Ashutosh Kumar is a classically trained materials engineer. Having grown up with a passion for making things, he has explored steel design and studied stress fractures in alloys.Throughout Kumar’s education, however, he was also drawn to biology and medicine. When he was accepted into an undergraduate metallurgical engineering and materials science...

Researchers at MIT, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Harvard Medical School have developed a potential new treatment for alopecia areata, an autoimmune disorder that causes hair loss and affects people of all ages, including children.For most patients with this type of hair loss, there is no effective treatment. The team developed a microneedle patch...

From cutting-edge robotics, design, and bioengineering to sustainable energy solutions, ocean engineering, nanotechnology, and innovative materials science, MechE students and their advisors are doing incredibly innovative work. The graduate students highlighted here represent a snapshot of the great work in progress this spring across the Department...

On April 18, the World Health Organization (WHO) released new guidance on airborne disease transmission that seeks to create a consensus around the terminology used to describe the transmission of infectious pathogens through the air. Lydia Bourouiba, the director of the MIT Fluid Dynamics of Disease Transmission Laboratory and the Fluids and Health...

Anna Russo likes puzzles. They require patience, organization, and a view of the big picture. She brings an investigator’s eye to big institutional and societal challenges whose solutions can have wide-ranging, long-term impacts.Russo’s path to MIT began with questions. She didn’t have the whole picture yet. “I had no idea what I wanted to do with my...

Giving drugs at different times of day could significantly affect how they are metabolized in the liver, according to a new study from MIT. Using tiny, engineered livers derived from cells from human donors, the researchers found that many genes involved in drug metabolism are under circadian control. These circadian variations affect how much of...