News & Stories

J-PAL expands evidence-to-policy government partnerships to fight poverty worldwide

The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at MIT has announced a significant expansion of its efforts to forge evidence-to-policy partnerships with innovative-minded governments seeking to use rigorous research to inform their social policies and programs. These partnerships will support governments in laying the groundwork to take evidence-informed policies and programs to scale, aiming […]

New J-WAFS-led project combats food insecurity

Today the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) at MIT announced a new research project, supported by Community Jameel, to tackle one of the most urgent crises facing the planet: food insecurity. Approximately 276 million people worldwide are severely food insecure, and more than half a million face famine conditions. […]

A better way to make development projects work

In poorer countries, economic development projects tend to get built with the aid of partner countries and companies, and multilateral development organizations. One line of thought is that such projects work better when the outside partner is also from a lower-income country, what is often referred to as the “Global South.” Suppose the Brazilian cooperation […]

Emma Gibson: Optimizing health care logistics in Africa

Growing up in South Africa at the turn of the century, Emma Gibson saw the rise of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and its devastating impact on her home country, where many people lacked life-saving health care. At the time, Gibson was too young to understand what a sexually transmitted infection was, but she knew that HIV […]

Getting the carbon out of India’s heavy industries

The world’s third largest carbon emitter after China and the United States, India ranks seventh in a major climate risk index. Unless India, along with the nearly 200 other signatory nations of the Paris Agreement, takes aggressive action to keep global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius relative to preindustrial levels, physical and financial losses […]

How the debt crisis of 2008-09 fueled populist politics

The economic downturn of 2008-09 has often been described as a financial-sector crisis, featuring failing banks. But it was much more than that. Many people with stagnant or dropping incomes, having borrowed to sustain their standard of living, found themselves deep in debt when the economy sagged and joblessness increased. In turn, those economic problems […]

Study: Trade can worsen income inequality

International trade exacerbates domestic income inequality, at least in some circumstances, according to an empirical study that two MIT economists helped co-author. The research, focusing on Ecuador as a case study, digs into individual-level income data while examining in close detail the connections between Ecuador’s economy and international trade. The study finds that trade generates […]

Mobilizing across borders to address global challenges

For the most creative minds to work together to solve the world’s greatest challenges, it is essential for global collaboration to be unencumbered by distance. The MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI) Global Seed Funds (GSF) program enables participating faculty teams to collaborate across borders with international partners to develop and launch joint research […]

When politics is local in the Middle East

As the old adage has it, all politics is local. That might seem a quaint idea in an age of social media and global connectivity. And yet, as a study co-led by an MIT political scientist finds, it may describe Middle East politics more accurately than many people realize. More specifically, sectarian identity in the […]

SMART researchers enable early-stage detection of microbial contamination in cell therapy

Researchers from the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore, have identified a critical quality attribute (CQA) that potentially allows the development of a rapid and sensitive process analytical technology for sterility. Specifically, this technology enables the detection of early-stage microbial contamination in human cell therapy products (CTPs). Cell therapy […]