Co-hosted by Georgia Tech's Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience and the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. 

Elsje Pienaar
Director of Undergraduate Programs
Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering
Purdue University

RESEARCH
Infectious diseases kill >10 million people each year. Several challenges remain in treating infectious diseases. Combination therapies, using multiple drugs simultaneously, are complex and expensive to develop and optimize; and drug concentration and action at the sites of infection remains relatively unknown for many diseases; drug resistance is on the rise; and some infections, like HIV, remain without cure.

Our systems pharmacology approach constructs multi-scale, hybrid computational models that describe host immune, pathogen and drug dynamics within an infected patient. In close collaborations with experimentalists, we integrate these computational models with multiple in vitro and in vivo datasets to: predict drug efficacy, optimize treatment, identify new drug targets, and inform future experiments; all in the context of complex host-pathogen-drug interactions.

Faculty host: Melissa Kemp

2025-2026 Bioengineering Seminar Schedule