Artificial intelligence has been touted as the most transformative technology of our time. With only a few years of mainstream use, it’s changed how we work and communicate, generated billions of dollars in investments, and sparked global debate. But according to leading neuroethics expert Karen Rommelfanger, the race isn’t over yet.
“Can you think of a more transformative technology than one that intervenes with the fundamental organ that drives your experience in the world?”
That fundamental organ is the brain.
Technologies interfacing directly with the brain have been reserved for treating severe injury or disease for decades. Now, neurotechnology is expanding into brain-responsive wearables meant to enhance, augment, and monitor everyday life. As these technologies accelerate and AI is incorporated, the question is no longer if neurotechnology will transform society, but how — and who will shape the boundaries.
These are some of the questions on which Karen Rommelfanger has built her career. Trained as a biomedical researcher and neuroscientist, Rommelfanger went on to found the Institute for Neuroethics, the world’s first think and do tank devoted entirely to neuroethics, public engagement, and policy implementation.
“The brain is special; it’s central to who we are,” says Rommelfanger, who was also an inaugural recipient of the Dana Foundation Neuroscience and Society Award. “And that means when you intervene with the brain, there are unique responsibilities. The field of neuroethics addresses things like: How do you ensure mental privacy? How do you protect free will? How do you ensure that people have the power to be narrators of their own lives and their cognitive experience?”
Now, Rommelfanger is joining Georgia Tech’s Institute for Neuroscience, Neurotechnology, and Society (INNS) as a professor of the practice, where she will work to further embed neuroethics into Georgia Tech’s research and technology development ecosystem.
“Georgia Tech is producing the next generation of neurotechnologists, and Karen’s expertise will help ensure we’re preparing them to think about societal impact as deeply as they think about the technical and scientific aspects of their work,” says Christopher Rozell, executive director of INNS. “Her leadership strengthens the Institute in exactly the way this moment in neurotechnology demands.”
“Georgia Tech has many, many ways that it leads in the technology ecosystem. But one of the powerful, unique ways it can lead is through neurotechnology,” says Rommelfanger. “I hope that the INNS, given its unique mandate for neuroscience, neurotechnology, and society, can be a lighthouse for these types of conversations.”
From institutional review boards to mandatory responsible research conduct training, ethics are a foundational part of scientific research. But designing neurotechnologies raises ethical challenges beyond the scope of typical training. What happens when discoveries leave the lab and enter people’s lives?
That question sits at the core of Rommelfanger’s work. She argues it’s a neurotechnologist’s responsibility to recognize and proactively address the need for unique safeguards for privacy, autonomy, and long-term responsibility. Her solution is to move neuroethics upstream, embedding it directly into the research, design, and deployment of neurotechnology through an approach she calls “neuroethics by design.”
“Neuroethics by design considers ethics as a core criterion where principles can drive innovation with more of a lens toward societal outcomes,” she says — an approach informed by years of advising national-level brain research initiatives and her experience at the intersection of clinical practice and ethics scholarship.
Rather than treating ethics as a compliance checklist or a post hoc review, neuroethics by design integrates ethical thinking throughout the entire innovation lifecycle, from early ideation and research questions to product requirements, governance strategies, and long-term sustainability. She has used the approach for years as an embedded partner for neurotechnology startups in her neuroethics consultancy, Ningen Co-Lab.
After decades as a traditional academic professor and then years advising companies and policymakers with this philosophy, Rommelfanger says Georgia Tech is the right place to scale this work. With its strength in neurotechnology and INNS’s rare focus on neuroscience and society, “I could not think of a better place to launch and pilot this neuroethics by design scaling effort.”
She will work with INNS to help equip researchers, students, and industry partners with practical tools for ethical decision-making. Her vision is not to create neuroethicists as a standalone profession, but to cultivate ethically engaged neurotechnologists and engineers.
Central to her plans at INNS are hands-on training programs that bring ethics out of the abstract and into practice. “I wanted to be a professor of the practice because, while the field does need more scholars, what it really needs most at this point are practitioners.”
Rommelfanger is exploring modular content that can be embedded into existing courses across disciplines, as well as immersive training — such as neuroethics boot camps and problem-solving hackathons — that bring together students, faculty, and professionals to tackle real-world challenges collaboratively.
“No one discipline can solve all the ethical challenges ahead,” says Rommelfanger. She is particularly interested in creating spaces where experts from across science and engineering, policy and law, design and the arts, and philosophy can work side by side with people with lived experience of neurological conditions. “The onus is not on scientists alone, but is a shared responsibility that benefits immensely from dialogue, accountability, and action across diverse communities.”
By situating neuroethics within Georgia Tech’s broader research ecosystem, Rommelfanger hopes INNS can help shift how the field evolves globally.
“It's really difficult to get your arms around something once it's out of the gate,” she says, citing the rapid adoption of AI without proper ethical or policy guidelines. “With neurotechnology, we still have a little bit of time, but not that much time. We are at that moment where we could change the course of global history.”
To help find answers, researchers at the Institute for Neuroscience, Neurotechnology, and Society (INNS) are using math, data, and AI to unlock the secrets of thought. Together they are helping turn the brain’s raw electrical “noise” into real insights about how people think, move, and perceive the world.
Fair warning: Prepare your neurons for the complexity of this brain research ahead.
What if artificial neurons in AI programs were arranged as they are in the brain?
AI programs would then help us understand why the brain is organized the way it is. This neuro-AI synthesis would also work faster, use less energy, and be easier to interpret. Creating such systems is the goal of Apurva Ratan Murty, an assistant professor of Psychology who is creating topographic AI models like the one above of three domains — vision, audition, and language inspired by the brain. In the near future, he predicts doctors might be able to use these patterns to predict the effects of brain lesions and other disorders. “We’re not there yet,” he says. “But our work brings us significantly closer to that future than ever before.”
How cats walk keeps Chethan Pandarinath on his toes. This biomedical engineer uses sensors to analyze how two sets of feline leg muscles — flexors and extensors — are controlled by the spinal cord. Understanding how that happens could help patients partially paralyzed from spinal cord injuries, strokes, or progressive neuro-degenerative diseases get back on their feet again. “My lab is using AI tools that allow us to turn complex spinal cord activity data into something we can interpret. It tells us there’s a simple underlying structure behind the complex activity patterns,” says the associate professor.
“The brain is like a symphony conductor,” says Simon Sponberg. “Individual instruments have some independent control, but most of the music comes from the brain’s precise coordination of notes among the different players in the body.” This physics professor studies the fantastically fast-beating wings of the hummingbird-sized hawk moth (Manduca sexta). Its agile flight movement comes as a result of spikes in electrical activity in 10 muscles. Sponberg found something that surprised him — the brain focuses less on creating the number of spikes than in orchestrating their precise patterns over time. To Sponberg, every millisecond matters. “We are just beginning to understand how the nervous system first acquires precisely timed spiking patterns during development,” he says.
Put a mouse in a maze with food far away, and it will learn to find it. But life for mice — and people — isn’t so simple. Sometimes they want to explore, only want water, or just want to go home. What’s more, animals make decisions based on their history, not just on how they feel at the moment. To dig deeper into the decision-making process, Anqi Wu, an assistant professor in the School of Computational Science and Engineering, is giving mice more options. By using a new computational framework called SWIRL (Switching Inverse Reinforcement Learning), her findings have outperformed models that fail to take historical behavior into account. “We’re seeking to understand not only animal behavior but also human behavior to gain insight into the human decision-making process over a long period of time,” she says.
Connectivity shapes cognition in the cerebral cortex, a layered structure in the brain. The visual cortex, in particular, processes visual data from the retina relayed through the Lateral Geniculate Nucleus (LGN) in the thalamus, and directs it to the correct cognitive domain in the brain. How it does this is the mystery that computational neuroscientist Hannah Choi wants to solve. “The big question I’m interested in is how network connectivity patterns in the architecture of the LGN are related to computations,” says this assistant math professor. To find answers, she shows mice repeated image patterns such as flower-cat-dog-house and then disrupts the pattern. The goal? To grasp how the thalamus’s nonlinear dynamical system works. If scientists and doctors better understand how brain regions are wired together, such knowledge could lead to better disease treatment.
This story was originally published through the Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine. Read the original publication here.
]]>News and Media Contact: Audra Davidson
]]>Amino acids also play a critical role commercially where they are manufactured and added to pharmaceuticals, dietary supplements, cosmetics, animal feeds, and industrial chemicals — an energy-intensive process leading to greenhouse gas emissions, resource consumption, and pollution.
A landmark new system developed at Georgia Tech could lead to an alternative: a commercially scalable, environmentally sustainable method for amino acid production that is carbon negative, using more carbon than it emits.
The breakthrough builds on a method that the team pioneered in 2024 and solves a key issue – increasing efficiency to an unprecedented 97% and reducing the bioprocess cost by over 40%. It’s the highest reported conversion of CO2 equivalents into amino acids using any synthetic biology system to date.
Published in the journal ACS Synthetic Biology, the study, “Cell-Free-Based Thermophilic Biocatalyst for the Synthesis of Amino Acids From One-Carbon Feedstocks,” was led by Bioengineering Ph.D. student Ray Westenberg and Professor Pamela Peralta-Yahya, who holds joint appointments in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. The team also included Shaafique Chowdhury (Ph.D. ChBE 25) and Kimberly Wennerholm (ChBE 23); alongside University of Washington collaborators Ryan Cardiff, then a Ph.D. student and now a Chain Reaction Innovations Fellow at Argonne National Laboratory, and Charles W. H. Matthaei Endowed Professor in Chemical Engineering James M. Carothers; in addition to Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Synthetic Biology Team Leader Alexander S. Beliaev.
"This work shifts the narrative from simply reducing carbon emissions to actually consuming them to create value,” says Peralta-Yahya. “We are taking low-cost carbon sources and building essential ingredients in a truly carbon-negative process that is efficient, effective, and scalable.”
The work builds on the cell-free technology the team used in their earlier study. “Previously, we discovered that a system that uses the machinery of cells, without using actual living cells, could be used to create amino acids from carbon dioxide,” Peralta-Yahya explains. “But to create a commercially viable system, we needed to increase the system’s efficiency and reduce the cost.”
The team discovered that bits of leftover cells were consuming starting materials, and — like a machine with unnecessary gears or parts — this limited the system’s efficiency. To optimize their “machine,” the team would need to remove the extra background machinery.
"Leftover cell parts were using key resources without helping produce the amino acids we were looking for,” says Peralta-Yahya. “We knew that heating the system could be one way to purify it because heat can denature these components.”
The challenge was in how to protect the essential system components from the high temperatures, she adds. “We wondered if introducing enzymes produced by a heat-loving bacterium, Moorella thermoacetica, might protect our system, while still allowing us to denature and remove that inefficient background machinery.”
The results were astounding: after introducing the enzymes, heating and “cleaning” the system, and letting it cool to room temperature, synthesis of the amino acids serine and glycine leaped to 97% yield — nearly three times that of the team’s previous system.
To make the system viable for large-scale use, the team also needed to reduce costs. “One of the most costly components in this system is the cofactor tetrahydrofolate (THF),” Peralta-Yahya shares. “Reducing the amount of THF needed to start the process was one way to make the system more inexpensive and ultimately more commercially viable.”
By linking reaction steps so waste from one step fueled the next, the team devised a method to recycle THF within the system that reduces the amount of THF needed by five-fold — lowering bioprocessing costs by 42%.
“This decrease in cost and increase in yield is a critical step forward in creating a method with real potential for use in industry and manufacturing,” Peralta-Yahya says. “This system could pave the way for moving this carbon-negative technology out of the lab and onto the continuous, industrial scale."
Funding: The Advanced Research Project Agency-Energy (ARPA-E); U.S. Department of Energy; and the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Biological and Environmental Research Program.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1021/acssynbio.5c00352
]]>Selena Langner
College of Sciences
Georgia Institute of Technology
If you’ve walked the aisles of a grocery store, scrolled through social media, watched television, or set foot in a fast-casual restaurant chain in recent months, you know that protein is having its moment.
So, why are brands pushing protein? An International Food Information Council study found that 70% of adults are looking to increase their protein intake. But as it makes its way into more products than ever before, is it too much of a good thing?
Lesley Baradel is a registered dietitian, nutritionist, and lecturer in the College of Sciences at Georgia Tech. She joined Generating Buzz to discuss the protein-packed trend, with implications ranging from health and wellness to marketing and how the rise of GLP-1s factors into the increased focus on the macronutrient.
"The IOP has a long and distinguished history as the primary learned society and professional body for physicists in the U.K., Ireland, and beyond,” says Kamerlin, who completed both a Master of Natural Sciences and a Ph.D. in Theoretical Organic Chemistry from the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. “As a society, it plays an important role in building community, promoting science, advancing advocacy for our discipline, and supporting the next generation of physicists.”
Kamerlin joins a list of distinguished Fellows that includes legendary physicists such as Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, a preeminent astrophysicist responsible for the discovery of pulsars (a previously unknown type of star) and the first female president of the IOP.
“It is a great honor to be awarded Fellowship of the IOP, particularly as women more broadly remain vastly underrepresented in physics,” Kamerlin says. “I look forward to giving back to the physics community, supporting the mission of the society, and working to remind the next generation that physics is for everyone."
Kamerlin’s research in computational biophysics is at the intersection of chemistry and biology, where she focuses on investigating fundamental physical chemistry and using computational tools to understand complex biomolecular problems. Currently, she is interested in leveraging machine learning tools to design new enzymes and in predicting protein structures and behaviors using large language models.
In addition to her roles at Georgia Tech, Kamerlin is a senior editor of Protein Science, the editor-in-chief of Electronic Structure, and was named a 2025-27 visiting professor at Lund University. She was also named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, received the 2026 Inspiration and Resilience Award from the Biochemical Society, and was the 2023 Biophysical Society Theory & Computation Subgroup Mid-Career Award Winner.
]]>The new initiative was sparked by ongoing research at Georgia Tech — and a Yellow Jacket connection: when Postdoctoral Research Fellow Hannah Youngblood’s work on exfoliation glaucoma (XFG) was featured by the BrightFocus Foundation, it caught the attention of Jennifer Rucker, an Alabama resident who was diagnosed with XFG several years ago.
Excited that the research could change outcomes for people like her — and proud that it’s happening at her husband Philip Rucker’s, EE 72, alma mater — Jennifer Rucker reached out to Youngblood and her advisor, School of Chemistry and Biochemistry Professor and Kelly Sepcic Pfeil, Ph.D. Chair Raquel Lieberman.
“As the wife of a Georgia Tech graduate and an individual with pseudoexfoliation glaucoma, I was inspired to support the scientists whose efforts may help me and others,” Jennifer Rucker says. What followed was a meaningful dialogue and a shared sense of purpose — and the creation of the Georgia Tech Glaucoma Research Fund (Wreck Glaucoma! Fund).
“It meant so much that Jennifer took the initiative to reach out to learn more about our research,” says Lieberman. “Moments like this remind me how deeply meaningful it is to connect with people in the broader community who are navigating glaucoma. Opportunities for such personal connections are rare, but they inspire and further motivate us to achieve our lab’s mission to improve the lives of individuals suffering from blindness diseases.”
Youngblood’s interest in glaucoma research also stems from a personal connection: her father was diagnosed with glaucoma as a young adult. Now, Youngblood studies the genetic and molecular factors behind XFG in the Lieberman research lab.
“XFG is an aggressive form of the disease with no known cure,” Youngblood says. While scientists know that XFG is the result of abnormal accumulation of proteins in the eye, current treatments only address symptoms rather than treating the root cause of the disease.
“We know XFG is driven by protein buildup, but we still don’t know why it happens,” she explains. “My work studying specific genetic variants aims to uncover this.”
In particular, Youngblood is researching the role of LOXL1, a protein that plays a role in soft tissue throughout the body, including the eyes.
“Research has shown that people with variants in the genes responsible for this protein are more likely to have XFG,” she says. “That made me curious to see if the variants might be impacting the structure of the LOXL1 protein itself and how those variants might lead to disease.”
Youngblood is currently testing her theory in the lab. “My hope is that new insight into proteins like LOXL1 will bring us closer to treatments that address XFG at its source,” she says. “The new Georgia Tech Glaucoma Research Fund is a tremendous step forward in making that hope a reality.”
Please visit the Glaucoma Research Fund support page to give to this specific program. To discuss additional philanthropic opportunities, please contact the College of Sciences Development Team: development@cos.gatech.edu
Your investment ensures that these scholars and researchers have world-class resources, facilities, and mentors to excel in this critical work. Thank you for helping us shape the future.
]]>“The Sloan Research Fellows are among the most promising early-career researchers in the U.S. and Canada, already driving meaningful progress in their respective disciplines,” says Stacie Bloom, president and chief executive officer of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “We look forward to seeing how these exceptional scholars continue to unlock new scientific advancements, redefine their fields, and foster the wellbeing and knowledge of all.”
"This is a wonderful and welcome surprise that will support my ongoing research on mountains across the globe,” says Freeman. “It's a vote of confidence and will let me get out there and get to work."
Freeman is one of 126 scientists selected this year for the honor and will receive a two-year $75,000 grant of flexible funding to support his research.
He joins the ranks of nearly 50 faculty from Georgia Tech who have received Sloan Research Fellowships, including School of Mathematics’ Alex Blumenthal in 2024, Hannah Choi in 2022, Yao Yao in 2020, Konstantin Tikhomirov in 2019, Lutz Warnke in 2018, Zaher Hani in 2016, Jen Hom in 2015, and Greg Blekherman in 2012; School of Chemistry and Biochemistry's Vinayak Agarwal in 2018; School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences' Christopher Reinhard in 2015; and School of Physics’ Chunhui (Rita) Du in 2024 and Tamara Bogdanović in 2013.
Freeman joined the Institute in 2023 and was also recently named a 2024 Packard Fellow by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and 2025 Early Career Fellow by the Ecological Society of America.
Known for his groundbreaking research in climate change and bird ecology, Freeman studies birds worldwide from Appalachia to Ecuador. He specializes in tropical populations where his work is centered on understanding how mountain species respond to a changing climate — and how to facilitate their survival.
“Tropical mountains are some of Earth’s largest biodiversity hotspots; they harbor an extraordinary number of species,” shares Freeman. “Additionally, tropical mountain birds are particularly sensitive to environmental change, so they can serve as an early warning system for global conservation efforts.”
Previously, his research has shown that some species are on an ‘escalator to extinction’ with vulnerable groups moving to higher elevations to escape warming temperatures. At the top of the escalator, some summit-dwelling species are disappearing.
“We know that many species are on this escalator,” Freeman says. “The next step is to figure out which species are most vulnerable and why. In order to direct conservation efforts, we need to know who is vulnerable, why small increases in temperature have dramatic effects, and what can be done to help.”
To uncover those answers, Freeman is taking two approaches: mapping global patterns with big picture data and conducting on-the-ground research in the tropics.
To target the former, he created the Mountain Bird Network, which supports community scientists in conducting bird surveys on their local mountains. The goal is to create a system that allows researchers to diagnose vulnerable species before they are too sparse to save.
“When a species is in trouble, we need to know as soon as possible,” Freeman says. “Once a population is small enough to be at risk of extinction, it’s very hard to reverse that process. The Mountain Bird Network collects data on mountain bird abundances and distributions across the globe, which, when used with data from a global citizen science program called eBird, can be leveraged to build models to identify which species might be vulnerable before those populations become critically small.”
Freeman’s other avenue of research involves building an ambitious living laboratory in Pinchincha, Ecuador. The research site will span thousands of meters along the flanks of a local mountain, spanning lowland rainforest, foothill rainforest, and cloud forest ecosystems.
“The mountain is home to thousands of birds from hundreds of species,” Freeman says. “My goal is to track and understand their daily lives — and how climate changes impact them.”
Using cutting-edge tracking technology, he will tag and monitor their daily movements, mapping those against microclimate sensors placed at different elevations along the mountain’s slopes. The challenge of placing and maintaining thousands of tiny sensors in rugged conditions means that it has never been done before.
“We’ll track these birds for at least five years –- but hopefully for decades,” Freeman says. “The data we gather at Tech Mountain will be the first of its kind, and my hope is that it makes a real difference in conservation efforts worldwide.”
]]>“It has been a pleasure for the Center for Programs to Increase Engagement in the Sciences (C-PIES) to collaborate with Google and the College of Sciences Advisory Board to bring this fellowship, which will positively impact our community and highlight how science can align with public good,” says Lewis A. Wheaton, professor in the School of Biological Sciences and director of C-PIES.
In the year ahead, the fellows will work with C-PIES and community partners on campus and in the metro Atlanta area to develop projects in one of three priority areas: civic and policy engagement, community-engaged research, and K-12 research outreach.
The fellowship was open to all graduate students in the College of Sciences, and four inaugural fellows — Aniruddh Bakshi, Katherine Slenker, Miriam Simma, and Nikolai Simonov — were named based on their exciting, yet feasible applications.
Ph.D. student Aniruddh Bakshi studies the problem of drug delivery at the intersections of organic chemistry, biochemistry, and immunology. As mRNA vaccines are closely related to his area of research, he sees the need for a grassroots outreach movement from young academics to help bolster public confidence in rigorous scientific methodology.
In collaboration with local hospitals and nonprofits, his proposed project is to start a social media content series, titled “A Day in the Life of a Ph.D. Student,” to show the realities of graduate school for those interested in this career path while connecting his research to broader public issues.
“Science has the power to solve urgent problems, but only if people understand and trust it,” says Bakshi. “Through this fellowship, I will use my research and outreach efforts to help strengthen that trust — showing how discoveries in drug delivery and vaccine design can make a real difference in people’s lives.”
Atlanta is often referred to as “the city in a forest,” but according to Ph.D. student Katherine Slenker, wildlife has a difficult time navigating across roads and housing developments, often resulting in human-wildlife conflict.
“Conservation ecologists have long recommended that the movement of wildlife could be eased through the creation of ‘ecological corridors,’ which connect greenspaces and wildlife populations,” she explains. “Determining the movement patterns of wildlife, and where such corridors may be best situated, requires that we first understand what species reside in the metro Atlanta area as well as how they are expected to disperse.”
As a fellow, Slenker plans to build a biodiversity data network by comparing wildlife monitoring at Davidson-Arabia Mountain Nature Preserve and Stone Mountain Park and increasing the coalition of metro Atlanta researchers. This data can be used in the development of ecological corridors to reduce clashing between humans and wildlife, notably animals struck by vehicles, and improve ecosystem health at these parks.
The study of crystallography is vital in academia, industry, and medicine because it enables researchers to decipher the atomic structures of proteins, but it is scarcely taught outside of graduate school. Ph.D. student Miriam Simma wants to change that.
Her proposed project is to introduce protein crystallography to K-12 students and teachers through hands-on activities in local high school classrooms and to the public during the Atlanta Science Festival at Georgia Tech.
“My vision is to make structural biology research accessible, so everyone can engage with cutting-edge scientific research — fostering curiosity and interest in STEM careers,” says Simma. “Long term, I will synthesize these activities into a chemical education article that introduces K-12 students to protein structure and function.”
Last year, Ph.D. student Nikolai Simonov became involved in the GoSTEM Club at Lilburn Middle School — leading student activities and recruiting other graduate student volunteers. In partnership with Georgia Tech’s Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics and Computing, the club is a weekly afterschool program for students, many of whom come from underserved backgrounds, to grow their scientific curiosity.
“I assembled a team of 10 Tech graduate students who could explain complex scientific concepts in approachable ways for middle school students. Through this fellowship, we are excited to enrich the GoSTEM Club with an ongoing mentorship program and materials for more ambitious science fair projects,” shares Simonov.
As part of the program, club members can meet one-on-one with Georgia Tech mentors to discuss their educational and career goals. “By sharing their stories and connecting scientific ideas to real-world applications, our mentors aim to show students that STEM is not only accessible but a path toward a fulfilling life,” he adds.
]]>Writer: Annette Filliat
]]>The award will support the design of nature-based solutions including living shorelines and marsh restoration in flood-prone areas of Camden County, Georgia, adjacent to Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay, Cumberland Island National Seashore, and the city of St. Marys.
“Restoring wetlands in Camden County is not just an environmental priority — it’s a resilience strategy for the entire region,” says principal investigator (PI) Joel Kostka, Tom and Marie Patton Distinguished Professor, associate chair for Research in the School of Biological Sciences, and faculty director of Georgia Tech for Georgia’s Tomorrow. “Each acre of restored marshland protects coastal communities from natural hazards like storms and flooding, provides essential marine habitat, and has the potential to aid the Navy and the Army Corps of Engineers in developing management alternatives for dredged materials. When our wetlands flourish, our whole coastline does.”
In addition to Kostka, co-PI’s include University of Georgia (UGA) Skidaway Institute of Oceanography Director Clark Alexander, UGA Associate Professor Matt Bilskie and Professor Brian Bledsoe, The Nature Conservancy Coastal Climate Adaptation Director Ashby Worley, and Georgia Tech alumnus Nolan Williams of Robinson Design Engineers, a firm dedicated to the engineering of natural infrastructure in the Southeast that is owned and operated by Georgia Tech alumnus Joshua Robinson.
The new project, known as a “pipeline project” by NFWF, builds on multiple resilience plans and years of previous research conducted by the established team. “This is a testament to the value of the long-term collaborations and partnerships that enable coastal resilience work,” Kostka says. “We’re working closely with local communities and a range of city, state, and federal stakeholders to ensure these solutions align with local priorities and protect what matters most.”
It’s not the first time that the team has brought this type of collaboration to the coastline. Since 2019, Kostka has worked alongside the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources, the South Carolina Aquarium, and Robinson Design Engineers in a $2.6 million effort to restore degraded salt marshes in historic Charleston, also funded by NFWF. Now in the implementation phase, much of the marsh restoration in Charleston involves planting salt-tolerant grasses, restoring oyster reefs, and excavating new tidal creeks — work that is being spearheaded by local volunteers.
“Coastal resilience isn’t something one group can tackle alone,” Kostka adds. “That shared, community-driven vision is what makes these projects possible.”
]]>Despite their importance, most of what scientists know about proteins only comes from a small sample size. This stands in the way of fully understanding how most proteins work and unlocking their full potential.
Georgia Tech’s Yunan Luo believes artificial intelligence (AI) could fill this knowledge gap. The National Science Foundation agrees. Luo is the recipient of an NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award.
“So much of biology depends on knowing what proteins do, but decades of research have concentrated on a relatively small set of well-studied proteins. This imbalance in scientific attention leads to a distorted view of the biological landscape that quietly shapes our data and our algorithms,” Luo said.
“My group’s goal is to build machine learning (ML) models that actively close this gap by generating trustworthy function predictions for the many proteins that remain understudied.”
[Related: Yunan Luo to use AI for Protein Design and Discovery with Support of $1.8 Million NIH Grant]
In his proposal to NSF, Luo coined this rich-get-richer effect “annotation inequality.”
One problem of annotation inequality is that it slows progress in disease prognosis, drug discovery, and other critical biomedical areas. It is challenging to innovate the few proteins that scientists already know so much about.
A cascading effect of annotation inequality is that it diminishes the effectiveness of studying proteins with AI.
AI methods learn from existing experimental data. Datasets skewed toward well-known proteins propagate and become entrenched in models. Over time, this makes it harder for computers to research understudied proteins.
“Protein annotation inequality creates an effect analogous to a vast library where 95% of patrons only read the top 5% popular books, leaving the rest of the collection to gather dust,” Luo said.
“This has resulted in knowledge disparities across proteins in current literature and databases, biasing our understanding of protein functions.”
The NSF CAREER award will fund Luo with over $770,000 for the next five years to tackle head-on the problem of protein annotation inequality.
Luo will use the grant to build an accurate, unbiased protein function prediction framework at scale. His project aims to:
More enduring than the ML framework, Luo will leverage the NSF award to support educational and outreach programs. His goal is to groom the next generation of researchers to study other challenges in computational biology, not just the annotation inequality problem.
Luo teaches graduate and undergraduate courses focused on computational biology and ML. Problems and methods developed through the CAREER project can be used as course material in his classes.
Luo also championed collaboration with Georgia Tech’s Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics, and Computing (CEISMC) in his proposal.
Through this partnership, local high school teachers and students would gain access to his data and models. This promotes deeper learning of biology and data science through hands-on experience with real-world tools.
Luo sees reaching students and the community as a way of paying forward the support he received from Georgia Tech colleagues.
“I am incredibly grateful for this recognition from the NSF,” said Luo, an assistant professor in the School of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE).
“This would not have been possible without my students and collaborators, whose hard work laid the groundwork for this proposal.”
Luo praised CSE faculty members B. Aditya Prakash, Xiuwei Zhang, and Chao Zhang for their guidance. All three study machine learning and computational bioscience, two of CSE’s five core research areas.
Luo also thanked Haesun Park for her support and recommendation for the CAREER award. Park is a Regents’ Professor and the chair of the School of CSE.
]]>Despite their importance, most of what scientists know about proteins only comes from a small sample size. This stands in the way of fully understanding how most proteins work and unlocking their full potential.
Georgia Tech’s Yunan Luo believes artificial intelligence (AI) could fill this knowledge gap. The National Science Foundation agrees. Luo is the recipient of an NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award.
]]>The award — named in recognition of Carl Gans’ contributions to animal morphology, biomechanics, and functional biology — is one of the highest honors from the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB), and recognizes Manafzadeh’s “exceptional creativity and originality in comparative biomechanics research as well as her strong mentoring contributions.”
“I’m very fortunate to have done science with incredible mentors, collaborators, and students who’ve helped me develop this body of research,” she says. “I’m grateful to be recognized with the Carl Gans Award, and look forward to continuing to explore new ways to study biomechanics when I start my lab at Georgia Tech.”
The new Manafzadeh Lab at Georgia Tech will investigate how joints work and where they come from — both evolutionarily and developmentally. With powerful new technology, called X-Ray Reconstruction of Moving Morphology (XROMM), Manafzadeh can look inside bodies with 4D “X-ray vision” — and can create animations of moving skeletons with sub-millimeter precision.
“This research has the potential to transform our understanding of animal motion,” she says, “and that can ultimately open doors to everything from personalized surgical treatments for people to new designs for bio-inspired robots.”
As part of the award, Manafzadeh will deliver a plenary speech on “Joints: Form, Function, and the Future of Comparative Biomechanics” this January at the annual SICB meeting in Portland, Oregon.
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Busy with her career and family, DeWitt tucked the idea away — until she stepped back from the professional world and knew it was time to pursue keeping bees. She enrolled in a one-day beekeeping class that was offered by the Metro Atlanta Beekeepers Association. From there, DeWitt learned the fundamentals, purchased her first honey bees, and began the fascinating — and sometimes mystifying — work of caring for them in her backyard.
Like many new beekeepers, she faced steep challenges: sick bees, failing colonies, secondary pests, and ensuring her hives had enough resources to survive winter. But DeWitt says that she also discovered how remarkably generous and supportive the beekeeping community is. She connected with mentors and attended local bee club meetings and state conferences where researchers shared their latest findings. Beekeeping became meaningful in ways she had never anticipated.
“I fell in love with honey bees and all things related. There is an innate spirituality in keeping bees,” she says. “Once I put the veil on, life slows to a standstill and becomes a walking meditation into a delicately complex and endlessly fascinating world.”
Her marketing background came full circle too. “Like any creative endeavor, beekeepers must be keenly observant,” DeWitt explains. “We have to think outside the box, pivot quickly, anticipate problems, and plan ahead.”
As her colony numbers grew, so did her reach. DeWitt established apiaries at several metro Atlanta schools and at sites in Chattahoochee Hills, Grant Park, Brookhaven, Arabia Mountain, and Brevard, North Carolina. Along the way, she earned her Master Beekeeper certification from Cornell University, served as the central regional director for the Georgia Beekeepers Association, taught beekeeping to incarcerated individuals through the Georgia Department of Corrections, and partnered with tree companies to rescue wild honey bee colonies living in trees slated for removal.
This breadth of experience prepared her for a unique opportunity: becoming Georgia Tech’s 2025 Beekeeper in Residence with the Urban Honey Bee Project. The one-year residency, DeWitt says, offered “a rare opportunity to be part of the Georgia Tech community,” allowing her to explore new ideas in beekeeping while tending to and expanding the rooftop hives at The Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design.
The Urban Honey Bee Project, an interdisciplinary initiative of Georgia Tech’s College of Sciences and Office of Sustainability, established the Beekeeper in Residence program to maintain colonies at The Kendeda Building and in the EcoCommons, mentor student beekeepers, and enrich the program with diverse expertise.
“Deb did so much this year — working closely with the Beekeeping Club, keeping our hives healthy, and even rehoming a wild hive from a dead tree on campus,” says Jennifer Leavey, assistant dean for faculty mentoring in the College of Sciences and director of the Urban Honey Bee Project. “Most importantly, Deb showed our students how an expert beekeeper approaches hive care. She took every opportunity to include them, and it made a real impact.”
