New Postdoctoral Scholarship Program to Accelerate Healthcare Innovation | MIT News

The MIT Collaboration for Health and Life Sciences (MIT HEADS) is launching the Biswas Postdoctoral Fellowship Program to promote the work of outstanding early researchers in the field of health and life sciences. Supported by gifts from the Biswas Family Foundation, the program is designed to help apply cutting-edge research to improve health care and the lives of millions.

The program will support outstanding postdoctoral fellows specifically for human health care innovation through various avenues, such as leveraging AI in health-related research, developing low-cost diagnosis, and the integration of life sciences with fields such as economics, business, policy or humanities categories. The initial funding is $12 million, starting in early 2026, five four-year scholarships will be awarded for each of the next four years.

“An essential goal of MIT HEALS is to find new ways and opportunities to deliver health care solutions at scale, and the Biswas Family Foundation shares our commitment to scalable innovation and broad impact. MIT is also in the talent business, and the foundation’s gift allows us to bring exceptional schools to campus to explore some of the most pressing issues in human health and build meaningful connections across academicia and industry. We look forward to welcome the first cohort of Biswas partner to MIT,” said Sally Kornbluth, president of MIT.

“We are extremely honored to launch this world-class postdoctoral fellow program,” added Anantha P. Chandrakasan, Chief Innovation and Strategy Officer and Head of MIT HEALS, added. “We fully expect to attract top candidates from around the world to lead innovative cross-cutting projects in AI and health, cancer therapy, diagnosis and beyond. These fellows will select these fellows through a rigorous process led by the Distinguished Committee and will have the opportunity to work with our faculty on the most promising and impactful ideas.”

Angela Koehler, a professor in the Department of Bioengineering at MIT and associate director of the Koch Institute for Comprehensive Cancer, stressed that the MIT’s goal of good aims coincide with the stated goal of the Biswas Family Foundation: to leverage “advances in science and technology to revolutionize health care and its impact on global health.”

“Healthcare is a team sport,” Kohler said. “MIT’s Heals seeks to connect with investigators with a variety of expertise throughout the institute to address the most transformative issues affecting human health. Members of the MIT community are expected to be involved in the team and make an impact.”

MIT Heals is also trying to maximize its effectiveness by expanding its collaboration with medical schools and hospitals, from defining important issues that can be addressed through research and continue to clinical research, Koehler said.

The Biswas Family Foundation has shown similar strategies.

“The BISWAS family has a history of building connections and partnerships,” Koehler said. “It could be a dataset, algorithm, agent, technology platform or patient.” ”

Hope Biswas, co-founder of the Biswas Family Foundation, and her husband, MIT alumnus Sanjit Biswas SM ’05, also highlighted the synergy between the foundation and MIT.

“The Biswas Family Foundation is proud to support MIT’s treatment program, which reimagines how scientific discoveries translate into real-world health impacts. It focuses on fostering interdisciplinary collaboration to find new solutions to health care challenges to align with our mission to promote science and technology to enhance the mission of science and technology to enhance the health status of science and technology at scale,” Biswas said.

Biswas added: “As part of this commitment, we are particularly proud to support outstanding scholars in high-impact interdisciplinary work in areas such as computational biology, nanoscale therapies, women’s health and basics, curiosity-driven life science research. We have worked hard for the effort and have worked hard for one effort.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning systems provide a new opportunity to study disease, biological mechanisms, therapeutic agents, and healthcare using a large number of data sets.

“AI and computing systems biology can improve the accuracy of diagnostic approaches, enable the development of precise drugs, improve the choices associated with personalized treatment strategies, and increase operational efficiency within the health care system,” Koehler said. “The support of Sanjit and Hope’s broad program for AI and computing systems biology will help Massachusetts researchers explore a variety of pathways that impact human health at scale.”

It is increasingly discovered that the boundaries of health-related research are fused in different fields, and Koehler provides an example of how advances in developing high-throughput experiments in large data sets “may fit with the development of new computing or AI tools.” She added that the four-year funding period provided by the postdoctoral scholarship is “long enough to allow researchers to think largely and do projects on the interface and become bilingual researchers at the end of the program.”

Chandrakasan believes that Biswas researchers have the potential to make revolutionary progress in health research in the program.

“I am very grateful to the BISWAS Family Foundation for its generous support in MIT for promoting transformative research,” Chandrakasan said.