“I wanted to work on something that didn’t exist”

In 2017 Polina Anikeeva, PhD ’09, was invited to a conference in the Netherlands to give a talk about magnetic technologies that she and her team had developed at MIT and how they might be used for deep brain stimulation to treat Parkinson’s disease. After sitting through a long day of lectures, she was struck by one talk in particular, in which a researcher brought up the idea that Parkinson’s might be linked to pathogens in the digestive system. And suddenly Anikeeva, who had pioneered the development of flexible, multifunction brain probes, found herself thinking about how she might use these probes to study the gut.

While the idea of switching gears might give some researchers pause, Anikeeva thrives on venturing beyond her academic comfort zones. In fact, the path that led to her becoming the Matoula S. Salapatas Professor in Materials Science and Engineering—as well as a professor of brain and cognitive sciences, associate director of MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics, and an associate investigator at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research—was rarely a clear or obvious one. There is, however, one constant in everything she does: an indefatigable curiosity that pushes her toward the edge of risk—or, as she likes to call it, “the intellectual abyss.”

After the conference in the Netherlands, she soon dove into studying the human gut, a system that doesn’t simply move nutrients through the body but also has the capacity to interpret or send information. In fact, she has come to think of it as a largely uncharted “distributed nervous system.” In 2022, she became the director of the newly launched K. Lisa Yang Brain-Body Center at MIT, where she’s directing research into the neural pathways beyond the brain—work that could shed light on the processes implicated in aging and pain, the mechanisms behind acupuncture, and the ways digestive issues might be linked not just to Parkinson’s but to autism and other conditions.

Although she hadn’t heard of it before that conference in the Netherlands, the hypothesis that piqued Anikeeva’s interest in studying the brain-body connection was first posed by the German anatomist Heiko Braak in 2003. He and colleagues posited that a type of Parkinson’s disease has environmental origins: a pathogen that enters the body through the mouth or the nasal cavity and ends up in the digestive tract,where it triggers the formation of abnormal, possibly toxic clumps of protein within neurons. That condition, known as Lewy pathology, is the hallmark of the disease.

“The reason the environmental hypothesis came about is because those Lewy bodies actually have been found in the GI tract of patients with Parkinson’s,” Anikeeva explains. “But what’s more striking is that if you go back in the medical history, Parkinson’s patients—many of them, like 80% or so—have been diagnosed with GI dysfunction, most commonly constipation, years before they get a Parkinson’s diagnosis.”

Functions, behaviors, and diseases long thought to originate in the brain might be influenced by signals from other parts of the body.

Researchers have debated the hypothesis and have yet to make definite causal connections between the ingestion of pathogens and the progression of Parkinson’s disease. But Anikeeva was intrigued. 

“It’s quite controversial and it has seen some attempts at testing, but nothing conclusive,” she says. “I thought that my lab had a unique tool kit to start testing this hypothesis.”  

GRETCHEN ERTL

At the time, Anikeeva’s lab was focused on flexible polymer-fiber probes that can interface with the brain and spinal cord. Having developed these fibers, she and her team were testing them in mice, both to stimulate neurons and to record their signals so they could study the ways in which those signals underlie behavior. The lab had also been working on using magnetic nanomaterials to stimulate neurons so their activity could be regulated remotely—without needing to run fibers to a mouse’s brain at all.  

Braak’s hypothesis made Anikeeva wonder: Could similar multifunctional probes be used to explore the digestive system? Could she and her team engineer gut-­specific tools to study the neurons that make up what’s known as the enteric nervous system, which regulates sensing, moving, absorbing, and secreting—the tasks that the gastrointestinal tract must perform to digest food? And for that matter, could they study any of the body’s peripheral systems?

“I started thinking about interfacing not only with the central nervous system, but also with other organ systems in the body, and about how those organ systems contribute to brain function,” she explains.

Ultimately, this interface could help researchers understand the way the body communicates with the brain and vice versa, and to pinpoint where diseases, including Parkinson’s, originate.

“For many years neuroscience has essentially considered the brain in a vacuum. It was this beautiful thing floating, disconnected,” Anikeeva says. “Now we know that it’s not in a vacuum … The body talks back to the brain. It’s not a strictly downward information flow. Whatever we think—our personality, our emotions—may not only come from what we perceive as the conscious brain.” In other words, functions, behaviors, and neurodegenerative diseases long thought to originate in the brain—perhaps even the act of thinking itself—might be influenced by signals from other parts of the body. “Those are the signals that I’m very excited about studying,” she says. “And now we have the tools to do that.”

“It’s opened technological floodgates into these neuroscience questions,” she adds. “This is a new frontier.”

Anikeeva grew up in Saint Petersburg, Russia, the child of engineers, and showed brilliance from an early age. She was admitted to a selective science magnet school, but she briefly considered pursuing a career in art.

“I was about 15 years old when I was choosing between professional art and professional physics, and I didn’t want to be poor,” she says with a laugh. “Being good at watercolor doesn’t help with leaving Russia, which was my objective. I grew up in a very unstable political environment, a very unstable economic environment. Nobody becomes an artist if they can do something else that’s more practical.” She chose science and earned her undergraduate degree in biophysics at Saint Petersburg State Polytechnic. 

But Anikeeva says her artistic brain, along with the mind-clearing avocations of climbing and long-distance running, helps her with her work today: “I use that way of thinking, the imagination, to think conceptually about how a device might come together. The idea comes first as an image.”

After graduating, Anikeeva got an internship in physical chemistry with the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and worked on solar cells using quantum dots. In 2004, she arrived at MIT to begin her PhD in materials science and engineering.

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE RESEARCHERS

As a graduate student, Anikeeva helped develop quantum-dot ­LED display technology that’s now used by television manufacturers and sold in stores around the world. She has coauthored two papers on that research with her primary advisor, Vladimir Bulović, the Fariborz Maseeh (1990) Professor of Emerging Technology, associate dean for innovation at the School of Engineering, and director of MIT.nano, and seven with Bulović and Nobel Prize winner Moungi Bawendi, MIT’s Lester Wolfe Professor of Chemistry.

But after earning her PhD in 2009, Anikeeva says, she got bored—as she frequently does. “I wanted to work on something that didn’t exist,” she says.

That led her to seek out a postdoctoral fellowship in neuroscience at Stanford University in the lab of Karl Deisseroth, one of the inventors of optogenetics, which uses laser light to activate proteins in genetically modified brain cells. Optogenetic tools make it possible to trigger or inhibit neurons in test rodents, creating an on/off switch that lets researchers study how the neurons work. 

“I was really fortunate to be hired into that lab, despite the fact that my PhD, ultimately, was not in neuroscience but in optical electronics,” she says. “I saw all these animals running around with optical cables coming out of their heads, and it was amazing. I wanted to learn how to do that. That’s how I came to neuroscience.”

Realizing that the tools neuroscientists used to study complex biological phenomena in the brain were inadequate, she started to develop new ones. In Deisseroth’s lab, she found a way to improve upon the fiber-optic probes they were using. Her version incorporated multiple electrodes, allowing them to better capture neuronal signals. 

