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      in Environment

      Looking to the past to prepare for an uncertain future

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      Aviva Intveld, an MIT senior majoring in Earth, atmospheric, and planetary sciences, is accustomed to city life. But despite hailing from metropolitan Los Angeles, she has always maintained a love for the outdoors.

      “Growing up in L.A., you just have a wealth of resources when it comes to beautiful environments,” she says, “but you’re also constantly living connected to the environment.” She developed a profound respect for the natural world and its effects on people, from the earthquakes that shook the ground to the wildfires that displaced inhabitants.

      “I liked the lifestyle that environmental science afforded,” Intveld recalls. “I liked the idea that you can make a career out of spending a huge amount of time in the field and exploring different parts of the world.”

      From the moment she arrived at MIT, Intveld threw herself into research on and off campus. During her first semester, she joined Terrascope, a program that encourages first-year students to tackle complex, real-world problems. Intveld and her cohort developed proposals to make recovery from major storms in Puerto Rico faster, more sustainable, and more equitable.

      Intveld also spent a semester studying drought stress in the lab of Assistant Professor David Des Marais, worked as a research assistant at a mineral sciences research lab back in L.A., and interned at the World Wildlife Fund. Most of her work focused on contemporary issues like food insecurity and climate change. “I was really interested in questions about today,” Intveld says.

      Her focus began to shift to the past when she interned as a research assistant at the Marine Geoarchaeology and Micropaleontology Lab at the University of Haifa. For weeks, she would spend eight hours a day hunched over a microscope, using a paintbrush to sort through grains of sand from the coastal town of Caesarea. She was looking for tiny spiral-shaped fossils of foraminifera, an organism that resides in seafloor sediments.

      These microfossils can reveal a lot about the environment in which they originated, including extreme weather events. By cataloging diverse species of foraminifera, Intveld was helping to settle a rather niche debate in the field of geoarchaeology: Did tsunamis destroy the harbor of Caesarea during the time of the ancient Romans?

      But in addition to figuring out if and when these natural disasters occurred, Intveld was interested in understanding how ancient communities prepared for and recovered from them. What methods did they use? Could those same methods be used today?

      Intveld’s research at the University of Haifa was part of the Onward Israel program, which offers young Jewish people the chance to participate in internships, academic study, and fellowships in Israel. Intveld describes the experience as a great opportunity to learn about the culture, history, and diversity of the Israeli community. The trip was also an excellent lesson in dealing with challenging situations.

      Intveld suffers from claustrophobia, but she overcame her fears to climb through the Bar Kokhba caves, and despite a cat allergy, she grew to adore the many stray cats that roam the streets of Haifa. “Sometimes you can’t let your physical limitations stop you from doing what you love,” she quips.

      Over the course of her research, Intveld has often found herself in difficult and even downright dangerous situations, all of which she looks back on with good humor. As part of an internship with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, she spent three months investigating groundwater in Homer, Alaska. While she was there, she learned to avoid poisonous plants out in the field, got lost bushwhacking, and was twice charged by a moose.

      These days, Intveld spends less time in the field and more time thinking about the ancient past. She works in the lab of Associate Professor David McGee, where her undergraduate thesis research focuses on reconstructing the paleoclimate and paleoecology of northeastern Mexico during the Early Holocene. To get an idea of what the Mexican climate looked like thousands of years ago, Intveld analyzes stable isotopes and trace elements in stalagmites taken from Mexican caves. By analyzing the isotopes of carbon and oxygen present in these stalagmites, which were formed over thousands of years from countless droplets of mineral-rich rainwater, Intveld can estimate the amount of rainfall and average temperature in a given time period.

      Intveld is primarily interested in how the area’s climate may have influenced human migration. “It’s very interesting to learn about the history of human motivation, what drives us to do what we do,” she explains. “What causes humans to move, and what causes us to stay?” So far, it seems the Mexican climate during the Early Holocene was quite inconsistent, with oscillating periods of wet and dry, but Intveld needs to conduct more research before drawing any definitive conclusions.

      Recent research has linked periods of drought in the geological record to periods of violence in the archaeological one, suggesting ancient humans often fought over access to water. “I think you can easily see the connections to stuff that we deal with today,” Intveld says, pointing out the parallels between paleolithic migration and today’s climate refugees. “We have to answer a lot of difficult questions, and one way that we can do so is by looking to see what earlier human communities did and what we can learn from them.”

      Intveld recognizes the impact of the past on our present and future in many other areas. She works as a tour guide for the List Visual Arts Center, where she educates people about public art on the MIT campus. “[Art] interested me as a way to experience history and learn about the story of different communities and people over time,” she says.

      Intveld is also unafraid to acknowledge the history of discrimination and exclusion in science. “Earth science has a big problem when it comes to inclusion and diversity,” she says. As a member of the EAPS Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee, she aims to make earth science more accessible.

      “Aviva has a clear drive to be at the front lines of geoscience research, connecting her work to the urgent environmental issues we’re all facing,” says McGee. “She also understands the critical need for our field to include more voices, more perspectives — ultimately making for better science.”

      After MIT, Intveld hopes to pursue an advanced degree in the field of sustainable mining. This past spring, she studied abroad at Imperial College London, where she took courses within the Royal School of Mines. As Intveld explains, mining is becoming crucial to sustainable energy. The rise of electric vehicles in places like California has increased the need for energy-critical elements like lithium and cobalt, but mining for these elements often does more harm than good. “The current mining complex is very environmentally destructive,” Intveld says.

      But Intveld hopes to take the same approach to mining she does with her other endeavors — acknowledging the destructive past to make way for a better future. More

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      in Energy

      Ian Hutchinson: A lifetime probing plasma, on Earth and in space

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      Ordinary folks gazing at the night sky can readily spot Earth’s close neighbors and the light of distant stars. But when Ian Hutchinson scans the cosmos, he takes in a great deal more. There is, for instance, the constant rush of plasma — highly charged ionized gases — from the sun. As this plasma flows by solid bodies such as the moon, it interacts with them electromagnetically, sometimes generating a phenomenon called an electron hole — a perturbation in the gaseous solar tide that forms a solitary, long-lived wave. Hutchinson, a professor in the MIT Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE), knows they exist because he found a way to measure them.

      “When I look up at the moon with my sweetheart, my wife of 48 years, I imagine that streaming from its dark side are electron holes that my students and I predicted, and that we then discovered,” he says. “It’s quite sentimental to me.”

