A “Passive House” building that’s aggressively green

Cody Friesen, PhD ’04, pulls water from air

Plus: How MIT went coed

News of the MIT Community

Published by MIT Technology Review

May/June 2020

The intersection of interesting and feasibleHealth-care economist Amy Finkelstein delves into the data to clarify the value of health insurance—and health care itself.

MJ20_MIT_cover.indd 1 3/26/20 7:54 AM

“If you feel the urge to create and discover and do something that will bring you fulfillment and happiness, do it now while

you’re young. You will never have more energy or enthusiasm, hair, or brain cells than you have today.”

MIT Index

MIT has had more than its share of memorable commencements, from the collapse of founder William Barton Rogers during his 1882 speech, to the arrival of 17 beavers who parachuted into Killian Court when NASA’s Daniel Goldin spoke in 2001. But all speakers, from heads of state to the legendarily goofy Car Talkbrothers Tom Magliozzi ’58 and Ray Magliozzi ’72, have been

united in their respect for the graduates and the gargantuan achievement of earning an MIT degree. Since the in-person celebration of the Class of 2020 must be pushed off to a future date, we revisit some notable commencement addresses from years past. Watch for more information from MIT about the vir-tual commencement scheduled for May 29. —Matt Mahoney

Historic commencements

“You can imagine how sorry I was to learn that the MIT commencement speaker does not get to go home with a

degree. So yes, today, for the second time in my life, I am fake-graduating from a college in my hometown.”

1999

Ray Magliozzi ’72, former cohost of

NPR’s weekly radio show Car Talk

1970

Two minutes of silence to consider what can be done.

At the height of the Vietnam War, the grad-uating class requested that MIT president

Howard Wesley Johnson not give the tradi-tional commencement speech and instead

observe a moment of silence.

1984

Let me say why I have fought so hard for 24 years for equality of

opportunity for people of all races and of all backgrounds, for the black women of Brooklyn and of Roxbury, for the white women of San Francisco and Cambridge, as well as for white men and black men and Spanish-speaking men from every corner of this country.”

—US Representative Shirley Chisholm, first black person to speak at commencement

��

1882

Formerly a wide separation existed between theory and

practice; now in every fabric that is made, in every structure that is reared, they are closely united into one inter-locking system—the practical is based upon the scientific, and the scientific is solidly built upon the practical.”

—MIT founder William Barton Rogers on the mission of the Institute

��

Total diplomas prepared:

2,978

Number of chairs on Killian

Court:

~14,000

Gallons of spring water consumed:

~3,170

Number of ponchos

distributed:

~18,000

Total speakers since 1880:

114

MIT presidents:

11

MIT alumni:

22

World leaders:

6

2016

Matt Damon, the first celebrity commencement

speakerSPEAKERS

LASTYEAR

MJ20_MIT_index.indd 2 3/25/20 7:40 AM

Just as we were finalizing production of this issue, Covid-19 arrived in Cambridge, and MIT made the di�cult decision to send students home. The next issue will focus on how the MIT community is coping with Covid-19 and remote life. Tell us your story at mitnews@technologyreview.com.

01C

OV

ER

PH

OT

OG

RA

PH

BY

BR

YC

E V

ICK

MA

RK

Senior editor Alice Dragoon

Chief creative o�cer Eric Mongeon

Photo editor Stephanie Arnett

Art director Emily Luong

Copy chief Linda Lowenthal

Alumni connection editor Nicole Estvanik Taylor

Puzzle corner editor Allan Gottlieb ’67

Contributors David L. Chandler; Jennifer Chu; Peter Dizikes; Rachel Fritts, SM ’20; Sean Holstege; David Kaiser; Anne Trafton; the MIT News O�ce

MIT News and MIT Technology Review are provided to all alumni compliments of the MIT Alumni Association.

Contact MIT News: mitnews@technologyreview.com One Main Street, 13th Floor Cambridge, MA 02142

2

Weathering the Covid-19 crisisFrom the president | The MIT campus has become strangely quiet. But the MIT commu-nity remains connected, over any distance.

3

77 Mass AveAI-identified antibiotics; simplified testing for heavy metals; the problem with labeling false news stories; controlling brain waves to increase attention; a passive solar system that desalinates water.

7

Power in numbersMeet the author | Data Feminism examines biases and inequities in information science.

8

Double visionUnder the dome | My dual career as a physicist and a chronicler of science history.By David Kaiser

10

How the Institute went coed1865 | Ellen Swallow Richards wasn’t just the first woman to earn a degree or teach at MIT. She also played a critical role in opening the Institute’s doors to other women who wanted to study science.By Rachel Fritts, SM ’20

27

Alumni connectionRolling up his sleeves: A conversation with Daniel Huttenlocher, SM ’84, PhD ’88, dean of the new MIT Schwarzman College of Computing.

29

Class notes and course newsPeter H. Spitz ’48, SM ’49; Matthew Kallis ’82; Umber Ahmad ’94; Marina Umaschi Bers, SM ’97, PhD ’01; Charles Cadieu ’04, MEng ’05

63

Puzzle corner

Features

Departments

Contents

12

A healthy understandingAmy Finkelstein has changed what we know about the economics of health insur-ance—and, increasingly, medical care itself.By Peter Dizikes

18

Water where you need itCody Friesen, PhD ’04, invented panels that harvest water from air—even in arid Arizona. By Sean Holstege

22

The passive house that’s aggressively greenArchitect Michelle Apigian, MA ’00, MCP ’00, gives us a tour of a new Cambridge building and explains why it’s so energy efficient. By Alice Dragoon

MJ20_MIT_contents.indd 1 3/26/20 10:38 AM

02 From the president

SIM

ON

SIM

AR

DAs this issue of MIT News goes to press, MIT has joined the nation, and the world, in facing an unprecedented public health crisis. Our community has a significant role to play in the response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and this extraordinary chal-lenge has called for dramatic action.

The scope of that action may be unparalleled in MIT’s history. Following the advice of public health experts, we have taken decisive measures to protect the well-being of our community and the many other communities we belong to. Two weeks ago, we made the painful decision to suspend classes and required undergraduates living in our residences and FSILGs to pack up and leave for the semester. The libraries have shut their doors. Most offices are empty and dark,

their regular occupants working from home to help minimize the virus’s spread. Even a week ago, the Infinite Corridor was strangely quiet.

Faculty are racing to move course-work online, and researchers are tack-ling the problem of scaling back MIT’s immense research enterprise, ensur-ing the kind of social distancing we are learning to practice. Staff and adminis-trators—from medical and emergency management to technical support to student life—are working tirelessly to ensure the health and safety of our com-munity. And many of our alumni are reaching out to us with heartfelt expres-sions of care and concern, as well as generous offers to help students who are navigating unexpected hardships.

Perhaps more than any other mem-bers of our community, MIT graduates can best understand the sense of loss our students are experiencing—espe-cially the Class of 2020, compelled to leave their campus “home” at just the time when they should be able to enjoy and appreciate it the most. We now must rethink even our most cher-ished and long-standing traditions, including commencement and MIT Tech Reunions. (We have just sched-uled a special online commencement ceremony for May 29, and will plan a future in-person celebration of the Class of 2020. And although 2020 Tech Reunions will not occur as they usually would, we will explore ways to honor class milestones and bring the commu-nity together again.)

My consolation in this unsettled and deeply distressing moment is that while the public health situation changes rap-idly, the spirit of MIT remains constant. From day to day and from moment to moment, I am inspired by the selfless-ness, kindness, and courage of the MIT community. I can only guess at the sit-uation the world will be facing as you read these lines. But I have immense faith that we will weather this crisis, and I look forward to the time when all of us can be together on campus again.

March 24, 2020

Weathering the Covid-19 crisis

The MIT campus has become strangely quiet. But the selflessness, kindness, and courage of our community keep us connected, over any distance.

L. RAFAEL REIF

MJ20_MIT_president.indd 2 3/25/20 7:41 AM

AI vs.bacteria

03A

MR

ITA

MA

RIN

O77 Mass Ave

MIT researchers have used a new type of neural net-work model to identify a powerful antibiotic com-pound that kills many of

the world’s most problematic disease- causing bacteria, including some that are resistant to all previously known antibiotics.

The algorithm, which can screen more than 100 million chemical compounds in a matter of days, is designed to pick out potential antibiotics that use different mechanisms from existing drugs. Very few new antibiotics have been introduced over the past few decades.

“We wanted to develop a platform that would allow us to harness the power of artificial intelligence to usher in a new age of antibiotic drug discovery,” says James Collins, a professor of biological engineer-ing and a member of MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science.

Collins and Regina Barzilay, a profes-sor of electrical engineering and computer science in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, are the senior authors of the study and the fac-ulty co-leads for MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health (J-Clinic). Jonathan Stokes, a postdoc at MIT and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, is the lead author of the study, which appeared in Cell.

The MIT team used the model to look for chemical features that make molecules effective at killing E. coli. From a library of about 6,000 potential drug compounds, it picked out one that was predicted to have strong antibacterial activity and whose chemical structure was different from that of any existing antibiotic. This molecule, which the researchers decided to call hali-cin (after the fictional artificial-intelligence system from 2001: A Space Odyssey), had been previously investigated as a possible diabetes drug.

The researchers tested halicin against dozens of bacterial strains isolated from patients and grown in lab dishes. It was able to kill many that are resis-tant to treatment, including Clostridium difficile, Acinetobacter baumannii, andMycobacterium tuberculosis.

In studies of mice, halicin also cleared infections by a strain of A. baumannii that is resistant to all known antibiotics; it worked within 24 hours. The researchers plan to pursue further studies of halicin, working with a pharmaceutical company or nonprofit organization, in hopes of developing it for use in humans. In a larger screen of about 100 million molecules that took just three days, the researchers also identified 23 other promising antibiotic candidates, which they plan to test fur-ther. —Anne Trafton

A neural network helped identify a new antibiotic that kills some of the world’s most drug-resistant germs.

MJ20_MIT_77MassAve.indd 3 3/19/20 11:18 AM

04

ME

LA

NIE

GO

NIC

K/M

IT

77 Mass Ave

Monitoring water systems for dangerous heavy metals often requires workers to collect many liters of water and chemically preserve samples before transporting them to distant laboratories for analysis.

To simplify the process, MIT research-ers developed a device that absorbs trace contaminants in water and preserves them in a dry state so the samples can be easily dropped in the mail. The design is inspired by dry blood spotting, a tech-nique that involves pricking a person’s finger and collecting a drop of blood on a card of cellulose.

To create a similar collection system for heavy metals, the team used polymer beads called ion-exchange resins, each containing groups of molecules bound to a hydrogen ion. In water, the hydrogen comes off and can be exchanged with another ion, such as a heavy metal cation. In this way, the beads can absorb heavy metals from water.

The researchers made a stirring device from a polymer mesh cut into propeller-like panels. Emily Hanhauser, SM ’17, a mechan-ical engineering graduate student, hand-stitched small pockets in each panel and filled them with the beads. She then stitched them closed and attached each panel to a polymer stick to resemble a whisk.

The researchers tested the device on samples of water that they spiked with various heavy metals. They stuck a device into each sample, twirled it around to catch the contaminants, and let it dry overnight.

It turned out to absorb and preserve about 94% of the metals in each sample, which the researchers could then collect by dipping the device in hydrochloric acid.

“[This project has] taught me a lot about our own water issues and trace contami-nants in the United States,” says Hanhauser. “For instance, someone who has heard about the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, who now wants to know what’s in their water, might one day order something like this online, do the test themselves, and send it to a lab.” —Jennifer Chu

Water monitorSimplified testing for heavy metals.

