The 2025 MIT Japan Conference will explore future research trends at MIT, highlighting breakthroughs in key areas such as Soft Materials and Mechanics, Biomedical Innovation, and the impact of Generative AI (GAI) on the Work of the Future. Additional sessions will focus on Quantum and Silicon Photonics, Nanotechnology in materials and additive manufacturing, and the latest Machine Learning and AI tools for chemical discovery. Advances in semiconductor technology, hydrogen innovation, and electrochemistry, as well as thermofluidic interfaces, will also be featured.
Attendees will have the opportunity to engage in in-depth discussions with MIT faculty speakers and MIT Startup Exchange companies during both lunch and an evening networking reception.
Steve Palmer is a Senior Director within MIT’s Office of Corporate Relations. Steven comes to OCR with many years of experience building relationships, advancing diplomacy, and seeking new business initiatives in both the public and private sectors. He has spent his career highlighting and translating technological issues for policy makers, engineers, analysts, and business leaders. Steven has worked in government, industry, and academia in the U.S. and abroad. He is also an Executive Coach at MIT Sloan and Harvard Business School. Steven earned his Bachelor of Science at Northeastern University, and his M.B.A. at MIT Sloan where he was in the Fellows Program for Innovation and Global Leadership.
Professor, MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering
Kripa K. Varanasi is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge. He received his B.Tech from Indian Institute of Technology Madras, India, and his SM (ME and EECS) and Ph.D. from MIT. Before joining MIT as a faculty member, Prof. Varanasi was a lead researcher and project leader at the GE Global Research Center, where he was recognized with awards such as Best Patent, Best Technology Project, and a Leadership Award. At MIT, he leads an interdisciplinary lab focused on understanding many aspects of physico-chemical and biological phenomena. These include interfacial science, thermal-fluids, soft matter, electromagnetism, electrochemistry, phase transitions, and life sciences. His work has contributed to the development of innovative materials, devices, products, and processes designed to address challenges in areas such as energy, decarbonization, water, agriculture, transportation, medical devices, and consumer products. He is passionate about entrepreneurship, scale-up, and manufacturing and has translated various technologies from lab to market. He has co-founded several companies, including Arnasi-LiquiGlide, Dropwise, Infinite Cooling, Alsym Energy, AgZen, and Coflo Medical. LiquiGlide has been recognized by Time and Forbes magazines as one of the "Best Inventions of the Year." Additionally, the Infinite Cooling project has received awards at competitions such as the DOE's National Cleantech University Prize, the Rice Business Plan Competition, and MIT-100K, among others. Throughout his career, Prof. Varanasi has been honored with several awards, including the NSF Career Award, DARPA Young Faculty Award, SME Outstanding Young Manufacturing Engineer Award, ASME Bergles-Rohsenow Heat Transfer Award, Boston Business Journal’s 40 Under 40, ASME Gustus L. Larson Memorial Award, APS Milton van Dyke Award, and MIT Graduate Student Council’s Frank E. Perkins Award for Excellence in Graduate Advising.
Physico-chemical interactions at interfaces are ubiquitous across multiple industries, including energy, decarbonization, healthcare, water, agriculture, transportation, and consumer products. In this talk, Professor Varanasi summarizes how surface/interface chemistry, morphology, and thermal and electrical properties can be engineered across multiple length scales to achieve significant efficiency enhancements in a wide range of processes. These approaches involve both passive and active manipulation of interfaces.
Varanasi first describes a variety of slippery interfaces that can significantly reduce interfacial friction for efficient dispensing of viscous products, enhance thermal transport in heating and cooling systems, provide anti-icing solutions, and create self-healing barriers for protection against scaling. Active strategies are also discussed, such as engineering charge transfer to alter multiphase flows for applications like water harvesting, anti-dust systems for solar panels, and reducing agricultural runoff to address critical challenges at the energy-water and water-agriculture nexus. Varanasi highlights efforts in decarbonization and the energy transition, focusing on CO₂ capture and conversion as well as battery energy storage systems. These efforts include enhancing electrochemical and biological methods for CO₂ capture and conversion, with recent advancements in CO₂ capture from point sources and direct air capture (DAC), marine CO₂ removal via a pH-swing process using electroactive materials, and electrochemical CO₂ conversion to fuels, ethylene, and other valuable products. Additionally, Varanasi introduces a high-performance rechargeable battery energy storage solution that is free of lithium and cobalt, intrinsically non-flammable, and ideal for stationary storage applications, including utility grids, home storage, microgrids, data centers, warehouses, manufacturing facilities, and chemical plants.
