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Amaris Torres-Delgado: biochemist, process development scientist, and salsa dancer

How an MIT Biology alum from Puerto Rico came to love living in Boston

Saima Sidik
October 27, 2020

Even as a kid, Amaris Torres-Delgado PhD ’16 was analytical. “I wanted to be fact-based,” she says. “Once I had the facts, I’d speak with conviction.” As a result, her family wasn’t surprised that she decided to earn a PhD from MIT Biology, then apply for jobs in the pharmaceutical industry. Now, she works as a process development scientist at Amgen, where she uses her analytical skills to optimize drug production.

Torres-Delgado grew up in Puerto Rico, and the people, mindsets — and even the food — that she encountered in Cambridge, Massachusetts were unfamiliar at first. But after a decade of living in the Boston area, Torres-Delgado has come to love her new home, and she embraces the diversity of people and scientific problems she encounters.

Young child sitting on stairs
Even as a young child, Torres-Delgado was curious and analytical. Here she is at age three, on her first day of school. Credit: Escuela Josefita Monserrate de Selles

In high school, Torres-Delgado considered becoming either a medical doctor or a lawyer. But because Torres-Delgado loves problem solving, her mother suggested that she consider becoming a scientist instead. This advice led her to earn a bachelor’s degree in industrial biotechnology from the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez. The drug company Amgen helped create this degree program in order to train future employees for its Puerto Rican branch. Torres-Delgado found the program to be an exciting opportunity to learn a combination of biology, chemistry, and chemical engineering, as well as a doorway into a meaningful career in the pharmaceutical industry.

During college, Torres-Delgado spent a summer working in Tania Baker’s lab as part of the MIT Summer Research Program in Biology (MSRP-Bio). “The mentorship I received was wonderful,” she says, and so when she was accepted to the MIT Biology Graduate Program, she didn’t hesitate to return, and she opted to stay in the Baker lab.

Being more than a thousand miles from home left Torres-Delgado feeling lonely, but fortunately, another Puerto Rican graduate student introduced her to a new hobby: salsa dancing. “We’d go to socials at the different salsa schools around Boston,” Torres-Delgado says. With this new community, she started to feel less homesick.

In the lab, Torres-Delgado became captivated by a protein degradation machine that others in the Baker lab were studying. Cells use these wood-chipper-like machines to regulate protein levels, and a component of this machine called ClpS carries proteins to the site where they’re destroyed. Strikingly, ClpS speeds up the degradation of some kinds of proteins and slows down the degradation of others, but no one had been able to figure out why. Although other Baker lab members told Torres-Delgado that the ClpS mystery would be tricky to solve, she was determined to crack this cold case.

By the end of her PhD, she’d discovered that, in addition to delivering proteins to the degradation machine, ClpS sits on the same machine and makes it work less efficiently. Carrying certain proteins to the machine speeds up their degradation, but sitting on the machine slows down degradation of incoming proteins.

Although she enjoyed learning biochemistry in the Baker lab, Torres-Delgado says, “I’ve always been excited about pharmaceutical work that goes on close to the patient.” Her original plan was to return to Puerto Rico after earning her doctorate in order to work as an industry scientist there, but when she finished her PhD, she felt like she wasn’t done exploring Boston.

Torres-Delgado and her PhD advisor, Tania Baker. Credit: Juan E. Parra

She took a job at Vertex Pharmaceuticals with a group that oversaw manufacturing of the company’s first drug based on a biological molecule. While many drugs are produced through chemical reactions, this drug was produced in living cells, and Torres-Delgado was part of the team that supervised this new area of drug production. The biochemistry she’d learned during her PhD gave her the scientific background to provide valuable insight, but Torres-Delgado had a lot to learn about the process of efficiently producing a high-quality drug, and her industry colleagues helped her pick up the new skills she needed.

“I learned these skills on the job, from my peers, and this way of learning is something that’s available and encouraged,” she says. “You don’t have to be super focused on your long-term career goals during your training.” She’s since moved to Amgen’s Cambridge branch, where she works in process development as part of their oncology division.

Ten years after leaving her childhood home in Puerto Rico, Torres-Delgado still doesn’t feel like she’s finished living in Boston. She moved north at an impressionable point in her life, at a time when minority rights were gaining traction, and the people and philosophies she found in Boston have impacted her world view substantially.

