Category: Profiles

Richard Hynes, a pioneer in the biology of cellular adhesion, dies at 81

Professor, mentor, and leader at MIT for more than 50 years shaped fundamental understandings of cell adhesion, the extracellular matrix, and molecular mechanisms of metastasis.

Bendta Schroeder | Koch Institute
February 9, 2026

MIT Professor Emeritus Richard O. Hynes PhD ’71, a cancer biologist whose discoveries reshaped modern understandings of how cells interact with each other and their environment, passed away on Jan. 6. He was 81.

Hynes is best known for his discovery of integrins, a family of cell-surface receptors essential to cell–cell and cell–matrix adhesion. He played a critical role in establishing the field of cell adhesion biology, and his continuing research revealed mechanisms central to embryonic development, tissue integrity, and diseases including cancer, fibrosis, thrombosis, and immune disorders.

Hynes was the Daniel K. Ludwig Professor for Cancer Research, Emeritus, an emeritus professor of biology, and a member of the Koch Institute for Integrated Cancer Research at MIT and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. During his more than 50 years on the faculty at MIT, he was deeply respected for his academic leadership at the Institute and internationally, as well as his intellectual rigor and contributions as an educator and mentor.

“Richard had an enormous impact in his career. He was a visionary leader of the MIT Cancer Center, what is now the Koch Institute, during a time when the progress in understanding cancer was just starting to be translated into new therapies,” reflects Matthew Vander Heiden, director of the Koch Institute and the Lester Wolfe (1919) Professor of Molecular Biology. “The research from his laboratory launched an entirely new field by defining the molecules that mediate interactions between cells and between cells and their environment. This laid the groundwork for better understanding the immune system and metastasis.”

Pond skipper

Born in Kenya, Hynes grew up during the 1950s in Liverpool, in the United Kingdom. While he sometimes recounted stories of being schoolmates with two of the Beatles, and in the same Boy Scouts troop as Paul McCartney, his academic interests were quite different, and he specialized in the sciences at a young age. Both of his parents were scientists: His father was a freshwater ecologist, and his mother a physics teacher. Hynes and all three of his siblings followed their parents into scientific fields.

“We talked science at home, and if we asked questions, we got questions back, not answers. So that conditioned me into being a scientist, for sure,” Hynes said of his youth.

He described his time as an undergraduate and master’s student at Cambridge University during the 1960s as “just fantastic,” noting that it was shortly after two 1962 Nobel Prizes were awarded to Cambridge researchers — one to Francis Crick and James Watson for the structure of DNA, the other to John Kendrew and Max Perutz for the structures of proteins — and Cambridge was “the place to be” to study biology.

Newly married, Hynes and his wife traded Cambridge, U.K. for Cambridge, Massachusetts, so that he could conduct doctoral work at MIT under the direction of Paul Gross. He tried (and by his own assessment, failed) to differentiate maternal messages among the three germ layers of sea urchin embryos. However, he did make early successful attempts to isolate the globular protein tubulin, a building block for essential cellular structures, from sea urchins.

Inspired by a course he had taken with Watson in the United States, Hynes began work during his postdoc at the Institute of Cancer Research in the U.K. on the early steps of oncogenic transformation and the role of cell migration and adhesion; it was here that he made his earliest discovery and characterizations of the fibronectin protein.

Recruited back to MIT by Salvador Luria, founding director of the MIT Center for Cancer Research, whom he had met during a summer at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute on Cape Cod, Hynes returned to the Institute in 1975 as a founding faculty member of the center and an assistant professor in the Department of Biology.

Big questions about tiny cells

To his own research, Hynes brought the same spirit of inquiry that had characterized his upbringing, asking fundamental questions: How do cells interact with each other? How do they stick together to form tissues?

His research focused on proteins that allow cells to adhere to each other and to the extracellular matrix — a mesh-like network that surrounds cells, providing structural support, as well as biochemical and mechanical cues from the local microenvironment. These proteins include integrins, a type of cell surface receptor, and fibronectins, a family of extracellular adhesive proteins. Integrins are the major adhesion receptors connecting the extracellular matrix to the intracellular cytoskeleton, or main architectural support within the cell.

Hynes began his career as a developmental biologist, studying how cells move to the correct locations during embryonic development. During this stage of development, proper modulation of cell adhesion is critical for cells to move to the correct locations in the embryo.

Hynes’ work also revealed that dysregulation of cell-to-matrix contact plays an important role in cancer cells’ ability to detach from a tumor and spread to other parts of the body, key steps in metastasis.

As a postdoc, Hynes had begun studying the differences in the surface landscapes of healthy cells and tumor cells. It was this work that led to the discovery of fibronectin, which is often lost when cells become cancerous.

He and others found that fibronectin is an important part of the extracellular matrix. When fibronectin is lost, cancer cells can more easily free themselves from their original location and metastasize to other sites in the body. By studying how fibronectin normally interacts with cells, Hynes and others discovered a family of cell surface receptors known as integrins, which function as important physical links with the extracellular matrix. In humans, 24 integrin proteins have been identified. These proteins help give tissues their structure, enable blood to clot, and are essential for embryonic development.

“Richard’s discoveries, along with others’, of cell surface integrins led to the development of a number of life-altering treatments. Among these are treatment of autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis,” notes longtime colleague Phillip Sharp, MIT Institute professor emeritus.

As research technologies advanced, including proteomic and extracellular matrix isolation methods developed directly in Hynes’ laboratory, he and his group were able to uncover increasingly detailed information about specific cell adhesion proteins, the biological mechanisms by which they operate, and the roles they play in normal biology and disease.

In cancer, their work helped to uncover how cell adhesion (and the loss thereof) and the extracellular matrix contribute not only to fundamental early steps in the metastatic process, but also tumor progression, therapeutic response, and patient prognosis. This included studies that mapped matrix protein signatures associated with cancer and non-cancer cells and tissues, followed by investigations into how differentially expressed matrix proteins can promote or suppress cancer progression.

Hynes and his colleagues also demonstrated how extracellular matrix composition can influence immunotherapy, such as the importance of a family of cell adhesion proteins called selectins for recruiting natural killer cells to tumors. Further, Hynes revealed links between fibronectin, integrins, and other matrix proteins with tumor angiogenesis, or blood vessel development, and also showed how interaction with platelets can stimulate tumor cells to remodel the extracellular matrix to support invasion and metastasis. In pursuing these insights into the oncogenic mechanisms of matrix proteins, Hynes and members of his laboratory have identified useful diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers, as well as therapeutic targets.

Along the way, Hynes shaped not only the research field, but also the careers of generations of trainees.

“There was much to emulate in Richard’s gentle, patient, and generous approach to mentorship. He centered the goals and interests of his trainees, fostered an inclusive and intellectually rigorous environment, and cared deeply about the well-being of his lab members. Richard was a role model for integrity in both personal and professional interactions and set high expectations for intellectual excellence,” recalls Noor Jailkhani, a former Hynes Lab postdoc.

