The Italy that MIT likes so much

Serenella Sferza, the head of relations between MIT and the school and university system in Italy, welcomed the #TechMission organised by the Lombard Manufacturer’s Association, Confindustria Lombardia, Digital Innovation Hub Lombardia and the Varese Association of Industrialists, to MIT in Boston.

There are a lot of similarities between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Italy. They were founded in the same year, 1861, and they develop partnership programs like MISTI (MIT International Science and Technologies Initiatives), with the aim of sending students from the well-known institute in Boston around the world, to learn from other people, from the best, including a good part of Italian manufacturing. Research partnerships are formed that involve companies like Lamborghini, who collaborate at MIT with two laboratories, one dedicated to materials, and the other, to batteries. And the existing partnership with Loccioni, the “small-scale” multinational in Le Marche, and Sissa, in Trieste. This strategic partnership was created by one of the world’s most important centres for scientific and technological development.

Talented individuals from every corner of the Earth come to Boston to study at MIT. There are not many, approximately 12,000, like a small Italian university, but they are the best, as the more that 60 Nobel Prizes winners from that scientific community demonstrate (source, Treccani). “The Italian students are greatly appreciated here,” Serenella Sferza proudly points out. The proof of this is the giant poster in one of the university’s entry halls, with the Arduino board, which was designed and produced by Massimo Banzi (from Ivrea), in the middle. One of the building sites most visited by MIT students is the Pellestrina site, where there is MOSE, the device designed to prevent the phenomenon of high water, in Venice. This work is considered by many lecturers at MIT to be one of the most brilliant contemporary inventions.