November 8, 2022 – MIT Healthcare Innovation Ecosystem
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New research collaboration aims to tackle global societal challenges through design

At a signing ceremony last week, leaders from the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, the MIT Morningside Academy for Design (MAD) and the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) announced the Hasso Plattner Institute-MIT Research Program on Designing for Sustainability. This research collaboration, funded by the Hasso Plattner Foundation, is an eight-year program to drive joint scientific research at both institutes in sustainable design, innovation, and digital technologies, as well as in translating research results into practice.

Through this engagement, MIT and HPI aim to tackle global challenges as expressed in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The program will connect faculty and students from both institutions, with the intention of having the most significant possible societal impact.

“We are very pleased to embark on this significant research initiative with the Hasso Plattner Institute,” says Hashim Sarkis, dean of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning. “Addressing the world’s large-scale societal challenges requires work across disciplines and institutions, and we welcome the opportunity to engage with this leading research center. We are grateful to the Hasso Plattner Foundation for making this collaboration possible.”

The MIT Morningside Academy for Design, a new Institute-wide hub for cross-disciplinary education, research, and innovation, will administer the collaboration and ensure the program’s reach across MIT. Faculty leaders at MAD and HPI will oversee the research funding application process as well as other activities of the program.

The Hasso Plattner Institute, based in Potsdam, Germany, is an international center for digital engineering, advancing research and education in IT systems engineering, data engineering, cyber security, entrepreneurship, and digital health.

The HPI School of Design Thinking is Europe’s first innovation school for university students. PhD candidates conduct research at the HPI Research Schools in Potsdam and its branches in Cape Town, Haifa, Irvine, and Nanjing.

“This cooperation brings new opportunities for research and our students,” says Christoph Meinel, professor and managing director at HPI, and head of the department of Internet Technologies and Systems. “It will give impulses to academia as well as into practice. At the same time, it will closely connect PhD students of both institutions through joint research in workshops and exchange programs.”

Program participants will conduct research in basic and applied design thinking and innovation. Design is understood broadly to include design research and thinking, as well as the use of creativity in addressing challenges in disciplines such as computer science and entrepreneurship, all with consideration of human and social impacts.

Funded researchers study the complex interaction between members of multidisciplinary teams challenged to deliver breakthrough product, service, and business-model sustainable design innovations. Applied design thinking research will focus primarily on topics from among the 17 SDGs, including health, education, energy, and climate action. Innovation research is targeted on the creation of high-impact products and startups (product and venture design) that translate research into practice.

“We are thrilled to collaborate with HPI to apply the power of design to sustainability and digital technologies,” says John Ochsendorf, the Class of 1942 Professor and a professor of architecture and of civil and environmental engineering at MIT, and director of the Morningside Academy. “By working together, the research talents of students and other researchers at HPI and MIT can accelerate design innovations for a low-carbon economy.”

“Alongside artificial intelligence, design research is a key driver for innovation in sustainability,” says Ralf Herbrich, professor and managing director of HPI. He also serves as head of the department of AI and Sustainability at HPI and a steering committee member. “Bringing talented PhD students of our two institutions together that are committed to the SDGs will foster breakthroughs in this societally very important area.”

The Hasso Plattner Foundation supports the research collaboration that is set up over eight years, with an interim evaluation after four years. The funded program will entail semi-annual research workshops, quarterly virtual seminars, and student exchanges between both institutes.

Urbanization: No fast lane to transformation

Accra, Ghana, “is a city I’ve come to know as well as any place in the U.S,” says Associate Professor Noah Nathan, who has conducted research there over the past 15 years. The booming capital of 4 million is an ideal laboratory for investigating the rapid urbanization of nations in Africa and beyond, believes Nathan, who joined the MIT Department of Political Science in July.

“Accra is vibrant and exciting, with gleaming glass office buildings, shopping centers, and an emerging middle class,” he says. “But at the same time there is enormous poverty, with slums and a mixing pot of ethnic groups.” Cities like Accra that have emerged in developing countries around the world are “hybrid spaces” that provoke a multitude of questions for Nathan.

“Rich and poor are in incredibly close proximity and I want to know how this dramatic inequality can be sustainable, and what politics looks like with such ethnic and class diversity living side-by-side,” he says.

With his singular approach to data collection and deep understanding of Accra, its neighborhoods, and increasingly, its built environment, Nathan is generating a body of scholarship on the political impacts of urbanization throughout the global South.

A trap in the urban transition

Nathan’s early studies of Accra challenged common expectations about how urbanization shifts political behavior.

“Modernization theory states that as people become more ‘modern’ and move to cities, ethnicity fades and class becomes the dominant dynamic in political behavior,” explains Nathan. “It predicts that the process of urbanization transforms the relationship between politicians and voters, and elections become more ideologically and policy oriented,” says Nathan.

But in Accra, the heart of one of the fastest-growing economies in the developing world, Nathan found “a type of politics stuck in an old equilibrium, hard to dislodge, and not updated by newly wealthy voters,” he says. Using census data revealing the demographic composition of every neighborhood in Accra, Nathan determined that there were many enclaves in which forms of patronage politics and ethnic competition persist. He conducted sample surveys and collected polling-station level results on residents’ voting across the city. “I was able to merge spatial data on where people lived and their answers to survey questions, and determine how different neighborhoods voted,” says Nathan.

