Travels with Rambax

KAOLACK, Senegal – The MIT students have just finished dinner and are crumpling soda cans into trash bins when they get the summons: “Grab your drums, grab your drums, grab your drums …” 

It is time for the tanibeer, a nighttime drum and dance party, in Kaolack, a town amid salt plains and peanut farms located 220 kilometers southeast of Dakar, Senegal’s capital. For the members of Rambax MIT, the Institute’s Senegalese drumming ensemble, the excitement is palpable as they fetch their drums and make their way up the road. Their destination is a small field on the family land of their director, Lamine Touré, who comes from a long line of griots, the musicians and oral historians of the Wolof people.

NIKO ODHIAMBO ’25

Touré, a Senegalese master drummer and an MIT lecturer in world music, cofounded Rambax in 2001 with Patricia Tang, an associate professor and ethnomusicologist who specializes in West African music. It began as an extracurricular group to teach students and other members of the MIT community the art of sabar, a vibrant West African drumming and dance tradition. Today, Rambax is a credit-bearing class (21M.460) enrolling as many as 50 students a semester, and its ensemble’s performances draw audiences from MIT and the wider Boston community.  

During Independent Activities Period (IAP), 16 members of the ensemble joined Touré and Tang on a two-week study tour in Senegal, the birthplace of the music that inspires Rambax. In addition to performing, the students attended drumming classes and dance workshops taught by expert Senegalese drummers, and they experienced sabar drumming within its traditional and cultural context in Dakar and Kaolack.

A sabar celebration, known as a tanibeer when held at night, is a lavish display of dance music, a great neighborhood carnival.

“Rambax is unique,” says Touré, whose family of prominent griot percussionists had him drumming from the age of four. Traveling to Senegal allowed the students to experience the cultural significance of the music—and Touré says their Senegalese audiences were really impressed with their playing.

COURTESY OF RAMBAX

A sabar celebration, also known as a tanibeer when held at night, is a lavish display of dance music: a great neighborhood carnival, jammed with lights, blaring speakers, griots, costumed dancers, drums and drums and ever more drums, and—of course—dancing.

On the night of the Rambax tanibeer in January, the sky is clear and chilly breezes waft across the field, where throngs of people, some dressed in colorful Senegalese traditional garb, gather under fluorescent lights perched on lampposts, chatting and gesticulating while waiting to watch the performance.

As the MIT students walk in, wearing their bright yellow, green, and red knee-length dashikis, the crowd erupts into applause. 

Standing in front of his hometown audience, long dark dreadlocks spilling to his shoulders, Touré takes a microphone and introduces the ensemble in his native Wolof. He explains that his students are lovers of African music and, under his tutelage at MIT, have been learning the art of sabar. He pauses for a moment and leans in close to start conducting. 

Then Rambax begins to play.

NIKO ODHIAMBO ’25

The audience cheers and dances, forming a large circle in front of the musicians. Before long, women take turns at the center of the circle, matching the energetic rhythms of the drumming in the exuberant hip twists, arm swings, jumps, and impossibly high knee kicks of sabar dancing. The high-spirited drumming and dancing continue until the early hours of the morning.   

The tanibeer is a chance for Touré “to show what he’s been teaching his American students and that they can really play sabar quite well,” says Tang, who serves as a faculty advisor to Rambax. “And that’s often a surprise to the Senegalese audience.” 

PATRICIA TANG

COURTESY OF RAMBAX

Among the 16 Rambax members on the Senegal trip is Autumn Geil ’21, a researcher and PhD student in the department of mechanical engineering. Initially drawn to music through choir and opera singing in high school, she had never heard of sabar drumming before discovering Rambax through a friend as an undergrad. She joined and has been a member of the ensemble, which she calls “just so incredible,” ever since. 

NIKO ODHIAMBO ’25

For Geil, practicing sabar with custodians of the tradition in Senegal is an opportunity to “observe and learn from the drummers to improve my skills for future performances.” 

Baran Mensah ’24, a Ghanian master’s student in mechanical engineering who minored in music as an undergrad, also joined Rambax after a friend recommended it. He sees it as a way to tap into his African roots while at MIT but says it’s also “a gateway to learn about Senegalese art, music, and culture.” Until the tour, he notes, “I really didn’t know much about my country’s West African neighbor.”   

“Coming on this trip allows us to take a step back, to learn about people and cultures, making us more effective communicators.”

Autumn Geil ’21

Eri-ife Olayinka ’25, a computation and cognition major who took Rambax classes for two semesters, says she finds the learning environment supportive and the cultural insights provided by Touré and Tang rewarding. “You see yourself getting better, becoming comfortable with playing in the class,” she says. After completing the classes to satisfy her art requirements, Olayinka stayed on in the drumming ensemble. “I genuinely enjoy being in Rambax—it’s such a cool thing we get to do as a group,” she says.

