The Email That Made My Coffee Go Cold

Big news: I'm joining MIT as a Novo Nordisk Fellow, and I'll be doing my postdoc at L4TE.

There are emails you skim, emails you archive, and emails you read four times in a row while your coffee quietly goes cold. Not long ago, I got one of the last kind.

It said I'd been selected as an MIT–Novo Nordisk AI Postdoctoral Fellow, and that I'll be carrying out my postdoctoral research at MIT in L4TE, Giovanni Traverso's Laboratory for Translational Engineering. technologyreview

The coffee never stood a chance.

What the fellowship is

The program is a partnership between MIT's School of Engineering and Novo Nordisk, and it's part of MIT HEALS, the Institute-wide Health and Life Sciences Collaborative. It's built for researchers working where AI and data science meet the life sciences, which is exactly where I want to be. Each cohort is small, capped at ten fellows a year, and each fellowship lasts two years. Every fellow works closely with a faculty advisor and can collaborate across all five of MIT's schools and the Schwarzman College of Computing. mit novo nordisk artificial intelligence postdoctoral fellows program

In other words: two years, one of the most ambitious research ecosystems on the planet, and a standing invitation to think big.

Why L4TE

L4TE is the kind of lab whose projects sound like science fiction until you see the data: electronics you can swallow, microneedle patches, a capsule designed to stand in for insulin shots. mit

But the hardware is only half the story. Mechanical and electrical engineers work alongside biologists, physicians and even veterinarians, backed by in-house core teams that handle fabrication, bioanalytics and in vivo studies. Lab meeting happens every Monday at Brigham and Women's Hospital, and it takes an entire classroom to hold the hundred-plus people who show up. And all of that energy points in one direction: technology that doesn't just look good on paper but actually reaches the patients who need it.

For someone who wants AI to do more than climb leaderboards, I can't imagine a better place to land. At L4TE, ideas are expected to leave the whiteboard.

The thank-yous

None of this happened solo. Enormous thanks to [PhD advisor] for [what they taught you]; to every mentor and colleague who read a draft, asked a hard question, or simply told me to go for it; and to my family and friends, who were cheering long before this email ever arrived. And thank you to MIT, Novo Nordisk and Professor Giovanni Traverso for betting on me. I plan to make it a very good bet.

Next stop: Cambridge

Ahead: a new lab, a new city, and almost certainly a crash course in New England winters. I'll be documenting the ride here, including the breakthroughs, the prototypes that don't work (yet), and everything in between. If you're working on AI for health, drug delivery or medical devices, or you just want to grab coffee in Cambridge or Boston, my inbox is open.

This time, I promise to drink it while it's hot.