A new crop of awards

Three members of the MIT assemblage person been honored with immoderate of the world’s biggest awards.

In October, Ben S. Bernanke, PhD ’79, shared the Nobel Prize successful economics with Douglas W. Diamond and Philip H. Dybvig. Bernanke, who chaired the Federal Reserve from 2006 to 2014, was honored for his enactment showing however slope runs exacerbated the Great Depression. After galore banks collapsed, the Nobel citation states, “valuable accusation astir borrowers was mislaid and could not beryllium recreated quickly. Society’s quality to transmission savings to productive investments was frankincense severely diminished.”

In September, chemistry prof Danna Freedman and Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Scholar Moriba Jah received MacArthur Fellowships, often referred to arsenic “genius grants.” 

JON FRIEDMAN/FEDERAL RESERVE (BERNACKE), JOHN D. AND CATHERINE T. MACARTHUR FOUNDATION (FREEDMAN, JAH)

Freedman, a erstwhile MIT postdoc who joined the module successful 2021, designs molecules that tin relation arsenic quantum units, oregon qubits. One absorption she hopes to prosecute with her $800,000 assistance is moving with scientists from fields specified arsenic neurobiology oregon Earth sciences connected quantum sensors, successful which immoderate particles are successful specified a delicately balanced authorities that they are affected by minuscule variations successful their environment.

Jah, an subordinate prof of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics astatine the University of Texas astatine Austin, is moving connected a associated probe programme to summation resources and visibility for abstraction sustainability. He is besides helping to big the AeroAstro Rising Stars symposium, which highlights academics from backgrounds underrepresented successful aerospace engineering.