Martha L. Gray SM ’81, PhD ’86

INTERVIEWER: This is MIT's 150th anniversary celebration interview with Dr. Martha Gray. And if I can begin with the early years. Where were you born? Where did you grow up?

GRAY: I grew up and was born in the Boston area. I have to start over again. I've been here too long! So I was born and grew up in the Detroit area, and I was there actually until I went to college. I grew up with three sisters and a brother. A father who was an engineer and a mom who was a nurse. And had a, in some ways unremarkable, but wonderful upbringing. And family still lives in the same town.

INTERVIEWER: Do you remember, was there any moment in your childhood where you just knew you were going to be involved in the sciences?

GRAY: When I was growing up my whole view of what I thought my future would be were very typical I think of a girl of that era. I used to teach nursery school in high school, so I thought that I'd spend my career teaching nursery school or maybe elementary school. I was good at math, so they said maybe you should be a math teacher. And I don't know how I knew I was going to college. Maybe because both my parents are college educated. It didn't come up for discussion.

I knew I'd go to college, but I went to college thinking that I would be in Detroit or in Michigan at least for my life. And that's what I would do. And I'd be a teacher and do the regular things. I hadn't seriously considered science or engineering, any of that prior to going to college. College was really the place that my world view expanded remarkably.

INTERVIEWER: Can you tell me a little bit more about that and how you wound up at Michigan State?

GRAY: Thinking about how I went to college, I've thought about it a lot recently because my eldest has just left for college, a few days ago. And that whole process was very, very different for him than it was for me. I applied to two schools, Cornell and Michigan State. It's perhaps embarrassing to say that I chose those two because I had family in both those places. And they seemed like perfectly wonderful schools. Cornell costs probably still now 10 times what Michigan State cost. And so I went to Michigan State. Which was a wonderful choice but I wish I could tell you that I had thought about college in some strategic way. I'm not sure most people do. But that's how I came to be going to Michigan State.

INTERVIEWER: So how did your world view expand there?

GRAY: Well, one of the lucky things that happened at Michigan State for me was, number one I was part of a residential college. And so that meant that though there were some 40,000 students at Michigan State at the time, you were in a much smaller cohort where you got to know other students and faculty. And the college had a science, math, engineering type-- they didn't call it that, but it tended to emphasize that. And my world view opened for perhaps obvious reasons. One is that you meet people from all over the world. And their whole view of life is different than the one place I'd grown up. And secondly I had faculty who really reached out to me and perhaps others. And because of that, I wound up in computer science actually. Someone said, you're really good at this. You should consider it.

And at that point I had taken some math education classes thinking that that's what I was going to go do. And I knew I was capable of more than that. And computer science was a lot of fun. And then that's what I did. But I think I was fortunate in just meeting the right people. I'd say that's been true throughout my career. You meet people. They make you think about the world differently, and you do things you never anticipated beforehand. And that was true of my college experience.

INTERVIEWER: So when you graduated from Michigan State, how did the decision to come to MIT come about?

GRAY: I decided to come to MIT-- Backing up, the sequence of events that led me to come to MIT were completely random chance, serendipitous. And a month before I said I was coming to MIT, I never would have known it. So to back up and explain that a little bit further, I actually applied to MIT and to other graduate schools because I had a faculty mentor at Michigan State who said you really should go to graduate school. I wasn't seriously considering it, but if I have a faculty mentor telling me you ought to at least apply, the worst that can happen is I turn people down.

So I applied to MIT and other schools for computer science graduate school. And I also applied to industry. Completely coincidentally, somebody from MIT, Roger Mark, came to Michigan State. He came because his brother in law's best friend happened to be my professor. So we were introduced. And Roger Mark came to Michigan State to talk about the newly formed PhD program in HST, in Health Sciences and Technology. And so he talked to me and then he gave me a call about a month later, and said you've been admitted to MIT, but I think what you say you want to do, this would be perfect for you. And I can say more about what made it perfect, but that is the reason I came to MIT. Is that he happened to go to Michigan State, that he met me, and that he called to me after. And it was a perfect match for what I thought would be cool.

INTERVIEWER: And why was it a perfect match?

