Eleven MIT faculty, including nine from the School of Engineering and two from the School of Science, received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). Fifteen other MIT alumni were also honored. Established in 1996 by President Bill Clinton, PECASE is awarded to scientists and engineers who “demonstrate exceptional potential for leadership…
David McGee, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at MIT, was recently named chair of MIT’s Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) Department, effective January 15. McGee specializes in using isotopic geochemistry and geochronology to reconstruct Earth’s climate history, contributing to our understanding of how the climate system responds during…
Senior Audrey Lorvo conducts AI safety research, which seeks to ensure that increasingly sophisticated AI models are trustworthy and can benefit humanity. This growing field focuses on technical challenges, such as the robustness and alignment of AI with human values, as well as social issues, such as transparency and accountability. Physicians are also concerned about…
Sarah Berry came to MIT as an assistant professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) eager to focus on environmental challenges. She built her research career on the opportunity to use her expertise in computer vision, machine learning, and data science to solve real-world conservation and sustainability problems. Berry was drawn…
A new technology developed at MIT allows scientists to label proteins in millions of individual cells in completely intact 3D tissues with unprecedented speed, uniformity, and versatility. Using this technology, the team was able to label large tissue samples in a single day. In their new study in Nature Biotechnology, they also show that the ability to label…
In India, many children who work in retail markets have good math skills: they can quickly perform various calculations to complete transactions. But a new study shows that these children often perform much worse on the same problems they learn in the classroom. This is even though many of these students are still in school…
Superconducting materials are like a carpool lane in a densely populated state. Like passengers riding together, electrons that pair up can bypass normal traffic and move through materials with zero friction. But like carpools, how easily electron pairs can flow depends on a number of conditions, including the density of the pairs moving in the…
A lot has changed in the 15 years that Kaiming has been a doctoral student. “When you’re in a PhD, there’s a high wall between different fields and subjects, and there’s an even higher wall in computer science,” he says. “The guy sitting next to me might be doing things I don’t fully understand.” Seven…
Andrew Babin tries to collect vehicles for business trips. Along with the travel essentials, however, he also brings a roll of electrical tape, duct tape, lab tape, zip ties, and some bungee cords. “That’s my MacGyver kit: You never know when you’ll need to fix something on the farm or fix a broken bag,” says…
