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    From nanoscale to global scale: Advancing MIT’s special initiatives in manufacturing, health, and climate

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    “MIT.nano is essential to making progress in high-priority areas where I believe that MIT has a responsibility to lead,” opened MIT president Sally Kornbluth at the 2025 Nano Summit. “If we harness our collective efforts, we can make a serious positive impact.”It was these collective efforts that drove discussions at the daylong event hosted by MIT.nano and focused on the importance of nanoscience and nanotechnology across MIT’s special initiatives — projects deemed critical to MIT’s mission to help solve the world’s greatest challenges. With each new talk, common themes were reemphasized: collaboration across fields, solutions that can scale up from lab to market, and the use of nanoscale science to enact grand-scale change.“MIT.nano has truly set itself apart, in the Institute’s signature way, with an emphasis on cross-disciplinary collaboration and open access,” said Kornbluth. “Today, you’re going to hear about the transformative impact of nanoscience and nanotechnology, and how working with the very small can help us do big things for the world together.”Collaborating on healthAngela Koehler, faculty director of the MIT Health and Life Sciences Collaborative (MIT HEALS) and the Charles W. and Jennifer C. Johnson Professor of Biological Engineering, opened the first session with a question: How can we build a community across campus to tackle some of the most transformative problems in human health? In response, three speakers shared their work enabling new frontiers in medicine.Ana Jaklenec, principal research scientist at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, spoke about single-injection vaccines, and how her team looked to the techniques used in fabrication of electrical engineering components to see how multiple pieces could be packaged into a tiny device. “MIT.nano was instrumental in helping us develop this technology,” she said. “We took something that you can do in microelectronics and the semiconductor industry and brought it to the pharmaceutical industry.”While Jaklenec applied insight from electronics to her work in health care, Giovanni Traverso, the Karl Van Tassel Career Development Professor of Mechanical Engineering, who is also a gastroenterologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, found inspiration in nature, studying the cephalopod squid and remora fish to design ingestible drug delivery systems. Representing the industry side of life sciences, Mirai Bio senior vice president Jagesh Shah SM ’95, PhD ’99 presented his company’s precision-targeted lipid nanoparticles for therapeutic delivery. Shah, as well as the other speakers, emphasized the importance of collaboration between industry and academia to make meaningful impact, and the need to strengthen the pipeline for young scientists.Manufacturing, from the classroom to the workforcePaving the way for future generations was similarly emphasized in the second session, which highlighted MIT’s Initiative for New Manufacturing (MIT INM). “MIT’s dedication to manufacturing is not only about technology research and education, it’s also about understanding the landscape of manufacturing, domestically and globally,” said INM co-director A. John Hart, the Class of 1922 Professor and head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering. “It’s about getting people — our graduates who are budding enthusiasts of manufacturing — out of campus and starting and scaling new companies,” he said.On progressing from lab to market, Dan Oran PhD ’21 shared his career trajectory from technician to PhD student to founding his own company, Irradiant Technologies. “How are companies like Dan’s making the move from the lab to prototype to pilot production to demonstration to commercialization?” asked the next speaker, Elisabeth Reynolds, professor of the practice in urban studies and planning at MIT. “The U.S. capital market has not historically been well organized for that kind of support.” She emphasized the challenge of scaling innovations from prototype to production, and the need for workforce development.“Attracting and retaining workforce is a major pain point for manufacturing businesses,” agreed John Liu, principal research scientist in mechanical engineering at MIT. To keep new ideas flowing from the classroom to the factory floor, Liu proposes a new worker type in advanced manufacturing — the technologist — someone who can be a bridge to connect the technicians and the engineers.Bridging ecosystems with nanoscienceBridging people, disciplines, and markets to affect meaningful change was also emphasized by Benedetto Marelli, mission director for the MIT Climate Project and associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at MIT.“If we’re going to have a tangible impact on the trajectory of climate change in the next 10 years, we cannot do it alone,” he said. “We need to take care of ecology, health, mobility, the built environment, food, energy, policies, and trade and industry — and think about these as interconnected topics.”Faculty speakers in this session offered a glimpse of nanoscale solutions for climate resiliency. Michael Strano, the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering, presented his group’s work on using nanoparticles to turn waste methane and urea into renewable materials. Desirée Plata, the School of Engineering Distinguished Climate and Energy Professor, spoke about scaling carbon dioxide removal systems. Mechanical engineering professor Kripa Varanasi highlighted, among other projects, his lab’s work on improving agricultural spraying so pesticides adhere to crops, reducing agricultural pollution and cost.In all of these presentations, the MIT faculty highlighted the tie between climate and the economy. “The economic systems that we have today are depleting to our resources, inherently polluting,” emphasized Plata. “The goal here is to use sustainable design to transition the global economy.”What do people do at MIT.nano?This is where MIT.nano comes in, offering shared access facilities where researchers can design creative solutions to these global challenges. “What do people do at MIT.nano?” asked associate director for Fab.nano Jorg Scholvin ’00, MNG ’01, PhD ’06 in the session on MIT.nano’s ecosystem. With 1,500 individuals and over 20 percent of MIT faculty labs using MIT.nano, it’s a difficult question to quickly answer. However, in a rapid-fire research showcase, students and postdocs gave a response that spanned 3D transistors and quantum devices to solar solutions and art restoration. Their work reflects the challenges and opportunities shared at the Nano Summit: developing technologies ready to scale, uniting disciplines to tackle complex problems, and gaining hands-on experience that prepares them to contribute to the future of hard tech.The researchers’ enthusiasm carried the excitement and curiosity that President Kornbluth mentioned in her opening remarks, and that many faculty emphasized throughout the day. “The solutions to the problems we heard about today may come from inventions that don’t exist yet,” said Strano. “These are some of the most creative people, here at MIT. I think we inspire each other.”Robert N. Noyce (1953) Cleanroom at MIT.nanoCollaborative inspiration is not new to the MIT culture. The Nano Summit sessions focused on where we are today, and where we might be going in the future, but also reflected on how we arrived at this moment. Honoring visionaries of nanoscience and nanotechnology, President Emeritus L. Rafael Reif delivered the closing remarks and an exciting announcement — the dedication of the MIT.nano cleanroom complex. Made possible through a gift by Ray Stata SB ’57, SM ’58, this research space, 45,000 square feet of ISO 5, 6, and 7 cleanrooms, will be named the Robert N. Noyce (1953) Cleanroom.“Ray Stata was — and is — the driving force behind nanoscale research at MIT,” said Reif. “I want to thank Ray, whose generosity has allowed MIT to honor Robert Noyce in such a fitting way.”Ray Stata co-founded Analog Devices in 1965, and Noyce co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957, and later Intel in 1968. Noyce, widely regarded as the “Mayor of Silicon Valley,” became chair of the Semiconductor Industry Association in 1977, and over the next 40 years, semiconductor technology advanced a thousandfold, from micrometers to nanometers.“Noyce was a pioneer of the semiconductor industry,” said Stata. “It is due to his leadership and remarkable contributions that electronics technology is where it is today. It is an honor to be able to name the MIT.nano cleanroom after Bob Noyce, creating a permanent tribute to his vision and accomplishments in the heart of the MIT campus.”To conclude his remarks and the 2025 Nano Summit, Reif brought the nano journey back to today, highlighting technology giants such as Lisa Su ’90, SM ’91, PhD ’94, for whom Building 12, the home of MIT.nano, is named. “MIT has educated a large number of remarkable leaders in the semiconductor space,” said Reif. “Now, with the Robert Noyce Cleanroom, this amazing MIT community is ready to continue to shape the future with the next generation of nano discoveries — and the next generation of nano leaders, who will become living legends in their own time.” More

