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    Secretary of Energy Chris Wright ’85 visits MIT

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    U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright ’85 visited MIT on Monday, meeting Institute leaders, discussing energy innovation at a campus forum, viewing poster presentations from researchers supported through the MIT-GE Vernova Energy and Climate Alliance, and watching energy research demos in the lab where he used to work as a student. “I’ve always been in energy because I think it’s just far and away the world’s most important industry,” Wright said at the forum, which included a panel discussion with business leaders and a fireside chat with MIT Professor Ernest Moniz, who was the U.S. secretary of energy from 2013 to 2017. Wright added: “Not only is it by far the world’s most important industry, because it enables all the others, but it’s also a booming time right now. … It is an awesomely exciting time to be in energy.”Wright was greeted on campus by MIT President Sally Kornbluth, who also gave introductory remarks at the forum, held in MIT’s Samberg Center. While the Institute has added many research facilities and buildings since Wright was a student, Kornbluth observed, the core MIT ethos remains the same.“MIT is still MIT,” Kornbluth said. “It’s a community that rewards merit, boldness, and scientific rigor. And it’s a magnet for people with a drive to solve hard problems that matter in the real world, an enthusiasm for working with industry, and an ethic of national service.”When it comes to energy research, Kornbluth added, “MIT is developing transformational approaches to make American energy more secure, reliable, affordable, and clean — which in turn will strengthen both U.S. competitiveness and national security.”At the event, Wright, the 17th U.S. secretary of energy, engaged in a fireside chat with Moniz, the 13th U.S. secretary of energy, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics and Engineering Systems Post-Tenure, a special advisor to the MIT president, and the founding director of the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI). Wright began his remarks by reflecting on Kornbluth’s description of the Institute.“Merit, boldness, and scientific rigor,” Wright said. “That is MIT … to me. That hit me hard when I got here, and frankly, it’s a good part of the reason my life has gone the way it’s gone.”On energy topics, Wright emphasized the need for continued innovation in energy across a range of technologies, including fusion, geothermal, and more, while advocating for the benefits of vigorous market-based progress. Before becoming secretary of energy, Wright most recently served as founder and CEO of Liberty Energy. He also was the founder of Pinnacle Technologies, among other enterprises. Wright was confirmed as secretary by the U.S. Senate in February.Asked to name promising areas of technological development, Wright focused on three particular areas of interest. Citing artificial intelligence, he noted that the interest in it was “overwhelming,” with many possible applications. Regarding fusion energy, Wright said, “We are going to see meaningful breakthroughs.” And quantum computing, he added, was going to be a “game-changer” as well.Wright also emphasized the value of federal support for fundamental research, including projects in the national laboratories the Department of Energy oversees.“The 17 national labs we have in this country are absolute jewels. They are gems of this country,” Wright said. He later noted, “There are things, like this foundational research, that are just an essential part of our country and an essential part of our future.”Moniz asked Wright a range of questions in the fireside chat, while adding his own perspective at times about the many issues connected to energy abundance globally.“Climate, energy, security, equity, affordability, have to be recognized as one conversation, and not separate conversations,” Moniz said. “That’s what’s at stake in my view.”Wright’s appearance was part of the Energy Freedom Tour developed by the American Conservation Coalition (ACC), in coordination with the Hamm Institute for American Energy at Oklahoma State University. Later stops are planned for Stanford University and Texas A&M University.Ann Bluntzer Pullin, executive director of the Hamm Institute, gave remarks at the forum as well, noting the importance of making students aware of the energy industry and helping to “get them excited about the impact this career can make.” She also praised MIT’s advances in the field, adding, “This is where so many ideas were born and executed that have allowed America to really thrive in this energy abundance in our country that we have [had] for so long.”The forum also featured remarks from Roger Martella, chief corporate officer, chief sustainability officer, and head of government affairs at GE Vernova. In March, MIT and GE Vernova announced a new five-year joint program, the MIT-GE Vernova Energy and Climate Alliance, featuring research projects, education programs, and career opportunities for MIT students.“That’s what we’re about, electrification as the lifeblood of prosperity,” Martella said, describing GE Vernova’s work. “When we’re here at MIT we feel like we’re living history every moment when we’re walking down the halls, because no institution has [contributed] to innovation and technology more, doing it every single day to advance prosperity for all people around the world.”A panel discussion at the forum featured Wright speaking along with three MIT alumni who are active in the energy business: Carlos Araque ’01, SM ’02, CEO of Quaise Energy, a leading-edge firm in geothermal energy solutions; Bob Mumgaard SM ’15, PhD ’15, CEO of Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a leading fusion energy firm and an MIT spinout; and Milo Werner SM ’07, MBA ’07, a general partner at DCVC and expert in energy and climate investments. The panel was moderated by Chris Barnard, president of the ACC.Mumgaard noted that Commonwealth Fusion Systems launched in 2018 with “an explicit mission, working with MIT still today, of putting fusion onto an industrial trajectory,” although there is “plenty left to do, still, at that intersection of science, technology, innovation, and business.”Araque said he believes geothermal is “metric-by-metric” more powerful and profitable than many other forms of energy. “This is not a stop-gap,” he added. Quaise is currently developing its first power-plant-scale facility in the U.S.Werner noted that the process of useful innovation only begins in the lab; making an advance commercially viable is the critical next step. The biggest impact “is not in the breakthrough,” she said. “It’s not in the discovery that you make in the lab. It’s actually once you’ve built a billion of them. That’s when you actually change the world.”After the forum, Wright took a tour of multiple research centers on the MIT campus, including the MIT.nano facility, guided by Vladimir Bulović, faculty director of MIT.nano and the Fariborz Maseeh Chair in Emerging Technology.At MIT.nano, Bulović showed Wright the Titan Krios G3i, a nearly room-size electron microscope that enables researchers to take a high-resolution look at the structure of tiny particles, with a variety of research applications. The tour also viewed one of MIT.nano’s cleanrooms, a shared fabrication facility used by both MIT researchers and users outside of MIT, including many in industry.On a different note, in an MIT.nano hallway, Bulović showed Wright the One.MIT mosaics, which contain the names of all MIT students and employees past and present — well over 300,000 in all. First etched on a 6-inch wafer, the mosaics are a visual demonstration of the power of nanotechnology — and a searchable display, so Bulović located Wright’s name, which is printed near the chin of one of the figures on the MIT seal.The tour ended in the basement of Building 10, in what is now the refurbished Grainger Energy Machine Facility, where Wright used to conduct research. After earning his undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering, Wright entered into graduate studies at MIT before leaving, as he recounted at the forum, to pursue business opportunities.At the lab, Wright met with David Perreault, the Ford Foundation Professor of Engineering; and Steven Leeb, the Emanuel Landsman Professor, a specialist in power systems. A half-dozen MIT graduate students gave Wright demos of their research projects, all involving energy-generation innovations. Wright readily engaged with all the graduate students about the technologies and the parameters of the devices, and asked the students about their own careers.Wright was accompanied on the lab tour by MIT Provost Anantha Chandrakasan, himself an expert in developing energy-efficient systems. Chandrakasan delivered closing remarks at the forum in the Samberg Center, noting MIT’s “strong partnership with the Department of Energy” and its “long and proud history of engaging industry.”As such, Chandrakasan said, MIT has a “role as a resource in service of the nation, so please don’t hesitate to call on us.” More

