2024 MIT R&D Conference: Welcome & Introduction

GAYATHRI SRINIVASAN: Thank you. Thank you. First of all, well, good morning, everyone. I'm Gayathri Srinivasan, executive director, Office of Corporate Relations, MIT. It is an honor to welcome you to our flagship conference, Research and Development, where you'll hear all about the wonderful cutting-edge research that's happening at MIT, and all the innovations.

I also want to thank our distinguished speakers. You're going to hear from all of them, and I'm hoping you're going to be inspired, and you'll hear about a lot of wonderful activities that are happening there. I do want to emphasize that your participation and engagement drive the success of not only this conference, but also, of all the wonderful collaborative solutions that we come up at MIT. We are all about working with real problems and solving them.

To begin, I'd like to-- if we can move on to the next slide, I'm hoping. So I know you've all seen, or many of you know about MIT, but I just wanted to give you a snapshot of who we are, and what we are. We have 105 Nobel Prize winners. And two of them were the most recent winners. And I wanted to highlight those for those of you who may have missed that news at some point. But we have about 1,100 faculty members, 4,300 researchers, 4,500 undergraduate students, and 7,500, close to 7,500, graduate students. And we have a lot of international students in our midst as well.

I did want to emphasize that MIT is MIT because of all the industry-driven projects that we do. We have 65-plus departments, labs, and centers. We have about $840 million in research, out of which 20% comes from industry-sponsored research. Half of that industry-sponsored research comes from you all. ILP members. You all come to these conferences, learn about work that we do at MIT, and solve real problems engaging with our faculty and researchers.

We have about 600 patents filed in the last fiscal year, 362 patents issued, $40 million in licensing revenue, and about 23 startup companies that were formed using MIT ILP.

Now, I did want to focus, you're going to hear about all kinds of research activities that are happening at MIT in all kinds of sectors. But I did want to emphasize that when President Kornbluth came, she charged us with focusing on three institutional areas, climate and sustainability, life sciences, artificial intelligence to focus on global problems and solving for them at MIT.

Now, you must have heard about the Industry Liaison Program. You must be wondering, what is the Industry Liaison Program? The Industry Liaison Program is a way for you to connect with MIT. And you can connect with MIT in through its research, through its innovation, through its students, and through its education offerings. And you can do it in three modes.

One is, you can understand and learn through developing your employees, through webinars, conferences, workshops, through executive briefings for your companies, through learning journeys, through access to our conferences, of course, and of course, discount on professional education, exec education, and open learning. You can also discover and solve your problems through meeting with faculties, labs, and centers, strategic executive education, assistance with identification of opportunities for sponsored research, and solving those problems.

And of course, lastly, you can network. You can network with our students, you can network with our 800 plus startups through our Startup Exchange program, and of course, you can network amongst yourself with other ILP members. And so please go forth and do that. And of course, you must have heard about Startup Exchange. What is the Startup Exchange? It's a program to connect industry with startups. MIT-connected startups, we call them. And they are all-- we have about 856 startups in our midst.

We have about startups, 51 startups that joined last fiscal year. And we have had 120 plus lightning talks. And you are going to be treated with lightning talks today as well. And I'm hoping you're going to enjoy and discover innovative ideas that could be helpful for your companies as well. And we have had 87 stacks event.

Lastly, I did want to, before I conclude, I want to thank Hong Fan and Natalie Kim. You will hear from them. They are the hard-working people behind the content for today's conference. And I do want to thank them. And of course, behind all of that, I want to thank the communications and events team who work tirelessly behind the scenes. And all that you see today is because of their effort, right? This show is a success because of them.

And I also want to thank the Startup Exchange team members who tirelessly work to bring the startups to the midst to showcase them and highlight them for your effort. Lastly, before I leave, I want to say there are a bunch of program directors in the audience today. And so if you want to learn more about ILP, and our offerings, please feel free to reach out to them. And they'll be able to navigate MIT for you. Thank you so much.

NATALIE KIM: Thank you, Gayathri, for a wonderful introduction. Good morning. And good afternoon, and good evening for all who are joining us online. Welcome to the 2024 MIT Research and Development conference. I'm Najung Kim, Natalie Kim, one of the program directors at MIT, OCI Corporate Relations. This year's R&D conference is the ILP's flagship event, featuring an engaging two-day program with six deep-dive tracks covering space tech, mobility, innovation strategy, AI, health care, and quantum.

And this year, especially, in celebration of the 40th anniversary of the MIT Microsystems Technology Laboratories, MTL, we are also highlighting the latest research from MTL honoring the fourth decades of innovation and discovery.