Author: mantulin

Probe expands understanding of oral cavity homeostasis

A new approach opens the door to a greater understanding of protein-microbe interactions.

Lillian Eden | Department of Biology
July 19, 2023

Your mouth is a crucial interface between the outside world and the inside of your body. Everything you breathe, chew, or drink interacts with your oral cavity — the proteins and the microbes, including microbes that can harm us. When things go awry, the result can range from the mild, like bad breath, to the serious, like tooth and gum decay, to more dire effects in the gut and other parts of the body.

Even though the oral microbiome plays a critical role as a front-line defense for human health and disease, we still know very little about the intricacies of host-microbe interactions in the complex physiological environment of the mouth; a better understanding of those interactions is key to developing treatments for human disease.

In a recent study published in PNAS, a team of scientists from MIT and elsewhere revealed that one of the most abundant proteins found in our saliva binds to the surface of select microbes found in the mouth. The findings shed light on how salivary proteins and mucus play a role in maintaining the oral cavity microbiome.

The collaboration involved members of the labs of Barbara Imperiali in the MIT Department of Biology and Laura Kiessling in the MIT Department of Chemistry, as well as the groups of Stefan Ruhl at the University at Buffalo School of Dental Medicine and Catherine Grimes at the University of Delaware.

The work is focused on an abundant oral cavity protein called zymogen granule protein 16 homolog B (ZG16B). Finding ZG16B’s interaction partners and gaining insight into its function were the overarching goals of the project. To accomplish this, Soumi Ghosh, a postdoc in the Imperiali lab, and colleagues engineered ZG16B to add reporter tags such as fluorophores. They called these modified proteins “microbial glycan analysis probes (mGAPs)” because they allowed them to identify ZG16B binding partners using complementary methods. They applied the probes to samples of healthy oral microbiomes to identify target microbes and binding partners.

The results excited them.

“ZG16B didn’t just bind to random bacteria. It was very focused on certain species, including a commensal bacteria called Streptococcus vestibularis,” says Ghosh, who is first author on the paper.

Commensal bacteria are found in a normal healthy microbiome and do not cause disease.

Using the mGAPs, the team showed that ZG16B binds to cell wall polysaccharides of the bacteria, which indicates that ZG16B is a lectin, a carbohydrate-binding protein. In general, lectins are responsible for cell-cell interactions, signaling pathways, and some innate immune responses against pathogens. “This is the first time that it has been proven experimentally that ZG16B acts as a lectin because it binds to the carbohydrates on the cell surface or cell wall of the bacteria,” Ghosh highlights.

ZG16B was also shown to recruit Mucin 7 (MUC7), a salivary glycoprotein in the oral cavity, and together the results suggest that ZG16B may help maintain a healthy balance in the oral microbiome by forming a complex with MUC7 and certain bacteria. The results indicate that ZG16B regulates the bacteria’s abundance by preventing overgrowth through agglutination when the bacteria exceed a certain level of growth.

“ZG16B, therefore, seems to function as a missing link in the system; it binds to different types of glycans — the microbial glycans and the mucin glycans — and ultimately, maintains a healthy balance in our oral cavity,” Ghosh says.

Further work with this probe and samples of oral microbiome from healthy and diseased subjects could also reveal the lectin’s importance for oral health and disease.

Current attention is focused on developing and applying additional mGAPs based on other human lectins, such as those found in serum, liver, and intestine to reveal their binding specificities and their roles in host-microbe interactions.

“The research carried out in this collaboration exemplifies the kind of synergy that made me excited to move to MIT five years ago,” says Kiessling. “I’ve been able to work with outstanding scientists who share my interest in the chemistry and the biology of carbohydrates.”

Kiessling and Imperiali, both senior authors of the paper, came up with the term for the probes they’re creating: “mGAPS to fill in the gaps” in our understanding of the role of lectins in the human microbiome, according to Ghosh.

“If we want to develop therapeutics against bacterial infection, we need a better understanding of host-microbe interactions,” Ghosh says. “The significance of our study is to prove that we can make very good probes for microbial glycans, find out their importance in the front-line defense of the immune system, and, ultimately, come up with a therapeutic approach to disease.”

This research was supported by the National Institute of Health.

Andrea Lo ’21 draws on ecological lessons for life, work, and education

With a minor in literature and environmental sustainability, the biology alumna considers perspectives from Charles Darwin to Annie Dillard.

Lillian Eden | Department of Biology
July 6, 2023

Growing up in Los Angeles about 10 minutes away from the Ballona Wetlands, Andrea Lo ’21 has long been interested in ecology. She witnessed, in real-time, the effects of urbanization and the impacts that development had on the wetlands.

“In hindsight, it really helped shape my need for a career — and a life — where I can help improve my community and the environment,” she says.

Lo, who majored in biology at MIT, says a recurring theme in her life has been the pursuit of balance, valuing both extracurricular and curricular activities. She always felt an equal pull toward STEM and the humanities, toward wet lab work and field work, and toward doing research and helping her community.

“One of the most important things I learned in 7.30[J] (Fundamentals of Ecology) was that there are always going to be trade-offs. That’s just the way of life,” she says. “The biology major at MIT is really flexible. I got a lot of room to explore what I was interested in and get a good balance overall, with humanities classes along with technical classes.”

Lo was drawn to MIT because of the focus on hands-on work — but many of the activities Lo was hoping to do, both extracurricular and curricular, were cut short because of the pandemic, including her lab-based Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) project.

Instead, she pursued a UROP with MIT Sea Grant, working on a project in partnership with Northeastern University and the Charles River Conservancy with funding support from the MIT Community Service fund as part of STEAM Saturday.

She was involved in creating Floating Wetland kits, an educational activity directed at students in grades 4 to 6 to help students understand ecological concepts,the challenges the Charles River faces due to urbanization, and how floating wetlands improve the ecosystem.

“Our hope was to educate future generations of local students in Cambridge in order for them to understand the ecology surrounding where they live,” she says.

In recent years, many bodies of water in Massachusetts have become unusable during the warmer months due to the process of eutrophication: stormwater runoff picks up everything — from fertilizer and silt to animal excrement — and deposits it at the lowest point, which is often a body of water. This leads to an excess of nutrients in the body of water and, when combined with warm temperatures, can lead to harmful algal blooms, making the water sludgy, bright green, and dangerously toxic.

The wetland kits Lo worked with were mini ecosystems, replicating a full-sized floating wetland. One such floating wetland can be seen from the Longfellow Bridge at one end of MIT’s campus — the Charles River floating wetland is a patch of grass attached to a buoy like a boat, which is often visited by birds and inhabited by much smaller critters that cannot be seen from the shore.

The Charles River floating wetland has a variety of flora, but the kits Lo helped present use only wheat grass because it is easy to grow and has long, dangling roots that could penetrate the watery medium below. A water tray beneath the grass — the Charles river of the mini ecosystem — contains spirulina powder for replicating algae growth and daphnia, which are small, planktonic crustaceans that help keep freshwater clean and usable.

