Professor Masic’s research focuses on the science-enabled engineering of sustainable construction materials for large-scale infrastructure innovation. A chemist by training, with expertise in biomineralization, he specializes in the development of multifunctional cement-based materials, ranging from self-healing concrete materials to carbon absorbing concretes and electron conducting cement-based materials. He is a principal investigator in the Concrete Sustainability Hub at MIT, a faculty fellow in Archaeological Materials at MIT’s Center for Materials Research in Archaeology and Ethnology (CMRAE), and the faculty director of the Refugee ACTion Hub (ReACT) at MIT. MIT ReACT aims at providing new professional content development for displaced learners around the world. Visit react.mit.edu to learn more.

Professor Ulm’s research interests are in the mechanics and structures of materials. His research group is looking at the nano- and micro mechanics of porous materials, such as concrete, rocks and bones; in the durability mechanics of engineering materials and structures; in computational mechanics; and in the bio-chemo-poromechanics of high-performance composite materials.

Hessam AzariJafari, PhD, is Deputy Director of the Concrete Sustainability Hub (CSHub) at MIT. His background is in industrial ecology and its application to construction management and engineering. As a principal investigator and researcher, AzariJafari has led various projects related to the life cycle sustainability assessment and the nexus of pavements, buildings, and vehicles. He is a voting and advisory member of several technical committees on sustainable construction and environmental assessment, including the FHWA Sustainable Pavement Working Group, NIST Consortium for Low Carbon Cement and Concrete, ACI 323 – Low-Carbon Concrete Code, and ACI 130 – Sustainability in Concrete. AzariJafari has been chairing the ACI eco-concrete competition since 2017, which aims to promote and educate undergraduate civil engineering students on life cycle sustainability. He received his PhD from the University of Sherbrooke in Canada in 2018.

Professor Yang Shao-Horn studies materials for electrochemical and photoelectrochemical energy storage and conversion. Her research exploits physical and materials chemistries to understand and control the kinetics and dynamics for storing electrons, critical to enable clean energy and mitigate climate change. She develops universal design principles of materials to enhance functions in a number of applications, from sustainable chemicals and fuels to rechargeable lithium-ion and lithium-air batteries. She received a BS in metallurgical and materials engineering from Beijing University of Technology in 1992 and a PhD in the same discipline from Michigan Technological University in 1998. Before coming to MIT in 2002, she was a staff scientist at the Eveready Battery Company in Westlake, Ohio, where she researched materials for various types of batteries. She later received a National Science Foundation International Research Fellowship to work with Claude Delmas at the Institute of Condensed Matter Chemistry in Bordeaux, France. Outside of her professorial duties, she serves as senior editor for accounts of Materials Research of the American Chemical Society and on advisory and editorial boards for several leading journals.

Dr. James C. Weaver runs the Wide-Field Electron Optics Laboratory and leads the Biologically Inspired Materials and Design Group. He received his Bachelor’s degree in Aquatic Biology and Ph.D. in Marine Science from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and went on to pursue postdoctoral studies in Molecular Biology, Chemical Engineering, Physics, and Earth History. Working at the interface between zoology, materials science, biomedical engineering, and multi-material 3D printing, his main research interests focus on investigating structure – function relationships in hierarchically ordered biological composites and the advanced fabrication of their synthetic analogues. He has played critical roles in the development of new model systems for the study of a wide range of biomineralization processes, is an internationally recognized and award-winning scanning electron microscopist, and for ten years, has led all additive manufacturing-related research efforts on commercial 3D printers within the greater Harvard community. With a strong history of national and international academic and industrial collaborations, he has coauthored more than 150 journal articles in the biological, physical, and geological sciences. His work has been featured on the covers of more than 40 scientific journals and he has contributed to numerous collaborative art installations, which have been exhibited in Berlin, Boston, Frankfurt, London, New York, Paris, and San Francisco.

Dr. Damian Stefaniuk serves as a Research Scientist at the MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub. He earned his Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from the University of Wroclaw in 2018, where he also served as an Assistant Professor between 2019 and 2022. At the University of Houston, he served as a Postdoctoral Fellow, Lecturer, and Research Associate.

Andrew Laurent is the Communications Director of the MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub, where he advocates for life cycle thinking as a key part of the sustainability solution. His work has been published in outlets such as The Hill and the World Economic Forum.