When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, Sheila Dodge, EMBA '12, was leading Broad Institute’s Genomics Platform, the engine behind some of the most advanced sequencing efforts in biomedical science. Practically overnight, she and her colleagues were asked to help convert Broad into one of the first high-throughput COVID-19 testing centers in the United States. With hospitals overwhelmed and national testing infrastructure lagging, her team had just weeks to redesign the lab, acquire equipment, train staff, and implement a system that could process tens of thousands of tests per day.
Dodge, a graduate of the first MIT Executive MBA cohort, credits her experience at MIT Sloan with shaping how she approached the challenge: by thinking in systems, building for scale, and leading through uncertainty. Now the Chief Operating Officer of Broad Clinical Labs, she continues to bridge science, strategy, and service, turning research into real-world health solutions.
Sheila Dodge, EMBA '12
What made you decide to pursue an Executive MBA, and why MIT Sloan?
I'd been at Broad for quite a while and had grown into leadership roles organically. When I started, I was a lab scientist. I was doing research and development in sequencing technologies, working on this big project to sequence the first human genome. Before the MIT EMBA, I was managing a team within the sequencing group. We didn't yet have a clinical lab or the complex multi-omics operations we do now. It was very focused on sequencing itself.
At the same time, I was completely fascinated by operations. No matter what the science was, I was always the one asking: How do we scale this? How do we design the workflow? What kind of staffing do we need? I had zero background in finance, but I was curious. How do we track expenses? What does sustainability look like for a research operation? I realized I loved thinking about how things work, not just scientifically, but organizationally. The EMBA format allowed me to keep working full time, which meant I could immediately apply what I was learning.
What lessons from MIT Sloan do you still use today?
Right now, I lead a team of about 300 people. Our group has an annual operating budget of approximately $200 million. We operate like a medium-sized startup within the Broad Institute, which has 6,000 people and is a $700 million business. There's a ton going on. Everyone is stretched, and we’re constantly looking for ways to manage work more effectively without burning people out. That makes the tools I learned at MIT Sloan incredibly relevant.
Just this morning, we discussed a change the lab had implemented. It significantly improved turnaround time and quality. Objectively, a great change. But the work stopped there. No one had taken the next steps: communicating the update to customers, updating the software systems to reflect new options, or ensuring the clinical validation report was revised. These tasks live in different parts of the organization, and without someone thinking at the system level, they fall through the cracks.
That's where MIT Sloan's system dynamics and dynamic work design training has made the biggest difference for me. Now, I immediately see those missing links and bring teams together to map out the full process. Who needs to be involved? What's the target? How do we visualize and prioritize this work alongside everything else? It's not just about solving one problem; it’s about coordinating across the entire system so we can deliver high-quality outcomes efficiently and sustainably.
How did the MIT EMBA prepare you for your current level of leadership?
The EMBA helped me grow into the leader I am today. I gained a foundational understanding of business concepts. I had always been curious about how the financial side of the organization worked, but after MIT Sloan, I could not only understand accounting and finance; I could lead with it. I took on more responsibility for the financial aspects of our work, and that deeper understanding allowed me to improve how our group operates. I could finally see how the internal work connected to financial performance, and that helped me get the engine running faster and more effectively.
The world I live in at the Broad, what we do is very fast paced. Another thing you learn about in operations is the clock speed of the industry. How fast is your industry revolutionizing itself over and over? We're constantly reinventing ourselves, to stay on pace with the larger scale economic environment, the technology space that we're in. Change management has been a critical part of how I think of myself as a leader. I think about the right way to manage that change and I feel it's paved a path where people see, "Wow, she's a really strong leader. She knows how to make change happen. She knows how to bring the team along with her, and she knows how to influence people that are not on the team." All of those pieces are a culmination of things that I've learned at MIT Sloan.
How did the idea to convert Broad into a COVID-19 testing lab come about?
Right before the pandemic hit, we were preparing to scale several big sequencing projects for the NIH that had been in the works for some time. Then Boston shut down. We were planning to close our lab and send everyone home, essentially pause operations.
That's when one of Core Faculty Members, who's a Broad researcher and an infectious disease physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital, came to my boss at the time, and said, "You’ve got all this genomics capability, could Broad help set up COVID testing? We desperately need it." At that point, hospitals didn’t have enough testing capacity, mostly due to supply chain issues, and people were dying.
My boss came straight to me and my colleague, who at that time was the director of clinical strategy. She said, "I know we’re about to shut everything down, but what if we did COVID testing? What would it take?"
We got a small team together and started looking into it. From our perspective, the test seemed simple enough, but we knew we had to do things differently. We needed to make it modular. We had to be able to get the supplies. And we had to think at a systems level, setting up not just the lab, but the licensing, customer communication, protected health information protocols, and business contracts. This wasn’t our typical collaboration with researchers; this was a whole new operational and legal model.
It took us about two weeks to set it up. The first day, we did about 500 tests, which was about two-fold more than the hospitals could do at that time, then we did 700, then 1,000, then 2,000. We got up to a steady 10,000 tests a day within the first couple months of COVID testing.
What has been the return on investment of the EMBA for you, personally and professionally?
The return on investment has been massive, and not just in terms of title or salary. It transformed how I show up as a leader. People sometimes ask if the EMBA is worth it, especially scientists who aren’t sure if business school is the right path. And I tell them, without hesitation: absolutely. For a scientist, it’s transformative. You take deep technical expertise and combine it with business fluency. It changes how you think about science, how you lead teams, how you drive impact.
Before MIT Sloan, I was already confident as a scientist. But after MIT Sloan, I had confidence in a much broader set of skills. That made me a much more valuable player within the ecosystem I'm in. And it changed how I approach leadership entirely. After MIT Sloan, I felt fearless.
