First year HASTS student Jorge Palacios, a mixed-media scholar-artist who holds an MFA in environmental art and practice from the University of California, Santa Cruz, is featured in two upcoming gallery exhibitions taking place in Chattanooga, TN and Kansas City, MO, respectively.
From January 31st to March 7th, Jorge’s work will be on display at the 100,000,000 Gallery in an exhibition entitled “Bone Snack.” According to the curators, the artwork featured in the Kanas City-based exhibition represents “intensity and narrative in both concept and process.” Jorge’s submission was one of 36 selected from a pool of 140 artists.
From February 27th to June 6th, meanwhile, Jorge’s artwork will be on display at Stove Works in Chattanooga. The curators of that exhibition, entitled “Paradise,” write that the artworks featured challenge normative ideas about the future, offering “a queer reading of paradise that presents the idyllic as an endless possibility.”
To learn more about Jorge’s artistic practice, visit their website at jorgx.com.
Third year HASTS student Odinaka Eze has been awarded a MIT Bevans Artistic Exploration Fund grant. Established in 2024 by Keith (SB ’95) and Natasha Bevans, the $5,000 grant sponsors artistic projects that explore and illuminate Black experience and culture.
With support from the Bevans Fund, Odinaka will produce a historical documentary on Garuba Garuba, an activist and leprosy patient during Nigerian independence. The project will add a mixed-media component to Odinaka’s HASTS dissertation research on related themes.
On January 25, 2026, the Board of Trustees of Columbia University announced that it has designated HASTS alumna Jennifer L Mnookin PhD ’99 as the University’s 21st president.
Mnookin, who presently serves as Chancellor of the University of Wisconsin – Madison, is a scholar of technology and the law. She was previously Dean of the School of Law and Ralph and Shirley Shapiro Professor of Law at the University of California, Los Angeles. During her graduate studies at MIT, Mnookin wrote a dissertation entitled “Images of Truth: Evidence, Expertise and Technologies of Knowledge in the American Courtroom” under the tutelage of Mellon Professor of Humanities Emeritus Michael M.J. Fischer.
Mnookin will begin her appointment as Columbia’s next leader on July 1. The HASTS community extends her the warmest congratulations as she prepares to assume the new post.
Following the successful launch of Contrasts magazine in autumn 2025, the editorial team has announced a call for pitches for Issue 02 on the theme of “fortunes.”
For Issue 02, the team invites submissions that explore the vast and (un)predictable realms of “fortunes.” Whether they’re tucked into cookies, ranked by the dollar on lists of 500, tempted, or chased, fortunes are slippery, contentious things that shape how we choose, desire, imagine, and forge connections with worlds seen and unseen. Fortunes prompt us to critically examine how science and technology shape the ways we sense, influence, predict, and contend with the future.
Pitches are due via this form by 11:59:59 ET on Monday, February 23, 2026. The editors invite submissions from emerging scholars both within academia (from undergrads through early career scholars) and without (including artists and designers).You can read more about the theme, the types of features they welcome, and how to pitch your submission, at contrastsmag.net.
About the magazine:
Contrasts is an online magazine featuring works that can speak to a broad audience about the intersections of science, technology, and society. Through multiple genres—including creative nonfiction, visual essays, and short films—Contrasts aims to foster critical reflection on STEM projects by making visible the politics and social contexts of science, technology, and medicine.
Contrasts is sponsored by the doctoral program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology and Society at MIT and edited by its graduate students.
Fourth-year HASTS PhD candidate Thelma Wang has been awarded a 2025 Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. Based in New York, the private Wenner-Gren Foundation has been funding innovative research in all four sub-fields of anthropology since 1941.
Currently, Wang is completing ethnographic fieldwork for her HASTS project “Seeking Care Elsewhere: Trans Medical Mobility across China and Thailand.”
The HASTS community warmly recognizes Thelma for her receipt of this prestigious grant.
From November 19th to November 23, HASTS anthropologists traveled to New Orleans, LA for the American Anthropological Association’s (AAA) annual meeting. The theme of this year’s conference— Ghosts— encouraged the assembled scholars “to examine the ways that the past haunts the present, and that the material becomes tangible to inflect the everyday.”
PhD candidates Raha Peyravi and Zachary La Rock presented papers at the conference’s flash sessions and moderated panels. Peyravi presented a paper entitled “Real-Time Work: Temporal Care and Control in Public Transit in the City of Chicago” in a flash session on November 21st. Later that day, La Rock presented a paper entitled “Crises of Cure: Ernesto De Martino and the Environmental History of South Italy” on a panel that commemorated and revisited the scholarship of 20th century Italian anthropologist Ernesto De Martino.
Students in attendance appreciated the opportunity to connect with faculty in the MIT Anthropology and STS Programs and the many HASTS alumni who also presented in New Orleans.
On Friday, November 14th, sixth-year PhD candidate Rustam Khan presented a paper on a moderated panel of the 2025 Urban Worlds Colloquium. The graduate-student conference was organized and hosted by the Laboratory for Urban Spatial and Landscape Research (Urban Space Lab) at The New School in New York City.
Rustam’s paper, “Hip Hop, Migrant Youth, and the Struggle for the Streets of Brussels” drew from a chapter-in-progress of his HASTS dissertation. That research explores the intersections of breakdancing, migration, and urban life in postcolonial Belgium from the late 1950s until the present.
Congratulations, Rustam!
Third-year HASTS student Odinaka Kingsley Eze is among thirty-two MIT doctoral students to be selected for the 2025-2026 Health and Life Sciences Fellowship (HEALS). This new, highly competitive award recognizes students whose academic research intervenes in pressing problems across the health and life sciences.
As a HEALS fellow, Aka will work with the Association of Nigerian Physicians in the Americas (ANPA) to build a digital infrastructure for re-engineering global health within and outside Africa. This work builds from his HASTS research on the history of biomedical research and medical expertise in Nigeria and African diasporic spaces.
During the fellowship, Aka will also be part of an interdisciplinary cohort of students from across MIT’s five schools. Together, they will complete targeted mentorship sessions with MIT faculty members and leverage a broad base of Institute alumni and industrial partners to grow their respective professional networks. The fellowship will culminate in an symposium wherein the cohort will present their work to the broader Institute community.
Congratulations, Aka!
This October, the MIT Program in History, Anthropology, and STS (HASTS) launched Contrasts, a magazine of public facing works that intersect science, technology, and society. It is edited and produced by graduate students of the HASTS PhD program.
Contrasts‘s editorial collective includes editors-in-chief Alona Bach, Hina Walajahi, and Gwendolyn Wallace, as well as Thea Appelbaum Licht, Tathagat Bhatia, Danhue Kim, Xinche Zheng, and Boyd Ruamcharoen PhD ’25. The initiative’s faculty advisor is Kate Brown, the Thomas M. Siebel Distinguished Professor in History of Science at MIT.
Oriented around the theme of “portals,” the inaugural issue of the magazine was released on Thursday, October 30th at a celebration that took place in MIT’s Hayden Library. The event featured zine-making, food, and a DJ set curated by Rustam Khan.
To view Contrasts online, readers may visit the magazine’s website at www.contrastsmag.net.
Via the podcast Soonish, technology journalist Wade Roush PhD ’94 has released an interview with David Mindell PhD ’96, Professor of Aerospace Engineering and Dibner Professor of the History of Engineering and Manufacturing at MIT.
In a conversation that took cues from overlapping areas of interest in science, technology, and society (STS), the pair discussed Mindell’s recent book, The New Lunar Society: An Enlightenment Guide to the Next Industrial Revolution. The book was published in February 2025 by MIT Press.