SHASS News

MIT Research Scientist Afreen Siddiqi ’99, SM ’01, PhD ’06; MIT professors Kathleen Thelen and Vinod Vaikuntanathan SM ’05, PhD ’09; as well as Kate Manne PhD ’11 are among 223 scientists, artists, and scholars awarded 2026 fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Working across 55 disciplines, the fellows were selected from almost 5,000 applicants […]

A dozen MIT students recently set out for Barcelona — not just to study climate resilience, but to experience it firsthand. As part of STS.S22 (How to Grow Resilient Futures: Regenerative Agriculture and Economies in Catalunya, Spain), an Independent Activities Period course taught by Kate Brown, the Thomas M. Siebel Distinguished Professor in the History of […]

When she was a child, MIT senior Olivia Honeycutt would spend summers on her grandparents’ farm in rural Alabama outside Birmingham. The practical and cultural differences between farm and city life became more pronounced by comparison. “Life and the way we lived it slowed down on the farm,” she says. “It was a nice change […]

Good caregivers are often in short supply, but after the Covid-19 pandemic hit the U.S. in early 2020, staff levels at nursing homes dropped by 10 percent. What was a simple personnel shortage has moved closer to being a nursing-care crisis. “We have an aging population, care for them is labor-intensive, and there are shortages […]

Six MIT affiliates — Denisse Córdova Carrizales SM ’26; Ria Das ’21, MNG ’22; Ronak Desai; Stacy Godfreey-Igwe ’22; Arya Rao; and Ananthan Sadagopan ’24 — have been named 2026 P.D. Soros Fellows. In addition, P.D. Soros Fellow Avinash Vadali will begin a PhD in condensed-matter physics at MIT this fall. The fellowship provides immigrants […]