What does your license plate say about you?
In the United States, over 9 million vehicles are fitted with “vanity” license plates that feature a word, number or phrase of your choice instead of randomly assigned letters and numbers to identify the vehicle. While each state and the District of Columbia maintain their own rules for appropriate selections, creativity is key when choosing a unique vanity plate. What’s more, the stories behind them are just as interesting as the people who use them.
It might not be a surprise to you to learn that quite a few MIT community members take part in these whimsical rides. Read on to meet some of them and learn about the geeky, artistic, techy, and MIT-related license plates that adorn their rides.
A little tech haven
One of the most well-known cars on campus is Samuel Klein’s 1998 Honda Civic. It’s more than just a license plate holder; Art Car — A vehicle custom designed as a way to express an artistic idea or theme. Klein’s Civic is plastered with hundreds of 5.5-inch floppy disks in various colors, and the interior is decorated with disks, computer keys, and other high-tech knickknacks. With the double-meaning license plate “DSKDRV” (“Disk Drive”), the art car originally came from the West Coast.
Klein, a longtime member of the MIT Media Lab, MIT Press, and MIT Libraries, first heard about the car from fellow Wikimedian and current MIT librarian Phoebe Ayers, whose artistic friend Lara Wiegand said: Designed and decorated the car It was living in Seattle and was looking for a new owner, and Klein was intrigued, so he decided to fly out west to check out the Civic.
“I went in there and spent a whole day looking at how she maintained the car and talking to her about the engineering and the mechanics and the logistics of what works and what doesn’t,” Klein said. “It had already been improved upon many times.”
Klein quickly decided he took it upon himself to be the new owner, and as he drove the car around the country, he “got a really great, wide-reaching response from different parts of the U.S.”
Upon returning to Massachusetts, Klein made a few tweaks: “I painted the hubcaps, added racing stripes, and added some new generation laser-etched glass circuitry. Plus, I also had a collection of old school tech discs that I thought would fit perfectly.”
The license plate also had to be redone: In Washington it read “DISKDRV,” but “in Massachusetts, it’s less letters, so we had to trim it down a little bit,” Klein said.
This car currently has about 250,000 miles on it. Instagram account“The biggest challenge is having to repaint the disk’s surface like a lizard every few years,” says Klein, a partner and research scientist at MIT who often parks the car on campus. “It’s collected a little bit of love letters. People leave notes on the car, which is really cool.”
Making STEM History
Omar Abdayeh (Class of 2012, PhD 2018), a McGovern Fellow at the MIT McGovern Institute for Brain Research and now an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, told a similarly intriguing story about the “CRISPR” license plate on his SUV.
This plate is Genome editing technology CRISPR allows for the rapid modification of genetic material, revolutionizing biology and medical research. As a graduate student at MIT in the lab of Professor Feng Zhang, a pioneer of CRISPR technology, Abudayeh was deeply involved in the early development of CRISPR for editing DNA and RNA. In fact, he and Jonathan Guttenberg (Class of 2013), an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and a recent McGovern Fellow who works closely with Abudayeh, Discovering many new CRISPR enzymesWe have developed novel recombinant protein synthesis technologies, such as Cas12 and Cas13, and have applied these technologies to both gene therapy and CRISPR diagnostics.
So how did Abudaeh get his license plate? It all started when he attended a genome editing conference in 2022, where another early-stage CRISPR researcher, Samuel Sternberg, showed up in a car with New York “CRISPR” plates. “It became quite a topic of discussion at the conference, and during a break, Sam and his lab mates encouraged us to get Massachusetts license plates,” Abudaeh explains. “I insisted that we absolutely had to get them, but we applied anyway, paid $70, and then got a message that we’d get a letter in 8-12 weeks about whether the plate was available. Then we went back to Boston, forgot about it, and then a few months later, to our surprise, the plate arrived in the mail.”
While Abdayeh continues his affiliation with the McGovern Institute, he and Gutenberg recently launched a lab at Harvard Medical School as new professors. “We continue to discover new enzymes, such as Cas7-11, that are breaking new ground in RNA sensing and programmable proteases for new therapeutics, and we are applying CRISPR technology to new approaches in gene editing and aging research,” Abdayeh noted.
Of the license plates, he says, “I saw people posting about it on Twitter and asking about it in our Slack channel. Multiple times, people would stop me and say they’d read Walter Isaacson’s book on CRISPR and ask what I had to do with it. I explained my story and that I was actually featured in the CRISPR diagnostics chapter of the book.”
Showcasing your MIT roots and geek pride
For some, the MIT connection is reason enough to register a license plate, or even three. Aeronautics and Astronautics alumnus Jeffrey ChambersSM ’06, PhD ’14, says he drives a car with Virginia license plates that read “PHD MIT.” Biology professor Anthony Sinske, ScD ’67, owns several cars with license plates honoring Course 20 (now the Department of Biological Engineering, but now the Department of Bioengineering). Previously known Food Technology, Nutrition and Food Science, and Applied Biosciences. Sinskey says he has both “MIT 20” and “MIT XX” license plates in Massachusetts and New Hampshire.
At least two MIT couples have dual license plates. Chemistry professor Laura Keesling (Class of 1983) says, “My license plate is ‘SLEX,’ which is short for a carbohydrate called sialyl Lewis X, which has many functions, including a role in fertilization (the joining of sperm and egg). When asked what it means, I get a variety of responses. Unless you’re a scientist, your husband probably has dual license plates. [Ron Raines ’80, professor of biology] “He told me this as an inside joke. His license plate number is ‘Protein.'”
Marcia Bartusiak, Professor Emeritus of Comparative Media Studies and Writing at MIT, and her husband, Dr. Steven Rowe (1988), previously had two similar license plates. When the couple lived in Virginia, Rowe was a mathematician studying the structure of spiral galaxies, and Bartusiak was a junior science writer specializing in astronomy, and they had the license plates “SPIRAL” and “GALAXY.” Now retired in Massachusetts, they no longer have registered license plates, but they name their current cars “Redshift” and “Blueshift.”
Additionally, some community members have plates that honor their hobbies, like “ICANAE” for Sarah Seager, professor in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences and Aeronautical Astronomy. Or they playfully interact with other drivers. Julianna Mullen, director of communications for the Plasma Science and Fusion Center, said of her “OMGWHY” plate, “It’s an existential reminder of the importance of scientific inquiry, especially when you’re stuck in traffic and someone cuts in and you’re just trying to get two car lengths in front of you. Oh my God, why did I do that?”
Are you an MIT associate with a unique license plate? I would love to see it!
