Ron Mott of NBC News reports on the MIT football team and its first undefeated season. “It’s not hard to motivate them because they are very intelligent, very motivated, very passionate about what they are trying to accomplish in every facet of their lives,” says Engineers Head Coach Chad Martinovich.
When students at MIT banded together in 1978 to form a football team, another group of students came together to start the Institute’s marching band, writes Ben Cohen for The Wall Street Journal. “You have to have a marching band if you have a football team,” said marching band co-founder Tom Gaul.
Rheana Murray of ABC News spotlights the undefeated MIT football team. "It's nice to see our players get this kind of attention for what they're doing on the field because they are all-stars, if you will, off the field," says Head Coach Chad Martinovich. "I am really proud of them and happy for them."
Margot Sanger-Katz of The New York Times writes about Prof. Amy Finkelstein’s work “trying to help researchers find rigorous ways to evaluate new approaches to the health delivery system — questions about what sorts of services to offer different patients, financing methods for care, or other such questions.”
Financial Times reporter John Authers writes about a new study, co-authored by MIT Professor Evan Apfelbaum, which found that diversity among stock market traders increased pricing accuracy. “It’s not about diversity boosting performance, it’s about homogeneity tanking it,” says Apfelbaum of the study.
“Really it’s a tribute to the kids on the roster, the seniors in particular. When they came in as freshmen, they were 2-7 and they’ve helped really improve the program each year, along with the three recruiting classes since then,” says Head Coach Chad Martinovich of the MIT football team’s perfect season.
Graduate student Kevin Lu speaks with Heidi Legg of BetaBoston about his work transforming the way that we consume information. “We want to democratize data visualization so that anyone with data can map an image that explains things,” says Hu.
Cory Bennett of The Hill writes about a broad effort to tackle cybersecurity challenges at MIT, Stanford and Berkeley. “MIT will examine the immediate policy concerns, such as how to protect vulnerable financial and medical data, as well as emerging technologies like self-driving cars and drones,” explains Bennett.
In a piece for Scientific American, Ryan Bradley examines how MIT researchers have developed a new method to control cells by squeezing them. The work, which is being commercialized as a company called SQZ Biotech, was named one of 10 World Changing ideas by Scientific American.
Caroline Fairchild of Fortune speaks with Professor Cynthia Brazeal about women and entrepreneurship. “The world would certainly be a better place if we had more women entrepreneurs,” says Breazeal. “Women are going to bring a different angle to startups.”
Sam Gardner writes for Fox Sports about the MIT football team’s first undefeated season. “Academics are always going to be the most important thing at this place, but you can excel in other things and be an MIT student,” says Coach Chad Martinovich.
WBUR’s Deborah Becker and Lynn Jolicoeur report on the new MIT-MGH partnership aimed at developing better tools to treat disease. Prof. Arup Chakraborty hopes the collaboration will allow researchers to take risks. “Safe ideas are often not the transformative ones,” he says.
Writing for The New York Times, Michael Cooper reports on Prof. Tod Machover’s new work about Detroit, “Symphony in D.” “I look forward to working with Detroiters from all backgrounds to create a collective musical portrait of this exciting moment in the city’s history, when everything is being rethought and anything is possible,” says Machover.
BostInno’s Elise Harmon writes that a $15 million grant from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to MIT could “help pave the way for a comprehensive cybersecurity policy.” The gift to MIT is part of $45 million in total to MIT, Stanford and UC Berkeley as part of the foundation’s Cyber Initiative.
Forbes reporter Susan Adams examines a new study co-authored by MIT Prof. Evan Apfelbaum that looks at how diversity impacts the performance of stock traders. The researchers compared groups of ethnically homogenous and diverse traders and found that “traders in the diverse group did a 58% better job at correctly pricing assets.”