After the 2016 US presiden-tial election, Facebook began putting warning tags on news stories fact-checkers judged to be false. But a new study coauthored by Sloan profes-sor David Rand finds there’s a catch: this makes readers more willing to believe and share other stories that are also false.

“Putting a warning on some content is going to make you think, to some extent, that all

of the other content without the warning might have been checked and verified,” says Rand. Fortunately, that problem can be addressed by also label-ing stories found to be true.

In the study, 6,739 US res-idents were given a variety of true and false headlines and asked if they’d share each story on social media. Those in the control group had no stories labeled; others saw a “FALSE”

label on some false stories; a third group saw warnings on some false stories and “TRUE” labels on some true ones.

Participants considered sharing just 16.1% of labeled false stories, compared with 29.8% in the control group. But they were also willing to share 36.2% of the unlabeled false stories, up from 29.8%. Those who saw both warning and verification labels shared only

13.7% of the headlines labeled false, and just 26.9% of the nonlabeled false ones. These findings held true regardless of whether the discredited items were “concordant” with partici-pants’ stated politics.

Rand advises labeling both true and false stories. Then, he says, “if you see a story with-out a label, you know it simply hasn’t been checked.”

—Peter Dizikes

The fact-checking trapLabeling some false stories can make people likelier to think other ones are true. Fortunately, there’s a fix.

MJ20_MIT_77MassAve.indd 4 3/23/20 12:02 PM

CO

UR

TE

SY

PH

OT

O

Finding focusPeople can increase their attention by controlling certain brain waves.

Having trouble paying attention? MIT neuro-scientists may have a solution: turn down your alpha brain waves. In a recent study, subjects who used neurofeedback to suppress alpha waves in one hemisphere of their parietal cortex were able to pay better attention to objects that appeared on the opposite side of their visual field.

“There’s a lot of interest in using neuro-feedback to try to help people with various brain disorders and behavioral problems,” says Robert Desimone, director of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, who led the study. “It’s a completely noninvasive way of controlling and testing the role of dif-ferent types of brain activity.”

Subjects were asked to use mental effort to increase the contrast in a grating pattern at the center of a screen while being scanned with magnetoencephalography (MEG), which reveals brain activity with millisecond preci-sion. The greater the asymmetry between alpha levels in the left and right hemispheres of the parietal cortex, which is involved in attention, the more visible the pattern became, offering real-time feedback.

Although subjects were not told what was happening, after about 20 trials they were able to increase the contrast. The MEG results indicated they had done so by dampening alpha waves in one hemisphere. Experimental tasks they performed after the training showed that they paid more atten-tion to activity in the side of the visual field opposite that hemisphere.

“After the experiment, the subjects said they knew that they were controlling the con-trast, but they didn’t know how they did it,” says McGovern Institute postdoc Yasaman Bagherzadeh, the study’s first author. She believes the feedback enabled them to learn by practicing. —Anne Trafton

A completely passive solar-powered desalination system developed by researchers at MIT and in China could provide more than 1.5 gallons of fresh drinking water per hour for every square meter of solar collecting area. Such systems could potentially serve off-grid arid coastal areas to provide a low-cost water source.

The system uses multiple layers of flat solar evaporators and condens-ers, topped with transparent aerogel insulation. It then desalinates the water in stages, with each stage har-nessing heat released by the previ-ous stage—heat that would usually be wasted. In this way, the team’s demonstration device can achieve a world-record efficiency level in con-verting the energy of sunlight into the energy needed to induce water evaporation.

The device is essentially a multi-layer solar still, with a series of evap-orating and condensing components

like those used to distill liquor. Its flat panels absorb heat and then transfer it to a layer of water, which begins to evaporate. The vapor then condenses on the next panel and gets collected, while the heat from the vapor condensation gets passed to the next layer.

The team used a 10-stage sys-tem for the proof-of-concept device, which was tested on an MIT build-ing rooftop. The system delivered pure water that exceeded city drink-ing water standards, at a rate more than double that previously produced by any such passive solar-powered desalination system, says Evelyn Wang ’00, professor of mechanical engineering and department head, who led the research.

The team, which included Lenan Zhang, SM ’18, and Lin Zhao, PhD ’19, estimates that a system to serve the needs of a family might be built for around $100. —David L. Chandler

Desalination by sunlightA passive system could provide cheap drinking water off the grid.

MJ20_MIT_77MassAve.indd 5 3/19/20 11:18 AM

Introducing Deep Tech, our brand-new, subscriber-only podcast.Conversations with makers, users, and influencers drawn from the pages of our magazine.

Listen to the premiere episode attechnologyreview.com/DeepTech

MA20 Deep Tech Ad 8x10.875 D4.indd 1 2/3/20 12:17 PM

07Meet the author

“Let the data speak for themselves” is common advice in some scientific circles. But “the data never speak for themselves,” says Catherine D’Ignazio, SM ’14. “There are always humans and institutions speak-ing for the data, and different people have their own agendas. The data are never innocent.”

Those are the issues that D’Ignazio, an assistant pro-fessor of urban studies and planning, examines in a new book with Lauren Klein, an associate professor at Emory University. In Data Feminism (MIT Press, 2020, $29.95), the authors use the lens of intersectional feminism to scrutinize how data science reflects social structures.

“Intersectional feminism examines unequal power,” they write. “And in our con-temporary world, data is power too. Because the power of data is wielded unjustly, it must be challenged and changed.”

D’Ignazio and Klein point to research led by MIT’s own Joy Buolamwini, SM ’17, who observed that a facial recognition pro-gram could not “see” her. She found that the software was based on a set of faces that were 78% male and 84% white; only 4% were female and dark-skinned, like herself.

Or consider another example, in which Amazon tested an AI system to screen job applicants. Because a high percentage of company employees were men, the algo-rithm favored men’s names.

Such problems can be addressed with a more participatory process or more diverse training data, D’Ignazio says, but the ques-tion of who participates is “the elephant

in the server room.” As of 2011, 26% of all undergraduate computer science degrees in the US went to women, down from 37% in 1985. Lack of diversity, D’Ignazio and Klein believe, blinds many data projects

to some facets of the social sit-uations they seek to measure.

“We want to try to tune peo-ple in to these kinds of power relationships,” D’Ignazio says. “Who’s on the team? Who had the idea? Who’s benefit-ing from the project? Who’s potentially harmed?”

D’Ignazio and Klein outline seven prin-ciples of data feminism. Among them: examine and challenge power, rethink binary systems and hierarchies, embrace pluralism, and “value multiple forms of knowledge,” including firsthand knowledge that may contradict official data. Also, we should consider the context in which data are generated, and “make labor visible. ” This last principle acknowledges that even when marginalized people contribute to data projects, they often receive less credit.

For all the critiques, D’Ignazio and Klein also include examples of data sets that empower women, such as the WomanStats Project, an academic effort investigating how the security and activities of nation-states affect the security of their women.

“For people who are data people but are new to feminism, we want to provide a very accessible introduction,” D’Ignazio says. For those already versed in feminism, they seek to highlight “the ways data sci-ence is problematic, but can be marshalled in the service of justice.” —Peter Dizikes

Data Feminism examines the biases and inequities lurking in modern information science. Power in numbers

Recent books from the MIT communityPaul Samuelson: Master of Modern EconomicsBy Robert A. Cord, Richard G. Anderson, PhD ’80, and William A. Barnett ’63PALGRAVE MACMILLAN, 2019, $129

Computing Possible Futures: Model-Based Explorations of “What if?”By William B. Rouse, SM ’70, PhD ’72 OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2019, $38.95

Thomas Wride and Wesley’s Methodist ConnexionBy Clive Murray Norris, SM ’92ROUTLEDGE, 2020, $155

Harold Edgerton: Seeing the UnseenBy Ron Kurtz ’54, ’59, SM ’60; Deborah Douglas, MIT Museum director of collections; Gus Kayafas ’69; J. Kim Vandiver, SM ’69, PhD ’75, professor of mechanical engineering; and Gary Van ZanteSTEIDL/MIT MUSEUM, 2019, $50

Advancing the Common Good: Strategies for Businesses, Governments, and NonprofitsBy Philip Kotler, PhD ’56PRAEGER, 2019, $39

Quantum Legacies: Dispatches from an Uncertain WorldBy David Kaiser, professor of physics and of the history of scienceUNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, 2020, $26

The Creative Classroom: Innovative Teaching for 21st-Century LearnersBy Keith Sawyer ’82 TEACHERS COLLEGE PRESS, 2019, $31.95

Send book news to MITNews@technologyreview.com orMIT News, 1 Main Street, 13th FloorCambridge, MA 02142

MJ20_MIT_author.indd 7 3/26/20 7:57 AM

08 Under the dome

I still remember the smell of the tobacco smoke. Bans on indoor smoking had recently gone into effect, but there had been no pro-vision to fumigate, and a haze lingered throughout Professor Joseph Harris’s office. Still, as a student at Dartmouth College, I found myself racing up three flights of creaking wooden stairs

to visit him in the Department of Physics and Astronomy nearly every day. From the moment I arrived on campus as an overeager undergraduate, Harris’s musty, book-choked enclave held me in a special kind of thrall.

I couldn’t know it then, but those many hours I spent talking with Harris set me on an unusual path, ultimately helping me build a career as a physicist and historian of science. After 20 years on the faculty at MIT, I still find myself grappling with some of the questions that Harris opened up for me all those years ago in his cramped, pungent office.

Back in the late 1950s, Harris had been a postdoc, advised by the legendary quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg in Munich. His scientific passion cen-tered on Albert Einstein’s general the-ory of relativity, that elegant description of gravitation as a mere side effect of the warping of space and time. By the time I met him, Harris had long since settled into the classic habits of a lib-eral arts professor, letting his interests wander broadly. He typically had a few recent textbooks on general relativity open on his desk or stacked, haphazard

and dog-eared, on a nearby table, inter-leaved with books on everything from the history of an astronomical observatory in 13th-century Persia to the letters of the novelist Thomas Mann (in the original German, natürlich).

I had found my way to Harris’s office even before classes began for my first semester of college. During one of my ini-tial visits, he listened with a kindly smile as I breathlessly recounted stories he surely knew about Einstein and Heisenberg—things I’d read in the popular books I’d devoured as a high school student about the grand mysteries of modern physics. Then he leaned back in his chair and told me that there was a whole field of study known as the history of science. People specialized in the field, he said, and their rich, empirical studies of science, culture, institutions, and politics were often much more interesting—and far more revealing of what it meant to study nature—than the well-worn tales of genius I had absorbed as a kid.

Harris directed me to two historians of science on campus. Under their guidance I began to explore books and articles by other historians, ranging from studies of Copernicus and the slow-grinding tran-sition to heliocentrism to the early stir-rings of quantum theory amid the swirling uncertainties of the Weimar era, right after Germany’s shocking defeat in the First World War. These studies were ani-mated by intriguing questions: What does it take to convince a broad scientific com-munity to adopt new ideas or approaches? How do new techniques—so often rooted

in specific times and places—percolate to new researchers or become second nature to the next generation?

These questions tugged at me as I dived into my problem sets and labora-tory courses in the physics department. Soon the example of Naomi Oreskes—one of the two historians of science I stud-ied with—became as inspiring to me as her classes. She had recently completed PhDs in both geology and the history of science. Her own history advisor in grad-uate school, Peter Galison, had pursued a similar course not long before, complet-ing PhDs in physics and the history of science. Naomi and Peter became a kind of existence proof for me: it was possi-ble to pursue these paired interests in a serious way.

