The milestone comes as the one-year master’s program in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering graduated another 26 students this week, celebrating the end of its most challenging academic year yet.

The students delivered their final group project presentations during a virtual event Aug. 2 and celebrated with their families Aug. 3. The presentations are the final requirement for the degree, and they’re no easy task with about three dozen faculty members,  industry leaders, entrepreneurs, and clinicians tuned in.

As MBID Program Director Sathya Gourisankar noted in his opening statements, this year’s cohort operated under pandemic constraints, “which called for tremendous adaptability from all involved — students and faculty.”

“You did this in extraordinary times,” said Raheem Beyah, dean of Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering and Southern Company Chair. “I can’t think of a time when medicine and technology have been so important to the world. Your future will help shape the future of this pandemic and other health challenges in the years and decades to come.”

He added: “Innovation and commercialization are incredibly important to me and to Georgia Tech. They’re among the main reasons this program was created — we wanted to address a gap in biomedical education.”

Students form teams early in the program. Through clinical observations of procedures and discussions with stakeholders, they identify an unmet clinical need. Then they set about developing a medical device to address the problem in a holistic manner, with clinical and business impact in mind. Essentially, they build a bench-to-bedside commercialization pathway for medical device companies from the ground up.

Along the way, students are exposed to and become experienced in all of the elements involved in starting such an enterprise, from researching market viability — including a patent search — of their proposed device, to pitching their product, raising capital, meeting regulatory requirements, developing strategies for reimbursement monetization, and so on.

“It’s a real-world focus with real-world exposure,” said Gourisankar, who designed the program’s curriculum and assembled a faculty team that includes industry leaders, entrepreneurs, clinicians, business school professors, and others who have been there or done that or both — just like Gourisankar, who has more than 30 years’ of experience in medical device development.

“From the start, we’ve identified the industry hiring manager as our key customer,” he said. “We want to provide them with candidates who are well rounded in the various aspects of the medical device industry, which doesn’t like to spend too much time training people. They want quick starters who can hit the ground running.”

This year’s graduating class is typical of previous years in that all of the students are already engaged in successful careers or have jobs waiting for them. They’re moving into careers in research and development, quality control, regulatory affairs, clinical work, manufacturing, project management, and marketing, among other areas.

“Going through the MBID program has strengthened my passion for medical devices and improving the quality of patients’ lives,” said Anuradha Nagulapati, a 2021 graduate who will begin a new role as a regulatory affairs engineer at medical device company MiRus in a few weeks. “I will be wearing multiple hats and will also get the chance to gain experience working with other departments.”

And if her career follows the kind of arc Gourisankar envisions for all of his graduates, she’ll be on a slightly expanded path: “Leadership,” he said. “I’ll give this cohort the same challenge I give every cohort. Develop your skills, build your resume for five years, and at the end of that time, I expect you to be on the way to a leadership role. I look at every one of these graduates as future leaders of the device industry.”

During their final presentations, students gave streamlined versions of the kind of pitch a start-up would give a group of investors: identifying the problem and describing their solution, the path to market, manufacturing costs, plus the clinical, technological, and financial value. Then they received feedback from their clinical advisors and industry experts.

Learn more about the 2021 MBID projects:

EmergenSix

Students: John Richardson, Andrew Payton, Daria Tereneva, Keya Patel, Malvika Upadhyaya, Zak Kaminsky. Clinical Advisor: Lekshmi Kumar, M.D., MPH

Problem: Every year, emergency medical services respond to about 5 million patients who require immobilization of the cervical spine. The current gold standard fails to do the job effectively and can even exacerbate the trauma.

Solution: A safer, more effective way to immobilize the cervical spine in blunt force trauma. The NovaSpine device is an affordable, slim, foldable unit that slides quickly and easily under the patient’s head and neck and conforms to a patient’s unique anatomy, reducing instability.

Heart Throbs

Students: Adrianna Carter, Jaxon Sommers, Jared Fox, Nabeel Abusharkh, Andrew Ten Eyck, Megha KulKarni, Ingrid Cubillos. Clinical Advisor: Gautam Kumar, M.D.

Problem: Currently, there are no devices that can help monitor blood flow and boost circulation to lessen recurring pulmonary embolisms and prevent blood clots in the lungs.  

Solution: A wearable device that patients can take home to enhance recovery after a pulmonary embolism. The device provides electric muscle stimulation and senses blood flow. Designed to be worn on the leg, the device delivers nerve or muscle stimulation to increase and stabilize blood circulation.

Upnea

Students: Reagan Newman, Adam Paley, Suraj Vuduta, Sahil Kemkar, Alvaro Benitez, Sara Zulfiqar. Clinical Advisor: Adam Klein, M.D.

Problem: About 12 percent of U.S. adults have sleep apnea, and the number is likely higher. Women, specifically, are a critically underdiagnosed population whose daytime symptoms, like fatigue and sleepiness, deserve investigation. The team is seeking a way to reduce underdiagnosis.

Solution: An ergonomic, wearable device — the Wireless ST — that collects daytime data, which current sleep tests don’t do. The device provides isolated, selected physiologic signals to help clinicians capture a patient’s state of wakefulness, which is when the hallmark symptom of sleep apnea actually shows up.

UroTech

Students: Milosz Bis, Tyler Bryson, Stanley Koryta, Cristina Madalo, Bailey McLain, Anuradha Nagulapati, Cody Schoenfuss. Clinical Advisors: Spencer Kozinn, M.D.; Raymond Pak, M.D., MBA; Jaime Wong, M.D., MBA

Problem: About 2.5 million hospital patients suffer from pressure injuries in the U.S. each year, leading to 60,000 deaths. The sacral region is the most prominent location for these injuries. Given the ever-heightening U.S. nursing shortage, consistent manual repositioning is less feasible and harder to achieve.

Solution: A device to improve preventative techniques. The team is developing a working wearable prototype that continuously monitors pressure and moisture of the sacral region in patients, sending an alert to healthcare professionals when pressure and moisture are present at harmful levels.

Hanjoong Jo and his team have been working to understand the detailed reasons why — and how — and recently found an interesting protein that could be a key.

The protein, known as HEG1, is found on the endothelial cells lining our blood vessels. It appears to act as a critical blood flow sensor, keeping everything humming along as it should when blood flow is good and turning on inflammatory signals, a critical step toward atherosclerosis, when blood flow is bad.

Jo wants to know just how HEG1 works — with the hope that a deeper understanding could lead to new options for preventing or curing atherosclerotic diseases — and he has the chance with a new $2.68 million grant from the National Institutes of Health.

“We are really excited about this flow-sensitive protein, HEG1, because this could be potentially a new sensor that detects how blood is flowing in the vessel — whether it goes one way or multiple directions, at a high speed or low speed — and this flow sensor could then play a very important role in preventing or causing atherosclerosis,” said Jo, Wallace H. Coulter Distinguished Chair and Professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. “We have shown some evidence, which allowed us to get this grant, that good flow makes more of this HEG1 gene and protein, preventing inflammation. If you have a bad flow, this potential flow sensor is reduced, causing inflammation.”

Jo described the protein produced by the HEG1 gene like a big tree with lots of branches sticking out to catch the wind as it blows. The HEG1 protein has branches jutting out from endothelial cells into arteries to catch the blood flowing by: “It is just perfectly shaped and positioned, but nobody has studied it. So, we are studying it.”

Scientists have known for a while that HEG1 is important. Other researchers removed the gene in zebrafish and mice and the results were catastrophic: blood vessels — normally tightly sealed conduits — started to leak, and hearts without HEG1 grew very large and very fragile. That’s where HEG1 gets its name: It’s the “heart of glass” gene.

The question now is, does HEG1 have another crucial role in cardiovascular disease?

Jo and his team — including M.D./Ph.D. student Ian Tamargo and postdoctoral fellow Aitor Andueza — want to establish the link. If it’s there, it opens up new targets for therapies to treat atherosclerosis, a disease that can lead to heart attacks, strokes, and peripheral artery disease.

“We already know how important HEG1 is,” Jo said. “We just don't know whether flow has anything to do with it and whether it really plays a role as a sensor. And if it does act as a sensor, then how does it control the atherosclerosis-related functions? These are all unknown questions.”

In the four-year NIH project, Jo and his team will dive deeply into how HEG1 works. Extending Jo's tree analogy, researchers will trim the tree in different ways to see how cells respond. They may adjust how the roots grow — Jo said the junction between the protein outside the cell and inside of the cell looks like it could be a critical sensing area. Maybe they'll remove the tree altogether, or keep the tree in some areas but not in others. All of that will help them understand the mechanisms of HEG1's functions.

Jo’s collaborators will be key in the investigation, including several Coulter BME researchers: James Dahlman’s lab will help to develop ways to either delete or overexpress various forms of the HEG1 gene in the artery walls of mice; Cheng Zhu’s lab will help with studies to quantify how much and what types of mechanical forces can turn on or off the HEG1 molecule’s response at the single-cell level; Sung Jin Park will study calcium signaling in live cells in response to flow; and Sandeep Kumar will carry out single cell RNA sequencing studies to understand the effect of HEG1 in cells, animals, and human patient tissues with atherosclerosis. Emory cardiologist Kathy Griendling will collaborate on understanding how HEG1 signals inside the cells.

“We will really look inside the cells and explore the inflammatory response that is happening,” Jo said. “If the HEG1 proteins are sensing blood flow, what are the next steps? Are they talking to other proteins? Which ones, and how do they trigger the next events?

“Knowing that detail of the mechanisms will actually help us to figure out how to develop therapeutics.”

Here are the six alumni from the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering on this year’s list:
 

Mahdi Al-Husseini, PP 2018, BME 2018, MSCS 2020

Aeromedical Evacuations Officer | U.S. Army

“Iron sharpens iron, and my peers at Georgia Tech were certainly of a higher caliber. I remain in touch with many of my former classmates; their success is inspirational,” Al-Husseini says.
 

Ambika Bumb, BME 2005

President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology | White House

“My initial exposure at Georgia Tech to developing nanotechnology led me to Oxford to do a PhD and then the NIH for two post-docs, all related to nanomedicine. I launched a biotech startup Bikanta from that academic research and for five years enjoyed the nimbleness and innovation that a startup allows for,” Bumb says.
 

Cory Sago, Ph.D. BME 2019

Senior Director, Head of LNP Discovery | Beam Therapeutics

“As scientists and engineers, many of us are wired to try to understand the facts of our world (the ‘what’). I’d encourage GT students and new graduates to also consciously pursue the ‘why’ behind the world,” Sago says.
 

Mike Weiler, BME 2010, MSME 2012, Ph.D. BioE 2015 

Cofounder and CEO | LymphaTech

“During grad school at Georgia Tech, I was a recipient of the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, a graduate of the NSF Innovation Corps, and a TI:GER Fellow. The TI:GER program was particularly instrumental in my career, as it provided an opportunity to learn the fundamentals of business model generation and customer discovery applied to my dissertation research. The final business plan that we created in the TI:GER program is very similar to the business plan that LymphaTech still follows today,” Weiler says.
 

Varun Yarabarla, BME 2016

Development Lead | VentLife

“I was honestly a little disappointed that I would be leaving engineering behind when I chose to pursue medical school. However, when there is a will, people can always find a way; in medical school, I still used my engineering-based computer coding skill to land a position in a distinguished neurology lab,” Yarabarla says.
 

Y. Shrike Zhang, Ph.D. BME 2013

Assistant Professor | Harvard Medical School
Associate Bioengineer | Brigham and Women’s Hospital

“The engineering education at GT is excellent and transdisciplinary,” Zhang says.
 

See the full 40 Under 40 on the Georgia Tech Alumni Association’s website.

Specifically, Sendi proposed adding portable EEG brain scans to an existing study looking at the effectiveness of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) for patients experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The goal is to better understand the functional changes in the brain from the stimulation, which induces a small, safe electrical current in targeted areas.

“Despite the significant impact of TMS in treating PTSD patients, an unresolved issue is that the response varies across individuals,” said Sendi, who is pursuing his doctorate in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. “Quantifying transcranial magnetic stimulation’s functional and neurophysiological effects and their link to changes in symptom severity is an essential step towards understanding TMS’s neural mechanisms and developing more effective, and individualized, TMS therapies.”

The $3,000 mini-grant was designed to support projects with the potential of enhancing knowledge of basic processes involved in neuromodulation methods or understanding the clinical effects of those methods, especially in under-researched areas.

Sendi will integrate his portable EEG approach before, during, and after brain stimulation treatments that are part of the ongoing Grady Trauma Project at Emory. He’ll work with Sanne van Rooij, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Emory, and Jeffrey Malins, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at Georgia State University.

“Optimizing TMS protocol and individualizing TMS treatment parameters can substantially benefit patient-specific therapy of PTSD and restore function and induce longer-lasting results,” Sendi said.

Sheft has joined Melanie Martin’s lab at the University of Winnipeg to work on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) techniques to determine the diameter of axons in the human brain. Axons are the long, thin part of nerve cells that transmit impulses, and diameter influences how fast the information is conducted. She’s one of two undergraduates from Georgia Tech selected for the program this summer.

“I was attracted to the program by the variety of project opportunities and the availability of researchers in my field of interest,” said Sheft, who is entering her fourth year of studies in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory.

Sheft was able to select several potential projects from faculty members across Canada. She interviewed with Martin’s lab and was invited to join in their work. Though she wasn’t able to travel to Canada because of the ongoing pandemic, she’s been deeply involved in data analysis and writing papers and grants.

Sheft said she’s planning to graduate in December and will be applying to Ph.D. programs in the fall — making the Fulbright Canada program a valuable experience.

Yet, an undergraduate in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University has been working on a project that could make it easier to experiment with putter characteristics. The project’s goal is to allow golfers to adjust parts of their club to find a better stroke, rather than having to buy a new club. It also could help equipment manufacturers reimagine their prototyping and design process.

For the last year and a half, Caroline Means has been designing a putter using an advanced metal-depositing 3D printer that is usually used to make aircraft parts. Working with Jud Ready, principal research engineer at the Georgia Tech Research Institute, the idea was to be able to adjust the putter’s key characteristics, toe hang and loft, and explore new kinds of face materials.

“We wanted to design a club that was able to be customized to a golfer in those three areas without having to get a new club or go to a professional and have them bend your club, and without significantly and permanently altering the structure or composition of the club,” said Means, a fourth-year student who has pursued the idea as part of a President’s Undergraduate Research Award at Tech. “There hasn't been as much innovation in the area of putter heads, and so, we decided to take on that challenge.”

The team’s prototype putter is made from stainless steel (eventually they’ll explore a multi-material composition), with an innovative shaft attachment method that allows for continuous adjustment of the toe hang. Its face inserts are made of either metal or a polymer created by Carbon, a California-based 3D-printing company. The inserts come in a variety of angles to adjust the club’s loft. They can be combined or stacked and easily removed via a unique attachment system Means and Ready created.

“The 3D printing in collaboration with mechanical engineering associate professor Chris Saldana gives us an advantage to create structures that could not be machined through traditional methods,” Means said. “That means that after it's been manufactured, a golfer can pick what face surface material they want for the putter. They can decide how many degrees of loft is best for the green conditions that day. As their swing changes and improves, they are able to adjust the toe hang of the golf club.”

Perhaps it’s worth pausing for a quick putter primer: Toe hang is a measure of the center of gravity of the putter, which affects how the clubhead moves during a stroke. The idea is to hit the ball with the putter’s face squared up, but every golfer’s stroke is different, and most rotate the face during their swing. Changing the toe hang can help the putter and the golfer’s swing work together for improved directional control of the ball.

Loft is the angle of the putter face when it rests on the green — usually just a degree or two. Too little loft, and the ball is pushed into the green when the putter hits it, slowing it down; too much, and the ball may hop at contact instead of rolling. All of that affects whether the ball reaches its intended target: the bottom of the cup.

To create their patent-pending design, Means and Ready contacted the golf pros at Atlanta’s historic Bobby Jones Golf Course. They also enlisted a pretty famous Georgia Tech alumnus who knows a thing or two about golf clubs.

“I come from a unique perspective on things like product development and innovation,” said Stewart Cink, a former Tech golfer and eight-time winner on the PGA Tour, including two wins in 2021. “I've got the on-course experience and knowledge, and I've been through a lot of product innovation with companies that I've worked with in the past. Jud had no way of knowing that it would be something that I would like really like, but this is part of my job that I really enjoy doing.”

After many months of design and a nearly day-long printing operation with the help of Saldana’s graduate students Elliott Jost and Jaime Berez in Tech’s Advanced Manufacturing Pilot Facility, Cink and his son Reagan tested the putter this summer at Bobby Jones Golf Course. The Cinks were hooked up to a system that collects mountains of data to help the pros at the course teach golfers about their stroke and where they can improve.

Cink said the adjustable putter could help golfers explore new putter configurations that might help their game without breaking the bond they have with their club.

“One of the biggest challenges with the pros and their putters is how to go from something that's really cozy and warm and comfortable to something that has a little bit different specs,” Cink said. “What their putter does is, it gives you the chance to take the old baby and change a little bit about it at a time. If you decide you want to go back to the other way, just change it back.”

So how does a biomedical engineering student end up elbows-deep in golf putter design?

Means met Ready when she took two of his courses, including Materials Science and Engineering of Sports.

“Caroline was a stand-out student,” said Ready, who also leads innovation initiatives at the Georgia Tech Institute for Materials. “She asked great questions, got good grades, had wonderful oral presentation and organizational skills — so I offered her a job after the semester was over.”

In the class, Ready’s class visited Georgia Tech’s Advanced Manufacturing Pilot Facility, where they learned about Saldana’s 3D printer that uses metal powder and lasers to build metal objects. Before long, Ready and Means were thinking about golf clubs and how they might be able to innovate while exploring the potential of the machine.

“My background in biomedical engineering really came in strong. We spend a lot a lot of time focused on learning how to put users at the center of the design process,” Means said. “I talked to professionals at Bobby Jones Golf Course to learn what makes a person come back to a putter. Our team wanted to know what kind of things they have to account for when they're fitting a club to someone, and how we can make this something that is unique and that people will want to use.”

This spring, Means and Ready were joined by Brittan Pero, a second-year student in mechanical engineering and an avid golfer who played for Oglethorpe University before transferring to Georgia Tech. He’s been helping with the testing, and he has secured his own President’s Undergraduate Research Award to continue the project.

“I've always wanted to design golf clubs, and I saw that Dr. Ready taught a class on engineering of sports equipment, so I figured I'd email him see if there was an internship or maybe undergrad research somewhere in the field,” Pero said. “It turned out that he had the exact field that I wanted to be in — putter design — which is crazy.”

