News & Stories
News & Stories Filtered BY
In it together: Faculty mentors and graduate students
It can be very easy for students to become overwhelmed in graduate school. The daily challenges of research, the pressure to reach academic milestones, and the management of life outside MIT can tax even the most well-organized mind. Although no student is alone in their cohort, reaching out to classmates or colleagues for help may […]
MIT D-Lab awards fellowships to six East African social entrepreneurs
The MIT D-Lab Scale-Ups fellowship program, which offers one year of support to social entrepreneurs bringing poverty-alleviating products to market at scale, has announced its six fellows for 2019. This year’s fellows include the founders of homegrown, high-impact ventures in underserved markets in Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda. “I look forward to learning from — and sharing with — other D-Lab Scale-Ups […]
Commerce and coercion
Growing up on the Big Island of Hawaii, Kacie Miura says she felt removed from issues roiling the mainland U.S. and the rest of the world. “We were insulated in our own bubble and I wasn’t that interested in domestic or international politics,” says the fifth-year doctoral candidate. But while serving a two-year Peace Corps […]
MIT receives $30 million to help address energy challenges in Egypt
MIT is the recipient of a $30 million award from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), announced this week at a two-day ceremony in Cairo. The award will support MIT over the next five years in developing a Center of Excellence in Energy at Ain Shams University, Mansoura University, and Aswan University, in Egypt. […]
After the Cold War, an uncertain peace
Why have U.S.-Russia relations been rather fraught over much of the last decade? Some might argue that tension is inevitable among international powers. Others have contended that U.S.-backed expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in the last two decades has made Russia feel threatened. But those are hardly the only possible explanations. In […]
President Julius Maada Bio of Sierra Leone visits MIT
In just 10 months in office as the Republic of Sierra Leone’s fifth democratically elected president, Julius Maada Bio has already laid out and begun to implement one of Africa’s most ambitious agendas, aimed at transforming the impoverished nation into a major hub for technology and innovation. In a visit to MIT on Thursday, he […]
Tackling poverty, one person at a time
When Staten Island-native Sarah Tress first arrived at MIT, she had never been outside of the United States. Now, almost four years later, she’s travelled across Asia, spending weeks at a time in India, Vietnam, and Indonesia. But the reason for all this travel hasn’t been sightseeing — she’s been working to reduce poverty, one […]
Combining artificial intelligence with their passions
Computational thinking will be the mark of an MIT education when the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing opens this fall, and glimpses of what’s to come were on display during the final reception of a three-day celebration of the college Feb. 26-28. In a tent filled with electronic screens, students and postdocs took turns explaining […]
Vectorly reinvents itself to maximize its impact on mobile learning
It’s easy to make major changes to a startup in the early stages of its development. But when an entrepreneur has invested years into building a company, attracting employees and customers in the process, changing course can be a painful experience. Sam Bhattacharyya learned that lesson firsthand in 2018, a year he calls the hardest […]
In China, a link between happiness and air quality
For many years, China has been struggling to tackle high pollution levels that are crippling its major cities. Indeed, a recent study by researchers at Chinese Hong Kong University has found that air pollution in the country causes an average of 1.1 million premature deaths each year and costs its economy $38 billion. Now researchers […]