Reimagining sound and space

On a typical afternoon, MIT’s new Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building hums with life. On the fourth floor, a jazz combo works through a set in a rehearsal suite as engineers adjust microphone levels in a nearby control booth. Downstairs, the layered rhythms of Senegalese drumming pulse through a room built to absorb its force. In the building’s makerspace, students solder circuits, prototype sensor systems, and build instruments. Just off the main lobby, beneath the 50-foot ­ceiling of the circular Thomas Tull Concert Hall, another group tests how the room, whose acoustics can be calibrated to shift with each performance, responds to its sound.

Situated behind Kresge Auditorium on the site of a former parking lot, the Linde building doesn’t mark the beginning of a serious commitment to music at MIT—it amplifies an already strong program. Every year, more than 1,500 students enroll in music classes, and over 500 take part in one of the Institute’s 30 ensembles, from the MIT Symphony Orchestra to the Fabulous MIT Laptop Ensemble, which creates electronic music using laptops and synthesizers. They rehearse and perform in venues across campus, including Killian Hall, Kresge, and a network of practice rooms, but the Linde Building provides a dedicated home to meet the depth, range, and ambition of music at MIT.

“It would be very difficult to teach biology or engineering in a studio designed for dance or music,” Jay Scheib, section head for Music and Theater Arts, told MIT News shortly before the building officially opened. “The same goes for teaching music in a mathematics or chemistry classroom. In the past, we’ve done it, but it did limit us.” He said the new space would allow MIT musicians to hear their music as it was intended to be heard and “provide an opportunity to convene people to inhabit the same space, breathe the same air, and exchange ideas and perspectives.”

The building, made possible by a gift from the late philanthropists Edward ’62 and Joyce Linde, has already transformed daily music life on campus. Musicians, engineers, and designers now cross paths more often as they make use of its rehearsal rooms, performance spaces, studios, and makerspace, and their ideas have begun converging in distinctly MIT ways. Antonis Christou, a second-year master’s student in the Opera of the Future group at the MIT Media Lab and an Emerson/Harris Scholar, says he’s there “all the time” for classes, rehearsals, and composing.

“It’s really nice to have a dedicated space for music on campus. MIT does have very strong music and arts programs, so I think it reflects the strength of those programs,” says Valerie Chen ’22, MEng ’23, a cellist and PhD candidate in electrical engineering who works on interactive robotics. “But more than that, I think it makes a statement that technology and the arts, and music in particular, are very interconnected.”

A building tuned for acoustics and performance

Acoustic innovation shaped every aspect of the building’s 35,000 square feet of space. From the outset, the design team faced a fundamental challenge: how to create a facility where radically different types of music could coexist without interference. Keeril Makan, the Michael (1949) and Sonja Koerner Music Composition Professor and associate dean of MIT’s School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS), helped lead that effort.

“It was important to me that we could have classical music happening in one space, world music in another space, jazz somewhere else, and also very fine measurements of sound all happening at the same time. And it really does that,” says Makan. “But it took a lot of work to get there.”

WINSLOW TOWNSON

That work resulted in a building made up of three artfully interconnected blocks, creating three acoustically isolated zones: the Thomas Tull Concert Hall, the Erdely Music and Culture Space, and the Lim Music Maker Pavilion. Thick double shells of concrete enclose each zone, and their physical separation minimizes vibration transfer between them. One space for world music rests on a floating slab above the building’s underground parking garage and is constructed using a box-in-box method, with its inner room structurally isolated from the rest of the building. Other rooms use related techniques, with walls, floors, and ceilings separated by layers of sound-dampening materials and structural isolation systems to reduce sound transmission.

The building was designed by the Japanese architecture firm SANAA, in close collaboration with Nagata Acoustics, the team behind Berlin’s Pierre Boulez Saal. Inspired in part by that German hall, the 390-seat Thomas Tull Concert Hall is meant to serve musicians’ varying acoustic needs. Inside, ceiling baffles and perimeter curtains make it possible to adapt the room on demand, shifting the acoustics from resonant and open for chamber music and classical performances to drier and more controlled for jazz or electronic music.

Makan and the acoustics team pushed for a 50-foot ceiling, a requirement from Nagata for acoustic flexibility and performance quality. The result is a concert hall that breaks from traditional form. Instead of occupying a raised stage facing rows of seats, performers in Tull Hall are positioned at the bottom of the space, with the audience seated around and above them. This layout alters the relationship between listeners and performers; audience members can choose to sit next to the string section or behind the pianist, experiencing sounds and sights typically reserved for musicians. The circular configuration encourages movement, intimacy, and a more immersive musical experience. 

“It’s a big opportunity for creativity,” says Ian Hattwick, a lecturer in music technology. “You can distribute musicians around the hall in interesting ways. I really encourage people in electronic music concerts to come up and get close. You can come up and peer over somebody’s shoulder while they’re playing. It’s definitely different. But I think it’s beautiful.”

That sense of openness shaped one of the first performances in the new hall. As part of the building’s opening-weekend event in February, called “Sonic Jubilance,” the Fabulous MIT Laptop Ensemble (FaMLE), directed by Hattwick, took the stage, testing the venue’s variable acoustics and capacity for spatial experimentation as it employed laptops, gestural controllers, and other electronic devices to improvise and perform electronic music.

“I was really struck by how good it sounded for what I do and for what FaMLE does,” says Hattwick. “There’s a surround system of speakers. It was really fun and really satisfying, so I’m super excited to spend some more time working on spatial audio applications.” That evening, a concert featured performances by a diverse array of additional ensembles and world premieres by four MIT composers. It was the first moment many performers heard what the hall could do—and the first time they’d shared a space designed for all of them.

JONATHAN SACHS

JONATHAN SACHS

The community joined MIT music faculty, staff, and students for special workshops and short performances at the building’s public opening in February.

Since then, the hall has hosted a wide range of performances, from student recitals to concerts featuring guest artists. In the span of two weeks in March, the Boston Chamber Music Society celebrated the music of Fauré and the Boston Symphony Chamber Players performed works by Aaron Copland, Brahms, and MIT’s own Makan. Other concerts have featured student compositions, historical instruments, and multichannel electronic works. 

Just a few steps from the entrance to Tull Concert Hall, across the brick- and glass-lined lobby, the Beatrice and Stephen Erdely Music and Culture Space supports a different kind of sound. It’s designed to host rehearsals of percussion groups like Rambax MIT, the Institute’s Senegalese drumming ensemble, which uses hand-carved sabar drums, each played with a stick and open palm to produce tightly woven polyrhythms. At other times, students gather there around bronze-keyed instruments as they play with the Gamelan Galak Tika ensemble, practicing the interlocking patterns of Balinese kotekan. 

