MIT Better World
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L. Rafael Reif is the 17th president of MIT. During his tenure, he has fostered the growth of MIT’s nonprofit online platform, edX, and helped MIT pioneer the role that online learning and credentials will play in the future of higher education. Reif created the MIT Innovation Initiative; established the Environmental Solutions Initiative, the Abdul Latif Jameel World Education Laboratory, and the Abdul Latif Jameel World Water and Food Systems Lab; issued the MIT Plan for Action on Climate Change; and launched The Engine, a specialized “tough tech” accelerator. Other key priorities for Reif include the Kendall Square Initiative, an ambitious redevelopment plan powered by MIT, the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, the MIT Quest for Intelligence, and the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing, the most significant reshaping of MIT since the 1950s. A faculty member since 1980, Reif also serves as a freshman advisor and is a passionate advocate for students. Born in Venezuela, he holds a PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford and is an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering. He received honorary doctoral degrees from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Tsinghua University.

Featured Speaker

Lilly Kam ’04 is senior product manager at i.am+, a technology company founded by musician will.i.am that creates innovative wearable devices powered by artificial intelligence. She serves as advisor to the i.am.angel Foundation, a nonprofit that brings high-impact STEAM education programs to students in underserved communities. She also cofounded Hack for L.A., an organization that brings the Los Angeles tech community together with city government to solve civic problems through open data and app development. Kam is a former vice president of the MIT Club of Beijing, and she received MIT’s Great Dome Award. She earned an SB in management and an SB in comparative media studies from MIT.

Featured Speaker

Samuel Ngai SM ’02, PhD ’05 is CEO and cofounder of Dax Biosciences. Ngai is an inventor, an entrepreneur, and an angel investor. He previously held roles as the Asia Pacific Head of Corporate Development at Thermo Fisher Scientific and as a VC investment professional at KT Venture Group, LLC. While studying for his BS in chemical engineering at the University of California at Berkeley, Ngai worked in research and development at the University of California San Francisco Mount Zion Medical Center and, later, in strategy consulting at the Mitchell Madison Group and ZS Associates. Ngai received an SM and PhD from MIT, also in chemical engineering, where he was awarded the Patrick J. McGovern Jr. Award for his contribution to entrepreneurship. He is the president and the past director of the MIT Club of Shanghai and a Club Councils member.

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Elaine Wong ’97 is cofounder and partner of HAO Capital, a China-focused growth equity fund with more than $700 million of assets under management and has more than 20 years of private equity experience in the United States and Asia. An active member of her community, she is currently an MIT Alumni Association Selection Committee member. Wong previously served on the MIT Alumni Association Board of Directors. She is chairman of the board for the MIT Club of Beijing and also served as president. She received MIT’s Great Dome Award. She was selected by the Asia Society as one of Asia 21’s Young Leaders. Wong earned an SB in chemical engineering from MIT and an MBA from Stanford University. 

Featured Speaker

Gang Chen is the Carl Richard Soderberg Professor of Power Engineering and the director of the MIT Pappalardo Micro/Nano Engineering Laboratory. Chen’s research interests center on nanoscale thermal transport and energy conversion phenomena and their applications in energy storage and conversion, thermal management, and water treatment and desalination. He has made important contributions to the understanding of heat transfer in nanostructures and exploited them to develop energy conversion, storage, and water technologies.

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Robert Desimone is the director of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT and the Doris and Don Berkey Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. Desimone studies the brain mechanisms that allow people to focus their attention on a specific task while filtering out irrelevant distractions. This critical skill is often impaired in those with brain diseases such as attention deficit disorder, Parkinson’s disease, and schizophrenia.

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Joichi “Joi” Ito is the director of the MIT Media Lab and professor of the practice, Media Arts and Sciences. Ito focuses on the ethics and governance of technology and tackling complex problems such as climate change and redesigning the systems that support scholarship and science. He supports researchers at the MIT Media Lab to deploy design, the sciences, and technology such as AI, blockchain, and synthetic biology, to transform society in substantial and positive ways. Currently a visiting professor of law from practice at the Harvard Law School, he has helped found a number of internet startups. Ito serves on the boards of PureTech Health, the New York Times Company, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Knight Foundation.

