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Emma Gibson: Optimizing health care logistics in Africa
Growing up in South Africa at the turn of the century, Emma Gibson saw the rise of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and its devastating impact on her home country, where many people lacked life-saving health care. At the time, Gibson was too young to understand what a sexually transmitted infection was, but she knew that HIV […]
MIT Governance Lab hosts speaker series on governance innovation
Late this spring, the MIT Governance Lab (MIT GOV/LAB) hosted a pair of online conversations between public service leaders about governance innovation. Discussion topics included how governments can be motivated to innovate and what role design can play in reforming government and public services. MIT GOV/LAB is an applied research group directed by Lily L. […]
Getting the carbon out of India’s heavy industries
The world’s third largest carbon emitter after China and the United States, India ranks seventh in a major climate risk index. Unless India, along with the nearly 200 other signatory nations of the Paris Agreement, takes aggressive action to keep global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius relative to preindustrial levels, physical and financial losses […]
How the debt crisis of 2008-09 fueled populist politics
The economic downturn of 2008-09 has often been described as a financial-sector crisis, featuring failing banks. But it was much more than that. Many people with stagnant or dropping incomes, having borrowed to sustain their standard of living, found themselves deep in debt when the economy sagged and joblessness increased. In turn, those economic problems […]
Study: Trade can worsen income inequality
International trade exacerbates domestic income inequality, at least in some circumstances, according to an empirical study that two MIT economists helped co-author. The research, focusing on Ecuador as a case study, digs into individual-level income data while examining in close detail the connections between Ecuador’s economy and international trade. The study finds that trade generates […]
Mobilizing across borders to address global challenges
For the most creative minds to work together to solve the world’s greatest challenges, it is essential for global collaboration to be unencumbered by distance. The MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI) Global Seed Funds (GSF) program enables participating faculty teams to collaborate across borders with international partners to develop and launch joint research […]
Migration Summit addresses education and workforce development in displacement
“Refugees can change the world with access to education,” says Alnarjes Harba, a refugee from Syria who recently shared her story at the 2022 Migration Summit — a first-of-its-kind, global convening to address the challenges that displaced communities face in accessing education and employment. At the age of 13, Harba was displaced to Lebanon, where […]
When politics is local in the Middle East
As the old adage has it, all politics is local. That might seem a quaint idea in an age of social media and global connectivity. And yet, as a study co-led by an MIT political scientist finds, it may describe Middle East politics more accurately than many people realize. More specifically, sectarian identity in the […]
Novelist Elizabeth Acevedo’s work reflects the rich stories, traditions, and cultures of the Caribbean diaspora
On Thursday, April 21, the air in MIT room 3-270 was electric with excitement, as poet and novelist Elizabeth Acevedo took the floor, along with student moderator Nailah J. Smith ’22. Acevedo is Afro-Latinx, born in Harlem, New York, to Dominican parents, and one of the most acclaimed young Latinx writers on the contemporary literary […]
SMART researchers enable early-stage detection of microbial contamination in cell therapy
Researchers from the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore, have identified a critical quality attribute (CQA) that potentially allows the development of a rapid and sensitive process analytical technology for sterility. Specifically, this technology enables the detection of early-stage microbial contamination in human cell therapy products (CTPs). Cell therapy […]