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veterinarians; materials scientists; physicists; and pharmaceutical
chemists. Members from different disciplines sit side by side in the
labs and offices that honeycomb the sixth floor of the Koch Institute.
Multidisciplinary labs are sprouting up as academia recognizes
their value in tackling challenges ranging from cancer to global warm-
ing. (One of the hallmarks of the Stand Up to Cancer campaign is its
funding of such teams.) But the revolution is still in early days. The
2016 MIT report “Convergence: The Future of Health,” coauthored
by Susan Hockfield, highlights the importance of bringing together
engineering, physical, computational, mathematical, and biomedi-
cal sciences “to help solve many of the world’s grand challenges.” It
calls for ambitious reforms in education, industry, and government,
including the creation of a “culture of convergence” in academia and
industry and changes to government research-funding practices.
Langer’s reputation, the challenges his lab takes on, and the
career opportunities afforded, including the chance to participate
in start-ups, attract lots of applicants. The lab has 119 researchers
from all over the world, plus 30 to 40 undergraduates each semes-
ter. It receives 4,000 to 5,000 applications for the 10 to 20 postdoc
positions that open up each year and conducts global searches when
specialized skills are needed for particular projects.
It’s a given that applicants must have outstanding academic cre-
dentials and be highly motivated. Beyond that, the leadership team
of Langer, Traverso, and Ana Jaklenec, a biomedical engineer and
MIT staff scientist, looks for people who “are nice, get along well with
others, and are good communicators”—vital qualities given that the
lab’s researchers must constantly explain their fields to coworkers
and find ways to conduct experiments that work for everyone. Dif-
ferences in technical languages, work practices, values, and even
ways of defining problems constitute one of the most formidable
challenges of a multidisciplinary lab, says Hockfield, a champion of
convergence during her eight years at MIT’s helm.
Jaklenec showed me a whiteboard filled with equations. It was from
a meeting of two postdocs—a biologist and a biomedical engineer who
were collaborating on a single-injection polio vaccine that could stay
in the body and be released in pulses over time. The biologist was

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