GRAY: So at this point I wasn't sure that I wanted to-- So backing up, since I didn't incorporate your question. I knew it was a perfect match. The suggestion that I join the HST PhD program, because at this point I was uncertain about a career as a pure computer scientist. That I wasn't sure that was a fit for me in the long haul even though I could do it. I had developed some interest in medical applications, both through research at Michigan State and elsewhere. And what really captured my imagination about HST was the idea you could do engineering or computer science in the context of medicine with applications to medicine. And you did it by working shoulder to shoulder, being in the same classroom with MD students. Being taught by engineers, being taught by physicians. And to me, as an absolutely gut reaction, I thought this is the way to do it. And I thought that was just the coolest academic idea I'd ever imagined. It was so different from anything I'd ever seen. And it just felt right. I was nervous that I couldn't survive MIT, but I thought that this was actually something. I had to give it a shot.

INTERVIEWER: So was that the origins of your interest in sort of the propagating collaboration?

GRAY: So the excitement that I had when I first made the decision to come to HST has actually only grown. And I will tell you today that it is absolutely the best professional decision I've ever made in my life, to come to HST. For the same reasons it was exciting to me then. It's what I've continued to spend a lot of my time doing. Helping other institutions, governments, do the same kind of thing, because it remains a very unusual kind of experience. So in fact, in my old age-- we're talking about the early years now-- but in my old age, I think one of the most important things I can do is help provide those kinds of opportunities for many, many more people than can get them now.

INTERVIEWER: Is it the nature of collaboration itself? Or is there something about HST that is unique in your thinking?

GRAY: So I've thought a lot about what makes HST tick. Is it my interpretation of the opportunity? And is that just a quirkiness that I have? Or is there something fundamental about the way it is structured? And after nearly 30 years in participating in it, I actually think there is something quite fundamental about how HST is structured and implemented. And the thing to compare it to is most of academics, virtually all of academics, from an educational point of view is disciplinary focused. The job of departments and department heads is to steward the discipline. And over 400 years, these disciplines have become narrower and narrower and narrower, as the knowledge base has expanded extraordinarily. And that's a very, very powerful paradigm that has led to a huge number of advancements.

But it's a very different paradigm when you think about where do you go with what you know? And how do you do the next step? Than saying we're going to think about major problems. None of which are solved by single disciplines or professions or institutions or individuals for that matter. And it doesn't happen by accident. When people are able to connect with other disciplines and professions and people. It's partly a phenotype, it's probably how people tick. But also I think, just as you can educate people in a disciplinary way of thinking, you can educate people to operate in a multidisciplinary world. So the magic of HST fundamentally is that you have to become comfortable with multiple disciplines and professions.

The people that are attracted to it-- like me --I think are instinctively drawn to those kinds of opportunities. And less drawn to disciplinary opportunities. But I think the experience of having to work side by side, teach classes with a range of disciplines, helps you build the experience base that enables you to trust and value other disciplines. To have an expertise yourself and understand how to reach out. It becomes hard to articulate in any sensible detail in general terms what happens. But there is a certain magic that is not replaced by content in a classroom, or by a single professor. It's a community thing. It's a value system thing.

INTERVIEWER: Is it the nature of the problems that you're working on that requires more interdisciplinary background?

GRAY: I don't think it's that. I think there are huge problems. I've focused most of my career, all of my career, on medically related problems. But I think when you think about the environment and energy and economies probably, there are many, many really important problems that are not purely disciplinary. And it's easy to interpret some of what I'm saying in a way I don't intend. So I'm not saying that there's no value in disciplinary work at all. In point of fact, people who do multidisciplinary things like I do, can't do it in the absence of a very strong disciplinary setting. Even though my approach is different, at some level in our education and what I do, I count on the disciplines continuing to grow and flourish and develop and subdivide and so forth.

Secondly, people who work in disciplinary work certainly work on important problems. So I don't want to say and I don't at all mean that if you solve important problems, you do it in a multidisciplinary sense, and all the rest do disciplinary. What I've really come to believe is that we need to create an academic culture that supports both those paradigms on equal footing. That we really need both. Not turn all the disciplinary people into multidisciplinary people. And certainly not vice versa. But we need to create that. And I think people feel much more comfortable in one versus the other.