Jailkhani is CEO and co-founder, with Hynes, of Matrisome Bio, a biotech company developing first-in-class targeted therapies for cancer and fibrosis by leveraging the extracellular matrix. “The impact of his long and distinguished scientific career was magnified through the generations of trainees he mentored, whose influence spans academia and the biotechnology industry worldwide. I believe that his dedication to mentorship stands among his most far-reaching and enduring contributions,” she says.

A guiding light

Widely sought for his guidance, Hynes served in a number of key roles at MIT and in the broader scientific community. As head of MIT’s Department of Biology from 1989 to 1991, then a decade as director of the MIT Center for Cancer Research, his leadership has helped shape the Institute’s programs in both areas.

“Words can’t capture what a fabulous human being Richard was. I left every interaction with him with new insights and the warm glow that comes from a good conversation,” says Amy Keating, the Jay A. Stein (1968) Professor, professor of biology and biological engineering, and head of the Department of Biology. “Richard was happy to share stories, perspectives, and advice, always with a twinkle in his eye that conveyed his infinite interest in and delight with science, scientists, and life itself. The calm support that he offered me, during my years as department head, meant a lot and helped me do my job with confidence.”

Hynes served as director of the MIT Center for Cancer Research from 1991 until 2001, positioning the center’s distinguished cancer biology program for expansion into its current, interdisciplinary research model as MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. “He recruited and strongly supported Tyler Jacks to the faculty, who subsequently became director and headed efforts to establish the Koch Institute,” recalls Sharp.

Jacks, a David H. Koch (1962) Professor of Biology and founding director of the Koch Institute, remembers Hynes as a thoughtful, caring, and highly effective leader in the Center for Cancer Research, or CCR, and in the Department of Biology. “I was fortunate to be able to lean on him when I took over as CCR director. He encouraged me to drop in — unannounced — with questions and concerns, which I did regularly. I learned a great deal from Richard, at every level,” he says.

Hynes’ leadership and recognition extended well beyond MIT to national and international contexts, helping to shape policy and strengthen connections between MIT researchers and the wider field. He served as a scientific governor of the Wellcome Trust, a global health research and advocacy foundation based in the United Kingdom, and co-chaired U.S. National Academy committees establishing guidelines for stem cell and genome editing research.

“Richard was an esteemed scientist, a stimulating colleague, a beloved mentor, a role model, and to me a partner in many endeavors both within and beyond MIT,” notes H. Robert Horvitz, a David H. Koch (1962) Professor of Biology. He was a wonderful human being, and a good friend. I am sad beyond words at his passing.”

Awarded Howard Hughes medical investigator status in 1988, Hynes’ research and leadership have since been recognized with a number of other notable honors. Most recently, he received the 2022 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award, which he shared with Erkki Ruoslahti of Sanford Burnham Prebys and Timothy Springer of Harvard University, for his discovery of integrins and pioneering work in cell adhesion.

His other awards include the Canada Gairdner International Award, the Distinguished Investigator Award from the International Society for Matrix Biology, the Robert and Claire Pasarow Medical Research Award, the E.B. Wilson Medal from the American Society for Cell Biology, the David Rall Medal from the National Academy of Medicine and the Paget-Ewing Award from the Metastasis Research Society. Hynes was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, the Royal Society of London, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Easily recognized by a commanding stature that belied his soft-spoken nature, Hynes was known around MIT’s campus not only for his acuity, integrity, and wise counsel, but also for his community spirit and service. From serving food at community socials to moderating events and meetings or recognizing the success of colleagues and trainees, his willingness to help spanned roles of every size.

“Richard was a phenomenal friend and colleague. He approached complex problems with a thoughtfulness and clarity that few can achieve,” notes Vander Heiden. “He was also so generous in his willingness to provide help and advice, and did so with a genuine kindness that was appreciated by everyone.”

Hynes is survived by his wife Fleur, their sons Hugh and Colin and their partners, and four grandchildren.

Celebrating worm science

Time and again, an unassuming roundworm has illuminated aspects of biology with major consequences for human health.

Jennifer Michalowski | McGovern Institute
December 12, 2025

For decades, scientists with big questions about biology have found answers in a tiny worm. That worm–a millimeter-long creature called Caenorhabditis elegans–has helped researchers uncover fundamental features of how cells and organisms work. The impact of that work is enormous: Discoveries made using C. elegans have been recognized with four Nobel prizes and have led to the development of new treatments for human disease.

In a perspective piece published in the November 2025 issue of the journal PNAS, eleven biologists including Robert Horvitz, the David H. Koch (1962) Professor of Biology at MIT, celebrate Nobel Prize-winning advances made through research in C. elegans. The authors discuss how that work has led to advances for human health and highlight how a uniquely collaborative community among worm researchers has fueled the field.

MIT scientists are well represented in that community: The prominent worm biologists who coauthored the PNAS paper include former MIT graduate students Andy Fire and Paul Sternberg, now at Stanford University and the California Institute of Technology, and two past postdoctoral researchers in Horvitz’s lab, University of Massachusetts Medical School professor Victor Ambros and Massachusetts General Hospital investigator Gary Ruvkun. Ann Rougvie at the University of Minnesota is the paper’s corresponding author.

Early worm discoveries

“This tiny worm is beautiful—elegant both in its appearance and in its many contributions to our understanding of the biological universe in which we live,” says Horvitz, who in 2002 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine along with colleagues Sydney Brenner and John Sulston for discoveries that helped explain how genes regulate programmed cell death and organ development. Horvitz is also a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research and Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research as well as an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Those discoveries were among the early successes in C. elegans research, made by pioneering scientists who recognized the power of the microscopic roundworm. C. elegans offers many advantages for researchers: The worms are easy to grow and maintain in labs; their transparent bodies make cells and internal processes readily visible under a microscope; they are cellularly very simple (e.g., they have only 302 nerve cells, compared with about 100 billion in a human) and their genomes can be readily manipulated to study gene function.

Most importantly, many of the molecules and processes that operate in C. elegans have been retained throughout evolution, meaning discoveries made using the worm can have direct relevance to other organisms, including humans. “Many aspects of biology are ancient and evolutionarily conserved,” Horvitz explains. “Such shared mechanisms can be most readily revealed by analyzing organisms that are highly tractable in the laboratory.”

In the 1960s, Brenner, a molecular biologist who was curious about how animals’ nervous systems develop and function, recognized that C. elegans offered unique opportunities to study these processes. Once he began developing the worm into a model for laboratory studies, it did not take long for other biologists to join him to take advantage of the new system.

In the 1970s, the unique features of the worm allowed Sulston to track the transformation of a fertilized egg into an adult animal, tracing the origins of each of the adult worm’s 959 cells. His studies revealed that in every developing worm, cells divide and mature in predictable ways. He also learned that some of the cells created during development do not survive into adulthood and are instead eliminated by a process termed programmed cell death.

By seeking mutations that perturbed the process of programmed cell death, Horvitz and his colleagues identified key regulators of that process, which is sometimes referred to as apoptosis. These regulators, which both promote and oppose apoptosis, turned out to be vital for programmed cell death across the animal kingdom.

