Fan Wang spends most of her workdays in the confines of a lab, overseeing experiments, reviewing reams of data, and managing a team of research scientists.
Her lab in MIT’s Building 46, which she moved into upon joining the faculty in January, is pristine and orderly, a sterile place ruled by rigor and numbers, where daily interactions are as likely to be with research mice as with people.
But Wang thinks more these days about the human dimensions of her work and its implications in the messy realms of emotion and hope. After she and her colleagues published a paper on pain suppression in Nature Neuroscience last year, a flood of people—strangers living with unexplained, unrelieved, and relentless pain—poured into her life. They sent emails. They wanted her help. They wanted reassurance it wasn’t all in their head.
“They said, ‘Dr. Wang, I’m willing to be your guinea pig,’” she recalls. “It just shows how desperate they are.”
