All events

Writing Together Online offers the structured writing time to help you stay focused and productive during the busy fall months. Join our daily 90-minute writing sessions and become part of a community of scholars who connect online, set realistic goals, and write together in the spirit of accountability and camaraderie. We offer writing sessions every workday, Monday through Friday. The program is open to all MIT students, postdocs, faculty, staff, and affiliates who are working on papers, proposals, thesis/dissertation chapters, application materials, and other writing projects.Please register for any number of sessions:Monday, Wednesday, and Friday 9:00–10:30am (EST) Tuesday and Thursday, 8:00–9:30am and 9:30-11:00am (EST)For more information and to register, go to this link or check the WCC website. Please spread the word and join with colleagues and friends. MIT Students and postdocs who attend at least 5 sessions per challenge will be entered into a gift-card raffle.

On view October 1 -- December 11, 2025This exhibition draws on archival materials from the Aga Khan Documentation Center at MIT (AKDC) to explore a century of cultural heritage preservation in Aleppo, Syria. It takes as its point of departure the work of Kamil al-Ghazzi (1853–1933), the pioneering Aleppine historian whose influential three-volume chronicle, Nahr al-Dhahab fī Tārīkh Ḥalab (The River of Gold in the History of Aleppo), was published between 1924 and 1926.Ink, Stone, and Silver Light presents three modes of documentation—manuscript, built form, and photography—through which Aleppo’s urban memory has been recorded and preserved. Featuring figures such as Michel Écochard and Yasser Tabbaa alongside al-Ghazzi, the exhibition traces overlapping efforts to capture the spirit of a city shaped by commerce, craft, and coexistence. At a time when Syria again confronts upheaval and displacement, these archival fragments offer models for preserving the past while envisioning futures rooted in dignity, knowledge, and place.

Janet Echelman's Remembering the Future widens our perspective in time, giving sculptural form to the history of the Earth's climate from the last ice age to the present moment, and then branching out to visualize multiple potential futures.Constructed from colored twines and ropes that are braided, knotted and hand-spliced to create a three-dimensional form, the immersive artwork greets you with its grand scale presiding over the MIT Museum lobby.This large-scale installation by 2022-2024 MIT Distinguished Visiting Artist Janet Echelman, was developed during her residency at the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST). Architect, engineer and MIT Associate Professor Caitlin Mueller collaborated on the development of the piece.The title, Remembering the Future was inspired by the writings commonly attributed to Søren Kierkegaard: "The most painful state of being is remembering the future, particularly the one you'll never have."As the culmination of three years of dedicated research and collaboration, this site-specific installation explores Earth's climate timeline, translating historical records and possible futures into sculptural form.Echelman's climate research for this project was guided by Professor Raffaele Ferrari and the MIT Lorenz Center, creators of En-ROADS simulator which uses current climate data and modeling to visualize the impact of environmental policies and actions on energy systems.Learn more about Janet Echelman and the MIT Museum x CAST Collaboration.Learn more about the exhibition at the MIT Museum.

The MIT Disabilities ERG is proud to present the first in a series of events for Disability Employment Awareness Month this October. In this keynote kick-off event, ADA Coordinator/Executive Director of the Cambridge Commission for Persons with Disabilities, Rachel Tanenhaus, will discuss how we can create accessible workplaces that improve everyone's experience.Detailed Description:Accessibility, inclusion, and neurodiversity are essential to any workplace and certainly to anywhere that serves students and members of the public. We often hear about "special needs", but in fact needs are normal and human; neurotypical folks and those without disabilities often just see their needs accommodated automatically. This presentation will discuss how to ensure that your work and processes are as effective as possible by including the needs of all kinds of people.Please register to attend. A Zoom link will be sent prior to the event.RACHEL H. TANENHAUS, MPH, ADAC is the ADA Coordinator/Executive Director of the Cambridge Commission for Persons with Disabilities. She spent nearly twelve years as a Program Coordinator in the Health and Disability Program at the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, helping to ensure that people of all abilities and across the lifespan have access to health care. She has provided technical assistance on the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), accessible information technology and other access-related topics for twenty-five years and has been participating in disability awareness panels since she was ten years old. She has worked as an information specialist on the ADA technical assistance lines at the New England ADA Center and the US Department of Justice. She holds degrees from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the Boston University School of Public Health, and has served on several municipal disability commissions and on the Alumni Council for the Guide Dog Foundation for the Blind. In her spare time, she loves to read, write, travel, volunteer, spend way too much time on the Internet, and watch baseball and women's hockey.Other events in this Series10/8 - Disabled Artists in Converstation10/3, 10/7, 10/17 -Festival Henge10/15 - Building Inclusive Workplace Practices: A talk with Laura Beretsky