Such music was originally meant to be performed in the open. The Music and Culture Space provides the physical and sonic headroom these traditions require, using materials chosen not only to isolate sound but also to let it breathe. Inside, the room thrums with rhythm, while just outside its walls, the rest of the building stays silent.

“We can imagine [world music] growing with this new home,” says Makan. Previously, these ensembles had rehearsed in a converted space inside the old MIT Museum building on Massachusetts Avenue, separated from the rest of the music program. 

“They deserved their own space for so long,” says Hattwick, “and it’s really fantastic that they managed to get it and that it is integrated in the music building the way that it is.” 

ADAM DETOUR

The building’s commitment to sound isolation extends beyond its rehearsal and performance spaces, and for faculty working in sound design and music technology, it has changed their daily rhythms. Mark Rau, an assistant professor of music technology with a joint appointment in electrical engineering and computer science (EECS), regularly uses speakers at high volume in his office—something that he says wouldn’t have been possible in MIT’s previous facilities.

“All the rooms in the building have good sound isolation, even the offices—not just the performance rooms, which is pretty great,” says Rau, whose second-floor office in the Jae S. and Kyuho Lim Music Maker Pavilion features gray acoustic panels lining the walls and ceiling. “To be able to test the algorithms that I’m working on and things for homework assignments, and not bother my neighbors, is important.” 

The attention to acoustic detail continues upstairs. On the fourth floor, Rau ran the first two sessions in the building’s new recording facilities, which were purpose-­built to support both ensemble work and critical listening. He says they offer professional-­quality recording.

The recording suite includes a large main room that can accommodate up to a dozen players, a smaller isolation booth for separating instruments or voices, and a control room designed for precise monitoring. Each space is acoustically treated and linked to the building’s dedicated audio network, so sound can be routed from any room in the building to any other in real time.  

ADAM DETOUR

“You could record an entire symphony orchestra, and almost everybody could be in a different room,” says Hattwick. Or you could have the orchestra playing together in the concert hall and record it in one of the studios. The whole building uses a digital audio protocol called Dante, which allows low-latency, high-fidelity ­transmission over Ethernet.

MIT multimedia specialist Cuco Daglio, who helped oversee technical planning, advocated for that level of fidelity. “It’s a beautifully designed acoustic space,” says Hattwick. 

The building’s exterior reflects a similar attention to performance. The arch above its entryway facing the Johnson Athletic Center and the Zesiger Sports and Fitness Center forms a conical shell that shapes and reflects sound, creating a natural stage. On warm days, music drifts out into the open air as groups rehearse beneath the overhang or students gather to play informally in small groups. 

New program, new space

This fall, MIT is launching a new one-year master’s program in music technology, bringing together faculty from engineering and the arts. The Linde Music Building serves as the program’s home base, providing studios, tools, and collaborative spaces that students will use to design new instruments, software, and performance systems. Eran Egozy ’93, MEng ’95, professor of the practice in music technology and cofounder of Harmonix Music Systems, which developed Guitar Hero and Rock Band, directs the program. He developed the curriculum with Anna Huang, SM ’08, an associate professor with a joint appointment in music and EECS who did research on human-AI music collaboration technologies at Google, and he, Huang, and Rau are among its faculty.

KATE LEMMON

“It’s really about inventing new things,” says Egozy. “Asking questions like: What would the future musician want? What kinds of tools will a composer want?”

Rachel Loh ’25, who double-majored in computer science and engineering and music, will be part of the inaugural cohort. A vocalist with Syncopasian, MIT’s East Asian a cappella group, she draws on performance experience in her research. Her current project explores how AI systems improvise alongside human musicians, using visualizations to provide insight into machine decision-making.

“In high school, I knew I wanted to work at the intersection of music and computer science,” she says. “Now, this new music tech program is the perfect thing for me.”

KATE LEMMON

A flexible workshop on the Music Maker Pavilion’s second floor will serve as a core space for the new program, outfitted with essentials like soldering stations, a laser cutter, and testing gear but left unfinished by design. Hattwick and Rau, who oversee the space, are allowing its exact form to emerge over time. 

“We’ve been spending this year outfitting it and starting to think about how we make all of these resources available to our students, and what the best way is to utilize this opportunity in this space,” Hattwick says. “[The makerspace] directly supports research and our specific coursework.” 

Already, students have begun to push the makerspace into new territory. Some are designing analog circuits and signal-­boosting devices known as preamplifiers for musical instrument sensors. Others are experimenting with embedded systems that blur the boundary between physical and digital sound. In one class, students are building custom digital instruments from scratch—tools that don’t yet exist, shaped to suit musical ideas still in formation. The building’s infrastructure, including features like Dante, gives these projects unusual flexibility.

AV PRODUCTIONS

Ayyub Abdulrezak ’24, MEng ’25, one of Egozy’s students, worked in the makerspace to develop compact sensor boxes that combine a microphone, a Raspberry Pi board, and custom signal-processing software. Each device logs when and how long a campus piano is played, sending the data to a central server. The resulting heat maps could help inform tuning schedules, improve access, or guide planning for music spaces across MIT.

The makerspace also supports repair, maintenance, and modification. Hattwick describes it as a place to “build and fix and maintain and explore new kinds of instruments,” where students can learn what it means to refine a musical system—not just in theory but in screws, solder, and code. Rau, who also builds guitars, is incorporating more hands-on fabrication into his courses, merging electronics with instrument making and repair to yield a unified design practice.

ADAM DETOUR

ADAM DETOUR

ADAM DETOUR

ADAM DETOUR

While the space is still growing into its full potential, its ethos is clear: experimentation at the intersection of sound, system, and student agency. These kinds of projects rely not only on equipment but on space where musicians can experiment, fail, and refine. As the new master’s program takes shape, that environment will be central to how students learn and create.

Building sound and community

For the first time, MIT musicians, technologists, composers, and researchers share a space designed to bring their disciplines into conversation. The building’s form encourages these exchanges. Its three wings connect through a glass-lined lobby filled with daylight and movement. Students pause there to talk, overhear a rehearsal in progress, or catch sight of a friend heading to a practice room. 

ADAM DETOUR

“Music is such a community thing,” says Christou. “I’ve learned about concerts, or that someone is coming to visit, or I’ve seen friends just studying or practicing. It’s really nice to have a hub with musical activity.”