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      Palladium filters could enable cheaper, more efficient generation of hydrogen fuel

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      Palladium is one of the keys to jump-starting a hydrogen-based energy economy. The silvery metal is a natural gatekeeper against every gas except hydrogen, which it readily lets through. For its exceptional selectivity, palladium is considered one of the most effective materials at filtering gas mixtures to produce pure hydrogen.Today, palladium-based membranes are used at commercial scale to provide pure hydrogen for semiconductor manufacturing, food processing, and fertilizer production, among other applications in which the membranes operate at modest temperatures. If palladium membranes get much hotter than around 800 kelvins, they can break down.Now, MIT engineers have developed a new palladium membrane that remains resilient at much higher temperatures. Rather than being made as a continuous film, as most membranes are, the new design is made from palladium that is deposited as “plugs” into the pores of an underlying supporting material. At high temperatures, the snug-fitting plugs remain stable and continue separating out hydrogen, rather than degrading as a surface film would.The thermally stable design opens opportunities for membranes to be used in hydrogen-fuel-generating technologies such as compact steam methane reforming and ammonia cracking — technologies that are designed to operate at much higher temperatures to produce hydrogen for zero-carbon-emitting fuel and electricity.“With further work on scaling and validating performance under realistic industrial feeds, the design could represent a promising route toward practical membranes for high-temperature hydrogen production,” says Lohyun Kim PhD ’24, a former graduate student in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering.Kim and his colleagues report details of the new membrane in a study appearing today in the journal Advanced Functional Materials. The study’s co-authors are Randall Field, director of research at the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI); former MIT chemical engineering graduate student Chun Man Chow PhD ’23; Rohit Karnik, the Jameel Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT and the director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS); and Aaron Persad, a former MIT research scientist in mechanical engineering who is now an assistant professor at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore.Compact futureThe team’s new design came out of a MITEI project related to fusion energy. Future fusion power plants, such as the one MIT spinout Commonwealth Fusion Systems is designing, will involve circulating hydrogen isotopes of deuterium and tritium at extremely high temperatures to produce energy from the isotopes’ fusing. The reactions inevitably produce other gases that will have to be separated, and the hydrogen isotopes will be recirculated into the main reactor for further fusion.Similar issues arise in a number of other processes for producing hydrogen, where gases must be separated and recirculated back into a reactor. Concepts for such recirculating systems would require first cooling down the gas before it can pass through hydrogen-separating membranes — an expensive and energy-intensive step that would involve additional machinery and hardware.“One of the questions we were thinking about is: Can we develop membranes which could be as close to the reactor as possible, and operate at higher temperatures, so we don’t have to pull out the gas and cool it down first?” Karnik says. “It would enable more energy-efficient, and therefore cheaper and compact, fusion systems.”The researchers looked for ways to improve the temperature resistance of palladium membranes. Palladium is the most effective metal used today to separate hydrogen from a variety of gas mixtures. It naturally attracts hydrogen molecules (H2) to its surface, where the metal’s electrons interact with and weaken the molecule’s bonds, causing H2 to temporarily break apart into its respective atoms. The individual atoms then diffuse through the metal and join back up on the other side as pure hydrogen.Palladium is highly effective at permeating hydrogen, and only hydrogen, from streams of various gases. But conventional membranes typically can operate at temperatures of up to 800 kelvins before the film starts to form holes or clumps up into droplets, allowing other gases to flow through.Plugging inKarnik, Kim and their colleagues took a different design approach. They observed that at high temperatures, palladium will start to shrink up. In engineering terms, the material is acting to reduce surface energy. To do this, palladium, and most other materials and even water, will pull apart and form droplets with the smallest surface energy. The lower the surface energy, the more stable the material can be against further heating.This gave the team an idea: If a supporting material’s pores could be “plugged” with deposits of palladium — essentially already forming a droplet with the lowest surface energy — the tight quarters might substantially increase palladium’s heat tolerance while preserving the membrane’s selectivity for hydrogen.To test this idea, they fabricated small chip-sized samples of membrane using a porous silica supporting layer (each pore measuring about half a micron wide), onto which they deposited a very thin layer of palladium. They applied techniques to essentially grow the palladium into the pores, and polished down the surface to remove the palladium layer and leave palladium only inside the pores.They then placed samples in a custom-built apparatus in which they flowed hydrogen-containing gas of various mixtures and temperatures to test its separation performance. The membranes remained stable and continued to separate hydrogen from other gases even after experiencing temperatures of up to 1,000 kelvins for over 100 hours — a significant improvement over conventional film-based membranes.“The use of palladium film membranes are generally limited to below around 800 kelvins, at which point they degrade,” Kim says. “Our plug design therefore extends palladium’s effective heat resilience by roughly at least 200 kelvins and maintains integrity far longer under extreme conditions.”These conditions are within the range of hydrogen-generating technologies such as steam methane reforming and ammonia cracking.Steam methane reforming is an established process that has required complex, energy-intensive systems to preprocess methane to a form where pure hydrogen can be extracted. Such preprocessing steps could be replaced with a compact “membrane reactor,” through which a methane gas would directly flow, and the membrane inside would filter out pure hydrogen. Such reactors would significantly cut down the size, complexity, and cost of producing hydrogen from steam methane reforming, and Kim estimates a membrane would have to work reliably in temperatures of up to nearly 1,000 kelvins. The team’s new membrane could work well within such conditions.Ammonia cracking is another way to produce hydrogen, by “cracking” or breaking apart ammonia. As ammonia is very stable in liquid form, scientists envision that it could be used as a carrier for hydrogen and be safely transported to a hydrogen fuel station, where ammonia could be fed into a membrane reactor that again pulls out hydrogen and pumps it directly into a fuel cell vehicle. Ammonia cracking is still largely in pilot and demonstration stages, and Kim says any membrane in an ammonia cracking reactor would likely operate at temperatures of around 800 kelvins — within the range of the group’s new plug-based design.Karnik emphasizes that their results are just a start. Adopting the membrane into working reactors will require further development and testing to ensure it remains reliable over much longer periods of time.“We showed that instead of making a film, if you make discretized nanostructures you can get much more thermally stable membranes,” Karnik says. “It provides a pathway for designing membranes for extreme temperatures, with the added possibility of using smaller amounts of expensive palladium, toward making hydrogen production more efficient and affordable. There is potential there.”This work was supported by Eni S.p.A. via the MIT Energy Initiative. More