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      in Energy

      Battery-powered appliances make it easy to switch from gas to electric

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      As batteries have gotten cheaper and more powerful, they have enabled the electrification of everything from vehicles to lawn equipment, power tools, and scooters. But electrifying homes has been a slower process. That’s because switching from gas appliances often requires ripping out drywall, running new wires, and upgrading the electrical box.Now the startup Copper, founded by Sam Calisch SM ’14, PhD ’19, has developed a battery-equipped kitchen range that can plug into a standard 120-volt wall outlet. The induction range features a lithium iron phosphate battery that charges when energy is cheapest and cleanest, then delivers power when you’re ready to cook.“We’re making ‘going electric’ like an appliance swap instead of a construction project,” says Calisch. “If you have a gas stove today, there is almost certainly an outlet within reach because the stove has an oven light, clock, or electric igniters. That’s big if you’re in a single-family home, but in apartments it’s an existential factor. Rewiring a 100-unit apartment building is such an expensive proposition that basically no one’s doing it.”Copper has shipped about 1,000 of its battery-powered ranges to date, often to developers and owners of large apartment complexes. The company also has an agreement with the New York City Housing Authority for at least 10,000 units.Once installed, the ranges can contribute to a distributed, cleaner, and more resilient energy network. In fact, Copper recently piloted a program in California to offer cheap, clean power to the grid from its home batteries when it would otherwise need to fire up a gas-powered plant to meet spiking electricity demand.“After these appliances are installed, they become a grid asset,” Calisch says. “We can manage the fleet of batteries to help provide firm power and help grids deliver more clean electricity. We use that revenue, in turn, to further drive down the cost of electrification.”Finding a missionCalisch has been working on climate technologies his entire career. It all started at the clean technology incubator Otherlab that was founded by Saul Griffith SM ’01, PhD ’04.“That’s where I caught the bug for technology and product development for climate impact,” Calisch says. “But I realized I needed to up my game, so I went to grad school in [MIT Professor] Neil Gershenfeld’s lab, the Center for Bits and Atoms. I got to dabble in software engineering, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, mathematical modeling, all with the lens of building and iterating quickly.”Calisch stayed at MIT for his PhD, where he worked on approaches in manufacturing that used fewer materials and less energy. After finishing his PhD in 2019, Calisch helped start a nonprofit called Rewiring America focused on advocating for electrification. Through that work, he collaborated with U.S. Senate offices on the Inflation Reduction Act.The cost of lithium ion batteries has decreased by about 97 percent since their commercial debut in 1991. As more products have gone electric, the manufacturing process for everything from phones to drones, robots, and electric vehicles has converged around an electric tech stack of batteries, electric motors, power electronics, and chips. The countries that master the electric tech stack will be at a distinct manufacturing advantage.Calisch started Copper to boost the supply chain for batteries while contributing to the electrification movement.“Appliances can help deploy batteries, and batteries help deploy appliances,” Calisch says. “Appliances can also drive down the installed cost of batteries.”The company is starting with the kitchen range because its peak power draw is among the highest in the home. Flattening that peak brings big benefits. Ranges are also meaningful: It’s where people gather around and cook each night. People take pride in their kitchen ranges more than, say, a water heater.Copper’s 30-inch induction range heats up more quickly and reaches more precise temperatures than its gas counterpart. Installing it is as easy as swapping a fridge or dishwasher. Thanks to its 5-kilowatt-hour battery, the range even works when the power goes out.“Batteries have become 10 times cheaper and are now both affordable and create tangible improvements in quality of life,” Calisch says. “It’s a new notion of climate impact that isn’t about turning down thermostats and suffering for the planet, it’s about adopting new technologies that are better.”Scaling impactCalisch says there’s no way for the U.S. to maintain resilient energy systems in the future without a lot of batteries. Because of power transmission and regulatory limitations, those batteries can’t all be located out on the grid.“We see an analog to the internet,” Calisch says. “In order to deliver millions of times more information across the internet, we didn’t add millions of times more wires. We added local storage and caching across the network. That’s what increased throughput. We’re doing the same thing for the electric grid.”This summer, Copper raised $28 million to scale its production to meet growing demand for its battery equipped appliances. Copper is also working to license its technology to other appliance manufacturers to help speed the electric transition.“These electric technologies have the potential to improve people’s lives and, as a byproduct, take us off of fossil fuels,” Calisch says. “We’re in the business of identifying points of friction for that transition. We are not an appliance company; we’re an energy company.”Looking back, Calisch credits MIT with equipping him with the knowledge needed to run a technical business.“My time at MIT gave me hands-on experience with a variety of engineering systems,” Calisch. “I can talk to our embedded engineering team or electrical engineering team or mechanical engineering team and understand what they’re saying. That’s been enormously useful for running a company.”He adds: “I also developed an expansive view of infrastructure at MIT, which has been instrumental in launching Copper and thinking about the electrical grid not just as wires on the street, but all of the loads in our buildings. It’s about making homes not just consumers of electricity, but participants in this broader network.” More

