Anthropic, one of the world’s largest AI vendors, has a powerful family of generative AI models called Claude. These models can perform a range of tasks, from captioning images and writing emails to solving math and coding challenges. With Anthropic’s model ecosystem growing so quickly, it can be tough to keep track of which Claude […]
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Microbes that gobble up or break down environmental toxins can clean up oil spills, waste sites, and contaminated watersheds. But until his faculty mentor asked him for help with a project he was working on with doctors at Boston Children’s Hospital in 2009, Eric Alm had not thought much about their role in a very different environment: the human digestive system.
David Schauer, a professor of biological engineering, was examining how microorganisms in the gut might be linked to inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), and he hoped advanced statistical analysis of the data he was collecting could make those connections clearer. Alm, who’d joined the civil and environmental engineering faculty in 2006 as a computational biologist studying environmental uses of microbes, had the statistical experience needed and could apply machine-learning tools to help. But for him, the project was supposed to be a brief detour.
In June of 2009, however, Schauer—just 48—died unexpectedly, only two weeks after falling ill. Alm, heartbroken, worked to help push his mentor’s project over the finish line. As that effort was underway, Neil Rasmussen ’76, SM ’80, a longtime member of the MIT Corporation and the philanthropist funding the project, asked for a tour of his lab. That encounter would change the course of Alm’s career.
At the end of the lab tour, Rasmussen, who has a family member with IBD, had a surprise: He asked Alm if he’d be willing to pivot to researching inflammatory bowel disease—and offered to fund his lab if he did so.
Alm was game. He began shifting the main focus of his research away from harnessing microbes for the environment and turned most of his attention to exploring how they could be applied to human health. Then Rasmussen decided he wanted to “do something really big,” as Alm puts it, and make Boston a hub for microbiome research. So in 2014, with a $25 million grant from the Neil and Anna Rasmussen Foundation, the Center for Microbiome Informatics and Therapeutics (CMIT) was launched with Alm and Ramnik Xavier, chief of gastroenterology at Massachusetts General Hospital, as its co-directors.
By teaming up with Alm and others, Rasmussen hoped to create a research hub where scientists, engineers, doctors, and next-generation trainees would collaborate across scientific disciplines. They would build the tools needed to support a new research field and translate cutting-edge research into clinic-ready interventions for patients suffering from a wide range of inflammatory and autoimmune conditions influenced by the gut, including not only IBD but diabetes and Alzheimer’s—and potentially autism, Parkinson’s disease, and depression as well.
In its first 10 years, CMIT has made remarkable progress.
When the center started, Alm says, it was still a relatively novel idea that the human microbiome—particularly the community of trillions of symbiotic microbes that reside in the gut—might play a key role in human health. Few serious research programs existed to study this idea.
“It was really this undiscovered territory,” he recalls. “[In] a lot of diseases where there seemed to be things that we couldn’t explain, a lot of people thought maybe the microbiome plays a role either directly or indirectly.”
It has since become increasingly clear that the microbiome has a far greater impact on human health and development than previously thought. We now know that the human gut—often defined as the series of food-processing organs that make up the gastrointestinal tract—is home to untold trillions of microorganisms, each one a living laboratory capable of ingesting nutrients, sugars, and organic materials, digesting them, and releasing various kinds of organic outputs. And the metabolic outputs of these gut-dwelling microbes are similar to those of the liver, Alm says. In fact, the gut microbiome can essentially mirror some of the liver’s functions, helping the body metabolize carbohydrates, proteins, and fats by breaking down complex compounds into simpler molecules it can process more easily. But the gut’s outputs can change in either helpful or harmful ways if different microbes establish themselves within it.
“I would love to have bacteria that live on my face and release sunscreen in response to light. Why can’t I have that?”
Tami Lieberman
“Our exquisite immune defenses evolved in response to the microbiome and continue to adapt during our lifetime,” Rasmussen says. “I believe that advancing the basic science of human interactions with the microbiome is central to understanding and curing chronic immune-related diseases.”
By now, researchers affiliated with the center have published some 200 scientific papers, and it has found ways to advance microbiome research far beyond its walls. It funds a team at the Broad Institute (where Alm is now an Institute Member) that does assays and gene sequencing for scientists doing such research. Meanwhile, it has established one of the world’s most comprehensive microbiome “strain libraries,” facilitating studies around the globe.
To create this library—which includes strains in both the Broad Institute–OpenBiome Microbiome Library and the Global Microbiome Conservancy’s Biobank—researchers have isolated more than 15,000 distinct strains of microbes that are found in the human gut. The library can serve as a reference for those hoping to gain information on microbes they have isolated on their own, but researchers can also use it if they need samples of specific strains to study. To supplement the strain library, CMIT-affiliated researchers have traveled to many corners of the globe to collect stool samples from far-flung indigenous populations, an effort that continues to this day through the Global Microbiome Conservancy.
“We’re trying to build a critical mass and give folks working in different labs a central place where they can communicate and collaborate,” says Alm. “We also want to help them have access to doctors who might have samples they can use, or doctors who might have problems that need an engineering solution.”
The clinical applications produced by CMIT have already affected the lives of tens of thousands of patients. One of the most significant began making an impact even before the center’s official launch.
For decades, hospitals had been grappling with the deadly toll of bacterial infections caused by Clostridioides difficile (C. diff), a hardy, opportunistic bacterium that can colonize the gut of vulnerable patients, often after heavy doses of antibiotics wipe out beneficial microbes that usually keep C. diff at bay. The condition, which causes watery diarrhea, abdominal pain, fever, and nausea, can be resistant to conventional treatments. It kills roughly 30,000 Americans every year.