Probing the brain is challenging because it’s very soft—“like pudding,” as she puts it—and the tools researchers used then were rigid and potentially damaging. So when Anikeeva returned to MIT as an assistant professor, her lab collaborated with Yoel Fink, PhD ’00, a professor of materials science and engineering as well as electrical engineering and computer science and director of MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics, to create very thin, highly flexible fibers that can enter the brain and the spinal cord without doing any harm (see “A Better Way to Probe the Brain,” MIT News, May/June 2015). Unlike the bulky hardware that Deisseroth was using to deliver light for optogenetics, Anikeeva’sfibers are multifunctional. They’re made of an optical core surrounded by polycarbonate and lined with electrodes and microfluidic channels, all of which are heated and then stretched in production. “You pull, pull, pull and you get kilometers of fiber that are pretty tiny,” Anikeeva explains. “Ultimately it gets drawn down to about a hair-thin structure.”

Using these ultrathin fibers, researchers can record neuronal signals and send their own signals to neurons in the brain and spinal cord of genetically engineered mice to turn them on and off. The fibers offered a new way to investigate neural responses—and earned Anikeeva a spot on our 2015 list of 35 Innovators Under 35. They also proved to be a useful therapeutic tool for drug delivery using the fibers’ microfluidic channels.

As this work hummed along, Anikeeva heard about Braak’s hypothesis in 2017 and set out to find resources to investigate the gut-brain connection. “I promptly wrote an NIH grant, and I promptly got rejected,” she says. 

But the idea persisted.

Later that year, neural engineers studying brain interfaces at Duke invited Anikeeva to give a talk. As she had gotten in the habit of doing during her travels to other universities, she looked up researchers working on GI systems there. She found the gut-brain neuroscientist Diego Bohórquez.

While the brain is extraordinarily complex, from an engineering and research standpoint it’s much more convenient to study than the digestive tract.

“I told him that I’m really interested in the gut, and he told me that they were … studying nutrient absorption in the gut and how it affects brain function,” Anikeeva recalls. “They wanted to use optogenetics for that.”

But the glass fibers he’d been trying to use for optogenetics in the gut could do serious damage to the fragile GI system. So Anikeeva proposed a trade of sorts.

“I thought that we can easily solve Diego’s problems,” she says. “We can make devices that are highly flexible, basically in exchange for Diego teaching us everything about the gut and how to work in that really fascinating system.”

Bohórquez remembers their first meeting, the beginning of a fruitful collaboration, in some detail. “She said, ‘I see that you are doing some really interesting work in sensations and the gut. I’m sure that you’re probably trying to do something with behavior,’” he says. “And then she pulls out these fibers and said, ‘I have this flexible fiber. Do you think that you can do something with it?’”

She returned to MIT and, she says, began to “take this lab that is a rapidly moving aircraft carrier and start reorienting it from working on the brain to working on the gut.”

The move may have surprised colleagues, but Anikeeva refuses to do anything if it loses her interest—and while the brain is extraordinarily complex, from an engineering and research standpoint it’s much more convenient to study than the digestive tract. “The gut wall is about 300 microns or so,” Anikeeva says. “It’s like three to four hairs stuck together. And it’s in continuous motion and it’s full of stuff: bile, poop, all the things.” The challenges of studying it, in other words, are nothing short of daunting.

The nervous system in the gut, Anikeeva explains, can be thought of as two socks, one inside the other. The one on the outside is the myenteric plexus, which regulates peristalsis—the rhythmic contraction of muscles that enables food to move along the gastrointestinal tract, a process known as motility. The one on the inside is the submucosal plexus, which is closer to the mucosa (the mucus-coated inner lining) and facilitates sensing within the gut. But the roles of the plexuses are not fully understood. “That’s because we can’t just implant the gut full of hardware the same way we do in the brain,” Anikeeva says. “All the methods, like optogenetics and any kind of electrical physiology—all of that was pretty much impossible in the gut. These were almost intractable problems.”

Anikeeva’s work developing tools for the brain had been so successful and groundbreaking that it was difficult for her to find financial support for her pivot to other parts of the body. But then, she says, came “another fateful meeting.”

In 2018, she gave a presentation at a McGovern Institute board meeting, conveying her latest ideas about studying Parkinson’s disease and engineering tools to explore the GI system. Lisa Yang, a board member, mentioned that many people with autism also suffer from GI dysfunction—from motility disorders to food sensitivities. Yang was already deeply interested in autism, and she and her husband had just launched the McGovern Institute’s Hock E. Tan (’75, SM ’75) and K. Lisa Yang Center for Autism Research the year before. 

“She was interested in this gut-brain connection,” Anikeeva remembers. “I was brought into the Center for Autism Research for a small project, and that small project kind of nucleated my ability to do this research—to begin developing tools to study the gut-brain connection.”

As that effort got underway, a number of colleagues at MIT and elsewhere who were also interested in brain-body pathways were drawn to the new research.

STEPH STEVENS

“As our tools started to mature, I started meeting more people and it became clear to me that I’m not the only person interested in this area of inquiry at MIT,” she says. “The tools opened this frontier, and the Brain-Body Center bubbled up from that.” 

To launch into their work on the gut-brain connection, Anikeeva and her team had to completely rethink the fibers they had designed previously to study the brain. 

In brain probes, all the functional features sit at the tip of the fiber, and when that fiber is threaded into the skull, the light-emitting tip faces downward, allowing researchers a view of everything under it. That doesn’t work with the GI system. “It’s not how you want to interface with the gut,” Anikeeva says. “The gut is a lumenal organ—it’s a sock—and the nervous system is distributed in the wall.”

In other words, if the probe is looking downward, all it will see is matter passing through the gut. To research the GI tract, Anikeeva and her colleagues needed these features to sit laterally, along the length of the fiber. So with this fabrication challenge in mind, Anikeeva again approached Fink, a longtime mentor and collaborator—and a fellow TR35 veteran. 

Mice “would normally eat ferociously” when given access to food after fasting. “But if you stimulate those cells in the gut, they would feel full.”

Together they developed a way to distribute microelectronic components—LEDs for optogenetic stimulation, temperature sensors, and microfluidic channels that can deliver drugs, nutrients, and genetic material—along the fiber by essentially creating a series of pockets to contain them. Grad student Atharva Sahasrabudhe put in countless hours to make it happen and optimized the process with the help of technician Lee Maresco, Anikeeva says. Then, with Anantha P. Chandrakasan, dean of MIT’s School of Engineering, the Vannevar Bush Professor of EECS, and head of MIT’s Energy-Efficient Circuits and Systems Group, the team designed a wireless, battery-powered unit that could communicate with all those components.

The result was a fiber, about half a millimeter by one-third of a millimeter wide, made out of a rubbery material that can bend and conform to a mouse’s gut yet withstand its harsh environment. And all the electronic components housed within it can be controlled wirelessly via Bluetooth. 

“We had all the materials engineers, and then we collaborated with our wireless colleagues, and we made this device that could be implanted in the gut. And then, of course, similar principles can also be used in the brain,” Anikeeva explains. “We could do experiments both in the brain and the gut.”

GRETCHEN ERTL

In one of the first experiments with the new fibers, Anikeeva worked with Bohórquez and his team, who had determined that sensory cells in the GI tract, called neuropods, send signals to the brain that control sensations of satiety. Using mice whose cells are genetically engineered to respond to light, the MIT and Duke researchers used the specialized fibers to optically stimulate these cells in the gut.

