Does the United States have a “moral responsibility” for providing aid to poor nations—which have a significantly smaller carbon footprint and face catastrophic climate events at a much higher rate than wealthy countries?
A study published Dec. 11, 2024, in Climatic Change explores U.S. public opinion on global climate policies considering our nation’s historic role as a leading contributor of carbon emissions. The randomized, experimental survey specifically investigates American attitudes toward such a moral responsibility.
The work was led by Evan Lieberman, director of CIS, and Volha Charnysh, associated faculty of the Global Diversity Lab. It was co-authored with PhD student Jared Kalow and University of Pennsylvania postdoc Erin Walk PhD ’24.
"We set out to measure American attitudes towards climate-related foreign aid, and explicitly to test the impact of this particular moral responsibility narrative. We did this on an experimental basis, so subjects were randomly assigned to receive different messages," said Lieberman.
Taylor Fravel, director of the Security Studies Program (SSP), explores China's military capability and preparedness for potential conflict. Below is an excerpt from his July 18 article in Foreign Affairs:
A new wave of purges has engulfed the senior leadership of China’s military, the People’s Liberation Army. Since the 20th National Party Congress in October 2022, more than 20 senior PLA officers from all four services—the army, navy, air force, and rocket force—have disappeared from public view or been removed from their posts. The absences of other generals have also been reported, which could foreshadow additional purges.
Most notably, since the fall of 2023, three of the six uniformed members of the party’s Central Military Commission, the top body of the Chinese Communist Party charged with overseeing the armed forces, have been removed from their posts. The first to fall was Defense Minister Li Shangfu, who was removed in October 2023 and expelled from the CCP in June 2024. Then, this past November, Miao Hua, the director of the CMC’s Political Work Department, which manages personnel and party affairs, was suspended for “serious violations of discipline” before being formally removed from the CMC last month. And most recently, the Financial Times reported that He Weidong, the second-ranked vice chair who has not appeared in public since early March, had been purged.
Never before has half the CMC been dismissed in such a short period. Even stranger is the fact that all three generals had previously been promoted by Chinese leader Xi Jinping; they were appointed to the CMC itself in 2022, after Xi consolidated his control over the party at the 20th Party Congress. He Weidong was even a member of the Politburo, one of the party’s top decision-making bodies, comprised of the 24 highest-ranking party leaders. And Miao and He have been described by analysts as being part of a “Fujian faction” within the PLA, because the generals had been stationed in that province at the same time as Xi and are believed to have close ties with him.
The fact that these high-profile purges are occurring now is not lost on outside observers. In 2027, the PLA will celebrate the 100th anniversary of its founding. It is also the year by which Xi expects China’s armed forces to have made significant strides in their modernization. Finally, the year is noteworthy because, according to former CIA director Bill Burns, Xi has instructed the PLA to be “ready by 2027 to conduct a successful invasion” of Taiwan. Xi’s instructions do not indicate that China will in fact invade Taiwan that year, but, as Burns put it, they serve as “a reminder of the seriousness of his focus and his ambition.”
On December 12, 2024, national and international experts gathered in Belém, Brazil, to debate the relationship between urbanization, contemporary technologies and traditional knowledge in the Amazon. Held at the Estação Gasômetro theater, the meeting brought together researchers from the MIT Media Lab, the UFPA Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism (FAU-UFPA), the Emílio Goeldi Museum of Pará and the City Lab. Rosabelli Coelho, managing director of MIT-Brazil and MIT-Amazonia, was an organizer of the event.
With the aim of rethinking the Amazon as a cradle of socio-biodiversity and guiding it in the search for innovative solutions to global urban and climate challenges, the event was structured in two stages. In the morning, a program open to the public featured round table discussions and lectures by experts such as Roberta Menezes (FAU-UFPA) and Kent Larson (MIT City Science). Among the topics discussed were new forms of urbanization that respect the specificities of the Amazon biome and the importance of integrating modern technologies with the region's ancestral knowledge.
Gabriela Bilá, a researcher at MIT, highlighted the need to reinvent the traditional urban model. “The idea, as the name suggests, is to think of new ways of living in the Amazon. Starting with Belém, we want to explore alternatives to the imported Western model that has already proved to be flawed, causing social and environmental disruption and being inadequate to deal with the major climate issues that lie ahead,” she explained.
