From an early age, Katie Spivakowski realized to check the world from completely different angles. Dinner conversations at her dad and mom’ house in Menlo Park, California, usually gravitated towards matters such because the Maillard response, the chemistry behind the browning of meals, and the intriguing thriller of prime numbers. Spivakowski’s dad and mom, one in every of whom studied bodily chemistry and the opposite statistics, fostered a love of interdisciplinary information.
Throughout highschool, Spivakowski explored all the pieces from classical literature to laptop science. She needed an undergraduate expertise that inspired a variety of pursuits and had entry to all areas.
“MIT stood out straight away,” Spivakowski says. “However particularly, New engineering education transformation (NEET) — a really distinctive initiative that immerses undergraduates in interdisciplinary alternatives on and off campus — solidified my perception that MIT was the precise match for me. ”
NEET is a cross-faculty academic program that empowers undergraduate college students to handle the urgent challenges of the twenty first century via interdisciplinary studying. Beginning within the second yr, NEET students select one in every of 4 analysis areas, or ‘threads’: autonomous machines, local weather and sustainability techniques, digital cities, or residing machines. Over the course of a typical four-year interval, NEET students graduate with a level of their main and a NEET certificates, gaining each depth of their chosen discipline and the power to work and make an influence in a number of areas.
Spivakowski is at the moment double majoring in bioengineering, synthetic intelligence, and determination making, and minoring in arithmetic. She describes herself as “excited about leveraging engineering and computational instruments to find new biomedical insights,” as fields similar to biology and laptop science are converging like by no means earlier than. I’m. That is the central theme of this analysis. NEET’s living machine threadat the moment enrolled in
“NEET is extra than simply engineering,” says Amitava “Bhabhi” Mitra, NEET Founding Government Director. “It is about creating younger engineers who dream huge, who worth collaboration, and who’re able to deal with the world’s hardest challenges with coronary heart and curiosity. That is why this program is so necessary.”
Spivakowski’s work whereas at MIT has already had a worldwide influence. In 2023, she led an undergraduate staff on the Worldwide Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) Competitors in Paris, France, the place they offered a proof of idea for a remedy to deal with most cancers cachexia. Cachexia is a fats and muscle losing situation for which there isn’t a FDA-approved therapy. This situation impacts 80 p.c of individuals with terminal most cancers and is answerable for 30 p.c of most cancers deaths. Spivakowski’s staff gained a silver medal for proposing the manipulation of macrophages to take away extra interleukin-6, a pro-inflammatory protein overproduced in sufferers with cachexia, and their analysis was later printed at MIT Printed within the journal. undergraduate analysis journalsThe consideration was “surreal and humbling,” she says.
Spivakowski works as a scholar researcher within the Bionano Lab of Mark Beis, a bioengineering professor and former NEET dean. The lab makes use of DNA and RNA to design nanoscale supplies for functions similar to remedy and computing. Her focus is on the validation of nucleic acid nanoparticles for therapeutic use.
“Katie reveals nice promise as a scientific chief. She has a really unparalleled depth of data in each biology and computation, and she or he brings an unparalleled dedication to the challenge to create a brand new vaccine. “It brings loads of ardour and creativity.”
Spivakowski stated class 20.054 (Dwelling Machine Analysis Immersion), which she is taking within the NEET program, enhances her work in Beite’s lab and gives a chance for science communication, staying updated on the scientific literature, and maintaining with analysis progress. The corporate stated it should present an enriching expertise via workshops centered on the newest info. “I am excited about completely different topics and discover that switching between them helps preserve issues contemporary,” she says.
Her interdisciplinary ambitions led her to affix Merck for the summer time, the place Spivakowski interned within the modeling and informatics staff. Whereas contributing to the event of medication that inactivate cancer-causing proteins, she realized how you can use computational chemistry instruments to develop geometries to determine areas on proteins the place drug molecules may probably bind. He says he has developed a scientific evaluation expertise.
“My staff continues to actively use the software program I developed and the insights I gained via my work,” Spivakowski says. “There’s a enormous affected person inhabitants for the protein targets, so I hope that throughout the subsequent 10 years there shall be medicine in the marketplace and that my small contribution will make a distinction in lots of lives.”
As Spivakowski appears to his future, he envisions a task on the intersection of synthetic intelligence and biology, ideally combining moist lab and computational analysis. “I can not think about myself in a profession that’s fully devoid of 1 or the opposite,” she says. “This unbelievable synergy is what I discover most inspiring.”
Irrespective of the place Spivakowski’s curiosity takes her subsequent, she says one factor is definite: “NEET actually helped me develop as a scientist.”
