The MIT Health and Life Sciences Collaborative (MIT HEALS) is launching the Biswas Postdoctoral Fellowship Program to advance the work of outstanding early-career researchers in health and life sciences. Supported by a present from the Biswas Family Foundation, this system goals to assist apply cutting-edge research to enhance health care and the lives of thousands and thousands.
This system will support exceptional postdocs dedicated to innovation in human health care through a full range of pathways, equivalent to leveraging AI in health-related research, developing low-cost diagnostics, and the convergence of life sciences with such areas as economics, business, policy, or the humanities. With initial funding of $12 million, five four-year fellowships will probably be awarded for every of the subsequent 4 years, starting in early 2026.
“An important goal of MIT HEALS is to search out latest ways and opportunities to deliver health care solutions at scale, and the Biswas Family Foundation shares our commitment to scalable innovation and broad impact. MIT can also be within the talent business, and the muse’s gift allows us to bring exceptional scholars to campus to explore among the most pressing issues in human health and construct meaningful connections across academia and industry. We sit up for welcoming the primary cohort of Biswas Fellows to MIT,” says MIT president Sally Kornbluth.
“We’re deeply honored to launch this world-class postdoctoral fellows program,” adds Anantha P. Chandrakasan, MIT’s chief innovation and strategy officer and head of MIT HEALS. “We fully expect to draw top candidates from across the globe to steer revolutionary cross-cutting projects in AI and health, cancer therapies, diagnostics, and beyond. These fellows will probably be chosen through a rigorous process overseen by a distinguished committee, and could have the chance to collaborate with our faculty on essentially the most promising and impactful ideas.”
Angela Koehler, faculty lead of MIT HEALS, professor in MIT’s Department of Biological Engineering, and associate director of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, emphasized that the objectives of MIT HEALS align well with a stated goal of the Biswas Family Foundation: to leverage “scientific and technological advancements to revolutionize health care and make an enduring impact on global public health.”
“Health care is a team sport,” Koehler says. “MIT HEALS seeks to create connections involving investigators with diverse expertise across the Institute to tackle essentially the most transformative problems impacting human health. Members of the MIT community are well poised to take part in teams and make an impact.”
MIT HEALS also seeks to maximise its effectiveness by expanding collaboration with medical schools and hospitals, starting with defining necessary problems that might be approached through research, and continuing all of the technique to clinical studies, Koehler says.
The Biswas Family Foundation has already demonstrated the same strategy.
“The Biswas family has a history of enabling connections and partnerships between institutions that every bring a chunk to the puzzle,” Koehler says. “This could possibly be a dataset, an algorithm, an agent, a technology platform, or patients.”
Hope Biswas, co-founder of the Biswas Family Foundation along with her husband, MIT alumnus Sanjit Biswas SM ’05, also highlighted the synergies between the muse and MIT.
“The Biswas Family Foundation is proud to support the MIT HEALS initiative, which reimagines how scientific discovery can translate into real-world health impact. Its deal with promoting interdisciplinary collaboration to search out latest solutions to challenges in health care aligns closely with our mission to advance science and technology to enhance health outcomes at scale,” Biswas says.
“As a part of this commitment,” Biswas adds, “we’re especially proud to support outstanding postdoctoral scholars focused on high-impact cross-disciplinary work in fields equivalent to computational biology, nanoscale therapeutics, women’s health, and fundamental, curiosity-driven life sciences research. We’re excited to contribute to an effort that brings together cutting-edge science and a deep commitment to translating knowledge into motion.”
AI and machine-learning systems present a brand new universe of opportunities to analyze disease, biological mechanisms, therapeutics, and health care delivery using huge datasets.
“AI and computational systems biology can improve the accuracy of diagnostic approaches, enable the event of precision medicines, improve decisions related to individualized treatment strategy, and improve operational efficiency inside health care systems,” says Koehler. “Sanjit and Hope’s support of broad initiatives in AI and computational systems biology will help MIT researchers explore a wide range of paths to affect human health on a big scale.”
Frontiers in health-related research are increasingly found where diverse fields converge, and Koehler provides the instance of how advances in high-throughput experimentation to develop large datasets “may couple well with the event of latest computation or AI tools.” She adds that the four-year funding term provided by the postdoctoral fellowship is “long enough to enable fellows to think big and tackle projects at interfaces, emerging as bilingual researchers at the tip of this system.”
Chandrakasan sees potential in this system for the Biswas Fellows to make revolutionary progress in health research.
“I’m incredibly grateful to the Biswas Family Foundation for his or her generous support in enabling transformative research at MIT,” Chandrakasan says.
