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    Developing materials for stellar performance in fusion power plants

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    When Zoe Fisher was in fourth grade, her art teacher asked her to draw her vision of a dream job on paper. At the time, those goals changed like the flavor of the week in an ice cream shop — “zookeeper” featured prominently for a while — but Zoe immediately knew what she wanted to put down: a mad scientist.When Fisher stumbled upon the drawing in her parents’ Chicago home recently, it felt serendipitous because, by all measures, she has realized that childhood dream. The second-year doctoral student at MIT’s Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE) is studying materials for fusion power plants at the Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) under the advisement of Michael Short, associate professor at NSE. Dennis Whyte, Hitachi America Professor of Engineering at NSE, serves as co-advisor.On track to an MIT educationGrowing up in Chicago, Fisher had heard her parents remarking on her reasoning abilities. When she was barely a preschooler she argued that she couldn’t have been found in a purple speckled egg, as her parents claimed they had done.Fisher didn’t put together just how much she had gravitated toward science until a high school physics teacher encouraged her to apply to MIT. Passionate about both the arts and sciences, she initially worried that pursuing science would be very rigid, without room for creativity. But she knows now that exploring solutions to problems requires plenty of creative thinking.It was a visit to MIT through the Weekend Immersion in Science and Engineering (WISE) that truly opened her eyes to the potential of an MIT education. “It just seemed like the undergraduate experience here is where you can be very unapologetically yourself. There’s no fronting something you don’t want to be like. There’s so much authenticity compared to most other colleges I looked at,” Fisher says. Once admitted, Campus Preview Weekend confirmed that she belonged. “We got to be silly and weird — a version of the Mafia game was a hit — and I was like, ‘These are my people,’” Fisher laughs.Pursuing fusion at NSEBefore she officially started as a first-year in 2018, Fisher enrolled in the Freshman Pre-Orientation Program (FPOP), which starts a week before orientation starts. Each FPOP zooms into one field. “I’d applied to the nuclear one simply because it sounded cool and I didn’t know anything about it,” Fisher says. She was intrigued right away. “They really got me with that ‘star in a bottle’ line,” she laughs. (The quest for commercial fusion is to create the energy equivalent of a star in a bottle). Excited by a talk by Zachary Hartwig, Robert N. Noyce Career Development Professor at NSE, Fisher asked if she could work on fusion as an undergraduate as part of an Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) project. She started with modeling solders for power plants and was hooked. When Fisher requested more experimental work, Hartwig put her in touch with Research Scientist David Fischer at the Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC). Fisher eventually moved on to explore superconductors, which eventually morphed into research for her master’s thesis.For her doctoral research, Fisher is extending her master’s work to explore defects in ceramics, specifically in alumina (aluminum oxide). Sapphire coatings are the single-crystal equivalent of alumina, an insulator being explored for use in fusion power plants. “I eventually want to figure out what types of charge defects form in ceramics during radiation damage so we can ultimately engineer radiation-resistant sapphire,” Fisher says.When you introduce a material in a fusion power plant, stray high-energy neutrons born from the plasma can collide and fundamentally reorder the lattice, which is likely to change a range of thermal, electrical, and structural properties. “Think of a scaffolding outside a building, with each one of those joints as a different atom that holds your material in place. If you go in and you pull a joint out, there’s a chance that you pulled out a joint that wasn’t structurally sound, in which case everything would be fine. But there’s also a chance that you pull a joint out and everything alters. And [such unpredictability] is a problem,” Fisher says. “We need to be able to account for exactly how these neutrons are going to alter the lattice property,” Fisher says, and it’s one of the topics her research explores.The studies, in turn, can function as a jumping-off point for irradiating superconductors. The goals are two-fold: “I want to figure out how I can make an industry-usable ceramic you can use to insulate the inside of a fusion power plant, and then also figure out if I can take this information that I’m getting with ceramics and make it superconductor-relevant,” Fisher says. “Superconductors are the electromagnets we will use to contain the plasma inside fusion power plants. However, they prove pretty difficult to study. Since they are also ceramic, you can draw a lot of parallels between alumina and yttrium barium copper oxide (YBCO), the specific superconductor we use,” she adds. Fisher is also excited about the many experiments she performs using a particle accelerator, one of which involves measuring exactly how surface thermal properties change during radiation.Sailing new pathsIt’s not just her research that Fisher loves. As an undergrad, and during her master’s, she was on the varsity sailing team. “I worked my way into sailing with literal Olympians, I did not see that coming,” she says. Fisher participates in Chicago’s Race to Mackinac and the Melges 15 Series every chance she gets. Of all the types of boats she has sailed, she prefers dinghy sailing the most. “It’s more physical, you have to throw yourself around a lot and there’s this immediate cause and effect, which I like,” Fisher says. She also teaches sailing lessons in the summer at MIT’s Sailing Pavilion — you can find her on a small motorboat, issuing orders through a speaker.Teaching has figured prominently throughout Fisher’s time at MIT. Through MISTI, Fisher has taught high school classes in Germany and a radiation and materials class in Armenia in her senior year. She was delighted by the food and culture in Armenia and by how excited people were to learn new ideas. Her love of teaching continues, as she has reached out to high schools in the Boston area. “I like talking to groups and getting them excited about fusion, or even maybe just the concept of attending graduate school,” Fisher says, adding that teaching the ropes of an experiment one-on-one is “one of the most rewarding things.”She also learned the value of resilience and quick thinking on various other MISTI trips. Despite her love of travel, Fisher has had a few harrowing experiences with tough situations and plans falling through at the last minute. It’s when she tells herself, “Well, the only thing that you’re gonna do is you’re gonna keep doing what you wanted to do.”That eyes-on-the-prize focus has stood Fisher in good stead, and continues to serve her well in her research today. More

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      Puzzling out climate change

