Faculty and Academic Staff

Research co-authored by MIT economist Tobias Salz examines the value consumers place upon time, in transportation, and the benefits of this to firms. “One of the important quantities in transportation is the value of time,” he says. “The majority of consumers still benefit from rideshare efforts like personalized pricing.”

Informal help is a huge share of elder care in the U.S., a burden that is only set to expand. A new book co-edited by MIT economist and department head Jonathan Gruber explores different countries’ solutions.

MIT historian of science Robin Scheffler looks at the public discussions over safety and regulations that, once established, helped the biotechnology industry thrive in the Boston area. “It’s hard to imagine the American biotechnology industry without this dense cluster in Boston and Cambridge,” he says. “These things that happened on a very local scale had huge echoes.”

Director of Keyboard Studies Mi-Eun Kim and Research Scientist Praneeth Namburi want to develop an understanding of musical expression and skill development.

A new book from MIT political scientist Kathleen Thelen, “Attention, Shoppers! American Retail Capitalism and the Origins of the Amazon Economy,” examines the political dynamics behind the huge U.S. retail economy. “The markets that we take as given, that we think of as the natural outcome of supply and demand, are heavily shaped by policy and by politics,” she says.

“My argument is that this physical object adds up to more than the sum of its parts, through its creative interplay of text, image, and materials,” MIT Literature professor Arthur Bahr says. His book, “Chasing the Pearl-Manuscript: Speculation, Shapes, Delight,” explores the Pearl-Manuscript, a singular bound volume from the 1300s containing the earliest versions of the masterly medieval poem “Pearl,” the famous tale “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” and two other poems.

MIT linguist Shigeru Miyagawa shares new research about the emergence of human human language, arguing for its appearance 135,000 years ago. “The logic is very simple,” he says. “Every population branching across the globe has human language, and all languages are related.”

A new book by David Mindell, the Dibner Professor of the History of Engineering and Manufacturing in MIT’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society, draws from the Enlightenment to show how today’s inventors can produce useful technologies and good jobs.