Meet MIT’s newest astronaut candidates: Marcos Berríos ’06, Christina Birch PhD ’15, and Christopher Williams PhD ’12 are among 10 new candidates selected from around the nation out of more than 12,000 applicants.

Writing in The Hill, four MIT researchers explore how to maximize the impact of the infrastructure spending bill. “New findings have given us the opportunity — and the mandate — to spend more boldly and intelligently than ever before,” they wrote.

A longtime maker and builder, PhD student Lucy Du is designing a prosthetic ankle that is readily accessible to people of all sizes. She also works to make engineering more accessible to others, from starting a student makerspace to teaching high school girls.

Undergraduates George Bian, Juliana Drozd, and Cami Mejia offer a look at what it’s like to live and learn at MIT in 2021. “I love being on campus at MIT,” says Mejia, who “missed it dearly” when access to campus was limited due to Covid-19. 

Helping people understand and track their health, alumnus-founded Fitnescity lets users schedule health tests, work with physicians, and interpret results. “We’re making navigating personal health a lot easier,” says co-founder Laila Zemrani MBA ’13.

Senior Shardul Chiplunkar’s academic focus is on the interface of people and programming. But his varied extracurriculars — from spinning fire to building firewalls — fed a secondary goal, to serve as a translator between the tech world and society.