Category: Slice of MIT

Alumni Feature: Carrie Muh, SB ’96, ’97, SM ’97

Muh came to MIT planning to pursue health policy, but ended up majoring in biology and political science, and earned a master's degree in political science before heading to Columbia University for medical school. Now she serves as the chief of pediatric neurosurgery and surgical director of the Pediatric Epilepsy Program at Maria Fareri Children’s Hospital and Westchester Medical Center in Valhalla, New York.

Kara Baskin | MIT Technology Review
December 8, 2025

Carrie Muh ’96, ’97, SM ’97 works in an office surrounded by letters from grateful parents. As the chief of pediatric neurosurgery and surgical director of the Pediatric Epilepsy Program at Maria Fareri Children’s Hospital and Westchester Medical Center in Valhalla, New York, Muh performs life-changing surgeries.

“I see parents who come into my office on their post­operative visit in tears because, for the first time, their child is able to talk or walk. Having a mom come in and say their child said ‘Mama’ for the first time is huge,” she says. Other patients can finally play sports after a lifetime of falls.

About 2% of kids have epilepsy, a neurological condition that can cause seizures, falls, and language issues. About 30% of pediatric epilepsy patients are resistant to the drugs available to treat the condition, but in some cases surgery can help. “Surgery can be such a huge game-changer. Even if it can’t cure them, it can significantly improve quality of life,” she says.

Muh came to MIT planning to pursue health policy. She majored in both biology and political science and then earned a master’s degree in political science. But after a summer interning at the White House, she saw a stronger opportunity for influence as a physician.

As a medical student at Columbia University, Muh got to observe the transplant of a heart from a child who had passed away to another child in need. That sparked her interest in pediatric surgery. “I was able to watch a surgical team save a child’s life,” she remembers.

She took a gap year during medical school to conduct brain tumor research at Columbia, shadowing neurosurgical residents and observing the precise poetry of their surgery. “I absolutely knew that was for me,” she says, adding that the need was also compelling. “There aren’t enough pediatric epilepsy surgery specialists in the country.”

Now patients often travel to Muh for laser ablation, which destroys the part of the brain responsible for seizures without damaging nearby healthy tissue. In other cases, she installs a vagal-nerve stimulator in a child’s chest, which can make seizures less frequent and intense. An additional option is to outfit a child’s brain with EEG electrodes to pinpoint areas of seizure activity; then she can treat those precise areas. For some children, a responsive neurostimulator—“a pacemaker for the brain,” she calls it—can stop a seizure in its tracks.

“Most of my research for the last five years has been on new ways to use technology to help more patients,” she says—younger people and those who have not traditionally been considered candidates for these devices.

Despite her workload, Muh finds time for Yankees games and Broadway plays with her three children. She also travels internationally to care for vulnerable patients. In April 2024, she performed some of the first pediatric epilepsy surgeries with deep brain stimulation in Ukraine. She was also scheduled to head to Kenya for similar work in September of this year.

But wherever she travels, she maintains strong ties to MIT as class secretary and as a former Undergraduate Association president. This reflects her outgoing nature, though she once doubted if she would fit in with the Institute’s intensely engineering-focused culture.

“My dad had gone to MIT and always told me how amazing it was. I loved engineering and science from a young age, so he thought I would obviously love MIT. But I didn’t know if I was ‘techy’ enough to go,” she jokes, even though in high school she did research at NASA’s Student Space and Biology program while juggling sports and theater commitments.

When she toured campus, though, she was hooked.

“I made lifelong friends at MIT and actually met my husband at the wedding of one of my sorority sisters,” she says. “I discovered MIT was a welcoming, open place. I tell my kids now: ‘I’m proud to be a nerd!’ Cool, passionate people are proud of the work they do and the things they love.”

Alumni Spotlight: Michael Franklin ’88

Franklin describes himself as an overachiever, so perhaps it’s not surprising that when he set out to become an educational counselor, one of the MIT alums who volunteers to interview applicants for undergraduate admission, he quickly started racking up record numbers.

Kathryn M. O'Neill | Slice of MIT
December 4, 2025

Michael Franklin ’88 describes himself as an overachiever. So perhaps it’s not surprising that when he set out to become an educational counselor (EC)—an MIT alum who volunteers to interview applicants for undergraduate admission—he quickly started racking up record numbers.

