Lisa Su '90, SM '91, PhD '94, chair and CEO of Advanced Micro Devices, has been named Time’s CEO of the Year, reports Morgan Smith for CNBC. “Su is one of few Fortune 500 CEOs with a PhD,” explains Smith. “Her engineering background helped her spearhead some of the technological innovations — including a new faster CPU chip for computers — that drove AMD’s recent success.”
President Sally Kornbluth speaks with undergraduate student Emiko Pope for the MIT Admissions Blog about her personal interests, passions, and life at MIT. Sally “is proud of MIT and how it can provide real solutions to society’s problems,” writes Pope. “She loves that you can get a daily fix of science because you are surrounded by such amazing people and endeavors.”
Prof. Daron Acemoglu, one of the recipients of the 2024 Nobel Prize in economics, speaks with NPR Planet Money hosts Jeff Guo and Greg Rosalsky about the academic inspirations that led to his award-winning research studying the role of institutions in shaping economies. “In 1980, as I was in middle school, just the beginning of my seventh grade, Turkey suffered a big military coup,” explains Acemoglu. “There were soldiers everywhere, including in our school. Turkey was definitely not a democratic country at the time, and it was also suffering via a series of economic problems. I got interested in exactly these sets of issues.”
Liquid AI, an MIT startup, is developing technology that “holds the same promise of writing, analyzing, and creating content as its rivals while using far less computing power,” reports Aaron Pressman for The Boston Globe.
Researchers at MIT and the Center for Strategic and International Studies have used a tabletop exercise to determine whether a further build-up of US nuclear capabilities would impact China’s nuclear weapon use in Taiwan, reports Kathrin Hille for Financial Times. “The US has 600-plus tactical nuclear weapons, and it is modernizing their delivery means,” explains Principal Research Scientist Eric Heginbotham. “In the game, the one US team that employed tactical nuclear weapons used fewer than a dozen. In no cases did any of the participants ever say: ‘We need SLCM-N or some other system that is not in the inventory or being deployed under the current modernization plan.’”
Alumnus Charles Handy – a "writer, social philosopher and management theorist” – has died at age 92, reports Glenn Rifkin for The New York Times. Handy, “presciently imagined a brave new corporate world where employees worked remotely, jobs were outsourced and workers had ‘portfolio careers,’ working for themselves and contracting their skills to companies, explains Rifkin.
Alumnus Charles Handy, a “management guru” whose work “favored counseling over consulting for leaders,” has died at the age of 92, reports Andrew Hill for the Financial Times. Handy’s “many insights into organizations, offered in public lectures and a series of books and articles, were practical, prescient and often provocative,” writes Hill.
Hank Green - an online educator, author and Youtuber will deliver the 2025 OneMIT Commencement address, reports Molly Farrar for Boston.com. Green is “the creator of VidCon, the world’s largest annual gathering of digital content creators,” writes Farrar. “He and his brother also created SciShow and Crash Course, two YouTube education shows played in high school classrooms.”
A new study by researchers at MIT and elsewhere has found that “87% of people say employees in their organization are confused to a certain degree about where to turn for data and tech services and issues,” reports Rachel Curry for CNBC. “Most of the organizations whose leaders responded to the survey had multiple executive roles in the tech and data spaces,” explains Curry.
Physics World has selected two research advances by MIT physicists for its Top 10 Breakthroughs of the Year for 2024, reports Hamish Johnston for Physics World. Graduate student Andrew Denniston and his colleagues were honored for their work “being the first to unify two distinct descriptions of atomic nuclei,” which Johnston describes as a “major step forward in our understanding of nuclear structure and strong interactions.” MIT researchers were also featured for their work demonstrating quantum error correction on an atomic processor with 48 logical qubits, making it “far more likely that quantum computers will become practical problem-solving machines.”
Writing for Scientific American, former postdoctoral fellow Aza Allsop PhD '16 and his colleagues spotlight bias in the scientific community. “When the significant contributions of Black scientists are excluded, we all lose,” they write. “This is why it is time that awarding committees and beyond finally begin acknowledging the significant discoveries made by Black scientists that benefit all of humanity—and giving them the proper recognition they deserve.”
Deborah Blum, director of the Knight Science Journalism Program, shares advice she received from her grandmother on sharing compliments, New York Times reporter Sadie Stein writes. “My Kentucky grandmother used to say that the easiest way to make yourself happy is to make someone else happy,” shares Blum.
Deborah Blum, director of the Knight Science Journalism Program, shares advice she received from her grandmother on sharing compliments, New York Times reporter Sadie Stein writes. “My Kentucky grandmother used to say that the easiest way to make yourself happy is to make someone else happy,” shares Blum.
Joseph Coughlin, director of the MIT AgeLab, shares the importance of having conversations about intergenerational family wealth transfers to help avoid disputes in inheritances plans, report Anne Tergesen and Dalvin Brown for The Wall Street Journal. "The only way to avoid causing stress, surprise or anger to people is to have these discussions gradually over time," says Coughlin.
New research by graduate student William Parker SM '22 has found that two geomagnetic storms have led to the mass migrations of thousands of satellites in low Earth orbit, reports Jeff Foust for Space News. “This is a significant impact,” says Parker. “This is critical infrastructure to all of our space operations moving forward, and it will only become more important as time goes on.”