“This work was really fulfilling, but it’s also really important, because environmental sustainability relies on future generations to carry on the work that past generations have been doing,” she says. “MIT’s motto is ‘mens et manus’ — education for practical application, and applying theoretical knowledge to what we do in our daily lives. I think this project really helped reinforce that.”

Since 2021, Lo has been working in Denmark in a position she learned about through the MIT-Denmark program.

She chose Denmark because of its reputation for environmental and sustainability issues and because she didn’t know much about it except for it being one of the happiest countries in the world, often thought of synonymously with the word “hygge,” which has no direct translation but encapsulates coziness and comfort from the small joys in life.

“At MIT, we have a very strong work-hard, play-hard culture. I think we can learn a lot from the work-life balance that Denmark has a reputation for,” she says. “I really wanted to take the opportunity in between graduation and whatever came after to explore beyond my bubble. For me, it was important to step back, out of my comfort zone, step into a different environment — and just live.”

Currently, her personal project is comparing the conditions of two lagoons on the island of Fyn in Denmark. Both are naturally occurring, but in different states of environmental health.

She’s been doing a mix of field work and lab work. She collects sediment and fauna samples using a steel corer, or “butter stick” in her lab’s slang. In the same way that one can use a metal tube-shaped tool to remove the core of an apple, she punches the steel corer into the ground, removing a plug of sample. She then sifts the sample through 1 millimeter mesh, preserves the filtered sample in formalin, and takes everything back to the lab.

Once there, she looks through the sample to find macrofauna — mollusks, barnacles, and polychaetes, a bristly-looking segmented worm, for example. Collected over time, sediment characteristics like organic matter content, sediment grain size, and the size and abundance of macrofauna, can reveal trends that can help determine the health of the ecosystem.

Lo doesn’t have any concrete results yet, but her data could help researchers project the recovery of a lagoon that was rehabilitated using a technique called managed realignment, where water is allowed to reclaim areas where it was once found. She says she’s glad she gets a mix of field work and lab work, even on Denmark’s stormiest days.

“Sometimes there are really cold days where it’s windy and I wish I was in the lab, but, at the same time, it’s nice to have a balance where I can be outside and really be hands-on with my work,” she says.

Reflecting her dual interests in the technical and the innovative, she will be back in the Greater Boston area in the fall, pursuing a master of science in innovation and management and an MS in civil and environmental engineering at the Tufts Gordon Institute.

“So much has happened and changed due to the pandemic that it’s easy to dwell on what could’ve been, but I tell myself to be optimistic and take the positive aspects that have come out of the circumstances,” Lo says. “My opportunities with the Sea Grant, MISTI, and Tufts definitely wouldn’t have happened if the pandemic hadn’t happened.”

Novo Nordisk to support MIT postdocs working at the intersection of AI and life sciences

MIT-Novo Nordisk Artificial Intelligence Postdoctoral Fellows Program will support up to 10 postdocs annually over five years.

Mary Beth Gallagher | School of Engineering
June 26, 2023

MIT’s School of Engineering and global health care company Novo Nordisk has announced the launch of a multi-year program to support postdoctoral fellows conducting research at the intersection of artificial intelligence and data science with life sciences. The MIT-Novo Nordisk Artificial Intelligence Postdoctoral Fellows Program will welcome its first cohort of up to 10 postdocs for a two-year term this fall. The program will provide up to $10 million for an annual cohort of up to 10 postdoc for two-year terms.

“The research being conducted at the intersection of AI and life sciences has the potential to transform health care as we know it,” says Anantha Chandrakasan, dean of the School of Engineering and Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “I am thrilled that the MIT-Novo Nordisk Program will support early-career researchers who work in this space.”

The launch of the MIT-Novo Nordisk Program coincides with the 100th anniversary celebration of Novo Nordisk. The company was founded in 1923 and treated its first patients with insulin, which had recently been discovered in March of that year.

“The use of AI in the health care industry presents a massive opportunity to improve the lives of people living with chronic diseases,” says Thomas Senderovitz, senior vice president for data science at Novo Nordisk. “Novo Nordisk is committed to the development of new, innovative solutions, and MIT hosts some of the most outstanding researchers in the field. We are therefore excited to support postdocs working on the cutting edge of AI and life sciences.”

The MIT-Novo Nordisk Program will support postdocs advancing the use of AI in life science and health. Postdocs will join an annual cohort that participates in frequent events and gatherings. The cohort will meet regularly to exchange ideas about their work and discuss ways to amplify their impact.

“We are excited to welcome postdocs working on AI, data science, health, and life sciences — research areas of strategic importance across MIT,” adds Chandrakasan.

A central focus of the program will be offering postdocs professional development and mentorship opportunities. Fellows will be invited to entrepreneurship-focused workshops that enable them to learn from company founders, venture capitalists, and other entrepreneurial leaders. Fellows will also have the opportunity to receive mentorship from experts in life sciences and data science.

“MIT is always exploring opportunities to innovate and enhance the postdoctoral experience,” adds MIT Provost Cynthia Barnhart. “The MIT-Novo Nordisk Program has been thoughtfully designed to introduce fellows to a wealth of experiences, skill sets, and perspectives that support their professional growth while prioritizing a sense of community with their cohort.”

Angela Belcher, head of the Department of Biological Engineering, the James Mason Crafts Professor of Biological Engineering and Materials Science, and member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, and Asu Ozdaglar, deputy dean of academics for the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, will serve as co-faculty leads for the program.

The new program complements a separate postdoctoral fellowship program at MIT supported by the Novo Nordisk Foundation that focuses on enabling interdisciplinary research.

Studying phages far from home

Biology graduate student Tong Zhang has spent the last two years learning the intricacies of how bacteria protect themselves.

Lillian Eden | Department of Biology
June 12, 2023

For the past two and a half years, graduate student Tong Zhang has been figuring out how bacteria protect themselves against phages — the viruses that infect them. All the while, doing so as a student far from her hometown of Beijing, China.

Phages and bacteria are in a constant arms race, which those in the field call the Red Queen Conflict: Alice in Wonderland running to stay in place, the queen making chase. Both the infector and the infected are constantly forced to adapt — the host and the parasite persistently co-evolving.

Perhaps the best-known anti-phage defense systems are called restriction modification systems, and much of the influential work on those systems was done by Salvador Luria, the longtime MIT professor and founding director of what is now called the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. Those anti-phage defense systems can distinguish self DNA from foreign DNA; they are always active, in surveillance mode, ignoring the host DNA but on the hunt for foreign DNA to slice up to protect the host.

Other anti-phage systems, however, require activation. Although researchers have characterized systems that protect bacteria from phage, many questions remain about how those systems become activated during infection.