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      J-WAFS welcomes Daniela Giardina as new executive director

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      The Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) announced that Daniela Giardina has been named the new J-WAFS executive director. Giardina stepped into the role at the start of the fall semester, replacing founding executive director Renee J. Robins ’83, who is retiring after leading the program since its launch in 2014.“Daniela brings a deep background in water and food security, along with excellent management and leadership skills,” says Robins. “Since I first met her nearly 10 years ago, I have been impressed with her commitment to working on global water and food challenges through research and innovation. I am so happy to know that I will be leaving J-WAFS in her experienced and capable hands.”A decade of impactJ-WAFS fuels research, innovation, and collaboration to solve global water and food systems challenges. The mission of J-WAFS is to ensure safe and resilient supplies of water and food to meet the local and global needs of a dramatically growing population on a rapidly changing planet. J-WAFS funding opportunities are open to researchers in every MIT department, lab, and center, spanning all disciplines. Supported research projects include those involving engineering, science, technology, business, social science, economics, architecture, urban planning, and more. J-WAFS research and related activities include early-stage projects, sponsored research, commercialization efforts, student activities and mentorship, events that convene local and global experts, and international-scale collaborations.The global water, food, and climate emergency makes J-WAFS’ work both timely and urgent. J-WAFS-funded researchers are achieving tangible, real-time solutions and results. Since its inception, J-WAFS has distributed nearly $26 million in grants, fellowships, and awards to the MIT community, supporting roughly 10 percent of MIT’s faculty and 300 students, postdocs, and research staff from 40 MIT departments, labs, and centers. J-WAFS grants have also helped researchers launch 13 startups and receive over $25 million in follow-on funding.Giardina joins J-WAFS at an exciting time in the program’s history; in the spring, J-WAFS celebrated 10 years of supporting water and food research at MIT. The milestone was commemorated at a special event attended by MIT leadership, researchers, students, staff, donors, and others in the J-WAFS community. As J-WAFS enters its second decade, interest and opportunities for water and food research continue to grow. “I am truly honored to join J-WAFS at such a pivotal moment,” Giardina says.Putting research into real-world practiceGiardina has nearly two decades of experience working with nongovernmental organizations and research institutions on humanitarian and development projects. Her work has taken her to Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Central and Southeast Asia, where she has focused on water and food security projects. She has conducted technical trainings and assessments, and managed projects from design to implementation, including monitoring and evaluation.Giardina comes to MIT from Oxfam America, where she directed disaster risk reduction and climate resilience initiatives, working on approaches to strengthen local leadership, community-based disaster risk reduction, and anticipatory action. Her role at Oxfam required her to oversee multimillion-dollar initiatives, supervising international teams, managing complex donor portfolios, and ensuring rigorous monitoring across programs. She connected hands-on research with community-oriented implementation, for example, by partnering with MIT’s D-Lab to launch an innovation lab in rural El Salvador. Her experience will help guide J-WAFS as it pursues impactful research that will make a difference on the ground.Beyond program delivery, Giardina has played a strategic leadership role in shaping Oxfam’s global disaster risk reduction strategy and representing the organization at high-level U.N. and academic forums. She is multilingual and adept at building partnerships across cultures, having worked with governments, funders, and community-based organizations to strengthen resilience and advance equitable access to water and food.Giardina holds a PhD in sustainable development from the University of Brescia in Italy. She also holds a master’s degree in environmental engineering from the Politecnico of Milan in Italy and is a chartered engineer since 2005 (equivalent to a professional engineering license in the United States). She also serves as vice chair of the Boston Network for International Development, a nonprofit that connects and strengthens Boston’s global development community.“I have seen first-hand how climate change, misuse of resources, and inequality are undermining water and food security around the globe,” says Giardina. “What particularly excites me about J-WAFS is its interdisciplinary approach in facilitating meaningful partnerships to solve many of these problems through research and innovation. I am eager to help expand J-WAFS’ impact by strengthening existing programs, developing new initiatives, and building strategic partnerships that translate MIT’s groundbreaking research into real-world solutions,” she adds.A legacy of leadershipRenee Robins will retire with over 23 years of service to MIT. Years before joining the staff, she graduated from MIT with dual bachelor’s degrees in both biology and humanities/anthropology. She then went on to earn a master’s degree in public policy from Carnegie Mellon University. In 1998, she came back to MIT to serve in various roles across campus, including with the Cambridge MIT Institute, the MIT Portugal Program, the Mexico City Program, the Program on Emerging Technologies, and the Technology and Policy Program. She also worked at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she managed a $15 million research program as it scaled from implementation in one public school district to 59 schools in seven districts across North Carolina.In late 2014, Robins joined J-WAFS as its founding executive director, playing a pivotal role in building it from the ground up and expanding the team to six full-time professionals. She worked closely with J-WAFS founding director Professor John H. Lienhard V to develop and implement funding initiatives, develop, and shepherd corporate-sponsored research partnerships, and mentor students in the Water Club and Food and Agriculture Club, as well as numerous other students. Throughout the years, Robins has inspired a diverse range of researchers to consider how their capabilities and expertise can be applied to water and food challenges. Perhaps most importantly, her leadership has helped cultivate a vibrant community, bringing together faculty, students, and research staff to be exposed to unfamiliar problems and new methodologies, to explore how their expertise might be applied, to learn from one another, and to collaborate.At the J-WAFS 10th anniversary event in May, Robins noted, “it has been a true privilege to work alongside John Lienhard, our dedicated staff, and so many others. It’s been particularly rewarding to see the growth of an MIT network of water and food researchers that J-WAFS has nurtured, which grew out of those few individuals who saw themselves to be working in solitude on these critical challenges.”Lienhard also spoke, thanking Robins by saying she “was my primary partner in building J-WAFS and [she is] a strong leader and strategic thinker.”Not only is Robins a respected leader, she is also a dear friend to so many at MIT and beyond. In 2021, she was recognized for her outstanding leadership and commitment to J-WAFS and the Institute with an MIT Infinite Mile Award in the area of the Offices of the Provost and Vice President for Research.Outside of MIT, Robins has served on the Board of Trustees for the International Honors Program — a comparative multi-site study abroad program, where she previously studied comparative culture and anthropology in seven countries around the world. Robins has also acted as an independent consultant, including work on program design and strategy around the launch of the Université Mohammed VI Polytechnique in Morocco.Continuing the tradition of excellenceGiardina will report to J-WAFS director Rohit Karnik, the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Water and Food in the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering. Karnik was named the director of J-WAFS in January, succeeding John Lienhard, who retired earlier this year.As executive director, Giardina will be instrumental in driving J-WAFS’ mission and impact. She will work with Karnik to help shape J-WAFS’ programs, long-term strategy, and goals. She will also be responsible for supervising J-WAFS staff, managing grant administration, and overseeing and advising on financial decisions.“I am very grateful to John and Renee, who have helped to establish J-WAFS as the Institute’s preeminent program for water and food research and significantly expanded MIT’s research efforts and impact in the water and food space,” says Karnik. “I am confident that with Daniela as executive director, J-WAFS will continue in the tradition of excellence that Renee and John put into place, as we move into the program’s second decade,” he notes.Giardina adds, “I am inspired by the lab’s legacy of Renee Robins and Professor Lienhard, and I look forward to working with Professor Karnik and the J-WAFS staff.” More

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      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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      Creeping crystals: Scientists observe “salt creep” at the single-crystal scale

