The MAD fellowship provides freedom for graduate students
to explore in their areas of passion
and to bring their design skills to the world's problems.
I really want to help address one of the pressing
issues that our generation is facing,
which is climate change.
The crisis of biodiversity is also
a crisis of ethnodiversity.
We need radically different ways of consuming, producing,
and restoring.
I believe that design is able to expand the way that we approach
not just our industries and the impacts that we have
on the world physically, but literally
our relationships to each other, our relationships
to the ecosystem, our relationships
to the past and the cosmos, and everything beyond.
Every year, our MAD Fellows tackle a range
of challenging problems.
I study floodplain agriculture.
My project has two objectives --
climate change resilience and food production.
I'm studying nature based solutions
for coastal adaptation, specifically how
different configurations of oyster reef restoration
strategies influence wave attenuation.
My current PhD project is on designing a new architecture
for a high pressure hydrogen storage
tank for CO2 mitigation.
Design has a deep, deep history at MIT,
as a way of translating technology and creativity
into the world.
The project that I'm working on is the connection
between how students learn in a technical class
and how students apply that knowledge in a project
or in their career later on.
I like to say I'm kind of a musician
at heart, maybe a designer and an engineer at hand,
and a neuroscientist in mind.
I build instruments that are a combination
between a medical instrument and a musical instrument.
How might we use human centered design
to design last mile transportation delivery
networks that will really enable us to help communities
that need it the most?
I want to help astronauts be able to have
the tools that they need to solve a medical crisis when
a life could be at risk.
And I'm hoping to use automation to be that tool.
I'm a graduate architect by profession.
We have a lot of interesting tools coming out
in the generative AI space.
And we could leverage the power of these tools
to make architecture more accessible to a lot
of different people.
My current project is related to this idea
that we can actually control the behavior of a fabricated object
by modifying the distribution of material inside of that object.
And I'm so excited to learn from everyone
else, and different corners of design
that I haven't thought of.
One thing that I'm exploring is using
textiles and physical making techniques
in order to both reflect on and archive histories
within different diasporas.
I don't think a single person can accomplish the whole design
by himself or herself.
My approach to design, I sort like
to think of it as a multi-species approach, where
it's not just the people living on the coast.
But it's the oyster.
It's the larval fish.
It's the birds.
I generate conditions for two things that would never
get to speak in real life to meet and grow generatively.
I feel inspired seeing the amount of resources and support
that we get.
It really makes me feel hopeful for the world.
We continually come up with solutions
to overcome any hurdle that stands
in the way of better understanding
our world or the universe.
And the MAD Fellowship is really a gift.
It's a gift for students to be able to do their work,
without worrying about where their support will come from.
But it's also much more than a gift.
It's about building community around design.
It's about learning best practices,
sharing with each other, and ultimately elevating design
across MIT and around the world.