The highlight of my week was a talk at MIT yesterday by a former Weston student of mine, Akiva Gordon. You may think that I must not get out much if a lecture at MIT was the highlight of my week — but please withhold that judgment! While it’s true that I don’t get out much, this would still have been a memorable occasion even if I did have an exciting social calendar.

So what’s going on here? The talk was the public-facing portion of Akiva’s PhD defense in chemical engineering.

Now don’t stop reading! I don’t know anything about chemical engineering either; I wouldn’t even attempt to read Akiva’s thesis, which is titled Chemical and Structural Optimization of Lipid Nanoparticles for Pulmonary and Other Delivery. Actually I almost understand that title, but that’s because of my background in classical languages, not because of any chemical knowledge. I never took chem in college, nor even in high school!

Despite all that, almost the entire talk actually made sense to me — 90% of it at a minimum. Furthermore, it’s really important stuff. So let’s back up and fill in the context. Akiva has been working in Dan Anderson’s lab, and you can see from their public page where I got that picture up above. If you go to that page and scroll down, you see an amazingly concise sentence about Akiva’s research:

Akiva is working on developing inhalable dry powders for pulmonary delivery of mRNA LNPs.

And that we can understand, at least if we combine it with the thesis title.

I did manage to read the abstract of the thesis, but it was pretty intimidating to my non-chem brain. Fortunately the lecture about the thesis was anything but intimidating: like any good public speaker, Akiva tuned the abstract and the talk to the two different audiences. The audience for the abstract was his committee and others who were experts in biochemistry, chemical engineering, and biomedical issues; the audience for the talk was pretty much a general assemblage of reasonably educated people, some of whom might be experts in the above fields but many of whom were not.

If you’re starting to get lost in the weeds, just think about the larger implications of Akiva’s research, such as being able to deliver mRNA vaccines in non-refrigerated environments. For the bigger picture, it would be worth your while to scan the captions below all 47 pictures of the members of Anderson’s lab, just to see why this is a big deal. Let’s just hope that RFK Jr. and the remaining members of the DOGE squad don’t decide to eliminate their funding!

As an aside, I can hear a different former student of mine complaining that well over half of the members of the Anderson Lab are Asian. “Must be DEI,” he would say. I have no comment on the observation, but the DEI explanation is clearly untrue.

Categories: Life, Teaching & Learning, Weston