News & Events

A course that combines machine learning and health care explores the promise of applying artificial intelligence to medicine. MIT professors David Sontag and Peter Szolovits don’t assign a textbook for their class, 6.S897HST.956 (Machine Learning for Healthcare), because there isn’t one. Instead, students read scientific papers, solve problem sets based on current topics like opioid…

Hacking Nanomedicine kicks off a series of events to develop an idea over time. A traditional hackathon focuses on computer science and programming, attracts coders in droves, and spans an entire weekend with three stages: problem definition, solution development, and business formation. Hacking Nanomedicine, however, recently brought together graduate and postgraduate students…

Along the genome, proteins form liquid-like droplets that appear to boost the expression of particular genes. In recent years, MIT scientists have developed a new model for how key genes are controlled that suggests the cellular machinery that transcribes DNA into RNA forms specialized droplets called condensates. These droplets occur…

Hundreds of thousands of colon cells offer new clues into what goes wrong in an inflammatory bowel disease and why some patients don’t respond to drugs. Inflammatory bowel diseases are chronic, painful disorders of the intestine that afflict roughly 1.5 million people in the United States. Yet the underlying mechanisms…

Discovery could enable longer lasting and better functioning of devices—including pacemakers, breast implants, biosensors, and drug delivery devices Researchers from the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) at MIT, the National University of Ireland Galway (NUI Galway) and AMBER, the SFI Research Centre for Advanced Materials and BioEngineering Research…

Noninvasive device could benefit patients with kidney disease, congestive heart failure, or dehydration. For patients with kidney failure who need dialysis, removing fluid at the correct rate and stopping at the right time is critical. This typically requires guessing how much water to remove and carefully monitoring the patient for…

Neuroscientists co-led by HST MEMP PhD student Nicolas Meirhaeghe find brain activity patterns that encode our beliefs and affect how we interpret the world around us. For decades, research has shown that our perception of the world is influenced by our expectations. These expectations, also called “prior beliefs,” help us…

From June 20-21, 13 select teams of entrepreneurs, doctors, and researchers from countries including Spain, Chile, Canada, and the U.S. gathered to participate in the 2019 MIT LinQ IDEA2 Global program. Teams worked with technology experts and entrepreneurs from elite institutions in the Boston area and throughout the world alongside…

In 2017, five PhD students in the Medical Engineering and Medical Physics (MEMP) program at HST launched efforts to markedly expand the program’s outreach to students from underrepresented groups in the sciences, e.g. women, minorities, and students with disabilities. Recognizing opportunities to adopt more inclusive practices across HST, Aditi Gupta,…

Kwanghun Chung, an associate professor in MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, the Department of Chemical Engineering and the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, has won a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the White House announced. A PECASE is the nation’s highest honor for young…