The new Angola initiative marks a significant collaboration between MIT-Africa, Sonangol (Angola’s national energy company), and the Instituto Superior Politécnico de Tecnologias e Ciências (ISPTEC). The partnership was formalized at a signing ceremony on MIT’s campus on Friday, June 13, with key stakeholders from all three institutions present, including Dr. Diamantino Pedro Azevedo, the Angolan Minister of Mineral Resources, Petroleum, and Gas, and Sonangol CEO Mr. Gaspar Martins.
“This partnership marks a pivotal step in the Angolan government's commitment to leveraging knowledge as the cornerstone of the country’s economic transformation,” says Minister Azevedo. “By connecting the oil and gas sector with science, innovation, and world-class training, we are equipping future generations to lead Angola into a more technological, sustainable, and globally competitive era.”
The sentiment is shared by the MIT-Africa Program leaders. “This initiative reflects MIT’s deep commitment to fostering meaningful, long-term relationships across the African continent,” said Mai Hassan, faculty director of the MIT-Africa Program. “It supports our mission of advancing knowledge and educating students in ways that are globally informed, and it provides a platform for mutual learning. By working with Angolan partners, we gain new perspectives and opportunities for innovation that benefit both MIT and our collaborators.”
At the core of Raymond Wang’s work lies a seemingly simple question: Can’t we just get along?
Wang, a fifth-year political science graduate student and a member of SSP, is a native of Hong Kong who witnessed firsthand the shakeup and conflict engendered by China’s takeover of the former British colony. “That type of experience makes you wonder why things are so complicated,” he says. “Why is it so hard to live with your neighbors?”
Today, Wang is focused on ways of managing a rapidly intensifying U.S.-China competition, and more broadly, on identifying how China — and other emerging global powers—bend, break, or creatively accommodate international rules in trade, finance, maritime, and arms control matters to achieve their ends.
The current game for global dominance between the United States and China continually threatens to erupt into dangerous confrontation. Wang’s research aims to construct a more nuanced take on China’s behaviors in this game.
“U.S. policy towards China should be informed by a better understanding of China’s behaviors if we are to avoid the worst-case scenario,” Wang believes.
Olivia Wynne Houck, PhD candidate in the History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture, and Natasha Ansari, PhD candidate in the Urban Studies and Planning department, received the Center's Jeanne Guillemin Prize in 2024 and conducted their funded work over the past academic year. The grant provides critical funding for female PhD students pursuing research in international affairs.
Houck said the grant helped fund three weeks of research and travel expenses to Brussels, Belgium, where she immersed herself in the NATO Archives. Examining documents there will give her the understanding needed to complete the final three chapters of her dissertation, Concrete Security: NATO as a Territorial Project (1940-1960).
Grounded in a study of the built environment, Houck's project looks at the formation of NATO in the Postwar period and how a diverse group of countries came together under a single alliance but had to negotiate internal politics and the construction of military bases in order to truly collaborate.
Ansari used her grant to expand her ongoing dissertation fieldwork in South Africa last summer. For the past three years, she has spent time on the ground in a resource-scarce informal settlement outside the urban township of Soweto, trying to determine ways that those living with profound intellectual disabilities can still have a voice and agency in participatory processes related to planning their own lives.
This built on her related fieldwork, in which her observational research honed in on a minor with severe intellectual disabilities who resided in the informal settlement with five siblings supported by a single mother.
At a time when the U.S. Department of Defense increasingly grapples with emerging technologies and their implications for national security, Erik Lin-Greenberg ’09, SM ’09 occupies a rare position at the intersection of theory and practice.
The MIT political scientist and lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force Reserve recently assumed command of the 820th Intelligence Squadron at the Offutt Air Force Base near Omaha, Nebraska, where he now leads dozens of officers and enlisted personnel. He does so while maintaining his full-time role as the Leo Marx Career Development Associate Professor in the History and Culture of Science and Technology at MIT, with areas of focus including emerging technologies, crisis escalation, and security.
Combining these two worlds—the military and the academic—has been natural for Lin-Greenberg, and he anticipates that his duties in both will continue to amplify each other.
“I’m honored to have the privilege of serving as a squadron commander,” Lin-Greenberg, who is the founding co-director of the SSP Wargaming Lab, says. “I’ve learned a lot about leadership as a professor, an airman, and as a reservist, and look forward to serving the airmen in my squadron.”
When Gediminas Urbonas, MIT-Eurasia faculty co-director, discusses MISTI Lithuania, it becomes clear that this is no conventional academic exchange. It is, in his words, a “transatlantic bridge” – one built on the foundations of artistic intelligence, cultural innovation, and a profound belief in the humanities as essential agents of technological transformation. In an expansive conversation with Marissa Friedman in June 2025, Urbonas traced the program’s trajectory, its richly interdisciplinary fabric, and its bold vision for the future.