By 2003, researchers had discovered that transplanting stool from a healthy donor into the colon of a sick patient could restore the healthy microbes and solve the problem. But even a decade later, there was no standardized treatment or protocol—relatives were often asked to bring in their own stool in ice cream containers. In 2013, Mark Smith, PhD ’14, then a graduate student in Alm’s lab, cofounded the nonprofit OpenBiome, the nation’s first human stool bank. OpenBiome developed rigorous methods to screen donors (people joke that it’s harder to get approved than to get into MIT or Harvard) and standardized the procedures for sample processing and storage. Over the years, the nonprofit has worked with some 1,300 health-care facilities and research institutions and facilitated the treatment of more than 70,000 patients—work that OpenBiome says helped set the stage for the US Food and Drug Administration to approve the first microbiome-based therapeutic for recurrent C. diff infections.
Today, CMIT’s flagship effort is a 100-patient clinical trial that it launched to study IBD, using a wide array of technologies to monitor two cohorts of patients—one in the US and the other in the Netherlands—over the course of a year. People with Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis typically experience periods of full or partial remission, but they currently have no way to predict when they will relapse. So researchers are tracking weekly changes in each patient’s microbiome and other biological indicators while amassing continuous physiological data from Fitbits and recording self-reported symptom scores along with other clinical data. The goal is to identify biomarkers and other indicators that might be used to predict flare-ups so that already approved therapies can be used more effectively.
Although data is still being collected, early analysis suggests that a patient’s gut microbiome begins to change six to eight weeks before flare symptoms appear, and a few weeks later, genetic analysis of epithelial cells in their stool samples starts to show signs of increased inflammation. The team is planning to host a hackathon this summer to help speed analysis of the mountain of disparate types of data being collected.
Meanwhile, the community of clinicians, engineers, and scientists CMIT has nurtured is undertaking projects that Alm could hardly have imagined when he first delved into research on the human microbiome.
Right below the photograph on the bio page of her Twitter/X account, Alyssa Haynes Mitchell has three emojis: a tiny laptop, a red and blue strand of DNA, and a smiling pile of poo. The digital hieroglyphics neatly sum up her area of focus as she pursues a doctorate in microbiology. A 2024 Neil and Anna Rasmussen fellow, Mitchell is attempting to understand precisely what it is that allows microbes to survive and thrive in the human gut.
Mitchell fell in love with the study of microbes as an undergrad at Boston University. First, her mind was blown after she read a paper by researchers who could create a facsimile of a patient’s intestinal cell population—a “gut on a chip”—and planned to culture a microbiome on it. She was fascinated by the idea that this might lead to personalized treatments for conditions like IBD. Then she cultured her first colony of a strain of the microbe Bacillus subtilis that had been genetically engineered to fluoresce.
“They form these really complex ridges, and the more you look at microscopy images, the more you realize that there’s patterns of collective behavior of bacterial biofilms that we just don’t understand,” she says. “They’re super beautiful, and it’s really quite amazing to look at.”
In 2023, Mitchell joined the lab of Tami Lieberman, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and a member of both CMIT and MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science.
Mitchell and others who study the microbiome think that “probiotics,” beneficial microbes that are applied to the skin or ingested in supplements or foods such as yogurt or kombucha, could have broad potential to help treat disease. But for reasons that still aren’t well understood, once probiotics are introduced into the gut, only a small percentage of them are able to survive and proliferate, a process known as engraftment. A probiotic with an engraftment rate of 30% (meaning it’s still detectable in 30% of subjects) six months after administration is considered good, says Mitchell. She and Lieberman, who also holds the title of Hermann L.F. von Helmholtz Professor, are studying the way individual strains of microbes evolve to survive in the microbiome—a key mystery that needs to be solved to engineer more effective, longer-lasting therapies.
Alyssa Haynes Mitchell, a PhD student pursuing a doctorate in microbiology, is working with Tami Lieberman, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering, to study how strains of microbes evolve to survive in the gut. Lieberman also studies how microbes survive and proliferate on the skin.
“Hopefully if we learn a little bit more about what drives evolution of the ones that stick around, we might be able to learn why some don’t,” she says.
Mitchell has been working with samples collected by a local biotech company developing biotherapeutics for the gut. Its probiotic products, which are used to treat recurrent C. diff infections, contain eight closely related microbial strains belonging to the order known as Clostridiales. The company gave one of its products to 56 human subjects and collected stool samples over time. Mitchell is using genetic sequencing techniques to track how three of the microbial species evolved in 21 of the subjects. Identifying person-specific differences and similarities might reveal insights about the host environment and could help explain why some types of mutations allow some microbes to survive and thrive. The project is still in its early phases, but Mitchell has a working hypothesis.
“The model that I have in my mind is that people have different [gut] environments, and microbes are either compatible with them or not,” she says. “And there’s a window in which, if you’re a microbe, you might be able to stick around but maybe not thrive. And then evolution kind of gets you there. You might not be very fit when you land there, but you’re close enough to hang around and get there. Whereas in other people, you’re totally incompatible with what’s already there, and the resident microbes beat you out.”