Among his findings: Ethnic politics were thriving in many parts of Accra, and many middle-class voters were withdrawing from politics entirely in reaction to the well-established practice of patronage rather than pressuring politicians to change their approach. “They decided it was better to look out for themselves,” he explains.

In Nathan’s 2019 book, “Electoral Politics and Africa’s Urban Transition: Class and Ethnicity in Ghana,” he described this situation as a trap. “As the wealthy exit from the state, politicians double down on patronage politics with poor voters, which the middle class views as further evidence of corruption,” he explains. The wealthier citizens “want more public goods, and big policy reforms, such as changes in the health-care and tax systems, while poor voters focus on immediate needs such as jobs, homes, better schools in their communities.”

In Ghana and other developing countries where the state’s capacity is limited, politicians can’t deliver on the broad-scale changes desired by the middle class. Motivated by their own political survival, they continue dealing with poor voters as clients, trading services for votes. “I connect urban politics in Ghana to the early 20th-century urban machines in the United States, run by party bosses,” says Nathan.

This may prove sobering news for many engaged with the developing world. “There’s enormous enthusiasm among foreign aid organizations, in the popular press and policy circles, for the idea that urbanization will usher in big, radical political change,” notes Nathan. “But these kinds of transformations will only come about with structural change such as civil service reforms and nonpartisan welfare programs that can push politicians beyond just delivering targeted services to poor voters.”

Falling in love with Ghana

For most of his youth, Nathan was a committed jazz saxophonist, toying with going professional. But he had long cultivated another fascination as well. “I was a huge fan of ‘The West Wing’ in middle school” and got into American politics through that,” he says. He volunteered in Hillary Clinton’s 2008 primary campaign during college, but soon realized work in politics was “both more boring and not as idealistic” as he’d hoped.

As an undergraduate at Harvard University, where he concentrated in government, he “signed up for African history on a lark — because American high schools didn’t teach anything on the subject — and I loved it,” Nathan says. He took another African history course, and then found his way to classes taught by Harvard political scientist Robert H. Bates PhD ’69 that focused on the political economy of development, ethnic conflict, and state failure in Africa. In the summer before his senior year, he served as a research assistant for one of his professors in Ghana, and then stayed longer, hoping to map out a senior thesis on ethnic conflict.

“Once I got to Ghana, I was fascinated by the place — the dynamism of this rapidly transforming society,” he recalls. “Growing up in the U.S., there are a lot of stereotypes about the developing world, and I quickly realized how much more complicated everything is.”

These initial experiences living in Ghana shaped Nathan’s ideas for what became his doctoral dissertation at Harvard and first book on the ethnic and class dynamics driving the nation’s politics. His frequent return visits to that country sparked a wealth of research that built on and branched out from this work.

One set of studies examines the historical development of Ghana’s rural north in its colonial and post-colonial periods, the center of ethnic conflict in the 1990s. These are communities “where the state delivers few resources, doesn’t seem to do much, yet figures as a central actor in people’s lives,” he says.

Part of this region had been a German colony, and the other part was originally under British rule, and Nathan compared the political trajectories of these two areas, focusing on differences in early state efforts to impose new forms of local political leadership and gradually build a formal education system.

“The colonial legacy in the British areas was elite families who came to dominate, entrenching themselves and creating political dynasties and economic inequality,” says Nathan. But similar ethnic groups exposed to different state policies in the original German colony were not riven with the same class inequalities, and enjoy better access to government services today. “This research is changing how we think about state weakness in the developing world, how we tend to see the emergence of inequality where societal elites come into power,” he says. The results of Nathan’s research will be published in a forthcoming book, “The Scarce State: Inequality and Political Power in the Hinterland.”

Politics of built spaces

At MIT, Nathan is pivoting to a fresh new framing for questions on urbanization. Wielding a public source map of cities around the world, he is scrutinizing the geometry of street grids in 1,000 of sub-Saharan Africa’s largest cities “to think about urban order,” he says. Digitizing historical street maps of African cities from the Library of Congress’s map collection, he can look at how these cities were built and evolved physically. “When cities emerge based on grids, rather than tangles, they are more legible to governments,” he says. “This means that it’s easier to find people, easier to govern, tax, repress, and politically mobilize them.”

Nathan has begun to demonstrate that in the post-colonial period, “cities that were built under authoritarian regimes tend to be most legible, with even low-capacity regimes trying to impose control and make them gridded.” Democratic governments, he says, “lead to more tangled and chaotic built environments, with people doing what they want.” He also draws comparisons to how state policies shaped urban growth in the United States, with local and federal governments exerting control over neighborhood development, leading to redlining and segregation in many cities.

Nathan’s interests naturally pull him toward the MIT Governance Lab and Global Diversity Lab. “I’m hoping to dive into both,” he says. “One big attraction of the department is the really interesting research that’s being done on developing countries.” He also plans to use the stature he has built over many years of research in Africa to help “open doors” to African researchers and students, who may not always get the same kind of access to institutions and data that he has had. “I’m hoping to build connections to researchers in the global South,” he says.

