At an early age, Katie Spivakovsky realized to review the world from totally different angles. Dinner-table conversations at her household’s dwelling in Menlo Park, California, typically leaned towards matters just like the Maillard response — the chemistry behind meals browning — or the fascinating mysteries of prime numbers. Spivakovsky’s mother and father, one in every of whom studied bodily chemistry and the opposite statistics, fostered a love of information that crossed disciplines.
In highschool, Spivakovsky explored all of it, from classical literature to laptop science. She knew she needed an undergraduate expertise that inspired her broad pursuits, a spot the place each subject was inside attain.
“MIT instantly stood out,” Spivakovsky says. “Nevertheless it was particularly the existence of New Engineering Schooling Transformation (NEET) — a really distinctive initiative that immerses undergraduates in interdisciplinary alternatives each inside and past campus — that solidified my perception that MIT was the proper match for me.”
NEET is a cross-departmental schooling program that empowers undergraduates to deal with the urgent challenges of the twenty first century by means of interdisciplinary studying. Beginning of their sophomore 12 months, NEET students select from one in every of 4 domains of examine, or “threads:” Autonomous Machines, Local weather and Sustainability Methods, Digital Cities, or Dwelling Machines. After the standard 4 years, NEET students graduate with a level of their main and a NEET certificates, equipping them with each depth of their chosen subject and the flexibility to work in, and drive impression throughout, a number of domains.
Spivakovsky is now a junior double-majoring in organic engineering and synthetic intelligence and decision-making, with a minor in arithmetic. At a time when fields like biology and laptop science are merging like by no means earlier than, she describes herself as “enthusiastic about leveraging engineering and computational instruments to find new biomedical insights” — a central theme of NEET’s Dwelling Machines thread, during which she is now enrolled.
“NEET is about greater than engineering,” says Amitava “Babi” Mitra, NEET founding govt director. “It’s about nurturing younger engineers who dream huge, worth collaboration, and are able to deal with the world’s hardest challenges with coronary heart and curiosity. Watching college students like Katie thrive is why this program issues so deeply.”
Spivakovsky’s achievements whereas at MIT have already got a worldwide attain. In 2023, she led an undergraduate workforce 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 fat- and muscle-wasting situation with no FDA-approved therapy. The situation impacts 80 p.c of late-stage most cancers sufferers and is chargeable for 30 p.c of most cancers deaths. Spivakovsky’s workforce gained a silver medal for proposing the engineering of macrophages to take away extra interleukin-6, a pro-inflammatory protein overproduced in cachexia sufferers, and their analysis was later printed in MIT’s Undergraduate Analysis Journal, an honor she says was “unreal and humbling.”
Spivakovsky works as a scholar researcher within the BioNanoLab of Mark Bathe, professor of organic engineering and former NEET college director. The lab makes use of DNA and RNA to engineer nanoscale supplies for such makes use of as therapeutics and computing. Her focus is validating nucleic acid nanoparticles to be used in therapeutics.
Based on Bathe, “Katie exhibits great promise as a scientific chief — she brings unparalleled ardour and creativity to her challenge on making novel vaccines with a depth of information in each biology and computation that’s really unmatched.”
Spivakovsky says class 20.054 (Dwelling Machines Analysis Immersion), which she is taking within the NEET program, enhances her work in Bathe’s lab and gives well-rounded expertise by means of workshops that emphasize scientific communication, staying abreast of scientific literature, and analysis progress updates. “I’m enthusiastic about a variety of topics and discover that switching between them helps maintain issues recent,” she says.
Her interdisciplinary drive took her to Merck over the summer season, the place Spivakovsky interned on the Modeling and Informatics workforce. Whereas contributing to the event of a drug to deactivate a cancer-causing protein, she says she realized to make use of computational chemistry instruments and developed geometric evaluation strategies to determine places on the protein the place drug molecules may have the ability to bind.
“My workforce continues to actively use the software program I developed and the insights I gained by means of my work,” Spivakovsky says. “The goal protein has an infinite affected person inhabitants, so I’m hopeful that throughout the subsequent decade, medicine will enter the market, and my small contribution might make a distinction in lots of lives.”
As she appears towards her future, Spivakovsky envisions herself on the intersection of synthetic intelligence and biology, ideally in a job that mixes moist lab with computational analysis. “I can’t see myself in a profession totally devoid of 1 or the opposite,” she says. “This unbelievable synergy is the place I really feel most impressed.”
Wherever Spivakovsky’s curiosity leads her subsequent, she says one factor is definite: “NEET has actually helped my growth as a scientist.”