Student spotlight: Victory Yinka-Banjo
This interview is part of a series from the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science featuring students answering questions about themselves and life at the Institute. Today’s interviewee, Victory Yinka-Banjo, is a junior majoring in MIT Course 6-7: Computer Science and Molecular Biology. Yinka-Banjo keeps a packed schedule: She is a member of the Office of Minority Education (OME) Laureates and Leaders program; a 2024 fellow in the public service-oriented BCAP program; has previously served as secretary of the African Students’ Association, and is now undergraduate president of the MIT Biotech Group; additionally, she is a SuperUROP Scholar; a member of the Ginkgo Bioworks’ Cultivate Fellowship (a program that supports students interested in synthetic biology/biotech); and an ambassador for Leadership Brainery, which equips juniors/leaders of color with the resources needed to prepare for graduate school. She recently found time to share a peek into her MIT experience.
Q: What’s your favorite building or room within MIT?
A: It has to be the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard on Ames Street in Kendall Square, where I do my SuperUROP research in Caroline Uhler’s lab. Outside of classes, you’re 90 percent likely to find me on the newest mezzanine floor (between the 11th and 12th floor), in one of the UROP [Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program] rooms I share with two other undergrads in the lab. We have standing desks, an amazing coffee/hot chocolate machine, external personal monitors, comfortable sofas — everything, really! Not only is it my favorite building, it is also my favorite study spot on campus. In fact, I am there so often that when friends recently planned a birthday surprise for me, they told me they were considering having it at the Broad, since they could count on me being there.
I think the most beautiful thing about this building, apart from the beautiful view of Cambridge we get from being on one of the highest floors, is that when I was applying to MIT from high school, I had fantasized working at the Broad because of the groundbreaking research. To think that it is now a reality makes me appreciate every minute I spend on my floor, whether I am doing actual research or some last-minute studying for a midterm.
Q: Tell me about one interest or hobby you’ve discovered since you came to MIT.
A: I have become pretty involved in the performing arts since I got to MIT! I have acted in two plays run by the Black Theater Guild, which was revived during my freshman year by one of my friends. I played a supporting role in the first play called “Nkrumah’s Last Day,” which was about Ghana at a time of governance under Kwame Nkrumah, its first president. In the second play, a ghost story/comedy called “Shooting the Sheriff,” I played one of the lead roles. Both caused me to step way out of my comfort zone and I loved the experiences because of that. I also got to act with some of my close friends who were first-time stage actors as well, so that made it even more fun.
Outside of acting, I also do spoken word/poetry. I have performed at events like the African Students Association Cultural Night, MIT Africa Innovate Conference, and Black Women’s Alliance Banquet. I try to use my pieces to share my experiences both within and beyond MIT, offering the perspective of an international Nigerian student. My favorite piece was called “Code Switch,” and I used concepts from [computer science] and biology (especially genetic code switching), to draw parallels with linguistic code-switching, and emphasize the beauty and originality of authenticity. This semester, I’m also a part of MIT Monologues and will be performing a piece called “Inheritance,” about the beauty of self-love found in affection transferred from a mother.
Q: Are you a re-reader or a re-watcher — and if so, what are your comfort books, shows, or movies?
A: I don’t watch too many movies, although I used to be obsessed with all parts of “High School Musical;” and the only book I’ve ever reread is “Americanah.” I would actually say I am a re-podcaster! My go-to comfort-podcast is this episode, “A Breakthrough Unfolds”, by Google DeepMind. It makes me a little emotional every time I listen. It is such an exemplification of the power of science and its ability to break boundaries that humans formerly thought impossible. As a computer science and biology major, I am particularly interested in these two disciplines’ applications to relevant problems, like the protein-folding problem discussed in the episode, which DeepMind’s solution for has caused massive advances in the biotech industry. It makes me so hopeful for the future of biology, and the ways in which computation can advance human health and precision medicine.
