Category: Profiles

Raised in the “Kitchen”

Karen O’Leary, lab associate and acting supervisor in the Glassware Sterilization Facility, has become a cornerstone of the department’s operations.

Samantha Edelen | Department of Biology
June 25, 2026

Early mornings in the halls of Building 68 feature the sounds of rolling wheels on big metal carts, the rattling of glassware, the whooshing of faucets, and the clanking of autoclaves.

These aren’t the sounds of researchers at work, but rather those of keeping the labs sterilized and stocked with the sundries of research: pipette tips, test tubes, flasks, petri dishes, and more.

Orchestrating this sunrise cacophony and the staff that undertakes it is Karen O’Leary, lab associate and acting supervisor in the Glassware Sterilization Facility, also known as the “kitchen.”

Thanks, in part, to O’Leary’s proactivity and hard work, the kitchen staff were recently recognized with an MIT Excellence Award in 2025 for exceptional contributions in service of the community.

“My goal is to get the scientists everything they need to do their research,” O’Leary says. “I’m good at what I do.”

O’Leary admits she did not always possess such confidence. In almost 40 years at MIT, O’Leary has grown into this critical role for the department, and the department itself has evolved, moving into a brand-new building and away from previously standard practices like submerging equipment in acid for sterilization.

From rookie to running the show

On Sept. 7, 1987, Karen O’Leary joined the MIT community as a staff member for the first time. The 18-year-old was fresh from vocational high school, where she studied cosmetology but felt too shy to pursue that as a career. She was also nervous about joining a research institution.

“When I started, I didn’t even know what a beaker was,” she recalls.

Too embarrassed to admit in her interview that she couldn’t remember her brand-new home phone number, “I just made one up.” Fortunately, this didn’t prevent her from getting the job, where she worked under the mentorship of Thelma Watkins, who would retire in 1996 after 21 years at MIT. Watkins was critical for instilling a good work ethic and boosting O’Leary’s confidence.

“She taught me to show up every day, and work hard, and laugh,” O’Leary says.

Even now, O’Leary continues to bring joy to that daily diligence, for herself and for her staff.

“Karen is always on top of things,” says longtime friend and fellow Lab Associate AnnMarie Budhai. “She doesn’t refuse work and always goes above and beyond.”

Facilities and Operations Manager Cesar Duarte says that O’Leary’s long tenure, support, and knowledge have been invaluable as he transitioned into his role in Building 68 starting in 2023.

“Karen is one of those people who makes everything around her run more smoothly and more pleasantly,” Duarte says.

Better, faster, safer

Although some might consider it drudgery, O’Leary says that washing glassware is her favorite task.

“I like that when I wash, I can see the job is complete at the end of the day,” she says.

Although washing glassware is a perennial task, safety and efficiency have come a long way in the past 38 years. More-effective autoclaves and dishwashers have eliminated steps like steaming to dissolve agar solvents before autoclaving, and scrubbing individual test tubes before washing.

O’Leary was working for the department in 2011 when Building 68 piloted a new approach to MIT’s management of regulated medical waste (RMW), such as petri dishes, blood, and needles — the new system, which is cheaper and produces less waste, is now used by all departments at MIT that produce RMW.

“EHS [the Environment, Health and Safety Office] has come really far — I’m glad we got away from acid,” O’Leary notes of the bygone era of submerging glass pipettes for sterilization. “Back then, no one knew of a better way.”

Other tasks include cleaning velvets, which are used for replicating bacterial colonies on petri dishes, and pouring agar plates.

“Everyone knows how to do almost every job, so we can take turns doing different tasks,” O’Leary says. “If you get sick, there’s always someone to cover.”

All in the family

For O’Leary, kinship with MIT has spanned generations. O’Leary was raised in Weymouth, Massachusetts, by a father who worked at MIT as a supervisor in the sheet metal shop. Having raised children of her own, now grown, O’Leary came to greatly appreciate the flexibility her job has granted her.

“I’ve had great work-family balance here,” she says. Even though she’s often at work more than an hour before the researchers that the kitchen serves, “The hours are great, and with MIT Health right across the street, it was easy to take everyone to doctors’ appointments.”

She’s also gained a chosen family at MIT, spending breaks at work taking long walks along the Charles River, “talking about anything and everything” with colleagues like Budhai and Lab Aide Janet Katin.

“We really grew up together,” she says.

Working at MIT has provided O’Leary with support and community, and she’d like to pay it forward. In addition to strolling with colleagues, she hits the gym to help maintain the energy required for her highly active work.

“I don’t like sitting around,” she says.

In addition to maintaining her stamina at work, she hopes that taking care of herself will keep her actively involved if she ever has grandchildren, and enable her to help neighborhood kids when she someday retires.

“I owe a lot to MIT,” she says. “I have been allowed to work hard and get satisfaction and have been appreciated and given space to care for my family.”

O’Leary returns this care to the Department of Biology in spades.

“It’s an understatement to say that Biology is lucky to have her,” says Duarte. “Karen’s overflowing energy, attention to detail, and care for the Biology research community are nothing short of amazing.”

Harriet having it all

From Boston to Moscow and across the U.S., Harriet Latham Robinson SM ’61, PhD ’65 has balanced an exciting career at the forefront of molecular biology with family, friends, and adventure.

Lillian Eden | Department of Biology
June 12, 2026

In winter 1997, at age 60, when many researchers might be looking forward to retirement, Harriet Latham Robinson SM ’61, PhD ’65 was pursuing a faculty position as the chief of microbiology and immunology at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.

She got the job.

There, she would also co-found GeoVax, a biotechnology company, based on her preclinical research, including work on developing an HIV-1 vaccine.

Often, as the only woman in a room throughout much of her career, and in the still-developing and male-dominated field of molecular biology, her colleagues were referred to as “doctor” or “professor” at scientific symposia and committee meetings.

“In contrast,” she recalls, “I was Harriet.”

Becoming a scientist

Robinson was born in 1938, the second of four children, to a mother, Ruth, and a father, Allen, from Ohio and Connecticut, respectively. After finishing grammar school, she attended the Girls’ Latin School, a public magnet school for college-bound young women. Although the school offered only two classes in science — one semester of chemistry and a health class — Robinson credits her time there for inspiring a lifelong love of learning, especially history and languages.

