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Founded in 1861, MIT has a proud history of influencing the world through technological leadership and research innovation. MIT is one of the world’s preeminent research universities: renowned for rigorous academic programs in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship; cutting-edge research; a diverse campus community; and a longstanding commitment to working with the public and private sectors to bring new knowledge to bear on the world’s complex challenges.

10/16/2026

For students in class 2.70: Fundamentals of Precision Product Design, accuracy and repeatability are the name of the game.

Through the MIT Mechanical Engineering course, students learn deterministic design, selection, and assembly of machine elements to create and manufacture robust precision machines, instruments, and systems.

“As an engineer, you have an extra responsibility to overlook nothing,” says course instructor Alex Slocum. “If you miss something, someone could be hurt or die.”

Slocum’s message is serious, but his approach to teaching the material is fun — in fact, he prefers the spelling “FUNdaMENTALs” for the first word of the class name. “I want students to understand that we are governed by the laws of physics, and that is a catalyst for creativity, not a hindrance,” he says. “It is a hindrance if you forget that.”

Students in the class apply Slocum’s “Functional Requirements, Ergonomics and Environment, Design Parameters, Analysis, References, Risks, Countermeasures” (FRED PARRC, pronounced like “Fred Park”) model, and engage in peer review and evaluation. Some students may describe the course as “creative chaos,” but tend to agree that their learning experience is one that drives home the fundamentals.

“It definitely made me more confident knowing that I can look at what I'm designing and be very deliberate in taking steps toward mitigating the risks that anyone would face when they use a product,” says graduate student Adian Salazar. “I feel like I've been able to apply all those really fundamental concepts that I learned in the more theory-heavy classes to real-world machines.”

📸: Lauren Futami

https://meche.mit.edu/news-media/fundamentals-precision-design

10/15/2026

Lanie McKinney, a fifth-year MIT Aeronautics and Astronautics PhD student, works in the Aerospace Plasma Group with Professor Carmen Guerra-Garcia, developing technologies that could help humans explore Mars.

One of the current challenges of sending humans to Mars is figuring out how to supply them once they arrive — including how to enable their journey back home. Rather than transporting everything from Earth, McKinney is interested in using the resources already available on the planet. “If we don’t build gas stations on Mars, it will be very difficult to get humans back to Earth,” she says. “We’re going to need some way to produce the propellant on site.”

McKinney has been fascinated with space since she was 3 years old, when her parents stopped at a massive meteor crater during a road trip through the U.S. Southwest. Her research uses cold plasma to convert carbon dioxide, which is abundant in the martian atmosphere, into oxygen and carbon monoxide, a technology that could eventually be used to produce life support and propellant on Mars.

The challenge now is separating out the oxygen before it recombines. Her current work pairs the plasma reactor with an oxygen-selective membrane designed to extract oxygen rapidly. The integration process isn’t well-understood, leaving McKinney and her colleagues with questions about how the reactive plasma environment will affect the membrane. For McKinney, the possibility of connecting laboratory experiments to future human missions is what makes the work particularly rewarding.

“I get to work in a really cool lab and develop exciting experiments,” she says. “I get ownership over an entire experimental system, and then I get to connect that to performance requirements for a future Mars system. That’s just the dream.”

📸: Gretchen Ertl

https://aeroastro.mit.edu/news-impact/fueling-a-return-journey-from-mars/

10/14/2026

Mack Cleveland, a third-year doctoral student at the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE), is researching how dopants and sintering conditions improve nuclear fuels—reducing harmful byproducts and lowering production costs.

Working under Professor Ericmoore Jossou in the MIT Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, Cleveland is exploring the mechanics of fuel improvement at the material level.

As a kid growing up near Dallas, Texas, Cleveland was fascinated by materials, asking questions like, “why is a ceramic cup breakable but not a metal spoon?” He was also committed to work that emphasized service to society. Nuclear engergy gave him both: a path to rigorous science with real-world impact, leading him to pursue a PhD at MIT.

