Suzanne Freeman and Mariel Garcia-Montes are the recipients of this year’s Jeanne Guillemin Prize at the Center for International Studies (CIS). The prize provides financial support to women studying international affairs, a field that has long been dominated by men. Jeanne Guillemin, a veteran colleague at CIS, endowed the fund shortly before her death in 2019. […]
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Protestors acting against repressive regimes face a particular problem: The tools they use to organize demonstrations can also be deployed to repress their actions. For instance, when citizens communicate on the internet to plan a protest, a ruling regime can access that information and be ready to break up the demonstration. Then what? What happens […]
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This summer, five MIT graduate students will travel to Mexico, Brazil, Kenya, and Cape Verde as part of a new fellowship to explore how governance innovations are making governments more transparent and accountable to citizens in regions of the world that are underrepresented in global innovation and design research. The students will be embedded within […]
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What do a student tinkerer in Bhutan, a design professional in Nairobi, and an artist in Brazil have in common? They’re part of a global community of makers benefiting from the fab lab network, which provides the space, equipment, and training to make (almost) anything. Today the fab lab network includes more than 2,500 centers […]
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Theo St. Francis is an MIT senior majoring in aeronautics and astronautics. He is graduating this month with a concentration in Portuguese, and has visited Brazil with the MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives’ Global Teaching Labs. This year, St. Francis was the recipient of the Global Languages Margarita Ribas Groeger Distinguished Scholar award. In […]
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In March, two vans filled with doctors and medical supplies crossed the Polish border into Ukraine and made their way to Kyiv as part of a humanitarian mission. Both vans were packed with traditional medical supplies the country is in desperate need of, such as tourniquets, bandages, and suture kits. But one van also carried […]
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“The scale, complexity, the global nature of the problems we’re dealing with are so big that no single institution, industry, or country can deal with them alone,” MIT President Sally Kornbluth stated in her first remarks to the Solve community. Over 300 social impact leaders from around the world convened on MIT’s campus for Solve […]
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In July 2022, Professor Per Urlaub joined MIT as the new director of Global Languages. A prolific researcher in second-language studies and the role of technology in language and humanities education, he holds a teaching appointment in MIT’s literature section. He came to MIT after having served in a variety of faculty and leadership roles […]
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When the Axiom-2 mission launches later this month, it will carry with it a payload of languages never heard beyond Earth’s atmosphere. The Humanity United with MIT Art and Nanotechnology in Space (HUMANS) nanowafer, which will travel to the International Space Station (ISS) as part of the mission, is a record of messages in over […]
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Russia’s ongoing full-scale invasion of Ukraine, commencing in February 2022, is continuing to cause immense upheaval and destruction, and Ukrainians continue to fight to defend their nation-state. Last fall, MIT launched its MIT-Ukraine program, an effort to find ways to leverage the Institute’s expertise and resources to help a country devastated by war. This has […]
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President Yoon Suk Yeol of South Korea visited MIT on Friday, participating in a roundtable discussion with Institute leaders and faculty about biomedical research and discussing the fundamentals of technology-driven innovation clusters. South Korea, Yoon noted in his remarks, has highly regarded educational institutions, hospitals, and research facilities, along with robust legal and business systems. […]
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Allocating land for people to use is one of the most powerful tools a government can have. A newly published study by an MIT scholar now identifies the extent to which state land distribution can be a politically charged act. The research, focused on Kenya in recent decades, challenges some conventional wisdom while bringing new […]
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Tahmina S. was a junior studying computer engineering at a top university in Afghanistan when a new government policy banned women from pursuing education. In August 2021, the Taliban prohibited girls from attending school beyond the sixth grade. While women were initially allowed to continue to attend universities, by October 2021, an order from the […]
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Uganda reported its first case of Covid-19 on March 21, 2020. Almost a year later, the first batch of vaccines to protect against the spread of the disease arrived in the country. As people began receiving their injections in the ensuing months, researchers from the MIT Governance Lab (MIT GOV/LAB) and Makerere University’s School of […]
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As Russia’s war in Ukraine rages on, this year’s MIT Energy Conference spotlighted the role of geopolitics in the world’s efforts to lower greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate the worst effects of climate change. Each year, the student-run conference, which its organizers say is the largest of its kind, brings together leaders from around the […]
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Participating in an intensive three-week lab in Yucatán, Mexico, changed how MIT junior Penelope Herrero-Marques views her role as an engineer. The January trip was the first step in a new partnership between MIT D-Lab and Perkins School for the Blind, a Massachusetts-based national service provider and international nonprofit that strives to make education accessible […]