Georgia Tech undergraduate Alyssa Zhang agrees. “The Beekeeping Club loved working with Deb. She was always happy to teach us — whether it was managing Varroa mites last summer, when she helped reduce counts from 17% to below 1%, or preparing the hives for winter.”
The Varroa mite is one of many pressures beekeepers face. “The biggest challenges affecting honey bees — as well as native bees and other pollinators — are climate change, habitat loss, pesticide use, pests, and pathogens,” DeWitt explains. “These factors contributed to U.S. commercial beekeepers losing a devastating average of 62% of their colonies last year.”
Honey bees play a critical role in pollinating food crops and producing honey and beeswax. These threats fuel DeWitt’s passion for education, mentorship, and advocacy at the local, state, and national levels. Yet, the most meaningful rewards are personal.
“Honey bee colonies are superorganisms — tens of thousands of individuals working together for the good of the hive,” she adds. “Bees are intelligent, endlessly fascinating creatures, and I never stop learning from them. Beekeeping has made me a better gardener, horticulturist, ecologist, conservationist, carpenter, biologist, scientist, student, teacher, problem solver… you name it.”
Her passion for the craft is unmistakable. In 2025, DeWitt received one of the state’s highest honors: Georgia Beekeepers Association’s Beekeeper of the Year Award.
“I am profoundly grateful to the state’s beekeeping community for recognizing my efforts over the past eight years,” says DeWitt. “This award reflects the mentorship I’ve received from some truly exceptional beekeepers.”
]]>Writer: Annette Filliat
Editor: Selena Langner
]]>Imagine stepping into a space the size of multiple football fields — only instead of turf and goalposts, it’s filled with science. Every inch is alive with posters, equipment demos, and researchers sharing the latest breakthroughs.
Welcome to the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) Conference, one of the largest scientific gatherings in the world, drawing more than 30,000 attendees to San Diego in November. According to Annabelle Singer, it is the place to be for neuroscientists. “If you want to know what is going on now in neuroscience, it is being talked about at SfN.”
Singer is a McCamish Foundation Early Career Professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME) at Georgia Tech and Emory University. A frequent SfN attendee, she describes the meeting as “Dragon Con for neuroscience, with thousands of talks and posters going on simultaneously.”
This year, Georgia Tech didn’t just show up — it made a statement with more than 60 presentations, a major outreach award, and a spotlight press conference.
“Seeing Georgia Tech and INNS represented so strongly at SfN is exciting,” says Chris Rozell, executive director of Tech’s Institute for Neuroscience, Neurotechnology, and Society (INNS). “It reflects the incredible breadth of neuroscience and neurotechnology research happening across our campus and how our work is shaping conversations at the highest level.”
Many conferences center around structured lectures, but at SfN, posters are the heart. You might find a senior researcher presenting groundbreaking findings right next to a first-time attendee sharing early results. This diversity is what makes the experience so valuable, says Singer. “Trainees get to talk directly with the scientist doing the work to get their questions answered, from wondering about future implications to clarifying technical details.”
The scale of SfN can feel overwhelming, but for many, that’s part of the excitement. “There are so many different posters from so many different fields. It’s a lot to absorb, but it’s all very interesting,” said Benjamin Magondu, a biomedical engineering Ph.D. student presenting for the first time. “I’ve definitely learned at least 47 things by just walking 10 feet.”
For students like Magondu, the experience is critical, says Biological Sciences Assistant Professor Farzaneh Najafi. “SfN has such a big scope, all the way from molecular to cognitive and computational systems. Especially for those deciding which direction of neuroscience they want to go into, it’s invaluable.”
That breadth also fosters connections across disciplines. “Conferences are usually pretty niche,” noted Tina Franklin, a research scientist in BME. “You have your own field that you’re really good at, but it’s difficult to venture out and find new people who can help you figure out what comes next. This conference brings people from all different fields together with the common interest of neuroscience and brain research.”
Georgia Tech’s impact went beyond the conference floor. Ming-fai Fong, an assistant professor in BME, received the prestigious Next Generation Award, one of SfN’s education and outreach awards. The honor recognizes members who make outstanding contributions to public communication and education about neuroscience.
“I’m certainly very grateful to the Society for Neuroscience for recognizing these types of contributions,” says Fong, who was recognized for her work supporting blind and visually impaired youth in Atlanta. “Rewarding outreach efforts reinforces my core belief that scientists and engineers can make an immediate impact on communities we care about through outreach. It’s a great parallel avenue to making a positive impact through research.”
Building on this recognition, Georgia Tech was in the spotlight during one of SfN’s selective press conferences — a session on artificial intelligence in neuroscience moderated by Rozell, who is also the Julian T. Hightower Chair in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
During the SfN press event, Trisha Kesar, an associate professor in BME and adjunct faculty in the School of Biological Sciences, presented her research using AI to improve gait rehabilitation. Her work was among just 40 abstracts selected from more than 10,000 submissions for this honor, and one of five abstracts selected for the AI in neuroscience press conference. The project is a collaboration with Hyeok Kwon, a Georgia Tech computer science alumnus and an assistant professor in BME.
“It’s exciting to see Georgia Tech and Atlanta emerging as hubs for neuroscience innovation,” said Kesar. “Being part of a press conference on AI in neuroscience shows how much our community is contributing to the future of brain research, and how collaboration across institutions can accelerate progress.”
Presenter Dashboard:
Created by Joshua Preston, Communications Manager, College of Computing
Data collection by Audra Davidson, Hunter Ashcraft
“Georgia Tech and UGA's collective commitment to advancing science and technology exceeds the intensity of our athletic rivalry,” Fedorov said. “Together, we’re advancing cell and therapy biomanufacturing to develop lifesaving treatments for the most devastating diseases.”
Georgia Tech’s Francisco Robles and UGA’s Lohitash Karumbaiah are using manufactured T cells to target cancer. Robles, who leads the Optical Imaging and Spectroscopy Lab in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, developed quantitative Oblique Back-illumination Microscopy (qOBM) to monitor tumor growth in real time. The method allows scientists to visualize patient-derived glioblastoma cell clusters generated in the Karumbaiah Lab, tracking tumor structure and behavior at various stages.
“Assessing therapeutic potency is often complex, costly, and ineffective for solid tumors,” Karumbaiah said. “qOBM simplifies the process by providing real-time, label-free monitoring of therapeutic efficacy against 3D solid tumors.”
The work could help doctors personalize cancer treatments by providing early, detailed signs of whether a therapy is working.
“This technique is more compact and affordable and lets us watch T cells attack cell cultures in real time,” Robles said. “This breakthrough could transform how we study disease and screen new treatments.”
A Playbook for Local Healthcare
Created in 2007 by the National Institutes of Health, Georgia CTSA is one of several NIH-funded national partnerships advancing new health therapeutics and practices. Since 2017, it has comprised UGA, Georgia Tech, Emory, and the Morehouse School of Medicine. The alliance’s reach extends far beyond campus borders, bringing together researchers, clinicians, professional societies, and community and industry partners to identify local health challenges and translate research into practical solutions.
And out of this alliance have come many collaborative studies among CTSA’s members.
One, the Georgia Health Landscape Dashboard, is a tool to identify local health gaps and connect regional health professionals or policymakers with the researchers who can best address their community’s challenges. UGA College of Family and Consumer Sciences Associate Professors Alison Berg and Dee Warmath, along with community health engagement coordinator Courtney Still Brown, are working with Georgia Tech’s Jon Duke, director of the Center for Health Analytics and Informatics at the Georgia Tech Research Institute and a principal research scientist in the School of Interactive Computing.
The dashboard has already helped match researchers with communities by combining epidemiological data with “community voice” insights through surveys of residents and local leaders.
For example, when examining diabetes data, the dashboard indicates Randolph County has the state’s highest prevalence, despite declining by about 8% between 2021-24. Meanwhile, Treutlen County’s rate increased 29.2% during the same period. Perhaps Treutlen’s need for diabetic care is a growing concern, while Randolph’s is being addressed. And perhaps Hancock County, which ranks diabetes its top priority in the community voice category, is in search of immediate solutions.
“The Landscape Dashboard is a fantastic example of how the unique expertise found at Georgia Tech and UGA can be brought together to create something truly valuable for all Georgia,” Duke said. “By bringing together a range of data sources and health analytics approaches, this collaboration has created a tool that delivers novel insights into health, community, and policy across the state.”
Supported by UGA Cooperative Extension and the Biomedical and Translational Sciences Institute, the project leverages a network of agents in every county across the state. Warmath said the project’s strength lies in its ability to connect research with real-world needs.
“To build a community-responsive ecosystem for biomedical research, scientists must recognize local needs, share progress with communities to foster trust and acceptance, recruit clinicians and industry partners, and strengthen the relationships between patient and caregiver,” Warmath said.
Teaming Up for Maternal Health
Warmath and a team of researchers at UGA, Georgia Tech, and Emory are also collaborating on an NIH-funded project uniting experts in maternal health, biostatistics, and consumer science to explore how wearable technologies could improve delivery-room care.
During childbirth, clinicians monitor countless maternal and fetal vitals — contractions, heart rates, oxygen levels, kidney function, and more. What new insights, the researchers asked, could advanced wearable technologies offer in the delivery room, and what barriers might prevent their use?
Using nationwide surveys and focus groups, the team gathered information from a representative sample of pregnant, postpartum, and reproductive-age women, as well as healthcare professionals, to examine acceptance of wearable health technologies during labor and delivery. In their analysis of this rich data source, the team is identifying key variables that reveal gaps in technology acceptance and the unique needs of diverse maternal populations.
Each partner institution brings unique expertise. At Emory, principal investigator Suchitra Chandrasekaran contributes clinical insights from direct patient care. At UGA, Warmath applies her knowledge in consumer science to analyze end-user motivation, attitudes, and behaviors. At Georgia Tech, experts like Sarah Farmer in the Center for Advanced Communications Policy’s Home Lab facilitate large-scale data collection.
With data collection now complete, the team is analyzing results to inform future design and deployment of wearable technologies.
“Each school has a different perspective,” Farmer said. “It’s not as simple as one school does this but doesn’t do that. Each has their expertise, but they offer different perspectives and different resources that, when pooled, can make our research that much more effective.”
Whether advancing maternal health, mapping Georgia’s health needs, or engineering next-generation therapies, UGA and Georgia Tech continue to prove that collaboration is Georgia’s strongest tradition. Further, the undergraduate and graduate students who work in these labs and others represent the state’s highly skilled workforce of tomorrow.
“When our institutions work together, Georgia wins,” Warmath said.
— By David Mitchell
Georgia Tech and UGA are teaming up to tackle big health challenges, from cancer and bone repair to maternal care and community health. By combining their strengths, these schools are turning research into real-world solutions that make life better for Georgians.
]]>Freeman, who grew up in Seattle, mainly studies the ecology of tropical birds — but the discovery of Waterhouse’s paper made him curious about research closer to home. The results were surprising: over the last three decades, most of the bird populations in the region were stable and had been increasing in abundance at higher elevations.
The study, “Pacific Northwest birds have shifted their abundances upslope in response to 30 years of warming temperatures” was published in the journal Ecology this fall. In addition to lead author Freeman, the team also included Harold Eyster (The Nature Conservancy), Julian Heavyside (University of British Columbia), Daniel Yip (Canadian Wildlife Service), Monica Mather (British Columbia Ministry of Water, Lands and Resource Stewardship), and Waterhouse (British Columbia Ministry of Forests, Coast Area Research).
“It is great news that most birds in the region are resilient, and by doing this work, we can focus on the species that do need help, like the Canada Jay, which is struggling in this region,” Freeman says. “Studies like this help us focus resources and effort.”
Conducting the fieldwork was a detective game, Freeman says. Each day, he would wake up at four in the morning to locate and visit the research areas — often navigating trails, open forest, and rough terrain on foot.
This area of the Pacific Northwest is punctuated with old-growth stands of trees — sections of forest that have never been logged or altered. “These areas feel like islands,” Freeman shares. “They feel ancient and untouched, but even in pristine habitats, birds are still responding to climate change.”
Most of the work was conducted during the birds’ breeding season, from late May into June. This is when the birds are most vocal, which is ideal for surveys, Freeman says. The downside? Even in June, there is often snow in the mountains. “I was out at dawn, hiking through snow in the freezing cold, wondering why I didn’t stay in bed,” he recalls. “But then I’d hear birds singing all around me and realize it was all worth it.”
By comparing the two “snapshots,” the team showed that while temperatures have increased over the last 30 years, most bird populations in the region haven’t declined — but they have become more abundant at higher elevations. “It’s encouraging,” Freeman says. “Thirty years of warming has led to changes, but for the most part, these bird populations are mostly stable or improving.”
One reason for this resilience could be the stability that old growth forests provide, and Freeman suggests that conserving wide swaths of mountain habitat might help birds thrive as they continue to adapt, while still supporting populations at lower elevations. The study also helps identify which bird species need additional support, like the Canada Jay — a gray and white bird known for following hikers in pursuit of dropped snacks.
It’s just one piece of Freeman’s larger research goal — he aims to do this type of snapshot research in many different places to identify general patterns, especially differences in temperate versus tropical environments.
“In the tropics, most bird species are vulnerable, with only a few resilient species. In the Pacific Northwest, we saw the opposite,” he says. “A pattern is emerging: temperate zones show more resilience, tropics more vulnerability.”
Freeman is also conducting research with a group of students in Northern Georgia. “We predict that these Appalachian birds will be resilient as well,” he says, “but we need to study and understand what’s happening in nature — not just make predictions.”
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/ecy.70193
Funding: Packard Foundation
]]>The event marks the culmination of the semester-long I2P course, where undergraduate students develop functional prototypes aimed at solving real-world problems. Prototypes this semester include a smart military drone, a gentler device for cervical cancer screening, a rotating espresso station, tools to keep AI safe, compact data centers, systems that simulate cyberattacks to help companies strengthen their defenses, and many more.
The showcase is free and open to students, faculty, staff, and members of the local community.
Winning teams will receive prizes and a “golden ticket” into CREATE-X’s Startup Launch, a summer accelerator that provides optional seed funding, accounting and legal service credits, mentorship, and more to help students turn their prototypes into viable startups.
This is a free event, and refreshments will be provided. Register for the Fall 2025 I2P Showcase today!
]]>Marketing Strategist
]]>A state-of-the-art anatomy and medical education system, the seven-foot-long Anatomage Table features life-size human — as well as several animal — bodies in digital formats, providing accurate representations of three-dimensional anatomy, physiology, and digital pathology.
“Cadaver dissection is still the gold standard,” explains Senior Academic Professional and Director of Anatomical Sciences Adam Decker, who has taught anatomy and other courses at Georgia Tech since 2010. “But the Anatomage Table lets students interact with living systems digitally — and that’s something we couldn’t offer before.”
Decker is a passionate advocate for using the best tools available to prepare students for medical careers. After leading efforts to bring prosections (pre-dissected specimens that students learn from) to Georgia Tech in 2021, he set his sights on acquiring the Anatomage Table.
“Providing the table was the logical next step,” says Decker. “It’s a way to bridge the tactile experience with dynamic visualization.”
The Anatomage Table was purchased with College of Sciences Technology Fee funds, designed to enhance students' experiences using modern instruments and techniques.
“It’s a great resource for our students, especially for those who are interested in pursuing any field of medicine,” says David Collard, senior associate dean in the College of Sciences. “It supports active learning that will enhance students' applications to medical programs, and gives them experiences with technologies they will encounter in post-graduate professional training.”
Anatomy in action
The Series 11 Anatomage Table is housed in the Gilbert Hillhouse Boggs Building and offers a one-to-one display of actual cadavers with five different bodies available for virtual dissection. Students can click on a structure and instantly access detailed information.
“It’s one thing to sit in a classroom and have a professor explain which body parts are which,” says Yusuf Abdalla, a second-year biology student with a pre-med focus. “But being able to independently manipulate the screen to view various parts of the body takes learning to the next level.”
The table offers a cleaner environment with less exposure to odors and chemicals than traditional cadaver dissection.
“Cadavers don’t come with labels. Using the table enables us to see how the body works as a system rather than just viewing individual parts,” adds Rayhan Quraishi, a fourth-year neuroscience major pursuing a career in medicine.
Decker emphasizes that while the Anatomage Table is a game changer, it doesn’t replace prosections. Students will continue to work with real hearts, lungs, and even full spinal cords, thanks to a partnership with Emory University’s Body Donation Program.
Combining cadaver dissection with the table enhances the overall learning experience, explains Decker:
“With prosections, they learn how the veins and arteries feel when you cut into them. With the Anatomage Table, students will see what it looks like when the heart beats or the lungs expand. They can virtually follow a drop of blood through the blood vessel, then use the touch screen to see what that same drop of blood would look like under a microscope. You can’t do that with a cadaver.”
From anatomy to imaging
One of the table’s most powerful features is its integration of diagnostic imaging. Students can compare anatomical structures side-by-side with CT and MRI scans and overlay images as they simulate physiological processes like heartbeats and brain activity.
Decker is currently designing a new course, Anatomy for Diagnostic Imaging, that will use the table to teach students how to interpret MRI, CT, and ultrasound scans. The Anatomage Table contains built-in datasets of MRIs of the spine, heart, and brain, so students can look at the diagnostic image and the actual structure at the same time.
“Some students enter medical school without once taking an anatomy course,” says Decker. “Georgia Tech students, on the other hand, will already have an introduction to imaging and pathology.”
Sameeha Lalani, a third-year biology major who works as an EMT praises the clinical features found in the table. “After one of my EMT shifts, I went back and recreated what happened to my patient using the table. It really made the clinical experience click, so I could better understand what happened.”
Expanding access
The table will soon be in use in BIOS 3754 (Anatomy Lab), which runs five lab sections each fall. Decker is also exploring ways to integrate the table into live lectures, transmitting demonstrations from the table directly into large lecture halls.
Plans are currently underway to use the table in the wellness requirement course, APPH 1040 (Scientific Foundations of Health). Students will be able to visualize cardiovascular anatomy and heart disease by rotating the heart, opening chambers, and simulating conditions, such as a stroke or heart attack.
Decker is eager to collaborate with other departments and make the table a campuswide resource. He sees opportunities in health-related subjects across campus, including biomedical and mechanical engineering, neuroscience, and physiology. Student clubs like the Student Neuroscience Association, Physician Assistant Club, and Pre-Dental Society are also expected to rotate through the lab.
“Anatomy is an ancient science, but it’s the foundation of all healthcare. There are going to be many students who benefit from this — all across campus,” Decker says. “We’ve barely scratched the surface of what it can do.”
Awarded annually to just 20 individuals by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Packard Fellowships for Science and Engineering support researchers pursuing cutting-edge research and ambitious goals. “These visionary Packard Fellows are pushing the boundaries of knowledge, and their bold ideas will become tomorrow’s real-world solutions,” says Nancy Lindborg, president and CEO of the Packard Foundation in a recent press release.
The flexible funding allows researchers to maximize their creativity and ingenuity. Stroud will spend the next five years transforming Lizard Island into the world’s premier evolutionary observatory, merging groundbreaking technology with long-term field research.
On Lizard Island, that means equipping every lizard with an ultra-lightweight sensor “backpack.” Although the sensors weigh just six-hundredths of a gram each — the same as two grains of rice — when combined with innovations in mapping technology, they will help Stroud investigate the role that behavior plays in driving evolution in the wild.
“I’m incredibly honored to be named a 2025 Packard Fellow,” says Stroud. “This support allows me to pursue a question that has fascinated evolutionary biologists for centuries: how does behavior shape evolution? It’s a transformative opportunity, and I’m deeply grateful to the Packard Foundation for believing in the potential of this work.”
Begun in 2015, Stroud’s work on Lizard Island is one of the longest-running evolutionary studies of its kind: for the last 10 years, he has carefully caught and released every lizard on the island, measuring evolution through documenting their body characteristics, habitat use, and survival.
Through his studies, he has captured evolution in action, but monitoring and measuring behavior in evolutionary studies has historically been an extremely difficult and elusive task. The problem? While smaller animals tend to have higher population densities and reproduce more quickly (making them ideal candidates for evolutionary field studies), it has been difficult to find durable and long-lasting sensors small enough for these animals to carry.
“This has been a missing link because behavior is a critical component of evolution,” Stroud says. “Behavior can both expose individuals to — or shield them from — natural selection. For example, an animal with a less favorable trait, like bad eyesight, could change its behavior to avoid situations where it is disadvantaged.
“These decisions can ultimately determine whether they survive and reproduce in the wild, directly influencing the outcome of natural selection. However, until now, we just haven’t had the technology to measure these types of extremely intricate behaviors across many individuals before.”
Stroud won’t just know exactly where each lizard is — he’ll also create a detailed three-dimensional map of the entire island using remote sensing technology called LiDAR, updating it each year. “By shooting millions of laser beams, we can create a highly detailed three-dimensional map of Lizard Island, capturing the shape of every branch, rock, and blade of grass on the island,” he explains. “When connected to our lizard backpacks, we’ll know the exact microhabitats and resources available to each lizard as they move through this environment.”
Stroud will also deploy hundreds of microclimate sensors to understand how species are reacting to changes in temperature and climate. The result will be the world’s first comprehensive database: a record of minute lizard movements, the resources each individual uses, daily interactions, and changes in the environment spanning seasons and years.
“For evolutionary scientists, it has been seemingly impossible to track the moment-by-moment decisions of individual organisms… until now,” he says.
“Today, it’s possible to study what Darwin could only dream of — evolution occurring in real time,” Stroud adds. “Behavior is a critical component of evolution, understanding evolution is critical to understanding life on Earth, and understanding life on Earth is more important than ever.”
]]>The course, BIOS 4590, is a research project lab for senior biology majors that provides an opportunity for professors to share their expertise with students in a hands-on environment. In his class, Associate Professor Vinayak (Vinny) Agarwal, who holds joint appointments in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and School of Biological Sciences, aimed to introduce undergraduates to advanced bioinformatics tools through applied research using new-to-science raw data.
The resulting paper, “Phylogenomic Identification of a Highly Conserved Copper-Binding RiPP Biosynthetic Gene Cluster in Marine Microbulbifer Bacteria,” which was recently published in ACS Chemical Biology, involves the historically understudied genus of Microbulbifer, a type of bacteria often associated with sponges and corals. These microbial communities are rich sources of natural products, small biological molecules often associated with medicine and drug discovery.
"This class, and the resulting research, is a testament to the transformative power of hands-on learning,” says Susan Lozier, dean of the College of Sciences, Betsy Middleton and John Clark Sutherland Chair, and professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. “The success of this course — and the students’ remarkable achievement — reflects Georgia Tech's commitment to fostering curiosity, collaboration, and scientific rigor and to empowering the next generation of scientists and leaders."
Funded by Agarwal’s 2023 National Science Foundation CAREER grant and Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation Teacher-Scholar award, the class also received support from leadership in the College of Sciences, School of Biological Sciences, and School Chemistry and Biochemistry. The study’s lead author, graduate student Yifan (Grace) Tang, served as the class teaching assistant, and was funded in part by a Biochemistry and Biophysics Graduate Assistance in Areas of National Need fellowship.
“The students in this class are working on important, novel work — this cohort worked with real genomic data that had never been sequenced before,” she says. “Typically, researchers might work with one or two genome sequences, but we provided students with 42 — this might be the first time anyone has looked at Microbulbifer at such a wide scope.”
To prepare for the class, Tang worked alongside Laboratory Manager Alison Onstine, who manages the School of Biological Sciences teaching laboratory spaces, to sequence the Key West bacterial genomes.
“Our work in the Agarwal Lab is in natural product discovery. We focus on finding new pharmaceutical drugs through marine bacteria — but with a bioinformatics spin,” Tang explains. “We wanted to bring this type of experience to undergraduates, so we gave fully sequenced genomes to students and asked them to look for potential properties.”
Throughout the class, students learned different techniques for analyzing bacterial genome sequences and extracting data with various tools — gaining both lab and computational skills through hands-on experiences, live demos, and troubleshooting sessions.
“The highlight was showing students just how much we can learn about a bacterial genus, especially one that hasn’t been studied at this scale before,” Tang shares. “This is a growing field, so there are so many opportunities for students to make meaningful contributions while learning new skills.”
For many students, it was their first time using these types of tools, but Agarwal says that it’s something they'll likely encounter in both industry and research. He sees this type of research experience as especially helpful for seniors, who are often deciding between entering the workforce or continuing their education.
“Bioinformatics is increasingly important for analyzing big data. Students need the ability to manipulate and understand data using computational tools, and this class plays an important role in familiarizing them with this process,” he shares. “Our goal is to demystify research and give students the confidence and tools for both graduate school and for the workforce after graduation.”
The class will be offered for a third time in Fall 2026. While the exact course of research hasn’t yet been decided, “we always aim for something new that can produce publication-quality research — students don’t repeat past year’s work,” Agarwal says. This recent cohort of students built on the success of 18 undergraduates who took the class in 2023, who also published a paper. “This course truly underscores Georgia Tech’s commitment to pioneering meaningful undergraduate experiences — no other peer institution I know of is exposing undergraduates to bioinformatics at this level.”
Funding: NSF CAREER and the Dreyfus Foundation
]]>Understanding the brain is key to unlocking human health and flourishing. The need has never been more urgent, but this challenge is too vast for any single discipline to solve alone.
That’s why Georgia Tech recently launched the Institute for Neuroscience, Neurotechnology, and Society (INNS). A step toward a more connected, collaborative future, INNS brings together experts from across Georgia Tech’s seven colleges and the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) to study the brain in ways that connect scientific discovery with technological innovation and real-world societal needs.
INNS supports research that crosses traditional academic boundaries. As an Interdisciplinary Research Institute (IRI), it builds community, fosters collaboration, and fills critical gaps in education, professional development, and research infrastructure.
“Georgia Tech has a long-standing culture of interdisciplinary collaboration — it’s in our DNA,” says INNS Executive Director Chris Rozell. Rozell also serves as Julian T. Hightower Chaired Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “INNS builds on that strength to create a space where breakthroughs in neuroscience and neurotechnology can move from lab to life, impacting real people in real ways.”
INNS is home to a growing network of faculty, students, and research centers spanning the full spectrum of Georgia Tech’s research expertise. This diversity is not just a feature, it’s the foundation.
That foundation was laid over decades of growth, vision, and grassroots momentum. Georgia Tech welcomed its first neuroscience-focused faculty member in 1990, sparking a steady expansion of brain-related research across campus. As more faculty joined and new focus areas emerged, a vibrant, cross-disciplinary community began to take shape.
In 2014, that community organized under the name GT Neuro, a grassroots initiative that united researchers who shared a passion for understanding the brain. This collective energy led to new educational programs, including the launch of Georgia Tech’s undergraduate neuroscience major in the College of Sciences.
“Our undergraduate students absolutely love teaching others about Neuroscience,” said Christina Ragan, director of Outreach for the Undergraduate Neuroscience Program and senior academic professional in the School of Biological Sciences. “I'm really excited to explore ways for INNS to connect our neuroscience community at Tech with the public.”
By 2023, the Neuro Next Initiative launched to bring together leaders from across campus and chart a strategic path forward — the result of nearly two years of community-driven planning to formalize and expand Georgia Tech’s neuroscience ecosystem.
“The launch of INNS has built on the momentum of the Neuro Next Initiative, which ignited crucial conversations and fostered new collaborations between researchers at GTRI and Georgia Tech faculty,” says Tabitha Rosenbalm, GTRI senior research engineer. “The remarkable demonstration at Interface Neuro — witnessing a quadriplegic man walk and communicate thanks to innovative research — underscores the transformative breakthroughs possible when academic and applied researchers unite. INNS is uniquely positioned to serve as a catalyst, propelling Atlanta, Georgia Tech, and GTRI as national leaders in neurotechnology, driving advancements in both human health and engineering innovation.”
INNS is also helping shape the future of education. A new interdisciplinary Ph.D. program in neuroscience and neurotechnology welcomed its first cohort this fall, and INNS is poised to support it with professional development, research opportunities, and community engagement.
Whether it’s developing neurotechnologies, designing therapeutic environments, or exploring the ethical implications of brain research, INNS is here to support work that spans fields and impacts lives.
“To responsibly address the societal and human impacts of advances in neuroscience and neurotechnology, we first need to understand them,” said Margaret Kosal, professor and director of Graduate Students in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts. “That requires real and substantive collaboration beyond traditional engineering or biology labs.”
One example of INNS in action is the Smart Transitional Home Lab, a project funded by the inaugural INNS/Shepherd Center Seed Grant. This initiative brings together experts in architecture, inclusive design, neuroengineering, and rehabilitation to prototype environments that actively support stroke recovery, blending rigorous research with human-centered design.
“The establishment of INNS creates a powerful platform where diverse minds, from neuroscience to architecture to rehabilitation, can converge around a shared mission to advance human health,” says Hui Cai, professor in the School of Architecture, executive director of the SimTigrate Design Center, and co-leader of the project. “It enables interdisciplinary work with the potential to transform lives and redefine how we design for healing and recovery.”
“From whole brain recordings, to mapping the connectome, to the incredible advances in artificial intelligence, it's never been a more exciting time to study the mind and brain,” says Bob Wilson, director of the Center of Excellence for Computation and Cognition and associate professor in the School of Psychology. “I'm extremely excited for INNS to act as a central hub, building the neuroscience community at Georgia Tech and beyond.”
INNS is more than an institute, it’s a growing, vibrant community of researchers, educators, students, and partners. Together, we’re working to understand the brain, develop technologies that improve lives, and ensure those innovations serve society responsibly.
Whether you're a student, researcher, policymaker, or simply curious about the brain, INNS is your gateway to interdisciplinary neuroscience at Georgia Tech. Get involved at neuro.gatech.edu.
]]>The Georgia Tech-Shepherd Center Seed Grant Program is part of an ongoing partnership between the two institutions that started in 2023 with the goal of advancing rehabilitative patient care and research.
“The seed grant program is intended to stimulate new interdisciplinary research collaborations by providing seed funding to obtain preliminary data or prototypes necessary for the submission of an external grant or industry opportunities,” says Deborah Backus, vice president of Research and Innovation at Shepherd Center. “As two leading research institutions, we know the potential for advancing rehabilitation therapies is even greater when we work together. We look forward to the solutions, treatments, and therapies that emerge from these initial seed grants.”
Experts from both institutions evaluated and scored seed grant applications based on the research’s innovation, approach, and potential for training opportunities, as well as its anticipated impact, prospects for commercial translation, and strategy for securing continued funding. This year, each awardee team received close to $50,000.
“We are very excited to launch this new seed grant program, which will spur ideas and propel research forward,” said Michelle LaPlaca, professor in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Georgia Tech lead of the Collaborative. “The complementary expertise of Georgia Tech and Shepherd Center researchers, combined with the motivation to find solutions for individuals with neurological injury and disability, is a winning formula for innovation.”
"Offering new hope for neurorehabilitation patients requires bringing together interdisciplinary researchers to explore new and creative ideas,” adds Chris Rozell, Julian T. Hightower Chaired professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the inaugural executive director of the Institute of Neuroscience, Neurotechnology, and Society (INNS) at Georgia Tech. “I'm excited to see the talent at these world class institutions coming together to develop new solutions for these complex problems."
This year’s seed grants were awarded to the following projects:
Audra Davidson
Research Communications Program Manager
Institute for Neuroscience, Neurotechnology, and Society
When McCallum learned about the Jim Pope Fellowship, he saw it as a tremendous opportunity. “Biomedical engineering research has so much potential to be translated into products and solutions that tackle unmet clinical needs, that could be shaped to enhance society in general,” he says. “It’s a collaboration between biology, medicine, and engineering. The Pope Fellowship is a unique opportunity to explore new projects dedicated to entrepreneurship.”
McCallum is one of five faculty members to receive the Jim Pope Fellowship, which supports faculty in becoming entrepreneurial instructors and mentors in CREATE-X. He hopes to leverage this fellowship to instill entrepreneurial confidence in biomedical engineering graduate students and faculty and help them translate their research into IP and healthcare-focused products to be used in and out of the clinic.
Since being named a fellow, McCallum has applied the funding to attend conferences to learn more about new methods for teaching commercialization and entrepreneurship, develop programming to enhance the student experience, increase student understanding and interest in entrepreneurship, and explore creative new projects he has envisioned while at Georgia Tech.
Establishing a New Commercialization Course
Beginning in the fall, he will teach a new course, Fundamentals of Biotechnology Commercialization, targeting BME graduate students. McCallum developed the curriculum, which begins with an overview of technology commercialization and the commercialization process, followed by modules on IP — how to protect one’s inventions; financing, with a focus on early-stage commercialization funding opportunities; and choosing a commercialization path.
“In the second part of the course, students will simulate a patent filing,” says McCallum. “It’s a really important step in the commercialization process. In future iterations of the course, I would love to have students file real disclosures and provisional patent applications with our Tech Transfer Office and have a licensing associate talk to them about managing the IP.”