NIKO ODHIAMBO ’25

Visiting Kaolack is more than an opportunity for Rambax members to glimpse the culture that gave rise to sabar. With horse-drawn wagons clip-clopping through its rugged terrain but also massive solar farms, Kaolack is a city where old meets new. Witnessing those contrasts—and getting to perform and to immerse themselves in the performances of local musicians—helps the students enhance what Geil calls the “human connection skills” that all scientists and technologists need. 

“It’s really important for people in STEM to make space for art and music,” she says. “Coming on this trip allows us to take a step back, to learn about people and cultures, making us more effective communicators of our technology.” 

NIKO ODHIAMBO ’25

NIKO ODHIAMBO ’25

PATRICIA TANG

COURTESY OF RAMBAX

Back inside Touré’s family compound, Tang invites the students to gather around so she can introduce them to Touré’s mother, Marie Sow, and his sisters and aunts. Sow showers them with good wishes and they bask in the glow.

It’s important for Rambax members to know the history and culture of the people behind the music they practice, says Tang. “We really want the students to have this sort of cultural immersion—live in a Senegalese house like the Senegalese people do, hang out with Senegalese drummers, and really get a sense of what it’s like in Senegal.”

Abdullahi Tsanni, SM ’23, a former MIT Technology Review fellow, is a science writer based in Dakar, Senegal, who specializes in narrative features. 

What if computer history were a romantic comedy?

The computer first appeared on the Broadway stage in 1955 in a romantic comedy—William Marchant’s The Desk Set. The play centers on four women who conduct research on behalf of the fictional International Broadcasting Company. Early in the first act, a young engineer named Richard Sumner arrives in the offices of the research department without explaining who he is or why he is studying the behavior of the workers. Bunny Watson, the head of the department, discovers that the engineer plans to install an “electronic brain” called Emmarac, which Sumner affectionately refers to as “Emmy” and describes as “the machine that takes the pause quotient out of the work–man-hour relationship.”

What Sumner calls the “pause quotient” is jargon for the everyday activities and mundane interactions that make human beings less efficient than machines. Emmarac would eliminate inefficiencies, such as walking to a bookshelf or talking with a coworker about weekend plans. Bunny Watson comes to believe that the computing machine will eliminate not only inefficiencies in the workplace but also the need for human workers in her department. Sumner, the engineer, presents the computer as a technology of efficiency, but Watson, the department head, views it as a technology of displacement.

Bunny Watson’s view was not uncommon during the first decade of computing technology. Thomas Watson Sr., president of IBM, insisted that one of his firm’s first machines be called a “calculator” instead of a “computer” because “he was concerned that the latter term, which had always referred to a human being, would raise the specter of technological unemployment,” according to historians Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray. In keeping with the worry of both Watsons, the computer takes the stage on Broadway as a threat to white-collar work. The women in Marchant’s play fight against the threat of unemployment as soon as they learn why Sumner has arrived. The play thus attests to the fact that the very benefits of speed, accuracy, and information processing that made the computer useful for business also caused it to be perceived as a threat to the professional-managerial class.

Comedy provides a template for managing the incongruity of an “electronic brain” arriving in a space oriented around human expertise and professional judgment.

This threat was somewhat offset by the fact that for most of the 1950s, the computing industry was not profitable in the United States. Manufacturers produced and sold or leased the machines at steep losses, primarily to preserve a speculative market position and to bolster their image as technologically innovative. For many such firms, neglecting to compete in the emerging market for computers would have risked the perception that they were falling behind. They hoped computing would eventually become profitable as the technology improved, but even by the middle of the decade, it was not obvious to industry insiders when this would be the case. Even if the computer seemed to promise a new world of “lightning speed” efficiency and information management, committing resources to this promise was almost prohibitively costly.

While firms weighed the financial costs of computing, the growing interest in this new technology was initially perceived by white-collar workers as a threat to the nature of managerial expertise. Large corporations dominated American enterprise after the Second World War, and what historian Alfred Chandler called the “visible hand” of managerial professionals exerted considerable influence over the economy. Many observers wondered if computing machines would lead to a “revolution” in professional-managerial tasks. Some even speculated that “electronic brains” would soon coordinate the economy, thus replacing the bureaucratic oversight of most forms of labor. 