“At our 50th and 60th high school reunions, I was struck by what my Girls’ Latin school classmates had done with their lives,” she says. “We had become not only wives, mothers, teachers, and nurses we were supposed to become, but also physicians, lawyers, professors, politicians, and businesswomen.”

Robinson pursued her undergraduate studies at Swarthmore College, where she intended to study political science. After an introductory biology course, however, she switched her major. Despite the shift, a love of languages persisted: Robinson took Russian and, the summer after her senior year of college, served as a Russian-English speaking guide at the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow. Despite mounting tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, she served again in a similar role from September 1961 to January 1962 for a traveling transportation exhibition in Russia and Ukraine, where she was stationed by a Ford Thunderbird, wearing a TWA stewardess uniform.

“We were true entertainment, as well as education, and I worked to do my best to answer questions about America,” she says. “I was most surprised by the pride the Russian people took in the post-World War II accomplishments of their country.”

Robinson might not have had a career in science at all had it not been for a dean at Radcliffe College who recognized Robinson’s interest in science. Robinson had thought it appropriate, as a young lady, to pursue marriage and to only further her education to become a teacher or nurse. Seeking permission to take chemistry instead of education courses to fulfill requirements for getting a teaching degree, she was referred to a dean who considered it perfectly appropriate for a young woman to pursue another career. Robinson recalls that the dean declared, “My dear, you want to be a scientist.”

The foundation for a career

Robinson was soon accepted at MIT and was offered a fellowship to teach in an introductory biology lab to help pay her way. She returned from Moscow just five days before the start of a master’s program in biochemistry. In the Department of Biology at MIT, there were only a handful of women, no female faculty, and few ladies’ rooms in 1959.

It was there that she met Walter “Wally” J.K. Tannenberg, a onetime partner but lifelong friend and companion, an MD taking courses at MIT. He wasn’t “at all taken aback by my becoming an educated woman,” Robinson says. He taught her to ski, and they sailed his lightening, the Ondine, in circles around Robinson’s parents’ comparatively slow motor sailor, the Palometa.

Their breakup just before the winter holidays in 1963 precipitated her reentry to graduate school, to pursue her thesis work in the lab of Jim Darnell; she threw herself into studies to sit a qualifying exam less than a month after reentry.

“A Bell Labs physicist who had just joined the Darnell Lab opined that any concept in biology could be mastered in two weeks,” Robinson says. “Much to everyone’s amazement, I not only passed my qualifying exam, but did much better than expected.”

It was at the University of California at Berkeley during her postdoctoral work that she met her husband. Although the marriage would not last the test of time, Robinson and her husband were blessed with three boys, each 13 months apart.

Robinson knew that she wanted to take time away from her career to stay home with her children before they entered primary school. As a graduate student at MIT, to prepare for both having a career and pursuing motherhood, Robinson hired a housekeeper and committed to being in the lab for only a typical 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. workday. If she were to compete with her male counterparts and be with her children, she needed to be able to get things done while working short hours.

Robinson successfully completed her thesis work in just over two years.

“The difference between bearing children and rising up professional ladders is that you can start up the professional ladder after you are 40,” she advises. “Such is more problematic for having children.”

Robinson’s thesis work at MIT concerned how DNA, which is identical in all cells of an organism, produces different cell types from the same genetic blueprint. She explored this question through the lens of messenger RNA, a gene product that determines which DNA sequences are expressed in a cell. Later, her work on cancer-causing viruses in chickens would help lay the groundwork for gaining insight into genes that can cause tumors to form.

“In contrast to becoming a wife, becoming a PhD from MIT did not falter, but rather provided me with the foundations for a career I loved in which I used molecular biology and chickens to study the genetic basis of cancer and pioneered the use of DNA as a new method of vaccination,” Robinson says.

Cancer-causing viruses

Robinson, supported by an National Science Foundation fellowship, pursued postdoc training at the University of California at Berkeley, in the lab of Harry Rubin. The Rubin Lab specialized in work on a virus known to cause cancer: the Rous sarcoma virus, which causes rapid tumor onset when introduced into chickens. RNA, it had recently been discovered, was the underlying genetic cause of tumors developing in chickens exposed to the Rous sarcoma virus. It cannot, however, do this deadly work without co-infection with something called a helper virus — in this case, avian leukosis virus.

Both Rous sarcoma virus and its helper viruses were retroviruses, which can make DNA copies from RNA sequences, a departure from the previously accepted dogma that DNA is only transcribed into RNA, and not the other way around.

Robinson joined the Worcester Foundation for Biomedical Research in 1977, where she continued research on Rous helper viruses and had the opportunity to run her own lab for the first time. In 1998, she was recruited to be a professor of pathology at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. While there, she conducted pioneering studies on the use of DNA for vaccination and worked on developing an AIDS vaccine.

In 1999, she moved again, this time to step into the role of chief of microbiology and immunology at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University, where she began testing her candidate HIV vaccines in primates. While at the University of Massachusetts and Emory, Robinson and her lab used DNA vaccines, both with and without a poxvirus booster vaccine provided by Bernie Moss at the National Institutes of Health, to immunize animals against influenza, HIV, measles, and Ebola.

“From the early days of DNA vaccines, I had wanted to start a company to help move DNA vaccines from bench to bedside,” she says.

Thus, GeoVax, short for “Georgia Vaccines,” was born. Robinson co-founded it with Don Hildebrand in 2001 after her move to Yerkes; Robinson would serve as chief scientific officer and a member of the board of directors during her tenure at the company.

GeoVax successfully moved Robinson’s candidate AIDS vaccine into human clinical trials. These trials were stopped due to the generally poor performance of HIV vaccines in clinical trials, compared to the outstanding therapeutic potential of more recently developed anti-HIV drugs. GeoVax, however, continues to work on vaccines for Mpox, Covid-19, and Ebola, and has expanded its scope to include a cancer treatment.

A well-deserved retirement 

After rounds of good-natured roasting from colleagues at Emory University and GeoVax, Robinson retired and has been enjoying returning to Palo Alto, California, where her oldest son, Bill, and his wife now live.

Ultimately, Robinson hopes that her story can encourage everyone, especially young women, not to let pursuing a challenging and enriching career prevent them from realizing the dream of having a family.

