MIT: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

By gillooly@mit.edu (Peter Dizikes, MIT News Office) Colleagues say “Why Agree? Why Move?” is a significant contribution to comparative linguistics. “What I particularly liked is the three-way comparison,” says Mark Baker, a professor of linguistics at Rutgers University. “He’s one of the leading experts on Japanese syntax, and it’s th...

MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI) has awarded four student projects funding for international collaborations through its new initiative, MISTI 2.0. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

By gillooly@mit.edu (David L. Chandler, MIT News Office) Inspiration from aluminum “It’s an example of work that sprang from basic science, was developed to a pilot scale, and now is being scaled up to have a real transformational impact in the world,” says Ernest Moniz, director of the MIT Energy Initiative.

On the weekend before Thanksgiving, more than 2,500 middle and high school students from Massachusetts and across the country will come to the MIT campus to take classes in subjects ranging from black holes to Egyptian mythology, “Cheesecakeology” to design and analysis of roller coa...

By gillooly@mit.edu (Anne Trafton, MIT News Office) For Sinskey and Peoples, the road started 25 years ago. Peoples, who had just earned his PhD in molecular biology from the University of Aberdeen, arrived in Sinskey’s lab in 1984 and set out to sequence a bacterial gene. Today, high-speed sequencing machines could do the job in about a week....

By gillooly@mit.edu (Denise Brehm, Civil and Environmental Engineering) “Our research shows that water from the ponds carries degradable organic carbon into the shallow aquifer. Groundwater flow, drawn by irrigation pumping, transports that pond water to the depth where dissolved arsenic concentrations are greatest and where it is then pumped up into the...

MIT Medical will hold a free undergraduate H1N1 influenza vaccination walk-in clinic on Tuesday, Nov. 17, in the dining room at MacGregor House (W61) from 11:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. or until vaccine supplies last. Students must present a valid MIT ID to get vaccinated. Please wear short sleeves or slee...

For 60 years, Edgerton combined extraordinary engineering talents and aesthetic sensibility, making 'frozen movement' part of our modern visual culture," says Deborah Douglas, curator of science and technology at the MIT Museum. "Although he perfected tools that enable us to 'see t...

The MIT community is mourning the loss of Kabelo Zwane, a 21-year-old sophomore from Swaziland who was studying mechanical engineering. Holly Sweet, associate director of the Experimental Study Group, was Zwane’s freshman adviser. She said he was well-liked by his peers and teachers,...

Joint MIT/Harvard MBA student Leland Cheung made history on Nov. 3 by becoming the first university student and the first Asian American to be elected to the Cambridge City Council. He will join his new colleagues in January as the youngest member of the nine-member body.

By gillooly@mit.edu (Anne Trafton, MIT News Office) There is a long way to go, says Sharp, but the potential of RNA interference is very large. “The discovery of RNA interference opened our eyes to a whole new aspect of biomedical science and biology that we just had never been aware of.”

By gillooly@mit.edu (Morgan Bettex, MIT News Office correspondent) In addition to Winn and Simon Albrecht, a postdoctoral fellow in Winn’s group at MIT, the team included John Asher Johnson of the University of Hawaii; Andrew Howard and Geoffrey Marcy of the University of California, Berkeley; Ian Crossfield of the University of California, Los Angel...

By gillooly@mit.edu (Larry Hardesty, MIT News Office) Last Thursday, the day after the New York Yankees won their first World Series of the 21st century, MIT Institute Professor Barbara Liskov, the 2008 recipient of the Turing Award — frequently called the Nobel Prize for computer science — delivered the first lecture of the 2009 Dertouzos...

By gillooly@mit.edu (Larry Hardesty, MIT News Office) Computer scientists have spent decades developing techniques for answering a single question: How long does a given calculation take to perform? Constantinos Daskalakis, an assistant professor in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, has exported thos...

Donal Fox occupies a unique position in contemporary music, not so much because he straddles the line between jazz and concert music, but because he includes improvisation in both genres with equal enthusiasm and expertise," said Peter Child, professor of music in the School of Humani...

By gillooly@mit.edu (Anne Trafton, MIT News Office) About five years ago, Professor Janet Sawicki at the Lankenau Institute in Pennsylvania read an article about nanoparticles developed by MIT’s Robert Langer for gene therapy, the insertion of genes into living cells for the treatment of disease. Sawicki was working on treating ovaria...

By gillooly@mit.edu (David L. Chandler, MIT News Office) The planned turbine, a Skystream 3.7 with a rated output of 2.4 kilowatts, about enough to power an average home, is a gift from Philip Deutch as a tribute to his father, Institute Professor John Deutch. In addition to providing some power for lighting on the Briggs Field, the turbine would pr...