Howard Gammon, an official with the US Bureau of the Budget, explained in a 1954 essay that “electronic information processing machines” could “make substantial savings and render better service” if managers were to accept the technology. Gammon advocated for the automation of office work in areas like “stock control, handling orders, processing mailing lists, or a hundred and one other activities requiring the accumulating and sorting of information.” He even anticipated the development of tools for “erect[ing] a consistent system of decisions in areas where ‘judgment’ can be reduced to sets of clear-cut rules such as (1) ‘purchase at the lowest price,’ or (2) ‘never let the supply of bolts fall below the estimated one-week requirement for any size or type.’”

Gammon’s essay illustrates how many administrative thinkers hoped that computers would allow upper-level managers to oversee industrial production through a series of unambiguous rules that would no longer require midlevel workers for their enactment. 

This fantasy was impossible in the 1950s for so many reasons, the most obvious being that only a limited number of executable processes in postwar managerial capitalism could be automated through extant technology, and even fewer areas of “judgment,” as Gammon called them, can be reduced to sets of clear-cut rules. Still, this fantasy was part of the cultural milieu when Marchant’s play premiered on Broadway, one year after Gammon’s report and just a few months after IBM had announced the advance in memory storage technology behind its new 705 Model II, the first successful commercial data-processing machine. IBM received 100 orders for the 705, a commercial viability that seemed to signal the beginning of a new age in American corporate life.

It soon became clear, however, that this new age was not the one that Gammon imagined. Rather than causing widespread unemployment or the total automation of the visible hand, the computer would transform the character of work itself. Marchant’s play certainly invokes the possibility of unemployment, but its posture toward the computer shifts toward a more accommodative view of what later scholars would call the “computerization of work.” For example, early in the play, Richard Sumner conjures the specter of the machine as a threat when he asks Bunny Watson if the new electronic brains “give you the feeling that maybe—just maybe—that people are a little bit outmoded.” Similarly, at the beginning of the second act, a researcher named Peg remarks, “I understand thousands of people are being thrown out of work because of these electronic brains.” The play seems to affirm Sumner’s sentiment and Peg’s implicit worry about her own unemployment once the computer, Emmarac, has been installed in the third act. After the installation, Sumner and Watson give the machine a research problem that previously took Peg several days to complete. Watson expects the task to stump Emmarac, but the machine takes only a few seconds to produce the same answer.

While such moments conjure the specter of “technological unemployment,” the play juxtaposes Emmarac’s feats with Watson’s wit and spontaneity. For instance, after Sumner suggests people may be “outmoded,” Watson responds, “Yes, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if they stopped making them.” Sumner gets the joke but doesn’t find it funny: “Miss Watson, Emmarac is not a subject for levity.” The staging of the play contradicts Sumner’s assertion. Emmarac occasions all manner of levity in The Desk Set, ranging from Watson’s joke to Emmarac’s absurd firing of every member of the International Broadcasting Company, including its president, later in the play. 

This shifting portrayal of Emmarac follows a much older pattern in dramatic comedy. As literary critic Northrop Frye explains, many forms of comedy follow an “argument” in which a “new world” appears on the stage and transforms the society entrenched at the beginning of the play. The movement away from established society hinges on a “principle of conversion” that “include[s] as many people as possible in its final society: the blocking characters are more often reconciled or converted than simply repudiated.”

We see a similar dynamic in how Marchant’s play portrays the efficiency expert as brusque, rational, and incapable of empathy or romantic interests. After his arrival in the office, a researcher named Sadel says, “You notice he never takes his coat off? Do you think maybe he’s a robot?” Another researcher, Ruthie Saylor, later kisses Sumner on the cheek and invites him to a party. He says, “Sorry, I’ve got work to do,” to which Ruthie responds, “Sadel’s right—you are a robot!” 

Even as Sumner’s robotic behavior portrays him as antisocial, Emmarac further isolates him from the office by posing a threat to the workers. The play accentuates this blocking function by assigning Emmarac a personality and gender: Sumner calls the machine “Emmy,” and its operator, a woman named Miss Warriner, describes the machine as a “good girl.” By taking its place in the office, Emmarac effectively moves into the same space of labor and economic power as Bunny Watson, who had previously overseen the researchers and their activities. After being installed in the office, the large mainframe computer begins to coordinate this knowledge work. The gendering of the computer thus presents Emmarac as a newer model of the so-called New Woman, as if the computer imperils the feminist ideal that Bunny Watson clearly embodies. By directly challenging Watson’s socioeconomic independence and professional identity, the computer’s arrival in the workplace threatens to make the New Woman obsolete. 