In humans, apoptosis shapes developing organs, refines brain circuits, and optimizes other tissue structures. It also modulates our immune systems and eliminates cells that are in danger of becoming cancerous. The human version of CED-9, the anti-apoptotic regulator that Horvitz’s team discovered in worms, is BCL-2. Researchers have shown that activating apoptotic cell death by blocking BCL-2 is an effective treatment for certain blood cancers. Today, researchers are also exploring new ways of treating immune disorders and neurodegenerative disease by manipulating apoptosis pathways.

Collaborative worm community

Horvitz and his colleagues’ discoveries about apoptosis helped demonstrate that understanding C. elegans biology has direct relevance to human biology and disease. Since then, a vibrant and closely connected community of worm biologists—including many who trained in Horvitz’s lab—has continued to carry out impactful work. In their PNAS article, Horvitz and his coauthors highlight that early work, as well as the Nobel Prize-winning work of:

  • Andrew Fire and Craig Mello, whose discovery of an RNA-based system of gene silencing led to powerful new tools to manipulate gene activity. The innate process they discovered in worms, known as RNA interference, is now used as the basis of six FDA-approved therapeutics for genetic disorders, silencing faulty genes to stop their harmful effects.
  • Martin Chalfie, who used a fluorescent protein made by jellyfish to visualize and track specific cells in C. elegans, helping launch the development of a set of tools that transformed biologists’ ability to observe molecules and processes that are important for both health and disease.
  • Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun, who discovered a class of molecules called microRNAs that regulate gene activity not just in worms, but in all multicellular organisms. This prize-winning work was started when Ambros and Ruvkun were postdoctoral researchers in Horvitz’s lab. Humans rely on more than 1,000 microRNAs to ensure our genes are used at the right times and places. Disruptions to microRNAs have been linked to neurological disorders, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and autoimmune disease, and researchers are now exploring how these small molecules might be used for diagnosis or treatment.

Horvitz and his coauthors stress that while the worm itself made these discoveries possible, so too did a host of resources that facilitate collaboration within the worm community and enable its scientists to build upon the work of others. Scientists who study C. elegans have embraced this open, collaborative spirit since the field’s earliest days, Horvitz says, citing the Worm Breeder’s Gazette, an early newsletter where scientists shared their observations, methods, and ideas.

Today, scientists who study C. elegans—whether the organism is the centerpiece of their lab or they are looking to supplement studies of other systems—contribute to and rely on online resources like WormAtlas and WormBase, as well as the Caenorhabditis Genetics Center, to share data and genetic tools. Horvitz says these resources have been crucial to his own lab’s work; his team uses them every day.

Just as molecules and processes discovered in C. elegans have pointed researchers toward important pathways in human cells, the worm has also been a vital proving ground for developing methods and approaches later deployed to study more complex organisms. For example, C. elegans, with its 302 neurons, was the first animal for which neuroscientists successfully mapped all of the connections of the nervous system. The resulting wiring diagram, or connectome, has guided countless experiments exploring how neurons work together to process information and control behavior. Informed by both the power and limitations of the C. elegans’ connectome, scientists are now mapping more complex circuitry, such as the 139,000-neuron brain of the fruit fly, whose connectome was completed in 2024.

C. elegans remains a mainstay of biological research, including in neuroscience. Scientists worldwide are using the worm to explore new questions about neural circuits, neurodegeneration, development, and disease. Horvitz’s lab continues to turn to C. elegans to investigate the genes that control animal development and behavior. His team is now using the worm to explore how animals develop a sense of time and transmit that information to their offspring.

Also at MIT, Steven Flavell’s team in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory is using the worm to investigate how neural connectivity, activity, and modulation integrate internal states, such as hunger, with sensory information, such as the smell of food, to produce sometimes long-lasting behaviors. Flavell is Horvitz’s academic grandson, as Flavell trained with one of Horvitz’s postdoctoral trainees. As new technologies accelerate the pace of scientific discovery, Horvitz and his colleagues are confident that the humble worm will bring more unexpected insights.

Paper: “From nematode to Nobel: How community-shared resources fueled the rise of Caenorhabditis elegans as a research organism”

Alumni Feature: Carrie Muh, SB ’96, ’97, SM ’97

Muh came to MIT planning to pursue health policy, but ended up majoring in biology and political science, and earned a master's degree in political science before heading to Columbia University for medical school. Now she serves as the chief of pediatric neurosurgery and surgical director of the Pediatric Epilepsy Program at Maria Fareri Children’s Hospital and Westchester Medical Center in Valhalla, New York.

Kara Baskin | MIT Technology Review
December 8, 2025

Carrie Muh ’96, ’97, SM ’97 works in an office surrounded by letters from grateful parents. As the chief of pediatric neurosurgery and surgical director of the Pediatric Epilepsy Program at Maria Fareri Children’s Hospital and Westchester Medical Center in Valhalla, New York, Muh performs life-changing surgeries.

“I see parents who come into my office on their post­operative visit in tears because, for the first time, their child is able to talk or walk. Having a mom come in and say their child said ‘Mama’ for the first time is huge,” she says. Other patients can finally play sports after a lifetime of falls.

About 2% of kids have epilepsy, a neurological condition that can cause seizures, falls, and language issues. About 30% of pediatric epilepsy patients are resistant to the drugs available to treat the condition, but in some cases surgery can help. “Surgery can be such a huge game-changer. Even if it can’t cure them, it can significantly improve quality of life,” she says.

Muh came to MIT planning to pursue health policy. She majored in both biology and political science and then earned a master’s degree in political science. But after a summer interning at the White House, she saw a stronger opportunity for influence as a physician.

As a medical student at Columbia University, Muh got to observe the transplant of a heart from a child who had passed away to another child in need. That sparked her interest in pediatric surgery. “I was able to watch a surgical team save a child’s life,” she remembers.

She took a gap year during medical school to conduct brain tumor research at Columbia, shadowing neurosurgical residents and observing the precise poetry of their surgery. “I absolutely knew that was for me,” she says, adding that the need was also compelling. “There aren’t enough pediatric epilepsy surgery specialists in the country.”

Now patients often travel to Muh for laser ablation, which destroys the part of the brain responsible for seizures without damaging nearby healthy tissue. In other cases, she installs a vagal-nerve stimulator in a child’s chest, which can make seizures less frequent and intense. An additional option is to outfit a child’s brain with EEG electrodes to pinpoint areas of seizure activity; then she can treat those precise areas. For some children, a responsive neurostimulator—“a pacemaker for the brain,” she calls it—can stop a seizure in its tracks.

“Most of my research for the last five years has been on new ways to use technology to help more patients,” she says—younger people and those who have not traditionally been considered candidates for these devices.

Despite her workload, Muh finds time for Yankees games and Broadway plays with her three children. She also travels internationally to care for vulnerable patients. In April 2024, she performed some of the first pediatric epilepsy surgeries with deep brain stimulation in Ukraine. She was also scheduled to head to Kenya for similar work in September of this year.

