# Alex Shalek (MIT) delivers E. Bright Wilson Prize Lecture February 19, 2026 - [ News ](/news-categories/news) On Thursday, February 19, Alex Shalek, the Pfizer-Laubach Career Development Associate Professor at MIT, delivered his E. Bright Wilson Prize Lecture, "Identifying & Counteracting the Impact of Environment Stresses on Tissue Dysfunction." Shalek is also an Associate Member of the Ragon Institute, an Institute Member at the Broad Institute, an Assistant in Immunology at MGH, and an Instructor in Health Sciences and Technology at HMS. His research is directed towards the development and application of new technologies that facilitate understanding of how cells collectively perform systems-level functions in healthy and diseased states. Shalek received his bachelor's degree *summa cum laude* from Columbia University and his Ph.D. From Harvard University in chemical physics under the guidance of Hongkun Park, and performed postdoctoral training under Hongkun Park and Aviv Regev (Broad/MIT). To date, his interdisciplinary research has focused on realizing and utilizing nanoscale manipulation and measurement technologies to examine how small components (molecules, cells) drive systems of vast complexity (cellular responses, population behaviors). E. Bright Wilson, Jr., was one of the most distinguished and admired professors of chemistry at Harvard. In his research, Bright became a major architect of chemical physics. He provided definitive theoretical treatments of many aspects of molecular vibrational and rotational dynamics, especially symmetry analysis, and developed with his students key experimental methods in infrared and microwave spectroscopy. He also published two extremely useful books, Introduction to Scientific Research in 1952, and Molecular Vibrations with Decius and Cross in 1955. Both are still in print. He was the sole author of more than eighty papers, and trained 90 Ph.D.’s and some 60 postdoctoral fellows. The synopsis of Shalek's lecture is below: "During chronic stress, cells must support both tissue function and their own survival. Hepatocytes perform metabolic, synthetic, and detoxification roles; with chronic nutrient imbalances, metabolic stress can precipitate metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD, formerly NAFLD/NASH). Despite prior work on stress-induced drivers of hepatocyte death, the functional impact of chronic stress on surviving cells remains unclear. In my talk, I will discuss how we used cross-species longitudinal single-cell multi-omic profiling to show that ongoing stress drives developmental and cancer-associated programs in non-transformed hepatocytes while reducing mature functional identity – significantly before transformation and predicting worsened human survival. Further, I will outline how we developed and applied integrative computational methods and experimental validations to uncover master regulators perturbing hepatocyte functional balance, increasing proliferation under stress, and directly priming future tumorigenesis. I will also explain how we utilized human tissue microarray spatial transcriptomics and geographic regression to reveal spatially-structured multicellular communities and signaling interactions shaping stress responses. Finally, toward counteracting these core mechanisms driving tissue dysfunction and instability, I will present our development of a new information-rich, high-throughput phenotypic screening platform, with reduced required sample, labor and cost requirements, that can be leveraged to help discover strategies to improve tissue health and resilience. " Pictures: ![Shalek and Zhuang](/sites/g/files/omnuum7776/files/2026-02/IMG_2059JPG.jpg) ![Shalek](/sites/g/files/omnuum7776/files/2026-02/IMG_2040JPG.jpg) ![Shalek](/sites/g/files/omnuum7776/files/2026-02/IMG_2044JPG.jpg) ![Shalek](/sites/g/files/omnuum7776/files/2026-02/IMG_2053JPG.jpg) See also:- [ Zhuang ](/news-and-events-faculty/zhuang) - [ Prizes & Awards ](/news-type/prizes-awards) Share on:- [ Facebook ](#) - [ Twitter ](#) - [ Linkedin ](#)