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      Shreyaa Raghavan’s journey into solving some of the world’s toughest challenges started with a simple love for puzzles. By high school, her knack for problem-solving naturally drew her to computer science. Through her participation in an entrepreneurship and leadership program, she built apps and twice made it to the semifinals of the program’s global competition.Her early successes made a computer science career seem like an obvious choice, but Raghavan says a significant competing interest left her torn.“Computer science sparks that puzzle-, problem-solving part of my brain,” says Raghavan ’24, an Accenture Fellow and a PhD candidate in MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society. “But while I always felt like building mobile apps was a fun little hobby, it didn’t feel like I was directly solving societal challenges.”Her perspective shifted when, as an MIT undergraduate, Raghavan participated in an Undergraduate Research Opportunity in the Photovoltaic Research Laboratory, now known as the Accelerated Materials Laboratory for Sustainability. There, she discovered how computational techniques like machine learning could optimize materials for solar panels — a direct application of her skills toward mitigating climate change.“This lab had a very diverse group of people, some from a computer science background, some from a chemistry background, some who were hardcore engineers. All of them were communicating effectively and working toward one unified goal — building better renewable energy systems,” Raghavan says. “It opened my eyes to the fact that I could use very technical tools that I enjoy building and find fulfillment in that by helping solve major climate challenges.”With her sights set on applying machine learning and optimization to energy and climate, Raghavan joined Cathy Wu’s lab when she started her PhD in 2023. The lab focuses on building more sustainable transportation systems, a field that resonated with Raghavan due to its universal impact and its outsized role in climate change — transportation accounts for roughly 30 percent of greenhouse gas emissions.“If we were to throw all of the intelligent systems we are exploring into the transportation networks, by how much could we reduce emissions?” she asks, summarizing a core question of her research.Wu, an associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, stresses the value of Raghavan’s work.“Transportation is a critical element of both the economy and climate change, so potential changes to transportation must be carefully studied,” Wu says. “Shreyaa’s research into smart congestion management is important because it takes a data-driven approach to add rigor to the broader research supporting sustainability.”Raghavan’s contributions have been recognized with the Accenture Fellowship, a cornerstone of the MIT-Accenture Convergence Initiative for Industry and Technology. As an Accenture Fellow, she is exploring the potential impact of technologies for avoiding stop-and-go traffic and its emissions, using systems such as networked autonomous vehicles and digital speed limits that vary according to traffic conditions — solutions that could advance decarbonization in the transportation section at relatively low cost and in the near term.Raghavan says she appreciates the Accenture Fellowship not only for the support it provides, but also because it demonstrates industry involvement in sustainable transportation solutions.“It’s important for the field of transportation, and also energy and climate as a whole, to synergize with all of the different stakeholders,” she says. “I think it’s important for industry to be involved in this issue of incorporating smarter transportation systems to decarbonize transportation.”Raghavan has also received a fellowship supporting her research from the U.S. Department of Transportation.“I think it’s really exciting that there’s interest from the policy side with the Department of Transportation and from the industry side with Accenture,” she says.Raghavan believes that addressing climate change requires collaboration across disciplines. “I think with climate change, no one industry or field is going to solve it on its own. It’s really got to be each field stepping up and trying to make a difference,” she says. “I don’t think there’s any silver-bullet solution to this problem. It’s going to take many different solutions from different people, different angles, different disciplines.”With that in mind, Raghavan has been very active in the MIT Energy and Climate Club since joining about three years ago, which, she says, “was a really cool way to meet lots of people who were working toward the same goal, the same climate goals, the same passions, but from completely different angles.”This year, Raghavan is on the community and education team, which works to build the community at MIT that is working on climate and energy issues. As part of that work, Raghavan is launching a mentorship program for undergraduates, pairing them with graduate students who help the undergrads develop ideas about how they can work on climate using their unique expertise.“I didn’t foresee myself using my computer science skills in energy and climate,” Raghavan says, “so I really want to give other students a clear pathway, or a clear sense of how they can get involved.”Raghavan has embraced her area of study even in terms of where she likes to think.“I love working on trains, on buses, on airplanes,” she says. “It’s really fun to be in transit and working on transportation problems.”Anticipating a trip to New York to visit a cousin, she holds no dread for the long train trip.“I know I’m going to do some of my best work during those hours,” she says. “Four hours there. Four hours back.” More

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      in Energy

      MIT Climate and Energy Ventures class spins out entrepreneurs — and successful companies

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      In 2014, a team of MIT students in course 15.366 (Climate and Energy Ventures) developed a plan to commercialize MIT research on how to move information between chips with light instead of electricity, reducing energy usage.After completing the class, which challenges students to identify early customers and pitch their business plan to investors, the team went on to win both grand prizes at the MIT Clean Energy Prize. Today the company, Ayar Labs, has raised a total of $370 million from a group including chip leaders AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA, to scale the manufacturing of its optical chip interconnects.Ayar Labs is one of many companies whose roots can be traced back to 15.366. In fact, more than 150 companies have been founded by alumni of the class since its founding in 2007.In the class, student teams select a technology or idea and determine the best path for its commercialization. The semester-long project, which is accompanied by lectures and mentoring, equips students with real-world experience in launching a business.“The goal is to educate entrepreneurs on how to start companies in the climate and energy space,” says Senior Lecturer Tod Hynes, who co-founded the course and has been teaching since 2008. “We do that through hands-on experience. We require students to engage with customers, talk to potential suppliers, partners, investors, and to practice their pitches to learn from that feedback.”The class attracts hundreds of student applications each year. As one of the catalysts for MIT spinoffs, it is also one reason a 2015 report found that MIT alumni-founded companies had generated roughly $1.9 trillion in annual revenues. If MIT were a country, that figure that would make it the 10th largest economy in the world, according to the report.“’Mens et manus’ (‘mind and hand’) is MIT’s motto, and the hands-on experience we try to provide in this class is hard to beat,” Hynes says. “When you actually go through the process of commercialization in the real world, you learn more and you’re in a better spot. That experiential learning approach really aligns with MIT’s approach.”Simulating a startupThe course was started by Bill Aulet, a professor of the practice at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the managing director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship. After serving as an advisor the first year and helping Aulet launch the class, Hynes began teaching the class with Aulet in the fall of 2008. The pair also launched the Climate and Energy Prize around the same time, which continues today and recently received over 150 applications from teams from around the world.A core feature of the class is connecting students in different academic fields. Each year, organizers aim to enroll students with backgrounds in science, engineering, business, and policy.“The class is meant to be accessible to anybody at MIT,” Hynes says, noting the course has also since opened to students from Harvard University. “We’re trying to pull across disciplines.”The class quickly grew in popularity around campus. Over the last few years, the course has had about 150 students apply for 50 spots.“I mentioned Climate and Energy Ventures in my application to MIT,” says Chris Johnson, a second-year graduate student in the Leaders for Global Operations (LGO) Program. “Coming into MIT, I was very interested in sustainability, and energy in particular, and also in startups. I had heard great things about the class, and I waited until my last semester to apply.”The course’s organizers select mostly graduate students, whom they prefer to be in the final year of their program so they can more easily continue working on the venture after the class is finished.“Whether or not students stick with the project from the class, it’s a great experience that will serve them in their careers,” says Jennifer Turliuk, the practice leader for climate and energy artificial intelligence at the Martin Trust Center for Entrepreneurship, who helped teach the class this fall.Hynes describes the course as a venture-building simulation. Before it begins, organizers select up to 30 technologies and ideas that are in the right stage for commercialization. Students can also come into the class with ideas or technologies they want to work on.After a few weeks of introductions and lectures, students form into multidisciplinary teams of about five and begin going through each of the 24 steps of building a startup described in Aulet’s book “Disciplined Entrepreneurship,” which includes things like engaging with potential early customers, quantifying a value proposition, and establishing a business model. Everything builds toward a one-hour final presentation that’s designed to simulate a pitch to investors or government officials.“It’s a lot of work, and because it’s a team-based project, your grade is highly dependent on your team,” Hynes says. “You also get graded by your team; that’s about 10 percent of your grade. We try to encourage people to be proactive and supportive teammates.”Students say the process is fast-paced but rewarding.“It’s definitely demanding,” says Sofie Netteberg, a graduate student who is also in the LGO program at MIT. “Depending on where you’re at with your technology, you can be moving very quickly. That’s the stage that I was in, which I found really engaging. We basically just had a lab technology, and it was like, ‘What do we do next?’ You also get a ton of support from the professors.”From the classroom to the worldThis fall’s final presentations took place at the headquarters of the MIT-affiliated venture firm The Engine in front of an audience of professors, investors, members of foundations supporting entrepreneurship, and more.“We got to hear feedback from people who would be the real next step for the technology if the startup gets up and running,” said Johnson, whose team was commercializing a method for storing energy in concrete. “That was really valuable. We know that these are not only people we might see in the next month or the next funding rounds, but they’re also exactly the type of people that are going to give us the questions we should be thinking about. It was clarifying.”Throughout the semester, students treated the project like a real venture they’d be working on well beyond the length of the class.“No one’s really thinking about this class for the grade; it’s about the learning,” says Netteberg, whose team was encouraged to keep working on their electrolyzer technology designed to more efficiently produce green hydrogen. “We’re not stressed about getting an A. If we want to keep working on this, we want real feedback: What do you think we did well? What do we need to keep working on?”Hynes says several investors expressed interest in supporting the businesses coming out of the class. Moving forward, he hopes students embrace the test-bed environment his team has created for them and try bold new things.“People have been very pragmatic over the years, which is good, but also potentially limiting,” Hynes says. “This is also an opportunity to do something that’s a little further out there — something that has really big potential impact if it comes together. This is the time where students get to experiment, so why not try something big?” More

