Starstruck

Few people, if any, contemplate stars—celestial or cinematic—the way Aomawa Shields does. 

An astronomer and astrobiologist, Shields explores the potential habitability of planets beyond our solar system. But she is also a classically trained actor—and that’s helped shape her professional trajectory in unexpected ways. 

Today, Shields is an associate professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Irvine, where she oversees a research team that uses computer models to explore conditions on exoplanets, or planets that revolve around stars other than the sun. But while searching for life many light-years away is her day job, creative endeavors round out her purpose on Earth.

In 2023 Shields published a memoir, Life on Other Planets: A Memoir of Finding My Place in the Universe. She has started an influential educational program that encourages young girls to explore space, given a hugely popular TED Talk about how we’ll find life on other planets, and won a string of prestigious academic awards, honors, and grants. She also plays the violin, cooks, practices yoga, and is a mom. And as what she calls a “rest leader”—a professional proponent of slowing down—Shields has somehow managed the seemingly impossible: She makes time.

Her unorthodox path began on the screen, in the realm of make-believe. 

“I wanted to become an astronaut. That dream started very early in my life, at the age of 12, after seeing a movie that dramatized kids getting launched into space,” she says, referring to SpaceCamp, an ’80s kids’ comedy about an accidental space shuttle flight. 

The next bit of cinematic inspiration cemented her interest. 

“Charlotte Blackwood was an astrophysicist, and she was very glamorous, too,” Shields says, smiling at how she was captivated by the heroine in Top Gun. “There’s an iconic scene where she’s walking down the aisle between Tom Cruise and other pilot trainees, and she just kind of whips off her glasses and just looks like such a badass.”

A high-achieving student while growing up in California, Canada, and Massachusetts, Shields made her way to Phillips Exeter Academy, in large part drawn by its state-of-the-art astronomical observatory. Once there, she got pulled into acting in a serious way. “Enter a new dream,” she says.

Throughout high school her astronomy and acting aspirations “kind of danced beside each other,” Shields remembers. “But I held firm to the first one and went to MIT because I understood that it’s the best science school in the country. I learned that at the age of 12—that’s where I’m going to go.”

At MIT, Shields struggled academically at first and took refuge in the creative arts. She was chosen to participate in the Burchard Scholars Program, whose monthly dinner seminars bring faculty members together with students who excel in the arts, social sciences, and humanities. She sang in the a cappella group the Muses and performed in lots of plays. At the end of her senior year, she found herself wondering: “Do I go to grad school in acting or astronomy?” 

“There were a lot of these things that seemed to be aligning—that were telling me: Go back and get that PhD.”

The latter won out, but not for long. Shields headed to a graduate program in astronomy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “During that year, I had a white male professor tell me to consider other career options, and that was hard to hear,” she says. She remembers thinking, “I’m going to the other dream because clearly someone’s telling me that I don’t belong here. Maybe they’re right.”

So she applied to UCLA, where she got an MFA in acting, leaving astronomy for more than a decade. But then, when Shields was working odd jobs to supplement her acting gigs, a mentor from her undergraduate years encouraged her to look on a Caltech-operated job website. She saw an opening for a help desk operator at the Spitzer Space Telescope, an infrared telescope that is particularly adept at viewing the formation of young stars—and it only required a bachelor’s degree. “I’d refer the harder questions to the PhDs,” she says. “But by taking that job, I got to go to astronomy talks again … This field of exoplanets had just exploded during the time I’d been away.”

Shields had some success in acting, including a part in a film called Nine Lives, which screened at the Sundance Film Festival. But a big break—and then heartbreak—came after she was cast as the host of the show Wired Science, only to lose the job when the producers decided to change presenters. It was a “devastating moment,” she says. 

Soon after, she emailed the astrophysicist and science communications luminary Neil deGrasse Tyson, whom she’d been introduced to over email by an astronomer working with the Spitzer Space Telescope, and relayed what had happened. He replied that he’d seen her in the pilot and told her that “without a PhD you don’t have that street cred if you want to do science television,” she recalls. Meanwhile, she had applied to NASA’s astronaut candidate program but didn’t make it past the first level. (She did, however, get to play an astronaut in a recent Toyota ad.) “There were a lot of these things that seemed to be aligning—that were telling me: Go back and get that PhD,” she says. So she did, earning her doctorate in astronomy and astrobiology in 2014 from the University of Washington. 

Astrobiology, Shields explains, is a relatively new field that studies the origin, evolution, and distribution of life in the universe: “It’s about how life got started on Earth.” 

Astrobiologists might focus on the habitability of planets, or on methods for exploring life on other planets, or on liquids other than water that could support life. It’s a highly interdisciplinary field. “There are astronomers that are looking for these planets and are using their particular field of expertise to answer that question: Are we alone?” Shields explains. Some of them are “also chemists and biologists and oceanographers and geologists who tackle these questions from their own lens and specific area of expertise,” she says. “That’s why I love it. As an astrobiologist, we don’t have to get 15 PhDs. We get to collaborate with people in different departments who lend their own expertise … on those science questions.”

Shields is trying to answer a question sparked by the night sky—one that’s deeply personal yet universal in both the astronomical and the colloquial sense. “Ever since I was a little girl, I would look up at the sky and wonder what was out there,” she says. “It comes from a sense of wonder for me. I still have that feeling when I look up at the night sky and I see these little pinpoints of light. I wonder: Is there anyone looking back at me? … How far does space go?” 

There are, she explains, 100 billion stars in our galaxy, most orbited by at least one planet, and over 100 billion galaxies beyond ours. That’s about 10²² stars in the universe. The likelihood that only Earth was able to produce life “I think is pretty low,” Shields says. 

“I’m looking for planetary environments that could be conducive to life beyond Earth,” she says. “And my team does that largely using climate models. These are the same kinds of models that can predict climate and weather on Earth.”

Shields plugs information gathered by observational astronomers into such models, along with different potential combinations of other, unknown variables—like the type of light a planet receives from its host star, the composition of its atmosphere and surface, and certain orbital information. “There’s only so much that you can really tell about a planet from the telescope information that you get,” she explains. “We can explore that parameter space with climate models and say: Okay, if it has this surface composition, this is what the temperature would be like on this planet. If it has this atmospheric composition, this type of orbit, this is what the climate would be like, and this is how habitable it would be across its surface.”

Since the early 1990s, astronomers have discovered 6,000 exoplanets. Shields says those in Earth’s size range—in which she’s most interested—number in the hundreds. A smaller subset of those are orbiting in what’s called the “habitable zone” of their star, creating warm enough conditions to maintain water in liquid form—the key to life. So far, as many as 100 or so planets that fall into that category have been identified, but the James Webb Space Telescope, launched in 2021, could find even more potentially habitable planets by detecting “biosignatures” suggesting a biological presence, such as particular gases in their atmospheres or glints that might be reflections of water on the planetary surface. 