Q: Who’s your favorite artist?
A: When I think of the word ‘artist,’ I think of music artists first. There are so many who I love; my favorites also evolve over time. I’m Christian, so I listen to a lot of gospel music. I’m also Nigerian so I listen to a lot of Afrobeats. Since last summer, I’ve been obsessed with Limoblaze, who fuses both gospel and Afrobeats music! KB, a super talented gospel rapper, is also somewhat tied in ranking with Limo for me right now. His songs are probably ~50 percent of my workout playlist.
Q: It’s time to get on the shuttle to the first Mars colony, and you can only bring one personal item. What are you going to bring?
A: Oooh, this is a tough one, but it has to be my Brass Rat. Ever since I got mine at the end of sophomore year, it’s been nearly impossible for me to take it off. If there’s ever a time I forget to wear it, my finger feels off for the entire day.
Q: Tell me about one conversation that changed the trajectory of your life.
A: Two specific career-defining moments come to mind. They aren’t quite conversations, but they are talks/lectures that I was deeply inspired by. The first was towards the end of high school when I watched this TEDx Talk about storing data in DNA. At the time, I was getting ready to apply to colleges and I knew that biology and computer science were two things I really liked, but I didn’t really understand the possibilities that could be birthed from them coming together as an interdisciplinary field. The TEDx talk was my eureka moment for computational biology.
The second moment was in my junior fall during an introductory lecture to “Lab Fundamentals for Bioengineering,” by Professor Jacquin Niles. I started the school year with a lot of confusion about my future post-grad, and the relevance of my planned career path to the communities that I care about. Basically, I was unsure about how computational biology fit into the context of Nigeria’s problems, especially because my interest in the field is oriented towards molecular biology/medicine, not necessarily public health.
In the U.S., most research focuses on diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s, which, while important, are not the most pressing health conditions in tropical regions like Nigeria. When Professor Niles told us about his lab’s dedication to malaria research from a molecular biology standpoint, it was yet another eureka moment. Like, Yes! Computation and molecular biology can indeed mitigate diseases that affect developing nations like Nigeria — diseases that are understudied, and whose research is underfunded.
Since his talk, I found a renewed sense of purpose. Grad school isn’t the end goal. Using my skills to shine a light on the issues affecting my people that deserve far more attention is the goal. I’m so excited to see how I will use computational biology to possibly create the next cure to a commonly neglected tropical disease, or accelerate the diagnosis of one. Whatever it may be, I know that it will be close to home, eventually.
Q: What are you looking forward to about life after graduation? What do you think you’ll miss about MIT?
A: Thinking about graduating actually makes me sad. I’ve grown to love MIT. The biggest thing I’ll miss, though, is Independent Activities Period (IAP). It is such a unique part of the MIT experience. I’ve done a web development class/competition, research, a data science challenge, a molecular bio crash course, and a deep learning crash course over the past three IAPs. It is such an amazing time to try something low stakes, forget about grades, explore Boston, build a robot, travel abroad, do less, go slower, really rejuvenate before the spring, and embrace MIT’s motto of “mind and hand” by just being creative and explorative. It is such an exemplification of what it means to go here, and I can’t imagine it being the same anywhere else.
That said, I look forward to graduating so I can do more research. My hours spent at the Broad thinking about my UROP are always the quickest hours of my week. I love the rabbit holes my research allows me to explore, and I hope that I find those over and over again as I apply and hopefully get into PhD programs. I look forward to exploring a new city after I graduate, too. I wouldn’t mind staying in Cambridge/Boston. I love it here. But I would welcome a chance to be somewhere new and embrace all the people and unique experiences it has to offer.
I also hope to work on more passion projects post-grad. I feel like I have this idea in my head that once I graduate from MIT, I’ll have so much more time on my hands (we’ll see how that goes). I hope that I can use that time to work on education projects in Nigeria, which is a space I care a lot about. Generally, I want to make service more integrated in my lifestyle. I hope that post-graduation, I can prioritize doing that even more: making it a norm to lift others as I continue to climb.