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      in Energy

      How to make small modular reactors more cost-effective

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      When Youyeon Choi was in high school, she discovered she really liked “thinking in geometry.” The shapes, the dimensions … she was into all of it. Today, geometry plays a prominent role in her doctoral work under the guidance of Professor Koroush Shirvan, as she explores ways to increase the competitiveness of small modular reactors (SMRs).Central to the thesis is metallic nuclear fuel in a helical cruciform shape, which improves surface area and lowers heat flux as compared to the traditional cylindrical equivalent.A childhood in a prominent nuclear energy countryHer passion for geometry notwithstanding, Choi admits she was not “really into studying” in middle school. But that changed when she started excelling in technical subjects in her high school years. And because it was the natural sciences that first caught Choi’s eye, she assumed she would major in the subject when she went to university.This focus, too, would change. Growing up in Seoul, Choi was becoming increasingly aware of the critical role nuclear energy played in meeting her native country’s energy needs. Twenty-six reactors provide nearly a third of South Korea’s electricity, according to the World Nuclear Association. The country is also one of the world’s most prominent nuclear energy entities.In such an ecosystem, Choi understood the stakes at play, especially with electricity-guzzling technologies such as AI and electric vehicles on the rise. Her father also discussed energy-related topics with Choi when she was in high school. Being soaked in that atmosphere eventually led Choi to nuclear engineering.

      Youyeon Choi: Making small modular reactors more cost-effective

      Early work in South KoreaExcelling in high school math and science, Choi was a shoo-in for college at Seoul National University. Initially intent on studying nuclear fusion, Choi switched to fission because she saw that the path to fusion was more convoluted and was still in the early stages of exploration.Choi went on to complete her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in nuclear engineering from the university. As part of her master’s thesis, she worked on a multi-physics modeling project involving high-fidelity simulations of reactor physics and thermal hydraulics to analyze reactor cores.South Korea exports its nuclear know-how widely, so work in the field can be immensely rewarding. Indeed, after graduate school, Choi moved to Daejeon, which has the moniker “Science City.” As an intern at the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute (KAERI), she conducted experimental studies on the passive safety systems of nuclear reactors. Choi then moved to the Korea Institute of Nuclear Nonproliferation and Control, where she worked as a researcher developing nuclear security programs for countries. Given South Korea’s dominance in the field, other countries would tap its knowledge resource to tap their own nuclear energy programs. The focus was on international training programs, an arm of which involved cybersecurity and physical protection.While the work was impactful, Choi found she missed the modeling work she did as part of her master’s thesis. Looking to return to technical research, she applied to the MIT Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE). “MIT has the best nuclear engineering program in the States, and maybe even the world,” Choi says, explaining her decision to enroll as a doctoral student.Innovative research at MITAt NSE, Choi is working to make SMRs more price competitive as compared to traditional nuclear energy power plants.Due to their smaller size, SMRs are able to serve areas where larger reactors might not work, but they’re more expensive. One way to address costs is to squeeze more electricity out of a unit of fuel — to increase the power density. Choi is doing so by replacing the traditional uranium dioxide ceramic fuel in a cylindrical shape with a metal one in a helical cruciform. Such a replacement potentially offers twin advantages: the metal fuel has high conductivity, which means the fuel will operate even more safely at lower temperatures. And the twisted shape gives more surface area and lower heat flux. The net result is more electricity for the same volume.The project receives funding from a collaboration between Lightbridge Corp., which is exploring how advanced fuel technologies can improve the performance of water-cooled SMRs, and the U.S. Department of Energy Nuclear Energy University Program.With SMR efficiencies in mind, Choi is indulging her love of multi-physics modeling, and focusing on reactor physics, thermal hydraulics, and fuel performance simulation. “The goal of this modeling and simulation is to see if we can really use this fuel in the SMR,” Choi says. “I’m really enjoying doing the simulations because the geometry is really hard to model. Because the shape is twisted, there’s no symmetry at all,” she says. Always up for a challenge, Choi learned the various aspects of physics and a variety of computational tools, including the Monte Carlo code for reactor physics.Being at MIT has a whole roster of advantages, Choi says, and she especially appreciates the respect researchers have for each other. She appreciates being able to discuss projects with Shirvan and his focus on practical applications of research. At the same time, Choi appreciates the “exotic” nature of her project. “Even assessing if this SMR fuel is at all feasible is really hard, but I think it’s all possible because it’s MIT and my PI [principal investigator] is really invested in innovation,” she says.It’s an exciting time to be in nuclear engineering, Choi says. She serves as one of the board members of the student section of the American Nuclear Society and is an NSE representative of the Graduate Student Council for the 2024-25 academic year.Choi is excited about the global momentum toward nuclear as more countries are exploring the energy source and trying to build more nuclear power plants on the path to decarbonization. “I really do believe nuclear energy is going to be a leading carbon-free energy. It’s very important for our collective futures,” Choi says. More