A fire broke out at around 8:15 a.m. Wednesday in a construction trench on Amherst Street outside the ATO building. Cambridge firefighters had the blaze under control by around 8:50 a.m. The cause of the fire is under investigation by the Cambridge FD and MIT safety officials.

The MIT Solar Electric Vehicle Team is a student-run organization that designs, builds, tests, and races a solar vehicle on a two-year design cycle. Consisting mainly of undergraduates, the team competes in domestic and international competitions. The SEVT operates with the support o...

By gillooly@mit.edu (Anne Trafton, MIT News Office) Successes like these prove the value of basic research, says Constantine Stratakis, director of scientific programs for the NIH’s National Institute of Childhood Health and Human Development. In fact, the lines between basic and clinical research are becoming increasingly blurred...

“UROP gets undergraduates excited about economics research, and the undergraduates work with the data collected in the field, contributing to our research,” Gonwa told a panel discussion during UROP’s 40th-anniversary symposium on Oct. 29.

By gillooly@mit.edu (Larry Hardesty, MIT News Office) In 2005, Eran Tromer, now a postdoc at CIS, and colleagues at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel, showed that without any breach of security in the ordinary sense, a seemingly harmless computer program could eavesdrop on other programs and steal the type of secret cryptographic...

By gillooly@mit.edu (Anne Trafton, MIT News Office) “This knowledge could help public health officials identify potential changes that could occur over the course of an epidemic,” said Jeremy M. Berg, director of the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences, which partially funded the work.

Set in Boston’s Hyde Park neighborhood, an area not known for its excellent schools, the Boston Preparatory Charter Public School nonetheless has an enviable academic record: Last spring, 100 percent of its 10th-graders received a score of “excellent” or “proficient” in English, sc...

By gillooly@mit.edu (Larry Hardesty, MIT News Office) Sipser also says that “the P-versus-NP problem has become broadly recognized in the mathematical community as a mathematical question that is fundamental and important and beautiful. I think it has helped bridge the mathematics and computer science communities.”

By gillooly@mit.edu (David L. Chandler, MIT News Office) The whole field is evolving, and that is changing the way research is carried out and therefore the way the field is taught, says Professor of Materials Science and Engineering W. Craig Carter. "Over the next decade, how you decide to teach materials science will depend on the evolution of t...

By gillooly@mit.edu (Anne Trafton, MIT News Office) Dawson and his colleagues describe the latest generation of the EIM probe in a paper they have submitted to the Annals of Biomedical Engineering. They presented the first generation probe at the IEEE International Engineering in Medicine and Biology Conference last year.

Launched through a $20 million gift by The Bernard M. Gordon Foundation, the Bernard M. Gordon-MIT Engineering Leadership Program is a new educational initiative at MIT whose goal is to help MIT's undergraduate engineering students develop the skills, tools, and character they will ne...

By gillooly@mit.edu (David L. Chandler, MIT News Office) The five who made the presentations to the President, along with some of their students, gathered in two labs in Building 13, with posters describing their work and demonstrations to show the technology in action. Before delivering his talk at Kresge Auditorium, Obama was escorted thro...

By gillooly@mit.edu (Anne Trafton, MIT News Office) MIT has been awarded a five-year grant from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) to start a new Physical Science-Oncology Center. The funding, approximately $3.5 million per year, will support four cancer research projects led by MIT physical scientists.

By gillooly@mit.edu (David L. Chandler, MIT News Office) The tour marked the first time a sitting president has visited MIT's laboratories to see demonstrations of ongoing research work and meet with faculty members who are conducting that research. He was escorted through the labs by MIT President Susan Hockfield and MIT Energy Initiative D...

After taking the stage in Kresge, Obama began his talk with a few quips about MIT, initially describing it as "the most prestigious school in Cambridge Massachusetts." The graduate of Harvard Law School quickly backtracked, adding, "well, in this part of Cambridge." Then, referring to M...

Harris Wang '05, a graduate student in the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST), shared the $25,000 grand prize in the 2009 Collegiate Inventors Competition for inventing a new way of programming cells — a technology that could allow bioengineers to produce cu...

The MIT Sloan School of Management, in collaboration with the MIT Energy Initiative and the School of Engineering, will be launching a groundbreaking new workshop called Clean Energy Ventures: Creating Innovative New Businesses Through Entrepreneurial Management.

By gillooly@mit.edu (Larry Hardesty, MIT News Office) Four or five years ago, chip makers realized that they couldn't make chips go much faster, so they adopted a new strategy for increasing computers' power: putting multiple "cores," or processing units, on each chip. In theory, a chip with two cores working in parallel can accomplish twic...

By gillooly@mit.edu (Greg Frost, MIT News Office) As is common with Presidential visits, seating for the address in Kresge Auditorium will be extraordinarily limited and will be by invitation only. The tickets MIT has for the event will be allocated in such a way as to be broadly representative of the Institute — and weighted to favor stud...

By gillooly@mit.edu (Anne Trafton, MIT News Office) In human lung cancer patients, the ras gene is active in 30 percent of patients, and p53 is lost in about 50 percent of tumors, meaning that about 15 percent overall have this combination. Drugs that inhibit NF-kappaB could potentially help treat such tumors, says Etienne Meylan, lead aut...

As is common with Presidential visits, seating for the address in Kresge Auditorium will be extraordinarily limited and will be by invitation only. As Vice President for Institute Affairs and Secretary of the Corporation Kirk Kolenbrander noted in his letter to the community on Tuesda...

President Barack Obama's visit to MIT this week will be only the second time a sitting U.S. president has appeared at the Institute, and the first such visit that is not for a Commencement speech. President Bill Clinton was the Commencement speaker in 1998.

President Barack Obama will visit MIT on Friday, Oct. 23. Details of the event were described in an e-mail sent this evening to the MIT community from Kirk Kolenbrander, MIT's Vice President for Institute Affairs and Secretary of the Corporation. The letter follows.

InvenTeam students will work through the various stages of design and development to create invention prototypes. In June, they will showcase these prototypes at EurekaFest, a multi-day celebration of the inventive spirit, presented by the Lemelson-MIT Program at the Massachusett...

By gillooly@mit.edu (Anne Trafton, MIT News Office) Soon enough we realized we had cells keeping time, which everyone has wanted to find, but nobody has found them before," says Graybiel, who is also an investigator in MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research. The neurons are located in the prefrontal cortex and the striatum, both of wh...

At last Friday's Energy Night at the MIT Museum, Dr. Keith Collins described his approach to fighting global warming with all the gusto of a really good insurance salesman. But Collins, who graduated from MIT in 1970 with a degree in political science, wasn't actually selling anything. He w...

By frost@mit.edu (Anne Trafton, MIT News Office) Two physicists recently put forth a new theory on why the accelerator has encountered so many delays. Holger Bech Nielsen, of the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, and Masao Ninomiya of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics in Kyoto, Japan, suggest that the hypothesized Higgs...

By gillooly@mit.edu (Anne Trafton, MIT News Office) Wilson, now a professor at MIT and a researcher at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, had set up an experiment where he recorded neural signals from rats' brains as they ran a maze in the lab. One day, he left the rats hooked up to the recording equipment after they finished runn...

By frost@mit.edu (Anne Trafton, MIT News Office) Yamamoto earned his bachelor's degree and PhD, both in physics, from MIT in 1957 and 1963, respectively. He joined the MIT's Laboratory for Nuclear Science in 1963 and became an instructor of physics in 1964. He joined the faculty as an assistant professor in 1965 and became a full professo...

By gillooly@mit.edu (David L. Chandler, MIT News Office) IBEX is a project run by the Southwest Research Institute that involves dozens of researchers from several institutions around the country, including three from MIT who are co-authors of the group of Science papers: Peter Ford, a principal research scientist at the Kavli Institute fo...

I think most people would agree that there is more work to be done in terms of graduate student and faculty/staff diversity. And although my focus will be on the undergraduate experience, the diversity, or the lack thereof, in these areas also impacts the work that I do. Students need to see d...

MIT-Israel is one of 10 country programs in the MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives, or MISTI. MISTI matches more than 400 MIT students each year with paid professional internships and research projects around the world, and awards funding to MIT faculty for internat...

By gillooly@mit.edu (David L. Chandler, MIT News Office) Their results are reported Oct. 13 in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. The paper's eight authors include chemical engineering graduate student Seung Woo Lee and mechanical engineering postdoctoral researcher Shuo Chen, along with Shao-Horn and other researchers at MIT,...

The MIT Community Development and Substance Abuse Center (CDSA) is one of three college programs to receive the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) 2009 Science and Service Award for exemplary implementation of evidence-based services

The event, which is taking place from 5:30-8:30 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 16, at the MIT Museum (265 Massachusetts Ave.), is free and open to the public. Participants will have the opportunity to meet experts from various energy-related fields and to discuss ideas for new energy research and busin...

By gillooly@mit.edu (Larry Hardesty, MIT News Office) But Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Antonio Torralba and Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab graduate students Ce Liu, PhD '09, and Jenny Yuen have developed an object recognition system that doesn't req...

By gillooly@mit.edu (Peter Dizikes, MIT News Office) In granting the award, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences cited Williamson "for his analysis of economic governance, especially the boundaries of the firm." His co-winner, Elinor Ostrom of Indiana University, is a professor of political science at Indiana University, and the firs...

MIT Professor of Economics Amy Finkelstein and Tyler Jacks, director of the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT, were elected today to the Institute of Medicine, an arm of the National Academies of Science.

