News & Stories
News & Stories Filtered BY
Filtered by
Community
Baran Mensah: Savoring college life in a new country
MIT senior Baran Mensah recalls taking apart his toys as a child, curious to see how every piece worked. When his mother explained to him what an engineer was, he knew that’s what he wanted to be. Mensah wasn’t particularly familiar with the culture of MIT while growing up in Ghana. But for the last […]
3 Questions: Melissa Nobles on combating antisemitism and Islamophobia
On Nov. 14, President Sally Kornbluth launched Standing Together Against Hate (STAH), a community-driven initiative coordinated by Chancellor Melissa Nobles. The initiative will support efforts led by MIT faculty, staff, students, and the administration to come together, MIT-style, to use our problem-solving skills to address antisemitism, Islamophobia, and other forms of hate. Chancellor Nobles spoke […]
Celebrating diversity and cultural connections
The aroma of global delicacies filled MIT’s Bush Room, as students made cultural connections and answered trivia questions at the third “Heritage Meets Heritage” event. The event is organized by MIT Global Languages, and has become a tradition. It was first held in spring 2022, and again that fall. The third event, held Oct. 19, […]
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 […]
Designing for better lives
Even though Flavio Emilio Vila Skrzypek left his native country of Peru to study at MIT, you can tell immediately that his homeland is close to his heart. Vila, who is pursuing a master’s in city planning, has made it his mission to improve land-use policy back home. “Property policies in Peru should learn from […]
Building bridges to Ukraine through language, art, and community
In a new course that ran this Independent Activities Period (IAP), MIT students studied Ukrainian language and culture and heard from Ukrainian scholars, artists, and activists about the country and the ongoing struggle against the devastating Russian invasion. As Russia began its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Maria Khotimsky, senior lecturer in Russian […]
MIT student club Engineers Without Borders works with local village in Tanzania
Four students from the MIT club Engineers Without Borders (EWB) spent part of their summer in Tanzania to begin assessment work for a health and sanitation project that will benefit the entire village, and an irrigated garden for the Mkutani Primary School. The club has been working with the Boston Professional Chapter of Engineers Without […]
Tackling social issues through engineering and theater
Susan Su thought she was discovering a new café. She was in Beijing for the second half of her gap year, working with a biomedical engineering group at Tsinghua University. But the lab was relatively new, and she was filling her time by exploring the city. She soon realized she had instead stumbled into the […]