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By attracting the world’s sharpest talent, MIT helps keep the US a step ahead
MIT is a global community whose international engagement bestows benefits well beyond the Cambridge campus.
MIT in the world
MIT-Imperial Seed Fund marks a decade of collaborative research and discovery
Nearly 50 projects have been funded since 2015, capitalizing on the unique areas of expertise at each university and setting the stage for further studies.
MIT students turn vision to reality
ASA Impact Fund finances unique and impactful projects in Africa.
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Maria Zuber testifies before Congress on striking the right balance between research security and openness
The United States must perform a careful balancing act to secure federally funded research against improper interference from China and other foreign governments without shutting down valuable international scientific research collaborations, MIT Vice President for Research Maria T. Zuber said this week in testimony before Congress. Speaking at a virtual hearing held by two subcommittees […]
3 Questions: Understanding the Haiti earthquakes
On Aug. 14, a magnitude 7.2 earthquake struck Haiti. The largest earthquake in the region since 2010, the disaster left at least 2,000 people dead, 12,000 people injured, and nearly 53,000 houses destroyed. Two assistant professors in the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences discuss why the region is susceptible to earthquakes and […]
Citizens emerge from the slums
Do the world’s nearly 1 billion urban poor, who subsist without legal housing, reliable water and sewer infrastructure, and predictable employment, lack political engagement as well? Ying Gao does not buy the claim by many social scientists that social and economic marginalization necessarily means political marginalization. “My results contradict the prevailing wisdom about slums and […]
MIT, US Space Force to explore opportunities for research and workforce development
Advancing human understanding and exploration in space is a long-standing pursuit of researchers and students at MIT. For the U.S. military, space technologies and discovery have wide-ranging implications on national security. With that history and context in mind, the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro) hosted an on-campus event on Aug. 31, marking a […]
Study: Global cancer risk from burning organic matter comes from unregulated chemicals
Whenever organic matter is burned, such as in a wildfire, a power plant, a car’s exhaust, or in daily cooking, the combustion releases polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) — a class of pollutants that is known to cause lung cancer. There are more than 100 known types of PAH compounds emitted daily into the atmosphere. Regulators, […]
Data flow’s decisive role on the global stage
In 2016, Meicen Sun came to a profound realization: “The control of digital information will lie at the heart of all the big questions and big contentions in politics.” A graduate student in her final year of study who is specializing in international security and the political economy of technology, Sun vividly recalls the emergence […]
Crossing disciplines, adding fresh eyes to nuclear engineering
Sometimes patterns repeat in nature. Spirals appear in sunflowers and hurricanes. Branches occur in veins and lightning. Limiao Zhang, a doctoral student in MIT’s Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, has found another similarity: between street traffic and boiling water, with implications for preventing nuclear meltdowns. Growing up in China, Zhang enjoyed watching her father […]
What’s the next chapter in Afghanistan?
After nearly 20 years, the U.S. has withdrawn its troops from Afghanistan, and the Taliban has regained control over the country. In light of those developments, a panel of foreign-policy experts on Tuesday addressed two separate but related questions: Why did the U.S. military action in Afghanistan fall short, and what comes next for the […]
Researchers design sensors to rapidly detect plant hormones
Researchers from the Disruptive and Sustainable Technologies for Agricultural Precision (DiSTAP) interdisciplinary research group of the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore, and their local collaborators from Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory (TLL) and Nanyang Technological University (NTU), have developed the first-ever nanosensor to enable rapid testing of synthetic auxin […]
End-to-end supply chain transparency
For years, companies have managed their extended supply chains with intermittent audits and certifications while attempting to persuade their suppliers to adhere to certain standards and codes of conduct. But they’ve lacked the concrete data necessary to prove their supply chains were working as they should. They most likely had baseline data about their suppliers […]