Transistors, the building blocks of modern electronics, are typically made of silicon. Because it’s a semiconductor, this material can control the flow of electricity in a circuit. But silicon has fundamental physical limits that restrict how compact and energy-efficient a transistor can be.

MIT researchers have now replaced silicon with a magnetic semiconductor, creating a magnetic transistor that could enable smaller, faster, and more energy-efficient circuits. The material’s magnetism strongly influences its electronic behavior, leading to more efficient control of the flow of electricity. 

The team used a novel magnetic material and an optimization process that reduces the material’s defects, which boosts the transistor’s performance.

The material’s unique magnetic properties also allow for transistors with built-in memory, which would simplify circuit design and unlock new applications for high-performance electronics.

“People have known about magnets for thousands of years, but there are very limited ways to incorporate magnetism into electronics. We have shown a new way to efficiently utilize magnetism that opens up a lot of possibilities for future applications and research,” says Chung-Tao Chou, an MIT graduate student in the departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and Physics, and co-lead author of a paper on this advance.

Chou is joined on the paper by co-lead author Eugene Park, a graduate student in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE); Julian Klein, a DMSE research scientist; Josep Ingla-Aynes, a postdoc in the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center; Jagadeesh S. Moodera, a senior research scientist in the Department of Physics; and senior authors Frances Ross, TDK Professor in DMSE; and Luqiao Liu, an associate professor in EECS, and a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics; as well as others at the University of Chemistry and Technology in Prague. The paper appears today in Physical Review Letters.

Overcoming the limits

In an electronic device, silicon semiconductor transistors act like tiny light switches that turn a circuit on and off, or amplify weak signals in a communication system. They do this using a small input voltage.

But a fundamental physical limit of silicon semiconductors prevents a transistor from operating below a certain voltage, which hinders its energy efficiency.

To make more efficient electronics, researchers have spent decades working toward magnetic transistors that utilize electron spin to control the flow of electricity. Electron spin is a fundamental property that enables electrons to behave like tiny magnets.

So far, scientists have mostly been limited to using certain magnetic materials. These lack the favorable electronic properties of semiconductors, constraining device performance.

“In this work, we combine magnetism and semiconductor physics to realize useful spintronic devices,” Liu says.

The researchers replace the silicon in the surface layer of a transistor with chromium sulfur bromide, a two-dimensional material that acts as a magnetic semiconductor.

Due to the material’s structure, researchers can switch between two magnetic states very cleanly. This makes it ideal for use in a transistor that smoothly switches between “on” and “off.”

“One of the biggest challenges we faced was finding the right material. We tried many other materials that didn’t work,” Chou says.

They discovered that changing these magnetic states modifies the material’s electronic properties, enabling low-energy operation. And unlike many other 2D materials, chromium sulfur bromide remains stable in air.

To make a transistor, the researchers pattern electrodes onto a silicon substrate, then carefully align and transfer the 2D material on top. They use tape to pick up a tiny piece of material, only a few tens of nanometers thick, and place it onto the substrate.

“A lot of researchers will use solvents or glue to do the transfer, but transistors require a very clean surface. We eliminate all those risks by simplifying this step,” Chou says.

Leveraging magnetism

This lack of contamination enables their device to outperform existing magnetic transistors. Most others can only create a weak magnetic effect, changing the flow of current by a few percent or less. Their new transistor can switch or amplify the electric current by a factor of 10.

They use an external magnetic field to change the magnetic state of the material, switching the transistor using significantly less energy than would usually be required.

The material also allows them to control the magnetic states with electric current. This is important because engineers cannot apply magnetic fields to individual transistors in an electronic device. They need to control each one electrically.

The material’s magnetic properties could also enable transistors with built-in memory, simplifying the design of logic or memory circuits.

A typical memory device has a magnetic cell to store information and a transistor to read it out. Their method can combine both into one magnetic transistor.

“Now, not only are transistors turning on and off, they are also remembering information. And because we can switch the transistor with greater magnitude, the signal is much stronger so we can read out the information faster, and in a much more reliable way,” Liu says.

Building on this demonstration, the researchers plan to further study the use of electrical current to control the device. They are also working to make their method scalable so they can fabricate arrays of transistors.

This research was supported, in part, by the Semiconductor Research Corporation, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Army Research Office, and the Czech Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sports. The work was partially carried out at the MIT.nano facilities.

The moment a nuclear reactor begins operation, a complex chain of events is initiated within the fuel: Heavy atoms split into fission products, knocking other atoms out of place and creating defects that can change how the fuel swells, transfers heat, and reacts chemically over time. 

Understanding those processes is key to understanding how safe and efficient a nuclear reactor will be. But even for some of the most-studied fuel types, the mechanisms controlling those processes are unclear.

Such is the case with a particular kind of metallic fuel, uranium alloyed with 10 percent zirconium by weight, also known as U-10Zr. This fuel was extensively tested in historic sodium-cooled fast reactors such as the Experimental Breeder Reactor-II (EBR-II) in Idaho and the Fast Flux Testing Facility (FFTF) in Washington state, helping establish the foundation for metallic fuel development in the U.S. Today, U-10Zr is again attracting attention for use in next-generation advanced reactors.

But most studies of U-10Zr took place decades ago, leaving unanswered questions about exactly how the fuel changes when it undergoes nuclear fission in a reactor and how it interacts with the protective fuel cladding surrounding it.

Now, together with Idaho National Laboratory (INL), MIT researchers have led one of the most detailed three-dimensional studies of irradiated U-10Zr to date. The researchers used a technique known as high energy synchrotron X-ray computed tomography at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in New York to analyze the pore networks and chemical changes that formed under irradiation during use inside the FFTF reactor, providing new insights into how the material swells, transfers heat, and interacts with the fuel cladding. 

The findings could help keep some nuclear reactors running for longer, while also informing the next generation of nuclear reactor fuel systems.

“This study helps us model the pore distribution in the fuel more accurately,” says senior author Ericmoore Jossou, MIT’s John Clark Hardwick (1986) Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering. “It also helps us design for the safe operation of metallic fuels in reactors by giving us a better understanding of the role of pores and their importance.”

Joining Jossou on the paper are first author and MIT postdoc Anthony Harrup; Riley Moeykens ’25, SM ’25; BNL researchers Michael Drakopoulos and Nghia Vo; and INL researchers Jana Howard, Colby Jensen, and Tiankai Yao.

Understanding nuclear fuel

A class of nuclear reactors known as sodium-cooled fast reactors generate energy from rods of metallic fuels that are sealed inside metal tubes called cladding. In each rod, heat generally moves outward from the center to the edge and then to the cladding, where liquid sodium carries heat away to be harvested into power.

“As you operate the reactor, the contact between the fuel and the cladding material creates chemical interactions that can be problematic,” explains Jossou. “There is a migration of materials from the fuel to the cladding, like fission gases and rare earth elements called lanthanides, which can react with the cladding, cause embrittlement, and damage the fuel system.”

Studies of previously irradiated fuel and its cladding have captured mostly two-dimensional snapshots, preventing scientists from seeing the full scale of the pore networks that influence heat transfer and transport materials like lanthanides. Previous studies also mainly focused on specific sections of the fuel system, such as the fuel center or the fuel cladding interface.

For their study, the MIT researchers used fuel samples from the Fast Flux Testing Facility reactor, a sodium-cooled fast neutron reactor located in Washington state that operated from 1982 to 1992.

The Idaho National Lab managed the samples and prepared the samples. The team studied the prepared samples using high-energy synchrotron X-ray tomography at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. The synchrotron generated high-energy X-rays that allowed the researchers to reconstruct the fuel’s internal pore networks in three dimensions, revealing how porosity, chemistry, and fuel-cladding interactions evolve across the fuel radius.

The researchers found porosity increased modestly from the center of the fuel toward the fuel edge, but pore density jumped by over two orders of magnitude at the fuel’s edge by the cladding. The researchers also characterized the size and shape of pores, finding small pores at the center that turn into larger pore networks pointing outward toward the edge.

“The pores are currently modeled as spheres; however, in reality they are more complex, especially when many pores merged together,” Harrup says. “That’s true from the center all the way to the cladding. It explains why the cladding reacts the way it does, and why we see cladding chemicals in the fuel.”

The pore networks toward the edge allow fission products and lanthanides to move but slow down heat transport, impacting the fuel’s performance and lifetime. The researchers also mapped their microstructural findings with changes in the chemistry of the fuel in different areas.

“With this study, we’ve conducted an in-depth analysis enabled by advanced computational imaging methods that has never been done before, with correlations between local chemical environments and the formation of pores,” Harrup says. “It turns out that whether the environment is uranium rich or zirconium rich impacts the morphology and the channels of the pores. That has never been reported before.”

“The ability to directly visualize pore connectivity and fuel cladding interaction in three dimensions gives us important insight for improving fuel performance for advanced metallic fuel for sodium fast reactors,” says Tiankai Yao of INL.

Informing reactor designs

The experimental findings differed from some models of how pores form and how the fuel system swells, which could improve simulations to help keep reactors running for longer. They also give a more nuanced picture of how pores influence reactor performance and safety.

“This helps optimize the current metallic fuel proposed for sodium fast reactors,” Jossou says. “Now, together with INL, we better understand how pores are influencing the thermal performance of metallic fuel in reactors. At high temperature, the pores are not all bad, because we found they act as pathways for liquid sodium metal to flow through the fuel and sustain thermal conductivity. Connected pores could also serve as releasing channels for fission gases which reduce the internal fuel matrix stress.”

The findings could also be used to design better fuel systems for next generation of sodium fast reactors.

“This excellent piece of work generated by Professor Jossou’s group in collaboration with INL and BNL has elegantly combined the strength of attenuation-based X-ray tomography and focused ion beam lift-outs and produced valuable insights to the location-specific 3D porosity distribution in neutron-irradiated U-10Zr fuel,” says Dong Liu, a professor at Oxford University who was not associated with this work. “What is also impressive is that they correlated 3D porosity to the thermal properties of the fuels: The total volume fraction is not the only parameter that is important, the 3D topology also matters. This is extremely informative for the study of other types of porous nuclear materials.”

The work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Nuclear Energy and utilized resources at BNL and INL. The sample preparation was carried out at INL, which is part of the Nuclear Science User Facilities, through a Rapid Turnaround Award.

A new short film spotlights the life and career of MIT Institute Professor and School of Engineering Dean Paula Hammond ’84, PhD ’93.

The documentary, “Full Circle: Paula Hammond at MIT,” traces Hammond’s path from childhood in Detroit, Michigan, to her arrival at MIT at 16 years old, to her evolution into a pioneering researcher in nanotechnology and ovarian cancer, as well as a leader at the Institute and around the globe.

The film is one of the debut offerings within “MIT Stories,” a new documentary series on MIT Learn that spotlights the innovators and changemakers whose work extends far beyond campus walls. Produced through intimate storytelling by MIT Open Learning’s Emmy Award-winning video team, the series aims to explore the passions that spark global impact and the human stories behind innovation.

“Everything Paula Hammond does is grounded in a deeply personal sense of purpose,” says Lana Scott, assistant media development director at MIT Open Learning who produced the film with Nick Vandenberg. “As a pioneering researcher and the first woman to lead MIT’s School of Engineering, she didn’t just break barriers, she changed what leadership can look like in a field that hasn’t always made space for people like her. Her story blends curiosity, care, and conviction, turning complex science into something human, relatable, and genuinely cinematic.”

The film’s original score was composed by Vandenberg, who was inspired by a musician Hammond has long cherished.

“Before our second interview, Paula and I spoke about our shared love of jazz, including artists like Charlie Parker and Miles Davis,” says Vandenberg, a videographer and senior editor at MIT Open Learning. “She mentioned Ramsey Lewis as a particular favorite of hers. So, as a little Easter egg for her, I wrote and recorded a composition with upright bass, drums, and organ based loosely on the sound of his early trio recordings.”

Video by Lana Scott and Nick Vandenberg / MIT Open Learning | 8 minutes, 40 seconds

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has selected MIT to establish and lead a new Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) focused on materials technologies for medical imaging, sustainable metals production, and next-generation semiconductors, according to an NSF announcement released July 30.

Expected to provide $18 million in research funding over six years, the award brings together 16 research groups from nine departments across four institutions, including five MIT departments, three collaborating universities, and a teaching hospital. The award is pending MIT’s negotiation of a formal research agreement with the NSF.

The MIT Materials Research Science and Engineering Center will be directed by Associate Professor Rafael Jaramillo of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE), with Professor Caroline Ross of DMSE serving as associate director. The center will be housed administratively within the MIT Materials Research Laboratory.

The center will have two main research thrusts. One will engineer specialized materials to advance X-ray detectors used in medical imaging, potentially leading to better cancer diagnosis, lower radiation exposure, and improved industrial and security imaging. The other will explore high-temperature sulfur-based molten materials to transform how metals and semiconductors are made, opening a path to more efficient metal production, improved access to critical materials, and new thin-film semiconductor technologies. 

The expected funding will also support a new shared laboratory for testing magnetic materials and materials under extreme conditions, managed by MIT.nano. This facility will be available to academic and industry users, expanding the nationwide portfolio of NSF-supported research facilities. 

“The long-term goal is for the broader materials and engineering community to see the disruptive potential of bringing researchers together across disciplines to solve complex challenges,” says Jaramillo, the Stavros V. Salapatas Career Development Professor of Materials Science and Engineering. “And that includes specifically in medical diagnostics and metals production, where entirely new things will be possible that aren’t considered possible today.”

