Michal Tal | Principal Scientist
MIT

Michal Caspi Tal (Mikki) is an immunoengineer and a principal scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Dr. Tal leads the Tal Research Group within the Department of Biological Engineering and also serves as the associate scientific director of the Center for Gynepathology Research at MIT.

From tick-borne disease to COVID, there are many similarities across the infection-associated chronic illnesses and important sex differences in the immune response to infection which could impact risk for developing chronic illness. Michal is trying to understand why not everyone can just “bounce back” from an infectious disease. She’s combining preclinical and clinical investigations to map distinct illness trajectories and examine how sex, hormones, and age differences affect these trajectories and disease outcomes.

Dr. Tal is running the largest clinical study at MIT, MAESTRO, comparing and contrasting the responses of people with chronic Lyme and Long COVID, using comprehensive, deeply multimodal assessments to transform currently subjective assessments into objective, informative diagnostics that can guide targeted therapeutics. These involve developing informative metrics for measuring “brain fog”, inflammation, blood flow, barrier integrity, metabolic function, and other key disease determinants.