Petroleum-based adhesives are everywhere: bonding the wood and drywall in a construction project, holding together the joints of furniture, and even sticking labels to otherwise recyclable containers.
“The labels on a container are held up with petroleum-based glue. And because of that, even though you’re putting the container in the recycle bin, it will not get recycled,” says Patty Ferreira, MBA ’97, CEO and cofounder of Silvis Materials, which is combating this problem with its fully biodegradable cellulose adhesives.
When Ferreira began thinking about bio-based adhesives, in 2014, she started by modifying cellulose’s existing role as a stabilizer in adhesive emulsions and replicating the known adhesive properties of more expensive nanocellulose. Today, the formula can make adhesives from virtually every type of plant cellulose, and the MIT Startup Exchange (STEX) is helping Silvis work with packaging and construction companies to test the results.
She expects the adhesive to cut production emissions by up to 80% and use half the energy of fossil-based glues.
As a first-generation student from a small town, Gohar Khan ’21 had to navigate the college admissions process largely on his own. He founded his YouTube channel, Gohar’s Guide, to make things easier for other young people.
Today, more than 10 million people follow Khan on social media for college application advice, study tips, and life hacks. He is also the CEO and cofounder of Next Admit, a consulting business that provides help with college essays, applications, and test preparation. “I’m on a mission to help students worldwide succeed inside and outside of school,” he says.
Born in Pakistan, Khan moved to the United States when he was six months old and grew up in Connecticut, attending a public high school that rarely sent students to top colleges. “That, coupled with the fact that my parents hadn’t gone through the process themselves, made [applying to colleges] a little bit difficult,” he says. “I wanted to demystify the admissions process for a lot of people in the position I was once in.”
Even as a teenager, Laurie Stach ’06 says, she had a “crazy ambition to take on the world and solve problems.” At MIT, she realized she wasn’t the only one.
“Adults always see these youth who are good at math and science and say, ‘You’re going to do great things—someday,’” says Stach. “Meanwhile, traditional education isn’t preparing them.”
That’s why in 2012 Stach founded LaunchX, a for-profit entrepreneurship program that helps high school students build practical skills through an intensive summer program in which they start real companies. Stach says that students form teams, identify a problem, and build an actual product or service that they then take to market—often generating preorders or even revenue before the four-week program ends.
Raised in Texas and the Carolinas, Stach majored in mechanical engineering at MIT and earned her MBA from Harvard Business School in 2011. She ran her first summer program on MIT’s campus with 30 students in 2013 and says “it kind of snowballed.” LaunchX now serves about 500 students per year across both in-person and online programs.
For Rupert Young ’95, SM ’95, his career in data science and cybersecurity began when his grandfather gifted him thousands of stamps: He built intricate databases to catalogue them, displaying the “precise eye” for detail and nuance that his MIT application essay said would make him a good engineer.
Young is now chief product officer of MaxMind, whose work with IP-address location data and fraud prevention has made it a go-to resource. Streaming companies, security vendors, merchants, and ad-network providers use its signature tool, GeoIP, to determine how and where users are accessing services. This information makes it possible to ensure retail sites are using the correct currency, flag suspicious bank logins, and more.
Young’s passion for engineering was shaped by internships, and he has paid it forward by volunteering at his children’s California high school and trying to keep up with what “the next generation of engineers are tinkering with.” The next generation of product innovation at MaxMind excites him too.
“Working with my team to try to find patterns in data and solve challenging problems—to me, there’s no greater joy,” he says.
When Don Yansen ’63 arrived at the MIT AgeLab for a study on technology in caregiving for older adults, he didn’t plan to launch another company. But when he heard participants talk about how hard modern devices can be to use, he decided to develop an alternative.
Yansen, a serial entrepreneur who retired to care for his wife, earned an MIT degree in electrical engineering and a master’s in physics from Northeastern. “What I took from MIT was a good education and the feeling I could solve difficult problems,” he says.
One such problem: Many older adults “can’t even use a modern cell phone,” he says, “and very few people can use something like an Apple Watch.” So Kiwi Health, which he founded in October 2024, sells a wristband controlled primarily by voice. Wearers can set reminders, make calls, send texts, and share health data, all without navigating screens. AI helps interpret these commands, accounting for the way voices may change with age. The device also measures health metrics and automatically alerts caregivers to falls.
Yansen’s hope, he says, is that it can “help seniors live the best life that they can.”