      Hutchinson’s studies of these wave phenomena, summed up in a paper, “Electron holes in phase space: What they are and why they matter,” recently earned the 2022 Ronald C. Davidson Award for Plasma Physics presented by the American Physical Society’s Division of Plasma Physics.

      Measuring perturbations in plasma

      Hutchinson’s exploration of electron holes was sparked by his work over many decades in fusion energy, another branch of plasma physics. He has made many contributions to the design, operation, and experimental investigation of tokamaks — a toroidal magnetic confinement device — intended to replicate and harness the fiery thermonuclear reactions in the plasma of stars for carbon-free energy on Earth. Hutchinson took a particular interest in how to measure the plasma, notably the flow at the edges of tokamaks.

      Heat generated from fusion reactions may escape magnetic confinement and build up along these edges, leading to potential temperature spikes that impact the performance of the confinement device. Hutchinson discovered how to interpret signals from small probes to measure and track plasma velocity at the tokamak’s edge.

      “My theoretical work also showed that these probes quite likely induce electron holes,” he says. But proving this contention required experiments at resolutions in time and space beyond what tokamaks allow. That’s when Hutchinson had an important insight.

      “I realized that the phenomena we were trying to investigate can actually be measured with exquisite accuracy by satellites that travel through plasma surrounding Earth and other solid bodies,” he says. Although plasmas in space are at a much larger scale than the plasmas generated in the laboratory, measurements of these gases by a satellite is analogous “to a situation where we fly a tiny micron-sized spacecraft through the wakes of probes at the edge of tokamaks,” says Hutchinson.

      Using satellite data provided by NASA, Hutchinson set about analyzing solar plasma as it whips by the moon. “We predicted instabilities and the generation of electron holes,” he recounts. “Our theory passed with flying colors: We saw lots of holes in the wake of the moon, and few elsewhere.”

      Developing tokamaks

      Hutchinson grew up in the English midlands and attended Cambridge University, where he became “intrigued by plasma physics in a course taught by an entertaining and effective teacher,” he says.

      Hutchinson headed for doctoral studies at Australian National University on fellowship. The experience afforded him his first opportunity for research on plasma confinement. “There I was at the ends of the Earth, and I was one of very few scientists worldwide with a tokamak almost to myself,” he says. “It was a device that had risen to the top of everyone’s agenda in fusion research as something we really needed to understand.”

      His dissertation, which examined instabilities in plasma, and his hands-on experience with the device, brought him to the attention of Ronald Parker SM ’63, PhD ’67, now emeritus professor of nuclear science and engineering and electrical engineering and computer science, who was building MIT’s Alcator tokamak program.

      In 1976, Hutchinson joined this group, spending three years as a research scientist. After an interval in Britain, he returned to MIT with a faculty position in NSE, and soon, a leadership role in developing the next phase of the Institute’s fusion experiment, the Alcator-C Mod tokamak.

      “This was a major development of the high-magnetic field approach to fusion,” says Hutchinson. Powerful magnets are essential for containing the superhot plasma; the MIT group developed an experiment with a magnetic field more than 150,000 times the strength of the Earth’s magnetic field. “We were in the business of determining whether tokamaks had sufficiently good confinement to function as fusion reactors,” he says.

      Hutchinson oversaw the nearly six-year construction of the device, which was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. He then led its operation starting in 1993, creating a national facility for experiments that drew scientists and students from around the world. At the time, it was the largest research group on campus at MIT.

      In their studies, scientists employed novel heating and sustainment techniques using radio waves and microwaves. They also discovered new methods for performing diagnostics inside the tokamak. “Alcator C-Mod demonstrated excellent confinement in a more compact and cost-effective device,” says Hutchinson. “It was unique in the world.”

      Hutchinson is proud of Alcator C-Mod’s technological achievements, including its record for highest plasma pressure for a magnetic confinement device. But this large-scale project holds even greater significance for him. “Alcator C-Mod helped beat a new path in fusion research, and has become the basis for the SPARC tokamak now under construction,” he says.

      SPARC is a compact, high-magnetic field fusion energy device under development through a collaboration between MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center and startup Commonwealth Fusions Systems. Its goal is to demonstrate net energy gain from fusion, prove the viability of fusion as a source of carbon-free energy, and tip the scales in the race against climate change. A number of SPARC’s leaders are students Hutchinson taught. “This is a source of considerable satisfaction,” he says. “Some of their down-to-Earth realism comes from me, and perhaps some of their aspirations have been molded by their work with me.” 

      A new phase

      After leading Alcator C-Mod for 15 years and generating hundreds of journal articles, Hutchinson served as NSE’s department head from 2003 to 2009. He wrote the standard textbook on measuring plasmas, and has more recently written “A Student’s Guide to Numerical Methods” (2015), which evolved from a course he taught to introduce graduate students to computational problem-solving in physics and engineering.

      After this, his 40th year on the MIT faculty, Hutchinson will be stepping back from teaching. “It’s important for new generations of students to be taught by people at the pinnacle of their mental and intellectual capacity, and when you reach my age, you’re aware of the fact that you’re slowing down,” he says.

      Hutchinson’s at no loss for ways to spend his time. As a devout Christian, he speaks and writes about the relationship between religion and science, trying to help skeptics on both sides find common ground. He sings in two choral groups, and is very busy grandparenting four grandsons. For a complete change of pace, Hutchinson goes fly fishing.

      But he still has plans to explore new frontiers in plasma physics. “I’m gratified to say I still do important research,” he says. “I’ve solved most of the problems in electron holes, and now I need to say something about ion holes!” More

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      in Environment

      Sustainable supply chains put the customer first

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      When we consider the supply chain, we typically think of factories, ships, trucks, and warehouses. Yet, the customer side is equally important, especially in efforts to make our distribution networks more sustainable. Customers are an untapped resource in building sustainability, says Josué C. Velázquez Martínez, a research scientist at MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics. 

      Velázquez Martínez, who is director of MIT’s Sustainable Supply Chain Lab, investigates how customer-facing supply chains can be made more environmentally and socially sustainable. One way is a Green Button project that explores how to optimize e-commerce delivery schedules to reduce carbon emissions and persuade customers to use less carbon-intensive four- or five-day shipping options instead of one or two days. Velázquez Martínez has also launched the MIT Low Income Firms Transformation (LIFT) Lab that is researching ways to improve micro-retailer supply chains in the developing world to provide owners with the necessary tools for survival.  

