Arthur Jemison II MCP ’94 speaks with Boston Globe correspondent Adrian Walker about his appointment as the City of Boston’s chief planner. “I think you’ll see more ambitious ideas being proposed and implemented in more parts of the city,” Jemison said of his goals. “And I think you’ll see more people feeling like they understand how to participate in the dialogue about development.”
Bruce Anderson ’73, founder and CEO of MIT spinout 247 Solar, speaks with Bloomberg Baystate Business Hour host Janet Wu about the power of solar energy and growing climate concerns for the future. “We are facing dire circumstances here,” says Anderson. “We have no clue what the climate’s tipping point is where it all of sudden goes in a direction that we cannot recover from, no matter how much carbon we remove from the air."
MIT President L. Rafael Reif and Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry discussed the urgency of addressing climate change during the Climate Grand Challenges Showcase event, reports Chris Lisinski for the State House News Service. “Climate change has been called a ‘super wicked’ problem. In Boston, that might sound like a local way of saying ‘really hard,’ but this phrase is actually a technical term,” Reif said. “It describes any enormously complex societal problem that has no single right answer and no clear finish line as well as multiple stakeholders with conflicting priorities and no central authority empowered to solve it.”
James Arthur Jemison II M.C.P ’94 has been appointed Boston’s first planning chief by Mayor Michelle Wu, reports Saraya Wintersmith for GBH. "I'm incredibly grateful to Mayor Wu for the opportunity to bring my expertise and passion for equitable development back to Boston,” Jemison said. “I am honored to have the opportunity to work with Bostonians to reform the development process and create the kind of growth that reflects our values.”
MIT announced five projects "targeting the world's toughest climate riddles" that were selected following a rigorous two-year competition, reports Benjamin Kail for Boston Business Journal. “Climate Grand Challenges represents a whole-of-MIT drive to develop game-changing advances to confront the escalating climate crisis, in time to make a difference,” says President L. Rafael Reif.
Neri Oxman, founder and former director of the Mediated Matter group at the MIT Media Lab, speaks with Wall Street Journal about how the work she started at MIT can impact the future of urban architecture. “As part of our research at MIT, we 3D-printed glass augmented with synthetically engineered microorganisms to produce energy [from the sun],” said Oxman. “This allows us to develop solar-harnessing glass façades that can act as a skin for pre-existing buildings.”
Arun Saigal SB ’13, MEng ’13 and WeiHua Li ’BS ’14 MA ’15 co-founded Thunkable, an online platform developed to make building mobile apps easier, writes Ingrid Lunden for TechCrunch. “Saigal said that its initial focus was on consumers, which in itself is another big concept of the moment, that of the creator economy and users – not professional publishers and others – creating the content that the mass market is consuming,” writes Lunden.
A new report co-authored by Lecturer Eric Robsky Huntley has found that tenants in predominately nonwhite neighborhoods are nearly twice as likely to face eviction than renters in mostly white areas, reports Chris Lisinski for WBUR. “Our takeaway here is that we really have to act now,” says Huntley. “Ensuring an equitable recovery is a critical first step toward securing safe and stable homes for all.”
With the announcement of the new MIT Morningside Academy for Design, MIT is looking to create “a hub of resources for the next generation of designers, integrating areas of study such as engineering and architecture in the process,” reports Dana Gerber for The Boston Globe. “This is really going to give us a platform to connect with the world around problems that communities are facing,” explained Prof. John Ochsendorf, who will serve as the academy’s founding director.
Lecturer Eric Robsky Huntley has found that eviction rates for communities of color in Massachusetts were nearly twice as high as eviction rates for predominately white neighborhoods, reports Katie Johnson for The Boston Globe. “In neighborhoods made up predominately of people of color, landlords filed 30 evictions for every 1,000 renters, while majority-white neighborhoods had 18.5 evictions filed for every 1,000 renters,” writes Johnson.
A new analysis by lecturer Eric Robsky Huntley finds that communities of color were hit harder by new eviction filings than white residents after Massachusetts’s eviction moratorium ended in October 2020, reports Adam Reilly for GBH. “Huntley also found that there were nearly twice as many eviction filings per renter in predominately nonwhite communities as in predominantly white ones – and, in certain municipalities, the disparity was even greater,” writes Reilly.
MIT has announced the creation of a new multidisciplinary center, called Morningside Academy for Design, which is intended to serve as a “focal point for design research, education, and entrepreneurship,” reports Michael T. Nietzel for Forbes.
MIT has announced the establishment of the MIT Morningside Academy for Design, reports Susan H. Greenberg for Inside Higher Ed. The new center “aims to foster collaboration and innovation across academic disciplines – including engineering, science, management, computing, architecture, urban planning and the arts – to address such pressing global issues as climate change, public health, transportation, and civic engagement,” writes Greenberg.
Bloomberg News spotlights how MIT researchers have developed a new material that works like a microphone, converting sounds into vibrations and then electrical signals. “The development means the possibility of clothes that act as hearing aids, clothes that answer phone calls, and garments that track heart and breathing rates,” writes Bloomberg News.
Researchers from MIT and the Rhode Island School of Design have developed a wearable fabric microphone that can detect and transmit soundwaves and convert them into electrical signals, reports Shi En Kim for Popular Science. “Computers are going to really become fabrics," says Prof. Yoel Fink. "We’re getting very close.”