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    MIT senior turns waste from the fishing industry into biodegradable plastic

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    Sometimes the answers to seemingly intractable environmental problems are found in nature itself. Take the growing challenge of plastic waste. Jacqueline Prawira, an MIT senior in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE), has developed biodegradable, plastic-like materials from fish offal, as featured in a recent segment on the CBS show “The Visioneers with Zay Harding.” “We basically made plastics to be too good at their job. That also means the environment doesn’t know what to do with this, because they simply won’t degrade,” Prawira told Harding. “And now we’re literally drowning in plastic. By 2050, plastics are expected to outweigh fish in the ocean.” “The Visioneers” regularly highlights environmental innovators. The episode featuring Prawira premiered during a special screening at Climate Week NYC on Sept. 24.Her inspiration came from the Asian fish market her family visits. Once the fish they buy are butchered, the scales are typically discarded. “But I also started noticing they’re actually fairly strong. They’re thin, somewhat flexible, and pretty lightweight, too, for their strength,” Prawira says. “And that got me thinking: Well, what other material has these properties? Plastics.” She transformed this waste product into a transparent, thin-film material that can be used for disposable products such as grocery bags, packaging, and utensils. Both her fish-scale material and a composite she developed don’t just mimic plastic — they address one of its biggest flaws. “If you put them in composting environments, [they] will degrade on their own naturally without needing much, if any, external help,” Prawira says. This isn’t Prawira’s first environmental innovation. Working in DMSE Professor Yet-Ming Chiang’s lab, she helped develop a low-carbon process for making cement — the world’s most widely used construction material, and a major emitter of carbon dioxide. The process, called silicate subtraction, enables compounds to form at lower temperatures, cutting fossil fuel use. Prawira and her co-inventors in the Chiang lab are also using the method to extract valuable lithium with zero waste. The process is patented and is being commercialized through the startup Rock Zero. For her achievements, Prawira recently received the Barry Goldwater Scholarship, awarded to undergraduates pursuing careers in science, mathematics, or engineering. In her “Visioneers” interview, she shared her hope for more sustainable ways of living. “I’m hoping that we can have daily lives that can be more in sync with the environment,” Prawira said. “So you don’t always have to choose between the convenience of daily life and having to help protect the environment.” More