Her work is just one of many projects using new approaches developed by Lieberman, who worked as a postdoc in Alm’s lab before starting her own in 2018. As a graduate student at Harvard, Lieberman gained access to more than 100 frozen samples collected from the airways, blood, and chest tissue of 14 patients with cystic fibrosis, a genetic disease that causes mucus to build up in the lungs and creates conditions ripe for infections. The patients were among those who had developed bacterial infections during an outbreak in the 1990s.
Lieberman and her colleagues recognized a perfect opportunity to use genetic sequencing technologies to study the way the genome of the Burkholderia dolosa bacterium evolved when she cultured those samples. What was it that allowed B. dolosa to adapt and survive? Many of the surviving microbes, she discovered, had developed similar mutations independently in different patients, suggesting that at least some of these mutations helped them to thrive. The research indicated which genes were worthy of further study—and suggested that this approach holds promise for understanding what it takes for microbes to grow well in the human body.
Lieberman joined Alm’s lab in 2015, aiming to apply the same experimental paradigm and the statistical techniques she had developed to the emerging field of microbiome research. In her own lab, she has developed an approach to figuring out how the pressures of natural selection result in mutations that may help certain microbes to engraft. It involves studying colonies of bacteria that form on the human skin.
“The idea is to create a genetically engineered metabolite factory in the gut.”
Daniel Pascal
In the gut, Lieberman explains, hundreds of different species of microbes coexist and coevolve, forming a heterogeneous community whose members interact with one another in ways that are not fully understood. This creates a wide array of confounding variables that make it more difficult to identify why some engraft and others don’t. But on the skin, the metabolic environment is less complex, so fewer species of bacteria coexist. The smaller number of species makes it far easier to track the way the genomes of specific microbes change over time to facilitate survival, and the accessibility of the skin makes it easier to figure out how spatial structure and the presence of other microbes affect this process.
One discovery from Lieberman’s lab is that each pore is dominated by just one random strain of a single species. Her group hypothesizes that survival may depend on the geometry of the pore and the location of the microbes. For example, as these anaerobic microbes typically thrive at the hard-to-access bottom of the pore, where there is less oxygen, the first to manage to get there can crowd out new migrants.
“My vision, and really a vision for the microbiome field in general,” Lieberman says, is that one day therapeutic microbes could be added to the body to treat medical conditions. “These could be microbes that are naturally occurring, or they could be genetically engineered microbes that have some property we want,” she adds. “But how to actually do that is really challenging because we don’t understand the ecology of the system.” Most bacteria introduced into a person’s system, even those taken from another healthy human, will not persist in the new person’s body, she notes, unless you “first bomb it with antibiotics” to get rid of most of the microbes that are already there. “Why that is,” she adds, “is something we really don’t understand.”
If Lieberman can solve the puzzle, the possible applications are tantalizing.
“I would love to have bacteria that live on my face and release sunscreen in response to light,” she says. “Why can’t I have that? In the future, there’s no reason we can’t figure out how to do that in a safe and controlled manner. And it would be much more convenient than applying sunscreen every day.”
Harnessing light-sensitive, sunblock-producing microbes may sound like a distant fantasy. But it’s not beyond the realm of possibility. Other microbial products that sound straight out of a science fiction novel have already been invented in the lab.
When Daniel Pascal first landed in the lab of MIT synthetic biologist Christopher Voigt, he had no idea he’d be staying on to make bacteria with superpowers. He was a first-year PhD student rotating through various labs, with little inkling of the potential contained in the microbes that live inside us.
Pascal, a 2024 Neil and Anna Rasmussen fellow who is pursuing a doctorate in biological engineering, was originally paired with a graduate student doing a more materials-related synthetic biology project. But he came from a family of physicians and soon found himself speaking with other graduate students in the lab whose projects had to do with health.
He then learned that two of the lab’s postdocs, Arash Farhadi and Brandon Fields, were receiving funding under a program sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon’s R&D organization, to develop solutions for common traveler’s ailments that result from problems like disrupted sleep cycles and limited access to safe food and water. When they explained that they hoped to harness microbes in the human body, they had his attention.
“It’s amazing how these tiny little organisms have so much control and can wreak so much havoc,” he says.
Intrigued, Pascal wound up officially joining Voigt’s lab, where he is working to create microbes that can carry out a wide array of functions they would not perform in the natural world.
To do so, he is using a custom “landing pad” system developed in the lab. The system relies on synthetic biology to create a new region in the genome of a microbe that, using specific enzymes, can be filled with pieces of DNA designed to imbue the microbe with special new abilities.
After engineering the landing pad into samples of an existing probiotic, Pascal and his collaborators on a project funded by the US Air Force and DARPA were able to deliver DNA that allows the probiotic to essentially set up a specialized drug production facility within the gut. First it absorbs two common amino acids, arginine and glycine. Then it converts them into a precursor compound that the body transforms into creatine, which can facilitate the production of muscle tissue from exercise and may help with memory.
Pascal explains that creatine is often taken as an over-the-counter supplement by people doing weight training and other athletes who want to improve their fitness. “But creatine has been shown to improve performance in fatigued humans,” he says. “So the motivation for this project was the idea that Air Force pilots that are traveling all over the world are jet-lagged, are working crazy hours and shifts.” What if, the researchers wondered, those pilots “could take a supplement that would improve some of their responsiveness, athletic accuracy, intelligence, and reasoning?”
A typical oral supplement delivers a spike of creatine in the bloodstream that largely dissipates relatively quickly. More useful to the pilots would be a probiotic engineered to produce a consistent amount of the creatine precursor that could be turned into creatine as needed.
