New Leadership to Advance MIT HEALS

Dear members of the MIT community,

At the December launch of the MIT Health and Life Sciences Collaborative (MIT HEALS), I promised we would soon announce a faculty lead, and today I'm delighted to let you know that we have appointed Angela Koehler. A professor of biological engineering, a pioneering researcher and a highly successful entrepreneur, Angela will serve as faculty director, leading MIT HEALS’ efforts to help inspire, accelerate and deliver solutions, at scale, to some of society’s most urgent and intractable health challenges.

Angela is an associate director at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and an Institute Member at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Her lab focuses on innovation at the earliest stages of drug discovery, building chemical tools and technologies to target cancer-related proteins that many consider to be “undruggable” – a term Angela would like to see replaced by “yet to be drugged.”

Angela’s deep experience in translating research into real-world impact will further strengthen MIT HEALS. As faculty director of the MIT Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation and a founder of multiple biotech companies – including Ligon Discovery, Kronos Bio, 76Bio and Samori Bio – she has firsthand knowledge of how to transform scientific discoveries into potential therapeutics.

Angela will be joined in her work by two associate directors: Iain Cheeseman, member of the Whitehead Institute and the Herman and Margaret Sokol Professor of Biology, and Katharina Ribbeck, the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Biological Engineering. Iain and Katharina bring wide-ranging knowledge and experience to MIT HEALS, and I’m grateful to them for agreeing to take on these leadership roles.

Finally, I want to thank the search advisory group, led by Matthew Vander Heiden, for their thoughtful approach to the search process. We are incredibly fortunate to have such strong leadership in place, and we look forward to sharing updates as MIT HEALS sparks exciting collaborations and generates new knowledge, new tools and new cures that will shape the future of health care and biomedicine.

Sincerely,

Sally Kornbluth
President

Search Advisory Group Members

Matthew Vander Heiden, chair

Mariana Arcaya

Angela Belcher

Dimitris Bertsimas

Emery N. Brown

Amy E. Keating

Laura L. Kiessling

Sendhil Mullainathan

Giovanni Traverso