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      Salt creeping, a phenomenon that occurs in both natural and industrial processes, describes the collection and migration of salt crystals from evaporating solutions onto surfaces. Once they start collecting, the crystals climb, spreading away from the solution. This creeping behavior, according to researchers, can cause damage or be harnessed for good, depending on the context. New research published June 30 in the journal Langmuir is the first to show salt creeping at a single-crystal scale and beneath a liquid’s meniscus.“The work not only explains how salt creeping begins, but why it begins and when it does,” says Joseph Phelim Mooney, a postdoc in the MIT Device Research Laboratory and one of the authors of the new study. “We hope this level of insight helps others, whether they’re tackling water scarcity, preserving ancient murals, or designing longer-lasting infrastructure.”The work is the first to directly visualize how salt crystals grow and interact with surfaces underneath a liquid meniscus, something that’s been theorized for decades but never actually imaged or confirmed at this level, and it offers fundamental insights that could impact a wide range of fields — from mineral extraction and desalination to anti-fouling coatings, membrane design for separation science, and even art conservation, where salt damage is a major threat to heritage materials.In civil engineering applications, for example, the research can help explain why and when salt crystals start growing across surfaces like concrete, stone, or building materials. “These crystals can exert pressure and cause cracking or flaking, reducing the long-term durability of structures,” says Mooney. “By pinpointing the moment when salt begins to creep, engineers can better design protective coatings or drainage systems to prevent this form of degradation.”For a field like art conservation, where salt can be devastating to murals, frescoes, and ancient artifacts, often forming beneath the surface before visible damage appears, the work can help identify the exact conditions that cause salt to start moving and spreading, allowing conservators to act earlier and more precisely to protect heritage objects.The work began during Mooney’s Marie Curie Fellowship at MIT. “I was focused on improving desalination systems and quickly ran into [salt buildup as] a major roadblock,” he says. “[Salt] was everywhere, coating surfaces, clogging flow paths, and undermining the efficiency of our designs. I realized we didn’t fully understand how or why salt starts creeping across surfaces in the first place.”That experience led Mooney to team up with colleagues to dig into the fundamentals of salt crystallization at the air–liquid–solid interface. “We wanted to zoom in, to really see the moment salt begins to move, so we turned to in situ X-ray microscopy,” he says. “What we found gave us a whole new way to think about surface fouling, material degradation, and controlled crystallization.”The new research may, in fact, allow better control of a crystallization processes required to remove salt from water in zero-liquid discharge systems. It can also be used to explain how and when scaling happens on equipment surfaces, and may support emerging climate technologies that depend on smart control of evaporation and crystallization.The work also supports mineral and salt extraction applications, where salt creeping can be both a bottleneck and an opportunity. In these applications, Mooney says, “by understanding the precise physics of salt formation at surfaces, operators can optimize crystal growth, improving recovery rates and reducing material losses.”Mooney’s co-authors on the paper include fellow MIT Device Lab researchers Omer Refet Caylan, Bachir El Fil (now an associate professor at Georgia Tech), and Lenan Zhang (now an associate professor at Cornell University); Jeff Punch and Vanessa Egan of the University of Limerick; and Jintong Gao of Cornell.The research was conducted using in situ X-ray microscopy. Mooney says the team’s big realization moment occurred when they were able to observe a single salt crystal pinning itself to the surface, which kicked off a cascading chain reaction of growth.“People had speculated about this, but we captured it on X-ray for the first time. It felt like watching the microscopic moment where everything tips, the ignition points of a self-propagating process,” says Mooney. “Even more surprising was what followed: The salt crystal didn’t just grow passively to fill the available space. It pierced through the liquid-air interface and reshaped the meniscus itself, setting up the perfect conditions for the next crystal. That subtle, recursive mechanism had never been visually documented before — and seeing it play out in real time completely changed how we thought about salt crystallization.”The paper, “In Situ X-ray Microscopy Unraveling the Onset of Salt Creeping at a Single-Crystal Level,” is available now in the journal Langmuir. Research was conducted in MIT.nano.  More

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      in Energy

      Evelyn Wang: A new energy source at MIT