The origins of MISTI Lithuania trace back to the summer of 2022, mere months after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. It was then that Urbonas met with Elizabeth Wood, MIT-Eurasia faculty co-director, and Ekaterina Zabrovski, MIT-Eurasia managing director, to explore how MIT could foster transatlantic academic bridges with countries facing heightened geopolitical threats, particularly in the Baltic region. What began as a pilot exchange grew into a national consortium involving major universities and companies including Lithuanian Railways, Ignitis Group, and Novian Group. At the heart of this vision is scale. “What Lithuania can offer is a unique laboratory of manageable scale… to experiment with autonomous energy grids, climate resilience, cyber security, biotech and regional collaboration across the Baltic sea,” he explained.
Working closely with Gintaras Valinčius, the chairman of the Lithuanian Research Council, as well as with the Global Lithuanian Leaders network (GLL), the team assembled a powerful coalition of universities, public institutions, private companies, and startups. Among others this included the National Gallery of Art, which hosted MIT student interns in Lithuania during the summers of 2023 and 2024.
“No cash prizes. But our friends in Kyiv are calling in, and they’ll probably say thanks,” was the the tagline that drew students and tech professionals to join MIT-Ukraine’s first-ever hackathon this past January.
The hackathon was co-sponsored by MIT-Ukraine and Mission Innovation X and was shaped by the efforts of MIT alumni from across the world. It was led by Hosea Siu ’14, SM ’15, PhD ’18, a seasoned hackathon organizer and AI researcher, in collaboration with Phil Tinn MCP ’16, a research engineer now based at SINTEF [Foundation for Industrial and Technical Research] in Norway. The program was designed to prioritize tangible impact.
“In a typical hackathon, you might get a weekend of sleepless nights and some flashy but mostly useless prototypes. Here, we stretched it out over four weeks, and we’re expecting real, meaningful outcomes,” says Siu, the hackathon director.
Unlike most hackathons, where projects end when the event does, MIT-Ukraine’s goal is to ensure these ideas don’t stop here. All the projects developed during the hackathon will be considered as potential avenues for MIT’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) and MISTI Ukraine summer internship programs. Last year, 15 students worked on UROP and MISTI projects for Ukraine, contributing in areas such as STEM education and reconstruction in Ukraine. With the many ideas generated during the hackathon, MIT-Ukraine is committed to expanding opportunities for student-led projects and collaborations in the coming year.
"The MIT-Ukraine program is about learning by doing, and making an impact beyond MIT’s campus. This hackathon proved that students, researchers, and professionals can work together to develop solutions that matter—and Ukraine’s urgent challenges demand nothing less," says Elizabeth Wood, faculty director of the MIT-Ukraine program.
In 1867, five Japanese students took a long sea voyage to Massachusetts for some advanced schooling. The group included a 13-year-old named Eiichirō Honma, who was from one of the samurai families that ruled Japan. Honma expected to become a samurai warrior himself, and enrolled in a military academy in Worcester.
And then some unexpected things happened.
Japan’s ruling dynasty, the shogunate that had run the country since the 17th century, lost power. No longer obligated to become a warrior, Honma found himself free to try other things in life. In 1870, he enrolled in the recently opened Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he studied civil engineering. By 1874, Honma had become MIT’s first graduate from Japan.
“Honma may have thought he was going to be a military officer, but by the time he got to MIT he wanted to do something else,” says Hiromu Nagahara, an associate professor of history at MIT. “And that something else was the hottest technology of its time: railroads.” Indeed, Honma returned to Japan and became a celebrated engineer of rail lines, including one through the mountainous Usai Pass in central Japan.
Now, 150 years after he graduated, Honma was a central part of an exhibit about MIT’s earliest Japanese students, “From Samurai into Engineers,” which ran through Dec. 19 at Hayden Library.
Others on campus significantly collaborated on the project from its inception. Christine Pilcavage, managing director of the MIT-Japan Program, helped encourage the development of the effort, having held an ongoing interest in the subject.
“I’m in awe of this relationship that we’ve had since the first Japanese students were at MIT,” Pilcavage says. “We’ve had this long connection. It shows that MIT as an Institute is always innovating. Each side had much to gain, from Honma coming to MIT, learning technology, and returning to Japan, while also mentoring other students ... ”