Many people who are multidisciplinary have multidisciplinary instincts, function effectively in a disciplinary setting. But you have to ask whether or not they would be even more impactful if they had a multidisciplinary work. I mean, lots and lots of smart people who do work in spite of whatever barriers there are. And there are always barriers.

INTERVIEWER: Well it may not be quite as important if you're a specialist in poetry.

GRAY: Yeah, I guess it may be true that if you get out of the sciences and engineering and things like that, that what I'm saying is less true. But I bet if I were an expert in other areas, that I think this is a general. There are different ways of thinking. I have colleagues who are anthropologists for example. You mentioned poetry, and I won't. I don't know. And the arts tend to be more individual sometimes. But anthropology I think struggles with this issue as much as scientists do.

INTERVIEWER: So if we can go back to the sort of sequential. When you first got to MIT, can you talk a little bit about your first impressions? Maybe how it was different than Michigan State.

GRAY: So at this point, it's hard to recall with great fidelity, and any certainty of accuracy, how I felt when I first arrived. But what immediately jumps to mind when I think of those early years. One is that MIT is much smaller in terms of numbers than Michigan State. But in many ways it felt much bigger. And I don't know if some of that is just, you walk into a completely new territory. And by then I was quite comfortable at Michigan State, because I really have very few memories of what it felt like to leave for college. But it may also have been a part of, this is a world of fiercely independent people. Everybody's trying to head somewhere. And I say that in a positive sense. And I come from the Midwest, which does have a certain social, friendly culture, that's outward. People here at MIT are very friendly. But when I travel back to the Midwest, there's no question that there's a somewhat different general feel to that.

MIT's an incredibly exciting place to show up. I do remember feeling like I was handed, you can do what you want. Just figure it out. Which was part of what attracted me to here. But it's also a major change from undergraduate school. I think that's a general comment about undergrad versus grad school as well.

INTERVIEWER: So talk a little bit about your graduate experience for your Master's and doctorate. And how that sort of educational process felt different or seemed new to you.

GRAY: Well, when you think about comparing undergraduate to graduate experiences independent of institutions, an undergraduate experience is largely driven by satisfying requirements that are laid out for you. There are some electives and the degree towards certain electives depend on the institution and the area. But there's still a set number of credits or specific courses you have to take. So your road map is not entirely open. Graduate school, the explicit road map is mostly, you have to pass your qualifying exams. And you have to do a PhD thesis. Then there are a few course requirements there. And I'm exaggerating the differences some, but not a whole lot. And so in a way that I personally hadn't really thought through is, okay, what do I really want to do? Where do I really want to work? And how do I find this out? And that's just not something I remember worrying about as an undergrad. Now that could be me. And I was growing. And it could be that it's a general case. But I think when I see even undergraduate students at MIT becoming graduate students at MIT now, this is a big transition. And those two ways of thinking.

In my graduate work thought at MIT, I was very fortunate to be part of a small group of people that started the same PhD program. We were the first students in this HST PhD program. At that time, Building 20 still existed, so we all had this big office space. You know, it's just a big space with desks. So the camaraderie that developed through that, even though we all took very different classes, at least our classes outside of the HST classes, we had developed very, very close friendships. Ones that I have to this day. So in that sense, I think my graduate experience was incredibly positive, compared with what some people I know still struggle with, where getting to know people becomes more difficult.

INTERVIEWER: So when you finished your doctorate, how did you wind up deciding to do the postdoc work? And can you talk a little bit about that?

GRAY: Well I'd say at the end of my time as a graduate student, I hope it's not heresy to say this, but I told many people I'm never coming back to MIT. This has been a wonderful 10 years, but now it's time for life. Right? And I hadn't thought a lot about exactly what I wanted to do next. I considered for the first time in my life whether I should get an MD, because I had done a lot of clinical work at that point. Considered academia, maybe partly burnt out. And somebody I knew offered me a postdoc, and it seemed really interesting. It was going from med school to a vet school. And I thought they were many fascinating things about that work. So I thought that was a logical next step. Again not a whole lot of planning any more than my plan to go to undergrad or grad school.

