Borodovsky, Platt, and Taylor all share another distinction – they are faculty members of the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. Together with Lee they all are researchers in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Georgia Tech as well.
The College of Fellows is comprised of the top two percent of medical and biological engineers. College membership honors those who have made outstanding contributions to “engineering and medicine research, practice, or education” and to “the pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional fields of medical and biological engineering, or developing/implementing innovative approaches to bioengineering education.”
Borodovsky, Regents’ Professor in the Coulter Department and director of the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Genomics at Georgia Tech, was nominated, reviewed, and elected by peers and members of the College of Fellows for, “outstanding contribution to Bioinformatics by developing effective algorithms critically important for accelerated progress of genomics science and engineering.”
Lee is the Virginia C. and Joseph C. Mello Chair and Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech, where she also serves as director of the Center for Operations Research in Medicine and Healthcare. She’s also co-director of the Center for Health Organization Transformation (an NSF Industry/University Cooperative research center). She was recognized for, “contributions in novel cancer therapeutics, vaccine immunogenicity prediction, and public health emergency preparedness with successful implementation and broad impact.”
Platt, associate professor, Georgia Research Alliance Distinguished Scholar, and co-founder of Project ENGAGES at Georgia Tech, was recognized for, “outstanding contributions to diversity, inclusion, community involvement, and interdisciplinary research aimed at global health problems and domestic health disparities.”
Taylor, who is the Marcus Chair in vascular medicine, professor of medicine and biomedical engineering, director of cardiology, and executive vice chair of the department of medicine at Emory, was honored for, “outstanding contributions advancing our understanding the pathology of cardiovascular disease.”
Borodovsky, Platt, and Taylor were inducted (along with 156 colleagues who make up the AIMBE College of Fellows Class of 2019) at a formal ceremony during the AIMBE Annual Meeting at the National Academy of Sciences, today in Washington, DC.
While most AIMBE Fellows hail from the United States, the College of Fellows has inducted Fellows representing 30 countries. AIMBE Fellows are employed in academia, industry, clinical practice and government.
AIMBE Fellows are among the most distinguished medical and biological engineers including two Nobel Prize laureates, 17 Fellows having received the Presidential Medal of Science and/or Technology and Innovation, and 158 also inducted to the National Academy of Engineering, 72 inducted to the National Academy of Medicine and 31 inducted to the National Academy of Sciences.
]]>But Phil Santangelo, biomedical engineering professor at Georgia Tech, has another approach in mind. He’s working on an aerosolized RNA-based HIV preventative that eventually could protect women against the disease. It’s applied vaginally and, currently, the aerosol has been tested on sheep and monkeys. The early results are promising; it’s been shown to create HIV antibodies that ward off the infection. It also has the potential to protect against genital herpes and other pathogens, depending on what protein the RNA encodes for.
“A single administration of this aerosol is showing expression of antibodies against HIV for up to three months in sheep,” said Santangelo. “Our hope is that this will be more affordable, granting easier access to women in developing countries, especially. With women’s health at the forefront of many conversations today, this has the potential to revolutionize disease prevention.”
Eventually, Santangelo says RNA could be used for contraception as well – the RNA would express antibodies that inhibit sperm. Again, if birth control can’t be accessed in developing countries, a self-administered, inexpensive aerosol could change the lives of many women.
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Said Aaron Morris about the opportunity, “Our current work focuses on entirely new diagnostic paradigms and I decided to apply for the TED fellowship to bring attention to some of these unconventional ideas. I'm very excited to present my TED talk in April and meet and interact with everyone at TED. I think it will help bring attention to the work and identify possible collaborators to move the work forward. For a long time I've been involved in scientific outreach, and it is harder to think of a bigger platform for communicating science in a tangible way than the TED stage.”
Morris focuses on developing devices that harness the immune system to provide information about diseased locations within the body. Tissue biopsy is a hallmark of modern medicine, but cannot be used if the site for biopsy is unknown (e.g. metastatic cancer) or too dangerous to access (e.g. brain). The devices he develops can be implanted under the skin and enable safe and easy biopsies, serving as a synthetic diagnostic site. The devices interact with the immune system and contain molecular information related to diseased sites within the body. These devices are able to monitor onset and treatment responsiveness in metastatic cancer and autoimmune diseases.
