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      in Environment

      Convening for cultural change

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      Whether working with fellow students in the Netherlands to design floating cities or interning for a local community-led environmental justice organization, Cindy Xie wants to help connect people grappling with the implications of linked social and environmental crises.The MIT senior’s belief that climate action is a collective endeavor grounded in systems change has led her to work at a variety of community organizations, and to travel as far as Malaysia and Cabo Verde to learn about the social and cultural aspects of global environmental change.“With climate action, there is such a need for collective change. We all need to be a part of creating the solutions,” she says.Xie recently returned from Kuala Lumpur, where she attended the Planetary Health Annual Meeting hosted by Sunway University, and met researchers, practitioners, and students from around the world who are working to address challenges facing human and planetary health.Since January 2023, Xie has been involved with the Planetary Health Alliance, a consortium of organizations working at the intersection of human health and global environmental change. As a campus ambassador, she organized events at MIT that built on students’ interests in climate change and health while exploring themes of community and well-being.“I think doing these events on campus and bringing people together has been my way of trying to understand how to put conceptual ideas into action,” she says.Grassroots community-buildingAn urban studies and planning major with minors in anthropology and biology, Xie is also earning her master’s degree in city planning in a dual degree program, which she will finish next year.Through her studies and numerous community activities, she has developed a multidimensional view of public health and the environment that includes spirituality and the arts as well as science and technology. “What I appreciate about being here at MIT is the opportunities to try to connect the sciences back to other disciplines,” she says.As a campus ambassador for the Planetary Health Alliance, Xie hosted a club mixer event during Earth Month last year, that brought together climate, health, and social justice groups from across the Institute. She also created a year-long series that concluded its final event last month, called Cultural Transformation for Planetary Health. Organized with the Radius Forum and other partners, the series explored social and cultural implications of the climate crisis, with a focus on how environmental change affects health and well-being.Xie has also worked with the Planetary Health Alliance’s Constellation Project through a Public Service Fellowship from the PKG Center, which she describes as “an effort to convene people from across different areas of the world to talk about the intersections of spirituality, the climate, and environmental change and planetary health.”She has also interned at the Comunidades Enraizadas Community Land Trust, the National Institutes of Health, and the World Wildlife Fund U.S. Markets Institute. And, she has taken her studies abroad through MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI). In 2023 she spent her Independent Activities Period in a pilot MISTI Global Classroom program in Amsterdam, and in the summer of 2023, she spent two months in Cabo Verde helping to start a new research collaboration tracking the impacts of climate change on human health.The power of storytellingGrowing up, Xie was drawn to storytelling as a means of understanding the intersections of culture and health within diverse communities. This has largely driven her interest in medical anthropology and medical humanities, and impacts her work as a member of the Asian American Initiative.The AAI is a student-led organization that provides a space for pan-Asian advocacy and community building on campus. Xie joined the group in 2022 and currently serves as a member of the executive board as well as co-leader of the Mental Health Project Team. She credits this team with inspiring discussions on holistic framings of mental health.“Conversations on mental health stigma can sometimes frame it as a fault within certain communities,” she says. “It’s also important to highlight alternate paradigms for conceptualizing mental health beyond the highly individualized models often presented in U.S. higher education settings.”Last spring, the AAI Mental Health team led a listening tour with Asian American clinicians, academic experts, and community organizations in Greater Boston, expanding the group’s connections. That led the group to volunteer last November at the Asian Mental Health Careers Day, hosted by the Let’s Talk! Conference at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. In March, the club also traveled to Yale University to participate in the East Coast Asian American Student Union Conference alongside hundreds of attendees from different college campuses.On campus, the team hosts dialogue events where students convene in an informal setting to discuss topics such as family ties and burnout and overachievement. Recently, AAI also hosted a storytelling night in partnership with MIT Taara and the newly formed South Asian Initiative. “There’s been something really powerful about being in those kinds of settings and building collective stories among peers,” Xie says.Community connectionsWriting, both creative and non-fiction, is another of Xie’s longstanding interests. From 2022 to 2023, she wrote for The Yappie, a youth-led news publication covering Asian American and Pacific Islander policy and politics. She has also written articles for The Tech, MIT Science Policy Review, MISTI Blogs, and more. Last year, she was a spread writer for MIT’s fashion publication, Infinite Magazine, for which she interviewed the founder of a local streetwear company that aims to support victims of sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo.This year, she performed a spoken word piece in the “MIT Monologues,” an annual production at MIT that features stories of gender, relationships, race, and more. Her poetry was recently published in Sine Theta and included in MassPoetry’s 2024 Intercollegiate Showcase. Xie has previously been involved in the a capella group MIT Muses and enjoys live music and concerts as well. Tapping into her 2023 MISTI experience, Xie recently went to the concert of a Cabo Verdean artist at the Strand Theatre in Dorchester. “The crowd was packed,” she says. “It was just like being back in Cabo Verde. I feel very grateful to have seen these local connections.”After graduating, Xie hopes to continue building interdisciplinary connections. “I’m interested in working in policy or academia or somewhere in between the two, sort of around this idea of partnership and alliance building. My experiences abroad during my time at MIT have also made me more interested in working in an international context in the future.” More