Unlocking phage science

In an open-access paper published last year, Zhang, along with collaborators, found that during infection, the capsid protein that coats the outside of the phage directly triggers activation of a toxin-antitoxin system called CapRel, where the N-terminus of the protein is the toxin and the C-terminus is the antitoxin; the C-terminus works as both infection sensor and inhibitor of the toxic N-terminus. The capsid protein of some phages infecting Escherichia coli, the bacteria studied for the paper, will bind to the C-terminal domain, which triggers activation of the toxic N-terminus defense system to restrict infection by blocking phage replication.

“The capsid is essential for the phage and is the most abundant thing in the phage.” Zhang says. “The bacteria are sensing something that the phage cannot just get rid of and still be happy, so this really limits the possibility that the phage can overcome this defense system.”

Before Tong’s paper, it was unclear that phage proteins could directly activate this defense system.

Although the details and molecules are different for different immune systems, the concept of sensing foreign invaders and responding to infection is conserved across all domains of life.

“It’s a testament to how hard she works, how smart she is, and how dedicated she is, that this project resulted in a paper in just two years — and started during a pandemic,” Laub says.

From Beijing to MIT

Zhang has thought biology was “cool” since long before she arrived at MIT. She hails from Beijing and was an undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley, where her mentor gave her the perfect mix of guidance and independence.

“I think that experience made me realize that trying to figure out a problem is like solving a puzzle,” she says. “What I’m interested in is understanding mechanisms, the details of how different systems work. In my current research, there are a lot of open questions like that, which is really exciting.”

Laub says Zhang was the driving force behind the project, but collaborations also helped move the project along.

Although the pandemic posed a lot of challenges for research, it also changed the scales of distance: certain things work well in a virtual format. Laub was able to participate in a thesis defense abroad from the comfort of his desk in Cambridge, for example, and Zhang’s project came about in part because Laub served as an outside examiner for a lab in Sweden that had been studying CapRel.

But some things just don’t work on Zoom — like going home.

“There have been some unique challenges for Tong — and for all of our international students. They’re a long way from home, a long way from family,” Laub says. “The courage and the tenacity that it takes to not only do this work but to thrive and to succeed the way she has is remarkable.”

Zhang, like many international students pursuing education in the United States, has not been home in more than three years; in contrast, as an undergraduate, she went home for extended periods at least twice a year.

“I think that’s the most challenging part,” she says of her time at MIT.

She arrived in the United States to attend UC Berkeley having never visited the campus before. Zhang, used to sitting in the same classroom with the same group of people all day, was surprised to find that not only did she have the flexibility to pick out her course schedule, she also had to go to different places to attend classes, each with their own group of people.

“I’m really glad I went to UC Berkeley. There were a ton of opportunities and the science there was amazing. Obviously there were difficulties navigating a huge university and overcoming language barriers, but I think that also trained me to be more proactive in finding resources, finding help, looking for opportunities, and working to get them,” she says.

Laub says she’s just the type of student that MIT’s graduate programs are a good fit for.

“Our graduate program attracts people like Tong who are super rigorous scientists that really want to push that deep mechanistic, incisive understanding of things.”

Zhang is currently hard at work on her next project with “cool data” already in hand, Laub says.

Inaugural symposium draws diverse science, underrepresented voices to MIT

Catalyst Symposium is part of an effort to bring outstanding postdocs from underrepresented backgrounds in science to engage with MIT community members.

Lillian Eden | Department of Biology
June 9, 2023

The MIT biology community recently welcomed eight postdocs — Catalyst Fellows — to campus as part of the inaugural Catalyst Symposium.

Catalysts speed up reactions, and the symposium aims to accelerate progress in inclusive diversity — not just at MIT, but at top research institutions across the country, according to Professor Amy Keating, head of the Department of Biology.

“To make new discoveries and expand our understanding of life, we seek colleagues and trainees who are curious, persistent, creative, ingenious, insightful, determined, collaborative, generous, and ambitious,” Keating says. “To find these exceptional people, we have to look broadly. We have to look further than we have in the past.”

The symposium is part of an effort to expose outstanding candidates from backgrounds traditionally underrepresented in academic research to the biology department. The three-day symposium included research talks by the Catalyst Fellows, one-on-one meetings with faculty members, panel discussions on the faculty search process and the experiences of junior faculty in the department, and social events. Each Catalyst Fellow was paired with a faculty mentor.

The research talks ranged from molecular to behavioral: Krishna Mudumbi from Yale School of Medicine presented “Probing the kinetics of EGFR signaling: Why timing is important;” Coral Yishan Zhou from the University of California at Berkeley presented “Mechanisms of mitotic chromosome scaling in Xenopus;” Andre Toussaint from Columbia University presented “Neurobiology of addiction and tactile sensation;” Sofia Quinodoz from Princeton University presented “Probing nuclear organization and functions of condensates at genome-wide scale;” Junior West from Johns Hopkins School of Medicine presented “Claudin 7 restricts cancer invasion and metastasis by suppressing smooth muscle actin networks;” Shan Meltzer from Harvard Medical School presented “Molecular and Cellular Mechanisms of Touch Circuit Formation;” José Reyes from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center presented “Catching p53 in the act of tumor suppression;” and Begüm Aydin from The Rockefeller University presented “Cellular Plasticity in the Enteric Nervous System.”

Iain Cheeseman, associate department head, Herman and Margaret Sokol Professor of Biology, and core member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, says what stood out about the event was the “fantastic celebration of amazing science.”

“I loved the presentations as well as the beautiful range of different science approaches, research questions, and ideas,” he says. “These talks focused on research areas that are not currently represented in our department, so it was great to have this exposure to these new ways of thinking and to hear from these future leaders.”

Cheeseman was also a faculty mentor for Catalyst Fellow Yishan Zhou. Each Catalyst Fellow was paired with a faculty member based on shared scientific interests and matched with those who could provide support and feedback on the fellow’s academic journeys.

Fellows were selected based on nominations from current faculty and their scientific match within the department. They began their time at MIT connecting with their faculty mentors over dinner and then gave presentations about their research the following day. Lively Q&A sessions followed each talk, which formed the basis for further conversations and potential collaborations. The department also organized panels of junior and senior faculty. The fellows heard from junior faculty who recently experienced the job search process, and from senior faculty who were involved in deciding which candidates would be invited for interviews. The aim of both panels was to provide the fellows insights that would help them succeed in their own job searches.

“The Catalyst Symposium has been a great opportunity to bring incredibly talented postdocs from across the country to share their research with our community. Our long-term goal is to promote and support scientists from underrepresented groups in their transition to faculty positions — many of the connections and collaborations that emerge from these three days will hopefully help us realize this goal,” says associate professor of biology and core member of the Whitehead Institute Sebastian Lourido. Lourido was on the organizing committee for the event.

The event also provided an opportunity for current graduate students to interact with the Catalyst Fellows; some were curious about what factors went into the fellows’ selection of a postdoctoral position.