But wherever she travels, she maintains strong ties to MIT as class secretary and as a former Undergraduate Association president. This reflects her outgoing nature, though she once doubted if she would fit in with the Institute’s intensely engineering-focused culture.

“My dad had gone to MIT and always told me how amazing it was. I loved engineering and science from a young age, so he thought I would obviously love MIT. But I didn’t know if I was ‘techy’ enough to go,” she jokes, even though in high school she did research at NASA’s Student Space and Biology program while juggling sports and theater commitments.

When she toured campus, though, she was hooked.

“I made lifelong friends at MIT and actually met my husband at the wedding of one of my sorority sisters,” she says. “I discovered MIT was a welcoming, open place. I tell my kids now: ‘I’m proud to be a nerd!’ Cool, passionate people are proud of the work they do and the things they love.”

Alumni Spotlight: Michael Franklin ’88

Franklin describes himself as an overachiever, so perhaps it’s not surprising that when he set out to become an educational counselor, one of the MIT alums who volunteers to interview applicants for undergraduate admission, he quickly started racking up record numbers.

Kathryn M. O'Neill | Slice of MIT
December 4, 2025

Michael Franklin ’88 describes himself as an overachiever. So perhaps it’s not surprising that when he set out to become an educational counselor (EC)—an MIT alum who volunteers to interview applicants for undergraduate admission—he quickly started racking up record numbers.

In his first year as an EC, Franklin did 96 interviews—a lot but not quite the most anyone conducted for the 2023–’24 admission cycle. The following year, he redoubled his efforts and earned the top spot. He did it again for students hoping to enter in 2025–’26, interviewing a whopping 160 candidates—nearly twice as many as the No. 2 interviewer.

Interviewing for MIT is a passion he shares with his wife, Debbie Birnby ’91, who conducted 44 interviews herself for students applying for this year. “We started doing this, and it turned out to be just amazing talking to people,” Franklin says. “There’s this glow about students when they talk about what they really like to do, and I enjoy seeing that.”

Birnby agrees. “You hear bad stuff on the news, and then you see young people and you have hope for the future,” she says. “They have so much energy and enthusiasm.”

A Huge Volunteer Corps

Educational counselors form one of the largest groups of MIT volunteers, with more than 7,500 people signed up during the 2024–’25 interview cycle alone. Many—like Franklin and Birnby—love it enough to come back year after year. Currently, MIT has more than 3,500 ECs who have volunteered for over five years and more than 2,000 who have been interviewing for over 10 years. Five ECs have been interviewing for over 50 years.

All play a vital role by helping MIT Admissions get a more holistic view of the candidates, according to Yi Tso ’85, the staff member who runs the EC program as director of the Educational Council. The average EC completes just about six interviews each year. So Franklin and Birnby—who also produce very informative reports on candidates, Tso emphasizes—really stand out: “They are clearly among our super-superstar volunteers.”

The couple’s large interview numbers are, in part, an accident of geography. ECs typically interview candidates who live near them, but when Franklin and Birnby decided to start interviewing in 2022, they were living in an area of Maryland without many MIT applicants. As a result, they took on interviews with “overflow” candidates—those without access to a local EC. They could conduct these interviews easily online, so the pair—who were both newly retired (Franklin was a software developer; Birnby was in lab technical service)—quickly got into a groove and just kept going.

Two years later, they moved back to the Boston area, “partly because we kept telling people how great Boston was, so we started believing it,” Franklin jokes. Since the area has a robust group of ECs, the couple—who by then had been named regional coordinators for the EC program in Boston—continued to interview students from the overflow list.

The Personal Touch

ECs start their work with very little information—just the student’s name, high school, and contact information—and EC guidelines recommend that they spend 30 to 60 minutes with each student. Birnby says she typically spends about an hour and a half. Franklin often takes even more time; he admits he happily spoke for four hours with one enthusiastic candidate. “You meet all these interesting people,” he explains, noting that he and his wife have heard students discuss a full range of interests and ambitions, including everything from competing in the sailing Junior Olympics to launching a national-scale desalination project.

ECs also answer questions from applicants, and both Franklin and Birnby say most students are eager to learn more about campus culture. “A lot of people don’t have a good idea about how weird and wonderful MIT is. It’s a really weird place in a totally good way,” Franklin says. He likes to tell students about the Banana Lounge, the Pirate Certificate, the Baker House piano drop, and other quirky traditions.

Both Franklin and Birnby hope they can help students find out if MIT will be a good fit for them—because that’s at the heart of why they care enough to give back to the Institute themselves. “At MIT I felt I had found my people. I fit there,” says Birnby, who was a biology major while Franklin studied political science. (She says they knew each other when they were both at the Institute but didn’t become a couple until decades later.)

Of course, most candidates ECs interview do not ultimately gain admission. Consider that for the 2025–’26 year, MIT admitted 1,334 undergraduates out of a competitive field of 29,282 applicants. Still, Franklin and Birnby have been able to congratulate several students each year. Today there are MIT students from all over the world—from North Carolina to Kyrgyzstan—who can say they were interviewed by one of them.

Mentors and Friends

Franklin and Birnby have made a point of keeping in touch with many of these students, who now count them as mentors and friends. The pair begin by congratulating students as soon as they can see who has been accepted, which is posted online. “We can’t see results until they see. So we’re like, check already!” Birnby says.

In the fall, they welcome the new students. Then they invite their admitted interviewees from all classes—a group that now numbers 55—to various gatherings throughout the year. In 2024, for example, the pair hosted 10 students for Thanksgiving at their house in Somerville.

“When I came to MIT, it felt so reassuring to know I always had someone to talk to and ask questions of during my MIT journey,” says Yumn Elameer ’28, whom Franklin interviewed. “I’m so grateful to have gotten Mike as an interviewer, to have gained him as a friend and as someone I know will always be there for help, a good laugh, or advice.”

The joy of life (sciences)

Mary Gallagher’s deeply rooted MIT experience and love of all life supports growth at the MIT Department of Biology.

Samantha Edelen | Department of Biology
November 28, 2025

For almost 30 years, Mary Gallagher has supported award-winning faculty members and their labs in the same way she tends the soil beneath her garden. In both, she pairs diligence and experience with a delight in the way that interconnected ecosystems contribute to the growth of a plant, or an idea, seeded in the right place.

Gallagher, a senior administrative assistant in the Department of Biology, has spent much of her career at MIT. Her mastery in navigating the myriad tasks required by administrators, and her ability to build connections, have supported and elevated everyone she interacts with, at the Institute and beyond.

Oh, the people you’ll know

Gallagher didn’t start her career at MIT. Her first role following graduation from the University of Vermont in the early 1980s was at a nearby community arts center, where she worked alongside a man who would become a household name in American politics.

“This guy had just been elected mayor, shockingly, of Burlington, Vermont, by under 100 votes, unseating the incumbent. He went in and created this arts council and youth office,” Gallagher recalls.