Vaccines that turn the body’s immune system against tumors have shown promise in clinical trials, and a handful have been FDA approved for certain cancers. In many patients, however, these vaccines don’t stimulate enough of a response, and the approach some researchers have taken to strengthening it—delivering the vaccine along with immune-stimulating molecules called cytokines—can cause severe side effects.
Now MIT chemical engineer Daniel Anderson and colleagues at MIT, Harvard, and the University of Houston have reported promising results with a different way of attacking the problem: amplifying the T-cell response to mRNA vaccines. The advance could lead to much more powerful cancer vaccines as well as stronger protection against infectious diseases.
Most vaccines generate not only antibodies but also T cells that can activate antigen-presenting cells, which help tell the immune system what to attack. In their study, the researchers boosted that response with a new type of vaccine adjuvant (a material that can help stimulate the immune system). It consists of mRNA molecules encoding two genes that can switch immune cells into a more active state by turning on certain signaling pathways.
In studies of mice modeling bladder cancer, colon carcinoma, melanoma, metastatic lung cancer, and more, injections of lipid nanoparticles containing the mRNA-encoded adjuvant enabled the immune system to slow growth of some tumors and eradicate many others. This happened even when the mice were not given a vaccine against a specific cancer antigen, but when they were, the response was stronger still.
“When these adjuvant mRNAs are included in the vaccines, the number of antigen-targeted T cells is substantially increased. These T cells play an important role in the immune response,” Anderson says. The mRNA adjuvant also enhanced the immune response to immunotherapy drugs called checkpoint blockade inhibitors, which work by lifting a brake that tumor cells put on T cells and are FDA approved to treat several kinds of cancer.
“The microenvironment of solid tumors is often hostile to T cells and represents a major barrier to effective immunotherapy. We find that immune remodeling with these adjuvants creates a T-cell-permissive environment and promotes tumor rejection,” says Christopher Garris, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and one of the paper’s senior authors.
The researchers also explored whether their adjuvant could boost the immune response to vaccination against viral infection. When they delivered the mRNA particles to mice along with covid or flu vaccines, they found that the vaccine generated a T-cell response 10 to 15 times stronger than usual.
The researchers now plan to test this approach in additional animal models, in hopes of developing it for use in both cancer and infectious diseases.
Meanwhile, they are not the only MIT scientists making exciting advances with adjuvants. A group led by Ana Jaklenec, a principal investigator at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, has used one to help the injectable form of the polio vaccine induce a strong mucosal immune response in the GI tract. That could help reduce viral shedding and transmission, a key objective of polio eradication efforts. But to date this immunity has been produced mainly by the oral form of the vaccine, and many countries have stopped using it because it carries rare risks that the injectable version does not.
Oral and forehead thermometers may not accurately capture a person’s core body temperature, and the few ingestible temperature sensors on the market are so big they are hard to swallow and risk obstructing the GI tract. But MIT engineers created one that can send continuous temperature updates at a size of just six by four millimeters.
To create it, the researchers built a circuit that can fit on a one-square-millimeter silicon chip and designed an oscillator based on leakage current—the small current that flows through a circuit when it’s off. Its frequency varies depending on the temperature of the chip’s surroundings.
The circuit detects temperature within 0.01 °C and can be powered with a 1.55-volt coin cell battery. A strategy known as backscattering further cuts energy consumption, allowing most of the power requirements to be outsourced to an antenna outside the body. It emits an ultra-high-frequency radio wave, which is modulated by an antenna within the sensor and sent back to the external one. By interpreting the changes in the radio wave, the external antenna can calculate the temperature value.
The result is “the smallest ingestible capsule that we have seen for temperature-sensing paradigms,” says Saransh Sharma, a former MIT postdoc now at the University of Cambridge, who is lead author of a paper on the work.
The researchers envision using it to monitor infection, observe patients during and after anesthesia, track fevers in children, help mark ovulation, and more. It could also be used to monitor athletes, soldiers, or anyone else exposed to extreme temperatures.
“A sensor like this gives us the ability to monitor infections and identify them early,” says Giovanni Traverso, an associate professor of mechanical engineering and one of the paper’s senior authors, along with MIT provost Anantha Chandrakasan. “That’s very relevant, particularly for at-risk populations like people who are immunosuppressed.” Ultimately, he hopes, it could replace other types of thermometers for everyone.
