• Jun. 21, 2015
    When graduate student Natasha Wright began her PhD program in mechanical engineering, she had no idea how to remove salt from groundwater to make it more palatable, nor had she ever been to India,...
  • Jun. 10, 2015
    Assistant Professor Alberto Rodriguez led a team in this past May’s Amazon Picking Challenge, winning second place out of 28 entrants for their robot. The challenge, whose judging panel included...
  • Mar. 24, 2015
    Researchers at MIT and Stanford University have developed a new kind of solar cell that combines two different layers of sunlight-absorbing material in order to harvest a broader range of the sun’s...
  • Feb. 16, 2015
    Just one minute with Professor Alexander Slocum and you can see why his course 2.75 is so popular – and successful. He has a way of inciting passion and excitement in his students while imbuing them...
  • Feb. 10, 2015
    Some of the most prized violins in the world were crafted in the Italian workshops of Amati, Stradivari, and Guarneri — master violinmaking families from the 17th and 18th centuries who produced...
  • Jan. 13, 2015
    One day in the 1990s, as he was riding home from high school in São Paulo, Tonio Buonassisi looked out the bus window at the Brazilian city’s long lines of traffic, and its smoggy haze. In that...
  • Jan. 8, 2015
    Back in 2009, alumna Jodie Wu ’09 launched Global Cycle Solutions (GCS) in Tanzania to bring small-scale farmers an innovative product she designed in MIT’s D-Lab: a bike-mounted maize sheller....
  • Dec. 13, 2014
    Elliot Avila (SB ’14) is a recent graduate of the Department of Mechanical Engineering who has a particular interest in the developing world. As an undergraduate student in D-Lab, he traveled to...
  • Dec. 13, 2014
    MechE faculty members are engineering for global change through their research, but that’s not the only way to make the world a better place. Several are also collaborating with international...
  • Dec. 13, 2014
    Designing products for the developing world can be a hit-or-miss endeavor: While there may be a dire need for products addressing problems such as access to clean water, sanitation, and electricity,...
  • Dec. 13, 2014
    You’ve probably heard of MechE alum and Associate Professor Hugh Herr (SM ’93), head of the Biomechatronics group at MIT Media Lab. The TED Talk he gave earlier this year sparked a flurry of media...
  • Nov. 22, 2014
    Global Research Innovation and Technology (GRIT), an MIT MechE spinoff started by Tish Scolnik ’10, Mario Bollini ’09 SM ’12, Benjamin Judge ’11 MEng ’12, and Assistant Professor Amos Winter SM ’05...
  • Nov. 6, 2014
    Wind turbines across the globe are being made taller to capture more energy from the stronger winds that blow at greater heights. But it’s not easy, or sometimes even economically feasible, to build...
  • Nov. 3, 2014
    When an aspiring mechanical engineer on a budget wants a top-of-the-line guitar, what does he do? He makes it himself, of course. At age 13, Nathan Spielberg — now an MIT senior — began building his...
  • Sep. 26, 2014
    Last week, at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, MIT researchers unveiled an oval-shaped submersible robot, a little smaller than a football, with a flattened panel on...
  • Sep. 10, 2014
    Where other mechanical engineering faculty come bearing specific innovative artifacts, Maria Yang offers conceptual strategies for innovation, regardless of the technology. For her, innovation first...
  • Aug. 1, 2014
    Researchers at MIT and in Saudi Arabia have developed a new way of making surfaces that can actively control how fluids or particles move across them. The work might enable new kinds of biomedical or...
  • Jul. 29, 2014
    Several years ago, as a graduate student at MIT, Amos Winter spent a summer in Tanzania surveying wheelchair technology. What he found was a disconnect between products and the lives of their...
  • May. 23, 2014
    Graphene’s promise as a material for new kinds of electronic devices, among other uses, has led researchers around the world to study the material in search of new applications. But one of the...
  • May. 23, 2014
    “It’s all about the process,” says Warren Seering, a professor of mechanical engineering. He's referring to his spring class, Course 2.739 (Product Design and Development). “We want 2.739 students to...

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