges that come with scaling are very different than the challenges that come in a university lab.” At the same time, although not every research breakthrough becomes a commercial product, open-ended, curiosity-driven knowledge pursuit holds its own crucial value, he adds.It has been rewarding for Grossman to see his technically gifted student and colleague develop a host of other skills the role of CEO demands. Getting out to the market and talking about the technology with potential partners, putting together a dynamic team, discovering the challenges facing industry, drumming up support, early on — those became the most pressing activities on Smith’s agenda. “What’s most fun to me about being a CEO of an early-stage startup is that there are 100 different factors, most people-oriented, that you have to navigate every day. Each stakeholder has different motivations and objectives. And you basically try to fit that all together, to create value for our partners and customers, the company, and for society,” says Smith. “You start with just an idea, and you have to keep leveraging that to form a more and more tangible product, to multiply and progress commercial relationships, and do it all at an ever-expanding scale.” MIT DNA runs deep in the nine-person company, with DMSE grad and former Grossman student Jatin Patil as director of product; Ahmed Helal, from MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, as vice president of research and development; Daniel Bregante, from the Department of Chemistry, as VP of technology; and Sarah Melvin, from the departments of Physics and Political Science, as VP of strategy and operations. Melvin is the first hire devoted to business development. Smith plans to continue expanding the team following the closing of the company’s seed round.  Strategic alliancesBeing a good communicator was important when it came to securing funding, Smith says. SiTration received $2.35 million in pre-seed funding in 2022 led by Azolla Ventures, which reserves its $239 million in investment capital for startups that would not otherwise easily obtain funding. “We invest only in solution areas that can achieve gigaton-scale climate impact by 2050,” says Matthew Nordan, a general partner at Azolla and now SiTration board member. The MIT-affiliated E14 Fund also contributed to the pre-seed round; Azolla and E14 both participated in the recent seed funding round. “Brendan demonstrated an extraordinary ability to go from being a thoughtful scientist to a business leader and thinker who has punched way above his weight in engaging with customers and recruiting a well-balanced team and navigating tricky markets,” says Nordan. One of SiTration’s first partnerships is with Rio Tinto, one of the largest mining companies in the world. As SiTration evaluated various uses cases in its early days, identifying critical materials as its target market, Rio Tinto was looking for partners to recover valuable metals such as cobalt and copper from the wastewater generated at mines. These metals were typically trapped in the water, creating harmful waste and resulting in lost revenue. “We thought this was a great innovation challenge and posted it on our website to scout for companies to partner with who can help us solve this water challenge,” said Nick Gurieff, principal advisor for mine closure, in an interview with MIT’s Industrial Liaison Program in 2023. At SiTration, mining was not yet a market focus, but Smith couldn’t help noticing that Rio Tinto’s needs were in alignment with what his young company offered. SiTration submitted its proposal in August 2022. Gurieff said SiTration’s tunable membrane set it apart. The companies formed a business partnership in June 2023, with SiTration adjusting its membrane to handle mine wastewater and incorporating Rio Tinto feedback to refine the technology. After running tests with water from mine sites, SiTration will begin building a small-scale critical-materials recovery unit, followed by larger-scale systems processing up to 100 cubic meters of water an hour.SiTration’s focused technology development with Rio Tinto puts it in a good position for future market growth, Smith says. “Every ounce of effort and resource we put into developing our product is geared towards creating real-world value. Having an industry-leading partner constantly validating our progress is a tremendous advantage.”It’s a long time from the days when Smith began tinkering with tiny holes in silicon in Grossman’s DMSE lab. Now, they work together as business partners who are scaling up technology to meet a global need. Their joint passion for applying materials innovation to tough problems has served them well. “Materials science and engineering is an engine for a lot of the innovation that is happening today,” Grossman says. “When you look at all of the challenges we face to make the transition to a more sustainable planet, you realize how many of these are materials challenges.” More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Environment

      Two MIT teams selected for NSF sustainable materials grants

      by

      Two teams led by MIT researchers were selected in December 2023 by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Convergence Accelerator, a part of the TIP Directorate, to receive awards of $5 million each over three years, to pursue research aimed at helping to bring cutting-edge new sustainable materials and processes from the lab into practical, full-scale industrial production. The selection was made after 16 teams from around the country were chosen last year for one-year grants to develop detailed plans for further research aimed at solving problems of sustainability and scalability for advanced electronic products.

