Thursday, July 16th, 2020

Time	Event
9:30a	MIT-BU law clinics help students bring innovations into the world In 2015, the first of two MIT-Boston University law clinics was formed to provide free legal services to student innovators while giving law students experience working on technology-related legal matters. Several metrics could be used to measure the clinics’ success since then: More than 750 student teams have received support through the program over the course of its lifetime. Those interactions have led to about 50,000 hours of client work performed by BU law students, accounting for around $17.5 million worth of legal services to students from both campuses. The extent to which the clinics have become ingrained into each schools’ operations also underscores their success. In last year’s MIT delta v summer accelerator, two-thirds of the teams benefited from the clinics’ support. On BU’s side, 44 law students worked in the clinics during the last school year and over the summer, accounting for almost one-sixth of the entire law class. The numbers show the importance students place on being on sound legal footing as they bring a disruptive startup or revelatory research paper out into the world. The numbers also made the two schools’ recent decision to renew the clinics’ operations for five more years an easy one. “For a startup or an academic researcher, it’s not knowing [about potential issues] that can be the most paralyzing thing,” says Andy Sellars, a member of BU Law’s faculty who directs the Technology Law Clinic. “What we can give them is the map. We can say here are the legal issues, here’s where the law is pretty settled, here’s where the law is unsettled, here are some things to do to mitigate your risk. And by doing all that we can add some extra confidence and energy to the venture or research project.” Coming into form MIT and BU’s collaboration began in September of 2015, with the launch of the Startup Law Clinic as part of a new Entrepreneurship, Intellectual Property, and Cyberlaw program at BU. A year later, as planned, the Technology Law Clinic was formed. The Startup Law Clinic helps student entrepreneurs navigate issues associated with launching a venture, like establishing a corporation or LLC, securing intellectual property, and hiring employees. The Technology Law Clinic, whose client base includes researchers as well as entrepreneurs, helps ensure students’ work aligns with laws around data collection, privacy, information disclosure, encryption, and more. At the time of their founding, both clinics consisted of a supervising lawyer and eight student advocates. “What we realized pretty much immediately was that wasn’t going to do it — we needed to grow,” Sellars says. “And the major story of the last four years has been figuring out what the needs are and growing to meet those needs.” Today each clinic includes three licensed attorneys, although BU’s law students do most of the work advising and representing clients. The clinics held regular office hours at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, the Media Lab, MIT Sandbox, and elsewhere to expand access to clinic services; they have since shifted to virtual office hours due to the Covid-19 pandemic. BU’s law students also write white papers on specific legal areas and conduct presentations at locations around MIT to reach a broader audience. “Our goal is to educate our law students to do the work and maintain the client relationships, although we’re there supervising,” says James Wheaton, who directs the Startup Law Clinic. Since 2017, the collaboration has been bolstered by the Matthew Z. Gomes Fellowships, a program at BU Law that supports students from underrepresented communities in order to foster greater diversity among the next generation of technology and startup lawyers. Four of the seven fellows working for the clinics this summer are Gomes Fellows.  “The tech sector has known this about itself for some time: We have a major diversity problem in all corners of tech, including among the lawyers who represent tech companies,” Sellars says. “We wanted to think of some ways to improve diversity in technology by improving the pipeline.” Legal support for impact In 2014, MIT anthropology PhD candidate Amy Johnson filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act with the CIA, seeking information about the organization’s Twitter account. When the CIA failed to produce any documents, Johnson worked with the Technology Law Clinic to file a lawsuit against the agency, which then sent her 30 documents related to her request. Johnson and her legal team decided that wasn’t enough, and following several more rounds of litigation, she has received around 400 records. That case is ongoing and Johnson is still seeking more documents. “We really kicked in the door by suing the CIA our first year,” Sellars says. The CIA case is one of several high-profile projects the law clinics have been involved with. The Technology Law Clinic also advised MIT researchers who were publishing a study revealing bias in multiple company’s facial-analysis programs. The clinic helped the students ensure the study complied with computer access laws and share the results with the companies in advance of the paper’s publication.   More recently, the clinic helped researchers in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory as they published technical papers that exposed security vulnerabilities in a mobile voting application that had been used in the 2018 midterm elections. The vulnerability gave hackers the opportunity to alter, stop, or expose how users voted. “A popular area we work in is computer science, both because of the huge population of CS students at MIT, and also because a lot of advanced computer science research can feel like the sort of ‘hacking’ that is prohibited by laws like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act,” Sellars says. “So often we’re helping clients stay on the right side of ‘anti-hacking’ laws. Then there are a lot of data related questions … [dealing with] data privacy, access to data, use of data, and web scraping, which is writing a script that systematically gathers info across the web.” Even as the field of computer science accounts for a large portion of the clinics’ work, students from across MIT’s campus have benefited from the clinics’ support, something people familiar with MIT’s innovation ecosystem expected from the start. “I’m not surprised at all that the clinics have supported students from all five of MIT’s schools,” says Michael Cima, MIT’s associate dean for innovation, who also serves on the board of the clinics. “Student-led startups, in particular, are very diverse in their makeup. These include not only for-profit oriented businesses but also sustainable non-profits.” A bright future The disruptions caused by Covid-19 have forced everyone to adjust to remote work, but they haven’t slowed the number of innovations coming out of MIT, or the law clinics’ work