“As a young adult, I wanted to experience a way of living that differed from how I grew up,” she says. “I didn’t realize how much more there is to the world until I moved to Boston. Here, I’ve had the opportunity to learn about other religions, other cultures, people from the whole gender spectrum — even understanding that there is a gender spectrum was a new experience.”

Torres-Delgado also finds diversity in her job, which includes a variety of tasks like figuring out how to optimize a manufacturing process, making sure Amgen meets regulatory standards, and mentoring other scientists. Underlying all these skills is the same analytical mindset that she started developing back in Puerto Rico and built on at MIT — it’s all about leveraging the facts.

Posted 10.22.20
Top photo: Amaris Torres-Delgado/Ammar Arsiwala
Tyler Jacks, founding director of MIT’s Koch Institute, to step down

A search committee chaired by Institute Professor Phillip Sharp will work to identify a new director for the MIT’s pioneering cancer research center.

Bendta Schroeder | Koch Institute
October 26, 2020

The Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT, a National Cancer Institute (NCI)-designated cancer center, has announced that Tyler Jacks will step down from his role as director, pending selection of his successor.

“An exceptionally creative scientist and a leader of great vision, Tyler also has a rare gift for launching and managing large, complex organizations, attracting exceptional talent and inspiring philanthropic support,” says MIT President L. Rafael Reif. “We are profoundly grateful for all the ways he has served MIT, including most recently his leadership on the Research Ramp Up Lightning Committee, which made it possible for MIT’s research enterprise to resume in safe ways after the initial Covid shutdown. I offer warmest admiration and best wishes as Tyler steps down from leading the Koch and returns full time to the excitement of the lab.”

Jacks, the David H. Koch Professor of Biology, has served as director for more than 19 years, first for the MIT Center for Cancer Research (CCR) and then for its successor, the Koch Institute. The CCR was founded by Nobel laureate Salvador Luria in 1974, shortly after the federal government declared “war on cancer,” with the mission of unravelling the molecular core of cancer. Jacks became the center’s fourth director in 2001, following Luria, Nobel laureate and Institute Professor Phillip Sharp, and Daniel K. Ludwig Professor for Cancer Research Richard Hynes.

Aided by the championship of then-MIT President Susan Hockfield and a gift of $100 million from MIT alumnus David H. Koch ’62, SM ’63, Jacks oversaw the evolution of the Center for Cancer Research into the Koch Institute in 2007 as well as the construction of a new home in Building 76, completed in 2010. The Koch Institute expands the mission of its predecessor by bringing life scientists and engineers together to advance understanding of the basic biology of cancer, and to develop new tools to better diagnose, monitor, and treat the disease.

Under the direction of Jacks, the institute has become an engine of collaborative cancer research at MIT. “Tyler’s vision and execution of a convergent cancer research program has propelled the Koch Institute to the forefront of discovery,” notes Maria Zuber, MIT’s vice president for research.

Bolstered by the Koch Institute’s associate directors Jacqueline Lees, Matthew Vander Heiden, Darrell Irvine, and Dane Wittrup, Jacks oversaw four successful renewals of the coveted NCI-designated cancer center stature, with the last two renewals garnering perfect scores. In 2015, Jacks was the recipient of the James R. Killian Jr. Faculty Achievement Award, the highest honor the MIT faculty can bestow upon one of its members, for his leadership in cancer research and for his role in establishing the Koch Institute.

“Tyler Jacks turned the compelling idea to accelerate progress against cancer by bringing together fundamental biology, engineering know-how, and clinical expertise, into the intensively collaborative environment that is now the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research,” says Hockfield. “His extraordinary leadership has amplified the original idea into a paradigm-changing approach to cancer, which now serves as a model for research centers around the world.”

To support cross-disciplinary research in high-impact areas and expedite translation from the bench to the clinic, Jacks and his colleagues shepherded the creation of numerous centers and programs, among them the Ludwig Center for Molecular Oncology, the Marble Center for Cancer Nanomedicine, the MIT Center for Precision Cancer Medicine, the Swanson Biotechnology Center, the Lustgarten Lab for Pancreatic Cancer Research, and the MIT Stem Cell Initiative. In addition, Jacks has co-led the Bridge Project, a collaboration between the Koch Institute and Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center that brings bioengineers, cancer scientists, and clinical oncologists together to solve some of the most challenging problems in cancer research. Jacks has raised nearly $375 million in support of these efforts, as well as the building of the Koch Institute facility, the Koch Institute Frontier Research Program, and other activities.