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      in Environment

      MIT engineers solve the sticky-cell problem in bioreactors and other industries

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      To help mitigate climate change, companies are using bioreactors to grow algae and other microorganisms that are hundreds of times more efficient at absorbing CO2 than trees. Meanwhile, in the pharmaceutical industry, cell culture is used to manufacture biologic drugs and other advanced treatments, including lifesaving gene and cell therapies.Both processes are hampered by cells’ tendency to stick to surfaces, which leads to a huge amount of waste and downtime for cleaning. A similar problem slows down biofuel production, interferes with biosensors and implants, and makes the food and beverage industry less efficient.Now, MIT researchers have developed an approach for detaching cells from surfaces on demand, using electrochemically generated bubbles. In an open-access paper published in Science Advances, the researchers demonstrated their approach in a lab prototype and showed it could work across a range of cells and surfaces without harming the cells.“We wanted to develop a technology that could be high-throughput and plug-and-play, and that would allow cells to attach and detach on demand to improve the workflow in these industrial processes,” says Professor Kripa Varanasi, senior author of the study. “This is a fundamental issue with cells, and we’ve solved it with a process that can scale. It lends itself to many different applications.”Joining Varanasi on the study are co-first authors Bert Vandereydt, a PhD student in mechanical engineering, and former postdoc Baptiste Blanc.Solving a sticky problem

      Credit: Joy Zheng

      The researchers began with a mission.“We’ve been working on figuring out how we can efficiently capture CO2 across different sources and convert it into valuable products for various end markets,” Varanasi says. “That’s where this photobioreactor and cell detachment comes into the picture.”Photobioreactors are used to grow carbon-absorbing algae cells by creating tightly controlled environments involving water and sunlight. They feature long, winding tubes with clear surfaces to let in the light algae need to grow. When algae stick to those surfaces, they block out the light, requiring cleaning.“You have to shut down and clean up the entire reactor as frequently as every two weeks,” Varanasi says. “It’s a huge operational challenge.”The researchers realized other industries have similar problem due to many cells’ natural adhesion, or stickiness. Each industry has its own solution for cell adhesion depending on how important it is that the cells survive. Some people scrape the surfaces clean, while others use special coatings that are toxic to cells.In the pharmaceutical and biotech industries, cell detachment is typically carried out using enzymes. However, this method poses several challenges — it can damage cell membranes, is time-consuming, and requires large amounts of consumables, resulting in millions of liters of biowaste.To create a better solution, the researchers began by studying other efforts to clear surfaces with bubbles, which mainly involved spraying bubbles onto surfaces and had been largely ineffective.“We realized we needed the bubbles to form on the surfaces where we don’t want these cells to stick, so when the bubbles detach it creates a local fluid flow that creates shear stress at the interface and removes the cells,” Varanasi explains.Electric currents generate bubbles by splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen. But previous attempts at using electricity to detach cells were hampered because the cell culture mediums contain sodium chloride, which turns into bleach when combined with an electric current. The bleach damages the cells, making it impractical for many applications.“The culprit is the anode — that’s where the sodium chloride turns to bleach,” Vandereydt explained. “We figured if we could separate that electrode from the rest of the system, we could prevent bleach from being generated.”To make a better system, the researchers built a 3-square-inch glass surface and deposited a gold electrode on top of it. The layer of gold is so thin it doesn’t block out light. To keep the other electrode separate, the researchers integrated a special membrane that only allows protons to pass through. The set up allowed the researchers to send a current through without generating bleach.To test their setup, they allowed algae cells from a concentrated solution to stick to the surfaces. When they applied a voltage, the bubbles separated the cells from the surfaces without harming them.The researchers also studied the interaction between the bubbles and cells, finding the higher the current density, the more bubbles were created and the more algae was removed. They developed a model for understanding how much current would be needed to remove algae in different settings and matched it with results from experiments involving algae as well as cells from ovarian cancer and bones.“Mammalian cells are orders of magnitude more sensitive than algae cells, but even with those cells, we were able to detach them with no impact to the viability of the cell,” Vandereydt says.Getting to scaleThe researchers say their system could represent a breakthrough in applications where bleach or other chemicals would harm cells. That includes pharmaceutical and food production.“If we can keep these systems running without fouling and other problems, then we can make them much more economical,” Varanasi says.For cell culture plates used in the pharmaceutical industry, the team envisions their system comprising an electrode that could be robotically moved from one culture plate to the next, to detach cells as they’re grown. It could also be coiled around algae harvesting systems.“This has general applicability because it doesn’t rely on any specific biological or chemical treatments, but on a physical force that is system-agnostic,” Varanasi says. “It’s also highly scalable to a lot of different processes, including particle removal.”Varanasi cautions there is much work to be done to scale up the system. But he hopes it can one day make algae and other cell harvesting more efficient.“The burning problem of our time is to somehow capture CO2 in a way that’s economically feasible,” Varanasi says. “These photobioreactors could be used for that, but we have to overcome the cell adhesion problem.”The work was supported, in part, by Eni S.p.A through the MIT Energy Initiative, the Belgian American Educational Foundation Fellowship, and the Maria Zambrano Fellowship. More