In the end, when I was doing my postdoc and a faculty position became open here in HST, and then I got the offer. I said forget it, I'm not going to do an MD. I still think HST is just the best thing ever. And I have many colleagues here that, again wonderful mentors, who encouraged me along the way.

INTERVIEWER: Do you want to mention some of them?

GRAY: Let me come back to that. Let me think about how to do that.

INTERVIEWER: So you didn't have to be away for very long before you decided it wasn't so bad here after all?

GRAY: It is true. I didn't have to be away that long to decide. The separation didn't make me say my concerns about MIT life were groundless. But the real point is where are the opportunities? And so I think timing is often an important issue. So the timing was fortunate, both in the decision to come back. There was the possibility of a faculty position, which isn't always the case. And secondly, the laboratory of my postdoc moved from Grafton, Massachusetts to the middle of Long Island. And so I had to be uprooted one way or the other. And so it became a fork in the road in determining what to do. And the timing plus the enormous opportunity. I thought, it's worth a try. I don't know if I can succeed at this. But I truly believe it in my heart. And I was duly appointed in HST and electrical engineering. And I'd very much liked my colleagues in electrical engineering and computer science. So again, you reach the fork, not because I planned it so much as it seemed like the right decision to make at the time.

INTERVIEWER: I'm wondering if you can articulate the difference, how it was different being at MIT as a faculty member, where your previous experience had been as a graduate student.

GRAY: So we've been talking about a number of the transitions as I've moved from one position or institution to another. And the move from being a graduate student to faculty member is as large as undergraduate to graduate. And the fact that I came back to the same place adds a whole other layer of complexity. The obvious layer of complexity is that I was here as a student. People knew me as a student. You become a faculty. To some people I'm still that student. It's not explicit, but there is that, and the expectations and the mode of interaction stays the same. I wouldn't say that to my knowledge that was problematic. Most of it is how do you engage with people?

What I remember even more than that is that the students here, however, know it's a big difference. I went from being one of them to the other. And so whereas before, I was an addition to our many scientific discussions, which continued. The whole social infrastructure was dramatically different. I no longer was part of that social culture of people that I had known well even a year ago. So that transition was more stark because I had been at this institution and they were people that I knew.

The other differences between being a graduate student and faculty are probably completely obvious. You go from it's up to me to decide exactly what I'm going to do in research. To some extent I had done that as a graduate student, but you have a different layer of protection. You had to teach. And I hadn't really done any teaching before. So as this place is, it's the fire hose. And that fire hose exists at every single level I think, including becoming a faculty.

INTERVIEWER: I'm a little uncertain how to address your various areas of interest. So maybe the best way is, can you walk me through your career here, and how your areas of expertise have connected over time? If they have?

GRAY: You think they've connected?

INTERVIEWER: Well maybe they don't.

GRAY: You know, if I think about what I've done and my career at MIT, there are really sort of two buckets. And they are to some extent independent. So the one research bucket has been my work in arthritis. Where I've had a longstanding interest in understanding how connective tissues that line your joints, like your knees and hips, what makes them degenerate? What makes them grow? Do they repair? Those kinds of questions. And in particular, whether or not mechanical forces like as might happen, certain forms of injury or forms of exercise or your personal anatomy, what role those mechanical forces play in the development of your tissue and your risk for having degenerative arthritic disease. That area of interest actually got me into cartilage imaging. So those are directly linked. And I got into cartilage imaging largely because it was clear that the tools we had at our disposal to understand how they adapted to mechanical forces just weren't what they needed to be. Especially trying to understand what happens in real people. So I have no idea what, nobody knows what your cartilage looks like, and whether or not it's in good shape or not in good shape. And in order to actually address the medical problem, you have to actually assess whether you have it or not at some early stage.

INTERVIEWER: So before the imaging, the only way to know anything would be to open up someone's knee, for example, and look?