While Pero works on refining the putter head to get it closer to a market-ready design, Means is off doing an internship this summer in pursuit of a career in medical device design. She said she hopes their testing data will show the idea is viable and they can create a small startup or even use some of their collaborators’ connections to club-makers to interest them in the concepts.

“Caroline will be back in the fall, and I expect the two of them to make even greater advancements as a team,” Ready said. “I can’t wait for Caroline’s patent to get fully prosecuted, and for Britt to file his own.”

The grant will create the Integrative and Quantitative Biosciences Accelerated Training Environment (InQuBATE) Predoctoral Training Program at Georgia Tech. InQuBATE is designed to train a new generation of biomedical researchers and thought leaders to harness the data revolution.

“We want to improve and enhance the training of students to focus on biological questions while leveraging modern tools, and in some cases developing new tools, to address foundational challenges at scales from molecules to systems,” said Joshua Weitz, professor and Tom and Marie Patton Chair in the School of Biological Sciences. Weitz is co-leading the program with Peng Qiu, associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.

Biology is undergoing a transformation, according to Weitz and Qiu, requiring a new educational paradigm that integrates quantitative approaches like computational modeling and data analytics into the experimental study of living systems.

“Our intention is to develop a training environment that instills a quantitative, data-driven mindset, integrating quantitative and data science methods into all aspects of the life science training pipeline,” added Weitz, founding director of Tech’s Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Quantitative Biosciences (QBioS).

The roots of InQuBATE go back to the fall of 2016, shortly after QBioS was launched. Weitz saw an opportunity to augment what he was teaching in his cornerstone course, Foundations of Quantitative Biosciences, in which students model living systems from the molecular level up through cells, organisms, populations, and ecosystems. In doing so, students “got a brief introduction to implementing high-dimensional data analytics, visual analytics, clustering, and modern machine learning methods. But we couldn’t cover allthose topics in detail,” Weitz said.

So, he reached out to Qiu, who was teaching data analytic methods in his Machine Learning in Biosciences course: “Instead of us developing that class, we started strongly encouraging QBioS students to take Peng’s class,” Weitz said.

“For me, this was a great opportunity to work with students from the biology side who had real interests in learning data mining and machine learning, as well as students from the engineering side,” said Qiu, principal investigator in the Machine Learning and Bioinformatics Lab in Coulter BME. “We could see that it was a great learning environment and the QBioS students really excelled in the class. That gave us confidence. Now we’re building this [InQuBATE] training program, and hope it will foster even greater cross pollination.”

The training program is designed to do exactly that, bringing together students and faculty from three Georgia Tech colleges: computing, engineering, and sciences. That combination of expertise is reflected in the leadership team. In addition to principal investigators Weitz (College of Sciences) and Qiu (College of Engineering), the faculty leadership team includes Elizabeth Cherry (School of Computational Science and Engineering, College of Computing), Eva Dyer (Coulter BME, College of Engineering and Emory School of Medicine), and Marvin Whiteley (School of Biological Sciences, College of Sciences).

The InQuBATE program will ultimately support 15 Ph.D. students over five years. The first cohort — prioritizing second-year Ph.D. students — will be selected in August. Next spring, the program will begin soliciting applications from first-year Ph.D. students.

“The program will extend the breadth of student training without adding time to the Ph.D.,” Weitz said. “For students on the engineering or computing side, InQuBATE will augment their living systems research experience. For students on the living systems side, the program will augment their training in modeling and data analytics.”

Weitz, Qiu, and their collaborators also are developing a series of semester-long and short-form (a week or less) courses that will be available to other graduate students, in addition to the InQuBATE cohorts.

“We intend to make programmatic offerings available to a broader community,” Weitz said. “In the long term, we hope InQuBATE takes on a central role in shaping the culture of integrative approaches in the study of living systems at Georgia Tech.”

Correct response: Who is Keshav Shah?

“Competing on Jeopardy! is something that I feel very fortunate to have been able to do. It's obviously a high-stakes affair and is exhausting, because they tape an entire week's worth of shows in one day. However, the entire Jeopardy! crew was super energetic and friendly and they helped make the experience memorable,” said Shah, a first-year Ph.D. student in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.

“My experience was a bit different than usual because of Covid-19 protocols, but I loved getting to meet the other contestants and hear their stories. They're all so bright and come from such different backgrounds,” he said.

Shah has been trying for a few years to make it through the highly competitive screening process to appear on Jeopardy! Of the thousands who try, only about 400 make it to the stage each season. He passed the online test in the fall and had an audition over Zoom earlier this year. It wasn’t the first time he’d made it that far in the process: he passed the test and auditioned in-person for the College Championship and the regular show as a second-year undergraduate at Virginia Tech. Aspiring contestants only remain in the active pool for 18 months after an audition, however, and he never got the call back then.

This time, it was only a few weeks before producers invited him to Los Angeles for a taping.

“Being on stage honestly feels a bit surreal, and it is very different compared to playing along at home,” Shah said. “It's so easy to sit at home and say, ‘Wow, I can't believe none of the contestants answered that clue correctly,’ but Jeopardy! is nerve-wracking, and things on TV sometimes don't always go smoothly. The host may misspeak, or the judges may have to make a lengthy ruling on an answer. All those little things can interrupt what viewers perceive as a constant flow of the game.”

There’s also that famed buzzer — which Shah called the “great equalizer.” Contestants who buzz in before the host finishes reading the clue are locked out for a fraction of a second. That’s all it takes to lose a shot at providing a response. Like many contestants, Shah said he spent a great deal of time practicing his buzzer technique at home with a clicker pen.

In a fun twist, Shah’s appearance coincided with the guest-hosting stint of fellow Atlantan and CNN medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta.

“His easygoing personality was great for the show. He is definitely someone I admire and have looked up to for his work as a medical professional and correspondent for CNN,” Shah said. “Meeting him was a dream come true.”

Shah works with Professor Johnna Temenoff, where he is focused on biomaterial- and stem-cell-based strategies to treat muscle degeneration after rotator cuff injuries.

Of course, there’s one answer we don’t know: how well Shah did in his turn behind a Jeopardy! podium. We’ll all have to watch July 7 to find out.

UPDATE: Shah started slow but stormed to the lead and entered Final Jeopardy! ahead of his two competitors. However, he wagered almost all of his money and missed the final clue, so he ended the game in third.

Margulies will step down as chair in August to answer that call — as head of the Directorate of Engineering at the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF). She is the first biomedical engineer to lead the directorate, which supports fundamental research, enhances the nation’s innovation through a range of initiatives, and is a driving force behind the training and development of the United States’ engineering workforce. Margulies appointment at the NSF begins in mid-August.

“Susan’s NSF appointment will impact the nation, and I congratulate her on this high honor,” said Vikas P. Sukhatme, dean of the Emory School of Medicine and Woodruff Professor. “Her leadership at Coulter BME over the last four years has been transformative. I have enjoyed working closely with her and respect the high standards she has set for all our missions.”

Margulies has been chair of Coulter BME since August 2017, overseeing a unique collaboration between a leading public engineering school and a highly respected private medical school that graduates more women and underrepresented students than any other biomedical engineering program in the nation. She is the first woman to chair a basic science department in the Emory School of Medicine and the second woman chair in the history of Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering.

Though she’s stepping down as chair of the Coulter Department, Margulies will remain a member of the Emory and Georgia Tech faculties.

“I congratulate Susan on this incredible honor and opportunity to serve our nation at the National Science Foundation," said Raheem Beyah, dean and Southern Company Chair of Georgia Tech’s College of Engineering. “She has served as a pioneer while leading BME, diligently working to increase access and diversity, while also strengthening our cross-university collaboration with a sincere commitment to research excellence. I look forward to continuing the College’s partnership with the NSF as Susan and the Foundation expand its engineering goals and initiatives.”

As chair, Margulies worked to building a deeper sense of community in Coulter BME, including increasing shared governance with faculty, staff, and students and convening a 50-member committee charged with developing and implementing programs to boost the Department’s community, diversity, and inclusion. Margulies helped raise $41 million in philanthropic gifts to support the Department; led development of a new strategic plan for Coulter BME to increase impact, enhance engagement, and enrich community; and provided leadership to campus-wide strategic planning efforts at both Emory and Georgia Tech.

“The opportunity to serve the NSF resonates with my values — catalyzing impact through innovation, rigor, partnership, and inclusion. It’s an irresistible invitation, and it has to be to pull me away from my Coulter BME family,” Margulies said. “I’m so proud to have worked alongside this unmatched group of students, staff, and faculty in our shared drive to improve health and well-being.”

Building on initiatives she developed at the University of Pennsylvania, Margulies prioritized career development for faculty members and Ph.D. graduates during her years leading Coulter BME. She added dedicated staff to help doctoral students prepare for increasingly popular career paths outside of academia. The Department increased the diversity of Ph.D. students and improved faculty diversity at all ranks during her tenure. Margulies oversaw hiring of 20 new faculty members and launched formalized mentoring for early career professors, including creating a new associate chair position dedicated to faculty development.

Margulies also introduced a new leadership position, executive director of learning and training, to formalize the integration of pioneering teaching methods developed through federal and foundation grants. These initiatives infuse elements of story-driven learning across the curriculum and build inclusive environments in required courses and research labs.

Margulies’ popular weekly office hours with the chair were a year-round forum for students to share their ideas and consult with her one-on-one on all kinds of topics. Those weekly hours became one of her favorite parts of the job.

“Our students inspire me, and these conversations emboldened students to create their unique pathways to integrate who they are with their studies in biomedical engineering — to become who they want to be,” she said.

Much as she has in the Coulter Department and throughout her career, Margulies said, she plans to forge partnerships in her new role across industry, foundations, academia, and around the world to help NSF address some of the most pressing challenges in science and engineering.

"Susan Margulies' extensive experience and expertise is a valuable addition to the National Science Foundation's work to advance the frontiers of science and engineering research,” said NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan. “Her strong leadership combined with her deep knowledge of research translation will help accelerate our nation's progress to be at the vanguard of discovery and innovation. I am looking forward to her insights and perspectives.”

Margulies is a renowned scholar in pediatric traumatic brain injury and lung injury associated with mechanical ventilators, where she has worked to open avenues for prevention, intervention, and treatment. Her career has been marked by interdisciplinary research and education, thanks in part to her training in mechanical and aerospace engineering, bioengineering, and physiology and biophysics. She is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and the National Academy of Engineering.

She has conducted more than $35 million in research with funding from the NSF, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and industry sources. Her research group has trained dozens of postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and undergraduate students who’ve gone on to careers in consulting, federal agencies, industry, academia, and startups. She is a fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering, the Biomedical Engineering Society, and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

Interim leadership for the Department will be announced soon, along with more details on a search to find the next permanent chair of Coulter BME.

UPDATE JULY 21: Machelle Pardue has been named interim chair of the Coulter Department, starting Aug. 16.

A native of Sri Lanka who moved to Kansas City, Missouri, with her family as a young girl, she grew up playing the piano and violin, and danced in a local ballet company, shaping an abiding appreciation of the arts and culture.

Lokugamage discovered a love of science while an undergraduate at the University of Missouri, which she satisfied with a degree in bioengineering. Perhaps more significantly, she said, “I also found a passion for community outreach, activism, and mentorship.”

And now that she’s earned a Ph.D. from the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, Lokugamage is ready for the next new experience on her polymathic journey. She’ll make the transition this summer from graduate researcher in a university lab to venture capital associate for Massachusetts-based Alloy Therapeutics.

“As a graduate researcher, I was taught to think critically about data,” she said. “This thinking can help me evaluate and identify promising new technology. Joining Alloy will allow me to apply my deep understanding of drug delivery to new biotech company development.”

Atypical Path

Her Ph.D. advisor James Dahlman is confident in what Lokugamage brings to the table, even though going into venture capital straight from a research Ph.D. isn’t a typical path.

“I’m not surprised Melissa was able to do it,” said Dahlman, assistant professor in the Coulter Department. “She can see around corners, so to speak, meaning she is great at identifying large scale trends before others. At the same time, she can evaluate the nitty gritty details of the science.”

That attention to the details, the kind of investigative skills developed over years in a lab, will allow Lokugamage, “to predict whether a company’s scientific foundation is sturdy enough to survive the valley of death between early stage science and the clinic,” Dahlman added. “I can’t wait to see what world-changing technologies she helps develop at Alloy.”

With her colleagues in Dahlman’s lab, Lokugamage’s Ph.D. research focused on RNA drug delivery. Now she wants to expand on that.

“While I enjoyed my time as a scientist and researcher, I was ready to use my understanding of drug delivery and medicine in a new way,” Lokugamage said.

She didn’t really have a career in mind when she entered Missouri, where Lokugamage also earned a minor in women’s and gender studies that nurtured her interest in service and community.

“It started when I took a course on women’s health and history,” she said. “The subject was interesting, the students were thoughtful, and it felt deeply personal as a woman of color. I continued to fill my schedule with courses like this. I learned the importance of intersectionality and the role it plays in my life and my career. From there, I started joining service organizations.”

Scientific Journey

Meanwhile, an influential professor provided Lokugamage with the tools to constructively pose important scientific questions, treating her as if she already was a grad student. Early and often, he sent her to speak at conferences. He encouraged her to apply for a summer internship at NASA, where she participated in the space agency’s Space Life Science Training Program. At the Ames Research Center in California, she was as a member of the BioSentinel Team, working on development of a biosensor to monitor the long-term effects of radiation on DNA.

She worked in an RNA-focused lab at Missouri, exploring the theory that RNA was the precursor molecule to DNA in the origin of life — and falling hard for the biomolecule. As she considered grad schools, Coulter BME was interesting because, while she’d been studying RNA in a more exploratory manner, “the Dahlman lab was applying RNA therapies to treat diseases. This felt like a way for me to continue working in the RNA space but grow as well,” she said.

Looking back on it, joining Dahlman’s research group was almost like a ground-floor opportunity — he’d only been on the Georgia Tech campus a year at the time, “and they were building a novel barcoding platform from the ground up,” she said. “It was really exciting. Dr. Dahlman provided the necessary support and guidance I needed to thrive during my Ph.D. The mistakes I made and the insight I gained in that type of environment were invaluable.”

Along the way, she developed a deep expertise in drug delivery, according to Dahlman.

“Melissa is a rising star, and that expertise will be critical as clinicians work with emerging companies to develop new gene therapies for patients,” he said.

Another new interest, another new experience, and Lokugamage is ready for it.

“The space of venture capital and investing are very new to me,” she said. “My biggest goal is to learn as much as possible. This new role is my chance to absorb as much information as possible, provide my assistance to a new team, and create new tech.”

Related Links

James Dahlman Lab

Michelle LaPlaca was invited to serve on the Acute Neural Injury and Epilepsy Study Section, which primarily reviews patient-oriented research into central nervous system injuries caused by concussion, stroke, traumatic brain injury, epilepsy, and spinal cord injury. As a member of the Cellular and Molecular Technologies Study Section, Ankur Singh will consider applications focused on developing and applying new methods, tools, and techniques for studying cellular processes. LaPlaca is a professor and Singh is an associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.

“It’s truly an honor to serve the NIH. Membership on a study section is a major commitment of professional time and energy as well as a unique opportunity to contribute to the national biomedical research effort,” said Singh, who also is a Woodruff Faculty Fellow and a member of the faculty in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Tech.

The study sections review grant proposals and make recommendations to the agency’s national advisory council. Members are selected based on their research accomplishments and demonstrated expertise. Singh said the panels provide great value to biomedical research in the United States.

“Service on a study section also requires mature judgment and objectivity as well as the ability to work effectively in a group, which was quite attractive to me,” Singh said. “I look forward to serving the NIH and the research community in best possible ways.

LaPlaca’s work focuses on traumatic brain injury — understanding injury mechanisms to develop better diagnostics and strategies for protection and repair from neurological trauma.

Singh’s research centers on creating biomaterials-based “living” immune organoids or on-chip tissues that mimic lymph node structure and function with application to infectious diseases, inflammatory diseases, and cancer.

They’ll serve as members of the study sections for a four-year term.

Lakshmi Prasad Dasi and May Wang will join 14 other faculty members in an intensive, year-long leadership journey. Wang is a professor and Dasi is professor and associate chair for undergraduate studies in the Coulter Department.

Starting in Fall 2021 and continuing through Spring 2022, the group will participate in a variety of leadership development activities, including a fall weekend workshop, monthly workshops, small-group work, and a 360-degree assessment.

“I’m excited to welcome the sixth cohort of the Emerging Leaders Program,” said Steven W. McLaughlin, provost and executive vice president for Academic Affairs. “The program supports faculty invested in pursuing their leadership journey, which benefits the Institute’s strategic plan goals and the Georgia Tech community as a whole.”

The Emerging Leaders Program started in 2016 and is designed for associate and full professors who have earned tenure. The program is a collaboration between the Office of the Provost, the Office of the Executive Vice President for Research, the Institute for Leadership and Social Impact, and the Office of Graduate Education and Faculty Development. 

The sixth cohort reflects many of Georgia Tech’s Schools and Colleges. The full group:

College of Design

• Young Mi Choi, Associate Professor and Associate Chair, School of Industrial Design

Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts 

• Justin B. Biddle, Associate Professor, School of Public Policy
• Jenna Jordan, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Sam Nunn School of International Affairs
• Usha Nair-Reichert, Associate Professor and Director of Master’s Programs, School of Economics

College of Sciences 

• Andrew Newman, Professor, School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
• Zhigang Peng, Professor, School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
• Chandra Raman, Professor, School of Physics

College of Engineering

• Chloé Arson, Associate Professor, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering
• Lakshmi Prasad Dasi, Rozelle Vanda Wesley Professor and Professor, Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
• Elliot Moore II, Associate Professor and Associate Chair for Undergraduate Affairs, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering
• Kamran Paynabar, Fouts Family Early Career Professor and Associate Professor, H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering
• Mary Lynn Realff, Associate Professor and Associate Chair for Undergraduate Programs, School of Materials Science and Engineering
• Julian J. Rimoli, Pratt & Whitney Professor and Associate Professor, Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering
• Iris Tien, Williams Family Early Career Professor and Associate Professor, School of Civil and Environmental Engineering
• May Dongmei Wang, Professor, Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering
• Shannon Yee, Associate Professor, George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering

Learn more about the Emerging Leaders Program.

It may seem like a big responsibility on top of the all-consuming work of pursuing a doctorate, but it’s the kind of thing Jarquin has been doing his whole college career — first as an undergraduate and then as an executive cabinet member in Tech’s Graduate SGA last year.

“Research and lab work and classes are important, but GSGA is something for me to kind of get away from all the research while still being productive with my time and making a positive impact,” said Jarquin, who is entering his third year of doctoral work in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. “I really enjoy working to make campus a better place, and SGA has always been my avenue or outlet.”