In parallel, Varanasi discusses ongoing research in biomedical technologies, spanning biomanufacturing to ovarian cancer treatment. Surface engineering strategies are presented to prevent thrombosis and biofilm formation, tailor cell adhesion and protein adsorption, and enhance the biomanufacturing value chain. Inspired by slippery surface technologies, Varanasi introduces a novel methodology for subcutaneous injection of highly viscous biologics, expanding the range of injectable formulations and improving healthcare accessibility. Innovative approaches to protein separation via undersaturated crystallization, promoted through in-situ templating, are also described, enabling continuous biomanufacturing. Passive and active techniques for enhancing bioreactors by preventing foam buildup are detailed, with a non-invasive approach that eliminates the need for defoamers, preventing cell death caused by bubble rupture and optimizing reactor space utilization.
Throughout the talk, Varanasi addresses manufacturing and scale-up strategies, robust materials and processes, and entrepreneurial efforts to translate these technologies into impactful products and markets. Insights from the start-up companies co-founded by Varanasi are interwoven with these discussions.
Dr. Stacy Springs is the Executive Director at the MIT Center for Biomedical Innovation (CBI). The Center integrates the Institute’s technical, scientific, and management expertise to solve complex biopharmaceutical challenges. CBI leads multi-stakeholder, multidisciplinary research and educational initiatives with real world impact, including MIT's Biomanufacturing Consortium, (BioMAN), and its Consortium on Adventitious Agent Contamination in Biomanufacturing, (CAACB). Dr. Springs is a principal investigator on several research programs in biologics manufacturing, from application of data analytics and PAT in the continuous production of monoclonal antibodies, viral vectors, and vaccines; to development of innovative rapid sterile tests and new approaches to adventitious agent contamination through long read sequencing. Dr. Springs is a principal investigator at SMART CAMP, an interdisciplinary research group focused on Critical Analytics for Manufacturing Personalized- Medicine at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) and serves as the Chair of Landmark Bio’s Science and Technology Committee and is a member of Avantor’s SAB and HeMAB’s CMC advisory group. Dr. Springs’ research interests include biopharmaceutical development and manufacturing, risk management, regulatory science, translational science and food safety and control. She holds a PhD in Chemistry from the University of Texas at Austin and gained postdoctoral training in protein and biophysical chemistry at Princeton University.
Biologic medicines (e.g., monoclonal antibodies, gene and cell therapies, vaccines) are critical to treating and preventing disease. Recent regulatory approvals of exciting new biomedicines such as cell and gene therapies provide new hope to patients who have exhausted alternative therapies or suffer from a rare disease with no other treatment. To help patients access these medicines, biopharmaceutical companies must be able to manufacture very complex molecules safely, reliably, and in the quantities needed, which can range from the very large (industrialized) scale to the very small (personalized) scale. This presentation will review the challenges in manufacturing these complex biologic medicines as well as approaches to modernization of biomanufacturing with the goal of providing broadened access to biologic medicines. Dr. Springs will describe multiple approaches that MIT’s Center for Biomedical Innovation and collaborators are taking to achieve this goal, including continuous manufacturing, novel purification strategies, novel analytical technologies for assessing novel product quality attributes, and rapid methods for sterility and viral safety assessment.
