Forbes reporter Geri Stengel spotlights Black Opal Ventures, a women-led venture capital investment firm, founded by Tara Bishop '97 and Eileen Tanghal '97. “Whenever you see venture capital and tech, there are very few women,” says Tanghal. “It’s been my passion to bring more women into the venture capital ecosystem.”
Prof. Dimitris Bertsimas, vice provost for MIT Open Learning, speaks with Forbes contributor Aviva Legatt about AI usage among university students. “Universities have a responsibility to ensure students, faculty, and staff gain a strong foundation in AI’s concepts, opportunities, and risks so they can help solve society’s biggest challenges,” says Bertsimas.
Prof. Anant Agarwal speaks with Fortune reporter Nino Paoli about the benefits of a four-year college degree. “In this environment, learning deeply and building real expertise is more important than ever because the AI roles and applications are in the context of these other fields,” says Agarwal. “Degrees also future-proof your career by preparing you for the next big technology, whatever it might be.”
Boon Uranukul PhD '19 co-founded Terra Oleo, a startup working to “develop microbes that can transform agricultural waste into a variety of oils,” reports Tim De Chant for TechCrunch. “The company selected three yeast species based on the microbes’ abilities to produce certain oils when fed with organic waste, including from agriculture and biodiesel production,” explains de Chant. “It then used genetic and metabolic engineering to boost and tune their ability to produce certain fats and triglycerides.”
Edwin Chen '08 speaks with Forbes reporter Pheobe Liu about his journey to founding Surge AI, a startup that “helps tech companies get the high-quality data they need to improve their AI models.”
Richard Locke PhD '89, the newly appointed dean of the Sloan School of Management, speaks with Bloomberg reporter Bill Donahue about his goals for his new role and his desire to help Sloan’s “brilliant, curious students” address urgent global problems. “For me, working at a place like MIT is a completely unexpected gift,” says Locke. “Every single day, I come to work with wonder and happiness. I’m in a world that I never imagined I would ever be in.”
Boston Globe reporter Jon Chesto spotlights the kickoff event for the new MIT-GE Vernova Energy and Climate Alliance, which will “fund research initiatives, fellowships, and other programs with an eye toward improving energy technologies and decarbonization.” GE Vernova CEO Scott Strazik emphasized that he has been impressed with the passion and talent for clean-tech among the students at MIT and other universities. “I started these discussions with the objective that we should inspire future leaders to come into our industry and ideally come to our company,” Strazik said. “They’ve probably inspired us more than we’ve inspired them.”
Gizmodo reporter Gayoung Lee writes that MIT researchers created “lab quakes” or miniature versions of earthquakes in a controlled setting and found that “anywhere between 68 and 98% of the energy goes into generating heat around a quake’s epicenter.” The findings “could help inform the creation of a physical model for earthquake dynamics or seismologists’ efforts to pick out regions most vulnerable to earthquakes.”
WBZ NewsRadio reporter Emma Friedman visits the MIT AgeLab to get a firsthand look at the body suit AgeLab researchers developed to replicate what aging feels like. The Age Gain Now Empathy System or AGNES suit “mimics the visual capability, motor ability, and strength of people in their 70s and 80s,” Friedman explains. Graduate student Sophia Ashebir notes that “essentially what AGNES is, is a series of equipment that you can put on to gain empathy for and experience what an older version of yourself might be like.”
Earlier this week, Biogen celebrated the groundbreaking for the company’s new headquarters in MIT’s Kendall Common development, reports Catherine Carlock for The Boston Globe. “When a company as influential as Biogen breaks ground on the new global headquarters, it is an unmistakable vote of confidence — confidence in Massachusetts, confidence in Cambridge, and confidence in Kendall Square, and confidence in the future," said MIT President Sally Kornbluth. “It is on us, on us in Massachusetts, to find new ways to make sure this amazing ecosystem can maintain its record of trailblazing science and transformative treatments and cures.”
Boston Business Journal reporter Grant Welker spotlights Biogen's groundbreaking ceremony for its new headquarters in MIT’s Kendall Common development. "This area is the most perfect place to do it, because you have some of the highest levels of ingenuity, innovation and energy around the biotech industry, and not to mention partnerships with academic excellence," said Nicole Murphy, Biogen’s executive vice president for pharmaceutical operations and technology." It was absolutely critical to why we feel we want to be here."
MIT’s Sloan School of Management has been recognized as one of the top ten best MBA programs in the world, according to LinkedIn’s 2025 rankings, reports Kamaron McNahir for CNBC.
New York Times reporter Catherine Porter spotlights Roofscapes, an MIT startup founded by Olivier Faber MArch '23, Tim Cousin MArch '23 and Eytan Levi MArch/MSRED '21 that aims to transform the zinc-roofed buildings in Paris into accessible green spaces as part of an effort to decrease building temperatures while improving quality of life. “We have an opportunity with all these untouched surfaces to do something that is virtually impossible anywhere else in a city like Paris,” explains Levi. “There’s a new way you can live.”
Prof. Regina Barzilay speaks with Newsweek reporter Katherine Fung about the how hospitals around the world around increasingly adopting new technologies. “Countries with a centralized healthcare system, or centralized healthcare records, can do a much better job because they have so much data and so much ability to monitor what AI tools are doing," says Barzilay.
Prof. Nergis Mavalvala, dean of the MIT School of Science, joins Bob McDonald of CBC’s “Quirks & Quarks” to discuss how 10 years after LIGO’s first detection of gravitational waves the observatories are still “helping scientists better understand the life cycles of stars, the nature of gravity, and transforming the way we explore the farthest reaches of space.” Mavalvala shares: "Scientists have been able to design and construct these instruments that are capable of measuring imperceptibly small changes in spacetime distance, and in the past 10 years the sensitivity of these instruments has improved. That’s what is allowing us to make greater discoveries.”