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      in Environment

      Minimizing the carbon footprint of bridges and other structures

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      Awed as a young child by the majesty of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, civil engineer and MIT Morningside Academy for Design (MAD) Fellow Zane Schemmer has retained his fascination with bridges: what they look like, why they work, and how they’re designed and built.He weighed the choice between architecture and engineering when heading off to college, but, motivated by the why and how of structural engineering, selected the latter. Now he incorporates design as an iterative process in the writing of algorithms that perfectly balance the forces involved in discrete portions of a structure to create an overall design that optimizes function, minimizes carbon footprint, and still produces a manufacturable result.While this may sound like an obvious goal in structural design, it’s not. It’s new. It’s a more holistic way of looking at the design process that can optimize even down to the materials, angles, and number of elements in the nodes or joints that connect the larger components of a building, bridge, tower, etc.According to Schemmer, there hasn’t been much progress on optimizing structural design to minimize embodied carbon, and the work that exists often results in designs that are “too complex to be built in real life,” he says. The embodied carbon of a structure is the total carbon dioxide emissions of its life cycle: from the extraction or manufacture of its materials to their transport and use and through the demolition of the structure and disposal of the materials. Schemmer, who works with Josephine V. Carstensen, the Gilbert W. Winslow Career Development Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT, is focusing on the portion of that cycle that runs through construction.In September, at the IASS 2024 symposium “Redefining the Art of Structural Design in Zurich,” Schemmer and Carstensen presented their work on Discrete Topology Optimization algorithms that are able to minimize the embodied carbon in a bridge or other structure by up to 20 percent. This comes through materials selection that considers not only a material’s appearance and its ability to get the job done, but also the ease of procurement, its proximity to the building site, and the carbon embodied in its manufacture and transport.“The real novelty of our algorithm is its ability to consider multiple materials in a highly constrained solution space to produce manufacturable designs with a user-specified force flow,” Schemmer says. “Real-life problems are complex and often have many constraints associated with them. In traditional formulations, it can be difficult to have a long list of complicated constraints. Our goal is to incorporate these constraints to make it easier to take our designs out of the computer and create them in real life.”Take, for instance, a steel tower, which could be a “super lightweight, efficient design solution,” Schemmer explains. Because steel is so strong, you don’t need as much of it compared to concrete or timber to build a big building. But steel is also very carbon-intensive to produce and transport. Shipping it across the country or especially from a different continent can sharply increase its embodied carbon price tag. Schemmer’s topology optimization will replace some of the steel with timber elements or decrease the amount of steel in other elements to create a hybrid structure that will function effectively and minimize the carbon footprint. “This is why using the same steel in two different parts of the world can lead to two different optimized designs,” he explains.Schemmer, who grew up in the mountains of Utah, earned a BS and MS in civil and environmental engineering from University of California at Berkeley, where his graduate work focused on seismic design. He describes that education as providing a “very traditional, super-strong engineering background that tackled some of the toughest engineering problems,” along with knowledge of structural engineering’s traditions and current methods.But at MIT, he says, a lot of the work he sees “looks at removing the constraints of current societal conventions of doing things, and asks how could we do things if it was in a more ideal form; what are we looking at then? Which I think is really cool,” he says. “But I think sometimes too, there’s a jump between the most-perfect version of something and where we are now, that there needs to be a bridge between those two. And I feel like my education helps me see that bridge.”The bridge he’s referring to is the topology optimization algorithms that make good designs better in terms of decreased global warming potential.“That’s where the optimization algorithm comes in,” Schemmer says. “In contrast to a standard structure designed in the past, the algorithm can take the same design space and come up with a much more efficient material usage that still meets all the structural requirements, be up to code, and have everything we want from a safety standpoint.”That’s also where the MAD Design Fellowship comes in. The program provides yearlong fellowships with full financial support to graduate students from all across the Institute who network with each other, with the MAD faculty, and with outside speakers who use design in new ways in a surprising variety of fields. This helps the fellows gain a better understanding of how to use iterative design in their own work.“Usually people think of their own work like, ‘Oh, I had this background. I’ve been looking at this one way for a very long time.’ And when you look at it from an outside perspective, I think it opens your mind to be like, ‘Oh my God. I never would have thought about doing this that way. Maybe I should try that.’ And then we can move to new ideas, new inspiration for better work,” Schemmer says.He chose civil and structural engineering over architecture some seven years ago, but says that “100 years ago, I don’t think architecture and structural engineering were two separate professions. I think there was an understanding of how things looked and how things worked, and it was merged together. Maybe from an efficiency standpoint, it’s better to have things done separately. But I think there’s something to be said for having knowledge about how the whole system works, potentially more intermingling between the free-form architectural design and the mathematical design of a civil engineer. Merging it back together, I think, has a lot of benefits.”Which brings us back to the Golden Gate Bridge, Schemmer’s longtime favorite. You can still hear that excited 3-year-old in his voice when he talks about it.“It’s so iconic,” he says. “It’s connecting these two spits of land that just rise straight up out of the ocean. There’s this fog that comes in and out a lot of days. It’s a really magical place, from the size of the cable strands and everything. It’s just, ‘Wow.’ People built this over 100 years ago, before the existence of a lot of the computational tools that we have now. So, all the math, everything in the design, was all done by hand and from the mind. Nothing was computerized, which I think is crazy to think about.”As Schemmer continues work on his doctoral degree at MIT, the MAD fellowship will expose him to many more awe-inspiring ideas in other fields, leading him to incorporate some of these in some way with his engineering knowledge to design better ways of building bridges and other structures. More