That political newcomer was none other than a young Bernie Sanders, now the longest-serving independent senator in U.S. congressional history.

Gallagher arrived at MIT in 1996, becoming an administrative assistant (aka “lab admin”) in what was then called the MIT Energy Laboratory. Shortly after her arrival, Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics and Engineering Systems Ernest Moniz transformed the laboratory into the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI).

Gallagher quickly learned how versatile the work of an administrator can be. As MITEI rapidly grew, she interacted with people across campus and its vast array of disciplines at the Institute, including mechanical engineering, political science, and economics.

“Admin jobs at MIT are really crazy because of the depth of work that we’re willing to do to support the institution. I was hired to do secretarial work, and next thing I know, I was traveling all the time, and planning a five-day, 5,000-person event down in D.C.,” Gallagher says. “I developed crazy computer and event-planner skills.”

Although such tasks may seem daunting to some, Gallagher has been thrilled with the opportunities she’s had to meet so many people and develop so many new skills. As a lab admin in MITEI for 18 years, she mastered navigating MIT administration, lab finances, and technical support. When Moniz left MITEI to lead the U.S. Department of Energy under President Obama, she moved to the Department of Biology at MIT.

Mutual thriving

Over the years, Gallagher has fostered the growth of students and colleagues at MIT, and vice versa.

Friend and former colleague Samantha Farrell recalls her first days at MITEI as a rather nervous and very “green” temp, when Gallagher offered an excellent cappuccino from Gallagher’s new Nespresso coffee machine.

“I treasure her friendship and knowledge,” Farrell says. “She taught me everything I needed to know about being an admin and working in research.”

Gallagher’s experience has also set faculty across the Institute up for success.

According to one principal investigator she currently supports, Novartis Professor of Biology Leonard Guarente, Gallagher is “extremely impactful and, in short, an ideal administrative assistant.”

Similarly, professor of biology Daniel Lew is grateful that her extensive MIT experience was available as he moved his lab to the Institute in recent years. “Mary was invaluable in setting up and running the lab, teaching at MIT, and organizing meetings and workshops,” Lew says. “She is a font of knowledge about MIT.”

A willingness to share knowledge, resources, and sometimes a cappuccino, is just as critical as a willingness to learn, especially at a teaching institution like MIT. So it goes without saying that the students at MIT have left their mark on Gallagher in turn — including teaching her how to format a digital table of contents on her very first day at MIT.

“Working with undergrads and grad students is my favorite part of MIT. Their generosity leaves me breathless,” says Gallagher. “No matter how busy they are, they’re always willing to help another person.”

Campus community

Gallagher cites the decline in community following the Covid-19 pandemic shutdown as one of her most significant challenges.

Prior to Covid, Gallagher says, “MIT had this great sense of community. Everyone had projects, volunteered, and engaged. The campus was buzzing, it was a hoot!”

She nurtured that community, from active participation in the MIT Women’s League to organizing an award-winning relaunch of Artist Behind the Desk. This subgroup of the MIT Working Group for Support Staff Issues hosted lunchtime recitals and visual art shows to bring together staff artists around campus, for which the group received a 2005 MIT Excellence Award for Creating Connections.

Moreover, Gallagher is an integral part of the smaller communities within the labs she supports.

Professor of biology and American Cancer Society Professor Graham Walker, yet another Department of Biology faculty member Gallagher supports, says, “Mary’s personal warmth and constant smile has lit up my lab for many years, and we are all grateful to have her as such a good colleague and friend.”

She strives to restore the sense of community that the campus used to have, but recognizes that striving for bygone days is futile.

“You can never go back in time and make the future what it was in the past,” she says. “You have to reimagine how we can make ourselves special in a new way.”

Spreading her roots

Gallagher’s life has been inextricably shaped by the Institute, and MIT, in turn, would not be what it is if not for Gallagher’s willingness to share her wisdom on the complexities of administration alongside the “joie de vivre” of her garden’s butterflies.

She recently bought a home in rural New Hampshire, trading the buzzing crowds of campus for the buzzing of local honeybees. Her work ethic is reflected in her ongoing commitment to curiosity, through reading about native plant life and documenting pollinating insects as they wander about her flowers.

Just as she can admire each bug and flower for the role it plays in the larger system, Gallagher has participated in and contributed to a culture of appreciating the role of every individual within the whole.

“At MIT’s core, they believe that everybody brings something to the table,” she says. “I wouldn’t be who I am if I didn’t work at MIT and meet all these people.”

Pathology and the Allure of Analytical Thinking

Susan Fuhrman ’75 pursued pathology because she liked providing clear answers to diagnostic questions, and has spent her retirement making complex beaded jewelry, a hobby she started more than 30 years ago as a foil for the stresses of work.

Kathryn M. O'Neill | Slice of MIT
October 7, 2025

Susan Fuhrman ’75 became a pathologist because she likes providing clear answers to diagnostic questions. “As opposed to guessing what people have, you’ve got the lab results, you have reviewed the pathology slides,” she says. “It’s pretty analytical. Your answer is the answer.”

That clarity of focus was never more valuable than in 2020, when Fuhrman was charged with answering the question everyone was asking: Is it Covid?

As the system director for pathology and laboratory services at OhioHealth, a major hospital system based in Columbus, Ohio, Fuhrman led efforts to address the epidemic—through hospital protocols and, of course, testing—all while fielding seemingly endless requests for her expertise in identifying disease.

“Everybody—from hospital vice presidents to the chief medical officer for the system— was calling me late at night and multiple times on weekends. It was incredible,” she says.

Within a year, the system’s labs had performed over half a million Covid tests and Fuhrman had been featured several times in CAP Today, a publication of the College of American Pathologists. She discussed general testing challenges as well as whom to test when and on which testing platform.

As it happened, however, Fuhrman was already famous thanks to work dating back to the 1980s.

Understanding Renal Cancer

The daughter of two chemists, Fuhrman majored in biology at MIT and earned her medical degree from the University of Michigan in 1978. She then went to the University of Minnesota Medical Center for her residency in pathology and laboratory medicine and found herself in need of a research topic. “I remember asking the head of our surgical pathology department, Dr. Juan Rosai, ‘What is a question in pathology that hasn’t been answered?’” she says. “He said, ‘Well, we don’t have a good way of determining which renal cell cancers have a bad prognosis. Currently we go by size, but there must be more than that. No one’s cracked the code. Why don’t you try that?’”

So, Fuhrman teamed up with another doctor at the Minneapolis veterans hospital, Dr. Catherine Limas, and together they developed and proposed a set of parameters to grade kidney cancers that might predict cancer outcomes. Then, Fuhrman did the painstaking work of reviewing and analyzing thousands of tumor slides, as well as cancer registry clinical data and medical charts. Her husband, Larry Lasky ’72—whom she had met at MIT and who also became a pathologist—programmed the analysis and helped her run the data she found through an early computer. “I input everything with computer cards and a teletype, super primitive stuff,” she says.