“I have had a wonderful life, far exceeding what I ever could have anticipated,” Robinson says. “I have had international adventure, the romance of a man who truly loved me, the joy of motherhood, and the warmth, wonder, and adventure of family and friends, and last, but not least, the exhilaration of a career in molecular biology.”

Advancing stem cell research and building the next generation of biologists

Biology PhD student Giselle Valdes (Reddien Lab) studies stem cell regeneration while encouraging aspiring students and researchers.

Stefanie Koperniak | Division of Graduate and Undergraduate Education
June 11, 2026

As an undergraduate at Florida International University, Giselle Valdes tackled rigorous studies in the school’s Honors College while simultaneously caring for family members with medical needs.

“I think that the choice to pursue any field in the space of biology and medical research was entirely shaped by having to be there for my family,” says Valdes.

As a McNair Scholar and biomedical engineering major who also did extensive research in biochemistry, she leaned more toward undergraduate courses in mechanical and electrical engineering that were geared primarily toward equipping students to build medical devices. She began to shift her research interests more firmly into biology, however, the summer before her senior year in 2018. She spent 10 weeks on the MIT campus as a participant in the Bernard S. and Sophie G. Gould MIT Summer Research Program in Biology (BSG-MSRP-Bio), working in the lab of Associate Professor Eliezer Calo PhD ’11, also a former BSG-MSRP-Bio participant. The Calo Lab focuses on ribosomes, small cellular particles that translate RNA into proteins, and looks at how mutations in ribosome development can lead to disorders.

After working in Calo’s lab, she could see herself as a biology graduate student at MIT. In January 2019, she attended the MIT biology department’s Quantitative Methods Workshop, a weeklong, intensive workshop designed to introduce non-MIT undergraduates to tools and programming languages used to analyze experimental data in biology and neuroscience. While there, she was elated to receive an email from the department inviting her to interview for the PhD program. She was accepted and began her doctoral studies in the fall of that year.

“When I think about my experiences at MIT, both as an undergraduate in MIT programs and as a PhD candidate in biology, I think about all the great mentors who have helped me along the way,” says Valdes. “I’ve also really valued the richly collaborative community, and being able to take a lot of risks in how I address the questions I have the opportunity to pursue.”

Researching stem cell regeneration

Since she came from a biomedical engineering background, Valdes spent the first year of the biology doctoral program taking foundational biology courses and working in different labs to decide which type of research she wanted to do. She gravitated toward cell and developmental biology and joined the lab of Professor Peter Reddien, associate director of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. Valdes was awarded an MIT Fund for the Future of Science Fellowship to support her research.

“Giselle is doing terrific work on a fundamental problem related to adult stem cells and regeneration — how do progenitor cells choose what cell types to make? Fate choice in progenitors is typically studied in embryogenesis, and how it occurs in the context of adult regeneration is poorly understood and very important to address,” says Reddien.

Valdes has worked extensively with stem cells in highly regenerative flatworms, called planaria. analyzing the process of “cell fate choice,” or how cells determine which specific cell types and functions to develop. To date, Valdes, Reddien, and other researchers have studied “neighborhoods” of neoblasts (adult stem cells) and their fate choices, finding that different neighboring stem cells often chose different fate options — suggesting that cell fate choices are largely made by processes autonomous to individual cells.

Her current research aims to better understand the driving mechanism for cell fate choice, both within planaria and an additional model system: the evolutionarily distant acoel Hofstenia miamia.

“A lot of the things I’m doing in my current project have involved developing techniques that didn’t previously exist in our model organism,” says Valdes.

Working on model systems with limitations in the toolkit traditionally available to more well-established systems, such as transgenics, has allowed her to be creative in the techniques she applies to determine how stem cells choose what to become. It has also opened doors to collaborations, such as one with Ye Zhang of the Manalis Lab in the biological engineering department (now an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Virginia Tech), that have allowed Valdes and team to sort neoblasts in novel ways based on their morphology, and better relate that to their dynamic state.

In summer 2024, Valdes mentored a BSG-MSRP-Bio student who now works with her on a current research project.

“She’s been with me as a technical assistant in the lab now for over a year, and we’ve been able to work on one of my projects together,” says Valdes. “It’s been exciting to come full circle in this way.”

Teaching and mentoring, near and far

In addition to her research, Valdes devotes a lot of her time to teaching and mentoring, both for MIT biology students and younger students discovering an interest in STEM.

“It’s been so rewarding to have a lot of opportunities to do for others what has been done for me,” she says.

Valdes has worked with secondary students both locally and abroad. She participates in the biology department’s developmental biology lab for high-school students and teaches in an annual biology lecture series for high schoolers. She has worked with the Enroot program from Cambridge Community Services, acting as a direct mentor to local high-school and community college students. At the Whitehead Institute’s Expedition: Bio program, for middle- and high-school students, she runs a planarian workshop. And she gives lab tours through the Whitehead Discovery Lab initiative, engaging in discussion with local high-school students.

Valdes has also assisted with a hackathon for Sprouting, a social impact venture providing STEM education opportunities to under-resourced communities in Puerto Rico. Sprouting was launched by Taylor Baum, a doctoral student in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Valdes taught coding essentials to Spanish-speaking middle- and high-school students in Puerto Rico.

“That was really emotional,” says Valdes. “The parents were so grateful, and there were kids who were clearly brilliant and gifted. They were able to really take off with the tools that we gave them.”

In her department, Valdes has been a teaching assistant for classes 7.003 (Applied Molecular Biology Laboratory) and 7.03 (Genetics). She is also a teaching assistant for the Quantitative Methods Workshop and teaches a Python module to students in the program.

“Giselle may be quite small in physical stature, yet she dominates the room when she speaks, and commands the full attention of an audience of 80 students when giving a lecture,” says Mandana Sassanfar, a biology senior lecturer and director of outreach who runs the Quantitative Methods Workshop. “She is highly respected both for her knowledge and the way she interacts with people. She is extremely approachable, very generous with her time, and always very supportive and encouraging. She is a wonderful mentor, teacher, and scientist.”

Valdes says she is always happy to help mentor undergrads and graduate students. She is co-founder and coordinator of the MIT Biology Application Assistance Program (BAAP), which aims to demystify the graduate school application process and offer interested applicants the tools and direct mentorship necessary for putting together a successful application. She also helped to coordinate, and has been an active participant in, the MIT BioPals Program, a student-organized peer mentorship initiative within the department that connects incoming first-year graduate students with senior graduate students. During the Covid-19 pandemic, this program provided critical support and social connection for new students navigating remote learning and social distancing.

