A distinguished MIT student, medical robotics researcher, recipient of numerous scholarships and awards, A. Michael West is in no hurry to comment on his chosen career path.
“I kind of fell into it,” says the mechanical engineering doctoral candidate, adding that growing up in suburban California, he was outgoing, athletic — and good at math. “I had the classic choice: You can be a doctor, a lawyer or an engineer.”
“He witnessed his mother’s grueling workload as she trained to be a doctor, and he felt that he didn’t enjoy reading and writing enough to become a lawyer. So he became an engineer,” he says.
Fortunately, he enjoyed physics in high school because, he says, “it gave meaning to the numbers we were learning in math,” and his later major, mechanical engineering at Yale University, suited him.
“I definitely stuck with it,” West says. “I liked what I was learning.”
As a senior at Yale University, West was selected to participate in MIT Summer Research Program (MSRP)The program identifies talented students who will spend a summer on the MIT campus conducting research under the supervision of MIT faculty, postdoctoral students, and graduate students to prepare program participants for graduate study.
For West, the MSRP was an education in “what exactly graduate school is, and especially what it’s going to be like at MIT.”
It was also, and most importantly, a source of confirmation that West could succeed at the higher echelons of academia.
“It gave me the confidence to apply to top grad schools, to know that I could really contribute and succeed,” West says. “It gave me a ton of confidence to walk into a room and approach people who clearly know a lot more about certain topics than I do.”
Through MSRP, West also found community and formed lasting friendships, he says. “It’s nice to be in places where you see a lot of minorities in science, and MSRP was like that,” he says.
Having benefited from the MSRP experience, West repaid the favor when he enrolled at MIT, working as an MRSP group leader for two years. “You can create the same experience for people after you,” he says.
His involvement as a leader and mentor at MSRP is just one way West has tried to give back. For example, as an undergraduate, he served as president of his school’s chapter of the National Society of Black Engineers, and at MIT, he was treasurer of both the Black Graduate Student Association and the Academy of Courageous Minority Engineers.
“Maybe it’s just a family thing,” West says, “but as a black American, my parents raised me in a way that I always remember where I came from, what my ancestors went through.”
West’s current research — conducted with Neville Hogan, the Sun Jae Professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Eric P. and Evelyn E. Newton Laboratory of Human Biomechanics and Rehabilitation — also aims to facilitate others, especially those who have suffered orthopedic or neurological injuries.
“I’m trying to understand how people control and manage their movement from a mathematical perspective,” he says. “If you have a way to quantify movement, you can better measure it and implement it into robotics to create better devices to help with rehabilitation.”
In his first year of graduate studies, West was selected as a Bernard (Ben) Gold Fellow. In 2022, he was selected as an MIT-Takeda Fellow. MIT-Takeda Programcollaboration between MIT’s School of Engineering and Takeda Pharmaceuticals Company, primarily promotes the application of artificial intelligence to human health. As a Takeda Fellow, West 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, and the funding allowed him to step down from his teaching assistant job. Although he loves teaching and hopes to get a tenured professorship after his doctorate, he says the time commitment of being a teaching assistant is significant. By the third year of his doctorate, West was putting in about 20 hours a week in a teaching position.
“Having a lot of time to do research is great,” he says. “Learning what you need to learn and doing the research gets you to the next step.”
In fact, the kind of research West conducts is particularly time-consuming. That’s at least in part because human motor control involves a lot of automatic, subconscious actions that are predictably tough to understand.
“How do humans control these complex, subconscious systems? Understanding this is a slow process. Many 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 not-testable into the testable,” West says, adding, “We won’t understand how humans control movement in my lifetime.”
West says that to make progress, he must carefully take one step at a time.
“What are some small questions I can ask? What questions have already been asked, and how can we expand on them? That makes it less daunting,” he says.
In September, West will begin his internship as part of the program. MIT and Accenture Convergence Initiative for Industry and TechnologyHoping to encourage and facilitate interaction between technology and industry, the corporation selects five MIT-Accenture Fellows each year.
“They’re looking for someone whose research is translational, has the potential to have an impact on industry,” West says. “It’s encouraging that they’re interested in the basic, foundational research that I do. I haven’t worked on the translational side yet. That’s something I’d like to do after I graduate.”
While he has won prestigious scholarships and is developing human-robot interactions in healthcare, West remains the laid-back guy who “fell into” engineering. He finds time to meet up with friends on weekends, took up rugby as a postgraduate student, and maintains a long-distance relationship with his fiancée, with a wedding date set for next summer.
When asked what advice he would give to his future students when they are faced with convoluted tasks, he responded with a predictably relaxed tone.
“Don’t be afraid to ask for help. There’s always someone who’s better at something than you are, and that’s a good thing. If they weren’t, life would be kind of boring.”