News & Stories

MIT-Kalaniyot program expands, with new cohort of scholars

As a new academic year dawns, the MIT-Kalaniyot program is welcoming its second cohort of scholars to campus, expanding an innovative effort to build new connections between MIT and researchers from Israel. In fall 2026, MIT-Kalaniyot has 11 new scholars arriving at MIT to pursue research, collaborating with Institute faculty across a wide variety of disciplines. […]

How architecture influences political activity

Could the precise architectural form of your residence influence how much you participate in politics? A new study by MIT scholars finds this to be exactly the case — at least in Accra, Ghana, where many people live in semi-communal structures known as “compound houses,” often sharing kitchens, bathrooms, and common living-room spaces, while having […]

Q&A with an MIT dining influencer

Last fall, MIT Campus Dining recruited a group of students to make short videos and share their experiences as student diners on Instagram. The MIT Dining Ambassadors program is an effort to get students talking about — and helping to improve — MIT’s food services and systems. One of the inaugural ambassadors, Michaela Brown, a biochemical […]

Innovative projects explore ways to deal with extreme heat

When MIT mechanical engineering Professor Kripa Varanasi landed in New Delhi in the middle of the night in June 2024 to attend a conference, he found himself in 104-degree Fahrenheit heat. “This was June, and it was crazy. It was so hot for the whole meeting that I never left the hotel,” with daytime temperatures […]

Research from the ground up

When Sonya Atalay conducted her doctoral research, she studied pottery in Çatalhöyük, a remarkable ancient site in Turkey. It’s one of the world’s earliest known urban settlements, flourishing by at least 7000 B.C.E. Yet even as Atalay was conducting field research and writing her doctoral thesis, she was scrutinizing standard archaeological practices, believing the discipline to […]

Learning to teach, learning to discover

Nik Sandu points to a graph on the whiteboard in a seventh-grade science class. “According to the graph, what is the energy of the ball?” she asks, gently waving a hand to settle the room’s twitchy energy. “Voices are off.” A student raises his hand, noticing an askew Y-axis. “This one doesn’t go through zero. A […]

MIT Asia Real Estate Initiative expands its footprint in booming Asian cities

Urbanization in the Asia-Pacific region of the world is occurring at an alarmingly rapid pace, with more than 2.2 billion people now living in cities in the region, and an additional 1.2 billion projected to migrate to cities by 2050, according to a February 2026 report from the U.N. Economic and Social Commission for Asia and […]

A bet that has paid off 500 million times over

In 2001, at the dawn of the digital age, MIT made a bold decision: to open its curriculum to the world. Through MIT OpenCourseWare — now part of MIT Open Learning — the Institute began sharing materials from nearly all of its courses online for free. A quarter of a century later, that decision has […]

Testing sustainable agriculture in Barcelona

A dozen MIT students recently set out for Barcelona — not just to study climate resilience, but to experience it firsthand. As part of STS.S22 (How to Grow Resilient Futures: Regenerative Agriculture and Economies in Catalunya, Spain), an Independent Activities Period course taught by Kate Brown, the Thomas M. Siebel Distinguished Professor in the History of […]

Study: Immigrants help address the US eldercare shortage

Good caregivers are often in short supply, but after the Covid-19 pandemic hit the U.S. in early 2020, staff levels at nursing homes dropped by 10 percent. What was a simple personnel shortage has moved closer to being a nursing-care crisis. “We have an aging population, care for them is labor-intensive, and there are shortages […]