A legacy of collaboration

The selection of MIT’s MRSEC is part of a $108 million NSF investment in six research centers that will explore a range of topics, including artificial intelligence-driven experimental laboratories and hybrid quantum materials that combine light and matter. NSF’s MRSEC program brings together interdisciplinary teams of researchers to push the boundaries of materials science and engineering and tackle complex scientific challenges.

The MIT center builds on nearly 60 years of interdisciplinary materials research at the Institute, extending a legacy that began with U.S. Department of Defense-supported laboratories in the 1960s and continued through NSF-funded centers in subsequent decades. Past MRSEC investments helped build research communities that enabled MIT centers of excellence such as the MIT Microphotonics Center and the Microsystems Technology Laboratories.

“We were inspired to continue that legacy of collaborative research in materials science,” Jaramillo says. “It’s mainly the mode of working — the mode of working in a very intentional way as a team across disciplinary boundaries and having this program that brings people together.”

MIT departments involved in the MRSEC include DMSE; Chemistry; Chemical Engineering; Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS); and Physics. Collaborating institutions identified in the MRSEC proposal are Yale University, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the Department of Radiology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. 

The first research group will focus on re-engineering scintillators — materials that convert X-rays into visible light — at the nanoscale, with the goal of improving resolution, speed, and energy sensitivity.

“My vision for that is really Marin and JJ’s vision. So I'm basically cheerleading for them,” Jaramillo says, referring to optical materials experts Professor Marin Soljačić of Physics and Professor Juejun Hu of DMSE, who are expected to lead the effort.

The second group is closer to Jaramillo’s own research in semiconductor and advanced electronic materials. It seeks to develop a deeper understanding of high-temperature sulfur-based liquids to improve the yield and efficiency of producing critical metals such as copper. Expertise in these types of materials has become increasingly rare in U.S. academia, Jaramillo says, and one goal of the center is to rebuild that capability at MIT. “I’m very excited about that being a new intellectual center of gravity.”

Telling stories about materials

Beyond research, the center is also expected to develop outreach activities highlighting the importance of materials science in society, particularly in the Boston region, where Jaramillo said industries need more workers with backgrounds in materials processing.

“For example, our community colleges don’t offer it,” Jaramillo says. “If you were looking at a community college in Michigan, everyone would know what materials science is.”

One initiative, DISASTER! — “with all caps and an exclamation mark,” Jaramillo says — will tell stories of real-world catastrophes and the materials failures that contributed to them.

A major part of materials science over the last century has been understanding why things fail, Jaramillo says. “It’s also a tremendous foot in the door for introducing the field. Because frankly, ‘if it bleeds, it leads.’ If you have giant disasters, then suddenly people are like, ‘Why did the bridge fail?’”

The program will encourage MIT undergraduates to research and tell these stories, illustrating how forensic materials science has helped prevent future failures.

Among the examples Jaramillo cited are the rivets used to assemble the RMS Titanic, whose impurities made the rivets more brittle in the freezing North Atlantic, and the crashes of the world’s first commercial jetliner, the de Havilland Comet, which revealed the dangers of metal fatigue.

“There are so many other stories that need to be told around how a material failed,” Jaramillo said. “It really cost people money and time and lives. And then through forensic materials science, we understood why it failed and we avoided future failures.”

The MRSEC team is planning to stage public outreach events at the MIT Future Fest.

Looking ahead six years, Jaramillo hopes the center will have become a self-sustaining hub for materials research. 

“I hope that we will have rebuilt the muscle memory to come together in an interdisciplinary way around materials science, and that it should have a bit of a self-sustaining element to it. I hope that we then compete successfully for the next center, and lay the groundwork for the next 60 years.”

MIT Research Administration Services supported the MRSEC proposal development through its Research Development team, which specializes in providing substantive assistance for large and complex research proposals, and in supporting early-career faculty.

MIT faculty expected to be involved in the MRSEC are Rafael Jaramillo, Caroline Ross, Juejun Hu, and Antoine Allanore of DMSE; Moungi Bawendi of Chemistry; Martin Bazant of Chemical Engineering; Nicole Nie and Shuhei Ono of EAPS; and Marin Soljačić, Riccardo Comin, Nuh Gedik, and Long Ju of Physics.

Astronomers at MIT and elsewhere have spotted an extremely bright red spot in the early universe. The object resembles an enormous star, spanning the size of our solar system. But it also is putting out 100 billion times more energy than any known star can physically produce. In fact, such energies are closer to what a black hole might generate.

The curious combination suggests that the red spot is an entirely new type of astrophysical source. The astronomers are calling it a “black hole star.”

In a paper appearing today in the journal Nature, the team presents their analysis of the new object, which they discovered using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The telescope spotted the bright red dot in the very early universe, just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.

The scientists conclude that the most likely explanation for the strange red dot is that it is a mashup of a black hole and a star — a combination that has never been observed until now. The object is likely a hugely dense cloud of gas, powered not by standard nuclear fusion, but by a central black hole.

“Our picture of this object is evolving very rapidly,” says lead author Rohan Naidu, a NASA Hubble Fellow and Pappalardo Fellow at MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research (MKI). “We think there is a central black hole that is 100,000 times as massive as the sun. And around this black hole, there would be this very extended envelope of gas that looks like a star the size of the solar system. It’s huge.”

If the bright red dot is indeed a black hole star, it would help to solve the identity of other mysterious “little red dots” that have appeared in nearly every deep space image JWST has taken to date.

“These little red dots seem to be everywhere in the early universe but essentially disappear by the present day,” Naidu says. “What exactly these objects are has been one of the most debated topics of the JWST era.”

The study’s MIT co-authors are MKI Director Robert Simcoe, the Bruno B. Rossi Professor of Experimental Physics; and Wendy Sun ’26, along with collaborators from multiple other institutions.

A singular source

Naidu and his colleagues didn’t intend to find a black hole star. They were looking for the most distant, earliest galaxies, as part of a survey that they named “Mirage or Miracle” (MoM). The team used the JWST to look into deep space, back when the universe was a few hundred million years old. Their goal was to look for galaxies that actually formed at those early times.

“There’s been this puzzle of many bright galaxies showing up at extremely early times,” Naidu says. “What we found was that what looks like an extremely bright early galaxy, aka a ‘miracle,’ in some cases actually could be a ‘mirage.’”

As they looked through JWST’s images for intriguing sources to target with their survey, they noticed a feature that stood out from the rest: a dot that was very red, and very bright.

“When we see something very red in the universe, we often assume that it is surrounded by dust, like soot or ash,” Simcoe explains. “The same way that the wildfire smoke from Canada recently made the sky in Boston look bright red, astronomical objects can also appear redder than their intrinsic color when you see them through a veil of dust.”

But there were other signatures in the light that didn’t quite match up with what physicists expect from dust. The team also observed another strange pattern: The dot’s light was extremely bright, except below certain wavelengths, where the light completely disappeared. 

This spectral drop-off is known as a “Balmer break” — a signature traditionally associated with dense gas soaking up photons in the atmospheres of stars that are a few hundred millions of years old. Vega, one of the brightest stars in the night sky shows exactly this pattern. 

“The break we observed in this object is the deepest break we have ever observed in any object, ruling out ‘ordinary’ stars as the source,” Naidu says. “But it made us wonder if we were seeing a new kind of ‘stellar atmosphere,’ but on a spectacular scale.” 

What’s more, the red dot’s light contained almost no signature of metals or any elements other than hydrogen and helium. “It was truly singular in so many ways,” Naidu says.

Pure light

To puzzle out what the source of the red dot could be, the team ran simulations of different scenarios to see what combination of astrophysical features could produce the red dot’s distinctive color.

“We started to ask: Could you make something that red using just hydrogen, without any dust?” Simcoe says. “To our surprise, it turns out you can, if you have an extremely dense screen of hydrogen, so dense that it looks more like the surface of an enormous star than a wispy interstellar nebula.”

Their simulations pointed to the red dot possibly being some powerful enshrouded energy source, surrounded by an extremely dense cocoon of hydrogen. If this were the case, it would explain the light-blocking Balmer break and the lack of anything other than hydrogen and helium that the astronomers observed. But it still wouldn’t explain the object’s extreme brightness.

“You have something that looks a bit like a star but is 100 billion times brighter,” Naidu says. “That means you can’t be powering this by nuclear fusion, which is the energy source that sits at the heart of all the stars we have.”

Black holes, however, routinely produce energy at the scales the team observed. Naidu and his colleagues incorporated an active, accreting black hole into their simulations of the hydrogen-cocooned star and varied the black hole’s mass, along with other parameters. They then compared the resulting brightness of the simulated “black hole star” with the brightness that JWST observed from the red dot.

From these simulations, they found the closest match, and concluded that the most likely scenario to explain the red dot, is a black hole star. Specifically, the object likely contains a central black hole that is about 100,000 times as massive as the sun. This powerful core is surrounded by a dense, star-like cocoon of hydrogen that is roughly the size of the solar system.

The team has named the object MoM-BH*-1, after the survey that detected it, as well as the moniker “black hole star – one,” which implies that the object is the first of others. The researchers suspect that black hole stars could explain many of the other little red dots that appear in JWST images. Those objects are not as bright as MoM-BH*-1. 

“Every little red dot is consistent with being a black hole star, embedded in a generic early galaxy,” Naidu says. “But what is special about MoM-BH*-1 is, the black hole star is essentially completely outshining its surrounding host galaxy, such that we’re seeing pure black hole star light.”

This research was supported, in part, by the MIT Department of Physics, NASA, and the Space Telescope Science Institute.

It is a transformation for the ages: The Metropolitan Storage Warehouse in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is opening as the new home of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, after a makeover turning the century-old storage facility into a light-infused center for teaching, research, and public engagement.

The massive structure is a unique addition to daily life at the Institute. A hulking brick building and local landmark over 500 feet long and five stories high, the Met Warehouse now stands as a remarkable feat of architecture, engineering, and “adaptive reuse.” It includes four segments of glass walls, double-height studio spaces, copious common areas, and building-long walkways overlooking the work areas on all five floors — a 21st-century variation on the Infinite Corridor in MIT’s main group buildings. 

Designed by the architecture studio Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R), the Met Warehouse is intended to serve as a new campus hub. Beyond work studios, offices, and classrooms, there is an auditorium, galleries, and common spaces where MIT scholars and students can learn and design together, and the public can engage in lectures, exhibitions, and other programming.

“Walking through the Met Warehouse, everywhere you look you see the artful melding of the original architecture with the new design. It’s a perfect expression of the historical importance of architecture at MIT and of the creative promise of this new hub,” says MIT President Sally Kornbluth. “The new Met Warehouse will create a central home for design at MIT, and together with the new Linde Music Building, the presence of the Met will create a magnetic new west campus district for arts and design.”

Faculty, staff, and students have started moving into the Met Warehouse this month. The School of Architecture and Planning will stage a ceremonial procession into the building on Sept. 8, with a formal dedication event on Oct. 1, and a day welcoming the general public on Oct. 3 as part of MIT Future Fest. 

The Met Warehouse’s conversion began in the late 2010s, championed by Hashim Sarkis, the dean of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, and his collaborators. They envisioned a new and dedicated space for architecture, design, and planning at MIT — while reusing an existing structure for that purpose.

“I think it sends a very good message that this vanguard school of architecture, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is moving into a historic building and adapting it for the future,” says Sarkis, the Elizabeth and James Killian 1926 Professor. “This is a big statement on the part of MIT.” 

Sarkis adds: “We’re expecting the Met to facilitate a very vibrant in-person culture. The vitality of interpersonal connection will be highlighted in the building. The faculty and the students wanted more research space, more space for exhibitions and galleries, and more spaces that enable what we do best, which is to work together. Design is about collaboration, and planning is about community.”

From fortress to studio 

First opened in 1894 and completed in 1923, the building known as the Metropolitan Storage Warehouse long stood as a forbidding, fortress-like facility, with some tiny window slits. Only a few people had reason to venture inside. Visible from across the river in Boston, the Met Warehouse was a landmark, an advertisement of services, and a curiosity. It had about 1,500 storage spaces inside, and few other uses. 

MIT acquired the building in 1962, and by 2015 it was no longer used for storage. That raised a question: What comes next? Over time, the idea of moving the School of Architecture and Planning into the Met Warehouse took hold. That left the hard work of designing and transforming the building into a place that people could inhabit, while respecting the historically designated façade’s monolithic qualities. 

To create such a thoroughgoing transformation, MIT engaged DS+R, known for the design of high-profile cultural and institutional projects, including the Broad Museum in Los Angeles; the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston; the Shed, a nonprofit cultural and performing-arts space in New York City; and, not least, the transformation of a postindustrial rail line into New York City’s High Line. Shawmut Design and Construction managed the renovation, and the entire endeavor was made possible by the generous philanthropic support of MIT alumni, volunteers, and friends. 

Significantly, some of the signature projects of DS+R, including the High Line and the renovation of Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center in New York, involved updating and adaptively reusing existing structures. For the Met Warehouse, this meant a revamping of the interior, creating new workspaces, new ways to help people circulate through the massive building, and new ways to bring light inside the structure. In addition to the glass wall segments, the architects expanded the building’s windows, added a connective staircase, and found additional ways to let light and air permeate throughout. 

“Our thinking was always around trying to bring communities on campus together, knowing there would be a convergence of labs, classrooms, resource spaces, and disciplines,” says Elizabeth Diller, founding partner at DS+R. “The big challenge from the start of the project was the building itself. The building is stubborn and big and heavy, and it was conceived to hold furniture and suitcases and pianos, not humans.”

