Chris Zegras, professor of mobility and urban planning and the current head of the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), has been appointed chief executive officer and director of the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), effective Sept. 1. Zegras succeeds Bruce Tidor, professor of biological engineering and computer science, who has served as interim CEO and director since January 2025. Established in collaboration with the National Research Foundation of Singapore in 2007, SMART is MIT's only research center outside the United States'. Housed within the Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise, SMART serves as a key platform for collaboration between MIT and Singapore's research ecosystem, bringing together leading experts and institutions from the United States, Singapore, and the region for world-class research and innovation. 'Professor Zegras brings a distinguished track record of interdisciplinary leadership and a deep understanding of SMART's mission and impact,' says Anantha Chandrakasan, MIT's provost, who announced Zegras' appointment in a letter to the MIT community today. 'His appointment reinforces MIT's commitment to the alliance, which has advanced innovation and driven global impact, and which remains as important as ever in a time of accelerating technological and global change.'...

Carbon capture is an important climate change mitigation strategy, but it faces technological barriers and can be energy-intensive and expensive. To help make necessary advances in this area, a team of MIT researchers, with support from the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium (MCSC), are exploring energy-efficient and scalable alternatives to conventional carbon dioxide (CO2) capture methods. Conventional amine scrubbing, which is the current standard for CO2 capture, is energy-intensive and difficult to scale, limiting its impact despite the urgent need to reduce carbon emissions and upgrade CO2 into valuable products. In a new article published in Nature Energy, MIT researchers ' graduate students Fang-Yu Kuo of the Department of Chemical Engineering, and Gi Hyun Byun of the Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE); Professor Betar Gallant of MechE; and former MCSC postdoctoral Impact Fellows Glen Junor and Akachukwu Obi ' investigate a promising alternative to these conventional CO2 capture methods. Their findings could move the needle on achieving efficient and flexible carbon capture and removal.In their paper, the team explores an alternative, electrochemically mediated CO2 capture (EMCC). This approach enables electrification of CO2 separation ' driven ideally by renewables ' but currently faces challenges, such as relying on sorbents that require highly reducing potentials, where oxygen reduction side reactions become significant. This can compromise both efficiency and long-term performance. To tackle this shortcoming of EMCC, the MIT team researched whether N-heterocyclic imines (NHIs) is a useful new class of EMCC sorbent.'NHIs have shown promise in recent years as CO2 sorbents because of the ease of NHI molecular modifications for tuning basicity,' says Fang-Yu Kuo. 'Our work translates these NHIs for the first time into the EMCC application space, and demonstrates that NHI-based sorbents can be modulated electrochemically for CO2 separation by a unique separation mechanism that avoids the need of applying highly reducing potentials.'The team's initial research establishes a novel bis(NHI) structure that can enable a theoretical CO2 modulation of two molecules per electron during cell operation. The initial published result also indicates that with further molecular engineering of bis(NHI) structures to strengthen CO2 binding affinity, the bis(NHI) could operate in more diverse electrolyte environments, opening new possibilities to optimize system performance in terms of electron efficiency, energy efficiency, and operational flexibility.'A critical future direction of our work involves gaining deeper mechanistic insight into the stability and degradation pathways of the bis(NHI) radical cation,' says Kuo. 'Understanding these pathways will inform the rational design of next-generation bis(NHI) molecules, enabling longer operational lifetimes and enhanced cycling durability for practical deployment.'...

'I'm originally from Moorestown, New Jersey, a suburb of Philadelphia. While my degree is in chemical engineering, I consider myself a materials scientist, and I'm passionate about using innovative materials to propel next-generation technologies. When I started my bachelor's degree at Cornell University, I was introduced to polymers and nanotechnology and even got to partake in some meaningful industry experiences in the medical device field. While the work I did felt impactful, I felt like I lacked a sense of driving innovation, and so I decided to pursue a PhD at MIT. My doctorate in Michael Strano's lab has focused on a novel material at the intersection of polymers and nanomaterials. This material, called 2DPA-1, is like a combination of graphene, the strongest and most conductive material, with Kevlar, which is what makes up bulletproof vests. My thesis has been pivotal in establishing the characterization tools for this material so that future researchers can optimize its properties for different applications. Going forward, I've signed an offer letter with a startup that is making portable nuclear reactors for areas without stable grid electricity. I'll work on various problems surrounding the materials that make up the reactors....

Evaluating each of those compounds experimentally would be far too time-consuming for chemists. So, in recent years, researchers have begun using artificial intelligence to help identify compounds that could make good drug candidates. One of those researchers is MIT Associate Professor Connor Coley PhD '19, the Class of 1957 Career Development Associate Professor with shared appointments in the departments of Chemical Engineering and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing. His research straddles the line between chemical engineering and computer science, as he develops and deploys computational models to analyze vast numbers of possible chemical compounds, design new compounds, and predict reaction pathways that could generate those compounds. Coley's interest in science runs in the family. In fact, he says, his family includes more scientists than non-scientists, including his father, a radiologist; his mother, who earned a degree in molecular biophysics and biochemistry before going to the MIT Sloan School of Management; and his grandmother, a math professor....