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Suborbital space tourism finally arrives | FCC prepares to run public C-band auction | The big four in the U.S. launch industry — United Launch Alliance, SpaceX, Blue Origin and Northrop Grumman — hope to be one of two providers that will receive five-year contracts later this year to launch national security payloads starting in 2022. | China’s launch rate stays high | The International Space Station is the largest ever crewed object in space.

 
Remembering Chasity Nunez, a shining star at...
On March 5, the MIT community lost one of its shining stars when Chasity Nunez passed away. She was 27. “Chas,” as her friends and colleagues called her, served as the patient safety and clinical quality program coordinator at MIT Health. In her role, Nunez helped MIT Health maintain its high safety standards, working to train staff on reporting procedures and best practices for patient safety. Director of Clinical Collaborations and Partnerships Elene Scheff was Nunez’s hiring manager and...

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Three from MIT awarded 2024 Guggenheim Fellowships
MIT faculty members Roger Levy, Tracy Slatyer, and Martin Wainwright are among 188 scientists, artists, and scholars awarded 2024 fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Working across 52 disciplines, the fellows were selected from almost 3,000 applicants for “prior career achievement and exceptional promise.” Each fellow receives a monetary stipend to pursue independent work at the highest level. Since its founding in 1925, the Guggenheim Foundation has awarded over $400 million in fellowships to more than 19,000...

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A musical life: Carlos Prieto ’59 in...
World-renowned cellist Carlos Prieto ’59 returned to campus for an event to perform and to discuss his new memoir, “Mi Vida Musical.” At the April 9 event in the Samberg Conference Center, Prieto spoke about his formative years at MIT and his subsequent career as a professional cellist. The talk was followed by performances of J.S. Bach’s “Cello Suite No. 3” and Eugenio “Toussaint’s Bachriation.” Valerie Chen, a 2022 Sudler Prize winner and Emerson/Harris Fellow, also performed Phillip Glass’s “Orbit.”...

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Two from MIT awarded 2024 Paul and...
MIT graduate student Riyam Al Msari and alumna Francisca Vasconcelos ’20 are among the 30 recipients of this year’s Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans. In addition, two Soros winners will begin PhD studies at MIT in the fall: Zijian (William) Niu in computational and systems biology and Russel Ly in economics. The P.D. Soros Fellowships for New Americans program recognizes the potential of immigrants to make significant contributions to U.S. society, culture, and academia by providing...

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MIT Emerging Talent opens pathways for underserved...
Two ambitions drive Eric Tuyizere: advancing his technological skills and following his passion for entrepreneurship. In July 2023, when he discovered that MIT’s Emerging Talent program was launching the fifth cohort of its Certificate in Computer and Data Science, he applied right away. Seven months in, he says he has found even more than he dreamed of: community and support. This unexpected benefit has turned into a key motivation for Tuyizere as he combines work on the challenging curriculum...

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The MIT Edgerton Center’s third annual showcase...
On April 9, a trailer with the words “Born by Fire” emblazoned on the back pulled down MIT’s North Corridor (a.k.a. the Outfinite). Students, clad in orange construction vests, maneuvered their futuristic creation out of the trailer, eliciting a surge of curious bystanders. The aerodynamic shell is covered by 5 square meters of solar panels. This multi-occupancy solar car, Gemini, designed and built by the Solar Electric Vehicle Team (SEVT), is slated to race in the 2024 American Solar Challenge. Positioned...

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Two MIT teams selected for NSF sustainable...
Two teams led by MIT researchers were selected in December 2023 by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Convergence Accelerator, a part of the TIP Directorate, to receive awards of $5 million each over three years, to pursue research aimed at helping to bring cutting-edge new sustainable materials and processes from the lab into practical, full-scale industrial production. The selection was made after 16 teams from around the country were chosen last year for one-year grants to develop detailed plans...

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Seven from MIT elected to American Academy...
Eight MIT faculty members are among the 250 leaders from academia, the arts, industry, public policy, and research elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the academy announced April 24. One of the nation’s most prestigious honorary societies, the academy is also a leading center for independent policy research. Members contribute to academy publications, as well as studies of science and technology policy, energy and global security, social policy and American institutions, the humanities and culture, and...

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Study demonstrates efficacy of MIT-led Brave Behind...
Several years ago, a team of scientists from MIT and the University of Massachusetts at Lowell designed and deployed a first-of-its-kind web programming course for incarcerated individuals across multiple correctional facilities. The program, Brave Behind Bars, uses virtual classroom technology to deliver web design training to students behind prison walls. The program brought together men and women from gender-segregated facilities to learn fundamentals in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, helping them to create websites addressing social issues of their own...

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Bringing an investigator’s eye to complex social...
Anna Russo likes puzzles. They require patience, organization, and a view of the big picture. She brings an investigator’s eye to big institutional and societal challenges whose solutions can have wide-ranging, long-term impacts. Russo’s path to MIT began with questions. She didn’t have the whole picture yet. “I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life,” says Russo, who is completing her PhD in economics in 2024. “I was good at math and science and thought...

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Circadian rhythms can influence drugs’ effectiveness
Giving drugs at different times of day could significantly affect how they are metabolized in the liver, according to a new study from MIT. Using tiny, engineered livers derived from cells from human donors, the researchers found that many genes involved in drug metabolism are under circadian control. These circadian variations affect how much of a drug is available and how effectively the body can break it down. For example, they found that enzymes that break down Tylenol and...

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A closed-loop drug-delivery system could improve chemotherapy
When cancer patients undergo chemotherapy, the dose of most drugs is calculated based on the patient’s body surface area. This is estimated by plugging the patient’s height and weight into an equation, dating to 1916, that was formulated from data on just nine patients. This simplistic dosing doesn’t take into account other factors and can lead to patients receiving either too much or too little of a drug. As a result, some patients likely experience avoidable toxicity or insufficient...

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Mapping the brain pathways of visual memorability
For nearly a decade, a team of MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) researchers have been seeking to uncover why certain images persist in a people’s minds, while many others fade. To do this, they set out to map the spatio-temporal brain dynamics involved in recognizing a visual image. And now for the first time, scientists harnessed the combined strengths of magnetoencephalography (MEG), which captures the timing of brain activity, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which...

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Professor Emeritus Bernhardt Wuensch, crystallographer and esteemed...
MIT Professor Emeritus Bernhardt Wuensch ’55, SM ’57, PhD ’63, a crystallographer and beloved teacher whose warmth and dedication to ensuring his students mastered the complexities of a precise science matched the analytical rigor he applied to the study of crystals, died this month in Concord, Massachusetts. He was 90. Remembered fondly for his fastidious attention to detail and his office stuffed with potted orchids and towers of papers, Wuensch was an expert in X-ray crystallography, which involves shooting...

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Erin Bahm, Steven Parks named 2024–25 UPS...
The MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics (CTL) has announced Erin Bahm and Steven Parks as recipients of the UPS Fellowship for the 2024–25 academic year. Made possible by a grant from the UPS Foundation, the UPS Fellowship awards financial support to two outstanding students each year, one incoming MIT master’s student and one MIT doctoral student pursuing study relating to logistics, freight transportation, supply chain management, or a related topic. The UPS Fellowship aims to recognize and reward excellence...

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