A delicate dance
In early 2022, economist Catherine Wolfram was at her desk in the U.S. Treasury building. She could see the east wing of the White House, just steps away.
Russia had just invaded Ukraine, and Wolfram was thinking about Russia, oil, and sanctions. She and her colleagues had been tasked with figuring out how to restrict the revenues that Russia was using to fuel its brutal war while keeping Russian oil available and affordable to the countries that depended on it.
Now the William F. Pounds Professor of Energy Economics at MIT, Wolfram was on leave from academia to serve as deputy assistant secretary for climate and energy economics.
Working for Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen, Wolfram and her colleagues developed dozens of models and forecasts and projections. It struck her, she said later, that “huge decisions [affecting the global economy] would be made on the basis of spreadsheets that I was helping create.” Wolfram composed a memo to the Biden administration and hoped her projections would pan out the way she believed they would.
Tackling conundrums that weigh competing, sometimes contradictory, interests has defined much of Wolfram’s career.
Wolfram specializes in the economics of energy markets. She looks at ways to decarbonize global energy systems while recognizing that energy drives economic development, especially in the developing world.
“The way we’re currently making energy is contributing to climate change. There’s a delicate dance we have to do to make sure that we treat this important industry carefully, but also transform it rapidly to a cleaner, decarbonized system,” she says.
Economists as influencers
While Wolfram was growing up in a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota, her father was a law professor and her mother taught English as a second language. Her mother helped spawn Wolfram’s interest in other cultures and her love of travel, but it was an experience closer to home that sparked her awareness of the effect of human activities on the state of the planet.
Minnesota’s nickname is “Land of 10,000 Lakes.” Wolfram remembers swimming in a nearby lake sometimes covered by a thick sludge of algae. “Thinking back on it, it must’ve had to do with fertilizer runoff,” she says. “That was probably the first thing that made me think about the environment and policy.”
In high school, Wolfram liked “the fact that you could use math to understand the world. I also was interested in the types of questions about human behavior that economists were thinking about.
“I definitely think economics is good at sussing out how different actors are likely to react to a particular policy and then designing policies with that in mind.”
After receiving a bachelor’s degree in economics from Harvard University in 1989, Wolfram worked with a Massachusetts agency that governed rate hikes for utilities. Seeing its reliance on research, she says, illuminated the role academics could play in policy setting. It made her think she could make a difference from within academia.
While pursuing a PhD in economics from MIT, Wolfram counted Paul L. Joskow, the Elizabeth and James Killian Professor of Economics and former director of the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research, and Nancy L. Rose, the Charles P. Kindleberger Professor of Applied Economics, among her mentors and influencers.
After spending 1996 to 2000 as an assistant professor of economics at Harvard, she joined the faculty at the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley.
At Berkeley, it struck Wolfram that while she labored over ways to marginally boost the energy efficiency of U.S. power plants, the economies of China and India were growing rapidly, with a corresponding growth in energy use and carbon dioxide emissions. “It hit home that to understand the climate issue, I needed to understand energy demand in the developing world,” she says.
The problem was that the developing world didn’t always offer up the kind of neatly packaged, comprehensive data economists relied on. She wondered if, by relying on readily accessible data, the field was looking under the lamppost — while losing sight of what the rest of the street looked like.
To make up for a lack of available data on the state of electrification in sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, Wolfram developed and administered surveys to individual, remote rural households using on-the-ground field teams.
Her results suggested that in the world’s poorest countries, the challenges involved in expanding the grid in rural areas should be weighed against potentially greater economic and social returns on investments in the transportation, education, or health sectors.
Taking the lead
Within months of Wolfram’s memo to the Biden administration, leaders of the intergovernmental political forum Group of Seven (G7) agreed to the price cap. Tankers from coalition countries would only transport Russian crude sold at or below the price cap level, initially set at $60 per barrel.
