Course One Newsletter Spring/Summer 2020

COURSE ONE Newsletter Spring/Summer 2020

Responding to COVID-19

Associate Professor Lydia Bourouiba Researching fluid dynamics and disease transmission

CEE Research Faculty focus on understanding and fighting the virus Page 4 MIT Online How faculty and students successfully completed the spring semester Page 9 Quantitative Ecology Empirical and mathematical ecologists explore and restore the world’s ecosystems Page 11

COURSE ONE Newsletter Spring/Summer 2020

Department Head and Jerry McAfee (1940) Professor in Engineering Markus Buehler, PhD Administrative Officer Jarina Shrestha Communications Officer Zachary Goodale, MA Writer and Editor Maria Iacobo, MS Design Ink Design, Inc. Contact us at: one@mit.edu 2

Inside cover photo: Multiphase Turbulent Gas Cloud From a Human Sneeze Courtesy of Bourouiba Research Group Front cover: Professor Lydia Bourouiba Cover photo: Gretchen Ertl

Table of Contents

Letter from Markus

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CEE News and Events

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• Global pandemic: what CEE faculty are working on to address COVID-19

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• Teaching in a Pandemic: how CEE adjusted to remote learning

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• MathWorks Awards Fellowships

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• Honors for Student Research

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• Quantitative Ecology: Biennial meeting shares cutting-edge research

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• CEE’s 9th annual Research Speed Dating event

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• mini-UROPs offer first year students opportunities to explore CEE

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• Rachel Housego – Grad student invites citizens to share research data

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Faculty Research

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Faculty Recognition

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Alumni Profiles

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• Marybeth Martello ’96 SM

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• Amber Crabbe ’00 SB

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• Annette Lee ’93 SB

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• John Dracup ’60 SM

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Traveling Research Environmental eXperiences 2020

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A Note From Markus

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Dear CEE Alumni and Friends: I write, first and foremost, to send my best wishes for your overall well-being during this continuously challenging time. Despite current circumstances, I am pleased to share with you the latest edition of our newsletter, Course One. I invite you to browse this newsletter to learn about the recent happenings within MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

Although the Spring semester brought with it new and different challenges, I could not be prouder of our students, postdocs, faculty, and staff.

In fact, our department displayed an amazing resiliency this semester; in an extremely short span of time, we were able to make the difficult transition from in-person activities on campus and move to virtual learning and research. This has been an extremely trying time for everyone on campus, as well as our larger MIT community, both personally and professionally. However, at this moment, I have never been prouder to be part of the MIT community, and I know that together, we will all pull through this, and be stronger for it in the end.

I was especially heartened to see how they have all come together, and found new ways to collaborate and support each other – at all levels, faculty, staff, and students. In my almost 15 years at MIT, I have never seen a similar collaborative spirit and mutual support than in the past months.

Our CEE colleagues have produced some truly amazing work related to COVID-19. Professor Lydia Bourouiba’s research into respiratory emissions has improved our understanding of how diseases travel and spread. Also, Professor Ruben Juanes’ work estimates that improved handwashing rates by travelers passing through just ten of the world’s leading airports could significantly reduce the spread of infectious diseases. My own research has been focusing on the nanomechanics of the structural and vibrational properties of key proteins in the virus.

Professor Elfatih Eltahir has led a special subject course with leading COVID-19 experts, to discuss the nexus of environmental and public health with our students. It has been a tremendous success, and involved faculty and students from across the Institute.

Earlier this semester we held our 9th annual research speed dating event. This important event shows off the tremendous diversity within our department, and provides our students the opportunity to talk with one another about their work and identify areas for collaboration to help solve complex problems.

Also, you can learn about the work of Rachel Housego, a doctoral student in the joint MIT-WHOI program. Rachel recently created an app to help citizens track flooding

patterns along North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Rachel will use the data captured to better understand the role that groundwater plays in the flooding process.

Finally, it has been a tremendous year also for faculty promotions, and I am pleased to announce that Professor Desiree Plata and Professor Serguei Saavedra have been promoted to Associate Professor without Tenure. Professor Plata is an environmental chemist who focuses on environmental impact of materials and process design, offering a new way of thinking in environmental engineering. You can learn more about her work in the newsletter, especially how she is creatively balancing her research, teaching and family life during the pandemic. Professor Saavedra is a theoretical ecologist whose work is changing the way we think about species dynamics and how environmental change is impacting these. Finally, please also join me in congratulating Professor Lydia Bourouiba on receiving Tenure. Her work on understanding the micromechanical details on fluid fragmentation in droplets, sheets and films is transforming the breakup of fluids in various environmental and infrastructural settings, and building on our long trajectory of leadership in fluid mechanics in CEE. This edition of the newsletter also includes alumni profiles, which are truly inspiring for all of us here at MIT. We are tremendously excited to learn where their MIT education has taken them. You all make us proud! We hope to hear from you as well, as we strive to highlight a diverse representation of our alumni and friends. I thank you all for your continued support of MIT and the department and MIT. We need a little bit of MIT out in the world more than ever!

In closing, I wish you and your loved ones all the best in this difficult situation. Please know that we are thinking of you and are excited for a time when we can all celebrate on campus together, once again.

Sincerely,

Markus J. Buehler Department Head, MIT Civil and Environmental Engineering McAfee Professor of Engineering

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Feature

COVID-19: the new science on social distancing When COVID-19 made its way into the collective awareness of the United States populace, federal and state governments were ill-prepared for the disruption. The World Health Organization (WHO), the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and federal and state governments urged people to keep at least six feet of space between themselves and others to slow the spread of the disease.

CEE News and Events

This heretofore little-known behavior — social distancing — began to reshape life worldwide.

Associate Professor Lydia Bourouiba has been studying the sciences of fluid dynamics and epidemiology for several years and, as nations around the world were in the grip of the pandemic, published her most recent research in The Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA). The research discussed a new paradigm showing the recommended social distance guidelines based on early 20th century science needed to be updated in light of the underlying physics of exhalations, revealed and modelled in her laboratory, and its implications. Public health experts around the world took notice.

“Scientists were focused on tuberculosis transmission research conducted in the 1930s,” says Bourouiba. “They introduced a dichotomy categorizing respiratory droplets into ‘large’ versus ‘small’ droplets, and ‘droplets’ versus ‘airborne’ routes of transmission. A droplet is categorized into one group or the other – large vs small – using an arbitrary size based on a static physical picture of isolated droplet emissions.”

They determined “large drops” travel no more than 1-2 meters.

The “small drops” evaporate, presumably staying in the air; if these “small drops” were to travel, they would not go beyond

“ Outside of healthcare settings, for most asymptomatic lowrisk individuals who are not showing signs of illness, the six to seven feet designation could be sufficient, but it all depends on their environment — indoors or outdoors — and the level of protection they are wearing.”

– Professor Lydia Bourouiba

a few centimeters, even if emitted at high-speed. Only a background airflow or venting would be able to move them in indoor spaces.

By contrast, Bourouiba’s research examines how dynamics — information about space and time — and fluid dynamics prevail in a number of physical processes, such as exhalations, sneezes and coughs. Using high-speed imaging, optical techniques, and other innovative approaches, Bourouiba demonstrated coughs and sneezes are primarily made of and shaped by a multiphase high-momentum turbulent gas cloud that traps and carries all sizes of droplets further than what would be possible without the cloud. The locally moist and warm atmosphere within this gas turbulent cloud also allows the pathogen-laden droplets to evade evaporation for much longer than would occur with isolated droplets emitted without the cloud.

According to Bourouiba, even when maximum containment policies are enforced, the rapid international spread of COVID-19 suggests using arbitrary droplet size cutoffs and the false dichotomy between “droplet” versus “aerosol” routes of transmission does not accurately reflect what actually occurs with respiratory emissions of all types. Depending on specific 4

atmospheric conditions — as well as the physical attributes of a given individual — a particular exhalation, cough or sneeze carrying disease could potentially travel much farther than six feet. Bourouiba’s work suggests that sneezes, the highest momentum respiratory emission, have the potential to travel as far as 26 feet. Coughs have the potential to reach about 16-19 feet, and regular exhalations or vocalizations can emit mucosalivary droplets to about six feet.

Bourouiba says the current guidelines used by health officials do not account for the correct physical picture of the exhalations, leading to potentially hazardous gaps in the protection against the spread of the disease. Those gaps, she says, could potentially impact the safety of healthcare workers where many symptomatic patients may be present in a confined space.

The direct implication of this research is the need to require the highest protection for healthcare workers in those settings, even when they are not in close proximity to patients or are farther than six feet away from a patient.

“Outside of healthcare settings, for most asymptomatic low-risk individuals who are not showing signs of illness, the six to seven feet designation could be sufficient, but it all depends on their environment — indoors or outdoors — and the level of protection they are wearing,” says Bourouiba.

The Fluid Dynamics of Disease Transmission Laboratory is accelerating its work to fill key gaps about biophysical processes, epidemiology and modeling of risk and infection control and implications for new innovations to mitigate and manage risk in a range of environments. This work, in turn, will inform health agencies and policy makers to keep people safe in all settings. The reception for Bourouiba’s work has already been noted by the WHO, CDC and other health and infection control groups and agencies around the world, who have updated their recommendations. The general public is now encouraged to wear masks based, in part, on her research. This research continues to generate discussion and open new research directions and technological innovations for management and adaptation for a range of workplace settings, clinical settings and return-to-work considerations.

By Zachary Goodale

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Feature

Sound science: how music may help defeat coronavirus Professor Markus Buehler designs new proteins with the help of artificial intelligence. Using this method, he recently translated the spike protein of the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) into sound to visualize its vibrational properties – a new approach that could help in finding ways to stop the virus.

resulting piece is a form of counterpoint music, in which notes are played against notes. Like a symphony, the musical patterns reflect the protein’s intersecting geometry realized by materializing its genetic code.”

The musical composition is available on Soundcloud.

CEE News and Events

APL Bioengineering recently published a paper by Buehler that describes his method of using machine learning to create new proteins, a process incorporating music and sound vibration. The goal is to create new biological materials for sustainable, nontoxic applications. As the coronavirus outbreak was beginning, he used the sonification method to render the spike protein of the virus into a two-hour classical music composition. According to Buehler, this helps scientists better understand something they cannot see.