When thinking through the project, Diller adds, “The first thing was assessing the building itself and its potential, and our ability to perforate it [allowing light] and to create new spaces inside of it. … We saw the potential, because of the structure, that it could endure some surgery.”

“The choice by MIT and Hashim Sarkis to adaptively reuse a building as a center for design represents a bold vision,” says Benjamin Gilmartin, partner at DS+R. “It’s a courageous idea: that the future of design and architecture very much lives in the reuse of structures we already have.”

MIT campus leaders say they are delighted with the outcome. 

“The way the building is structured, the architects, Liz Diller, Ben Gilmartin, and their team, have been unbelievably shrewd in understanding our culture and respecting it while transforming the building,” Sarkis says. “That transformation enables the things we want, which include collaborative work, while also combining instruction and research.”

The makeover of the building also represents a collaboration between the City of Cambridge and MIT. Because the Metropolitan Storage Warehouse is a historically listed building, the city had to approve the substantial exterior renovations — such as on the north side, where several glass walls now cascade from the top of the Met to ground level. On the south side, the architects preserved many of the small storage units, redesigning them as offices with an innovative “skin” of new windows.

“That was one of the big decisions, based on light and the sensitivities of the history, that the large studios would be facing the north, and extracted from the north side of the building,” Diller explains. “Which left a lot of peripheral areas to act as small-scale and more intimate spaces, offices, and other types of spaces as needed.”

Indeed, the architects emphasize, the redesign of the Met Warehouse is not simply an overhaul; the plan significantly reflects the longtime interior structure of the building, too. 

“It wasn’t just about converting the shell,” Gilmartin says. “It was about trying to find a balance and determining how much was already there [structurally] that we could use as a fabric.” 

That historical fabric is evident through one of the building’s signature features: The old brick structure in key places is exposed to view, next to many places where the architects made dramatic cuts to create platforms for light-filled studio spaces. Students, designers, and visitors can see both how the old Met Warehouse was built and how the new version of it was created.

“The building itself can be a teaching tool,” Diller says. “When we did those extractions from the building, we left our intervention exposed, so there’s a kind of conversation between a contemporary strategy and the historical building. The traces are all there; they’re all revealed.”

Educators at the Institute view the building in a similar manner as they think about architectural teaching broadly.

“Our move to the Met is an exciting physical transition for the school, and an occasion for us to articulate the shifts in architectural education we have been undertaking,” says Ana Miljački, the Francis White Davis Professor at MIT and head of the Department of Architecture. “Making our home in the building will be part of our rethinking of the discipline, the profession, and our pedagogical tasks.” 

Five stories, five blocks, one vision

As originally constructed, the Met Warehouse had five contiguous segments. Given that it is also five stories high, the building has 25 natural segments, in a sense. A wide range of activity will be housed inside it, including several core parts of the School of Architecture and Planning: the Department of Architecture, the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), and the Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism. (The MIT Media Lab, the Art, Culture, and Technology Program, and the Center for Real Estate, all part of the School of Architecture and Planning, will remain in their existing locations on campus.)

The MIT Morningside Academy for Design (MAD), a campus-wide center promoting interdisciplinary design work, will also be located in the Met Warehouse, helping to further establish the building as the essential hub of design and planning work on campus.

Many MIT scholars say they welcome the opportunity to bring so many related programs into greater proximity with each other, along with all the physical assets the Met Warehouse will provide. 

“At MIT we have fewer boundaries, less conventions, and we bump into each other on campus,” says Jinhua Zhao, the Class of 1941 Professor and head of DUSP. “I have always appreciated this spirit since I first came here as a student and walked along the Infinite Corridor. A lot of places value interdisciplinary research. At MIT, you can’t help it happening. I believe the new Met Warehouse will expand that custom.”

Those who saw the inside of the building in its old days as a storage space, and are moving into it now, are deeply impressed by the complete readaptation of the Met Warehouse and the provision of new “commons” spaces for the campus.

“It’s almost inconceivable that this brick box, which was not designed for human habitation but to store objects, has been opened up, through the work of Diller Scofidio + Renfro,” says John Ochsendorf, the Class of 1942 Professor and director of MAD. “Our hope is you will find vibrant cross-fertilization across disciplines, across the School of Architecture and Planning, but also across all of MIT. That’s really important.”

Indeed, as Ochsendorf and others have noted, the building figures to produce its own urban dynamics within its monumental walls. 

“As you go up into the building, you will find different neighborhoods concerned with different aspects of design,” Ochsendorf says. “These are all areas pushing frontiers in research and education and design of the built environment, which interact with so many of the pressing issues facing humanity. We’re excited to create new neighborhoods of inquiry with the building.”

That is certainly part of the intention, the architects say. 

“There are a lot of opportunities for smaller groupings of people to be organized in ways that are visible and connected to the larger shared spaces but also offer the prospect of retreat in different places to work,” Gilmartin observes. 

“The challenges facing cities cannot be addressed by any one discipline,” says Sarah Williams, director of the Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism. “Innovation comes from bringing together all the fields that shape — and are shaped by — the built environment. The Met Warehouse gives us a place to work across those boundaries, inspiring new ways to imagine and build the future of our cities.”

Sarkis, for his part, professes some happy relief that the long-held conception of the Met Warehouse is finally becoming reality. The building, he thinks, will influence the flow of people through MIT’s campus, bringing a transformative multiuse space into the daily lives of students, faculty, staff, and the public.

“It is going to be a new center of gravity for the campus,” Sarkis says. 

MIT News will offer a further look at the Met Warehouse’s transformative architecture in concert with the Sept. 8 procession, as well as coverage of events from the formal dedication weekend in October. 

In extreme environments, habitats are built for survival. Submarines, Antarctic bases, and postdisaster dwellings are designed to prioritize health and safety. This is especially the case for habitats in space, where room is at a minimum, contact with Earth is remote, and hazards are numerous. 

But as humans plan for longer journeys to the moon and eventually Mars, designing habitats where crews can not only survive but also thrive will be essential to a mission’s success.

Now, engineers at MIT and elsewhere are exploring ways that habitats in extreme environments can support a person’s mental, emotional, and social wellbeing. They have assembled a resource that relates habitat design features with behavioral health outcomes such as stress, anxiety, and feelings of isolation. 

Going a step further, the team has visualized these relationships in the form of an interactive online platform. Users can click through to explore connections between design and behavior, such as how a habitat’s layout affects social connection and team cohesion, and how a reconfigurable space can minimize homesickness. 

“The awareness has been there for some time that living in space is difficult,” says Mich Lin, a PhD candidate in the Human Systems Lab and the Engineering Systems Lab at MIT. “We’ve come a long way from the human in a tin can. As our priorities shift toward long-duration exploration missions, making sure a crew is safe, healthy, happy, and productive becomes even more important.”

The insights that Lin’s team presents, which appear today in the journal npj Microgravity, were assembled after an extensive literature search and expert interviews. They identified many studies on habitat design and its influence on specific behaviors, such as how levels of lighting affect an astronaut’s quality of sleep. But this is the first time that anyone has brought such information together, visualizing the relationships and risks associated with a habitat’s design and an inhabitant’s wellbeing. 

Lin notes that the work can be applied to designing habitats in not only space but also  other extreme, isolated, and confined environments. 

“Submarines, oil rigs, polar expeditions, and even refugee camps or war zones are incredibly stressful environments,” says Lin, who is the study’s lead author. “We try to make this work applicable to a lot of scenarios and identify points of intervention in habitat design to reduce stress in those extreme environments.”

The study’s co-authors include former MIT undergraduate Lu Chen and Professor Katya Arquilla of the University of Colorado at Boulder. Other key contributors to the work include Lauren Blackwell Landon at KBR/NASA, Jeffrey Montes of the space architecture firm Different Systems, and MIT undergraduate Kara Chou. 

Emotional design

The researchers modeled their new design tool after a risk mapping format used by NASA. When designing a spacecraft or habitat for astronauts in space, the agency maps out the associated risks in the form of “directed acyclic graphs.” A DAG resembles a large web of relationships that illustrate how certain habitat or mission features can affect certain mission-relevant outcomes. 

A typical NASA DAG depicts one-way connections between mission constraints, such as “distance from Earth,” to an astronaut’s physical health outcome, such as quality of sleep, cardiovascular impacts, cognitive function, and so forth. 

“By mapping risks, we can identify points of intervention to characterize and mitigate them,” Lin explains. “NASA uses DAGs as a countermeasure to the risky business that is human spaceflight.”

The researchers looked to create a similar DAG format to map risks associated with habitat design, and less tangible behavioral health outcomes, such as stress, boredom, trust, nostalgia, curiosity, and kinship with crewmates. 

“The connection between habitat and behavioral health has not been made in this format before,” Lin emphasizes. “So we made those connections for the first time.”

To do so, the team first identified habitat design factors and behavioral health outcomes that would be specifically relevant for living in extreme environments. The researchers looked to multiple resources across aerospace and human factors fields. To prioritize a human-centered perspective, they referenced the “Atlas of the Heart,” written by author, social work researcher, and University of Houston Professor Brené Brown. In the book, Brown identifies 87 emotions and experiences that define what makes us human. 

“From there, we did a down-selection of which emotions would be the most impactful in our scenario of habitat design in extreme environments,” Lin explains. 

The team zeroed in on 14 main emotions or experiences that they considered behavioral outcomes that could be influenced by habitats in extreme environments. These include anxiety, autonomy, nostalgia, curiosity, fatigue, and kinship.

They then carried out a wide-ranging search through the scientific literature to identify studies relating to habitability in extreme environments. For instance, NASA has carried out extensive research on the effects of lighting on sleep, the resetting of circadian rhythms, and productivity. Other studies have investigated circulation and habitat layout and their effects on privacy, social connection, and crew performance. 

Lin and their colleagues assembled connections and conclusions from numerous studies to create a DAG, or a web of habitat design features, and their downstream effects on aspects of mental, emotional, and social wellbeing. They also solicited feedback from experts across industry, academia, and NASA to evaluate and strengthen the DAG.

They then developed an online platform, dubbed the Human-Environment Connection and Interaction Atlas, or HECIA, as an interactive tool for habitat designers. 

Click and connect

When using the atlas, the team envisions that designers can take either a forward or backward approach. The atlas lays out habitat design elements, and their downstream behavioral connections, in roughly the order in which decisions are made in designing a mission. 

For instance, in designing a spacecraft to journey to Mars, a designer might take a forward approach, and first click on a feature associated with an early design stage, such as “distance from Earth,” knowing that this would be a significant consideration. The atlas would automatically display risks associated with being far from Earth, such as limits to resources such as “food,” “medical capability,” and “family and friends,” and to behavioral health outcomes such as “nostalgia/homesickness.” 

A designer could then take a backward approach. If, for instance, they want to prioritize minimizing nostalgia/homesickness, they could click on the term to reveal design features and ideas that affect and could potentially improve it, such as in this case, “place attachment,” or feeling emotionally attached to a place. Clicking on this term would in turn reveal upstream elements such as “reconfigurability” and “privacy” — design elements that could be put in place to encourate place attachment, and reduce homesickness. 

For every term that a designer clicks on, Lin and their colleagues provide a summary, based on empirical research, that explains both the term in the context of extreme habitats, and provides examples of design interventions. For instance, a designer who is looking for ideas to minimize social isolation on long-duration missions may click on the term, to reveal a description. 

“They may read that research has found ‘access paths, stairs, entrances, contribute to the formation of friendships and social cohesion,’” Lin offers. “So that would give them an idea of connecting public spaces in the habitat, via the private spaces, so people have to mingle, essentially.”

They emphasize that the new platform and the ideas informing it are not a one-size-fits-all for how to design any extreme habitat. That depends on a particular habitat’s specifications and constraints. 

“Rather, this helps you think about connections that might be important, but that aren’t immediately obvious,” Lin says. “As we envision truly becoming an off-planet species, or creating places we want to live in in space, there is so much potential for us to reimagine habitats that make us happy and productive.”

This research was supported, in part, by NASA.

The MIT Sloan School of Management is launching an Evening MBA program designed for high-performing individuals who want to earn an MBA while continuing to work. Beginning with its first cohort in August 2027, the 22-month program will offer the same academic rigor, admissions standards, and world-class faculty as MIT Sloan's existing MBA programs, providing a primarily in-person, cohort-based experience tailored to working professionals. In this interview, MIT Sloan Dean Richard M. Locke speaks about the new program, why now is the right time to launch it, and what it means for the Greater Boston region.

Q: Who is the new MIT Sloan Evening MBA designed for?

A: We created the Evening MBA for talented, ambitious professionals who want to earn an MBA from MIT Sloan during the week, but prefer to remain in their current jobs while pursuing their degree. We know there is a growing population of professionals who want to accelerate their careers, who want the intellectual challenge, leadership development, and network that come with a world-class MBA, but who are also building momentum in their organizations and don't want to step away from their careers to attend a full-time program. This program allows them to continue contributing to their organizations and immediately apply what they learn in the classroom to their work.

Students in the Evening MBA will be held to the same high academic standards, learn from the same world-class faculty, and benefit from the same commitment to rigorous, innovation-driven management education that defines our existing MBA programs. The difference is the format. 

Q: What sets the Evening MBA apart from other MBA programs for working professionals?

A: Several things make this program distinctive. First, it combines MIT Sloan's academic rigor and strengths in innovation, analytics, technology, and applied management. It connects students to a high-caliber, technically sophisticated peer network inside the broader MIT ecosystem. Maintaining the school's high standards was a foundational principle in the program's design, so students can expect the same level of excellence that characterizes all MIT Sloan MBA offerings.

