February 26, 2025 - July 17, 2025Hidden within MIT’s Distinctive Collections, many architectural elements from the earliest days of the Institute’s architecture program still survive as part of the Rotch Art Collection. Among the artworks that conservators salvaged was a set of striking windows of gypsum and stained-glass, dating to the late 18th- to 19th c. Ottoman Empire. This exhibition illuminates the life of these historic windows, tracing their refracted histories from Egypt to MIT, their ongoing conservation, and the cutting-edge research they still prompt.The Maihaugen Gallery (14N-130) is open Monday through Thursday, 10am - 4pm, excluding Institute holidays.

What is Gender Ideology?11-12pm | 9-255Catherine D’Ignazio (Assoc. Prof., DUSP, Director, Data + Feminism Lab), and an MIT PostdocAn activity of the AAUP Day of ActionScience Engagement for Better Society2-3PM | 45-230Amy Brand (Director, MIT Press), Marzyeh Ghassemi (Assoc. Professor EECS), Crystal Lee (Ass't Professor, CoC and CMS/W), Seth Mnookin (Assoc. Prof. CMS/W), Deb Roy (Prof. Media Arts and Sciences, Director of the MIT Center for Constructive Communication)An activity of the AAUP Day of ActionLegal Challenges to Ideological Deportation3-4 PM | 45-230Carrie DeCell (Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia), Rachel Davidson (ACLU of Massachusetts), in conversation with Malick Ghachem (Prof, History)An activity of the AAUP Day of ActionAn activity of the AAUP Day of Action

Date: April 17th at 11amZoom link: https://mit.zoom.us/j/92091786511?pwd=SluDifJieYQFOMjAC70Gh3ziteHnSk.1Password: ODPIn-Person Location: 46-3310Title: Non-invasive tuning of experience-dependent plasticity in the primary visual cortexAbstract: The cerebral cortex exhibits a remarkable capacity for experience-dependent plasticity, a feature that is predominantly confined to critical periods (CPs) during early postnatal development. In the mouse primary visual cortex (V1), ocular dominance plasticity (ODP) has served as a premier model for investigating the cellular and molecular mechanisms that underlie the formation and stabilization of cortical circuits. During the CP, short-term monocular deprivation (MD) induces both functional and anatomical changes in binocular V1, characterized by a weakening of deprived-eye responsiveness via mechanisms of synaptic long-term depression. As the critical period closes, increased inhibitory drive and the emergence of perineuronal nets (PNNs) stabilize neural circuits and restrict further experience-dependent plasticity. In Chapter 1, I review the key literature on ODP and provide a survey of interventions that have been shown to enhance ODP in adulthood. In Chapter 2, I present our findings that repeated anesthetic ketamine treatment can reinstate ‘juvenile-like’ plasticity in the adult mouse V1. Importantly, I demonstrate that this effect relies on the microglia-mediated depletion of PNNs, and that interfering with microglial purinergic P2Y12 receptor activation blocks the ketamine-induced enhancement of ODP. Building on these insights, Chapter 3 investigates the use of non-invasive light-flicker stimulation at different temporal frequencies as a means to unlock different forms of ODP in the adult mouse V1. Our results reveal that 60 Hz light-flicker stimulation reduces PNN levels and promotes a depression of deprived-eye responses following short-term MD, whereas 40 Hz stimulation – without altering PNN levels – enhances an adult form of ODP characterized by the strengthening of non-deprived eye responses following short-term MD. Furthermore, we show that in mice subjected to long-term MD initiated early in life, 40 Hz light-flicker treatment promotes recovery of visual function, as evidenced through physiological and behavioral assays. Finally, Chapter 4, outlines a series of future experiments designed to further elucidate the mechanisms by which light-flicker stimulation promotes enhanced ODP in adult V1. Together, the findings presented in this thesis introduce novel, minimally invasive (ketamine) and non-invasive (light-flicker) interventions that show promise as therapeutic strategies for ameliorating deficits arising from early life sensory deprivation.

Eversource is hosting an in-person Q&A session to provides information about specific impacts to the MIT community and what to expect during construction of the Greater Cambridge Energy Program throughout MIT's Cambridge campus. Eversource plans to begin construction on Ames Street in April of 2025.The Greater Cambridge Energy Program (GCEP), being led and implemented by Eversource and the City of Cambridge, is designed to address the region’s growing electric demand and enhance the resiliency and flexibility of the transmission system and the grid. Find more details about the project and impacts here.

Join us for a timely conversation and participatory panel on the Woman, Life, Freedom revolutionary feminist movement, featuring Iranian women artists and scholars, including members of the Hamdel Collaborative and digital performance artivist (artist+activist) Dr. Sahar Sajadieh.This panel will highlight the powerful intersection of art and activism, exploring creative strategies of civil disobedience and the vital role of art in amplifying feminist and political movements across borders.Featuring artists whose work merges digital media, performance, poetry, and activism, the panel will delve into the use of creative technologies, artificial intelligence, and extended reality to craft counter-narratives that resist dominant systems and advocate for women’s rights.The Hamdel Collaborative will share their recent work centered on the Woman, Life, Freedom Archive—a living, expansive repository of daily acts of resistance and socio-political performance in Iran. This conversation underscores how art preserves cultural memory, sustains feminist solidarity, and fuels cross-border resistance.Sahar Sajadieh will present her video artwork, Tales of the Hair (قصه های گیسو)—her artistic response to the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement in Iran, her personal-political dance in a dialogue with the wisdom of Persian mythology, and her poetic therapeutic co-creation with generative AI. This work tells the tales of the hair—intertwined in every wave—the tales of resistance inspired by the mythical symbolism of the renowned Persian Sufi poet Attar Nishabouri. Tales of the Hair strives to decolonize and reclaim the narratives of the Iranian movement while creating a universal visual poetry about obtaining one’s power as a community.Together, the panelists offer powerful insight into the resilience, creativity, and collective defiance of Iranian women in their ongoing struggle for freedom, revealing how emerging media and artistic expression can catalyze lasting social change.Artists talks and panel Discussion: Hamdel Collaborative and MIT Open Documentary Fellow Dr. Sahar Sajadieh.

Distinguished Seminar Series in Computational Science and EngineeringThursday April 17 │12:00 PM ET“Slender and close: accurate Stokes flows for rigid particles in challenging geometries”Alex BarnettGroup Leader, Numerical Analysis,Center for Computational Mathematics, Flatiron Institute, NY*In-Person: Conference Room 45-432 in Building 45 / Live-Streamed via Zoom, Registration Required https://mit.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_jC2UQ-CKQS6_EE-em9L2CQ#/registrationNote: If you’re interested in an individual/small group meeting with Alex, please email zxian@mit.eduAbstract: The modeling of suspensions of rigid particles in a viscous incompressible fluid in the low-Reynolds-number limit is crucial to applications including sedimentation, rheology, microfluidic devices, active matter, and bacterial or cellular transport. Accurately modeling the relation between hydrodynamic forces and motions demands solving a Stokes boundary-value problem throughout the fluid domain at every time-step, yet the available numerical tools are far from satisfactory. This is especially true when objects become relatively close ("lubrication effects"). I will overview two new tools to address this with controlled accuracy using potential theory: 1) For the common case of spheres we show that interior fundamental solutions (MFS) augmented by simple image systems accurately handle separations down to a thousandth of the radius, and that large collections of spheres/ellipsoids can be tackled via block-diagonal least-squares preconditioning. 2) For slender fibers of circular cross-section, we present a boundary integral (BIE) scheme with adaptive quadrature. Unlike widely-used slender body theory---which is non-convergent (merely asymptotic in the fiber radius) and incorrect when fibers approach---our scheme is convergent, and handles very close fibers with up to 10 accurate digits. We combine it with high-order time-stepping for sedimentation. For both tools we show high-order convergence, and well-conditioned iterative solution with close-to-linear cost scaling.Bio: Alex Barnett is an applied mathematician and numerical analyst. He is a Senior Research Scientist, and Group Leader for Numerical Analysis, at the Center for Computational Mathematics at the Flatiron Institute in New York City. After a Ph.D. in physics from Harvard, he did postdoctoral work in radiology at Massachusetts General Hospital and as a Courant Instructor at New York University. He served on the mathematics faculty at Dartmouth College for 12 years, becoming a full professor, and creating several new courses on topics such as the math of music and sound. His research includes numerical partial differential equations (wave scattering, Stokes flow, and high-frequency eigenvalues), integral equations, fast algorithms, signal processing, statistics, imaging, inverse problems, quantum physics and biomathematics. He has authored or coauthored over 70 articles and two books, and developed popular scientific software libraries. His awards include several NSF grants, Dartmouth's Karen E. Wetterhahn Memorial Award for Distinguished Creative or Scholarly Achievement, and 1st prize in the 1990 International Physics Olympiad.