When Muyinatu A. Lediju Bell ’06 won the National Science Foundation’s Alan T. Waterman Award, the country’s top honor for early-career researchers, she sat on a panel with her two fellow awardees, surrounded by the academic luminaries on the National Science Board. The atmosphere was formal, even weighty, but when asked by a board member how she became interested in science, Bell didn’t hesitate: 

“Watching the scientists on Sesame Street mix colorful liquid in test tubes.”

Decades later, her scientific interests range across many disciplines, yet Bell’s focus is singular: She wants to save millions of lives around the world by providing better tools for early detection of diseases. 

The Waterman Award recognized Bell for pioneering innovations in ultrasound and photoacoustic imaging that have led to new techniques and improved the quality of medical images, especially for people with darker skin or larger bodies. She is working to ensure that those innovations eventually become accessible to everyone.

Bell, who goes by “Bisi,” is the John C. Malone Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Johns Hopkins University, where she founded and directs the Photoacoustic & Ultrasonic Systems Engineering (PULSE) Lab and has appointments in the departments of biomedical engineering, computer science, and oncology. On a warm day this past June she sat in her office, meeting with one of her dozen or so graduate and postdoctoral students and checking in on the student’s ongoing work. 

“We work not only in optics but acoustics, robotics, signal processing, deep learning, and AI,” she said, walking through one of the four labs and centers she oversees. “We do a little bit of physics and some hands-on building and mechanical engineering.”

Bell’s goal of improving medical imaging wasn’t one she had in mind when she arrived at MIT as an undergrad, but it’s now underpinned and motivated by personal loss. 

COURTESY OF MUYINATU BELL

Her mother, Jane Rivers, grew up in McClellanville, South Carolina, before eventually moving to Brooklyn, where Bell was born. Rivers, who was the first in her family to go to college, spotted her daughter’s aptitude for science and math, cultivating it from an early age. 

“She made it a point, very early on, to buy educational books and videos that I found very intriguing and take me on trips to the public library, where I got to dig deeper into science,” Bell says.

In grade school, Bell would do homework assigned to her brother—who was two grades ahead. “I wanted to work out his multiplication tables,” she remembers. “I always found it to be fun.” A few years later, she would tackle the math sections of her brother’s SAT prep books. “Even doing the math problems in there was fun, and it augmented what I was doing in school,” she says. 

At 14, Bell enrolled in the highly selective Brooklyn Technical High School, where she divided her time between academics and a newfound interest in running; she was, as she puts it, “competitive in track and competitive in school.” During her sophomore year, she participated in a program designed to introduce girls to engineering—and was hooked. “I fell in love with engineering through that program,” she says. 

Once she’d set her sights on becoming an engineer, Bell says, her brother, Abdul-Rahman Lediju (who is now an attorney), directed her attention to the Institute. “He was the one who told me about MIT,” she says, remembering her excitement. “I thought: ‘I want to cure cancer and AIDS—and I’ll get to do math there!’”

At 18, Bell already knew she wanted to focus on biomedical engineering, but at the time it was only offered as a minor, so she majored in mechanical engineering. “Just looking at the trajectory of the curriculum, I knew it was a way to get a foundation in how to make stuff in general,” she says, remembering the sequence of courses, from Mechanics and Materials to Measurement and Instrumentation. “I knew I could learn biomedical engineering later. For me it was the perfect setup.”

In her junior year, while Bell was making her way through that curriculum, her mother died of breast cancer. The loss solidified her interest in cancer research and clarified her academic path forward. “I wanted to use everything I learned at MIT, and I wanted to save lives,” she says. “So I moved to early detection and ultrasound as the best possible tool, in terms of safety, portability, and cost-efficiency.”

Bell found the right next step at Duke University in the lab of biomedical engineer Gregg Trahey, whose work focuses on developing new ultrasound technologies. She knew his lab was the ideal fit even though she jokes, “I probably scared him with how direct and focused I was.”

Bell remembers her excitement at the prospect of going to MIT. “I thought: ‘I want to cure cancer and AIDS—and I’ll get to do math there!’”

During her first year in Trahey’s lab, Bell investigated what’s known as acoustic clutter—random noises or artifacts that are recorded and translated into ultrasound images and can interfere with their clarity and usefulness. “It makes it difficult to identify structures of interest,” she explains. 

But a solution soon presented itself. Bell realized that when the motion of an ultrasound probe caused the abdominal wall to move while, say, the bladder was being imaged, some of these acoustic artifacts “moved” in the image too. Analyzing that movement led to ways of filtering out that clutter, resulting in clearer ultrasonic images with better contrast-to-noise ratio, one of the main metrics of ultrasound image quality. “What’s left behind is the structure itself,” she says.

