Confronting Unknowns
MIT's first course in sensemaking.
Role: Creator and lead instructor. Program Lead, MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering.
What it is
MIT's first course in sensemaking, applied to non-human intelligence, aerospace safety, and unidentified anomalous phenomena. The inaugural cohort ran in January 2026: 55 participants over two intensive days on the MIT campus, plus a voluntary writing workshop. Participants came from institutions including MIT, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, MIT Haystack Observatory, Harvard, Yale, Carnegie Mellon, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, the CIA, Americans for Safe Aerospace, Airbus US Space and Defense, and Shield AI. The cohort rated the course 9 of 10 for value added.
The artifact
Verification
The MIT-hosted course page names the program creator and lead instructor.
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