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      in Energy

      Elaine Liu: Charging ahead

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      MIT senior Elaine Siyu Liu doesn’t own an electric car, or any car. But she sees the impact of electric vehicles (EVs) and renewables on the grid as two pieces of an energy puzzle she wants to solve.The U.S. Department of Energy reports that the number of public and private EV charging ports nearly doubled in the past three years, and many more are in the works. Users expect to plug in at their convenience, charge up, and drive away. But what if the grid can’t handle it?Electricity demand, long stagnant in the United States, has spiked due to EVs, data centers that drive artificial intelligence, and industry. Grid planners forecast an increase of 2.6 percent to 4.7 percent in electricity demand over the next five years, according to data reported to federal regulators. Everyone from EV charging-station operators to utility-system operators needs help navigating a system in flux.That’s where Liu’s work comes in.Liu, who is studying mathematics and electrical engineering and computer science (EECS), is interested in distribution — how to get electricity from a centralized location to consumers. “I see power systems as a good venue for theoretical research as an application tool,” she says. “I’m interested in it because I’m familiar with the optimization and probability techniques used to map this level of problem.”Liu grew up in Beijing, then after middle school moved with her parents to Canada and enrolled in a prep school in Oakville, Ontario, 30 miles outside Toronto.Liu stumbled upon an opportunity to take part in a regional math competition and eventually started a math club, but at the time, the school’s culture surrounding math surprised her. Being exposed to what seemed to be some students’ aversion to math, she says, “I don’t think my feelings about math changed. I think my feelings about how people feel about math changed.”Liu brought her passion for math to MIT. The summer after her sophomore year, she took on the first of the two Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program projects she completed with electric power system expert Marija Ilić, a joint adjunct professor in EECS and a senior research scientist at the MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems.Predicting the gridSince 2022, with the help of funding from the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI), Liu has been working with Ilić on identifying ways in which the grid is challenged.One factor is the addition of renewables to the energy pipeline. A gap in wind or sun might cause a lag in power generation. If this lag occurs during peak demand, it could mean trouble for a grid already taxed by extreme weather and other unforeseen events.If you think of the grid as a network of dozens of interconnected parts, once an element in the network fails — say, a tree downs a transmission line — the electricity that used to go through that line needs to be rerouted. This may overload other lines, creating what’s known as a cascade failure.“This all happens really quickly and has very large downstream effects,” Liu says. “Millions of people will have instant blackouts.”Even if the system can handle a single downed line, Liu notes that “the nuance is that there are now a lot of renewables, and renewables are less predictable. You can’t predict a gap in wind or sun. When such things happen, there’s suddenly not enough generation and too much demand. So the same kind of failure would happen, but on a larger and more uncontrollable scale.”Renewables’ varying output has the added complication of causing voltage fluctuations. “We plug in our devices expecting a voltage of 110, but because of oscillations, you will never get exactly 110,” Liu says. “So even when you can deliver enough electricity, if you can’t deliver it at the specific voltage level that is required, that’s a problem.”Liu and Ilić are building a model to predict how and when the grid might fail. Lacking access to privatized data, Liu runs her models with European industry data and test cases made available to universities. “I have a fake power grid that I run my experiments on,” she says. “You can take the same tool and run it on the real power grid.”Liu’s model predicts cascade failures as they evolve. Supply from a wind generator, for example, might drop precipitously over the course of an hour. The model analyzes which substations and which households will be affected. “After we know we need to do something, this prediction tool can enable system operators to strategically intervene ahead of time,” Liu says.Dictating price and powerLast year, Liu turned her attention to EVs, which provide a different kind of challenge than renewables.In 2022, S&P Global reported that lawmakers argued that the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s (FERC) wholesale power rate structure was unfair for EV charging station operators.In addition to operators paying by the kilowatt-hour, some also pay more for electricity during peak demand hours. Only a few EVs charging up during those hours could result in higher costs for the operator even if their overall energy use is low.Anticipating how much power EVs will need is more complex than predicting energy needed for, say, heating and cooling. Unlike buildings, EVs move around, making it difficult to predict energy consumption at any given time. “If users don’t like the price at one charging station or how long the line is, they’ll go somewhere else,” Liu says. “Where to allocate EV chargers is a problem that a lot of people are dealing with right now.”One approach would be for FERC to dictate to EV users when and where to charge and what price they’ll pay. To Liu, this isn’t an attractive option. “No one likes to be told what to do,” she says.Liu is looking at optimizing a market-based solution that would be acceptable to top-level energy producers — wind and solar farms and nuclear plants — all the way down to the municipal aggregators that secure electricity at competitive rates and oversee distribution to the consumer.Analyzing the location, movement, and behavior patterns of all the EVs driven daily in Boston and other major energy hubs, she notes, could help demand aggregators determine where to place EV chargers and how much to charge consumers, akin to Walmart deciding how much to mark up wholesale eggs in different markets.Last year, Liu presented the work at MITEI’s annual research conference. This spring, Liu and Ilić are submitting a paper on the market optimization analysis to a journal of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.Liu has come to terms with her early introduction to attitudes toward STEM that struck her as markedly different from those in China. She says, “I think the (prep) school had a very strong ‘math is for nerds’ vibe, especially for girls. There was a ‘why are you giving yourself more work?’ kind of mentality. But over time, I just learned to disregard that.”After graduation, Liu, the only undergraduate researcher in Ilić’s MIT Electric Energy Systems Group, plans to apply to fellowships and graduate programs in EECS, applied math, and operations research.Based on her analysis, Liu says that the market could effectively determine the price and availability of charging stations. Offering incentives for EV owners to charge during the day instead of at night when demand is high could help avoid grid overload and prevent extra costs to operators. “People would still retain the ability to go to a different charging station if they chose to,” she says. “I’m arguing that this works.” More