CMIT is also funding Pascal’s project using the landing pad system to get microbes to produce substances that target specific pathogens without disrupting the entire microbiome. Although Pascal cannot yet reveal any details about these molecular-level assassins, he notes that other researchers in the Voigt lab have recently used the landing pad system to redesign the Escherichia coli Nissle (EcN) microbe, which had previously been engineered to produce such things as antibiotics, enzymes that break down toxins, and chemotherapy drugs to fight cancer. The lab’s work made it possible to improve the efficacy of a treatment for phenylketonuria and perhaps of other EcN therapeutics as well.
The lab has, in short, been able to get microbe strains (one of which he says is a commercially available probiotic that in some countries you can buy over the counter) to do some very useful things. “They’ve figured out a way to take this mundane thing and give it these extraordinary capabilities,” he says. “The idea is to create a genetically engineered metabolite factory in the gut.”
Understanding the microbiome may also lead to new therapies for one of the greatest public health challenges currently facing the US: rising rates of obesity.
Jason Zhang, a pediatric gastroenterologist at Boston Children’s Hospital, has received a CMIT clinical fellowship to study how gut bacteria may be linked to childhood obesity and diabetes. As a visiting scientist in Alm’s lab, he is using AI to predict people’s loss of control over what or how much they eat. His working hypothesis is that microbial metabolites are interacting with endocrine cells in the lining of the gut. Those endocrine cells in turn secrete hormones that travel to the brain and stimulate or suppress hunger.
“We believe that the microbiome plays a role in how we make choices around food,” he says. “The microbiome can send metabolites into the bloodstream that will maybe cross the blood-brain barrier. And there may be a direct connection. There is some evidence of that. But more likely they’re going to be interacting with cells in the epithelial layer in the gut.”
Zhang has sequenced the microbes found in the stool of subjects who have exhibited “loss-of-control eating” and developed a machine-learning algorithm that can predict it in other patients on the basis of their stool samples. He and his colleagues have begun to home in on a specific microbe that appears to be deficient in kids who experience this eating pattern.
The researchers have discovered that this particular microbe appears to respond to food in the gut by creating compounds that stimulate enteroendocrine cells to release a series of hormones signaling satiety to the brain—among them GLP-1, the hormone whose signal is turned up by weight-loss drugs like Ozempic. Zhang has already begun experimenting with therapies that artificially introduce the microbe into mice to treat obesity, diabetes, and food addiction.
“As with any single mechanism that treats a really complex disease, I would say it’s likely to make a difference,” he says. “But is it the silver bullet? Probably not.” Still, Zhang isn’t ruling it out: “We don’t know yet. That’s the ongoing work.”
All these projects provide a taste of what’s to come. For more than a decade, CMIT has played a key role in building the fundamental infrastructure needed to develop the new field.But with as many as 100 trillion bacterial cells in the human microbiome, the efforts to explore it have only just begun.
Jane Muschenetz’s poems don’t look like the sonnets you remember studying in high school English. If anything, they’re more likely to call to mind your statistics class.
Flip through the pages of her poetry chapbook Power Point and you’ll see charts, graphs, and citations galore. One poem visually documents maternal mortality rates and women’s unpaid domestic labor in such a way that the bar and pie graphs spell out the word “MOM.” Another tracks deaths from gun violence across the globe and is presented as a gun-shaped graph. Still others are written in more standard poetic form but include citations that reference documents put out by the US government, the United Nations, and news organizations.
These poems are just a few of the many in Muschenetz’s latest book that wrestle with contemporary social issues using a combination of data-driven insights and the poetic form. The format is a unique one: The first time Hayley Mitchell Haugen, founding editor in chief of Muschenetz’s publisher Sheila-Na-Gig, saw the poems, she thought to herself, “I’ve never seen anything like this before.”
While cold, hard numbers and poetry might seem antithetical at first blush, from Muschenetz’s perspective, the two couldn’t be a better fit. A former business consultant at Bain & Company who received her MBA at the Sloan School of Management, she released her first poetry book in her 40s, and she’s enjoyed uncovering what the artistic and scientific approaches to understanding the world have in common.
“Even though it maybe feels unintuitive that poetry and science are interrelated, they both make connections that are not immediately obvious,” she says. “They test out theories; they take risks. There’s a lot of nonlinear thinking that happens in both.”
Many of the poems in Power Point were inspired by watershed moments in global politics and culture, particularly ones that would shape the lives of women. From the partisan political theater on display at the confirmation hearing of US Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson to the passage of laws restricting women’s freedoms in Iran and Afghanistan, these events often left Muschenetz overwhelmed with frustration at the state of women’s rights today.
But knowing that women’s emotions are so often dismissed, she looked for a way to turn those feelings into something that she hoped would be harder to write off than standard poetry while still evoking the openheartedness with which people tend to approach art.
“I wanted something that listed just facts but expressed how angry I am,” she says. “I really wanted it to be fact-based. I wanted my sources to be publicly available and almost unassailable.” Her hope was that by repackaging these facts in the form of statistics-driven poetry, she might allow readers to receive the information in a new way—and get them thinking.
Muschenetz’s childhood primed her to understand how global currents can shape an individual life from an early age. Born Yevgenia Leonidovna Veitzman to a Jewish family in the Ukrainian city of Lviv, Muschenetz says her family began trying to leave the country before she was born, hoping to escape the discrimination they faced under the Soviet government. But it wasn’t until she was 10 years old that the family was finally able to emigrate. When they were at last cleared to cross the border, they headed for San Diego, where she decided that Jane would be easier for Americans to pronounce than her given first name. (Ultimately, she would change her last name, too, when she married.)