The data produced clear patterns in the predictive value of the appearance of cell nuclei, and the three published a paper proposing a grading system classifying which renal tumors are most aggressive and likely to spread based on their findings. The system, which is still the standard, is known as the Fuhrman Nuclear Grade for Clear Cell Renal Carcinoma.

American Board of Pathology President

After her residency, Fuhrman taught laboratory medicine to senior medical students as an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota for 12 years before moving to Ohio in 1994. In addition to working at OhioHealth, Fuhrman served for several years as president and CEO of CORPath, a private pathology practice. In 2022, she served a term as president of the American Board of Pathology, which later named her a life trustee in honor of her many years of service.

Fuhrman retired at the end of 2020 and has since spent much of her time making beaded jewelry—a hobby she started 35 years ago as a foil to work. “The job was stressful, and beading uses a totally different part of your brain. The left side can rest,” she says. “I can sit and sort beads by size and color for hours. That’s really weird and mindless, but I love it. I also love bead weaving; it’s like physics and architecture, building beautiful, structurally sound pieces from tiny beads.”

She creates elaborate bracelets and necklaces, often giving them away to friends or donating them to charity. “Jewelry making doesn’t pay very well, but I’m very lucky I don’t need to support myself on my hobby,” she says. “I do this for me.”

Little picture, large revelations

A summer intensive using microscopy to study a unique type of yeast was a dream come true for BSG-MSRP-Bio student Adryanne Gonzalez.

Lillian Eden | Department of Biology
September 11, 2025

For Adryanne Gonzalez, studying yeast using microscopy at MIT this summer has been a dream come true. 

“Whatever world we’re living in, there’s an even smaller one,” Gonzalez says. “Knowing and understanding the smaller one can help us learn about the bigger stuff, and I think that’s so fascinating.” 

Gonzalez was part of the Bernard S. and Sophie G. Gould MIT Summer Research Program in Biology, working in the Lew Lab this summer. The program offers talented undergraduates from institutions with limited research opportunities at their home institutions the chance to spend 10 weeks at MIT, where they gain experience, hone skills, and create the types of connections with potential collaborators and future colleagues that are critical for success in academia. 

Gonzalez was so excited about the opportunity that she didn’t apply for any other summer programs.  

“I really wanted to work on becoming more independent in the lab, and this program was research-intensive, and you get to lead your own project,” she says. “It was this or nothing.”

two people standing at a bench in front of a computer
Adryanne Gonzalez, right, with her mentor, Lew Lab graduate student Clara Fikry, left. Gonzalez spent the summer studying Aureobasidium pullulans, a type of yeast that produces large, root-like networks. Photo credit: Mandana Sassanfar/MIT Department of Biology

The fun of science & the rigors of mentoring

The Lew Lab works with two different specimens: a model baker’s yeast that multiplies by producing a round growth called a bud that eventually separates into a separate, daughter cell; and Aureobasidium pullulans, which is unusual because it can create multiple buds at the same time, and can also spread in large networks of branching, rootlike growths called hyphae. A. pullulans is an emerging model system, meaning that researchers are still defining what normal growth and behavior is for the fungus, like how it senses and responds to obstacles, and how resources and molecular machinery are allocated to its branching structures.  

“I’m really interested in all the diversity of biology that we don’t get to study if we’re only focused on the model species,” says Clara Fikry, a graduate student in the Lew Lab and Gonzalez’s mentor for the summer. 

On the mentoring side, Fikry learned how to balance providing a rigorous workload while not overwhelming her mentee with information. 

“Science should be fun,” Fikry says. “The goal of this isn’t to produce as much data as possible; it’s to learn what the process of science is like.”

Although her day-to-day work was with Fikry, Gonzalez also received guidance from Daniel Lew himself. For example, his advice was invaluable for honing a draft of her research statement for potential graduate school applications, which she’d previously written as part of a class assignment.

“It was an assignment where I needed to hit a page count, and he pointed out that I kind of wrote the same thing three times in the first paragraph,” she shares with a laugh. He helped her understand that “when you’re writing something professionally, you want your writing to be concise and understandable to a broad spectrum of readers.” 

Life in the cohort

The BSG-MSRP-Bio program gives undergraduate students a taste of what the day-to-day life of graduate school might feel like, from balancing one’s workload and reading research papers to learning new techniques and troubleshooting when experiments don’t go as planned. Gonzalez recalls that the application process felt very “adult” and “professional” because she was responsible for reaching out to the faculty member of the lab she was interested in on her own behalf, rather than going through a program intermediary. 

Gonzalez is one of just three students from Massachusetts participating in the program this year—the program draws students from across the globe to study at MIT. 

Every student also arrives with different levels of experience, from Gonzalez, who can only work in a lab during the school year about once a week, to Calo Lab student Adriana Camacho-Badillo, who is in her third consecutive summer in the program, and continuing work on a project she began last year.

“We’re all different levels of novice, and we’re coming together, and we’re all really excited about research,” Gonzalez says.

Gonzalez is a Gould Fellow, supported at MIT through the generous donations of Mike Gould and Sara Moss. The program funding was initiated in 2015 to honor the memory of Gould’s parents, Bernard S. and Sophie G. Gould. Gould and Moss take the time to come to campus and meet the students they’re supporting every year. 

“You don’t often get to meet the person that’s helping you,” Gonzalez said. “They were so warm and welcoming, and at the end, when they were giving everyone a nice, firm handshake, Mike Gould said, ‘Make sure you keep going. Don’t give up,’ which was so sweet.” 

Gonzalez is also supported by Cedar Tree, a Boston-based family foundation that primarily funds local environmental initiatives. In the interest of building a pipeline for future scientists with potential interest in the environmental sciences and beyond, Cedar Tree recently established a grant program for local high school and undergraduate students pursuing STEM research and training opportunities. 

Gonzalez discusses her summer research with attendees of the poster session that serves as the culmination of the 10-week summer research intensive for talented non-MIT undergraduate students from around the world. Photo credit: Lillian Eden/MIT Department of Biology.

Preparing for the future

The BSG-MSRP-Bio program culminates with a lively poster session where students present their summer projects to the MIT community—the first time some students are presenting their data to the public in that format.

Although the program is aimed at students who foresee a career in academia, the majority of students who participate are uncertain about the specific field, organism, or process they’ll eventually want to study during a PhD program. For Gonzalez, the program has helped her feel more prepared for the potential rigors of academic research.

“I think the hardest thing about this program is convincing yourself to apply,” she says. “Don’t let that hinder you from exploring opportunities that may seem out of reach.” 

3 Questions: Mariely Morales Burgos on the BSG-MSRP-Bio program

Undergraduate student and Gould Fellow discusses choosing a summer research lab, living in the Greater Boston Area, and managing imposter syndrome.