Jarquin was elected this spring alongside Stephen Eick, a Ph.D. student in computer science. They’ll serve over the next year in what Jarquin said is a critical time as more people return to campus and find ways to reconnect and rebuild some of the community that has been lost during the coronavirus pandemic.

“Definitely our main priorities center around student well-being and mental health. There are grad students, and of course also undergrads, who really never got to interact with their peers as much. The biggest challenge is, how do we transition safely to more meaningful interactions that aren't virtual,” Jarquin said, noting that returning to large in-person events will be an adjustment — albeit an important one.

Jarquin said the pandemic has underscored the importance of mental health for students, so he expects he and Eick will work with campus leaders to ensure services meet students where they are.

“It's not just adding counselors,” he said, praising the satellite counseling program that has put a therapist right in the Whitaker building and other academic spaces to improve access for students. “There are particular populations of students that, for counseling sessions, it’s important to see someone who understands your specific struggles or specializes in what you're dealing with. It'd be nice, maybe, for you to have profiles of the counselors and what they specialize in, what they look like, and the kind of experience they have, to select a particular counselor who suits your unique needs.

“We’re going to develop a lot of initiatives around supporting mental health for students, well-being, and engagement.”

Of course, Jarquin will continue to push forward on his graduate work with Coulter BME Professor Sakis Mantalaris and Emory Associate Professor Nicki Panoskaltsis, who co-lead the Biological Systems Engineering Lab. Jarquin studies the process of red blood cell formation called erythropoiesis using a unique 3D model that mimics the architecture of bone marrow and produces functional cells so the team can study the linkages between the marrow microenvironment and the cells.

“The only kind of model that usually can do that is a mouse model. So being able to link that to the human condition really interests me,” Jarquin said. In particular, he focuses on anemia and is using the model to find possible treatment targets for the disease. “It's mainly the unknown — and I guess that's science in general — it's just that there are a lot of unknowns or unanswered questions, and that is what interests me the most about it.”

Jarquin came to Coulter BME after studying biomedical engineering at Mississippi State University. He said he was drawn to the Mantalaris and Panoskaltsis lab because of the collaboration between a bioprocess engineer and a clinician — a hallmark of the Department he discovered early on in his search for graduate programs.

In fact, it was a talk by Coulter BME Associate Professor Manu Platt at the Biomedical Engineering Society conference in Atlanta that stuck with Jarquin as he was exploring programs.

“One of the first things that he stressed was that the research isn't as important as whoever is going to be guiding you through that research,” Jarquin said, “so that's the approach I took [looking for an advisor and a lab].”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Jarquin already has an idea of how he’ll blend service and uncovering the unknown even after he leaves Emory and Georgia Tech. He plans to pursue a career as a research scientist at a federal agency, where he wants to ensure underrepresented voices are heard.

“For me, it's like serving the country,” he said. “You're not doing it for a financial gain for a company; the research that's being done belongs to the people, belongs to us.”

At the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, a group of five Georgia Tech students decided to apply what they had learned about data science in their classes to help those affected by the pandemic.

Undergraduate biomedical engineering students Davis White, Thomas Beckler, and Jaime Vera teamed with Ricardo Meizoso (ME), Leonardo Ricci (CS) and Nicolas Mirchandani (ID) to take a data science-focused approach to social distancing and pandemic regulations and created a transit car Automated Passenger Counter.

The team’s device tracks the number of people moving in and out of public transit cars and was inspired by pre-Covid-19 technology used on college campuses to track movement patterns across major buildings, such as libraries and dining halls. Their plans for the Automated Passenger Counter device led to enrolling in the MIT Covid-19 Challenge hackathon, winning their division, and creating their startup, PopTracker. The desire to help communities and use the classroom skills to enact change has been a constant in the team’s journey from hackathon competitors to a student-led startup.

“I knew some of the skills that Georgia Tech taught me could help make a difference in communities if applied them the right way, and so Thomas Beckler and I organized a team full of people that wanted to do something,” said White, who has finished his biomedical engineering degree and is now CEO and project lead of the company, now called Elbowroom.
 

Elbowroom’s Technical Development

The team wanted to create a device that acted as a low-cost Automated Passenger Counter and could be put in transit or train cars to count the number of people in a given space and report the data in real time to a transit application, such as Google Maps or WAZE. To accomplish this, the Elbowroom device uses WiFi sensors and Bluetooth sniffing, which are common methods of counting devices in a certain area; however, the number of devices in a train car does not usually equate to the exact number of passengers, which is where the team’s novel machine learning algorithms came into play.

“We’re taking a data science approach to solve the inaccuracy that WiFi and Bluetooth sniffing brings up,” White said. “We use machine learning algorithms to take in not only the data we’ve collected from the sensors, but also data from other disparate data streams to get more accurate estimates of how many people are in a train car.”
 

CREATE-X Startup Launch

After the Elbowroom team created the idea for their device along with a prototype of a Bluetooth sensor, they applied for Georgia Tech’s Startup Launch, a 12-week program where students “intern” to launch their startups. Teams are provided with seed funding, legal services, makerspace, mentorship, and intellectual property protection.

"Launch provides students an incredible opportunity to create real startups,” said Raghupathy "Siva" Sivakumar, director of CREATE-X. “We have helped launch more than 230 companies over the last six years. This is easily the largest number of student startups launched by any college campus in the country over this period.”

“Elbowroom is a great example of how student founders can bring a fresh and scrappy approach to solving real problems while utilizing the latest technology in a cost-effective way,” said Rahul Saxena, associate director of CREATE-X. “The team identified a societal need that they were highly motivated to solve, unencumbered by legacy or bureaucracy.”

Through Startup Launch, Elbowroom gained access to invaluable resources, such as lawyers and community connections, and they learned how to network, give pitch deck presentations, and continue to develop their device. White also emphasized his newfound interest in networking and highlighted its importance for PopTracker’s development and visibility.

“The biggest thing I learned from the Startup Launch program was how to be a more businesslike and startup-oriented leader,” White said. “I feel so much more comfortable being part of the startup space going forward.”

According to White, the most difficult part of the group's journey toward becoming a startup has been the technical development of the physical device and the device-related pitfalls the team has experienced. Additionally, the company found that they had to interface with other businesses to add certain data streams into their counting algorithms. This process was new to White and the team, and it was a complicated process to which the company had to adjust. Startup Launch gave the team the tools and connections necessary to adapt and develop as a company.
 

MARTA Pilot Program

To test their device and its ability to take in different data streams, Elbowroom established a developmental pilot program with MARTA – the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority. They were introduced though one of the team’s mentors, Melissa Heffner, VentureLab program manager, and pitched their idea — putting devices on some of their trains to test the algorithms and use the data it collects to further the development of the device.

“Through networking and our mentor’s connection to MARTA, I eventually found someone at MARTA who listened to our crazy idea and saw the value in it, and realized that as engineers, we had the technical expertise to build something worthwhile,” White said.

The pilot program entailed setting up four of Elbowroom’s devices on MARTA train cars. After the team finishes development on the program they are currently working on, they hope to use the validation statistics obtained from their data to bolster Elbowroom and begin to branch out and work with other transit agencies.

Additionally, with the data from their devices on MARTA trains, the new company plans to market to transit applications that could use and broadcast the data collected by Elbowroom devices.

“The problem is not a lack of transit apps,” White said. “The problem is that there are no data producers because this type of technology is too expensive for general public transport. We’re going to develop an enterprise software through which agencies can access the transit car data in a way that’s helpful for them to broadcast.”
 

Looking to the Future

In the short-term, White said the company plans on collecting and utilizing the data from the MARTA devices, ensuring that their algorithm is fully operational, and eventually securing funding from venture capitalists. Moving forward, though, he’s confident Elbowroom can survive in the multibillion-dollar worldwide Automated Passenger Counter industry and help people even as the pandemic begins to come to an end.

The team is still active in student startup competitions such as the Student IoT Innovation Challenge at Tech’s Center for the Development and Application of Internet of Things Technologies, where they placed second.

Through the process of co-founding and being the public face of Elbowroom, White is interested in the possibility of combining his passion for biomedicine and biotech research with the startup space in his future career.

“Elbowroom has made me realize that I really love starting organizations, coordinating teams, and creating new products,” White said. “I’ve always been interested in research, but the application of that research and translational engineering is what I want to do, and I’d love the opportunity to organize teams or even a biotech startup in the future.”

Sung Jin Park is working to create a better model of this complex process, one that includes all the different kinds of cells and tissues involved in autonomous cardiac contractions and better reproduces the functions of the sinoatrial node responsible for heart beats. The American Heart Association is investing in the project with a three-year career development award — a highly selective grant intended to recognize and support promising researchers just beginning their careers.

“I want to recapitulate the unique structure of the sinoatrial node so we can overcome this kind of transient pacemaker behavior,” said Park, an assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.

To create his model, Park plans to a use a kind of tissue manufacturing that’s a bit like the inverse of 3D printing. Rather than depositing lines of cells in layer after layer to bioprint tissues, Park aims to create a layer of cells and then sculpt or etch them using light. By repeating the process with layer after layer of different kinds of cells, he aims to create functional, multicellular organoids that replicate the sinoatrial node.

“The career development award presents a great opportunity for me to build my career in cardiac research,” said Park, whose training is in mechanical and electrical engineering. “It’s a stepping stone toward pursuing future research grants from the National Institutes of Health or other significant funding agencies.”

The American Heart Association has designed the career development award to help early career scientists develop their skills and prepare them to pursue and win more significant grants. As part of the program, Park built a team of mentors to help him — senior faculty members who will offer counsel and help guide his scholarship. Park’s mentoring team includes Coulter BME faculty members Hee Cheol Cho, Hanjoong Jo, and Shuichi Takayama.

Platt told health news site STAT, “I love that they are doing things. I like they are saying the word racism.” But he cautioned that the agency may not be moving fast enough to fix structural problems that result in Black scientists receiving far fewer grants, which are critical to supporting faculty members and earning them tenure.

“It’s very difficult out there,” he told STAT’s Usha Lee McFarling. “Funding Black investigators needs to be the linchpin.”

Platt, associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, was one of several advocates who told STAT the plan released in the journal Cell was an important step, but perhaps not enough.

“As scientists, administrators, staff, and leaders at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), we take this opportunity to acknowledge that structural racism has been a chronic problem in our society, and biomedical science is far from free of its stain,” a group of agency leaders, including director Francis Collins, wrote. “Structural racism has significantly disadvantaged the lives of many people of color across our society, including those who conduct or support the science funded by NIH.”

The leaders pledged to “enhance diversity, equity, and inclusion and using every tool at our disposal to remediate the chronic problem of structural racism.”

From STAT:

Platt, who was recently asked to advise the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering on diversity issues, said his experience serving on funding review panels showed him that systemic racism plays a clear role, even though race is not listed on grant applications. “They look at where people trained, who they trained with, and what institution they’re at. If you’re at an HBCU (historically Black college and university) or a smaller institution, you get penalized,” he said. “And structural racism may be playing a role in why people are not being hired at those larger institutions to begin with. It all feeds forward.”

The NIH could easily prioritize funding for scientists from underrepresented groups, Platt said, as it does for early-career scientists to help them establish a funding track record and improve their chances of success and tenure. He said such a program would be a more direct route to increasing racial parity in funding than running programs to help improve the skills of minority scientists, such as grant-writing workshops.

“I’d like to see more programs that don’t want to fix the investigators but want to fix the system,” he said.

Read McFarling’s full story in STAT.

The program annually selects sets of researchers from the Petit Institute as co-principal investigators, providing early-stage funding opportunities that serve as a catalyst for bio-related breakthroughs.

The teams and their projects are:

Shu Jia (assistant professor, Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University) and Alberto Stolfi (assistant professor, School of Biological Sciences) are working on a project called, “Super-Resolution Scanning Micros- copy for Studying Neuronal Cell Biology in vivo,” a new collaboration linking novel biological discovery and imaging technology. This project will transform existing imaging infrastructure, laying a critical intellectual foundation for broader science, engineering, and technology advances. 

Costas Arvanitis (assistant professor, Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University) and Liang Han (assistant professor, School of Biological Sciences) submitted a project called, “Ultrasonic actuation of mechanosensitive ion channels.” This interdisciplinary team will explore new ways to balance and control sound and vibration and study how it interacts with cell membrane proteins. Their long-term goal is to advance research in the field of neurosciences through the discovery of new tools for noninvasive, focal, and at depth manipulation of brain activity.

The Petit Institute Seed Grants provide year-one funding of $50,000 with equivalent year-two funding contingent on submission of an NIH R21/R01 or similar collaborative grant proposal within 12 to 24 months of the year-one start date (July 1, 2021).

New research by Georgia Tech and Emory University published in the journal Biomaterials sheds new light on the mechanics and physics of blood clotting through modeling the dynamics at play during a still poorly understood phase of blood clotting called clot contraction.

“Blood clotting is actually a physics-based phenomenon that must occur to stem bleeding after an injury,” said Wilbur A. Lam, W. Paul Bowers Research Chair, in the Department of Pediatrics and the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Emory University and Georgia Institute of Technology. “The biology is known. The biochemistry is known. But how this ultimately translates into physics is an untapped area.”

And that’s a problem, argues Lam and his research colleagues, since blood clotting is ultimately about “how good of a seal can the body make on this damaged blood vessel to stop bleeding, or when this goes wrong, how does the body accidentally make clots in our heart vessels or in our brain?”

How Blood Clotting Works

The workhorses to stem bleeding are platelets – tiny 2-micrometer cells in the blood in charge of making the initial plug, said Lam. The clot that forms is called fibrin, which acts as a glue scaffold that the platelets attach to and pull against. Blood clot contraction arises when these platelets interact with this fibrin scaffold. To demonstrate the contraction, the researchers embedded a three-millimeter-sized Jell-O mold of a LEGO figure with millions of platelets and fibrin to recreate a simplified version of a blood clot.

“What we don't know is ‘How does that work?' ‘What's the timing of it so all these cells work together -- do they all pull at the same time?’ Those are the fundamental questions that we worked together to answer,” Lam said.

Lam’s Lab collaborated with Georgia Tech’s Complex Fluids Modeling and Simulation Group headed by Alexander Alexeev, professor and Anderer Faculty Fellow in The George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, to create a computational model of a contracting clot. The model incorporates fibrin fibers forming a three-dimensional network and distributed platelets that can extend filopodia, or the tentacle-like structures that extend from cells so they can attach to specific surfaces, to pull the nearby fibers. 

Model Shows Platelets Dramatically Reducing Clot Volume 

When the researchers simulated a clot where a large group of platelets was activated at the same time, the tiny cells could only reach nearby fibrins because the platelets can extend filopodia that are rather short, less than 6 micrometers. “But in a trauma, some platelets contract first. They shrink the clot so the other platelets will see more fibrins nearby, and it effectively increases the clot force,” Alexeev explained. Just due to the asynchronous platelet activity, the force enhancement can be as high as 70% leading to an 90% decrease of the clot volume. 

“The simulations showed that the platelets work best when they’re not in total sync with each other,” said Lam. “These platelets are actually pulling at different times and by doing that they’re increasing the efficiency (of the clot).”

This phenomenon, dubbed by the team, asynchronous mechanical amplification, is most pronounced “when we have the right concentration of the platelets corresponding to that of healthy patients,” Alexeev said.

Research Could Lead to Better Ways to Treat Clotting, Bleeding Issues

The findings could open medical options for people with clotting issues, said Lam, who treats young patients with blood disorders as a pediatric hematologist in the Aflac Cancer & Blood Disorders Center at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. 

“If we know why this happens, then we have a whole new potential avenue of treatments for diseases of blood clotting,” he said, emphasizing that heart attacks and strokes occur when this biophysical process goes wrong. 

Lam explained that fine tuning this contraction process to make it faster or more robust could help patients who are bleeding from a car accident, or in the case of a heart attack, make the clotting less intense and slow it down.  “Understanding the physics of this clot contraction could potentially lead to new ways to both treat bleeding problems and clotting problems.”

Alexeev added that their research also could lead to new biomaterials such as a new type of Band-Aid that could help augment the clotting process.

First author and Georgia Tech PhD candidate Yueyi Sun says the coolest aspect of this research was the simplicity of the model and the fact that the simulations allowed her and the team to understand how the platelets work together to contract the fibrin clot as they would in the body.

“When we started to include the heterogeneous activation suddenly it gave us the correct volume contraction,” she said. “Allowing the platelets to have some time delay so one can use what the previous ones did as a better starting point was really neat to see. I think our model can potentially be used to provide guidelines for designing novel active biological and synthetic materials.” 

Sun agreed with her research colleagues that this phenomenon might occur in other aspects of nature. For example, multiple asynchronous actuators can fold a large net more effectively to enhance packaging efficiency without the need of incorporating additional actuators.

“It theoretically could be an engineered principle,” said Lam. “For a wound to shrink more, maybe we don't have the chemical reactions occur at the same time – maybe we have different chemical reactions occur at different times. You gain better efficiency and contraction when one allows half or all of the platelets to do the work together.”

Building on the research, Sun hopes to examine more closely how a single platelet force converts or is transmitted to the clot force, and how much force is needed to hold two sides of a graph together from a thickness and width standpoint. Sun also intends to include red blood cells in their model since red blood cells account for 40% of all blood and play a role in defining the clot size. “If your red blood cells are too easily trapped in your clot, then you are more likely to have a large clot, which causes a thrombosis issue,” she explained.

This work is funded by the National Science Foundation (DMR Awards 1809566 and CAREER 1255288) and the National Institutes of Health (Awards R35HL145000, R21EB026591, and R01HL155330).  

CITATION: Y. Sun, et.al., “Platelet heterogeneity enhances blood clot volumetric contraction: An example of asynchrono-mechanical amplification.” (Biomaterials 274, 120828, 2021)  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biomaterials.2021.120828

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The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is a top 10 public research university developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition.
The Institute offers business, computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences degrees. Its nearly 40,000 students, representing 50 states and 149 countries, study at the main campus in Atlanta, at campuses in France and China, and 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.

Writer: Anne Wainscott-Sargent

The three-year distinguished fellowships offer discretionary funding that allows faculty members to explore new areas of research, support students, purchase key equipment, or cultivate new industry and research relationships, and conduct pilot studies.

The new faculty fellows are:

• Jaydev Desai – Carol Ann and David D. Flanagan Distinguished Faculty Fellow
• Gabe Kwong – Wallace H. Coulter Distinguished Faculty Fellow
• Manu Platt – Wallace H. Coulter Distinguished Faculty Fellow
• Peng Qiu – Wallace H. Coulter Distinguished Faculty Fellow
• May Dongmei Wang – Wallace H. Coulter Distinguished Faculty Fellow

“Each of these fellowships recognizes the ongoing and outstanding impactful contributions of these faculty members to Coulter BME — and the biomedical engineering profession, writ large,” said Susan Margulies, Wallace H. Coulter Chair of the Department. “They are national and international leaders, scholars, and mentors.”