      Of the two MIT-led teams chosen for this current round of funding, one team, Topological Electric, is led by Mingda Li, an associate professor in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering. This team will be finding pathways to scale up sustainable topological materials, which have the potential to revolutionize next-generation microelectronics by showing superior electronic performance, such as dissipationless states or high-frequency response. The other team, led by Anuradha Agarwal, a principal research scientist at MIT’s Materials Research Laboratory, will be focusing on developing new materials, devices, and manufacturing processes for microchips that minimize energy consumption using electronic-photonic integration, and that detect and avoid the toxic or scarce materials used in today’s production methods.

      Scaling the use of topological materials

      Li explains that some materials based on quantum effects have achieved successful transitions from lab curiosities to successful mass production, such as blue-light LEDs, and giant magnetorestance (GMR) devices used for magnetic data storage. But he says there are a variety of equally promising materials that have shown promise but have yet to make it into real-world applications.

      “What we really wanted to achieve is to bring newer-generation quantum materials into technology and mass production, for the benefit of broader society,” he says. In particular, he says, “topological materials are really promising to do many different things.”

      Topological materials are ones whose electronic properties are fundamentally protected against disturbance. For example, Li points to the fact that just in the last two years, it has been shown that some topological materials are even better electrical conductors than copper, which are typically used for the wires interconnecting electronic components. But unlike the blue-light LEDs or the GMR devices, which have been widely produced and deployed, when it comes to topological materials, “there’s no company, no startup, there’s really no business out there,” adds Tomas Palacios, the Clarence J. Lebel Professor in Electrical Engineering at MIT and co-principal investigator on Li’s team. Part of the reason is that many versions of such materials are studied “with a focus on fundamental exotic physical properties with little or no consideration on the sustainability aspects,” says Liang Fu, an MIT professor of physics and also a co-PI. Their team will be looking for alternative formulations that are more amenable to mass production.

      One possible application of these topological materials is for detecting terahertz radiation, explains Keith Nelson, an MIT professor of chemistry and co-PI. This extremely high-frequency electronics can carry far more information than conventional radio or microwaves, but at present there are no mature electronic devices available that are scalable at this frequency range. “There’s a whole range of possibilities for topological materials” that could work at these frequencies, he says. In addition, he says, “we hope to demonstrate an entire prototype system like this in a single, very compact solid-state platform.”

      Li says that among the many possible applications of topological devices for microelectronics devices of various kinds, “we don’t know which, exactly, will end up as a product, or will reach real industrial scaleup. That’s why this opportunity from NSF is like a bridge, which is precious, to allow us to dig deeper to unleash the true potential.”

      In addition to Li, Palacios, Fu, and Nelson, the Topological Electric team includes Qiong Ma, assistant professor of physics in Boston College; Farnaz Niroui, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT; Susanne Stemmer, professor of materials at the University of California at Santa Barbara; Judy Cha, professor of materials science and engineering at Cornell University; industrial partners including IBM, Analog Devices, and Raytheon; and professional consultants. “We are taking this opportunity seriously,” Li says. “We really want to see if the topological materials are as good as we show in the lab when being scaled up, and how far we can push to broadly industrialize them.”

      Toward sustainable microchip production and use

      The microchips behind everything from smartphones to medical imaging are associated with a significant percentage of greenhouse gas emissions today, and every year the world produces more than 50 million metric tons of electronic waste, the equivalent of about 5,000 Eiffel Towers. Further, the data centers necessary for complex computations and huge amount of data transfer — think AI and on-demand video — are growing and will require 10 percent of the world’s electricity by 2030.

      “The current microchip manufacturing supply chain, which includes production, distribution, and use, is neither scalable nor sustainable, and cannot continue. We must innovate our way out of this crisis,” says Agarwal.

      The name of Agarwal’s team, FUTUR-IC, is a reference to the future of the integrated circuits, or chips, through a global alliance for sustainable microchip manufacturing. Says Agarwal, “We bring together stakeholders from industry, academia, and government to co-optimize across three dimensions: technology, ecology, and workforce. These were identified as key interrelated areas by some 140 stakeholders. With FUTUR-IC we aim to cut waste and CO2-equivalent emissions associated with electronics by 50 percent every 10 years.”

      The market for microelectronics in the next decade is predicted to be on the order of a trillion dollars, but most of the manufacturing for the industry occurs only in limited geographical pockets around the world. FUTUR-IC aims to diversify and strengthen the supply chain for manufacturing and packaging of electronics. The alliance has 26 collaborators and is growing. Current external collaborators include the International Electronics Manufacturing Initiative (iNEMI), Tyndall National Institute, SEMI, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Intel, and the Rochester Institute of Technology.