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      Evelyn Wang ’00 knows a few things about engineering solutions to hard problems. After all, she invented a way to pull water out of thin air.Now, Wang is applying that problem-solving experience — and a deep, enduring sense of optimism — toward the critical issue of climate change, to strengthen the American energy economy and ensure resilience for all.Wang, a mechanical engineering professor by trade, began work this spring as MIT’s first vice president for energy and climate, overseeing the Institute’s expanding work on climate change. That means broadening the Institute’s already-wide research portfolio, scaling up existing innovations, seeking new breakthroughs, and channeling campus community input to drive work forward.“MIT has the potential to do so much, when we know that climate, energy, and resilience are paramount to events happening around us every day,” says Wang, who is also the Ford Professor of Engineering at MIT. “There’s no better place than MIT to come up with the transformational solutions that can help shape our world.”That also means developing partnerships with corporate allies, startups, government, communities, and other organizations. Tackling climate change, Wang says, “requires a lot of partnerships. It’s not an MIT-only endeavor. We’re going to have to collaborate with other institutions and think about where industry can help us deploy and scale so the impact can be greater.”She adds: “The more partnerships we have, the more understanding we have of the best pathways to make progress in difficult areas.”From MIT to ARPA-EAn MIT faculty member since 2007, Wang leads the Device Research Lab. Along with collaborators, she identifies new materials and optimizations based on heat and mass transport processes that unlock the creation of leading-edge innovations. Her development of the device that extracts water from even very dry air led Foreign Policy Magazine to name her its 2017 Global ReThinker, and she won the 2018 Eighth Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water.Her research also extends to other areas such as energy and desalination research. In 2016, Wang and several colleagues announced a device based on nanophotonic crystals with the potential to double the amount of power produced by a given area of solar panels, which led to one of her graduate researchers on the project to co-found the startup Antora Energy. More recently, Wang and colleagues developed an aerogel that improves window insulation, now being commercialized through her former graduate students in a startup, AeroShield.Wang also spent two years recently as director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), which supports early-stage R&D on energy generation, storage, and use.  Returning to MIT, she began her work as vice president for energy and climate in April, engaging with researchers, holding community workshops, and planning to build partnerships.“I’ve been energized coming back to the Institute, given the talented students, the faculty, the staff. It’s invigorating to be back in this community,” Wang says. “People are passionate, excited, and mission-driven, and that’s the energy we need to make a big impact in the world.”Wang is also working to help align the Institute’s many existing climate efforts. This includes the Climate Project at MIT, an Institute-wide presidential initiative announced in 2024, which aims to accelerate and scale up climate solutions while generating new tools and policy proposals. All told, about 300 MIT faculty conduct research related to climate issues in one form or another.“The fact that there are so many faculty working on climate is astounding,” Wang says. “Everyone’s doing exciting work, but how can we leverage our unique strengths to create something bigger than the sum of its parts? That’s what I’m working toward. We’ve spun out so many technologies. How do we do more of that? How do we do that faster, and in a way so the world will feel the impact?”A deep connection to campus — and strong sense of optimismUnderstanding MIT is one of Wang’s strengths, given that she has spent over two decades at the Institute.Wang earned her undergraduate degree from MIT in mechanical engineering, and her MS and PhD in mechanical engineering from Stanford University. She has held several chaired faculty positions at MIT. In 2008, Wang was named the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Assistant Professor; in 2015, she was named the Gail E. Kendall Professor; and in 2021, she became the Ford Professor of Engineering. Wang served as head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering from 2018 through 2022.As it happens, Wang’s parents, Kang and Edith, met as graduate students at the Institute. Her father, an electrical engineer, became a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles. Wang also met her husband at MIT, and both of her brothers graduated from the Institute.Along with her deep institutional knowledge, administrative experience, and track record as an innovator, Wang is bringing several other things to her new role as vice president for climate: a sense of urgency about the issue, coupled with a continual sense of optimism that innovators can meet society’s needs.“I think optimism can make a difference, and is great to have in the midst of collective challenge,” Wang says. “We’re such a mission-driven university, and people come here to solve real-world problems.”That hopeful approach is why Wang describes the work as not only as a challenge but also a generational opportunity. “We have the chance to design the world we want,” she says, “one that’s cleaner, more sustainable and more resilient. This future is ours to shape and build together.”Wang thinks MIT contains many examples of world-shaping progress, She cites MIT’s announcement this month of the creation of the Schmidt Laboratory for Materials in Nuclear Technologies, at the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion center, to conduct research on next-generation materials that could help enable the construction of fusion power plants. Another example Wang references is MIT research earlier this year on developing clean ammonia, a way to make the world’s most widely-produced chemical with drastically-reduced greenhouse gas emissions.“Those solutions could be breakthroughs,” Wang says. “Those are the kinds of things that give us optimism. There’s still a lot of research to be done, but it suggests the potential of what our world can be.”Optimism: There’s that word again.“Optimism is the only way to go,” Wang says. “Yes, the world is challenged. But this is where MIT’s strengths — in research, innovation, and education — can bring optimism to the table.” More