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      in Security

      Coffee fix: MIT students decode the science behind the perfect cup

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      Elaine Jutamulia ’24 took a sip of coffee with a few drops of anise extract. It was her second try.“What do you think?” asked Omar Orozco, standing at a lab table in MIT’s Breakerspace, surrounded by filters, brewing pots, and other coffee paraphernalia.“I think when I first tried it, it was still pretty bitter,” Jutamulia said thoughtfully. “But I think now that it’s steeped for a little bit — it took out some of the bitterness.”Jutamulia and current MIT senior Orozco were part of class 3.000 (Coffee Matters: Using the Breakerspace to Make the Perfect Cup), a new MIT course that debuted in spring 2024. The class combines lectures on chemistry and the science of coffee with hands-on experimentation and group projects. Their project explored how additives such as anise, salt, and chili oil influence coffee extraction — the process of dissolving flavor compounds from ground coffee into water — to improve taste and correct common brewing errors.Alongside tasting, they used an infrared spectrometer to identify the chemical compounds in their coffee samples that contribute to flavor. Does anise make bitter coffee smoother? Could chili oil balance the taste?“Generally speaking, if we could make a recommendation, that’s what we’re trying to find,” Orozco said.A three-unit “discovery class” designed to help first-year students explore majors, 3.000 was widely popular, enrolling more than 50 students. Its success was driven by the beverage at its core and the class’s hands-on approach, which pushes students to ask and answer questions they might not have otherwise.For aeronautics and astronautics majors Gabi McDonald and McKenzie Dinesen, coffee was the draw, but the class encouraged them to experiment and think in new ways. “It’s easy to drop people like us in, who love coffee, and, ‘Oh my gosh, there’s this class where we can go make coffee half the time and try all different kinds of things?’” McDonald says.Percolating knowledgeThe class pairs weekly lectures on topics such as coffee chemistry, the anatomy and composition of a coffee bean, the effects of roasting, and the brewing process with tasting sessions — students sample coffee brewed from different beans, roasts, and grinds. In the MIT Breakerspace, a new space on campus conceived and managed by the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE), students use equipment such as a digital optical microscope to examine ground coffee particles and a scanning electron microscope, which shoots beams of electrons at samples to reveal cross-sections of beans in stunning detail.Once students learn to operate instruments for guided tasks, they form groups and design their own projects.“The driver for those projects is some question they have about coffee raised by one of the lectures or the tasting sessions, or just something they’ve always wanted to know,” says DMSE Professor Jeffrey Grossman, who designed and teaches the class. “Then they’ll use one or more of these pieces of equipment to shed some light on it.”Grossman traces the origins of the class to his initial vision for the Breakerspace, a laboratory for materials analysis and lounge for MIT undergraduates. Opened in November 2023, the space gives students hands-on experience with materials science and engineering, an interdisciplinary field combining chemistry, physics, and engineering to probe the composition and structure of materials.“The world is made of stuff, and these are the tools to understand that stuff and bring it to life,” says Grossman. So he envisioned a class that would give students an “exploratory, inspiring nudge.”“Then the question wasn’t the pedagogy, it was, ‘What’s the hook?’ In materials science, there are a lot of directions you could go, but if you have one that inspires people because they know it and maybe like it already, then that’s exciting.”Cup of ambitionThat hook, of course, was coffee, the second-most-consumed beverage after water. It captured students’ imagination and motivated them to push boundaries.Orozco brought a fair amount of coffee knowledge to the class. In 2023, he taught in Mexico through the MISTI Global Teaching Labs program, where he toured several coffee farms and acquired a deeper knowledge of the beverage. He learned, for example, that black coffee, contrary to general American opinion, isn’t naturally bitter; bitterness arises from certain compounds that develop during the roasting process.“If you properly brew it with the right beans, it actually tastes good,” says Orozco, a humanities and engineering major. A year later, in 3.000, he expanded his understanding of making a good brew, particularly through the group project with Jutamulia and other students to fix bad coffee.The group prepared a control sample of “perfectly brewed” coffee — based on taste, coffee-to-water ratio, and other standards covered in class — alongside coffee that was under-extracted and over-extracted. Under-extracted coffee, made with water that isn’t hot enough or brewed for too short a time, tastes sharp or sour. Over-extracted coffee, brewed with too much coffee or for too long, tastes bitter.Those coffee samples got additives and were analyzed using Fourier Transform Infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, measuring how coffee absorbed infrared light to identify flavor-related compounds. Jutamulia examined FTIR readings taken from a sample with lime juice to see how the citric acid influenced its chemical profile.“Can we find any correlation between what we saw and the existing known measurements of citric acid?” asks Jutamulia, who studied computation and cognition at MIT, graduating last May.Another group dove into coffee storage, questioning why conventional wisdom advises against freezing.“We just wondered why that’s the case,” says electrical engineering and computer science major Noah Wiley, a coffee enthusiast with his own espresso machine.The team compared methods like freezing brewed coffee, frozen coffee grounds, and whole beans ground after freezing, evaluating their impact on flavor and chemical composition.“Then we’re going to see which ones taste good,” says Wiley. The team used a class coffee review sheet to record attributes like acidity, bitterness, sweetness, and overall flavor, pairing the results with FTIR analysis to determine how storage affected taste.Wiley acknowledged that “good” is subjective. “Sometimes there’s a group consensus. I think people like fuller coffee, not watery,” he says.Other student projects compared caffeine levels in different coffee types, analyzed the effect of microwaving coffee on its chemical composition and flavor, and investigated the differences between authentic and counterfeit coffee beans.“We gave the students some papers to look at in case they were interested,” says Justin Lavallee, Breakerspace manager and co-teacher of the class. “But mostly we told them to focus on something they wanted to learn more about.”Drip, drip, dripBeyond answering specific questions about coffee, both students and teachers gained deeper insights into the beverage.“Coffee is a complicated material. There are thousands of molecules in the beans, which change as you roast and extract them,” says Grossman. “The number of ways you can engineer this collection of molecules — it’s profound, ranging from where and how the coffee’s grown to how the cherries are then treated to get the beans to how the beans are roasted and ground to the brewing method you use.”Dinesen learned firsthand, discovering, for example, that darker roasts have less caffeine than lighter roasts, puncturing a common misconception. “You can vary coffee so much — just with the roast of the bean, the size of the ground,” she says. “It’s so easily manipulatable, if that’s a word.”In addition to learning about the science and chemistry behind coffee, Dinesen and McDonald gained new brewing techniques, like using a pour-over cone. The pair even incorporated coffee making and testing into their study routine, brewing coffee while tackling problem sets for another class.“I would put my pour-over cone in my backpack with a Ziploc bag full of grounds, and we would go to the Student Center and pull out the cone, a filter, and the coffee grounds,” McDonald says. “And then we would make pour-overs while doing a P-set. We tested different amounts of water, too. It was fun.”Tony Chen, a materials science and engineering major, reflected on the 3.000’s title — “Using the Breakerspace to Make the Perfect Cup” — and whether making a perfect cup is possible. “I don’t think there’s one perfect cup because each person has their own preferences. I don’t think I’ve gotten to mine yet,” he says.Enthusiasm for coffee’s complexity and the discovery process was exactly what Grossman hoped to inspire in his students. “The best part for me was also just seeing them developing their own sense of curiosity,” he says.He recalled a moment early in the class when students, after being given a demo of the optical microscope, saw the surface texture of a magnified coffee bean, the mottled shades of color, and the honeycomb-like pattern of tiny irregular cells.“They’re like, ‘Wait a second. What if we add hot water to the grounds while it’s under the microscope? Would we see the extraction?’ So, they got hot water and some ground coffee beans, and lo and behold, it looked different. They could see the extraction right there,” Grossman says. “It’s like they have an idea that’s inspired by the learning, and they go and try it. I saw that happen many, many times throughout the semester.” More