      “The definition of sustainable supply chain keeps evolving because things that were sustainable 20 to 30 years ago are not as sustainable now,” says Velázquez Martínez. “Today, there are more companies that are capturing information to build strategies for environmental, economic, and social sustainability. They are investing in alternative energy and other solutions to make the supply chain more environmentally friendly and are tracking their suppliers and identifying key vulnerabilities. A big part of this is an attempt to create fairer conditions for people who work in supply chains or are dependent on them.”

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      The move toward sustainable supply chain is being driven as much by people as by companies, whether they are playing the role of selective consumer or voting citizens. The consumer aspect is often overlooked, says Velázquez Martínez. “Consumers are the ones who move the supply chain. We are looking at how companies can provide transparency to involve customers in their sustainability strategy.” 

      Proposed solutions for sustainability are not always as effective as promised. Some fashion rental schemes fall into this category, says Velázquez Martínez. “There are many new rental companies that are trying to get more use out of clothes to offset the emissions associated with production. We recently researched the environmental impact of monthly subscription models where consumers pay a fee to receive clothes for a month before returning them, as well as peer-to-peer sharing models.” 

      The researchers found that while rental services generally have a lower carbon footprint than retail sales, hidden emissions from logistics played a surprisingly large role. “First, you need to deliver the clothes and pick them up, and there are high return rates,” says Velázquez Martínez. “When you factor in dry cleaning and packaging emissions, the rental models in some cases have a worse carbon footprint than buying new clothes.” Peer-to-peer sharing could be better, he adds, but that depends on how far the consumers travel to meet-up points. 

      Typically, says Velázquez Martínez, garment types that are frequently used are not well suited to rental models. “But for specialty clothes such as wedding dresses or prom dresses, it is better to rent.” 

      Waiting a few days to save the planet 

      Even before the pandemic, online retailing gained a second wind due to low-cost same- and next-day delivery options. While e-commerce may have its drawbacks as a contributor to social isolation and reduced competition, it has proven itself to be far more eco-friendly than brick-and-mortar shopping, not to mention a lot more convenient. Yet rapid deliveries are cutting into online-shopping’s carbon-cutting advantage.

      In 2019, MIT’s Sustainable Supply Chain Lab launched a Green Bottle project to study the rapid delivery phenomenon. The project has been “testing whether consumers would be willing to delay their e-commerce deliveries to reduce the environmental impact of fast shipping,” says Velázquez Martínez. “Many companies such as Walmart and Target have followed Amazon’s 2019 strategy of moving from two-day to same-day delivery. Instead of sending a fully loaded truck to a neighborhood every few days, they now send multiple trucks to that neighborhood every day, and there are more days when trucks are targeting each neighborhood. All this increases carbon emissions and makes it hard for shippers to consolidate. ”  

      Working with Coppel, one of Mexico’s largest retailers, the Green Button project inspired a related Consolidation Ecommerce Project that built a large-scale mathematical model to provide a strategy for consolidation. The model determined what delivery time window each neighborhood demands and then calculated the best day to deliver to each neighborhood to meet the desired window while minimizing carbon emissions. 

      No matter what mixture of delivery times was used, the consolidation model helped retailers schedule deliveries more efficiently. Yet, the biggest cuts in emissions emerged when customers were willing to wait several days.

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      “When we ran a month-long simulation comparing our model for four-to-five-day delivery with Coppel’s existing model for one- or two-day delivery, we saw savings in fuel consumption of over 50 percent on certain routes” says Velázquez Martínez. “This is huge compared to other strategies for squeezing more efficiency from the last-mile supply chain, such as routing optimization, where savings are close to 5 percent. The optimal solution depends on factors such as the capacity for consolidation, the frequency of delivery, the store capacity, and the impact on inbound operations.” 

      The researchers next set out to determine if customers could be persuaded to wait longer for deliveries. Considering that the price differential is low or nonexistent, this was a considerable challenge. Yet, the same day habit is only a few years old, and some consumers have come to realize they don’t always need rapid deliveries. “Some consumers who order by rapid delivery find they are too busy to open the packages right away,” says Velázquez Martínez.  

      Trees beat kilograms of CO2

      The researchers set out to find if consumers would be willing to sacrifice a bit of convenience if they knew they were helping to reduce climate change. The Green Button project tested different public outreach strategies. For one test group, they reported the carbon impact of delivery times in kilograms of carbon dioxide (CO2). Another group received the information expressed in terms of the energy required to recycle a certain amount of garbage. A third group learned about emissions in terms of the number of trees required to trap the carbon. “Explaining the impact in terms of trees led to almost 90 percent willing to wait another day or two,” says Velázquez Martínez. “This is compared to less than 40 percent for the group that received the data in kilograms of CO2.” 

      Another surprise was that there was no difference in response based on income, gender, or age. “Most studies of green consumers suggest they are predominantly high income, female, highly educated, or younger,” says Velázquez Martínez. “However, our results show that the differences were the same between low and high income, women and men, and younger and older people. We have shown that disclosing emissions transparently and making the consumer a part of the strategy can be a new opportunity for more consumer-driven logistics sustainability.” 

      The researchers are now developing similar models for business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce. “We found that B2B supply chain emissions are often high because many shipping companies require strict delivery windows,” says Velázquez Martínez.  

      The B2B models drill down to examine the Corporate Value Chain (Scope 3) emissions of suppliers. “Although some shipping companies are now asking their suppliers to review emissions, it is a challenge to create a transparent supply chain,” says Velázquez Martínez.  “Technological innovations have made it easier, starting with RFID [radio frequency identification], and then real-time GPS mapping and blockchain. But these technologies need to be more accessible and affordable, and we need more companies willing to use them.” 

      Some companies have been hesitant to dig too deeply into their supply chain, fearing they might uncover a scandal that might risk their reputation, says Velázquez Martínez. Other organizations are forced to look at the issue when nongovernmental organizations research sustainability issues such as social injustice in sweat shops and conflict mineral mines. 

      One challenge to building a transparent supply chain is that “in many companies, the sustainability teams are separate from the rest of the company,” says Velázquez Martínez. “Even if the CEOs receive information on sustainability issues, it often doesn’t filter down because the information does not belong to the planners or managers. We are pushing companies to not only account for sustainability factors in supply chain network design but also examine daily operations that affect sustainability. This is a big topic now: How can we translate sustainability information into something that everybody can understand and use?” 