By gillooly@mit.edu (David L. Chandler, MIT News Office) James Elliot, a professor in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, is leading the project, and was due to discuss it and first-look results from Thursday night's observations on Friday at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division for P...

By gillooly@mit.edu (Anne Trafton, MIT News Office) A new paper from scientists at MIT, the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, University of Massachusetts Medical School and Harvard University, reveals the three-dimensional structure of the human genome and answers the thorny question of how each of our cells stows some three billion...

ESD researchers study the complex social/technological questions that “will increasingly determine the future,” says Susan Hockfield. At MIT, Hockfield's job “is to lower boundaries that still exist between departments, and schools. By bringing together faculty, ESD creates enor...

By gillooly@mit.edu (Larry Hardesty, MIT News Office) We've looked at a lot of these web applications, and there's literally hundreds of places where these checks happen," says Nickolai Zeldovich, an assistant professor in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. Indeed, Zeldovich and his colleagues identified one popu...

Anyone who has ever stepped barefoot onto blacktop pavement on a hot sunny day knows the phenomenon very well: Black surfaces absorb the sun's heat very efficiently, producing a toe-scorching surface. In the wintertime, that can be a good thing: A dark roof heats up in the sun and helps red...

Anderson was tabbed as the 2009 New England Women’s and Men’s Athletic Conference (NEWMAC) Coach of the Year, after guiding his team to a program-record-tying 21 wins, including a dramatic, first round upset of Rhode Island College in the NCAA Division III Tournament. The Engineers als...

Lauded by the magazine as “MIT’s famously well-equipped Hobby Shop,” the facility is a wood and metal shop open to the entire MIT community. Students, faculty, staff, and alumni can use the shops diverse array of machines and power tools to work on projects that range from academic to pers...

The Alan ’73 and Terri Spoon Community Catalyst Leadership Program held its third-annual kickoff event on Saturday, Oct. 3, at the Hyatt Regency Cambridge. Community Catalyst pairs 50 juniors from across the Institute with alumni coaches for a year-long intensive leadership developm...

By gillooly@mit.edu (Peter Dizikes, MIT News Office) Economist Robert Solow's seminal work in the 1950s and 1960s showed how new technologies create a large portion of economic growth, an achievement for which he was awarded the 1987 Nobel Prize in Economics. With the economy seemingly in need of a technological boost again, the emeritus I...

Stubbe, who joined the MIT faculty in 1987, is the Novartis Professor of Chemistry and a professor of biology. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

At the Sept. 30 State of the Institute forum, senior administrators announced that MIT had cut $58 million in costs in the current fiscal year, exceeding by $8 million the original target. The Institute is calling for cuts of $60 to $70 million for fiscal year 2011.

By gillooly@mit.edu (Anne Trafton, MIT News Office) Charles Lieber, professor of chemistry at Harvard and an expert in nanoscale technology, describes Yanik's proposal as a "highly original and exciting concept for 'noninvasive' high-resolution imaging" using an electron microscope.

Now the MIT Museum is featuring more collaborations that highlight the work of the MIT community. The Second Friday of every month the Museum will be open from 5-8:00 p.m. for students, faculty, staff, and the general public to mix and mingle in the museum galleries, and to enjoy presentatio...

By gillooly@mit.edu (Larry Hardesty, MIT News Office) On Wednesday, the Boston Red Sox reached Major League Baseball's postseason playoffs for the sixth time in seven years. But whether or not they go on to win another World Series, when the Sox report to spring training next year, they could be spending some time in the trainer's room with mem...

On its new "Flu 101" web site, the MIT Center for Engineering Systems Fundamentals (CESF) presents new research results and educational materials related to planning for and responding to the H1N1 flu pandemic.

MIT approaches an amplification of our international engagements with important strengths. We enjoy an unusually international community of faculty, alumni, and students — a great asset in building cultural awareness, educational infrastructure, and research networks. Our prima...

As part of the development of the curriculum for the new minor, seven new undergraduate classes were created, and three existing classes were significantly revised. Among the new offerings are a social sciences class called “Energy Decisions, Markets and Policies,” and a new class in E...

Last week, a panel co-chaired by MIT Institute Professor Phillip Sharp called for the United States to launch a new biology initiative to accelerate breakthroughs that could solve some of society's most pressing problems. The National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundati...

For commercial transport, a company called Hammock aims to provide a way for shippers to connect with truckers, allowing for a better coordination of resources so that trucks are less likely to travel half-full, and farmers, for example, can get their goods to market without fear of spo...

The findings are being reported in a paper in the May issue of Electron Device Letters and also in a talk this week at the American Physical Society meeting by Tomás Palacios, assistant professor in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a core member of the...

Researchers at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard have received a five-year grant of about $15 million from NIH to map the epigenomes of a variety of medically important cell types, including human embryonic stem cells.