After she completes her doctoral program, she envisions pursuing a postdoc and, ultimately, a faculty role, citing her passion for both academic research and teaching.

“My goal is to stay in academia in some way,” says Valdes. “I love mentorship and curiosity-driven science.”

Biologist Joey Davis explores how cells build complex structures

His studies have shed light on the assembly instructions that govern ribosomes, the critical protein-building machines of the cell.

Anne Trafton | MIT News
May 5, 2026

Ribosomes, the cellular machines that assemble proteins, are made from dozens of proteins and RNA molecules. Putting all of those pieces together is a complex puzzle — one that MIT Associate Professor Joey Davis PhD ’10 revels in trying to solve.

Understanding how these structures form and later break down could help researchers learn more about how disruptions of these fundamental processes can lead to disease. But, as Davis points out, it’s also an interesting biological question.

“Our long-term goal is to really understand how the natural world assembles these huge complexes rapidly and efficiently. It’s a fundamentally interesting question to think about how these things get put together,” he says.

His work has helped reveal that unlike building a house, which happens in a prescribed sequence of steps — pouring the foundation, building the frame, putting on the roof, then doing electrical and plumbing work — ribosomes can be assembled in a more flexible way. Cells can even skip an assembly step and then come back to it later.

“In these natural systems, it seems like the assembly pathways are much more dynamic and flexible,” he says. “It appears that evolution has selected pathways that aren’t strictly ordered in the way we would think about an assembly line, where you always put in one component, then the next, and then the next. We’re excited to understand the selective advantages of such approaches.”

A love of discovery

Davis’ interest in how things are put together developed early in life, inspired by his father, a carpenter who framed houses. During the mid-1980s, the family moved from Colorado to Southern California, where his father worked in construction during a housing boom there.

“I was always interested in building things, which I think probably came from being around my dad and other builders,” Davis says.

As an undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley, where he majored in computer science and biological engineering, Davis’ interests turned toward smaller scales, in the realm of cells and molecules. During his junior year, he started working in the lab of chemistry professor Michael Marletta, who studies molecular-level biological interactions.

In the lab, Davis investigated how enzymes that contain heme are able to preferentially bind to either oxygen or nitric oxide, two gases that are very similar in structure. That work kindled a love of studying the natural world and pursuing discoveries in fundamental science.

“Being in the Marletta lab and seeing students and postdocs that were really passionate about these problems had a big impact on me,” Davis says. “The goal was to understand the fundamentals of how molecular discrimination works, and the idea of discovery for the sake of discovery was thrilling.”

After graduating from Berkeley, Davis spent another year working in Marletta’s lab, and then a year working odd jobs, before heading to MIT to pursue a PhD in biology. There, he worked with Professor Bob Sauer, now emeritus, who studied the relationship between protein structure and function, with a particular focus on the molecular machines that degrade or remodel proteins.

Davis’ thesis research centered on enzymes called AAA proteases, which remove damaged proteins from cellular membranes and send them to cell organelles that break them down. In addition to studying the structure and function of the proteases, Davis worked on ways to engineer them to tag specific proteins for destruction.

That work led him into synthetic biology, which he used to develop genetic parts that drive production of proteins of interest. Some of those parts ended up being used by the biotech startup Ginkgo Bioworks, where Davis took a job as a senior scientist after graduating.

Working at Ginkgo Bioworks allowed Davis to stay in Boston while his partner finished her PhD. The couple then moved back to California, where Davis worked as a postdoc at Scripps Research, which was home to one of the first direct electron detection cameras for cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM). These detectors allow researchers to generate structures with near atomic resolution. At Scripps, Davis began using them to study ribosomes as they were being assembled.

Peering into the ribosome

After joining the MIT faculty in 2017, Davis continued his work on ribosomes and assembled a lab group that includes students from a variety of backgrounds who work together to develop new ways to explore biological phenomena.

“I have a mix of method developers and biologists in the group, and the work from each of them informs each other,” Davis says. “My lab goes back and forth between building sets of tools to answer biological questions, and then as we’re answering those questions, it motivates the next generation of tool development.”

During ribosome assembly, RNA molecules fold themselves into the correct shapes, creating docking sites for proteins to attach. Then, more RNA molecules come in and fold themselves into the structure.

“It’s a beautifully coupled process by which the cell folds hundreds of RNA helices and binds on the order of 50 proteins, and it does it in two minutes from start to finish. E. coli does this 100,000 times per hour, and it’s amazing how rapid and efficient the process is,” Davis says.

Cryo-EM allows scientists to capture this process in minute detail. It can be used to take hundreds of thousands of two-dimensional images of ribosome samples frozen in a thin layer of ice, from different angles. Computer algorithms then piece together these images into a three-dimensional representation of the ribosome.

To gain insight into how ribosomes are assembled, researchers can stall the process at different points and then analyze the resulting structures. In 2021, Davis’s lab developed a new method called CryoDRGN, which uses neural networks to analyze cryo-EM data and generate the full ensemble of structures that were present in the sample.

This work has shown that when certain steps of ribosome assembly are blocked, many different structures result, suggesting that the assembly can occur in a variety of ways.

In future work, Davis aims to dramatically increase the throughput of cryo-EM to generate datasets of protein structures that could help improve the AI-based models that are now used to predict protein structures.

“There are still huge swaths of sequence space that these models are very poor at predicting, but if we could collect data on those sequences en masse, that could potentially serve as key training data for a next-generation protein structure prediction method that could fill out that space,” he says.

Alumni Spotlight: Caring for Service Dogs

Brenda Schafer Kennedy, SM '93, knows firsthand that sometimes the best medicine comes with four legs and fur. To date, Canine Companions, a California-based nationwide organization for which Kennedy serves as the chief veterinary and research officer, has paired more than 7,000 dogs to provide assistance to children, veterans, and adults with disabilities at no cost.

Kara Baskin | MIT Technology Review
May 1, 2026

Brenda Schafer Kennedy SM ’93 knows that sometimes the best medicine comes with four legs and fur. Kennedy is the chief veterinary and research officer for Canine Companions, a California-based, nationwide organization that provides assistance dogs at no cost to children, veterans, and adults with disabilities.

