Courtney Lesoon and Elizabeth Yarina win Fulbright-Hays Scholarships
Two MIT doctoral students in the MIT School of Architecture and Planning have received the prestigious Fulbright-Hays Scholarship for Doctoral Dissertation Research Award. Courtney Lesoon and Elizabeth “Lizzie” Yarina are the first awardees from MIT in more than a decade.
The fellowship provides opportunities for doctoral students to engage in full-time dissertation research abroad. The program, funded by the U.S. Department of Education, is designed to contribute to the development and improvement of the study of modern foreign languages and area studies. Applicants anticipate pursuing a teaching career in the United States following completion of their dissertation. There were 138 individuals from 47 institutions named scholars for the 2021 cycle.
Courtney Lesoon
Lesoon is a doctoral candidate in the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture, in the History, Theory and Criticism Section of the Department of Architecture. Lesoon earned her BA from College of the Holy Cross and was a 2012-13 Fulbright U.S. Student grantee to the United Arab Emirates, where her research concerned contemporary art and emerging cultural institutions. Her dissertation is titled “Spatializing Ahl al-ʿIlm: Learning and the Rise of the Early Islamic City.” Losoon’s fieldwork will be done in Morocco, Egypt, and Turkey.
“Courtney’s project presents an innovative idea that has not, to my knowledge, been investigated before,” says Nasser Rabbat, professor and director of the MIT Aga Khan Program. “How did the emergence and evolution of a particularly Islamic learning system affect the development of the city in the early Islamic period? Her work enriches the thinking about premodern urbanism and education everywhere by theorizing the intricate relationship between traveling, learning, and the city.”
“I’ll be working in different manuscripts collections in Morocco, Egypt, and Turkey to investigate where and how scholars were learning inside of the early Islamic city before the formal institutionalization of higher education,” says Lesoon. “I’m interested in how learning — as a set of social practices — informed urban life. My project speaks to two different fields; Islamic urbanism and Islamic intellectual history. I’m really excited about my time on Fulbright-Hays; it will be a really fruitful time for my research and writing.”
Before arriving at MIT, Lesoon worked as a research assistant in the Art of the Middle East Department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Recently, she was awarded the 2021 Margaret B. Ševčenko Prize for “the best unpublished essay written by a junior scholar” for her paper “The Sphero-conical as Apothecary Vessel: An Argument for Dedicated Use.” Lesoon earned her MA from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where her thesis investigated an 18th-century “Damascus Room” and its acquisition as a collected interior in the United States.
Lizzie Yarina
Yarina is a doctoral candidate in the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) and a research fellow at the MIT Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism. She is presently co-editing a volume on the relationship between climate models and the built environment with a multidisciplinary team of editors and contributors. Yarina was a research scientist at the MIT Urban Risk Lab, where she was part of a team examining alternatives to the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s post-disaster housing systems; she also conducted research on disaster preparedness in Japan. Her award supports her doctoral research under the title “Modeling the Mekong: Climate Adaptation Imaginaries in Delta Regions,” which will include fieldwork in Vietnam, the Netherlands, Thailand, and Cambodia.
“Lizzie’s research brings together three dimensions critical to global well-being and sustainability: adapting to the inevitability of changing ecosystems wrought by the climate crisis; questioning the equity, appropriateness, and relationality of adaptation planning models spanning the global North and the global South; and understanding how to develop durable and just climate futures,” says Christopher Zegras, professor of mobility and urban planning and department head for DUSP. “Her work will be an important contribution toward the long-term health of our planet and of communities working to justly adapt to climate change.”
Previously, Yarina was awarded a U.S. Scholarship Fulbright to New Zealand to research spatial mapping and policy implications of Pacific Islander migration to New Zealand.
“My dissertation project looks at climate adaptation planning in delta regions,” she says. “My focus is on Vietnam’s Mekong River Delta, but I’m also looking at how models that are used in delta adaptation planning move between different deltas, including the Netherlands Rhine Delta and the Mississippi Delta.”
