The Georgia Institute of Technology was well represented at the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) Annual Event, March 15-17, in Washington, D.C., as five faculty members of the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience were inducted into the AIMBE College of Fellows.

Hanjoong Jo, Hang Lu, Garrett Stanley, Johnna Temenoff, and May Wang survived an extensive, multi-step review process, and were voted in by current fellows (each candidate must receive at least 74.5 percent in positive votes).

Their induction gives Georgia Tech 28 AIMBE fellows, an impressive accomplishment for the university’s bioengineering/bioscience community when you consider there are only about 1,500 AIMBE fellows, total, and that represents the top two percent of medical and biological engineers in the field.

This year’s five honorees from Georgia Tech reflect the multitalented, multidisciplinary, collaborative qualities that have become synonymous with the Petit Institute.



Hanjoong Jo

Jo’s lab is working on more effective therapies to treat cardiovascular disease. Jo, a professor in the Emory/Georgia Tech Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, is an international leader in the application of engineering to vascular biology.

Among Jo’s contributions is development of a potential treatment for atherosclerosis that targets micro RNA, neutralizing the effects of disturbed blood flow on blood vessels, essentially preventing arteries from becoming blocked. 

Last year he was named a Biomedical Engineering Society fellow. Now, as an AIMBE fellow, Jo welcomes the opportunity to connect with legislators at the state and local level (AIMBE is a leading advocate of public policy related to biomedical engineering).



Hang Lu
Lu, professor and James R. Fair Faculty Fellow/Dennis Frank Faculty Fellow in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, helms the Lu Fluidics Group, where researchers are working on big problems utilizing tiny technology.

Her lab has become a leader in engineering BioMEMS (Bio Micro-Electro-Mechanical System) and microfluidic devices to address questions in neuroscience, cell biology, and biotechnology – questions that are difficult to answer using conventional techniques. Applied to the study of fundamental biological questions, these “lab on a chip” techniques allow researchers to gather large-scale quantitative data about complex systems.

Lu also is a Fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).


Garrett Stanley

Stanley’s area of research deals with the frontier that is the human brain. He leads the Neural Coding Laboratory, which is helping to define the cutting edge by researching how information from the outside world is encoded by the patterns of spiking neurons in the sensory pathways of the brain.

Stanley also is principal investigator in an early-stage $1.5 million NIH study that is part of President Obama’s BRAIN Initiative, a national movement that has only increased interest and competition in neuroscience research.


“The field of neuroscience is exploding, and it’s been a little surprising,” says Stanley, associate professor in the Coulter Department. “To be specific, when the president of the United States is talking about your area of research as if it were the next moon shot, that can take you by surprise.”




Johnna Temenoff

Temenoff, co-author of the award-winning textbook, Biomaterials: The Intersection of Biology and Materials Science, has established a lab at Georgia Tech where researchers are designing biomaterials to help regenerate the stuff we’re made of – tendons, ligaments, cartilage, bone.

“Part of my lab has been focused on degenerative conditions, like those found in tendon overuse injuries. Our approach has been to prevent further degeneration as a first step on the road to regenerative medicine, which could then lead to regenerating and restoring tissue,” says Temenoff, who is co-director of the Center for Regenerative Engineering and Medicine (REM).

“What’s excited me for several years now is this idea of what we can do with a biomaterial that doesn’t necessarily direct stem cell differentiation, but enhances the natural progression the cell is already undergoing,” she adds.
 

May Dongmei Wang

Since joining the Coulter Department more than 12 years ago, Wang has been working on integrated translational biomedical informatics, researching and developing data analysis algorithms and computational models, ultimately for personalized and predictive health care.

She leads the Bio-Medical Informatics and Bio-Imaging Lab (Bio-MIBLab), which has contributed to a number of different multidisciplinary programs through the years.

As a new AIMBE fellow, she’ll continue to foster collaborative research programs involving the College of Engineering, the College of Science, the College of Computing, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, the Winship Cancer Institute at Emory, among others.

Contact:

Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience