On the MIT Media Lab director search

The Media Lab has always been an argument about what a laboratory is for. Not a department, not a product group, not a think tank — something stranger and more useful than any of those. I put my name forward for its directorship because I think the argument is worth having again, in public, with the stakes that 2026 has handed us.

My own path has been a loop between three rooms: the clinic, the classroom, and the company. I trained as a physician. I taught health and medicine to millions of people who will never meet me. I co-founded and led a company that had to make its ideas survive contact with paying customers. Each room teaches a different lesson about rigour, and the Media Lab is one of the few institutions that takes all three seriously at once.

A lab is a promise about which questions are allowed to be asked.

What the job is

The temptation is to describe the directorship as fundraising with a research accent. I think that gets it backwards. The scarce resource is not money; it is legitimacy — the standing to convene people who have no obligation to sit in the same room, and the credibility to say that a piece of work matters before the market agrees.

That means three commitments. First, a governance posture that is boring in the best way: transparent funding, clear conflicts, published norms. Second, an intellectual agenda that treats health, learning, and machine intelligence as one continuous problem rather than three adjacent ones. Third, a real answer to the question of who the work is for — named communities, not abstractions.

What I would try

I would spend the first year listening in the open: group by group, with notes published. I would push for fewer, longer bets with explicit exit criteria. And I would make the lab's teaching output — not just its papers and demos — a first-class measure of success, because the fastest route from a laboratory to the world is still a person who understood something and went to explain it.

I don't know whether I'll get the job. I do know the questions are the right ones, and that writing them down is the least I owe anyone who reads this later and wants to know what I actually thought at the time.