in support of those innovations. In fact, April 2020 was the busiest month in the clinics’ history, and they’ve continued to see a dramatic increase in work as students pursue ideas to help with the pandemic. Now that the clinics have been renewed for five more years, its directors are brainstorming ways to further expand their services. The pandemic has shown the clinics can work even if members can’t meet their clients in person, and has reinforced the idea that technology can help scale operations. “We know no matter how big we grow, the program will never fully meet the needs of the MIT student body, and because of that we’re trying to think of more ways to have an impact, even if you’re not a client,” Sellars says, noting the clinics have started work on guides and “how to” documents for students that will be offered on the clinics’ websites. Regardless of where the clinics go from here, it’s clear they’ve already blossomed into an integral part of MIT’s innovation ecosystem, which bodes well for the Institute’s next generation of innovators. “The clinics have been successful teaching and learning labs for both MIT and BU students, and have helped our students advance their passion for innovation and entrepreneurship,” says Mark DiVincenzo, vice president and general counsel at MIT. “The issues have been varied, cutting edge in many ways, allowing BU students to assist MIT students in projects that are or will impact the world.” (Comment on this)
3:35p	Researchers develop new materials for energy and sensing A team of researchers from MIT and Northwestern University has demonstrated the ability to fine-tune the electronic properties of hybrid perovskite materials, which have drawn enormous interest as potential next-generation optoelectronic materials for devices such as solar cells and light sources. The materials are classified as “hybrid” because they contain inorganic components like metals, as well as organic molecules with elements like carbon and nitrogen, organized into nanoscale layers. In a paper published online this week in Nature Chemistry, the researchers showed that by strategically varying the composition of the organic layers, they could tune the color of light absorbed by the perovskite and also the wavelength at which the material emitted light. Importantly, they accomplished this without substantially changing the inorganic component. “Until now, most experimental and theoretical evidence indicated that the organic layers simply act as inert spacers whose only role is to separate the electronically active inorganic layers,” says Will Tisdale, the ARCO Career Development Professor in Energy Studies at MIT and co-corresponding author on the paper. “These new results show that we can teach the organic layer to do much more.” “Our laboratory has been interested in the design of novel hybrid materials that combine inorganic and organic components in order to create synergistic properties, and this is precisely what we have done in this work on the exciting energy materials known as perovskites,” says Samuel Stupp, Board of Trustees Professor of Chemistry, Materials Science and Engineering, Medicine, and Biomedical Engineering at Northwestern and co-corresponding author on the paper. Perovskites, first discovered as naturally occurring minerals in the Ural Mountains almost 200 years ago, have been investigated vigorously in the past decade after it was determined that they could turn light into usable electricity. These materials are considered a possible key to a sustainable energy future because they are less expensive to manufacture than the popular silicon-based solar cells, and can convert light to electricity nearly as efficiently. However, perovskite solar cells are far less durable and stable in outdoor conditions due to their sensitivity to heat and moisture. Scientists have recently found that splitting the traditional 3D structure of perovskites into many thin layers — ranging from a few atoms thick to dozens of atoms thick — improves stability and performance. In layered perovskites, the inorganic layer absorbs light and produces the charges that eventually are needed to produce electrical energy. The organic layers typically are insulating and act like giant walls preventing the light-generated charges from moving out of the inorganic layer. “This collaboration has been exciting because the materials that the Stupp group sent to us from Northwestern were exactly in line with the questions we were asking at MIT, about how excitons in the inorganic layers of the perovskite could be influenced by the properties of the organic layers,” says Katie Mauck, a former postdoc in the Tisdale group and now an assistant professor of chemistry at Kenyon College. Along with James Passarelli, a graduate student in the Stupp group, she is a co-first author of the paper. “James’ modular approach to the perovskite synthesis enabled us to controllably tune the interaction between these layers and study the effects on exciton dynamics in depth, through spectroscopy in the Tisdale lab.” “When light is absorbed by semiconductors such as perovskites, electrons with their negative charge acquire energy and move away,” Stupp says. “This sets up an attractive force with the positively charged sites they leave behind, since matter wants to be neutral. We were able to control the magnitude of this force by incorporating specific types of molecules within the organic layers, which in turn modifies their interesting properties.” The Northwestern-MIT collaboration began after a chance encounter between Mauck and a Stupp lab member at a scientific conference in summer 2018. The Stupp laboratory had previously performed pioneering work on the synthesis of inorganic-organic hybrid materials for potential applications in energy and medicine, while the Tisdale group specializes in using lasers to probe the properties of nanomaterials. These interests overlapped perfectly for this project, as the Stupp group developed the hybrid perovskite structures and the Tisdale group performed the precise spectroscopic measurements necessary to confirm the interactions within the systems. In the future, the ability to fine-tune the electronic properties of these materials could be applied to various optical or electronic sensors — including molecular sensors that take advantage of the presence of organic layers — as well as solar cells and light detectors. “In addition to a pathway toward improved optoelectronic devices, this work underscores some of the unique advantages of nanoscale semiconductors, which are more sensitive to their surrounding environment than bulk materials,” Tisdale says. “The lessons we’ve learned in the context of hybrid layered perovskites can be extended to many other emerging materials.” This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences and the Center for Bio-Inspired Energy Science, an Energy Frontiers Research Center. (Comment on this)

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