In his first year as an EC, Franklin did 96 interviews—a lot but not quite the most anyone conducted for the 2023–’24 admission cycle. The following year, he redoubled his efforts and earned the top spot. He did it again for students hoping to enter in 2025–’26, interviewing a whopping 160 candidates—nearly twice as many as the No. 2 interviewer.

Interviewing for MIT is a passion he shares with his wife, Debbie Birnby ’91, who conducted 44 interviews herself for students applying for this year. “We started doing this, and it turned out to be just amazing talking to people,” Franklin says. “There’s this glow about students when they talk about what they really like to do, and I enjoy seeing that.”

Birnby agrees. “You hear bad stuff on the news, and then you see young people and you have hope for the future,” she says. “They have so much energy and enthusiasm.”

A Huge Volunteer Corps

Educational counselors form one of the largest groups of MIT volunteers, with more than 7,500 people signed up during the 2024–’25 interview cycle alone. Many—like Franklin and Birnby—love it enough to come back year after year. Currently, MIT has more than 3,500 ECs who have volunteered for over five years and more than 2,000 who have been interviewing for over 10 years. Five ECs have been interviewing for over 50 years.

All play a vital role by helping MIT Admissions get a more holistic view of the candidates, according to Yi Tso ’85, the staff member who runs the EC program as director of the Educational Council. The average EC completes just about six interviews each year. So Franklin and Birnby—who also produce very informative reports on candidates, Tso emphasizes—really stand out: “They are clearly among our super-superstar volunteers.”

The couple’s large interview numbers are, in part, an accident of geography. ECs typically interview candidates who live near them, but when Franklin and Birnby decided to start interviewing in 2022, they were living in an area of Maryland without many MIT applicants. As a result, they took on interviews with “overflow” candidates—those without access to a local EC. They could conduct these interviews easily online, so the pair—who were both newly retired (Franklin was a software developer; Birnby was in lab technical service)—quickly got into a groove and just kept going.

Two years later, they moved back to the Boston area, “partly because we kept telling people how great Boston was, so we started believing it,” Franklin jokes. Since the area has a robust group of ECs, the couple—who by then had been named regional coordinators for the EC program in Boston—continued to interview students from the overflow list.

The Personal Touch

ECs start their work with very little information—just the student’s name, high school, and contact information—and EC guidelines recommend that they spend 30 to 60 minutes with each student. Birnby says she typically spends about an hour and a half. Franklin often takes even more time; he admits he happily spoke for four hours with one enthusiastic candidate. “You meet all these interesting people,” he explains, noting that he and his wife have heard students discuss a full range of interests and ambitions, including everything from competing in the sailing Junior Olympics to launching a national-scale desalination project.

ECs also answer questions from applicants, and both Franklin and Birnby say most students are eager to learn more about campus culture. “A lot of people don’t have a good idea about how weird and wonderful MIT is. It’s a really weird place in a totally good way,” Franklin says. He likes to tell students about the Banana Lounge, the Pirate Certificate, the Baker House piano drop, and other quirky traditions.

Both Franklin and Birnby hope they can help students find out if MIT will be a good fit for them—because that’s at the heart of why they care enough to give back to the Institute themselves. “At MIT I felt I had found my people. I fit there,” says Birnby, who was a biology major while Franklin studied political science. (She says they knew each other when they were both at the Institute but didn’t become a couple until decades later.)

Of course, most candidates ECs interview do not ultimately gain admission. Consider that for the 2025–’26 year, MIT admitted 1,334 undergraduates out of a competitive field of 29,282 applicants. Still, Franklin and Birnby have been able to congratulate several students each year. Today there are MIT students from all over the world—from North Carolina to Kyrgyzstan—who can say they were interviewed by one of them.

Mentors and Friends

Franklin and Birnby have made a point of keeping in touch with many of these students, who now count them as mentors and friends. The pair begin by congratulating students as soon as they can see who has been accepted, which is posted online. “We can’t see results until they see. So we’re like, check already!” Birnby says.

In the fall, they welcome the new students. Then they invite their admitted interviewees from all classes—a group that now numbers 55—to various gatherings throughout the year. In 2024, for example, the pair hosted 10 students for Thanksgiving at their house in Somerville.

