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The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard announced on Oct. 10 that it laid off 87 employees as part of a strategic restructuring.
Of the impacted employees, 75 were part of the Data Sciences Platform and IT departments. The other 12 employees who were laid off occupy administrative positions at the Broad Institute.
Broad Institute Director Todd R. Golub wrote in an email to staff members that “the rapid pace of technological and scientific change requires us to retool to stay ahead of the field.”
“What’s needed is a focus on our core strength: the power of direct collaborations with Broad scientists on cutting-edge research projects, which inspire entirely new solutions for the analytical challenges the field will soon confront,” he added.
A spokesperson for the Broad Institute did not respond to a request for comment on Sunday.
Alec Wysoker, a Broad senior principal software engineer who was not affected by the layoffs, said he did not fully understand the restructuring.
“I have questions because the technology that the Data Sciences Platform is developing is both the present and the future of how computing is happening at the Broad,” Wysoker said.
Such computing is “absolutely essential for the vast majority of work that is done at the Broad,” Wysoker added.
Golub wrote in his letter to staff members that “for the last four months we have been focused on how Terra and the DSP can best advance the frontier of biomedical science.”
“The changes we’re making today will allow us to do this more nimbly, and we’ll incorporate these advances into Terra, the DSP’s flagship product,” Golub added. “So the DSP can focus on building these tools, we have begun to work with a mission-aligned external partner to advance the infrastructure on which our analytical tools sit.”
The restructuring comes shortly after Microsoft opted to not renew a technological partnership with Broad Institute.
The Broad Institute’s Data Sciences Platform collaborated with Microsoft to develop Terra, a program for biomedical data analysis and sharing with over 650,00 users, according to Broad’s website.
But the Broad Institute’s expansion into Burlington and Kendall Square could be an additional factor, according to Wysoker.
“My understanding is that there needs to be some belt tightening because those investments in real estate are going to take a while to pay off in terms of grants,” Wysoker said.
—Staff writer Veronica H. Paulus can be reached at veronica.paulus@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @VeronicaHPaulus.
—Staff writer Aran Sonnad-Joshi can be reached at aran.sonnad-joshi@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @asonnadjoshi.