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MIT Lecturer Min-Min Liang has won the 2023 MAFLT LCTL Innovation Award in the Classroom Innovation category, offered by the National Less Commonly Taught Languages (LCTL) Resource Center at Michigan State University. Liang has taught Chinese at MIT for over 20 years as part of the Global Languages unit. In making the award notification, the […]
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Within 72 hours of the first Russian missiles striking Kyiv, Ukraine, in February 2022, Ian Miller SM ’19 boarded a flight for Poland. Later, he’d say he felt motivated by Kyiv’s “tragic ocean of suffering” and Ukrainian President Zelensky’s pleas for help. But he arrived with little notion of what to do. As he’d anticipated, […]
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President José Maria Neves of Cape Verde visited MIT on Tuesday, meeting with the campus community and conducting a public event about e-governance in Africa, which highlighted the ways technology has helped his country. “Technology and information are a mechanism or means to establish links between [our] islands, and between Cape Verde and the diaspora,” […]
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The popular board game “Puerto Rico,” dating to 2002, features sophisticated rules and heavily rewards skill, not chance, as players attempt to create 19th-century economic growth on the island. Many people have found it compelling but haven’t delved into its implications. “I played that game without thinking about it too much,” says Mikael Jakobsson, a […]
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When the historic cities of Europe were built hundreds of years ago, there were open green spaces all around them. But today’s city centers can be a 30-minute drive or more to the vast open greenery that earlier Europeans took for granted. That’s what the startup Roofscapes is trying to change. The company, founded by […]
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When Congolese doctor Denis Mukwege won a share of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018, Milain Fayulu SM ’22 was filled with pride in his home country. He eagerly set an alarm from Miami to wake up in the early hours and watch Mukwege’s speech in Norway. In the speech, Mukwege discussed his experience caring […]
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Commencement 2022 marked a milestone in MIT’s history, as Stacy Godfreey-Igwe ’22 became the first student to graduate in African and African diaspora studies (AADS). Godfreey-Igwe also majored in mechanical engineering and is now a fellow at the Science Technology Policy Institute in Washington. She recalls that while she did not initially intend to major […]
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They come by foot and by boat. Desperate, many bring nothing more than the clothes on their backs. They seek asylum and hope. Since 2015, more than a million refugees have flooded into Greece. Syrians, Afghanis, Iraqis, and Kurds, they’ve been uprooted from their home countries by violence and oppression. Political gridlock traps them in […]
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Average crop yields in Africa are consistently far below those expected, and one significant reason is the prevalence of counterfeit seeds whose germination rates are far lower than those of the genuine ones. The World Bank estimates that as much as half of all seeds sold in some African countries are fake, which could help […]
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Today marks the 20th anniversary of the United States-led invasion of Iraq. Code-named “Operation Iraqi Freedom” by the George W. Bush administration, the goal was to eliminate weapons of mass destruction, topple Saddam Hussein, and remake Iraq into a democracy. Two decades later, U.S. troops are still on Iraqi soil and that nation is ravaged […]
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A new research collaboration with The Bahrain Institute for Pearls and Gemstones (DANAT) will seek to develop advanced characterization tools for the analysis of the properties of pearls and to explore technologies to assign unique identifiers to individual pearls. The three-year project will be led by Admir Mašić, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, […]
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Researchers from the Disruptive and Sustainable Technologies for Agricultural Precision (DiSTAP) interdisciplinary research group of the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore, and their collaborators from Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory have developed the first-ever nanosensor that can detect and distinguish gibberellins (GAs), a class of hormones in plants that […]
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The MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) leads energy education at MIT, developing and implementing a robust educational toolkit for MIT graduate and undergraduate students, online learners around the world, and high school students who want to contribute to the energy transition. As MITEI’s director of education, Antje Danielson manages a team devoted to training the next […]
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Ukraine has been withstanding Russia’s invasion for slightly more than a year. One element of this resistance has been the military aid many allies have provided Ukraine. But surely the most important factor, ever since Russia attacked in February 2022, has been the strong sense of solidarity Ukranians have displayed in their attempt to keep […]
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How do you quantify the value of education or measure success? For the team behind the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society’s (IDSS) MicroMasters Program in Statistics and Data Science (SDS), providing over 1,000 individuals from around the globe with access to MIT-level programming feels like a pretty good place to start. Thanks to […]
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