One of Bell’s pioneering discoveries came during her final years at Duke, where she developed a technique known as short-lag spatial coherence beamforming. In ultrasonography, sound waves are transmitted through the body, and echoes that bounce off internal organs are used to form images of them. These images, traditionally, are created through a process known as “delay and sum” beamforming—a signal-processing algorithm that converts the acoustic echoes captured or received by an ultrasound transducer into an image that is displayed. 

Between ultrasound sensors placed on the body and the target body structure that’s being imaged, signals are being recorded at varying times. “Therefore,” Bell explained at her Waterman Award lecture in August, “we apply system time delays to align all the signals that came from the same location, and then we sum across channels to get one large high-amplitude signal associated with that location.” This process of amplitude-based delay-and-sum beamforming underlies ultrasound systems used worldwide. 

But fat tissue and dense tissue can cause sound waves to bounce off an image target, distorting the final image because of acoustic scattering. This scattering is clutter that’s captured as a “random recording.” And when the random recording gets added into the summed signal that’s ultimately converted into the ultrasound image, it can obscure the target signal, potentially confounding diagnoses or treatment decisions. As a result, the traditional process isn’t as effective for larger patients and those with dense breast tissue. 

JUSTIN TSUCALAS

Bell figured out that the signals reflecting from the targeted area of the body have a high spatial coherence, meaning that they are similar to one another. In contrast, the signals correlated with the “random recording” are less similar—they have a low spatial coherence. This discovery is the basis of the coherence-based beamforming method she invented, initially for ultrasound imaging and later for other diagnostic interventions.

By directly displaying these differences, Bell’s coherence-­based approach filters out clutter and makes it possible to capture a clearer image of the target. She demonstrated the benefits in breast imaging and says that recent work has shown that the technique can be applied to ultrasounds of the liver, fetal structures, small vessels or arterioles that surround major arteries, and the heart.

Doctors will often order a follow-up ultrasound if something abnormal is found in a regular screening mammogram. In breast ultrasound, the traditional amplitude-based approach produces images in which solid masses and surrounding fluid are similarly dark. But Bell’s coherence-based technique produces a clearer image by distinguishing between the spatial coherence of fluid masses and solid masses—fluid has a lower spatial coherence than the surrounding tissue, while solid masses have a similar spatial coherence to surrounding tissue. 

“This coherence-based technology is particularly promising for women with dense breasts, who tend to generate more acoustic clutter and also represent a patient population who are underserved with respect to noninvasive methods to detect breast cancer,” Bell explains.

The goal, she says, is to reduce the number of false positives and the need for biopsies or other invasive interventions, which often delay accurate diagnoses. “I would love for it to be in every clinic around the world,” she says of the technique. 

After finishing her PhD at Duke in 2012, Bell went to Johns Hopkins as a postdoc in computer science and began building on the work she did in graduate school. At first she focused primarily on improving ultrasound and other diagnostics, mainly for breast cancer. She also began to apply her coherence-based beamforming technique to photoacoustics, an emerging technique for disease diagnosis that combines optical imaging with the high penetration and spatial resolution of ultrasound. As she describes it, light is transmitted to a target, which absorbs the light, undergoes thermal expansion, and generates a sound wave.

“It’s kind of like lightning and thunder, just on a smaller scale,” says Bell, who joined the Johns Hopkins faculty in 2016. “It’s the conversion of optical energy (lightning) to acoustic (thunder). We convert the optical to the acoustic.”

Bell’s short-lag spatial coherence (SLSC) beamformer technique, when integrated into photoacoustics, addresses a challenge that is common to all optics-based technologies: “poor optical penetration depth in the presence of highly melanated skin.”

Darker skin acts as an optical absorber, she explains, and the resulting photoacoustic effect propagates additional unwanted sound waves that generate acoustic clutter, which in turn obscures the signals of interest in the body. 

“When we instead take the SLSC approach to imaging, we can see that regardless of skin tone, we can see the structures within the body more clearly,” Bell explains. “So while the amplitude-based approach leads to an inherent skin-tone bias, the coherence-based approach could address this bias by reducing clutter, which is particularly beneficial for patients with darker skin tones.”

The technique also gets around the scattering caused by fat tissue, leading to clearer photoacoustic imaging for people who are overweight or obese. 

JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY

For Bell, considering the needs of all types of patients leads to better outcomes for a greater breadth of the population. The same is true, she explained in her Waterman lecture, of making sure that diverse types of people work in medical research: “It’s this diversity of thought that allows us to ask a diversity of questions, and it’s this diversity that really determines the type of science that’s being done.”