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      in Security

      Exploring frontiers of mechanical engineering

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      From cutting-edge robotics, design, and bioengineering to sustainable energy solutions, ocean engineering, nanotechnology, and innovative materials science, MechE students and their advisors are doing incredibly innovative work. The graduate students highlighted here represent a snapshot of the great work in progress this spring across the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and demonstrate the ways the future of this field is as limitless as the imaginations of its practitioners.Democratizing design through AILyle RegenwetterHometown: Champaign, IllinoisAdvisor: Assistant Professor Faez AhmedInterests: Food, climbing, skiing, soccer, tennis, cookingLyle Regenwetter finds excitement in the prospect of generative AI to “democratize” design and enable inexperienced designers to tackle complex design problems. His research explores new training methods through which generative AI models can be taught to implicitly obey design constraints and synthesize higher-performing designs. Knowing that prospective designers often have an intimate knowledge of the needs of users, but may otherwise lack the technical training to create solutions, Regenwetter also develops human-AI collaborative tools that allow AI models to interact and support designers in popular CAD software and real design problems. Solving a whale of a problem Loïcka BailleHometown: L’Escale, FranceAdvisor: Daniel ZitterbartInterests: Being outdoors — scuba diving, spelunking, or climbing. Sailing on the Charles River, martial arts classes, and playing volleyballLoïcka Baille’s research focuses on developing remote sensing technologies to study and protect marine life. Her main project revolves around improving onboard whale detection technology to prevent vessel strikes, with a special focus on protecting North Atlantic right whales. Baille is also involved in an ongoing study of Emperor penguins. Her team visits Antarctica annually to tag penguins and gather data to enhance their understanding of penguin population dynamics and draw conclusions regarding the overall health of the ecosystem.Water, water anywhereCarlos Díaz-MarínHometown: San José, Costa RicaAdvisor: Professor Gang Chen | Former Advisor: Professor Evelyn WangInterests: New England hiking, biking, and dancingCarlos Díaz-Marín designs and synthesizes inexpensive salt-polymer materials that can capture large amounts of humidity from the air. He aims to change the way we generate potable water from the air, even in arid conditions. In addition to water generation, these salt-polymer materials can also be used as thermal batteries, capable of storing and reusing heat. Beyond the scientific applications, Díaz-Marín is excited to continue doing research that can have big social impacts, and that finds and explains new physical phenomena. As a LatinX person, Díaz-Marín is also driven to help increase diversity in STEM.Scalable fabrication of nano-architected materialsSomayajulu DhulipalaHometown: Hyderabad, IndiaAdvisor: Assistant Professor Carlos PortelaInterests: Space exploration, taekwondo, meditation.Somayajulu Dhulipala works on developing lightweight materials with tunable mechanical properties. He is currently working on methods for the scalable fabrication of nano-architected materials and predicting their mechanical properties. The ability to fine-tune the mechanical properties of specific materials brings versatility and adaptability, making these materials suitable for a wide range of applications across multiple industries. While the research applications are quite diverse, Dhulipala is passionate about making space habitable for humanity, a crucial step toward becoming a spacefaring civilization.Ingestible health-care devicesJimmy McRaeHometown: Woburn, MassachusettsAdvisor: Associate Professor Giovani TraversoInterests: Anything basketball-related: playing, watching, going to games, organizing hometown tournaments Jimmy McRae aims to drastically improve diagnostic and therapeutic capabilities through noninvasive health-care technologies. His research focuses on leveraging materials, mechanics, embedded systems, and microfabrication to develop novel ingestible electronic and mechatronic devices. This ranges from ingestible electroceutical capsules that modulate hunger-regulating hormones to devices capable of continuous ultralong monitoring and remotely triggerable actuations from within the stomach. The principles that guide McRae’s work to develop devices that function in extreme environments can be applied far beyond the gastrointestinal tract, with applications for outer space, the ocean, and more.Freestyle BMX meets machine learningEva NatesHometown: Narberth, Pennsylvania Advisor: Professor Peko HosoiInterests: Rowing, running, biking, hiking, bakingEva Nates is working with the Australian Cycling Team to create a tool to classify Bicycle Motocross Freestyle (BMX FS) tricks. She uses a singular value decomposition method to conduct a principal component analysis of the time-dependent point-tracking data of an athlete and their bike during a run to classify each trick. The 2024 Olympic team hopes to incorporate this tool in their training workflow, and Nates worked alongside the team at their facilities on the Gold Coast of Australia during MIT’s Independent Activities Period in January.Augmenting Astronauts with Wearable Limbs Erik BallesterosHometown: Spring, TexasAdvisor: Professor Harry AsadaInterests: Cosplay, Star Wars, Lego bricksErik Ballesteros’s research seeks to support astronauts who are conducting planetary extravehicular activities through the use of supernumerary robotic limbs (SuperLimbs). His work is tailored toward design and control manifestation to assist astronauts with post-fall recovery, human-leader/robot-follower quadruped locomotion, and coordinated manipulation between the SuperLimbs and the astronaut to perform tasks like excavation and sample handling.This article appeared in the Spring 2024 edition of the Department of Mechanical Engineering’s magazine, MechE Connects.  More

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      in Environment

      Bringing an investigator’s eye to complex social challenges

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      Anna Russo likes puzzles. They require patience, organization, and a view of the big picture. She brings an investigator’s eye to big institutional and societal challenges whose solutions can have wide-ranging, long-term impacts.

      Russo’s path to MIT began with questions. She didn’t have the whole picture yet. “I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life,” says Russo, who is completing her PhD in economics in 2024. “I was good at math and science and thought I wanted to be a doctor.”

      While completing her undergraduate studies at Yale University, where she double majored in economics and applied math, Russo discovered a passion for problem-solving, where she could apply an analytical lens to answering the kinds of thorny questions whose solutions could improve policy. “Empirical research is fun and exciting,” Russo says.

      After Yale, Russo considered what to do next. She worked as a full-time research assistant with MIT economist Amy Finkelstein. Russo’s work with Finkelstein led her toward identifying, studying, and developing answers to complex questions. 