Veronica Montgomery and Elisa Nieves each receive cash stipends of $10,000 as part of the engineering honor society’s newest class of fellows, whose selection is based on academic performance, campus leadership and service, and the promise of future contributions in their fields.

“I was an officer in my Tau Beta Pi chapter as an undergrad, and it was a fabulous experience,” said Montgomery, who studied biological engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology before entering Coulter BME in 2016. “It is such a great honor now to receive the fellowship as a grad student.”

Always an analytical thinker with a creative mindset, she entered college intent on making, “a clear and obvious impact on society. That led me to biomedical engineering.”

Her undergraduate research in a large drug delivery lab inspired her to pursue that route as a Ph.D. student. Montgomery – born and raised in Dallas, Texas – admitted the climate difference between Boston and Atlanta played a part in her decision to come to Coulter BME.

“I was excited to move to a warmer state,” she said, adding pragmatically, “but I decided to come to Georgia Tech and Emory because it’s such a great program, with several labs working on drug delivery research. I knew I’d have a lot of great options when joining a lab.”

She joined the lab of Mark Prausnitz who, in addition to being the J. Erskine Love Jr. Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, is director of the Center for Drug Design, Development and Delivery – CD4 – at Georgia Tech.

“I was very lucky that Dr. Prausnitz gave me a thesis project perfectly suited to my interests,” said Montgomery, whose research is focused on engineering the skin microbiome for drug delivery. “I have a lot of intellectual freedom to explore the fields that I’m most interested in, and it’s been a great opportunity to prepare for my career.”

With plans to graduate in the summer of 2022, Montgomery is intent on doing similar research in the biotech industry with an emphasis on health care and disease prevention. But she’s also planning to use the community-focused skillsets she developed while at Tech.

“There are a lot of science outreach opportunities here, and participating in that has been significant for me because I have realized how important and fun science communication is,” she said. “Science communication and science outreach have become a major interest of mine, and I’d like to continue working on that in the future, either as a part of my job or as a side interest.”

Outreach also has been one of the key drivers for Nieves, but so has her life experience. She grew up surrounded by medical professionals in Naples, Florida – her parents are a phlebotomist and a physician’s assistant.

“Hearing their stories from work first sparked my interest in the medical field,” said Nieves, who studied biomedical engineering as an undergraduate at the University of Florida. “I love how interdisciplinary this field is. It’s constantly challenging me to learn new material and apply that knowledge for creative solutions.”

While at UF, she had the opportunity to present her research on tissue scaffolds at two national conferences for minority students as well as the Biomedical Engineering Society’s Annual Meeting. She also worked as a trainee in a program designed to support minority students interested in pursuing a Ph.D.

“These experiences were very influential on my decision to apply for graduate school and motivated me to apply for the Georgia Tech Summer Undergraduate Research Experience,” said Nieves, who studied in the Coulter BME lab of Assistant Professor Vahid Serpooshan, work that advanced 3D bioprinting techniques and inspired her to return to Tech for her graduate studies.

But it was Tau Beta Pi’s emphasis on community service that really caught her attention as an undergrad.

“I wanted to inspire the next generation of engineers and become a role model to females and underrepresented minorities interested in STEM careers,” said Nieves, who held several officer posts at the UF chapter, where she coordinated outreach events and facilitated creation of instructional videos aimed to increase the retention rate of first-year engineering students.

But nothing could have prepared her for the past year.

“It’s not how I expected to finish my bachelor’s degree and start my graduate program,” said Nieves, a nod to the challenging circumstances of a global pandemic during a time of critical transition.

“That being said, I am unbelievably grateful for the resilience of my new department and university,” she added. “Georgia Tech has stepped up during a time of crisis and provided an incredible amount of support for its students.”

In her own case, Nieves said that a number of faculty have been staunch advocates, including Coulter BME’s Serpooshan and Manu Platt, and her current principal investigator, Andrés García, executive director of the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience. “They’ve helped me achieve several awards and fellowships during my short time at Georgia Tech,” she said.

But sometimes it’s the basic things in the day-to-day work of science that matter most. She remembered a few weeks after joining the García lab.

“I was able to pick up a pipette for the first time in six months,” she said. “And by the end of my first semester, I had a new set of wet lab skills and confidence in my ability to learn from my experiments and make a plan to move forward.”

In addition to Montgomery and Nieves, a third Georgia Tech graduate student – Abraham Atte, Aerospace Engineering – also earned a fellowship from Tau Beta Pi, which has initiated more than 615,000 members since it was founded in 1885 at Lehigh University. The fellowship program has awarded more than 1,736 fellowships and more than $8 million since the program began in 1929.

LINKS

Tau Beta Pi: The Engineering Honor Society

Those tools will be animal models specifically designed to replicate risk factors prevalent among people with African ancestry or to mimic social determinants of health experienced by Black Americans. The work is made possible by a seed grant program developed by Coulter BME faculty members Edward Botchwey and Johnna Temenoff that has awarded $25,000 to each of the four projects.

The grants are the product of conversations over the last year about ways that Coulter BME — and the broader campus community, for that matter — could harness the commitment to address structural racism that crystallized after the killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Rayshard Brooks, and others in 2020.

“What I personally hope is one of the outcomes of this is that we all in BME, and the broader bioscience community at Georgia Tech, can realize that we have something to contribute to solving the problems of healthcare disparities, and that it is something that's important not just for the Black and underrepresented minority community but it's important for all of us,” said Botchwey, associate professor in the Department.

The projects cover a wide range of health problems, from traumatic brain injury to alopecia and breast cancer to glaucoma. Botchwey said that range demonstrates the different ways researchers in the Department can make a real difference in addressing disparate outcomes.

“Some may be more obvious — say, in glaucoma, where you’re addressing a disease whose prevalence has a known and disparate impact on the African American community,” he said. “Others might be in an area, like traumatic brain injury, that maybe the impact is not statistically as disparate as in some other injuries and diseases, but there may be really important underlying pathological mechanisms in place that have to be understood in order to provide better care and outcomes for African Americans and other underrepresented minorities.”

The seed-grant model is designed to address a gap that faculty members often face as they consider applying for federal research grants: they need preliminary data to show agency reviewers.

“Our faculty members helped us identify that we might not even have the models yet to generate the preliminary data,” said Susan Margulies, Wallace H. Coulter Chair of the Department. “The important piece of this is really about providing seed funds with the goal of using it over the next 12 months to develop these models, verify them, and, ideally, gather a little bit of preliminary data so that our teams can subsequently pursue federal grants.”

Botchwey added: “Part of our motivation, in fact, was that, through the success of this seed grant and the dialogue that we're having here at Georgia Tech, we could really spur extramural funding agencies into action to put a much larger set of resources in place to address the healthcare disparities in the U.S. Through our seed grants, we can really show how those types of investments can pay off.”

The four funded projects propose developing new models for:

Glaucoma – C. Ross Ethier: The incidence of glaucoma — the most common cause of blindness — is four to six times greater for people of African ancestry than in other racial groups, and African Americans develop the disease earlier and have more severe cases than white Americans. This project will capitalize on a recent discovery of a gene associated with glaucoma in those of African ancestry but not in white or Asian populations. Collaborators include Michael Anderson, University of Iowa, and Michael Hauser, Duke University.

Breast Cancer – Karmella Haynes: Triple negative basal-like breast cancer affects pre-menopausal African American women disproportionately, and this highly metastatic cancer is the most prevalent type of breast cancer for obese Black women. The relationship between obesity and cancer remains unclear, particularly because social factors like income and access to healthcare and quality food are often related to obesity and can impact cancer survival. This project will develop a model to untangle those complications. Co-investigator: Curtis Henry, Pediatrics, Emory University.

Traumatic Brain Injury – Michelle LaPlaca: African Americans with a traumatic brain injury (TBI) are more likely to have complications, greater disabilities, and less rehabilitation services. They also are more likely to die from the injury than white patients. This project will work to understand how chronic stressors present for some underrepresented groups influence poor outcomes for TBI patients. This kind of lasting, unpredictable, mild stress can lead to disruption of normal physiological processes and exaggerated responses to disease, but it has not been applied to animal models of TBI. Co-investigator: Levi Wood, Mechanical Engineering, Georgia Tech.

Alopecia Areata – Cheng Zhu: Alopecia areata, complete or partial hair loss on parts of the body that normally have hair, is more common in women of African descent that white women over the course of their lives. The disease is one of the most common autoimmune disorders in the world, but it manifests very differently for patients, so it is difficult to study and treat. What’s more, many studies have lacked enough Black participants. This project will work to understand the mechanisms that lead to alopecia areata and open new avenues of research to develop more targeted treatments. Co-investigator: Loren Krueger, Dermatology, Emory University

Haynes was one of the eight women celebrated at a virtual ceremony in late May. The Innovator in STEM is “a leader who identifies, supports, and promotes innovative practices that address important challenges in expanding access to quality STEM education,” according to the magazine. Award nominations came from scientists and health professionals across the country.

“I am honored to receive this year’s Women of COLOR STEM Achievement Award for innovation in STEM,” Haynes said in her acceptance remarks. “Thank you to the award committee for this great opportunity.”

Haynes is an assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, where she uses engineering and molecular biology to design and build proteins that target and control cancer cells. She’s especially focused on triple-negative breast cancer, which disproportionately affects Black women.

Haynes also has created the AfroBiotech Conference to showcase the innovation, contributions, and leadership of the diverse engineering community and to inspire the next generation of students and scholars. In its two years, Haynes said the conference has highlighted innovations from more than 200 young and established Black scientists.

“Beyond my own research, I hope to grow a biotech community here in the Southeast that offers more lucrative and flexible opportunities to our marginalized community,” she said.

Platt officially takes on his new responsibilities July 1, though he already has been working with current associate chair Michael Davis on a seamless transition.

“I am thrilled that is Manu taking on this new role in the Department. He has proven to be a talented and enthusiastic advocate for our programs, and I look forward to tapping his creativity and leadership in a new way,” said Susan Margulies, Wallace H. Coulter Chair of the Department. “I’m also deeply grateful to Mike Davis for his guidance and dedication over the last five years. He has been a tireless champion for our students and graduate programs.”

Platt said he will build on a long tradition of success that includes a true commitment to diversity and inclusion, engaging and empowering students to chart their own unique path, and preparing graduates for success across a variety of careers.

“As an alumnus of this Ph.D. program, I take great pride in this program,” Platt said. “I truly believe that we have the best program in the country, and I am grateful for the opportunity to build on our many strengths and long tradition of success.”

Platt has led the Department’s graduate admissions and recruiting efforts for the last four years, helping establish Coulter BME as a leader in attracting and retaining students from historically underrepresented backgrounds. He also serves as deputy director of the interdisciplinary bioengineering graduate program at Georgia Tech.

Platt said his priorities as associate chair will include adding greater structure to the student-advisor matching process, creating more opportunities for new students to meet and interact with faculty members, and improving mental health training to help students distinguish between transient issues and more severe problems. He said he would like to use thesis and dissertation committees to foster new connections and collaborations among faculty members. And he plans to offer more professional development and career planning guidance for students.

“While an academic career is rewarding and exciting, the truth is that a number of our graduates will not pursue this pathway. Preparation for success in all career paths empowers students to choose their own adventures — whether industry, government, nonprofit, entrepreneurship, and more. This is a critical component of developing the whole biomedical engineer that we must retain and strengthen,” he said.

Platt has been a member of the Coulter BME faculty for more than a decade. His research focuses on understanding how cells sense, respond to, and remodel their immediate mechanical and biochemical environments for tissue repair and regeneration. He also leads two programs aimed at improving access and inclusion for underrepresented groups in science, technology, engineering, and math. Project ENGAGES focuses on students at several high schools in Atlanta; GT-ESTEEMED is a National Institutes of Health-funded program for undergraduates.

Previous work found that violet light can stop the progression of myopia, an elongation of the eye between the cornea and the retina that results in nearsightedness where far-away objects appear blurry. Now researchers at Keio University in Japan, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Emory University have discovered that the protective effects of violet light depend on a newly discovered photoreceptor protein in the eye called OPN5, or neuropsin, which was known to be sensitive to violet light.

“Among all the light that reaches our eyes, we have known for sure that violet light is special,” says Toshihide Kurihara, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor at Keio University in Japan. “The human eye seems to use it as a clue to control its size, whereas we knew neither the mechanism nor the necessity behind this phenomenon. We believe to elucidate this mystery might be the key to stop myopia pandemic and worked on it for years.”

A few years ago, the Keio team reported that violet light could prevent myopia progression. Violet light is abundant in outdoor sunlight but largely absent indoors, where it’s not emitted by artificial lights and ultraviolet protective coatings on windows also filter out violet light wavelengths.

In a paper published online May 24 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the research team explained the molecular mechanism behind this violet light effect on myopia progression and presented a new function of the OPN5 protein. OPN5 is part of a group of photoreceptor proteins called opsins found in the membranes of cells that are not involved in forming visual images but that play other important roles in the eye.

The researchers used an established mouse model of myopia to demonstrate that without OPN5, violet light did nothing to halt elongation of the eye. Mice without the OPN5 protein also saw continued thinning of the choroid, a vascular layer that decreases in thickness in myopic eyes.

At Cincinnati Children’s, Richard Lang, Ph.D., has played a key role in detailing unexpected roles that opsins play in the skin and the brain in addition to the eye. Some of his previous work has shown that Opsin 5  could regulate dopamine levels in the eye.

Because dopamine has a role in myopia development, he says, “it then became obvious that Opsin 5 was likely to be the light sensor that explained the observations of the Keio group — that violet light could suppress myopia. When we approached Machelle Pardue, Toshi Kurihara, and Kazuo Tsubota, they were keen to assess this question. My group has been delighted to take part in this collaboration.”

Understanding how violet light protects against worsening myopia is key as the condition’s prevalence accelerates. Already, roughly a third of people around the world are myopic, and some projections suggest nearly 5 billion people will have the condition by 2050. Nearsightedness typically begins in school-age children, and it’s often not considered a significant problem since it can be corrected with glasses. Yet, in China, myopia is the second-leading cause of blindness.

Slowing or stopping the changes in the eye that lead to myopia will limit the number of people who develop what’s called high myopia—elongation so severe that it can lead to detached retinas, glaucoma, and other problems that cause vision loss. A 2016 study in the journal Ophthalmology predicted nearly 10% of the world’s population will have high myopia by 2050.

“This study really does point to the fact that violet light is protective, and now there's a mechanism, this OPN5, that may underlie that,” says Machelle Pardue, Ph.D., professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory and a co-author of the study. “Next is to understand how you could use violet light to be protective in the human population. There are still some mechanistic aspects that need to be investigated to really understand how OPN5 may be doing this. This process is complex — if OPN5 is detecting violet light, it still has to have some sort of signaling molecule that's telling the eye to grow excessively.”

The time of day of any potential violet-light therapy for myopia also could matter. The researchers exposed mice to the light at different times of day, and their data showed treatment in the evening hours seemed to be most effective.

This research was supported by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (grant No. 18K09424); the Tsubota Laboratory, Inc.; the United States National Eye Institute (grant Nos. EY016435, EY027077, EY027711; the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (grant No. IK6 RX003134; and the Emma and Irving Goldman Scholar Endowed Chair at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. 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.

Now they have results from the first human feasibility study of the flicker treatment, and they’re promising.

“We looked at safety, tolerance, and adherence, and several different biological outcomes, and the results were excellent — better than we expected,” said Singer, assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory.

Singer shared preliminary results of the feasibility study in October at the American Neurological Association annual meeting. Now she is a corresponding author with Emory neurology researcher James Lah of a paper outlining their findings in the journal Alzheimer’s & Dementia: Translational Research & Clinical Interventions.

The flicker treatment stimulates gamma waves, manipulating neural activity, recruiting the brain’s immune system, and clearing pathogens — in short, waging a successful fight against a progressive disease that still has no cure.

Previous research already had shown that sensory areas in the human brain will entrain to flickering stimuli for seconds to hours. But this was the first time Singer and her team were able to test gamma sensory stimulation over an extended period of time.

The study included 10 patients with Alzheimer’s-associated mild cognitive impairment, which required them to wear an experimental visor and headphones that exposed one group to light and sound at 40 hertz for an hour a day over eight weeks, and another group for four weeks after a delayed start.

“We were able to tune the devices to a level of light and sound that was not only tolerable, but it also successfully provoked an underlying brain response,” Lah said.

As they hoped and expected, Singer said, “there was widespread entrainment.” That is, brain activity – in this case, gamma waves – synchronized to the external stimulation.

Gamma waves are associated with high-level cognitive functions, like perception and memory. Disruptions to these waves have been found in various neurological disorders, not just Alzheimer’s.

The human feasibility study showed that the gamma flicker treatment was safe and tolerable. And perhaps most surprising, patients followed the full treatment schedule.

“Adherence was one of our major concerns,” Singer said. “When we sent the device home with the participants, would they use it? Would they use it for a couple of days, and that would be it? We were pleasantly surprised that this wasn’t the case.”

Adherence rates hovered around 90 percent, with no severe adverse effects reported during the study or the 10-month open label extension (some patients even volunteered to continue being monitored and assessed after the study, though this data wasn’t part of the published research).

Some participants reported mild discomfort that could have been flicker related — dizziness, ringing in the ears, and headaches. But overall, Singer said, the device’s safety profile was excellent. She also reported some positive biological outcomes.

“We looked at default mode network connectivity, which is basically how different brain regions that are particularly active during wakeful rest and memory, interact with each other,” Singer said. “There are deficits in this network in Alzheimer’s, but after eight weeks [of treatment], we found strengthening in that connectivity.” This may indicate stronger interactions and therefore better communication between these regions.

In previous animal studies, the 40Hz of flicker stimulated mouse gamma waves, significantly reducing some Alzheimer’s pathogenic hallmarks and recruited microglia to the cause – these are the primary immune cells in the brain. But in the human study, there were no clear changes in the presence of pathogens amyloid beta or p-Tau.

However, as with the mouse studies, “we are getting immune engagement in humans,” Singer said. The flicker treatment sparked the activity of cytokines, proteins used in cell signaling — a sign that flicker had engaged the brain’s immune system.

“That is something we want to see, because microglia do things like clear out pathogens. Some people think that part of what’s going wrong in Alzheimer’s is a failure of this clearance mechanism,” Singer said.

She and Lah have wondered if a longer human trial would make a difference — would there be reduced amyloid activity, for example.