In addition to improving imaging techniques for traditionally marginalized groups of patients, Bell pioneered integration of photoacoustic imaging into the da Vinci surgical robot. This makes it easier for doctors to visualize such things as blood vessels, contrast agents, or metal implants in real time during surgery, making complex surgical procedures less risky. She was also the first to apply deep learning to ultrasound and photoacoustic image formation and, with her group, recently developed a way to use AI to detect covid in ultrasound images of patients’ lungs.

Bell’s 44-page CV notes her eight patents and the nearly $14 million in research funding she’s received so far, as well as an arm’s-length list of awards, including a 2016 position on MIT Technology Review’s annual list of 35 innovators under 35. 

And she continues to push the boundaries of her fields, all the while trying to make diagnosing diseases more equitable and accessible.

“I hope one day,” she says, “we’ll all have ultrasounds at home and we can diagnose ourselves.”

On June 6, 1944, the Allies deposited nearly 160,000 troops on the beaches of Normandy, France, in what still stands as the largest land invasion by sea in world history. D-Day would, of course, prove to be a critical milestone leading to the Allied victory in World War II.

But were it not for the invention of a new gadget in November 1939, D-Day might never have happened. Had it been attempted without said gadget—a high-­frequency radio transmitter known as the resonant cavity magnetron—it might well have failed. 

This is the story of how the MIT Rad Lab—formally named the MIT Radiation Laboratory to confuse the Nazis—was charged with using that top-secret British invention to design, build, and field-test advanced radar equipment that would pave the way for the invasion that helped win the war.

In the summer of 1995, I wanted to find out how the resonant cavity magnetron had made the leap from a British lab to the waters of the Atlantic and the skies above Europe in time to give the Allies a critical strategic advantage. So I phoned my uncle, retired captain Stanley Fine, who had flown more than 30 combat missions as a B-17 navigator with the Eighth Air Force during World War II. 

“Stanley,” I asked, “did you happen to know any of the crews that flew the new H2X radar-equipped B-17s—the ‘Mickey’ planes? I want to talk to one of those guys. I’ve been reading about that radar and the top-secret gadget that made it possible. It’s a hell of a story. They rescued D-Day, and scarcely anyone has ever heard about it.”

The pause that followed was so long, I thought we were disconnected. Then my uncle laughed.

COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

“Norman, I flew from the States to Alconbury, England, in a brand-new B-17 with the first production model of the H2X radar to begin my combat tour,” he said. “I was a Mickey operator.”

Some weeks later, I discovered that George Valley, the physicist who had led the H2X design team at the Rad Lab, was living in the town next to me. This highly opinionated, cocky character agreed to talk to me, and his story was even better than I’d imagined. Over the next 20 years, I read more about the development of radar, took notes, and waited for some popular historian to write a book about it. None did, so I wrote one myself, chronicling the journey of the resonant cavity magnetron from a laboratory at the University of Birmingham to the European theater of operations. Thanks to the efforts of the inventors who came up with the idea, the statesmen who saw to its development, the small band of British and American scientists who used it to build new microwave radars, and the handful of military warriors who believed in the technology, airborne offensive radar revolutionized warfare. And after the war, the cavity magnetron would eventually revolutionize kitchens around the world, powering the microwave oven. 

The warriors

By late 1943, it was clear to Allied Air Force leaders that their strategic heavy bombing campaign against Nazi Germany had not yet achieved the prerequisites for launching the D-Day invasion. After three years of bombing by Britain’s Royal Air Force and a year and a half of bombing by the US Army Air Forces (USAAF), Germany’s war-making infrastructure—production plants, energy sources, and transportation systems—was still operating. And Germany’s air force remained a potent threat. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme commander of Allied forces in Europe, would not send his young men to the beaches until the bombing campaign had crippled that German infrastructure and established air superiority over the Luftwaffe. USAAF leaders recognized that a new bombing strategy was needed but argued over what that should be.

The USAAF had the B-17 Flying Fortress, the long-range B-24 Liberator, and the Norden bombsight (said to make it possible to drop a bomb into a pickle barrel from an altitude of 20,000 feet). And all that was backed up by America’s vaunted production capabilities. 

But the dreadful European weather—overcast and stormy, particularly in the late fall, winter, and early spring months—rendered all that firepower virtually useless. By the end of 1943, with D-Day only months away, the Allies had averaged only seven completed bombing missions a month; 70% to 80% of the year’s planned missions had been scrubbed or recalled because of the weather. Even if the Norden bombsight was truly capable of dropping a bomb into a pickle barrel—George Valley, for one, didn’t think so—it was useless if the bombardier could not see the target through the cloud cover. 