Muschenetz often felt out of place in her new home, even though she was surrounded by other immigrant kids whose parents had moved to California in search of a better life. In one way she was like many American teenage girls, though: She had a lot of feelings, especially about romantic relationships, whether real or imagined, and she often wrote poems about them.
At age 16, she began submitting her poetry to magazines and publishers, which brought her first taste of writerly rejection. “I was like, ‘Oh, well, I tried. Clearly this isn’t for me.’ Even though in my heart, since I was like four years old, I knew I was a writer and I loved literature,” she says.
Her parents were “completely horrified” about the prospect of her pursuing a career in writing, but they weren’t much more excited about what she eventually landed on instead: a degree in political science at UC San Diego. “The response was always ‘Poets get shot. Politicians get shot,’” she says.
She might not have been able to articulate it at age 18, but looking back, Muschenetz makes sense of the decision to study political science as driven by her desire to understand the global forces that caused her family to emigrate. “I wanted to know: How do we structure policy? Who makes these choices, and how can we change them and make them better?” she says.
But the dream of writing was hard to let go of. By the time Muschenetz was a few years out of college, she’d applied for two different programs: an MFA in writing and the MBA program at Sloan. And though she didn’t get accepted to the MFA program, her time at Sloan ended up profoundly shaping the poetry she would write two decades later, giving her the statistical analysis and data interpretation skills that formed the backdrop for Power Point. Those were skills she sharpened even further in the years she spent working as a business consultant at Bain right after earning her MBA.
“I don’t think the average joe could pull off [what she does in that book], because she knows how to present statistics well,” says Haugen. “She knows how to look at them analytically and offer them up in a way that a layperson can understand.”
Muschenetz left the business world after four years at Bain to focus on parenting her two children, as well as serving in various volunteer capacities at their schools and with local community organizations. It wasn’t until the world shut down in 2020 with the onset of the covid-19 pandemic that she found herself getting back in touch with the creative impulses that had animated her previously. Those impulses manifested in part as visual art: Muschenetz began painting a menagerie of animals on the bases of palm fronds she would find on the ground after a big storm in San Diego. “It just felt good, even though it made no sense,” she says. “At the same time, it was keeping me sane.”
Being willing to dip her toe into a creative endeavor that she knew she “didn’t have to be good at” also helped open Muschenetz to the idea of getting back to the poetry writing that had made her heart sing as a girl.
“Through my high school and early college years, every margin of every notebook was covered with poems or rhymes,” she says. “And then it was just gone. It was scary for me to realize that I had cut that part out of myself, and how bad that was for me.”
When Muschenetz did start writing again, she thought she might write a collection of poems rooted in domesticity and home life. She was surprised to find that what started flowing out of her instead were poems about her immigrant experience, which had never been the subject of her poetry while she was living it as a teenager. “I thought, ‘Well, shouldn’t I have gotten this out of my system?’ But here I was writing about this aspect of my identity that I never actually had written about before.”
She eventually had enough poems to pull together what became her first collection, titled All the Bad Girls Wear Russian Accents. The book reveals her propensity for weaving together dark and light, humor and tragedy, in a range of poems that cover everything from the war in Ukraine to the experience of being stereotyped for her ability to speak Russian, the language of many American movie villains.
Muschenetz initially thought that writing a book of poetry might be a onetime thing, the kind of undertaking that would allow her to check a box and move on. But as she was promoting her first book, she found herself fixating on a poem she hadn’t even written yet—one in the form of data that would spell out a word. The idea was eventually realized in “100% MOM.”
That poem was the seed that grew into Power Point, and Muschenetz, whose poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize three times, hasn’t looked back since. In addition to releasing that second volume of poetry, the product of what she calls the “analytic and overachieving brain” that helped her get through (and enjoy) business school, Muschenetz has used those same skills to help the poetry community in San Diego with some of the more practical needs, like grant writing, that are often lacking in communities of artists, says Katie Manning, a local poet and professor emeritus of poetry.
Muschenetz is mostly just happy to have found a way to use poetry to keep integrating and honoring the many different parts of her identity, from immigrant to business consultant.
“It is a huge disservice to all humanity when we ask our scientists or mathematicians or poets to only be that one thing, as opposed to being their whole selves,” she says.
You Are 600% Hotter than the Sun
By Jane Muschenetz
A cup of the Sun’s core produces ~60 milliwatts
of thermal energy. By volume … less than that of
a human [350 mW]. In a sense, you are hotter than
the Sun—there’s just not as much of you.
—Henry Reich, Minute Physics
Speaking roughly, in terms of heat
generated per every human inch, you give
off more milliwatts—surge/energy. Only
the Sun is bigger … it matters.
We are all blinded
by love, the expanding/contracting
universe is just another metaphor
for longing, and life—its own purpose.
How dazzling, this science!
Consider falling for a physicist—
the painstakingly slow way they undress
mathematical mysteries,
talk about bodies in motion
gets me every time—space
—continuum, part, particle—
Atomic. Incandescent! You
are, pound-for-pound, more Life-Source,
more Bomb, more Season-Spinning Searing Center
Heart/Engine/Radiating Nuclear Dynamic
than the Sun. Can’t look directly
in the mirror? Small Wonder! Imagine—
none of us powerless.
