MIT was named the top school for positioning graduates to find a job in the QS Graduate Employability Rankings, reports August Saraiva for Bloomberg. “For the third year, MIT landed a perfect score,” writes Saraiva, “retaining its title as the best alma mater to have when looking for a job.”
Alexis Sablone ’16, a professional skateboarded who competed in the 2021 Olympics, speaks with New York Times reporter Allie Conti about how she spends a typical Sunday in New York, “where she currently builds public art projects and furniture. And skates. A lot.”
Erin Genia ‘19 a multidisciplinary artist, has been honored as one of The ARTery 25, which highlights artists of color in the Greater Boston area who stand out for the work they are making, reports WBUR. “Genia, a tribal member of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate of South Dakota, sees her artistic mission as one of many efforts to make up for the centuries of assimilation and cultural repression.”
Forbes reporter Aayushi Pratap spotlights Vicarious Surgical, an MIT startup and surgical robot company aimed at making “abdominal surgery faster, easier and subject to fewer complications, starting with hernia repairs.”
Oliver “Ollie” Smoot ’62 speaks with Rob Michaelson of NBC Boston about the origin and history of the Smoot, a unit of measurement created when Smoot and his friends used the length of his body to measure the bridge that brings Massachusetts Avenue from Cambridge to Boston.
New York Times reporter Steve Lohr spotlights the origin and history of MIT startup Gingko Bioworks, a synthetic biology company founded with a “shared belief that biology could be made more like computing with reusable code and standard tools instead of the bespoke experiments of traditional biology." Jason Kelly ’03, PhD ’08, one of the founders of MIT startup Ginkgo Bioworks and the company’s chief executive, explains that “the ultimate goal for Ginkgo is to make it as easy to program a cell as it is to program a computer.”
Writing for The Boston Globe, Gregg Martin SM ’88, PhD ’92, a retired two-star Army general and former president of the National Defense University, shares his concern for the mental health of Afghanistan war veterans. “While most troops are justifiably proud of what they did at the tactical, local level, they’re now seeing their efforts go up in smoke,” writes Martin. “They’re angry, sad, hurting, and confused, and I fear that the mental health of some of them will unravel so unrelentingly they’ll take their own lives.”
Alumna Loewen Cavill speaks with Forbes contributor Mary Juetten about her startup AuraBlue, which is creating wearable technology aimed at improving sleep for menopausal women by automatically adjusting room and mattress temperatures. “After hearing again and again how sleep loss from nighttime hot flashes has completely flipped so many women's lives upside down, I had to do something,” says Cavill. “Enabling women to stay on their career path and perform their best at the final part of their career climb is the single most important thing I can do to promote women in leadership.”
Boston Globe reporter Pranshu Verma spotlights BitSight, a cybersecurity ratings company founded by MIT graduates. “The company’s platform uses algorithms to assess a company’s chances of being breached,” writes Verma. “It also provides customers with cybersecurity ratings, risk metrics, and security benchmarks to better assess and combat cyber threats.”
Writing for Pointe Magazine, Grace Young ’14 explores how her background in ballet taught her many of the skills that she currently uses as an engineer. Young emphasizes that as dancer she quickly learned the importance of practicing, a skill she applied as a student at MIT. “If it weren’t for ballet,” she writes, “I’m not sure I would appreciate all the work that goes into making science and engineering skills look effortless.”
Bloomberg’s Janet Wu speaks with alumna Nan-Wei Gong PhD '13, co-founder of Figur8, an MIT startup applying AI to help diagnose musculoskeletal problems. “Figur8 is a tool that really brings lab experience into the field so everyone can quantify their musculoskeletal injuries,” says Gong. “We invented a wearable system that allows you to capture biomarkers of your musculoskeletal health and pinpoint injury through our AI algorithm.”
Nuria Oliver PhD ’00 speaks with Wired reporter Willem Marx about her work developing a data gathering system to help combat Covid-19 in Valencia, Spain. Olivier and her team developed “a powerful predictor that's been road-tested during a time of unprecedented strain, and continues to be used across Valencia," writes Marx. "They have also created a system that can suggest a small number of specific, effective pandemic-related policies or interventions that a government can make.”
Boston Globe correspondent Dana Gerber spotlights how eight of the photographs alumna Linda Benedict-Jones captured of Cambridge Rindge and Latin high school students will be on display at the Harvard Art Museums this fall. “I thought of Cambridge Rindge and Latin as a kind of microcosm of society,” said Benedict-Jones. “I figured, there are probably kids in this school who are the sons and daughters of Harvard professors, and there are probably kids in this school who are recent immigrants.”
TechCrunch reporter Mary Ann Azevedo spotlights Insurify, a startup founded by alumna Snejina Zacharia. “Insurify has built a machine learning-based virtual insurance agent that integrates with more than 100 carriers to digitize — and personalize — the insurance shopping experience,” Azevedo explains.
Reporting for the PBS NewsHour, Miles O’Brien visits alumnus Dexter Ang ‘05 to learn more about how his startup, Pison, is developing a wrist-worn sensor that detects the faint electrical signals controlling simple hand gestures, allowing users to control digital interfaces using brain signals. “The device is connected to a smartphone, allowing control of it or other devices, conveyor belts in factories, drones, even pinball machines, to name a few,” notes O’Brien. He adds that Ang was inspired by his late mother, who contracted ALS, as “he wanted to make her life easier.”