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      in Security

      MIT gears up to transform manufacturing

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      “Manufacturing is the engine of society, and it is the backbone of robust, resilient economies,” says John Hart, head of MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE) and faculty co-director of the MIT Initiative for New Manufacturing (INM). “With manufacturing a lively topic in today’s news, there’s a renewed appreciation and understanding of the importance of manufacturing to innovation, to economic and national security, and to daily lives.”Launched this May, INM will “help create a transformation of manufacturing through new technology, through development of talent, and through an understanding of how to scale manufacturing in a way that enables imparts higher productivity and resilience, drives adoption of new technologies, and creates good jobs,” Hart says.INM is one of MIT’s strategic initiatives and builds on the successful three-year-old Manufacturing@MIT program. “It’s a recognition by MIT that manufacturing is an Institute-wide theme and an Institute-wide priority, and that manufacturing connects faculty and students across campus,” says Hart. Alongside Hart, INM’s faculty co-directors are Institute Professor Suzanne Berger and Chris Love, professor of chemical engineering.The initiative is pursuing four main themes: reimagining manufacturing technologies and systems, elevating the productivity and human experience of manufacturing, scaling up new manufacturing, and transforming the manufacturing base.Breaking manufacturing barriers for corporationsAmgen, Autodesk, Flex, GE Vernova, PTC, Sanofi, and Siemens are founding members of INM’s industry consortium. These industry partners will work closely with MIT faculty, researchers, and students across many aspects of manufacturing-related research, both in broad-scale initiatives and in particular areas of shared interests. Membership requires a minimum three-year commitment of $500,000 a year to manufacturing-related activities at MIT, including the INM membership fee of $275,000 per year, which supports several core activities that engage the industry members.One major thrust for INM industry collaboration is the deployment and adoption of AI and automation in manufacturing. This effort will include seed research projects at MIT, collaborative case studies, and shared strategy development.INM also offers companies participation in the MIT-wide New Manufacturing Research effort, which is studying the trajectories of specific manufacturing industries and examining cross-cutting themes such as technology and financing.Additionally, INM will concentrate on education for all professions in manufacturing, with alliances bringing together corporations, community colleges, government agencies, and other partners. “We’ll scale our curriculum to broader audiences, from aspiring manufacturing workers and aspiring production line supervisors all the way up to engineers and executives,” says Hart.In workforce training, INM will collaborate with companies broadly to help understand the challenges and frame its overall workforce agenda, and with individual firms on specific challenges, such as acquiring suitably prepared employees for a new factory.Importantly, industry partners will also engage directly with students. Founding member Flex, for instance, hosted MIT researchers and students at the Flex Institute of Technology in Sorocaba, Brazil, developing new solutions for electronics manufacturing.“History shows that you need to innovate in manufacturing alongside the innovation in products,” Hart comments. “At MIT, as more students take classes in manufacturing, they’ll think more about key manufacturing issues as they decide what research problems they want to solve, or what choices they make as they prototype their devices. The same is true for industry — companies that operate at the frontier of manufacturing, whether through internal capabilities or their supply chains, are positioned to be on the frontier of product innovation and overall growth.”“We’ll have an opportunity to bring manufacturing upstream to the early stage of research, designing new processes and new devices with scalability in mind,” he says.Additionally, MIT expects to open new manufacturing-related labs and to further broaden cooperation with industry at existing shared facilities, such as MIT.nano. Hart says that facilities will also invite tighter collaborations with corporations — not just providing advanced equipment, but working jointly on, say, new technologies for weaving textiles, or speeding up battery manufacturing.Homing in on the United StatesINM is a global project that brings a particular focus on the United States, which remains the world’s second-largest manufacturing economy, but has suffered a significant decline in manufacturing employment and innovation.One key to reversing this trend and reinvigorating the U.S. manufacturing base is advocacy for manufacturing’s critical role in society and the career opportunities it offers.“No one really disputes the importance of manufacturing,” Hart says. “But we need to elevate interest in manufacturing as a rewarding career, from the production workers to manufacturing engineers and leaders, through advocacy, education programs, and buy-in from industry, government, and academia.”MIT is in a unique position to convene industry, academic, and government stakeholders in manufacturing to work together on this vital issue, he points out.Moreover, in times of radical and rapid changes in manufacturing, “we need to focus on deploying new technologies into factories and supply chains,” Hart says. “Technology is not all of the solution, but for the U.S. to expand our manufacturing base, we need to do it with technology as a key enabler, embracing companies of all sizes, including small and medium enterprises.”“As AI becomes more capable, and automation becomes more flexible and more available, these are key building blocks upon which you can address manufacturing challenges,” he says. “AI and automation offer new accelerated ways to develop, deploy, and monitor production processes, which present a huge opportunity and, in some cases, a necessity.”“While manufacturing is always a combination of old technology, new technology, established practice, and new ways of thinking, digital technology gives manufacturers an opportunity to leapfrog competitors,” Hart says. “That’s very, very powerful for the U.S. and any company, or country, that aims to create differentiated capabilities.”Fortunately, in recent years, investors have increasingly bought into new manufacturing in the United States. “They see the opportunity to re-industrialize, to build the factories and production systems of the future,” Hart says.“That said, building new manufacturing is capital-intensive, and takes time,” he adds. “So that’s another area where it’s important to convene stakeholders and to think about how startups and growth-stage companies build their capital portfolios, how large industry can support an ecosystem of small businesses and young companies, and how to develop talent to support those growing companies.”All these concerns and opportunities in the manufacturing ecosystem play to MIT’s strengths. “MIT’s DNA of cross-disciplinary collaboration and working with industry can let us create a lot of impact,” Hart emphasizes. “We can understand the practical challenges. We can also explore breakthrough ideas in research and cultivate successful outcomes, all the way to new companies and partnerships. Sometimes those are seen as disparate approaches, but we like to bring them together.” More

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      in Environment

      After more than a decade of successes, ESI’s work will spread out across the Institute

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      MIT’s Environmental Solutions Initiative (ESI), a pioneering cross-disciplinary body that helped give a major boost to sustainability and solutions to climate change at MIT, will close as a separate entity at the end of June. But that’s far from the end for its wide-ranging work, which will go forward under different auspices. Many of its key functions will become part of MIT’s recently launched Climate Project. John Fernandez, head of ESI for nearly a decade, will return to the School of Architecture and Planning, where some of ESI’s important work will continue as part of a new interdisciplinary lab.When the ideas that led to the founding of MIT’s Environmental Solutions Initiative first began to be discussed, its founders recall, there was already a great deal of work happening at MIT relating to climate change and sustainability. As Professor John Sterman of the MIT Sloan School of Management puts it, “there was a lot going on, but it wasn’t integrated. So the whole added up to less than the sum of its parts.”ESI was founded in 2014 to help fill that coordinating role, and in the years since it has accomplished a wide range of significant milestones in research, education, and communication about sustainable solutions in a wide range of areas. Its founding director, Professor Susan Solomon, helmed it for its first year, and then handed the leadership to Fernandez, who has led it since 2015.“There wasn’t much of an ecosystem [on sustainability] back then,” Solomon recalls. But with the help of ESI and some other entities, that ecosystem has blossomed. She says that Fernandez “has nurtured some incredible things under ESI,” including work on nature-based climate solutions, and also other areas such as sustainable mining, and reduction of plastics in the environment.Desiree Plata, director of MIT’s Climate and Sustainability Consortium and associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, says that one key achievement of the initiative has been in “communication with the external world, to help take really complex systems and topics and put them in not just plain-speak, but something that’s scientifically rigorous and defensible, for the outside world to consume.”In particular, ESI has created three very successful products, which continue under the auspices of the Climate Project. These include the popular TIL Climate Podcast, the Webby Award-winning Climate Portal website, and the online climate primer developed with Professor Kerry Emanuel. “These are some of the most frequented websites at MIT,” Plata says, and “the impact of this work on the global knowledge base cannot be overstated.”Fernandez says that ESI has played a significant part in helping to catalyze what has become “a rich institutional landscape of work in sustainability and climate change” at MIT. He emphasizes three major areas where he feels the ESI has been able to have the most impact: engaging the MIT community, initiating and stewarding critical environmental research, and catalyzing efforts to promote sustainability as fundamental to the mission of a research university.Engagement of the MIT community, he says, began with two programs: a research seed grant program and the creation of MIT’s undergraduate minor in environment and sustainability, launched in 2017.ESI also created a Rapid Response Group, which gave students a chance to work on real-world projects with external partners, including government agencies, community groups, nongovernmental organizations, and businesses. In the process, they often learned why dealing with environmental challenges in the real world takes so much longer than they might have thought, he says, and that a challenge that “seemed fairly straightforward at the outset turned out to be more complex and nuanced than expected.”The second major area, initiating and stewarding environmental research, grew into a set of six specific program areas: natural climate solutions, mining, cities and climate change, plastics and the environment, arts and climate, and climate justice.These efforts included collaborations with a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, three successive presidential administrations from Colombia, and members of communities affected by climate change, including coal miners, indigenous groups, various cities, companies, the U.N., many agencies — and the popular musical group Coldplay, which has pledged to work toward climate neutrality for its performances. “It was the role that the ESI played as a host and steward of these research programs that may serve as a key element of our legacy,” Fernandez says.The third broad area, he says, “is the idea that the ESI as an entity at MIT would catalyze this movement of a research university toward sustainability as a core priority.” While MIT was founded to be an academic partner to the industrialization of the world, “aren’t we in a different world now? The kind of massive infrastructure planning and investment and construction that needs to happen to decarbonize the energy system is maybe the largest industrialization effort ever undertaken. Even more than in the recent past, the set of priorities driving this have to do with sustainable development.”Overall, Fernandez says, “we did everything we could to infuse the Institute in its teaching and research activities with the idea that the world is now in dire need of sustainable solutions.”Fernandez “has nurtured some incredible things under ESI,” Solomon says. “It’s been a very strong and useful program, both for education and research.” But it is appropriate at this time to distribute its projects to other venues, she says. “We do now have a major thrust in the Climate Project, and you don’t want to have redundancies and overlaps between the two.”Fernandez says “one of the missions of the Climate Project is really acting to coalesce and aggregate lots of work around MIT.” Now, with the Climate Project itself, along with the Climate Policy Center and the Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy, it makes more sense for ESI’s climate-related projects to be integrated into these new entities, and other projects that are less directly connected to climate to take their places in various appropriate departments or labs, he says.“We did enough with ESI that we made it possible for these other centers to really flourish,” he says. “And in that sense, we played our role.”As of June 1, Fernandez has returned to his role as professor of architecture and urbanism and building technology in the School of Architecture and Planning, where he directs the Urban Metabolism Group. He will also be starting up a new group called Environment ResearchAction (ERA) to continue ESI work in cities, nature, and artificial intelligence.  More

