The impact of climate change on the ocean
When deciding on a major, one thing was clear for Michelle Kornberg — she didn’t want to be stuck inside for four years. “I like the environment of working on something in the lab, but I grew up in a very outdoorsy family,” she says. “I definitely knew I didn’t want to be inside all the time.”
During MIT’s First-Year Pre-Orientation Program, Kornberg got a sense of which major would help her achieve this goal. One of her orientation counselors presented on their summer aboard the research vessel Nautilus Explorer. The counselor was studying Course 2-OE (Mechanical and Ocean Engineering). Later that year, Kornberg declared 2-OE.
“I think ocean engineering as a field is really interesting because it marries the holistic side of living on planet Earth with solving all the technical challenges mechanical engineers face,” explains Kornberg, now a senior.
This balance of using fundamental theories in areas like fluid dynamics, controls, and acoustics to solve problems in underwater environments has been a driving force throughout her academic career.
“I am interested in how we can apply specific ocean engineering solutions to larger global problems, particularly climate change,” Kornberg adds.
Throughout her time in Course 2-OE, Kornberg has tackled problems stemming from climate change through an ocean engineer’s lens in a number of ocean environments, including Boston Harbor and the Great Barrier Reef.
Measuring ocean acidification in Boston Harbor
By the middle of her first year, Kornberg started working with the MIT Sea Grant College Program as an undergraduate researcher working alongside Thomas Consi, research education specialist. In addition to building a model tugboat through her work with Consi, Kornberg worked on a project to track ocean acidification in Boston Harbor.
During coastal ocean acidification, higher levels of carbon in the water cause algae blooms that negatively impact organisms in the ecosystems. In Boston Harbor, shellfish suffer in particular. To understand the impact coastal ocean acidification has in Boston, Kornberg worked with Consi on developing a suite of sensors to take measurements below the water.
“Being able to track different elements of the coastal ocean environment is important to understanding the chain of events that leads to things like coastal ocean acidification,” she says.
In addition to mapping the topography of the ocean floor — known as bathymetry — the team measured variables such as water current speed. Their goal was to identify the best place to situate a measurement station that could track coastal ocean acidification in Boston Harbor.
Kornberg would have more opportunities to work on one of Boston’s waterways throughout her 2-OE classes. In the capstone classes 2.013/2.014 (Engineering Systems Design and Development) during her junior year, she worked with a team on designing and building a working prototype of an autonomous vehicle.
“The class was the first time I had the experience of working on a team with people with very different backgrounds,” Kornberg adds. “It was such a good experience — you had some people who focused on electronics and others who had a background in materials science.”
The student team built a prototype for an MIT Lincoln Laboratory project called the Ionobot. An autonomous surface vessel, the Ionobot measures changes in the ionosphere to help identify and prevent interference with GPS signals.
On the day of the final project presentation, Kornberg and her team assembled on the docks of the MIT Sailing Pavilion, nervously awaiting the moment of truth. Would their prototype work as they planned?
An angry storm offered the team one additional challenge — windy conditions made for a choppy day on the Charles River. The team launched the Ionobot prototype and took a sigh of relief. It performed as they expected.
“It was objectively the worst weather day that semester, but it was still somehow the greatest day,” recalls Kornberg.
Several weeks later, Kornberg would be working in very different conditions along the northeast coast of Australia.
Tracking coral bleaching in the Great Barrier Reef
Last summer, Kornberg worked at the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) in Townsville, Australia through the MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives. Alongside Nicholas Fritzinger-Pittman, a senior studying mechanical engineering, Kornberg worked on developing a rail system that would enable a hyperspectral scanner to collect accurate data on thousands of coral samples in the AIMS Sea Simulator.
“In a regular camera, each pixel has a specific color. A hyperspectral camera, on the other hand, assigns a frequency distribution to each pixel, allowing you to track more than just physical light,” explains Kornberg.
This technology is particularly useful in predicting whether or not a coral is experiencing the early stages of bleaching — a condition often caused by climate change that has destroyed of large swaths of coral reefs globally.
“Coral depend on algae to stay alive. The algae can tell when conditions are suboptimal for photosynthesis before the coral can so they ‘get out of Dodge’ and leave the coral. This is the first sign of coral bleaching,” Kornberg adds.
Since researchers are unable to see algae leave the coral using the visual spectrum, they rely on a linear hyperspectral scanner to capture this process.
Before Kornberg and Fritzinger-Pittman arrived at AIMS, coral samples would have to be transported from one tank to the tank with the hyperspectral scanner on it. Since removing the coral from their environment could compromise the experiment, Kornberg and Fritzinger-Pittman worked with researchers at AIMS to develop a portable rail system that would bring the hyperspectral scanner to the coral — not the other way around.
As part of their time at AIMS, Kornberg and Fritzinger-Pittman joined a research cruise on the RV Cape Ferguson. Over the course of six days, the team visited Keeper Reef and John Brewer Reef. During breaks in research, they were able to snorkel explore the reef.