Egozy sees these exchanges as central to the building’s mission. “It’s the idea cross-pollination that happens when you just happen to run into someone you know, literally by the water cooler, and you’re just chatting about this or that,” he says. “That’s my favorite part.”

Many of these encounters occur in the makerspace, where students working on entirely different projects end up asking each other questions, swapping tools, or launching ideas together. 

“Lots of students from all different walks of life have been building instruments, prototyping different devices,” says Makan, who adds that he wants the new building to be “a place for people to gather and hang out.” Many ensembles that once rehearsed in classrooms scattered across campus now work in adjoining rooms. “You feel like something is always happening,” Christou says. “It’s not just your practice or your rehearsal. It’s this sense of a shared rhythm.”

New frontiers for MIT’s music culture

Already, the Linde Music Building is affecting how music is conceived, taught, and experienced at MIT. Faculty members are rethinking syllabi to take advantage of the building’s multi-room routing capability and to delve more into spatial acoustics, interactive sound design, and even instrument making. Students are beginning to compose with acoustics in mind, treating the building itself as part of their instrument.

For example, Rau is engaging students in projects that explore room dynamics and acoustics as integral to music. In one class, students listen for differences in how music sounds in various parts of Tull Hall and observe changes when the curtains are used. Then they conduct acoustic measurements of the hall’s reverberation and build a digital copy of the hall, creating a sonic blueprint of the space that lets them produce artificial reverberation. Egozy, meanwhile, is developing tools that let performers engage audiences in new ways. 

This June, one of those ideas was scaled up. As part of the International Computer Music Conference, MIT premiered a piece that invited audience members to shape the sound in real time using their phones. Musicians performed in Tull Hall, surrounded by a circular array of 24 speakers, with the audio shifting throughout the space in response to the audience input. 

ADAM DETOUR

Performances like these are fueling growing interest in the building’s creative potential at MIT and beyond. Visiting composers have proposed site-specific works. Local ensembles are booking time to record in Tull Hall. Faculty are exploring how the building might support residencies that pair MIT researchers with performers working at the leading edges of both sound and computation.

CAROLINE ALDEN

“This hall is really special. There’s nothing like it anywhere in the Boston area,” Egozy says. “We will have a lot of really amazing events that will draw people into MIT. We’re excited about what it’s going to do for the MIT students, but it’s also going to do a lot just for the whole Boston area.”

Each day, students and faculty explore its possibilities—linking rehearsal with recording, sound design with performance, tradition with experiment.

MIT is “a place to enable exploration of new vistas, and really letting everyone pursue their path to what their vision is,” Hattwick says. “The music building is just going to be like a huge boost to doing even more cool things in the future.”

Junior Peña, neutrino hunter

Growing up in South Central Los Angeles, Junior Peña learned to keep his eyes down and his schedule full. In his neighborhood, a glance could invite trouble, and many kids—including his older brother—were pulled into gang culture. He knew early on that he wanted something else. With his parents working long hours, he went to after-school programs, played video games, and practiced martial arts. But his friends had no idea that he also spent hours online poring over textbooks and watching lectures, teaching himself advanced mathematics and philosophy. “Being good at school wasn’t how people saw me,” he says. 

One night in high school, he came across a YouTube video about the Higgs boson—the so-called “God particle,” thought to give mass to nearly everything in the universe. “I remember my mind being flooded with questions about life, the universe, and our existence,” he recalls. He’d already looked into philosophers’ answers to those questions but was drawn to the more concrete explanations of physics.

After his independent study helped Peña pass AP calculus as a junior, his fascination with physics led him to the University of Southern California, the 2019 session of MIT’s Summer Research Program, and then MIT for grad school. Today, he’s working to shed light on neutrinos, the ghostly uncharged particles that slip effortlessly through matter. Particles that would require a wall of lead five light-years thick to stop.

As a grad student in the lab of Joseph Formaggio, an experimental physicist known for pioneering new techniques in neutrino detection, Peña works alongside leading physicists designing technology to precisely measure what are arguably the universe’s most elusive particles. Emanating from such sources as the sun and supernovas (and generated artificially by particle accelerators and nuclear reactors), neutrinos reveal their presence through an absence. Their existence was initially posited in the 1930s by the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, who noticed that energy seemed to go missing when atoms underwent a process known as radioactive beta decay. According to the law of conservation of energy, the total energy of the particles emitted during radioactive decay must equal the energy of the decaying atom. To account for the missing energy, Pauli proposed the existence of an undetectable particle that was carrying it away. 

Einstein’s E = mc² tells us that if energy is missing, then mass must be too. Yet according to the standard model of physics—which offers our most trusted theory for how particles behave—neutrinos should have no mass at all. Unlike other particles, they don’t interact with the Higgs field, a kind of cosmic molasses that slows particles down and gives them mass. Because they pass through it untouched, they should remain massless. 

But by the early 2000s, researchers had discovered that neutrinos, which had first been detected in the 1950s, can shift between three types, a feat possible only if they have mass. So now the tantalizing question is: What is their mass? 

Determining neutrinos’ exact mass could explain why matter triumphed over antimatter, refine models of cosmic evolution, and clarify the particles’ role in dark matter and dark energy. And the Formaggio Lab is part of Project 8, an international collaboration of 71 scientists in 17 institutions working to make that measurement. To do this, the lab uses tritium, an unstable isotope of hydrogen that decays into helium, releasing both an electron and a particle called an antineutrino (“every particle has an antiparticle counterpart,” Formaggio explains). By precisely measuring the energy spectrum of those electrons, scientists can determine how much energy is missing, allowing them to infer the neutrinos’ mass.

At the heart of this experiment is a novel detection method called cyclotron radiation emission spectroscopy (CRES), first proposed in 2008 by Formaggio and his then postdoc Benjamin Monreal, which “listens” to the faint radio signals emitted as electrons spiral through a magnetic field. Peña was instrumental in designing a crucial part of the tool that will make this possible: a copper cavity that he likens to a guitar, with the electrons released during beta decay acting like plucked strings. The cavity will amplify their signals, helping researchers to measure them exactly. Peña spent more than a year developing and refining a flashlight-size prototype of the device in collaboration with machinists and fellow physicists.

JESSICA CHOMIK-MORALES, SM ’25

“He had to learn the [design and simulation] software, figure out how to interpret the signals, and test iteration after iteration,” says Formaggio, Peña’s advisor. “It’s been incredible watching him take this from a rough idea to a working design.”