West says that during the course of a PhD, graduate students develop three things: a scientific question or questions; a specific system to address those questions; and specific methodology.

“The advice that I was given was that when you transition from a PhD to a postdoc, you should consider keeping two of those things and changing one,” West says. “It’s very important to start off with strong footing, but changing one thing also gives you the opportunity to grow as a scientist and extend your skill set.”

In his postdoc, West has been studying tumor metastasis and is hoping to dissect the signaling network of a gene whose loss is correlated with aggressive forms of breast cancer. West says that it’s important not to get so caught up in the endgame — the far-off paper or grant proposal — that one stops appreciating the triumph of everyday discoveries.

Quinodoz noted the importance of networking during graduate school, including at scientific conferences. Attending a conference helped her secure her own postdoc position: her current principal investigator heard her give a talk at a conference and invited her for an interview.

The 2022 Catalyst Symposium was planned and coordinated by diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) officer Hallie Dowling-Huppert; the DEI Faculty Committee, including organizing committee members Lourido, Jacqueline Lees, and Michael Laub; headquarters staff in the Department of Biology; Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research Director Matthew Vander Heiden; and Keating.

In future years, Dowling-Huppert says they will try fostering more of a cohort environment among the fellows, and also give the fellows more time to interact with current postdocs at MIT and others in the department, because building those relationships early in their careers will support them in the short and long terms.

Yadira Soto-Feliciano, an assistant professor of biology and intramural faculty at the Koch Institute who was paired with Reyes, says that building in some time for the fellows to explore MIT and the greater Boston area would be a welcome addition next year since some of the fellows were visiting the city for the first time. She says she’s planning to stay in contact with Reyes in the future.

“I think the Catalyst Symposium was a fantastic platform for these postdoctoral scholars to experience MIT in a more intimate fashion,” she says. “I’m certain that this experience will be beneficial in their short- and long-term success, and I would not be surprised if collaborations arose from these interactions.”

Exploring the links between diet and cancer

Omer Yilmaz’s work on how diet influences intestinal stem cells could lead to new ways to treat or prevent gastrointestinal cancers.

Anne Trafton | MIT News Office
May 25, 2023

Every three to five days, all of the cells lining the human intestine are replaced. That constant replenishment of cells helps the intestinal lining withstand the damage caused by food passing through the digestive tract.

This rapid turnover of cells relies on intestinal stem cells, which give rise to all of the other types of cells found in the intestine. Recent research has shown that those stem cells are heavily influenced by diet, which can help keep them healthy or stimulate them to become cancerous.

“Low-calorie diets such as fasting and caloric restriction can have antiaging effects and antitumor effects, and we want to understand why that is. On the other hand, diets that lead to obesity can promote diseases of aging, such as cancer,” says Omer Yilmaz, the Eisen and Chang Career Development Associate Professor of Biology at MIT.

For the past decade, Yilmaz has been studying how different diets and environmental conditions affect intestinal stem cells, and how those factors can increase the risk of cancer and other diseases. This work could help researchers develop new ways to improve gastrointestinal health, either through dietary interventions or drugs that mimic the beneficial effects of certain diets, he says.

“Our findings have raised the possibility that fasting interventions, or small molecules that mimic the effects of fasting, might have a role in improving intestinal regeneration,” says Yilmaz, who is also a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.

A clinical approach

Yilmaz’s interest in disease and medicine arose at an early age. His father practiced internal medicine, and Yilmaz spent a great deal of time at his father’s office after school, or tagging along at the hospital where his father saw patients.

“I was very interested in medicines and how medicines were used to treat diseases,” Yilmaz recalls. “He’d ask me questions, and many times I wouldn’t know the answer, but he would encourage me to figure out the answers to his questions. That really stimulated my interest in biology and in wanting to become a doctor.”

Knowing that he wanted to go into medicine, Yilmaz applied and was accepted to an eight-year, combined bachelor’s and MD program at the University of Michigan. As an undergraduate, this gave him the freedom to explore areas of interest without worrying about applying to medical school. While majoring in biochemistry and physics, he did undergraduate research in the field of protein folding.

During his first year of medical school, Yilmaz realized that he missed doing research, so he decided to apply to the MD/PhD program at the University of Michigan. For his PhD research, he studied blood-forming stem cells and identified new markers that allowed such cells to be more easily isolated from the bone marrow.

“This was important because there’s a lot of interest in understanding what makes a stem cell a stem cell, and how much of it is an internal program versus signals from the microenvironment,” Yilmaz says.

After finishing his PhD and MD, he thought about going straight into research and skipping a medical residency, but ended up doing a residency in pathology at Massachusetts General Hospital. During that time, he decided to switch his research focus from blood-forming stem cells to stem cells found in the gastrointestinal tract.

“The GI tract seemed very interesting because in contrast to the bone marrow, we knew very little about the identity of GI stem cells,” Yilmaz says. “I knew that once GI stem cells were identified, there’d be a lot of interesting questions about how they respond to diet and how they respond to other environmental stimuli.”

Dietary questions

To delve into those questions, Yilmaz did postdoctoral research at the Whitehead Institute, where he began investigating the connections between stem cells, metabolism, diet, and cancer.

Because intestinal stem cells are so long-lived, they are more likely to accumulate genetic mutations that make them susceptible to becoming cancerous. At the Whitehead Institute, Yilmaz began studying how different diets might influence this vulnerability to cancer, a topic that he carried into his lab at MIT when he joined the faculty in 2014.

One question his lab has been exploring is why low-calorie diets often have protective effects, including a boost in longevity — a phenomenon that has been seen in many studies in animals and humans.

In a 2018 study, his lab found that a 24-hour fast dramatically improves stem cells’ ability to regenerate. This effect was seen in both young and aged mice, suggesting that even in old age, fasting or drugs that mimic the effects of fasting could have a beneficial effect.

On the flip side, Yilmaz is also interested in why a high-fat diet appears to promote the development of cancer, especially colorectal cancer. In a 2016 study, he found that when mice consume a high-fat diet, it triggers a significant increase in the number of intestinal stem cells. Also, some non-stem-cell populations begin to resemble stem cells in their behavior. “The upshot of these changes is that both stem cells and non-stem-cells can give rise to tumors in a high-fat diet state,” Yilmaz says.

To help with these studies, Yilmaz’s lab has developed a way to use mouse or human intestinal stem cells to generate miniature intestines or colons in cell culture. These “organoids” can then be exposed to different nutrients in a very controlled setting, allowing researchers to analyze how different diets affect the system.

Recently, his lab adapted the system to allow them to expand their studies to include the role of immune cells, fibroblasts, and other supportive cells found in the microenvironment of stem cells. “It would be remiss of us to focus on just one cell type,” Yilmaz says. “We’re looking at how these different dietary interventions impact the entire stem cell neighborhood.”

While Yilmaz spends most of his time running his lab at MIT, he also devotes six to eight weeks per year to his work at MGH, where he is an associate pathologist focusing on gastrointestinal pathology.