      LIFT Lab lifts micro-retailers  

      In 2016, Velázquez Martínez launched the MIT GeneSys project to gain insights into micro and small enterprises (MSEs) in developing countries. The project released a GeneSys mobile app, which was used by more than 500 students throughout Latin America to collect data on more than 800 microfirms. In 2022, he launched the LIFT Lab, which focuses more specifically on studying and improving the supply chain for MSEs.  

      Worldwide, some 90 percent of companies have fewer than 10 employees. In Latin America and the Caribbean, companies with fewer than 50 employees represent 99 percent of all companies and 47 percent of employment. 

      Although MSEs represent much of the world’s economy, they are poorly understood, notes Velázquez Martínez. “Those tiny businesses are driving a lot of the economy and serve as important customers for the large companies working in developing countries. They range from small businesses down to people trying to get some money to eat by selling cakes or tacos through their windows.”  

      The MIT LIFT Lab researchers investigated whether MSE supply chain issues could help shed light on why many Latin American countries have been limited to marginal increases in gross domestic product. “Large companies from the developed world that are operating in Latin America, such as Unilever, Walmart, and Coca-Cola, have huge growth there, in some cases higher than they have in the developed world,” says Velázquez Martínez. “Yet, the countries are not developing as fast as we would expect.” 

      The LIFT Lab data showed that while the multinationals are thriving in Latin America, the local MSEs are decreasing in productivity. The study also found the trend has worsened with Covid-19.  

      The LIFT Lab’s first big project, which is sponsored by Mexican beverage and retail company FEMSA, is studying supply chains in Mexico. The study spans 200,000 micro-retailers and 300,000 consumers. In a collaboration with Tecnológico de Monterrey, hundreds of students are helping with a field study.  

      “We are looking at supply chain management and business capabilities and identifying the challenges to adoption of technology and digitalization,” says Velázquez Martínez. “We want to find the best ways for micro-firms to work with suppliers and consumers by identifying the consumers who access this market, as well as the products and services that can best help the micro-firms drive growth.” 

      Based on the earlier research by GeneSys, Velázquez Martínez has developed some hypotheses for potential improvements for micro-retailer supply chain, starting with payment terms. “We found that the micro-firms often get the worst purchasing deals. Owners without credit cards and with limited cash often buy in smaller amounts at much higher prices than retailers like Walmart. The big suppliers are squeezing them.” 

      While large retailers usually get 60 to 120 days to pay, micro-retailers “either pay at the moment of the transaction or in advance,” says Velázquez Martínez. “In a study of 500 micro-retailers in five countries in Latin America, we found the average payment time was minus seven days payment in advance. These terms reduce cash availability and often lead to bankruptcy.” 

      LIFT Lab is working with suppliers to persuade them to offer a minimum payment time of two weeks. “We can show the suppliers that the change in terms will let them move more product and increase sales,” says Velázquez Martínez. “Meanwhile, the micro-retailers gain higher profits and become more stable, even if they may pay a bit more.” 

      LIFT Lab is also looking at ways that micro-retailers can leverage smartphones for digitalization and planning. “Some of these companies are keeping records on napkins,” says Velázquez Martínez. “By using a cellphone, they can charge orders to suppliers and communicate with consumers. We are testing different dashboards for mobile apps to help with planning and financial performance. We are also recommending services the stores can provide, such as paying electricity or water bills. The idea is to build more capabilities and knowledge and increase business competencies for the supply chain that are tailored for micro-retailers.” 

      From a financial perspective, micro-retailers are not always the most efficient way to move products. Yet they also play an important role in building social cohesion within neighborhoods. By offering more services, the corner bodega can bring people together in ways that are impossible with e-commerce and big-box stores.  

      Whether the consumers are micro-firms buying from suppliers or e-commerce customers waiting for packages, “transparency is key to building a sustainable supply chain,” says Velázquez Martínez. “To change consumer habits, consumers need to be better educated on the impacts of their behaviors. With consumer-facing logistics, ‘The last shall be first, and the first last.’” More

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      in Security

      Food for thought, thought for food

      by

      According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, approximately 3.1 billion people worldwide were unable to afford a healthy diet in 2020. Meanwhile, in 2021 close to 2.3 billion people were moderately or severely food insecure. Given the strong link between malnutrition and income disparity, the numbers paint a grim picture representing one of the grand challenges of our time.

      “I’m probably an idealist,” says MIT Research Scientist Christopher Mejía Argueta, “but I really believe that if we change our diets and think about ways to help others, we can make a difference — that’s my motivation.”

      Mejía Argueta is the founder and director of the MIT Food and Retail Operations Lab (FaROL). He has more than a decade of experience in supply chain management, optimization, and effective data-driven decision-making on pressing issues like the evolution of end consumers for retail and e-tail supply chains, food waste, and equitable access to nutrition.  

      Supply chain network designs typically focus on minimizing costs without considering the implications (e.g., cost) of changes in consumer behavior. Mejía Argueta and his colleagues at the FaROL, however, are working to understand and design optimal supply chains to create high-performance operations based on consumer choice. “Understanding the significant factors of consumer choice and analyzing their evolution over time becomes critical to designing forward-looking retail operations with data-driven and customer-centric supply chains, inventory management, and distribution systems,” explains Mejía Argueta. 

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      One of his recent projects examined the challenges of small retailers worldwide. These mom-and-pop outlets, or nanostores, account for 50 percent of the global market share and are the primary source of consumer packaged goods for people in urban areas. Worldwide there are nearly 50 million nanostores, each serving between 100-200 households in a community. In India alone, there are 14 million nanostores known as kiranas. And while these retailers are more prevalent in emerging markets, they play an important role in developed markets, particularly in under-resourced communities, and are frequently located in “food deserts,” where they are the only source of essential goods for the community.  

      These small retailers thrive thanks, partly, to their ability to offer the right combination of affordability and convenience while fostering trust with local customers, who often lack access to a supermarket or a grocery store. They often exist in fragmented, densely populated areas where infrastructure and public transportation services are poor and consumers have limited purchasing power. But nanostore shopkeepers and owners are intimately familiar with their customers and their consumption patterns, which means they can connect those consumption patterns or information to the larger supply chain. According to Mejía Argueta, when it comes to the future of retail, nanostores will be the cornerstones of growth in emerging economies. 

      But it’s a complicated scenario. Mom-and-pop shops don’t have the capacity to offer a broad range of products to their customers, and often, they lack access to nutritious food options. Logistically speaking, it is expensive to supply them, and the cost-to-serve (i.e., the logistics cost) is between 10 to 30 percent more expensive than other retailers. According to Mejía Argueta, this has a significant ripple effect, impacting education, productivity, and, eventually, the economic performance of an entire nation.  