“Our brains are great at processing sound. In one sweep, our ears pick up all of its hierarchical features: pitch, timbre, volume, melody, rhythm, and chords,” says Buehler. “One would need a high-powered microscope to see the equivalent detail in an image, and we could never see it all at once.”

Typically, sound is made from vibrating a material, like a guitar string, and music is made by arranging sounds in hierarchical patterns. AI can be used to combine these concepts, and use molecular vibrations and neural networks to construct new musical forms. He and his team have been working on methods to turn protein structures into audible representations, and translate these representations into new materials, such as this one.

“The coronavirus protein spike contains three protein chains folded into an intriguing pattern” says Buehler. “The spike protein’s amino acid sequence, its secondary structure patterns and its intricate three-dimensional folds are all featured. The

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“The virus has an uncanny ability to deceive and exploit the host for its own multiplication,” says Buehler. “Its genome hijacks the host cell’s protein manufacturing machinery and forces it to replicate the viral genome and produce viral proteins to make new viruses. Through music, we can see the SARS-CoV-2 spike from a new angle and appreciate the urgent need to learn the language of proteins.”

But this new discovery has happened in the place where science and art meet, and scientists aren’t the only ones who have been impressed by Buehler’s creation. One Hungarian ballet dancer even choreographed a dance routine to the melody and has challenged others to do so as well.

Translating proteins into sound gives scientists another tool to understand and design proteins.

“Even a small mutation can limit or enhance the pathogenic power of SARS-CoV-2. Through sonification, we can also compare the biochemical processes of its spike protein with previous coronaviruses, such as SARS or MERS,” adds Buehler.

Buehler’s hope is that this new way of thinking about the virus may provide a new path of discovery for researchers and assist in the rapid development of a cure, by applying his AI method that can use the musical coding of the protein language to design new proteins that nature has not yet invented.

By Zachary Goodale

Feature

Hand hygiene and travel: moving forward with new guidelines

Research published this past December by Professor Ruben Juanes and others identified how vital hand washing is, in just ten airports around the world, to mitigating disease transmission.

Using well-established epidemiological models in the context of worldwide air transportation, the researchers found that — at any given time — only 20 percent of travelers have clean hands.

The team was taken aback by this statistic.

“We concluded our paper by saying there is no way to put into place incentives that would get us to a 30 or 40 percent increase,” says Juanes. “Then the pandemic took over and, well, the incentive is here now.”

Juanes’s new research is taking some of this same data, together with additional long-range travel and human mobility data, and applying it specifically to COVID-19. With people around the world sheltering in place and personal hygiene top of mind, the researchers are investigating how these two behaviors will impact the spread of COVID-19 as society is beginning to scale back personal mobility restrictions and air travel.

restrictions and school and business closures, or gradually lift social-distancing measures and the use of face masks? Or, is it a combination of the two?

“I think this is a very interesting question and one that is very pressing. You could say all of this is evolving faster than we can do the research. And, that is true. But I would argue, that this is going to be the new normal so coming up with a better understanding of how these strategies will combine [for the safest outcomes] is going to be useful either for this [viral] wave or the next wave.

In addition to developing safety guidelines, another upside for Juanes’s research is it is providing research opportunities (via MIT’s UROP program) for several undergraduates over the summer. Although unable to conduct their work on campus, the students will learn modeling techniques and may help contribute to the newest standards in public health policies.

By Maria Iacobo

“The question we are trying to address is what combination of personal hygiene and mobility restrictions work best to mitigate the spread of the virus,” says Juanes. “Is it better to limit travel 7

Feature

Designing low-cost ventilators for the COVID-19 crisis Sam Raymond ’20 PhD may never have the opportunity to work on research into the prediction and modeling of brain trauma that brought him to Stanford University as a bioengineering postdoc.

He’s not complaining.

CEE News and Events

Just a few months after defending his thesis, Raymond arrived in the Bay Area, took a few days to buy a car and rent a place to live and began his new role. Mid-way through his first day, the university shut down and the state enacted a shelter-in-place order to slow the spread of the global pandemic.

Raymond met his boss, David Camarillo, the principle investigator for Stanford’s CamLab, and other team members over a Zoom meeting later in the week. A competition had been released by the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) to design and build a prototype for a rapid-response, low-cost ventilator within one week. Camarillo asked the group if “anyone wanted to take this on.”

Listed in the DoD’s instructions and criteria for the prototype was the following statement: “This is an impossible task.” For Raymond, that pronouncement was the “spark.”

“MIT helped me dispel the idea that something can be impossible. There’s just really difficult stuff and you shouldn’t be scared of trying to conquer those things.

“I was the only one to stand up and say, ‘We have to do this,’” says Raymond. “After that, David and I sprang into action working 14-hour days for three weeks straight. Even now, after our team has swelled to over 50, we are working day and night.”

It was a punishing schedule. Pulmonologists, respiratory technicians, regulatory experts and a design engineering firm Camarillo had worked with in the past joined the effort and the team created what they believe will be used successfully in hospitals around the world: a streamlined ventilator that can be built quickly and at low-cost.

The team is filing for emergency-use approval from the Food and Drug Administration. They anticipate having the ventilators shipped around the U.S. by the end of the summer, with shipping worldwide after that.

Most surprising – even to Raymond – is taking on work that he had never done before (from mechanical design, prototyping, regulatory analysis, project management, animal testing, firmware development, prototype testing to funding application), in an environment completely unfamiliar and without access to laboratories or buildings. And, all this while navigating life, alone, in a global pandemic.

“What has saved me is what MIT-life taught me about managing my mental health and the time management skills required during extremely intense and stressful situations,” says Raymond.

“Being able to manage the intensity of classes, teaching and research at the same time and at that level of extreme performance felt exactly the same. Actually, [the ventilator development] felt maybe 20 percent more intense, but that’s not a huge lift in reality. Keeping mentally healthy has been incredibly difficult and MIT gave me the opportunity to become healthy and tougher in that regard.”

By Maria Iacobo

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Teaching in a Pandemic: how CEE adjusted to remote learning

Zoe Lallas’s remote workspace

As with many colleges and universities across the country, the decision to suspend nonessential activity on MIT’s campus was not an easy one. For CEE in particular, this was a difficult challenge due to the amount of hands-on work and lab research being conducted within the department – but not an insurmountable one.

For Professor Colette Heald, teaching through Zoom was strange at first, but she commended her students for staying engaged and contributing to discussions in class. There had been debate among faculty as to whether it was better to video lectures or host live ones, but Heald felt the live classes were far more impactful.

“My experience was that everyone showed up. I think they really valued having the schedule to be honest, it was a sign of normalcy to be in the class together. And I also felt it was much more interesting and engaging to teach that way when they were all online listening.”

For undergrad, Zoe Lallas, a big challenge was getting used to the awkwardness of communicating via digital platforms.

“The whole lack of physical indicators from classmates and professors makes it so starkly obvious that there is a barrier between you and the people you’re talking to in class,” says Lallas. It wasn’t all bad though; Lallas, a senior who finished her undergraduate degree this semester and was a member of the sailing team, says she missed seeing her friends and interacting with people every day, but that the opportunity to spend time with her family and work on personal projects became something she appreciated.

“My self-motivation came back so strongly when I came home because there is less external value to things and is more about what I would gain from doing something or how I feel about occupying my time,” says Lallas.

Professor Elfatih Eltahir also saw an opportunity, and developed a six-week special subject focussed on COVID-19, each lecture delivered by a different CEE faculty member.

“I recognized that we as a department, had a lot to offer in this domain,” says Eltahir. “The results have been very successful; a lot of students were thirsty to learn about the topic.” Students could join the class via Zoom for weekly sessions to learn about COVID-19 as it related to fluid dynamics, structural materials, environmental health and more. Eltahir believes that this exposure may actually help to focus career ambitions for some.

“Many of these students are in a stage of deciding which future track they take. If for example, they listen to a lecture on disease modeling or environmental health, it may be a defining moment for them in choosing their future careers.”

Despite the inherent difficulties of shutting down experimental laboratories, Professor Jesse Kroll says that even this was done relatively painlessly.

“When we got the word from MIT that we needed to ramp-down research except for the really essential stuff, we were sort of expecting that already,” says Kroll, who teaches in and manages the facilities at MIT’s Parsons Laboratory. According to Kroll, the shutdown process went smoothly and was completed within a few days. Although plans for new experiments were postponed, Kroll says it allowed students to take deeper dives into complex data collected by the lab over the years.

“It forced us to slow down a little bit and look more in depth at the data we already had. Now a number of people in the group are learning some pretty interesting things from that data,” Kroll says.

With the semester coming to a close, most are excitedly looking forward to activity ramping back up on campus, but with a sense that, whatever the challenges, they are ready.

By Zachary Goodale

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Grad Students Awarded MathWorks Engineering Fellowships

CEE News and Events Bauyrzhan Primkulov

Isabelle Su

Two CEE graduate students were awarded engineering fellowships from MathWorks, a leading developer of mathematical computing software for the 2019-20 academic year. The fellows are doctoral candidates Bauyrzhan Primkulov and Isabelle Su. They are using two of MathWorks’s software to advance their research: MATLAB, a programming environment for algorithm development, data analysis, visualization and numeric computation, or Simulink, a block diagram environment for simulation and model-based design of multidomain and embedded engineering systems.

“It has been a wonderful journey so far. I am very happy and grateful to receive the fellowship. Although I am on the receiving end of it, the credit belongs to many mentors and collaborators I’ve had along the way.”

Bauyrzhan builds computational models and explores how fluids interact in porous materials.

“Spiders are nature’s structural engineers,” says Su. “We can learn from spiders, silk and spiderwebs. Spiders are an evolutionary success, having lived for so long and in so many environments. Spiderwebs are well-built structures. The broader goal of this research is to take inspiration from spiders and to design better materials and structures.”

“In particular, I study the formation of patterns during fluid-fluid displacement,” says Bauyrzhan. “This is a fascinating subject, but it is also a complex one. The difficulty of the problem often forces us to work at the intersection of mathematical formulation, experiments, and computation. When two of the three happen to work out, you gain some confidence in your understanding of the physics behind the problem.”

