Alumni/ae

Aaron Leanhardt PhD '03 has developed a new baseball bat that has “moved the fattest part from the end to the area where most contact is made,” reports Steve Henson for The Los Angeles Times.

Aaron Leanhardt PhD '03 speaks with The Athletic reporter Brendan Kuty about his work developing a new “torpedo-like” baseball bat. The bats “are custom-made to player preferences and are designed so that the densest part of the bat is where that particular hitter most often makes contact with the baseball,” writes Kuty. Says Leanhardt of the bat’s design: “It’s just about making the bat as heavy and as fat as possible in the area where you’re trying to do damage on the baseball.” 

Prof. David Sontag, Monica Agrawal PhD '23, Luke Murray SM '22, and Divya Gopinath '19, MEng '20 co-founded Layer Health - an AI healthcare startup that is applying large language models (LLMs) to help clinicians with medical chart reviews and data abstraction, reports Seth Joseph for Forbes. “The same chart review problem we’re solving with our clinical registry module is faced by clinicians at the point of care,” says Sontag. “For example, one of our next modules will focus on real-time clinical decision support to help automate clinical care pathways, leading to more reliable, high-quality care."

Lee Selwyn PhD '69 speaks with WVCB reporter Ben Simmoneau about how gas companies in Massachusetts promised consumers discounts on their March and April bills, following soaring energy costs this winter. 

The Smoot Standard, a new neighborhood café, restaurant and bar has opened in Cambridge’s Central Square, reports Kara Baskin for The Boston Globe. “The name is an homage to Ollie Smoot, MIT ‘62, whose body was famously used to measure the Harvard Bridge in 1958 (which is 364.4 smoots),” explains Baskin. 

CNBC reporter Kif Leswing spotlights Lisa Su '90, SM '91, PhD '94 and her work as CEO of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). “On Su’s watch, AMD was the first major company to embrace a technology called ‘chiplets,’” writes Leswing. “Instead of manufacturing one big chip with all the elements needed — the compute cores as well as an input and output block — AMD could make smaller chips and then assemble them together.” 

Venti Technologies – a company co-founded by MIT researchers and alumni – has been named one of the most innovative companies in the Asia-Pacific region for Fast Company’s 2025 roundup of top companies, reports Katerina Barton. The company focuses “on autonomous technologies for industrial use—specifically in low-speed environments like ports, airports, and warehouses,” explains Barton. “The company’s suite of special-purpose algorithms is designed to optimize cargo container transportation and works with a wide range of vehicles, allowing the AI-enabled technology to move varying weight loads and distances through complex spaces and changing routes.” 

Ariel Ekblaw SM ’17, PhD ’20, founder of the MIT Space Exploration Initiative, joins WCVB-TV to discuss the successful return of NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, and the impact of nine months in space on the human body. "When you're living in a long-duration microgravity mission, you do lose some of your muscle mass,” Ekblaw explains. “Your heart weakens because it's not having to pump your blood against the force of gravity. And even funny things like your eyesight can change because the shape of your eyeball is a little different in microgravity.”

Newsha Ghaeli PhD '17, co-founder of BioBot Analytics, speaks with GBH Morning Edition host Mark Herz about the company’s role in helping public health officials during the Covid-19 pandemic. “When we started the company, the vision was really that wastewater is a source of very important source on human health,” says Ghaeli. 

Ariel Ekblaw, principal investigator for the “To the Moon to Stay” mission and a visiting scientist at the MIT Media Lab, speaks with Chaiel Schaffel of WBZ News Radio about the three payloads MIT engineers built for a recent mission to the moon. Of the AstroAnt rover that Ekblaw and her team developed for spacecraft assembly and external servicing, she explains: "What we want to do in the future is send hundreds or thousands that will crawl on the outside of space stations, maybe crawl on the outside of a lunar habitat, and do the inspections that would be really risky for humans to do."

Researchers at MIT have sent three payloads into space, including the AstroAnt, a small robotic device developed to help monitor spaceship conditions, reports Kenneth Chang for The New York Times. The AstroAnt rover is about the size of a “Hot Wheels” toy car and can measure a lunar rover’s temperature and communicate via a wireless Bluetooth connection. “MIT researchers envision that swarms of AstroAnts could be used to perform various tasks in space,” Chang explains. 

Orlando Sentinel reporter Richard Tribou spotlights the AstroAnt, a small robotic device developed by MIT researchers to monitor spaceship conditions during lunar missions. The device can wheel around the roof of a lunar rover “to take temperature readings and monitor its operation.”  

MIT researchers developed a small robotic rover called the AstroAnt and a depth-mapping camera for use in monitoring spaceship conditions during space missions, reports Richard Luscombe for The Guardian. The AstroAnt is designed to “eventually assist in diagnostic and repair tasks for spacecraft during lunar missions,” explains Luscombe.

Boston Globe reporter Hiawatha Bray spotlights how MIT researchers developed a thumb-sized rover and a depth-mapping camera, technologies that will be used on a mission to the south pole of the Moon. The mini rover, dubbed AstroAnt, could one day be used to “patrol the exteriors of lunar probes, satellites, or space stations. Some might use cameras to spot meteorite damage, while others could apply sealants to prevent air or fuel leaks.”

New Yorker reporter Brent Crane spotlights Quaise Energy, an MIT geothermal energy startup founded by Carlos Araque BS '01, MS '02. Crane explains that central to Quaise’s system is the gyrotron, a tubular device that “works like a very, very powerful microwave, emitting ‘millimeter waves’ that would vaporize your vegetables; they can generate temperatures of a hundred million degrees Celsius.” Crane notes that: “About a decade ago, Paul Woskov, an MIT research engineer, showed that the technology could be used for ‘energy drilling’ without a physical bit. Quaise’s scientists propose that the heat of a gyrotron could stabilize tunnel walls by vitrifying them into glass.”