      “My research combines ideas from two fields of economic inquiry — public finance and industrial organization — and applies them to questions about the design of environmental and health care policy,” Russo says. “I like the way economists think analytically about social problems.”

      Narrowing her focus

      Studying with and being advised by renowned economists as both an undergraduate and a doctoral student helped Russo narrow her research focus, fitting more pieces into the puzzle. “What drew me to MIT was its investment in its graduate students,” Russo says.

      Economic research meant digging into policy questions, identifying market failures, and proposing solutions. Doctoral study allowed Russo to assemble data to rigorously follow each line of inquiry.

      “Doctoral study means you get to write about something you’re really interested in,” Russo notes. This led her to study policy responses to climate change adaptation and mitigation. 

      “In my first year, I worked on a project exploring the notion that floodplain regulation design doesn’t do a good job of incentivizing the right level of development in flood-prone areas,” she says. “How can economists help governments convince people to act in society’s best interest?”

      It’s important to understand institutional details, Russo adds, which can help investigators identify and implement solutions. 

      “Feedback, advice, and support from faculty were crucial as I grew as a researcher at MIT,” she says. Beyond her two main MIT advisors, Finkelstein and economist Nikhil Agarwal — educators she describes as “phenomenal, dedicated advisors and mentors” — Russo interacted regularly with faculty across the department. 

      Russo later discovered another challenge she hoped to solve: inefficiencies in conservation and carbon offset programs. She set her sights on the United States Department of Agriculture’s Conservation Reserve Program because she believes it and programs like it can be improved. 

      The CRP is a land conservation plan administered by USDA’s Farm Service Agency. In exchange for a yearly rental payment, farmers enrolled in the program agree to remove environmentally sensitive land from agricultural production and plant species that will improve environmental health and quality.

      “I think we can tweak the program’s design to improve cost-effectiveness,” Russo says. “There’s a trove of data available.” The data include information like auction participants’ bids in response to well-specified auction rules, which Russo links to satellite data measuring land use outcomes. Understanding how landowners bid in CRP auctions can help identify and improve the program’s function. 

      “We may be able to improve targeting and achieve more cost-effective conservation by adjusting the CRP’s scoring system,” Russo argues. Opportunities may exist to scale the incremental changes under study for other conservation programs and carbon offset markets more generally.  

      Economics, Russo believes, can help us conceptualize problems and recommend effective alternative solutions.

      The next puzzle

      Russo wants to find her next challenge while continuing her research. She plans to continue her work as a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, after which she’ll join the Harvard Department of Economics as an assistant professor. Russo also plans to continue helping other budding economists since she believes in the importance of supporting other students.   

      Russo’s advisors are some of her biggest supporters. 

      Finklestein emphasizes Russo’s curiosity, enthusiasm, and energy as key drivers in her success. “Her genuine curiosity and interest in getting to the bottom of a problem with the data — with an econometric analysis, with a modeling issue — is the best antidote for [the stress that can be associated with research],” Finklestein says. “It’s a key ingredient in her ability to produce important and credible work.”

      “She’s also incredibly generous with her time and advice,” Finklestein continues, “whether it’s helping an undergraduate research assistant with her senior thesis, or helping an advisor such as myself navigate a data access process she’s previously been through.”

      “Instead of an advisor-advisee relationship, working with her on a thesis felt more like a collaboration between equals,” Agarwal adds. “[She] has the maturity and smarts to produce pathbreaking research.

      “Doctoral study is an opportunity for students to find their paths collaboratively,” Russo says. “If I can help someone else solve a small piece of their puzzle, that’s a huge positive. Research is a series of many, many small steps forward.” 

      Identifying important causes for further investigation and study will always be important to Russo. “I also want to dig into some other market that’s not working well and figure out how to make it better,” she says. “Right now I’m really excited about understanding California wildfire mitigation.” 

      Puzzles are made to be solved, after all. More

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      in Energy

      A delicate dance

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      In early 2022, economist Catherine Wolfram was at her desk in the U.S. Treasury building. She could see the east wing of the White House, just steps away.

      Russia had just invaded Ukraine, and Wolfram was thinking about Russia, oil, and sanctions. She and her colleagues had been tasked with figuring out how to restrict the revenues that Russia was using to fuel its brutal war while keeping Russian oil available and affordable to the countries that depended on it.

      Now the William F. Pounds Professor of Energy Economics at MIT, Wolfram was on leave from academia to serve as deputy assistant secretary for climate and energy economics.

      Working for Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen, Wolfram and her colleagues developed dozens of models and forecasts and projections. It struck her, she said later, that “huge decisions [affecting the global economy] would be made on the basis of spreadsheets that I was helping create.” Wolfram composed a memo to the Biden administration and hoped her projections would pan out the way she believed they would.

      Tackling conundrums that weigh competing, sometimes contradictory, interests has defined much of Wolfram’s career.

      Wolfram specializes in the economics of energy markets. She looks at ways to decarbonize global energy systems while recognizing that energy drives economic development, especially in the developing world.

      “The way we’re currently making energy is contributing to climate change. There’s a delicate dance we have to do to make sure that we treat this important industry carefully, but also transform it rapidly to a cleaner, decarbonized system,” she says.

      Economists as influencers

      While Wolfram was growing up in a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota, her father was a law professor and her mother taught English as a second language. Her mother helped spawn Wolfram’s interest in other cultures and her love of travel, but it was an experience closer to home that sparked her awareness of the effect of human activities on the state of the planet.

      Minnesota’s nickname is “Land of 10,000 Lakes.” Wolfram remembers swimming in a nearby lake sometimes covered by a thick sludge of algae. “Thinking back on it, it must’ve had to do with fertilizer runoff,” she says. “That was probably the first thing that made me think about the environment and policy.”