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      in Energy

      Using classic physical phenomena to solve new problems

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      Quenching, a powerful heat transfer mechanism, is remarkably effective at transporting heat away. But in extreme environments, like nuclear power plants and aboard spaceships, a lot rides on the efficiency and speed of the process.It’s why Marco Graffiedi, a fifth-year doctoral student at MIT’s Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE), is researching the phenomenon to help develop the next generation of spaceships and nuclear plants.Growing up in small-town ItalyGraffiedi’s parents encouraged a sense of exploration, giving him responsibilities for family projects even at a young age. When they restored a countryside cabin in a small town near Palazzolo, in the hills between Florence and Bologna, the then-14-year-old Marco got a project of his own. He had to ensure the animals on the property had enough accessible water without overfilling the storage tank. Marco designed and built a passive hydraulic system that effectively solved the problem and is still functional today.His proclivity for science continued in high school in Lugo, where Graffiedi enjoyed recreating classical physics phenomena, through experiments. Incidentally, the high school is named after Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro, a mathematician who laid the foundation for the theory of relativity — history that is not lost on Graffiedi. After high school, Graffiedi attended the International Physics Olympiad in Bangkok, a formative event that cemented his love for physics.A gradual shift toward engineeringA passion for physics and basic sciences notwithstanding, Graffiedi wondered if he’d be a better fit for engineering, where he could use the study of physics, chemistry, and math as tools to build something.Following that path, he completed a bachelor’s and master’s in mechanical engineering — because an undergraduate degree in Italy takes only three years, pretty much everyone does a master’s, Graffiedi laughs — at the Università di Pisa and the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna (School of Engineering). The Sant’Anna is a highly selective institution that most students attend to complement their university studies.Graffiedi’s university studies gradually moved him toward the field of environmental engineering. He researched concentrated solar power in order to reduce the cost of solar power by studying the associated thermal cycle and trying to improve solar power collection. While the project was not very successful, it reinforced Graffiedi’s impression of the necessity of alternative energies. Still firmly planted in energy studies, Graffiedi worked on fracture mechanics for his master’s thesis, in collaboration with (what was then) GE Oil and Gas, researching how to improve the effectiveness of centrifugal compressors. And a summer internship at Fermilab had Graffiedi working on the thermal characterization of superconductive coatings.With his studies behind him, Graffiedi was still unsure about this professional path. Through the Edison Program from GE Oil and Gas, where he worked shortly after graduation, Graffiedi got to test drive many fields — from mechanical and thermal engineering to exploring gas turbines and combustion. He eventually became a test engineer, coordinating a team of engineers to test a new upgrade to the company’s gas turbines. “I set up the test bench, understanding how to instrument the machine, collect data, and run the test,” Graffiedi remembers, “there was a lot you need to think about, from a little turbine blade with sensors on it to the location of safety exits on the test bench.”The move toward nuclear engineeringAs fun as the test engineering job was, Graffiedi started to crave more technical knowledge and wanted to pivot to science. As part of his exploration, he came across nuclear energy and, understanding it to be the future, decided to lean on his engineering background to apply to MIT NSE.He found a fit in Professor Matteo Bucci’s group and decided to explore boiling and quenching. The move from science to engineering, and back to science, was now complete.NASA, the primary sponsor of the research, is interested in preventing boiling of cryogenic fuels, because boiling leads to loss of fuel and the resulting vapor will need to be vented to avoid overpressurizing a fuel tank.Graffiedi’s primary focus is on quenching, which will play an important role in refueling in space — and in the cooling of nuclear cores. When a cryogen is used to cool down a surface, it undergoes what is known as the Leidenfrost effect, which means it first forms a thin vapor film that acts as an insulator and prevents further cooling. To facilitate rapid cooling, it’s important to accelerate the collapse of the vapor film. Graffiedi is exploring the mechanics of the quenching process on a microscopic level, studies that are important for land and space applications.Boiling can be used for yet another modern application: to improve the efficiency of cooling systems for data centers. The growth of data centers and electric transportation systems needs effective heat transfer mechanisms to avoid overheating. Immersion cooling using dielectric fluids — fluids that do not conduct electricity — is one way to do so. These fluids remove heat from a surface by leaning on the principle of boiling. For effective boiling, the fluid must overcome the Leidenfrost effect and break the vapor film that forms. The fluid must also have high critical heat flux (CHF), which is the maximum value of the heat flux at which boiling can effectively be used to transfer heat from a heated surface to a liquid. Because dielectric fluids have lower CHF than water, Graffiedi is exploring solutions to enhance these limits. In particular, he is investigating how high electric fields can be used to enhance CHF and even to use boiling as a way to cool electronic components in the absence of gravity. He published this research in Applied Thermal Engineering in June.Beyond boilingGraffiedi’s love of science and engineering shows in his commitment to teaching as well. He has been a teaching assistant for four classes at NSE, winning awards for his contributions. His many additional achievements include winning the Manson Benedict Award presented to an NSE graduate student for excellence in academic performance and professional promise in nuclear science and engineering, and a service award for his role as past president of the MIT Division of the American Nuclear Society.Boston has a fervent Italian community, Graffiedi says, and he enjoys being a part of it. Fittingly, the MIT Italian club is called MITaly. When he’s not at work or otherwise engaged, Graffiedi loves Latin dancing, something he makes time for at least a couple of times a week. While he has his favorite Italian restaurants in the city, Graffiedi is grateful for another set of skills his parents gave him when was just 11: making perfect pizza and pasta. More

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      in Energy

      Burning things to make things

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

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      Burning Things to Make ThingsVideo: Department of Mechanical Engineering