BME Innovations Pivotal to Georgia Tech’s IP Ecosystem
McCallum sees Georgia Tech BME researchers as an important driver of innovation, and the Institute’s patent track record reflects their critical role: More than 21% of U.S.-issued patents to Georgia Tech have at least one BME inventor listed, according to the Office of Commercialization.
In the past year, he has already seen the value of infusing an entrepreneurial spirit into his curriculum. Annabelle Singer (BME) and Levi Wood (ME) were mentored by McCallum while they were developing an audiovisual device to help stimulate brain activity in patients with Alzheimer’s disease and epilepsy. Through this mentorship, Singer and Wood recognized possible use cases and commercialization pathways for their technology.
“Their device has potential applications in a wide range of other neurological conditions — to lessen the impact of these disorders on people in their everyday life,” says McCallum, adding, “I’m excited about Georgia Tech and Emory’s commitment to developing programs to enhance neuroscience and neural engineering research. There’s so much potential in that space, especially for being able to significantly impact diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and Huntington’s disease, as well as strokes and epilepsy. We are moving in the right direction with being able to improve the efficacy of the modalities to diagnose and treat these conditions.”
According to McCallum, his close connection to CREATE-X has given him a unique opportunity to see the impact of the program on the entrepreneurial endeavors of students and even faculty members.
“Previous fellows have been very successful with developing new educational programs and courses, as well as creating new spaces to spawn innovation, to instill entrepreneurial confidence in undergraduate students, and I want to use those successes as inspiration to make an impact on graduate student entrepreneurial confidence in BME, with much more to come,” he said.
As one of President Ángel Cabrera's four Big Bets, the drive for entrepreneurial education and opportunities has accelerated at Georgia Tech. In 2023, over a third of all Georgia Tech applicants selected entrepreneurship as an interest. Pope Fellows have a unique opportunity to help students tap into entrepreneurial pathways with CREATE-X, access an abundance of resources, and solve real-world problems. For faculty interested in joining, applications are open for the 2025 Jim Pope Fellowship until Sept. 2. For more information, visit https://create-x.gatech.edu/faculty/jim-pope-fellowship.
]]>Internal Contact
Breanna Durham
Marketing Strategist
]]>Few animals captivate people’s imagination like sharks. From the enduring cultural legacy of Jaws, which celebrated its 50th anniversary this year, to the continued popularity of the Discovery Channel's Shark Week, now in its 37th year, media portrayals of the apex predator can shape public perception, illuminate their role within Earth's ecosystems, and influence conservation efforts.
For Cameron Perry, every week is shark week. The Georgia Tech alumnus earned his Ph.D. in ocean science and engineering in 2024 and now leads the whale shark and manta ray initiatives at Georgia Aquarium.
As a 6-year-old listening to his mother read him Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and imagining the creatures Captain Nemo encountered, Perry had dreams of exploring the oceans for himself. When he saw his first whale shark in Georgia Aquarium's 6.3-million-gallon tank, he set out to learn as much as he could about the gentle giants and help to conserve the endangered species.
Perry's research has taken him around the world to observe whale shark behaviors in St. Helena and the Galapagos Islands, working to understand their migration habits, reproduction, and global ecology. While most people won't encounter sharks daily as he does, Perry sees the aquarium as well as the media as effective tools in showcasing sharks in the proper light.
"They are kind of mysterious and unknown. For many people, they've never encountered sharks in their lifetime, and part of that captivation could lead to fear, but education can turn that fear into wonder and awe. There's a narrative that these animals are mindless eating machines, but the more you learn, you realize that's not the case," he said. “These creatures have existed for 400 million years; they're older than trees, and understanding their role on our planet is important to changing the narrative around sharks."
Perry likens sharks to the white blood cells of the ecosystems in which they live, as they help prevent the spread of disease through the consumption of dead or diseased prey, contribute to population control, and provide balance to the ocean's biodiversity.
While at Georgia Tech, Perry worked alongside Regents’ Chair and Harry and Anna Teasley Chair in Environmental Biology Mark Hay, whose research has highlighted the role that sharks, and other large predators, play in habitat regulation within coral reefs. Hay explains that overfishing and other human activities have decimated shark populations in certain parts of the world, significantly affecting coral reefs and the populations that rely on them.
As the manager of a freshwater beach in Kentucky in 1975, Hay saw firsthand the impact that Jaws had on the beachgoing public at the time — including his lifeguards.
“I had about 25 lifeguards, and I made them swim a mile every day on our buoy line. After we all went to see Jaws, about half of them refused to swim the mile for over a week. They'd look at me and say, 'You can fire me. I'm not going in,' and I'd laugh and say, ‘We're in freshwater. Jaws isn't in there.’"
Hay said that while the movie remains a favorite of his, its depiction of sharks isn't representative of their behavior in the wild, as shark attacks are often accidents, not predatory actions. Like Perry, Hay believes that education can help protect sharks and bring a renewed focus to solving the ongoing issues facing the oceans.
"These ecosystems are degrading, and it's us that's doing it. What I am trying to do in my teaching is to go beyond cataloging the demise and take a more Georgia Tech-type approach by saying, 'If the bridge is broken, we have to be the ones to rebuild it,'" he said.
Hay keeps a saber-toothed tiger fossil on his desk as a constant reminder to himself that "everything I study was shaped by what used to be here," and how understanding nature can help preserve it for the future. Sharks are a captivating species, and both Perry and Hay stress that continued research and a commitment to education are the key to their conservation.
The newly endowed faculty position supports research and teaching that meaningfully advances the understanding and responsible stewardship of species and community dynamics amid evolving ecological interactions driven by global environmental change.
McGuire, an associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences and the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, was selected for her pioneering ecological research and exceptional teaching efforts.
“Jenny’s creative and fundamental research in spatial and community ecology is helping to position Georgia Tech as a leader in biodiversity and ecosystem conservation,” says Todd Streelman, professor and chair of the School of Biological Sciences. “Her appointment continues a trend in the School to award research endowments to our most promising early- and mid-career scientists and highlights the strong support and generosity of alumni such as the Teasley family.”
McGuire joined the Georgia Tech faculty in 2017 as an assistant professor. She earned a Ph.D. in Integrative Biology from the University of California, Berkeley, and completed postdoctoral research at the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center and the University of Washington.
Her research explores how plants and animals respond to environmental changes across space and time — from the ancient past to modern urban environments to the future. She leads the Spatial Ecology and Paleontology Lab, which integrates paleontological data, ecological modeling, and fieldwork to understand how biodiversity shifts in response to climate change and human development.
“Our goal isn’t just to preserve biodiversity, but also to help it thrive in a changing landscape,” says McGuire.
She plans to use the Teasley endowment to advance wildlife redistribution research in the Southeastern U.S.
“Georgia is a climate change highway,” explains McGuire. “Species are moving northeast toward the Appalachian Mountains, but roads, development, and fragmented habitats often block their paths.”
McGuire believes Georgia Tech is uniquely positioned to lead in this field, thanks to its technological strengths. She and her team will collaborate across campus and the Southeast, implementing cutting-edge biodiversity monitoring to better understand how species experience and respond to environmental changes.
“Conducting this research in urban areas like Atlanta — where green infrastructure can serve as vital wildlife corridors — is especially important,” adds McGuire.
The Teasley Professorship will also support student involvement at all levels. McGuire hopes to build a more connected and proactive research community that brings together students, ecologists, biologists, engineers, computer scientists, and community partners to address biodiversity challenges across the Southeast.
McGuire is a 2024 Cullen-Peck Fellow, a Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems Faculty Fellow since 2023, and an NSF CAREER Award winner. Her long-running outreach program, Fossil Fridays, invites students, families, and community members into the lab to sort and study real fossil specimens.
Looking ahead, she’s eager to explore the possibilities provided by the Teasley Professorship.
“It’s an incredible opportunity to elevate Georgia Tech’s role in shaping how we understand and protect life on a changing planet.”
Harry E. Teasley, Jr. graduated from Georgia Tech in 1959 with a degree in industrial engineering and worked for over 33 years for The Coca-Cola Company. In addition to the many leadership roles he held at Coca-Cola, Mr. Teasley is remembered for pioneering the first Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to be used in an industrial context. LCA was a pioneering analytical framework assessing environmental impacts of a product's life from "cradle to grave," and it is used across most major industries today.
The Harry and Anna Teasley Professorship in Ecology is the second Teasley Professorship supporting environmental research at Georgia Tech. School of Biological Sciences Regents’ Professor Mark Hay has held the Harry and Anna Teasley Chair in Environmental Biology since 1999.
Mrs. Teasley provided an official statement regarding the Harry and Anna Teasley Professorships at Georgia Tech:
“It was the intent of my late husband Harry E. Teasley Jr. that the funds he gave to Professor Mark Hay at Georgia Tech would be to support excellence in the field of environmental biology and to provide him with the freedom to study any concept, hypothesis, or organism that his experience-honed intuition guided him to.
With time, Professor Hay has proven to have been a very worthy choice and has made my late husband and I very proud through the breadth and depth of his studies, discoveries, and highest possible awards he has received. Once this was established, and along with the profound esteem both men had developed for each other, there was the wish to leave a legacy beyond the research: the human values and scientific approach to research that Professor Hay has demonstrated from the start.
Having been the unanimous choice of the evaluating committee, Associate Professor Jenny McGuire seems to be an excellent first recipient, and I am very proud to welcome her as I know my late husband would have been as well.
I wish her many successes in pursuing and teaching her very promising research, and I look forward to learning about the impact she will have in her field as we have through the years admired Professor Mark Hay’s achievements.
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To learn more about Transforming Tomorrow: The Campaign for Georgia Tech, visit transformingtomorrow.gatech.edu.
]]>The Shriners Children’s Research Institute will be in Science Square Labs, positioned across from Georgia Tech’s North Avenue Research Area. The institute will serve as a multidisciplinary innovation hub focused on advancing healthcare for children. Areas of research will include cell and gene therapies, robotics, artificial intelligence, medical devices, biologics, and data informatics.
"Georgia Tech is excited to welcome Shriners Children’s to Science Square,” said Georgia Tech President Ángel Cabrera. “We developed Science Square to create a leading hub for life sciences research and innovation, and Shriners’ decision to be here will accelerate our progress to drive medical innovation, create high-impact jobs, and greatly strengthen Atlanta's thriving innovation ecosystem.”
Georgia Tech’s proximity and research strengths were key factors in the decision to locate the institute in Atlanta. The collaboration is expected to enhance the region’s growing reputation in life sciences and advanced research. Projected to be the largest tenant of Science Square, Shriners Children's would put the facility at 82% occupancy.
Shriners Children’s, founded in 1922 by members of the Shriners International fraternity, focuses on orthopedic and neuromuscular conditions, burn injuries, spinal cord injury rehabilitation, and cleft lip and palate. The organization also maintains a strong commitment to education and research. In 2024, Shriners Children’s served patients from all 50 U.S. states, every Canadian province, and 128 countries.
This news comes after Tech’s recent announcement regarding the move-in of about seven biomedical research labs into Science Square.
Science Square, a mixed-use development adjacent to Georgia Tech’s Midtown campus, continues to attract leading organizations in healthcare, technology, and research. The addition of Shriners Children’s further establishes the district as a hub for global innovation and community impact.
]]>The award’s €80,000 endowment will support a research trip to Germany for up to a year — during which Kostka will collaborate with Professor Marcel Kuypers, director of the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in Bremen, Germany — to assess the role of marine plant microbiomes in coastal marine ecosystem health and climate resilience.
Kostka, who holds joint appointments in the School of Biological Sciences and School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, is also the associate chair for research in Biological Sciences. He was recently named the inaugural faculty director of Georgia Tech for Georgia's Tomorrow. The new Center, announced by the College of Sciences in December 2024, will drive research aimed at improving life across the state of Georgia.
“Human population is centered on coastlines, and coastal ecosystems provide many services for people,” Kostka says. “Although they cover less than 1 percent of the ocean, coastal wetlands store over 50 percent of the seafloor’s rich carbon reserves.” But researchers aren’t sure how these ecosystems will respond to a changing climate.
Microbes may be the key. Microbes play a critical role in maintaining plant health and helping them adapt to stressors, Kostka says. Similar to human bodies, plants have microbiomes: a community of microbes intimately associated with the plant that help it take up nutrients, stimulate the plant’s immune system, and regulate plant hormones.
“Our research indicates that plant microbiomes are fundamental to wetland ecosystem health, yet almost everything we know about them is from agricultural systems,” he adds. “We know very little about the microbes associated with these important marine plants that dominate coastal ecosystems.”
Kostka’s work in Germany will investigate how microbiomes help coastal marine plants adapt to stress and keep them healthy. From there, he will investigate how plant microbiomes contribute to the carbon and nutrient cycles of coastal ecosystems — and how they contribute to ecosystem resilience.
One goal of the collaboration is to exchange information on two types of marine plants that dominate coastal ecosystems worldwide: those associated with seagrass meadows and salt marshes.
“I’ve investigated salt marsh plants in the intertidal zone between tides, and my colleagues at the Max Planck Institute have focused on seagrass beds and seagrass meadows, which are subtidal, below the tides,” Kostka says. “While these two ecosystems have some different characteristics, they both cover large areas of the global coastline and are dominated by salt-tolerant plants.”
In salt marshes, Kostka has shown that marine plants have symbiotic microbes in their roots that help them to take up nitrogen and deal with stress by removing toxic sulfides. He suspects that these plant-microbe interactions are critical to the resilience of coastal ecosystems. “The Max Planck Institute made similar observations in seagrass meadows as we did in salt marshes,” Kostka explains. “But they found different bacteria.”
Beyond supporting excellence in research, another key goal of the Humboldt Research Award is to support international collaboration — something very familiar to Kostka. “I've been working with Professor Kuypers and the Max Planck Institute in Bremen for many years,” he says, adding that he completed his postdoctoral research at the Institute. “Max Planck's labs are some of the best in the world for what they do, and their imaging technology can give us an unprecedented look at plant-microbe interactions at the cellular level.”
“This project is also special because I am collaborating with other scientists in northern Germany,” Kostka adds. “The University of Bremen is home to the Center for Marine Environmental Sciences (MARUM), which is designated as a Cluster of Excellence by the German National Science Foundation, so there are a number of fantastic research centers in Bremen to work with.”
His hope is that this project will deepen collaboration between the research at Georgia Tech and research in Germany. “I look forward to seeing what we can uncover about these critical systems while working together.”
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Contact: Jess Hunt-Ralston
]]>As temperatures and humidity levels rise in the summer months, hydration and heat acclimatization become increasingly vital in maintaining physical and mental health and maximizing performance.
Research from the Exercise Physiology Laboratory, led by Professor Mindy Millard-Stafford, director, and Adjunct Professor Mike Sawka in the School of Biological Sciences, aims to help athletes and occupational workers better understand and prevent sweat loss and dehydration through the development of predictive tools.
Heat Acclimation Takes Time
According to Millard-Stafford, it can take between five and seven days of active exposure in hot conditions to properly acclimate the body to extreme temperatures. During this period, taking frequent breaks, along with proper hydration, is necessary while the body attempts to thermoregulate through the evaporation of perspiration. She also advises easing into a full workload or exercise routine, if possible, and seeking shade with intermittent breaks when working outdoors for long periods.
Sawka, retired senior scientist for environmental medicine, stressed that even those familiar with summer conditions can be susceptible to the symptoms of overheating following months of cooler temperatures or indoor activity. A predictive tool developed by collaborating with the University of Canberra, Australia, and recently published in the Journal of Comprehensive Physiology illustrates the benefits of heat acclimation based on environmental factors like temperature, humidity, duration of exposure, and other factors to inform their training and recovery plans.
"Just like you train for your activity, whether it's running or tennis or basketball, it's the same with adapting to environmental extremes. It's specific, and the tool allows you to input the unique conditions you will attempt to acclimate to," he said.
Staggering start times can also effectively mitigate injury and heat-related incidents until an individual is properly acclimated to the climate.
Staying Sharp
Studies from the Exercise Physiology Laboratory have revealed a drop in performance and cognitive function when subjects lose 2% of their body mass during exposure to heat. Without proper planning and fluid replacement, thermoregulation can be hindered, cardiovascular strain increases, and an individual's energy levels and performance can diminish. As more body water is lost, more significant symptoms can occur.
The amount of sweat lost during heat exposure is another key indicator of how much fluid an individual needs to avoid these symptoms. A sweat loss prediction calculator, recently published in the Journal of Applied Physiology and funded by Coca-Cola in collaboration with the University of Sydney and Canberra University, uses predicted output and other factors to help individuals plan hydration management strategies for exercise in hot conditions. Relying solely on thirst as a guide frequently leads to underhydration by nearly 50%; therefore, fluids should be consumed before, during, and after exposure to heat.
Understanding sweat loss can also help individuals avoid the dangers of overhydration. "This is not a 'more-is-always-better' kind of approach. You can run into problems by drinking too much over extended periods while exercising," Millard-Stafford said. "Hyponatremia, or water intoxication, can be lethal. You want to follow the Goldilocks theory of ‘not too much and not too little’ to maintain fluid balance with the sweat loss calculator.”
Elderly adults are at an increased risk of heat-related incidents, even if they aren't outside as much, due to differences in their body's ability to regulate temperature and potential adverse effects of medication such as diuretics. Older adults also have a diminished thirst sensation when dehydrated, so they tend to underdrink.
More Than One Way to Hydrate
Eighty percent of human hydration comes from consuming liquids, while the remaining 20% comes from food. Millard-Stafford recommends adding more fresh fruits and vegetables as a part of your diet over the summer.
Drinking fluids remains the primary combatant against dehydration, but she and Sawka also recommend pre-planning meals that include sodium to better retain fluids and nutrients. Humans generally rehydrate at mealtime, with food stimulating thirst and fluid consumption, helping cells maintain balance. Electrolytes in sports drinks can also help hydrate during and after sustained heat exposure.
For many, simply choosing not to go outdoors in the heat is not an option. So, Millard-Stafford and Sawka continue to share best practices and strategies to avoid heat-related illness and dehydration while optimizing performance.
“When I finished rehabilitation, my doctors and therapist and, most importantly, the insurance company said, ‘For someone with your condition, we feel like you've made all the improvement that you will, have a nice life,’” said Burkhart, who was left with limited feeling and mobility below the neck after a 2010 diving accident injured his spinal cord. “That didn't sit well with me.”
Hoping even a fraction of hand mobility would increase his independence, Burkhart turned to a clinical research trial on a brain-computer interface (BCI) designed to detect movement signals in the brain and send them to a computer to stimulate the arm muscles, bypassing the spinal cord in the hopes of restoring movement.
“I had had four and a half years of never thinking my hand was going to move again,” he recalled. When testing to see if he qualified for the study, researchers stimulated his hand muscles. “I saw my hand move, and that was all I needed to know — I was ready to risk it all for something that may or may not work.”
Burkhart’s story is one of many that reveal the deeply personal side of neurotechnology research. Centering lived experiences like his is central to the mission of the Institute for Neuroscience, Neurotechnology, and Society (INNS), a new Interdisciplinary Research Institute launching this July at Georgia Tech.
“If we want to build neurotechnology that truly serves people, their voices should be part of the scientific process from the very beginning,” said Chris Rozell, a professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and one of the many researchers at Georgia Tech working to understand and advance BCIs. “Hearing from individuals who live with these devices helps guide more ethical, inclusive, and effective research. The entire field benefits from inclusive conversations like these.”
Burkhart and three others recently shared their stories live on the Ferst Center stage at “Wired Lives: Personal Stories of Brain-Computer Interfaces, an event organized by Georgia Tech’s Neuro Next Initiative. Their stories gave over 200 attendees a rare, honest glimpse into the realities of neurological conditions and the path to brain-computer interface research.
“I was at a crossroads in my life at 47 years old,” said Brandan Mehaffie, who told his story of living with early-onset Parkinson’s disease. “I was trying to figure out, do I continue with the status quo and watch my career dwindle into nothing? Watch my life with my family, my kids, not being able to go on hikes or family vacations?”
Mehaffie eventually qualified for deep brain stimulation (DBS) treatment, a procedure where a pacemaker-like device is implanted into the brain to provide electrical stimulation. “It changed my life for the better in ways that I can't even tell you.”
When former U.S. Air Force Sgt. Jennifer Walden’s doctor told her about a clinical trial testing DBS as an epilepsy treatment, she jumped at the chance. “The 48 hours after those seizures are 48 hours where you don't want to live anymore.” Walden explained that her response to medication had dwindled after years of traditional treatment, increasing the frequency and severity of her seizures. “I feared suicide. It's something I didn't want to do, but if something happened in those 48 hours to end my life, I didn't care,” she said.
“I am now probably 99% seizure-free,” she beamed as she recalled her response to DBS on stage. “I don't know how I got so lucky in life, but I don't take it for granted.”
Common themes in their stories were resilience, hope, and a deep desire to give back.
“When I joined the study, it had no physical benefit to me, but that's not why I joined it,” said Scott Imbrie, who experienced a major spinal cord injury and participates in a clinical BCI study at the University of Chicago. “I decided to have invasive brain surgery and have electrodes implanted on my brain to help other people.”
Timed alongside the InterfaceNeuro conference at Georgia Tech, the gathering offered a rare opportunity for scientists, engineers, and clinicians to engage directly with the lived experiences of individuals using brain-computer interfaces — a perspective often missing from traditional research settings.
“It makes you think about how we ethically conduct research and how we recruit and interface with patients,” said Eric Cole, a postdoctoral researcher at Emory University, who was reminded that many patients participating in BCI research have been on a long, difficult journey before interacting with researchers. “We should remember to take their experiences seriously and respect them. They're giving up something for research — that part we should always remember.”
“Wired Lives” was one in a series of events highlighting the lived experience of individuals with neurological conditions organized by the Neuro Next Initiative, which has served as the precursor to INNS.
“A core mission of INNS is to consider how neuroscience and neurotechnology impact people’s lives,” said Jennifer Singh, associate professor in the School of History and Sociology, a member of NNI’s executive committee, and a co-organizer of the event. “Their stories matter when it comes to the types of science and technology we pursue and how they benefit the human condition. Many scientists and engineers may never encounter people living with neurological conditions outside of events like this. That will be a priority for INNS — to bring the expertise of lived experiences to the research process.”
Ian Burkhart’s lived experience reminded the audience that not every clinical trial has a happy ending. His BCI was ultimately removed after seven years as research funding ran short, taking his newly improved hand mobility with it. Despite this, Burkhart remained positive.
“I'm so glad I was able to take that risk and have that voluntary brain surgery and participate in this type of research because it's defined my life.” Burkhart went on to found the BCI Pioneers Coalition and his own nonprofit because of his research participation. “It gave me a lot of hope for the future, and a lot of hope that these types of devices are going to be able to help people and improve their quality of life.”
This event was produced in partnership with The Story Collider and made possible through support from Blackrock Neurotech and Medtronic.
]]>The study, “Evidence for a composite volcano on the rim of Jezero crater on Mars,” was published this May in the Nature-family journal Communications Earth & Environment, and underscores how much we have left to learn about one of the most well-studied regions of Mars.
Lead author Sara C. Cuevas-Quiñones completed the research as an undergraduate during a summer program at Georgia Tech; she is now a graduate student at Brown University. The team also included corresponding author Professor James J. Wray (School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences), Assistant Professor Frances Rivera-Hernández (School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences), and Jacob Adler, then a postdoctoral fellow at Georgia Tech and now an assistant research professor at Arizona State University.
“Volcanism on Mars is intriguing for a number of reasons — from the implications it has on habitability, to better constraining the geologic history,” Wray says. “Jezero Crater is one of the best studied sites on Mars. If we are just now identifying a volcano here, imagine how many more could be on Mars. Volcanoes may be even more widespread across Mars than we thought.”
Wray first noticed the mountain in 2007, while considering Jezero Crater as a graduate student.
“I was looking at low-resolution photos of the area and noticed a mountain on the crater’s rim,” he recalls. “To me, it looked like a volcano, but it was difficult to get additional images.” At the time, Jezero Crater was newly discovered, and imaging focused almost entirely on its intriguing water history, which is on the opposite side of the 28-mile-wide crater.
Then, Jezero Crater, due to these lake-like sedimentary deposits, was selected as the landing spot for the 2020 Perseverance Rover — an ongoing NASA mission seeking signs of ancient Martian life and collecting rock samples for possible return to Earth.
However, after landing, some of the first rocks Perseverance encountered were not the sedimentary deposits one might expect from a previously-flooded area — they were volcanic. Wray suspected he might know the origin of these rocks, but to make a case for it, he would need to show that the mountain on the edge of Jezero Crater could indeed be a volcano.
The opportunity presented itself several months after Perseverance landed when Cuevas-Quiñones applied to a Summer Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program hosted by the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences to work with Wray.
“A previous study led by Briony Horgan (professor of planetary science at Purdue University) had also suggested that Jezero Mons could be volcanic,” Cuevas-Quiñones says. “I began wondering if there was a way to home in on these suspicions.”
The team partnered with study coauthor Rivera-Hernández, who specializes in characterizing the surface of planets and their habitability. They decided to use datasets gathered from spacecraft orbiting Mars to compare the properties of Jezero Mons to other, known, volcanoes. “We can’t visit Mars and definitively prove that Jezero Mons is a volcano, but we can show that it shares the same properties with existing volcanoes — both here on Earth and Mars,” Wray explains.
“We used data from the Mars Odyssey Orbiter, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, and Perseverance Rover, all in combination to puzzle this out,” he adds. “I think this shows that these older spacecraft can be extremely valuable long after their initial missions end — these old spacecraft can still make important discoveries and help us answer tricky questions.”
For Cuevas-Quiñones, it also underscores the importance of REU programs and opportunities for undergraduates. “I was an undergraduate student at the time, and this was my first time conducting research,” she says. “It was fascinating to learn how different data sets could be used to decode the origin of a landscape. After Jezero Mons, it became clear to me that I would continue to study Mars and other planetary bodies.”
The discovery makes the crater even more intriguing in the search for past life on Mars. A volcano so close to watery Jezero Crater could add a critical source of heat on an otherwise cold planet, including the potential for hydrothermal activity — energy that life could use to thrive.
This type of system also holds interest for Mars as a whole. “The coalescence of these two types of systems makes Jezero more interesting than ever,” shares Wray. “We have samples of incredible sedimentary rocks that could be from a habitable region alongside igneous rocks with important scientific value.” If returned to Earth, igneous rocks can be radioisotope dated to know their age very precisely. Dating the Jezero Crater samples could be used to calibrate age estimates, providing an unprecedented window into the geologic history of the planet.
The take home message? “Mars is the best place we have to look in our solar system for signs of life, and thanks to the Perseverance Rover collecting samples in Jezero, the United States has samples from the best rocks in the best place on Mars,” Wray says. “If these samples are returned to Earth, we can do incredible, groundbreaking science with them.”
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s43247-025-02329-7
Funding: Cuevas-Quiñones was supported by Georgia Tech’s 2021 Research Experience for Undergraduates program sponsored by NSF and 3M corporation. Wray was supported by NASA funding for Co-Investigators on HiRISE and CaSSIS. CaSSIS is a project of the University of Bern and funded through the Swiss Space Office via ESA’s PRODEX program. The instrument hardware development was also supported by the Italian Space Agency (ASI) (ASI-INAF agreement 2020-17-HH.0), INAF/Astronomical Observatory of Padova, and the Space Research Center (CBK) in Warsaw. Support from SGF (Budapest), the University of Arizona Lunar and Planetary Lab, and NASA are also gratefully acknowledged. Operation support from the UK Space Agency is also acknowledged.
]]>“Joel is perfectly suited to lead this new initiative, especially since his research for a number of years has focused on Georgia and the vulnerability of both humans and ecosystems to climate change,” says Susan Lozier, dean of the College of Sciences, Betsy Middleton and John Clark Sutherland Chair, and professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. “I look forward to seeing how Science for Georgia’s Tomorrow takes shape and evolves under his thoughtful leadership.”
“I believe that my experience in research administration and in leading multidisciplinary research programs, along with the focus of my research on the vulnerability of Georgia’s communities to climate change, have prepared me well for this role,” says Kostka, who is the Tom and Marie Patton Distinguished Professor and associate chair for Research in the School of Biological Sciences with a joint appointment in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. “I am excited about the opportunity to lead the center as its inaugural director.”
Kostka’s appointment will begin on May 1, 2025.
Georgia's Tomorrow was created to foster research related to the health and resilience of Georgia’s people, ecosystems, and communities. Specifically, it will serve to boost research collaboration across the Institute, pave the way for public-private partnerships, and expand opportunities for Georgia students and communities to engage with Institute research.
Among Kostka’s first tasks as faculty director will be the development of the center’s strategic plan and the completion of two dedicated cluster hires from within the College of Sciences’ six schools.
Kostka is known for bridging biogeochemistry and microbiology to elucidate the role of microorganisms in ecosystem function. He has emerged as an international leader in ecosystem biogeoscience, providing a quantitative predictive understanding of how ecosystems function as well as determining the mechanisms by which climate change alters ecosystem resilience. He partners with a variety of stakeholders to conduct research on the restoration and adaptive management of coastal ecosystems in Georgia.
Kostka has also served as the PI of a range of multidisciplinary research projects focused on environmental change as well as scientific advisory boards including Georgia Tech’s Strategic Energy Institute, the NSF-funded Plum Island Estuary Long-term Ecological Research program, and the Johnston Center for Coastal Sustainability on Bald Head Island.
Kostka received a B.S. in Biology from Western Illinois University and a Ph.D. in Marine Science from the University of Delaware. Prior to joining Georgia Tech in 2011, he was a professor at the Department of Oceanography and Associate Director of the Institute of Energy Systems, Economics, and Sustainability at Florida State University.
Initial support for Georgia Tech for Georgia’s Tomorrow is generously provided by the College of Sciences Betsy Middleton and John Clark Sutherland Dean's Chair fund. Cluster hire funding has been awarded by Provost Steven W. McLaughlin. The initiative will also seek funding from state, national and international organizations, private foundations, and government agencies to expand impact. Philanthropic support will also be sought in the form of professorships, programmatic support for the center, and seed funding.
Georgia Tech for Georgia's Tomorrow initially launched under the working name Science for Georgia's Tomorrow (Sci4GT).
]]>]]>
Ph.D. candidate Md Abdur Rahaman’s dissertation studies brain data to understand how changes in brain activity shape behavior.
Computational tools Rahaman developed for his dissertation look for informative patterns between the brain and behavior. Successful tests of his algorithms show promise to help doctors diagnose mental health disorders and design individualized treatment plans for patients.
“I've always been fascinated by the human brain and how it defines who we are,” Rahaman said.
“The fact that so many people silently suffer from neuropsychiatric disorders, while our understanding of the brain remains limited, inspired me to develop tools that bring greater clarity to this complexity and offer hope through more compassionate, data-driven care.”
Rahaman’s dissertation introduces a framework focusing on granular factoring. This computing technique stratifies brain data into smaller, localized subgroups, making it easier for computers and researchers to study data and find meaningful patterns.
Granular factoring overcomes the challenges of size and heterogeneity in neurological data science. Brain data is obtained from neuroimaging, genomics, behavioral datasets, and other sources. The large size of each source makes it a challenge to study them individually, let alone analyze them simultaneously, to find hidden inferences.
Rahaman’s research allows researchers and physicians to move past one-size-fits-all approaches. Instead of manually reviewing tests and scans, algorithms look for patterns and biomarkers in the subgroups that otherwise go undetected, especially ones that indicate neuropsychiatric disorders.
“My dissertation advances the frontiers of computational neuroscience by introducing scalable and interpretable models that navigate brain heterogeneity to reveal how neural dynamics shape behavior,” Rahaman said.
“By uncovering subgroup-specific patterns, this work opens new directions for understanding brain function and enables more precise, personalized approaches to mental health care.”
Rahaman defended his dissertation on April 14, the final step in completing his Ph.D. in computational science and engineering. He will graduate on May 1 at Georgia Tech’s Ph.D. Commencement.
After walking across the stage at McCamish Pavilion, Rahaman’s next step in his career is to go to Amazon, where he will work in the generative artificial intelligence (AI) field.
Graduating from Georgia Tech is the summit of an educational trek spanning over a decade. Rahaman hails from Bangladesh where he graduated from Chittagong University of Engineering and Technology in 2013. He attained his master’s from the University of New Mexico in 2019 before starting at Georgia Tech.
“Munna is an amazingly creative researcher,” said Vince Calhoun, Rahman’s advisor. Calhoun is the founding director of the Translational Research in Neuroimaging and Data Science Center (TReNDS).
TReNDS is a tri-institutional center spanning Georgia Tech, Georgia State University, and Emory University that develops analytic approaches and neuroinformatic tools. The center aims to translate the approaches into biomarkers that address areas of brain health and disease.
“His work is moving the needle in our ability to leverage multiple sources of complex biological data to improve understanding of neuropsychiatric disorders that have a huge impact on an individual’s livelihood,” said Calhoun.