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Dina Katabi SM ’99, PhD ’03 is the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences; the director of Networks@MIT, CSAIL; and also the director of the MIT Center for Wireless Networks and Mobile Computing. Katabi’s research interests are in computer networks and data communication. They encompass congestion control, network measurements, scalability and robustness of communication systems, differentiated services, internet pricing, routing, content distribution, peer-to-peer systems, self-configurable and wireless networks, and network security. She maintains a particular interest in adapting tools from various fields of applied mathematics such as control theory, coding theory, and AI to solve problems in computer networks.

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Retsef Levi is the J. Spencer Standish (1945) Professor of Operations Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, the faculty co-director of MIT Leaders for Global Operations, and the faculty co-director of the MIT Sloan Initiative for Health Systems Innovation. Levi’s current research is focused on the design of analytical data-driven decision support models and tools addressing complex business and system design decisions under uncertainty in areas such as health and health care management, supply chain, food safety and security, risk management, procurement and inventory management, revenue management, pricing optimization, and logistics. He currently leads a collaborative, multiyear US-China effort to develop new predictive risk analytics tools and testing technologies and platforms to address core food safety challenges in China.

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Nergis Mavalvala PhD ’97 is the Curtis and Kathleen Marble Professor of Astrophysics and the associate head of the Department of Physics. Mavalvala, who was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2010, is a physicist whose research focuses on the detection of gravitational waves and quantum measurement science. She is a longtime member of the scientific team that announced in 2016 the first direct detection of gravitational waves from colliding black holes by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory.

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Robert C. Merton PhD ’70 is the School of Management Distinguished Professor of Finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Merton’s research focuses on finance theory, including lifecycle and retirement finance, optimal portfolio selection, capital asset pricing, pricing of derivative securities, credit risk, loan guarantees, financial innovation, the dynamics of institutional change, and improving the methods of measuring and managing macro-financial systemic risk. Merton received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for a new method to determine the value of derivatives in 1997.

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Melissa Nobles is the Kenan Sahin Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences and a professor of political science. Nobles has focused on the comparative study of racial and ethnic politics and issues of retrospective justice in her research and teaching. Her current research centers on constructing a database of racial killings in the American South from 1930 to 1954. Working closely as a faculty collaborator and advisory board member of Northeastern Law School’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice law clinic, Nobles has conducted extensive archival research, unearthing understudied and, more often, unknown deaths, and contributing to legal investigations.

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Sanjay Sarma is the Vice President for Open Learning and the Fred Fort Flowers and Daniel Fort Flowers Professor of Mechanical Engineering. Sarma’s research focuses on sensors, the Internet of Things, cybersecurity, and radiofrequency identification (RFID). A cofounder of the Auto-ID Center at MIT, he developed many of the key technologies behind the electronic product code suite of RFID standards now used worldwide. From 2010 to 2012, Sarma led MIT’s collaboration to establish the Singapore University of Technology and Design. Since 2012, he has led the Open Learning Initiative, which has pioneered a number of new learning efforts, including the MicroMasters, the Abdul Latif Jameel World Education Lab, and the MIT Integrated Learning Initiative.

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Siqi Zheng is the Samuel Tak Lee Associate Professor and faculty director of the China Future City Lab. Zheng’s field of specialization is in urban and environmental economics, urban development, and the real estate market, with a special focus on China. She is the current president of the Asian Real Estate Society. Zheng’s research projects have been conducted under the auspices of the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, China’s Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, and the National Statistics Bureau of China, among others.

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Maria Zuber is the Vice President for Research and the E. A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics. Zuber is responsible for research administration and policy across MIT. She oversees the MIT Lincoln Laboratory and more than a dozen interdisciplinary research laboratories and centers, including the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, MIT Energy Initiative, MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative, Plasma Science and Fusion Center, Research Laboratory of Electronics, Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, and Haystack Observatory. She is also responsible for intellectual property and research integrity and compliance, as well as research relationships with the federal government. Zuber was the first woman to lead a science department at MIT and the first to lead a NASA planetary mission.

Faculty Host at Reception Following Program