Alumni/ae

For The Hill, Liberty Vittert Capito ‘10, cohost of MIT’s Data Science Podcast, advises individuals against confiding private information in AI chatbots. “A search query into google is just a few words, but a late-night confession, or a sensitive medical inquiry contains hundreds of words of context. It often specifies why the inquiry is being made. It illuminates exactly what users fear, whom they love, what they regret, their moods and their most intimate health issues,” writes Vittert Capito. “This is unlike anything data brokers have been selling for years and getting rich.” 

The conversational AI models developed by MIT spinout Liquid AI are being introduced in Mercedes-Benz cars, writes Isabelle Bousquette for The Wall Street Journal. “Liquid AI invented a new architecture known as liquid neural networks, adaptive and efficient systems inspired by the neural activity of worms known scientifically as C. elegans,” writes Bousquette. Using the Liquid AI models in vehicles instead of cloud-based AI systems could allow for more “privacy, speed and the ability to run without constant network connectivity.” 

NBC News covers Nithya Raman MCP '08 winning the Los Angelos mayor’s race. “I wanted to say how grateful I am for the trust Angelinos have placed in me to be their next mayor,” said Raman. “People from across this city have welcomed me to their backyards, into their neighborhoods, told me about their hopes and dreams for the future of this city and trusted in me that I would be able to take on the problems that we have.”  

Forbes’ Amy Feldman spotlights Ossium, a startup that retrieves and cryopreserves bone marrow for use in life-saving procedures, co-founded by CEO Kevin Caldwell ‘08. “Ossium’s bone marrow has been used to treat blood cancer and, in one case, severe aplastic anemia, a rare and serious condition where the bone marrow stops making enough new red blood cells,” writes Feldman. “We want to make these blood and immune diseases a thing of the past,” says Caldwell.  

Northwood Space Corp., “a maker of critical ground infrastructure for satellites,” cofounded by CEO Bridgit Mendler MS ‘20, is highlighted by Bloomberg’s Edward Ludlow and Sana Pashankar. “Northwood builds phased-array antenna systems that use electronically steered beams to communicate with multiple satellites without the need for large, mechanically rotating dishes,” Ludlow and Pashankar note. “The company so far has deployed six ground sites on two continents and says it added new customers across U.S. government agencies and commercial space companies in addition to traditional satellite operators.”  

Alumna Thapanee Techajareonvikul, CEO and president of Berli Jucker, is honored as one of Forbes Asia’s Power Businesswomen 2026, writes reporter Rana Wehbe Watson. Techajareonvikul is “keen to promote gender equality at the company [Berli Jucker], where today more than half the 61,000 workforce is female,” notes Wehbe Watson. “In the top management positions women make up 53%,” says Techajareonvikul.  

William D. Nordhaus PhD ’67, a “Yale economist and Nobel laureate who tabulated the economic wreckage of carbon emissions and influenced climate policy across several presidential administrations,” has died at 85, reports The New York Times’ Lydia DePillis. Nordhaus developed a model over decades, “to balance climate change’s long-term damage with the costs required to contain it,” that has “underpinned dozens of regulations around the world aimed at limiting fossil fuels and seeded the ground for a new field of research that bridges the gap between economics and earth science,” writes DePillis.  

Alumna Ifeoluwa Dare-Johnson, founder and CEO of Healthtracka, is named as one of the “Top 8 Women in Biotech in 2026” by Tech Round, writes reporter Les-Leigh A. “Dare-Johnson founded Healthtracka in 2021 to make diagnostics easier in Nigeria,” notes A. "People book a lab test online, a phlebotomist collects the sample at home and results arrive digitally.” 

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.”  

Visiting Scholar Ariel Ekblaw SM ’17, PhD ’20 speaks with CNN’s Amy Gunia about her work developing TESSERAE, a space architecture project involving magnetic, self-assembling tiles that could one day be used to create structures in space. “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,” Gunia explains. The tiles “can self-assemble into something way bigger than the size of the rocket that they came up in,” Ekblaw shares, which could allow humans to build “science-fiction-worthy, big, grand structures” in space. 

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.”