]]>Ph.D. candidate Md Abdur Rahaman’s dissertation studies brain data to understand how changes in brain activity shape behavior.
Computational tools Rahaman developed for his dissertation look for informative patterns between the brain and behavior. Successful tests of his algorithms show promise to help doctors diagnose mental health disorders and design individualized treatment plans for patients.
]]>“This is a meaningful prize that honors the longstanding impact of two Russian scientists, Anatol Feldman and Mark Latash. They founded the ISMC and were influential in building a community of scientists in the United States and Canada focused on motor systems research following in the tradition of Bernstein,” says Nichols, who retired from the School of Biological Sciences in 2023. “Receiving this prize is thrilling. It’s a cap on my career.”
Nichols will receive the award during ISMC’s biennial meeting this summer.
Nichols began his decades-long career researching the spinal cord, a key component of the central nervous system that relays information between the brain and periphery (muscles, joints, skin, etc.). He notes that the spinal cord is more than a simple communications highway; it contains neural networks that can exert some control.
“When we walk across the room, the spinal cord — not the brain — generates and sends detailed messages to our muscles. The brain simply says, ‘It’s time to walk across a room and avoid this or that obstacle.’ The spinal cord contains the machinery to do so,” explains Nichols.
Nichols' research initially centered on understanding how sensory information from the periphery is used by the spinal cord and brain to control movement. More recently, his focus shifted to possible real-world applications of his findings.
For example, Nichols collaborated with Dena Howland of the University of Louisville on research grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) that are centered on understanding spinal cord injury.
“Had it not been for my collaboration with Dena over the past 11 years, my work would have remained limited to the fundamental science of how the spinal cord and brain function. Our translational project has broadened the scope and impact of my research,” he adds.
According to Nichols, the NIH and VA grants were synergistic: the NIH grant focused on spinal cord function, while the VA grant centered on rehabilitation strategies following spinal cord injury. Through this complementary research, the team uncovered insights about the spinal cord — potentially revealing new treatment pathways to aid motor control recovery after spinal cord injury.
Nichols retired from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2023 after 16 years of service. Before joining the Institute in 2007 as chair of the School of Applied Physiology (now the School of Biological Sciences), he chaired the Department of Physiology at Emory University. Nichols received a B.S. in Biology from Brown University and a Ph.D. in Physiology from Harvard University.
]]>Freeman is one of only 10 Early Career Fellows and eight Fellows honored by ESA this year for advancing the knowledge and application of ecological science in a way that strengthens the field and benefits communities and ecosystems.
“Ecological science tells us how nature works, and my research uses birds as ‘canaries in the coal mine’ to learn how animals are responding to the rapid changes taking place on our planet,” he says. “I am delighted by this honor.”
Freeman studies why species live where they do and how their ranges are changing in response to climate change. He is recognized for integrating evolutionary and ecological approaches to address fundamental questions in bird biology and for communicating science to the public. Freeman leads the Mountain Bird Lab at Georgia Tech and launched the Mountain Bird Network, which aims to compile systematic survey data on mountain birds across the globe. He is currently developing “Tech Mountain,” a first-of-its-kind field site to study how birds and other organisms are responding to climate change.
Freeman, who joined the Institute in 2023, received a Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Cornell University.
]]>McShan, an assistant professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, has been awarded a $1.4 million CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to support this research.
“Protein-lipid assemblies carry out all sorts of biological functions, and harnessing their interactions could lead to powerful tools and treatments — but historically, they’ve been difficult to study,” McShan says. “Building resources for researchers and making this information accessible are critical steps in developing this field. This CAREER grant will enable me to expand the current knowledge base, while also allowing me to develop a class that will train the next generation of researchers, which is hugely important to me.”
The NSF Faculty Early Career Development Program is a five-year grant designed to help promising researchers establish a foundation for a lifetime of leadership in their field. Known as CAREER awards, the grants are NSF’s most prestigious funding for early-career faculty.
Crucial for nearly all biological processes, lipid-protein interactions play a key role in everything from immune responses to energy storage — but what drives their interactions has historically been difficult to map and understand.
McShan will use the CAREER grant to expand that knowledge base, experimenting in the lab to characterize protein-lipid interactions, and developing computational tools that can predict those interactions. The work will include an in-depth study of how lipids interact with different families of proteins that are important for immune system function.
“Right now, understanding protein-lipid assemblies is expensive in both time and lab materials,” McShan says. “My goal is to create computer models that can predict how these biomolecular interactions occur, what they look like, and how they contribute to cellular functions.”
The new model would allow researchers to quickly and inexpensively ‘experiment’ with molecules on a computer, vastly expanding the amount of research that could be conducted.
The project builds on McShan’s recent publication in the Nature-family journal Communications Chemistry, which showcased BioDolphin — a first-of-its-kind, comprehensive, and annotated database of protein-lipid interactions that are all integrated into a user-friendly web server and freely accessible to all.
It’s also adjacent to research funded by a Curci Grant from the Shurl and Kay Curci Foundation, which McShan was previously awarded for research on cutting-edge cancer treatments that involved identifying new cancer lipid signatures in tumor cells, and characterizing known cancer lipid antigens.
Additionally, the CAREER grant will support McShan’s initiatives to train the next generation of researchers through a new class centered around hands-on laboratory research and peer mentorship. Students will have the opportunity to pick a protein-lipid assembly, study it using computational and experimental biophysical methods, develop testable hypotheses, and — if successful — publish their results in peer reviewed journals.
The class will also pair undergraduate and graduate students into research teams. “I’m excited to see how a peer mentoring approach will add depth to the class,” McShan shares, explaining that graduate students will gain valuable mentoring experience in a collaborative research environment. “This is very different from typical mentoring experiences many graduate students have, which tend to be more along the lines of a TA experience rather than collaborating on hands-on research.”
“This type of class, to my knowledge, hasn’t been offered before, and there’s a lot of research that I’m doing to lay the groundwork for it,” McShan adds. “Hopefully, it can not only introduce students to lipid-based research — something typically lacking in many biochemistry curricula — but also to the type of collaborative mentorship we want to foster in research.”
]]>Contact: Jess Hunt-Ralston
]]>The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) selected Elizabeth Cherry and Katya Scheinberg as Class of 2025 fellows. The two Georgia Tech faculty join an illustrious class of 23 other researchers from around the globe in this year’s class.
SIAM selected Cherry to recognize her contributions to mathematical and computational modeling and extensive service to the SIAM community. She studies the electrical behavior of cardiac cells and tissue.
Cherry’s computer models and simulations improve understanding of cardiac dynamics in normal and diseased states. Using these tools, she designs advanced strategies for preventing and treating arrhythmias.
“SIAM has played a huge role in my professional development—the first conference I attended as a graduate student was a SIAM conference, and I’ve attended at least one SIAM conference almost every year since then,” Cherry said.
“Given this long history, it means a lot to me for SIAM to acknowledge my contributions in this way.”
Scheinberg, from Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering, was selected for her foundational contributions to derivative-free optimization and optimization applications in data science and her dedicated service to the optimization community.
[Related: Coca-Cola Foundation Chair Katya Scheinberg selected for 2025 Class of SIAM Fellows]
Cherry is the fifth faculty member from the School of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) to be selected as a SIAM Fellow.
Cherry’s announcement as a SIAM Fellow comes weeks after serving in a leadership role at a SIAM conference. She co-chaired the organizing committee of the SIAM Conference on Computational Science and Engineering (CSE25).
In 2023, SIAM members reelected Cherry to a second term as a council member-at-large. She began her three-year term in January 2024.
"SIAM Fellows are selected for deep mathematical contributions. Receiving Fellow status is a high honor for any applied mathematician," said Regents’ Professor Srinivas Aluru, senior associate dean of the College of Computing and Class of 2020 SIAM Fellow.
"Not only are Elizabeth's contributions technically outstanding, but her work also provides deep insights into the functioning of the heart and its abnormalities."
Cherry’s leadership and service extends outside of SIAM, influencing students and faculty across Georgia Tech.
In December, the College of Computing appointed Cherry as associate dean for graduate education. Before this appointment, she served as associate chair for academic affairs of the School of CSE.
With her new role as associate dean, Cherry continues serving as director of CSE programs at Georgia Tech.
In March 2024, Cherry was among five Georgia Tech faculty members selected for the ACC Academic Leaders Network (ACC ALN) Fellows program. The ALN program fosters cross-institutional networking and collaboration between ACC schools, increasing each institution’s academic leadership capacity.
Cherry was part of a team of Georgia Tech and Emory University researchers who won a Georgia Clinical and Translational Science Alliance award in 2023. The group earned the Team Science Award of Distinction for Early Stage Research Teams award for work that captures high-resolution visualizations of spiral waves that create heart arrhythmias.
SIAM will recognize Cherry, Scheinberg, and Class of 2025 fellows during a reception at the SIAM/CAIMS Annual Meetings this July in Montréal.
“It is such an honor to be recognized as a SIAM Fellow,” Cherry said. “I’m thrilled to join my CSE colleagues who have also received this recognition.”
]]>The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) selected Elizabeth Cherry and Katya Scheinberg as Class of 2025 fellows. The two Georgia Tech faculty join an illustrious class of 23 other researchers from around the globe in this year’s class.
SIAM selected Cherry to recognize her contributions to mathematical and computational modeling and extensive service to the SIAM community. She studies the electrical behavior of cardiac cells and tissue.
Scheinberg, from Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering, was selected for her foundational contributions to derivative-free optimization and optimization applications in data science and her dedicated service to the optimization community.
]]>Wang is a recipient of the 2025 Outstanding Dissertation Award from the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI). The award recognizes Wang for his lifelong work on democratizing human-centered AI.
“Throughout my Ph.D. and industry internships, I observed a gap in existing research: there is a strong need for practical tools for applying human-centered approaches when designing AI systems,” said Wang, now a safety researcher at OpenAI.
“My work not only helps people understand AI and guide its behavior but also provides user-friendly tools that fit into existing workflows.”
[Related: Georgia Tech College of Computing Swarms to Yokohama, Japan, for CHI 2025]
Wang’s dissertation presented techniques in visual explanation and interactive guidance to align AI models with user knowledge and values. The work culminated from years of research, fellowship support, and internships.
Wang’s most influential projects formed the core of his dissertation. These included:
“I feel extremely honored and lucky to receive this award, and I am deeply grateful to many who have supported me along the way, including Polo, mentors, collaborators, and friends,” said Wang, who was advised by School of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) Professor Polo Chau.
“This recognition also inspired me to continue striving to design and develop easy-to-use tools that help everyone to easily interact with AI systems.”
Like Wang, Chau advised Georgia Tech alumnus Fred Hohman (Ph.D. CSE 2020). Hohman won the ACM SIGCHI Outstanding Dissertation Award in 2022.
Chau’s group synthesizes machine learning (ML) and visualization techniques into scalable, interactive, and trustworthy tools. These tools increase understanding and interaction with large-scale data and ML models.
Chau is the associate director of corporate relations for the Machine Learning Center at Georgia Tech. Wang called the School of CSE his home unit while a student in the ML program under Chau.
Wang is one of five recipients of this year’s award to be presented at the 2025 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2025). The conference occurs April 25-May 1 in Yokohama, Japan.
SIGCHI is the world’s largest association of human-computer interaction professionals and practitioners. The group sponsors or co-sponsors 26 conferences, including CHI.
Wang’s outstanding dissertation award is the latest recognition of a career decorated with achievement.
Months after graduating from Georgia Tech, Forbes named Wang to its 30 Under 30 in Science for 2025 for his dissertation. Wang was one of 15 Yellow Jackets included in nine different 30 Under 30 lists and the only Georgia Tech-affiliated individual on the 30 Under 30 in Science list.
While a Georgia Tech student, Wang earned recognition from big names in business and technology. He received the Apple Scholars in AI/ML Ph.D. Fellowship in 2023 and was in the 2022 cohort of the J.P. Morgan AI Ph.D. Fellowships Program.
Along with the CHI award, Wang’s dissertation earned him awards this year at banquets across campus. The Georgia Tech chapter of Sigma Xi presented Wang with the Best Ph.D. Thesis Award. He also received the College of Computing’s Outstanding Dissertation Award.
“Georgia Tech attracts many great minds, and I’m glad that some, like Jay, chose to join our group,” Chau said. “It has been a joy to work alongside them and witness the many wonderful things they have accomplished, and with many more to come in their careers.”
]]>Wang is a recipient of the 2025 Outstanding Dissertation Award from the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI). The award recognizes Wang for his lifelong work on democratizing human-centered AI.
]]>“You can’t go it alone,” said Yunker, an associate professor of physics at Georgia Tech.
In January, Yunker co-founded the biotechnology startup TopoDx LLC, with David Weiss, an Emory University School of Medicine researcher and director of the Emory Antibiotic Resistance Center, and Yogi Patel, a Georgia Tech alumnus with a background in business development and bioengineering.
“Researchers often think that they have a good commercialization idea to help people, but that alone does not guarantee success,” said Yunker. “Look for partners with complementary skills who understand aspects of the commercialization process that you don’t. Find mentors with business and scientific backgrounds in the specific industry you want to enter.”
TopoDx has developed a microbial test to identify antibiotic resistance and susceptibility rapidly and accurately. Current tests produce a result in three to five days. TopoDx’s approach can gain a result within four hours. Every hour counts in treating serious infections. Delays in accurate treatment can increase antibiotic resistance, which is a global challenge, causing up to 1 million deaths a year.
The company’s testing method was inspired by a fundamental biophysics project in Yunker’s lab. His team was interested in understanding how bacterial colonies behave. They tested white-light interferometry, a technology that can measure bacterial colonies down to the nanometer level.
“White-light interferometry allowed us to identify changes in the topography of a colony that indicated larger changes in the volume of cells in the entire colony,” said Yunker. “We thought this might have practical applications.”
The next step was giving research talks at meetings and looking for collaborators. “I wanted to find someone with expertise on the bacteriology side, and I was very fortunate to meet David Weiss,” Yunker said, noting his proficiency in heteroresistance, a phenomenon where a small subset of a bacterial colony resists an antibiotic.
“If you have just one antibiotic-resistant cell in a hundred cells, it can cause treatments to fail,” said Yunker.
The two collaborators hoped to commercialize their technology, identifying heteroresistance in microbial samples. However, they needed guidance in creating a business model. They consulted Harold Solomon, an entrepreneur with Georgia Tech VentureLab and a principal in the Quadrant-i program, a specialized program helping Georgia Tech faculty and students commercialize research.
Solomon became a key mentor. He guided them away from an ill-advised partnership and instead introduced them to Yogi Patel, who became a co-founder and the company CEO.
This new collaboration provided the team with an important lesson — one that Yunker passes along to other researchers looking to commercialize their discoveries. “Seek expertise outside your field, be humble about your knowledge limitations, and view collaboration as a strategic partnership,” he says.
When Patel came on board, he conducted extensive interviews with more than 15 clinical professionals.
“You need to interview end users or purchasers of whatever solution you want to build,” said Patel. “Ask them if the problem you think you may have solved is a problem with scale, with a market need.”
Clinicians, Patel learned, did not see heteroresistance as a significant issue. Instead, the slow pace of antibiotic testing was identified as a major problem. Faster testing could allow clinicians to prescribe targeted drugs more quickly and accurately, reducing unnecessary antibiotic use and the risk of multi-resistant infections.
With this survey information, Patel asked Yunker and Weiss to rethink how their technology could be commercialized.
“A company must solve a real-world problem,” said Patel. “I recommended that we switch from heteroresistance to solving slow antibiotic testing. We could keep heteroresistance as something we can still do as a second or third priority.”
TopoDx’s new technology can measure, with single-nanometer accuracy, how bacterial colonies are responding to antibiotics in real time. This method could revolutionize how antibiotics are tested and prescribed. Testing would be conducted on a countertop device about the size of a large microwave. The co-founders envision the device as eventually being used by urgent care facilities and hospitals.
“We want to make microbial testing susceptibility accessible anywhere and everywhere,” said Patel.
Adam Krueger, once a Ph.D. student in Yunker's lab, has continued to refine the technology. Now a post-doctoral researcher, Krueger joined TopoDx in a technical leadership role to expand the technology’s capabilities for microbiological diagnostics.
“We will keep pushing the envelope forward scientifically while we try to commercialize the accomplishments that we have already made,” Yunker said. “We hope that some fundamental studies we are doing now out of scientific curiosity could lead to further commercial applications.”
Georgia Tech faculty members and graduate students, join the Quadrant-i Startup Launch Program to commercialize your research this summer: Over 12 weeks, you'll receive comprehensive support including guidance from experienced mentors, a $10,000 commercialization grant, and $150,000 worth of in-kind services. Showcase your innovation at Demo Day, where you'll have the opportunity to present to over 1,500 attendees, including industry leaders and investors. Apply today! Applications close April 11.
]]>Internal Contact:
Breanna Durham
Marketing Strategist
]]>“ASNR is a great society because of the range and breadth of its work, spanning cellular neuroscientists all the way to people that do massive multicenter phase three clinical drug trials,” says Wheaton, who has been involved in the organization for nearly two decades. “I am excited to serve as its president.”
Wheaton’s research interests initially drew him to ASNR — his research examines changes in the brain following a stroke or upper limb loss in order to inform the design of therapies that promote better limb function and prosthetics; his belief in the organization’s mission led him to join its leadership team.
“I got involved in the executive board because I appreciated the vision of the society and the opportunities it provides for engaging more people in neurorehabilitation-based research and training the next generation of neurorehabilitation researchers,” he says.
Wheaton was elected ASNR vice president in 2022 and worked during the subsequent three years to develop the organization’s strategic plan. When he assumes the role of ASNR president this April, he will implement that plan.
“We’re focusing on how to broaden and improve the sense of community within the society,” he shares. “Two of our goals are centered on enhancing our multidisciplinary focus and expanding engagement. We want to bring in not only people from other disciplines — as other disciplines are connected to the goals of neurorehabilitation — but also develop a culture that supports diverse groups of people entering the field.”
Wheaton recognizes the parallels between his work at ASNR and the College of Sciences: “It is very consistent with many of the things that I've always enjoyed at the College: creating a community that brings people together, that people want to be a part of, and that they see a home for themselves in,” he explains, referencing his efforts as director of the Center for Programs to Increase Engagement in the Sciences (C-PIES) and mentoring students in his research lab.
Wheaton joined the Institute as an assistant professor in the School of Applied Physiology (now the School of Biological Sciences) in 2008. He is currently a professor in Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech, an adjunct professor in the Department of Rehabilitation at the Emory School of Medicine, and a member of the Children’s Center for Neurosciences Research at the Emory Children’s Pediatric Research Center.
Wheaton received a B.S. in biology from Radford University and a Ph.D. in neuroscience and cognitive science from the University of Maryland, College Park. He studied neural function and recovery of motor control after stroke as a fellow at the Medical Neurology Branch of the National Institutes of Health and performed neuroscience research in aging and stroke motor control as a postdoctoral fellow at the Baltimore Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Maryland.
The American Society of Neurorehabilitation (ASNR) was created in 1990 to advance clinical care and the science of neurorehabilitation and neural repair. The 2025 edition of the ASNR annual meeting will take place in Atlanta in late April.
]]>Through a new review paper published in Nature, the researchers underscore how long-term studies have captured evolution's most elusive processes, including the real-time formation of new species and the emergence of biological innovations.
"Evolution isn't just about change over millions of years in fossils — it's happening all around us, right now," says James Stroud, the paper’s lead author and an Elizabeth Smithgall Watts Early Career Assistant Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech. "However, to understand evolution, we need to watch it unfold in real time, often over many generations. Long-term studies allow us to do that by giving us a front-row seat to evolution in action."
The paper, “Long-term studies provide unique insights into evolution,” is the first-ever comprehensive analysis of these types of long-term evolutionary studies, and examines some of the longest-running evolutionary experiments and field studies to date, highlighting how they provide new perspectives on evolution. For example, in the Galápagos, a 40-year field study of Darwin’s finches — songbirds named after evolutionary biology’s famous founder — documented the formation of a new species through hybridization. In the lab, a study spanning 75,000 generations of bacteria showed populations unexpectedly evolving completely new metabolic abilities.
“These remarkable evolutionary events were only caught because of the long-term nature of the research programs,” Stroud says. “Even if short-term studies captured similar events, their evolutionary significance would be hard to assess without the historical context that long-term research provides.”
“The most fascinating results from long-term evolution studies are often completely unexpected — they're serendipitous discoveries that couldn't have been predicted at the start,” explains the paper’s co-author, Will Ratcliff, Sutherland Professor in the School of Biological Sciences and co-director of the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Quantitative Biosciences at Georgia Tech.
“While we can accelerate many aspects of scientific research today, evolution still moves at its own pace,” Ratcliff adds. “There's no technological shortcut for watching species adapt across generations.”
The new paper also highlights a growing challenge in modern science: the critical importance of supporting long-term research in an academic landscape that increasingly favors quick results and short-term funding. Yet, they say, some of biology's most profound insights emerge only through multi-decadal efforts.
Those challenges and rewards are familiar to Stroud and Ratcliff, who operate their own long-term evolutionary research programs at Georgia Tech.
In South Florida, Stroud’s ‘Lizard Island’ is helping document evolution in action across the football field-sized island’s 1,000-lizard population. By studying a community of five species, his research is providing unique insights into how evolution maintains species’ differences, and how species evolve when new competitors arrive. Now operating for a decade, it is one of the world’s longest-running active evolutionary studies of its kind.
In his lab at Georgia Tech, Ratcliff studies the origin of complex life — specifically, how single-celled organisms become multicellular. His Multicellularity Long Term Evolution Experiment (MuLTEE) on snowflake yeast has run for more than 9,000 generations, with aims to continue for the next 25 years. The work has shown how key steps in the evolutionary transition from single-celled organisms to multi-celled organisms occur far more easily than previously understood.
Stroud says that the insights from these types of studies, and this review paper, are arriving at a crucial moment. “The world is rapidly changing, which poses unprecedented challenges to Earth's biodiversity,” he explains. “It has never been more important to understand how organisms adapt to changing environments over time.”
“Long-term studies provide our best window into achieving this,” he adds. “We can document, in real time, both short-term and long-term evolutionary responses of species to changes in their environment like climate change and habitat modification."
By drawing together evolution's longest-running experiments and field studies for the first time, Stroud and Ratcliff offer key insights into studying this fundamental process, suggesting that understanding life's past — and predicting its future — requires not just advanced technology or new methods, but also the simple power of time.
Funding: The US National Institutes of Health and the NSF Division of Environmental Biology
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08597-9
]]>Contact: Jess Hunt-Ralston
]]>Eighty-four graduate students from across the Institute participated in the poster competition, presenting their research to faculty and staff judges.
Congratulations to the poster competition winners from the College of Sciences:
A second-year Ph.D. student in computational chemistry, Berry works in the Sherrill Group.
“My research focuses on advancing computational quantum mechanical (QM) methods to feasibly model biological systems,” says Berry. “A specialized QM method developed in our group, F-SAPT, has the potential to reveal why certain drug molecules are favored over others, advancing the field of rational drug design. If we can accurately model protein-ligand interactions using quantum mechanics, it could ultimately pave the way for integrating these methods into computer-aided drug discovery workflows.”
Johnson is working on a Ph.D. in ocean science, studying how corals respond to environmental stressors as part of the Kubanek Group.
“Corals can't move,” says Johnson. “Instead of hiding when it is hot or bright out, they must respond physiologically. I use a technique called metabolomics to study the cellular physiology of corals and look for metabolic changes over time. Understanding what makes a coral more resistant to stress is useful for protecting and restoring coral reefs."
Kothari conducts research for the Kubanek Group and is pursuing a Ph.D. in biology. She attempts to discover natural dispersant-like biomolecules helpful for oil spill remediation.
“While some microbes can degrade and clean up oil from the contaminated sites, the process is often slow,” says Kothari. “However, dispersant-like biomolecules can speed up oil degradation by breaking oil into smaller droplets and increasing its availability to oil-degrading microbes. I aim to determine the chemical structure and function of such biomolecules and test their effectiveness in treating real-world environmental spills by applying them in small-scale experiments that mimic oil spill conditions. These biomolecules may offer an eco-friendly alternative to toxic chemical dispersants and improve existing bioremediation strategies to mitigate environmental damage caused by oil pollution."
As part of her Ph.D. studies, Monge works in the Garg Lab and focuses on understanding marine bacteria community dynamics.
“I am specifically trying to decipher how disease-causing bacteria (pathogenic) and bacteria that doesn’t harm its host (commensal) communicate with one another via chemical signals and the metabolic changes resulting from those interactions,” says Monge. “My ultimate goal is to identify beneficial traits from commensal bacteria that we can leverage to alleviate coral diseases.”
Scott-Sharoni is earning a Ph.D. in engineering psychology and works in the Sonification Lab.
“My research focuses on human interaction with AI technologies,” says Scott-Sharoni. “Specifically, I examine how different features of AI agents, such as anthropomorphism and social intelligence, impact how people psychologically perceive and behave in collaboration with these agents. This work helps improve the effectiveness of AI systems by aligning them to human social and cognitive expectations, leading to better joint performance and proper trust.”
A third-year Ph.D. student studying ocean science and engineering, Straight conducts research in the Kubanek Group.
“Sometimes I consider myself a microbial spy as I listen in to the chemical conversation between microbes and analyze how each microbe is affected by the interaction,” says Straight. “My current work is focused on the interaction between two types of marine microbes, bacteria and microscopic algae. By understanding how bacteria can be good or bad for algal growth, I hope to shed light on the mechanisms by which bacteria can help algae form algal blooms, including harmful algal blooms. This understanding could help scientists predict the beginning and ending of harmful algal blooms and keep beachgoers and shellfish farms safe from harmful algae.”
]]>Currently, there are nine students in the Cardiovascular Biomechanics Graduate Training Program at Emory and Georgia Tech (CBT@EmTech). The program offers two years of training in an assortment of disciplines, including cardiovascular biomechanics, mechanobiology, medical imaging, computational modeling, medical devices, therapeutics discovery and delivery, and data science.
“The goal of the program is to stimulate interdisciplinary training,” so we expose the students to multiple areas of research,” says Hanjoong Jo, CBT@EmTech director, Wallace H. Coulter Distinguished Professor.
“And we have a very diverse group of trainees interested in various aspects of cardiovascular research and medicine,” Jo added. “Four out of five students from our first cohort already have secured prestigious fellowships, demonstrating the caliber of the trainees in the program.”
The students from that cohort brought a wide range of experiences, interests, and ambitions to the program. Now in their final months as CBT@EmTech trainees, they took time to share their stories.
Principal Investigator: Michael Davis
Campus: Emory
Undergraduate: University of Texas-San Antonio
I've always had a passion for helping people and I feel that I’m doing this through my research on aortic valve tissue engineering for pediatric patients. Aortic valve disease is found in 1-2% of live births, because of congenital heart defects or infections. Current valve replacements are limited — for one thing, they’re incapable of growing and remodeling with the patient. This presents a need for a new tissue-engineered valve that can address these challenges. In the Davis lab, we’re working on a tissue engineered heart valve to provide a better, long-term solution.
Throughout my time in the CBT@EmTech program, I've gained a range of knowledge in the cardiovascular space, learning about atherosclerosis, peripheral artery disease, valve disease, as well as computational and imaging techniques to help solve some of these problems. As part of the program, we are also required to take an Advanced Seminar class in the cardiovascular area.
Through this class, I was able to participate in some interesting clinical observations in the Emory University Hospital cardiology department. For example, I watched a cardiologist perform a transesophageal echocardiogram. The doctor was checking for heart blockages on a patient who had atrial fibrillation. This procedure was followed by a cardioversion to restore a normal heart rhythm. This was a profound demonstration of biomedical technology in action that left a lasting impression on me.
Principal Investigator: Hanjoong Jo
Campus: Emory
Undergraduate: Duke University
As a PhD student in the Jo Lab, I am studying how disturbed flow influences transcriptional regulation in endothelial cell reprogramming and atherosclerosis. Our goal is to identify and develop therapeutics that target non-lipid residual pathways contributing to this widespread and deadly disease.
I initially became interested in this line of research due to a family history of cardiovascular disease. As an undergraduate, I worked in a tissue engineering lab where I employed stem cell and tissue engineering methods to model the circulatory system. A desire to further explore the role of mechanosensitive genes and proteins in cardiovascular disease led me to pursue a PhD in this field.
One of the most valuable aspects of the CBT@EmTech program has been the opportunity to connect with a network of students and faculty who are leaders in cardiovascular research. Through monthly meetings, we share our work and gain insights into the diverse engineering applications our interdisciplinary program brings to the field, with the common goal of improving cardiovascular health.
Principal Investigator: Lakshmi Prasad
Campus: Georgia Tech
Undergraduate: Georgia Tech
October 2024 marked the three-year anniversary of my uncle’s passing due to complications from a mild heart attack. His angiogram showed 30% vessel blockage, leading to heart surgery. Sadly, he suffered a brain stroke days later, resulting in deteriorating speech, muscle movement, and eventually death at 48. This personal tragedy brought urgency to my research questions: Can the risk of complications following cardiovascular treatments be predicted? Can underlying cardiovascular pathology be treated before it progresses to a heart attack or stroke? Was my uncle’s death preventable? These questions drive my cardiovascular research, focused on predicting post-procedural heart valve outcomes through computational modeling.
Being part of the prestigious CBT@EmTech program at Emory and Georgia Tech has significantly advanced my research journey. Learning from fellow trainees, presenting my research, and attending academia-focused workshops (like one about grant writing) have helped me stand out in heart valve computational modeling. The program, along with my PI, Dr. Lakshmi Prasad Dasi, and co-PI, Dr. John Oshinski, has provided the resources needed to translate my research from the lab to the clinic through regular meetings with clinicians and data transfer to and from hospitals. I am grateful for the opportunity to pursue my long-term goal of predicting risks of complications before cardiovascular treatments and helping prevent adverse clinical outcomes like those experienced by my uncle.
Principal Investigator: Simone Douglas-Green
Campus: Georgia Tech
Undergraduate Degree: University of Virginia
Peripheral artery disease (PAD) occurs when atherosclerotic plaque accumulates in limb arteries, blocking blood flow. Current interventions limit disease progression, but surgery is often needed to prevent critical limb ischemia. A less invasive approach promotes angiogenesis and arteriogenesis to strengthen collateral vessels and bypass blockages. The Hansen Lab studies satellite cells (SCs), which repair muscle fibers and release growth factors, as a potential PAD therapy.
My research focuses on improving the delivery of SCs using a special fibrin scaffold in a mouse model of blocked blood flow in the legs. By adjusting the properties of the fibrin scaffold, we can create an environment that helps these cells grow and renew themselves. We study how quickly the fibrin forms to ensure the cells stay where we inject them and how it breaks down to keep a steady supply of renewing SCs. We believe that with fibrin, the cells will move into the damaged tissue, repair muscle fibers, and release growth factors to encourage new blood vessel growth.
The goal is to create alternative treatments for PAD that prevent disease progression and improve patients' quality of life.
The CBT@EmTech program has given me a supportive network of peers and mentors, enhancing my growth as a researcher. The program chairs have tailored the curriculum to our needs and allowed us to shape it. For example, I’ve had the privilege of co-planning our biannual retreat. We recruited guests for two panels and invited a guest speaker for a storytelling workshop. This retreat shows how the program imparts knowledge beyond research, aiming to improve our scientific storytelling and self-presentation skills, valuable for any career.
Principal Investigator: Simone Douglas-Green
Campus: Georgia Tech
Undergraduate Degree: University of Virginia
As a researcher, I am challenged to explore the unknown. Moreover, my role as an engineer is rooted in using knowledge that has already been conceptualized. Combining these perspectives as a biomedical engineer has led me to pursue research with an emphasis on improving human health.
Today, cardiovascular diseases represent the global leading cause of death. While this glaring statistic indicates the egregious burden of cardiovascular diseases, my parents' lived experiences with cardiovascular diseases is what drives me to use my life’s work to address critical challenges at the intersection of the cardiovascular field and biomedical engineering.
My research seeks to alleviate cardiovascular diseases by using nanoparticles to target endothelial cells, which line the innermost layer of blood vessels and contribute to blood vessel function. The Cardiovascular Biomechanics and Mechanobiology Program at Emory (CBT@EmTech) has given me an avenue to pursue this research.
Through my CBT@EmTech co-mentorship, I have developed a foundation in endothelial cell biology and atherosclerosis. I have also been challenged to think critically about how my research benefits both science and society through my exposure to prominent cardiovascular researchers. My experiences with CBT@EmTech have made me eager to use my training to pursue a postdoc in the and eventually lead a lab answering critical questions in cardiovascular research.
Led by Loren Williams (Georgia Institute of Technology) and Moran Frenkel-Pinter (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) and published in Nature Chemistry, the team’s paper investigates how chemical mixtures evolve over time, offering new insights into the origins of biological complexity.