GRAY: So there's two contexts in which I've been interested in understanding how cartilage degeneration might occur. So in the medical context, which is fundamentally what we care about addressing, even today the way in which a clinician determines whether your joint is in good shape is x-ray. And you can't see cartilage in x-ray, but if the bones are touching one another, you can presume there is no cartilage between them or if they're very close. You can also, if you happen to have an arthroscopic exam, where they put a light into your joint and then you can look directly through that. And the other is complaints of pain. So if it really hurts, the presumption is that you have some tissue distraction. Not always the case. You have to rule out other things. So today, that's the gold standard clinically. And that was the gold standard 50 years ago. There's been some advances that allow you to look at cartilage directly and measure its morphology. But so far those have not really turned out to be any more sensitive to early prediction of disease of degeneration. So you can tell when somebody has a joint nearly destroyed. An underlying assumption, all that I'm saying is that if we want to prevent it or understand it, we need to look much, much earlier than the point at which you've lost the tissue from the joint. At that point the likelihood of repairing it short of total joint replacement, I think and most people would agree that it becomes much, much longer.

The kinds of studies I was doing initially were not clinically based. They were ex-vivo. So that meant we took pieces of cartilage out of animals. Typically you can do it with human tissue. And keeping it alive. In an incubator in the right kinds of conditions. And then we would apply mechanical forces and look and see what the cells did differently as a result of that. And there's been lots of work of my own and many other people in the last 30 years looking at that question. The real challenge to that scientific approach is that the time scale over which changes happen, that we care about, are weeks to months. And it becomes technically very, very challenging for reasons I can go into if you're interested. But it becomes very challenging to think about keeping tissue alive and understanding from that what happens in response to mechanical forces. Unless you can visualize it in a non-destructive way. So if I can take a picture of what the state of it is today. And then tomorrow, and next week, and the week after. Then I have a chance. But if I have to destroy it in order to measure it, then you have to have hundreds of samples. And it's just technically very hard. So it's those two sides that got me interested in imaging.

And we've talked again a lot about transitions and how we make decisions on what to do. So it wasn't that I sat in my office one day, frustrated about the difficulties I was having in doing the kinds of experiments, as frustrated as I was. But it was really an encounter with a colleague where I learned what you could do with imaging. This was a colleague also had been an HST student with me who did cardiac imaging. And the techniques that she was using, I thought, oh if I could do that in cartilage, that would change the world. That would be very, very different. And so then we got together and convinced people eventually to fund us. And that really started what we thought would be a five year project, which is now 15 plus. Maybe almost 20 years.

INTERVIEWER: You mentioned that your areas of interest fall into two buckets. So what's the second bucket?

GRAY: Okay. So the second area of interest is not research per se, but it is academic organization. And trying to create academic ecosystems that support and promote multidisciplinary kinds of approaches, not just for research but in education. And to do that with the backdrop of disciplinary institutions. So my 13 plus years of leadership in HST certainly got me thinking about that. About how do you create organizational structures that really can enhance and enable that? And through as an HST director, I encountered lots of people that were thinking about the same things elsewhere. And was increasingly called to advise and even help create similar kinds of organizations. And again, it wasn't that I had this laid out plan when I started HST. I thought I would be running HST for six months. But as I became part of it, I really began to understand how it really worked, and why I think the issues are foundational. And so forth. And I also saw how difficult it is to make it happen, even though for me, this was motherhood and apple pie. And I couldn't imagine why everybody didn't try to make this happen. And I also didn't understand until trying to understand disciplinary structures better, why it was hard. So as I became to understand that, I realized that this actually is. I don't know if it's so much an area of study, but an area of potential impact.

INTERVIEWER: Tell me why it's so difficult.

GRAY: It's reasonable to ask, what is it that makes it so hard to create an academic entity that is multidisciplinary in the way I think? And it has a lot to do with the culture that gets embedded in organizational structures. So with 400 years of development, or however long it's been, the disciplinary approach has really emphasized the individual. It's emphasized your contribution to that discipline. Even if you worked with others, the question that gets asked in promotion is, what was your contribution out of the 10 other people? There's some notable exceptions to this broad generalization, but everything about how we think about who do admit as students, what to support in terms of who we hire as faculty, how we evaluate faculty, all of those things are really framed in a disciplinary context. In fairness, I think everybody at MIT and many other places say, we love multidisciplinary interdisciplinary research.

