Richard “Dick” Eckaus, Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics, emeritus, in the Department of Economics, died on Sept. 11 in Boston. He was 96 years old. Eckaus was born in Kansas City, Missouri on April 30, 1926, the youngest of three children to parents who had emigrated from Lithuania. His father, Julius Eckaus, was a […]
Graduate student Jacob Jaffe wants to improve the administration of American elections. To do that, he is posing “questions in political science that we haven’t been asking enough,” he says, “and solving them with methods we haven’t been using enough.” Considerable research has been devoted to understanding “who votes, and what makes people vote or […]
The atmosphere of discovery generated by MIT’s research and innovation activities has been described as magic by many. But that magic can sometimes seem obscure or even intimidating to outsiders. Now the MIT Museum, which opens to the public on Oct. 2, is inviting everyone to take part in MIT’s magic with a new 56,000-square-foot […]
Although Fernanda De La Torre still has several years left in her graduate studies, she’s already dreaming big when it comes to what the future has in store for her. “I dream of opening up a school one day where I could bring this world of understanding of cognition and perception into places that would […]
This year’s incoming cohort of new MIT graduate students enjoyed a warm welcome from the Graduate Student Council (GSC), with a number of in-person orientation activities from Aug. 21 through Sept. 6. The GSC has traditionally offered a broad range of in-person orientation activities to the entire incoming graduate cohort. Katie Chen, a graduate student […]
As an undergraduate, Mitch Murdock was a rare science-humanities double major, specializing in both English and molecular, cellular, and developmental biology at Yale University. Today, as a doctoral student in the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, he sees obvious ways that his English education expanded his horizons as a neuroscientist. “One of my […]
On Saturday night, MIT came out to party. An all-Institute dance party, organized by L. Rafael Reif as a thank you to the community as he approaches the conclusion of his tenure as MIT’s 17th president, was attended by thousands of students, staff, faculty, and their guests. The festivities opened with a community café dinner, […]
As a teenager, Jamie Wong was a professional pop songwriter. Now, she’s an anthropologist studying venture capitalism in China. Her key turning point? Coaching a prison band in Hong Kong. “When I tell people this, they’re always quite surprised,” she says. “But [my journey] feels so natural to me.” Wong grew up in Hong Kong […]
The world is facing a maternal health crisis. According to the World Health Organization, approximately 810 women die each day due to preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth. Two-thirds of these deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa. In Rwanda, one of the leading causes of maternal mortality is infected Cesarean section wounds. An interdisciplinary team […]
Two MIT scientists from the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (BCS) are among this year’s winners of the Ig Nobel Prize, the satiric award celebrating “achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think.” BCS professor Edward “Ted” Gibson and graduate student Eric Martinez, along with former MIT visiting researcher Francis Mollica, […]