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      in Environment

      Study: Burning heavy fuel oil with scrubbers is the best available option for bulk maritime shipping

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      When the International Maritime Organization enacted a mandatory cap on the sulfur content of marine fuels in 2020, with an eye toward reducing harmful environmental and health impacts, it left shipping companies with three main options.They could burn low-sulfur fossil fuels, like marine gas oil, or install cleaning systems to remove sulfur from the exhaust gas produced by burning heavy fuel oil. Biofuels with lower sulfur content offer another alternative, though their limited availability makes them a less feasible option.While installing exhaust gas cleaning systems, known as scrubbers, is the most feasible and cost-effective option, there has been a great deal of uncertainty among firms, policymakers, and scientists as to how “green” these scrubbers are.Through a novel lifecycle assessment, researchers from MIT, Georgia Tech, and elsewhere have now found that burning heavy fuel oil with scrubbers in the open ocean can match or surpass using low-sulfur fuels, when a wide variety of environmental factors is considered.The scientists combined data on the production and operation of scrubbers and fuels with emissions measurements taken onboard an oceangoing cargo ship.They found that, when the entire supply chain is considered, burning heavy fuel oil with scrubbers was the least harmful option in terms of nearly all 10 environmental impact factors they studied, such as greenhouse gas emissions, terrestrial acidification, and ozone formation.“In our collaboration with Oldendorff Carriers to broadly explore reducing the environmental impact of shipping, this study of scrubbers turned out to be an unexpectedly deep and important transitional issue,” says Neil Gershenfeld, an MIT professor, director of the Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA), and senior author of the study.“Claims about environmental hazards and policies to mitigate them should be backed by science. You need to see the data, be objective, and design studies that take into account the full picture to be able to compare different options from an apples-to-apples perspective,” adds lead author Patricia Stathatou, an assistant professor at Georgia Tech, who began this study as a postdoc in the CBA.Stathatou is joined on the paper by Michael Triantafyllou, the Henry L. and Grace Doherty and others at the National Technical University of Athens in Greece and the maritime shipping firm Oldendorff Carriers. The research appears today in Environmental Science and Technology.Slashing sulfur emissionsHeavy fuel oil, traditionally burned by bulk carriers that make up about 30 percent of the global maritime fleet, usually has a sulfur content around 2 to 3 percent. This is far higher than the International Maritime Organization’s 2020 cap of 0.5 percent in most areas of the ocean and 0.1 percent in areas near population centers or environmentally sensitive regions.Sulfur oxide emissions contribute to air pollution and acid rain, and can damage the human respiratory system.In 2018, fewer than 1,000 vessels employed scrubbers. After the cap went into place, higher prices of low-sulfur fossil fuels and limited availability of alternative fuels led many firms to install scrubbers so they could keep burning heavy fuel oil.Today, more than 5,800 vessels utilize scrubbers, the majority of which are wet, open-loop scrubbers.“Scrubbers are a very mature technology. They have traditionally been used for decades in land-based applications like power plants to remove pollutants,” Stathatou says.A wet, open-loop marine scrubber is a huge, metal, vertical tank installed in a ship’s exhaust stack, above the engines. Inside, seawater drawn from the ocean is sprayed through a series of nozzles downward to wash the hot exhaust gases as they exit the engines.The seawater interacts with sulfur dioxide in the exhaust, converting it to sulfates — water-soluble, environmentally benign compounds that naturally occur in seawater. The washwater is released back into the ocean, while the cleaned exhaust escapes to the atmosphere with little to no sulfur dioxide emissions.But the acidic washwater can contain other combustion byproducts like heavy metals, so scientists wondered if scrubbers were comparable, from a holistic environmental point of view, to burning low-sulfur fuels.Several studies explored toxicity of washwater and fuel system pollution, but none painted a full picture.The researchers set out to fill that scientific gap.A “well-to-wake” analysisThe team conducted a lifecycle assessment using a global environmental database on production and transport of fossil fuels, such as heavy fuel oil, marine gas oil, and very-low sulfur fuel oil. Considering the entire lifecycle of each fuel is key, since producing low-sulfur fuel requires extra processing steps in the refinery, causing additional emissions of greenhouse gases and particulate matter.“If we just look at everything that happens before the fuel is bunkered onboard the vessel, heavy fuel oil is significantly more low-impact, environmentally, than low-sulfur fuels,” she says.The researchers also collaborated with a scrubber manufacturer to obtain detailed information on all materials, production processes, and transportation steps involved in marine scrubber fabrication and installation.“If you consider that the scrubber has a lifetime of about 20 years, the environmental impacts of producing the scrubber over its lifetime are negligible compared to producing heavy fuel oil,” she adds.For the final piece, Stathatou spent a week onboard a bulk carrier vessel in China to measure emissions and gather seawater and washwater samples. The ship burned heavy fuel oil with a scrubber and low-sulfur fuels under similar ocean conditions and engine settings.Collecting these onboard data was the most challenging part of the study.“All the safety gear, combined with the heat and the noise from the engines on a moving ship, was very overwhelming,” she says.Their results showed that scrubbers reduce sulfur dioxide emissions by 97 percent, putting heavy fuel oil on par with low-sulfur fuels according to that measure. The researchers saw similar trends for emissions of other pollutants like carbon monoxide and nitrous oxide.In addition, they tested washwater samples for more than 60 chemical parameters, including nitrogen, phosphorus, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and 23 metals.The concentrations of chemicals regulated by the IMO were far below the organization’s requirements. For unregulated chemicals, the researchers compared the concentrations to the strictest limits for industrial effluents from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and European Union.Most chemical concentrations were at least an order of magnitude below these requirements.In addition, since washwater is diluted thousands of times as it is dispersed by a moving vessel, the concentrations of such chemicals would be even lower in the open ocean.These findings suggest that the use of scrubbers with heavy fuel oil can be considered as equal to or more environmentally friendly than low-sulfur fuels across many of the impact categories the researchers studied.“This study demonstrates the scientific complexity of the waste stream of scrubbers. Having finally conducted a multiyear, comprehensive, and peer-reviewed study, commonly held fears and assumptions are now put to rest,” says Scott Bergeron, managing director at Oldendorff Carriers and co-author of the study.“This first-of-its-kind study on a well-to-wake basis provides very valuable input to ongoing discussion at the IMO,” adds Thomas Klenum, executive vice president of innovation and regulatory affairs at the Liberian Registry, emphasizing the need “for regulatory decisions to be made based on scientific studies providing factual data and conclusions.”Ultimately, this study shows the importance of incorporating lifecycle assessments into future environmental impact reduction policies, Stathatou says.“There is all this discussion about switching to alternative fuels in the future, but how green are these fuels? We must do our due diligence to compare them equally with existing solutions to see the costs and benefits,” she adds.This study was supported, in part, by Oldendorff Carriers. More