Originally published by Cathexis Northwest Press, May 2024
For Those of Us Forced to Flee
By Jane Muschenetz
For those of us forced to flee
the world is forever shrinking down to a single question:
What can you carry?
The suitcase of your heart closed tight
on all the things there was no room to bring—
your memories of “home,” the snowflake moments
of your youth, the blooming Lilac tree
outside your bedroom window … a heavy burden
saps your strength on the long journey, bring
only what you need.
Homes can be built again,
a new tree can be rooted.
Survive.
When you have nothing left to plant, become the seed.
Originally published in Issue 8, The Good Life Review, 2022. It received the 2022 Honeybee Poetry Prize and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Find more poetry by Jane Muschenetz at www.palmfrondzoo.com/janewriting.
A trip to Walmart. An aging German shepherd. A cheap disposable camera.
These are just a few of the seemingly mundane things that have sparked the relentlessly imaginative mind of Kurt Schroder ’90, leading to some of his groundbreaking inventions.
“I just can’t stop doing it,” he says, with a chuckle and a tiny trace of southern Indiana twang. “I invent all the time. It doesn’t matter what it is. I’m always doing experiments.”
Schroder grew up on a farm but always knew his future wasn’t in agriculture. With his heart set on studying physics, he applied only to MIT—ignorant, he says, of just how academically rigorous it would be. Once enrolled, he watched as his “super genius” classmates appeared to sail through their classes, while he worked harder than they did but earned only Bs.
Everything changed when he made his way through the notorious gauntlet of Course 8 Junior Lab, considered one of the most demanding two-term lab classes at the Institute. While tinkering during that advanced experimental physics class, he found his path.
“It eliminates a lot of people, but for some reason it was the easiest class for me,” he remembers now. “I would not only fix the machines and get them working but actually get better measurements than other people did, and figured out ways to use the equipment to do things that no one had noticed.”
But in his regular classes, he still felt he was treading water. “I realized that, okay, I still wanted to be a physicist, but maybe a slightly different kind of physicist,” he says.
For example, the kind of physicist who manages to improve the everyday hammer—a tool so ubiquitous and taken for granted that it hadn’t been reconceived in hundreds, maybe thousands, of years until Schroder came along. Or the kind who would save an old dog using nanoparticles of silver. Or one who would use a $7 camera to brainstorm his way to a new thermal processing technique that has revolutionized the mass production of electronic circuits.
After MIT, Schroder spent two years designing weapons for the US Navy before enrolling in a doctoral program in plasma physics at the University of Texas at Austin. As he was approaching his final year, he and his wife, Lisa, went to Walmart one day to run an errand. “Like a stereotypical guy, I walked into the tool section and I started looking at the hammers,” Schroder recalls. “I realized all the hammers were designed incorrectly. It became almost an obsession for me.”
“I became enamored with the fact that I could work on something that everybody had the opportunity to fix and did not.”
What Schroder picked up on wasn’t the design of the tools, exactly, but the fact that the manufacturers were effectively broadcasting a flaw. “The labels of all the hammers said ‘We have a shock-reduction grip’ or a ‘vibration-reducing grip’ and I would try it and it didn’t work,” he says. “They were saying: ‘This is not a solved problem.’ They just gave me the information I needed. Have you ever heard of a tire company that says ‘Our tires are round’?”
At the time, Schroder was taking another exacting class, this one on mechanics. The professor told students he planned to cover 14 weeks of the syllabus in a mere six weeks and focus on special topics in the remaining time. Many students were intimidated and dropped out, but Schroder stuck with it. (“It was the type of abuse I was used to at MIT,” he jokes, pointing to his brass rat. “So it was just fine.”) Somewhat fortuitously, one of those “special topics” was baseball bats.
Because Schroder was so consumed by the hammer vibration problem—another activity that involves the mechanics of swinging—he read books about the legendary Boston Red Sox batter Ted Williams to learn more. He interviewed carpenters. He spent a fair amount of time with a hammer in his hand. “I got to be pretty good at it myself. I was just hammering all the time,” he says. “I ended up losing part of my hearing because I was doing all this work on anvils.”
He developed tests to measure vibrations and crafted a “cyberglove” that would read them and upload the data into a computer program. After two years of data collection and analysis, he concluded that most attempts to improve hammers involved adding length and therefore weight. That causes fatigue and potentially exacerbates what is known as “hammer elbow” or lateral epicondylitis, a repetitive stress disorder that can plague construction workers.
Schroder determined that there was a “little spot in a hammer where there’s not much vibration”—the part of the handle most people would naturally grasp. He figured out that if you remove weight from the parts of the handle adjacent to the grip and insert foam there, that insulates the user’s hand from the shock of impact and resulting vibration. Using foam inserts also made it feasible for him to redesign the hammer head to increase the effective length of the hammer—and boost momentum transfer by about 15%—without adding weight. In other words, his design not only reduced vibration but made the hammer hit harder with less effort.
These modifications also cut manufacturing costs. Today, Schroder’s design improvements have made their way into the majority of hammers sold in the United States, making hammering much easier on users’ elbows—and relieving manufacturers from the mounting threat of lawsuits for vibration-related workplace injuries.
“It’s kind of a boring thing, really. It’s not something that physicists work on,” he says. “I became enamored with the fact that I could work on something that everybody had the opportunity to fix and did not.”