Bauyrzhan is in his second year at MIT. Originally from Kazakhstan, Bauyrzhan immigrated to Canada before arriving in Cambridge.

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Isabelle Su, from Paris and in her sixth year at MIT, builds computational models with MATLAB to understand the mechanical properties of spider webs. Su’s research includes imaging, mechanics, construction and sonification of 3-dimensional spider webs.

By Maria Iacobo

Quantitative Ecology Meeting 2020 Biannual convergence of empirical and mathematical ecologists flourishes amid exploring and restoring the world’s ecosystems

Explore the offerings at any major university and they likely have a department or unit classified as “ecology.” MIT may be the only exception. But, despite the lack of a unifying department, there are pockets of researchers working – directly or indirectly – on ecology throughout the INSTITUTE.

“The first meeting was a call to whomever at MIT was working on ecology as an opportunity to present their work and connect with each other,” says Saavedra. “And it was also a way for other universities working on these issues to connect with MIT.” The meeting has since grown from about 50 participants, primarily from MIT and Boston-area universities in 2016, to more than 130 participants across the United States and Canada at this year’s meeting. Co-organized with Jeff Gore, a biophysicist

“It’s growing and this is telling,” says Saavedra of the increased participation.

The field of ecology itself has grown. Initially an observational practice, ecologists today are focused on rigorously quantifying the interactions between species and their environments. These relationships shape the dynamics of these species; some are diminishing while others are increasing and all while our environment continues to change. Thus, in the face of larger and more frequent environmental variations, the field of quantitative ecology is of central importance for establishing successful strategies for sustaining ecosystem services that depend on biodiversity, such as: nutrient cycling, water purification, soil formation, CO2 sequestration, and human health.

CEE News and Events

Arriving at CEE in 2016, Professor Serguei Saavedra founded CEE’s Structural Ecology Group, which takes a systematic and probabilistic approach to study the dynamics of ecological systems under environmental change. Seeking to coalesce the disparate groups studying ecology across MIT, he organized the bi-annual Quantitative Ecology Meeting.

on MIT’s physics faculty, the event itself has evolved from a series of faculty lectures; 2020’s event offered four plenary sessions followed by a research poster session with students, grad students, postdocs and faculty sharing their work.

11 Photos: Maria Iacobo

Student Research Snapshots The 2020 Quantitative Ecology Meeting hosted a poster session for the first time with 18 student researchers from across the country sharing their work.

Here, three students explain their research.

Pengjuan Zu, postdoc fellow, Structural Ecology Group (PI: Serguei Saavedra) Poster: Information arms race explains plant-herbivore chemical communication in ecological communities

CEE News and Events

I am interested in how plants ‘talk’ to insect herbivores by using ‘chemical language’ in ecological communities. The ‘chemical language’ in this study is the volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that make up leaf scent. By integrating information theory with ecological and evolutionary theories, we proposed a novel information arms-race theory where plants aim to decrease the information carried by each VOC in order to confuse herbivores, whereas herbivores aim to increase the information in order to target their host plants. This conflicting, optimization, information arms-race process between plants and herbivores lead to a stable information structure of plant VOCs that successfully resembled the information structure from our field data. Understanding the communication between plants and herbivores has the potential to unveil central mechanisms driving the maintenance of the diversity in systems characterized by information processes, such as biological, social, or even financial systems.

Lucas Medeiros, PhD student, Structural Ecology Group (advisor: Serguei Saavedra) Poster: Assessing the predictability of nonlinear dynamics under smooth parameter changes

to make an accurate forecast of the population dynamics of different species. In this study, led by Simone Cenci (PhD ‘19), we developed a predictability measure based on nonlinear time series analysis to estimate how predictable an ecosystem is at different points in time—even when we do not know the true population dynamics model. We validated our method using a 20-year time series tracking the population size of algae, barnacle, and mussel species in a rocky shore. Our results provide a framework to detect points in time when an ecosystem forecast is more likely to be accurate. These findings may help to manage ecosystems under environmental change. This study was published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface (https://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2019.0627).

Martina Dal Bello, Postdoc, Ecologist Physics of Living Systems, Gore Lab Poster: Modest increase of microbial diversity with the number of added limiting resources

Microbial communities are ubiquitous and play important roles for ecosystems and humans. They are also extremely diverse, but the processes underlying such diversity are still largely unknown. For example, we might expect that if just one resource were available, microbial species would compete for it and eventually only one would survive. What several experiments have shown instead is that even one single carbon source can support communities with dozens of species. Indeed, byproducts of the metabolism of microbes can leak into the surrounding environment and become a food source for other microbes, thereby promoting the coexistence of several species.

My research aims at getting a better understanding of the relationship between the diversity of microbial communities and the availability of resources, i.e. the number of supplied resources and their characteristics.

Story and photos by Maria Iacobo

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To efficiently manage ecosystems under changing environments, it is key to know at which points in time we are more likely

Student Research Honors

Josh Moss

Chuliang Song

Josh Moss awarded AGU Outstanding Student Presentation Award The American Geophysical Union (AGU) awarded graduate student Josh Moss the Outstanding Student Presentation Award for the Fall 2019 meeting for his presentation titled Detailed Comparison of Chamber Measurements and Mechanistic Predictions to Improve Understanding of SOA Formation Mechanism. The Outstanding Student Presentation Awards (OSPAs) are awarded to promote, recognize and reward undergraduate, Master’s and PhD students for quality research in the geophysical sciences. Each year, sections recruit judges to assess and score student oral and poster presentations at meetings.

Chuliang Song honored by American Society of Naturalists The American Society of Naturalists has recognized doctoral student Chuliang Song, as the winner of The American Naturalist 2020 Student Paper Award. The paper, entitled “On the consequences of the interdependence of stabilizing and equalizing mechanisms,” was one of 70 eligible submissions published in 2019. This is one of the most important recognitions for students working in ecology. Song works in the Structural Ecology Group.

Postdoc Daniel J. Short Gianotti has article published

by American Geophysical Union In his work, Terrestrial and Moisture Drainage in a Warmer Climate, Gianotti used satellite observations of soil moisture and expected increase in air temperature to determine how evaporation and soil drainage (to groundwater recharge and rivers/streamflow) will change in a warmer climate. Gianotti is part of the Entekhabi Research Group. Read the full article on the AGU website: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/ doi/10.1029/2019GL086498

Augustine Zvinavashe

Augustine Zvinavashe ’16 selected as a 2020-2021 Legatum Fellow Legatum Fellows are chosen based on their abilities to embrace the broader mission of the Legatum Center, demonstrate principled entrepreneurial leadership, and act as catalysts for positive change across the MIT and developing world ecosystems. Zvinavashe ’16 is a graduate student working in Professor Marelli’s lab. The Center says this year’s candidate pool was the strongest since the fellowship’s inception.

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Speed Dating for the Research Crowd 9th Annual CEE Event Builds Bridges, Catalyzes Connections

CEE News and Events

Photos: Gretchen Ertl

Researchers in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) develop solutions to some of the world’s most complex problems. Connecting researchers within such a broad engineering discipline, one that includes ecological systems, resources and sustainability, structures and design, and more, remains a perennial challenge. Catalyzing connections among researchers is the goal of “CEE Research Speed Dating: Engineering Solutions in Ever-Changing Environments and Infrastructures,” held February 10th at the Samberg Conference Center.

As CEE department head Professor Markus Buehler explains, “our department is very diverse and talking to each other helps us generate ideas for collaborations, and how we can combine our strengths to solve complex problems. This event enables those connections and conversations to happen, and we also back it up with seed funding that provides support for graduate students to collaborate across multiple faculty labs.” The 9th annual Research Speed Dating included research presentations, a faculty panel on “Computing for a Resilient Society,” a poster presentation with research from undergraduate students, graduate students, and postdocs and a networking reception

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Research Presentations: Small Solutions with Big Impact The event kicked off with nine research presentations from CEE faculty, postdocs, and graduate students. Researchers shared their current work which addresses societal challenges around climate change, agriculture, construction, river restoration, energy, and more. Assistant Professor of CEE Desiree Plata described how innovation can often bring good and bad consequences, solving existing challenges while sometimes causing new, unanticipated ones. She explained that engineers need to look beyond economic metrics and modify their design approaches to “predict environmental and material performance.

We need to change how we innovate.” Postdoc Isabella Schalko explained how wood (logs) can be used for river restoration and how wood also creates habitat for fish.

Assistant Professor of CEE Josephine Carstensen asked “whether we can use less concrete in reinforced concrete structures?” Her research suggests that we can, using topology optimization, by as much as 25%. Why is it important to use less concrete? “An essential component in concrete is cement and cement is like the glue that binds all the sand and stones that make up concrete together,” said Carstensen. “The global cement production currently accounts for 8% of the annual CO2 emissions. Today, concrete is the most used construction material in the world and it’s projected that by 2050 the global concrete production will be almost double of what it is now.”

During the short break between the research presentations and the panel discussion, the “connections and conversations” Prof.

Buehler hoped for actually took place. Grad student Souha EL Mousadik, who had just finished presenting her research on “drop impacts close to edges of complex geometry: sheet dynamics” walked across the conference room and began chatting about research methods with grad student Augustine Zvinavashe, who had earlier presented on “a bio-inspired approach to engineer the seed micro-environment.” The two CEE researchers work at neighboring labs, but as EL Mousadik

explained, “sometimes you don’t know all the ongoing research that a lab neighbor is working on, so this is a good opportunity to learn about their research.” Zvinavashe nodded his head, adding, “it’s so good for us to share what we’re doing and get feedback.

Other researchers, or even a member of the public, might have a question or an observation that can really help.”

Grad student Andrew F. Feldman, whose presentation focused on “satellite-observed patterns of impact of rainfall on plants” also chatted during the break. “I enjoy learning about other researcher’s innovative approaches to the different problems they’re working on,” he said.

Assistant Professor of CEE Benedetto Marelli, when asked what graduate students and postdocs gain from presenting at Research Speed Dating, said, “the goal here is for researchers to have fun and to see new research techniques, to gain insights from what other researchers are doing. The presenters also benefit from having to communicate their research to a broader audience,” forcing them to distill it down to the essentials in just minutes.