Working on her masters at MIT, Yarina had a teaching fellowship in Singapore, where she conducted research on climate adaptation plans in four major cities in Southeast Asia.
“Through that process I learned about the role of Dutch experts and Dutch models in shaping how climate adaptation planning was taking place in Southeast Asia,” she says. “This project expands on that work from looking at a single city to examining a regional plan at the scale of a delta.”
Yarina holds a joint masters in architecture and masters of city planning from MIT, and a BS in architecture from the University of Michigan.
In Down syndrome cells, genome-wide disruptions mimic a senescence-like state
In Down syndrome, the third copy of chromosome 21 causes a reorganization of the 3D configuration of the entire genome in a key cell type of the developing brain, a new study shows. The resulting disruption of gene transcription and cell function are so similar to those seen in cellular aging, or senescence, that the scientists leading the study found they could use anti-senescence drugs to correct them in cell cultures.
The study published in Cell Stem Cell therefore establishes senescence as a potentially targetable mechanism for future treatment of Down syndrome, says Hiruy Meharena, who led the work as a Senior Alana Fellow in the Alana Down Syndrome Center at MIT and is now an assistant professor at the University of California at San Diego.
“There is a cell-type-specific genome-wide disruption that is independent of the gene dosage response,” Meharena says. “It’s a very similar phenomenon to what’s observed in senescence. This suggests that excessive senescence in the developing brain induced by the third copy of chromosome 21 could be a key reason for the neurodevelopmental abnormalities seen in Down syndrome.”
The study’s finding that neural progenitor cells (NPCs), which develop into major cells in the brain including neurons, have a senescent character is remarkable and novel, says senior author Li-Huei Tsai, but it is substantiated by the team’s extensive work to elucidate the underlying mechanism of the effects of abnormal chromosome number, or aneupoloidy, within the nucleus of the cells.
“This study illustrates the importance of asking fundamental questions about the underlying mechanisms of neurological disorders,” says Tsai, Picower Professor of Neuroscience, director of the Alana Center, and of the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT. “We didn’t begin this work expecting to see senescence as a translationally relevant feature of Down syndrome, but the data emerged from asking how the presence of an extra chromosome affects the architecture of all of a cell’s chromosomes during development.”
Genome-wide changes
Meharena and co-authors spent years measuring distinctions between human cell cultures that differed only by whether they had a third copy of chromosome 21. Stem cells derived from volunteers were cultured to turn into NPCs. In both the stem cells and the NPCs, the team examined 3D chromosome architecture, several metrics of DNA structure and interaction, gene accessibility and transcription, and gene expression. They also looked at the consequences of the gene expression differences on important functions of these developmental cells, such as how well they proliferated and migrated in 3D brain tissue cultures. Stem cells were not particularly different, but NPCs were substantially affected by the third copy of chromosome 21.
Overall, the picture that emerged in NPCs was that the presence of a third copy causes all the other chromosomes to squish inward, not unlike when people in a crowded elevator must narrow their stance when one more person squeezes in. The main effects of this “chromosomal introversion,” meticulously quantified in the study, are more genetic interactions within each chromosome and fewer interactions among them. These changes and differences in DNA conformation within the cell nucleus lead to changes in how genes are transcribed and therefore expressed, causing important differences in cell function that affect brain development.
Treated as senescence
For the first couple of years as these data emerged, Meharena says, the full significance of the genomic changes were not apparent, but then he read a paper showing very similar genomic rearrangement and transcriptional alterations in senescent cells.
After validating that the Down syndrome cells indeed bore such a similar signature of transcriptional differences, the team decided to test whether anti-senecence drugs could undo the effects. They tested a combination of two: dasatinib and quercetin. The medications improved not only gene accessibility and transcription, but also the migration and proliferation of cells.