In the course of tackling the hammer problem, Schroder says, he learned that being an inventor is as much about perseverance and grit as it is about science or imagination. His professors told him he was wasting his time and shouldn’t bother. Then, after he presented his innovations to hammer companies, they said they didn’t think his developments were patentable—yet proceeded to incorporate them into their new designs. Two patents were ultimately issued to Schroder, and 16 years later, after suing the hammer companies, he was finally compensated for his innovations. He paid off his house, took his wife and five kids to Italy, and gave the rest of the proceeds to charity, he says.
By that time, he had already moved on.
In the early 2000s, while working at a company then called Nanotechnologies, Schroder was applying the concept of pulsed power, a subfield of physics and electrical engineering he’d studied at MIT, to synthesize nanoparticles. Pulsed power involves extremely brief, intense bursts of electric current that deliver “a huge amount of power—a ridiculous amount of power—for a short period of time,” Schroder explains. For example, a flash camera might take five seconds to charge, drawing a mere five watts from an AA battery. But when it releases that stored energy in less than a thousandth of a second, the flash is about 20,000 watts.
“Inventing is a skill, not a talent. Everyone can be an inventor.”
For one of its many projects, the company had been developing an electro-thermal gun, originally intended for military purposes, that Schroder says had “a very intense arc discharge—a spark, but 100,000 amps.” He describes the 50-megawatt prototypes they produced as “a little bit scary” and calls it a “failed device that never got out of the laboratory.” But his predecessors at the company realized that if they pulled the trigger after removing the projectile from the barrel, the high heat of the pulsed arc discharge would erode the silver electrodes inside the barrel, generating plasma that shot out of the device. When the plasma rapidly cooled, these eroded, or ablated, electrodes reacted with gases to form nanoparticles. An inert gas, like helium, would generate silver nanoparticles. A reactive gas would form nanoparticles of a compound, like silver oxide.
Abandoning the idea of an electrothermal gun altogether, Schroder and his colleagues drew on his expertise in pulsed power and focused on applying it to rods of, say, silver or aluminum to produce nanoparticles of those materials. Then they determined that if they tweaked the length of the pulse, from one millisecond to two or more, they could change the average particle size to suit a broader range of applications. The discovery was “really exciting,” Schroder says now, but it proved difficult to capitalize on given the lack of commercial demand for nanoparticles at the time. The company was on the verge of bankruptcy.
Around this time, in 2001, Schroder inherited an ailing 12-year-old German shepherd named Heidi. “She had these pus-y wounds that were a half-inch in diameter and a half-inch deep in her knees and elbows,” Schroder recalls. “The infection was so bad she couldn’t get up.” He began to treat Heidi with a salve made for dogs and horses, but after a couple of weeks she was not improving. “I thought, darn it, I don’t want to put her down,” Schroder remembers.
But then he thought of the silver nanoparticles that his company had developed. “I had heard that some of the stuff might be antimicrobial,” he says. So he mixed the nanoparticles into the salve and applied it to Heidi’s wounds. Within two weeks, they had healed, and Heidi could stand and even run. Now the nanoparticle-infused salve is an FDA-approved product that hospitals use to treat burn victims. “We referred to her, lovingly, as Heidi the Nano Dog,” Schroder says.
Today, Schroder is best known for his second nanoparticle invention, which he dreamed up when he became fascinated with the idea of printed electronics.
“I thought, wouldn’t it be kind of cool if you could take an inkjet printer cartridge, jailbreak it, and [add metallic] nanoparticles and make a dispersion, make an ink?” he says. “You could print wires on a piece of paper and make the cheapest circuit in the world.”
The problem is that cheaper substrates, including paper and plastic, will ignite at the high temperatures necessary to sinter, or cure, the nanoparticles into wires. (Melting silver requires a temperature of 962 °C, but paper ignites at 233 °C, or the novelistically famous Fahrenheit 451.) Equally problematic, the ovens in which this sintering takes place are often very large and slow, and they require a lot of energy.
This is where a disposable camera enters the picture.
“The first one I got from Walgreens. It cost me seven bucks, but I jailbroke it so I could keep on flashing it,” he recalls. Schroder says he figured that he could use the intense flash of light to heat only the nanoparticles (which are black and readily absorb light), sintering them together into wires so fast that the paper or plastic substrate on which he’d printed them did not have a chance to melt or warp. The idea, Schroder explains, was to harness the intensity of the flash (the pulsed power) to generate millisecond bursts of high power using minimal energy. “It was one of those rare times in technological development in which faster, better, and cheaper all happened simultaneously,” he says.
He and his colleagues ultimately scaled up the flash concept into an industrial system known as PulseForge, which can generate bursts of heat hot enough to cure nanoparticles into conductive traces—and do it so quickly that their substrates survive the heat.
“With this flash lamp technology—photonic curing, that’s what I called it—we can go up to about 400 °C. But we can do in one millisecond what normally would take 10 minutes or longer,” Schroder says. “This replaces an oven, which can be hundreds of meters long and take up an entire building and use tons and tons of energy.” Today, he is CTO of the company, which is now known as PulseForge. It offers digital thermal processing systems that make manufacturing more sustainable and more affordable.
Though he can’t be specific about what the company’s clients manufacture, Schroder says PulseForge’s technology is used to make consumer electronics that most people own today.
