SHASS News

Debates about vaccines are a recurring feature of contemporary politics. It turns out they actually date back more than 200 years, since the development of the first smallpox vaccine. MIT Professor Thomas Levenson, one of the country’s leading science writers, explores this important history in a new book about the contours of anti-vaccination thought. Levenson […]

Living Climate Futures Symposium brings together humanities, sciences, and institutions to strengthen both social justice movements and research.

When MIT mechanical engineering Professor Kripa Varanasi landed in New Delhi in the middle of the night in June 2024 to attend a conference, he found himself in 104-degree Fahrenheit heat.  “This was June, and it was crazy. It was so hot for the whole meeting that I never left the hotel,” with daytime temperatures […]

In “The Acquisition of Relativization,” MIT linguist Suzanne Flynn and other researchers investigate how children from different cultures develop language skills.

On April 30, the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing’s Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC) initiative hosted a full-day research symposium examining how artificial intelligence is shaping the world and its implications for society.  The symposium included research talks by SERC’s latest seed grant recipients on topics such as air pollution forecasting and responsible computer vision deployment, panels on AI […]