MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Undergraduate students Avani Ahuja '26, Julianna Lian '26, Jacqueline Prawira '26, and Alex Tang '26 have been honored as recipients of the Barry Goldwater Scholarship for the 2025-2026 academic year, reports Vivian Hir for The Tech. “Established by Congress in 1986, the Barry Goldwater Scholarship financially supports talented college sophomores and juniors who plan to pursue research careers in the natural sciences, mathematics, or engineering,” explains Hir. 

Dr. Mallika Marshall joins CBS Boston to discuss E-BAR, a new mobile robot designed to physically support the elderly and prevent them from falling as they move around their homes. Marshall notes that E-BAR could also “lift someone from sitting to standing or vice versa, and catch someone safely by rapidly inflating side airbags if they begin to fall.” 

Prof. Nelson Repenning and Don Kieffer, a senior lecturer at MIT Sloan, speak with Boston Herald reporter Vicki Salemi about how spring-cleaning strategies can be applied to organizing work, from handling emails and meeting requests to tackling new assignments. “First, most people take on too many tasks at once and start those tasks before they are ready,” says Repenning. “We would never let a surgeon do three procedures at once or start operating before all the equipment and people were in place, but knowledge workers do this every day.”

Tech Crunch reporter Tim De Chant spotlights Fieldstone Bio, an MIT startup that turns microbes into sensors to support agricultural and national security efforts. “Each strain is tailored to sense a particular compound, such as nitrogen on a farm field or TNT residue from a landmine,” explains De Chant. “After the microbes have some time to sense their environment — several hours to days, depending on the target — the company will have another drone snap photos of the area.” 

Prof. Carlo Ratti, curator of the 2025 Venice Biennale, speaks with Archinect reporter Niall Patrick Walsh about his vision for the biennale as a “living laboratory from which ideas and research can emerge to guide the evolution of the built environment.” Says Ratti: “We are hoping to use the biennale to convey the message that architecture is about survival. Architecture is central to how we can move from climate mitigation to adaptation. If we can use the biennale as a way to reorient how we work and practice, that will be its most important legacy.”

Materials World reporter Sarah Morgan spotlights how MIT researchers have “combined the waterproof stickiness of mussel-inspired polymers with the germ-fighting properties of mucus-derived proteins, mucins, to form a cross-linking gel that strongly adheres to surfaces.” The new adhesive could be used to coat medical implants to prevent infection and bacteria build-up. Postdoc George Degen explains: “We demonstrate adhesion to wet tissue and metal-oxide surfaces, important substrates for biomedical applications. Moreover, our mucin-derived hydrogels discourage the formation of bacterial biofilms, raising the possibility of antifouling coatings.” 

Prof. Carlos Portela and postdoc James Surjadi speaks with TechBriefs reporter Andrew Corselli about their work developing a new metamaterial that is both strong and stretchy. “We have demonstrated the concept with these polymeric materials and, from here, we see a couple of opportunities,” Surjadi explains. “One is extending this to more brittle material systems. The real dream will be to be able to do this with glasses, other ceramics, or even metals — things that normally we don't expect to deform a lot before they break. Brittle materials are the perfect candidates for us to try to make into woven-type architectures.” 

MIT researchers have developed a superconducting circuit that can increase the speed of quantum processing, reports Aamir Khollam for Interesting Engineering. “This device is a superconducting circuit designed to produce extremely strong nonlinear interactions between particles of light (photons) and matter (qubits),” explains Khollam. “This breakthrough could make operations up to 10 times faster, bringing fault-tolerant, real-world quantum computing a major step closer.”   

Prof. John Urschel speaks with Guardian reporter Rich Tenorio about his decision to call an audible and leave his career as a guard for the Baltimore Ravens to focus on his love for math as a student and then a professor at MIT. “I realized I was missing the academic environment,” he says. “I missed talking math with people, learning things, being around other people who like … math-related issues."

Prof. Christopher Knittel joins the Marketplace podcast “Make Me Smart” to discuss how the U.S. can be in the best position for global energy dominance. “The world is switching to electric vehicles, the world is switching to solar and wind,” says Knittel. “And the less we do domestically, the less capability we build domestically to provide those clean energy resources, the worse off our industries will be in the future.”

A study by Prof. Rebecca Saxe and her colleagues has found that the medial prefrontal cortex in infants is active when exposed to faces, reports Elizabeth Hlavinka for Salon. “Maybe it’s not that [at] first babies do visual processing and only later are connected to social meaning,” says Saxe. “Maybe these brain regions are active because babies are responding to the social meaning of people and faces as early on as we can measure their brains.”