The scientists

In 1904, the German physicist Christian Hülsmeyer had demonstrated that radio waves could be used to detect ships. Through the 1930s, scientists in England, America, Germany, and other technologically advanced nations had been working on using reflected radio waves to detect and measure the distance to and direction of objects that could not be seen because of darkness, clouds, precipitation, fog, or distance. Eventually, this new technology became known as radar, an acronym for “radio direction and ranging.”

In 1940, radar was still in its infancy. Radio wave reflections bouncing back from large objects provided little detail about the nature of the object, and small objects could not be detected at all. What’s more, the antennas required to send the low-­frequency transmissions seeking the presence of these objects were too large for mobile deployment. Yet despite these limitations, radar was effective for defensive purposes. Anticipating war, England installed a chain of radar stations on its coastline to detect incoming German bombers and provide vector coordinates to fighter planes so they could intercept them.

Radar scientists understood that transmitting higher-frequency radio waves would enable them to “see” more detail in the signal returns, detect smaller targets, and reduce the size of the antennas for mobile uses. But no device existed that could transmit high-frequency radio waves with sufficient power to detect objects at long distances.

As Britain watched Nazi Germany rebuild its military might through the 1930s, British scientists were urged to advance radio-wave technology for communications and radar detection. Two months after Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, physicists John Randall and Harry Boot, working at the University of Birmingham, sketched out a new concept for a radio-wave transmitter. (It later came to light that scientists in Russia, France, and Japan had come up with similar ideas but hadn’t developed them.) It took Randall and Boot four months to beg, borrow, and steal the components and equipment needed for a test. When they finally turned on what looked like a rat’s nest of wires, electronic components, transformers, electromagnets, vacuum pumps, and metering devices, they found that their resonant cavity magnetron generated a thousand times more high-frequency power than any known radio transmitter.

At the time, radio-transmitting tubes like the popular Klystron could generate at most 20 watts of power at microwave frequencies—only enough to detect objects that were relatively close. An MIT microwave radar system set up in a rooftop laboratory before the war could detect nearby planes and clock moving automobile traffic on the other side of the Charles River, but its reach was too limited for military applications. 

The cavity magnetron would make radar portable: Radar systems could be designed using antennas small enough to be installed in boats, trucks, and planes.

Randall and Boot’s resonant cavity magnetron, however, could generate high-frequency radio waves at power levels three orders of magnitude greater than the Klystron—and high-frequency radar systems with more powerful signals would detect smaller objects in greater detail at much greater distances.

What’s more, by increasing the frequency of radar transmission from 30 megahertz to 3,000, Randall and Boot had shortened the signal wavelength from 10 meters to 10 centimeters. They realized that their new device could make it feasible to develop radar systems that could count approaching bomber planes or detect a surfaced submarine even at a great distance—and do so with much smaller transmitting antennas.

The cavity magnetron, in other words, would make radar a hundred times more effective. It would also be portable: Radar systems able to detect very small targets could be designed using antennas small enough to be installed in boats, trucks, and planes. Known by the enemy primarily as a cumbersome defensive tool, radar could now be considered a mobile offensive weapon of war with capabilities the enemy could not yet imagine.

But Britain had neither time nor resources to devote to further development and production of the device. So at the urging of Sir Henry Tizard, one of Britain’s leading scientists, Prime Minister Winston Churchill made the difficult and controversial decision to reveal that country’s most valuable technological secrets to the United States. 

In August 1940, Tizard boarded a plane to lead a technical mission to the US. Asking nothing in return, the delegation shared Britain’s top-secret designs for jet engine, navigation, and radar technologies with American scientists and military leaders, hoping that the US would further develop them and get them into production in time to help the Allied cause. The cavity magnetron was by far the most important of all.

On the night of Thursday, September 19, 1940, two members of Tizard’s technical mission, Ed “Taffy” Bowen and John Cockroft, walked from their hotel in Washington, DC, to the Wardman Park Hotel carrying a small, wrapped box and a sheaf of mechanical and electrical diagrams. Awaiting them in a suite were four Americans, known in science, education, and the military. After introductions and a discussion of radar technology in both countries, Bowen quietly unwrapped the box to reveal an odd-looking device, small enough to be held in the palm of his hand. Painted black, it resembled a small hockey puck atop a larger one, with three glass and metal rods protruding from its body.

When the Brits described its performance, the Americans were stunned. MIT scientists had been working on microwave radar for years, but their best setups could detect objects not much farther than across the river. The new British device opened the door to high-frequency radar systems that could change the course of the war.