      In high school, Wolfram liked “the fact that you could use math to understand the world. I also was interested in the types of questions about human behavior that economists were thinking about.

      “I definitely think economics is good at sussing out how different actors are likely to react to a particular policy and then designing policies with that in mind.”

      After receiving a bachelor’s degree in economics from Harvard University in 1989, Wolfram worked with a Massachusetts agency that governed rate hikes for utilities. Seeing its reliance on research, she says, illuminated the role academics could play in policy setting. It made her think she could make a difference from within academia.

      While pursuing a PhD in economics from MIT, Wolfram counted Paul L. Joskow, the Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics and former director of the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research, and Nancy L. Rose, the Charles P. Kindleberger Professor of Applied Economics, among her mentors and influencers.

      After spending 1996 to 2000 as an assistant professor of economics at Harvard, she joined the faculty at the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley.

      At Berkeley, it struck Wolfram that while she labored over ways to marginally boost the energy efficiency of U.S. power plants, the economies of China and India were growing rapidly, with a corresponding growth in energy use and carbon dioxide emissions. “It hit home that to understand the climate issue, I needed to understand energy demand in the developing world,” she says.

      The problem was that the developing world didn’t always offer up the kind of neatly packaged, comprehensive data economists relied on. She wondered if, by relying on readily accessible data, the field was looking under the lamppost — while losing sight of what the rest of the street looked like.

      To make up for a lack of available data on the state of electrification in sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, Wolfram developed and administered surveys to individual, remote rural households using on-the-ground field teams.

      Her results suggested that in the world’s poorest countries, the challenges involved in expanding the grid in rural areas should be weighed against potentially greater economic and social returns on investments in the transportation, education, or health sectors.

      Taking the lead

      Within months of Wolfram’s memo to the Biden administration, leaders of the intergovernmental political forum Group of Seven (G7) agreed to the price cap. Tankers from coalition countries would only transport Russian crude sold at or below the price cap level, initially set at $60 per barrel.

      “A price cap was not something that had ever been done before,” Wolfram says. “In some ways, we were making it up out of whole cloth. It was exciting to see that I wrote one of the original memos about it, and then literally three-and-a-half months later, the G7 was making an announcement.

      “As economists and as policymakers, we must set the parameters and get the incentives right. The price cap was basically asking developing countries to buy cheap oil, which was consistent with their incentives.”

      In May 2023, the U.S. Department of the Treasury reported that despite widespread initial skepticism about the price cap, market participants and geopolitical analysts believe it is accomplishing its goals of restricting Russia’s oil revenues while maintaining the supply of Russian oil and keeping energy costs in check for consumers and businesses around the world.

      Wolfram held the U.S. Treasury post from March 2021 to October 2022 while on leave from UC Berkeley. In July 2023, she joined MIT Sloan School of Management partly to be geographically closer to the policymakers of the nation’s capital. She’s also excited about the work taking place elsewhere at the Institute to stay ahead of climate change.

      Her time in D.C. was eye-opening, particularly in terms of the leadership power of the United States. She worries that the United States is falling prey to “lost opportunities” in terms of addressing climate change. “We were showing real leadership on the price cap, and if we could only do that on climate, I think we could make faster inroads on a global agreement,” she says.

      Now focused on structuring global agreements in energy policy among developed and developing countries, she’s considering how the United States can take advantage of its position as a world leader. “We need to be thinking about how what we do in the U.S. affects the rest of the world from a climate perspective. We can’t go it alone.

      “The U.S. needs to be more aligned with the European Union, Canada, and Japan to try to find areas where we’re taking a common approach to addressing climate change,” she says. She will touch on some of those areas in the class she will teach in spring 2024 titled “Climate and Energy in the Global Economy,” offered through MIT Sloan.

      Looking ahead, she says, “I’m a techno optimist. I believe in human innovation. I’m optimistic that we’ll find ways to live with climate change and, hopefully, ways to minimize it.”

      This article appears in the Winter 2024 issue of Energy Futures, the magazine of the MIT Energy Initiative. More

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      in Energy

      Optimizing nuclear fuels for next-generation reactors

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      In 2010, when Ericmoore Jossou was attending college in northern Nigeria, the lights would flicker in and out all day, sometimes lasting only for a couple of hours at a time. The frustrating experience reaffirmed Jossou’s realization that the country’s sporadic energy supply was a problem. It was the beginning of his path toward nuclear engineering.

      Because of the energy crisis, “I told myself I was going to find myself in a career that allows me to develop energy technologies that can easily be scaled to meet the energy needs of the world, including my own country,” says Jossou, an assistant professor in a shared position between the departments of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE), where is the John Clark Hardwick (1986) Professor, and of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

      Today, Jossou uses computer simulations for rational materials design, AI-aided purposeful development of cladding materials and fuels for next-generation nuclear reactors. As one of the shared faculty hires between the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and departments across MIT, his appointment recognizes his commitment to computing for climate and the environment.

      A well-rounded education in Nigeria

      Growing up in Lagos, Jossou knew education was about more than just bookish knowledge, so he was eager to travel and experience other cultures. He would start in his own backyard by traveling across the Niger river and enrolling in Ahmadu Bello University in northern Nigeria. Moving from the south was a cultural education with a different language and different foods. It was here that Jossou got to try and love tuwo shinkafa, a northern Nigerian rice-based specialty, for the first time.

      After his undergraduate studies, armed with a bachelor’s degree in chemistry, Jossou was among a small cohort selected for a specialty master’s training program funded by the World Bank Institute and African Development Bank. The program at the African University of Science and Technology in Abuja, Nigeria, is a pan-African venture dedicated to nurturing homegrown science talent on the continent. Visiting professors from around the world taught intensive three-week courses, an experience which felt like drinking from a fire hose. The program widened Jossou’s views and he set his sights on a doctoral program with an emphasis on clean energy systems.