Being able to detect more of these sorts of signals, Shields says, is the next “big mission” in astronomy.

TED CONFERENCES, VIA YOUTUBE

Today, in her academic work, her mind hurtles to the farthest reaches of the universe. But in her precious hours outside of academia, she has learned to be still. When her work schedule started to overwhelm her, Shields’s health began to suffer. Then she discovered the practice of yoga nidra—an ancient form of meditation in which practitioners are guided into a deeply restful “yogic sleep.” Shields read the book Do Less: A Revolutionary Approach to Time and Energy Management for Ambitious Women, which claims that 20 or 30 minutes of yoga nidra “feels like three hours of sleep in your body,” she says. “And as the mother of a young child, I was like: Okay, sign me up!” 

Last year she trained with Karen Brody, author of Daring to Rest: Reclaim Your Power with Yoga Nidra Rest Meditation, and became a certified facilitator. “It’s been important to me to share it broadly and to really try to do my part to introduce the culture of academia, in particular, to this notion of resting as a daily practice,” she says. Now she’s at work on a book about her attempt to moderate—to resist the temptation to take on too much. She has learned to decline invitations and put firm boundaries between her work and personal life. 

Shields has realized that her seemingly disparate interests in astronomy and acting don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Combining them makes her a more effective educator.

On a weekday in August, an ayurvedic soup simmers on her kitchen stove. A music stand occupies the corner of a room where she sometimes picks up her violin and plays fiddle tunes. (Her parents, both professional musicians, derived her name from a chant of vowel sounds they made up.) She mentions the poem “swim | women of color”by Nayyirah Waheed and recites it in a soft, rich voice. Part of it goes: “This structure counts on your inability to say no. mean no. they take no from our first breath. go back and return it to your mouth. your heart. your light.”

“I need to graciously let go or say no—make room for someone else to say yes,” Shields says. “That allows me to have more spaciousness in my schedule, because one thing I’ve discovered is that women of color, as we proceed up the academic ladder, the requests just exponentially increase, and so saying no is not simply an important skill—it’s a survival skill.”

Along the way, Shields has come to realize that her seemingly disparate interests in astronomy and acting don’t have to be mutually exclusive. In fact, combining them—and sharing her passion for both—makes her a more effective educator. Her training as an actor helps her craft lectures that keep students engaged and animates her presentations, including her TED Talk, in a way that resonates with nonscientists. 

COURTESY OF RISING STARGIRLS

Shields is also tapping into her love of acting to inspire the next generation of scientists who will help answer astronomy’s big questions. As part of a postdoctoral fellowship through the National Science Foundation, she was asked to design an educational outreach component. “I was like: Is there a scenario in which I could use acting to teach astronomy?” she says. “And I looked it up. There was precedent for that. Astronomy education journals had shown that when you involve girls in creative arts—theater, writing—and you incorporate that into astronomy education, you increase girls’ confidence in both asking and answering questions.”

The finding resonated with her own experience. After all, it was acting—which she turned to when her professor discouraged her from studying astronomy—that gave her the confidence to pursue astronomy again. “I looked at acting as this outlet, this safe space,” she says. “Nobody could tell me that I was wrong as an actor.”

With that in mind, Shields launched Rising Stargirls, which holds workshops using the creative arts to teach astronomy to ­middle-school-aged girls of all backgrounds. She and her colleagues have since published a study showing that girls who attended the program reported being more excited to take science classes and were more likely to believe they could do well in science.  

“We want them to know that who they are is inherently pivotal and critical to their study and practice of astronomy,” Shields says. “The sciences are incredibly creative, and they get to bring that creative imagination and creative inspiration they find through the arts into learning about the universe.”

That same exchange has played out in Shields’s life, but it’s only recently that she’s come to see similarities between her roles as an astronomer and an actor. “They’re both about story,” she says. 

Actors have to convey the arc or evolution of a story through the lives of their characters. “Stars, ­planets—they have lives, too,” Shields says. “They have births, they have evolution, and they die. It’s my job as a scientist to unveil the story—to discover the story of whether there’s life elsewhere.” 

Dennis Whyte’s fusion quest

Ever since nuclear fusion was discovered in the 1930s, scientists have wondered if we could somehow replicate and harness the phenomenon behind starlight—the smashing together of hydrogen atoms to form helium and a stupendous amount of clean energy. Fusing hydrogen would yield 200 million times more energy than simply burning it. Unlike nuclear fission, which powers the world’s 440 atomic reactors, hydrogen fusion produces no harmful radiation, only neutrons that are captured and added back to the reaction. Instead of radioactive wastes with long, lethal half-lives, fusion’s by-product is helium, the most stable element—and a year’s worth from a fusion plant wouldn’t supply a party balloon business.

Dennis Whyte’s part in the fusion quest began in graduate school, in a lab belonging to the electric utility Hydro-Québec, just outside Montreal. There he was shown a device built to replicate stellar fusion on an earthly scale. It was a doughnut-shaped hollow chamber, big enough for a lanky physicist like him to stand inside, based on a design conceived in 1950 by the future Nobel Peace Prize laureate Andrei Sakharov, who also developed hydrogen bombs for the Soviet Union. It was called a tokamak, a word derived from a Russian phrase meaning “ring-shaped chamber with magnetic coils.”

GRETCHEN ERTL

The idea is straightforward: Fill the doughnut with hydrogen gas, and then heat that gas until it turns to electrically charged plasma. In this ionic state, plasma would be held in place by magnets positioned around the tokamak. Achieving fusion on Earth without the immense pressure of a star’s interior, scientists calculated, would require temperatures nearly 10 times hotter than our sun’s center—around 100 million degrees Celsius. So the trick would be to suspend the hot plasma so perfectly in a surrounding magnetic field that it wouldn’t touch inner surfaces of the chamber. Such contact would instantly cool it, stopping the fusion reaction.

The good part about that was safety. In a failure, a fusion power plant wouldn’t melt down—just the opposite. The bad part was that gaseous plasma wasn’t very cooperative—any slight irregularity in the chamber walls could cause destabilizing turbulence. But the concept was so tantalizing that by the mid-1980s, 75 universities and governmental institutes around the world had tokamaks. If anyone could get fusion—the most energy-dense reaction in the universe—to work, the deuterium in a liter of seawater could meet one person’s electricity needs for a year. It would be, effectively, a limitless resource.