That said, the drugs have very significant side effects — dasatinib is only given to cancer patients when other treatments have not done enough — so they are not appropriate for attempting to intervene in brain development amid Down syndrome, Meharena says. Instead, an outcome of the study could be to inspire a search for medications that could have anti-senolytic effects with a safer profile.
Senescence is a stress response of cells. At the same time, years of research by the late MIT professor of biology Angelika Amon, who co-directed the Alana Center with Tsai, has shown that aneuploidy is a source of considerable stress for cells. A question raised by the new findings, therefore, is whether the senescence-like character of Down syndrome NPCs is indeed the result of an aneuploidy-induced stress and, if so, exactly what that stress is.
Another implication of the findings is how excessive senescence among brain cells might affect people with Down syndrome later in life. The risk of Alzheimer’s disease is much higher at a substantially earlier age in the Down syndrome population than among people in general. In large part this is believed to be because a key Alzheimer’s risk gene, APP, is on chromosome 21, but the newly identified inclination for senescence may also accelerate Alzheimer’s development.
In addition to Meharena and Tsai, the paper’s other authors are Asaf Marco, Vishnu Dileep, Elana Lockshin, Grace Akatsu, James Mullahoo, Ashley Watson, Tak Ko, Lindsey Guerin, Fatema Abdurrob, Shruti Rengarajan, Malvina Papanastasiou and Jacob Jaffe.
The Alana Foundation, the LuMind Foundation, Burroughs Wellcome Fund, UNCF-Merck, and the National Institutes of Health funded the research.
Method for delivering immune system-stimulating drugs may enhance cancer immunotherapy
Stimulating the body’s immune system to attack tumors is a promising way to treat cancer. Scientists are working on two complementary strategies to achieve that: taking off the brakes that tumors put on the immune system; and “stepping on the gas,” or delivering molecules that jumpstart immune cells.
However, when jumpstarting the immune system, researchers have to be careful not to overstimulate it, which can cause severe and potentially fatal side effects. A team of MIT researchers has now developed a new way to deliver a stimulatory molecule called IL-12 directly to tumors, avoiding the toxic effects that can occur when immunostimulatory drugs are given throughout the body.
In a study of mice, this new treatment eliminated many tumors when delivered along with an FDA-approved drug that takes the brakes off the immune system.
“Even beyond this particular case of IL-12, which we really hope will have some impact, it’s a strategy that you could apply to any of these immunostimulatory drugs,” says Darrell Irvine, who is the Underwood-Prescott Professor with appointments in MIT’s departments of Biological Engineering and Materials Science and Engineering; an associate director of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research; and a member of the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard.
The researchers have filed for patents on their strategy, and the technology has been licensed to a startup that hopes to begin clinical trials by the end of 2022.
Irvine and Dane Wittrup, the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering and Electrical Engineering and a member of the Koch Institute, are the senior authors of the study, which appears today in Nature Biomedical Engineering. MIT graduate student Yash Agarwal is the paper’s lead author.
Stepping on the gas
As tumors develop, they secrete molecules that disable nearby T cells and other immune cells, allowing the tumors to grow unchecked. Drugs known as checkpoint blockade inhibitors, which can take these brakes off the immune system, are now used to treat some types of cancer, but many other types are resistant to this kind of treatment.
Combining checkpoint inhibitors with drugs that stimulate the immune system could potentially make cancer immunotherapy work for more patients. Cytokines, which are immune chemicals naturally produced by the body, are one class of drugs that researchers have tried as a way to “step on the gas.” However, in clinical trials, these drugs have shown too many toxic side effects, ranging from flu-like symptoms to organ failure.
“If you soak the patient in cytokines, their whole body reacts and you get such a strong, toxic side effect that you can’t reach the levels you wish you could within the tumor and get the effects that you want,” Wittrup says.