      A pivot to nuclear science

      While in Nigeria, Jossou learned of Professor Jerzy Szpunar at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, who was looking for a student researcher to explore fuels and alloys for nuclear reactors. Before then, Jossou was lukewarm on nuclear energy, but the research sounded fascinating. The Fukushima, Japan, incident was recently in the rearview mirror and Jossou remembered his early determination to address his own country’s energy crisis. He was sold on the idea and graduated with a doctoral degree from the University of Saskatchewan on an international dean’s scholarship.

      Jossou’s postdoctoral work registered a brief stint at Brookhaven National Laboratory as staff scientist. He leaped at the opportunity to join MIT NSE as a way of realizing his research interest and teaching future engineers. “I would really like to conduct cutting-edge research in nuclear materials design and to pass on my knowledge to the next generation of scientists and engineers and there’s no better place to do that than at MIT,” Jossou says.

      Merging material science and computational modeling

      Jossou’s doctoral work on designing nuclear fuels for next-generation reactors forms the basis of research his lab is pursuing at MIT NSE. Nuclear reactors that were built in the 1950s and ’60s are getting a makeover in terms of improved accident tolerance. Reactors are not confined to one kind, either: We have micro reactors and are now considering ones using metallic nuclear fuels, Jossou points out. The diversity of options is enough to keep researchers busy testing materials fit for cladding, the lining that prevents corrosion of the fuel and release of radioactive fission products into the surrounding reactor coolant.

      The team is also investigating fuels that improve burn-up efficiencies, so they can last longer in the reactor. An intriguing approach has been to immobilize the gas bubbles that arise from the fission process, so they don’t grow and degrade the fuel.

      Since joining MIT in July 2023, Jossou is setting up a lab that optimizes the composition of accident-tolerant nuclear fuels. He is leaning on his materials science background and looping computer simulations and artificial intelligence in the mix.

      Computer simulations allow the researchers to narrow down the potential field of candidates, optimized for specific parameters, so they can synthesize only the most promising candidates in the lab. And AI’s predictive capabilities guide researchers on which materials composition to consider next. “We no longer depend on serendipity to choose our materials, our lab is based on rational materials design,” Jossou says, “we can rapidly design advanced nuclear fuels.”

      Advancing energy causes in Africa

      Now that he is at MIT, Jossou admits the view from the outside is different. He now harbors a different perspective on what Africa needs to address some of its challenges. “The starting point to solve our problems is not money; it needs to start with ideas,” he says, “we need to find highly skilled people who can actually solve problems.” That job involves adding economic value to the rich arrays of raw materials that the continent is blessed with. It frustrates Jossou that Niger, a country rich in raw material for uranium, has no nuclear reactors of its own. It ships most of its ore to France. “The path forward is to find a way to refine these materials in Africa and to be able to power the industries on that continent as well,” Jossou says.

      Jossou is determined to do his part to eliminate these roadblocks.

      Anchored in mentorship, Jossou’s solution aims to train talent from Africa in his own lab. He has applied for a MIT Global Experiences MISTI grant to facilitate travel and research studies for Ghanaian scientists. “The goal is to conduct research in our facility and perhaps add value to indigenous materials,” Jossou says.

      Adding value has been a consistent theme of Jossou’s career. He remembers wanting to become a neurosurgeon after reading “Gifted Hands,” moved by the personal story of the author, Ben Carson. As Jossou grew older, however, he realized that becoming a doctor wasn’t necessarily what he wanted. Instead, he was looking to add value. “What I wanted was really to take on a career that allows me to solve a societal problem.” The societal problem of clean and safe energy for all is precisely what Jossou is working on today. More

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      in Environment

      Letting the Earth answer back: Designing better planetary conversations

      by

      For Chen Chu MArch ’21, the invitation to join the 2023-24 cohort of Morningside Academy for Design Design Fellows has been an unparalleled opportunity to investigate the potential of design as an alternative method of problem-solving.

      After earning a master’s degree in architecture at MIT and gaining professional experience as a researcher at an environmental nongovernmental organization, Chu decided to pursue a PhD in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. “I discovered that I needed to engage in a deeper way with the most difficult ethical challenges of our time, especially those arising from the fact of climate change,” he explains. “For me, MIT has always represented this wonderful place where people are inherently intellectually curious — it’s a very rewarding community to be part of.”

      Chu’s PhD research, guided by his doctoral advisor Delia Wendel, assistant professor of urban studies and international development, focuses on how traditional practices of floodplain agriculture can inform local and global strategies for sustainable food production and distribution in response to climate change. 

      Typically located alongside a river or stream, floodplains arise from seasonal flooding patterns that distribute nutrient-rich silt and create connectivity between species. This results in exceptionally high levels of biodiversity and microbial richness, generating the ideal conditions for agriculture. It’s no accident that the first human civilizations were founded on floodplains, including Mesopotamia (named for its location poised between two rivers, the Euphrates and Tigris), the Indus River Civilization, and the cultures of Ancient Egypt based around the Nile. Riverine transportation networks and predictable flooding rhythms provide a framework for trade and cultivation; nonetheless, floodplain communities must learn to live with risk, subject to the sudden disruptions of high waters, drought, and ecological disequilibrium. 

      For Chu, the “unstable and ungovernable” status of floodplains makes them fertile ground for thinking about. “I’m drawn to these so-called ‘wet landscapes’ — edge conditions that act as transitional spaces between land and water, between humans and nature, between city and river,” he reflects. “The development of extensively irrigated agricultural sites is typically a collective effort, which raises intriguing questions about how communities establish social organizations that simultaneously negotiate top-down state control and adapt to the uncertainty of nature.”

