The hosts of Bloomberg Radio’s Baystate Business discussed the announcement that Sally Kornbluth has been named the 18th president of MIT. "[Kornbluth] said that she was excited for those 'global challenges,' and that is something that has been really the mantle of MIT: solving the world’s problems with technology,” reports Janet Wu. “It sounded like she wanted to be part of that.”
Forbes contributor Michael T. Nietzel spotlights how Sally Kornbluth, the provost of Duke University, has been selected as the 18th President-elect of MIT. “A highly accomplished researcher, Kornbluth is currently the Jo Rae Wright University Professor of Biology at Duke where she has been a member of the faculty since 1994, first in the Department of Pharmacology and Cancer Biology at the Duke University School of Medicine and then as a member of the Department of Biology in the Trinity College of Arts and Sciences,” writes Nietzel.
President-elect Sally Kornbluth discusses her hopes and aspirations for her tenure as MIT’s president with Katie Mogg of The Boston Globe. “I just want to continue the excellence of MIT,” she said. “I hope when I turn my head back down the road some years from now that this will have been viewed as a period of continued excellence, but also of the discovery, innovation, and invention of things that continue to really have a huge impact on the world stage.”
New York Times reporter Anemona Hartocollis writes that Sally Kornbluth, the 18th President-elect of MIT, will be the “second female president of the university, and will join a long list of women in its top leadership ranks. The provost, chancellor, dean of science and chair of the M.I.T. Corporation, the school’s governing body, are all women.”
Sally Kornbluth has been named the next president of MIT, reports the Associated Press. “Maybe above all, I was drawn here because this is a moment when humanity faces huge global problems, problems that urgently demand the world’s most skillful minds and hands,” said Kornbluth. “In short, I believe this is MIT’s moment. I could not imagine a greater privilege than helping the people of MIT seize its full potential.”
Prof. Tod Machover’s multi-sensory musical score, “Brain, Body + Breath,” will premiere at the MIT Museum the weekend of Oct. 14, reports Lauren Williams for WBUR. “The concert will explore how music affects our entire beings, whether we are performing or listening to it,” writes Williams.
David Moinina Sengeh MS ’12, PhD ’15 speaks with Ted Radio Hour host Manoush Zomorodi about his research in developing a more comfortable socket for prostheses. Sengeh “pioneered a new system for creating prosthetic sockets, which fit a prosthetic leg onto a patient's residual limb,” writes NPR.
The new MIT Museum opens to the public this weekend in its new location in Kendall Square, which is “quite significant because this is the heart of innovation,” notes GBH’s Jared Bowen. Museum visitors will not only get a sense of MIT’s long history of innovation, but also get a sense of the scientific process, with exhibits featuring “part of the machinery that was used to help sequence the human genome, [and] the star shade petal that allowed NASA to photograph exoplanets,” Bowen explains.
Kim Donohue will run the 2023 Boston Marathon to honor her husband, who was injured in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, and raise awareness for the Sean Collier Memorial Fund, reports Karen Anderson for WCVB. Donohue is “drawing inspiration from her husband and their friend, Sean Collier, an MIT police officer shot and killed just days after the marathon attacks,” writes Anderson.
WBUR’s Pamela Reynolds spotlights “Symbionts: Contemporary Artists and the Biosphere,” an upcoming exhibit at the MIT List Visual Arts Center that explores “how organisms of different species live together and thrive because of it.” The exhibit highlights the work of over a dozen international artists and will be on display October 21 through February 26.
MIT’s Leap Lab will be hosting a free event for children on Saturday, July 9th. The event will provide kids “a chance to explore the floating wetland on the Charles River through a microscope, learn to paint with algae, and compete in friendly engineering challenges with peers,” reports The Boston Globe.
Prof. Karilyn Crockett speaks with Boston Globe reporter Miles Howard about how transportation planning in the Greater Boston area needs to be centered around improving connectivity. “As Boston’s population grows, our public transportation infrastructure continues to crumble, and our transit planning can’t just be about new cars on one line and new tracks on another,” says Crockett. “It has to be a discussion about the system and the economic impacts of that system on Black and brown communities that are struggling to get to doctors’ appointments, to schools, to jobs that don’t allow working from home.”
Prof. Sherry Turkle writes for The New York Times spotlighting “The Fight to Save the Town,” a new book by Michelle Wilde Anderson. “Anderson’s book is an artful mixture of ethnography, narrative history, in-depth interviews and legal scholarship,” writes Turkle.
Associate Provost Richard Lester and Prof. Noelle Selin speak with Tiziana Dearing, host of Radio Boston, about MIT’s Climate Grand Challenges. “To me, the Climate Grand Challenges effort really represents that we’re kind of at a frameshift when thinking about the climate problem. It’s not just a problem that some people can work on,” says Selin. “A climate challenge is a whole of society challenge, and therefore it really has to be a whole of MIT challenge.” Lester adds he hopes the challenges will “inspire a new generation of students to roll up their sleeves, put their shoulders to the wheel and help us solve this problem.”
A time capsule buried in 1957 by former MIT President James R. Killian and Prof. Harold Edgerton will be unveiled in 2957 a full millennium after its burial, writes Michele Debczak for Salon.