SHASS News

Anantha Chandrakasan, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science who has held multiple leadership roles at MIT, has been named the Institute’s new provost, effective July 1. Chandrakasan has served as the dean of the School of Engineering since 2017 and as MIT’s inaugural chief innovation and strategy officer since 2024. Prior to becoming […]

Back in 1676, a Dutch cloth merchant with a keen interest in microscopes, Antony van Leeuwenhoek, discovered microbes and began cataloging them. Two hundred years later, a German doctor in current-day Poland, Robert Koch, identified the anthrax bacterium, a crucial step toward modern germ theory. Those two signal advances, with others, have helped create the […]

In Washington, where conversations about Russia often center on a single name, political science doctoral candidate Suzanne Freeman is busy redrawing the map of power in autocratic states. Her research upends prevailing narratives about Vladimir Putin’s Russia, asking us to look beyond the individual to understand the system that produced him. “The standard view is […]

In 15 TED Talk-style presentations, MIT faculty recently discussed their pioneering research that incorporates social, ethical, and technical considerations and expertise, each supported by seed grants established by the Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC), a cross-cutting initiative of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing. The call for proposals last summer was met with […]

MIT has an unparalleled history of bringing together interdisciplinary teams to solve pressing problems — think of the development of radar during World War II, or leading the international coalition that cracked the code of the human genome — but the challenge of climate change could demand a scale of collaboration unlike any that’s come […]