The design of Peña’s cavity had to balance competing demands. It needed a way to extract the electrons’ signals that was compatible with the researchers’ methods for calibrating the system, one of which involves using an electron gun to inject electrons of a known, precise energy into the cavity. And it also needed to preserve the properties of the electromagnetic fields within the cavity. In May, Peña sent his final prototype to the University of Washington, where it was installed in July. Researchers hope to begin calibration this fall. Then Peña’s cavity and the full experimental setup will be scaled up so in a few years they can begin collecting CRES data using tritium.

“We’ve been working toward this for at least three years,” says Jeremy Gaison, a Project 8 physicist at the Pacific Northwest National Lab. “When we finally turn on the experiment, it’s going to be incredible to see if all of our simulations and studies actually hold up in real data.”

Peña’s contribution to the effort “is the core of this experiment,” says Wouter Van De Pontseele, another Project 8 collaborator and former Formaggio Lab postdoc. “Junior took an idea and turned it into reality.” 

Project 8 is still in its early stages. The next phase will scale up with larger, more complex versions of the technology Peña played a key role in developing, culminating in a vast facility designed to hunt for the neutrino’s mass. If that is successful, the findings could have profound implications for our understanding of the universe’s structure, the evolution of galaxies, and even the fundamental nature of matter itself.

Eager to keep probing such open questions in fundamental physics, Peña is still exploring options for his postdoc work. One possibility is focusing on the emerging field of levitated nanosensors, which could advance gravitation experiments, efforts to detect dark matter, and searches for the sterile neutrino, a posited fourth variety that interacts even more rarely than the others.

“Experimental particle physics is long-term work,” says Van De Pontseele. “Some of us will stay on this project for decades, but Junior can walk away knowing he made a lasting impact.”

Peña also hopes to have a lasting impact as a professor, opening doors for students who, like him, never saw themselves reflected in the halls of academia. “A summer program brought me here,” he says. “I owe it to the next kid to show they belong.”

MIT is worth fighting for

As I write in late July, we’re contending with a major tax increase on the annual returns from MIT’s endowment as well as other investments and assets. This new tax burden will strain the resources we use to support research, innovation, and student scholarships and financial aid—the heart and soul of the Institute. 

Infinite Threads

Textiles account for 5% of landfill space—and clothing made with polyester can take up to 200 years to decompose. Massachusetts tackled the problem by banning disposal of clothing and fabrics in 2022. And Infinite Threads, a spinoff of the Undergraduate Association Sustainability Committee, is addressing it by collecting lightly used clothing from the MIT community and selling it for $2 to $6 per item at popup sales held several times each semester. 

“Our goal is simple: We want to keep clothing out of landfills,” says Cameron Dougal ’25, who led the effort with Erin Hovendon ’26 in 2024–’25. That year, the group sold over 1,000 items and gave about 750 pounds of unsold goods to Helpsy, an organization that collects used clothing for resale and recycling. Infinite Threads uses proceeds from its sales to pay student workers and to rent a U-Haul to bring clothing to the popups. 

SARAH FOOTE

In addition to helping the planet, offering affordable clothing options generates a lot of positive feedback on campus. “I love hearing from students that they got clothing items they now wear frequently from one of our sales,” says Hovendon. 

Infinite Threads also gives away leftover T-shirts from residence hall events and career fairs, which Dougal says demonstrates the importance of a hyperlocal reuse ecosystem. “As soon as these types of items leave campus,” he says, “there is a much lower chance that they will find a new home.”

Fix damaged art in hours with AI

Art restoration takes steady hands and a discerning eye. For centuries, conservators have identified areas needing repair and then mixed the exact shades needed to fill in one area at a time. Restoring a single painting can take anywhere from a few weeks to over a decade. Now an MIT graduate student in mechanical engineering has used artificial intelligence to speed up the process by orders of magnitude.

Digital restoration tools are not new; computer vision, image recognition, and color matching have all helped generate repaired versions of damaged paintings in recent years. But until now, there has been no way to apply the results directly onto an original canvas. Instead, they are usually displayed virtually or printed as stand-alone works.

In his study, Alex Kachkine, SM ’23, presents a new method he’s developed that involves printing the restoration on a very thin polymer film that can be carefully aligned with a painting and adhered to it or easily removed. As a demonstration, he used the method to repair a highly damaged 15th-century oil painting he owned. First he used traditional techniques to clean the painting and remove any past restoration efforts. Then he scanned the painting, including the many regions where paint had faded or cracked, and used existing algorithms to create a virtual version of what it may have looked like originally.

Next, Kachkine used software he developed to create a map of regions on the original painting that require infilling, along with the exact colors needed. The method automatically identified 5,612 regions in need of repair and filled them in using 57,314 different shades. This map was then translated into a physical, two-layer mask printed onto polymer-based films. The first layer was printed in color, while the second layer was printed in the exact same pattern but in white.

“In order to fully reproduce color, you need both white and color ink to get the full spectrum,” Kachkine explains. He used high-fidelity commercial inkjets to print the mask’s two layers, which he carefully aligned with the help of computational tools he developed. Then he overlaid them by hand onto the original painting and adhered them with a thin spray of conventional varnish. The films are made from materials that can be easily dissolved in case conservators need to reveal the original, damaged work. The entire process took 3.5 hours, which he estimates is about 66 times faster than traditional restoration methods.

If this method is adopted widely, Kachkine emphasizes, conservators should be involved at every step, to ensure that the final work is in keeping with an artist’s style and intent. The digital file of the mask can also be saved to document exactly what was restored. “Because there’s a digital record of what mask was used, in 100 years, the next time someone is working with this, they’ll have an extremely clear understanding of what was done to the painting,” Kachkine says. “And that’s never really been possible in conservation before.”

The result, he hopes, will be a new lease on life for many works that have not had a chance to be repaired by hand. “There is a lot of damaged art in storage that might never be seen,” he says. “Hopefully with this new method, there’s a chance we’ll see more art.” 

Emergency help for low blood sugar

Most people with type 1 diabetes inject insulin to prevent their blood sugar levels from getting too high. However, if their blood sugar gets too low, it can lead to confusion, seizures, and even death.

To combat this hypoglycemia, some patients carry syringes of glucagon, a hormone that stimulates release of glucose. Now MIT engineers have developed an alternative that could work even when people don’t realize they are becoming hypoglycemic. It could also help during sleep, or for children who are unable to inject themselves. “Our goal was to build a device that is always ready to protect patients,” says Daniel Anderson, a professor in MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering and the senior author of a study on the work.

The implantable device, about the size of a quarter, contains a polymer reservoir holding powdered glucagon and sealed with a material that can be programmed to change shape when heated. It also includes an antenna that allows the user to remotely turn on a small electrical current, which heats that material until it bends and releases the drug. Because the device can receive wireless signals, it could also be triggered automatically by a glucose monitor.