Second, the program is primarily in-person and cohort-based. Students will spend two evenings each week learning together, developing strong relationships with a group of high-performing peers, and also participating in week-long intensive components of the program together. We believe those personal connections, classroom interactions, and opportunities for collaboration are an essential, and distinctive, part of the MIT Sloan experience.

Finally, students will have the opportunity to put their learning into practice immediately. Because they remain active in their organizations throughout the program, they can bring new ideas, frameworks, and skills directly back to their workplaces and see the impact in real time.

Q: How do you see the program impacting Greater Boston and the region?

A: We see a strong connection between the Evening MBA and Greater Boston's vibrant technology and innovation economy. The region is home to leading organizations across life sciences, health care, finance, energy, engineering, and entrepreneurship, and many of the professionals driving those industries are looking for opportunities to continue developing their management skills and knowledge, as well as leadership capabilities, without having to pause their careers or leave their organizations.

Because students will remain in their current jobs throughout the program, the benefits of this program also extend beyond the individual. Employers benefit from the upskilling and retention of these individuals, and this program accelerates participants’ careers and increases their value to their organizations. 

The Evening MBA will also strengthen MIT Sloan's relationships with employers across Greater Boston and New England, expand our alumni network, and create new opportunities for collaboration among students, alumni, industry partners, and organizations throughout the region. Ultimately, it will help us advance MIT Sloan's mission of developing principled, innovative leaders who improve the world, while also contributing to the continued growth and success of one of the world's most dynamic innovation ecosystems.

When MIT historian Tristan Brown first examined a Chinese tea chest label displayed as a relic of the Boston Tea Party, he had no reason to doubt its story.

Descendants of Boston blacksmith Thomas Wells had donated the label to the Old South Meeting House in 1987, saying it had been recovered during the destruction of British tea in 1773. Because so few objects from the protest survive, the label appeared to offer a rare material connection to the event.

But after a year of archival and linguistic research, Brown reached a different conclusion: The label was made nearly a century later.

The decisive clue lay hidden in its Chinese text. Earlier researchers had approached the text through Mandarin, but Brown found that one sequence of characters was being used phonetically. Read in Cantonese, it rendered the name “Smith, Archer,” identifying Smith, Archer & Co., an American trading firm active in East Asia during the 1860s and 1870s.

The discovery does not make the label historically insignificant. Instead, it reveals a different story — one connecting Chinese migration, Pacific commerce, family memory, and the ways Americans constructed the history of the Revolution.

Brown presents his open-access findings in “Tea Chest Label,” published July 3 in the June 2026 issue of the American Historical Review. What began as an inquiry into a supposed Boston Tea Party relic became a study of how ordinary objects acquire historical authority, and how historical memory itself is made.

The project began in 2024, when the American Historical Review issued a call for essays on 76 objects connected to 1776, the year the United States declared independence from Britain.

“I’m a historian of China and don’t usually work in American history, but the idea of taking on one of 76 artifacts for the 250th anniversary of the U.S. sounded like a fun challenge,” Brown says.

As he considered which object to study, Brown recalled seeing the intriguing Chinese label during a visit to the Old South Meeting House, a major site of public debate in Revolutionary-era Boston and the place where colonists gathered before the Tea Party.

The object had stayed with him.

Following the evidence

The label offered Brown an unusual point of entry into the history of the Boston Tea Party. Its apparent significance was heightened by the scarcity of surviving objects from the event.

That scarcity reflects the nature of the protest itself. The destruction of the tea was a criminal act, and participants had strong reasons to conceal their identities and avoid punishment by the British Crown. Even today, no completely definitive list exists of the people who took part.

“That is one reason why the event remains shrouded in a degree of mystery,” Brown says.

With that uncertainty a given, Brown pursued two lines of investigation simultaneously: establishing the label’s provenance, and deciphering the label’s wording.

At the outset, he learned that scholars associated with the British Museum and Harvard University had examined the label. Their assessments had not definitively authenticated the label as a Tea Party relic, but neither had they ruled out an 18th-century origin.

“I believed it was real,” Brown says. “None of the parties who had previously assessed the label’s provenance concluded definitively that it wasn’t from the Boston Tea Party. And frankly, it was hard to imagine how an American family with no ties to China could have possessed a label written in formal Chinese listing the exact teas that were traded in the region.”

Brown spent months interviewing Wells descendants and searching for original documents that might connect the label to the 1773 protest. At the same time, he began tracing how the family tradition surrounding the object had developed.

Because claims of family participation in the Tea Party are often difficult to verify, Brown worked closely with members of the Wells family throughout the project, and found in them willing and generous partners. As the evidence began pointing away from the Revolutionary era, the research required both scholarly rigor and personal sensitivity.

“The Wells family, especially Charles Wells, were extraordinary collaborators,” Brown says. “They cared deeply about their ancestor’s legacy and the label’s history, and they wanted the truth as much as I did. This is their discovery as much as mine.”

Cracking the label

The Chinese wording on the label presented a separate challenge.

Brown could see that part of the text did not function like ordinary Chinese prose, but its meaning remained elusive. The breakthrough came when he revisited the way earlier scholars had pronounced the characters.

Previous translations and interpretations had relied on Mandarin, China’s official language rooted in the northern part of the country. Brown gradually recognized that one sequence of characters was being used phonetically to represent a foreign company name. When pronounced in Cantonese — the dominant language of the 19th-century commercial networks in which the label circulated — the characters reproduced the name “Smith, Archer.”

That reading identified Smith, Archer & Co., a New York-based import-export firm with offices in East Asia during the 1860s and 1870s. The company acquired Chinese and Japanese teas for shipment to American markets.

The label also named Yuan Tianbo, a Cantonese merchant connected to that trading network, whom Brown later traced to Yokohama, Japan in the 1860s.

The linguistic clue therefore did more than reveal a company name. It established that the label belonged to the world of 19th-century Pacific commerce, not the tightly controlled Canton trading system of the 1770s.

“That was the moment the entire story changed,” Brown says. “Once we could date the label, we finally knew where to look.”

From East Asia to the American Midwest

Once Brown had identified the company, he could begin reconstructing the label’s likely route into the Wells family’s possession.

The trail led to John Milton Wells, a relative who traveled from Michigan to the San Francisco Bay Area during the Gold Rush era from 1848 to 1855. Although John Milton did not strike gold, his years in California changed the course of his life. After returning to Michigan, he worked as a grocer and operated a business recorded in commercial directories as the “California Tea Store.”

A surviving trade card associated with Wells advertised imported Asian teas. Together with family letters, census records, and local business directories, it points to the commercial world through which a label produced for an East Asian tea merchant could have entered the Midwestern family’s collection. The label was therefore likely acquired through the family’s 19th-century tea business, rather than during the Boston Tea Party.

Brown argues that its Revolutionary pedigree probably developed later, amid the centennial commemorations of the 1870s, when many American families were emphasizing their connections to the nation’s founding era.

By the early 1900s, the story had appeared in a local newspaper, which reported that the label had been taken from a tea chest during the Boston Tea Party. Repetition in family accounts, newspapers, commemorative culture, and eventually museum interpretation helped transform an unverified tradition into an apparently authoritative history.

“The label shows how 19th-century global trade, Asian migration, and family storytelling together reconfigured American revolutionary memory by manufacturing the very relics that seemed to authenticate that memory,” Brown writes.

A different kind of historical artifact

Brown’s investigation also demonstrates how new research tools are allowing historians to revisit questions that once appeared settled.

Digitized commercial directories made it possible to trace Smith, Archer & Co. across East Asian ports. Searchable newspapers helped Brown follow the development of the Wells family story. Attention to Cantonese, rather than Mandarin, unlocked a company name that had gone unrecognized in earlier interpretations.

“Though the tea chest label is not from the Revolutionary War era, it’s still an important educational artifact documenting China’s long-standing trade with the Americas and the ways Americans have long looked to China to tell stories about their own country’s past,” Brown says.

The discovery changes the label’s historical significance, rather than diminishing it. The object’s value lies not in what it was reported to have witnessed in 1773, but in what it reveals about how later generations used globally circulating objects to construct memories of the American Revolution.

The label also preserves an important truth beneath the mistaken family tradition: The tea destroyed in Boston Harbor came from China. Its journey from an East Asian commercial network to a Midwestern family and finally to a Boston museum illustrates how American revolutionary memory became intertwined with Pacific trade and migration.

For Brown, the project offers a broader lesson about historical scholarship as an ongoing process of questioning, debate, and discovery.

“History is never finished,” Brown says. “Even objects that have sat in museums for decades can reveal entirely new stories when we ask new questions.”

Physicists across the globe are on a quest for a particle that makes up nearly 85 percent of all matter in the universe, yet no one has ever directly detected it. Jessica Fry, a fifth-year physics PhD candidate in the Laboratory for Nuclear Science (LNS), is one such hunter.

Fry grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, not far from the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. She began dancing at age 3 and by elementary school was competing nationally. On her office desk sits a photograph of her on stage from one of those early recitals, dressed in a ham costume, arms flung wide open — a reminder, she says, that she doesn’t “half-ass” anything.

That includes her fascination with the sciences: when her high school physics teacher handed her a pair of defunct detectors from SLAC and told her to do something with them, she scrounged up a paper from the 1960s using similar equipment, replicated the experiment, and wrote up the project.

“I was hooked,” she says. “I could answer philosophical questions about how time and space interact with something I could physically touch. That just blew my mind.”

Parallel pursuits

Fry went on to study at Stanford University, where she double majored in physics and theater and performance studies, committed to both.

During her sophomore year, a talent agent she had met through the dance competition circuit called: A Broadway production of David Henry Hwang’s “M. Butterfly” was casting. But for Fry, it was midterm season. She flew cross-country to New York for the audition and immediately returned home in time for exams. Then, a month of deafening silence. Fry, assuming she’d been rejected, secured a summer research position in Switzerland at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics. Then she got the call: She had been selected for the Broadway show. After finishing her summer research in Geneva, she flew directly to New York to begin rehearsals.

Fry took two years away from Stanford to perform, training vigorously in ballet, contemporary, and jazz dance. She also learned traditional Māori dance, Peking opera-style movement, and stage combat. She says, “All of those skills go toward the central theme of: How do I tell a story in the best possible way?”

But slowly, she noticed something in herself and the people around her. Every couple of months there was another round of auditions, another round of external judgment from strangers with the power to control her future. One “occupational hazard of theater,” Fry explains, “is beginning to trust someone else’s opinion of you more than your own.” She struggled to reconcile her love for dance as an art with what dance as a career was doing to her confidence and sense of self.

“It was turning me into someone I didn’t want to be,” she says. “It took a lot of reflection to recognize that.”

Having hit a crossroads with her dance career, she made the aching decision to return to Stanford to finish her degrees. Shortly after, she applied to graduate programs — MIT among them.

“MIT’s Laboratory for Nuclear Science alone is the size of most other institutions’ entire physics departments,” she notes. “Similar to how, at CERN, there’s just this buzz, this scientific energy. I felt that when I visited MIT.”

Searching for a signal in the dark

Now Fry channels that scientific energy into tackling an enduring phenomenon that has long confounded astrophysicists: dark matter. For nearly a century, scientists have observed that the universe contains far more matter than we can see — that the way galaxies move and form cannot be explained by visible matter alone. Dark matter emits no light and interacts with next to nothing, yet exerts a gravitational pull on almost everything. Fry is searching for what she believes is the field’s best theoretical candidate: the axion.

The axion, should it exist, is ultralight and many orders of magnitude smaller than an electron. At that scale, it behaves less like a discrete particle and more like a coherent wave that permeates the galaxy and clusters gravitationally around matter.

Fry is working on two experiments to detect axions. The first, already operating at MIT, is called ABRACADABRA: A Broadband/Resonant Approach to Cosmic Axion Detection with a Bayesian B-Ring Apparatus. “I had to practice saying that many times my first year,” she grins. The second, which she is currently helping to build at Stanford, her alma mater, is called DMRadio, short for Dark Matter Radio. Both operate on the same principle: In the presence of a strong magnetic field, axions should produce a faint, oscillating electric current.

“Think about two waves in the ocean — when they collide, they create a rip current. We are looking for that rip current,” she says.

The current is amplified through resonance using circuit components and quantum amplifiers. Different axion masses correspond to different frequencies, so the detector is tuned systematically across the full range, much like tuning a car radio. The problem is that even the amplified signal is buried in noise; thermal fluctuations, environmental interference, and other electrical activity all cloud it. Thanks to theorists in the field, Fry knows the shape of what she is looking for, but the axion’s mass and interaction strength remain unknown.

“It’s a hard problem. But it’s a tractable one because the shape of the axion signal is so distinctive. There’s basically nothing else that looks like it,” she says. “It is a fun hunt.”

Tuning in

Fry works with professor of physics Lindley Winslow, who leads the Neutrino and Dark Matter Group within MIT’s LNS. Winslow sees in her advisee a quality she recognizes from her own life.

“We share in our history a turning point, a choice between two great passions and a difference in the direction our lives could have taken,” she says. “Those lives-not-lived continue to shape how we approach our physics . … I see this in her work: a drive to always do it better, a demand for feedback, and then when the curtain rises, the fearlessness to deliver.”

The Neutrino and Dark Matter Group consists of four principal investigators whose collaborative structure Fry describes as one of the best features of the department, one that has pushed her well beyond her own subfield. Outside the lab, in a studio in an old church near Harvard, she still dances. “At the end of a long day of using my brain,” she says, “I love just being in my body.”