Faculty Panel: “Computing for a Resilient Society” The faculty panel, moderated by CEE Professor John R. Williams, examined the opportunities and challenges created by computing. “Before Tim Berners-Lee and the web, moving data was tough,” said Williams. “Now we’re all hyper-connected and producing data constantly, There’s a good side to this, and a challenging side.”

Panelist Dean Dan Huttenlocher, the inaugural dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, said that “computing is now tied to every discipline, from the sciences to the humanities.”

In his new role, Huttenlocher faces a big question: “How do we think about computing cutting across all these disciplines, as well as across business and society?” He said he’ll be focusing on three big issues in his new role: (1) “dealing with a more dynamic world in core computing” (2) “dealing with issues of computing across the disciplines,” and (3) “the societal and ethical responsibilities of computing.”

“ It’s so good for us to share what we’re doing and get feedback. Other researchers or a member of the public might have a question or observation that can really help.”

— Augustine Zvinavashe

Assistant Professor of CEE Cathy Wu, who researches machine learning and transportation systems, said the increasing speed at which we introduce new technologies and business models is outpacing traditional approaches to designing good transportation systems. CEE Professor Andrew Whittle agreed, explaining that “the biggest challenges for cities is largely jurisdictional. How do we get different departments talking to each other?”

Computation alone, whether machine learning or the Internet of Things, won’t provide all the solutions to complex challenges, said Whittle.

Assistant Professor of CEE Tami Lieberman raised another limitation for computing: “In biological data, there’s a problem dealing with “messy” data. You have missing data and unreliable data points, and so we need systems that can automatically quality-control data.”

H.M. King Bhumibol Professor Dennis McLaughlin pivoted to decision-making, which can also be messy. “Many decisions involve trade-offs, and they’re difficult to deal with computationally. We need models that give us the flexibility to deal with multiple objectives and uncertainty.” Professor in CEE Ali Jadbabaie raised an additional complication: “group decision-making is often inefficient.” How then can computation help generate complex decisions that must be made collectively?

The panel next discussed collective solutions to climate change adaptation, with all six panelists and the moderator agreeing that climate adaptation represents a great opportunity for future collaborations between the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and CEE.

The Conversations Continue . . .

CEE department head Professor Buehler closed the proceedings by thanking attendees and encouraging them to continue their research conversations at the poster session and catered networking reception held after the panel, as well as into the future. Professor Wu expressed her intention to do just that., “I learned a lot today and this event sparked a lot of connections,” she said. “For instance, I’m going to be reaching out to Professor Carstensen about her research on reducing the use of concrete.

It was great to have so many diverse perspectives in one room.”

Many of the conversations and collaborations initiated at this year’s event will likely continue into next year: the 10th annual Research Speed Dating is scheduled for February 12, 2021.

By Chuck Leddy 15

2020 CEE Mini-UROPs Unique to MIT, the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) offers undergraduates hands-on research experience with faculty in every department across the Institute. These semester- or year-long UROPS provide data building skills, a chance to learn laboratory techniques and insight into how researchers tackle real-world problems.

Every January, over MIT’s Individual Activities Period (IAP), CEE offers first-year students a “mini-UROP” experience: hands-on research with a graduate student or postdoc who will mentor them for four weeks. The opportunity also provides exposure to Course One’s diverse research. This year, 19 students in the Class of 2023 were matched with mentors in a variety of ongoing research. The students shared their work with CEE faculty and others in a poster session at the end of January to sum up their work and experience.

CEE News and Events 16

mini-UROP Snapshots Research: Technologies for the destruction of N-nitrosodimethylamine “Our research in the Plata lab is aimed towards having sustainable engineered solutions to complex environmental problems associated with industrially relevant processes such as water treatment. One aspect of our work involves developing analytical tools and remediation technologies for variety of hazardous pollutants such as N-nitrosodimethylamine (NDMA) - a pervasive contaminant in drinking water,” says Glen de Vera, a postdoc. “Many conventional treatment methods are not effective against NDMA. The Plata Lab has developed a lab-scale electrochemical carbon nanotube filter technology that has potential for wide-range of applications. I’m working with Hannah to develop a method to detect NDMA and evaluate the effectiveness of the electrochemical filter to remove NDMA in drinking waters. This is a great opportunity to learn the whole process of scientific investigation such as idea conception, study design, experimentation, data analysis and science communication.”

Research: Context-specific assessment of cooling pavement strategies on Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect Under the mentorship of Hessam Azarijafari, a postdoc studying urban sustainability, Enrique Casillas and Catherine Lu worked on a project that studies the impact of albedo (the measure of the diffuse reflection of light) in Boston. Rapid and sustained urbanization has given rise to the urban heat island (UHI) effect, a phenomenon by which cities experience higher temperatures than their less-urban surroundings. UHI increases the frequency of heat waves and contributes to climate change by heightening building energy consumption.

“In this research, we examined how city layouts can predict the severity of the urban heat island,” says Azarijafari. “We also leveraged the building energy consumption linked to the hourly electricity generation to make a real-time estimation of the UHI effect on the cooling and heating demands on buildings.”

Enrique Casillas

Hannah Spillman

“I took this mini-UROP to explore more of what CEE has to offer. I had no idea what CEE was before I came to MIT. I’ve always been passionate about the environment. I feel like Course One, with the environmental program in it, would really help me achieve my goals of helping to save the world and conduct more research to increase the knowledge the general public has about the environment.”

“I analyzed how building sheet (span-to-depth ratio) in a certain neighborhood would impact the effectiveness of an increase of pavement albedo. I measured if the span-to-depth ratio would either increase the building energy demand due to an increase in albedo or decrease the building energy demand due to a decrease in albedo. What I found was that for cooling demand, as you decrease the span-to-depth ration, you get benefits from increasing the pavement albedo. On the other hand, for heating demands, it seems to be the opposite, although not as defined.

I learned how to work with a model, a new software – Rhino – and how to configure different ratios. I had to figure out how to extract the data from the data I obtained. It involved many different programs to find what worked best.”

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Catherine Lu

Research: 3-Dimensional spider web scanning, modeling and deep learning Doctoral candidate Isabelle Su builds computational models with MATLAB to understand the mechanical properties of spider webs. Her research includes imaging, mechanics, construction and sonification of 3-dimensional spider webs.

Ian Lee

“We looked at how albedo affects building energy demands.

Typically, lower albedo will absorb the radiation. During warmer seasons it will re-emit the radiation which leads to forcing buildings to use more air- conditioning or cooling and, consequently creating more greenhouse gas emissions. We explored increasing the reflectivity of the surface and whether this will decrease greenhouse gas emissions. We found that aged concrete is more optimal than new concrete or new asphalt in Boston, specifically. However, during cold days, the reflectance contributes to less energy consumption for heating the buildings.

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“Spiders can do so much beyond their small bodies. I learned that spiders can be very, very interesting. Spiders can make webs in, for them, what would be earthquake conditions, and they can still create amazing geometrics. In this mini-UROP, I learned you can’t underestimate what the potential of a small thing can be. Anything can have an impact and create amazing things and push scientific progress forward. In my work, these geometrics can be applied to create more durable and earthquake-proof buildings and bridges. The fact that we can get inspired from small organisms, like spiders, and apply it to bigger things, like buildings…that to me is the most amazing thing. I was afraid of laser before this mini-UROP, but I was trained on how to use them and how to be safe with lasers.”

“I studied spiderweb structure. We built frames for spiders and then let them build webs in these controlled environments. Then we scanned their webs to analyze the structure and understand what makes spiderwebs so architecturally strong. It was really cool to work with biological organisms and to see how evolution has optimized architectural designs and see how we can learn from nature’s designs. The mini-UROP is an excellent opportunity to get involved in research where they know you are a first-year student and you’re coming onboard with very little experience.

It’s set up to get you up to speed quickly. It’s also nice to get involved in research during IAP, a time when I don’t have to be focused on other responsibilities and classes. I could focus just on this and understand the work before committing to it.”

Lucy Ward Research: Environmental risks associated with hydraulic fracturing is poorly defined due to limited contamination database High-density hydraulic fracturing (HDHF) has relied on the use of hundreds of anthropogenic organic chemicals near residential areas for a decade. Chemical exposure levels to residences from potentially contaminated drinking water and groundwater vulnerabilities have not been established. Having conducted the largest groundwater sampling and characterization in eastern Ohio to date, this research taught students how to measure and analyze organic contaminants (e.g. benzene) under the mentorship of post doc Boya Xiong.

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“There are a number of things I want Haley and Juliette to learn from this experience,” says Xiong. Most important, I want them to understand what civil and environmental engineering’s responsibilities are for research and to our society. As an environmental engineer, how do we use science and engineering principles and tools to examine the environmental impact by new oil and gas development and how can we design industrial practice that is more responsible without damaging the environment. And I want to show them how cool and important research is in achieving this goal.”

Juliette Liao

Before coming to MIT, I didn’t know anything about CEE. I decided to take this mini-UROP because I saw some of the opportunities you could do in CEE but I wasn’t sure I wanted to fully commit to it. I think getting to be in a program that is made for you to take a dive into research without having the pressure of a full UROP is really helpful. I got to see what the research is like and what a job could potentially look like in CEE. I think you gain a lot of real-world experience from this.”

Research: Cities for People, Not For Cars: Urban Accessibility: Designing Transport Systems to Prioritize Access This research project by grad student Aziz Alhassan looks at factors that make cities more walkable and transit friendly using geographic information systems, coding in Python and 3-Dimensional software. After identifying factors that promote walkability and easily accessed public transit, the goal of the research is to design a case study for a new neighborhood.

Karissa Wenger

“I think the mini-UROP was really foundational since I don’t have a lot of knowledge of what everyone studies in Course One. This opportunity was so valuable. It was only a month and I learned so much. I got a lot of experience with data analysis and Excel and I learned about the environmental engineering going on in Course One. I ran some statistical tests too. To have a mentor tell you more about a potential major and what kind of opportunities are here is was valuable for me. The amount of work we were given was definitely manageable and helped me learn about the research gradually.”

Haley Nakamura

“I’ve never done any research before. I learned how to use new software, such as Grasshopper and Rhino, which is something you need to know when you study systems engineering.