So it's not that people don't acknowledge or believe that working together in collaboration is important. But nine times out of 10, these multidisciplinary collaborations are a division of labor. Which is not the same thing as saying we are in it together. At the risk of putting a terrible-- it's like marriage. You can't be both the man and the woman in a heterosexual marriage. But you better begin to trust and understand to the best of your ability. And it is never perfect. What that other is. To work together, to do whatever you do. So it's that kind of thing. And the evaluative structures, the hiring structures, what you implicitly value. Not what you write on paper. What you implicitly value is fundamentally different between a disciplinary organizational and multidisciplinary. And I don't think you can make people who think in disciplinary terms magically become the people that make the multidisciplinary happen. I don't actually think one organizational unit can do both of those things. Another thing I've thought about quite a bit. That they really are valuing two different things.

Related to that, that's part of at least in the medical context. Many of the people you want under the tent for a medically multidisciplinary approach are people that are not necessarily even part of your own institution. So it mattered to us that we had physicians. Even practicing clinicians that aren't necessarily scientists. MIT is very strong, because people value the quality of the science and the engineering that happens here. That is its bread and butter. At some level, its bread and butter claim to fame. Clinicians, as innovative as they can be, they're not innovative in that same way. So it's very hard in an Institution that's built on supporting that one thing, to legitimately value the other guys. As the head of HST, I'm in a very different position. So there, I can say, it's my role to value it. And it's part of our strategy. It's part of our-- But I have to do that in the context of recognizing that the head of biology may feel very differently about the value. As he should.

INTERVIEWER: Do you think it's-- It's not either or I guess. Is it a lack of experience in the way people have been educated? Because it is sort of getting narrower and narrower as you get further in the academic process? Or does it become an issue of ego?

GRAY: I think there are a lot of reasons that in addition make it difficult to move to this being the norm. In some ways one of the biggest is that there are not many examples of an HST-like structure. There are many examples of research institutes that include multiple disciplines. But they tend to be either structured differently, or the promotion of the individuals is related to their discipline. But there really are not very many-- if any --other academic organizations to cut across. So I think it's hard in the context of academia, where a lot of what you do is compare your value to somebody else's. How do we compare HST to something else? In biology or electrical engineering, or pick any department here, some of the way they measure success is comparing themselves to other biology departments. There's some implicit, not explicit, but implicit understanding of what it means to be that unit. It just is embodied in the individuals here. But there's no implicit worldwide or nationwide view of what that means. And I think that probably is the single biggest challenge.

It's not the most important reason, but is one reason why I've gotten involved in talking with other organizations about how to do it. I think if there were more around the world, it would strengthen MIT in this space. MIT's been a leader by having HST formed in 1970. It's remarkable. That was definitely a vision for the future. And it should be recognized for that leadership role. But it would be even more recognized if there were others around. So a form of criticism for example is, if it's so great, why hasn't Stanford done it, or why hasn't-- Which is I think is an understandable statement. But I think the reason they haven't done it is it's really hard to do, unless you think through what it means to create that kind of position.

INTERVIEWER: So as director of HST, you transformed the organization pretty significantly. Can you talk about how it was when you first started as a faculty member? And then how you moved it into a model that you think works better, promotes interdisciplinary work in a better way?

GRAY: So, when I took over as director of HST, we thought a lot about how do we strengthen HST? Every organization can always be strengthened. How do we strengthen HST so that it'll still exist 50 years from now. What are the things that need to happen? And when I started HST, some of the key players were ones that had been part of HST from day one. So these are people that were my teachers when I was there. And obviously that isn't going to last in perpetuity. There were a couple key areas that we addressed. One is that HST was mostly defined by the students. It had some 300 odd students at the time. But it was created mainly by borrowing faculty from other departments. And I think it attracted those faculty for reasons that varied over the years, but partly because they were unusual faculty in their own departments for their interest in medicine. So in 1970, there weren't very many people. It was unusual to be interested in health and medicine. Nowadays MIT is a transformed place itself, in terms of the emphasis on health and medicine. So we needed to evolve with that in that way. So I don't think that any academic organization is sustainable if you do it by borrowing faculty from others. And for reasons that are I think both obviously and completely understandable, you need a few changes in department heads when you have conflict between the time demands on faculty that are nominally part of one department and we're borrowing them for another, for example. And that's completely appropriate for them to have concerns. And it makes it impossible for somebody running HST.