Jacks first became interested in cancer as a Harvard University undergraduate while attending a lecture by Robert Weinberg, the Daniel K. Ludwig Professor of Cancer Research and member of the Whitehead Institute, who is himself a pioneer in cancer genetics. After earning his PhD at the University of California at San Francisco under the direction of Nobel laureate Harold Varmus, Jacks joined Weinberg’s lab as a postdoctoral fellow. He joined the MIT faculty in 1992 with appointments in the Center for Cancer Research and the Department of Biology.

Jacks is widely considered a leader in the development of engineered mouse models of human cancers, and has pioneered the use of gene-targeting technology to construct mouse models and to study cancer-associated genes in mice. Strains of mice developed in his lab are used by researchers around the world, as well as by neighboring labs within the Koch Institute. Because these models closely resemble human forms of the disease, they have allowed researchers to track how tumors progress and to test new ways to detect and treat cancer. In more recent research, Jacks has been using mouse models to investigate how immune and tumor cells interact during cancer development and how tumors successfully evade immune recognition. This research is expected to lead to new immune-based therapies for human cancer.

Outside his research and MIT leadership, Jacks co-chaired the Blue Ribbon Panel for the National Cancer Moonshot Initiative, chaired the National Cancer Advisory Board of the National Cancer Institute, and is a past president of the American Association for Cancer Research. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Science, the National Academy of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Jacks serves on the Board of Directors of Amgen and Thermo Fisher Scientific. He is also a co-founder of T2 Biosystems and Dragonfly Therapeutics, serves as an advisor to several other companies, and is a member of the Harvard Board of Overseers.

Sharp will lead the search for the next director of the Koch Institute, with guidance from noted leaders in MIT’s cancer research community, including Hockfield and Hynes, as well as Angela M. Belcher, head of the Department of Biological Engineering and Jason Mason Crafts Professor; Paula T. Hammond, head of the Department of Chemical Engineering and David H. Koch Professor of Engineering; Amy Keating, professor of biology; Robert S. Langer, David H. Koch Institute Professor; and David M. Sabatini, Professor of Biology and member, Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.

“Jacks is a renowned scientist whose personal research has changed the prevention and treatment of cancer,” says Sharp. “His contributions to the creation of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and his leadership as its inaugural director have also transformed cancer research at MIT and nationally. By integrating engineers and cancer biologists into a community that shares knowledge and skills, and collaborates with clinical scientists and the private sector, this convergent institute represents the future of biological research in the MIT style.”

After Jacks steps down, he will continue his research in the areas of cancer genetics and immune-oncology and his teaching, while also stewarding the Bridge Project into its second decade.

“It has been a privilege for me to serve as director of the MIT Center for Cancer Research and the Koch Institute for the past two decades and to work alongside many of the brightest minds in cancer research,” says Jacks. “The Koch Institute is a powerhouse of research and innovation, and I look forward to the next generation of leadership in this very special place.”

Bench, bath and beyond

Transform your apartment into a yeast lab, and have fun doing it!

Grad Admissions Blog | Veda K.
October 22, 2020
One of the very first lessons you learn in microbiology is that while countless things can – and will – go wrong, you can almost always count on your microbes to grow. There is some strange comfort in knowing that what looks like clear liquid today will reveal countless gleaming colonies smiling up at you from your petri dish tomorrow. This radical assurance of growth transforms the many tedious tasks of lab work into an almost meditative experience. Pouring, plating, streaking — these could easily be yoga poses in the clinically sterile studio of a BSL-2 lab[1].

When the pandemic-that-shall-not-be-named abruptly separated me from my work this March, I threatened to bring the lab home. Unsurprisingly, my roommates were far from enthused at the idea of me culturing human pathogens in our garage. Somewhere in-between trying to bribe them with beer and baked goods I realized I could turn my scientific focus on an organism far more delicious than MRSA[2]: yeast!

Yeast, the tiny organism so miraculous that it was known as “godisgoode” in the days before microscopes were invented, is behind the magical transformations that give us beer, wine, sourdough, doughnuts, kombucha — you name it. In our technological times, it is tempting to relegate the study of microbes to sterile, fluorescently-lit, strictly controlled labs where the genetically engineered organisms you order off the internet live pampered lives. In quarantine in my own home, I re-discovered a centuries-old truth: yeast will appear and grow anywhere. Like any good pet, yeast are largely well-behaved and will sit, stand, and shake your hand on command. Disclaimer: they may also bubble over and stain your carpet in unsavory ways.

