How can you use science to build a better gingerbread house?
This was something Miranda Schwak spent a lot of time thinking about. A graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE) is part of the Kitchen mattersa group of graduate students who use food and kitchen tools to explain scientific concepts through short videos and awareness events. Past topics have included why chocolate is “stiff” or difficult to handle when melting (burn: water ingress), and how to make isomalt, the cup of sugar that actors jump through in action movies.
Two years ago, when the group was making a video How to build a structurally sound gingerbread houseSchwak searched cookbooks for a variable that would produce the most dramatic difference in the cookies.
“I was reading about what determines the texture of cookies, and then I tried several recipes in my kitchen until I came up with two gingerbread recipes that pleased me,” Shawaki says.
It focused on butter, which contains water that turns into steam at high baking temperatures, creating air pockets in the biscuits. Schwak predicted that reducing the amount of butter would result in denser gingerbread, sturdy enough to hold together like a house.
“This hypothesis is an example of how changing the structure affects the properties and performance of a material,” Schvak said in an eight-minute video.
The same curiosity about the properties and performance of materials is what led her to research the rising energy costs of computing, especially for artificial intelligence. Schwacke develops new materials and devices for neural computing, which mimics the brain by processing and storing information in the same place. She studies electrochemical ionic synapses — small devices that can be “tuned” to adjust conductivity, much like strengthening neurons or weakening connections in the brain.
“If you look at artificial intelligence in particular — to train these really big models — that consumes a lot of energy,” Shawaki says. “And if you compare that to the amount of energy we consume as humans when we learn things, the brain consumes a lot less energy.” “And that’s what led to this idea of finding more brain-inspired, energy-efficient ways to do AI.”
Her advisor, Bilge Yildiz, emphasizes this point: One reason the brain is efficient is that data doesn’t need to be transferred back and forth.
“In the brain, the connections between our neurons, called synapses, are where we process information. Signal transmission is there. It is also processed, programmed and stored in the same place,” says Yildiz, the Brain Kerr (1951) Professor in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering and DMSE. Schwacke devices aim to replicate this efficiency.
Scientific roots
The daughter of a marine biologist mother and an electrical engineer father, Shawak was immersed in science from a young age. Science has “always been part of the way I understand the world.”
“I was obsessed with dinosaurs,” she says. “I wanted to be a paleontologist when I grew up.” But her interests expanded. At her middle school in Charleston, South Carolina, she joined the FIRST Lego League robotics competition, where she built robots to complete tasks such as pushing or pulling objects. “My parents, and Dad in particular, were very involved in the school team and helped us design and build our own little robot for the competition.”
Meanwhile, her mother studied how dolphin populations were affected by pollution for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. This had a lasting impact.
“It was an example of how we can use science to understand the world, and also to figure out how we can improve the world,” Schwak says. “That’s what I always wanted to do with science.”
Her interest in materials science came later, in her high school magnet program. There, I was introduced to the interdisciplinary subject, a combination of physics, chemistry and engineering that studies the structure and properties of materials and uses that knowledge to design new materials.
“I’ve always liked that it starts from this very basic science, where we study how atoms are arranged, all the way down to these solid materials that we interact with in our daily lives — and how that gives them their properties that we can see and play with,” Schwak says.
During her graduate studies, she participated in a research program with a thesis project on dye-sensitized solar cells, a low-cost, lightweight solar technology that uses dye molecules to absorb light and generate electricity.
“What motivated me was understanding how we go from light to energy we can use, and also seeing how this could help us get more from renewable energy sources,” Shawake says.
After high school, I headed across the country to Caltech. “I wanted to try somewhere completely new,” she says, studying materials science, including nanostructured materials that are thousands of times thinner than a human hair. She focused on the properties of materials and their microstructure—the fine internal structure that governs the behavior of materials—which led her to electrochemical systems such as batteries and fuel cells.
Artificial Intelligence Energy Challenge
At MIT, she continued to explore energy technologies. She met Yildiz during a Zoom meeting in her first year of graduate school, in the fall of 2020, when the campus was still operating under strict Covid-19 protocols. Yildiz’s lab studies how charged atoms or ions move through materials in technologies such as fuel cells, batteries, and electrolyzers.
