Research

Ankur Gupta SM '14, PhD '17 has been named to the Chemical & Engineering News’ 2025 Talent 12 list, which highlights young scientists using chemistry to create real-world solutions, reports Sam Lemonick for Chemical & Engineering News. “By accounting for the way particles move in a chemical gradient—a phenomenon known as diffusiophoresis… [Gupta and his colleagues have] improved a model that mathematician Alan Turing developed to explain patterns in nature, such as the shape of a zebra’s stripes or the spacing of a jellyfish’s tentacles,” explains Lemonick. 

Wall Street Journal reporter Angelina Torre spotlights “Letterlocking: The Hidden History of the Letter,” a new book by MIT Libraries Conservator Jana Dambrogio and King’s College London Senior Lecturer Daniel Smith that explores the history and art of “folding a letter so it serves as its own envelope.” The book “calls on scholars to ‘read the folds’ of written correspondence – to peer into the historical, social or personal circumstances that might not be explicitly stated,” explains Torre. 

Lecturer Michael Schrage speaks with Forbes reporter Josipa Majic Predin about the shift towards generative AI in business. "AI should not be seen overwhelmingly as just an ethical or a technical or a digital innovation and platform," says Schrage. "It's actually a philosophical capability and resource."

Writing for The Boston Globe, graduate students Manuj Dhariwal SM '17 and Shruti Dhariwal SM '18 highlight new efforts to reframe the language used to describe the ways humans are interacting with AI technologies. “It is a subtle reframing, but one that we urgently need as AI systems become interwoven with our creative, social, and emotional worlds,” they write. “The point is not necessarily to choose one over the other — but to clearly distinguish one from the other.” 

Prof. Daron Acemoglu speaks with WBUR On Point host Meghna Chakrabarti about the role of trust in institutions. “Institutions crucially depend on the trust that people place in them,” says Acemoglu. “Corruption is the tip of the spear, because once you start suspecting that people in high office are using their position for corrupt ends, it tarnishes the entire set of institutions. And I think that's the situation we're in, and we're getting deeper and deeper.” 

Researchers from MIT and other institutions have uncovered new pathways, along with identifying genes, that may contribute to the development of a new class of drugs to treat Alzheimer’s disease, reports John R. Ellement for The Boston Globe. “The drugs currently approved to treat Alzheimer’s have not been as successful as hoped,” Ellement explains. “Those drugs tend to target amyloid plaques in the brain, but the new research suggests other areas to target.” 

Postdoc Rohan Naidu and his colleagues have used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to examine galaxy MoM-z14, first spotted in 2023, reports Jonathan O’Callaghan for New Scientist. “Naidu and his colleagues confirmed MoM-z14 is the most distant galaxy yet,” writes Naidu. “The light we see now was emitted just 280 million years after the big bang, breaking the previous record by about 10 million years.” 

Writing for Financial Times, Prof. Emeritus Donald Sadoway makes the case that to meet the growing need for critical minerals, innovation is needed in metals extraction technology. “Imagine a process that produces superior metal at a lower price point than that of legacy technology and does so with zero emissions to air, water and to soil,” writes Sadoway. “Such technologies would recapture US domestic market share from foreign producers while meeting our pressing materials needs.” 

Principal Research Scientist Kalyan Veeramachaneni speaks with WBUR On Point host Meghna Chakrabarti about the benefits and risks of training AI on synthetic data. “I think the AI that we have as of today and we are using is largely very small; I don't mean that as in size, but in the tasks that it can do,” says Veeramachaneni. “And as days go by, we are asking more and more of it… that requires us to provide more data, train more models that are much more efficient in reasoning, and can solve problems that we haven't thought of solving.”

President Emeritus L. Rafael Reif speaks with Scott Detrow of NPR’s All Things Considered about the importance of investing in university research. In America, “we have the best research ecosystem in the world. It is fueled by public funds. And it includes not just, of course, the university system but academic medical centers. This is where the best and the most advanced research happens,” Reif emphasizes. He adds that “if we don't have public funds supporting research universities none of the innovations are going to happen.”

Prof. Daniela Rus, director of CSAIL, speaks with Wall Street Journal reporter Isabelle Bousquette about her vision for the future of robots as soft, squishy, flexible and maybe even edible. Bousquette notes that Rus is a “pioneer” in the field of soft robotics and Steve Crowe, chair of the Robotics Summit and Expo, emphasizes: “there’s literally nobody in the world that knows more about this stuff than Daniela Rus.” “I really wanted to broaden our view of what a robot is,” says Rus. “If you have a mechanism that’s made out of paper and that moves, is that a robot or not? If you have an origami flower that you attach to a motor, is that a robot or not? To me, it’s a robot.” 

Neha Narula, director of the MIT Digital Currency Initiative, joins Taylor Wilson of USA Today’s The Excerpt podcast to discuss the future of cash as the use of digital currencies expands. On her vision for the future of money, Narula says, “We’ve had a lot of promise, we’ve had a lot of exciting ideas, but now it’s time to really buckle down and really build products that help users and help make their lives better.” 

Dr. Mallika Marshall joins CBS Boston to discuss E-BAR, a new mobile robot developed by MIT researchers to physically support the elderly and prevent them from falling as they move around their homes. Marshall notes that E-BAR could also “lift someone from sitting to standing or vice versa, and catch someone safely by rapidly inflating side airbags if they begin to fall.” 

Christian Lau PhD SM ’20, PhD ’22 and Vaikkunth Mugunthan SM ’19, PhD 22, co-founders of Dynamo AI, have been named to the 2025 Forbes 30 under 30 Asia list, reports Yue Wang, John Kang for Forbes. “Dynamo AI offers software to run tests on AI programs to identify potential risks, and prevent the models from accessing sensitive data,” they write. 

Prof. Nelson Repenning and Don Kieffer, a senior lecturer at MIT Sloan, speak with Boston Herald reporter Vicki Salemi about how spring-cleaning strategies can be applied to organizing work, from handling emails and meeting requests to tackling new assignments. “First, most people take on too many tasks at once and start those tasks before they are ready,” says Repenning. “We would never let a surgeon do three procedures at once or start operating before all the equipment and people were in place, but knowledge workers do this every day.”