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      in Energy

      Helping students bring about decarbonization, from benchtop to global energy marketplace

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      MIT students are adept at producing research and innovations at the cutting edge of their fields. But addressing a problem as large as climate change requires understanding the world’s energy landscape, as well as the ways energy technologies evolve over time.Since 2010, the course IDS.521/IDS.065 (Energy Systems for Climate Change Mitigation) has equipped students with the skills they need to evaluate the various energy decarbonization pathways available to the world. The work is designed to help them maximize their impact on the world’s emissions by making better decisions along their respective career paths.“The question guiding my teaching and research is how do we solve big societal challenges with technology, and how can we be more deliberate in developing and supporting technologies to get us there?” says Professor Jessika Trancik, who started the course to help fill a gap in knowledge about the ways technologies evolve and scale over time.Since its inception in 2010, the course has attracted graduate students from across MIT’s five schools. The course has also recently opened to undergraduate students and been adapted to an online course for professionals.Class sessions alternate between lectures and student discussions that lead up to semester-long projects in which groups of students explore specific strategies and technologies for reducing global emissions. This year’s projects span several topics, including how quickly transmission infrastructure is expanding, the relationship between carbon emissions and human development, and how to decarbonize the production of key chemicals.The curriculum is designed to help students identify the most promising ways to mitigate climate change whether they plan to be scientists, engineers, policymakers, investors, urban planners, or just more informed citizens.“We’re coming at this issue from both sides,” explains Trancik, who is part of MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society. “Engineers are used to designing a technology to work as well as possible here and now, but not always thinking over a longer time horizon about a technology evolving and succeeding in the global marketplace. On the flip side, for students at the macro level, often studies in policy and economics of technological change don’t fully account for the physical and engineering constraints of rates of improvement. But all of that information allows you to make better decisions.”Bridging the gapAs a young researcher working on low-carbon polymers and electrode materials for solar cells, Trancik always wondered how the materials she worked on would scale in the real world. They might achieve promising performance benchmarks in the lab, but would they actually make a difference in mitigating climate change? Later, she began focusing increasingly on developing methods for predicting how technologies might evolve.“I’ve always been interested in both the macro and the micro, or even nano, scales,” Trancik says. “I wanted to know how to bridge these new technologies we’re working on with the big picture of where we want to go.”Trancik’ described her technology-grounded approach to decarbonization in a paper that formed the basis for IDS.065. In the paper, she presented a way to evaluate energy technologies against climate-change mitigation goals while focusing on the technology’s evolution.“That was a departure from previous approaches, which said, given these technologies with fixed characteristics and assumptions about their rates of change, how do I choose the best combination?” Trancik explains. “Instead we asked: Given a goal, how do we develop the best technologies to meet that goal? That inverts the problem in a way that’s useful to engineers developing these technologies, but also to policymakers and investors that want to use the evolution of technologies as a tool for achieving their objectives.”This past semester, the class took place every Tuesday and Thursday in a classroom on the first floor of the Stata Center. Students regularly led discussions where they reflected on the week’s readings and offered their own insights.“Students always share their takeaways and get to ask open questions of the class,” says Megan Herrington, a PhD candidate in the Department of Chemical Engineering. “It helps you understand the readings on a deeper level because people with different backgrounds get to share their perspectives on the same questions and problems. Everybody comes to class with their own lens, and the class is set up to highlight those differences.”The semester begins with an overview of climate science, the origins of emissions reductions goals, and technology’s role in achieving those goals. Students then learn how to evaluate technologies against decarbonization goals.But technologies aren’t static, and neither is the world. Later lessons help students account for the change of technologies over time, identifying the mechanisms for that change and even forecasting rates of change.Students also learn about the role of government policy. This year, Trancik shared her experience traveling to the COP29 United Nations Climate Change Conference.“It’s not just about technology,” Trancik says. “It’s also about the behaviors that we engage in and the choices we make. But technology plays a major role in determining what set of choices we can make.”From the classroom to the worldStudents in the class say it has given them a new perspective on climate change mitigation.“I have really enjoyed getting to see beyond the research people are doing at the benchtop,” says Herrington. “It’s interesting to see how certain materials or technologies that aren’t scalable yet may fit into a larger transformation in energy delivery and consumption. It’s also been interesting to pull back the curtain on energy systems analysis to understand where the metrics we cite in energy-related research originate from, and to anticipate trajectories of emerging technologies.”Onur Talu, a first-year master’s student in the Technology and Policy Program, says the class has made him more hopeful.“I came into this fairly pessimistic about the climate,” says Talu, who has worked for clean technology startups in the past. “This class has taught me different ways to look at the problem of climate change mitigation and developing renewable technologies. It’s also helped put into perspective how much we’ve accomplished so far.”Several student projects from the class over the years have been developed into papers published in peer-reviewed journals. They have also been turned into tools, like carboncounter.com, which plots the emissions and costs of cars and has been featured in The New York Times.Former class students have also launched startups; Joel Jean SM ’13, PhD ’17, for example, started Swift Solar. Others have drawn on the course material to develop impactful careers in government and academia, such as Patrick Brown PhD ’16 at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Leah Stokes SM ’15, PhD ’15 at the University of California at Santa Barbara.Overall, students say the course helps them take a more informed approach to applying their skills toward addressing climate change.“It’s not enough to just know how bad climate change could be,” says Yu Tong, a first-year master’s student in civil and environmental engineering. “It’s also important to understand how technology can work to mitigate climate change from both a technological and market perspective. It’s about employing technology to solve these issues rather than just working in a vacuum.” More