“So far, this is very preliminary, and we’re nowhere close to drawing conclusions about the clinical benefit of this treatment,” Lah said. “But we now have some very good arguments for a larger, longer study with more people.”

The study was funded by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke at the National Institutes of Health (grant No. R01-NS109226-01S1), by the Packard Foundation, the Friends and Alumni of Georgia Tech, the Lane Family, the Wright Family, and Cognito Therapeutics. Any findings, conclusions, and recommendations are those of the researchers and not necessarily of the sponsors.

Competing interests: Annabelle Singer owns shares in Cognito Therapeutics, which funded the human study at Emory Brain Health Center. Cognito aims to develop gamma stimulation-related products. These conflicts are managed by Georgia Tech’s Office of Research Integrity Assurance.

Under normal conditions, PD-1 serves an important role as an off-switch, preventing well-intentioned T cells from running amok and attacking normal, healthy cells by mistake. It does this by binding with a protein called PD-L1, found on some normal and some cancer cells. This interaction basically signals the T cell to leave the other cell alone. Unfortunately, sometimes the other cell is cancer, which then goes unbothered because PD-1 told the T cell to stand down.

The immunotherapy drug used to treat President Carter, Keytruda, is a checkpoint inhibitor. It inhibited PD-1, freeing the T cells to do their job and destroy the brain tumor. Since then, research into the molecule has expanded and PD-1 blockade continues its evolution as a promising treatment against solid tumors. The Japanese scientist who discovered the protein in 1992, Tasuku Honjo, won the Nobel Prize in 2018.

“It has become a very hot molecule,” said Cheng Zhu, professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University and the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Tech. “But only a minor fraction of cancer patients — about one third of the melanoma patients who have been treated with the blockade therapy — are responsive, indicating an incomplete understanding of how PD-1 works.”

Zhu and his colleagues are particularly interested in explaining how PD-1 inhibits T-cell activity, and they unravel one part of the mystery in a new paper in Nature Communications. Using technology Zhu developed decades ago that measures the biochemistry on live cell membranes, the researchers discovered that PD-1 disrupts the recruitment of CD8, a protein co-receptor that partners in T cell signaling and activation.

“The results of our study identify a PD-1 inhibitory mechanism that disrupts cooperative molecular interactions and prevents CD8 from augmenting antigen recognition,” Zhu said. “This explains the molecule’s potent inhibitory function regarding T cell activation and also explains its value as a target for clinical intervention.”

The lead author on the paper is Kaitao Li, a research scientist in Zhu’s Cellular and Molecular Biomechanics Lab, who focused on PD-1 for his Ph.D. dissertation in 2016. Li’s interest in the molecule has only grown through his friendship with Rafi Ahmed’s lab at Emory. Ahmed is a co-author of the new Nature Communications paper.

“I was taking an immunology class at Emory in 2010, and it was the first time I came across the PD-1 molecule,” Li recalled. “A friend of mine was a grad student in Rafi’s lab, and eventually, I became very inspired by their work.”

Ahmed’s lab identified PD-1 as a major mediator of T cell dysfunction during chronic infection, work that ultimately translated into human clinical studies of blockade therapy. Meanwhile, the Zhu lab had been focusing mainly on the basic science of on T cell activation and T cell receptors – TCR, a protein complex used by T cells for recognizing invading antigens.

“What excites me most is that [this study] reinforces and extends the work that Dr. Zhu did 10 years ago on the sequence of events leading up to T cell activation, but now it brings PD-1 into the story, revealing how PD-1 dampens T cell activation,” explained Simon Davis, paper co-author, whose immunology lab at the University of Oxford has studied PD-1 and other proteins for about 20 years. “We had proposed a long time ago that the activation sequence is dictated by the relative strengths of protein interactions involves, but Dr. Zhu’s lab was able to tease all this apart.”

While Zhu’s lab is rich in basic science, there is a translational aspect to this work. A biotech company that spun out Davis’ work is interested in Zhu’s discoveries, particularly the series of interactions among all of these critical molecules engaged in the immune response, Davis said.

And it’s bound to get more interesting going forward. Zhu and Li, who collaborated on PD-1 research for a paper in 2017, said they are planning two more studies focusing on the notable molecule, now the target of a hopeful treatment regimen that still has plenty of room for improvement.

“There has certainly been some clinical success even though we don’t fully understand the mechanism behind it,” Zhu said. “But there is still a long way to go because two thirds of the patients are not responding successfully. Why? We have another study planned to try to answer that question.”

This research was supported by National Institutes of Health grants U01CA214354, R01CA243486, and U01CA250040 (to C.Z. and R.A.).

CITATIONS: Kaitao Li, Zhou Yuan, Jintian Lyu, Eunseon Ahn, Simon J. Davis, Rafi Ahmet, Cheng Zhu, “PD-1 suppresses TCR-CD8 cooperativity during T-cell antigen recognition” (Nature Communications, May 2021)

Related Links:

“PD-1 suppresses TCR-CD8 cooperativity during T-cell antigen recognition” (Nature Communications, May 2021)

Cellular and Molecular Biomechanics Laboratory

Jimmy Carter’s Cancer Immunotherapy Story

Gleason and his wife were in the process of adopting a young girl from Ethiopia in 2009 named Kennedy. Before they could bring her home, however, she died — the result, Gleason said, of a seemingly preventable combination of malnutrition and diarrhea.

That personal tragedy changed everything for Gleason, an associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering and the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering.

“This loss shifted my passion and redirected both my personal activities and my academic teaching, research, and service activities at Georgia Tech,” Gleason said.

As a result, he has mentored dozens of students on trips to sub-Saharan Africa. He has developed courses focused on global health challenges and bioengineering. He has built research collaborations with scientists and clinicians in developing countries. And he mentors teams of Capstone Design students who focus on projects to improve health and medicine in Ethiopia.

Now his work is being recognized with the Steven A. Denning Award for Global Engagement from the Office of the Vice Provost for International Initiatives at Tech. The award honors a faculty member who has demonstrated sustained outstanding achievement and commitment to the advancement of the Institute’s global engagement.

“Receiving the Denning Award is a tremendous honor,” Gleason said. “It is my hope that this award will provide a platform for me to continue to engage students, faculty, and international students and scholars in research, teaching, and service activities at the interface of bioengineering and global health to reduce disparities in health around the world.”

In Ethiopia, that work is focused on developing resource-appropriate biomedical devices to reduce maternal and child mortality. As Gleason has learned — and as his students learn, too — the challenges are not always about resources or technology; sometimes, the challenges are about culture and social norms. He has been supported in his efforts by a variety of funders, including the Fulbright Scholars Program, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the U.S. Agency for International Development.

On campus, Gleason developed a course called Engineering for Global Health and Development to teach students how to use their skills to address economic and health disparities in the developing world.

He also helped create a special section of the Coulter BME Capstone Design course focused on creating solutions for the developing world. One of the projects from those design teams, a device to prevent neonatal hypothermia in Ethiopia, is the subject of pending grant applications to the NIH and the Gates Foundation.

Gleason’s passion for this work stretches beyond his professional life. He and his wife have started a nonprofit that focuses on women and family empowerment and child development in vulnerable families in Ethiopia. It’s called Because of Kennedy. They also continued to pursue adoption, and they have two daughters who are now 11 and 12 years old.

As Gleason sees it, though, the work is just beginning.

“In the years ahead, I hope to broaden collaborations between Georgia Tech students and faculty and international researchers in the developing world,” he said. “I hope to explore the development of research and teaching centers aimed at translating bioengineering innovation to the developing world and joint biomedical engineering institutes between Georgia Tech and universities in the developing world.”

Mostly.

Currently, more than half of cancer patients receive radiation as part of their treatment. But 20 percent of them, give or take, will find that they need different options because their tumors are resistant to radiation therapy. It’s a bad place to be: They may still face the potential side effects without the therapeutic benefit, and they’ve lost precious time.

What if clinicians had a way to predict and possibly improve radiosensitivity for individual patients? A team of researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University is working on something with that ultimate goal in mind.

“There still isn’t a great understanding of why some tumors don’t respond well to radiation, and it’s a significant hurdle to the long-term survival of many patients,” noted Joshua Lewis, who sought answers to the radiation resistance question while a graduate student in the lab of Melissa Kemp in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering.

Together, they’ve taken steps to begin to understand the underlying metabolism and build a tool to predict whether specific tumors will be one of the stubborn ones that doesn’t respond. In back-to-back papers, with Lewis as lead author, Kemp said they created a new pipeline, “in which you can automatically take data, plug it into our whole cell modeling of metabolism, and actually predict the way certain tumors of various cancer types, from various patients, are going to respond.”

She added: “This is the first example of really asking, with respect to radiation resistance, why there are differences that manifest themselves in tumor metabolism.”

In January, they published the first study with collaborators from Wake Forest and Indiana University in the journal Cell Systems. The newest research appears this month in Nature Communications. Lewis based the studies on his Ph.D. thesis, “Genome-Scale Modeling of Redox Metabolism and Therapeutic Response in Radiation-Resistant Tumors,” which he defended a year ago.

Shortly after Lewis began grad school, Wake Forest researcher Cristina Furdui approached the Kemp lab with the radiation resistance problem, “asking us to apply our expertise in systems biology,” he said. “It’s a more holistic approach than working with individual molecules or proteins, taking into account many different factors and their interactions, seeing if that leads to a particular response to radiation therapy.”

Lewis used a well-established type of cellular modeling called “flux balance analysis,” in which, “you try to model the entire metabolism of a cell — all the different chemical reactions. We model them using different biochemical equations.” The researchers then plug those equations into a computer. Within seconds, they can accurately analyze about 13,000 different metabolic reactions.

“We came up with our own approach for making more accurate flux balance analysis models by integrating multiple different types of omics data,” said Lewis, now pursuing his medical degree in the Emory MD/PhDProgram. “Omics” measure characteristics of molecules like genes, proteins, or metabolites, which comprise the cells of an organism.

By integrating genomics, transcriptomics, and metabolomics data, the researchers could model redox metabolism – the process of oxidation and reduction reactions, or the loss and gain of electrons – in cancer cells, “and use that to accurately predict how certain tumors react to radiation therapy,” said Lewis, who mined data from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA).

“We looked for metabolic enzymes or metabolic targets where, if you tweaked them, it could affect a tumor’s radiosensitivity,” Lewis said. “So, imagine if you’re giving a patient radiation therapy, and you could also give them a chemotherapeutic at the same time that inhibits the action of a particular enzyme to make a tumor more sensitive to radiation.”

That is, essentially, the first paper. In the second — written only by Lewis and Kemp — the researchers integrated machine learning with genome-scale metabolic modeling, “to see if we can better predict what sort of biological features are associated with a patient’s response to radiation.”

One main challenge for the researchers in either paper, Lewis said, was in the datasets they used from TCGA. They had good genomics and transcriptomics data, but their metabolomics data was incomplete. The computational models they developed for the Cell Systems paper helped fill in the blanks, making metabolomic predictions. They fed the data from those models into a machine learning model to better identify biomarkers of radiation resistance.

“We can think clinically of a patient giving a blood sample, and from that blood you’re able to measure the levels of different metabolites and determine if the patient would be a good candidate for radiation therapy, or whether we should go ahead and think of other therapies,” Lewis said.

That speaks directly to what Lewis is training for now in his M.D. program. He wants to be a pathologist and better understand how patients respond to different therapies.

“I’d like to help bridge the gap between research and the clinic,” he said.

He’s off to a good start, and it’s exciting for Kemp.

“Josh’s computational platform turns easy-to-acquire data into a model representation of hard-to-acquire attributes, like metabolic fluxes and metabolite changes, that are otherwise very challenging to measure with the scale it takes to cover many different patients,” she said.

This research was supported by a National Institutes of Health/National Cancer Institute fellowship (F30 CA224968), an NIH/NCI U01 grant (CA215848), and the Wake Forest Baptist Comprehensive Cancer Center (NIH/NCI P30 CA12197).

CITATIONS: Joshua Lewis, Tom E. Forsha, David A. Boothman, Cristina Furdui, Melissa Kemp, “Personalized Genome-Scale Metabolic Models Identify Targets of Redox Metabolism in Radiation-Resistant Tumors ” (Cell Systems, 2021)

Joshua Lewis, Melissa Kemp, “Integration of machine learning and genome-scale metabolic modeling identifies multi-omics biomarkers for radiation resistance” (Nature Communications, 2021).

Related Links:

“Personalized Genome-Scale Metabolic Models Identify Targets of Redox Metabolism in Radiation-Resistant Tumors ” (Cell Systems, 2021)

“Integration of machine learning and genome-scale metabolic modeling identifies multi-omics biomarkers for radiation resistance” (Nature Communications, 2021).

The American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, or AIMBE, has honored Ajit Yoganathan with its Professional Impact Award for Education and Manu Platt with a Professional Impact Award for Diversity. They were recognized in late March at a virtual awards ceremony alongside five other winners from around the nation.

Yoganathan’s award cites his long record of innovation in development of biomedical engineering education as well as his involvement in developing international standards in cardiovascular devices. In the 1990s, Yoganathan helped create Georgia Tech’s cross-disciplinary bioengineering Ph.D. and then the unique joint Georgia Tech-Emory University Ph.D. program. He also helped develop the Master of Biomedical Innovation and Development.

“I am extremely proud of what we have done in this space, because there was really nothing at Tech in the bio space when I started,” said Yoganathan, Regents Professor Emeritus and Wallace H. Coulter Distinguished Faculty Chair in Biomedical Engineering. “The impact I've seen — how it impacts the graduate students that we've developed — and the students’ contributions makes me extremely proud.”

Platt, associate professor in the Department, was honored for “visionary leadership and an established track record of improving diversity and inclusion” in biomedical engineering, according to AIMBE. He was cited for “changing the culture for historically underrepresented students and faculty across the nation.”

Among his work, Platt leads Project ENGAGES at Georgia Tech, a high school science education program that works with seven minority-serving public schools in Atlanta. He also runs a National Institutes of Health-funded initiative at Tech to build a pipeline of future researchers in biomedical engineering and biomedical sciences from groups that are historically underrepresented in the field.

But those plans disintegrated as the coronavirus pandemic upended life around the globe just before students voted. And when Lonsberry won that election, she and Smith realized quickly where their focus had to be.

“Kyle and I and our whole campaign team, we had a whole platform that we were so excited to be able to focus on this last year. Of course, when Covid hit, we said, ‘That's not our priority anymore; we have to focus on Covid,’” Lonsberry said recently, fresh from handing the reins over to a new team of student leaders.

Lonsberry estimates probably half of her Student Government Association (SGA) time was focused on Covid-19 and helping campus leaders as they worked to get students safely back in classes and figure out how to operate campus. Twice a week, she joined the Georgia Tech recovery task force meetings to hear the latest and represent students while offering the hands and voice of SGA for the work that had to be done.

“I keep joking that when I graduate, I'm expecting my bachelor's in BME, but also my master's in public health,” Lonsberry said, “because I have learned so much about public health this last year.”

As she prepared to graduate with her bachelor’s degree this weekend, the biomedical engineering student said it was certainly a difficult time to be SGA president — but perhaps the most rewarding time, too.

“Even before Covid, I was interested in public health,” Lonsberry said. “I've learned that I really am passionate about public health. And [this year] confirms that I do want a career in public health.”

As things have calmed somewhat this spring, Lonsberry and her team in SGA have been able to revisit some of those original pre-pandemic ideas. She said her team worked to hold the line on mandatory student fees, working with the committee that sets the fees to make adjustments without increasing the total amount. Lonsberry said she’s been most proud of their work on Title IX policy in Georgia, which had to be updated based on new federal guidance for responding to complaints of sexual misconduct on campuses.

“I was able to work closely with some of my cabinet members, and we started a University System of Georgia-wide SGA campaign to make sure that the new Title IX policy written and adopted by the state was very survivor-focused. That was a really cool part of this year,” she said.

That is a lot of impact for someone who had no connection to Georgia, Georgia Tech, or Emory University a few years ago. Lonsberry is originally from West Palm Beach, Florida, and she knew biomedical engineering would nicely blend her interests in math and science with her passion for people and their health. She also knew the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering was one of the nation’s best programs.

“I was really able to fall in love with the school on my own and decide, this is the place that I love. I love the culture, I love the people, I love the opportunities that I'll be able to have on this campus,” she said. Looking back four years later, she said she was right: “I've been able to experience more and accomplish more at Georgia Tech than I ever thought that I would and could.”

To wit: Lonsberry has served as a student ambassador and a member of the Coulter BME Undergraduate Student Advisory Board. She studied abroad in the BME Galway Summer Program in Ireland, and she traveled to Eastern Europe through the Leadership for Social Good Study Abroad Program. She joined a sorority and added a minor in leadership studies.

In other words, she squeezed every drop out of her years at Tech.

As she celebrates what’s to come, Lonsberry is also been reflecting on what she’s learned, especially over the challenging past year — that her voice is more powerful than she realizes sometimes; that how she approaches people and problems really does matter; and that things that seem really crazy and scary sometimes aren’t that crazy and scary when you have the right people supporting you. And she thinks a lot about something a Tech administrator she’s worked with this year told her: “He said, ‘Brielle, when you win, who wins with you?’ That's really powerful.”

After graduation, Lonsberry has a job lined up as an associate at Boston Consulting Group in Atlanta, and she already has her eye on getting that master’s degree in public health down the road.

“I've loved every second of being at Georgia Tech,” she said. “It has not been easy. It has definitely been very challenging at times, and life has thrown crazy curveballs. But I have never been prouder to be a Yellow Jacket. And I'm so proud to have been a part of the BME Department.”

Do you have any key memories from your years here that have stuck with you?

I think what I'll value most about the last four years are, of course, my friendships with people my age, but then also the relationships I've been able to build with faculty and administrators here on campus. Especially within the BME Department, being able to get to know my professors really well, like Dr. [Wendy] Newstetter. We would just hang out and get coffee and just catch up and talk about careers and random things.

One cool memory that I've been thinking about the last few days is about Austin [Stachowski] on my Capstone Design team. We were in our very first class ever at Georgia Tech together — so, Monday at 8 a.m., we were in that class together. And now we were in our very last class at Georgia Tech together. It is really cool to see some of the friendships that have just stayed throughout all four years.

Was there a particular class or a professor that had a significant impact on you?

Professor Bill Todd. I'm very close with him. He's actually a professor of the practice in Scheller [College of Business]. I took his Management in the Healthcare Sector course, and I've been able to do a practicum with him at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta. He's just been such a great mentor to me. He’s like the go-to person if you're interested in public health and want a career in public health, and so, he's been great in helping me merge my BME degree with what I'm passionate about and [giving me] exposure to public health while I'm here at Georgia Tech. I can't give him enough kudos. He's amazing.

