The Lemelson-MIT Program (LMIT) announced the launch of Biogen-MIT Biotech in Action: Virtual Summer Lab — a new online learning lab for high school students underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). The collaboration pairs Biogen’s established Community Lab science learning program with LMIT’s 25 years of experience preparing students to be the next generation of creative and inventive problem solvers. The summer virtual lab will offer 400 Massachusetts and North Carolina high school students from backgrounds underrepresented in STEM the opportunity to learn directly from, and be mentored by, leading scientists at Biogen and MIT. The five sessions of the weeklong online summer program will teach students about biotechnology, and the unique ways neuroscientists and inventors use STEM knowledge to solve problems that matter. These problems include diseases of the brain like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, multiple sclerosis, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. “Lemelson-MIT research has validated our beliefs about the importance of teaching STEM through hands-on, real-world projects and opportunities to engage with STEM professionals and other adults.” says Michael Cima, Lemelson-MIT Program faculty director and associate dean of innovation for MIT’s School of Engineering. “We also know that hands-on doesn’t have to mean in-person, and mentoring can happen effectively using web-based collaboration tools. We are excited to join forces with Biogen and their unique expertise, combined with ours, to help another generation of students discover their passion for invention in biotechnology and neuroscience.”...

Materials whose electronic and magnetic properties can be significantly changed by applying electrical inputs form the backbone of all of modern electronics. But achieving the same kind of tunable control over the thermal conductivity of any material has been an elusive quest. Now, a team of researchers at MIT have made a major leap forward. They have designed a long-sought device, which they refer to as an “electrical heat valve,” that can vary the thermal conductivity on demand. They demonstrated that the material’s ability to conduct heat can be “tuned” by a factor of 10 at room temperature. The findings are reported today in the journal Nature Materials, in a paper by MIT professors Bilge Yildiz and Gang Chen, recent graduates Qiyang Lu PhD ’18 and Samuel Huberman PhD ’18, and six others at MIT and at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Thermal conductivity describes how well heat can transfer through a material. For example, it’s the reason you can easily pick up a hot frying pan with a wooden handle, because of wood’s low thermal conductivity, but you might get burned picking up a similar frying pan with a metal handle, which has high thermal conductivity....

The School of Engineering will add an exceptionally large class of new faculty to its ranks during the 2015-16 academic year. Eighteen engineers whose skills span scholarship, invention, innovation, and teaching will contribute to new directions in research and education across the school and to a range of labs and centers across the Institute. “We are welcoming a large and remarkably talented group of young faculty to engineering this year,” says Ian A. Waitz, dean of the School of Engineering. “They are working on an amazing range of exciting topics with direct applications to the world, from medical devices, to energy storage, to data optimization, to biofabrication strategies, and more. Their energy and enthusiasm for solving practical problems is an inspiration — to me, and to our students.” Michael Birnbaum will join the Department of Biological Engineering faculty as an assistant professor and become a core member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research in January 2016. He received an BA in chemical and physical biology from Harvard University and a PhD in immunology from Stanford University, where he received the Gerald Lieberman Award, given to the school’s most outstanding medical school PhD graduate. Birnbaum’s research combines protein engineering, structural biology, and bioinformatics to understand and manipulate immune-cell responses to antigenic stimuli in cancer and infectious disease. He will teach the Department of Biological Engineering's required sophomore biological thermodynamics subject and assist in creating a new immunoengineering elective....

One of the defining features of Covid-19 is the excessive immune response that can occur in severe cases. This burst of immune overreaction, also called a cytokine storm, damages the lungs and can be fatal. “The idea is that they can be injected into the body and bind to the excessive cytokines as generated by the cytokine storm, removing the excessive cytokines and alleviating the symptoms from the infection,” says Rui Qing, an MIT research scientist who is one of the senior authors of the study. The researchers have reported their initial findings in the journal Quarterly Review of Biophysics (QRB) Discovery, and they now hope to begin testing their proteins in human cells and in animal models of cytokine release and coronavirus infection. Shuguang Zhang, a principal research scientist in the MIT Media Lab’s Laboratory of Molecular Architecture, is also a senior author of the paper. Shilei Hao, a visiting scientist at MIT, is the lead author of the study, and David Jin, CEO and president of Avalon GloboCare, is also an author....