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      in Environment

      In a unique research collaboration, students make the case for less e-waste

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      Brought together as part of the Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC) initiative within the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, a community of students known as SERC Scholars is collaborating to examine the most urgent problems humans face in the digital landscape.Each semester, students from all levels from across MIT are invited to join a different topical working group led by a SERC postdoctoral associate. Each group delves into a specific issue — such as surveillance or data ownership — culminating in a final project presented at the end of the term.Typically, students complete the program with hands-on experience conducting research in a new cross-disciplinary field. However, one group of undergraduate and graduate students recently had the unique opportunity to enhance their resume by becoming published authors of a case study about the environmental and climate justice implications of the electronics hardware life cycle.Although it’s not uncommon for graduate students to co-author case studies, it’s unusual for undergraduates to earn this opportunity — and for their audience to be other undergraduates around the world.“Our team was insanely interdisciplinary,” says Anastasia Dunca, a junior studying computer science and one of the co-authors. “I joined the SERC Scholars Program because I liked the idea of being part of a cohort from across MIT working on a project that utilized all of our skillsets. It also helps [undergraduates] learn the ins and outs of computing ethics research.”Case study co-author Jasmin Liu, an MBA student in the MIT Sloan School of Management, sees the program as a platform to learn about the intersection of technology, society, and ethics: “I met team members spanning computer science, urban planning, to art/culture/technology. I was excited to work with a diverse team because I know complex problems must be approached with many different perspectives. Combining my background in humanities and business with the expertise of others allowed us to be more innovative and comprehensive.”Christopher Rabe, a former SERC postdoc who facilitated the group, says, “I let the students take the lead on identifying the topic and conducting the research.” His goal for the group was to challenge students across disciplines to develop a working definition of climate justice.From mining to e-wasteThe SERC Scholars’ case study, “From Mining to E-waste: The Environmental and Climate Justice Implications of the Electronics Hardware Life Cycle,” was published by the MIT Case Studies in Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing.The ongoing case studies series, which releases new issues twice a year on an open-source platform, is enabling undergraduate instructors worldwide to incorporate research-based education materials on computing ethics into their existing class syllabi.This particular case study broke down the electronics life cycle from mining to manufacturing, usage, and disposal. It offered an in-depth look at how this cycle promotes inequity in the Global South. Mining for the average of 60 minerals that power everyday devices lead to illegal deforestation, compromising air quality in the Amazon, and triggering armed conflict in Congo. Manufacturing leads to proven health risks for both formal and informal workers, some of whom are child laborers.Life cycle assessment and circular economy are proposed as mechanisms for analyzing environmental and climate justice issues in the electronics life cycle. Rather than posing solutions, the case study offers readers entry points for further discussion and for assessing their own individual responsibility as producers of e-waste.Crufting and crafting a case studyDunca joined Rabe’s working group, intrigued by the invitation to conduct a rigorous literature review examining issues like data center resource and energy use, manufacturing waste, ethical issues with AI, and climate change. Rabe quickly realized that a common thread among all participants was an interest in understanding and reducing e-waste and its impact on the environment.“I came in with the idea of us co-authoring a case study,” Rabe said. However, the writing-intensive process was initially daunting to those students who were used to conducting applied research. Once Rabe created sub-groups with discrete tasks, the steps for researching, writing, and iterating a case study became more approachable.For Ellie Bultena, an undergraduate student studying linguistics and philosophy and a contributor to the study, that meant conducting field research on the loading dock of MIT’s Stata Center, where students and faculty go “crufting” through piles of clunky printers, broken computers, and used lab equipment discarded by the Institute’s labs, departments, and individual users.Although not a formally sanctioned activity on-campus, “crufting” is the act of gleaning usable parts from these junk piles to be repurposed into new equipment or art. Bultena’s respondents, who opted to be anonymous, said that MIT could do better when it comes to the amount of e-waste generated and suggested that formal strategies could be implemented to encourage community members to repair equipment more easily or recycle more formally.Rabe, now an education program director at the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative, is hopeful that through the Zero-Carbon Campus Initiative, which commits MIT to eliminating all direct emissions by 2050, MIT will ultimately become a model for other higher education institutions.Although the group lacked the time and resources to travel to communities in the Global South that they profiled in their case study, members leaned into exhaustive secondary research, collecting data on how some countries are irresponsibly dumping e-waste. In contrast, others have developed alternative solutions that can be duplicated elsewhere and scaled.“We source materials, manufacture them, and then throw them away,” Lelia Hampton says. A PhD candidate in electrical engineering and computer science and another co-author, Hampton jumped at the opportunity to serve in a writing role, bringing together the sub-groups research findings. “I’d never written a case study, and it was exciting. Now I want to write 10 more.”The content directly informed Hampton’s dissertation research, which “looks at applying machine learning to climate justice issues such as urban heat islands.” She said that writing a case study that is accessible to general audiences upskilled her for the non-profit organization she’s determined to start. “It’s going to provide communities with free resources and data needed to understand how they are impacted by climate change and begin to advocate against injustice,” Hampton explains.Dunca, Liu, Rabe, Bultena, and Hampton are joined on the case study by fellow authors Mrinalini Singha, a graduate student in the Art, Culture, and Technology program; Sungmoon Lim, a graduate student in urban studies and planning and EECS; Lauren Higgins, an undergraduate majoring in political science; and Madeline Schlegal, a Northeastern University co-op student.Taking the case study to classrooms around the worldAlthough PhD candidates have contributed to previous case studies in the series, this publication is the first to be co-authored with MIT undergraduates. Like any other peer-reviewed journal, before publication, the SERC Scholars’ case study was anonymously reviewed by senior scholars drawn from various fields.The series editor, David Kaiser, also served as one of SERC’s inaugural associate deans and helped shape the program. “The case studies, by design, are short, easy to read, and don’t take up lots of time,” Kaiser explained. “They are gateways for students to explore, and instructors can cover a topic that has likely already been on their mind.” This semester, Kaiser, the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and a professor of physics, is teaching STS.004 (Intersections: Science, Technology, and the World), an undergraduate introduction to the field of science, technology, and society. The last month of the semester has been dedicated wholly to SERC case studies, one of which is: “From Mining to E-Waste.”Hampton was visibly moved to hear that the case study is being used at MIT but also by some of the 250,000 visitors to the SERC platform, many of whom are based in the Global South and directly impacted by the issues she and her cohort researched. “Many students are focused on climate, whether through computer science, data science, or mechanical engineering. I hope that this case study educates them on environmental and climate aspects of e-waste and computing.” More

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      in Environment

      MIT delegation mainstreams biodiversity conservation at the UN Biodiversity Convention, COP16

