Meet Alex Shalek, Director of the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science
For Shalek, institutes like IMES are all about creating cohesive units “greater than the sum of their parts.”
Image provided by Alex Shalek, courtesy of Len Rubenstein
Even before his appointment to the Director roles at the Institute for Medical Engineering and Sciences (IMES), Professor Alex Shalek wore many hats. In his quest to understand how individual cells function and respond to their environment, particularly in the context of immune responses and disease, Professor Shalek has worked across the Broad, Koch, and Ragon Institute, and at Mass General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.
When The Tech sat down with Professor Shalek, it quickly became clear that he is not driven by academic title or turf. Rather, it’s the people — especially those he mentors. The work the Shalek Lab produces is “not really my work at this point,” he reflected. “It's the students' work. I'm just trying to help them accomplish their goals, and push them further and do so more efficiently.” Particularly, he hopes to teach them “how to show up as a scientist, how to engage with the world, and how to approach things with intentionality.”
He also wants them to channel ambition and avoid burnout. “There will always be somebody who got a paper faster than you. That doesn’t matter,” he said. Shalek himself didn’t publish his first paper until five and a half years into graduate school. “It all works out in the long run.”
This humble response frames Shalek’s approach to leadership. When asked about his major vision as Director of IMES, he rejected and redirected the question.
“Being a director is not about my vision,” he asserted. “A lot of what I'm doing is to try and help others build out programs that are nascent and bring things together in cohesive, collaborative ways.” These collaborations stretch all over the Boston ecosystem including to surrounding universities, industries, and hospitals, as well as internationally. Shalek wants to accelerate that process, since institutes like IMES are all about creating cohesive units “greater than the sum of their parts.”
Part of the challenge, he acknowledged, is structure. MIT’s “entrepreneurial” spirit fuels innovation, but there may be a lack of collaborative cohesiveness. “There are people working with clinicians on problems everywhere at MIT,” Shalek added. “But everyone has one or two connections. It’s this very loose network.”
He wants to see MIT as “more of a hub of human health” through improved integration with hospitals and industry. Stronger partnerships would ensure that researchers have access to the resources they need and “are engineering towards the right problems.”
That’s where institutes like IMES and initiatives like the MIT Health and Life Sciences Collaborative (HEALS) come into play. Despite setbacks like the “erosion of a sense of community” during the pandemic, he is hopeful that a combination of “top-down administration” with “bottom-up creativity” will help.
“A lot of these [initiatives] require administrative legwork,” he continued, citing fields from pediatric health initiatives to AI in health research to climate-driven disease research to space medicine.
Yes, space medicine.
“You now have lots of people going into space,” Shalek said. “And we don’t understand how space flight or space travel impacts human health.” He highlights MIT faculty like Lonnie Peterson, who IMES is supporting to build out the Space, Ecological, Arctic, and Resource-limited Medicine (SPEAR) program at Mass General Brigham. New programs like this bring about new programs like clinical partnerships and fellowships. This collaboration, while perhaps unintuitive, reflects the multidisciplinary and collaborative attitude at IMES, driven by scientific questions more than anything else.
This is just one example. He concluded that it would be “incredible” if we could lower “barriers to partnership and collaboration. So that we could find the right experts to go further, faster together.”