The highly competitive honors go to students who’ve demonstrated outstanding leadership in research, entrepreneurship, service, and academics. Department faculty and staff nominate students, who then submit applications and letters of recommendation.

In announcing this year’s winners, the selection committee noted that the awards represent only a small fraction of the great things that happen in the course of a year in Coulter BME and that the committee had to make difficult decisions among a group of talented and worthy nominees.

The 2021 winners are:
 

Ana Cristian

Outstanding Academic Service

This award honors a graduating senior who has challenged themselves through involvement both inside and outside the classroom and contributed to the student educational experience at Georgia Tech. Cristian served as a PLUS mentor, a FOCUS tutor, a teaching assistant for Quantitative Engineering Physiology Laboratory (BMED 3110), a BME Peer Advising Leader (PALS), and an Undergraduate Research Ambassador.

Anabel Alonso

Outstanding Community Service

This award honors a graduating senior who has made service an integral part of their college experience through their commitment and significant contributions to the community. Alonso co-founded ABLE Alliance, a new student organization dedicated to improving disability inclusion on campus. The group was voted Best New Organization by the Georgia Tech Student Government Association in 2020.

Julia Woodall

Outstanding Research

This award honors a graduating senior who has demonstrated outstanding research skills and has shared their work with the broader research community through presentations at local, regional, or national conferences, or through one or more peer-reviewed publications. Woodall contributed to multiple articles, presented at conferences, and held several leadership positions as an Undergraduate Research Ambassador for three years.

Austin Stachowski

Outstanding Industrial Experience

This award honors a graduating senior who has performed exceptional work in, and demonstrated significant commitment to, the biomedical engineering industry through internships, cooperative education, or international work experiences. Stachowski interned for five semesters, including stints at MiMedx Group, MD Innovate, and Edwards LifeSciences. He also received a certificate in business strategy and innovation.

Michael Pullen

Outstanding Entrepreneur

This award recognizes a student or student team who has demonstrated entrepreneurial spirit and initiative and who has made significant progress toward turning their innovative ideas into reality. Pullen is co-founder and CEO of LZRD Tech LLC, an apparel company based on internationally patented grip-enhancing technology.

Amanda Wijntjes

Outstanding Senior

This award honors a student who has exemplified all-around excellence through their significant accomplishments in several of the following categories of activities: service, academics, research, industry, and entrepreneurship. Candidates for this award must have a GPA of at least 3.75. Wijntjes completed two internships, conducted research during several semesters, co-authored a publication, and completed a minor in computer science. Wijntjes also served as vice president of finance for the Society of Women Engineers and volunteered as a BME FUTURES Ambassador and a HealthReach volunteer. Her Capstone Design team won the top BME award at the Spring 2021 Capstone Design Expo with their screening device to assess the ability of newborns to properly breastfeed.  

Jared Meyers

Outstanding Academic Achievement

In addition to his biomedical engineering degree, Meyers has minored in computer science and co-founded Augment Health, which is developing a device to replace urine collection bags for patients with catheters. Meyers completed three internships, performed research for several semesters, was co-author on a publication, and served as president for the Medical Robotics Club. He also was a team member of COVIDx, which finished in the top three at the national TechStars Startup Weekend 2020.

Since then she has earned a major, minor, and certificate across the College of Engineering, Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, and College of Sciences, respectively. She also just completed her senior BME Capstone project on an all-female team working on the National Security Innovation Network’s X-Force Fellowship. 

And although her last year before graduation was unexpectedly altered by the pandemic, Bove made good use of a hybrid schedule and some extra time to write and publish a collection of poems that seeks to show the joy of human connection — an especially relevant theme in a year that lacked a lot of direct human contact. 

“I am passionate about helping people — about forming connections with those around me,” she shares about her poetry book, “A Day of Humanity,”  which she published last summer. “I am passionate about showing people that they are not alone.” Bove gathered “touching stories from a wide variety of people — stories of anxiety, of love, of childhood pains, of friendship” for the book, which features 56 poems across a trio of themes: morning, day, and night. 

Now, as she gets ready to turn a tassel and begin the next chapter of her life, Bove reflects on the spirit of connection and community at Tech, where she says she’s found a home in many ways — on campus and in the classroom, where she’s met peers and professors who have challenged and encouraged her — and through a number of clubs and organizations where she’s made friends and relationships for life. Bove met her husband, Alejandro Muñoz, B.S. MSE 2019, while they were both studying at Georgia Tech. 

“I've grown in every single dimension of my life — emotionally, mentally, spiritually, intellectually,” she says. “I met my husband here. I met lifelong friends here. I've fallen in love with the sound of the Whistle on a sunny fall day. I love Tech.” 

Bove recently joined us virtually for a Q&A on her time as a student and what’s next: 

So, how have your initial expectations of Georgia Tech compared to your actual experience? 

I honestly wasn’t quite sure what to expect out of Georgia Tech when I first enrolled in 2016. I had never heard of Tech until my mom introduced me to it during my college search. I fell in love with the collaborative and innovative atmosphere and decided that I would call GT my home for the next four (which then turned to five) years. I still am surrounded by collaboration and innovation, but I found Tech to be so much more than that, too. I think the biggest shock was the level of success and experience each student brought to the table, and the way everyone really pushes you to be your best. 

What is the most important thing you've learned at Georgia Tech? 

The most important thing that I’ve learned here is the power of asking for help. Georgia Tech is a hard school that really pushes you. One of the ways I think it pushes you is to leave your comfort zone and lean on those around you. It is easy to “stay still” in your frustration and run around a problem over and over in your head without going anywhere — but what is more fruitful is to turn to the person next to you and work together to move forward. That was a really important lesson that allowed me to really engage with my studies. 

What is your proudest achievement at Georgia Tech? 

Georgia Tech has helped me grow so much and become proud of who I am and what I have done. I am especially proud of my senior design project. I worked with a team of four other amazing female biomedical engineers. We started our project in the summer as a part of the National Security Innovation Network’s X-Force Fellowship. We were partnered with the Army Rangers and were tasked with investigating traumatic brain injury in the military.  

This was an exciting project because it allowed me to incorporate some of the insights from my psychology courses as we spent an entire summer conducting interviews and performing a literature review. During the fall semester, we took our findings and designed a “blast attenuator” device for a mortar weapon system that would direct the damaging blast away from the brains of the service members firing the weapon. This design will hopefully be further refined by future teams.  

We also designed an experiment to measure the physiological and cognitive effects and the exact magnitude of the mortar weapon systems’ blasts upon firing. We were able to travel to Fort Benning to conduct this experiment.  

We have won two presentation awards for our work at different conferences and now are working on a research article to publish our findings. I am especially proud of this project, not because of the awards that we have won or for the possibility of having my name in an established research journal, but because my team worked well together and because we are making a real impact in the lives of those who serve us. 

Which professor or class made a big impact on you? 

A class that made a huge impact on me was The Art of Telling Your Story (BMED 4000), taught by Janece Shaffer, Joe Le Doux, and Cristi Bell-Huff. This class was so impactful because it showed me that the science world doesn’t have to be 100% technical — and that soft skills, like effective communication, are essential. After taking and being inspired by the connections formed in this class, I have been a teaching assistant for it for the past two semesters. Each semester I learn something new from the instructional team and from the students in the class. I have a passion for sharing stories, as a poet, and love being a part of this course. 

What is your most vivid memory at Georgia Tech? 

I have had so many amazing memories at Georgia Tech! One of my most vivid memories at Tech is actually one from my first semester. I was in a freshmen lounge with a few other people from my Classical Physics I course.  

We had a test that week and were trying to work through some problems that we didn’t understand. The white board was covered with acceleration and velocity equations, and across the room was an older student who didn’t appear to be paying any attention to us. After some time, we looked up from the problem we were working on to realize he had left. We continued to discuss the best equation to use for the problem we were working on.  

About thirty minutes later, we heard the door to the lounge creak open and then quickly shut. One of the people with me walked over towards the door to investigate. On the floor sat a bright blue box scribbled on with Sharpie: “Because every 1st year studying on Friday night deserves a donut! #stayhype.” Inside were a dozen Sublime Doughnuts.  

In this moment, I fell in love with Georgia Tech even more. It showed me that we are all looking out for each other and willing to help and support each other, any way we can. Georgia Tech is full of caring, smart, and passionate people — and that is why I love it. 

Where are you headed after graduation? 

After graduation I am getting married to another Tech graduate, Alejandro Muñoz, and we are moving up to Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. I will be joining 3M as an optimized operations engineer.

At Georgia Tech, I fell in love with learning, and I wanted to be sure my future job would provide continuous education opportunities. I am excited for my role at 3M since I will be joining their Optimized Operations Developmental Program. This will allow me to grow and expand upon the lessons I have learned at Tech. I also hope to continue writing and sharing poetry. 

Are you joining Commencement festivities? 

I will be attending Commencement! I am most looking forward to walking across the stage, and feeling the peace that I have actually done it come over me. My family and fiancé will be in the stands — and I know how proud they are of me. 

Mostly.

So far, these promising drugs haven’t been very useful in getting through to the well-protected brain to treat tumors or other maladies.

Now a multi-institutional team of researchers, led by Costas Arvanitis at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University, has figured out a way: using ultrasound and RNA-loaded nanoparticles to get through the protective blood-brain barrier and deliver potent medicine to brain tumors.

“We’re able to make this drug more available to the brain and we’re seeing a substantial increase in tumor cell death, which is huge,” said Arvanitis, assistant professor in the Wallace H, Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME) and Georgia Tech’s George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering (ME).

Arvanitis, whose collaborators include researchers and clinicians from Emory’s School of Medicine and the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, is the corresponding author of a new paper published in the journal Science Advances that describes the team’s development of a next-generation, tunable delivery system for RNA-based therapy in brain tumors.

“Our results were very positive, but if you think I’m excited, you haven’t talked to oncologists – they’re 10 times as excited,” Arvanitis said.

The roots of this project go back to when he and the paper’s lead author, ME grad student Yutong Guo, arrived at Georgia Tech in August 2016.

“From the start, I was very interested in the application of ultrasonics in treating brain disease,” said Arvanitis, who linked up with Emory physician Tobey MacDonald, director of the Pediatric Neuro-Oncology Program at the Aflac Cancer and Blood Disorders Center, and one of the paper’s co-authors. “Our main question was, can we use ultrasound to deliver drugs to tumors? Because that is a major challenge.”

RNA drugs have two major weaknesses: limited circulation time and limited uptake by cells. To overcome these challenges, the drugs are packaged in robust nanocarriers, typically 100 nm in size, to improve their bioavailability. Still, these nanocarriers have typically been too large to penetrate the blood-brain barrier, the tightly-connected and selective endothelial cells surrounding blood vessels in the brain, until now a locked door to RNA drugs.

But now, Arvanitis and his colleagues have discovered a safe way to get the drug safely across.

Using mouse models, the team deployed a modified version of ultrasound, the diagnostic imaging technique that uses sound waves to create images of internal body structures, such as tendons, blood vessels, organs and, in the case of pregnant women, babies in utero. The researchers combined this technology with microbubbles — tiny gas pockets in the bloodstream, designed as vascular contrast agents for imaging — which vibrate in response to ultrasound waves, changing the permeability of blood vessels.

“Focusing multiple beams of ultrasound energy onto a cancerous spot caused the microbubbles’ vibrations to actually stretch, pull, or shear the tight junctions of endothelial tissue that make up the blood-brain barrier, creating an opening for drugs to get through,” Guo said.

It’s a technique that biomedical ultrasound researchers have been refining for more than a decade, and recent clinical trials have demonstrated its safety. But there hasn’t been much evidence for selective and effective delivery of nanoparticles and their payloads directly into brain tumor cells. But even when blood borne drugs succeed in penetrating the blood-brain barrier, if they are not taken up by the cancer cell, the job isn’t complete.

Arvanitis and his team packaged siRNA, a drug that can block the expression of genes that drive tumor growth, in lipid-polymer hybrid nanoparticles, and combined that with the focused ultrasound technique in pediatric and adult preclinical brain cancer models. Using single-cell image analysis, they demonstrated a more than 10-fold improvement in delivery of the drug, reducing harmful protein production and increasing tumor cell death in preclinical models of medulloblastoma, the most common malignant brain tumor in children.

“This is completely tunable,” Arvanitis said. “We can fine tune the ultrasound pressure to attain a desired level of vibration and by extension drug delivery. It’s non-invasive, because we are applying sound from outside the brain, and it’s very localized, because we can focus the ultrasound to a very small region of the brain.”

Current standard treatments for brain tumors come with potentially awful side effects, Arvanitis said, “however, this technology can provide treatment with minimal side effects, which is very exciting. Now we are moving forward to try and identify what components are missing to translate this technology to the clinic.”

Citation: Y. Guo, H. Lee, Z. Fang, A. Velalopoulou, J. Kim, B. Thomas, T. Kim, A. F. Coskun, D. P. Krummel, S. Sengupta, T. McDannold, and C. D. Arvanitis. “Single-cell analysis reveals effective siRNA delivery in brain tumors with microbubble-enhanced ultrasound and cationic nanoparticles” Science Advances, April 2021.

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), grant No. R00 EB016971 and grant No. R37 CA239039; and the CURE Foundation.

Related Links

Arvanitis Lab

“Single-cell analysis reveals effective siRNA delivery in brain tumors with microbubble-enhanced ultrasound and cationic nanoparticles”

The Atlanta Jewish Times explored the possibilities and turned to Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering Regents Professor Mark Borodovsky to explain how the technology works:

Borodovsky, who first came to Atlanta in the first wave of Jewish immigration from the Soviet Union in 1990, has been at the forefront of this rapidly developing frontier of modern medicine.

As the founder and director of the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Genomics at Georgia Tech, he has been instrumental in developing new ways of sequencing the genome, the key to the foundational building blocks of all human life.

His work has been supported by The Marcus Foundation, funded by the cofounder of Home Depot Bernie Marcus.

In 2006, Marcus gave the university $15 million to build a research center to explore what are called nano particles, the small building blocks of all matter. He also established the Marcus Center for Therapeutic Cell Characterization and Manufacturing to develop new medical initiatives in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries.

According to Dr. Borodovsky, recent medical advances and the COVID vaccines are simply technology urged on by the world’s medical needs, catching up with basic science.

“It can take 30 years to come up with a concept and get this concept up to realization in a technological sense. So now we talk about several months.”

Read the full story in the Atlanta Jewish Times.

Now he has the support of the American Society of Hematology to help him get there. Jarquin has won a 2021 Minority Hematology Graduate Award, which includes two years of funding from the professional society for stipends and research costs along with connections to mentors and other researchers studying blood and blood disorders.

“This award gives me a chance to conduct independent research that will hopefully lead to a career in transforming hematological research into engineered solutions to treat hematological disorders,” Jarquin said. “I see this as a stepping stone for enhanced mentoring and professional activities that are usually more difficult for Hispanic students, like myself, to access.”

The Minority Hematology Graduate Award encourages graduate students from historically underrepresented minority groups to pursue careers in academic hematology, according to the society. It comes with society membership, invitations to present research, and opportunities to meet leaders in the field.

Jarquin studies red blood cell development in health and disease with Coulter BME Professor Sakis Mantalaris and Nicki Panoskaltsis in the Emory University School of Medicine. He previously received a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and an Emory Centennial Scholars Fellowship.

“What makes my training in the field of hematology and biomedical engineering unique is the partnership between my mentors — Dr. Panoskaltsis is a physician practicing hemato-oncology and Dr. Mantalaris is a bioprocess engineer — a partnership that is made possible by our joint BME program between Georgia Tech and Emory,” Jarquin said. “The unique mentor setup of tackling complex hematological processes from both a clinical standpoint and an engineering standpoint was a highlight in why I was given the award.”

As Jarquin uses this latest award to work toward his goal of a federal research position, he’s also keeping his eyes on his true mission: to make a real difference in the lives of Hispanic Americans.

“There is a lack of minority scientists in [federal agency research] roles, which leads to gaps in the research areas pursued,” he said. “With more minority scientists at the helm in our federal government, this will lead to more equitable research being pursued and, then, better health outcomes for these populations.

Breastfeeding is widely recognized for its health benefits, but many mothers and babies have difficulty in the first few days after birth. The Milk Maid measures how well an infant is able to create the negative pressure necessary to properly draw in milk, giving doctors clinical data to decide if medical intervention is necessary or if other issues, like technique, are at play.

“There are so many experts, all with different opinions about the potential problems in breastfeeding, but there’s no objective evidence,” said Brielle Lonsberry, a senior from West Palm Beach, Florida.

Team Milk Maids was one of 30 solutions presented by Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering undergraduates at the expo. More than 180 teams showcased their work in a virtual version of the event that typically packs Georgia Tech’s McCamish Pavilion each fall and spring to show off senior design projects.

The team worked with their sponsors at Emory Healthcare to develop a device to fill that gap. They also reached out to physicians at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta for expertise, and before long, they had a whole cadre of doctors there helping to refine their ideas.

“Our novel device offers exactly what clinicians identified as the greatest need: quantifying infants’ sucking ability,” said team member Simran Dhal from Milton, Georgia.

The team has filed a provisional patent on the screening tool they created, with hopes that it could progress to a clinical trial — even if they’re not involved.

“We all really view this as the first step in quantifying breastfeeding, to helping doctors feel like they’re really able to support their patients better,” said Austin Stachowski, another member of the team from Milton. “This is one quantification that opens the door to so much more and to better treatment.”

Team Milk Maids also included Emma Kate Costanza from Columbus, Georgia and Amanda Wijntjes from Annapolis, Maryland. Wijntjes said they’ve all known each other since their first year on campus, but they never had the chance to work together — until now. She said it has been an appropriate culmination of everything they’ve done over the last four years.

The overall best project at the spring expo went to Team StrideLink, an interdisciplinary team that included biomedical engineering student Cassandra McIltrot. They designed a simple, cheap, wearable device for gait analysis.

Other biomedical engineering teams included some work on gait — developing a virtual reality game to help people with difficulty walking improve their gait. Teams also created a robotically assisted knee rehabilitation device, built a machine to make at-home hemodialysis easier for patients, and much more. (See all of their work in the Coulter BME Virtual Expo.)

Working with Mayo Clinic Jacksonville, Team ScolAlign created a system to help doctors accurately measure the position of a patient’s spine during spinal realignment surgery. They developed a deep learning algorithm that automatically detects markers and calculates two key measurements of spine alignment, the Cobb angle and plumb line. It sets up quickly and reduces the need for X-rays in the operating room.

