Alex Shalek | |
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Born | December 18, 1981 |
Alma mater | Columbia University Harvard University |
Awards | Harold E. Edgerton Faculty Achievement Award, MIT (2020) Pew Charitable Trust Pew-Stewart Scholar (2018) Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Sloan Research Fellow (2018) Searle Scholars Program (2015) Beckman Young Investigators Award (2015) NIH Director's New Innovator Award (2015) |
Scientific career | |
Institutions | Massachusetts Institute of Technology Broad Institute Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research Ragon Institute Mass General Hospital Harvard Medical School |
Doctoral advisor | Hongkun Park |
Website | www |
Alex K. Shalek is a biomedical engineer, and a core faculty member of the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES), an Associate Professor of Chemistry, and an Extramural Member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Additionally, he is a Member of the Ragon Institute and an Institute Member of the Broad Institute, an Assistant in Immunology at Massachusetts General Hospital, and an Instructor in Health Sciences and Technology at Harvard Medical School. The multi-disciplinary research of the Shalek Lab aims to create and implement broadly-applicable methods to study and engineer cellular responses in tissues, to drive biological discovery and improve prognostics, diagnostics, and therapeutics for autoimmune, infectious, and cancerous diseases. Shalek and his lab are best known for their work in single-cell genomics and for studying a number of devastating, but difficult to study, human diseases with partners around the world.[1]
Shalek received his B.A. summa cum laude in 2004 from Columbia University where he studied chemical physics as a John Jay Scholar with Richard Bersohn and Louis Brus. He then performed graduate work in chemical physics developing arrays of nanowires as cellular "syringes" and electrochemical probes under the direction of Hongkun Park at Harvard University.[2] After, as a postdoctoral fellow, under the direction of Park and Aviv Regev at the Broad Institute, Shalek helped pioneer single-cell patterns in cellular responses to study how cells respond differently to the same condition, showing that genome-wide gene expression covariation across cells could be used to define cellular types and states, their internal "circuitry", from the “bottom-up”.[3][4][5][6]
As an independent investigator, Shalek and his lab have helped scale and simplify single cell genomics to study complex, low-input clinical specimens around the world.[7][5][8] In parallel, they have used these and other approaches [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][excessive citations] to help examine the causes and consequences of cellular heterogeneity across cancers,[15][16][17][18][19] infectious diseases,[5][8][9][10][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][excessive citations] and inflammation.[28][29][30]
Current work in the Shalek Lab includes both the development of broadly enabling technologies as well as their application to characterize, model, and control multicellular systems. With respect to technology development, the lab brings together areas of research in genomics, chemical biology, and nanotechnology to establish accessible approaches to profile and control cells and their interactions.
In addition to these tools with the global research community,[31] the lab is applying them to dissect human diseases, like COVID-19,[32][33] methodically linking cellular features and clinical observations. Major areas of focus include how: immune cells coordinate balanced responses to environmental stresses;[28][29][8][34] host cell-pathogen interactions evolve during infection;[8][9][10][21][22][23][26][excessive citations] and, tumor cells evade therapeutic treatment and natural immunity.[15][17][18][19][25][35]
From these observations and those of others, the lab aims to understand how disease alters tissue function at the cellular level and realize therapeutic and prophylactic interventions to reestablish or support human health.