Professor Scott Manalis never thought he’d end up in academia. Despite having a father who lectured in Environmental Science at UC Santa Barbara, Manalis had never envisioned himself as the professorial type. “I didn’t take school that seriously in my early days,” Manalis reflects. “If you had told me this is how I’d end up, I would have never believed it.”
Looking at Manalis’ list of activities, it’s hard to imagine, quite frankly, that he would have chosen any other path. He directs a highly innovative research program at the MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research where his lab is pushing the limits of precision measurement in biological systems, he chairs the undergraduate program committee in biological engineering which is driven by his passion for teaching and he co-founded Affinity Biosensors that has commercialized new measurement approaches that were developed in his lab.
Despite all of this, Manalis shares that “I never really planned my life out. If I had to do it over again, who knows what my path would be.”
Although Manalis might have you think that he stumbled his way into being a tenured professor in BE, it is clear that a fire of scientific curiosity was ignited for him at UC Santa Barbara, when he attended the College of Creative Studies as an undergraduate. “I was drawn to physics because you can break problems down into simple parts. You can go from the ground up.” With very few requirements in his program, Manalis remembers that he was able to focus on what he was most interested in.
It was during this intense focused time of study at UC Santa Barbara when Manalis had two experiences that made him realize he was passionate about research: working in Professor Paul Hansma’s physics lab and interning at Digital Instruments (now Bruker). After those two experiences, Manalis decided to pursue a PhD in Applied Physics at Stanford, where he worked in Professor Cal Quate’s lab, the birthplace of Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM). His goal at that time was to one day return to a company like Digital Instruments as a staff scientist.
While wrapping up his graduate studies, Manalis had an opportunity to do some consulting for two biotech companies (Affymetrix and Molecular Devices) and, through that work, he made two major realizations: first, he knew he wanted to apply his background in physics and engineering to biology, and second, he had a clear scientific vision for what he wanted to explore. “I suddenly had a research plan – something I wanted to do – and that became a powerful force that drove me towards seeking a faculty position.”
At about the time Manalis was about to graduate, the MIT Media Lab was looking to hire someone at the physics/engineering/biology interface and Professor Quate recommended Manalis for the job. When he came to MIT to give his job talk, Manalis recalls: “I didn’t feel much pressure since I had planned on applying to faculty positions much later – after my postdoc.”
Manalis defended his dissertation in May and, by December, he was on the faculty at MIT’s Media Lab in a unique position in which he didn’t have to write grants. “I had this incredibly flexible position; it was like a playground. I did really risky things,” recalled Manalis. Having such freedom gave Manalis the opportunity to be supremely creative and grew his initial research plans to new dimensions by developing the suspended microchannel resonator (SMR) device, which uses the concept analogous of an underwater diving board’s vibrations to measure mass. With the SMR, Manalis can now measure the mass of particles with a resolution better than an attogram – one millionth of a trillionth of a gram, making it possible to weigh small viruses, extracellular vesicles and many of the engineered nanoparticles that are being used for nanomedicine.
Over the years, Manalis and his research team have been able to fine-tune the device with such accuracy that it is now revealing new insights into the way cells grow. “Within ten minutes,” Manalis shares about the SMR, “you can precisely determine the rate at which a mammalian cell gets heavier. This is allowing us to study fundamental properties of cell growth on a time scale that hasn’t been explored before.”
One practical application of such a measurement is to determine how a patient will respond to cancer treatments. Instead of having to culture a patient’s cancer cells outside of their natural environment, which requires several days to weeks, the mass measurement developed by Manalis and his team could allow the response of a drug to be evaluated very quickly. Right now the SMR can measure the growth of a few cells in an hour but his lab is working on increasing this rate to thousands per hour.
“It’s common to start with a question and then identify the technology to address it. Although this sounds quite logical, my lab doesn’t always work this way,” Manalis shares. “Going in the reverse direction can be incredibly rewarding – the idea of taking a new type of measurement that has not existed before and then coming up with new questions. Sometime these new questions can be better than the ones we started with.”
Some of the questions that Manalis’ new technology is raising are shifting fundamental concepts about what cells “eat” and what they are actually made of. With collaborators at the Koch Institute, Manalis and his lab members hope to use their measurements to better understand the metabolism of cancer cells.
For Manalis, working with students and postdocs is one of his favorite aspects of the job. “I thoroughly enjoy teaching undergraduates and talking with my lab members about new results and new directions. I lose track of time very easily when this happens.” Although originally part of the Media Lab, Manalis met Professor Doug Lauffenburger through a DARPA collaboration and the two immediately hit it off. When he was up for tenure, Manalis chose BE and now serves as Chair of their undergraduate program. Manalis enjoys thinking about the student experience and admits that his job, as Chair, is not as daunting as it may sound. “We have faculty who are teaching what they’re most interested in teaching so students tend to be highly engaged by their courses. Having faculty teach material they’re passionate about is essential for maintaining a thriving undergraduate program.”
BE is the youngest undergraduate major in 39 years at MIT and it is growing quickly. With an average of 40-70 students enrolling in the major each year, Manalis’ committee is trying to keep up with the demand while also thinking critically about what students need and want from the program. Improving writing skills was a “hot topic” but, with the creation of the BE Writing Lab, Manalis feels as though the issue is now on “a path to be solved.” Two other topics that the committee is discussing right now, though, are how to give students a deeper understanding of how to use statistics and how to explore the ethical questions that are surfacing as research enters new territories.
For someone who never imagined being at MIT, Manalis surely has made a life for himself in Cambridge. Aside from frequenting Felipe’s burritos with his wife and two daughters, Manalis is usually working with his students and postdocs “making innovation happen.” For Manalis, it truly is the journey; “I am very interested in process, much more so than destination.” So, there really is no saying exactly where his research will take him – or where he will take Science as he dives deeper with making precision measurements in biological systems.
For more information on Manalis’ research, check out his website: http://manalis-lab.mit.edu/research.html.