“I enjoy my clinical work, and it always reminds me about the importance of the research we do,” he says. “Seeing colon cancer and other GI cancers under the microscope, and seeing their complexity, reminds me of the importance of our mission to figure out how we can prevent these cancers from forming.”

MIT community members who work to eradicate sexual violence recognized at 2023 Change-Maker Awards

Violence Prevention and Response and the Institute Discrimination and Harassment Response Office celebrate students and employees for their efforts in combating sexual misconduct.

Vera Grbic | Office of the Chancellor
May 24, 2023

On April 24, MIT celebrated outstanding students and employees at the annual Change-Maker Awards for their diligent work to eradicate sexual misconduct and support survivors. These architects of positive change exemplify one of MIT’s core values: striving to make our community a more humane and welcoming place where all can thrive.

Hosted by MIT Violence Prevention and Response (VPR) and the Institute Discrimination and Harassment Response Office (IDHR), the awards are held each April to coincide with Sexual Assault Awareness Month. The awardees were recognized at a ceremony among invited senior leaders and the faculty, staff, and students involved in the Institute’s sexual misconduct prevention and response work. The awards were held in person for the first time since 2019, making this year’s celebration with fellow community members a very special event.

Chancellor Melissa Nobles opened the event by noting that, “Tonight’s honorees — individual students and staff members, a student group, and an entire office — are all amazing leaders and advocates. Day-in and day-out, they are making enduring contributions so that MIT is a more safe, supportive, respectful, and welcoming community for all.”

Nominated by peers and colleagues from across MIT, this year’s Change-Makers were selected for their multifaceted contributions, creative approaches, and breadth and depth of impact. Honors went to an undergraduate student; a graduate student; a student group; an employee group; and a PLEASURE Peer Educator of the Year. For the first time in Change-Maker Awards history, Provost Cynthia Barnhart recognized a longtime MIT employee and Change-Maker with a special recognition award.

The following students and employees are MIT’s 2023 Change-Makers:

  • Outstanding Undergraduate Student: Ana Velarde, a third-year undergraduate student in biology and women’s and gender studies, is an MIT Change-Maker who goes out of her way to volunteer her time, lifts up fellow community members doing this important work, and regularly facilitates workshops that challenge harmful cultural norms around sexual violence and harassment. Velarde serves on PLEASURE’s Executive Committee and has led over 30 hours of peer-to-peer trainings. She co-chaired PLEASURE’s biggest event of the year — PLEASURE Week, a week-long series of educational events that reach hundreds of students — to support the student group’s mission of ending sexual violence and promoting healthy relationships. Velarde’s collaboration with MIT faculty also led to a Queer Faculty and Staff Panel.
  • Outstanding Graduate Student: Jules Drean, a fifth-year PhD student in electrical engineering and computer science and Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory affiliate, is this year’s graduate student Change-Maker. Drean advocates for survivors of sexual violence by educating peers about reporting options and supportive measures. He is also a member of the MIT student group Student Advocates for Survivors (SAS). Through his work with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science’s Thrive — a student group that supports all forms of diversity — he curated various initiatives, from a discussion group about a TV show that portrays violence to a self-care class. In all these endeavors, Drean’s thoughtful presence and unhurried compassion bring other graduate students along with him in this critical work.
  • Outstanding Employee Group: The Office of Graduate Education (OGE) Graduate Support Staff were honored for helping graduate students navigate the aftermath of harassment or assault. They represent graduate students’ concerns on numerous committees and are helping create an online training module about navigating power dynamics. They have also taken on the day-to-day work of managing the Guaranteed Transitional Support Program, advancing funding for graduate students seeking a new lab or principal investigator. The team gladly stepped up to take on this new responsibility because they recognize the positive impact the program has on graduate students.
  • Outstanding Student Group: The MIT Monologues (MITMo) is an annual show run by students who create and produce an adaptation of the Vagina Monologues tailored to the MIT community. These students embody what it means to be a Change-Maker as they use theater, one of our most powerful modes of societal change, to challenge and reflect on the harmful attitudes that support sexual violence. The show is a series of performances highlighting subjects ranging from sex, gender equity, and sexual assault. The performances also actively work to highlight the experiences of those from marginalized communities. MITMo donates all profits from the show to the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center, a local nonprofit agency dedicated to helping victims of sexual assault.
  • Outstanding PLEASURE Peer Educator: Em McDermott, a graduating senior in biology, is this year’s PLEASURE Peer Educator Change-Maker. PLEASURE is a student-led peer education program that promotes healthy relationships and strives to eliminate sexual violence at MIT. As a Change-Maker, McDermott’s impact at MIT has been profound. This past year, they continued to serve on PLEASURE’s executive board as the communications chair. In the spring, they co-led a seminar on body positivity, body neutrality, and self-love, exploring body shaming systems and offering insight into how to reconnect with the self. Ultimately, McDermott leads with compassion and intentionally empowers others to make their voices heard, serving as a role model for peer educators for years to come.
  • Special Recognition Award: Maryanne Kirkbride was recognized for her many years of creating change at MIT. As MIT’s deputy Institute community and equity officer and co-founder and former executive director of MindHandHeart, Kirkbride has been serving the MIT community for over 20 years. She is lauded for her creative and committed leadership at MindHandHeart, where she created and led a coalition of students, faculty, and staff who strengthened the fabric of the MIT community. At MindHandHeart she added the Department Support Program to enhance the welcoming and inclusive climate of each academic department. While Kirkbride was a nurse at MIT Medical, focused on public health, she helped secure a federal grant to fund the formation of Violence Prevention and Response, an office that provides support and advocacy for students who have experienced sexual violence. As Kirkbride will be retiring, the Change-Makers Committee felt it was important to celebrate the many ways she has worked to create a more welcoming and supportive MIT.
3 Questions: A new model of nervous system form, function, and evolution

Developing a new neuroscience model is no small feat. New faculty member Brady Weissbourd has risen to the challenge in order to study nervous system evolution, development, regeneration, and function.

Lillian Eden | Department of Biology
May 22, 2023

How does animal behavior emerge from networks of connected neurons? How are these incredible nervous systems and behaviors actually generated by evolution? Are there principles shared by all nervous systems or is evolution constantly innovating? What did the first nervous system look like that gave rise to the incredible diversity of life that we see around us?

Combining the study of animal behavior with studies of nervous system form, function, and evolution, Brandon “Brady” Weissbourd, a new faculty member in the Department of Biology and investigator in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, uses the tiny, transparent jellyfish Clytia hemisphaerica, a new neuroscience model.

Q: In 2021, you developed a new model organism for neuroscience research, the transparent jellyfish Clytia hemisphaerica. How do these jellyfish answer questions about neuroscience, the nervous system, and evolution in ways that other models cannot?

