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

“I kind 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 classic choice: You can be a doctor, a lawyer, or an engineer.”

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

Luckily, he loved physics in highschool as a result of, he says, “it gave meaning to the numbers we were learning in mathematics,” and in a while, his main in mechanical engineering at Yale University agreed with him.

“I definitely stuck with it,” West says. “I liked what I was learning.”

As a rising senior at Yale, West was chosen to take part within the MIT Summer Research Program (MSRP). The program identifies gifted undergraduates to spend a summer season on MIT’s campus, conducting analysis with the mentorship of MIT school, postdocs, and graduate college students to arrange program individuals for graduate research.

For West, MSRP was an schooling in what “exactly grad school was, especially what it would be like at MIT.”

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

“It gave me the confidence to apply to top grad schools, to know that I could actually contribute here and be successful,” West says. “It very much gave me the confidence to walk into a room and approach people who obviously know way more than I do about certain topics.”

With MSRP, West additionally discovered a group and made enduring friendships, he says. “It’s nice to be in spaces where you get to see a lot 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 can create this same experience for people after you,” he says.

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

“Maybe it’s just a familial thing,” West says, “but being a Black American, my parents raised me in a way that you always remember where you come from, you remember what your ancestors went through.”

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

“I’m trying to understand how humans control and manage their movement from a mathematical standpoint,” he says. “If you have a way of quantifying the movement, then you can measure it better and implement that to robotics, to make better devices to help in rehabilitation.”

In 2022, West was chosen to be an MIT-Takeda fellow. The MIT-Takeda Program, a collaboration between MIT’s School of Engineering and Takeda Pharmaceuticals Company, primarily promotes the applying of synthetic intelligence to learn human well being. As a Takeda Fellow, West has studied the flexibility of the human hand to govern 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. Although 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. In the third yr of his PhD, West devoted about 20 hours every week to a instructing place.

“Having a lot of time to do research is great,” he says. “Learning what you need to learn about and doing the research gets you to the next step.”

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

“How do people control these complex, subconscious systems? Understanding that is a slow-going process. A lot of the 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 non-testable to testable,” West says, including, “We won’t understand how humans control movement in my lifetime.”

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

“What are the small questions I can ask? What are the questions that have already been asked, and how can we build upon those? That’s when the task becomes less daunting,” he says.

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

“What they’re looking for is someone whose research is translational, that can have impacts in industry,” West says. “It’s promising that they’re interested in the basic, fundamental research I’m doing. I haven’t worked on the translational side yet. It’s something I’d like to get into after graduation.”

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

Asked how he’ll counsel his future college students after they strategy sophisticated work, he has a predictably relaxed response.

“Don’t be afraid to ask for help. There’s always going to be someone who’s better at something than you are, and that’s a good thing. If there weren’t, life would be a little boring.”