      “The high fragmentation of nanostores causes substantial distribution inefficiencies, especially in congested megacities,” he says. “At my lab, we study how to make nanostores more efficient and effective by considering various commercial and logistics strategies while considering inherent technical challenges. We need to serve these small retailers better to help them survive and thrive, to provide a greater impact for underserved communities and the entire economic ecosystem.”

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      Mejía Argueta and his team recently collaborated with Tufts University and the City of Somerville, Massachusetts, to conduct research on food access models in underserved communities. The Somerville Project explored various interventions to supply fresh produce in food desert neighborhoods.

      “A lack of nutrition does not simply mean a lack of food,” Mejía Argueta says. “It can also be caused by an overabundance of unhealthy foods in a given market, which is particularly troublesome for U.S. cities where people in underserved communities don’t have access to healthy food options. We believe that one way to combat the problem of food deserts is to supply these areas with healthy food options affordably and create awareness programs.”  

      The collaborative project saw Mejía Argueta and his colleagues assessing the impact of several intervention schemes designed to empower the end consumer. For example, they implemented a low-cost grocery delivery model similar to Instacart as well as a ride sharing system to transport people from their homes to grocery stores and back. They also collaborated with a nonprofit organization, Partnership for a Healthier America, and began working with retailers to deliver “veggie boxes” in underserved communities. Models like these provide low-income people access to food while providing dignity of choice, Mejía Argueta explains.  

      When it comes to supply chain management research, sustainability and societal impact often fall by the wayside, but Mejía Argueta’s bottom-up approach shirks tradition. “We’re trying to build a community, employing a socially driven perspective because if you work with the community, you gain their trust. If you want to make something sustainable in the long term, people need to trust in these solutions and engage with the ecosystem as a whole.”  

      And to achieve real-world impact, collaboration is key. Mejía Argueta says that government has an important role to play, developing policy to connect the models he and his colleagues develop in academia to societal challenges. Meanwhile, he believes startups and entrepreneurs can function as bridge-builders to link the flows of information, the flows of goods and cash, and even knowledge and security in an ecosystem that suffers from fragmentation and siloed thinking among stakeholders.

      Finally, Mejía Argueta reflects on the role of corporations and his belief that the MIT Industrial Liaison Program is essential to getting his research to the frontline of business challenges. “The Industrial Liaison Program does a fantastic job of connecting our research to real-world scenarios,” he says. “It creates opportunities for us to have meaningful interactions with corporates for real-world impact. I believe strongly in the MIT motto ‘mens et manus,’ and ILP helps drive our research into practice.” More

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      in Energy

      Pursuing a practical approach to research

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      Koroush Shirvan, the John Clark Hardwick Career Development Professor in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE), knows that the nuclear industry has traditionally been wary of innovations until they are shown to have proven utility. As a result, he has relentlessly focused on practical applications in his research, work that has netted him the 2022 Reactor Technology Award from the American Nuclear Society. “The award has usually recognized practical contributions to the field of reactor design and has not often gone to academia,” Shirvan says.

      One of these “practical contributions” is in the field of accident-tolerant fuels, a program launched by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi incident. The goal within this program, says Shirvan, is to develop new forms of nuclear fuels that can tolerate heat. His team, with students from over 16 countries, is working on numerous possibilities that range in composition and method of production.

      Another aspect of Shirvan’s research focuses on how radiation impacts heat transfer mechanisms in the reactor. The team found fuel corrosion to be the driving force. “[The research] informs how nuclear fuels perform in the reactor, from a practical point of view,” Shirvan says.

      Optimizing nuclear reactor design

      A summer internship when Shirvan was an undergraduate at the University of Florida at Gainesville seeded his drive to focus on practical applications in his studies. A nearby nuclear utility was losing millions because of crud accumulating on fuel rods. Over time, the company was solving the problem by using more fuel, before it had extracted all the life from earlier batches.

      Placement of fuel rods in nuclear reactors is a complex problem with many factors — the life of the fuel, location of hot spots — affecting outcomes. Nuclear reactors change their configuration of fuel rods every 18-24 months to optimize close to 15-20 constraints, leading to roughly 200-800 assemblies. The mind-boggling nature of the problem means that plants have to rely on experienced engineers.

      During his internship, Shirvan optimized the program used to place fuel rods in the reactor. He found that certain rods in assemblies were more prone to the crud deposits, and reworked their configurations, optimizing for these rods’ performance instead of adding assemblies.

      In recent years, Shirvan has applied a branch of artificial intelligence — reinforcement learning — to the configuration problem and created a software program used by the largest U.S. nuclear utility. “This program gives even a layperson the ability to reconfigure the fuels and the reactor without having expert knowledge,” Shirvan says.

      From advanced math to counting jelly beans

      Shirvan’s own expertise in nuclear science and engineering developed quite organically. He grew up in Tehran, Iran, and when he was 14 the family moved to Gainesville, where Shirvan’s aunt and family live. He remembers an awkward couple of years at the new high school where he was grouped in with newly arrived international students, and placed in entry-level classes. “I went from doing advanced mathematics in Iran to counting jelly beans,” he laughs.

      Shirvan applied to the University of Florida for his undergraduate studies since it made economic sense; the school gave full scholarships to Floridian students who received a certain minimum SAT score. Shirvan qualified. His uncle, who was a professor in the nuclear engineering department then, encouraged Shirvan to take classes in the department. Under his uncle’s mentorship, the courses Shirvan took, and his internship, cemented his love of the interdisciplinary approach that the field demanded.

      Having always known that he wanted to teach — he remembers finishing his math tests early in Tehran so he could earn the reward of being class monitor — Shirvan knew graduate school was next. His uncle encouraged him to apply to MIT and to the University of Michigan, home to reputable programs in the field. Shirvan chose MIT because “only at MIT was there a program on nuclear design. There were faculty dedicated to designing new reactors, looking at multiple disciplines, and putting all of that together.” He went on to pursue his master’s and doctoral studies at NSE under the supervision of Professor Mujid Kazimi, focusing on compact pressurized and boiling water reactor designs. When Kazimi passed away suddenly in 2015, Shirvan was a research scientist, and switched to tenure track to guide the professor’s team.