An easier way to remove medical devices

By taking advantage of a phenomenon that leads to fractures in metal, MIT researchers have designed medical devices that could be used inside the body as stents, staples, or drug depots, then safely broken down on demand when they’re no longer needed.

The researchers showed that biomedical devices made from aluminum can be disintegrated by exposing them to a liquid metal known as eutectic gallium-indium (EGaIn). In practice, this might work by painting the liquid onto staples used to hold skin together, for example, or by administering EGaIn microparticles to patients.

Triggering the disintegration of such devices this way could eliminate the need for surgical or endoscopic procedures to remove them, the researchers say.

“It’s a really dramatic phenomenon that can be applied to several settings,” says Giovanni Traverso, the Karl van Tassel Career Development Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT and a gastroenterologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. “What this enables, potentially, is the ability to have systems that don’t require an intervention such as an endoscopy or surgical procedure for removal of devices.”

Traverso is the senior author of the study, which appears in Advanced Materials. Vivian Feig, an MIT postdoc, is the lead author of the paper.

Breaking down metals

For several years, Traverso’s lab has been working on ingestible devices that could remain in the digestive tract for days or weeks, releasing drugs on a specific schedule.

Most of those devices are made from polymers, but recently the researchers have been exploring the possibility of using metals, which are stronger and more durable. However, one of the challenges of delivering metal devices is finding a way to remove them once they’re no longer needed.

To create devices that could be broken down on demand inside the body, the MIT team drew inspiration from a phenomenon known as liquid metal embrittlement. This process has been well-studied as a source of failure in metal structures, including those made from zinc and stainless steel.

“It’s known that certain combinations of liquid metals can actually get into the grain boundaries of solid metals and cause them to dramatically weaken and fail,” Feig says. “We wanted to see if we could harness that known failure mechanism in a productive way to build these biomedical devices.”

One type of liquid metal that can induce embrittlement is gallium. For this study, the researchers used eutectic gallium-indium, an alloy of gallium that scientists have explored for a variety of applications in biomedicine as well as energy and flexible electronics.

For the devices themselves, the researchers chose to use aluminum, which is known to be susceptible to embrittlement when exposed to gallium.

Gallium weakens solid metals such as aluminum in two ways. First, it can diffuse through the grain boundaries of the metal — border lines between the crystals that make up the metal — causing pieces of the metal to break off. The MIT team showed that they could harness this phenomenon by designing metals with different types of grain structures, allowing the metals to break into small pieces or to fracture at a given point.

Gallium also prevents aluminum from forming a protective oxide layer on its surface, which increases the metal’s exposure to water and enhances its degradation.

The MIT team showed that after they painted gallium-indium onto aluminum devices, the metals would disintegrate within minutes. The researchers also created nanoparticles and microparticles of gallium-indium and showed that these particles, suspended in fluid, could also break down aluminum structures.

On-demand disintegration

While the researchers began this effort as a way to create devices that could be broken down in the gastrointestinal tract, they soon realized that it could also be applied to other biomedical devices such as staples and stents.

To demonstrate GI applications, the researchers designed a star-shaped device, with arms attached to a central elastomer by a hollow aluminum tube. Drugs can be carried in the arms, and the shape of the device helps it be retained in the GI tract for an extended period of time. In a study in animals, the researchers showed that this kind of device could be broken down in the GI tract upon treatment with gallium-indium.

The researchers then created aluminum staples and showed that they could be used to hold tissue together, then dissolved with a coating of gallium-indium.

“Right now, removing the staples can actually induce more tissue damage,” Feig says. “We showed that with our gallium formulation we can just paint it on the staples and get them to disintegrate on-demand instead.”

The researchers also showed that an aluminum stent they designed could be implanted in esophageal tissue, then broken down by gallium-indium.

Currently, esophageal stents are either left in the body permanently or endoscopically removed when no longer needed. Such stents are often made from metals such as nitinol, an alloy of nickel and titanium. The researchers are now working to see if they could create dissolvable devices from nitinol and other metals.

“An exciting thing to explore from a materials science perspective is: Can we take other metals that are more commonly used in the clinic and modify them so that they can become actively triggerable as well?” Feig says.

In this study, the researchers conducted initial toxicity studies in rodents and found that gallium-indium was non-toxic even at high doses. However, more study would be needed to ensure it would be safe to administer to patients, the researchers say.

The research was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, the Brigham and Women’s Hospital Division of Gastroenterology, the Schmidt Science Fellows Program, and the Rhodes Trust.

Other authors of the paper include Eva Remlova, Benjamin Muller, Johannes Kuosmanen, Nikhil Lal, Anna Ginzburg, Kewang Nan, Ashka Patel, Ahmad Mujtaba Jebran, Meghana Bantwal, Niora Fabian, Keiko Ishida, Joshua Jenkins, Jan-Georg Rosenboom, Sanghyun Park, Weema Madani, and Alison Hayward.