The researchers have successfully tested the implant in mice and say it could also be used to deliver epinephrine to treat heart attacks or prevent anaphylactic shock. 

‘Bubbles’ turn air into drinkable water

Today, 2.2 billion people in the world lack access to safe drinking water. But the atmosphere contains millions of billions of gallons of water in the form of vapor, and researchers have tried various strategies to capture and condense it in places where traditional sources are inaccessible. Now MIT engineers have improved on that approach with an atmospheric water harvester based on an absorbent hydrogel.

The gel they developed has more vapor-carrying capacity than some materials others have used to trap water from the air, and it is less likely to leak the salts that are often embedded in hydrogels to increase absorption. They also increased its surface area, and thus the amount of vapor it can hold, by molding it into a pattern of small domes resembling bubble wrap. 

COURTESY OF THE RESEARCHERS

In the researchers’ prototype device, a half-square-meter panel of the hydrogel is enclosed in a glass chamber coated with a cooling polymer film. When the vapor captured by the textured material evaporates, the bubbles shrink down in an origami-­like transformation. The vapor then condenses on the glass, where it can flow out through a tube.

The system runs entirely on its own, unlike other designs that require batteries, solar panels, or electricity from the grid. The team ran it for over a week in Death Valley, California—the driest place in North America. Even in those conditions, it squeezed clean water from the air at rates of up to 160 milliliters (about two-thirds of a cup) per day.

“We have built a meter-scale device that we hope to deploy in resource-limited regions, where even a solar cell is not very accessible,” says Professor Xuanhe Zhao, the senior author of a paper on the work. The team estimates that a small array of the panels could passively supply a household with drinking water even in a desert, with greater production in temperate and tropical climates.

Chandrakasan named provost

Anantha Chandrakasan became the Institute’s new provost on July 1, succeeding Cynthia Barnhart, SM ’86, PhD ’88, who announced her decision to step down in February.

Chandrakasan, who earned his BS, MS, and PhD in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, joined MIT in 1994. Head of the Energy-Efficient Circuits and Systems Group, he has been dean of the School of Engineering since 2017 and MIT’s inaugural chief innovation and strategy officer, playing a key role in launching multiple new initiatives, since 2024. He headed the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT’s largest academic department, for six years.

As MIT’s senior academic and budget officer, Chandrakasan will focus on understanding institutional needs and strategic financial planning, attracting and retaining top talent, and supporting cross-cutting research, education, and entrepreneurship programming. On all these fronts, he plans to seek frequent input from across the Institute. He also plans to establish a provost faculty advisory group, as well as student/postdoc advisory groups and an external provost advisory council.

“There is a tremendous opportunity for MIT to be at the center of the innovations in areas where the United States wants to lead,” Chandrakasan says. “It’s about AI. It’s about semiconductors. It’s about quantum, the bio­security and biomanufacturing space—but not only that. We need students who can do more than just code or design or build. We really need students who understand the human perspective and human insights.” 

One-shot vaccines for HIV and covid

A team at MIT and the Scripps Research Institute has made important progress toward vaccines that can protect against HIV, and potentially other diseases, with a single dose.

The researchers treated mice with a vaccine that combines two different adjuvants, materials that help stimulate the immune system—one incorporating a compound previously developed by Scripps professor Darrell Irvine. 

Irvine and MIT professor J. Christopher Love, the senior authors of a paper on the work, had found that the combination helped generate more robust immune responses. In the new paper, they showed that the dual-adjuvant vaccine accumulated in the lymph nodes, where white blood cells known as B cells encounter antigens and undergo rapid mutations that generate new antibodies. The vaccine’s antigens remained there for up to a month, allowing the immune system to build up a much greater number and diversity of antibodies against the HIV protein than the vaccine given alone or with one adjuvant.

“When you think about the immune system sampling all of the possible solutions, the more chances we give it to identify an effective solution, the better,” Love says. 

This approach may mimic what occurs during a natural infection and could lead to an immune response so strong and broad that vaccines only need to be given once. Love says, “It offers the opportunity to engineer new formulations for these types of vaccines across a wide range of different diseases, such as influenza, SARS-CoV-2, or other pandemic outbreaks.”

From MIT to low Earth orbit

Not everyone can point to the specific moment that set them on their life’s course. But for me, there’s no question: It happened in 1982, when I was a junior at MIT, in the Infinite Corridor. In those pre-internet days, it was where we got the scoop about everything that was happening on campus. One day, as I was racing to the chemistry labs, a poster caught my eye.

As I remember it, the poster showed a smiling woman in a flight suit, holding a helmet by her side. I recognized her immediately: Sally Ride, one of America’s first group of female astronauts. It had just been announced that she would be part of the crew for one of the upcoming space shuttle flights, making her the first American woman in space. And while she was visiting Lincoln Lab for training, she would be giving a speech and attending a reception hosted by the Association of MIT Alumnae. A woman speaker was still a novelty at MIT in those days. But a woman astronaut? I knew this was one event I had to attend. 

NASA

On the day of Sally Ride’s talk, I hurried into 10-250, the large lecture hall beneath the Great Dome that is the emblem of MIT. Sandy Yulke, the chair of the Association of MIT Alumnae, was already introducing Sally. Sally. Just a first name. As if she were one of us. I slid into an empty seat just a few rows back as Sandy talked about how proud she was to welcome the soon-to-be first American woman in space. And Sally was standing there, right where our professors stood every day. A woman. And an astronaut. 

When I was growing up in the 1960s and ’70s, the image I’d had of astronauts—or any kind of explorer, for that matter—could not have been further from the figure before me that day. And I’m not just talking about images I saw in the media—I had one much closer to home. My dad—James Joseph Coleman, known as JJ—was a career naval officer who ultimately led the Experimental Diving Unit. A legend among Navy divers, he had also been a project officer for the Sealab program that built the first underwater habitats, allowing men—and it was all men at the time—to live and work in the deep seas for extended periods. The spirit of exploration, the desire to understand fascinating and challenging environments, seemed normal to me. But because none of the explorers I saw looked like me, it didn’t occur to me that I could be one. My dad worked in a male-dominated world where I’m sure very few of his colleagues imagined that people like me might belong too.

By the time I got to MIT, in 1979, only six women had been selected as NASA astronauts. But seeing Sally Ride on the stage that day turned a possibility into a reality—a reality that could include me. Instead of being larger than life, she was surprisingly real and relatable: a young, bright-eyed woman, with wavy brown hair kind of like mine, wearing a blue flight suit and black boots. She seemed a little shy, looking down at her hands as she was introduced and applauded. 