“Our research applies concepts from evolutionary biology to chemistry,” explains Williams, a professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. “We know that everything in biology can be reduced to chemistry, but the idea of this paper is that in the right conditions, chemistry can evolve, too. We call this chemical evolution.”
While much research has focused on individual chemical reactions that could lead to biological molecules, this study establishes an experimental model to explore how entire chemical systems evolve when exposed to environmental changes.
“Chemical evolution is chemistry that keeps changing and doing new things,” Williams explains. “It’s unending chemical change, but with exploration of new chemical spaces. We wondered if we could set up a system that does that without introducing new molecules ourselves — instead we had the system oscillate between wet and dry conditions.”
In nature, these systems might look like a landscape where water condenses, and then dries out, over and over again — conditions that arise naturally from the day-night cycles of our planet.
The study identified three key findings — chemical systems can continuously evolve without reaching equilibrium, avoid uncontrolled complexity through selective chemical pathways, and exhibit synchronized population dynamics among different molecular species. This suggests that environmental factors played a key role in shaping the molecular complexity needed for life to emerge.
“This research offers a new perspective on how molecular evolution might have unfolded on early Earth,” says Frenkel-Pinter, assistant professor in the Institute of Chemistry at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “By demonstrating that chemical systems can self-organize and evolve in structured ways, we provide experimental evidence that may help bridge the gap between prebiotic chemistry and the emergence of biological molecules.”
Beyond its relevance to origins-of-life research, the study’s findings may have broader applications in synthetic biology and nanotechnology. Controlled chemical evolution could be harnessed to design new molecular systems with specific properties, potentially leading to innovations in materials science, drug development, and biotechnology.
This research is shared jointly with The Hebrew University of Jerusalem newsroom.
]]>Georgia Tech’s Space Exploration and Analysis Laboratory (SEAL) has developed new algorithms that are headed to the Moon, as part of the Intuitive Machine’s IM-2 mission. The mission is sending a Nova-C class lunar lander named Athena to the Moon’s south pole region to test technologies and collect data that aim to enable future exploration. The mission is part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative.
SEAL, led by AE professor John Christian, collaborated with Intuitive Machines to develop algorithms to guide Athena to the Shackleton crater: a region known for its limited sunlight and cold temperatures. In coordination with SpaceX, launch of the company’s IM-2 mission is targeted for a multi-day launch window that opens no earlier than February 26 from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Athena will transport NASA's PRIME-1 (Polar Resources Ice Mining Experiment-1) which includes two instruments: a drill and spectrometer. The Regolith and Ice Drill for Exploring New Terrain (TRIDENT) is designed to drill up to three feet of lunar surface to extract soil, while the mass spectrometer (MSOLO) will measure the amount of ice in the soil samples.
After launch, Athena will separate from the rocket and begin a roughly five-to-four-day cruise to the Moon’s orbit. The lander will orbit the Moon for approximately three to 1.5 days before its descent to the south pole.
In Fall 2022, Research Engineer Ava Thrasher (AE 2022, M.S. AE 2024) began working on IM-2, developing new algorithms to guide Athena to the Shackleton crater using optical terrain relative navigation (TRN). Her approach looked at developing a crater detection algorithm (CDA) using image processing techniques that capture crater center locations on the Moon which are then used to determine Athena's position estimations.
Then, she developed a crater identification algorithm (CIA) to match craters found in the image to a catalog of known lunar craters. By using CDA and CIA in tandem, Athena is able to estimate its location and orientation with a single photo, autonomously, and in real-time.
“We wanted to strike a balance between creating something that would be done quickly on board, but also something that was reliable,” she explained. “We ended up using simple crater geometry and knowledge of the sun angle to render what we expect a crater to look like in the image.”
The CDA finds craters by calculating a similarity score between the image and the rendered crater at each image pixel point. This process, also known as template matching, marks crater centers at points of very high similarity. CIA then uses these crater center locations to match them with known craters in a catalog. By matching pixel locations in an image to known three-dimensional positions on the Moon, the spacecraft is able to produce an estimation of its position.
After two years of research and testing, Thrasher, Christian, and the Intuitive Machines team successfully demonstrated the CDA and CIA on synthetic imagery and Thrasher handed off the algorithms to Intuitive Machines to convert them into flight software for Athena.
She first got involved with optical navigation (OPNAV) research after she took AE 4342: Senior Design with Prof. Christian as an undergraduate student. “I found optical navigation to be really interesting. I liked the idea of being able to figure out where you are and how you’re moving in real-time based on a picture,” she said. In Fall 2022, she started her first graduate semester at Tech and was a new member of SEAL, where she quickly began demonstrating the idea of detecting craters and prototyping the CDA and CIA programmed into Athena.
After she graduated with her master’s degree in aerospace engineering in May 2024, she loved what she did so much, that she decided to stay and work as a full-time research engineer in SEAL. Now, she’s gearing up to see her work make its way to the Moon.
“It's been really exciting and humbling to contribute to the massive task of putting a lander on the Moon. I never really appreciated the scale of work and collaboration needed to make it happen until I was lucky enough to be a part of it. I'll certainly be watching the launch and tracking the mission with great anticipation of both the engineering and scientific results,” said Thrasher.
As part of a multi-year collaboration, Christian helped develop a key navigation algorithm for Intuitive Machines’ first space mission (IM-1) which launched a Nova-C lunar lander named Odysseus to the Malapert A crater on the Moon’s south pole region; about 11 miles away from IM-2’s targeted Shackleton crater.
The IM-1 mission launched from Kennedy Space Center on February 15, 2024 and soft-landed on the Moon on February 22, 2024---making Odysseus the first U.S. lunar landing since the Apollo program and the first-ever successful commercial lunar landing. Odysseus had a rougher-than-expected soft landing due to an anomaly with the altimeter that was supposed to provide insight into the lander’s height above the lunar surface. In the absence of these altimeter measurements, Odysseus relied critically on the visual odometry technique that was jointly developed by Christian and Intuitive Machines.
Despite these challenges, Odysseus captured images of the Moon during landing and operated on the lunar surface for 144 hours before entering standby mode.
Prof. Christian and SEAL have more projects on the horizon to develop new technologies for exploring our Moon, other planets, asteroids, and the solar system. These technologies will enable future scientific missions to safely explore challenging destinations and answer scientific questions that were impossible with yesterday’s technology.
SEAL, led by Professor John Christian, collaborated with Intuitive Machines to develop algorithms to guide Athena to the Shackleton crater: a region known for its limited sunlight and cold temperatures. Research Engineer Ava Thrasher (AE 2022, M.S. AE 2024) led Georgia Tech's SEAL team on developing the algorithms used for Athena's flight software.
]]>6:30 p.m. EST launch coverage begins
7:02-7:34 p.m. EST launch window
Stream on NASA+
]]>Intuitive Machines' IM-2 mission lunar lander, Athena, in the company's Lunar Production and Operations Center. Credit: Intuitive Machines
“This is a very well-deserved recognition for Srinivas as he joins the illustrious list of past recipients of the Charles Babbage Award,” said Vivek Sarkar, the John P. Imlay Jr. Dean of the College of Computing.
“Srinivas’ accomplishments reflect positively on himself and all of us at Georgia Tech. This is indeed an occasion to celebrate.”
The IEEE Computer Society presents the Babbage Award annually. The award recognizes significant contributions to parallel computation.
[Related: IEEE-CS interview with Aluru on his award-winning career]
The award is named after Charles Babbage, widely considered to be a “father of the computer.” Babbage and Ada Lovelace are credited with inventing the first mechanical computers in the 19th century, eventually leading to more complex designs.
Aluru is a pioneer in computational genomics, an area of biology that studies the order, structure, function, and evolution of genetic material. Throughout his career, his lab has developed software and algorithms to analyze the genomes of several species of plants, animals, and microorganisms.
Genome base pair sizes can number into the billions, which can be interpreted as massive datasets. Ever since the early years of his career, Aluru championed parallel computing as a practical approach to studying these challenging datasets.
Parallelism divides a large problem into smaller ones, allowing different processors on a computer to solve the simpler tasks simultaneously. This approach breaks a genome into smaller segments, allowing computers to efficiently transcribe genetic code and identify insightful patterns.
“Srinivas Aluru’s groundbreaking contributions have profoundly shaped the intersection of parallel processing and bioinformatics. His work is nothing short of extraordinary,” said Yves Robert, awards chair of the IEEE Computer Society Babbage Committee.
“It is a privilege to recognize a researcher whose work will undoubtedly have a lasting impact for generations to come.”
IEEE selected Aluru as a fellow in 2010, and he recently served as the editor-in-chief of the journal IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics.
Aluru has fellowships with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics. He is a past recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, IBM Faculty Award, and the Swarnajayanti Fellowship from the government of India.
Along with receiving the Babbage Award, Aluru’s leadership acumen earned him the recent appointment as senior associate dean of Georgia Tech’s College of Computing.
Aluru helped form the Institute for Data Engineering and Science (IDEaS) at Georgia Tech in 2016, serving as co-executive director. Later, he became the institute’s sole executive director from 2019 to 2025. Regents’ Professor C. David Sherrill became interim executive director of IDEaS when Aluru accepted his associate dean appointment.
Aluru started at Georgia Tech in 2013 to join the new School of Computational Science and Engineering, established in 2010. He served as the School’s interim chair from 2019 to 2020. In 2023, the University System of Georgia appointed Aluru as Regents’ Professor.
Aluru completed his Ph.D. at Iowa State University in 1994. He then worked at Ames National Laboratory, Syracuse University, and New Mexico State University before returning to his alma mater from 1999 to 2013.
“This award is a recognition of over two and a half decades of research efforts in my group, reflecting not only my work but that of numerous graduate students and collaborators,” said Aluru.
“I hope the award draws attention to the importance of parallel methods in computational biology and points key advancements to new entrants in the field.”
]]>The interdisciplinary degree is a joint effort across the Colleges of Sciences, Computing, and Engineering. The program expects to enroll its first graduate students in Fall 2025, pending approval by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges.
The Institute Curriculum Committee has also approved a new Minor in Neuroscience, set to become available in the Georgia Tech 2024-2025 Catalog.
The Ph.D. and Minor offerings build on the recently launched Neuro Next Initiative in Research, and the established Undergraduate Program in Neuroscience, respectively.
Approved by the Board of Regents in 2017, the interdisciplinary B.S. in Neuroscience degree in the College of Sciences enrolled more than 400 undergraduate students in 2022, and has been the fastest growing undergraduate major at Georgia Tech.
The B.S. in Neuroscience is also key to a strong ecosystem of undergraduate neuroscience education across the state, which includes peer programs at Mercer University, Augusta University, Georgia State University, Agnes Scott College, and Emory University.
The new doctoral degree will provide a path for the rapidly growing pipeline of in-state neuroscience undergraduate students and young alumni — while also welcoming a wider slate of graduate researchers to campus.
The Ph.D. Program’s mission is focused on educating students to advance the field of neuroscience through an interdisciplinary approach, with scientists and engineers of different backgrounds — ultimately integrating neuroscience research and technological development to study all levels of nervous system function.
Biological Sciences Professor Lewis A. Wheaton, who chaired the Ph.D. Program Planning Committee, shares that a cohort model will fuse “experimental and quantitative skill development, creating opportunities for students to work in science and engineering labs to promote collaborations, while also fostering a program and community that’s unique to the state and against national peer offerings.”
Wheaton explains that the new Ph.D. aims to equip graduates for a wide range of employment opportunities and growing specializations, including computational neuroscience, neurorehabilitation, cultural and social neuroscience, neuroimaging, cognitive and behavioral neuroscience, developmental neuroscience, and neurolinguistics.
The new degree will also help meet the country’s growing demand for a neuro-centric workforce. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, job growth for medical scientists (including neuroscientists) tracked around 13% between 2012 and 2022, faster than the average for all tracked occupations.
Wheaton adds that the program will equip neuroscientists to conduct research that can significantly improve lives.
The Planning Committee anticipates a tentative February 1, 2025 application deadline for Fall 2025 enrollments — and encourages students with the following interests to learn more and apply in the coming school year:
Director search
The participating Colleges will soon conduct a search for a program director, engaging a tenured member of the Georgia Tech faculty to serve as the new program’s administrator. A graduate program committee composed of five faculty members and mentors across the Colleges of Sciences, Computing, and Engineering, will also be created.
During their April 2024 meeting, Regents also announced budget approvals and tuition changes for Georgia's 26 member institutions.
The Ph.D. Program Planning Committee included the following faculty:
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Press Contact:
Jess Hunt-Ralston
Director of Communications
College of Sciences at Georgia Tech
Neuro Next Initiative:
Sarah Peterson
Program Manager
GT Neuro
Audra Davidson
Research Communications Program Manager
Neuro Next Initiative at Georgia Tech
The Institute for Neuroscience, Neurotechnology, and Society (INNS) at Georgia Tech has initiated an internal search for its inaugural executive director. This new Interdisciplinary Research Institute (IRI) will build upon the foundation laid by the Neuro Next Initiative, fostering cutting-edge research and innovation at the intersection of neuroscience, neurotechnology, and societal impact.
At the newly established IRI, the executive director will profoundly shape a unifying vision for neuroscience research and innovation at Georgia Tech, integrating various disciplines and fostering collaboration across campus. They will translate research into practical applications, engage students, and connect them to industry networks. The ideal candidate will have a visionary, innovative, and entrepreneurial leadership style, with experience in leading large-scale, interdisciplinary research initiatives, securing external funding, and promoting large-scale initiatives both internally and externally.
INNS aims to advance our understanding of the brain and nervous system, develop transformative technologies, and address critical societal challenges through interdisciplinary collaboration and engagement. INNS is dedicated to advancing innovative research and educational programs in neuroscience, neurotechnology, and society; fostering a broad and engaged community; and empowering society through public engagement and responsible technology deployment.
Farzaneh Najafi, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Biological Sciences(SBS) , recently received multiple awards that will enable her to dig deeper into the molecular origins of cognitive processes, with the help of interdisciplinary teams.
“If we want to understand cognition, we really have to start small: at the level of molecules, genes, and the genome, and then work our way up to systems, behavior, and cognition,” says Najafi. “Impactful discoveries happen when people from different disciplines come together and collaborate. That’s how we make real breakthroughs.”
Two of her recent awards stem from the third and final year of the Scialog: Molecular Basis of Cognition initiative. Funded by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement (RCSA), the Frederick Gardner Cottrell Foundation, and the Walder Foundation, this initiative has provided 48 multidisciplinary teams with more than $2.4 million to advance this area of research.
“It’s exciting that Farzaneh has won not just one, but two team-based Scialog awards,” said SBS School Chair Jeffrey (Todd) Streelman. “Solving big problems in neuroscience often requires teams, and Farzaneh is well-placed to apply this in her research program.”
With additional funding from the Whitehall Foundation and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Najafi is set to lead several interdisciplinary projects to uncover the role of the cerebellum and neocortex (the brain’s outer layer) across distinct cognitive processes.
“At the end of the day, the goal is to develop effective therapeutics,” says Najafi, whose work has long aimed to better understand and treat psychiatric and neurological disorders. “To develop targeted treatments, we have to identify the molecules that are at the core of these cognitive processes.”
Throughout her career, Najafi has focused on how the brain makes and uses predictions to influence learning and behavior, with a particular focus on an area in the back of the brain called the cerebellum.
“Without those predictions, our perceptions and actions would be significantly delayed, which could impact our survival,” explains Najafi. “Learning happens when we update those predictions to better align with the world around us.”
Najafi will bring that cerebellar expertise to two collaborative teams with the Scialog initiative.
Working with researchers from Stanford University and Case Western Reserve University, one of Najafi’s Scialog projects will focus on how sleep deprivation alters the 3D structure of genetic material in different species’ cerebellum— and investigate potential mechanisms to reverse those changes.
Her second project, in collaboration with researchers from University of California San Francisco and Duke University, explores how the brain chemical norepinephrine affects cerebellar activity across species. This research aims to understand the cerebellum's role in behavioral flexibility and adaptation, revealing how these chemical signals influence various brain functions.
Formed at the October 2024 Scialog meeting, Najafi’s two collaborative teams are part of an RCSA initiativethat unites early career scientists in advancing basic science and developing high-risk, high-reward research projects. The Scialog: Molecular Basis of Cognition initiative, begun in 2022, annually gathered around 50 early career researchers to create collaborative proposals.
“The best part of the Scialog meeting was connecting with people from all kinds of disciplines. They worked with different species, used a variety of experimental and computational tools, and some attendees came from non-neuroscience backgrounds,” says Najafi. “I had no idea that these were the topics I was going to write about — they only came about because of the inspiring conversations I had at the meeting. I really loved the experience.”
Both Scialog teams are highly interdisciplinary, with researchers bringing expertise in different techniques and species to the team. Even within her own lab, Najafi attributes impactful research to interdisciplinary teams.
“The only way to solve big questions in neuroscience is through an interdisciplinary approach,” says Najafi, who is affiliated with two Interdisciplinary Research Institutes (IRI) at Georgia Tech: the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience and the Neuro Next Initiative, a nascent IRI in neuroscience and society. “What’s great about Georgia Tech is its strong emphasis on interdisciplinary collaboration. With these research institutes, the infrastructure is already in place, and they're actively working to expand it.”
]]>Middlemen get a bad rap for adding cost and complications to an operation. So, eliminating the go-betweens can reduce expense and simplify a process, increasing efficiency and consumer happiness.
James Dahlman and his research team have been thinking along those same lines for stem cell treatments. They’ve created a technique that eliminates noisome middlemen and could lead to new, less-invasive treatments for blood disorders and genetic diseases. It sidesteps the discomfort and risks of current treatments, making life easier for patients.
“This would be an alternative to invasive hematopoietic stem cell therapies — we could just give you an IV drip,” said Dahlman, McCamish Early Career Professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering. “It simplifies the process and reduces the risks to patients. That’s why this work is important.”
Dahlman and a team of investigators from Georgia Tech, Emory University, and the University of California, Davis, published their approach in the journal Nature Biotechnology.
Hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) are like parent cells. Residing in the bone marrow, they produce all types of cells needed to sustain the blood and immune systems. Their versatility makes HSCs a valuable therapeutic tool in treating genetic blood diseases, such as sickle cell anemia, immune deficiencies, and some cancers.
HSC therapies usually involve extracting cells from the patient’s bone marrow and re-engineering them in a lab. Meanwhile, the patient endures chemotherapy to help prepare their body to receive the modified HSCs.
“These therapies are effective but also hard on the patients,” Dahlman said. “Patients undergo chemotherapy to wipe out their immune systems so the body will accept the therapeutic cells without a fight. The procedure can be life-threatening. We’re hoping to change that.”
HSCs can also be modified directly inside the body. The procedure uses lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) to carry genetic instructions to the stem cells. The LNPs have targeting ligands attached — molecules designed to find specific target cells. Precisely engineering them adds layers of time, complexity, and cost to the process. They are, like extraction from bone marrow and chemotherapy, another middleman.
The researchers wanted something simpler. They found it in a specific nanoparticle called LNP67.
“Unlike other nanoparticle designs, this one doesn’t require a targeting ligand,” Dahlman said. “It’s chemically simple, which means it’s easier to manufacture and opens the door to eventually scaling production, like mRNA vaccines.”
The key to LNP67’s success is its ability to dodge the liver, the body’s primary blood filter. Foreign invaders, even helpful invaders delivered through an IV as medicine, can be captured by a healthy liver.
“The liver absorbs almost everything,” Dahlman said. “But, by reducing what it captures by even as little as 10 percent, we can double delivery to other tissues where the nanoparticles and their payloads are needed.”
The researchers developed 128 unique nanoparticles, narrowing the list down to 105 LNPs that didn’t have targeting ligands. These were ultimately screened and evaluated for their performance in delivering genetic instructions (in the form of mRNA) effectively and safely.
LNP67 emerged as the best performer thanks to its stealthy design. For example, the surface is designed to repel proteins and other molecules that would mark the LNP for capture by the liver. This feature helped the particles circulate more evenly in the body and reach the HSCs.
“We achieved low-dose delivery without a target ligand, which is exciting,” Dahlman said. “This is something we’ve been working toward for years, and I’m very happy we got there.”
Citation: Hyejin Kim, Ryan Zenhausern, Kara Gentry, Liming Lian, Sebastian G. Huayamares, Afsane Radmand, David Loughrey, Ananda Podilapu, Marine Z. C. Hatit, Huanzhen Ni, Andrea Li, Aram Shajii, Hannah E. Peck, Keyi Han, Xuanwen Hua, Shu Jia, Michele Martinez, Charles Lee, Philip J. Santangelo, Alice Tarantal, James E. Dahlman. Lipid Nanoparticle Study, Nov. 2024, Nature Biotechnology.
Funding: This research was supported by the National Institutes of Health grants UL1TR002378, UH3-TR002855, U42 OD027094, and TL1DK136047; National Science Foundation grant 0923395. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of any funding agency.
Competing Interests: James Dahlman, Marine Z. C. Hatit, and Huanzhen Ni have filed a provisional patent related to this manuscript (US patent application number 63/632,354).
Lead author James Stroud, an assistant professor in the School of Biological Sciences, was studying Cuban brown anoles (Anolis sagrei) in South Florida when the Puerto Rican crested anole (Anolis cristatellus), suddenly appeared in the region.
Published in Nature Communications, the study documents what happens as the two Anolis lizards adapted in response to the new competitor, while helping to resolve a longstanding challenge in evolutionary biology — directly observing the role of natural selection in character displacement: how similar animals adapt in response to competition.
"Most of what we know about how animals change in response to this process comes from studying patterns that evolved long ago,” Stroud says. “This was a rare opportunity where we could watch evolution as it happened."
While these two small, brown lizards diverged evolutionarily between 40-60 million years ago and evolved on completely separate Caribbean islands, the two species are nearly identical, and fill similar ecological niches.
So, when the Puerto Rican crested anole suddenly appeared in Cuban brown anole habitat at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in 2018, the two were competing for similar habitats and food sources.
“When two similar species compete for the same resources, like food and territory, they often evolve differences that allow them to coexist,” Stroud says. But, while scientists have found many examples of similar species developing different traits to ease this overlap, “scientists have rarely been able to observe this process as it unfolds in nature.”
Stroud’s team had already been studying Cuban brown anoles at the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Gardens in Miami, Florida, two years prior to when the crested anoles invaded. The team was able to quickly pivot to observe how the invasion changed both species, analyzing the lizards’ changing diets, measuring if the lizards were moving through foliage or on the forest floor, and recording the different species’ locations relative to each other. For over a thousand lizards, they also measured perch height — the distance from the ground that the lizard is perching — a primary marker of how Anolis lizards divvy up habitat.
“We not only observed how these lizards changed their habitat use and behavior when they encountered each other,” says Stroud, “but we also documented the natural selection pressures driving their physical evolution in real-time."
The research team found that when these lizard species occur together, they divide up their habitat in predictable ways — the Cuban brown anole shifted to spend more time on the ground, and evolved longer legs to run faster in this habitat, while the slightly larger Cuban crested anole lived in vegetation above the ground.
"We found that brown anoles with longer legs had higher survival after crested anoles showed up," says Stroud. "This matches perfectly with the physical differences we see in populations where these species have been living together for many generations."
Stroud adds that while the research provides some of the strongest observations of evolution in action to date, it also demonstrates how human activities can create natural experiments that help us understand fundamental evolutionary processes — both species of Anolis lizard in the study were originally non-native to South Florida.
“As species increasingly come into contact due to human-mediated introductions and climate change, these studies may be important for predicting how communities will respond,” he says. "By studying these non-native lizards who are meeting each other for the first time in their existence, we had a unique opportunity to see the actual process unfold and connect it to the patterns we observe in nature."
]]>Contact: Jess Hunt-Ralston
]]>A study led by Georgia Tech is showcasing a new resource to help researchers understand the structure and function of these interactions — called assemblies — at both molecular and functional levels. The work is published in the Nature-family journal Communications Chemistry.
Called BioDolphin — short for Biological Database of Lipid-Protein Highly Inclusive Interactions — the resource is the first comprehensive, annotated database of protein-lipid interactions. Integrated into a user-friendly web server, BioDolphin is freely accessible to all. Users can easily view and download interaction data and systematically analyze lipid-protein assemblies.
“Understanding lipid-protein interactions is crucial in advancing our understanding of human health and disease treatment,” says the study’s corresponding author, Andrew McShan. “BioDolphin is the first resource to collect this type of information for all kinds of proteins, not just those found in membranes. And because it is publicly available, this information is now at the tips of researchers’ fingertips.”
“BioDolphin as a comprehensive database of lipid–protein binding interactions” is led by McShan, an assistant professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Georgia Tech, alongside first author Li-Yen (Zoey) Yang, Bioinformatics Ph.D. student; School of Computational Science and Engineering Assistant Professor Yunan Luo; and Kaike Ping, a Ph.D. student at Virginia Tech.
A curated database with richly annotated information, BioDolphin contains over 127,000 lipid-protein binding interactions. And while most databases of lipid-protein assemblies have focused solely on a specific type of protein — membrane proteins — BioDolphin expands beyond that.
“BioDolphin enables us to globally define the structural features of lipid-protein assemblies across the eight different classes of lipid compounds to understand their cellular function and roles in disease,” says McShan, adding that the database also provides information on paired lipid-protein annotation, experimental binding affinities, intermolecular interactions, and atomic structures across a wide range of lipid-protein interactions — all available to anyone with an internet connection.
“In the past, this research has been limited because lipids are notoriously difficult to study in the lab,” McShan says. "BioDolphin changes the paradigm. It is the first time that anyone has collected, annotated, and analyzed the known structural universe of lipid-protein interactions across all organisms.”
It’s a rapidly developing field. McShan was recently awarded a prestigious Curci grant for cutting-edge cancer research into lipid-based universal immunotherapies and vaccines.
Beyond research applications, the team hopes that BioDolphin will be a resource for biochemistry students.
“The database can serve as a tool for teachers and students studying these protein-lipid interactions, which is often an underdeveloped topic in biology and biochemistry courses,” McShan says. “I hope that BioDolphin is a valuable resource for the researchers of today — and that it can also be a building block for the researchers of tomorrow.”
Funding: Shurl and Kay Curci Foundation, NSF Advanced Cyberinfrastructure Coordination Ecosystem: Services & Support (ACCESS) program, NIH National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), Partnership for an Advanced Computing Environment (PACE) at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Taiwan Ministry of Education Government Scholarship to Study Abroad program.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s42004-024-01384-z
]]>Contact: Jess Hunt-Ralston
]]>Less than 10 years later, her high school dream became a hectic, fast-paced — and fulfilling — reality. Armed with an accelerated bachelor’s degree in biology and a master’s degree in bioinformatics from Georgia Tech, the double Jacket started a fellowship at the CDC during a pivotal time in history — the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It was sink or swim for sure,” says Lacek. “Knowing I was working on public health decision-making that could make a lifesaving difference worldwide showed me I had chosen the right path.”
Today, Lacek continues her drive to make a positive global impact as a bioinformatics scientist at the CDC, specializing in influenza and SARS-CoV-2 genomics. Her career has taken her around the world, with time spent in places like Ghana, Oman, Panama, Algeria, India, Thailand, and the Republic of Georgia. She currently lives in Denver, but will return to Georgia Tech to provide the graduation speech at the College of Sciences’ inaugural master’s commencement ceremony this December.
We recently sat down with Lacek to talk about her career and Georgia Tech experience:
What is your favorite memory from Georgia Tech?
Lacek: I always enjoyed the Georgia Tech nights at various Atlanta special event locations like the aquarium and Six Flags. When I was in grad school, the grad gala was held at the Fernbank Museum of Natural History. Halfway through the night, my then-boyfriend-and-now husband looked around and said we should get married here — and we did!
What were some of your college activities?
Lacek: I worked a lot to fund my way through school. I tutored at the Center for Academic Success and worked as an athletic training aid with the track and field team. I gained research experience in the Exercise Physiology Laboratory as an undergrad and in the Gibson Lab as a grad student. Each summer, I served as the teaching assistant for the Biomolecular Engineering, Science, and Technology (BEST) Study Abroad Program in Lyon, France.
How did Georgia Tech prepare you for success?
Lacek: The mix of coursework in my undergraduate and graduate studies was ideal for my career. As an undergrad biology major, I learned key theories and scientific concepts that I still use daily. Studying bioinformatics in grad school, I refined my technical skills in coding, math, and computer science. My two skill sets work well together. Because I understand the molecular side of the interdisciplinary coin, I can better apply technical tools to get the answers I need from the data.
What advice do you have for Georgia Tech students, particularly those looking for a career in bioinformatics?
Lacek: Being a fast learner is the best skill you can have, especially as technology continues to rapidly evolve. The things you are learning right now may not be the exact language or application you will use as a young professional, so the ability to learn new products, programs, and schema quickly will make you very valuable.
On the public health side of things, I think being a really good collaborator and communicator is quintessential for success. One of my biggest regrets is not learning another language. As someone who does a large amount of technical support for other countries and overseas partners, working well with others and good communication is vital.
How do you define bioinformatics?
Lacek: To me, bioinformatics is like a triangle of biology, computer science, and mathematics/statistics. I’m kind of halfway between the biology and computer science side, focusing a lot on next generation sequencing. I use code and statistical applications to make global health predictions based on the data analytics available.
Tell us more about what you do.
Lacek: I do a lot of genomic surveillance, which is basically tracking and monitoring genetic material to detect new mutations and variants. Influenza, for example, circulates year-round worldwide, and we are constantly sequencing samples from all over the place to track what the virus currently looks like and project what will happen globally. At the same time, we're also monitoring for novel outbreaks, with a posture of pandemic preparedness so that if something new and scary pops up, we are already looking for it.
How are you making a difference in the world today?
Lacek: After the COVID-19 emergency response wound down, I moved my focus to influenza. Over the last two years I have been going around the world to train other ministries of health in bioinformatics and next generation sequencing to do what we do in the United States for respiratory virus surveillance.
I believe I've trained and supported scientists from 89 different countries. Because of this effort, we’ve detected some novel variants, such as a new swine flu in Vietnam. It’s thrilling to know that we are making a worldwide impact by helping countries who don’t always have the technical resources and informatics personnel we enjoy here in the U.S.
What are your hobbies?
Lacek: I love to read; I read 106 books last year! I live in Denver, so of course, I enjoy hiking. I recently completed my first 14er (hiking a mountain peak that’s 14,000 feet above sea level). I also love to thrift, cook, and eat out!
]]>laura.smith@cos.gatech.edu
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A firm handshake between proteins on immune cells is important for the body’s ability to fight infection. Meanwhile, a weak grip helps explain the poor immune deficiencies caused by a rare genetic disorder.
A new study led by Georgia Tech and Emory University researcher Cheng Zhu explores the role of physical force on the immune system’s ability to fight an infection. The team’s discoveries could lead to new therapies that boost immune responses and improve the outcomes of patients battling a rare and devastating disease.
“With this research, we’ve shown how dynamic and physical the immune system truly is,” said Zhu, Regents' Professor and J. Erskine Love Jr. Chair in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME).
The work focuses on the interaction of B cells and T cells in the body’s immune system via two proteins — CD40 on B cells and CD40L on T cells — in an immune deficiency disease called X-linked Hyper IgM syndrome, or X-HIgM. It’s a genetic disorder affecting two out of every million newborn boys, 80% of whom die before the age of 25.
The researchers found mechanical forces generated by these interactions create a “catch bond” between the proteins. It’s like a strong handshake that only gets firmer when each person tries to pull away.
When the bond is strong, it causes T cells to signal B cells they need to make antibodies to fight an invading pathogen. In fact, the B cells can actually switch gears, producing antibodies that are different from what they had been making.
But people with X-HIgM have damaged CD40L proteins, resulting in weak bonds, poor signaling, and the inability to make the right antibodies.
The team published their findings in Science Advances. The work emphasizes the role of mechanotransduction — the conversion of physical force into chemical activity — in the immune system.
Zhu’s fellow principal investigators in the study included Georgia Tech researcher Ankur Singh and Juergen Wienands of the University Medical Center Göttingen in Germany. Lead authors were BME PhD student Stefano Travaglino and former postdoc Hyun-Kyu Choi (now an assistant professor at Yonsei University in South Korea).
In the body’s defense system, B cells are produced in the bone marrow and migrate to a part of the lymph nodes called the germinal center.
“It’s like a training camp where B cells undergo improvement processes, including affinity maturation and antibody class switch, enhancing their ability to make effective antibodies,” Travaglino said.
B cells interact with and receive instructive signals from T cells to make antibodies that are most effective in coping with the pathogen invader. It’s a process that relies heavily on the interaction of CD40 and CD40L.
Using techniques like fluorescence microscopy, the researchers were able to look closely at activity in germinal centers. They used force spectroscopy tools like the biomembrane force probe which revealed that the strong, tugging handshake is suppressed by X-HIgM mutation.