I applied to PhD programs in phys-ics and in the history of science, sending off six applications to three institutions. I wound up at Harvard, where I worked closely with Galison and became espe-cially fascinated by the impact—both on the world of ideas and on specific insti-tutions—of massive wartime ventures like radar and the Manhattan Project. Graduate students who studied physics soon after the Second World War—Joe Harris’s generation—encountered a dis-cipline that had been utterly transformed. Budgets and enrollments for physics were skyrocketing; cultural shifts were afoot as well. “Physicists are in vogue these days,” declared one observer in Harper’s maga-zine in 1946. “No dinner party is a success without at least one physicist.” (Oh, how the times have changed.)

In college, I loved tales of the history of physics as much as I loved the science itself. A kindly professor encouraged me to carve out a dual career as a physicist and a chronicler of science history.

By David Kaiser

Double vision

MJ20_MIT_Dome.indd 8 3/24/20 12:14 PM

09Under the domeS

ILV

AN

A X

IME

NA

For my physics research, I explored a different era of high drama: the earliest moments of cosmic history, around the time of the Big Bang. Beginning in the early 1980s, MIT physicist Alan Guth ’68, PhD ’72, had upended conventional ideas about the early universe with his the-ory of cosmic inflation. During inflation the wobbly trampoline of spacetime, as

described by Einstein’s relativity, should have stretched at a mind-boggling rate, doubling in size every trillion-trillion- trillionth of a second. Tiny quantum fluc-tuations—an unavoidable consequence of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle—would have been stretched too, ultimately seeding the lumpiness we see throughout the uni-verse today, with huge clusters of galaxies

separated by enormous voids. Joe Harris and others had introduced me to these ideas during my undergraduate studies, which only left me hungry to learn more. Alan kindly agreed to advise my physics dissertation, and I got in the habit of rid-ing the Red Line between Harvard and Kendall Square.

Thanks to a joint MIT faculty appoint-ment in both the Program in Science, Technology, and Society and the Department of Physics, I have continued to wrestle, in my research and teaching, with questions that were first sparked for me in Joe Harris’s smoky office: questions revolving around a kind of doubleness of scientific research. So often, scientists have aimed to transcend their limited view and to craft some lasting bit of knowledge about the world. Yet each of us—Einstein and Heisenberg no less than today’s research-ers—encounters the world from a very par-ticular vantage point. We are immersed in the particulars, moment by moment, even as so many of us dream of contributing insights that might endure beyond the horizon of our historical circumstances.

In one sense, the smoke has cleared; my office smells nothing like Joe’s. But the questions remain. What a remarkable privilege it is to puzzle through them with new students of my own. ■

A professor of both physics and the history of science, David Kaiser recently collaborated on a simulation of the “reheating” phase following cosmic inflation, which could have laid the groundwork for the Big Bang. His latest book explores the history of quantum physics.

David Kaiser is the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science, Professor of Physics, and Associate Dean for Social and Ethical Respon-sibilities of Computing at MIT. His latest book is Quantum Legacies: Dispatches from an Uncertain World (University of Chicago Press, 2020).

We are immersed in the particulars, moment by moment, even as so many

of us dream of contributing insights that might endure beyond the horizon of our

historical circumstances.

MJ20_MIT_Dome.indd 9 3/24/20 12:14 PM

10 1865

When Ellen Swallow Richards became the first woman to gradu-ate from MIT in 1873, she was convinced that

her aptitude for science was not unusual—that she was not, as people claimed, an “exception.” Richards had graduated from Vassar in 1870 and was admitted to MIT to study chemistry in January 1871, when opportunities for women to gain hands-on laboratory experience were limited. The Institute considered her a special case, but Richards was determined to prove that other women would eagerly pursue scientific enquiry if given the chance.

In 1867, MIT professors had begun offering free laboratory sessions to the general public through an initiative called the Lowell Free Courses of Instruction. Because these demonstrations were open to the public, women were not barred from taking part, even though they could not attend the Institute as students. Several local female chemistry teachers had jumped at the opportunity.

Those free laboratory exercises were on hiatus for the winter of 1872-’73, though, when a young woman from a medical col-lege arrived in Boston hoping to sharpen her quantitative analysis skills. She applied to attend a class at MIT with Professor James Mason Crafts, a chemistry instructor, but he “saw no suitable way of accommo-dating her in his already crowded rooms,” Richards later wrote. The young woman would have been out of luck had it not been for the Woman’s Education Association (WEA), a group of educated, largely wealthy

Boston women formed in December of 1871, and the efforts of Richards herself.

Dedicated to bettering women’s edu-cation, the WEA came to the woman’s aid, securing a space in the chemistry lab in the local Girls’ High School on West Newton Street in Boston, as well as the funds to supply it. In the winter of 1873, 16 women came together for a special advanced chemistry class.

Under the direction of Professor Crafts, Richards, who was then still a student at MIT, and Bessie Capen, a local school-teacher and WEA member, taught the course without pay. This was the first time the WEA and Richards combined forces in what would prove to be a fruitful partner-ship. The class in the Girls’ High School laboratory acted as a powerful proof of concept—if provided the opportunity to study science, women would come.

Over the next few years, women fre-quently applied to study at MIT for short periods. For instance, teachers might apply for a couple of months’ instruction in quantitative analysis to qualify for better teaching positions. But the Institute still hadn’t opened its doors to women as reg-ular students. Richards was keen to see a dedicated space for women on MIT’s campus, and she wanted MIT to establish a permanent class similar to the one that had been held in the Girls’ High School.

The tide was turning in her favor. In the winter of 1876, so many women applied to attend the Lowell lectures that MIT’s chem-istry professors took eight female students into their own private laboratories free of charge. That year, Richards stood before

a session of the WEA and announced her plan for a Special Laboratory for Women.

“When you gave a small sum of money for a Class in Chemistry at the Girls’ High School three years ago, you doubtless did not anticipate these results,” she said. “But that Class demonstrated more fully than any previous one, the ability and interest of women in this Science.”

With the WEA’s support, Richards peti-tioned MIT to provide space for a Women’s Laboratory in the Walker Building, a pro-posed new facility that would expand MIT’s Boston campus. When the build-ing’s construction was delayed, an alterna-tive space was identified, and the Institute determined that it would need $2,000 for the lab’s instruments and apparatus. The WEA raised the money within three weeks. When a change of plans called for the Women’s Laboratory to occupy a larger space—in a five-room annex of the Rogers Building, MIT’s original building on Boston’s Boylston Street—the WEA rapidly provided an additional $500 to cover the extra costs. The annex was outfitted with a chemical laboratory, a library and weigh-ing room, a reception room, and industrial and optical laboratories.

The MIT Corporation voted to admit women as special students to study in the laboratory, and on October 5, 1876, its open-ing was officially announced. Under the direction of John M. Ordway, the lab offered “the advanced study of Chemical Analysis, Mineralogy, and Chemistry as related to Vegetable and Animal Physiology and to the Industrial Arts.” Any woman interested in such an education was invited to apply.

How the Institute went coed

Ellen Swallow Richards wasn’t just the first woman to earn a degree or teach at the Institute. She also played a critical role in opening MIT’s doors to other women who wanted to study science.

By Rachel Fritts, SM ’20

MJ20_MIT_1865.indd 10 3/25/20 8:56 AM

On October 23, the Women’s Laboratory welcomed its inaugural class of 23 students. A year later, Richards couldn’t help but gloat in a speech to the WEA, since some at MIT had predicted she wouldn’t even get 10. “It is always pleasant to have our prophecies fulfilled,” she said, “and especially pleasant when some doubt has been expressed as to the probability of fulfillment.” Chemistry teachers made up most of the first class, but Richards was especially satisfied that an aspiring physician and a budding min-eralogist were among their ranks.

Richards taught chemistry and miner-alogy at the lab for several hours a day all seven years it was open, though her name was not officially listed in the course cata-logue until 1878 and she was not paid. (She wouldn’t be placed on MIT’s payroll until 1884, when she received an annual salary of $1,000 to instruct a sanitary chemistry course.) Her co-instructor at the Girls’ High School, Bessie Capen, was one of the lab’s

first students. In 1878, Capen and a class-mate became the third and fourth women to earn bachelor’s degrees from MIT.

In all, the Women’s Laboratory served 102 women, and many went on to earn MIT bachelor’s degrees. It closed its doors in 1883 when the annex the lab had been housed in was torn down to make room for the construction of the Walker Building, which would contain brand-new laboratory spaces for the study of chemistry.

With the closure of the Women’s Lab, the future of women’s education at MIT was uncertain. But Richards saw an oppor-tunity. “The only objection now urged by the officers of the Institute to the admission of women to full privileges in all courses is lack of room,” she wrote. She and the WEA once again advocated for constructing the Walker Building with women in mind so they, too, could use the laboratories. When MIT administrators resisted the idea, citing the prohibitive expense, Richards simply

asked how much money was needed. Upon learning that it would take $8,000, the WEA again sprang into action and soon raised the funds. The money covered the cost to construct the new building with more laboratory space, a private women’s reception room (which would be known as the Margaret Cheney Reading Room), and toilets for women. On September 29, 1883, the Corporation voted to admit students to the new building’s chemistry laboratories “without distinction of sex.”

Richards would continue to be a cham-pion for women at MIT throughout her career. She cofounded the MIT Women’s Association, an organization promoting fellowship among MIT women, in 1900 and was elected president every year for a decade. In 1911, she was voted permanent president of the Women’s Association—a mark of the respect and admiration she’d earned from the women who followed in her footsteps. ■

11C

OU

RT

ES

Y M

IT M

US

EU

M1865

Ellen Swallow Richards (back row, far left) saw to it that MIT’s Walker Building in Boston had enough lab space—and, yes, bathrooms—for women.

MJ20_MIT_1865.indd 11 3/25/20 8:56 AM

12 MIT News

Back in 2008, Oregon health officials had enough money to let additional people join their state-run Medicaid system. They figured demand would exceed the number of spaces available, so the state ran a drawing: 90,000 people applied, and 10,000 were accepted.

The unusual program seemed almost designed for Amy Finkelstein, PhD ’01, to study. Finkelstein, the John and Jennie S. MacDonald Professor of Economics, is a leading health economist and spends a significant amount of her time looking for new ideas and data. And this was a golden opportunity to study the impact of Medicaid, with a built-in control group.

But she first heard about the program from a comedian.

“Oregon ran this lottery,” says Finkelstein, sitting in her office in E52. “Stephen Colbert did a spoof about it. You know, I can’t imitate him, but basi-cally: ‘Have you heard of this crazy thing? They’re running a lottery for health care. In Oregon! Scratch and sniff—did I win a kidney?’”

Suddenly in the know about a promis-ing new research opportunity, Finkelstein set to work connecting with Oregon offi-cials and health-economics colleagues. The defining feature of Finkelstein’s career is that she brings finely sharp-ened data points to health-care conver-sations that had been driven by mere assumptions. What difference does it make to people, medically and finan-cially, when they get health insurance? What’s the financial impact of being

hospitalized? What drives health-care costs: the decisions of doctors or the condition of patients? Time and again, Finkelstein has made such discussions more rigorous.

For instance, for decades conventional wisdom held that uninsured people did not lack access to medical care, because they could always use emergency rooms. If the uninsured routinely depended on these facilities to handle their problems, it would seem that joining Medicaid, the largely federally funded insurance pro-gram for low-income Americans, would cut down on ER use, not only because people would have other options for rou-tine care but also because they might avoid acute medical problems by get-ting better preventive care. But what Finkelstein and her colleagues found

Amy Finkelstein has changed what we know

about Medicaid, Medicare, the economics of health

care—and, increasingly, medical care itself.

