MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology - On Campus and Around the world

MIT has been named the top college in the country in the latest Best Salaries ranking by the Wall Street Journal and College Pulse. The annual roundup  identifies universities with the largest impact on graduates’ salary outcomes, reports Kamaron McNair for CNBC. 

Writing for The Conversation, Prof. Justin Reich offers insight into the integration of educational technology in schools. “It takes years for educators to develop new practices and norms, for students to adopt new routines, and for families to identify new support mechanisms in order for a novel invention to reliably improve learning,” writes Reich. “But as AI spreads through schools, both historical analysis and new research conducted with K-12 teachers and students offer some guidance on navigating uncertainties and minimizing harm.”

MIT has been named among the top colleges in the country for return on investment, in a new survey by Stacker, reporters Meagan Drillinger for Boston 25. “The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is an internationally renowned institution for STEM studies,” adds Drillinger. “It is need-blind and full-need for undergraduate students. Six out of 10 students receive financial aid, and almost 88% of the Class of 2025 graduated debt-free.” 

Leah Ellis, a former MIT postdoc and co-founder of MIT startup Sublime Systems, speaks with Nature reporter Jacqui Thornton about the creation of the company. “I felt that the word Sublime encapsulated the spirit of excellence, transcendence and purity that we intend to exemplify as we build a technology and a company that we hope will change the world — and the inherent properties of cement itself.” 

MIT has been named among the best employers in Massachusetts, according to Forbes’ America’s Best Employers by State rankings, reports Annie Jonas for Boston.com. Survey “participants worked at companies with at least 500 employees and rated their employers on a range of factors including pay equity, work environment, career development opportunities, and how well the organization addresses serious workplace issues like discrimination and harassment.” 

ABC News reporter Will Reeve spotlights the AGNES, a suit developed by MIT AgeLab researchers in an effort to help wearers experience the effects of aging on the body. “One of the greatest challenges that we’ve uncovered here at the AgeLab and elsewhere is that we really can’t envision our future self,” says Joseph Coughlin, director of the AgeLab. “If everyone could wear AGNES, they would be in better touch with what their future self is, and what I would hope is they would invest in themselves physically [and] cognitively.” 

Prof. Canan Dagdeviren speaks with Bloomberg Businessweek Daily reporters Carol Massar and Tim Stenovec about her work developing conformable ultrasound technology aimed at enabling earlier breast cancer detection. “This technology can be a part of your personal bra, and you can wear it and while drinking your coffee within seconds, it can tell you [about] any anomaly with pinpoint accuracy,” Dagdeviren explains. 

Prof. Caitlin Mueller has been named Innovator of the Year by Architectural Record for her work advancing a “vision for building design and construction that unites these disciplines with computation to create structure that are sustainable, high performing, and delightful,” reports Architectural Record. “Her group develops computational design and digital fabrication methods that integrate efficiency, performance, material circularity, and architectural expression,” Architectural Record notes. “This work spans robotic assembly of optimized trusses, fabrication of low-cost earthen and concrete systems, and algorithmic strategies for reusing salvaged wood and reassembled concrete parts.” 

In an effort to better understand how protein language models (PLMs) think and better judge their reliability, MIT researchers applied a tool called sparse autoencoders, which can be used to make large language models more interpretable. The findings “may help scientists better understand how PLMs come to certain conclusions and increase researchers’ trust in them," writes Andrea Luis for The Scientist. 

MIT researchers have uncovered new evidence that suggests some of Earth’s first living creatures are ancestors of the modern sea sponge, reports Andrew Paul for Popular Science. The researchers identified 541 million-year-old chemical fossils embedded in sediment that they believe may indicate that some of Earth’s earliest creatures were the ancient relatives of today’s sea sponges. 

Noman Bashir, a fellow with MIT’s Climate and Sustainability Consortium, speaks with Smithsonian Magazine reporter Amber X. Chen about the impact of AI data centers on the country’s electric grid and infrastructure. Bashir notes “that the industry’s environmental impacts can also be seen farther up the supply chain,” writes Chen. “The GPUs that power A.I. data centers are made with rare earth elements, the extraction of which Bashir notes is resource intensive and can cause environmental degradation.” 

Fierce Biotech reporter Darren Incorvaia writes that a new study by MIT researchers demonstrates how potential NIH budget cuts could endanger the development of new medications. The researchers found that if the NIH budget had been 40% smaller from 1980 to 2007, the level of NIH cuts currently being proposed, “the science underlying numerous drugs approved in the 21st century would not have been funded,” Incorvaia explains. The findings suggest that “massive cuts of the kind that are being contemplated right now could endanger the intellectual foundations of the drugs of tomorrow,” explains Professor Pierre Azoulay. 

The MIT Museum presents “Remembering the Future,” a new installation by artist Janet Echelman in collaboration with Prof. Caitlin Mueller, reports Kat Barandy for DesignBoom. The installation suspends above the museum’s grand lobby and will be open to the public through fall 2027. “The work transforms climate data into a three-dimensional form that invites visitors to engage both visually and conceptually,” Barandy explains.

George Smoot '66, PhD '70, a recipient of the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work “finding the background radiation that finally pinned down the Big Bang Theory,” has died at age 80, reports the Associated Press. 

MIT has been named the number two college in the United States in U.S. News & World Report’s annual ranking, reports Alia Shoaib for Newsweek. “U.S. News & World Report ranks more than 1,700 colleges using a weighted formula that considers factors such as graduation and retention rates, faculty resources, academic reputation, financial resources and student selectivity,” explains Shoaib. 

Visiting Scholar Ariel Ekblaw SM '17, PhD '20 speaks with WBUR’s On Point host Meghna Chakrabarti about her academic career, the space industry and her new non-profit company the Aurelia Institute. The company is “dedicated to building humanity’s future in space for the benefit of the earth,” says Chakrabarti. Additionally, the company plans to use “space infrastructure, satellites, and large scale space structures in orbit to do really profound things for day-to-day life on Earth,” adds Ekblaw.