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

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      in Energy

      The brain power behind sustainable AI

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      How can you use science to build a better gingerbread house?That was something Miranda Schwacke spent a lot of time thinking about. The MIT graduate student in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE) is part of Kitchen Matters, a group of grad students who use food and kitchen tools to explain scientific concepts through short videos and outreach events. Past topics included why chocolate “seizes,” or becomes difficult to work with when melting (spoiler: water gets in), and how to make isomalt, the sugar glass that stunt performers jump through in action movies.Two years ago, when the group was making a video on how to build a structurally sound gingerbread house, Schwacke scoured cookbooks for a variable that would produce the most dramatic difference in the cookies.“I was reading about what determines the texture of cookies, and then tried several recipes in my kitchen until I got two gingerbread recipes that I was happy with,” Schwacke says.She focused on butter, which contains water that turns to steam at high baking temperatures, creating air pockets in cookies. Schwacke predicted that decreasing the amount of butter would yield denser gingerbread, strong enough to hold together as a house.“This hypothesis is an example of how changing the structure can influence the properties and performance of material,” Schwacke said in the eight-minute video.That same curiosity about materials properties and performance drives her research on the high energy cost of computing, especially for artificial intelligence. Schwacke develops new materials and devices for neuromorphic computing, which mimics the brain by processing and storing information in the same place. She studies electrochemical ionic synapses — tiny devices that can be “tuned” to adjust conductivity, much like neurons strengthening or weakening connections in the brain.“If you look at AI in particular — to train these really large models — that consumes a lot of energy. And if you compare that to the amount of energy that we consume as humans when we’re learning things, the brain consumes a lot less energy,” Schwacke says. “That’s what led to this idea to find more brain-inspired, energy-efficient ways of doing AI.”Her advisor, Bilge Yildiz, underscores the point: One reason the brain is so efficient is that data doesn’t need to be moved back and forth.“In the brain, the connections between our neurons, called synapses, are where we process information. Signal transmission is there. It is processed, programmed, and also stored in the same place,” says Yildiz, the Breene M. Kerr (1951) Professor in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering and DMSE. Schwacke’s devices aim to replicate that efficiency.Scientific rootsThe daughter of a marine biologist mom and an electrical engineer dad, Schwacke was immersed in science from a young age. Science was “always a part of how I understood the world.”“I was obsessed with dinosaurs. I wanted to be a paleontologist when I grew up,” she says. But her interests broadened. At her middle school in Charleston, South Carolina, she joined a FIRST Lego League robotics competition, building robots to complete tasks like pushing or pulling objects. “My parents, my dad especially, got very involved in the school team and helping us design and build our little robot for the competition.”Her mother, meanwhile, studied how dolphin populations are affected by pollution for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That had a lasting impact.“That was an example of how science can be used to understand the world, and also to figure out how we can improve the world,” Schwacke says. “And that’s what I’ve always wanted to do with science.”Her interest in materials science came later, in her high school magnet program. There, she was introduced to the interdisciplinary subject, a blend of physics, chemistry, and engineering that studies the structure and properties of materials and uses that knowledge to design new ones.“I always liked that it goes from this very basic science, where we’re studying how atoms are ordering, all the way up to these solid materials that we interact with in our everyday lives — and how that gives them their properties that we can see and play with,” Schwacke says.As a senior, she participated in a research program with a thesis project on dye-sensitized solar cells, a low-cost, lightweight solar technology that uses dye molecules to absorb light and generate electricity.“What drove me was really understanding, this is how we go from light to energy that we can use — and also seeing how this could help us with having more renewable energy sources,” Schwacke says.After high school, she headed across the country to Caltech. “I wanted to try a totally new place,” she says, where she studied materials science, including nanostructured materials thousands of times thinner than a human hair. She focused on materials properties and microstructure — the tiny internal structure that governs how materials behave — which led her to electrochemical systems like batteries and fuel cells.AI energy challengeAt MIT, she continued exploring energy technologies. She met Yildiz during a Zoom meeting in her first year of graduate school, in fall 2020, when the campus was still operating under strict Covid-19 protocols. Yildiz’s lab studies how charged atoms, or ions, move through materials in technologies like fuel cells, batteries, and electrolyzers.The lab’s research into brain-inspired computing fired Schwacke’s imagination, but she was equally drawn to Yildiz’s way of talking about science.