By Peter DizikesPortraits by Bryce Vickmark

A healthyunder-

standingMJ20_MIT_profile2.indd 12 3/23/20 12:25 PM

13Cover story

MJ20_MIT_profile2.indd 13 3/23/20 12:25 PM

14

CO

UR

TE

SY

OF

TH

E R

ES

EA

RC

HE

RS

defied expectations: Medicaid enrollees visit the ER more often when they first join the program, and their elevated ER use continues for at least two years. The chances that someone will make both an ER visit and a primary-care visit go up 13 percentage points with Medicaid.

Research from the Oregon Medicaid experiment also revealed several other things experts hadn’t known. Policymakers suddenly had proof that Medicaid coverage increases overall doctor visits, prescription drug use, and hospital admissions. They could say with certainty that being on Medicaid reduces patients’ out-of-pocket expenses and unpaid medical debt. And they could point to evidence that while Medicare does not seem to change some physical health measures, such as blood pressure, it does increase patients’ self- reported good health and seems to reduce the incidence of depression.

Before long, this research was landing on the front page of the New York Times.

“That was an extremely important con-tribution to the policy debate, around what would happen if you added more insur-ance coverage,” says James M. Poterba, the Mitsui Professor of Economics at MIT, who was Finkelstein’s principal disserta-tion advisor and is now her colleague. “It was timely; it was right on the national agenda,” he adds. “It really had a very important impact on discussion on poli-cies like the Affordable Care Act.”

Finkelstein’s many papers on the Oregon program constitute the deep-est empirical work yet done on the sub-ject of Medicaid, but they represent just part of her research portfolio. Her work includes studies of Medicare, the federal health insurance program for seniors, as well as work on the long-term financial fallout of being hospitalized, the value of long-term-care insurance, the reasons for geographic variability in health-care costs, and much more. (See “8 things we now know about health economics thanks to Amy Finkelstein and her collaborators,” page 15.)

From her first published paper in 2002 through the beginning of 2020, Finkelstein

has authored or coauthored 49 peer- reviewed journal articles based on orig-inal research, another 10 journal articles serving as overviews of particular subjects, and eight published conference papers.

“I know a lot about Amy,” says Heidi Williams, a Stanford University econ-omist who has coauthored papers with Finkelstein and once had an office next to her as an MIT colleague. “But there are parts of her research I don’t even know about, because she’s so prolific.”

In 2012, Finkelstein was awarded the John Bates Clark Medal, given by the American Economic Association to the best economist under 40. In 2018, she won a MacArthur fellowship, often referred to as a “genius grant.” She has also been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and (unusually for an econ-omist) to the Institute of Medicine. And she’s the founding editor of American

Economics Review: Insights and co- directs the Public Economics Program and the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Yet for all that productivity, all the awards, and all the exacting empirical studies on her CV, Finkelstein takes the position that she, like most of us, under-stands relatively little about the health- insurance and health-care industries.

“If you made me king or queen of the world, it’s not obvious how we should be designing our health-care system,” she says. “Which makes me a very bad cock-tail party conversationalist, because when people say ‘What do you think of Medicare for All?’ or ‘How should we design health insurance?’ my usual reaction is ‘Well, I don’t know the answer, and that’s why I work on it.’ There are a lot of things I know or think I know the answer to, but those are not the things I do research on.”

A study coauthored by Amy Finkelstein shows where US medical providers are most likely to offer tests and treatments, given populations with equivalent levels of underlying health. In areas with greater “diagnostic intensity” (dark red is most intense), overall health appears worse because more problems are discovered.

10 to 15%

5 to 10%

0 to 5%

-5 to 0%

-5 to -10%

-10 to -15%

Not populated

MIT News

Mapping “diagnostic intensity”

MJ20_MIT_profile2.indd 14 3/25/20 7:43 AM

Health care vs. health insuranceWhen Finkelstein recounts the Stephen Colbert anecdote, she pauses to cor-rect the talk-show host. Oregon was not running a “lottery for health care,” as he had it.

“That isn’t quite right,” she says. “It’s health insurance.”

This distinction—between health care and health insurance—matters a great deal in grasping what Finkelstein does. For most of the first decade of her career, until 2010 or 2011, she focused on health insurance: what difference does it make when peo-ple have it? For the quarter of the elderly population suffering the greatest out-of-pocket medical costs relative to income, for example, she found that access to Medicare reduced their spending by 40%.

Finkelstein has continued to study health insurance, but over the last decade, she has also studied how effective health care itself is. For example, a paper she published recently in the New England Journal of Medicine found that “hotspot-ting”—programs aimed at preventing cer-tain patients with complex conditions from needing to return to the hospital—had little significant impact.

Even now, though, Finkelstein regards studies about health-care outcomes as a relatively new branch of her research.

“Over time, people started saying ‘Oh, so you’re a health economist,’ because a lot of my work was on health insurance,” she recounts. “And I would say, ‘No, I’m an insurance economist.’ And my husband would tell me, ‘You say that like it’s sup-posed to be more interesting.’”

She adds: “I understand that also doesn’t sound like good cocktail party conversation.”

Destined for academiaFinkelstein grew up in Manhattan, the child of biology professors, and jokingly calls herself “constitutionally unsuited” to any occupation outside academia. “I always thought, correctly or incorrectly, that I was going to be a professor,” she says.

Correctly, it turns out. Finkelstein stud-ied political science as an undergraduate at Harvard, but gravitated to economics in part because she’d taken economist Lawrence Katz’s course “Social Problems in the American Economy.” After gradu-ating summa cum laude from Harvard, she earned a master’s in economics from Oxford University and then became a staff economist on the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers, headed by future US Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen.

“She was a phenomenal person to work for, as were all the other senior economists there,” Finkelstein says. But on top of that, she adds, “I got exposed to so many differ-ent economic topics. When I thought about the things I enjoyed working on the most, I did some work on natural- disaster insur-ance, some work on automobile insurance, some work on unemployment insurance—the common denominator was insurance.”

Finkelstein liked insurance because of its imperfections—a reason that may reso-nate with anyone who has visited a doctor and later been charged some infuriating fee that no customer service representa-tive can explain.

“The cartoon version of economics is Adam Smith, the invisible hand, markets functioning perfectly,” Finkelstein says. “It seemed [to me] that insurance markets were a very important set of markets for the econ-omy in which there was clear theory, going back to [economists] Michael Rothschild,

Cover story

8

1

2

3

4

things we now know about health economics thanks to Amy Finkelstein and her collaborators

continued

The postwar spread of health insurance—especially

Medicare—greatly spurred use of medical care.

From 1950 to 1990, US spending on health care increased sixfold. Scholars

once thought the growth of health insurance had little to do with this. But

Finkelstein found that the spread of health insurance—especially the advent of Medicare in 1965—accounts for half the increase in medical spending. When

people have coverage, they use it.

Medicare saved patients a bundle.

Health insurance reduces financial strain. Finkelstein has documented that

Medicare reduced out-of-pocket medical spending and unpaid medical debt. For example, the quarter of the elderly population that had faced the largest out-of-pocket expenses saw

their medical spending decline by 40%.

Insurers make a bundle on long-term-care insurance.

Long-term-care insurance covers the costs of managing chronic medical con-

ditions, helping to pay for such things as nursing-home care and home health care. Finkelstein studied it extensively

early in her career, concluding that peo-ple purchasing policies get back only

49 cents on the dollar.

Medicaid changes the way people use health care.

Finkelstein found that contrary to expec-tations, Medicaid enrollees increase ER visits after joining the program. Patient visits to both an ER and a primary-care doctor go up 13 percentage points with

Medicaid, which also increases over-all doctor visits, prescription drug use,

and hospital admissions, and decreases patients’ out-of-pocket expenses and

unpaid medical debt.

“If you made me king or queen of the world, it’s not obvious how we should be designing our health-care system. Which makes me a very bad cocktail party conversationalist.”

MJ20_MIT_profile2.indd 15 3/23/20 12:25 PM

16

[Joseph] Stiglitz, and George Akerlof, [but] these markets did not actually work, and so there might be scope for welfare-improving government inter-vention.” She realized that empirical evidence on this topic could prove useful to policymakers.

From the Council of Economic Advisers, Finkelstein was admitted into MIT’s PhD program in econom-ics, an ideal place for an empirically minded student. And among some highly motivated peers, she stood out.

“Even as an early-stage graduate student, Amy was extremely talented at tracking down data that could be brought to bear on particular ques-tions,” says Poterba. He adds: “She has always had a really good instinct for identifying important questions that need to be studied.”

After receiving her PhD from MIT in 2001, Finkelstein spent three years as a junior fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows. She rejoined MIT as an assistant pro-fessor in 2005 and received tenure within three years of her appoint-ment. Her formula for success is simple: she works consistently and very hard on a subject that energizes her, continually searching for data that can be applied to pressing medical questions.

“I don’t think Amy has ever wasted time at work, ever,” says Williams, who describes her as an exceptionally clear-thinking colleague. “She’s very good about ask-ing, ‘What are the facts?’ And she’s very entrepreneurial about getting new data.”

To a numbers-driven MIT-trained econ-omist, the Oregon Medicaid experiment is academic catnip, because the state’s use of a lottery created two otherwise identi-cal groups of people to study: those who gained access to Medicaid and those who did not. By comparing the results for the two groups, it is possible to get a clear look at Medicaid’s effects.

Similarly, Finkelstein’s recent work on hotspotting is important because of its methodological sophistication, which has cast doubt on a popular concept.

Publications such as the New Yorker have touted data from the nation’s best-known hotspotting program, in Camden, New Jersey, which had shown apparent success: about 40% of patients who participated in the program after being released from the hospital did not need to return over the next six months.

But Finkelstein and her colleagues (including Joseph Doyle of the MIT Sloan School of Management) worked with the Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers, the group that created the program, and conducted a randomized controlled trial. The study split a population of patients who’d just been released from the hospital in two, assigning half to the hotspotting program. The result? In both groups, about 40% did not need to be rehospitalized within six months of discharge. If a similar portion of almost any group of patients will be able to avoid returning to the hospital

for six months, the apparent success of hotspotting may well be an illusion.

Finkelstein’s research has also shown some popular claims about health-care costs to be wrong. Consider a brief political controversy from 2019. The Washington Post fact-checked Bernie Sanders’s oft- repeated claim that 500,000 people in the US file for bankruptcy annually because of medical expenses; the number derives from a survey Elizabeth Warren helped conduct, in which people were asked if medical costs had led to their bankruptcy filings.

Surveys have their value, but in 2019, two papers by Finkelstein and colleagues, based on an intensive study of California medical and credit records, showed the numbers in more exact terms, suggesting that many fewer than 500,000 bankrupt-cies are directly attributable to medical expenses (as the Post noted). At the same time, though, the work revealed that the

MIT News

MJ20_MIT_profile2.indd 16 3/23/20 12:26 PM

17

financial consequences of hospitalization, as measured in increased unemployment and lowered earnings, are still extremely serious (and can later be among the causes, if not the sole cause, of bankruptcy).

Finkelstein, for her part, stays out of the political fray, instead emphasizing the rigor of her discipline.

“I do think that economics has been at the forefront in developing credible empirical methods, which I do hope will percolate more broadly,” she says.

Examining antipoverty policyThere is no Finkelstein formula for iden-tifying a plausible topic of study—just an ongoing effort to see if there is data or an opportunity to study a pressing question. Part of a health economist’s job, Finkelstein notes, involves pursuing potential research projects that do not pan out.

“It’s a constant dance between the ques-tions that motivate you and the answers you can deliver,” she says. “You’re trying to find a match that’s at the intersection of interesting and feasible. You only see the times we succeed.”

