Alumni/ae

Profs. Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson PhD '89 have been awarded the 2024 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for their work explaining the gaps in prosperity between nations and advancing our understanding of inequality, reports Jeanna Smialek for The New York Times. “Reducing the huge differences in income between countries is one of our times’ greatest challenges,” said Jakob Svensson, chairman of the economics prize committee. Thanks to the economists’ “groundbreaking research,” he said, “we have a much deeper understanding of the root causes of why countries fail or succeed.” Acemoglu reacted to winning the prize, noting that: “You dream of having a good career, but this is over and on top of that.” 

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Victor Ambros '75, PhD '79 and Gary Ruvkun for the discovery of microRNA, “a tiny class of RNA molecules that play a crucial role in determining how organisms mature and function – and how they sometimes malfunction,” reports Teddy Rosenbluth and Derrick Bryson Taylor for The New York Times. Ambros and Ruvkun “had been postdoctoral fellows at the same time at Massachusetts Institute of Technology,” they explain . “As they studied C. elegans, they at first felt a smidgen of friendly competition as they each started their own labs in the Boston area, Dr. Ambros said.”

Victor Ambros '75, PhD '79 and Gary Ruvkun have won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of microRNAs, report Mark Johnson and Lizette Ortega for The Washington Post. “Ambros and Ruvkunhad worked together as postdoctoral researchers in the lab of Nobel laureate and MIT Professor Robert Horvitz. “What the microRNAs really end up revealing for us is a way that parts of our genome can communicate with other parts of the genome,” says Ambros. “The significance of this discovery of microRNAs is that it allowed us to be aware of a very complex and nuanced layer of regulation whereby genes in our cells talk to each other.”

Victor Ambros ‘75, PhD ‘79 and Gary Ruvkun have won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for “their groundbreaking work on how genes behave,” reports Patrick Smith for NBC News. Ambros and Ruvkun, who worked as postdocs in the lab of Professor H. Robert Horvitz in the late 1980s, discovered how microRNA molecules play a key role in gene regulation. "The pair sought to explore how nerve cells and muscle cells, for example, have very different characteristics despite having the same genetic information," writes Smith.

Wired reporter Parker Hall spotlights Lila Snyder SM '96, PhD '98 and her impact as CEO of Bose. Snyder  "helped turn a rickety start in the wireless earbud and Bluetooth speaker space into some of the sleekest, best-sounding models on the market," explains Hall. "In a world where management consultants and tech executives are known for stripping companies for parts and raising prices, Snyder and a slimmed-down Bose have maintained the brand’s noise-canceling superiority in the face of stiff competition from Apple, Sony, and others.”

Yamilée Toussaint '08 has founded STEM From Dance – a dance program that combines STEM education and the performing arts as part of an effort to make STEM fields more accessible and engaging. The program currently works with girls of color in cities around the country. “I believe that the solution to some of the world’s most pressing problems relies on these girls being in the room because they have a different set of life experiences,” says Toussaint. “They’re creative, they’re intellectual, they’re curious, they’re artistic, and they’re going to bring a different set of ideas to the table, so we must make sure that they are included.”

Seonghoon Woo PhD '15, Jongwon Choi PhD '17, Young Suk Jo SM '13, PhD '16, and Hyunho Kim SM '14, PhD '18 have co-founded Amogy – a startup company that is using ammonia produced by renewable energy as a carbon-free way to fuel a tugboat, report Jennifer McDermott and Michael Hill for The Associated Press. “Without solving the problem, it’s not going to be possible to make the planet sustainable,” says Woo. “I don’t think this is the problem of the next generation. This is a really big problem for our generation.”

Postdoctoral research Wenxuan Jia PhD '24 and colleagues at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) have developed a way to reduce the impact of quantum noise by squeezing the laser light used in the detectors, enabling scientists to double the number of gravitational waves they can find, reports Karmela Padavic-Callaghan for New Scientist. “We realized that quantum noise will be limiting us a long time ago,” says Jia. “It’s not just a fancy [quantum] thing to demonstrate, it’s something that really affects the actual detector.” 

Research Scientist Josh Bendavid PhD '13 and his colleagues have “produced a new value for the W boson mass,” a "fundamental particle that is crucial for processes like nuclear decay and setting the mass of the Higgs boson,” reports Alex Wilkins for New Scientist. The result is in line with predictions made in the standard model of particle physics. “The standard model survives for the moment,” said Bendavid of the findings. 

The Boston Globe’s Angelina Parrillo interviews Jasmina Aganovic ’09 about her beauty company Arcaea, which reconstructs data from extinct flowers to produce fragrances. “I viewed fragrance as this remarkable emotional storytelling category and people don’t view science as being associated with creativity, emotion, or storytelling,” Aganovic says. “I think that that’s very far from the truth.”

Dr. Mark Price PhD '01 an orthopedic surgeon who augmented his military honors with Super Bowl rings in 2017 and 2019 and a World Series ring in 2018 through his sports medicine duties with the Patriots and Red Sox, has died at age 52, reports Bryan Marquard for The Boston Globe. Awarded a Bronze Star for service in Afghanistan, Price was an integral part of the Red Sox and Patriots organizations, with owner Robert Kraft commenting he “was a blessing to have on our staff for nearly a decade and we’re going to miss him dearly.”

Alum Brian Ketcham, “an engineer and influential environmentalist who promoted mass transit and favored bridge tolls, bus lanes, limits on parking and other curbs on vehicular traffic,” has died at age 85, reports Sam Roberts for The New York Times. As a long-time city official and consultant, “no one in New York City or anywhere accomplished as much as Brian in reducing the societal harms of urban auto use,” says former city environmental analyst Charles Komanoff.

During an interview with Lisa Mullins of WBUR’s Here & Now, graduate student Emelie Eldracher '22 shares the excitement she felt after winning the 2024 Paralympics silver medal win in the mixed-four crew and delves into her research at MIT focused on developing a low-cost system to gather biomechanical feedback for athletes and help improve their performance. “I really hope to contribute to the sphere and hopefully we can use AI in a way that influences athletes to help them get that one-hundredth of a second, as our coach likes to say,” Eldracher explains. “Because if you add up all the one-hundredths of a second in a race, that could be the difference between a medal or not.” 

Glenn Loury PhD '67 is a guest on the Boston Globe podcast “Say More” with Shirley Leung, discussing his memoir “Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative.” Now a Brown economics professor, Loury had an unusual and difficult life for an academic, saying he wrote the memoir because “I owed it to myself to tell the real story, and to rely on the generosity of the reader to see past the darkest and ugliest to the hopefully decent and honest human being grappling with his life.”

Since meeting as undergraduates at MIT, graduate student Ashwin Sah '20 and Mehtaab Sawhney PhD '24 have “written a mind-boggling 57 math proofs together, many of them profound advances in various fields,” writes Leila Sloman for Quanta Magazine. Now, in what is being praised as a “huge achievement” and “phenomenally impressive” by fellow mathematicians, Sah and Sawhney have “obtained a long-sought improvement on an estimate of how big sets of integers can get before they must contain sequences of evenly spaced numbers."