WORKING TOGETHER

Carlos Castro-Gonzalez

Co-Founder and CEO

Leuko Labs, Inc.

“Working Together”

MIT linQ was a program headed by professor Martha Gray, here at MIT, to start new projects in biomedical innovation from scratch, and it had a very different approach to other labs at MIT.

Typically, when you join MIT as a postdoc or PhD student, you start working for a lab, a professor is heading that lab, and they get some funding to develop their research projects. And you're typically recruited to join one of those projects for your expertise in particular.

So, this was a new approach. It was, I guess, an innovative approach to innovation. And the goal was to have those trainees, the PhDs and the postdocs, be the ones who direct and lead the projects. And part of the program was about coming up with new projects from scratch and defining an unmet medical need or a huge clinical problem that is not solved in current practice.

And the whole goal of the project was to set up also collaboration, so that you didn't have to rely necessarily on your area of expertise or be bounded by that. And you could always find collaborators that can, you know, fill the gaps and carry out the project successfully.

My name is Carlos Castro-Gonzalez. I used to be a postdoc at the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT, and I am currently the co-founder and CEO of Leuko Labs, Inc. We are a medical device startup that came out of our laboratory research.

John Belcher

Professor, Emeritus

MIT Department of Physics

MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research

“Working Together”

We wrote the proposal for Voyager in the early ’70s, ’71. One of the things that our chief engineer did for the plasma science experiment is, he knew that there was going to be a golden record on the Voyager spacecraft, which was a number of different songs and artifacts to do with the Earth.

He decided to do his own golden record, which was put the names of all the people who had been involved in the experiment at MIT on one of our collector plates. I said, there's a metal plate at the back, which collects particles, and he just engraved on that plate.

And I was a lowly postdoc at the time, and I ended up at the end of the list. But nonetheless, as I tell people, this plate will probably last longer than the Earth itself. The Sun on the other hand will go into a red giant phase and the Earth will not last more than probably another 3 billion years. And after that, there will be nothing from the Earth left, but Voyager will be sitting out there, between the stars, with my name on it. Absolutely quite amazing.

My name is John Belcher. I was a physics professor for 50 years.

Nergis Mavalvala

Dean of the School of Science

Professor

MIT Department of Physics

MIT LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory)

“Working Together”

Many, many people at MIT have inspired me at different points in my career, but probably the most enduring figure in my career has been Rai Weiss. He is technically a wizard, and that's one kind of inspiration, but the thing I think that is less appreciated about someone like him is that he actually gave birth to a whole field. He didn't just make this one discovery or enable this one discovery that was the discovery of gravitational waves. When he started thinking about this, it was thought of as a completely maverick idea that was never going to work, don't waste your time on it. And yet, he inspired a generation of scientists of my generation to sort of come along on this journey with him. And I think that's something that's really extraordinary, because he believed we could do this, and we believed with him.

And we were all, in some ways, doing things that had never been done before. And we all thought because of the cleverness of each other, that we would make it.

My name is Nergis Mavalvala, and I am an experimental physicist, I'm a professor of physics, and I'm currently serving as the Dean of the School of Science at MIT.

Noelle Eckley Selin

Professor

MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society

MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences

“Working Together”

It's something that I keep sort of saying in the MIT context is that, in order to solve the climate problem, we need engagement of a diverse range of stakeholders from different places, with different capacities, and I think the societal challenge focus of MIT really fits nicely in what we need to do in addressing the climate challenge. Because it's true, some societal challenges can be addressed by commercializing a technology, but for some, you need other means, and MIT doesn't say how exactly you do it. It doesn't prescribe one way. It's just, here's a big challenge, and you need to use every available tool in the toolbox to address it.

And that's where the interdisciplinary spirit comes from. It really comes from the definition of, well, here's some big problems to solve, and here's where science and technology, writ large, can play a role.

Go do it.

I'm Noelle Selin. I'm a professor in MIT's Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, and also in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences.

Sara Seager

Professor

MIT Department of Physics

MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences

MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics

“Working Together”

One thing I love about MIT is even a crazy idea is always a yes. When I first came to MIT, I wanted to build a tiny space telescope that had to point about a hundred times better than anything in its mass category. The tiny telescope became ASTERIA, and was developed here at MIT and Draper Lab, and eventually built and implemented at JPL by my former MIT students.

I incubated my project ASTERIA in a class, and the undergraduate students worked on it along with graduate student technical mentors. After the class was finished and we had a kind of preliminary design to work with, we brought Draper Lab in to help us with the very technical challenge. Some graduate students worked on the project and included parts of the project in their PhD thesis, and a handful of these students went on to work at NASA JPL.

Eventually, ASTERIA was launched in 2017 as cargo to the International Space Station, and lasted for two years. And the same students who had developed the project got to be the leaders on the project.

I'm Sarah Seager, professor of planetary science, physics, and aeronautical and astronautical engineering at MIT.