That concern with empirically sound economics runs throughout Finkelstein’s household. Her husband is MIT econom-ics professor Benjamin Olken, an anti-poverty researcher who has spent years conducting field experiments in Indonesia. Olken is also a longtime member (and now the director) of MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), the innovative research center that has made a splash by emphasizing the use of empirical findings from field experiments as a guide for anti-poverty policy.

When two of J-PAL’s founders, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, PhD ’99, won

the Nobel Prize in Economics last fall, Finkelstein and Olken accompanied them to the awards ceremony in Stockholm. Finkelstein, in recent years, has become a J-PAL official as well. In 2013, she and Lawrence Katz, her old Harvard profes-sor, launched J-PAL North America, a new branch of the organization.

Some of J-PAL North America’s research efforts are focused on health care, such as an ongoing project that arranges regu-lar nurse visits for low-income first-time mothers in South Carolina. But its scope runs beyond health care; one project is a multi-city study of youth summer employ-ment programs.

As co–scientific director of J-PAL North America, Finkelstein is enjoying the oppor-tunity to design experiments. (The Oregon study, after all, examined a randomized program that was already in place.) She says she still has much to learn from Duflo and Banerjee, whose well-honed skills in the art of experiment design she admires.

In short, Finkelstein’s J-PAL work puts her in the position of learning still more about her craft, while encouraging and sup-porting other health-industry economists. Already a dedicated teacher at MIT, she is now doing even more to mentor junior colleagues as well.

“There been a huge influx of great young economists working on health eco-nomics, so it’s a really great time to be working in this field,” she says. For all her self-deprecating asides about the study of insurance, she wants other researchers to share her fascination with the field. “One of my main roles in life now,” she says, “is to take these very, very smart economists working on, to my mind, very boring top-ics and get them to study health care.” ■

Cover story

8

5

6

7

8

Doctors and patients are both behind the geographic differ-

ences in health-care costs. Finkelstein has examined the geographic

price disparities for health care in the US, finding that about half the cost dif-ferences are due to the characteristics

of patients and about half are due to the differences among providers. She also

uncovered significant variation in “diagnostic intensity”—the propensity of providers to offer tests and treatment—in different regions of the US. Miami, the

Detroit area, and Long Island are especially test-heavy areas.

Bankruptcies directly caused by medical expenses have been

overestimated, but decreased earnings and increased unem-

ployment following hospitaliza-tion have been overlooked.

When presidential candidates argue about medical bankruptcies, Finkelstein’s numbers are seen as the best available.

While it’s often reported that 60% of bankruptcy filings are directly attribut-

able to medical costs, she found that it’s closer to 4%—but the financial hit from poor health is still significant in terms of

reduced earnings and employment.

Being hospitalized after age 50 can damage your long-

term earning potential.Finkelstein found that even seemingly routine hospitalizations have punishing long-term effects. Among people aged

50 to 59, for instance, being hospitalized lowers employment by 11% and earnings

by 20% over the next four years.

Hospitals’ proactive care teams don’t appear to help.

A study coauthored by Finkelstein and released in early 2020 showed that “hotspotting”—an attempt to reduce

hospitalizations and costs for vulnerable high-use populations

through the use of proactive care teams—appears to have no effect at all

on patients’ rate of readmission.

continued

“It’s a constant dance between the questions that motivate you and the answers you can deliver. You’re trying to fi nd a match that’s at the intersection of interesting and feasible.”

MJ20_MIT_profile2.indd 17 3/24/20 8:00 AM

In 2018, Cody Friesen, PhD ’04, trekked through the bush in Kenya’s Rift Valley to comprehend the perils the girls of the Samburu Girls Foundation faced when they went out to gather water.

Every day, girls living at the rescue orga-nization had to walk two miles—often past men who see them as property—to the near-est water in a land where the past decade had been marked by blistering droughts.

There, on the muddy banks of a river riddled with cholera, Friesen saw the tracks of hyenas and men, reminders of what might await any girl who lingered.

The scene also stood as a reminder that an estimated 2.2 billion people worldwide lack safe drinking water, including these

vulnerable Kenyan girls 200 miles north of Nairobi.

Friesen eliminated that daily trek to the river by installing an array of 40 devices resembling solar panels on the foundation’s grounds. He designed the device, which he calls the Source Hydropanel, to pull water out of air, powered only by solar energy. It solved the water safety crisis at the Kenyan girls’ refuge—and Friesen says his device can do the same for people around the globe who lack access to clean drinking water.

Friesen first got interested in water growing up in what were then relatively rural suburbs southeast of Phoenix. “As a kid hiking in the desert, we were always hiking to a body of water like a creek or

a spring,” he says. “From an early age, appreciating the importance and sig-nificance of water was just a part of my life.” He’d also always been curious about how things worked, the kind of kid who tore apart the new toy car on Christmas morning and had it reassembled by lunch-time. So as a teen chancing upon stands of cottonwoods and natural springs on hikes, he’d not only ponder the value of water but also think about the infrastruc-ture that got it from the Colorado River to metro Phoenix. He figured there was a better alternative to the existing solu-tion: damming one of North America’s mightiest rivers and pumping its water hundreds of miles.

18 MIT News

Water where you need it

MJ20_MIT_zerowater.indd 18 3/24/20 8:06 AM

When he started at Arizona State University as an undergraduate, he gravi-tated to materials science, which he calls a “trifecta of physics, chemistry, and mechan-ical engineering.” His doctoral research at MIT focused on the properties of thin metallic films and the quantum mechan-ics of catalysis related to fuel cells. Upon earning his PhD in 2004, he returned to ASU, joining the materials science faculty at the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering.

In his new lab at ASU, he turned his attention to building a better battery. Within three years, Friesen had created a recharge-able zinc-air battery and founded a startup called Fluidic Energy to commercialize it. He followed that with his water-from-air

hydropanel and in 2014 launched his sec-ond venture, Zero Mass Water, to refine, manufacture, and distribute it.

Friesen describes similar origins and paths of discovery for each. In both cases, he started by trying to understand and then reframe big-picture problems. He then looked for ways to address them using mate-rials that were best suited to the particular chemical and physical challenges at issue. It’s an approach he says was instilled at MIT, where people focus on tough challenges and “are constantly thinking about how to hack together new solutions,” he says.

The zinc-air battery had its genesis when Friesen looked at the periodic table and asked what the cheapest possible

Cody Friesen, PhD ’04, invented panels

that harvest water from the air—even in arid

Arizona. And that’s after he’d figured out how to

make rechargeable high-energy batteries that are cheap and eco-friendly.

By Sean Holstege

19Feature

Water where you need it

MJ20_MIT_zerowater.indd 19 3/24/20 8:06 AM

20 MIT News

battery would be. That led him to think about oxygen in the air as the cathode and zinc metal as the anode. Zinc-air batter-ies had been around for about 100 years, but nobody knew how to recharge them. They discharge the energy stored in the zinc by exposing it to the air’s oxygen, creating zinc oxide and releasing elec-trons. But recharging the battery causes spiky crystals, or dendrites, of zinc to build up on the surface of the anode, making it impossible to recharge it more than a few times. To get around th e dendrite problem, Friesen created a layered nickel scaffold with an array of holes in various sizes; the layers are characterized by different electrical properties. Zinc is plated to the scaffold, which then functions as a porous anode, and a mix of potassium hydroxide and liquid-based ionic additives serves as an electrolyte. When the electrolyte passes through the anode during charging and discharging, this mixture works with the pores and the layered structure to prevent dendrites from forming and building up. As a result, the batteries can be recharged repeatedly and are designed to last more than 10 years.

The device ticked all the boxes. It was built with cheap, nontoxic, and abundantly available raw materials. And it could store more energy than a lithium-ion battery at a much lower cost—potentially for as little as $10 per kilowatt-hour at scale.

Friesen’s batteries could maintain power for 12 hours or more during extended black-outs. In areas without access to the grid, they could be charged by solar panels and used to provide power. The invention prompted MIT Technology Review to include him on the 2009 TR35 list recog-nizing outstanding innovators under 35.

In 2018, Fluidic Energy was bought by surgeon and medical entrepreneur Patrick Soon-Shiong and became NantEnergy. The company says it has supplied power to 200,000 people in rural Africa and cites a demonstration project in Madagascar, where three-quarters of the population has no electricity. Although it laid off half its workforce last fall, NantEnergy reported installing 3,000 systems in nine countries

last year and says that all told, it has pro-vided backup power during more than a million hours of extended blackouts.

As the zinc-air battery was moving from lab to market, Friese n was already working on his next big challenge. Since 2010 he had wanted to develop a device that could produce clean water where it’s needed—and use only freely available resources and renewable energy to do so.

He realized that there is lots of mois-ture in the air. The challenge was how to extract and deliver it efficiently. By 2014, Friesen was fine-tuning a working proto-type in his ASU lab in Tempe.

Today, the Source hydropanel looks like a thick solar panel measuring eight feet by four feet by five inches atop a base with

a reservoir; all told it’s about three feet tall and weighs about 300 pounds. The device uses so lar-powered fans to draw air inside, where water vapor is adsorbed onto a proprietary hygroscopic material—a desiccant that Friesen engineered at the nanoscale to maximize its ability to attract water without compromising its ability to release the water that collects on its surface. Heat captured by the device’s solar thermal panels increases the vapor pressure of the water, causing the hygroscopic material to release it. This raises the specific humidity of the water vapor inside the device, ele-vating the dew point above the ambient temperature so there’s no need to chill the vapor to get it to condense—even in arid environments. Friesen calls this process

How the hydropanel works

Residents of Bahia Hondita on the La Guajira peninsula in Colombia now get water from this array of Source hydropanels instead of relying on

brackish water from a local borehole.

1

Ambient air is drawn in, and its water vapor is adsorbed onto engineered

hygroscopic materials.

2

Solar heat desorbs the water vapor, raising the specific humidity and the dew point. This allows the vapor to condense and flow into a reservoir at

the base of the panel.

3

Water is pumped from the reservoir

through a polishing cartridge to a tap.

MJ20_MIT_zerowater.indd 20 3/24/20 8:06 AM

21Feature

“passive condensation.” From there, the water pools in a 30-liter tank at the base of the device. New water is repeatedly drawn into and released from the hygroscopic materials many times per day.

The hygroscopic materia l effectively attracts only water molecules, so the com-bined processes of adsorption and passive condensation consistently deliver water of high purity. In theory, even water harvested from polluted air is pure, says Friesen, who adds that all the company’s measurements to date confirm that. The water in the tank is regularly treated with ozone to prevent the growth of microbes, and before it reaches a dispenser, it passes through calcium and magnesium cartridges to improve its taste.

Solar-powered sensors help optimize the hydropanel’s performance by mea-suring the ambient air temperature, solar intensity, and relative humidity, feeding that data into an algorithm that dynami-cally controls the rate at which fans draw air into the device. Solar-powered wireless transmitters also send live data to a cloud database, making it possible for Zero Mass

Water to monitor all installed panels. The company’s network operations center can usually resolve functional issues with over-the-air commands and programming; if a maintenance issue is detected, the center can loop in local partners to address it.

Each hydropanel can generate up to five liters of drinking water a day, depending on cloud cover and humidity. In locations with limited sunlight or low humidity, the panels are less efficient. But Friesen says the two units on the roof of his Arizona home provide enough drinking water for his family of four plus two Weimaraners, in a place with an average 110 days of triple-digit temperatures and more than seven months of single-digit humidity. Water cannot be produced in freezing con-ditions, however, limiting the hydropanels’ usefulness in wintry climates.

