In the Media

Dr. Warren Zapol ’62, an anesthesiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital who made breakthroughs in studying the impact of inhaled nitric oxide, died on Dec. 14, 2021, at the age of 79, reports Bryan Marquard for The Boston Globe. “Warren’s discovery and demonstration that nitric oxide is a highly effective therapy for pulmonary hypertension in newborns and in adults is one of the most significant achievements in recent intensive care medicine history,” says Prof. Emery N. Brown, director of the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology program.

Undergraduate Aniket Dehadrai represented MIT in the Jeopardy! National College Championship tournament, reports Breanna Kovatch for The Boston Globe. Dehadrai was among “36 students from 36 colleges who competed in the special two-week tournament,” writes Kovatch.

Good Morning America reporters Shivani Parmar, Sara Russell and Zohreen Shah spotlight Payal Kadakia ’05 and her new book, “LifePass: Drop Your Limits, Rise to Your Potential.” Parmar, Russell and Shah note that in Kadakia's book, she writes that "your intuition will tell you if the time is right to meet a specific goal and to listen to the inner voice and figure out what goals you want to focus on.”

Provost Martin Schmidt speaks with Tech reporter Caroline Powers about his proudest accomplishments as MIT’s senior academic officer, what he will miss most about MIT and the importance of integrating ethics into engineering education. “I’m going to miss the interactions I’ve had with the students and my faculty colleagues,” notes Schmidt. “Part of the joy of being here has been making those relationships and working together.”

Wired reporter Gregory Barber spotlights Prof. Desirée Plata’s work developing a new process for removing methane emissions using zeolite. Plata’s team is currently working on converting their system to a filter that air can be pushed through. “Plata wants to install the filters in places where methane is concentrated, but there’s not enough of it to burn,” Barber explains.

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala MCP ’78, PhD ’81, director-general of the World Trade Organization (WTO), will address the Class of 2022 at MIT’s Commencement exercises, reports the AP. Okonjo-Iweala, the first woman and first African to lead the WTO, noted that: “From the warm and caring welcome of the International Students Office on my first day of graduate school in 1976, to my tough but equally caring doctoral dissertation committee that propelled me to graduation in 1981, my memories of my time at MIT are spectacularly positive.”

Popular Science reporter Shi En Kim spotlights how MIT scientists created a new plastic material with the strength of steel. “This substance could be used as protective coatings for metal surfaces, such as the finish on cars, or as filters for purifying water,” writes Kim.

MIT Press and Brown University Library have announced a new book series called “On Seeing," reports Nina MacLaughlin for The Boston Globe. The series is “'committed to centering underrepresented perspectives in visual culture,’ exploring places where visual culture intersects with questions of race, care, decolonization, privilege, and precarity,” writes MacLaughlin.

Assia Boundaoui, a fellow at the MIT Open Documentary Lab, writes for The Los Angeles Times about her experience as a Muslim American filmmaker. “Despite the many ways we have been marginalized within the film industry, Muslim and Middle Eastern filmmakers will continue to tell our stories – stories where our humanity is assumed, not a subject of debate,” writes Boundaoui.

New York Times reporter Steve Lohr spotlights how the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Omidyar Network have made a gift to help establish a new program that will analyze forces contributing to the erosion of job quality and labor market opportunity for workers without college degrees. “Markets are terrific, but we have to overcome this notion that ‘markets are autonomous — so just leave it to the market,’” says Prof. David Autor. “That fatalism is a decision.”

Boston.com reporter Marta Hill spotlights how MIT scientists used a new polymerization technique to create a material that serves as both a durable coating and strong structural element. “We now have a completely new way of making materials as two-dimensional polymers, [which] means we’re going to get new properties,” says Prof. Michael Strano. “This material that we’ve made happens to be pretty exceptional. It’s very strong and very light. It’s unusual for a polymer.”

Recent MIT research has found a high number of errors in public datasets often used for training models, reports David Talby for Forbes. “An average of 3.3% errors were found in the test sets of 10 of the most widely used computer vision, natural language processing (NLP) and audio datasets,” writes Talby.

Researchers have placed an upper mass limit on the subatomic particle called neutrino, reports Robert Lea for Newsweek. “The idea of using radioactive decays to measure neutrino masses is as old as the idea of the neutrino itself, says Prof. Joseph Formaggio. “But only now do we have the capabilities to make use of the techniques to extra the neutrino mass with such precision.”

Bloomberg reporter Ben Holland spotlights “The Work of the Future: Building Better Jobs in an Age of Intelligent Machines” – a new book written by Prof. David Autor, Prof. David Mindell and Elizabeth Reynolds PhD ’10 – about the future of job mobility and social safety nets in the United States.

Thanks to its affordability and cross-generational appeal, pickleball is becoming an increasingly popular sport, reports Shannon Mullen for NPR. “I think if pickleball, in its own humble way, can continue to grow its participation and find ways to make the sport a compelling fan product,” says senior lecturer Ben Shields, in "10, 20 years it could be a very viable competitor in the global sports industry."