A: First, I believe in the importance of more broadly understanding the natural world and diversifying the organisms that we deeply study. One reason is to find experimentally tractable organisms to identify generalizable biological principles — for example, we understand the basis of how neurons “fire” from studies of the squid giant axon. Another reason is that transformative breakthroughs have come from identifying evolutionary innovations that already exist in nature — for example, green fluorescent protein (GFP, from jellyfish) or CRISPR (from bacteria). In both ways, this jellyfish is a valuable complement to existing models.

I have always been interested in the intersection of two types of problems: how nervous systems generate our behaviors; and how these incredible systems were actually created by evolution.

On the systems neuroscience side, ever since working on the serotonin system during my PhD I have been fascinated by the problem of how animals control all of their behaviors simultaneously in a flexible and context-dependent manner, and how behavioral choices depend not just on incoming stimuli but on how those stimuli interact with constantly changing states of the nervous system and body. These are extremely complex and difficult problems, with the particular challenge of interactions across scales, from chemical signaling and dynamic cell biology to neural networks and behavior.

To address these questions, I wanted to move into a model organism with exceptional experimental tractability.

There have been exciting breakthroughs in imaging techniques for neuroscience, including these incredible ways in which we can actually watch and manipulate neuronal activity in a living animal. So, the first thing I wanted was a small and transparent organism that would allow for this kind of optical approach. These jellyfish are a few millimeters in diameter and perfectly transparent, with interesting behaviors but relatively compact nervous systems. They have thousands of neurons where we have billions, which also puts them at a nice intermediate complexity compared to other transparent models that are widely used — for example, C. elegans have 302 neurons and larval zebrafish have something like 100,000 in the brain alone. These features will allow us to look at the activity of the whole nervous system in behaving animals to try to understand how that activity gives rise to behaviors and how that activity itself arises from networks of neurons.

On the evolution side of our work, we are interested in the origins of nervous systems, what the first nervous systems looked like, and broadly what the options are for how nervous systems are organized and functioning: to what extent there are principles versus interesting and potentially useful innovations, and if there are principles, whether those are optimal or somehow constrained by evolution. Our last common ancestor with jellyfish and their relatives (the cnidarians) was something similar to the first nervous system, so by comparing what we find in cnidarians with work in other models we can make inferences about the origins and early evolution of nervous systems. As we further explore these highly divergent animals, we are also finding exciting evolutionary innovations: specifically, they have incredible capabilities for regenerating their nervous systems. In the future, it will be exciting to better understand how these neural networks are organized to allow for such robustness.

Q: What work is required to develop a new organism as a model, and why did you choose this particular species of jellyfish?

A: If you’re choosing a new animal model, it’s not just about whether it has the right features for the questions you want to ask, but also whether it technically lets you do the right experiments. The model we’re using was first developed by a research group in France, who spent many years doing the really hard work of figuring out how to culture the whole life cycle in the lab, injecting eggs, and developing other key resources. For me, the big question was whether we’d be able to use the genetic tools that I was describing earlier for looking at neural activity. Working closely with collaborators in France, our first step was figuring out how to insert things into the jellyfish genome. If we couldn’t figure that out, I was going to switch back to working with mice. It took us about two years of troubleshooting, but now we can routinely generate genetically modified jellyfish in the lab.

Switching to a new animal model is tough — I have a mouse neuroscience background and joined a postdoc lab that used mice and flies; I was the only person working with jellyfish, but had no experience. One of my goals is now to optimize and simplify this whole process so that when other labs want to start working with jellyfish we have a simple aquaculture platform to get them started, even if they have no experience.

In addition to the fact that these things are tiny and transparent, the main reason that we chose this particular species is because it has an amazing life cycle that makes it an exciting laboratory animal.

They have separate sexes that spawn daily with the fertilized eggs developing into larvae that then metamorphose into polyps. We grow these polyps on microscope slides, where they form colonies that are thought to be immortal. These colonies are then constantly releasing jellyfish, which are all genetically identical “clones” that can be used for experiments. That means that once you create a genetically modified strain, like a transgenic line or a knockout, you can keep it forever as a polyp colony — and since the animals are so small, we can culture them in large numbers in the lab.

There’s still a huge amount of foundational work to do, like characterizing their behavioral repertoire and nervous system organization. It’s shocking how little we know about the basics of jellyfish biology — particularly considering that they kill more people per year than sharks and stingrays combined — and the more we look into it, the more questions there are.

Q: What drew you to a faculty position at MIT?

A: I wanted to be in a department that does fundamental research, is enthusiastic about basic science, is open-minded, and is very diverse in what people work on and think about. My goal is also to be able to ultimately link mechanisms at the molecular and cellular level to organismal behavior, which is something that [the] MIT [Department of] Biology is particularly strong at doing. It’s been an exciting first few months! MIT Biology is such an amazing place to do science and it’s been wonderful how enthusiastic and supportive everyone in the department has been.

I was additionally drawn to MIT by the broader community and have already found it so easy to start collaborations with people in neuroscience, engineering, and math. I’m also thrilled to have recently become a member of The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, which further enables these collaborations in a way that I believe will be transformational for the work in my lab.

It’s a new lab. It’s a new organism. There isn’t a huge, well-established field that is taking these approaches. There’s so much we don’t know, and so much that we have to establish from scratch. My goal is for my lab to have a sense of adventure and fun, and I’m really excited to be doing that here in MIT Biology.

3 Questions: Sara Prescott on the brain-body connection

New MIT faculty member investigates how sensory input from within the body controls mammalian physiology and behavior.

Lillian Eden | Department of Biology | Picower Institute for Learning and Memory
May 17, 2023

Many of our body’s most important functions occur without our conscious knowledge, such as digestion, heartbeat, and breathing. These vital functions depend on the signals generated by the “interoceptive nervous system,” which enables the brain to monitor our internal organs and trigger responses that sometimes save our lives. One second you are breathing normally as you eat your salad and the next, when a vinegar-soaked crouton enters your throat, you are coughing or swallowing to protect and clear your airway. We know our bodies are sensitive to cues like irritants, but we still have a lot to learn about how the interoceptive system works to meet our physiological needs, keep organs safe and healthy, and affect our behavior. We can also learn how chronic insults may lead to organ dysfunction and use what we learn to create therapeutic interventions.

Focusing on the airway, Sara Prescott, a new faculty member in the Department of Biology and investigator in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, seeks to understand the ways our nervous systems detect and respond to stimuli in health and disease. Here, she describes her work.

Q: Why is understanding the peripheral nervous system important, and what parts of your background are you drawing on for your current research?

A: The lab focuses on really trying to explore the body-brain connection.

People often think that our mind exists in a vacuum, but in reality, our nervous system is heavily integrated with the rest of the body, and those neural interfaces are important, both for taking information from our body or environment and turning it into an internal representation of the world, and, in reverse, being able to process that information and being able to enact changes throughout the body. That includes things like autonomic reflexes, basic functions of the body like breathing, blood-gas regulation, digestion, and heart rate.