      Chu is in the process of honing the focus of his dissertation and refining his data collection methods, which will include archival research and fieldwork, as well as interviews with floodplain inhabitants to gain an understanding of sociopolitical nuances. Meanwhile, his role as a design fellow gives him the space to address the big questions that fire his imagination. How can we live well on shared land? How can we take responsibility for the lives of future generations? What types of political structures are required to get everyone on board? 

      These are just a few of the questions that Chu recently put to his cohort in a presentation. During the weekly seminars for the fellowship, he has the chance to converse with peers and mentors of multiple disciplines — from researchers rethinking the pedagogy of design to entrepreneurs applying design thinking to new business models to architects and engineers developing new habitats to heal our relationship with the natural world. 

      “I’ll admit — I’m wary of the human instinct to problem-solve,” says Chu. “When it comes to the material conditions and lived experience of people and planet, there’s a limit to our economic and political reasoning, and to conventional architectural practice. That said, I do believe that the mindset of a designer can open up new ways of thinking. At its core, design is an interdisciplinary practice based on the understanding that a problem can’t be solved from a narrow, singular perspective.” 

      The stimulating structure of a MAD Fellowship — free from immediate obligations to publish or produce, fellows learn from one another and engage with visiting speakers via regular seminars and events — has prompted Chu to consider what truly makes for generative conversation in the contexts of academia and the private and public sectors. In his opinion, discussions around climate change often fail to take account of one important voice; an absence he describes as “that silent being, the Earth.”

      “You can’t ask the Earth, ‘What does justice mean to you?’ Nature will not respond,” he reflects. To bridge the gap, Chu believes it’s important to combine the study of specific political and social conditions with broader existential questions raised by the environmental humanities. His own research draws upon the perspectives of thinkers including Dipesh Chakrabarty, Donna Haraway, Peter Singer,  Anna Tsing, and Michael Watts, among others. He cites James C. Scott’s lecture “In Praise of Floods” as one of his most important influences.

      In addition to his instinctive appreciation for theory, Chu’s outlook is grounded by an attention to innovation at the local level. He is currently establishing the parameters of his research, examining case studies of agricultural systems and flood mitigation strategies that have been sustained for centuries. 

      “One example is the polder system that is practiced in the Netherlands, China, Bangladesh, and many parts of the world: small, low-lying tracts of land submerged in water and surrounded by dykes and canals,” he explains. “You’ll find a different but comparable strategy in the colder regions of Japan. Crops are protected from the winter winds by constructing a spatial unit with the house at the center; trees behind the house serve as windbreakers and paddy fields for rice are located in front of the house, providing an integrated system of food and livelihood security.”

      Chu observes that there is a tendency for international policymakers to overlook local solutions in favor of grander visions and ambitious climate pledges — but he is equally keen not to romanticize vernacular practices. “Realistically, it’s always a two-way interaction. Unless you already have a workable local system in place, it’s difficult to implement a solution without top-down support. On the other hand, the large-scale technocratic dreams are empty if ignorant of local traditions and histories.” 

      By navigating between the global and the local, the theoretical and the practical, the visionary and the cautionary, Chu has hope in the possibility of gradually finding a way toward long-term solutions that adapt to specific conditions over time. It’s a model of ambition and criticality that Chu sees played out during dialogue at MAD and within his department; at root, he’s aware that the outcome of these conversations depends on the ethical context that shapes them.

      “I’ve been fortunate to have many mentors who have taught me the power of humility; a respect for the finitude, fragility,  and uncertainty of life,” he recalls. “It’s a mindset that’s barely apparent in today’s push for economic growth.” The flip-side of hubristic growth is an assumption that technological ingenuity will be enough to solve the climate crisis, but Chu’s optimism arises from a different source: “When I feel overwhelmed by the weight of the problems we’re facing, I just need to look around me,” he says. “Here on campus — at MAD, in my home department, and increasingly among the new generations of students — there’s a powerful ethos of political sensitivity, ethical compassion, and an attention to clear and critical judgment. That always gives me hope for the planet.” More

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      in Energy

      Moving past the Iron Age

      by

      MIT graduate student Sydney Rose Johnson has never seen the steel mills in central India. She’s never toured the American Midwest’s hulking steel plants or the mini mills dotting the Mississippi River. But in the past year, she’s become more familiar with steel production than she ever imagined.

      A fourth-year dual degree MBA and PhD candidate in chemical engineering and a graduate research assistant with the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) as well as a 2022-23 Shell Energy Fellow, Johnson looks at ways to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions generated by industrial processes in hard-to-abate industries. Those include steel.

      Almost every aspect of infrastructure and transportation — buildings, bridges, cars, trains, mass transit — contains steel. The manufacture of steel hasn’t changed much since the Iron Age, with some steel plants in the United States and India operating almost continually for more than a century, their massive blast furnaces re-lined periodically with carbon and graphite to keep them going.

      According to the World Economic Forum, steel demand is projected to increase 30 percent by 2050, spurred in part by population growth and economic development in China, India, Africa, and Southeast Asia.

      The steel industry is among the three biggest producers of CO2 worldwide. Every ton of steel produced in 2020 emitted, on average, 1.89 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere — around 8 percent of global CO2 emissions, according to the World Steel Association.

      A combination of technical strategies and financial investments, Johnson notes, will be needed to wrestle that 8 percent figure down to something more planet-friendly.

      Johnson’s thesis focuses on modeling and analyzing ways to decarbonize steel. Using data mined from academic and industry sources, she builds models to calculate emissions, costs, and energy consumption for plant-level production.

