Gratitude to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty.

Thank you for inventing the World Wide Web and then spending your MIT years fighting to give people back ownership of their own data. That fight is ours too.

Thank you for data abstraction and the substitution principle every one of us leans on daily. A Turing Award earned by making software honest about what it promises.

Thank you for the R in RSA and a lifetime spent making privacy something math can defend. Consent-first computing stands on foundations you laid.

Thank you for turning machine learning toward earlier cancer detection and drug discovery, and for showing that AI is at its best when it is quietly working to keep people well.

Thank you for imagining robots that work alongside people rather than replace them, and for leading CSAIL with a scientist's rigor and a builder's optimism.

Thank you for asymptotic freedom and a Nobel that helped us see how the strong force holds matter together, and for writing about physics with a poet's sense of wonder.

Thank you for cooling atoms to a hair above absolute zero and letting us watch a Bose-Einstein condensate come to life. A Nobel earned by chasing nature to its quietest edge.

Thank you for helping hear the collision of black holes a billion light-years away, and for leading the School of Science while widening the door you walked through.

Thank you for discovering that a magic twist angle in graphene can switch on superconductivity, opening a whole new field. Curiosity, rewarded at the atomic scale.

Thank you for finding the deep geometry hidden inside hard analysis problems, and for teaching mathematics as an act of patient, honest imagination.

Thank you for illuminating how waves evolve and disperse, and for a life story, from a small Italian farm to the National Academy, that tells students the door is open.

Thank you for learning to make quantum dots so precisely they now light our screens and guide surgeons. A Nobel earned by mastering the chemistry of very small, very bright things.

Thank you for the Buchwald-Hartwig chemistry that lets chemists build molecules once thought out of reach, quietly speeding the medicines the world depends on.

Thank you for uncovering the genes that govern programmed cell death, a discovery in a tiny worm that reaches all the way to human disease. Patience with nature, richly repaid.

Thank you for turning CRISPR into a tool that edits human cells and now treats disease, and for building it in the open so the whole field could move faster.

Thank you for mapping the basal ganglia and how habits take hold in the brain, work that reaches into Parkinson's, addiction, and the everyday shape of our days.

Thank you for finding the specialized regions with which the human brain recognizes faces and places, and for teaching the science of the mind so openly to the world.

Thank you for optogenetics and expansion microscopy, tools that let us switch neurons on with light and see the brain in astonishing detail. New senses, given to all of neuroscience.

Thank you for discovering RNA splicing and rewriting how we understand our own genes, and for a generosity of mentorship that shaped generations of MIT biologists.

Thank you for inventing controlled drug delivery and the tissue-engineering ideas behind treatments that reach millions. Proof that great engineering is deeply humane.

Thank you for learning from geckos and cheetahs to build robots that climb and run, and for the craft of watching nature closely before daring to imitate it.

Thank you for pioneering the study of exoplanet atmospheres and the search for signs of life beyond Earth, and for asking, without embarrassment, whether we are alone.

Thank you for tangible bits and radical atoms, the vision of computing you can hold in your hands, and for insisting that technology should honor the richness of the physical world.

Thank you for founding affective computing and building wearables that read emotion to protect health, always with the person's dignity and privacy held first.

Head of the Biomechatronics group, whose bionic limbs give people back the ability to walk, run, and dance, drawing on his own life to reimagine what a body can do. Thank you for engineering dignity and freedom of movement.

A pioneer of social robotics and a champion of AI literacy for everyone, working to make people, especially young people, confident and thoughtful with technology. Thank you for making machines more humane and humans more capable.

As MIT's 18th president she rallies the whole Institute to go big on the hardest problems, from climate to manufacturing to AI, and calls curiosity our intellectual rocket fuel. Thank you for leading with heart and ambition.

As Provost since 2025 he stewards MIT's academic mission and budget while remaining a pioneer of energy-efficient computing. Thank you for building bridges across every school and lab.

Leading MIT Sloan since 2025, he brings a scholar's care for labor, ethics, and global supply chains to how the next generation of managers is formed. Thank you for keeping people at the center of business.

A 2024 Nobel laureate who studies how institutions and technology shape who shares in prosperity, and asks how progress can lift everyone. Thank you for insisting that the gains of innovation be widely held.

A 1997 Nobel laureate whose work on valuing derivatives and managing risk became foundational to modern finance, and who keeps working to make retirement more secure. Thank you for the mathematics that steadies people's futures.

Director of the Laboratory for Financial Engineering, whose adaptive-markets ideas and work on funding cures apply finance to human problems like curing disease. Thank you for pointing the tools of finance at what matters most.

A philosopher of logic and language now leading SHASS, he champions the humanities as essential to a technical education and sparks unexpected collaborations across MIT. Thank you for defending a fuller view of what people are.

A 2024 Nobel laureate whose work on why nations fail shows that good institutions, democracy, and broadly shared technology are what make prosperity last. Thank you for asking who progress is really for.

A 2019 Nobel laureate and J-PAL co-founder who turned the fight against global poverty into rigorous, testable science that has reached hundreds of millions of people. Thank you for treating the poor as partners in real evidence.

A 2019 Nobel laureate and J-PAL co-founder whose experimental approach reshaped how the world designs anti-poverty policy from the ground up. Thank you for the patience to measure what actually helps.

A 2021 Nobel laureate whose natural-experiment methods let economists draw honest causal lessons from real-world data, especially about schools and work. Thank you for making empirical truth-seeking more rigorous.

A leading syntactician and beloved former department head who has spent a career revealing the hidden structure shared by all human languages, even music. Thank you for teaching us to hear the grammar underneath everything.

A philosopher who links metaphysics and epistemology to real questions of justice, and who has worked tirelessly to open her field to more voices. Thank you for showing that careful thought and social conscience belong together.

Director of the Security Studies Program and a leading voice on grand strategy and restraint, teaching generations to think hard and soberly about war and peace. Thank you for prizing prudence over bravado.

A historian whose book Ebony and Ivy revealed the ties between America's oldest universities and slavery, prompting an honest reckoning across higher education. Thank you for the courage to tell institutions the truth about themselves.

A scholar of Renaissance writing and travel narratives, longtime head of Literature and recent Chair of the MIT Faculty who gives students the gift of deep reading. Thank you for keeping the human story at the heart of a technical world.

A 2010 Nobel laureate whose work on markets with search frictions and on Social Security shaped how societies design pensions and safety nets. Thank you for a lifetime spent making retirement more secure.

A 2016 Nobel laureate whose contract theory explains how to align incentives fairly between people, firms, and institutions. Thank you for clarifying how trust and reward can be designed well.

The founder of modern linguistics, whose theory of universal grammar reframed how we understand the human mind, and whose decades of public conscience never let up. Thank you for a lifetime of fearless thinking.