Alumni/ae

Boston Globe reporter Jon Chesto spotlights the MIT Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship’s delta v startup accelerator program, which is designed to help early-stage startups find success in the Boston area. With financial support from Klaviyo co-founders Ed Hallen MBA ’12, and Andrew Bialecki, the program will “help support more customizing, to better tailor the program for each entrepreneur, as well as a broadening of its professional network, to support mentorship from industry veterans for the participating startups,” writes Chesto. 

Guide Labs, co-founded by Julius Adebayo SM ’15, SM ’16, PhD ’22, has debuted a large language model designed to make “its actions easily interpretable,” reports Tim Fernholz for Tech Crunch. “Every token produced by the model can be traced back to its origins in the LLM’s training data,” explains Fernholz. 

Prof. Anette “Peko” Hosoi and Jerry Lu MFin '24 speak with Eli Chavez of the Boston Business Journal about their work using AI technologies to help athletes improve their performance. Lu notes that the AI tool he created for figure skating allows athletes to not only evaluate themselves, “but it also lets you analyze pretty much everybody in history: your idols, your mentors, your coaches, or even your competitors, and you can make these measurements without having to ask them to do anything.”  

Prof. Anette “Peko” Hosoi and Jerry Lu MFin ’24 speak with Edgar B. Herwick III, host of GBH’s Curiosity Desk, about their work at the intersection of sports and technology. “We founded the [MIT] Sports Lab about 10 years ago and the idea was to give MIT students and MIT faculty a chance to apply their technical expertise to problems in sports, to advance the state-of-the-art, to help athletes achieve the maximum that they can achieve,” says Hosoi. 

Forbes reporter Jeff Kauflin spotlights Andres Santos MBA '21, co-founder of Común, as one of the six entrepreneurs making their debut on the Forbes Fintech 50 list. Común is a “digital bank for Hispanic immigrants,” writes Kauflin. “Customers can open checking accounts through an app using a passport or ID from their home country and use it for direct deposit, a debit card and international money transfers.” 

Increase, a startup founded by alumnus Darragh Buckley, has been named to the Forbes The Future of Business to Business Banking: Fintech 50 2026 list, reports Brandon Kochkodin for Forbes. “Increase provides banking infrastructure that lets fintechs and businesses move money, store deposits and access payment rails without building direct bank connections,” writes Kochkodin.

Kalshi and Común, two startups founded by MIT alumni, have been named to the 2026 Forbes Fintech 50 list. Kalshi is a prediction market that “had 1.2 million active users in 2025, and total trading volume hit $24 billion” while Común “offers digital banking geared toward Hispanic immigrants,” reports Jeff Kauflin for Forbes. 

Mitali Chowdhury '24 has been named a 2026 Gates Cambridge Scholar, reports Michael T. Nietzel for Forbes. Beginning this fall, Chowdhury will pursue “a PhD in Sensor Technologies and Applications [at the University of Cambridge]” explains Nietzel. “Her research will focus on CRISPR-based diagnostics to assess antimicrobial resistance, with the goal of expanding equitable access to health care.” 

Jerry Lu MFin ’24 speaks with Fast Company reporter Grace Snelling about his work developing a new AI tool that can be used to help figure skaters land their jumps and Olympic audiences better understand just how challenging a quadruple Axel is. “Some of the artistic sports were missing this data-driven storytelling ability—if you watch hockey on TV, it looks slow, but if you watch it in person, it looks fast,” Lu explains. 

President Sally Kornbluth and MIT Corporation member Noubar Afeyan PhD '87 served as panelists at the 2026 Davos Imagination in Action event to discuss “upholding scientific principles in the era of LLMs,” reports John Werner for Forbes. “We want all of our students to have a foundational facility with AI,” said Kornbluth. “What we want them to know, now, is how they can really be passionate about the content that they care about, whether it's materials design, whether it's aerospace, whether it's biochemical innovation, and understanding the many ways in which AI can help in that innovation.”

Nithya Raman MCP '08 has announced her decision to run for Los Angeles Mayor, reports Jill Cowan and Shawn Hubler for The New York Times. Raman “represents a district that encompasses a diverse array of neighborhoods, including some where immigrants live in dense apartments and some in the fast-growing San Fernando Valley, where wealthy Hollywood executives live in hillside bungalows,” they write. “That diversity, Ms. Raman has said, has given her unique insight into the needs of vastly different communities in the city of nearly four million.” 

Prof. Marzyeh Ghassemi and Monica Agrawal PhD '23 speak with Boston Globe reporter Hiawatha Bray about the risks on relying solely on AI for medical information. “What I’m really, really worried about is economically disadvantaged communities,” says Ghassemi. “You might not have access to a health care professional who you can quickly call and say, ‘Hey… Should I listen to this?’”  

Jennifer Mnookin, PhD ’99, has been named the president of Columbia University, effective July 1, 2026. Mnookin earned “a doctorate in the history and social study of science and technology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her academic work focuses on evidence, proof and decision making in the legal system,” writes Sharon Otterman for the New York Times.  

Graduate student Stephen Casper speaks with Wired reporter Matt Burgess about the rise of “deepfake video abuse and its role in nonconsensual intimate imagery generation.” “This ecosystem is built on the back of open-source models,” says Casper. “Oftentimes it’s just an open-source model that has been used to develop an app that then a user uses.” 

Fast Company reporter Adele Peters spotlights Electrified Thermal Solutions, an MIT startup that has developed a new “thermal battery” that could be used to help power factories manufacturing energy-intensive materials like steel and cement. “The battery uses power from the grid to heat its custom bricks when electricity is cheap,” explains Peters. “When a factory needs hot air later, it’s provided by the superheated bricks.”