“When I came to MIT, it felt so reassuring to know I always had someone to talk to and ask questions of during my MIT journey,” says Yumn Elameer ’28, whom Franklin interviewed. “I’m so grateful to have gotten Mike as an interviewer, to have gained him as a friend and as someone I know will always be there for help, a good laugh, or advice.”

Pathology and the Allure of Analytical Thinking

Susan Fuhrman ’75 pursued pathology because she liked providing clear answers to diagnostic questions, and has spent her retirement making complex beaded jewelry, a hobby she started more than 30 years ago as a foil for the stresses of work.

Kathryn M. O'Neill | Slice of MIT
October 7, 2025

Susan Fuhrman ’75 became a pathologist because she likes providing clear answers to diagnostic questions. “As opposed to guessing what people have, you’ve got the lab results, you have reviewed the pathology slides,” she says. “It’s pretty analytical. Your answer is the answer.”

That clarity of focus was never more valuable than in 2020, when Fuhrman was charged with answering the question everyone was asking: Is it Covid?

As the system director for pathology and laboratory services at OhioHealth, a major hospital system based in Columbus, Ohio, Fuhrman led efforts to address the epidemic—through hospital protocols and, of course, testing—all while fielding seemingly endless requests for her expertise in identifying disease.

“Everybody—from hospital vice presidents to the chief medical officer for the system— was calling me late at night and multiple times on weekends. It was incredible,” she says.

Within a year, the system’s labs had performed over half a million Covid tests and Fuhrman had been featured several times in CAP Today, a publication of the College of American Pathologists. She discussed general testing challenges as well as whom to test when and on which testing platform.

As it happened, however, Fuhrman was already famous thanks to work dating back to the 1980s.

Understanding Renal Cancer

The daughter of two chemists, Fuhrman majored in biology at MIT and earned her medical degree from the University of Michigan in 1978. She then went to the University of Minnesota Medical Center for her residency in pathology and laboratory medicine and found herself in need of a research topic. “I remember asking the head of our surgical pathology department, Dr. Juan Rosai, ‘What is a question in pathology that hasn’t been answered?’” she says. “He said, ‘Well, we don’t have a good way of determining which renal cell cancers have a bad prognosis. Currently we go by size, but there must be more than that. No one’s cracked the code. Why don’t you try that?’”

So, Fuhrman teamed up with another doctor at the Minneapolis veterans hospital, Dr. Catherine Limas, and together they developed and proposed a set of parameters to grade kidney cancers that might predict cancer outcomes. Then, Fuhrman did the painstaking work of reviewing and analyzing thousands of tumor slides, as well as cancer registry clinical data and medical charts. Her husband, Larry Lasky ’72—whom she had met at MIT and who also became a pathologist—programmed the analysis and helped her run the data she found through an early computer. “I input everything with computer cards and a teletype, super primitive stuff,” she says.

The data produced clear patterns in the predictive value of the appearance of cell nuclei, and the three published a paper proposing a grading system classifying which renal tumors are most aggressive and likely to spread based on their findings. The system, which is still the standard, is known as the Fuhrman Nuclear Grade for Clear Cell Renal Carcinoma.

American Board of Pathology President

After her residency, Fuhrman taught laboratory medicine to senior medical students as an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota for 12 years before moving to Ohio in 1994. In addition to working at OhioHealth, Fuhrman served for several years as president and CEO of CORPath, a private pathology practice. In 2022, she served a term as president of the American Board of Pathology, which later named her a life trustee in honor of her many years of service.

Fuhrman retired at the end of 2020 and has since spent much of her time making beaded jewelry—a hobby she started 35 years ago as a foil to work. “The job was stressful, and beading uses a totally different part of your brain. The left side can rest,” she says. “I can sit and sort beads by size and color for hours. That’s really weird and mindless, but I love it. I also love bead weaving; it’s like physics and architecture, building beautiful, structurally sound pieces from tiny beads.”

She creates elaborate bracelets and necklaces, often giving them away to friends or donating them to charity. “Jewelry making doesn’t pay very well, but I’m very lucky I don’t need to support myself on my hobby,” she says. “I do this for me.”

Ophthalmologist Puts Mind and Hand to Art

Carmel Mercado ’09 describes herself as “existing at the intersection of health and art.” A Seattle-based pediatric ophthalmologist, Mercado is also a visual artist whose whimsical illustrations and colorful animal characters can be found in places as varied as a children’s hospital and a microbrewery.