“ScolAlign has developed a fully integrated system that measures spinal curvature and spinal balance with no radiation — all with just the click of a button,” said Yoel Alperin, a senior from Sandy Springs who worked on the project with Sindhu Kannappan from Marietta; Parth Gami from York, Pennsylvania; and Kelly Qiu from Cranbury, New Jersey.

The team said the device proved more than 90% accurate in their testing.

“Surgeons will no longer have to use makeshift gadgets to measure spinal alignment, expose themselves to more radiation than needed, or risk the patient developing an infection due to surgery length,” Alperin said.

Two other projects tackled issues that have come to the forefront during the coronavirus pandemic. One group developed a system for putting on and removing powered respirators that are critical personal protective equipment for hospital workers. The other created a tool to help doctors collect physiological data during telemedicine visits.

The PAPR MagStand uses magnets and an adapted design of the Powered Air-Purifying Respirator (PAPR) hood to allow health professionals to quickly suit up. Designed by Abby Kettle and Maria Luna from Atlanta; Gianni Natale from Allendale, New Jersey; Dwayne Watkins from McDonough; and Ming Wen from Shenzhen, China, the MagStand uses magnets to hold the hood, which has metal strips on the side, and a small shelf for the purifier’s battery pack. The design minimizes contact and potential contamination.

“Since the start of Covid-19, there have been no adaptations of the PAPR to the fast-paced environment that healthcare workers face on a day-to-day basis in hospitals. There are no specific instructions on donning and doffing procedures, much less decontamination procedures for the PAPR itself,” Natale said. “The MagStand presents the quickest and most effective solution in reducing risk of contamination for healthcare workers.”

Team HeartThrobs tackled a key limitation of virtual doctor visits: the inability to touch patients or listen to their heart, lungs, and other organs. This practice, called auscultation, usually requires listening through a stethoscope. Ram Akella from Lilburn; Keval Bollavaram from Snellville; Ahdil Gill from Roswell; and Atharv Marathe and Sil Savla from Johns Creek came up with a way to stretch that stethoscope across the virtual miles with their AusculBand.

“The AusculBand improves the physician’s diagnostic capabilities by enabling audio recordings and real-time audio transmission that can be sent directly from the patient to his or her physician,” Gill said.

Savla added: “Our device underwent rigorous frequency-response testing to ensure it captures all critical sounds. We conducted noise-comparison tests against the competition and even redesigned our stethoscope head to maximize sound clarity. Our results show that the sound we captured is over 50% clearer than the leading digital stethoscope.”

The five-year, $2 million National Science Foundation (NSF) project initiated in 2019 already has resulted in several published journal articles that offer promising new methods to focus ultrasound waves through the skull, which could lead to broader use of ultrasound imaging — considered safer and less expensive than magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technology.  

Specifically, the team is researching a broad range of frequencies, spanning low frequency vibrations (audio frequency range) and moderate frequency guided waves (100 kHz to 1 MHz) to high frequencies employed in brain imaging and therapy (in the MHz range).

“We’re coming up with a unique framework that incorporates different research perspectives to address how you use sound and vibration to treat and diagnose brain diseases,” explained Costas Arvanitis, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. “Each researcher is bringing their own expertise to explore how vibrations and waves across a range of frequencies could either extract information from the brain or focus energy on the brain.”

Accessing the Brain Is a Tough Challenge

While it is possible to treat some tumors and other brain diseases non-invasively if they are near the center of the brain, many other conditions are harder to access, the researchers say. 

“The center part of the brain is most accessible; however, even if you are able to target the part of the brain away from the center, you still have to go through the skull,” Arvanitis said.

He added that moving just 1 millimeter in the brain constitutes “a huge distance” from a diagnostic perspective. The science community widely acknowledges the brain’s complexity, each part associated with a different function and brain cells differing from one to the other.  

According to Brooks Lindsey, a biomedical engineering assistant professor at Georgia Tech and Emory, there is a reason why brain imaging or therapy works well in some people but not in others. 

“It depends on the individual patient’s skull characteristics,” he said, noting that some people have slightly more trabecular bone —  the spongy, porous part of the bone that makes it more difficult to treat. 

Using ultrasound waves, the researchers are tackling the challenge on multiple levels. Lindsey’s lab uses ultrasound imaging to assess skull properties for effective imaging and therapy. He said his team conducted the first investigation that uses ultrasound imaging to measure the effects of bone microstructure — specifically, the degree of porosity in the inner, trabecular bone layer of the skull.

“By understanding transmission of acoustic waves through microstructure in an individual’s skull, non-invasive ultrasound imaging of the brain and delivery of therapy could be possible in a greater number of people,” he said, explaining one potential application would be to image blood flow in the brain following a stroke.

Refocusing Ultrasound Beams on the Fly   

Arvanitis’ lab recently found a new way to focus ultrasound through the skull and into the brain, which is “100-fold faster than any other method,” Arvanitis said. His team’s work in adaptive focusing techniques would allow clinicians to adjust the ultrasound on the fly to focus it better.

“Current systems rely a lot on MRIs, which are big, bulky, and extremely expensive,” he said. “This method lets you adapt and refocus the beam. In the future this could allow us to design less costly, simpler systems, which would make the technology available to a wider population, as well as be able to treat different parts of the brain.”

Using ‘Guided Waves’ to Access Periphery Brain Areas

Another research cohort, led by Alper Erturk, Woodruff Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech, and former Georgia Tech colleague Massimo Ruzzene, Slade Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder, performs high-fidelity modeling of skull bone mechanics along with vibration-based elastic parameter identification. They also leverage guided ultrasonic waves in the skull to expand the treatment envelope in the brain. Erturk and Ruzzene are mechanical engineers by background, which makes their exploration of vibrations and guided waves in difficult-to-reach brain areas especially fascinating. 

Erturk noted that guided waves are used in other applications such as aerospace and civil structures for damage detection. “Accurate modeling of the complex bone geometry and microstructure, combined with rigorous experiments for parameter identification, is crucial for a fundamental understanding to expand the accessible region of the brain,” he said. 

Ruzzene compared the brain and skull to the Earth’s core and crust, with the cranial guided waves acting as an earthquake. Just as geophysicists use earthquake data on the Earth’s surface to understand the Earth’s core, so are Erturk and Ruzzene using the guided waves to generate tiny, high frequency “earthquakes” on the external surface of the skull to characterize what comprises the cranial bone.

Trying to access the brain periphery via conventional ultrasound poses added risks from the skull heating up. Fortunately, advances such as cranial leaky Lamb waves increasingly are recognized for transmitting wave energy to that region of the brain.

These cranial guided waves could complement focused ultrasound applications to monitor changes in the cranial bone marrow from health disorders, or to efficiently transmit acoustic signals through the skull barrier, which could help access metastases and treat neurological conditions in currently inaccessible regions of the brain. 

Ultimately, the four researchers hope their work will make full brain imaging feasible while stimulating new medical imaging and therapy techniques. In addition to transforming diagnosis and treatment of brain diseases, the techniques could better detect traumas and skull-related defects, map the brain function, and enable neurostimulation. Researchers also see the potential for uncovering ultrasound-based blood-brain barrier openings for drug delivery for managing and treating diseases such as Alzheimer’s.

With this comprehensive research of the skull-brain system, and by understanding the fundamentals of transcranial ultrasound, the team hopes to make it more available to even more diseases and target many parts of the brain. 

This work is funded by the National Science Foundation (CMMI Award 1933158 “Coupling Skull-Brain Vibroacoustics and Ultrasound Toward Enhanced Imaging, Diagnosis, and Therapy”).  

CITATIONS: C. Sugino, M. Ruzzene, and A. Erturk, “Experimental and Computational Investigation of Guided Waves in a Human Skull.” (Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology, 2021) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ultrasmedbio.2020.11.019

M. Mazzotti, E. Kohtanen, A. Erturk, and M. Ruzzene, “Radiation Characteristics of Cranial Leaky Lamb Waves.” (IEEE Transactions on Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control, 2021) https://doi.org/10.1109/TUFFC.2021.3057309 

S. Schoen, C. Arvanitis, “Heterogeneous Angular Spectrum Method for Trans-Skull Imaging and Focusing.” (IEEE Xplore, 2020) https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8902167 

B. Jing, C. Arvanitis, B. Lindsey, “Effect of Incidence Angle and Wave Mode Conversion on Transcranial Ultrafast Doppler Imaging.” (IEEE Xplore, 2020)   https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9251477 

***
The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is a top 10 public research university developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition.
The Institute offers business, computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences degrees. Its nearly 40,000 students, representing 50 states and 149 countries, study at the main campus in Atlanta, at campuses in France and China, and 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.
 

Writer: Anne Wainscott-Sargent

Kettle has received a David Cowan Scholarship from the Georgia Chapter of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) for her commitment to the future of healthcare information management and health information technology. The scholarship is named for a now-retired Georgia Tech senior research scientist.

“This scholarship means a lot for me, because it will help me afford the master’s program and allow me to continue my education,” said Kettle, who will graduate in May with her biomedical engineering bachelor’s degree.

Interestingly, Kettle had never heard of the society or the scholarship until its namesake, David Cowan, encouraged her to apply. Kettle had taken Cowan’s Healthcare Design of the Future course, and it turned out the society was a great resource for her. After graduate school, Kettle said she hopes to work for a hospital, where she can use her training to help improve the efficiency and flow of patient care.

She said other students also would benefit from the network of 1,600 Georgia members from some of the state’s largest hospitals and healthcare facilities.

“HIMSS is a great society with many opportunities for anyone interested in healthcare, and I think it could be a good society to join for BME students,” Kettle said.

The slow-motion TV replay shows how the receiver made a difficult catch and still managed to keep his toes inbounds. It’s instant replay for instant effect.

In a healthy brain, as you scratch your head and try to place the face, your neurons fire in the same order as when you first met this person, reactivating familiar neural patterns that happen during a behavior, connecting the dots, and helping you conjure the right name and store the whole experience for later recall.

It’s extended replay for extended effect. A new study from a team of Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University researchers shows that defects in this replay activity is indicative of brain disease, a discovery that could lead to better screening or diagnostic tools for Alzheimer’s disease.

Led by principal investigator Annabelle Singer, the team got the April 2021 cover story in the journal Cell Reports with research that links defective replay with synaptic dysfunction in Alzheimer’s disease. What’s more, the team measured these two things for the first time in vivo in a mouse model of Alzheimer’s, “in awake mice, during behavior,” said Singer, assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory and corresponding author of the paper.

“We know that synapses are important for neural activity: those connections are how neurons talk to each other. But we hadn’t really put deficits in replay — neural activity essential for memory — and synaptic dysfunction together before,” Singer said. “Synapse dysfunction is one of the early signs of Alzheimer’s, and it happens long before cells are lost to the disease. It predicts cognitive decline.”

According to lead author of the paper, Stephanie Prince, a grad student in Singer’s lab, “we used an established method for measuring the extracellular electrophysiological data.” Basically, electrodes are used to measure electrical activity coming from adjacent neurons, in this case, in mice that were fully awake and navigating virtual reality tasks.

Information in a healthy brain is passed from cell to cell via trillions of synapses with high precision. Part of the synapses’ job also involves the targeted inhibition of neural activity — a way of regulating information sharing. A neural activity like replay requires the coordinated work of many neurons at once, and synapses, Singer said, “are part of what gives you this precise timing of replay, organizing cells to fire together in short time windows.”

When looking over the data, “we found that the replay was basically missing, and the inhibitory synapses were weakened,” Singer said. “Synaptic dysfunction and replay dysfunction are conceptually different, but related because they co-occur. That suggests a synaptic cause that underlies deficits in network activity for memory, such as replay. So this work makes a connection between synaptic and neural activity deficits in Alzheimer’s for the first time.”

Their discoveries could lead to new screening or diagnostic tools for Alzheimer’s, perhaps based on technology Singer’s lab has been working on for the past few years. The technology uses flickering lights and pulses of sound (delivered through a visor and headphones) to stimulate gamma waves, cutting down on amyloid beta proteins, which are an early hallmark of Alzheimer’s. Gamma waves are associated with high-level cognitive functions, like perception and memory.

Singer expects to soon publish the findings of the first human feasibility study using her flicker treatment. She reported promising results from the trial last fall at the American Neurological Association annual meeting. Now her lab is studying how to use the non-invasive technology to address synaptic issues.

“We’re working right now on developing therapeutic options to rescue these dysfunctions in synapses and replay,” she said. “We’re seeing some intriguing results, but we’ve got more work to do.”

This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), grant No. R01-NS109226, the Lane Family, and the Wright Family. 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.

Links

“Alzheimer’s pathology causes impaired inhibitory connections and reactivation of spatial codes during spatial navigation”

Singer Lab

The award honors two non-tenure-track faculty members every year who make outstanding contributions to undergraduate education.

“This award means the world to me, because it is a recognition of what is most important to me in my job: the well-being, success, and learning of the people in my courses,” Fernandez said. “I want to thank the students who wrote amazing letters of recommendation and whose words and time mean a lot to me.”

Fernandez teaches the foundational BMED 1000 course, Introduction to Biomedical Engineering, as well as BMED 2400, Introduction to Bioengineering Statistics. He’s also one of the learning scientists in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering.

Third-year student Cassandra McIltrot took BMED 1000 with Fernandez. In a letter supporting Fernandez’s nomination, she said her experience in the course helped her find confidence.

“His classroom was a safe space where I knew my voice was heard and my ideas were important. I was challenged in collaborative settings with my classmates and was able to build my definition of what it means to be an engineer through my own creativity and reflection,” wrote McIltrot, who later became a teaching assistant in the course. “There was no longer a question of if I could accomplish something, but how I could get there.”

Sarah Blake credited Fernandez with changing her perspective on homework and how it could build her understanding of course material. In her supporting letter, the fourth-year student recalled presenting a solution to her entire Intro to Bioengineering Statistics course.

“I ended up getting part of the problem right and part of it wrong. More importantly, I ended up understanding the problem better after Todd explained why part of my answer was incorrect,” Blake wrote.

“I do not remember what the problem was about, but I remember how I felt after answering my question. Todd made sure to point out what I did right and did not make me feel bad about the part I got wrong.”

Fernandez said he thrives on interactions like those, helping students learn — and learning from them along the way.

He shares the 2021 Undergraduate Educator Award with Stephanie Reikes, lecturer in the School of Mathematics. He’s the third faculty member from Coulter BME to win the award in the last four years, and his name will join theirs permanently on the Teaching Awards wall in the Clough Undergraduate Learning Commons.

The new initiative will create pilot research projects and tools that align with the needs and aims of the SHC network of clinicians to enable state-of-the-art clinical research and facilitate clinical practice. The seed grants will support Georgia Tech faculty and research associates working directly with SHC physicians and surgeons. The overall goal remains to improve the lives of children treated at SHC.

Leanne West, chief engineer of pediatric technologies at Georgia Tech, added, “This particular round of research is all about going further with information and data and making it accessible for research and patient care. With the unique data from SHC and Tech’s expertise in data analytics, we’re going to be able to provide more specific information for diagnosis and treatment of Shriners patients.”

The seed grant opportunity inspired investigator partners to conceptualize seven successful clinical research projects. Coleman Hilton, Shriners’ Research Informatics manager, who is responsible for addressing resource needs from the teams, noted that “these seven projects represent the breadth of care provided at Shriners and they are very focused on the specific research needs for each of the patient populations.”

The teams, awarded two-year seed grants of either $50,000 or $150,000, are led by principal investigators from each institution. May Dongmei Wang, a professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, is the Georgia Tech principal investigator for three of the seven projects this year.

Her lab has been busy working with SHC, “to establish a new Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) prototype as the backend server. We want to enable interoperable clinical data management across all SHC hospitals,” Wang said. Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) is the standard for joining disparate systems together in the exchange of electronic health records. It was developed by HL7 International, the non-profit organization that develops standards and solutions to empower global health data interoperability.

In the 2021 round of seed projects, Wang said, “we’ll assist four Shriners hospitals to develop three FHIR applications to showcase the acceleration of the clinical informatics pipeline from idea, to data, to insights, using FHIR.”

“This program will allow us to capture, access, share, and analyze data, including diagnostics, radiographic images, and genomics in a way that is not currently available in existing Shriners Hospital for Children patient registries and research databases,” said Marc Lalande, vice president of SHC’s research programs. “The infrastructure that will be developed will not only enhance our clinical research capabilities, but also advance our clinical practices.”

Here’s a rundown of the seven projects funded for 2021:

3D Graphical Scale for Assessing Hip Functional Range of Motion

Principal Investigators: Megan Denham, Senior Research Associate, Georgia Tech Research Institute; Harold van Bosse, SHC-Philadelphia

Project Synopsis: Hip pathology in babies and children can affect long-term development and lead to malformations and deformations and other conditions. While surgery can correct pediatric hip conditions and optimize functionality and range of motion, there currently are no outcome measurements that can adequately analyze hip function across the spectrum of conditions; no way to compare results of different treatment modalities; and none that follow results over time and growth.

Utilizing a computer model to graph range of motion, the team will develop a pediatric hip score system, allowing for more precise evaluation of various treatments of hip contractures in children across the spectrum of neuromuscular conditions (such as cerebral palsy and muscular dystrophies). They intend to develop a mobile application that can quantify function with a single figure, to help clinicians make more practical evaluations, leading to more valid comparisons of treatment options.

Craniofacial Microsomia (CFM) Informatics Infrastructure

Principal Investigators: May Dongmei Wang, Professor, Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering (Georgia Tech and Emory University); Chad Purnell, M.D., SHC-Chicago

Project Synopsis: CFM is a clinical conundrum – it is the second most common craniofacial anomaly, but its pathogenesis is not clearly understood. The research team’s long-term goal is to develop an AI model of how genes and environmental factors conspire in CFM. This seed grant will establish the first step in the process, creating a framework for sharing phenotypic, clinical, radiologic, and genetic data between SHC-Chicago and Georgia Tech.

Specific aims for the seed project include creating a set of minimum common data elements for CFM research data, and developing a system to allow secure, high-volume data sharing between institutions, which will leverage the Wang lab’s expertise in developing parallel FHIR infrastructure, enabling flexible integration of data sets within the SHC system.

GL-SMART (Greenville-Lexington Shriner Multisite AI-enabled Rehabilitation Technology)

Principal Investigators: May Dongmei Wang, Professor, Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering; J. Michael Wattenbarger, M.D., Chief of Staff, SHC-Greenville; Henry J. Iwinski, M.D., Chief of Staff, SHC-Lexington

Project Synopsis: This is a multi-site collaboration between Shriners Hospitals for Children in Greenville (SC) and Lexington (KY), the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering (BME) at Georgia Tech and Emory University, and Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). Together, they intend to develop an advanced technology platform to improve scoliosis patient care at multiple Shriners sites.

