An completed MIT scholar researcher in well being care robotics, with many scholarship and fellowship awards to his identify, A. Michael West is nonchalant about how he selected his path.

“I form of fell into it,” the mechanical engineering PhD candidate says, including that rising up in suburban California, he was social, athletic — and good at math. “I had the basic alternative: You generally is a physician, a lawyer, or an engineer.”

Having witnessed his mom’s grueling residency when she was coaching to be a health care provider, and feeling like he didn’t get pleasure from studying and writing sufficient to be a lawyer, “That left engineer,” he says.

Fortunately, he loved physics in highschool as a result of, he says, “it gave which means to the numbers we had been studying in arithmetic,” and in a while, his main in mechanical engineering at Yale College agreed with him.

“I positively caught with it,” West says. “I preferred what I used to be studying.”

As a rising senior at Yale, West was chosen to take part within the MIT Summer time Analysis Program (MSRP). This system identifies proficient undergraduates to spend a summer time on MIT’s campus, conducting analysis with the mentorship of MIT college, postdocs, and graduate college students to arrange program individuals for graduate examine.

For West, MSRP was an schooling in what “precisely grad faculty was, particularly what it will be like at MIT.”

It was additionally, and most significantly, a supply of validation that West might succeed within the greater ranges of academia.

“It gave me the boldness to use to prime grad faculties, to know that I might really contribute right here and achieve success,” West says. “It very a lot gave me the boldness to stroll right into a room and method individuals who clearly know far more than I do about sure subjects.”

With MSRP, West additionally discovered a group and made enduring friendships, he says. “It’s good to be in areas the place you get to see a variety of minorities in science, which MSRP was,” he says.

Having benefited from the MSRP expertise, West gave again as soon as he enrolled at MIT by working as an MRSP group chief for 2 summers. “You possibly can create this identical expertise for folks after you,” he says.

His involvement as a frontrunner and mentor in MSRP is only one means West has sought to provide again. As an undergraduate, for instance, he served as president of his faculty’s Nationwide Society of Black Engineers chapter, and at MIT, he has served as treasurer for the Black Graduate Scholar Affiliation and the Academy of Brave Minority Engineers.

“Possibly it’s only a familial factor,” West says, “however being a Black American, my dad and mom raised me in a means that you simply all the time bear in mind the place you come from, you bear in mind what your ancestors went via.”

West’s present analysis — with Neville Hogan, the Solar Jae Professor in Mechanical Engineering, within the Eric P. and Evelyn E. Newton Laboratory for Biomechanics and Human Rehabilitation — can also be aimed toward serving to others, particularly those that have suffered orthopedic or neurological damage.

“I’m making an attempt to know how people management and handle their motion from a mathematical standpoint,” he says. “If in case you have a means of quantifying the motion, then you possibly can measure it higher and implement that to robotics, to make higher gadgets to assist in rehabilitation.”

Throughout his first 12 months of graduate faculty, West was chosen because the Bernard (Ben) Gold Fellow. In 2022, he was chosen to be an MIT-Takeda fellow. The MIT-Takeda Program, a collaboration between MIT’s College of Engineering and Takeda Prescribed drugs Firm, primarily promotes the applying of synthetic intelligence to profit human well being. As a Takeda Fellow, West has studied the power of the human hand to control objects and instruments.

West says the Takeda Fellowship gave him time to deal with his analysis, the funding permitting him to forgo working as a instructing assistant. Though he loves instructing and hopes to safe a tenure-track place as a professor after incomes his PhD, he says the time dedication related to being a instructing assistant is critical. Within the third 12 months of his PhD, West devoted about 20 hours every week to a instructing place.

“Having a variety of time to do analysis is nice,” he says. “Studying what you should study and doing the analysis will get you to the subsequent step.”

The truth is, the kind of analysis that West conducts is particularly time-intensive. That is a minimum of partly as a result of human motor management entails a lot computerized, unconscious exercise that’s predictably obscure.

“How do folks management these advanced, unconscious techniques? Understanding that could be a slow-going course of. Quite a lot of the findings construct on one another. It’s important to have a stable understanding of what’s identified, what’s a working speculation, what’s testable, what will not be testable, and the best way to convey the non-testable to testable,” West says, including, “We gained’t perceive how people management motion in my lifetime.”

To make progress, West says he has to rigorously proceed one step at a time.

“What are the small questions I can ask? What are the questions which have already been requested, and the way can we construct upon these? That’s when the duty turns into much less daunting,” he says.

In September, West will start a fellowship with the MIT and Accenture Convergence Initiative for Trade and Know-how. Hoping to encourage and facilitate interplay between expertise and business, the company selects 5 MIT-Accenture fellows every year.

“What they’re on the lookout for is somebody whose analysis is translational, that may have impacts in business,” West says. “It’s promising that they’re within the primary, basic analysis I’m doing. I haven’t labored on the translational facet but. It’s one thing I’d wish to get into after commencement.”

Whereas incomes prestigious fellowships and advancing human-robot interactions in well being care, West remains to be very a lot the laid-back man who “fell into” engineering. He finds time to satisfy with buddies on the weekends, took up rugby as a graduate scholar, and has a long-distance relationship together with his fiancée, with a marriage date set for subsequent summer time.

Requested how he’ll counsel his future college students once they method sophisticated work, he has a predictably relaxed response.

“Don’t be afraid to ask for assist. There’s all the time going to be somebody who’s higher at one thing than you’re, and that’s factor. If there weren’t, life could be somewhat boring.”