Around the globe, young children receive the smallest share of public expenditures on children, in direct contradiction to the growing evidence on the importance of early childhood. At the same time, countries are increasingly adopting Universal Child Benefits (UCBs)—regular cash payments to children, often beginning with policies focused on the youngest. Most recently, China announced a child benefit for children under the age of three. This seminar will examine these trends: spending on children by age and the increasing adoption of UCBs, with a focus on both the role of national and global actors in shaping the landscape of child benefits and the implications for the health and wellbeing of the next generation.David Harris, PhD, Senior Research Fellow, Center on Poverty and Social Policy, Columbia University and President, Children’s Research and Education Institute, will present. He is the President of Children’s Research and Education Institute and a partner at Kids Project, as well as an advisory board member of the Social Policies for Health Equity Research Center at Harvard University, an affiliate of the Center on Poverty and Inequality at Stanford University, and a senior research fellow at UNICEF Innocenti, Global Office for Research and Foresight. He received a Doctor of Philosophy in Social Welfare from Columbia University.This seminar will be held in E53-482 (Millikan Room). Lunch will be available. Please RSVP here.Contact Kate Danahy at kdanahy@mit.edu with any questions.This event is part of the CIS Global Research & Policy Seminar Series. Join our mailing list here to learn about upcoming seminars in the series.

MIT Global Opportunities (GO) Fair 2025Explore MISTI Programs!Speak to MISTI alums about their experiences abroad and our MISTI country managers who have been placing MIT students across ALL majors and departments for internships in over 40+ countries.Our goal is to make it possible for YOU to experience the world while chasing your dreams and passions, tackling global issues, and making an impact in this interconnected world.Come speak to us about:Internships abroadStudy abroadTeaching abroadLearning abroadand MORE!Representatives from other MIT programs will also be there as MISTI partners to help you make the most of your opportunities abroad.Pssst.... we'll also be having gelato!

Speakers: Marie Law Adams, Principal Landing Studio / Associate Professor, Northeastern University Dan Adams, Director and Professor Northeastern University, Principal Landing Studio Respondent: Eran Ben Joseph, Class of 1922 Professor of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning, MITThis is part of the CDD / LCAU lunchtime lecture series. Lunch will be Served

Vishan Gandhi Nigam (MIT)

joint with Development Economics Seminar

Ten minutes for your mind@2:50 every day at 2:50 pm in multiple time zones:Europa@2:50, EET, Athens, Helsinki (UTC+2) (7:50 am EST) https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88298032734Atlantica@2:50, EST, New York, Toronto (UTC-4) https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85349851047Pacifica@2:50, PST, Los Angeles, Vancouver (UTC=7) (5:50 pm EST) https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85743543699Almost everything works better again if you unplug it for a bit, including your mind. Stop by and unplug. Get the benefits of mindfulness without the fuss.@2:50 meets at the same time every single day for ten minutes of quiet together.No pre-requisite, no registration needed.Visit the website to view all @2:50 time zones each day.at250.org or at250.mit.edu