With a bit of intuition and a lot of patience, you too can transform any apartment into a lab to grow your pet yeast in!

The kitchen: your new bench

Sourdough: needy but delicious

Growing your own sourdough starter is a relatively low-effort process that is not only ridiculously easy, it also lends you serious kitchen clout. All you need to get started are flour, water, and the right temperature. Combine the flour and water in equal quantities in a container with quite a bit of headspace. “Feed” your starter once a day by replacing half of it by weight with a fresh water-flour mixture. Grow your starter at 68-75F. In the cold of the winter, yeast will take longer to grow and consume the complex nutrients in flour. In the summer, your starter may be so active it requires “feeding” twice a day!

 A young starter with “hooch” on top

As the complex community develops in your starter, it will go from being watery (the liquid on top is actually called “hooch”, if that is any indication of its actual nature) and frankly pretty stinky to bubbly and aromatic. Your nose and eyes are your best tools for judging what bugs are living in your starter (move over, Illumina[3]!). Fuzzy and white? Probably mould! Orange and cheesey? Serratia marcescens is likely the culprit. Simply use a clean spoon to remove these offending species. The wonderful magic of your starter is that, as a living community of wild yeasts and bacteria, it will eventually fend off nastier invaders and reach a set-point of well-behaved yeast. Patience is crucial! Keep feeding, and believe in “godisgoode”.

As a microbiologist, I must admit that the process of developing a working starter far outweighed the actual bread-baking process. For those of you who are excited about baking – the starter can be used for pancakes, doughnuts, muffins, cake, almost any dessert that uses dry active yeast. When you need a break from your prolific baking streak, simply pop your starter in the freezer and it’ll be ready for the next time you get hungry!

Beer: hurry up and wait

Over our many weeks in confinement, my roommates and I have been refining our beer-tasting palates by attending Lamplighter Brewery’s virtual tasting events. The wonderful folks at lamp gave me my first introduction to how beer is made and, eager to fill my weekends with more than just existential dread, I decided to venture into brewing.

To be completely honest, I’d also been missing those $6 pitchers of High Life at the Muddy (the Muddy Charles Pub, a campus highlight).

Like baking, brewing is a process that has engendered a cult-following. Homebrewers take their craft seriously, and you can find countless blog posts and youtube videos describing everything from sanitization techniques to pitch rates (how much yeast goes in) to heated debates on hop flavor profiles. To an MIT grad student, drinking from this “firehose” of information should feel almost comfortable, if you can withstand the flashbacks to 7.51 (principles of biochemical analysis). The trick, I’ve learned, is to dive in headfirst and take in specific pieces of information only as needed.

Brewing requires a little more investment than baking. The equipment you need will likely not be lying around the house, and unfortunately cannot be repurposed for much if you find that brewing isn’t quite your thing. The good news is that there are several companies selling pre-assembled “kits” to get you started on your boozy journey. After doing some research of my own, and soliciting advice from my homebrewer friends, I went with an IPA kit that included most of the hardware I’d need.

My first (and only, so far) brew day was a 6-hour process. Like any experiment in the lab, I anxiously sanitized, scrubbed, stirred, heated and cooled alternately. The day after, I realized my hyper-aware level of caution had been superfluous – my yeast were happily bubbling away in their preferred temperature range of 68F-75F. Little did I know that they’d still be bubbling away two weeks later at 91F (!!), thanks to the heat of a Boston summer and a failed condenser in our central AC.

The garage: your new incubator / engineering lab

Once your beer has been brewed, it needs to ferment in a cool, dark place for two weeks. The only cool, dark place in our now very hot apartment is our garage, which has been taken over by my MechE roomie (hey Annie!) Annie, not constrained by a study of deadly bacteria, was uninhibited in her assembly of a mini-engineering lab in our garage, even having equipment sent directly to our apartment! My yeast and fermenting beer join her assorted selection of wires in filling the void in our hearts normally filled by our labs.

Sourdough starter fed and beer bottled, all that is left to do is wait. In between waiting for bread and booze, I like to sneak in some studying for my upcoming qualifying exams!

