Alex K. Shalek

Alex K. Shalek, is an American biomedical engineer. He is the Director of the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) and the J. W. Kieckhefer Professor in IMES and the Department of Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is an Extramural Member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT. Additionally, he is a Member of the Ragon Institute, 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.