      Agarwal leads FUTUR-IC in close collaboration with others, including, from MIT, Lionel Kimerling, the Thomas Lord Professor of Materials Science and Engineering; Elsa Olivetti, the Jerry McAfee Professor in Engineering; Randolph Kirchain, principal research scientist in the Materials Research Laboratory; and Greg Norris, director of MIT’s Sustainability and Health Initiative for NetPositive Enterprise (SHINE). All are affiliated with the Materials Research Laboratory. They are joined by Samuel Serna, an MIT visiting professor and assistant professor of physics at Bridgewater State University. Other key personnel include Sajan Saini, education director for the Initiative for Knowledge and Innovation in Manufacturing in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering; Peter O’Brien, a professor from Tyndall National Institute; and Shekhar Chandrashekhar, CEO of iNEMI.

      “We expect the integration of electronics and photonics to revolutionize microchip manufacturing, enhancing efficiency, reducing energy consumption, and paving the way for unprecedented advancements in computing speed and data-processing capabilities,” says Serna, who is the co-lead on the project’s technology “vector.”

      Common metrics for these efforts are needed, says Norris, co-lead for the ecology vector, adding, “The microchip industry must have transparent and open Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) models and data, which are being developed by FUTUR-IC.” This is especially important given that microelectronics production transcends industries. “Given the scale and scope of microelectronics, it is critical for the industry to lead in the transition to sustainable manufacture and use,” says Kirchain, another co-lead and the co-director of the Concrete Sustainability Hub at MIT. To bring about this cross-fertilization, co-lead Olivetti, also co-director of the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium (MCSC), will collaborate with FUTUR-IC to enhance the benefits from microchip recycling, leveraging the learning across industries.

      Saini, the co-lead for the workforce vector, stresses the need for agility. “With a workforce that adapts to a practice of continuous upskilling, we can help increase the robustness of the chip-manufacturing supply chain, and validate a new design for a sustainability curriculum,” he says.

      “We have become accustomed to the benefits forged by the exponential growth of microelectronic technology performance and market size,” says Kimerling, who is also director of MIT’s Materials Research Laboratory and co-director of the MIT Microphotonics Center. “The ecological impact of this growth in terms of materials use, energy consumption and end-of-life disposal has begun to push back against this progress. We believe that concurrently engineered solutions for these three dimensions will build a common learning curve to power the next 40 years of progress in the semiconductor industry.”

      The MIT teams are two of six that received awards addressing sustainable materials for global challenges through phase two of the NSF Convergence Accelerator program. Launched in 2019, the program targets solutions to especially compelling challenges at an accelerated pace by incorporating a multidisciplinary research approach. More

    • 63 Shares129 Views

      in Environment

      MIT announces 2024 Bose Grants

      by

      MIT Provost Cynthia Barnhart announced four Professor Amar G. Bose Research Grants to support bold research projects across diverse areas of study, including a way to generate clean hydrogen from deep in the Earth, build an environmentally friendly house of basalt, design maternity clothing that monitors fetal health, and recruit sharks as ocean oxygen monitors.

      This year’s recipients are Iwnetim Abate, assistant professor of materials science and engineering; Andrew Babbin, the Cecil and Ida Green Associate Professor in Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences; Yoel Fink, professor of materials science and engineering and of electrical engineering and computer science; and Skylar Tibbits, associate professor of design research in the Department of Architecture.

      The program was named for the visionary founder of the Bose Corporation and MIT alumnus Amar G. Bose ’51, SM ’52, ScD ’56. After gaining admission to MIT, Bose became a top math student and a Fulbright Scholarship recipient. He spent 46 years as a professor at MIT, led innovations in sound design, and founded the Bose Corp. in 1964. MIT launched the Bose grant program 11 years ago to provide funding over a three-year period to MIT faculty who propose original, cross-disciplinary, and often risky research projects that would likely not be funded by conventional sources.

      “The promise of the Bose Fellowship is to help bold, daring ideas become realities, an approach that honors Amar Bose’s legacy,” says Barnhart. “Thanks to support from this program, these talented faculty members have the freedom to explore their bold and innovative ideas.”

      Deep and clean hydrogen futures

      A green energy future will depend on harnessing hydrogen as a clean energy source, sequestering polluting carbon dioxide, and mining the minerals essential to building clean energy technologies such as advanced batteries. Iwnetim Abate thinks he has a solution for all three challenges: an innovative hydrogen reactor.

