Boston 25 spotlights Vivian Chinoda '25, Alice Hall, Sofia Lara, and Sophia Wang '24 who have been named 2026 Rhodes Scholars. “The students will attend the University of Oxford as part of the Rhodes scholar program, which awards more than 100 scholarships worldwide each year for students to pursue two to three years of graduate studies.”
Vivian Chinoda '25, Alice Hall, Sofia Lara, and Sophia Wang '24 have been selected as 2026 Rhodes Scholars, reports Lila Hempel-Edgers for The Boston Globe. “It’s just a thrill and an inspiration to meet each one of them,” said Prof. Nancy Kanwisher, who co-chairs MIT’s Presidential Committee on Distinguished Fellowships. “You just can’t believe how accomplished they are and how thoughtful they are about the major problems facing the world.”
Prof. Linda Griffith speaks with Science Friday host Flora Lichtman about her work studying endometriosis. “I did a lot of things in the regenerative medicine space. But I had an epiphany that there’s so many chronic and inflammatory disease that we don’t know how to treat so I started building models of human organs and tissues in the lab using what we called microfluidic chips,” Griffith explains. “When I got asked about endometriosis, it was actually a perfect application for this kind of approach because we really need to study the lesions very carefully in the lab in ways that is very hard to study in patients.”
The MIT Health and Life Sciences Collaborative (MIT HEALS) launched the Fairbairn Menstruation Science Fund earlier this year as part of an effort aimed at improving women’s health, reports Zoë Corbyn for The Guardian. “This is frontier science,” says Prof. Linda Griffith. Corbyn also spotlights how Ridhi Tariyal MS '10 has co-founded NextGen Jane, a women’s healthcare startup that aims to gain better insight into women’s reproductive health by studying menstruation.
Prof. Linda Griffith and her colleagues have “developed a model of the human gut to study how the organ’s microbes interact with immune cells and regulate inflammation,” reports Gemma Conroy for Nature. Griffith and her team “have also created models for endometriosis and pancreatic cancer,” writes Conroy.
In an effort to better understand how protein language models (PLMs) think and better judge their reliability, MIT researchers applied a tool called sparse autoencoders, which can be used to make large language models more interpretable. The findings “may help scientists better understand how PLMs come to certain conclusions and increase researchers’ trust in them," writes Andrea Luis for The Scientist.
Prof. Linda Griffith speaks with Nature reporter Cassandra Willyard about her work developing lab-made organoids to help study the root causes of endometriosis. Griffith has been working to develop “a model of abnormal endometrial tissue that the researchers can use to test therapies for the condition,” writes Willyard. “Because blood vessels are crucial to maintaining this tissue, Griffith knew she wanted to include them. To do this, she and her colleagues placed the organoid on a microfluidic chip surrounded by cells that form blood vessels.”
Beth Pollack, a research scientist in the Department of Biological Engineering, speaks with The Guardian’s Science Weekly hosts Madeleine Finaly and Ian Sample about her research on chronic fatigue syndrome (MF CFS) and other chronic illnesses. “There are a number of interesting treatments addressing the different aspects of immune disfunction with different immunomodulators,” says Pollack.
Using generative AI, researchers at MT have designed new antibiotics to combat MRSA and gonorrhea, reports James Gallagher for the BBC. "We're excited because we show that generative AI can be used to design completely new antibiotics," says Prof. James Collins. "AI can enable us to come up with molecules, cheaply and quickly and in this way, expand our arsenal, and really give us a leg up in the battle of our wits against the genes of superbugs."
Strand Therapeutics, co-founded Jake Becraft PhD '19, has developed a programmable drug that could one day shrink tumors in cancer patients, reports Amy Feldman for Forbes. “It shocked even us,” says Becraft. “You hope something happens, but you don’t expect to see a huge response because these patients have already proven to have cancers so resistant to treatment.”
Researchers at MIT are working to advance our understanding of acute Lyme disease and long Covid, reports Brianna Abbott for The Wall Street Journal. “What we’re trying to do is measure everything,” said Principal Scientist Michal Caspi Tal. “I want to find a way to give people hope.”
Wall Street Journal reporter Dominique Mosbergen spotlights how Prof. James Collins and his lab have built their “own algorithms to trawl chemical databases, such as those of existing pharmaceutical drugs, for potential antibacterial compounds.” Collins’ His lab is “also experimenting with using generative AI to design completely new molecules that could kill bacteria,” writes Mosbergen.
Researchers from MIT and other institutions have uncovered new pathways, along with identifying genes, that may contribute to the development of a new class of drugs to treat Alzheimer’s disease, reports John R. Ellement for The Boston Globe. “The drugs currently approved to treat Alzheimer’s have not been as successful as hoped,” Ellement explains. “Those drugs tend to target amyloid plaques in the brain, but the new research suggests other areas to target.”
Tech Crunch reporter Tim De Chant spotlights Fieldstone Bio, an MIT startup that turns microbes into sensors to support agricultural and national security efforts. “Each strain is tailored to sense a particular compound, such as nitrogen on a farm field or TNT residue from a landmine,” explains De Chant. “After the microbes have some time to sense their environment — several hours to days, depending on the target — the company will have another drone snap photos of the area.”
Materials World reporter Sarah Morgan spotlights how MIT researchers have “combined the waterproof stickiness of mussel-inspired polymers with the germ-fighting properties of mucus-derived proteins, mucins, to form a cross-linking gel that strongly adheres to surfaces.” The new adhesive could be used to coat medical implants to prevent infection and bacteria build-up. Postdoc George Degen explains: “We demonstrate adhesion to wet tissue and metal-oxide surfaces, important substrates for biomedical applications. Moreover, our mucin-derived hydrogels discourage the formation of bacterial biofilms, raising the possibility of antifouling coatings.”