I found that the distance people have to walk, the cost of public transportation and various street layouts are factors for walkability. People are more likely to walk if they just have to walk one straight road rather than make a lot of turns. Essentially, I created a street network that would make people more likely to use public transportation in their area. I also learned what research was, which was kind of fun!

Story and photos by Maria Iacobo

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Community Science at Work MIT-WHOI student seeks to mitigate coastal flooding “We plan to share both the model and the flooding reports we receive with the town managers,” said Housego. “We hope this helps identify regions in their communities where there are recurrent flooding issues and help recognize the role groundwater driven processes may play in flooding in their community. Understanding the cause of the flooding may help inform future management strategies.”

Now, Housego is researching how the interactions between groundwater, waves and rainfall contribute to flooding on the Outer Banks. The work is part of her thesis while earning her Civil and Environmental Engineering and Applied Ocean Science and Engineering degrees through the MIT-Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Joint Program (MIT-WHOI). She says she was exposed to the research of CEE Professors Heidi Nepf and Charles Harvey as an undergrad and was eager to continue her studies with them at MIT. “I chose MIT because of the scope of the research you’re exposed to and opportunity to collaborate with MIT faculty,” says Housego. “To be a part an institution where a lot of the theories in fluid mechanics originated was a big draw for me. The faculty here are doing really impressive lab work and field studies and the communities that you have to draw from at MIT are great for the interdisciplinary research I wanted to do.”

During her first three years in the program, Housego worked with both Professors Nepf and Harvey in CEE’s Parsons Laboratory for Environmental Science and Engineering. Now at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Housego has developed an innovative approach to manage the flooding hazards on the Outer Banks. Housego developed an app, iFlood, allowing local residents to gather data and load it onto the app. The data – photographs, location, dates, times, survey questions – helps Housego colleagues in Woods Hole evaluate and improve models for flooding.

“There will be about 50 scientists leveraging their research efforts,” says Housego. “I’m very excited to see how different collaborations develop. I think there’s a lot of value in bringing together scientists from all of these different academic communities” In the meantime, she is using the data garnered from her app to work on her thesis, and thriving in the joint program. She says having access to a lot of different technology at WHOI has allowed her to learn new skills that she wouldn’t otherwise have been exposed to in Cambridge. One of the “cool things” she’s done at Woods Hole is take an Ocean Instrumentations course which included setting out on water, learning to fly a drone and use GPS location and camera angle data to create 3-D reconstructions of underwater bed forms.

CEE News and Events

It was a “happy accident” that allowed Rachel Housego, an MIT doctoral student, the opportunity to return to North Carolina’s Outer Banks, the series of barrier islands known worldwide for their open beachfront to the Atlantic Ocean. As an undergrad at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Housego spent a semester in the area studying marine science and an additional six months working on her thesis.

Housego is particularly excited about the opportunity to share her research and participate in a major experiment taking place on the Outer Banks this fall. The During Nearshore Event Experiment (DUNEX) is a collaboration between government agencies and academic institutions whose goal is to improve understanding, predictive capabilities and observational technologies for extreme coastal storm impacts.

“It’s been wonderful to find academic and personal communities in both Cambridge and Woods Hole. At Woods Hole—everyone always has their door open and are receptive to you coming and asking them questions and helping on projects,” says Housego. “We have a strong cohort of students here as well.

Being able to access people and engage with them has been a really positive experience.”

By Maria Iacobo

“We want to determine what combination of precipitation and increased ocean levels will increase the water table above the ground surface,” said Housego. “Sometimes the flooding occurs up to several days after the storm because the bulge of high groundwater continues to move inland after the storm recedes.”

Previous studies have only captured one or two storm events.

The Woods Hole team has four years of continuous data and made measurements during 27 different storms, including 6 hurricanes, with different forcing conditions (offshore wave heights, rain etc.), enabling them to look at some processes not considered in prior studies. The iFlood app became available September 2019. Researchers have received 66 responses to date with 34 from seven storms this past winter providing valuable data to assess whether the analytical model the research team has developed accurately predicts the timing and location of groundwater-driven coastal flooding.

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Faculty Research

Research Highlights

“Polypeptide templating for designer hierarchical materials,” in Nature Communications on January 17. The researchers demonstrated a way of templating the growth of silk that combines molecular control with scalable production. According to Professor Marelli, their research “defined a new rule to ‘grow’ silk materials in ordered hierarchical structures.” Read more here.

Professor Penny Chisholm

Professor Oral Buyukozturk

MIT Institute Professor Penny Chisholm, research scientists Paul Berube and Steven Biller, collaborate on new research published in Cell Professor Penny Chisholm and research scientists Paul Berube and Steven Biller were collaborators on a multidisciplinary research project led by the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences and published in Cell this week. The Bigelow research team analyzed over 12,000 individual microbial genomes to build the Global Ocean Reference Genomes Tropics (GORG-Tropics) database. Surprisingly, every cell they analyzed was genetically unique.

The work demonstrates an amazing amount of biological diversity that defies contemporary definitions of microbial species, illuminates reasons behind challenges in metagenomic studies and offers clues as to how marine microbes may respond to climate change.

“Combined with our existing genomes of Prochlorococcus, many from the same samples used in the generation of the GORG-Tropics database, this new data set will give us a uniquely powerful view of the co-existing microorganisms that might shape the ecology of Prochlorococcus,” Berube said.

Professor Oral Buyukozturk’s paper showcased on NIST’s main page George Macomber Professor Oral Buyukozturk’s paper with research scientist Dr. Kunal Kupwade-Patil and others on water dynamics in cement paste with nano-additives has been showcased on the main page of NIST’s (National Institute of Standards and Technology) webpage. Read the paper here.

Professor Benedetto Marelli

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Professor Benedetto Marelli publishes new research in Nature Communications Professor Marelli and doctoral candidate Hui Sun published new research,

New method may improve ability of scientists to deliver biological payloads in plants In a paper recently published in Advanced Science, Professor Benedetto Marelli and graduate student Yunteng Cao, in collaboration with several others, introduce a new method of delivering biological payloads in plants through the use of microneedles. Microneedles are made of silk-based biomaterials that can be used to deliver nutrients, drugs, genetic materials or other molecules to specific parts of the plant. This new method may also be used to sample plant fluids to assess diseases and metabolic activity and can be used to mitigate epidemic diseases in plants, such as the citrus green crisis, currently threatening a $9 billion industry. Read more here.

New study assessing the predictability of nonlinear dynamics published in Journal of the Royal Society Interface Students in the Structural Ecology Group, Simone Cenci and Lucas Medeiros, developed new mathematical tools for nonlinear systems to identify when the probability of making a prediction error is small or large. Nonlinear systems are in general hard to predict. Any small difference in initial conditions or small external perturbations can lead to big dynamical differences in the long run.

These tools can have broad applications in ecology, physics, finance, and management. The study, “Assessing the predictability of nonlinear dynamics under smooth parameter changes” can be read here. Simone Cenci, PHD ‘19 working is now working as a postdoctoral research associate at Diversified Credit Investment (DCI) in San Francisco; Lucas Medeiros is a PhD candidate in the Structural Ecology Group.

• Prof. David Simchi-Levi predicts impact disruptions on global supply chains In February, Simchi-Levi forecast accurate predictions about what the state of manufacturing would look like in mid-March due to the COVID-19 disruption. Now in this latest MIT News story, he looks to the future again.

Read the article here.

Prof. Yossi Sheffi describes supply • chain landscape in US In the article, Sheffi explains that solutions to the disruption will vary by industry. Read the article here.

Professor Otto Cordero

Professor Cordero has article published in Nature Communications The article, titled “Context-dependent dynamics lead to the assembly of functionally distinct microbial communities” appeared in Nature Communications on March 18. Read the full article on the publication website.

New research reveals the importance of microscale hotspots of dimethylsulfoniopropionate (DMSP) in biogeochemistry.

Recently published research has quantified the way specific marine bacteria process a key chemical called dimethylsulfoniopropionate (DMSP), which is produced in enormous amounts by phytoplankton. This chemical plays a pivotal role in the way sulfur and carbon get consumed by microorganisms in the ocean and released into the atmosphere. The work was reported in the journal Nature Communications, in a paper by MIT graduate student Cherry Gao, and former MIT professor of civil and environmental engineering Roman Stocker (now a professor at ETH Zurich, in Switzerland), in collaboration with several others. Read the full paper here.

Professor David Simchi-Levi

MIT News features CEE professors in pair of supply chain articles related to COVID-19 MIT News examines core supply-chain issues, in terms of affected industries and the timing of unfolding interruptions.

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Coated Seeds May Enable Agriculture on Marginal Land A specialized silk covering could protect seeds from salinity while also providing fertilizer-generating microbes.

Research Highlights 24

Providing seeds with a protective coating that also supplies essential nutrients to the germinating plant could make it possible to grow crops in otherwise unproductive soils, according to new research at MIT.

The findings are being published this week in the journal PNAS, in a paper by graduate students Augustine Zvinavashe ’16 and Hui Sun, postdoc Eugen Lim, and professor of civil and environmental engineering Benedetto Marelli.

A team of engineers has coated seeds with silk that has been treated with a kind of bacteria that naturally produce a nitrogen fertilizer, to help the germinating plants develop. Tests have shown that these seeds can grow successfully in soils that are too salty to allow untreated seeds to develop normally.

The researchers hope this process, which can be applied inexpensively and without the need for specialized equipment, could open up areas of land to farming that are now considered unsuitable for agriculture.

The work grew out of Marelli’s previous research on using silk coatings as a way to extend the shelf life of seeds used as food crops. “When I was doing some research on that, I stumbled on biofertilizers that can be used to increase the amount of nutrients in the soil,” he says. These fertilizers use microbes that live symbiotically with certain plants and convert nitrogen from the air into a form that can be readily taken up by the plants.

Not only does this provide a natural fertilizer to the plant crops, but it avoids problems associated with other fertilizing approaches, he says: “One of the big problems with nitrogen fertilizers is they have a big environmental impact, because they are very energetically demanding to produce.” These artificial fertilizers may also have a negative impact on soil quality, according to Marelli.

Although these nitrogen-fixing bacteria occur naturally in soils around the world, with different local varieties found in different regions, they are very hard to preserve outside of their natural soil environment. But silk can preserve biological material, so Marelli and his team decided to try it out on these nitrogen-fixing bacteria, known as rhizobacteria.