So one was to build a faculty. In terms of building the faculty in a way that supported the objectives. It was clear that building a faculty that were made up of people that were only appointed in HST would only serve to create something that was not multidisciplinary, because you can't possibly cover all disciplines and professions in one unit. So we spent a lot of time with people who were principles at HST at the time, thinking about how do we build a faculty structure that actually values people who may be appointed in another department, and actually to the extent possible pays them for their time? So that we could have a multidisciplinary kind of faculty.

So one of the big changes in HST between when I started and when I finished was when I began there were five people with primary appointments in HST. Most of whom have been there for a long time. And there were about 200 affiliated faculty who had no real explicit role. To a very, very different structure including the end processes to support the structure, that had a faculty that included primary and dual, meaning they were appointed in two departments and joined, which is a complicated version. Of course Harvard and MIT have different names for these things. But that was our faculty. And they were evaluated. They were evaluated by committee, they were evaluated up the line at each institution. So they were legitimized-- if that's a word --in their role. And you can't have faculty meetings with five. You can't run an organization with 300 students and five faculty. You need real faculty. So we moved to a faculty of and about sixty in that way. Including hiring about 13 new people. And maintained affiliated faculty to do some things like our clinical teaching.

So we changed both structurally and in terms of the people that were there, the average age dropped by probably-- I didn't figure it out, but it had to have dropped by at least 30 years. And that of course brings important and positive energy into the organization. So the faculty was probably the biggest change that I think I made as part of HST. Everything else in some ways followed from that. You don't do anything without faculty and colleagues. So I could tell you I did it. But really I was part of a big team of absolutely amazing people that believed just much as I do in the value of this kind of organization, that made it happen.

INTERVIEWER: So it sounds to me that what you're talking about in terms of creating an environment that supports true multidisciplinary problem solving, has to do with money. In that if you have sort of affiliation with an organization, but you're not really paid by that organization, most of your efforts are not going to go in that direction. But if you're part of the organization and paid by that organization, and acknowledged for your value to it, then your commitment would be greater, the time spent would be greater, and all of that?

GRAY: So I did mention that when people are part of the organization, we wanted to pay them for it. It is not completely to say that it's all about money. That paying somebody for that role is all that it takes. So it is about money to the extent that there's an expectation that people are supported for the work they do, which includes the salary. And there's also a recognition that if somebody splits their time with multiple loyalties, that if somebody else is paying their full salary and we don't have some other kind of arrangement, that that's a setup for a challenge down the line. It may work out initially because there's some common values. So money is a piece of it. But just as important as the money was the process and the way in which-- The process for appointment which involved a conversation.

The people that were part of HST primarily, it's straightforward. It's what you would expect in any department. So the trickiest people are ones that are appointed primarily in another department. So the process through which they were appointed, if they were already here, involved conversation with their department head. It involved often shared things that led to that department benefiting through HST's effort, just as it benefited HST. So those kinds of conversations took place. And in some cases, it involved us supporting part of their salary. So partnerships work because they're valued by both parties. So they had to work at the faculty level, but they had to work at the organizational level as well. The value that came to me as head of HST, or came to HST, might not have been identical to the value that went to the other unit. But it was as much my job to make sure the other unit felt valued, as it was that other unit's job to see that we got value. So the fundamental premise is what makes partnerships work. Which is absolutely more than money.

INTERVIEWER: So there is some ego involved?

GRAY: There is absolutely. There is ego involved, and we were helped tremendously by the vision of HST. People in other units very often, really wanted this kind of academic community in order to thrive. They felt this is how they thrived. They thrive because they have students like this, because they're next to colleagues that they otherwise wouldn't be on committees with and meet. Especially young people. Once you get old, you also know a lot of people and the organizational structures don't matter as much, in terms of your networking. But when you're young, that's actually a primary way in which you end up meeting people and going in new directions. So we provided a very different kind of academic community to faculty who were part of disciplinary units. So if we'd handed somebody money who actually didn't value that, they would have taken the money maybe, but it wouldn't have valued us at all. So to some extent, ego has to be a part of it. But that's not the first word that comes to my mind. It's how do we enable somebody who really values this. And then create expectations that say they have to help make it happen as well.