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      in Environment

      Merging AI and underwater photography to reveal hidden ocean worlds

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      In the Northeastern United States, the Gulf of Maine represents one of the most biologically diverse marine ecosystems on the planet — home to whales, sharks, jellyfish, herring, plankton, and hundreds of other species. But even as this ecosystem supports rich biodiversity, it is undergoing rapid environmental change. The Gulf of Maine is warming faster than 99 percent of the world’s oceans, with consequences that are still unfolding.A new research initiative developing at MIT Sea Grant, called LOBSTgER — short for Learning Oceanic Bioecological Systems Through Generative Representations — brings together artificial intelligence and underwater photography to document the ocean life left vulnerable to these changes and share them with the public in new visual ways. Co-led by underwater photographer and visiting artist at MIT Sea Grant Keith Ellenbogen and MIT mechanical engineering PhD student Andreas Mentzelopoulos, the project explores how generative AI can expand scientific storytelling by building on field-based photographic data.Just as the 19th-century camera transformed our ability to document and reveal the natural world — capturing life with unprecedented detail and bringing distant or hidden environments into view — generative AI marks a new frontier in visual storytelling. Like early photography, AI opens a creative and conceptual space, challenging how we define authenticity and how we communicate scientific and artistic perspectives. In the LOBSTgER project, generative models are trained exclusively on a curated library of Ellenbogen’s original underwater photographs — each image crafted with artistic intent, technical precision, accurate species identification, and clear geographic context. By building a high-quality dataset grounded in real-world observations, the project ensures that the resulting imagery maintains both visual integrity and ecological relevance. In addition, LOBSTgER’s models are built using custom code developed by Mentzelopoulos to protect the process and outputs from any potential biases from external data or models. LOBSTgER’s generative AI builds upon real photography, expanding the researchers’ visual vocabulary to deepen the public’s connection to the natural world.

      This ocean sunfish (Mola mola) image was generated by LOBSTgER’s unconditional models.

      AI-generated image: Keith Ellenbogen, Andreas Mentzelopoulos, and LOBSTgER.

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      At its heart, LOBSTgER operates at the intersection of art, science, and technology. The project draws from the visual language of photography, the observational rigor of marine science, and the computational power of generative AI. By uniting these disciplines, the team is not only developing new ways to visualize ocean life — they are also reimagining how environmental stories can be told. This integrative approach makes LOBSTgER both a research tool and a creative experiment — one that reflects MIT’s long-standing tradition of interdisciplinary innovation.Underwater photography in New England’s coastal waters is notoriously difficult. Limited visibility, swirling sediment, bubbles, and the unpredictable movement of marine life all pose constant challenges. For the past several years, Ellenbogen has navigated these challenges and is building a comprehensive record of the region’s biodiversity through the project, Space to Sea: Visualizing New England’s Ocean Wilderness. This large dataset of underwater images provides the foundation for training LOBSTgER’s generative AI models. The images span diverse angles, lighting conditions, and animal behaviors, resulting in a visual archive that is both artistically striking and biologically accurate.

      Image synthesis via reverse diffusion: This short video shows the de-noising trajectory from Gaussian latent noise to photorealistic output using LOBSTgER’s unconditional models. Iterative de-noising requires 1,000 forward passes through the trained neural network.Video: Keith Ellenbogen and Andreas Mentzelopoulos / MIT Sea Grant

      LOBSTgER’s custom diffusion models are trained to replicate not only the biodiversity Ellenbogen documents, but also the artistic style he uses to capture it. By learning from thousands of real underwater images, the models internalize fine-grained details such as natural lighting gradients, species-specific coloration, and even the atmospheric texture created by suspended particles and refracted sunlight. The result is imagery that not only appears visually accurate, but also feels immersive and moving.The models can both generate new, synthetic, but scientifically accurate images unconditionally (i.e., requiring no user input/guidance), and enhance real photographs conditionally (i.e., image-to-image generation). By integrating AI into the photographic workflow, Ellenbogen will be able to use these tools to recover detail in turbid water, adjust lighting to emphasize key subjects, or even simulate scenes that would be nearly impossible to capture in the field. The team also believes this approach may benefit other underwater photographers and image editors facing similar challenges. This hybrid method is designed to accelerate the curation process and enable storytellers to construct a more complete and coherent visual narrative of life beneath the surface.