Besides turbulence, there were two other big obstacles. The magnets surrounding the plasma needed to be really powerful—meaning really big. In 1986, 35 nations representing half the world’s population—including the US, China, India, Japan, what is now the entire European Union, South Korea, and Russia—agreed to jointly build the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, a $40 billion giant tokamak in southern France. Standing 100 feet tall on a 180-acre site, ITER (the acronym also formed the Latin word for “journey”) is equipped with 18 magnets weighing 360 tons apiece, made from the best superconductors then available. If it works, ITER will produce 500 megawatts of electricity—but not before 2035, if then. It’s still under construction. The second obstacle is the biggest: Many tokamaks have briefly achieved fusion, but doing so always took more energy than they produced. 

After earning his doctorate in 1992, Whyte worked on an ITER prototype at San Diego’s National Fusion Facility, taught at the University of Wisconsin, and in 2006 was hired by MIT. By then, he understood how huge the stakes were, and how life-changing commercial-scale fusion energy could be—if it could be sustained, and if it could be produced affordably.

MIT had been trying since 1969. The red brick buildings of its Plasma Science and Fusion Center, where Whyte came to work, had originally housed the National Biscuit Company. PSFC’s sixth tokamak, Alcator C-Mod, built in 1991, was in Nabisco’s old Oreo cookie factory. C-Mod’s magnets were coiled with copper to serve as a conductor (think of how copper wire wrapped around a nail and connected to a battery turns it into an electromagnet). Before C-Mod was finally decommissioned, its magnetic fields, 160,000 times stronger than Earth’s, set the world record for the highest plasma pressure in a tokamak.

As Ohm’s law describes, however, metals like copper have internal resistance, so it could run for only four seconds before overheating—and needed more energy to ignite its fusion reactions than what came out of it. Like the now 160 similar tokamaks around the world, C-Mod was an interesting science experiment but mainly reinforced the joke that fusion energy was 20 years away and always would be.

Each year, Whyte had challenged PhD students in his fusion design classes to conjure something just as compact as C-Mod, one-800th the scale of ITER, that could achieve and sustain fusion—with an energy gain. But in 2013, as he neared 50, he increasingly had doubts. He’d devoted his career to the fusion dream, but unless something radically changed, he feared it wouldn’t happen in his lifetime.

The US Department of Energy decided to scale back on fusion. It informed MIT that funding for Alcator C-Mod would end in 2016. So Whyte decided he would either quit fusion and do something else or try something different to get there faster. 

There was a new generation of ceramic “high-temperature” superconductors, not available when ITER’s huge magnets were being wrapped in metallic superconducting cable, which has to be chilled to 4 kelvin above absolute zero (–452.47 °F) for its resistance to current to fall to zero. Discovered accidentally in 1986 in a Swiss lab, the new ceramic superconductors still needed to be cooled to 20 K (–423.7 °F). But with far smaller power requirements, their output was so much greater that a year later the discoverers won a Nobel Prize.

The potential applications were limitless, but because ceramic is so brittle, coiling it around electromagnets wasn’t feasible. Then one day Whyte ran into research scientist Leslie Bromberg ’73, PhD ’77, in the hallway holding a fistful of what resembled unspooled tape from a VCR cassette. “What’s all that?” he asked.

“Superconducting tape, new stuff.” The filmy strips were coated with ceramic crystals of rare-earth barium copper oxide. “It’s called ReBCO,” Bromberg said.

ReBCO’s rare-earth component, yttrium, is 400 times more common than silver. Could superconducting tape, Whyte immediately wondered, be wound like copper wire to make much smaller but far more powerful magnets?

The class met in a windowless room in a former Nabisco cracker factory, surrounded by blackboards.

He assigned his 2013 fusion design class to see. If the students managed to double the strength of a magnetic field surrounding hot plasma, he knew, they might multiply fusion’s power density sixteenfold. They came up with an eye-­opening design they called Vulcan. It yielded five peer-reviewed papers—but whether layers of wound ReBCO tape could stand the stress of the current needed to hold plasma suspended while being superheated to ignite a fusion reaction was unknown.

For two years, his classes refined Vulcan. By 2015, with ReBCO more consistent in quality and supply, he challenged his students—11 male and one female, including an Argentine, a Russian, and a Korean—to outdo what 35 nations had been attempting for nearly 30 years.

“Let’s see if ReBCO lets us build a 500-megawatt tokamak—the same as ITER, only way smaller.”

If superconducting tape could let them make a fusion reactor to fit the footprint of a decommissioned coal-fired plant, he told them, it could plug right into existing power lines. To then make enough carbon-­free energy to stop pushing Earth’s climate past the edge, its components would have to be mass-­producible, so any competent contractor could assemble and service them.

The class met in a windowless room in a former Nabisco cracker factory, surrounded by blackboards. Divided into teams, the students set about figuring out how thin-tape electromagnets could be made robust, and how to capture neutrons expelled from fusion reactions so their heat could be used for turning a turbine—and so they could be harnessed to breed more tritium for the plasma. That’s crucial, because natural tritium is exceedingly rare. Since ReBCO-wrapped magnets would be so much smaller, shrinking the dimensions of one component rippled through everything else. One team’s innovations fed another’s, and parts of the design started to link together. As excitement spread through PSFC, members of earlier classes, now postdocs or faculty members, pitched in. Whyte’s students, some with doctoral dissertations due, were putting in 50-hour weeks on this, reminding him of why he’d dreamed of fusion in first place.

Whyte looked it over for the thousandth time. He was pretty sure they hadn’t broken any laws of physics.

And then, at the semester’s end, out popped their design. Just over 10 feet in diameter, it actually looked like a prototype power plant. While ITER had massive shielding, their tokamak would be wrapped in a compact blanket containing a molten-salt mixture of lithium fluoride and beryllium fluoride to absorb the heat of the neutrons escaping from the fusion reaction. Those neutrons would also react with the lithium to breed more tritium.

The blanket’s heat would be tapped for electricity—except one-fifth of the heat energy would remain in the plasma, meaning the reaction was now heating itself and was self-sustaining, producing more energy than was needed to ignite it. Net fusion energy had been achieved.

The ReBCO magnets, although just a 40th the size of ITER’s, could deliver a magnetic field strength of 23 tesla (a hospital MRI machine typically operates at 1.5 tesla). That was more than enough to achieve a fusion reaction, yet it would require less electricity than its copper-clad C-Mod predecessor by a factor of 2,000. Everything was designed for easy maintenance, and parts could be replaced without having to dismantle the entire reactor.

Most important, the calculated energy output was more than 13 times the input.

Whyte looked it over for the thousandth time. He was pretty sure they hadn’t broken any laws of physics. He calculated the cost per watt and was astonished. Suddenly their goal wasn’t just building a much smaller ITER. It was being commercially competitive.

Stunned, he told his wife, “This can actually work.”