Said TED Fellows director Shoham Arad, “TED Fellows are an incredibly diverse group but they all have at least one thing in common: they are tackling extremely important problems in a unique and brilliant way. This year’s class is no exception. We are so excited to support them and their important work - and can’t wait for them to share their ideas at TED this year.”
Founded in 2009, the TED Fellows program now has 492 Fellows from 99 countries. In its eleven-year history, the TED Fellows program has created a powerful, far-reaching network made up of scientists, doctors, activists, artists, entrepreneurs, inventors, journalists and beyond.
Applications for the 2021 TED Fellows class will be open later this year. Interested applicants should visit the TED Fellows program website for information and updates about the fellowship: http://www.ted.com/participate/ted-fellows-program/apply-to-be-a-ted-fellow.
About the TED Fellows program
The TED Fellows program brings together young innovators from around the world and across disciplines, who display both outstanding achievement and exemplary character, to raise international awareness of their work and maximize their impact. The program offers Fellows full participation in a TED or TEDGlobal Conference, a two-day pre-conference of workshops and activities, a Fellows Retreat, ongoing professional coaching and mentoring, dedicated PR coaching and active participation in the TED community, including the global TED Fellows network.
Learn more:
Complete list of all new 2020 TED Fellows and TED Senior Fellows: ted.com/fellows
Playlist: Top 10 talks by TED Fellows
Website: ted.com/fellows
Connect:
Email: fellows@ted.com
Instagram: TED Fellows (@tedfellow)
Facebook: TED Fellows - Home
YouTube: TED Fellow
BioE Day was designed specifically to unify the graduate program’s students and faculty, who come from many different home schools and are immersed in a wide range of research topics. The event incorporates research, competitions, awards, fellowship, games, and a keynote address by Bob Nerem, founding director of the Petit Institute.
“I’m thrilled the students recommended Bob,” said Andrés García, BioE faculty advisor. “He’s my friend and mentor. He’s ‘Uncle Bob.’”
Nerem delivered his address, entitled, “Bioengineering: Building a New Discipline, a Personal Journey.” He talked about living in Norway as a child and about his career. Nerem began in aeronautical engineering and gravitated toward bioengineering after NASA recruited him to help the organization better understand how launch and re-entry from orbit affects the human body. Since then, he’s been a leading researcher in bioengineering for more than 40 years, focusing primarily on tissue engineering and regenerative medicine.
“If you don’t know where you’re going, you may end up somewhere else,” Nerem said, offering a suitable theme for his career, borrowed from the wisdom of Yogi Berra.
Following Nerem’s address and lunch, the students engaged in a poster competition and a rapid-fire presentation competition, which was won by Joshua Hooks and Tom Bongiorno, respectively.
Winners of the 2016 BioE Outstanding Paper award (grad student Jordan Ciciliano) and Outstanding Advisor award (Krishnendu Roy, professor in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering) made research presentations.
Hooks and Bongiorno were then given their awards, and Bongiorno was named winner of the Chris Ruffin Student Leadership Award, which recognizes exemplary leadership and community involvement.
BioE Day was supposed to end with a cookout and games in courtyard, but rain pushed the fun inside, where a couple of cornhole games ensued, but not before the bean bags were co-opted by several members of the staff, faculty and student body, who demonstrated heretofore unseen juggling skills and may have laid the groundwork for a new competition at the next BioE Day.
CONTACT:
Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience
Launched in 2005 by friends and colleagues of Bob Nerem, founding director of the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at the Georgia Institute of Technology, the travel award typically supports travel costs for one graduate student or post-doctoral trainee traveling outside of the U.S. for research. But this year, for the first time, two winners are sharing the award.
Sweeney-Jones, from the lab of Petit Institute researcher Julia Kubanek, will use her portion for underwater research with the University of the South Pacific in Fiji. Meanwhile Hunckler, who works in the Petit Institute lab of Andrés J. García, is using his to visit the University of Toronto, where he’ll work alongside stem cell biologists on his ongoing goal to find a treatment Type 1 diabetes, a disease he and his brother have been battling for years.
“When I was in third grade, my younger brother was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, and I vowed that I would help him, in some way, alleviate the daily struggles he faced,” recalls Hunckler, who was diagnosed six years later, during his first week of high school. “I finally was able to appreciate firsthand the burden that diabetes had on my brother’s life.”
The experience reinvigorated his interest in alleviating the consequence of the disease, continuing through his undergraduate studies at the University of Notre Dame and now at Georgia Tech, where he is a third-year BioEngineering PhD student working in the García lab to develop game-changing solutions for treating diabetes.