      “I optimize steel production pathways using emission goals, industry commitments, and cost,” she says. Based on the projected growth of India’s steel industry, she applies this approach to case studies that predict outcomes for some of the country’s thousand-plus factories, which together have a production capacity of 154 million metric tons of steel. For the United States, she looks at the effect of Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) credits. The 2022 IRA provides incentives that could accelerate the steel industry’s efforts to minimize its carbon emissions.

      Johnson compares emissions and costs across different production pathways, asking questions such as: “If we start today, what would a cost-optimal production scenario look like years from now? How would it change if we added in credits? What would have to happen to cut 2005 levels of emissions in half by 2030?”

      “My goal is to gain an understanding of how current and emerging decarbonization strategies will be integrated into the industry,” Johnson says.

      Grappling with industrial problems

      Growing up in Marietta, Georgia, outside Atlanta, the closest she ever came to a plant of any kind was through her father, a chemical engineer working in logistics and procuring steel for an aerospace company, and during high school, when she spent a semester working alongside chemical engineers tweaking the pH of an anti-foaming agent.

      At Kennesaw Mountain High School, a STEM magnet program in Cobb County, students devote an entire semester of their senior year to an internship and research project.

      Johnson chose to work at Kemira Chemicals, which develops chemical solutions for water-intensive industries with a focus on pulp and paper, water treatment, and energy systems.

      “My goal was to understand why a polymer product was falling out of suspension — essentially, why it was less stable,” she recalls. She learned how to formulate a lab-scale version of the product and conduct tests to measure its viscosity and acidity. Comparing the lab-scale and regular product results revealed that acidity was an important factor. “Through conversations with my mentor, I learned this was connected with the holding conditions, which led to the product being oxidized,” she says. With the anti-foaming agent’s problem identified, steps could be taken to fix it.

      “I learned how to apply problem-solving. I got to learn more about working in an industrial environment by connecting with the team in quality control as well as with R&D and chemical engineers at the plant site,” Johnson says. “This experience confirmed I wanted to pursue engineering in college.”

      As an undergraduate at Stanford University, she learned about the different fields — biotechnology, environmental science, electrochemistry, and energy, among others — open to chemical engineers. “It seemed like a very diverse field and application range,” she says. “I was just so intrigued by the different things I saw people doing and all these different sets of issues.”

      Turning up the heat

      At MIT, she turned her attention to how certain industries can offset their detrimental effects on climate.

      “I’m interested in the impact of technology on global communities, the environment, and policy. Energy applications affect every field. My goal as a chemical engineer is to have a broad perspective on problem-solving and to find solutions that benefit as many people, especially those under-resourced, as possible,” says Johnson, who has served on the MIT Chemical Engineering Graduate Student Advisory Board, the MIT Energy and Climate Club, and is involved with diversity and inclusion initiatives.

      The steel industry, Johnson acknowledges, is not what she first imagined when she saw herself working toward mitigating climate change.

      “But now, understanding the role the material has in infrastructure development, combined with its heavy use of coal, has illuminated how the sector, along with other hard-to-abate industries, is important in the climate change conversation,” Johnson says.

      Despite the advanced age of many steel mills, some are quite energy-efficient, she notes. Yet these operations, which produce heat upwards of 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, are still emission-intensive.

      Steel is made from iron ore, a mixture of iron, oxygen, and other minerals found on virtually every continent, with Brazil and Australia alone exporting millions of metric tons per year. Commonly based on a process dating back to the 19th century, iron is extracted from the ore through smelting — heating the ore with blast furnaces until the metal becomes spongy and its chemical components begin to break down.

      A reducing agent is needed to release the oxygen trapped in the ore, transforming it from its raw form to pure iron. That’s where most emissions come from, Johnson notes.

      “We want to reduce emissions, and we want to make a cleaner and safer environment for everyone,” she says. “It’s not just the CO2 emissions. It’s also sometimes NOx and SOx [nitrogen oxides and sulfur oxides] and air pollution particulate matter at some of these production facilities that can affect people as well.”

      In 2020, the International Energy Agency released a roadmap exploring potential technologies and strategies that would make the iron and steel sector more compatible with the agency’s vision of increased sustainability. Emission reductions can be accomplished with more modern technology, the agency suggests, or by substituting the fuels producing the immense heat needed to process ore. Traditionally, the fuels used for iron reduction have been coal and natural gas. Alternative fuels include clean hydrogen, electricity, and biomass.

      Using the MITEI Sustainable Energy System Analysis Modeling Environment (SESAME), Johnson analyzes various decarbonization strategies. She considers options such as switching fuel for furnaces to hydrogen with a little bit of natural gas or adding carbon-capture devices. The models demonstrate how effective these tactics are likely to be. The answers aren’t always encouraging.

      “Upstream emissions can determine how effective the strategies are,” Johnson says. Charcoal derived from forestry biomass seemed to be a promising alternative fuel, but her models showed that processing the charcoal for use in the blast furnace limited its effectiveness in negating emissions.

      Despite the challenges, “there are definitely ways of moving forward,” Johnson says. “It’s been an intriguing journey in terms of understanding where the industry is at. There’s still a long way to go, but it’s doable.”

      Johnson is heartened by the steel industry’s efforts to recycle scrap into new steel products and incorporate more emission-friendly technologies and practices, some of which result in significantly lower CO2 emissions than conventional production.

      A major issue is that low-carbon steel can be more than 50 percent more costly than conventionally produced steel. “There are costs associated with making the transition, but in the context of the environmental implications, I think it’s well worth it to adopt these technologies,” she says.

      After graduation, Johnson plans to continue to work in the energy field. “I definitely want to use a combination of engineering knowledge and business knowledge to work toward mitigating climate change, potentially in the startup space with clean technology or even in a policy context,” she says. “I’m interested in connecting the private and public sectors to implement measures for improving our environment and benefiting as many people as possible.” More