      He plans to build a reactor that will create natural hydrogen from ultramafic mineral rocks in the crust. “The Earth is literally a giant hydrogen factory waiting to be tapped,” Abate explains. “A back-of-the-envelope calculation for the first seven kilometers of the Earth’s crust estimates that there is enough ultramafic rock to produce hydrogen for 250,000 years.”

      The reactor envisioned by Abate injects water to create a reaction that releases hydrogen, while also supporting the injection of climate-altering carbon dioxide into the rock, providing a global carbon capacity of 100 trillion tons. At the same time, the reactor process could provide essential elements such as lithium, nickel, and cobalt — some of the most important raw materials used in advanced batteries and electronics.

      “Ultimately, our goal is to design and develop a scalable reactor for simultaneously tapping into the trifecta from the Earth’s subsurface,” Abate says.

      Sharks as oceanographers

      If we want to understand more about how oxygen levels in the world’s seas are disturbed by human activities and climate change, we should turn to a sensing platform “that has been honed by 400 million years of evolution to perfectly sample the ocean: sharks,” says Andrew Babbin.

      As the planet warms, oceans are projected to contain less dissolved oxygen, with impacts on the productivity of global fisheries, natural carbon sequestration, and the flux of climate-altering greenhouse gasses from the ocean to the air. While scientists know dissolved oxygen is important, it has proved difficult to track over seasons, decades, and underexplored regions both shallow and deep.

      Babbin’s goal is to develop a low-cost sensor for dissolved oxygen that can be integrated with preexisting electronic shark tags used by marine biologists. “This fleet of sharks … will finally enable us to measure the extent of the low-oxygen zones of the ocean, how they change seasonally and with El Niño/La Niña oscillation, and how they expand or contract into the future.”

      The partnership with sharks will also spotlight the importance of these often-maligned animals for global marine and fisheries health, Babbin says. “We hope in pursuing this work marrying microscopic and macroscopic life we will inspire future oceanographers and conservationists, and lead to a better appreciation for the chemistry that underlies global habitability.”

      Maternity wear that monitors fetal health

      There are 2 million stillbirths around the world each year, and in the United States alone, 21,000 families suffer this terrible loss. In many cases, mothers and their doctors had no warning of any abnormalities or changes in fetal health leading up to these deaths. Yoel Fink and colleagues are looking for a better way to monitor fetal health and provide proactive treatment.

      Fink is building on years of research on acoustic fabrics to design an affordable shirt for mothers that would monitor and communicate important details of fetal health. His team’s original research drew inspiration from the function of the eardrum, designing a fiber that could be woven into other fabrics to create a kind of fabric microphone.

      “Given the sensitivity of the acoustic fabrics in sensing these nanometer-scale vibrations, could a mother’s clothing transcend its conventional role and become a health monitor, picking up on the acoustic signals and subsequent vibrations that arise from her unborn baby’s heartbeat and motion?” Fink says. “Could a simple and affordable worn fabric allow an expecting mom to sleep better, knowing that her fetus is being listened to continuously?”

      The proposed maternity shirt could measure fetal heart and breathing rate, and might be able to give an indication of the fetal body position, he says. In the final stages of development, he and his colleagues hope to develop machine learning approaches that would identify abnormal fetal heart rate and motion and deliver real-time alerts.

      A basalt house in Iceland

      In the land of volcanoes, Skylar Tibbits wants to build a case-study home almost entirely from the basalt rock that makes up the Icelandic landscape.

      Architects are increasingly interested in building using one natural material — creating a monomaterial structure — that can be easily recycled. At the moment, the building industry represents 40 percent of carbon emissions worldwide, and consists of many materials and structures, from metal to plastics to concrete, that can’t be easily disassembled or reused.

      The proposed basalt house in Iceland, a project co-led by J. Jih, associate professor of the practice in the Department of Architecture, is “an architecture that would be fully composed of the surrounding earth, that melts back into that surrounding earth at the end of its lifespan, and that can be recycled infinitely,” Tibbits explains.

      Basalt, the most common rock form in the Earth’s crust, can be spun into fibers for insulation and rebar. Basalt fiber performs as well as glass and carbon fibers at a lower cost in some applications, although it is not widely used in architecture. In cast form, it can make corrosion- and heat-resistant plumbing, cladding and flooring.