The Radiation Laboratory

The Americans with whom Bowen and Cockroft shared their secret that evening had many ties to MIT. Karl Compton was the Institute’s president. Alfred Loomis, chairman of the Microwave Committee at the newly established National Defense Research Committee (NDRC), would move his private laboratory from Tuxedo Park, New York, to Cambridge and establish a joint research program with the Institute shortly after the meeting. Carroll L. Wilson ’32 was the personal assistant to NDRC chair Vannevar Bush, formerly both vice president of MIT and dean of the School of Engineering. And MIT professor Ed Bowles, SM ’22, who joined the group later, had been leading the Institute’s radar research program. Only Vice Admiral Harold Bowen, director of the Naval Research Laboratory, didn’t have a direct MIT connection.

The MIT contingent wanted to build a lab for the microwave radar program at the Institute, but Frank Jewett, president of Bell Telephone Laboratories and a member of the NDRC, was keen to have Bell Labs take on the work. Bush asked Loomis to convene a meeting of the Microwave Committee to decide on a location.

At the meeting, Loomis waited patiently for Jewett to make one favorable statement about MIT. Jewett stressed Bell Labs’ expertise in project management but acknowledged that MIT was a wonderful school. Loomis pounced.

“Oh, Dr. Jewett,” he broke in, “I’m so glad that you approve of having the lab at MIT.”  

TOM ALFOLDI/COURTESY OF CANADA SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY MUSEUM

In short order, laboratory space on campus was cleared and the misleadingly named “Radiation Lab” was established. Its brief was to design, build, test, and get into production what became known as microwave radar, made possible by the revolutionary resonant cavity magnetron. Within three months, the cream of America’s young scientists had been recruited from across the country and relocated to Cambridge, where they worked in parallel with the few British scientists continuing their efforts in England.

Bush, Compton, and Loomis hoped to lure Ernest Lawrence away from Berkeley to lead the lab. Absorbed in his cyclotron research, Lawrence (who later joined the Manhattan Project) demurred but recommended Lee DuBridge, chairman of the physics department at the University of Rochester. With one phone call, DuBridge was on board. He took a train to New York that evening and met the following day with Lawrence and Loomis to make a list of promising physicists and a plan to recruit them.

Fortuitously—or perhaps by design—600 physicists from around the country had been invited to MIT for a conference on applied nuclear physics in late October of 1940. Between sessions, targeted recruits would be grasped by the elbow and steered into a private room. Offered an exciting way to serve the country, many initially hedged. A name would be dropped. “Oh, he’s coming?” the would-be recruit would say. “Well … I’ll come.” Three of Lawrence’s picks were among the nine Rad Lab scientists who went on to win Nobel Prizes. 

The Battle of the Atlantic

Protecting British supply lines was soon a critical order of business for the Allies. If they failed and England fell—which some American statesmen expected to happen—any thought of a troop invasion across the English Channel was moot. 

Admiral Karl Dönitz, commander of the German U-boat fleet, boasted that his submarines alone could win the war. His plan was to sink Allied ships carrying goods to England faster than they could be replaced.

Did the Allies have a new type of unknown radar that could detect submarines? the German admiral asked his scientists. No, they assured him. Radar cannot do that.

In August 1940, Hitler declared a total blockade of the British Isles and warned that even neutral ships would be sunk—and 56 ships carrying about 250,000 tons wound up on the ocean floor in that one month. With just 35 U-boats, Germany sank 274 ships between June and October that year, losing only six U-boats in the process. In June 1942, U-boats sank 700,000 tons of Allied shipments, achieving the monthly goal that Dönitz calculated was necessary to starve Britain out of the war. It capped off a six-month stretch in which U-boats sank more weapons, ammunition, and supplies off the US coast than the Allies had lost in the last two and a half years. And the U-boat fleet was growing.

But that same year, a curious thing began happening: U-boats were being sunk after surfacing in the dark of night to recharge their batteries. (The charging generators were run by an internal-combustion engine, which required air.) The Germans couldn’t explain it. Did the Allies have a new type of unknown radar that could detect submarines? Dönitz asked his scientists. No, they assured him. Radar cannot do that.

Ten-centimeter radar could, though. In early 1942, the Rad Lab–affiliated Research Construction Company delivered 10 new anti-­surface-vessel radars designed by Rad Lab engineers. Once installed in British Shore Patrol planes and American long-range B-24 bombers, the microwave radars and those that followed from Philco made it possible to push the U-boats from the shipping lanes and win the Battle of the Atlantic.

Overcoming the weather

By late 1943, with German production plants still churning, the Luftwaffe still flying, and the highly secret D-Day invasion scheduled for early June, Army Air Force leaders had only a few months remaining to accomplish what years of bombing had been unable to do. They had to find a way to enable their heavy bombers to fly—and hit their targets—in any sort of weather. Reluctantly, they finally listened to the scientists.

COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

Two visionary US Eighth Air Force officers, Colonel Bill Cowart and Major Fred Rabo, stationed in England, had learned of the MIT project to develop an advanced radar that could see bombing targets hidden by cloud cover. Rad Lab director DuBridge had assigned George Valley to lead the design of a new radar to operate at three times the frequency of the 10-centimeter radars successfully used against the U-boats. Cowart and Rabo decided to go to the Rad Lab to investigate, showing up unannounced in the spring of 1943.

For Valley, it had started out as another dull day, he recalled, when out of the blue, in walked two officers.

“I’m Bill Cowart. You George Valley?”

“Yup.”

 “How soon can you give us 20 of those radar bombsights of yours and fit 12 of them onto 12 B-17s?”

Valley had only built one at that point—because, as he later told me, “nobody wanted the damn thing.”

“Well,” Valley said to Cowart, “maybe you’d like to fly the damn thing and see what you’re asking for. It ain’t what you’re used to.”

“What we’re doing ain’t what we’re used to either,” replied Cowart. “Let’s go.” 

Valley took Cowart and Rabo on a test flight so they could compare the radar images of the terrain with what they saw through the window. Despite continued institutional resistance, the two officers persuaded their leaders to try the new tactic. 

A fleet of 12 B-17s was fitted with Valley’s three-centimeter radar bombsights. Designated H2X, the 12 radar sets were hastily hand-built by MIT technicians and installed into B-17s at the East Boston Airport (now Logan International). 

“Looks Mickey Mouse to me,” said Major Rabo upon his first glimpse of the alterations Rad Lab technicians had made to the B-17s. The H2X radar was henceforth known as “Mickey,” as were the navigators who operated the radar bombsights.

Twelve US pilots flew the fleet of newly outfitted B-17s to a heavy bomber base in Alconbury, England, in the fall of 1943, accompanied by Valley and Rad Lab engineers and technicians. There, Valley’s team hastily trained a handful of veteran B-17 navigators as radar operators. Over the final months of 1943, with much of Europe hidden beneath clouds, the radar-equipped bombers were sent on missions to evaluate whether a navigator could, by peering only at the radar scope and navigation charts, successfully locate and bomb targets obscured by cloud cover. 

The crews of the Mickey bombers led Allied formations to the targets, dropping the first bombs along with marker flares so that the planes behind them could see where to drop their own bombs. Airborne offensive radar bombing was a new tactic in warfare, and they were pioneering it under intense pressure, without manuals or experience. The early results weren’t always successful, but there were no better options. So the Mickey crews kept at it.

In January 1944, the Eighth Air Force Bomber Command, which oversaw the strategic bombing campaign in Europe, officially overhauled bombing protocols. With only 11 hand-built American radar-equipped B-17s in Europe—one had been lost—every bombing mission would henceforth be led by a radar-equipped Mickey plane, no matter the weather. If the targets were visible, the bombardier would take over with his Norden bombsight. Otherwise, and more often, bombing would be done by radar.

The first production model of the H2X radar-equipped B-17 arrived in England on January 29, 1944. The navigator chaperoning the first H2X radar off Philco’s production line was my uncle Stanley Fine, then a lieutenant. Now there were 12 B-17s with H2X in Europe once again, with more to follow. 

COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

Four months and one week later, the day that Eisenhower sent some 160,000 armed men to Normandy, there was scarcely a Nazi plane in the sky to oppose them. The few German planes still airworthy had a limited supply of spare parts for repairs, little fuel to run them, and few experienced pilots to fly them. Most had been shot down by the Fortresses and the fighter escorts, augmented only months earlier by the long-range P-51 Mustangs, as the Luftwaffe vainly tried to defend against the relentless five-month bombing campaign made possible by the resonant cavity magnetron and the advanced radar systems developed at the MIT Rad Lab. 

The radar bombing protocols implemented in January 1944 continued until VE Day in 1945. Millions of cavity magnetrons produced by American companies were used widely by all branches of the Allied fighting forces for a host of radar and radio communications applications. The device played such a critical role in winning the war that the American historian James Phinney Baxter III, in his Pulitzer Prize–winning 1946 book, Scientists Against Time, would call the cavity magnetron “the most valuable cargo ever brought to our shores.” 

As co-founder of Beta Instrument Corp., Norman Fine worked with Raytheon, the US Naval Research Lab, and US Air Force prime contractors to design and build high-resolution radar displays for aerial reconnaissance, rubbing shoulders with MIT Rad Lab engineers along the way. His book Blind Bombing: How Microwave Radar Brought the Allies to D-Day and Victory in World War II won the Independent Publisher Book Awards 2020 Silver Medal in World History.

