An achieved MIT scholar researcher in well being care robotics, with many scholarship and fellowship awards to his title, A. Michael West is nonchalant about how he selected his path.
“I form 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 in a while, his main in mechanical engineering at Yale College agreed with him.
“I undoubtedly caught with it,” West says. “I favored what I used to be studying.”
As a rising senior at Yale, West was chosen to take part within the MIT Summer Research 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 individuals for graduate examine.
For West, MSRP was an training in what “precisely grad college 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 boldness to use to prime grad faculties, to know that I might really 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 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 a whole lot 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’ll be able to create this similar expertise for individuals after you,” he says.
His involvement as a frontrunner and mentor in MSRP is only one approach West has sought to offer again. As an undergraduate, for instance, he served as president of his college’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 approach 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 also be aimed toward serving to others, particularly those that have suffered orthopedic or neurological harm.
“I’m attempting to grasp how people management and handle their motion from a mathematical standpoint,” he says. “When you have a approach of quantifying the motion, then you possibly can measure it higher and implement that to robotics, to make higher units to assist in rehabilitation.”
In 2022, West was chosen to be an MIT-Takeda fellow. The MIT-Takeda Program, a collaboration between MIT’s College of Engineering and Takeda Prescribed drugs Firm, primarily promotes the applying of synthetic intelligence to learn 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 give attention to 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 12 months of his PhD, West devoted about 20 hours every week to a instructing place.
“Having a whole lot of time to do analysis is nice,” he says. “Studying what that you must study and doing the analysis will get you to the subsequent step.”
In reality, 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 automated, unconscious exercise that’s predictably obscure.
“How do individuals management these advanced, unconscious techniques? Understanding that could be a slow-going course of. Numerous 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 is just not testable, and find out how to carry 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 Industry and Technology. Hoping to encourage and facilitate interplay between expertise and business, the company selects 5 MIT-Accenture fellows annually.
“What they’re searching 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 continues to be very a lot the laid-back man who “fell into” engineering. He finds time to fulfill with mates on the weekends, took up rugby as a graduate scholar, 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 once they strategy difficult 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 might be, and that’s factor. If there weren’t, life could be slightly boring.”