As lead engineer of the collaboration with the Toronto team, Hunckler hopes to integrate the advanced biomaterial development of the García lab with the stem cell biology techniques of the Nostro lab.
“I find it critically valuable that I understand the stem cell work being done by the Nostro lab, and it will be immensely valuable for the Nostro lab to understand the biomaterials techniques that we are implementing,” says Hunckler. “So, this travel grant will allow me to learn their research, teach our research, and facilitate a fruitful collaboration for the remainder of my PhD and beyond.”
Almost 8,000 miles away in another hemisphere, Sweeney-Jones will be back in somewhat familiar waters. She visited Fiji last year as part of a study abroad program, and had a chance to do some exploring.
“I’ve actually had a chance to dive twice in Fiji, but this will be an amazing opportunity to go back and actually do some field research,” says Sweeney-Jones, a PhD student in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry who will work in Fiji with the lab of University of the South Pacific researcher Kate Soapi.
The Kubanek lab looks at how marine organisms use chemical cues for defense, mating, habitat selection, and food tracking. Sweeney-Jones is interested in studying natural products derived from marine organisms that have potential pharmacological activity.
While in Fiji this summer, “I want to identify compounds that are active against malaria and infectious worms,” she says. “And see what ecological roles these compounds have in their natural environment.”
Previous Nerem Travel Awards have sent trainees from Georgia Tech across the planet, to some of the world’s top research universities and institutions, including the Karolinska Institute (Sweden), the RIKEN Brain Science Institute (Japan), the National University of Singapore, the University of Twente (The Netherlands), Queensland University of Technology (Australia), and the Max Planck Institute (Germany), among others.
From the program’s beginning, Nerem has always stressed the importance of getting out of familiar surroundings to experience research.
“This award has never been about sending a student to a conference,” Nerem says. “This is about going to another laboratory in another place and sharing your research while learning research techniques from other experts.”
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Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, collaborating with the University of Southern California and the University of Waterloo, recently published a paper that looks into the impacts of sea-level rise on human migration. The paper, “Modeling Migration Patterns in the USA Under Sea Level Rise”, proposes a framework to couple sea level rise models with human migration models so that researchers can see the indirect effects of rising sea levels on human populations.
“Traditionally sea level rise has been talked about in terms of the number of people on the coastline that will be affected, how many homes may be flooded, and how day-to-day activities may be disrupted. But in our modeling we can see the effects go much further beyond just the coast,” said Georgia Tech Ph.D. student and lead author Caleb Robinson.
Previous work in this area has mainly explored existing migration pathways, like people moving from New York City to Los Angeles. This new research looks into pathways between counties and cities that previously might not exist. For example, Atlanta and Dallas are becoming inland cities that many coastal residents migrate to, while they were not previously thought of as cities affected by rising sea levels.
Researchers used historical migration data from 2005 and 2006 after Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita nearly destroyed the city of New Orleans. Both of the hurricanes resulted in mass flooding across several counties, resulting in an outpouring of migrants. Using machine learning, researchers were able to better understand people’s moving patterns and build a separate model for people impacted by similar scenarios of forced migration compared to regular migration patterns.
They combined this model with future estimates of the human population and sea-level rise in 2100 to look at what areas might be underwater and better understand where the affected people from these areas might go.
"Our study emphasizes that modeling and understanding better forced migration dynamics is key to more accurately estimating the more global ripple effects of sea-level rise," says University of Southern California assistant professor Bistra Dilkina, who is the corresponding author of the study.
Robinson emphasized that while this work is a huge step in the right direction, they built the framework so that it could be continued to be refined upon by other researchers.
“Our framework allows others to plug in different information like population projections that will allow researchers to develop more complicated and better-understood models. If that happens, we can all continue to update our results and make even better predictions and assessments,” said Robinson.
The researchers hope that their work will not only lead to more research being done in this area and lead to more people understanding other effects of climate change but that it will also help city planners better plan for shifting migration patterns in the future.
Understanding this data will hopefully help coastal cities increase funding for sea walls and other measures so that there will be fewer homes destroyed by a flood, or for other inland cities to reconsider how they are structuring their transportation options.
The paper and more of its findings will be published in the latest issue of PLOS ONE in January 2020.
]]>Communications Officer
allie.mcfadden@cc.gatech.edu
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