“It really hit me that even abstract science could lead to positive societal impacts. It made me think, ‘how do I cultivate the craft and the skills to tackle these kinds of hard problems, of working with materials in a way that serves the broader mission of making the world a safer place,’” Cleveland says.

📸: Gretchen Ertl

https://nse.mit.edu/mack-cleveland-using-computational-materials-science-to-engineer-higher-burnup-fuels/

10/13/2026

David Des Marais, the Amgen Career Development Professor in MIT Civil and Environmental Engineering, received tenure in 2026.

He leads the Des Marais Lab, whose primary focus of research is to understand the mechanisms of plant-environment interaction, using tools from molecular, quantitative, and population genetics to identify the physiological basis of plant response to environmental cues.

Read more: https://news.mit.edu/2026/tenured-engineers-0615

10/12/2026

Marzyeh Ghassemi, a core faculty member in the MIT Institute for Medical Engineering and Science and a professor in MIT EECS, is conducting research to ensure that medical AI models do not learn biased rules or recommendations, that in the end, can harm minority populations.

She leads the Healthy ML Lab, which tackles the many novel technical opportunities for machine learning in health, and works to improve how AI is deployed for health and medicine. Lab members develop methods to detect failures, quantify uncertainty, reduce bias, and design safer ways for clinicians and patients to work with AI.

One of the projects Ghassemi is working on at the Healthy ML Lab is around integrating multi-modal clinical data, and using recurrent and convolution neural networks to predict when patients will need important interventions. While her work provides insights into model learning, the task is complicated by data sources that are sparse, noisy, heterogeneous, and with imbalanced outcomes.

“Health data really are unusually difficult: vital signs are measured continuously, laboratory tests are ordered irregularly, clinical notes appear at different times, some patients have genomics and environmental data. Multimodal models improve prediction, but we also need to examine what they learned before placing them in clinical workflows,” Ghassemi says.

https://imes.mit.edu/news-events/3-questions-finding-pulse-robust-ai-health

10/11/2026

An MIT student team won first prize in NASA's LunaRecycle Challenge, a competition asking participants to develop recycling solutions that reduce space waste and improve the sustainability of lunar missions. Teams were encouraged to envision solutions with applications on Earth as well as in space.

The team's solution collects waste materials, grinds them down, and transforms them into manufacturing feedstock. This approach produces tools, life-support components, and other essential items for a lunar outpost.

The team designed the process to work in lunar conditions. Because it relies on mechanical grinding powered by electricity—not water or chemicals—it produces no secondary waste. This lets lunar outposts convert delivered packaging and materials into usable feedstock, enabling astronauts to manufacture needed items from waste already on-site.

“We set out to build something that could actually work on the Moon, not just in a lab,” says Lanie McKinney, a graduate student in MIT AeroAstro and team lead. “That means no water and no chemicals you can’t replace. Every design choice we made was driven by those constraints. And we don’t want to recycle just for recycling’s sake; we want to make useful things. Part of how we framed the problem was to create a system that can process nearly any feedstock and turn it into a wide array of components, giving more utility than producing a single item.”

https://aeroastro.mit.edu/news-impact/mit-student-team-cerberuz-wins-nasa-lunarecycle-centennial-challenge-turning-lunar-trash-into-treasure/

10/10/2026

Developing better, more cost-effective wind turbines requires controlled environments for researchers to conduct tests. Wind tunnels can be used for testing, but the scale generated by traditional wind tunnels often differ widely from conditions in the field.

Now, a team of researchers from MIT and elsewhere are using a wind tunnel that features high pressurization to simulate the real-world atmosphere. The researchers determined how the alignment of the turbine, its tip speed, and blade pitch angles relative to the wind influence the power it generates, offering new insights into how to get more power from existing wind farms..