I’ve integrated both my graduate training and postdoctoral training into thinking about biology across multiple scales.

Graduate school for me was quite focused on deep molecular mechanism questions, particularly gene regulation, so I feel like that has been very useful for me in my general approach to neuroscience because I take a very molecular angle to all of this.

It also showed me the power of in vitro models as reductionist tools to explore fundamental aspects of cell biology. During my postdoc, I focused on larger, emergent phenotypes. We were able to manipulate specific circuits and see very impressive behavioral responses in animals. You could stimulate about 100 neurons in a mouse and see that their breathing would just stop until you remove the stimulation, and then the breathing would return to normal.

Both of those experiences inform how we approach a problem in my research. We need to understand how these circuits work, not just their connectivity at the anatomical level but what is driving their changes in sensitivity over time, the receptor expression programs that affect how they sense and signal, how these circuits emerge during development, and their gene expression.

There are still s­o many foundational questions that haven’t been answered that there’s enough to do in the mouse for quite some time.

Q: How are you specifically looking into interoceptive biology at MIT?

A: Our flagship system is the mammalian airway. We use a mouse model and modern molecular neuroscience tools to manipulate various neural pathways and observe what the effects are on respiratory function and animal health.

Neuroscience and mouse work have a reputation for being a little challenging and intense, but I think this is also where we can ask really important questions that are useful for our everyday lives — and the only place where we can fully recapitulate the complexity of nervous system signaling all the way down to our organs, back to our brain, and back to our organs.

It’s a very fun place to do science with lots of open questions.

One of the core discoveries from my postdoctoral work was focusing on the vagus nerve as a major body-to-brain conduit, as it innervates our lungs, heart, and gastrointestinal tract. We found that there were about 40 different subtypes of sensory neurons within this small nerve, which is really a remarkable amount of diversity and reflects the massive sensory space within the body. About a dozen of those vagal neurons project to the airways.

We identified a rare neuron type specifically responsible for triggering protective responses, like coughing when water or acid entered the airway. We also discovered a separate population of neurons that make us feel and act sick when we get a flu infection. The field now knows what four to five vagal populations of neurons are actually sensing in the airways, but the remaining populations are still a mystery to us; we don’t know what those populations of sensory neurons are detecting, what their anatomy is, and what reflex effects those neurons are evoking.

Looking ahead, there are many exciting directions for the interoceptive biology field. For example, there’s been a lot of focus on characterizing the circuits underlying acute motor reflexes, like rapid responses to visceral stimuli on the timescale of minutes to hours. But we don’t have a lot of information about what happens when these circuits are activated over long periods of time. For example, respiratory tract infections often last for weeks or longer. We know that the airways undergo changes in composition when they’re exposed to different types of infection or stress to better accommodate future threats. One of the hypotheses we’re testing is that chronically activating neural circuits may drive changes in organ composition. We have this idea, which we’re calling reflexive remodeling: neurons may be communicating with stem cells and progenitor cells in the periphery to drive adaptive remodeling responses.

We have the genetic, molecular, and circuit scale tools to explore this pheno­­­menon in mice. In parallel, we’re also setting up some in vitro models of the mouse airway mucosa to expedite receptor screening and to explore basic mechanisms of neuron-epithelium cross-talk. We hope this will inform our understanding of how the airway surface senses and responds to different types of irritants or damage.

Q: This all sounds fascinating. Where does it lead?

A: Human health has been my north star for a long time and I’ve taken a long, wandering path to find particular areas where I can scratch whatever intellectual itch that I have.

I originally thought I would be a doctor and then realized that I felt like I could have a more lasting impact by discovering fundamental truths about how our bodies work. I think there are a number of chronic diseases in which autonomic imbalance is actually a huge clinical component of the disorder.

We have a lot of interest in some of these very common airway remodeling diseases, like chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder — COPD — asthma, and potentially lung cancer. We want to ask questions like how autonomic circuits are altered in disease contexts, and when neurons actually drive features of disease.

Perhaps this research will help us come up with better molecular, cellular, or tissue engineering approaches to improve the outcomes for a variety of autonomic diseases.

It’s very easy for me to imagine how one day, not too far from now, we can turn these findings into something actionable for human health.

Thirteen from MIT win 2023 Fulbright fellowships

The Fulbright US Student Program funds opportunities for research, graduate study, and teaching abroad.

Julia Mongo | Office of Distinguished Fellowships
May 15, 2023

Thirteen MIT undergraduates, graduate students, and alumni have been awarded Fulbright fellowships and will embark on projects overseas in the 2023-24 grant year. Four other MIT affiliates were offered awards but declined them to pursue other opportunities.

Sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, the Fulbright U.S. Student Program offers American citizen students and recent alumni year-long grants for independent research, graduate study, and English teaching in over 140 countries.

For the past four years, MIT has been a Fulbright Top-Producing Institution. MIT students and alumni interested in applying should contact Julia Mongo in Distinguished Fellowships in Career Advising and Professional Development.

Lainie Beauchemin ’22 earned a BS in biological engineering at MIT, where she researched the molecular underpinnings of schizophrenia and other neurological diseases at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Her Fulbright project will focus on broadening neurological diagnostic care in rural India, in conjunction with IIT Delhi and Project Prakash. During her time at MIT, Beauchemin was co-president of a math mentorship program for underserved middle school girls in the Cambridge/Boston area and worked in various roles for The Educational Justice Institute, including teaching Python to incarcerated women. She was chair of the MIT Shakespeare ensemble as well as an actress, producer, and designer for multiple productions. She looks forward to working with the children of Project Prakash to put on a performance to celebrate Diwali.

Shelly Ben-David is a senior studying electrical engineering and computer science with a minor in mechanical engineering. Her Fulbright research fellowship will take her to Lausanne, Switzerland, where she will work on germanium nanowire networks for spin-qubit applications. Beyond her research, Ben-David is excited to improve her French skills and explore the nature and culture that Switzerland has to offer. At MIT, Ben-David mentored over 300 middle school girls and non-binary students in Scratch through CodeIt; served her community in Maseeh Hall’s Executive Council; and spent much of her time in MIT.nano conducting research, leading building tours, and writing stories about science to inspire young students to pursue STEM. After Fulbright, she plans to return to MIT to pursue a PhD in electrical engineering.

Victor Damptey will graduate in June with a major in biological engineering and a minor in Spanish. At the Chemical Institute of Sarrià in Barcelona, Spain, Damptey will test alternative conduits for cardiovascular grafting surgery. He gained a passion for conducting impactful research at the Hammond Lab, where he helped develop a drug delivery system for osteoarthritis. Damptey has cultivated his interest in applying his Spanish fluency to alleviate real-world problems by serving as an English-as-a-second-language tutor and leading a medical interpreting initiative within ActLingual. He plans to continue utilizing his Spanish skills to effectively engage with local communities in Spain and reinforce his cultural awareness. After his Fulbright year, Damptey will continue his studies in medical school while combining research and public service.

