MIT Professor Xiao Wang's research is focused on developing tools that pinpoint where in a cell different types of messenger RNA are translated into proteins — information that can offer insight into how cells control their fate and what goes wrong in disease.
When Xiao Wang applied to faculty jobs, many of the institutions where she interviewed thought her research proposal — to study the life cycle of RNA in cells and how it influences normal development and disease — was too broad. However, that was not the case when she interviewed at MIT, where her future colleagues embraced her ideas and encouraged her to be even more bold. "What I'm doing now is even broader, even bolder than what I initially proposed," says Wang, who holds joint appointments in the Department of Chemistry and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. "I got great support from all my colleagues in my department and at Broad so that I could get the resources to conduct what I wanted to do. It's also a demonstration of how brave the students are. There is a really innovative culture and environment here, so the students are not scared by taking on something that might sound weird or unrealistic." Wang's work on RNA brings together students from chemistry, biology, computer science, neuroscience, and other fields. In her lab, research is focused on developing tools that pinpoint where in a given cell different types of messenger RNA are translated into proteins — information that can offer insight into how cells control their fate and what goes wrong in disease, especially in the brain. "The joint position between MIT Chemistry and the Broad Institute was very attractive to me because I was trained as a chemist, and I would like to teach and recruit students from chemistry. But meanwhile, I also wanted to get exposure to biomedical topics and have collaborators outside chemistry. I can collaborate with biologists, doctors, as well as computational scientists who analyze all these daunting data," she says. Imaging RNA Wang began her career at MIT in 2019, just before the Covid-19 pandemic began. Until that point, she hardly knew anyone in the Boston area, but she found a warm welcome. "I wasn't trained at MIT, and I had never lived in Boston…