Using his background in physics, Aaron Leanhardt PhD '03 redesigned the modern baseball bat to “improve the frequency and quality of contact, based on where the batters most frequently hit the ball,” reports Alex Speier for The Boston Globe.
USA Today reporter Steve Gardner spotlights the “torpedo bat” – a baseball bat developed by Aaron Leanhardt PhD '03. The new design moves “more of the wood toward the sweet spot of the bat, where players try to make contact and where the bat will produce optimal results,” explains Gardner.
Prof. David Pritchard speaks with NBC News reporter David K. Li about his former student Aaron Leanhardt PhD '03 and his work developing the “torpedo” baseball bat. “It just takes some outsiders, like Aaron, who has a Ph.D. from MIT and really understands physics and knows what's going on, to be the sort of guy who drives something under the radar and see if it works," says Pritchard.
Aaron Leanhardt PhD '03 has designed a new baseball bat, dubbed the torpedo bat, in which wood is moved “lower down the barrel after the label, and shapes the end a little like a bowling pin,” reports the Associated Press. “At the end of the day it’s about the batter not the bat,” says Leanhardt. “It’s about the hitter and their hitting coaches. I’m happy to always help those guys get a little bit better but ultimately it’s up to them to put good swings and grind it out every day. So, credit to those guys.”
Aaron Leanhardt PhD '03 has developed a new baseball bat that has “moved the fattest part from the end to the area where most contact is made,” reports Steve Henson for The Los Angeles Times.
Aaron Leanhardt PhD '03 speaks with The Athletic reporter Brendan Kuty about his work developing a new “torpedo-like” baseball bat. The bats “are custom-made to player preferences and are designed so that the densest part of the bat is where that particular hitter most often makes contact with the baseball,” writes Kuty. Says Leanhardt of the bat’s design: “It’s just about making the bat as heavy and as fat as possible in the area where you’re trying to do damage on the baseball.”
After suffering a concussion during her sophomore year, senior Emiko Pope, a mechanical engineering major and midfielder on the MIT women's soccer team, was inspired to study the effectiveness of concussion headbands, reports Cathy Cecere for Mechanical Engineering Magazine. “After collecting data simulating concussions and testing multiple concussion headbands, my data revealed that certain concussion headbands can reduce the force of direct impact by up to 80 percent,” says Pope.
The MIT women’s cross-country team won its first national championship, securing the Division 3 title, reports Amin Touri for The Boston Globe. “Junior Kate Sanderson of West Hartford finished 16th, leading five Engineers to score in the top 40, the only team to do so as depth delivered for MIT,” writes Touri. “Rujuta Sane, Christina Crow, Liv Girand, and Lexi Fernandez rounded out the scoring for MIT, but Heather Jensen and Gillian Roeder were just seconds back as all seven Engineers finished within a span of 33.4 seconds.”
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.”
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.”
Graduate student Emelie Eldracher '22 has won a silver medal in the Mixed PR3 Coxed Four A Final at the 2024 Paris Paralympics, reports Brendan Kurie for The Boston Globe. “It was the third consecutive silver medal for the United States in the event, but this year’s boat was filled with first-time medalists,” explains Kurie.
Graduate student Emelie Eldracher '22 will complete in the Paris Paralympics as a coxswain in the PR3 Mixed Coxed Four race, reports Henry Dinh-Price, Alexa Podalsky and Aiden Sprole for The Boston Globe. “While studying at MIT, Eldracher designed the first AI-powered heated jacket,” they write.
Lecturer Shira Springer speaks with Bianca Beltrán of NBC 10 Boston about the rise of women in Olympic sports, highlighting how this is the first Olympics to achieve gender parity. "That's a tremendous accomplishment for all involved. It's a tremendous milestone," says Springer . "But you also have to be cognizant of how far women have come and how far they still have to go."
With skateboarding the sixth fastest-growing sport in the U.S. from 2019 to 2023, Bloomberg reporter Alexandra Lange highlights how Alexis Sablone MA ’16, coach of the 2024 Olympic Women’s U.S. Skateboarding Team, a three-time X-Games gold medalist, and graduate of MIT’s Department of Architecture, recently “designed a set of sculptural skate elements for a former tennis court, formalizing and aestheticizing what had been an informal spot” at a park in Montclair, New Jersey.
MIT graduate student Jerry Lu and University of Virginia Prof. Ken Ono are developing new techniques to help swimmers competing at the Paris Olympics glide through the water even faster, reports Davide Castelvecchi for Nature. Lu and Ono created 3D models of the athletes and then suggested “tiny changes that can shave off precious fractions of a second at every stroke."