Lillian Eden | Department of Biology
August 28, 2025

Mariely Morales Burgos first fell in love with MIT while participating in the Quantitative Methods Workshop, a weeklong intensive offered in January to prepare students to analyze data in biology and neuroscience. Those skills have come in handy this summer while participating in the Bernard S. and Sophie G. Gould MIT Summer Research Program in Biology (BSG-MSRP-Bio), a ten-week training program for non-MIT undergraduate students interested in pursuing an academic career.

A Gould Fellow and McNair Scholar, Morales Burgos spent the summer mentored by Associate Professor of Biology Eliezer Calo, for whom the program served as a critical stepping stone in his own career. Calo is the first BSG-MSRP-Bio program alum to receive tenure at MIT. 

A rising senior at the University of Puerto Rico at Aguadilla, Morales Burgos spent the summer using zebrafish to study the molecular machinery responsible for making proteins. 

Three people standing in an interior lab space smiling at the camera
(from right to left) Mariely Morales Burgos, mentor and Associate Professor of Biology Eliezer Calo, and Adriana Camacho-Badillo in the lab at MIT. Camacho-Badillo, a returning BSG-MSRP-Bio student, encouraged Morales Burgos to apply for the program. Photo Credit: Mandana Sassanfar/MIT Department of Biology.

Q: How did you select your lab, and what have you been working on?

A: I knew I wanted to work in Eliezer’s lab after meeting him during a QMW faculty lunch. I felt like we really connected because of his genuine passion for science, commitment to his trainees, and the way he spoke about his lab and the care he puts into mentoring. 

My research focuses on ribosomes, which are the protein factories of the cell, and they’re essential to make what the cell needs to go through different developmental stages and through its most crucial processes. In early development, zebrafish and numerous other organisms depend on maternally deposited ribosomes and associated molecular components inherited directly from the oocyte. As time goes on, their own genomes activate, and they start being able to make their own ribosomes. What I’m studying is this transition from maternal to zygotic ribosomes during early development. We know this transition happens, but we don’t know how this transition is regulated, whether it happens passively, through dilution, or actively, through targeted cellular mechanisms.  

One skill that I’ve been able to learn here, other than just learning and applying techniques, is how to develop a whole project independently, how to think critically about the next step of my project, and what other questions I can ask.

Being able to work with a live animal organism and see the developmental stages in real-time, I thought that was really cool. And it really makes me appreciate the beauty of developmental biology, and just life in general.

Q: How did you prepare for the program, and what has it been like living and working in Boston and Cambridge? As a Gould Fellow, you also met with program supporters Mike Gould and Sara Moss, who established the Bernard S. and Sophie G. Gould fund to honor the memory of Mike’s parents. What was it like to meet and talk to Mike and Sara? 

A: Once we get accepted, we’re encouraged to start communication with our faculty. I had a few meetings with Eliezer to discuss some papers, and based on our discussion and the expectations for the project, I was able to read more and start preparing before I arrived.

Every few weeks beforehand, we had a meeting with Mandana and the rest of the cohort on Zoom, and we were talking on an app called GroupMe, and we exchanged socials, so when we came here, we weren’t complete, total strangers. 

When I’m not in the lab, I spend a lot of time with my roommates, and we like walking around Boston. It’s a very walkable city and has a lot of unique architecture, but Boston weather is very unpredictable. I’m from a tropical island, so I wish someone had told me to prepare for the rain and cold, but the July weather has been so nice. 

In Puerto Rico, you don’t have public transportation, so I’ve really enjoyed commuting. Our dorms are at Northeastern, so I take the bus, and it goes over the Charles, and it’s so beautiful. 

I’m a person who feels a lot of emotions, so I was the only one who cried when we met the Goulds. It was a bit embarrassing, but that’s okay. They told me to never lose the empathy that I have, no matter how hard my journey is, to keep on holding on to my sentimental side and keep working hard, and they’re so excited to see where we end up and what we end up doing.

Mariely Morales Burgos standing in front of a paper poster, indicating a certain point of data to three people
The summer research intensive culminated in a lively poster session. Photo Credit: Lillian Eden/MIT Department of Biology

Q: This program’s aim is to make research available for students who don’t have access to hands-on experience at their home institutions, so many students, including you, are embarking on independent research projects for the first time, which could trigger “imposter syndrome.” What was that experience like for you, and what advice would you give to future BSG-MSRP-Bio program participants? 

A: I was a little bit intimidated by the program, and didn’t apply the first time I had the opportunity. Then I did the Quantitative Methods Workshop, and those eight days were beautiful. I got to see how everybody loves collaborating and that the community here is very supportive. I met many wonderful faculty who were passionate about their research, and that exposure made me realize I would love to be part of a place like this. 

Imposter syndrome is something that I feel like most everybody deals with, but MSRP is a place that, if you’re willing to put in the work, everyone is willing to help you reach the places that you dream of being. It might feel intimidating to ask questions, and you could be scared of feeling like you don’t deserve to be in these spaces. But somebody who wants you to grow will answer your questions. I wanted to be able to work independently as soon as possible, because that really showcases your abilities, but no matter what, Eliezer, who’s mentoring me, his door is always open. 

What I advise is to really dive into your project and take advantage of everything this program offers. Working hard on your project, you get to fall in love with the process and the questions you’re trying to answer and science as a whole, and there’s nothing better than to spend the summer on a project that you love.

Ophthalmologist Puts Mind and Hand to Art

Carmel Mercado ’09 describes herself as “existing at the intersection of health and art.” A Seattle-based pediatric ophthalmologist, Mercado is also a visual artist whose whimsical illustrations and colorful animal characters can be found in places as varied as a children’s hospital and a microbrewery.

Sara Shay | MIT Technology Review
July 26, 2025

Carmel Mercado ’09 describes herself as “existing at the intersection of health and art.” A Seattle-based pediatric ophthalmologist, Mercado is also a visual artist whose whimsical illustrations and colorful animal characters can be found in places as varied as a children’s hospital and a microbrewery.

Looking back, Mercado says that even as a premed biology major at MIT she was pursuing both paths. She took a First-Year Advising Seminar in the arts and found a mentor in Michèle Oshima, then director of student and artist-in-residence programs at MIT’s Office of the Arts, who encouraged her to apply for the MIT Arts Scholars program. That gave her the opportunity to showcase her work in a gallery at MIT.

Mercado’s next stop was medical school at Johns Hopkins (she graduated in 2014). There, too, she gravitated toward opportunities for artistic expression, such as designing T-shirts and posters for an event welcoming prospective students. “That kind of helped me get through some darker days when I was really tired or really overwhelmed by the medical part of it,” she says.

She chose ophthalmology as her specialty in part because she found the eye itself visually appealing. “The first time I saw the fundus, the retina, the back of the eye, it was so beautiful to me,” she says. “Just looking at the optic nerve, the colors, the placement, I thought about how amazing it is that we can get such beautiful and complex imagery of our world from what looks to most people like a blob of jelly.”