When Anthony Jones ’08 reminisces about his childhood, he thinks of clams. Growing up on the reservation of the Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe, about an hour from Seattle, he spent a lot of time playing outside with his brothers—fishing, digging clams, and gathering oysters on the beach.

Those idyllic childhood memories wouldn’t have been possible, though, if not for a legal fight that happened before Jones was born—a case that in some ways paved the way for his own career as a lawyer.

The Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe signed a treaty with the US government in 1855 that ceded the vast majority of their historic territories but left them rights to access traditional food sources, especially fish. But for years the Washington state government didn’t honor those rights, leading to large-scale protests during the civil rights era by the S’Klallam (whose historical name means “the strong people”) and other tribes. Finally, thanks to a landmark 1974 decision in a federal lawsuit, the federal government compelled the state to recognize them.

“Growing up as I did in a Native American community, I was aware of the struggle that my community had gone through to have their rights vindicated,” Jones says. That history left him with a “deep sense of justice,” which is part of what pushed him toward law as an adult. 

These days, he practices a unique combination of Native law and patent law, the latter of which draws from his background as a mechanical engineering student at MIT and his “tendency to tinker.” Though his two primary practice areas remain largely separate, his willingness to follow his passions as a young man set him on the path that allows him to do both.

As a teenager, when Jones wasn’t on the beach, he was learning to play electric guitar—or learning how to take one apart. While other kids his age might have focused on memorizing chords, he found himself more interested in how the instrument worked, trying to understand circuit diagrams and the role of the potentiometer, the electrical component that helps make volume knobs work. That helped him land at the Summer Science Program at New Mexico Tech, just south of Albuquerque, before his senior year of high school.

The program, which focused on astrophysics, helped set the stage for Jones’s next step. “It felt like the first time that I was around kids who had similar interests to mine,” he says. He loved the atmosphere, and the experience convinced him to apply to MIT, where he enrolled a year later. 

The move from Port Gamble to Cambridge was tough at times—there was the culture shock of transitioning from the Pacific Northwest to the Northeast and from life in a rural community to one near a bustling metropolis like Boston, not to mention the relative lack of Native students and faculty on campus and the challenging academics. “It was not an easy adjustment, but I learned a lot from it,” Jones says. “It was invigorating in many ways, and challenging for many of the same reasons.”

COURTESY OF ANTHONY JONES

COURTESY OF ANTHONY JONES

As he found his footing, he also began to find outlets for his diverse skills. He remembers hands-on classes, like a robotics competition course, as highlights that let him indulge his innate curiosity. Jones was also part of the first class to complete the undergraduate business minor that the Sloan School of Management had just started offering. 

“It was very different from the STEM stuff I was studying in my major program—counterbalancing the technology focus with more of a human focus. It was about understanding negotiation and how businesses operate,” he says. “I enjoyed that quite a bit.”

Realizing how much he liked working on the “human side” of things, and with his tribe’s legal rights in mind, Jones decided to go to law school after graduating from MIT in 2008. He enrolled at Washington University in St. Louis, where he studied, among other things, tribal governance and federal Native American law, an area of practice that requires specialized expertise.

“It’s not as simple as taking your knowledge of state and federal law and just transferring that to another setting. There’s a big learning curve,” he says. “Plus, there are over 500 Native American tribes in the United States, and each of them has its own culture, history, and language.” But Jones was willing to put in the extra work, explaining, “It’s very helpful to have somebody who comes from these communities to be able to be an advocate for a Native American tribe.”

As soon as he finished law school, he was offered a job as an in-house attorney for the Tulalip Tribes, focusing on tribal governance, economic development, and tribal court litigation. “It was rewarding to use my legal advocacy skills while also helping them advocate in a very cultural way,” he says, noting that while working with the tribe he was able to transition fluidly between drum ceremonies and the courtroom. Mike Taylor, the lawyer who recruited him for the job and who worked with him for six or seven years before his retirement, describes Jones as working quickly, quietly, and “meticulously” on behalf of the Tulalip.

A young Jones holds his first hand drum, which his great-uncle made for him. Jones made the white raven drum (right) for his daughter.

Not long after starting the job, Jones moved home to the Port Gamble reservation on the Kitsap Peninsula, and Taylor remembers being struck by the dedication to his community that the decision symbolized. In order to get to work, he had to drive to the ferry terminal, take a half-hour-long ferry ride, and then drive another 45 minutes to the Tulalip reservation. 

After almost nine years working for the Tulalip, Jones decided it was time to start using his engineering background again, and he set his sights on a job focused more on intellectual-property law. 