Xuanhe Zhao is the Uncas and Helen Whitaker Professor at MIT. The mission of Zhao Lab is to merge humans and machines to address grand societal challenges in health and sustainability. Dr. Zhao is the co-inventor and pioneer of nascent research fields, including tough adhesive hydrogels, hard-magnetic soft robotics, and wearable ultrasound. To translate technologies in these fields into societal impacts, he co-founded startup companies, including SanaHeal, Magnendo, and Sonologi.
Dr. Zhao is aHumboldt Research Awardee. He has been a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher since 2018. Bioadhesive ultrasound, based on Zhao Lab’s work published in Science, was named one of TIME Magazine's Best Inventions of the year in 2022. SanaHeal Inc., based on Zhao Lab’s work published in Nature, was awarded the 2023 Nature Spinoff Prize. Over 15 patents from Zhao Lab have been licensed by companies and have contributed to FDA-approved and widely-used medical devices.
Whereas human tissues and organs are mostly soft, wet, and bioactive, machines are commonly hard, dry, and abiotic. Merging humans and machines is of imminent importance in addressing grand societal challenges in health, environment, sustainability, security, education, and happiness in life. However, merging humans and machines is extremely challenging due to their fundamentally contradictory properties. At MIT Zhao Lab, we invent, understand, and facilitate the translation of soft materials and systems to form long-term, robust, non-fibrotic, and high-efficacy interfaces between humans and machines. In this talk, I will discuss three examples of innovation and translation for merging humans and machines:
I will conclude the talk with a vision for future human-machine convergence – aided by and synergized with modern technologies such as artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, and precision medicine.
Josh Santos is co-founder and CEO of Noya, an Oakland-based startup that is reversing climate change by removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Josh holds a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from MIT and has experience building B2B products and services from scratch, scaling technology as a Project Manager on the Tesla Model 3 program, and leading R&D teams as the first ever Program Manager for Harley Davidson’s electric vehicle division. In his free time, Josh enjoys reading and sailing in the San Francisco Bay.
Evan Haas is CEO & Co-Founder of Helix Carbon, an industrial decarbonization company that turns CO2 into carbon-negative industrial chemicals. Prior to Helix, he was the Senior Fellow at E14 Fund, the MIT-affiliated venture fund that invests in deep technology startups, and a consultant at BCG where he focused on military aerospace and climate technology commercialization & policy with Breakthrough Energy and the Biden Administration. Evan holds a B.S. in Chemistry from Yale University an M.S. in Mechanical Engineering and MBA from MIT.
Maher Damak is the CEO and Co-Founder of Infinite Cooling, a start-up out of MIT that helps industrial and commercial customers achieve efficiency, productivity, and sustainability goals by enhancing and optimizing cooling towers in various processes.
Abhi Yadav is a serial entrepreneur and AI innovator at the forefront of customer experience, identity, and AI. As the CEO of iCustomer, a pioneering decision intelligence company, he spearheads advancements in omnichannel customer personalization and marketing optimization. With a proven track record of building and successfully exiting enterprise AI software startups in Customer Data Platform (CDP) and consumer identity spaces, Abhi has transformed digital transformation for global leaders like GM, Nike, Travellers, Google and Cisco across the US and Asia Pacific. His expertise spans Insurance, banking, consumer goods, and high-tech sectors. Abhi also co-founded the AI Innovators Community (AIC), a prestigious network of over 1,000 curated corporate, academic, and startup executives driving applied AI innovation. His actionable insights on overcoming AI adoption challenges and maximizing its potential stem from extensive collaborations with Fortune 500 companies and cutting-edge startups. An alumnus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with both engineering and MBA degrees, Abhi is on a mission of AI-driven, privacy-compliant personalization with data to decision intelligence for business teams.
Sean (Shunsuke) Matsuoka has experience in marketing at Sony, management consulting at McKinsey & Company, and business development at M3 Inc. and caresyntax. Sean brings a wealth of experience in business development across diverse sectors, including notable companies like Mitsubishi Corporation (MC Healthcare), Takeda Pharmaceutical (Whiz Partners), and Fujifilm. His ability to foster collaborations, especially within pharmaceuticals and medical devices, is highlighted by his track record of managing deals with industry leaders. Holding degrees from Keio University and Harvard Business School, he is a versatile leader poised to drive impactful growth and innovation.
