Alumni/ae

Writing for Forbes, alumnus Paul Hsieh discusses radiologists employing rapidly evolving AI tools to help deliver diagnoses. “Radiologists are willing to employ AI tools that have been statistically validated to provide reliable diagnoses, even if we don’t yet fully understand how those tools work,” writes Hsieh. “But radiologists are not content to stop there. We also continually seek to improve genuine human understanding of how AI works in our field as a matter of professional responsibility for ourselves and for our patients.”  

CNN’s Amy Gunia highlights TESSERAE, magnetic, self-assembling tiles that can be used to create structures in space for humans to live in, designed by Visiting Scholar Ariel Ekblaw SM ’17, PhD ’20. “The tiles can be stacked on top of each other inside a rocket and released in space, where they can autonomously attach to each other—employing electro-permanent magnets, cameras and AI—to create a predetermined shape,” writes Gunia. “They can self-assemble into something way bigger than the size of the rocket that they came up in,” Ekblaw explains. 

Mike Beigel ‘70, who invented Mu-Tron III, considered to be “the first commercial envelope filter pedal [that] allowed guitar players to achieve a synthesizer-like sound” used in popular 1970s music, has died at 79, reports Alex Williams for The New York Times. “The Mu-Tron III was the most renowned of several effects pedals that Mr. Beigel invented for Musitronics, a New Jersey-based company that he co-founded in 1972,” writes Williams. Musitronics, “produced a variety of sought-after pedals, including the Mu-Tron Octave Divider, Phasor, Flanger and Bi-Phase, which have been adopted by notables like Neil Young, Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins and John Frusciante, the Chili Peppers guitarist.” 

CodeSignal, co-founded by alumnus and CEO Tigran Sloyan, has developed Agentic Skills Intelligence, a new product that “uses AI agents to evaluate the skills people use in their work and links the findings to personalized practice,” writes Forbes’ Ray Ravaglia. CodeSignal has built an AI agent “for each domain in its job taxonomy, such as engineering and sales, along with agents for capabilities that cut across jobs, among them communication and AI literacy,” notes Ravaglia. “The agents draw on systems including Gong, Salesforce, and GitHub, and they score what they find against rubrics the company says are grounded in industrial-organizational psychology.” 

Arcaea, a biotech beauty company founded by CEO Jasmina Aganovic ‘09, has partnered with the actress and producer Jennifer Lawrence to develop mes°, a new haircare brand, reports Flavio Gomez for the Los Angelos Times. “A TED Talk by Aganovic, an MIT-trained chemical and biological engineer exploring how biology can open new possibilities in beauty, prompted the two to connect and eventually develop the brand,” notes Gomez. “Instead of treating each [hair] concern as an isolated problem, the brand looks to biology for ways to address it.”  

The New Yorker’s Gideon Lewis-Kraus details how Morris Chang ’52, SM ’53 founded the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), “one of the most valuable tech companies globally” that “makes almost all of the world’s advanced [computer] chips.” “Chang proposed a semiconductor ‘foundry,’ which would do for pricey chips what its predecessors had done for cheap junk. At the time, however, the market didn’t exist,” writes Lewis-Kraus. “By the end of TSMC’s first decade, the company was bringing in a billion dollars in annual revenue.”  

Maxime Cohen PhD ‘15 speaks to Forbes’ Karl Moore about his latest book “Pricing in the Age of AI,” that explores how AI is transforming pricing decisions for businesses, consumers and society. “We may be entering an era of agent-to-agent commerce, in which AI systems negotiate directly with one another on behalf of consumers and businesses,” says Cohen. “This could fundamentally reshape how prices are determined and how transactions take place.” 

MIT startup LNK Energies has created a system to efficiently convert heavy-duty trucks from diesel to hydrogen, “slashing pollution and costs while shielding operators from the price spikes that result from geopolitical instability,” writes Tim De Chant for TechCrunch. “A lot of the reactors that LOHC (Liquid organic hydrogen carriers) companies have today are really large. They’re about the size of a shipping container,” says Alexis Huynh ‘24, cofounder of LNK. “We have shrunk that basically to the size of a mini fridge.” 

NPR’s Greg Rosalsky explains how Robert Hall PhD ’67 and Michael Woodford PhD ’83, winners of the 2026 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, were honored for their work helping to lay the groundwork for New Keynesian economics, taking a fresh scoop of the field. “Hall and Woodford helped rebuild macroeconomics around the decisions of individual people and businesses. Hall broke new ground in understanding how people's expectations about the future shape their spending today. Woodford built on that work, developing a framework that combined forward-looking spending decisions with sticky prices.”

Forbes’ Michael T. Nietzel spotlights Robert Hall PhD ’67 and Michael Woodford PhD ’83, who were awarded the 2026 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for their work on economic stabilization policies. “The work of Hall and Woodford has proved beneficial for managing economic shocks like those from the pandemic and the energy crises of recent years,” Nietzel writes. “While recessions and episodes of high inflation have not disappeared, they tend to be less long-lasting.”  

Robert Hall PhD ’67 and Michael Woodford PhD ’83 have won the 2026 Nobel economics prize for their work “developing models that help central bankers and finance ministers to stabilize their countries, avoiding long recessions and runaway inflation,” writes reporter Graeme Wearden for The Guardian. “The laureates’ work has provided us with a stable theoretical foundation for the models that are now used by central banks and governments around the world,” says John Hassler, chair of the Nobel Committee. “With them, we are better equipped to deal with shocks in the economy, such as energy crises or sudden changes in how much households consume.” 

Christina Qi ‘13 speaks to Entrepreneur’s Sherin Shibu about her experience starting her own hedge fund as an undergraduate, and co-founding and serving as the CEO of Databento, a market data platform. Qi encourages founders to support one another: “You can succeed and raise each other up and support each other, even as competitors in this industry,” she says. “That is absolutely possible. That’s what I have done and strive to do with a lot of our competitors in this space, with other founders.” 

Chris Cassidy SM ’00, who “flew three space missions, commanded the International Space Station, and earned multiple combat awards for his service in Afghanistan,” moderated the USS Constitution Museum's Leadership Forum on Oct. 8, reports WCVB 5. “Cassidy served as NASA’s Chief Astronaut, accumulating 378 days in space, more than 54 hours across 10 spacewalks.”  

In an interview with Smithsonian Magazine’s Diane Tedeschi, alumnus Mike Massimino SM ’88, PhD ’92 discusses working on NASA’s space shuttle as a mission specialist and repairing the Hubble Space Telescope. “Nothing can really prepare you, though, for the overwhelming beauty that you see—the emotion of it [space],” says Massimino. “When you see the beauty of Earth and the stars and the Moon and everything around you, it’s so inspiring. But as far as your job goes, you’re 100-percent ready.”  

Hertha Metals, a startup founded by alumna Laureen Meroueh SM ’18, PhD ’20, “has developed a way to produce high-purity iron needed in the magnets used in everything from electric vehicles to humanoid robots,” writes reporter Stephanie Findlay for the Financial Times. “Hertha is breaking ground on a 10,000-tonne-a-year commercial facility today on the outskirts of Houston to produce the metal,” Findlay highlights. “The company plans to produce the first steel-grade iron in the fourth quarter of next year and start producing the high-purity iron by 2028.”