Greetings from the MIT Center for International Studies. In today’s M³ Europe/Eurasia newsletter, we’ve included updates on MIT faculty collaborations with Mongolia and Poland; new partnerships with Germany, France, and Italy; and a scholar from Ukraine.

You are receiving this email because you have research interests in Europe/Eurasia or have been a friend to MISTI or the Center for International Studies (CIS). Please share this newsletter with others in our research community who might be interested in joining. They can sign up for the newsletter here. Do you have questions or news to submit? Contact our Europe/MIT Lead Ekaterina Zabrovski at zabroves@mit.edu.

MIT Global Seed Funds in Europe and Eurasia

Last call for Global Seed Fund applications: Due December 10

The Global Seed Funds (GSF) program helps MIT faculty create new connections with colleagues abroad. Targeted Seed Fund opportunities in Europe/Eurasia are available with Armenia, Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Poland, Slovakia, Spain, and the United Kingdom.

MIT faculty interested in collaborations with other European countries — or the rest of the world — are invited to apply to the General Seed Fund.

Have questions? Get in touch with us.

Bridging anthropology and engineering for clean energy in Mongolia

Anthropologists Manduhai Buyandelger and Lauren Bonilla discuss their experience collaborating with MIT engineers to tackle air pollution in Mongolia. The project, supported by the Global Seed Funds program, has led to the development of a hybrid stove that uses molten salt to reduce emissions from coal burning. Read more here.

Manduhai Buyandelger (far left) and Lauren Bonilla (far right), with MIT students who went to Mongolia with Bonilla in January 2024.

Transforming research through global collaborations

Josephine Carstensen, the Gilbert W. Winslow Career Development Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, generates computational designs for large-scale structures with the intent of designing novel low-carbon solutions. The Global Seed Funds program enabled her research group to leverage their expertise alongside researchers at TUDelft (Netherlands) who are experts in the physical casting and fabrication of glass structures. “Both the Delft and MIT teams bring highly different essential expertise that has been necessary for the successful project outcome. It has been fruitful in ways we couldn’t have imagined within our lab at MIT,” she explains. Read more here.

A new publication from the MIT-Poland seed fund

Congratulations to Svetlana Boriskina, principal research scientist in the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE), and her team on their recently published paper in Advanced Optical Materials.

The paper, titled “Synergistic Effects of Defects and Strain on Photoluminescence in Van der Waals Layered Crystal AgScP2S6,” is the result of a collaboration between the MIT-META Lab, MIT.nano, MIT Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, and the Institute of Physics in Warsaw, supported by the MIT-Poland Lockheed Martin Seed Fund.

New seed funds with Italy

In the 2024–25 academic year, the MIT-Italy program is inviting MIT faculty to apply for new seed funds:

The “Links Foundation and Politecnico di Torino” seed fund supports collaborations in the fields of computer science, electronics and telecommunications
The “UniCattolica “seed fund supports collaborations in sciences and humanities with the Universita’ Cattolica Del Sacro Cuore di Milano
The FVG seed fund supports collaborations with Scuola Internazionale superiore di studi avanzati-Trieste (SISSA) Universita’ of Trieste and Universita’ di Udine

Video: Engineering plastic-eating microbes in Spain

Nicole Harris, Biological Engineering ’24, a Climate and Sustainability Impact Area student, interned at the Center for Biological Research (CIB-CSIC) this past summer in Madrid, where she worked on plastic-eating microbes.

Hear more about her MISTI experience in Spain before starting her PhD this fall.

Video: Engineering plastic-eating microbes in Spain

Internship in Denmark turned into a permanent adventure

MIT graduate Dahlia Dry (Physics, EECS ’23) came to Denmark to do an internship at the high-tech startup TEGnology. Today, she has a permanent job and what she describes as a fulfilling everyday life in Demark. Read more here.

Video: MIT data science and machine learning internship in Lithuania

MIT student Inna Voloshchuk (EECS ’27) interned at Euromonitor International in Vilnius, Lithuania, through the MIT-Eurasia program. She trained two models to predict product attributes and worked on data cleaning and analysis to understand the models' behavior. Watch a video about her experience here.

Other featured activities

A new scholar from Ukraine at MIT

This fall, the MIT-Ukraine program welcomed a new Global MIT At-Risk Fellow (GMAF), Dr. Nataliia Fihurka, to MIT. Her research focuses on synthetic and natural hydrogels, as well as the synthesis of functionalized polymers and nanoparticles.

In addition to her scientific research, Dr. Fihurka and her colleagues at Lviv Polytech have been volunteering to produce hydrogel dressings for Ukraine’s Armed Forces. With the help of several charitable organizations, her team has sent over 200,000 medical products to military and civilian hospitals, as well as to military brigades to supplement soldiers’ first aid kits. Contact Dr. Nataliia Fihurka here.

University of Regensburg and MIT-Germany renew partnership

The MIT-Germany program and the University of Regensburg (UR) in Bavaria, Germany, have signed a five-year renewal of their partnership, which began in 2013. This dynamic partnership includes MIT student research internships, Global Teaching Labs, Seed Funds, faculty workshops, and more. With the support of the Bavarian government, UR recently established an ambitious new Faculty of Informatics and Data Science (FIDS). In October, UR leadership visited MIT for a workshop to exchange ideas with MIT leaders, faculty, and administrators across campus.

New student internship opportunities from MIT-France

This academic year, the MIT-France program is offering new internship opportunities in Sophia Antipolis at the National Institute for Research in Digital Science and Technology (INRIA), University of Côte d'Azur, and companies such as Amadeus, Ansys, Capgemini, NXP, SAP, ST, and Symphony. Located in the heart of the French Riviera, the technology park Sophia Antipolis is home to over 2,500 companies and 43,000 professionals spread across 6,000 acres. For more information on how students can apply, go to the MIT-France home page.

Video: MIT-UK AI safety event

The MIT-UK program and CSAIL collaborated with the UK government’s Global Talent Network to host a panel featuring policymakers, academics, and businesses involved in AI safety. Watch the video here.

Roots of resilience: Ukraine exhibition

The exhibition at MIT, “Roots of Resilience: Reclaiming Ukrainian City and Identity,” showcased the story of Sviatohirsk, a small city in the eastern part of Ukraine, that was heavily damaged and occupied by Russian forces from June to September 2022. Watch the video here.

Upcoming events

Debriefing COP29

Join MIT delegates from this and previous United Nations Climate Change Conferences (COP) as they discuss observations, insights, and avenues for future involvement in the UN climate initiatives.

December 4

12:00–1:30 PM

Bush Room, 10-105

RSVP here

Writing feminist prose in the South Caucasus

The MIT-Eurasia program invites you to a talk by the MIT-Armenia Seed Fund recipients on the ongoing research in the life and work of Armenian female writer Yekaterina Bahaturian (1870–1944). The talk will reflect on how women writers positioned themselves and their writing within the broader context of social revolutions and wars that shaped the twentieth century.

December 9, 12-1:30 PM

Building E51, Room 272

More information here.