The lab’s research into brain-inspired computing fired Şawaki’s imagination, but she was equally drawn to Yıldız’s way of talking about science.
“It wasn’t based on jargon, and emphasized a very basic understanding of what’s going on — that ions go here, electrons go here — to basically understand what’s going on in the system,” Schwak says.
This mentality shaped her approach to research. Her early projects focused on the properties these devices need to work well — fast operation, low power use, and compatibility with semiconductor technology — and on using magnesium ions instead of hydrogen, which can leak into the environment and make the devices unstable.
Her current project, the focus of her doctoral thesis, focuses on understanding how to change its electrical resistance by introducing magnesium ions into tungsten oxide, a metallic oxide whose electrical properties can be finely tuned. In these devices, tungsten oxide acts as a channel layer, where resistance controls signal strength, just as synapses regulate signals in the brain.
“I’m trying to understand exactly how these devices change the conductivity of the channel,” Schwak says.
Shawaki’s research has been recognized with a MathWorks Fellowship from the College of Engineering in 2023 and 2024. This fellowship supports graduate students who make use of tools such as MATLAB or Simulink in their work; Schwacke applied MATLAB to analyze and visualize important data.
Yildiz describes Şawaki’s research as a new step towards solving one of the biggest challenges facing artificial intelligence.
“This is the electrochemistry of brain-inspired computing,” Yildiz says. “It’s a new context for electrochemistry, but it also has an energy impact, because energy consumption in computing is growing unsustainably. We have to find new ways to do computing using much less energy, and this is one way that can help us move in that direction.”
Like any pioneering work, it comes with challenges, especially in bridging concepts between electrochemistry and semiconductor physics.
“Our group comes from a background in solid-state chemistry, and when we started this work looking at magnesium, no one had used magnesium in these types of devices before,” Schwak says. “So we were looking at the literature on magnesium batteries for inspiration and different materials and strategies that we could use. When I started this, I wasn’t just learning the language and standards of one domain – I was trying to learn them in two domains, as well as translating between them.”
It also faces a challenge familiar to all scientists: how to make sense of messy data.
“The main challenge is being able to take my data and know that I’m interpreting it correctly, and that I understand what it actually means,” Schwak says.
She overcomes obstacles by collaborating closely with colleagues in various fields, including neuroscience and electrical engineering, sometimes by making small changes to her experiments and seeing what happens next.
Community matters
Schwacke’s work isn’t just limited to the lab. At Kitchen Matters, she and fellow DMSE graduate students set up booths at local events like the Cambridge Science Fair and Steam It Up, an after-school program that includes hands-on activities for kids.
“We spelled pHun with Food with fun spelled with pH, so we had cabbage juice as a pH indicator,” Shawaki says. “We let the kids test the pH of lemon juice, vinegar and dish soap, and they had a lot of fun mixing different liquids and seeing all the different colors.”
She has also served as Social Chair and Treasurer of the DMSE Graduate Student Group, and the Graduate Subject Council. As an undergraduate at Caltech, she led science and technology workshops for Robogals, a student-run group that encourages young women to pursue careers in science, and helped students apply for the school’s summer undergraduate research fellowships.
For Schwak, these experiences have enhanced her ability to explain science to different audiences, a skill she finds vital whether she is presenting at a children’s fair or at a research conference.
“I always think, where do my audience start, and what do I need to explain before I can get into what I’m doing so that it all makes sense to them?” She says.
Schwak sees the ability to communicate as essential to building community, which she considers an important part of conducting research. “It helps spread ideas. It always helps to get a new perspective on what you’re working on,” she says. “I also think it keeps us sane while we get our PhDs.”
Yildiz sees Chowaki’s involvement in the community as an important part of her resume. “She does all of these activities to motivate the broader community to conduct research, be interested in science, and pursue science and technology, but this ability will also help her advance her research and academic endeavours.”
After earning her doctorate, Schwak wants to take this ability to communicate with her into academia, where she wants to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers. Yildiz has no doubt that it will flourish.
“I think it’s a perfect fit,” Yildiz says. “She’s amazing, but glamor in and of itself isn’t enough. She’s persistent and resilient. You really need those above all of that.”
(tags for translation) MIT DMSE