To win such a position, he would have to sit for the patent bar exam, which many people take classes to prepare for. But besides his full-time job, Jones had a family with young kids, so he didn’t think he could spare the money or the time for a course. He ordered a 10-years-out-of-date study manual from eBay and began updating and studying it in his spare time.

His hard work paid off, and after passing the patent bar, he was able to land his first job in patent law, where he stayed for two years before switching to his current firm, Dorsey & Whitney. There, he’s been able to find a balance between his two primary areas of expertise: Dorsey & Whitney not only practices patent law but was “basically the first full-service large law firm to start practicing Native American law back in the ’80s,” he says.

In between his work and his family life, Jones has also found time to make art that honors and carries forward his tribe’s cultural legacy.

“The experience of moving away for college and law school and then coming back to my community gave me a greater appreciation for what was unique about my upbringing and the place that I came from,” he says. “So I started studying the culture and the history of Northwest Native people, and that led me to also study the material culture—the artwork, the artifacts, things like that.”

CHONA KASINGER

It didn’t take long before his tinkering instinct kicked back in, and he found himself trying to figure out how to make the things he was studying, whether they were drums or canoes. He also sought out chances to learn from other experts nearby. 

Though he’d never thought himself artistically inclined, his creations suggest otherwise. Today, his thunderbird design adorns a Washington state ferry; a drum he emblazoned with a killer whale resides at the offices of Earthjustice, an environmental nonprofit focused on legal advocacy; and a glass sculpture representing a stylized human figure of larger-than-life proportions that he collaborated on with three other artists (one of whom is a cousin) stands proudly in Seattle’s Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture.

In many ways the instincts that animate the art, the commitment to his community, and his professional life all emanate from the same place. “I would not have been able to predict all of the interesting things I’ve been able to do,” Jones says. “I’ve just been open to a variety of experiences and been ready to go when these opportunities arise.”

One of the things I’ve come to value deeply about the MIT community is the near-universal willingness to name a problem, measure it, design a solution, and keep iterating until it’s right. It’s an approach that has worked for a long time, and it’s one we’ll continue to rely on. As we step into the fall, we’re exploring new ways to harness the Institute’s collective power by fostering and supporting new collaborations on compelling global problems. 

In September we introduced the MIT Collaboratives, developed in close consultation with deans and other faculty leaders, to make it easier for faculty to pursue their most innovative ideas, collaborate with others outside their field, and explore fresh approaches to teaching our students. The first Collaborative, launched in October, is grounded in the human-centered fields represented by our School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. The next one will focus on inspiring and delivering solutions in the life sciences and health. 

We’re also hearing significant interest in developing new efforts in three other areas: quantum science and technology, new approaches to manufacturing, and new approaches to education. Working closely with faculty, we’ll determine whether these additional areas would benefit from the MIT Collaboratives structure or need a different approach. 

We also created the MIT GenAI Impact Consortium, following on the success of last year’s GenAI week and significant interest from industry. The consortium will foster collaborations between MIT faculty and industry on pressing problems that require MIT know-how. It will provide support for visiting scientists, professional education for our industrial partners, and enhanced opportunities for our students to interact with the firms that join us in this work.

And there are many more areas where our creative community can collaborate in delivering knowledge and solutions that are worthy of MIT. I look forward to a lot more measuring, designing, solving, and iterating as we pursue our great mission together.

“I spent 10 years at MIT, earning four degrees in electrical engineering and computer science,” says Arvola Chan ’74, SM ’76, EE ’78, PhD ’80. “I was a beneficiary of scholarships through my undergraduate years and research assistantships through my graduate years, so I’m forever grateful.” As planned-giving chair for the Class of 1974 50th Reunion Gift Committee, Chan invited classmates to join him in making a planned gift benefiting MIT. His own generous bequest will support graduate student fellowships. Meanwhile, he and wife Ginn-Shian Hua, MAA ’81, have established the Albert Tzong-Jyh Chan Memorial Scholarship in honor of their late son. The first award of the scholarship was to be made this fall.

On his vision for the Chan Memorial Scholarship: “This fund aims to support deserving students who have the potential to make significant contributions to the world. I hope this gesture inspires others to consider how their legacy can impact future generations and perpetuate the spirit of giving and excellence at MIT.”

On his planned-giving pitch to classmates: “I want to set an example for my friends to plan their legacy and inspire people to make gifts while they’re still living.”

On why MIT is worth supporting: “MIT is world renowned for doing good work in science and technology. Supporting MIT is my way of expressing deep gratitude to the Institute, which was instrumental in my academic and professional development. My contributions are a way to ensure that future students can benefit as I did.”

Help MIT build a better world. For more information, contact Amy Goldman: 617.253.4082; goldmana@mit.edu. Or visit giving.mit.edu/planned-giving.

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