The findings suggest that the physical environment and activity within the germinal center is just as important as the chemical signals at play between the proteins. By demonstrating how X-HIgM mutations impair catch bonds, the researchers provided a mechanistic explanation for the condition’s antibody deficiencies — knowledge that could open the door to future innovations in therapeutic intervention and immunotherapy.
Singh called the team’s findings “nothing short of revolutionary.”
“The significance of the research extends far beyond understanding X-HIgM, offering a fresh perspective on how to approach a variety of immune disorders,” he said. “As this field of study evolves, the potential for advancements in immune therapies looks bright.”
CITATION: Hyun-Kyu Choi, Stefano Travaglino, Matthias Münchhalfen, Richard Görg, Zhe Zhong, Jintian Lyu, David M. Reyes-Aguilar, Jürgen Wienands, Ankur Singh, and Cheng Zhu. “Mechanotransduction governs CD40 function and underlies X-linked Hyper IgM syndrome,” Science Advances. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adl5815
FUNDING: This research was supported by National Institutes of Health grants U01CA250040, U01CA280984, R01CA238745, and R01CA266052; The Hyper IgM Foundation AWD-004331; German Research Foundation SFB TRR 274, project A08; National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant RS-2024-00337196; and the Yonsei University Research Fund 2024-22-0036. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of any funding agency.
The research team used advanced microscopy techniques to capture these images of CD40 and CD40L interactions.
The human brain is often seen as the world's most complex computer, processing vast amounts of information, learning from experiences, and making complex decisions. Georgia Tech’s Center of Excellence in Computational Cognition (CoCo) was established in 2023 to better understand this “biological computer” using the principles of computation and mathematics.
“Research on computational cognition leads to a deep, mechanistic understanding of the human mind. It also teaches us how to build more robust and generalizable AI,” says Doby Rahnev, a professor in the School of Psychology and the Center’s founding director. “CoCo aims to bring together researchers from Georgia Tech, Atlanta, the Southeast, and beyond to advance this field.”
The Center recently hosted its first annual Computational Cognition Conference, gathering over 100 Atlanta-area researchers to explore cutting-edge work in computation, perception, decision-making, and more.
Computational cognition as a field merges psychology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to understand how our brains work. By creating sophisticated models and simulations, researchers are not only uncovering the secrets of cognition but also paving the way for advancements in AI and technology.
“If you go back just five years, there were only three faculty in the School of Psychology working in computational cognition,” said Rahnev. Now, with over a dozen faculty working in the area, a new minor in Computation and Cognition, and the establishment of CoCo, “Computational cognition has gone from something that barely existed in the School to something that is a recognized strength.”
CoCo was created as a Center of Excellence in the School of Psychology. Since its founding, it has been supported by the College of Sciences and the Neuro Next Initiative, the precursor to Georgia Tech’s burgeoning Interdisciplinary Research Institute on neuroscience, neurotechnology, and society.
Held on Nov. 15, the Center’s inaugural conference connected students and faculty from across Atlanta, featuring over 25 lightning talks by faculty from Georgia Tech and Emory University on a wide range of topics.
“This was a special moment for me and everyone else involved,” said Rahnev, who worked with psychology Professor Sashank Varma and inaugural CoCo graduate fellow Alish Dipani to organize the event. “This conference felt like a coming-of-age event and made it clear that there is a very large community of people working on this topic right here in Atlanta.”
Though Rahnev recently stepped down as the Center’s director after his appointment as the School of Psychology’s associate chair for Research, he says, “The future is bright for CoCo.”
“Exciting things are happening at Georgia Tech,” said newly appointed CoCo Director Bob Wilson, an associate professor in psychology. “In the last few years, there's been a hiring spree bringing in experts in computation and cognition across psychology, biology, BME, interactive computing, and beyond. Combined with Georgia Tech’s already established excellence in computation and tech, this offers a unique environment where computational approaches are encouraged, and synergies and collaborations between people can grow.”
Researchers from the School of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) created the Large Pre-Trained Time-Series Model (LPTM) framework. LPTM is a single foundational model that completes forecasting tasks across a broad range of domains.
Along with performing as well or better than models purpose-built for their applications, LPTM requires 40% less data and 50% less training time than current baselines. In some cases, LPTM can be deployed without any training data.
The key to LPTM is that it is pre-trained on datasets from different industries like healthcare, transportation, and energy. The Georgia Tech group created an adaptive segmentation module to make effective use of these vastly different datasets.
The Georgia Tech researchers will present LPTM in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, at the 2024 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2024). NeurIPS is one of the world’s most prestigious conferences on artificial intelligence (AI) and ML research.
“The foundational model paradigm started with text and image, but people haven’t explored time-series tasks yet because those were considered too diverse across domains,” said B. Aditya Prakash, one of LPTM’s developers.
“Our work is a pioneer in this new area of exploration where only few attempts have been made so far.”
[MICROSITE: Georgia Tech at NeurIPS 2024]
Foundational models are trained with data from different fields, making them powerful tools when assigned tasks. Foundational models drive GPT, DALL-E, and other popular generative AI platforms used today. LPTM is different though because it is geared toward time-series, not text and image generation.
The Georgia Tech researchers trained LPTM on data ranging from epidemics, macroeconomics, power consumption, traffic and transportation, stock markets, and human motion and behavioral datasets.
After training, the group pitted LPTM against 17 other models to make forecasts as close to nine real-case benchmarks. LPTM performed the best on five datasets and placed second on the other four.
The nine benchmarks contained data from real-world collections. These included the spread of influenza in the U.S. and Japan, electricity, traffic, and taxi demand in New York, and financial markets.
The competitor models were purpose-built for their fields. While each model performed well on one or two benchmarks closest to its designed purpose, the models ranked in the middle or bottom on others.
In another experiment, the Georgia Tech group tested LPTM against seven baseline models on the same nine benchmarks in zero-shot forecasting tasks. Zero-shot means the model is used out of the box and not given any specific guidance during training. LPTM outperformed every model across all benchmarks in this trial.
LPTM performed consistently as a top-runner on all nine benchmarks, demonstrating the model’s potential to achieve superior forecasting results across multiple applications with less and resources.
“Our model also goes beyond forecasting and helps accomplish other tasks,” said Prakash, an associate professor in the School of CSE.
“Classification is a useful time-series task that allows us to understand the nature of the time-series and label whether that time-series is something we understand or is new.”
One reason traditional models are custom-built to their purpose is that fields differ in reporting frequency and trends.
For example, epidemic data is often reported weekly and goes through seasonal peaks with occasional outbreaks. Economic data is captured quarterly and typically remains consistent and monotone over time.
LPTM’s adaptive segmentation module allows it to overcome these timing differences across datasets. When LPTM receives a dataset, the module breaks data into segments of different sizes. Then, it scores all possible ways to segment data and chooses the easiest segment from which to learn useful patterns.
LPTM’s performance, enhanced through the innovation of adaptive segmentation, earned the model acceptance to NeurIPS 2024 for presentation. NeurIPS is one of three primary international conferences on high-impact research in AI and ML. NeurIPS 2024 occurs Dec. 10-15.
Ph.D. student Harshavardhan Kamarthi partnered with Prakash, his advisor, on LPTM. The duo are among the 162 Georgia Tech researchers presenting over 80 papers at the conference.
Prakash is one of 46 Georgia Tech faculty with research accepted at NeurIPS 2024. Nine School of CSE faculty members, nearly one-third of the body, are authors or co-authors of 17 papers accepted at the conference.
Along with sharing their research at NeurIPS 2024, Prakash and Kamarthi released an open-source library of foundational time-series modules that data scientists can use in their applications.
“Given the interest in AI from all walks of life, including business, social, and research and development sectors, a lot of work has been done and thousands of strong papers are submitted to the main AI conferences,” Prakash said.
“Acceptance of our paper speaks to the quality of the work and its potential to advance foundational methodology, and we hope to share that with a larger audience.”
]]>Researchers from the School of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) created the Large Pre-Trained Time-Series Model (LPTM) framework. LPTM is a single foundational model that completes forecasting tasks across a broad range of domains.
Along with performing as well or better than models purpose-built for their applications, LPTM requires 40% less data and 50% less training time than current baselines. In some cases, LPTM can be deployed without any training data.
The key to LPTM is that it is pre-trained on datasets from different industries like healthcare, transportation, and energy. The Georgia Tech group created an adaptive segmentation module to make effective use of these vastly different datasets.
The Georgia Tech researchers will present LPTM in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, at the 2024 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2024). NeurIPS is one of the world’s most prestigious conferences on artificial intelligence (AI) and ML research.
]]>“We are proud and excited to honor this year’s recipients of the O’Hara Fellowships,” says College of Sciences Senior Associate Dean David Collard. “They represent the best of our amazing Ph.D. students with impressive research, teaching, service, and leadership accomplishments.”
Boever is a fifth-year EAS student, conducting research for Martial Taillefert’s Group. His research spans the land-to-ocean continuum and includes studies on how groundwater fluctuations control the fate and transport of uranium in stream sediments, how wetland changes affect methane emissions, and how river pulses influence carbon transformations in low-oxygen ocean sediments. Boever has been extremely active in field research, participating in six research cruises and leading the field component of a Department of Energy-funded project at the Savannah River National Laboratory that included more than six research trips in two years. As a result of his extensive field work, Boever is working on three first-author publications and co-authoring three additional articles.
“I play in the mud, using sensors to monitor chemical changes that affect the environment,” says Boever. “Field studies are tough, but what we learn is invaluable not only for improving our current understanding of these processes but also informing us of their potential influence on future ecosystem function and global climate impacts.”
Connolly will earn her Ph.D. in bioinformatics. As a member of the Gibson Lab, she studies single-cell genomics, data visualization, gene regulation, autoimmunity, cancer, and personalized medicine. In addition to her research activities, Connolly has presented posters or presentations at five national and international meetings, was active in the Women-in-Science promotion, and has mentored high school and undergraduate students.
“My research focuses on understanding how our immune system differs between sexes, changes with age, and responds to treatments such as radiation and immunotherapy,” says Connolly. “By studying these differences, I aim to uncover details that can lead to more personalized and effective therapies for cancer and age-related diseases. This work can potentially make healthcare more effective, improving patient outcomes across diverse populations.”
Knavel, whose research focuses on symplectic topology and is advised by John Etnyre, is an avid mentor and teacher. She served on the Graduate Council and runs the Directed Reading Program for the School of Mathematics, pairing undergraduate students with graduate students to pursue advanced topics in mathematics. She also developed a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) based on her Ph.D. research. As a teaching assistant, she has been recognized with an Outstanding Student Evaluation Award and numerous Thank-a-Teacher certificates.
“My time at Georgia Tech grows more enriching each year,” says Knavel. “The community is welcoming, with abundant mentorship. I've received support at every level for my decisions to attend conferences, teach abroad, and help organize activities in the School of Mathematics. Because of the supportive community, I’ve gained the skills and knowledge necessary to teach and motivate undergraduate students in both classroom and research settings.”
Xu will receive her Ph.D. in chemistry and has published two first-author papers, with three more in preparation. She has contributed to four additional publications as a second or third author. Additionally, she mentored several undergraduate and first-year graduate students within the Wu Research Group and served as a mentor for the Summer 2023 National Science Foundation Research Experience for Undergraduates Program.
"My research focuses on identifying glycoprotein alterations in human cancer,” says Xu. “I’m particularly fascinated by how I can use chemical probes and mass spectrometry to 'visualize' changes in glycoproteins within clinical cancer models. This area of study interests me because glycoproteins play a crucial role in cancer progression and metastasis, and understanding these alterations could lead to new therapeutic strategies."
Xue specializes in cognition and brain science. Although she has been a part of the Ph.D. program for only two years, she has published three scientific papers and has several others submitted and under review. She has also served as a highly ranked teaching assistant.
"My research centers on perceptual decision-making and metacognition, focused on using computational modeling and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to advance our understanding of how confidence is computed,” says Xue. “This exploration into the mechanisms of human confidence computation deeply fascinates me; I am incredibly grateful to my supervisor, Dobromir Rahnev, whose unwavering support and guidance have been invaluable throughout this journey."
]]>laura.smith@cos.gatech.edu
]]>Haley scholars receive a one-time merit award of up to $4,000 thanks to the generosity of the late Marion Peacock Haley. Haley’s estate established the merit-based graduate fellowships in honor of her late husband, Herbert P. Haley (ME 1933).
Gleaton specializes in engineering psychology. Since 2020, she has served as president, secretary, webmaster, and treasurer of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society student chapter and held multiple leadership positions in the Psychology Graduate Student Council. She was recognized by Georgia Tech’s Center for Student Engagement as part of the 2023 Celebrating Student Leadership Project.
“My research focuses on how to reduce the disuse of assistive technologies and improve user outcomes through enhanced instruction and training,” says Gleaton. “These technologies, from mobility aids to smart devices like wearables and conversational agents, help people perform tasks more easily. I hope my work fosters the successful adoption of assistive technology — and supports individuals aging in place, improving health, and gaining greater independence.”
A third-year Ph.D. student studying mathematics, Havrilla focuses on both theoretical and applied topics in generative machine learning. He has published several papers in academic journals and is an active attendee/presenter in the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics student chapter seminar series. Outside of Georgia Tech, Alex co-founded CarperAI, an open-source research group studying reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) for large language models.
"My theoretical work tries to understand how well models generalize depending on model size and the amount and makeup of training data. My applied research improves the mathematical reasoning abilities of generative models through synthetic data generation," says Havrilla. "I love the interplay between both theory and application. Knowing the theory helps give me a more principled understanding of what is done in practice, and knowing the practice helps me decide what are the most relevant questions to study theoretically.”
As part of the Rosenzweig Lab, Lindsey investigates the evolution of multicellularity and cell differentiation. He also assists Team Phoenix Supercomputing via Georgia Tech’s Vertically Integrated Projects program, which engages undergraduate and graduate students in long-term, large-scale, multidisciplinary project teams led by faculty. Lindsey trains the Team Phoenix Supercomputing to compete in high-performance computing (HPC) competitions while equipping them with fundamental skills necessary for HPC research.
“My research has largely focused on a small group of freshwater green algae known informally as the ‘volvocine algae’,” says Lindsey. “The varying levels of developmental and sexual complexity make these organisms a useful model system for investigating major evolutionary questions. I infer the phylogenetic relationships of this group and perform ancestral-state reconstructions of key traits thought necessary for the evolution of differentiated, multicellularity.”
McKaig has two first-author publications and has presented her research nationally and internationally. She participated in the International Space Station (ISS) analog experiment at Jules’ Undersea Lodge in Key Largo and NASA outreach for the Atlanta Science Festival. On campus, she was the 2023 President of ExplOrigins, a group of young scientists interested in the origins and evolution of life, the exploration of our solar system, and the search for habitable planets beyond Earth.
“My research focuses on detecting signs of life and characterizing microbes in very salty environments,” says McKaig. “I am interested in life at the fringe of habitability, where the environmental conditions are harsh, but adequate for living things to exist. By learning about life in the extremes on Earth, we can make predictions about what life may look like if it exists on other planets or moons, and how we might be able to detect such life forms. In my lab work, I explore the applications that nanopore instrumentation may have in the search for extraterrestrial life.”
Stellmach is a Ph.D. student in chemistry. She is heavily involved in the Student Polymer Network, serving as secretary, vice president, and president. As an adamant supporter of reducing the gender gap in STEM fields, Kellie frequently invites female researchers to Georgia Tech to share their science research and assists with outreach events through the Girls Excelling in Math and Science (GEMS) program.
"My research focuses on the chemical recycling of polymers back to their monomers, a process that enables plastic waste to be recycled in a circular fashion,” says Stellmach. “I'm particularly interested in this area of research because it combines the challenge of developing new chemical methods with the potential for significant environmental impact. By improving the efficiency of recycling processes, my work aims to reduce plastic waste and support a more sustainable future."
]]>laura.smith@cos.gatech.edu
]]>Eng is a Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology (FINESST) Fellow. Her research compares rover and orbital datasets of Mars to increase the spatial resolution of quantitative geologic mapping.
“I am excited to receive this award as it validates the importance of my research and my abilities as a scientist,” says Eng.
Nominated by her advisor, School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Assistant Professor Frances Rivera-Hernández, Eng is also a part of Georgia Tech's Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute and Center for Lunar Environment and Volatile Exploration Research.
“Alivia is an exceptional graduate student and planetary scientist,” says Rivera-Hernández. “Her curiosity, passion, and question-driven approach have sparked multiple new projects at Georgia Tech and led my research group in exciting new directions. Beyond her research, Alivia is deeply committed to community engagement, aiming to inspire future generations to pursue careers in planetary geology. I am grateful for the opportunity to work with her.”
Izykowicz’s research focuses on synthesizing nanoparticles designed to target and retain anti-cancer drugs in both primary and metastatic tumors of various cancers. Her research tackles the challenge of treating metastatic lesions, which are difficult to target due to their small size and abundance.
“I am deeply passionate about my work because it addresses an issue that has plagued humanity for centuries,” says Izykowicz. “My research investigates the complexities of metastatic cancer, building on the knowledge of those who came before me to pave the way toward a potential cure.”
She was nominated for the award by M.G. Finn, who serves as a professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and the James A. Carlos Family Chair for Pediatric Technology.
“Marrissa is a wonderful student and colleague — always willing to do whatever is needed to advance her studies,” says Finn. “Her research is tremendously exciting, working with collaborator Stephen Housley on nanoparticles that can deliver medications directly to cancerous tumors. The project involves chemistry, cell biology, immunology, and analytical biochemistry, and Marrissa does it all with great dedication and expertise.”
Mobille is pursuing a Ph.D. in Quantitative Biosciences, specializing in computational neuroscience.
“I am passionate about my research because it sheds light on how the brain’s structure and abilities are related quantitatively,” says Mobille. “It targets a deeper understanding of how information is processed in networks of neurons, which may influence how computational devices are designed in the future.”
Mobille serves as chair of the community impact committee of the Georgia Tech/Emory Computational Neural-engineering Training Program (CNTP) and is a past recipient of Georgia Tech’s InQuBATE Training grant.
School of Mathematics Assistant Professor Hannah Choi, who advises Mobille, states: “Zach is driven by curiosity and determined to solve complex research problems. He has consistently impressed me with his creativity and motivation in computational neuroscience. Zach proposes innovative ideas, is never afraid of learning new techniques, and takes initiative in his research. I am thrilled that the ARCS fellowship has recognized his qualities as an independent and creative researcher.”
Pederson uses computer simulations to study chemistry at solid/liquid interfaces at the molecular scale.
“Computational modeling across length- and time-scales is a powerful technique for gaining insight into chemical and physical processes,” says Pederson. “With my research, I hope to promote wider adoption of these multi-scale computational techniques to enable the design of cleaner and safer chemical processes.”
In addition to his research work, Pederson helped organize and run ComSciCon-ATL 2024, an interdisciplinary science communications conference for Southeast STEM graduate students.
“John is an outstanding researcher and problem-solver,” says Jessie McDaniel, associate professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry who nominated Pederson. ”He has contributed substantially to software and method development efforts that form the core of our group’s work on studying chemical reaction mechanisms in complex environments related to electrochemistry and surface chemistry. John exemplifies excellence in all facets of research, scholarship, and service.”
]]>RNA molecules are best known as protein production messengers. They carry genetic instructions from DNA to ribosomes — the factories inside cells that turn amino acids into the proteins necessary for many cell functions. But Storici’s team found that RNA can also help cells repair a severe form of DNA damage called a double-strand break, or DSB.
A DSB means both strands of the DNA helix have been severed. Cells have the tools to make some repairs, but a DSB is significant damage — and if not properly fixed can lead to mutations, cell death, or cancer. (Interestingly, cancer treatments, like chemotherapy and radiation, can cause DSBs.)
Storici, a professor in the School of Biological Sciences, has dedicated her research to studying the molecules and mechanisms underlying damaged DNA repairs. Ten years ago, she and collaborators discovered that RNA could serve as a template for DSB repair.
“Now we’ve learned that RNA can directly promote DSB repair mechanisms,” said Storici, whose lab teamed with mathematics experts in the lab of Nataša Jonoska from the University of South Florida. They’re all part of the Southeast Center for Mathematics and Biology based at Georgia Tech. They explain their discovery in the journal Nature Communications.
“These findings open up a new understanding of RNA's potential role in maintaining genome integrity and driving evolutionary changes,” added Storici.
The researchers used variation-distance graphs to visualize millions of DSB repair events, offering a comprehensive snapshot of sequence variations. The graphs highlighted major differences in repair patterns, depending on the DSB position.
This mathematical approach also uncovered significant differences in repair efficiency, pointing to RNA's potential in modulating DSB repair outcomes.
“These findings underscore the critical role of mathematical visualization in understanding complex biological mechanisms and could pave the way for targeted interventions in genome stability and therapeutic research,” said Jonoska.
When a DSB happens in DNA, it’s like a load-bearing beam in a building breaking. A careful, precise repair is needed to ensure the building’s — or the DNA’s — stability. The pieces must be rejoined accurately to prevent further damage or mutation. Repairing a damaged building requires having a reliable foreman on the job site. A DSB requires something very similar.
“A key mechanism we identified is that RNA can help position and hold the broken DNA ends in place, facilitating the repair process,” explained Storici, whose team conducted the research in both human and yeast cells.
Specifically, they found that RNA molecules and the broken section of DNA can match up like puzzle pieces. When RNA has this kind of complementarity with the DNA break site, it acts as a scaffold, or a guide, beyond its traditional coding function, showing the cellular machinery where to make repairs. Over millennia, cells have evolved complex mechanisms to fix DSB, each of them functioning like different tools from the same toolbox.
Storici’s team showed that RNA can influence which tools are used, depending on its complementarity to the broken DNA strands. This means that in addition to being the important protein production messenger, RNA acts as both a foreman and laborer when it comes to DNA repair.
A deeper understanding of RNA’s role in DNA repair could lead to new strategies for strengthening repair mechanisms in healthy cells, potentially reducing the harmful effects of treatments like chemotherapy and radiation.
“RNA has a much broader function than we knew,” Storici said. “We still have a lot of research to do into these mechanisms, but this work opens up new ways for exploring how RNA could be harnessed in healthcare, potentially leading to new treatments for cancer and other genetic diseases.”
As Storici and other researchers continue probing RNA’s effects in DNA repair, their revelations could have a lasting impact on human health and evolution. That means better gene therapies, new cancer treatments and anti-aging strategies — and also the ability to influence how organisms adapt and evolve.
CITATION: Youngkyu Jeon, Yilin Lu, Margherita Maria Ferrari, Tejasvi Channagiri, Penghao Xu, Chance Meers, Yiqi Zhang, Sathya Balachander, Vivian S. Park, Stefania Marsili, Zachary F. Pursell, Nataša Jonoska, Francesca Storici. “RNA-mediated double-strand break repair by end-joining mechanisms.” Nature Communications https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-51457-9
FUNDING: NIH grants GM115927, ES028271; NSF grant MCB-1615335; Howard Hughes Medical Institute Faculty Scholar grant 55108574; Southeast Center for Mathematics and Biology NSF DMS-1764406; Simons Foundation grant 59459; NSF grants CCF-2107267 and DMS-2054321.
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And while our bodies naturally make amino acids, manufacturing them for commercial use can be costly — and that process often emits greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide (CO2).
In a landmark study, a team of researchers has created a first-of-its kind methodology for synthesizing amino acids that uses more carbon than it emits. The research also makes strides toward making the system cost-effective and scalable for commercial use.
“To our knowledge, it’s the first time anyone has synthesized amino acids in a carbon-negative way using this type of biocatalyst,” says lead corresponding author Pamela Peralta-Yahya, who emphasizes that the system provides a win-win for industry and environment. “Carbon dioxide is readily available, so it is a low-cost feedstock — and the system has the added bonus of removing a powerful greenhouse gas from the atmosphere, making the synthesis of amino acids environmentally friendly, too.”
The study, “Carbon Negative Synthesis of Amino Acids Using a Cell-Free-Based Biocatalyst,” published today in ACS Synthetic Biology, is publicly available. The research was led by Georgia Tech in collaboration with the University of Washington, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and the University of Minnesota.
The Georgia Tech research contingent includes Peralta-Yahya, a professor with joint appointments in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (ChBE); first author Shaafique Chowdhury, a Ph.D. student in ChBE; Ray Westenberg, a Ph.D student in Bioengineering; and Georgia Tech alum Kimberly Wennerholm (B.S. ChBE ’23).
There are two key challenges to synthesizing amino acids on a large scale: the cost of materials, and the speed at which the system can generate amino acids.
While many living systems like cyanobacteria can synthesize amino acids from CO2, the rate at which they do it is too slow to be harnessed for industrial applications, and these systems can only synthesize a limited number of chemicals.
Currently, most commercial amino acids are made using bioengineered microbes. “These specially designed organisms convert sugar or plant biomass into fuel and chemicals,” explains first author Chowdhury, “but valuable food resources are consumed if sugar is used as the feedstock — and pre-processing plant biomass is costly.” These processes also release CO2 as a byproduct.
Chowdhury says the team was curious “if we could develop a commercially viable system that could use carbon dioxide as a feedstock. We wanted to build a system that could quickly and efficiently convert CO2 into critical amino acids, like glycine and serine.”
The team was particularly interested in what could be accomplished by a ‘cell-free’ system that leveraged some process of a cellular system — but didn’t actually involve living cells, Peralta-Yahya says, adding that systems using living cells need to use part of their CO2 to fuel their own metabolic processes, including cell growth, and have not yet produced sufficient quantities of amino acids.
“Part of what makes a cell-free system so efficient,” Westenberg explains, “is that it can use cellular enzymes without needing the cells themselves. By generating the enzymes and combining them in the lab, the system can directly convert carbon dioxide into the desired chemicals. Because there are no cells involved, it doesn’t need to use the carbon to support cell growth — which vastly increases the amount of amino acids the system can produce.”
While scientists have used cell-free systems before, one of the necessary chemicals, the cell lysate biocatalyst, is extremely costly. For a cell-free system to be economically viable at scale, the team needed to limit the amount of cell lysate the system needed.
After creating the ten enzymes necessary for the reaction, the team attempted to dilute the biocatalyst using a technique called ‘volumetric expansion.’ “We found that the biocatalyst we used was active even after being diluted 200-fold,” Peralta-Yahya explains. “This allows us to use significantly less of this high-cost material — while simultaneously increasing feedstock loading and amino acid output.”
It’s a novel application of a cell-free system, and one with the potential to transform both how amino acids are produced, and the industry’s impact on our changing climate.
“This research provides a pathway for making this method cost-effective and scalable,” Peralta-Yahya says. “This system might one day be used to make chemicals ranging from aromatics and terpenes, to alcohols and polymers, and all in a way that not only reduces our carbon footprint, but improves it.”
Funding: Advanced Research Project Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Biological and Environmental Research Program.
DOI: 10.1021/acssynbio.4c00359
]]>While they’re at it, they’re pioneering new fields of research, and possibly spinning the work into a new commercial venture.
Last year, Coskun and his team introduced a new study in “single cell spatial metabolomics,” which explores the distribution of small molecules — metabolites — within tissues and organs. Now they’re spearheading “spatial interactomics,” a research area concerned with interactions between various biomolecules inside of individual cells.
To study these interactions, they’ve developed an innovative technique, or tool, to better understand why non-small cell lung cancer, or NSCLC, resists treatment in so many patients. They call it the “intelligent sequential proximity ligation assay,” or iseqPLA.
“It’s a smart test that can look at proteins and how they interact with each other in space,” said Coskun, Bernie Marcus Early Career Professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.
“Basically, we’re the first to create a new research area on spatial protein-protein interactions, which can tell us more about cell types and their functions,” said Coskun. “With spatial interactomics, we can validate how cells physically touch, sense, and regulate nearby cells through the interaction of pairs of proteins.”
So, the immediate goal of spatial interactomics is to investigate how protein-protein interactions drive drug resistance in NSCLC. And iseqPLA allows researchers to visualize how it’s all happening at the subcellular level. Coskun’s team described its work recently in the journal Nature Biomedical Engineering. He’s also forming a company to commercialize the technology.
Drugs called tyrosine kinase inhibitors (TKIs, like Osimertinib) have been successful in treating people with NSCLC. But many patients who initially respond well to the regimen, eventually develop a resistance. Protein interactions, a molecular kind of crosstalk, are a prime suspect in causing this resistance.
Proteins interact with each other all the time, and this mingling controls how cells grow, divide, or survive. Coskun and his team want to see how these interactions change in response to cancer treatment, and iseqPLA shows them, essentially attaching glowing tags to proteins, lighting up their locations and interactions under a microscope.
“Think of it like a super detailed map showing how different proteins in a cell are connected,” Coskun said.
The iseqPLA can examine 47 protein interactions in a single sample, which saves a lot of time (and resources) when compared to older methods, which look at two to three interactions at a time.
The researchers also created a computer model to analyze the spatial data they collected from iseqPLA, identifying patterns in protein interactions to help predict whether a cell was responding to a treatment or developing resistance.
“We showed that the test works not only in lab-grown cells but also in tissues from mice and humans,” Coskun said. “It can really help us understand how patients respond to certain treatments.”
Going forward, Coskun aims to enhance iseqPLA to study interactions among RNA, proteins, and metabolites, as well as the RNA, proteins, metabolites, etc., and other subcellular dynamics. He also hopes to get the technology into the hands of other researchers.
“We believe it will be a groundbreaking tool,” he said.
With that in mind, Coskun is planning to form a startup company called SpatAllize. He’s working with VentureLab, the nonprofit organization at Georgia Tech that provides entrepreneurship programs for students and faculty.
“We are currently performing customer interviews and forming a strategy for a viable plan towards the marketplace,” he said.
He also plans to expand iseqPLA’s utility into other areas of research, focusing on how protein interactions influence the immune system, the heart, and brain health. His team is also developing a spatial interactomics robot that integrates iseqPLA with advanced imaging and automated deep learning.
“This will allow us to map all molecules within cells and tissues for an even better understanding of drug-cell interactions, particularly in cancer treatment planning,” Coskun said.
CITATION: Shuangyi Cai, Thomas Hu, Abhijeet Venkataraman, Felix G. Rivera Moctezuma, Efe Ozturk, Nicholas Zhang, Mingshuang Wang, Tatenda Zvidzai, Sandip Das, Adithya Pillai, Frank Schneider, Suresh S. Ramalingam, YouTake Oh, Shi-Yong Sun, and Ahmet F. Coskun. “Spatially resolved subcellular protein–protein interactomics in drug-perturbed lung-cancer cultures and tissues.” Nature Biomedical Engineering.
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41551-024-01271-x
FUNDING: This research was supported by the National Institutes of Health, grant Nos. P50CA217691, P30CA138292, and R33CA291197; and the National Science Foundation, grant No. R35GM151028. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of any funding agency.
COMPETING INTERESTS: Coskun, Cai, and Hu declare a patent application related to the spatial-signaling interactomics assay (U.S. Provisional 63/399,427 and U.S. Application No. 18/452,178).
]]>An artistic rendering of sub-cellular activity: The cell membrane is seen at the top, nucleus on the bottom/right. Protein pairs are being targeted by antibodies (sets of two). Then antibodies are linked to DNA pieces that glow when proteins were found to be closely interacting with each other. The glowing fluorescence DNA signal is then imaged by a microscope indicating the spatial locations of protein interactions as dots, which researchers use to generate graph models. The straight lines connecting the antibody and protein pairs indicate their graph wiring that gets altered in drug resistance.
The new Scholars include School of Biological Sciences/School of Modern Languages student Sonali Kaluri, School of Chemistry and Biochemistry student Seth Kinoshita, and School of Biological Sciences student Medina McCowin.
As part of the program, the selected students will receive a full-ride scholarship, special mentoring, and travel opportunities.
About the Scholars
Sonali Kaluri is a third-year student double majoring in biology and applied languages and intercultural studies (with a concentration in Spanish). Deeply passionate about women's health, she has researched clinical considerations of treating liver disease in pregnant women and the impact of a virtual lactation program on maternal and infant health outcomes at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. In her spare time, she volunteers at the Winship Cancer Institute and the March of Dimes and is a member of the Yellow Jacket Fencing Club.
“I hope to attend medical school and pursue a career in academic medicine after graduation from Georgia Tech,” says Kaluri. “My research experience has made me acutely aware of the gaps in medical knowledge regarding the different ways disease processes affect women, and I hope to become an advocate for change through research and clinical practice!”
Seth Kinoshita is a third-year biochemistry major with a minor in health and medical sciences. As an undergraduate research assistant with the Department of Biomedical Engineering, he focuses on a novel drug delivery structure that can be surgically inserted to decrease recovery time and minimize invasiveness for tendon injuries. His work has been published in several academic journals. He serves as an undergraduate research ambassador and a pre-health mentor — and spends his free time with Sympathetic Vibrations, Georgia Tech's male a cappella group. Kinoshita also works as the medical coordinator for Aurora Day Camp, a camp for children with cancer and their siblings.