      Another project that Shirvan took in 2015: leadership of MIT’s course on nuclear reactor technology for utility executives. Offered only by the Institute, the program is an introduction to nuclear engineering and safety for personnel who might not have much background in the area. “It’s a great course because you get to see what the real problems are in the energy sector … like grid stability,” Shirvan says.

      A multipronged approach to savings

      Another very real problem nuclear utilities face is cost. Contrary to what one hears on the news, one of the biggest stumbling blocks to building new nuclear facilities in the United States is cost, which today can be up to three times that of renewables, Shirvan says. While many approaches such as advanced manufacturing have been tried, Shirvan believes that the solution to decrease expenditures lies in designing more compact reactors.

      His team has developed an open-source advanced nuclear cost tool and has focused on two different designs: a small water reactor using compact steam technology and a horizontal gas reactor. Compactness also means making fuels more efficient, as Shirvan’s work does, and in improving the heat exchange device. It’s all back to the basics and bringing “commercial viable arguments in with your research,” Shirvan explains.

      Shirvan is excited about the future of the U.S. nuclear industry, and that the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act grants the same subsidies to nuclear as it does for renewables. In this new level playing field, advanced nuclear still has a long way to go in terms of affordability, he admits. “It’s time to push forward with cost-effective design,” Shirvan says, “I look forward to supporting this by continuing to guide these efforts with research from my team.” More

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      in Environment

      Machinery of the state

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      In Mai Hassan’s studies of Kenya, she documented the emergence of a sprawling administrative network officially billed as encouraging economic development, overseeing the population, and bolstering democracy. But Hassan’s field interviews and archival research revealed a more sinister purpose for the hundreds of administrative and security offices dotting the nation: “They were there to do the presidents’ bidding, which often involved coercing their own countrymen.”

      This research served as a catalyst for Hassan, who joined MIT as an associate professor of political science in July, to investigate what she calls the “politicized management of bureaucracy and the state.” She set out to “understand the motivations, capacities, and roles of people administering state programs and social functions,” she says. “I realized the state is not a faceless being, but instead comprised of bureaucrats carrying out functions on behalf of the state and the regime that runs it.”

      Today, Hassan’s portfolio encompasses not just the bureaucratic state but democratization efforts in Kenya and elsewhere in the East Africa region, including her native Sudan. Her research highlights the difficulties of democratization. “I’m finding that the conditions under which people come together for overthrowing an autocratic regime really matter, because those conditions may actually impede a nation from achieving democracy,” she says.

      A coordinated bureaucracy

      Hassan’s academic engagement with the state’s administrative machinery began during graduate school at Harvard University, where she earned her master’s and doctorate in government. While working with a community trash and sanitation program in some Kenyan Maasai communities, Hassan recalls “shepherding myself from office to office, meeting different bureaucrats to obtain the same approvals but for different jurisdictions.” The Kenyan state had recently set up hundreds of new local administrative units, motivated by what it claimed was the need for greater efficiency. But to Hassan’s eyes, “the administrative network was not well organized, seemed costly to maintain, and seemed to hinder — not bolster — development,” she says. What then, she wondered, was “the political logic behind such state restructuring?”

      Hassan began researching this bureaucratic transformation of Kenya, speaking with administrators in communities large and small who were charged with handling the business of the state. These studies yielded a wealth of findings for her dissertation, and for multiple journals.

      But upon finishing this tranche of research, Hassan realized that it was insufficient simply to study the structure of the state. “Understanding the role of new administrative structures for politics, development, and governance fundamentally requires that we understand who the government has put in charge of them,” she says. Among her insights:

      “The president’s office knows a lot of these administrators, and thinks about their strengths, limitations, and fit within a community,” says Hassan. Some administrators served the purposes of the central government by setting up water irrigation projects or building a new school. But in other villages, the state chose administrators who could act “much more coercively, ignoring development needs, throwing youth who supported the opposition into jail, and spending resources exclusively on policing.”

      Hassan’s work showed that in communities characterized by strong political opposition, “the local administration was always more coercive, regardless of an elected or autocratic president,” she says. Notably, the tenures of such officials proved shorter than those of their peers. “Once administrators get to know a community — going to church and the market with residents — it’s hard to coerce them,” explains Hassan.

      These short tenures come with costs, she notes: “Spending significant time in a station is useful for development, because you know exactly whom to hire if you want to build a school or get something done efficiently.” Politicizing these assignments undermines efforts at delivery of services and, more broadly, economic improvement nationwide. “Regimes that are more invested in retaining power must devote resources to establishing and maintaining control, resources that could otherwise be used for development and the welfare of citizens,” she says.

      Hassan wove together her research covering three presidents over a 50-year period, in the book, “Regime Threats and State Solutions: Bureaucratic Loyalty and Embeddedness in Kenya” (2020, Cambridge University Press), named a Foreign Affairs Best Book of 2020.

      Sudanese roots

      The role of the state in fulfilling the needs of its citizens has long fascinated Hassan. Her grandfather, who had served as Sudan’s ambassador to the USSR, talked to her about the advantages of a centralized government “that allocated resources to reduce inequality,” she says.

      Politics often dominated the conversation in gatherings of Hassan’s family and friends. Her parents immigrated to northern Virginia when she was very young, and many relatives joined them, part of a steady flow of Sudanese fleeing political turmoil and oppression.

      “A lot of people had expected more from the Sudanese state after independence and didn’t get it,” she says. “People had hopes for what the government could and should do.”

      Hassan’s Sudanese roots and ongoing connection to the Sudanese community have shaped her academic interests and goals. At the University of Virginia, she gravitated toward history and economics classes. But it was her time at the Ralph Bunche Summer institute that perhaps proved most pivotal in her journey. This five-week intensive program is offered by the American Political Science Association to introduce underrepresented undergraduate students to doctoral studies. “It was really compelling in this program to think rigorously about all the political ideas I’d heard as I was growing up, and find ways to challenge some assertions empirically,” she says.

      Regime change and civil society

      At Harvard, Hassan first set out to focus on Sudan for her doctoral program. “There wasn’t much scholarship on the country, and what there was lacked rigor,” she says. “That was something that needed to change.” But she decided to postpone this goal after realizing that she might be vulnerable as a student conducting field research there. She landed instead in Kenya, where she honed her interviewing and data collection skills.

