The beauty of a nice infographic published alongside a news or magazine story is that it makes numeric data more accessible to the average reader. But for blind and visually impaired users, such graphics often have the opposite effect. For visually impaired users — who frequently rely on screen-reading software that speaks words or numbers […]
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In the United States, social institutions from church organizations to sports leagues occupy key roles in shaping political life, with unions perhaps the most familiar player, affecting change in realms from protest movements to elections. But while these civil society institutions draw little notice in a democracy, they turn heads in settings where political […]
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“I recently exhaled a breath I’ve been holding in for nearly half my life. After applying over a decade ago, I’m finally an American. This means so many things to me. Foremost, it means I can go back to the the Middle East, and see my mama and the family, for the first time in […]
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Proteins called transcription factors are like molecular traffic cops that tell genes when to stop and go. If they malfunction — what scientists refer to as dysregulation — transcription factors stop orchestrating healthy gene expression and instead become a driving force for diseases like cancer. Unsurprisingly, dysregulated transcription factors have garnered a lot of attention […]
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Over a decade ago, the neuroscientist Ev Fedorenko asked 48 English speakers to complete tasks like reading sentences, recalling information, solving math problems, and listening to music. As they did this, she scanned their brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging to see which circuits were activated. If, as linguists have proposed for decades, language is […]
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Mariama N’Diaye, a design fellow at the MIT Morningside Academy for Design (MAD), works to transform the public sector through design thinking and innovation. With a diverse background in urban planning and business administration — she’s pursuing a dual master’s degree at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) and the MIT Sloan School […]
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Innovating at the intersection of chemistry, biology, and engineering, Professor Brad Pentelute and the Pentelute Lab at MIT invent new chemistry, platforms, and techniques that might revolutionize therapeutics. Their formula in brief: nature-inspired research that begins at the molecular level, infused with state-of-the-art machine learning and automation, aimed at solving real-world problems. Take, for example, […]
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An accomplished MIT student researcher in health care robotics, with many scholarship and fellowship awards to his name, A. Michael West is nonchalant about how he chose his path. “I kind of fell into it,” the mechanical engineering PhD candidate says, adding that growing up in suburban California, he was social, athletic — and good […]
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After three years leading biking tours through U.S. National Parks, Jackson Jewett decided it was time for a change. “It was a lot of fun, but I realized I missed buildings,” says Jewett. “I really wanted to be a part of that industry, learn more about it, and reconnect with my roots in the built […]
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Before Leila Mirzagholi arrived at MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) to begin her postdoc appointment, she had spent most of her time in academia building cosmological models to detect properties of gravitational waves in the cosmos. But as a member of Assistant Professor César Terrer’s lab in CEE, Mirzagholi uses her physics […]
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Although women’s wartime roles and agency tend to be neglected in conventional discourses on conflict, there are times when women not only take up arms but also shape the practices and policies of insurgent groups they fight for. Apekshya Prasai, a PhD candidate in MIT’s Department of Political Science, studies how rebel groups subvert entrenched […]
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Around 2010, Facebook was a relatively small company with about 2,000 employees. So, when a PhD student named Dean Eckles showed up to serve an intership at the firm, he landed in a position with some real duties. Eckles essentially became the primary data scientist for the product manager who was overseeing the platform’s news […]
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Senior staff accountant Abisola Okuk’s role has changed a lot since she first came to MIT back in 2014. She started in the Media Lab as an administrative assistant, then moved to the MIT Sloan School of Management’s external relations team, and is now senior staff accountant in the Office of the Vice President for […]
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Growing up in the Tidewater region of Virginia, Dyanna Jaye had a front row seat to the climate crisis. She recalls beach stabilization efforts that pumped sand from the bottom of the ocean to the shore in response to rising sea levels. And every hurricane season, the streets would flood. “I was thinking at a […]
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Constantine Tzouanas aims to deconstruct, understand, and engineer complex biological systems by studying their smallest units — individual cells. “The analogy I like to use is whenever you see a broken car, it’s very easy to describe that the windshield is broken, the bumper is crumpled,” says the fourth-year PhD candidate. “It’s much harder to […]
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