Zero Mass Water began in 2014 in a former Volvo dealership. At the end of last year, workers were hanging signs over the entrance to a new headquarters, a tucked-away industrial building a few miles south in Tempe. The company has raised $65

million in venture capital and has installed panels in 37 countries, in jungles and des-erts alike. Source panels have provided water in government offices, hotels, hos-pitals, schools, and restaurants, as well as in Syrian refugee camps, in Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria, and for the girls’ foundation in Kenya.

But the devices are expensive; each hydropanel is $2,500, and installing an array of two can cost up to $6,500. To make prog-ress toward his vision of providing water “for every person in every place,” Friesen will need to bring the cost down. (To date, many installations have been funded by grants from governments, foundations, and NGOs.) In the meantime, he recently announced that the company is rolling out

a half-size unit with a footprint that’s easier to integrate with residential solar panels.“It took solar PV decades to get where it is now with economic and performance effi-ciency,” he says. “In just five years, we’ve managed to mirror that growth and are on a trajectory to make Source water accessible on a significantly compressed time line.”

Friesen says Zero Mass Water takes up most of his time these days, but he remains a part-time associate professor and senior sustainability scientist at ASU’s sustainability institute. He’s also serving his second term on the US Manufacturing Council, to which he was appointed during the Obama administration.

He has applied for 88 patents to date, and he won the 2019 Lemelson-MIT Prize for invention last fall. The $500,000 prize, which honors inventors whose work prom-ises to improve the world, reflected his work on both the zinc-air battery and the hydropanel. “I still pinch myself,” says Friesen, who is using most of the prize money to install his hydropanels in Bahia Hondita, a Colombian village facing a severe drinking water shortage. He picked the installation site by calling a friend at Conservation International and asking which place most needed help.

Gary Dirks, the senior director of ASU’s Global Futures Lab, isn’t surprised by how his colleague is spending his prize money, given that Friesen has also set up scholar-ships to support young entrepreneurs at the university. The two met when Friesen was beta-testing the hydropanel and Dirks agreed to steer grant money into the project. “He is very much an astute serial entrepre-neur and a serial inventor. That’s what he likes to do, and he likes to take on really big things,” says Dirks, who describes Friesen as “a man on a mission.”

“The end result [of research] should not be a publication,” Friesen says. “Academia is about the creation of new knowledge andabout the translation of that knowledge”—its journey out of the lab and into practical applications that can improve people’s lives.

That’s not the well-rehearsed, polished salesman talking, says Dirks: “He’s moti-vated by the big problems of the world.” ■

Friesen says the end result of research should not be a publication. Academia is about the creation of new knowledge and the translation of that knowledge into practical applications.

PR

EV

IOU

S S

PR

EA

D: A

RT

HO

LE

MA

N; C

OU

RT

ES

Y I

MA

GE

S

MJ20_MIT_zerowater.indd 21 3/24/20 8:07 AM

22

ST

EP

HA

NIE

AR

NE

TT

This May, residents chosen from a lotteryof 2,600 applicants are scheduled to begin moving into 98 affordable housing units in the new Finch Cambridge building on Concord Avenue near Fresh Pond in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Designed by Boston’s Icon Architecture, the building features playful bay and corner windows to let in sunlight and allow cross- ventilation, a lobby with a vaulted ceiling and an open staircase meant to entice people to forgo the elevators, and other thoughtful touches like sage-green accent walls and large floor tiles in the bathrooms to minimize the use of dirt-attracting grout. Its family-friendly laundry room is next to a large community space with a lounge, a kitchen area, and homework nooks—and both are sited on the top floor, with windows offering stun-ning views of Fresh Pond and access to a rooftop terrace that will have raised beds for gardening.

But what’s most remarkable about the building isn’t visible at all.

Finch Cambridge was designed to meet the world’s most energy-efficient build-ing standard, known as the Passive House (PH) standard, which will make it dramat-ically cheaper to heat and cool than a typ-ical building. In fact, it’s projected to be 70% more energy efficient than the 2016 national average for multifamily buildings. Airtight and extremely well insulated, such

a structure is considered “passive” because it can efficiently maintain its temperature no matter what the weather outside, rely-ing only minimally on traditional heat-ing and cooling systems. “It’s effectively a thermos,” says Finch Cambridge’s project manager, Michelle Apigian, MA ’00, MC P ’00, an associate principal and sustain-ability leader at Icon Architecture who also worked on the building’s design. The Passive House approach, which works for all types of buildings from single-family homes to skyscrapers, calls for a ventilation system that carefully controls intake of fresh air and recovers the heat (or air-conditioned coolness) from outgoing stale air. That not only reduces the need for heating and cool-ing but delivers better indoor air quality for healthier, more comfortable living spaces. You can still o pen a window for a burst of fresh air if you really want to.

Given all the benefits—and the fact that buildings account for 54% of energy usage in Massachusetts—it’s surprising that Finch Cambridge will be only the second multifamily PH building in the state. Apigian also project-managed and helped design the first one, a market-rate apartment building in South Boston called Distillery North, which opened in 2017. That building earned LEED Platinum sta-tus—the highest level of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design green

building certification program—with-out any additional effort. The building is 72% more energy efficient than the 2016 national average for multifamily buildings. Tenants there pay an average of $22.50 a month to heat and cool their apartments, which are mostly one- and two-bedroom units, says building owner Fred Gordon. He adds that two residents with severe respiratory allergies report that their symp-toms completely disappeared shortly after moving in—and reappear when they travel.

The concepts behind PH design began to take shape during the oil crisis of the 1970s, when the US government funded research to reduce the country’s dependence on oil. But interest in building energy-efficient

The passive house that’s aggressively green

A six-story building designed to the “Passive House” standard just went up in Cambridge. Architect Michelle Apigian, MA ’00, MCP ’00, gives us a tour and explains

why it’s so energy efficient. By Alice Dragoon

MIT News

TThis May, residents chosen from a lottery

TThis May, residents chosen from a lotteryof 2,600 applicants are scheduled to begin Tof 2,600 applicants are scheduled to begin moving into 98 affordable housing units Tmoving into 98 affordable housing units in the new Finch Cambridge building Tin the new Finch Cambridge building on Concord Avenue near Fresh Pond in Ton Concord Avenue near Fresh Pond in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Designed by TCambridge, Massachusetts. Designed by Boston’s Icon Architecture, the building TBoston’s Icon Architecture, the building Tfeatures playful bay and corner windows to Tfeatures playful bay and corner windows to let in sunlight and allow cross- ventilation, Tlet in sunlight and allow cross- ventilation, a lobby with a vaulted ceiling and an open Ta lobby with a vaulted ceiling and an open staircase meant to entice people to forgo Tstaircase meant to entice people to forgo the elevators, and other thoughtful touches Tthe elevators, and other thoughtful touches

MJ20_MIT_building.indd 22 3/25/20 11:44 AM

homes waned when oil prices fell and Americans got back into their gas-guzzling cars. A group of Europeans then picked up where the Americans (and some Canadian colleagues) had left off, refining best prac-tices and standards for building airtight homes that are easier to heat in the win-ter—an approach they promoted as the Passivhaus movement. A German architect built the first US Passivhaus in Illinois in 2003; in 2007, she founded the Passive House Institute of the US, which has fine-tuned PH approaches for different climates.

Although the idea of designing extremely energy-efficient buildings seems like a no-brainer, Apigian says awareness of the PH standard has only recently begun to

spread in the US design community. She first learned about it in 2008 when working on a competition to design net-zero hous-ing—homes that create as much energy as they use—for the former Fort Devens Army base in Massachusetts. Now certi-fied in PH building and an active advocate for incentives to promote such projects, she thinks designing to these standards will eventually become the new normal. “When LEED hit the ground, it felt new and crazy to everybody,” she says. “Now, it’s basically a given—every architecture firm is thinking holistically. LEED put that clearly on the map.”

Fear of high costs has prevented many developers from embracing Passive House

principles. Few builders are experienced with the construction techniques, which drives up the price. “If there’s an inex-pert team, it’s more likely you’ll get a pretty high cost estimate because they’re nervous and don’t know what it’ll take,” Apigian says. But as more builders gain experience, the prices should come down. “We believe we can really do it for 1% to 2% added cost if Passive House princi-ples are integral from the get-go of the design process and the whole team is on board,” she says.

With the final phase of Finch Cambridge construction well under way in February, Apigian gave MIT News a tour of the build-ing, explaining the key concepts.

23

MJ20_MIT_building.indd 23 3/25/20 11:45 AM

24

2

1

AL

ICE

DR

AG

OO

N; C

OU

RT

ES

Y P

HO

TO

MIT News

Contin uous insulation is critical. But in a traditional building, insulation is placed only in the wall cavities between studs, leaving gaps—an approach Apigian lik-ens to “a sweater with a bunch of holes in it.” For PH buildings, architects typically also add a layer of continuous exterior insulation with high thermal resistance, effectively creating a blanket around the entire building. The blanket’s thickness depends on the building’s size, use, and occupancy, as well as the climate zone. At Finch Cambridge, Icon used spray- applied fiberglass insulation in the exte-rior wall cavities and then wrapped the building with a two-inch layer of “min-eral wool,” a fire-resistant insulating material made of melted-down basalt stone and recycled slag from steel mills. (The Distillery North building got cellu-lose insulation in its exterior wall cavi-ties plus three inches of mineral wool.)

The architects also covered the roof with tapered rigid foam-board insulation, placed six inches of high-density rigid foam between the garage ceiling and the floor above it, and sprayed polyurethane foam insulation in transition spots that would otherwise be difficult to cover.

It’s also critical to avoid or disrupt thermal bridges, elements that create a path for heat to get in or out because they are more thermally conductive than the surrounding materials. Studs—espe-cially metal studs—are notorious ther-mal bridges; at Finch Cambridge, they are disrupted by the two inches of exte-rior insulation. Likewise, the Z-shaped metal strips used to attach the external cladding are secured to the building with clips made of fiberglass, which has lim-ited thermal conductivity. (At left: red fiberglass clips prevent thermal bridging; tan mineral wool blankets the exterior.)

Unless someone walk s through a do or or opens a window, no air should come in or out of a PH building except through the ventilation system. So the building’s sheathing is completely encased in a three-layer air barrier consisting of two outer layers of polypropylene thermally bonded to a watertight middle polymeric layer. At every corner and all edges of every punched opening—think win-dows, doors, duct openings—this barrier is taped with special water- and wind-proof tape. (Apigian says a single-layer air barrier isn’t as effective, and proper application is critical. If attached with staples—or worse, if it’s ripped and blow-ing—it won’t keep air out. Continuously adhered barriers are more secure.)

This is the first step in creating what’s known as a Passive House enve-lope—a continuous barrier against out-side air, moisture, and unwanted heat or cold. All 98 apartments at Finch Cambridge are within the envelope and must meet the strict standards for airtightness and efficient heating and cooling. But to help contain costs, a few areas with more challenging ventila-tion, heating, and cooling issues—the lobby and its open staircase, as well as the laundry and community rooms—are excluded from the envelope. All doors leading into the PH envelope and all of its windows are gasketed and triple-glazed to prevent unintended air-flow when they’re closed.

Wrap the building in a blanket.

Create an airtight “envelope.”

The building ‘envelope’ is doing the bulk of the work, maintaining interior temperature regardless of what’s happening outside. ££

MJ20_MIT_building.indd 24 3/25/20 11:45 AM

25A

LIC

E D

RA

GO

ON

Feature story

A building with a proper PH envelope and an ERV system requires minimal additional heating and cooling. The heat generated by bodies, appliances, lights, and plugged-in devices like computers, televisions, and toasters goes a long way to keeping it toasty. In fact, it’s often said that you can heat a PH home with a hair-dryer. In New England, Apigian says, that can be true. But she points out that the effectiveness of the PH envelope at retaining heat means that cooling in the summer tends to be a bigger issue.