“We could take mice that are hungry, that have been fasting for about 18 hours, and we could put them in a cage with access to food, which they would normally eat ferociously,” Anikeeva says. “But if you stimulate those cells in the gut, they would feel full even though they were hungry, and they would not eat, or not as much.”

This was a breakthrough. “We knew that the technology works,” she says, “and that we can control gut functions from the gut.”

Next Anikeeva’s team wanted to explore how these neural connections between the gut and the brain can influence a mouse’s perception of reward or pleasure. They put the new fiber into the area of the brain where reward perception is processed. It’s packed with neurons that release dopamine—the “happy hormone”—when activated.

Then they ran tests in which mice had a choice between two compartments in a cage; each time a mouse entered a particular one, the researchers stimulated its dopamine neurons, causing the mouse to prefer it. 

To see if they could replicate that reward-seeking behavior through the gut, the researchers used the gut-specific fibers’ microfluidic channels to infuse sucrose into the guts of the mice whenever they entered a particular compartment—and watched as dopamine neurons in the brain began firing rapidly in response. Those mice soon tended to prefer the sucrose-associated compartment. 

But Anikeeva’s group wondered if they could control the gut without any sucrose at all. In collaboration with Bohórquez and his team at Duke, the researchers omitted the sucrose infusion and simply stimulated the gut neurons when the mice entered a designated compartment. Once again, the mice learned to seek out that compartment.

“We didn’t touch the brain and we stimulated nerve endings in the gut, and the mice developed the exact same type of preference—they felt happy just when we stimulated the nerve endings in their small intestines using our technology,” Anikeeva says. “This, of course, was a technical demonstration that it is now possible to control the nervous system of the gut.”

The new tools will make it possible to study how different cells in the gut send information to the brain, and ultimately the researchers hope to understand the origins not only of digestive diseases, like obesity, but of autism and neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s.

Researchers at the Brain-Body Center are already exploring those connections.  “We’re particularly interested in the gut-brain connection in autism,” Anikeeva says. “And we’re also interested in more affective disorders, because there is a big genetic link, for instance, between anxiety and IBS [or irritable bowel syndrome].”

In the future, the technology also could lead to new therapies that can control gut function more precisely and effectively than drugs, including semaglutides like Ozempic, which have made headlines in the past year for weight control.

Now that Anikeeva has developed and tested the device in the GI system and solved a lot of technical challenges, other peripheral systems in the body could be next.

“The gut is innervated, but so is every organ in the body. Now we can start asking questions: What is the connection to the immune system? The connection to the respiratory system?” she says. “All of these problems are now becoming tractable. This is the beginning.”

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Probing the mind-body connection

Founded in 2022, the K. Lisa Yang Brain-Body Center at MIT is focusing on four major lines of research for its initial projects.

GUT-BRAIN:

Polina Anikeeva’s group is expanding a toolbox of new technologies and applying these tools to examine major neurobiological questions about gut-brain pathways and connections in the context of autism spectrum disorders, Parkinson’s disease, and affective disorders.

AGING:

CRISPR pioneer Feng Zhang, the James and Patricia Poitras Professor of Neuroscience at MIT and an investigator at the McGovern Institute, is leading a group in developing molecular tools for precision epigenomic editing and erasing accumulated “errors” of time, injury, or disease in various types of cells and tissues.

PAIN:

The lab of Fan Wang, an investigator at the McGovern Institute and professor of brain and cognitive sciences, is designing new tools and imaging methods to study autonomic responses, activity of the sympathetic and parasympathetic neurons, and interactions between the brain and the autonomic nervous system, including how pain influences these interactions.

ACUPUNCTURE:

Wang is also collaborating with Kelly Metcalf Pate’s group in MIT’s Division of Comparative Medicine, to advance techniques for documenting changes in brain and peripheral tissues induced by acupuncture in mouse models. If successful, these techniques could help make it possible to better understand the mechanisms involved in acupuncture—specifically, how the treatment stimulates the nervous system and restores function. 

Part of the goal of the Brain-Body Center, Wang says, is to dissect how the circuits of the central nervous system interact with the peripheral autonomic system to generate emotional responses to pain. She says her research has led her to a deeper understanding of the two responses to pain—sensory and emotional. The latter, a function requiring the autonomic nervous system, is what leads to a sense of suffering. If researchers can prevent the autonomic responses elicited by pain, she explains, then the same stimulus may produce “a sensation without pain.” The idea is to develop devices to manipulate autonomic responses in mice, and then ultimately develop devices that can help humans.  —Julie Pryor and Georgina Gustin

A walking antidote to political cynicism

Burhan Azeem ’19 had never been to a city council meeting before he showed up to give a public comment on an affordable-­housing bill his senior year. Walking around Cambridge, he saw a “young, dynamic, racially diverse city,” but when he stepped inside City Hall, most of the others who had arrived to present comments were retirees reflecting a much narrower—and older—demographic.

Less than a year later, Azeem set out to shift the balance in who gets to make decisions on behalf of the city by running for city council himself.

A materials science and engineering major, Azeem had long been civically engaged, volunteering for Ayanna Pressley’s campaign for the US Congress as a junior. But what really set him on the path to local politics was his curiosity about why living in Cambridge is so expensive. He’d experienced the problems that arise from a lack of access to affordable housing as a kid in New York, and he wanted to understand what was contributing to that problem in the city where he’d chosen to live as an adult.

He launched his campaign a month before graduation—encouraged by Marc McGovern, himself a council member and at the time the city’s mayor, whom he’d met while campaigning for Pressley. (In Cambridge, the council chooses the mayor from within its ranks.) Azeem lost by a hundred votes, but he outperformed a candidate who’d raised more than $40,000, while he himself had raised less than $7,000. That made him think it might be worth another try. So in 2021 he ran again, and he won by 200 votes. At age 24, he was the youngest Cambridge city councilor ever elected. 

He quickly set to work trying to make Cambridge a better city, passing bills focused on housing, transit, and climate initiatives. Those successes set him up not just to win reelection in November 2023, but to garner more votes than any other council member but the mayor. 

“We passed a lot of policy—way more than an average term,” he says. “What’s cool about city council is that even though we don’t have as big a scope as Congress or the state house, we have absolute power where we do have power. Over our roads and housing zoning policy, even the president cannot tell me what to do. I think that’s why I’ve had so much success: I’m very narrowly focused on the places where we can make a really big change.”

TOAN TRINH

If Azeem didn’t have an average first term, maybe it’s because there’s very little about him that’s average. In addition to serving on the city council, he’s also employed full-time at Tandem, a startup offering pop-up veterinary clinics, a pharmacy, and telehealth for pets that he helped get off the ground with former classmates from MIT, among others. As the company’s head of AI engineering, Azeem has led an effort to use AI to suggest medications and is working on developing tools that could potentially help vets with diagnoses. The founding team is the same one with which he helped build DayToDay Health, a startup that offers digital tools and live chat to support human patients before and after medical procedures. Having served as an EMT with MIT’s Emergency Medical Services as an undergrad, Azeem found working for DayToDay especially meaningful during the pandemic, since it gave him a way to serve his fellow citizens when everyone was in lockdown at home. DayToDay scaled from eight people to over 400 and was sold just before Azeem was elected to his first term.

“He’s like a Swiss Army knife. It doesn’t matter what the challenge is—he’s the person you want to keep with you.”