To try to avoid those side effects, Wittrup and Irvine have been working on ways to deliver cytokines in a more targeted way. In a 2019 study, they showed that they could deliver the cytokines IL-12 and IL-2 directly to tumors by attaching the cytokines to a collagen-binding protein. This protein then sticks to collagen found in tumors, which usually have large amounts of collagen.
This strategy worked well in a study of mice, but the researchers wanted to find a way to make cytokines bind even more strongly to tumors. In their new study, they replaced the collagen-binding protein with aluminum hydroxide. This compound, also called alum, is often used as a vaccine adjuvant (a drug that helps boost the immune response to vaccination).
“One major advantage of alum is that the particles are on the micron size scale, so when you inject them in people or in mice, they stay wherever you inject them for weeks, going on to months sometimes,” Agarwal says.
Fighting tumors
To test the effectiveness of this treatment, the researchers gave mice one injection of IL-12 or IL-2 bound to alum particles, and treated the mice with a checkpoint blockade inhibitor called anti-PD1 every few days.
In mouse models of three types of cancer, the researchers found that the tumors were eliminated in 50 to 90 percent of the mice. In a model where breast cancer cells were transplanted into mice, and then metastasized to the lungs, one injection at the breast cancer site also cleared the metastatic tumors, even though IL-12 was not injected into the lungs.
Alum-IL-12 particles given without the checkpoint blockade inhibitors also showed some ability to stimulate the immune system to fight tumors.
Further studies showed that IL-12 stimulates the production of another cytokine called interferon gamma, and these two molecules work together to activate T cells as well as dendritic cells and macrophages. The treatment also stimulates memory T cells that may be able to respond to tumors that regrow.
The researchers also found that the treated mice did not show any of the side effects that are seen when IL-12 is given systemically. The startup company that has licensed the technology plans to first test IL-12-alum particles on their own, and if that treatment is shown to be safe, they hope to test Il-12 in combination with checkpoint blockade inhibitors.
The new approach of attaching molecules to alum could also be used to deliver other types of immunostimulatory drugs, the researchers say.
“This whole class of drugs that involves stepping on the gas has largely not succeeded yet. Our hope is that this opens the way to test any of those drugs,” Irvine says.
The research was funded in part by the Koch Institute’s Marble Center for Nanomedicine; the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard; and the Koch Institute Support (core) Grant from the National Cancer Institute.
WBUR
Nude trees, a pale sun, gelid wind and shoe trays overflowing with salty boots and squishy shoes. Winter has arrived.But don’t fret. Although winter can be a downer, there are still places to go and art to see. In 2022, even as omicron causes more closures and confusion, local museums are forging ahead with a roster of exhibits promising to scintillate and delight — or, at least, to get us out of the house if we dare to leave. From the work of Syrian American artist Mohamad Hafez who excavates the pain and trauma of the Syrian civil war through sculpture, to the work of Sharona Franklin who creates “bioshrines” incorporating medicinal plants and food items to elucidate her life as an artist grappling with chronic illness, there are lots of wonders afoot.Keep in mind that last-minute pandemic changes may cause some venues to close, depending on COVID developments. Check with each venue first before making a visit.Mohamad HafezUniversity Hall Gallery, UMass BostonThrough Feb. 4Syrian American artist Mohamad Hafez creates miniature sculptures of war-torn scenes from Syria using found objects, paint and scrap metal. His surreal streetscapes, which condense entire blocks down to just one or two feet, carry a big message: war brings ruin and destruction, but the human spirit persists.His 3D collages incorporate his wartime memories of Damascus — surveillance cameras, ivy, plush Victorian furnishings and trucks belonging to security forces. On his website, he writes about his 2018 series, “Damascene Athan,” “While flowers and jasmine ivy continued to peacefully grow on our architecture, so did fear and stress depicted in surveillance cameras. The contrast between what I recorded and what I witnessed reveals the complexity of what one experiences at the cusp of a vicious war in their homeland.”Hafez now works as