They called it ARC, for “affordable, robust, compact.” “Buildable in a decade,” Whyte predicted.The peer-reviewed article his 12 students published in FusionEngineering and Design estimated it would cost around $5 billion. In 2015, that wasn’t much more than the cost of a comparably sized coal-fired plant, and one-eighth ITER’s price tag.

That May, Whyte gave a keynote about ARC at a fusion engineering symposium in Austin, Texas. Four of his students attended. When he described their plan for a workable reactor by 2025, in just 10 years, conferees were astounded—everyone else was talking decades. Afterward, the MIT contingent went to lunch at Stubb’s Bar-B-Q. It was clear that with the climate eroding and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warning that yet-­uninvented technologies were needed to keep temperatures from soaring into dreaded realms, they had to do this. But since the DOE had pulled its funding, how could they?

On a napkin, Whyte started listing what they’d need to do and what each step might cost. Over ribs, they crafted a proposal to spin off a startup to raise venture capital to finance a SPARC (for “soon-as-possible ARC”) demo fusion reactor to show that this could really happen. Then they’d build a commercial-scale ARC.

GRETCHEN ERTL

Forming a company would free them from academic and government funding cycles, but they were plasma physicists, most still in their 20s, without business backgrounds. Nevertheless, Whyte and Martin Greenwald, deputy director of the PSFC, agreed to join them, and in 2018 Commonwealth Fusion Systems, CFS, was born. Three of his former students would run the company, and three would remain at MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, which—in a profit-sharing agreement—would be CFS’s research arm.

They opened shop up the street, in The Engine, MIT’s “tough tech” startup incubator, and gained the attention of climate-concerned backers like Bill Gates, George Soros, and Jeff Bezos. But they weren’t the only ones competing for fusion funds, and it became a race to see who could make commercial-scale fusion first. 

The CFS team may have been young, but because of its partnership with MIT and its more than a hundred experienced fusion scientists, it had a running start.

By the end of 2021, Commonwealth Fusion Systems had raised more than $2 billion and was breaking ground on 47 acres outside Boston for a commercial fusion energy campus, to build SPARC by 2025—and commercial-scale, mass-­producible ARC by 2030.

Gaining and actually sustaining net energy is perpetually called fusion’s yet-unreached “holy grail,” but by September 2021, the CFS team of CEO Bob Mumgaard, SM ’15, PhD ’15 (a coauthor of the Vulcan design), chief science officer Brandon Sorbom, PhD ’17 (lead author of the 2015 fusion design class’s breakthrough paper), Whyte, and their 200 CFS colleagues were confident they could do it—if their magnets held. For three years, straight through the pandemic, they’d worked in PSFC’s West Cell laboratory, the cavernous former Oreo factory that had housed Alcator C-Mod, furiously solving problems like how to solder thin-film ReBCO tape together into a structure strong enough to withstand 40,000 amps passing through it—enough to power a small town.

The completed SPARC would have 18 magnets encircling its plasma chamber, but for this test they’d built just one. It was composed of 16 layers, each a D-shaped, 10-foot-high steel disk grooved like an LP. On one side, the grooves held tight spirals of ReBCO film, 270 kilometers in all—the distance from Boston to Albany. “Yet all that ReBCO holds just a sprinkling of rare earth,” said Sorbom. “That’s the magic of superconductors: A tiny bit of material can carry so much current. By comparison, a wind turbine’s rare-earth neodymium magnets weigh tons.”

On each disk’s flip side, the grooves channeled liquid helium to cool the superconductor for zero resistance. (The design dates to history’s first high-field magnet, built at MIT in the 1930s, which used copper conductors and water for coolant.) Each layer was built on an automated assembly line. “The idea,” said Mumgaard, “is to make 100,000 magnets a year someday. This can’t be a scientific curiosity. This needs to be an energy source.”

Although covid-19 had waned, an outbreak could foil everything, so they maintained coronavirus protocols, moving computer terminals outside beneath a tent to avoid crowding within. Others worked virtually. For a month, dozens worked eight-hour, continuous shifts. Some operated the electromagnetic coil, encased in stainless steel in the middle of the room, which over a week had to be gradually supercooled from room temperature of 298 K down to 20 K before slowly ramping up to full magnetic strength. Others constantly compared real-time data with redundant models. As the temperature dropped, the internal connections, welds, and valves contracted at different rates, so they watched for leaks. 

On September 2, 2021, the Thursday before Labor Day, they started ramping up by a few kiloamps, stopping frequently to check what the current was revealing, how the cooling characteristics had changed, and how the stresses on the ReBCO coil increased as the magnetic field strengthened to record heights.

Two nights later, they cranked the amperage toward their goal: a 20-tesla magnetic field, powerful enough to lift 421 Boeing 747s or contain a continuous fusion reaction. They’d been aiming for 7:00 a.m. on Sunday, the 5th. At 3:30, the large screen in the design center showed that they’d reached 40 kiloamps, and the magnetic field had reached 19.56 tesla.

At 4:30 a.m., they were at 19.98 tesla. Things got very quiet. At 5:20 a.m., every redundant on-screen meter read 20 tesla, and nothing had leaked or exploded—except under the tent, where champagne corks were popping.

Five years earlier, on its final four-­second run, C-Mod’s copper-conducting magnet had consumed 200 million watts of energy to reach 5.7 tesla. This took 30 watts—less energy by a factor of around 10 million, Whyte told reporters—to produce a magnetic field strong enough to sustain a fusion reaction. The joints that transferred current from one layer to the next actually performed better than expected. That was the biggest unknown, because there was only one way to test them: in the magnet itself. They looked spectacular.

After five hours, the team ramped down the power. “It’s a Kitty Hawk moment,” Mumgaard said.

Adapted from Hope Dies Last: Visionary People Across the World, Fighting to Find Us a Future by Alan Weisman, published by Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Random House. © 2025 by Alan Weisman.

Hands-on engineering

Jaden Chizuruoke May ’29 worked with teammates Rihanna Arouna ’29 and Marian Akinsoji ’29 to design the chemically powered model car whose framework he is building in this scene from the Huang-Hobbs BioMaker Space, where students have a chance to work safely and independently with biological systems.

The assignment to build the car—and the layered electrochemical battery that powers it—came in a class called “Hands-On Engineering: Squishy Style Making with Biology and Chemistry” taught by the lab’s director, Justin Buck, PhD ’12. “It is definitely one of my favorite classes,” says May, who appreciates that after being trained, students are given the freedom to figure out how to tackle each task in a project.

Located in the basement of Building 26, the BioMaker Space welcomes novices and expert mentors alike, offering workshops in such things as bacterial photography, biobots, lateral flow assay, CRISPR, and DNA origami.

For May, the makerspace has been a hub for collaboration. “I could never have done anything in that lab without my peers and counselors helping me, and the emphasis placed on teamwork is what makes the class feel both welcoming and exciting,” he says, adding that he made some of his first friends at MIT there: “It has been a great introduction to campus.”