Prem Sharma ’18, CEO and cofounder, Tandem and DayToDay

As if that weren’t enough, Azeem is also one of the cofounders and a current board member and treasurer of Abundant Housing Massachusetts, a nonprofit seeking to address the state’s housing shortage and legacy of housing segregation. The organization, which started in 2020 as a group of volunteers meeting in an MIT classroom, now has six full-time employees and a million-dollar annual budget. In addition to pushing for laws aimed at increasing the housing supply, it also creates tools and resources to help grassroots groups take advantage of existing legislation like the MBTA Communities Act, a zoning reform bill meant to help Massachusetts add more than 280,000 homes near existing public transit.

“I tell him all the time, ‘I don’t know how you do it,’” says Prem Sharma ’18, CEO and cofounder of Tandem and DayToDay, who’s called Azeem a coworker and friend for years. Though Azeem has lots going on, Sharma insists that he “delivers results” at work and “his output is always quality … he’s one of our top people.” 

“He’s like a Swiss Army knife,” Sharma adds. “It doesn’t matter what the challenge is—he’s the person you want to keep with you.”

Policy priorities from personal experience

Azeem was born in Multan, Pakistan, and moved to Staten Island, New York, with his family in 2001, when he was four. His parents had immigrated after winning the visa lottery, in pursuit of financial options that might help them pay down medical debt that had arisen from his sister’s premature birth. Money was tight, so they moved in with family friends.

“There were 11 of us living in this three-bedroom. We were too many people to be legal, so we would hide out in closets whenever the landlord came over,” he recalls. “We were very nervous about being caught, which is a big reason I skipped pre-K and kindergarten.”

The family moved often from one place to another within Staten Island over the next decade. Though in some ways it was a tough place to grow up as a Pakistani immigrant kid, especially in the years after 9/11, Azeem considers himself “very lucky” in that he was naturally gifted enough at science and math to get into a science and technology high school. That paved the way for him to eventually attend MIT on a full scholarship.

His experience growing up “very poor,” as he describes it, has informed his policy priorities as an adult. When he considers what he wants to accomplish in office, he’s looking for things that can ease the burden of day-to-day life for citizens who face the kinds of challenges his family did. Those struggles aren’t all just distant memories, either—in the middle of his first term, as he was pushing to pass affordable-housing legislation, he ran into his own difficulties finding an apartment he could afford to rent. Even as someone with a decent salary who was willing to share with roommates, he often found himself competing with upwards of 50 applicants for a single unit in an apartment search process he describes as “horrific.”

“I will do whatever needs to be done. I just don’t want to waste my life.”

“The way that I think about politics is by asking: What are the most expensive things for people [that I can take on as a city councilor]?” he says. “Number one is housing. Number two is child care. And number three is transit. So how can we make those better?”

Azeem has prioritized bills that address all of the above, plus climate policy, another issue he cares deeply about. In his first term, he wrote the bill that made Cambridge the first city in New England to abolish the requirement that new construction include a certain number of parking spaces, which can make housing prohibitively expensive to build. He also played a key role in pushing through amendments to an existing law that pave the way for taller buildings to be built for affordable housing, among other initiatives.

TOAN TRINH

“I don’t know that he always gets a ton of the credit, but he’s probably been one of the most, if not the most, prominent councilors on a lot of the housing issues that have been worked on over the last term,” says Cambridge city manager Yi-An Huang, an appointed official who works with the city council.

Azeem worked to update Cambridge’s Building Energy Use Disclosure Ordinance (BEUDO) so that it requires large nonresidential buildings, like those on MIT and Harvard’s campuses, to reach net zero emissions by 2035. He also helped pass the “specialized stretch energy code,” which requires all new construction and major renovations to rely entirely on electricity or be wired to transition to such a system in the future, and advocated for the buildout of 25 miles of protected bike lanes in the city. But while he’s pushing for more affordable housing, he’s also working to block a proposal that would ban lab development in Cambridge. Although its proponents say the ban is meant to preserve space for housing, he says a lot of developments include both lab space and housing, so it’s not one or the other. And he sees the research that goes on in the city’s labs as essential to its economic vibrancy.

He credits his success in part to being “really good at the boring technical stuff,” as he puts it. “I write my own policy and I go through all the details of the bills,” he says, noting that not every local politician is willing or able to do that. “There’s lots of stuff that people just don’t enjoy doing, and if you can find a way to enjoy it, then there’s lots of work to be done.”

Huang says Azeem’s tendency to pore over every detail makes him stand out, as do his “listening very well” and his collaborative approach. “He’s impressively in the weeds on policy,” he says. “He does his homework and understands the issues and really grapples with the nuance.”

A lifetime to go

Though young people are notorious for skipping local elections, Azeem sees his experience as a testament to the remarkable power of hyperlocal politics—and to why his peers shouldn’t sit them out. 

“[The city council] has a roughly $1.25 billion budget. Divide that by nine [council members], and it’s over $100 million per person. Each of us gets elected on 2,000-ish votes. So it’s almost $60,000 per vote. That’s your impact,” he says. “I lost by 100 votes in my first election and won by 200 in my second. If you had taken the person who came in 10th, and replaced them with me, more than 100 million dollars would have gone in a different direction than they did. That’s crazy to think about: 200 citizens decided where $100 million went.”

In his second term, Azeem hopes to influence where another $100 million–plus will go. He already has ideas for bills that he thinks will increase public transit options, help Cambridge fight climate change while adapting to its impact, make it easier for citizens to afford basic necessities like housing, and make streets safer for cyclists, pedestrians, and all citizens. 

He acknowledges that public service is not always the easiest choice to make as a young person. Despite his remarkable work ethic and ambition, Azeem is still a twentysomething who wants to enjoy his life. Going out with his friends for a night of dancing can be a bit odd when it ends with people approaching him and asking, “Are you my city council member?” He even got recognized once when he was using a dating app.

From Sharma’s perspective, the best way to understand Azeem’s seemingly boundless drive is through the lens of “immigrant psychology,” which Sharma in many ways shares. “When I was starting this new company, he wanted to join,” he recalls, “and I was like, ‘How will you do all of this? Starting a new company is demanding. You cannot do both that [and be on city council]. He said, ‘I will do whatever needs to be done. I just don’t want to waste my life.’” 

With reelection in the bag, and with a fresh influx of funding at Tandem, Azeem is finding himself in a more stable position than he’s been in for a long time, which is affording him new space to think about the future. He’s grateful that he’s been able to both work in local politics and be part of two successful startups, but he knows that down the line he may have to choose one path or the other.

He hasn’t decided yet which will win out. But what he does know for sure is that he wants to leave a legacy he can be proud of—and he’ll be happy to let his work speak for itself.

“A lot of people feel like they need to be in the spotlight because they feel like they’re the ‘main character,’” he says. “But five to 10 years from now, when I’m looking back, I just want to see that the things I did are still around and having a positive impact.”

Raman to go

For a harried wastewater manager, a commercial farmer, a factory owner, or anyone who might want to analyze dozens of water samples, and fast, it sounds almost miraculous. Light beamed from a central laser zips along fiber-optic cables and hits one of dozens of probes waiting at the edge of a field, or at the mouth of a sewage outflow, or wherever it’s needed. In turn, these probes return nearly instant chemical analysis of the water and its contaminants—fertilizer concentration, pesticides, even microplastics. No need to walk around taking samples by hand, or wait days for results from a lab. 