an architect at the firm Pickard Chilton in New Haven, Connecticut. In this show, he presents not only his recent sculptures, but also paintings and some early work made long before the outbreak of the Syrian civil war. Although homesickness and nostalgia may motivate Hafez’s work, it is the loss and celebration of an ancient city that is the emotional heart of the show. Please note: this exhibit is open by appointment only to visitors who are not UMass Boston students, faculty or staff, so call ahead.Mohamad Hafez, “Damascus Memory,” 2005. (Courtesy UMass Boston)Jan. 15-June 5YoAhn Han, “In Search of Floral Bodies,” 2021. (Courtesy the artist and Chase Young Gallery)Boston-based Korean artist YoAhn Han creates arresting and vivid works centered around one of the most arresting and vivid forms nature offers: the flower. His work, he says on his website, is a “visual dialogue between suppression and desire,” which he says speaks to his experience of “cerebral arteriovenous malformation” and his “bifurcated cultural identity.”For this show, Han combines dyed synthetic papers that he traces, cuts and pastes into rich watercolor and gouache paintings finished with a coat of gloss varnish. The result is lush botanical forms that, while still abstract, recall the flowers Han remembers from his childhood in South Korea. The ethereal shapes and seductive colors suggest beauty, death, desire, transgression and being. They are also the perfect antidote to frozen and white winter days, consoling us with the thought that months full of color lie ahead.Jan. 29-May 15Sigmund Freud described psychoanalysis as “the talking cure.” Melissa Stern’s show takes its name from Freud’s famous phrase, inspired by New York neuroses and psychobabble. Using clay, Stern creates an imaginary cast of characters that are animated by a soundtrack depicting an inner monologue that could be happening within. Each monologue was written by 12 different writers and performed by 12 different actors. Stern herself is a journalist who is a contributing writer for the Brooklyn-based online arts magazine Hyperallergic, so it makes sense that her work is formed not of the material, but of the conceptual. Including the written, visual and spoken word, Stern’s exhibit is uniquely interactive, allowing viewers to hear other voices in their heads, besides just their own.Jan. 31-June 5Photographer Martin Parr has traveled the world examining themes around leisure, consumption and communication in work that is both artistic and anthropological. His photographs often juxtapose specific images with universal ones in a way that makes us ponder our globalized world and the distinct cultural and national characteristics that give us a connection to a particular time or place.In this exhibit of more than 135 works and an extensive selection of photobooks, Parr, a native of the U.K., presents photographs of Ireland. We see a rapidly changing country, glimpse changes in consumer habits, social class and even humor. The brightly saturated photographs are often heavily influenced by both commercial and documentary photography. The exhibit includes photos from several bodies of work created in Europe, North America, the Middle East, Africa and Asia, offering cultural critiques that are sometimes affectionate, sometimes ironic, sometimes bitter, and sometimes all these things at once.Martin Parr, “Glenbeigh Races, County Kerry (A Fair Day),” 1983. (Courtesy McMullen Museum of Art)Feb. 5-Dec. 4, 2023Amy Genser creates the kinds of shapes and colors you glimpse in a drop of plankton under a microscope. Working with paper, paint, metal and wood, the Connecticut-based artist says she is fascinated by the flow of water, the shape of beehives and the natural, organic forms seen in plants, rocks, moss, lichen and seaweed. In this installation, created especially for Fuller Craft, Genser allows her biomorphic, cellular forms to extend off the wall into 3D constructions invoking the beauty of each season as well those transitional periods between them, hence the title of the show.Feb. 10-May 8Surely, you’ve heard of at least one of the two immersive Van Gogh exhibits that swept the country last year. Reviled by some and adored by others, both exhibits offered viewers a 360-degree immersion into Van Gogh’s paintings, projected on walls and floors. Well, the Frida exhibit is the same idea, giving visitors a taste of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo’s best-known works, all set to a rousing musical score. For an entry fee ranging from $40 to $70, depending on what hour you reserve, you can immerse yourself not only in the artist’s work but in her life story. It’s sort of like IMAX meets art for those who find museums boring or inaccessible.