Still in the final stretch of her program, Fry has already earned a spot on the Forbes 30 Under 30 Science 2026 list. For now, she is focused on completing the data analysis for DMRadio and seeing the detector to the finish line. What comes next — postdoctoral positions, her own lab group, possibly her own detector — she considers with a clarity she attributes, in part, to having already made a harder decision once before.

“I realized that doing physics is going to make me happy and allow me to make the impact I want to,” she says. “I keep checking in on that. I don’t want to just chase prestige and go to the end of the road because I can. I want to make sure it’s what I want to do.”

She is convinced dark matter will be discovered within her lifetime. She says “when,” not “if.” The detection approach she has spent five years refining is, she thinks, among the most promising ones in the field. “We just need to keep tuning.”

Artificial intelligence models are jacks of many trades, including writing, generating images, and creating 3D models. But they aren’t as helpful when it comes to testing robots or designs for vehicles in diverse environments, since they don’t understand physics as well as they do pixels or text.

To build an AI system that can reliably simulate a variety of physical scenarios, engineers need a range of physics data at a scale that isn’t yet feasible. That’s because it’s very time-consuming to get neural networks just a few data points they can understand. They rely on algorithms called “numerical solvers” to calculate physical properties at different points of a 3D shape. It’s a thorough process, but it takes so long that it limits how much data you’ll have to, say, test if your plane designs are safe and aerodynamic.

A new pre-training approach known as “GeoPT,” deveoped by researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Tsinghua University, gives simulation models a chance to learn physics in a broader, more efficient way. It virtually reenacts everyday mechanical interactions in 3D, showing how particles stop when reaching some part of an object. These simulations give the models a sense of how physics works, helping them model the real world more accurately, reach peak performance twice as fast, and train on up to 60 percent less data compared to leading models.

Soon, the project could help engineers predict how vehicles (like cars and planes), everyday items (including chairs and containers), and robots respond to various physical elements, such as wind, water, and collisions. The researchers believe their work could also be a step toward a physics foundation model, a backbone system trained on lots of data that can help AI tools generalize to different tasks.

“We believe physics is the third modality for AI models, after text and pixels,” says MIT PhD student and CSAIL researcher Minghao Guo, a co-lead author on a paper introducing GeoPT. “Our general-purpose model has the versatility to help build a world model for physics. Many models, such as those that generate robotics data and videos, are already well-versed in textual and visual data, but with physical accuracy, they’ll get more-realistic results.”

Easy to use

To use GeoPT, users simply upload 3D models of objects like battleships, passenger airplanes, and trucks, and specify the direction and speed of the force they want to simulate. The result is a kind of heat map showing how the object will be affected in different places. If you know the speed and direction (velocity) of the force you’re looking to simulate, you can capture it in GeoPT. This comes in handy when you want to simulate things like how a car would look after crashing into a wall, the ways light bounces around objects, and whether a boat stays afloat over turbulent waves.

But how does GeoPT “get” physics so well? Its knowledge comes from “synthetic dynamics,” a series of interactions between small particles and complex 3D shapes. GeoPT studied 1.3 million samples of synthetic dynamics, in which tiny spheres moved at various speeds and angles until stopping at a certain point on the object.

These particles basically “stick” to an object once they make contact, instead of moving through or bouncing off. Picture learning about physical interactions using marbles and action figures — similarly, simulation models can use synthetic dynamics to gain a feel for physics before they train on labeled data.

Industry success

The researchers found that GeoPT was particularly skilled at simulating industrial scenarios, as it outperformed state-of-the-art simulation models across benchmarks. The common thread: It reached peak performance faster than other tools, while needing significantly fewer labeled data.

On a dataset of complex 3D shapes and their responses to wind currents and surface pressure, for example, GeoPT surpassed state-of-the-art models in speed, accuracy, and efficiency. It had similar triumphs in speed and accuracy in capturing how fighter jets responded to wind. When GeoPT tested how the hull of a boat handled both air and waves, it required 60 percent fewer labeled data to capture both physical forces and reached peak accuracy four times faster than top baselines.

The system even succeeded at simulating how different types of cars look after colliding with another object. It correctly predicted how 3D vehicles would deform while using less data than state-of-the-art baselines. Likewise, its simulations of how light would pass through what was essentially a toy rabbit were accurate, despite never training on that 3D model or light physics beforehand.

“If your model performs well on industrial benchmarks, that means it can solve the hardest physics tasks,” says co-lead author Haixu Wu, an MIT postdoc and CSAIL researcher. “GeoPT was making high-fidelity simulations with over 100 million mesh points in seconds. This could make the tool extremely helpful for engineers hoping to test out blueprints for vehicles without needing to run so many physical experiments.”

The researchers add that their system is only a preview of the kind of physics world model they’ve been working toward. The team hopes to scale up their system, training on even more shapes and simulating more complex physical phenomena. For example, a more in-depth approach could help model weather patterns, test out different materials, and generate realistic videos.

“Using synthetic dynamics data is an exciting paradigm for imbuing physics into foundation models,” says Fei Sha, AI research scientist at Meta, who wasn’t involved in the research. “It challenges the traditional wisdom that physics and geometry are necessarily entangled in computation, and one must acquire costly and specialized data. The demonstrated success in a wide range of application domains leads us to this important juncture: We are ready to build physics foundation models, now and fast."

Wu and Guo wrote the paper with MIT CSAIL colleagues including Zongyi Li, a postdoc in the lab; Zhiyang (Frank) Dou, a CSAIL affiliate and MIT PhD student in electrical engineering and computer science (EECS); Kaiming He, a principal investigator in the lab, associate professor of EECS, and a distinguished scientist at Google DeepMind; and senior author Wojciech Matusik, the Joan and Irwin M. (1957) Jacobs Professor of EECS and a CSAIL principal investigator. Tsinghua University Associate Professor Mingsheng Long was also a co-author. The team presented the paper at the International Conference on Machine Learning in July.

The researchers’ work was supported, in part, by Neural Modular Physics Twin for Robotics.

On Earth, the processes behind navigation are made nearly invisible by global positioning satellites (GPS). In cislunar space — the region between Earth and the moon — spacecraft do not have that kind of always-available positioning service. Missions beyond geosynchronous Earth orbit still rely heavily on NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN), an accurate but limited Earth-based international array of radio antennas shared across many missions and nations.

Because all DSN sites are located on Earth, their separation is small compared with the scale of cislunar space, which limits the angular baselines available for orbit determination. Therefore, precisely estimating orbits for distant spacecraft can take hours, and DSN supports only a few missions at a time. In addition, DSN requires user spacecraft to actively emit signals for measurement, unlike GPS, which passively sends data for users to receive.

The Laser Communications Group and Advanced Capabilities and Technologies Group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory are developing a concept called the Light High-Orbit Utility Signal Emitter (LightHOUSE) to help overcome these limitations. LightHOUSE would use a small constellation of satellites in high-altitude orbits as cooperative optical beacons. These beacons would exchange timing and communication signals with user spacecraft and use imaging against the stellar background to estimate each spacecraft's three-dimensional position and velocity. By providing timely, independent navigation data across cislunar space, LightHOUSE could reduce the need for corrective maneuvers, preserve spacecraft propellant, lessen the burden on onboard navigation sensors, and ease demand on existing ground-based systems.

“Satellites in cislunar space have limited access to support resources, even though orbits at and beyond the geosynchronous belt are increasingly important for various missions,” says Aaron Greenberg, a technical staff member in the Laser Communications Group. “The moon is reemerging as a strategic priority for national security. Nearly all space missions require some degree of precision navigation and timing, but no global positioning system exists in this domain. Here is where LightHOUSE is intended to step in, expanding critical and reliable communication and navigation services across this vast region.”

LightHOUSE would use free-space optical communications — laser links through space — rather than relying solely on radio-frequency systems. The concept builds on laboratory work demonstrated through NASA-sponsored programs such as TBIRD and O2O, as well as the Optical Time Transfer for Resilient Satellite Communications Networks project led by the Laser Communications Group with funding from the laboratory's internally administered R&D portfolio in optical systems technology.

“This concept hinges on a cooperative ranging capability enabled by free-space optical communications,” says Timothy Yarnall, an associate leader of the Laser Communications Group. “This technology area is one in which the laboratory is a global leader, as evidenced by the recent O2O success during Artemis II. The laboratory's experience with radiation hardening of digital focal plane array technology will also enable the sensitive receivers and star cameras — like the camera built by the Advanced Imager Technology Group for NASA's Psyche mission — that this concept relies upon.”

LightHOUSE beacons would be based in ultrahigh orbits, up to roughly 1 million miles in altitude. These high orbits replicate the angular diversity of GPS signals for users across cislunar volumes. They would also allow communication with spacecraft on the far side of the moon as viewed from Earth, preventing blackouts like the 40-minute period when Artemis II passed behind the moon.

Borrowing from the GPS philosophy, LightHOUSE is designed to place most of the technical burden on the beacon satellites, rather than on user spacecraft. The beacons would carry telescopes with tens-of-centimeter diameters and laser transmitters in the tens-of-watts range, while users would need only centimeter-scale apertures and tens-of-milliwatt lasers. The central engineering challenge is making that asymmetry work across cislunar space.

“From a design perspective, a major challenge will be making these services as easily accessible as possible to all potential users. The designed systems would be highly asymmetric, with LightHOUSE beacons taking on most technological and operational demands necessary to close links over the entire cislunar domain,” says Seth Trotz, a senior staff member in the Advanced Capabilities and Technologies Group.

Obtaining precise position measurements over such distances — combining optical communications with high-resolution imaging when beacons and user spacecraft are more than half a million miles from Earth — is itself a significant technical hurdle.

The team is now refining the system concept through analysis, simulation, and laboratory experimentation. In the near term, they plan to publish a detailed architecture for providing navigation data to LightHOUSE users. Longer term, the goal is to make navigation beyond geosynchronous altitudes routine, reliable, and accessible for a broad range of users, supporting Artemis and the growing wave of missions to follow in cislunar space.

This work is sponsored by the undersecretary of war for research and engineering through the laboratory's internally administered R&D portfolio in sensing and communications. A full-scale system would require substantial investment, potentially on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars; for comparison, the operating budget of GPS is $1.8 billion per year, and a single DSN dish costs roughly $85-100 million.

In the last decade, scientists have shown that fusion energy can work, as a physical process. Next question: Can it work economically? 

A study co-authored by MIT professors Dennis Whyte and Andrew W. Lo proposes a framework for understanding what’s needed to make fusion energy commercially viable in the marketplace. The method considers the physical inputs needed to sustain controlled fusion energy production, as well as the cost of building power plants that can compete in energy markets.

“It’s all the things that come along with finding, allocating, and spending money at this scale,” says Whyte, a professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT and a key driver of the field’s progress, who co-authored the paper. “This is critical to what we do. We should look at the economics. If we want this technology to actually be meaningful in the world economy, we have to start getting straight with ourselves about these topics.” 

The goal of the paper, Whyte says, is to create “this framework, where are all the economics are clear, and then we understand what it would mean” for any fusion energy power plant. 

Fusion energy harnesses the reaction that powers the stars: the fusion of light nuclei. It is often referred to as “plasma fusion,” as the fusion reactions generate fuel in a plasma state, often confined by magnets or initiated by powerful lasers. Whyte says the goal is to generate abundant energy while also offering society attractive safety, licensing, and siting options.

In 2022, researchers at the National Ignition Facility in Livermore, California, one of the U.S. national labs, achieved a reaction with positive energy gain. Venture funding has also poured into the field in recent years, although there are still many challenges regarding the construction of viable commercial fusion energy.

“It’s challenging to reduce complex scientific and engineering requirements to economic consequences,” Lo says. “But if we don’t do that, we’re not going to get the funding we need to achieve the impact we want.”

The open-access publication, “Criteria for the economic viability of fusion power plants,” appears online in the Journal of Fusion Energy. The authors are Whyte, who is the Hitachi America Professor of Engineering and a professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT; Lo, who is the Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor and a professor of finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management; Rachel Bielajew, an analyst with Rutherford Energy Ventures and a researcher at MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center; Maria Hancock and Riley Moeykens of Rutherford Energy Ventures; and Guinevere Shaw of Rutherford Energy Ventures and MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center.

Whyte is a former head of MIT’s Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering and a former director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center. He co-founded Commonwealth Fusion Systems, an MIT spinoff firm that is one of the leaders in the fusion industry. Whyte and Lo also co-founded Rutherford Energy Ventures, a consultancy and investment advisory firm, which is working with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory to build a consortium for new fusion research. 

10 parameters, any power plant

The framework Whyte and Lo propose in the paper has 10 parameters for evaluating the economic viability of a fusion energy power plant. Some of these are scientific and physical, dealing with the energy consumed and produced in a given plant. Most of the parameters are in the realm of engineering and economics, such as the costs of plant construction.

A key inspiration for the framework is the so-called Lawson Criterion, derived in the 1950s, which describes the combinations of temperature, plasma density, and energy confinement time that can produce net energy from the plasma due to fusion, regardless of its absolute power or volume. Specifically it calculates a “plasma Q,” which is the ratio of fusion power produced to the external power required to sustain the plasma.

“The Lawson Criterion describes the scientific success of energy gain from fusion plasmas, while our framework generally describes economic Q, which is the ratio of capital gained to that expended,” Whyte explains.