“The need is enormous: One in four people in the US has a disability. We have so many people who could benefit from these dogs,” Kennedy says.

While service dogs might be best known for guiding the blind, Canine Companions trains dogs to do such things as open doors for wheelchair users or alert deaf people to doorbells, fire alarms, and other key sounds. Its psychiatric service dogs help veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder—waking them from nightmares, for example. To date, it’s paired more than 7,000 dogs with people in need.

It’s critical to ensure that every service dog placed is healthy, and Kennedy—a veterinarian—spearheads the organization’s efforts to breed dogs with that in mind. “We wouldn’t place a dog that might have a life-shortening or a significant medical issue that a person might have to manage,” she says.

Kennedy also takes the lead in developing tech to support Canine Companions’ work. She is a co-inventor of CanineAlert, a patented device that sends a signal to a dog’s collar so the dog can interrupt a nightmare when its owner’s heart rate spikes. The technology may soon expand to address daytime anxiety episodes.

“These dogs can really be not only life-transforming in terms of providing people with independence, but critically essential and even life-saving,” she says.

An animal lover since childhood, Kennedy earned her undergraduate degree from Northwestern University before coming to MIT for her master’s in biology. “I found incredible mentors at MIT,” she says, noting that she particularly enjoyed working with Professor Hazel Sive, whose lab studied African clawed frogs.

The research was fascinating, but Kennedy wanted to work in hands-on medicine, so she obtained her veterinary degree from Tufts University. She then spent 16 years in private practice. Today, she is delighted to combine animal care with research at Canine Companions. “I had a passion for doing something really mission-oriented,” she says. “I love the idea of helping people through the human-canine bond.”

In addition to providing service, dogs also offer something elemental, Kennedy says: “Dogs add unconditional love to the mix. They support emotional and mental health for people and can be bridges to the community.”

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

Photo: Chris Kittredge

Building the blocks of life

Computational biologist Sergei Kotelnikov is working to develop new methods in protein modeling as part of the School of Science Dean’s Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Lyn Nanticha Ocharoenchai | School of Science
March 31, 2026

Billions of years ago, simple organic molecules drifted across Earth’s primordial landscape — nothing more than basic chemical compounds. But as natural forces shaped the planet over hundreds of millions of years, these molecules began to interact and bond in increasingly complex ways. Along the way, something spectacular emerged: life.

“Life is, to some degree, magical,” says computational biologist Sergei Kotelnikov. Simple organic compounds congregate into polymers, which assemble into living cells and ultimately organisms — the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.

“You can write formulas on how a molecule behaves,” he says, referring to the world of quantum mechanics. “But yet somehow, a few orders of magnitude above, on a bigger scale, it gives rise to such a mystery.”

Kotelnikov builds models to analyze and predict the structure of these biomolecules, particularly proteins, the fundamental building blocks of every organism. This year, he joined MIT as part of the School of Science Dean’s Postdoctoral Fellowship to work with the Keating Lab, where researchers focus on protein structure, function, and interaction. Using machine learning, his goal is to develop new methods in protein modeling with potential applications that span from medicine to agriculture.

A hunger for problems to solve

Kotelnikov grew up in Abakan, Russia, a small city sitting right in the center of Eurasia. As a child, one of his favorite pastimes was playing with Lego bricks.

“It encouraged me to build new things, rather than just following instructions,” he says. “You can do anything.”

Kotelnikov’s father, whose background lies in engineering and economics, would often challenge him with math problems.

“Your brain — you can feel some kind of expansion of understanding how things work, and that’s a very satisfactory feeling,” Kotelnikov says.

This itch to solve problems led him to join science Olympiad competitions, and later, a science-focused public boarding school located near the Russian Academy of Sciences, from which he often encountered scientists.

“It was like a candy shop,” he recalls, describing the period as a life-changing experience.

In 2012, Kotelnikov began his bachelor of science in physics and applied mathematics at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology — considered one of the leading STEM universities in Russia, and globally — and continued there for his master’s degree. It was there that biology came into the picture.

During a course on statistical physics, Kotelnikov was first introduced to the idea of the “emergence of complexity.” He became fascinated by this “mysterious and attractive manifestation of biology … this evolution that sharpens the physical phenomenon” to create, drive, and shape life as we know it today. By the time he completed his master’s degree, he realized he had only scratched surface of the field of computational biology.

In 2018, he began his PhD at Stony Brook University in New York and began working with Dima Kozakov, who is recognized as one of the world’s leaders in predicting protein interactions and complex structures.

Studying the architecture of life  

Proteins act like the bricks that construct an organism, underpinning almost every cellular process from tissue repair to hormone production. Like pieces of a Lego tower, their structures and interactions determine the functions that they carry out in a body.

However, diseases arise when they’re folded, curled, twisted, or connected in unusual ways. To develop medical interventions, scientists break down the tower and examine each individual piece to find the culprit and correct their shape and pairing. With limited experimental data on protein structures and interactions currently available, simulations developed by computational biologists like Kotelnikov provide crucial insight that inform fundamental understanding and applications like drug discovery.

With the guidance of Kozakov at Stony Brook’s Laufer Center for Physical and Quantitative Biology, Kotelnikov carried over his understanding of physics to create modeling methods that are more effective, efficient, reliable, and generalizable. Among them, he developed a new way of predicting the protein complex structures mediated by proteolysis-targeting chimeras, or PROTACs, a new class of molecules that can trigger the breakdown of specific proteins previously considered undruggable, such as those found in cancer.

PROTACs have been challenging to model, in part because they are composed of proteins that don’t naturally interact with each other, and because the linker that connects them is flexible. Imagine trying to guess the overall shape of a bendy Lego piece attached to two other pieces of different irregular, unmatched shapes. To efficiently find all possible configurations, Kotelnikov’s method conceptually cuts the linker into two halves and models each separately, then reformulates the problem and calculates it using a powerful algorithm called Fast Fourier Transform.

“It’s kind of like applied math judo that you sometimes need to do in order to make certain intractable computations tractable,” he says.

Kotelnikov’s state-of-the-art methods have been instrumental to his team’s top performance in numerous international challenges including the Critical Assessment of protein Structure Prediction (CASP) competition — the same contest in which the Nobel Prize-winning AlphaFold system for protein 3D structure prediction was presented.