Sara Shay | MIT Technology Review
July 26, 2025

Carmel Mercado ’09 describes herself as “existing at the intersection of health and art.” A Seattle-based pediatric ophthalmologist, Mercado is also a visual artist whose whimsical illustrations and colorful animal characters can be found in places as varied as a children’s hospital and a microbrewery.

Looking back, Mercado says that even as a premed biology major at MIT she was pursuing both paths. She took a First-Year Advising Seminar in the arts and found a mentor in Michèle Oshima, then director of student and artist-in-residence programs at MIT’s Office of the Arts, who encouraged her to apply for the MIT Arts Scholars program. That gave her the opportunity to showcase her work in a gallery at MIT.

Mercado’s next stop was medical school at Johns Hopkins (she graduated in 2014). There, too, she gravitated toward opportunities for artistic expression, such as designing T-shirts and posters for an event welcoming prospective students. “That kind of helped me get through some darker days when I was really tired or really overwhelmed by the medical part of it,” she says.

She chose ophthalmology as her specialty in part because she found the eye itself visually appealing. “The first time I saw the fundus, the retina, the back of the eye, it was so beautiful to me,” she says. “Just looking at the optic nerve, the colors, the placement, I thought about how amazing it is that we can get such beautiful and complex imagery of our world from what looks to most people like a blob of jelly.”

Initially, Mercado assumed art would take a backseat to her medical career, but time in Japan—including a MISTI summer internship in Kobe—led her to realize she had other options. She connected with a mentor, Kenji Watanabe, while studying the history of medicine at Keio University in Tokyo during medical school. Watanabe “showed me a very different lifestyle,” she says: He didn’t limit his work to academia. “He had this really cool niche where he could do all this policy work. He was traveling to different countries to meet up with other physicians. It was eye-opening,” Mercado says. “He made me realize you can shape your career and your life to be able to pursue your passions. You shouldn’t just accept the traditional way. Being exposed to that early on probably gave me the courage to do what I’m doing now.”

As a practicing ophthalmologist, she began to involve art in her work by designing patient materials featuring characters she created. Colleagues noticed and offered her commissions. About four years ago, Mercado decided to pursue art full-time. The problem: She wasn’t sure how to promote herself. “I just about tried everything to see what would stick,” she says. She started an Etsy page and social media accounts, and she applied to art shows, art walks, and galleries. After about a year, her efforts paid off, and she started to get invitations for projects.

She has since exhibited her work in juried shows and galleries in the Boston, Orlando, and Seattle areas and has received commissions for public art from several cities in Washington. She even has a piece in the permanent gallery at Japan’s Sobana Museum.

Despite her artistic success, Mercado says she eventually missed the problem-solving and patient care involved in clinical work. She started tinkering with her schedule and settled on a roughly 60-40 split in favor of medicine.

In addition to seeing patients, she continues to pursue art projects, working mostly with acrylics and mixed media on canvas and with digital illustration; her style reflects her experiences with children and her observations of wildlife and folk art around the world, especially in Japan.

“I’ve found a space where I’m happy,” she says, “and where it feels a little bit more balanced for me.”

This story also appears in the July/August issue of MIT Alumni News magazine, published by MIT Technology Review. 

Alumni Spotlight: Distillery Founder with a Spirited Passion

Jennifer Yang, '97, has been drawing on her biology degree for making spirits at a craft distillery in Maryland.

Jessica R. Simpson | Slice of MIT
October 15, 2024

If you had told Jennifer Yang ’97 during her time as a Course 7 major at MIT that she would use her biology degree to run a distillery, she wouldn’t have believed you.

“When I was at MIT, I looked at entrepreneurs and I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s not me. I’m not one of those people who are so innovative and gutsy and brave,’” Yang says.

Managing a distillery is a passion that matured in Yang over time—much like the complex flavor of a barrel-aged whiskey. After graduating from MIT, the New York-native moved to Washington, DC, to pursue a career in management and technology consulting, which involved a lot of after-hours networking events. While building connections with colleagues over a glass of whiskey—a drink that was particularly popular with clients—Yang discovered her passion. Over the course of 10 years, she researched the science of making spirits, explored different small distilleries, and even started a whiskey tasting club.