Sally was obviously passionate about her scientific work—she was an accomplished astrophysicist—but she also had this amazing job where she flew jets, practiced spacewalking, and was part of a crew with a mission. Both scientist and adventurer, she was accomplishing something that no American woman ever had—and, in the process, opening the door for the rest of us. As I listened to her speak that day, an utterly unexpected idea popped into my head: Maybe I—Cady Coleman—could have that job. 

If you can see it, you can be it. Representation doesn’t fix everything, but it changes, on a visceral level, the menu of options that you feel you can reach for. No matter how many people tell us we can be whatever we want to be—and my mother told me that from the moment I was old enough to understand—some of us need more than words. Representation matters. A lot. We are enormously influenced by the signals that we get from our surroundings. What do people expect of us? What models do we have? What limitations do we internalize without knowing it? In her quiet, matter-of-fact way, Sally Ride shattered assumptions I didn’t know I’d taken on. Like so many people at MIT, I was an explorer at heart. What if I could explore in space as well as in the lab? 

Becoming an astronaut

No one just becomes an astronaut. Every astronaut is something else first. At MIT, I had fallen in love with organic chemistry and was determined to become a research chemist, hoping to use science to improve people’s lives. Because I attended MIT on an ROTC scholarship, I was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the US Air Force upon graduation, but I was given permission to get my doctorate in polymer science and engineering from UMass Amherst before serving. I was then stationed at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, where I worked on new materials for airplanes and consulted on NASA’s Long Duration Exposure Facility experiment. I also set endurance and tolerance records as a volunteer test subject in the centrifuge at the aeromedical laboratory, testing new equipment.

But the ideas that Sally Ride had sparked were never far from my mind, and when NASA put out a call for new astronauts in 1991, I applied—along with 2,053 others. I was among the 500 who got our references checked, and then one of about 90 invited to Houston for an intense weeklong interview and physical. In 1992, after months of suspense, I got the fateful phone call asking, “Would you still like to come and work with us at NASA?” Thrilled beyond words, I felt a kind of validation I’d never experienced before and have never forgotten.

Four months later, I reported for duty at the Johnson Space Center. Knowing that years of rigorous training lay ahead before I might launch into space on a mission, I couldn’t wait to dive in.

That training turned out to be a wild ride. Within days of our arrival in Houston, we ASCANs (NASA-speak for astronaut candidates) headed to Fairchild Air Force Base in Washington state for land survival training. We practiced navigation skills and shelter building. Knots were tied. Food was scavenged. Worms were eaten. Tired, grubby people made hard decisions together. Rules were broken. Fun was had. And, importantly, we got to know one another. Water survival skills were next—we learned to disconnect from our parachutes, climb into a raft, and make the most of the supplies we had in case we had to eject from a jet or the space shuttle. 

NASA

Back in Houston, we learned about each of the shuttle systems, studying the function of every switch and circuit breaker. (For perspective, the condensed manual for the space shuttle is five inches thick.) The rule of thumb was that if something was important, then we probably had three, so we’d still be okay if two of them broke. We worked together in simulators (sims) to practice the normal procedures and learn how to react when the systems malfunctioned. For launch sims, even those normal procedures were an adventure, because the sim would shake, pitch, and roll just as the real shuttle could be expected to on launch day. We learned the basics of robotics, spacewalking, and rendezvous (how to dock with another spacecraft without colliding), and we spent time at the gym, often after hours, so we’d be in shape to work in heavy space suits. 

Our training spanned everything from classes in how to use—and fix—the toilet in space to collecting meteorites in Antarctica, living in an underwater habitat, and learning to fly the T-38, an amazing high-performance acrobatic jet used to train Air Force pilots. (On our first training flight, we got to fly faster than the speed of sound.) All of this helped us develop an operational mindset—one geared to making decisions and solving problems in high-speed, high-pressure, real-risk ­situations that can’t be simulated, like the ones we might encounter in space. 

Mission: It’s not about you, but it depends on you

Each time a crew of astronauts goes to space, we call it a mission. It’s an honor to be selected for a mission, and an acknowledgment that you bring skills thatwillmake it successful. Being part of a mission means you are part of something that’s bigger than yourself, but at the same time, the role you play is essential. It’s a strange paradox: It’s not about you, but it depends on you. On each of my missions, that sense of purpose brought us together, bridging our personal differences and disagreements and allowing us to achieve things we might never have thought possible. A crew typically spends at least a year, if not a few years, training together before the actual launch, and that shared mission connects us throughout.

In 1993, I got word that I’d been assigned to my first mission aboard the space shuttle. As a mission specialist on STS-73, I would put my background as a research scientist to use byperforming 30 experiments in microgravity. These experiments, which included growing potatoes inside a locker (just like Matt Damon in The Martian), using sound to manipulate large liquid droplets, and growing protein crystals, would advance our understanding of science, medicine, and engineering and help pave the way for the International Space Station laboratory.

While training for STS-73, I got a call from an astronaut I greatly admired: Colonel Eileen Collins. One of the first female test pilots, she would become the first woman to pilot the space shuttle in 1995, when the STS-63 mission launched. Collins had invited some of her heroes—the seven surviving members of the Mercury 13—to attend the launch, and she was calling to ask me to help host them. The Mercury 13 were a group of 13 women who in the early 1960s had received personal letters from the head of life sciences at NASA asking them to be part of a privately funded program to include women as astronauts. They had accepted the challenge and undergone the same grueling physical tests required of NASA’s first astronauts. Although the women performed as well as or better than the Mercury 7 astronauts on the selection tests, which many of them had made sacrifices even to pursue, the program was abruptly shut down just days before they were scheduled to start the next phase of testing. It would be almost two decades before NASA selected its first female astronauts. 

Never had I felt more acutely aware of being part of that lineage of brave and boundary-breaking women than I did that day, standing among those pioneers, watching Eileen make history. I can’t know what the Mercury 13 were thinking as they watched Eileen’s launch, but I sensed that they knew how much it meant to Eileen to be carrying their legacy with her in the pilot seat of that space shuttle.

Missions and malfunctions

Acouple of years after I had added my name to the still-too-short list of women who had flown in space, Eileen called again. This time she told me that I would be joining her on her next mission, ­STS-93, scheduled to launch in July 1999. Our Mercury 13 heroes would attend that launch too, and Eileen would be making history once again, this time as NASA’s first female space shuttle commander. I would be the lead mission specialist for delivering the shuttle’s precious payload, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, to orbit. I’d also be one of the EVA (extravehicular activity) crew members, if any spacewalking repairs were needed.  