Yet much like Frye’s claims about the “argument” of comedy, the conflict between Emmarac and Watson resolves as the machine transforms from a direct competitor into a collaborator. We see this shift during a final competition between Emmarac and the research department. The women have been notified that their positions have been terminated, and they begin packing up their belongings. Two requests for information suddenly arrive, but Watson and her fellow researchers refuse to process them because of their dismissal, so Warriner and Sumner attempt to field the requests. The research tasks are complicated, and Warriner mistakenly directs Emmarac to print a long, irrelevant answer. The machine inflexibly continues although the other inquiry needs to be addressed. Sumner and Warriner try to stop the machine, but this countermanding order causes the machine’s “magnetic circuit” to emit smoke and a loud noise. Sumner yells at Warriner, who runs offstage, and the efficiency expert is now the only one to field the requests and salvage the machine. However, he doesn’t know how to stop Emmarac from malfunctioning. Marchant’s stage directions here say that Watson, who has studied the machine’s maintenance and operation, “takes a hairpin from her hair and manipulates a knob on Emmarac—the NOISE obligingly stops.” Watson then explains, “You forget, I know something about one of these. All that research, remember?”

The madcap quality of this scene continues after Sumner discovers that Emmarac’s “little sister” in the payroll office has sent pink slips to every employee at the broadcasting firm. Sumner then receives a letter containing his own pink slip, which prompts Watson to quote Horatio’s lament as Hamlet dies: “Good night, sweet prince.” The turn of events poses as tragedy, but of course it leads to the play’s comic resolution. Once Sumner discovers that the payroll computer has erred—or, at least, that someone improperly programmed it—he explains that the women in the research department haven’t been fired. Emmarac, he says, “was not meant to replace you. It was never intended to take over. It was installed to free your time for research—to do the daily mechanical routine.”

Even as Watson “fixes” the machine, the play fixes the robotic man through his professional failures. After this moment of discovery, Sumner apologizes to Watson and reconciles with the other women in the research department. He then promises to take them out to lunch and buy them “three martinis each.” Sumner exits with the women “laughing and talking,” thus reversing the antisocial role that he has occupied for most of the play.

Emmarac’s failure, too, becomes an opportunity for its conversion. It may be that a programming error led to the company-wide pink slips, but the computer’s near-breakdown results from its rigidity. In both cases, the computer fails to navigate the world of knowledge work, thus becoming less threatening and more absurd through its flashing lights, urgent noises, and smoking console. This shift in the machine’s stage presence—the fact that it becomes comic—does not lead to its banishment or dismantling. Rather, after Watson “fixes” Emmarac, she uses it to compute a final inquiry submitted to her office: “What is the total weight of the Earth?” Given a problem that a human researcher “can spend months finding out,” she chooses to collaborate. Watson types out the question and Emmarac emits “its boop-boop-a-doop noise” in response, prompting her to answer, “Boop-boop-a-doop to you.” Emmarac is no longer Watson’s automated replacement but her partner in knowledge work.

In Marchant’s play, comedy provides a template for managing the incongruity of an “electronic brain” arriving in a space oriented around human expertise and professional judgment. This template converts the automation of professional-­managerial tasks from a threat into an opportunity, implying that a partnership with knowledge workers can convert the electronic brain into a machine compatible with their happiness. The computerization of work thus becomes its own kind of comic plot. 

Benjamin Mangrum is an associate professor of literature at MIT. This excerpt is from his new book, The Comedy of Computation: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Obsolescence, published by Stanford University Press, ©2025 by Benjamin Mangrum. All rights reserved. 

An intelligent, practical path to reindustrialization

This past spring, we launched a brand-new manufacturing initiative—building on ideas that are as old as MIT. Since William Barton Rogers created a school to help accelerate America’s industrialization, manufacturing has been an essential part of our mission—a particularly MIT brand of manufacturing, informed and improved by scientific principles and advanced by the kind of hands-on leaders Rogers designed MIT to train.

In the 1980s, the Institute’s “Made in America” study opened with the enduring observation “To live well, a nation must produce well.” Along with The Machine That Changed the World, the 1990 book that told the story of “lean production,” this landmark report helped US manufacturers understand and successfully compete with Japan’s quality model. 

Then, a little over a decade ago, MIT’s “Production in the Innovation Economy” initiative highlighted the opportunities we miss if design and manufacturing teams are miles or even oceans apart—and played a significant role in shaping the nation’s Advanced Manufacturing Initiative.

Building on this legacy, and in response to an urgent national interest in restoring America’s manufacturing strength, an inspired group of MIT faculty came together in 2022 to found the Manufacturing@MIT Working Group. They explored new ways to marshal MIT’s expertise in technology, the social sciences, and management to forge an intelligent, practical path to reindustrialization.

As a result of this group’s foundational work, we’ve now created the MIT Initiative for New Manufacturing (INM),which will join the ranks of our other Presidential Initiatives—all designed to help the people of MIT come together in new ways to accelerate our progress and increase our impact. 

To help make manufacturing more productive, resilient, and sustainable, we aim to do the following:

 –Work with firms big and small to help them adopt new approaches for increased productivity.

