When Veronica Calzadilla Sosa transferred to MIT from Miami Dade College in Florida, she was an incoming second-year student with an interest in chemical engineering. She didn't know how involved she would soon become as a student leader in the department. At the encouragement of a friend who was then a team captain, Calzadilla Sosa joined MIT's chapter of American Institute of Chemical Engineers, and the two worked with the Department of Chemical Engineering to build up the team of students representing MIT in the organization's lively chemical engineering competitions. As the organization's competition chair last year and the vice president of external relations this year, she has fallen in love with the club and found joy in bringing students together to work toward a common goal and have fun along the way. When she first took on the role, MIT was new to the competition, and students were participating in only one of several events. Now, they participate in three categories: ChemE Cube (where teams build a miniature chemical plant that fits inside a 1-cubic-foot cube), ChemE Jeopardy (a 'Jeopardy!'-style trivia competition), and ChemE Sports (where teams operate and optimize a virtual chemical plan)....

Hana Sousa, a senior in chemical engineering who grew up at the confluence of the Rio Negro and the Amazon River, learned some important lessons as the leader of MIT's Brazilian Students Association. Now president of the Association of Student Activities (ASA) ' the organization that oversees all student clubs on campus ' she is using what she's learned to help hundreds of student groups navigate the intricacies of Institute policies. The ASA serves as a bridge between MIT and all 359 of the Institute's student clubs and groups, which are organized around topics ranging from acroyoga to model railroads to yearbook. Sousa likes to focus on how to get things done; in this interview she talks about how she works closely with Institute staff and her fellow students to help club leaders, and also takes part in water-treatment research that can be applied to the Amazon River and her hometown. A: I was president of the Brazilian Club. I'm from Manaus, a 2-million-person city in the North region [of Brazil]. You can only get there on a boat or an airplane; there is only one road, and it goes to Venezuela. It's in the middle of the Amazon, but Manaus feels very urban....

MIT engineers have developed a new way to program natural killer (NK) immune cells to target cancerous T cells or T cells that have become autoreactive, leading to diseases such as lymphoma and autoimmune hepatitis. Using their new technique, the researchers can reprogram NK cells to target diseased T cells without ever removing the NK cells from the patient's body. Instead, they use lipid nanoparticles to deliver messenger RNA directly to NK cells. These mRNA molecules encode proteins that allow the NK cells to seek and destroy the dysfunctional T cells. Known as CAR NK cells, these cells could be deployed against a variety of diseases. The MIT team's new approach could bypass one of the major obstacles to using these cells, which is the time and expense of manufacturing them outside the body. 'The manufacturing challenges with CAR NK cells are significant. The idea here is you can deliver a nanoparticle that will modify your own NK cells with a CAR construct and teach them to attack tumor cells,' says Daniel Anderson, a professor in MIT's Department of Chemical Engineering and a member of MIT's Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and Institute for Medical Engineering and Science....

Among the academic specialties that U.S. News evaluates, MIT's engineering program continues to lead the rankings of undergraduate engineering programs at a doctoral institution. The Institute's undergraduate computer science and economics programs also ranked No. 1, and its undergraduate business program ranked No. 2. U.S. News ranked MIT highly in several other categories: The Institute is No. 1 for undergraduate research and creative projects, No. 2 on the list of most innovative schools, and No. 3 on the list of best value schools. MIT placed first in five engineering specialties: aerospace/aeronautical/astronautical engineering; chemical engineering; electrical/electronic/communication engineering; materials engineering; and mechanical engineering. It placed second in computer engineering. In computer science, MIT placed first in three specialties: biocomputing/bioinformatics/biotechnology (tied with Carnegie Mellon University); computer systems (tied with Carnegie Mellon); and theory. It placed second in three other disciplines: artificial intelligence, data analytics/science; and programming languages....