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Creating innovative health solutions for individuals and populations
The factors impacting successful patient care are many and varied. Early diagnosis, proper adherence to prescription medication schedules, and effective monitoring and management of chronic disease, for example, all contribute to better outcomes. However, each of these factors can be hindered by outside influences — medication doesn’t work as well if it isn’t taken as prescribed, and disease can be missed or misdiagnosed in early stages if symptoms are mild or not present.
Giovanni Traverso, the Karl Van Tassel Career Development Professor, an associate professor of mechanical engineering, and a gastroenterologist in the Division of Gastroenterology, Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), is working on a variety of innovative solutions to improve patient care. As a physician and an engineer, he brings a unique perspective.
“Bringing those two domains together is what really can help transform and accelerate our capacity to develop new biomedical devices or new therapies for a range of conditions,” he says. “As physicians, we’re extremely fortunate to be able to help individuals. As scientists and engineers, not only can we help individuals … we can help populations.”
Physician, engineer, innovator
Video: MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering
Traverso found a passion for this work early in life. His family lived in his father’s native Peru through much of his childhood, but left in the late 1980s at the height of the nation’s political instability, emigrating to Canada, where he began high school.
“In high school, I had the incredible opportunity to actually spend time in a lab,” he says. “I really fell in love with molecular genetics. I loved the lab environment and that ability to investigate a very specific problem, with the hopes that those developments would eventually help people.”
He started medical school immediately after high school, attending the University of Cambridge, but paused his medical training to pursue a PhD in medical sciences at Johns Hopkins University before returning to Cambridge. After completing medical school, he completed internal medicine residency at BWH and his gastroenterology fellowship training at Massachusetts General Hospital, both at Harvard Medical School. For his postdoctoral research, he transitioned to the fields of chemical and biomedical engineering in the laboratory of Professor Robert Langer.
Traverso’s research interests today include biomedical device development, ingestible and implantable robotics, and drug delivery for optimal drug adherence. His academic home at MIT is in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, but his work integrates multiple domains, including mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, material science, and synthetic biology.
“The mechanical engineering department is a tremendous place to engage with students, as well as faculty, towards the development of the next generation of medical devices,” he says. “At the core of many of those medical devices are fundamental mechanical principles.”
Traverso’s team in the Laboratory for Translational Engineering is developing pioneering biomedical devices such as drug delivery systems to enable safe, efficient delivery of therapeutics, and novel diagnostic tests to support early detection of diseases.
The heart of his work, he says, is “about trying to help others. Patients, of course, but also students, to help them see the arc of bench-to-bedside and help stimulate their interest in careers applying engineering to help improve human health.”
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MIT’s Science Policy Initiative holds 14th annual Executive Visit Days
From Oct. 21 to 22, a delegation of 21 MIT students and one postdoc met in Washington for the 14th Executive Visit Days (ExVD). Organized by the MIT Science Policy Initiative (SPI) and the MIT Washington Office, ExVD enables students to engage with officials and scientists from federal agencies. Students are given a platform to form connections in the capital while learning about the many facets of science policy work and careers.
In two days, the delegation visited eight different agencies. The first day started with meeting the team of the MIT Washington Office. Subsequently, the group held meetings with the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP), White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). On the second day, meetings continued with the Department of Energy (DoE), National Science Foundation (NSF), Institute of Defense Analysis (IDA), and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The meetings offered insights into each agency’s activities and showed how each agency’s work is related to science policy.
One specific example of the delegation’s visits was to the White House OSTP, located directly next to the West Wing at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. This special agency of fewer than 200 staff, mostly in rotation or on loan from other federal agencies, directly reports to the president on all matters related to science and policy. The atmosphere at the White House complex and the exchanges with Kei Koizumi, principal deputy director for policy at OSTP, deeply inspired the students and showcased the impact science can have on federal policy.
The Science Policy Initiative (SPI) is an organization of students and postdocs whose core goal is to foster the discourse of MIT students and the policy community. SPI organizes multiple trips to Washington every year to empower students to connect with federal agencies and policymakers, as well as showcase potential career paths for scientists in the policy. In particular, ExVD offered opportunities to network with officials, many of whom are MIT alums and open to discussing their paths toward careers in science policy.
The impact ExVD has is profound. “It was a fantastic opportunity to learn more about science policy and interact with representatives from several federal agencies. I strongly believe that scientists equipped with policy knowledge can play a crucial role in shaping effective and evidence-based policies that can benefit society,” says Maria Proestaki, a postdoc researching organ-on-a-chip technologies at the Department of Biological Engineering.
Alexandra Cabanelas, a PhD student of biological oceanography at the MIT-Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Joint Program, adds: “It was interesting to see common themes across the agencies, especially the importance of having individuals from diverse fields and expertise in federal roles, highlighting that even if you are not pursuing a science policy-specific degree, you can still succeed in these roles.”
Joachim Schaeffer, a PhD student working on machine learning for batteries and SPI ExVD chair, concludes: “Science and technology are fundamental pillars of our society, and in particular now, it is more important than ever that scientists engage with policymakers to work on solving great challenges, such as biosecurity, AI safety, and climate change. Neither science nor policy can solve these challenges alone. We need strong science and policies informed by science to thrive.”
The overall sentiment among the ExVD participants has been motivation. Participants have expressed feeling more informed and inspired to integrate policy in their future careers or in their graduate research, aware that a scientific background is a great asset in the policy world.