Ben Armstrong is the Executive Director and a Research Scientist at MIT’s Industrial Performance Center, where he co-leads the Work of the Future initiative. His research and teaching examine how workers, firms, and regions adapt to technological change. His current projects include a working group on generative AI and its impact on jobs, as well as a book on American manufacturing competitiveness. His research has been published or featured in academic and popular outlets including the New York Times, Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Sloan Management Review, Times Higher Education, Boston Review, Daedalus, and Economic Development Quarterly.
Previously, Ben was a Research Fellow and Postdoctoral Research Associate at Brown University, where he studied how workers, policymakers, and the public think about automation and taught courses on technology, public policy, and capitalism. He worked with the Provost to spearhead the Brown and the Innovation Economy initiative, which developed a strategy for the university to contribute to good job growth in the region, and a faculty colloquium on the future of work. In partnership with the State of Rhode Island and others, he studied the longest autonomous vehicle public transit route in the United States to date.
Ben completed his undergraduate degree at Northwestern University and his PhD at MIT, where he received the Lucian Pye Award for Outstanding Political Science PhD Dissertation. Before graduate school, he helped lead an open-source hardware non-profit and worked at Google Inc.
How have some companies experienced dramatic growth and productivity improvement in manufacturing even as their peers struggle to compete? What explains how some manufacturing firms have been faster to adopt new technologies or workforce practices than other firms? This presentation will focus on understanding the operational and technological patterns of high-performing manufacturing firms in the United States. It will emphasize particularly the way that these firms have built on – and in some cases departed from – the Toyota Production System, which has for decades been the paradigm for manufacturing excellence in the United States and abroad.
Ryan Hamerly was born in San Antonio, Texas in 1988. He graduated from Boulder High School in 2006 and received a B.S. degree from Caltech in 2010, working with Prof. Yanbei Chen on black hole mergers. In 2016 he received a Ph.D. degree in applied physics from Stanford, for work with Prof. Hideo Mabuchi on quantum control, nanophotonics, and nonlinear optics. In 2017 he was at the National Institute of Informatics (Tokyo), working with Prof. Yoshihisa Yamamoto on quantum annealing and optical computing concepts. He is currently an IC postdoctoral fellow at MIT with Prof. Dirk Englund.
The rise of LLMs and generative AI has caused a dramatic increase in the energy consumption of data centers, a problem that will continue to grow as AI becomes more ubiquitous. Our group studies the use of photonics as an enabler for next-generation AI accelerators that can be orders of magnitude faster and more efficient than electronic processors, leveraging the bandwidth, latency, and low-loss interconnection advantages of optically encoded signals. I will discuss our work addressing the main challenges of photonic computing, including (i) scalability, where we are developing time-multiplexed and free-space optical systems to overcome area bottlenecks, (ii) noise and imperfections, where we have developed new hardware error correction algorithms for photonics, (iii) the use of delocalized computing to overcome von Neumann bottlenecks (with additional applications in quantum-secure computation), and (iv) training, where we have demonstrated a forward-only training algorithm for photonic neural networks.
Carlos M. Portela is the Robert N. Noyce Career Development Professor in Mechanical Engineering at MIT. Prof. Portela received his Ph.D. and M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology, where he was given the Centennial Award for the best thesis in Mechanical and Civil Engineering, and he received degrees in Aerospace Engineering (B.S.) and Physics (B.A.) from the University of Southern California. At Caltech he worked on exploring the mechanical response of 3D architected materials from experimental and computational perspectives. He joined MIT in August of 2020.
Architected materials—i.e., materials whose three-dimensional (3D) micro- or nanostructure has been engineered to attain a specific purpose—are ubiquitous in nature and have enabled properties that are unachievable by all other existing materials. Their concept relies on maximizing performance while requiring a minimal amount of material. Several human-made 3D architected materials have been reported to enable novel mechanical properties such as high stiffness-to-weight ratios or extreme resilience, especially when nanoscale features present. However, most architected materials have relied on advanced additive manufacturing techniques that are not yet scalable and yield small sample sizes. Additionally, most of these nano- and micro-architected materials have only been studied in controlled laboratory conditions, while our understanding of their performance in real-world applications requires attention.