“We came up with the idea to use them in our seed coating, and once the seed was in the soil, they would resuscitate,” he says.

Preliminary tests did not turn out well, however; the bacteria weren’t preserved as well as expected.

That’s when Zvinavashe came up with the idea of adding a particular nutrient to the mix, a kind of sugar known as trehalose, which some organisms use to survive under low-water conditions. The silk, bacteria, and trehalose were all suspended in water, and the researchers simply soaked the seeds in the solution for a few seconds to produce an even coating. Then the seeds were tested at both MIT and a research facility operated by the Mohammed VI Polytechnic University in Ben Guerir, Morocco. “It showed the technique works very well,” Zvinavashe says.

The resulting plants, helped by ongoing fertilizer production by the bacteria, developed in better health than those from untreated seeds and grew successfully in soil from fields that are presently not productive for agriculture, Marelli says.

In practice, such coatings could be applied to the seeds by either dipping or spray coating, the researchers say. Either process can be done at ordinary ambient temperature and pressure.

“The process is fast, easy, and it might be scalable” to allow for larger farms and unskilled growers to make use of it, Zvinavashe says. “The seeds can be simply dip-coated for a few seconds,” producing a coating that is just a few micrometers thick.

The ordinary silk they use “is water soluble, so as soon as it’s exposed to the soil, the bacteria are released,” Marelli says.

But the coating nevertheless provides enough protection and nutrients to allow the seeds to germinate in soil with a salinity level that would ordinarily prevent their normal growth. “We do see plants that grow in soil where otherwise nothing grows,” he says.

These rhizobacteria normally provide fertilizer to legume crops such as common beans and chickpeas, and those have been the focus of the research so far, but it may be possible to adapt

“ One of the big problems with nitrogen fertilizers is they have a big environmental impact, because they are very energetically demanding to produce.”

– Professor Benedetto Marelli them to work with other kinds of crops as well, and that is part of the team’s ongoing research. “There is a big push to extend the use of rhizobacteria to nonlegume crops,” he says. One way to accomplish that might be to modify the DNA of the bacteria, plants, or both, he says, but that may not be necessary.

“Our approach is almost agnostic to the kind of plant and bacteria,” he says, and it may be feasible “to stabilize, encapsulate and deliver [the bacteria] to the soil, so it becomes more benign for germination” of other kinds of plants as well.

Even if limited to legume crops, the method could still make a significant difference to regions with large areas of saline soil.

“Based on the excitement we saw with our collaboration in Morocco,” Marelli says, “this could be very impactful.”

As a next step, the researchers are working on developing new coatings that could not only protect seeds from saline soil, but also make them more resistant to drought, using coatings that absorb water from the soil. Meanwhile, next year they will begin test plantings out in open experimental fields in Morocco; their previous plantings have been done indoors under more controlled conditions.

The research was partly supported by the Université Mohammed VI Polytechnique-MIT Research Program, the Office of Naval Research, and the Office of the Dean for Graduate Fellowship and Research.

By David Chandler/MIT News Office

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Researchers Project Increased Risk of Malaria Transmission with Rising Temperature in East Africa Research Highlights

Study culminates 15 years of investigations on impact of climate change on disease in Africa A new study on disease transmission in Ethiopia, East Africa, completes 15 years of research on the impact of climate change on malaria across Africa by MIT CEE. Taken together, the work

by Professor Elfatih Eltahir and his team provides a guide for designing climate change adaptation strategies and allocation of limited resources to prevent a public health threat from a leading cause of death in Africa.

The Ethiopian Highlands, one of the most heavily populated regions of Africa, will experience warmer conditions over the course of this century leading to a significant increase in malaria outbreaks, according to the new research published in the journal Environmental Research Letters by Noriko Endo PhD ’17, and Professor Eltahir.

“Climate change will warm Ethiopia and malaria will flourish,” says Eltahir. “There is a topographical band of land in which, as climate change warms everything up, the warmer temperature will make the subregion more susceptible for malaria and the situation will be exacerbated because people living in this area do not have enough immunity to this disease.”

Malaria is a disease of temperature-sensitive parasites and is spread by climate-sensitive mosquitoes. With the impact of climate change, the burden of this disease can shift.

Using sophisticated modeling tools including hydrology, researchers in this project identified why malaria is likely to increase in some parts of Africa and decrease in others.

The ideal temperature range for Malaria spans about 5 degrees centered around a daily temperature of about 80 F (27 C). In the Ethiopian Highlands, current temperatures tend to be colder and the region has not had much malaria compared to other regions of Africa. Eltahir’s new research identifies hotspots within the Highlands where projected warming towards the end of the 21st century will bring the temperature into this ideal temperature range and hence significantly increase the risk of malaria transmission.

Eltahir’s research combines a new model of malaria transmission with global forecasts for temperature and rainfall to improve predictions of malaria with climate change. Over the past 15 years, three CEE doctoral students and three postdocs have worked with Eltahir conducting research on this topic.

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The group developed a comprehensive malaria transmission simulator --Hydrology, Entomology, and Malaria Transmission Simulator (HYDREMATS) -- to estimate the impact of climate change on malaria transmission in Africa. The hydrology module

“ We’ve developed enough understanding of climate change impacts on malaria that we can tell you which region of Africa are likely to face higher health hazards than others, as a result of climate change” – Professor Elfatih Eltahir takes in climate information, such as temperature and rainfall, and environment, such as topography and soil type, to simulate the presence of puddles in space and time. The entomology module uses this information for vector breeding sites and the population dynamics of malaria vectors are simulated through vector-to-breeding sites and vector-to-human interactions.

The malaria transmission module simulates malaria parasite development and human immunity, together simulating malaria transmission in a most sophisticated manner.

Eltahir Research Group at MIT, which specializes in researching how climate change will impact water availability, extreme weather patterns and disease transmission at local and regional scales, has produced nearly two dozen papers on the topic.

In 2013, their research demonstrated the impact climate change will have in West Africa, a hot spot for malaria, where temperatures are currently ideal but will rise significantly beyond the ideal range for malaria, and as a result the overall infection rates are unlikely to increase.

“We’ve developed enough understanding of climate change impacts on malaria that we can tell you which region of Africa are likely to face higher health hazards than others, as a result of climate change” said Eltahir. “That should help inform more optimal allocation of resources for adaptation to climate change between different regions and better preparation in local communities of Africa.”

By Maria Iacobo

Why C. difficile infection spreads despite increased sanitation practices

New research underscores infection is not a common hospital transmission New research from MIT suggests the risk of becoming colonized

by Clostridium difficile (C. difficile) increases immediately following gastrointestinal (GI) disturbances that result in diarrhea.

Once widely considered an antibiotic- and hospital-associated pathogen, recent research into C. difficile has shown the infection is more frequently acquired outside of hospitals. Now, a team of researchers has shown that GI disturbances, such as those caused by food poisoning and laxative abuse, trigger susceptibility to colonization by C. difficile, and carriers remain C. difficile-positive for a year or longer.

“Our work helps show why the hospital and antibiotic association of C. difficile infections is an oversimplification of the risks and transmission patterns, and helps reconcile a lot of the observations that have followed the more recent revelation that transmission within hospitals is uncommon,” says David VanInsberghe PhD ‘19, a recent graduate of MIT’s Department of Biology and lead author of the study. “Diarrheal events can trigger long-term Clostridium difficile colonization with recurrent blooms” in Nature Microbiology, published on Feb. 10.

The researchers analyzed human gut microbiome time series studies conducted on individuals who had diarrhea illnesses and were not treated with antibiotics. Observing the colonization of C. difficile soon after the illnesses were acquired, they tested this association directly by feeding mice increasing quantities of laxatives while exposing them to non-pathogenic C. difficile spores. Their results suggest that GI disturbances create a window of susceptibility to C. difficile colonization during recovery.

Further, the researchers found that carriers shed C. difficile in highly variable amounts day-to-day; the number of C. difficile cells shed in a carrier’s stool can increase by over 1,000 times in one day. These recurrent blooms likely influence the transmissibility of C. difficile outside of hospitals, and their unpredictability questions the reliability of single time-point diagnostics for detecting carriers.

“In our study, two of the people we followed with high temporal resolution became carriers outside of the hospital,” says VanInsberghe, who is now a postdoc in the Department of Pathology at Emory University. “The observations we made from their data helped us understand how people become susceptible to colonization and what the short- and long-term patterns in C. difficile abundance in carriers look like. Those patterns told us a lot about how C. difficile can spread between people outside of hospitals.”

“I believe that there is a lot of rethinking of C. diff infections at the moment and I hope our study will help contribute to ultimately better manage the risks associated with it,” says Martin Polz, senior author of the study and a visiting professor in MIT’s Parsons Laboratory for Environmental Science and Engineering within the MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

The research team also included Joseph A. Elsherbini, a graduate student in the MIT Department of Biology; Bernard Varian, a researcher in MIT’s Division of Comparative Medicine; Theofilos Poutahidis, a professor in the Department of Pathology within the College of Veterinary Medicine at Aristotle University in Greece; and Susan Erdman, a principal research scientist in MIT’s Division of Comparative Medicine.

By Maria Iacobo

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Faculty Recognition Career Award ten years ago. They recently profiled Professor Ruben Juanes who won the award in 2010 and notes that one of his most widely recognized contribution has been in the area of CO2 sequestration. You may read the full interview here.

Faculty News

Professor Franz-Josef Ulm

Professor Franz-Josef Ulm honored by the Technical University Professor Ulm will receive an honorary doctor degree from the Technical University in Vienna, Austria. The celebration is scheduled for March 17, 2020 in Wien.

Professor Ulm and colleagues featured in The New York Times The Business section of The New York Times featured a story on an app that will turn a smartphone into a tool to track potholes and measure overall road quality. Professor Ulm’s team and colleagues at UMass-Dartmouth and Birzeit University in the West Bank are currently testing their app, called Carbin.

Read the full story and see photos.