Physics and machine learning

At MIT, Kotelnikov is working with Amy Keating, the Jay A. Stein (1968) Professor of Biology, biology department head, and professor of biological engineering, to study protein structure, function, and interactions.

A recognized leader in the field, Keating employs both computational and experimental methods to study proteins, their interactions, as well as how this can impact disease. By infusing physics with machine learning, Kotelnikov’s goal is to advance modeling methods that can vastly inform applications such as cancer immunology and crop protection.

“Kotelnikov stands to gain a lot from working closely with wet lab researchers who are doing the experiments that will complement and test his predictions, and my lab will benefit from his experience developing and applying advanced computational analyses,” says Keating.

Kotelnikov is also planning to work with professors Tommi Jaakkola and Tess Smidt in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science to explore a field called geometric deep learning. In particular, he aims to integrate physical and geometric knowledge about biomolecules into neural network architectures and learning procedures. This approach can significantly reduce the amount of data needed for learning, and improve the generalizability of resulting models.

Beyond the two departments, Kotelnikov is also excited to see how the diversity and interdisciplinary mix of MIT’s community will help him come up with ideas.

“When you’re building a model, you’re entering this imaginary world of assumptions and simplifications and it might feel challenging because of this disconnect with reality,” Kotelnikov says. “Being able to efficiently communicate with experimentalists is of high value.”

Leading with rigor, kindness, and care

“We cannot be effective scientists if we are unhappy or unhealthy outside of the lab,” says “Committed to Caring” honoree Sara Prescott.

Leila Hudson | Office of Graduate Education
March 27, 2026

Professor Sara Prescott embodies the kind of mentorship every graduate student hopes to find: grounded in scientific rigor, guided by kindness, and defined by a deep commitment to well-being. Her approach reflects a simple but powerful belief that transformative mentorship is not only about advancing research, but about cultivating confidence, belonging, and resilience in the next generation of scholars.

A member of the 2025–27 Committed to Caring cohort, Prescott exemplifies the program’s spirit, which honors faculty who go above and beyond in nurturing both the intellectual and personal development of MIT’s graduate students.

Prescott is the Pfizer Inc. – Gerald D. Laubach Career Development Professor in the MIT departments of Biology and Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and an investigator at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory. Her research addresses fundamental questions in body-brain communication, with a focus on lung biology, early-life adversity, women’s health, and the impacts of climate change on respiratory health.

A culture of compassion

Prescott’s mentoring philosophy begins with a focus on professional sustainability. “We cannot be effective scientists if we are unhappy or unhealthy outside of the lab,” she says.

She pushes back against what she sees as an unhelpful narrative in academia. “There’s this idea that you must choose between a successful PhD or having a personal life. This is a false dichotomy, and a problematic attitude.” Instead, she reminds her mentees that “graduate school is a marathon, not a sprint,” encouraging them to place importance not only on their research, but also on their mental and physical well-being.

This set of values shines through within her lab climate as a whole. Students describe support for flexible scheduling and mental health leave, a willingness to reimburse meals during late-night lab sessions, and encouragement during stretches of experimental failure. In addition to these more technical supports, nominators also shared stories of Prescott engaging in the smaller details: prioritizing connection for her students, celebrating their milestones, organizing lab retreats, and fostering a culture where people feel valued beyond their productivity.

Students recognize Prescott as a safe haven within the often complex and challenging world of research. Joining Prescott’s lab was a turning point for one student who was recovering from a damaging prior mentorship experience. They arrived uncertain, struggling to trust faculty and questioning whether they belonged in science at all. Prescott met them with empathy and professionalism, offering patience and trust not just in their work, but in them as a person. They describe steady support that, over time, helped them “fall back in love with science” and envision a future they had nearly abandoned.

Prescott draws inspiration from the mentorship she received early in her career. As a trainee, she had mentors who helped her believe that she could succeed. Now in a mentoring role herself, she does her best to pass this sense of confidence on to her advisees.

She is intentional about creating space where students can grow without fear. From their very first meetings, one nominator wrote, Prescott emphasized that “graduate school is a place for learning and curiosity.” They never felt judged for not knowing something; instead, they were encouraged to ask questions, share ideas, and take intellectual risks. That environment, the student explained, allowed them to grow into their scientific identity with confidence.

Prescott reinforces this message often. Success, she tells students, grows from effort, learning, and persistence, rather than from fixed traits. When working with students, she does her best to reframe failure as part of the process, emphasizing its importance within the scientific journey. Through these avenues, she cultivates a lab culture where nominators are challenged to think boldly while feeling genuinely supported, and where her students are seen not only as researchers, but as whole people.

Advocacy beyond the bench

Prescott’s commitment to caring extends well beyond day-to-day lab work. Her nominators relate that she actively supports her students’ professional development, encouraging them to pursue writing projects, certificates, internships, leadership roles, and community engagement.

Nominators also highlight Prescott’s focus on supporting underserved communities within the field as a whole. Students highlight her involvement with Graduate Women in Biology (GwiBio), where she volunteered as a speaker for the “Glass Shards” series. Her talk “Failure as the Path to Success,” in which she candidly shared pivots and setbacks in her own career, was described as one of the organization’s most impactful sessions.

Her dedication to inclusion is equally evident in her mentorship of scholars whose role in her lab is more temporary.  She welcomes international visiting scholars, temporary lab techs, and undergraduate interns in the MIT Summer Research Program. When one intern encountered barriers at their home institution, Prescott ensured they had a continued research home in her lab at MIT. These additional resources allowed them to complete their undergraduate thesis and graduate on time from their university.

Prescott says that she views mentorship as an evolving practice, regularly soliciting feedback from her students. Effective leadership, in her view, grows from mutual trust and open communication.

For many nominators, Prescott’s impact extends beyond their careers. “She has taught me what positive and supportive mentoring relationships look like,” one student reflected. “When I think about the type of mentor I want to be, I hope I can emulate the ways in which she supports and guides nominators to develop their scientific independence and confidence.”

In lifting up the people behind the science as thoughtfully as the science itself, Sara Prescott demonstrates that the most enduring legacy of a mentor is not only the discoveries from their lab, but the composure and courage their advisees carry forward.

CryoPRISM: A new tool for observing cellular machinery in a more natural environment

The method allows researchers to observe biomolecular complexes in a quick, accurate, and budget-friendly way, providing new insights into bacterial protein synthesis.

