Dr. Matthew Might ’99 – 2022 St. Francis Xavier Award for Ignatian Identity

This award is given annually to an alumnus who, after graduating from Brophy, has sought to deepen his commitment to the ideals of Jesuit education in remarkable ways. Like St. Francis Xavier, who was moved by his encounter with Ignatius to boldly and selflessly live Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam for the greater glory of God — the recipient of this award has been moved by his Jesuit education to find unique points of intersection between his talents and the needs of the world. Brophy is happy to announce that Matthew Might, Ph.D. ’99, has been named the 2022 recipient of the St. Francis Xavier Award for Ignatian Identity.

There is nothing more Ignatian than charting a course into the unknown — Jesuits have done it for almost 500 years, starting with St. Ignatius himself and followed by his companion St. Francis Xavier. Dr. Matthew Might ‘99 knows something about the unknown, as well. And like the storied Jesuit scientists who came before him, Matt shares a certain reverence for the power of science. “Science is where you turn when you have to do the impossible,” he notes. For Matt, doing the impossible was not an option — it was the only way to prolong, improve and possibly save his son’s life.
 
Matt left Brophy for the Georgia Institute of Technology on his way to a Ph.D. in computer science. His early work focused on cybersecurity; however, his life took a sharp detour when his son, Bertrand, was born. After four years of undiagnosed symptoms that included hundreds of seizures a day, doctors finally told the Might family that Bertrand was the only known patient in the world to have an NGLY1 deficiency. There was no cure. To Matt, “no cure” was not an edict but a challenge. The human genome is essentially an operating manual for the human body, he reasoned. If he followed the same kind of threads he had learned to navigate as a computer scientist, maybe he could find an answer.
 
Matt ultimately was successful in identifying the genetic mutations that caused his son’s illness; that was progress, but effective research meant identifying more patients. It could take decades, he was advised — time he didn’t have. A viral blog post started the process of putting him in touch with other families whose children had the same undiagnosed symptoms and, before long, Matt’s goal of creating a community of patients, researchers and doctors started to be realized. An interest in precision medicine — delivering the right drug to the right patient at the right time — quickly followed. Using his computer science background he focused on drug repurposing — finding existing drugs that could be effective antidotes to the debilitating symptoms of NGLY1 deficiency and, ultimately, to other rare illnesses.

Matt was able to identify several drugs that alleviated some of Bertrand’s symptoms including greatly reducing his seizures, allowing him a quality of life he had not known. Although Bertrand lost his battle with NGLY1 deficiency in 2020, Matt continues to work on the front lines of computer science and medicine, and like St. Francis Xavier, Matt has become a missionary — a scientist bent on delivering hope and, ultimately, effective medicine and potential cures to the often-overlooked sufferers of rare diseases that fall outside the curve of modern medicine. 

Today, he is the director of the Hugh Kaul Precision Medicine Institute at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and a senior lecturer at Harvard University. He travels the world encouraging the kind of scientific collaboration that challenges impossibility and instead, harnesses science, determination and faith to overcome the most grievous of diseases. Brophy College Preparatory is honored to present the 2022 St. Francis Xavier Award for Ignatian Identity to Dr. Matthew Might, Class of 1999.
Back