Bloomberg reporters Simon Kennedy and Chris Anstey write that Kazuo Ueda PhD ’80, who is expected to be named the Bank of Japan’s next governor, is one of the many prominent students of former MIT Prof. Stanley Fischer PhD ’69. The emphasis at MIT was “economics about the real world," said Fischer. “The faculty makes the place but the students also make the place. One of the reasons you go to MIT is because you have the best students in the world.”
Alumnus Kazuo Ueda has been nominated to lead Japan’s central bank, reports Toru Fujioka for Bloomberg.
Xander, an MIT spinoff founded by Alex Westner SM ’98, has developed glasses that generate real-time captions of conversations for the wearer, reports Aaron Pressman for The Boston Globe. “The glasses have their own processor and front-facing microphones and are designed to convert conversational speech into text captions,” writes Pressman.
Kyle Greenberg PhD ’15, a professor at the United States Military Academy at West Point, and Nancy Qian PhD ’05, a professor at Northwestern University, speak with NPR hosts Jeff Guo and Amanda Aronczyk about the papers that helped them fall in love with economics. Greenberg notes his inspiration was a paper by Prof. Joshua Angrist examining how serving in the military impacts future earnings.
Graduate student Karenna Groff ‘22 has been named NCAA Woman of the Year, an honor presented to a graduating female student-athlete who has distinguished herself in athletics, academics, leadership and community service, reports Matt Doherty for The Boston Globe. “I think the award is the first recognition I’ve gotten that looks into who I am and who I want to be,” says Groff. “I think it will help me frame the direction towards what I want the next chapter in my life to look like.”
Boston Metal, an MIT startup, has developed a way to generate steel without releasing carbon dioxide emissions, reports Catherine Clifford for CNBC. The company “plans to begin construction of a demonstration steel plant in 2024 and a commercial sized plant in 2026,” says Boston Metal CEO Tadeu Carneiro.
MIT startup Boston Metal is developing technology to decarbonize steel production, reports Ed Davey for the Associated Press. “Boston Metal said it can eliminate all carbon dioxide from its steel production and hopes to ramp up production to millions of tons by 2026,” writes Davey.
Graduate student Karenna Groff ’22 speaks with CBS Boston reporter Mike UVA about her academic and athletic accomplishments. “Groff become just the sixth Division III student-athlete ever to be recognized as the NCAA Woman of the Year,” says Uva. “An honor that celebrates excellence both on and off the field for all divisions.”
Natalia Rodriguez ’09 speaks with Diverse Issues in Higher Education reporter Pearl Stewart about her work as a biomedical engineer focused on community healthcare. “I work to bring health technologies from the lab to the people, and I also work to bring the needs, the priorities and the strengths of communities back to engineers so they know who they’re designing for,” Rodriguez explains.
MIT spinoff E Ink, an ePaper technology company, has developed new color technology to provided stronger color displays for their devices, reports Harri Weber for TechCrunch. “Eventually, E Ink aims to build a magazine reading experience that’s good enough to win over even the most demanding publishers,” E Ink U.S. business lead Timothy O’Malley ’93 tells TechCrunch.
Deepak Dugar MBA ’13, PhD ’13 founded Visolis, a biomanufacturing company developing carbon-negative, high-performance materials, reports John Cumbers for Forbes. “We use biology to make platform molecules. And then we use chemistry to turn them into a lot of different products. Because of this unique combination, we have an advantage both in terms of market as well as cost of technology development,” says Dugar.
Boston Magazine reporter Kyle Paoletta spotlights Arthur Jemison MCP ’94, the Chief of Planning and Director of the Boston Planning and Development Agency. “People making the decision every day to be together and to grow together: I’ve always wanted to be in the middle of that,” says Jemison. “Building that bridge.”
On a recent episode of “Shark Tank,” Amrita Saigal '10 scored a $250,000 investment in her company Kudos, which is focused on making disposable diapers from sustainable and natural materials, reports Megan Sauer for CNBC. Saigal, who also founded a company called Saathi that makes sanitary napkins from banana peel fibers, notes she was inspired by seeing “just how much plastic we were putting into sanitary napkins and diapers.”
Kevin Hu SB ’13, SM ’15, PhD ’19 co-founded Metaplane, a startup aimed at providing users with data analytics-focused tools, reports Kyle Wiggers for TechCrunch. “Metaplane monitors data using anomaly detection models trained primarily on historical metadata. The monitors try to account for seasonality, trends and feedback from customers, Hu says, to minimize alert fatigue, “writes Wiggers.
A review led Prof. Marzyeh Ghassemi has found that a major issue in health-related machine learning models “is the relative scarcity of publicly available data sets in medicine,” reports Emily Sohn for Nature.