An accomplished MIT student researcher in health care robotics, with many scholarship and fellowship awards to his name, A. Michael West is nonchalant about how he chose his path.
โI kind of fell into it,โ the mechanical engineering PhD candidate says, adding that growing up in suburban California, he was social, athletic โ and good at math. โI had the classic choice: You can be a doctor, a lawyer, or an engineer.โ
Having witnessed his motherโs grueling residency when she was training to be a doctor, and feeling like he didnโt enjoy reading and writing enough to be a lawyer, โThat left engineer,โ he says.
Luckily, he enjoyed physics in high school because, he says, โit gave meaning to the numbers we were learning in mathematics,โ and later on, his major in mechanical engineering at Yale University agreed with him.
โI definitely stuck with it,โ West says. โI liked what I was learning.โ
As a rising senior at Yale, West was selected to participate in the MIT Summer Research Program (MSRP). The program identifies talented undergraduates to spend a summer on MITโs campus, conducting research with the mentorship of MIT faculty, postdocs, and graduate students to prepare program participants for graduate study.
For West, MSRP was an education in what โexactly grad school was, especially what it would be like at MIT.โ
It was also, and most importantly, a source of validation that West could succeed in the higher levels of academia.
โIt gave me the confidence to apply to top grad schools, to know that I could actually contribute here and be successful,โ West says. โIt very much gave me the confidence to walk into a room and approach people who obviously know way more than I do about certain topics.โ
With MSRP, West also found a community and made enduring friendships, he says. โItโs nice to be in spaces where you get to see a lot of minorities in science, which MSRP was,โ he says.
Having benefited from the MSRP experience, West gave back once he enrolled at MIT by working as an MRSP group leader for two summers. โYou can create this same experience for people after you,โ he says.
His involvement as a leader and mentor in MSRP is just one way West has sought to give back. As an undergraduate, for example, he served as president of his schoolโs National Society of Black Engineers chapter, and at MIT, he has served as treasurer for the Black Graduate Student Association and the Academy of Courageous Minority Engineers.
โMaybe itโs just a familial thing,โ West says, โbut being a Black American, my parents raised me in a way that you always remember where you come from, you remember what your ancestors went through.โ
Westโs current research โ with Neville Hogan, the Sun Jae Professor in Mechanical Engineering, in the Eric P. and Evelyn E. Newton Laboratory for Biomechanics and Human Rehabilitation โ is also aimed at helping others, especially those who have suffered orthopedic or neurological injury.
โIโm trying to understand how humans control and manage their movement from a mathematical standpoint,โ he says. โIf you have a way of quantifying the movement, then you can measure it better and implement that to robotics, to make better devices to help in rehabilitation.โ
During his first year of graduate school, West was selected as the Bernard (Ben) Gold Fellow. In 2022, he was chosen to be an MIT-Takeda fellow. The MIT-Takeda Program, a collaboration between MITโs School of Engineering and Takeda Pharmaceuticals Company, primarily promotes the application of artificial intelligence to benefit human health. As a Takeda Fellow, West has studied the ability of the human hand to manipulate objects and tools.
West says the Takeda Fellowship gave him time to focus on his research, the funding allowing him to forgo working as a teaching assistant. Although he loves teaching and hopes to secure a tenure-track position as a professor after earning his PhD, he says the time commitment associated with being a teaching assistant is significant. In the third year of his PhD, West devoted about 20 hours a week to a teaching position.
โHaving a lot of time to do research is great,โ he says. โLearning what you need to learn about and doing the research gets you to the next step.โ
In fact, the type of research that West conducts is especially time-intensive. This is at least partly because human motor control involves much automatic, subconscious activity that is predictably difficult to understand.
โHow do people control these complex, subconscious systems? Understanding that is a slow-going process. A lot of the findings build on each other. You have to have a solid understanding of what is known, what is a working hypothesis, what is testable, what is not testable, and how to bring the non-testable to testable,โ West says, adding, โWe wonโt understand how humans control movement in my lifetime.โ
To make progress, West says he has to carefully proceed one step at a time.
โWhat are the small questions I can ask? What are the questions that have already been asked, and how can we build upon those? Thatโs when the task becomes less daunting,โ he says.
In September, West will begin a fellowship with the MIT and Accenture Convergence Initiative for Industry and Technology. Hoping to encourage and facilitate interaction between technology and industry, the corporation selects five MIT-Accenture fellows each year.
โWhat theyโre looking for is someone whose research is translational, that can have impacts in industry,โ West says. โItโs promising that theyโre interested in the basic, fundamental research Iโm doing. I havenโt worked on the translational side yet. Itโs something Iโd like to get into after graduation.โ
While earning prestigious fellowships and advancing human-robot interactions in health care, West is still very much the laid-back guy who โfell intoโ engineering. He finds time to meet with friends on the weekends, took up rugby as a graduate student, and has a long-distance relationship with his fiancรฉe, with a wedding date set for next summer.
Asked how he will counsel his future students when they approach complicated work, he has a predictably relaxed response.
โDonโt be afraid to ask for help. Thereโs always going to be someone whoโs better at something than you are, and thatโs a good thing. If there werenโt, life would be a little boring.โ
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