May says he’s thinking of double majoring in Course 10-ENG (energy) and Course 21W (writing)—but the class has gotten him interested in biology, too.

Investing in the promise of quantum

As MIT navigates a difficult and constantly changing higher education landscape, I believe our best response is not easy but simple: Keep doing our very best work. The presidential initiatives we’ve launched since fall 2024 are a vital part of our strategy to advance excellence within and across high-impact fields, from health care, climate, and education to AI and manufacturing—and now quantum. On December 8, we launched Quantum at MIT, or QMIT—the name rhymes with qubit, the basic unit of quantum information—to elevate MIT’s long-standing strengths in quantum science and engineering across computing, communication, and sensing.

More than 40 years ago, MIT helped kick off what is widely considered the second quantum revolution as host of the first Physics of Computation Conference at Endicott House, bringing together physics and computing researchers to explore the promise of quantum computing. Now we’re investing further in that promise.

Like all MIT’s strategic priorities, QMIT will help ensure that new technologies are used for the benefit of society. Faculty director Danna Freedman, the Frederick George Keyes Professor of Chemistry, is leading the initiative with a focus that extends beyond research and discovery to the way quantum technologies are developed and deployed. QMIT will enable scientists and engineers to co-develop quantum tools, generating unprecedented capabilities in science, technology, industry, and national security. 

Although QMIT is a new initiative, it grew naturally from the Center for Quantum Engineering (CQE), created in 2019 to help bridge the gap between PIs at MIT and Lincoln Laboratory. A key to QMIT’s success will be integration with Lincoln Lab, with its deep and broad expertise in scaling and deployment.

And CQE has already gotten us started with industry collaborations through its Quantum Science and Engineering Consortium (QSEC), which brings together companies—from startups to large multinationals—that can help us realize positive, practical impact. We’re even envisioning a physical home for quantum at the heart of campus, a space for academic, industry, and public engagement with quantum systems.

As we set out for this new frontier, QMIT will allow us to shape the future of quantum, with a focus on solving “MIT-hard” problems. We hope that as the initiative evolves, our alumni and friends will be inspired to join us in supporting this exciting new effort to build on MIT’s quantum legacy.

Secrets of the sleep-deprived brain

Nearly everyone has experienced it—after a night of poor sleep, your brain might seem foggy, and your mind drifts off when you should be paying attention. A new MIT study reveals what happens biologically as these momentary lapses occur: Your brain is performing essential maintenance that it usually takes care of while you sleep. 

During a normal night of sleep, the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) that cushions the brain helps flush away metabolic waste that has built up during the day. In a 2019 study, MIT electrical engineering and computer science professor Laura Lewis, PhD ’14, and colleagues showed that the CSF flows rhythmically in and out in a way that’s linked to changes in brain waves.

To explore what might happen to this CSF flow in a sleep-deprived brain, Lewis, who is also a member of MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, and her colleagues tested 26 volunteers on several cognitive tasks after they’d been kept awake in the lab and when they were well-rested. Using both electroencephalograms and functional magnetic resonance imaging, the researchers measured heart rate, breathing rate, pupil diameter, blood oxygenation in the brain, and flow of CSF in and out of the brain as participants tried to press a button when they heard a beep or saw a visual change on a screen.

Unsurprisingly, sleep-deprived participants performed much worse than well-rested ones. Their response times were slower, and in some cases the participants never noticed the stimulus at all.

The researchers identified several physiological changes during these lapses of attention. Most significant was a flow of CSF out of the brain just as a lapse occurred—and back in as it ended. The researchers hypothesize that when the brain is sleep-deprived, it “attempts to catch up on this process by initiating pulses of CSF flow,” as Lewis says, even at the cost of one’s ability to pay attention.

“One way to think about those events is because your brain is so in need of sleep, it tries its best to enter into a sleep-like state to restore some cognitive functions,” says Zinong Yang, a postdoctoral associate and lead author of a paper on the work. 

The researchers also found several other physiological events linked to attentional lapses, including decreases in breathing and heart rate, along with constriction of the pupils. They found that pupil constriction began about 12 seconds before CSF flowed out of the brain, and pupils dilated again after attention returned.

“When your attention fails, you might feel it perceptually and psychologically, but it’s also reflecting an event that’s happening throughout the brain and body,” Lewis says.

“These results suggest to us that there’s a unified circuit that’s governing both what we think of as very high-level functions of the brain—our attention, our ability to perceive and respond to the world—and then also really basic, fundamental physiological processes.” 

The researchers did not explore what this circuit might be, but one good candidate, they say, is the noradrenergic system, which regulates many cognitive and bodily functions through the neurotransmitter norepinephrine—and has recently been shown to oscillate during normal sleep.

Listening to battery failure

Lithium-ion batteries produce faint sounds as they charge, discharge, and degrade. But until now, nobody could interpret those sounds to detect when a battery might be about to lose power, fail, or burst into flames.

Now, MIT engineers have found a way to do that, even with noisy data. The findings could provide the basis for relatively simple, totally passive, and nondestructive devices that could continuously monitor the health of battery systems like those in electric vehicles or grid-scale storage facilities.

“Through some careful scientific work, our team has managed to decode the acoustic emissions,” says Martin Z. Bazant, a professor of chemical engineering and mathematics. They were able to classify them as coming from gas bubbles generated by side reactions or from fractures caused by expansion and contraction of the active material, two primary mechanisms of degradation and failure.

The team coupled electrochemical testing of working batteries with recordings of their acoustic emissions, using signal processing to correlate sound characteristics with voltage and current. Then they took the batteries apart and studied them under an electron microscope to detect fracturing.

With Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers, the team has also shown that acoustic emissions can warn of gas generation before thermal runaway, which can lead to fires. As Bazant says, it’s “like seeing the first tiny bubbles in a pot of heated water, long before it boils.” 

Under 10% of an earthquake’s energy makes the ground shake

Earthquakes are driven by energy stored up in rocks over millennia—energy that, once released, we perceive mainly in the form of the ground’s shaking. But a quake also generates a flash of heat and fractures and damages underground rocks. And exactly how much energy goes into each of these three processes is exceedingly difficult to measure in the field.

Now, with the help of carefully controlled miniature “lab quakes,” MIT geophysicist Matěj Peč and colleagues have quantified this so-called energy budget. Only about 1% to 10% of a lab quake’s energy causes physical shaking, they found, while 1% to 30% goes into breaking up rock and creating new surfaces. The vast majority heats up the area around a quake’s epicenter, producing a temperature spike that can actually melt surrounding material.