Ekaterina Khalizeva | Department of Biology
March 20, 2026

The blobfish, once considered the ugliest animal in the world, has since had quite the redemption arc. Years after it was first discovered, scientists realized that the deep-sea creature appeared so unnervingly blobby only because it went through an extreme change in pressure when it was brought up to the surface. In its natural environment, 4,000 feet underwater, the fish looks perfectly handsome.

Structural biologists, whose goal is to deduce a molecule’s structure and function within a cell, face the risk of making a similar mistake. If biomolecular complexes are extracted from the cell, better-quality images can be obtained, but the molecules may not look natural. On the other hand, studying molecules without disrupting their environment at all is technically challenging, like filming deep underwater.

A new method, called purification-free ribosome imaging from subcellular mixtures (cryoPRISM), offers an appealing compromise. Developed by graduate students Mira May and Gabriela López-Pérez in the Davis lab in the MIT Department of Biology and recently published in PNAS, the technique allows biologists to visualize molecular complexes without taking them too far out of their natural context.

CryoPRISM captures molecular structures in cells that have just been broken open. This comes as close to preserving the natural interactions between molecules as possible, short of the extremely resource-intensive in-cell structural imaging, according to associate professor of biology Joey Davis, the faculty lead of the study.

“We think that the cryoPRISM method is a sweet spot where we preserve much of the native cellular contacts, but still have the resolution that lets us actually see molecular details,” Davis says. “Even in the extremely well-trodden system of translation in E. coli, which people have worked on for over 50 years, we are still finding new states that had just escaped people’s attention.”

A negative control that was not so negative

The development of cryoPRISM, as many discoveries in science, resulted from an unexpected observation that Mira May, the co-first author of the study, made while working on a different project.

Like all living organisms, bacteria rely on a process called translation to manufacture the proteins that carry out essential functions within the cell, from copying DNA to digesting nutrients. A key machine involved in translation is the ribosome — a biomolecular complex that assembles proteins based on instructions encoded by another molecule called mRNA. To regulate its activity, cells employ additional proteins that can change the shape of the ribosome, thus guiding its function.

May sought to identify new players in ribosomal regulation using cryoEM, by rapidly freezing lots of purified molecules and collecting thousands of 2D images to reconstruct their 3D structures. May was trying to pull ribosomes out of cells to visualize them together with their regulators. For her experiments, she designed a negative control containing unpurified bacterial lysate — a mixture of everything spilled from burst cells.

May expected to get noisy, low-quality images from this sample. To her surprise, instead, she saw intact ribosomes together with their natural interacting partners.

In just a few days, this technique experimentally validated data that would have taken months to acquire using other approaches.

“As I found more and more ribosomal states, this project became a method, not just a one-off finding,” May recalls.

Discovering new biology in a saturated field

Once May and her colleagues were confident that cryoPRISM could detect known ribosomal states, they began searching for ones that had previously escaped detection.

“It’s not just that we can recapitulate things that have been previously observed, but we can actually also discover novel ribosomal biology,” May says.

One of the novel states May identified has important implications for our understanding of the evolution of translation regulation.

During active translation, bacterial ribosomes are accompanied by a group of helper proteins called elongation factors. These factors bring in the materials for protein synthesis, like tRNAs and amino acids.

When cells encounter unfavorable conditions, such as colder temperatures, they reduce translation, which means that many ribosomes are out of work. These idle, hibernating ribosomes stop decoding mRNA, and the interface where they usually interact with helper molecules gets blocked by a hibernation factor called RaiA. This protein helps idle ribosomes avoid reactivation, like a sleeping mask that prevents a person from being woken up by light.

May observed the idle ribosomal state in her data, which on its own did not surprise her – this state had been described before. What surprised her was that some inactive ribosomes were interacting not only with RaiA, but also with an elongation factor called EF-G, which in bacteria was previously believed to only interact with active ribosomes.

A similar phenomenon has been seen before in more complex organisms, but observing it in a microbe suggests that its evolutionary origin may be older than previously thought.

“It fits an emerging model in the field, that elongation factors might bind to hibernating ribosomes to protect both the ribosome and themselves from degradation during periods of stress,” May explains. “Think of it like short-term storage.”

An unstressed cell might quickly eliminate unneeded inactive ribosomes, but because any stressor that puts ribosomes to sleep could be temporary, the cell may prefer to hold off on destroying them. That way, the ribosomes can be quickly reactivated if conditions improve.

The future of cryoPRISM

May has already teamed up with other MIT researchers to use cryoPRISM to visualize ribosomes in cells that are notoriously difficult to work with, including pathogenic organisms, which can be challenging to culture at the scale required for particle purification, and red blood cells isolated from patients, which cannot be cultured at all.

Besides its immediate application for translation research, cryoPRISM is a stepping stone toward the broader goal of structural biology: studying biomolecules in their natural environment.

To truly learn about deep-sea fish, scientists need to look at them in the deep sea; and to learn about cellular machines, scientists need to look at them in cells. According to Davis, cryoPRISM perfectly fits into the “theme of structural biology moving closer and closer to cellular context.”

Studying the genetic basis of disease to explore fundamental biological questions

Eliezer Calo’s studies of craniofacial malformations have yielded insight into protein synthesis and embryonic development.

Anne Trafton | MIT News
March 6, 2026

When Associate Professor Eliezer Calo PhD ’11 was applying for faculty positions, he was drawn to MIT not only because it’s his alma mater, but also because the Department of Biology places high value on exploring fundamental questions in biology.

In his own lab, Calo studies how craniofacial malformations arise. One motivation is to seek new treatments for those conditions, but another is to learn more about fundamental biological processes such as protein synthesis and embryonic development.

“We use genes that are mutated in disease to uncover fundamental biology,” Calo says. “Mutations that happen in disease are an experiment of nature, telling us that those are the important genes, and then we follow them up not only to understand the disease, but to fundamentally understand what the genes are doing.”

Calo’s work has led to new insights into how ribosomes form and how they control protein synthesis, as well as how the nucleolus, the birthplace of ribosomes in eukaryotic cells, has evolved over hundreds of millions of years.

In addition to earning his PhD at MIT, Calo is also an alumnus of MIT’s Summer Research Program (MSRP), which helps to prepare undergraduate students to pursue graduate education. Since starting his lab at MIT, Calo has made a point to serve as a research mentor for the program every summer.