  –Design high-quality, human-centered jobs that bring new life to communities across the country. 

  –Re-elevate manufacturing in MIT’s own curriculum—and provide pathways for people outside MIT to gain the skills to transform their own prospects and fuel a “new manufacturing” economy.

  –Reimagine manufacturing technologies and systems to advance fields like energy production, health care, computing, transportation, consumer products, and more. 

  –Tackle such challenges as making supply chains more resilient and informing public policy to foster a broad, healthy manufacturing ecosystem that can drive decades of innovation and growth.

If all this sounds ambitious—it is. And these are just the highlights! But I’m convinced that there is no more important work we can do right now to meet the moment and serve the nation. 

Art rhymes

As an MIT visiting scholar, rap legend Lupe Fiasco decided to go fishing for ideas on campus. In an approach he calls “ghotiing” (pronounced “fishing”), he composed nine raps inspired by works in MIT’s public art collection, writing and recording them on site. On May 2, he and the MIT Festival Jazz Ensemble debuted six of them, performing in front of a packed audience in Kresge for the final performance of the MIT Artfinity festival. The concert featured arrangements of Fiasco’s music done by Kevin Costello ’21, grad student Matthew Michalek, students in Fiasco’s Rap Theory and Practice class, and professor Evan Ziporyn. Produced in collaboration with the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Fiasco’s “Ghotiing MIT: Public Art” project also lets campus visitors scan a QR code and listen to his site-specific raps on their phones as they view the artworks in person.  

Click here to go on a virtual tour of seven pieces from MIT’s public art collection as you listen to Lupe Fiasco’s raps inspired by each piece.

WBUR’s coverage of the project is available here and you can also read more about it in the Boston Globe and The Guardian.

CAROLINE ALDEN

CAROLINE ALDEN

CAROLINE ALDEN

More news from the labs of MIT

Hundred-year storm tides could strike every decade in Bangladesh

Tropical cyclones can generate devastating storm tides—seawater heightened by the tides that causes catastrophic floods in coastal regions. An MIT study finds that as the planet warms, the recurrence of destructive storm tides will increase tenfold for one of the world’s hardest-hit regions.

New electronic “skin” could lead to lightweight night-vision glasses 

MIT engineers have developed a technique to grow and peel ultrathin “skins” of electronic material that could be used in wearable sensors, flexible transistors and computing elements, and sensitive compact imaging devices.

Technology makes pesticides stick to plant leaves

A new pesticide application system developed by MIT researchers and their spinoff company could significantly cut use of pesticides and fertilizers, saving farmers money and reducing polluting runoff.

New printable metamaterials that are both strong and stretchy could allow fabrication of bendable ceramics, glass, and metals.

These tough yet bendy materials could be made into tear-resistant textiles, flexible semiconductors, electronic chip packaging, and durable yet compliant scaffolds on which to grow cells for tissue repair.

An epic year for women’s sports

It was a banner year for the Engineers in 2024–’25, with four MIT women’s teams all clinching NCAA Division III national titles for the first time.

After winning their fourth straight NCAA East Regional Championship, the cross country team claimed their first national title in November with All-American performances from Christina Crow ’25 (pictured), Rujuta Sane ’26, and Kate Sanderson ’26. In March, the indoor track and field team scored 49 points—the most ever by an MIT women’s team at a national indoor meet—to win their first national title. A week later, the swimming and diving team won three individual and four relay titles and captured their first national title. Kate Augustyn ’25 ended her MIT career with four individual and four relay national championships and 27 All-America honors. Then in May, the outdoor track and field team claimed their first national championship, making MIT the first to sweep the Division III national titles in women’s cross country and indoor and outdoor track and field in the same year. 

NATALIE GREEN

D3 PHOTOGRAPHY

DAVID BEACH

Immune molecules may affect mood

Two new studies from MIT and Harvard Medical School add to a growing body of evidence that infection-fighting molecules called cytokines also influence the brain, leading to behavioral changes during illness. 

By mapping the locations in the brain of receptors for different forms of IL-17, the researchers found that the cytokine acts on the somatosensory cortex to promote sociable behavior and on the amygdala to elicit anxiety. These findings suggest that the immune and nervous systems are tightly interconnected, says Gloria Choi, an associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences and one of both studies’ senior authors.

“If you’re sick, there’s so many more things that are happening to your internal states, your mood, and your behavioral states, and that’s not simply you being fatigued physically. It has something to do with the brain,” she says.

