It is not hard to find glowing reviews of saxophonist Miguel Zenón, a creative jazz artist whose compositions incorporate musical elements from his native Puerto Rico. For instance, The Jazz Times called “Jibaro,” Zenón’s breakthrough 2005 album, “profound yet joyful.” The New York Times called the same music “strong and light,” adding that we have “rarely seen a […]
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What makes work valuable? Michal Masny, the NC Ethics of Technology Postdoctoral Fellow in the MIT Department of Philosophy, investigates the role work plays in our lives and its impact on our well-being. Masny sees numerous benefits to work, beyond a paycheck. It’s a space for people to develop excellence at something, make a social contribution, […]
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Bank runs are dramatic: Picture Depression-era footage of customers lined up, trying to get their deposits back. Or recall Lehmann Brothers emptying out in 2008 or Silicon Valley Bank collapsing in 2023. But what causes these runs in the first place? One viewpoint is that something of a self-fulfilling prophecy is involved. Panic spreads, and […]
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Today, there are 94 nuclear reactors operating in the United States, more than in any other country in the world, and these units collectively provide nearly 20 percent of the nation’s electricity. That is a major accomplishment, according to Dean Price, but he believes that our country needs much more out of nuclear energy, especially […]
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Billions of years ago, simple organic molecules drifted across Earth’s primordial landscape — nothing more than basic chemical compounds. But as natural forces shaped the planet over hundreds of millions of years, these molecules began to interact and bond in increasingly complex ways. Along the way, something spectacular emerged: life. “Life is, to some degree, […]
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Growing up in Mexico and Texas, Mariano Salcedo ’25 couldn’t readily indulge his passion for creating music. “There are no bands in Mexican public schools,” he says. While some families could pay for instruments and lessons, others, like Salcedo’s, were less fortunate. “I’ve always loved music,” he continues. “I was a listener.” Salcedo, the Alex […]
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Like many people who end up going into physics, Sophia Henneberg had a hard time, when she was young, choosing between that discipline and mathematics. Both subjects came easily to her, and she — unlike many of her peers — thought they were fun. Henneberg grew up in a small town in central Germany, and […]
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Alex Tang’s dream of becoming a physician started in grade school when he read Lisa Sanders’ “Diagnosis” column in The New York Times Magazine. Although he often encountered unfamiliar medical terms, Tang was captivated by the magic of medicine, as Sanders described how physicians turned puzzling sets of symptoms into concrete diagnoses and treatment plans […]
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The sense of support and community was palpable when Sojun Park, a postdoc at the MIT Center for International Studies (CIS), delivered a recent presentation on The Global Diffusion of AI Technologies and Its Political Drivers. The event, part of the CIS Global Research and Policy Seminar, filled the venue with audience members from across MIT. “My […]
Read MoreA few weeks ago, Amy Moran-Thomas and 20 students in her class 21A.311 (The Social Lives of Medical Objects) were gathered around a glucose meter, a jar of test strips, and various spare medical parts in the MIT Museum seminar room, talking about how to make them work better. The class had just heard a […]
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Growing up in the village of Kewa — located between Santa Fe and Albuquerque in New Mexico — William Pacheco, a member of the Santo Domingo Pueblo, learned the value of his language, its history, and the traditions it carries. “We speak Keres, a language isolate found in seven villages and communities in central New Mexico,” […]
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MIT senior Srihitha Dasari never imagined she would be speaking in front of the United Nations about health care, technology, and the power of co-designing public health interventions in collaboration with impacted communities. But when she stepped up to the podium to speak about digital well-being and community-centered health care design, she carried with her […]
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Amid the hum of milking equipment and the shuffle of cow hooves, PhD student Audrey Parker and her collaborators pull a wagon through a dusty path of a dairy barn, measuring an invisible greenhouse gas drifting through the air. Most engineering students wouldn’t expect their graduate research to take them to a dairy farm, but […]
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Joseph Paradiso thinks that the most engaging research questions usually span disciplines. Paradiso was trained as a physicist and completed his PhD in experimental high-energy physics at MIT in 1981. His father was a photographer and filmmaker working at MIT, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, and the MITRE Corporation, so he grew up in a house where artists, […]
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When Associate Professor Eliezer Calo PhD ’11 was applying for faculty positions, he was drawn to MIT not only because it’s his alma mater, but also because the Department of Biology places high value on exploring fundamental questions in biology. In his own lab, Calo studies how craniofacial malformations arise. One motivation is to seek […]
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In many academic circles, innovation is imagined as a lab-to-market pipeline that travels through patent filings, venture rounds, and coastal research hubs. But a growing movement inside U.S. universities is pushing students toward a different frontier: solving real engineering problems alongside rural communities whose challenges directly shape national food security. A compelling example of this […]
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For more than a decade, MIT Associate Professor Rafael Gómez-Bombarelli has used artificial intelligence to create new materials. As the technology has expanded, so have his ambitions. Now, the newly tenured professor in materials science and engineering believes AI is poised to transform science in ways never before possible. His work at MIT and beyond […]
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