Arthur “Art” Samberg ’62, a pioneer in investment management and longtime member of the MIT Corporation, died of leukemia on July 14. He was 79. Reflecting his wide-ranging interests at MIT, Samberg served on the executive committee of the MIT Corporation and on visiting committees for the departments of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Mathematics, and Nuclear Science and Engineering. He also served on the School of Science Dean’s Advisory Council, the MIT Energy Initiative External Advisory Board, and the MIT Investment Management Company Board. Samberg joined the Corporation in 2003. He and his wife Rebecca Samberg established a scholarship fund that has supported more than 200 MIT scholars since its inception, many throughout their MIT undergraduate careers. A gift from the couple also enabled a new conference facility at MIT, the Samberg Conference Center. "Art Samberg would often say with pride that his life was transformed by MIT — so it is wonderfully fitting that he and Becky made possible the same transformative experience for so many young people with limited means but with all the talent to succeed here,” says MIT President L. Rafael Reif. “Through the countless roles he took on in service to the Institute, MIT also benefited from his brilliant insight, wide-ranging curiosity, decisiveness, and extraordinary personal dedication. Every time we enjoy the exhilarating view from the Samberg Conference Center, we can take inspiration from Art’s warmth, playfulness, down-to-earth attitude, and open-hearted generosity. We miss him!”...

In the quest to make buildings more energy efficient, windows present a particularly difficult problem. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, heat that either escapes or enters windows accounts for roughly 30 percent of the energy used to heat and cool buildings. Researchers are developing a variety of window technologies that could prevent this massive loss of energy. “The choice of windows in a building has a direct influence on energy consumption,” says Nicholas Fang, professor of mechanical engineering. “We need an effective way of blocking solar radiation.” Fang is part of a large collaboration that is working together to develop smart adaptive control and monitoring systems for buildings. The research team, which includes researchers from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Leon Glicksman, professor of building technology and mechanical engineering at MIT, has been tasked with helping Hong Kong achieve its ambitious goal to reduce carbon emissions by 40 percent by 2025....

A team of researchers from MIT and Northwestern University has demonstrated the ability to fine-tune the electronic properties of hybrid perovskite materials, which have drawn enormous interest as potential next-generation optoelectronic materials for devices such as solar cells and light sources. The materials are classified as “hybrid” because they contain inorganic components like metals, as well as organic molecules with elements like carbon and nitrogen, organized into nanoscale layers. In a paper published online this week in Nature Chemistry, the researchers showed that by strategically varying the composition of the organic layers, they could tune the color of light absorbed by the perovskite and also the wavelength at which the material emitted light. Importantly, they accomplished this without substantially changing the inorganic component. “Until now, most experimental and theoretical evidence indicated that the organic layers simply act as inert spacers whose only role is to separate the electronically active inorganic layers,” says Will Tisdale, the ARCO Career Development Professor in Energy Studies at MIT and co-corresponding author on the paper. “These new results show that we can teach the organic layer to do much more.”...

Imagine you’ve been diagnosed as Covid-19 positive. Health officials begin contact tracing to contain infections, asking you to identify people with whom you’ve been in close contact. The obvious people come to mind — your family, your coworkers. But what about the woman ahead of you in line last week at the pharmacy, or the man bagging your groceries? Or any of the other strangers you may have come close to in the past 14 days? A team led by MIT researchers and including experts from many institutions is developing a system that augments “manual” contact tracing by public health officials, while preserving the privacy of all individuals. The system relies on short-range Bluetooth signals emitted from people’s smartphones. These signals represent random strings of numbers, likened to “chirps” that other nearby smartphones can remember hearing. If a person tests positive, they can upload the list of chirps their phone has put out in the past 14 days to a database. Other people can then scan the database to see if any of those chirps match the ones picked up by their phones. If there’s a match, a notification will inform that person that they may have been exposed to the virus, and will include information from public health authorities on next steps to take. Vitally, this entire process is done while maintaining the privacy of those who are Covid-19 positive and those wishing to check if they have been in contact with an infected person....