In the cortex, the researchers found certain receptors in a population of neurons that, when overactivated, can lead to autism-like symptoms such as reduced sociability in mice. But the researchers determined that the neurons become less excitable when a specific form of IL-17 binds to the receptors, shedding possible light on why autism symptoms in children often abate when they have fevers. Choi hypothesizes that IL-17 may have evolved as a neuromodulator and was “hijacked” by the immune system only later. 

Meanwhile, the researchers also found two types of IL-17 receptors in a certain population of neurons in the amygdala, which plays an important role in processing emotions. When these receptors bind to two forms of IL-17, the neurons become more excitable, leading to an increase in anxiety.

Eventually, findings like these may help researchers develop new treatments for conditions such as autism and depression. 

Cancer-targeting nanoparticles are moving closer to human trials

Over the past decade, Institute Professor Paula Hammond ’84, PhD ’93, and her students have used a technique known as layer-by-layer assembly to create a variety of polymer-coated nanoparticles that can be loaded with cancer-fighting drugs. The particles, which could prevent many side effects of chemotherapy by targeting tumors directly, have proved effective in mouse studies. Now the researchers have come up with a technique that allows them to manufacture many more particles in much less time, moving them closer to human use.

“There’s a lot of promise with the nanoparticle systems we’ve been developing, and we’ve been really excited more recently with the successes that we’ve been seeing in animal models for our treatments for ovarian cancer in particular,” says Hammond, the senior author of a paper on the new technique along with Darrell Irvine, a professor at the Scripps Research Institute.

In the original production technique, layers with different properties can be laid down by alternately exposing a particle to positively and negatively charged polymers, with extensive purification to remove excess polymer after each application. Each layer can carry therapeutics as well as molecules that help the particles find and enter cancer cells. But the process is time-consuming and would be difficult to scale up. 

In the new work, the researchers used a microfluidic mixing device that allows them to sequentially add layers as the particles flow through a microchannel. For each layer, they can calculate exactly how much polymer is needed, which eliminates the slow and costly purification step and saves significantly on material costs.

GRETCHEN ERTL

This strategy also facilitates compliance with the FDA’s GMP (good manufacturing practice) requirements, which ensure that products meet safety standards and can be manufactured consistently. “There’s much less chance of any sort of operator mistake or mishaps,” says Ivan Pires, PhD ’24, a postdoc at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a visiting scientist at the Koch Institute, who is the paper’s lead author along with Ezra Gordon ’24. “We can create an innovation within the layer-by-layer nanoparticles and quickly produce it in a manner that we could go into clinical trials with.”

In minutes, the researchers can generate 15 milligrams of nanoparticles (enough for about 50 doses for certain cargos), which would have taken close to an hour with the original process. They say this means it would be realistic to produce more than enough for clinical trials and patient use.

To demonstrate the technique, the researchers created layered nanoparticles loaded with the immune molecule ­interleukin-­12; they have previously shown that such particles can slow growth of ovarian tumors in mice. Those manufactured using the new technique performed similarly to the originals and managed to bind to cancer tissue without entering the cancer cells. This lets them serve as markers that activate the immune system in the tumor, which can delay tumor growth and even lead to cures in mouse models of ovarian cancer. 

The researchers have filed for a patent and are working with MIT’s Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation in hopes of forming a company to commercialize the technology, which they say could also be applied to glioblastoma and other types of cancer. 

Crop signals

Bacteria can be engineered to sense a variety of molecules, such as pollutants or soil nutrients, but usually these signals must be detected microscopically. Now Christopher Voigt, head of MIT’s Department of Bio­logical Engineering, and colleagues have triggered bacterial cells to produce signals that can be read from as far as 90 meters away. Their work could lead to the development of sensors for agricultural and other applications, which could be monitored by drones or satellites.

The researchers engineered two different types of bacteria, one found in soil and one in water, so that when they encounter certain target chemicals, they produce hyperspectral reporters—molecules that absorb distinctive wavelengths of light across the visible and infrared spectra. These signatures can be detected with hyperspectral cameras, which determine how much of each color wavelength is present in any given pixel. Though the reporting molecules they developed were linked to genetic circuits that detect nearby bacteria, this approach could also be combined with sensors detecting radiation, soil nutrients, or arsenic and other contaminants. 

“The nice thing about this technology is that you can plug and play whichever sensor you want,” says Yonatan Chemla, an MIT postdoc who is a lead author of a paper on the work along with Itai Levin, PhD ’24. “There is no reason that any sensor would not be compatible with this technology.” The work is being commercialized through Fieldstone Bio.

Building better cities

Clara Brenner, MBA ’12, arrived in Cambridge on the lookout for a business partner. She wanted to start her own ­company—and never have to deal with a boss again. She would go it alone if she had to, but she hoped to find someone whose skills would complement her own.