As we become ever more intimately acquainted with our homes and the yeast that inhabit them, I highly encourage you to experience the magic of micro-organismal life for yourself. Biting into that first slice of bread or taking your first sip of home-brewed beer is a fulfilling reminder that, but for the pardoning mercy of an only 99.99% effective clorox wipe, our sterile world would be dull and flat. Grant yourself a moment to breathe and celebrate the 0.01% of microbes that make our world wonderful — you’ll be back in the lab in no time!

[1] Biosafety level 2 (BSL-2)refers to  laboratories that work with biological agents that pose a moderate health hazard

[2] Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA) is a form of antibiotic resistant bacteria that causes infections

[3] Illumina is a DNA sequencing company that is well known for its technology

Course 7 Alums Named to 2020 Fortune 40 Under 40 List
Julie Fox | Slice of MIT
October 21, 2020

To mark a year of “monumental change,” the editors of Fortune say they decided to upend the publication’s annual “40 Under 40” feature, forgoing a single list and instead highlighting 40 influential people in each of five categories: finance, technology, health care, government and politics, and media and entertainment.

Read on to meet the six MIT alumni who made this year’s list. And learn more about them and the other honorees on the Fortune 40 Under 40 website. (All images via Fortune.)

Fortune 2020 “40 Under 40”: MIT Alumni

Amir Barsoum MBA ’20 (Health Care)

Founder and CEO, Vezeeta

“A Zocdoc-like platform…to empower people with information about health providers that has been traditionally hard to find in the region.” Read more: Fortune.

Suelin Chen ’03, SM ’07, PhD ’10 (Health Care)

CEO, Cake

“A web-based service that helps users plan for their end-of-life goals and wishes.” Read more: Fortune.

Jason Kelly ’03, PhD ’08 (Health Care)

Cofounder and CEO, Ginkgo Bioworks

“The company’s early investment in automation made it uniquely well equipped to tackle Covid-19…building a facility capable of testing 100,000 samples a day.” More: Fortune.

Akshay Naheta SM ’04 (Finance)

Senior vice president of investments, SoftBank Group

“Helping implement the [Japanese telecom] company’s multibillion-dollar plan to win back shareholder confidence.” More: Fortune.

Kartik Ramamoorthi PhD ’14 (Health Care)

Cofounder and CEO, Encoded Therapeutics

“An inventor and provisional patent holder with more than a dash of scientist and entrepreneurial spirit.” More: Fortune.

Rebecca Elizabeth Lipon Weekly ’03 (Technology)

Senior director of cloud business strategy and platform enabling, Intel Corporation

“Helps craft products and features to appeal to Intel’s cloud provider customers amid fierce competition from AMD and Nvidia.” More: Fortune.

Cancer researchers collaborate, target DNA damage repair pathways for cancer therapy

MIT researchers find blocking the expressions of the genes XPA and MK2 enhances the tumor-shrinking effects of platinum-based chemotherapies in p53-mutated cancers.

Koch Institute
October 2, 2020

Cancer therapies that target specific molecular defects arising from mutations in tumor cells are currently the focus of much anticancer drug development. However, due to the absence of good targets and to the genetic variation in tumors, platinum-based chemotherapies are still the mainstay in the treatment of many cancers, including those that have a mutated version of the tumor suppressor gene p53. P53 is mutated in a majority of cancers, which enables tumor cells to develop resistance to platinum-based chemotherapies. But these defects can still be exploited to selectively target tumor cells by targeting a second gene to take down the tumor cell, leveraging a phenomenon known as synthetic lethality.

Focused on understanding and targeting cell signaling in cancer, the laboratory of Michael Yaffe, the David H. Koch Professor Science and director of the MIT Center for Precision Cancer Medicine, seeks to identify pathways that are synthetic lethal with each other, and to develop therapeutic strategies that capitalize on that relationship. His group has already identified MK2 as a key signaling pathway in cancer and a partner to p53 in a synthetic lethal combination.

Now, working with a team of fellow researchers at MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, Yaffe’s lab added a new target, the gene XPA, to the combination. Appearing in Nature Communications, the work demonstrates the potential of “augmented synthetic lethality,” where depletion of a third gene product enhances a combination of targets already known to show synthetic lethality. Their work not only demonstrates the effectiveness of teaming up cancer targets, but also of the collaborative teamwork for which the Koch Institute is known.