“Snorkeling along the reef was just an incredibly humbling and magical experience,” says Kornberg.
Later in the summer, the pair also took a scuba diving trip to Cairns, Australia. While they got to see colorful reefs and animals like clownfish, giant clams, and sea turtles, they also saw the effects of coral bleaching on some parts of the reef off the coast of Cairns.
“Seeing some coral bleaching in the reef itself was a really sad, sobering sight,” she adds.
Wave energy conversion in Spain
As Kornberg prepares for life after graduation this May, she is shifting her focus to renewable energy.
“I personally am most interested in looking at how we can build platforms that harness energy from the ocean environment,” she says.
Kornberg plans to work for several months this fall at Seaplace in Madrid, Spain. Her focus will be on designing and building marine turbines for wave energy conversion.
“Waves offer so much potential in terms of renewable energy. We’ve known this for a long time, but haven’t been able to figure out how to best harness this energy,” she explains. “I’m really interested in working on technologies that can help us utilize wave energy at scale.”
Originally appeared in MIT News, March 23, 2020.
Demystifying artificial intelligence
Natalie Lao was set on becoming an electrical engineer, like her parents, until she stumbled on course 6.S192 (Making Mobile Apps), taught by Professor Hal Abelson. Here was a blueprint for turning a smartphone into a tool for finding clean drinking water, or sorting pictures of faces, or doing just about anything. “I thought, I wish people knew building tech could be like this,” she said on a recent afternoon, taking a break from writing her dissertation.
Scaling up a cleaner-burning alternative for cookstoves
Mechanical engineering students in MIT D-Lab are working with collaborators in Uganda on a solution for the health hazards associated with wood-burning stoves. For millions of people globally, cooking in their own homes can be detrimental to their health, and sometimes deadly. The World Health Organization estimates that 3.8 million people a year die as a result of the soot and smoke generated in traditional wood-burning cookstoves. Women and children in particular are at risk of pneumonia, stroke, lung cancer, or low birth weight.
An Immersive Experience in Industry
Over the summer, four mechanical engineering graduate students had the opportunity to gain hands-on experience working in industry. Through the recently launched Industry Immersion Project Program (I2P), students were paired with a company and tasked with tackling a short-term project. Projects in this inaugural year for the program came from a diverse range of industries, including manufacturing, robotics, and aerospace engineering.
A New Lens Into the Past
For the fourth summer in a row, 16 rising sophomores visited civilization-spanning structures and monuments in Italy through the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering’s ONE-MA3 program, which integrates the study of art, architecture, and archaeology. During the three-week field course, which is supported by the AREA3 Association (Associazione per la Ricerca e l'Educazione nell'Arte, Archeologia e Architettura), students conducted research on ancient artifacts and structural materials to inspire new research projects grounded in time, which they explore further in the fall semester in 1.057 (Heritage Science and Technology).
Making It Real
Cloudy beige liquid swirls inside a large bioreactor resembling a French press as Jenna Ahn examines small flasks nearby. The lab where Ahn is working, in the subbasement of Building 66, has the feel of a beehive. She’s part of one of nine teams of undergraduates huddling in groups at their benches. Every now and then, someone darts off to use a larger piece of equipment among the shakers, spectrometers, flasks, scales, incubators, and bioreactors lining the walls.
Human-Exosystem Adaptation
As engineers make strides in the design of wearable, electronically active, and responsive leg braces, arm supports, and full-body suits, collectively known as exoskeletons, researchers at MIT are raising an important question: While these Iron Man-like appendages may amp up a person’s strength, mobility, and endurance, what effect might they have on attention and decision-making?
Fabrics Are the Future
Yoel Fink stands under an unassuming LED ceiling lamp wearing what appears to be just an ordinary baseball cap. “Do you hear it?” he asks. Semiconductor technology within the fibers of the hat is converting the audio encoded in light pulses to electrical pulses, he explains, which are then converted to sound. “This is one of the first examples of an advanced fabric. It looks like an ordinary hat, but it’s really a sophisticated optical communication system.”
Decoding Language Barriers
“Learning a new language gives you a window into someone else’s world,” says Virginia Adams, who graduated from MIT this past May. For Adams, learning Chinese has given her a glimpse into a fascinating, fast-paced culture where technology is rapidly advancing. As a MIT International Science & Technology Initiatives (MISTI) intern at Tencent, a large technology company in Shenzhen, China, Adams hones her ability to communicate with her Chinese co-workers and friends in order to better build the programs that instruct computers to communicate.
MIT Alumnus and GM Engineer Returns to Campus to Inspire Student Innovation
Will Dickson ’14 parks General Motors’ first self-driving vehicle, the Cruise AV, on campus and invites MIT students to think flexibly about its design opportunities. “You are future engineers and thought leaders in the area of new machines,” he says. “How do you design future vehicles like this one better for a safe and autonomous experience?”