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      in Environment

      Technology developed by MIT engineers makes pesticides stick to plant leaves

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      Reducing the amount of agricultural sprays used by farmers — including fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides — could cut down the amount of polluting runoff that ends up in the environment while at the same time reducing farmers’ costs and perhaps even enhancing their productivity. A classic win-win-win.A team of researchers at MIT and a spinoff company they launched has developed a system to do just that. Their technology adds a thin coating around droplets as they are being sprayed onto a field, greatly reducing their tendency to bounce off leaves and end up wasted on the ground. Instead, the coated droplets stick to the leaves as intended.The research is described today in the journal Soft Matter, in a paper by recent MIT alumni Vishnu Jayaprakash PhD ’22 and Sreedath Panat PhD ’23, graduate student Simon Rufer, and MIT professor of mechanical engineering Kripa Varanasi.A recent study found that if farmers didn’t use pesticides, they would lose 78 percent of fruit, 54 percent of vegetable, and 32 percent of cereal production. Despite their importance, a lack of technology that monitors and optimizes sprays has forced farmers to rely on personal experience and rules of thumb to decide how to apply these chemicals. As a result, these chemicals tend to be over-sprayed, leading to runoff and chemicals ending up in waterways or building up in the soil.Pesticides take a significant toll on global health and the environment, the researchers point out. A recent study found that 31 percent of agricultural soils around the world were at high risk from pesticide pollution. And agricultural chemicals are a major expense for farmers: In the U.S., they spend $16 billion a year just on pesticides.Making spraying more efficient is one of the best ways to make food production more sustainable and economical. Agricultural spraying essentially boils down to mixing chemicals into water and spraying water droplets onto plant leaves, which are often inherently water-repellent. “Over more than a decade of research in my lab at MIT, we have developed fundamental understandings of spraying and the interaction between droplets and plants — studying when they bounce and all the ways we have to make them stick better and enhance coverage,” Varanasi says.The team had previously found a way to reduce the amount of sprayed liquid that bounces away from the leaves it strikes, which involved using two spray nozzles instead of one and spraying mixtures with opposite electrical charges. But they found that farmers were reluctant to take on the expense and effort of converting their spraying equipment to a two-nozzle system. So, the team looked for a simpler alternative.They discovered they could achieve the same improvement in droplet retention using a single-nozzle system that can be easily adapted to existing sprayers. Instead of giving the droplets of pesticide an electric charge, they coat each droplet with a vanishingly thin layer of an oily material.In their new study, they conducted lab experiments with high-speed cameras. When they sprayed droplets with no special treatment onto a water-repelling (hydrophobic) surface similar to that of many plant leaves, the droplets initially spread out into a pancake-like disk, then rebounded back into a ball and bounced away. But when the researchers coated the surface of the droplets with a tiny amount of oil — making up less than 1 percent of the droplet’s liquid — the droplets spread out and then stayed put. The treatment improved the droplets’ “stickiness” by as much as a hundredfold.“When these droplets are hitting the surface and as they expand, they form this oil ring that essentially pins the droplet to the surface,” Rufer says. The researchers tried a wide variety of conditions, he says, explaining that they conducted hundreds of experiments, “with different impact velocities, different droplet sizes, different angles of inclination, all the things that fully characterize this phenomenon.” Though different oils varied in their effectiveness, all of them were effective. “Regardless of the impact velocity and the oils, we saw that the rebound height was significantly lower,” he says.The effect works with remarkably small amounts of oil. In their initial tests they used 1 percent oil compared to the water, then they tried a 0.1 percent, and even .01. The improvement in droplets sticking to the surface continued at a 0.1 percent, but began to break down beyond that. “Basically, this oil film acts as a way to trap that droplet on the surface, because oil is very attracted to the surface and sort of holds the water in place,” Rufer says.In the researchers’ initial tests they used soybean oil for the coating, figuring this would be a familiar material for the farmers they were working with, many of whom were growing soybeans. But it turned out that though they were producing the beans, the oil was not part of their usual supply chain for use on the farm. In further tests, the researchers found that several chemicals that farmers were already routinely using in their spraying, called surfactants and adjuvants, could be used instead, and that some of these provided the same benefits in keeping the droplets stuck on the leaves.“That way,” Varanasi says, “we’re not introducing a new chemical or changed chemistries into their field, but they’re using things they’ve known for a long time.”Varanasi and Jayaprakash formed a company called AgZen to commercialize the system. In order to prove how much their coating system improves the amount of spray that stays on the plant, they first had to develop a system to monitor spraying in real time. That system, which they call RealCoverage, has been deployed on farms ranging in size from a few dozen acres to hundreds of thousands of acres, and many different crop types, and has saved farmers 30 to 50 percent on their pesticide expenditures, just by improving the controls on the existing sprays. That system is being deployed to 920,000 acres of crops in 2025, the company says, including some in California, Texas, the Midwest, France and Italy. Adding the cloaking system using new nozzles, the researchers say, should yield at least another doubling of efficiency.“You could give back a billion dollars to U.S. growers if you just saved 6 percent of their pesticide budget,” says Jayaprakash, lead author of the research paper and CEO of AgZen. “In the lab we got 300 percent of extra product on the plant. So that means we could get orders of magnitude reductions in the amount of pesticides that farmers are spraying.”Farmers had already been using these surfactant and adjuvant chemicals as a way to enhance spraying effectiveness, but they were mixing it with a water solution. For it to have any effect, they had to use much more of these materials, risking causing burns to the plants. The new coating system reduces the amount of these materials needed, while improving their effectiveness.In field tests conducted by AgZen, “we doubled the amount of product on kale and soybeans just by changing where the adjuvant was,” from mixed in to being a coating, Jayaprakash says. It’s convenient for farmers because “all they’re doing is changing their nozzle. They’re getting all their existing chemicals to work better, and they’re getting more product on the plant.”And it’s not just for pesticides. “The really cool thing is this is useful for every chemistry that’s going on the leaf, be it an insecticide, a herbicide, a fungicide, or foliar nutrition,” Varanasi says. This year, they plan to introduce the new spray system on about 30,000 acres of cropland.Varanasi says that with projected world population growth, “the amount of food production has got to double, and we are limited in so many resources, for example we cannot double the arable land. … This means that every acre we currently farm must become more efficient and able to do more with less.” These improved spraying technologies, for both monitoring the spraying and coating the droplets, Varanasi says, “I think is fundamentally changing agriculture.”AgZen has recently raised $10 million in venture financing to support rapid commercial deployment of these technologies that can improve the control of chemical inputs into agriculture. “The knowledge we are gathering from every leaf, combined with our expertise in interfacial science and fluid mechanics, is giving us unparalleled insights into how chemicals are used and developed — and it’s clear that we can deliver value across the entire agrochemical supply chain,” Varanasi says  “Our mission is to use these technologies to deliver improved outcomes and reduced costs for the ag industry.”  More