P53 serves two functions: first, to give cells time to repair DNA damage by pausing cell division, and second, to induce cell death if DNA damage is too severe. Platinum-based chemotherapies work by inducing enough DNA damage to initiate the cell’s self-destruct mechanism. In their previous work, the Yaffe lab found that when cancer cells lose p53, they can re-wire their signaling circuitry to recruit MK2 as a backup pathway. However, MK2 only restores the ability to orchestrate DNA damage repair, but not to initiate cell death.

The Yaffe group reasoned that targeting MK2, which is only recruited when p53 function is absent, would be a unique way to create a synthetic lethality that specifically kills p53-defective tumors, by blocking their ability to coordinate DNA repair after chemotherapy. Indeed, the Yaffe Lab was able to show in pre-clinical models of non-small cell lung cancer tumors with mutations in p53, that silencing MK2 in combination with chemotherapy treatment caused the tumors to shrink significantly.

Although promising, MK2 has proven difficult to drug. Attempts to create target-specific, clinically viable small-molecule MK2 inhibitors have so far been unsuccessful. Researchers led by co-lead author Yi Wen Kong, then a postdoc in the Yaffe lab, have been exploring the use of RNA interference (siRNA) to stop expression of the MK2 gene, but siRNA’s tendency to degrade rapidly in the body presents new challenges.

Enter the potential of nanomaterials, and a team of nanotechnology experts in the laboratory of Paula Hammond, the David H. Koch Professor of Engineering, head of the MIT Department of Chemical Engineering, and the Yaffe group’s upstairs neighbor. There, Kong found a willing collaborator in then-postdoc Erik Dreaden, whose team had developed a delivery vehicle known as a nanoplex to protect siRNA until it gets to a cancer cell. In studies of non-small cell lung cancer models where mice were given the MK2-targeting nanocomplexes and standard chemotherapy, the combination clearly enhanced tumor cell response to chemotherapy. However, the overall increase in survival was significant, but relatively modest.

Meanwhile, Kong had identified XPA, a key protein involved in another DNA repair pathway called NER, as a potential addition to the MK2-p53 synthetic lethal combination. As with MK2, efforts to target XPA using traditional small-molecule drugs have not yet proven successful, and RNA interference emerged as the team’s tool of choice. The flexible and highly controllable nature of the Hammond group’s nanomaterials assembly technologies allowed Dreaden to incorporate siRNAs against both XPA and MK2 into the nanocomplexes.

Kong and Dreaden tested these dual-targeted nanocomplexes against established tumors in an immunocompetent, aggressive lung cancer model developed in collaboration between the laboratories of professor of biology Michael Hemann and Koch Institute Director Tyler Jacks. They let the tumors grow even larger before treatment than they had in their previous study, thus raising the bar for therapeutic intervention.

Tumors in mice treated with the dual-targeted nanocomplexes and chemotherapy were reduced by up to 20-fold over chemotherapy alone, and similarly improved over single-target nanocomplexes and chemotherapy. Mice treated with this regimen survived three times longer than with chemotherapy alone, and much longer than mice receiving nanocomplexes targeting MK2 or XPA alone.

Overall, these data demonstrate that identification and therapeutic targeting of augmented synthetic lethal relationships — in this case between p53, MK2 and XPA — can produce a safe and highly effective cancer therapy by re-wiring multiple DNA damage response pathways, the systemic inhibition of which may otherwise be toxic.

The nanocomplexes are modular and can be adapted to carry other siRNA combinations or for use against other cancers in which this augmented synthetic lethality combination is relevant. Beyond application in lung cancer, the researchers — including Kong, who is now a research scientist at the Koch Institute, and Dreaden, who is now an assistant professor at Georgia Tech and Emory School of Medicine — are working to test this strategy for use against ovarian and other cancers.

Additional collaborations and contributions were made to this project by the laboratories of Koch Institute members Stephen Lippard and Omer Yilmaz, the Eisen and Chang Career Development Professor.

This work was supported in part by a Mazumdar-Shaw International Oncology Fellowship, a postdoctoral fellowship from the S. Leslie Misrock (1949) Frontier Fund for Cancer Nanotechnology, and by the Charles and Marjorie Holloway Foundation, the Ovarian Cancer Research Foundation, and the Breast Cancer Alliance.