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      For the first time, MIT sent an organized engagement to the global Conference of the Parties for the Convention on Biological Diversity, which this year was held Oct. 21 to Nov. 1 in Cali, Colombia.The 10 delegates to COP16 included faculty, researchers, and students from the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative (ESI), the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), and the Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy.In previous years, MIT faculty had participated sporadically in the discussions. This organized engagement, led by the ESI, is significant because it brought representatives from many of the groups working on biodiversity across the Institute; showcased the breadth of MIT’s research in more than 15 events including panels, roundtables, and keynote presentations across the Blue and Green Zones of the conference (with the Blue Zone representing the primary venue for the official negotiations and discussions and the Green Zone representing public events); and created an experiential learning opportunity for students who followed specific topics in the negotiations and throughout side events.The conference also gathered attendees from governments, nongovernmental organizations, businesses, other academic institutions, and practitioners focused on stopping global biodiversity loss and advancing the 23 goals of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF), an international agreement adopted in 2022 to guide global efforts to protect and restore biodiversity through 2030.MIT’s involvement was particularly pronounced when addressing goals related to building coalitions of sub-national governments (targets 11, 12, 14); technology and AI for biodiversity conservation (targets 20 and 21); shaping equitable markets (targets 3, 11, and 19); and informing an action plan for Afro-descendant communities (targets 3, 10, and 22).Building coalitions of sub-national governmentsThe ESI’s Natural Climate Solutions (NCS) Program was able to support two separate coalitions of Latin American cities, namely the Coalition of Cities Against Illicit Economies in the Biogeographic Chocó Region and the Colombian Amazonian Cities coalition, who successfully signed declarations to advance specific targets of the KMGBF (the aforementioned targets 11, 12, 14).This was accomplished through roundtables and discussions where team members — including Marcela Angel, research program director at the MIT ESI; Angelica Mayolo, ESI Martin Luther King Fellow 2023-25; and Silvia Duque and Hannah Leung, MIT Master’s in City Planning students — presented a set of multi-scale actions including transnational strategies, recommendations to strengthen local and regional institutions, and community-based actions to promote the conservation of the Biogeographic Chocó as an ecological corridor.“There is an urgent need to deepen the relationship between academia and local governments of cities located in biodiversity hotspots,” said Angel. “Given the scale and unique conditions of Amazonian cities, pilot research projects present an opportunity to test and generate a proof of concept. These could generate catalytic information needed to scale up climate adaptation and conservation efforts in socially and ecologically sensitive contexts.”ESI’s research also provided key inputs for the creation of the Fund for the Biogeographic Chocó Region, a multi-donor fund launched within the framework of COP16 by a coalition composed of Colombia, Ecuador, Panamá, and Costa Rica. The fund aims to support biodiversity conservation, ecosystem restoration, climate change mitigation and adaptation, and sustainable development efforts across the region.Technology and AI for biodiversity conservationData, technology, and artificial intelligence are playing an increasing role in how we understand biodiversity and ecosystem change globally. Professor Sara Beery’s research group at MIT focuses on this intersection, developing AI methods that enable species and environmental monitoring at previously unprecedented spatial, temporal, and taxonomic scales.During the International Union of Biological Diversity Science-Policy Forum, the high-level COP16 segment focused on outlining recommendations from scientific and academic community, Beery spoke on a panel alongside María Cecilia Londoño, scientific information manager of the Humboldt Institute and co-chair of the Global Biodiversity Observations Network, and Josh Tewksbury, director of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, among others, about how these technological advancements will help humanity achieve our biodiversity targets. The panel emphasized that AI innovation was needed, but with emphasis on direct human-AI partnership, AI capacity building, and the need for data and AI policy to ensure equity of access and benefit from these technologies.As a direct outcome of the session, for the first time, AI was emphasized in the statement on behalf of science and academia delivered by Hernando Garcia, director of the Humboldt Institute, and David Skorton, secretary general of the Smithsonian Institute, to the high-level segment of the COP16.That statement read, “To effectively address current and future challenges, urgent action is required in equity, governance, valuation, infrastructure, decolonization and policy frameworks around biodiversity data and artificial intelligence.”Beery also organized a panel at the GEOBON pavilion in the Blue Zone on Scaling Biodiversity Monitoring with AI, which brought together global leaders from AI research, infrastructure development, capacity and community building, and policy and regulation. The panel was initiated and experts selected from the participants at the recent Aspen Global Change Institute Workshop on Overcoming Barriers to Impact in AI for Biodiversity, co-organized by Beery.Shaping equitable marketsIn a side event co-hosted by the ESI with CAF-Development Bank of Latin America, researchers from ESI’s Natural Climate Solutions Program — including Marcela Angel; Angelica Mayolo; Jimena Muzio, ESI research associate; and Martin Perez Lara, ESI research affiliate and director for Forest Climate Solutions Impact and Monitoring at World Wide Fund for Nature of the U.S. — presented results of a study titled “Voluntary Carbon Markets for Social Impact: Comprehensive Assessment of the Role of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLC) in Carbon Forestry Projects in Colombia.” The report highlighted the structural barriers that hinder effective participation of IPLC, and proposed a conceptual framework to assess IPLC engagement in voluntary carbon markets.Communicating these findings is important because the global carbon market has experienced a credibility crisis since 2023, influenced by critical assessments in academic literature, journalism questioning the quality of mitigation results, and persistent concerns about the engagement of private actors with IPLC. Nonetheless, carbon forestry projects have expanded rapidly in Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and local communities’ territories, and there is a need to assess the relationships between private actors and IPLC and to propose pathways for equitable participation. 

      Panelists pose at the equitable markets side event at the Latin American Pavilion in the Blue Zone.

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      The research presentation and subsequent panel with representatives of the association for Carbon Project Developers in Colombia Asocarbono, Fondo Acción, and CAF further discussed recommendations for all actors in the value chain of carbon certificates — including those focused on promoting equitable benefit-sharing and safeguarding compliance, increased accountability, enhanced governance structures, strengthened institutionality, and regulatory frameworks  — necessary to create an inclusive and transparent market.Informing an action plan for Afro-descendant communitiesThe Afro-Interamerican Forum on Climate Change (AIFCC), an international network working to highlight the critical role of Afro-descendant peoples in global climate action, was also present at COP16.At the Afro Summit, Mayolo presented key recommendations prepared collectively by the members of AIFCC to the technical secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). The recommendations emphasize:creating financial tools for conservation and supporting Afro-descendant land rights;including a credit guarantee fund for countries that recognize Afro-descendant collective land titling and research on their contributions to biodiversity conservation;calling for increased representation of Afro-descendant communities in international policy forums;capacity-building for local governments; andstrategies for inclusive growth in green business and energy transition.These actions aim to promote inclusive and sustainable development for Afro-descendant populations.“Attending COP16 with a large group from MIT contributing knowledge and informed perspectives at 15 separate events was a privilege and honor,” says MIT ESI Director John E. Fernández. “This demonstrates the value of the ESI as a powerful research and convening body at MIT. Science is telling us unequivocally that climate change and biodiversity loss are the two greatest challenges that we face as a species and a planet. MIT has the capacity, expertise, and passion to address not only the former, but also the latter, and the ESI is committed to facilitating the very best contributions across the institute for the critical years that are ahead of us.”A fuller overview of the conference is available via The MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative’s Primer of COP16. More