| Healing With Hydrogels | | | | | | After an accident landed his brother in intensive care with traumatic injuries, mechanical engineering grad student Hyunwoo Yuk worked to develop a bioadhesive tape that can repair damaged tissue. “I believe that personal problems are the best problems for engineers to solve,” he says. |
| Data transfer system connects silicon chips with a hair’s-width cable The advance could improve energy efficiency of data centers and lighten the load for electronics-rich vehicles. |  |
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| Improving sanitation for the world’s most vulnerable people With deep roots at MIT, the startup change:WATER Labs has created a toilet that treats waste without water or power. |  |
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| Future Founders Initiative aims to increase female entrepreneurship in biotech MIT faculty collaborate with members of the Boston-area biotech community to commercialize women’s discoveries and promote female entrepreneurship. |  |
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| Eight from MIT named 2021 Sloan Research Fellows |
The awards honor and support young professors in the Media Lab and the departments of Biology, Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Chemical Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Mathematics. |
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| Stefanie Mueller changes everything: A hands-on class responds to Covid-19 |
The assistant professor adapted her laboratory class, Engineering Interactive Technologies, to the pandemic, with surprising results. |  |
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| Celebrating Black chemists and chemical engineers // C&EN Professor Paula Hammond, head of MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering, guest edits the 2021 Trailblazers issue of C&EN. She also serves as the subject of a feature profile, in which she discusses what inspired her to pursue a career in engineering, how her research at MIT has evolved to focus on biomedical applications, and the importance of inclusivity and diversity. |
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| MIT’s “MOXIE” lands on Mars // The Boston Globe |
Michael Hecht, associate director of MIT’s Haystack Observatory, discusses the MIT-designed Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment (MOXIE), which is aboard the NASA Perseverance rover that landed on Mars last Thursday. “If we could plant a tree on Mars, it would do what MOXIE is doing. But we can’t, so we build a machine to do it,” he says. “If we’re serious about having a presence on Mars and having a research base, we need a way to make oxygen.” |
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| One on one with Kristala L. J. Prather // C&EN Professor Kristala L. J. Prather speaks about her career path and her work harnessing the synthetic power of microbial systems. Of the importance of mentorship, Prather notes, “The exponential way in which you can actually have a positive impact is by taking good care of the people who are placed into your academic and intellectual trust. That’s how we make a difference.” |
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| The face of the Perseverance landing was an Indian American woman // CNN |
Alumna Swati Mohan PhD ’10 was the guidance and controls operations lead for NASA’s Mars 2020 mission and also served as the mission commentator. Mohan, who first became intrigued by space while watching Star Trek as a child, was the “eyes and ears” for the historic landing. |
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| | | Via MIT Black History: Three students, seen here, visited an information table at the Kresge Auditorium in 1968. The assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy that same year sparked new initiatives toward making MIT a more equitable community. This included the formation of the Black Students’ Union and Project Interphase (now Interphase EDGE), a program for incoming first-year students of color. Shirley Ann Jackson ’68, PhD ’73 and Jennifer Rudd ’68 became the first Black women to graduate from MIT. |
| | | At the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, the MIT Activities Committee began offering a variety of virtual activities for the MIT community, on topics ranging from cooking to the physics of golf. The program’s popularity “has shown the need to stay connected,” says Diane Betz Tavitian. |
| | | A website from the San Francisco-based Kronos Quartet features “Gammified,” a composition by MIT Professor Tod Machover, which was commissioned as part of the quartet’s “Fifty for the Future” series. The composition is based on MIT research into the reparative effects of 40 Hz. audio signals on the mind. The site includes a Kronos recording for string quartet and electronics; the score and parts for the composition so that any string quartet can read and perform it; program notes with links to the research; and an interview with Machover. |
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