The parameters in the framework describe engineering features of the fusion power plant such as power density, the efficiency of converting fusion power into an economic product, and the durability of components used in the energy conversion, in addition to costing and market parameters that assess the expenses and returns from invested capital. Or, as Whyte puts it, the framework is centered on what it takes to achieve a net-positive economic return, “but applied to practical power plant design.” In parallel to plasma Q, the economic Q described in the framework must be greater than 1 for basic viability.

Researchers have tried a variety of methods for generating and containing fusion energy. The paper’s framework, Whyte emphasizes, is “completely agnostic to whatever fusion concept you use, because the physical reality of fusion is that you expend money to build the capability to produce fusion power.” And the parameters do not depend on the size of any reactor being built; the framework is set up so that any inputs can be scaled to a given project or power output. 

“It doesn’t matter whether the fusion power plant is a small or large, the bottom line is: In both cases you better have money coming out that exceeds the money going in, otherwise it’s not going to be around for very long,” Lo says. 

One source of motivation for the paper, Whyte and Lo say, is to underscore the importance of accounting for all costs in fusion research as rigorously as possible. While researchers will be highly aware of the costs of basic experiments, estimating the costs of a fusion reactor is a somewhat different matter, but something leaders in the field have to be increasingly oriented around.

Fixing a missing link

That is certainly the case, the authors note, as new rounds of funding enter the fusion energy industry. Just last week, Commonwealth Fusion Systems obtained a new billion-dollar round of funding support from investors; it hopes to open its first working power plant in the 2030s, in the state of Virginia. 

Lo acknowledges that there will be uncertainties and challenging decisions involved in the development of the very first commercial fusion reactor. If successful, though, the industry might follow the path of learning by doing that has been common in energy and other industries, helping plants become more economical over time. 

“This pattern of learning by doing exists in all deep technology sectors,” says Lo, noting that sequencing a human genome is a million times cheaper right now than it was about 25 years ago. “We’re going to see the same thing, but maybe not to the same degree, in fusion energy.”

Lo has long worked to develop ways for scientific research to gain financial support in biotechnology — and is launching a new MIT Sloan educational program, called CATAPULT, to provide more tools for people in any field of study to translate their research advances into products. 

When it comes to fusion, Lo says, “It’s pretty clear that economic viability is something we can start assessing now.” And while there might be thousands of particular decisions involved in building a commercial fusion plant, the authors think they have an overall approach that will let people quantify all that work. 

“When you’ve got a framework to evaluate it in a quantitative way, it tells you about the literal worth of making a particular design decision. That seems to me at this moment of fusion development absolutely critical, and what we’ve been missing,” Whyte says.

A tall glass of ice water isn’t just a thirst quencher; it’s also an everyday example of coexisting phases. Water’s molecular makeup can exist simultaneously in both a liquid and solid phase. And as it turns out, this phase duality can exist in more exotic, quantum materials, and in ways that are far more complicated to tease apart. 

A new study by MIT physicists sheds light on how two different phases of electron behavior can emerge and coexist in the same quantum material. 

Their results, reported today in the journal Nature Physics, can help to explain how some materials host superconductivity, magnetism, and other electronic phases. Untangling such phases, and understanding how they emerge, will help engineers control electronic behavior and design high-performance quantum devices. 

“People believe the cornerstone of replacing silicon lies in quantum materials that have multiple coexisting phases,” says co-author Alfred Zong PhD ’20, who co-led the study as an MIT graduate student and is now an assistant professor at Stanford University. “Our experiment provides a very neat way to study these multiple phases.”

The team, led by Nuh Gedik, the Donner Professor of Physics at MIT, studied the rare-earth material erbium tritelluride. As with most materials, erbium tritelluride’s electrons are normally scattered uniformly throughout the material. But when cooled to certain temperatures, the electrons suddenly organize into a wave-like pattern, which physicists term a “charge density wave” (CDW) phase. When cooled even further, electrons coordinate again as a second wavy phase that criss-crosses the first. The effect is of an atomic checkerboard of co-existing electron phases. 

Now, Gedik and his colleagues have teased apart erbium tritelluride’s phases and observed how each phase emerges. They found that one phase forms gradually, similar to how liquid water transitions uniformly into vapor. This is the classic, textbook way in which electronic phase transitions are thought to occur.

But the second phase came about in an entirely new and unexpected way: Instead of emerging gradually, the electrons organized first in pockets that eventually expanded, similar to how liquid water crystallizes into ice. 

“The mechanism responsible for the emergence of this second phase has long been debated, and our approach provides a powerful new way to uncover the hidden physics behind phase transitions in quantum materials,” Gedik says.

The study’s other MIT co-authors are first authors Yifan Su PhD ’24 and Bai-Qing Lv, a former postdoc; Dongsung Choi SM ’17, PhD ’24; and former postdocs Doron Azoury and Masataka Mogi; along with collaborators from multiple other institutions.

A clear view

A charge density wave is made up of charges, such as electrons, that spontaneously organize as a wave. The wave’s crests hold the highest density of electrons, and the lowest are found in the troughs. In some materials, electrons transition into this strange coordinated phase at super-cold temperatures. 

Scientists have observed charge density waves for decades, and most recently in materials that also host other, more complicated forms of electron coordination, such as various forms of magnetism, and superconductivity, in which electrons pair up and flow through a material without friction. 

“Just like superconductivty, charge density waves are a collective phenomena where electrons move together in certain ways,” explains lead author Yifan Su. “The power of CDWs is that they are a much simpler form of matter compared to superconductivity. They offer a playground for fundamental understanding.”

Su and the team looked to get a clear view of charge density waves in a material that hosts two CDW phases simultaneously. How these waves emerge and coexist in a single material could shed light on how superconductivity and other more complicated phase transitions occur. 

“One of the biggest questions in physics is why some materials host multiple phases while others do not. And when multiple phases do exist, how do they interact? Do they reinforce one another, compete, or coexist independently?” Gedik says. “This is like a case study for us to understand much more complicated materials.”

Shake, then listen

Scientists have observed two different charge density waves in erbium tritelluride — a rare-earth material that can be synthesized in the lab, in atomically thin sheets that can then be probed for unique, quantum-scale properties. 

In previous experiments, physicists have found that when erbium tritelluride is cooled down to -8 degrees Celsius, the first of two charge density waves forms among the material’s electrons. This “dominant” wave stretches across the material in one direction. When the material is further cooled to -113 degrees Celsius, a second, “subdominant” charge density wave emerges, perpendicular to the first, creating a checkerboard of coexisting electronic phases. 

In their new study, Gedik and his colleagues sought to tease out how each phase emerges in erbium tritelluride. The team obtained small, atomically thin samples of the material, which were synthesized by collaborators at Stanford. In Gedik’s lab, the researchers then cooled the samples down to about -230 degrees Celsius — temperatures at which the material should host both charge density waves, in a simultaneous, checkerboard pattern. They then either destroyed or weakened the checkerboard, and watched how both types of waves reemerged. 

To do so, they exposed each cooled sample to a one-two punch of laser pulses. 

“This is how we ‘shake’ and then ‘listen’ to the system,” Gedik says.

The first pulse was the “shake” that dissolved the checkerboard. The researchers could control the intensity of this kick to vary the degree to which the waves were disturbed. They then delivered a second laser pulse, of high-energy photons, to kick out electrons from the material. This second pulse was sent in at various times after the first pulse. The researchers then measured the energy and momentum of the kicked-out electrons, to get snapshots of how the material’s electronic phases recovered. 

“We see the destroying of these phases, and then if we wait long enough, they come back,” Gedik explains. “And depending on how you hit them, the two phases respond differently.”

From their experiments, the team found that the first, dominant phase of charge density waves reemerges gradually and uniformly, no matter how hard the material was initially “kicked.” This smooth restoration is a textbook, “second-order” phase transition, similar to a magnet gradually losing its magnetism as it is heated.

What was more surprising was how the second wave pattern reemerged. This subdominant phase reformed more like water into ice. The electrons reassembled the wave in isolated pockets that spread, like crystals of ice. This more rare, “first-order” transition was not expected. The team’s study captured the the long-debated mechanism underlying the emergence of the subdominant CDW phase. 

“In systems that are much more complex, like high-temperature superconductors, you see there are multiple phases — magnetism, superconductivity, charge density waves, and they all exist together,” Gedik says. “One of the theories is that, the way they interact with each other is key for their exotic properties. The lessons we learn here can be applied to much more complex materials.”

This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. National Science Foundation, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation’s EPiQS Initiative grant.

MIT has appointed Akirah Bradley-Armstrong as vice chancellor for student life, effective Oct. 19, 2026. 

The appointment, following a national search, was announced yesterday in a letter sent to the MIT community from Chancellor Melissa Nobles, to whom Bradley-Armstrong will report. Bradley-Armstrong will succeed Vice Chancellor for Student Life Suzy M. Nelson, who transformed student life at MIT during her 10 years in the role. Nelson announced her retirement earlier this year.

Bradley-Armstrong joins MIT from the University of California at Santa Cruz, where she has served as vice chancellor for student affairs and success since 2022. In that role, she has led one of the university's largest divisions, overseeing approximately 800 professional staff, 2,100 student employees, and more than 30 departments dedicated to supporting student success, health and wellness, housing, athletics, recreation, and campus life. She has served as a principal advisor to UCSC’s chancellor on student issues and collaborated with the academic deans, faculty, and the campus provost on student initiatives. 

“Akirah is an accomplished and compassionate leader whose commitment to student success, belonging, and well-being has been demonstrated throughout her career,” says Nobles. “She brings a deep understanding of the challenges students face today, extensive expertise leading complex organizations, and a collaborative approach that will help her continue the work we have done to strengthen the student experience at MIT.”

The Office of the Chancellor oversees student life and learning at MIT. In her new role, Bradley-Armstrong will lead the student life side of that mission for undergraduate and graduate students. This broad portfolio encompasses dining; well-being and support; student organizations and events; the Department of Athletics, Physical Education and Recreation; and living communities, including oversight of the faculty-led residential house system. 

Before assuming her current role at UC Santa Cruz, Bradley-Armstrong was the vice chancellor for student affairs at the University of Colorado at Boulder and held senior student life roles at the University of California at Berkeley. Bradley-Armstrong is a nationally recognized leader in higher education who served on the board of the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators and chaired its 2025 national conference.

“Throughout my career, I have partnered with high-achieving students across multiple institutions and understand that extraordinary achievement must be paired with strong investments in well-being, mental health, and belonging,” says Bradley-Armstrong. “I’m particularly energized by MIT’s large graduate student population, having worked with graduate students on housing, childcare, and student support, while also teaching a graduate course at CU Boulder. I’m equally drawn to MIT's residential house system, which clearly plays a critical role in the lives of students.”

Bradley-Armstrong has extensive experience leading institutions through periods of change and responding to complex student issues. She has collaborated with campus partners to develop policies and programs that promote dynamic campus communities. Grounded in her background as a first-generation college graduate, student-athlete, and sorority member, Bradley-Armstrong has earned a reputation for leading with deep integrity and an unshakeable commitment to student success. 

“I am honored to join MIT and to serve alongside its students, faculty, and staff to support an exceptional student experience,” Bradley-Armstrong says. “MIT has a remarkable tradition of innovation, excellence, and community. I look forward to listening, learning, and building on the Institute's strong commitment to helping every student thrive.”

Nobles notes, “Throughout her career, Akirah has driven high-impact, system-level change across residential and Greek life, dining, athletics, and campus planning. Her innovative approach led to the launch of the University of California system’s first campus mobile crisis response team, the establishment of a two-year housing guarantee, and the advancement of initiatives of the UC Santa Cruz strategic plan.”

Bradley-Armstrong earned a Doctor of Education in Educational Leadership from the University of California at Davis. Her doctoral research examined how universities respond to tragedy as well as the support systems that help administrators navigate crisis response and recovery. She also holds a Master of Education in Higher Education and Student Affairs Administration from the University of Vermont, and a bachelor's degree from Mansfield University. 

“I look forward to welcoming Akirah to MIT and to working alongside her — and our whole community — to shape MIT’s next chapter of student life,” says Nobles.

The same overheating problem that happens to our laptops also plagues computer servers and data centers around the world — and heat management is only getting harder as computer chips get more compact and powerful.

Understanding how heat moves through chips at the micro scale is essential for continuing to improve their performance. Unfortunately, most methods for measuring heat flow struggle with multilayered devices like the electronics that power our modern world.

Now MIT researchers have demonstrated a new way to study how heat moves through multilayered materials, combining X-rays that penetrate multiple layers with laser pulses for delivering heat. The researchers used the technique to measure how heat moves inside a promising device for transistors and flexible electronics. 

The method was so precise it allowed the researchers to quantify the effect of a single micron-scale defect in the device, revealing a surprising fourfold reduction in the material’s ability to transfer heat at that spot. They also found that the defect caused heat to spread unevenly, moving more easily in one direction than in the other.

The team believes the approach could help researchers understand overheating in devices and help companies develop more power-dense electronics for everything from AI applications to wearables and clean energy systems.

“Chip developers need devices that can handle heat,” says Mingda Li, an associate professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT and co-corresponding author on an open-access paper about the work in Nature Communications. “I think overheating has become the real bottleneck in device performance. When doing these diagnoses using traditional techniques, they couldn’t get down to the micro- or nanometer scale. But eventually they’d like to go beyond that to study the heat carriers and understand exactly what causes failure, in order to avoid local hotspots and design better devices. This approach is a step in that direction.”

