In the Media

NPR’s Greg Rosalsky explains how Robert Hall PhD ’67 and Michael Woodford PhD ’83, this year’s Nobel Prize winners in economics, helped lay the groundwork for New Keynesian economics. “Hall and Woodford helped rebuild macroeconomics around the decisions of individual people and businesses,” writes Rosalsky. “Hall broke new ground in understanding how people's expectations about the future shape their spending today. Woodford built on that work, developing a framework that combined forward-looking spending decisions with sticky prices.” 

MIT spinout Cambridge Heavy Industries is developing a desktop-sized fusion reactor that can enable 50 to 80 experiments per day, writes TechCrunch’s Tim De Chant. “Cambridge Heavy’s fusion reactor uses lasers to compress a fuel target, similar to the groundbreaking experiment that proved controlled fusion reactions could produce more power than they consume,” notes De Chant. “But unlike other inertial confinement designs, Cambridge Heavy’s minimizes the number of lasers required to spark fusion.”  

MIT startup LNK Energies has created a system to efficiently convert heavy-duty trucks from diesel to hydrogen, “slashing pollution and costs while shielding operators from the price spikes that result from geopolitical instability,” writes Tim De Chant for TechCrunch. “A lot of the reactors that LOHC (Liquid organic hydrogen carriers) companies have today are really large. They’re about the size of a shipping container,” says Alexis Huynh ‘24, cofounder of LNK. “We have shrunk that basically to the size of a mini fridge.” 

Robert Hall PhD ’67 and Michael Woodford PhD ’83 have won the 2026 Nobel economics prize for their work “developing models that help central bankers and finance ministers to stabilize their countries, avoiding long recessions and runaway inflation,” writes reporter Graeme Wearden for The Guardian. “The laureates’ work has provided us with a stable theoretical foundation for the models that are now used by central banks and governments around the world,” says John Hassler, chair of the Nobel Committee. “With them, we are better equipped to deal with shocks in the economy, such as energy crises or sudden changes in how much households consume.” 

Forbes’ Michael T. Nietzel spotlights Robert Hall PhD ’67 and Michael Woodford PhD ’83, who were awarded the 2026 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for their work on economic stabilization policies. “The work of Hall and Woodford has proved beneficial for managing economic shocks like those from the pandemic and the energy crises of recent years,” Nietzel writes. “While recessions and episodes of high inflation have not disappeared, they tend to be less long-lasting.”  

Prof. Ankur Moitra and Prof. John Urschel share their thoughts with Forbes’ Alex Knapp about OpenAI releasing more than 700 math preprint papers online. “We’re used to landmark results being accompanied by new insights and theories,” writes Moitra. “But these feel different. The claims are spectacular, the papers are incomprehensible and there’s no punchline in sight that explains why the mysteries suddenly unraveled.” Adds Urschel: “It’s obvious that how we do and evaluate mathematics is going to have to change. What I think is constant is the fundamental idea of understanding that underpins our profession. And I’m excited to learn from these breakthroughs.” 

The newly renovated, historic Metropolitan Warehouse, home to MIT’s School of Architecture + Planning “has become a teaching tool” for students who can look up at features such as the “cutaways of the terra cotta subway arches vaulting across the old building’s ceilings” and “understand what structural engineers were thinking 130 years ago,” writes Bloomberg’s Anthony Flint. “The whole multiyear process for rehabbing the Met has been left delightfully legible.”  

Using a technique based on Raman microscopy, MIT researchers have found a way to detect senescent cells, “zombie cells” that accumulate as tissues age, without destroying them, writes reporter Eric Ralls for Earth.com. “If the approach eventually works in living people, researchers could gain a way to track senescent cells over time without repeatedly removing tissue,” notes Ralls. “That could help scientists understand how these cells contribute to aging and whether treatments designed to eliminate them are working.” 

Forbes’ Lisa Chambers highlights MIT as one of the “12 top colleges reinventing education for the AI era.” “At Forbes’ No. 1-ranked college in the nation—and one of the world’s leading technology schools—AI is hardly confined to a single degree,” writes Chambers. “MIT’s undergraduate offerings range from machine learning, computer vision and natural language processing to robotics, deep-learning hardware and AI applications in biology and medicine.”  

In an interview with Bloomberg, Prof. Justin Solomon discusses how mathematicians are responding to advances in AI in the wake of an AI platform solving the Navier-Stokes problem. “The really interesting part [of proof writing] is the modeling and figuring out which questions to ask and what insights they bring us to the universe, and the AI tools are not doing that,” says Solomon. “Writing the prompts is very much what we’ve been teaching our students to do for centuries now, and that skill, I think, persists.” 

Prof. Pat Pataranutaporn and graduate student Manuel Cherep speak to the Scientific American’s Mary Randolph about companies creating AI agents to assist users in personal tasks. “We have this narrative crisis about AI right now. There’s two opposite visions of the future, and while people worry about AI,” says Pataranutaporn, “there’s this cute AI tool that’s being released.” 

Boston Globe reporter Jon Chesto spotlights the fall fair event held as part of the MIT x GE Vernova Energy & Climate Alliance, during which, GE Vernova CEO Scott Strazik shared his enthusiasm for hiring MIT graduates. “Something we talk a lot about inside Vernova is the world is changing very quickly but we need to change quicker and even faster than that so we can lead in the world,” says Strazik. “Over the last year-plus on this campus, we see a lot of opportunities for us to get better through bringing you into the organization.”  

Christina Qi ‘13 speaks to Entrepreneur’s Sherin Shibu about her experience starting her own hedge fund as an undergraduate, and co-founding and serving as the CEO of Databento, a market data platform. Qi encourages founders to support one another: “You can succeed and raise each other up and support each other, even as competitors in this industry,” she says. “That is absolutely possible. That’s what I have done and strive to do with a lot of our competitors in this space, with other founders.” 

Prof. Virginia Vassilevska Williams speaks to the Scientific American’s Peter Hall and Joseph Howlett about AI assisting in faster matrix multiplications. “Matrix multiplication is needed all over the place,” says Williams. “But also, its complexity is one of the great mysteries in computer science. In a maybe diabolical sense, the advance on matrix multiplication can be seen as an attempt by the LLMs to speed themselves up.”  

The New York Times’ Siobhan Roberts highlights Prof. Frank Wilczek’s 1973 discovery of asymptotic freedom, a physical property that “allowed physicists to better understand the nuclear force,” according to Edward Witten at the Institute for Advanced Study, that may help solve the Yang-Mills Millennium Prize Problem. The discovery “indicated that proving the existence of quantum Yang-Mills theory in four-dimensional spacetime was central to understanding the mathematical framework of modern subatomic physics.”