In this talk, we will explain the concept of architected materials, providing various examples that we routinely fabricate and test in our laboratory at MIT, and we will discuss how nanoscale features significantly enhance their performance. We will also discuss ongoing research directions that will not only allow us to scale-up their fabrication, but also understand how they perform in realistic conditions outside the laboratory—towards contributing to more efficient material solutions in industry and beyond.
Heather J. Kulik is a Professor of Chemical Engineering and Chemistry at MIT. She received her B.E. in Chemical Engineering from Cooper Union in 2004 and her Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering from MIT in 2009. She completed postdocs at Lawrence Livermore (2010) and Stanford (2010−2013), prior to returning to MIT as a faculty member in 2013 and receiving tenure in 2021. She was promoted to the rank of Full Professor in 2024.
Her work has been recognized by a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award at the Scientific Interface (2012-2017), Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award (2018), DARPA Young Faculty Award (2018), AAAS Marion Milligan Mason Award (2019-2020), NSF CAREER Award (2019), the ACS COMP Division OpenEye Award for Outstanding Junior Faculty in Computational Chemistry, the JPCB Lectureship (ACS PHYS), the DARPA Director’s Fellowship (2020), a Sloan Fellowship (2021), the AIChE CoMSEF Impact award (2023), and a TUM Hans Fischer Senior Fellowship (2023).
Prof. Kulik will describe their efforts to accelerate the discovery of novel transition metal containing materials using machine learning. She will discuss how they have leveraged experimental data sets through both text mining and semantic embedding to uncover relationships between structure and function in molecular catalysts and metal-organic frameworks. Then she will describe how they have leveraged large datasets of synthesized materials to uncover those with novel function in polymer networks. She will describe how they demonstrate the success of their design strategy through macroscopically visible changes in network scale properties.
Abate is the Chipman Career Development Professor and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT. He completed his postdoctoral training at UC Berkeley and his PhD at Stanford University. His interdisciplinary research group at MIT works at the nexus of electrochemistry, condensed matter physics, earth sciences, and data science to develop materials and devices for next-generation energy storage, computing, and mining technologies. Prior to his Ph.D., he conducted research at IBM Almaden and Los Alamos National Laboratory for two years. Abate has been recognized as one of the “Talented 12” by C&E News, a Bose Fellow by MIT, and a Miller Fellow and Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow by UC Berkeley. He also received the Young Investigator Award from the International Solid State Ionics Society, Daniel Cubicciotti Award from the Electrochemical Society and became the Principal Investigator on an ARPA-E award for geological hydrogen.
Outside the lab, Iwnetim is a co-founder and president of a non-profit organization (www.scifro.org) that empowers African youth to address local challenges through scientific research and innovation. The organization is generously supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the American Physical Society.
Decarbonizing transportation, the grid, and heavy industries depends on the success of both short- and long-duration energy storage solutions. Through novel material design and chemistry, my lab addresses critical challenges in developing affordable, sustainable, and reliable energy storage technologies. For short (to medium)-duration storage, we design and develop new cathode materials for sodium-ion batteries rich in manganese and iron. Our goal is to achieve energy densities comparable to lithium-ion batteries but at lower costs, without relying on critical minerals, thereby accelerating the transition to more sustainable energy storage. For long-duration storage, we have developed groundbreaking pathways for producing hydrogen (H₂) and ammonia (NH₃) using subsurface chemistry. By harnessing redox reactions on Fe-rich rocks and utilizing the Earth's natural heat and pressure, we demonstrate the potential for stimulated geological H₂ and NH₃ production. These methods achieve near-zero CO₂ emissions while remaining cost-competitive with existing technologies. Our work integrates advanced materials design with sustainable chemistry to provide scalable, impactful solutions for a decarbonized future.