After 30 years of experimentation in many fields—including mechanical engineering, chemistry, pulsed power, nanotechnology, and printed electronics—Schroder holds 41 US patents and more than 70 international ones. He’s won the prestigious R&D 100 Award twice. In 2012, the Texas State Bar named him Inventor of the Year, and in 2023, the Austin Intellectual Property Law Association did the same.
Schroder says he won’t live long enough to explore all the ideas bouncing around in his head. But one thing he’d like to do is provide some guidance to fledgling inventors—a kind of practical and personal road map to success. He’s already started writing a book, called simply How to Invent.
The book was partially inspired by a gathering he organized a few years ago for his oldest daughter, who was then 11, and 40 or so of her friends from a scouting group. Schroder called it an “invention fair.”
“I told them: I want you to identify problems in the world,” he says. “You’re going to try to solve them.”
He was so impressed with the girls’ ideas, including his daughter’s—a backpack that dispenses M&Ms—that something struck him. “Inventing is a skill, not a talent,” he says. “Everyone can be an inventor, and seeing these 40 little girls come up with some pretty darn good inventions—I realized there’s a process for this.”
One of his hard-won pieces of advice is to find joy in that process—to be happy simply because an experiment works. “Don’t focus too much [on] if you’re going to make a zillion dollars or be in charge of it,” he says. “Because guess what? There are a hundred more inventions after that.”
There is, however, one intangible trait that every inventor should have: the outlook that a glass is neither half full nor half empty.
“The inventor says: ‘I can make a better glass,’” he says. “An inventor always sees a future in which everything is better.”
The tiny beads added to some cleansers and cosmetics are one source of the long-lasting microplastics that threaten the environment. But MIT researchers have found a way to address the problem at its source: replacing them with polymers that break down into harmless sugars and amino acids. Particles of this polymer could also be used to encapsulate nutrients such as vitamin A to fortify foods, which could help some of the 2 billion people around the world who suffer from nutrient deficiencies.
To develop the material, graduate student Linzixuan (Rhoda) Zhang and her colleagues turned to poly-beta-amino esters, a class of polymers previously developed in the lab of Institute Professor Robert Langer, ScD ’74, which have shown promise for medical applications.
By changing the composition of these materials’ building blocks, researchers can optimize properties such as hydrophobicity (ability to repel water), mechanical strength, and pH sensitivity. One property the team targeted, with an eye to using the polymer to add nutrients to food, was the ability to dissolve when exposed to acidic environments such as the stomach.
The researchers showed that they could use particles of the polymer to encapsulate vitamins A, D, E, and C, as well as zinc and iron. Many of these nutrients are susceptible to heat and light degradation, but the team found that the particles could protect them from boiling water for two hours. They also showed that even after being stored for six months at high temperature and high humidity, more than half of the encapsulated vitamins were undamaged.
To demonstrate the particles’ potential for fortifying food, the researchers incorporated them into bouillon cubes—a common ingredient in Africa, where nutrient deficiencies are common, says Ana Jaklenec, a principal investigator at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and a senior author, with Langer, of a paper on the work.
In this study, the researchers also tested the particles’ safety by exposing them to cultured human intestinal cells. At the amounts that would be used in food, the particles were not found to damage the cells.
To explore the particles’ potential for use in cleansers, the researchers mixed them with soap foam. This mixture, they found, removed permanent marker and waterproof eyeliner much more effectively than soap alone. Soap mixed with the new microparticles was also more effective than a cleanser that includes polyethylene microbeads, and the particles did a better job of absorbing potentially toxic elements such as heavy metals.
The researchers plan to run a small human trial later this year and are gathering data that could be used to apply for GRAS (generally recognized as safe) classification from the US Food and Drug Administration. They are also planning a clinical trial of foods fortified with the particles.
Their work on the polymer, they hope, could help significantly reduce the amount of microplastic released into the environment from health and beauty products. “One way to mitigate the microplastics problem is to figure out how to clean up existing pollution,” Jaklenec says. “But it’s equally important to look ahead and focus on creating materials that won’t generate microplastics in the first place.”
Wearable devices like smart watches and fitness trackers help us measure and learn from physical functions such as heart rates and sleep stages. Now MIT researchers have developed a tiny equivalent for individual brain cells.
These soft, battery-free wireless devices, actuated with light, are designed to wrap around different parts of neurons, such as axons and dendrites, without damaging them. They could be used to measure or modulate a neuron’s electrical and metabolic activity. They could also serve as synthetic myelin for axons that have lost this insulation, helping to address neuronal degradation in diseases like multiple sclerosis.
The devices are made from thin sheets of a soft polymer called azobenzene, which roll when exposed to light. Researchers can precisely control the direction of the rolling and the size and shape of the tubes by varying the intensity and polarization of the light. This enables the devices to snugly, but gently, wrap around curved axons and dendrites.
“To have intimate interfaces with these cells, the devices must be soft and able to conform to these complex structures. That is the challenge we solved in this work,” says Deblina Sarkar, an assistant professor in the Media Lab and the senior author of a paper on the research. “We were the first to show that azobenzene could even wrap around living cells.”
The researchers, who developed a scalable fabrication technique that doesn’t require the use of a cleanroom, have demonstrated that the devices can be combined with optoelectrical materials that can stimulate cells. Moreover, atomically thin materials can be patterned on top of the tubes, offering opportunities to integrate sensors and circuits.
In addition, because they make such a tight connection with cells, they could make it possible to stimulate subcellular regions with very little energy. This could enable a researcher or clinician to treat brain diseases by modulating neurons’ electrical activity.
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