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      in Energy

      Making solar projects cheaper and faster with portable factories

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      As the price of solar panels has plummeted in recent decades, installation costs have taken up a greater share of the technology’s overall price tag. The long installation process for solar farms is also emerging as a key bottleneck in the deployment of solar energy.Now the startup Charge Robotics is developing solar installation factories to speed up the process of building large-scale solar farms. The company’s factories are shipped to the site of utility solar projects, where equipment including tracks, mounting brackets, and panels are fed into the system and automatically assembled. A robotic vehicle autonomously puts the finished product — which amounts to a completed section of solar farm — in its final place.“We think of this as the Henry Ford moment for solar,” says CEO Banks Hunter ’15, who founded Charge Robotics with fellow MIT alumnus Max Justicz ’17. “We’re going from a very bespoke, hands on, manual installation process to something much more streamlined and set up for mass manufacturing. There are all kinds of benefits that come along with that, including consistency, quality, speed, cost, and safety.”Last year, solar energy accounted for 81 percent of new electric capacity in the U.S., and Hunter and Justicz see their factories as necessary for continued acceleration in the industry.The founders say they were met with skepticism when they first unveiled their plans. But in the beginning of last year, they deployed a prototype system that successfully built a solar farm with SOLV Energy, one of the largest solar installers in the U.S. Now, Charge has raised $22 million for its first commercial deployments later this year.From surgical robots to solar robotsWhile majoring in mechanical engineering at MIT, Hunter found plenty of excuses to build things. One such excuse was Course 2.009 (Product Engineering Processes), where he and his classmates built a smart watch for communication in remote areas.After graduation, Hunter worked for the MIT alumni-founded startups Shaper Tools and Vicarious Surgical. Vicarious Surgical is a medical robotics company that has raised more than $450 million to date. Hunter was the second employee and worked there for five years.“A lot of really hands on, project-based classes at MIT translated directly into my first roles coming out of school and set me up to be very independent and run large engineering projects,” Hunter says, “Course 2.009, in particular, was a big launch point for me. The founders of Vicarious Surgical got in touch with me through the 2.009 network.”As early as 2017, Hunter and Justicz, who majored in mechanical engineering and computer science, had discussed starting a company together. But they had to decide where to apply their broad engineering and product skillsets.“Both of us care a lot about climate change. We see climate change as the biggest problem impacting the greatest number of people on the planet,” Hunter says. “Our mentality was if we can build anything, we might as well build something that really matters.”In the process of cold calling hundreds of people in the energy industry, the founders decided solar was the future of energy production because its price was decreasing so quickly.“It’s becoming cheaper faster than any other form of energy production in human history,” Hunter says.When the founders began visiting construction sites for the large, utility-scale solar farms that make up the bulk of energy generation, it wasn’t hard to find the bottlenecks. The first site they traveled to was in the Mojave Desert in California. Hunter describes it as a massive dust bowl where thousands of workers spent months repeating tasks like moving material and assembling the same parts, over and over again.“The site had something like 2 million panels on it, and every single one was assembled and fastened the same way by hand,” Hunter says. “Max and I thought it was insane. There’s no way that can scale to transform the energy grid in a short window of time.”Hunter says he heard from each of the largest solar companies in the U.S. that their biggest limitation for scaling was labor shortages. The problem was slowing growth and killing projects.Hunter and Justicz founded Charge Robotics in 2021 to break through that bottleneck. Their first step was to order utility solar parts and assemble them by hand in their backyards.“From there, we came up with this portable assembly line that we could ship out to construction sites and then feed in the entire solar system, including the steel tracks, mounting brackets, fasteners, and the solar panels,” Hunter explains. “The assembly line robotically assembles all those pieces to produce completed solar bays, which are chunks of a solar farm.”

