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Professor Cecilia Leal is contributing to MIGHTY, a five-year ARPA-H-funded initiative to develop phage-based therapies that precisely target harmful bacteria while preserving beneficial microbes. Leal will design advanced materials to encapsulate and deliver these bacterial viruses to the oral cavity, enabling their strong antibacterial activity. The project aims to create accessible products like chewable gummies for oral health, with potential future applications for gut, metabolic and autoimmune diseases.

Materials Science and Engineering doctoral candidate Yiteng Wang, working with Professor Minjoo Larry Lee and collaborators at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, has demonstrated visible red lasers grown directly inside silicon nitride photonic chips for the first time. This breakthrough bridges III-V semiconductor materials with silicon-based photonics, opening new possibilities for quantum computing, biosensing and augmented reality applications that require integrated visible-light sources.

Associate Professor Hua Wang has earned the Rising Star Junior Faculty Award from the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering (CMBE) Special Interest Group. The award honors Wang's groundbreaking advances in developing cutting-edge technologies and therapies  fighting back against cancer. 

Professor Paul Braun has been elected to the Materials Research Society Board of Directors — the governing body of MRS —  in a vote from the organization's global membership. His three-year term is set to begin Jan. 1, 2026. 

Assistant Professor Chris Anderson co-authored research published in Science identifying strontium titanate as a material with electro-optic effects 40 times stronger than current leading materials at cryogenic temperatures. He completed his postdoctoral research at Stanford University under Jelena Vuckovic, the study's senior author.

Saeed Moradi, Ben Zahiri and Paul V. Braun just published findings that are taking us a step closer to practical solid-state rechargeable batteries that, unlike previous efforts, don’t require high pressure to hold the solid components together during charge and discharge cycles. The team made novel experimental observations of how electrodes expand and contract during battery cycling, and used the resulting insights to design solid-state batteries that can operate for thousands of cycles at low pressure.