"After graduation, I want to pursue an M.D./Ph.D. in regenerative orthopedic medicine to bridge my tendon repair research with direct implementation into patients,” says Kinoshita. “I aim to develop innovative treatments that can restore mobility in the extremities and improve the quality of life for patients with musculoskeletal disorders."
Medina McCowin is a third-year biology major researching cancer treatment methods in the Sulchek BioMEMS and Biomechanics Lab. She also worked for Lachance Laboratories as an undergraduate researcher, investigating cancer genetics. Active on campus, she is the biology representative for the Georgia Tech Undergraduate House of Representatives and president of the Georgia Tech Public Health Student Association. McCowin has also held several leadership roles with the Georgia Tech American Medical Student Association.
“In the future, I hope to pursue an M.D./Ph.D. and become a pediatric oncologist and cancer treatment researcher, focusing on improving pediatric cancer treatments,” says McCowin. “Working in the healthcare field and experiencing personal loss has taught me that empathy and compassion are the most important factors in becoming a doctor. As a doctor, I want to contribute to the advancements of pediatric medicine, but also be dedicated to improving the emotional and mental well-being of my patients and their families.”
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laura.smith@cos.gatech.edu
]]>Presented as a part of a symposium arranged and given by former students and colleagues to honor the recipient, the award recognizes an outstanding analytical chemist that has advanced the field through exemplary research, teaching, or other endeavors.
“This award is very significant to me as it is given to the most accomplished scientists in the field of analytical chemistry, including some of my long-time heroes, such as Bob Kennedy of the University of Michigan, Catherine Fenselau of the University of Maryland and Scott McLuckey of Purdue University,” says Fernández.
“Anachem award winners include Rosalyn Yallow, who received the Nobel Prize for the development of the radioimmunoassay technique,” he adds. “It is enormously significant to be recognized by such close peers who appreciate the value of measurement science in general, and analytical chemistry in particular.”
Fernández is a noted leader in the field of metabolomics and molecular imaging, where his research encompasses the development of new ionization, imaging, machine learning and ion mobility spectrometry tools for probing composition and structure in complex molecular mixtures. He is the author of over 225 peer-reviewed publications and has received the NSF CAREER award, the CETL/BP Teaching award, the Ron A. Hites best paper award from the American Society for Mass Spectrometry, and the Beynon award from Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry, among others.
]]>“From all of us in Biological Sciences, we’re thrilled to see Ben Freeman named a Packard Fellow,” says School Chair Jeffrey (Todd) Streelman. “Ben’s research is important, compelling, and creative — a triple-threat combination that justifies this recognition.”
Awarded annually to only 20 individuals by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Packard Fellows are known for pursuing cutting-edge research, never-before-done projects, and ambitious goals.
“These scientists and engineers are the architects of tomorrow, leading innovation with bold ideas and unyielding determination,” shares Nancy Lindborg, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Packard Foundation. “Their work today will be the foundation for the breakthroughs of the future, inspiring the next wave of discovery and invention.”
“I'm flabbergasted to receive this prestigious award,” says Freeman. “Packard support will be transformative. It will give me the freedom to do the sorts of risky projects that I've dreamed about, and will support the intense fieldwork that I'm convinced is necessary to understand big questions in climate change ecology.”
The Packard funding will support Freemans most ambitious project to date: developing “Tech Mountain” in the tropics, a long-term field project focused on surveying thousands of individual birds. From mountain slope to summit, he will track their motions, their nests and predators, where they live, eat, move, and die — and how this changes as temperatures warm.
The pioneer study will shape a window into how birds and other organisms are responding to our changing climate, while developing technology and methodology that could revolutionize the fields of ecology and biology.
Freeman’s previous research has shown that, in general, birds are moving to higher elevations as our climate changes.
“I found that as it's gotten warmer in the tropics, it's set in motion what I call an escalator to extinction,” he explains. “Birds are living at higher and higher elevations, and those that were common on a mountain top when I was a toddler in Peru are now gone from that mountain.”
While this previous research has shown that tropical birds are on this escalator, it hasn’t been possible to determine the specifics: which birds might be most vulnerable and what the key stressors are.
Freeman explains that “Tech Mountain” will be a first-of-its-kind field site, equipped with innovative sensors and trackers — think cameras placed on nets, recording equipment, climatic sensors, and small individual trackers on each bird.
“I want to figure out what drives their birth rates, where they're dying, and where they're moving during the course of their life,” he shares. “That will help us unravel how this escalator to extinction works.”
Several thousand meters tall, encompassing lowland rainforest, foothill rainforest, and cloud forest, Freeman’s field site will feature dense vegetation, steep grades, and encompass several different climatic zones — each with unique species.
Along its slopes, Freeman’s team will find, catch, mark, and follow the lives of thousands of individual birds across hundreds of species — for a minimum of five years, but potentially for decades. It’s never been done before.
Currently, most GPS trackers are too large for small birds, and smaller trackers capture limited information. Additionally, these smaller trackers cannot wirelessly transfer data — in order to download and access the data, each bird must be recaptured.
“The conditions are tough. It’s rugged. It’s humid. It’s cloudy and wet. We’ll need to put resources into developing technology that fits our needs, and experiment with different ways of tracking individuals in these difficult conditions,” Freeman says.
Freeman will also leverage eBird, an online hub where community scientists can upload their observations. “Millions upon millions of observations are uploaded by community scientists, citizen scientists, birders — people,” he adds. “And using this data, we can estimate the vulnerability of mountain bird species — which species seem to be shrinking their ranges and declining in abundance.”
This builds on Freeman’s current work creating the Mountain Bird Network, which supports community scientists in conducting bird surveys on their local mountains.
Freeman’s tools and methodologies could revolutionize fieldwork for ecologists and biologists, opening the door for rigorous new field studies.
It will also provide opportunities to deepen collaborations abroad. “I'm planning on working closely with Dr. Elisa Bonaccorso's lab at the University of San Francisco, Quito (USFQ Ecuador),” Freeman says, “and I’m looking forward to that collaboration. The Packard funding will also support work in Ecuador conducted by an Ecuadorian graduate student who is studying at Georgia Tech.”
Throughout the research, students will be at the heart of the projects. “I take mentoring scientists very seriously,” Freeman shares. “Undergraduates will have the opportunity to get involved on the biology side of this research, the computational side, and on the engineering side of the research. They’ll even help develop new tracking technologies.
The Packard Fellowship will not only support my research — but help me provide these opportunities in the coming years to Georgia Tech’s future scientists.”
]]>The most recognizable yellow jacket at Georgia Tech is made of fabric and foam, but Professor Mike Goodisman and a team of researchers revealed a far more complex cellular structure by successfully sequencing the genome of two local species of yellow jacket wasps — Vespula squamosa (the southern yellow jacket) and Vespula maculifrons (the eastern yellow jacket).
Having the genome sequences of yellow jacket wasps expands biologists' understanding of the behaviors and evolution of social insects, including the intricacies of the caste system made up of queens, males, and workers.
"The genome is fundamental for a lot of questions that we ask," Goodisman said.
The research, published in Annals of the Entomological Society of America, identifies rates of gene evolution among the different species, which Goodisman says could offer explanations for the various roles each wasp plays in their colonies as well as their ability to adapt and thrive in different environments. Variations in the genomes will also help scientists dissect the interactions between the two local species.
Southern and eastern yellow jacket queens produce all caste members in the colony, and while mated queens from both species hibernate in the winter following the decline of their colonies, V. squamosa will stay in hibernation slightly longer. Southern queens then actively seek out established eastern yellow jacket nests, kill the resident queen, and take over her colony. Goodisman and his research team hope the genome provides insight into the southern queens’ parasitic behavior.
The typical colony will survive six to eight months, but in certain climates, colonies can outlast the winter months to become "supercolonies." These larger colonies take on multiple queens as they grow to the size of a couch or a car. Goodisman's team will use the genome to look for clues as to how these supercolonies thrive for multiple years and how natural selection operates in the two species.
Throughout the study, Goodisman relied on the Georgia Tech community's shared interest in the social insect to gather the necessary samples. Through ads in The Whistle and other campus publications, he collected yellow jacket wasps’ nests from faculty, staff, and alumni, in addition to samples from around the region. DNA was extracted from individual wasp samples and then sent to the University of Georgia for DNA sequencing. The resulting genomes, which are about 200 million base pairs in length, were then jointly analyzed by scientists at Georgia Tech and the University of Georgia.
“When you get the data back, you get these long sequences of the building blocks of DNA. Part of the game is putting that together like a puzzle, and then we analyze the sequence to figure out what it means,” he said.
With the genome sequenced, the team can then compare the local species to each other and all species of yellow jacket wasps worldwide. Unlike honeybees, yellow jacket wasps are not considered significant pollinators, but because their diet consists of insects and carrion, Goodisman explains that understanding their place in the ecosystems they inhabit is equally important.
He is enthused to be on a campus that shares his interest in the group of social insects known as Hymenoptera. That interest led him to study insects like fruit flies at Cornell University and fire ants at the University of Georgia before beginning his postdoctoral research on other members of the Hymenoptera order.
Now, when discussing his research with members of the Georgia Tech community, he finds himself answering one question more than any other. His response is always the same. "Because of the stinger, Buzz is anatomically female."
And while he can't definitively say which species of yellow jacket the mascot would be, Goodisman said Buzz's feisty nature would lean toward the more aggressive and charismatic southern yellow jacket, V. squamosa.
Why It Matters: Proximity operations in space refer to the intricate and precise maneuvers and activities that spacecraft or satellites perform when they are in close proximity to each other, such as docking, rendezvous, or station-keeping. These operations are essential for a variety of space missions, including crewed spaceflights, satellite servicing, space exploration, and maintaining satellite constellations. While this is a very broad field, this initiative will concentrate on robotic servicing and associated challenges. In this context, robotic servicing is composed of proximity operations that are used for servicing and repairing satellites in space. In robotic servicing, robotic arms and tools perform maintenance tasks such as refueling, replacing components, or providing operation enhancements to extend a satellite's operational life or increase a satellite’s capabilities.
Our Approach: By forming an initiative in this important area, IRIM will open opportunities within the rapidly evolving space community. This will allow us to create proposals for organizations ranging from NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Space Force. This will also position us to become national leaders in this area. While several universities have a robust robotics program and quite a few have a strong space engineering program, there are only a handful of academic units with the breadth of expertise to tackle this problem. Also, even fewer universities have the benefit of an experienced applied research partner, such as the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), to undertake large-scale demonstrations. Georgia Tech, having world-renowned programs in aerospace engineering and robotics, is uniquely positioned to be a leader in this field. In addition, creating a workshop in proximity operations for autonomous servicing will allow the GTRI and Georgia Tech space robotics communities to come together and better understand strengths and opportunities for improvement in our abilities.
Why It Matters: The coming robot “apocalypse” and foundation models captured the zeitgeist in 2023 with “ChatGPT” becoming a topic at the dinner table and the probability occurrence of various scenarios of AI driven technological doom being a hotly debated topic on social media. Futuristic visions of ubiquitous embodied Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robotics have become tangible. The proliferation and effectiveness of first-person view drones in the Russo-Ukrainian War, autonomous taxi services along with their failures, and inexpensive robots (e.g., Tesla’s Optimus and Unitree’s G1) have made it seem like children alive today may have robots embedded in their everyday lives. Yet, there is a lack of trust in the public leadership bringing us into this future to ensure that robots are developed and deployed with beneficence.
Our Approach: This proposal seeks to assemble a team of bright, savvy operators across academia, government, media, nonprofits, industry, and community stakeholders to develop a roadmap for how we can be the most trusted voice to guide the public in the next 100 years of innovation in robotics here at the IRIM. We propose to carry out specific activities that include conducting the activities necessary to develop a roadmap about Robots in 2125: Altruistic and Integrated Human-Robot Society. We also aim to build partnerships to promulgate these outcomes across Georgia Tech’s campus and internationally.
Why It Matters: The field of robotics continues to evolve beyond rigid, precision-controlled machines for amplifying production on manufacturing assembly lines toward soft, wearable systems that can mediate the interface between human users and their natural and built environments. Recent advances in materials science have made it possible to construct flexible garments with embedded sensors and actuators (e.g., exosuits). In parallel, computers continue to get smaller and more powerful, and state-of-the art machine learning algorithms can extract useful information from more extensive volumes of input data in real time. Now is the time to embed lean, powerful, sensorimotor elements alongside high-speed and efficient data processing systems in a continuous wearable device.
Our Approach: The mission of the Wearable Robotic Augmentation for Human Resilience (WeRoAHR) initiative is to merge modern advances in sensing, actuation, and computing technology to imagine and create adaptive, wearable augmentation technology that can improve human resilience and longevity across the physiological spectrum — from behavioral to cellular scales. The near-term effort (~2-3 years) will draw on Georgia Tech’s existing ecosystem of basic scientists and engineers to develop WeRoAHR systems that will focus on key targets of opportunity to increase human resilience (e.g., improved balance, dexterity, and stamina). These initial efforts will establish seeds for growth intended to help launch larger-scale, center-level efforts (>5 years).
Why It Matters: The design and operation of reliable systems is primarily an integration issue that involves not only each component (software, hardware) being safe and reliable but also the whole system being reliable (including the human operator). The necessity for reliable autonomous systems (including AI agents) is more pronounced for “safety-critical” applications, where the result of a wrong decision can be catastrophic. This is quite a different landscape from many other autonomous decision systems (e.g., recommender systems) where a wrong or imprecise decision is inconsequential.
Our Approach: This new initiative will investigate the development of protocols, techniques, methodologies, theories, and practices for designing, building, and operating safe and reliable AI and autonomous engineering systems and contribute toward promoting a culture of safety and accountability grounded in rigorous objective metrics and methodologies for AI/autonomous and intelligent machines designers and operators, to allow the widespread adoption of such systems in safety-critical areas with confidence. The proposed new initiative aims to establish Tech as the leader in the design of autonomous, reliable engineering robotic systems and investigate the opportunity for a federally funded or industry-funded research center (National Science Foundation (NSF) Science and Technology Centers/Engineering Research Centers) in this area.
Why It Matters: The concepts for how robotics might be incorporated more broadly in agriculture vary widely, ranging from large-scale systems to teams of small systems operating in farms, enabling new possibilities. In addition, there are several application areas in agriculture, ranging from planting, weeding, crop scouting, and general growing through harvesting. Georgia Tech is not a land-grant university, making our ability to capture some of the opportunities in agricultural research more challenging. By partnering with a land-grant university such as the University of Georgia (UGA), we can leverage this relationship to go after these opportunities that, historically, were not available.
Our Approach: We plan to build collaborations first by leveraging relationships we have already formed within GTRI, Georgia Tech, and UGA. We will achieve this through a significant level of networking, supported by workshops and/or seminars with which to recruit faculty and form a roadmap for research within the respective universities. Our goal is to identify and pursue multiple opportunities for robotics-related research in both row-crop and animal-based agriculture. We believe that we have a strong opportunity, starting with formalizing a program with the partners we have worked with before, with the potential to improve and grow the research area by incorporating new faculty and staff with a unified vision of ubiquitous robotics systems in agriculture. We plan to achieve this through scheduled visits with interested faculty, attendance at relevant conferences, and ultimately hosting a workshop to formalize and define a research roadmap.
Why It Matters: Collaborative robots in unstructured environments such as construction and warehouse sites show great promise in working with humans on repetitive and dangerous tasks to improve efficiency and productivity. However, pre-programmed and nonflexible interaction behaviors of existing robots lower the naturalness and flexibility of the collaboration process. Therefore, it is crucial to improve physical interaction behaviors of the collaborative human-robot teaming.
Our Approach: This proposal will advance the understanding of the bi-directional influence and interaction of human-robot teaming for complex physical activities in dynamic environments by developing new methods to predict worker intention via multi-modal wearable sensing, reasoning about complex human-robot-workspace interaction, and adaptively planning the robot’s motion considering both human teaming dynamics and physiological and cognitive states. More importantly, our team plans to prioritize efforts to (i) broaden the scope of IRIM’s autonomy research by incorporating psychology, cognitive, and manufacturing research not typically considered as technical robotics research areas; (ii) initiate new IRIM education, training, and outreach programs through collaboration with team members from various Georgia Tech educational and outreach programs (including Project ENGAGES, VIP, and CEISMC) as well as the AUCC (World’s largest consortia of African American private institutions of higher education) which comprises Clark Atlanta University, Morehouse College, & Spelman College; and (iii) aim for large governmental grants such as DOD MURI, NSF NRT, and NSF Future of Work programs.
-Christa M. Ernst
]]>Working at the forefront of research in AI and machine learning, the two are both recent NSF CAREER Award winners – and are collaborators in a multi-institutional, three-year, $1.2 million effort supported by the NSF’s Division of Information and Intelligent Systems.
“Our goal is to provide a precise understanding of the impact of data augmentation on generalization,” said Muthukumar, assistant professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. She’s also principal investigator of the NSF project called, “Design principles and theory for data augmentation.”
Generalization is a hallmark of basic human intelligence – if you eat a food that makes you sick, you’ll likely avoid foods that look or smell like that food in the future. That’s generalization at work, something that we do naturally, but takes a greater effort to do efficiently in artificial intelligence.
To build more generalizable AI, developers use data augmentation (DA), in which new data samples are generated from existing datasets to improve the performance of machine learning models. For example, data augmentation is often used in computer vision – existing image data is augmented through techniques like rotation, cropping, flipping, resizing, and so forth.
Basically, data augmentation artificially increases the amount of training data used in machine learning models. The idea is, a machine learning model trained on augmented images of dogs is better equipped to recognize dogs in different environments, poses, and angles, even if the environments, poses, and angles are different from those seen during initial model training.
“But data augmentation procedures are currently done in an in an ad-hoc manner,” said Muthukumar. “It’s like, let’s apply this and see if it works.”
They are designed and tested on a dataset-by-dataset basis, which isn’t very efficient. Also, augmented data does not always have the desired effects – it can do more harm than good. So, Muthukumar, Dyer, and their collaborators are developing a theory, a set of fundamental principles to understand DA and its impact on machine learning and AI.
“Our aim is to leverage what we learn to design novel augmentations that can be used across multiple applications and domains,” said Dyer, assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.
Muthukumar became interested in data augmentation when she was a graduate student at University of California at Berkeley.
“What I found intriguing was how everyone seemed to view the role of data augmentation so differently,” she said. During a summer internship she was part of an effort to resolve racial disparities in a machine’s classification of facial images, “a commonly encountered problem in which the computer might perform well with classifying white males, but not so well with dark-skinned females.”
The researchers employed artificial data augmentation techniques – essentially, boosting their learning model’s dataset by adding virtualized facial images with different skin tones and colors. But to Muthukumar’s surprise, the solution didn’t work very well. “This was an example of data augmentation not living up to its promise,” she said. “What we’re finding is, sometimes data augmentation is good, sometimes it’s bad, sometimes it’s just weird.”
That assessment, in fact, is almost the title of a paper Muthukumar and Dyer have submitted to a leading journal: “The good, the bad and the ugly sides of data augmentation: An implicit spectral regularization perspective.” Currently under revision before publication, the paper lays out their foundational theory for understanding how DA impacts machine learning.
The work is the latest manifestation of a research partnership that began when Muthukumar arrived at Georgia Tech in January 2021, and connected with Dyer, whose NerDS Lab has a wide-angled focus, spanning the areas of machine learning, neuroscience, and neuro AI (her work is fostering a knowledge loop – the development of new AI tools for brain decoding and new neuro-inspired AI systems).
“We started talking about how data augmentation does something very subtle to a dataset, changing what the learning model does at a very fundamental level,” Muthtukumar said. “We asked, ‘what the heck is this data augmentation doing? Why is it working, or why isn’t it? And, what types of augmentation work and what types don’t?’”
Those questions led to their current NSF project, supported through September 2025. Muthukumar is leading the effort, joined by co-principal investigators Dyer; Mark Davenport, professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering; and Tom Goldstein, associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Maryland.
The four researchers comprise a kind of super-team of machine learning experts. Davenport, a member of the Center for Machine Learning and the Center for Signal and Information Processing at Georgia Tech, aims his research on the complex interaction of signal processing, statistical inference, and machine learning. He’s collaborated with both Dyer and Muthukumar on recent research papers.
Goldstein’s work lies at the intersection of machine learning and optimization. A member of the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies at Maryland, he was part of the research team that recently developed a “watermark” that can expose text written by artificial intelligence.
Dyer is a computational neuroscientist whose research has blurred the line between neuroscience and machine learning, and her lab has made advances in neural recording and gathering data. Muthukumar is orchestrating all of this expertise to thoroughly characterize data augmentation’s impact on generalization in machine learning.
“We hope to gain a full understanding of its influence on learning – when it helps and when it hurts,” Muthukumar said. Furthermore, the team aims to broaden the promise of data augmentation, expanding its effective use in other areas, such as neuroscience, graphs, and tabular data.
“Overall, there’s promise in being able to do a lot more with data augmentations, if we do it in a clever and informed kind of way,” Dyer said. “We can build more robust brain-machine interfaces, we can improve fairness and transparency. This work can have tremendous long-range impact, especially regarding neuroscience and biomedical data.”
]]>Kostka serves as Tom and Marie Patton Distinguished Professor and associate chair for Research in Biological Sciences with a joint appointment in Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech.
Each year, AGU recognizes individuals and teams for their accomplishments in research, education, science communication and outreach. “These recipients have transformed our understanding of the world, impacted our everyday lives, improved our communities and contributed to solutions for a sustainable future,” shared AGU President Lisa J. Graumlich and the organization’s Honors and Recognition Committee in a September 18 announcement.
Kostka is an expert in ecosystem biogeoscience, which couples biogeochemistry with microbiology to uncover the role of microorganisms in ecosystem function — along with determining the mechanisms by which environmental perturbations (climate change) alter microbially-mediated biogeochemical cycles.
“To be named as a fellow of the American Geophysical Union is very special to me, in particular because it signifies the trust and respect of my colleagues,” Kostka says. “I am honored to stand on the shoulders of such a great group of researchers that have moved this field forward.”
“Of course,” he adds, “I would not be in this position without amazing mentors, colleagues, students, and postdocs from whom I have learned so much.”
“I want to congratulate Dr. Kostka on this tremendous honor,” adds Biological Sciences Professor and Chair Todd Streelman. “His passion for ecology and understanding the impacts of environmental change on ecosystems is evident. I am delighted that his significant contributions have been recognized by his colleagues in the American Geophysical Union.”
Honorees will be celebrated at AGU24, which will convene more than 25,000 attendees from over 100 countries in Washington, D.C. this December under the theme “What’s Next for Science.”
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Commemorating the enthusiasm and vision of the organization’s founders, the Founder's Prize is awarded to an outstanding early career ecologist who is beginning to make a significant contribution to the science of ecology.
Stroud is being recognized for his groundbreaking research as an integrative evolutionary ecologist, investigating how ecological and evolutionary processes may underlie patterns of biological diversity at the macro-scale.
Earlier this year, Stroud was also named an Early Career Fellow by the Ecological Society of America (ESA). He is the first person to win both seminal early career researcher awards from ESA and BES — the two largest and most influential ecological societies in the world — in the same year.
“The British Ecological Society could not have selected a more deserving recipient of this prestigious award,” says David Collard, senior associate dean in the College of Sciences and professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. “James is a model of faculty excellence in his innovative research, commitment to education, and leadership in the field. We look forward to his continued impact in driving forward the field of ecology.”
Stroud's highly multidisciplinary research combines field studies with macro-ecological and evolutionary comparative analyses, primarily studying lizards. His current interests focus on measuring natural selection in the wild, often leveraging non-native lizards as natural experiments in ecology and evolution.
"I am completely overwhelmed and honored to receive this award,” Stroud says, “and especially from a society very close to my heart. My first ever scientific conference was a BES meeting.”
Stroud will be presented with an honorarium prize during a ceremony at the BES Annual Meeting in Liverpool this December. The meeting brings together over 1,000 ecologists to discuss the latest advances in ecological research. For more than a century, the BES has been championing ecology through its journals, meetings, grants, education, and policy work.
“This award really symbolizes the amazing support and guidance I have received throughout my career from an incredible network of mentors and colleagues,” Stroud adds, “and now, the amazing people I get to work with in my own research group, as well.”
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About the British Ecological Society
The British Ecological Society (BES), founded in 1913, is the oldest ecological society in the world, championing the study of ecology for over a century. With over 7,000 members in more than 120 countries, the BES is the largest scientific society for ecologists in Europe and promotes the study of ecology through its six academic journals, conferences, grants, education initiatives and policy work.
About Georgia Tech
The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is one of the top public research universities in the U.S., developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition. The Institute offers business, computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences degrees. Its more than 47,000 undergraduate and graduate students represent 54 U.S. states and territories and more than 143 countries. They study at the main campus in Atlanta, at instructional sites around the world, or through distance and online learning. As a leading technological university, Georgia Tech is an engine of economic development for Georgia, the Southeast, and the nation, conducting more than $1 billion in research annually for government, industry, and society.
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Davy Falkner
Media Relations Officer
British Ecological Society
“Some research says that 80% of infections in human bodies can be attributed to the bacteria growing in biofilms,” Aawaz Pokhrel says, lead author of a groundbreaking new study that uses physics to investigate how these biofilms grow.
The paper, “The Biophysical Basis of Bacterial Colony Growth,” was published in Nature Physics this week, and it shows that the fitness of a biofilm — its ability to grow, expand, and absorb nutrients from the medium or the substrate — is largely impacted by the contact angle that the biofilm’s edge makes with the substrate. The study also found that this geometry has a bigger influence on fitness than anything else, including the rate at which the cells can reproduce.
“That was the big surprise for us,” says corresponding author Peter Yunker, an associate professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Physics. “We expected that the geometry would play an important role, and we thought that figuring out exactly what the geometry is would be important for understanding why the range expansion rate, for example, [the rate at which the biofilm spreads across the surface over time] is constant. But we didn't start the project thinking that geometry would be the single most important factor.”
Understanding how biofilms grow — and what factors contribute to their growth rate — could lead to critical insights on controlling them, with applications for human health, like slowing the spread of infection or creating cleaner surfaces. “What got me excited was this opportunity to use physics to learn about complex biological systems,” Pokhrel, who is also a Ph.D. student in Yunker’s lab, adds. “Especially on a project that has so many applications. The combination of the importance for human health and exciting research was really intriguing for me.”
While biofilms are ubiquitous in nature, studying them has proven difficult. Because these “cities of microorganisms” are comprised of tiny individuals, scientists have struggled to image them successfully.
That changed in 2015, when Yunker began wondering if interferometry, a commonly used imaging technique in physics and materials science, could be applied to biofilms. “Given my background in physics, I was familiar with its use in materials applications,” Yunker recalls. “I thought applying this technique more broadly might be interesting, because we know from decades of physics that surface interfaces contain a lot of information about the processes that create them.”
The technique proved to be simple, effective, and time-efficient, providing nanometer-scale resolution of bacterial colonies. “It allows us to essentially get a picture of the topography — the shape of the surface of the bacterial population — with super-resolution,” Yunker adds.
Leveraging interferometry, the team began conducting new biofilm experiments, investigating how colonies’ shapes changed over time. Co-first author Gabi Steinbach, formerly a postdoctoral scholar in Yunker’s lab and now a scientific research coordinator at the University of Maryland, noticed that every colony had a specific shape when it was small: a spherical cap, like a slice from the top of a sphere, or a droplet of water. It’s a shape that shows up often in physics, and that sparked the team’s interest.
“A spherical cap in physics is very interesting, because it is a surface-minimizing shape,” Pokhrel adds. “I was curious why a biological material was growing in this shape, and we started wondering if there was some physics to it – perhaps geometry was involved. And that made us think that maybe we could develop a model. And that got me really excited.”
However, the researchers soon hit a roadblock. “While we could see that the colonies were spherical caps at first, they would deviate from that shape as they grew,” Pokhrel says. “And the shape that they grew into was difficult to describe with existing spherical cap geometry.”
“The middle didn’t grow as quickly as it should to keep the spherical cap shape, and we wanted to connect all of this to the range expansion [the rate at which the colony spread across a surface],” Yunker adds. “But we knew that somehow, geometry was playing a very important role.”
Finally, Thomas Day, a former graduate student in Yunker’s lab, now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Southern California, and one of the authors of the paper, suggested a quirky problem of geometry called the napkin ring problem.
“As soon as we started to think about the napkin ring problem, we were able to start developing a mathematical toolkit,” Yunker says, though the solution wasn’t effortless. “We couldn't find anyone who had ever looked at a spherical cap napkin ring before, because the application is very rare.”
Pokhrel, alongside two co-authors, was responsible for working out the geometry. He discovered that the cells grew exponentially at the edge of the shape, expanding further onto the medium, while the cells in the middle grew upward, creating a shape not unlike an egg in a frying pan — if the egg white was expanding outwards, while the yolk was only growing taller.
This was the breakthrough discovery: Because the cells at the middle were only contributing to the biofilm’s height, the team only needed to account for how many cells were at the edge of the biofilm, and the shape they needed to be in to grow and spread.
After incorporating their findings into a mathematical model, the team found that the contact angle was the most important factor: the angle that the very edge of the biofilm made when it touched the surface it was growing on. That single geometric quality is even more important to a biofilm’s growth than the rate at which it can reproduce cells.
Overall, the project took more than three years, from conception to publication. “Aawaz really made an incredible effort seeing this work through,” Yunker says. “It was many years and many, many experiments. But the finished product is 100% worth it.”
The team hopes the research will pave the way for future studies, which could lead to applications like controlling biofilm growth to help prevent infections.
“Going forward, there are still a lot of research avenues,” Pokhrel says. “For example, looking at competition experiments between biofilms — do taller colonies change their contact angle so that they can spread faster? What role does this geometry play in competition?”
“Biology is complex,” Yunker adds. In nature, the surface a biofilm grows on may not be as consistent as a laboratory surface, and colonies may have different mutations or may consist of more than one species. And while the model is based on how biofilms behave in a controlled lab environment, it’s a critical first step in understanding how they may behave in nature.
Citation: Pokhrel, A.R., Steinbach, G., Krueger, A. et al. The biophysical basis of bacterial colony growth. Nat. Phys. (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-024-02572-3
Funding information: This research was funded by the NIH National Institute of General Medical Sciences and NSF Biomaterials
]]>Now Georgia Tech bioengineer Ankur Singh and his research team have developed a method to improve this pioneering immunotherapy.
Their solution involves using nanowires to deliver therapeutic miRNA to T-cells. This new modification process retains the cells’ naïve state, which means they’ll be even better disease fighters when they’re infused back into a patient.
“By delivering miRNA in naïve T cells, we have basically prepared an infantry, ready to deploy,” Singh said. “And when these naïve cells are stimulated and activated in the presence of disease, it’s like they’ve been converted into samurais.”
Currently in adoptive T-cell therapy, the cells become stimulated and preactivated in the lab when they are modified, losing their naïve state. Singh’s new technique overcomes this limitation. The approach is described in a new study published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.
“Naïve T-cells are more useful for immunotherapy because they have not yet been preactivated, which means they can be more easily manipulated to adopt desired therapeutic functions,” said Singh, the Carl Ring Family Professor in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering.
The raw recruits of the immune system, naïve T-cells are white blood cells that haven’t been tested in battle yet. But these cellular recruits are robust, impressionable, and adaptable — ready and eager for programming.
“This process creates a well-programmed naïve T-cell ideal for enhancing immune responses against specific targets, such as tumors or pathogens,” said Singh.
The precise programming naïve T-cells receive sets the foundational stage for a more successful disease fighting future, as compared to preactivated cells.
Within the body, naïve T-cells become activated when they receive a danger signal from antigens, which are part of disease-causing pathogens, but they send a signal to T-cells that activate the immune system.
Adoptive T-cell therapy is used against aggressive diseases that overwhelm the body’s defense system. Scientists give the patient’s T-cells a therapeutic boost in the lab, loading them up with additional medicine and chemically preactivating them.
That’s when the cells lose their naïve state. When infused back into the patient, these modified T-cells are an effective infantry against disease — but they are prone to becoming exhausted. They aren’t samurai. Naïve T-cells, though, being the young, programmable recruits that they are, could be.
The question for Singh and his team was: How do we give cells that therapeutic boost without preactivating them, thereby losing that pristine, highly suggestable naïve state? Their answer: Nanowires.
Singh wanted to enhance naïve T-cells with a dose of miRNA. miRNA is a molecule that, when used as a therapeutic, works as a kind of volume knob for genes, turning their activity up or down to keep infection and cancer in check. The miRNA for this study was developed in part by the study’s co-author, Andrew Grimson of Cornell University.
“If we could find a way to forcibly enter the cells without damaging them, we could achieve our goal to deliver the miRNA into naïve T cells without preactivating them,” Singh explained.
Traditional modification in the lab involves binding immune receptors to T-cells, enabling the uptake of miRNA or any genetic material (which results in loss of the naïve state). “But nanowires do not engage receptors and thus do not activate cells, so they retain their naïve state,” Singh said.