“Being a science geek at heart and being very curious, I went down this rabbit hole pretty quickly in terms of wanting to learn more about it,” Yang explains.

In November 2022, she and her husband opened Covalent Spirits, a craft distillery, tasting room, and event space in Westminster, Maryland. In addition to producing bourbon whiskey, Covalent Spirits distills and blends vodka, gin, rum, and liqueurs. One of the bar’s unique and in-demand offerings is the “pH,” or “power of hydrogen,” cocktail, which uses the acidity of lemonade to turn a blue tea into a vibrant purple. Yang still works in consulting, but you can find her in her element behind the bar, engineering “pH” (and many other) cocktails Thursday through Saturday.

In her spare time, Yang is a committed MIT volunteer. An active participant in the Club of Washington DC, she is the regional alumni ambassador for the Baltimore area as well. Yang is also an educational counselor and the current president of the Class of 1997. She notes that she and her ’97 classmates were the first to organize pi reunions, a tradition in which alums gather in Las Vegas 3.14 years after graduation. “We’re glad our class could leave a little bit of a legacy,” she says.

In fact, the shared MIT connection between alumni inspired Yang to name her company Covalent Spirits. One year, at an MIT gathering, Yang started talking to another alum about planning events for undergrad classes that shared years at MIT—what they called “covalent classes.” Yang has since incorporated literal and metaphorical covalent bonds (a chemical connection between atoms formed by sharing) into every facet of her business: from the chemistry of making spirits, to the design of the distillery logo, to the company’s emphasis on community.

“While we are striving to create really good products, we also want to create a space and experiences for people to get together and geek out over a common interest, to celebrate an occasion, or to connect over anything,” Yang elaborates. “You share a drink, you share an experience, you share a community. Bonding through sharing is the covalent spirit.”

Transforming Veterans’ Lives, One Kidney Transplant at a Time

When Reynold I. Lopez-Soler, SB ’94, saw his first kidney transplant, during his medical residency, he found his life’s work.

Kathryn M. O'Neill | MIT Technology Review
September 6, 2024

When Reynold I. Lopez-Soler ’94 saw his first kidney transplant, during his medical residency, he found his life’s work.

“It’s such a magical and incredible thing that you can do this,” says Lopez-Soler, director of the renal transplant program at the Edward Hines Jr. Veterans Affairs Hospital outside Chicago. “You’re watching this organ that was taken out [of the donor], practically lifeless and inert, and through the expertise of surgery it comes to life and becomes pink; it starts to make urine.”

About 100,000 people in the United States are currently waiting for a kidney transplant; on average, they will wait five to seven years. Lopez-Soler is expanding access to this care for veterans.

Kidney transplants are life-changing, he says, not only because kidney disease can make people very sick, but because the main treatment—dialysis, which does some of the kidney’s job outside the body—is so demanding that many patients can’t work or even travel. “Getting a kidney transplant not only fixes the problem, but fixes their lives going forward,” he says. “There is this substantial transformation.”

Growing up in Puerto Rico, Lopez-Soler always expected to become a surgeon (his father is a surgical oncologist). During high school, he discovered the MIT Introduction to Technology, Engineering, and Science (MITES) program, spent a summer on campus, and fell in love with the Institute. “MIT was an incredibly inclusive place,” he says. “Whatever you did, you were welcome. I’ve brought that acceptance with me in my ethos in how I deal with people.”

After majoring in biology at MIT (with a minor in Spanish literature), Lopez-Soler earned his MD and PhD from Northwestern University and completed his surgical residency at Yale New Haven Hospital. Then he practiced in Virginia and New York, where he was director of research at Albany Medical Center.

In 2019, Lopez-Soler was tapped to establish the VA transplant program at Hines, and in its first year, it completed 36 kidney transplants. Last year, the center did 105. He now chairs the Department of Veterans Affairs Transplant Surgery Surgical Advisory Board, which helps develop transplant policies and procedures for the whole VA system.

The grandson of a brigadier general, Lopez-Soler is proud to serve veterans. “I was lucky enough to fall in love with the job because of the people we treat,” he says. “It exposed me to these amazing veterans who have done so much for this country.”

This story also appears in the September/October issue of MIT Alumni News magazine, published by MIT Technology Review.

Photo illustration by Mary Zyskowski; image of Reynold I. Lopez-Soler courtesy of Lopez-Soler.