This networked system of pen-size probes is the brainchild of Nili Persits, a final-year doctoral candidate in electrical engineering at MIT. Persits, who sports a collection of tattoos and a head of bouncy curls, seems to radiate energy, much like the powerful lasers she works with. She hopes that her work to develop a highly sensitive probe will help a technology known as Raman spectroscopy step beyond the rarefied realm of laboratory settings and out into the real world. These spectrometers—which use a blast of laser light to analyze an object’s chemical makeup—have proved their utility in fields ranging from medical research to art restoration, but they come with frustrating drawbacks. 

KEN RICHARDSON AND REBECCA RODRIGUEZ

In a cluttered room full of dangling cables and winking devices in MIT’s Building 26, it’s easy to see the problem. A line of brushed-aluminum boxes stretching eight or so feet across a table makes up the conventional Raman spectrometer. It costs at minimum $70,000—in some cases, more than twice that amount—and the vibration-damping table it sits on adds another $15,000 to the tab. Even now, after six years of practice, it takes Persits most of a day to set it up and calibrate it before she can begin to analyze anything. “It’s so bulky, so expensive, so limited,” she says. “You can’t take it anywhere.” 

Elsewhere in the lab, two other devices hint at the future of Raman spectroscopy. The first is a system about the size of a desk. Although this version is too big and too sensitive to be moved, it can support up to 100 probes connected to it by fiber-­optic cables, making it possible to analyze samples kilometers away. 

The typical Raman system is “so bulky, so expensive, so limited. You can’t take it anywhere.”

The second is a truly portable Raman device, a laser about the size and shape of a Wi-Fi router, with just one probe and a cell-phone-size photodetector (a device that converts photons into electrical signals) attached. While other portable Raman systems do exist, Persits says their resolution and sensitivity leave a lot to be desired. And this one delivers results on par with those of bigger and pricier versions, she says. Whereas the bigger device is intended for large-scale operations such as chemical manufacturing facilities or wastewater monitoring, this one is suited for smaller uses such as medical studies. 

Persits has spent the last several years perfecting these devices and their attached probes, designing them to be easy to use and more affordable than traditional Raman systems. This new technology, she says, “could be used for so many different applications that Raman wasn’t really a possibility for before.” 

A molecular photograph with a hefty price tag 

All Raman spectrometers, big or small, take advantage of a quirk in the way that light behaves. If you shine a red laser at a wall, you’ll see a red dot. Of the photons that bounce off the wall and hit your retina, nearly all of them remain red. But for a precious few photons—one in 100 million—something strange happens. The springlike molecular bonds of the materials in the wall jangle the photon, which absorbs or loses energy on the rebound. This changes its wavelength, thereby changing its color. The color change corresponds to whatever type of molecule the photon collided with, whether it’s the polymers in the wall’s latex paint or the pigments that create its hue. 

This phenomenon, called Raman scattering, is happening right now, all around you. But you can’t see this color-shifted photon confetti—it’s far too faint, so looking for it is like trying to see a distant star on a sunny day. 

A traditional Raman spectrometer separates out this faint signal by guiding it through an obstacle course of mirrors, lenses, and filters. After the light of a powerful, single-color laser is beamed at a sample, the scattered light is directed through a filter to remove the returning photons that retained their original hue. The color-­shifted photons then go through a diffraction grating—a series of prisms—that separates them by color before they hit a detector that measures their wavelength and intensity. This detector, Persits says, is essentially the same as a digital camera’s light sensor. 

KEN RICHARDSON AND REBECCA RODRIGUEZ

At the end of the spectroscopy process, a researcher is left with something akin to a photograph—not of an object’s appearance, but of its molecular makeup. This allows researchers to study the chemical components of DNA, detect contaminants in food, or figure out if an antique painting is authentic or a modern counterfeit, among many other uses. What’s more, Raman spectroscopy makes it possible to analyze samples without grinding them up, dissolving them, or dousing them in chemicals.  

“The problem with spectrometers is that they have this intrinsic trade-off,” Persits says. The more light that goes into the spectrometer itself—specifically, into the color-separating diffraction grating and the detector—the harder it is to separate photons by wavelength, lowering the resolution of the resulting chemical snapshot. And because Raman light is so weak, researchers like Persits need to gather as much of it as possible, particularly when they’re searching for chemicals that occur in minute concentrations. One way to do this is to make the detector much bigger—even room-size, in the case of astrophysics applications. This, however, makes the setup “exponentially more expensive,” she says. 

Raman spectroscopy on the go

In 2013, Persits had bigger things to worry about than errant photons and unwieldy spectrometers. She was living in Tel Aviv with her husband, Lev, and their one-year-old daughter. She’d been working in R&D at a government defense agency—an easy, predictable job she describes as “engineering death”—when a thyroid cancer diagnosis ground her life to a halt. 

As Persits recovered from two surgeries and radiation therapy, she had time to take stock of her life. She resolved to complete her stalled master’s degree and, once that was done, begin a PhD program. Her husband encouraged her to apply beyond Israel, to the best institutions in the United States. In 2017, when her MIT acceptance letter arrived, it was a shock to Persits, but not to her husband. “That man has patience,” she says with a laugh, recalling Lev’s unflagging support. “He believes in me more than me.”

The family moved to Massachusetts that fall, and soon after, Persits joined the research group of Rajeev Ram, a professor of electrical engineering who specializes in photonics and electronics. “I’m looking for people who are willing to take risks and work on a new area,” Ram says. He saw particular promise in Persits’s keen interest in research outside her sphere of expertise. He put her to work learning the ins and outs of Raman spectroscopy, beginning with a project to analyze the metabolic components of blood plasma. 

“The first couple of years were pretty stressful,” Persits says. In 2016, she and her husband had welcomed their second child, another girl, making the pressures of grad school even more acute. The night before her quantum mechanics exam, she recalls, she was awake until 3 a.m. with a vomiting child. On another occasion, a sprinkler in the lab malfunctioned, ruining the Raman spectrometer she’d inherited from a past student. 

“We can have real-time assessment of what’s going on. Are our plants happy?”

Persits persevered, and things started to settle into place. She began to build on the earlier work of Ram and optical engineer Amir Atabaki, a former postdoc in the Ram lab who is now a research fellow at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. Atabaki had figured out a fix for that fundamental Raman trade-off—the brighter the light, the lower the resolution of the chemical snapshot—by using a tunable laser that emits a range of different colors, instead of a fixed laser limited to a single hue. Persits compares the process to photographing a rainbow. A traditional Raman spectrometer is like a camera that takes a picture of all the rainbow’s colors simultaneously; the updated system, in contrast, takes snapshots of only one color at a time.

This tunable laser eliminates the need for the bulkiest, costliest parts of a Raman spectrometer—those that diffract light and collect it in a photon-gathering sensor. This makes it possible to use miniaturized and “very simple” silicon photodetectors, Persits says, which “cost nothing” compared with the standard detectors.  