Joining Li on the paper are co-lead authors Thanh Nguyen PhD ’24 and MIT postdoc Chuliang Fu; PhD candidate Mouyang Cheng; Abhijatmedhi Chotrattanapituk ’21, SM ’26; Denisse Córdova Carrizales SM ’26; Eunbi Rha SM ’26; Tyra Espedal ’26; Buxuan Li PhD ’24; Shivam Kajale SM ’23, PhD ’26; Tongtong Liu PhD ’23; Kuan Qiao PhD ’22; University of Texas at Austin Assistant Professor Zhantao Chen SM ’18, PhD ’22; Argonne National Laboratory researchers Kumar Neeraj, Donald Walko, and Haidan Wen; MIT Principal Research Scientist Svetlana Boriskina; MIT Associate Professor Deblina Sarkar; and co-corresponding author and MIT Associate Professor Jeehwan Kim.

Tracking heat

Making more powerful computers and electronics often comes down to cramming more transistors into a smaller area. But the closer those transistors get to each other, the hotter the device gets as it operates, and the more heat needs to be moved.

Most people learn about the problem from their laptops overheating on their lap. At the data center scale, it means an enormous amount of energy must be devoted to cooling the servers.

The quest to design more power-dense computers and electronics is thus a quest to find materials that can transport heat most efficiently.

Researchers have used a number of methods to measure and model heat flow across materials, but they all have limitations when it comes to studying realistic device architectures. One common optical method to study heat at the microscopic level, for instance, is called time domain thermal reflectance.

“Because that technique uses optics, it doesn’t allow you to study different layers,” Kim explains. “Real devices have five or more layers. It also only provides an overall signal, and that makes it hard to see thermal transport happening in layers buried under the surface.”

Other techniques, like infrared cameras, don’t capture tiny changes at a fast enough frame rate to be useful at small scales.

To address those limitations, the researchers wanted to create something that could measure heat transfer at the nanoscale in multilayer systems. To do that, they used an emerging analysis technique that sends electron pulses and ultrafast X-rays at a material and measures changes in energy.

“Over the last few years, researchers have developed what is basically the brightest X-ray source in the world,” Nguyen says. “That allows you to focus an X-ray beam and get incredibly fine spatial resolution. You can also use a laser to heat the sample while the X-ray scans and shows how the heat dissipates across space in real-time.”

The technique offered a better view of heat transfer because the laser-powered electron pulse can capture changes in material strain at the atomic level while the X-rays can penetrate into multiple layers of the material, and the measurements can be combined to provide a clearer view of how a material moves heat.

“Using previous measurement techniques, in real devices, you couldn’t resolve what happens on one layer versus another, so you’d just measure the average,” Fu says. “X-rays can clearly show how heat propagates across the interface through their diffraction.”

The researchers applied their technique to a test device made of a layer of gallium nitride, which has shown promise for conducting heat efficiently, on top of silicon. The material combination has been studied for years, but its thermal performance has been shown to deteriorate because of tiny defects created during processing.

The researchers measured a fourfold reduction in heat dissipation across a wrinkle defect on the device and a 25 percent drop in heat dissipation across materials, showing more disruption to heat flow than they had expected.

“When people model heat dissipation, they model perfect crystals without defects,” Li says. “But these types of large wrinkle defects are very common in 2D materials. People never even knew how much heat is blocked by these wrinkles. Those are things we can now directly observe with this technique.”

Designing better chips

Li says a leading semiconductor industry consortium has already reached out to collaborate on applying the measurement technique to study different types of chips. He believes the technique will work to study a wide array of materials and devices.

“We can now pass a current and shine an X-ray on a device and see how the heat dissipates at a very small scale,” Kim says. “That’s something the industry has been longing for.”

Li says the approach will provide researchers with new information to improve the design of electronic systems.

“This will enable better thermal design of electronic systems,” Kim says. “Even with the same type of materials, the geometry and how the materials are laid out is quite complicated, so it will show us how those differences impact thermal flow by providing direct experimental measurements.”

The work was supported, in part, by the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. National Science Foundation, and the MIT School of Engineering Distinguished Energy Efficiency Fellowship.

On July 26, 1951, the U.S. Air Force, Army, and Navy signed a charter establishing Project Lincoln, an R&D program managed by MIT to develop the nation's first continent-wide air defense system, SAGE. The charter called for a research center to be opened within the towns of Bedford, Lincoln, and Lexington, Massachusetts, to support Project Lincoln, which was subsequently renamed MIT Lincoln Laboratory.

Seventy-five years later, Lincoln Laboratory — operating as a U.S. Department of War (DoW) federally funded research and development center managed by MIT — continues to innovate technology solutions to pressing national security challenges in partnership with government, industry, and academia. These innovations have at once protected the war fighter and U.S. homeland while impacting society. 

To commemorate the lab’s 75th anniversary, 10 staff members reflect below on key technology impacts. Additional technology impacts, both past and present, are featured on the laboratory’s historical timeline and in its 2025 Impact Report.

Surveilling space

“Since the dawn of the Space Age, Lincoln Laboratory has developed, prototyped, and/or operated essentially all radar and optical systems that the nation uses to surveil space. From detecting Sputnik in 1957 and conducting the first space-based tracking of satellites in 1997 to discovering more than 50 percent of then-known natural objects in the solar system by the early 2000s, these innovations have not only provided space situational awareness for the military but also advanced science.”

—Grant Stokes, laboratory fellow in the Space Systems and Technology Division

Trailblazing military satellite communications (MILSATCOM)

“Today, MILSATCOM is an expectation, used in almost every mission. But when we began the Lincoln Experimental Satellites program in the 1960s, only the glimmer of an idea existed. The laboratory brought this concept into fruition, developing a series of prototypes and then supporting industry as they built multiple generations of operational capabilities. The laboratory continues to provide assessments, test infrastructure, and advanced technologies for ensuring warfighters remain connected globally now and into the future.”

—Tom Macdonald, head of the Communication Systems Division

Advancing capability at a national test range

“For 64 of the laboratory’s 75 years, our staff, accompanied by their families, have been serving the Ronald Reagan Space and Missile Test Range on Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific. As the range’s scientific advisor, we have helped envision, build, operate, and enhance instrumentation critical to missile defense and space situational awareness. With our technical support, this national asset hosts stakeholders across the DoW developing and demonstrating advanced technologies to keep us ahead of adversaries.” 

—Katherine Rink, head of the Air, Missile, and Maritime Defense Technology Division

Protecting air travelers

“Aviation safety around the world has improved tremendously thanks to technologies developed at Lincoln Laboratory. Advanced surveillance and collision-avoidance systems pioneered here were critical to keep aircraft safely separated as traffic levels increased. Laboratory innovations in radar processing and weather forecasting now help controllers guide flights smoothly around storms. Today, we are excited to be designing novel technologies for drones and advanced air mobility systems that will revolutionize air transportation over the next 75 years.” 

—James Kuchar, associate head of the Homeland Protection and Air Traffic Control Division

Miniaturizing microelectronics

“All electronic devices, from smartphones to laptops, rely on ever-shrinking transistors. The laboratory’s pioneering work in 193-nanometer lithography and liquid-immersion lithography enabled chip manufacturers to continue this miniaturization from 2000 onward. For nearly two decades, we had served as the international center of excellence for developing these technologies. The semiconductor industry adopted them worldwide, impacting virtually every aspect of modern life. We continue innovating techniques to fit more transistors on chips powering our digital age.”

—Mordechai Rothschild, principal staff member in the Advanced Technology Division

Saving lives on the front lines

“During operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom, Lincoln Laboratory’s work countering improvised explosive devices helped shift the fight from reacting to roadside bombs to anticipating, detecting, and defeating them. We quickly prototyped, integrated, and fielded several advanced surveillance and sensing systems that reduced casualties and improved freedom of maneuver. This approach — combining rapid innovation with rapid transition to the field — continues to strengthen national security and save lives as we confront today’s newest battlefield challenges.”

—Justin Brooke, Lincoln Laboratory assistant director for research and development

Providing actionable intelligence

“How do you find targets hidden in plain sight? The laboratory has been addressing this question for decades. We've developed airborne 3D lidar systems to image beneath triple-canopy jungle, ground-penetrating radar and opto-acoustic systems to locate buried mines, techniques exploiting molecular vibration at terahertz frequencies to identify trace-explosives residue, and airborne synthetic aperture radar systems to map vast areas and pinpoint objects of interest. These technologies have enhanced the effectiveness of U.S. military missions globally.”

—Jalal Khan, assistant head of the ISR and Tactical Systems Division

Beaming data over lasers

“In 2013, the laboratory and NASA made history by transmitting data from the moon to Earth at record-breaking speeds using lasers instead of traditional radio. This laser communications demonstration incorporated decades of laboratory engineering innovation and paved the way for future missions. The same technology was used recently to connect the world with the Artemis II astronauts, enabling near-continuous transmission of awe-inspiring high-definition images and videos — forever shaping how we communicate across the solar system.” 

—Bryan Robinson, leader of the Optical and Quantum Communications Group

Detecting biological threats

“Biological threats, whether from weaponized agents like anthrax or infectious diseases like Covid-19, pose significant risks to national security. For three decades, the laboratory has advanced technologies that strengthen the nation’s ability to detect, prevent, and respond to such threats. Our innovations in environmental biosensing and presymptomatic detection of infection enhance public health resilience and protect infrastructure. For war fighters, these technologies provide improved health monitoring and threat awareness to maintain operational readiness in complex environments.”

—Christina Rudzinski, assistant head of the Biotechnology and Human Systems Division

Securing cyber systems

“The greatest reward of our cybersecurity work is not the research we publish or technologies we create — it is the impact we’ve delivered to the men and women on the front lines using our technology. By understanding the threats, strengthening resilience, and delivering new capabilities to confront our adversaries, we have helped secure the nation. Our innovations have not only supported the DoW and intelligence community but also advanced the world of computing and security research.”

—Stephen Rejto, head of the Cyber Security and Information Sciences Division

Looking forward

“Our founding charter called upon MIT to solve an urgent national security crisis. That mission still drives us 75 years later. Lincoln Laboratory’s technological innovations have defended the homeland from emerging threats, enhanced war fighter operations on the modern battlefield, protected the public from natural and deliberate hazards, and enhanced daily life. Across air, land, sea, space, and cyber, we are advancing technologies and prototyping complex systems to help safeguard the nation for decades to come.” 

—Melissa Choi, Lincoln Laboratory director

Super-thin superconducting materials, which are only one or a few atoms thick, have unique properties scientists can leverage to produce more compact, scalable, and efficient quantum devices. But these fragile materials degrade so rapidly in air that they are difficult to study or manufacture.

Now, researchers from MIT and elsewhere have discovered and harnessed a method to generate a large, uniform area of ultrathin superconducting material that remains stable in air. 

They “grow” the superconducting material, called niobium diselenide, underneath another atomically thin material, carbon-based graphene. The graphene layer protects the fragile superconductor from oxidation, while guiding it to grow in a smooth layer over a large wafer-scale area.

The researchers further integrated this air-stable superconductor into a superconducting microwave circuit. When tested, the material maintained its superconducting properties and exhibited high kinetic inductance, which is a resource for many quantum devices. 

In the long run, this advance could help miniaturize superconducting quantum computing hardware, as well as technologies like ultrasensitive quantum detectors for communications or cosmology.

“Emerging superconductors that are only a monolayer thick have a lot of potential. Thanks to our new process, they are no longer materials that can only be made at a very small scale. There are now exciting opportunities for scientists to study these materials, utilize them in circuits, and explore their practical applications,” says co-lead author Xudong Sheldon Zheng, a graduate student in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS).

He is joined on the paper by co-lead authors Sameia Zaman SM ’24, an EECS graduate student, and Kenan Zhang, a recent postdoc in the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE); corresponding authors William D. Oliver, the Henry Ellis Warren (1894) Professor of EECS and professor of physics, director of the Center for Quantum Engineering, and associate director of RLE; Joel Î-j. Wang, an assistant professor at New York University; and Jing Kong, the Jerry Mcafee (1940) Professor in Engineering at MIT and a member of RLE; as well as others at MIT and Lincoln Laboratory, Rice University, Yale University, and Pohang University in South Korea. The research appears today in Nature.

Powerful properties

Superconductors are materials that can conduct electricity without resistance, and they are essential for some types of quantum devices. 

Two-dimensional superconducting materials retain their superconducting properties despite being only a few atoms thick. These materials hold the promise to miniaturize superconducting circuitry.

Niobium diselenide, an ultrathin superconductor composed of a single, closely packed layer of niobium atoms sandwiched between a single layer of selenium atoms on either side, has a very high kinetic inductance, as members of the research team recently reported.

This enables the material to store a great deal of inductive energy in a very small area. Large kinetic inductance in a small form-factor is a desirable design element in many quantum devices. 

One commonly used approach to realizing a large kinetic inductance is to string together an array of devices called Josephson junctions.

If scientists could incorporate materials such as thin niobium diselenide with sufficiently large kinetic inductance into a quantum circuit, they could replace the large area of electronic junctions with a tiny piece of thin-film material, making the circuit more compact. But because niobium diselenide degrades rapidly in air, scientists have not been able to reliably fabricate devices at the wafer scale. Instead, they rely on exfoliation techniques that yield small flakes. Furthermore, researchers have struggled to grow material with uniform monolayer thickness. Consequently, it has been challenging to fully probe its properties or test it in practical applications.

“Typically, once we make the material and remove it from its inert environment, it immediately starts to oxidize and degrade, ultimately becoming damaged,” Zheng explains.

