By Zach Winn

In late October 2025, Tropical Storm Melissa moved through the Caribbean Sea with moderate winds that didn’t get much attention. But on Oct. 25, aided by a patch of warm ocean, the storm rapidly intensified. By the time it made landfall in Jamaica, it was one of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes on record, uprooting trees, tearing the roofs from buildings, and causing catastrophic flooding and power outages.

Ravi Pappu SM ’95, PhD ’01 blames the surprise on our inability to gather high-quality ocean data.

Pappu came to MIT after completing a 10-year homework assignment. It started when he was a child in India in the 1980s, when he saw a hologram on the cover of National Geographic for the first time.

“I was so taken by it that I decided I needed to learn how to make those three-dimensional images,” Pappu recalls. “I learned what I could by reading books and papers. I didn’t know who invented the hologram until I read a book about MIT’s Media Lab. The book named the person who invented the rainbow hologram, so I wrote him a letter. I didn’t know his address, so I just wrote on the envelope, ‘Steve Benton, holography researcher, MIT, USA.’”

To Pappu’s surprise, the letter reached Benton, and the former Media Lab professor even wrote back with some further topics he needed to learn about.

Pappu never forgot that. He earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in India, then earned his master’s degree at Villanova University, taking all the optics classes he could.

“Eventually, about 10 years after I saw my first hologram, I wrote to Steve and I said, ‘I did all these things you asked me, now I want to study with you,’” Pappu says. “That’s how I got into MIT.”

Pappu studied under Benton for the next three years. He also studied under Professor Neil Gershenfeld as part of his PhD. Following graduation, Pappu and four classmates started ThingMagic, a consulting company that eventually sold RFID readers. ThingMagic was acquired 2010. Pappu returned to MIT for two years as a visiting scientist around the time of the acquisition.