KEN RICHARDSON AND REBECCA RODRIGUEZ

Persits’s key innovation was an exceptionally sensitive probe that’s the size of a large marker and is connected to the laser via a fiber-optic cable. These cables can be as long (even kilometers long) or short as needed. Armed with a tunable laser, simple photodetectors, and her robust, internet­-enabled probes, Persits was able to develop both her handheld Raman device and the larger, nonportable version. This second system is more expensive, with a vibration-damping table needed for its sensitive laser, but it can support dozens of different probes, in essence offering multiple Raman systems for the price of one. It also has a much broader spectral range, allowing it to distinguish a greater variety of chemicals. 

These probes open up a remarkable host of possibilities. Take biologics, a class of drugs generated by genetically engineered cells, which account for more than half of all modern cancer treatments. For drug manufacturers, it’s important to make sure these cells are happy, healthy, and producing the desired compounds. But the mere act of checking in on them—cracking open the bioreactors in which they grow to remove a sample—stresses them out and introduces the risk of contamination. Persits’s probes can be left in vessels to monitor how much the cells are eating and what chemicals they’re secreting, all without any disturbance. 

Persits is particularly excited about the technology’s potential to simplify water monitoring. First, though, she and her team had to make sure that water testing was even feasible. “A lot of techniques don’t work in water,” she says. Last summer, an experiment with hydroponic bok choy proved the technology’s mettle. The team could watch, day by day, as the plants sucked up circulating nitrate fertilizer until none remained in the water. “We can actually have real-time assessment of what’s going on,” Persits says. “Are our plants happy? Are they getting enough nutrients?” 

In the future, this may allow for precision dosing of fertilizers on large commercial farms, saving farmers money and reducing the hazardous runoff of nitrates into local waterways. The technology can also be adapted for a range of other watery uses, such as monitoring chemical leakage from factories and refineries or searching for microplastics and other pollutants in drinking water. 

With graduation at the end of May, Persits has set her sights on the next phase of her career. Last year, funding and support from the Activate fellowship helped her launch her own company, Dottir Labs. Dottir—which stands for “digital optical technology” and also alludes to her two daughters, now 12 and eight—aims to bring her Raman systems to market. “Dottir is really focusing on the larger-scale applications where there are few alternatives to this type of chemical sensing,” Persits says. 

Like the subject of one of her tattoos, which shows a lotus growing from desert ground, Persits’s research career has been defined by surprising transformation—photons that change color after a glancing blow, bulky machines that she shrank down and supplemented with a web of probes. These transformations could nudge the world in a new direction as well, leading to cleaner water, safer drugs, and a healthier environment for all of us downstream.

Taking on climate change, Rad Lab style

When I last wrote, the Institute had just announced MIT’s Climate Project. Now that it’s underway, I’d like to tell you a bit more about how we came to launch this ambitious new enterprise. 

In the fall of 2022, as soon as I accepted the president’s job at MIT, several of my oldest friends spontaneously called to say, in effect, “Can you please fix the climate?”

And once I arrived, I heard the same sentiment, framed in local terms: “Can you please help us organize ourselves to help fix the climate?” 

Everyone understood that MIT brought tremendous strength to that challenge: More than 20% of our faculty already do leading-edge climate work. And everyone understood that in a place defined by its decentralization, focusing our efforts in this way would require a fresh approach. This was my kind of challenge—creating the structures and incentives to help talented people do much more together than they could do alone, so we could direct that collective power to help deliver climate solutions to the world, in time.

My first step was to turn to Vice Provost Richard Lester, PhD ’80, a renowned nuclear engineer with a spectacular record of organizing big, important efforts at MIT—including the Climate Grand Challenges. Working with more than 100 faculty, over the past year Richard led us to define the hardest climate problems where MIT could make the most substantial difference—our six Climate Missions:

Each mission will be a problem-solving community, focused on the research, translation, outreach, and innovation it will take to get emerging ideas out of the lab and deployed at scale. We are unabashedly focused on outcomes, and the faculty leaders we are recruiting for each mission will help develop their respective roadmaps.

In facing this vast challenge, we’re consciously building the Climate Project in the spirit of MIT’s Rad Lab, an incredible feat of cooperative research which achieved scientific miracles, at record speed, with an extraordinary sense of purpose. With the leadership and ingenuity of the people of MIT, and our partners around the globe, we aim for the Climate Project at MIT to do the same. 

Sally Kornbluth
March 20, 2024

I went to COP28. Now the real work begins.

As an international student at MIT, I find that the privileges I’ve experienced in the States have made me even more conscious of my nation’s struggles. Brief visits home remind me that in Jamaica, I can’t always count on what I often take for granted in Massachusetts: water flowing through the faucet, timely public transportation, a safe neighborhood to live in. And after working hard in school for years so my family and I won’t have to struggle so much to meet our basic needs, I’ve recently been challenging myself to think about the needs of nations too. Being from a developing nation, I am very aware of the urgent need for sustainable development, which the UN defines as “development that meets the needs of the present, without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” 

Jamaica is among the countries least responsible for the acceleration of global warming, yet it is already facing some of its worst effects. Many Jamaicans can’t afford air-conditioning to cope with the extreme heat, and in my city, many of the trees that once provided shade are being cut down to build apartments, leaving people sweltering in a concrete jungle. Even if ambitious net-zero emissions targets are met, these severe consequences may continue to worsen for some years. 

COURTESY OF RUNAKO GENTLES

Beyond significantly lowering the standard of living for the poor and lower-middle classes, climate change is also threatening agriculture and tourism, two major sources of Jamaica’s GDP. Given that the country is already struggling with crime and widespread poverty, what’s going to happen as climate change continues causing droughts to worsen, beaches to shrink, and energy bills to rise?  

My MIT degree could definitely help me migrate to another country with a higher standard of living. But if young people like me leave these critical problems for someone else to solve, then what will the future look like for my family, friends, and neighbors? 

I grew up wanting to be a physician, but at MIT I became significantly more interested in the health of communities, the planet, and the economy. I decided to major in environmental engineering as a step toward addressing the social, economic, and environmental dimensions of issues like climate change, pollution, and water management. Then I took advantage of opportunities to attend conferences where I could gather with experts, industry leaders, and other young people eager to tackle these issues. Last fall I was elated to be selected as one of MIT’s six student delegates to COP28, the 28th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Some 84,000 attendees would converge in the United Arab Emirates over the course of two weeks in November and December for the world’s largest global climate conference. I would be among those attending the second half. 

We can’t wait for someone else to address the crises affecting not only our generation but also those to come.

After a 12-hour nonstop flight, I landed in the UAE around 7:30 p.m. local time and woke up early the next morning ready to get down to business. I was tired, but it was go time. Having attended the Global Youth Climate training program and MIT’s pre-COP28 sessions, I had spent a lot of time thinking about how to make the most of the conference. There were hundreds of plenary meetings, pavilions, side events, and booths to choose from. I combed through the COP schedule each day, noting events with themes relevant to developing nations and those in which I would likely find the leaders I wanted to connect with. 

I spent the week zipping from building to building in the enormous Dubai Exhibition Centre, listening to panels, presentations, and press conferences, as well as questioning speakers, observing negotiations, taking copious notes on my iPad, and networking. A highlight was getting to interview some of the senior Jamaican delegates. I shared with them my long-term plan to help the Caribbean adapt to climate change and develop sustainably. UnaMay Gordon, one of Jamaica’s leading climate-change specialists, gave me a memorable piece of advice: Be present, represent youth, and bring other young people along to engage with these issues. I was glad to receive the Jamaican delegates’ insights—and their contact information. I took full advantage of the opportunity to approach experts and introduce myself as an MIT undergraduate. It was my first COP, and I was a man on a mission. 