“Frida Kahlo’s work is uniquely suited to be explored in an immersive environment,” show producer Svetlana Dvoretsky said in a statement. “Kahlo lived her life as one giant journey of exploration, and her art mirrored that journey. Our goal is to give our viewers more than an examination of her work; we also hope they will leave with a richer understanding of the complex woman who created these timeless masterpieces.”An installation view of “Frida: Immersive Dream.” (Courtesy Lighthouse Immersive)”My Mechanical Sketchbook” — Barkley L. Hendricks & PhotographyRose Art MuseumFeb. 10-July 24Barkley L. Hendricks became famous over his long career for august and vibrantly painted portraits of people of color, modeled after the regal court portraits kings and popes once commissioned. His work has long stood out in what was once a lily-white art world. That is still the case, even when we talk about another aspect of Hendricks’ career: photography, or specifically the photos he used as models for his oil paintings. In this show, the Rose Art Museum presents these shots as works of art in their own right. On display are photographs, paintings and works on paper. We get to see Hendricks’ working process, offering a rare glimpse into the process of a luminary artist.Barkley L. Hendricks, “Self-Portrait with a Black Hat,” 1989-2013. (Courtesy the artist’s estate and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York)Feb. 12-June 5Fruit and vegetable stands, crumbling shacks, tanks painted with the American flag – these are all the sorts of things you might glimpse on a cross-country road trip. In “American Roadsides,” we see these structures once more, in all their grandeur and banality. Frank Armstrong teaches at Clark University in Worcester. His work focuses on the American material culture as seen in architecture, consumer products and advertising – elements that are reflected in the work of his students who have also become successful fine arts photographers. This exhibit includes some of their work as well.Frank Armstrong, “Coshocton, OH,” 2019. (Courtesy of the artist)Feb. 17-July 24Napoleon Jones-Henderson, “TCB, 1970. (Courtesy the artist)Napoleon Jones-Henderson creates electric Kool-Aid graphic tapestries, tile works, sculptures and works on paper. Based in Roxbury since the 1970s, he is one of the founding members of the artists’ collective AfriCOBRA (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists) founded in Chicago in 1968 with the idea of using an accessible, graphic, colorful style (some people would call it a “Black aesthetic”) celebrating the lived experience of people within the African diaspora. Works coming out of this movement were affirming and optimistic, although they acknowledged a difficult past. In this survey of Jones-Henderson’s career, a sampling of works from various years and media are on display, with an emphasis on his woven textiles. The ICA bills this as one of the artist’s most comprehensive solo exhibitions in Boston. Since Jones-Henderson is a prominent local artist and educator, it’s about time.March 10-June 5As a child, Sharona Franklin grappled with Still’s disease, which causes severe, painful inflammation of the joints and internal organs. Later, she developed endometriosis and two blood disorders. In her artistic practice, which began at the age of 4, Franklin has made illness and disability a major theme, attempting to challenge conventional notions of what it means to live with chronic illness. Using sculpture and textiles, her oeuvre has been dedicated to probing the psychic, social and biomedical realities of living with a degenerative disease. Franklin creates gelatinous collage-like molds, embedding medicinal plants, flowers, syringes, food items, hardware, prescription pills and autobiographical ephemera. Much of her work combines the ideas of domesticity with technology/science. In a recent series, she created printed textiles and ceramic plates documenting what she refers to as her “bioshrines” — arrangements of materials she uses for self-administering antibody treatments. In this exhibit, Franklin presents a new installation combining the themes of chronic illness with bioethics, environmental harm and holistic approaches to healthcare.March 12-Aug. 28Textiles are also featured in the Marilyn Pappas retrospective at the Fuller Craft Museum. Pappas is a Somerville artist who has been creating work for 60 years. This exhibit takes in everything from her garment-based work with a social perspective created in the 1960s to her large textiles developed from sculptures of ancient goddesses. Her work takes us through the stages of a lifetime, acting as a