Scientists usually grow niobium diselenide by depositing chemical precursors onto a silicon dioxide substrate. Then they place another layer of two-dimensional material, like graphene or hexagonal boron nitride, on top to protect the fragile superconductor from air.

But such postgrowth protection presents a challenge. The superconductor begins to oxidize almost immediately after synthesis, degrading its properties before it is protected. Meanwhile, the protection process requires a stringent inert environment and delicate processing.

Mind the gap

The MIT researchers used a different tactic. They put the layer of graphene on top of the silicon dioxide substrate first. Then they deposited the precursors and grew the superconducting material in the tiny gap between the two layers.

“It took a long time for us to understand how the growth could happen underneath the graphene. Through collaboration and discussion, we eventually uncovered the mechanism for growing the material at the interface, and this solves a lot of problems and allows us to simplify our fabrication steps,” Zheng says.

The silicon dioxide substrate helps trap the precursors long enough for the crystal to begin forming, while the graphene layer allows them to move around easily and spread into a continuous monolayer.

The researchers used this technique to generate a perfectly smooth layer of niobium diselenide more than an inch in size.

“By carefully tuning the growth conditions, we can ensure the material grows between the layers in exactly the way we’ve designed,” Zheng says.

Even though the graphene is placed on top of the silicon dioxide, the weak adhesion between these materials leaves a gap between them less than 1 nanometer thick. The niobium diselenide grows only within that gap. Then, since it is already encapsulated by graphene, the researchers can safely remove it into the ambient environment without causing degradation.

Careful connections

The researchers also designed an oxidation-free transfer technique to peel the graphene-niobium diselenide structure from its growth substrate, building on prior work by members of the team.

Then, they developed a method to integrate the thin film into a quantum circuit without hampering the fragile superconductor or its properties.

“It is challenging to make a good electrical connection between this very thin material, which is only about 1 nanometer in thickness, and our electrodes, which are a few hundred nanometers in thickness,” Zaman says.

They carefully etch the side walls of the thin-film superconductor in a vacuum chamber, which preserves the smooth edge of the material. When they integrate the prepared niobium-graphene structure into a conventional superconducting circuit, it forms a reliable electrical connection. Importantly, the material maintained its superconducting properties and exhibited high kinetic inductance after clean room fabrication and integration into the circuit. This makes it particularly attractive for fabricating compact superconducting quantum devices and other quantum technologies.

Furthermore, the growth strategy is not limited to monolayer niobium diselenide. The researchers demonstrated that it can be extended to a broad family of monolayer quantum materials with diverse and technologically important properties.

In the future, the researchers aim to integrate these ultrathin superconducting materials into functional device architectures to enable the exploration of fundamental physics and the prototyping of quantum devices and other advanced technologies.

“We’ve taken a very good step toward exploring both the physics and the application side of this thin, monolayer superconductor, which we can now grow in wafer scale or in even larger areas. There are a lot of directions we can go in the future,” Zaman says.

This research was funded, in part, by the U.S. Army Research Office, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Schlumberger Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Semiconductor Research Corporation Center, the MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, and the National Research Foundation of Korea. This work was carried out, in part, using MIT.nano facilities.

To develop new targeted treatments for cancer, scientists need tissue models that accurately represent the genetic and molecular traits of the cancer they’re studying. An international team led by researchers at MIT’s Koch Institute, the Broad Institute, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, the National Cancer Institute, and numerous other partnering institutions has developed nearly 700 new cancer models, derived from patient tumors, which they hope will aid in drug development. 

These cells, which represent 25 different types of cancer, are now available for cancer researchers around the world to use. The project is described in a new paper appearing today in Nature, with contributors from more than two dozen institutions.

The models are the result of a 10-year initiative, funded by the National Cancer Institute, to expand the number of patient-derived tissue models available. For most of these models, the researchers converted tumor cells into organoids — 3D cell cultures that can survive indefinitely and mimic the genetic and molecular features of the tumors that they originally came from.

This type of model could help researchers identify new drug targets and test potential new treatments for many more types of cancer.

“Since the sequencing of the human genome and the analysis of cancer genomes over the last 20 years, we have had many ideas about cancer targets, but we need experimental systems in the lab to validate those targets and launch drug discovery projects,” says Jesse Boehm, a research scientist at the Koch Institute and one of the senior authors of the study.

From tumors to organoids

The Human Cancer Models Initiative was launched in 2016, following the completion of the Cancer Genome Atlas, an effort to catalog the genomic alterations responsible for cancer growth. 

For the atlas project, researchers sequenced cancer cell samples from thousands of patients. That work revealed that the diversity of tumor genetic profiles was not fully captured by the roughly 1,000 patient-derived cancer cell lines that existed at the time.

“We realized that a thousand wasn’t enough, that the international community needed to invest in many more thousands to represent all cancers, all genotypes, all ethnicities,” Boehm says. “Most existing models come from European and Southeast Asian patients, and many rare cancers are missing.”

Funded by the National Cancer Institute and the United Kingdom’s Wellcome Trust, hundreds of scientists across dozens of institutions participated in obtaining patient samples and developing them into cell lines that could be used for research.

“It’s been an enormous initiative, and this Nature paper is the culmination of that 10-year swath of activity,” Boehm says.

More than 2,700 tumor samples were obtained from hospitals participating in the study, from patients who gave their permission for their cells to be used for research. These samples were collected by hospitals in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands. 

“A resource of this scale depends on the kind of systematic effort that often happens behind the scenes,” says Mushriq Al-Jazrawe, scientific director of the High Throughput Sciences (HTS) platform at the Koch Institute and one of the lead authors of the study. “I’m especially grateful to the technical and scientific teams across the participating institutes whose careful, expert work turns patient tumor samples into well-characterized models and data that researchers everywhere can use with confidence.”

Most of these samples came from commonly seen cancers such as lung, liver, and pancreatic, but they also included about 150 rare types including tumors of the gallbladder and the small intestine.

To convert these samples into cells that can survive indefinitely in the lab, the researchers developed techniques for culturing the cells in specialized growth media with a scaffold that helps them grow into a 3D structure. Overall, the researchers were able to successfully convert about one-third of the patient samples that they received.

Most of these new models consist of organoids, which in some cases more closely mimic the structure of the tissue that the cells came from. Traditional cancer cell lines, which were developed beginning in the 1950s, exist as single layers of cells grown in a lab dish, while organoids consist of three-dimensional balls of cells embedded in a gelatin-like structure.

Once the organoids and cell lines were established, which can take up to a year, the researchers analyzed them to make sure that their genomic sequences, RNA expression, and epigenomic modifications closely matched those of the tumor cells that they were derived from.

Cancer vulnerabilities

All of the models developed as part of the HCMI were deposited at the American Type Culture Collection (ATCC), a nonprofit distributor of cell lines. Each model also has extensive data from the patient whose cells were used to start the cell line, including mutations that the patient inherited from their parents (germline mutations), and information on the cancer treatments they received.

Using these models, scientists should be able to perform much larger scale screens that could aid in drug development efforts. 

In another paper also appearing in Nature today, Broad Institute researchers reported that they were able to profile more than 300 of the new models using high-throughput genome-sequencing, RNA sequencing, and more than 100 with CRISPR loss-of-function screens. This enabled them to identify vulnerabilities in each model that could be targeted with new drugs.

These findings have been added to a resource known as the Cancer Dependency Map (DepMap), which now includes information on more than 2,000 types of cancer.

In another Nature companion paper, researchers at the Sanger Institute led an effort to characterize an additional 256 organoids developed through the HCMI project. 

Additionally, even though most aspects of the formal HCMI project are currently winding down, researchers hope to continue developing models derived from additional patient tumor samples, including more pediatric cancers and rare cancers.

“We now have about 2,000, but if we really want to represent all humans with cancer in our preclinical research, more work is needed. We have to invite patients to donate tissue to make research tools that the whole world can use,” Boehm says. “I think this will hopefully be not the end, but the beginning.”

“A major opportunity now is to carry the lessons of HCMI forward, so we can generate as much insight as possible from these precious tissue donations,” says Al-Jazrawe, who is also a researcher in the Broad Institute’s Cancer Program. “Here at HTS, we are continuing the work by developing methods to study patient-derived samples and models reproducibly and at scale, and by providing a platform for close collaboration with clinical and research teams.”

Other senior authors of the HCMI paper are Mathew Garnett of the Wellcome Sanger Institute, David Tuveson of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Andrea Califano of Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, Paul Spellman of the University of California at Los Angeles, Keith Ligon of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Daniela Gerhard of the NCI Center for Cancer Genomics, and Louis Staudt of the NCI Center for Cancer Research.

In addition to Al-Jazrawe, the paper’s lead authors are Dina El-Harouni of the Broad Institute and Dana Farber, Seongmin Choi of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Merve Dede of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Toshinori Hinoue of the Van Andel Institute, Sean Misek of the Broad Institute and Dana-Farber, Heeju Hoh of the Institute of Systems Biology and the Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, and Luca Zanella of the Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons. 

The research was funded primarily by the National Cancer Institute and the Wellcome Trust.

Imagine a bottle of hazardous chemicals sitting on a laboratory shelf that changes its appearance to alert scientists that its lid is not properly secured, potentially preventing a dangerous spill.

A new 3D-printing system created by MIT researchers enables users to produce interactive objects like this chemical bottle, which change their appearance when they are pressed, slid, or turned, without the use of any internal electronics. 

Their system simplifies the process of designing and fabricating 3D objects with mechanically switchable surface appearances, enabling individuals without technical expertise to quickly generate dynamic everyday objects.

The design and fabrication system combines specially arranged optical layers with built-in mechanical parts so a single object can display different images or patterns. The resulting objects change appearance based on user interactions like screwing on a lid or flipping a switch, and they can be manufactured in one pass on a multimaterial 3D printer.

The system can be used to fabricate a range of interactive objects that don’t require fragile electronic circuits, such as adaptable warning signs that could withstand foul weather or dynamic packaging that alerts users if fasteners came loose during shipping. 

The end-to-end system could also streamline rapid prototyping of adaptable objects for artistic, architectural, and engineering applications.

“With our system, an object can tell you whether you are using it properly, without the need for sensors or any complicated electronics. The interactive display is mechanical, so you can create a self-contained, multistate, interactive device that a user can control very intuitively,” says Yunyi Zhu, a graduate student in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and lead author of a paper on this platform.

Her co-authors include Dingning Cao, an MIT undergraduate; Jeremy Mrzyglocki, a graduate student at the Technical University of Munich; Stefanie Mueller, an associate professor in EECS and the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL); and Narjes Pourjafarian, a postdoc at Northeastern University. The research will be presented at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology.

Mechanically switchable surfaces

Many interactive products rely on screens and electronics to change their appearance. But if these dynamic objects are exposed to water or harsh chemicals, or are squished, twisted, or pressed with great force, the fragile electronics could be damaged.

On the other hand, conventional methods that use surface optics to change an object’s appearance without electronics typically utilize static labels like stickers or curved lenses to create different visual effects based on where the user is looking, limiting interactivity.

To simplify the process of making dynamic, interactive objects that don’t require electronics, the MIT researchers developed a system that automatically converts a user’s design into a 3D printer-ready model of an object with a mechanically switchable surface appearance.   

Their design, ShiftLens, creates switchable appearances by combining two optical layers on an object’s surface. It places a layer of special lenses over an underlying, patterned backplane. 

The object displays different visual states based on the motion between the two layers. 

The lens layer contains an array of tiny lenticular lenses, curved lenses which steer light differently depending on the viewing angle of the user. The pattern layer contains strips of images that correspond to multiple appearances of the object surface.

When the user shifts the lens layer, different parts of the backplane come into view. The lenses magnify these parts of the backplane image, changing the surface appearance.

“The biggest challenge in this project was to make sure all moving parts align. We need to make sure that the optical effect, mechanical linkages, and computational graphics align with one another,” Zhu says.

A straightforward system

To simplify the design process, the researchers created a user-friendly tool that does all this work behind the scenes. 

It automatically generates a ShiftLens structure based on a few inputs, including images of the visual states the user wants to achieve and the desired shape and curves of the object.

“Another challenge is to communicate to users who are not familiar with optics or mechanical structures and let them specify and achieve what they have in mind,” she says.

The researchers thought carefully about how to communicate the limitations of the ShiftLens design tool to the user. For instance, ShiftLens is not compatible with all objects, since it requires a shifting motion to enable interaction between the two layers.

Users can either incorporate a ShiftLens into the design of an object that has this type of interaction built-in, like the rotation of a lipstick tube, or integrate an actuation mechanism like a switch, knob, or roller. 

“With ShiftLens, users can control what an object looks like while they are using it,” she says.

The researchers showcased how someone might use ShiftLens by fabricating a range of interactive objects.

In one experiment, they created a chemical bottle that turns green and displays a check mark when the cap is securely tightened, but turns red and displays an exclamation mark when it is loose. For another demonstration, they fabricated a tic-tac-toe game with squares that can display a red X, a blue O, or no letter, depending on which direction a user turns a knob.

While the ShiftLens tool is designed to simplify the fabrication process for makers, the techniques could be scaled up for commercial and industrial applications, Zhu says. For instance, it could be used to design piping that can change its appearance to identify a damaged connection that is causing a leak.

“The leaking sink in my apartment would be a lot easier to fix if it could tell me where the leak was coming from,” Zhu adds.

The researchers want to explore additional applications in future work. They also plan to develop an algorithm that can generate a ShiftLens structure with fewer user inputs, simplifying the design process. In addition, they plan to enhance the design tool so users can incorporate a wider variety of actuation mechanisms.