It’s a common MBA tale. Many people attend business school with hopes of finding the one. Building that relationship is so important to a company’s foundation that it’s been described in romantic terms: Networking is akin to dating around, and some view settling down with a business partner as a marriage of sorts.

Brenner didn’t have to look for long. She met her match—Julie Lein, MBA ’12—soon after arriving at Sloan more than a decade ago. But their first encounter wasn’t exactly auspicious. In fact, their relationship began with an expletive.

Lein was sitting at a card table in a hallway in E52, glumly selling tickets to a fashion show featuring work-­appropriate clothes for women—at that time, the marquee event for Sloan’s Women in Management Club, and one that both Lein and Brenner thought was patently absurd. 

Lein had no interest in attending, but she wanted to support the club’s mission of boosting women in business. “She looked very miserable,” says Brenner. Lein asked if she wanted to buy a ticket, Brenner recalls, and “I think I said, ‘F*** no.’” 

“We both bonded over the fact that this was such a stupid idea,” says Lein. (The fashion show has since been retired, in part thanks to Lein and Brenner’s lobbying.)                             

Today, the two run the Urban Innovation Fund, a San Francisco–based venture capital firm that has raised $212 million since 2016 and invested in 64 startups addressing the most pressing problems facing cities. It has supported businesses like Electriphi, a provider of EV charging and fleet management software, which was acquired by one of the biggest names in the auto industry. And it funds companies focused on helping kids learn to code, providing virtual tutoring services, offering financing for affordable housing, and more. The companies in its portfolio have a total value of $5.3 billion, and at least eight have been acquired thus far.                             

Though Brenner and Lein hit it off quickly, they weren’t an obvious fit as business partners. Brenner arrived at Sloan after weathering an early career in commercial real estate just after the 2008 financial crash. She hoped to start her own company in that industry. Lein, on the other hand, had worked in political polling and consulting. She initially planned to get an advanced policy degree, until a mentor suggested an MBA. She hoped to start her own political polling firm after graduation. 

Ultimately, though, their instant kinship became more important than their subject matter expertise. Brenner, says Lein, is “methodical” and organized, while she “just goes and executes” without overthinking. Their relationship—in business, and still as close friends—is rooted in trust and a commitment to realizing the vision they’ve created together.

“We were able to see that … our skills and style were very complementary, and we just were able to do things better and faster together,” says Brenner. 

In 2012, the two teamed up to run Sloan’s second Women in Management Conference, which they had helped found the year before. It was then, they say, that they knew they would work together after graduation. 

Still, they had trouble agreeing on the type of venture that made the most sense. Their initial talks involved a tug-of-war over whose area of expertise would win—real estate or policy. 

But in the summer of 2011, they’d both happened to land internships at companies focused on challenges in cities—companies that would now be called “urban-tech startups,” says Brenner, though that term was not used at the time. The overlap was fortuitous: When they compared notes, they agreed that it made sense to investigate the potential for companies in that emerging space. Lyft was just getting its start, as was Airbnb. After exploring the idea further, the two concluded there was some “there” there.

“We felt like all these companies had a lot in common,” says Brenner. “They were solving very interesting community challenges in cities, but in a very scalable, nontraditional way.” They were also working in highly regulated areas that VC firms were often hesitant to touch, even though these companies were attracting significant attention. 

To Brenner and Lein, some of that attention was the wrong kind; companies like Uber were making what they saw as obvious missteps that were landing in the news. “No one was helping [these companies] with, like, ‘You should hire a lobbyist’ or ‘You should have a policy team,’” says Brenner.

The two saw an opportunity to fund businesses that could make a measurable positive impact on urban life—and to help them navigate regulatory and policy environments as they grew from startups to huge companies. 

Upon graduating in 2012, they launched Tumml, an accelerator program for such startups. The name was drawn from the Yiddish word tummler, often used by Brenner’s grandmother to describe someone who inspires others to action. 

At the time, Brenner says, “world-­positive investing” was “not cool at all” among funders because it was perceived as yielding lower returns, even though growing numbers of tech companies were touting their efforts to improve society. In another unusual move, the partners structured their startup accelerator as a nonprofit evergreen fund, allowing them to invest in companies continuously without setting a fixed end date. By the end of their third year, they were supporting 38 startups. 

Tumml found success by offering money, mentorship, and guidance, but the pair realized that relying solely on fickle philanthropic funding meant the model had a ceiling. To expand their work, they retired Tumml and launched the Urban Innovation Fund in 2016 with $24.5 million in initial investments. While Tumml had offered relatively small checks and support to companies at the earliest stages, UIF would allow Brenner and Lein to supercharge their funding and involvement. 

