An achieved MIT pupil researcher in well being care robotics, with many scholarship and fellowship awards to his identify, A. Michael West is nonchalant about how he selected his path.
“I sort of fell into it,” the mechanical engineering PhD candidate says, including that rising up in suburban California, he was social, athletic — and good at math. “I had the traditional selection: You generally is a physician, a lawyer, or an engineer.”
Having witnessed his mom’s grueling residency when she was coaching to be a physician, and feeling like he didn’t take pleasure in studying and writing sufficient to be a lawyer, “That left engineer,” he says.
Fortunately, he loved physics in highschool as a result of, he says, “it gave which means to the numbers we had been studying in arithmetic,” and in a while, his main in mechanical engineering at Yale College agreed with him.
“I positively caught with it,” West says. “I preferred what I used to be studying.”
As a rising senior at Yale, West was chosen to take part within the MIT Summer season Analysis Program (MSRP). This system identifies proficient undergraduates to spend a summer season on MIT’s campus, conducting analysis with the mentorship of MIT school, postdocs, and graduate college students to organize program contributors for graduate research.
For West, MSRP was an training in what “precisely grad faculty was, particularly what it could be like at MIT.”
It was additionally, and most significantly, a supply of validation that West may succeed within the larger ranges of academia.
“It gave me the boldness to use to high grad colleges, to know that I may truly contribute right here and achieve success,” West says. “It very a lot gave me the boldness to stroll right into a room and strategy individuals who clearly know far more than I do about sure matters.”
With MSRP, West additionally discovered a group and made enduring friendships, he says. “It’s good to be in areas the place you get to see plenty of minorities in science, which MSRP was,” he says.
Having benefited from the MSRP expertise, West gave again as soon as he enrolled at MIT by working as an MRSP group chief for 2 summers. “You possibly can create this identical expertise for individuals after you,” he says.
His involvement as a frontrunner and mentor in MSRP is only one means West has sought to offer again. As an undergraduate, for instance, he served as president of his faculty’s Nationwide Society of Black Engineers chapter, and at MIT, he has served as treasurer for the Black Graduate Pupil Affiliation and the Academy of Brave Minority Engineers.
“Possibly it’s only a familial factor,” West says, “however being a Black American, my dad and mom raised me in a means that you just all the time bear in mind the place you come from, you bear in mind what your ancestors went via.”
West’s present analysis — with Neville Hogan, the Solar Jae Professor in Mechanical Engineering, within the Eric P. and Evelyn E. Newton Laboratory for Biomechanics and Human Rehabilitation — can be geared toward serving to others, particularly those that have suffered orthopedic or neurological harm.
“I’m attempting to know how people management and handle their motion from a mathematical standpoint,” he says. “When you have a means of quantifying the motion, then you’ll be able to measure it higher and implement that to robotics, to make higher gadgets to assist in rehabilitation.”
Throughout his first yr of graduate faculty, West was chosen because the Bernard (Ben) Gold Fellow. In 2022, he was chosen to be an MIT-Takeda fellow. The MIT-Takeda Program, a collaboration between MIT’s College of Engineering and Takeda Prescription drugs Firm, primarily promotes the applying of synthetic intelligence to profit human well being. As a Takeda Fellow, West has studied the flexibility of the human hand to control objects and instruments.
West says the Takeda Fellowship gave him time to concentrate on his analysis, the funding permitting him to forgo working as a instructing assistant. Though he loves instructing and hopes to safe a tenure-track place as a professor after incomes his PhD, he says the time dedication related to being a instructing assistant is critical. Within the third yr of his PhD, West devoted about 20 hours per week to a instructing place.
“Having plenty of time to do analysis is nice,” he says. “Studying what that you must find out about and doing the analysis will get you to the following step.”
Actually, the kind of analysis that West conducts is very time-intensive. That is not less than partly as a result of human motor management entails a lot computerized, unconscious exercise that’s predictably obscure.
“How do individuals management these advanced, unconscious programs? Understanding that may be a slow-going course of. A whole lot of the findings construct on one another. It’s a must to have a strong understanding of what’s recognized, what’s a working speculation, what’s testable, what shouldn’t be testable, and the right way to deliver the non-testable to testable,” West says, including, “We received’t perceive how people management motion in my lifetime.”
To make progress, West says he has to fastidiously proceed one step at a time.
“What are the small questions I can ask? What are the questions which have already been requested, and the way can we construct upon these? That’s when the duty turns into much less daunting,” he says.
In September, West will start a fellowship with the MIT and Accenture Convergence Initiative for Business and Expertise. Hoping to encourage and facilitate interplay between know-how and trade, the company selects 5 MIT-Accenture fellows every year.
“What they’re searching for is somebody whose analysis is translational, that may have impacts in trade,” West says. “It’s promising that they’re within the primary, basic analysis I’m doing. I haven’t labored on the translational aspect but. It’s one thing I’d prefer to get into after commencement.”
Whereas incomes prestigious fellowships and advancing human-robot interactions in well being care, West continues to be very a lot the laid-back man who “fell into” engineering. He finds time to satisfy with pals on the weekends, took up rugby as a graduate pupil, and has a long-distance relationship together with his fiancée, with a marriage date set for subsequent summer season.
Requested how he’ll counsel his future college students after they strategy difficult work, he has a predictably relaxed response.
“Don’t be afraid to ask for assist. There’s all the time going to be somebody who’s higher at one thing than you’re, and that’s a superb factor. If there weren’t, life could be a little bit boring.”