The nanowires, silicon wafers made with specialized tools at Georgia Tech’s Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology, form a fine needle bed. Cells are placed on the nanowires, which easily penetrate the cells and deliver their miRNA over several hours. Then the cells with miRNA are flushed out from the tops of the nanowires, activated, eventually infused back into the patient. These programmed cells can kill enemies efficiently over an extended time period.
“We believe this approach will be a real gamechanger for adoptive immunotherapies, because we now have the ability to produce T-cells with predictable fates,” says Brian Rudd, a professor of immunology at Cornell University, and co-senior author of the study with Singh.
The researchers tested their work in two separate infectious disease animal models at Cornell for this study, and Singh described the results as “a robust performance in infection control.”
In the next phase of study, the researchers will up the ante, moving from infectious disease to test their cellular super soldiers against cancer and move toward translation to the clinical setting. New funding from the Georgia Clinical & Translational Science Alliance is supporting Singh’s research.
CITATION: Kristel J. Yee Mon, Sungwoong Kim, Zhonghao Dai, Jessica D. West, Hongya Zhu5, Ritika Jain, Andrew Grimson, Brian D. Rudd, Ankur Singh. “Functionalized nanowires for miRNA-mediated therapeutic programming of naïve T cells,” Nature Nanotechnology.
FUNDING: Curci Foundation, NSF (EEC-1648035, ECCS-2025462, ECCS-1542081), NIH (5R01AI132738-06, 1R01CA266052-01, 1R01CA238745-01A1, U01CA280984-01, R01AI110613 and U01AI131348).
Ankur Singh has developed a new way of programming T cells that retains their naïve state, making them better fighters. — Photo by Jerry Grillo
“Asthma is typically considered an allergic inflammatory disease,” Han says, “and so the majority of research has previously focused on immune responses. But there is emerging evidence that the nervous system plays a critical role in the disease.”
Han highlights that our lungs are full of sensory nerves, which help monitor their internal state, and play an important role in regulating our breathing patterns and respiratory system. Vagal sensory neurons help send information from the lungs to the brain. Recent data collected by Yanyan Xing, a former postdoctoral researcher in the Han lab and now a scientist at Empress Therapeutics, suggested that blocking a group of vagal sensory neurons stopped the development of asthma symptoms in mice.
“Since these sensory neurons are responsible for responses like coughing, bronchoconstriction, and mucus secretion, all of which are asthma symptoms, we want to investigate whether blocking these neurons can help inhibit asthma in humans,” Han says. “If so, this might prove a promising treatment avenue for asthma.”
In her lab at Georgia Tech, Han’s research team investigates the role the nervous system plays in creating and behavioral responses, and how that contributes to chronic diseases. “We want to understand how the nervous system receives, transmits, and interprets various stimuli to induce physiological and behavioral responses,” she explains.
This year, Han also received a $550k grant from the National Science Foundation to investigate the neural circuit controlling itch sensation. The research has the potential to uncover new treatments for sensory conditions like chronic itch.
]]>“Nakia has been instrumental in helping to expand Georgia’s life sciences community and ecosystem,” said David Bridges, vice president of the Enterprise Innovation Institute, Georgia Tech’s chief economic development arm. “Leading Innovation Lab already builds on a foundation he created since joining us in 2019 and further supports our broad economic development mission.”
He's already leading in the healthcare research practice expansion with his work in the MedTech Center and running the ScaleUp Lab Program for deep tech innovation.
Under Melecio’s leadership as founding director, the MedTech Center, which has the Georgia Manufacturing Extension Partnership and Global Center for Medical Innovation as partners, has worked with and evaluated the innovations of more than 200 companies. Since launching in 2021, the MedTech Center’s 66 active startups have raised $13.1 million in investment capital and an additional $6.4 million in federal, non-dilutive funding grants.
In 2023, the MedTech Center was selected to join the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health’s ARPA-H Investor Catalyst Hub to accelerate the commercialization of practical, accessible biomedical solutions.
He is supporting Georgia Tech’s efforts to collaborate with Atlanta University Center schools — Spelman College, Clark-Atlanta University, Morehouse College, and the Morehouse School of Medicine — to collaborate with those minority-serving institutions as they build out capacity for their scientists and researchers to create more life sciences technology companies, following an award from the Economic Development Administration.
Similarly, Melecio is working with the University of Alabama at Birmingham on a collaborative project in biologics and medical devices to move more of its researchers’ innovations out of the lab and into commercial markets.
As Innovation Lab lead, Melecio, who has secured more than $5.76 million in federal grants and awards to Georgia Tech, will also work to develop biomanufacturing partnerships for Georgia Tech.
With EI2 Global, the Enterprise Innovation Institute’s program that fosters economic opportunity through collaborations with universities, innovators, governments, and nonprofit organizations worldwide, Melecio will serve as an instructor on Lab-to-Market and CREATE-X programming for entrepreneurs. He will also create and provide educational content for EI2 Global’s university and ecosystem partners.
Closer to home, his Innovation Lab work includes ongoing projects as a principal in VentureLab, a program of Georgia Tech’s Office of Commercialization. In that capacity, he will work on VentureLab’s National Science Foundation-related Innovation Corps (I-Corps) programming. Those efforts, overseen by Commercialization Vice President Raghupathy "Siva" Sivakumar, include the NSF I-Corps Hub Academy, where Melecio will serve as director.
“Our efforts with Innovation Lab are centered around finding new opportunities, new markets, and new industries by leveraging our areas of expertise at the Enterprise Innovation Institute and Georgia Tech to build economic development capacity in the life sciences and biosciences space,” Melecio said.
“We’re looking to take a broader perspective, away from being hyper-focused in one or two niche areas in life sciences, to ensure that we maximize opportunities to support new ideas, build stronger practice areas in this space, and secure funding to bring those innovations to scale.”
]]>Fenton uses physics to better understand how the heart functions — or malfunctions, as in the case of arrhythmias. Arrhythmias happen when a heart beats irregularly, and too slow or too fast. These contractions are cued by electrical signals — electrical signals that he has spent the last thirty years uncovering.
“I am extremely honored and grateful to have been selected for this award,” Fenton says. “It is really a privilege to join the list of recipients of this award, so many of whom I have long admired and whose research has formed and inspired me since my early days as a researcher. It is particularly meaningful for me to be recognized for my contributions to the study of cardiac arrhythmias by a society predominantly composed of medical doctors, especially given the unusual circumstance of a physicist receiving such an honor.”
By leveraging mathematical and computational models, along with conducting experiments, Fenton unravels the dynamics of voltage and calcium waves in the heart, and how their instabilities relate to arrhythmias — in particular the unique spiral waves associated with them. By combating these spiral waves with specifically-tailored electrical shocks, he has developed gentler, less-damaging methods than those traditionally-used in current defibrillators, which he hopes can be clinically applied in the future.
Fenton’s contributions to the field have also included new methods to visualize and study arrhythmias experimentally and the development of theoretical and computational tools, increasing the accessibility of cutting-edge computer simulations aimed at personalizing heart treatments.
“I would like to dedicate this award to my mentors and collaborators Alain Karma, Steve Evans, Robert Gilmour, and Elizabeth Cherry, as well as to all my students whose contributions have been invaluable and with whom I have had so much fun doing research,” he says. “This award is a testament to our collective work.”
]]>Previously, Singer and her collaborators demonstrated that the lights and sounds, delivered to patients through goggles and headphones, have beneficial effects. Flicker has been successful in animal studies and in early human feasibility trials, where it was tested for safety, tolerance, and patient adherence.
Now, thanks to a clinical trial for people with epilepsy, the researchers quantified flicker’s effects with unprecedented precision. They also made an unexpected, but encouraging, discovery: The treatment reduced interictal epileptiform discharges (IEDs) in the brain.
These large, intermittent electrophysiological events are observed between seizures in people with epilepsy. They appear as sharp spikes on an EEG readout.
“What’s interesting about these IEDs is that they don’t just occur in epilepsy,” said Singer, McCamish Foundation Early Career Professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. “They occur in autism, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s, and other neurological disorders, too.” And IEDs disrupt normal brain function, causing memory impairment.
Singer and her team published their findings recently in Nature Communications.
Inside the brain are elaborate symphonies of electrical activity: brain waves, or oscillations, that compose our memories, thoughts, and emotions. Singer wants to modulate those oscillations for therapeutic purposes.
At specific frequencies of light and sound, the flicker treatment can induce gamma oscillations in mice. This helps the brain recruit microglia, cells responsible for removing beta amyloid, which is believed to play a central role in Alzheimer’s pathology. Part of the work is in recording what’s happening in the brain during treatment to verify how it’s working.
The patients in the trial were under the care of physician Jon Willie at the Emory University Hospital Epilepsy Monitoring Unit. (Willie, co-corresponding author of the study with Singer, is now at Washington University in St. Louis.) They were awaiting surgery to remove an area of the brain where seizures occur. Before that could happen, they had to undergo intracranial seizure monitoring — recording electrodes are placed in the brain to pinpoint the seizure onset zone and determine exactly which tissue should be removed. Then, patients and their care team wait for a seizure to happen. It can take days.
“In human studies, we’ve used noninvasive methods like functional MRI or scalp EEG, but they have real downsides in terms of resolution,” Singer said. “Working with these patients was a game changer. These are people with treatment-resistant epilepsy, which means that drugs aren’t working for them.”
Singer’s team recruited 19 patients. Lead author of the study, Lou Blanpain, a former Ph.D. student in Singer’s lab and now a medical student at Emory, went from patient to patient with the flicker stimulation and recording equipment.
“Because these patients already had recording probes implanted for clinical reasons, we were able to record directly from the brain,” Singer said. “We’ve never been able to get recordings of this quality during flicker treatment before.”
As the researchers expected, flicker modulated the visual and auditory brain regions that respond strongly to stimuli. But it also reached deeper, into the medial temporal lobe and prefrontal cortex, brain regions crucial for memory. And across the brain, in regions Singer hadn’t fully explored before, she found IEDs were decreasing.
“That has important implications for whether flicker is therapeutically relevant for people with Alzheimer’s, but also in general if we want to target anything beyond the primary sensory regions,” she said. “All of this points to the potential use of flicker in a lot of different contexts. Going forward, we’re definitely going to look at other conditions and other potential implications.”
Citation: Lou T. Blanpain, Eric R. Cole, Emily Chen, James K. Park, Michael Y. Walelign, Robert E. Gross, Brian T. Cabaniss, Jon T. Willie, Annabelle C. Singer. “Multisensory Flicker Modulates Widespread Brain Networks and Reduces Interictal Epileptiform Discharges,” Nature Communications.
Funding: National Institutes of Health (R01 NS109226, RF1NS109226, RF1AG078736, R01 MH120194, P41 EB018783, MH12019), DARPA, McCamish Foundation, Packard Foundation.
Competing interests: Annabelle Singer owns shares in Cognito Therapeutics, which aims to develop gamma stimulation-related products. These conflicts are managed by Georgia Tech’s Office of Research Integrity Assurance.
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The North Atlantic ocean is a hub of biological activity, due in large part to the Gulf Stream, which supplies a rich current of nutrients. Scientists have speculated that our changing climate may lead to a decline of nutrients and biological activity in the North Atlantic due to a weakening of the ocean circulation — but this theory has previously been supported only by models.
Now, by studying sediments buried at the Gulf Stream’s origin, the team has conducted a first-of-its-kind investigation into the impact of a similar climate-induced decline nearly 13,000 years ago, when Earth exited the last ice age.
The paper, “A Diminished North Atlantic Nutrient Stream During Younger Dryas Climate Reversal” was published in Science this week. Led by Jean Lynch-Stieglitz, a professor in the School of Earth of Atmospheric Sciences, the team also included Lynch-Stieglitz’s past students: Tyler Vollmer, Shannon Valley, and Eric Blackmon, along with Sifan Gu (Jiao Tong University School of Oceanography), and Thomas Marchitto (University of Colorado, Boulder).
“The research tests a concept that has previously only been explored in theory and models,” Lynch-Stieglitz says. “The large-scale Atlantic overturning circulation provides the nutrients that underly biological productivity in the North Atlantic.”
Since the current is expected to continue weakening over the next century as a result of greenhouse gas emissions, researchers anticipate that the North Atlantic will receive fewer and fewer nutrients.
“This concept has real-world implications for the future health of the oceans and fisheries,” Lynch-Stieglitz explains. Impacts range from a decline in fish populations to potentially impacting the amount of CO2 the ocean can uptake.
“The dramatic climate changes the Earth has experienced in the past can help us understand what parts of the Earth system are vulnerable to change, and help us evaluate ideas about the impacts of the ongoing climate change,” she adds.
The team studied the Younger Dryas, a period of time during the transition out of the last ice age when there was a weakening of the Atlantic circulation. By examining how the nutrient stream changed when circulation weakened in the past, the researchers hoped to better understand what we may expect from today's warming oceans.
However, the team didn’t initially set out with this goal in mind — the work began as an undergraduate research project with an intriguing mystery. Eric Blackmon, then a student in Lynch-Stieglitz’s lab, was interested in investigating the disappearance of a species of plankton from the North Atlantic Ocean during the last ice age.
“The outcome of this study was puzzling,” Lynch-Stieglitz recalls. The team decided to use a rarely used technique to better understand the results. The method of reconstructing seawater oxygen concentration produced an unusually clear record of how oxygen concentration in the seawater had changed through time.
“Our team realized that when combined with an earlier reconstruction of seawater chemistry, the technique provided key information on the history and mechanisms of nutrient delivery into the North Atlantic Ocean,” Lynch-Stieglitz says. “We set out to answer a small question, and along the way discovered our data has broader implications than we anticipated.”
With this new technique, the team analyzed layers of sediment in the Florida Straits, a narrow passage between the Florida Keys and Cuba, where the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean meet. By coring into these layers and taking a cylindrical sample, “the layers of accumulating sediments provide an environmental history at the site,” Lynch-Stieglitz explains. In this instance, “we looked at how the shells of single-celled organisms called foraminifera changed with time.” Because foraminifera live on the ocean floor, their shells accumulate within each layer of sediment, preserving important chemical signatures that can be used to reconstruct the chemistry of the ocean in which they resided.
“It is pretty amazing that ocean chemistry of the past can be reconstructed in such detail using beautiful, tiny shells,” Lynch-Stieglitz says.
The research showed that during the Younger Dryas, as the overturning circulation weakened, nutrients in the Gulf Stream decreased and the amount of oxygen in the Florida Straits increased. The team also found that as the nutrient stream decreased, the amount of biological productivity in the North Atlantic decreased as well.
“The study represents an important development of the carbon isotope-based proxy for past oxygen concentrations,” Lynch-Stieglitz says. “The record is very clean, and the magnitude and timing of the changes in dissolved oxygen are mirrored to an astonishing degree in the phosphate reconstruction.”
Beyond these findings about how the ocean works, the team’s study of foraminifera also provides new ways to understand how nutrients are cycled around the ocean, and how we investigate this. These windows into how Earth’s oceans changed in the past provide a critical tool for testing models, letting us better predict how our oceans and the resources they provide may respond to climate change in the future.
“The physical changes in the earth system can have profound changes on life in the ocean, and far-reaching impacts,” Lynch-Stieglitz notes. “Climate change is about more than climate,”
This study was supported by National Science Foundation grant OCE-1459563 (J.L.-S.) and National Science Foundation grant OCE-1851900 (J.L.-S.).
DOI: science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adi5543
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“We are grateful to our NIH sponsor for this award to improve treatment of post-stroke individuals using advanced robotic solutions,” said Young, who is also affiliated with Georgia Tech's Neuro Next Initiative.
The R01 will support a project focused on using optimization and artificial intelligence to personalize exoskeleton assistance for individuals with symptoms resulting from stroke. Sawicki and Young will collaborate with researchers from the Emory Rehabilitation Hospital including Associate Professor Trisha Kesar.
“As a stroke researcher, I am eagerly looking forward to making progress on this project, and paving the way for leading-edge technologies and technology-driven treatment strategies that maximize functional independence and quality of life of people with neuro-pathologies," said Kesar.
The intervention for study participants will include a training therapy program that will use biofeedback to increase the efficiency of exosuits for wearers.
Kinsey Herrin, senior research scientist in the Woodruff School and Neuro Next Initiative affiliate, explained the extended benefits of the study, including being able to increase safety for stroke patients who are moving outdoors. “One aspect of this project is testing our technologies on stroke survivors as they're walking outside. Being outside is a small thing that many of us take for granted, but a devastating loss for many following a stroke.”
Sawicki, who is also an associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences and core faculty in Georgia Tech's Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines, is also looking forward to the project. "This new project is truly a tour de force that leverages a highly talented interdisciplinary team of engineers, clinical scientists, and prosthetics/orthotics experts who all bring key elements needed to build assistive technology that can work in real-world scenarios."
]]>The findings are the latest product of the Molecular Transducers of Physical Activity Consortium (MoTrPAC), a ten-year effort launched in 2016 by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to uncover how exercise improves and maintains our health at the molecular level.
Georgia Institute of Technology bioanalytical chemist Facundo Fernández and Emory University biochemist Eric Ortlund lead one of the Consortium’s Chemical Analysis Sites, joining researchers across the country to collect and translate data from animals and more than 2,000 volunteers into comprehensive maps of the cellular changes throughout the body in response to exercise.
The $226 million MoTrPAC NIH Common Fund investment also hopes to help people with chronic illnesses identify specific physical activities to improve individual health, and to potentially unearth therapeutic targets — medicines that might mimic the positive effects of exercise.
MoTrPAC’s latest group of papers details data from studies in rats, uncovering how endurance exercise affects biological molecules and “all tissues of the body,” as well as tissues and gene expression, along with striking tissue differences between male and female organisms.
Read more:
Facundo M. Fernandez, is Regents’ Professor and Vasser Woolley Foundation Chair in Bioanalytical Chemistry at Georgia Tech. He also serves as associate editor of the Journal of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry (JASMS).
Eric Ortlund is a professor in the Department of Biochemistry at Emory University and a member of the Discovery and Developmental Therapeutics Research Program at Winship Cancer Institute.
Study co-authors from Georgia Tech also include David A. Gaul (School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, along with Samuel G. Moore (Petit Institute of Bioengineering and Biosciences). Emory University co-authors also include Tiantian Zhang and Zhenxin Hou (Department of Biochemistry).
Funding: The MoTrPAC Study is supported by multiple NIH grants and institutes, as well as the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, and NORC at the University of Chicago.
NIH grants include: U24OD026629 (Bioinformatics Center), U24DK112349, U24DK112342, U24DK112340, U24DK112341, U24DK112326, U24DK112331, U24DK112348 (Chemical Analysis Sites), U01AR071133, U01AR071130, U01AR071124, U01AR071128, U01AR071150, U01AR071160, U01AR071158 (Clinical Centers), U24AR071113 (Consortium Coordinating Center), U01AG055133, U01AG055137 and U01AG055135 (PASS/Animal Sites); as well as NHGRI Institutional Training Grant in Genome Science 5T32HG000044; National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institute of Health F32 postdoctoral fellowship award F32HL154711; National Institute on Aging P30AG044271 and P30AG003319.
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Jess Hunt-Ralston
Director of Communications
College of Sciences
Georgia Tech
Anthony (Tony) Van Witsen
Health Sciences Writer
Woodruff Health Sciences Center
Emory University
Andréa Harris, Ph.D., M.S.P.H., S.C.P.M.
Health Science Policy Analyst
Office of Strategic Coordination – The Common Fund
Division of Program Coordination, Planning, and Strategic Initiatives
Office of the Director, NIH
Georgia Tech’s Simon Sponberg recently collaborated with researchers at the University of Washington, Simon Fraser University, University of Colorado Boulder, and Stanford Research Institute to answer one deceptively complex question: Why can’t robots outrun animals?
“This work is about trying to understand how, despite have some really amazing robots, there still seems to be a gulf between the capabilities of animal movement and what we can engineer,” says Sponberg, who is Dunn Family Associate Professor in the School of Physics and School of Biological Sciences.
Recently published in Science Robotics, their study systematically examines a suite of biological and robotic runners to figure out how to further advance our best robotic designs.
“In robotics design we are often very component focused — we are used to having to establish specifications for the parts that we need and then finding the best component solution,” said Sponberg, who also serves on the executive committee for Georgia Tech's Neuro Next Initiative. “This is of course not how evolution works. We wondered if we systematically analyzed the performance of animals in the same component way that we design robots, if we might see an obvious gap.”
The gap turns out not to be in the function of individual robotic components, but rather the ability of those components to work together in the seamless way biological components do, highlighting a field of opportunity for new research in robotic development.
“This means that the frontier is not necessarily figuring out how to design better motors or sensors or controllers,” says Sponberg, “but rather how to integrate them together — this is where biology really excels.”
He joins the ranks of nine newly appointed ESA Fellows and ten 2024-2028 ESA Early Career Fellows, elected for "advancing the science of ecology and showing promise for continuing contributions" and recently confirmed by the organization's Governing Board.
Stroud, an Elizabeth Smithgall Watts Early Career Assistant Professor in the School of Biological Sciences, is an integrative evolutionary ecologist who investigates how ecological and evolutionary processes may underlie patterns of biological diversity at the macro-scale.
He primarily studies lizards and his research is highly multidisciplinary, combining field studies with macro-ecological and evolutionary comparative analyses. Stroud’s current interests are particularly focused on measuring natural selection in the wild, often taking advantage of non-native lizards as natural experiments in ecology and evolution.
Earlier this month, Stroud presented his recent work at the inaugural College of Sciences Frontiers in Science: Climate Action Conference and Symposium, joining more than 20 faculty experts and 100 stakeholders from across all six colleges at Georgia Tech to discuss climate change, challenges, and solutions.
Stroud joined the Georgia Tech faculty in August 2023. He earned a Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolution from Florida International University.
"I am thrilled to recognize the exceptional contributions of our newly selected Fellows and Early Career Fellows,” says ESA President Shahid Naeem. “Their groundbreaking research, unwavering commitment to mentoring and teaching and advocacy for sound science in management and policy decisions have not only advanced ecological science but also inspired positive change within our community and beyond. We celebrate their achievements and eagerly anticipate the profound impacts they will continue to make in their careers."
ESA will formally acknowledge and celebrate its new Fellows for their exceptional achievements during a ceremony at ESA’s 2024 Annual Meeting in Long Beach, California.
About ESA Fellowships
ESA established its Fellows program in 2012 with the goal of honoring its members and supporting their competitiveness and advancement to leadership positions in the Society, at their institutions, and in broader society. Past ESA Fellows and Early Career Fellows are listed on the ESA Fellows page.
About ESA
The Ecological Society of America, founded in 1915, is the world’s largest community of professional ecologists and a trusted source of ecological knowledge, committed to advancing the understanding of life on Earth. The 8,000 member Society publishes six journals and a membership bulletin and broadly shares ecological information through policy, media outreach, and education initiatives. The Society’s Annual Meeting attracts 4,000 attendees and features the most recent advances in ecological science. Visit the ESA website at https://www.esa.org.
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Mayda Nathan
Ecological Society of America
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Recently, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Professor Chris Rozell traveled to Washington, D.C. to share the impact of his BRAIN Initiative research with U.S. Congressional offices — and offer insights on how critical this program is to society. The briefing took on a particular urgency because BRAIN Initiative funding was cut over 40% this year, and future funding appears to be in jeopardy in the current federal budget climate.
“The millions of patients suffering with intractable neurologic disorders and mental illness deserve a moonshot to develop new solutions for their conditions,” said Rozell, who also holds the Julian T. Hightower Chair in ECE and serves on the executive committee for Georgia Tech’s Neuro Next Initiative. “You can't get to the moon with a paper plane, and you can’t get there without a map. The BRAIN Initiative is a vital program because it's one of the few places that brings together interdisciplinary teams that include the scientists who have been building maps of brain circuits and the engineers who have been building rockets to understand and intervene with those circuits.
“I'm proud to have had the chance to represent not only our own research, but the incredible community here at Georgia Tech and around the country working to understand many different aspects of the brain, developing new neurotechnologies, and advancing therapies for neurologic disorders.”
“The main message we presented to Congress is that the interdisciplinary combination of rigorous science and technical innovation can have enormous societal impact over the next few decades,” said Rozell.
A stark example of that impact was published in Nature this past fall. In this research, Rozell and his collaborators at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Emory University School of Medicine identified the first known biomarker of disease recovery with deep brain stimulation in treatment-resistant depression.
“The fact that an engineer can advance clinical therapies is a testament to the new era we're in,” says Rozell, “where disciplinary boundaries are fading, and technological innovation accelerates our scientific and translational breakthroughs.”
This research served as a focal point of the congressional briefing, where Rozell presented with BRAIN Initiative Director John J. Ngai, clinical collaborators, and a family whose lives have been transformed by this work.
“Events like last week are dream come true,” shared Jon Nelson, who was treated with deep brain stimulation as part of the study and presented with Rozell in D.C. After living through 10 years of debilitating, treatment-resistant depression, Nelson says “remission of depression still doesn't feel real. It's been a year and a half, and I still am in awe every single day.
“The fact that I have come out of this study and found that the disease is purely an electrical deficiency in my brain has fueled me to completely pulverize the stigma of mental illness,” Nelson explained. “When you have an opportunity to go speak to Congress — that’s about as great of a platform as you can get for that. Being able to put a face to what the BRAIN Initiative funding can do for people was just amazing.”
When meeting with local representatives, Rozell also relayed his work as co-executive leader of the Neuro Next Initiative, a budding Interdisciplinary Research Institute at Georgia Tech.
“I was thrilled to highlight that Georgia Tech is leading the charge with the Neuro Next Initiative, which will evolve into a full Interdisciplinary Research Institute in 2025,” said Rozell. “Georgia Tech has the ingredients to become a leading center for modern technology-driven interdisciplinary brain research and workforce development.
“This visit was a reminder to me that research funding is not guaranteed and it’s important to keep communicating the critical value that research plays in advancing our understanding, training our workforce, fueling our economy, and ultimately making a better tomorrow for society.”
]]>On April 18, the College of Sciences hosted more than 20 speakers and panelists from across the Institute and Atlanta community presenting groundbreaking research and discussing innovations and ideas in climate change, challenges, and solutions.
Georgia Tech President Ángel Cabrera (M.S. PSY 1993, Ph.D. PSY 1995) kicked off the morning sessions by highlighting the Institute’s new Climate Action Plan, which outlines the pathway to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. Cabrera’s remarks focused on Georgia Tech’s role on the frontlines of research and education informing how we respond to climate challenges — and noted that the Institute’s work must extend beyond our laboratories and classrooms.
“It is essential that we not only do the science, but that we also tell that science to the world,” Cabrera says.
Interdisciplinary inquiry
This year, Frontiers in Science featured an array of climate research and initiatives led by the College of Sciences, fellow colleges across Georgia Tech, and the wider Atlanta community.
Following a three-year hiatus of the Frontiers series, the 2024 edition re-envisioned the signature annual event as a research conference and symposium to convene campus experts — and to incubate seed grant proposals to support the work of early career faculty.
Frontiers previously hosted Nobel laureates and invited thought leaders for individual talks across the College’s six schools, and celebrated milestones like the International Year of the Periodic Table of the Chemical Elements.
“This year, we wanted to showcase what we are doing right here in the College of Sciences and throughout the Institute,” says Susan Lozier, dean of the College of Sciences, Betsy Middleton and John Clark Sutherland Chair and professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. “Our faculty are at the forefront of broadening our knowledgebase and uncovering solutions in areas critical to the planet and our well-being. We wanted to uplift that work and see what sort of connections could be made.”
Connections and collaboration were key themes of the day as faculty, staff, students, and alumni participants representing all six Georgia Tech colleges shared research results and ongoing work and discussed collaborative ideas for horizons ahead.
“Scientists alone cannot [create accurate models],” noted Annalisa Bracco, professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and associate chair for Research, who shared her own research alongside Lozier, who presented a version of her 2024 TED Talk on ocean overturning. “Engineers alone cannot do it. We need social scientists, policy makers, communicators.”
The importance of an interdisciplinary approach was reinforced by the Strategic Energy Institute at Georgia Tech (SEI) and Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS), which announced an interdisciplinary seed grant funding opportunity for assistant professors with ideas for new climate solutions.
Frontiers in focus
Across three themed sessions, faculty and leadership from the Colleges of Sciences, Engineering, and Design spearheaded talks on the ocean and cryosphere, biodiversity, carbon cycling, coastal wetlands, biofuels production, and beyond.
Panels on climate challenges across community, technological, and policy initiatives were hosted by Georgia Tech Vice President for Interdisciplinary Research and Professor in the School of Biological Sciences and the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry Julia Kubanek.
Following a networking lunch with climate table topics, Georgia Tech Executive Vice President for Research and Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering Chaouki T. Abdallah (M.S. ECE 1982, Ph.D. ECE 1988) kicked off the afternoon sessions — which also announced the scholarship recipients of a student video competition and featured videos with a pair of alumnae working in meteorology, climate research, and policy.
Afternoon highlights also included discussions on the Georgia Tech Climate Action Plan and Sustainability Next initiative, led by Jennifer Chirico (B.S. MGMT 1997, Ph.D. PUBP 2011), associate vice president of Sustainability for Georgia Tech Infrastructure and Sustainability, and Jennifer Leavey (B.S. CHEM 1995), assistant dean for Faculty Mentoring in the College of Sciences and interim assistant director for Interdisciplinary Education in the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems.
Although many of the presentations provided a stern outlook of the state of our ecosystems, the conference concluded with a sense of hope. This optimism was grounded in the range of opportunities that exist to address climate challenges — thanks, in part, to the body of knowledge and solutions being tested and explored by Georgia Tech researchers.
At the end of the day, Katie Griffin, a first year undergraduate student in Environmental Science, read Amanda Gorman’s poem Earthrise and provided this reminder:
All of us bring light to exciting solutions never tried before
For it is our hope that implores us, at our uncompromising core,
To keep rising up for an earth more than worth fighting for.
Experience the event in pictures with the College of Sciences’ Flickr account, and discover the highlights through the day’s live tweets on College of Sciences’ X account.
]]>Jess Hunt-Ralston
Director of Communications
College of Sciences at Georgia Tech
The award follows two Phase I NIH grants the company received, the most recent being in 2021.
Annoviant's patented TxGuard™ stands at the forefront of technological innovation in conduit replacements for treating congenital heart disease (CHD), the most prevalent birth defect globally and a leading cause of birth-related mortality, the company said.
CHD encompasses a broad range of abnormalities that disrupt blood flow to and from the heart. It affects approximately 40,000 newborns annually — or 1% of births in the U.S. — and 1.35 million worldwide. With an estimated 2.9 million CHD patients in the U.S. alone, the need for advanced solutions is paramount.
"This marks a significant milestone for Annoviant as we accelerate our pursuit of impactful innovation to save lives," said Annoviant CEO and co-founder Ajay Houde, Ph.D. "It validates our hypothesis and shows the NIH's confidence in our ability to make good progress. Because we are a small startup, it gives private investors the confidence to invest with us and more companies working with us across the broader ecosystem."
Addressing critical shortcomings observed in current commercial devices, TxGuard™ offers clinical advantages, notably its resistance to calcification, thrombosis, infection, and the host cell integration. This cutting-edge technology marks a new era in pediatric cardiac interventions, providing durable pulmonary valved grafts that adapt and regenerate alongside patients, minimizing the need for multiple re-operations over their lifetimes.
"Heart disease is the leading killer of men and women in the U.S. and is the most common birth defect in our newborns," said Center for MedTech Excellence Director Nakia Melecio, who worked with Annoviant to help it scale and reviewed its federal funding submissions.
The Center for MedTech Excellence, which launched in 2022, works with early-stage life sciences startups that have specific obstacles that young tech companies in other sectors don't face.
"This is a critical milestone for the company, and validates its research and work, thus far," Melicio said. "Annoviant's technology is tackling several challenges that the market currently faces and elevating the possibility for better patient outcomes in management of congestive heart failure."
Pediatric patients with CHD often undergo multiple cardiovascular surgeries throughout their lives, with associated costs totaling billions for the U.S. healthcare industry. TxGuard™ offers a transformative solution to this ongoing challenge, promising extended durability and reduced healthcare burden for patients and providers alike.
He credited the company's work with the Center for MedTech Excellence and being a health tech startup in the Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC), the Enterprise Innovation Institute's startup incubator, as being pivotal in Annoviant's growth.
ATDC SBIR/STTR Catalyst Connie Casteel, who works with the incubator's portfolio companies to help the prepare for these federal, non-dilutive funding grants, had worked with Annoviant on its federal funding approach and strategy.
"We went through the 16-week program with the MedTech Center and it really helped us think through the various aspects of the commercialization process and operational challenges we would face," Houde said. "Greg Jungles at ATDC was also instrumental in helping us. I'm really thankful for Nakia and his work with the MedTech Center and Greg and the team at ATDC."
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