The team also found that the fractions of quake energy producing heat, shaking, and rock fracturing can shift depending on the tectonic activity the region has experienced in the past. “The deformation history—essentially what the rock remembers—really influences how destructive an earthquake could be,” says postdoc Daniel Ortega-Arroyo, PhD ’25, lead author of a paper on the work. “That history affects a lot of the material properties in the rock, and it dictates to some degree how it is going to slip.”

The lab quakes—which involve subjecting specially prepared samples of powdered granite and magnetic particles to steadily increasing pressure in a custom-built apparatus—are a simplified analogue of what occurs during a natural earthquake. Down the road, if scientists have an idea of how much shaking a quake generated in the past, they might be able to estimate the degree to which the quake’s energy also affected rocks deep underground by melting or breaking them apart. This in turn could reveal how much more or less vulnerable that region is to future quakes.

Building materials are getting closer to doubling as batteries

Concrete already builds our world, and an MIT-invented variant known as electron-­conducting carbon concrete (ec³, pronounced “e c cubed”) holds out the possibility of helping power it, too. Now that vision is one step closer. 

Made by combining cement, water, ultra-fine carbon black, and electrolytes, ec³ creates a conductive “nanonetwork” that could enable walls, sidewalks, and bridges to store and release electrical energy like giant batteries. To date, the technology has been limited by low voltage and scalability challenges. But the latest work by the MIT team that invented ec³ has increased the energy storage capacity by an order of magnitude. With the improved technology, about five cubic meters of concrete—the volume of a typical basement wall—could store enough energy to meet the daily needs of the average home.

MIT EC³ HUB

The researchers achieved this progress by using high-resolution 3D imaging to learn more about how the conductive carbon network—essentially, the electrode—functions and interacts with electrolytes. Equipped with their new understanding, the team experimented with different electrolytes and their concentrations. “We found that there is a wide range of electrolytes that could be viable candidates for ec³,” says Damian Stefaniuk, a research scientist at the MIT Electron-Conducting Carbon-Cement-Based Materials Hub, led by associate professor Admir Masic. “This even includes seawater, which could make this a good material for use in coastal and marine applications, perhaps as support structures for offshore wind farms.”

At the same time, the team streamlined the way electrolytes were added to the mix, making it possible to cast thicker electrodes that stored more energy.

While ec³ doesn’t rival conventional batteries in energy density, itcan in principle be incorporated directly into architectural elements and last as long as the structure itself. To show how structural form and energy storage can work together, the team built a miniature arch that supported its own weight and an additional load while powering an LED light. 

Engineering better care

Every Monday, more than a hundred members of Giovanni Traverso’s Laboratory for Translational Engineering (L4TE) fill a large classroom at Brigham and Women’s Hospital for their weekly lab meeting. With a social hour, food for everyone, and updates across disciplines from mechanical engineering to veterinary science, it’s a place where a stem cell biologist might weigh in on a mechanical design, or an electrical engineer might spot a flaw in a drug delivery mechanism. And it’s a place where everyone is united by the same goal: engineering new ways to deliver medicines and monitor the body to improve patient care.

Traverso’s weekly meetings bring together a mix of expertise that lab members say is unusual even in the most collaborative research spaces. But his lab—which includes its own veterinarian and a dedicated in vivo team—isn’t built like most. As an associate professor at MIT, a gastroenterologist at Brigham and Women’s, and an associate member of the Broad Institute, Traverso leads a sprawling research group that spans institutions, disciplines, and floors of lab space at MIT and beyond. 

For a lab of this size—spread across MIT, the Broad, the Brigham, the Koch Institute, and The Engine—it feels remarkably personal. Traverso, who holds the Karl Van Tassel (1925) Career Development Professorship, is known for greeting every member by name and scheduling one-on-one meetings every two or three weeks, creating a sense of trust and connection that permeates the lab.

That trust is essential for a team built on radical interdisciplinarity. L4TE brings together mechanical and electrical engineers, biologists, physicians, and veterinarians in a uniquely structured lab with specialized “cores” such as fabrication, bioanalytics, and in vivo teams. The setup means a researcher can move seamlessly from developing a biological formulation to collaborating with engineers to figure out the best way to deliver it—without leaving the lab’s ecosystem. It’s a culture where everyone’s expertise is valued, people pitch in across disciplines, and projects aim squarely at the lab’s central goal: creating medical technologies that not only work in theory but survive the long, unpredictable journey to the patient.

“At the core of what we do is really thinking about the patient, the person, and how we can help make their life better,” Traverso says.

Helping patients ASAP

Traverso’s team has developed a suite of novel technologies: a star-shaped capsule that unfolds in the stomach and delivers drugs for days or weeks; a vibrating pill that mimics the feeling of fullness; the technology behind a once-a-week antipsychotic tablet that has completed phase III clinical trials. (See “Designing devices for real-world care,” below.) Traverso has cofounded 11 startups to carry such innovations out of the lab and into the world, each tailored to the technology and patient population it serves.

But the products are only part of the story. What distinguishes Traverso’s approach is the way those products are conceived and built. In many research groups, initial discoveries are developed into early prototypes and then passed on to other teams—sometimes in industry, sometimes in clinical settings—for more advanced testing and eventual commercialization. Traverso’s lab typically links those steps into one continuous system, blending invention, prototyping, testing, iteration, and clinical feedback as the work of a single interdisciplinary team. Engineers sit shoulder to shoulder with physicians, materials scientists with microbiologists. On any given day, a researcher might start the morning discussing an animal study with a veterinarian, spend the afternoon refining a mechanical design, and close the day in a meeting with a regulatory expert. The setup collapses months of back-and-forth between separate teams into the collaborative environment of L4TE.

“This is a lab where if you want to learn something, you can learn everything if you want,” says Troy Ziliang Kang, one of the research scientists. 

In a field where translating scientific ideas into practical applications can take years (or stall indefinitely), Traverso has built a culture designed to shorten that path.

The range of problems the lab tackles reflects its interdisciplinary openness. One recent project aimed to replace invasive contraceptive devices such as vaginal rings with a biodegradable injectable that begins as a liquid, solidifies inside the body, and dissolves safely over time. 

Another project addresses the challenge of delivering drugs directly to the gut, bypassing the mucus barrier that blocks many treatments. For Kang, whose grandfather died of gastric cancer, the work is personal. He’s developing devices that combine traditional drugs with electroceuticals—therapies that use electrical stimulation to influence cells or tissues.

“What I’m trying to do is find a mechanical approach, trying to see if we can really, through physical and mechanical approaches, break through those barriers and to deliver the electroceuticals and drugs to the gut,” he says.