“A price cap was not something that had ever been done before,” Wolfram says. “In some ways, we were making it up out of whole cloth. It was exciting to see that I wrote one of the original memos about it, and then literally three-and-a-half months later, the G7 was making an announcement.
“As economists and as policymakers, we must set the parameters and get the incentives right. The price cap was basically asking developing countries to buy cheap oil, which was consistent with their incentives.”
In May 2023, the U.S. Department of the Treasury reported that despite widespread initial skepticism about the price cap, market participants and geopolitical analysts believe it is accomplishing its goals of restricting Russia’s oil revenues while maintaining the supply of Russian oil and keeping energy costs in check for consumers and businesses around the world.
Wolfram held the U.S. Treasury post from March 2021 to October 2022 while on leave from UC Berkeley. In July 2023, she joined MIT Sloan School of Management partly to be geographically closer to the policymakers of the nation’s capital. She’s also excited about the work taking place elsewhere at the Institute to stay ahead of climate change.
Her time in D.C. was eye-opening, particularly in terms of the leadership power of the United States. She worries that the United States is falling prey to “lost opportunities” in terms of addressing climate change. “We were showing real leadership on the price cap, and if we could only do that on climate, I think we could make faster inroads on a global agreement,” she says.
Now focused on structuring global agreements in energy policy among developed and developing countries, she’s considering how the United States can take advantage of its position as a world leader. “We need to be thinking about how what we do in the U.S. affects the rest of the world from a climate perspective. We can’t go it alone.
“The U.S. needs to be more aligned with the European Union, Canada, and Japan to try to find areas where we’re taking a common approach to addressing climate change,” she says. She will touch on some of those areas in the class she will teach in spring 2024 titled “Climate and Energy in the Global Economy,” offered through MIT Sloan.
Looking ahead, she says, “I’m a techno optimist. I believe in human innovation. I’m optimistic that we’ll find ways to live with climate change and, hopefully, ways to minimize it.”
This article appears in the Winter 2024 issue of Energy Futures, the magazine of the MIT Energy Initiative.
Unlocking mRNA’s cancer-fighting potential
What if training your immune system to attack cancer cells was as easy as training it to fight Covid-19? Many people believe the technology behind some Covid-19 vaccines, messenger RNA, holds great promise for stimulating immune responses to cancer.
But using messenger RNA, or mRNA, to get the immune system to mount a prolonged and aggressive attack on cancer cells — while leaving healthy cells alone — has been a major challenge.
The MIT spinout Strand Therapeutics is attempting to solve that problem with an advanced class of mRNA molecules that are designed to sense what type of cells they encounter in the body and to express therapeutic proteins only once they have entered diseased cells.
“It’s about finding ways to deal with the signal-to-noise ratio, the signal being expression in the target tissue and the noise being expression in the nontarget tissue,” Strand CEO Jacob Becraft PhD ’19 explains. “Our technology amplifies the signal to express more proteins for longer while at the same time effectively eliminating the mRNA’s off-target expression.”
Strand is set to begin its first clinical trial in April, which is testing a proprietary, self-replicating mRNA molecule’s ability to express immune signals directly from a tumor, eliciting the immune system to attack and kill the tumor cells directly. It’s also being tested as a possible improvement for existing treatments to a number of solid tumors.
As they work to commercialize its early innovations, Strand’s team is continuing to add capabilities to what it calls its “programmable medicines,” improving mRNA molecules’ ability to sense their environment and generate potent, targeted responses where they’re needed most.
“Self-replicating mRNA was the first thing that we pioneered when we were at MIT and in the first couple years at Strand,” Becraft says. “Now we’ve also moved into approaches like circular mRNAs, which allow each molecule of mRNA to express more of a protein for longer, potentially for weeks at a time. And the bigger our cell-type specific datasets become, the better we are at differentiating cell types, which makes these molecules so targeted we can have a higher level of safety at higher doses and create stronger treatments.”