      Today, empowered by her prior work, she has returned to Sudan. “I felt that the popular uprising in Sudan and ousting of the Islamist regime in 2019 should be documented and analyzed,” she says. “It was incredible that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, acted collectively to uproot a dictator, in the face of brutal violence from the state.”But “democracy is still uncertain there,” says Hassan. The broad coalition behind regime change “doesn’t know how to govern because different people and different sectors of society have different ideas about what democratic Sudan should look like,” she says. “Overthrowing an autocratic regime and having civil society come together to figure out what’s going to replace it require different things, and it’s unclear if a movement that accomplishes the first is well-suited to do the second.”

      Hassan believes that in order to create lasting democratization, “you need the hard work of building organizations, developing ways in which members learn to compromise among themselves, and make decisions and rules for how to move forward.”

      Hassan is enjoying the fall semester and teaching courses on autocracy and authoritarian regimes. She is excited as well about developing her work on African efforts at democratic mobilization in a political science department she describes as “policy-forward.”

      Over time, she hopes to connect with Institute scholars in the hard sciences to think about other challenges these nations are facing, such as climate change. “It’s really hot in Sudan, and it may be one of the first countries to become completely uninhabitable,” she says. “I’d like to explore strategies for growing crops differently or managing the exceedingly scarce resource of water, and figure out what kind of political discussions will be necessary to implement any changes. It is really critical to think about these problems in an interdisciplinary way.” More

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      in Energy

      On batteries, teaching, and world peace

      by

      Over his long career as an electrochemist and professor, Donald Sadoway has earned an impressive variety of honors, from being named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2012 to appearing on “The Colbert Report,” where he talked about “renewable energy and world peace,” according to Comedy Central.

      What does he personally consider to be his top achievements?

      “That’s easy,” he says immediately. “For teaching, it’s 3.091,” the MIT course on solid-state chemistry he led for some 18 years. An MIT core requirement, 3.091 is also one of the largest classes at the Institute. In 2003 it was the largest, with 630 students. Sadoway, who retires this year after 45 years in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, estimates that over the years he’s taught the course to some 10,000 undergraduates.

      A passion for teaching

      Along the way he turned the class into an MIT favorite, complete with music, art, and literature. “I brought in all that enrichment because I knew that 95 percent of the students in that room weren’t going to major in anything chemical and this might be the last class they’d take in the subject. But it’s a requirement. So they’re 18 years old, they’re very smart, and many of them are very bored. You have to find a hook [to reach them]. And I did.”

      In 1995, Sadoway was named a Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellow, an honor that recognizes outstanding classroom teaching at the Institute. Among the communications in support of his nomination:

      “His contributions are enormous and the class is in rapt attention from beginning to end. His lectures are highly articulate yet animated and he has uncommon grace and style. I was awed by his ability to introduce playful and creative elements into a core lecture…”

      Bill Gates would agree. In the early 2000s Sadoway’s lectures were shared with the world through OpenCourseWare, the web-based publication of MIT course materials. Gates was so inspired by the lectures that he asked to meet with Sadoway to learn more about his research. (Sadoway initially ignored Gates’ email because he thought his account had been hacked by MIT pranksters.)

      Research breakthroughs

      Teaching is not Sadoway’s only passion. He’s also proud of his accomplishments in electrochemistry. The discipline that involves electron transfer reactions is key to everything from batteries to the primary extraction of metals like aluminum and magnesium. “It’s quite wide-ranging,” says the John F. Elliott Professor Emeritus of Materials Chemistry.

      Sadoway’s contributions include two battery breakthroughs. First came the liquid metal battery, which could enable the large-scale storage of renewable energy. “That represents a huge step forward in the transition to green energy,” said António Campinos, president of the European Patent Office, earlier this year when Sadoway won the 2022 European Inventor Award for the invention in the category for Non-European Patent Office Countries.

      On “The Colbert Report,” Sadoway alluded to that work when he told Stephen Colbert that electrochemistry is the key to world peace. Why? Because it could lead to a battery capable of storing energy from the sun when the sun doesn’t shine and otherwise make renewables an important part of the clean energy mix. And that in turn could “plummet the price of petroleum and depose dictators all over the world without one shot being fired,” he recently recalled.

      The liquid metal battery is the focus of Ambri, one of six companies based on Sadoway’s inventions. Bill Gates was the first funder of the company, which formed in 2010 and aims to install its first battery soon. That battery will store energy from a reported 500 megawatts of on-site renewable generation, the same output as a natural gas power plant.

      Then, in August of this year, Sadoway and colleagues published a paper in Nature about “one of the first new battery chemistries in 30 years,” Sadoway says. “I wanted to invent something that was better, much better,” than the expensive lithium-ion batteries used in, for example, today’s electric cars.

      That battery is the focus of Avanti, one of three Sadoway companies formed just last year. The other two are Pure Lithium, to commercialize his inventions related to that element, and Sadoway Labs. The latter, a nonprofit, is essentially “a space to try radical innovations. We’re gonna start working on wild ideas.”

      Another focus of Sadoway’s research: green steel. Steelmaking produces huge amounts of greenhouse gases. Enter Boston Metal, another Sadoway company. This one is developing a new approach to producing steel based on research begun some 25 years ago. Unlike the current technology for producing steel, the Boston Metal approach — molten oxide electrolysis — does not use the element at the root of steel’s problems: carbon. The principal byproduct of the new system? Oxygen.

      In 2012, Sadoway gave a TED talk to 2,000 people on the liquid metal battery. He believes that that talk, which has now been seen by almost 2.5 million people, led to the wider publicity of his work — and science overall — on “The Colbert Report” and elsewhere. “The moral here is that if you step out of your comfort zone, you might be surprised at what can happen,” he concludes.

      Colleagues’ reflections

      “I met Don in 2006 when I was working for the iron and steel industry in Europe on ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the production of those materials,” says Antoine Allanore, professor of metallurgy, Department of Materials Science and Engineering. “He was the same Don Sadoway that you see in recordings of his lectures: very elegant, very charismatic, and passionate about the technical solutions and underlying science of the process we were all investigating; electrolysis. A few years later, when I decided to pursue an academic career, I contacted Don and became a postdoctoral associate in his lab. That ultimately led to my becoming an MIT professor. People don’t believe me, but before I came to MIT the only thing I knew about the Institute was that Noam Chomsky was there … and Don Sadoway. And I felt, that’s a great place to be. And I stayed because I saw the exceptional things that can be accomplished at MIT and Don is the perfect example of that.”