Computer models factor in the heat generated by the appliances, electric devices, lighting fixtures, and people and calculate how much extra heat or cooling is needed. Heat pumps, which operate on the same principles as an air conditioner or freezer and require minimal energy to run, are typically sufficient for both purposes. A heat pump’s evaporator, or

heat exchanger, extracts heat from the air using a refrigerant fluid that turns to vapor; that vapor is then compressed in a condenser to increase its temperature, providing heat. The process is reversed when cooling is needed. Each unit at Finch Cambridge has an electric heat pump, but all 98 heat pumps (and those in the common spaces) share just 16 condensers on the roof (shown at right). Because the system allows simultaneous variable refrigerant flow, a west-facing unit that’s baking in the sun can request cooling at the same time an east-facing unit can call for heat.

The site energy usage intensity (EUI) projected at Finch Cambridge—the number of kBTUs required to heat and cool each square foot per year—is just 23. That’s an impressive 70% less than US average site EUI for multifamily homes, which in 2016 was 78.8.

Energy recovery ventilators (known as ERVs) are used to provide a con-tinuous, balanced flow of air into and out of PH buildings. For each of Finch Cambridge’s two ERVs, one duct draws in fresh air and a second duct expels stale air. Both ducts pass the air through the ERV, a heat exchanger that takes advantage of the basic thermodynamic principle that thermal energy will always flow from hot toward cold. So while the air in the two separate ducts doesn’t mix, in cold weather the heat from the outgoing stale air helps warm the cold fresh air coming in, reducing the demand for heating in the building. In warm weather, the system extracts the heat from the incoming fresh air,

transferring it to the outgoing cooler stale air and minimizing the need for air conditioning. The ERVs also help man-age humidity.

Fresh air, which is filtered to remove particulate matter, is delivered into all of Finch Cambridge’s living rooms and bedrooms from one of the building’s two fresh-air ducts. Stale air is drawn from vents in all bathrooms and kitch-ens and flows out to one of the ERVs through one of the two outgoing ven-tilation ducts (shown at right, before insulation was applied).

“It’s very simple technology that’s kind of amazing, but not complicated,” says Apigian. “It’s been around a long while.”

Install right-sized heating.

Carefully manage ventilation.

The building ‘envelope’ is doing the bulk of the work, maintaining interior temperature regardless of what’s happening outside.

££

3Energy recovery ventilators (known 3Energy recovery ventilators (known as ERVs) are used to provide a con-3as ERVs) are used to provide a con-tinuous, balanced flow of air into and 3tinuous, balanced flow of air into and 3Carefully manage ventilation.3Carefully manage ventilation.

4A building with a proper PH envelope 4A building with a proper PH envelope and an ERV system requires minimal 4and an ERV system requires minimal additional heating and cooling. The heat 4additional heating and cooling. The heat 4Install right-sized heating. 4Install right-sized heating.

MJ20_MIT_building.indd 25 3/25/20 11:46 AM

26

6

5

ST

EP

HA

NIE

AR

NE

TT

; PA

SS

IVH

AU

S I

NS

TIT

UT

/WIK

IME

DIA

The right windows and shading devices make it possible to exploit the sun’s heat in winter and deflect it in the summer. To help maintain the interior temperature whether it’s hot or cold outside, all windows in the PH envelope at Finch Cambridge are triple-glazed and gasketed, with insulated frames that prevent thermal bridging. And Icon avoids double-hung windows whenever possible, since it’s difficult to main-tain a gasketed seal on a window made to slide up and down. “The traditional New England double-hung window is a disaster—the leakiest thing known to man,” Apigian says.

Exterior shades above the windows on the south façade of Finch Cambridge extend half the length of the window. (The architects had originally planned to install shades on the east, west, and south façades, but energy modeling

revealed that they were only needed for south-facing windows. Eliminating the rest helped contain costs.) They chose shades with slanted slats that block the summer sun but prevent rain and snow accumulation and allow the wind to blow through. Because the sun is lower in the sky in the winter, the sunlight and some of its radiant heat can enter the windows beneath the shades, help-ing to warm the building.

In a nod to the birds at nearby Fresh Pond, the architects designed the roofline of the building to resemble wings. The wings also provide shade for the community room and laundry room on the top floor and host part of the 150-kilowatt array of solar panels installed the roof. The solar panels are projected to offset 98,144 kilowatt-hours per year, or about 20% of the total elec-tricity required to operate the building.

Energy modeling is helpful to guide the design and construction of a PH build-ing. The building’s engineers can calcu-late the energy load (the peak amount of energy needed at any given time) to make sure they’re specifying appro-priately sized equipment for the build-ing instead of overdoing it. They can also determine the building’s energy demand (the overall energy used in a single year) to be sure it meets PH stan-dards. But measuring its airtightness once it’s built is the ultimate test—and is required for certification as a Passive House building.

Apigian fully expects the building to receive PH certification. In March, she was preparing for Finch Cambridge’s first full-building blower door test to determine its airtightness. The test involves closing all exterior doors and windows and placing a special door

with a fan in one main door of the PH envelope to draw air out of the building, lowering its internal air pressure. If the building isn’t airtight, the door fan has to work harder to maintain the air pres-sure level, and smoke pens can be used to reveal leaks.

As the final construction of Finch Cambridge wrapped up, Apigian was also juggling other local Passive House projects under way in Gloucester, Salem, and Lowell. In each case, the goal is to give heating and cooling systems very little to do. “With air-tightness and thermal continuity and control, the building envelope is doing the bulk of the work that we typically rely on our systems to do, maintain-ing interior temperature regardless of what’s happening outside the building,” she says. And in New England, that could mean almost anything. ■

Choose windows wisely—and shade as needed.

Do energy modeling and testing.

MIT News

MJ20_MIT_building.indd 26 3/25/20 11:46 AM

27R

OS

E L

INC

OL

NAlumni connection

The Institute launched the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing (SCC) with three critical objectives: to support the rapid evolu-

tion and growth of computer science and AI, to facilitate collaborations between computing and other disciplines, and to address the social and ethical responsi-bilities of computing. In August 2019, Daniel Huttenlocher, SM ’84, PhD ’88, became the inaugural dean of the college. Having helped to create and lead Cornell Tech, Cornell’s technology, business, law, and design campus in New York City, and Cornell’s Faculty of Computing and Information Science, Huttenlocher had all the qualifications to lead the groundbreaking new college—exten-sive experience in research, industry, and entrepreneurship, as well as in academic administration.

As of January, Huttenlocher, who also holds the title of Henry Ellis Warren (1894) Professor of Computer Science and AI & Decision-Making, had put the college’s initial organizing structure in place. In addition to appointing key members of its leadership team, he’d also announced which departments, institutes, labs, and centers make up the college. Among these is MIT’s larg-est academic department, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), situated jointly within the School of Engineering and SCC and now reor-ganized into three overlapping sub-units: electrical engineering, computer science, and artificial intelligence and decision-making. Searches are under way to begin filling 50 new faculty posi-tions. And given that some 40% of MIT

undergraduates are now majoring in computer science, an interdepartmental teaching collaborative called Common Ground for Computing Education launched this spring to facilitate multide-partmental computing education, as well as to support students in existing and new undergraduate blended-degree programs such as 6.9 (Computation and Cognition). For more detail on these plans, visittechnologyreview.com/SCCplans.

The MIT Alumni Association sat down with Huttenlocher during his second semester on the job to find out what it’s been like to return to campus as an alum in order to lead one of the greatest struc-tural changes in MIT’s history.

What about your student experience at MIT made you confident that this is an institution where an undertaking like SCC could succeed?I did my master’s and PhD over in the old Tech Square, in what was then the Artificial Intelligence Lab [a precursor to the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), now part of SCC]. In the 1980s, MIT’s research in AI and in CS was across the railroad tracks, in its own little universe over there. Fast-forward to today, and it’s very different. When you look at CSAIL, it’s in the heart of the campus, more con-nected both physically and intellectually to the fabric of the Institute.

For my master’s thesis, I worked on speech recognition, informed by lin-guistic models. For my PhD, I worked in

Rolling up his sleeves

A conversation with Daniel Huttenlocher, SM ’84, PhD ’88, dean of the new MIT Schwarzman College of Computing

By Nicole Estvanik Taylor

Daniel Huttenlocher, SM ’84, PhD ’88, is the first dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing.

MJ20_MIT_connection.indd 27 3/25/20 7:41 AM

28 Alumni connection

computer vision and object recognition. I was always interested, and still am, in how machines can perceive the world around them directly.

A big part of the culture of the AI Lab when I was there was to do really bold things. It was a time when the govern-ment was funding big, bold experiments in computing, early in the days of AI and computer science. There was a healthy view that we should be pushing the envelope. That’s the way I see the model of MIT.

And building any new academic organization in a university is definitely pushing the envelope. We don’t change very frequently in academia—we change our research, our scholarship, those kinds of things, but we don’t change the structure of institutions. It takes bold thinking to do that. It takes institutions that are willing to think and execute out-side the box. And certainly, that was my experience of MIT decades ago.

What excited you about returning to MIT for this role?When I took the job, I viewed it as this amazing opportunity to help an insti-tution for which I feel a deep affinity develop something new. I believe we’re in a time now that is in many ways sim-ilar to the time period in which MIT was founded—when a lot of technol-ogy practice had gotten out ahead of our understanding of it. We’re there with computing and AI today, much in the ways we were with what we now know as engineering.

Now, being back, it’s also become much more personal. MIT has changed a lot in 30 years, mainly in ways that are good, and there’s a lot more change we still need to go through. But MIT is peculiar in a way I find really special, and I had forgotten how much it was a part of me until I was back here. People here really roll up their sleeves and flock to get the work done. And there’s a real focus on thinking things through carefully and rigorously and logically.

That’s not uniformly true in my experi-ence, let’s just put it that way. Those are aspects about MIT I’d forgotten a little bit about, and I’d missed them.

What new opportunities will SCC create for students? Is the message to them that if you’re passionate about a given disci-pline, but also want a grounding in com-puting, we’re going to map a coherent path for you?Well, it’s still MIT—we’re not going to map every path. One of the great things about this institution is you should map your own path if there’s not a path here for you, and that’s not going away. But we will provide more paths that are thought through, that aren’t just the silos of the disciplines. Part of what the college is doing is putting in structures that support those kinds of cross-cutting missions. Eventually undergraduates—and to some degree graduate students, although graduate studies are still pretty discipline-based and should remain that way—will see the results of that. They’ll see new kinds of classes, new kinds of majors, new kinds of minors. But the dean doesn’t plan those things. I try to build the structures that get the right people working together to make those happen.

Is there a specific way this will affect graduate students?At the graduate level there are a lot of non-departmental programs—the Operations Research Center, for exam-ple, or the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), where there are sev-eral master’s and PhD programs—as well as the EECS graduate program in Course 6. Having those all be part of

the same college is going to give us a lot more opportunity to coordinate between those programs, to really think about the mix of statistics and machine learning and operations research and computer science, where the boundaries between those disciplines have suddenly blurred. So I think we’re just making it more flexible for grad students.

What questions and concerns have you been hearing from alumni? Concerns, or mandates? [Laughs.] I hear one a lot: Don’t mess with Course 6.

How do you respond to that? It’s important not to try to fix what “ain’t broke,” but at the same time to recog-nize that the world has changed a lot and computing is changing very quickly. Part of what we’ve come up with [with three sub-units in EECS] is something that doesn’t fundamentally disrupt the department structure of Course 6 but allows us to be much more responsive to the changes in the field.