INTERVIEWER: If we go back to the two buckets. The research in arthritis and in imaging techniques. And then this sort of, how do you set up a truly multidisciplinary research facility. Can you tell me as you look at those two areas, what accomplishments you feel the best about?

GRAY: Now if I think about the accomplishments I feel the best about, I'm not trying to articulate them in the context of the two buckets per se. So I feel the best in many ways about people. So I'm very, very proud of all the faculty that we recruited from outside this Institution. Who I think are wonderful assets. What little role I can play in helping them launch their career and then have their impact, I feel very, very good about that. And same way for the students that I've had in my group, which would be younger colleagues that I've worked with in my group, that have been able to do things. So in some ways the most important thing we do in terms of impact has been the people. And the faculty told me that when I was a student, and I didn't believe it. I mean, it sounded gratuitous and now I find myself, at the end of the day, where do you say, I feel really good about what I did. And that's it. There were probably 100 different strategies that could have led to that same outcome. And I picked one or two or whatever. But that's actually far and away what I feel best about.

INTERVIEWER: I wonder if you would talk just a little bit about some of the programs that were created while you were director of HST, like the biomedical enterprise program?

GRAY: So, I said before that the number one thing that I worked on in HST was building faculty. But we did build a number of programs as well. And in some ways, one of the most interesting was the biomedical enterprise program. And a thumbnail sketch of that program is to bring in individuals who are interested in having an impact in health and medical sciences, but to do it through enterprise. Through big business, small business. And the underlying premise is that traditional training for these students, say an MBA, tended not to include the many unique things that are associated with developing a biomedical device or drug or biological of some sort. Number one. And both in regulatory terms, but also in terms of the ultimate recipient of that advance-- whether direct or indirect --that is to say the patient.

So this is a program that was actually modeled on the PhD program. It brought in people with a business interest, as I said, but put them in the same classroom with our graduate students and our medical students. It gave them an opportunity to interact with patients, which by the way I don't believe I mentioned that on the PhD program, the second thing that was the clincher is that as a PhD student I had to take care of patient. And there's no better way to understand what that experience is really like, than to go in and do it. Not because you want to be a clinician. But if you want to understand the real world as it were. And that being there, no classroom can replace that. Similarly for these business students, we said, if you want to understand the way in which clinicians make decisions, the way in which patients make decisions, how that whole encounter is structured, you've got to go there and you have to see it. So they had a designed experience at Mass General where they did that. So this attracted a very interesting and spectacular group of students. If they didn't already have an MBA, they received an MBA at Sloan. And a Master's from HST as a dual degree.

It was an experiment in saying, can we take the model of the PhD program, apply it to a somewhat different paradigm, and come up with a curriculum. There are many, many things I would continue to improve about the curriculum. But the fundamental structure I think has proven to be very sound. So I've told you why we created BEP-- our acronym for biomedical enterprise program --for the students and for the world. From an internal point of view for HST, a lot of the reasons people want to be part of HST is they want to solve problems in human health. In order to solve many problems in human health, they have to be translated. They need to connect eventually through some business enterprise. And even though I personally felt that was a perfectly legitimate career path for a PhD and our MD students to take, they had really no exposure and certainly no exposure through HST to people that thought about how to do that. So by creating BEP and putting it under the umbrella of HST, it created a sense that we valued that as much as we valued becoming a clinician or becoming a bench scientist. And I had MD students and PhD students use phrases like, I felt like now I could come out of the closet, because I was really interested in taking what I'm working on and carrying it through.

So companies have formed between PhD students and our BEP students and the conversation has changed, and the faculty enjoy having a whole different kind of questions come up in the classroom. One of the most powerful things actually in the classroom about putting these multiple disciplinary students together, is they really learn more from each other. Not necessarily content, but they learn the values through the questions that are asked. So business students ask different types of questions on average than a science student. So that was a major program. And in putting it together, we engaged people from the local business community. They teach some of the classes. They were actively involved in the many discussions we had about how to create the program. Something that is also very unusual in academic circles. There's usually a pretty big divide between the business sector and the academic sector, except in the sort of boutique kinds of courses. But they were part of the process from the beginning. And I think that helped make it work.