In the Media

Ariel Ekblaw, director of MIT’s Space Exploration Initiative, speaks with Denise Chow at NBC News about the increased opportunities in space and satellite research in recent decades. “If you were a Ph.D. student in the prior domain, it could have taken years and you may never have had a chance to actually deploy your research on the International Space Station,” said Ekblaw. “But now, within four to six years, we might do three or four missions to the International Space Station within that time.”

Prof. Alison Wendlandt speaks with Univ. of Michigan graduate student and C&EN guest writer Bec Roland about her journey to leading her own research lab and how being queer has been integral to that journey. “I think being different, whatever that means – in my case, being LGBTQ – has been like a superpower,” says Wendlandt. “It’s granted me the opportunity to reflect on my interests, my desires, and my life. It’s allowed me to pursue a career that’s very honest to my own needs.”

Prof. Jonathan Gruber speaks with Boston Public Radio hosts Margery Eagan and Jim Braude about his experience working on the Affordable Care Act over twelve years ago, and how he thinks health coverage can be improved moving forward.

TechCrunch reporter Brian Heater spotlights new MIT robotics research, including a team of CSAIL researchers “working on a system that utilizes a robotic arm to help people get dressed.” Heater notes that the “issue is one of robotic vision — specifically finding a method to give the system a better view of the human arm it’s working to dress.”

Qichao Hu ’07 - founder and CEO of SES, a battery research company and supplier to the electric vehicle industry - speaks with Wired reporter Omar L. Gallaga about electric vehicle batteries. “Huge battery innovations happen about every 30 years, according to HU, and the good news is we’re about due for the next evolution,” writes Gallaga

Boston Magazine reporter Scott Kearnan spotlights Clover, a farm-fresh restaurant and food truck, created by Ayr Muir BS ’00, SM ’01. “Clover is so confident about its commitment to only using fresh-from-the-farm produce that, believe it or not, it doesn’t have a single freezer in its restaurants,” writes Kearnan.

TechCrunch reporter Kyle Wiggers spotlights MIT startup Amplemarket, a sales enablement company, co-founded by João Batalha ’13, Luis Batalha and Micael Oliveira. “We’ve leveraged our combination of technical backgrounds and applied it to one of the oldest trades: sales,” says J. Batalha.

Newsha Ghaeli ’17 - president and co-founder of Biobot, a public health research, data and analytics firms that has developed and promoted wastewater surveillance technology - speaks with Vox reporter Muizz Akhtar about how wastewater surveillance can be used to predict and prepare for future pandemics. “Our vision is that this is a permanent infrastructure layer on our sewer systems, so that it becomes one of the core kinds of pandemic preparedness in this country and disease surveillance globally,” says Ghaeli.

The Boston Globe highlights Robert Buderi’s new book, “Where Futures Converge: Kendall Square and the Making of a Global Innovation Hub.” Buderi features the Future Founders Initiative, an effort by Prof. Sangeeta Bhatia, President Emerita Susan Hockfield and Prof. Emerita Nancy Hopkins aimed at increasing female entrepreneurship. 

STAT reporter Katie Palmer spotlights Principal Research Scientist Leo Anthony Celi’s research underscoring the importance of improving the diversity of datasets used to design and test clinical AI systems. “The biggest concern now is that the algorithms that we’re building are only going to benefit the population that’s contributing to the dataset,” says Celi. “And none of that will have any value to those who carry the biggest burden of disease in this country, or in the world.”

Chiamaka Agbasi-Porter, the K-12 STEM outreach coordinator for Lincoln Lab, speaks with CBS Boston about her mission to help inspire young people to pursue STEM interests through the Lincoln Laboratory Radar Introduction for Student Engineers (LLRISE) program. “I think of it as a community,” said Agbasi-Porter, “we are a village that is helping our kids advance and move forward in their careers.”

Arun Saigal SB ’13, MEng ’13 and WeiHua Li ’BS ’14 MA ’15 co-founded Thunkable, an online platform developed to make building mobile apps easier, writes Ingrid Lunden for TechCrunch. “Saigal said that its initial focus was on consumers, which in itself is another big concept of the moment, that of the creator economy and users – not professional publishers and others – creating the content that the mass market is consuming,” writes Lunden.

MIT researchers and two high school seniors have developed DualFair, a new technique for removing bias from a mortgage lending dataset, reports Hiawatha Bray for The Boston Globe. “When a mortgage-lending AI was trained using DualFair and tested on real-world mortgage data from seven US states,” writes Bray, “the system was less likely to reject applications of otherwise qualified borrowers because of their race, sex, or ethnicity.”

MIT startup ReadySet, co-founded by Alana Marzoev PhD ’18 and Jon Gjengset PhD ’20, provides database infrastructure to help developers build real-time applications, reports Kyle Wiggers for TechCrunch. “Rather than rebuilding these same broken systems, developers need solutions that slot into their existing infrastructure and achieve limitless read scaling,” says Marzoev. “With ReadySet, we aim to make the process of globally caching… query results as streamlined and automated as caching images in a content delivery system.”

Writing for The Los Angeles Times, Prof. Simon Johnson makes the case for imposing more stringent sanctions on Russia. “The war crimes committed by Russian forces at Bucha in Ukraine have brought greater clarity to economic sanctions,” writes Johnson. “What is in place now is insufficient and needs to be expanded.”