In a field where the process of translating scientific ideas into practical applications can take years (or stall indefinitely), Traverso, 49, has built a culture designed to shorten that path. Researchers focus on designing devices with the clinical relevance to help people in the near term.  And they don’t wait for outsiders to take an idea forward. They often initiate collaborations with entrepreneurs, investors, and partners to create startups or push projects directly into early trials—or even just do it themselves. The projects in the L4TE Lab are ambitious, but the aim is simple: Solve problems that matter and build the tools to make those solutions real.

Nabil Shalabi, an instructor in medicine at Harvard/BWH, an associate scientist at the Broad Institute, and a research affiliate in Traverso’s lab, sums up the attitude succinctly: “I would say this lab is really about one thing, and it’s about helping people.”

The physician-inventor

Traverso’s path into medicine and engineering began far from the hospitals and labs where he works today. Born in Cambridge, England, he moved with his family to Peru when he was still young. His father had grown up there in a family with Italian roots; his mother came from Nicaragua. He spent most of his childhood in Lima before political turmoil in Peru led his family to relocate to Toronto when he was 14.

In high school, after finishing most of his course requirements early, he followed the advice of a chemistry teacher and joined a co-op program that would give him a glimpse of some career options. That decision brought him to a genetics lab at the Toronto Hospital for Sick Children, where he spent his afternoons helping map chromosome 7 and learning molecular techniques like PCR.

“In high school, and even before that, I always enjoyed science,” Traverso says.

After class, he’d ride the subway downtown and step into a world of hands-on science, working alongside graduate students in the early days of genomics.

“I really fell in love with the day-to-day, the process, and how one goes about asking a question and then trying to answer that question experimentally,” he says.

By the time he finished high school, he had already begun to see how science and medicine could intersect. He began an undergraduate medical program at Cambridge University, but during his second year, he reached out to the cancer biologist Bert Vogelstein and joined his lab at Johns Hopkins for the summer. The work resonated. By the end of the internship, Vogelstein asked if he’d consider staying to pursue a PhD. Traverso agreed, pausing his medical training after earning an undergraduate degree in medical sciences and genetics, and moved to Baltimore to begin a doctorate in molecular biology.

As a PhD student, he focused on the early detection of colon cancer, developing a method to identify mutations in stool samples—a concept later licensed by Exact Sciences and used in what is now known as the Cologuard test. After completing his PhD (and earning a spot on Technology Review’s 2003 TR35 list of promising young innovators for that work), he returned to Cambridge to finish medical school and spent the next three years in the UK, including a year as a house officer (the equivalent of a clinical intern in the US).

Traverso chose to pursue clinical training alongside research because he believed each would make the other stronger. “I felt that having the knowledge would help inform future research development,” he says.

JARED LEEDS

So in 2007, as Traverso began a residency in internal medicine at Brigham and Women’s, he also approached MIT, where he reached out to Institute Professor Robert Langer, ScD ’74. Though Traverso didn’t have a background in Langer’s field of chemical engineering, he saw the value of pairing clinical insight with the materials science research happening in the professor’s lab, which develops polymers, nanoparticles, and other novel materials to tackle biomedical challenges such as delivering drugs precisely to diseased tissue or providing long-term treatment through implanted devices. Langer welcomed him into the group as a postdoctoral fellow.

In Langer’s lab, he found a place where clinical problems sparked engineering solutions, and where those solutions were designed with the patient in mind from the outset. Many of Traverso’s ideas came directly from his work in the hospital: Could medications be delivered in ways that make it easier for patients to take them consistently? Could a drug be redesigned so it wouldn’t require refrigeration in a rural clinic? And caring for a patient who’d swallowed shards of glass that ultimately passed without injury led Traverso to recognize the GI tract’s tolerance for sharp objects, inspiring his work on the microneedle pill.

“A lot of what we do and think about is: How do we make it easier for people to receive therapy for conditions that they may be suffering from?” Traverso says. How can they “really maximize health, whether it be by nutrient enhancement or by helping women have control over their fertility?” 

If the lab sometimes runs like a startup incubator, its founder still thinks like a physician.

Scaling up to help more people

Traverso has cofounded multiple companies to help commercialize his group’s inventions. Some target global health challenges, like developing more sustainable personal protective equipment (PPE) for health-care workers. Others take on chronic conditions that require constant dosing—HIV, schizophrenia, diabetes—by developing long-­acting oral or injectable therapies.

From the outset, materials, dimensions, and mechanisms are chosen for more than just performance in the lab. The researchers also consider the realities of regulation, manufacturing constraints, and safe use in patients.

“We definitely want to be designing these devices to be made of safe materials or [at a] safe size,” says James McRae, SM ’22, PhD ’25. “We think about these regulatory constraints that could come up in a company setting pretty early in our research process.” As part of his PhD work with Traverso, McRae created a “swallow-­and-forget” health-tracking capsule that can stay in the stomach for months—and it doesn’t require surgery to install, as an implant would. The capsule measures tiny shifts in stomach temperature that happen whenever a person eats or drinks, providing a continuous record of eating patterns that’s far more reliable than what external devices or self-reporting can capture. The technology could offer new insight into how drugs such as Ozempic and other GLP-1 therapies change behavior—something that has been notoriously hard to monitor. From “day one,” McRae made sure to involve external companies and regulatory consultants for future human testing.

Traverso describes the lab’s work as a “continuum,” likening research projects to children who are born, nurtured, and eventually sent into the world to thrive and help people.

COURTESY OF THE RESEARCHERS

For lab employee Matt Murphy, a mechanical engineer who manages one of the main mechanical fabrication spaces, that approach is part of the draw. Having worked with researchers on projects spanning multiple disciplines—mechanical engineering, electronics, materials science, biology—he’s now preparing to spin out a company with one of Traverso’s postdocs. 

“I feel like I got the PhD experience just working here for four years and being involved in health projects,” he says. “This has been an amazing opportunity to really see the first stages of company formation and how the early research really drives the commercialization of new technology.”

The lab’s specialized “cores” ensure that projects have consistent support and can draw on plenty of expertise, regardless of how many students or postdocs come and go. If a challenge arises in an area in which a lab member has limited knowledge, chances are someone else in the lab has that background and will gladly help. “The culture is so collaborative that everybody wants to teach everybody,” says Murphy.

Creating opportunities 

In Traverso’s lab, members are empowered to pursue technically demanding research because the culture he created encourages them to stretch into new disciplines, take ownership of projects, and imagine where their work might go next. For some, that means cofounding a company. For others, it means leaving with the skills and network to shape their next big idea.

“He gives you both the agency and the support,” says Isaac Tucker, an L4TE postdoc based at the Broad Institute. “Gio trusts the leads in his lab to just execute on tasks.” McRae adds that Traverso is adept at identifying “pain points” in research and providing the necessary resources to remove barriers, which helps projects advance efficiently. 