powerful statement of the courage, brio and resilience of women.March 31-Sept. 5“Swinguerra” is a fast-paced, sexy, athletic video centered on transgender and nonbinary dancers in Recife, Brazil. Dance in Brazil has traditionally functioned as a form of discreet organization against oppressive regimes. We get an exhilarating glimpse of this resistance in this work created by Bárbara Wagner, a native of Brazil, and Benjamin de Burca, a native of Germany. Since 2013, the two have created works in video, photography and installation that focus on underground dance and musical genres. Much of their work, which they refer to as “documentary musicals,” has been made in collaboration with cinematographer Pedro Sotero and focuses on urban subcultures of the South Atlantic diaspora. “Swinguerra” allows ICA visitors a mesmerizing look into these subcultures.Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca, “Swinguerra,” 2019. (Courtesy the artists and Fortes D’aloia & Gabriel, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro)March 31-Sept. 5Exploring ideas of intimacy, community and the power to represent oneself in painting, this collective show offers up a new generation of artists at the forefront of contemporary painting. Including work by David Antonio Cruz, Louis Fratino, Doron Langberg, Aubrey Levinthal, Gisela McDaniel, Arcmanoro Niles, Celeste Rapone and Ambera Wellmann, the show is dedicated to showing how figurative painting is not only experiencing a revival, reveling in unique approaches to painting the human figure with love and care, but how it’s kind of cool, too.Louis Fratino, “My Meal,” 2019. (Courtesy Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York)
A dirt cheap solution? Common clay materials may help curb methane emissions
Methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and it has a pronounced effect within first two decades of its presence in the atmosphere. In the recent international climate negotiations in Glasgow, abatement of methane emissions was identified as a major priority in attempts to curb global climate change quickly.
Now, a team of researchers at MIT has come up with a promising approach to controlling methane emissions and removing it from the air, using an inexpensive and abundant type of clay called zeolite. The findings are described in the journal ACS Environment Au, in a paper by doctoral student Rebecca Brenneis, Associate Professor Desiree Plata, and two others.
Although many people associate atmospheric methane with drilling and fracking for oil and natural gas, those sources only account for about 18 percent of global methane emissions, Plata says. The vast majority of emitted methane comes from such sources as slash-and-burn agriculture, dairy farming, coal and ore mining, wetlands, and melting permafrost. “A lot of the methane that comes into the atmosphere is from distributed and diffuse sources, so we started to think about how you could take that out of the atmosphere,” she says.
The answer the researchers found was something dirt cheap — in fact, a special kind of “dirt,” or clay. They used zeolite clays, a material so inexpensive that it is currently used to make cat litter. Treating the zeolite with a small amount of copper, the team found, makes the material very effective at absorbing methane from the air, even at extremely low concentrations.
The system is simple in concept, though much work remains on the engineering details. In their lab tests, tiny particles of the copper-enhanced zeolite material, similar to cat litter, were packed into a reaction tube, which was then heated from the outside as the stream of gas, with methane levels ranging from just 2 parts per million up to 2 percent concentration, flowed through the tube. That range covers everything that might exist in the atmosphere, down to subflammable levels that cannot be burned or flared directly.
The process has several advantages over other approaches to removing methane from air, Plata says. Other methods tend to use expensive catalysts such as platinum or palladium, require high temperatures of at least 600 degrees Celsius, and tend to require complex cycling between methane-rich and oxygen-rich streams, making the devices both more complicated and more risky, as methane and oxygen are highly combustible on their own and in combination.
“The 600 degrees where they run these reactors makes it almost dangerous to be around the methane,” as well as the pure oxygen, Brenneis says. “They’re solving the problem by just creating a situation where there’s going to be an explosion.” Other engineering complications also arise from the high operating temperatures. Unsurprisingly, such systems have not found much use.
