Alumni/ae

Honorees on The Boston Globe’s 2026 Tech Power Players list shared their reasons for having optimism about the future of the Greater Boston area’s tech and innovation scene. President Sally Kornbluth says opportunities abound in what she calls “AI + X” — integrating AI into fields such as manufacturing, life sciences, and energy. “Massachusetts can absolutely lead in this next wave,” says Kornbluth. “The ecosystem has the building blocks,” shares Bob Mumgaard SM ’15. “Massachusetts is the strongest in the nation in innovation in energy.”

For Fast Company, reporter Max Ufberg features MIT startup Formlabs, a company that has spent over a decade building 3D printers that make professional grade prototyping cheaper and faster. Using the selective laser sintering (SLS) Fuse X1 machine, Ufberg notes that Formlabs will apply their playbook to larger industrial systems. “The goal has always been make it easier to go from an idea to a real thing,” says Formlabs CEO Maxim Lobovsky ‘11. 

Moving Health, a D-Lab spinout founded by MIT students, tackles maternal mortality in rural Ghana by decreasing transport time to hospitals. CNN reporter Maya Baylis highlights how Moving Health’s tricycle ambulances were designed to navigate narrow, rough roads in areas where ambulances are scarce or impractical. “Sometimes the biggest barrier to surviving a medical emergency isn’t the lack of hospitals,” says Emily Young ‘18, CEO and co-founder of Moving Health, “it’s being able to get there in time.”

Writing for The Daily Caller, Jesse Hamel Executive MBA ’25 - a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, an AC-130 gunship combat aviator, a former Air Force Special Operations Command drone squadron commander and founder of VICTUS Technologies - makes the case for the Department of War sponsoring graduate-level education and fellowships at MIT. “The talent base and the operational seriousness of MIT made VICTUS possible,” Hamel writes. “My time on [the MIT] campus from 2023 through 2025 reinforced that view. As a veteran, I encountered respect for my service alongside some of the most demanding technical and academic standards I have ever faced.” 

During her OneMIT Commencement address, Lisa Su 90, SM ’91, PhD ’94, Advanced Micro Devices CEO, shared her views on the critical role humans should play in the development and use of AI technologies, reports Courtney Connley-Hampton for Forbes. “For everything that AI can do, AI can’t decide which problems are worth solving. It can’t make the hard judgments when the data is not there. It can’t take responsibility for the outcomes. These are actually our responsibilities and they matter now more than ever,” Su emphasized. “Technology itself does not decide what the future looks like—the best people do.”

Fortune reporter Preston Fore spotlights Lisa Su ’90, SM ’91, PhD ’94, Advanced Micro Devices CEO, who was named to Fortune’s “2026 Most Powerful Women” list. “After immigrating from Taiwan to the U.S. with her family at a young age, Lisa Su spent her early years fascinated by technology. She studied electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, obtaining her bachelor’s and PhD focused on semiconductors,” writes Fore. Since being named president of AMD in 2014, Su has “led the company to the forefront of computing and the AI revolution.” 

In her address to the Class of 2026 during the OneMIT Commencement Ceremony, Lisa Su ’90, SM ’91, PhD ’94, Advanced Micro Devices CEO, emphasized that “the world does not just need people who know how to use powerful tools, it needs people who know what to use them for, people with a sense of purpose, judgment, courage.” She added: “For everything that AI can do, AI can’t decide which problems are worth solving. It can’t make the hard judgments when the data is not there. It can’t take responsibility for the outcomes. These are actually our responsibilities, and they matter now more than ever.”

During MIT’s 2026 OneMIT Commencement ceremony, Lisa Su ’90, SM ’91, PhD ’94, Advanced Micro Devices CEO, urged graduates to “run toward the hardest problems,” reports Aayushi Datta for The Boston Globe. In her address, President Sally Kornbluth underscored the value and power of curiosity-driven science, noting that: “shrinking the pipeline of basic discovery research means choking off the flow of future solutions, innovations, and cures.” 

In an article for Forbes, Senior Lecturer Guadalupe Hayes-Mota '08 MS '16, MBA '16 explores how “AI is now embedded in the critical path of drug discovery, and it is making consequential decisions at a speed and scale that existing governance structures were simply not designed to handle.” Hayes-Mota emphasizes: “The goal is to ensure that as AI accelerates the machine of drug development, we have deliberate mechanisms for human accountability threaded through every critical junction.” 

Forbes contributor Michael T. Nietzel spotlights the 120 new members and 25 international members elected by the National Academy of Sciences for 2026. Several MIT faculty members – including Professors Michale Fee, Gareth McKinley, Keith Nelson, Bengt Holmstrom and Catherine Wolfram – were selected. 

President Sally Kornbluth joins Sloan Senior Lecturer Brian Halligan MBA ’05 on his podcast “Long Strange Trip: CEO to CEO” to chat leadership strategies, AI and education, and MIT's approach to preparing students for life after college. “People talk to me, alums talk to me about how MIT changed their lives. It's not because of some particular class or some particular skill they acquired. It’s the whole environment,” Kornbluth notes. She adds that when it comes to educating students, at MIT "we want them to have the kind of knowledge base and ability to navigate the world that will enable them to do anything they want to do.”

Jasmin Moghbeli '05 is featured in USA Lacrosse’s roundup of women “whose journeys trace back to lacrosse: a sport that taught decisiveness, teamwork, resilience and joy.”  Moghbeli, a “NASA astronaut and former U.S. Marine Corps pilot who completed 150 combat missions, studied aerospace engineering at MIT— where she was also a three-sport athlete in volleyball, basketball and lacrosse.” 

MIT has launched a new effort aimed at helping high schoolers across the U.S. tackle calculus, reports Juliet Schulman-Hall for MassLive. The new program, called the MIT4America Calculus Project, pairs trained MIT undergraduates and alumni with school districts across the U.S. to tutor high school students from Montana to Texas in calculus. The program “was created last year with an in-person summer calculus camp,” Schulman-Hall notes. “Since then, it has grown to include 14 school districts.” 

Luana Lopes Lara '18 and Tarek Mansour '18, MNG '19, co-founders of prediction market firm Kalshi, have been named to the Forbes World’s Youngest Billionaires list, reports Simone Melvin for Forbes.

Boston Globe reporter Jon Chesto spotlights the MIT Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship’s delta v startup accelerator program, which is designed to help early-stage startups find success in the Boston area. With financial support from Klaviyo co-founders Ed Hallen MBA ’12, and Andrew Bialecki, the program will “help support more customizing, to better tailor the program for each entrepreneur, as well as a broadening of its professional network, to support mentorship from industry veterans for the participating startups,” writes Chesto.