3 Questions: Nancy Hopkins on improving gender equality in academia

Molecular biologist and professor emerita advocates for more inclusive science and advises how to get there.

Raleigh McElvery | Department of Biology
September 30, 2020

Over the course of her exceptional career, Amgen Professor of Biology Emerita Nancy Hopkins has overturned assumptions and defied expectations at the lab bench and beyond. After arriving at MIT in 1973, she set to work mapping RNA tumor virus genes, before switching her focus and pioneering zebrafish as a model system to probe vertebrate development and cancer.

Her experiences in male-dominated fields and institutions led her to catalyze an investigation that evolved into the groundbreaking 1999 public report on the status of women at MIT. These findings spurred nine universities, including MIT, to establish an ongoing effort to improve gender equity. A recent documentary, “Picture a Scientist,” chronicles this watershed report and spotlights researchers like Hopkins who champion underrepresented voices. She sat down to discuss what has changed for women in academia in the last two decades — and what hasn’t.

Q: How has the situation for women in science evolved since the landmark 1999 report?

A: It’s hard today to remember just how radical the 1999 report was at the time. I read it now and think, ‘What was so radical about that?’

The report documented that women joined the faculty believing that only greater family responsibilities might impede their success relative to male colleagues. But, as they progressed through tenure, many were marginalized and undervalued. Data showed this resulted in women having fewer institutional resources and rewards for their research, and in their exclusion from important professional opportunities. When the study began, only 8% of the science faculty were women.

Former MIT Dean of Science Robert Birgeneau addressed inequities on a case-by-case basis, adjusting salaries, space, and resources. He recruited women aggressively, quickly increasing the number of women School of Science faculty by 50%.

When the report became public, the overwhelming public reaction made clear that it described problems that were epidemic among women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Former MIT President Chuck Vest and Provost Bob Brown addressed gender bias for all of MIT and “institutionalized” solutions. They established committees in the five MIT schools to ensure that inequities were promptly addressed and hiring policies were fair; rewrote family leave policies with input from women faculty; built day care facilities on campus; and recruited women faculty to high-level administrative positions.

Today, we realize that the MIT report elucidated two underappreciated forms of bias: “institutional bias” resulting from a system designed for a man with a wife at home; and “unconscious or implicit gender bias.” Voluminous research by psychologists has documented the latter, showing that identical work is undervalued if people believe it was done by a woman. Refusal to acknowledge unconscious gender bias today is akin to denying the world is round.

Q: What do you hope people will take away from the “Picture a Scientist” film?

A: I hope people will better understand why women are underrepresented in science, and women of color particularly so. The film does a terrific job of portraying the range of destructive behaviors that collectively explain the question, “Why so few?” The movie also focuses on the courage it takes for young women scientists to expose these problems.

I hope people will agree that, despite all the progress for women in my generation, as the bombshell report from the National Academy of Sciences documented in 2018, sexual harassment and gender discrimination persist and still require constant attention. It remains a challenge to identify, attract, and retain the best STEM talent. And, as the movie points out, it’s critical to do so.

The producers have received an unprecedented number of requests to show the documentary in institutes, universities, and companies, confirming that underrepresentation remains a widespread and pressing issue.

Q: Where do we go from here? How can academia better support underrepresented groups in science moving forward?

A: People often say you have to “change the culture,” but what does that really mean? You have to do what MIT did: look at the data; make corrections, including policy changes if necessary; continue to track the data to see if the policies work; and repeat as needed. Second, as the National Academies report points out, you must reward administrators who create a diverse workplace. Top talent is distributed among diverse groups. You can only be the best by being diverse.

But how do you change the behavior of individual faculty? Years ago, President Vest told me, “Nancy, anything I can measure I can fix, but I don’t know how to fix marginalization.” His comment was prescient. We’re pretty good at fixing things we can measure. But not at retraining our own unconscious biases: preference for working with people who look just like us; and unexamined, biased assumptions about people different from us. But psychologists tell us all we have to do is ‘change the world and our biases will change along with it.’  Furthermore, they now have methods to measure change in our biases.

I championed this cause because I believe being a scientist is the greatest job there is. I want anyone with this passion to be able to be a scientist. I’m grateful I got to see change first hand. I just wish the change was faster, so young women like Jane Willenbring and Raychelle Burks in the movie can just be scientists.