News & Stories

MIT-Mexico Program fosters cross-border collaboration

Favianna Colón Irizarry spent last summer at Tecnológico de Monterrey, working alongside Mexican biotechnology researchers to develop a biodegradable coating that prolongs the shelf life of local foods. Assisting in this and other innovative projects at one of Mexico’s top research institutions was the opportunity of a lifetime, for sure. But, for Colón Irizarry, it’s […]

K. Lisa Yang Global Engineering and Research Center will prioritize innovations for resource-constrained communities

Billions of people worldwide face threats to their livelihood, health, and well-being due to poverty. These problems persist because solutions offered in developed countries often do not meet the requirements — related to factors like price, performance, usability, robustness, and culture — of poor or developing countries. Academic labs frequently try to tackle these challenges, […]

Diving into nuclear submarines

In 2021, the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia formed a partnership, dubbed AUKUS, which will allow the Royal Australian Navy to purchase several nuclear-powered submarines in an effort to modernize their fleet. Building a nuclear submarine program from scratch is anything but easy, but when they set out to do so, the Australian navy knew […]

An e-commerce marketplace to spur growth in Latin America

Today, people in countries like the United States take it for granted that they can press a button on their phone and receive nearly any product at their front door the next day. But people living in rural parts of lower-income countries often must choose between travelling to cities or paying high prices for many […]

MIT D-Lab works to empower artisanal women miners in Colombia

In Colombia, approximately 60 percent of gold extraction originates from an informal sector known as artisanal and small-scale gold mining. Among them are “las chatarreras,” women who arrive early in the morning at the mines to scavenge and collect rocks or tailings discarded by male miners. Through a project launched in 2020, MIT D-Lab is […]

The City Science Network empowers local communities to collaborate globally

The City Science group at the MIT Media Lab, directed by Principal Research Scientist Kent Larson, launched the City Science Network nine years ago to create sister labs around the world that could share data, code, design ideas, and systems for analysis, simulation, and community engagement. Today, 10 affiliated City Science labs are operating in […]

Morris Chang ’52, SM ’53 describes the secrets of semiconductor success

Groundbreaking technologist Morris Chang ’52, SM ’53 discussed the key elements behind Taiwan’s long-term ascendancy in semiconductor manufacturing, while speaking to a large campus audience in an MIT talk on Tuesday. Chang is the influential founder and former longtime head of TSMC, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, which has become the world’s leading microchip maker. […]

Mobilizing creative learning with OctoStudio

A group of schoolchildren in Chile walk on a hillside, taking photos of plants and animals with mobile devices. They later integrate the photos into animated stories about the local environment. Two friends in Uganda create an interactive game with an animated chicken that moves across the screen as you tilt the phone — and speaks […]

Designing a revolution

It is widely recognized that the period in the early 1970s in which Salvador Allende was president of Chile was a moment of political innovation, when people thought they could bring about socialist transformation peacefully and within existing democratic institutions. “People thought that this would be a political third way,” says Eden Medina, an associate […]

Bringing sustainable and affordable electricity to all

When MIT electrical engineer Reja Amatya PhD ’12 arrived in Rwanda in 2015, she was whisked off to a village. She saw that diesel generators provided power to the local health center, bank, and shops, but like most of rural Rwanda, Karambi’s 200 homes did not have electricity. Amatya knew the hilly terrain would make […]