“It wasn’t based on jargon and emphasized a very basic understanding of what was going on — that ions are going here, and electrons are going here — to understand fundamentally what’s happening in the system,” Schwacke says.That mindset shaped her approach to research. Her early projects focused on the properties these devices need to work well — fast operation, low energy use, and compatibility with semiconductor technology — and on using magnesium ions instead of hydrogen, which can escape into the environment and make devices unstable.Her current project, the focus of her PhD thesis, centers on understanding how the insertion of magnesium ions into tungsten oxide, a metal oxide whose electrical properties can be precisely tuned, changes its electrical resistance. In these devices, tungsten oxide serves as a channel layer, where resistance controls signal strength, much like synapses regulate signals in the brain.“I am trying to understand exactly how these devices change the channel conductance,” Schwacke says.Schwacke’s research was recognized with a MathWorks Fellowship from the School of Engineering in 2023 and 2024. The fellowship supports graduate students who leverage tools like MATLAB or Simulink in their work; Schwacke applied MATLAB for critical data analysis and visualization.Yildiz describes Schwacke’s research as a novel step toward solving one of AI’s biggest challenges.“This is electrochemistry for brain-inspired computing,” Yildiz says. “It’s a new context for electrochemistry, but also with an energy implication, because the energy consumption of computing is unsustainably increasing. We have to find new ways of doing computing with much lower energy, and this is one way that can help us move in that direction.”Like any pioneering work, it comes with challenges, especially in bridging the concepts between electrochemistry and semiconductor physics.“Our group comes from a solid-state chemistry background, and when we started this work looking into magnesium, no one had used magnesium in these kinds of devices before,” Schwacke says. “So we were looking at the magnesium battery literature for inspiration and different materials and strategies we could use. When I started this, I wasn’t just learning the language and norms for one field — I was trying to learn it for two fields, and also translate between the two.”She also grapples with a challenge familiar to all scientists: how to make sense of messy data.“The main challenge is being able to take my data and know that I’m interpreting it in a way that’s correct, and that I understand what it actually means,” Schwacke says.She overcomes hurdles by collaborating closely with colleagues across fields, including neuroscience and electrical engineering, and sometimes by just making small changes to her experiments and watching what happens next.Community mattersSchwacke is not just active in the lab. In Kitchen Matters, she and her fellow DMSE grad students set up booths at local events like the Cambridge Science Fair and Steam It Up, an after-school program with hands-on activities for kids.“We did ‘pHun with Food’ with ‘fun’ spelled with a pH, so we had cabbage juice as a pH indicator,” Schwacke says. “We let the kids test the pH of lemon juice and vinegar and dish soap, and they had a lot of fun mixing the different liquids and seeing all the different colors.”She has also served as the social chair and treasurer for DMSE’s graduate student group, the Graduate Materials Council. As an undergraduate at Caltech, she led workshops in science and technology for Robogals, a student-run group that encourages young women to pursue careers in science, and assisted students in applying for the school’s Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships.For Schwacke, these experiences sharpened her ability to explain science to different audiences, a skill she sees as vital whether she’s presenting at a kids’ fair or at a research conference.“I always think, where is my audience starting from, and what do I need to explain before I can get into what I’m doing so that it’ll all make sense to them?” she says.Schwacke sees the ability to communicate as central to building community, which she considers an important part of doing research. “It helps with spreading ideas. It always helps to get a new perspective on what you’re working on,” she says. “I also think it keeps us sane during our PhD.”Yildiz sees Schwacke’s community involvement as an important part of her resume. “She’s doing all these activities to motivate the broader community to do research, to be interested in science, to pursue science and technology, but that ability will help her also progress in her own research and academic endeavors.”After her PhD, Schwacke wants to take that ability to communicate with her to academia, where she’d like to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers. Yildiz has no doubt she’ll thrive.“I think she’s a perfect fit,” Yildiz says. “She’s brilliant, but brilliance by itself is not enough. She’s persistent, resilient. You really need those on top of that.” More