Professor Elfatih Eltahir

The Eltahir Research Group publishes book on the future of the Nile basin Breene M. Kerr Professor Elfatih Eltahir and his research group have published a book, “A Path Forward for Sharing the Nile Water: Sustainable, Smart, Equitable, Incremental,” that discusses a pathway forward for sustainable future development in the Nile basin. The book is available on Amazon Proposal by Breene M. Kerr Professor of Hydrology and Climate Elfatih Eltahir and his colleagues selected among top 100 proposals for the MacArthur $100 Million Grant The MacArthur Foundation has announced that a proactive climate resilience system co-developed by MIT and BRAC, a leading development organization, was one of the highestscoring proposals in its 2020 “100&Change” competition. The top 100 proposals are competing for a single $100 million grant to help solve one of the world’s most critical challenges. The MIT/BRAC system, known as Climate Resilience Early Warning System Network (CREWSNET), aims to empower climate threatened populations to make timely, science-driven decisions about their future. Starting with Western Bangladesh but scalable to other frontline nations across the globe, CREWSNET will combine leading-edge climate forecasting and socioeconomic analysis with innovative resilience services to enable people to make and implement informed decisions about adaptation and relocation. Prof. Eltahir is the project’s principal investigator; working with John Aldridge at MIT Lincoln Laboratory who serves as CREWSNET project leader.

Professor Ruben Juanes

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Professor Juanes profiled in US Department of Energy story The US Department of Energy’s Office of Science has a series of stories in which they follow researchers who received their Early

CEE Awarded Gift to Use Artificial Intelligence in Biomedical Device Design

Patters of suspended 1-micrometer polystyrene particles in channel shapes are given by a new AI platform (interior boundary highlighted in white). An applied surface acoustic wave propagates from left to right.

This image depicts the modeled acoustic field within a 300 square micrometer design area; scale bars are 200 micrometers long.

Professor Kathy Wu

Prof. Kathy Wu featured on TWIML AI Podcast The discussion focuses on Prof. Wu’s transition to applying machine learning to civil engineering, specifically, understanding the potential impact autonomous vehicles would have on traffic once deployed. Listen to the full podcast here.

Device designed by AI has potential to replace damaged organs with ones grown in a laboratory Researchers in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have received a gift to advance their work on a device designed to position living cells for growing human organs using acoustic waves. The Acoustofluidic Device Design with Deep Learning is being supported by Natick-based MathWorks, the leading developer of mathematical computing software.

“One of the fundamental problems in growing cells is how to move and position them without damage,” said John R. Williams a professor in MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “The devices we’ve designed are like acoustic tweezers.”

Inspired by the complex and beautiful patterns in the sand made by waves, our approach is to use sound waves controlled by machine learning to design complex cell patterns. The pressure waves generated by acoustics in a fluid gently move and position the cells without damaging them.

The engineers developed a computer simulator to create a variety of device designs, which were then fed to an AI platform to understand the relationship between device design and cell positions.

Professor Desiree Plata

Nina Jankovic and Professor Desiree Plata 2019 research paper recognized among best by Royal Society of Chemistry Published in Environmental Science: Nano in 2019, the paper has been named as the Runner-Up Best Paper. Engineered nanomaterials in the context of global element cycles provides a birds-eye view of the status and scale of commercialized and nascent nanotechnologies in the context of global element cycles to prioritize and guide relevant environmental health research.

Read the paper here.

Professor Plata featured in MIT News Professor Plata and her research team demonstrated how they are advancing their work remotely while balancing family life.

View the video here.

“Our hope is that, in time, this AI platform will create devices that we couldn’t have imagined with traditional approaches,” said Sam Raymond, PhD. Raymond recently earned his doctorate working with Williams on this project. Raymond’s thesis title, Combining Numerical Simulation and Machine Learning, explored the application of machine learning in computational engineering.

“MathWorks and MIT have a 30-year long relationship that centers on advancing innovations in engineering and science,” said P.J. Boardman, director at MathWorks. “We are pleased to support Dr. Williams and his team as they use new methodologies in simulation and deep learning to realize significant scientific breakthroughs.”

Williams and Raymond collaborated with researchers at the University of Melbourne and the Singapore University of Technology and Design on this project.

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Alumni Profiles

Sustainability Begins at Home Marybeth Martello CEE SM ’96; Science and Public Policy PhD ’00

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arybeth Martello’s master’s and doctoral research took her around the world and across disciplines. Her work in hydroclimatology, examining Sahelian drought through water vapor transport over West Africa and Europe, sparked her curiosity in the politics and science of global change.

Alumni News

“I became interested in the nexus of environmental science and governance,” says Martello, “and how the production and use of scientific knowledge shape and are shaped by culture and politics. MIT opened doors to these interests. I also enrolled in Urban Studies, Political Science, Technology and Public Policy and Kennedy School of Government classes.”

Martello proposed an interdepartmental PhD to examine the science and politics of international efforts to address desertification throughout the twentieth century. As she began her studies, she accepted a predoctoral position with Harvard’s Global Environmental Assessment Project (GEA) returning to MIT to earn a PhD in Science and Public Policy. Upon completing her PhD, she spent several years as a Fellow with the Science, Technology and Society and GEA Programs at Harvard’s Kennedy School, where she carried out research, authored papers and co-edited a book with Professor Sheila Jasanoff, Earthly Politics: Local and Global in Environmental Governance.

While raising three children, Martello turned her attention from the global to the local: leading community environmental programs; co-founding a biennial STEM Expo; writing grants for local schools; and coaching FIRST Lego League and Destination Imagination teams to encourage youth to engage with STEM. Four years ago, Martello seized a new opportunity to serve as Sustainable Energy Director for the Town of Wellesley (MA). The position has put her in the vanguard of roles in local government.

“Why does a town need a Sustainable Energy Director? Having a leader dedicated to climate change and energy issues helps a town more effectively mitigate climate change and increase resilience to its impacts. In my role, I use scientific knowledge and an understanding of relevant technology to raise awareness of climate change and hopefully enable and inspire the community to take action.”

Martello works directly with a Sustainability Energy Committee (SEC) of seven, appointed by the town’s governing board. The SEC’s mission focuses on tracking, analysis and reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Says Martello, “Because climate change touches just about everything we do and crosses all boundaries, we collaborate regularly with other departments, citizen groups, state and federal agencies and international organizations in pursuit of our goals.”

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Examples of Martello’s work are numerous. To lead Wellesley to earn a Green Communities Designation from the state, Martello developed a five-year municipal energy reduction plan, a fuelefficient vehicle policy and changes to town bylaws to include a solar overlay district. As a Green Community, Wellesley is eligible for state funding for clean energy and energy conservation projects Martello helps to identify and develop. Thanks to Wellesley’s sustainable energy work, the town won a 2018 Leading by Example award from the Massachusetts Department of Energy Resources.

Martello and the SEC developed and advocated for Municipal Sustainable Building Guidelines to establish sustainable building goals and processes to achieve them. With these in place, a new school and a Town Hall Annex will be zero net energy buildings; a second school project is on track to meet similar guidelines.

“In the U.S., we waste between 30 and 40 percent of the food we produce, contributing to both landfills and climate change,” says Martello. “We try to raise awareness of this problem, reduce food waste and divert it to more productive ends.”

Martello directed a study to reveal waste management opportunities in Wellesley school cafeterias. This collaborative effort led to recycling programs and food rescue initiatives that deliver unused cafeteria food to the Wellesley Food Pantry and to a food rescue network linking Wellesley Public Schools, colleges and food insecure people through the non-profit Food For Free.

These programs have won state awards and the Environmental Protection Agency’s Environmental Merit Award.

Challenges ahead for Martello include emissions reductions in the complex transportation sector and a town-wide Climate Action and Resiliency Plan which will engage the municipality and community in developing measures to enhance Wellesley’s climate change mitigation and resilience.

Martello says CEE provided her with many skills and experiences fundamental to her current position. She draws on analytical, problem-solving, communication and teamwork abilities honed in the Parsons Lab. MIT also enabled her to bridge disciplines and institutions to develop, advocate for and pursue her own ideas and projects. Even though climate change everywhere is daunting, “Wellesley is civically engaged and blessed with resources and community support for environmental causes.”

Mindful that efforts to address climate change face more serious roadblocks in less fortunate areas. “One of my goals is to support communities where action on climate change is even more challenging.”

By Maria Iacobo

Alumni Profiles

Keeping San Francisco Moving Day-to-day triage while focusing on future transit goals Amber Crabbe ’00

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Ultimately, Crabbe earned dual degrees in Transportation and Urban Planning. Despite her dream of living and working in cities around the world, she fell in love with San Francisco and made it her home. Working at a nonprofit initially, one of Crabbe’s proudest achievements was organizing a state lobby day for more than a hundred Bay Area transit union members to speak directly with state legislators about the importance of transit funding in the state budget.

“The transportation policy climate is always changing - you have no idea what emergency is going to come up that requires your immediate attention,” says Crabbe.

Moving into the public sector, she advocates for all residents in a city where – for many – using the public transportation system is their only option. Among her accomplishments, Crabbe helped lead an effort to develop an expenditure plan for a local $10 per vehicle registration fee for the 2010 ballot. Approved by voters, the measure brings in $5 million a year for transit, safety and road maintenance in San Francisco.

While Crabbe has dealt with many hurdles in her 14 years with the agency, none have compared to the extensive disturbance for transit operators and residents caused by the spread of the COVID-19 virus. Determining how to secure and distribute funding from the federal relief packages approved by the U.S. Congress is the “policy medic’s” current concern.

“I’m proud to help lead my agency in this work,” says Crabbe.

“Our focus is on the revenue and service our transit agencies are losing, how to make transit safe for workers and riders, and the value of transit as an essential service. What do they need in the immediate term? How do you divide limited resources among the 27 transit operators in the Bay Area, all of which have unique funding needs and unique service plans? These are very delicate policy decisions I get to analyze and help construct an approach that balances a number of different needs.”

When Crabbe began her education at MIT, she wasn’t certain what career path she would follow. She chose MIT because of the school’s reputation and its large pool of undergraduate peers as well as the opportunity to interact and conduct research with its graduate community.

In addition to the challenges the pandemic has added to her work, Crabbe spends the majority of her time analyzing policy proposals and advising officials on their potential impacts to the city and its transportation system. She says it’s rewarding to work closely with elected and appointed officials and see her analysis reflected in their engagement and decision-making.

