Speaker Profile
Ph.D., Director, Institute for Medical Engineering & Science, MIT
Biography
Alex K. Shalek is the Director of the Institute for Medical Engineering & Science (IMES) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the J. W. Kieckhefer Professor in IMES and the Department of Chemistry at MIT, as well as an Extramural Member of MIT's Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research. He is also an Institute Member of the Broad Institute, a Member of the Ragon Institute, and an Instructor in Health Sciences & Technology at Harvard Medical School. The multi-disciplinary research in his laboratory aims to create and implement broadly-applicable methods to study and engineer cellular responses in tissues, to drive biological discovery and improve prognostics, diagnostics, and therapeutics for autoimmune, infectious, and cancerous diseases. Shalek and his lab are best known for their work in single-cell and spatial genomics, and for studying a number of devastating, but difficult to study, human diseases with partners around the world.
Session Abstract – PMWC 2027 Silicon Valley
Track Chair:
Serge Saxonov, 10x Genomics
PMWC Award Ceremony
• Sarah Teichmann, Wellcome Sanger Institute (Luminary)
• Aviv Regev, Genentech (Pioneer)
Featured Speakers
• Sarah Teichmann, Wellcome Sanger Institute
• Aviv Regev, Genentech
• Eric Lander, Broad Institute
• Gad Getz, Broad Institute
• Emma Lundberg, Stanford
• Garry Nolan, Stanford
• Nikhil Wagle, Genentech
• Satish Viswanath, Emory
• Alex Shalek, MIT / Broad Institute
• Christina Curtis, Stanford
• Fei Chen, Broad Institute
• Andy Beck, PathAI
• Kevin Wei, Harvard
• Rebecca Critchley-Thorne, Castle Biosciences
• Dan Rozelle, Rancho BioSciences
• Maximilian Strauss, OmicVision
The Next Map of Biology
From the Human Genome to the Human Cell Atlas in the AI era.
Spatial Biology in Practice
From tissue architecture to decisions that change the answer.
Spatial Proteomics
Cell states, therapeutic targets, and what can be measured in context.
Spatial Pathology from Discovery to Clinical Biomarker
Turning a beautiful image into a validated test.
AI for Spatial Biology
Foundation models, digital pathology, and tissue-scale interpretation.
Scaling Spatial Biology to Clinical Translation
From discovery platform to reproducible clinical evidence.
PMWC Hall of Impact
Previous Speakers Include
Nobel laureates, technology founders, regulators, CEOs and scientific pioneers who have taken the PMWC stage.