DREAMING BIG

Lisa Barsotti

Principal Research Scientist

MIT LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory)

“Dreaming Big”

I work on instrumentation for gravitational wave detectors.

Where I was when the first detection happened… It's not very glamorous, but I was, you know, I just woke up and at that time I was leading the group for the LIGO scientific collaborations which manages the run, the observing run. And a colleague that was working in Europe sent an email saying our detection pipeline saw this very clean signal – was this a hardware injection?

So, hardware injections are some tests that we do end to end to our system. So we intentionally inject a signal. Like, we move the mirror, like gravitational waves would do, to make sure that everything works.

Until the night before, I was, you know, working and trying to support some of the people at the sites to make a hardware injection work.

So, I was a hundred percent sure that that was not a hardware injection, just because we didn't yet have the capabilities to produce them. When he sent this email, we were like, okay, now this is something really big.

My name is Lisa Barsotti, I'm a principal research scientist in the LIGO group at MIT.

Martha Gray

Professor

Institute for Medical Engineering and Sciences

Electrical Engineering Department

Research Lab for Electronics

MIT Innovation Initiative

“Dreaming Big”

You know, it's a really fascinating journey I've had and what brought me to MIT in the first place. I learned about this Harvard/MIT program where I could be an engineer and apply those engineering skills to medicine, and be in the same academic unit with people training to be physicians. And my gut said, this is really exciting. I've got to try it.

So about 10 years ago I founded MIT linQ. Fundamentally it's about helping individuals who aspire to advance human health in some way using their ingenuity, to help foster that aspiration and make it a reality.

The people that are doing the creative process of generating an idea and then executing on that idea – it takes some fearlessness. It takes some willingness to actually ask questions and accept that you don't know, in order to try to do something that both is new and will make a difference. That is inspirational, right? Aspirational and inspirational.

My name is Martha Gray. I have many affiliations at MIT. I'm part of the Institute for Medical Engineering and Sciences, Electrical Engineering department, Research Lab for Electronics, and MIT Innovation Initiative.

Nergis Mavalvala

Dean of the School of Science

Professor

MIT Department of Physics

MIT LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory)

“Dreaming Big”

I think my own journey into science began with this question of where do we come from? But then, my own journey on sort of the path to being a researcher I think started in college. I just loved this idea that you were trying to answer a question. Me, a lowly undergraduate, was trying to answer a question that no one knew the answer to. And just maybe, just maybe, I would find that answer. And that to me was just amazing.

In the case of LIGO, these first detections of gravitational waves are just opening the window into the universe. And now, the thing that I hope for most is that we will have the wisdom to recognize when we've seen something completely crazy and outside of our imaginations, and that in time our instruments will get better and better.

Good enough that ultimately, we might see gravitational waves from the very earliest moments of the birth of our universe. And then we might eventually answer that question of where do we come from?

My name is Nergis Mavalvala, and I am an experimental physicist, I'm a professor of physics, and I'm currently serving as the Dean of the School of Science at MIT.

Sara Seager

Professor

MIT Department of Physics

MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences

MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics

“Dreaming Big”

MIT is a place for big dreams. If we can conceive of something, no matter how incredible, as long as it's backed up by physics and buildable, sometime in our lifetime, it's worth pursuing.

It's very, very challenging to observe a planet atmosphere. It's like the skin of an onion on an onion, next to, or in front of, a big, bright, massive star. Starshade is a giant, specially-shaped screen, tens of meters in diameter, shaped like a flower with many giant petals, if you will. And starshade has to formation fly with the space telescope at tens of thousands of kilometers distance, and lineup just so, so starshade can block out the starlight so that only planet light enters the telescope.

I would love to see us discover a true Earth twin, a rocky planet orbiting a Sun-like star, a planet with evidence for water oceans, with a thin atmosphere and possibly even signs of life, by way of oxygen or another gas that shouldn't be there.

It's possible.

I'm Sarah Seager, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Yang Shao-Horn

Professor

MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering

MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering

“Dreaming Big”

I work in the area of electrochemical energy storage to develop mitigating solutions for climate change.

I think I was always curious. I always wanted to learn more and learn different things, but I was not good with grades and I was not good at memorization. But I think I was maybe naturally, innately, good at deductive reasoning. I chose the research topic of lithium-ion batteries back in the nineties. And that was really at the beginning, right after Sony commercialized lithium-ion batteries.

And I chose the topic because I just never heard of it. And so that was something I was curious about and I was eager to learn. And then really through graduate school or graduate research, I really find research is fascinating because everything's open-ended, right? So, it's almost like putting puzzles together, and you can define the paths of pursuit and, no matter what you do, there's something interesting waiting for you.

My name is Yang Shao-Horn. I'm JR East Professor of Engineering at MIT.

GAINING PERSPECTIVE

Carlos Castro-Gonzalez

Co-Founder and CEO

Leuko Labs, Inc.

“Gaining Perspective”

There is a saying that it takes a village to make anything happen. So that was very much the case in our journey as well.