Our mission to launch the world’s most powerful x-ray telescope would change the world of astrophysics. With eight times the resolution of its predecessors and the ability to observe sources that were fainter by a factor of more than 20, Chandra was designed to detect x-rays from exploding stars, black holes, clusters of galaxies, and other high-energy sources throughout the universe. Because cosmic x-rays are absorbed by our atmosphere, we can’t study them from Earth, so an x-ray telescope must operate from well above our atmosphere. Chandra wouldlaunch into low Earth orbit on the shuttle and then require additional propulsion to achieve its final orbit, a third of the way to the moon.

I was thrilled by the idea that my team and I would be launching a telescope whose work would continue long after we were back on Earth. Preparation for launch was intense. As Chandra’s shepherd, I needed to be able to perform what we called the deploy sequence in my sleep. And I had to have a close relationship with the folks at the Chandra Mission Control, which was separate from NASA Mission Control, and make sure the two groups were working together. In a very real sense, Chandra represented the future of astrophysics—a window that promised a deeper understanding of the universe. When the moment came for the telescope to be deployed, all of this would be, quite literally, in my hands.

But first it was in the hands of the launch team at the Kennedy Space Center, whose job it was to get us off the ground and into orbit. And we almost didn’t make it.

Our first launch attempt was aborted eight seconds before liftoff. There we were, waiting for the solid rocket boosters to ignite and the bolts holding us to the launchpad to explode. Instead, we heard “Abort for a hydrogen leak” from Launch Control. Later it was revealed that a faulty sensor had been the issue.  

For our second attempt, we were confidently told we were “one hundred percent GO for weather.” In other words, there was not even a hint of bad weather to delay us. And then there were lightning strikes at the launchpad. Really.

For our third launch attempt, under a bright moon on a cool, clear night, we strapped in and the countdown began. This time I was determined I wouldn’t take anything for granted—even in those final 30 seconds after control switched over to the shuttle’s internal computers. Even when the engines kicked in and I felt the twang of the nose tipping forward and then back. Only when the solid rockets ignited did I let myself believe that we were actually heading back to space. As a seasoned second-time flyer, I kept my excitement contained, but inside I was whooping and hollering. And then, as Columbia rolled to the heads-down position just seconds after liftoff, my joyful inner celebration was drowned out by an angry alert tone and Eileen’s voice on the radio:

My first thought: We know how to deal with this. We did it last week in the simulator. But we weren’t in the simulator anymore. This was a real, no-shit emergency. After we returned to Earth we realized just how close we’d come to several actual life-or-death situations. No matter how much you train for just such a moment, you can’t really anticipate what it will mean to find yourself in one. I was relieved that it wasn’t long before I heard the steady voice of Jeff Ashby, our pilot, confirming that he had successfully flipped the bus sensor switches, reducing our exposure to the potential catastrophe of additional engine shutdowns.

NASA

We were still headed to space, but with the loss of some of our backup capabilities, we were vulnerable. We carefully monitored the milestones that would tell us which options we still had. I tried not to hold my breath as the shuttle continued to climb and we listened for updates from Houston:

An electrical short is a serious problem. After our mission landed, the shuttle fleet would be grounded for months after inspections revealed multiple cases of wire chafing on the other shuttles. Some would call us lucky, but listening to the audio from our cockpit and from Mission Control, I credit the well-trained teams that worked their way patiently through multiple failures catalyzed by the short and by a separate, equally dangerous issue: a slow leak in one of our three engines used during launch. 

Our STS-93 launch would go down in the history books as the most dangerous ascent of the shuttle program that didn’t result in an accident. Even in the midst of it, my sense of mission helped anchor me.

NASA

The plan in 1999 had been that Chandra would last five years. But as of this writing, Chandra is 25 and still sending valuable data back from space. Each year, on its “birthday,” the crew from STS-93 and the teams who worked on the ground connect via email, or in person for the big ones. We’ll always share a bond from that mission and its continuing legacy. And what a legacy it is. Young astronomers who were still toddlers when I pulled that deploy switch are now making discoveries based on the data it’s produced. Chandra is responsible for almost everything that we now know about black holes, and it’s still advancing our understanding of the universe by giant leaps. But these are difficult times. Sadly, budget cuts proposed in 2025 would eliminate Chandra, with no replacements planned. 

Suiting up and making change 

People often wonder what would possess any sane person to strap themself on top of a rocket. And by now you’re probably wondering why, after the harrowing malfunctions during the STS-93 launch, I was eager not only to return to space again but to spend six months living and working aboard the International Space Station. It comes back to mission. I don’t consider myself to be braver than most people, though I may be more optimistic than many. I take the risks associated with my job because I believe in what we’re doing together, and I trust my crew and our team to do all that’s humanly possible to keep us safe.

But the odds were stacked against me in my quest to serve on the space station. 

The world of space exploration, like so many others, is slow to change. Long-standing inequities were still evident when I joined NASA in 1992, and many endured during my time there. But it can be difficult to know when to fight for change at the outset and when to adapt to unfair circumstances to get your foot in the door.

The first trained astronauts tended to be tall, athletic, and male—and the biases and assumptions that led to that preference were built into our equipment, especially our space suits. Our one-piece orange “pumpkin suits” worn for launching and landing weren’t designed for people with boobs or hips, so many of us wound up in baggy suits that made fitting a parachute harness tricky and uncomfortable. But fit issues with our 300-pound white spacewalking suits proved to be a much bigger problem, especially for the smaller-framed astronauts—including some men. 

The bulky EVA suits, which allow astronauts who venture outside a spacecraft to breathe and communicate while regulating our temperature and protecting us from radiation, are essentially human-shaped spaceships. But while they came in small, medium, large, and extra-large, those suits were designed for (male) astronauts of the Apollo era with no thought to how they might work for different body types. Given that ill-fitting equipment would affect performance, astronauts like me—who weren’t shaped like Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and their compatriots—were often negatively prejudged before we even started training. As a result, NASA failed for years to leverage the skills of many members of the astronaut corps who physically didn’t fit an institutional template that hadn’t been redesigned for half a century.

Spacewalk training was the most physically difficult thing I did as an astronaut. Training in that way-too-large space suit made it even harder, forcing me to find ways to optimize my ability to function.  

NASA

We practice spacewalking underwater in an enormous swimming pool. If the suit is too big for you—as even the small was for me—the extra volume of air inside drags you up to the surface when you’re trying to work underwater. It’s a profound physical disadvantage. 