      Left: Enhanced image of an American lobster using LOBSTgER’s image-to-image models. Right: Original image.

      Left: AI genertated image by Keith Ellenbogen, Andreas Mentzelopoulos, and LOBSTgER. Right: Keith Ellenbogen

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      In one key series, Ellenbogen captured high-resolution images of lion’s mane jellyfish, blue sharks, American lobsters, and ocean sunfish (Mola mola) while free diving in coastal waters. “Getting a high-quality dataset is not easy,” Ellenbogen says. “It requires multiple dives, missed opportunities, and unpredictable conditions. But these challenges are part of what makes underwater documentation both difficult and rewarding.”Mentzelopoulos has developed original code to train a family of latent diffusion models for LOBSTgER grounded on Ellenbogen’s images. Developing such models requires a high level of technical expertise, and training models from scratch is a complex process demanding hundreds of hours of computation and meticulous hyperparameter tuning.The project reflects a parallel process: field documentation through photography and model development through iterative training. Ellenbogen works in the field, capturing rare and fleeting encounters with marine animals; Mentzelopoulos works in the lab, translating those moments into machine-learning contexts that can extend and reinterpret the visual language of the ocean.“The goal isn’t to replace photography,” Mentzelopoulos says. “It’s to build on and complement it — making the invisible visible, and helping people see environmental complexity in a way that resonates both emotionally and intellectually. Our models aim to capture not just biological realism, but the emotional charge that can drive real-world engagement and action.”LOBSTgER points to a hybrid future that merges direct observation with technological interpretation. The team’s long-term goal is to develop a comprehensive model that can visualize a wide range of species found in the Gulf of Maine and, eventually, apply similar methods to marine ecosystems around the world.The researchers suggest that photography and generative AI form a continuum, rather than a conflict. Photography captures what is — the texture, light, and animal behavior during actual encounters — while AI extends that vision beyond what is seen, toward what could be understood, inferred, or imagined based on scientific data and artistic vision. Together, they offer a powerful framework for communicating science through image-making.In a region where ecosystems are changing rapidly, the act of visualizing becomes more than just documentation. It becomes a tool for awareness, engagement, and, ultimately, conservation. LOBSTgER is still in its infancy, and the team looks forward to sharing more discoveries, images, and insights as the project evolves.Answer from the lead image: The left image was generated using using LOBSTgER’s unconditional models and the right image is real.For more information, contact Keith Ellenbogen and Andreas Mentzelopoulos. More

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      in Environment

      Window-sized device taps the air for safe drinking water

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      Today, 2.2 billion people in the world lack access to safe drinking water. In the United States, more than 46 million people experience water insecurity, living with either no running water or water that is unsafe to drink. The increasing need for drinking water is stretching traditional resources such as rivers, lakes, and reservoirs.To improve access to safe and affordable drinking water, MIT engineers are tapping into an unconventional source: the air. The Earth’s atmosphere contains millions of billions of gallons of water in the form of vapor. If this vapor can be efficiently captured and condensed, it could supply clean drinking water in places where traditional water resources are inaccessible.With that goal in mind, the MIT team has developed and tested a new atmospheric water harvester and shown that it efficiently captures water vapor and produces safe drinking water across a range of relative humidities, including dry desert air.The new device is a black, window-sized vertical panel, made from a water-absorbent hydrogel material, enclosed in a glass chamber coated with a cooling layer. The hydrogel resembles black bubble wrap, with small dome-shaped structures that swell when the hydrogel soaks up water vapor. When the captured vapor evaporates, the domes shrink back down in an origami-like transformation. The evaporated vapor then condenses on the the glass, where it can flow down and out through a tube, as clean and drinkable water.

      MIT engineers test a passive water harvester in Death Valley, CA. The window-sized setup is made from an origami-inspired hydrogel material (black) that absorbs water from the air, and releases it into tubes where researchers can collect the moisture as pure drinking water.