As for the new process, “I think we’re still surprised at how well it works,” says Plata, who is the Gilbert W. Winslow Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering. The process seems to have its peak effectiveness at about 300 degrees Celsius, which requires far less energy for heating than other methane capture processes. It also can work at concentrations of methane lower than other methods can address, even small fractions of 1 percent, which most methods cannot remove, and does so in air rather than pure oxygen, a major advantage for real-world deployment.
The method converts the methane into carbon dioxide. That might sound like a bad thing, given the worldwide efforts to combat carbon dioxide emissions. “A lot of people hear ‘carbon dioxide’ and they panic; they say ‘that’s bad,’” Plata says. But she points out that carbon dioxide is much less impactful in the atmosphere than methane, which is about 80 times stronger as a greenhouse gas over the first 20 years, and about 25 times stronger for the first century. This effect arises from that fact that methane turns into carbon dioxide naturally over time in the atmosphere. By accelerating that process, this method would drastically reduce the near-term climate impact, she says. And, even converting half of the atmosphere’s methane to carbon dioxide would increase levels of the latter by less than 1 part per million (about 0.2 percent of today’s atmospheric carbon dioxide) while saving about 16 percent of total radiative warming.
The ideal location for such systems, the team concluded, would be in places where there is a relatively concentrated source of methane, such as dairy barns and coal mines. These sources already tend to have powerful air-handling systems in place, since a buildup of methane can be a fire, health, and explosion hazard. To surmount the outstanding engineering details, the team has just been awarded a $2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to continue to develop specific equipment for methane removal in these types of locations.
“The key advantage of mining air is that we move a lot of it,” she says. “You have to pull fresh air in to enable miners to breathe, and to reduce explosion risks from enriched methane pockets. So, the volumes of air that are moved in mines are enormous.” The concentration of methane is too low to ignite, but it’s in the catalysts’ sweet spot, she says.
Adapting the technology to specific sites should be relatively straightforward. The lab setup the team used in their tests consisted of “only a few components, and the technology you would put in a cow barn could be pretty simple as well,” Plata says. However, large volumes of gas do not flow that easily through clay, so the next phase of the research will focus on ways of structuring the clay material in a multiscale, hierarchical configuration that will aid air flow.
“We need new technologies for oxidizing methane at concentrations below those used in flares and thermal oxidizers,” says Rob Jackson, a professor of earth systems science at Stanford University, who was not involved in this work. “There isn’t a cost-effective technology today for oxidizing methane at concentrations below about 2,000 parts per million.”
Jackson adds, “Many questions remain for scaling this and all similar work: How quickly will the catalyst foul under field conditions? Can we get the required temperatures closer to ambient conditions? How scaleable will such technologies be when processing large volumes of air?”
One potential major advantage of the new system is that the chemical process involved releases heat. By catalytically oxidizing the methane, in effect the process is a flame-free form of combustion. If the methane concentration is above 0.5 percent, the heat released is greater than the heat used to get the process started, and this heat could be used to generate electricity.
The team’s calculations show that “at coal mines, you could potentially generate enough heat to generate electricity at the power plant scale, which is remarkable because it means that the device could pay for itself,” Plata says. “Most air-capture solutions cost a lot of money and would never be profitable. Our technology may one day be a counterexample.”
Using the new grant money, she says, “over the next 18 months we’re aiming to demonstrate a proof of concept that this can work in the field,” where conditions can be more challenging than in the lab. Ultimately, they hope to be able to make devices that would be compatible with existing air-handling systems and could simply be an extra component added in place. “The coal mining application is meant to be at a stage that you could hand to a commercial builder or user three years from now,” Plata says.
In addition to Plata and Brenneis, the team included Yale University PhD student Eric Johnson and former MIT postdoc Wenbo Shi. The work was supported by the Gerstner Philanthropies, Vanguard Charitable Trust, the Betty Moore Inventor Fellows Program, and MIT’s Research Support Committee.