      “A monomaterial architecture is both a simple and radical proposal that unfortunately falls outside of traditional funding avenues,” says Tibbits. “The Bose grant is the perfect and perhaps the only option for our research, which we see as a uniquely achievable moonshot with transformative potential for the entire built environment.” More

    • 50 Shares169 Views

      in Environment

      Advancing technology for aquaculture

      by

      According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, aquaculture in the United States represents a $1.5 billion industry annually. Like land-based farming, shellfish aquaculture requires healthy seed production in order to maintain a sustainable industry. Aquaculture hatchery production of shellfish larvae — seeds — requires close monitoring to track mortality rates and assess health from the earliest stages of life. 

      Careful observation is necessary to inform production scheduling, determine effects of naturally occurring harmful bacteria, and ensure sustainable seed production. This is an essential step for shellfish hatcheries but is currently a time-consuming manual process prone to human error. 

      With funding from MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS), MIT Sea Grant is working with Associate Professor Otto Cordero of the MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Professor Taskin Padir and Research Scientist Mark Zolotas at the Northeastern University Institute for Experiential Robotics, and others at the Aquaculture Research Corporation (ARC), and the Cape Cod Commercial Fishermen’s Alliance, to advance technology for the aquaculture industry. Located on Cape Cod, ARC is a leading shellfish hatchery, farm, and wholesaler that plays a vital role in providing high-quality shellfish seed to local and regional growers.

      Two MIT students have joined the effort this semester, working with Robert Vincent, MIT Sea Grant’s assistant director of advisory services, through the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP). 

      First-year student Unyime Usua and sophomore Santiago Borrego are using microscopy images of shellfish seed from ARC to train machine learning algorithms that will help automate the identification and counting process. The resulting user-friendly image recognition tool aims to aid aquaculturists in differentiating and counting healthy, unhealthy, and dead shellfish larvae, improving accuracy and reducing time and effort.

      Vincent explains that AI is a powerful tool for environmental science that enables researchers, industry, and resource managers to address challenges that have long been pinch points for accurate data collection, analysis, predictions, and streamlining processes. “Funding support from programs like J-WAFS enable us to tackle these problems head-on,” he says. 

      ARC faces challenges with manually quantifying larvae classes, an important step in their seed production process. “When larvae are in their growing stages they are constantly being sized and counted,” explains Cheryl James, ARC larval/juvenile production manager. “This process is critical to encourage optimal growth and strengthen the population.” 

      Developing an automated identification and counting system will help to improve this step in the production process with time and cost benefits. “This is not an easy task,” says Vincent, “but with the guidance of Dr. Zolotas at the Northeastern University Institute for Experiential Robotics and the work of the UROP students, we have made solid progress.” 

      The UROP program benefits both researchers and students. Involving MIT UROP students in developing these types of systems provides insights into AI applications that they might not have considered, providing opportunities to explore, learn, and apply themselves while contributing to solving real challenges.

      Borrego saw this project as an opportunity to apply what he’d learned in class 6.390 (Introduction to Machine Learning) to a real-world issue. “I was starting to form an idea of how computers can see images and extract information from them,” he says. “I wanted to keep exploring that.”

      Usua decided to pursue the project because of the direct industry impacts it could have. “I’m pretty interested in seeing how we can utilize machine learning to make people’s lives easier. We are using AI to help biologists make this counting and identification process easier.” While Usua wasn’t familiar with aquaculture before starting this project, she explains, “Just hearing about the hatcheries that Dr. Vincent was telling us about, it was unfortunate that not a lot of people know what’s going on and the problems that they’re facing.”

      On Cape Cod alone, aquaculture is an $18 million per year industry. But the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries estimates that hatcheries are only able to meet 70–80 percent of seed demand annually, which impacts local growers and economies. Through this project, the partners aim to develop technology that will increase seed production, advance industry capabilities, and help understand and improve the hatchery microbiome.

      Borrego explains the initial challenge of having limited data to work with. “Starting out, we had to go through and label all of the data, but going through that process helped me learn a lot.” In true MIT fashion, he shares his takeaway from the project: “Try to get the best out of what you’re given with the data you have to work with. You’re going to have to adapt and change your strategies depending on what you have.”

      Usua describes her experience going through the research process, communicating in a team, and deciding what approaches to take. “Research is a difficult and long process, but there is a lot to gain from it because it teaches you to look for things on your own and find your own solutions to problems.”

      In addition to increasing seed production and reducing the human labor required in the hatchery process, the collaborators expect this project to contribute to cost savings and technology integration to support one of the most underserved industries in the United States. 

      Borrego and Usua both plan to continue their work for a second semester with MIT Sea Grant. Borrego is interested in learning more about how technology can be used to protect the environment and wildlife. Usua says she hopes to explore more projects related to aquaculture. “It seems like there’s an infinite amount of ways to tackle these issues.” More