      Credit: Courtesy of the researchers; MIT News

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      The system runs entirely on its own, without a power source, unlike other designs that require batteries, solar panels, or electricity from the grid. The team ran the device for over a week in Death Valley, California — the driest region in North America. Even in very low-humidity conditions, the device squeezed drinking water from the air at rates of up to 160 milliliters (about two-thirds of a cup) per day.The team estimates that multiple vertical panels, set up in a small array, could passively supply a household with drinking water, even in arid desert environments. What’s more, the system’s water production should increase with humidity, supplying drinking water in temperate and tropical climates.“We have built a meter-scale device that we hope to deploy in resource-limited regions, where even a solar cell is not very accessible,” says Xuanhe Zhao, the Uncas and Helen Whitaker Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT. “It’s a test of feasibility in scaling up this water harvesting technology. Now people can build it even larger, or make it into parallel panels, to supply drinking water to people and achieve real impact.”Zhao and his colleagues present the details of the new water harvesting design in a paper appearing today in the journal Nature Water. The study’s lead author is former MIT postdoc “Will” Chang Liu, who is currently an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore (NUS). MIT co-authors include Xiao-Yun Yan, Shucong Li, and Bolei Deng, along with collaborators from multiple other institutions.Carrying capacityHydrogels are soft, porous materials that are made mainly from water and a microscopic network of interconnecting polymer fibers. Zhao’s group at MIT has primarily explored the use of hydrogels in biomedical applications, including adhesive coatings for medical implants, soft and flexible electrodes, and noninvasive imaging stickers.“Through our work with soft materials, one property we know very well is the way hydrogel is very good at absorbing water from air,” Zhao says.Researchers are exploring a number of ways to harvest water vapor for drinking water. Among the most efficient so far are devices made from metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs — ultra-porous materials that have also been shown to capture water from dry desert air. But the MOFs do not swell or stretch when absorbing water, and are limited in vapor-carrying capacity.Water from airThe group’s new hydrogel-based water harvester addresses another key problem in similar designs. Other groups have designed water harvesters out of micro- or nano-porous hydrogels. But the water produced from these designs can be salty, requiring additional filtering. Salt is a naturally absorbent material, and researchers embed salts — typically, lithium chloride — in hydrogel to increase the material’s water absorption. The drawback, however, is that this salt can leak out with the water when it is eventually collected.The team’s new design significantly limits salt leakage. Within the hydrogel itself, they included an extra ingredient: glycerol, a liquid compound that naturally stabilizes salt, keeping it within the gel rather than letting it crystallize and leak out with the water. The hydrogel itself has a microstructure that lacks nanoscale pores, which further prevents salt from escaping the material. The salt levels in the water they collected were below the standard threshold for safe drinking water, and significantly below the levels produced by many other hydrogel-based designs.In addition to tuning the hydrogel’s composition, the researchers made improvements to its form. Rather than keeping the gel as a flat sheet, they molded it into a pattern of small domes resembling bubble wrap, that act to increase the gel’s surface area, along with the amount of water vapor it can absorb.The researchers fabricated a half-square-meter of hydrogel and encased the material in a window-like glass chamber. They coated the exterior of the chamber with a special polymer film, which helps to cool the glass and stimulates any water vapor in the hydrogel to evaporate and condense onto the glass. They installed a simple tubing system to collect the water as it flows down the glass.In November 2023, the team traveled to Death Valley, California, and set up the device as a vertical panel. Over seven days, they took measurements as the hydrogel absorbed water vapor during the night (the time of day when water vapor in the desert is highest). In the daytime, with help from the sun, the harvested water evaporated out from the hydrogel and condensed onto the glass.Over this period, the device worked across a range of humidities, from 21 to 88 percent, and produced between 57 and 161.5 milliliters of drinking water per day. Even in the driest conditions, the device harvested more water than other passive and some actively powered designs.“This is just a proof-of-concept design, and there are a lot of things we can optimize,” Liu says. “For instance, we could have a multipanel design. And we’re working on a next generation of the material to further improve its intrinsic properties.”“We imagine that you could one day deploy an array of these panels, and the footprint is very small because they are all vertical,” says Zhao, who has plans to further test the panels in many resource-limited regions. “Then you could have many panels together, collecting water all the time, at household scale.”This work was supported, in part, by the MIT J-WAFS Water and Food Seed Grant, the MIT-Chinese University of Hong Kong collaborative research program, and the UM6P-MIT collaborative research program. More

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      in Energy

      “Each of us holds a piece of the solution”

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      MIT has an unparalleled history of bringing together interdisciplinary teams to solve pressing problems — think of the development of radar during World War II, or leading the international coalition that cracked the code of the human genome — but the challenge of climate change could demand a scale of collaboration unlike any that’s come before at MIT.“Solving climate change is not just about new technologies or better models. It’s about forging new partnerships across campus and beyond — between scientists and economists, between architects and data scientists, between policymakers and physicists, between anthropologists and engineers, and more,” MIT Vice President for Energy and Climate Evelyn Wang told an energetic crowd of faculty, students, and staff on May 6. “Each of us holds a piece of the solution — but only together can we see the whole.”Undeterred by heavy rain, approximately 300 campus community members filled the atrium in the Tina and Hamid Moghadam Building (Building 55) for a spring gathering hosted by Wang and the Climate Project at MIT. The initiative seeks to direct the full strength of MIT to address climate change, which Wang described as one of the defining challenges of this moment in history — and one of its greatest opportunities.“It calls on us to rethink how we power our world, how we build, how we live — and how we work together,” Wang said. “And there is no better place than MIT to lead this kind of bold, integrated effort. Our culture of curiosity, rigor, and relentless experimentation makes us uniquely suited to cross boundaries — to break down silos and build something new.”The Climate Project is organized around six missions, thematic areas in which MIT aims to make significant impact, ranging from decarbonizing industry to new policy approaches to designing resilient cities. The faculty leaders of these missions posed challenges to the crowd before circulating among the crowd to share their perspectives and to discuss community questions and ideas.Wang and the Climate Project team were joined by a number of research groups, startups, and MIT offices conducting relevant work today on issues related to energy and climate. For example, the MIT Office of Sustainability showcased efforts to use the MIT campus as a living laboratory; MIT spinouts such as Forma Systems, which is developing high-performance, low-carbon building systems, and Addis Energy, which envisions using the earth as a reactor to produce clean ammonia, presented their technologies; and visitors learned about current projects in MIT labs, including DebunkBot, an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot that can persuade people to shift their attitudes about conspiracies, developed by David Rand, the Erwin H. Schell Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management.Benedetto Marelli, an associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering who leads the Wild Cards Mission, said the energy and enthusiasm that filled the room was inspiring — but that the individual conversations were equally valuable.“I was especially pleased to see so many students come out. I also spoke with other faculty, talked to staff from across the Institute, and met representatives of external companies interested in collaborating with MIT,” Marelli said. “You could see connections being made all around the room, which is exactly what we need as we build momentum for the Climate Project.” More