Dear MIT alumni and friends, 

This past year, among a host of other honors, MIT faculty members were awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry and all three of the Kavli Prizes—in neuroscience, nanoscience and astrophysics. That’s not quite “routine” for the Institute but we all know it’s not that unusual, and it’s a mark of the breadth of field-defining excellence the world expects from MIT. From students to faculty to staff, there’s an intensity here, an appetite for the hardest, most important problems, and an instinct to turn new findings and ideas into value for the world.

To make the most of our great shared strengths, at my inauguration I invited the entire MIT community to join in tackling urgent societal challenges where our collective effort could make a consequential difference, from climate change to AI to human health.

With your support, the Institute is positioned to make an enormous positive impact in these areas and beyond.

Since the late 1970s, MIT researchers have made pioneering contributions in fields related to climate change, from climate modeling to solar energy to nuclear fusion. But the current moment demands a different order of ambition, focus, scale and collective impact. And that’s what we aim to deliver with the Climate Project at MIT.

Launched in February, the Climate Project is a new strategy for accelerated innovation that will focus our community’s talent and resources on solving very large, critical climate problems with all possible speed. Our central focus will be six “Climate Missions.” Each of these cross-disciplinary, problem-solving communities will focus on a strategic area of the climate challenge, from decarbonizing energy and industry, to designing more resilient cities, to devising effective new policies. We even have a mission dedicated to “Wild Cards”—the big solutions we can’t yet imagine.

Given the scale of our climate ambitions, we will need partnership and support from every quarter—from industry, from government and certainly from our dedicated alumni and friends. Your contributions will give us the flexibility to swiftly develop and deliver technological, behavioral and policy solutions to the world in time to make a difference—and to take advantage of those wild cards when they turn up.

Artificial intelligence is another field where wild cards may emerge, and people are looking to MIT to make sense of it all. How can we be sure that the array of rapidly evolving AI tools will be broadly beneficial, and how can we act to mitigate harm? How can business, government and communities adapt and prepare? This year, we invited our faculty to share their best ideas for effective roadmaps, policy recommendations and calls for action across the broad domain of generative AI. And they offered so many intriguing ideas that we asked for a second round of concepts, ultimately supporting the development of 43 papers.

As with our climate efforts, MIT’s AI research is cross-disciplinary and collaborative, bringing together faculty from across the Institute. For instance, faculty from urban studies and planning, electrical engineering and computer science, and Science, Technology and Society together developed a paper on AI for civic engagement—what they call “People Powered Gen AI.” While a team with expertise in management, computer science, and public policy explored how generative AI could improve the US healthcare system, another group brought together leading thinkers in computer science, media studies, and education to investigate the use of gen AI in schools.

Society is looking to MIT for leadership in answering key questions about the future of AI; an online collection of these impact papers has already attracted more than 100,000 viewers. And we intend to bring this same kind of more-than-the-sum-of-our-parts thinking to a range of other areas, from the intersection of life sciences and human health, to quantum, to advanced manufacturing. Stay tuned!

Like generations of MIT graduates before them, today’s MIT students are driven to make a difference in these areas and more. When you make an unrestricted gift, you ensure that MIT can rise to meet the challenges before us and excel.

You also help ensure that we’re able to make good on our promise to students. Thanks in large part to unrestricted giving, MIT stands as one of only eight US colleges that are able to practice need-blind admissions and cover the demonstrated need of all undergraduates. This strength in turn sustains our ability, year after year, to build a class of extraordinary students from the widest range of backgrounds. And while they excel academically, they tell us that they learn just as much from each other; they deeply value the connections they make with each other and the collaborations they engage in every day, inside and outside the classroom.

Your support allows us to create the best possible environment for our students to master our legendary curriculum and to develop their ability and passion to work wisely, creatively, effectively—and we might add, entrepreneurially—for the betterment of humankind.

American universities have been in the news a lot lately, in ways that can tend to obscure their central mission and the value they bring to the world. But you can have every confidence that, while we face these broader challenges, MIT continues to push the boundaries of discovery, learning, invention and design—and to seek solutions that will improve people’s lives, their prosperity, their health and the health of our planet. We’re responding to the needs of a world that is hungry for technical, scientific and policy solutions to global challenges—solutions that can only emerge from a bedrock commitment to rigorous education, innovation and research.

I am deeply grateful for your confidence in MIT and for your support of our great enduring mission to bring knowledge to bear on the world’s most urgent challenges.

Sincerely,

Sally Kornbluth

 

P.S. Annual support from alumni and friends of the Institute, like you, reflects your own commitment to invest in a brighter future. Your gift brings together talented people from all over the world to solve problems and meet the great challenges before us. I hope we can count on your support this year to continue to help build foundations for our students, faculty, and staff so that they can create a better world for us all.