I left the UAE even more determined to support sustainable development, eager to bring about positive change in the MIT community during my final semester on campus—and feeling I had a lot of work to do before graduation. Progress toward becoming a more sustainable society cannot just rely on the relatively slow process of persuading governments to pass laws that enact COP agreements. Individual COP attendees play a pivotal role in supporting the sustainability transition by helping their communities take action. 

For my last semester, I decided I could have the most impact by helping implement a campus sustainability initiative, sharing my knowledge and experiences, and encouraging more undergraduates to get involved in sustainability efforts. I started by attending the Sustainability Connect 2024 meeting run by the MIT Office of Sustainability (MITOS), which led to my joining the MIT Food Waste Fighters and working to address the need for better separation of garbage in our campus dorms to help produce biofuels and reduce methane emissions from food waste in landfills. This gave me experience implementing on-the-ground strategy to take on a problem that is also very relevant to developing nations. 

JOHN WERNER

Meanwhile, I dove into organizing a student-led series of sustainability talks hosted by my department’s civil engineering society, Chi Epsilon, in collaboration with MITOS and the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium (MCSC). As an MCSC scholar, I worked on writing an opinion piece and a research article on my work analyzing earthquakes induced by carbon dioxide sequestration. I was also chosen to give a talk at TEDx MIT in April on how MIT can equip undergrads so they’re ready to seize opportunities to support the sustainability transition.

It was a lot to tackle on top of my classes, but I really wanted to do all I could in my last few months to galvanize the MIT community. And at the same time, I wanted to remind everyone of the importance of having empathy for those who are most vulnerable to—and least responsible for—the consequences of unsustainable behavior and of innovation that doesn’t factor in sustainability. 

I hope my work empowers more MIT undergraduates to step up and help tackle the many obstacles to achieving sustainable development while setting the stage for a more just society. We can’t wait for someone else to address the crises affecting not only our generation but also those to come. We need more minds and hands to work on ensuring that the places we live remain livable.

Runako Gentles ’24 plans to return to Jamaica upon graduation and will begin a master’s program in environmental engineering at Stanford in the fall.

What’s one memento you kept from your time at MIT?

Alumni leave MIT armed with knowledge and a whole lot of memories. During Tech Reunions in 2023, the MIT Alumni Association asked returning alums what else they had held onto since leaving campus. Here are just a few of their responses. 

Diane Marie McKnight ’75, SM ’78, PhD ’79, kept a bronze oarlock used for securing an oar on a boat. “I sand-casted it myself as part of my last class in mechanical engineering, and I learned how to use a lathe,” she said.

Amy (Schonsheck) Simpkins ’03 got her Institute keepsake early— a “cheap hoodie sweatshirt that was on special at the Coop the first week of my freshman year.” She still wears it almost every day.

Alan Paul Lehotsky ’73 said that in addition to his brass rat, he still has the Groucho glasses he wore to graduation. He admitted that the mustache has not held up very well.

Elliot Owen ’18, SM ’20, still has the precision-machined aluminum flexures that he used for his graduate research. “It is easy to create structures with a low stiffness in the direction of travel and high stiffness in all other directions,” he said. “I keep them on my bookshelf and show them off when I have people over. Most people are very surprised to see a solid piece of metal flex and move so easily and without friction.”

Walt Gibbons ’73, SM ’75, had the most popular response, provided by 22 of the 69 alums interviewed. He named his MIT brass rat.

Check out the recent MIT alumni video about physical objects grads have kept—and why they kept them—at bit.ly/MITMemento.

The silver-platter season

In the spring of 1974, I was new to both MIT and rugby football. As a Course 2 graduate student, I shared a basement office with several other students, including two players on the Tech rugby club who encouraged me to join them. Being both an Anglophile and a beer drinker, I was pretty easily talked into participating in this sport, with its British roots and after-match parties.

I played mainly on the squad’s B side that season but was among those asked to join the A side players in the annual tournament of the New England Rugby Football Union (NERFU), held at UMass Amherst. We needed extra men for the exhausting tournament schedule, in which players from both the A and B sides would be combined in various ways for different matches. Today NERFU has many more teams and several divisions of competition. But in 1974 it had just one division and held a single annual tournament.  

Institute records show rugby being played as early as 1882, making the Tech club the oldest in NERFU and one of the oldest in the nation. In 1974, it fielded two 15-man sides that practiced twice a week and played every Saturday during the spring and fall seasons. (There was no women’s side then.) Our school-supplied uniforms were classics of a bygone era—striped long-sleeve jerseys with collars and rubber buttons.

Rugby matches are grueling affairs involving continuous running and tackling and (for forwards like me, who make up half the team) pushing in organized scrums and ad hoc rucks. (In both scrums and rucks, players grab teammates’ shirts, binding together to push against the opposing team while attempting to gain possession of a ball on the ground with their feet.) In 1974, substitution was allowed only in cases of injury. Usually, one match per week was all a player would play. Making it to the tournament’s championship match would require playing four or five in two days, so some players would need to sit out some of the matches. 

MIT RUGBY FOOTBALL CLUB

Unlike now, in the 1970s there were few (if any) US high school or under-19 rugby teams, so American college teams were generally inexperienced. However, the 1974 MIT club had several international players who had been playing since grade school in England, Scotland, New Zealand, France, Argentina, or Japan. It also included grad students and an assistant professor (Ron Prinn, ScD ’71), which raised the average age of the team. MIT was thus not a typical college team, although we might have been mistaken for one. Undoubtedly some club teams in the 1974 tournament rested their best players when scheduled to play us. 

Our coach was Serge Gallant, a savvy, bearded Frenchman and former scrum half forced by concussions to retire from playing. Shin Yoshida ’76, our fly half, was our star player. Shin would kick high-arching punts downfield, accurately positioned to allow our team to immediately tackle opponents receiving them, or occasionally to recover the ball ourselves. Much like a fast-break offense from a basketball team with smaller players, this helped neutralize the height and power of bigger teams.    

The 1974 NERFU tournament, held on May 11 and 12, pitted 24 teams against each other in five rounds of single-elimination matches. The MIT club had some role in the seeding, so we managed to get a first-round bye and the prospect of an easy opponent in the second round. However, the remaining matches promised to be very difficult.

Our first match on Saturday was in the second round against Springfield, whom we beat handily, 13–0. Our last match of the day was against Charles River, a club that had beaten us the week before. We eked out a 16–12 victory in double overtime. 

Since we’d advanced to the semifinal round to be held on Sunday, arrangements were made for our team to pile into a few rooms of an Amherst motel for the night. But first most of us went out to a local restaurant. Despite our camaraderie and shared joy over having won our first two matches, our celebration was subdued, with none of the usual libations and rugby songs. We were pleasantly surprised when a former MIT rugby player turned businessman pick up our meal tab. 

At the restaurant we exchanged friendly banter with a well-known forward on the Providence city club, our next opponent. During the meal he playfully growled at us while chomping on a handful of spring onions. However, he did not play against us in the semifinals on Sunday. He was rested for the finals match he never got to play.

During the Providence match, their sideline people kept yelling “Get the foot,” meaning to target Yoshida and take him out of the game. But our “enforcers” took care of theirs, and he was not hurt. We went on to win, 6–3. 

