Alex Shalek

Director, Institute for Medical Engineering & Science | Institute Member | Member

Alex K. Shalek has directed MIT's Institute for Medical Engineering and Science since August 2024 and holds the J. W. Kieckhefer Professorship in IMES and the Department of Chemistry; he also directs MIT's Health Innovation Hub. He is a member of the Ragon Institute, an Institute Member of the Broad Institute, an extramural member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, an Assistant in Immunology at Massachusetts General Hospital, and an Instructor in Health Sciences and Technology at Harvard Medical School. He received his BA summa cum laude from Columbia University in 2004 and his AM and PhD in chemical physics from Harvard University, training with Hongkun Park and, as a postdoctoral fellow, with Park and Aviv Regev. His laboratory develops technologies coupling single-cell genomics, chemical biology and nanotechnology, most notably Seq-Well, a low-cost portable platform for single-cell RNA sequencing in resource-limited settings; his work has been applied to COVID-19, tuberculosis, melanoma and inflammatory disease.