      “I had the joy of meeting Don when I first arrived on the MIT campus in 1994,” recalls Felice Frankel, research scientist in the MIT departments of Chemical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering. “I didn’t have to talk him into the idea that researchers needed to take their images and graphics more seriously.  He got it — that it wasn’t just about pretty pictures. He was an important part of our five-year National Science Foundation project — Picturing to Learn — to bring that concept into the classroom. How lucky that was for me!”

      “Don has been a friend and mentor since we met in 1995 when I was an MIT senior,” says Luis Ortiz, co-founder and chief executive officer, Avanti Battery Co. “One story that is emblematic of Don’s insistence on excellence is from when he and I met with Bill Gates about the challenges in addressing climate change and how batteries could be the linchpin in solving them. I suggested that we create our presentation in PowerPoint [Microsoft software]. Don balked. He insisted that we present using Keynote on his MacBook Air, because ‘it looks so much better.’ I was incredulous that he wanted to walk into that venue exclusively using Apple products. Of course, he won the argument, but not without my admonition that there had better not be even a blip of an issue. In the meeting room, Microsoft’s former chief technology officer asked Don if he needed anything to hook up to the screen, ‘we have all those dongles.’ Don declined, but gave me that knowing look and whispered, ‘You see, they know, too.’ I ate my crow and we had a great long conversation without any issues.”

      “I remember when I first started working with Don on the liquid metal battery project at MIT, after I had chosen it as the topic for my master’s of engineering thesis,” adds David Bradwell, co-founder and chief technology officer, Ambri. “I was a wide-eyed graduate student, sitting in his office, amongst his art deco decorations, unique furniture, and historical and stylistic infographics, and from our first meeting, I could see Don’s passion for coming up with new and creative, yet practical scientific ideas, and for working on hard problems, in service of society. Don’s approaches always appear to be unconventional — wanting to stand out in a crowd, take the path less trodden, both based on his ideas, and his sense of style. It’s been an amazing journey working with him over the past decade-and-a-half, and I remain excited to see what other new, unconventional ideas, he can bring to this world.” More

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      in Energy

      Finding community in high-energy-density physics

      by

      Skylar Dannhoff knew one thing: She did not want to be working alone.

      As an undergraduate at Case Western Reserve University, she had committed to a senior project that often felt like solitary lab work, a feeling heightened by the pandemic. Though it was an enriching experience, she was determined to find a graduate school environment that would foster community, one “with lots of people, lots of collaboration; where it’s impossible to work until 3 a.m. without anyone noticing.” A unique group at the Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) looked promising: the High-Energy-Density Physics (HEDP) division, a lead partner in the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Center for Excellence at MIT.

      “It was a shot in the dark, just more of a whim than anything,” she says of her request to join HEDP on her application to MIT’s Department of Physics. “And then, somehow, they reached out to me. I told them I’m willing to learn about plasma. I didn’t know anything about it.”

      What she did know was that the HEDP group collaborates with other U.S. laboratories on an approach to creating fusion energy known as inertial confinement fusion (ICF). One version of the technique, known as direct-drive ICF, aims multiple laser beams symmetrically onto a spherical capsule filled with nuclear fuel. The other, indirect-drive ICF, instead aims multiple lasers beams into a gold cylindrical cavity called a hohlraum, within which the spherical fuel capsule is positioned. The laser beams are configured to hit the inner hohlraum wall, generating a “bath” of X-rays, which in turn compress the fuel capsule.

      Imploding the capsule generates intense fusion energy within a tiny fraction of a second (an order of tens of picoseconds). In August 2021, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) used this method to produce an historic fusion yield of 1.3 megajoules, putting researchers within reach of “ignition,” the point where the self-sustained fusion burn spreads into the surrounding fuel, leading to a high fusion-energy gain.  

      Joining the group just a month before this long-sought success, Dannhoff was impressed more with the response of her new teammates and the ICF community than with the scientific milestone. “I got a better appreciation for people who had spent their entire careers working on this project, just chugging along doing their best, ignoring the naysayers. I was excited for the people.”

      Dannhoff is now working toward extending the success of NIF and other ICF experiments, like the OMEGA laser at the University of Rochester’s Laboratory for Laser Energetics. Under the supervision of Senior Research Scientist Chikang Li, she is studying what happens to the flow of plasma within the hohlraum cavity during indirect ICF experiments, particularly for hohlraums with inner-wall aerogel foam linings. Experiments, over the last decade, have shown just how excruciatingly precise the symmetry in ICF targets must be. The more symmetric the X-ray drive, the more effective the implosion, and it is possible that these foam linings will improve the X-ray symmetry and drive efficiency.

      Dannhoff is specifically interested in studying the behavior of silicon and tantalum-based foam liners. She is as concerned with the challenges of the people at General Atomics (GA) and LLNL who are creating these targets as she is with the scientific outcome.

      “I just had a meeting with GA yesterday,” she notes. “And it’s a really tricky process. It’s kind of pushing the boundaries of what is doable at the moment. I got a much better sense of how demanding this project is for them, how much we’re asking of them.”

      What excites Dannhoff is the teamwork she observes, both at MIT and between ICF institutions around the United States. With roughly 10 graduate students and postdocs down the hall, each with an assigned lead role in lab management, she knows she can consult an expert on almost any question. And collaborators across the country are just an email away. “Any information that people can give you, they will give you, and usually very freely,” she notes. “Everyone just wants to see this work.”

      That Dannhoff is a natural team player is also evidenced in her hobbies. A hockey goalie, she prioritizes playing with MIT’s intramural teams, “because goalies are a little hard to come by. I just play with whoever needs a goalie on that night, and it’s a lot of fun.”

      She is also a member of the radio community, a fellowship she first embraced at Case Western — a moment she describes as a turning point in her life. “I literally don’t know who I would be today if I hadn’t figured out radio is something I’m interested in,” she admits. The MIT Radio Society provided the perfect landing pad for her arrival in Cambridge, full of the kinds of supportive, interesting, knowledgeable students she had befriended as an undergraduate. She credits radio with helping her realize that she could make her greatest contributions to science by focusing on engineering.

      Danhoff gets philosophical as she marvels at the invisible waves that surround us.

      “Not just radio waves: every wave,” she asserts. “The voice is the everywhere. Music, signal, space phenomena: it’s always around. And all we have to do is make the right little device and have the right circuit elements put in the right order to unmix and mix the signals and amplify them. And bada-bing, bada-boom, we’re talking with the universe.”

      “Maybe that epitomizes physics to me,” she adds. “We’re trying to listen to the universe, and it’s talking to us. We just have to come up with the right tools and hear what it’s trying to say.” More