IAP roundup 2026

This year’s Independent Activities Period (IAP) saw AeroAstro courses that connected engineering, science, and creativity, giving participants opportunities to learn from faculty, staff, and peers outside their coursework during the semester.

Defense radar technology
Professor of the Practice Eric Evans introduced a new course on defense radar technology, where more than 20 students learned the fundamentals of how radar systems work and how engineers design them. The course covered radar antennas, transmitter and receiver design, signal processing, and the tradeoffs engineers consider when building radar systems for ground-, air-, and space-based sensing.

Fundamentals of Climate Science and Policy
Graduate students Shreya Sharma and Chris Womack co-instructed a lecture series on the Fundamentals of Climate Science and Policy with the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy. The series focused on the science of climate change and policies aimed at stabilizing the global climate. Videos of the sessions are available here.

Puzzle box engineering
Brian Mernoff, manager of the AeroAstro Communication Lab, led a Puzzle Box Engineering Series that invited students and staff to explore the engineering principles behind designing puzzle boxes. Participants designed sequential discovery puzzle boxes where solvers must figure out a series of steps and find tools in order to unlock the box or find a prize.

MIT-WHOI Join Program winter cruise
Graduate student James Dingley participated in the MIT-WHOI Join Program winter cruise, part of the Northeast U.S. Shelf Long-Term Ecological Research project. The goal of the NES-LTER is to understand and predict how planktonic food webs change through space and time in response to changes in the physical environment, and how those changes impact ecosystem productivity, particularly of higher trophic levels. NES-LTER transect process cruises are focused on characterizing cross-shelf distributions of physical properties, nutrients, production rates, and plankton.