Though the fit of the small spacewalking suit wasn’t great, I persevered and adapted, training for many years in that suit with above-average spacewalking grades. And I was chosen to serve as a spacewalker for both of my shuttle missions, should the need arise. Not long before my first mission, Tom Akers, one of the experienced spacewalkers, came up to me and said, “Cady, I can see that you have a real aptitude for spacewalking and also a head that thinks like a spacewalker.” But then he told me that to cut costs, NASA had decided not to use the small suits on the space station. “People are going to look at you and think you’re too small, but I think someone like you could learn to function inside a medium suit,” he said. “So my advice is this: If you are interested in flying on the space station, then when someone asks you what size suit you wear, you tell them a medium will be no problem.” 

Sure enough, after my second shuttle flight, NASA announced that the small suit would be eliminated. I’ve never forgotten the wording of the rationale: “We’ve looked ahead at the manifest, and we have all of the spacewalkers that we need.” Implied was that they wouldn’t miss the smaller astronauts—not a bit. 

I think people might not have understood at the time what it meant to get rid of those small space suits. You could not live and work on the space station unless you were space-suit qualified. And because NASA was about to shut down the shuttle program, soon missions to the space station would be the only ones there were. NASA’s decision to eliminate the small suit effectively grounded more than a third of female astronauts. It also meant that few women would have the experience needed to serve in positions where they could have a say in important decisions about everything from prioritizing missions and choosing crews to making changes in NASA’s culture.    

To me, eliminating the small space suit indicated that the organization didn’t understand the value of having teams whose members contribute a wide range of experiences and viewpoints. When team members are too much alike—in background, ways of thinking and seeing the world, and, yes, gender—the teams are often less effective at finding innovative solutions to complex problems. 

Determined to contribute to the important scientific work being done on the space station, I had no choice but to qualify in the medium suit. But it would be a tall order because for the instructors, the gear is seldom at fault. You just need to get used to it, understand it better, or practice more. I did all three—but it wasn’t enough. So I also adapted everywhere I could, and I recruited a lot of great help. Kathy Thornton, one of the first female spacewalkers, recommended that I buy a waterskiing vest at Walmart to wear inside the suit. The space-suit team was horrified at the thought of using nonregulation materials, but it got them thinking. Together, we settled on having me wear a large girdle—left over from the Apollo guys—and stuffing it with NASA-approved foam to center me in the suit. This kept the air pockets more evenly distributed and allowed me to practice the required tasks, showing that I could work effectively in a medium.

By adapting, which sometimes means staying silent, you may perpetuate a discriminatory system. But if I’d tried to speak the truth from day one, I’d never have made it to the day when I was taken seriously enough to start conversations about the importance of providing all astronauts with equipment that fits. I needed to launch those discussions from a place of strength, where I could be heard and make a difference.

How best to catalyze change is always a personal decision. Sometimes drawing a line in the sand is the most effective strategy. Other times, you have to master the ill-fitting equipment before you get a chance to redesign it. Qualifying in the too-large suit was my only option if I wanted to fly on the International Space Station, since every flight to the ISS needed two spacewalkers and a backup spacewalker—and there were only three seats in the space capsule. The alternative would have been waiting at least 11 years for the newer spacecraft, which would have a fourth seat. I had to play by the unfair rules in order to get to a point where I could change those rules.

With grit and a lot of support from others, I did end up qualifying in the medium suit. And in 2010, I set off for the International Space Station, serving as the lead robotics and science officer for Expedition 26/27 as I traveled 63,345,600 miles in 2,544 orbits over 159 days in space.

NASA/PAOLO NESPOLI

Today, efforts are underway to redesign NASA’s space suits to fit the full range of sizes represented in the astronaut corps. Because of the work I put in to make it possible for a wider range of people to excel as spacewalkers, NASA hung a portrait of me in the row of space-suit photos outside the women’s locker room. And I’m proud to know that my colleagues—women and men—are continuing the work of making change at NASA. Every change has been hard won. The numbers matter. The astronaut corps is now 40% women. Given that, it is harder to make decisions with the potential to leave women out. When a female NASA astronaut walks on the moon for the first time, she will do so in a redesigned space suit. I hope it fits her like a glove.

The crew of spaceship Earth

Contributing to an important mission is a privilege. But who gets to contribute is as important to mission success as it is to the individuals who want to play a part. I can’t emphasize enough how much our incredibly complex NASA missions have benefited from the broad range of people involved. Bringing together people of different backgrounds and skills, with different ways of seeing the world and unique perspectives on opportunities and problems, is what makes space exploration possible.

NASA/JOEL KOWSKY

Sharing space, to me, means including more people—both in the privilege of going to space and in so many of our endeavors here on Earth. When I applied to be an astronaut, very few women had orbited our planet. Today, that number has grown to 82 of 633 human beings in total, and newer NASA astronaut classes have averaged 50% women. Spaceflight is making progress in terms of including people with a wider range of backgrounds, fields of expertise, and physical abilities. But we have a long way to go. And the same is true in countless fields—the barriers that we struggle with in space exploration seem to be ubiquitous in the working world.

As a planet, we’re facing enormous challenges, in areas from climate change to public health to how to sustainably power our endeavors. If there’s one thing I learned above all else from my time in space, it’s that we’re all sharing Earth. No one else is coming to solve our complex problems. And we won’t find solutions with teams of people who share too much in common. We need everyone to contribute where they can, and so we need to create systems, environments, and equipment that make that possible. And we need to be sure that those making contributions are visible, so they can serve as models for future generations. Our job now is to make sure everyone gets enough support to acquire the skills that we—all of us—need to build collaborative teams and solve problems both on Earth and in space. 

It’s worth repeating: We’re all sharing Earth. Looking down from space, you see very few borders separating humans from one another. You understand—not as an abstract ideal but as a visceral, obvious reality—that we are one family sharing a precious, life-supporting home. It’s so clear from up there that we are all the crew of “Spaceship Earth.” I believe that sharing that perspective, bringing it to life, will help more people see that our differences matter less than what binds us together, and motivate us to combine our efforts to tackle the challenges affecting all of us.

In her 24 years at NASA, Cady Coleman ’83, a scientist, musician, and mother of two, flew on two space shuttle missions and began her 159-day mission aboard the International Space Station the day after turning 50. Today, as a public speaker and consultant, she shares her insights on leadership and teamwork gleaned from the high-stakes world of space exploration.

This excerpt is adapted from her book, Sharing Space: An Astronaut’s Guide to Mission, Wonder, and Making Change, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Random House. © 2024 by Catherine Coleman.