An completed MIT scholar 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 basic alternative: You generally is a physician, a lawyer, or an engineer.”
Having witnessed his mom’s grueling residency when she was coaching to be a health care provider, 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 afterward, 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 time Analysis Program (MSRP). This system identifies gifted undergraduates to spend a summer season on MIT’s campus, conducting analysis with the mentorship of MIT college, postdocs, and graduate college students to organize program individuals for graduate examine.
For West, MSRP was an training in what “precisely grad faculty was, particularly what it will be like at MIT.”
It was additionally, and most significantly, a supply of validation that West might succeed within the greater ranges of academia.
“It gave me the arrogance to use to high grad colleges, to know that I might really contribute right here and achieve success,” West says. “It very a lot gave me the arrogance to stroll right into a room and strategy individuals who clearly know far more than I do about sure subjects.”
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 similar expertise for folks after you,” he says.
His involvement as a frontrunner and mentor in MSRP is only one method West has sought to provide 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 Scholar Affiliation and the Academy of Brave Minority Engineers.
“Perhaps it’s only a familial factor,” West says, “however being a Black American, my dad and mom raised me in a method that you just at all times keep in mind the place you come from, you keep in mind what your ancestors went by.”
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 damage.
“I’m making an attempt to grasp how people management and handle their motion from a mathematical standpoint,” he says. “When you have a method 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 12 months 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 Faculty of Engineering and Takeda Prescribed 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 govern objects and instruments.
West says the Takeda Fellowship gave him time to deal with his analysis, the funding permitting him to forgo working as a educating assistant. Though he loves educating and hopes to safe a tenure-track place as a professor after incomes his PhD, he says the time dedication related to being a educating assistant is critical. Within the third 12 months of his PhD, West devoted about 20 hours per week to a educating place.
“Having plenty of time to do analysis is nice,” he says. “Studying what you might want to study and doing the analysis will get you to the following step.”
In truth, the kind of analysis that West conducts is very time-intensive. That is at the least partly as a result of human motor management entails a lot computerized, unconscious exercise that’s predictably obscure.
“How do folks management these advanced, unconscious methods? Understanding that could be a slow-going course of. A number of the findings construct on one another. You must have a stable understanding of what’s identified, what’s a working speculation, what’s testable, what isn’t testable, and learn how to deliver the non-testable to testable,” West says, including, “We gained’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 expertise and business, the company selects 5 MIT-Accenture fellows annually.
“What they’re on the lookout for is somebody whose analysis is translational, that may have impacts in business,” West says. “It’s promising that they’re within the fundamental, basic analysis I’m doing. I haven’t labored on the translational facet 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 remains 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 scholar, and has a long-distance relationship along with his fiancée, with a marriage date set for subsequent summer season.
Requested how he’ll counsel his future college students after they strategy sophisticated work, he has a predictably relaxed response.
“Don’t be afraid to ask for assist. There’s at all times going to be somebody who’s higher at one thing than you’re, and that’s an excellent factor. If there weren’t, life can be slightly boring.”
