Formulating Prakash Opportunities

This course presents students a generalizable model for defining projects that can simultaneously have real-world impact while advancing fundamental science. A long-standing MIT-based initiative, Project Prakash, that has successfully achieved this confluence of concurrent science and service, provides a template. This effort fulfills the humanitarian need of providing sight surgeries to blind children, and, thereby, offering an unprecedented vantage point for addressing major questions about brain mechanisms of learning. The course premise is that many such ‘Prakash opportunities’ exist; they allow an immediate coupling of fundamental science and societal service. Students will have a first-hand opportunity to shape such projects, and thus get a concrete demonstration of how to implement MIT’s ethos – achieving real-world change while advancing the frontiers of knowledge.