The two Shriners sites involved in the study have accumulated extensive data from more than 1,000 patients over the past decade – insight that can help clinicians make better care decisions. Wang’s lab will develop a FHIR application to enable clinicians at both Shriners sites to share and access clinical data seamlessly. Wang also is developing a multimodal AI algorithm to streamline the process of predicting clinical outcomes in scoliosis patients.

HR-pQCT Informatics Infrastructure

Principal Investigators: May Dongmei Wang, Professor, Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering; Gary S. Gottesman, M.D., Center for Metabolic Bone Disease, SHC-St. Louis

Project Synopsis: For patients with musculoskeletal disorders, bone mineral density scans are critical in the evaluation, surveillance, and treatment. High resolution peripheral computed tomography (HR-pQCT) is a revolutionary advancement as a new 3-D skeletal imaging tool with the ability to differentiate internal structures from cortical bone, and inform the pathophysiology of bone diseases, providing insights into bone biology, and better treatments.

Using all of that illuminating information is hampered by the inability to query the data based on significant research parameters, which is crucial to gaining deeper insight into bone disorders. So the researchers plan to build an integrative, relational database to house the data, design a FHIR interface, then populate the database with patient data, and explore options for automating the extraction, transformation, and loading of new HR-pQCT data as it is generated.

Machine Learning to Predict Fentanyl Efficacy and Adverse Effects to Advance Precision Medicine

Principal Investigators: Jeffrey Skolnick, School of Biological Sciences, Georgia Tech; Kristin Grimsrud, Assistant Clinical Professor, University of California-Davis

Project Synopsis: Personalized pain management continues to be a challenging issue for patients and clinicians. Although advances in pharmacogenetics aid in decoding genetic variants, no one really knows how a given patient will respond to a particular drug until it is administered.

To address this problem, data from two ongoing SHC studies will be used as input for machine learning (ML) algorithms to predict if a patient will experience a decrease in pain or adverse events following fentanyl administration. Skolnick’s lab will then use an ML tool it developed, MEDICASCY, for disease indication, mode of action, small molecule drug efficacy, and side effect predictions. MEDICASCY predictions will then be combined with an enzyme inference algorithm, patient clinical data, and information on fentanyl blood concentrations to generate specific predictions for fentanyl efficacy and adverse effects.

Platform Architecture and Machine Learning for Arthrogryposis

Principal Investigators: Tony Pan, Research Scientist, institute for Data Engineering and Science (IDEaS) at Georgia Tech; Noémi Dahan-Oliel, SHC-Montreal

Project Synopsis: Three Shriners Hospitals – Chicago, Greenville, and Montreal – are involved in this project with Georgia Tech to address important knowledge gaps in understanding arthrogryposis multiplex congenita (AMC), a rare (1 in 3,000 live births) chronic musculoskeletal disease. Shriners will identify the underlying causes, risk factors, and distribution of AMC, documenting interventions and outcomes, and determining genetic and/or environmental factors.

Pan and his team at Georgia Tech are essentially going to help make the data more accessible, developing a computational framework for machine learning to ultimately enable precision medicine. The researchers will design and implement a system to meet the needs for this project, deploying high-performance computing and cloud friendly cyber infrastructure to enable ad-hoc, on-demand, and reproducible data analysis with low deployment cost.

Sports Medicine Registry

Principal Investigators: Minoru Shinohara, Associate Professor, School of Biological Sciences, Georgia Tech; Corinna Franklin, director of sports medicine, SHC-Philadelphia

Project Synopsis: Six Shriners Hospitals for Children (Northern California, Erie, Chicago, Portland, Philadelphia, Montreal), as part of the Shriners Sports Medicine Consortium, are working with researcher Minoru Shinohara, who directs the Human Neuromuscular Physiology Lab at Georgia Tech. Their goal is to develop a comprehensive registry that will help clinical researchers answer many large-scale questions in pediatric sports medicine.

Shinohara, and his Georgia Tech and SHC colleagues will identify the core data elements to use from Shriners system motion analysis centers, surgical procedures, and rehab/clinical information. Ultimately, they intend to create a sports medicine registry that will be easily accessible to researchers within the consortium, giving Shriners clinicians an opportunity to have a greater impact in the treatment of pediatric sports injuries.

Shovan Bhatia

3rd-year biomedical engineering student

Shovan Bhatia is a third-year student from the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering on a pre-med track. He has been involved in Professor Jaydev Desai’s Medical Robotics and Automation (RoboMed) Lab since Fall of 2019, where he has been able to blend his love of robotics with his goal of working in the medical field. Bhatia is currently working on creating an assistive robotic exoskeleton to improve the quality of life for those living with spinal cord injury.

Seokhwan Jeong and Phillip Tran have also served as mentors for Bhatia and encouraged him to independently discover and pursue his interests in medicine and robotics from his first day in the lab.

“Through the research I’m performing, I have had the unique opportunity to design and iterate at the benchtop and then translate our work into the clinical space through spinal cord injury human subject testing,” said Bhatia. “I plan on carrying what I learn from my research into medical school and beyond, where I hope to use innovative techniques to improve people’s lives.”

Bhatia’s on-campus activities extend past the academic sphere — he is President of Engineers without Borders at Tech and serves as a board member on the India Club at Georgia Tech.

Bhatia applied for the Goldwater Scholarship to become part of a community of highly motivated individuals that the program cultivates. Receiving the scholarship has further encouraged him to pursue his goal of practicing medicine and finding ways to translate engineering and robotics principles into his work.

Pradyot Yadav

3rd-year electrical and computer engineering student

Pradyot Yadav is a third-year student from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Yadav worked in Professor James Kenney’s lab investigating radio frequency and microwave power amplifier design, which led to his winning the IMS Student Design Competition in 2019 and a publication in the Microwave Journal in 2020. As a member of Professor Yang Wang’s lab, the Georgia Tech Electronics and Micro-System Lab (GEMS), Yadav helped to implement the group’s first Gallium Nitride (GaN) MMIC design. He is currently working as a technical fellow with the Hughes Research Laboratory GaN process, which is the fastest GaN process in the world.

Outside of the academic sphere, Yadav also works as a Radio Operator for WREK FM’s Rock, Rhythm, and Roll segment and is a member of The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Eta Kappa Nu, and the IMS 2021 Steering Committee.

Yadav applied for the Goldwater Scholarship to expand his horizons in terms of future research and graduate studies, and for him, becoming a Goldwater scholar is a testament to the extensive work he has put into research.

“My being awarded this scholarship marks the start of a career focused on the cutting edge in RF/mmWave research,” said Yadav. “The scholarship also provides me with a solid academic foundation for when I apply to graduate school and seek funding for my future research.”

Yadav plans to intern this summer at Qorvo, a leading radio frequency company, where he will work with a device physics Fellow to develop a new GaN device model that would provide its designers with more flexibility. This will be his second summer interning for the company. After he graduates next Spring, he will be pursuing a PhD in Microwave Engineering, with a focus on III-IV semiconductor research and mmWave circuit design and ultimately aims for a career in industry research.

Katie Groenhout

3rd-year chemical and biomolecular engineering student

Katie Grouenhout is a third-year student from the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. Since the fall of 2019, she has been part of the lab run by Professor Paul Kohl, her research advisor, and she is currently working on a project on anion-exchange membrane electrolyzers for clean production of hydrogen. Grouenhout met two of her other mentors in Kohl’s lab: Garrett Huang, a recently graduated Ph.D. student, and Mrinmay Mandal, a post-doc currently in Kohl’s lab, both of whom Grouenhout has worked closely with. In addition to research, Grouenhout works as an undergraduate teaching assistant for the School.

Grouenhout was encouraged to pursue a career in research by her research advisor at a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program at The University of Mississippi the summer after her freshman year. She was motivated to apply for the scholarship because of the many ways in which it would aid her goal of pursuing a Ph.D. after graduation.

“Receiving the Goldwater scholarship reinforces my goal to pursue chemical engineering at the doctorate level,” said Grouenhout. “With this scholarship, I plan to take on more independent experiments in the lab and continue to develop my knowledge of electrochemistry.”

After earning her Ph.D. in chemical engineering, Grouenhout plans to pursue a career in research and academia, with a focus on electrochemical energy solutions.

About the Scholarship

The Goldwater Scholarship, the most prestigious one of its kind for natural science, engineering and mathematics students, awards college sophomores and juniors who plan to pursue careers in STEM research. Its goal is to cultivate scientific talent and aid in the creation of highly qualified professionals in science and engineering fields in the US. More than 1250 STEM students were nominated for the scholarship by 438 different schools, and out of the 410 who were selected, a little over half are women. Each recipient will receive $7,500.

“At Emory, we believe in re-envisioning the future and never being satisfied with what has been done before. We're fueled by curiosity and know there's more than one right answer to every problem,” says Vikas P. Sukhatme, M.D., Sc.D., dean of Emory University School of Medicine. “That’s why we are honored and grateful for the John and Rosemary Brown Family Innovation to Market Fund, which will allow us to continue bolstering interdisciplinary interactions and changing the way we think of medicine.”

Since 1997, Emory School of Medicine and Georgia Tech have jointly run one of the top biomedical engineering programs in the world, the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering. Biolocity, a philanthropic program in the Department, accelerates the commercialization of early-stage medical technologies with intellectual property held at Emory or Georgia Tech. Its resources and funding are available to all faculty members across both campuses.

Facilitated by the generous support of John and Rosemary Brown, the $5 million gift will establish a fund to advance technologies through a three-pronged approach: provide foundational information for medical technology development, de-risking grant funding driven by heavy market and technical diligence, and nondilutive funding to prepare market-ready projects through industry expertise and ecosystem connectivity.

“We’ve identified a broad list of initiatives to grow the interface between Emory and Georgia Tech far beyond biomedical engineering that will enrich opportunities for students and faculty to solve challenging problems together,” says Susan Margulies, Wallace H. Coulter Chair of the Coulter Department. “This was the result of many conversations with our colleagues across the School of Medicine and the College of Engineering and research leaders across both campuses, and we are grateful to the Brown family for enabling us to pursue these ideas.”

"Rosemary and I are excited to see the opportunity for the disciplines of engineering and medicine to collaborate with a common goal. This focus will accelerate innovation that allows clinical needs to move forward more quickly to license, start-up and commercialization,” says Brown.

Goals for the first year of the fund include:

• Expanding project funding opportunities through Biolocity, which provides “de-risking” support and entrepreneurs in residence for faculty at Emory and Georgia Tech who have developed early-stage biomedical technologies that address unmet clinical needs and have compelling commercial potential. More than 50 percent of projects funded move on to license or startup.
• Creating programming and curriculum for a workshop series leveraging engineering and design expertise at Georgia Tech to teach Emory School of Medicine students, trainees, faculty, and staff concepts of design thinking in medicine, including applications for health and healthcare disparities in Atlanta.
• Providing support for training for engineering students and medical personnel (faculty, students, and staff) in problem identification and refinement, including a focus on a more inclusive “voice of the customer.”
• Providing seed funds for Emory-Georgia Tech collaborative early-stage research projects in novel health care technology, including those that lower the cost of healthcare.
• Developing a staffing infrastructure to support the administrative functions required to develop, execute, and monitor the success of programs developed through the creation of this innovation ecosystem.

John Brown is Chairman Emeritus, Stryker Corporation. John Brown received his Bachelor of Science degree in chemical engineering from Auburn University. John Brown received an Honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Freed-Hardeman University, an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters from Kalamazoo College, and an Honorary Doctor of Science degree from Auburn University.

Rosemary Brown, a lifelong educator, shared her passion for Mathematics with students in East Brunswick, New Jersey, and several schools in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Rosemary Brown received her Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry from Auburn University and her Master’s in Mathematics Education degree from Rutgers University. She received an Honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Freed-Hardeman University, was recognized by Auburn University with an Honorary Doctor of Science Degree, and the Distinguished Alumni Award from Auburn’s College of Science and Math.

Turns out, Cassie Mitchell already was on the case.

“We’d been working for a few weeks on something, since the White House started asking data scientists to do analysis on old SARS data, but also on the emerging Covid dataset that was being updated weekly,” said Mitchell, assistant professor in Coulter BME who specializes in using data to forecast disease. “We had already started adapting our text-mining architecture for Covid-19.”

Text mining is what it sounds like: an artificial intelligence process that involves analyzing a lot of existing text for useful data that could lead to new discoveries. Mitchell’s lab received a $10,000 seed grant to use her tools to dig through millions of peer-reviewed articles, seeking hidden patterns that would be relevant to Covid-19 — perhaps identifying patient risk factors or even drugs that might be repurposed to treat the virus.

Using Covid-19 as a test case, the lab adapted a process called link prediction, an important tool in artificial intelligence and machine learning that predicts the existence of a link between two entities. It’s kind of like filling in the blanks after identifying the blanks.

Link prediction is at play when your social media platform suggests a new friend for you, or when an online marketplace predicts which customers will buy what products.

“Though it’s used for other things, we adapted it to biomedical text — as you might imagine, a biomedical application is more difficult than dealing with customer segmentation data,” Mitchell said.

Mitchell’s team excavated information from the articles and built a “knowledge graph, or network that links symptoms, drugs, antecedent diseases, genes, proteins, and much more to Covid-19 or similar coronaviruses,” she said.

The team ranked relationships with the coronavirus to find the most promising research paths, with the intent of expediting translational research. They highlighted thousands of potential repurposed drugs for further research.

“The process can be applied to any emergent or poorly understood biomedical issue for a quicker and more diligent meta-analysis of research, compared to existing methods,” said Kevin McCoy, a third-year BME student who was technical team lead of the lab’s Covid-19 study and co-authored a journal article on the work that’s currently under review.

“The most important finding is that machine learning techniques can be used to rapidly ingest and summarize biomedical literature to generate insightful and accurate summaries of the current research.”

Mitchell said the grant primarily supported student researchers, who took part in several conferences during the year in addition to writing their study.

And what started as a modest seed grant could yield results for years to come — the data mining technology, “which we intend to use for other biomedical issues,” Mitchell said — and a new course for McCoy’s future.

“I quickly fell in love with the applications of data science to biomedical engineering,” McCoy said.

He joined Mitchell’s lab in Summer 2020 and is now looking at Ph.D. programs in statistics and machine learning, “to continue learning about and using their respective techniques to solve pressing biomedical problems.”

Ultimately, these tiny babies may face multiple significant surgeries in their early weeks of life.

That’s what Vahid Serpooshan thinks about when he’s in his lab using a sophisticated 3D bioprinter to create models of the earliest stages of heart development: the babies and their families and how his team can help by unravelling some of the mysteries of the developing human heart.

“These are babies who are a few days old and who are suffering from very severe, acute heart disease and heart defects. And many of them do not survive — even after multiple surgeries,” Serpooshan said. “Being able to simulate such severe situations in bioprinted and bioengineered platforms where there's no real limit to their manufacturing for study and analysis — that has a really high value for us in terms of how we're able to help patients and save patients’ lives.”

Understanding normal heart development — and thus, what can go wrong and lead to severe defects — is the cornerstone of the Faculty Early Career Development award Serpooshan received this spring from the National Science Foundation. Known as CAREER awards, these five-year grants are NSF’s most-prestigious award for early career faculty. They identify potential leaders and academic role models, giving them funds to build the foundation for a lifetime of study.

Serpooshan’s foundation will be the first 3D-printed model of heart tissue using soft, flexible hydrogel materials that are infused with cells from specific patients. He’s working to develop models that mimic the exact structure of the heart at two stages: the embryonic heart tube present at roughly 20 days after conception and a more fully developed fetal heart at 30-34 weeks.

Serpooshan and his team will connect the models to a bioreactor that creates a flow of stand-in material similar to blood, creating a dynamic system that functions just like the real thing.

“Up until this point, printing a synthetic, plastic model and perfusing it with different types of media has been done. But when it comes to hydrogels, and adding cells, and then having this flow going through — this is something that is a lot more complex, and no one has really tried this before,” said Serpooshan, assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory. “We bioprint with soft hydrogels that mimic heart tissue, and we add cells that look exactly like the real heart tissue cellular structure. Then we perfuse with the flow that mimics the developing heart flow.”

Nothing that exists now can replicate heart development in quite the same way, Serpooshan said. Animal models are imperfect substitutes for human heart development, and 2D models lack fidelity to the three-dimensional structures and flow at play.

“Having a bioprinted, engineered model that you can print hundreds of is one of our main advantages. You can order the machine to print hundreds of consistent models,” Serpooshan said. “This allows us to change parameters and study how cells behave without using any animals or even going to clinical trials.”

That means the models could be used to accurately test promising new drugs. They could also be used to help surgeons hone their techniques and develop new methods. Early versions of the models have been used by Serpooshan’s close collaborator Holly Bauser-Heaton in just that way. She’s a pediatric cardiologist at Emory.

In particular, Serpooshan and his team are focused on the velocity of blood flow through the developing heart in all three dimensions and the shear stresses that flow exerts on heart cells. Serpooshan said these are critical signals to cells that guide when they grow or move or change. When flow is altered, so, too, is the tissue development.

“There is a theory called ‘no flow, no grow,’ that says that any disruption in the flow of the blood during the development of the heart could result in significant abnormal development,” he said. “That's where the significance of these measurements comes. Being able to visualize and quantify in 3D the flow parameters, including velocity and shear stress, helps us to study what cells are sensing in these environments and if we disrupt flow, for example, how that could change cell behavior.”

Of course, what Serpooshan is proposing is not easy. Heart tissue is complex, so creating this kind of model wasn’t even imaginable until 3D bioprinting came along, he said. The technique allows Serpooshan to deposit specific kinds of cells and biomaterials in specific areas of the tissue models to accurately reflect actual heart tissue composition.

They use three kinds of heart cells, created by reprogramming patients’ blood cells or skin cells into stem cells. This induced pluripotent stem cell technology allows Serpooshan to turn those stem cells into cardiac muscle cells and endothelial cells in the developing heart.

Building the models requires detailed imaging and processing to turn the scans into 3D structures before printing can begin. Serpooshan said other Coulter Department faculty, including Lakshmi “Prasad” Dasi, David Frakes, and Brooks Lindsey, as well as collaborators at Emory School of Medicine, including Bauser-Heaton and Timothy Slesnick, bring key expertise to the work.

Once his team has functioning models, they’ll be able to study two other key conditions along with blood flow that make up the microenvironment around cells as the heart forms and could affect their behavior: stiffness of the tissues and the concentrations of the different proteins in those tissues.

Data suggests all three contribute to abnormalities that lead to congenital heart defects. The question is, how significant is their role?

“Gaining knowledge about some very complex and vague processes that no one has been really able to study in such precision is going to be one of the main outcomes,” Serpooshan said.