The researchers estimate these optimizations could potentially result in tens of thousands of dollars per turbine every year in additional revenue.

“Wind energy is a uniquely challenging problem to study experimentally,” says MIT civil and environmental engineering Professor Michael Howland. “We want to test the effect of a certain change in isolation, but wind farms operate in chaotic, turbulent environments where the weather is constantly evolving. Wind turbines have to react to weather conditions that we have no control over, and that introduces complexities in identifying the impact of the imposed change we are studying. The field sits at this unique intersection between environmental flow, mechanics, aerodynamics, and meteorology.”

https://cee.mit.edu/pressurized-experiments-could-help-wind-farms-generate-more-power/

10/09/2026

RNA vaccines — proven effective against Covid-19 and in development for cancer and other diseases — require ultracold storage. Using an AI algorithm, MIT researchers reformulated these vaccines to withstand higher temperatures.

Using this approach, they formulated vaccines that could remain stable when stored at room temperature for up to a year, or at nearly 100 degrees Fahrenheit for two months.

When administered to mice, the new vaccines generated immune responses comparable to Moderna's Covid-19 vaccine. By using the AI algorithm to predict optimal formulations, the researchers significantly reduced the number of experiments needed, accelerating the development process.

Making these vaccines more heat-tolerant would enable broader distribution and could help researchers develop new vaccines for novel delivery methods, such as microneedle patches that dissolve upon skin contact.

https://news.mit.edu/2026/new-formulation-helps-rna-vaccines-withstand-high-temperatures-0928

10/08/2026

MIT engineers have developed a design for a thin, muscle-powered robot that can swim through a simple watery maze, covering a distance of about four times its body length in one minute. The new design is the first example of a very thin, two-dimensional, muscle-powered robot capable of locomotion.

The “skeleton” of the aquabot is made from a film of gel that is about the length and width of a stick of gum. The two halves of the gel form the “fins” of the bot, and each fin is covered with a layer of live muscle cells that is thinner than a single strand of hair. The cells are genetically engineered to twitch in response to light.

When the researchers shine light on one fin, the muscles on its surface twitch in response, causing the whole fin to flap with enough force to pull the robot through water. By flashing light on one fin or the other, at various intervals, they can control the swimming robot’s direction and speed.

“Currently, biohybrid robots from our group and others’ are built from bulky, 3D chunks of lab-grown skeletal muscle that require millions of cells to fabricate,” says MIT mechanical engineering Professor Ritu Raman, who notes that thinner, less bulky designs such as the team’s new bot could be cheaper to build and could move more efficiently. “We believe that biohybrid robots powered by living muscle could one day perform delicate jobs like exploring environments too fragile or unpredictable for conventional hardware, because living tissue is soft, responsive to its surroundings, and can heal itself.”

https://meche.mit.edu/news-media/powered-muscle-cells-paper-thin-robot-swims-through-watery-maze

10/07/2026

This fall, astronaut and retired Air Force Colonel E. Michael Fincke ‘89 joined the faculty of MIT Aeronautics and Astronautics as a full-time Professor of the Practice. He returns to MIT after a 30-year career with NASA that included four spaceflights, totaling 549 days in space and nine spacewalks.

Col. Fincke joined the Human Systems Laboratory (HSL), co-directed by Professor Dava Newman and Professor Jeff Hoffman. He will teach and develop courses, advise undergraduate and graduate students, and contribute his considerable expertise to research and education in human spaceflight, flight software, integrated testing, system safety, and spacecraft and habitat design.

“This opportunity is deeply meaningful to me,” Fincke says. “MIT is where my journey in aerospace began, and the chance to return home—to teach, mentor, learn, and help prepare the next generation—is both humbling and exhilarating. I cannot wait to become part of the daily life of AeroAstro and to give our students and the department my very best.”

https://aeroastro.mit.edu/news-impact/astronaut-mike-fincke-joins-mit-aeroastro-as-professor-of-the-practice/

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