"Overcoming Uncertainty for Decision-Making in Planetary Health"Our planet faces growing crises including biodiversity loss, food insecurity, and public health risks, which compound and accelerate one another. Underlying these global challenges is the urgent need to effectively allocate scarce resources, often in dynamic environments with limited data. Many of these challenges can be modeled using Markov decision processes such as restless multi-armed bandits, which traditionally require a perfect model of the environment and relatively small problem sizes. We’ll explore how online learning, deep reinforcement learning, and mixed-integer programming can help overcome these challenges of missing data and complexity.Lily Xu is an Assistant Professor at Columbia University, in the department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research. She develops AI methods across machine learning, optimization, and causal inference for planetary health challenges, particularly to address environmental challenges such as biodiversity conservation. Previously, she was a postdoc at the University of Oxford with the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery, working with Alex Teytelboym, and received her PhD in computer science from Harvard University, advised by Milind Tambe. She co-directs the EAAMO research initiative, which advances computational techniques to improve access to opportunity for historically marginalized communities. Additionally, she partners closely with NGOs to bridge research and practice, serving as AI Lead for the SMART Partnership, where she helps build computational and research solutions for effective conservation management.

Two Bites at the Apple: Molecular Design and Repair of Peptide Therapeutics

Aroon Narayanan (MIT)

"The Equilibrium Effects of Neighborhood Schools" (with Clemence Idoux) | Ray Han (MIT)

Speaker: Oriol Sole Pi (MIT)Title: Graph structure and soficityAbstract:A random rooted graph is said to be sofic if it is the Benjamini-Schramm limit of a sequence of finite graphs. Sofic graphs are known to possess a certain property known as unimodularity. In a recent breakthrough, Bowen, Chapman, Lubotzky and Vidick have shown that not all unimodular graphs are sofic. In this talk, I will give an overview of what is known in the other direction: Which additional conditions on the graph are known to imply soficity? Then, I will discuss a novel result in this direction: For any finite graph H, every one-ended, unimodular graph which does not have H as a minor must be sofic.

Come by for snacks, and tea with Literature Section friends, instructors, students, etc. What are you reading? What 21L classes are you taking or hoping to take? This event is specifically geared towards undergrads; but open to friends of the community that engage in the literary and humanities at MIT.

Speaker: Zhouli Xu (University of California, Los Angeles)Title: Proof of the existence of 𝜃6Abstract: The Kervaire invariant problem asks in which dimensions there exists a stably framed manifold of Kervaire invariant one. Hill– Hopkins–Ravenel resolved this problem in all but one dimen- sion: 126.In this talk, I will present an overview of the proof that $h_6^2$survives in the Adams spectral sequence, thereby resolving the final open case of the Kervaire invariant problem. I will discuss new techniques involved, some of which are inspired by mo- tivic homotopy theory. This is joint work with Weinan Lin and Guozhen Wang.

Join us for an evening with Dr. Sonali Majumdar, on how international scientists can empower themselves to seek career and professional development experiences and bring valuable, important perspectives that enrich the U.S. STEM ecosystem.Dr. Majumdar is an international scientist trained in the U.S. and a longtime leader in the world of graduate and postdoctoral professional development. Sonali holds a PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of Georgia and completed a postdoc at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. She has been the Associate Director of Graduate Development at University of Virginia and is now the Assistant Dean for Professional Development at the Graduate School at Princeton University. She is also the founder of the Graduate Career Consortium's International Community of Practice.This CAPD event is open to MIT PhDs and postdocs as well as the PhDs and postdocs of Boston-area institutions. Please note this event does not focus on visa sponsorship. Registration is required for this event. Please register here.

Join us on Monday evenings for Argentine tango classes with outstanding instructors. Whether you are completely new to tango, or already have some experience, you will find a friendly environment in which to learn new things and improve your technique. You don't have to bring a partner, since the classes involve rotations with all participants.Full Series: Sep 15, 22, 29, October 6, 13, 20, 27, Nov 3, 10, 17, 24, Dec 1, 8, 15.For all info and registration, visit following link.