Alumni News

orking to improve the quality and safety of public transportation for San Francisco residents and visitors, Amber Crabbe ’00 has long considered herself a “Transportation Policy Medic.” As the public policy manager for the San Francisco County Transportation Authority, Crabbe is on the executive team charged with planning, funding and overseeing major transportation projects and collaborating with multiple agencies for one of the country’s major cities.

“One of my experiences at MIT that really stands out is the access to people who are at the top of their field. I might not have appreciated it when I was there, but it has lasted with me throughout my career. I learned to respect the ideas of others without being intimidated by them. I learned to have confidence in my own ideas and not be afraid to articulate them. MIT inspired within me a hunger for lifelong learning and appreciation for interests beyond my major. Even 20 years later, I’m still a voracious reader and regularly attend lectures and take classes that have nothing to do with my own life.”

By Maria Iacobo

“I also liked the fact that, across the board, MIT had strong departments. I knew that with their curriculum I was going to get an opportunity to try out a lot of different fields.”

Initially, Crabbe was attracted to architecture, so much so she earned a bachelors in Art and Design. Enjoying her physics and engineering courses, she decided to add a CEE degree so she’d not only be able to design buildings, but understand the dynamics behind how they’re constructed.

“As I got further along in my studies, I realized that, design wise, I was thinking more about movement through space and buildings than the space itself,” says Crabbe. “At the same time, I began taking courses and serving as an intern in MIT’s transportation program.”

By graduation, Crabbe knew she wanted to go to grad school and opted for the University of California, Berkeley. In short order, she found herself focusing on public policy.

“I think I had a heavy dose of youthful idealism and wanted to change the world,” says Crabbe. “I loved the analysis, critical thinking and logistics and thought pursuing policy was doing my part to make the world better.”

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Alumni Profiles

A Science You Can Taste Annette Lee ’93

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ollowing her sophomore year, Annette Lee ’93 put MIT in her rearview mirror and drove home to Oregon. Although happy at MIT and loving chemistry, she realized a career as a chemical engineer was not for her. Transferring to Oregon State and enrolling in a forestry program “felt better.”

Alumni News

But by summer’s end, Lee recognized the rigorous coursework at MIT would not be replicated elsewhere and returned for her junior year. By chance, she attended a lecture on Course One and knew that was where she belonged.

“It had chemistry and other things that I love,” says Lee. “Working on environmental issues was more in tune with where I was as an individual. I switched majors and got super excited about school again.”

Lee needed an extra semester to acquire the credits for her CEE major and then dove into work as an environmental engineer.

Working for small environmental design firms in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, Lee designed in situ remediation technologies for sites around the country and abroad.

“It was a cool approach to environmental cleanup,” says Lee. “We weren’t digging everything up and moving it someplace else. We tested the soil and groundwater and designed specific technologies for each location. We were one of the first companies to use soil vapor extraction and air sparging [to remove contaminant vapors below ground for treatment above the ground]. I designed these wholescale systems, installed them and got them running.”

On the road, Lee would go out for a beer with colleagues after work. One fellow engineer in particular, Bruce, was an avid home brewer and provided insight into the art and science behind their beers. Attending one of Bruce’s annual summer beer fests intrigued Lee even more.

“I was blown away by the creativity in the different beers,” says Lee. “At the time, you couldn’t go to the store and buy something off the shelf like you can now. Within a few months of that first beer fest, [my partner] Nicole Carrier and I learned how to home brew. After that, it just took over my life. I loved the chemistry of brewing. Brewing became an outlet for me to be creative and apply the science.”

Eventually she asked herself, “what can I do to make this more of my life?”

Photo: Michael Penney

With the precision of an engineer, Lee took classes at the Siebel Institute of Technology to earn her brewing certificate, sought inspiration from other brewers, developed a business model and interned at a local brewery to “get a feel for what professional brewing work would be like. A lot of my work as an engineer was quite physical. I’d be on drill rigs or assembling design systems and installing them in the field. So, the physical aspect of brewing appealed to me as well.”

When she made the decision to leave her engineering job, she convinced Carrier to join her.

“When we thought about what our brewery would look like we were adamant about supporting our local economy and building our brewery in a sustainable way. From the beginning we made a commitment to sourcing as much as we could within 200 miles of the brewery to make our beer.”

With New Hampshire liquor licenses allowing brewers to pour only four ounces unless food is served, Throwback Brewery began as a tasting room open only on weekends. Visitors could taste beers and purchase them to take home. Throwback also sold to restaurants and stores. One year into their new business, an opportunity to purchase an historic farm less than a half mile from their warehouse became available. Dating from the early 1700s and available for the first time, the property came with a barn, carriage house and Victorian home.

“I drove by that property for years and when I saw it was available, I became obsessed with how to get it,” says Lee. “We were already at capacity in the warehouse and needed to expand. I could see where I wanted to go. We could restore the property to a working farm and grow food and some beer ingredients.”

After three years of hard work, Lee’s vision was realized.

Throwback Brewery’s operations, tap room and restaurant are located in the barn. The farm grows much of the food served; whatever else is needed is purchased from local farms. The brewery also hosts community events and private parties.

Looking back, Lee says a few friends were concerned she might become bored running a brewery rather than working as an environmental engineer.

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“One of the things I learned at MIT was how to solve problems and tackle things head on,” says Lee. “There are so many transferable skills that I acquired between MIT and the engineering world. It was a really cool realization that the time I spent working in the field as an engineer provided experiences for running my own business.”

By Maria Iacobo

Alumni Profiles

From Preaching to Practice: bringing clean water to the Developing World John Dracup SM ’60

High praise for Dracup who says he went into teaching after earning his masters in Course One. “I was inspired while I was at MIT,” says Dracup. “The professors were very dedicated to their work. They were hardworking, teaching professors and the teaching was superb.”

One professor in particular, Professor Emeritus Peter Eagleson, stood out.

“He was a hard task master, but he changed my life,” says Dracup. “Over his door he had a sign that read: ‘Go, Go, Go.’ He was a role model, as were all the faculty. The professors even had their students over to their homes for dinner once a month.”

Dracup internalized those lessons and carried them forward.

After MIT, Dracup taught at a college in Oregon before heading to Berkeley to earn his PhD. He spent the next 35 years teaching at the University of California, Los Angeles before returning north to Berkeley for another 17 years. His course, “Clean Water in Developing Countries,” was a popular freshman seminar during his last several years at Berkeley and the spark for his next mission.

Dracup, third from left, with his Berkeley students, at the Centre for Affordable Water and Sanitation Technology in Calagary.

detailing how to choose the best method for providing clean and safe water to communities in need worldwide. Published in early 2020, “Clean Water for Developing Countries” explores all of the factors entailed to successfully deliver clean drinking water and how to sustain the quality long after a team leaves the site. So many questions that have to be answered – from the number of people who will use the water to how it will be distributed – that Dracup wanted to demonstrate optimal solutions for any scenario. The book was written to assist humanitarian groups and individuals who have no training in water resources or environmental engineering.

Many systems will fail within five years if you haven’t done due diligence working with the community, according to Dracup.

Local people have to be trained how to use the filters correctly and maintain the systems.

“Understanding local culture is so important it can’t be overemphasized,” says Dracup.

“When you’re a professor, all of your designs – and engineering is about design – are erased off blackboards at the end of class,” says Dracup. “I really wanted to do something with them. It sounds a little hokey, but it’s about making the world a better place. It’s about giving back.”

In the seven years since the water treatment system was installed on Remba Island, Dracup says water quality and sanitation continues to improve the quality of life there. A cell tower was installed and businesses, restaurants and even a movie theater have sprung up.

So Dracup joined Rotary International, a worldwide humanitarian group whose focus includes bringing clean water to developing countries. His first project took place on the small island of Remba on Lake Victoria in Kenya with about 10,000 residents who were using lake water polluted with fecal bacteria. It took nearly three years, but a water purification system was installed and activated in May 2013. Dracup was on site when they turned on the water.

“It’s remarkable to see the impact of clean water in a community,” says Dracup. “We take it for granted in this country.”

“We gave free water to everyone on the island who wanted it.

People seemed to come from everywhere. They rushed to fill up their 20-liter jerrycans which they placed on their heads and walked away, smiling.”

The emotional experience incentivized Dracup to put his skills to work elsewhere – Peru, Honduras, Guatemala – and write a book

Alumni News

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n 2017 the University of California, Berkeley’s student news blog, published a list of faculty they identified as deserving acclaim for their achievements in and out of the classroom.

Among such lofty names as novelist Joyce Carol Oats and activist-author Michael Pollen, was Professor John Dracup SM ’60. Dracup is a major figure in environmental engineering whose work in hydro-climatology includes time spent as principle investigator for many major research agencies, the National Science Foundation and Environmental Protection Agency among them.

“Clean Water for Developing Countries” is available on Amazon and barnesandnoble.com

By Maria Iacobo

Dear Alumni: we welcome your career news.

You may contact us at one@mit.edu 33

Aloha, Hawaii

Alumni News Zack Roberts (CEE ’21) and Neosha Narayanan (DMSE ’22) assemble a branch enclosure to measure emissions of volatile organic compounds produced by plants.

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n January, a group of MIT students spent two weeks on the Island of Hawaii conducting three research projects related to volcanic emissions, and the health of native ‘Ohi’a forests. The unique fieldwork opportunity – CEE’s annual Traveling Research Environmental eXperiences (TREX) – exposes students to a variety of research methods while exploring the island’s rich geological, biological, and cultural history. Students collected samples, analyzed their data and presented their findings to a local community group.

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Among the students was Zach Roberts ’21 who took part in measuring sulfur dioxide emissions following the 2018 Eruption of the Kilauea volcano and measuring Volatile Organic Compounds specifically omitted by the ‘Ohi’a tree.

“During the trip we met great people and saw stunning scenery,” says Zach. “We hope our research from the trip will contribute to meaningful results in the future. Personally, I loved the research we conducted throughout the trip, but my favorite part about the trip was the people in the class I got to spend it with!”

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Lights from the City of Boston across the Charles River compete with electronic posters to capture attention of attendees at the 2020 CEE Research Speed Dating event.

Full story on the 9th annual event on page 14.

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