I used to be a postdoc at the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT, and I am currently the co-founder and CEO of Leuko Labs, Inc. We are a medical device startup that came out of our laboratory research.

So, we had the support of many different, I guess entrepreneurial, programs within MIT. I had no idea that I could be an entrepreneur. I never thought that I would follow this path.

So that was very exciting to me because the main reason why I started doing biomedical engineering was because I found like doing applications in healthcare particularly motivating. But as a PhD, I was maybe a little bit, when I finished, I was a little bit frustrated maybe, because I did my research and I published some good papers, but at the end of the day, I wasn't completely sure whether those papers were really going to make any difference, other than, you know, get academic citations and obviously advance the field. But, you know, maybe you will see the impact, like 30 years down the line or somebody will pick it up and use it, I don't know. So, I thought that this was a much more direct route to really achieve that impact. And that was, particularly motivating to me and why I ended up doing this.

My name is Carlos Castro-Gonzalez. I am currently the co-founder and CEO of Leuko Labs, Inc.

David Shoemaker

Senior Research Scientist

MIT LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory)

“Gaining Perspective”

I've been working in this domain of gravitational wave detection – really instrumentation has been my focus – for my entire career and at MIT continuously since 1989.

It was clear from the very beginning that this project is going to take decades. One of the things that I will always remember from our efforts to get initial LIGO going, was being up at the Hanford observatory with Nergis, and we were both trying to get a piece of electronics working.

It was a serial interface, RS-232 interface, that was used to communicate some instructions to a module to tell it what state to go into. And she and I were both cross-legged on the floor with an oscilloscope and a DVM and this piece of equipment, and we were trying to understand how it worked. And a filmmaker came by and took a look at us and said, I can't believe that this is how you get this experiment done, but it really was how you got the experiment done. You just sit down with somebody, work on a problem until it's solved, and move on.

This is big science, in the sense that it costs a lot of money, that the instruments are kilometers in scale, but most significantly because there's so many different skills that are required, so many different perspectives that can feed into making success.

I'm David Shoemaker, I'm a senior research scientist at MIT.

Eric Verploegen

Research Engineer

MIT D-Lab

“Gaining Perspective”

Having a background in material science and specifically in the energy sector, I became interested in evaporative cooling because of the simplicity of the technology, and the ability for it to have impact on people living in poverty.

The beauty of clay pot coolers is that they're simple to make. They can be made with local available materials in countries like Mali, and you don't have to make them in a super precise way. Evaporative cooling has a lot of potential to improve the shelf life of fruits and vegetables by lowering the temperature and increasing the humidity where they're stored.

One really important example of collaboration in this project is how Kadidia Nienta, a clay potter from the Mopti region of Mali, has contributed a ton of really important ideas and guidance to this project. Originally, we were thinking to focus on training entrepreneurs like her. She said that we also needed to train end-users in order to generate demand, so that she would have someone to sell to.

One of the really important ways that D-Lab engages with our partners around the world is really ensuring that we see everyone as having knowledge that's worthwhile. So, this is like truly my favorite project ever.

My name is Eric Verploegen. I'm a research engineer at MIT D-Lab.

Nergis Mavalvala

Dean of the School of Science

Professor

MIT Department of Physics

MIT LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory)

“Gaining Perspective”

Progress is not linear. In the case of LIGO, I think a few things happened that took Einstein's prediction of gravitational waves, and suddenly catapulted it to being of sufficient interest that university groups around the planet started to invest in doing it. So Ray Weiss is an interesting story, too, right? Part of the way in which he thought about interferometers as a way of detecting gravitational waves, was because he came from an atomic physics background. He had this idea that lasers are useful for making very precise measurements. So, I kind of feel like every story of discovery will be slightly different, but it always has a few tipping points where something important happened in the history of the field that suddenly made it take off.

But you know, as the Dean of Science, you have to know the science of all the departments represented in the school, right? And so I kind of feel like I'm back in college, I'm learning things I haven't ever learned or learned and forgot, and I love that part.

My name is Nergis Mavalvala, and I am an experimental physicist, I'm a professor of physics, and I'm currently serving as the Dean of the School of Science at MIT.

Yang Shao-Horn

Professor

MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering

MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering

“Gaining Perspective”

I work to develop mitigating solutions for climate change in the area of electrochemical energy storage.

One of the ongoing projects is where we bring computational scientists, machine learning, AI, organic chemists, battery researchers, so engineers, together to discover the next generation of electrolyte solutions for batteries. And in the beginning, we can hardly understand each other because we are all typically, you know, localized in our field with all this terminology.

And this is where I think it’s really in this open environment at MIT where colleagues are always very open-minded to learn, to teach, and have the perspective to look at a problem, not only from their traditional discipline point of view. They can actually go seek the solutions.

And I would say for climate change, we're looking at net zero by 2050, and zero carbon for the electricity sector by 2035.

We can do it.

My name is Yang Shao-Horn. I'm JR East Professor of Engineering at MIT.