When remotely operated vehicles settle on the seafloor or dig through a sand bed, they can kick up clouds of sediment that onboard cameras struggle to see through. Often, the only thing to do is wait until the dust settles. But a new system developed by Amy Phung, SM ’23, PhD ’26, and her advisor Richard Camilli, SM ’00, PhD ’03, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), offers a solution.
In this technique, the vehicle first uses sonar to quickly map its surroundings. That technology doesn’t provide detailed resolution, but it works equally well in cloudy and clear water. And it allows a vehicle to safely get close enough to specific objects for cameras to visualize them more carefully. To speed up the processing so the mapping can be done in real time, the researchers combined the sonar tech with an image-matching algorithm developed by researchers in France that quickly estimates the relative depth of each pixel in a 2D scene.
“An analogy would be if you were to go into a china shop in the dark, and try to pick your way around to find a specific coffee mug without knocking things over,” Camilli says of their new technique. “This would allow you to do that.” He and Phung say applications could include scientific exploration, underwater construction and maintenance, and handling of unexploded undersea mines.
Many people find AI-based chatbots helpful in keeping up with news, but a study by Pattie Maes and her colleagues at the MIT Media Lab points to a big problem with this strategy.
Participants who evaluated paired news headlines and images over the course of four weeks were initially 21% percent more accurate at telling fake news from real when aided by a chatbot—but by week four, they’d become 15% worse at identifying fake news without AI than they were before (though roughly a quarter of them reported feeling better at it). The result reflects an “AI dependency paradox” that has been observed in other domains, including medicine.
“Users get excited about these ‘magical’ LLMs but forget that they’re just statistical models that predict the next ‘token’ in a sequence,” says Anku Rani, a PhD student in media arts and sciences and one of the lead authors of the study, along with fellow MAS PhD student Valdemar Danry, SM ’23.
The researchers also found, however, that certain AI styles were associated with stronger independent performance later on, even if they slowed people down at first. “AIs that ‘tell’ by providing direct answers are more likely to foster reliance, while those that ‘ask’ via Socratic questioning are better at engaging someone to actually learn how to discern the truth on their own,” says Danry. “But it’s very much a trade-off between speed and effort.”
During the original US missions to the moon in the 1960s and ’70s, astronauts relied on radio-frequency systems to communicate, sending grainy, low-quality images and videos to Earth. But on the Artemis II Orion mission in April, spacecraft transmitted crystal-clear footage at speeds on par with those of home internet connections.
The livestreams so many people enjoyed were made possible through the Orion Artemis II Optical Communications System (O2O), developed by MIT Lincoln Laboratory in collaboration with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Based on infrared laser light, which can transmit 10 to 100 times more data per second than radio waves, the system downlinked nearly half a terabyte of data at up to 260 megabits per second. This data trove contained never-before-seen views of the basins and craters on the far side of the moon, a crescent Earth setting behind the moon, a nearly hour-long total solar eclipse, and flashes of light from tiny meteoroids striking the lunar surface.
“Our goal was to demonstrate O2O’s operational utility for human spaceflight, extending the high-bandwidth connections that internet users enjoy on Earth to astronauts in deep space,” says lead systems engineer Farzana Khatri ’90, SM ’92, PhD ’96, a senior staff member in Lincoln Lab’s Optical and Quantum Communications Group.
“Participating in this historic mission … and having O2O be useful—I couldn’t have asked for anything more amazing in my career,” she says.
Do fine art and high tech ever converge? At Sotheby’s they do, thanks to Kelly Shen ’17. Shen works in the growing field of art intelligence for the New York auction house.
Shen builds algorithms to predict prices, using factors like buying trends and artists’ popularity. She has also worked on such efforts as cataloguing and ensuring that real-time systems can handle thousands of potential bidders visiting the house’s website. At the same time, she serves MIT as a class officer, vice president of the Association of MIT Alumnae, and a volunteer for the MIT Club of New York.
A double major in computer science and math, Shen credits lessons from MIT—along with a lifelong passion for drawing—with shaping her career. Her favorite class was Project Laboratory in Mathematics, where students present creative answers to intricate math puzzles. “The class helped me talk about what I do with different audiences,” she says.
Though she appreciates elegant algorithms, she understands when they’re impractical: “You can build a super-sophisticated algorithm, but if it doesn’t bring more audience engagement, it doesn’t really matter.”
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