By adding a specially treated conductive layer of tin dioxide bonded to the perovskite material, which provides an improved path for the charge carriers in the cell, and by modifying the perovskite formula, researchers have boosted its overall efficiency as a solar cell to 25.2 percent — a near-record for such materials, which eclipses the efficiency of many existing solar panels. (Perovskites still lag significantly in longevity compared to silicon, however, a challenge being worked on by teams around the world.)

Scientists have been on the front lines of active citizenship and policy engagement in recent years in very visible ways — in the People’s Climate Movement, in controlling the global Covid-19 pandemic, and in testimony about biases in facial recognition in Congress, to name just a few.

As students in the Science Activism class have learned, this engagement isn’t a new phenomenon. There is a long history of scientists championing important issues, policy positions, and public education by contributing their scientific knowledge and perspectives. Case studies in this course include the civil rights movement, the nuclear freeze campaign, climate science and action, environmental justice, Vietnam War protests, the March 4 Movement at MIT, and advocating for gender equality in STEM fields.

Scientific knowledge is now critical for public understanding and sound policy for most of today’s most critical issues — from climate to human health to food security — and MIT students are eager to understand how their works interact with social realities and how they can lend their expertise to advancing better conditions and policies.

“The class was informed by the increasing efforts by scientists to engage in public policy not only at the ballot box, or by providing testimony,” says Ed Bertschinger, professor of physics, who led the initial class in 2019 as well as the 2020 class. “More scientists are also taking up causes of activism. That’s been true at MIT and around the country.”

As a faculty affiliate of the WGS program, Bertschinger notes that science has never been purely objective or detached from society. “Activism is a way for groups with less power in democratic societies to have their voices heard in order to effect change,” he observes. “Scientists can no longer take for granted that their results speak for themselves.”

Bertschinger recalls that his first experience with activism was in graduate school, in the 1980s, when he served as an organizer for the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign. “I was following the lead of an MIT group,” reflects Bertschinger, “including scholars such as the late Randall Forsberg and Philip Morrison, who were leaders in the nuclear disarmament effort in the U.S.”

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