Their focus has remained on startups tackling urban problems in areas such as public health, education, and transportation. The types of companies they look for are those that drive economic vitality in cities, make urban areas more livable, or make cities more sustainable. As Tumml did, UIF provides not just funding but also consistent support in navigating regulatory challenges.

“It’s a very, very small subset of companies that can both work on a problem that, at least in our minds, really matters and be an enormous business.”

And, like Tumml, UIF has taken on industries or companies that other investors may see as risky. When it was raising its first fund, Lein remembers, they pitched a large institution on its vision, which includes investing in companies that work on climate and energy. The organization, burned by the money it lost when the first cleantech bubble burst, was extremely wary—it wasn’t interested in a fund that emphasized those areas. But Lein and Brenner pressed on. Today, climate tech remains one of the fund’s largest areas, accounting for more than a sixth of its portfolio of 64 companies (see “Urban innovation in action,” at right). In addition to Electriphi, they have invested in Public Grid, a company that gives households access to affordable clean energy, and Optiwatt, an app that helps EV drivers schedule charging at times of day when it is cheaper or cleaner.                             

“They took risks in areas, [including] mobility and transportation, where other people might not play because of policy and regulation risk. And they were willing to think about the public-private partnerships and what might be needed,” says Rachel Sheinbein, MBA ’04, SM ’04, a Bay Area–based angel investor who has worked with the Urban Innovation Fund on investments. “They weren’t afraid to take that on.”

Lein and Brenner have also invested in health companies like Cleancard, which is working to provide at-home testing for cancers, and startups creating workflow tools, like KarmaSuite, which has built software to help nonprofits track grants. 

Meanwhile, they have cast a wide net and built a portfolio rich in companies that happen to be led by entrepreneurs from underrepresented groups: Three-quarters of the companies in UIF’s current portfolio were founded by women or people of color, and nearly 60% include an immigrant on their founding team.  

When it comes to selecting companies, Brenner says, they make “very calculated decisions” based in part on regulatory factors that may affect profits. But they’re still looking for the huge returns that drive other investors. 

“It’s a very, very small subset of companies that can both work on a problem that, at least in our minds, really matters and be an enormous business,” she says. “Those are really the companies that we’re looking for.”

One of the most obvious examples of that winning combination is Electriphi. When Brenner and Lein invested in the company, in 2019, the Biden administration hadn’t mandated the electrification of federal auto fleets, and the Inflation Reduction Act, which included financial incentives for clean energy, hadn’t yet been drafted. And California had yet to announce its intention to completely phase out gas-powered cars. “It was not a hot space,” says Brenner.

But after meeting with Electriphi’s team, both Brenner and Lein felt there was something there. The partners tracked the startup for months, saw it achieving its goals, and ended up offering it the largest investment, by several orders of magnitude, that their fund had ever made. Less than two years later, Ford acquired it for an undisclosed sum. 

“When we were originally talking about Electriphi, a lot of people were like, ‘Eh, it’s going to take too long for fleets to transition, and we don’t want to make a bet at this time,’” Sheinbein recalls. But she says the partners at Urban Innovation Fund were willing to take on an investment that other people were “still a little bit hesitant” about. Sheinbein also invested in the startup. 

GABRIELA HASBUN

Impact investing has now taken root in the building where Lein and Brenner first met. What was once an often overlooked investing area, says Bill Aulet, SM ’94, managing director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, is now a core element of how Sloan teaches entrepreneurship.

Aulet sees Urban Innovation Fund’s social-enterprise investing strategy as very viable in the current market. “Will it outperform cryptocurrency? Not right now,” he says, but he adds that many people want to put their money toward companies with the potential to improve the world. 

Lein, who worked as Aulet’s teaching assistant at Sloan for a class now known as Entrepreneurship 101, helped establish the mold at Sloan for a social-impact entrepreneur—that is, someone who sees doing good as a critical objective, not just a marketing strategy.

“Entrepreneurs don’t just have to found startups,” says Aulet. “You can also be what we call an entrepreneurship amplifier,” which he defines as “someone who helps entrepreneurship thrive.”

When they make investments, VCs tend to prioritize such things as the need for a company’s products and the size of its potential market. Brenner and Lein say they pay the most attention to the team when deciding whether to make a bet: Do they work together well? Are they obsessive about accomplishing their goals? Those who have watched UIF grow say Brenner and Lein’s partnership fits that profile itself. 

“I can just tell when a team really respects each other and [each] sees the value in the other one’s brain,” says Sheinbein. For Lein and Brenner, she says, their “mutual respect and admiration for each other” is obvious. 

“We went to Sloan, we spent a bunch of money, but we found each other,” says Lein. 

“We couldn’t agree on a new urban-tech startup to start,” she adds, so instead, they built an ecosystem of them—all in the name of improving cities for the people who live there.