In February, President Sally Kornbluth announced the appointment of Professor Angela Koehler as faculty director of the MIT Health and Life Sciences Collaborative (MIT HEALS), with professors Iain Cheeseman and Katharina Ribbeck as associate directors. Since then, the leadership team has moved quickly to shape HEALS into an ambitious, community-wide platform for catalyzing research, translation, and education at MIT and beyond ' at a moment when advances in computation, biology, and engineering are redefining what's possible in health and the life sciences. Rooted in MIT's long-standing strengths in foundational discovery, convergence, and translational science, HEALS is designed to foster connections across disciplines ' linking life scientists and engineers with clinicians, computational scientists, humanists, operations researchers, and designers. The initiative builds on a simple premise: that solving today's most pressing challenges in health and life sciences requires bold thinking, deep collaboration, and sustained investment in people....

'Can we make tissues that are made from you, for you'' asked Jennifer Lewis ScD '91 at the 2025 Mildred S. Dresselhaus Lecture, organized by MIT.nano, on Nov. 3. 'The grand challenge goal is to create these tissues for therapeutic use and, ultimately, at the whole organ scale.' Lewis, the Hansjorg Wyss Professor of Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, is pursuing that challenge through advances in 3D printing. In her talk presented to a combined in-person and virtual audience of over 500 attendees, Lewis shared work from her lab that focuses on enhanced function in 3D printed components for use in soft electronics, robotics, and life sciences. 'How you make a material affects its structure, and it affects its properties,' said Lewis. 'This perspective was a light bulb moment for me, to think about 3D printing beyond just prototyping and making shapes, but really being able to control local composition, structure, and properties across multiple scales.' A trained materials scientist, Lewis reflected on learning to speak the language of biologists when she joined Harvard to start her own lab focused on bioprinting and biological engineering. How does one compare particles and polymers to stem cells and extracellular matrices' A key commonality, she explained, is the need for a material that can be embedded and then erased, leaving behind open channels. To meet this need, Lewis' lab developed new 3D printing methods, sophisticated printhead designs, and viscoelastic inks ' meaning the ink can go back and forth between liquid and solid form....

People familiar with the matter said the company may sell properties individually or as a portfolio worth several billion dollars. ESR plans to appoint advisers to review options, though discussions remain preliminary and may not result in a transaction. Greater China accounted for 27% of ESR's revenue last year. The firm manages roughly $30bn of assets across the region, including logistics parks on the mainland, a data centre in Hong Kong, retail and office properties in Shanghai, and a life sciences facility. ESR also owns industrial and logistics assets across Asia and has a presence in Europe. ESR was delisted from the Hong Kong stock exchange earlier this year after being acquired by a consortium including Starwood Capital Group, Sixth Street Partners, SSW Partners, Qatar Investment Authority, Warburg Pincus, and its founders. Foreign investors have deployed close to $140bn into Chinese real estate over the past 15 years, but many are now seeking exits as the sector comes under pressure. Bloomberg reported in October that numerous global buyers are reassessing their China exposure as warehouses stand empty and asset values soften....

'At MIT, we believe in the transformative power of learning by doing, and there's no better example than UROP,' says MIT President Sally Kornbluth, who attended the mixer with Provost Anantha Chandrakasan and Chancellor Melissa Nobles. 'The energy at the inaugural UROP mixer was exhilarating, and I'm delighted that students now have this easy way to explore different paths to the frontiers of research.' The event gave students the chance to explore internships and undergraduate research opportunities ' in fields ranging from artificial intelligence to the life sciences to the arts, and beyond ' all in one place, with approximately 150 researchers from labs available to discuss the projects and answer questions in real time. The offices of the Chancellor and Provost co-hosted the event, which the UROP office helped coordinate. First-year student Isabell Luo recently began a UROP project in the Living Matter lab led by Professor Rafael Gomez-Bombarelli, where she is benchmarking machine-learned interatomic potentials that simulate chemical reactions at the molecular level and exploring fine-tuning strategies to improve their accuracy. She's passionate about AI and machine learning, eco-friendly design, and entrepreneurship, and was attending the UROP mixer to find more 'real-world' projects to work on....