Maggie Freeman is a PhD candidate in the History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art Program and the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture. During her Fulbright year in Amman, Jordan, she will conduct research for her doctoral dissertation, “Principles for Desert Control: Architecture, Imperialism, and Nomadic Peoples during the British Mandate (1920-1948).” Freeman’s research investigates British imperial uses of architecture as a mechanism of control over nomadic Bedouin and Kurdish populations in Palestine, Jordan, and Iraq. In Jordan, she will study transformations of the built environment under British colonial rule and the resulting, ongoing effects on Jordan’s Bedouin community.

Jola Idowu will graduate this spring from the Master of Architecture and Master of City Planning programs at MIT. Her thesis is on the historical preservation of tabby concrete, a global material whose presence in the United States was made possible by the labor of enslaved Blacks and Indigenous peoples along the Eastern Gulf of the United States. For her Fulbright grant, Idowu will research implementation methods of coastal resilience across complicated networks of stakeholders Senegal, focusing on Gorée and the greater Dakar area. She hopes that this work will contribute to centering Black Atlantic narratives within discourses on climate change. As a Nigerian-American, she is excited to explore other parts of West Africa. She will be hosted by the Department of Urban Planning at Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar. After Fulbright, Idowu hopes to pursue her licensure in architecture.

Nathan Liang ’21 graduated with a double major in biological engineering and comparative media studies. He is currently teaching high school biology with Teach For America Miami-Dade. As a Fulbright English teaching assistant in Taiwan, he hopes to hone his skills as a teacher leader and share his love of American media with his students. At MIT, his passion for education developed through his work with dynaMIT, Concourse, and InterphaseEDGE, where he filled the roles of co-director, associate advisor, and communications and writing teaching assistant, respectively. He also enjoyed leading the MIT Lion Dance Team and performing as part of Odaiko New England. After Fulbright, Nathan plans to pursue a PhD in education with focuses on social work and uplifting LGBTQ+ communities.

Liam Ludington ’22 graduated from MIT with a mathematics degree and will receive a master’s in mathematics from the University of Oxford this spring. As a Fulbright Germany research grantee at the University of Heidelberg, he is eager to investigate biologically plausible learning algorithms and implement them in brain-inspired computing systems, with the dual aims of bringing the efficiency of the brain to AI systems and better understanding how the brain performs inference. At MIT, Ludington’s research ranged from building flexible solar panel deployment systems to the advantages of a generalized first-price ad auction. He was also a member of the men’s heavyweight crew and the Number Six Club fraternity. After Fulbright, Ludington hopes to pursue a PhD in computational neuroscience.

Rachana Madhukara is a senior double majoring in mathematics and electrical engineering and computer science. She is the recipient of the Fulbright Budapest Semesters in Mathematics-Rényi Institute award. In Hungary, Madhukara will take classes and conduct research on combinatorics. She also looks forward to immersing herself in Hungary’s rich culture and engaging in mathematics teaching outreach to Romani students in the community. At MIT, Madhukara is president of the MIT Undergraduate Society for Women in Mathematics and a mentor for PRIMES Circle and the Research Science Institute. She has been active with the MIT Educational Studies Program, the Ring Committee, and the Borderline murals art project. She has published five papers in mathematical journals and has conducted research at MIT with Professor Henry Cohn as well as through NSF Research Experiences for Undergraduates programs at the University of Minnesota Duluth and the University of Virginia.

Mercy Oladipo will graduate this spring with a BS in computer science and molecular biology. Having always had a passion for health equity and technology, she will continue this work through her Fulbright research in São Paulo, Brazil, with support from the University of São Paulo. In Brazil, Oladipo will use the lens of reproductive justice to investigate disparities in obstetric care experiences and outcomes for Black Brazilian women and create impactful resources to improve care. Oladipo has taught STEM topics to students in Aguascalientes, Mexico, through the MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI); conducted research at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Tufts’s MOTHER Lab; and is co-founder of Birth By Us, a health equity-focused digital platform that has been supported by MIT’s Experimental Study Group, the PKG Center, MIT Sandbox, and more

Erica P. Santana ’18 graduated MIT with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and computer science. After MIT, Santana returned to her home island of Puerto Rico, aspiring to leverage data science and artificial intelligence to drive positive change and enhance the local tech ecosystem. Santana’s passion for international education stems from her transformative MISTI undergraduate experiences in Brazil, Chile, and Mexico. As a recipient of a Fulbright graduate studies grant, Santana will pursue an International MBA at IE University in Madrid, Spain, with the goal of advancing her business skills to foster innovation. Combining her technology background and business acumen, Santana hopes to create a lasting global impact in the education and technology sectors.

Sophia Sonnert will graduate this spring with a major in mechanical engineering, concentrating in micro/nanoengineering, and a minor in German. At the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Switzerland, she will create new equipment to observe salt segregation to advance our understanding of salt hydrates as a phase change material for thermal energy storage. She is also excited to explore the Alpine scenery and practice her German. Her previous research experiences at MIT have ranged from microfluidics and studying algae adhesion to a life-cycle assessment of the benefits of sustainability classes as well as e-scooters. During her undergraduate studies, she enjoyed participating in international opportunities in Germany and Mexico. Before starting her Fulbright fellowship, she will conduct droplet sorting research at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim.

Michael Sutton is a senior majoring in computer science and minoring in Chinese. He will be an English teaching assistant in Taiwan. With a deep interest in the intersection of technology and education, Sutton has conducted research on utilizing machine learning techniques to improve classroom assessments and interned for a company focused on using virtual reality for language immersion. Especially committed to language acquisition, he was awarded the MIT Global Languages Excellence prize for his studies in Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese. Alongside his own language learning, Sutton tutors English through the ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) office and ITEC (Individualized Tutoring for English and Citizenship), helping others achieve their language goals. He is excited to develop his Mandarin skills while immersing himself in Taiwan’s natural beauty and vibrant culture. Sutton is passionate about education and the impact it can have on individuals and communities, and he is eager to contribute to Taiwan’s educational system while learning from the local community.

Veronica Will is a senior majoring in biological engineering. She is a recipient of the Fulbright Taiwan Award in Mind, Brain, and Consciousness. For her Fulbright grant in Taiwan, she will pursue a two-year master’s degree in neuroscience at Taipei Medical University. At MIT, Will was an undergraduate researcher in Professor Polina Anikeeva’s lab, where she worked on developing a soft neural interface device that combined electrical recording, optical stimulation, and microfluidic delivery for use in studying brain tumors. Outside of her research, Will volunteers as an emergency medical technician with MIT Emergency Medical Services and is excited to learn more about the differences in health-care delivery between the United States and Taiwan. After her Fulbright grant, Will hopes to pursue an MD-PhD to combine her passions for research and patient care.