      Charge Robotics’ machine transports an autonomously assembled portion of solar farm to its final place in a solar farm.

      Credit: Courtesy of Charge Robotics

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      Each bay represents a 40-foot piece of the solar farm and weighs about 800 pounds. A robotic vehicle brings it to its final location in the field. Hunter says Charge’s system automates all mechanical installation except for the process of pile driving the first metal stakes into the ground.Charge’s assembly lines also have machine-vision systems that scan each part to ensure quality, and the systems work with the most common solar parts and panel sizes.From pilot to productWhen the founders started pitching their plans to investors and construction companies, people didn’t believe it was possible.“The initial feedback was basically, ‘This will never work,’” Hunter says. “But as soon as we took our first system out into the field and people saw it operating, they got much more excited and started believing it was real.”Since that first deployment, Charge’s team has been making its system faster and easier to operate. The company plans to set up its factories at project sites and run them in partnership with solar construction companies. The factories could even run alongside human workers.“With our system, people are operating robotic equipment remotely rather than putting in the screws themselves,” Hunter explains. “We can essentially deliver the assembled solar to customers. Their only responsibility is to deliver the materials and parts on big pallets that we feed into our system.”Hunter says multiple factories could be deployed at the same site and could also operate 24/7 to dramatically speed up projects.“We are hitting the limits of solar growth because these companies don’t have enough people,” Hunter says. “We can build much bigger sites much faster with the same number of people by just shipping out more of our factories. It’s a fundamentally new way of scaling solar energy.” More

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      in Energy

      MIT spinout Gradiant reduces companies’ water use and waste by billions of gallons each day

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      When it comes to water use, most of us think of the water we drink. But industrial uses for things like manufacturing account for billions of gallons of water each day. For instance, making a single iPhone, by one estimate, requires more than 3,000 gallons.Gradiant is working to reduce the world’s industrial water footprint. Founded by a team from MIT, Gradiant offers water recycling, treatment, and purification solutions to some of the largest companies on Earth, including Coca Cola, Tesla, and the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. By serving as an end-to-end water company, Gradiant says it helps companies reuse 2 billion gallons of water each day and saves another 2 billion gallons of fresh water from being withdrawn.The company’s mission is to preserve water for generations to come in the face of rising global demand.“We work on both ends of the water spectrum,” Gradiant co-founder and CEO Anurag Bajpayee SM ’08, PhD ’12 says. “We work with ultracontaminated water, and we can also provide ultrapure water for use in areas like chip fabrication. Our specialty is in the extreme water challenges that can’t be solved with traditional technologies.”For each customer, Gradiant builds tailored water treatment solutions that combine chemical treatments with membrane filtration and biological process technologies, leveraging a portfolio of patents to drastically cut water usage and waste.“Before Gradiant, 40 million liters of water would be used in the chip-making process. It would all be contaminated and treated, and maybe 30 percent would be reused,” explains Gradiant co-founder and COO Prakash Govindan PhD ’12. “We have the technology to recycle, in some cases, 99 percent of the water. Now, instead of consuming 40 million liters, chipmakers only need to consume 400,000 liters, which is a huge shift in the water footprint of that industry. And this is not just with semiconductors. We’ve done this in food and beverage, we’ve done this in renewable energy, we’ve done this in pharmaceutical drug production, and several other areas.”Learning the value of waterGovindan grew up in a part of India that experienced a years-long drought beginning when he was 10. Without tap water, one of Govindan’s chores was to haul water up the stairs of his apartment complex each time a truck delivered it.“However much water my brother and I could carry was how much we had for the week,” Govindan recalls. “I learned the value of water the hard way.”Govindan attended the Indian Institute of Technology as an undergraduate, and when he came to MIT for his PhD, he sought out the groups working on water challenges. He began working on a water treatment method called carrier gas extraction for his PhD under Gradiant co-founder and MIT Professor John Lienhard.Bajpayee also worked on water treatment methods at MIT, and after brief stints as postdocs at MIT, he and Govindan licensed their work and founded Gradiant.Carrier gas extraction became Gradiant’s first proprietary technology when the company launched in 2013. The founders began by treating wastewater created by oil and gas wells, landing their first partner in a Texas company. But Gradiant gradually expanded to solving water challenges in power generation, mining, textiles, and refineries. Then the founders noticed opportunities in industries like electronics, semiconductors, food and beverage, and pharmaceuticals. Today, oil and gas wastewater treatment makes up a small percentage of Gradiant’s work.As the company expanded, it added technologies to its portfolio, patenting new water treatment methods around reverse osmosis, selective contaminant extraction, and free radical oxidation. Gradiant has also created a digital system that uses AI to measure, predict, and control water treatment facilities.“The advantage Gradiant has over every other water company is that R&D is in our DNA,” Govindan says, noting Gradiant has a world-class research lab at its headquarters in Boston. “At MIT, we learned how to do cutting-edge technology development, and we never let go of that.”The founders compare their suite of technologies to LEGO bricks they can mix and match depending on a customer’s water needs. Gradiant has built more than 2,500 of these end-to-end systems for customers around the world.“Our customers aren’t water companies; they are industrial clients like semiconductor manufacturers, drug companies, and food and beverage companies,” Bajpayee says. “They aren’t about to start operating a water treatment plant. They look at us as their water partner who can take care of the whole water problem.”Continuing innovationThe founders say Gradiant has been roughly doubling its revenue each year over the last five years, and it’s continuing to add technologies to its platform. For instance, Gradiant recently developed a critical minerals recovery solution to extract materials like lithium and nickel from customers’ wastewater, which could expand access to critical materials essential to the production of batteries and other products.“If we can extract lithium from brine water in an environmentally and economically feasible way, the U.S. can meet all of its lithium needs from within the U.S.,” Bajpayee says. “What’s preventing large-scale extraction of lithium from brine is technology, and we believe what we have now deployed will open the floodgates for direct lithium extraction and completely revolutionized the industry.”The company has also validated a method for eliminating PFAS — so-called toxic “forever chemicals” — in a pilot project with a leading U.S. semiconductor manufacturer. In the near future, it hopes to bring that solution to municipal water treatment plants to protect cities.At the heart of Gradiant’s innovation is the founders’ belief that industrial activity doesn’t have to deplete one of the world’s most vital resources.“Ever since the industrial revolution, we’ve been taking from nature,” Bajpayee says. “By treating and recycling water, by reducing water consumption and making industry highly water efficient, we have this unique opportunity to turn the clock back and give nature water back. If that’s your driver, you can’t choose not to innovate.” More