In the Media

Anantha Chandrakasan, MIT’s chief innovation and strategy officer and dean of MIT’s School of Engineering, speaks with Boston Globe reporter Jon Chesto about the new MIT-GE Vernova Energy and Climate Alliance. “A great amount of innovation happens in academia. We have a longer view into the future,” says Chandrakasan. He adds that while companies like GE Vernova have “the ability to get products out quickly to scale up, to manufacture, we have the ability to think past the short-term. ... It’s super smart of them to surround themselves with this incredible talent in academia. That will allow us to make the kind of breakthroughs that will keep U.S. competitiveness at its peak.”

Biology graduate Katharine Dexter McCormick, SB 1904, a philanthropist, a pivotal force in the fight for women's suffrage and chief funder of the science that led to the birth control pill, is included in the New York Times’ Overlooked series, which features obituaries of “remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.”  Rejecting societal conventions, McCormick “successfully challenged a rule that female students had to wear hats at all times, arguing that they posed a fire hazard in the science labs,” writes Katharine Q. Seelye. 

Jon Arizti Sanz PhD '24 and postdoctoral associate Ren Hao Soon have been named to the 2025 cohort of Schmidt Science Fellows, reports Michael T. Nietzel for Forbes. “This year’s class of 32 fellows are all recent PhDs who’ve been identified as some of the most outstanding early-career scientists in the world,” explains Nietzel.

Wall Street Journal reporter Lauren Weber spotlights a paper by Prof. David Autor that finds import tariffs have had little effect on job creation and preservation in the U.S., particularly in parts of the country with tariff-protected industries. Autor and his colleagues found “manufacturing employment didn’t increase, though it also didn't fall (other research found that U.S. companies had a hard time selling more products abroad, which may help explain why manufacturers didn't add jobs),” Weber explains. “Worse than that, retaliatory tariffs from trading partners led to job losses, especially in agriculture.”

Berly McCoy and Sushmita Pathak of NPR’s Short Wave spotlight research by postdoctoral associate Funing Li and his team on tornado occurrence. The researchers used “historical data to model and simulate the interaction between land and the atmosphere,” explains McCoy. 

Ben Armstrong, executive director of the MIT Industrial Performance Center, speaks with Marketplace reporter Samantha Fields about the impact of tariffs on manufacturing in the U.S. “Things like magnets, which are really critical for batteries and other core electronic technologies, we’ve really lost the capacity to build in the U.S.” Armstrong adds that it’s possible to build that capacity here, but “it takes a long time, and it takes really significant investment,” likely from the government and from companies.

Aaron Leanhardt PhD '03 speaks with ABC News about his work developing the “torpedo bat,” a new baseball bat design that “moves the barrel – or the thickest part – closer than usual to the batter’s hand, putting more wood in the area where the hitter is most likely to hit the ball.” Leanhardt explains: “The world of data analytics, physics, math, etc., can have such a positive impact on the game of baseball and generate so much excitement.”  

“AT MIT innovation ranges from awe-inspiring technology to down-to-earth creativity,” notes Chronicle during a visit to campus to peek behind the scenes at the innovations underway at the Institute. Classes taught by Prof. Erik Demaine are a “mix of rigorous math and creative collaboration,” host Anthony Everett explains, highlighting how Demaine’s work in computational origami has found its way into practical applications in such fields as medicine, architecture and space exploration. “I think origami provides a really powerful tool for making transformable shapes,” Demaine relates. 

Chronicle visits MIT to learn more about how the Institute “nurtures groundbreaking efforts, reminding us that creativity and science thrive together, inspiring future advancements in engineering, medicine, and beyond.” Prof. Julien de Wit and Research Scientist Artem Burdanov discuss their planetary defense efforts aimed at identifying small asteroids that could pose a threat to Earth, and Prof. Canan Dağdeviren demonstrates her work developing ultrasound devices to detect the earliest stages of breast cancer. “Big ideas have a way of breaking out of conventional boundaries," says Chronicle host Anthony Everett, "just part of what makes MIT one giant laboratory of groundbreaking ideas."

The US Air Force has renewed a longstanding contract for the continued operation of MIT Lincoln Laboratory, reports Don Seiffert for Boston Business Journal. Lincoln Laboratory’s research is “essential to a robust defense sector and to addressing the rapidly evolving nature of world conflict,” says Ian Waitz, MIT’s vice president for research. “Its rapid prototyping has saved the lives of U.S. service members and supported responses to domestic crises.” He adds that research at Lincoln also “goes to the private sector, enhancing both the nation’s technological advantage and its manufacturing prowess.”

Chronicle visits Prof. Skylar Tibbits and the Self-Assembly Lab to see how they are embedding intelligence into the materials around us, including furniture, clothing and buildings. Prof. Caitlin Mueller and graduate student Sandy Curth are digging into eco-friendly construction with programmable mud by “taking a low-cost material and a really fast manufacturing system to make buildings out of very, very low climate impact materials.” Says Tibbits: “MIT is a really wild place, and most people know of it for its technical expertise…But what I am really inspired by is on the creative end, the design spectrum. I think the mix of those two is super special.” He adds: “We can ask the right questions and discover new science, and we can also solve the right problems through engineering.”

MIT engineers have developed a new system that helps pesticides adhere more effectively to plant leaves, allowing farmers to use fewer chemicals without sacrificing crop protection, reports Michigan Farm News. The new technology “adds a thin coating around droplets as they are being sprayed onto a field, increasing the stickiness of pesticides by as much as a hundredfold.”

Wall Street Journal reporter Jared Diamond spotlights how Aaron Leanhardt PhD ’03 went from an MIT graduate student who was part of a research team that “cooled sodium gas to the lowest temperature ever recorded in human history” to inventor of the torpedo baseball bat, “perhaps the most significant development in bat technology in decades.” Leanhardt’s new baseball bat design is aimed at helping “batters make more contact at a time when strikeouts are at an all-time high,” Diamond explains. “The result is a product that better resembles a bowling pin than a traditional bat, redistributing the weight to the area where players most often make contact with the ball.”

E&E News reporter Christa Marshall writes that the new MIT-GE Vernova Energy and Climate Alliance will “scale sustainable energy systems across the globe” and advance breakthrough low-carbon technologies.

Prof. Pulkit Agrawal speaks with NPR Short Wave host Regina Barber and science correspondent Geoff Brumfiel about his work developing a new technique that allows robots to train in simulations of scanned home environments. “The power of simulation is that we can collect very large amounts of data,” explains Agrawal. “For example, in three hours' worth of simulation, we can collect 100 days' worth of data.”