Faculty

Boston.com reporter Eric Levenson writes that MIT senior class president Anish Punjabi, “closed his commencement speech at graduation on Friday with a rush of rap riffing on Matt Damon’s film career, sending the actor into hysterics.”

Matt Damon was awarded an honorary MIT Pirate Certificate during MIT’s Commencement, Nicole Hernandez reports for The Boston Globe. The certificate - which is presented to students who complete courses in pistol, archery, sailing and fencing - notes that Damon is “no longer a lily-livered landlubber.”

Chloe Melas reports for CNN on Matt Damon’s address at MIT’s 2016 Commencement exercises. During his speech, Damon called on graduates to tackle some of the world’s most pressing problems. "This world has some problems that we need you to drop everything and solve," Damon noted.

During his MIT Commencement address, Matt Damon urged graduates to engage with the world, reports WBUR’s Andrea Shea. Senior class president Anish Punjabi likened MIT students to Will Hunting, the character Damon played in “Good Will Hunting,” noting that “like Will we possess a gift not just for creativity, but more importantly a gift for relentless service and compassion.”

Writing for The Boston Globe, James Sullivan recounts MIT’s 2016 Commencement exercises, which featured an address from actor and filmmaker Matt Damon. In his charge to the graduates, Sullivan noted that MIT President L. Rafael Reif reminded graduates that “heart is what makes the hard problems worth solving. Heart is what makes the data sing with meaning.”

The AP spotlights MIT’s 2016 Commencement exercises, which featured an address from actor and filmmaker Matt Damon. Damon told graduates, “You’ve got to go out and do really interesting things, important things, inventive things, because this world has problems that we need you to drop everything and solve."

Prof. Hugh Herr has been named the recipient of Spain’s 2016 Princess of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research, according to the AP. Herr’s achievements “have had a major impact on people with disabilities, through adaptive knee prostheses for femoral amputees, and ankle-and-foot orthopedic prostheses for those with clubfoot or disabilities caused by cerebral palsy or multiple sclerosis.”

Prof. Emerita Suzanne Corkin, whose work with a famous amnesia patient was instrumental in uncovering the nature of memory, died on May 24, reports Benedict Carey for The New York Times. Carey writes that Corkin’s work “helped settle a debate about the function of the hippocampus in retrieving and reliving past experiences.”

In a BBC News article about the Venice Architecture Biennale, Will Gompertz highlights a "drone-port" developed in collaboration with MIT researchers. “With the aid of cutting edge computer science and buried steel tension ropes, the largely self-supporting structure uses a fraction of the materials such a building would normally need.”

Prof. Richard Schmalensee speaks with Forbes’ David Slocum about his book “Matchmakers: The New Economics of Multisided Platforms.” Schmalensee explains that the fundamentals of new businesses “are similar to those of old, familiar ones — from how they price, to how they solve the…problem of getting both groups of customers on board. New startups can then learn from old successful ones.”

Prof. Vladimir Bulović, associate dean for innovation, speaks with Paul McDougall of Scientific American about developing a solar-powered smart phone. “You want something that can be reasonably efficient at a reasonable cost so it doesn’t change the paradigm of what your cell phone costs,” says Bulović. 

President Barack Obama honored Prof. Michael Artin and RPI President Shirley Ann Jackson, an MIT Corporation Life Member, with The National Medal of Science. Artin was honored for “leadership in modern algebraic geometry,” and Jackson for her work in “condensed matter physics and particle physics, and science-rooted public policy achievements,” according to AP reporter Darlene Superville. 

Prof. Thomas Kochan speaks with WBUR reporter Deborah Becker about the contract dispute between Verizon and the company’s employees. Kochan says that in order to avoid these situations in the future, “we need to fundamentally change our labor policy to provide more workers access to a variety of different ways to have a voice at work.”

Prof. Earl Miller speaks with Meghna Chakrabarti, host of Radio Boston, about the dangers of distracted driving. Miller explains that our brains “have a very limited capacity for simultaneous thought.” He adds that people have a hard time ignoring their phones while driving because the “brain evolved to find new information rewarding.”

Boston Globe reporter Eric Moskowitz chronicles the life and work of Prof. Emeritus Rainer Weiss, from his childhood passion for tinkering with radios to the decades he spent dedicated to the search for gravitational waves. Kip Thorne, a professor at Caltech, remarks that Weiss “really is, by a large margin, the most influential person this field has seen.”