I had played in the third- and fourth-round matches and was exhausted. So when our coach asked me to play in the finals, I begged off. My spot was taken by Mark Sneeringer ’76, PhD ’82, an amiable sophomore from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Because I wasn’t playing, I was picked to serve as a line judge.

For the championship match Tech faced off against the Beacon Hill club, which had won the year before. This was another tight and grueling game that went into double overtime. In the first overtime, our forwards were gasping for breath. Roger Simmonds, PhD ’78 (an Englishman and our most experienced player), lifted spirits and energy levels with an impromptu pep talk noting how well the forwards were playing and how worn out the Beacon Hill squad was.    

In the second overtime, team captain Paul Dwyer, SM ’73, finally scored the game-winning try. Because I was a line judge, my jumping for joy with a cloth in my hand caused temporary confusion. That was soon resolved when I explained that my action was not an officiating signal. We’d bested Beacon Hill, 7–3. 

Our reward for winning the championship was a silver platter. In those days, beer was always on hand after rugby matches, so while still on the pitch, we awkwardly drank beer from the platter as if it were a trophy cup. 

Having pulled off a major upset in the NERFU tournament, MIT was no longer a dark horse in the 1974 fall season, and other teams made sure to give us their best efforts. The loss of Yoshida, Dwyer, and other key players from the spring season weakened our fall A side, to which I was promoted. We began the fall season with two wins and two losses and then lost the rest of our matches, including one in which the Boston club thoroughly overpowered and crushed us. 

Nevertheless, Tech reigned as the NERFU champion until the next tournament. NERFU would eventually add a college division to its annual competition, so to this day, MIT’s rugby club remains the only college side ever to capture the top-tier NERFU title.

After retiring from a long career in mechanical and nuclear engineering, Dan Guzy, MechE ’75, has written four books and many articles on local history.

The energy transition’s effects on jobs

A county-by-county analysis by MIT researchers shows the places in the US that stand to see the biggest economic changes from the switch to cleaner energy because their job markets are most closely linked to fossil fuels. 

While many of those places have intensive drilling and mining operations, the researchers find, areas that rely on industries such as heavy manufacturing could also be among the most significantly affected—a reality that policies intended to support American workers during the energy transition may not be taking into account, given that some of these communities don’t qualify for federal assistance under the Inflation Reduction Act.

COURTESY OF THE RESEARCHERS

“The impact on jobs of the energy transition is not just going to be where oil and natural gas are drilled,” says Christopher Knittel, an economist at the MIT Sloan School of Management and coauthor of the paper. “It’s going to be all the way up and down the value chain of things we make in the US. That’s a more extensive, but still focused, problem.” 

Using several data sources measuring energy consumption by businesses, as well as detailed employment data from the US Census Bureau, Knittel and Kailin Graham, a master’s student in the Technology and Policy Program, calculated the “employment carbon footprint” of every county in the US.

“Our results are unique in that we cover close to the entire US economy and consider the impacts on places that produce fossil fuels but also on places that consume a lot of coal, oil, or natural gas for energy,” says Graham. “This approach gives us a much more complete picture of where communities might be affected and how support should be targeted.”

He adds, “It’s important that policymakers understand these economy-­wide employment impacts. Our aim in providing these data is to help policymakers incorporate these considerations into future policies.”

An invisibility cloak for would-be cancers

One of the immune system’s roles is to detect and kill cells that have acquired cancerous mutations. However, some early-stage cancer cells manage to survive. A new study on colon cancer from MIT and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute has identified one reason why: they turn on a gene called SOX17, which renders them essentially invisible to immune surveillance.

The researchers focused on precancerous growths called polyps that often form as mutations accumulate in the intestinal stem cells, whose job is to continually regenerate the lining of the intestines. Using a technique they had developed for growing mini colon tumors in a lab dish and then implanting them in mice, they engineered tumors to express mutations that are often found in human colon cancers.

In the mice, the researchers observed a dramatic increase in the tumors’ expression of SOX17. This gene encodes a transcription factor that is normally active only during embryonic development, when it helps control development of the intestines and the formation of blood vessels.

The experiments revealed that when SOX17 is turned on in cancer cells, it helps them create an immunosuppressive environment. Among its effects, SOX17 prevents cells from synthesizing the receptor that normally detects interferon gamma, one of the immune system’s primary weapons against cancer cells. Without those receptors, cancerous and precancerous cells can simply ignore messages from the immune system, which would normally direct them to die off.

The absence of this signaling also lets cancer cells minimize their production of molecules called MHC proteins, which display cancerous antigens to the immune system, and prevents them from producing molecules called chemokines, which normally recruit T cells that would help destroy the cancerous cells.

When the researchers generated colon tumor organoids with SOX17 knocked out, and implanted those into mice, their immune system was able to attack them much more effectively. This suggests that blocking the gene or the pathway that it activates could offer a new way to treat early-stage cancers before they grow into larger tumors.

“Just by turning off SOX17 in fairly complex tumors, we were able to essentially obliterate the ability of these tumor cells to persist,” says MIT research scientist Norihiro Goto, the lead author of a paper on the work.

But transcription factors such as the one encoded by the SOX17 gene are considered difficult to target using drugs, in part because of their structure. The researchers now plan to identify other proteins that this transcription factor interacts with, in hopes that it might be easier to block some of those interactions. They also plan to investigate what triggers SOX17 to turn on in precancerous cells.

“Activation of the SOX17 program in the earliest innings of colorectal cancer formation is a critical step that shields precancerous cells from the immune system,” says Ömer Yilmaz, an MIT associate professor of biology, a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, and one of the study’s senior authors. “If we can inhibit the SOX17 program, we might be better able to prevent colon cancer, particularly in patients that are prone to developing colon polyps.”

A linguistic warning sign for dementia

Older people with mild cognitive impairment, especially when characterized by episodic memory loss, are at increased risk for dementia due to Alzheimer’s disease. Now a study by researchers from MIT, Cornell, and Massachusetts General Hospital has identified a key deficit unrelated to memory that may help reveal the condition early—when any available treatments are likely to be most effective.

The issue has to do with a subtle aspect of language processing: people with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) struggle with certain ambiguous sentences in which pronouns could refer to people not referenced in the sentences themselves.For instance, in “The electrician fixed the light switch when he visited the tenant,” it is not clear without context whether “he” refers to the electrician or some other visitor. But in “He visited the tenant when the electrician repaired the light switch,” “he” and “the electrician” cannot be the same person. And in “The babysitter emptied the bottle and prepared the formula,” there is no reference to a person beyond the sentence.

The researchers found that people with aMCI performed significantly worse than others at producing sentences of the first type. “It’s not that aMCI individuals have lost the ability to process syntax or put complex sentences together, or lost words; it’s that they’re showing a deficit when the mind has to figure out whether to stay in the sentence or go outside it to figure out who we’re talking about,” explains coauthor Barbara Lust, a professor emerita at Cornell and a research affiliate at MIT. 

“While our aMCI participants have memory deficits, this does not explain their language deficits,” adds MIT linguistics scholar Suzanne Flynn, another coauthor. The findings could steer neuroscience studies on dementia toward brain regions that process language. “The more precise we can become about the neuronal locus of deterioration,” she says, “that’s going to make a big difference in terms of developing treatment.”