News & Stories

Pandemic mood: Much worse than a bad Monday

The Covid-19 pandemic has been depressing, demoralizing, and stressful for people around the world. But is there any way to measure exactly how bad it has made everyone feel? A new study led by MIT researchers attempts just that, through a massive examination of hundreds of millions social media posts in about 100 countries. The […]

MIT Morningside Academy for Design created as a new hub for cross-disciplinary education, research, and innovation

MIT President L. Rafael Reif today announced the creation of the MIT Morningside Academy for Design, a major interdisciplinary center that will build on the Institute’s leadership in design-focused education and become a global hub for design research, thinking, and entrepreneurship. The new academy, which aims to foster collaboration and innovation on campus, will be […]

Q&A: Climate Grand Challenges finalists on building equity and fairness into climate solutions

Note: This is the first in a four-part interview series that will highlight the work of the Climate Grand Challenges finalists, ahead of the April announcement of several multiyear, flagship projects. The finalists in MIT’s first-ever Climate Grand Challenges competition each received $100,000 to develop bold, interdisciplinary research and innovation plans designed to attack some of […]

Training STEM teachers to uncover students’ full potential

In the summer of 2011, MIT PhD student Heather Beem travelled to a rural region of Ghana to try engaging students from low-resource schools in hands-on learning projects. She began by asking a group of high school students what they wanted to work on. “They said, ‘Anything, whatever you want,’” Beem recalls. Hoping to narrow […]

Can the world meet global climate targets without coordinated global action?

Like many of its predecessors, the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow, Scotland concluded with bold promises on international climate action aimed at keeping global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius, but few concrete plans to ensure that those promises will be kept. While it’s not too late for the Paris Agreement’s […]

Responding to the tragedy in Ukraine

The following letter was sent to the MIT community on Saturday by President L. Rafael Reif. To the members of the MIT community, Though 4,500 miles separate Kyiv and Cambridge, several factors make the shock of the Russian invasion and its terrible consequences feel very close to home. I write to let you know how […]

Tuning in to invisible waves on the JET tokamak

Research scientist Alex Tinguely is readjusting to Cambridge and Boston. As a postdoc with the Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC), the MIT graduate spent the last two years in Oxford, England, a city he recalls can be traversed entirely “in the time it takes to walk from MIT to Harvard.” With its ancient stone […]

CIS Summer Study Fellowship and Jeanne Guillemin Prize

CIS Summer Study Fellowship Doctoral students may apply for summer support for dissertation research or writing that has an international component. Support may be requested either for fieldwork and/or archival research, or for home-based research and write-up. Grants will not exceed $3,500. The main criteria for determining which proposals will be funded are: (1) the importance of the […]

Call for Proposal: MIT Portugal Program

The MIT Portugal Program (MPP) is pleased to announce its 2022 call for seed grant proposals from MIT Principal Investigators from any of the Institute’s schools, departments, laboratories, or centers. The call is open now through April 4, 2022. The MIT Portugal Program (MPP) is a strategic international partnership between MIT, Portuguese universities and research institutions, […]

Advancing public understanding of sea-level rise

Museum exhibits can be a unique way to communicate science concepts and information. Recently, MIT faculty have served as sounding boards for curators at the Museum of Science, Boston, a close neighbor of the MIT campus. In January, Professor Emerita Paola Malanotte-Rizzoli and Cecil and Ida Green Professor Raffaele Ferrari of the Department of Earth, […]