Making mRNA smarter
Becraft got his first taste of MIT as an undergraduate at the University of Illinois when he secured a summer internship in the lab of MIT Institute Professor Bob Langer.
“That’s where I learned how lab research could be translated into spinout companies,” Becraft recalls.
The experience left enough of an impression on Becraft that he returned to MIT the next fall to earn his PhD, where he worked in the Synthetic Biology Center under professor of bioengineering and electrical engineering and computer science Ron Weiss. During that time, he collaborated with postdoc Tasuku Kitada to create genetic “switches” that could control protein expression in cells.
Becraft and Kitada realized their research could be the foundation of a company around 2017 and started spending time in the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship. They also received support from MIT Sandbox and eventually worked with the Technology Licensing Office to establish Strand’s early intellectual property.
“We started by asking, where is the highest unmet need that also allows us to prove out the thesis of this technology? And where will this approach have therapeutic relevance that is a quantum leap forward from what anyone else is doing?” Becraft says. “The first place we looked was oncology.”
People have been working on cancer immunotherapy, which turns a patient’s immune system against cancer cells, for decades. Scientists in the field have developed drugs that produce some remarkable results in patients with aggressive, late-stage cancers. But most next-generation cancer immunotherapies are based on recombinant (lab-made) proteins that are difficult to deliver to specific targets in the body and don’t remain active for long enough to consistently create a durable response.
More recently, companies like Moderna, whose founders also include MIT alumni, have pioneered the use of mRNAs to create proteins in cells. But to date, those mRNA molecules have not been able to change behavior based on the type of cells they enter, and don’t last for very long in the body.
“If you’re trying to engage the immune system with a tumor cell, the mRNA needs to be expressing from the tumor cell itself, and it needs to be expressing over a long period of time,” Becraft says. “Those challenges are hard to overcome with the first generation of mRNA technologies.”
Strand has developed what it calls the world’s first mRNA programming language that allows the company to specify the tissues its mRNAs express proteins in.
“We built a database that says, ‘Here are all of the different cells that the mRNA could be delivered to, and here are all of their microRNA signatures,’ and then we use computational tools and machine learning to differentiate the cells,” Becraft explains. “For instance, I need to make sure that the messenger RNA turns off when it’s in the liver cell, and I need to make sure that it turns on when it’s in a tumor cell or a T-cell.”
Strand also uses techniques like mRNA self-replication to create more durable protein expression and immune responses.
“The first versions of mRNA therapeutics, like the Covid-19 vaccines, just recapitulate how our body’s natural mRNAs work,” Becraft explains. “Natural mRNAs last for a few days, maybe less, and they express a single protein. They have no context-dependent actions. That means wherever the mRNA is delivered, it’s only going to express a molecule for a short period of time. That’s perfect for a vaccine, but it’s much more limiting when you want to create a protein that’s actually engaging in a biological process, like activating an immune response against a tumor that could take many days or weeks.”
Technology with broad potential
Strand’s first clinical trial is targeting solid tumors like melanoma and triple-negative breast cancer. The company is also actively developing mRNA therapies that could be used to treat blood cancers.
“We’ll be expanding into new areas as we continue to de-risk the translation of the science and create new technologies,” Becraft says.
Strand plans to partner with large pharmaceutical companies as well as investors to continue developing drugs. Further down the line, the founders believe future versions of its mRNA therapies could be used to treat a broad range of diseases.
“Our thesis is: amplified expression in specific, programmed target cells for long periods of time,” Becraft says. “That approach can be utilized for [immunotherapies like] CAR T-cell therapy, both in oncology and autoimmune conditions. There are also many diseases that require cell-type specific delivery and expression of proteins in treatment, everything from kidney disease to types of liver disease. We can envision our technology being used for all of that.”