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      in Security

      Optimizing food subsidies: Applying digital platforms to maximize nutrition

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

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      in Energy

      Fighting for the health of the planet with AI

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

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      in Energy

      Working to make fusion a viable energy source

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

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      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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      Shaping the future through systems thinking

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      Long before she stepped into a lab, Ananda Santos Figueiredo was stargazing in Brazil, captivated by the cosmos and feeding her curiosity of science through pop culture, books, and the internet. She was drawn to astrophysics for its blend of visual wonder and mathematics.Even as a child, Santos sensed her aspirations reaching beyond the boundaries of her hometown. “I’ve always been drawn to STEM,” she says. “I had this persistent feeling that I was meant to go somewhere else to learn more, explore, and do more.”Her parents saw their daughter’s ambitions as an opportunity to create a better future. The summer before her sophomore year of high school, her family moved from Brazil to Florida.  She recalls that moment as “a big leap of faith in something bigger and we had no idea how it would turn out.” She was certain of one thing: She wanted an education that was both technically rigorous and deeply expansive, one that would allow her to pursue all her passions.At MIT, she found exactly what she was seeking in a community and curriculum that matched her curiosity and ambition. “I’ve always associated MIT with something new and exciting that was grasping towards the very best we can achieve as humans,” Santos says, emphasizing the use of technology and science to significantly impact society. “It’s a place where people aren’t afraid to dream big and work hard to make it a reality.”As a first-generation college student, she carried the weight of financial stress and the uncertainty that comes with being the first in her family to navigate college in the U.S. But she found a sense of belonging in the MIT community. “Being a first-generation student helped me grow,” she says. “It inspired me to seek out opportunities and help support others too.”She channeled that energy into student government roles for the undergraduate residence halls. Through Dormitory Council (DormCon) and her dormitory, Simmons Hall, her voice could help shape life on campus. She began serving as reservations chair for her dormitory but ended up becoming president of the dormitory before being elected dining chair and vice president for DormCon. She’s worked to improve dining hall operations and has planned major community events like Simmons Hall’s 20th anniversary and DormCon’s inaugural Field Day.Now, a senior about to earn her bachelor’s degree, Santos says MIT’s motto, “mens et manus” — “mind and hand” — has deeply resonated with her from the start. “Learning here goes far beyond the classroom,” she says. “I’ve been surrounded by people who are passionate and purposeful. That energy is infectious. It’s changed how I see myself and what I believe is possible.”Charting her own courseInitially a physics major, Santos’ academic path took a turn after a transformative internship with the World Bank’s data science lab between her sophomore and junior years. There, she used her coding skills to study the impacts of heat waves in the Philippines. The experience opened her eyes to the role technology and data can play in improving lives and broadened her view of what a STEM career could look like.“I realized I didn’t want to just study the universe — I wanted to change it,” she says. “I wanted to join systems thinking with my interest in the humanities, to build a better world for people and communities.”When MIT launched a new major in climate system science and engineering (Course 1-12) in 2023, Santos was the first student to declare it. The interdisciplinary structure of the program, blending climate science, engineering, energy systems, and policy, gave her a framework to connect her technical skills to real-world sustainability challenges.She tailored her coursework to align with her passions and career goals, applying her physics background (now her minor) to understand problems in climate, energy, and sustainable systems. “One of the most powerful things about the major is the breadth,” she says. “Even classes that aren’t my primary focus have expanded how I think.”Hands-on fieldwork has been a cornerstone of her learning. During MIT’s Independent Activities Period (IAP), she studied climate impacts in Hawai’i in the IAP Course 1.091 (Traveling Research Environmental Experiences, or TREX). This year, she studied the design of sustainable polymer systems in Course 1.096/10.496 (Design of Sustainable Polymer Systems) under MISTI’s Global Classroom program. The IAP class brought her to the middle of the Amazon Rainforest to see what the future of plastic production could look like with products from the Amazon. “That experience was incredibly eye opening,” she explains. “It helped me build a bridge between my own background and the kind of problems that I want to solve in the future.”Santos also found enjoyment beyond labs and lectures. A member of the MIT Shakespeare Ensemble since her first year, she took to the stage in her final spring production of “Henry V,” performing as both the Chorus and Kate. “The ensemble’s collaborative spirit and the way it brings centuries-old texts to life has been transformative,” she adds.Her passion for the arts also intersected with her interest in the MIT Lecture Series Committee. She helped host a special screening of the film “Sing Sing,” in collaboration with MIT’s Educational Justice Institute (TEJI). That connection led her to enroll in a TEJI course, illustrating the surprising and meaningful ways that different parts of MIT’s ecosystem overlap. “It’s one of the beautiful things about MIT,” she says. “You stumble into experiences that deeply change you.”Throughout her time at MIT, the community of passionate, sustainability-focused individuals has been a major source of inspiration. She’s been actively involved with the MIT Office of Sustainability’s decarbonization initiatives and participated in the Climate and Sustainability Scholars Program.Santos acknowledges that working in sustainability can sometimes feel overwhelming. “Tackling the challenges of sustainability can be discouraging,” she says. “The urgency to create meaningful change in a short period of time can be intimidating. But being surrounded by people who are actively working on it is so much better than not working on it at all.”Looking ahead, she plans to pursue graduate studies in technology and policy, with aspirations to shape sustainable development, whether through academia, international organizations, or diplomacy.“The most fulfilling moments I’ve had at MIT are when I’m working on hard problems while also reflecting on who I want to be, what kind of future I want to help create, and how we can be better and kinder to each other,” she says. “That’s what excites me — solving real problems that matter.” More