Alumni/ae

Arthur Musah '04, MEng '05 and graduate student Philip Abel Adama speak with WBUR host Tiziana Dearing about Musah’s documentary, “Brief Tender Light,” which follows the lives of four African-born MIT students, who “were driven to study in the U.S. and create change at home.” Musah explains, “I made this film because I felt having gone through the experience of studying in the U.S. and gone through a transformative experience, I felt that there were questions that were unanswered that I didn’t know I would have after the experience and so it was a way to go back and answer those questions or look for answers.” 

Milena Pagán '11 bringing her Providence-based bagel shop, Rebelle, to Kendall Square this winter, reports Kara Baskin for The Boston Globe. “Pagán was a 2023 Best Chef: Northeast James Beard semifinalist for her Puerto Rican café, Little Sister, also based in Providence,” writes Baskin.

Arvid Lunnemark '22, Michael Truell '22, Sualeh Asif '22, and Aman Sanger '22 co-founded Anysphere, a startup building an “‘AI-native’” software development environment, called Cursor,” reports Kyle Wiggers for TechCrunch. “In the next several years, our mission is to make programming an order of magnitude faster, more fun and creative,” says Truell. “Our platform enables all developers to build software faster.”

Curtis Northcutt SM '17, PhD '21, Jonas Mueller PhD '18, and Anish Athalye SB '17, SM '17, PhD '23 have co-founded Cleanlab, a startup aimed at fixing data problems in AI models, reports Alex Konrad for Forbes. “The reality is that every single solution that’s data-driven — and the world has never been more data-driven — is going to be affected by the quality of the data,” says Northcutt.

Quaise Energy co-founder Carlos Araque BS '01 MS '02 speaks with PBS Energy Switch host Scott Tinker about the future of geothermal energy. [Geothermal is “truly everywhere so it’s not a resource uncertainty, like there is with oil and gas, there’s always heat, but the technological gap prevents us from getting to it,” says Araque. These gaps “are the one caveat in unlocking this resource for everybody.”

Sonita Lontoh MLOG '04 has been named to the San Francisco Business Times list of the 2023 most influential women, reports Simon Campbell for San Francisco Business Times. “As a first-generation immigrant from Indonesia, who grew up in a diverse environment with family and friends of different ethnic and religious backgrounds, and who came to the United States alone as a teenager and built a technology career in Silicon Valley, I believe my upbringing and life experiences have enabled me to develop a truly diverse and global perspective,” says Lontoh.

Jasmina Aganovic ’09 founded Future Society, a brand that uses sequenced DNA from extinct flowers to create new scents, reports Celia Shatzman for Forbes. “[With] plants that are from another time, never before have we been able to time travel through smell,” says Aganovic. “But now we can do that, thanks specifically to DNA sequencing. It’s an example of where we're starting off with this concept of limitless nature. It isn't just about stories; it's also about performance.”

Senior Lecturer and Senior Research Associate Fred Salvucci BS '61 SM '62 speaks with GBH’s The Big Dig Podcast host Ian Coss about his role in Boston’s “Big Dig” project. “The idea for the Big Dig began with an unlikely friendship,” explains Coss. “During the highway debates in the early 70s, Fred Salvucci – one of the highway opponents – went to a ton of meetings. And across the table at many of those meetings was a man named Bill Reynolds; he was there to represent the road builders.”

Peter Mui ’82 founded FixIt Clinic, a nonprofit which hosts “community events where volunteer fixers are matched with those in need of a repair,” reports Veronique Greenwood for The Boston Globe. “To Mui, now a hardware and software engineer in Berkeley, Calif., throwaway culture encourages a devaluing of our own lives,” writes Greenwood. “It took hours to earn the money to buy something. If someone fails to even look for a repair, how little must that time mean, in the end?”

In an article for Forbes, Lecturer Guadalupe Hayes-Mota SB '08, SM '16, MBA '16 explores the “strategies to enhance supply chain visibility in biopharma.” “As the biopharmaceutical industry continues to grow and evolve, the supply chain's role becomes ever more critical,” writes Hayes-Mota. “Investing in these detailed strategies ensures resilience and positions companies for growth and innovation in a rapidly changing landscape.”

WBZ News Radio’s Emma Friedman spotlights the #IfThenSheCan Exhibit at this year’s Cambridge Science Festival, which features 30, 3-D printed orange statues of women innovators in science, technology, engineering and math, six of whom are MIT affiliates.

Researchers from Atlantic Quantum, an MIT startup building quantum computers, have published new research showing “the architecture of the circuits underlying its quantum computer produces far fewer errors than the industry standard,” reports Rashi Shrivastava for Forbes.

STAT reporter Annalisa Merelli writes that the 2023 Lasker Award has been given to Prof. James Fujimoto, research affiliate Eric Swanson SM ’84 and David Huang PhD ’93 for their work advancing the diagnosis of eye disease. Fujimoto, Swanson and Huang developed “optical coherence tomography (OCT) — the first noninvasive technology allowing doctors to see high-resolution images of the retina.”

Prof. James Fujimoto, research affiliate Eric Swanson SM ’84 and David Huang PhD ’93 have won a Lasker Award for their work inventing optical coherence tomography, which can “detect conditions like macular degeneration and diabetic retinopathy earlier than previous methods, preventing blindness,” reports Noah Weiland and Cade Metz for The New York Times. “O.C.T. now is commonly used in ophthalmology offices, where the patient simply rests a chin and forehead against an instrument for a brief scan,” write Weiland and Metz. “The method, invented in 1991, offers a staggering amount of detail about the retina.”

Prof. James Fujimoto, research affiliate Eric Swanson SM ’84 and David Huang PhD ’93 have been honored with the Lasker Award for their work for their work inventing “imaging technology that revolutionized how ophthalmologists diagnose diseases of the eye," reports Jonathan Saltzman for The Boston Globe. The scientists were recognized for developing “optical coherence tomography, or OCT, the first technology that enabled doctors to see a two- and three-dimensional cross-sectional image of the retina,” Saltzman explains. “This painless scan takes less than 10 minutes, and is now the standard of care for diagnosing retina diseases.”