I think the alumni I’ve talked to realize that it’s important for MIT to be doing something to lead in this area. The question is: What’s the something? When people see an institution through a lens from their experience of 20, 30, 50 years ago, sometimes you have to remind them why we have to be going forward today. That’s not just alumni; it’s true of students, faculty, and staff who are here today, too. Everybody comes to an institution like MIT because of its past, in part. Of course they’re here for today’s research and teaching, but they’re also here because it’s MIT, and that’s a century and a half of history. ■

“It’s important not to try to fix what ‘ain’t broke,’ but at the same time to recognize that the world has changed a lot and computing is changing very quickly.”

MJ20_MIT_connection.indd 28 3/25/20 3:15 PM

63Puzzle corner

As I finalize this column in early March, I hope that when you read it in May/June, the worldwide incidence of Covid-19 will be steadily decreasing. Intellectually, I realize that infectious diseases can spread rapidly, but it is jolting to see it happen. I extend my best wishes and sympathies to everyone affected.

ProblemsM/J1. We begin with a bridge problem from Larry Kells. Assume you hold:

Spades: AQ10Hearts: AKQ Diamonds: AKQ Clubs: AKQJ

You bid 6 no-trump and play it there. Can you make this contract against any distribution of cards to

the remaining three hands assuming best play on all sides? You should also assume you and the opponents know the distribution.

M/J2. Our second offering is an unusual pentominoes problem from H. Yamamoto (via that most prolific puzzler Nob Yoshigahara). First choose one of the 12 pentominoes as your tile. Recall that a pentomino contains five 1 × 1 squares and consider an 8 × 8 board, initially empty. What is the maximum number of your tiles that can be placed on the board without overlap? The answer depends on your choice of tile, so a full solution consists of determining the maximum for each of the 12 distinct pentominoes.

M/J3. Bruce Heflinger has a question about the terms in the Fibonacci sequence. This well-known sequence begins 1, 1, 2, 3, 5 . . . and is defined by the equations F (0) = F (1) = 1 and for all n >= 2, F (n) = F (n – 1) + F (n – 2). Heflinger asks you to show that any two adjacent numbers in the sequence are relatively prime (i.e., they share no common factor other than 1).

Speed departmentSorab R. Vatcha wants you to find two different sets each con-taining three unequal integers such that, for each set, the three numbers have the same sum and product.

SolutionsJ/F1. Larry Kells wants you to construct a single full deal (i.e., specify all four hands) where, with South as declarer, the oppo-nents can defeat every possible contract—and to maximize the number of high-card points South can hold in such a deal. To be clear, with this one full deal any contract by South can be defeated with best play on both sides.

I report two solutions. The second looks “too good to be true,” but I am not sufficiently knowledgeable about bridge to be sure.

This first solution, from Jim Larsen, gives a 22-point hand.

In the following hand, South has 22 points, the maximum high-card points he/she can have with the condition that the opponents can defeat any possible contract:

South can win six tricks, but no more. No-trump play is straight-forward, with South getting six top tricks and West getting the remainder. Spades or hearts as trump play essentially the same way. Clubs are the most advan-tageous other trump choice, but when North eventually gets a chance to ruff, East can over-ruff, pull North’s remaining trump, and either run diamonds or return the hand to West-South control. There is no arrangement where a Q can be substituted for a J with-out South getting an extra trick.

Our second solution, from Bob Wake, is a 30-point dream hand.

East-West can take eight tricks in clubs, and seven in every other suit. Against a spade, heart, or no-trump contract, West can lead a diamond to the ace, East returns a club, and West plays high clubs at every opportunity. South is forced to ruff twice if spades are trump, or once if hearts are trump, setting up the needed four trump tricks either way. Against a diamond contract, West leads a spade,

Send problems, solutions, and comments to Allan Gottlieb at New York University, 60 Fifth Ave., Room 316, New York, NY, 10011, or gottlieb@nyu.edu. For other solutions and back issues, visit the Puzzle Corner website at cs.nyu.edu/~gottlieb/tr.

Puzzle corner

North

♠ 7 6 5♥ 6 5 4♦ 4 3 2♣ 5 4 3 2

West

♠ Q J 10 9 8♥ Q J 10 9♦ K Q♣ K Q

East

♠

♥ 8 7♦ 10 9 8 7 6 5♣ 10 9 8 7 6

South

♠ A K 4 3 2♥ A K 3 2♦ A J♣ A J

North

♠ 4 3 2♥ 3 2♦ 6 5 4 3♣ 6 5 4 3

West

♠ 10 9 8 7 6 5♥ ♦ 2♣ A Q 10 9 8 7

East

♠

♥ 10 9 8 7 6 5 4♦ A 10 9 8 7 ♣ 2

South

♠ A K Q J♥ A K Q J♦ K Q J♣ K J

MJ20_MIT_puzzle.indd 63 3/20/20 11:23 AM

64 Puzzle corner

East ruffs and returns a heart for West to ruff, West leads another spade, East ruffs and leads a club, and then West takes two clubs and forces South to ruff, giving East the fourth trump trick they need. Finally, to get that eighth trick in clubs, West leads a spade for East to ruff, East then leads a heart for West to ruff, diamond to the ace at trick three; West ruffs a red card at trick four and exits with a spade. South has too many red cards left to avoid the endplay if West ruffs and exits with a spade at every opportunity. (East-West also have long-shot chances to take extra tricks against a red-suit contract against subpar play by drawing trumps, but if West leads diamonds against a diamond contract, East ducks, and South realizes the need to respond by breaking clubs and ends up making the contract.)

J/F2. Richard Thornton sometimes overpays, since he occasionally multiplies the costs of individual items instead of summing them. (We assume all items cost a positive-integer multiple of cents.)

One time, he purchased four items whose total cost is $7.11, but he was lucky since the product was also $7.11. What did the individual items cost?

Thornton also asks a more challenging question. There are many examples of four item costs (again, each a positive-integer number of cents) with the sum equal to the product. Which of these sets of four costs gives the largest sum? Which gives the smallest?

Richard Lipes sent us the following unique solution approach he received from a friend, who worked on the problem and then replied to Lipes: “After some trial and error, I used the new [his name] approach, which works like this. Go to Google, enter ‘Advanced Search,’ and then enter in the first field ‘Diophantine $7.11.’ Works like a charm!”

Indeed it does! But I find the more traditional method, “fig-ure it out yourself,” to be more satisfying, although admittedly more time consuming. As Lipes mentions, the Google search does reveal that significant work has been done on this problem.

The following satisfying solution is from Greg Muldowney.

If four items cost a, b, c, and d cents respectively, in dollars and cents the sum is (a + b + c + d)/100, whereas the product is abcd/(100)4. For these to equate, the individual costs must satisfy (a + b + c + d ) = abcd/(100)3 = abcd/(56 × 26). In Thornton’s case both sides are 711. Therefore abcd comprises the factors of 711—that is, 79 × 32, as well as 56 × 26. These 15 integers are to be parsed into sub-products a, b, c, and d that sum to 711. Not all can have 5 as a factor—one must end in 1 or 6. Having factors of 5 in three costs, notably as 53, 52, and 51, leads to the solution:

abcd = (79 × 32) (56 × 26) = (53) (52 × 3 × 2) (5 × 3 × 23) (79 × 22) = (125)(150) (120) (316) a + b + c + d = 125 + 150 + 120 + 316 = 711

Thornton’s item costs were then $1.20, $1.25, $1.50, and $3.16.The largest sum of four item costs is deduced by solving the

sum-product equality, (a + b + c + d) = abcd (100)3, for the one dependent cost (say d) and using it to express the sum (in cents):

Maximal S values are implied at abc = 106 + 1. Further, for fixed abc, the term (a + b + c) is greatest if a = b = 1. The abso-lute largest sum S therefore has (a, b, c) = (1, 1, 1000001), and:

Thus $10,000,040,000.03 is both the sum and the product of the item costs $0.01, $0.01, $10,000.01, and $10,000,030,000.00.

The smallest sum of four costs that matches the product occurs when all costs are equal. In this case 4d = d4/(100)3, from which d = 100 × 41/3 = 158.74 and S = 634.96. Therefore each integer from 635 upward (except primes such as 641 and 643) is factored into all possible sub-products along with 26 × 56, and combinations of these tested for sum-product equality. The first feasible case is found at 644 = 22 × 7 × 23, or $6.44, with item costs of $1.25, $1.75, $1.60, and $1.84—multiples of 53, 52, 51, and 50, respectively.

Better late than neverY2019. John Chandler sent the following improvements.

8 = 9 − 120

9 = 210 × 914 = 10/2 + 918 = 19 − 20

19 = 29 − 1093 = 102 − 9

N/D3. Jim Williams recommends the following video solution: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQc-54hQ8kw.

Other respondersS. Alexander, R. Anderson, M. Branicky, B. Chapp, N. Derby, D. Forouhari, H. Gries, T. Hafer, T. Harriman, D. Mellinger, T. Mita, B. Rhodes, L. Schaider, E. Signorelli, S. Sperry, and L. Tatevossian.

Solution to speed problem{1, 2, 3} and {−1, −2, −3}

= 1,000,004,000,003S = (1 + 1 + 1,000,001) × 1,000,001

1,000,001 – 106

d = a + b + c

– 1abc106( )

S = (a + b + c) abc

abc – 106

= 1,000,003,000,000– 1

1,000,001106( )

1,000,003106

d = 1 + 1 + 1,000,001

=

MJ20_MIT_puzzle.indd 64 3/24/20 7:56 AM

Profiles in generosity

Ivan Burns studied electrical engineering at MIT before founding a software company, Business Systems Resources. He and his spouse, Anne Hayden, raised three daughters, one of whom attended MIT, and are active philanthropists. In honor of Ivan’s 50th reunion, the couple established a fund to support SPARC—the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center’s fast-track experiment to demonstrate by 2025 that a fusion reaction can produce more energy than it consumes.

An energy revolution. “There are dozens of exciting things going on at MIT that I’d be glad to support. But energy contributes to quality of life in many ways, and if we want to eliminate carbon-based energy sources, there’s only one answer: fusion energy,” Ivan says. Carbon-free and limit-less, fusion produces little waste, makes few demands on natural resources, and can operate 24/7. “MIT is the first organization to take advantage of new magnet technology that greatly reduces not only the size of the tokamak device

that produces fusion energy, but the cost and time to build it as well,” he says.

Long-term impact. Ivan worked with the MIT adminis-tration as president of his dormitory as a student and in a professional capacity in the 1990s, so he and Anne have confidently made unrestricted gifts to the Institute for many years. “I have a great deal of respect and trust in the MIT administration to make the best use of resources,” he says. “The world is a better place because of the science and engineering that takes place at MIT.”

Help MIT build a better world.For more information, contact David Woodruff: 617.253.3990; daw@mit.edu. Or visit giving.mit.edu.

Ivan Burns ’69, SM ’70, and Anne HaydenConcord, Massachusetts

MJ20_MIT_donor.indd 3 3/23/20 11:57 AM

Technologies driving business

June 8 & 9, 2020Virtual conference

EmTech Next o�ers peer-to-peer networking and access to the experts successfully navigating the influx of technologies

driving business. With curated, actionable sessions, you’ll gain real-world, cross-industry insights into how to develop strategies and a workforce ready to capitalize on change.

Joining us on our virtual stage this year:

Clara Vu

Veo Robotics

Dugra Malladi

Qualcomm

Amy Webb

NYU Stern School

of Business

Greg Lavender

VMWare

Scott Penberthy

Google Cloud

Alumni save 20% with code ALUMMJ20

EmTechNext.com/Alumni2020

MJ20 ETN20 NewsFull page 8x10.875 D2.indd 1 4/3/20 12:44 PM