Building communities, founding a startup with people in mind
MIT postdoc Francesco Benedetti admits he wasn’t always a star student. But the people he met along his educational journey inspired him to strive, which led him to conduct research at MIT, launch a startup, and even lead the team that won the 2021 MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition. Now he is determined to make sure his company, Osmoses, succeeds in boosting the energy efficiency of traditional and renewable natural gas processing, hydrogen production, and carbon capture — thus helping to address climate change.
Launchpad for healthcare entrepreneurs
When Computation and Systems Biology PhD student Elvira Kinzina was diagnosed with Lyme disease during her first year at MIT, she struggled to find a doctor specializing in the disease – even though Boston is renowned for its thriving healthcare community. She soon found out this was common for Lyme patients, with many specialists booked out months, years, or indefinitely. Now she is involved with a new Independent Activities Period (IAP) program focused on healthcare entrepreneurship, developing an app that would help Lyme patients find doctors and answers sooner.
Brave Behind Bars: Prison education program focuses on computing skills for women
A programming language textbook might not be the first thing you’d expect to see when walking into a correctional facility.
Compassionate mentorship both inside and outside the lab
Although his professional expertise lies in developing chemical catalysts, MIT Visiting Professor Karthish Manthiram also makes sure to catalyze positive relationships with his graduate students.
Student, Alum Team Up to Combat Covid
“One of the reasons I like to interview for MIT is to be inspired—and maybe inspire a little bit back,” says George Hu ’89, a former Microsoft developer and creator of the language used for macros in Microsoft Excel. Hu says interviewing MIT applicants in his native Seattle is one way he stays connected to the alma mater that has had so much impact on his life and on the lives of students like computation and cognition major Darren Lim ’23, whom he interviewed in January 2019.
Diagnosing cancer with a barcode-inspired test
As Dana Al-Sulaiman peers into a microscope, a row of dots appears on a slide. These dots can help provide a cancer diagnosis. Al-Sulaiman was inspired by barcodes found on consumer products.
A pet brand on a mission
Two years ago, as Rhett James was starting a dual-degree MBA/master's degree in city planning, a chance meeting with Leyou Tameru, a legal consultant based in Ethiopia, would take him down an unexpected path. An architect by trade, James had an eye for design, but never anticipated that he would go into consumer goods. When casually discussing small business ideas with Tameru, the pair landed on a concept that stuck with them: an inclusive, social impact pet brand inspired by African and Black culture.
Meet this year’s MathWorks Fellows: A three-part series, III
When the Perseverance Rover landed on Mars last February, it carried with it an oxygen generation experiment called MOXIE. The instrument uses electrolysis to split oxygen out of a Martian atmosphere predominantly composed of carbon dioxide. When the system is initiated, it can produce enough oxygen for one human to breathe for a little more than ten minutes.
Faster than a snail
On September 12, the student-led group, MIT Hyperloop III will be presenting a machine learning-augmented drilling technology at Elon Musk’s ‘Not-A-Boring’ competition to be held in the Mojave Desert. The competition is sponsored by Musk’s The Boring Company, which he founded to pursue hyperloop technology. MIT Hyperloop III was selected as one of twelve groups, the “Digging Dozen,” to participate in the competition out of an applicant pool of over 400 teams.
Recognizing seven years of the MIT University Center for Exemplary Mentoring (UCEM)
MIT University Center for Exemplary Mentoring (UCEM) was founded in 2015 with an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant that centers on the recruitment, retention, and academic success of underrepresented minority doctoral students in five departments in the School of Engineering: Biological Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Mechanical Engineering, and the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science/Health Sciences and Technology.