Initially, Mercado assumed art would take a backseat to her medical career, but time in Japan—including a MISTI summer internship in Kobe—led her to realize she had other options. She connected with a mentor, Kenji Watanabe, while studying the history of medicine at Keio University in Tokyo during medical school. Watanabe “showed me a very different lifestyle,” she says: He didn’t limit his work to academia. “He had this really cool niche where he could do all this policy work. He was traveling to different countries to meet up with other physicians. It was eye-opening,” Mercado says. “He made me realize you can shape your career and your life to be able to pursue your passions. You shouldn’t just accept the traditional way. Being exposed to that early on probably gave me the courage to do what I’m doing now.”

As a practicing ophthalmologist, she began to involve art in her work by designing patient materials featuring characters she created. Colleagues noticed and offered her commissions. About four years ago, Mercado decided to pursue art full-time. The problem: She wasn’t sure how to promote herself. “I just about tried everything to see what would stick,” she says. She started an Etsy page and social media accounts, and she applied to art shows, art walks, and galleries. After about a year, her efforts paid off, and she started to get invitations for projects.

She has since exhibited her work in juried shows and galleries in the Boston, Orlando, and Seattle areas and has received commissions for public art from several cities in Washington. She even has a piece in the permanent gallery at Japan’s Sobana Museum.

Despite her artistic success, Mercado says she eventually missed the problem-solving and patient care involved in clinical work. She started tinkering with her schedule and settled on a roughly 60-40 split in favor of medicine.

In addition to seeing patients, she continues to pursue art projects, working mostly with acrylics and mixed media on canvas and with digital illustration; her style reflects her experiences with children and her observations of wildlife and folk art around the world, especially in Japan.

“I’ve found a space where I’m happy,” she says, “and where it feels a little bit more balanced for me.”

This story also appears in the July/August issue of MIT Alumni News magazine, published by MIT Technology Review. 

A shining light in the lab

Sriram “Sri” Srikant was known for insightful questions and irrepressible love of the pursuit of knowledge.

Lillian Eden | Department of Biology
July 24, 2025

Sriram “Sri” Srikant, a postdoctoral Scholar in the Laub Lab in the Department of Biology at MIT, succumbed to cancer in March. He was 35.

Srikant received a degree in Chemical Engineering with a minor in chemistry from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in 2011, and a PhD in Molecular and Cellular Biology from Harvard University in 2019. Among many accomplishments, Srikant was awarded an HHMI International Student Research Fellowship and a Peralta Prize for an outstanding dissertation proposal, both in 2013.

Srikant is described by mentors and colleagues alike as brilliant — a remarkable researcher who was both knowledgeable and approachable and whose enthusiasm was a bright beacon to all who had the chance to know him.

“There’s a blues line that I love, ‘Let the Midnight Special shine the ever lovin’ light on me,’” says Harvard College Professor Andrew Murray, one of Srikant’s thesis advisors. “For me, Sri was that Midnight Special, and we were lucky to have his ever lovin’ light shine on us.”

Academics are often equally motivated by a mix of a love of the work and a desire to succeed, whether it be by publications, grants, or high-impact findings. According to colleagues, however, Srikant’s passion came entirely from his need to know more.

“He told me once that ‘A life without science wouldn’t be worth living,’” said Dia Ghose, PhD ’24, a graduate student in the Laub Lab. “He wanted to move his career forward so he could keep doing science, but he didn’t care about impressing people. He just loved science and wanted to keep doing it.”

In the face of a terminal diagnosis, Srikant kept coming into the lab until his illness made it impossible. His marks on Building 68, however, remain — people are and will continue using the strains he built, the technique he developed, and the expertise he was so generous in sharing.

“There’s so many reminders of him, which is how it should be, because he contributed so much,” Ghose says. “He’s living on in the lab, and we’re still using everything that he gave us every day.”

The generosity of Sri Standard Time

As a graduate student at Harvard, Srikant pursued his thesis work in a joint PhD in the labs of both Murray and Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology Rachelle Gaudet.

“The experiments in Rachelle’s lab failed utterly, and those in mine failed miserably, but gave enough glimmers of possibility for him to make a series of technical innovations to turn something that looked hopeless into a very nice paper,” recalls Murray. “There was no part of science he wasn’t curious about, there was nothing he wouldn’t discuss, and there was no technical challenge he wouldn’t take on.”

In the Laub Lab, Srikant developed an experimental evolution approach to studying phage, the viruses that infect bacteria. Srikant set up an experimental pipeline to explore how phages can evolve to overcome anti-phage defense systems in bacteria. He was also investigating the broader mechanisms of how phage genomes evolve, and the types of mutations they acquire. In the case of recombination between co-infecting phages, he was developing a new methodology to study exactly how recombination between different phages occurs.

The experimental evolution approach swept through not just the lab at MIT but across the world, and Srikant assisted other labs in implementing his process.

“He was this incredibly selfless, generous guy who was always willing to help out other people,” says Michael Laub, Salvador E. Luria Professor and HHMI Investigator. “He also had this incredible encyclopedic knowledge and memory about all aspects of phages, and he was constantly drawing on that to help people with their projects.”

Srikant was so generous with his time and expertise that he was usually on “SST” or “Sri standard time”—which was, often, running late. He would declare he was heading out or needed to start experiments, and then engage in hours-long conversations with lab mates on topics ranging from physics to visa issues.

Srikant’s hobbies included reading papers from other fields — he was, simply put, interested in the pursuit of knowledge. If he wasn’t an expert on some topic, he could spend hours studying it, just in case he could be helpful. After ChatGPT was released, lab mates joked that ChatGP-Sri was more knowledgeable, had more reliable answers, and was usually available 24/7, says Tong Zhang, PhD ’24, another graduate student in the Laub Lab.

Srikant’s sole area of ignorance was seemingly was pop culture. He didn’t know who Taylor Swift was, and only knew of Lady Gaga from the one time she wore a meat dress more than a decade ago—which, Ghose noted, was a rather niche reference.

Always curious, never quiet

Murray recalls an incident when he was flying from Boston to San Francisco with Srikant, discussing science every minute of the flight. Srikant was so passionate about the subject that his neighbor felt the need to shush him repeatedly, which Srikant took in stride, saying, with a smile, “People have been telling me to be quieter my entire life, and they’re probably right!”

From his first year at Harvard to his final days in the Laub Lab, Srikant was known for his boundless curiosity. Murray says that it’s a rare thing, after a department seminar, for students to ask questions, but Srikant would always put his hand up. That habit continued through graduate school and at science and lab meetings during his too-brief time at MIT.

“It was remarkable,” Laub says. “After any talk, he always had the most probing, incisive, and really helpful questions, across very broad fields.”

Every time he asked a question, whether it was in class during his time at Harvard or at the Building 68 research retreat on the cape, Srikant would begin with, “One of the things I’m curious about.” Ghose says the phrase became something akin to a meme in the lab, and Srikant even commemorated the colloquialism with a bracelet that read ‘I’m curious.’

“For a person that brilliant and knowledgeable, Sri was so special. His impact on me and others will last forever,” Zhang says. “I have always been, and I will continue, looking up to him, honoring his passion for science, his brilliance as a scientist, and his kindness and generosity as a great friend.”