“I feel that it’s important to pay back to the program that helped me realize what I wanted to do,” he says.

A nontraditional path

Growing up in a mountainous region of Puerto Rico, Calo was the first person from his family to finish high school. While attending the University of Puerto Rico at Rio Piedras, the largest university in Puerto Rico, he explored a few different majors before settling on chemistry.

One of Calo’s chemistry professors invited him to work in her lab, where he did a research project studying the pharmacokinetics of cell receptors found on the surface of astrocytes, a type of brain cell.

“It was a good mix of biology and chemistry,” he says. “I think that that was the catalyst to my pursuit of a career in the sciences.”

He learned about MSRP from Mandana Sassanfar, a senior lecturer in biology at MIT and director of outreach for several MIT departments, at an event hosted by the University of Puerto Rico for students interested in careers in science. He was accepted into the program, and during the summer after his junior year, he worked in the lab of Stephen Bell, an MIT professor of biology. That experience, he says, was transformative.

“Without that experience, I would have probably chosen another career,” Calo says. In Puerto Rico, “science was fun, but it was a struggle. We had to make everything from scratch, and then you spend more time making reagents than doing the experiments. When I came to MIT, I was always doing experiments.”

During that time, he realized he liked working in biology labs more than chemistry labs, so when he applied to graduate school, he decided to move into biology. He applied to five schools, including MIT. “Once MIT sent me the acceptance, I just had to say yes. There was no saying no.”

At MIT, Calo thought he might study biochemistry, but he ended up focusing on cancer biology instead, working with Jacqueline Lees, an MIT biology professor, to study the role of the tumor suppressor protein Rb.

After finishing his PhD, Calo felt burnt out and wasn’t sure if he wanted to continue along the academic track. His thesis committee advisors encouraged him to do a postdoc just to try it out, and he ended up going to Stanford University, where he fell in love with California and switched to a new research focus. Working with Joanna Wysocka, a professor of developmental biology at Stanford, he began investigating how development is affected by the regulation of proteins that make up cellular ribosomes — a topic his lab still studies today.

Returning to MIT

When searching for faculty jobs, Calo focused mainly on schools in California, but also sent an application to MIT. As he was deciding between offers from MIT and the University of California at Berkeley, a phone call from Angelika Amon, the late MIT professor of biology, convinced him to take the cross-country leap back to MIT.

“She had me on the phone for more than one hour telling me why I should come to MIT,” he recalls. “And that was so heartwarming that I could not say no.”

Since starting his lab in 2017, Calo has been studying how defects in the production of ribosomes give rise to diseases, in particular craniofacial malformations such as cleft palate.

Ribosomes, the organelles where protein synthesis occurs, consist of two subunits made of about 80 proteins. A longstanding question in biology has been why mutations that affect ribosome formation appear to primarily affect the development of the face, but not the rest of the body.

In a 2018 study, Calo discovered that this is because the mutations that affect ribosomes can have secondary effects that influence craniofacial development. In embryonic cells that form the face, a mutation in a gene called TCOF1 activates p53 at a higher level than in other embryonic cells. High levels of p53 cause some of those cells to undergo programmed cell death, leading to Treacher-Collins Syndrome, a disorder that produces underdeveloped bones in the jaw and cheek.

His lab has shown that p53 overactivation is also responsible for craniofacial disorders caused by mutations in RNA splicing factors.

Calo’s work on ribosome formation also led him to explore another cell organelle known as the nucleolus, whose role is to help build ribosomes. In 2023, he found that a gene called TCOF1, which can lead to craniofacial malformations when mutated, is critical for forming the three compartments that make up the nucleolus.

That finding, he says, could help to explain a major evolutionary shift that occurred around 300 million years ago, when the nucleolus transitioned from two to three compartments. This “tripartite” nucleolus is found in all reptiles, birds, and mammals.

“That was quite surprising,” Calo says. “Studying disease-related genes allowed us to understand a very fundamental biological process of how the nucleolus evolved, which has been a question in the field that nobody could figure out the answer for.”

Alumni Spotlight: Pia Banerjee, ’05

Banerjee lost a friend to brain cancer in eighth grade, sparking a lifelong curiosity about the disease and how it affects families.

Pamela Ferdinand | MIT Technology Review
March 3, 2026

Pia Banerjee ’05 traces her path into health care to eighth grade, when the loss of a friend to brain cancer first sparked her curiosity about the disease and how it affects families. Today, she is the inaugural director of cancer innovation and transformation at the American Cancer Society (ACS), which supports over 110 million patients and caregivers each year. Amid seismic shifts in how care is delivered and accessed, she leads initiatives to use technology to improve care and make it more equitable.

“Our goal is clear: to transform the cancer experience from fragmented and burdensome to equitable, connected, and personalized,” says Banerjee, who earned a biology degree from MIT and a PhD in psychology from Washington University in St. Louis before completing a postdoctoral fellowship in clinical neuropsychology at UCLA.

Working with patients and caregivers as a postdoc gave her a close-up view of how overwhelmed patients felt trying to coordinate complex care. Hoping to provide better support, Banerjee created her first digital health tool: a system designed to flag psychosocial and cognitive difficulties such as memory loss and prompt follow-up from the oncology team.

She then joined St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital as a researcher and clinician, helping lead studies on the long-term impacts of cancer treatment in children. Her work resulted in several high-impact publications and changes to clinical care guidelines.

Then the covid-19 pandemic hit, and as telehealth programs and remote patient monitoring soared, she reached a turning point. “I saw how moments of disruption can spark solutions that transform care in lasting ways,” she says.

Seeing the potential for personalized care from home, Banerjee next served as senior VP and founding clinical executive of Neuroglee Therapeutics, where she led the development of digital health solutions and a telehealth clinic. She then founded Synapse Health Partners in 2023 to help organizations create and adopt transformative health tech solutions.

In 2024, she joined the ACS, where her initiatives include an app for patients and caregivers to enhance quality of life and confidence in living with cancer, a unified data ecosystem, and an AI-facilitated service to match and navigate patients to clinical trials.

“MIT taught me to think across boundaries, with a curiosity and boldness that truly defines MIT,” Banerjee says. “That mindset drives me toward creating a future where every person with cancer can have more and better days.”