A project led by Kimberley Biggs, another L4TE postdoc, captures how the lab approaches high-stakes problems. Funded by the Gates Foundation, Biggs is developing a way to stabilize therapeutic bacteria used for neonatal and women’s health treatments so they remain effective without refrigeration—critical for patients in areas without reliable temperature-controlled supply chains. A biochemist by training, she had never worked on devices before joining the lab, but she collaborated closely with the mechanical fabrication team to embed her bacterial therapy for conditions such as bacterial vaginosis and recurrent urinary tract infections into an intravaginal ring that can release it over time. She says Traverso gave her “an incredible amount of trust” to lead the project from the start but continued to touch base often, making sure there were “no significant bottlenecks” and that she was meeting all the goals she wanted to meet to progress in her career.

Traverso encourages collaboration by putting together project teams that combine engineers, physicians, and scientists from other fields—a strategy he says can be transformative. 

“If you only have one expert, they are constrained to what they know,” he explains. But “when you bring an electrical engineer together with a biologist or physician, the way that they’ll be able to see the problem or the challenge is very different.” As a result, “you see things that perhaps you hadn’t even considered were possible,” he says. Moving a project from a concept to a successful clinical trial “takes a village,” he adds. It’s a “complex, multi-step, multi-person, multi-year” process involving “tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of effort.”

Good ideas deserve to be tested

The portion of Traverso’s lab housed at the “tough tech” incubator The Engine—and the only academic group working there—occupies a 30-bench private lab alongside shared fabrication spaces, heavy machinery, and communal rooms of specialized lab equipment. The combination of dedicated and shared resources has helped reduce some initial equipment expenses for new projects, while the startup-dense environment puts potential collaborators, venture capital, and commercialization pathways within easy reach. Biggs’s work on bacterial treatments is one of the lab’s projects at The Engine. Others include work to develop electronics for capsule-based devices and an applicator for microneedle patches.

Traverso’s philosophy is to “fail well and fail fast and move on.”

The end of one table houses “blue sky” research on a topic of long-standing interest to Traverso: pasta. Led by PhD student Jack Chen, the multi-pronged project includes using generative AI to help design new pasta shapes with superior sauce adhesion. Chen and collaborators ranging from executive chefs to experts in fluid dynamics apply the same analytical rigor to this research that they bring to medical devices. It’s playful work, but it’s also a microcosm of the lab’s culture: interdisciplinary to its core, unafraid to cross boundaries, and grounded in Traverso’s belief that good ideas deserve to be tested—even if they fail.

“I’d say the majority of things that I’ve ever been involved in failed,” he says. “But I think it depends on how you define failure.” He says that most of the projects he worked on for the first year and a half of his own PhD either just “kind of worked” or didn’t work at all—causing him to step back and take a different approach that ultimately led him to develop the highly effective technique now used in the Cologuard test. “Even if a hypothesis that we had didn’t work out, or didn’t work out as we thought it might, the process itself, I think, is valuable,” he says. So his philosophy is to “fail well and fail fast and move on.”

JARED LEEDS

In practice, that means encouraging students and postdocs to take on big, uncertain problems, knowing a dead end isn’t the end of their careers—just an opportunity to learn how to navigate the next challenge better.

McRae remembers when a major program—two or three years in the making—abruptly changed course after its sponsor shifted priorities. The team had been preparing a device for safety testing in humans; suddenly, the focus on that goal was gone. Rather than shelving the work, Traverso urged the group to use it as an opportunity to “be a little more creative again” and explore new directions, McRae says. That pivot sparked his work on an autonomous drug delivery system, opening lines of research the team hadn’t pursued before. In this system, patients swallow two capsules that interact in the stomach. When a sensor capsule detects an abnormal signal, it directs a second capsule to release a drug.

“He will often say, ‘I have a focus on not wasting time. Time is something that you can’t buy back. Time is something that you can’t save and bank for later.’”

Kimberley Biggs

“When things aren’t working, just make sure they didn’t work and you’re confident why they didn’t work,” Traverso says he tells his students. “Is it the biology? Is it the materials science? Is it the mechanics that aren’t just aligning for whatever reason?” He models that diagnostic mindset—and the importance of preserving momentum. 

“He will often say, ‘I have a focus on not wasting time. Time is something that you can’t buy back. Time is something that you can’t save and bank for later,’” says Biggs. “And so whenever you do encounter some sort of bottleneck, he is so supportive in trying to fix that.” 

Traverso’s teaching reflects the same interplay between invention, risk, and real-world impact. In Translational Engineering, one of his graduate-level courses at MIT, he invites experts from the FDA, hospitals, and startups to speak about the realities of bringing medical technology to the world.

“He shared his network with us,” says Murphy, who took the course while working in the lab. “Now that I’m trying to spin out a company, I can reach out to these people.” 

Although he now spends most of his time on research and teaching, Traverso maintains an inpatient practice at the Brigham, participating in the consult service—a team of gastroenterology fellows and medical students supervising patient care—for several weeks a year. Staying connected to patients keeps the problems concrete and helps guide decisions on which puzzles to tackle in the lab.

“I think there are certain puzzles in front of us, and I do gravitate to areas that have a solution that will help people in the near term,” he says.

For Traverso, the measure of success is not the complexity of the engineering but the efficacy of the result. The goal is always a therapy that works for the people who need it, wherever they are. 

Designing devices for real-world care 

A sampling of recent research from Traverso’s Lab for Translational Engineering

A mechanical adhesive device inspired by sucker fish sticks to soft, wet surfaces; it could be used to deliver drugs in the GI tract or to monitor aquatic environments. 

A pill based on Traverso’s technology that can be taken once a week gradually releases medication within the stomach. It’s designed for patients with conditions like schizophrenia, hypertension, and asthma who find it difficult to take medicine every day. 

A new delivery method for injectable drugs uses smaller needles and fewer shots. Drugs injected as a suspension of tiny crystals assemble into a “depot” under the skin that could last for months or years. 

A protein from tiny tardigrades, also known as “water bears,” could protect healthy cells from radiation damage during cancer treatments, reducing severe side effects that many patients find too difficult to tolerate. Injecting messenger RNA encoding this protein into mice produced enough to protect healthy cells.

An inflatable gastric balloon could be enlarged before a meal to prevent overeating and help people lose weight. 

Inspired by the way squid use jets to shoot ink clouds, a capsule releases a burst of drugs directly into the GI tract. It could offer an alternative to injecting drugs such as insulin, as well as vaccines and therapies to treat obesity and other metabolic disorders.

An implantable sensor could reverse opioid overdoses. Implanted under the skin, it rapidly releases naloxone when an overdose is detected.

A screening device for cervical cancer offers a clear line of sight to the cervix in a way that causes less discomfort than a traditional speculum. It’s affordable enough for use in low- and middle-income countries.