The email arrives, as they often do, with a quiet gravity. Deblina Sarkar, leading her Nano-Cybernetic Biotrek group at the MIT Media Lab, reads the words of a father pleading for his daughter. The ten-year-old has a devastating brain cancer, resistant to all standard treatments. He has found Sarkar’s research online, her work on nanoscale devices that could navigate the bloodstream to deliver targeted electrical therapy to diseased tissue. He is asking for hope. For Sarkar, an associate professor of media arts and sciences, these messages are a heartbreaking refrain. They are also, she says, the core motivation for her work. This drive to heal, to make revolutionary care accessible, encapsulates a pivotal spirit as the MIT Media Lab marks its 40th anniversary. It is a spirit of optimistic, humane invention now steering the lab—and by extension, the broader conversation—into an era defined by artificial intelligence.
Sarkar’s journey mirrors the lab’s cross-disciplinary ethos. Trained as a physicist and electrical engineer, she once chased ever-smaller, more efficient transistors. She realized the most efficient computer was the human brain, running on the power of a dim bulb. Modern silicon consumes a million times more for comparable tasks. This insight, coupled with the stark lack of treatments for brain diseases, pivoted her focus. For over seven years, her team has developed what she calls circulatronics. These are electronic devices fabricated at the nanoscale, bonded to living cells like monocytes—immune cells that naturally travel to sites of inflammation. These hybrid entities can ride the bloodstream, cross the blood-brain barrier without damage, and implant at precise locations. Once there, an external transmitter beams near-infrared light through tissue to wirelessly power the devices, allowing them to stimulate neurons. In collaboration with the Mayo Clinic, this approach has halted tumor growth in mice where standard treatments failed. As reported by the MIT Media Lab, the goal is to replace invasive, costly brain surgery with a scalable, accessible platform. Clinical trials could begin within three years. “I envision a future,” Sarkar says, “where human beings will not be slaves of their biological limitations.”
This work arrives at an inflection point, not just for the lab but for technology itself. AI is reshaping every domain the lab touches, from medicine and psychology to art and ethics. As the institution begins its fifth decade, new leadership is guiding its response. Following a global search after Joi Ito’s 2019 departure, Dava Newman, former NASA deputy administrator, served as director and initiated a restructuring. The lab now operates with dual leadership: a faculty director for research and an executive director for vision and operations. In July 2025, composer and inventor Tod Machover, a lab faculty member since the 1980s, stepped into the faculty director role. This past September, Jessica Rosenworcel, former chair of the Federal Communications Commission, became executive director. Rosenworcel’s FCC tenure showed her how deployed technology shapes public life, for good and ill. At the Media Lab, she sees a chance to steer it positively from its inception. “This is a place invested in the idea that if technology is changing, we should wrestle with it and figure out what good we can do for humanity,” she says.
| Leadership | Role | Background |
|---|---|---|
| Dava Newman | Director | Former NASA deputy administrator |
| Tod Machover | Faculty Director | Composer and lab faculty member since the 1980s |
| Jessica Rosenworcel | Executive Director | Former chair of the FCC |
Their partnership reflects the lab’s enduring thesis, established by founders Nicholas Negroponte and Jerome Wiesner in 1985. They believed computers would become creative, communicative tools that democratized innovation. This philosophy propelled early breakthroughs like Seymour Papert’s Logo programming language for children, Mitch Resnick’s ubiquitous Scratch platform, and Neil Gershenfeld’s global fab lab network. The ethos was consistent, as noted in analyses by outlets like Wired: powerful tools should reach everyone. Today, AI presents the ultimate test of that principle. “Nothing compares to what’s happened in these last few years,” Machover observes. He argues that much contemporary AI development actually shuts people out, relying on opaque, centralized systems that don’t leverage human individuality. “What’s the future of being a human being? That’s the question everybody here is asking.”
For new faculty member Pat Pataranutaporn, that question is literal. He runs the Cyborg Psychology group, exploring the human psyche as technology blends with our lives. What happens to agency when machines answer any question? What becomes of curiosity with instant search? He believes current AI benchmarks focus too narrowly on productivity, missing the holistic goal of human flourishing. A model might solve a calculus problem while eroding the student’s own ability. A chatbot might pass safety checks yet fail someone in crisis. With his mentor Pattie Maes, he co-launched the Advancing Humans with AI initiative. They develop new benchmarks measuring AI’s impact on agency, curiosity, mental health, and purpose. This research has already influenced policy, including California legislation on companion chatbots. Pataranutaporn also uses generative AI for cultural preservation, creating virtual avatars that perform Thai classical dance. “How we shape technology really matters,” he says. “We should not let the technology take the wheel.”
Media Lab doctoral candidate Raechel Walker addresses who is doing the shaping. In her undergraduate data science classes, she was often the only woman, the only Black student. She saw how this lack of diversity directly led to AI harm, like systems failing on darker skin or non-native English speakers. Her work in Cynthia Breazeal’s Personal Robots group focuses on liberatory computing. She creates curricula that teach young people from underrepresented communities to use data and AI as tools for civic action. In her Data Activism Program, high school students partner with organizations like the Algorithmic Justice League, founded by Media Lab alum Joy Buolamwini. One project had students investigate surveillance in their own schools. They studied historical context, conducted interviews, analyzed data, and produced a report used to advocate for changes in student data collection. Walker’s latest research emphasizes reflexivity—the need for developers to interrogate their own assumptions before deploying community-facing AI. “People should be more aware of how history is contributing to some of these harms that AI is amplifying,” she states. She recently contributed to an AHA workshop with researchers from Stanford, Oxford, and companies like OpenAI, concluding that benchmarks for human flourishing cannot be set by a small elite. They must be community-driven.
This commitment to openness and dissemination is what Machover believes has sustained the lab for 40 years, unlike the finite bursts of creativity at places like Bell Labs or Xerox PARC. The lab’s disposition is to find a powerful idea, demonstrate it compellingly, and give it away. Scratch is free. Fab labs spread globally because Gershenfeld willed it. The lab attracts those who, like Sarkar, are “misfits” elsewhere, whose passions force them across disciplinary walls. Master’s students often arrive with multiple, seemingly disconnected interests. “We look at our master’s program as a place for students to find out who they really are and what they really care about,” Machover says.
- Deblina Sarkar’s focus on healing
- Development of circulatronics
- Cross-disciplinary ethos at MIT Media Lab
- Impact of AI on various fields
- Advancing Humans with AI initiative
- Raechel Walker’s work in liberatory computing
Looking ahead, the convergence is clear. Sarkar’s circulatronics platform is a path toward ultra-low-power, in-body AI that could diagnose and treat autonomously. Pataranutaporn’s psychology work ensures such intimacy enhances rather than diminishes our humanity. Walker’s activism demands the process is equitable from the start. They are all, in Rosenworcel’s words, “responsible optimists.” In a world where technology can feel like a force that limits agency and privacy, the lab’s response is to engage, to wrestle, and to redirect. Sarkar still thinks of that father and his daughter. She anticipates the next email, and the billions living with neurological disease. Her vision, and the lab’s, is of a future where technology meets our deepest biological challenges not with cold automation, but with accessible, intelligent grace. The next forty years have already begun.
